2014-2015 board of reviewers mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college, city university of new york krishna bista, university of louisiana at monroe caitlin block, drexel university cendrine bomboko, george washington university dr. caroline m. brackette, mercer university-atlanta alisha brown, michigan state university dr jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio dr. pamela m christian, azusa pacific university, california ross collin, manhattanville college arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia dr. yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo dellicarpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin anton dobart, austrian ministry of education ms alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college william dwyer, stephen f. austin state university, texas cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsyl vania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida terri l germain-williams, mercy college damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago dr. amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame dr. heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h greenberg, the children’s institute of hong kong dr. e. francine guastello, st. john’s university amanda m. gunning, mercy college douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom mark hamilton, education development center, united states dr. nancy heilbronner, mercy college stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university ms. sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university ravi kumar, davanagere univeristy, india jayne c. lammers, university of rochester kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom meghan e. marrero, mercy college eric martone, mercy college patrick mccabe, mercy college carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas dr. ezella mcpherson, wayne state university mr evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom maroun naser, stem academy, canada newhouse, erica, mercy college nitecki, elena, mercy college victoria nunez, mercy college carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico mustafa ozmusul, harran university, turkey melissa parenti, st. john’s university do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota kari f. pawl, concordia university, chicago dr. diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university dr. salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom sudha ramaswamy, mercy college matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles dr. jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college ms pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington dr. james b. schreiber, duquesne university susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college scott schuth, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom mr. harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school good day john ezinwa silas, nnamdi azikiwe university awka, nigeria kenneth simonson, university of cincinnnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri dessirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university elaine marie walker, seton hall university helge wasmuth, mercy college amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark angela webb, louisiana state university melvin wermuth, mercy college jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra mornit white, mississipi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand dr gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh jie zhang, the college at brockport state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh strategies for k-12 social studies 179 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2014). strategies for k-12 social studies. [review of the book teaching history with museums by alan s. marcus, jeremy d. stoddard, and walter w. woodward]. global education review, 1 (4). 179-181. book review strategies for k-12 social studies “teaching history with museums” by alan s. marcus, jeremy d. stoddard, and walter w. woodward by eric martone field trips, particularly to museums, are a common activity within american schools. while many districts mandate that such trips connect to their curricula, the “rich pedagogical power” of museums, as the authors assert in teaching history with museums, is not usually exploited to its fullest potential. their book, following on the heels of the rising popularity of public history and museum studies within the larger history profession,1 takes a giant leap toward helping educators achieve this goal by providing them “with both a conceptual model linking museum visits to learning about the past, and a collection of practical strategies illustrated through case studies focused on different ‘types’ of museum” (5). a large part of the introduction defends the importance of museums for history/social studies education. the authors cite interesting studies revealing that secondary teachers, despite specializing in history/social studies content, plan only a limited number of trips because of “logistical and pedagogical barriers” (6-7). consequently, the majority of student museums trips are organized at the elementary level. after the introduction, the authors establish a theoretical framework for using museums (including the history of museums’ roles in society, and museums’ shifting missions and methods) to provide an overview of the ways museums can be used effectively to enhance social studies content and skills. many of these skills also relate to language arts and common core standards. however, the authors also focus on how museum trips can impact students’ dispositions toward history since they provide opportunities to develop not only more sophisticated understandings of the past, but also “habits of the mind,” or attitudes toward the past that are not easily learned or transferred within classroom walls. they argue that since students are more likely continue to visit museums in their adult lives (as opposed to strategies for k-12 social studies 180 reading historical narratives), these are the sites (sources) where they are likely to continue learning about the past. as a result, it is important to be able to read museums as visual narratives. the authors thus encourage educators to teach their students to recognize that despite museums’ seemingly authoritative roles in interpreting the past, these interpretations are as subjective as traditional narrative accounts and need to be analyzed and questioned in a similar fashion. the heart of the book, however, is a series of several case studies grouped according to different categories (or types) of museums to demonstrate history teaching through museum visits. these categories include: artifact and display-based museums (us holocaust museum in washington, dc); state history museums (minnesota history center); historic forts (fort at no. 4 in new hampshire and fort ticonderoga in new york); historic house museums (mark twain house in hartford, connecticut and the johnson county historical society’s properties in iowa); living history museums (colonial williamsburg, the jamestown settlement, yorktown); and memorials and monuments (911 memorials in connecticut). each case study chapter includes a general discussion about this type of museum, followed by the case study (or studies). each case study includes pre-visit, during visit, and post-visit activities for students, followed by a reflection on the case study discussing the pros and cons of using this type of museum as well as further resources. the final chapter, “bringing the museum to the classroom,” focuses on the various services and programs museums offer educators in the form of outreach programs, museum kits, and virtual trips, in keeping with the authors’ view that museums are really three sources in one (the museum itself, its staff, and its online resources). the book’s back matter includes three appendices (including a particularly useful one on ten overall strategies for effective museum visits), a list of the museums mentioned in the book, and resources for educators. since two of the authors are from the university of connecticut (one is from the college of william and mary), many case studies are from the mid-atlantic and new england regions. this is a distinct advantage for teachers in these areas because less adapting is needed to make use of the case studies. nevertheless, the case studies are intended to be adapted and altered for any region and the models are clear and straightforward enough for this to be accomplished relatively easily. the case studies, however, rely on using museums as a way to teach “history.” yet social studies is a multidisciplinary subject. while history is arguably the dominant discipline within social studies education at the secondary and upper elementary levels, this is not so much the case within early elementary social studies, where general scope and sequence pattern at the national level privileges other social scientific fields (like political science, anthropology, and sociology). further, the book’s subtitle, which markets it to grades k through 12 teachers, is slightly misleading for elementary level educators since most of the activities within the book are directed toward teachers of grades 5 and above. as a result of these two caveats, the book is most valuable for teachers in the upper elementary and secondary grade levels, rather than those at the lower elementary/early childhood level. overall, teaching history with museums successfully weds theory and practice to serve as a valuable resource for educators seeking to integrate museums into their curricula. consequently, it succeeds in meeting its general goals and is highly recommended for history and social studies educators. notes 1. public history has become an increasingly common and popular program at north 181 global education review 1 (4) american colleges and universities. further, the abysmal academic job market for history phds has prompted the american historical association, a professional organization for historians based in north america, to take efforts to develop initiatives to direct history phd graduates to alternative careers, including historical preservationists and museum curators. see: allen mikaelian, “department specializations and the history major,” perspectives on history 52, 7 (2014): 12-13; allen mikaelian, “the academic job market’s jagged line,” perspectives on history 52, 6 (2014): 14-15; anthony grafton and james grossman, “no more plan b: a very modest proposal for graduate programs in history,” perspectives in history 49 (2011); debbie ann doyle, “museums and the future of education,” perspectives on history 51, 4 (2013); nicholas evan sarantakes, “some proposals to help solve the job crisis,” perspectives on history 51, 4 (2013). “teaching history with museums: strategies for k12 social studies” by alan s. marcus, jeremy d. stoddard, and walter w. woodward. new york: routledge, 2012. isbn: 978-0-41589165-3 about the authors alan s. marcus is an associate professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the neag school of education, university of connecticut. jeremy d. stoddard is a former middle school teacher and curriculum and technology professional development specialist. he is currently an associate professor in the school of education at the college of william and mary. walter w. woodward is an associate professor in the department of history, university of connecticut and is the connecticut state historian. about the reviewer eric martone, phd, is assistant professor of history/social studies education at mercy college, dobbs ferry, new york. prior to receiving his phd in history from stony brook university, he was a social studies teacher in connecticut. his books include the encyclopedia of blacks in european history and culture (2009), the black musketeer: reevaluating alexandre dumas within the francophone world (2011), and mercy college: yesterday and today (2013). 94 global education review 2 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2015). holocaust education and jewish identity in modern poland. [review of the book jewish studies and holocaust education in poland by lynn w. zimmerman with contributing scholars]. global education review, 2 (3). 94-96. book review holocaust education and jewish identity in modern poland “jewish studies and holocaust education in poland” by lynn w. zimmerman with contributing scholars by colin everett among the interesting facts about poland is that it is home to one of europe’s largest jewish festivals. like most of the jewish cultural festivals in poland, the country’s biggest, held in krakow, was largely created, maintained, and attended by non-jews. a combination of factors has led to this fascination with jewish culture in poland. for some poles, it is a sincere desire to connect with the past, for others a search for the authentic as well as a curiosity from a generation who grew up in the holocaust’s shadow, but never learned much about it under communist rule. in addition to cultural festivals, poles learn about jewish identity and the holocaust through a variety of experiences, including museums and schooling. the aim of jewish studies and holocaust education in poland is to better understand this context by which poles learn about and comprehend both jewish identity and the holocaust in poland. author lynne zimmerman and her seven contributors take a consistent approach, first introducing the reader to a concept, and then putting that concept into the context of the holocaust or jewish studies in poland. over the course of eight chapters, the authors lay a foundation for the modern conception of the holocaust in poland and then explore the different methods by which poles understand jewish identity and the holocaust. zimmerman begins with a chapter on culture, identity, and stereotypes. this chapter essentially delivers what it promises, providing a background on the concepts of culture and identity, and how stereotypes are shaped by a dominant culture and how it impacts minority cultures in a country. this section could be skipped by most college-educated readers, particularly those with a background in the social sciences. however, it would be helpful as holocaust education and jewish identity in modern poland 95 an introduction to these concepts for undergraduates and those approaching the subject for the first time. the historical context chapter provides an excellent six-page summary of polish history. for the author, the poles possess a collectivist culture, the strongest binding elements of which are the polish language and catholicism. even though poland had the largest pre-wwii population of jews in europe, jews never fully integrated into polish culture, which the author describes as “one of insider-outsider and of contending with the lure of and/or demands of assimilation” (30). jews’ political status has also been fluid throughout polish history. jews at times maintained their own parliament, but in general, as the strength of the polish state waned in the eighteenth century, the status and rights of jews also declined. the status of jewish identity and the holocaust in communist-era poland is a fascinating subject. during the decades of communist rule in poland, the holocaust was de-judaized and the emphasis was placed on framing the nazi crimes as a war or struggle over fascism. in this period, the government never denied that most of the holocaust’s victims were jews, but neither did they emphasize the place of jews in this horrific event. a good example of this is the polish parliament’s dedication of auschwitz, during which politicians stated that the site should be preserved “for all times as a monument to the martyrdom of the polish nation and other nations” (95). jews were part of the “other nations.” during the era of communist rule, polish universities removed their theology departments. instruction in hebrew and yiddish declined, and jewish studies were marginalized and subsequently forgotten. holocaust studies that did occur during this time pertaining to poland occurred abroad in places like england, israel, and north america. throughout the communist era, school textbooks taught that only the criminal element in poland cooperated with the nazi occupation. among the major efforts of ngos and holocaust education programs in poland is the teaching of the holocaust in polish schools. in perhaps one of the most powerful letters ever written by a school principal, holocaust survivor chaim ginott summarizes what would become the motto of the polish holocaust curriculum: dear teachers: i am a survivor of a concentration camp. my eyes saw what no person should witness. gas chambers built by learned engineers. children poisoned by educated physicians. infants killed by trained nurses. women and babies shot and burned by high school and college graduates. so i am suspicious of education. my request is: help your students become more human. your efforts must never produce learned monsters, skilled psychopaths, or educated eichmanns. reading, writing and arithmetic are important only if they serve to make our children more human (93). holocaust education in public schools emerged in the late 1990s and was incorporated into state sponsored textbooks in 2003, finally becoming a distinct subject in 2009. other sections of the book deal with the role that cultural festivals, museums, and other non-governmental organizations play in shaping the understanding of jewish identity and the holocaust in poland. one fascinating section, written by a young jewish student in poland, discusses the view that jews are a novelty in poland. most poles do not know any jews, since they are a tiny minority in poland today. as a 96 global education review 2 (3) result, the image of jews in poland is laden with stereotypes and misconceptions. jewish studies and holocaust education in polish universities have expanded greatly since the collapse of communism. holocaust studies in poland are a new subject that did not develop as a separate academic discipline as it did in western europe and north america. most of the academic study of the holocaust and jewish studies are all fairly recently established and contain the familiar practices of conferences, institutes, and curricula for schoolteachers, academic journals, and publishing. jewish studies and holocaust education in poland is organized into short, well-written chapters. as is often the nature of such edited collections, it can sometimes feel as if each chapter is a distinct, although related, piece of the larger book. the historical background is frequently repeated in multiple chapters. this material could have been better edited to reduce repetitive background information and context and/or moved to the historical context chapter located earlier in the book. multiple authors also draw comparisons between holocaust education and jewish studies in poland and north america and western europe. these comparisons are helpful and interesting, but it would have perhaps been more intriguing to see how holocaust education in poland compares with other former warsaw bloc countries. overall, this was an interesting book that would be ideal for holocaust studies classes, students learning about the role of culture and education, and students of modern polish history. “jewish studies and holocaust education in poland.” by lynn w. zimmerman with contributing scholars. jefferson, nc: macfarland and company, 2014. isbn: 978-0-7864-7861-3 about the author lynn w. zimmerman is a professor of education/applied linguistics at purdue university and tischner european university in krakow, poland. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts and a history instructor at cape cod community college. 102 global education review 2(3) 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university 2015-2016 board of review 105 neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york amy lachuk, hunter college, city university of new york jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york 106 global education review 2(3) nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, indiana university south bend claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles maroun naser, stem academy, canada ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schittesser, university of vienna susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuth, concordia university, chicago 2015-2016 board of review 105 beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand roseanne vallice, mercy college, new york karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york elaine marie walker, seton hall university sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh arlene zimny, mercy college, new york 10 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jordan, kathy-anne & ramaswamy, sudha (2014). global perspectives on inclusion. global education review, 1 (1). 10-13 global perspectives on inclusion kathy-anne jordan mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy mercy college, new york in spite of all the rhetoric surrounding inclusion in the united states and abroad, many students continue to be excluded on the basis of presumed difference and “special” needs (ferri & connor, 2005; liasidou, 2008). across the us, the risk of identification as disabled, and subsequent placement within a special education classroom, is greatest for certain culturally and linguistically diverse students (zion & blanchett, 2011). at the core of this dilemma are questions related to difference, perceptions surrounding it, and beliefs about how it is best responded to within schools. since its inception, the field of special education has been guided by a medical model discourse that equates student difficulty with inherent pathology. within this dominant narrative, “symptoms” result from an underlying biological condition and assessment is subsequently focused on the individual in order to discern proper diagnosis and treatment. similarly, within special education, ability and potential are assumed to be inherent qualities, also subject to diagnosis and treatment (mehan, hertweck, & miels, 1986). this discourse of intrinsic deficit has become so naturalized within the field of special education that it is commonplace for practitioners to speak of student difficulty in terms of inherent qualities and characteristics. in one research study examining race and disability in schools, a teacher discussing the nature of student difficulty commented, “some children, you know, are just born with it…you know, like some children have blue eyes” (harry & klingner, 2006, p. 72). deficit-based discourses embed assumptions about the nature and meaning of difference, and thus limit interpretations that can be reached about the academic and social behaviors of individuals who differ from institutional and social norms. too often, such differences are equated with pathology, resulting in special education identification and placement. rather than a search for intrinsic deficit, scholars within the field of education have proposed an alternative view of disability as a product of the interaction between the individual and his environment (collins, 2003; forman & mccormick, 1995; gindis, 1999; goodley & rapley, 2002; poplin & phillips, 1993; reid & valle, 2004; varenne & mcdermott, 1998). this sociocultural perspective calls for an examination of the myriad ways in which schools and classroom environments facilitate success for some students and failure for others (collins, 2003; ______________________________ corresponding author: kathy-anne jordan, mercy school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 10522 email: kjordan3@mercy.edu mailto:kjordan3@mercy.edu global perspectives on inclusion 11 slee & cook, 1993). both perspectives on difference hold implications for the ways in which inclusion is conceptualized and practiced within school contexts. in this inaugural issue of global education review, we engage the broad and controversial topic of inclusion by examining dominant perspectives, international efforts and issues, and core values for teachers. curt dudley-marling and mary bridget burns begin the conversation with a critical analysis of two dominant views on inclusion: the deficit view and the social constructivist view. in two perspectives on inclusion in the united states, the authors consider the goals, assumptions, and practices that undergird each perspective while clearly aligning their interests and work within a social constructivist framework. in their discussion of inclusive practices, dudleymarling and burns explain that in the united states, the deficit perspective draws heavily on special education law, specifically the least restrictive environment mandate, and this ultimately becomes the basis for determining whether students will gain entry into the general education classroom. if so, further determination is made regarding the suitability of full or partial access. in contrast, the social constructivist perspective assumes, from the outset, that the general education classroom is the suitable environment for all students; as such, it should be appropriately modified to meet the variety of student needs it encompasses. in the following article, maria-luise braunsteiner and susan mariano lapidus consider the ways in which perspectives on inclusion fuel resistance to inclusive efforts. they offer that resistance is based on limited and narrow perceptions of inclusion and concern over limited resources such as teacher time and attention. the authors provide several suggestions for moving an inclusive agenda forward, focusing mainly on teacher training institutions and the index for inclusion as a comprehensive resource to facilitate inclusive schools. thus it is evident that inclusion defies any simple explanation. this is especially true in the international arena where its meaning and significance derive more from the context in which it is implemented than from the policy documents that define it. international resolutions such as the salamanca statement (unesco, 1994) and unesco’s education for all (unesco, 2010) champion inclusion and equality in education, but empirical studies within some developing countries shed light on the limits of these policy documents in guiding the implementation of inclusive education (naraian, 2013). they furthermore raise questions about the feasibility of inclusive practices within educational systems that are plagued by persistent low achievement and challenges in effectively educating most of the student body (armstrong, armstrong & spandagou, 2011). although these countries may adopt the language of inclusion, the reality may indeed stray far from the goal of a truly egalitarian educational system for all. whether the context is national or international, inclusion requires examination of the values and goals held across a system; it requires understanding of the concept in the sociocultural contexts within which it is being implemented, and it requires multidimensional transformation of schooling systems (miles & singhal, 2009; naraian, 2013). the next two articles grapple with some of the aforementioned issues related to inclusive practice within an international context. in it takes two to tango: inclusive schooling in hong kong, jeremy h. greenberg and christine greenberg discuss the challenges associated with the inclusion movement in the hong kong special administrative region of china. among those mentioned are attitudinal barriers, limited specialized training for teachers, an inflexible 12 global education review 1(1) education system, and the theoretical and practical shortcomings of a government issued tool for school self-evaluation and development. the authors propose a need to look abroad for successful evidence-based practices in the education of students with special needs and specifically recommend the use of a teaching methodology called, “applied behavior analysis” in teaching students with special needs. they conclude by examining one successful inclusive school model that implements this approach. the next article attempts to bring the subject of disability and inclusion to the forefront of the comparative education literature. alisha brown, in situating disability within comparative education: a review of the literature, first examines representations of disability across four comparative education journals and also analyzes global and national perceptions of inclusive education as represented within these journals. brown finds that disability is commonly represented as a social product, resulting from an individual’s interaction with the environment. this finding is significant in that inclusive efforts require naming, critiquing, and dismantling of all environmental barriers preventing full inclusion. brown’s work also highlights the dilemmas that emerge when global educational initiatives intersect with local educational values, norms, and realities. we close this theme issue with a look at core values for teachers working within inclusive contexts. amanda watkins and verity donnelly in core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion begin their discussion of teacher education policy issues in the context of the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (the un convention) (un, 2006) and discuss how the un convention served as an impetus for change in the educational landscape of europe. the authors later delve into the current policy agenda for teacher education for inclusion in europe and discuss the core values necessary for teachers to work effectively in inclusive education. the core values discussed were drawn from the work of the european agency for development in special needs education project on teacher education for inclusion (the agency) and on the feedback of hundreds of european stakeholders in education from the policy makers to parents as well as learners themselves. subsequently, the authors present a framework of core values linked to critical areas of teacher competence which the agency developed. in this first issue of global education review, the authors contribute to a growing body of knowledge on the controversial issue of inclusion. their contributions enrich an age-old conversation surrounding the nature and meaning of difference and the ways in which societies treat those deemed “other.” references armstrong, a. c., armstrong, d., & spandagou, i. (2011). inclusion: by choice or by chance? international journal of inclusive education, 15(1), 29-39. collins, k. m. (2003). ability profiling and school failure: one child's struggle to be seen as competent. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. ferri, b, & connor, d.j. (2005). tools of exclusion: race, disability, and (re)segregated education. teachers college record,107(3), 453-474. forman, e. a., & mccormick, d. e. (1995). discourse analysis. remedial & special education, 16(3), 150. gindis, b. (1999). vygotsky's vision: reshaping the practice of special education for the 21st century. remedial and special education, 20(6), 333-340. goodley, d., & rapley, m. (2002). changing the subject: postmodernity and people with 'learning' difficulties. in t. shakespeare (ed.), disability/postmodernity: embodying disability theory (pp. 127-142). new york: continuum press. harry, b., & klingner, j. k. (2006). why are so many minority students in special education? understanding race and disability in schools. new york: teachers college press. liasidou, a. (2008). critical discourse analysis and inclusive educational policies: the power to exclude. journal of educational policy, 23(5), 483-500. mehan, h., hertweck, a., & meihls, j. l. (1986). handicapping the handicapped: decision making in students' educational careers. stanford, ca: stanford university press. global perspectives on inclusion 13 miles, s., & singhal, n. the education for all and inclusive education debate: conflict, contradiction, or opportunity? international journal of inclusive education, 14(1), 1-15. naraian, s. (2013). dis/ability, agency, and context: a differential consciousness for doing inclusive education. curriculum inquiry, 43(3), 360-387. poplin, m., & phillips, l. (1993). sociocultural aspects of language and literacy: issues facing educators of students with learning disabilities. learning disability quarterly, 16(4), 245-255. reid, d. k., & valle, j. w. (2004). the discursive practice of learning disability: implications for instruction and parent-school relations. journal of learning disabilities, special issue, 37(6), 466-481. slee, r. & cook, s. (1993). disabling or enabling. youth studies australia, 12(1), 35-39. unesco (1994). the salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education. author. unesco (2010). efa global monitoring report. education for all. reaching the marginalized. http://unescodoc.unesco.org/images/ 0018/001866/186606e.pdf. united nations (2006). convention on rights of persons with disabilities. retrieved from:http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/co nventionfull.shtml. united nations (2007). from exclusion to equality: realizing the rights of persons with disabilities. handbook for parliamentarians on the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities and its optional protocol. geneva: un office of the high commissioner for human rights. retrieved from: https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&scri d=bmlszxnoc2luz2lolm9yz3xlbmnycgqtaw5kaw f8zg6yzy2mdyzmme4mzuxodg3. varenne, h., & mcdermott, r. (1998). successful failure: the school america builds. boulder, co: westview press. zion, s., & blanchett, w. (2011). [re]conceptualizing inclusion: can critical race theory and interest convergence be utilized to achieve inclusion and equity for african american students? teachers college record, 113(10), 2186-2205. about the author(s) kathy-anne jordan, edd, is an associate professor of education at mercy college, new york. her research interests include racial disproportionality in special education and inclusive education. sudha ramaswamy, phd, bcba-d is an assistant professor of education at the mercy college, new york graduate school of education, where her scholarship focuses on teacher and parent education as well as development of teaching strategies specific to children with developmental disabilities. http://unescodoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186606e.pdf http://unescodoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186606e.pdf cultural and linguistic challenges 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tazi, zoila & wasmuth, helge (2015). cultural and linguistic challenges in early childhood education and care. global education review, 2(1). 1-4. cultural and linguistic challenges in early childhood education and care zoila tazi mercy college, new york helge wasmuth mercy college, new york global migration along with birth patterns among immigrant groups has greatly impacted the demographics of child populations in developed countries (organisation for economic cooperation and development & united nations department of economic and social affairs, 2013). at the same time, the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) reported increases in the availability of early childhood programs as well as the growing consensus on the value of investing in early childhood education and care (ecec) as a strategy to enhance educational attainment (oecd, 2006). as ecec services grow, questions arise about the quality of programming, professional training, and credentialing particularly as the child population rapidly changes. early childhood professionals across the globe are increasingly focused on the issues surrounding the diverse backgrounds of child populations (unesco, 2008); implementing culturally and linguistically relevant programming comes to the fore as a critical element of best practices in ecec. the oecd has tracked initiatives and policy development in early childhood services and identified research on issues of diversity as a growing focus among its member nations (oecd, 2006). as a result of these efforts, the diversity in early childhood education and training (decet) network was created to bring together european organizations to research and promote “valuing diversity in early childhood education and training; studying democratic child care; acknowledging the multiple (cultural and other) identities of children and families; and to effectively address prejudices and discrimination” (www.decet.org). likewise, the international step by step association (issa) was formed in the netherlands to connect early childhood professionals across europe and central asia in a mission to ensure social inclusion and quality care for young children (www.issa.nl). in the united states, prominent organizations such as head start and the national association for the education of young children (naeyc) have clearly articulated principles that guide programming for culturally and linguistically diverse child populations (head start, 2008; naeyc, 1995). undergirding the principles promoted by these organizations is the notion that best practices call for honoring children’s home languages and cultures. in the early childhood ______________________________ corresponding author: zoila tazi, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: ztazi@mercy.edu http://www.issa.nl/ mailto:ztazi@mercy.edu 2 global education review 2(1) setting this means preserving the home language as a means of promoting positive cultural identity, connecting with both the child and his or her family, and, notably, as a means of promoting academic achievement. however, this perspective remains controversial and politicized across the globe. as recently as december of 2014, germany’s conservative christian social union party advocated for immigrants to adopt the german language (abandoning all others) in all public spheres as well as in their homes in order to achieve integration into german society (smale, 2014). while the statement was met with widespread criticism and unfavorable commentary, the incident is reflective of the message often leveled at culturally and linguistically diverse immigrant populations: if you want to belong, shed your language and foreign ways. pitting multiculturalism or multilingualism against integration poses a double bind to an immigrant population. oftentimes it is the children of immigrants, born in the host country, who must resolve the conflict at their own expense. in the united states, for example, sacrificing one’s ancestral language or culture for the sake of assimilating not only represents painful personal losses, but it is still no guarantee of success in broader society (haller, portes & lynch, 2011). in fact, the betrayal of such closely held markers of identity can contribute to a spiral of downward assimilation leaving the second generation to experience greater rates of disenfranchisement, poverty, and unemployment than their own immigrant parents (haller et al., 2011). implementing best practices of ecec in diverse communities across the globe implies pluralistic approaches that embrace children’s cultures and languages. this means being willing to challenge closely held beliefs about parenting or family life, for example, in order to make room for the diverse perspectives of other cultures (sanagavarapu, 2010 ). it also means adopting heteroglossic ideologies that recognize and value the unique unfolding of language skills in the multilingual child rather than privilege a single national language for gaining status or citizenship (flores & schissel, 2014). to effectively serve the multilingual child, all of her languages need to be at her disposal for learning and meaning-making. elevating the status of one language over others, or strictly controlling the use and purpose of a language, runs counter to the nature of multilingualism and creates subtractive conditions where children are at risk for language loss. this issue of global education review seeks to understand the cultural and linguistic challenges confronting young children across countries experiencing marked changes in demographics. conditions across three very different contexts (bhutan, luxembourg, and the united states) inform a discussion on the tensions between promoting assimilation and preserving cultural affiliations; likewise, preserving children’s home languages can be seen as inconvenient, irrelevant to their learning or, perhaps worse, threatening to their full membership in society. even where children are encouraged to learn more than one language, it is not necessarily to preserve ethno-minority languages but rather to introduce the languages associated with political power (such as english) or the language conveying a national identity. these tensions consume public attention and thereby forestall the exploration and discovery of the inherent benefits of cultural and linguistic diversity among young children. in using a policy of ‘gross national happiness,’ jessica ball and karma chimi wangchuk identify societal, familial, and economic shifts in bhutan that are driving the demand for ecec programs. these programs are expected to promote school readiness and provide a much needed transition to formal education for children in bhutan’s over 20 different language groups. however, only dzongkha, the national language, and english, are the languages of instruction in primary cultural and linguistic challenges 3 [type text] schools while english is the language of instruction for the remainder of grades. the excusive focus on learning dzongkha and english means that ethno-minority linguistic proficiency is not supported, which can lead to a loss of languages. to avoid such a loss, ball and wangchuk argue for a “made in bhutan” approach in accordance with bhutan’s unique gross national happiness policy. such a multicultural model aims for importing and implementing well-proven western approaches, while at the same time valuing local knowledge, goals, and practices. in lost in translanguaging? practices of language promotion in luxembourgish early childhood education, sascha neumann introduces luxembourg as one of the few officially multilingual states in western europe which maintains the largest proportion of foreign immigrants in europe. its “super diversity” of languages has created a population of translinguals who, not only speak multiple languages, but routinely use languages in combination. this fluid and dynamic use of languages exemplifies garcía’s (2009) description of translanguaging. in recent years there has been an enormous expansion of the child care system, both public and private forcing the question of how to address the many languages spoken by young children. while there is a strong commitment to multilingualism as a special feature of the luxembourgian society, multilingualism is perceived as a challenge to the national identity. neumann describes two approaches for this dilemma: one is the promotion of luxembourgish as the so-called “language of integration.” the other is the maintenance of multilingualism through concepts such as "one face one speech” where each adult working with children would speak only one language at all times. both of these approaches, however, are in contrast with the translanguaging in the lived experience of luxembourgish society. neumann argues that multilingualism viewed through a monolingual lens still results in limitations imposed on children’s various language resources. finally, linda espinosa examines conditions in the united states for young children called “dual language learners” (dlls) who are learning english while continuing to master their home language. in challenges and benefits of early bilingualism in the u.s. context, she describes how the dll population has tripled in the last several decades and now accounts for 25% of all children in the united states. despite research highlighting children’s innate ability to learn multiple languages and garner long-term social, cognitive, cultural and economic advantages from being bilingual, english-only instruction is the most common approach offered in ecec. in the united states, learning english as a second language often comes at the expense of continued first language development. thus, dlls are unlikely to benefit from the cognitive advantages of bilingualism. in addition, in many u.s. early care settings young dlls show first language loss as they become more proficient in english. espinosa argues that the united states needs to re-examine the science of early bilingualism, recognize the unique developmental contexts and characteristics of young dlls without concluding that these differences are deficits, and design instructional and assessment approaches that are responsive to their needs. the articles in this issue highlight the struggles early childhood professionals face in embracing multiculturalism and multilingualism as ecec expands. eager to adopt researchbased approaches, they nevertheless struggle with political realities and ideologies that control program development in ways that jeopardize children’s linguistic potential. this seems a contradiction of the very purpose of expanding ecec across the globe. world census figures indicate that immigration will continue to drive demographic changes (organisation for economic 4 global education review 2(1) cooperation and development & united nations department of economic and social affairs, 2013). as diverse families and children across the world avail themselves of ecec programs, there will be a greater call for early childhood professionals well versed in multiculturalism and multilingualism. it will also be a call for greater engagement in advocacy on behalf of children. if we are to safeguard the intercultural dispositions and the multilingual skills we will need in the next generation, we must preserve these competencies in young children now. likewise, if we are to create effective ecec programs that contribute to children’s eventual educational attainment, we cannot begin by disregarding their cultures and eradicating their home languages. we imagine instead ecec programs that promote cultural competence; that invite children to speak and develop their home languages; programs that promote language learning not just for children but for the adults who work with them; and programs that embrace diversity in all its forms, welcoming diverse young children, in the broadest sense, as citizens of the world. references diversity in early childhood education and training (decet) and international step by step association (issa). diversity and social inclusion exploring competences for professional practice in early childhood education and care. retrieved december 8, 2014 from http://www.decet.org/fileadmin/decetmedia/publications/diversity-and-socialinclusion.pdf flores, n., & schissel, j.l. (2014). dynamic bilingualism as the norm: envisioning a heteroglossic approach to standards-based reform. tesol quarterly vol. 48, no. 3, pp. 454-479. garcía, o. (2009). bilingual education in the 21st century: a global perspective. oxford: wiley. haller, w., portes, a., & lynch, s.m. (2011). dreams fulfilled, dreams shattered: determinants of segmented assimilation in the second generation. social forces vol. 89 (3), pp. 733-762. head start (2008). revisiting and updating the multicultural principles for head start programs serving children ages birth to five. retrieved december 15, 2014 from http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/hs/resources/ecl kc_bookstore/pdfs/revisiting%20multicultural%2 0principles%20for%20head%20start_english.pdf national association for the education of young children (1995) position statement: responding to linguistic and cultural diversity: recommendations for effective early childhood education. retrieved december 15, 2014 from http://www.naeyc.org/files/naeyc/file/positions/ps div98.pdf organisation for economic cooperation and development & united nations department of economic and social affairs (2013). world migration in figures. retrieved december 7, 2014 from http://www.oecd.org/els/mig/worldmigration-in-figures.pdf organisation for economic cooperation and development (2006). starting strong ii: early childhood education and care. retrieved december 7, 2014 from http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/37425999.pdf sanagavarapu, p. (2010). what does cultural globalisation mean for parenting in immigrant families in the 21st century? australasian journal of early childhood, vol. 35 (2), pp. 36-42. smale, a. (2014, december 8). party backs off german-only as a suggestion for immigrants. new york times. united nations educational scientific and cultural organisation (2008). the impact of global migration on the education of young children. unesco policy brief, no. 43, april – september, 2008. about the authors zoila tazi, phd, is an associate professor in educational leadership at mercy college. her research interests include bilingualism in early childhood, school readiness and early childhood education. she has served as director of a head start program, a family literacy program and as a school principal. she has worked with young children and families in leadership positions over many years. she has been in an administrative capacity in several children’s programs including as director of a head start program, a family literacy program and as a school principal. helge wasmuth, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of childhood education at mercy college. prior to mercy college, he held positions in kindergarten training and higher education in germany and switzerland. his scholarly research interests include the history of early childhood education, bilingualism, and innovative teaching methods in online learning. http://www.decet.org/fileadmin/decet-media/publications/diversity-and-social-inclusion.pdf http://www.decet.org/fileadmin/decet-media/publications/diversity-and-social-inclusion.pdf http://www.decet.org/fileadmin/decet-media/publications/diversity-and-social-inclusion.pdf http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/hs/resources/eclkc_bookstore/pdfs/revisiting%20multicultural%20principles%20for%20head%20start_english.pdf http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/hs/resources/eclkc_bookstore/pdfs/revisiting%20multicultural%20principles%20for%20head%20start_english.pdf http://eclkc.ohs.acf.hhs.gov/hslc/hs/resources/eclkc_bookstore/pdfs/revisiting%20multicultural%20principles%20for%20head%20start_english.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/mig/world-migration-in-figures.pdf http://www.oecd.org/els/mig/world-migration-in-figures.pdf http://www.oecd.org/newsroom/37425999.pdf new perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ferrer, aramina vega, núñez, victoria & mercado, carmen i. (2015). new perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism in a globalized world. global education review, 2 (2). 1-6 new perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism in a globalized world aramina vega ferrer mercy college, new york victoria núñez mercy college, new york carmen i. mercado hunter college, city university of new york we are living through changes far greater in magnitude and many times more rapid than any generation in human history, primarily due to globalization and the development of new learning technologies (kellner, 2000; pea, 2009; suárez-orozco & páez, 2001). globalization moves jobs, people, products, and ideas, blurring national boundaries and augmenting the racial, ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity of schools (banks et al., 2007). in this context of globalization, technological change, and social diversity, a new and broader term for literacy development has emerged: multiliteracies. multiliteracies was coined in 1996 by a group of international literacy researchers and educators (the new london group) who gathered in new london, new hampshire, united states (u.s.), to discuss the changes in literacy development. the term builds upon the underlying theories that literacy development cannot be separated from language and culture (vygotsky, 1978), and that knowledge cannot be transmitted, but rather is constructed by each learner on the basis of what is already known and by the strategies developed over a lifetime, at home and in school (wells, 1986). for the new london group (1996), literacy is multidimensional, reflecting the changing social and educational perspectives of learning. from a sociocultural context, for example, literacy tools such as books and technology do not have meaning in and of themselves. instead, they can only be understood in terms of what they provide the individual in achieving a particular purpose in meaningful social contexts. the new london group argued for a different understanding of linguistic and cultural diversity by recognizing the local and global connectedness of languages and cultures in contact: effective citizenship and productive work now require that we interact effectively using multiple languages, multiple englishes, and communication variations in language, be they technical, sporting, or related to groupings of interest and affiliation. when the proximity of cultural ______________________________ corresponding author: aramina vega ferrer, mercy college school of education department of literacy and multilingual studies 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 10522 email: aferrer@mercy.edu mailto:aferrer@mercy.edu 2 global education review 2(2) and linguistic diversity is one of the key facts of our time, the very nature of language learning has changed. (para. 13) within this new local and global reality, bilingualism has found its place — providing educators with a clearer lens for understanding the phenomenon as a complex, dynamic process, and consequently suggests that “bilingual education practices must be extended to reflect the complex multilingual and multimodal communicative networks of the twenty-first century” (garcía, 2009, p. 5). garcía defined bilingualism as “using more than one language, and/or language varieties, in whatever combination” (p. 9) thereby addressing national multilingual positons, policies and practices in countries worldwide today. the development of bilingualism and biliteracy within educational contexts varies based on geographical location. in europe, for example, bilingualism and linguistic diversity have been long held norms “based on human rights, democracy, and the rule of the law,” (baetens beardsmore, 2009, p. 198), and supported through policy and funding for bilingual education by supra-national institutions that promote plurililingualism and multilingualism such as the council of europe and the european commission. notwithstanding, baetens beardsmore noted that although major policy changes in recent years by the council of europe and the european commission promote bilingual education programs for majority and minority languages that integrate second or foreign language learning with content instruction, such as content and language integrated learning (clil), they have yet to address the languages of immigrants. english has emerged as a world language and is taught in schools and universities today as english as a native language (enl), english as a second language (esl) and english as a foreign language (efl) (sharma, 2008). kachru (1985) developed a framework of three concentric circles for discussing the prominent role of english and its varieties globally and the functional domains of its bilingual development alongside native and indigenous languages: (1) inner circle native english-speaking countries such as the us, britain, canada, australia and new zealand, (2) outer circle former british and u.s. colonized countries such as india, kenya, ghana, nigeria, jamaica, south africa, the philippines, etc., where english plays an important historical and governmental role, and (3) expanding circle countries where english is not an official language but is recognized as an important international language for business, science, technology, among them western europe, israel, japan, china, korea, russia, taiwan, and saudi arabia. in the u.s., recent research indicates that 75% of the u.s. latino population uses both english and spanish in the home (krogstad & gonzález-barrera, 2015), and 95% of latinos believe it is important for latinos to continue to speak spanish in the future (taylor, lópez, martínez, & velasco, 2012). immigration from central and south america to the u.s. has dramatically augmented the spanish speaking population, and latino immigrant children, predominantly mexican, account for more than half (58%) of all immigrant youth (kohler & lazarín, 2007). lacking in material resources, and nonmaterial resources (young, 1990), latinos from marginalized communities interact in transnational or diasporic spaces to survive and adapt, and, as a group, continue to forge new ways of being latino, which includes new ways of communicating in spanish, english, indigenous languages of the americas, and the various combinations to which these give rise. u.s. policies shaping teacher recruitment and preparation resulting from the influential no child left behind act of 2002 (a) reduce the new perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism 3 curriculum to a few core subjects (mainly reading and mathematics), and (b) shift student and teacher evaluations to high-stakes tests with public accountability. these policies serve to pressure many states and local schools into the placement of bilingual immigrant students in mainstream english-only classrooms with additional english as a second language (esl) support or transitional bilingual education programs which aim at scaffolding learning for students as they acquire english, over placing them in maintenance bilingual education, or dual language programs which focus on long term bilingualism (rodríguez, carrasquillo, & lee, (2014). the rigorous common core standards (2010) approved by 45 states of the u.s. have done little in the way of promoting bilingualism or improving educational outcomes for bilingual immigrant students, and beliefs and practices that contribute to the low level education to which latino children and youth have access, contrasts sharply with the educational dreams and aspirations of these communities (brittain, 2009; valenzuela, 1999). language proficiency and academic performance for bilinguals is compounded by the complexity of bilingualism and the degree of proficiency in each language (mackey, 1968; macnamara, 1970). in addition, communicative competence for bilinguals develops differently from monolinguals with regard to language use at home, along with each linguistic community’s attitudes and understandings about what accounts for competence (bialystok, 2001; grosjean, 1989; romaine, 2000). for example, zentella (1988) identified four major patterns of communication in the home for migrant puerto rican families in new york city which were related to the fluid use and mixing of language(s) that the parents speak to each other, the language(s) that the parents speak to the children and vice versa, and the language(s) the children speak among themselves. ferrer (in press) found clear evidence for puerto rican families engaging in the bilingual practice of code-switching between spanish and english at home, thereby demonstrating “a fluid comfort with both languages at the spoken level” (p. 45). these communication patterns in the home support the notion garcía (2009) posited of “multiple discursive practices” or translanguaging where, “bilinguals translanguage to include and facilitate communication with others, but also to construct deeper understandings and make sense of their bilingual worlds” (p. 45). consequently, no single profile or test score can adequately measure bilingual competence because single language scores do not capture the richness and fullness of a bilingual’s repertoire (bialystok, 2001; grosjean, 1989; romaine, 2000). further, bialystok stressed that advanced from a methodological stand point, “bilingualism is not a categorical variable” (p. 19). this issue of global education review presents new perspectives on bilingualism in all of its dynamism and complexity seen through the lens of multiliteracies to examine the teaching and learning process in developing literacy in two languages that occurs transnationally within the social contexts of school, family, and community. correspondingly, these perspectives serve to underscore the pivotal role biculturalism plays in forming new civic identities in four diverse global contexts where english is used alongside multiple native and indigenous languages: the united states, austria, the united kingdom, and kenya. in the first article, “the construction of biliterate narratives and identities between children and families,” bobbie kabuto explores the social and cultural perspectives of bilingualism in the home through research with two families in the united states: one a greek4 global education review 2(2) speaking family and the other a spanishspeaking family. her article presents a definition of a bilingual family within a u.s. context. further, she considers the influence of social class and global power in the families’ varied emphasis on their children’s biliterate development. the construction of bilingual identities and the concurrent construction of bicultural identities are highlighted in kabuto’s research as it is in subsequent articles in this issue. robin danzak, in her article, “the meaning of roots: how a migrant farmworker student developed a bilingual-bicultural identity through change,” introduces research that explores the linguistic and cultural tensions that exist for young bilingual migrant farmworkers throughout the u.s. she presents a case study of manuel, a mexican teen migrant farmworker in the southeastern u.s., and bilingual speaker of spanish, english, and otomi (indigenous language). manuel’s story, documented through interviews and autobiographical writing at two points in time, age 14 and 18, offers keen insights into the academic and sociocultural challenges of school that bilingual immigrants face, and the role that family plays in the development of their bilingual-bicultural social identities. the importance of educating bilingual children is complemented in this issue by a concurrent inclusion of research that incorporates the training of bilingual pre-service teachers. maría arreguín-anderson presents research on an inquiry-based afterschool program in san antonio, texas, in her article, “bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition: biophilia at a la clase mágica site.” writing from this border region between the u.s. and mexico, the participating students were mexican-american and mexican. she found that the inquiry approach allowed for rich linguistic and cognitive development for the children in both spanish and english. because the children were being educated in a dual language school, the goal of the after-school program was to enrich the children’s language and cognitive development in both spanish and english. in their article, “teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom: a transnational study in the united states and the united kingdom,” gail mceachron and ghazala bhatti, compare educational outcomes and programs for language minority students learning english as an additional language (eal) in grades k-12 in henrico, u.s. and bristol, united kingdom (u.k.). mceachron in the u.s. and bhatti in the u.k., worked collaboratively as teacher educators alongside a team of exchange pre-service teacher candidates from their two universities. they observed classroom teachers in practice, collected data, made comparisons, and generated global insights. mceachron and bhatti’s research underscores the commonality of linguistic, cultural, and instructional needs for language minority students learning eal in two inner circle countries where english is the native language, and the value of collaborating across national boundaries for teacher preparation to develop “a more global dimension for perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism” (pp. 19–20). in another transnational study, “teaching english as a ‘second language’ in kenya and the united states: convergences and divergences,” zaline roy-campbell compares the linguistic needs and instruction of high school students learning english as a second language (esl) in two diverse global contexts where english is used for different purposes as outer circle and inner circle countries. she presents instructional models and materials for teaching esl that integrate academic content with language at the secondary school level, and suggests an new perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism 5 alternative focus in the preparation of esl teacher candidates for secondary schools. finally, claudia mewald presents research on vocabulary development in the context of clil classrooms in lower austria in her article, “lexical range and communicative competence of learners in bilingual schools in lower austria.” mewald’s research further develops ideas associated with the lexical approach and lexical priming theory and offers conclusions that can be applied to bilingual education occurring in many different program models. her research confirms for us the great value in vocabulary work as a tool to developing greater communicative competence in a non-dominant language. further, her article offers examples of vocabulary strategies that lead educators away from straightforward memorization of vocabulary to richer means of assisting students to create connections between new vocabulary and existing vocabulary in their non-dominant language. implications of the research presented here lead us to consider three ideas. first, europe has taken multiple steps in the direction of creating policy and practices across nations as opposed to an approach toward the bilingual education of citizens that goes nation by nation. this is a worthwhile trend that other nations should consider. second, educators around the globe are moving away from terms that represent the presence of two languages in an educational context, bilingualism, to terms that represent more than two languages such as multilingualism or plurilingualism. this semantic shift allows for the recognition of multiple home languages for children. finally, educators are encouraged to take into account parents’ perspectives on bilingualism and biliteracy for a number of reasons. educators and parents may have different perspectives on the bilingual development of the same child. further, the shifts around the development of bilingual education are promoting a different perspective than held by educators in the past: that developing biliteracy is not an “all-ornothing” proposition, as kabuto writes in her article published here (p. 7). references banks, j. a., au, k.h., ball, a. f., bell, p., & gordon, e. w., et al. 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(1986). the meaning makers: children learning language and using language to learn. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. young, i.m. (1990). justice and the politics of difference. princeton, nj: princeton university press. zentella, a. c. (1988). the language situation of puerto ricans. in s. l. mckay & s. c. wong (eds.), language diversity: problem or resource? (pp. 140– 165). boston, ma: heinle & heinle publishers. about the author(s) aramina vega ferrer, phd., is an associate professor of literacy and multilingual studies and director of the school of education bronx parent center at mercy college. she is a former spanish high school teacher, junior high school bilingual program esl teacher, supervisor of bilingual education at the district level, and elementary school principal. her research interests are bilingualism, bilingualism and literacy development, family literacy, and community engaged scholarship. victoria núñez, phd., is an assistant professor in literacy and multilingual studies at mercy college. she has worked in teacher education for the past nine years. her career as an educator began in adult literacy programs in boston. she has worked as a literacy educator, an esl and humanities teacher in the boston public schools, and with the state department of education in massachusetts. her research interests include second language writing, bilingualism and literacy development, equity in higher education, and latino studies. carmen i. mercado, phd., is professor emeritus at the city university of new york. her formal preparation as an educator began in a small, experimental spanish/english dual language school in the bronx, new york. her lifelong commitment to addressing educational inequality through teaching, research and service has been shaped by experiences in her family, as a public school student, teacher and teacher educator. 172 global education review 2014-2015 board of reviewers mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji stateuniversity, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college, city university of new york krishna bista, university of louisiana at monroe caitlin block, drexel university cendrine bomboko, george washington university dr. caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta alisha brown, michigan state university dr jon callow, the university of sydney, australia mi-hyun chung, mercy college hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio dr. pamela m christian, azusa pacific university, california ross collin, manhattanville college arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut dr. yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo dellicarpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education ms alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college william dwyer, stephen f. austin state university, texas cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l germain-williams, mercy college damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago dr. amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame dr. heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h greenberg, the children’s institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university 2014-2015 board of reviewers 173 amanda m. gunning, mercy college douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom mark hamilton, education development center, united states dr. nancy heilbronner, mercy college stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university ms. sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university ravi kumar, davanagere university, india jayne c. lammers, university of rochester kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the georgewashington university lawry v. mahon, victoria university, australia gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom meghan e. marrero, mercy college eric martone, mercy college nicole martone, naugatuck community college patrick mccabe, mercy college jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas ezella mcpherson, wayne state university jung kang miller, mercy college evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom maroun naser, stem academy, canada newhouse, erica, mercy college nitecki, elena, mercy college victoria nunez, mercy college aki ohseki, mercy college carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman, mercy college mustafa ozmusul, harran university, turkey melissa parenti, st. john’s university do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university 2014-2015 board of reviewers 174 eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota kari f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom sudha ramaswamy, mercy college matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuth, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom harun serpil, university of wisconsin madison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school good day john ezinwa silas, nnamdi azikiwe university awka, nigeria kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri dessirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university elaine marie walker, seton hall university sabrina l. walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark angela webb, louisiana state university melvin wermuth, mercy college jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra mornit white, mississipi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand dr gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh jie zhang, the college at brockport state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh the role of case study in teacher education 187 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schritteser, ilse (2014). the role of case study in teacher education: an attempt to bridge the gap between action and reflection. global education review, 1 (4). 187-194. the role of case study in teacher education: an attempt to bridge the gap between action and reflection ilse schrittesser university of vienna abstract international studies provide evidence that effective teachers are essential to students’ learning success. research on teacher effectiveness in the united states began in the 1980’s, and valid and reliable methods for assessing teacher effectiveness have been developed in its context, research on this topic is still relatively new in german-speaking countries. while effective teaching is a highly complex construct which includes a whole repertoire of skills, there seems evidence that some of these skills play a particularly significant role for effective teaching. the present article will take a close look at these skills from the perspective of two mostly separate discourses: expertise research and the qualities of expert teachers, which are usually discussed in the anglo-american context, and theories of teacher professionalism which is highly influential in the german speaking countries. the two concepts are explained and it is argued that–interestingly enough–research results of both discourses converge in the proposition that diagnostic and interpretative skills and an intuitive feel for situations –situation awareness–are decisive when it comes to successfully fostering students’ learning processes. these skills do not grow automatically with growing experience but need to be fostered by deliberate practice. consequences for teacher education are drawn by suggesting that focusing on case study in teacher education as a particularly useful type of deliberate practice, is a promising approach to develop the above mentioned key skills. keywords effective teachers, expert teachers, case study, case method, teacher training, teacher professionalism 1. introduction since international studies provide evidence that high-quality teaching is directly connected with students’ learning success, special attention is now being given to the topic of teacher education (cf. among others, darlinghammond, 2000; darling-hammond et al., 2002; hattie, 2003; oecd, 2005; wu, 2005; schratz & schrittesser, 2007; zlatkintroitschanskaia et al., 2009). while research on teacher effectiveness is still relatively new in german-speaking countries, the teachereffectiveness movement in the usa began back in the 1980s, and reliable and valid methods for assessing teacher effectiveness have been developed in the context of that research http://www.metproject.org. although teacher effectiveness is a highly complex topic (cf. among others helmke, 2004, seidel & shavelson, 2007) that demands dynamic research models (e.g. kyriakides & creemer, 2008), there are some factors that can be considered reliable indicators of effective teaching, for example teaching that fosters students’ learning and supports their gains in ______________________________ corresponding author: ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, department of education and center for teacher education room: 324b, 1090 wien, porzellangasse 4, austria email ilse.schrittesser@univie.ac.at 188 global education review 1(4) achievement. in this article, i will argue that research into expertise and professionalism theories support this notion of teacher effectiveness. as two mostly separate discourses, findings on how expertise develops and professionalization processes converge when it comes to identifying situation awareness and interpretative skills as focal points for high-quality performance. i, in turn, will endeavour to show that these skills should be given more attention in teacher education programmes, as numerous studies suggest and advocate. 2. expertise research and the expert teacher a considerable number of studies on effective teaching refer to the findings of expertise research and relate effective teaching to expertise in teaching. indeed, expertise research has offered some crucial insights into what distinguishes expert teachers from their less effective counterparts. experts rely on contextualized thinking when teaching, while less proficient teachers tend to teach with less regard to context. that is the reason why experts are more able to respond quickly and intuitively to events and are more flexible in their practices, which also helps them to creatively improve their performance. mica endsley (2006) speaks in this context of situation awareness, by which she means that experts of all fields share fast and accurate pattern recognition capabilities and perceive meaningful patterns in the domain in which they are experienced, whereas less capable performers cannot always make sense of what confronts them. i will come back to this notion later in this article. one question that of course arises is whether the results of expertise research can be validly translated into research on the expert teacher. many of the researchers working on expertise in teaching seem to naturally draw on the results of expertise research. david berliner (2001) questioned whether this was justifiable and ultimately concluded–on the basis of validated research results–that experts in teaching share characteristics of experts in other fields (such as chess, medical diagnosis and physics problem solving). “there is no basis to believe there are differences in the sophistication of the cognitive processes used by teachers and experts in other fields.” (berliner, 2001, p. 471) in the analysis below, i follow berliner’s position when he underlines that propositions derived from research about expertise generally also “set the stage for (the now) validated prototypical set of features of expert teachers.” (berliner, p. 472). 3. expert vs. experienced teacher there is another question that also needs to be asked here, namely when can we talk of expertise in teaching and which other group(s) can be identified and used to compare the achievement of expertise in teaching? whereas most of the studies in expertise research compare novices with experts, john hattie (2003), for example, argues that significant differences are not only to be found between novice and expert teachers but also between expert teachers and teachers with many years of experience who have not developed expertise in their field. based on a large-scale literature review, hattie identifies five dimensions which seem crucial to the development of expertise that goes beyond mere experience. expert teachers, as hattie reports “can identify essential representations of their subject, can guide learning through classroom interactions, can monitor learning and provide feedback, can attend to affective attributes, and can influence student outcomes.” (hattie, 2003, p. 5) according to hattie, these five dimensions lead to 16 prototypical attributes of expertise. for example, there is the capacity of deep subject representation, which enables expert teachers to quickly recognize crucial learning and interaction processes in the classroom. being at home in their subjects, these teachers are more able to recognize sequences of events, make better predictions about what is going to happen and act more spontaneously in line with the requirements of the individual students. they can also be more responsive the role of case study in teacher education 189 not only to each of their students, but also to the class as a whole. hattie, parenthetically, criticizes the fact that teachers, also the experienced ones, traditionally focus on “curriculum, assessment, time bells, and other bureaucratic controls,” while more responsiveness to students’ needs would be more beneficial and also more effective in terms of student achievement (hattie, pp. 5-9). another of these 16 attributes deals with the special guidance of learning by expert teachers. due to their ability to perceive the classroom situation on multiple dimensions, they can again guide and monitor learning processes better. they are more contextoriented and have better situation cognition than the average experienced teacher. another attribute refers to the use of routines and to the fact that expert teachers seem to be more “automatic” than other teachers. while they share well-learned routines with experienced teachers, expert teachers optimise their automaticity to allow them to be able to concentrate on and respond to more complex, i.e., less routine, challenges (hattie, p. 8). the majority of hattie’s 16 prototypic attributes explicitly address capacities like being sensitive to context, being receptive to classroom interaction patterns or being responsive to students’ learning attempts and individual needs and interests. the other attributes not mentioned explicitly here also refer to highly significant aspects of the profile of an expert teacher and round this profile off. these include a high level of respect for students on the part of the teacher, having a passion for teaching and learning and the special and personalized ways in which expert teachers influence students’ learning outcomes. finally, and most importantly, expert teachers are not content to see their students merely achieve the goals set; they transcend surface learning and encourage deep learning in order to see their students go beyond these goals. surface learning is more about content knowledge and knowing what to do to pass an exam, while deep learning is aimed at understanding meaning and identifying related, and extending ideas (hattie, p. 9). aside from the aspects mentioned above, which are clearly all important, the majority of the attributes identified seem to converge in what is referred to in expertise research as situation awareness. 4. situation awareness, interpretative skills and adaptive expertise a closer look at the concept of situation awareness, which plays an important role in many expert domains, reveals three factors it seems to combine: perception, comprehension and projection. the perception of relevant information forms the basis of situation awareness. yet this involves not just perception, but also comprehension, which “demands that people understand the meaning and significance of what they have perceived.” (endsley, 2006, p. 634) this, in turn, “encompasses how people combine, interpret, store and retain information, integrating multiple pieces of information and arriving at a determination of its relevance.” at the highest level of situation awareness, the ability to project is developed in addition to refined perception and comprehension. this essentially refers to “the ability to forecast future situation events and dynamics.” as endsley notes: “the ability to project from current events and dynamics to anticipate future events (and their implications) allows for timely decision making. experts rely heavily on future projections as a hallmark of skilled performance.” (endsley p. 635) studies on expertise–mostly undertaken with world-class chess players, athletes, pilots or military experts–show that situation awareness increases with increasing expertise, which in turn relies on experience. however, according to these studies (and similar to hattie’s line of argument, see above), gathering mere experience is not sufficient. “although the act of understanding and projecting can become quick and often effortless, i.e., a clear comprehension of the situation springing readily to mind, evidence also shows that experts spend considerable effort at the task of situation assessment.” (endsley, p. 648) situation awareness must therefore be seen as an area of study that 190 global education review 1(4) “provides a focal point around which experts integrate the information they gather in order to perform their tasks.” (endsley, p. 649) “the ability to develop and maintain situation awareness is a significant contributor to the high levels of performance exhibited by experts in the many domains where dynamic situations must be mastered and understood in order to perform well.” (endsley, p. 649) in an older study on expert intuition, hubert and stuart dreyfus argue (using less technical vocabulary than some of the more recent research on expert performance) that interpretation lays the basis for expert intuition as it determines what is seen as important in a situation. accordingly, interpretative ability constitutes the type of expert judgment that suggests meaningful answers to given situations (dreyfus & dreyfus 1986, p. 36). this notion brings to mind johann friedrich herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact, which he elaborated in his 1802 introductory lecture on pedagogy. “the teacher’s pedagogical tact,” writes andrea r. english in a recent re-interpretation of herbart’s theory, “truly reveals itself in the way that she effectively responds in the moment … to the learner’s needs and abilities when these become apparent ….” (english 2013, p. 146; for an analysis of herbart’s concept of pedagogical tact see also van manen, 1991). similar to hattie’s distinction between expertise and experience, linda darlinghammond and john bransford (2005) distinguish between different forms of expertise, namely routine expertise and adaptive expertise. the former, they contend, is used to solve everyday problems representative of the specific domain (analogous to what hattie refers to as “experience”). the latter, in contrast, allows experts to deal with completely novel tasks by looking for new approaches to the problem they are confronted with. in a similar attempt, nietfeld et al. (2007) take up the idea of crystallized and fluid intelligence (cf. horn & cattell 1966) when they state that “crystallized abilities are essential in the development of well-organized knowledge structures that lead to expertise, while fluidization requires that learners revise existing problem-solving strategies, assemble new ones, search for new analogies, or new perspectives (nietfeld et al. 2007, p. 511). just as experience is necessary for expert performance, so-called crystallized abilities can be understood as the routine scaffold of expertise. yet in every novel situation–and teaching is full of such novelties and uncertainties–only fluidization will provide access to flexible decisions and will offer a larger, more creative repertoire of options. all the concepts mentioned have one thing in common: they all contend that refined and sophisticated forms of expertise are characterised by a somewhat context-adaptive, fluid, interpretative capacity which finds its equivalent in notions such as pedagogical tact (herbart), expert intuition (dreyfus & dreyfus), fluid or adaptive expertise (bransford & darling-hammond, nietfeld et al.), or situation awareness (endsley). while hattie neither explicitly defines nor uses an explicit term for this type of analysis, it is still present in almost all the attributes mentioned in connection with his distinction between expertise vs. experience. accordingly, the development of this capacity should be given more attention in teacher education curricula. 5. case knowledge and case-based methods in professionalism research berliner (2001) points out that “case knowledge” seems to be a key for opening up ways to make adaptive or fluid expertise grow. when a problem occurs, experts go through their case knowledge until they find “an old friend”–“a case like the one before them” (berliner, p. 476). by having a similar experience to draw on, they have made a good start towards solving the problem. consequently, berliner recommends greatly enhancing the role of case study in teacher education. “it is case knowledge that is probably the basis for positive transfer by experts in complex environments, meaning that the ability to codify and draw on case knowledge may be the essence of adaptive or fluid expertise.” (berliner, p. 477) the role of case study in teacher education 191 this observation goes hand in hand with findings in professionalism research (cf. among others oevermann, 1996), which point out that the formation of a professional habitus involves an intuitive and reflective dimension, which is closely linked to narrative and interpretative skills (cf. charon, 2001, schrittesser, 2013). but before i deal more closely with the notion of the professional habitus, let me first make a few remarks on the use of the term “professional.” although this term is now widely used, it still remains a frequent topic of discussion. “the idea of a ‘profession’,” writes lee s. shulman in a 1998 article in which he tries to clarify what is usually meant by profession, “describes a special set of circumstances for deep understanding, complex practice, ethical conduct, and higher-order learning, circumstances that define the complexity of the enterprise and explain the difficulties of prescribing both policies and curriculum in this area.” (shulman 1998/2004, p. 529) accordingly, the role of professions in society is not simply to apply expert knowledge–as is assumed in some accounts of professionalism. in fact, professionalism serves as a source of social cohesion and has to be understood as a literate practice that draws on research-based knowledge and a repertoire of interpretative skills (cf. kanes, 2012, p.6). however, as andrew abbott (1988, p. 318) points out, profession is “not ‘objectively’ definable precisely because of its power and importance in our culture.” according to abbott, the crucial question in connection with professions is “how societies structure expertise” (abbott, p. 323). “as i have repeatedly argued,” he continues, “expertise is also institutionalized in commodities and organizations. to ask why societies incorporate their knowledge in professions is thus not only to ask why societies have specialized, life-time experts, but also why they place expertise in people rather than things or rules.” abbott’s answer to this question adopts a systemic approach–he argues that we have professions because our market-governed societies prefer personally-held resources, whether of knowledge or wealth, to any other type of institutionalization (abbott, 324f.). another answer to this question would be that only people can appropriately and individually understand and adequately respond to the individual case they are confronted with in their domain. in other words, if we look at those specifics of professionalism which cannot be met by a set of rules or a type of institution, but can instead only be dealt with using the interpretative capacities of highly skilled individuals, the intricate, case-oriented pattern of professional performance becomes evident (also see schrittesser, 2011, pp. 95–102). following ulrich oevermann’s (1996) line of argument, a core task of professions that seems to be irreplaceable in any type of society is to successfully deal with real or potential areas of crises in any society or culture–such as the legal and the medical systems, which seem to be represented in some or other form in any type of social community. in today’s knowledge society, the education system must also be regarded as such a highly sensitive area when it comes to safeguarding social cohesion and economic development. against this background, professions, including the teaching profession, have a mediating task between collective and individual interests. teachers, for example, are expected to teach the young in order to make them valuable members of society. at the same time, they should also make sure that each child is perceived as an individual with his or her own particular interests and talents. so, while trying to meet collective demands, teachers are also expected to respect the individual student in his or her own right. this task requires special competences–parallel to those included in theories of professionalism and as pointed out in the shulman quote above. the mediating task reflects this dual commitment to both society as a whole and to the individual client– be it in a medical, legal or education context (oevermann, 1996) and expresses itself, almost necessarily, in what is referred to as a casebased approach. along with higher-order 192 global education review 1(4) learning and domain-specific skills, each professional also has to perceive, comprehend and adequately judge every individual case. this case orientation again not only demands knowledge, it also implies a receptive and intuitive dimension which enables professionals to perceive and to comprehend the underlying meaning in a situation, a remark or a gesture, and allows them to offer appropriate interpretations and, consequently, fruitful solutions. according to this view, professionals work in uncertain situations in which the assessment of the individual situation is more important than routine or technical solutions. one focus of professionalism, therefore, lies on its dynamic and dialectic structure. professionals will use their knowledge to draw their action plans, which they should, in turn, assess against the background of the demands of the specific situation. the latter, however, i.e., the demands of the specific situation, can only become evident to them through a receptive attitude which will help them to become aware of what the individual situation–the case–has to tell them (helsper, 2001; oevermann, 1996). as a matter of fact, the results of expertise research and professionalism research go hand in hand with recent empirical studies in german research on teacher education. andreas gruschka’s (2009) and fritz oser’s and maria spychiger’s (2005) studies in particular, along with some smaller studies on teacher professionalism and expertise (cf. gerhartz, paseka & schrittesser, 2014) show that teachers, even after many years of experience, tend to be predominantly concerned with their lesson plans, and therefore adopt a programmatic instead of a responsive attitude. they cling more to their routine expertise and neglect context and case sensitivity, which leads to a blind spot when case orientation would be required. some teachers tend to just reel off their scripts and observe too little of what is going on among the learners. this is why they often ignore crucial questions asked or mistakes made by their students. being focused on their own scripts, they pay too little attention to the messages coming from the learners. interestingly enough, this also seems to be a problem in the medical field. consequently, some medical curricula are trying to foster interpretative skills in an approach referred to as narrativebased medicine (cf. charon, 2001, also greenhalgh & hurwitz, 1999). also teacher education programmes in german speaking countries have recently begun to recognize a narrative, case-based approach as an entry gate to adaptive or fluid expertise as a central attribute of professionalism in teaching. 6. conclusion i tried to show that although expertise and professionalism research operate in two separate discourses they come to similar conclusions concerning teacher effectiveness. on the basis of research in both fields it is argued that successful teaching, in the sense that it fosters students’ learning success and supports students to become autonomous learners, relies on diagnostic and interpretative skills and a feel for the immediate situation, i.e., situation awareness. case study was identified as the entry gate to the development and refinement of these skills. i concluded therefore that the analysis and interpretation of cases and the use of case study to impart case knowledge and interpretative skills should become an integral part of teacher education programmes. the aims of such an approach would be to cultivate a receptive, contextsensitive attitude, and the comprehension skills which are essential to encouraging deep learning in students; to foster observational and diagnostic skills which are central to monitoring student progress and potential; to learn to analyze the specifics of a situation in order to find out what is the case and why it is an instance of a more general question, which becomes relevant given the dual commitment of teachers both to society and to the individual student; the role of case study in teacher education 193 to try and bridge the gap between doing practice oneself and reflecting on practice incidents as an exercise in deliberate practice, which in turn is crucial for the growth of expertise in teaching. references abbott, a. 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(eds.). pädagogische professionalität: quer denken umdenken neu denken. impulse für next practice im lehrerberuf. thinking pedagogical professionalism outside the box. impulses for next practice in the teaching profession wien: facultas.wuv, pp. 95 122. schrittesser, i. (2013). pädagogische professionalität entfalten: eine besondere form des lernens? professionalism in education: a special type of learning?in: christof, e. & schwarz, j.f. (eds.). lernseits des geschehens. über das verhältnis von lernen, lehren und leiten. being mindful of learning. on the relation between learning, teaching and leadership innsbruck: studienverlag, pp. 85–100. schrittesser, i., s. gerhartz, & a. paseka (2014). innovative learning environments: about traditional and new patterns of learning. european educational research journal 13 (2), pp. 143 – 155. seidel, t., & shavelson, r. j. (2007). teaching effectiveness research in the past decade: the role of theory and research design in disentangling metaanalysis results. review of educational research, 77(4), 454-499. shulman, l. s. ( 1998/2004): the wisdom of practice. essays on teaching, learning, and learning to teach. san francisco: jossey bass. van manen, m. (1991). the tact of teaching. the meaning of pedagogical thoughtfulness. albany: the state university of new york press. wu, r.t.y. (2005). relationship between teachers' teaching effectiveness and school effectiveness in comprehensive high schools in taiwan, republic of china. paper presented at the international congress for school effectiveness and improvement conference, barcelona, spain, 2005. zlatkin-troitschanskaia, o., beck, k., sembill, d., nickolaus, r., & mulder, r. (eds.). (2009). lehrprofessionalität. bedingungen, genese, wirkungen und ihre messung. teacher professionalism. conditions, development, impact, testing weinheim: beltz. about the author ilse schrittesser, phd, is professor of school research and teacher education at the university of vienna. her research interests lie in teaching and learning research, professionalism, teacher education and organization development. she is editor in chief of the austrian-german-swiss journal of teacher education and on the editing board of cos (challenging organizations and society). welcome to the new international journal 8 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: melvin wermuth (2014). thank you, all. global education review, 1 (1). 8-9. thank you, all melvin wermuth editor, global education review it is customary for the editor of a new journal to thank all of the people who helped to make the dream a reality, and this introduction is no different. without the generous help of literally dozens of people, global education review would not exist today. to them and for all of their help, i am grateful. first, thanks to the authors. authorship and publication is the lifeblood of academia, and “the coin of the realm” with respect to promotions and tenure. it is impossible to express in words the debt that we at ger owe to the authors who were willing to take a chance and submit their important work to a journal that had never published. i first suggested the idea of an open access on-line journal to alfred posamentier, dean of the school of education at mercy college. al’s advice, always very pragmatic, was “why don’t you announce it at a faculty meeting and see what kind of support you get?” the faculty was interested and ever since, al’s personal support has been unwavering. at the conclusion of that meeting, patrick mccabe approached me to say, “i want to help you.” patrick, then a new faculty member, had been associate editor at reading and writing quarterly for fifteen years and with his suggestions and guidance the form of the journal was developed: it would be an international, policy oriented journal, focused on timely topics in the field of education. using the broadest definition of “policy maker,” to include practitioners as well as academics and governing elite, was something of a stumbling block. the articles would have to be data based, but still readable enough to ensure access to the widest possible audience. we hope that you will agree that this challenge has been met. many meetings and conversations ensued with bruce cooper (fordham university) who wrote an introduction to this inaugural issue. thank you, bruce, for asking, “what is it going to be about?” then suggesting the title, global education review. thanks, too, to the advisory board who graciously lent their names to this nascent journal, and who selflessly continue to provide support, advice, suggestions and access to their wealth of contacts: dr. maria-luise brownsteiner (university college of teacher education – lower austria), dr. bruce s. cooper (fordham university), dr. anton dobart (austrian ministry of education and culture), dr. curt dudley-marling (lynch school of education, boston college), dr. doris p. fromberg ( hofstra university), dr. r. douglas greer (teachers college, columbia university), dr. ulrike greiner (university college of education upper austria), dr. brigitte rollett (university of vienna), dr. james b. schreiber, (duquesne university), dr. ilse schrittesser javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/80') 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recognition is due to the members of the review board for their timely recommendations and advice, which helps to ensure publication of high quality material. it goes without saying that no peer-reviewed journal exists without reviewers. and the quality of the articles that are published, of course, is dependent on the quality of the reviews. thanks, too, to the faculty of the school of education: the chairs, the theme editors, and the supportive faculty for their help, encouragement and advice every step along the way. tesse santoro of the mercy college libraries gave unstintingly of her time to help me to understand meta data, search engines, and data bases to ensure that global education review reaches the widest possible audience. finally, special thanks are due to erwin epstein, loyola university chicago (emeritus), past president of the comparative and international education society. one of the first questions that he put to me, in the beginning, when i reached out for help was, “what makes you think the world needs another education journal?” thank you, erwin, for putting us on the right track and helping us to answer that question. thank you, dear reader, for logging on and reading this journal. we at ger hope that you will agree that the world really did need another journal. about the author melvin wermuth, edd., is assistant professor of education at mercy college, new york. interrupting deficit narratives in literacy education 3 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mccabe, patrick & newhouse, erica (2014). interrupting deficit narratives in literacy education . global education review, 1 (2), 3-6. interrupting deficit narratives in literacy education patrick mccabe mercy college, new york erica newhouse mercy college, new york the intersection of literacy education, marginalized individuals and groups, and poverty from an international perspective is the focus of this issue of global education review. these three topics are inextricably intertwined. within this labyrinth, to initiate change becomes a massive undertaking. for many, the schools seem to be the logical place to begin. the assumption being, if student achievement levels are increased, so too is access to better, high-paying jobs. as those levels rise, poverty should decrease. in theory, individuals can rise from marginalized economic, social, and cultural status to a more powerful position in the dominant society; or, they can empower themselves within their own economic, social, and cultural setting. however, factors outside the school setting often hamper the opportunity for success in school and become a counter influence to well-intentioned educational reform there are many narratives constructed about the impoverished, marginalized and undereducated. in the united states, the one told by politicians and policy-makers supports starting change in the schools. it is discussed with “standards” and “achievement gaps” and intimidates through the fear of falling behind the other countries. this narrative doesn’t address the underlying problems that cause the lack of academic success by the marginalized in societies world-wide. thus, in order to continue to benefit a particular group, a narrative must be constructed to explain this inequality. these stories of inability, inferiority and immorality become institutionalized, they become ideology. it may seem paradoxical that educational reform alone cannot be expected to be the panacea for increasing the achievement levels of those at the bottom of the economic ladder. david berliner noted of u.s. schools, “although the power of schools and educators to influence individual students is never to be underestimated, the out-of-school factors associated with poverty play both a powerful and a limiting role in what can actually be achieved” (2006, p.950). additionally, joseph stiglitz, recipient of the 2001 nobel prize in economics, decried the growing inequality and economic class bifurcation in america arguing that it leads to decreased opportunity, including decreased educational opportunity (stiglitz, 2012). this is especially true for children whose impoverished surroundings contribute in a significant way to poor health and nutrition, unstable family life, school absence, and, ultimately, to low corresponding author: erica newhouse school of education mercy college 555 broadway dobbs ferry, ny 10522 email: enewhouse@mercy.edu mailto:enewhouse@mercy.edu 4 global education review 1(2) educational achievement as measured by present standards, such as standardized tests. another advocate of social and economic reform to accompany educational reform is james traub, an american journalist, who wrote, ““educational inequality is rooted in economic problems and social pathologies too deep to be overcome by school alone. and if that's true, then there really is every reason to think about the limits of school” (traub, 2000, p. 54). recently, michael katz (2013) released the 2nd edition of the undeserving poor: america’s enduring confrontation with poverty. in a frank and accessible manner, katz explains the evolution of personal and political beliefs about the poor in the united states. in his view, poverty is not just an economic problem; it is also a moral problem; a biological problem; a cultural problem. these long-standing beliefs about those living in poverty are replicated in the educational system. students and their families are viewed as deficient; they are lacking proper drive and desire for education; families don’t care about their kids or value education; they don’t read to their children or value literacy. thus, successful literacy practices or literacy practices valued by the dominant group are also constructs. the number of books in a household often has been used as an indicator of levels of literacy and attitudes toward education. however, the ownership of books may not be possible for a number of reasons, especially financial. there are many ways to access books and be involved in literacy activities. the literacy practices of different groups arise from different needs. there is no one way of “doing” literacy. while this may be a gross oversimplification, this is just one small example of a type of construction. how can researchers disrupt these narratives? the articles in this issue serve as examples of research that interrupt narratives of deficit and pathology. the researchers avoid generalizations. however, as the articles illustrate, unequal educational outcomes for marginalized students is documented in three countries. all the articles study impoverished communities, but the poverty experienced is very different and is a reflection of particular histories and social constructs associated with each place. the overarching goal of the research in this issue is to report success evidence-based approaches to enhance literacy internationally. the researchers begin with strengths, not deficits, of the students, literacy practices and communities they study. they build upon what is known and has already been successful for students. each article in this issue describes the plight of impoverished, marginalized, and disenfranchised individuals or groups in public schools and surrounding communities. more specifically, they address areas where change is possible. as the articles in this special issue illustrate, the deficit model in education and society has been constructed across time and place. whether in argentina, costa rica, or the united states, those affected by poverty do not have equal access to education. it is also common for the impoverished to be physically separated from those with higher socioeconomic status. research sites for the articles in this issue are: (a) the inner city interrupting deficit narratives in literacy education 5 “ghetto” in the united states; (b) the “precarios” in costa rica and; (c) the “villas de emergencia” in buenos aires, argentina. although these areas have physical boundaries that separate them from other more affluent areas of their respective societies, significant invisible boundaries exist as well. katz (2013) noted that despite empirical evidence to the contrary, “the terms used to describe the undeserving poor serve to isolate and stigmatize them …. part of the reason [for this] is that conventional classifications of poor people serve such useful purposes. they offer a familiar and easy target for displacing rage, frustration and fear” (2013, p.2). the first article in this issue by victoria purcell-gates provides an example of how history shapes how one group constructs a negative perception of another. using an ethnographic analysis, purcellgates investigates the perception of marginalized nicaraugan students in costa rica in the article “constructions of difference and deficit, a case study: nicaraguan families and children on the margins in costa rica.” her results reveal the historical, economic, and cultural contexts that lead to negative perceptions of marginalized and impoverished nicaraguan immigrants. these perceptions are held by the dominant as well as the nondominant, marginalized class. these perceptions, in turn, result in a deficit model rather than a difference model. the deficit model, in turn, influences perceptions of ability to learn, in this case nicaraguan families living in costa rica. she found, “the 'problem' of underachievement of children from marginalized communities lies not in the community marginalized but in the marginalizing community – in their socially constructed perceptions of deficit and difference” (p.21). catherine compton-lilly’s article “a family case study: how money matters for academic learning” provides a counternarrative to the perception of a passive parent who doesn’t value education. drawing on data collected in a ten year ethnographic study, compton-lilly, reinforces ms. rodriguez’ agency and understanding of the issues directly related to living in poverty that are impeding the academic success of her children. compton-lilly reveals the struggles of an impoverished mother and her family who, although living in a high poverty area, tenaciously strived to instill literacy as a family value despite perceptions of an inequitable school system that systematically provided little support for the education of children in her neighborhood. compton-lilly advocates for a change in the dominant discourses that blame poor families and teachers for the literacy challenges faced by poor children, and issues a “call to arms” for all to “have a more powerful voice” to redress the pernicious effects of poverty. students living in poverty experience many difficulties. ironically, before their education begins, they are already behind; they are “at-risk of failing.” in order to ensure that all students are ready for school, many countries have implemented pre-kindergarten programs. rosemberg, alam, and stein’s article “children interactions in literacy tutoring situations. a study with urban marginalized populations in argentina,” addresses a tutoring program that pairs 4-5 6 global education review 1(2) year old tutees with tutors who are12-13 year old, resulting in a mutually beneficial relationship. the “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program” builds upon the literacy practices of this “urban-marginalized population” in order to develop the skills necessary for success at the kindergarten level. this article employs conversation analysis of the tutoring session to show the development of practices that promote learning. it is with the hope of changing the narrative about literacy potential and achievement for marginalized populations internationally that we present the articles in this issue. katz (2013) wrote that “poverty has been viewed as a problem of persons” (p.xxii). instead of looking at the deeper social inequalities that cause certain groups to remain in poverty, marginalized groups are constructed as being responsible for their own poverty; they lack the skills, the motivation, and the intelligence to be successful. who is deserving and who is undeserving is often a matter of perception. in education, a perception of difference as synonymous with deficit is a misunderstanding with pernicious consequences, especially for individuals with no voice, or have been silenced in society. we hope this issue of ger foregrounds problems and solutions to change the “difference is deficit” model. references berliner, d. (2006). our impoverished view of educational research. teachers college record, 108(6), 949-995. katz, m. b. (2013). the undeserving poor: america’s enduring confrontation with poverty. new york: oxford university press. stiglitz, j.e. (2012). the price of inequality: how today’s divided society endangers our future. new york, ny: w. w. norton and co. traub, j. (2000, january 16). what no school can do. new york times magazine. retrieved may 19, 2005, http://www.augsburg.edu/. about the authors patrick mccabe, phd, is associate professor of literacy education at mercy college, ny, ny. his research interests include self-efficacy, text complexity, and the effect of poverty on learning. dr. mccabe has taught at the elementary and secondary levels in high poverty areas in new york city, and has been a teacher educator for over fifteen years. he can be reached at pmccabe1@mercy.edu erica newhouse, phd, is assistant professor of literacy education at mercy college, ny. her research interests include adolescent literacy, multicultural young adult literature, critical race theory and teacher education. dr. newhouse taught secondary english language arts. on the college level, she taught in elementary and secondary teacher education programs. she can be reached at enewhouse@mercy.edu. http://www.augsburg.edu/education/edc480/noschool.html educating the disenfranchised and marginalized 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wermuth, mel (2014). educating the disenfranchised and marginalized.. global education review, 1 (2). 1-2. educating the disenfranchised and marginalized mel wermuth mercy college in preparing this issue of global education review on literacy practices in high poverty populations, it is noted that some of the issues pertaining to literacy practices are similar to the issues presented in the inaugural issue which dealt with special education and inclusion. central to this is the perception that one class of persons is somehow inferior to another class, a question of morality that has been with us for centuries. indeed, in discussing the rise of mercantilism in the eighteenth century (and globalizationbefore the word was coined), r.h.tawney (1926/1958) wrote, “granted, i should love my neighbor as myself, [but] the questions which . . . remain for solution are, 'who precisely is my neighbor?’ and ‘how exactly am i to make my love for them effective in practice?’. . . . . religion had not yet learned to console itself for the practical difficulty of applying its moral principles.” (1958, p.156) in a rapidly globalizing society with global communications fueled by around-the clock news channels, the internet and social media, the “practical difficulty of applying moral principles” assumes greater importance than it had in the not too distant past. this is because “globalization” is characterized by the spread of social, political, and economic activities across borders, migrations and spread of culture, speed of diffusion of ideas, and increased impact of global intercourse (held & mcgrew, 2014). in their introduction to the inaugural issue, kathy anne jordan and sudha ramaswamy (2014) wrote about exclusion on the basis of presumed difference and special needs because of perceived differences, beliefs about the “outclass,” and perceptions surrounding them. they might have been writing an introduction to the current issue. in reading victoria purcell-gates’ article about the marginalization of nicaraguan children in costa rican schools because they are viewed as “different,” i could not help but recognize the similarity by which in the united states students with disabilities are marginalized by those who subscribe to the deficit model described in the article by curt dudley-marling and bridget burns (2014). catherine compton-lilly’s longitudinal study describes the experience of a student living in a high poverty community in wisconsin, and how economic and social challenges affected her over a ten-year period, as described by her mother. writing about special needs education in hong kong, jeremy greenberg and j. christine greenberg (2014) describe the difficulties of finding placement for special needs students (15 schools for 15,000 students). he recounts the beginning of the school in which 2 global education review 1(2) he works, “the children’s institute of hong kong,” a school that was begun in 2003 by an american family residing in hong kong who had two children, both diagnosed with autism. the parents brought in experts in autism from teachers college (columbia university) and founded the school. these are only two cases, but who wouldn’t agree that money matters as much in hong kong as in wisconsin. in the concluding article, celia rosemberg and her colleagues offer hope for the disenfranchised in public schools in an article that describes a longitudinal study which began in 2009 and is still ongoing, “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program,” in buenos aires, argentina. results to date show significant longitudinal differences in the performance of the activities, with increases in the performance of the tutors and in the learning of the younger child. thus, at this time of rapid globalization, these first two issues of global education review explore issues that may support nations as they seek to understand their education issues, problems, programs and policies from a worldwide perspective, and to learn to adapt interesting and important models, methods, and research designs from other nations. references dudley-marling, c. & burns, m. b. (2014). two perspectives on inclusion in the united states. global education review, 1(1) 14-31. greenberg, j. h. & greenberg, c. (2014). it takes two to tango: inclusive schooling in hong kong. global education review, 1(1) 44-55. held, d & mcgrew, a. (2014). globalization. entry for oxford companion to politics retrieved on 4/1/2014 from http://www.polity.co.uk/global/globalizationoxford.asp jordan, k. & ramaswamy, s. (2014). global perspectives on inclusion. global education review, 1 (1) 10-13. tawney, r. h. (1958). religion and the rise of capitalism. new york: new american library. (original work published 1926). : http://www.polity.co.uk/global/globalization-oxford.asp http://www.polity.co.uk/global/globalization-oxford.asp 82 global education review 2(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: james-ward, cheryl & abuyen, joy. (2015). mcrel leadership responsibilities through the lens of data: the critical nine.. global education review, 2(3). 82-93 mcrel leadership responsibilities through the lens of data: the critical nine cheryl james-ward san diego state university joy abuyen san diego state university abstract at the onset of the 21st century, the united states ushered in a new era of school accountability and reform with the no child left behind act [nclb] (united states department of education, 2010). until and unless it is repealed or replaced, this law continues in effect today, with many states now applying to renew their nclb waivers (klein, 2015). moreover, the responsibility for meeting the expectations of accountability and the need for ongoing improvement continue to rest squarely on the shoulders of school principals, many of whom may broadly understand data-driven decision making, but may lack the knowledge and strategic information to maximize the use of data findings in improving student achievement. the mid-continent research for education and learning organization (mcrel) has identified 21 leadership responsibilities that describe the knowledge and skills school leaders need to positively impact student achievement.1 this analysis centers around the mcrel leadership responsibilities with an effect size of .25 or higher that require a focus on data. the use of hard and soft data to focus improvement is then analyzed and expanded upon through the mcrel leadership framework lens. keywords school leadership, metadata, hard data, soft data, change, mcrel, student achievement leadership responsibilities through the lens of data over the last two decades, much attention has been paid to educational leadership and its effect on student outcomes. a particularly noteworthy finding, reinforced in a major study by researchers at the university of minnesota and university of toronto (wallace foundation, 2012) is the importance of the principal in improving student achievement. drawing on two studies and large-scale quantitative analysis, the research showed that most school variables, considered separately, have at most small effects on learning. the real payoff comes when these individual variables combine to reach critical mass. in another study based on wide-ranging ______________________________ corresponding author: cheryl james-ward, college of education, san diego state university, 5500 campanile dr, san diego, ca 92182 email: cward@mail.sdsu.edu mcrel leadership responsibilities 83 review of literature on educational leadership organized around a framework which emerged from the empirical research in sociology and organizational and industrial psychology, leithwood, louis, anderson, & wahlstrom (2004) found that “the effect of leadership is second only to classroom instruction among all school-related factors that contribute to what students learn at school" (p. 7). more recently, in a study that included roughly 7,240 texas principals and their students over a period of 6 years (focusing on math achievement adjusted for student background characteristics and school mobility rates), branch, hanushek, and rivkin (2013) revealed that “highly effective principals raise the achievement of a typical student in their schools by between two and seven months of learning in a single school year” (p.1). marzano, waters, and mcnulty (2003) identified 21 leadership responsibilities that influence student achievement. at the core of nine of these responsibilities is the use of data to improve instruction. this paper utilizes the research studies and findings from the mid-continent research for education and learning (mcrel) organization in order to examine those leadership responsibilities intertwined with the use of data to improve student achievement. researchers from mcrel; marzano, waters, and mcnulty (2003); identified 21 leadership responsibilities they then translated into a leadership framework which describe the knowledge and skills school leaders need to positively impact student achievement. the leadership framework was developed from two main sources of knowledge: (1) a quantitative meta-analysis of 30 years of research beginning in 1970; and (2) a comprehensive review of theoretical literature on leadership. moreover, the meta-analysis consisted of more than 5,000 studies, of which 70 met the criteria for design, controls, data analysis, and rigor. these were quantitative student achievement data; student achievement measured on standardized or norm-referenced tests; student achievement as the dependent variable; and teacher perceptions of leadership as the independent variable. the data from this meta-analysis confirmed that there is a significant relationship between leadership and student achievement. specifically, marzano et al. (2003) reported the importance of these findings by explaining that, “one standard deviation improvement in leadership practices is associated with an increase in average student achievement from [for example] the 50th percentile to the 60th percentile” (p.3) or 10 percentile points. marzano, et al. (2003) reported that this translates into an average effect size (expressed as a correlation) between leadership and student achievement of .25 and that such an effect size signifies that as leadership practices improve, so does student achievement. the 21 leadership responsibilities and the average size of their effect on student achievement are reported in table 1 (marzano et al., 2005, pp. 42-43). 84 global education review 2(3) table 1 mcrel’s 21 leadership responsibilities that impact student achievement responsibility the extent to which the principal... average r 1. affirmation recognizes and celebrates accomplishments and acknowledges failures .19 2. change agent is willing to challenge and actively challenges the status quo .25 3. contingent rewards recognizes and rewards individual accomplishments .24 4. communication establishes strong lines of communication with and among teachers and students .23 5. culture fosters shared beliefs and a sense of community and cooperation .25 6. discipline protects teachers from issues and influences that would detract from their teaching time or focus .27 7. flexibility adapts his or her leadership behavior to the needs of the current situation and is comfortable with dissent .28 8. focus establishes clear goals and keeps those goals in the forefront of the school’s attention .24 9. ideals/beliefs communicates and operates from strong ideals and beliefs about schooling .22 10. input involves teachers in the design and implementation of important decisions and policies .25 11. intellectual stimulation ensures faculty and staff are aware of the most current theories and practices and makes the discussion of these a regular aspect of the school’s culture .24 12. involvement in curriculum, instruction, and assessment is directly involved in the design and implementation of curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices .20 13. knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment is knowledgeable about current curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices .25 14. monitoring/ evaluating monitors the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning .27 15. optimizer inspires and leads new and challenging innovations .20 16. order establishes a set of standard operating procedures and routines .25 17. outreach is an advocate and spokesperson for the school to all stakeholders .27 18. relationships demonstrates an awareness of the personal aspects of teachers and staff .18 19. resources provides teachers with materials and professional development necessary for the successful execution of their jobs .25 20. situational awareness is aware of the details and undercurrents in the running of the school and uses this information to address current and potential problems .33 21. visibility has quality contact and interactions with teachers and students .20 source: (marzano et al., 2005, p. 42-43) mcrel leadership responsibilities 85 analyzing the mcrel nine through a data lens this paper focuses on the mcrel leadership responsibilities with an effect size of .25 or higher which require a focus on data, both hard and soft. it is this focus on data that the authors will expound upon for the nine identified mcrel leadership responsibilities listed in table 2. hard data hard data is quantitative. it is reported using descriptive statistics that answer the questions who, what, and when (creswell, 2009). for example, when did the students take the exam, which students took the exam, and what was the content of the assessment? another example would be which students were suspended, when, why and by whom? hard data is generally a “snapshot” report: a report of student understanding of mathematics or the students being suspended from school on a given day, month, or year (james-ward et al., 2013). such hard data also qualifies for comparative statistical analysis. as we look at hard data and discuss the relevant leadership responsibilities, the comparative statistical analysis skills of the leader along with other leadership skills becomes magnified. it is through the comparison of data across a number of factors that leaders are able to make compelling arguments to address student achievement (white, 2005). mcrel’s leadership responsibilities regarding change, resources, discipline, monitoring and evaluation, and input all depend on school leaders’ ability to navigate through the hard data. finally, hard data is actionable, meaning that we can do something table 2 mcrel’s nine leadership responsibilities with a focus on data 1. change agent is willing to challenge and actively challenges the status quo 25 2. culture fosters shared beliefs and a sense of community and cooperation 25 3. input involves teachers in the design and implementation of important decisions and policies 25 4. knowledge of curriculum, instruction, and assessment is knowledgeable about current curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices 25 5. resources provides teachers with materials and professional development necessary for the successful execution of their jobs 25 6. monitoring/ evaluating monitors the effectiveness of school practices and their impact on student learning 27 7. outreach is an advocate and spokesperson for the school to all stakeholders 27 8. discipline protects teachers from issues and influences that would detract from their teaching time or focus 27 9. flexibility adapts his or her leadership behavior to the needs of the current situation and is comfortable with dissent 28 86 global education review 2(3) with it. under all nine of the identified leadership responsibilities, the leaders’ ability to turn hard data into action is significant. the types of hard data include: criterion and norm-referenced student assessments results, demographic data, attendance data, suspension rates, referral rates, detention rates, school nurse records, and teacher credentials and assignments (james-ward et al., 2013). success in the nine identified leadership responsibilities requires the ability of the leader to triangulate data from multiple sources to confirm findings so that decisions have solid bases (white, 2005). for example, referral rates from a single teacher to teacher preparedness across periods, weeks and even months; suspension rates of a given group of students by teacher, periods, and teacher attendance or preparedness; yet another example would be third grade student benchmark results compared to taught curriculum and instructional strategies. effectiveness in the nine leadership practices requires the ability to analyze data across data points, looking for trends across multiple periods, disciplines, and classrooms. it requires looking for and confirming trends across numerous weeks, months, quarters, and even years. in essence, it requires that the leader have a focus on both useful assessment data like baseline assessments, weekly quizzes, progress monitoring data, benchmark exams, and end of year state tests, as well as nonacademic data, such as attendance and suspensions, that nonetheless have a direct impact on academic achievement. soft data soft data is qualitative information about student learning. it is acquired by observing student and adult actions and by talking to students and adults (merriam, 2009). it is uncovered in classrooms, staff lounges, the front office, playground, athletic fields, the hallways, and other corners of the school. soft data can be described best in words and pictures rather than numbers. soft data is gathered through observations, by talking to students and other stakeholders, and through surveys. observations include learning walks, capacity-building learning walks, ghost walks, instructional rounds, and guided visits. learning walks are those in which the principal and the capacity building team walk the campus together in order to get a common sense of what’s happening, to share ideas, learn from one-another, and to determine and prioritize needs for faculty growth. capacity building teams are groups of classroom teachers and instructional support staff that observe classrooms together, with a focus on a particular instructional strategy, curriculum delivery method, or classroom environment. a briefing must initiate the process, to ensure that as the team walks everyone is visualizing what they are seeing in a similar manner (david, 2008; fisher & frey, 2014). since the classroom with our without students should tell a story of the learning that has and is occurring when students are present, capacity building teams might also engage in ghost walks. ghost walks are classroom visits when students and teachers are not present. their purpose is to get a sense of the classroom environment and to determine whether the room supports current and past instruction through evidence found in and around the classroom. examples of evidence include student artifacts, writing samples, and recently made instructional charts. ghost walks in essence, mine visual and tangible data to determine if the classroom is a living, supportive environment. other types of soft data observations include instructional rounds and guided visits. instructional rounds are performed by faculty and/or administrators from two or more campuses who walk classrooms together with a particular focus (city, elmore, fiarman, & teitel, 2009). guided visits refer to classroom walkthroughs with outside school visitors. these walkthroughs begin with discussions regarding the school’s strengths and challenges, the school’s instructional foci, and request by the hosting team for visitors to provide feedback based on the pre-meeting discussions. all walkthroughs should end with a debriefing in mcrel leadership responsibilities 87 which members share what they observed in structured terms. walkthroughs, in addition to surveys, can lead to situational awareness. through the gathering and analysis of this sort of data, school leaders are made aware of the details and undercurrents in the running of their school. they use this information to address current and potential problems before they can undermine student achievement. surveys include those focused on school climate and/or course evaluations, and teacher and administrator evaluations. climate questionnaires can be geared toward parents, students, teachers, other community members, or a combination of stakeholders. they include requests for input ranging from the performance of the school as a whole, components thereof, and interaction between school stakeholders, to its curricula and other programs. course evaluation surveys, although standard in higher education, are not very common in the prek-12th grades, but school leaders focused on the mcrel leadership responsibilities specifically systemic changes, school culture, curriculum and instruction, monitoring/evaluating and allocation of resources may want information that can be garnered by these evaluations. these can be administered at middle and high schools. they may include information about instructional delivery, student engagement, usefulness of the course, student/teacher engagement, relation of homework to classwork, and teacher readiness, to name a few (fiore, 2011). leaders focused on culture as well as curriculum, and instructors can use findings from these surveys to address issues around equity and access (theoharis, 2009). soft data culture school culture both internal and external, can be defined by the continuum of cultural proficiency (lindsey, robins & terrell, 2009), described in table 3. school leaders wishing to continuously focus on the mcrel leadership responsibilities around data use soft data to transform their staff by fully engaging them in difficult conversations, exercises, and professional development in order to move teachers and their students along the cultural proficiency continuum from culturally destructive towards being culturally proficient (lindsey et al., 2009) (table 3). this transformation can only take place if the leadership and the staff both have a firm focus on the social and emotional aspects of schooling as obtained through both soft and hard data. table 3 cultural proficiency continuum cultural destructiveness cultural incapacity cultural blindness cultural precompetence cultural competence cultural proficiency practices that seek to eradicate cultures different than that of the dominant culture. practices that demean and seek to show cultures other than the dominant as wrong. practices in which the dominant culture refuses to acknowledge the cultures of others. working awareness of what one knows or doesn’t know about working in diverse settings. practices that are additive to cultures that are different than the dominant culture. practices that seek to continuously learn about other cultures in a positive manner and are inclusive and celebratory of all groups in the school community. note. adapted from cultural proficiency: a manual for school leaders, by r. lindsey, k. robins, and r. terrell, p. 112. copyright 2009 by corwin. 88 global education review 2(3) the culturally proficiency continuum moves from destructive behaviors to culturally proficient ones. at the destructive end, adults and students engage in behaviors that may lead to students withdrawing from and even dropping out of school (rumberger & lim, 2008). at the culturally proficient end of the spectrum, adults educate all students to high levels, a process which includes knowing, valuing, and using students’ cultural backgrounds, languages, and learning styles within the context of their teaching. being culturally proficient requires acknowledging the additive value that all stakeholders bring to the school community. it requires a paradigmatic shift from viewing others as problematic to viewing how we work with people who are different from ourselves in a manner that ensures social justice and equitable practices (robins et al., 2002). this comes from a deep desire to seek soft and hard data about our students’ demographics and analysis of the data followed by second-order changes or transformational training for staff and students. leadership responsibilities, especially those pertaining to culture, change, and flexibility, are critical here. data for change leaders wishing to focus on the mcrel leadership responsibilities around data are purposeful in how they display data and engage in conversation around information gathered through the data analysis. these leaders are likely to use bar graphs, line graphs, frequency charts and tables to display different types of data so that the data are meaningful to stakeholders and lead to impactful discussions (james-ward et al., 2013). the tools they use are further employed to gather input from staff, provide resources, protect teacher time and focus, and develop and adapt culture to optimally improve student achievement (wallace foundation, 2012). communicating data findings leaders concentrating on the mcrel responsibilities around data are likely to use focused goals and objectives, valid sample sizes of data, and triangulation of both hard and soft data sets to actively challenge the status quo (mcrel leadership responsibility, change agents). they actively engage teachers in the design and implementation of important decisions and policies (mcrel leadership responsibility, input), and jointly determine where to put resources so that teachers are provided with the materials and professional development necessary for successful execution of their job (mcrel leadership responsibility, resources). figure 1 provides an example of several ways to visually display data so as to be more comprehensible to stakeholders. table 4 is an example of how a school leader might organize the data for discussion, and table 5 is an example of how the mcrel leadership responsibilities – specifically, resources, monitoring/evaluating, and outreach – might be implemented and purposefully focused on various stakeholders. mcrel leadership responsibilities 89 figure 1: visual displays of data for discussion and action bm refers to benchmark assessments that are administered by grade level district wide generally 3 to 4 times yearly. p1 refers to period 1, and q to quarters, i.e., quarter 1, quarter 2, quarter 3 and quarter 4 of the school year. 90 global education review 2(3) table 4 organizing data for discussion analysis of the standards we asked ourselves… next steps towards mastery • identify standards covered on 1st quarter benchmark assessment • determine standards that need intensive instruction both in ela and mathematics by grade level • determine which are common core (cc) standards emphasizing critical thinking and creativity • are we providing rigorous and intensive instruction to all students? • are we focusing on common core standards, critical thinking and creativity? • is delivery of the instruction and biweekly assessments aligned? if not, what needs to change? • how can we guarantee that the common core standards are presented to students in a variety of ways so that we can meet the learning styles of all of our students? • are we maximizing all of the resources and programs that we have in order to master cc standards? how can we bring up the rigor of programs? what else can we incorporate and what needs to be modified? • teachers will meet in plcs (with focus on culturally proficient curriculum) to analyze biweekly assessments as well as re-teaching and/or reassessing strategies. • leadership team will meet bi-weekly to analyze weekly data results and instruction • teaching schedules will be rearranged such that the most qualified teachers will teach both the lowest and highest performing students during regrouping • students will be grouped accordingly for re-teaching in order to maximize time and results • teachers will meet monthly as culturally proficient learning communities, examining practices through the lens of student demographics mcrel leadership responsibilities 91 table 5 example of implementation of mcrel responsibilities: resources, outreach and monitoring and evaluating school-wide grade level or content area targeted group targeted individual student • restorative practices implemented school-wide • revised homework policy emphasizing spiral review and student reflection • academic language development initiative in k-3 • 11th and 12th graders use writing processes to publish essay including college entrance essays • design thinking k-5 to increase creativity and critical thinking • students at bottom 25% on benchmarks receive 30 minutes daily targeted intervention by most highly qt • self-advocacy workshop for students with disabilities • boys’ group for those most challenged academically and socially • response to intervention for identified students • wraparound service and counseling for students with significant attendance issues • online intervention for high and low performing students faculty and staff • professional development in design thinking • daylong focus on school data • cultural proficiency training for school climate and multiple perspectives in curriculum • interdisciplinary units designed by 9th grade team • professional learning community focusing on fostering critical thinking • grade-level effort on improving attendance • review of units for multiple perspectives & contributions • classroom management coaching and support for new teachers • restorative practice training for new teachers • front office personnel training on a welcoming climate • common core math training through swun math • coaching using gradual release of responsibility framework for identified teachers • collegial coaching for coteaching k-5 92 global education review 2(3) families and community • use home calling programs to disseminate information to families • school-wide vaccination initiative per enrollment guidelines • financial aid training for 11th grade families • parent-teacher literacy and math nights for incoming 6th grade families • careerdevelopment community mentors assigned for gifted and talented students • language education classes for parents offered during school day • counseling for parents of frequently absent students • creation of book share program for parents • nutrition and health training for parents ________________________________________________________________________ source: note. adapted from using data to focus instructional improvement, by james-ward et al., p. 69 copyright 2013 by ascd. conclusion the purpose of this analysis was to highlight specific strategies that school leaders can employ to acheive the mcrel leadership responsibilities by focusing on data. in order for school leaders to be successful change agents they must know how to harness and utilize both hard and soft school data to create second-order change (waters, marzano & mcnulty, 2003). this same focus on data is essential to establish a school culture of shared beliefs and practices that are culturally additive by nature (mageleno, 2013). developing such a school culture and creating second-order change comes from knowledge about stakeholders, curriculum, instruction and assessment. these are garnered through the purposeful use of soft and and hard data. armed with cyclically gathered data (boudette, city, & murnane, 2007), school leaders are able to continuously present information to staff and other stakeholders in ways that allow for purposeful and impactful input from all stakeholders, lead to vetted use of resources, and protect the sacred use of teacher time so that the focus can be on student achievement. notes 1. mcrel is an international education research organization founded in 1966. it is dedicated to supporting schools and districts across the globe through educational research, training, workshops, resources and consulting. references alvoid, l. & black, w. l. (2014). the changing role of the principal. retrieved from www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/r eport/2014/07/01/93015/the-changing-role-of-theprincipal boudette, k.p., city, e.a., & murnane, r.j. (2007). data wise: a step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. cambridge massachusetts: harvard education press. branch, g., hanushek, e., & rivkin, s.g. (2013). school leaders matter: measuring the impact of effective principals. education next, 13(1), 62-69. city, e., elmore, r., fiarman, s., & teitel, l. (2009). instructional rounds in education. cambridge, ma: harvard education press. david. j. (2008). what research says about classroom walkthroughs. educational leadership, 65(4), 81-82. fiore, d. j. (2011). school-community relations, (3rd edition). berkeley, ca: eye on education, inc. http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2014/07/01/93015/the-changing-role-of-the-principal http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2014/07/01/93015/the-changing-role-of-the-principal http://www.americanprogress.org/issues/education/report/2014/07/01/93015/the-changing-role-of-the-principal mcrel leadership responsibilities 93 fisher, d., & frey, n. (2014). using teacher learning walks to improve instruction. principal leadership, 14(5), 58-61. james-ward, c, fisher, d, frey, n., & lapp, d. (2013). using data to focus instructional improvement. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. klein, a. (2015). no child left behind: an overview. education week, 34(26) 1,18-20. retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/nochild-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html knapp, m., swinnerton, j., copland, m., & monpas-huber (2006). data informed leadership in education. center for the study of teaching and policy: wallace foundation. leithwood, k., louis, k. s., anderson, s., & wahlstrom, k. (2004). how leadership influences student learning. new york: the wallace foundation. lindsey, r., robins, k., & terrell, r. (2009). cultural proficiency: a manual for school leaders (3rd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. marzano, r., waters, t. & mcnulty, b. a. (2003). balanced leadership: what 30 years of research tells us about the effect of leadership on student achievement. denver, co:.mid-continent research for education and learning. marzano, r., waters, t. & mcnulty, b. a. (2005). school leadership that works: from research to results. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. marzano, r. (2012). school leadership evaluation model. retrieved from http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/esea/teacher/pri ncipal_marzano_essi.pdf merriam, s. (2009). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. san francisco, ca: josseybass. rumberger, r., & lim, s. (2008). why students drop out of school: a review of 25 years of research. california dropout research project, university of california, santa barbara. theoharis, g. (2009). the school leaders our children deserve. new york: teachers college press. united states department of education. (2010). a blueprint for reform: the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act. retrieved from http://www2.ed.gov/policy/elsec/leg/blueprint/blue print.pdf wallace foundation (2012). the school principal as leader: guiding principals to better teaching and learning. waters, t., marzano, r., & mcnulty, b.a. (2003). balanced leadership: a brief overview. retrieved from http://www.mcrel.org/~/media/files/mcrel/ homepage/products/01_99/prod82_balancedleade rship.ashx white, s. (2005). show me the proof: tools and strategies to make data work for you. englewood, co: advanced learning press. about the author(s) cheryl james-ward, edd, is the director of the san diego state university master of arts in educational leadership with a focus on technology online program. she directs the sdsu chinese and american educational leadership symposium. she co-coordinates the master’s and administrative credential programs in the department of educational leadership where she teachers both master’s and doctorate level courses. dr. ward also coaches principals across the state and leads schools in design thinking training. joy abuyen, ma, is an ed.d. candidate in the department of educational leadership at san diego state university. her research interest focuses on school leadership. she teaches in a neighboring school district. http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/esea/teacher/principal_marzano_essi.pdf http://www.dpi.state.nd.us/esea/teacher/principal_marzano_essi.pdf http://www.mcrel.org/~/media/files/mcrel/homepage/products/01_99/prod82_balancedleadership.ashx http://www.mcrel.org/~/media/files/mcrel/homepage/products/01_99/prod82_balancedleadership.ashx http://www.mcrel.org/~/media/files/mcrel/homepage/products/01_99/prod82_balancedleadership.ashx mcrel #6 to format with footer boudette, k.p., city, e.a., & murnane, r.j. (2007). data wise: a step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. cambridge massachusetts: harvard education press. david. j. (2008). what research says about classroom walkthroughs. educational leadership, 65(4), 81-82. fiore, d. j. (2011). school-community relations, (3rd edition). berkeley, ca: eye on education, inc. fisher, d., & frey, n. (2014). using teacher learning walks to improve instruction. principal leadership, 14(5), 58-61. james-ward, c, fisher, d, frey, n., & lapp, d. (2013). using data to focus instructional improvement. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. klein, a. (2015). no child left behind: an overview. education week, 34(26) 1,18-20. retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html knapp, m., swinnerton, j., copland, m., & monpas-huber (2006). data informed leadership in education. center for the study of teaching and policy: wallace foundation. marzano, r., waters, t. & mcnulty, b. a. (2005). school leadership that works: from research to results. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. mcrel #6 to format no footer boudette, k.p., city, e.a., & murnane, r.j. (2007). data wise: a step-by-step guide to using assessment results to improve teaching and learning. cambridge massachusetts: harvard education press. david. j. (2008). what research says about classroom walkthroughs. educational leadership, 65(4), 81-82. fiore, d. j. (2011). school-community relations, (3rd edition). berkeley, ca: eye on education, inc. fisher, d., & frey, n. (2014). using teacher learning walks to improve instruction. principal leadership, 14(5), 58-61. james-ward, c, fisher, d, frey, n., & lapp, d. (2013). using data to focus instructional improvement. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. klein, a. (2015). no child left behind: an overview. education week, 34(26) 1,18-20. retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/ew/section/multimedia/no-child-left-behind-overview-definition-summary.html knapp, m., swinnerton, j., copland, m., & monpas-huber (2006). data informed leadership in education. center for the study of teaching and policy: wallace foundation. marzano, r., waters, t. & mcnulty, b. a. (2005). school leadership that works: from research to results. alexander, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. 76 global education review 1 (1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: watkins, amanda & donnelly, verity (2014). core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion. global education review, 1 (1). 76-92. core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion amanda watkins european agency for development in special needs education verity donnelly european agency for development in special needs education abstract teacher education issues are high on the policy agenda across europe. the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (united nations, 2006) is gaining momentum and providing a lever for change. article 24 covers many aspects of education and the un handbook for parliamentarians on the (united nations, 2007) argues that inclusive education not only provides the best educational environment for learners with disabilities, but also helps break down barriers and challenge stereotypes. this paper outlines the current policy agenda for teacher education for inclusion in europe and considers the core values necessary for teachers to work effectively in inclusive education. the paper draws upon the work of the european agency for development in special needs education (the agency) project on teacher education for inclusion (te4i –more information is available from http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion) and on evidence gathered from discussions with over 450 european stakeholders in education – policy makers, school leaders, teachers, support staff, parents and learners. these stakeholders, over a series of 14 country study visits, highlighted the importance of the core values as the foundation for all teachers working in inclusive education. within the agency project a framework of core values was developed. these core values for inclusive education were linked with essential areas of teacher competence. the process of verification used to validate a final framework of core values and areas of competence at the european level is described in this paper. keywords initial teacher education; inclusive education; core values; areas of teacher competence education and training across europe – the current policy context the term inclusion is used in an increasing number of european countries to encompass a far wider range of pupils vulnerable to ______________________________ corresponding author: amanda watkins, phd, assistant director european agency for development in special needs education, østre stationsvej 33 dk-5000, odense c, denmark email: amanda@european-agency.org http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 77 exclusion than those identified as having special educational needs (sen). acedo et al. (2009) reflecting on the 48th session of the international conference on education (ice) recommended that policy makers should acknowledge that: inclusive education is an on-going process aimed at offering quality education for all while respecting diversity and the different needs and abilities, characteristics and learning expectations of the students and communities, eliminating all forms of discrimination. (p. 126) the conclusions of the council of the european union (2010) on the social dimension of education and training note that education and training systems across the eu need to ensure both equity and excellence; and to recognise that improving educational attainment and key competencies for all are crucial, not only to economic growth and competitiveness, but also to reducing poverty and fostering social inclusion. the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (2006) is also gaining momentum and providing a force for change (see http://www.un.org/disabilities/ for the most current list of ratifications). article 24 states that persons with disabilities should have access to an inclusive, quality, free primary and secondary education on an equal basis with others in the communities in which they live. the united nations publication from exclusion to equality: realising the rights of persons with disabilities handbook for parliamentarians (2007) stresses that inclusive education not only provides the best educational environment for learners with disabilities, but also helps break down barriers and challenge stereotypes. more specifically regarding teacher education, the world report on disability (world health organization, 2011) states: the appropriate training of mainstream teachers is crucial if they are to be confident and competent in teaching children with diverse needs. the principles of inclusion should be built into teacher training programmes, which should be about attitudes and values, not just knowledge and skills. (p. 222) the need to strengthen teacher education the preparation of teachers to meet the increasingly diverse needs of learners in today’s classrooms is a key area of policy debate at european level. the commission of the european union (2008a) in an updated strategic framework for european cooperation in education and training stressed that “the quality of teachers, trainers and other educational staff is the most important withinschool factor affecting student performance” (p. 8). european union ministers responsible for education agreed that teachers should be equipped to meet the challenges of increasing social and cultural diversity in the classroom, stressing that this is crucial for the development of more equitable education systems and for progress towards providing equal opportunities for all (council of the european union, 2007). the communication from the european commission on improving competences for the 21st century also highlighted the need for initial teacher education to improve the balance between theory and practice, and to present teaching as a problem-solving or research-in-action activity linked to children’s learning and progress (commission of the european union, 2008a). in their conclusions on the professional development of teachers and school leaders, the council of the http://www.un.org/disabilities/ 78 global education review 1 (1) european union (2009a) recognised that no course of initial teacher education can equip teachers with all the competencies they might require during their careers and noted that the demands on the teaching profession are evolving rapidly requiring teachers to reflect on their own learning requirements in the context of their particular school environment, and to take greater responsibility for their own lifelong learning. key messages from european research literature in reviewing the literature on teacher education programmes from a range of european countries, many common themes emerge. guðjónsdóttir et al. (2008) stressed the need to develop a holistic approach to inclusion, including issues of equity, poverty and diversity. saloviita (2005) noted the importance of developing shared terminology and appropriate use of inclusive language while esteve (2009) and nuova (2009) stated that teaching practice is key in developing knowledge of the professional culture of teaching. hajkova (2007) also stressed the importance of reflection in transformational learning. other key issues discussed included the need to close the theory-practice gap (munoz, 2009, mattson, 2006, molina, 2006), and to develop critical skills in research and develop a research attitude (rodrigues 2009). dispositions such as resilience, positive attitudes towards disability, and beliefs regarding the potential of learners with diverse needs are considered to be essential (tubele, 2008). many other researchers point to the need to remove the experience based barriers which arise because students themselves were not educated in inclusive settings (naukkarinen, 2008). the importance of the development of skills to ensure positive relationships with peers and pupils, and regard for pupil voice was noted (molina, 2006, kaikkonen, maunonen-eskelinen and aidukiene, 2007); knowledge of learning (i.e. constructivist approaches), personalisation and support strategies were mentioned (casonova et al., 2006, kavkler, 2009, onfrih, 2008, cefai, fenech and galea, 2007); the need to undertake research and improve networking among teacher educators was also described (franzkowiak, 2009); and the importance of developing initial teacher education institutions’ understanding of disability and inclusion were mentioned (cardona, 2009). collaboration is widely considered to be an essential skill for inclusive teachers but is also an important skill for teacher educators teaching in special and mainstream teacher education programmes who need to merge content to better prepare all teachers to meet diverse needs (pugach & blanton, 2009). acedo et al. (2009) expressed the view that due to the myriad difficulties with which all teachers are confronted, separate pre-service education tracks (special and mainstream) are not helpful. this view is supported by young (2008) who suggested that the implied need for an ever greater range of qualifications and specialisations limits the range of pupils that teachers think they can teach. overall, hollins and gunzman (2005) suggested that teacher education requires the reduction of prejudice, development of an equity pedagogy and field experiences to increase understanding of and sensitivity to cultural diversity. the literature therefore supports the need to move towards initial teacher education that prepares all teachers to work in increasingly inclusive settings. this preparation necessarily involves holding certain attitudes and values in relation to inclusion, as well as possessing knowledge and skills relevant for teaching in inclusive settings. core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 79 the agency teacher education for inclusion (te4i) project the european agency for development in special needs education (the agency) was established in 1996 by agreement among the ministers of education in european union member countries. it is a permanent network of ministerial representatives acting as the member countries’ platform for collaboration to promote quality and equity in education as a way to achieve greater social cohesion. the agency is maintained by the member countries (austria, belgium [flemish and french speaking communities], cyprus, czech republic, denmark, estonia, finland, france, germany, greece, hungary, iceland, ireland, italy, latvia, lithuania, luxembourg, malta, netherlands, norway, poland, portugal, slovenia, spain, sweden, switzerland, united kingdom [england, northern ireland, scotland and wales]) and is supported by the european union institutions1 although it works independently from these institutions. co-operative work between agency member country ministerial representatives highlighted a range of common concerns and priority areas for future work in the area of teacher education for inclusion:  what kind of teachers do we need for an inclusive society in a 21st century school?  what are the essential teacher values and competences for inclusive education? the agency project on teacher education for inclusion involved 25 countries and ran from 2009-2012. representatives from the european commission directorate general-education and culture (dg-eac), the organisation for economic co-operation and development centre for educational research and innovation (oecd-ceri) and united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization international bureau of education (unesco-ibe) were involved in the project to ensure consistency with other european and international initiatives in this area of work. it was agreed the project would focus upon the education of mainstream teachers and how they are prepared to work in inclusive settings, with initial teacher education as a priority. the essential question for consideration was: how are all teachers prepared via their initial education to be 'inclusive'? key messages from the te4i project during the 3 year agency project, information collected was linked to three strands of evidence:  project reviews of policy and research literature;  information from agency member countries collected via a survey on policy and practice;  discussions with country nominated experts during country study visits. (all sources of project information are available in full from the project website: http://www.european-agency.org/agencyprojects/teacher-education-for-inclusion). the analysis of this information highlighted a number of key messages, discussed in detail in the project synthesis report teacher education for inclusion across europe – challenges and opportunities (2011):  the reform of teacher education must be part of wider societal reform to support greater inclusion. this requires collaboration between policy makers to ensure a holistic approach and recognition of the role of inclusive education as one of the main strategies to address the challenges of marginalisation and exclusion.  there is a need for further debate around standards, accountability and 80 global education review 1 (1) equity in education to ensure that measures support inclusive practice  reform must include clarification of the language around inclusion and diversity and a clear understanding of the underlying premises associated with and the implications of using different terminology. this should include a move away from the categorisation and labelling of children and young people.  preparation for teaching must maintain academic rigour, educating rather than training teachers. the status of teachers must be raised and reinforced by the development of training parallel to other professional groups to ensure lifelong learning. in order to select appropriate teacher candidates and reduce drop out from training and teaching, further research is required to look at the selection process, bearing in mind the need to increase diversity in the teacher workforce.  while there is wide agreement on the content required to effectively prepare teachers for diversity in the classroom, there is, as yet, little research evidence to indicate the most effective approaches to teacher education, and how best to support a move from discrete modules dealing with inclusion towards integrated content – single courses that prepare all teachers to meet the diverse needs of all learners. more rigorous follow-up of new teachers and evaluation of new initiatives are also needed to gather evidence on the most effective routes into teaching.  teaching practice needs to be supported by intellectual analysis and a clear understanding of theoretical issues to close the theory-practice gap. student teachers ideally need to be placed in inclusive settings with mentors/supervising teachers who are themselves trained for this important role and are able to demonstrate attitudes and values that support inclusion.  there is a need for closer collaboration between training institutions and schools (e.g. demonstration schools, communities of practice). teacher educators should model effective practice for teachers in training (in schools and during teacher education courses) and use a wider range of more flexible methods of assessment, such as portfolios.  the research and the work of the project show the need for competences for teachers (adapted to countries’ own contexts) that can help to support a shared understanding of quality inclusive teaching and, therefore, consistent judgements about effective teacher education. competences are a dynamic combination of knowledge, understanding, skills and abilities, developed during the process of learning and will also require new approaches to assessment. the project analysis concluded that the goal of initial teacher education should be to develop new teachers who are inclusive practitioners, effective in their teaching as well as expert in their subject. significantly, the project findings support the arguments that core values for teaching in inclusive settings play a key role in achieving these goals. a values based approach to inclusive education within the te4i project, there was widespread agreement that inclusion is essentially a principled, rights-based approach to education underpinned by a number of central values. core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 81 such a viewpoint is implicit within wider european and international level work. within the europe 2020 strategy (2009ab) one of the five headline targets relates to education. this target clearly stresses the importance of values in european education systems: in the period up to 2020, the primary goal of european co-operation should be to support the further development of education and training systems in the member states which are aimed at ensuring: (a) the personal, social and professional fulfilment of all citizens; (b) sustainable economic prosperity and employability, whilst promoting democratic values, social cohesion, active citizenship, and intercultural dialogue. (council of the european union, 2009b, p3) education and training 2020 (et2020), a strategic framework for european cooperation in education and training sets out four strategic objectives for member states. strategic objective 3 focuses upon promoting equity, social cohesion and active citizenship. within this objective, the importance of values is highlighted: education should promote intercultural competences, democratic values and respect for fundamental rights and the environment, as well as combat all forms of discrimination, equipping all young people to interact positively with their peers from diverse backgrounds. (2009b, p,4) in the report on the international conference on inclusive education (unesco, 2008) it is argued that: inclusive education is based on a series of conceptions and values regarding the type of society to be built and the ideal person to be developed. if we want to have more inclusive societies, which are more peaceful and respectful of differences, it is essential that students have the opportunity to develop and experience these values in their education, whether in schools or nonformal settings. (p.11) it can be seen, therefore, that thinking has moved on beyond the narrow idea of inclusion as a means of understanding and overcoming a deficit and it is now widely accepted that it concerns issues of gender, ethnicity, class, social conditions, health and human rights encompassing universal involvement, access, participation and achievement (ouane, 2008). the international conference on inclusive education (unesco, 2008) states that: applying a rights-based approach to education in order to move towards inclusion will require comprehensive school system reform including modification of constitutional guarantees and policies, curricula, teacher training systems, materials, learning environments, methodologies, resource allocation, etc. above all, it will require a change in attitudes of all people, throughout the system, to welcome diversity and difference and see these as opportunities rather than problems. (p. 29) recent developments such as the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (2006) support such attitudinal change. article 24 of the convention emphasises that people 82 global education review 1 (1) with disabilities have a right to education. it goes further outlining: states parties recognize the right of persons with disabilities to education. with a view to realising this right without discrimination and on the basis of equal opportunity, states parties shall ensure an inclusive education system at all levels and lifelong learning directed to: the full development of human potential and sense of dignity and selfworth, and the strengthening of respect for human rights, fundamental freedoms and human diversity. (p. 17) however, unicef and unesco (2007) argue that: the right to education requires a commitment to ensuring universal access, including taking all necessary measures to reach the most marginalized children. but getting children into schools is not enough; it is no guarantee of an education that enables individuals to achieve their economic and social objectives and to acquire the skills, knowledge, values and attitudes that bring about responsible and active citizenship. (p27) inclusive education as an over-arching concept impacts on different policies and implementation approaches in compulsory, higher and teacher education. at all levels, the goals of inclusive education are achieved within settings and systems that value everyone equally and see schools as community resources. inclusive education is concerned with all learners and is aimed at increasing the meaningful participation of an individual in learning opportunities and reducing their exclusion from education and wider society. rights-based, inclusive education for all learners consequently needs a holistic approach and this requires a view of teachers as more than deliverers of content. the 2011 european commission report on the peer learning activity centred upon teacher professional development (2011) suggests that “not every aspect of teaching can be fully described or defined; aspects such as the teacher’s professional values, dispositions and attitudes can be as important as more measurable and quantifiable aspects” (p7). the report suggests that across europe, “components of teacher competences often include: knowledge, skills and values” (p.10). the world report on disability (who, 2011) also suggests that: “the appropriate training of mainstream teachers is crucial if they are to be confident and competent in teaching children with diverse needs” (p.222). the report clearly emphasises the need for this training to be focussed upon attitudes and values, not just knowledge and skills. in summary, it can be argued that:  inclusive education can be seen to be underpinned by the values of equality, participation, developing and sustaining communities and respect for diversity.  the values a teacher holds are an essential determinant of their actions.  values are principles that can be evidenced in a teacher’s actions and that become theory enriched practical knowledge as a result of the learning opportunities presented during teacher education courses.  these values form the foundation for all teachers to acquire knowledge, develop understanding and implement the skills necessary for working in inclusive education. core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 83 core values as a basis for identifying areas of teacher competence at the international level, the report teachers matter (oecd, 2005) identifies a range of personal competencies that make a difference to the quality and effectiveness of teaching (p.100). the potential competences identified focus upon subject knowledge and a range of transversal skills (such as communication, self-management, organisational and problem-solving skills). the majority of the countries participating in the te4i project are debating teacher competences at either higher education institution (hei) or national policy level. however, it should be acknowledged that the understanding of competences and/or their application in initial teacher education (ite) in general differs greatly across countries. within the project, it was the case that different countries not only identified different essential competences for teachers, but also interpreted the term competences in different ways. within the te4i project it was agreed that the terms competences and standards are not inter-changeable, and as a result of project discussions the following definitions have been agreed with experts for use within the te4i project:  standards generally refer to a set of measures against which student teachers/teachers/teacher education courses can be evaluated – the summative outcomes at the end of a programme of study.  competences are seen as developing over time with ite students and teachers demonstrating progressive mastery in a range of settings and situations. as such, they form both the foundation for ite and the basis for continuing professional development. (european agency, 2011 p. 46) during project debates, country experts all agreed that there are practical and conceptual difficulties in focussing upon isolated competences for teaching and stressed the need for caution against  repeating work already done in participating countries in identifying and cataloguing specific competences for particular contexts;  developing an over simplistic checklist of teachers’ competences that could be interpreted as mechanistic. the framework proposed within project work was therefore based upon multi-faceted areas of competence linked to agreed core values for inclusive education. areas of competence are each made up of three elements: a certain attitude or belief demands certain knowledge or level of understanding and then skills in order to implement this knowledge in a practical situation. this approach builds upon the work of ryan (2009) who described attitudes as multidimensional traits, but most importantly shulman (2007) who described professional learning in terms of the apprenticeships of the head (knowledge), hand (skill, or doing), and heart (attitudes and beliefs). developing a framework of core values linked to areas of competence within the agency project, a series of country study visits were scheduled for 2010 and 2011; these visits were the main mechanism for discussing and then validating the framework of core values linked to areas of competence proposed in the project. during the five country study visits that took place during spring 2010, a draft framework of core values was discussed together with issues relating to the use of competency based approaches. the visits took place in: belfast, uk (northern ireland); porto, 84 global education review 1 (1) portugal; eger, hungary; borås, sweden and utrecht, netherlands. in addition to the country project experts, over 100 education professionals – including policy makers, teacher educators, students, school staff, specialist support staff and community group representatives participated in activities during the five visits. the key agreements arising from the discussions in the five visits focussed upon the crucial role of underlying values and attitudes towards education generally and inclusive education specifically that must be accounted for in initial teacher education. on the basis of the 2010 country study visits, a revised and extended framework of core values was presented for discussion at a full project meeting in zürich in autumn 2010 involving experts from all 25 participating countries as well as representatives of the european commission, oecd-ceri and unesco-ibe. using the concepts of core values and areas of competence as a framework, a model was developed in draft form for further discussion during the nine country study visits held in 2011. within the proposed framework, four core values were identified as essential for all teachers working in inclusive education. these core values were used as the basis for describing the areas of competence required by all teachers and each area of competence is seen as inter-connected and highly interdependent. the model of core values linked to areas of competence is presented below (core values indicated in bold font and areas of competence in italics): valuing learner diversity learner difference is considered as a resource and an asset to education. the areas of competence within this core value relate to:  conceptions of inclusive education;  the teacher’s view of learner difference. supporting all learners teachers have high expectations for all learners’ achievements. the areas of competence within this core value relate to:  promoting the academic, practical, social and emotional learning of all learners;  effective teaching approaches in heterogeneous classes. working with others collaboration and teamwork are essential approaches for all teachers. the areas of competence within this core value relate to:  working with parents and families;  working with a range of other educational professionals. personal professional development teaching is a learning activity and teachers take responsibility for their lifelong learning. the areas of competence within this core value relate to:  teachers as reflective practitioners;  initial teacher education as a foundation for on-going professional learning and development. the 2011 country visits involved a series of validation activities. within the project activities, validation was understood to refer to stakeholder agreement on the proposed framework of values and areas of competence. (european agency, 2012) in preparation for discussions during the visits, all participants (including country core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 85 stakeholders) were provided with copies of the draft model document (either in full or in summary format) before the meetings. the main goal of the 2011 country visits was to collect feedback from a range of different stakeholders in teacher education on the content and potential usefulness of the framework of core values linked to areas of competence. to achieve this goal, the country host teams organised a range of activities involving different stakeholder group representatives. activities included visits to and observations in schools and classes, visits to teacher education institutions and observations of ite classes, and presentations about country policy and practice for ite. most importantly, in all visits there were a series of discussions between the visiting project experts and country stakeholders in ite regarding the framework – its content and potential usefulness. these discussions were highly interactive and took the form of focus groups where stakeholders were encouraged to provide their feedback and the project experts and staff team acted as recorders. for all visits a template for collecting feedback on the framework was completed by all project experts and some key stakeholder participants. this template asked the project experts to record information relating to five areas:  stakeholder agreement about the framework of core values: valuing learners diversity, supporting all learners, working with others and personal professional development;  stakeholder agreement about the areas of competence outlined in the model;  discussion regarding the general principles underpinning the framework;  comments or suggestions regarding implications for implementation of the framework;  anything stakeholders want to add or delete. the visit discussion activities ranged from conversations with small groups, to large plenary debates with audiences of over 50 stakeholder group representatives. in addition to the country project experts, over 300 participants were involved in the nine visits. these included:  learners (both with and without special educational needs), their parents and family members;  local community representatives;  class teachers, school leaders, specialist teachers and support staff;  multi-disciplinary team members (including school psychologists, social workers and health care professionals);  school inspectors, local area administrators and policy makers;  newly qualified teachers;  student teachers – studying both ite and in-service education programmes;  teacher educators working in inclusive, special needs and subject based programmes;  teacher education institution senior managers (rectors, deans, heads of departments and faculties);  national level policy makers for inclusive education and teacher education. european stakeholder agreement on the framework of core values and areas of competence the nine country study visits in 2011 were grouped into two phases of information collection: information collection for validation: using the agreed template, feedback on the framework was collected during the visits to cyprus, malta, norway, latvia and finland and then analysed by the project staff team in 86 global education review 1 (1) order to identify emerging themes and ideas across visits. information verification: the key trends and messages emerging from the first visits were presented to participants in the visits to denmark, spain, uk (england) and austria. participants were asked to specifically comment on the trends identified in the first phase of visits in order to see if the findings the te4i project website: were verified or contested. (more information on the country study visits is available from http://www.europeanagency.org/agency-projects/teachereducation-for-inclusion/country-study-visits) this pattern of two phases of information collection activities, as well as the fixed structure of the visits and the varied participants involved in them meant that different forms of data (information) triangulation could be used. denzin (1979) originally identified four types of triangulation techniques, which have been latterly discussed by creswell and miller (2000) among others. two of these techniques were used in the visits: data triangulation (the same process for collecting information being repeated nine times, resulting in nine datasets) and different investigator information triangulation (two project managers and nine teams of experts all using the same information collection tools). in total, 68 written responses using the template for feedback and comments were collected and analysed; 36 in the information validation phase and 32 in the information verification phase. the respondents represented the following countries: austria, belgium [flemish and french speaking communities], cyprus, czech republic, denmark, estonia, finland, france, germany, iceland, ireland, latvia, lithuania, luxembourg, malta, netherlands, norway, poland, portugal, spain, sweden, switzerland, united kingdom [england, northern ireland, scotland and wales]. a potential problem with engaging the project experts to provide feedback was that even though they were asked to present the views of stakeholders during discussions, personal views on the values and areas of competence were likely to be reflected in their written comments. for the small number of responses where it was obvious that a personal reply had been given – for example, where the use of the word ‘i’ was prevalent – the staff team asked the respondent whether the reply was personal, or whether it did reflect the stakeholder discussions. only those replies confirmed as reflecting stakeholder discussions were included in the analysis. the main focus for the analysis of the respondents’ feedback was upon collecting evidence of agreement (or otherwise) with the framework model, specifically:  reported agreement with the core values;  reported agreement with the areas of competence. an overall breakdown of these responses is presented in the table below: reported agreement with the core values reported agreement with the areas of competence total overall 59 54 68 validation phase 30 30 36 verification phase 29 24 32 table 1 – overview of responses 32 http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion/country-study-visits http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion/country-study-visits http://www.european-agency.org/agency-projects/teacher-education-for-inclusion/country-study-visits core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 87 there was strong general stakeholder agreement on the model – over 87% of respondents reported agreement on the core values and 79% reported agreement on the areas of competence.2 in the validation phase, there was 83% agreement on both the core values and the areas of competence. in the verification phase, there was 91% agreement on the core values and 75% agreement on the areas of competence. based on the analysis of information from the nine visits, the basic framework based upon four core values linked to areas of competence (and presented in section 6 above) was agreed upon. as a result of this european level validation of the framework, the core values and areas of competence were used as the basis for developing a more extensive profile of inclusive teachers (european agency for development in special needs education 2012). this profile document was sent to all agency representatives and nominated project experts for comment in early 2012. the final draft was also presented at the te4i project dissemination conference, held in brussels in spring 2012. during this event, in addition to project experts having a final opportunity to comment on the text, structured reflections on the potential value of the profile were presented by representatives of unesco and unicef cee/cis, as well as speakers representing key education employers, newly qualified teachers and student teachers. the agreed objectives for the profile document were to:  identify a framework of core values and areas of competence that are applicable to any initial teacher education programme;  highlight the essential core values and areas of competence necessary for preparing all teachers to work in inclusive education considering all forms of diversity;  highlight key factors supporting the implementation of the proposed core values and areas of competence for inclusive education within all ite programmes;  reinforce the argument made within the te4i project that inclusive education is the responsibility of all teachers and that preparing all teachers for work in inclusive settings is the responsibility of all teacher educators working across ite programmes. core values linked to european policy priorities for school and teacher education the final profile of inclusive teachers developed within the teacher education for inclusion project presents the core values and agreed areas of competence needed by all teachers to enable them to work effectively in inclusive education. while the political priorities and effects of social policies within individual countries cannot be ignored, there is a framework of international and eu level policy subscribed to by all countries that impacts upon both inclusive education and teacher education. the work conducted to identify agreed european core values and areas of competence for teachers working in inclusive education links directly to three areas of european level policy initiatives: firstly, key competences for lifelong learning; secondly, competency approaches within higher education and finally improving teacher education policy. the key competences needed by all citizens within a context of lifelong learning are described in the recommendation of the european parliament and council of the european union (2006). eight key competencies are identified: 88 global education review 1 (1)  communication in the mother tongue;  communication in foreign languages;  mathematical competence and basic competences in science and technology;  digital competence;  learning to learn;  social and civic competences;  sense of initiative and entrepreneurship; and  cultural awareness and expression. the relevance of these eight key competences for all learners is highlighted within strategic objective 3 of the et 2020 strategic framework, which argues that: education and training policy should enable all citizens, irrespective of their personal, social or economic circumstances, to acquire, update and develop over a lifetime both job-specific skills and the key competences needed for their employability and to foster further learning, active citizenship and intercultural dialogue. (p4) the development of key competences during school education is closely linked with the use of competency-based approaches in higher education. within the european union bologna process3 work, the report from the joint quality initiative informal group (european universities association, 2003) supported not only an outcomes based approach to higher education, but recommended a competency based approach where learners: . . . can apply their knowledge and understanding in a manner that indicates a professional approach to their work or vocation, and have competences typically demonstrated through devising and sustaining arguments and solving problems within their field of study. (p.57) this is supported by sjur and radu (2010) who, in a council of europe report argue that developing learners' competence should be seen as part of the mission of higher education, with the competences to be developed dependent upon what are considered to be the purposes of higher education. they suggest that converging competences highlight the need to educate the whole person; education should be seen as being about acquiring knowledge and skills, but also about acquiring values and attitudes. a number of implications for teacher education are apparent: student teachers should be educated using a competency based approach, as this is likely to make their ite more effective, and prepare them to develop competence based learning with all learners in their classrooms. as the te4i project synthesis report (2011) suggests: new teachers must understand the complexities of teaching and learning and the many factors that affect them. they should recognise that all learners should be actively involved in making sense of their learning, rather than passive consumers of tightly prescribed curriculum content. (p68) three recent council conclusions – from 2007, 2008 and 2009 – have identified priorities for improving teacher education as defined by the ministers of education in member states. these have been summarised within the document, improving teacher quality: the european union policy agenda, (holdsworth, 2010). ten priority policy areas can be identified in these three sets of council conclusions. the priority areas are to:  promote professional values and attitudes; core values as the basis for teacher education for inclusion 89  improve teacher competences;  ensure effective recruitment and selection to promote educational quality;  improve the quality of initial teacher education;  introduce induction programmes for all new teachers;  provide mentoring support to all teachers;  improve quality and quantity of continuing professional development;  support effective school leadership;  ensure the quality of teacher educators;  improve teacher education systems. the core values for inclusive education agreed upon in the project by european stakeholders underpin all of these policy priorities; furthermore it is argued that the core values are beneficial for all learners, not just those at risk of exclusion. concluding comments many european countries are reviewing the structure of ite and considering where and by whom ite should be delivered (universities and/or schools). course structures and curriculum content are also being widely debated and many of the proposed revisions are in line with an inclusive approach. the oecd ‘teachers matter’ report (2005) discusses “changing the emphases in initial teacher education” and suggests that: it is unrealistic to expect that any initial teacher education programme, no matter how high quality, will be able to fully develop student teachers … rather than being the main or indeed the only qualification for teachers, initial teacher education is now starting to be viewed as the entry point for the profession and the platform for teachers’ on-going development (p. 134). the oecd report goes further and argues that raising teacher quality is the policy most likely to lead to gains in school performance. this argument is in alignment with the wide agreement among the professionals working with the agency project that educating teachers to respond to diversity is likely to be the policy having the greatest impact on the development of more inclusive schools and communities. the reform of teacher education must be part of wider systemic reform that requires the principle of inclusion to become an integral part of the thinking of policy makers and other stakeholders. such change inevitably takes time and highlights the importance of consistent, long-term, holistic policies. throughout the agency project, a recurring message from project experts and country stakeholders has been the potential of teacher education to act as a lever for change in the education system and promote inclusive practice. work within the project suggests that individual teachers cannot be viewed as agents for systemic change in education, but that they can be considered as a crucial factor contributing to necessary systemic change. teachers who hold values in line with an inclusive approach and who are prepared to work effectively with a diverse range of learners’ needs can act as multipliers for inclusive education. every action that supports inclusive education matters and all actors in education can make a difference in the short and long term. notes 1. the jean monnet action programme in the field of lifelong learning for 2007-2013 entered into force on 14th december 2006: http://ec.europa.eu/education/progra mmes/llp/structure/monnet_en.html 2. there were 9 negative responses (13%) in relation to the core values: 6 respondents did not reply; 1 respondent suggested that more http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/structure/monnet_en.html http://ec.europa.eu/education/programmes/llp/structure/monnet_en.html 90 global education review 1 (1) development to the framework of core values was needed; 2 respondents questioned whether the values were sufficiently personalised to individuals and local contexts. there were 14 negative responses (21%) in relation to the areas of competence: 8 respondents did not reply; 2 respondents suggested the concept was overly simplistic; 2 respondents suggested more details were needed to develop the concept; 1 respondent suggested the issue was not covered well enough in the visit to give a reply; 1 respondent stated that the concept requires a huge paradigm shift. 3. please see: http://ec.europa.eu/education/highereducation/bologna_en.htm for more information. references acedo, c., amadio, m., opertti, r., brady, j., duncombe, l., weyermann, m., . . . xu, x. 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http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/policy_dialogue/48th_ice/confinted_48-5_conclusions_english.pdf http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/policy_dialogue/48th_ice/confinted_48-5_conclusions_english.pdf http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789240685215_eng.pdf http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789240685215_eng.pdf https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&scrid=bmlszxnoc2luz2lolm9yz3x1bmnycgqtaw5kawf8z3g6yzy2mdyzmme4mzuxodg3 https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&scrid=bmlszxnoc2luz2lolm9yz3x1bmnycgqtaw5kawf8z3g6yzy2mdyzmme4mzuxodg3 https://docs.google.com/viewer?a=v&pid=sites&scrid=bmlszxnoc2luz2lolm9yz3x1bmnycgqtaw5kawf8z3g6yzy2mdyzmme4mzuxodg3 education and training across europe – the current policy context the need to strengthen teacher education key messages from european research literature 8tthe agency teacher education for inclusion (te4i) project key messages from the te4i project a values based approach to inclusive education core values as a basis for identifying areas of teacher competence developing a framework of core values linked to areas of competence  national level policy makers for inclusive education and teacher education. european stakeholder agreement on the framework of core values and areas of competence core values linked to european policy priorities for school and teacher education concluding comments 60 global education review 2(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kryst, erica l., kotok, stephen & bodovski, katerina (2015). rural/urban disparities in science achievement in post-socialist countries: the evolving influence of socioeconomic status. global education review, 2(4). 60-77 rural/urban disparities in science achievement in post-socialist countries: the evolving influence of socioeconomic status erica l kryst the pennsylvania state university stephen kotok university of texas at el paso katerina bodovski the pennsylvania state university abstract disparities in educational outcomes exist between students in rural areas as compared to students in urban settings. while there is some evidence that these rural disparities are present in eastern europe, little is known about young peoples’ lives in the rural areas of this region. this paper presents an analysis of science achievement by location (rural v. urban) using all available waves of the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss). we examined the eighth grade data from five countries: lithuania, romania, the russian federation, hungary, and slovenia. findings demonstrated that students attending rural schools had significantly lower science scores and that the rural disadvantage grew between 1995 and 2011 in some countries, but became non-significant in others. overall, family socioeconomic status played an important role in determining the educational outcomes of rural students. the implications of these findings are explored in relation to the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) 2015 education for all goals. keywords rural education, eastern europe, science achievement, socioeconomic status introduction regional disparities in educational outcomes existed in eastern europe between rural and urban areas during communist rule (gerber & hout, 1995). however, since the fall of communism, opportunity gaps between rural and urban areas in eastern europe have substantially widened (gerber, 2000; gerber & hout, 2004). in most cases, large urban centers experienced high levels of growth and development while rural areas have experienced corresponding author: erica l. kryst, the pennsylvania state university, university park, pa 16802 email: ell140@psu.edu mailto:ell140@psu.edu rural/urban disparities in science achievement 61 little change (heyns, 2005). despite evidence of a rural disadvantage in this region, little is known about how social exclusion and limited access to educational opportunities shape young people’s lives in rural areas of eastern europe. in the past few decades, the countries of central and eastern europe (cee) have performed increasingly well on international assessments. according to a report released by the united states department of education regarding education in post-socialist countries, “the quality of education in certain fields, especially math and sciences, was, and remains, exceptional” and recent studies show that a number of central and eastern european countries rank among the top countries internationally in eighth grade science and math (laporte & ringold, 1997, p. 1). while educational quality in central and eastern europe appears to be high overall, little is known about the differences that exist between rural and urban educational outcomes in this region. given what we know about the educational and social disadvantages associated with rural location in other countries, this paper examined disparities in science achievement between rural and urban areas in countries in post-socialist transition. the purpose of this study was to gain a better understanding of the relationship between rural location and educational achievement in the region. this paper presents an analysis of science achievement by location (rural v. urban) using all available waves of timss (1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011). we examined the eighth grade data from five post-socialist countries: lithuania, romania, russia, hungary, and slovenia. we start with a discussion of the overall differences in science achievement between urban and rural students. then, we model these differences while accounting for family socioeconomic status (ses) and gender. we included ses in our model because of the welldocumented relationship between rural areas and pervasive poverty. this is also the case in rural regions within eastern europe, where high poverty is a defining characteristic of many rural communities (european commission, 2008; zichy, 2000). in addition to contributing to the literature on the rural/urban dichotomy in educational achievement, we also address implications these findings have with respect to unesco’s 2015 education for all (efa) goals two and six. in light of our findings, we discuss the usefulness of efa as a framework for measuring educational equity based on geographic location, gender, and socioeconomic status in transition countries. the rural context in order to understand the relationship between living in a rural area and science achievement, we first explored the rural context as it is represented in the literature. below is a discussion of the rural context more broadly as well as an overview of what was found in the literature about rural areas and rural education in eastern europe. rural areas are diverse spaces and how rural is observed and defined varied across the literature (cuervo & wyn, 2013). some researchers relied on conceptual definitions that define rural spaces based on cultural characteristics and historically defined constructs, specifically occupational, ecological, and sociocultural constructs (bealer, willits, & kuvlesky, 1965). often, conceptual definitions of rural are based on meaningful differences that exist between rural and urban areas, such as the presence of traditional values and attitudes in rural areas in order to establish whether a place is rural (willits, bealer, & crider, 1973). other research utilized empirical definitions of rural. empirical definitions determine what is rural and what is not rural based on measures such as population density or distance from urban areas (isserman, 2005). whether one utilizes a conceptual or empirical definition, rural spaces are difficult to define and to capture. there are characteristics of rural spaces that are consistent across definitions and regional contexts. first, there are differences between urban and rural education, including 62 global education review 2(4) differences in quality (giroux, jah, & eloundouenyegue, 2010; agrawal, 2014), early education opportunities (miller & votruba-drzal, 2013), and post-secondary outcomes including participation in higher education (byun, meece, & irvin, 2012; provasnik, kewal-remani, coleman, gilbertson, gerring, & xie, 2007; koricick, 2014; chankseliani, 2013; mactavish & salamon, 2006; mcilveen, morgan, & bimrose, 2012), as well as differences in parents’ level of education (iannelli, 2002). second, poverty is a defining characteristic of many rural communities, and is often found in higher levels in rural areas compared to urban areas (tickamyer & duncan, 1990; zichy, 2000; miller & votruba-drzal, 2013; bailey, jensen, & ransom, 2014,). the presence of poverty in rural areas has implications for the educational outcomes of rural youth. last, several studies have explored the relationship between rural areas and access to technology, specifically the lack of technology related courses in rural schools (lee & mcintire, 2000), as well as disadvantages rural youth experience accessing technology at home compared to their peers in urban areas (li & ranieri, 2013; chen & liu, 2013). educational inequality between rural and urban contexts is global and widespread. there are vast differences between rural educational quality and access to opportunity as compared to urban, and suburban school settings (giroux, jah, & eloundou-enyegue, 2010; agrawal, 2014). rural children enter school with less advanced academic skills than children in small urban and suburban areas (miller & votrubadrzal, 2013). these lower levels of preparation are partially attributed to a lack of early education opportunities in rural areas, as well as overall lower levels of parental education (khattri, riley, & kane, 1997; hardre & hennessey, 2010). the deficits in educational quality and opportunity encountered by rural students have long-term effects on their life outcomes, influencing access to higher education and employment (chankseliani, 2013; mactavish & salamon, 2006). across countries, fewer numbers of rural students pursue postsecondary education compared to their counterparts in urban and suburban areas (byun, meece, & irvin, 2012; provasnik, kewalremani, coleman, gilbertson, gerring, & xie, 2007; koricick, 2014). one explanation for the rural disadvantage in post-secondary attainment is the high instance of poverty. poverty is rampant in rural areas and it has implications for education, as well as long term individual and community consequences (bailey et al., 2014). poverty in rural areas leads to limited opportunities for social and economic development, as well as decreased mobility, stable employment, investment in the community, and limited variation in industry or career options (tickamyer & duncan, 1990). in fact, the lower educational achievement of rural children is often attributed to less advantaged home environments – including, as was mentioned before, parents with lower levels of education, as well as decreased access to basic human needs relative to non-rural children, such as cognitive stimulation in the form of books and activities, as well as parental warmth, responsiveness, and emotional support (miller & votruba-drzal, 2013). thus, the association between poverty and educational outcomes deserves special attention in rural settings. rural context in central and eastern europe since the beginning of the post-socialist era, there have been increasing inequalities between rural and urban areas in central and eastern europe (cee) (gerber, 2000; gerber & hout, 2004). research using timss and the programme for international student assessment (pisa) data suggest the existence of disparities between urban and rural education systems in the post-socialist countries of cee (geske, grinfields, dedze, & zhang, 2006). while regional disadvantages in educational opportunity existed under communism (gerber rural/urban disparities in science achievement 63 & hout, 1995), opportunity gaps between rural and urban areas have widened (gerber, 2000; gerber & hout, 2004). heyns (2005) documented increasing inequalities between urban and rural areas, citing that while large urban centers have experienced high levels of growth and development in the post-communist world, rural areas have experienced little change. educational achievement in rural areas of cee was lower than in urban areas. typically, the educational level achieved by residents in rural areas within cee countries was below the national average for that country (zichy, 2000), and lower than in urban areas (davis & pearce, 2000). based on several papers published on learning achievement in central and eastern europe in 2006, results consistently demonstrated that children in urban schools scored higher on average than students in rural areas (willms, smith, zhang, & tramonte, 2006). much of the available data also showed that educational outcomes were highly correlated with socioeconomic status. low ses was often a characteristic of children in rural areas. one important correlate of socioeconomic status was parental education. this was particularly true in eastern europe where parental educational level was found to have a stronger impact on students’ educational and early occupational outcomes as compared to western european youth, who were more likely to achieve the same educational level as their parents (iannelli, 2002). in all cee countries, socioeconomic status was a significant factor in determining the level of education students will achieve (strakovam, tomasek, & willms, 2007). recent research using timss and pisa data hinted at the existence of disparities in science achievement between urban and rural education systems in this region (geske, grinfields, dedze, & zhang, 2006). in romania, timss 2003 showed that rural students had lower science achievement scores, lower levels of parental education, and fewer educational resources at home as compared to urban students (istrate, noveanu, & smith, 2006). however, it is possible that timss data underestimated the effect of poverty, since there was no specific measure for socioeconomic status. it is difficult to measure educational outcomes in rural areas where high numbers of the population still do not attend school. for example, in romania, over half of rural youth ages 15-24 do not attend any type of school (european commission, 2008). the presence of poverty is also an unfortunate reality in rural areas of eastern europe. rural regions within cee are characterized as “desolate and the rural population resigned” (zichy, 2000, p. 87), where poverty is an unfortunate reality (european commission, 2008). in lithuania, the poverty rate in rural areas is three times greater than in the country’s largest cities (european commission, 2008). in romania, the rate of poverty in rural areas is 42% compared to 18% in urban areas (european commission, 2008). as such, poverty is highly concentrated in rural areas of eastern europe. a variety of school factors influence educational outcomes in rural schools, including a lack of advanced course offerings, instructional resources, progressive instruction, professional training, and a safe/orderly climate (lee & mcintire, 2000). access to these resources varies greatly between rural and urban schools and decreased access to technology in particular is a correlate of higher poverty and the less developed infrastructure found in rural areas. in addition to inequities that exist in access to technology between rural and urban students, students in rural areas are also disadvantaged in their ability to use the internet autonomously, the degree of social support they received relative to internet use, and internet use as related to self-efficacy (li& ranieri, 2013; chen & liu, 2013). the lack of effective use and access to technology in rural areas potentially further exacerbated the rural-urban achievement gap. increasingly localized systems of government in post-socialist countries place additional strain on rural education in this region. prior to the upheaval of the early 1990s 64 global education review 2(4) and the fall of communism, education systems in eastern europe and the soviet union were highly centralized and controlled, fiscally and systemically through the control of curriculum, personnel, and standards (micklewright, 1999; eklof, holmes, & kaplan, 2005; laporte & ringold, 1997; amini & commander, 2012). during the post-socialist transition however, fiscal responsibility for education fell primarily on local governments and families, and the funding responsibility for early education was delegated to families, and private organizations (laporte & ringold, 1997). slovenia and hungary, for example, have what is considered to be the most decentralized schooling systems in all of eastern europe (ammermuller et al., 2005). because funding for schools is now more closely connected to regional resources and local governments, decentralization poses potential equity issues in this region. such issues have already been documented in hungary, where there are indications that educational resources are unequally distributed (laporte & ringold, 1997). a greater share of the fiscal burden also falls on families and individuals in this region. in the czech republic, schools charged tuition for pre-school and university education, and enrollment in private schools, particularly at the university level, had risen to 9% by 1997. similarly, in poland private university enrollment reached 10%, but the largest increase in private university enrollment was in romania, where 27% of students were paying tuition by 1997 (laporte & ringold, 1997). other financing alternatives are being explored in this region, including partnerships between educational institutions and the private sector (laporte & ringold, 1997). this decentralization has special implications for rural schools and communities, which have fewer fiscal resources, school options, and family financial resources to adapt to these changes. finally, gender is often considered a significant factor in youths’ educational outcomes. the post-socialist context is a unique frame through which to explore gender, given the high level of gender equality found in socialist education systems, particularly in the area of science. in central and eastern european countries, there is a lack of consensus amongst scholars about the relationship between gender and educational achievement. while demonstrating that students’ background characteristics were less impactful on science achievement than they are on math achievement in central and eastern europe, ammermuller et al. (2005) reported that in science, female students did have a disadvantage. on the other hand, heyns (2005) documented increases in educational inequality based on age, education level, and location but noted that the gender gap has declined since 1989. in the post-socialist region more broadly, kovaleva (2010) found no gender differences in natural sciences achievement among russian fourth and eighth grade students. similarly, amini and commander (2012) found mixed results in russia when examining gender differences in science achievement based on both timss and pisa. more research is needed to clarify the relationships between gender and academic achievement in post-socialist countries. considering the rural context and the characteristics that define rural areas and rural education in eastern europe, this paper will attempt to answer the following research questions:  has the rural gap in science achievement changed over time, as captured by timss 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011?  does computer ownership vary between rural and urban areas?  does the rural/urban difference in science achievement hold once we account for gender and family ses? data & methods this study used data from the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss). the international association for the evaluation of educational achievement (iea) has conducted timss every four years since rural/urban disparities in science achievement 65 1995 and this study utilized data from all five assessments: 1995; 1999; 2003; 2007 and 2011. timss measured student achievement in mathematics and science, and collected information on curriculum and instructional practices for participating countries. for the purposes of this study, we only used timss data on science achievement. timss used a two-stage stratified cluster sampling design in which schools were sampled with probability proportional to their size, and 4th and 8th grade classrooms were randomly selected from those schools. our study only utilized the 8th grade timss data given our focus on science learning which occurs more during secondary school. the 8th grade data for 1995 actually included a range of students from 6th to 9th grade in some countries, so we restricted the 1995 analysis to only 8th graders as to make it comparable across years. we restricted our choice of post-socialist eastern european countries based on the availability of the valid data for the countries that participated in all five data collections. as such, we employed data from five eastern european countries: hungary, lithuania, romania, russia, and slovenia. timms assigned sampling students weights to ensure the data represented the actual population of schools, classrooms, and students. using the recommended weights allowed the results to be generalized to target populations of all 8th grade students in each country. summary statistics were produced for each country for all five years, but we elected to only present the first and last years in text.1 we utilized timss 1999 data on computer ownership for lithuania because this data was not available in timss 1995. to answer the first research question, we conducted a bivariate regression analysis of science achievement by country and location, rural and urban, using timss 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011. to answer the second research question we used bivariate logistic regression to analyze if there was a statistically significant difference in the average ownership of computers between rural and urban students in each country.2 third, we conducted multivariate ordinary least squares (ols) regressions for each year in order to estimate how rurality, gender and socioeconomic background were related to science achievement. again, we only reported the findings based on the first and last waves. due to the sampling strategy, the usual ordinary least squares (ols) regression assumption of completely independent observations may be violated, since students in the same school tend to be similar on unmeasured variables. in order to obtain correct standard errors, we used the recommended jackknife repeated replication (jrr) technique. our dependent variable was performance scores in science in four content domains (biology, chemistry, physics, and earth science) and three cognitive domains (knowing, applying, and reasoning). timss uses item response theory (irt) method to map proficiency on a scale with an international mean of 500 with a standard deviation equaling 100. since timss uses multiple imputation to create five plausible values (pv) for science achievement, we used specific pv commands in stata to sum the plausible scores and to account for the additional standard error associated with pvs. our main variable of interest was a binary variable for whether a student attended a rural school. since timss altered the way they measured rural status between 1999 and 2003, we coded the variable to be consistent over time. for 1995 and 1999, rural was defined categorically as living in a geographically isolated or village area. we used this as our measure for rural when analyzing the 1995 and 1999 waves of timss. in subsequent years, rural was defined numerically indicating an area with less than 3,000 people. we utilized this definition of rural when analyzing the 2003, 2007, and 2011 waves. we compared descriptives as well as unesco data to ensure the rural measure captured the population of interest. 66 global education review 2(4) we also include other variables in the multivariate model, specifically gender and family socioeconomic status. gender was measured using a dichotomous scale (0=male and 1=female). family socioeconomic status was captured by using two variables: parental education and a composite of home possessions.3 one of the variables in home possessions, computer ownership, was also used in the analysis comparing rural and urban ownership of a computer. parental education is a dummy variable indicating that one of the parents has received a ba degree or higher. home possessions was a standardized variable that was used as a proxy for family wealth. it was a composite measure of home possessions including ownership of a calculator, desk, dictionary, and computer, as well as access to internet in the home. the number of books in the home was also included. the measure was standardized for each year so that it showed the relative position of a student’s family. results table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the variables used in the analysis for the first wave (1995) by country. table 2 presents descriptive statistics for the variables used in the analysis for the last wave of timss (2011) by country. in timss 1995 we see that only lithuania and romania scored below the international mean, at approximately 463 and 470 respectively. in the 2011 wave, romania is the only country in our study that remained below the international mean at 465. between 1995 and 2011, hungary’s overall eighth grade science score decreased by 2.7%, lithuania had a 10.88% increase, romania a 1.2% decrease, the russian federation a 3.7% increase, and finally slovenia saw a 0.3% increase in science score between 1995 and 2011. table 1. descriptive statistics by country for timss 1995 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia mean science achievement 536.75 463.56 470.93 522.58 540.98 percentage of rural students 0.35 0.32 0.31 0.23 0.33 percentage of female students 0.51 0.55 0.50 0.53 0.51 ses (standardized home possessions) 0.33 0.13 -0.83 0.21 0.23 parental education (ba or higher) 0.27 0.51 0.12 0.40 0.21 percentage with a computer 0.37 0.16i 0.19 0.35 0.47 n 2912 2525 3725 4022 2708 rural/urban disparities in science achievement 67 table 2. descriptive statistics by country for timss 2011 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia mean science achievement 522.39 513.87 464.69 542.46 542.82 % students rural 0.20 0.27 0.24 0.16 0.29 % female 0.49 0.49 0.48 0.49 0.49 ses (standardized home possessions) 0.19 -0.19 -0.48 -0.24 0.24 parental education (ba or higher) 0.29 0.28 0.22 0.57 0.34 % with a computer 0.95 0.96 0.84 0.88 0.99 n 5176 4735 5523 4891 4403 in 1995, from 19% of students (romania) to 47% of students (slovenia) owned a computer. within all five countries, there were significant disparities between rural and urban students in terms of computer ownership (see table 3). for instance, only a quarter of rural students in hungary possessed computers while 43% of urban students possessed computers. by 2011, computer ownership had rapidly increased for students in all countries, but important differences remained between rural and urban computer ownership. the disparity between rural and urban computer ownership had narrowed substantially in hungary and lithuania and had disappeared completely in slovenia. conversely, the russian federation had the widest difference between rural and urban ownership with urban areas approaching universal ownership (93%) while only about two-thirds of rural students owned computers. in most countries, rural students were less likely to own a computer as compared to students in urban areas. this trend was consistent across waves with little variation and in most cases the relationship was statistically significant. while this comparative analysis is descriptive in nature, it nonetheless sheds light on how differential access to technology may act as a stratifying mechanism between rural and urban students. table 3: mean differences in computer ownership by rural-urban status for timss 1995 and 2011 1995 2011 rural urban rural urban hungary 0.25 0.43*** 0.90 0.97*** lithuania4 0.09 0.19*** 0.91 0.98*** romania 0.10 0.24** 0.73 0.86** russian federation 0.24 0.38*** 0.66 0.93*** slovenia 0.38 0.50*** 0.99 0.99 note: * p<.05, ** p <.01, *** p<.001 68 global education review 2(4) in 1995, rural school children in cee performed worse than their urban counterparts in the area of science (see table 4). as indicated in our bivariate model, rural schools had significantly lower scores in four of the five countries. the rural deficit was largest in hungary (b=-30.94; p<.001) and the russian federation (b=-37.06; p<.001). no significant differences in rural scores were found in romania. once gender, home possessions, and parental education were controlled for, rural disadvantage remained significant in hungary (b=-12.44; p<.0.05) and the russian federation (b=-25.50; p<.001). family socioeconomic status, measured as home possessions and parental education, seemed to account for much of the rural deficit. socioeconomic status was significantly related to science achievement across all countries, with greater levels of home possessions associated with science scores. only in the russian federation, was the effect of home possessions smaller than the effect of being from a rural area. finally, parental education had a significant effect on science scores across all countries, with students whose parents held a ba or higher achieving higher science scores. in all countries, significant differences were found between genders, with females, on average, scoring lower than males on science. notably, we tested a rural gender interaction, but the rural disadvantage did not vary by gender. in sum, students in rural areas fared worse in science than their urban peers, but family socioeconomic explained away the deficit everywhere but the russian federation and hungary. table 4. multivariate ordinary least squares (ols) regression analysis for science achievement timss 1995 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia rural -30.94*** (5.78) -12.44* (5.91) -20.00* (8.57) -3.34 (9.66) -17.40 (13.27) 3.70 (11.95) 37.06*** (7.37) -25.50*** (7.20) -16.38* (6.74) -4.02 (6.61) female -25.39*** (4.40) -33.24*** (4.53) -11.76** (4.23) -12.36*** (3.33) -29.87*** (4.15) ses (standardized home possessions) 28.60*** (2.96) 24.27*** (3.79) 15.33*** (2.82) 14.98*** (3.71) 31.35*** (3.76) parental education (ba or higher) 37.42*** (5.19) 20.09*** (5.06) 27.49*** (9.35) 32.76*** (5.33) 41.12*** (4.93) constant 547.37*** (3.47) 547.25*** (4.41) 470.03*** (5.25) 485.30*** (5.85) 476.15*** (6.17) 499.77*** (5.71) 531.16*** (4.19) 523.41*** (6.15) 545.43*** (3.81) 543.88*** (4.22) r squared 0.0351 0.1716 0.0132 0.1219 0.0062 0.0755 0.0034 0.0937 0.0099 0.1557 n 2833 1909 2325 1198 3698 2670 4022 3270 2267 1963 note: * p<.05, ** p <.01, *** p<.001 standard errors in parenthesis rural/urban disparities in science achievement 69 rural children continued to perform worse than their urban counterparts in the area of science in 2011 in all countries except for slovenia (see table 5). the first model showed that rural school students scored lower on timss 2011 in hungary, lithuania, romania, and the russian federation. the rural deficit was largest in hungary (b=-41.53; p<.001) and lithuania (b=-37.83; p<.001). in slovenia, there was no significant difference between rural and urban students. when gender and family socioeconomic status were controlled for, significant negative differences in science achievement between rural and urban students remained in hungary (b=-25.47; p<.001) and lithuania (b=-23.33, p<.001). socioeconomic status via home possessions and parental education seem to explain away much of the rural deficit in romania. controlling for ses had the greatest impact on the magnitude of the rural effect in romania and hungary. notably, in lithuania the effect for home possessions was smaller in magnitude than the effect of being from a rural area. in slovenia, family socioeconomic status, specifically the standardized measure for home possessions, partially explained the rural deficit in science achievement. parental education, as a measure of ses, was associated with science scores in hungary, lithuania, romania, and the russian federation, with students whose parents held a ba or higher achieving higher science scores. markedly, in the russian federation, the effect of parental education accounted for the majority of rural disadvantage in science achievement while home possessions was not related to achievement. finally, significant differences by gender were found only in hungary and lithuania. in hungary, females on average scored lower than males (b=-13.26, p<.001), while in lithuania (b=6.25, p<.05) females on average scored higher than their male counterparts. as previously stated, we tested a rural gender interaction but found that the gender gap did not vary by type of location. overall, analysis of the 2011 wave demonstrates that students in rural areas performed less well in the area of science achievement as compared to their urban peers. however, family socioeconomic status explains away the rural deficit in all countries except hungary and lithuania. table 5. multivariate ordinary least squares (ols) regression analysis for science achievement timss 2011 note: * p<.05, ** p <.01, *** p<.001 standard errors in parenthesis hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia rural -41.53*** (6.44) -25.47*** (5.18) -37.83*** (5.70) -23.33*** (5.62) -33.95*** (8.58) -16.04 (8.83) -23.37* (10.33) -7.99 (10.91) 4.30 (5.04) -3.97 (5.31) female -13.26*** (3.78) 6.25* (3.06) 2.64 (3.50) -5.12 (3.13) -4.23 (3.98) ses (standardized home possessions) 30.80*** (2.65) 15.57*** (2.53) 16.99*** (2.09) 5.97 (2.04) 17.10*** (2.92) parental education (ba or higher) 33.89*** (3.63) 29.03*** (3.73) 26.69*** (5.21) 30.22*** (4.09) 35.30 (4.21) constant 531.38*** (3.42) 520.69*** (3.97) 524.28*** (2.83) 516.10 (3.67) 472.66*** (4.04) 481.74 (5.11) 546.25*** (3.30) 536.59*** (4.28) 544.81*** (3.54) 537.71*** (4.73) r squared 0.041 0.221 0.0492 0.1268 0.0282 0.1428 0.0127 0.0639 0.0006 0.0912 n 4991 3977 4536 3053 5433 3945 4893 3811 4210 3101 70 global education review 2(4) in addition, we also ran the analysis using timss 1999, 2003, and 2007.6 the results of the multivariate analysis using timss 1999, after controlling for gender and family socioeconomic status, found significant negative differences in achievement between rural and urban students in science in hungary and the russian federation. analysis of timss 2003 found no significant differences between rural and urban students on science achievement after controlling for gender and family socioeconomic status. results of the timss 2007 analysis show a resurgence of the effect of rural location on science achievement after controlling for gender and family socioeconomic status. in this wave, a significant difference in science achievement between rural and urban students was found in both hungary and lithuania. as already stated, this disparity remained in these two countries in 2011. attending a school in a rural location was negatively correlated with a students’ science achievement across countries with few inconsistencies. the only exceptions appeared to be a lack of a significant effect in romania in 1995 and in 1999, 2003, and 2011 for slovenia. slovenia presents the most inconsistent rural effect on science achievement, demonstrating significant differences between rural and urban science achievement in only in timss 1995 and 2007. overall, once we control for gender and family socioeconomic status, the rural effect disappeared in most cases. in 1995, the russian federation had a substantial rural-urban disparity, but it declined in subsequent years and eventually disappeared. in 2003, the rural effect on science achievement disappeared for all countries after controlling for gender and family ses. this was followed by the 2007 wave where we see the resurgence of the rural effect in hungary, as well as the presence of a rural effect in lithuania, which had not been present in previous waves. the rural effect in hungary and lithuania remained through the 2011 wave. across the multivariate analysis, family socioeconomic status exerted the greatest control over the effect of rural location on science achievement. discussion we employed the 8th – grade data from the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011 for five eastern european countries – hungary, lithuania, romania, the russian federation, and slovenia. the goal of this analysis was to answer three main research questions: a) does the rural gap in science achievement change over time, using timss 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011? b) does computer ownership vary between rural and urban areas? c) does the rural/urban difference in science achievement hold once we account for gender and family ses? our findings showed that there were significant differences between rural and urban eighth grade science achievement across waves from 1995 to 2011 in these post-socialist countries. we found that in most countries, students attending rural schools had significantly lower science scores than their urban counterparts and students in rural areas scored lower than urban students across all waves of timss. there were a small number of exceptions to this finding, including no rural/urban difference in romania in 1995, and in slovenia in 1999, 2003, 2011. it is evident from our findings that rural student achievement in the area of science has not improved since the fall of communism. considering these findings both historically, and as characteristics of the post-socialist transformation, the results are significant. through the course of the last two decades, as measured by timss, rural students continued to perform worse than their urban counterparts in rural/urban disparities in science achievement 71 the area of science. the fall of communism and the subsequent political and economic transformations in central and eastern europe have not had a positive impact on the educational outcomes of rural students in the area of science. after controlling for gender and family socioeconomic status however, our interpretation of the negative relationship between rural location and science achievement comes into focus. in all but a few cases, the rural disadvantage in science achievement disappeared after controlling for gender and family socioeconomic status. notably, family socioeconomic status accounted for a greater proportion of the rural disadvantage in science achievement, as compared to gender. looking at the impact of gender and family socioeconomic status historically, we can see that in 1995, the rural disadvantage only remained in hungary and the russian federation after controlling for these variables. there was no significant rural effect on science achievement for all countries in 2003. by the final wave in 2011, a significant rural effect on science achievement was observed in hungary and lithuania even after controlling for our other variables. what these findings show is that over the course of the post-socialist transition, family socioeconomic status explained much of the difference between rural and urban science achievement. this was especially true for 2003, when there was no significant rural disadvantage after controlling for these variables. however, the resurgence of the rural effect on science achievement in hungary and lithuania in the final wave, even after adding control variables was significant. in 2011, rural students in lithuania scored on average over 23 points lower than urban students even after controlling for gender and family ses. similarly, in hungary it was clear that family ses accounted for a significant amount of rural disadvantage in the area of science achievement. yet, even after accounting for these variables, the rural disadvantage was still present. in the case of hungary, being rural appeared to have a unique effect on science achievement. one possible explanation for the persistent rural effect in hungary is school tracking. hungary is more highly tracked compared to the other countries in this study and it tracks students early – at age 11 (woessmann, 2009). research on the effects of tracking indicate that tracking students into different types of schools increases inequality, and early tracking (before 9th grade) further exacerbates this effect (woessmann, 2009; hanushek & woessmann, 2006). there is also research that points to the effect of early tracking and its impact on the relationship between socioeconomic status and student performance. essentially, early tracking increases the effect of family background on student performance (woessmann, 2009; schuetz, ursprung, & woessmann, 2008). early tracking is one possible cause for the persistent rural effect on science achievement in hungary after accounting for family socioeconomic status. our bivariate analysis of computer ownership also sheds light on an important indicator for socioeconomic status, students’ access to technology. rural students were less likely to own computers than their urban counterparts. this finding was true across all countries included in this study with the exception of slovenia in 2003 and 2011. while this finding may not have been surprising in 1995, when home pc ownership was less common, in 2011 computer ownership was of greater importance in the field of education and in students’ life outcomes. this finding is in line with the literature on the lack of access to technology experienced by students in rural locations and has implications for students’ 72 global education review 2(4) socioeconomic status and ultimately, educational outcomes. there are some important trends here in the relationship between gender and science achievement. while a significant female disadvantage in science achievement was observed across countries in early waves of timss, by 2011 we observed significant effects for gender only in hungary and lithuania. however, the finding in lithuania was a positive significant effect between gender and science achievement, with female students outperforming male students. by the 2011 wave, gender accounted for little of the rural disadvantage, suggesting an even stronger connection between ses and the educational outcomes of rural youth. while gender was associated with science achievement, family socioeconomic status played a much larger role in the educational disadvantages of rural youth. through our analysis, we are able to conclude that the findings related to ses were consistent with literature on rural education, as well as the strong relationship between rural locations and poverty. in each case, family socioeconomic status, as measured through home possessions and parental education played a significant role in accounting for some of the observed disadvantage of rural location on science achievement in post-socialist countries. ultimately, the rural disadvantage appeared to be more of a ses disadvantage. this again goes back to the strong ties found between rural areas and poverty. these findings demonstrated the challenges that youth in rural areas face, as well as the impact of ses and poverty on the educational outcomes of rural youth. through this historical analysis we also observed changes in the effect of gender and family socioeconomic status on educational achievement over time, from 1995-2011. there are many possible explanations for the shifting role these variables play on educational achievement in these countries. as these countries transition out of socialist systems they are influenced by greater global market forces. consider the analysis of the 2003 wave of timss where the rural effect on science achievement was not significant in all countries after controlling for ses and gender. it was the only wave of timss where there was no rural effect. however, in the next wave the rural effect was again present in two of the five countries, and this effect persisted through 2011. what could have happened to once again bring about a rural effect? one possible explanation could be that the 2003 wave, which was collected approximately 12 years after the end of socialism and the fall of the soviet union, was a plateau, after which globalization and market forces impacted the economic and political structures of these transition countries to a greater degree. twelve years after the fall of the soviet union, these countries became greater economic players in europe and the western world. the 2007 and 2011 waves could also be capturing aspects of the global recession that began in earnest in 2007/2008. regardless of the origin of this emerging trend, special attention should be paid to the education outcomes of rural youth in postsocialist countries. implications: education for all the implications of our findings are explored in relation to the goals set forth in the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization’s (unesco) education for all goals. these internationally agreed upon goals regarding the achievement of youth all over the world were set to be achieved by 2015. critiques of the efa goals center on the challenges associated with numerical goals in education, as well as the negative consequences these goals can have for educational quality in poor countries (goldstein, 2004; jansen, 2005). we rural/urban disparities in science achievement 73 explored the efa goals as a framework for measuring educational equity in eastern europe based on geographic location (rural/urban), gender, and socioeconomic status in transition countries. specifically, we focused on two goals. these goals are focused on children in difficult circumstances having access to quality education, eliminating gender disparities, and improving all aspects of education including achieving measurable learning outcomes and gaining essential life skills (www.unesco.org). efa goal number two is to ensure that children in difficult circumstances have access to quality primary education. our findings here, which focused on eight grade science achievement have implications related to this goal, considering that eighth grade in most countries is the final year before secondary school begins and timss captures knowledge students have learned by eighth grade. our findings suggested that rural students lag behind their urban counterparts in science achievement in all countries, and that they lag behind them in hungary and lithuania even after controlling for family socioeconomic status and gender. these findings imply that there is still work to be done to ensure that children in poor rural areas have access to quality education. efa goal number six is important to consider in light of the findings we have presented here about technology. one of the tenets of goal six is to improve educational quality and ensure that children achieve essential life skills. in the 21st century, owning and regularly operating a computer is absolutely an essential life skill. however, our findings showed that rural children are far less likely to own a computer than their urban peers. having access to technology in the home has implications for educational achievement, as well as the achievement of essential life skills. eliminating the effect of socioeconomic background on educational achievement is a major aim of efa (goldstein, 2004). considering our analysis, it appears that family socioeconomic status continues to play a significant role in the educational achievement of youth. what we have uncovered through this analysis is that it is not necessarily rural location that affects educational outcomes, but rather the characteristics that define rural locations, such as persistent poverty, low parental education, and lack of quality educational resources. the education for all movement’s ultimate goal is to ensure that all children have access to education in order to help reduce poverty and improve the human condition worldwide (miles, 2008). there is still work to be done in this regard and as demonstrated here, this work is particularly important in countries in post-socialist transition. notes 1. 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(2000). the status of rural development in central and eastern europe. proceedings from the challenge of rural developing in the eu accession countries: third world bank/fao eu accession workshop. washington, dc: the world bank. about the author(s) erica lopatofsky kryst is a doctoral candidate at the department of education policy studies with a degree in educational theory and policy at the pennsylvania state university. her research interests include education in postsocialist countries, and the college access and academic achievement of students in rural areas. stephen kotok, phd, is an assistant professor of educational leadership and foundations at the university of texas at el paso. his research interests include educational policy, charter schools, school climate, the effects of social stratification on k-12 education, and quantitative methods. katerina bodovski, phd, is an associate professor of educational theory and policy, department of education policy studies at the pennsylvania state university. her research interests include sociology of education, stratification and inequality in educational outcomes, comparative and international education, post-socialist societies, parenting practices, and sociology of children. 76 global education review 2(4) appendix a descriptive statistics by country for timss 1999, 2003, and 2011 table a1. descriptive statistics by country for timss 1999 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia mean science achievement 552.38 488.15 471.87 533.25 520.01 percentage of rural students 0.30 0.30 0.39 0.36 0.38 percentage of female students 0.50 0.52 0.49 0.52 0.52 ses (standardized home possessions) 0.42 -0.17 -0.85 -0.04 0.47 parental education (ba or higher) 033 0.40 0.25 0.44 0.21 percentage with a computer 0.50 0.16 0.14 0.22 0.66 n 2339 3166 3393 4329 3086 table a2. descriptive statistics by country for timss 2003 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia mean science achievement 542.76 519.38 469.60 513.62 520.50 percentage of rural students 0.20 0.27 0.30 0.23 0.30 percentage of female students 0.50 0.50 0.52 0.49 0.50 ses (standardized home possessions) 0.49 -0.001 -0.88 -0.11 0.43 parental education (ba or higher) 0.48 0.43 0.19 0.51 0.29 percentage with a computer 0.75 0.48 0.32 0.30 0.86 n 3302 4964 4104 4667 3578 rural/urban disparities in science achievement 77 table a3. descriptive statistics by country for timss 2007 hungary lithuania romania russian federation slovenia mean science achievement 539.03 518.56 461.90 529.57 537.54 percentage of rural students 0.20 0.24 0.27 0.24 0.26 percentage of female students 0.50 0.50 0.49 0.52 0.50 ses (standardized home possessions) 0.22 0.46 -0.78 -0.45 0.38 parental education (ba or higher) 0.32 0.23 0.18 0.50 0.35 percentage with a computer 0.90 0.85 0.64 0.61 0.97 n 4111 3991 4198 4472 4043 revised manuscript_kryst_et al 8_31copy edit changes acceptedformatted revised manuscript_kryst_et al 8_31copy edit changes acceptedformatted no footer the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 7 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bobbie kabuto (2015). the construction of biliterate narratives and identities between parents and children. global education review, 2 (2). 7-23 the construction of biliterate narratives and identities between parents and children bobbie kabuto queens college, cuny abstract this article highlights two bilingual families who participated in a larger study titled “revaluing readers and families.” drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives to highlight the experiences of a greek and english speaking family and a spanish and english speaking family, this article explores how these two bilingual families created narratives and identities about biliteracy based on their perceptions of their children’s bilingual reading abilities. through a comparative analysis of multiple data sources that includes ethnographic observations, interview data, and miscue analysis data, this article investigates how the families co-constructed their children’s biliterate identities by acting and reacting to their children’s oral reading abilities in two languages. instead of viewing biliteracy as an all-or-nothing enactment, the findings suggest that families generate narratives of biliteracy that allow them to define and defend their children’s biliterate identities and abilities. the implications of this research for educational settings are also discussed. keywords literacy, bilingualism, education introduction families are becoming increasingly culturally and linguistically diverse within the united states and globally. bilingual families, which are defined as families in which at least one member of the family speaks, reads, and/or writes in two or more languages, must make educational and familial decisions to support (or not support) bilingualism in the home. while some families send their children to supplemental schools and after-school programs (kanno, 2003), other families make conscious decisions to forgo bilingualism in favor of the dominant language of the society in which they live (martinezroldan & malave, 2004). research suggests that parents make complex decisions and sacrifices for the sake of language, which is connected to identity, power, and culture (atkinson, 2011). for families, language is part personal history and part future. in studying in how families support their children’s literacy learning, i became interested in the dynamics of bilingual families and how and why parents either challenge or support their children’s literacy learning in english and their native language in the home and in the school. through my investigations, i found that issues of why parents support or challenge their children’s biliteracy learning in home and school ______________________________ corresponding author: bobbie kabuto, queens college, city university of new york 65-30 kissena blvd., flushing, new york 11367 email: bobbie.kabuto@qc.cuny.edu. the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 8 were multifaceted, as language is viewed as a set of linguistically, socially, and culturally complex acts that cannot be teased apart (block, 2003). bilingual families do not necessarily see bilingualism and biliteracy as stable enactments; instead, they view bilingualism and biliteracy as varying in degrees of usage and proficiency with each language. rather than claiming an all-ornothing interpretation of bilingualism and biliteracy, parents and children create narratives that give layers of meaning to their families’ bilingualism and biliteracy. within these narratives, parents may invest in their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy as they view it as a means of their children developing economic and cultural capital (compton-lily, 2007), or they may view it as a means of maintaining a cultural and linguistic identity (kabuto, 2010). conversely, parents may choose to privilege their children’s english language learning experiences because they view it as a tool for assimilating into an english-dominant culture , which in turns hinders becoming bilingual and biliterate (martinez-roldan & malave, 2004). based on data from two bilingual families who participated in a larger study titled “revaluing readers and families,” this article explores how bilingual reading abilities, or children’s abilities to read texts in two languages, are socially and culturally constructed between parents and children. the term revaluing places an emphasis on valuing the strengths that readers bring to literacy learning and supporting families rather than remediating them (goodman, watson, & burke, 2005). drawing on multiple theoretical perspectives to highlight the experiences of two bilingual families—one greek and english speaking and the other spanish and english speaking—this article explores the literacy interactions within these families to study the relationships between bilingual family units and literacy beliefs. through a comparative analysis of the two families, this article investigates how the families constructed their children’s biliterate identities by acting and reacting to their children’s reading abilities in two languages. the article also discusses the narratives of biliteracy that arose from the data, and how the parents defined and defended their children’s biliterate identities within these narratives. theoretical approaches to the study of reading, identity, and narratives in this article, biliteracy and reading in two languages are defined differently. biliteracy is first and foremost viewed as a mixture of social and cultural practices that involve communication through reading and/or writing in two or more languages (hornberger, 1990);it is defined as more than a discrete set of autonomous skills needed for reading and writing (street & street, 1991. reading is defined as a transaction between reader and texts in the construction of meaning. readers draw from their knowledge of grammar, the meaning of words and contexts, and letter-sound relationships and situate these aspects within their background knowledge to construct meaning from texts, such as books, signage, and labels. reading in more than one language is part of and contributes to biliteracy but is not synonymous with it. taking a sociocultural perspective, this article examines the social and language contexts of reading practices to better understand how parents perceive their children’s bilingual reading abilities and how their perceptions assist in the construction of biliterate identities. gee (2002) wrote, “if someone wants to know about the development of literacy, he or she should not ask how literacy and language develop. rather, he or she should ask how a specific set of sociocultural practices (or sets of them) embedded in specific ways with printed words develops” (p. 31). gee (1996) noted that the analysis of sociocultural practices the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 9 considers the whos (i.e., the participants engaging in activities) and the whats (i.e., what the participants are doing). in the following sections, i discuss the sociocultural processes and dynamics that define the narratives and identities of the participants (i.e., the whos engaging in the activities) in conjunction with reading in two languages (i.e., what the participants are doing). narratives and identities language acts as a mediational tool for the construction of our social reality. weedon (1997) wrote, “language, far from reflecting an already given social reality, constitutes social reality for us. neither social reality nor the natural world has fixed intrinsic meanings which language reflects or expresses” (p. 22). in this sense, language is used to construct narratives as an interpretive framework for social behaviors. language aligns us with particular social structures and institutions, or discursive fields, and challenges others (weedon, 1997). defining oneself as a bilingual or biliterate person is not based on a set of established, fixed criteria. instead, the meaning of being bilingual or raising bilingual children is socially produced within and through language to create a lived reality. consequently, the use of language within bilingual families is highly complex and context situated. in addition, the languages that bilingual families have available to them serve as social languages, which are defined as “different styles of language that we use to enact and recognize different identities in different settings” (gee, 1996, p. 12). through social languages, bilingual families use their two languages to organize their families’ social and cultural interactions within the family and with outside institutions and to talk about their experiences in the context of those interactions. for instance, a spanish and english speaking family may speak spanish in the home or while attending church, but speak english when attending school functions. the integration of multiple social languages creates narratives, which are larger constructs that create patterns of meaning. the concept of the formation of narratives through language builds on the bakhtian notion that language is dialogic (holquist, 1981). dialogism proposes that language is made up of multiple voices and that the speaker attempts to synchronize the cacophony of voices they hear in their environment. social languages act as the voices of discursive fields. when parents and their children read aloud across two languages and reflect on their readings, they use social languages to talk about their reading. phrases such as “i read it wrong,” “i have to get through all the words,” and “reading is not her thing” not only connect the speaker to the act of reading at the local level but also create narratives about the reader’s abilities. narratives evolve out of a praxis during which individuals define and defend their identities (rogers, 2004). it is defined through the idea of subjectivities, or our sense of ourselves and our ways of understanding ourselves in relation to the world (weedon, 1994); and through our self-in-practice—how we act, dress, and employ language in the context of sociocultural activities (holland, lachicotte, skinner, & cain, 1998). the marriage of these two definitions produces an identity that is precarious and conflicting. bilingual families may create narratives that support the use and development of speaking, listening, reading, and writing in two languages or they may generate narratives where one language is favored over another or where speaking, rather than reading, in one language is valued over another. through the creation of narratives, bilingual families align to, contradict, or resist alternative forms of identities, whether consciously or unconsciously. 10 global education review 2 (2) reading in two languages in this article, reading in two languages is viewed through the lens of sociopsycholinguistic theory, which contends that reading is the result of the active construction of knowledge as readers engage with the surface features of language to create a deeper meaning. the surface structure consists of the observable characteristics of written language, or the physical and measurable aspects (smith, 1997). the deep structure, on the other hand, is the meaning that readers construct that cannot be directly measured or observed. goodman (1996) asserted that readers use their sociocultural knowledge of and experiences with language when employing linguistic cuing systems (semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic) in combination with cognitive strategies (sampling, predicting, confirming, or disconfirming). in the context of the above, miscues, which are defined as observed responses that differ from expected responses (e.g., reading house instead of home in the sentence “i went into his home.”) are seen as windows into how readers integrate linguistic cues and cognitive strategies when reading (goodman, 1996). oral reading miscues have a qualitative nature to them and are defined as either high or low quality. high-quality miscues do not change the meaning or grammatical structure of the sentence, whereas low-quality miscues disrupt both. for instance, the substitution of house for home in the previous example is a high-quality miscue, whereas the substitution of green for home, for example, would be a low-quality miscue. in this study, high-quality miscues are considered to represent the effective and efficient use of linguistic cues and cognitive strategies by readers. parents, however, do not always have the same perception of miscues (kabuto, 2009, 2012). lacking theoretical knowledge, parents often view miscues as a weakness, and when they talk about miscues— regardless of quality—through a deficit lens, they construct identities that position their children as readers who struggle. to investigate how language mediates the construction of narratives and identities about biliteracy, bilingual parents and their children were asked to discuss the children’s high-quality reading miscues when reading texts in two languages. by discussing high-quality miscues, parents were presented with their children’s strengths as readers. nevertheless, the parents constructed alternative interpretations of those miscues that sometimes cast a negative light on their children’s experiences in reading in two languages. study design for the study “revaluing readers and families,” each family participated in a minimum of 10 weekly sessions. during the 10-week period, all family members read a variety of written texts aloud and engaged in retrospective reflections of their miscues using family retrospective miscue analysis (family rma; kabuto, 2009), a procedure whereby participating family members reflect on each other’s high-quality miscues. family members were also interviewed and observed in the home and community settings. the two families presented in this article were the only bilingual families who participated in the study. participants two bilingual students, sophie and thomas, and their families are the subjects of this article. sophie is a fourth-grade student at a private, dual-language (greek and english) school in an urban area, which she has attended since kindergarten. sophie’s mother, francis, is a the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 11 native greek speaker who is also fluent in english, while her father, steve, is monolingual english speaking. sophie lives in an economically stable home environment with two financially secure parents. francis holds a corporate job for a major bank and steve works for a manufacturing company. in addition to attending a private, dual-language school, sophie spends each summer in greece with her grandmother. sophie travels to greece with her aunt and then travels back with her mother. thomas is a sixth-grade student in an urban, public, dual-language school, which he has attended since kindergarten. thomas lives with his mother, maria; his father; and his sister, jenny (maria’s husband did not wish to participate in the study and visits to the home and community were made when he was absent). maria is spanish dominant in listening, speaking, reading, and writing. jenny, who was five years old at the time of the study and not in school, is spanish dominant in listening and speaking. thomas’ family is of low socioeconomic status and lives in an area with a high crime rate and low-income housing. maria immigrated to the united states 13 years ago and became a legal alien with the assistance of immigration lawyers. when it was time for thomas to attend school, maria was adamant that thomas continue his education in spanish while learning english. thomas’ zoned school did not offer a dual-language program and was not rated highly in the school district. maria said that she would “never allow” thomas to attend the school. maria searched out dual-language schools in the district and sent thomas to another area to attend his current school, which is highly rated. collected data a large corpus of longitudinal data was generated and analyzed as part of this study. all sessions were audiotaped and transcribed. several data analysis procedures were used to analyze the data and will be described in further detail below. in order to develop the larger social and cultural context of the home, the community, and how the parents and children interacted with print in the home, my research assistants and i collected ethnographic observations and reflective notes weekly. the ethnographic observations were critical for developing a sociocultural context for the narratives that the parents and children created. the reflective notes documented the researchers’ positionality and reflexivity within the research design. parent and child interviews conducted at the beginning and end of the study added additional information on the sociocultural context of the home, school, and community. the parent and child interviews were also critical for gathering data on the parents’ perceptions of their children’s bilingual reading abilities and how the children perceived their own abilities. as part of the family rma procedure, sophie and thomas read aloud books in english and their other home language. high-quality miscues were selected from the oral readings for the parents and children to reflect upon and discuss. after the oral readings were completed, story retellings were elicited. table 1 outlines the sequence of oral reading, retelling, and rma data collection. the oral readings and retellings formed the miscue data, which was collected using standard miscue procedures (goodman et al., 2005). 12 global education review 2 (2) table 1 outline of bilingual family rma sessions session # data collected 1 reading interviews for the child and parents 2 conduct miscue analysis with the child using english and other language text 3 conduct english rma session with the child 4 conduct other language rma with the child 5 conduct miscue analysis with the child using english and other language text 6 conduct other language rma session with the child 7 conduct english rma with the child 8 conduct miscue analysis with the child using english and other language text 9 conduct english and other language rma session with the child 10 closing reading interview texts were selected based on the child’s reading preference, ethnographic observations, or suggestions by me or my research assistants. at the beginning of the study, sophie and thomas were assessed using the qualitative reading inventory-4 (qri-4; leslie & caldwell, 2006). if sophie and thomas did not have an interest in reading the materials that were introduced through the ethnographic observations, we had a variety of reading materials based on the qri-4 results prepared for the miscue analysis sessions. the parents and children reflected on their high-quality miscues, which were preselected by the researchers, using family rma (goodman & marek, 1996; kabuto, 2009). as per rma procedures, the readers’ highquality miscues were played back to the reader. afterwards, my research assistants, who were bilingual in each family’s respective language, and i engaged the reader in the following semistructured interview questions (goodman & marek, 1996): 1. can you tell me what you did here? 2. why do you think you made the miscue? 3. does the miscue make sense? 4. was the miscue corrected? should it have been? why? 5. did the miscue affect your understanding of the text? comparative data analysis collected data were analyzed using a three part process. the first part involved analyzing the oral readings and retellings by sophie and thomas. the second part involved using discourse analysis procedures, particularly the process of denoting and connoting, to analyze interview data, including the semi-structured rma questions and conversational data, for each family. in the third part, a comparative analysis was conducted, which involved comparing the miscue analysis data and the discourse codes across the two families. analyzing oral readings and retellings miscue analysis procedures were used to analyze the oral readings. once the miscues were noted on the typescript, they were analyzed through an informal miscue coding procedure (goodman, 1996). first, the readers’ final produced sentences with the miscues were coded for the following: 1. syntactic acceptability: the sentence was given a yes if it was grammatically acceptable. 2. semantic acceptability: the sentence was given a yes if it made sense. 3. meaning change: the sentence was given a no if it did not change any significant aspect of the story or a yes if it changed a significant aspect of the story. the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 13 next, the readers’ word-for-word substitutions were coded for graphic similarity. each substitution was charted beside the target word and marked as having either (a) high graphic similarity, (b) some graphic similarity, or (c) no graphic similarity. after the substitutions were coded, the frequencies and percentages for high, some, and no graphic similarity were calculated. the retellings were transcribed and scored using an analytic rubric with the following criteria: characters, problem, resolution, events, and details. each criterion was rated on a 4point scale with 1 being the lowest and 4 being the highest. once each descriptor was rated, they were averaged to compute the overall retelling score. the miscue codings and retellings were scored by my research assistants and me to ensure agreement among the scores. discourse analysis i employed discourse analysis procedures to study how language defined the biliterate narratives and identities produced by the families of sophie and thomas and how the parents interpreted their children’s bilingual reading miscues. discourse analysis provides a venue for the analysis of language at the micro level, or the individual units of language, and at the macro level, or how language connects literacy learning to other aspects of family life, such as parenting or schooling experiences. in the present study, discourse analysis allowed us to navigate the complex issues that influenced literacy learning within the families. denoting and connoting processes were used to generate codes for concept formation during the discourse analysis procedure (larossa, 2012). these processes follow an inductive approach whereby the codes and concepts arise out of the data, as opposed to a set of predetermined codes being brought to the data. denoting data entails breaking down and highlighting important text segments, or utterances, after all the oral data is transcribed. after identifying important text segments, the segments are linked together to form particular concept codes through the process of connoting. connoting allows researchers to think about the text segments in a thematic and abstract way. the oral data were divided into two groups. the first group included the children’s rma interview data, and the second group included the reading interviews and the conversational data that arose during the sessions with both parents and children. the reason for this separation is the nature of the oral data. the rma data stems from a semistructured interview that examines reading from sociopsycholinguistic perspectives, or the micro aspects of language units. the rma group text segments were coded based on a priori concepts (larossa, 2012) or by applying existing concepts from sociopsycholinguistic theory that describe how readers engage in psycholinguistic strategies through sampling, predicting, and confirming and the reading cuing systems (semantic, syntactic, and graphophonic). after the rma text segments were coded, they were divided into two thematic code groups: psycholinguistic strategies and reading cuing systems. table 2 presents the thematic code groups, the concept codes for each group, and an example for each concept code. the second oral data group was made up of conversational data, for which a more diverse range of codes were identified compared to the rma discourse data. in addition, the codes were of a slightly different nature, as this data did not relate solely to the reading process. instead, the codes in this data group addressed the larger social, cultural, linguistic, and economic factors, or the macro aspects of language, that affected how the families interpreted, perceived, and made sense of their children’s reading abilities. the codes for this data group were composed of juxta vivo concepts, or the characterization of concepts (larossa, 2012). once the text segments were coded, they were grouped together under a general thematic code that linked the text segments together. table 3 presents the thematic code groups, the concept codes for each group, and an example for each concept code. the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 14 table 2 rma discourse codes thematic codes concept codes examples sociopsycholinguistic strategies predicting “i thought it would say.” cross-checking/self-monitoring “i went back and saw that it was plou.” engagement “i was, like, reading it.” reading cuing systems omissions “i noticed that i skipped that part.” graphophonic “because the words look similar.” comprehending “it really didn’t sound like a word.” substitutions “[i didn’t see the ‘lo’] so i said ‘porque’” table 3 conversational discourse codes thematic codes concept codes examples parenting accomplishments “i feel happy because i accomplished what i always dreamed of for him.” parent-child interactions “ever since michael was little, i would read with him.” teaching reading “make him repeat the words and follow with his finger.” school participation “i was the class mother. i would help every monday.” making sacrifices “i am making that sacrifice for her because i know that it will be worth it.” preparing for the future “so that they have more opportunities when looking for a job.” parental roles “is not really an activity that (dad) participate in.” judging the child’s reading concerns “i know that it’s a little more difficult for him to read in spanish.” reading strategies “she runs ahead and reads a word and she reads something else that's not there instead.” reading frequency “because he rarely reads in spanish anymore.” school performance “and sometimes this happens also, for example, with math homework.” reading ability/level “i don’t know to what level [so] i think she's okay.” comparing two languages “it was great, you know, but um, greek books is not [for her].” relating to child’s experiences emotional experiences “i feel very good because he is not going to suffer the way that i do.” comparing to others “i don't have a comparison of other kids of her age.” reading behaviors “then again, this is something that all of us do.” judging personal experiences language ability “it’s very difficult for me to learn english.” reading ability “i learned that i make mistakes, but that i also selfcorrect.” family sibling interactions “[jenny] is always asking thomas to read books to her.” extended family interactions “she speaks with her grandma in greece.” the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 15 comparative analysis after the text segments were coded for the concept codes and grouped together under larger themes, the codes for the two families were compared. the frequency of each concept code was calculated for each family in order to identify larger themes that dominated each family’s narratives and to compare the frequency of concepts in each family’s narratives. the familial narratives were generated through data triangulation using the miscue data, children’s rma data, and oral conservational data and were placed in the context of the ethnographic data. findings comparing the results of miscue analysis, rma discourse analysis, and conversational data analysis revealed how the parents talked about and perceived their children’s bilingual reading abilities. the parents’ perceptions were reflective and comprised the biliterate narratives and identities generated by each family. findings from miscue and rma discourse analysis according to the qri-4, sophie read at a fifthgrade level (she was in fourth grade at the time of the study). table 4 lists sophie’s english and greek readings and their corresponding miscue statistics and retelling scores. sophie read english fiction books that were at or above grade level and, based on the miscue statistics and retelling scores, possessed many effective reading strategies as she read for meaning. while sophie read english texts that were above grade level, she read greek texts that were below grade level. the miscue frequencies for the greek texts suggest that sophie was able to effectively read aloud and understand the stories; however, this effectiveness was dependent on reading books that were below her grade level, had strong picture support, and had predictable story structures. table 4 miscue analysis and retelling data for sophie books syntactic acceptability semantic acceptability meaning change graphic similarity retelling score english books the garden of abdul gasazi (van allsburg, 1979) yes: 97% yes: 95% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 42% some: 14% none: 42% 3.6 the invention of hugo cabret: chapter 2 (selznick, 2007) yes: 83 % yes: 83% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 62% some: 7% none: 15% 3.0 yo, vikings (schachner, 2002) yes: 96% yes: 92% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 40% some: 30% none: 30% 4.0 greek books the mouse of the countryside and the city mouse (aesop, 1995) yes: 88% yes: 75% no: 92% yes: 8% high: 7% some: 33% none: 0% 3.5 the hare and his friends (aesop, 1995) yes: 100% yes: 92% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 50% some: 0% none: 0% 3.5 the best squirrel in the forest (korla, 1975) yes: 100% yes: 87% no: 97% yes: 3% high: 80% some: 20% none: 0% 4.0 the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 16 according to the qri-4, thomas read at grade level (sixth grade). table 5 lists thomas’ english and spanish readings and their corresponding miscue statistics and retelling scores. the results show that thomas was an effective gradelevel reader in english and that he read spanish texts at a fifth-grade level. the miscue statistics and retelling scores for spanish and english texts suggest that thomas was a proficient reader in both english and spanish. the discourse analysis for the rma interview data revealed that in reflecting on their readings in each respective language, sophie and thomas talked about issues related to sociopsycholinguistic strategies and reading cuing systems. the frequencies of the various concept codes reflect the degree of evenness with which they talked about these strategies across their respective languages. table 6 presents the frequency of content codes for the rma interview data. table 5 miscue analysis and retelling data for thomas books syntactic acceptability semantic acceptability meaning change graphic similarity retelling score english books bored tom (avi, 2008) yes: 96% yes: 93% no: 99% yes: 1% high: 70% some: 22% none: 8% 4.0 small wonder (ghosh, 2012) yes: 95 % yes: 89% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 71% some: 0% none: 4% 4.0 good as new (tapper, 2012) yes: 90% yes: 79% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 100% some: 0% none: 0% 3.5 spanish books yo, naomi leon: chapter 1 (ryan, 2005) yes: 96% yes: 96% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 67% some: 17% none: 16% 2.25 yo, naomi leon: chapter 2 (ryan, 2005) yes: 99% yes: 98% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 71% some: 14% none: 15% 4.0 yo, naomi leon: chapter 3 (ryan, 2005) yes: 99% yes: 99% no: 100% yes: 0% high: 67% some: 0% none: 33% 4.0 the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 17 table 6 frequencies of rma codes for sophie and thomas strategies code sophie (n = 39) thomas (n = 38) english greek english spanish sociopsycholinguistic strategies prediction 0 1 5 5 cross-checking 9 3 7 2 engagement 0 0 2 2 subtotal (%) 9 (23) 4 (10) 14 (37) 9 (24) reading cuing systems omissions 0 0 2 0 graphophonic 3 2 1 3 comprehending 10 2 3 4 substitutions 3 1 1 0 grammatical 3 2 0 1 subtotal (%) 19 (49) 7 (20) 7 (18) 8 (21) total (%) 28 (72) 11 (30) 21 (55) 17 (45) of the 39 codes that emerged from sophie’s rma interview data, 33% addressed sociopsycholinguistic strategies and 69% addressed reading cuing systems. most of the codes addressed the english readings rather than the greek readings (72% and 30%, respectively). in reflecting on her reading, sophie addressed the following reading strategies: (1) employing graphophonic information to predict words, (2) monitoring for understanding, (3) substituting words, and (3) using grammatical knowledge to predict words. the distribution of codes by language suggests that sophie was more comfortable talking about her english reading than about her greek reading. for example, when talking about her english miscues, sophie provided extensive explanations about the different strategies that she employed when reading. however, when asked about her greek reading, she did not provide elaborate responses. instead, she tended to give answers such as “yeah,” “not really,” and “it did.” more follow-up questions were required to probe further into sophie’s thought processes in regard to her greek miscues. thomas spent more time than sophie discussing sociopsycholinguistic strategies when talking about his miscues (61% vs. 33%, respectively). in addition, the distribution of codes by language was more balanced for thomas’ rma interview data: 55% of codes addressed english reading and 45% addressed spanish reading. when talking about reading cuing, thomas referred to his english and spanish reading with approximately the same frequency (18% vs. 21%, respectively), whereas sophie referred to english reading much more frequently than her greek reading (19% vs. 7%, respectively). findings from conversational data analysis the parents talked about and responded to their children’s bilingual reading abilities and situated their reflections within the context of experiences at school, at home, and in the community. table 7 presents the frequencies of concept codes for each parent’s conversational data. sophie’s parents, francis and steve, spent a significant amount of time making judgments about sophie’s reading abilities in english and greek, and 73% of the codes identified in their data addressed this particular theme. for example, francis and steve frequently commented on sophie’s reading abilities and the reading strategies she used. the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 18 table 7 frequencies of concept codes in parents’ conversational data themes concept codes maria (n = 43) francis & steve (n = 59) parenting accomplishments 4 0 parent-child interactions 3 4 teaching reading 6 3 school participation 6 0 making sacrifices 3 0 preparing for the future 1 0 parental roles 0 2 total (%) 23 (53) 9 (15) judging the child’s reading concerns 3 1 reading strategies 0 13 reading frequency 2 1 school performance 2 1 reading ability/level 2 14 comparing two languages 4 13 total (%) 13 (30) 43 (73) relating to child’s experiences emotional experiences 1 0 comparing to others 0 1 reading behaviors 0 2 total (%) 1 (2) 3 (5) judging personal experiences language ability 4 3 reading ability 1 0 total (%) 5 (13) 3 (5) family sibling interactions 1 0 extended family interactions 0 1 total (%) 1 (2) 1 (2) the parents’ reflections on their children’s reading in both languages are illustrated in the following examples. after reading and reflecting on the first miscue analysis session with the mouse of the countryside and the city mouse, francis said: it was great you know, but, greek books is not…i think i told you last time… we don’t read as many greek books as we do english books. her reading in greek is not, i mean whatever her level in english reading, it’s not [the same]. you know, which for me it makes sense, because even though we have a lot of greek books at home, she always prefers [english], and when she was younger, she wanted me to read to her in english. francis’ perceptions of sophie as a bilingual reader were that sophie’s english speaking, reading, and writing abilities were not equal to her abilities in greek. francis also expressed concern over sophie’s overall academic performance in her fourth-grade year, the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 19 which francis described as challenging. francis stated that sophie’s grades dropped, and she brought home grades in the 60% to 80% range compared to a grades the previous year. francis described this as “very strange for me.” in addition to making reading judgments, the code frequencies reveal that francis linked reading and educational experiences to parenting. francis felt that sophie’s drop in grades was the result of francis trying to be less strict. francis described how she moved from punishing her when she brought home less than optimal grades to telling her to “try her best.” francis also felt that her language use at home influenced sophie’s reading abilities. when reflecting on sophie’s high quality miscues when reading of the garden of abdul gasazi, francis said, it was okay. i noticed that sometimes she runs ahead and reads a word…and she reads something else that's not there. instead of, like, the lights were on, [she read] the lights were open. sometimes it's like reading not what you see but reading what registers in your mind. specifically about this [one miscue], i want to tell you sometimes and maybe it's my mistake. you know how it is in greek… the expression turn off the lights [is said as] close the lights. in the latter part of this dialogue, francis blames one of sophie’s miscues on francis’ language use. when reading the garden of abdul gasazi, sophie read the phrase turn off the lights as close the lights. because francis is a native greek speaker, she felt that her direct translation of the phrase had negative consequences for sophie’s reading abilities. the major theme in maria’s conversational data was parenting. of the 43 codes that emerged from analysis of maria’s conversational data, 53% related to the theme of parenting. maria tended to view thomas’ reading abilities in two languages and his biliteracy in a positive light, which was reflected in her view of herself as a parent. for example, when maria reflected on thomas’ oral reading and retelling behaviors, she said, “i feel happy because i accomplished what i always dreamed of for him, to read in english and in spanish. i feel very good because he is not going to suffer the way that i do. it’s very difficult for me to learn english.” maria also talked about the sacrifices that she made so that thomas could develop his bilingualism and biliteracy. because their zoned school had a low rating within its urban district, maria sought out other schools in the district that thomas might attend. she applied for thomas to attend a dual-language school in the first year it opened, and she talked about how proud she was that he passed the entrance exam. maria described how it took one hour each way using public transportation to take thomas to school. after her daughter, jenny, was born, she often brought jenny along with her. maria felt that she was willing to make these sacrifices, as she called them, for thomas’s education. the dual-language school not only allowed thomas to develop his biliteracy, but also allowed maria to maximize her involvement as a spanish-speaking parent. maria felt that being a parent also meant being involved at the school. she said, “i was the class mother. i would help every monday. when thomas was little, i always went on trips with his class. i was always there. i always attended the shows and brought in food when asked.” maria acknowledged that if thomas had attended an english-only school, she would not have been as willing or able to actively participate. compared to francis and steve, maria made fewer statements related to judging her child’s reading abilities (73% vs. 30% of coded responses, respectively). while maria often expressed excitement about thomas’ ability to read in spanish, she occasionally commented that his english and spanish abilities were not equal and that he did not read as well in spanish. maria said, “[thomas] makes more 20 global education review 2 (2) mistakes in spanish than in english” and “[he] has some difficulty when reading in spanish because he rarely reads in spanish anymore.” these comments are interesting since maria’s limited english abilities would not allow her to fully critique thomas’ reading abilities in english, and the findings from the miscue analysis suggest that thomas’ english and spanish reading abilities were almost equal. few of maria’s conversations included attempts to relate to thomas’ bilingual experiences (2% of coded responses) or family interactions within the context of bilingualism (2% of coded responses). more of maria’s coded responses related to her own english reading and language abilities (13%). for example, she commented that it is difficult for her to learn english and that she does not understand much english. narratives of biliteracy while the parents and their children listened to high-quality miscues that, from one theoretical perspective, demonstrate reading competencies and abilities, both parents and children created their own interpretations of the miscues that influenced how they perceived the children’s bilingual reading abilities. both sophie’s and thomas’ parents interpreted their children’s miscues as signs of their differing abilities to read in each of their respective languages. at the same time, when discussing of their children’s high quality miscues, the parents used social languages to generate a matrix that created larger narratives within the families’ lives. these narratives became tools with which to negotiate and support their biliterate identities. by comparing the ways that francis, steve, and sophie used language to the ways that maria and thomas used language, the narratives that arose out of each family were revealed to reflect different perspectives on bilingualism and biliteracy. the varying natures of the narratives illustrate that bilingual and biliterate identities are multi-layered and socially constructed. these identities are extremely complex, and both the parents and the children simultaneously created identities that were complementary and contradictory. the two types of narrative that were identified are: variant, which emphasizes one language over the other, and cohesive, which supports the integration of two languages. narratives of variant biliteracy the major theme within the narrative of steve, francis, and sophie was that bilingualism and biliteracy serve different functions. while steve and francis supported sophie’s bilingualism and biliteracy by placing her in a dual-language school, francis felt that sophie’s english reading proficiency was stronger, and she provided reasons for the discrepancy. francis felt that it was acceptable for sophie to have varying proficiencies as long as she was able to draw on greek as a resource. sophie did not show a particular interest in reading in greek; she said, “i know how to read greek, but i don’t want to read greek books.” francis was not concerned about sophie’s lack of interest in greek or her preference for english because she felt that sophie could speak greek and use it as a resource when necessary. francis explained the importance of speaking greek when she said, “i mean her flow when she speaks with her grandma in greece, you know, she watches cartoons in greek, even here that we have dvds in greek, that’s fine. you know. but the reading is not, you know…[not her thing].” sophie supported this viewpoint when she explained that she does not speak greek with francis, only with her grandmother and her family who live in greece. steve expressed extreme pride in sophie’s bilingual speaking abilities. however, the same sentiment was not expressed when discussing and reflecting on sophie’s reading. francis, in particular, used language to construct a narrative of mismatched reading abilities. she frequently judged sophie’s reading ability and compared her reading in english and greek. from listening to and discussing sophie’s greek the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 21 and english readings, francis perceived sophie as better at reading english. when listening to sophie’s greek readings, francis’ attention was drawn to how sophie sounded when she read rather than what sophie was able to understand. within the narrative created by francis, steve, and sophie, the parents defined sophie as a more proficient english reader and established that her ability to speak greek was more important than her ability to read in greek. narratives of cohesive biliteracy maria and thomas constructed a type of narrative that demonstrated a more cohesive view of thomas’ bilingual reading abilities. maria was satisfied with thomas’ bilingual reading abilities and thomas articulated a sense of confidence in his bilingual reading. thomas said that he enjoyed reading in both english and in spanish and felt himself to be an equally good reader in both languages. within this cohesive narrative, biliteracy was accomplished through balanced reading abilities in both languages. maria said, “i feel happy because i accomplished what i always dreamed of for him: to read in english and in spanish. i know that it’s a little more difficult for him to read in spanish, but i know that it is good for him to know both.” when discussing thomas’ ability to read in spanish, maria commented that spanish is more difficult for him and that he does not read as often in spanish as in english. however, unlike francis, maria was able to overlook the differences in reading ability and see a more holistic picture of thomas’ bilingual reading abilities. the cohesiveness of the narrative was reflected in the distribution of codes in the data. while maria, like francis, compared thomas’ reading abilities and levels in both languages, she considered his biliteracy as a reflection of her parenting and her family’s ability to successfully prepare thomas for future schooling and an economically stable future. maria discussed this point in the following excerpt: ever since thomas was little, i would read with him and make him repeat the words and follow with his finger. i would teach him the numbers and colors, little by little. i don’t do the same with jenny yet because she is too little. she already knows her abc’s and can also count up to 50. jenny wowed the pre-k teachers because she did so well on the entrance test. they were amazed because she knew so much! that is why i don’t mind getting up very early to take jenny to that school. i am making that sacrifice for her because i know that it will be worth it. i want them to learn spanish and, with time, also learn another language so that they have more opportunities when looking for a job. for maria, bilingualism and biliteracy were equally important, and she viewed them as a reflection of her ability to successfully parent and raise her children. concluding thoughts in this comparative analysis of two bilingual families, several common themes were identified that inform our understanding of biliteracy learning. parents and their children come with their own definitions of reading, bilingualism, and biliteracy, which are operationalized through the language they use to talk about bilingual reading abilities. the families in this study had different views of their investment in their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy. norton and mckinney (2011) suggest that investment “signals the socially and historically constructed relationship of learners to the target language, and their often ambivalent desire to learn and practice it.” why each family in this study supported their children’s bilingualism and/or biliteracy was based on how they viewed language and literacy as investments that would provide their children with linguistic, social, cultural, and economic advantages within the 22 global education review 2 (2) social spaces they participate. at the same time, parents, such as the two highlighted in this article, can place unequal emphasis on supporting their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy. francis and steve invested differently in sophie’s bilingualism and biliteracy: they placed more value on sophie’s ability to speak greek than to read it. sophie, in turn, invested more in her speaking abilities. in contrast, maria’s cohesive narrative revealed a more equal investment in bilingualism and biliteracy. in maria’s family, the language investment was viewed as a future economic investment, whereas in sophie’s family, the language investment was a private, transnational investment that was connected to family members living in greece. returning to gee’s notion of the whos and whats (gee, 1996), examining local, situated reading behaviors within the family narratives illustrated the complexity of what it means to learn to read in more than one language. bilingualism and biliteracy cannot be studied separately from the social context from which they originate. the narratives that arose from the families in this study demonstrate the coconstruction of bilingual reading abilities and identities. the parents’ views of their children’s bilingual reading behaviors were connected to the children’s sense of being a good reader in either language. in thomas’ case, he felt confident reading in both languages, whereas in sophie’s case, she felt more confident reading in english than in greek. importantly, this connection was not necessarily unidirectional from the parents to the children. the parents may have taken cues from the children and their teachers and reproduced those ideas in the language that they used. nevertheless, the parents came into the social context with particular expectations of whether their children were considered “good readers” in each of their respective languages. this study illustrates how identities are laminated and multidimensional and that competing aspects of identities can exist simultaneously. this layering effect was illustrated through how the parents and their children used language to actively construct the narratives that defined and defended their children’s bilingual reading abilities. contradictions and affective factors played significant roles in the interpretation of the children’s bilingual reading abilities. being able to speak greek with family members in greece or viewing biliteracy as a matter of pride for the family provides motivation and generates dynamic relationships between individuals and language (in the formal sense of the word). researchers are not necessarily able to control for these relationships, but they play a significant role in identity. the implications of this research are important for educational institutions and policies. educational institutions and policy makers should be cautious of creating generalized definitions of bilingual families and their needs. while both families in this study are defined as bilingual, each family created their own identity of themselves and showed agency in how they supported their children’s bilingualism and biliteracy. furthermore, this article illustrates the dynamic and interpretative nature of bilingual reading abilities. the close examination of language and how it defined and defended the abilities and identities of the two children illustrate that common, everyday language is far from neutral. parents and educators can use language to position, support, or not support children’s bilingual reading abilities. this point raises questions for future investigations regarding how or why bilingual families challenge schooling discourses or integrate them into their narratives of biliteracy in order to reproduce or challenge the children’s positions as bilingual and biliterate learners. notes funding support for this research was provided by psc-cuny research foundation. the construction of biliterate narratives and identities 23 references aesop. 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(1997). feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. malden, ma: blackwell. about the author(s) bobbie kabuto, phd, is an associate professor at queens college, city university of new york. her research interests include reading and writing in multiple languages, early bi/literacy, socially constructed identities, and language ideologies. her research examines the ways in which schooling discourses frame socially constructed identities and how or why families support or challenge these identities in the home. 82-514-1-edkabuto copy edited1 proof-read page 1 introduction 82-514-1-edkabuto copy edited1 proof-read pg 2-17 narratives and identities reading in two languages study design participants collected data comparative data analysis findings findings from conversational data analysis narratives of variant biliteracy narratives of cohesive biliteracy concluding thoughts efficiency of oic secondary education 53 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mohd arshad, mohd nahar (2014). efficiency of secondary education in selected oic countries. global education review, 1 (4). 53-75. efficiency of secondary education in selected oic countries mohd nahar mohd arshad international islamic university malaysia abstract the purpose of this study is to investigate the level of technical efficiency of secondary education in 16 selected organisation of islamic conference (oic) countries (including west bank and gaza). educational efficiency has become an important issue given many countries’ pressing levels of public deficit and debt. since the educational sector always receives high priority in budget allocations, an evaluation of whether the allocations made for education have been technically efficient is important. with budget constraints and the public’s high expectation to see a continuous improvement in students’ academic achievement, the educational sector has been put under pressure to deliver. the study employs timss 2011 data, involving 40 countries. the technique used to calculate the level of technical efficiency is data envelopment analysis (dea). almost all of the 16 selected oic members are technically inefficient in utilising their educational resources to achieve better timss results in comparison with the non-oic countries. even after controlling for environmental factors, secondary education in the oic countries remains technically inefficient. keywords technical efficiency, secondary education, oic countries, data envelopment analysis, timms introduction the purpose of this study is to investigate the level of technical efficiency of secondary education in the organisation of islamic conference (oic) member countries in comparison with other countries. educational efficiency has become an important issue given many countries’ pressing levels of public deficit and debt. since the educational sector always receives high priority in budget allocations, an evaluation of whether the allocations made for education have been technically efficient is important. with budget constraints and the public’s high expectations to see a continuous improvement in students’ academic achievement, governments have been put under pressure to deliver higher educational outcomes. with cross-country data, the level of technical efficiency in the oic countries’ educational sectors can be assessed against those of other countries (among the oic and non-oic countries). the findings of the study ______________________________ corresponding author: mohd nahar mohd arshad, deparment of economics international islamic university malaysia, 53100 kuala lumpur, malaysia email: ma.nahar@iium.edu.my 54 global education review 1(4) are important in that they provide information about these countries’ level of efficiency in resource utilisation when it comes to promoting student academic achievement. in order to remain competitive, the members of the oic need to address the issue of the existing educational gap. according to the un 2010 millennium development goals (united nation, 2010), there has been a significant gap in the distribution of students’ academic achievement, especially between the first-tier (i.e. australia, south korea, singapore, and taiwan) and the second-tier economies (i.e. indonesia, iran, jordan, kazakhstan, lebanon, malaysia, morocco, syria, tunisia, and turkey). the gap, according to the report, needs to be reduced, given the constricted resources. the focus of this study is on secondary education. schultz (1963) points out that while primary education might suffice for basic production of goods and services, workers with secondary education can use technology in the workplace, while tertiary education is considered important in the process of inventing and innovating technology. in other words, the level of economic advancement needs to be backed up with a proportionally qualified workforce. since most of the oic countries fall under the category of “developing economy,” secondary education remains a crucial stage for the oic members to develop their human capital as a natural progression towards becoming a developed economy. for that matter, an evaluation of whether the investments made in these countries’ secondary education systems are efficient merits further scrutiny. for the study, secondary students’ achievements in mathematics and science on the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) are employed. timss is an international mathematics and science examination involving students in the fourth and eighth grades from countries all over the world. it provides reliable and comparable data to measure countries’ performance in mathematics and science. timss data have been collected in 1995, 1999, 2003, 2007, and 2011. in 2011, more than 60 countries participated in timss, involving more than 500,000 students. an international assessment such as timss offers a unique opportunity to compare the performance of students from each participating country at a global standard, since the students sat for the same examination (martin et al., 2008). with such data, a comparison can be made to know, for example, how efficient each of the oic countries has been in utilising its educational resources, given the performance of its students at a global stage. results from this analysis can provide valuable feedback in current efforts to improve mathematics and science instructions in the oic countries to global standards of excellence. high achievements in both subjects are considered an important ingredient for a nation to progress. low performance, by contrast, in the subjects may hamper oic members’ levels of competitiveness. again, according to the un 2010 mdg, a failure to reduce the gap in mathematics and science achievements between the second-tier and the first-tier economies could slow the pace of convergence for the developing countries. the organization of the paper is as follows. the concepts of efficiency and productivity in an educational sector are first discussed in section efficiency of oic secondary education 55 2. this section is crucial because it provides a perspective on how the concepts of educational efficiency and productivity, as economists view them, can be understood. a review of the theories and models of data envelopment analysis (dea) is presented in section 3. also in the section is a discussion of the application of dea models in education. in section 4, i provide descriptions of the data used for analysis. results of the analysis are discussed in section 5. some concluding remarks are presented in section 6. how do the oic countries fare internationally? to evaluate the educational achievement of the oic countries internationally, the researcher analysed a cross-sectional dataset of 40 countries that participated in timss 2011. the two educational outputs used for the analysis are each country’s eighth-grade average scores in science and each country’s eighth-grade average scores in mathematics. the source of the data is the world bank’s database on education statistics1 and the statistical, economic and social research and training centre for islamic countries (sesric).2 the analysis is limited to the 40 countries because only these countries participated in timss 2011 for the eighth grade. in fact, among the oic countries, there were only 16 countries that participated in timss 2011, and the remaining 24 were the non-oic countries. the number of the participating countries therefore limits the sample. the summary statistics of the selected countries’ performance on timss 2011 are shown in table 1. the scale of timss achievement levels is as follows: (i) advanced— score above 625; (ii) high—score between 550 and 625; (iii) intermediate—score between 475 and 550; and low—score between 400 and 475.3 as shown in the table, the average scores of the oic countries in both mathematics and science are lower than the sample averages. further, a more concerning point can be observed between the performance of the oic and the non-oic countries. the performance of students from the oic countries is significantly lower than their non-oic counterparts. as shown in table 1, the highest scoring oic country in both mathematics (at 487, that is kazakhstan) and science (490, also kazakhstan) are lower than the overall average of the non-oic countries for both subjects (494 and 498 points, respectively). the gap is a clear indication of how far behind the oic countries are in terms of meeting global educational standards. table 1: summary statistics of students’ performance on timss 2011 all oic non-oic statistics mathematics science mathematics science mathematics science average 462.63 473.18 415.63 436.69 493.96 497.5 std dev 66.0752 59.0918 33.87797 30.80848 63.97994 61.30537 minimum 331 306 366 376 331 306 maximum 613 590 487 490 613 590 observations 40 40 16 16 24 24 56 global education review 1(4) figure 1: students’ performance in mathematics on timss 2011, 8th grade (mean scores) in figure 1, each country’s performance in mathematics is graphed in order of highest to lowest scores. as indicated by the darkened bar chart, in general, all of the oic countries achieved lower scores as compared to many of the non-oic countries. kazakhstan is the country with the highest score in mathematics among the oic countries, while oman records the lowest score for the oic countries. in science, the oic countries also performed poorly. as illustrated in figure 2, all of the oic countries participating in timss 2011 are on the lower side of the chart. kazakhstan, again, scored the highest, while morocco got the lowest score among oic countries. both figures show a clear gap between the oic nations and countries that performed well on timss 2011, such as south korea, singapore, japan, and hong kong. looking back at history, one way in which those high-achieving countries managed to transform their economies and become high-income nations was through efforts to improve educational quality. science and mathematics were subjects considered particularly vital to human capital development throughout those countries’ processes of transformation. given the existing gap between the oic countries and those high-performing nations, serious efforts to reduce this gap need to be undertaken if the oic countries are serious about brighter futures. in order to understand the low performance of the oic countries in both mathematics and science, the discussion now turns to analysing allocated educational inputs. if the allocation of educational inputs by the oic countries is relatively proportional to those of high-achieving countries, then inefficiency in inputs utilisation could be one reason for the failure to translate the allocated inputs into higher student academic achievement. 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 so ut h ko re a si ng ap or e ho ng k on g ja pa n ru ss ia n is ra el fi nl an d u ni te d st at es sl ov en ia hu ng ar y au st ra lia li th ua ni a ita ly n ew z ea la nd ka za kh st an sw ed en u kr ai ne n or w ay ar m en ia ro m an ia u ae tu rk ey le ba no n m al ay sia g eo rg ia th ai la nd m ac ed on ia tu ni sia ch ile ira n q at ar ba hr ai n jo rd an w es t b an k an d g az a sa ud i a ra bi a in do ne sia sy ria m or oc co o m an g ha na ax is t itl e countries oic non-oic efficiency of oic secondary education 57 figure 2: students’ performance in science in timss 2011, 8th grade (mean scores) two sets of input-related data are considered: the average percentage distribution of current public expenditure to lower secondary education4 from 2008 to 2011, and the average student-teacher ratio in secondary education from 2008 to 2011. these inputs are discretionary educational inputs because they are under the direct control of ministries of education. in the study of educational production function, systematic associations have been found between these two inputs and students’ academic achievement. educational expenditure has a positive effect on students’ achievement (hedges et al., 1994), while there is a negative relationship between student-teacher ratio and students’ achievement (finn et al., 2003). for both inputs, the average figures are considered for three reasons. first, the figures represent the commitment of each country from the time of the last timss (in 2007) to the recent timss (in 2011). second, the lag in policy effectiveness is overcome by using the average data. third, the average data solves the problem of some missing data on the inputs. 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 si ng ap or e so ut h ko re a ja pa n fi nl an d sl ov en ia ru ss ia n ho ng k on g u ni te d st at es hu ng ar y au st ra lia is ra el li th ua ni a n ew z ea la nd sw ed en ita ly u kr ai ne n or w ay ka za kh st an tu rk ey ira n ro m an ia u ae ch ile ba hr ai n th ai la nd jo rd an tu ni sia ar m en ia sa ud i a ra bi a m al ay sia sy ria g eo rg ia w es t b an k an d g az a o m an q at ar m ac ed on ia le ba no n in do ne sia m or oc co g ha na sc or es countries oic non-oic 58 global education review 1(4) table 2: summary statistics of educational inputs to secondary education (average from 2008 to 2011) statistics all oic non-oic percentage distribution of public current expenditure to lower secondary education studentteacher ratio percentage distribution of public current expenditure to lower secondary education student -teacher ratio percentage distributio n of public current expenditur e to lower secondary education studentteacher ratio average 18.71 13.66 20.12 15.27 18.17 12.52 std dev 5.93 4.73 6.18 4.94 5.62 4.44 minimum 7.92 6.85 8.15 9.15 7.92 6.85 maximum 36.54 25.26 33.58 25.26 36.54 22.14 observations 40 40 16 16 24 24 figure 3: percentage distribution of public current expenditure to lower secondary education (average from 2008 to 2011) 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 35 40 li th ua ni a ka za kh st an jo rd an ba hr ai n ar m en ia au st ra lia sy ria m al ay sia ja pa n ira n hu ng ar y m or oc co o m an ho ng k on g g ha na so ut h ko re a m ac ed on ia g eo rg ia sa ud i a ra bi a sl ov en ia tu ni sia u ae u kr ai ne w es t b an k an d g az a ru ss ia ro m an ia ita ly n ew z ea la nd fi nl an d in do ne sia le ba no n q at ar sw ed en is ra el si ng ap or e n or w ay ch ile u ni te d st at es tu rk ey th ai la nd pe rc en t countries oic non-oic efficiency of oic secondary education 59 summary statistics of the inputs data are presented in table 2. as shown in the table, for the sample, the average financial allocation to lower secondary education is 18.71 percent, with a standard deviation of 5.93. the average financial allocation by the oic countries is 20.12 percent, which is higher than the sample and the non-oic countries’ average. in general, the commitment of the oic countries to improving their educational standards can be seen in terms of higher financial allocation made to lower secondary education. their poor performance in timss, however, may be attributed to inefficiency in utilizing the allocated financial resources. further investigation of this claim will follow in section 5. in figure 3, all countries’ financial allocation to lower secondary education is graphed from the highest to the lowest. as shown in the figure, three oic countries, namely kazakhstan, jordan, and bahrain, have allocated more than 25 percent of their current public expenditures to lower secondary education. their performance on timss 2011, however, is far from being impressive (see the position of these countries in figures 1 and 2). perhaps, had the allocated financial resources been utilised fully, these countries could have achieved better results. caution, however, needs to be exercised when comparing countries using this percentage data. high-income countries, for example, may have small percentage allocations, but in terms of absolute value, the figures can be higher than for a low-income country with high percentage allocation. by using the percentage figure for the analysis, countries’ educational allocations are normalized and more comparable. for the second input, readers should refer to table 2 and figure 4. the average studentteacher ratio of the oic countries (15.27) is higher than the sample (13.66) and the non-oic countries’ (12.57) averages, as shown in table 2. the high number of students per teacher may result in disturbance of the knowledge transmission process, thus providing one explanation for the oic countries’ low performance on timss as compared to the nonoic countries. as shown in figure 4, the student-teacher ratios in oic countries are fairly distributed, with countries such as kazakhstan, lebanon, and qatar having low student-teacher ratios (10 or fewer students per teacher); saudi arabia, uae, indonesia, malaysia, tunisia, bahrain, jordan, morocco, oman, and iran having moderate ratios (more than 10 but fewer than 20 students per teacher); and west bank and gaza, turkey, and syria having high ratios (more than 20 students per teacher). although countries such as kazakhstan, lebanon, and qatar have lower student-teacher ratios than the other oic countries, these countries’ performance on timss is still low as compared to the non-oic countries with relatively proportional studentteacher ratios. such an outcome could be attributed to technical inefficiency—for example, many teachers may not be able to engage in computer-aided learning. in order to understand how the concepts of efficiency and productivity are applied in the educational sector, further discussion is provided in the next section. 60 global education review 1(4) figure 4: student-teacher ratio (secondary level, average from 2008 to 2011) the concepts of efficiency and productivity in education according to worthington (2001), technical efficiency in education deals with the best use of educational inputs, such as school resources, to improve student academic achievement. allocative efficiency, he states, concerns the optimal combinations of educational inputs needed (for example, teacher instruction and computer-aided learning), in order to produce a given level of educational output at minimal cost. in other words, allocative efficiency is about choosing the right combination of educational inputs, and must take into account the relative costs of the inputs employed, assuming outputs are constant. the study here evaluates the level of technical efficiency, since the primary concern is whether the resources allocated to the secondary educational sector have been utilized fully. productivity in education, according to rolle (2004), is related to the issue of how to achieve the efficient production of educational outcomes. rolle (2004) further states that in the context of public educational institutions, educational productivity debates cover the matters of how to: minimise costs; maximise the utilisation of available resources; meet increased and diversified educational objectives; and become accountable to the public for the expenditure of resources. in order to apply the concepts of productivity and efficiency to the field of education, duyar et al. (2006) emphasise the need to establish the relationship between educational inputs and outputs. one way to 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 ar m en ia n or w ay g eo rg ia ru ss ia li th ua ni a le ba no n sl ov en ia ka za kh st an sw ed en is ra el fi nl an d q at ar hu ng ar y ita ly sa ud i a ra bi a ja pa n au st ra lia m ac ed on ia u ae in do ne sia ro m an ia u kr ai ne m al ay sia tu ni sia u ni te d st at es n ew z ea la nd si ng ap or e ba hr ai n jo rd an m or oc co o m an ira n so ut h ko re a g ha na th ai la nd ho ng k on g w es t b an k an d g az a ch ile tu rk ey sy ria st ud en tp te ac he r r at io countries oic non-oic efficiency of oic secondary education 61 understand that relationship is by estimating an educational production function. once the relationship is clear, a production frontier of the best-practice educational institutions (i.e. schools) can be estimated, where the estimated frontier stands as a benchmark in the process of evaluating the efficiency (relative) of other educational institutions. for the study, the construction of the production function of education is based on a technique called data envelopment analysis (dea). the construction of a production function based on dea takes a piecewise linear production frontier. economists have applied the frontier production approaches to measure the technical, allocative, and cost efficiency of schools. this study will only evaluate technical efficiency levels in several selected countries. technical efficiency alone is estimated because in order to estimate allocative efficiency, data on educational resource prices are required, and those data are not available. in order to investigate the efficiency level of resource utilization by the oic countries, dea is employed. the next sections review the models of dea to be applied for the analysis. data envelopment analysis (dea) theoretical framework of dea two basic dea models have been widely applied: (i) the constant returns to scale (crs) model of charnes, cooper, and rhodes (1978); and (ii) the variable returns to scale (vrs) model of banker, charnes, and cooper (1984). in figure 5, i illustrate the theoretical idea behind the two principal approaches to dea frontier analysis and the derivation of technical efficiency measures based on the dea frontier. the figure is constructed based on a singleinput, single-output case. the simplification enables the production process to be described in a simple two-dimensional diagram. in figure 5, points a, b, c, and d represent the observed performance of four decision-making units (called dmus—the dmus in this study are those countries that participated in timss), given their levels of input and output and production technology. the crs model is represented by the thin line extending from the origin of figure 5 through point b, where the dmu b is chosen to maximise the angle of the ray. the thin line is the production frontier as identified under the crs model. based on the crs model, the dmu b is identified as the most efficient dmu since it lies on the frontier. point b is, therefore, crsefficient. other dmus (a, c, and d), which lie below the frontier, are inefficient under the crs model. still referring to figure 5, the vrs model is illustrated by the solid thick lines that connect points a and b, and b and c. the solid lines depict the so-called “vrs production frontier.” the vrs model has its production frontier spanned by the convex hull of the dmus (from point a to b, and b to c). the frontier is piecewise linear and concave. the vrs frontier assumes variable returns to scale where: (i) increasing returns to scale occur in the first solid line (ab) segment, and (ii) decreasing returns to scale occur in the second segment (bc) (cooper et al., 2006). note that points a, b, and c are on the frontier and are therefore vrs-efficient. point d, on the other hand, is the inefficient dmu because it lies below the frontier (cooper et al., 2000). 62 global education review 1(4) figure 5: the best-practice reference frontier * source: based on coelli et al. (2005) given the crs-efficient and vrs-efficient frontiers, an inefficient dmu has two major projection paths to improve its performance; namely, (i) an input-oriented path, and (ii) an output-oriented path (cooper et al., 2000). the input-oriented path aims at reducing the input amounts by as much as possible while keeping the present output levels unchanged. the output-oriented path aims at maximising output levels under the given input consumption. for this study, an output-oriented path is adopted because in the context of public education, allocations to schools are made with expectations of full utilisation of the allocations provided, together with high student academic achievement. conservation of inputs is not the objective of public education, and as a result, an analysis based on the input-oriented path is not appropriate. referring to figure 5, the output-oriented model identifies technical efficiency as a proportional augmentation of output for a given level of input. under the vrs model, the inefficient dmu d can improve its performance by a movement to point s. the movement to point s means dmu d needs to increase its output level given the amount of inputs it has. as such, the vrs technical efficiency of dmu d under the output-oriented path (otevrs) is given by: otevrs = sd/st (1) with the understanding of the theoretical concept of dea in mind, i discuss the mathematical linear programming of dea in the next sub-section. vrs-efficient frontier 0 p r u s b d t c a q output (y) input (x) crs-efficient frontier efficiency of oic secondary education 63 mathematical linear programming of dea a case of multiple-output, multiple-input dea is now discussed. i start the discussion by defining some notation to be used in this section. the dataset is assumed to consist of j dmus (j=1, …, j). each dmu j employs nx inputs (for n = 1, …, n) in order to produce my outputs (for m = 1, …, m). the envelopment form of an outputoriented linear programming problem under constant returns to scale (crs) assumption is set out as: for each j, ,max j jφ φλ (2) subject to: 1 0, for = 1, ..., j j mj j mj j y y m mφ λ = − + ≥∑ 1 0, for = 1, ..., j nj j nj j x x n nλ = − ≥∑ 1, ..., 0jλ λ ≥ where jφ is the output weight of the jth dmu to be maximised, 'sλ refer to the value of weights for each dmu under the solution of the jth linear programming. the first constraint implies that the output produced by the observed dmu j must be less than or equal to the sum of output weights of all the dmus. the value of jφ is 1 jφ≤ < ∞ . the measure of technical efficiency for the jth dmu is given by 1 jφ [coelli, 1996]. the second constraint states that the inputs of the observed dmu j minus the sum of input weights of all the dmus must be greater than or equal to zero, and the last constraint is to ensure that the value of λ is non-negative. the weights for outputs and inputs are estimated as the best advantage for each dmu to maximise its relative efficiency. by adding a convexity constraint, 1 1 j j j λ = =∑ , to equation (2), the crs linear programming is now modified to a variable returns to scale (vrs) linear programming, as set out below: for each j, ,max j jφ φλ (3) subject to: 1 0, for = 1, ..., j j mj j mj j y y m mφ λ = − + ≥∑ 1 0, for = 1, ..., j nj j nj j x x n nλ = − ≥∑ 1 1 j j j λ = =∑ 1, ..., 0jλ λ ≥ where the purpose of the convexity constraint, according to coelli et al. (2005, p. 172), is to “… form a convexity hull of intersecting planes that envelope the data point more tightly than the crs conical hull and thus provides technical efficiency scores that are greater than or equal to those obtained using the crs model…” the convexity constraint also ensures that each dmu is only benchmarked or compared with dmus of relatively similar scale. if the jth dmu is technically efficient ( jθ is equal to one), the weight of its jλ is one, while the weights of 'sλ for the other dmus are zero. in a case when the observed jth dmu is technically inefficient, the weights of 'sλ for any (or some) of the other dmus (known as peers to the jth dmu) must be positive—a peer with higher value of λ signifies a greater position as an exemplar (relative to the other peers) to dmu j. 64 global education review 1(4) further, the values of λ (peer weights) can be used to calculate the input and output targets for dmu j. the measures of input and output targets for dmu j are calculated as: mth output target: 1 1 ...m j mjy yλ λ+ + , for m = 1, …, m, nth input target: 1 1 ...n j njx xλ λ+ + , for n = 1, …, n (4) the input and output targets can be used by dmu j to improve its efficiency. with the knowledge of how to calculate the crs and vrs technical efficiencies in mind, i explain the calculation of scale efficiency in the next subsection. scale efficiency for each dmu can be calculated when both the crs and the vrs technical efficiencies are obtained. a difference between the crs and vrs technical efficiency scores for a particular dmu indicates that the dmu has scale inefficiency. to describe the concept of scale efficiency, figure 5 is once again employed for expositional purposes (the crs and vrs frontiers are illustrated in the figure). notice that the distance pq gives the input technical efficiency under constant returns to scale for dmu d. under the vrs model, however, the input-oriented technical efficiency for dmu d is given by the distance pr. the difference between the two distances, qr, is due to scale inefficiency. a ratio efficiency expression for scale efficiency (se) based on figure 5 is given by: se = pq/pr (5) where the measure is bounded between zero and one. scale inefficiency, therefore, is given by one less se: scale inefficiency = 1 – se = qr/pr (6) another way to calculate scale efficiency is given by tecrs = tevrs x se (7) because pq pr pq pd pd pr   =       (8) from equation (8), the crs technical efficiency can be decomposed into two parts: (i) the vrs technical efficiency (which is also known as “pure” technical efficiency), and (ii) the scale efficiency (coelli et al., 2005). empirical strategy measuring the level of technical efficiency under the crs and vrs assumptions can be done by solving equations (2) and (3). the solutions involve two strategies: (i) no control is made on the effects of the environmental factors, and (ii) control is made on the environmental factors. caution needs to be exercised when interpreting the results based on the first strategy because of the possibility of biased estimates. differences in environmental factors create a cross-sectional heterogeneity across countries, where some countries may perform better than others due to socio-economic advantage. favourable environmental factors (better socio-economic conditions such as higher income, lower corruption level, and better health quality, just to mention a few) may have positive effects on technical efficiency, while non-favourable environmental factors may have negative effects on technical efficiency. the factors that constitute socio-economic heterogeneity in the production environment, therefore, need to be considered when comparing the efficiency scores; hence, the relevance of the second strategy. . efficiency of oic secondary education 65 table 3: summary statistics of the outputs and inputs according to high-income and middle-income countries’ divisions high-income countries middle-income countries man std dev min max mean std dev min max outputs math 495.4 7 69.18 366 613 432.91 47.48 331 539 science 506.7 4 48.62 419 590 442.81 51.41 306 542 inputs % current exp. to lower secondary level 17.48 4.25 8.72 7.541 19.83 7.03 7.92 36.54 secondary studentteacher ratio 12.47 3.39 26.55 20.13 14.73 5.54 6.85 25.26 to control for the environmental factors, the sample is divided into highand middleincome countries. to avoid low number of observations due to the sub-division of the middle-income countries into upper-middle and lower-middle categories, countries in these categories, together with one low-income country (only west bank and gaza), are placed into a middle-income group. the divisions are based on the world bank’s classification.5 separate estimates for high(19 countries) and middle-income (21 countries) countries, therefore, have been undertaken.6 the division provides some socio-economic homogeneity in the production environment of countries in each division. as such, countries are relatively more comparable in terms of their socio-economic conditions within their respective groups. based on the division, summary statistics of the outputs and inputs of education are presented in table 3. as shown in the table, the average performance of high-income countries is significantly higher for both mathematics and science as compared to the middle-income countries. in terms of inputs, the high-income countries on average have lower financial allocation to lower secondary education as compared to the middle-income countries. the student-teacher ratio for the high-income countries, however, is lower than that of the middle-income countries. given the differences between the level of inputs and outputs, an analysis of technical efficiency will shed light on the extent to which the resources have been properly utilised. in the next section, i turn to the discussion of the results of dea. results the efficiency scores based on an outputoriented dea are calculated using crosssectional data from 40 countries that participated in timss 2011. a panel data analysis was not employed because construction of a panel dataset would result in a lower number of observations, since a country might participate in timss one year, but not in the other years. a software package called deap 2.1 was used for the efficiency scores computation.7 results of dea involving all 40 countries (no controlling for environmental variables) are first discussed. then, the discussion proceeds with 66 global education review 1(4) table 4: summary statistics of dea efficiency scores involving all 40 countries statistics crs technical efficiency vrs technical efficiency scale efficiency average 0.70 0.86 0.80 std dev 0.20 0.12 0.14 minimum 0.37 0.54 0.51 maximum 1 1 1 the results obtained after controlling for the environmental variables. summary statistics of the dea results for all 40 countries are presented in table 4. as shown in the table, on average, the crstechnical efficiency for all the countries is 70 percent. the vrs-technical efficiency, on the other hand, is 86 percent, with a standard deviation of 12 percent. the minimum technical efficiency score under the crs assumption is 37 percent, while under the vrs assumption, it is 54 percent. the difference between the crs and vrs efficiency scores exists due to a large-scale difference, as shown by the average scale efficiency of 80 percent. in table 5, details of each country’s score and ranking are shown. ghana is the country with the lowest vrs technical efficiency score, which stands at only 54 percent. ghana, in other words, has failed to realise its potential educational outputs in terms of higher timss results, due to technical inefficiency of 46 percent. armenia, norway, and the united states, by contrast, have each recorded a crs technical efficiency score of 100 percent. nine countries, however, have the maximum score of 100 percent under the vrs assumption: armenia, norway, the united states, russia, turkey, singapore, thailand, finland, and south korea. these countries form the vrs frontier against which the performance of the other countries is evaluated. for all nine vrs-technically efficient countries, the number of times each of them acts as a peer (exemplar) is also identified. the objective of this exercise is to discriminate between superior and inferior peers among the identified efficient countries. singapore, for example, appears 29 times (the highest peer count) as a peer to the other countries, with relatively the same level of inputs. other countries with high peer count are russia (20 counts), norway (five counts), south korea (two counts), finland (two counts), united states (one count) and armenia (one count). although turkey and thailand have vrs efficiency scores of one, the peer count for these countries is zero, meaning that they form part of the vrs frontier, but do not stand as peers to the other countries. this is because these countries’ positions are at the lower end (near to the origin—recall figure 5) of the frontier, and no other countries are relatively comparable to them in terms of inputs. although they form parts of the frontier, their exclusion from the sample will not affect the efficiency scores of the other countries. the results in table 5 also show that turkey is the only oic country that is technically efficient under the vrs assumption. as mentioned above, although turkey forms part of the vrs frontier, it does not become a peer (exemplar) to other countries. based on vrs scores, the remaining oic countries dominated the bottom 20 positions of the ranking (refer to efficiency of oic secondary education 67 table 5: efficiency scores and rankings of all 40 countries countries crs vrs scale returns to scale crs rank vrs rank armenia 1 1 1 crs 1 1 norway 1 1 1 crs 2 2 united states 1 1 1 crs 3 3 russia 0.985 1 0.985 drs 4 4 turkey* 0.984 1 0.984 irs 5 5 singapore 0.977 1 0.977 drs 6 6 thailand 0.946 1 0.946 irs 7 7 finland 0.852 1 0.852 drs 12 8 south korea 0.699 1 0.699 drs 19 9 slovenia 0.903 0.992 0.91 drs 9 10 japan 0.752 0.987 0.763 drs 18 11 israel 0.915 0.98 0.933 drs 8 12 hong kong 0.632 0.956 0.661 drs 24 13 sweden 0.835 0.953 0.876 drs 13 14 lithuania 0.886 0.943 0.939 drs 10 15 hungary 0.778 0.94 0.827 drs 15 16 australia 0.662 0.913 0.725 drs 22 17 italy 0.756 0.9 0.84 drs 17 18 kazakhstan* 0.81 0.894 0.906 drs 14 19 georgia 0.872 0.876 0.995 drs 11 20 new zealand 0.649 0.873 0.743 drs 23 21 ukraine 0.616 0.868 0.709 drs 27 22 lebanon* 0.777 0.855 0.909 drs 16 23 uae* 0.597 0.816 0.731 drs 28 24 romania 0.623 0.814 0.766 drs 26 25 iran* 0.499 0.803 0.621 drs 33 26 chile 0.669 0.799 0.837 drs 21 27 saudi arabia* 0.632 0.782 0.808 drs 25 28 qatar* 0.686 0.778 0.882 drs 20 29 bahrain* 0.453 0.766 0.591 drs 34 30 jordan* 0.434 0.761 0.57 drs 36 31 tunisia* 0.534 0.754 0.709 drs 31 32 malaysia* 0.514 0.737 0.698 drs 32 33 macedonia 0.557 0.734 0.758 drs 30 34 syria* 0.367 0.722 0.508 drs 40 35 oman* 0.452 0.712 0.635 drs 35 36 west bank and gaza* 0.427 0.712 0.6 drs 37 37 indonesia* 0.584 0.711 0.822 drs 29 38 morocco* 0.409 0.637 0.641 drs 38 39 ghana 0.37 0.54 0.686 drs 39 40 note: * to indicate the oic countries; crs denotes constant returns to scale; irs denotes increasing returns to scale; drs denotes decreasing returns to scale. 68 global education review 1(4) vrs ranking column of table 5). after turkey, the second most efficient oic country is kazakhstan, with an efficiency level of 89 percent. morocco is ranked 39th (second to last), with a technical efficiency score of 64 percent. in what has become a central issue in the middle east, israel is 98 percent technically efficient. israel manages to outperform almost all of the oic countries (except turkey); not just in timss, but also in technical efficiency. the findings suggest that due to technical inefficiency, educational resources in most of the oic countries were not being utilised fully for the realisation of higher timss scores. an improvement in technical aspects of how the existing resources can be fully utilized is key for the oic nations to achieve better timss results, and to avoid wasting resources. the study, however, does not investigate factors that may explain the inefficiency. it could be a possible topic for future research. since the analysis is based on an outputoriented dea, the objective of the linear programming problem is to assess how much a country should improve its output given the allocated level of inputs. as shown in table 6, in the case of malaysia, for example, the projected outputs are 597 for mathematics and 581 for science—the calculation is based on equation (4). the projected outputs are obtained from the piecewise linear frontier constructed by joining the identified efficient countries (recall figure 5). the percentage difference between the projected and the original outputs shows the percentage improvement in mathematics and science malaysia needs to achieve in order to be technically efficient. in other words, the projected outputs stand as the key performance indicators for malaysia to improve its performance internationally. to offer another example, given the allocated resources, a country such as ghana needs to improve both mathematics and science average scores by 85 percent from the present results in order to be technically efficient. for the oic, morocco is the country that requires the most improvement in both subjects (65 percent improvement in mathematics and 57 percent improvement in science) in order to be fully efficient. so far in the analysis, i have not controlled for the effects of environmental factors on technical efficiency. as discussed in section 4.3, to control for environmental factors, the 40 countries are divided into highand middleincome nations. due to the division, two separate dea models are estimated. in table 7, summary statistics of the efficiency scores obtained under each division are presented. after controlling for the environmental factors, the average vrs efficiency score for the high-income countries is 92 percent, while the middle-income countries’ is 87 percent. the high-income countries’ scale efficiency, however, is only 81 percent, while the middle-income countries’ score is 88 percent. the findings suggest that scale inefficiency is more prevalent among the high-income countries than it is in the middle-income countries. efficiency of oic secondary education 69 table 6: projected outputs for all the countries country 2011 mean math for 8th grade projected math score % difference 2011 mean science for 8 grade projected science score % difference armenia 467 467 0 437 437 0 australia 505 578 15 519 568 10 bahrain* 409 611 49 452 590 31 chile 416 591 42 461 577 25 finland 514 514 0 552 552 0 georgia 431 492 14 420 487 16 ghana 331 613 85 306 566 85 hong kong 586 613 5 535 560 5 hungary 505 559 11 522 555 6 indonesia* 386 583 51 406 571 41 iran* 415 611 47 474 590 24 israel 516 526 2 516 531 3 italy 498 561 13 501 556 11 japan 570 578 1 558 568 2 jordan* 406 611 50 449 590 31 kazakhstan* 487 548 13 490 548 12 south korea 613 613 0 560 560 0 lebanon* 449 525 17 406 531 31 lithuania 502 544 8 514 545 6 macedonia 426 580 36 407 569 40 malaysia* 440 597 36 426 581 36 morocco* 371 611 65 376 590 57 new zealand 488 605 24 512 586 14 norway 475 475 0 494 494 0 oman* 366 611 67 420 590 40 qatar* 410 527 28 419 538 28 romania 458 583 27 465 572 23 russia 539 539 0 542 542 0 saudi arabia* 394 562 43 436 557 28 singapore 611 611 0 590 590 0 slovenia 505 547 8 543 547 1 sweden 484 512 6 509 534 5 syria* 380 611 61 426 590 38 thailand 427 427 0 451 451 0 tunisia* 425 599 41 439 582 33 turkey* 452 452 0 483 483 0 ukraine 479 592 24 501 577 15 uae* 456 581 27 465 570 23 united states 509 509 0 525 525 0 west bank & gaza* 404 611 51 420 590 40 note: * to indicate the oic countries 70 global education review 1(4) in table 8, the efficiency score and ranking of the 19 high-income countries are presented. based on vrs efficiency, all five oic countries that fall under the high-income category are at the lowest five positions; namely, uae (82 percent), qatar (79 percent), saudi arabia (78 percent), bahrain (77 percent), and oman (71 percent). as shown in table 8, norway, the united states, singapore, slovenia, finland, japan, and south korea are the most efficient countries under the vrs assumption. these countries form the vrs frontier against which the performance of other countries is evaluated; these highly technically efficient countries also stand as exemplars for the oic countries as they seek to improve technical efficiency. table 7: summary statistics of dea efficiency based on the division of the dmus into high and middle-income countries statistics 19 high-income countries 21 middle-income countries crs vrs scale crs vrs scale average 0.75 0.92 0.81 0.77 0.87 0.88 std dev 0.17 0.10 0.12 0.18 0.11 0.12 min 0.45 0.71 0.59 0.49 0.61 0.63 max 1 1 1 1 1 1 table 8: efficiency scores and rankings of 19 high-income countries countries crs vrs scale returns to scale vrs rank crs rank norway 1 1 1 crs 1 1 united states 1 1 1 crs 2 2 singapore 0.977 1 0.977 drs 3 3 slovenia 0.903 1 0.903 drs 4 5 finland 0.852 1 0.852 drs 5 6 japan 0.759 1 0.759 drs 6 10 south korea 0.699 1 0.699 drs 7 11 israel 0.915 0.995 0.919 drs 8 4 hong kong 0.632 0.956 0.661 drs 9 15 sweden 0.835 0.953 0.876 drs 10 7 hungary 0.781 0.952 0.821 drs 11 8 italy 0.76 0.931 0.817 drs 12 9 australia 0.668 0.914 0.731 drs 13 13 new zealand 0.649 0.873 0.743 drs 14 14 uae* 0.597 0.817 0.731 drs 15 17 qatar* 0.686 0.788 0.871 drs 16 12 saudi arabia* 0.632 0.783 0.807 drs 17 16 bahrain* 0.453 0.766 0.591 drs 18 18 oman* 0.452 0.712 0.635 drs 19 19 note: * to indicate the oic countries; crs denotes constant returns to scale; irs denotes increasing returns to scale and drs denotes decreasing returns to scale. efficiency of oic secondary education 71 in table 9, the efficiency scores of the 21 middle-income countries, together with their rankings, are shown. ghana once again has the lowest crs and vrs efficiency scores, and thus is positioned last (21st). six countries are technically efficient under the vrs assumption: armenia, russia, thailand, turkey, lebanon, and georgia. of the six efficient countries, russia has the highest peer count (15 counts), followed by turkey (three counts) and thailand (one count). these three countries are the superior peers, and the inefficient countries may learn from them. although armenia, lebanon, and georgia form the vrs frontier, these countries do not stand as exemplars to any of the inefficient countries, making them inferior peers. although they form parts of the frontier, their exclusion from the sample will not affect the efficiency scores of the other countries. from the estimated vrs technical efficiency, turkey and lebanon are the only oic countries with maximum efficiency scores. kazakhstan scored 90 percent, iran 88 percent, jordan 83 percent, malaysia 82 percent, tunisia 81 percent, indonesia 79 percent, syria 79 percent, west bank and gaza 78 percent, and morocco 69 percent. these inefficient oic countries are also found to be in the state of decreasing returns to scale (drs). in other words, a proportional change in the inputs of education results in less than a proportional change in the outputs of education. as an expositional purpose, we now turn to the case of indonesia. given its vrs technical efficiency of 79 percent, indonesia needs to improve. for that matter, the country may learn from its peers; namely, russia (peer weight = 0.684), thailand (peer weight = 0.218), and turkey (peer weight = 0.098). since russia’s peer weight is the highest, indonesia should learn most from that country. had indonesia been technically efficient, given its level of educational inputs, the country should have scored 506 in mathematics and 516 in science. those are the projected outputs for the nation to improve its technical efficiency (refer to table 10). in table 10, the projected outputs for the highand middle-income countries are presented. the projected outputs are obtained using equation (4). the projected outputs in table 10 are different than those in table 6 because the figures in table 10 are obtained after controlling for environmental factors. 72 global education review 1(4) table 9: efficiency scores and rankings of the middle-income countries countries crs vrs scale returns to scale vrs rank crs rank armenia 1 1 1 crs 1 1 russia 1 1 1 crs 2 2 thailand 1 1 1 crs 3 3 turkey* 1 1 1 crs 4 4 lebanon* 0.983 1 0.983 irs 5 5 georgia 0.882 1 0.882 irs 6 7 lithuania 0.903 0.948 0.952 drs 7 6 ukraine 0.825 0.924 0.893 drs 8 8 chile 0.821 0.919 0.893 drs 9 10 kazakhstan* 0.822 0.904 0.909 drs 10 9 iran* 0.67 0.875 0.766 drs 11 16 romania 0.817 0.868 0.941 drs 12 11 jordan* 0.517 0.828 0.625 drs 13 19 malaysia* 0.671 0.816 0.822 drs 14 15 tunisia* 0.712 0.81 0.88 drs 15 14 macedonia 0.724 0.79 0.916 drs 16 13 indonesia* 0.784 0.786 0.997 drs 17 12 syria* 0.495 0.786 0.63 drs 18 20 west bank & gaza* 0.577 0.775 0.744 drs 19 17 morocco* 0.54 0.694 0.778 drs 20 18 ghana 0.493 0.614 0.804 drs 21 21 note: * to indicate the oic countries; crs denotes constant returns to scale; irs denotes increasing returns to scale and drs denotes decreasing returns to scale. table 10: projected outputs for high-income and middle-income countries high-income country 2011 mean math for 8 grade projected math score % difference 2011 mean science for 8 grade projected science score % difference australia 505 555 10 519 568 9 bahrain* 409 611 49 452 590 31 finland 514 514 0 552 552 0 hong kong 586 613 5 535 560 5 hungary 505 531 5 522 549 5 israel 516 518 0 516 524 2 italy 498 535 7 501 538 7 efficiency of oic secondary education 73 japan 570 570 0 558 558 0 south korea 613 613 0 560 560 0 new zealand 488 601 23 512 586 14 norway 475 475 0 494 494 0 oman* 366 611 67 420 590 40 qatar* 410 520 27 419 531 27 saudi arabia* 394 526 34 436 557 28 singapore 611 611 0 590 590 0 slovenia 505 505 0 543 543 0 sweden 484 512 6 509 534 5 uae* 456 558 22 465 569 22 united states 509 509 0 525 525 0 middle-income country 2011 mean math for 8 grade projected math score % difference 2011 mean science for 8 grade projected science score % difference armenia 467 467 0 437 437 0 chile 416 479 15 461 501 9 georgia 431 431 0 420 420 0 ghana 331 539 63 306 542 77 indonesia* 386 506 31 406 516 27 iran* 415 539 30 474 542 14 jordan* 406 539 33 449 542 21 kazakhstan* 487 539 11 490 542 11 lebanon* 449 449 0 406 406 0 lithuania 502 539 7 514 542 5 macedonia 426 539 27 407 542 33 malaysia* 440 539 23 426 542 27 morocco* 371 539 45 376 542 44 romania 458 530 16 465 536 15 russia 539 539 0 542 542 0 syria* 380 539 42 426 542 27 thailand 427 427 0 451 451 0 tunisia* 425 539 27 439 542 23 turkey* 452 452 0 483 483 0 ukraine 479 539 13 501 542 8 w. bank & gaza* 404 539 33 420 542 29 note: * to indicate the oic countries 74 global education review 1(4) conclusion this study investigated the level of technical efficiency of secondary education in 40 countries that participated in timss 2011. central to the analysis was the assessment of oic countries’ technical efficiency in utilizing the allocated educational resources. the technique employed for the analysis was data envelopment analysis (dea). for the dea analysis, each country’s mean scores in timss 2011mathematics and science were employed as the educational outputs, while the inputs were represented by the percentage distribution of current public expenditure on lower secondary education and secondary school student-teacher ratios. from the analysis, the oic countries, in general, were technically inefficient in utilising their educational resources to achieve better timss results in comparison with the non-oic countries. although turkey and lebanon managed to achieve 100 percent vrs efficiency scores (refer to table 9), they were still inferior exemplars. had the oic countries been technically efficient, they would have achieved better timss results. to improve, the oic countries may learn from their identified superior peers. experience of the superior peers in utilising their educational resources should be carefully studied, particularly in areas to better enhance teaching and learning processes, to provide more effective educational technologies and to adopt best-practice education management system. notes 1. the database is retrievable for free at http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/hom e.do 2. input data for the oic countries are obtained from sesric database at http://www.sesrtcic.org/baseindstep1.php 3. source: http://www.centerforpubliceducatio n.org/libraries/documentlibrary/achievement-levels/descriptionof-timss-achievement-levels.html 4. these data represent a direct allocation to lower secondary education, where the eighth-grade students fall. although data such as percentage educational expenditure for secondary schools as a percentage of gdp are available, this allocation made covers both the lower and upper secondary levels of education. such data is less specific to capture the government’s effort on the lower secondary level. 5. refer to the world bank’s world databank at: http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/ho me.do. 6. refer to maragos & despotis (2003) for an example of this method in research to evaluate schools’ technical efficiency. 7. the software package is downloadable for free from the centre of efficiency and productivity analysis (cepa) at http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/d eap.htm references banker r., charnes a. and cooper w., 1984. some models for estimating technical and scale efficiencies in data envelopment analysis. management science 30(9): 1078-1092. centre of efficiency and productivity analysis (cepa), retrieved on jan 15, 2013 at: http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.ht m centre for public education, retrieved on dec 14 2012 at: http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/librari es/document-library/achievementlevels/description-of-timss-achievementlevels.html charnes a., cooper w.w. and rhodes e., 1978. measuring the efficiency of decision making units. european journal of operational research 2: 429-444. coelli t., 1996. a guide to frontier version 4.1: a computer program for stochastic frontier production and cost function estimation. cepa working papers, no. http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do http://www.sesrtcic.org/baseind-step1.php http://www.sesrtcic.org/baseind-step1.php http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.htm http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.htm http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.htm http://www.uq.edu.au/economics/cepa/deap.htm http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html http://www.centerforpubliceducation.org/libraries/document-library/achievement-levels/description-of-timss-achievement-levels.html efficiency of oic secondary education 75 7/96. department of econometrics, university of new england, armidale. coelli t.j., rao d.s.p., o'donnell c.j. and battese g.e., 2005. an introduction to efficiency and productivity analysis. springer. cooper w.w., seiford l.m. and tone k., 2000. data envelopment analysis: a comprehensive text with models, applications, references, and dea-solver software. kluwer academic, boston, mass; london. cooper w.w., seiford l.m. and tone k., 2006. introduction to data envelopment analysis with dea-solver software and references. springer. duyar i., mcneal l. and kara o., eds., 2006. productivity. encyclopedia of educational leadership and administration. thousand oaks sage, ca, 807-809. finn j.d., pannozzo g.m. and achilles c.m., 2003. the 'why's' of class size: student behavior in small classes. review of educational research 73(3): 321368. hedges l.v., laine r.d. and greenwald r., 1994. money does matter somewhere: a reply to hanushek. educational researcher 23: 9-10. maragos e.k. and despotis d.k., 2003. evaluation of high schools performance: a data envelopment analysis approach. proceedings of the apors2003 international conference, new delhi, india, 435-442. martin m.o., mullis i.v.s., foy p., olson j.f., erberber e., preuschoff c. and galia j., 2008. timss 2007 international science report: findings from iea’s trends in international mathematics and science study at the fourth and eighth grades. timss & pirls international study center, boston college, chestnut hill, ma. rolle r.a., 2004. out with the old-in with the new: thoughts on the future of educational productivity research. peabody journal of education 79(3): 3156. schultz t.w., 1961. investment in human capital. the american economic review 51(1): 1-17. united nations, 2010. the millennium development goals report 2010. new york. world bank’s world databank, retrieved on nov 2 2012 at: http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do worthington a.c., 2001. an empirical survey of frontier efficiency measurement techniques in education. education economics 9(3): 245 268. about the author mohd nahar mohd arshad, phd, is attached to the kulliyyah of economics and management sciences, international islamic university malaysia (iium) as an assistant professor. he is also a research fellow at the centre for islamic economics, iium. his research interests are in the areas of education economics, labor economics and islamic economics. http://databank.worldbank.org/ddp/home.do efficiency of secondary education in selected oic countries abstract introduction how do the oic countries fare internationally? the concepts of efficiency and productivity in education data envelopment analysis (dea) theoretical framework of dea mathematical linear programming of dea empirical strategy results conclusion references what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 110 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: naslund-hadley, emma, loera varela, armando & hepworth, katelyn (2014). what goes on in latin american math and science classrooms: a video study of teaching practices. global education review, 1 (3). 110-128. what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms: a video study of teaching practices emma näslund-hadley inter-american development bank armando loera varela heurística educative katelyn ann hepworth inter-american development bank abstract beyond common associated factors, such as teacher characteristics and socio-economic background of students, little is known about how student achievement in math and science is related to differences in the teaching approaches used in latin american classrooms. this paper highlights the main findings of a qualitative study on cross-country differences in teaching practices in three latin american countries. of the three countries selected for the study, paraguay and the dominican republic perform at the bottom of the regional comparative test, second regional comparative and explanatory study (serce), and the mexican state of nuevo leon is one of the top performers. our findings, based on a large sample of videotape recordings from sixth-grade classrooms in the three countries, indicate that inquiry based instruction appears to be associated with higher levels of learning. teachers who actively engage students in activities that promote analytical and critical-thinking skills and move beyond a procedural understanding may lead to better performance on the serce assessments. however, drill, practice, and memorization predominate in all three countries. keywords: math and science education, videotape recordings, inquiry based instruction, teaching approaches, serce, paraguay, dominican republic, mexico introduction in recent years scholars have devoted much attention to explaining differences in student achievement among countries. some of the differences in achievement on international standardized tests, such as the program for international student assessment (pisa), trends in international math and science study (timss), or progress in international reading literacy study (pirls), can be attributed to the characteristics of the teachers, students and schools, e.g., years of experience and training of the teachers, socio-economic background of students, and condition of the school _________________________________ corresponding author: 1,2 emma naslund-hadley, inter-american development bank, 1300 new york avenue, nw, washington, dc 20577. email: emman@iadb.org what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 111 infrastructure (baker, goesling & letendre, 2002; chiu, 2010). chiu (2010) also found math achievement to be linked to less tangible factors, such as school discipline and student–teacher relationships. others have sought to go inside classrooms to document instructional practices. the timss video study was one of the first of its kind to analyze pedagogical approaches through large-scale classroom observations (stigler, gonzales, kawanaka, knoll & serrano, 1999; stigler, gallimore & hiebert, 2000; hiebert, 2003; roth et al., 2006). recording math and science classes on videotape allowed researchers to thoroughly document content as well as teacher and student activities. the study provided possible explanations for cross-country differences on international examinations allowing policymakers and educators to gain a better sense of what was happening in classrooms, and how closely teachers adhered to the outlined curriculum. in latin america and the caribbean (lac) not much is known about what is happening in math and science classrooms. what pedagogical approaches are used to teach math and science content? how effective are teaching practices in producing high levels of learning? these questions motivated our research study, which attempted to shed light on reasons for some of the differences in achievement among latin american countries. teaching approaches continue to change as we better understand how students learn and which teaching methods are associated with higher levels of learning. studies have provided evidence that inquiry-based instruction practices that use hands-on activities to engage students in learning content are associated with increased learning, higher achievement, and greater student motivation in comparison with traditional instruction methods (anderson, 2002; furtak, seidel, iverson & briggs, 2012). these findings suggest that at least some degree of inquiry-based instruction should be used to maximize math and science learning (healy, 1990; lowery, 1998; colburn, 2000). this finding is supported by the timss 1995 and 1999 video studies. evidence from these studies showed higher levels of inquiry-based instruction in classrooms in countries that performed better on international tests. in the timss 1995 study in math, there were major instructional differences in classrooms in japan, the highest performing country in the study, compared to the other countries included. using a video study, we analyzed to what extent inquiry-based instruction was being applied in classrooms in the dominican republic, paraguay, and the mexican state of nuevo leon, and if there were any relationships between the levels of inquiry-based instruction and student performance on the second regional comparative and explanatory study (serce). in addition to coding the videos, we interviewed each teacher and allowed them to reflect on their own lesson based on the video recording. the interview covered issues related to the preparation and implementation of the lesson, the work environment, the teachers’ perception of the students’ performance during the lesson, and the overall quality of the lesson. the videos were also complemented with a questionnaire filled out by the teachers, which encompassed queries about the availability of didactic materials and science labs, as well perceived difficulty of teaching sixth grade science and mathematics. background math and science learning in latin america latin american students perform far below their peers in most developed countries in math and science. the poor performance of students in latin america on international assessments has been well documented (organisation for economic co-operation and development [oecd], 2009; international association for the evaluation of educational achievement [iea], 2007). although performance on international assessments has improved in recent years, the 112 global education review 1(3) 2009 results of the pisa and the 2011 results of the timss demonstrate that latin american students are still among the worst performers in both content area and skill development. disparities in performance on assessments exist not only when comparing students in latin america with students in other regions, but variation in performance persists from country to country within the region. students in some countries perform far better than their peers in other countries within latin america and the caribbean (united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organizationlatin american laboratory for assessment of the quality of education [unesco-llece], 2008). table 1 demonstrates the variation that exists among countries in the results of the 2006 serce, which assessed the science and math skills of sixth-grade students in 14 countries and territories in latin america and two participating countries from the caribbean. the results are summarized in terms of the proportion of students that achieved each level of competency in math and science. in the dominican republic, more than 47 percent of sixth grade students that participated in the serce failed to achieve a level ii competency. they were unable to solve problems that required multiplication or division, do addition with fractions, or recognize common geometric shapes. very few children, less than 7 percent of students in the dominican republic, reached level iii or iv. paraguayan students performed better than their counterparts in the dominican republic, but the number of students achieving level ii or above is well below the lac average. in contrast, students in the mexican state of nuevo leon ranked as some of the top performers on the serce. less than 7 percent of students in nuevo leon achieved level i or below and a majority of the students scored above level ii. in sixth-grade science, the situation is even more worrisome. the poor performance in science is a regional issue, as evidenced by the low proportion of students performing at level iii or iv within the lac average. more than half of the students in the dominican republic and paraguay did not reach level ii, indicating that they lack the skills to organize and compare information and classify living creatures according to predefined criteria. a greater proportion of students in nuevo leon achieved level ii or above than in paraguay or the dominican republic, but a large portion of sixth-graders, close to 34 percent, scored level i or below. table 1 serce 2006: proportion of students achieving competency levels (i-iv) in math and science (%) math science performance level lac dominican republic paraguay nuevo leon lac dominican republic paraguay nuevo leon below i 1.48 5.69 3.85 0.34 5.18 14.29 7.20 2.59 i 13.91 41.79 21.00 6.29 38.72 62.82 46.18 30.98 ii 40.82 45.43 46.50 29.35 42.24 21.50 38.11 47.78 iii 32.35 6.85 23.91 40.66 11.40 1.37 7.52 16.38 iv 11.44 0.24 4.74 23.36 2.46 0.03 0.99 2.28 source: unesco-llece 2008. what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 113 note: lac = latin america and the caribbean. the results of the serce illustrate major learning gaps in math and science throughout the region. some differences in achievement can be attributed to the quality of the teachers, the socio-economic background of the student or the characteristics of the school, but differences in these factors do not account for all variations in learning (levin & lockheed, 1993; unescollece, 2008). what happens in the classroom is a major contributor to learning; however, not much is known about the relationship between student achievement and teacher performance in latin american classrooms. low student performance on regional and international assessments leads us to question what is actually going on in the classroom and what teaching practices are being followed. a review of regional curriculum suggests that inquiry-based instruction should be the principal teaching approach used in the classroom (valverde, 2009). in order to analyze the use of inquiry within latin american and caribbean classrooms, it was necessary to first identify common characteristics of an inquiry-based instructional approach. inquiry-based teaching approaches inquiry-based instruction is one of the most effective pedagogical approaches. anderson (2002) asserts that using an inquiry-based or discovery approach supports higher achievement and greater student motivation. inquiry-based approaches can also contribute to a significant increase in student conceptual learning, according to furtak et al. (2012). there is no commonly agreed upon definition of inquiry-based instruction, but several scholars have suggested the use of some type of spectrum to classify different types of inquiry based teaching practices. colburn (2000) distinguishes four types of inquiry-based instruction: structured inquiry; guided inquiry; open inquiry; and learning cycle. each type provides a varying degree of inquiry based on the guidance provided by the teacher. similar to the classification provided by colburn, furtak et al. (2012) also defines the type of inquiry instruction by the level of guidance provided by the teacher. teacher-led instruction is most often characterized by lecture, practice, and drill. in comparison with inquiry-based instruction, several studies have found that traditional instruction approaches lead to lower levels of learning and motivation to learn science content (chang & mao, 1999). on the opposite end of the spectrum, though a student-led discovery approach allows students the freedom to guide the lesson based on interest and curiosity the approach may not increase levels of learning in comparison with teacher-led instruction. studies have shown that without guidance from the teacher, activities do not automatically increase students’ levels of learning because it is harder for students to draw concrete conclusions based on student-led activities. a balance between teacher-led instruction and student-led discovery may produce the greatest learning outcomes. the guidance provided by the teacher can be further defined as an implicit or explicit approach with the inquiry-based method. identifying instruction as implicit or explicit describes the way in which the teacher provides content to the students. with an implicit approach, students are not lectured or informed of the concepts before performing activities. implicit instruction is based on the belief that students will learn through engaging in handson activities, but participation does not ensure students will learn the scientific concepts and theories implemented during the lesson (khishfe & abd-el-khalick, 2002). without explicitly discussing the material covered, the objective of 114 global education review 1(3) the lesson can remain ambiguous. often, ambiguity is misconstrued as inquiry and the lack of defined concepts does not contribute to students’ learning (andrews, 2013). khishfe and abd-el-khalick (2002) recommend an explicitreflective approach that engages students in inquiry-based activities with planned reflective periods and discussion to make connections and highlight the important skills and concepts developed in the activities. dialogue between the teacher and the students is encouraged to help students generate, develop, and justify explanations as part of the science activities (furtak et al, 2012). inquiry-based teaching practices are widely accepted as critical for students to develop scientific thinking skills; however, additional research is required to determine what degree of inquiry is most effective (marzano, pickering, & pollack, 2001). similar to questions about the effectiveness of inquiry-based instruction in science, there is much debate regarding procedural versus conceptual understanding in math (skemp, 1987). procedural understanding is defined as knowing how to obtain a correct answer without understanding the method used. students memorize formulas and are able to produce an answer by inserting numbers into the equation; little interpretation of the process or reflection upon the meaning of the answer is necessary. the focus is on producing the correct answer, independent of understanding how and why students arrived at the answer. in contrast, conceptual understanding emphasizes the need to both solve the problem and understand how the process works. some experts argue that a foundational framework of memorization of formulas and definitions is essential in progressing to more advanced complex concepts, but others have found that memorization of basic concepts impedes later meaningful learning because students initiated early into relying on memorization are less inclined to develop critical thinking skills (pesek & kirshner, 2000; zacharos, 2006). some memorization is necessary to master certain basic skills, such as multiplication tables and common subtraction. however, teachers should promote critical thinking approaches that result in not only learning concepts and formulas, but in understanding how formulas function, and what a correct answer means. based on the literature reviewed, we focused our investigation on reviewing classroom activities and determining the use of inquiry-based instruction in math and science classes and the prevalence of procedural understanding in math. the most effective way to produce the evidence needed was to go into the classroom and film class lessons for further analysis. the video-study in 2010 we filmed math and science classes in 291 schools in three countries. this study is the first large-scale systematic crosscountry assessment of pedagogical processes in math and science classrooms in latin america. in order to accurately describe math and science teaching in paraguay, the dominican republic and the mexican state of nuevo leon, we needed samples that could be said to be illustrative of instruction in each country, and comparable to performance on an internationally accepted assessment. using the 2006 serce samples from the dominican republic, paraguay, and nuevo leon, we drew a random subsample of 100 elementary schools in each country, covering more than 70 percent of the original sample of schools. in each school, we randomly selected one science and one math class offered at the sixth-grade level. similar to the timss video studies, the national samples are not statistically representative, but large enough to identify teaching patterns at the national level(stigler et al., 2000). what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 115 most schools in the sample were urban (63 percent), with 37 percent of the sample from rural areas. in classifying the sample based on type of school administration, 80 percent were public schools, 13 percent were private and secular, and 7 percent were private schools affiliated with a religious institution. overall, half of the teachers had university degrees, but the proportion of teachers with university degrees differed greatly by country. only onefifth of teachers in paraguay held university degrees. a greater percentage of teachers in the dominican republic and nuevo leon, 82 percent and 40 percent respectively, had university degrees or higher levels of education. not surprisingly, teachers who had a university degree worked in schools with higher serce achievement levels in both math and science. as expected, urban schools showed higher performance than rural schools; and private schools showed higher tests scores than public schools. modeled after the well-known 1995 and 1999 timss videotape studies of eighth-grade classrooms in australia, the czech republic, japan, hong kong, the netherlands, germany, and the united states, our video study filmed each teacher once (stigler, gonzales, kawanaka, knoll, & serrano, 1999). class lessons were recorded with two cameras, one focused on the teacher and the other on students. the lessons were analyzed using the timss video studies of 1995 and 1999 coding frameworks. the timss video 1995 study developed coding based on what the literature suggested were important components of quality instruction. the basic criterion considered in the initial coding was the opportunity to learn the content of the lesson. this concept included use of time, organization of the class; occurrence of outside interruption; the organization of interaction; activity segments; and management of content. the length of time devoted to each criterion was recorded and most criteria contained subcategories (stigler et al., 1999). the organization of the class was divided into four sub-categories: pre-lesson, activities, the lesson, and postlesson. the interaction criteria classified lesson time as classwork or seatwork. any time identified as “seatwork” was further categorized as individual, group work, or mixed. the activity segments were defined as setting-up, working on, sharing, or teacher talk-demonstration. math content was classified as tasks, situations, principles, properties, or definitions, teacher alternative solutions, and student generated methods. science content was coded based on the nature of the scientific topic, the type of science knowledge, the level of difficulty, and the modes of content development (roth et al., 2006). the class lesson was further coded to define the type of discourse, either public or private talk, during the lesson. coders used software called videograph to quantify the occurrence of different classroom activities as a percentage of the lesson´s time. a team of local pedagogical experts and subject matter experts coded classroom practices in 594 mathematics and science lessons covering a total of 504 classroom hours. they reviewed a total of 2,489 math problems, considering 210 variables related to math lessons and 192 related to science lessons. the problems were coded based on a framework that determined the procedural complexity, the type of method used to solve the problem, if a solution method was repeated. problems were identified as exercise or application, and as proof, verification, or derivation (vincent & stacey, 2008). using the videograph software and analysis by the pedagogical experts, we created a database that included 1,169 indicators. the video codification was complemented by 371 teacher and 296 principal questionnaires, providing information about school and classroom resources and personal characteristics, such as education and 116 global education review 1(3) training in teaching science and mathematics. the questionnaire data was used to identify national patterns and internal differences on teacher´s general profiles and availability of teaching resources. once the class was finished, the teachers were invited to watch their performance and answer questions in a video-recorded interview. these questions were related to lesson planning strategies; a self-assessment of their activities and the performance of the students; a discussion of alternative activities that could be implemented; the influence of existing resources in their decision making process; and if the presence of cameras and researchers in the classroom affected or disrupted the normal flow of the class lesson. some students were also asked if the teacher´s performance on the class was “typical” of her or him. all of the teachers considered the recorded class as representative of their teaching style, almost all interviewed students on this regard agreed. in almost two thirds of the recorded lessons in paraguay, the teachers used guarani in some segments of their classes, the native official language; spanish being the other official language. these segments were translated to spanish. however, no ethnographic analysis has been made on these lessons or segments yet. the results of the study are strictly explorative and should not be used to draw any reliable conclusions about individual teachers, given the limited observation of only one lesson recorded for each educator. filming may have encouraged teachers to perform at their very best or possibly it caused anxiety that may have affected instruction. however, the timss video studies demonstrated that systematic observation of what goes on in the classroom can help identify shared practices, routines, and discourse that are common to an education system (stigler et al, 1999). some practices positively contribute to a student’s foundation of knowledge, while other practices may not support learning and might even hamper it. the timss study observed eighth-grade classrooms; therefore, we cannot directly compare results from our study with that of the timss video studies. however, in both studies, results were based on the same non-grade specific indicators. therefore, the results allow for cross-country comparison of culturally-specific trends in teaching approaches. that is to say very specific differences in teaching practices were seen between japan, the highest performer on the timss examination, and the united states and germany within the 1995 timms video study. based on the conclusions from the study, we often abstractly compare our results to what was observed in high performing countries, especially to japan in math. no claim is made on the cultural relevance of the findings because the focus of the study was the contrasting patterns at the national level of the three participant sites in this study. results the results of the study identified important possible relationships between learning, and content and methodology. based on comparisons between the three countries and links made between results from the timss video studies, we conclude that the method through which content is presented has a strong relationship with learning and the development of certain critical thinking skills, and the type of content and complexity of the content will also affect how well students capture and absorb math and science knowledge. all results are summarized in table 2. what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 117 table 2 results of the video study dominican republic paraguay nuevo leon, mexico proportion of math instruction time spent on different types of mathematical thinking (%) applying concepts 57 59 67 practicing routine procedures 43 39 30 inventing new solutions 0 2 3 math lessons in which students and teachers present alternative solutions to math problems (%) no alternative solutions considered 94 94 82 students present alternative solutions 3 3 14 teachers present alternative solutions 3 3 4 proportion of science lessons that focused on development of connections versus acquiring facts, definitions, and algorithms (%) acquiring facts, definitions, and algorithms 96 97 69 making connections 4 3 31 proportion of science instruction time devoted to work in seats and practical activities (%) seat workwhole class 20 22 28 seat workindependent 32 46 28 practical activitieswhole class 44 26 40 practical activitiesindependent 4 6 4 proportion of math lesson time devoted to new and previous content (%) reviewing previous content 82 68 28 introducing new content 11 12 15 practicing new content 7 20 57 complexity of the math problems covered (%) low 89 76 94 moderate 9 21 5 high 2 3 1 proportion of science lessons with different levels content complexity as compared to the national curriculum (%) basic 82 91 83 basic and challenging 17 8 17 challenging 1 1 0 sources of content used during science lessons (%) teachers 71 64 54 textbooks 23 6 26 worksheets 4 26 7 other sources 2 4 13 source: authors’ construction science 118 global education review 1(3) the timss video studies used a wide variety of indicators to assess the level of inquiry used in science instruction. one indicator categorizes lessons according to how scientific content is developed: by encouraging students to make connections among ideas, experiences, patterns, and explanations; or by acquiring facts, definitions, and algorithms. in the classrooms we filmed, lessons focused on memorization of scientific concepts and learning the history of science rather than doing science. students engaged in practical activities in all three countries: the dominican republic (48 percent) and nuevo leon (44 percent), and paraguay (32 percent). however, student opportunities for hands-on learning were severely limited as the teacher performed demonstrations of almost all of the practical work in front of the entire class and students were seldom given time to work through procedures and develop an understanding of concepts. the few lessons that contained practical independent work were restricted to confirming findings already given to them by their teacher. students were asked to replicate an activity modeled by the teacher, or the teacher would ask the students to follow a procedure to arrive at an outcome that the teacher had previously introduced. rather than asking students (for example) to formulate predictions about the density and mass of different materials and to design experiments to test their predictions, the teacher might tell students that copper is denser than aluminum, and then have the students confirm that this is the case. two-thirds of the practical experiments in paraguay were classified as confirming content. only in 6 percent of the paraguayan lessons did students explore a research question independently. the situation was not much better in the dominican republic (7 percent) and only slightly better in the state of nuevo leon (11 percent). evidence suggests that students who are taught through memorization of formulas and taught the history of science instead of actually doing science have lower levels of learning. the high proportion of reliance on presenting facts and definitions and the low performance of the countries on the serce in science supports this evidence. connecting classroom lessons to real life situations that students may encounter has been shown to increase interest in science and improve learning. students understand the application of concepts when lessons are linked to their environment (bouillion & gomez, 2001). in 38 percent of paraguayan science lessons connections were made to the everyday lives of students by discussing the relationship between scientific concepts and everyday experiences, using everyday examples, or addressing reasons for studying science in lectures or in whole-class discussion. links between the science content and the lives of the student were made during fewer lessons in the dominican republic (30 percent) and the mexican state of nuevo leon (26 percent). in the in-depth interviews with the teachers, they often discussed the importance of linking the lesson content to everyday life. however, they had trouble converting this theory into practice as the actual time devoted to real-life issues was very limited: 2 percent in the dominican republic and paraguay, and 3 percent in nuevo leon. often teachers asked the students to make connections as a pre-lesson activity, but failed to refer back to the connection students suggested or present the content through the lens of the of student connections. it is questionable whether making connections had a significant effect considering the method was used quite infrequently and for very short periods of time. in the countries of the timss video study such links to the everyday lives of students were made in 74 percent of the lessons on average, using 13 percent of public speaking time. in the timss video studies, if lessons provided at least one opportunity for students to study science-related content regardless of the source, the lesson was identified as an what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 119 opportunity to learn science (stigler et al, 1999). in countries, included in the timss video study, 90 percent of lessons provided an opportunity to learn science content. the average number of lessons providing science content in the latin american countries was 44 percent. more than half of lessons lacked any type of science content during the time allocated for science instruction. instead, the focus was on procedures, without any explicit connection made to the intended content. procedures are an important component of science learning; however, ideally all material should be connected to a broader theme in order for students to conceptualize the purpose of the procedure within the science content. lessons were further assessed according to the level of complexity of the content. based on categories used within the timss 1999 video study, content was rated as basic or challenging. components of the lesson were identified as challenging if they were above the sixth-grade level as determined by national curriculum standards and goals. concepts rated as basic were defined to be those that were below the sixth-grade curriculum level. the complexity of science content observed in paraguay corresponded to sixth-grade curriculum standards. only 9 percent of observed science lessons included some content that was above grade level. in the dominican republic and nuevo leon, the proportion of lessons that included some challenging content was somewhat higher (17 percent). this is not surprising as curricula are often misaligned with national learning standards or not fully implemented to meet national standards (vegas & petrow, 2008). however, the lack of challenging activities in science is worrisome because curricula in latin america and the caribbean often do not meet international standards (valverde, 2009). therefore, it is unclear whether the portion of science lessons designated as challenging within the study would also be considered challenging when compared to international standards. the sources of content used are important, as they help determine how lessons are organized. if textbooks are available, they can help to structure lessons and remove pressure from the teacher to provide content. the use of many sources of content allows the teacher to act as a learning facilitator, as observed in japanese eighth-grade science lessons in the 1999 timss video study. in japan, the teacher was the source of content only 22 percent of the time. in contrast, in paraguay and the dominican republic, the primary sources of science content were the teacher (64 percent and 71 percent) and worksheets (26 percent and 4 percent). textbooks were used more often in classrooms in nuevo leon (26 percent) and the dominican republic (23 percent) as compared to paraguay, where textbooks were used in just 6 percent of science lessons. the lack of textbook use, especially in paraguay is not surprising. unlike nuevo leon, where nine out of ten students have their own science textbooks, there is a lack of access to textbooks in paraguay in both math and science (unesco-llece, 2008). little is known about the quality of textbooks and their impact on learning in the region. given that the teacher is the dominant source of content in paraguay and the dominican republic, it is distressing that the study observed significant gaps in the content knowledge of teachers. in 59 of the 100 paraguayan science classes observed, the teacher committed at least one error. similar rates of error were observed in the dominican republic and nuevo leon. conceptual errors, ranging from a statement that sunlight causes the earth to rotate, to the incorrect labeling of parts of plants and the human body, represented the most frequent type of error, particularly in the area of reproductive health. specific errors included misrepresentations of how diseases spread and the functioning of the reproductive system. some errors reflected gender stereotypes, as was the case when students in one class were taught that drug and alcohol use by males tends to produce female offspring. 120 global education review 1(3) other errors were categorized as either procedural (omitting steps or taking them in the wrong order when manipulating data or conducting experiments), or factual (attributing historic scientific discoveries to the wrong inventor). in more than 90 percent of cases, neither the students nor the teacher noticed the error, and in the few cases where the teacher seemed to catch the error, they were reluctant to correct it. equally as alarming, when students committed errors, teachers neither corrected them nor guided them to discover the error. this was the case in 47 percent of cases in paraguay, 50 percent of cases in the dominican republic, and 53 percent of cases in nuevo leon. math in the math lessons, teachers focused primarily on the presentation and repetition of math procedures. the remaining time was spent copying from the blackboard, doing drills and practice, and memorizing math concepts. little to no time was spent on considering new solutions. only 2 percent of the effective lesson time was used for activities that required critical thinking in paraguay, and no time was devoted to inventing new solutions in the dominican republic. in nuevo leon, 30 percent of the time was devoted to practicing routine procedures, 67 percent was allocated for applying concepts, but only 3 percent of instruction time was used for inventing new solutions. the observations indicate a virtually exclusive focus on the development of procedural understanding. this focus on procedural understanding is very different than what was observed in eighth-grade classrooms in high-achieving countries in the timss video studies. in japan, students only spent 15 percent of lesson time applying concepts and used a larger proportion of the time, 44 percent, to invent new solutions (stigler et al., 1999). not surprisingly, the proportion of math problems for which either the student or teacher presented an alternative solution was extremely low. development of alternative problemsolving methods is widely believed to be central to the development of conceptual math understanding (national council of teachers of mathematics [nctm], 2000; hiebert, carpenter, fennema, fuson, wearne, & murray, 1997). only in a limited number of the latin american classes that our team analyzed did students or teachers present alternative solutions. the teacher or the students discussed alternative solution methods in just 3 percent of math problems in paraguay. in classrooms in nuevo leon, the presentation of alternative solutions was more frequent; in 14 percent of lessons alternative solutions were presented by students and in 4 percent of lessons by the teacher, but those figures are still significantly low in comparison to other countries. in the timss video studies, teachers in japan frequently encouraged students to identify alternative solution methods to math problems (42 percent of the lessons and 17 percent of all math problems) (stigler et al., 1999). the lack of opportunities to invent new solutions during instruction and present alternative solutions for practice problems emphasizes the reliance on procedural understanding in math classes in latin america. students are not encouraged to expand their critical thinking skills. as was done in science, several indicators were created to define students’ opportunities to learn math content. based on trends seen within the timss studies, we were interested in evaluating the emphasis on new content and previously studied content. the timss 1995 video study found that eighth-grade classrooms in high-achieving countries, such as hong kong and japan, dedicated close to 80 percent of the instruction time to new content (stigler et al., 1999). lesson time was identified as introducing new content, practicing new content, or reviewing previous content. in paraguay and the dominican republic, a small portion of lesson time was allocated to the introduction or what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 121 practice of new content, 32 and 18 percent, respectively. in the dominican republic, very little time was used for practicing new concepts, only 7 percent. in contrast, students in nuevo leon spent the majority of math lesson time focusing on new content. introducing new content accounted for 15 percent of lesson time, while 57 percent of the time was allocated to practicing the new content through group work or individual work solving problems. students in nuevo leon spent only 15 percent of time in class working on content that they had looked at in previous lessons. another important indicator of content is the complexity of the practice problems assigned to students. the number of decisions students need to make and steps or sub-problems necessary to arrive at a solution, provides the criteria for the degree of complexity of the problem. problems are characterized as low, moderate, or high complexity based on the classification system contained in the 1999 timss video study. low-complexity math problems involve few decisions and do not contain any sub-problems. problems of moderate complexity are those that require the student to make more than four decisions with the possibility of either no sub-problem or one sub-problem (hiebert, 2003). problems that involve four or more decisions and two or more sub-problems are classified as high complexity. in all three countries, low complexity math problems predominated. low complexity problems accounted for 76 percent of the problems covered in paraguay. in the dominican republic and nuevo leon, the proportion of low-complexity math problems was even higher, 89 percent and 94 percent respectively. all countries lacked highcomplexity problems. only one percent of problems were defined as high-complexity and 5 percent were assessed as moderate-complexity in nuevo leon, the highest performer on the serce exam. in seven relatively highperforming countries included in the 1999 timss video study, 40 percent of problems were categorized as high complexity (hiebert, 2003). the complexity of the problems is important because if activities are too easy students will not have the opportunity to develop the higher-level critical thinking skills (colburn, 2000). however, if the problems are too difficult, students will not effectively learn the content. teachers need to balance the levels of complexity to ensure that students are given ample opportunity to learn the content presented and also to develop critical skills using the content. discussion this study shifts the conversation from teacher characteristics to what is going on inside latin american classrooms and how teachers approach math and science in their daily practice. the results of the study provide important insight into the strengths and weakness of the pedagogical approaches used in three latin american countries. a combination of drill, practice, and memorization continue to be the primary method of teaching. instructional approaches reflected traditional teaching methods which sought to provide a procedural understanding of content through the memorizations of facts and formulas. few teachers in the sample made a concerted effort to actively engage students in hands-on science activities that provided opportunities to cultivate important analytical and critical thinking skills. this is an issue that policy makers in the region will want to address as the literature suggests that instructional practices have a strong relationship with performance on educational assessments (stigler et al, 1999). in nuevo leon, teachers implemented inquiry-based instructional approaches on a more frequent basis and in a higher proportion of classrooms. these differences may account for some of the disparity in performance on assessments between nuevo leon, and the dominican republic and paraguay. students in 122 global education review 1(3) nuevo leon, mexico, performed better on the serce exam than students in either paraguay or the dominican republic. while the study indicated many similarities in teaching practices used in classrooms in paraguay, the dominican republic, and nuevo leon, it is important to highlight the specific differences. in the dominican republic and paraguay we observed a stronger focus on drill and memorization with limited opportunities to engage in activities that stimulated the development of important critical thinking skills of students when compared to nuevo leon. in nuevo leon, a greater proportion of lesson time was devoted to introducing and practicing new content. the role of the teacher in the classroom also indicated a major difference between common practices within the countries. in paraguay and the dominican republic, the teacher was the main source of content and knowledge. there was little room for students to acquire knowledge through inquiry or discovery. this was also true for students in nuevo leon, but to a lesser extent than in paraguay and the dominican republic. a lack of interactive and inquiry-based practices in the classroom was the main observation provided by the study about classes in paraguay and the dominican republic, and to a lesser degree in nuevo leon. the teacher in-depth interviews provide some insight as to why inquiry-based approaches are not being implemented. observations provided by the teachers demonstrate that teachers vaguely understand the importance of an interactive approach to math and science instruction. several teachers noted that students are more excited and motivated when the teachers use games or experiments in lessons; however, they also shared certain obstacles to incorporating an inquiry-based approach into their classroom instruction practices. in science classes, students spent the majority of the class time memorizing facts and learning the history of science rather than performing scientific experiments. even when students were given the opportunity to participate in interactive activities, the emphasis was placed on the procedure. either the teacher performed the experiment and asked children to observe the result, or students were asked to perform a procedure to confirm an outcome that the teacher had already described. students were not expected to think critically about the problem and formulate a hypothesis. several teachers in paraguay cited a lack of science materials as the reason they did not perform more experiments in science classes. however, the initial results of an ongoing experimental pilot in argentina –contrasting two models of inquiry-based instruction– reveal that students who use simple classroom-based science kits learn as much as students who have access to more-sophisticated science materials and equipment (author, cabrol, & ibarran, 2009), thus demonstrating that hands-on science activities are not dependent upon expensive materials and advanced science labs. basic materials and equipment may be just as effective in teaching content as more expensive tools. likewise in math classes, students were expected to memorize formulas and procedures, with little innovation in how concepts were presented to students. one teacher noted that she preferred to walk the entire class through several math examples step-by-step in order to memorize the formula. by completing several examples as a class, students would recognize the concept as familiar when doing homework problems. the classroom practices observed stands in sharp contrast with the literature on good instructional methods for learning mathematical and scientific reasoning and problem solving (colburn, 2000; anderson, 2002; furtak, et al., 2012; andrews, 2013 ). some teachers emphasized that presenting the content through a traditional approach was the most effective method for student learning and not by providing extra time for activities. what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 123 other teachers stated that copying information was of the utmost importance because students needed notes to study for exams and, therefore, they did not attempt the activity. several teachers expressed that time limitations were a major constraint in planning for science experiments and more interactive lessons. a teacher in the dominican republic discussed his inability to be flexible with time explaining that he only had forty-five minutes with the students before the end of the period and there is no allowance for experiments to go beyond the allotted class time. other teachers adapted lessons plans to meet time constraints, but noted that doing so can potentially hamper the learning process. they stated that teachers need to provide students with ample time to digest information, work through any confusion, and allow students to make connections with the content. one teacher noted that she often performed the calculations for students when her objective was to teach a formula because students took too much time in completing sub-problems, specifically multiplication. this practice can be detrimental to learning as evidenced by students’ difficulty in completing problems on their own. the teacher remarked that students were unable to complete practice problems because they were confused by the added steps within the sub-problems, or they performed the calculations incorrectly and could not arrive at the correct answer. the literature indicates that providing answers to the students does not help them understand the concepts or give them the support to solve problems independently. for example, a recent meta-analysis of inquiry-based teaching found that when students are able to answer questions or are guided to a solution by the teachers, it helps to build their selfconfidence and interest in math and science (furtak et al., 2012). definitions of scientific literacy often include the ability to identify and weigh alternative explanations of events (american association of the advancement of science, 1993). it is therefore important to allow students to consider alternative solutions. developing alternative solutions encourages students to think critically about the content and other knowledge they possess to find a solution to the problem. in one classroom, a student suggested a different method for solving a math problem. initially, the teacher reprimanded the student for not following the formula presented and for not working diligently with her group. after checking the work, the teacher noted that the answer was correct, but instructed the student to focus on the group’s work and present the method the group used that followed the intended formula. opposing the presentation of the alternative solution restricted an opportunity to develop critical thinking skills and could have damaged the student’s interest in math. the in-depth interviews also illustrated that while teachers are aware that students enjoy practical activities, teachers may not understand what type of practical activities promote learning. in multiple classrooms, drawing was used as the main activity to reinforce the concept taught during the class. in a math class in the dominican republic, students were to draw portions of fruit that represented the fraction they were assigned. within a science lesson, students were instructed to draw the endangered species as projected from a slide in a classroom in nuevo leon. the teacher defended the activity because it encouraged students to pay attention and look at the slides the teacher presented. students seemed engaged in both activities; however, it is unknown whether the drawing activities helped the children to learn the intended content. the quality of instruction also extends to classroom discourse. many teachers begin lessons with a class discussion about the content, possibly asking the children to connect the topic to their everyday lives. although it is positive that teachers are encouraging this type of interaction, the quality of discourse is important for learning. asking multiple questions does not mean the teacher is 124 global education review 1(3) providing interactive feedback (smith & higgins, 2006), suggesting that questions should invite students to elaborate and discuss complete ideas. these issues can be targeted through comprehensive training and practice of an inquiry-based approach. we found teachers were the main providers of math and science content. however, as demonstrated within the study, there are clear gaps in the knowledge of teachers. research about the possible long-term negative effects of content errors during classroom instruction is limited, but we can assume it could have a detrimental effect on students’ future learning. the use of textbooks as the primary source of content could ameliorate the issue of teacher error. studies show that the use of textbooks can have a large impact on the impact of student learning(vegas & petrow, 2008). especially in latin america, the quality of the textbooks provided is still relatively unknown. many education systems in the region have undergone important reforms in the past two decades, but the textbooks provided to students may not reflect the changes made (vegas & petrow, 2008). therefore, further research is necessary to establish that textbooks are high-quality; otherwise, they may not be any better than the content teachers provide. the purpose of our study was to explore what is actually going on inside classrooms and to provide insight into how certain pedagogical approaches are associated with learning outcomes. we noticed specific differences in teaching practices in different countries that may have affected student performance on regional assessments. it is our hope that our findings will stimulate dialogue and inspire educators and policymakers to design reforms and programs that improve students’ opportunities to learn math and science. notes 1. support for this research was provided by the inter-american development bank. 2. the opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the 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(2009). estandardes y evaluacion. in s. schwartzaman, & c. cox (eds.), polticas, educativas y cohesion social en america latina. santiago, chile: coleccion cieplan. vegas, e., & petrow, j. (2008). raising student learning in latin america. washington, dc: the world bank. vincent, j., & stacey, k. (2008). do mathematics textbooks cultivate shallow teaching? applying the timss video study criteria to australian eight-grade mathematics textbooks. mathematics education research journal, 20(1), 82-107. zacharos, k. (2006). prevailing education practices for area measurement and students' failures in measuring areas. journal of mathematical behaviour, 25, 22439. about the author(s) emma naslund-hadley is lead education specialist at the inter-american development bank. she manages the bank’s efforts to improve mathematics and natural science education in latin america and the caribbean. armando loera varela is director of huerista educativa consulting group. his areas of interest include teacher performance and school improvement policies. katelyn hepworth is a research and evaluation officer at the bernard van leer foundation. her interests include initial and primary education in latin america http://timss.bc.edu/timss2007/idb_ug.html 126 global education review 1(3) appendices open ended teacher interview guide preparation of lesson. what was the purpose of your lesson? please describe how you prepared the lesson. did you prepare it differently than you usually do? if you used a lesson plan, would you please share it? how much did the lesson you prepared differ from the lesson you delivered? why do you think that there was a difference (or lack thereof)? delivery of lesson. what's your own reaction to your delivery of the lesson? what's your reaction to the performance of your students? would you please explain the logic behind the lesson: why did you initiate it the way you did? why did you choose to organize the students the way you did? how did you select which students to address? why did you choose to conclude the lesson in the way you did? would you say that this was a typical lesson? teaching environment. how would you say that the classroom environment facilitated or hampered the delivery of your lesson: the type and state of furniture? the noise level? the lighting? availability of materials and equipment? general school characteristics? the school community? student activities. what lesson activity do you consider most interesting for the students? what activity do you think was least interesting? what do you think that the students learnt from your lesson? do you consider that you accomplished the objective of your lesson? general self-appraisal of the lesson. what does a great math/science lesson look like? how would you classify your performance during the lesson? how much do you consider that the presence of cameras influenced your delivery of the lesson? seeing the video, is there anything that you wish you would have done differently during the lesson? questionnaire sixth-grade teachers school: school code: 1. age 2. highest education level attained. mark only one: primary education; secondary education; technical non university; pedagogical non university; university degree; graduate studies; other 3. how many years of teaching experience do you have? 4. how many years have you taught sixth grade? 5. since you started teaching, how many science teacher training courses have you taken on how to teach science? 6. since you started teaching, how many math teacher training courses have you taken? 7. on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being extremely easy and 10 being extremely difficult) how would you rate the difficulty of teaching sixth grade science? what goes on inside latin american math and science classrooms 127 8. on a scale from 1 to 10 (1 being extremely easy and 10 being extremely difficult) how would you rate the difficulty of teaching sixth grade math? 9. did you partake in the 2006 serce study? 10. how many students are there in your sixth grade classroom? 11. which of the following materials are available in your classroom and with what frequency are they used by your sixth grade students in mathematics? a. mathematics textbooks. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson b. mathematics workbooks. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson c. counting frame. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson d. logic blocks. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson e. cuisenaire rods. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson f. multi-base materials. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson g. tangram. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson h. calculator. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson i. geo-board with rubber bands. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson j. mathematical manipulatives. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson 12. which of the following materials are available in your classroom and with what frequency are they used by your sixth grade students in science? k. science textbooks. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson l. mathematic workbooks. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson m. books about science experiments. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson n. encyclopedias. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson o. atlas. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson p. magazines. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson q. terrestrial globe. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson r. prints and/or maps. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson s. magnifiers and/or scales. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson t. microscope. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson u. science manipulatives. availability: yes/no frequency of use: never/some lessons/most lessons/every lesson 13. do you have access to a computer to teach sixth-grade? yes/no how many? 14. do you have access to a science lab to teach sixth-grade? yes/no hours of weekly use? 128 global education review 1(3) 14 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dudley-marling, curt & burns, mary bridget (2014). two perspectives on inclusion in the united states. global education review, 1 (1). 14-31 two perspectives on inclusion in the united states curt dudley-marling boston college mary bridget burns boston college abstract the history of schooling for students with disabilities in the united states is marked by exclusion and, until the passage of the education for all children act in the 1970s, a substantial number of students with disabilities were denied free public education and many more were poorly served by public schools. the requirement that all children be educated in the “least restrictive environment” gradually allowed many students with disabilities to be educated alongside their peers without disabilities and today a majority of students with disabilities spend more than 80% of their school days in regular classroom settings. still, the meaning of inclusion is bitterly disputed, fueled in large part by two contrasting views of disability. this paper discusses these two views – a deficit stance and a social constructivist perspective – and the effects of these views on the meaning of inclusion, the purpose of inclusion, and how inclusive education is achieved. keywords inclusion, equity, deficit perspective on inclusion, social constructivist stance on inclusion introduction as we began writing this paper, the us department of education issued a clarification regarding the legal obligations of school districts to provide access to sports for students with disabilities. according to the new guidelines, school districts are “required to provide a qualified student with a disability an opportunity to benefit from the school district’s program equal to that of students without disabilities” (in pilon, 2013, p. d5). this ruling has been hailed by some as a significant moment in the movement to include students with disabilities into the normal life of us schools (pilon, 2013). however, the history of education for students with disabilities in the united states has, until relatively recently, been marked by exclusion, not inclusion. prior to the enactment of the landmark education for all children act (also known as public law 94-142), only one in five students with disabilities in the us were educated in public schools. moreover, many states had laws on their books that explicitly excluded many students with disabilities from public schooling including children who had ______________________________ corresponding author: curt dudley-marling, boston college lynch school of education, campion hall,140 commonwealth ave., chestnut hill, ma 02467 email: dudleyma@bc.edu mailto:dudleyma@bc.edu two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 15 been labeled deaf, blind, emotionally disturbed, education programs, 2007). other states “permitted” public school programs for certain groups of students with disabilities but did not require it. before the implementation of public law 94-142, new york state, for example, permitted school districts to provide an education to students with iqs below 50 (harrison, 1958). in the early 1970s, over one million children with disabilities in the us were completely excluded from public education and another 3.5 million were not receiving appropriate services (martin, martin, & terman, 1996). this situation changed with the passage of pl 94-142 which mandated that all students with disabilities be provided with “a free and appropriate education in the least restrictive environment” (osgood, 2005, p. 105). today nearly all students with disabilities spend at least part of their day being educated alongside children without disabilities (31st annual report to congress on the implementation of the individuals with disabilities education act, 2009). for some educators this represents a triumph of inclusive policies. others view the increased presence of students with disabilities in regular educational settings merely as a step toward truly inclusive schools (allen, 2006). these positions reflect fundamental differences in the meaning of inclusion and the means for achieving inclusive schools. fleshing out the meaning of inclusion in an american context is the aim of this paper. we begin by offering a brief history of inclusion in the united states drawing heavily on robert osgood’s (2005) historical review of inclusion in the us. we then turn our attention to explicating two positions on inclusion that dominate discussions of inclusion in the united states. the first position we discuss is the deficit stance (sometimes referred to as the medical model) on disabilities that situates disabilities in the minds and bodies of students. we then consider the goals and rationale for inclusion that derive from this perspective as well as the means for achieving inclusion within a deficit framework. next we take up a social constructivist view of disabilities that situates disabilities in the complex interaction between naturally occurring human differences and the sociocultural contexts of schooling. we then discuss the goals and rationale for inclusion that emerge from a social constructivist framework and how inclusion is achieved from this perspective. we give more space to the social constructivist perspective because it may be less familiar to many readers and because we find this stance more persuasive ourselves. history of inclusion in the united states the history of special education is typically understood in terms of the inexorable movement toward the integration of students with disabilities into regular education settings (ainscow, 1999). yet, the history of special education in the us has been marked mainly by segregation and exclusion. in his history of inclusion in the united states, robert osgood (2005) observed that, until relatively recently, a significant proportion of students with disabilities in the us, especially students with intellectual disabilities, were considered uneducable. these students were completely excluded from public schooling. even those students with disabilities who were considered to be “educable” were typically segregated within schools since it was presumed that these students had unique educational needs requiring the services of specially trained professionals. historically educators resisted the integration of “exceptional” children who, because they did not fit into the rigid structures of american schooling, “overtaxed the efficient operation of schools” (p. 24). the 16 global education review 1(1) assumption was that the inclusion of students into regular educational settings would demand so much attention from teachers as to have a detrimental effect on the education of students without disabilities. osgood cites instances of school superintendents who concluded that it was worth the higher costs of educating students with intellectual disabilities in segregated schools or classrooms given the negative effect their presence would have on the learning of “normal” children. as early as the late 19th century there were, however, a few exceptions to the pattern of segregation and exclusion of students with disabilities. osgood cites, for example, the cases of batavia, new york and newton, massachusetts where assistant or unassigned teachers provided support for students with disabilities within regular classrooms. still, osgood emphasizes that the dominant trend in well into the 20th century was the removal of students with disabilities from the regular classroom. in many cases, students with disabilities continued to be excluded from public schooling altogether although some states did pass enabling legislation during this time that permitted, but did not require, school districts to educate certain categories of students with disabilities within public schools. despite the continuing pattern of exclusion and segregation of students with disabilities there were occasional calls that these students have at least social contact with children without disabilities. some went even further. osgood (2005) quotes principal and illinois council of exceptional children member edward stullken who wrote in 1950s, “in general, it is best not to segregate any individual by placement in a special group, if he may receive as good or better training in a normal group of pupils” (p. 45). others began to question the efficacy of special class placement in general. in his classic article, “special education for the mildly retarded – is much of it justifiable?” lloyd dunn (1968) argued that “special education in its present form is obsolete and unjustifiable from the point of view of the pupils so placed” (dunn, 1968, p. 6). dunn was particularly concerned about the overrepresentation of minority students in special education classes, a problem that persists in the us (see harry & klingner, 2005). parental activism in the 1960s, along with court challenges to the practice of denying many children with disabilities a free public education, led to a rapid expansion of special education within public schools. for example, in pennsylvania association for retarded children v. commonwealth of pennsylvania (1971) a group of parents of whose children had been identified as mentally retarded successfully challenged a state law that absolved school districts of responsibility for educating students deemed to be “uneducable” or “untrainable” (osgood, 2005, p. 104). the result of the case was that the state of pennsylvania acknowledged its responsibility to provide all students with a free, appropriate education. parents in the district of columbia also challenged the exclusion of students with severe disabilities from public schooling resulting in a decision that the district of columbia schools had to provide a free, appropriate education to all students regardless of the severity of their disabilities (osgood, 2005). the activism 1960s and 1970s on behalf of children with disabilities – including the normalization and deinstitutionalization movements – culminated in the landmark education for all children act (public law 94-142) passed by the us congress in 1975. public law 94-142, eventually renewed as the individuals with disabilities education act (idea), guaranteed a free education for all students with disabilities. pl 94-142 also required school districts to provide students with disabilities with individualized education two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 17 programs (iep) to insure that these students received an education program appropriate to their particular needs. idea goes further by specifying that students with disabilities be educated in the least restrictive environment (lre). to the maximum extent appropriate, children with disabilities, including children in public or private institutions or other care facilities, are educated with children who are not disabled, and special classes, separate schooling, or other removal of children with disabilities from the regular educational environment occurs only when the nature or severity of the disability of a child is such that education in regular classes with the use of supplementary aids and services cannot be achieved satisfactorily. (quoted in beratan, 2006) still, while many of children with disabilities moved into public schools they often remained segregated in special education classes (osgood, 2005). osgood points to the emergence of the disability rights movement in the 1970s and 1980s in the increasing demand for inclusive placements as a matter of civil rights. the mid-1980s and early 1990s were also marked by the emergence of the regular education initiative (rei) that called for ending the separate special education system and, instead, “turn[ing] the spotlight to increasing the capabilities of the regular school environment, the mainstream, to meet the needs of all students” (stainback & stainback, 1984, p. 110). part of the problem according to advocates of the rei was the presumption that special education held the expertise for educating students with disabilities which often led regular educators to abdicate any responsibility for teaching students with disabilities (see collection of essays in kerzner & gartner, 1989 for an overview of the regular education initiative). michalko (2008) observes that, despite the intention of pl 94-142 that all students with disabilities be educated in the least restrictive environment, since the passage of the education for all children act there has been an “unfettered growth of overwhelmingly segregated arrangements” (p. 2133). still, the most recent data indicate that the vast majority of students with disabilities in the us ages 6-21 spend at least part of their educational day in regular education settings. as of 2008, over 57% of students with disabilities spent at least 80% of their school day inside regular classrooms while just over 5% were completely excluded from regular school placements (31st annual report to congress on the implementation of the individuals with disabilities eduation act, 2009). in preschool settings nearly one-third of students with disabilities are included in “regular” early childhood settings as their primary placement and nearly the same percentage participate in segregated settings with another 15% spending some time in both regular and special education settings (odom, buysse, & soukakou, 2011). of course, these data say nothing about the quality of these placements in pre-school and k-12 settings. one serious threat to the trend toward inclusion of students with disabilities in regular education settings may be found in the charter school movement. in a review of the effects of free-market schooling on students with disabilities, dudley-marling and baker (2012) report that the available evidence indicates that students with disabilities, especially students with more severe disabilities, are significantly underserved by charter schools. moreover, many charters enroll few, if any, students with disabilities. dudley-marling and baker conclude that, in the context of free-market schooling with the emphasis on test scores and costs, students 18 global education review 1(1) with disabilities may have less value than students who raise test scores and cost less to educate. charters, vouchers systems, and other free market initiatives represent a serious long-term threat to inclusive practices. school choice, in the name of the free market, “empowers each group to opt out of engaging with the others. exclusivity is not a by-product of school choice, but a primary goal (valle, connor, broderick, bejoian, & baglieri, 2011, p. 2291). despite these worries about the future impact of market-based schooling practices, overall, the evidence seems to indicate remarkable progress toward inclusion since the enactment of pl-142. in less than 40 years, us schools have gone from a time when many children with disabilities were completely excluded from public education to the current situation in which all students with disabilities receive a free, appropriate public education and most spend a significant portion of their school day in classrooms alongside peers without disabilities. however, as we argue below, the significance you attach to these developments depends on how you define disability (i.e., where disabilities reside) and your goals for inclusion. in the following section we discuss the meaning and goals for inclusion from the perspective of the deficit (or medical) model that has long dominated special education. a deficit perspective on inclusion special education is undergirded by assumptions of normality – and abnormality. specifically, it is widely assumed that human traits and abilities tend to cluster around a mean, that is, the norm(al). some people are very tall, for example, and others are very short, but most people tend toward “average.” in much the same way it is assumed that a relatively small proportion of people are highly intelligent and roughly the same proportion of people possess low intelligence with most people closer to average intelligence. other human traits and abilities (e.g., vision, hearing, physical prowess, the ability to do math, read, write, etc.) are assumed to distribute in a similar fashion1. when people differ sufficiently from the norm on these various traits and abilities (generally two standard deviations above or below the mean) they are considered “exceptional” (or abnormal). the focus of special education is generally on those students situated on the lower reaches of the normal curve, students who are presumed deficient in one or more skills or abilities necessary for success in school and, often, the world outside of school. these children have disabilities. this deficit gaze situates school failure in the minds and bodies of students who are presumed to be deficient in skills and abilities associated with school success. as miller (1993) puts it, “the philosophy of deficiency takes the view that those whose performance deviates from the majority lack some critical attribute, ability, or potential” (miller, 1993, p. 59). students with learning disabilities, for instance, are viewed as deficient in particular skills underlying success in reading, math, writing and other school subjects. moreover, it is assumed that these deficiencies are neurological in origin, literally in the heads of students (hammill, leigh, mcnutt, & larsen, 1981). similarly, from a deficit perspective intellectual disabilities are defined as cognitive deficits and conditions like autism are understood in terms of social and linguistic deficiencies. even students with physical and sensory impairments are defined in terms of lacking the visual, auditory, or motor capacities possessed by “normal” children. from a deficit perspective, the overarching goal of special education is to provide students with the skills needed to function normally in a normal environment2 – at least as far as possible. there are three two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 19 complementary approaches special educators typically employ to achieve this goal. one approach is to identify and then remediate deficiencies in student learning. a typical response to a reading disability, for example, is to identify the specific reading skills in which students are deficient and then remediate these deficits through the application of appropriate reading methods (bartolome, 1994). a second approach is compensatory skill training in which students are taught strategies for overcoming – or compensating for – their deficiencies. for example, a student with a severe reading disability might be taught alternative strategies for gathering information. a third approach seeks to assist students with disabilities by making environmental and curricular accommodations. a student with a reading disability, for instance, may be given more time on tests or have certain materials read to them. remedial teaching, compensatory skills training, and the provision of accommodations offer different, but complementary, means for supporting students with disabilities so that they can achieve a measure of success in and out of school. however, in the context of deficit thinking, these approaches share the assumption that the problem(s) reside in the student, that is, it is part of the student’s makeup and strategies must be brought to bear to overcome students’ innate deficiencies. it is further assumed that it takes specially trained professional to address the uncommon needs of students with disabilities – the primary rationale for special education. these assumptions about the nature of students with disabilities that emerge from a deficit stance inform a particular position on inclusion including what inclusion means, the rationale for including students with disabilities in regular classrooms, and the means for achieving inclusion. we take up these topics in the following sections. the meaning of inclusion from a traditional (deficit) special education perspective, the meaning of inclusion follows the legal requirement that students with disabilities be educated in the “least restrictive environment” (lre). the assumption is that the regular classroom is the lre for every child but not necessarily the most appropriate placement for all children (hyatt & filler, 2011). the regular classroom is the appropriate placement for students with disabilities if they are able to function in the regular classroom without significantly altering the regular education curriculum or student expectations (scanlon & baker, 2012). if students are not able learn the regular curriculum with supports, then their performance in class is taken as evidence that the regular classroom is not the appropriate placement for them (see ferri, 2012). following the principle that the regular classroom is not always the most appropriate setting for all students with disabilities all of the time, in many parts of the us inclusion is “procedurally defined as a student with an identified disability, spending greater than 80% of his or her school day in a general education classroom in proximity to nondisabled peers” (baglieri et al., 2011, pp. 2125-2126). from a deficit perspective, inclusion is linked to a service delivery model including the technical implementation of a set of research-based practices (baglieri et al., 2011; ferguson & nusbaum, 2012). as liasidou (2010) describes it, “the focus is on enabling disabled students to ‘overcome’ barriers to learning and participation by devising ‘specialist’ educational measures and interventions . . . intended to respond to students’ right to education” (p. 171). 20 global education review 1(1) the rationale for inclusion/exclusion the principle of educating students in the least restrictive environment is about exclusion – students for whom the regular classroom is not the appropriate placement – as much as it is about inclusion. therefore, the rationale for the lre model tends to focus on justifying the claim that it is in the best interest of children with and without disabilities – as well as regular classroom teachers – that many children with disabilities need to be excluded from regular classroom setting for at least some of the time and that some children with disabilities be excluded from the regular classroom entirely. the focus on the inappropriateness of the regular education setting for at least some children with disabilities is, in part, a response to those who are seen as arguing for the full inclusion in the regular classroom of all students with disabilities, including students with severe disabilities (see, for example, anastasiou & kauffman, 2011). generally, the argument for the claim that the regular classroom is not always the most appropriate settings for students with disabilities focuses on the unique needs of students and the inadequacies of the regular classroom environment. students with disabilities, it is argued, require the support of specially trained teachers who possess specialized knowledge that enables them to provide appropriate instruction geared to the particular needs of individual students (anastasiou & kauffman, 2011; kilanowskipress, foote & rinaldo, 2010). regular classroom teachers, on the other hand, are assumed to lack the specialized knowledge and training necessary to meet the needs of students with disabilities. even in cases where teachers possess the necessary training, large class sizes and inflexible curricula make it difficult for regular classroom teachers to accommodate the unique needs of students with disabilities (kilanowski-press, foote & rinaldo, 2010). it is also argued that the inclusion of students with disabilities in regular classrooms, by demanding disproportionate attention from teachers, will negatively affect the education of students without disabilities (grider, 1995). in general, advocates of educating students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment (which is often not the regular classroom) argue that what matters most is the quality of instruction provided for students with disabilities, not where this instruction is provided (e.g., fuchs & fuchs, 1994). responding to critics of lre who argue that exclusion of any child is inherently unjust (see below) supporters of lre make the point that the provision of appropriate instruction in whatever environment is best for students with and without disabilities is fair and just. gallagher (1994) asserts that fairness "does not consist of educating all children in the same place at the same time [and with the same curriculum] but in ensuring that the student has basic needs met and is traveling toward a well-thought-out career and a satisfying life style" (p.528). from this perspective, seeking inclusion at the perceived expense of effective instruction by thrusting students into environments for which they are unprepared – and which are unprepared for them – is neither fair nor just (anastasiou & kauffman, 2011). implementing inclusion from a deficit perspective for those taking a deficit stance on disabilities inclusion focuses on best instructional practices in the least restrictive environment which typically means at least some time spent outside the regular classroom. this process includes the diagnosis of children’s learning problems (i.e., disabilities) in order to determine the most appropriate learning environment along a continuum of services ranging from totally two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 21 separate schools and classrooms at one end of the continuum to in-class support at the other end (hyatt & filler, 2011). response-tointervention (rti), for example, provides several “tiers” of support for students with disabilities based on how students respond to various instructional interventions (see ferri, 2012). the diagnosis and evaluation process also enables special education professionals to select the most effective instructional strategies to remediate students’ deficits based on the assessed needs of individual students with disabilities. in this framing, students’ progress is marked by their movement along a continuum of services. this model also offers a role for parents who are expected to be included in the creation of individual education plans (iep) that are intended to insure that students’ placement and instruction is appropriate to their individual needs (narian, 2011). in general, the lre approach to inclusion, underpinned by deficit thinking, emphasizes technical solutions to the problem of disabilities. this typically includes specialized instruction tailored to the needs of students with disabilities with some attention to improving student behavior (caustontheoharis, theoharis, orsati, & cosier, 2011); in-class modifications of methods and materials (murphy, 1996; scanlon & baker, 2012) including the creation of distraction-free environments (causton-theoharis, et al., 2011); training in special education for regular classroom teachers (osgood, 2005); and, coteaching (regular and special education teachers (scanlon & baker, 2012). universal design for learning is increasingly used to allow students with disabilities to more easily access the regular class curriculum without reducing the demands of the curriculum (hunt & andreasen, 2011) while helping students develop communication skills in a “natural” manner (hart & whalon, 2011). supporting students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment often includes an emphasis on students’ emotional development as well as academics, helping students learn how to form friendships with their peers, for example, as they are often “deficient” in social skills (narian, 2011). devore, miolo, and hader (2011) provide an illustrative example of a typical deficit-based inclusion process in their case study of one preschool child’s experience with individual education plans (ieps) and least restrictive environments. the special education teacher, the early childhood teacher, specialists, and consultants came together with the little boy’s mother to design an iep that would enable him to make friends and acquire some of the skills of a typical preschool curriculum, skills in which he was thought to be deficient. the researchers emphasized the need for ‘buy in’ from all the parties involved, as well as the need to trust each other’s expertise, including that of the mother. the researchers found that this process was most effective when four key steps were followed. first, the group needed to build relationships with each other as they determined the roles and responsibilities of each member of the iep team. second, the team needed data in order to assess the boy’s current abilities, which they gathered from the preschool as well as his family. third, building upon his current abilities, the team needed to establish functional goals and strategies to mark the boy’s progress. and finally, the team needed to apply these strategies as they monitored his progress. throughout the process, the team wanted to design concrete, specific, almost prescriptive recommendations for the boy’s cognitive and emotional development (devore et al, 2011). this young boy received an education designed to directly address his perceived deficiencies (or disabilities). his education in his inclusive setting introduced him into the community in a gradual fashion by supporting his skills in the least restrictive 22 global education review 1(1) setting; designing, implementing and adjusting a specialized curriculum; and, measuring improvements in his behavior over time. success was measured in small victories, such as when the boy was able to interact with his classmates and neighborhood children, a goal his mother in particular wanted to see for her son. the emphasis on technical solutions to disabilities and the emphasis on “best practices” as determined by scientificallybased research (see, for example, anastasiou & kauffman, 2011) contrasts sharply with the social constructivist stance on inclusion which stresses structural reform over the individual remediation. a social constructivist stance on inclusion theory and research in disciplines such as cultural psychology (e.g., cole, 1996; gergen, 1990), sociolinguistics (e.g., gee, 1996), feminist studies (e.g., heilbrun, 1988), and anthropology (e.g., geertz, 1979; mcdermott, 1993) contradict the common-sense idea that learning resides “in the heads” of students (luke & freebody, 1997). these various disciplinary perspectives indicate that learning does not reside in the minds of autonomous individuals as much as it dwells in activities and cultural practices situated in the context of human relations and institutions (gergen, 1990). lynda miller (1993) puts it this way: “the traditional concept of self [as autonomous individual] has been challenged by a group of scholars who believe that the self resides not only inside the person, but also in the relationships, actions, artifacts, and objects surrounding her” (p. 63). this notion of a “distributed self” locates learning in the “people, procedures, practices, events, and structures participating in and constituting the process we call ‘education’” (miller, 1993, p. 64). if learning resides outside people’s heads, that is, in “people, procedures, practices, events, and structures,” so must learning problems. gergen (1990) offers the following analysis of learning failure: by and large we may view the common practice of holding single individuals responsible for achievements or deficits in human understanding as an exercise in practical rhetoric. in the same way that it is inappropriate to allocate depth of insight to single scientists, authors, philosophers, or statesmen, it is also problematic to discredit failing students . . . for their failure in understanding. . . . individuals are constituents of a complex array of relationships, and it is inappropriate from the present standpoint to disembed their actions from the relational sequence of which they are a part. (p. 587) as mcdermott (1993) explains it, no one can be disabled on their own. it takes a community of people doing just the right things in the right time and place for a student to be identified as disabled. consider the following analogy to football inspired by mehan (1993). crossing the goal line counts as a touchdown only in the context of an activity recognized as football requiring a group of people performing actions conventionally associated with football (e.g., lining up, running plays), the presence of particular props (at a minimum an object designated as a “football”), something that can be recognized as a playing field (a field but not a living room), and an agreed upon set of rules (e.g., the location of the goal line that must be crossed for it to count as a touchdown). if one of us casually crosses the goal line while taking a shortcut through the football stadium on the boston college campus, for example, this will two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 23 not count as a touchdown. it takes a group of people performing just the rights actions in the right time and place to perform the social practice of football. to be disabled also requires doing the right things at the right time and place including the presence of people authorized to adjudicate the performance of schooling. the behaviors associated with a learning disability, for instance, will only count as a learning disability if performed in the context of formal schooling in the presence of particular school officials (a teacher or school psychologist but not the janitor or school secretary). without the application of the institutional machinery of schooling, educational disabilities do not exist (mehan, 1993). it is in this sense that disability is a social construction. this does not mean, however, that human differences do not exist (see anastasiou & kauffman, 2011 for a critical take on social constructivist models of disability). clearly, deafness, blindness, physical impairments, and intellectual and learning disabilities represent observable human differences. educators working from a social constructivist perspective on disabilities do not deny the existence of these differences. what they argue, however, is that these differences represent normal human variation, not evidence of disorders or deficiencies (miller, 1993) and, for these naturally occurring human differences to count as disabilities, certain conditions must obtain. for instance, in the 18th century there was a high prevalence of deaf persons on martha’s vineyard but, because sign language was widely used by both deaf and hearing individuals, deafness was neither salient nor disabling. it took the influx of outsiders who could not sign to disable the deaf on martha’s vineyard (mcdermott & varenne, 1995). similarly, it takes the presence of certain physical barriers to make various physical impairments disabled. and, in much the same way, it takes the institution of schooling to make a learning disability (mcdermott & varenne, 1995). it is also not the case that a social constructivist stance denies the reality of categories of disability as some have suggested (see anastasiou & kauffman, 2011). human beings experience their worlds as social and cultural beings for whom socially constructed identities are quite real. however, as we argue below, alternative constructions of social reality can make various human differences more or less salient. social constructivists share with educators taking a deficit perspective a desire that students with disabilities succeed in school. however, a social constructivist perspective leads to a very different approach for supporting students with disabilities. social constructivists explicitly reject deficit thinking that continues to dominate special education and discussions of inclusion. rather than focusing on deficits to be remediated or compensated for, social constructivists begin with a presumption of competence (biklen, 2005). this is a philosophy of abundance that in contrast to the philosophy of deficiency, is based on capability and competence. it presumes an optimistic explanation for human thinking, learning, and ability. this abundance perspective assumes that each person, regardless of age, gender, economic circumstance, or geographic location, is constantly in the process of constructing meanings based on her or his own life experiences. (miller, 1993, p. 57) the belief that all children, regardless of their differences, are smart, competent learners leads to a different approach to inclusion for students with disabilities. instead of focusing on low-level skills and researchbased instruction aimed at remediating 24 global education review 1(1) students’ deficits, a social constructivist stance seeks to challenge all students with the sort of rich, engaging common in classrooms serving the most academically successful students. the optimum learning environment (ole) project, for example, brought rich, engaging curriculum typically found in classes for gifted students to inner-city, ell special education classrooms with great success (ruiz & figueroa, 1995) (see dudley-marling and michaels [2012] for other illustrations of high expectation curricula). such a stance does not, however, obviate the need for individualized support and direction for students with disabilities, often provided by special education teachers. social constructivism contrasts sharply with the deficit stance that dominates special education leading to a very different perspective on the meaning of inclusion, the rationale for including students with disabilities in regular classrooms, and the means for achieving inclusion of students with disabilities. the meaning of inclusion as noted earlier, in many places in the us inclusion is defined as students with disabilities spending more than 80% of their school day in regular education settings (baglieri et al., 2011). from this perspective, inclusion necessarily entails some exclusion. the practice of limiting (some) students’ participation in general education settings is consistent with the principle of educating students with disabilities in the least restrictive environment which presumes that regular classroom settings are not always the most appropriate placements for students with identified disabilities. the assumption here is that for many students with disabilities, because they are deficient in crucial skills and abilities, it is appropriate for them to be excluded from regular classroom settings for at least part of the school day. put another way, students with disabilities are permitted access to regular education settings only when they have proven they can fit in, when they are able to perform within the “normal range” for their age. disability educators working from a social constructivist stance reject what they characterize as an assimilationist perspective on inclusion that establishes a hierarchy between those being assimilated and members of the group of (normal) students into which students with disabilities are being assimilated (beratan, 2006). for these educators, diverse, inclusive classrooms ought to be the normal state of affairs. the onus is on school officials being able to demonstrate why some students should be excluded from regular education settings rather than having to show why they should be included (brantlinger, 1997). in other words, these educators, informed by a social constructivist perspective, believe that the regular classroom should be considered the default setting for all children. this does not mean, however, that inclusion requires treating all students the same, ignoring differences between them (hedge & mackenzie, 2005; morrier & gallagher, 2011). students with disabilities may require extra support to function in the regular classroom including the support of specially trained teachers. it does mean, however, that the verb include should refer to all students. as framed by the national center on inclusive education (2011) inclusive education is characterized by presumed competence, authentic membership, full participation, reciprocal social relationships, and learning to high standards by all students with disabilities in ageappropriate general education classrooms, with supports provided to students and teachers to enable them to be successful. (2011, p. 1) two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 25 the rationale for inclusion advocates for inclusion working from a social constructivist perspective point to a body of research evidence they believe supports the efficacy of inclusive practices (see ben-porath, 2012; brantlinger, 1997; and, causton et al., 2011 for reviews on the efficacy of inclusive schooling). for example, the national center on inclusive education (2011) cites a longitudinal study of 11,000 students with disabilities which indicates that, for students with disabilities, more time spent in regular classrooms correlates with higher test scores in math and reading, fewer absences, and fewer referrals for disruptive behavior. additionally, there is evidence that the presence of students with disabilities in the regular classroom does not negatively affect the academic performance of students without disabilities (ferguson & nusbaum, 2012; hyatt, iddings & ober, 2005). educators working from a deficit perspective, on the other hand, often argue that inclusion does not work for many students with disabilities (anastasiou & kauffman, 2011), that the evidence on the efficacy of inclusive classrooms is at best mixed (murphy, 1996). advocates of inclusion are not indifferent to evidence on the effectiveness of inclusion. however, inclusive education is “first and foremost a political position” (slee, 2011, p.14), part of a broad human rights agenda (ben-porath, 2012; wilde & avramidis, 2011). the inclusion movement is about the rights of disabled children – all children – to be educated in regular education settings alongside their peers (liasidou, 2012). from a rights perspective “inclusion is not about disability, nor it is only about schools. inclusion is about social justice” (sapon-shevin, 2003, p. 26). liasidou (2012) summarizes this position well when he states that inclusive education reflects values and principles and is concerned with challenging the ways in which educational systems reproduce and perpetuate social inequalities with regard to marginalized and excluded groups of students across a range of abilities, characteristics, developmental trajectories, and socioeconomic circumstances. hence, inclusion is inexorably linked with the principles of equality and social justice in both educational and social domains. (p. 168) ultimately, inclusive education is a tactic, an aspiration, and a statement of value (slee, 2011). there may be practical and pedagogical limits to inclusion (see hansen, 2012) but the use of any exclusionary criteria will always impinge on the rights of children with disabilities. including students with disabilities: reforming the structures of schooling as we noted above, educators who aspire to the full inclusion of students with disabilities have been accused of denying human differences, of desiring to put an end to the special education enterprise as we have known it, returning to the “days of old” when many students with disabilities languished in regular classroom with teachers unprepared to provide students with “appropriate” instructional support (e.g., anastasiou & kauffman, 2011; grider, 1995). it is true, as we discussed in a previous section, that educators working from a social constructivist perspective advocate for the inclusion of all students with disabilities in regular classrooms as a matter of principle. it is not true, however, that the aspiration to educate all students with disabilities in inclusive settings coincides with a desire to end the practice of supporting students with specially trained teachers. nor does an inclusionist 26 global education review 1(1) perspective deny the importance of regular classroom teachers being trained to support all students, including students with disabilities. certainly, no one believes (at least we hope not) that merely placing all students with disabilities in the regular education classrooms that produced so much failure in the first place is a good idea. the argument that disabilities – but not human differences – are socially constructed is based, in part, on the claim that it is the structures of contemporary schooling that transform naturally occurring human differences into disabilities by transforming certain (normal) human differences into abnormal deficiencies. mcdermott (1993) observes, for example, that in us schools “we make something of differential rates of learning to the point that the rate of learning rather than the learning is the total measure of the learner” (p. 272). it is easy to imagine a different set of priorities that valued other measures of learning with the effect of altering our sense of intellectual and learning disabilities, for example. indeed, mcdermott (1993) argues that there are cultures that do not place such an emphasis on the rate of learning. in any case, the mere physical presence of students with disabilities in regular education settings does nothing to undo the educational structures that create and perpetuate hierarchies of ability and disability (ashby, 2012, p. 92). the fundamental question for social constructivists is: inclusion in what? social constructivists agree with critics of inclusion that it would be disastrous to place students with disabilities in unchanging schools and classrooms (slee, 2011). but, social constructivists also argue that to create truly inclusive settings the restructuring of schools must go beyond mere technical solutions, curricular modifications, changes in the physical arrangements of schools and classrooms, the use of teacher aides, or alternative assessment practices that, together “fail to challenge the architecture of exclusion” (slee, 2011, p. 108). social constructivists advocate a radical approach to inclusion based on the fundamental assumption that it is the structures of schooling, not students, which must change (ashby, 2012; chimbala & fourie, 2012). they argue that the policy of educating students with disabilities in the “least restrictive environment” enshrined in idea reflects an “assimilationist” stance in which “the onus is on disabled students who, given the necessary ‘supplementary aids and services,’ must find a way to fit into ‘the regular educational environment’” (beratan, 2006, online). this reinforces the dominant narrative of schooling that valorizes normality which, for students with disabilities, demands overcoming or compensating for their differences. social constructivists argue that it is the educational environment that must adapt to the child, not the other way around (chimbala & fourie, 2012). as slee (2011) puts it, “inclusive school cultures require fundamental changes in educational thinking about children, curriculum, pedagogy and school organization” (slee, 2011, p. 110). for social constructivists, the project of inclusion is not limited to students with disabilities. students’ special educational needs are “inexorably linked with multiple and intersecting sources of disadvantage like ethnicity, social class, gender and poverty” (liasidou, 2012, p. 168). disability issues regularly intersect with issues of race, for example. students of color continue to be overrepresented in special education (harry & klingner, 2005) and, equally disturbing, students of color with identified disabilities are much more likely to be excluded from the regular classroom. over 25% of black students with disabilities, for instance, spend more than 60% of their day outside the regular classroom compared to only 14% of white students (31st annual report to congress on the two perspectives on inclusion in the united states 27 implementation of the individuals with disabilities eduation act, 2009). race also affects how students experience disability (petersen, 2009). the evidence is fairly clear that the structures of modern schooling fail many students, not just students with disabilities. michelle fine (1991) noted that “in the united states, public schools . . . were never designed for low-income students or students of color” (p. 31). the intractability of the so-called achievement gap in which poor students and students of color significantly underperform relative to their more affluent, white peers (see national assessment of educational progress, 2009) provides strong support for fine’s provocative claim. but it’s not just poor students, students of color and students with disabilities who are not well served by the structures of schooling. there have been worries over the years that girls are not well served in math and science classes (american association of university women, 1992). more recently there has been a focus on the relative underachievement of boys relative to girls in k-12 classrooms (e.g., newkirk, 2002). osgood (2005) notes that advocates for the gifted also argue that the needs of exceptionally talented students cannot be adequately met in regular classroom settings. given the failure of the structures of modern schooling in the us, many american advocates for inclusion participate in the international disability studies discourse on inclusion that goes beyond students with disabilities (baglieri et al., 2011). ware (2004) nicely summarizes this position: to be inclusive requires that we strive to identify and remove all barriers to learning for all children. this means that we must attend to increasing participation not just for disabled students but for all those experiencing disadvantage, whether this results from poverty, sexuality, minority ethnic status, or other characteristics assigned significance by the dominant culture in their society. (p. 2) in general, “inclusive education is code for educational reform at all levels” (slee, 2011, p. 122). creating inclusive environments for all students is an aspiration, a problem to be solved. in the long term this will require the dismantling of the institutional structures of schooling that never even imagined students with disabilities, students of color, or even girls for that matter. rigid, age-graded curriculum, normative testing practices, and tracking and ability grouping will never be congenial to the human diversity that exist in every school and classroom. in the place of these normalizing structures, we need to create new institutional structures that offer welcoming spaces for all students, acknowledging and building on the competence of all children regardless of their differences and the communities from which they come. realistically, this is a long-term political project that will encounter significant resistance from groups that benefit from current structures of schooling. therefore, more immediate strategies are required for creating more welcoming, inclusive classrooms within existing structures of schooling. significantly smaller class sizes would help. allington and mcgill-franzen (1989) argue that small class sizes could mitigate the need for identifying students as disabled. workshop structures for reading and writing that provide teachers with opportunities to provide individual support and direction for students as needed (see dudley-marling & paugh, 2004, 2009, for example) are also helpful. universal design for learning (udl) seeks to “leverage technology’s power to make education more 28 global education review 1(1) inclusive and effective . . . by offering [learners] 1) multiple means of representation . . . 2) multiple means of expression . . . and 3) multiple means of engagement” (rose, meyer & hitchcock, 2005). culturally-relevant pedagogies acknowledge and build on the linguistic and cultural knowledge all students bring with them to school (gay, 2000, 2002). most important is replacing deficit thinking that begins with the assumption of pathology with a stance that begins with the assumption that all students are competent learners entitled to the same rich, engaging curriculum provided to the highest achieving students. ultimately, as slee (2011) reminds us, the exclusion of students with disabilities is the consequence of a series of decisions. from a social constructivist perspective, the project of inclusion is about identifying and then challenging these decisions with the goal of doing better for all students in our schools. conclusion we have presented two perspectives on inclusion, each underpinned by sharply different, non-compatible notions of disability. the deficit perspective, which continues to dominate in special education and, perhaps, american schooling more generally situates disability in the minds and bodies of students with the concomitant that inclusion focus on helping students to overcome deficiencies in order to fit into normal school settings. a social constructivist perspective on inclusion focuses on cultural and social contexts that transform naturally occurring human differences into disabilities. here the focus is on reforming the structures of schooling. it is worth mentioning at this point that not all groups have embraced the practice of inclusion however defined. members of the deaf community and some advocates for gifted education prefer segregation to inclusion (osgood, 2005). given these dramatically different perspectives it is unsurprising that the debate about inclusion have become increasingly antagonistic. we do not doubt, however, that educators of students with disabilities, whatever their perspective on inclusion, are committed to doing what is best for students with disabilities. however, we believe that exclusion, for whatever reasons, will always sit uncomfortably with the principles of participatory democracy cherished by all americans. notes 1. in reality, only random events like the throw of the dice distribute along a normal, bellshaped curve. human traits and abilities are never random and, therefore, never distribute “normally” (see gallagher, 2010 for a detailed discussion of unsuitability of the normal curve as a model for describing human variation). 2. to be fair, while the institution of special education is dominated by deficit models of learning there are many special educators who have rejected deficit thinking. references allen, j. 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(2011). creating alliances against exclusivity: a pathway to inclusive educational reform, teachers college record, 113(10), 2283-2308. ware, l. (ed.). (2004). ideology and the politics of (in)exclusion. new york: peter lang. wilde, a., & avramidis, e. (2011). mixed feelings: towards a continuum of inclu sive pedagogies, education, 39(1), 83-101. about the author(s) curt dudley-marling, phd, is a professor in the lynch school of education at boston college where his scholarship focuses on language, literacy, and disability studies. mary bridget burns is a doctoral student in the lynch school of education at boston college. her interests include educational attainment for the marginalized, bilingual education, and literacy education. bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 43 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: arreguín-anderson, maría g. (2015). bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition:.biophilia at la clase magica site. global education review, 2 (2). 43-58 bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition: biophilia at a la clase mágica site maría g. arreguín-anderson university of texas at san antonio abstract in this article, the author suggests that children’s natural inclination to explore nature, or biophilia, can be explored as a factor that encourages both cognitive engagement and language development. the author summarizes the types of scientific inquiries that bilingual elementary students and their university partners engaged in when guided to design their own projects at a predominantly mexican-american school. children inquiries took place at a la clase mágica site, an after school program in which university undergraduates, faculty, bilingual children, and the community come together with the purpose of learning and exploring technology through interdisciplinary methodologies. the findings indicate that children overwhelmingly chose living organisms and life-like processes as the focus of their inquiries. the author presents the work of an exemplary dyad to illustrate how children engaged in scientific inquiry while developing language and complex thinking. keywords la clase mágica, project-based learning, science, informal learning, language, after school program, partnership, parents, pre-service teachers, elementary students, university faculty introduction “¿de veras no sabes nada de las mariquitas? bueno el ciclo es la etapa de los huevos, después la etapa del larva, luego la etapa del pupa y finalmente el adulto…” [you really don’t know anything about ladybugs! well, the cycle consists of phases including the egg, the larva, the pupa, and finally the adult…] explained laura in a letter to el maga making reference to the topic of her inquiry project at a la clase mágica (lcm) site. this excerpt illustrates part of the scientific vocabulary and the academic language that laura acquired as she engaged in a self-selected project-based experience in an informal after school context. this study describes ways in which children’s natural inclination towards nature, or biophilia, can potentially support cognitive growth and language development, especially if such ______________________________ corresponding author: maría g. arreguín-anderson, department of interdisciplinary learning & teaching, university of texas at san antonio, 1 utsa circle, san antonio, tx 78249. email: maria.arreguinanderson@utsa.edu mailto:maria.arreguinanderson@utsa.edu 44 global education review, 2 (2) endeavors take place in informal school settings such as those offered by lcm. lcm is an after school technology club that started in california in 1983 as a place where bilingual children from a mexicano community met with their amigos [friends] from the university of california, san diego to play computer games (vasquez, 2003). in san antonio, texas, lcm began operations in the fall of 2009 when the university of texas at san antonio (utsa) obtained a grant from the us department of education with which to fund an after school program in which faculty and 20 undergraduate students or aspirantes (teacher candidates) would incorporate the use of mobile devices including smart phones, netbook minilaptop computers, and tablets (rodriguez, 2010). utsa faculty, aspirantes, and students from los árboles elementary school met once a week and participated in informal activities. el maga, a virtual teacher, monitored children’s progress and held informal electronic conversations with them in the form of letters that generally ended with a question. lcm provided a space in which to freely explore content, language, and culture. often, children used electronic devices such as ipads to access websites seamlessly, navigating content in english and spanish. lcm’s focus on learning and development centered “on enhancing cognition by building on the children’s prior experiences and linking these to new information to create new understandings” in the language they choose to use (vasquez, 2003, p. 49). in the spring of 2012, utsa’s lcm team decided to adopt a project-based inquiry approach to continue enhancing children’s engagement in activities that promoted knowledge construction. self-selected science projects at lcm: a pedagogy of transformation that capitalizes on children’s biophilic affiliation project-based learning is an inherently collaborative approach closely guided by the teacher. however, at the heart of a projectbased critical approach to education is freire’s view of the teacher as an individual who also learns throughout the process. this transformation of roles is crucial in analyzing the overall experience at lcm and suggests that: …through dialogue, the teacher-of thestudent and the students-of the teacher cease to exist and a new term emerges: teacher-student with student-teachers. the teacher is no longer merely the –one-whoteaches, but one who is himself taught through dialogue with the students, who in turn while being taught also teach. they become jointly responsible for a process in which all grow. (freire, 2003, p. 80) this view of the learner as a decision maker is crucial to an after school club like lcm that seeks to open doors for authentic learning and student generated endeavors. the projectbased approach is congruent with national science reform movements that promote substantial participation of children as decisionmakers. for example, the benchmarks for science literacy indicate that by the end of second grade students should “raise questions about the world around them and be willing to seek answers to some of them by making careful observations and trying things out” (american association for the advancement of science, 1993, p. 285). an assumption underlying this study is that children are inherently inclined not only to explore the world in general, but are bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 45 specially attracted to life or life-like processes, a concept defined as biophilia. biophilia, wilson (1993) proposes,“ is the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms” (p. 31) and life-like processes. when given the opportunity, children tend to gravitate to and establish relationships with elements in nature that actively engage their senses. a tree trunk, for example, affords to be touched, climbed, hugged, etc. a rock, affords to be lifted, thrown, classified, etc. affordances in nature, “are functionally significant properties in the environment which are defined by the relationship between the environment and an organism” (chawla, 2007, p. 150). gibson’s (1979) concept of affordances is helpful in understanding the origins of children’s emotional ties to elements in nature that basically invite or beg exploration. it is no surprise, kellert (2002) asserted, that educators and publishers capitalize on this fascination by creating fiction and non-fiction stories overwhelmingly characterized by the presence of symbols from nature. kellert (1993) hypothesized that one of the dimensions of biophilia is significantly symbolic and stated that a “limited indication of the symbolic function is reflected in the findings that animals constitute more than 90 percent of the characters employed in language acquisition and counting in children’s preschool books” (p. 52). in contexts like lcm symbols of nature are now available in a variety of formats including ipad games, online versions of fiction and non-fiction books, and websites in english and spanish that offer information on plants and animals. context of the study the purpose of the study was to explore elementary students’ scientific inquiries and their cognitive and linguistic engagement while involved in a self-selected project at an lcm site. the study took place during the spring 2012 semester. adhering to a project-based approach, dyads of aspirantes and their elementary school amiguitos at los árboles elementary investigated a topic. prior to beginning their participation at the los árboles site, utsa aspirantes attended a series of workshops aimed at providing background on lcm’s guiding principles, addressed issues of technology, and shared details of a 10 week agenda during which utsa undergraduates were asked to collaborate in pairs with a los árboles amiguito. emphasis was placed on principles that have guided lcm since its inception including: 1. the activity must be a mixture of play and education. the play element is needed for the children to participate; the education element is needed for the adults to justify support. 2. the mix of play with education must be such that children come voluntarily. 3. learning is an active process that is fostered by norms of intergenerational interaction in which adults work alongside children as co-participants and not as directors. 4. each site combines community institutions with university courses. 5. there is an emphasis on interactive technologies, including but not limited to computers, telecommunications, and multimedia. 6. there is a culture of collaboration that supports the distribution of knowledge. 7. a mythical/virtual entity (e.g., wizard, el maga, golem) exists at each site to coordinate and mediate participants (gallego, 2001, p. 316). additionally, and given the bilingual nature of los árboles participating students, utsa 46 global education review, 2 (2) bilingual candidates and faculty deliberately provide a support system so that children could successfully respond to the cognitive and linguistic demands embedded in an after school project. cummins (2000) proposed that in order to achieve a cognitive academic language proficiency, “programs should provide a focus on meaning, a focus on language, and a focus on use on both languages...” in other words, we know that students are developing cognitive academic language proficiency “if we can say with confidence that our students are generating new knowledge, creating literature and art, and action on social realities that affect their lives” (p.99). based on these principles, the researcher sought to answer the two research questions: what is the nature of inquires that children pursue when prompted to engage in a selfgenerated project in an lcm site? in what way do self-selected projects foster cognitive and linguistic development in two languages at an lcm site? the plan for the spring 2012 semester included open-ended instructions to make sure that aspirantes and their amiguitos remained focused and were aware of important benchmarks/deadlines that were to be met during the semester (see table 1). during each meeting, the prospective teachers and children decided the type of sub-activities that would be designed in order to accomplish the general goal. social design experiment in lcm: methodology lcm spaces allow participants to engage in methodologies favorable to social transformation such as social design experiments. this approach, according to gutiérrez and vossoughi (2010) challenges university faculty and undergraduate students to “redesign the learning ecology so that ongoing opportunities for all participants to engage in robust learning practices are the norm” (p. 102). the context for experimentation in this case involved components such as a universitycommunity partnership represented by utsa table 1 self-selected inquiry: plan of action week activity 1 brainstorming session to figure out topic of inquiry project. homework for all weeks: share with parents. 2 define you research project, make a plan, and include your guiding question(s). 3 continue your research and explore at least two types of presentation software and choose one for your final presentation. 4 guided inquiry day. your utsa amigo will involve you in an activity that further explores your research topic. 5 continue working on your project. 6 preliminary presentation for feedback purposes. 7 revise and consider classmates’ suggestions. 8 continue working on project. have you met your goals? 9 final touches. test technology. 10 presentation and celebration: sharing final product with classmates and parents. table 1 47 global education review, 2 (2) los árboles elementary school, parents, university faculty, a mystical figure or el maga, and a maze or laberinto. this methodology also challenged faculty researchers to strategically intervene so that participants, in this case elementary students and pre-service teachers actively formulate and seek answers to their own questions. in these endeavors, “the subject is put in a structured situation where a problem exists and the subject is provided with active guidance toward the construction of new means to solve the problem” (engestrom, 2008, p.2). social design experiment methodology permeated the design, implementation, description, and analysis of the results of a project in which a community of learners used a variety of resources to engage in scientific inquiry. in this exploration, the goal was not only to focus on resulting products, but to understand participants’ contributions and how they made sense of this experience (trout, 2008, p. 70). for utsa faculty participating in this project, part of this experiment included a deliberate infusion of open-ended tasks stemming from a student-generated inquiry. as a result, aspirantes would be able to engage in practices that are congruent with a pedagogy of possibility. specifically, actions such as the inclusion of student voices in the decision making process, that challenge deficit perspectives that often permeate both regular and after school curricular settings in lowsocioeconomic neighborhoods (gutiérrez, bien, selland, & pierce, 2011). the researcher and participants were responsive to the context of learning and teaching and the changing conditions that occasionally emerge in today’s public schools. a responsive approach to change was crucial through out the 10-week collaboration in lcm and allowed participants and the researcher to adjust the plan as needed (merriam, 2009). participants and setting this qualitative inquiry, focused on a particular 10-week experience attended by a well defined group of participants (merriam, 2009) including 26 aspirantes or bilingual teacher candidates and 25 elementary students from a local two way dual language elementary school in a predominantly mexican neighborhood who met after school once a week for 10 weeks. of the aspirantes, all identified themselves as mexican and/or mexican-american. there were a total of 24 female and 2 male aspirantes. all pre-service teachers were enrolled in a science methods course and a reading comprehension course which included participation in this after school program as partial fulfillment of the course requirements. utsa aspirantes interacted in spanish with children, but children used the language of their choice in oral and written communication. once a week, aspirantes spent two and a half hours with a child. these learning dyads remained constant the entire semester unless unforeseen circumstances (e.g., occasional absence, a pre-service teacher became ill, etc.) forced the formation of triads. this dyadic structure in lcm engaged children and prospective teachers in dialogic exchanges so that they could learn from each other, and just as importantly, this experience situated the table 2 participating lcm children grades female male total k 3 1 4 1 1 0 1 2 2 3 5 3 0 2 2 4 7 3 10 5 2 1 3 total 25 table 2 48 global education review, 2 (2) prospective teacher in a position in which to learn about a child. participating children included a total of 25 children whose grades ranged from kindergarten to fifth grade as shown in table 2. this purposeful selection of site and individuals (miles & huberman, 1994) was necessary to understand the type of dynamics that take place in an after school setting. data collection and data analysis data included undergraduates’ field notes, researcher’s anecdotal notes, el maga communication, children’s responses to el maga, and all completed projects. after each one of the meetings with their lcm amiguito, aspirantes completed weekly field notes that included descriptions of the setting, observations, and reflections related to what was observed. this separation of commentaries was critical so that actual observations were not confused with what pre-service teachers thought the observed event meant (creswell, 1998). children’s notes were drawn from their communication with el maga. in these notes, they often shared not only their progress in relation to the project, but their overall attitudes and perspectives towards their own learning. finally, data collection included products presented at a culminating event in which students shared their inquiry or proyecto de indagación as they knew it. themes were identified through constant comparison and continuously revised as the researcher grouped the data (mertler, 2012). although initial categories included broad concepts such as science from a social, personal, and practical perspective, a closer analysis and triangulation of data prompted the researcher to redirect attention to more specific themes that branched out of those initial umbrella terms. new categories included projects that related nature (e.g., animals and plants, and related concepts); inquiries related to earth science and a smaller number that addressed physical science concepts. the researcher also started with preestablished categories including cognitive and language domains. within the cognitive domain, the researcher focused on open-ended activity and referred to bloom’s taxonomy to code data. in the language domain the researcher coded the data based on otto’s types of language knowledge including phonological, morphemic, pragmatic, syntactic, and semantic (otto, 2014). the next sections present a summary of the type of inquiries conducted during the spring 2012 semester. additionally, instances of cognitive and linguistic development are highlighted in the work of laura and myra, a pair that collaboratively worked on the topic of ladybugs and whose work serves to illustrate a patterns identified not only in this group, but throughout this experience at los árboles elementary. results biophilia as a pattern in children’s inquiries in this study, children overwhelmingly chose living organisms and life-like processes as the focus of their scientific inquiries. sixteen students worked on projects which included questions related to plants and animals as illustrated in table 3 (all names included in this manuscript are pseudonyms). this innate attraction or fascination that children expressed toward nature shaped the content, process, and format of their intended product. in the initial stages of the project, for example, student inquiries included: ¿por qué les atrae la sangre a los tiburones? quiero saber si pueden escuchar la música los perros [why are sharks attracted to blood? and i would like to know if dogs can listen to music]. another student expressed: “me llama la atención saber como bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 49 los elefantes pintan como yo [i am curious about elephants’ ability to paint like me].” there were also some projects related to plants such as the one selected by a kindergarten student who indicated: “la próxima semana voy a traer semillas de manzanas para sembrar las semillas. quiero ver cómo crecen las plantas” [next week, i am going to bring apple seeds to plant. i want to know how plants grow]. in order to answer/solve their inquiries, students engaged in direct and indirect experiences with nature (see figure 1). for example, students used their ipads and desktop computers to access internet websites, videos, and pictures related to their topic. the spontaneous attraction children feel and express towards living things is crucial not only from a social aspect, but as kellert (2003) contended, “nature continues to provide young people with an unrivaled source of attraction, stimulation and challenge relevant in both emotional and intellectual development” (p. 123). this type of stimulation, kellert also suggested, is inherent not only in direct experiences with nature but in the vicarious or symbolic experiences of nature that children access through print and electronic sources as it is the case in lcm. table 3 la clase mágica projects student grade level title of project brianna 2nd los perros que me gustan [i like dogs] melani and juliana k las flores: ¿qué puedo aprender?[flowers: what can i learn about them?] everardo 2nd los tiburones [sharks] maribel 1st los elefantes pintores [elephants that paint] rafael 4th ¿de veras son asesinas las orcas?[are killer whales really assesins?] adriana k ¿cómo crecen las frutas en las plantas? [how does fruit grow in plants?] ashley 4th los bulldogs [bulldogs] laura 4th las mariquitas y su hábitat [ladybugs and their hábitat] gabriela 5th los bulldogs [bulldogs] blanca 4th los animales y sus diferentes hábitats [animals and their hábitat] marco 2nd ¿son peligrosos los lobos? [are wolves dangerous?] joseph k ¿por qué suceden los tornados? [how do tornadoes happen?] denise 4th ¿por qué tiene sal el agua del mar? [why is seawater salty?] ana 5th ¿cómo es la luna? [what is the moon like?] alejandra 2nd las nubes: ¿cómo flotan en el cielo? [clouds: how do they float in the sky?] table 3 50 global education review, 2 (2) figure 1. direct indirect, and symbolic experiences with nature. during this experience, children’s natural attraction to living organisms was not only an important stimulating and empowering factor but a driving force in engaging in active inquiry at complex levels as stated by myrna, whose amiguita, laura, decided to study ladybugs: “i learned that it is essential to take the children outside and just let them explore. by letting them be their own teachers, we allow them to ask questions and explore their curiosity.” self-initiated exploration resulted in children making observations, gathering data, and drawing conclusions. taking a closer look: mariquitas [ladybugs] this section presents a closer look at the project laura chose to pursue which revolved around the life of ladybugs (mariquitas). laura was paired with myrna, an undergraduate student bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 51 whose field notes described part of the first encounter. in that encounter laura informed myrna that she was a fourth grader who loved mathematics and writing and that she joined the lcm club when it began at los árboles, when she was in second grade. myrna described their first encounter as a very relaxed session in which she tried not to be prescriptive or do the thinking for the student. participating in an informal learning environment in which students have a voice in the content, process, and product is an extremely unusual experience for teacher candidates. in their regular field placements, teacher candidates are generally expected to plan all aspects of a lesson including the learning outcomes, the introductory setting, the vocabulary, conceptual framework, guided practice, independent practice, and evaluation. all of this is standards-based and checked by their cooperating teacher and their university professor. lcm’s informal environment on the other hand, promoted student choice, a crucial component in a project-based approach, which in its initial stage called for a brainstorming session that aimed at narrowing the initial focus (katz & chard, 2000). for laura and for myrna, this was not an easy task. laura started by trying to ‘please the teacher’ or as myrna indicated in a field note: “cuando le pregunté a ella lo que le gustaba hacer para divertirse, me respondió que estudiar. se me hace que no estaba pensando en cosas que le fascinaban sino en cosas que a una maestra le gustaría escuchar” [when i asked her about what she liked to do for fun she replied that she likes to study. i think she was not thinking about things she loves to do, but about things that a teacher may want to hear]. eventually, after taking sometime to get to know each other at a personal level, laura indicated that if she was given an opportunity to learn about anything she wanted she would definitely choose mariquitas [ladybugs]. laura’s gravitation towards a living organisms, specifically an animal, is identified as an innate and historically embedded inclination in our cultures (lawrence, 1993; shepard, 1998; wilson, 1993) as wilson indicated, “these cultural forces give power to the analysis of animals’ symbolic roles” (p. 332). not surprisingly, a quick web search yielded an ample list of fiction and non-fiction children’s books with ladybugs as a central topic (cinco pequeñas mariquitas by melanie gerth and laura huliska-beith and la mariquita malhumorada by eric carle, and teresa malawer among others). cognitive biophilia in lcm: mariquitas that inspire extending the concept of biophilia to the cognitive domain allows us to dissect the innumerable ways in which animals “are good to think” (levi-strauss as cited by elizabeth lawrence, 1993, p. 302). lawrence (1993) proposed the term “cognitive biophilia” to emphasize the close connections between living organisms and human’s thinking processes (kahn jr., 1997; kellert, 1993; wilson, 1993). such affiliation, kellert (1993) contended, naturally leads to engagement in activity that fosters cognitive, affective, and moral development. in lcm, this focus on learning and development centered on stimulating complex thinking by making connections to students’ prior knowledge to construct meaning (vasquez, 2003). in laura’s case, she drew from earlier encounters with mariquitas to select this insect as the central topic of her inquiry project. to myrna’s surprise, laura immediately engaged in discovery at high cognitive levels as shown by a guiding question that was both open-ended and complex: “how is one day in the life of a ladybug?” responding to that question in the context of an informal learning environment such as lcm is highly contingent of the affective 52 global education review, 2 (2) connection that intrinsically draws the student to the topic. not surprisingly, iozzi (1989) suggested that affection or inclination toward something, in this case nature, is the “key entry point in learning and teaching” (pp. pp. 6-13). by the third meeting, the enthusiasm level had been maintained. as myrna indicated: “i noticed that her attitude towards the project is very positive and she enjoys learning more and more about ladybugs.” initially, laura spent much of her time navigating through websites and books in english and in spanish. this symbolic “experience with nature is an important aspect of this as well as other stages of cognitive development, often insufficiently appreciated and recognized” (kellert, 2002, p. 123). it was during weeks four and five that laura and myrna had gone through the books and learned among other things that “ladybugs eat aphids, which were usually found in farms. we also found out that during spring time, they are most likely mating and in form of eggs.” with this, laura generated an additional question. she wondered if some leaves with nibbled sections were the sign of the presence of adult ladybugs somewhere near the inspected area: “sigo aprendiendo mucho de las mariquitas y también tomé fotos de unas hojas que un insecto (a lo mejor una mariquita) había comido” [i continue to learn a lot about mariquitas and i also took pictures of some leaves that an insect (perhaps a ladybug) had eaten]. she also wondered if “lady bugs’ spots match both sides of their body” symmetrically. four ladybugs: a day to celebrate! by week seven, laura continued thinking and talking about mariquitas, but this time with active contribution from her parents. from its inception, this student-generated inquiry included parental involvement as a key feature. regardless of parents actual attendance at weekly meetings, lcm faculty designed a take home assignment in which parental input was requested in their children’s projects with the heading: “hola papás, necesitamos su ayuda” [hello parents, we need your help]. this particular time, myrna sent a ladybug box kit home and asked that they contribute to laura’s project by looking for ladybugs as a family. at the beginning of meeting seven, laura surpassed all expectations when she announced: “miss, not only did i find one ladybug this week, but i found four and three of them do not have spots!” she explained how her father was key in actually catching them. although proud and excited about being able to observe them closely, laura anxiously asked if myrna could go to the garden to free all ladybugs. this positive affiliation with mariquitas had been enhanced not only by this direct experience, but by the sum of all encounters including symbolic contact through readings. shepard (1998) argued that intellectual development of children is closely tied to their empathetic encounters with nature, such as laura’s experience in catching and releasing these insects: “as we observed the ladybugs, one by one we let them go, and her face lit up with joy. she felt the freedom the ladybugs got as they flew away,” wrote myrna. through her observations, laura, documented similarities and differences among the three captured ladybugs, leading her to conclude that ladybugs were not necessarily symmetrical and that they came in different colors, including hot pink, which highly surprised laura who began sharing much of this knowledge through conversations with other lcm children and with el maga. linguistic biophilia: the semantic and pragmatic intricacies of social and academic language knowledge congruent with lawrence (1993) who defined cognitive biophilia as a construct that underscores how “symbols and images of nature are often used to facilitate human intellectual development (p. 123), shepard’s (1998) bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 53 argument emphasizing the “importance of animate nature as a facilitator of human language and thought” (p. 51) extends this argument. in lcm, engagement in self-selected science projects facilitated by and with an undergraduate amigo resulted in numerous opportunities to develop language organically. this section focuses on the opportunities that lcm provided to develop pragmatic and sematic knowledge of language. children’s natural inclination to associate with nature favored acquisition of semantic knowledge of language (otto, 2014) as illustrated in figure 2. basically, when the adult (more knowledgeable other) or addressor connects living organisms or objects in nature (referents) with verbal symbols (words), they contribute to the process or symbol formation. this natural gravitation towards animals, for example, in early infancy can potentially be the source of a long list of labels that include: head, feet, body, fur, soft, eyes, mouth, whiskers, dogs, cat, bird, tree, bark, leave, bark, sing, among others. this word bank becomes a permanent part of the child’s linguistic repertoire and is accompanied by morphemic and syntactic knowledge when the adult purposefully utilizes more complex sentences. direct experiences in which children had an opportunity to engage their senses were crucial at the onset of the project. kellert (2002) suggested that direct experiences with nature provide opportunities to touch, smell, see, hear, and taste, but also to hear and produce simple and complex vocabulary. as myna became immersed in her project she began using terminology reflective of knowledge and skills in science. the biophilia hypothesis was important in explaining the important role that plants and animals play in the process of symbol formation. otto (2014) explained that when adults purposefully comment, share, dialogue or hold a conversation with children related to an object or referent, they contribute to the acquisition of a variety of labels, or words that associate sound and meaning. table 4 includes a list of words used by laura as she explored through both direct and indirect experiences with nature: figure 2. components of symbol formation addressor addressee /amiguito object/ referent symbolic medium 54 global education review, 2 (2) table 4 science vocabulary used during the duration of the project. vocabulary used in laura’s communication with el maga generally in spanish vocabulary laura shared with myrna in english and spanish vocabulary used in the final product (prezi) in spanish proyecto de indagación [inquiry project] retraer [retract] cabeza [head] cuerpo [body] sensores [sensors] olfato [smell] ciclo [cycle] etapa [stage] huevo [egg] larva [larva] pupa [pupa] adulto [adult] hojas [leaves] insecto[insect] reflejo [reflection] life prezi leaf nibble aphids farms investigación [investigation] sobrevivencia [survival] observaciones [observations] conclusión [conclusions] datos [data] brillo [shine] predador [predator] patas [legs] antenas [antennae] afidos [aphids] plantas [plants] hojas [leaves] actividad [activity] luz [light] table 4 pragmatic knowledge of language while learning science though their interactions in the context of lcm, children learn how to adjust language to address a variety of situations and individuals with whom they come in contact. this pragmatic knowledge of language “involves the knowledge or awareness of the overall intent of communication and language is used to achieve that intent” (otto, 2014, p. 10). during any regular session at lcm, children interacted orally and in writing with their undergraduate amigo or aspirante, their friends, university faculty, and el maga. communication with this mythical figure for example was always friendly and informal as illustrated in figure 3. this particular semester el maga purposely inquired about children’s self-selected projects. bilingual latino students learn science for fun while developing language and cognition 55 ¡hola laura!!!!!, ¿cómo estas? feliz día del amor y la amistad!!!!!!!!!!!!! …me da mucho gusto volver a escribir cartas… y me da más gusto el poder escribirte a ti como parte de la clase mágica… yo estoy súper emocionada de empezar un nuevo semestre con todos los niños de la clase mágica… este semestre espero que tu jornada por el laberinto mágico te guste mucho porque va a haber un proyecto padrísimo que espero que te guste!!!!… espero tu carta, ¿ok? cuídate mucho y diviértete mucho en la clase mágica… hasta luegooooooooo!!!!! el maga [hello laura!!!! how are you doing? happy valentine’s day!!!!!!!!!!!!! …i am so glad to write letter again…and i am happier to be able to write to you as a member of la clase mágica… i am thrilled to begin this new semester with all the children at la clase mágica… this semester i hope you like your journey through the magic maze because we will have a very cool project that i hope you like!!!!... i will be expecting you letter, ¿ok? take care and have fun at la clase mágica… see you later!!!!!!!!!!!!! el maga] figure 3. el maga letter as laura’s project progressed, she continued to engage in the complex skill of navigating social and academic language situations while completing her project. these skills are needed, otto (2014) asserts, if children are to identify situations or an immediate “awareness of the specific ways in which academic language is used” (p. 10). laura’s intrinsic motivation to carry out her project fueled her initiative to seek information from library books and electronic sources generally characterized by an academic discourse. academically, myrna’s notes reflected laura’s growth in different ways: “i noticed that laura was picking up facts about ladybugs to answer broad concepts that covered the ladybug cycle, ladybug anatomy, and the life of a ladybug. . . i can tell that her attitude, if it is continued will get her to college.” her prezi slides for example, were tailored for an expected audience that included teachers, students, parents, and aspirantes. in this piece and using formal academic language, laura added concrete points that summarized her learning about ladybugs up to that day (see figure 4). 56 global education review, 2 (2) figure 4. synthesis of a lady bug’s life cycle. parallel to summarizing her learning, laura adapted her discourse as she again engaged in communication with el maga, and while explaining the life cycle of a ladybug she concluded her letter by adding that “hoy mi día fue muy chidísimo en la clase mágica” [my day was super cool at lcm], to which el maga responded: “. . . a ver, dime por qué tu día fue chidísimo!!! cuéntame, anda!!!! . . . y que te han dicho tus papás de tu proyecto, te están ayudando? cuenta, cuenta!!! [let’s see, tell me why your day was super cool!!! go on, tell me!!! . . . and what have your parents said about your projects, are they helping you? tell me, tell me!!!]. historically, el maga has developed a relationship with children that blurs the line between the formal and the informal, the academic and the social. celebrating the completion of the project with a real audience congruent with a project-based approach in which students have an opportunity to present to a real audience, parents, school staff, and university professors were invited to a presentation of students’ final products which included i-movies, power point presentations, posters, demonstrations, and prezis. laura decided to prepare both, a poster and a prezi (see figure 5). according to myrna’s notes: laura presented and she had such a confidence that she made it seem interested. i loved the way she spoke, very clear and informative. she showed her videos over her results in the field. i thought she was amazing and silly with the way she presented the project. she was also excited to show her mom the trifold that we created. she explained everything, in detail. laura synthesized in a prezi all the information learned over the period of ten weeks and added other facts including cultural perceptions of ladybugs as insects that signal good luck; the fact that there are over 500 types of ladybugs in the united states, their bright colors may help in scaring predators away; they have six legs; not all ladybugs are ‘ladies’; their body expands or puffs up when they get ready to fly; they have two antennae; their diet consists of aphids, plants, and leaves; they can live up to a year; they are active during the day and sleep at night, when they do not respond to light; and not all of them have spots. 57 global education review, 2 (2) figure 5. inquiry project: laura’s final presentation conclusions lcm’s informal learning designs such as those implemented at los àrboles elementary allowed faculty and prospective educators to experiment pedagogically with equity aims in mind. the social design experiment described in this article yielded opportunities to tap into children’s scientific interests while engaging them in project-based activities. as a result, final products reflected a biophilic inclination that resulted in active exploration of nature related topics. the intrinsic motivation or affective tie to a self-selected topic in lcm immersed all participating children in a journey that allowed them to navigate social and academic situations seamlessly while significantly enhancing their vocabulary in both languages. laura’s experience demonstrated that when given the opportunity, children naturally surpass disciplinary barriers and show us that complex connections and academic language proficiency are the result of authentic opportunities to learn. too often, project-based approaches are perceived as time consuming and unrealistic in today’s accountability era. on average, laura spent 90 minutes a week dedicated to interestbased inquiries and was empowered to gain knowledge, synthesize, evaluate information and communicate her findings. through science, she developed pragmatic, sematic, syntactic, morphemic, and phonological knowledge of two languages. these opportunities for cognitive and linguistic engagement can be present in all classrooms when spaces for student choice are provided. references american association for the advancement of science. (1993). benchmarks for science literacy. new york. chawla, l. (2007). childhood experiences associated with care for the natural world: a theoretical framework for empirical results. children, youth and environments, 17(4), 144-170. 58 global education review, 2 (2) creswell, j. w. (1998). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five traditions. thousand oaks, ca: sage. engestrom, y. (2008). from teams to knots: activity theoretical studies of collaboration and learning at work. new york: cambridge university press. freire, p. (2003). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. gallego, m. a. (2001). is experience the best teacher: the potential of coupling classroom and communitybased field experiences. journal of teacher education, 52(4), 312-325. gibson, j. j. (1979). the ecological approach to visual perception. boston: ma: houghton-mifflin. gutiérrez, k. d., bien, a. c., selland, m. k., & pierce, d. m. (2011). polylingual and polycultural learning ecologies: mediating emergent academic literacies for dual language learners. journal of early childhood literacy, 11(2), 232-261. gutiérrez, k. d., & vossoughi, s. (2010). lifting off the ground to return anew: mediated praxis, transformative learning, and social design experiments. journal of teacher education, 61(1-2), 100-117. iozzi, l. a. (1989). what research says to the educator, part 2. journal of environmental education, 20(4), 6-13. kahn jr., p. h. (1997). developmental psychology and the biophilia hypothesis: children's affiliation with nature. developmental review, 17, 1-61. katz, l. g., & chard, s. c. (2000). engaging children's minds. stamford, ct: ablex publishing corporation. kellert, s. r. (1993). the biological basis for the human values of nature. in s. r. kellert & e. o. willson (eds.), the biophilia hypothesis (pp. 42-69). washington, dc: island press. kellert, s. r. (2002). experiencing nature: affective, cognitive, and evaluative development in children. in p. h. kahn jr. & s. r. kellert (eds.), children and nature (pp. 117-151). cambridge, ma: mit press. lawrence, e. a. (1993). the sacred bee, the filthy pig, and the bat out of hell: animal symbolism as cognitive biophilia. in s. r. kellert & e. o. willson (eds.), the biophilia hypothesis (pp. 301-341). washington, dc: island press. merriam, s. b. (2009). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. mertler, c. a. (2012). action research: improving schools and empowering educators. thousand oaks, ca: sage. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. otto, b. (2014). language development in early childhood. upper saddle river, nj: pearson. rodriguez, k. (2010). la clase magica program helps children succeed by using technology. utsa today retrieved april 4, 2014, from https://utsa.edu/today/2010/06/magica.html shepard, p. (1998). thinking animals: animals and the development of human intelligence. athens, ga: the university of georgia press. trout, l., m.,. (2008). attunement to the invisible: applying paulo freire's problem-posing education to "invisibility". the pluralist, 3(3), 63-78. vasquez, o. a. (2003). la clase magica: imagining optimal possibilities in a bilingual community of learners. mahwah, nj: lawrance erlbaum associates. wilson, e. o. (1993). biophilia and the conservation ethic. in s. r. kellert & e. o. wilson (eds.), the biophilia hyphothesis (pp. 31-41). washington, dc. about the author maría g. arreguín-anderson, edd, is an assistant professor in the department of interdisciplinary learning & teaching at the university of texas at san antonio where her research focusses on the intricacies of cultural and linguistic factors that influence minority students’ access to education in early childhood and elementary bilingual settings. march 8 2015 copy edited pg 1 keywords la clase mágica, project-based learning, science, informal learning, language, after school program, partnership, parents, pre-service teachers, elementary students, university faculty introduction march 8 2015 copy edited pg 2-16 endeavors take place in informal school settings such as those offered by lcm. lcm is an after school technology club that started in california in 1983 as a place where bilingual children from a mexicano community met with their amigos [friends] from the university of california, san diego to play computer games (vasquez, 2003)... utsa faculty, aspirantes, and students from los árboles elementary school met once a week and participated in informal activities. el maga, a virtual teacher, monitored children’s progress and held informal electronic conversations with them in the f... references haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 75 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: eichhorn, melinda sue (2016). haunted by math: the impact of policy and practice on students with math learning disabilities in the transition to post-secondary education in mumbai, india.. global education review, 3(3). 75-93 haunted by math: the impact of policy and practice on students with math learning disabilities in the transition to post-secondary education in mumbai, india melinda (mindy) s. eichhorn gordon college abstract only six states in india currently identify learning disabilities as a category of disability. this article highlights the challenges students with math learning disabilities face in their transition from secondary school to higher secondary education and bachelor of commerce degree programs in the state of maharashtra. while the current educational policy aims to help students with learning disabilities participate in the general education curriculum and pass the 10th standard secondary exam, the implementation of curricular modifications has repercussions in post-secondary settings when students lack the math content knowledge for a required math course in their bachelor’s degree program. this qualitative study highlights the transitional experiences of secondary and post-secondary individuals with math learning disabilities in mumbai through interviews with students, college administrators, and lecturers; and a document review of maharashtra’s special education policies. the results suggest that current special education policies and college practices in mumbai do not prepare students with math learning disabilities with the math knowledge that they need to succeed in post-secondary mathematics courses. current higher secondary and post-secondary interventions in mumbai are reviewed and implications for policy and practice for all levels of education are discussed. keywords math learning disability; dyscalculia; intervention; higher secondary; post-secondary; transition; primary math; elementary education; policy; india introduction from a young age, vinod (pseudonym) was interested in pursuing a career in business. before taking his 10th standard exam to complete secondary school, he underwent an educational assessment and was diagnosed with learning disabilities (ld). he majored in commerce at a junior college which did not require a mathematics course (11th and 12th standard) in mumbai. after completing junior college, vinod enrolled for a bachelor’s degree in commerce at a mumbai degree college. in the first year, he had to take the mandatory mathematical and statistical techniques course. vinod recounts his transitional experience: it was a shock for me to take math again. i was weak in math to begin with, and then it was like i wasn’t practicing hard enough or something. people said that ______________________________ corresponding author: melinda (mindy) s. eichhorn, department of education, gordon college, 255 grapevine road, wenham, ma 01984 email: melinda.eichhorn@gordon.edu mailto:melinda.eichhorn@gordon.edu 76 global education review 3(3) i wasn’t studying and i was not paying attention. but i was. it was frustrating. i started not to care. i left it (math); i was like “screw it.” you are stressed when you are behind. no one wants to be behind everyone else. (vinod, personal communication, april 25, 2013) vinod failed the mathematical and statistical techniques course and eventually moved to another degree college (which does not require a math course) to pursue a bachelor of arts degree because his previous college only offered commerce and science degrees. once he finished his bachelor of arts degree, he went to london to study media. he currently lives in mumbai and is a general manager of products and marketing for a multi-channel entertainment network on youtube (vinod, personal communication, april 25, 2013). vinod’s case is similar that of other students with learning disabilities in postsecondary education in mumbai. students with math learning disabilities (mld) reported having to study harder and longer than their peers, just to scrape by, or as in vinod’s case, taking another path in order to reach their goal. if students with mld have fallen behind in mathematics in primary school, and then discover they have a learning disability when they enter secondary school, what are the repercussions they face in mathematics as they transition to post-secondary education and into a career? students with mld eventually do learn basic math procedures in primary school, but are one to several years behind their typically achieving peers (geary, hoard, nugent, & bailey, 2012). if this gap widens during secondary school, what are the implications for students who opt out of math courses for 2-4 years, who must take required math courses in post-secondary education? this exploratory study is a first step in beginning to understand the way special education policy, and the current education system in india, impacts students’ math abilities and their post-secondary education options due to their math proficiency in secondary school. this qualitative study used interviews, observations, and a document analysis to examine the indian education system’s lack of options for students who may want to pursue a degree in commerce, but are unable to do so because of counsel from secondary counselors or college requirements. because only one type math course is offered as a part of the degree program, students lack options and may have to take extra private classes to keep up with their peers. this study originated from a desire of the maharashtra dyslexia association (mda) to correct the discrepancy between students with mld and their typically achieving peers in postsecondary education, because many students in their network were experiencing severe difficulties in mathematics during their postsecondary transition, especially in bachelor of commerce degree programs. to this end, this study addresses two main questions:  what accommodations and supports do students with mld use during their secondary and post-secondary education?  how do college math policies and procedures affect students with mld? overall, very little is known about students with mld in india. only one peer-reviewed article has examined the identification and classification of mld in india, and it focused on primary students in the city of mysore (ramaa & gowramma, 2002). there are a few other studies on learning disabilities in india, but these have focused on three types of learning disabilities (reading, writing, and math) together (mogasale et al., 2012; kulkarni et al., 2006; karande et al., 2007, 2009). although, in general, awareness of learning disabilities has increased in india over the past decade, there is still a general lack of awareness in schools (karande, sholapurwala, & kulkarni, 2011; karande, mahajan, & kulkarni, 2009). some studies have recommended increased training for primary school teachers, early screening haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 77 tools, and more remedial education and special educators in primary and secondary schools (karande, sholapurwala, & kulkarni, 2011; karande, doshi, thadhani & sholapurwala, 2013; unni, 2012). other studies have examined the lack of uniformity for learning disability diagnosis, and attempted to create alternative, simplified procedures, especially for students in vernacular-medium schools (mogasale et al., 2012, ramaa & gowramma, 2002). however, most researchers do not take an in-depth look at math learning disabilities and none have examined the impact of policy and transitional issues in post-secondary education. overall, the peer-reviewed literature on students with math learning disabilities in india is sparse. background defining math learning disabilities students and adults with mathematics learning disability (mld) are individuals that perform at a level substantially below their peers in mathematics, whose poor performance cannot be explained by any deficit in vision, speech, hearing, or intelligence. it is, in a sense, “unexpected underachievement” (fletcher, lyon, fuchs, & barnes, 2007, p. 27; american psychiatric association, 2013a, 2013b). learning disabilities, which can occur in the areas of reading, mathematics, and/or written expression, contribute to students experiencing low self-esteem due to their poor academic performance and negative school reports (fletcher et al., 2007; gibson & kendall, 2010; lahane et al., 2013). currently, there is no universal definition of math learning disability (mld) (mazzocco & myers, 2003). although there has been almost a century of efforts, problems with the definition of math “learning disability” still exist. there is still a lack of understanding as to which criteria classify mld so that it is reliable and valid (fletcher et al., 2007). according to the fourth edition of the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm-iv), the definition of math learning disability was a severe discrepancy (in some cases, more than two standard deviations) between a student’s achievement in math and his/her age, schooling, and level of intelligence (iq), and significant impairment in real-life activities that require math (apa, 2004; geary, 2011; sparks & lovett, 2009; allsopp, 2008). in the dsm-5, the iqachievement discrepancy requirement was eliminated and now the criteria for mld involves evidence of symptom persistence for at least six months, despite extra help or targeted instruction (tannock, 2014). the dsm-5 acknowledges that learning deficits in mathematics are sometimes referred to as “dyscalculia” internationally (american psychiatric association, 2013a). although the term, “dyscalculia,” is used extensively in india, the term “math learning disability” will be used throughout this paper in order to better reflect a wide range of difficulties in mathematics, rather than focusing on calculation and arithmetic. in the literature, these terms are occasionally used synonymously (butterworth, 2002; williams, 2012). in the field of mld, there is disagreement as to whether mld is caused solely by a core deficit in number sense/numerosity, as butterworth (2005) posits, or due to a more general deficit in working memory or spatial cognition, which is the view of geary et al. (2004) (as cited by pennington, 2009). these two theoretical perspectives or orientations are still under debate, which make it difficult to define mld (fletcher et al., 2007). overall, children with mld typically have a low start point on math achievement tests and show slow growth as compared to typically achieving peers (geary, hoard, nugent, & bailey, 2012). lewis (2014) posits that students with mld process or manipulate numbers in an atypical way due to differences in cognitive abilities. if these early math deficits, or differences, are remediated immediately, then students may not fall further behind their peers in math skills (desoete et al., 2009). addressing slow growth usually requires several 78 global education review 3(3) simultaneous types of remedial and instructional interventions (geary, hoard, nugent, & bailey, 2012). interventions may be particularly effective if they are early (dowker, 2005; nelson & sheridan, 2011). math learning disabilities in india the national government of india does not currently recognize “learning disability” or any type of mathematics learning disorder, so there are no uniform guidelines for assessment, diagnosis, or certification. there is also extreme lack of awareness of learning disabilities among teachers (unni, 2012). the educational boards in only six states consider learning disability (ld) as a category of disability (goa, gujarat, karnataka, kerala, maharashtra, and tamil nadu) (al-yagon et al., 2013). currently, students in mumbai, maharashtra receive a learning disability certificate from one of three government hospitals (nair, sion, and king edward memorial), or a recognized testing center, such as the maharashtra dyslexia association (mda). students are typically diagnosed as having a learning disability based on the iq-achievement discrepancy model (dsm-iv), but organizations in india are moving towards the dsm-5 criteria (m. khan, personal communication, september 30, 2014). the terms “dyslexia,” “dysgraphia,” and “dyscalculia” are used synonymously for reading, writing, and math learning disabilities on the ld certificates in maharashtra. the occurrence of mld in india is believed to be 5.5% to 6% among primary school children (ramaa & gowramma, 2002; karande & kulkarni, 2005). due to the lack of uniformity in diagnosing learning disabilities, it is difficult to present an accurate picture of the number of students with mld in the country. there are no standardized measures available for students who study in vernacular-medium schools (where the language of instruction is not english) (alyagon, et al., 2013). also, there is a debate as to whether standardized tests used in western countries, such as the woodcock-johnson tests of cognitive abilities or the wechsler intelligence scale for children (wisc) are culturally appropriate for indian students who are studying in english-medium schools (alyagon et al., 2013). the wisc does have an indian adaptation test available for iq, yet there are no standardized measures for academic achievement (m. khan, personal communication, march 6, 2014). at this point, centers like the maharashtra dyslexia association (mda) use the academic achievement battery standardized on the u.s. and u.k. populations, but place emphasis on “error analysis and give a qualitative report with rationales for diagnosis and accommodations” (m. khan, personal communication, march 6, 2014). the ld clinics at nair and sion hospitals also use tests that are not standardized for the indian population, while kem hospital uses curriculum-based tests for students in englishmedium schools (al-yagon et al., 2013). more research needs to be done in order to develop curriculum-based tests for diagnosis of learning disabilities in india, especially in the 21 official indian languages, apart from english (al-yagon et al., 2013). india, as a nation, is incredibly diverse. with 28 states and 7 union territories, there are 30 languages spoken by more than one million people. there are additional languages and dialects as well. overall, it is very difficult to standardize a uniform assessment of learning, let alone of learning disabilities in india (unni, 2012). in india, education is a responsibility of both the national and state governments. the national government performs an advisory role, but allows states the freedom to adapt or adopt policy and curricula, since the context varies considerably from state to state (m. jain & k. sharma, personal communication, july 5, 2013). elementary education in india is defined by the ministry of human resource development (mhrd) as schooling up to 8th standard, or ages 6–14 (mhrd department of school education and literacy, 2015a). secondary education is for haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 79 students between the ages of 14 and 18, which corresponds to 9th–12th standard (mhrd department of school education and literacy, 2015b). in the state of maharashtra, however, elementary education is further divided into primary (1st–5th standards) and upper primary (6th– 8th standard). secondary education includes 9th and 10th standards, while 11th and 12th standards are known as higher secondary or senior secondary school (maharashtra prathamik shikshan parishad, 2015). higher secondary schools are often called junior colleges in mumbai. since this study took place in maharashtra, i will refer to higher secondary education as coursework following 10th standard and post-secondary education as all education following the 12th standard. each school and college in india is associated with a board, or curriculum, such as the indian certificate of secondary education (icse) board, the central board of secondary education (cbse) board, or a state board. in maharashtra, the state board is the secondary school certificate (ssc) board for primary and secondary schools, while the higher secondary board is the higher secondary certificate (hsc) board. depending on the board, students with mld in mumbai are eligible for “provisions,” or accommodations, ranging from extra time to dropping math after 8th standard (karande, 2008; karande & gogtay, 2010; kulkarni, et al., 2006; mda, 2014). these provisions were originally intended to function as a “corrective lens” to help students with ld continue in regular education (karande, n.d., slide 28; karande, sholapurwala, & kulkarni, 2011, p. 516). although these provisions, or accommodations, were envisioned to “level the play(ing) field” in secondary school, they can actually lead to gaps in math content knowledge and set students up for failure when these students transition to junior college (11th and 12th standard) and degree college (karande, 2008, p. 75). additionally, there is low awareness among teachers and parents, and many students in mumbai are not diagnosed with mld or other learning disabilities until 8th standard or later (karande & gogtay, 2010). by this time, it is difficult to remediate the many misconceptions that students have formed about mathematical ideas. in higher secondary education (11th and 12th standard) math is an elective subject. students in both higher secondary certificate (hsc – maharashtra state board) and indian school certificate (isc) junior colleges can opt out of mathematics. however, once students finish junior college (12th standard) and they pursue a bachelor’s degree in post-secondary educational institutions (degree colleges), students may need to take a required math course, depending on their degree program. so although there is a (non-math) course substitution, such as secretarial practice in hscaffiliated junior colleges, which serves as a program accommodation, students may still have to take a math course later on in their academic career (madaus, 2010). for instance, if a student pursues a bachelor’s degree in commerce, a math course is required in the first year. students with mld in india may enter secondary school without the foundation required for higher-level mathematics, including conceptual understanding of math, mastery and automaticity of basic math facts and skills, and problem-solving strategies. yet, math lecturers in higher secondary education assume and expect that students have already acquired the needed foundational knowledge and skills in previous classes. 80 global education review 3(3) figure 1. pathway to post-secondary education for students in mumbai, maharashtra. the students in this sample studied in ssc board and icse board schools in secondary school. this study focused on students with learning disabilities that had entered or completed the commerce stream and their math course options. mathematics and the transition to postsecondary education pursuing higher education improves a student’s chances of a higher income, opportunities for career advancement, achieving status, and becoming part of a life-long professional network (wehman & yasuda, 2005). however, students with mld are at a great disadvantage in pursuing post-secondary education and job options since they typically lag behind their peers in conceptual and procedural understanding of math knowledge, skills, and problem solving. according to ramaa & gowramma (2002), nearly half of the indian students with mld also have a learning disability in reading and writing. although students with math learning disabilities in india have a complex profile of strengths and challenges, their difficulties in math may limit their options and opportunities within postsecondary education (pennini, 2006). on the whole, very little is known about the transitional experience of post-secondary post-secondary/degree college (bachelor's degree) commerce (mathematical and statistical techniques) arts science management mass media law pharmacy medicine engineering architecture higher secondary/junior college (11th and 12th standard) commerce (math or secretarial practice) arts science secondary school (up to 10th standard) ssc board (general or lower-level math) icse board (option to drop math after 8th standard) cbse board (no alternative options) igcse board (core or extended level math) haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 81 students with mld in india. this study begins to address this knowledge gap. theoretical/conceptual framework the theoretical framework of critical theory in education was used to reflect on the way policies and practice affect students with mld, and can actually disempower them, as well contributing to marginalization and exclusion (arnesen, mietola, lahelma, 2007; erevelles, 2005; peters, 2005). specifically, this article used insights from the intersection of critical pedagogy and disability studies in education to analyze the ways indian educational policies and practices deny access to math content for people of various abilities (gabel, 2002). for instance, if education is viewed as a “practice of access,” then all students should have access to the curriculum and learning opportunities (baglieri, valle, connor, & gallagher, 2011, p. 272). however, pulling students out of the regular classroom, tracking, and offering certain accommodations, will continue to separate them, mark them as different or disabled, and can limit their access to the curriculum and opportunities to learn (baglieri, valle, connor, & gallagher, 2011). this pattern of distinctions creates systems and norms that include or exclude students, based on their ability (popkewitz, 2001). additionally, current methods of identifying students as having a learning “disability” are problematic. the eligibility criteria make judgements between what is “normal” and what is a learning “disability,” and often categorizes students attaching a stigma to their identity (baglieri, valle, connor, & gallagher, 2011; goffman, 1963). because learning disabilities are an invisible disability, students may reject accommodations to conceal their label and avoid the stigma, which goffman (1963) calls “information control” (p. 91). students may or may not be willing to embrace this aspect of their identity, based on how they imagine others will perceive them (schifter, 2015). however, all human differences and diversity is normal, including the continuum of math abilities (baglieri, valle, connor, & gallagher, 2011). yet, general educational systems, especially those in india, are inflexible (hehir, 2015b). instead of questioning the norms of educational systems, students’ disabilities, or differences, are seen as the problem. so often, the “‘problem’ of disability” is seen as being the student’s fault, instead of questioning why institutional norms and classroom practices have not been changed (hehir, 2015a, p. 181). in this article, therefore, the indian education policy and college practices toward students with learning disabilities are viewed as inflexible systems which do not allow for diversity of mathematical abilities. each finding is examined in light of this critical theory framework, emphasizing the ways students with mld are denied access to mathematical content through current policy and practice. methodology setting and participants this study took place in mumbai (formerly bombay), india’s most populous city between april 2012 and november 2013. mumbai is located in the state of maharashtra. the approximate population of the mumbai metropolitan region (comprising mumbai, navi mumbai, thane, vasai-virar, bhiwandi and panvel) is nearly 21 million, according to the 2011 census (press information bureau, government of india, 2011). the students in this study are from predominately middle and upper-middle class areas of mumbai. five secondary students were selected for in-depth case studies (one male in 8th standard, two females and one male in 9th standard, and one 10th standard female). all of these students had been tested for ld at mda, so they were 82 global education review 3(3) familiar with the organization. these students were chosen based on their ability to express themselves verbally and the parents’ willingness to be involved in this research. six adults (five male and one female) with learning disabilities with a bachelor’s degree were also interviewed. they had received remedial or testing services at mda or responded to our requests for participants through the indian psychological association list-serv. pseudonyms have been used for all participants with learning disabilities. permission was obtained to interview college math lecturers and administrators where mda had some prior affiliation or personal connection. other prominent colleges in south mumbai and in the suburbs that offered degrees in commerce were contacted. all college names and lecturer names are pseudonyms. semi-structured interviews were conducted with college lecturers and administrators (n = 18) in seven colleges. additional lecturers (n = 28) in four of the seven colleges were also asked to complete a survey (appended). the surveys gathered descriptive information about the lecturers and their views of the transition experience. six observations were conducted with an in math courses in two of the colleges using an observation protocol. a document review was completed of government resolution circulars in maharashtra, which outline the exam accommodations and quotas that are required for students with learning disabilities, as well as college and university math syllabi from maharashtra state board of secondary and higher secondary education (msbshse, pune) and mumbai university. results accommodations and supports for students with mld in secondary and post-secondary education secondary school counselors have advised students with mld to drop math or take lowerlevel math as early as possible (sometimes after 7th standard) (a. kumar, personal communication, november 27, 2012). yet, college lecturers (both at the junior college and degree college level) recommend that all students take math throughout their academic career (k. kapoor, personal communication, january 21, 2013). students who have been counseled to drop math or take a lower level math by secondary school counselors may not know all of the ramifications of their choice according to mr. kumar: “since we cannot change the syllabus, we can change the way we counsel students about math courses, especially secondary school counselors” (a. kumar, personal communication, november 27, 2012). in other words, educational professionals can advise students to make informed choices about dropping math or continuing their study of mathematics, based on their desired educational and career path, but don’t. once students complete secondary school (10th standard), they can enter higher secondary studies by attending a junior college. the choice of stream (arts, commerce, or science) is very important to students in junior college, and can limit their future education and career options. for example, students who enter the arts stream in junior college may only complete a bachelor of arts (b.a.) or a bachelor’s in mass media degree in degree college (m. bose, personal communication, february 18, 2013). most junior colleges in maharashtra are affiliated with the higher secondary certification board (hsc). when secondary students with mld transition to a hsc junior college, they receive an accommodation of half an hour extra time on each exam (two hours in duration) and do not have to draw figures. if the student fails the exam, he/she gets “20 grace marks to pass the exam” (government of maharashtra higher & technical educational department, 2004, p. 1). grace marks are extra points given to students who meet a certain criteria to help equalize their opportunity for haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 83 success, as opposed to grading on a curve for all students. student with mld can apply these grace marks to one subject, or spread them across subjects. students identified as having a mld are not penalized for number reversals (government of maharashtra higher & technical educational department, 2004). degree colleges (for bachelor’s and master’s degrees) are affiliated with the university of mumbai. the same accommodations listed for the junior colleges above are available at the degree college level (mda, 2014). if students apply for the ld accommodations in higher secondary and postsecondary education, they have to take their exams in a separate room to receive extra time. vinod did not want to seem different from his peers, so he did not ask for accommodations in college for his learning disabilities: it is not always so easy to ask for help. if you get provisions, then you have to take your exam in a different room. you will be seated in the roll number order during the exam. people will notice you aren’t there and they will ask you, “why didn’t you give your exam?” “where were you?” no one was aware that i had a learning disability in college. (vinod, personal communication, april 25, 2013) if students have difficulty understanding the math concepts in junior college and degree college, most lecturers will offer extra classes. however, these are open to all students and are not remedial classes. the lecturer might be able to give more attention to students, but he/she does not use alternative teaching methods to explain the concepts. only a few colleges in south mumbai offer special “dyslexia cells.” these “cells,” or programs, are primarily for support services for students with learning disabilities (a. kumar, personal communication, november 27, 2012; r. archarya, personal communication, february 11, 2013; getzel & thoma, 2008). some students chose not to selfdisclose their learning disability to postsecondary faculty and do not avail the provisions (getzel, 2008). post-college adults remarked that they felt scared to ask lecturers for help during college. some of these overcame their fears during degree college due to strong self-determination skills, yet others reported feelings of being judged by lecturers and were afraid of what their peers might think if they found out they had learning disabilities. one lecturer mentioned that students in his college were afraid to meet him for extra help during school hours: most students with ld do not disclose their diagnosis. they get bullied. other students are very strong and harsh towards students with ld. in fact, many students do not want to meet me during school hours, for fear that their peers might see them getting extra help. (a. kumar, personal communication, november 27, 2012) participants with mld are also impacted by the level of support in their home and school environment. students with mld in this sample, such as vaibhav and kunal, had access to remedial education and private tutoring. kunal reported how he passed the mathematical and statistical techniques course: i took secretarial practice (s.p.) in junior college, so i had a gap of 2 years with no mathematics. plus, i wasn’t really comfortable with math in the first place. during my first year of b. com., i had a private tutor. he came to my house three days a week and taught me for two hours. then, he gave me homework and practice problems. for six days a week, i studied math. i had to work really hard at math. . . . . . if you dedicate your time, and study for three hours a day, you can easily get 18 84 global education review 3(3) marks on a 50 mark paper (which is 36%, just enough for the passing rate of 35%). (kunal, personal communication, march 13, 2013) kunal was solely focused on passing the class. certain colleges, like shri ram, offer special programs for students with learning disabilities. thus, students with mld can be further supported for post-secondary success and their math abilities, depending on their environment. however, many students with mld have difficulty meeting post-secondary mathematics demands. students with mld may have conceptual gaps in understanding, visual-spatial deficits and/or difficulties with word problems. due to the hierarchical nature of mathematics, students with mld are not prepared for postsecondary math demands if they have fallen behind their peers in primary and secondary school (strawser & miller, 2001). the government of maharashtra and the higher secondary certificate board have attempted to put some supports in place for students with mld in the post-secondary setting, such as curricular accommodations and exam concessions. if the current accommodations are viewed through the lens of critical theory, they are performing an exclusionary role. in other words, students with mld are excluded from math content and pre-requisite skills in secondary school, such as algebra, which are required for a degree college math course. the current policies for students with mld are a quick fix, but ignore the root of the problem gaps in math content and foundational skills. college policies and procedures in mathematics and the effect on students with mld in junior colleges, there is a 3% quota (or reservation) for admission to 11th standard for physically handicapped students, which includes visually impaired students, speech and hearing impaired students, and students with orthopedic disorders and learning disabilities (dyslexia, dysgraphia, and dyscalculia) (maharashtra secondary and higher secondary state education department, 2001). the 3% quota is based on merit, irrespective of the disability (m. khan, personal communication, april 19, 2016). according to the syllabus for standards 11 and 12, college students only have three compulsory subjects: english, environment education, and health and physical education. students can then choose four other electives (42 electives are listed in the syllabus) to complete the required coursework each year (maharashtra state board of secondary and higher secondary education, 2012). however, at all of the colleges in this sample, students must choose, as one of their electives, either mathematics or secretarial practice (s.p.). s.p. requires no mathematical skill. the students need only to understand english (s.p. college lecturer, personal communication, december 19, 2012). s.p. does not serve as a mathematical subject option. it is an entirely unrelated subject. in some colleges, students have an open choice between math and s.p.; yet other colleges have a cut-off score requirement in order to have access to math courses and all other students must take s.p. at ambedkar college, only students who have scored 87-88% on their 10th standard exam are eligible to enroll in 11th and 12th standard math classes. all other students take secretarial practice (s.p.) at ambedkar (l. ghose, personal communication, february 6, 2013). the case is the same at singh college, except the acceptable passing percentage on the 10th standard exam is a little lower at 83% (or 125 out of 150). only students who qualify for math based on their 10th standard exam score in math are eligible to enroll in math in 11th standard (v. jha, personal communication, february 6, 2013). at st. joseph junior college, if a student took general math or lower-level math for their 10th standard haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 85 exam (an accommodation for students with mld in the ssc board), they are ineligible to enroll in 11th standard math (u. jain, personal communication, january 21, 2013). the degree college math lecturers reported that they expect students to have the prerequisite skills and knowledge from having taken math continuously through 12th standard (k. kapoor, personal communication, january 21, 2013). a degree college math lecturer adamantly reported that students who take secretarial practice, then enroll in the mathematical and statistical techniques course are not prepared for it: “these students have a lot of difficulty, especially with word problems. they have difficulty figuring out what is given, what is asked, applying formulas, like with profit percentage” (m. bose, personal communication, february 18, 2013). a lecturer from shri ram college, as well as another lecturer from ambedkar college, also reported that any secondary student that drops math is not prepared to take math at the college level (survey, february 18, 2013). according to a review of the mathematical and statistical techniques course syllabus and textbooks, students must have pre-requisite understanding of algebraic concepts, such as linear equations and functions (welling, saraph, and diwanji, 2013; joshi et al., 2011). students must complete all of the math by hand in this course. calculators are permitted for all students in degree college, but statistical software is not available in the colleges in this sample (shri ram college, observation, february 11, 2013). college math lecturers reported through surveys that the most important skills that students need for their classes are reasoning skills, problem solving skills, and algebraic concepts. considering the current practices of junior colleges through the lens of critical theory, students who take secretarial practice are denied access to pre-requisite math content required for a bachelor’s degree in commerce based on their math abilities as measured by their 10th standard exam results. the seemingly simple choice between secretarial practice and mathematics in junior college may not be a choice at all, and may further reinforce systems of exclusion based on mathematical ability. discussion math learning disabilities do not disappear with time, and students with mld will continue to face difficulties as they enter secondary school and higher secondary education (mazzocco, devlin, & mckinney, 2008; vogel, fresko, & wertheim, 2007; shalev, manor, & gross-tsur, 2005). students with mld also need continued practice and review of foundational math skills (fuchs et al., 2013). this suggests the need for continued instruction of critical component skills and math content in secondary and postsecondary education. for students with mld, the gap in math knowledge and skills may have started in primary school, due to their atypical understanding of math concepts and possible deficits in number sense, working memory, processing, and attention. yet, these difficulties can be exacerbated for secondary students with mld in maharashtra due to current special education policies, including dropping mathematics (icse board), taking a lower-level math exam (ssc board), or applying 20 grace marks to a student’s failed exam to enable them to pass (ssc board). these policies are focused on helping students pass the 10th standard exams, but do not prepare them for postsecondary education. instead, the current policies allow students to have gaps in critical component skills and math content. students, parents, and secondary school counselors must understand the gap of necessary mathematical knowledge, skills, and strategies that will continue to widen if students take lower level math or drop math, and later on, take secretarial practice instead of math. viewing this gap from 86 global education review 3(3) the lens of critical theory in education, when junior colleges force students into s.p., they are performing a gate-keeping role by excluding certain students from the opportunity to continue math instruction. also, by offering a non-math substitute, like s.p., the junior colleges are continuing to marginalize students with mld in the transition. if enrolled in s.p., students with mld receive no re-teaching in critical mathematical skills during the two years of junior college. this limits their access to the mathematical curriculum, as well as restricts their opportunities to learn important math concepts required for a bachelor’s degree in commerce. lecturers in this sample reported that students who take secretarial practice instead of math during 11th and 12th standard are not prepared for the required math course for the first year of a bachelor’s degree in commerce. students with mld that took secretarial practice in junior college, then opted for a bachelor’s degree in commerce reported that they felt shocked and had to work extremely hard during the mathematical and statistical techniques class in their first year (vinod, personal communication, april 25, 2013; kunal, personal communication, march 13, 2013). some students are able to scrape by and pass, but others fail the math course and have to repeat the entire year. lecturers for the degree college math course assume that students have taken math throughout their academic career and have the pre-requisite skills through 12th standard mathematics. kunal reflected on his transition: “math keeps coming back. i might have a gap of 2-3 years of no math, but then i have to take another course” (personal communication, march 13, 2013). it is as if math is haunting him throughout his educational experience. these findings are consistent with current research on the hierarchical nature of mathematics and access to post-secondary education. according to strawser & miller (2001), students with mld will not be prepared for post-secondary math demands, if they have fallen behind their peers in primary and secondary school. also, students must have access to the general education curriculum and national standards to ensure positive academic outcomes and to prepare them for future steps (maccini & gagnon, 2002). lack of preparation for the mathematical and statistical techniques course (required for a bachelor’s degree in commerce) may be due to the fact that students with mld have not had access to or success in algebra, which has been referred to as an academic passport or a “gateway to expanded opportunities” (impecoven-lind & foegen, 2010, p. 31; fennel, 2008; lacampagne, blair, & kaput, 1995; maccini, mcnaughton, & ruhl, 1999). but, in order to succeed in algebra, students need a strong foundation in the prerequisite skills needed for algebra, such as fractions, decimals, percentages, ratio and proportion, problem solving, and even basic multiplication (fennell, 2008). it is imperative that students with mld in india have access to algebra so that they are not held back by the “gatekeeper” to educational and economic success (impecoven-lind & foegen, 2010, p. 32). another reason for lack of preparation is that junior colleges are performing a gatekeeping role and excluding students, by enforcing an eligibility score for mathematics courses in junior college, based on students’ performance on the 10th standard exam. when students are excluded from math in junior college, they lose additional pre-requisite skills that are required for the mathematical and statistical techniques course in b.com. if students fail this math course, they have to repeat the entire year of first-year b.com., and many of them experience similar difficulties in accounts and economics later in the coursework (s. parikh, personal communication, august 23, haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 87 2013). considering the current practices of junior colleges through the lens of critical theory, students who take secretarial practice are denied access to pre-requisite math content required for a bachelor’s degree in commerce based on their math abilities as measured by their 10th standard exam results. these findings were consistent with other international research on students with mld and transition to post-secondary education. therefore, the findings may have practical implications for special education policy at the secondary and post-secondary level, as outlined below. conclusions and recommendations it is very difficult to repair foundational deficits in math understanding once the student reaches post-secondary education. interventions are most effective when they are conducted early in a student’s academic career (dowker, 2005; nelson & sheridan, 2011; vanderheyden, 2008). also, in the indian educational system, students are not rewarded for understanding the math content or for increasing their mathematical literacy. instead, the goal is to simply pass the exam or pass the course (usually by memorizing). these findings suggest that current special education policy and junior college practices in maharashtra do not prepare students with mld for the math knowledge that they need to succeed in post-secondary mathematics. although the current policy may enable students with mld to pass the 10th standard exam, they, on average, lack critical component skills and math content required for post-secondary math courses. also, students with mld can be “forced” into taking secretarial practice for two years of junior college, excluding them from two additional years of math content and review of pre-requisite skills needed for the mathematical and statistical techniques course in the bachelor of commerce degree program. through the lens of critical theory, current policy and practice is segregating students with mld and denying them of essential math content needed for certain degree college programs. the current system is very rigid and does not cater to individual students’ needs, perhaps an artifact of an education system that must educate, uniformly, such a huge population. in order to help mld students be better prepared for secondary and post-secondary mathematics, there are three major systemic changes that can be instituted in the indian education system. these systemic changes should include: professional development for primary teachers, multiple math course options in secondary and post-secondary education, and awareness training for teachers and lecturers at the secondary and post-secondary level. first, primary school teachers should be provided with continued professional development that prepares them to identify students who are struggling with math early on and to use varied teaching methods to help students understand math concepts. since the gap between students with mld and typically achieving students emerges before they leave secondary school, primary teachers should identify students with math learning disabilities and difficulties in mathematics in the early stages of learning. the current practice of identifying students in 8th standard or later is difficult for intervention and the gap between these two groups of students will only widen in later years. for early intervention, teachers need math screening tools, multiple strategies to teach conceptual and procedural math skills, and knowledge and experience in math remediation. the maharashtra secondary school certificate (ssc) board and maharashtra state department of education can be involved in facilitating early math screening in primary 88 global education review 3(3) schools (english-medium as well as vernacularmedium). since the national government does not yet recognize learning disabilities, this information is not included in the bachelor’s degree in education syllabus at this time. therefore, teachers need additional pre-service and in-service training on identifying math difficulties and strategies for teaching students so they better understand math concepts early on and throughout primary and secondary school. teacher educators and teachers need access to teacher guides that accompany the textbook and outline specific strategies for teaching students with misconceptions and atypical understandings in mathematics, keeping in large class sizes in mind. professional development should include video examples of math remediation (since there are few experts in this area in india) in one-to-one, small group, and large group settings – so that teachers can observe methods of math remediation and snapshots of engagement with students with mld. the national council for educational research and training (ncert) has the capability to offer math remedial training through satellite and video conferencing to regional education institutes. the videos can also be uploaded on their website so that private school teachers can also view them. second, students with mld need multiple math course options throughout their secondary and post-secondary education. current curriculum board policies allow students with mld to drop math in secondary school (icse) or take a lower-level math exam without targeted instruction (ssc). however, secondary students with mld need continued practice and review of foundational math skills, as well as access to the grade-level curriculum, to be prepared for post-secondary math demands (strawser & miller, 2001). only one math class per standard, or year, is presently offered. yet, the data suggests that students with mld need more flexibility in math course options, including more time to complete all math tasks. course options continue to be an issue for students with mld in junior college. students with mld are not prepared for degree college mathematics because junior colleges are performing a gatekeeping role and excluding students, by enforcing an eligibility score for mathematics courses in junior college, based on students’ performance on the 10th standard exam. when students are excluded from math in junior college, they lose additional pre-requisite skills that are required for the mathematical and statistical techniques course in b.com. the higher secondary certificate (hsc) board can examine the exclusive practices of mumbai junior colleges in mathematics courses, as well as consider offering additional math courses to include students with various math abilities. third, secondary school teachers and college lecturers should be aware of learning disabilities as well, since the difficulties students with mld have in math will not disappear as they transition from primary to secondary and on to post-secondary education. during the data collection, there were only a few lone lecturers that were aware of mld and really wanted to advocate for these students, such as professor kumar at ambedkar college. college administrators questioned the authenticity of learning disability certificates and thought parents were taking advantage of the system of concessions, or accommodations. lecturers were unsure as to what mld was and how it impacted students’ learning. post-college adults remarked that they felt scared to ask lecturers for help. one lecturer even mentioned that current students in his college are scared to meet him for extra help during school hours, for fear that their peers might see them and later bully them. the maharashtra state board of secondary and higher secondary and mumbai university need to take an active role in leading an awareness campaign. when teachers gain knowledge of learning disabilities and the students’ need for haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 89 accommodations, they may form more positive attitudes towards these students (karande, sholapurwala, & kulkarni, 2011; saravanabhavan & saravanabhavan, 2001). in turn, students may find the lecturers more approachable for help. students with math learning disabilities need allies in learning – people who do not limit their achievement, but believe in intellectual growth and the talent of all students (dweck, 2006). additionally, teachers and lecturers can help typically achieving students to be more aware of the rationale behind the provisions and accommodations for students with learning disabilities, which may reduce bullying (karande, mahajan, & kulkarni, 2009). implications for policy makers these findings will be useful for inclusive education advocacy groups in india as they work with policy makers and enforcers at the national and state level, as they revise policy and procedures for students with learning disabilities in maharashtra and india. future researchers can build upon the present work by investigating students with mld from various socio-economic backgrounds in maharashtrian government (vernacular-medium) schools, as well as considering degree programs in professional (architecture, engineering, etc.) and vocational (management and mass media) streams. additionally, educational researchers might explore special education policies in other indian states. author note the author wishes to thank the maharashtra dyslexia association in mumbai for their support of this study. references american psychological association (apa). 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(2008). implementing cra with secondary students with learning disabilities in mathematics. intervention in school and clinic, 43(5), 270–276. doi: 10.1177/1053451208314734 about the author melinda (mindy) s. eichhorn, ed.d., is an assistant professor of education at gordon college. she currently teaches courses in special education and elementary methods in mathematics. she lived and worked in india for more than 6 years prior to living in massachusetts. haunted by math: mld policy in mumbai, india 93 appendix survey for college lecturers 1. which classes do you teach (include level)? 2. for how long have you been teaching at the college level? 3. do you feel that secondary students are prepared to enter college? yes no 4. why or why not? 5. overall, what skills do students have? 6. what skills do students need to improve on? 7. how many students are enrolled in your class? 8. on a typical day, how many students come to class? 9. what are the minimum criteria to pass in your college (actual test score, etc.)? 10. what methods of math instruction do you use in your class on a weekly basis (please tick all that apply)? lecture group work solving sums during class other, list here: _____________________________ 11. do you give homework following your class? yes no 12. if so, how much do you give per week? 13. what is your opinion about students’ success: the student is responsible for his/her own success the college supports students in their academic success 14. explain your choice above 15. please rank the following math skills as low (l), medium (m), or high (h) – depending on which skills are most important in your field of study:  algebra l m h  geometry l m h  statistics l m h  trigonometry l m h  calculus l m h 16. please rank the following cognitive skills as low (l), medium (m), or high (h) – depending on which skills are most important in your field of study:  analytical skills l m h  interpretation l m h  precision and accuracy l m h  problem solving l m h  reasoning l m h  time management l m h  strategic study skills l m h  persistence l m h  ability to use study groups l m h 17. do you allow students to use calculators in your class? yes no 18. why or why not? the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 101 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ngalawa, athanas, simmt, elaine & glanfield, florence (2015). exploring the emergence of community support for school and encouragement of innovation for improving rural school performance: lessons learned at kitamburo in tanzania. global education review, 2(4). 101125 exploring the emergence of community support for school and encouragement of innovation for improving rural school performance: lessons learned at kitamburo in tanzania athanas ngalawa mzumbe university, united republic of tanzania elaine simmt university of alberta, canada florence glanfield university of alberta, canada abstract this article describes a qualitative exploration of a primary school in a remote rural community of tanzania, whose students showed promising performance in mathematics, as measured by the primary school leaving examinations (psle). case study methods were used to conduct research about the school and the community and included interviews, focus groups, and observations. this paper describes the role of community leadership in generating a learning community (warren, 2005), that initiated community support of the school, which in turn prompted teachers’ innovations in professional development, that improved teaching and learning in mathematics and contributed to the observed promising performance on the psle. the article concludes that although school principals and teachers are regarded as keys in generating professional learning communities (dufour, dufour, & eaker, 2008), under good community leadership communities may be essential catalysts in establishing and sustaining professional learning communities which may contribute to school improvement. keywords school-community connectedness, tanzania, mathematics, learning communities, sequential sampling introduction similar to many nations, tanzania is focused on improving the education of its children and youth through improving schools. literature suggests that school-community connectedness is vital for improving school performance and corresponding author: athanas ngalawa, university, mzumbe university main campus, institute of development studies, p. o. box 83 mzumbe, tanzania, east africa. email: aangalawa@mzumbe.ac.tz 102 global education review 2(4) enhancing better community life (hewitt, 2006; lortie, 1975; stefl-mabry & lynch, 2006; unesco, 2012). this research was conducted in kitamburo, a rural community in tanzania. the community was studied to better understand the relationships that bind the community and the school. tanzania is basically a rural and agrarian community (hyden, 1980; stahl, 1961). after 70 years of european colonialism (stahl, 1961) followed by more than 50 years of independence gained in 1961, 70% of the approximately 45 million people of the united republic of tanzania reside in rural areas (united republic of tanzania, 2014, p. ix), with agriculture as the main economic activity (p. xi). the agricultural sector employs about 80% of the total population and contributes to approximately 45% of the country’s gross domestic product (gdp), and 30% of export earnings (united republic of tanzania, 2009). with an understanding of the importance of agriculture in improving the national economy, education in tanzania was one of the long accepted driving forces with the potential to improve agricultural productivity, the lives of the rural population, and ultimately national development. despite the efforts of the government to increase school enrollment, and to recognize the place of education in national development, actual practices were not promising. the expansion of both primary and secondary schools in tanzania did not bring quality education as expected due, in part, to poor preparation and remuneration of teachers, and to poor budgetary allocation for school infrastructure and teaching and learning materials (masenge, 2012). consequently, school performance has always been poor. in tanzania the primary school leaving examination (psle) conducted across the country, consists of one examination paper for each of the five subjects: swahili (kiswahili), english, general knowledge (maarifa), mathematics and science. almost 50% of all primary school leavers fail the psle by scoring an overall d or e grade (masenge, 2012). primary school failure rates for the five consecutive years of 2007, 2008, 2009, 2010 and 2011 were respectively 46%, 47%, 51%, 46% and 45% (necta, 2012). further, the failure rate of mathematics for the same five years were respectively 83%, 82%, 79%, 75%, and 61% (necta, 2012); failure rates in mathematics have consistently exceeded other subjects (masenge, 2012). whereas the failure rate can be explained from different points of view, one area worth considering is the relationship between teachers, students, and parents. the situation in tanzania reflects poor relationships between the said parties, who are key stakeholders of schools, particularly primary schools. in one primary school in tanzania, a grade 2 student went to school with a dilapidated school uniform which showed his private organs. a teacher ordered the child to go back home to fix the uniform. the father of the child went to school and caned the teacher because he did not find that a good reason for sending his child back home (raphael, 2014, july 29). another parent in a different school visited her child’s school to request clarification about school contributions that parents were required to pay to support the education of their children. she was jeered and chased by students after receiving an order from the school’s head teacher (kumba, 2014, august 14). this scenario, in contrast to the context of a school with community support, prompted the question: how do schools and communities in tanzania work together to generate learning communities? the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 103 conceptual framework the researcher approached the study using a community capabilities framework (ccf). community capabilities framework originates from an understanding that every human being has the capacity, real or potential, for self realization and uses that realization to act accordingly to support his/her survival and positive progress (ellis, 2000). this study adopted the perception that community capacity is “the collective ability of a group (the community) to combine various forms of capital within institutional and relational contexts to produce desired results or outcomes” (beckley et al., 2008, pp. 60–61). while the conditions that prompted the proposed study was students’ relatively better performance in mathematics at kitamburo primary school; observed school-community connectedness, and parents’ participation in meetings, the underlying conditions which led to those known aspects about kitamburo were not known. the study investigated the community conditions which prompted the emergence of community support, which contributed to improving the teaching and learning of mathematics at kitamburo primary school and the subsequent promising school performances. methodology the background of this paper is an international research project involving researchers from university of alberta and brock university of canada; and mzumbe university of tanzania and the institute for educational development, eastern africa, aga khan university in tanzania. the purpose of the partnership was to research possibilities for primary mathematics teacher development in rural and remote communities in tanzania. to familiarize themselves with the tanzanian context, the research team of eight researchers visited various institutions responsible for education in tanzania. after the familiarization visits, the team divided the broader research project into five small case studies: district leadership case, governance case, programming case, school case and teacher college case. the cases were meant to identify promising practices so as to inform the broader study and ultimately develop prototypes for improving the teaching and learning of mathematics. this paper is informed by findings of the school case study. data collection for the school case was conducted at kitamburo community between 2011 and 2014. kitamburo was chosen after having shown persistent promising performance in mathematics measured by psle. the school case involved two consecutive studies: the prestudy and the detailed follow-up case study. the purpose of the pre-study was to find out why students in the selected school performed better in mathematics by investigating a) the role of teachers in students’ performance b) the role of parents in students’ performance and c) the role of the general community in students’ performance. data of the pre-study school case was collected by interviewing 15 teachers of kitamburo primary school, one education officer of the district where kitamburo belongs and, ward education coordinator of a ward where kitamburo belongs. in addition, one focus group discussion was conducted with 12 villagers of kitamburo community. data collected in the pre-study was analysed and results showed that the promising performances of kitamburo primary school were primarily a function of a strong collaboration between the school and the community. while the pre-study helped researchers understand what was taking place at the school, the underlying conditions which led to the emergence of that community support was not known. the detailed follow-up case study 104 global education review 2(4) investigated the community conditions which prompted the emergence of community support operating at kitamburo primary school. the detailed follow-up case study aimed to learn, from participants, how the community support at kitamburo emerged and worked to make kitamburo primary school show promising performance in mathematics compared to other schools in similar rural settings. selection of focus group participants the pre-study used purposive selection of respondents. all 16 teachers of kitamburo primary school were chosen for interview, though in practice only 15 were interviewed because one teacher was attending in-service studies and could not be reached. teachers were selected because they were the people who taught the students who showed promising performance in mathematics upon writing their examinations. the 12 community members who participated in the focus group discussion were also selected purposely well in advance of the discussion with help from the village management team, after the objective of the study was explained to them by the research team. the detailed follow-up case study used purposive sequential selection of participants (neuman, 2003). sequential selection of research participants refers to a situation whereby a researcher continues to select more participants until there is no significant new information from new respondents. sequential selection was found more suitable for this study because it is an ongoing selection process (merriam, 1988) without a predetermined total number of respondents as the total number depends on a “situation of diminishing returns” (wellington, 2000, p. 139). thus, the detailed follow-up case study started by recruiting the village chairperson and the village executive officer of kitamburo village. through them, five additional members of the village government were selected to make a team of seven respondents who provided information through participation in a focus group discussion. the selection of the five members based on age and gender. thus two were female and three were male; of the five two were more than 60 years old, one was between 20 years and 30 years old and two were between 30 years and 40 years old. data collection started by a holding focus group discussion with the seven people and was followed by individual interviews with selected respondentsat the end of the focus group, the researcher requested that participants identify six villagers who, to the best of their knowledge, would be able to provide information about the question that dominated the focus group discussion. participants were given a chance to suggest a name and participants then voted. names were selected after being voted “yes” by at least five participants of the focus group. after getting the six additional names, the researcher conducted individual interviews with each of them. at the end of each interview, the researcher invited the interviewee to provide three additional names of villagers who, to the best of his/her knowledge, would be capable of telling more about the subject of the conversation. after finishing interviews with the six people, the researcher went through the list of names that interviewees provided and arranged the names in order beginning with the most frequent name. the researcher used the list to continue with interviews beginning with the name that was mentioned by the most people to the name that was mentioned the least. thus, in total 15 people were involved in individual interviews and seven in focus group discussion, making a total of 22 participants. although the researcher had a long list of potential participants during the process, he decided to stop the interviews because there was no significant new information gathered from new interviewee. table 1 presents summary of participants. the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 105 table 1 summary of research participants s/no type of participants number data collected 1 district education officer 1 interview 2 ward education coordinator 1 interview 3 school head teacher 1 interview and focus group discussion upon follow-up data collection 4 school teachers 14 interview and focus group discussion upon follow-up data collection 5 community members 12 focus group discussion 6 community members 15 interview 7 community members 7 focus group discussion table 1 methods of data collection data in both the pre-study and the detailed follow-up study was mainly collected through interviews. a basic interview guide was prepared and contextualized during field interviews on the basis of the status of the interviewee. focus group discussions were also guided by questions that were prepared well in advance. each interview session took 40 to 55 minutes and was carried out at relevant time and space according to respondents’ and researcher preferences. at the end of each interview, the respondent was requested to mention a pseudonym of his or her choice which is used in the research report and this paper. other data collection techniques were observation, document review and focus groups. the researcher recorded instances of specific events and behavior as suggested by merriam (1988) on a coded sheet of paper prepared well in advance for that purpose. documents reviewed in this study included certificates of award to the village, a football trophy, active and archival school and village documents, relevant individual letters of selected participants, and school and village buildings. all these were interpreted with reference to their potential contribution to the community commitment to support the school. in all cases when focus groups were used, the question for discussion was posed to the participants who were then allowed to respond voluntarily. the researcher moderated the discussion to insure it was within the topic. both directive and nondirective techniques were used to let participants contribute to the agenda. interviews and focus group discussions were audio recorded, then transcribed in kiswahili which was the language of communication and then translated for use. before using the information, respondents had the chance to read the transcription and confirm that what was transcribed represent what he/she had said. analysis of data data analysis was part and parcel of the data collection as recommended by wellington (2000, p. 134). the researcher started with data reduction. data reduction is the “selection and condensation” of the collected data into “themes, clusters and categories” (wellington, 2000, p. 134). after reduction, data was displayed (wellington, 2000) in order to have a visible conception of data and charting out potential 106 global education review 2(4) relationships that helped to lead to the conclusion. data display was done with a conception of framework of the study as suggested by yin (2009). this study was framed in the community capacity model and thus at that point the researcher visualized the community strengths, the community mechanisms, and the outputs for purposes of identifying possible catalysts conditions that led to the emergence of community support at kitamburo. data was analysed in relation to specific research questions and the conceptual framework. finally, conclusions which informed this paper were drawn. the study area kitamburo community is a rural community in the southern highlands of tanzania. it is located at the edges of a plateau within the general wider plateau that characterized the administrative district to which it belongs. it is about 40 km from the municipality which is also the headquarters of the administrative region to which kitamburo belongs. however, due to the poor roads that characterize most rural areas in tanzania, it takes about 90 minutes using a powerful vehicle like land-cruiser to reach the kitamburo community. of the 90 minutes, 30 minutes are needed to drive the 7 km from the district headquarters to the community. there was only one public transport vehicle (a bus) which passed through the community towards the regional headquarters and back to a village next to kitamburo. until 2009, the community belonged to one administrative village, but due to an increase in population it was divided into two administrative villages, kitamburo and ndolu. both the pre-study and the detailed case study approached the community as one entity and thus involved participants from both administrative villages. the approximate altitude of kitamburo is 1700m—2100m. rainy season is between november and may. the average annual rainfall in the community was 1000 mm. soils were predominantly red clay with dark top soil and were generally slippery when it rained. the main vegetation was forest and grassland. forests were predominantly manmade and most tree varieties were exotic indicating a deliberate effort at forestation by community members. trees were used for timber and fuel. the main economic activity in the community was crop cultivation. major crops were maize, vegetables and fruits. animal and bird keeping is also practiced. of the 15 interviews, 9 were conducted in the homes of the respondents. most household compounds had more than one house—a big house and small houses nearby. in most cases, the big house was relatively good and it was for sleeping and used as a sitting room, although some households had an independent house for a sitting room. other houses in the compounds were used as kitchens and for storage of food and other belongings of the household. none of the compounds had a kitchen inside the house. the overall scenario at kitamburo suggested that, economically, most community members had already moved out of abject poverty and were working their own pieces of land. however, the community had no dispensary, no supply of tap water and no big shops to purchase consumables. kitamburo primary school is located a few meters from the centre of the community. the school curriculum the school followed the national curriculum. subjects taught were mathematics, english, kiswahili, science, history, geography, civics, information and communication technology, domestic science and personality. these subjects were taught by 16 teachers who constituted the school teaching staff, including the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 107 table 2 the teachers’ years of service and teaching at kitamburo primary school interviewee 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 years of teaching 26 16 09 11 01 17 03 11 months 37 02 07 05 26 21 30 years at kitamburo 26 16 09 11 01 17 03 11 months 01 02 07 05 26 11 06 source: field data collection, 2011. table 2 the head teacher. including the incumbent head teacher, the school had employed eight different head teachers since 1975 when it was established. at the time of data collection, most teachers had been at the school for many years. table 2 shows a summary of teachers with the respective number of years they served at kitamburo primary school. in addition 12 of 15 teachers interviewed (80%) had the same number of years of service and years of staying in kitamburo, indicating that , they were not transferred to another school. moreover, whereas some teachers stayed for as many as 26 years in the school; six teachers had stayed in the school for 5 years or less, which provided the opportunity for mentorship by long-term experienced teachers. findings origin of the village the researcher approached kitamburo community as a single entity. data indicated that kitamburo started as a traditional settlement. while respondents knew little of the genealogical history of the community, they had insights about its emergence with one villager saying, “this village originates from up there. it was established in a land that belonged to my father.” (interview notes with kijogoo, 21/01/2014). another villager recalled, “when we started to join together and establish this village we had no strangers.” (interview notes with severina mkaluka, 18/01/2014). this indicated that founder community members were tied by blood relationships. none of the respondents could remember the exact number of residents who made up the community when it started, but village documents indicated that kitamburo started in the year 1968 with 38 founder households. a founding member of the community, galamula magobe, recalled the difficulties that villagers had in starting the community, saying, the village started with a lot of difficulties. this village was as if not well recognized and even if it was recognized it was as if there will be a certain loss in it. (interview notes with galamula magobe, 22/01/2014) from the beginning people were not sure whether joining in the village would help them to make positive progress or if they would be just wasting their time and resources because the village emerged from: a women faith based association. they were neighbors. the association included both clan members and nonclan members. (interview notes with galamula magobe, 22/01/2014) kitamburo community started as a village and the village emerged from member association. this suggested the existence of commonalities amongst association members who later turned to village members. the 108 global education review 2(4) association was called the “kitamburo lutheran church women association group” (interview notes with kijogoo, 21/01/2014). villagers did not remember the exact number of founding members and had mixed memories about the total number. while some said seven (interview with severina mkaluka, 18/01/2014), others said eight (interview notes with kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014), however reports consistently indicated there were fewer than 10. the association’s religious affiliation suggests the role of foreign ideas as a catalyst in the life of kitamburo community members since the roots of the lutheran church involved are not african. it seems clear though that common religious beliefs inside the church influenced founders to join together as an association, this extension from church might have been motivated by different things, but one probable motivation was a search for a tangible better life in the present rather than waiting for better life after death. an immediate result of the community’s efforts to create a tangible good life was more crop production. this prompted the association to request a piece of land so that they could establish joint crop cultivation activities. when asked how the association of few members grew to a big community, respondents responded that: in the course of farming [the association joint farm] the women cultivated wheat in the first year. in the next year the wheat did so well this made other people including men to join the group. (interview notes with kijogoo, 21/01/2014) this meant when men found women making progress on their farm, they decided to join them. joining the women’s association was not the only option for men. the men could easily have decided to use the patriarchal system widely practiced at that time in african culture to prohibit women from working in the association. the fact that the men did not revert to the patriarchal system with regard to the farm indicated that people at kitamburo had the urge to have a working strategy as a way out of the poverty in which they were living. the people’s urge for positive change was evidenced by one respondent who said: people in this highlands are pro changes, they like changes. (interview notes with kingie mnyumba 22/01/2014) the women’s decision to accept men into an association initiated by women implied recognition of the potency of diversity in having things done. it also reflected mutual trust between men and women. men trusted that women could do something and women trusted that the men would bring added value to the association. the association had females as founding members and was led by a female. when the women association group absorbed many members, mahugila the founder and leader found it difficult to lead and decided to delegate the leadership of the group to her brother. (interview notes with kijogoo, 21/01/2014) the decision by men to join an association initiated and led by women raised management challenges that made mahugila, the founder and leader of the women’s association, step down and hand over leadership to a brother, chipwasa. after leading the association for about two years, her brother handed over the leadership to yet another brother, milonge. village documents indicate that kitamburo community, which emerged from a women’s association with a woman as founding leader, had only that one woman leader throughout its existence. the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 109 these two milonge and mahugila were true brother and sister [were son and daughter of the same couple], and chipwasa though did not belong to same family belonged to the same clan so they were relatives. (interview notes with galamula magobe, 22/01/2014) although individual leaders changed, it is noteworthy that leaders were from the same clan and the same family background and thus provides reason to believe that the village was, for a long time, under the leadership of people who had a similar worldview. milonge spent more than 20 years as a village chairperson. villagers recounted that he had personal characteristics that made people love and trust him and thus they were willing to implement almost whatever he proposed. beginning of the school respondents recalled that literacy levels were extremely low when the community began. they noted that during those days: there were very few who could read and write. it was even difficult to get people who could take attendance of villagers in joint village activities. (interview notes with kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014) this had changed dramatically by the time the data were collected for this study when all respondents, males and females; young and old, were able to read and write as evidenced by their capacity to read the research consent forms and read drafts of their respective interview notes after the audio recorded interviews were transcribed by the researcher. as crop production and housing conditions improved, the population at kitamburo grew and the number of children grew also, but the village had no primary school. one respondent recalled that the idea of establishing a school came after having learnt that the village had many children and that letting them all go to another village in search of education was found to be very unfair. . . . so we tried to request for a school at the district . . . the district response was positive and they said that is one of the goals of establishing a village. (hussein juma, 17/01/2014) prior to having their own school, most children from kitamburo were schooled in primary schools in nearby villages, both of which were at least 5 km from kitamburo and required children to walk at least 10 km every school day. when asked who initiated the idea of constructing a school at kitamburo, one respondent recalled: in fact it was the people [community members at kitamburo] who requested for a school to the council. (i zakary niemba, 18/01/2014) kitamburo community was established pair pass with the country-wide villagization program in tanzania. as noted by respondent kingie mnyumba: one of the goals of socialism was to gather people [in collective villages] in order to provide them with important services including education. (kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014) although villagers initially hoped that the government would initiate construction of the school, it was the community members at kitamburo who ultimately asked that the government allow them to construct a primary school in their village. it is convincing that community members wanted to balance progress made in agricultural production with progress in other important sectors like 110 global education review 2(4) education. the excitement of having a school was evidenced by another respondent who said: we went to make bricks. we villagers made bricks for the construction of two classrooms. that was one stream. . . . so that is how the school as you saw it now was constructed. it was constructed by our own efforts. parents’ effort. yes mr.! (elizabeth kigula, 22/01/2014) elizabeth kigula had memories that the school started in a building designated as a village warehouse before shifting to the current proper kitamburo primary school buildings. according to her memories, which were later confirmed with school records, the school started in 1975. the researcher wanted to know how the spirit of supporting the school initiated in the last 40 years was sustained to the time of data collection. foundations were laid by the first teachers who told us that this school is around you so it is yours. we kindly request you [villagers] not be afraid of us [teachers]. we are teachers but we need to share with you, we ask your help so do not stay away from us. (yajenga paulo, 21/01/214) the first teacher, who was also the first head teacher of the school, was a female teacher. explaining how she was received by community members at kitamburo, kingie mnyumba said: in fact they [kitamburo community members] received her with suspicion because was a female teacher they did not believe that she could deliver what was expected of her. as you know the general trust over women during those days was doubtful. (kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014) this indicated that right from the beginning community members wanted a performing school. kingie mnyumba further commented that, contrary to the mistrust of community members, the female teacher was brave enough to accept living in the huts just like villagers did. this made villagers wholly accept the teacher and come to trust in her. even though the teacher accepted this environment, she did not lose her professionalism. she was brave. she already had experience of working in mountainous areas so she had no problems with the environment. she stayed and worked with us until she gave out fruits under her leadership. (kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014) the “fruits” were the students who were selected to join secondary school education. successes and challenges school success stories contributed to a sense of school community connectedness. there were more and more community investments to the school which demonstrated awareness that the school belonged to the community. we gave them [teachers] village tractors, we said teachers should not have difficulties of getting food, we tell them to pay by installment later on, the students went to weed teachers’ farms, helped them to spray insecticides, helped them to harvest, and helped to take the harvest from teachers’ farms to their respective homes without any complaint from community members. this made teachers realize the community recognition of their job and motivated them [teachers] to work hard in order to reciprocate the good things villagers the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 111 did to them. (mtamalile matege, 17/01/2014) respondents claimed that at kitamburo: a student to help a teacher in his/her private work is part of training to children. such activities were regarded to contribute to child upbringing and that a student belongs to both teachers and parents. (kingie mnyumba, 22/01/2014) the researcher witnessed students fetching water for teachers after finishing the school sessions. access to drinking water was still a problem at the community and villagers were not willing to see their teachers spending their time fetching water and thus allowed them to use students to do the job after classes. at the same time, teachers were government employees who were assigned to schools by the government through the district education officer. as a result, teachers were coming and going. the kitamburo community had a practice for recognizing when a teacher was performing well, according to the community-based indicators, amongst which the transition rate of their children to secondary education was most important. one time kitamburo received a head teacher who did not perform according to community [kitamburo] based indicators of a performing teacher. we found like a loss to us because we constructed school buildings, we paid school contributions but children were not going for secondary school education, the first year no child, the second year no child, and the third year! (mahanjam malinguni, 17/01/2014) this situation had a negative impact on the students and community members and made kitamburo community learn that not all teachers fit their set criteria. it seemed he had a language that whether they pass or not is none of my business provided i receive my salary. (kingie mnyumba 22/01/2014) with respect to involving the community in school matters: he did not want to cooperate [with community members] in solving trouble issues like absenteeism nor did he like to monitor school absentees and he was able of taking unilateral decisions and beating students so this made him be in different with the school committee. (kingie mnyumba 22/01/2014) while other teachers were friendly and well received by the community, and parents were ready to see their children helping teachers as already noted, this non-performing teacher was assessed as: unmarried and there were rumors that he was running with grown up school girls so parents found that he is likely to cause problems. (kingie mnyumba 22/01/2014) kitamburo community members were concerned with the teacher’s behavior and: that old man [milonge] said we shall go to the district to see education officers and tell them this issue. (mahanjam malinguni, 17/01/2014) this indicated that the kitamburo community had visionary leadership focused on the future of the community and that students were seen as important members for the future. the leaders had insight into what issues to deal with—who, where, and when. respondents said: 112 global education review 2(4) we really went there we talked to them [district education officers] in fact they understood us they said we shall do something and when they did it since that year we found students going for secondary school education. three students passed, four students, five students and sometimes eight students we came to say that we did a good thing. (mahanjam malinguni, 17/01/2014) the district transferred the poor performing head teacher and sent a new head teacher to the school. good leadership at the district level of education administration enhanced school community connectedness. the officers were ready to listen to community grievances and acted accordingly. thus the school experienced a certain period of challenges which made it perform badly. a new head teacher when the poor performing head teacher was transferred, a new head teacher came to revitalize school performance. i came here as a head teacher well informed that we transfer you to a school where community members complain about poor school performance. (mzee wa busara, 21/01/2014) mzee wa busara noted that when he reported at the school he found the school not performing well as measured by the psle results. he started to put into place strategies to improve school performance. in the first place we established school council which met once monthly. this was made by all students and all teachers. then we had staff meetings in which amongst others we discussed issues raised in the school council . . . then we had meetings of the school committee, then parents’ meeting which were convened to school and at the end of year we had parents open day. (mzee wa busara, 21/01/2014) it was through these meetings that school food was proposed as one of the strategies to address truancy and improve performance. this suggests that good leadership on the part of the school and the village helped the two institutions to work together. almost all interviewed community members made comments like the following: he [the new head teacher] improved the school because the one who was here before him dropped the school academically and economically to the extent that the school was about to die. (kingie mnyumba 22/01/2014) the teacher was described as having several key characteristics that helped the school: had a good language, he loved education, had a good way of guiding students. (galamula magobe, 22/01/2014) having “good language” raises the issue of communication. to communicate for the purpose of enhancing cooperation, one must use language which can convince the person you wish to cooperate with. community members further added that: he [the new head teacher] was a kind of person who loved education and loved mixing with community members. the head teacher before him did not bother with school matters after office hours. (galamula magobe, 22/01/2014) the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 113 this implied the head teacher was able to take school issues to the village through mixing and discussing school issues in informal settings with community members without losing his status as a teacher. he had a kind of personality that made community members associate the school with him. he lived as an insider without losing the outsider qualities that brought him to kitamburo as an expert in education. this demonstrated his creativity and flexibility, qualities that community members wished to support. role models the well-cherished milonge, who served the position of village chairperson for more than 20 years, had visited a number of foreign countries during the heyday of socialism in tanzania. as reported by one villager, he visited: west germany before the reunion of east germany and west germany. he visited both countries. he visited australia, he also visited cuba. he visited about 5 foreign countries. (mahanjam malinguni, 17/01/2014) upon returning from those visits, milonge used the experiences to sensitize community members to the importance of supporting the school and teachers’ innovations. it is without doubt that community members learned the importance of education and informally recognized education as a criterion of good leadership. thus one member of the focus group said: i should not feel so proud of myself but personally i finished schooling in this school in 1984 and there after i was privileged to go abroad for a one year study tour. i stayed in germany and denmark. while in denmark i visited russia, spain, east and west german, sweden and norway. (focus group discussion notes, 15/01/2014) this was the incumbent chairperson of kitamburo village who was also chairperson of the school committee. it is convincing that education and diverse experiences (such as traveling to other countries) of top village leadership helped kitamburo community develop workable management procedures and principles. in addition to that, educated people from kitamburo community were returning home, not as visitors but as development catalysts. for example: zelina constructed a house for her mother, terudi has built a house for her family, nolina has built a house for her mother, treace has built a house for her mother. (mzee wa busara, 21/01/2014) this made community members understand the benefits of investing in education which in turn motivated more effort in investing in education, an effort which was partly translated in investing social capital by having close cooperation with teachers. good governance the village management structure at kitamburo was in line with recommended structures as per the laws and regulations of tanzania (united republic of tanzania, 2001). at the top of the village management structure was a meeting that included all of the villagers, the second level was a meeting of the village council, and the third level, a meeting of the hamlet (subvillages). according to the law, hamlets and the village council met monthly, while all villagers met quarterly. kitamburo, like other villages, had a village executive officer responsible for the daily execution of village management activities and a village chair person who was the head of 114 global education review 2(4) the village and chairperson of all village level meetings, such as the meeting of the village council and villagers’ meetings (village assembly). according to the law, the veo was a government employee whereas the chairperson was democratically elected by villagers. the village chairperson represented the village at the ward and district levels. this suggested that the village chairperson was crucial for effective village representation and thus kitamburo community had to ensure that the post was held by a visionary person: steps are taken against leaders who are not stable. i will give an example of a period of time you can not specify the person concerned, but he assumed chairmanship of the village and we said this is just normal to rotate but his affairs were quite incorrect he was selfish, tribalism we started to question his leadership and people began to complain. eventually a team of about 10 elders decided to call a meeting and write down the complaints and submit to the district director. . . . the district sent here investigators who proved beyond doubt that the man squandered the village wealth . . . he was taken to custody and the district director finally came and said the person is no longer the village chairman he is terminated from office due to one two three reasons. we chose another chairperson. (mahanjam malinguni, 17/01/2014) through strong village management, kitamburo made bylaws to guide the various activities of the community members, including activities of education. yes we had village bylaws. if somebody did not attend to a village development activity was penalized. (interview notes with mpenda elimu, 17/01/2014) despite effective village government, some community issues required indigenous skills, relations, knowledge, and experience: when the village government finds an issue can best be solved at a clan level it advises the clan leader of the concerned clan to hold a [clan] meeting and try solve the matter. (severina mkaluka, 18/01/2014) this practice made the village involve indigenous leadership in various matters that were beyond the scope of village government. these included matters regarding welfare of individuals linked to clan relationships. probably if we see a clan fellow whose behavior is not in line of what is expected of him or her then the respective clan must call a meeting to counsel him or her. (severina mkaluka, 18/01/2014) in turn, community members recognized the importance of clan leadership. thus, the clan relationships, which contributed to the emergence of kitamburo community, continued to be active and respected. this section shows how community members were critically reflecting on their statuses and taking action towards improvement. mentorship and monitoring helped to forge collaboration despite potential different points of view amongst themselves. collective beliefs and mutual trust strengthened the collaboration between and among community members and teachers and students. summary of themes this study was framed in a community capabilities framework (ccf) which assumes the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 115 that communities in different places have forms of capital which, in the presence of catalysts, can be used to achieve community vision and mission (emery & flora, 2006). the pre-study, revealed a close collaboration between the school and the community as the main contributing factor to the promising school performance. collaboration is an aspect of social capital. literature about social capital argues two major orientations. there are those who look at the community as an entity and thus emphasize community social capital (putnam, 1993; whitley & mckenzie, 2005), and those who emphasize individual’s social capital (portes, 1998). analysis of the collected data in the detailed case study revealed existence of ties between community members and the school that were an important source of support to the school. these ties described above included a) commitment, b) accountability and responsibility, c) communication, d) participation, e)mentorship and monitoring, f) ideologies, g) values, norms and rules, h) reciprocity and i) systemic operationalization. since the establishment of kitamburo, the community showed commitment and signs of feeling responsible for their own development. this commitment made them construct a school. community support to the school grew organically from within the community due to the logic that the school belonged to the community. commitment went hand in hand with a sense of accountability and responsibility. they requested a school because they felt accountable for the long distance their children were walking in search of primary school education and they held non-performing teachers accountable in addition, there was smooth communication between parents, students, and teachers. communication enhanced and informed participation, which encouraged creativity and innovativeness among teachers, parents, and students. this, in turn, encouraged regular improvement of strategies and activities. further, there was always a system of mentorship and monitoring at kitamburo. teachers who stayed at the school for a long time mentored new teachers. therefore the school culture was sustained over time. moreover there was a systemic and ongoing monitoring of the practices of community members, teachers, and students ensuring each party effectively played its role. these roles among others were: reading on the part of students, taking care of students’ school expenses on the part of parents, and teaching on the part of teachers. also, kitamburo community has been guided by values, norms, and rules. “values are collective ideas about what is right or wrong, good or bad, and desirable or undesirable in a particular culture” (williams, as cited in kendall, murray, & linden, 2007, p. 77). whereas values provide ideas about how people are supposed to behave, norms “have specific behavioral expectations;” they are thus “established rules of behavior or standards of conduct” (kendall, et al., 2007, p. 78). rules, on the other hand, are documented stands of behavior with respective enforcement sanctions. in other words, values serve as vision; norms serve as mission; and rules serve as constitution towards achieving development goals. kitamburo community had improved well-being as its value. everybody was struggling to improve his or her life as evidenced right from the beginning of the community when the women association looked for a farm in order to improve their income and general life and well-being. the general value of the need for improved well-being made them choose hard work over laziness, unity over isolation, and supporting innovations rather than dormancy. also, there was strategic school community reciprocity that made the two institutions connect. the school benefited because the community was taking care of it on the grounds 116 global education review 2(4) that it viewed the school as a community property. community members were always thinking about how to improve the school. the community strengths the interplay of various forms of capital contributed to the emergence of community support to the school that can be traced right from the beginning of kitamburo community. religious teachings, arguably responsible for the establishment of the association, was a form of cultural capital (emery & flora, 2006). the cultural capital provided by women prompted them establish an association which influenced their progress in wheat cultivation. this progress prompted men to join the association, providing yet another source of human capital. men would not come to know how much the association had harvested without having at least some e ties with the association members. this indicated the existence of bonding ties between men and women. thus, the small-scale individual femalemale ties were translated into large scale association as well agued by granovetter (1973) in the concept of the strength of loose ties in social capital. acceptance of men in an association initially established and led by women, created a complex environment (mezrow, 2000) which called for stronger political capital (emery & flora, 2006). increased need of political capital required the association to have a leader with the ability to bring the voices together. taking advantage of cultural capital (bennett & silva, 2011), a brother to an outgoing leader was assigned to lead the association. the good leadership enabled association to look for bridge social capital (narayan, 1999) in order to address their dreams beyond the boundaries of their association. the bridge social capital enabled the association members to meet people, learn, and change their frames of reference (mezirow, 2000) with the effect of and transforming both the association and the village. the social capital enabled kitamburo community to work together and show promising results in agricultural production. however the money they gained from selling surplus farm products was not automatically translated into corresponding well-being of the individual community members. through critical discourse (mezirow, 2000), community members were able to reach a decision to construct a school, built capital, to improve teaching and learning of their children, which in turn created more human capital. the established school brought in teachers who had spent more years in school and colleges and arguably had more human capital than most community members. knowledge is power, thus arguably, teachers were viewed as sources of knowledge in the community and thus made community members support them which, in turn, encouraged teachers to deliver and contribute to students’ transition to secondary schools, an aspect of human capital. the trust and cooperation(aspects of social capital) community members had invested in constructing the school and supporting teachers was systematically being transformed to human capital through students’ attendance to the primary school and transition to secondary school. in turn, the students who continued with post-primary school education were able to accumulate enough human capital which was transformed into finance capital (hayami, 2009) through employment or improved production and productivity within the community. catalysts for the emergence and sustained community support to the school the study revealed that commitment to the school and encouragement to support the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 117 innovations which contributed to promising school performances were: a) incentive system, b) transparency c) personalities, d) sustained institutions and e) historical achievements. community members at kitamburo continued to have commitment in supporting the school and innovations because there was the incentive of positive outputs from what they were committed to do. the government encouraged the community by listening to their genuine requests. teachers had incentives because they received privileges like access to village land for cultivation, and living rent-free in teachers’ houses. although there were not institutionalized guidelines, when one party felt that another party was not doing what was expected, the incentives changed from positive to negative, as happened to the non-performing head teacher. further, kitamburo was a transparent community. community members were able to let their voices be heard at any administrative level provided they had well-grounded evidence to support their grievances. in addition, people who assumed top community leadership had personalities which enabled them to mobilize resources towards community progress, amongst which happened to include community support to the school. also, sustained institutions had a strong influence. kitamburo community emerged from a church-based association, the lutheran church. one characteristic feature of the lutheran church inherent from the founder of the lutheran church, martin luther, right from its inception in the 16th century, was a critical reflection of the doctrine of the roman catholic church. it is noteworthy that most community members at kitamburo, influenced by the teachings of the lutheran church during their formative years, adapted the church-based strategies of community-based development activities. this influenced the frame of reference of community members so that they engaged in critical reflections which enabled them to realize the importance of education and collaboration in enhancing community support to school improvement. in addition to the faith-based institutions, the glue that binds community members at kitamburo is indigenous knowledge in leadership and management dating back from pre-colonial days. at the time of data collection, kitamburo had at least 12 clan organizations, though the majority of the villagers belonged to only three clans. though hyden (1980), argues that social formations that existed before colonialism and socialism in tanzania survive because of the survival of the economic structures which give them life (p.4); i would say economic structures are not the only reasons that support the structures. indigenous knowledge is “the information base for society, which facilitates communication and decisionmaking. indigenous information systems are dynamic, and are continually influenced by internal creativity and experimentation as well as by contact with external systems” (flavier, et al. 1995, p. 479). since the traditional clans in kitamburo survived from pre-colonial days, it is convincing to argue that the indigenous knowledge applied in managing the clans is still needed in facilitating communication and decision making that make kitamburo show promising community support to the school. traditional clan leadership employs indigenous management knowledge (beidelman, 1997). clans in africa were responsible for maintaining norms and customs, including making sure that the reputation of a clan was maintained and sustained through good deeds of clan members (beidelman, 1997). another catalyst is the good record of achieving what the community had decided to do. achievement acted as a motivation and unifying argent. the long-term trend of strategy-action-success taught them 118 global education review 2(4) that there was always a possibility to win if they decided to work together toward the set objective. it was this historical achievement which contributed to the community support to the school. summary of results this study suggests that kitamburo was bestowed with a natural environment with good weather, and was conducive to support the cultivation of a myriad of crops and keeping a variety of animals. the environment attracted people to settle in the area. in the course of living and working together in the environment, villagers established a common way of looking and acting at the world around them. repeated testing of strategies and actions of working with the world around them showed promising results and such strategies were then institutionalized. this institutionalization led to the establishment of community values, norms, and rules which spoke with a moral voice to all villagers and therefore enhanced collaboration among the individuals and micro communities that constituted the broader kitamburo community. one such small institution was the primary school, hence the emergence of community support to the school. policy implications community support to school as a potential solution to poor school progress is an area extensively recommended by academics, policy makers and curriculum implementers. however, most studies are professionalcentered, focusing on teachers as key agents of establishing community support to schools. this study has shown that community support at kitamburo was organically generated and emerged from community members who then influenced teachers to innovate structures and programmes which improved school performances. these results, suggest the importance of making sure community members have their voices heard and their efforts recognized. villagers should not be viewed as merely recipients of curriculum and policy directives, but rather as generators of curriculum and public policies including policies in education. the well-documented decentralization program in tanzania should have practical implementations by giving community members more powers over the school in their area. if management powers of the school shall be vested in the community it will be easy for them to do counterchecking which will ensure teachers deliver what is expected of them. conclusion the situation of community support to school in tanzania is “long in prescription and short on description” (lortie, 1975, p.vii). tanzania is rich in writings and policy documents emphasizing the importance of communities to support their respective schools, with little equally important contextual step-by-step description on how to establish such commitment among communities. kitamburo community has shown signs of positive deviance by practical support to its school. teachers, community members and students have collectively innovated activities and structures which enhanced effective implementation of the curriculum. the innovations had implications on the teaching load of teachers, education costs on the part of community members and efforts on the part of students; but none of the three sub-communities found the implications as a burden. every subcommunity was committed to fulfill what was expected in order to meet the collective community objectives. this deep commitment made teachers teach as teachers, students study as students and community members participate in school issues as community members. teachers made the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 119 effective teaching a part of their identity; students identified themselves as hard working; and community members identified themselves with effective participation in supporting the education of their children. all these were a result of learning processes which to a large extent originated in the roots of the community. learning processes enabled community members, teachers and students to see what was working, and what needed to be changed. as a teacher teaching development studies at a university level, one of the challenges i face is whose stories i bring to class to share with students about education and development practices in general. in more cases than not, i used to feed my students with development policies, programs and strategies that skewed towards developmentalism (ibhawoh & dibua, 2003), an approach which took little cognizance of voices of the rural population or of those meant to benefit from development in general. the results of this case study will serve as immediate supporting evidence for home-grown rural development strategy. kitamburo has shown that the most important thing is not the documented policy or strategy or activity which is brought to rural community as prescription (pritchett, 2012). the most important service is not school buildings and other services brought to serve community members as unfortunate victims. the most important thing is not the rules, norms and values that community members are directed to adopt and adapt. rather, it is how the community gets to the activities, programs, and policies to establish services and values, norms and rules. kitamburo has shown that what matters is the struggle the community members have to engage in to establish values, norms, rules, and structures that shall serve to tackle problems and challenges. author note support for this research was provided by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada, partnership development grant 890-2010-0027. references beckley, t., martz, d., nadeau, s., wall, e., & reimer, b. 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(2000). rural livelihoods and diversity in developing countries. new york, ny: oxford university press. emiry, m., & flora, c. (2006). spiraling-up: mapping community transformation with community capitals framework. journal of the community development society, 37(1), 19–35.retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/15575330609490152 flavier, j., jesus, a., navarro, c., & warren, d. (19995).the regional program for the promotion of indigenous knowledge in asia. in d.warren, l. slikkerveer & d. brokensha (eds.), the cultural dimension of development: indigenous knowledge systems (pp.479487). london: intermediate technology publications. glanfield, f., & ngalawa, a. 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(1961). tanganyika sail in the wilderness. the hague: mouton&co. publishers. stefl-mabry, j., & lynch, b. (2006). knowledge communities: bringing the village into the classroom. toronto, on: the scarecrow press, inc. unesco. (2012). youth and skills: putting education to work (efa global monitoring report 2012). retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002180/21 8003e.pdf united republic of tanzania (urt). (2009). the national irrigation policy. dar es salaam: ministry of water and irrigation. united republic of tanzania (urt). (2014). basic demographic and socio-economic profile. dar es salaam: national bureau of statistics, ministry of finance. warren, m. (2005). communities and schools: a new view of urban education reform. havard educational review, 17(2), 133–173. wellington, j. (2000). educational research: contemporary issues and practical approaches. london: continuum. http://archive.lib.msu.edu/dmc/african%20journals/pdfs/political%20science/volume8n1/ajps008001004.pdf http://archive.lib.msu.edu/dmc/african%20journals/pdfs/political%20science/volume8n1/ajps008001004.pdf http://archive.lib.msu.edu/dmc/african%20journals/pdfs/political%20science/volume8n1/ajps008001004.pdf http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/9747/narayan.pdf http://info.worldbank.org/etools/docs/library/9747/narayan.pdf http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://content.ebscohost.com.login.ezproxy.library.ualberta.ca/pdf17_20/pdf/1998/aso/01aug98/1056932.pdf?t=p&p=an&k=1056932&s=r&d=a9h&ebscocontent=dgjymnlr40seqle4yovqolcmr0ueqk5ssam4slwwxwxs&contentcustomer=dgjympgrt0yup7zquepfgeyx9x3g http://staskulesh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/prosperouscommunity.pdf http://staskulesh.com/wp-content/uploads/2012/11/prosperouscommunity.pdf http://habarileo.co.tz/index.php/habari-za-kitaifa/27779-baba-acharaza-viboko-walimu http://habarileo.co.tz/index.php/habari-za-kitaifa/27779-baba-acharaza-viboko-walimu http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002180/218003e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0021/002180/218003e.pdf the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 121 whitley, r., & mckenzie, k. (2005). social capital and psychiatry: review of literature. havard review of psychiatry 13, 71–84 doi: 10.1080/10673220590956474 yin, k. (2009). case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). los angeles, ca: sage. about the author(s) athanas ngalawa, phd, is a lecturer of development studies. his areas of research interests are education, culture, environment, and community participation with focus to development processes of rural communities in tanzania. his previous researches were focused on factors influencing access and performance of students in primary schools. also, dr. ngalawa has a special interest in curriculum studies particularly curriculum implementation. he is conversant with, social capital theory, education policies of tanzania, and participatory theatre approaches in development interventions. elaine simmt, phd, is a professor of secondary (mathematics) education. her research is focused in mathematics education. in particular, she explores teaching and learning as understood through the frame of complexity theory. a second and complementary area of study is centred in teacher education, specifically mathematics-for-teaching. school-based research has led to simmt's interest in investigating research methods and designs suitable for studying the complex and contextual phenomena of teaching and learning. in her most recent work, dr simmt has joined colleagues in a series of international research and development projects in tanzania. florence glanfield, phd, is a professor of mathematics education. her research interests focus on the experiences that individuals (teachers and learners) and communities have with mathematics and learning mathematics. glanfield collaborates with colleagues in all research projects and is currently engaged in projects with canadian indigenous communities, urban aboriginal youth, elementary & secondary mathematics teachers, and primary teachers and teacher educators in tanzania. appendix a sample interview protocol kitamburo post ujamaa school-community connectedness: exploring learning communities in rural areas post ujamaa school-community connectedness: exploring learning communities in rural areas seek to understand how some communities in tanzania has managed to establish and maintain closer schoolcommunity partnership which promote the teaching and learning in primary schools. kitamburo village is one of the villages with such kind of relationships which helps the students at kitamburo to show good performance in mathematics. you are kindly requested to tell us stories which explain the conditions in kitamburo village which led to the emergence of a learning community that support the teaching and learning of mathematics in this village. you are chosen to participate in this study because of your better knowledge on the stories that led to the emergence of the said learning community. i have a tape recorder so i would like to get your consent to allow me tape record the stories you will tell me so that i will not miss any of them. the stories you tell will be treated confidentially and will be used for purposes of this study only. to ensure that you are requested to choose a pseudonym which will be used in reporting the stories you tell. if you agree to participate in this study, i kindly request you to fill in and sign the consent form. 122 global education review 2(4) date: interviewee actual name: interviewee pseudonym: position of interviewee: questions 1. please describe the schoolcommunity relationships in this village 2. what is the impact of the relationship between the school and community members? 3. what organs, people, norms, values and people do you think plays the central role in maintaining the relationships you have said? 4. when did the school and community members start having the kind of relationship you have said? 5. what conditions led to the beginning of the relationships you have said. 6. what things can you claim that villagers gains due to the said relationships. 7. what things can you claim that the school (teachers and students) gain due to the said relationships. 8. what mechanisms are in place to ensure community members unified actions to support the school? 9. are there free riders? how do you deal with them? 10. how do you reach to a consensus? 11. what role is played by the leaders, organs, values and norms in maintaining the relationships? 12. how do you manage the villagers – are villagers managed as whole group or in small groups? 13. is there rivalry and hostility from outside the village? how do you manage it? 14. how do you manage new comers? 15. what are the challenges facing school-community connectedness? 16. what are the achievements of the closer school-community relationships? 17. if i were to join the village as a new member of the villagewhat are the do and don’t do you were to tell me? why? the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 123 appendix b sample observation protocolkitamburo observational field notespost ujamaa school-community connectedness: exploring learning communities in rural areas. observer:………………………………….. role of observer: complete observer/observer as participant/ participant observer time:………………………………. length of observation:…………………………………. 1. the setting: physical environment:……………………………………….. context:……………………………………………………………. 2. participants: children youth middle age old very old total female male total 3. activities and interactions what is going on:………………………………………….. 4. frequency and duration when did it begin:……………………………. how long does it last:………………………………. how frequently it occurs:……………………………………….. 5. subtle factors: informal and unplanned activities:………………………………… symbolic and connotative meaning of words:………………………… nonverbal communication:………………………………………….. 124 global education review 2(4) appendix c sample focus group protocolkitamburo primary school good afternoon/morning and welcome to our session. my name is athanas ngalawa i teach at mzumbe university and i am currently interested in understanding the conditions that led to the emergence of a learning community at kitamburo which operates to the effect of making your schoolkitamburo primary school, have relatively better performance in mathematics in the district as measured by various examinations like primary school leaving examinations. you are invited to this session because you belong to the school, you are students here in the school and you know better what is happening around the village. i will be asking you questions and you will be giving me answers. there are no wrong and right answers but rather differing points of view. please feel free to share your point of view even if it differs from what others have said. i am interested in both negative comments and positive comments. i have a tape recorder because i don’t want to miss any of your explanations. you have very helpful things to tell me and i cannot write fast enough to get them all down. the explanation you will tell me shall contribute to writing a research report on the subject matter i just told you, how the learning community at kitamburo came into being. to effect that, i kindly request for your consent. if you are ready to participate in this discussion please fill in the consent form that i will give you just now. if you are not ready please be free to tell me so that i request somebody else to take over your position. well, let’s begin. to begin with, you already know my name and the place i work i would like to know the name of each of you and a brief story of himself/herself. i have this ball here with me. i will start by throwing it to one of you. your job is to catch it and once you have it then is your turn to tell us your name, your grade level, where do you live in this village, and a brief story about yourself. when you are done you will tell us and i will tell you to through the ball to another person of your choice so that he/she can do the same. now we know each other. let us go to the questions. 1. i have this circle here with a picture of a person at the center. this picture represents you. i also have a piece of paper written ‘mathematics”. your jobs is come forward and position this piece of paper at a distance you will choose from you (the picture at the center) and tell us why have you decide to put it at that particular distance from you. as a general rule putting it very close means you love mathematics and putting it far from you means you do not love mathematics. putting it outside the circle means you would wish not to see mathematics in your school timetable at all. 2. now this time the center picture is a house. this house represents your schoolkitamburo. instead of having just one piece of paper i have so many papers with names of institutions around our village. i will choose one of you to put the relative position of the institutions i have listed from the school. as usual, putting it very close to the school means the institution is very helpful to your life and learning here in the emergence of community support at kitamburo in tanzania 125 school while putting it very far it means the institution has insignificant contribution. ok now you see the institutionscan we read loudly? (they read while the one who put them is pointing using a pointer). do you think the list is exhaustive or i have forgotten some of the institutions? fine you see how our fellow “x” have positioned the institutions. now “x” can you tell us why do you put institution ‘a’ at that position? who has a different point of view and a different position he/she would have positioned institution ‘a’? ok go and show us? ok why do you decide to put it there? 3. now instead of institutions i have a list of organization organs here in the school and in our village. 4. ok. this time i have a list of teachers and at the center is mathematics. 5. ok this time i have a list of names of villagers and at the center is the school. 6. i have the same list of villagers and at the center is mathematics. 7. suppose you are to create a balance sheet between the school and the village how would it look like how the school gains from the villagers and how the villagers gains from the school? 8. suppose i want to join this village what would you tell me to do or not to do in order to be accepted as a good member of the village. 9. ok do you have a question to ask me? 10. thank you for taking your time to participate in this discussion. i will go and write down your views and come back to confirm with you in future days before i decide to use it in my research. teacher education that works 155 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dellicarpini, margo & alonso, orlando b. (2014). teacher education that works: preparing secondary level math and science teachers for success with english language learners through content based instruction. global education review, 1 (4). 155-178. teacher education that works: preparing secondary-level math and science teachers for success with english language learners through content-based instruction margo dellicarpini morehead state university orlando b. alonso lehman college, cuny abstract little research exists on effective ways to prepare secondary mathematics and science teachers to work with english language learners (ells) in mainstream mathematics and science (subsequently referred to as stem) classrooms. given the achievement gap that exists between ells and their native-speaking counterparts in stem subjects, as well as the growing numbers of ells in us schools, this becomes a critical issue, as academic success for these students depends on the effectiveness of instruction they receive not only in english as a second language classes (esl), but in mainstream classrooms as well. this article reports on the effects of a program restructuring that implemented coursework specifically designed to prepare pre-service and in-service mathematics, science, and esl teachers to work with ells in their content and esl classrooms through collaboration between mainstream stem and esl teachers, as well as effective content and language integration. we present findings on teachers’ attitudes and current practices related to the inclusion of ells in the secondary-level content classroom and their current level of knowledge and skills in collaborative practice. we further describe the rationale behind the development of the course, provide a description of the course and its requirements as they changed throughout its implementation during two semesters, and present findings from the participants enrolled. additionally, we discuss the lessons learned; researchers’ innovative approaches to implementation of content-based instruction (cbi) and teacher collaboration, which we term two-way cbi (dellicarpini & alonso, 2013); and implications for teacher education programs. keywords collaboration, teacher education, tesol, stem teacher education, english language learners, ells, esl teachers introduction schools in the united states are becoming more linguistically diverse, and as a result, greater numbers of mainstream teachers than ever before find themselves working with non-native ______________________________ corresponding author: margo dellicarpini, morehead state university college of education, 100 ginger hall, morehead , ky 40351 email: m.dellicarpini@moreheadstate.edu 156 global education review 1(4) english speakers. examining data over the 24year period between 1979 and 2003, for example, the increase is dramatic: ells as a percentage of the school-aged population increased by more than 169 percent (francis, rivera, lesaux, kieffer, & rivera, 2006). that growth has continued. according to the united states department of education, the percentage of ells in u.s. schools was even greater during the 2010-2011 school year than it was during the 2002-2003 school year, with ells representing approximately 10 percent of the nation’s schoolchildren (2013). all projections of the growth of the ell population point to continued increases as we move towards the mid-point of this century, with some models predicting that ells will comprise 40 percent of the schoolaged population by the year 2030 (thompson & collier, 2002). despite the growing numbers of ells in u.s. schools, there has been little change in how mainstream teachers are prepared to address the needs of these students (hollins & guzman, 2005). research found that 77 percent of content-area teachers have had no coursework or professional development addressing ells (nces, 2002). this poses a challenge to schools, teachers, and students, since ells generally spend about 80 percent of their school days in mainstream classrooms (dong, 2002). research indicates that content-area teachers feel the responsibility for developing ells’ language skills is not theirs, and that the professional organizations that shape the standards and expectations for content education often fail to include ells in the discussion (de jong & harper, 2005). further, as of 2012, only five states had made coursework specifically targeting the needs of ells in the mainstream classroom a requirement for teacher certification (samson & collins, 2012). while the u.s government mandates esl and/or bilingual education services, most ells spend most of the school day in mainstream classrooms with teachers who are often unprepared to work with them. this makes the preparation of content teachers who are able to effectively meet the needs of ells in their classrooms critical to the effective and equitable instruction of a large population of our nation’s students. this article reports on the findings from a graduate-level inquiry-based course co-taught by tesol and mathematics education faculty, with the goal of preparing teacher candidates (tcs) enrolled in secondary-level mathematics, science, and tesol teacher education programs to work with ells in their mainstream content classrooms and in esl classrooms through effective implementation of two-way cbi and teacher collaboration. the course was codeveloped and co-taught by a tesol professor and mathematics education professor, and was designed to serve as a pilot for the institutionalization of program restructuring to effectively prepare mainstream stem educators to work with ells in secondary-level content classrooms. the class provided explicit modeling (by the faculty/researchers) and instruction in interdisciplinary teacher collaboration. the goals of the course were: (1) to support novice secondary-level mathematics/science teachers in teaching ells in the mainstream content classroom, (2) to support novice esl teachers in their ability to understand and effectively engage in cbi, and (3) to support collaborative partnerships between secondary-level esl and content teachers. below, we first provide a review of the relevant literature related to teacher preparation, cbi, and teacher collaboration, which form the theoretical basis for the course, and then discuss the course itself and the findings of the research. teacher education that works 157 literature review the following theoretical perspectives inform the research in which we are engaged: teaching ells in content areas through the use of cbi or clil; current prevalent practices in esl and mainstream teacher education in the u.s. related to ells’ instruction; and the benefits of mainstream and english language teacher collaboration to enhance practice in the esl and the mainstream classrooms. teaching ells in content areas: challenges and promising practices english as a second language (esl) services are mandated by the federal government as a result of the bilingual education act of 1968 (and subsequent reauthorizations and amendments), lau v. nichols, (decided january 21, 1974), and the subsequent lau remedies. however, the u.s. department of education has provided only broad guidelines, since education is fundamentally a state-based right, meaning individual states are left to determine how best to provide these mandated services to ells. these broad guidelines create a dichotomy: on the one hand, services to ells are mandated; on the other, states are left to decide how best to serve their ell populations, which unfortunately often inspires politically charged discussion. to that end, rather than developing research-based, best practices approaches to educating language minority students, states frequently provide services that placate the largest and most vocal political constituents. examples of this can be seen in the passage of proposition 227 in california and proposition 203 in arizona, which essentially either outlawed bilingual education and the use of students’ native languages in instruction and/or severely limited the types of programs that districts could provide to ells through the initiative legislative process (for a full discussions see stritikus & garcia, 2005; wright, 2005). putting aside the political nature of the education of language minority students, there are research-based practices that work, and outside of an additive bilingual education setting, the most promising and most prevalent in united states is content-based instruction (cbi). as tesol international states, “as contrasted with language teaching in isolation, cbi uses specific subject matter on which to base language instruction. in other words, the language is taught within the context of a specific academic subject” (2008, p. 1). this definition does not distinguish between the provision of these services taking place in esl or subject-area classrooms: in other words, cbi can enhance both the acquisition of language and content, in either the language or content classroom. cbi can either be contentor language-driven (met, 1999). in a contentdriven approach, content is presented and taught in the second language, which for the purposes of our discussion we will say is english. the learning of content is the primary goal, with the learning of english a secondary goal. the content objectives are driven by the larger curricular goals, and in conjunction with these content objectives, teachers must select language objectives. students are assessed on their mastery of the content, rather than on language gains. this approach is similar to content and language integrated learning (clil), popular in european countries, in which the second language (in this case english) is used to teach material (subject matter) in a classroom setting that is not explicitly a language-learning environment. language-driven cbi, on the other hand (again summarizing met, 1999), is the mirror image of content-driven cbi. in this framework, the content is used to learn english, and learning the language is a priority. learning the content is not purposeful, and occurs as a consequence of the focus on language within a 158 global education review 1(4) particular content area. the language objectives are driven by the language (not content) curricular demands, and students are assessed based on gains in language proficiency, not directly on content learning. numerous research studies have documented the effectiveness of cbi as an integrated approach to learning both language and content. however, to date most of the cbi practice that occurs, whether content-driven or languagedriven, does so in the esl classroom exclusively, and mainstream content teachers are often unprepared or underprepared to work with ells in their classrooms, especially at the secondaryschool level. this is critical, since ells can face a number of challenges in mainstream content classrooms, and these challenges are multifaceted. first, the language of schooling is frequently very different from the types of communicative language we traditionally strive to develop in a language-learning environment (schleppegrell, 2004). second, the prevalent approach to educating language minority students has been to provide esl services, based on english proficiency levels as determined by state assessments, and to then mainstream the student for the remainder of his or her subject classes. finally, academic achievement has been a challenge for many ells. we do not wish to present a deficit model of ells; however, data show clearly the existence of an achievement gap between ells and their native-speaker counterparts. specifically looking at ell performance in secondary-level mathematics, the most recent data from the national assessment of educational progress (naep 2011) show that only one percent of ells scored above the 75th percentile on the eighth-grade mathematics assessment. moreover, research has shown that as many as 20 percent of all high-school-level and 12 percent of all middleschool-level ells have missed two or more years of formal education since the age of six (ruiz de velasco & fix, 2000), while more than one-third of new ells from latino backgrounds are placed below grade level in school (jamieson, curry, & martinez, 2001). according to richard fry, senior research associate at the pew research center’s hispanic trends project, “the analysis of national standardized testing scores shows that about 51 percent of eighth-grade ell students are behind whites in reading and math, meaning that the scores for one out of every two will have to improve for the group to achieve parity” (fry, 2007). content teachers’ preparedness for working with ells we believe that the achievement gap, in part, is a result of issues related to the preparation of content-area teachers who spend a majority of the day working with students for whom they have had little to no preparation. research has concluded that teacher preparation programs are not developing the skills that content teachers need to address both the content and language requirements for these students (menken & antunez, 2001). the mastery of the highly specific language of mathematics and science is more challenging when students are learning the concepts and language in a second or additional language (crandall, 1987). in addition, current models of stem teacher preparation not only focus on content knowledge, but on the idea that literacy in stem subjects means that students are able to be active participants in the discourse community of that subject (roth & tobin, 2007). in order for ells to be active participants, they must acquire the content-specific language skills to do so, and we argue that the best place for this is within the context of the subject-area classroom. however, preparation of mainstream secondary subject-area teachers often fails to include coursework specifically related to working with teacher education that works 159 ells in the mainstream classroom. while, as mentioned above, services for ells are mandated throughout the u.s., these students spend much or all of their days in mainstream classrooms (davison, 2006; dong, 2002; leung, 2007; mohan, leung, & davison, 2001) with teachers who may have had no coursework or professional development related to effective practices for these students (nces, 2002). while individual programs may provide more specific coursework related to working with ells, these are the exception rather than the rule. in a large study on the preparation of teachers working with ells, researchers found that fewer than one-sixth of teacher preparation programs offered specific coursework to mainstream teachers related to working with ells (menken & antunez, 2001), while only five states (arizona, california, florida, new york, and, as of 2011, pennsylvania) have adopted teacher certification requirements that include explicit coursework in teacher education programs related to teaching ells. we are not advocating for the elimination of esl services; in fact, we believe that these services should be expanded. nor are we promoting a situation in which “every teacher is an esl teacher.” we recognize the value of well prepared and fully certified esl teachers who provide language and sheltered content instruction for ells. additionally, we strongly support the development and preparation of subject-area teachers who are aware of the needs of ells in their classrooms, and are able to differentiate instruction so that all learners have access to the curriculum, and the needs of all learners are met. we believe that these are complementary services, and that one should not supplant the other. research has shown that when ells are placed in mainstream classrooms with teachers who have inadequate preparation, a number of negative outcomes can arise, including lower levels of academic achievement, lack of classroom participation, lack of meaningful teacher feedback and peer interactions, and lack of opportunities for meaningful language development (harper & platt, 1998; langman, 2003; platt & troudi, 1997; sharkey & layzer, 2000; valdez, 2001; verplaetse, 2000). teacher preparation programs have the power to positively influence tcs’ beliefs and practices related to effective instruction of ells in the mainstream content classroom. research has shown that when candidates had some training in working with ells, they held more positive beliefs about teaching these students than did teachers who had no such training (youngs & youngs, 2001). however, while more preparation in teaching ells increases teachers’ confidence and skills, as well as builds positive beliefs related to working with language learners, “many teachers are unaware of linguistic and cultural influences on student learning, [sic] do not consider teaching for diversity as their responsibility” (lee, adamson, maerten-rivera, lewis, thornton, & leroy, 2008, p. 42). promising practice: collaboration between mainstream and esl teachers based on the reviewed literature, the consensus is that mainstream teachers are receiving little to no coursework during their teacher preparation programs. we argue that this plays a role in the aforementioned achievement gap that exists. it is therefore important to develop innovative ways of preparing content teachers to meet the needs of ells in their mainstream classrooms. teacher collaboration is one way to address this, and this promising practice is becoming more prevalent in many parts of the world where language and content learning are integrated. “teacher collaboration” refers to activities ranging from informal discussions about shared students to highly structured and formalized co160 global education review 1(4) teaching models. we see collaboration, therefore, as a continuum, and we define formal co-teaching as the “strong form” of collaborative practice, and the informal discussions that can take place over lunch or in the hallway as the “weak form” of collaboration. practices that fall in the middle of these extremes can include coplanning lessons, sharing lesson plans and materials, professional visits to each other’s classroom, expert consultations (where a content teacher observes the esl teacher and offers feedback on how more content knowledge might be built, or an esl teacher observes the mathematics or science class and offers feedback on how language learning can be integrated). both forms, and the practices that fall in between, offer mainstream and esl teachers ways to address the needs of ells within both the mainstream and esl classrooms. effective collaboration, regardless of the strength of the form, refers to activities in which teachers develop partnerships to achieve to achieve a mutually agreed-upon goal (friend & cook, 1992). when reviewing the extant research, the evidence suggests that ells and their teachers benefit when collaborative practices exist. for example, the benefits to teachers include increased partnership and reduced isolation, increased efficiency and effectiveness, and the ability to share the responsibilities of teaching, as well as enhanced ability to reflect on practice and enhanced ability to learn from colleagues. further, collaborative practice allows teachers to engage in a continuous improvement cycle (hargreaves, 1994). this eliminates the “sink or swim” effect that both content and esl teachers can encounter when they are required to teach in isolation. in terms of benefits to ells, when content teachers and english language teachers collaborate, the result can be “a shared commitment to systemic school reform leading to higher achievement and greater multicultural understanding” (sakash & rodriguez-brown, 1995, p. 1). teacher collaboration also enhances academic outcomes for ells: recent research has found a positive relationship between teacher collaboration and differences among schools in mathematics and reading achievement (goddard, goddard & taschannenmoran, 2007). finally, collaborative practices between english language and content teachers can ensure that students’ needs are better met than when students are in classrooms where language and content teachers do not work together (wertheimer & honigsfeld, 2000). despite the benefits, teacher collaboration is not without its challenges. research specifically looking at the barriers that esl and content teachers face when engaging in collaborative practices identified issues related to time, the culture of isolation, teacher positioning, and esl teachers’ knowledge of content as most commonly inhibiting collaborative practice (dellicarpini, 2009). arkoudis (2006) shares that effective collaboration between esl and mainstream teachers assumes an equitable relationship between these educators from different disciplines, but in fact, esl teachers are frequently marginalized and have low status in the schools where they work. because of the status issue, meaningful collaboration can be a challenge, often reducing the english language educator to the status of helper rather than teacher. this result is further confirmed by recent work on interdisciplinary teacher collaboration between esl and content teachers, which found that esl teachers feel they are frequently not seen as “real teachers” by either their colleagues or their students, often finding themselves without classrooms (teaching in hallways or converted closets) and lacking resources (dellicarpini, 2009). the study also teacher education that works 161 found that when the seeds of collaborative practice were built at the teacher education level, positive changes in beliefs about collaboration and english language teachers emerged, knowledge about how and when to collaborate was developed, and skills related to collaborative practice were enhanced (dellicarpini, 2009). based on these findings and the extant literature, it would seem imperative that all clil and cbi have an element of collaboration, so that services provided to ells in the mainstream and esl classrooms are complementary. tying it all together: teacher collaboration and two-way cbi as stated earlier, cbi frequently takes place in the esl classroom only, and due to current models of teacher preparation in the u.s., these educators may have little experience with the content that their ells will have to master in their mainstream settings. conversely, mainstream stem educators frequently have had little to no preparation for working with ells. this was clear during a series of classroom observations that the researchers, a mathematics teacher educator and tesol teacher educator, conducted. first, a mainstream math teacher was observed over the course of a semester. the teacher, whom we will call ms. j, was teaching eighth-grade mathematics at a public middle school in the bronx, new york, and all 32 students in her class were ells. while the content she was teaching was satisfactory, there was no modification or accommodation made for her 100-percent ell class, which included some new arrivals who spoke no english, “generation 1.5” students (those who were born in the u.s. to non-native speaking parents, therefore developing the home language as the l1 with english being an additional language) and all levels in between. in our own discussions and review of what we observed, we noted that ms. j was teaching everything (all the necessary content) to no one, since none of the ells really were engaged; nor were any accommodations, such as sheltering or scaffolding of language, made. the next teacher we visited that semester, whom we will call ms. r, was teaching middle-school esl, using the content areas of math and science to engage in the cbi that was required in her school. over the course of the semester, we observed a linguistically rich classroom with a great deal of language accommodation, differentiated materials, and assignments, but the content was either watered down or not relevant. we concluded that ms. r was teaching nothing to everyone. in other words, there was no real content learning taking place. this is when we began developing the collaborative practice of two-way cbi. two-way cbi builds on and extends teacher collaboration and traditional cbi. it differs from the prevalent sheltered instructional observation protocol, or siop (echevarría, vogt, & short, 2000) in that language-driven content objectives (which are enacted in the mainstream classroom) and content-driven language objectives (which are enacted in the esl classroom) are collaboratively developed and are complementary in nature, therefore eliminating the disconnect that often is present between language and content in the classroom. twoway cbi also focuses on making both language and content teachers aware of the types of linguistic knowledge necessary for success in stem subjects, and through collaboration between the mainstream stem and esl teachers, the full range of language forms and functions are deconstructed and explicitly developed. this is critical, since research suggests that language objectives are often little more than vocabulary lessons, and do not make the language of the discipline visible (regalla, 2012). 162 global education review 1(4) these complementary objectives take the following forms (dellicarpini & alonso, 2013): table 1. complementary objectives math classroom language-driven content objectives esl classroom content-driven language objectives swbat1 discuss triangle classification using the following sentence starter: triangle abc is a (an) _______________ triangle because of its angle measures are ____________. students will generate sentences using the classification table (partition-pairs classification) and/or triangle names, (which can act as a semantic feature analysis chart to develop dictionary-like definitions [alonso & malkevitch, 2013]) using correct prepositions, conjunctions, and direct and indirect articles with an 80% level of accuracy. swbat associate triangles with their names, during whole group and small group discussions, based on the length of their sides and on the measure of their angles using the following academic terminology: sides(s), angle(s), length of a side, measure of an angle, base of an isosceles triangle, right angle, obtuse angle, acute angle, isosceles triangle, equilateral triangle, scalene triangle, right triangle, obtuse triangle, acute triangle, equal, unequal, congruent, degree(s). swbat discuss, during whole-group and smallgroup discussions, their arguments and constructively analyze the arguments of others using the academic vocabulary through oral presentation of their cooperative group activity results with an 80% level of accuracy, measured by the completion of the table and the sentences generated as a result of its completion swbat explain orally, using the academic vocabulary, conceptual hierarchical relationships among different kinds of triangles whenever they exist (is an equilateral triangle isosceles?) as well as to identify and communicate in written and oral forms different ways in which these could be defined as they use different classification criteria. swbat engage in a discussion web activity and reach consensus on how to best classify triangles (traditional or partition pairs), share their group results with the class, then individually write a paragraph, using the academic vocabulary of triangles and triangle classification to defend their ideas on this topic. swbat identify all types of triangles with 100% accuracy, understand the linguistic functions related to classifications as they associate observable features of shapes with a classification criterion with 90% accuracy, and to correctly define all types of triangles with 85% accuracy, as measured by their usage of venn diagrams, concept mapping, and other graphic organizers and as they communicate their findings. teacher education that works 163 these complementary objectives support the learning of the content that ells are required to master, and the collaborative development ensures that the activities in the esl classroom support the learning in the content classroom. additionally, as teachers engage in joint planning of these objectives, they learn about each other’s disciplines and learn to respect each other’s roles and jobs, which is one of the barriers to collaboration, as discussed before. course structure in order to understand the ways in which teacher education programs can effectively prepare mainstream stem educators for the ells they will encounter in their content classrooms, and to develop the skills needed for these educators to engage in collaborative cbi teaching partnerships in their teaching placements, we structured coursework that required stem educators and esl teachers to work together to develop content-driven cbi units for the secondary-level math and science classroom, and as a companion, language-driven cbi units for the esl classroom2. in this way, the needs of ells in both settings were being met, and both language and content were being developed in highly contextualized ways. among the lectures and discussion topics are: • who are our ells? • second language acquisition • l2 teaching and learning: bics and calp/language of the discipline • cummins quadrants • approaches to instruction for ells, challenges, and promising practices • teacher collaboration • language-driven and content-driven cbi • reflective practices (dr. thomas farrell as invited speaker) • teaching experiment and action research • common core state standards and ells • schema theory; content reading and ells • lexical acquisition: developing academic vocabulary for ells • cooperative learning and oral language development • text structure, materials, text adaptation, differentiation, and writing • technology/enhancing calp through call • and assessment of ells/the language factor. lectures followed by discussion and a related group activity were at the core of the course; additionally, weekly readings related to the topic and guided reflections on the readings were included in the course discussions, as were experiences from the participants’ field placements. with the purpose of understanding the effectiveness of the instruction from the perspective of the narrative inquiry methodology (reference), the course requires participants to engage in the ongoing development of a framework identifying and assessing ells’ challenges and their needs in the mainstream classroom, as well as to develop strategies to address these needs. starting from their own previous experiences, attitudes, and beliefs on working with ells, participants through collaborative inquiry, analysis of classroom observations, and reflective discussions and writing problematize the identified needs, reconceptualizing and re-framing their initial needs/solutions within a theoretical and sociocultural context. course assignments 1. position paper: narrative inquiry drafts develop into a position paper on teaching ells. 164 global education review 1(4) 2. collaboratively developed content/esl units of study explicitly addressing the needs identified, using the knowledge and skills gained during the course. 3. design and/or conduct a teaching experiment/action research paper/discursive approach to educational research. 4. field observation logs. 5. guided reflections on weekly readings. research questions 1. what is the effect of explicit coursework on mainstream math and science (mms) and english as a second language (esl) teachers’ attitudes and beliefs on current practices related to the inclusion of ells in the secondary-level content classroom and their ability to engage in contentdriven content-based instruction (cbi)? 2. how can coursework build the foundational skills needed to engage in effective esl/mainstream teacher collaboration? methodology the study makes use of a mixed-methods approach that included both quantitative and qualitative data collection and analysis. data came from several different sources. proficiencies related to the effective instruction of ells in the mainstream classroom were tested at the beginning of the semester (pre-test) and again at the end of the semester (post-test). quantitative data were obtained from a 25-item, four-point likert scale pre-and post-course survey addressing research question 1 and analyzed using descriptive statistics. qualitative data were obtained from reflective writing, position papers (draft 1, draft 2, and final paper), reflective teaching journals and/or field observation journals, and individually or collaboratively developed curriculum materials. by collecting data from multiple sources, we were able to triangulate and situate the findings within a theoretical framework that adds to the validity of mixed-methods research, provides for a clearer understanding of the issue, and increases confidence in the findings (jick, 1979). researchers’ reflective collaborative discussions and continuous analysis, including data analysis from the first iteration of the course and throughout, addresses research question 2. participants’ reflective writing and curriculum materials data were transcribed, coded, and analyzed. the qualitative data were analyzed within a grounded theory framework. data were coded using an interim analysis framework, and were initially coded separately by each of the researchers. once the researchers developed inductive codes for the data, the emergent themes were shared and the researchers collaboratively engaged in a second and third round of iterative coding from which core categories were developed. participants this was a pilot study in nature. we report on the findings of 33 participants: 25 in-service and pre-service stem teachers who had a majority of ells in their mainstream content classes or field placements, and eight in-service esl teachers responsible for teaching sheltered mathematics or science to secondary-level ells. during the fall of 2011, the spring of 2012, and the fall of 2012, respectively, seven participants, 18, and eight participants were enrolled in the newly developed course; they were either engaged in level-two fieldwork, which required them to work with small groups of students, or were teachers of record in their own classrooms. the teachers in this study agreed to participate on a voluntary basis, and informed consent was obtained for all participants. table 2 summarizes some of their characteristics. teacher education that works 165 table 2. participant characteristics cohort math bil. math science tesol total preservice *1-3 *4-7 *8-12 *12+ **ns no training 1 3 1 3 0 7 4 3 4 6 2 6 0 11 1 18 4 4 3 6 1 10 16 3 2 0 0 6 8 4 4 6 2 total 9 1 14 1 25 8 7 3 6 1 14 22 * years of experience ** ns = native speakers quantitative data analysis at the beginning (pre-test) and at the end of the course the same 25-item, four-point likert scale survey was administered. the survey contained the following items: table 3. survey items no. items 1 including ells = positive educational atmosphere 2 ell inclusion in mainstream benefits all 3 ells should not be in general education until they attain a minimum level of english* 4 ell students should avoid using their native language while at school* 5 subject-area teachers do not have enough time to deal with ells’ needs* 6 it is a good practice to simplify coursework for esl students* 7 it is a good practice to lessen the quantity of coursework for esl students* 8 it is a good practice to allow ells more time to complete coursework 9 teachers should not give ells a failing grade if the students display effort* 10 subject-area teachers should not modify assignments for the ells* 11 coursework modification for ells is difficult to justify to other students* 12 i have adequate training to work with esl students 13 i am interested in receiving more training in working with esl students 14 i would welcome the inclusion of esl students in my class 15 i would support legislation making english the us official language* 16 i allow ells more time to complete their coursework 17 i give ells less coursework than other students* 18 i allow an ell student to use her/his native language in my class 19 effort is more important to me than achievement when i grade ells* 20 the inclusion of ells in my classes increases my workload 21 ells require more of my time than other students require 22 the inclusion of ells in my class slows the progress of the entire class* 23 i receive adequate support from school administration to work with ells 24 i receive adequate support from the esl staff when working with ells 25 i conference with the esl or subject area teacher * values for these items were reversed in reported data (table 4) 166 global education review 1(4) for the first 15 statements, the scale was: (1) strongly disagree, (2) disagree, (3) agree, and (4) strongly agree; the scale for the remaining 10 statements was: (1) never, (2) some of the time, (3) most of the time, and (4) all of the time. in order to interpret gains in participants’ beliefs, attitudes, skills, and dispositions, the scale vales were reversed for items 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 9, 10, 11, 15, 17, 19, and 22 (*). overall, pre-post “agree or disagree” cross-tabulation (table 5) shows that participants were more likely to agree with the statements on the post-test than on the pre-test. it turned out frequencies went up significantly (pearson chi-square = 11.0891, p = .001). note that likert scale values 1 and 2 = disagree, while values 3 and 4 = agree, so the differences between preand post-test (columns pt-pr) are mirror images of each other. table 4. frequency table item/ pre post pre post pre post diff pre post pre post pre post diff respons e 1 1 2 2 1&2 1&2 ptpr 3 3 4 4 3&4 3&4 ptpr 1 1 0 2 1 3 1 -2 26 19 4 13 30 32 2 2 1 0 11 4 12 4 -8 19 20 2 9 21 29 8 3 3 3 14 6 17 9 -8 14 18 2 6 16 24 8 4 1 2 9 0 10 2 -8 16 16 7 15 23 31 8 5 3 2 12 10 15 12 -3 13 15 5 6 18 21 3 6 7 7 16 9 23 16 -7 7 13 3 4 10 17 7 7 3 5 10 6 13 11 -2 14 14 6 8 20 22 2 8 1 0 1 3 2 3 1 22 20 9 10 31 30 -1 9 4 4 17 19 21 23 2 10 8 2 2 12 10 -2 10 2 1 4 5 6 6 0 17 14 10 13 27 27 0 11 3 0 7 6 10 6 -4 18 18 5 9 23 27 4 12 8 1 12 15 20 16 -4 9 15 4 2 13 17 4 13 2 0 1 0 3 0 -3 16 22 14 11 30 33 3 14 0 0 1 0 1 0 -1 21 23 11 10 32 33 1 15 7 4 14 16 21 20 -1 6 6 6 7 12 13 1 16 4 2 7 13 11 15 4 14 11 8 7 22 18 -4 17 0 1 5 0 5 1 -4 14 12 14 20 28 32 4 18 4 2 19 14 23 16 -7 4 10 6 7 10 17 7 19 4 4 9 9 13 13 0 17 18 3 2 20 20 0 20 4 3 14 15 18 18 0 11 9 4 6 15 15 0 21 4 3 13 10 17 13 -4 13 16 3 4 16 20 4 22 0 1 6 5 6 6 0 18 17 9 10 27 27 0 23 11 9 11 12 22 21 -1 7 7 4 5 11 12 1 24 7 4 13 12 20 16 -4 8 13 5 4 13 17 4 25 13 13 6 5 19 18 -1 9 12 5 3 14 15 1 teacher education that works 167 table 5. count (15 items-33 participants) there is a subtle difference between the first 15 survey questions and the remaining ten. while both of these groups of items are intended to measure participants’ beliefs, attitudes, skills, and dispositions regarding working with ells, the latter reflects actual implementation of such proficiencies; therefore, while it was expected that data would reveal some gains, they should be still underdeveloped, and are supposed to follow participants’ changing beliefs. our teaching during the intervention implementation did not focus on asking participants to recite statements like the ones used in the survey, but rather was designed to facilitate students in coming up with their own positions on how to address meeting ells’ needs. the aforementioned assumption is corroborated by the data analysis, as illustrated by the corresponding chi-square values and cross-tabulation tables below. for the first group of questions, frequencies went up significantly (pearson chi-square = 10.8981, p = .001, table 6), while for the second group, although frequencies went up, there are no significant differences (pearson chi-square = 1.7765, p = .183, table 7). table 6. count (first 15 items-33 participants) agree or disagree cross tabulation disagree agree total prepos t pre-test 331 825 posttest 266 825 total 597 1053 1650 agree or disagree cross tabulation disagree agree total prepost pre-test 177 318 495 posttest 129 366 495 total 306 684 990 168 global education review 1(4) table 7. count (last 10 items-33 participants) the frequency table (table 4) reveals that major gains were related to items 2, 3, 4, 6, and 18, while drawbacks are more marked on items 8, 9 and 16. qualitative data analysis the core categories that emerged from the qualitative data analysis supported the findings from the pre-course survey. first, we found that the mainstream teachers generally held a deficit view of ells at the start of the class. there was a “blame the victim” mentality, and the participants generally felt that academic achievement was solely the responsibility of the student and his or her family, while any failure in that area was attributed to a number of personal factors. many teachers wrote about and discussed who was responsible for the achievement gap between ells and their nativespeaking counterparts. one participant shared: i believe that many factors are responsible for the poor achievements by ell students in the urban school settings in the united states. for example, many of the students’ parents are non-english speakers, and if they are, they are not academic literates, which makes it a big problem for students at home because they speak their parents’ language rather than mainstream english. some students have intrinsic behaviors and they learn because they want more for their lives; others like myself are extrinsic because we use motivation by others to achieve good results, but some of the students are simply lazy. (initial position on ells in mainstream classrooms. michael6, highschool science) this teacher clearly felt that the blame for what he terms “poor academic achievements” should be placed on non-native englishspeaking parents, who may lack academic literacy skills in their first languages, resulting in input that is not aligned with the language of schooling in the u.s. he also talks about motivation, saying that some “students are simply lazy.” many of the participants shared this view. the beliefs that teachers have about language minority students have a profound impact on student learning outcomes (valdes, 2001). when teachers have negative attitudes that are influenced by ethnocentric views or underlying racism, or when they believe that the lack of student success is the fault of the learner and not the responsibility of the teacher or the school system, students’ academic and social needs are not met, and school becomes a negative experience, rather than a positive one agree or disagree cross tabulation disagree agree total prepost pre-test 154 176 330 posttest 137 193 330 total 291 389 660 teacher education that works 169 (tse, 2001; valdes, 2001; youngs & youngs, 2001). such beliefs and such strong deficit views of ells must be explored, challenged, and ultimately changed at the teacher education level in order for this growing population of learners to have access to and achieve success with the mainstream curriculum. it was also found that the mainstream teachers initially had low levels of understanding regarding the needs of ells, but they desired more knowledge of these students in general. one teacher shared; mainstream teachers need to know more about their students then [sic] their name; though their names can tell you a lot—it doesn’t help you understand the cultural difference, language difference, and perhaps even the environmental language compared to content language. (emma, secondary-level math; reflective journal entry) this entry illustrates two key points. first, this teacher is aware of the need to know more about the ells in her classroom; second, and importantly, it highlights the superficial understanding that many mainstream teachers have about the culturally diverse students in their classrooms. emma suggests that you can gain information about a student’s culture and language by his or her name, hinting at the notion that teachers can assume a great deal about a student based on name. this is a very superficial view of cultural identity. the problem is that while emma realizes the need to know more about her students, thinking about that in terms of labeling students based on the ethnic origins of their names, even as a place to start, helps to perpetuate a superficial view of culture and the role it plays in teaching and learning, and creates a monolithic view of the diverse learners teachers encounter. for example, in new york city, where a majority of ells speak spanish as a first language, that first language may be the only element these students share. the cultural diversity represented within this group is immense, and to group these students as one is a mistake. taylor and sobel (2001) found that novice teachers are challenged in their ability to understand and work with their students’ diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds, and are therefore unable to engage in effective classroom practices for these learners. the issue of understanding students’ cultural identities is critical to all educators, but is especially so in a clil approach to instruction. as coyle proposes, “the role of ‘culture’ in clil is fundamental if we are to achieve intercultural learning and understanding” (2009, p. 105). another core category that emerged was that of a lack of knowledge regarding the role of language in the mainstream, content classroom. while the participants were math and science teachers, and these are disciplines with subjectspecific vocabulary and discipline-specific ways of making meaning, there was surprisingly little knowledge of the importance of building the academic language needed to be successful in the class. participants also seemed to believe that they had no role in building these language skills for their ells: mainstream teachers tend to remain unaware of the role of language plays in the classroom, in fact, when i consider this myself i begin to realize how perhaps some of the words i use may have double meaning. perhaps a class or working with ell teachers, [sic] can better give the teachers—us [content teachers], the skills we need to not leave them behind. (emma, secondary-level math, reflective journal) while the focus in u.s. content-teacher preparation programs is on the development of 170 global education review 1(4) content knowledge, teachers also must acquire the pedagogical knowledge and skills to facilitate the development of the types of academic language, namely the language of math and science, that will enhance students’ potential to succeed in these subjects. this development of appropriate academic language is critical for all learners, but ells have unique needs of which mainstream teachers must be aware. when we think of effective mathematics and science classrooms, a linguistically rich environment should be what we imagine: an environment where the teacher provides a foundation in language and concepts, and facilitates inquirybased construction of knowledge. the types of language needed to gain mastery lend themselves not only to the development of mathematical content knowledge, but also to the development of language in general for ells. de jong and harper (2005) address the issue of preparing mainstream teachers to work with ells, and point out that although the professional organizations that govern these disciplines have clearly articulated the content and concepts essential to understanding the development of content knowledge, as well as the sound pedagogical practices needed to facilitate learning, they …fail to explain the linguistic foundation underlying these effective content classrooms. yet students are expected to learn new information through reading texts, participate actively in discussions, and use language to represent their learning by presenting oral reports and preparing research papers. these extraordinary language and literacy demands remain invisible. (2005, p. 102) the teachers in the present study were aware of the content knowledge that they must teach, but were largely unaware of the role that language plays in the development of this knowledge. bailey, burkett, and freeman (2007) provide an excellent illustration of this very dilemma: the problem is that classroom participants generally do not appreciate how deeply embedded teaching and learning are in language use. like water for the fish, language is so fundamental and encompassing in classrooms settings that it becomes transparent. (p. 609) conversely, the esl teacher in the study, who was teaching secondary-level ells mathematics in a sheltered environment, was aware of the role that language played in the development of content knowledge, but unsure of how much content to focus on, and found the balance between the language and content focus challenging to meet. integration of language and content was a challenge for this teacher: it is difficult to incorporate vocabulary, expressions, and other aspects of the language to [sic] the mathematics [sic] classes, but i believe if this is done correctly it can greatly help students. every class i teach, i have to introduce at least two new words and i have to review many of them as i explain a concept or procedure. i have a hard time deciding when to focus on content and when to focus on language. i know that we are aiming for a totally integrated approach, but this is not easy for me to accomplish. i feel like i have to switch between language and content lessons in the same class and i know that the students don’t get enough of both when this happens. this is an area that needs improvement in my own teaching. (paloma, bilingual/esl math; reflective journal) teacher education that works 171 paloma struggles with balancing language and content teaching in her sheltered math class. more nuanced understandings of the language of schooling have developed in recent years (schleppegrell, 2004), and esl teachers have had to change their role from primarily that of a language teacher, whose responsibility was to build communicative and social language skills, to a teacher who must integrate content and language (harper & de jong, 2009). harper and de jong discuss how national and local policies in the u.s., along with revision of the tesol p12 standards, have created a situation in which esl teachers must offer content support in areas beyond english language arts. paloma is responding to these demands by working to balance content and language in her secondary math classroom, but is experiencing challenges in doing so. one of these challenges stems from how esl teachers are prepared in the u.s. while program requirements vary, many esl teacher education programs require only a liberal arts and science core. this may amount to as few as three to six undergraduate credits in entry-level courses in mathematics, science, history, and literature. contrast this with the usual 30to 36-credit major required for subject area teachers. with the increased demands on esl teachers to engage in clil, their preparation in the specific subject areas becomes an issue. esl teachers may have little actual knowledge or skills with the content of cbi, and therefore other interests may drive the focus in esl classes, rather than actual content needs. while this is acceptable practice when focusing on communicative and social language development, it fails to meet ells’ academic language development needs. enhancing teachers’ knowledge of and skills in interdisciplinary teacher collaboration through teacher education programs is one way to address this challenge. when looking specifically at the participants’ understanding of and ability to engage in collaborative practices at the beginning of the course, we found that a declarative knowledge of collaboration was present in all participants, but this did not translate to a procedural knowledge of esl/mainstream teacher collaboration. generally, all participants saw collaboration as a positive practice, but knowledge of how to engage in it was lacking. this can be seen in the following excerpts: the esl teachers are a vital resource, because they bridge the language gap between the teacher and the student. they can properly assess the student’s education and language and help you adjust your lesson plans to meet the needs of that student. (kayleen, secondary-level biology, reflective journal) i’m not exactly sure how i could work with the esl teacher in my school since she doesn’t know science. (michael, highschool biology, “needs of ells” paper) discussion changes in beliefs and practices our goals for the course were to prepare mainstream educators to integrate language and content instruction in the secondary-level math and science classroom through content-focused cbi, to prepare esl teachers to effectively engage in language-driven cbi, and to develop the knowledge and skills necessary to support collaborative partnerships between esl and content teachers. throughout the course data were continually collected in the form of reflective writing, teaching and field observation journals, and focus group discussions. at the end of the semester the post-course survey was administered. data were analyzed to determine 172 global education review 1(4) general trends and changes over time, and to compare the significant differences in participants’ beliefs and practices between the beginning and end of the term. looking specifically at the trends that emerged from the quantitative data and comparing pre and post survey responses’ frequency differences, we see that tcs had significantly changed their beliefs and practices, developing more positive beliefs about ells in the mainstream content classroom, the benefits that the inclusion of ells in mainstream can bring, the necessity of certain minimal english requirements prior to being placed in the content classroom, the use of ells’ native languages in the classroom, the responsibilities of mainstream teachers for ell education, and about practical issues related to the simplification of coursework for ells (to lessen and simplify). while they generally had mixed feelings about whether coursework modification for ells slows the progress of the entire class, and subsequently about allowing ells more time to complete their work (most significant negative gains, item 16), and while many confounded achievement with efforts, it became easier for the tcs to justify the coursework modifications to other students. while there was still a feeling of having had lessthan-adequate training for working with ells, the content teachers sought help from esl staff when working with ells, and enhanced their views on the importance of the role of the esl teacher. in terms of the qualitative data, we will focus on changes that emerged from three core themes: teachers’ beliefs and responsibilities, development of academic language, and collaborative practices. one major change was that the deficit view of ells held by the participants at the beginning of the semester changed to an understanding of the shared responsibility and role of educators in their success: all teachers are responsible for assisting ells with the acquisition of oral language and academic language. (sofia, secondary biology, final position paper) teaching mathematics to ells is about a commitment to set and maintain high standards based on sound pedagogical principles using data based research, state of the art technology, and effective collaboration techniques. when all of these techniques are combined it becomes a formula for student success. (oliver, secondary-level math, final position paper) the participants revised their views on the responsibility of the school system and teachers in educating ells in the content areas, and came to believe that when these students did not experience educational success it was not because they were in some way the problem, but because the system had to adjust to meet their needs. additionally, there was an understanding that all teachers are responsible for all students, rather than ells being the sole responsibility of the esl teacher. this is a significant change from the belief that teaching ells is not the responsibility of the content teacher, and that the work would be accomplished elsewhere, as has been found in prior research (dellicarpini, 2009a; dellicarpini & gulla, 2009b; de jong & harper, 2004, 2005; short, 2002). when all teachers share the responsibility of educating all learners, the marginalization that ells and their teachers can experience decreases, and shared responsibility leads to shared accountability. by the end of the semester, rather than merely expressing that knowledge is necessary in a somewhat passive way, participants described how they could gain that knowledge, therefore becoming agentive. teacher education that works 173 introduce yourself to the ell teacher, the math coach, the iep counselor, and the counselor and get all of their insight and thought on the student and their progress. if the language is what eludes you, introduce yourself to [the] administrator of the foreign language department if it’s a high school, if in a middle school i suggest finding a translator tool that you and the student will always have quick access to. if the language is spanish, as in my single experience as a teacher, find someone willing to translate. the iep teacher actually provided me with spanish text for the ell student. (emma, secondary-level math, final reflection) mainstream teachers’ knowledge of linguistically and culturally diverse learners is essential to effective teaching practices (banks, cochran-smith, moll, richert, zeichner, lepage, darling-hammond, duffy, & mcdonald, 2005). when mainstream teachers understand this need and are able to be agentive in their acquisition of knowledge about the diverse learners they are working with, effective practice can become a reality. we also found an increased understanding of the role of language in the acquisition of content on the part of the mainstream teachers: content teachers play a key role in helping ells develop essential strategies for deciphering words in english. i will provide ample opportunities for discussions, presentations, reading and writing tasks. various exposure and methods for practicing vocabulary will strengthen ells’ reading and language skills as well as science skills. (sofia, secondary-level science, reflection, november) the acquisition of the language of the discipline is essential to the acquisition of content knowledge, and many esl programs in the u.s. have been reorganized to account for this demand (nunan, 2005; richard-amato & snow, 2005). tesol has revised the p-12 learning standards to reflect the importance of the acquisition of the types of language ells need to be successful in their subject-area classrooms (tesol, 2006), which is a shift from earlier models of social language development. teachers must be aware of the language of their disciplines, and of how these linguistic demands impact ells in their classrooms. in terms of the balance between language and content instruction, the esl teacher in the study felt better prepared to engage in languagefocused cbi: in mathematics, you cannot teach content if the students do not have the appropriate vocabulary. as one of the articles stated: “mathematics has more concepts per word, per sentence, and per paragraph.” there is a solid interconnection between the content and the vocabulary, and this is where i need to help my students. if the students already have the knowledge in spanish it is only a matter of transferring the content into the l2, but if the students do not have the previous knowledge, there is where the challenge lies. i have to start teaching to them the basic vocabulary in spanish and then transfer the knowledge to english after they have understood the concept. by teaching this way i can balance language and content when i do cbi. (paloma, bilingual/esl math; reflective journal, november) paloma’s increased efficacy in integrating language and content in the esl math classroom is a critical finding. if esl teachers are to meet the needs of their students, but these students 174 global education review 1(4) are unable to be successful in their mainstream classrooms because they have not developed the requisite language skills to do so, then we are failing students in all contexts. esl teachers must be able to effectively engage in languagedriven cbi, with the focus being on the foundational types of academic language needed for success in the mainstream classroom. as harper and de jong point out, “the move towards content-based language and sheltered content teaching as well as increased attention to the linguistic demands of mainstream classrooms represent a significant shift” (2009, p. 141), and esl teachers must be adequately prepared to respond to these evolving demands. in terms of changes to participants’ beliefs about and ability to engage in collaborative practice between esl and content teachers, we found that while participants did have a favorable view of collaboration at the outset of the course, they did not have a clear understanding of how to engage in such practices. at the end of the course, they had increased understanding of the critical role of interdisciplinary collaboration, and importantly understood how to go about forming these partnerships: these partnerships that are formed with the different content area specialists will play an important role in both content area knowledge and literacy acquisition. the communication between mathematics [sic], ela, tesol, and other subject teachers can provide success stories that will guide your students to both l2 and mathematics content success. (oliver, secondary-level math, final position paper) collaboration with esl teachers can improve a student’s success. with my lessons prepared in advance, i will give a vocabulary list of science content words to the esl teachers. as a team, both teachers can help ells feel comfortable with vocabulary. having the same vocabulary list instructed by two distinct teachers, [sic] will further enhance students’ comprehension. if ells are previously exposed to new vocabulary, they may feel more comfortable in reading and interpreting a text. (sofia, secondarylevel science, final reflection) when looking at the academic success of ells, both language and content must be equally taken into account. one cannot be sacrificed at the expense of the other. as we have emphasized in this article, and as other researchers have discussed, content teachers are not language teachers, and esl teachers may have limited knowledge about the content that their ells need to master. collaboration seems to be a necessary component of any solution to such a dilemma. when esl and content teachers engage in collaborative practice, both teachers and students benefit. in an age of accountability and standardized testing, when ells are required to perform at the levels of their native-speaking counterparts, english language and content teachers must collaborate to ensure that students are successful (creese, 2005, 2006; davison, 2006). conclusion we developed this course as a pilot to begin address the needs of the growing populations of ells that mainstream math and science teachers are facing in their classrooms, and the demands on esl teachers to engage in cbi that addresses actual academic requirements. neither set of teachers, mainstream or esl, is adequately prepared to meet these demands. the general findings, based on this pilot semester, indicate that content teachers showed positive changes in beliefs and knowledge teacher education that works 175 related to working with ells in the mainstream classroom. in addition, the esl teacher who participated was better able to understand her role vis à vis integrating language and content effectively, while all tcs developed a deeper understanding of collaborative partnerships between esl and content teachers. as a result of our findings, we have moved forward in institutionalizing the class within the department. based on the success of the initial offering, we have expanded the number of tcs enrolled in this course to 33, math/science/tesol, during two additional iterations. we have revised the initial syllabus and refined the course assignments to include additional readings and expand cooperative learning classroom activities that enhance participants’ reflective and collaborative practices, as well as to engage participants in designing and implementing action research projects for their students. the researchers/instructors have sought to increase the number of curriculum materials that explicitly address the implementation of the common core state standards in an environment where a teacher must also develop the academic language of all students and attend to the needs of ells. enrolled tcs, overall, will dramatically increase linguistic knowledge related to the development of academic language proficiency for second-language learners. additionally, we have submitted a number of grant proposals to support the development of the course and research, and to support our further development of more effective models of teacher preparation and two-way cbi. an example of this, resulting from the initial findings, is the development of a pilot interdisciplinary practicum component into the system so we can fully analyze the effects of the course. this component will authenticate the gains tcs demonstrate in identifying, understanding, and addressing the needs of ells within a cbi framework, and developing a greater sense of efficacy in terms of their ability to engage in beneficial collaborative partnerships; it would aid in the creation and implementation of curriculum materials for both the mainstream and esl classroom. effective integration of language and content has the potential to create successful learning environments for ells through the meaningful acquisition of the academic subject under investigation and the academic language needed to communicate effectively within that subject. both esl and content teachers face challenges in understanding and implementing cbi effectively. the initial findings from this research and the ongoing project can impact teacher education in meaningful ways. students whose first language is not english are a growing part of the educational landscape in the u.s., and many parts of the world are working to develop effective practices for english language instruction. it is no longer acceptable for teachers of other subjects to have little to no knowledge of the issues related to the education of ells. when teachers are prepared to teach all learners they encounter in their classrooms, educational success and attainment are raised for all learners. notes 1. students will be able to (swbat). 2. for a full discussion of contentand language-driven cbi, see met, 1999. 3. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count of less than 5. the minimum expected count is 298.5. 4. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. the minimum expected count is 153 5. 0 cells (.0%) have expected count less than 5. the minimum expected count is 145.5. 6. all names are pseudonyms. 176 global education review 1(4) references alonso, o. b., & malkevitch, j. 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(2013). the condition of education 2013 (nces 2013-037), english language learners. u.s. department of education’s survey of the states’ limited english proficient students and available educational programs and services, 1991-1992 through 2000-2001 summary reports; state publications (1998-1999 data); enrollment totals from the national center for educational statistics core of common data, 1998-1999 through 20042005; fy 2002 consolidated state applications for state grants under title ix, part c, § 9302 of the elementary and secondary education act (p.l. 107110); 2004-2005 consolidated state performance reports; and additional 2002-2005 data reported by state. august 2006. valdes, g. (2001). learning and not learning english: latino students in american schools. new york: teachers college press. verplaetse, l.s. 2000. how content teachers allocate turns to limited english proficient students. journal of education 182, no. 3: 19–35. wertheimer, c., & honigsfeld, a. (2000). preparing esl students to meet the new standards. tesol journal, 9(1), 23–28. wong fillmore, l., & snow, c. e. (2000). what teachers need to know about language. washington, dc: eric clearinghouse on languages and linguistics. wright, w. e. (2005). the political spectacle of arizona’s proposition 203. educational policy, 19(5), 662-700. youngs, c. s., & youngs, g. a., jr. (2001). predictors of mainstream teachers’ attitudes toward esl students. tesol quarterly, 35(1), 97-120. about the authors margo dellicarpini, phd, is the dean of the college of education at morehead state university. she holds a ph.d. in linguistics and ma in tesol from stony brook university. as an esl teacher, teacher educator, and university administrator, her research and professional interests are in developing contexts for success for english language learners through interdisciplinary teacher collaboration and the development of academic language for ells in the mainstream, content classroom. she is currently developing urban/rural university and p-12 partnerships to prepare all teachers to teach all students. orlando b. alonso, edd, (teachers college of columbia university), is a mathematics educator who has been working to develop educational contexts where mainstream secondary teachers understand the importance of the development of academic language for linguistically and culturally diverse students. his research interests include the study of geometric classifications. prologue 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: freeley, mary-ellen, scricca, diane & wermuth, mel (2014). prologue. global education review, 1 (3). 1-4. prologue mary-ellen freeley st. john’s university diane scricca mercy college mel wermuth mercy college about two years ago we began a conversation about what school supervisors did that resulted in improved teacher performance in the classroom, which in turn would result in improved learning outcomes for students. at a time when all nations are engaged in economic competition and the issues of human capital development are paramount throughout the world, we asked the simple and reasonable question, “where school supervisors do contribute to improved learning outcomes for students, what is it specifically that they do?” taking our inspiration from the seminal article by black and william (1998) and the groundswell of research that followed it about teacher behaviors that positively influenced student outcomes (formative assessment); we wrote a call inviting articles about “formative observation of teachers by their supervisors.” we invited carol burris, a high school principal in new york state, and a fellow of the national education policy center, to write the introduction. it seemed to us that this was a sensible question to ask. we hoped that the question would provoke and invite readers to consider the matter of which policies and practices resulted in beneficial outcomes for all students. as carol burris reflects on her experience, and on the contributions of madelyn hunter, in her introduction to this issue, we see the political and social pressures that make the simple question that we asked at the outset so difficult to answer. the scripted lessons, numerical evaluations of teachers, checklist-type teacher observation forms to which she refers we recognize are only symptoms, the reasons for their existence are varied, and they run deep. burris suggests, hopefully, this issue will begin a dialogue among our readers of what effective teaching and productive supervisory relationships might be. we think that the voices reflected in this issue represent a fair cross section of the issues involved in teacher supervision and in development of effective teachers, but one aspect of what was found is somewhat troublingonly ______________________________ corresponding author: melvin wermuth, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs’ ferry, new york 10522 email: mwermuth@mercy.edu mailto:mwermuth@mercy.edu 2 global education review 1(3) one article addressed the topic of the call headon. in all of the nations represented by the articles included in this issue, there was a strong concern for improving outcomes, whether by modifying programs for teacher preparation, engaging in self-renewal of faculty, experimenting with videotaping and selfreflection of teachers, or engaging students in problem based instruction for students; only one submission dealt directly with the topic of the callsupervisory practices that are associated with increased student learning. initially, we were troubled by the lack of such targeted submissions; but all of the submissions reflected the press for improved teaching and teacher preparation. however, more significantly, they also reflected the political, hierarchal nature of teaching and teacher preparation, and the factors that originate from within the society (including poorly prepared teachers) that governments, policy makers, public schools and institutions of higher education have to respond to. of the eight articles in this issue, the first describes changes over a ten year period in teacher education in response to external and internal pressures. the second and third article deal with video-taping and self-reflection by teachers as a way to improve instruction. the fourth and fifth articles focus on instructional approaches that are associated with increased student learning. the sixth article describes an approach to improvement of instruction that the school and faculty refer to as professional renewal and self-assessment. in the seventh article, the only one to address supervisory practices directly, there was disagreement between teachers and their supervisors about what supervisors actually did when they observed classes and conferred with teachers. the concluding article describes education in rural uganda. while does not address teacher supervision, it does speak to two themes that appear in other articles in this this issue: the influence of social pressures on the schools that serve a society, and the need for better prepared teachersgovernments simply have to do more and better to prepare the next generation for productive lives. it is included in this issue on supervision to remind us of that. in the lead article, fiona benson describes the evolution in teacher education, specifically the student teaching component, at mcgill university, canada. in describing the changes that occurred in the field based component of teacher education over a ten year period, benson identifies the drivers of that change-the political and social external pressures that the university had to respond to. in addition to external pressure on the university, social and political pressures were felt by cooperating teachers, and by faculty, because of increases in the number of students in the public schools, and of student teachers, with learning and mental disabilities, and unique sexual orientations. the shortage of funds for on-going, quality professional development in the public schools, arguably among the most cost effective ways to improve teacher effectiveness (odden & picus, 2014) was a problem that was recognized, as was the difficulty of providing english language instructional materials for the public schools in quebec, a province where the official language is french. in the next article, leonardo a. mercado and laura baecher examine video-based selfobservation done by teachers as a vehicle for individual, reflective practice. mercado and baecher describe the systematic application of video-based self-observation the instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna) binational center in lima, peru by english as a foreign language (efl). in this article they prologue 3 describe a large implementation involving 400 teachers, and the institutional benefits of the implementation. they present a program-wide initiative in which video-based self-observation was central to the process of teacher improvement and evaluation. describing how video-based self-observation impacts teachers supervision, the authors also explain how the reflective process was related to improved teaching, providing insights on specific teacher skills, strategies and techniques that promote student learning. while formative teacher evaluation may provide information to administrators to determine which teachers they want to keep (in addition to improving the practice of teachers), teacher buy-in is required to achieve the full benefit. as mercado and baecher put it, “. . . getting teachers within a professional community to benefit from reflective practice through video-based selfobservation may not be possible unless a conscious decision is made at the institutional level to promote it within a well-defined professional development framework.” in a somewhat related article marcia knoll explores the need for sensitivity on the part of the supervisor to the needs of each teacher. this article addresses effective conferencing strategies and how a college helps program participants to prepare for leadership positions in the public schools. the importance of teacher supervisors to understand the needs of the teachers in order to be able to provide the opportunities for teacher growth through reflection on their practice is stressed. mariya yukhymenko and her associates describe an approach that used ill-structured problems, an approach that teachers can use to encourage collaborative learning and create student centered classrooms. using a strictly structured curriculum dealing with real-world international issues, middle school students in schools across the united states were engaged an online simulation (with students in other schools) of international decision-making dealing with, economic policies, environment, human rights, and health. at the end of the semester students were debriefed and asked to reflect on what they had learned. the study identified instructional practices that benefits students and teachers. an ancillary outcome was recognition that even in student-centered, self-directed classrooms, teachers played an important role in providing support to students. in the next article näslund-hadley and her associates investigate instructional approaches in classrooms in three latin american countries to attempt to identify instructional approaches that are associated with higher learning outcomes as measured on the same regional test. using video-taping of teachers to identify what was actually going on in the classrooms, they found that inquiry based instruction was associated with greater achievement and that complexity of the content, promotion of analytical and critical-thinking skills by the teacher was associated with higher scores on the regional assessments. the study also revealed that drill and memorization dominated instruction, and that many teachers were ill informed about the subjects (math and science) that they were teaching. at john paul college (a k-12 ecumenical school), pauline mundie and robert marr describe the approach that was used to improve instructionprofessional renewal and selfassessment. the decision to rely on professional renewal was the outcome of discussion among faculty, including school leaders and teachers about how to revise the teacher appraisal process, satisfy the australian professional standards for teachers; and more importantly, raise student achievement and respond to the learning needs of all students. 4 global education review 1(3) vincent romano surveyed the teachers and supervisors in a junior-senior high school district in suburban new york about what was actually happening when supervisors observed teachers and then conferred with them about what was going on in the classroom and compared the differences between teacher/supervisor perceptions. questions such as , ”my observer expresses his/her feelings honestly;” ”my observer encourages me to identify possible relationships between my particular teaching strategies and desired outcomes;” and “my observer focuses on my concerns by listening actively, reflectively, and empathetically. teachers and supervisors agreed on ten supervisory behaviors needed for supervisors to promote development of teachers. they disagreed on the degree to which supervisors actually displayed those behaviors. romano’s research, found that the greatest difference in perception between supervisors and teachers was trust, which reinforces what burris noted in the introduction, “if teachers [see] every observation as evaluative, they [will] not be as open to coaching, but would instead, hunker down and be on the defense.” drajea describes the schools in rural uganda noting the relationships that exist between poverty, parents’ level of literacy, and the educational opportunities that exist for their children. the report provided no surprises about the relationships that were found. what was encouraging was the fact that all parents, regardless of the level of their own education, recognized education as being important for their children to have a better life and more opportunities than they did. an interesting inclusion in this article is handwritten notes by pupils in the schools in rural, semi-rural, and urban areas about why they were retained in grade and what they expect from their parents. what children want and expect in rural uganda is no different from what children want and expect in all nations. we encourage you to peruse this “scrapbook.” a new addition to this issue and all future issues is a book review section. eric martone, the managing editor, has accepted the editorial responsibility for that section and will decide which books will be reviewed. this issue includes a review by eric martone of american cocktail by anita reynolds with howard m. miller. american cocktail is the memoir of anita reynolds (1901-1980) a black woman whose unconventional life led to meetings with the greats of her time, including james joyce, ernest hemingway, gertrude stein, charlie chaplin, picasso, matisse, and ralph bunche, among others. references black, p., & william, d. (1998). inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment. phi delta kappan, 80(2), 139-148. odden, a. r., & picus, l. o. (2014). school finance: a policy perspective. mcgraw-hill: new york. about the author(s) mary ellen freeley, edd, is an associate professor in the department of administration and instructional leadership at st. john’s university. before coming to st. john’s, she served as a new york city teacher, and then as principal, and assistant superintendent in nassau county, ny. diane b. scricca, edd, is an assistant professor, in the department of educational administration at mercy college. before coming to mercy college, she served as a new york city teacher, and then as a high school principal, assistant superintendent, and superintendent in nassau county, ny. mel wermuth, edd, is an assistant professor in the school of education at mercy college. before coming to mercy, he served as a new york city teacher, and then as an assistant principal and acting principal in elementary and junior high schools. https://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&title=assistant+professor%2c+educational+administration&sortcriteria=r&keepfacets=true&currenttitle=cp&trk=prof-exp-title https://www.linkedin.com/search?search=&title=assistant+professor%2c+educational+administration&sortcriteria=r&keepfacets=true&currenttitle=cp&trk=prof-exp-title prologue 5 2013-2014 board of reviewers dr. faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece dr. noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia, united states dr. marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware, united states dr. paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland, united states dr. alpana bhattacharya, graduate school and university center, city university of new york, united states ms. caitlin block, drexel university, united states dr. caroline m. brackette, mercer university, united states ms. alisha brown, michigan state university, united states dr jon callow, the university of sydney, australia dr. ross collin, manhattanville college, united states dr. jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia dr. indra dedze, university of latvia, latvia dr. julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha, united states ms. jodi lynn denyszyn, the university of texas at austin, united states dr. anton dobart, austrian ministry of education and culture, austria ms alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, france dr. curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college, united states dr. cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania, united states mr. daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya ms. terri l germain-williams, mercy college, united states dr. damiana gibbons, appalachian state university, united states dr. nancy p. gibson, concordia university chicago, united states dr. amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame, united states dr. heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts, united states dr. jeremy h greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong, hong kong dr. e. francine guastello, st. john's university, united states dr. amanda m gunning, mercy college, united states dr. douglas ray hainline, emeritus, university of london, united kingdom mr. mark hamilton, education development center, united states mr. stephen james hernandez, hofstra university, united states ms. sarah elizabeth hinshaw, m.s., george mason university, united states dr. janie daniel hubbard, university of alabama, united states dr. cheryl james-ward, san diego state university, united states dr. jordan h jay, lincoln university of missouri, united states mr. yves m jeanrenaud, technische universität münchen, germany dr. kathy-anne jordan, mercy college, united states dr. hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville, united states ms. shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university dr. namsook kim, university at buffalo, the state university of new york, united states ms. kara 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united states dr. meghan e marrero, mercy college, united states dr. patrick mccabe, mercy college, united states dr. carmen l. mccrink, barry university, united states dr. ezella mcpherson, wayne state university, united states mr evan michael mickey, indiana university, united states dr. mary lou miller, oral roberts university, united states mr. david morrison-love, university of glasgow pedagogy, policy & practice research knowledge transfer group, united kingdom dr. erica newhouse, mercy college, united states dr. elena nitecki, mercy college, united states mr. carlos ornelas, universidad autónoma metropolitana, mexico dr. melissa parenti, st. john's university, united states dr. do-yong park, illinois state university, united states dr. kari pawl, concordia university chicago, united states dr. diana payne, university of connecticut, connecticut sea grant, united states dr. emily pendergrass, vanderbilt univeristy, united states dr. salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, united states dr. sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, united states dr. leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles, united states dr. jessica f. riccio, teachers college columbia university, united states ms. pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington, united states dr. james b. schreiber, duquesne university, united states dr. susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, united states mr. scott schuth, concordia university chicago, united states dr. beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom dr. saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha, united states dr. georgios sideridis, harvard medical school clinical research center children's hospital boston, united states dr. robin m. smith, suny new paltz, united states dr. dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, united states dr. vicky spencer, george mason university, united states mr. kris stewart, uw madison, united states dr. sherri dessirea tapp, oral roberts university, united states dr. zoila tazi, mercy college, united states ms patisepa tuafuti, univeristy of auckland, new zealand dr. karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh, united states dr. elaine marie walker, seton hall university & sametric research, united states dr. helge wasmuth, mercy college, united states dr. amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, united kingdom javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/67') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/159') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/32') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/19') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/58') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/71') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/15') 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120 global education review 2 (2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: marrero, meghan e. (2015). why master teachers do what they do. [review of the book those who can, by neil bright]. global education review, 2 (2). 120-123. book review why master teachers do what they do “those who can” by neil bright by meghan e. marrero in those who can: why master teachers do what they do, master teacher, administrator, and curriculum developer neil bright distills the secrets of effective teaching into fifteen “practices” that he describes using clear language and extensive support from research literature. throughout the text, bright emphasizes the idea of putting research into practice, urging current and future teachers to rely on research results to effect change in united states schools, to ensure that children achieve their very best. his tone is authoritative, yet empowering and readable, and no-nonsense. in the introduction, for instance, he declares, “american teachers can’t have it both ways. if they are willing to accept praise when students do well, they should be equally willing to accept criticism when students do poorly” (p. xiv). he describes criticism of state mandated curricula as “fashionable,” but points out that passive resistance makes students less prepared for future realities (p. 3). he insists that teachers act as professionals, from “dressing for success” (p. 23) to modeling responsibility (p. 84) and reminds us that students deserve nothing less. underpinning the book is an unwavering philosophy that all children can learn, and that teachers must have a vision for children’s success, working with a community that includes schools, parents, and the students themselves. he implores teachers to take charge and be the change they want to see, to become teacher leaders and to lead and support students on their paths to success. bright begins the book with an introduction that immediately dismisses oftcited excuses for ineffective teaching and underperforming students. he reminds readers that good teaching matters, and is “the single most important and controllable factor contributing to student success” (p. ix). he notes that defenders of the united states educational why master teachers do what they do 121 system often discount comparative international studies, as they do not take into consideration american diversity or other factors. bright points out, however, that “relatively privileged american children performing at high levels often do not compete favorably, even with average students in well-off european and asian countries” (p. xiv). he cuts down the notions of too little time in the curriculum, that teaching is an “art” that cannot be learned, and poor funding for schools. while his arguments are strong, and his assertions about teaching and learning are evidence-based, in this overview he ignores compounding and well-documented factors that influence student achievement, e.g., poverty and home literacy levels (rothstein, 2014). the main section of the volume is broken down into short chapters on each of the fifteen identified practices, which bright asserts that master teachers consistently demonstrate. the first two, clarifying vision and unifying vision, are about the meaning and desired outcomes of education. bright argues that education’s purpose is “not in and of itself for students to do well in school, but for them to do well in life” (p. 1). he reminds us that as educators, we must design instructional activities and engage in pedagogical practices that will make students better thinkers and better citizens. bright asserts that master teachers must join together with their school community to create a unified vision of education that is consistent from year to year, striving for a more cohesive curriculum that is assessed with performance assessments rather than standardized tests. he stresses the importance of teachers taking the lead on enacting change, while acknowledging roadblocks that frequently occur, e.g., pushback from colleagues and administrators alike, and encourages master teachers to “fight the good fight” toward school improvement (p. 11), pushing through the naysayers to help students succeed and achieve the vision set for them. in concert with these ideas, his thirteenth practice, partnering with parents, asks teachers to engage with parents and work cooperatively toward school improvement, with the belief that collaborative efforts will achieve greater success. bright also offers practical advice for conducting parent-teacher conferences, and for creating shared visions of responsibility. similarly, his eleventh practice, promoting effort belief, is related to teachers’ philosophies. bright stresses the importance of embodying the philosophy that students should work hard to achieve greatness, noting that the “only variable leading to success or failure one can fully control is effort” (p. 95). of course, several practices focus on classroom instruction. with his third practice, performing instruction, the author discusses the importance of student engagement, leaning on the research to connect student success with being engaged in learning. he cites teacher preparation for lessons as one of the key factors, likening this process to an actor rehearsing his lines, and notes that students recognize passion and enthusiasm as defining characteristics of strong teachers. supported by a wide variety of educational research studies and reports that span decades, bright outlines specific practices shown to engage students during class, from promoting effective note taking, using lesson structures that allow for practice and review, moving around the classroom, to using every minute of class time. he emphasizes the importance of getting to know one’s students, validating their ideas and concerns, and creating a classroom climate in which children feel welcomed and supported. he explicitly notes that students who fear teachers, or being humiliated in class, do not learn. at the same time, bright’s fourth practice requires that we hold students accountable, refraining from enabling students to not achieve the highest 122 global education review 2 (2) possible levels of success. ever realistic and practical, he outlines the “’games students play” (p. 26) and how not holding students to high standards is detrimental to their success. in his discussion of how to design rubrics that effectively assess students, however, bright seems to contradict himself. he argues that educators must set their expectations high and have a vision of success, but when it comes to rubric design, he suggests that teachers gather student work that illustrate various levels of mastery, and create a rubric from these work samples, using, for instance, a top sample as an a paper. this practice directly contradicts best practices in assessment and rubric design, which hail the importance of using rubrics as a way to communicate expectations to students (jonsson & svingby, 2007; moskal, 2000). this critical feature of rubrics cannot be leveraged if the rubrics are created after student work has been submitted. later practices are also classroom focused. bright discusses the importance of maintaining discipline (practice 8), noting “highly effective teachers have a seemingly innate ability to diagnose and remedy the problem before the infection of misconduct spreads” (p. 63). he again gives detailed and evidence-based examples of effective and ineffective classroom management techniques, discussing why and how some common techniques do not work to improve classroom climate and learning. he follows this discussion with specific ways in which master teachers question skillfully (practice 9) and use questioning to support higher levels of critical thinking and link to effective assessment practices. practice 12, understanding motivation, begins with a statement that “the fact is that most students are motivated to learn” (p. 99). he provides instructions for effectively enacting strategies for increasing motivation, e.g., cooperative learning, differentiated instruction and avoiding “textbook abuse” (p. 107). these examples are written in ways that allow educators to immediately try out in their classrooms. beyond the classroom, bright asks teachers to take responsibility for their own instruction, thoughts, and actions. practices 5 through 7, 10, and 11 remind us that educators are responsible for reaching all students, regardless of ability or motivation level, and that teachers must continuously strive to be better, to learn new techniques, and not to fall into traps (such as taking student behavior personally or making situations out to be worse than they are). he prompts us to remember that teachers are continuously “modeling what matters” (practice 10) for students in our classrooms, and again implores educators to be professionals in every aspect of their career, both in and beyond the classroom. bright also unapologetically states things that teachers may not want to hear—picking on educational behaviors and characters that most teachers meet during their careers in schools. bright warns teachers to beware of teachers who oppose reform just to be contrarian, who are “too busy” to help students, or who blame others, e.g., administrators, parents, or students, for their own ineffectiveness (pp. 54-56). he cautions against those colleagues who will speak against teachers recognized for their successes, and asks prospective master teachers not to conform to negative group behavior. instead, he implores them to try to view administrative decisions and other controversies with “greater school-wide perspective” (p. 60). while bright’s characterizations of ineffective teachers may at times seem contemptuous and patronizing, most experienced teachers have met teachers like these—those who automatically oppose change, disparage students and their families, or immediately run to the aid of teachers who are ineffective and unprofessional. he does not adequately discuss, unfortunately, what teachers why master teachers do what they do 123 striving to become master educators should do when there are unsuccessful administrators steering the ship, and engaging in these ineffective and unprofessional behaviors themselves. the final two practices are also challenges to students and teachers as they look ahead. practice 14, internalizing kaizen, reminds educators to be reflective, to solicit feedback and to take risks. bright views master teachers as lifelong learners, who although they employ his effective practices, can always improve their effectiveness. he throws in the final practice, challenging students to courageously pursue their dreams, almost as an afterthought, not citing the practice in the table of contents, but rather providing food for thought near the book’s conclusion. the final chapter is a numbered, distilled review of the principles with significant details that may assist educators in translating what they have read into practice. to this end, bright also provides appendices, such as rubrics and planning documents. those who can is a useful book for preservice and in-service teachers and is an excellent starting point for discussion of the art and science of teaching, particularly for those who teach, or will teach, secondary students. unlike other books aimed at this audience, bright provides very specific, research-based, and easily implemented ideas that a reader can try right away. this approach empowers teachers rather than disheartening them, providing strategies that equate to keys to success for those striving for teaching excellence. at the same time, bright is a realist; he recognizes the realities of today’s schools—from unsupportive administrators and uninvolved parents to antagonistic colleagues—but insists that master teachers must rise above and employ practices that will make them better, and ensure that students get the best possible education. references jonsson, a., & svingby, g. (2007). the use of scoring rubrics: reliability, validity and educational consequences. educational research review, 2(2), 130-144. moskal, b. m. (2000). scoring rubrics: what, when and how? practical assessment, reserach & evaluation, 7(3). retrieved from http://pareonline.net/getvn.asp?v=7&n=3&sa=u&ei =yzihu67qfywbhaemlocybg&ved=0ceoqfjai&u sg=afqjcnetc-7odou3ubfespqqrges8rffrg rothstein, r. (2014). brown v. board at 60: why have we been so disappointed? what have we learned? washington, dc: economic policy institute. “those who can: why master teachers do what they do.” by neil bright. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2013. isbn: 978-1475801453 about the author neil bright is a retired assistant superintendent for curriculum and instruction, a former faculty union officer and chief negotiator, a college professor of psychology and government, a staff developer, and a teacher of students from fifth grade through high school seniors. currently a writer and student teacher supervisor in new york's catskill mountains, he was nominated for the dean's award as distinguished county educator, was named outstanding district instructor, and gained semifinalist recognition for the new york state teacher of the year competition in 1992. about the reviewer meghan e. marrero is an associate professor of secondary education at mercy college, where she directs two large grant programs focused on stem teacher education. her research interests include ocean literacy and stem education. 24 global education review 2 (2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: danzak. robin l. (2015). the meaning of roots: how a migrant farmworker student developed a bilingualbicultural identity through change. global education review, 2 (2). 24-42 the meaning of roots: how a migrant farmworker student developed a bilingual-bicultural identity through change robin l. danzak sacred heart university abstract thousands of children and teens labor as migrant farmworkers across the united states. these youngsters, many who are immigrants, face challenges in completing their education and breaking the cycle of agricultural work. such barriers are influenced by geographic instability, poverty, and sociocultural marginalization. beyond these factors, and the focus of this article, is the challenge of bilingual-bicultural identity negotiation experienced by young farmworkers in and out of the educational context. this question is explored through the case study of manuel (a pseudonym), a teen farmworker in florida. manuel emigrated from mexico at the age of 12, and is a speaker of spanish, otomi (an indigenous language), and english. although he recently completed high school, he struggled to adjust to life in the u.s. and acquire english. manuel provided interviews and autobiographical writing in 2008, when he was age 14 (grade 8), and again in 2012, when he was 18 (grade 11). his parents, also migrant farmworkers, contributed an interview in 2012. a qualitative, thematic analysis was applied to the data. themes that emerged included: resistance and acceptance of personal and cultural-linguistic change, the need to acostumbrarse (get used to it) with respect to these changes, the desire to salir adelante (get ahead) and the pathways to do so (e.g., finish school, learn english), and manuel’s developing bilingualism and his shifting attitudes towards it. overall, manuel’s story offers deep insights into the realities in which the bilingual-bicultural social identity of a migrant farmworker student develops and interacts in and out of school settings. keywords bilingualism, language and identity, migrant student, farmworker student; migrant farmworker era difícil porque me sentía muy raro vivir con mis padres. yo ya estaba acostumbrado con mis dos abuelas, y mi tía, que cuidaban de mí. me decía yo, “¿qué hago aquí? mi casa está en méxico.” pero yo no tengo casa en méxico. (it was difficult because i felt very strange living with my parents. i was already used to my two grandmothers, and my aunt, who took care of me. i said to myself, “what am i doing here? my home is in mexico.” but i don't have a home in mexico.) – manuel (a pseudonym), age 18 (all translations by the author). ______________________________ corresponding author: robin l. danzak, department of speech-language pathology, sacred heart university. fairfield, ct 068251000 e-mail: danzakr@sacredheart.edu mailto:danzakr@sacredheart.edu the meaning of roots 25 introduction the united states (u.s.) depends on migrant farmworkers to harvest the food we eat every day. despite cultural attitudes against child labor, hundreds of thousands of children and teens work in the fields alongside their parents to supplement the family income (romano & o’connor, 2011). whether they work or not, children of migrant farmworker families face immense challenges in completing their education and breaking out of the cycle of agricultural work (cranston-gingras & paul, 2008; green, 2003; romanowski, 2003; vocke, 2007). these obstacles are impacted by the geographic instability of migration, situations of poverty, and sociocultural marginalization. farmworker students are often immigrants who, along with their family/work responsibilities, must quickly acquire english and adapt to the cultural practices of u.s. schooling. the focus of this article is the negotiation of a bilingualbicultural identity of manuel, a teen farmworker in the southeastern u.s. who struggled to complete his education while adjusting to personal and cultural-linguistic change. the only son in a mexican family of four daughters, manuel and his two older sisters were raised in hidalgo by their grandmothers and aunts while their parents crossed the u.s. border in search of a better economic situation. manuel’s two younger sisters were born in the u.s. when he was 12 years old, manuel’s parents “lo mandaron a traer” (sent for him), and he entered grade 6 at a public middle school in florida. at age 16, while still attending school, manuel began to help his parents in the fields, picking tomatoes and other vegetables on weekends and during summer vacation in various locations in the u.s. southeast. manuel struggled academically, but managed to complete high school while also working in the fields. as an immigrant (previously undocumented) and migrant farmworker, manuel experienced continuous geographic, personal (familial), and cultural-linguistic changes throughout his adolescence. coming to the u.s. meant that manuel had to transition from being cared for by his grandmothers and aunts to living with his parents for the first time that he could remember. beyond this, to meet academic demands, he had to learn an additional language (english) and participate in sociocultural and educational practices that differed from his previous experiences. through a qualitative analysis of manuel’s autobiographical writing and interviews conducted with him and his parents, this case study examines manuel’s dynamic negotiation of a bilingual-bicultural sense of self in this, ever-changing context. the context: migrant farmworkers in the u.s. and florida it is difficult to determine an exact number of migrant farmworkers in the u.s., as many are undocumented and may elect not to participate in official surveys. the u.s. department of agriculture (2013) reported that, in 2012, there were slightly over one million agricultural workers in the country. however, the non-profit organization, migrant health promotion, indicated a much higher number: between three and five million (2013). among these, romano and o’connor (2011) suggested that over 400,000 are children. additionally, it is estimated that 68% of farmworkers in the u.s. are from mexico (u.s. department of agriculture, 2013). agricultural workers are critical to the economy of the state of florida, where manuel and his family spend most of the year. after 26 global education review 2 (2) california, florida has the largest number of farmworkers, and south florida ranks first in the country for agricultural employment in non-metropolitan areas (bureau of labor statistics, 2013). with a long growing season, there is work in the fields for florida farmworkers from september to may. the state provides 75% of the oranges (state of florida.com, 2000-2012) and up to 90% of the tomatoes (estabrook, 2009) consumed in the u.s. indeed, the country’s “tomato capital” is the town of immokalee, florida, where more than 30,000 farmworkers arrive annually to support this industry (ríos, 2011). while government documentation reports the average annual farmworker salary as approximately $20,000 (bureau of labor statistics, 2013; u.s. department of agriculture, 2013), estabrook (2011) indicated that the annual earnings of a tomato picker in immokalee were just $9,700 when he conducted his research. indeed, for decades, tomato pickers earned approximately $.50 per 30-pound bucket of tomatoes picked. currently, the coalition of immokalee workers (2014) is reporting significant improvements for florida tomato pickers, thanks to this organization's successful fair food program. now, 14 major corporations, including several fast food companies, food service industries, and walmart, have committed to a wage increase, a code of conduct in the fields, farmworker education sessions on labor rights, a complaint resolution mechanism, and auditing. in spite of important steps forward with regard to wages and worker rights in florida's tomato fields, migrant farmworkers in general continue to experience conditions of poverty and isolation. they frequently spend time living apart from their families, and children may support their parents’ efforts in the fields. often not knowing the dominant language, farmworkers may be unaware of their rights and subject to workplace abuse compounded by financial desperation (estabrook, 2011; holmes, 2013). migrant farmworkers also experience poor health, having increased rates of many chronic and acute conditions including, among others, malnutrition, diabetes, hypertension, dental problems, headaches, heat stroke, tuberculosis, urinary tract infections, and skin and pulmonary problems due to pesticide exposure (holmes, 2013). all of these conditions, along with the constant stress of housing and income insecurity, cause distinct educational challenges for children of migrant farmworker families. the education of migrant farmworker children due to their vulnerable status and social marginalization, the children of migrant farmworker families have been called “invisible children” in the context of schooling (national commission on migrant education, 1992). public schools in the state of florida serve more than 25,000 children of farmworker families, the third largest number in the country, after california and texas (florida advisory committee to the u.s. commission on civil rights, 2011). the majority of these children are from mexico, and many are speakers of one of mexico’s 68 indigenous languages (instituto nacional de lenguas indígenas, 2014). thus, when they arrive in the u.s., these students may be monolingual in an indigenous language or bilingual in their home language and spanish. in either case, most children of migrant farmworker families speak a home language(s) that differs from than the dominant language of schooling, english, which remains the primary language of instruction and the language of power in the u.s. (nieto, 2010; paris, 2010). the meaning of roots 27 the challenge of finishing school nearly two decades ago, martinez and cranston-gingras (1996) reported that students of farmworker families had the highest school abandonment rate of any other group. in order to identify their motives, these researchers surveyed 345 teen farmworkers who had left school. the most commonly cited reason was to work in the fields to help their families (36%), followed by a loss of interest in school (13%). the most current data on migrant student graduation rates from the u.s. department of education (2012) comes from the 2009-2010 academic year. according to this resource, migrant student school completion rates vary greatly from state to state (e.g., 25% in maryland vs. 86% in oregon). for the state of florida, it is reported that 64% of migrant students graduated high school in four years with a regular diploma, up 4% from the previous year. apparently, some states are better than others at harnessing the resources and resilience of migrant students. resilience and perseverance notwithstanding their challenges, and temptation for school abandonment, some farmworker students achieve school success and enter post-secondary education. several studies have focused on the characteristics of these resilient youth. for example, cranston-gingras (2003) described the high school equivalency program (hep) for migrant farmworker students at the university of south florida. this program offered individualized pathways for migrant teens that have previously abandoned school, some as early as sixth grade (average grade of school withdrawal was grade 9), to earn the general education diploma (ged). in addition to academic preparation with the ged curriculum, students attending hep could participate in an individualized learning resource program, english language instruction (if necessary), the sociocultural activities of the university, opportunities for service learning, and career counseling/vocational training. at the time of publication, 70% of hep students were successfully earning the ged, all with immediate, post-completion employment and/or enrollment in post-secondary education. outcomes of this program attest to the unique educational needs of many migrant farmworker teens, as well as their ability to succeed academically when these needs are met and supported. mchatton, zalaquett, and cranstongingras (2006) explored, also with surveys, the characteristics of 57 students who participated in a program especially for migrant farmworker students attending university. in general, the participants reflected characteristics of self-sufficiency, independence, perseverance, and resilience. the majority (78%) responded that their family had been a key motivating factor; that is, their parents had emphasized the importance of education and the desire that their children would have a better life than their own. finally, the results suggested the importance of the school community in demonstrating cultural-linguistic competence in order to support students of diverse backgrounds. in another qualitative study, romanowski (2003) confirmed the fundamental role of schools in recognizing and serving the unique needs of students from farmworker families. through observations and interviews with teachers, coordinators, and students participating in a summer workshop for migrant students in ohio, this study identified various keys to creating a supportive school climate for farmworker students. these included: critical selfreflection on the part of teachers to identify 28 global education review 2 (2) prejudices and challenge stereotypes; understanding of cultural differences that may exist between migrant families and the dominant school culture; a safe and positive school environment; and the use of a culturally relevant and consistent curriculum. these studies demonstrate that, although migrant farmworker students may move from place to place, the schools they attend have the opportunity to create supportive environments in which culturally competent staff and well-structured curricula have a positive impact on their future. indeed, it is in the school context where farmworker students acquire english and develop social identities as bilingual-bicultural individuals. however, it is important to note that the research cited was conducted at the program level and not at an individual level. delving more deeply into the story of a migrant farmworker student like manuel, through case study, has the potential to contribute additional insights into the challenges and resources, as well as the process of identity development, of these students. bilingual-bicultural identities and inbetween spaces immigrants–notwithstanding where they come from or where they go to–often experience “identity vulnerability or insecurity” (blackledge & pavlenko, 2001, p. 244) as they navigate an unfamiliar cultural environment. additionally, these individuals may feel tension as they find themselves socially positioned by others differently from how they see themselves, based on societal power structures involving gender, class, race, and ethnicity (blackledge & pavlenko). thus, in their new place of residence, immigrants must not only acquire a new language, but also de/re/construct their social identities in new cultural-linguistic contexts. in this way, immigrants, as well as the second and third generation children of immigrants, often negotiate hybrid identities that integrate their home culture and language with newly acquired cultural-linguistic practices (giampapa, 2001). for immigrant children and children of immigrants, this identity negotiation usually occurs in the context of school. qualitative methodologies have been employed to explore identity negotiation of immigrant students in various contexts. for example, sarroub (2002, 2005) investigated, through ethnography, the dual identities of female, yemeni, muslim students attending a public high school in michigan. on a daily basis, these students sought to balance their roles as “good muslim women” (2005, p. 1) and typical u.s. students in a strategic negotiation of often-divergent home and school worlds. sarroub used the term, “inbetweenness” (2002, p. 130), to describe the girls’ ever-shifting discourses and sociocultural practices in terms of language (arabic-english), culture, ethnicity, and identity across home and school contexts. giampapa (2001) also used ethnography to explore the hybrid identities, as expressed through linguistic practices, of second and third generation italian-canadians (aged 1924) studying italian at university. this author employed the phrase, “lean on” (p. 297; e.g., to lean on different elements of identity) to express how the informants strategically used language to highlight different aspects of their dual identities in various, transnational contexts (both in canada and on a study trip to italy). findings suggest the powerful role of language in identity negotiation for second and third generation youth. giampapa concluded: “my research highlights the fact that identity performances are never fixed but a hybrid, complex, multicultural and multilingual expression of the participants’ desires” (p. 308). the meaning of roots 29 also focusing on the role of language in identity negotiation, iannacci (2008) used ethnography to consider the code-switching practices of bilingual students attending kindergarten and grade 1 at a public school in canada. the focus was not so much on the children’s linguistic behaviors, but on the influence of context and power relations influencing why and how code switching occurs. iannacci (2008) framed the study with the concept of liminality, that is, the “sense of living between two languages and cultures” (p. 103) that culturally and linguistically diverse students experience in the context of schooling. iannacci found that the students used code switching in dealing with their liminality and the linguistic demands of their monolingual classroom, as well as in “capitalizing on their knowledge of official and unofficial discourses, and as such as a hybrid literacy practice (blending of primary and dominant languages and registers) that helped them negotiate socialization in the context of their classrooms” (p. 113). for iannacci (2008), the acceptance of code switching in diverse classrooms has the potential to create a third space, a term used by bhabha (1994) to describe cultures in contact. bhabha’s notion of a hybrid “third space” (p. 36) challenges our understanding of culture as a homogenous, unifying force and source of historical collective identity. for bhabha, it is in the “in-between spaces” (p. 1) that new identities and, indeed, new societies, are formed. in the “third space,” cultures in contact push the boundaries to reconstruct something that is not the sum of two cultures, but a completely new, third culture. the idea of a third culture is also essential to anzaldúa's (1999) work, borderlands/la frontera. this author suggested that the u.s.-mexican border represents a “third country” (p. 25): a border culture, where people grow up between two cultures. people living in the literal and metaphorical borderlands may discover that: it’s not a comfortable territory to live in, this place of contradictions. hatred, anger and exploitation are the prominent features of this landscape. . . living on borders and in margins, keeping intact one’s shifting and multiple identity and integrity, is like trying to swim in a new element, an alien element. (anzaldúa, 1999, preface). this concept of a third space identity serves as a framework for the case study of manuel. as a mexican immigrant and bilingual speaker of spanish, otomi, and emerging english, manuel found himself struggling to acostumbrarse (get used to) his new life in florida, where his family structure had changed and schooling was conducted in english and in the context of new and different sociocultural expectations. as a migrant farmworker, manuel also had to negotiate a balance between work and school identities to support the financial needs of his family and meet his parents' and his own expectations to salir adelante (get ahead). methods the present inquiry is a case study of manuel, a teen migrant farmworker in the southeastern u.s. stake (1995) identified the key purpose of a case study as, “we would like to hear their stories” (p. 1). seidman (2013) followed up with, “most simply put, stories are a way of knowing” (p. 7). this is certainly the motivation for working with manuel, as his story has the potential to contribute to our understanding of the lives of migrant 30 global education review 2 (2) farmworker students, a little studied group with unique educational needs. researcher self-disclosure i am a bilingual, biliterate researcher of bilingualism, especially the writing of adolescent english learners. i met manuel in this context, but did not know at the time that he was from a migrant farmworker family. from 2010-2013, i was involved in supporting florida farmworkers through community service and advocacy. i have witnessed firsthand the hardships of some of these families, and it is important to me to share manuel’s story as a means of promoting understanding and support for farmworker students. i conducted all interviews with manuel and his parents in spanish, and transcribed them myself, seeking assistance/clarification from native speakers from mexico when needed. encounters i met manuel in 2008, when he was age 14 and attending grade 8 at a public middle school on the west coast of florida. at that time, he was enrolled in the english for speakers of other languages (esol) program and, as part of this class, participated in a research project on the bilingual, narrative and expository writing of english learners in middle school (danzak, 2011a, 2011b). as one of six focal participants, manuel also contributed an interview about his language and literacy learning experiences. four years later (2012), i decided to follow-up with the focal participants of the bilingual writing study. it was a challenge to find manuel because he had left the district immediately after grade 8. however, thanks to his middle school esol teacher and social media, i discovered that manuel had spent the last four years moving around the state, attending high school while simultaneously picking tomatoes and other vegetables as a migrant farmworker. when i met with him in southeast florida for a second interview, manuel was 18 years old, attending grade 11 at a public high school, and still enrolled in an esol program. data data for manuel's case study came from interactions in 2008, when he was age 12 in grade 8 and in 2012, when he was age 14 in grade 11. collecting both interviews and writing samples from manuel at two distinct points in time, as well as an interview of his parents in 2012, allowed for data triangulation, strengthening the validity and, therefore, reliability, of the qualitative research (golafshani, 2003). interviews based on the preferences of manuel and his parents, all interviews were conducted in spanish. the interviews were recorded and transcribed immediately for analysis. in 2008, as part of the bilingual writing study, manuel contributed a semi-structured interview (bernard, 2006), during esol class time. a pre-determined protocol (used with all participants) guided this interview; however, the structure was flexible and allowed for additional questions and conversation. in the 2008 interview, manuel briefly described his family, summarized his immigration, and made general comparisons between his schooling in mexico and the u.s. he also talked about his usage patterns of spanish, otomi, and english, and described how he felt learning english as an additional language at school. manuel’s 2008 interview lasted approximately 12 minutes and produced four pages of single spaced text. in 2012, manuel provided a much more extensive, unstructured interview; i had a general plan in mind, but relinquished control to let manuel express himself on his terms the meaning of roots 31 (bernard, 2006). at this time, manuel and i met at a restaurant and talked for 1 hour 25 minutes. in this interview, manuel was able to provide rich detail about his family, his childhood in mexico, his transition in the u.s., his languages, and his experiences at school and as a migrant farmworker. the 2012 interview resulted in a transcript of 30 singlespaced pages. in 2012, after meeting with manuel, i also conducted an unstructured interview with his parents in which we conversed about manuel’s experiences (as reported by him), their feelings about his transitions, and their expectations and hopes for him. i spoke to his mother and father simultaneously by phone (on speaker), for 23 minutes, while they were driving from one work location to another. the resulting transcript was 7.5, single-spaced pages. writing as a participant in the 2008 bilingual writing project, manuel–like the other participants– completed a questionnaire on his language experience and use, and produced two narrative and two expository autobiographical texts, each in english and spanish (total of eight texts), and 10 journal entries in the language of his choice (always spanish). (see appendix for a list of autobiographical writing topics). like the other participants, manuel revised and compiled all of these texts, with selected illustrations, into a final, bilingual autobiography that was published as a book and displayed at a culminating community event (for details on manuel’s bilingual writing in 2008, see danzak, 2011b). manuel was invited to produce four more autobiographical texts in 2012 (two narrative, two expository, each in english and spanish). however, he opted not to complete this task. instead, he granted permission for me to include our facebook messages as writing samples from 2012. analysis all data (in the form of word documents) were uploaded in to dedoose (2013), an online, qualitative data analysis software. a thematic analysis (corbin & strauss, 2008; grbich, 2007) was applied to identify and code themes and subthemes in the data. for corbin and strauss (2008), themes are categories that “represent relevant phenomena and enable the analyst to reduce and combine data” (p. 159). creswell (2013) described the process of classification, in which data are organized into a few or several general themes, “broad units of information that consist of several codes aggregated to forma a common idea” (p. 186). as the themes and subthemes were identified and coded in the interviews and written texts, themes and excerpts were organized into tables and data displays (miles & huberman, 1994) using inspiration 8 (2006) concept-mapping software. this process determined relationships among the themes and subthemes and illustrated changes in manuel (e.g., feelings, goals, identities) from 2008 to 2012. findings thirty-seven themes and subthemes were identified and coded in manuel’s data (all interviews and writing samples across 2008 and 2012). these themes are interrelated, as illustrated by the data display (concept map) presented in figure 1, which includes most codes. 32 global education review 2 (2) figure 1. concept map of manuel’s story. graphic representation showing interrelationships of themes and subthemes. keeping in mind the conceptual framework of hybrid/third-space identities, manuel’s story and the emergence of his bilingual-bicultural identity can be told from the starting point of four major themes (identified in figure 1 by gray shading): change, acostumbrarse (get used to it), salir adelante (get ahead), and bilingualism. all other themes, including some that played important roles in the analysis (e.g., family, school, and learning english), are connected to the major four and will be explained within them. note that, for the purposes of this article, interview quotes were translated directly into english. however, excerpts from manuel’s writing are presented in the original spanish, including errors, and translations are provided. change as the child of migrant farmworker parents, instability and change have been constants in manuel’s life. his parents migrated to the u.s. before he was born, when his mother was just a teenager. she narrated, well, i came at 14 years old to the u.s.; since then we have been working, well, in agriculture. . . . but we can’t get used to it, though. i don’t know, lately, we need to find a little work, and we leave the city and return to the fields again. and that’s how we go. but my whole life has been in the fields. (parent interview, manuel’s mother, 2012). manuel’s two older sisters and he were born in mexico, due to their father’s “celos” (pride). manuel explained, ah, my dad was a very proud person, very proud. he criticized the chicanos [people of mexican origin born in the u.s.], said they were lazy. he didn’t want us to be like that. so, it was his pride that pushed him. my mom got pregnant here [in the u.s.]. she got the meaning of roots 33 pregnant here, and they went leave us in mexico. … the two younger [sisters] were born here. later my dad realized that it was better for us to be born here. but, i’m telling you, it was his pride that took us to the other side. (manuel’s interview, 2012). after he was born, manuel’s parents, desperate for work, returned to the u.s., leaving him and his two older sisters in the care of their grandmothers and aunts. his mother described, the hardest part, this was when we tried to bring them, well, we went and the kids, we left them in mexico. . . with relatives, my mom and my sister, we left them in charge and this was the hardest, being separated from our children. i said, “i’m going to look for something for you to eat, for a better life”, but at the same time, we were separated from them. when we went back [to mexico] they were already all grown up. (parent interview, manuel’s mother, 2012) thus, manuel attended grades kindergarten through six (primary school) in mexico. he describes himself during those years as a “street kid”: honestly, i have changed so much. my family has changed so much. … when i was small, i was a bum, a man–a boy of the streets. i was almost never home, when i was in mexico. my parents were here. they would go visit us, but it wasn’t the same. so, i was more a street kid than a home kid. i lived with my grandma, my aunt. and i went wherever i wanted. my sisters stayed in one place, but, as a boy, i think, i was more rebellious. honestly, i was a bad kid before. (manuel’s interview, 2012) understandably, manuel did not reveal the experience of living apart from his parents in 2008. in fact, he even softened/hid it, explaining in the interview that, when he was small, his mother helped him learn to read in spanish: “my mom taught me to, she showed me the alphabet, the vowels” (manuel’s interview, 2008). however, in line with his later selfidentification as a street kid, manuel’s 2008 written autobiography mentioned that, in mexico, he spent a lot of time outside playing soccer (all writing excerpts are reported verbatim): mi deporte favorito es el futbol porque es divertido. esta actividad lo aprendi cuando tenia 7 años. … esta actividad lo practique con mis primos que estan en méxico (my favorite sport is soccer because it is fun. i learned this activity when i was seven years old. i practiced this activity with my cousins who are in mexico). indeed, much of our conversation in 2012 involved looking back at what manuel had expressed (or not expressed) in 2008. he explained, “before, i was very, i was a very shy boy. i was afraid of everything” (manuel’s interview, 2012). also reflecting on how he was during the time of the 2008 project, manuel recognized, “i complained a lot. but, now with time, i see that we are put in different positions so that we learn more about life” (manuel’s interview, 2012). as a more mature, 18-year old, and after six years of living with his parents in the u.s., manuel was able to summarize very insightfully the significance of change in his life: honestly, for me, i shouldn’t change, i should continue to be the same as always. the only things to change are the bad things i have done and that’s it. but, i will keep being who i am. … like i said, before i was a very demanding kid, very rebellious. in this i have changed a 34 global education review 2 (2) little, and it has helped me. (manuel’s interview, 2012). his father agreed, and suggested that religion may have helped manuel mature out of his rebellious phase: well, religion influences a little too, i imagine, because it’s also about this. this influences a lot. through education more than anything because when children, let’s assume, have a rebellious phase, sometimes the church helps, by giving them a bit of education, along with us as parents. you know, god. i think it seems that this has helped him a little to go inside [off the streets]. (parent interview, manuel’s father, 2012). acostumbrarse (get used to it) a major turning point for manuel was when, at age 12, his parents decided to bring him to the u.s. to join them and his two younger sisters. his elder sisters, older teens at the time, stayed in mexico. manuel explained, they [his parents] say, “before, everything was easier, when you guys were in mexico” because, they say, it wasn’t that they stopped loving us, but they could save more money. because, they worked a little and they sent us money. it’s not like the money here; from here to there [mexico] the [value of the] money multiples, doubles. so, it was better. but, she [mom] said, “what good is it, sending them money, if i don't have them with me?” so she sent for us. (manuel’s interview, 2012). thus, manuel, a self-proclaimed mexican “street kid”, suddenly found himself in an urban area on the west coast of florida where he had to attend a u.s. school (grade 6), learn english, and live with his parents for the first time in his life. he remembers, it was difficult because i felt very strange living with my parents. i was already used to my two grandmothers, and my aunt, who took care of me. i said to myself, “what am i doing here? my home is in mexico.” but i don't have a home in mexico. (manuel’s interview, 2012). when i met manuel in 2008, two years after his arrival (age 14), it was clear that he was struggling to adjust (acostumbrarse) on multiple levels. he told me, “i have lived here for a few years. i can’t get used to it here.” when i asked, “do you think at some point you will get used to it here?” he replied, “no, never. because i feel that it is not my country” (manuel’s interview, 2008). this struggle was also reflected in his 2008 autobiographical writing: mi momento triste fue cuando vine a los ee.uu. porque me dolio dejarmis abuelos, hermanas, tios. con mis hermanas que me vine estaban felices pero yo no porque deje a todos mis familiares en méxico (my sad moment was when i came to the u.s. because it hurt me to leave my grandparents, sisters, uncles. with my sisters when i came they were happy but not me because i left all my relatives in mexico). in his “letter to a new student” text (english version), manuel wrote, mayby hi [he] can’t get useto like me still can’t get useto very good even though i have two years righ here in the u.s.a. both the content and structure of manuel’s grade 8 writing reflect his challenges in adjusting to the culture and acquiring english language and literacy. in his 2012 interview, manuel and i revisited the idea of acostumbrarse, in terms of his immigration as well as his work as a migrant farmworker. the meaning of roots 35 reflecting on his 2008 responses, manuel stated, i remember. but, well, i think that i couldn’t get used to it because i hadn’t visited other places. being able to visit others, i preferred [the west coast]. … and, well, what i really didn’t like about it was that we were very closed in … we almost never went out. because all we did was go to school, go home, go to school, go home. my mom was working at night, and my dad got home late from work. so we couldn’t spend time together. in reality, as time goes by, i don't know, things change. i say, we are put in this [situation] for something, right? to learn. (manuel’s interview, 2012). fortunately, manuel’s relationship with his parents improved over time: i see that with time i have changed a lot. i don't know, i see that now my life is better than before. . . . now i feel that my family is closer than before, when my parents were here and we were there. they went to visit us, but it wasn’t the same. i don't’ know, i didn’t like it because, each time they went, they went to visit us for a time, and they came back and, i don’t know, it was really crazy. but now, now that we are all together, we spend more time together. it is better. and my life changed because, now that we are more together, now, i’m not a street kid like i was before. (manuel’s interview, 2012). regarding his work in the fields, manuel reported that, after almost three years of picking crops, “i am getting used to it now” (manuel’s interview, 2012). however, he also stated, i’d say that the small ones [cherry/grape tomatoes are harder to pick] because it takes longer like, if you are fast, you fill a bucket in 20 minutes, with the small ones. the big ones, in two, three minutes you fill it. so, but really, it’s the same, because for the tomato, the big one, you have to be like this (crouching down), bent over all the time. and also the grape [tomato]: you sit, you squat, you kneel, but it’s also tiring. it’s tiring. it’s all tiring. (manuel’s interview, 2012). overall, manuel was more accepting of change and more comfortable in the u.s. in 2012; however, he still hoped to return to mexico: maybe i didn’t get used to it. i am getting used to it a little bit. i see now that it is different, but to stay here the rest of my life, no, i don’t think so. but yes, i am getting used to it a little bit. (manuel’s interview, 2012). salir adelante (get ahead) like most migrants, manuel’s parents came to the u.s. in search of work to provide for their families, and in hopes of better opportunities for their children’s future. his father summarized, “[manuel], i want him to get a career so he doesn’t have to work in the fields like us” (parent interview, manuel’s father, 2012). completing high school was not easy for manuel, especially considering his immigration to the u.s. at age 12, his struggles with change, geographic instability due to migration, and the challenge of learning academic english beginning in middle school. manuel’s father explained, thank god, he promised us that he was going to salir adelante and echarle ganas (try his best) in his studies and, well, really he is doing so-so. i can’t tell you that he is doing well-well exactly, but since we have moved from one place 36 global education review 2 (2) to another, it was not always the same school so he got a little bit behind. but now, thank god, during this period he has been going to only one school. (parent interview, manuel’s father, 2012). his mother agreed, “well, i believe that, for me, i am proud of him that he has that mentality for his studies” (parent interview, manuel’s mother, 2012). manuel’s own opinion about his school challenges has evolved over time. in 2008, he stated that learning english was “very difficult,” and later identified it as his greatest school challenge: “because everything else, once i learned english, it started getting easier for me” (manuel’s interview, 2012). in 2012, attending high school, manuel had greater concerns about science: before i was good at science, but now that i have gotten to chemistry, no, it’s harder for me. . . . it’s very difficult. now i realize that science isn’t as easy as it was before. so science has gotten a lot more complicated for me there. (manuel’s interview, 2012). on the other hand, thanks to a tutor who changed his attitude, manuel feels that he is improving in math: a tutor said to me, “do you realize, reading is harder than math?” and i said, “why?” he told me, “because with math, once you learn something… how to solve a problem, the others are the same”. … i started to like math a little more now. i don’t say that i’m good at it, but i think that now it’s a little bit easier. (manuel’s interview, 2012). regarding his hopes and plans for the future, manuel had already assumed the salir adelante mentality in 2008, when he wrote in a journal entry: yo quisiera para mi futuro ir a méxico para travajar en mexico. tambien planeo ayudar a mi pueblo para que sea mejor que los demas porque a mi nunca me gusta quedarme atras (i would like for my future to go to mexico and to work in mexico. i also want to help my town to become better than the others because i never like to be left behind). in 2012, when manuel considered his future, he said, honestly i don't know if i am going to stay here [south florida] or go with my parents to migrate there [north carolina], but i want to stay here more because i want to get my career: my career as a mechanic. … whether they pay well or not it’s because i like it. … engines are my passion. … yes, stay for a little while here and get my career going and then, afterwards, with time, at the right time, i do want to go to mexico, maybe to live or at least to travel. (manuel’s interview, 2012). bilingualism manuel’s journey can also be narrated as a tale of multiple languages. his family speaks otomi, an indigenous language, and spanish, the language of schooling and power in mexico. in 2008, in florida, manuel was resistant to learn and use english, explaining, “i don’t know, it’s very difficult. like, it’s like as if i were being born again because it’s another language” (manuel’s interview, 2008). at that time, manuel was a speaker of spanish and otomi, and an emerging english learner. however, he did not consider himself to be bilingual (instead, monolingual in spanish). he also suggested that he did not speak otomi and understood it only “a little” (manuel’s interview, 2008). in 2012, when i asked him about otomi, he explained, “i knew it. yes, i use it, but only with my parents. … my parents speak it, but only them. when they talk to me i understand it. i can't speak it, but i understand it” (manuel’s interview, 2012). the meaning of roots 37 in both 2008 and 2012, manuel’s preferred language, for both speaking and writing, was spanish: “i have it in my roots, because my family speaks spanish, i speak it too” (manuel’s interview, 2012). regarding his local community in 2012, manuel stated, “it’s full of hispanics here. it’s wonderful. … english is almost never used here” (manuel’s interview, 2012). however, school was a bit different: we have teachers that speak spanish, but sometimes they don’t speak spanish; they don’t want you to learn spanish . . . but to learn more english. so, if they know that someone doesn’t speak english, they say, “try to speak more english so you learn.” but when they see that someone really doesn’t understand, they speak to you in spanish. (manuel’s interview, 2012). although he is happy to use spanish in diverse social contexts, as a spanish speaker in the u.s., manuel has experienced the pain of language discrimination. in 2008, he stated, “i have heard several people say that we are in america, that we shouldn’t speak spanish. i have realized that, some people say we shouldn’t speak spanish. this depresses me” (manuel’s interview, 2008). when we discussed language discrimination in 2012, he reflected, ah, well, i think that i will continue to feel it. because, sometimes people, there are people who honestly want you to speak spanish. but there are people that, i don’t know, they criticize because they think we are talking bad about them. like before, i criticized them because i thought they were saying bad things about me [in english]. but now i realize that, it’s better to be, like you say, it’s better to be bilingual. (manuel’s interview, 2012). manuel recognized that learning english was a tremendous challenge, and suggested that he learned the most when he was forced to use it at a school in north carolina where he did not receive esol services: they took me out of esol, and i saw that i needed it. but afterwards i realized that, since no one spoke spanish at that school, i started learning a little more english. . . . so [as one of his teachers had suggested], it is true. i should get out of that class, because i know that i can learn more english when i am speaking only english, only english. (manuel’s interview, 2012). manuel’s parents also expressed a strong desire for their children to learn english, relating this skill to the salir adelante discourse. his mother stated, thank god, he is getting a little better at studying english because, three or four years ago, at that time, he was really shy about speaking it. i used to tell him, “try to speak english because here it is what you need.” because maybe we [parents] are silent; well, it’s because we don’t know how to speak english, we don’t know. we might not even be able to order food in an american restaurant. i used to tell them, “try your best because you kids have the opportunity to learn english.” and, thank god, they have advanced. now they do speak english. maybe not all the time, but they can defend themselves enough. (parent interview, manuel’s mother, 2012). 38 global education review 2 (2) reflecting on this process, in 2012, manuel redefined the term, “bilingual” and included himself in his definition: bilingual. hmm, it’s a word (laughs). it’s someone who can speak two languages, who can control them. i don’t know, maybe i am learning this, learning to control this, bilingualism, and speak two languages [englishspanish]. … i feel a little bilingual. because now, before i didn’t know english, so now, suddenly, i got more into english. yes, i feel a little bilingual. (manuel’s interview, 2012). perhaps manuel’s most profound reflection on his life and accomplishments was his 2012 response to my asking how he felt about being bilingual. he stated, hmm, i feel like, very proud, because maybe i haven’t done big things, but i have learned things. i have learned a lot of things about life. because, they are important things, the most important. like people say, forget about your past and live in the present. and go forward, don't look back. i say, erase the bad things you have done and keep doing better things. (manuel’s interview, 2012). discussion this case study has explored the personal and educational, cultural-linguistic challenges and achievements of manuel, a migrant farmworker student who has developed a bilingual-bicultural identity through a series of changes that prompted both resistance and acceptance. manuel’s story was told through the themes of change, acostumbrarse (get used to it), salir adelante (get ahead), and bilingualism. his own reflections on his life through interviews and autobiographical writing, and those of his parents through interview, provided layered insights into manuel’s adaptation to change and negotiation of a third space identity. bilingual-bicultural, third space identities: a process manuel’s creation of a third space identity emerged out of a series of intense personal and cultural-linguistic changes and his shifting along a continuum of resistance to acceptance of these changes. the process of acostumbrarse (getting used to it) was not easy for manuel. in 2008, when he was in grade 8, age 14, manuel positioned himself–in both his autobiographical writing and interview–as an unhappy teen. he felt sad that he had left his family in mexico and wanted to return, resisted learning english, which he considered “very hard”, and was “depressed” by the language discrimination that he experienced in his new environment. looking back on this time in the 2012 interview, manuel was able to understand that most of his previous unhappiness had come from his struggle to adjust to living with his parents for the first time, especially when they were working long/late hours and were not always available for him. he also expressed in 2012 that perhaps the greatest challenge for him, when he first came to the u.s., was the english language. indeed, when he was in grade 8, manuel described learning a new language as “being born again”. this deep insight can be interpreted at two levels. first, in a more literal sense, being a language learner entails, at least initially, severe constraints on the ability to understand and speak. especially in the case of adolescents and adults, the constraints of emerging, additional language acquisition can give the learner the sensation of feeling immature and limited, similar to a frustrated toddler without the words to express him/herself. second, and on a more metaphorical level, the idea of being born again through the meaning of roots 39 language acquisition suggests that learning a new language is not only about mastering linguistic structures, but also about redesigning the learner’s entire sense of self. therefore, developing a new language, especially within the context of a new culture, also necessitates the creation of a new social identity that goes with that language. the metaphor of being born again through the process becoming bilingual-bicultural aligns with bhabha’s (1994) concept of the third space. that is, as the additional language emerges, the speaker’s identity remains somewhere in-between the previous culturallinguistic self and the new cultural-linguistic self (e.g., sarroub, 2003). this, for anzaldúa (1999), is the “place of contradictions”: the border space. for example, even at age 18, after six years in the u.s. being educated in english, manuel only tentatively accepted his bilingual identity, stating, “i feel a little bilingual” (manuel’s interview, 2012). thus, in 2012, he did not perceive himself as monolingual, like in 2008, nor did he confidently identify himself as bilingual. instead, he positioned himself in an in-between space, somewhere along the path of becoming bilingual. additionally, it is interesting that, in both 2008 and 2012, manuel did not consider otomi to be part of his linguistic/bilingual repertoire. that is, he did not position himself as a speaker of otomi, but instead as occupying a third space, stating that he could understand it, but not speak it. for manuel, being bilingual involves the use and, in his words, “control” of spanish and english. apart from acquiring english, manuel faced the challenge of adapting to life in the u.s. on other, familial and cultural levels. this process of acostumbrarse (get used to it) played an important role in manuel’s identity negotiation. in 2008, manuel expressed with full certainty his resistance to living in the u.s. and his desire to return to mexico, which he considered his home. however, by 2012, he had softened the u.s.-mexico divide, stating that he would like to continue his education in the u.s. and, later, go to mexico “maybe to live or at least to travel” (manuel’s interview, 2012). here again manuel positioned himself in the third space, literally and metaphorically on the border between two cultures and identities. the meaning of roots for manuel, the development of a third space identity is also related to the metaphor of roots. for example, when he talked about his connection to the spanish language, he noted that it would always be a part of him because it was in his roots. these roots, for manuel, include strong ties to his family: both his parents and younger sisters in the u.s., as well as the grandmothers, aunts, and older sisters that he left behind in mexico. indeed, as a child being raised without his parents in mexico, manuel identified himself as a, perhaps rootless, street kid. however, when he immigrated to the u.s. as an early adolescent, it was difficult for him to adjust to living with his parents and the “closed in” routine of going to school and then going back home every day. after a few years had passed, when manuel felt that his relationship with his parents had improved, he was able to let go of his street kid identity and embrace a new identity rooted in the salir adelante discourse. this included the goals of finishing school and learning english, and also aligned with his parents’ dream of a better life for their children and an escape from working –with literal roots–in the fields. perhaps it was this shift, influenced by his parents and, as his father suggested, religion, that gave manuel the courage to stay in school and open up to learning english and using it as a tool to achieve his goals. 40 global education review 2 (2) new perspectives on migrant farmworker students manuel has shown us that, when working with migrant farmworker students, it is important that we understand that these children are experiencing intense transitions and are learning to deal with them (acostumbrarse) as they mature and negotiate new, third space identities. in this way, manuel’s story suggests that educators should not view migrant farmworker students from a perspective of deficit, but instead within a framework of change. from this perspective, it becomes paramount to understand how to best support these students in their perpetual context of shifting geographic, familial, and culturallinguistic contexts and related third space identities. applying the framework of change perspective to classrooms and schools that serve migrant farmworker students requires collaborative, critical dialogue to discover how educators and institutions can provide an oasis of stability, as well as both academic and moral support for migrant farmworker students in the school setting. over a decade ago, romanowski (2003) suggested that, to meet the needs of migrant farmworker students, schools should create safe, positive environments with culturally competent teachers and culturally relevant and consistent curricula. similarly, green (2003) recommended developing school cultures that welcome (both culturally and linguistically) migrant parents and families, value students’ cultural-linguistic experiences, and provide esol services, drop-out prevention, and college and career counseling. in addition, and in light of manuel’s revelations, schools serving migrant farmworker students should be willing to invest class time to develop rapport and build inclusive communities where respectful and trusting relationships can thrive, both between the teacher and students, as well as among the students themselves. these positive relationships, and the ability to view the classroom as safe space to be themselves and share their stories, could allow migrant farmworker students to feel less alone and better equipped to adapt to their ever-changing lives. manuel’s story is one of change, resistance, acceptance, reflection, and maturation. in his life, he has faced challenges such as growing up in a family divided between two countries, immigrating the u.s. to begin living with his parents at age 12, learning english as an additional language, and picking crops from the age of 16. however, manuel has also demonstrated tremendous resilience and insight into important life lessons. his reflections show us the importance of understanding migrant farmworker students from a perspective of change, and help us consider how we can support their bilingual-bicultural, third space identities. epilogue: manuel’s present thanks to social media, i have been able to keep in touch with manuel since our encounter in 2012. coincidentally, just as i was completing this article, he contacted me to let me know that he had entered a technical school in florida to study auto mechanics, his dream career path! the classes are in english; however, manuel is optimistic. he wrote, in english, “well, every day is a new day and every day i learn a new word.” i am grateful to manuel and his family for sharing their stories. may they continue to salir adelante. author note the author would like to express appreciation and gratitude to manuel and his parents for their contributions to this project. the meaning of roots 41 references anzaldúa, g. 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(2013). interviewing as qualitative research: a guide for researchers in education and the social sciences (4th ed.). new york, ny: teachers college press. stake, r. e. (1995). the art of case study research. thousand oaks, ca: sage. state of florida.com (2000-2012). retrieved from http://www.stateofflorida.com/portal/deskt opdefault.aspx?tabid=95 united states department of agriculture, economic research service (2013). farm labor. retrieved from http://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/farmeconomy/farm united states department of education, ed data express (2012), retrieved from http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/data-elementexplorer.cfm/tab/data/deid/1850/ vocke, k. s. (2007). “where do i go from here?” meeting the unique educational needs of migrant students. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. about the author robin danzak, phd, is an assistant professor of speech-language pathology at sacred heart university in fairfield, connecticut. her research focuses on bilingual language and literacy, especially writing of adolescent english learners. framed by a sociocultural perspective, her work aims to integrate students’ languages, cultures, and identities with classroom literacy practices. appendix manuel’s autobiographical writing topics, 2008 narrative text topics (each topic elicited in both english and spanish) • special or funny family memory • first day of school in the u.s. expository text topics (each topic elicited in both english and spanish) • a person i admire • letter to a new student journal topics (composed in students’ language of choice; for manuel, always spanish) • intro to journal (self-presentation) • happy moments • sad moments • problem or conflict • the languages we speak • sports/hobbies • goals • tradition/family/culture • dream vacation • three wishes http://www.nytimes.com/ http://www.stateofflorida.com/portal/desktopdefault.aspx?tabid=95 http://www.stateofflorida.com/portal/desktopdefault.aspx?tabid=95 http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/data-element-explorer.cfm/tab/data/deid/1850/ http://eddataexpress.ed.gov/data-element-explorer.cfm/tab/data/deid/1850/ model writing rubrics-1-3-14-15 formattig copy pg 1 model writing rubrics-1-3-14-15 formattig copy pages 2-end 182 global education review 1(4) 2014-2015 board of reviewers mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college, city university of new york krishna bista, university of louisiana at monroe caitlin block, drexel university cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta alisha brown, michigan state university jon callow, the university of sydney, australia mi-hyun chung, mercy college hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio pamela m christian, azusa pacific university, california ross collin, manhattanville college arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education ms. alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college william dwyer, stephen f. austin state university, texas cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, f1orida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, f1orida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l . germain-williams, mercy college damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts 2014-2015 board of review 183 jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom mark hamilton, education development center, united states helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university ravi kumar, davanagere university, india jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, newzealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york dina lopez, city college, city university of new york new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university lawry v. mahon, victoria university, australia gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind,united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, wayne state university claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria jung kang miller, mercy college, new york evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york 184 global education review 1(4) david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom maroun naser, stem academy, canada newhouse, erica, mercy college, new york nitecki, elena, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman, mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuth, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom harun serpil, university of wisconsin madison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school good day john ezinwa silas, nnamdi azikiwe university awka, nigeria kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri dessirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university elaine marie walker, seton hall university sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark angela webb, louisiana state university steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis 2014-2015 board of review 185 yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 59 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mceachron, gail & bhatti, ghazala . (2015). teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom:a transnational study in the united states and united kingdom. global education review, 2(2). 59-83 teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom: a transnational study in the united states and united kingdom gail mceachron the college of william and mary with student researchers alexandra hartley, aaron nawrot, rachel heideman and ashley jones ghazala bhatti bath spa university with student researchers amy lamborn, ben crushcov, lydia maley and lauren hogg abstract global research has shown the persistence of inequality with regard to accessing curriculum with a view to obtaining suitable work and making useful contributions to society. the intersection of race, gender, language and low socio-economic levels creates situations which often marginalize ethnic minorities in school settings (freire, 1968; nieto & turner, 2012). the graduation rates in the united states for native american, african american and hispanic students are lower than the graduation rates of whites and asian americans. in addition, bangladeshis and african caribbeans currently living in the uk are underrepresented in higher education, particularly young men in those communities. the research questions that guide this inquiry are: (1) according to databases, how does the academic performance of language minority groups compare to the academic performance of non-linguistic minority groups at the elementary and secondary levels of education? (2) according to language support teachers and university students, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the instructional practices for language minorities who are learning english in the united kingdom (uk) (bristol) and the united states (us) (henrico)? participants were: five uk teachers, four uk university students, five us teachers, four us university students. data collection supervised by lead researchers included interviews, focus groups, classroom observation, and performance documents. data analysis utilized a mixed-methods approach. overall, linguistic minority groups performed lower than their english proficient peers. culturally, uk teachers provided a greater emphasis on religious instruction, whereas us teachers addressed patriotic topics more frequently. teachers in the united states and the united kingdom were culturally supportive with slight variation in the encouraged use of the students’ heritage languages. keywords language support, social justice, comparative education, english as a second language, language minority group 60 global education review 2(2) rationale and purpose of study the purpose of this study was to explore the variation in academic achievement among language minorities and their english-proficient peers. mceachron and bhatti and their undergraduate and graduate students explored ways in which teachers in the us and uk work with students for whom english was not their first language. the study investigated whether institutions of higher education that prepare teachers take into account the promotion of good practice in relation to equal access to education. one aspect of best practice (echevarria, vogt, & short, 2012) is the ability of pre-service teachers to be culturally responsive and supportive of diverse linguistic populations. two faculty members, one from the college of william and mary and one from bath spa university, and eight students from their respective institutions investigated the intersection between ethnicity and english language proficiency among students at the primary and secondary levels. data was collected in four schools, one high school and one primary/elementary school in each country. the student populations in the two institutions of higher education were predominantly white, whereas the school population where the graduates will be employed might well be diverse with students from many ethnic groups whose first language is not english. the research affirms the importance of differentiating the curriculum for language minorities as well as providing pre-service teachers with the opportunity to work with diverse linguistic populations and their teachers prior to their future teaching roles. literature review this study was guided by the principles of social justice and the assumption that all students who attend schools in the us and uk should be able to access curricula that provides them with the opportunity to enter mainstream occupations and become actively engaged citizens. research has shown the persistence of unequal access to effective schools and curriculum materials, thus making it difficult for some students to obtain suitable work and make useful contributions to society. the intersection of race, gender, language and low socio-economic levels creates situations which often marginalize ethnic minorities in school settings (freire, 1970; battu & zenou, 2010; mitton & aspinall, 2011; berrittella, 2012; nieto & turner, 2012; hamilton, 2013; gallagher & beckett, 2014). for example, in the us, the graduation rates for native americans, african americans and hispanic students are lower than the graduation rates of whites and asian americans. in the uk some communities are under-represented in higher education, for example bangladeshis and african caribbeans, and particularly young men in those communities (tackey, barnes, & khambhaita, 2011). in english-dominated countries such as the us and uk, not to be able to operate adequately in english leads to disempowerment and social disengagement (blackaby, leslie, & murphy, 2005). in 2005, mceachron and bhatti reported that the lowest achieving tesol students by ethnic status were white, pakistani, bangladeshi, black caribbean, black african, black other, and other. gypsy/roma and travellers of irish heritage were considered to be one of the most disadvantaged groups in the education system. this study investigates the classroom experiences of these ethnic groups. they are a concern for educators because they are overrepresented in the low achieving performance levels. low academic achievement has serious implications beyond formal education. fraser and honneth (2003) discuss representation and re-distribution which have implications for ______________________________ corresponding author: gail mceachron, the college of william and mary, the school of education, 301 monticello avenue, williamsburg, va 23185. email: gamcea@wm.edu mailto:gamcea@wm.edu teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 61 bigger questions about the purpose of education itself and its impact on the lives of young people whose parents may have been disenfranchised through lack of engagement with educational opportunities. for fraser, recognition means taking the issue of students’ identities seriously. redistribution refers to taking resources to those who have few resources or none. this would mean re-distributing goods from those who have more to those who have nothing. this would lead to more social justice in a society and therefore by implication more opportunities for those who feel unable to contribute because they have been disenfranchised. representation would mean respecting and listening to the voices of young people whose experiences add new and different meanings to the mainstream discourse. re-distribution can work on at least two levels. on one level it would mean ensuring that both physical and intellectual resources (e.g., teaching resources, school building, teacher assistants, quality of teaching) are fairly distributed among all kinds of students. on a deeper level this raises difficult questions about social justice. for example, how can teachers enhance access to english and opportunities for a better future without dismissing the wealth of linguistic, social and cultural capital brought into the classroom by students of disenfranchised communities? the approach which claims to value every voice equally can lead to relativism and this is not very helpful for young people’s future. if students find it easier to operate and learn only their own language rather than english, the teacher will be doing them an injustice by not teaching adequate english, knowing that for example there are no jobs in the child’s first language. however, under the united nations convention of the rights of the child (uncrc) all children are entitled to maintain their own linguistic and cultural heritage. can heritage languages be supported as well as english? do schools meet this challenge successfully? teachers are expected to be versatile and creative, responsive and respectful to all their students. the challenge for schools is to promote equity and opportunity, but how do schools do this? researching what schools actually do with the resources they have and what happens in real classrooms can illuminate how language minorities receive linguistic and cultural support (gerwirtz & cribb, 2008). freire (1970) writes about the importance of literacy for empowerment. without the tools of the spoken language in a culture, citizens are powerless to be agents of change. nieto, who migrated to the mainland united states from puerto rico, has written extensively on how important it is for teacher preparation programs to teach future teachers to be culturally responsive to language, ethnicity, religion, race, national origin and exceptionalities. majors (2001), cork (2005), and nieto and turner (2012) emphasize the importance of working with families. in learning local and global literacies from students and families turner states the importance of understanding the socio-historical context of the community that future teachers will face in addition to the legacies of racism and classism: “it is important that they understand they’re not coming there to save the students or save the community. rather, they are coming to contribute to the ongoing struggle to improve education and outcomes for students’ lives in those communities” (p. 68). griffiths (2003, p. 49) has argued persuasively for connecting localized narratives or “little stories” such as a small scale study like this one with large scale theory or meta narrative, without losing new insights from field work in educational settings. she talks about “bridging the gap” (2003, p. 51). positioning theory can act as a bridge here. investigating the daily interactions of language support among teachers, students, and researchers is supported by positioning theory. analyses of these microinteractions are based upon discourse assumptions outlined by tirado and galvez (2007) including the importance that language plays in the production of social realities. according to tirado and galvez (2007, para. 22) 62 global education review 2(2) discursive practice is the fundamental core of positioning theory: discourse is. . .a collective and dynamic process through which meanings are constructed, acquired and transformed. . . the constituent force of each discourse practice is rooted in the fact that we provide the subject's positions. in this sense the theory concedes a special relevance to conversation, so much so that it claims the positioning is a phenomenon of conversation. . . once a determined position has been taken, the individual perceives and interprets the world from and through that strategic position. the concrete images, metaphors, narrative lines and concepts are relevant to the particular discursive practice and where they have been positioned. the pursuit of common and transformative goals among school division personnel and university personnel may reflect motivational differences. dallmer (2004, p. 43) participated in several school-university partnerships and expressed the following insight on motivational variations, “collaboration does not mean giving up our differences; it means that we must trust in those differences to accomplish our mutually agreed upon purposes.” positioning theory illuminates the manner in which individual commitment is grounded in cultural contexts, including work, school, and community. for example, when positioning theory is applied to qualitative research, each member of a research dyad is perceived as influencing the other during the process of information exchange. when such relationships occur over a long-term period, trust is cultivated gradually and can lead to teamwork, collective problem-solving, and nonhierarchical relationships (griffiths & davies, 1995; tshannen-moran, 2009). positioning theory is applied in three educational contexts—primary, secondary and tertiary education—in two countries. investigation and learning take place among (a) lead researchers and their students enrolled in institutions that promote international collaboration, (b) among lead researchers, their students and high school teachers, and (c) among lead researchers, their students and primary/elementary students. two research questions guide this inquiry. the first is: according to databases, which bilingual groups are performing better at primary and secondary levels of education? the second is: according to language support teachers and university students, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the programs for language minorities who are learning english in the uk (bristol) and us (henrico)? no comparative studies were found that involved university researchers with graduate and undergraduate students in studies that were jointly conducted in two countries. however, insights from international studies that utilized a comparative lens among language groups were reviewed. for example, goldstein (1997) and her research assistant conducted a pilot study of 28 cantonese-speaking secondary students and their teacher who was teaching them math, using english, in toronto. she discovered that a larger group of nine students spoke cantonese to each other and spoke english with non-chinese students while a smaller group of two students spoke english during all interactions. goldstein maintained that the use of cantonese and english created a language barrier that split the students into two groups yet concluded that it was not a question of whether to allow multilingual use when teaching english, but how to do so in a way that maintains positive interethnic relationships. at the elementary level, park and justin (2012) investigated first language (l1) use and second language (l2) use by teachers in classrooms that were team taught by native korean (n=4) and native english (n=3) speakers. of the three english speakers, all held teaching licenses and one had tesol licensure. observations were classified based on frequency and optimal language learning environments, such as negotiation of meaning and exposure to teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 63 varied and creative language. park and justin discovered that l1 was used in korean english teachers’ (ket) classrooms ten times more often than in native english teachers’ (net) classes with an assistant ket. the researchers recommend that ket utilize english more often and implement peer monitoring to make ket aware of frequent use of korean. this study raises awareness of the impact of the interaction of adults in multilingual classrooms and how modelling can enhance optimal language learning. durgunoğlu & hughes (2010) investigated the relationships among efficacy and preparation for 62 preservice teachers in the context of their field work with high school teachers who had english language learners (ell) in their classrooms. they found that preservice teachers did not feel prepared to work with ells and that the mentor teachers were not effective in modelling ways to engage ell students. these findings were relevant because seven of the student researchers in the current study aspire to work in classrooms with ell learners. a related study of preservice teachers by dorman (2012) underscored the importance of biographical awareness and history among future teachers who are placed in diverse settings that are different from the ones in which they attended. also bhatti (2007) discovered that pre-service teachers from ethnic minority backgrounds felt that there were misperceptions about their own biographical details when it came to interacting with mainly white mainstream teachers. for instance, one preservice teacher who wore a hijab in a school setting surprised teachers by her skilled and confident use of computers. the pre-service teacher also found the white children in the same school to be more open-minded and accepting of diversity than the white teachers who taught them. the literature review provides empirical and theoretical support for the basic right of children and youth to maintain their linguistic and cultural heritage. in school settings the realization of this right, or the lack thereof, is mediated by the interaction of teachers, administrators, students and parents, a process that is purported to be dynamic and changing according to positioning theory. researchers have begun to conduct empirical research about this dynamic process by focusing on the use of l1 and english by teachers, students and peers. teachers appeared receptive to the use of l1 but the findings were inconclusive with regard to the appropriate proportion of the use of l1 in relation to l2, especially since the use of l1 was also perceived as a way to be culturally affirming. the design of the current study builds on this research by introducing the first known transnational approach. methodology data collection was guided by positioning theory which allowed the researchers to bring their own perspectives to discoveries and interpret their findings with one another, examining comparative themes and differences unique to school settings. in addition, the study provided university students an opportunity to be both participants and observers while conducting comparative, transnational research using a mixed methods design. to gain insight for the first research question (according to databases, how does the academic performances of language minority groups compare to the academic performance of non-linguistic minority groups at the elementary and secondary levels of education?) databases through the virginia department of education (vdoe) and the uk pupil level annual school census (plasc) were analysed to assess which ethnic groups were demonstrating higher performance levels. for the second question (according to language support teachers and graduate and undergraduate students, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the instructional practices for language minorities who are learning english?) both the researchers and the university students interacted with teachers using an interview protocol and their analyses were integrated. see protocol in appendix a. 64 global education review 2(2) the researchers looked critically at educational theory, both national and local, which influences the way tesol is taught in schools (mceachron & bhatti, 2005). descriptions of the unique school localities were used to generate a deeper understanding of the challenges facing students and their teachers. university students were prepared by mceachron during three in-person sessions in additional to feedback on written reports for the first research question. bhatti provided eight inperson sessions in addition to feedback on written reports for the first research question. these sessions took place eight weeks prior to school visits to ensure that student researchers followed appropriate data collection procedures such as respecting confidentiality and asking questions in a way that does not reflect bias or intent to lead the response. w&m students had had coursework in educational research and esl so not as many orientation sessions took place. the scholars involved in guiding the research also analysed the data with the students. this project generated comparative data that demonstrated which teaching practices and instructional materials were being implemented and which ones were deemed more effective by teachers and pre-service students. the research was approved by the two universities’ institutional review boards. collection of data one of the challenges in conducting comparative educational research is that k-12 school divisions in various countries do not follow the same school calendar, do not have the same institutional infrastructures, and do not have the same curriculum materials. this is also true for institutions of higher education. in a study investigating the internationalization of teacher education, schneider (2005) noted that many obstacles for study abroad were related to the need for better logistical integration of student coursework. this study was designed with attention to when students would have time in their schedules to participate in internships overseas and continue with required coursework. the four student researchers from bath spa university (bsu) coordinated with bhatti and travelled to the us for two weeks during their spring break in april, 2014. the four college of william and mary (w&m) student researchers coordinated with mceachron in conjunction with coursework relevant to the english as a second language (esl) dual endorsement program. they travelled to the uk in mid-may 2014. respectively, each student spent eight days in the schools, seven hours daily, for 56 hours each, to total 448 hours of data collected by eight students. student researchers mceachron and bhatti each interviewed and selected four participants from their respective universities. they were selected on the basis of their interest in ell and their willingness to travel to another country to collect data and analyze the results. applicants were asked to provide an essay including motivation for participation and relevant coursework to language study and research. from w&m, three undergraduate female students and one male graduate student were selected. all were enrolled in elementary (n=2) and secondary (n=2) pre-service programs and all were pursuing a dual endorsement in esl. the four students had previously travelled abroad and had studied other languages. from bsu, three female and one male student were selected. one was pursuing a baccalaureate in sociology. the other three were pursuing baccalaureate degrees in education studies. all eight students were pre-service teachers. table 1: participants and their multi-cultural backgrounds, shows their varied degree pursuits, travel, and language experiences teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 65 table 1 participants and their multicultural backgrounds student researcher gender and ethnicity degree, major focus, & country countries visited prior to this study languages studied age range a. aj female, african american baccalaureate, elementary education, usa dominican republic, puerto rico, bahamas, spain, canada spanish italian 20-30 b. ah female, white baccalaureate, secondary education, usa bosnia, croatia, italy, greece, uk bosnian, arabic, spanish 20-30 c. rh female white baccalaureate, secondary education, usa honduras, spain spanish 20-30 d. an male white, caucasian of european heritage masters, elementary education, usa canada, netherlands, france, italy, germany, portugal, hungary, romania, iceland, tanzania italian 20-30 e. al female, white baccalaureate, education studies, uk france, spain, holland french spanish 20-30 f. lh female, white baccalaureate, education studies, uk 20-30 g. lm female, white baccalaureate, secondary education, uk australia, portugal, usa french 20-30 h. bc male, white baccalaureate, education studies, uk bulgaria france, belgium, portugal, spain, german, italy, holland, denmark, norway, hungary, greece, romania, turkey, morocco, india, uae, usa macedonian russian 30-40 classroom teachers mceachron and bhatti coordinated with the field placement directors at their respective universities to identify schools with english language learners (ell). mceachron and bhatti made a purposeful selection based on schools that had established teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) programs, for a period longer than ten years. school visits by mceachron and bhatti were 66 global education review 2(2) made prior to selections. letters of invitation were sent to teachers who worked with english language learners after approval to conduct research in the school divisions had been obtained by the respective universities and the respective school divisions. one limitation of the sample selection is that the schools in the uk were in an urban setting and the us schools were in a suburban setting. locating schools where there were significant esl populations combined with professional working relationships with the lead researchers resulted in samples of convenience. research reports prior to travelling abroad, the faculty researcher and four students from each university researched the first research question for their respective country: according to databases, how do the academic performances of language minority groups compare to the academic performance of non-linguistic minority groups at the elementary and secondary levels of education? bsu students consulted the plasc and local data bases and w&m students consulted the vdoe data base. after review by mceachron, w&m students shared their report with bsu students and bsu students shared their report with w&m students after review by bhatti. the reports provided a context for the student researchers prior to their travel abroad. observation and interview protocols after reviewing various observation protocols on cultural responsiveness and supportive classrooms for students who are learning eal including those with special needs, an observation instrument was designed by mceachron and bhatti. the instrument (see appendix a) provides guidance to student researchers, some of whom have not had formal training in tesol. students in secondary schools and elementary schools were observed to see how they were participating in class with respect to their speaking, writing, reading and listening activities. teachers were observed to see how they were presenting speaking, writing, reading and listening pedagogies as well as how they were culturally responsive to students. in addition to the observation protocol, a second interview protocol, designed by the authors, included questions that were posed to the student researchers for a journal response or for a verbal response in a focus group setting. journals and focus groups student researchers were asked to keep a journal, starting in the weeks leading up to their travel abroad, the two weeks while conducting research, and the weeks following their classroom-based research. focus groups were set up for interaction among the bsu and w&m students as well as for interaction among the two separate research teams so that mceachron and bhatti could document perceptions at designated points throughout the research when they were hosting the student researchers. one combined bsu and w&m focus group took place in the us and another combined focus group took place in the uk. see appendix b for examples of questions posed by mceachron and bhatti. the student researchers also interacted informally to discuss the research without mceachron and bhatti present because the student researchers were serving as hosts to each other during their visits. analysis of data analysis of data followed an “explanatory sequential mixed methods” approach whereby quantitative research was conducted first to address the first research question about performance data in relation to ethnic and linguistic cultural groups (creswell, 2014, p.1516). the findings from the first question were then built upon by the qualitative research conducted in relation to the second research question about instructional practices. ideally, the quantitative data identified in relation to the first research question would inform classroom observations in relation to the second research question. that is, general data about school performance in relation to ethnic and linguistic diversity could potentially be linked to the ethnic teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 67 and linguistic diversity of individual students in classrooms. data collected in relation to items on the classroom observation protocol (appendix a) were inserted into spreadsheets by each student researcher. mceachron, bhatti and student researchers then had access to the spreadsheet to discuss patterns that emerged for each question on the protocol. discussions took place in person with those student researchers who remained close to campus and through email correspondence with those students who were not in close proximity. positioning theory allowed for the researchers to explore their respective interpretations and illuminate crosscultural differences as well as positioning differences and similarities. data analysis utilized pattern matching and explanation building. each student researcher inserted his or her responses to the questions on the protocol into a spreadsheet that was posted to google docs1 so that everyone had access to the data. journal responses and research reports were also posted in order to triangulate the data. pattern-matching logic compares an empirically based pattern with general predications. an empirically based pattern would be a pattern that emerged that was consistent with the demographic academic performance patterns for language minorities. building an explanation about each school setting requires that the researchers explore possible causal links for phenomenon that are discovered for each person. according to yin (1984, p. 107), “the causal links may reflect critical insights into public policy process or into social science theory.” he argues that interpretations of case narratives are stronger when they reflect theoretically significant propositions. unfortunately, the researchers found reluctance on the part of school administrators and teachers to release specific performance data in relation to individual students which is consistent with one of the limitations identified by creswell (2012) when attempting to bridge quantitative and qualitative data. findings findings are presented in two sections that correspond to the following research questions: (1) according to databases, which bilingual groups are performing better at primary and secondary levels of education? (2) according to language support teachers and university students, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the programs for language minorities who are learning english in the uk (bristol) and us (henrico)? the following pseudonyms will be used for the four schools: us elementary, us secondary, uk elementary, and uk secondary. in the uk, the elementary schools are referred to as primary schools, but the elementary designation is used here so that it is clear that the samples are comparable. findings for the first research question follow. language policy and performance data in henrico, virginia unlike countries that have national language policies that provide guidelines for teachers, us teachers navigate federal, state, and local policies. this state of affairs has been influenced by no child left behind (nclb). nclb, signed into the law by president george w. bush in 2002, was the reauthorization of the elementary and secondary education act. with nclb, what was previously entitled the bilingual education act was replaced by the english language acquisition, language enhancement, and academic achievement act. under the general provisions of nclb’s title ix, part a, section 9101, any student identified as limited english proficient (lep) must have a home language survey that identifies the student as bilingual and a score showing limited proficiency in one or all of the four domains—listening, speaking, reading, writing. according to nclb limited english proficient describes individuals who are aged three through twenty-one, and are enrolled or preparing to enroll in an elementary or secondary school. their difficulties in speaking, reading, writing, or understanding english may affect their ability to succeed in 68 global education review 2(2) school and on state assessments and ultimately as citizens (center for public education, 2007). language policy in a virginia study, mceachron and martin (2012) explored the impact of nclb on selected school divisions, according to the divisions’ esl supervisors. the supervisors emphasized the challenge of realigning curriculum so that their school divisions would be in compliance with three distinct units—their local school division, the state of virginia, and the federal government as specified by nclb. despite the alignment challenges with local, state and federal testing guidelines in the three reviewed school divisions, the researchers noted that ell teachers and their supervisors were in agreement regarding the importance of differentiating curriculum and instruction for english language learners so that they would be more successful academically. one of the challenges in doing so is not to compromise high quality instruction, a sentiment echoed by florida teachers. in a study of english language learner (ell) teachers, harper, platt, naranjo and boynton (2007) reported that the implementation of nclb reforms compromised high quality instruction for ells, specifically the standardization of curriculum content, the means of instruction, and the lack of opportunities for individualized instruction. performance data the virginia department of education (vdoe) publishes annual reports for each school in the commonwealth, providing the most up-to-date information regarding a school’s performance on standardized testing, with a focus on english and math examinations. according to a 2012 report from the national center for education statistics, there were 87,472 students classified as ells, comprising 7.1% of virginia’s school population. this number is below the 9.8% of students nationwide who receive esl services, but virginia nevertheless has the seventeenthhighest percentage of esl students of all fifty states (nces, 2012). although virginia school systems do not report data on the native countries of their ells, the top five home countries for immigrants to virginia in 2010 were el salvador, mexico, india, korea and vietnam. the most common first languages of ells in virginia were: spanish, 56,445; korean, 4,709; vietnamese, 3,726; arabic, 3,490; and urdu, 2,765. as in all states, the number of ells enrolled in virginia tends to be higher in the earlier grades. following a nation-wide trend of ells performing lower academically than their english-proficient peers, virginia’s ells pass the state standardized tests, the virginia standards of learning (sol), at a lower rate than the statewide average. for example, in 2009-2010, only 84.7% of ell virginia third graders passed their mathematics sol test, scoring at or above proficient, compared to 91.4% of the total school population. likewise, this trend continued on the third grade reading/language arts assessment, where only 77.9% of ells, compared to 83.1% of the total school population, scored at or above proficient and in science, where only 82.1% of ells, compared to 90.7% of the total school population, passed. this gap in performance on standardized tests between ells and englishproficient students continues at all grade levels; on the high school level, only 84.2% of ells passed the mathematics sol, 79.9% passed the reading/language arts sol, and 70.1% passed the science sol, compared to 91.3%, 94.0% and 89.7% of the total population of students statewide who passed each test (virginia department of education, 2013). henrico county as of september 2012, the total number of lep students in henrico county, virginia was 2,703. among the lep students, 79 different native languages are spoken. of the total lep student population, castilian spanish was the most widely spoken native language (1,161 students) followed by arabic (311 students) and vietnamese (145 students). lep students are required to take standards of learning teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 69 assessments; english language proficiency is assessed annually and there are rarely any exemptions (henrico county public schools, 2014a; henrico county public schools, 2014b; virginia department of education, 2014). us elementary us elementary is a fully accredited public school, meeting the accreditation benchmarks across all four subjects for the 20132014 school year. as of september 30, 2012, 531 students were enrolled. data from the 20122013 school year showed that 73% of all students passed the grade three english reading assessment with 18% receiving advanced scores. on the same assessment, 52% of lep students received a passing score, and 16% received an advanced score. on the grade three mathematics assessment, 68% of all students passed with 16% of those students receiving an advanced score. lep students had lower scores with 43% passing the assessment and 7% achieving an advanced score (vdoe, 2014). as of january 2014, us elementary had 196 english language learners enrolled. it was one of the most culturally diverse elementary schools in henrico county with students from 28 different countries (henrico county public schools, 2014c). of all the elementary schools in henrico county, us elementary has the most ells. among the ell population, 20 native languages are spoken with spanish (86 students, 44%), nepali (48 students, 25%), and arabic (21 students, 11%) being the 3 most widely spoken native languages. students from all six of the english proficiency levels are enrolled at us elementary with most students being categorized at levels 1-4. of the 196 ells, 38 students are at level 1, 49 students are at level 2, 62 students are at level 3, 38 students are at level 4, and 38 students are at level 5. us secondary us secondary is a fully accredited public high school, meeting the accreditation benchmarks across all areas when considering the student population as a whole. there were 1,738 students enrolled during the 2013-2014 school year. when looking at combined data for all students at us secondary, the school continually performs higher than statewide averages on standardized testing. currently, more than 25% of us secondary students are enrolled in advanced placement courses, courses considered comparable to the college level (vdoe, 2014). in addition, 88% of all students graduate in the typical four year sequence with a standard or advanced studies diploma as outlined by the federal graduation indicator, compared to a statewide graduation rate of 83% (vdoe, 2014). focusing more exclusively on english language learners, 73% of lep students graduated in four years compared to a statewide graduation rate of 65% among lep students (vdoe, 2014). overall performance on english and reading assessments from the 2012-2013 school year show that 94% of all students at us secondary had passing scores (vdoe, 2014). however, only 53% of lep students at us secondary had passing scores albeit consistent with a 54% pass rate for lep students statewide (vdoe, 2014). as for mathematics performance, 71% of lep students at us secondary had passing scores, much higher than the 59% pass rate for lep students statewide, but still lower than an 89% pass rate for all students at us secondary (vdoe, 2014). as of january 2014, us secondary has 112 students classified as english language learners and this number is expected to rise before the end of the school year due to additional families moving to the area. based on percentages from higher to lower, the native languages of these students is first nepali, then spanish, and then arabic. the distribution among the six levels of english proficiency as determined by the world class instructional design and assessment (wida) levels is shown in table 2. 70 global education review 2(2) table 2. us secondary students’ wida levels level one level two level three level four levels five and six 13 20 25 26 18 language policy and performance data in bristol, england the department for education (dfe) in england determines the english school curriculum. as education in the united kingdom is a devolved matter this study focused solely on english policy, which is independent to the policies of the other members of the uk: wales, scotland and northern ireland. english as an additional language (eal) has no curriculum status, or discrete content, in england, and therefore has no specialization in the post graduate certificate of education (pgce) course, the most popular academic route into gaining qualified teacher status (qts) and becoming a teacher. language policy according to the national association for language development in the curriculum (naldic), the priority for children learning english as an additional language (eal) is to promote rapid language acquisition and include them in mainstream education as quickly as possible (overington, 2012). this means that eal learners are taught alongside native speakers in mainstream classrooms, while newly arrived pupils may be supported by specialist eal teachers or bilingual classroom assistants. in certain areas of high density eal learners, schools may also set up separate classes to provide more focused support (overington, 2012). one of the key sets of guidelines which the government has issued in relation to eal pupils is the guidance to accompany the standards for qualified teacher status (the training and development agency for schools, 2009). the training and development agency for schools offers teacher trainers best practice guidelines with regard to how to prepare and assess those wishing to gain qualified teacher status (qts). under the section entitled achievement and diversity, the guidelines focus on children with special educational needs including those for whom english is an additional language. supporting the implementation of government policy and guidelines, naldic issued a document entitled eal and initial teacher training: guidance for providers (davies, 2012). this provides detailed guidance for assisting initial teacher training providers in supporting trainee teachers to meet the needs of eal, and the related standards for qts. the document is drawn from a range of research, theoretical perspectives and practice, and is informed by the work naldic has undertaken to provide support and information on eal for all professionals involved in initial teacher education. davies (2012) reports that only 45% of newly qualified teachers felt their training was good or very good in relation to preparing them to teach learners for whom english is an additional language. bristol, england according to the bristol city council (2013), the estimated population of bristol is 432,500, the largest city in the south west of england. the percentage of the total population who are not classified as white british is 22%, a number that teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 71 is increasing, and the percentage of individuals who were not born in the uk is 15%. there are at least 45 religions practiced, at least 50 countries of birth represented, and at least 91 main languages spoken by people living in the city. a period of unprecedented population growth occurred from 1990 through the 2000s. since 2001 the population is estimated to have increased by 42,400 people (10.9%); this compares to an england and wales increase of 8.0% over the same period. bristol experienced significant population increases, particularly from 2004-2005 when the a8 accession countries joined the european union (eu). the black or minority ethnic group (bme) population (all groups with the exception of all the white groups) makes up 16% of the total population. of the 15% born outside the uk, 19,686 (4.6%) were born in other eu countries (including 10,520 in the eu accession countries) and 40,540 (9.5%) were born in countries outside of the eu. there are at least 50 countries represented in bristol, the ten most popular countries of birth of all bristol residents, excluding native uk citizens, are: poland (6,415 citizens); somalia (4,947); india (3,809); jamaica (3,279); other eu accession countries (3,025); ireland (2,900); pakistan (2,770); other eu members countries (2,478); germany (2,329). of the people not born in the uk, 69% arrived in the uk when they were of working age and 30% arrived as children. the main languages spoken, other than english, are polish and somali. overall 9% of people do not speak english as their main language. the increase in population has service delivery implications. concentration of this growth on particular population groups in certain areas of the city, such as somalis in lawrence hill, ashley and easton, will have localized implications on the delivery of these services. new communities bring both advantages and new challenges around cohesion and integration. the community cohesion strategy, whose strategies include supporting innovation around the teaching of english language (tesol) (bristol government, 2014) provides guidelines regarding how bristolians should foster good relations between homogeneous communities and the wider community. uk elementary according to a supply and voluntary staff document, the largest ethnic group in the uk elementary is pakistani followed by black somalian. in the classroom that student researcher ah was observing, there was also a student from iraq. an was told that the majority of students live within a 2-3 block radius and that the majority of the students’ families were seeking asylum or work in bristol, therefore, most did not speak english and most did not work. in the overall school population, 85%-90% of the students were classified eal. students primarily arrive from pakistan, somalia and areas in the middle east and india. a smaller percentage of students come from eastern europe and various regions in asia. some of the languages students speak include arabic, farsi, and kurdish. many girls wear hijabs indicating religious affiliation to islam. students in the elementary school typically attend the high school described in the following section. uk secondary uk secondary is a state funded school for young people from the age of 11 to 18 years. the school serves a diverse multi-ethnic student population. it is situated near the city center, and comprised of many facilities for arts, science, sports and 72 global education review 2(2) catering with an industrial level catering center making it possible for students to choose a future in academic work, professional or vocational fields. according to a 2013-2014 school prospectus, 96% of students continue in education or training after the age of 16. the school has over 210 students involved in post-16 to 18 studies and around 60 students progress to university every year at average age of 18. the area around uk secondary had the highest unemployment rate in bristol in 20122013, 9.7% compared to the city average of 4.1%. in 2013-2014, uk secondary had 989 students of whom 56% did not speak english as their first language. in 2013-2014 there were 106 teachers and 41 teaching assistants. the pupil to teacher ratio is 10.4. there are 55.3% male students and 44.7% female students, 5.9% are on the special education needs register, and 57.6% are on free school meals, an indicator of material poverty. on the whole, 73% of the students are considered to be disadvantaged and 27% not disadvantaged in terms of their socio-economic positions and parents’ occupations. uk secondary is a diverse school with many linguistic and ethnic variations. in terms of the uk secondary student population, 33 nationalities from outside europe are represented in the school. these include students who originate from afghanistan, armenia, burundi, cameroon, cuba, china, democratic republic of the congo, ethiopia, india, iran, iraq, nepal, nigeria, sierra leone, somalia, thailand, united arab emirates and zimbabwe. religions represented in the school include christianity, islam, hinduism, sikhism, atheism and buddhism. fourteen nationalities are from eastern and western europe, including romania, hungary, poland, slovakia and albania. the 2013-14 demographics, combining national census and school categories are as follows: any other asian, 2.81%; any other ethnic group, .13; any other mixed background, 2.17; bangladeshi, 4.59; black caribbean, 11.35; black somali, 19.90; chinese, .51; gypsy/gypsy roma, 2.17; indian, 4.59; information not obtained, .64; other black african, 2.81; other white, .51; pakistani, 11.73; white-british, 21.30; white and asian, .26; white and black african, 1.02; white and black caribbean, 7.40; white eastern european, 4.46; white western european, 1.40; identifier left blank, .26. there are a high number of refugees and asylum seekers in the local area from which the school draws its students. of the 16 year olds, 20% do not have any qualifications; 42% of those over 16 have a level 2 as their highest qualification—which is what 12 year olds might be expected to achieve in usual circumstances. according to bristol local government figures, the average number people from all ethnic groups aged 16 or over who have no qualifications is 20% (mills, 2014). overall 50% of children achieved level 4 in english and math at key stage 2. in 2013, only 30% of children achieved a to c grades at gcse including english and math at key stage 4. performance in english and reading assessments from 20122013 school year show that 66% of pupils achieved expected level of progress between key stage 2 and gcse english at the end of ks4; 47% achieved expected level of progress between ks2 and gcse math at the end of ks4; 4% with low prior attainment achieved level 2 threshold including a to c grades in both english and math gcses; 57% of middle prior attainment achieved level 2 threshold including a to c in english and math (department for education, 2013). table 3. provides performance comparisons for eal students and the statefunded average. 73 global education review 2(2) table 3. uk secondary eal performance comparisons the overall performance of uk secondary school compared to the average results of all english state funded schools, is considerably poorer. when looking at the total amount of pupils who passed both english and math at gsce, they follow a near identical performance gap (overall this 25.3%). however, the number of pupils in uk secondary school’s eal cohort who come from the weakest performing academic ethnicities is much higher than the national average. there is only a small performance gap between uk secondary school and the national average, when comparing the percentage of pupils who have made the expected progress in english (4.4%), yet a much larger difference (33.8%) when comparing the percentage of pupils who have made the expected progress in math. when comparing language needs between the henrico and bristol schools, the following differences emerged. in the us, the primary lep groups at the elementary level were spanish, followed by arabic and vietnamese; at the secondary level the relative proportions were nepalese, spanish and arabic. in the uk, the primary lep group was black somali (including somali and arabic), followed by pakistani (including urdu and approximately ten regional languages) and black caribbean (including dutch, spanish and french). one challenge in reporting the data is the difficulty of aligning one reporting system with the other. as a result the relative proportions are reported rather than the actual percentages since uk secondary reported ethnic group percentages for the entire school, the uk elementary school reported relative proportions of ethnic groups classified as eal, the us secondary school reported the total number of ell students with relative linguistic proportions, and the us elementary school reported total number of ell students in various language groups which could then be converted to percentages. how schools report ell data varies within countries, within school divisions and between countries. this makes it difficult to devise intelligible tables for ease of comparison regarding resources on the one hand and 0% 10% 20% 30% 40% 50% 60% 70% all boys girls eal percentage achieving a*c grades in gcse english and maths england state funded average uk secondary 74 global education review 2(2) accountability through public examination results on the other. for example, if there was a standard basis for comparison such as the performance levels in the wida standards, levels of achievement could be compared. in addition, the curriculum and ages at which students are tested are not identical. this makes direct comparisons difficult. despite reporting challenges it is generally evident that the us and uk are countries that attract immigrant populations and that the schools face similar challenges in accommodating linguistic diversity. for example, both the us (elementary) and uk (secondary) schools documented esl student populations representing 28 or more nationalities. among the esl populations in the uk and us, the levels of english language proficiency demonstrated wide ranges, but compared to the performance of esl students across the divisions, they performed well at the schools selected for this study. this leads us to findings for the second research question—according to language support teachers and university students, what are the strengths and weaknesses of the programs for language minorities who are learning english in the uk (bristol) and us (henrico)? uk and us student researchers’ perceived strengths based on themes that emerged from an examination of responses to the questions on the protocol, journal entries, and focus group discussions, uk and us researchers agreed that the tesol teachers were dedicated to welcoming new arrivals to their classrooms and to facilitating their increased knowledge of all subject areas and especially learning english. their perceptions are shown in table 4. table 4 student researchers’ perceived strengths of language support teachers uk student researchers’ perceptions of us teachers us student researchers’ perceptions of uk teachers elementary al : students are supported very well and most will be fluent in two languages, and all of them will be eventually fluent in english as their additional language which inevitably will help them immensely to get a job and have great prospects in america. due to the incredible support from the teachers, the children’s native tongue is valued. an: the teacher used a variety of strategies to elicit teacher-student interactions. this most common included question/response where the teacher provided many guiding questions to the students and modelled appropriate thinking for the students prior to letting the students respond. she also modelled expectations before completing activities. secondary lm: the strengths of the educational experiences for eal students are presented by the supportive and personable teachers that genuinely care about the students’ success. additionally, the waves of migration…presented a strength as students were able to translate for each other; this provided a kind of support-help culture amongst the students. rh: i think that a strength of the eal program is that the students are taught in full immersion and that the teachers demonstrate a lot of patience and experience working with eal learners. uk secondary appears to be a school that genuinely respects and honors each student’s background while maintaining high expectations for all students. 75 global education review 2(2) the perceptions expressed by the uk and us students echo the social justice theoretical positions espoused by freire (1970), nieto and turner (2012). literacy can empower students and teachers are in a unique position to affirm culture while providing students with the knowledge and skills needed to be successful rather than marginalized in their new cultural setting. the insights of positioning theorists tirado and galvez (2007) also underscore the uk and us student researchers’ insights regarding the manner in which classroom discourse and teacher-student interactions shape social realities. positioning theory also illuminates the interactive nature of conducting research when researchers are both participants and observers. with this in mind, the lead researchers, mceachron and bhatti, asked the student researchers if they were having difficulty applying critical pedagogy since they had been welcomed so warmly. the general reaction was that they didn’t have difficulty with critical pedagogy, but out of respect for the teachers and their own identity, they didn’t want the information to be traced to the student researcher or the specific teacher. this leads us to the student researchers’ perceived weaknesses of the eal programs. uk and us student researchers’ perceived weaknesses the perceived esl programmatic weaknesses fell into two categories—areas of congruence and divergence across us and uk contexts. the area of convergence was the frequency and cultural insensitivity of standardized testing. both uk and us student researchers remarked that the teachers they observed were frustrated by the frequent testing that occurs in late april and early may, as well as cultural insensitivities with regard to expectations and test items. below, al describes when a teacher attempted to prepare two us newcomer fifth-graders to take a state test in science, the only subject where they were not exempted. similarly, ah shares the perceptions of a teacher who complained that the state exams use questions that are geared at a british-born, middle class audience and do not consider different cultures when grading student responses. table 5 presents the researchers’ comments. table 5 cross-cultural convergence regarding perceived assessment weaknesses uk student researcher’s perception of us elementary approaches to standardized testing us student researcher’s perception of uk secondary approaches to standardized testing al: [the] time spent…could have been used to teach and learn english. the fact that they even have to sit for the test in the first place is ridiculous. i didn’t realize testing in virginia was a major thing. i always thought in england that testing was over the top but here in america it really is beyond anything i could have ever imagined. ah: the teacher expected that children of a middleclass background would get the answer, but noted that none of the students got the answer correct on the history exam. she also noted that last year in the gsce english exam, one of the questions asked students to describe their home town in a travel brochure. one of the students described his home town in eastern europe, but received points off by the examiner for “low interest value” due to the topic of the response. 76 global education review 2(2) areas of divergence focused on teacher-student interactions, classroom environment, and teacher qualifications. the uk and us student researchers noted environmental concerns that were not conducive to learning; the us researchers noted the lack of licensure for esl teaching, and the uk and us students reacted differently to what was appropriate for correcting student pronunciation. table 6 presents a summary of the researchers’ perceptions. environmental issues for the us student researchers focused more generally on the persistent discipline issues that teachers faced in uk secondary classrooms. table 7 presents the issues. one area of divergence that may have been related to educational differences between typical us and uk practice was the manner in which esl students’ pronunciation patterns were corrected. uk student researchers bc and al were surprised that the us teachers did not correct students’ pronunciation errors. bc, who has significant experience teaching english as a foreign language, wrote in his journal: bc (us secondary): yet there were no summarized error corrections (particularly with mispronunciations) at the end of a particular activity or lesson, which i found to be the most integral part of my own esl training: pupils learning through their own mistakes. table 6 cross-cultural divergence in uk perceptions of classroom environments uk researcher’s perception of us elementary uk researchers’ perceptions of us secondary uk researcher’s perception of us secondary al noted considerable background noise in us elementary pull-out class which was distracting bc and lm noted that us secondary lacked languagespecific posters such as verb charts and metacognitive processes, common in uk lm noted that visual support was minimal for an esl classroom; there was evidence of valuing diversity and the promotion of equality via anti-bullying poster table 7 cross-cultural divergence in us perceptions of classroom environments us researchers’perceptions of uk elementary us researchers’ perceptions of uk secondary general lack of communication between classroom teachers and resource teachers and the lack of formal eal training. persistent discipline issues were generally reported. 77 global education review 2(2) ah, who observed high school eal classes in the uk, was surprised to find that teachers corrected individual grammar and pronunciation errors immediately after students spoke in class. is this a cultural difference with regard to when and how to administer speech corrections or a matter of not having had coursework tied to pronunciation correction? the authors gained insight from samuel and other researchers to interpret these comparative differences. samuel (2010) maintains that there are four reasons why esl learners may have difficulty addressing target pronunciation: lack of knowledge of certain auditory features, the inability to hear the new sounds, l1 interference at the level of production, and low sound/spelling correspondence in english. samuel (2010) and others (hammerly, 1973; parish, 1977; nobuhiro, 2012) agree that errors should be corrected expeditiously; however, we still do not understand the tendency for the us teachers to correct less frequently than the uk teachers. it is also possible that incorrect pronunciations perceived by the uk student researchers were acceptable pronunciations in the us. given the vast geographic expanse of the us, teachers may be used to hearing and accepting a greater variation of pronunciations and dialects. student researcher an (us) posed an important question after his spirited conversation with bc (uk), “are the differences integrally related to both pedagogy and culture due to the fact that the europeans may be more influenced by vygotsky whereas the americans may be more influenced by krashen?” vygotsky (1934/1986) would lean more in the direction of editing speech to ensure language conformity and precision whereas krashen (1981) would support less monitoring to ensure greater fluency (lantolf, 2006). in addition to perceived strengths and weaknesses, the student researchers expressed cultural differences that affect the learning environments for uk and us students. in the uk, teachers devote more time to religious instruction during assembly time when groups of students are brought together in the same room. noting larger student populations in the us, and thus logistical challenges for schoolwide assemblies, announcements intended for larger audiences are often projected over the public address system, which the uk student observers found intrusive and impersonal. the separation of church and state in the us has contributed to an absence of religious activities compared with uk schools. in contrast, more patriotic activities were noted in us classrooms such as saying the pledge of allegiance, a practice absent from uk classrooms. the moment of silence in virginia was also perceived by the uk students to be symbolic of a religious act. further research is needed to understand perceived differences in the intent of classroom rituals such as the pledge of allegiance, religious assemblies and moments of silence. a few studies have investigated pedagogy and religion as a cultural phenomenon in the classroom (teece, 2010) and one study has taken a comparative investigation of us and uk social workers’ religion and spirituality (furman, benson, canda & grimwood, 2005). these studies take us too far from our study of language but they are important in that they demonstrate that moving to a new country and school system often introduces cultural expectations that affect ethnicity, religion, and classroom discourse. for example, in a recent study conducted in saudi arabia, al-osaimi and wedell (2014) concluded that students’ own purposes for learning, which were largely religious, led to beliefs about arabic learning that supported traditional pedagogy rather than contemporary pedagogy for l2 learning. discussion and future research the current study provided unique opportunities for k-12 educators and students to collaborate across national boundaries. no other study has investigated multilingual comparisons across countries and k-12 grade levels with teacher educators and their students in undergraduate and graduate programs. the ambitious approach yielded many rewards and expectations for further research. having a 78 global education review 2(2) more global dimension for perspectives on bilingualism, biliteracy, and biculturalism allowed researchers to look beyond their cultural assumptions about best practice in language learning and student adjustment to a new cultural context. with regard to social justice issues, this study revealed that schools can be welcoming places and, in some instances, safe havens and bridges for a new life for k-12 students whose families may be escaping ethnic discrimination or civil unrest. conversations with teachers and administrators revealed that newcomers who came from areas with high levels of conflict often entered the school systems with aggressive behaviors that gradually dissipated once the families realized that the bristol and henrico schools were supportive of immigrants. along with these welcoming behaviors was the introduction of patriotic and religious orientations that were in contrast to prior cultural experiences. the recognized need for licensed esl teachers in the us and the uk is another indication that school divisions are looking for resources to support language learning with the intent to ensure that recent immigrants can be successful upon graduation. with additional licensed teachers comes the opportunity to pursue research based on theoretical justifications. as the current study revealed, the student researchers who had formal esl training were able to link pedagogy to the theoretical influences of vygotsky and krashen, pointing out that krashen (1981) may have had a stronger influence in the us, whereas vygotsky’s (1934/1986) influence may have been stronger in the uk. linking theory to practice is a very important step in articulating a context for instruction. more empirical research is needed to assess the effectiveness of instruction as theoretically linked to academic achievement. one limitation of the study is that the schools in the uk were in an urban setting and the us schools were in a suburban setting, due to the proximity and accessibility to the lead researchers’ institutions. it is perhaps likely that some of the discipline issues noted by one student researcher in the uk secondary school would also exist in a us secondary school in an urban setting with a similar population. further research is also needed to explore the relationship between the need for discipline and the length of time that the students have lived in their respective communities. it is possible that the aggressive behaviors are more a function of length of time in the new country rather than differences based on urban and suburban contexts. challenges existed in the areas of resource support for enhancing a classroom environment that affirms language and cultural diversity in more explicit ways, in creating a more productive balance between instruction and assessment, in providing licensed tesol teachers, and in increasing an awareness of cultural insensitivities whether they exist in testing procedures, test items, interpretations of students responses, or time devoted to cultural inculcation through such activities as privileged holiday recognitions or patriotic rituals. exploring these barriers through theory, research and practice can demonstrate the potential for teachers to further support linguistic and cultural variation, and that the newcomers to the respective countries can be perceived as enhancing the countries by nature of their diverse cultural identities. note 1. google docs are web-based programs created by google, inc. . author note the authors would like to thank the college of william and mary and bath spa university for grants given through the reves center for international studies (w&m), and the school of education in bath spa university (bsu) through its affiliation to 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(1984). case study research: design and methods. beverly hills, ca: sage. about the authors gail mceachron, phd, is a professor at the college of william and mary where her research focus is social justice and multilingual education. in 2015, she received the prestigious phi beta kappa, john d. rockefeller, jr. award for excellence in teaching. ghazala, bhatti, is a senior lecturer at bath spa university. she is the founding member of the network on social justice and intercultural education for ecer (european conference on educational research) which meets annually in different european universities. http://schools.henrico.k12.va.us/ http://www.bristol.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/community_and_safety/equality_and_diversity/equality%20profile%20faith%20groups.pdf http://www.bristol.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/community_and_safety/equality_and_diversity/equality%20profile%20faith%20groups.pdf http://www.bristol.gov.uk/sites/default/files/documents/community_and_safety/equality_and_diversity/equality%20profile%20faith%20groups.pdf http://nces.ed.gov/ http://www.naldic.org.uk/resources/naldic/research%20and%20information/documents/brief_summary_of_government_policy_for_eal_learners.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/resources/naldic/research%20and%20information/documents/brief_summary_of_government_policy_for_eal_learners.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/resources/naldic/research%20and%20information/documents/brief_summary_of_government_policy_for_eal_learners.pdf http://www.naldic.org.uk/resources/naldic/research%20and%20information/documents/brief_summary_of_government_policy_for_eal_learners.pdf http://leg2.state.va.us/dls/h&sdocs.nsf/by+year/rd692009/$file/rd69.%20pdf/ http://leg2.state.va.us/dls/h&sdocs.nsf/by+year/rd692009/$file/rd69.%20pdf/ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/training-and-development-agency-for-schools-annual-report-and-accounts-for-2009-to-2010 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/training-and-development-agency-for-schools-annual-report-and-accounts-for-2009-to-2010 https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/training-and-development-agency-for-schools-annual-report-and-accounts-for-2009-to-2010 http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/consolidated/sy0910part1/va.%20pdf/ http://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/consolidated/sy0910part1/va.%20pdf/ http://www.doe.virginia.gov/federal_programs/esea/state_implementation.shtml http://www.doe.virginia.gov/federal_programs/esea/state_implementation.shtml https://p1pe.doe.virginia.gov/reportcard/ teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 81 appendix a school and classroom observation/engagement instrument: language support school: _______________________ grade level: _______________________ subject area: __________________ teacher: ___________________________ observer: _____________________ dates/time duration: _________________ directions: over the course of your observations, address the following areas of focus for student characteristics: language, culture, national origin, gender, age; if introduced, be receptive to and record ability/learning (exceptionalities), religion, socio-economic status and sexual orientation. scroll down within each category to allow for space to record responses. section #1: classroom and school observation a. describe the manner in which the following categories are met by the school and classroom environment. 1. describe the environmental print displayed about the room that demonstrates a valuing of diversity (i.e., visual supports, posters, banners, etc.). 2. describe grouping strategies that enhance student achievement and promote non-like group interaction (i.e., ability level, gender, flexible grouping, etc.). 3. on a separate sheet of paper, draw the room with attention to the instructional arrangements; use rulers and/or software program (e.g., http://classroom.4teachers.org/ ). does the arrangement facilitate language support and diverse interactions? if so, how; if not, why not? 4. describe specific instructional materials that illustrate valuing and promoting the understanding of diversity factors (i.e., multicultural literature, manipulatives, bilingual books, dual language books, microphones, equipment for special needs, language programs on computers). 5. describe speaking activities for students. 6. describe writing activities for students. 7. describe listening activities for students. 8. describe reading activities for students b. describe how teacher engages students. 1. evidence of interaction with each student (i.e., record names of students using pseudonyms and frequency of interaction). 2. describe the types of teacher-student interactions (i.e., question/response; role playing; demonstrations; experiments; hands-on activities, making dictionaries of often used words). 3. describe the activities designed by the teacher to encourage student-to-student interaction. c. describe how teacher is culturally responsive. 1. lesson incorporates culturally diverse curriculum materials. evidence: 2. assignments allow for culturally relevant personal responses. evidence: 3. instructional strategies allow for or encourage cultural variation and opportunities for cultural connections among students. evidence: 4. describe assessments and how they allow for cultural differences and similarities. d. school environment is culturally responsive to family. 1. visual material posted throughout office and reception area is diverse. evidence: 2. support services are offered. evidence: http://classroom.4teachers.org/ 82 global education review 2(2) section #2: guided questions for conversation with teachers by student researchers 1. how long have you taught this age group? 2. what advice would you give a novice teacher like me about eal teaching? 3. are there any particular programmes/books/resources/strategies that you would recommend? what are they? 4. what is the biggest challenge that you experience as a teacher in this class? 5. do you have an opportunity to talk to other teachers about eal/esl teaching? if yes, please explain how often that is and how helpful is it. 6. if you have a wish list of things you don’t have at present which 2 things would help you in eal teaching (prompts-resources, people)? section #3: guided questions for conversation and/or journal entries for student researchers a. engagement and interpretations. 1. how have you been engaged with students? 2. how have you been engaged with teacher(s)? 3. how have you been engaged with administrators and staff? 4. how have you been engaged with parents? 5. how have these experiences informed what you think about teaching english as an additional language? 6. what are the strengths of these educational experiences for eal students? 7. what are the limitations of these educational experiences for eal students? teaching english as an additional language in the global classroom 83 appendix b questions for student researchers and focus groups general questions 1. what were your initial concerns about data collection/introduction to schools? 2. what helped ease access to schools? 3. what are the barriers to accessing information/data? 4. how useful were the meetings before you started classroom research? 5. what was missing in your training that would have helped you? 6. do you feel part of a team? explain. 7. what strengths do you bring to the research? 8. what areas do you want to develop? specific questions 9. describe information found in schools. a. was this documentary? b. practice based? c. student based? d. administration/principal based? e. your own perceptions? 10. what is of particular interest to you personally 11. what elements of best practice would you like to share with teachers and colleagues back home? 12. what was unusual to you about the school routine? 13. how do you think the children find your presence? 14. what did you actually do in class as you could not write notes? 15. are you having difficulty applying critical pedagogy since you have been welcomed so warmly? in other words, since you have been developing personal relationships with the students and teachers, are you reticent about being too critical? can you give an example of when this happened? 16. what can the uk students offer the us students with regard to the way in which americans are perceived, perhaps in negative and positive light? what can be said about the way in which uk students might be perceived? [or vice versa for us] 17. in reference to the protocol, what can you tell us about what you have seen with regard to race, class, ethnicity, religion, gender, and so on? 18. what can you share about pedagogical approaches? 19. the protocol that you have been working from was developed by gb and gm. how has this experience enlightened you? changed you? what are the perceptions you have that have not been addressed by the protocol? 20. [continue to address questions from the protocol as time allows.] global education review (feb '15)-1 page 1 global education review (feb '15)-1.pg 2-end table 2. us secondary students’ wida levels table 3. uk secondary eal performance comparisons table 6 cross-cultural divergence in uk perceptions of classroom environments table 7 cross-cultural divergence in us perceptions of classroom environments references al-osaimi, s. & wedell, m. (2014). beliefs about second language learning: the influence of learning context and learning purpose. language learning journal, 42(1), 5-24. berrittella, m. (2012). modelling the labour market of minority ethnic groups. journal of policy modelling, 3(3), 389-402. bhatti, g. (2007) the irresistible attraction of information and communication technology: experiences of trainee teachers from minority ethnic backgrounds. in bhatti, g., gaine, c., gobbo, f. and leeman, y. (eds) (2007) social justice and intercultu... blackaby, d., leslie, d., murphy, p. & o’leary, n. (2005). born in britain: how are native ethnic minorities faring in the british labour market? economics letter, elsevier. u.s. department of education. (2011). consolidated state performance report: parts i and ii. retrieved from 3thttp://www2.ed.gov/admins/lead/account/consolidated/sy0910part1/va. pdf/3t virginia department of education. (2014). school, school division, and state report cards. [data file]. retrieved from 3thttps://p1pe.doe.virginia.gov/reportcard/3t vygotsky, l. s. (1934/1986). thought and language. cambridge, ma: mit press. 64 global education review 1 (2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gladstone, carol (2000). stories to read aloud to children. [review of the book how did stories, by frank sanchez]. global education review, 1 (2). 64-65. book review stories to read aloud to children “how did stories” by frank sanchez by carol gladstone dr. frank sanchez, professor emeritus, educator, and raconteur has penned a series of children’s tales entitled how did stories. like fables, these stories may have a moral, featuring anthropomorphized animals and natural phenomena. others highlight contests and interpersonal relationships. within the forty-five tale collection, sanchez explains how the bat got its wings, how the zebra got its stripes, how the llama got it long coat, and how the elephant got his trunk. more than just an update of the ancient aesop’s fables, the author is a narrator who enchants children of all ages with his accounts and extraordinary vocabulary in context. echoing the classic tales, sanchez begins the volume with a vignette of a twenty-first century child bored with modern technology, and his return to the primal relationship between father and son. the father spins the tales since google cannot give the youngster the information. nor can cable, video, movies or the internet replace the bond between parent and child. the volume is appropriate for recent immigrant families in the barrios of cities who may not yet own all the technological marvels that american-born children routinely enjoy and take for granted. traditional values such as listening to one’s parents and proceeding with caution rather than rushing headlong into something are especially apropos themes for young people who often must resist negative peer pressure and gang affiliations. instead, gentleness and cooperation between friends is a common theme. the book charms readers without being preachy. it has the mark of a literate storyteller that crafted the tales because he cares deeply about raising a generation of children who will stories to read aloud to children 63 continue to treat others with respect and will teach their own children to do the same. the short stories make an excellent gift for a parent who wants to share an enchanted few minutes with a young person before bedtime. “how did stories” by frank sanchez paperback. 180 pp. , amazon.com. $19.00. about the author born in puerto rico, the author l e a r n e d e n g l i s h w h e n h e w a s t w e l v e . frank sanchez, phd, now professor emeritus at mercy college, new york, is a former new york city principal and teacher. these stories are a re-telling of stories he told to children many years ago. about the reviewer carol gladstone, phd, assistant professor of english education at mercy college, began teaching in a sunday school kindergarten class when she was 12. she has taught middle and high school students in public education and supervised english departments in new york city high schools. carol gladstone, phd, assistant professor of english education at mercy college, began teaching in a sunday school kindergarten class when she was 12. she has taught middle and high school students in public education and supervised english departmen... new world, new global education review 3 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bruce s. cooper (2014). new world, new global education review. global education review, 1 (1). 3-7. new world, new global education review bruce s. cooper fordham university introduction the world is getting smaller, more interconnected, and more in touch in the modern electronic, high-tech era-and education is not very different. thus, the startup of the new journal, global education review, is both critical and timely. looking at problems, issues, and solutions in education becomes more interesting and useful when we compare what scholars and practitioners in different countries and cultures have found. confronting the same issues and problems across different countries can often be helpful as one nation learns from another. what follows are five examples of the comparative approach internationally often used in the study of education. each example has its own merit and advantages; when taken together, they give a strong, comprehensive view of education by topic and nation. 1. worldwide comparisons of topics: e.g., teacher unions in the 1990s, i edited and contributed to a book entitled, labor relations in education: an international perspective (1997), which compared and contrasted the unionization of teachers in 16 countries, the first book ever on this issue. i was able to get leading scholars and leaders in the labor movement to write about their countries. albert shanker, leader of the american federation of teachers (aft) and the united federation of teachers (uft), authored the chapter on the united states. other countries included in this book were from north america canada and mexico; in europe nations included england, france, germany and hungary; other nations included were china, israel, australia and new zealand. subsequently, teachers from south and central america invited me to visit brazil, to explain how nations are similar and different, and where these countries were in comparison to other nations that had been in the collective bargaining mode longer. thus, a major advantage of the global perspective is that one nation and region can learn and understand its education issues, problems, programs and policies from regional neighbors and worldwide. 2. comparing ideologies of education, worldwide interesting and important models, methods, and research designs from one country can be used and applied, when available and appropriate, in _________________________________ corresponding author: bruce s. cooper, fordham university, graduate school of education, 113 west 60 street, new york, ny 10023 email: bcooper@fordham.edu 4 global education review 1(1) other countries. certainly, each country has its own economic and social beliefs, ranging from marxist and socialism, to capitalism and privatization. when scholars look, for example, at the funding of schools, the differences pop up quickly. do families, regardless of income and status, have equal access to quality schools, and do their children excel or fail at the same rates? better understanding of worldwide notions of equity in education is also a good reason for global comparisons. each country, using available resources (funding, facilities, books and materials, and high-tech equipment), works to give each child a quality education, based on what’s available. some nations see education as an individualistic, personal concern and matter, while others focus on the communal and national value of education. thus, nations may work “to reform” education from different viewpoints, using different models. right now, we see a focus in the united states on bringing up the lowest achievers, so that all children can pass muster, graduate, and move on. other countries tend to ignore the least able and the disabled (since they will rarely be the leaders in industry and government), and may instead strive to push the highest achievers to greater heights. when nations compare children’s attainment in math and science, for example, the united states has dropped, as fallen (2012) found: “achieving proficiency in mathematics appears to be a particular area of challenge for students in the united states. results of the 2003 trends in international mathematics and science study (timss), recently released, revealed that eighth graders in the united states ranked 15th among 46 participating countries” (snell, 2012). but what about the above average, and the gifted? although international comparisons are often made among all children, both high and low achievers, these students are now commanding greater attention. 3. philosophies of education, globally a range of interesting philosophies of education can also be compared and used in numerous countries. for example, in the 1960s, the summerhill school in england went international when a. s. neill described the approach to education at summerhill, and schools in other countries began to try the highly individual, personalized, approaches to education. neill’s beliefs were better understood across societies and countries, based on a “free school movement” and other philosophies of life and instruction in schools. thus, nation-by-nation, we find very different arguments about why universal education is good for society and the individual. the socialist-communist countries see education as creating a class-less society --“do it for the socialist state!”-while capitalist, competitive, entrepreneurial nations often saw education as individual and personal -“do it for yourself”! from a third-world, developing-nation viewpoint, writers like bassey ubong from the federal college of education in nigeria, explained that the philosophies of education often reflect the values of nations, ranging from entrepreneurial and private viewpoints to more national public philosophies. he notes that china and russia, for example, were becoming more capitalistic. as ubong (2006) explained: one approach to national development is to develop the citizens by way of making them self-reliant. self-reliance implies independence that can be achieved through private effort in entrepreneurship, a situation in capitalist economies where private entrepreneurship has been allowed new world, new global education review 5 [type text] to flower. socialist economies such as china and russia have subtly and slowly but surely been embracing private entrepreneurship, which, in china in particular, has had a salutary effect on economic growth. developing countries should consider having definite national philosophies of education with selfreliance at the core. some national philosophies of education and the impact on national development are discussed here. (p. 864). thus, a global approach to education analysis can point out basic economicideological differences, while also tracing changes, such as russia becoming more entrepreneurial and the united states, more socialistic. 4. comparing student-school outcomes, internationally already we see student test scores and other school-based results being gathered, and international comparisons being made, such as the often quoted, trends in international math and science study (timss), which has regularly provided comparative data on how well children in different nations are doing in two critical areas: math and science. as reported, the scope and complexity of timss is enormous. forty-five countries collect data in more than 30 languages. five grade levels were tested in the two subject areas, totaling more than a million students tested around the world. the success of timss depended on collaborative effort between research centers in each country responsible for managing the across-countries tasks such as training, selecting comparable samples of schools and students, and conducting the various steps required for data processing and analysis. (beaton, et al., 1996, p. 54) another measure of school effectiveness is the value added model, or vam, that attempts to explain the causes of student improvements, by concentrating on the teacher, the school leadership and the program. as mccaffrey, lockwood, koretz, and hamilton (2003) explained in a rand corporation study done for the carnegie foundation, evaluating valueadded models for teacher accountability (2003), a teacher’s effectiveness might also depend on the context of the school or school district. for example, a teacher in a school with supportive colleagues or a cooperative principal might be more effective than in an alternative setting. similarly, policies of a school district or school principal might influence a teacher’s effect. (p. 12) thus, the global perspective often leads to international comparisons of programs, subjects, and outcomes. as countries of the world compete and learn from each other, the international view becomes ever more important. 5. student assessment and world comparisons of results methods of assessment, too, vary by type, and have important international meaning and implications. we assess children’s academic abilities, standings, growth and decline, and use 6 global education review 1(1) models such as “value added” (sometime called “gain scores”) that attempt to take students from where they are and determine their growth and improvement each year (see sanders, sanders, saxton, & horn, 1997). thus, we have worked for 40 years to measure and relate national and international improvements in education with economic growth and societal change and improvement. theodore schultz (1961) won a nobel prize for economic sciences by showing that investments in children’s education improved the gross domestic product (gdp) for nations. investing in human capital made differences in fiscal growth and improvement. later, levin, belfield, muennig and rouse (2007) found that not investing in children’s education, as with black males, actually costs the society, for these under-educated men will be more likely to be on welfare, on medicare or be incarcerated, each of which will cost society millions per year. they determined that, “specifically, the value of just the public benefits embodied in additional tax revenues and reductions in the cost of public health and crime amounts to almost $256,700 per new high school graduates” (levin, et al., 2007, p. 706). thus, not only does investing in children’s education raise their yearly income and life-time earning, this funding also means that these students when they grow up are less likely to be on welfare, be in need of public medical services, or be in jail. hence, we need to test the effects of good education, positively, nation-by-nation examining variables such as income, health, and compliance with the law, as well as negatively when education is lacking, poor, or inappropriate/inadequate for the individual. while the idea of treating human beings as “capital” was controversial, sounding to many like a form of slavery, the concept had important policy global educational-economic implications, whereby nations across the world were urged to improve human knowledge and skill – particularly now in science and technology – to help raise the income and living standard of members of the society and to improve the quality of life for all. conclusion a global review, as in this journal, should give nations across the world some sense of how and what kinds of education make a difference later in employment, health, and yearly-income and, of course, in yearly and lifetime earning streams. for we know that education, health, and income are complexly related, as families with resources will and can live better, healthier lives, educate themselves and their children to better and higher levels, and get and keep better and higher paying jobs (see cooper & mulvey, 2012). as benjamin franklin said centuries ago, people could and should be “healthy, wealthy, and wise,” if the system was working for them. this new journal explores education within and between countries, giving important information on nations’ education that have not often been assessed and analyzed -and then compared. for as marian wright edelman, founder of the children’s defense fund, explained, "education is for improving the lives of others and for leaving your community and world better than you found it." and the global education review is dedicated on a worldwide scale to doing just that – making our community, society, and world a better place in which to learn, work, and live in for all-well into the 21st century. references beaton, a. e., et al. (1996). mathematics achievement in the middle school years. boston: boston college centre for study, evaluation, and educational policy. cooper, b. s. (ed.) (1996). labor relations in education: an international perspective. greenwich, ct: greenwood press. cooper, b. s., & mulvey, j. d. (2012). intersections of children’s health, education, and welfare. new york: palgrave-macmillan. levin, h. m.; belfield, c.; muennig, p., & rouse, c. (2007). new world, new global education review 7 [type text] the public returns to public educational investments in african-american males. economics of education review, 26, 700-709. doi: 10.1016/j.econedurev.2007.09.004 mccaffrey, d. f.; lockwood, j. r.; koretz, d. m.; & hamilton, l. s. (2003). evaluating value-added models for teacher accountability. new york: rand corporation. neill, a. s. (1960). summerhill school: a new view of childhood. london: st. martin’s griffin press. rampell, c. (2013, february 3). in hard economy for all ages, older isn’t better…it’s brutal. the new york times, pp. a1, a20. sanders, w. l.; sanders, w.; saxton, a.; & horn, b. (1997). the tennessee value-added assessment system: a quantitative outcomes-based approach to educational assessment. in j. millman (ed.), grading teachers, grading schools: is student achievement a valid evaluation measure? (pp. 137162). thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. schultz, t. w. (1961). investment in human capital. the american economic review, 51 (1), 1-17. snell, l. (2013). u. s. students show slight improvement in math, science achievement. washington, d.c.: nces. ubong, b. (2006). nation philosophies of education and impact on national development. proceedings of the 1st international technology, education, and environment conference, nigeria: african society for scientific research (assr). ubong, b. (2009). the language threat in the nigerian educational system: can it be confronted? nigerian journal of empirical studies in psychology and education. 1(10), 78-87. about the author bruce s. cooper, ph.d., is professor of education leadership and policy at the fordham university graduate school of education, nyc, and a former president of the politics of education association. professional formation for communal bilingual intercultural teachers teaching our own babies 5 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: meyer, lois m. (2016). teaching our own babies: teachers’ life journeys into community-based initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico global education review, 3 (1). 5-26 teaching our own babies: teachers' life journeys into community-based initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico lois m. meyer university of new mexico, u.s.a. abstract in an era when u.s. and mexican teachers are valued more for their academic achievements than their community knowledge and local/ethnic identity (e.g. teach for america, or its off-shoot, teach for mexico), this study provides partial results of a one-year (2011-2012) intensive professional development experience (called a diplomado) for 35 indigenous teachers of initial education who attend pregnant mothers and infants from birth to 3 years old in marginalized communities of oaxaca, mexico. the goal was to enrich these local teachers' background knowledge and equip them with research skills to investigate and honor the collectivized practices, original languages, values and governance structures (together known as comunalidad) of the rural indigenous communities where they teach. the intent was to generate an authentic, bilingual, and community-based approach to initial education a groundbreaking alternative to the mexican government’s homogeneous approach. an analysis of their autobiographies indicated that these oaxacan indigenous teachers faced a complex of internal and external challenges in this radical, regenerative work: they are young, female, mostly novice teachers, they lack professional preparation, and they have confronted racism throughout their own lives, especially and intensely in mexican public schools. in the process of documenting communal life and early childhood socialization practices in rural communities where they teach, they confronted their own (often uneasy) biculturalism and bilingualism. “communalizing” early education in indigenous oaxaca involves reconstructing and revitalizing the indigenous identities and language use of children and teachers alike – a challenging, invaluable and achievable task. keywords community education, indigenous education, alternative education, alternative teacher preparation, initial education, oaxaca, comunalidad, teacher autobiographies, pedagogical movement, mexico, early childhood education “the importance of the first 3 years of life when children are so dependent on the family lies in the power of a social group to influence what is learned. meanings and standards are established by the culture, and ‘subtle interactional factors shape and socialize children to think and act like members of their own [cultural] groups’ ” (hart & risley, 1999, p. 11). 6 global education review 3(1) introduction in 2000, roberta wollons compiled a fascinating collection of 11 nation-state histories documenting the “global diffusion of an idea” – the kindergarten. “the kindergarten spread from the west,” she tells us, “producing a complex global discourse on the child, education, psychology, and a newly evolving science of child rearing and child development.” still, “in each instance the kindergarten became a local institution, taking on an identity and function of its own in each national setting” (p.10). individual chapters in wollons’ volume recount diverse national trajectories whereby the kindergarten model was “borrowed” internationally yet reimagined locally: from its origins in friedrich froebel’s 19th century germany, to its use as a tool of forced americanization of even the youngest immigrants in early 20th century u.s., to its conversion in japan from the christian kindergarten introduced by missionaries to an institution that reinforced confucian values, to vietnam’s mass kindergarten movement intended, first, to liberate women from the home, and then later “to teach the young anarchists to love their government, to love their family and country, and above all to be loyal to ho chi minh” (p. 13). throughout, wollons’ message is clear: “all borrowing nations exerted powerful cultural and political agency over borrowed ideas” (p. 7), thereby illuminating “the immense power of local cultures to respond to and reformulate borrowed ideas” (p. 1). wollons does not include mexico or any latin american country in her collection, nor do her chapters investigate the efforts of minoritized local cultures in the featured nations to reformulate, or even reject, the education models borrowed internationally and imposed on them by their governments. for centuries the nation-states of the americas have borrowed western models of schooling and imposed them on diverse indigenous populations. these governments continue to wield their powerful cultural and political agency to “reform” and homogenize public schooling in latin america today (ornelas, 2004; watson, 2007). in 2009, schmelkes detailed the situation of educational inequality endured by indigenous mexico: approximately 10% of the mexican population is indigenous, and some 10 million people speak one of 68 native languages. the indigenous population is probably much larger than the population that speaks a native language, as the number of local language speakers is decreasing rapidly. however, indigenous participation in the educational system does not reflect this percentage at any educational level...[i]t is estimated that only between 1% and 3% of higher education enrollment is indigenous…this is an indicator of educational inequality (p. 5-6). schmelkes (2009) went on to identify the demands, “both historical and more recent,” by indigenous peoples regarding national education systems. “the first and oldest demand” is to have access to bilingual and culturally pertinent education at all levels, including higher education. second, indigenous peoples demand that national populations become knowledgeable about their cultures in order to value and appreciate the indigeneity within their borders. the final demand is that “indigenous peoples want to make decisions about their own educational systems, and demand the resources to plan, execute and evaluate them” (p. 8-9). ______________________________ corresponding author: lois m. meyer, department of language, literacy & sociocultural studies, hokona 140, college of education, university of new mexico, albquerque, nm 87131. tel: 505/225-0022. email: lsmeyer@unm.edu teaching our own babies 7 oaxacan indigenous comunalidad in oaxaca these educational demands illuminate facets of the more complex and foundational indigenous concept of comunalidad. according to rendón (2002), comunalidad refers globally to the entire communal way of life of indigenous peoples. according to maldonado (2012), community members are socialized into comunalidad through processes of continuous, profound civic formation in communal responsibility. comunalidad is the foundation of indigenous life, identity and cultural resistance in oaxaca, maldonado (2002a; 2004) contends, and also is the basis for collective legal rights and future indian liberation: “recognition and respect for this collective character of their rights as peoples is today one of the principal demands of the indigenous movement” (maldonado, 2002b, p. 53). in 1995, in response to indigenous and teacher union pressure, comunalidad was written into the state education act as the fourth guiding principle of educational practice (martínez luna, 2009; 2010, p. 89). still, despite its fundamental importance to indigenous existence and identity in oaxaca and its presence in state law, comunalidad has had little impact on public education in the state. public education and teacher professional development in oaxaca though supposedly decentralized from federal to state control in 1992, the mexican public education system nevertheless retains expansive educational decision-making powers and standardizing curricular control at all school levels for the national secretariat of public education (sep) in mexico city, including teacher preparation and professional development (martínez vásquez, 2004, p.16-17). education policies in mexico have traditionally sought to strip indigenous communities of their languages and cultures in order to assimilate them for purposes of nationbuilding and “the national good” (arnaut, 1996; meyer, 2008; soberanes, 2003, 2010; soberanes & maldonado, 2002). mexican public school teachers, even indigenous teachers, have been prepared practically and ideologically to enact their state-interpreted “civic responsibility” to assimilate indigenous children and communities into the so-called mainstream and to teach them the spanish language (soberanes, 2010). a major tool in this assimilationist goal has been the abandonment of any effective preparation of teachers to maintain, develop or revitalize indigenous languages or to develop and implement educational pedagogies in accord with the values and cultural practices of the comunalidad which structures and defines their local community life. since the so-called decentralization of basic education in mexico and the creation in 1992 of the state institute of public education of oaxaca (ieepo), which is somewhat comparable to a state public education department, indigenous young adults contracted to teach in so-called “bilingual” schools1 have received minimal and inadequate formal teacher preparation. given the high poverty and unemployment levels in oaxaca, salaried teaching positions that prioritize indigenous bilingual candidates are politically contentious and rigorously competitive. most successful candidates for these positions are graduates of spanish-monolingual high schools who are contracted to immediately fill available teaching positions in indigenous schools, usually due to their tested proficiency (oral and written) in one of oaxaca’s more than 50 original languages2 or variants, and/or their political or family connections. 8 global education review 3(1) if teacher preparation is severely inadequate for indigenous basic education (the obligatory education offered in preschools, primaries, and middle schools), it is entirely absent for initial education, the level of educational attention focused on pregnant mothers and babies from birth through three years of age. in 1992, the same year the mexican education system was “decentralized,” the basis for initial education was laid in mexico with the establishment of the program for indigenous initial education (preii) (dirección general de educación indígena, 2009). since that time, successive policy revisions focused on this schooling level have occurred, such as the reform in 2010, which produced curricular guidelines for indigenous initial education (dirección general de educación indígena, 2010). despite new policies and curricular designs, teacher preparation for this level of schooling was largely ignored. most new teachers contracted for initial education are hired on limited time contracts, which require that they take university courses to be rehired, but since no institution of higher education in oaxaca, public or private, offers a program in initial education, they study something, anything, just to fulfill the academic requirement for the degree. far from prioritizing, encouraging, or even permitting the fundamental indigenous values of comunalidad, recent mexican education reforms rigorously pursue an accelerating agenda of homogenization and standardization in the preparation and evaluation of mexican teachers, as well as students, under the banner of global competitiveness and “increased opportunities for all.” a new system of teacher evaluation, adopted in 2011 by the secretariat of public education (sep) and the national syndicate of education workers (snte), recently revised, will determine which teachers achieve promotions in status and increased incentives and which are demoted in status, resulting in loss of incentives. under the new system, the greatest weight is given to a teacher’s professional development (40%) and continued professionalization (40%), as ratified solely on national standardized tests, while the remaining 20 percent of a classroom teacher’s evaluation is to be based on her/his students’ academic achievement as measured by “objective measures” based on the official curriculum and syllabi (martínez carballo, 2014; secretaría de educación pública and the comisión nacional snte, 2011). as i write these words, the newly created national coordination for professional teaching services is carrying out a massive standardized testing process (more than 190,000 registered test-takers as of may 2015), to competitively fill vacant teaching positions nationally in preschool through grade 9 based entirely on standardized test scores (garduño, 2015). in addition, the new reforms propose to incorporate all initial education teachers into the preschool teacher ranks. significantly also in 2011, teach for mexico (tfm), patterned on teach for america, surfaced as a new extra-official direction in “ideology and leadership” in rural education. tfm initiated its activities in 2013 by selecting the “100 best” of 1,400 applicants who were either recent university graduates or outstanding professionals no older than 29 with “profiles of excellence,” including stellar academic achievement records in diverse fields. after four weeks of intensive training, tfm places its “professionals” in schools in the most marginalized regions of several mexican states to support instruction in english, technology, and/or other subjects. while oaxaca did not sign on to receive tfm “professionals,” these minimally prepared “teachers” were placed in schools in marginalized, indigenous regions in mexican states such as chihuahua and puebla. their commitment to teach in these schools is teaching our own babies 9 limited to only two years (information accessed from the teach for mexico website, www.ensenapormexico.org). considering the vast educational inequality in access to higher education by mexican indigenous students reported by schmelkes (2009), it is highly unlikely that any of tfm’s “100 best” university graduates or young professionals who aspire to teach in rural mexico and who are accepted to this alternative program will be indigenous, much less that they will be proficient speakers of an indigenous language. despite mexico’s signature on international declarations of indigenous political, linguistic and educational rights (e.g. the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, the international labour organization’s convention 169, among others), neither the sep’s new teacher evaluation system nor teach for mexico’s selection and training processes indicate that their rankings or “profiles of excellence” prioritize selecting, preparing, or rewarding teachers based on their rural life experiences, the depth of their local community knowledge, their competence in the original language of the students, or their commitment to “teach their own babies or students.” tenaciously resisting homogenizing “education reforms” borrowed from the west, time and again pockets of indigenous populations in mexico and across the americas have reasserted their right to determine the values, priorities and practices by which their teachers will be prepared and their children will be schooled (meyer & maldonado, 2010). collectively, their grassroots efforts witness to the truth of wollons’ finding of “the immense power of local cultures to respond to and reformulate” education models that either they themselves have chosen to borrow (e.g. maori language nests adapted to oaxaca from new zealand, meyer & soberanes, 2009), or more commonly, western models that have been imposed upon them. this paper reports one such effort, organized by plan piloto-cmpio3 in oaxaca to recast western-style “teacher preparation” reforms to achieve local teacher education priorities. this was done not in isolation, but as part of a pedagogical movement4 to reconstruct bilingual (indigenous language/spanish), intercultural education in oaxaca according to the indigenous communal values, priorities and practices collectively referred to as comunalidad. specifically, this study provides partial results of a one-year (2011-2012) intensive training experience (called a diplomado) for 35 indigenous teachers of initial education who were “teaching their own babies” in marginalized communities of oaxaca, mexico. in the diplomado they were guided to carry out an array of diverse research tasks in the communities where they teach, which they documented in portfolios of written and photographic evidence as their final diplomado product. the goal was to value these teachers’ rural life experiences, enrich their background knowledge, and equip them with research skills to investigate and honor the collectivized practices, original languages, values and governance structures that constitute comunalidad in the rural indigenous communities where they teach. the outcome of this effort, it was hoped, would be the creation of an authentic, participatory, community-based approach to initial education for pregnant mothers, babies and toddlers up to 3 years old. if successful, this would be a ground-breaking alternative to the mexican government’s homogeneous initial education approach. critically, too, this radical, communal approach would be carried out by “our own teachers, working within our communities, according to our values and practices of comunalidad, to teach our own babies.” http://www.ensenapormexico.org/ 10 global education review 3(1) development of the diplomado plan piloto-cmpio’s diplomado in communitybased indigenous initial education was the first teacher preparation effort in oaxaca focused specifically on initial education and officially recognized and accredited by the ieepo. the commitment to develop this diplomado grew out of “our growing concern about the government’s assimilationist approaches to working with babies and toddlers and their parents in indigenous communities” (soberanes, 2010, p. 110): official approaches to the education of these very young children, which international funding agencies frequently encourage and support, focus on “re-training” indigenous parents, especially mothers, to abandon communal childbearing priorities and practices in order to adopt practices promoted by western theories of child development. individualism and the acquisition of the spanish language are unquestioned assumptions and priority outcomes of these assimilationist official programs. the intention of the diplomado was to acknowledge western knowledge but to value, even prioritize, local wisdom and practices concerning child socialization and development. these communities suffer from high rates of migration and accelerated loss of their original languages; however, in many instances they maintain communal child socialization practices, as well as other practices vital to the continuation of their original cultures. goals of the diplomado the following goals were identified by the planning committee, composed of the pedagogical committee of plan piloto-cmpio and trusted international, national and local advisors:  to provide local teachers of indigenous initial education with basic professional preparation, so that they could develop an alternative strategy of initial education that would be culturally relevant to the indigenous communities of oaxaca.  to contribute to the preservation and strengthening of indigenous socialization practices, cultures and languages in oaxaca.  to create the conditions for children under three years old to receive educational opportunities in their communities that are culturally relevant and of high quality, based in the community’s own values and assessments. the diplomado lasted for 12 months, from july 2011 through july 2012, for a total of 200 hours. throughout the year, the diplomado employed various formats: a) an intensive month of initial training in july 2011; b) observation and consultation visits by plan piloto-cmpio pedagogical committee members to the communities of many of the course participants from september 2011 through may 2012; c) five intensive weekend sessions throughout the year in the capital city of oaxaca; and, d) a final week of summation, reflection and closure in july 2012. participants all diplomado participants were females, mostly in their 20s, though some more experienced plan piloto-cmpio teachers of initial education participated. in the end, 35 teachers submitted the required final portfolio of tasks and were considered “completers.” all the completers were indigenous, their seven ethnicities shown in table 1. their proficiency in their original or heritage language varied considerably, as will be discussed later in this paper. teaching our own babies 11 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: meyer, lois m. (2016). teaching our own babies: teachers’ life journeys into community-based initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico global education review, 3 (1). 5-26 table 1 ethnicity of diplomado participants course content major themes introduced during the intensive initial month of the course and expanded throughout the year defined the goals of the diplomado. these included: a) comunalidad and education in oaxaca; b) articulation of initial education with later levels of schooling; c) theories of infant development, with a focus on rural, indigenous and communal contexts; d) research methodologies and their pedagogical applications; and, e) theory and pedagogy of communal initial education. final portfolio of tasks: “harvest of the diplomado” the diplomado as an academic professional development experience was accredited by the institute of public education of the state of oaxaca (ieepo). in order to evaluate participants’ achievement of the goals of the diplomado for accreditation purposes, and also to support plan piloto-cmpio’s continued efforts to develop an alternative communitybased approach to initial education, a final portfolio of tasks was devised in consultation with the advisors. the intent of the portfolio, which was named the “harvest of the diplomado” by the pedagogical committee, was to display each participant’s understanding and accomplishment of research tasks important to their work in their community and to motivate reflection on their learnings. twenty-eight of the thirty-five completers (80%) gave permission for their portfolio tasks to be analyzed in detail, and many of their voices are heard in this study. in each case, the teacher’s indigenous ethnicity is identified; in all but one case, they asked that their real names be used along with their words. the one exception has been given a pseudonym. analysis of each of the diverse tasks that comprise the portfolio is ongoing and is a shared responsibility of the diplomado advisors and the pedagogical committee. in this report, the analysis will focus on a general assessment of the extent to which the goals of the diplomado were successfully met and ways in which the family backgrounds, schooling experiences, and language competencies of the participants impacted their achievement of these goals. these findings are drawn primarily from an analysis of the teachers’ linguistic and educational autobiographies, an assignment described in more detail below. we consider these to be significant but partial findings of the diplomado, as other tasks in the teachers’ portfolios are still undergoing analysis5. preparation of the teacher/researchers and the analysts before discussing the influence of the teachers’ personal and professional backgrounds on their achievement of the diplomado goals as analyzed through their personal autobiographies, it is important to provide a description of the preparation provided to these 28 teachers in the diplomado which enabled them to develop into researchers of communal life and communitybased childrearing practices in the rural ethnicity number of participants 1 mixtec 15 2 zapotec 7 3 mixe 5 4 chinantec 4 5 triqui 2 6 mazatec 1 7 huave (ikoots) 1 total 35 12 global education review 3(1) indigenous communities where they teach. this is important, as most of these teachers had not completed higher education studies or any formal teacher education preparation. in the diplomado’s research module, the teachers were guided to document the life of their community through photographs and narratives of caretakers’, toddlers’, and their own spontaneous activities, through linguistic surveys and mapping exercises, and through biographies of the pregnancy, birth and early life of infants based on interviews with parents and grandparents. in each case, they were provided with sample research documents collected in communities similar to their own; the samples usually were presented to the group by the experienced teacher who had collected them. then the samples were analyzed and reflected upon in small and large group sessions facilitated by diplomado advisors who were experienced qualitative researchers. in most cases, the emerging teacher/researchers left each diplomado session with protocols for conducting in their own community the research tasks that had been presented and analyzed in the diplomado session (e.g. photographs and their analysis; interviews; linguistic surveys). the process of professional development described here was cyclical and applied; this means that after a preliminary orientation was provided for each research method during a diplomado session, usually accompanied by a sample of data collected using the method in an indigenous community similar to their own, the teachers returned to their communities to apply the method themselves. at the next diplomado gathering, we reflected in small groups and as a whole group on the documentation the teachers brought from their own communities, in order to refine the evidence and reflect on comments and suggestions of the participants and advisors.6 it is important to note that each portfolio included two letters confirming the legitimacy of the teacher’s investigative work, one written by the teacher’s school supervisor and the other written by an authority of the community. these letters certified that the teacher’s research documentation was recognized and approved in both of these critical arenas of her educational and community work. each teacher’s linguistic and educational autobiography was included in the portfolio to document their personal history and motivations for teaching. diplomado participants were provided with a series of guiding questions, organized into topical sections: a) early childhood; b) school experiences; c) personal linguistic history; d) literacy experiences; e) professional preparation and development; f) family and professional life today; g) initial education pedagogy; h) collaboration with parents, the community, and education authorities; and, i) reflections. participants were encouraged to write honestly about their personal experiences, but they were not required to answer all the questions on the protocol guide. prior to writing their autobiography, participants read and reflected on several sample autobiographies written by plan pilotocmpio teachers. they also were given the opportunity in diplomado sessions to “talk” their autobiography in small groups. these teacherresearchers had no previous experience documenting their personal linguistic and educational autobiographies in writing. many initially found this task intimidating, even painful. still, many produced carefully crafted, multipage autobiographical documents, often accompanied by family photos, which led to deep personal and group reflections regarding the impact of their own life histories on their work with infants and with their communities. analysis of the autobiographies the author of this text, who has collaborated with plan piloto-cmpio for more than 16 years teaching our own babies 13 and who served as the advisor for the research module of the diplomado, engaged members of the pedagogical committee in the early analysis of the teachers’ autobiographies. this collective analytic effort was done at the request of the pedagogical committee in order to develop their skills at analyzing qualitative research data. at all times we attempted to follow a cyclical analytic process similar to that of the diplomado teacher-researchers. initially, the 28 portfolios were divided among the pedagogical committee members, each of whom was asked to do an initial analysis of three teachers’ autobiographies, using the protocol of topical questions as a guide. the author of this study then compiled the separate analyses, producing a draft document (in spanish) that was discussed in detail and revised where appropriate by the committee. in this discussion, committee members also asked questions to deepen their understanding of the qualitative analysis process itself. the author then finalized the draft document and asked that two leaders of plan piloto-cmpio review the final spanish version. their suggestions were again incorporated. since our intention was to initially publish this analysis in english, the author (the only english speaker among the committee members) translated the final version of the analysis into english and submitted it for publication7. in a workshop in oaxaca in december 2014, the results of this analysis were shared (in spanish) with the teacher participants of the diplomado and other recently hired initial education teachers, as well as their educational supervisors. the pedagogical committee was eager to hear their reflections and suggestions, and as it turned out, to document their enthusiastic reception of this work. the cycle of research, reflection and action continues; that is, based on this recent feedback, plan pilotocmpio continues to renew and deepen its commitment and its efforts to construct a transformed and community-based initial education practice. the public affirmation of this analysis by initial education teachers and supervisors in fall 2014 has been added to the final version of this study to underscore the findings reported here. outcomes of the diplomado goal one: basic professional preparation as stated earlier, the first goal of the diplomado was to provide the teachers with basic professional preparation for indigenous initial education, so that they could develop an alternative strategy of initial education that would be culturally relevant to the indigenous communities of oaxaca. basic professional preparation for these novice teachers was necessary for several reasons. as documented in reflections in their portfolios, some of the participants entered teaching solely out of necessity or “destiny,” when their hopes for continued schooling in other professional fields were aborted for economic reasons or lack of job possibilities. others began teaching by filling a temporary teaching vacancy. when they discovered that they enjoyed the work, they competed for a teaching position of their own. bilingual teaching positions in oaxaca in 2012 when the teachers’ autobiographies were submitted were hotly contested, requiring two examinations, one of content knowledge and the other of bilingual proficiency, plus an interview. many of the participants, like amadelia quoted here, wrote about the impact the bilingual test had on their own perceptions of their original language, and those of their family members. this was the first time i sat for an examination of bilingualism. i didn’t know how to write [the indigenous language] and i only spoke it a little. i couldn’t carry on a good conversation. 14 global education review 3(1) this was when my parents realized the error they had made when they prohibited us from learning zapotec. my dad helped me study and with the help of my grandparents i learned a little more zapotec. when i sat for the exam again, i passed. (amadelia, zapotec) still other participants slipped into teaching through a controversial but teacher union protected policy: a retiring teacher could “bequeath” their teaching position to their child or relative, or even sell it to the highest bidder, regardless of the young replacement’s field of academic study or indigenous language skills (agren, 2012). in both of these cases, the participant entered the teaching field without professional preparation, “beginning from zero” as one said. ester (mixtec) acknowledged that when she began teaching initial education, “i didn’t even know what it was.” in many cases, they entered the teaching field because it provided secure employment, something quite rare in oaxaca. they also came in with an unpredictable personal profile of background experiences, language competencies and commitments to teaching. if these young teachers were to contribute to a radical re-visioning of initial education based in comunalidad, it was felt that the diplomado must provide them with basic professional skills and competencies as tools in this innovative process of educational reconstruction. goal two: preserving and strengthening the original culture and language the second goal of the diplomado involved preparing the teachers to actively contribute to the preservation and strengthening of indigenous socialization practices, cultures and languages in oaxaca. this meant that teachers of initial education needed to be familiar with (or at least learn to respectfully investigate) cultural expressions such as socialization practices, and also to be conversant in the local original language or variant, in order to foment both of these in their educational work. the question arose: what background experiences and “funds of knowledge” did the participants possess in either of these areas of cultural knowledge? early socialization in rural communities the linguistic autobiographies indicate that these teachers’ lives did prepare them to comprehend life and education in rural communities. all had been born and, with rare exceptions, raised in oaxaca’s indigenous communities, a somewhat surprising discovery given the years of poverty and out-migration these communities have experienced. even though the participants’ language profiles varied, there were still surprising similarities in their schooling lives, including ridicule and shaming for their linguistic “incompetence” in either spanish or the original language. the participants also were similar in what will be described as their “patchwork” of educational experiences as they bounced between schools affiliated with the “indigenous/bilingual” and “formal/official” school systems (see note 1). though all participants indicated that they grew up in poverty, there were noticeable differences between those who as children shouldered significant responsibilities at home, and those who did not. birth order seems to have had some influence here. since i was a little older, i began to help with tasks in the kitchen, help my father a little in activities in the field. after a short time i began to take care of the sheep with my sisters before and after school…within the family, i took care of my sisters when my parents were gone. i prepared the meal, washed clothes, made teaching our own babies 15 tortillas, that is, i did all the tasks of the kitchen or the house. (maría luz, zapotec) still, maría luz and a few others reported that these tasks did not feel onerous: “all the tasks i did i learned from my parents and my grandfather. they guided me with loving words because i was the first daughter of my parents and the first granddaughter of my grandfather.” (maría luz, zapotec) others, however, were stoic about the strenuous demands placed upon them as children. at six years old, galdina (mixtec) and her sister were responsible to take care of the corn field and care for the goats; at nine years old, she took care of the cattle. the work was hard because at times they treated us as if we were men, since we didn’t have brothers who could help us… more than anything i learned to obey and i learned what would serve me in the future. (galdina, mixtec) several participants were sent to work outside their homes, doing housework in exchange for school tuition, room and board. schoolwork was squeezed in at night, if it was accomplished at all. many reported that they could not continue studying beyond high school due to financial difficulties. interestingly, other participants, often but not always the youngest in the family, had no specific early responsibilities. according to gabriela (mixtec), youngest of eight: “most of the time i played with my siblings, who spoiled me.” for irma (chinantec), the freedom to study left her with a tremendous appreciation and sense of responsibility to her family. when her father died suddenly when she was six years old, her mother “struggled untiringly” so that all her children could complete elementary school. then her older siblings migrated to the city or worked the family corn field to keep food in their mouths and to support irma’s continued studies: i had to fulfill the dream of my father and my mother, the unconditional support of my siblings, who thanks to their prodding and efforts i was motivated, since they watched over my studies and supported me economically. they covered the costs of my schooling and went to the school to ask the teacher how i was doing. (irma, chinantec) according to these young teachers, migration and the grinding poverty that motivates it have had devastating effects on comunalidad in many of their communities: communal life in my community isn’t like it used to be, according to the elders, because there’s no longer respect, not for the language, the traditional dress, the fiestas, among other things, due to migration that has been caused by the lack of work. (rosa, zapotec) given the pervasive poverty, it might be assumed that parents were largely unavailable and uninvolved in the school life of their children. in some cases this appears to be true. maría luz (zapotec) reported that her parents never participated in any pedagogical activities, only going to the school “when there were meetings to hand out grades, or the school committees had to clean the school and bathe children who had lice.” still, the autobiographies contain many moving accounts of parental and family efforts to assure an educational future for their offspring. one account includes moving descriptive detail: my parents told me that i had to learn to read and write. i saw my father with so much enthusiasm, just like me. he said 16 global education review 3(1) he wanted to see me some day be something more in life, since he was not able to complete his elementary education for lack of teachers. when i entered first grade, i didn’t know how to hold a pencil or the crayons, or even draw a letter. with my teacher’s help i learned to color, to sing, to write dittos, and the courageous effort of my father supported me so that i improved my letters. (irma, chinantec) however, some family attempts to support schooling, though probably well-intentioned, instead were damaging to these teachers’ early original language proficiency and their attitudes toward the language. amadelia’s father prohibited his children from speaking zapotec and never used the language with them “since he had the idea that if we spoke zapotec we would stutter when we spoke spanish. i learned zapotec with my companions at school but in the house i never said a single word.” still, perhaps others, like nancy (ikoots), whose older sister did not support nancy’s original language use when she was sent to live with her in the city in order to study middle school, might now as an adult find the wisdom to weigh their personal life experiences with deeper understanding: i had to go to the city to study, but that experience didn’t remove me from the person i am, an ikoots. i understand perfectly well my variant of the ombeayüits language. i don’t dress traditionally, i like modern things, but i’m not ashamed to wear my native dress on a traditional holiday, or to walk barefoot on the mounds of cultivated land, … or to carry a basket of newly picked corn on my back, or to have my fingernails grimy from digging up sweet potatoes. language proficiency though all of the diplomado participants had spent years living in rural indigenous communities, only 27 of the 35 completers identified an original language as their home language, their l1. their original languages represent seven of oaxaca´s 16 ethnolinguistic groups and include the following: table 2 original language of diplomado participants only one of these participants said she was raised bilingually “from the cradle” (desde la cuna) in mixtec and spanish. still, her early bilingualism was not a product of bilingual schooling: “the elementary school used more spanish than original language because the teachers prohibited it.” the remaining eight participants reported that they were raised with spanish as their dominant home language, generally with an indigenous language present to some degree in the home environment. in some cases, they now have acquired some conversational ability in their heritage language through their teaching work in communities. original language spoken by participants total number of participants by original language 1 mixtec 10 2 zapotec 4 3 mixe 5 4 chinantec 4 5 triqui 2 6 mazatec 1 7 huave (ombeayüits) 1 total 27 teaching our own babies 17 table 3 heritage indigenous language of participants who were raised spanish dominant one defining difference between those who say they are proficient in their indigenous language and those who do not was the degree of transience at an early age. vegonia (mixtec) explained that the use of the original language has been diminishing in her family “for the simple need to leave the community to go elsewhere to work.” she described her life of constant movement, beginning when she was one year old when she moved from her community to mexico city to live with her mother: “logically the preschool was monolingual in spanish.” she returned to her community when she entered second grade and spent two miserable years there. when i arrived it was really hard because the children spoke only mixtec. plus i wore pants, and in the village the girls only wore dresses, so the boys said really gross things…i didn’t understand mixtec, so i had to learn it with the help of my grandma who spoke it well, though she was from another village. at vegonia’s pleading, her mother sent her away to a boarding school for fourth grade, then in fifth and sixth grades she attended two different spanish-only schools in different towns. her high school years were in a spanish monolingual school in a neighboring state. “as my years of schooling increased, i distanced myself more from the language and i liked it less.” language of schooling transiency also impacted those who were raised in their own communities, though in other ways. in the early grades it was often the teachers, not the students, who were transient. irma (chinantec) recounts that each year of her elementary schooling, she was taught by a teacher new to her community. maría luz (zapotec) speaks for many of the participants when she recounts her experience: “my teachers were indigenous but they spoke a different language than us, so they never spoke to me in my indigenous language, only spanish.”8 it was not only linguistic misplacement of teachers or their transiency in the community that affected language use at school. in addition, teachers´ negative attitudes toward their own original language and their suppression of it at school also affected the students. “the majority of the teachers were indigenous, but they were ashamed to speak their original language. i had teachers who did wear traditional dress, which i liked a lot. what i remember is that they only spoke to me in spanish” (ángela, mixtec). sofía’s (mixe) experience is perhaps especially graphic, as she was schooled entirely in her linguistic region by teachers from her ethnolinguistic group: i went to elementary school in my community. the school was “bilingual,” my teachers were from the mixe region, but even so they never spoke to us in mixe. it was always spanish. in sixth grade the teacher punished us for speaking mixe in the classroom. middle and high school were also in the mixe region but all instruction was in spanish. (sofía, mixe) the participants’ linguistic autobiographies are filled with accounts of pain, confusion, and alienation when these young teachers remembered how it felt to be silenced heritage indigenous language number of participants 1 mixtec 5 2 zapotec 3 18 global education review 3(1) and linguistically excluded and punished at school. maría luz’s (zapotec) experience stands for many: they first took me to school when i was eight years old…on the first day of class i got up early, ate breakfast so i could get to school early, because i had to walk one and a half hours to get there. but after the first week i became very sad because all my classmates spoke spanish. i didn’t have anyone to talk with, no one wanted to hang out with me. they ignored me because i spoke zapotec and i didn’t understand spanish…i spent all my time outside because i was afraid of my classmates. the teacher taught in spanish and i didn’t understand the lesson. only two of the diplomado participants described schooling experiences above preschool in which their original language and, even more rarely, their community and its cultural practices, influenced the curriculum as sources of knowledge and pride. without exception, the participants experienced spanish monolingual immersion in middle and high school, often in a town distant from home, and in schools where the original language was neither tolerated nor respected. for those who had actually experienced the use of their original language in the elementary school, “everything changed.” everything changed when i entered middle school because one of the rules of that school was that mixtec could not be spoken inside or outside the classroom, because they said it was disrespectful with the justification that that language was offensive to others…but it was complicated to prohibit 150 students from expressing themselves in their language. (norma, mixtec) however difficult it may have been for schools to actually implement restrictive and punitive regulations against the use of the original language, it is clear that many schools tried. punishments for using the original language at school included fines, pejorative name-calling, threats to lower grade point averages, and physical punishment, such as hitting the hands repeatedly with a rod. those students who weren’t confident to participate in spanish went silent: “i couldn’t speak spanish because i was ashamed to pronounce it weirdly since i only began to practice spanish at age 13” (nancy, ikoots). it must be recognized that those participants who were limited indigenous language speakers also report being ridiculed and shamed by their classmates and relatives who spoke the original language proficiently. this was the case of vegonia (mixtec), described earlier, who returned to her community from mexico city wearing pants and speaking no mixtec. her age-mates, especially the boys, ridiculed her mercilessly. other spanish monolinguals reported similar experiences of ridicule from original language speakers. books and home literacy events despite differences in their original language proficiency, the participants’ early experiences with books and literacy events at home were consistent and sobering. in most cases there were no books in their homes other than spanish language textbooks issued by the schools. one or two fathers, we were told, read stories aloud in spanish to these participants when they were children, and several mothers, fathers, or other relatives were skilled oral storytellers, like ángela’s grandparents, who “sparked my imagination with diverse stories, in spanish and mixtec.” over and over again, participants echoed gabriela’s (mixtec) teaching our own babies 19 comment: “no one ever read me a story in my indigenous language.” surprisingly, four of these teachers report that they now are able to read and write their original language, despite never having been taught to do so at school, usually because they learned these literacy skills from supervisors in their local school zone. in most cases, they only use original language literacy in their teaching work. still, if their use of original language literacy with their students could be further supported by other institutions in the community, such as the church, the likely impact seems clear from norma’s (mixtec) account: i learned mixtec in school and at church, because in those two institutions we translated texts into mixtec. i was taught the mixtec alphabet in elementary school. at church they had me translate biblical texts and prayers because the mass was given in original language, that’s where i developed reading and writing. i learned to write and to pray in mixtec, and also they sent us out to investigate and interview older persons and i learned more with them. at least two consequences surface from the lack of early literacy events in the teachers’ lives, as revealed in their portfolios: a) very few of these teachers today describe themselves as having “the reading habit” in any language. the teachers speak of having some books at home, mainly in spanish (“and a few in english”), but they tend to add, “i don’t really like to read.” b) it is not clear whether the teachers are in the practice of reading aloud to the young children in their care, even their own children, in either spanish or the original language. very few refer to reading aloud in the indigenous language to their children or students. only one teacher (ángela, mixtec) explicitly referred to having “about 20 children’s books,” and to teaching writing in mixtec to her students and her young son. maría luz (zapotec) mentioned that, while she has no books in zapotec, she makes use of a few materials in that language that she herself has made. it seems that the absence in these teachers’ lives of stimulating early reading experiences in either language has resulted in their lack as adults of the habit of reading for pleasure. perhaps even more concerning is that this pattern of “not liking to read” may be passed on to new generations. fortunately, the diplomado opened the teachers’ eyes to possibilities for early literacy as part of “teaching our own babies.” language use/ language loss even those diplomado participants who are proficient in their original language reported significant language loss, or at least a shift to a preference for spanish, in their communities, especially among young children. in most cases, this shift to spanish is also happening in their own families. language use in some cases was still a mark of community membership: i speak mixe with my family, relatives, and with my fellow mixes from the community where i teach. i now read and write in spanish and mixe. in my family we still conserve the mixe language as a first language, which makes me very proud. (sofía, mixe) yet even sofía admitted the language loss in her own family, and her contribution to it: when i had my children i wasn’t yet teaching. i committed the error of 20 global education review 3(1) speaking to my children in spanish at home. for this reason, my children learned to speak spanish because i heard it was better that one’s children learn to speak spanish. fortunately, thanks to my work, i realized that this was a mistake. now i speak to my children in mixe, and they are learning mixe. (sofía, mixe) in community after community, the teachers reported the observable loss of the indigenous language from one generation to the next. communities like norma’s (mixtec) that were monolingual 20 years ago when these teachers were young, are now stratified by language use: today in my community i mainly communicate in mixtec. in my family things haven’t changed much, i only speak about 10% in spanish, only when it becomes necessary. with young people of my age and older adults i use mixtec. but with children, i only communicate in my original language with some of them because the majority no longer speaks it. (norma, mixtec) the teachers said they tried to bring awareness of the language loss among the community’s children into their work with mothers. however, the dominance and status of the spanish language in schools at all levels, and even in so-called “bilingual” schools, provided mothers in some communities with a powerful counter-argument. according to hildeberta (triqui): they don’t give recuperating the indigenous language much importance, since the other school institutions aren’t bilingual and they only use spanish. this is why the mothers prefer that their children speak spanish well, and if they understand the original language, that’s sufficient. the participants expressed sadness at the language loss they witness around them and the breakdown of communication that results between youth and elders in the family and community. but they were especially sad about the apathy of the younger generations regarding this shift to spanish: “we’ve called them on this and told them that our original language is important, but like the majority of youth today they aren’t interested” (yesenia, mixtec). how well did the diplomado achieve its second goal of preparing these teachers to actively preserve and strengthen the indigenous socialization practices, cultures and languages of oaxaca? the preservation and strengthening of linguistic and cultural practices of indigenous comunalidad rarely become apparent in the space of a few months or even a few years. what has been documented in this analysis is that these young indigenous teachers, with their complex biographies, are equipped with important rural life experiences and original language and culture competencies. unlike the “profiles of excellence” prioritized by mexican official and extra-official teacher reform efforts, these local indigenous teachers were welcomed in the diplomado as potential, uniquely qualified candidates of excellence for this alternative, community-based work of linguistic and cultural revitalization. the diplomado prioritized preparing them with qualitative research practices so that they could investigate and deepen their understanding of and respect for local practices of socialization and language use. how well they accomplished the desired outcomes of the diplomado will be seen in the years ahead, for based on past experience, teachers who “teach their own babies,” unlike those recruited by teach for mexico, teaching our own babies 21 overwhelmingly remain for years, even decades, in this teaching work. goal three: creating the conditions for quality, culturally relevant learning opportunities the third goal of the diplomado was to create the conditions for children under three years old to receive educational opportunities in their communities that were culturally relevant and of high quality, based in the community’s own values and assessments. it would be impossible to summarize or generalize the diplomado’s impact on these 35 teachers as a group or cohort, or its success at achieving this final goal, or really any of its three transformative goals. much still remains to be investigated and analyzed in the other tasks documented in the participants’ portfolio materials. more importantly, the diplomado’s impact on these teacher-researchers’ daily work would need to be assessed now and in the future in their communities. only by observing them in the scenes of their local work would we be able to determine to what degree teachers with these complex “funds of knowledge” about community life, and linguistically complex and perhaps battered cultural identities, have been helped to re-vision initial education in the array of linguistically, culturally and economically diverse rural indigenous communities where they now teach. we might rightly be skeptical that these young teachers, given the details of their biographies, are perceptive enough, experienced enough, daring enough or committed enough, to re-vision initial education in oaxaca in ways that are truly “culturally relevant and of high quality,” as the third goal intends. the participants’ own educational histories are discouraging, replete with cultural rejection, linguistic silencing, and constant disparagement of their self-esteem and indigenous identities by both indigenous and mestizo teachers and classmates, and even by their own family members. in the linguistic autobiographies, participant after participant reported that the instruction they received throughout their schooling, and the instruction that is etched in their memories and which provides them with teaching models, was textbook driven, repetitive, very traditional and involved only transmission of knowledge. as ángela (mixtec) wrote: “i was only accustomed to memorizing…i couldn’t conceive of the idea of discovering my own knowledge.” another participant, speaking earlier for almost all the others, reported that she began her teaching career with no preparation or creative pedagogical insights, “beginning from zero.” these would hardly qualify as “profiles of excellence” in the eyes of official educational reform proponents. yet there were two accounts of schooling experiences that provide clear alternatives, and hope. while these are not accounts of initial education, a schooling level that did not exist when these teachers were infants, these accounts nevertheless break out of the bounds of traditional normative instruction and provide a glimpse into culturally respectful participatory teaching/learning exchanges, where community stories, legends, knowledge about medicinal plants, soap-making and cultural practices are investigated and valued. these rare and hopeful educational experiences were shared and discussed extensively at diplomado sessions; the written version of one is reproduced here: in fifth grade there was a teacher who didn’t hit us, and who only bawled us out when it was necessary. he taught us and supported us as we solved math problems – division, multiplication, addition, subtraction, square roots, etc. using problems, games, songs, and materials and objects from our region. in this grade 22 global education review 3(1) we had an encounter with the community in which the municipal authorities, education supervisors, parents, students, teachers, other adults participated. they explained to us events of the community, community knowledge about mathematics, how the folk art of the community is made, etc. this event was really interesting for us because we participated and collaborated with the people who took part in each activity. months later we had another exchange of experiences with other communities nearby. here we learned about new experiences of other children, other teachers. we could exchange products that we as students and parents had made. we could make friends and play with children from other communities, bring new learnings back to the classroom. (irma, chinantec) this account, shared and reflected upon in the diplomado, gives hope for profound pedagogical re-visioning, for transformation. the seeds of radical change, however few and sparse, are present here, within this group of inexperienced, even formerly unwilling, initial education teachers. the diplomado made every attempt to nurture and cultivate these seeds of radical pedagogical change among this motley and questionably selective group of novice teachers. in the diplomado, participants were given the chance to tell their stories, hear others’ stories, reflect on what they heard, carry out skilled tasks and investigations in their communities and in their own languages, share their discoveries and findings, support each other, critique each other, and also learn from the academic research literature. it was a process of unlearning, relearning, discovering, and also constructing, together with, and on behalf of, the communities. the intense, indigenous, communitybased professional development process described here was not easy; it contrasted with so much these emergent teacher-researchers had previously learned in their standardized schooling. they were challenged to rethink, reconsider, and un-learn so much. it was confusing, even confounding, and unquestionably painful at times. it turned these young teachers’ schooled understandings of their world and community inside out and upside down. who really possesses knowledge, and/or who simply has the power to impose a certain (academic) form of knowing on others? how is knowledge “imported” from elsewhere, both nationally and internationally? could this “imported” knowledge be made appropriate, or even be profoundly transformed, by the knowledge and priorities of local communities? if so, how? ángela (mixtec) summarized her jarring, transformative discoveries this way: it has been quite hard to realize that our language is important, that it should be preserved, and that everything around us is knowledge, that though it appears to be simple, it is really profound. i didn’t realize this until i became a teacher in indigenous communities. now i’m in the process of trying to understand all this and put it into practice. i really understand very little and i still have so much to learn and to understand… i had the idea that the best stimulation was what children received in developed countries. i thought that’s how a child learned and developed in a healthy manner. but now i’m trying to understand that everything that surrounds a child is learning, that it strengthens her/his development. (ángela, mixtec) teaching our own babies 23 conclusion a final personal note: across more than 16 years of close collaboration with plan piloto-cmpio on various intense, radical, community-based professional development efforts with indigenous teachers, i have witnessed again and again oaxaca’s commitment to work with the teachers at hand, just these local teachers, the ones that show up for a workshop or diplomado, whomever they are and whatever their background and expertise. in our work, there is no “teach-for-oaxaca” to entice prestigious college graduates with “excellent academic profiles” to serve these rural schools (what indigenous languages would such teachers speak, and what communal values would they hold?). instead, our work as professional developers has been to value these teachers precisely for who they are, for what they bring with them, especially their commitment to their rural communities, to understand their patchwork histories and to help them become the best bilingual, indigenous teachers they can be. and amazingly, in the end, not all of them but many, surprise, even astound us! visits to eight of the diplomado teachers in their communities in fall 2014, and conversations with appreciative mothers and fathers about these teachers’ work, displayed both the diplomado’s limitations and its successes. there was tremendous variety among the teacher-researchers’ communities and increasing urbanization in several zones (which the diplomado inadequately addressed), as well as pedagogical challenges that perhaps universally still need to be addressed if these teachers are to meet the constantly evolving challenges of their work. even so, their varied creative pedagogical efforts to value and promote indigenous knowledge, languages, and cultural practices in earliest infancy, in collaboration with the communities themselves, are remarkable and groundbreaking in mexico, especially given current federal education reform efforts. if only official mexico, as well as the united states, could glimpse the power that could be unleashed by valuing the complex and even painful biographies of the indigenous and other minoritized teachers who present themselves to the field of teaching. if only we could discover the difficult, critical, but deeply respectful professional development work necessary to enable teacher candidates such as these or native american or hispanic or other local teachers-in-waiting, whatever their complex personal and educational histories to become the critical, liberatory pedagogues their communities and our nations need and deserve. if only we would collaborate seriously with their communities to rigorously prepare and then free local, indigenous/minoritized teachers to “teach their own babies” in a quality education that is defined and supported by their community, to meet its, and our, present and future needs and priorities. author note the diplomado in community-based indigenous initial education, described and analyzed in this article, was planned and implemented by the pedagogical committee of plan piloto – cmpio, with assistance from national and international collaborators. the diplomado as an officially-approved professional development experience could not have been devised or implemented without the participation of plan piloto-cmpio, nor could the analysis in this article have been carried out or published without their participation and approval. i am deeply grateful for their many years of committed, community-based educational efforts in oaxaca and for their invaluable collaboration with me across the last 16 years. 24 global education review 3(1) notes 1. there are two subsystems of preschools and primaries in oaxaca: the so-called “formal” or “official” schools which provide instruction solely through spanish to students said to be spanish speakers, and the “bilingual” or “indigenous” schools which supposedly use both an original language and spanish to facilitate learning for indigenous students. the author’s experience is that this much-repeated description of the two school subsystems entirely misconstrues realities that are evident when observing in the schools, especially in rural contexts: a) spanish speaking students and original language speaking students populate the schools of both subsystems; b) depending upon the linguistic competence of individual teachers, an original language may be used for limited purposes in “formal” schools to meet specific, immediate communication needs; c) “bilingual” teachers may not be assigned to a “bilingual” school in the region of their original language competence; d) it is very rare that systematic bilingual instruction is provided to any students in either school subsystem; and, e) due to inconsistent provision of schools of either subsystem within a given municipality or region, students regularly bounce from one subsystem to the other as they attend different levels of schooling, further impeding the possibility that they experience any continuous model of bilingual education across grades or schooling levels. 2. in oaxaca, “original language” and “original peoples” are the preferred terms. 3. plan piloto-cmpio, with more than 40 years of struggle alongside rural communities (since 1974), wears 3 “hats”: a) since 1978, it functions as a jefatura de zonas de supervisión, similar to a statewide school district, part of the system of indigenous education of the state institute of public education of oaxaca (ieepo), with 1170 indigenous teachers in more than 450 rural bilingual schools across the state; b) in 1982, it was recognized as a local of the powerful section 22 of the national sindicate of education workers (snte), and is a key player in the dissident national coordination of education workers (cnte); and, c) in 1990, it was incorporated legally as a civic organization (a.c). 4. initiated in 1995, the pedagogical movement is a broad-based and inclusive movement of children, parents, teachers, committed intellectuals, and community authorities and other community members, intended to focus on the construction of educational alternatives that respond to the necessities and conditions of the indigenous communities of oaxaca. the pedagogical movement has been the core of plan piloto-cmpio’s instructional work for two decades. 5. see jiménez, j., martínez, l, mendoza, j., & meyer, l. (in press) for an analysis of infants’ spontaneous activities in rural indigenous communities of oaxaca, based on photographs and teacher-researcher narratives in the portfolios. 6. this process is familiar to those who do action research, a particular type of qualitative research very connected to the purposes of this diplomado and its participants’ needs. action research (stringer, 2004) seeks concrete changes in the practices of teachers, who reflect on and theorize about their own practices based on documentation that they themselves have collected in their community with community authorization. they begin by inquiring into the agendas and perspectives of the least powerful, and then expand the circle of inquiry to include all who are affected by the problem at hand. they share their reflections with others so that they can deepen their discoveries and seek clarity and understanding among all who form their research and analysis community. in this process, they participate in a continuous cycle of teaching our own babies 25 reflection, theorizing and action, in order to resolve a social problem and transform their pedagogical practice to meet the needs of their community (p. 5). 7. the linguistic demands of this kind of binational publication process are considerable; elsewhere i have referred to them as “the language divide” (meyer, 2010, p. 21-22). plan piloto-cmpio is composed of skilled, experienced bilingual teachers (indigenous language/spanish) who do not speak, read or write english. their community-based work is important, even internationally groundbreaking, and deserves to be known to the wider englishspeaking research world. with rare exceptions, articles published in english professional journals cannot have appeared in print previously in any other language. this means that plan piloto-cmpio research articles, if they first appear in english, cannot have been published earlier in spanish. for my oaxacan co-authors, this means that if they are to reference their own work or share it with other researchers in latin america, a publishable version in spanish must somehow appear, if funds for such an additional publication can be generated. and if their manuscripts are first published in spanish, which permits access for knowledge transmission among oaxacan authors and other latin american researchers, most english-focused international journals will refuse to publish their work in translation. 8. the phenomenon of “linguistic misplacement” (desubicación lingüística) is widespread among indigenous teachers in oaxaca. according to plan piloto-cmpio leadership, neither oaxaca’s state institute of public education (ieepo) nor section 22, the state affiliate of the national syndicate of education workers, considers placement of teachers in their linguistic area to have greater or even equal priority to the traditional practice of assigning teachers based on seniority and union participation. references agren, d. 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(2002). el movimiento magisterial y la educación indígena. unpublished presentation, iii encuentro estatal de la educación indígena, coordinadora nacional de trabajadores de la educación (cnte), organizaciones democráticas y populares, april 12, 2002. stringer, e. (2004). action research in education. upper saddle river, nj: pearson education inc. teach for mexico website (www.ensenapormexico.org), accessed may 2015. watson, k. (2007). language, education and ethnicity: whose rights will prevail in an age of globalization? international journal of educational development, 27, 252-265. wollons, r. (2000). kindergartens and cultures: the global diffusion of an idea. new haven & london: yale university press. about the author lois m. meyer, phd, (ucla, applied linguistics, specialties in second language acquisition, and language education) was a bilingual professor for 11 years in the department of elementary education at san francisco state university, focusing on urban education. in 1999-2000, she spent a year as a senior fulbright researcher in oaxaca, mexico, researching teacher education for oaxaca's rural, marginalized communities and schools. since 2000, she has continued her close collaboration with plan piloto-cmpio as a bilingual professor in the department of language, literacy and sociocultural studies in the college of education at the university of new mexico in albuquerque. http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion-mexico/2014/sep-modifica-evaluacion-en-carrera-magisterial-979980.html http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion-mexico/2014/sep-modifica-evaluacion-en-carrera-magisterial-979980.html http://archivo.eluniversal.com.mx/nacion-mexico/2014/sep-modifica-evaluacion-en-carrera-magisterial-979980.html http://jaf.lenguasindigenas.mx/docs/el-nido-de-lengua.pdf http://jaf.lenguasindigenas.mx/docs/el-nido-de-lengua.pdf https://books.google.com/books/about/the_language_nest.html?id=kvhqmweacaaj https://books.google.com/books/about/the_language_nest.html?id=kvhqmweacaaj http://www.sep.gob.mx/es/sep1/sep1_carrera_magisterial#.vqr9cy472tc http://www.sep.gob.mx/es/sep1/sep1_carrera_magisterial#.vqr9cy472tc http://www.ensenapormexico.org/ fostering early math comprehension 135 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: naslund hadley, emma, parker, susan w. & hernandez-agramonte, juan manuel (2014). fostering early math comprehension: experimental evidence from paraguay. global education review, 1 (4). 135-154 fostering early math comprehension: experimental evidence from paraguay emma naslund-hadley inter-american development bank susan w. parker centro de investigación y docencia económicas (cide) juan manuel hernandez-agramonte abstract research indicates that preschool children need to learn pre-math skills to build a foundation for primaryand secondary-level mathematics. this paper presents the results from the early stages of a pilot mathematics program implemented in cordillera, paraguay. in a context of significant gaps in teacher preparation and pedagogy, the program uses interactive audio segments that cover the entire preschool math curriculum. since paraguayan classrooms tend to be bilingual, the audio and written materials use a combination of spanish and guaraní. based on an experimental evaluation since the program’s implementation, we document positive and significant improvements of 0.16 standard deviations in standardized test scores. the program helped narrow learning gaps between lowand high-performing students, and between students with trained teachers and those whose teachers lack formal training in early childhood education. moreover, the program improved learning equally among both guaraníand spanish-speaking students. but not all learning gaps narrowed as a result of the program. although girls improved significantly, boys improved much more, ultimately increasing the gender gap. to close this gender gap, the program has been modified to encourage girls’ increased participation in the classroom and general interest in math. keywords initial education, preschool, early education, mathematics, paraguay jel: i21; i28; i29; o15; o31 introduction an increasing body of evidence suggests that the development of pre-math skills at an early age is more important than previously thought in order to foster later mathematical understanding and problem-solving skills. geary, hoard, nugent, & bailey (2013) find that early knowledge about _____________________________ corresponding author: 6, 7 emma naslund-hadley, inter-american development bank, 1300 new york avenue, nw, washington, dc 20577. email: emman@iadb.org 136 global education review 1(4) numbers predicts functional numeracy skills in seventh grade. resnick (1989) argues that developing rudimentary skills in preschoolers, specifically counting abilities, precipitates the retention and automatic use of mathematical concepts in everyday life. in other words, if the use of numbers and counting becomes second nature to children, then these numbers are at their disposal and can be understood in broader contexts (gersten & chard, 1999). for example, if a child does not have to ponder whether 9 is greater than 4, but rather knows this to be true, he or she can more easily work with these numbers when learning addition and subtraction. perhaps even more important, early engagement with numerical concepts is essential for the development of positive attitudes toward math (clements, sarama, & dibiase, 2004), which in turn have been found to be strongly correlated with test scores (house, 2006). goldenberg, june, sword, & cuoco (2010) have studied the importance of coherence in math across grade levels, showing that each year of math instruction builds on concepts taught in the previous year. unstructured play alone, others find, is not enough to allow preschool children to reach their full potential in math— they need adult instruction (clements & sarama, 2005). additionally, the literature suggests that rudimentary math skills can be developed at the same time as language and other basic cognitive functions—that is, it is not necessary to focus on language development before promoting the development of math skills (anuola, leskinen, lerkkanen, & nurmi, 2004). studies of preschool math education in the developing world are extremely rare. those conducted in the united states show that a lack of math education in preschool classrooms does the most harm to children from low socioeconomic backgrounds. that is, among all children who are not exposed to math at the preschool level, those from poorer backgrounds will struggle the most with math in later years (starkey, klein, & wakely, 2004). studies like these may provide a window into preschool math in the developing world, where children from low socioeconomic backgrounds predominate across school systems. inspired by the budding research on early math, the paraguayan government decided to strengthen its preschool math instruction in 2009. after reviewing a series of math initiatives from across the world, the government chose the big math for little kids (bmlk) program, which had been implemented in low-income schools in new york. bmlk delivers interactive learning to help young children not only improve their math scores but also to increase their interest in math. bmlk lesson plans and materials were adjusted to paraguayan conditions and preschool curricular content. the new national preschool math model was named tikichuela: mathematics in my school. it soon became clear that successful implementation of the tikichuela model required that some of the deficiencies of paraguayan preschool teachers in our sample, both in knowledge and in pedagogical technique, be addressed. the teachers lacked the skills to translate the lesson plans and activities into the intended classroom activities. based on the significant positive effects of audio math lessons in nicaragua,1 it was decided that tikichuela would be brought to paraguayan classrooms through audio lessons, including songs, dances, dramatization of math stories, games, and other interactive activities. these would help reduce the burden on teachers and ensure that all students receive the same instruction, regardless of their teachers’ level of pedagogical training and content knowledge. additionally, instruction is provided in spanish and guaraní, making this a bilingual instruction program. instruction that is done in a bilingual context has been shown to impact children positively by bridging the learning gap between children that speak two different languages (wilson et al., 2013). in our program, the audio lessons are provided in spanish with all key math concepts and central story lines are repeated in guaraní. in this paper we report the findings of an experimentally designed evaluation of the paraguayan pilot during the 2011 academic year, which draws on standardized tests administered in treatment and control groups as well as from surveys of principals, teachers, students, and parents. section two describes the program fostering early math comprehension 137 background, the instructional approach, and the context in which it was implemented. section three presents the research design and its implementation, as well as the quality of the data. section four presents the results and their interpretation. finally, section five summarizes key insights from the study. the program background paraguay is no exception to the generally poor performance of latin american countries in math and science. a large percentage of those who graduate from high school do not acquire enough knowledge or skills to function well in society. paraguayan students consistently perform below their peers in other countries in the region. the regional standardized learning test, which assesses the science and math skills of thirdand sixth-grade students in 16 countries and territories in latin america and the caribbean, reveals that more than half of paraguayan third-grade students did not attain level ii in math. this means that they could not solve simple addition or multiplication problems, extract information from tables, or recognize decimal numbers. in sixth grade a quarter of the students did not reach level ii for that grade level, meaning that they were unable to solve problems that required multiplication or division, do addition with fractions, or recognize common geometric shapes (unescollece, 2008). results from national assessments confirm the findings of the segundo estudio regional comparativo y explicativo (serce) test administered in 2006. the national education process evaluation (snepe) reveals that, on average, students are falling short of the national goals for math and science proficiency set by the ministry of education and culture (mec, 2010). over 50% of third-grade students and some 40% of sixthand ninth-grade students reach only the most basic level of math achievement. the intervention2 beyond fostering pre-math skills in general, the tikichuela project was designed to close gaps in learning between students in urban and rural areas, central and peripheral schools within school networks, and multiand single-grade classrooms. the interactive program was designed to include 108 audio cds that cover the entire preschool math curriculum. since paraguayan classrooms tend to be bilingual, mixing spanish and guaraní, the audio programs and written materials are produced using a combination of these languages. key concepts are repeated in both spanish and guaraní. teachers receive training and in-class tutoring in the interactive audio methodology. as pointed out earlier, the use of bilingual instruction can have positive effects on learning. in the pilot, the audio lessons were implemented four days a week, with one day set aside to review what had been learned during the week. this extra day gave teachers flexibility to review topics that, according to their observation, the children needed more practice or assistance in addressing. the average duration of each class was 60 minutes, divided into three phases: (a) preparation of the classroom and materials, (b) playing the audio lesson for 30–40 minutes, and (c) additional activities for 15–20 minutes. the program’s introduction was significantly postponed in the first academic year (2011) because of delays in the production of the audio lessons; thus, the planned ninemonth implementation time was reduced to five months. that delay, in turn, reduced the number of tikichuela lessons that could be delivered. although the program consisted of 108 separate lessons, during the first academic year teachers were able to implement no more than 76 lessons. although the full program has been implemented since 2011, this paper reports the results from only the first academic year. the context baseline tests in march 2011 indicated that preschool children in cordillera had poor math skills. the average child could name only two out of four geometric shapes, and was unable to recognize four numerals. these deficiencies make it hard for children to succeed in math at the primary level; future learning must build on basic concepts. 138 global education review 1(4) consistent with results from other latin american countries, paraguayan students from rural areas and from lower socioeconomic groups were outperformed by students from urban areas and from higher-level socioeconomic households. the baseline data revealed a tendency for the sample to fall into two markedly different groups. the smaller group consisted of urban schools at the center of school networks; these had larger class sizes, single-grade classrooms, and teachers trained in early education. students in this group obtained scores above the mean across multiple categories. they generally spoke spanish or both spanish and guaraní, came from a family environment with more education, and had previously attended preschool. a second, larger group of rural, peripheral schools was characterized by smaller class sizes, multigrade classrooms, and teachers without adequate training. students here obtained scores below the mean across multiple categories. they generally spoke guaraní or both spanish and guaraní, came from households with less education, and had not previously attended preschool. the baseline test indicated a math achievement gap between girls and boys across the entire sample, with boys outperforming girls. although hardly any latin american data are available on pre-math skills in very young children, the observed gender gap is in line with math achievement in higher grades across latin america.3 the baseline survey also revealed that preschool teachers felt unprepared to teach math; 94% stated that they had difficulties structuring their math lessons, and 90% said that they were unable to teach all topics in the preschool math curriculum. additionally, 40% of teachers reported giving math lessons three days or fewer per week, rather than daily as stipulated in the curriculum. these baseline findings suggested that teachers needed support in consistently implementing and completing math lessons. research strategy: design, implementation, and data design to be able to estimate whether the project produced the desired effects of raising overall pre-numeracy skills and closing learning gaps, we needed to estimate what would have happened in the absence of the tikichuela project. to do this, we conducted an experiment in which schools were randomly assigned to either a treatment or a control group. these types of randomized control trials (rcts) have been used to evaluate the effects of various education inputs, such as textbooks and computers (barrera-osorio & linden, 2009; malamud & pop-eleches, 2011; cristia, cueto, ibarraran, severin, & santiago, 2012), scholarships (glewwe, hanushek, humpage, & ravina, 2011), and tutoring (banerjee, cole, duflo, & linden, 2007). the randomized design covered 265 school districts in the department of cordillera, or approximately 4,500 preschool students and 400 teachers. one hundred and thirty-one schools were randomly selected to receive the treatment, while the remaining 134 schools were designated as the control group. the sample was stratified based on school location (urbanrural), school resources (high-low resources), number of children enrolled, and existence of split sessions schedule (one-two sessions). to measure the effects, three data collection instruments were used. first, we applied baseline and endline math learning tests at the beginning and the end of the school year. the tests were adapted from the early grade math assessment (egma) developed by the research triangle institute (rti). to make it possible to assess spillover effects, the tests also included three questions from rti’s early grade reading assessment (egra). the endline test was equivalent to the baseline test, but the level of difficulty was raised to the level expected of a preschool child at the end of the school year. interviewers administered the tests individually to each preschool child in spanish or guaraní, depending on the predominant language of each fostering early math comprehension 139 student. the tests consisted of 14 tasks4 that took less than 15 minutes to apply to each student. the tests were validated in four schools in the country’s central region that were not part of the sample. second, we surveyed principals, teachers, parents, and students to collect sociodemographic data on the schools and the students’ families. third, we conducted a qualitative evaluation to help us interpret the quantitative findings. data the baseline information showed that there were no significant differences between the treatment and control groups in terms of school or student characteristics, or the achievement level of the students. but the baseline revealed a significant difference between the two groups in terms of years of teacher experience. table 1. differences between treated and control groups at baseline treatment control difference observations (1) (2) (3) (4) panel a: school characteristics i number of teachers—preschool 1.11 1.10 0.01 265 (0.029) (0.030) (0.042) preschool enrollment 16.96 17.29 -0.33 265 (1.408) (1.393) (1.981) preschool classrooms 1.22 1.25 -0.03 265 (0.046) (0.049) (0.068) multigrade preschool classrooms 1.60 1.63 -0.03 265 (0.043) (0.042) (0.060) grade-appropriate furniture 1.19 1.22 -0.03 265 (0.034) (0.036) (0.050) availability of moe-provided didactic toys and games 1.85 1.77 0.09 265 (0.083) (0.080) (0.115) ventilation and lighting 1.09 1.11 -0.02 265 (0.025) (0.027) (0.037) cd player 1.95 1.93 0.02 265 (0.051) (0.053) (0.073) ministry of education basket of basic preschool materials 1.05 1.02 0.02 265 (0.026) (0.017) (0.031) panel b: school characteristics ii class size, morning session 15.20 14.50 0.70 123 (0.987) (0.877) (1.321) class size, afternoon session 13.18 13.29 -0.11 201 (0.698) (0.650) (0.954) level of formal education of teacher 4.06 4.12 -0.05 289 (0.051) (0.061) (0.079) years of experience of teacher 12.15 10.41 1.75** 286 (0.408) (0.444) (0.603) language of instruction 2.53 2.53 0.01 290 (0.065) (0.066) (0.093) number of math teacher-training courses 3.37 3.08 0.28 273 (0.578) (0.372) (0.687) panel c: performance of students oral counting 11.50 12.04 -0.55 2907 (0.242) (0.224) (0.330) average math score -0.01 0.00 -0.01 2907 (0.016) (0.015) (0.022) average literacy score -0.04 0.00 -0.04 2907 (0.021) (0.020) (0.029) note: estimated standard errors are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. test scores are expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. 140 global education review 1(4) the attrition rate was low (3.1%). of the 2,907 students who participated in the baseline test and survey, 2,815 also participated in the final measurement. to ensure that our treatment and control groups were still comparable at the end of the experiment, we used the following regression to test if attrition was systematically related to the treatment: ij j ijl tδ β ε= + ⋅ + (1) where lij is equal to one if the student i in school j was not evaluated at the endline, and zero if the student was evaluated. tj is equal to one if the school j was treated, and zero if it is part of the control group. the parameter β will be statistically indistinguishable from zero, if attrition rates were not systematically different between the treatment and control groups. the first column of table 2 reports the β estimate from equation (1). the estimated coefficient for β is statistically indistinguishable from zero, showing that attrition rates in the treated and control groups are not systematically different. although the attrition rate is similar for the treatment and control groups, we must verify if the attrition was orthogonal to the outcomes of interest, that is, if attrition was not correlated to test scores. this would be a problem by implying that even though attrition was statistically the same in treatment and control groups, there is a chance children with lower or higher scores may systematically drop out of the program, biasing the results. we test this empirically through the following regression: 1 1 2ij ij j j ij ijy l t t lδ δ β β ε= + ⋅ + ⋅ + ⋅ ⋅ + (2) where yij is the standardized test score at baseline for student i in school j. the other variables are defined as in equation (1). β1 estimates the test score difference between the treatment and control groups at baseline if the student did not end up participating in the final measurement, and β2 measures the test score difference, also at baseline, between treated and nontreated students that were tested at baseline and at the final measurement. for a causal interpretation of the impact estimations, both coefficients should be statistically indistinguishable from zero. yet the second column of table 2 shows that the math results of students for whom we do not have a final measurement are significantly different from those for which we have final measurement. the negative coefficient indicates that in the case of students who ended up not participating in the endline test, those in the treatment group had lower scores than those in the control group. however, since the attrition rate is low, this result may be random. in fact, this is suggested by the elevated standard errors and by the disappearance of these differences in the more precise measurement presented in the third column. the fourth and fifth columns show that the parameters β1 and β2 are statistically insignificant for reading comprehension. during the evaluation, we discovered that one of the 134 control schools had joined the treatment group. as it is not possible to reassign schools, in our analysis the contaminated school is considered a control school, and we report the effects based on the intent to treat. table 2. attrition tests for test scores dependent variables: baseline standardized scores incomplete math reading and comprehension (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) treated 0.00 (0.01) treated x incomplete -0.32** -0.18 0.016 -0.07 (0.14) (0.14) (0.19) (0.18) treated x remaining 0.00 0.01 -0.03 -0.04 (0.04) (0.03) (0.07) (0.04) observations 2,907 2,907 2,907 2,907 2,907 note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. test scores are expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. fostering early math comprehension 141 results and interpretation overall effects to assess the program’s effect on students’ test scores, the following regression was estimated: , 1 , 1 ,ij t ij t j ij ty y tδ δ β ε−= + ⋅ + ⋅ + (3) where yij,t is the standardized final measurement for student i in school j, and yij,t-1 is the baseline test score in mathematics.5 the parameter β measures the effect of the program (expressed in terms of standard deviations with respect to the control group) on the test score. the results of the estimated regression are given in table 3. column one shows the effects without any controls, column two shows the score when controlling for the baseline score, and column three shows the effects when we control for the baseline score, the strata used in the sample design, and the enumerators. we are particularly interested in column three, since they represent the most robust results. table 3. overall results—mathematics dependent variables: mathematics (1) (2) (3) panel a: overall effects treatment effect 0.15*** 0.15*** 0.16*** (0.05) (0.03) (0.03) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 panel b: within-school quartile effects quartile 1 0.22*** 0.20*** 0.22*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.04) quartile 2 0.11* 0.12*** 0.14*** (0.06) (0.04) (0.04) quartile 3 0.16** 0.18*** 0.19*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) quartile 4 0.09 0.08 0.09 (0.08) (0.06) (0.05) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 panel c: general quartile effects quartile 1 0.20*** 0.19*** 0.20*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.04) quartile 2 0.12*** 0.12*** 0.16*** (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) quartile 3 0.21*** 0.20*** 0.22*** (0.05) (0.05) (0.04) quartile 4 0.09 0.09 0.08 (0.07) (0.06) (0.05) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 panel d: effects by gender boys 0.22*** 0.22*** 0.21*** (0.06) (0.04) (0.04) girls 0.08* 0.10*** 0.13*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 baseline controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. all scores are expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. 142 global education review 1(4) students in the pilot program saw an increase in test scores (over those not in the program) of 0.15 standard deviation for column one and two, and 0.16 standard deviation for column three. a 0.16 standard deviation increase means that the students in the treatment group, who on average were in the 50th percentile, moved to the 57th percentile with respect to the distribution of the control group. these findings are most encouraging given the program’s short implementation. one aim of the program was to close achievement gaps among different groups of students. panel b of table 4 shows differential effects by quartiles on the baseline exam results. that is, students were ranked according to their baseline test scores within each school, and the distribution was categorized into quartiles. the following regressions were then estimated: , 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 1 , 1 2 , 1 3 , 1 4 , 1 , 1 2 3 1 2 3 4 ij t ij t ij t ij t ij t j ij t j ij t j ij t j ij t ij t y y q q q t q t q t q t q δ δ δ δ δ β β β β ε − − − − − − − − = + ⋅ + ⋅ + ⋅ + ⋅ + ⋅ ⋅ + ⋅ ⋅ + ⋅ ⋅ + ⋅ ⋅ + (4) where q1ij,t-1 is equal to one if the student i in school j was below the 26th percentile on the baseline test results distribution, and zero otherwise; q2ij,t-1 is equal to one if the student i in school j was between the 26th and 50th percentile in the baseline measurement, and zero otherwise; q3ij,t-1 is equal to one if the student i in school j was between the 51st and 75th percentile of the baseline distribution, and zero otherwise; and q4ij,t-1 is equal to one if the student i in school j was above the 75th percentile, and zero otherwise. the remaining variables are defined as above. the estimates of parameters β1, β2, β3, and β4 represent the effects of the program within each quartile of the baseline distribution. panel b shows that the effects of the program are present in all quartiles except the highest. that is, the program benefits all students with the exception of the highest performers. this means that the program was able to achieve its aim of boosting the performance of those needing the most remedial work in math. in light of the observed math gender disparities of latin american students on international standardized tests (the 2009 pisa and 2011 timss), we also analyzed the impacts of the tikichuela by gender. to obtain the differential effects by gender the following regression was estimated: tjijijjijjitij femaletmaletfemaleyy ,2121,1tij, εββδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+= − (5) where femaleij equals one if student i in school j is a female and zero otherwise. similarly maleij equals one if the student is male, and zero otherwise. parameters β1 and β2 capture the additional program effects on boys and girls, respectively. panel c of table 3 shows that both boys and girls saw significant increases in their math scores. notably, tikichuela girls not only caught up with boys in the control group, but surpassed them despite initially lower scores. but boys across the sample did better than girls, suggesting that the program affected girls differently than it affected boys. from the qualitative data, we know that a combination of cultural factors and attitudes toward gender differences affected the results of the program. thus the treatment accentuated gender inequality. while a number of possible factors could have contributed to this differential effect, the qualitative evaluation indicated that teachers might have been calling on boys to conduct activities in front of the class more fostering early math comprehension 143 often than girls. also, there was a widespread perception among the surveyed teachers that boys have more disciplinary problems and are thus in need of more individual attention than girls. impacts by geographical location and type of school the sample included 53 urban schools (with 803 students) and 212 rural schools (with 1,997 students), which allowed us to determine whether there are differential impacts by geographical location. we used the following model to estimate these differential effects: tijjijjijjitij ruralturbanturbanyy ,2121,1tij, εββδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+= − (6) where the categorical variable urbanij equals one if student i in school j attends a school located in an urban area, and zero otherwise. similarly, ruralij equals one if the student is in a school is located in a rural area, and zero otherwise. parameter β1 captures the effects of the program on students in urban areas, while β2 captures the additional program effects on students in rural areas with respect to students in urban areas. table 4 shows the estimated impacts by geographical location. table 4 reveals significant effects in both urban and rural areas of 0.12 and 0.18 standard deviations, respectively. although the effect is larger in rural areas, the difference is not significant. we therefore cannot say that the program contributed to narrowing the achievement gap between students in rural and urban schools. we were also interested in analyzing if the program helped close the learning gap between central and peripheral schools. to assess these types of effects, we estimated the following model: tjijijjijjitij peripheraltcentertcenteryy ,2121,1tij, εββδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+= − (7) where centerij equals one if student i in school j attends a central school, and zero otherwise. similarly, peripheralij equals one if the student attends a peripheral school, and zero otherwise. parameter β1 captures the effects of the program on students in central schools; while β2 captures the additional program effects on students in peripheral schools. table 5 shows the estimated impacts by school type. peripheral schools, which typically enjoy fewer resources than those at the center of school networks, saw a significant improvement in scores (0.21 standard deviations). central schools, on the other hand, did not demonstrate any effect. that is, the tikichuela program contributed to narrowing the learning gap between the two types of schools. table 4. results by geographic location mathematics (1) (2) (3) urban areas 0.22** 0.16** 0.12** (0.09) (0.06) (0.05) rural areas 0.12** 0.14*** 0.18*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. 144 global education review 1(4) table 5. results by school type mathematics (1) (2) (3) central school 0.10 0.07 0.05 (0.09) (0.06) -0.05 peripheral school 0.17*** 0.18*** 0.21*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. results by class size and grade composition most studies have found that smaller class sizes do not improve overall student performance (hanushek, 1999), but others have found that class-size reduction programs have positive effects (kreuger & whitmore, 2001). in cordillera the urban schools have an average of 21 students per classroom; in rural areas, the average class size is 14. to assess if the tikichuela program produced differential effects by class size, we used the following model: tjitijjtjij tjijtjtjitij eltmediumt smalltmediumismallyy ,1,31,2 1,11,31,21,1tij, arg εββ βδδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅⋅ +⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+⋅+= −− −−−− (8) where smallij equals one if student i in school j attends a classroom of six or fewer students, and zero otherwise. similarly, mediumij equals one if the student attends a classroom of 7 to 16 students, and zero otherwise. finally, largeij equals one if student i in school j attends a classroom of 17 or more students, and zero otherwise. parameters β1, β2, and β3 capture the program effects on students in small, medium, and large classrooms, respectively. table 6 reports the effects by class size, showing that class size has a great effect. when controlling for the baseline score, the strata of the sample design, and the enumerators, classes with six or fewer students have an effect of 0.54 standard deviations. we also observe strong effects in classes with 7 to 16 students. but in classes with 17 or more students there was no effect. as in other latin american countries, a large proportion of paraguayan classrooms are multigrade: students in different grades share one teacher. our sample included 94 schools with multigrade classrooms, 47 of which formed part of the treatment group and 47 of the control group. since multigrade classrooms present additional instruction challenges and tend to have lower achievement levels than single-grade classrooms, we wanted to assess if the tikichuela model works in a multigrade setting. to assess if the tikichuela program produced differential effects by classroom grade composition, we used the following model: tjijij jijjitij esinglegradt multigradetmultigradeyy ,2 121,1tij, εβ βδδδ +⋅⋅ +⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+= − ……(9) fostering early math comprehension 145 table 6. results by class size mathematics (1) (2) (3) class with six or fewer students 0.48*** 0.49*** 0.54*** (0.15) (0.13) (0.11) class with 7 to 16 students 0.19*** 0.20*** 0.21*** (0.06) (0.04) (0.03) class with 17 or more students 0.04 0.03 0.06 (0.08) (0.05) (0.04) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. table 7. results by classroom grade composition mathematics (1) (2) (3) multigrade classroom 0.19** 0.15** 0.19*** (0.08) (0.07) (0.05) single-grade classroom 0.14** 0.15*** 0.16*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. although the multigrade classrooms have larger effect sizes, these differences are not statistically significant. we can therefore conclude that the tikichuela instructional model works equally well in multiand single-grade classrooms. literacy effects the tikichuela instructional model does not aim to improve student achievement in other subject areas. but we included tests to assess possible spillover effects on reading and oral comprehension. to assess the program’s effect on students’ test scores in other subjects, we used equation 3 above, and exchanged the math test scores for literacy scores. the results are described in table 8. table 8. general results: literacy and oral comprehension naming letters reading writing oral comprehension (1) (2) (3) (4) panel a: general effects effect -0.05 0.05 0.07 0.11*** (0.05) (0.05) (0.05) (0.04) panel b: gender effects boys -0.01 0.05 0.09 0.11* (0.07) (0.06) (0.06) (0.06) girls -0.08 0.05 0.03 0.10** (0.06) (0.06) (0.05) (0.05) observations 2,800 2,800 2,800 2,800 controls yes yes yes yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. 146 global education review 1(4) panel a of table 8 shows that, with the exception of oral comprehension, the tikichuela instructional model does not produce any spillover effects. panel b of the same table shows that the oral comprehension effect is equally distributed between boys and girls. this result is expected since the tikichuela program focuses strictly on early math skills. the significant spillover into the improvement of oral comprehension is also not surprising since the purpose of the program is to actively engage students in inquiry and communication about math. sometimes, investment in math can generate spillover effects into other areas. in this case, the model does not seem to improve reading and writing skills. however, the strong focus of the program on listening and communication through audio instruction is reflected in the spillover into increased oral comprehension. the influence of students’ household characteristics to identify potential differential effects on children from different types of households, parents filled out questionnaires on the language spoken in the home, and the level of education of the parents. although slightly more parents in the treatment group chose to fill out the questionnaire, the difference was not significant. to assess differential effects by the language spoken at home, we used the following model: tjijijjij jijjijitij bothtspanisht guaranitspanishguaraniyy ,32 1321,1tij, εββ βδδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅⋅ +⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+⋅+= − (10) to assess differential effects by the level of education of the head of household, we used the following model: tjijijjitij olnohighschothighschoolyy ,121,1tij, εβδδδ +⋅⋅+⋅+⋅+= − (11) panels a and c of table 9 report the effects only for those children whose parents filled out the survey questionnaire. panel a shows that the effect was greater among children living with heads of households without a high school education than among children living with heads of households who have a high school or a higher level of education. the difference in effect size is not significant, however, and we can conclude that the instructional model works equally in both groups of children. likewise, based on the results reported in panels b and c, we conclude that the model was successful in both language groups. this is an encouraging as it shows that it is possible to impact learning when two languages are combined in the same lesson. fostering early math comprehension 147 table 9. effects of the educational level and language of the student’s household head dependent variables: endline standardized scores (1) (2) (3) panel a: effects—parental education hh head without 0.17*** 0.18*** 0.19*** high school (0.04) (0.04) (0.03) hh head with 0.12 0.12** 0.12*** high school or higher (0.08) (0.06) (0.05) observations 2,448 2,448 2,448 panel b: effects—language as reported by teacher speaks more guaraní 0.18*** 0.15*** 0.16*** (0.05) (0.03) (0.03) speaks more spanish 0.19*** 0.16*** 0.17*** (0.07) (0.04) (0.04) speaks both equally 0.07 0.14** 0.18*** (0.09) (0.06) (0.04) observations 2,799 2,799 2,799 panel c: effects—language as reported by head of household speaks more guaraní 0.12** 0.14*** 0.17*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) speaks more spanish 0.19* 0.15** 0.14** (0.10) (0.07) (0.06) speaks both equally 0.17*** 0.17*** 0.19*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) observations 2,451 2,451 2,451 note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. test scores expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. conclusions the results of the pilot are very encouraging. an improvement in score of 0.16 standard deviation in less than five months equals or surpasses the effect shown by the majority of studies of interventions to improve academic performance done between 1990 and 2010 (glewwe et al., 2011). other programs considered successful in improving childhood math skills achieved similar results, such as the baisakhi program in india (krueger and whitmore, 2001) and the star program in the united states (montsellter, 1995; folger and breda 1989), both achieving an increase of 0.18 and 0.15 standard deviations in math scores. tikichuela’s aggregate effect is on par with these programs, especially considering that it was applied for less than one academic year. the positive impact of the program on preschool math skills demonstrates that tikichuela is more effective in developing math abilities than the traditional methods used by the cordillera schools. in light of the many positive findings, it is worth mentioning that our pilot evaluation also helps us understand the limitations of the program and, from those lessons, to improve ours and other similar programs in the future. while the program was successful in the fivemonth period in which it was implemented, mediumand long-term effects will have to be evaluated. the tikichuela methodology is inclusive, benefiting children with initial low math skills (those in the bottom three-quarters on the baseline test) as well as children in lowincome schools (peripheral schools) regardless of whether the school has multior single-grade classrooms. the program also fosters improvements in children from both language groups (spanish and guaraní). not all learning gaps narrowed as a result of the program, 148 global education review 1(4) however. the gender gap actually increased, which prompted a modification in the program to encourage girls’ increased participation in the classroom and general interest in math. overall, the results presented here indicate that audiobased instruction can help bridge student learning gaps in a context of large teacher content and pedagogical gaps. notes 1. a 1981 study conducted in nicaragua provided daily radio mathematics lessons to a group of first-grade classrooms. a second group received mathematics workbooks. after one year, students who had received radio instruction scored 1.5 standard deviations higher than students in a control group, and students given workbooks scored about a third of a standard deviation higher than students in the control group (heyneman, jamison, searle, & galda, 1981). 2. the program was developed and implemented by the ministry of education and culture (mec), in collaboration with the interamerican development bank (idb), the education development center (edc), the japan international cooperation agency (jica), and the organization of ibero-american states (oei). the external evaluation was conducted by innovations for poverty action (ipa). 3. in chile and honduras—the two countries in the region that participated in the timss 2011 math assessment— boys performed significantly better than girls at both the 4th/6th and 8th/9th grade levels (iea, 2007). similarly, a review of the pisa 2009 math assessment (oecd, 2009) showed statistically significant gender differences across all the participating countries in the region (argentina, brazil, chile, colombia, mexico, panama, peru, and uruguay). 4. oral counting, one-to-one correspondence (counting of objects), number identification, missing number recognition, writing numbers, quantity discrimination, successor and predecessor, addition and subtraction, shape recognition, spatial relations, letter identification, reading numbers and words, writing words, oral, and comprehension 5. test scores were standardized to give the control group a mean of zero and a standard deviation of one. 6. support for this research was provided by the inter-american development bank. 7. the opinions expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the inter-american development bank, its board of directors, or the countries they represent. references anuola, k., leskinen, e., lerkkanen, m., & nurmi, j. 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(2009). program for international student assessment. retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/edu/pisa/2009. patrinos, h. a. and e. velez (2009). costs and benefits of bilingual education in guatemala: a partial analysis. international journal of educational development. 29: 594–598. resnick, lauren. 1989. developing mathematical knowledge. american psychologist, 44(2), 162– 169. starkey, p., klein, a., & wakeley, a. (2004). enhancing young children’s mathematical knowledge through a pre-kindergarten mathematics intervention. early childhood research quarterly, 19 (1), 99–120. unesco-llece (united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization–latin american laboratory for assessment of the quality of education). (2008). los aprendizajes de los estudiantes de américa latina y el caribe. first report from serce, orealc/unesco, santiago, chile. wilson, s. j., d. k. dickinson, and d. w. rowe (2013). impact of an early reading first program on the language and literacy achievement of children from diverse language backgrounds. early childhood research quarterly. 28: 578– 592. about the author(s) emma naslund-hadley is lead education specialist at the inter-american development bank. she manages the bank’s efforts to improve mathematics and natural science education in latin america and the caribbean. juan manuel hernández-agramonte is a policy manager for j-pal latin america where he is supporting the efforts of regional governments in producing evidence based policy, by building partnerships and providing technical assistance to policymakers for the scale-up and replication of proven effective interventions. previously he worked closely with researchers and governments in designing and implementing randomized control trials in various sectors. susan w. parker is professor of economics at the centro de investigación y docencia económicas (cide) in mexico city and adjunct economist at the rand corporation. she obtained her doctorate in economics from yale university. her research focuses principally on education and health in developing countries and on the design, implementation and evaluation of programs, with a particular emphasis on latin america. appendix begins next page http://timss.bc.edu/timss2007/idb_ug.html http://www.oecd.org/edu/pisa/2009 150 global education review 1(4) appendix annex 1 – detailed regression tables table 3: overall results—mathematics dependent variables: mathematics (1) (2) (3) panel a: overall effects treatment (in standard deviations) 0.15*** 0.15*** 0.16*** (0.05) (0.03) (0.03) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.09*** 0.09*** 0.09*** (0.03) (0.02) (0.02) equation y intercept 0.01 0.01 0.26 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 10.30 458.01 33.53 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.01 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.66 0.52 0.49 observations 2800 2800 2800 panel c: general quartile effects quartile 1 treatment (in standard deviations) 0.22*** 0.20*** 0.22*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.16*** 0.14*** 0.15*** (0.04) (0.04) (0.03) quartile 2 treatment (in standard deviations) 0.11* 0.12*** 0.14*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.07* 0.07** 0.08*** (0.04) (0.03) (0.03) quartile 3 treatment (in standard deviations) 0.16** 0.18*** 0.19*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.06* 0.07** 0.08*** (0.04) (0.03) (0.03) quartile 4 treatment (in standard deviations) 0.09 0.08 0.09 (0.08) (0.06) (0.05) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.06 0.05 0.05 (0.04) (0.03) (0.03) equation y intercept 0.53 0.11 0.41 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 83.17 130.50 34.18 fostering early math comprehension 151 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.23 0.40 0.47 root mse 0.58 0.52 0.49 observations 2800 2800 2800 panel d: effects by gender boys treatment (in standard deviations) 0.22*** 0.22*** 0.21*** (0.06) (0.04) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.13*** 0.12*** 0.13*** (0.03) (0.03) (0.02) girls treatment (in standard deviations) 0.08* 0.10*** 0.13*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.05 0.05 0.06*** (0.03) (0.02) (0.02) equation y intercept 0.01 0.02 0.26 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 6.38 235.59 33.08 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.02 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.66 0.52 0.49 observations 2800 2800 2800 baseline controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. all scores are expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. table 4: results by geographic location mathematics (1) (2) (3) urban areas treatment (in standard deviations) 0.22** 0.16** 0.12** (0.09) (0.06) (0.05) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.13*** 0.10*** 0.16** (0.05) (0.04) (0.07) rural areas treatment (in standard deviations) 0.12** 0.14*** 0.18*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.07** 0.08 0.07** (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) equation y intercept -0.02 0.01 0.04 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 8.12 230.94 33.84 152 global education review 1(4) prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.02 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.66 0.52 0.49 observations 2800 2800 2800 baseline controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. table 5: results by school type mathematics (1) (2) (3) central school treatment (in standard deviations) 0.1 0.07 0.05 (0.09) (0.06) (0.05) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.06 0.04 0.02 (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) peripheral school (treatment in s.d.) treatment (in standard deviations) 0.17*** 0.18*** 0.21*** (0.05) (0.04) (0.03) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.10*** 0.11*** 0.13*** (0.04) (0.03) (0.02) equation y intercept -0.03 -0.003 0.25 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 5.08 227.93 34.03 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.02 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.66 0.52 0.49 observations 2800 2800 2800 baseline controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. table 9: effects of the educational level and language of the student’s household head dependent variables: mathematics (1) (2) (3) panel b: effects—language as reported by teacher speaks more guaraní fostering early math comprehension 153 treatment (in standard deviations) 0.18*** 0.15*** 0.16*** (0.05) (0.03) (0.03) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.12*** 0.11*** 0.12*** (0.03) (0.03) (0.02) speaks more spanish treatment (in standard deviations) 0.19*** 0.16*** 0.17*** (0.07) (0.04) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.11*** 0.10*** 0.09*** (0.04) (0.03) (0.03) speaks both equally treatment (in standard deviations) 0.07 0.14** 0.18*** (0.09) (0.06) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.03 0.02 0.05 (0.05) (0.05) (0.04) equation y intercept 0.13 0.08 0.33 goodness of fit f(1, 264) 20.55 171.47 32.81 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.05 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.65 0.52 0.49 observations 2799 2799 2799 panel c: effects—language as reported by head of household speaks more guaraní treatment (in standard deviations) 0.12** 0.14*** 0.17*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.07* 0.07** 0.08*** (0.04) (0.03) (0.02) speaks more spanish treatment (in standard deviations) 0.19* 0.15** 0.14** (0.10) (0.07) (0.06) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.11** 0.09** 0.08** (0.05) (0.04) (0.04) speaks both equally treatment (in standard deviations) 0.17*** 0.17*** 0.19*** (0.06) (0.05) (0.04) treatment (coefficient in points) 0.11*** 0.10*** 0.12*** (0.03) (0.03) (0.02) equation y intercept 0.00 -0.01 0.25 154 global education review 1(4) goodness of fit f(1, 264) 13.14 163.69 29.82 prob > f 0.00 0.00 0.00 r2 0.04 0.39 0.46 root mse 0.65 0.52 0.49 observations 2451 2451 2451 baseline controls no baseline yes note: estimated standard errors clustered at the school level are in parentheses. * significant at 10%; ** significant at 5%; *** significant at 1%. test scores expressed in standard deviations with respect to the control group. 129 global education review 1(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kaden, ute, patterson, philip p., healy, joanne & adams, barbars l. (2016). stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition in arctic alaska schools. global education review, 3(1). 129-147 stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition in arctic alaska schools ute kaden school of education, university of alaska fairbanks philip p. patterson school of education, university of alaska fairbanks joanne healy school of education, university of alaska fairbanks barbara l. adams school of education, university of alaska fairbanks abstract limited research is available concerning teacher retention and teacher attrition in arctic alaska. this paper reports survey research findings, which identify factors related to teacher retention and attrition in alaskan arctic native communities. teacher retention rates (2009-2013) vary widely over time showing no significant trends. results confirm that teacher turnover in rural districts is higher than in urban school districts. the authors recognize that teacher retention and attrition are multidimensional issues recommending that better communication patterns and shared responsibilities between rural school districts, local administrators, teachers, community members, and university-based teacher preparation programs be established. key words teacher retention, teacher attrition, turnover, rural education, teacher preparation, arctic alaska, alaskan arctic native communities introduction recent research confirms that a stable and quality teacher workforce is directly related to student achievement (darling-hammond, newton, & wei, 2013; henry, bastian, & fortner, 2011; winters & cowen, 2013). teacher attrition has been an issue of concern for policy makers and educational stakeholders for many years (borman & dowling, 2008). nationally, about a third of new teachers leave the profession within five years (darling-hammond, chung, & frelow, 2002; ingersoll, 2001). the ______________________________ corresponding author: ute kaden, school of education, university of alaska fairbanks, fairbanks, ak 99775. email: ukaden@alaska.edu 130 global education review 1(3) turnover rate can be considerably higher in highpoverty schools as compared to more affluent ones (ronfeldt, loeb, & wyckoff, 2013). schools in arctic alaska, which are typically located in high-poverty communities, are no exception to this phenomenon. they experience high rates of overall teacher attrition and low rates of retaining quality teachers (hill & hirshberg, 2014; kaden, patterson, & healy, 2014). the popular media often portrays arctic alaska as a homogeneous locale. the resulting depiction sometimes presents the area as being populated by eskimos who live in igloos, truckers, gold miners, rabid politicians, and marooned polar bears. the fact is that arctic alaska is not as uniform, austere, or foreboding as it is so often made out to be. it is a highly unique area, encompassing a very diverse landscape and populated with a variety of life forms and people (nordic council of ministers, 2010). arctic alaska can be roughly defined as the northern region of alaska that is on or close to the arctic ocean. four distinct geographic regions constitute the area: the arctic coastal plain, the brooks range, the bering strait, and northern portions of the boreal forest (ritter, 2009). indigenous people, in particular inupiaq eskimo, siberian yup’ik eskimo, and athabascan indian, have lived in the regions of arctic alaska for millennia. with the arrival of a larger influx of western cultures in the late 1800s, which continues to grow even today, arctic alaska is now a merging of ethnicities and backgrounds where the alaska native groups are the majority in that region yet a minority within the state. although arctic towns and villages can vary in size from 200 to over 4000 residents, most are small, off the road system and require boats or aircraft to access them. one critical challenge facing arctic alaska is access to quality education. this includes a stable and qualified teacher workforce and academic curricula that promote indigenous cultures, languages, and ways of thinking and behaving (eppley & corbett, 2012; faircloth, 2009; kaden, patterson, & healy, 2014; white, 2008). teaching students in arctic alaska in ways that allow them to keep their cultural identity is vital for student motivation, curriculum relevance, and ultimately community and cultural stability (castagno & brayboy, 2008). maintaining an effective and stable teacher workforce that understands and embraces the powerful local contexts of alaska’s rural native villages is critical for healthy and resilient communities (barnhardt, 2014; kaden, patterson, & healy, 2014). substantial research documents that teachers choose to leave schools serving large percentages of poor, low-performing and nonwhite students, when opportunities arise (eppley, 2009; mueller, carr-stewart, steeves, & marshall, 2013). past high turnover rates of more than 23% in rural schools in alaska support those findings. in addition, more than 70% of newly hired teachers are not from alaska and less than 5% are native teachers (hill & hirshberg, 2014). teachers new to arctic alaska often learn about the local cultures, arctic lifestyles, and differentiating instruction only to leave after a year or two (munsch & boylan, 2008). excessive teacher turnover can be costly and detrimental to student achievement and engagement in education (ronfeldt et al., 2013). often, under such circumstances students and community members resign themselves to a revolving door of teachers. as the importance of well-qualified teachers for student achievement has become increasingly clear, the disruptions associated with low retention rates has become difficult to justify and ignore, especially in rural alaska (kaden & patterson, 2014). as a result, many policies and sporadic programs, such as the alaska statewide mentor program (asmp), orientation camps about native cultures for new teachers, and retention bonuses, have aimed to stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 131 reduce detrimental teacher attrition in alaska. however, without more detailed contextual understanding of why teachers leave, current approaches may not be as effective as they could be at reducing teacher turnover. limited research-based information currently available to policymakers and teacher education programs on predictors of teacher turnover in arctic alaska schools restricts the ability to intervene in this phenomenon in a strategic manner. this study contributes to the understanding of teacher attrition by researching the influence of school and community contextual factors on teacher retention including: work conditions and teaching responsibilities; community integration and living conditions; teaching assignments; elements of job satisfaction; and teachers’ plans for the future. using survey data and archival data sets, we document the complexity, and interaction of multiple factors influencing teacher retention and confirm that solutions are not simple. in the following sections we briefly review the historical context of alaska’s schooling, cite literature that motivated our research, describe the study design and methods, and present results. in the last section, we discuss recommendations, future research, and limitations of the study. historical context little is written about the pre-contact education systems of alaska’s native people (barnhardt, 2014). however, in order to survive the challenging environments of alaska as well as pass on the rich cultural heritage of its indigenous people, methods of transferring knowledge had to be in place. traditional forms of knowledge among indigenous people are typically expressed through, legends, folklore, ceremonies, songs, visual art, and laws (barnhardt, 2014). the evolution of the western educational system in alaska is better documented. when alaska was purchased from the russian empire in 1867, only a few schools operated by the russian orthodox church existed. later, a patchwork of schools slowly developed sponsored by the bureau of indian affairs (bia), and state and local governments to varying degrees. additionally, a series of boarding and day schools were established for native alaskan children. those boarding schools were often operated by the bureau of education, the bureau of indian affairs, or through contracted missionary groups (barnhardt, 2014). the meriam report, published in 1928, represents a benchmark in the education of american indians and alaska natives (meriam, 1928). the report was commissioned by the institute for government research and funded by the rockefeller foundation. the intent of the report was to examine living conditions of american indians in reservations and boarding schools across the country. variables such as health, education, economy, and family and community life were examined. although the survey upon which the meriam report was based did not include alaska and its indigenous people, the report did reflect the status of native life and education within the alaska territory. the meriam report examined the growing phenomena of boarding schools. the report concluded that boarding schools, many of which were mandatory and separated families, were frequently overcrowded, dependent upon a rigid western curriculum, provided students with poor diets, and delivered little medical care. although the report drew attention to the quality of educational services offered to indigenous people in the united states, boarding schools remained in vogue for five more decades (meriam, 1928). the 1970s was a significant period for schools in alaska influencing current education policies, schools and school district structure. the outcome of a 1972 lawsuit tobeluk vs. lind (commonly known as the molly hootch case) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/legend http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/folklore http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/law 132 global education review 1(3) curtailed mandatory boarding schools for native alaskan children and resulted in a building boom of local schools and educational services, even for communities in very rural and isolated areas. currently, alaska serves about 124,000 children in its preschool to grade 12 public school system, which consists of 54 school districts and 530 schools (alaska department of education and early development, 2014). perspectives on arctic alaska schools and motivation access to quality education for all alaskans is critical to sustaining healthy and vibrant communities in a rapidly changing global context (barnhardt, 2014; kisker et al., 2012). the education system can become a player in the cultural and economic well being of communities or it can amplify and accelerate the process toward losing cultural integrity, contact with nature, and community viability (corbett, 2009). lowe (2010) indicates that there is a sizable migration of rural residents into urban areas in alaska. factors precipitating such movement include employment, educational opportunities, and the rising cost of living. thus, a significant factor for healthy, resilient arctic communities can be schools (corbett, 2009; eppley, 2009; kline, white, & lock, 2013). in these areas, schools exceed the single role of education facility, often functioning as places where people meet, interact, and strengthen their social networks. schools can become community halls or sports centers where a variety of events take place, such as greatly anticipated basketball tournaments (nordic council of ministers, 2010). schools can also be perceived as the key institution that threatens native culture, language and community identity (barnhardt, 2014; strange, 2011). access to quality education involves a stable, well prepared, and culturally responsive teacher workforce that is integrated into the community life (burton, brown, & johnson, 2013; howley & howley, 2010). currently, approximately 60% of alaska’s teachers leave the arctic region after less than two years, informally citing a list of reasons, many of which are tied to school and community relations (alaska department of education and early development, 2014). teacher turnover impacts student achievement, contributes to a school climate of instability, and redirects funds for recruitment that might be better spent towards student learning (barnes, crowe, & schaefer, 2007). research on teacher attrition shows that a number of variables can affect teachers’ intentions to leave the profession or change schools and districts. for example, organizational characteristics (e.g., locale, school size), types of students served, and working conditions (e.g., workload, administration) have been linked to attrition (goldhaber & cowan, 2014; hughes, 2012; ladd, 2011). research further indicates that schools and districts with greater percentages of low-performing and minority students, poor resources, and unsupportive school climates have more difficulties in retaining teachers (burton, brown, & johnson, 2013; cochransmith et al., 2012; hancock & scherff, 2010; henry, bastian, & fortner, 2011; ingersoll, 2001; ondrich, pas, & yinger, 2008). teachers’ career intentions are also associated to personal background characteristics including gender, race/ethnicity, age, years of experience, education level, subject specialty, and academic ability (deangelis, wall, & che, 2013). compared with white peers, turnover and transfer rates are lower among african american and hispanic teachers. teachers are more willing to teach in schools with more same-race students (boyd, lankford, loeb, ronfeldt, & wyckoff, 2011; ingersoll, 2001). teachers at both ends of the age and experience distributions have higher average rates of turnover (ingersoll, 2001). stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 133 the underlying objective of this study was to identify factors that can be linked to teacher retention in rural arctic school districts. rural locations for this study are defined as small communities, which are considerable distances away from other communities, often are only reachable by airplane or boat, and with different local languages and heritages inclusive of native cultures (howley & howley, 2010; slack, bourne, & gertler, 2003). in such communities, indigenous people have particularly strong connections to cultural, environmental, and spiritual practices (corbett, 2009). in the literature on turnover and retention, “the general term turnover is used to describe the departure of teachers from their teaching jobs” (ingersoll, 2001, p. 500). for the purpose of our article, teacher retention is defined as remaining in the same school district as a classroom teacher from one school year to the next. the research questions for this paper are part of the larger study and focus on: 1. what are the trends in current teacher retention rates (2009-2013) in arctic school districts? 2. what contextual factors are related to the teacher retention and attrition trends? study design, instrumentation and participants this study used a mixed methods approach to identify and understand factors that contribute to current teacher retention and attrition in rural alaska’s public k-12 schools (creswell, 2007; kleinsasser, 2000; miles & huberman, 1994). archival data were retrieved from the alaska department of education & early development (2014), analyzed by descriptive statistics to document teacher retention in 10 rural school districts (figure 1) between 2009-2013, and compared to data of three alaskan urban districts (table 2). figure 1. the 10 research school districts in alaska (bering strait, denali, iditarod, nenana, nome, north slope, north west arctic, tanana, yukon flats, yukon-koyukuk) 134 global education review 1(3) survey research methodology was used to gather further quantitative and qualitative descriptions about the perceptions and opinions of teachers concerning contextual local factors that contribute to retention and attrition. the educator survey was based on the schools and staffing survey (sass) developed by the national center for education statistics (2010) and implemented in 2007-2008 targeting workforce issues. we supplemented the questions based on research literature (allensworth, ponisciak, & mazzeo, 2009), previous implemented surveys by the university of alaska anchorage institute of social and economic research (iser), and through discussions with stakeholders. for example, we included sections on community integration, living conditions, and place-relevant cultural training as suggested by teachers from native communities. this survey instrument was tested for reliability and validity. the survey included 57 likert-scale 5 point questions and openended questions concerning variables related to teachers’ decisions to stay or leave. our paper focuses only on a subset of survey data and is part of a larger study on teacher retention and effectiveness in rural alaska. participant sample institutional approval and participant informed consent were obtained prior to data collection. all certified teachers (n=820) from ten rural alaska school districts were identified from the current district employee database and cross referenced with the alaska national education association (anea). the survey was administered using the online platform qualtrics and the survey link was e-mailed to all teachers between april of 2013 and again in april of 2014. two issues prompted the second launch. in spring 2013 there were some difficulties with the accuracy of e-mail addresses. for this reason, and perhaps others, there was a smaller response rate than desired. the combined response rate was 57%. no changes to the survey occurred from 2013 to 2014. using descriptive statistics we assessed teachers’ responses to survey questions. survey participant demographics are reported in table 1. most of our respondents (84%) grew up in the u.s., but not in alaska and 78% received their teacher preparation training outside of alaska. this confirms the fact that alaska imports most of its teachers (hill & hirshberg, 2014). only 12% of teachers grew up in rural alaska. nearly one quarter of teachers had three years or less of teaching experience. less than 10% of the respondents were alaska native teachers. stakeholder input stakeholders for this research included a wide range of education related groups such as alaska native elders, community members, parents, educators from across the state, and other researchers working with indigenous populations. throughout the process of data collection, several check-ins with stakeholders were conducted to ensure researchers were working responsively and to verify that preliminary results were aligned with the stakeholders’ perceptions. the stakeholder input increased validity and reliability of the study (creswell, 2007). stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 135 table 1. descriptive statistics for educator survey as a percentage of the sample descriptive characteristic responses (n = 469) sex male female 32.0 68.0 ethnicity white an/ai hispanic other 82.8 9.4 2.5 5.0 highest level of education bachelors masters doctoral degree 53.1 45.4 1.5 age 20-34 35-54 55 and older teaching experience 1 to 3 years 4 to 10 years >11 years 28.8 47.4 23.8 24.7 28.2 47.1 education level completed bachelor’s degree some graduate work master’s degree specialist degree doctoral degree mobility (where did you grow up?) alaska us and outside of alaska teacher preparation (where did you receive your initial teacher license?) alaska us and outside of alaska 10.8 23.4 55.9 7.2 2.7 15.8 84.2 22.3 77.7 136 global education review 1(3) results teacher retention rates comparison archival data presented in table 2 and figure 1 indicate that average teacher retention rates of the ten rural districts (< 77%) are significantly lower than average retention rates in the three urban districts (> 94%). in addition, the rural district retention rates varied significantly (see sd) by school year. there was also a small negative trend uncovered in the average retention rates of the rural districts (r2 = 0.4). table 2. teacher retention rates between school years (sy) 2010 to 2013 district teacher count (n) % average retention sd % sy0910 & sy1011 & sy11-12 & sy1213 rural districts bering strait 234 68 2.6 65 70 70 66 denali 33 86 9.5 97 80 90 76 iditarod 30 66 9.5 78 56 67 61 nenana 26 91 10.5 92 100 76 96 nome 56 83 7.9 93 80 74 83 north slope 168 80 2.1 77 79 80 82 northwest arctic 153 77 7.3 85 80 72 69 tanana 5 74 18.9 60 60 75 100 yukon flats 34 69 9.0 75 74 59 * yukon-koyukuk 56 78 12.0 81 91 78 62 urban districts anchorage 3142 94 1.2 93 94 93 95 fairbanks 926 92 1.5 93 90 91 92 matsu 913 95 2.0 93 93 97 96 mean rural mean 80 77 2.4 80 77 74 77 urban mean 1660 94 0.8 93 92 93 94 alaska statewide 8862 82 2.3 90 89 89 90 * unreported stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 137 figure 2. average rural and urban teacher retention rates 2010-2013 working conditions, jobs satisfaction, and teaching responsibilities factors influencing work conditions and job satisfaction are reported in figure 3. on a 5point likert scale (very satisfied to very dissatisfied) more than 80% of the respondents were satisfied/very satisfied with health benefits and salaries, and retirement benefits. only 62% of participants were satisfied/very satisfied with their teacher workload. less than half of the respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with parent and community support (46%) and the least satisfaction was reported on district leadership (44%). figure 3. work conditions and job satisfaction 80 77 74 77 93 92 93 94 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 sy 2009-2010 sy 2010-2011 sy 2011-2012 sy 20122013 % rural urban linear (rural) linear (urban) 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 district leadership (n=386) parent and community support (n=386) instructional materials and resources (n=387) student conduct (n=387) teacher workload (n=385) school leadership (n=386) school facilities (n=387) retirement benefits (n=386) salary (n=386) health benefits (n=385) satisfied/ very satisfied (%) 138 global education review 1(3) in our survey we also asked participants about teaching responsibilities as part of overall job satisfaction, especially about multi-grade level teaching and multi-subject area preparations. over two-thirds (69%) of survey respondents taught at least one multi-grade level class. only 31% of the rural teachers taught exclusively singlegrade level classes. furthermore, only 13% of respondents stated that they have to prepare for only one subject area; whereas a majority (56%) reported having to prepare for anywhere from 4 to 7 courses or grade levels on a regular basis. nearly one in ten teachers (9%) prepared for 10 or more classes or grade levels on a regular basis. community integration and living conditions community integration and living condition indicators are reported in figure 4. over 60% of the respondents were satisfied or very satisfied with relationships/friendships, and housing. only half of the participants were very satisfied with access to cultural events, recreation, and access to the internet. the community aspects with the lowest satisfaction ratings included transportation, entertainment, shopping, and access to health care. participants were also asked how integrated in the community they felt, based on participation in events, cultural meetings (e.g., potlatch), or governance and decision making processes (table 3). feeling integrated into the community of the schools location is identified as an important factor in determining retention decisions by our study. a little less than half of the respondents (48%) felt integrated into their communities. figure 4. community integration and living conditions 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 shopping (n=404) access to health care (n=404) entertainment (n=402) transportation infrastructure (n=404) access to internet and communication (n=404) recreation (n=404) cultural events (n=404) housing (n=404) relationships/friendships (n=403) satifisfied/very satisfied (%) stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 139 table 3. percentages of community integration (n=404) % of integration frequency % 0 9 2.2 25 81 20.0 50 122 30.2 75 136 33.7 100 56 13.9 table 4. professional plan in two or more years (n=388) frequency % teach at my current school 177 45.6 teach in a different school in my district 25 6.4 teach in a different district in alaska 37 9.5 teach outside alaska 28 7.2 leave teaching and start a different career in the education field in alaska 8 2.1 leave teaching, leave alaska, and start a different career in the education field 2 0.5 leave teaching and start a non-education career 16 4.1 retire 30 7.7 unsure of plans 65 26.7 future plans on staying or leaving less than half of the respondents (46%) planned to continue teaching in their current school two years from the time of the survey, while 27% were still unsure about their plans (table 4). about 16% had some plans to continue teaching in alaska. another 13% of teachers planned to retire within that timeframe. only 4% planned to leave the profession entirely and about 10% of the participants planned to stay in education but are likely to leave alaska. discussion and recommendations the first research question addressed the trends in teacher retention rates between 2009-2013 in ten rural arctic districts. our results (table 2) indicate that teacher retention rates in the rural school districts of this study vary widely over time and that there were no statistically significant trends to those rates. years of higher and lower attrition appear to have been random events for rural districts (see sd). average teacher retention rates in urban school districts were about 15% higher than in rural school districts. the percentage of alaska native students served in rural school districts of this study is much higher (> 85%) compared to alaska native students served in urban districts (<10%). teacher attrition at some rural school districts is high enough to disrupt instructional 140 global education review 1(3) cohesion most likely resulting in low student achievement (mueller, carr-stewart, steeves, & marshall, 2013; ronfeldt et al., 2012). frequent departure of a considerable portion of its teachers takes a heavy toll on the functionality of alaska’s rural schools and the ability to deliver quality education to students. those schools with frequent high turnover rates are also least equipped to support new teachers. institutional knowledge is lost and already low performing schools become even more ineffective. high rates of teacher turnover disrupt trust and collaboration between school, teachers, students, and community members. the absence of structure and stability frustrates teachers and perpetuates the cycle of turnover (burton et al., 2013; goldhaber & cowan, 2014; ronfeldt, loeb, & wyckoff, 2013). the second research question addressed possible factors related to the teacher retention and attrition trends. only 9.4% of survey respondents were alaska native teachers: most teachers were white and female. as such, most teachers were not of the same cultural background or ethnicity of the student population they taught in rural districts where more than 85% of students are alaska natives. recruiting underrepresented, racial-minority teachers to the profession, and in rural community schools with students from similar racial backgrounds may add to better student achievement and predict career trajectories (dee, 2004). in addition, the high number of teachers “imported”, who received their teacher education from institutions outside of alaska, seems to contribute to attrition. multiple studies have found that female teachers are more likely to leave than male teachers (mills, martino, & lingard, 2004). similarly, teachers that enter the profession at a young age have also higher attrition rates than older entrants (imazeki, 2005; quartz et al., 2008). both conditions (high number of female and new to the job teachers) characterize alaska rural teacher demographics (table 1). limited knowledge about indigenous culture, job demands of teaching multi-grade level classes, and living in the arctic may add to low retention rates. research on race and ethnicity indicate that minority teachers were more likely than white teachers to stay and that males were slightly more likely to stay (ingersoll, 2001; mills, martino, & lingard, 2004). consistent recruitment efforts and modifications to current teacher preparation programs to better serve native students (e.g., distance learning, mentoring) need to be considered. an understanding of the cultural dimensions of teaching and learning by policy makers is essential and the complexity of cultural influences needs to be acknowledged and not reduced to simplistic assumptions about teachers and their students. intensified collaborative efforts are needed for a more diverse teaching force. there is strong evidence that teachers’ years of job experience is one of the predictors for retention and attrition (goldhaber & cowan, 2014; ronfeldt et al., 2013; winters & cowen, 2013). one of the most consistent findings and of particular concern to policy makers and administrators is that teachers in their first years in the profession have significantly higher attrition rates than teachers with more experience (borman & dowling, 2008). thus, the relatively high number of inexperienced teachers with less than three years of job experience hired for teaching jobs in rural alaska predicts a higher rate of turnover (table 1). increasingly, schools demand that new teachers immediately demonstrate high levels of on-the-job performance resulting in practices of letting teachers go often after only two years in the classroom instead of providing appropriate stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 141 support in the process of learning to teach in the specific local context. special attention is needed to offer induction programs, which support teachers new to the profession, help them to understand the cultural context of their schools, and prepare and support them for specific demands of job assignments in small rural schools that serve indigenous students. overall work conditions (e.g., facilities, workload, student contact, salary/benefits, instructional resources, leadership) affected teachers’ job satisfaction and ability to be effective (figure 3). especially in arctic locations, constant attention to functioning heating systems, clean water, and air circulation for both, the school and teacher housing is needed. additionally, only half of the survey participants were satisfied with instructional materials and supplies. missing instructional resources, deficient and defective facilities limit instruction. lack of textbooks, curricula, science equipment, or reliable technology (e.g., internet connections, computer, copy machine, printer) limits how teaching can be done and leads to frustration. districts need to better understand why these shortcomings occur and how funds can be allocated early in the school year to avoid or mitigate shortages. better overall communication between teachers and administration concerning working conditions is essential. the role that compensation plays in teachers’ career decisions seems complicated (burton et al., 2013; imazeki, 2005; xu, özek, & hansen, 2014). our data show that more than two-thirds of the teachers surveyed were satisfied with their salaries and benefits. the documented high rural turnover rate, however, indicates that the effects of pay on teacher satisfaction and retention are not independent of overall living and working conditions. in addition, there are differences from district to district in the salary scales (entering salaries to maximum salaries) and differences in the ways that pay is distributed across the salary scales (e.g., increase increments with years of experiences, acknowledgment of higher degrees and advanced course work). however, there is considerable evidence that individual career decisions especially for beginning teachers are sensitive to salary differences and that beginning salaries should be carefully considered (imazeki, 2005). our results further confirm that satisfaction with work and living conditions, teaching assignments, and administrative support played a decisive role in retention (allensworth, ponisciak, & mazzeo, 2009; loeb, darling-hammond, & luczak, 2005; ball & forzani, 2009). adequate teacher housing and school facilities that are safe and well maintained add to levels of work satisfaction. pay matters, but higher pay alone is unlikely to retain teachers in rural alaska if other factors are unsatisfactory. incentives for effective teachers to stay should be considered including: monetary; increased roles in school leadership; and more autonomy in instructional decisions. considerable improvements in overall working conditions are needed as well. satisfaction with student contact (e.g., discipline, attendance) was less than 60%, which may be an indication of tensions. the diversity in rural alaska may be unexpected. there may be a lack of preparedness to work with diverse student populations leading to a sense of helplessness, stress, guilt, and low professional self-esteem. teacher education and induction programs, local mentoring and professional development opportunities should address those shortcomings. consistent and ongoing cultural training can influence the potential link between teachers’ sense of efficacy and retention. teachers’ effectiveness and job satisfaction may increase when they have a prior understanding 142 global education review 1(3) of their students’ cultures and backgrounds. parental involvement, and school leadership can be positive influences in this regard as well. parent connections and community support received relatively low satisfaction ratings in our survey. parental involvement can decrease teachers’ uncertainties and support their community integration by helping teachers to understand the local culture, parental expectations, and individual students needs. however, when the parties are divided by race, class, status, and power tensions miscommunications may occur (lipka, mohatt, & ilutsik, 2014; mccarty & nicholas, 2014; wexler et al., 2013). school leadership and teachers need to acknowledge such tensions and support a respectful, understanding school climate that initiates and sustains parent involvement. professional development focusing on parent involvement may be helpful. district leadership was ranked the lowest in the satisfaction rating (less than 43% satisfied). educational leadership is an interdisciplinary and multidimensional task (boyed et al., 2010). educational leaders and school administrators should be aware of and acknowledge the socio-political, cultural, and linguistic context of their schools, districts, and employees. educational leaders need to support teachers by sharing leadership practices within local and culturally responsive parameters and practicing humility, which includes seeking collaboration and shared decision making with community stakeholders (e.g., elders, tribal leaders, teachers). satisfaction with job and teaching career is influenced by whether teachers are assigned to teach subjects and grade levels for which they feel prepared and if the assigned workload is fair and manageable (burton et al., 2013). excessive workloads are often cited as a reason for leaving the teaching profession (van droogenbroeck, spryt, & vanroelen, 2014). results indicate that the majority of teachers must take on multiple teaching assignments including both multigrade level and multi-subject preparations. teacher preparation programs should include courses that address multi-ability classrooms and offer teaching practices in schools with such characteristics. districts could also consider inservice training, and induction programs with mentoring during the initial year of hire to support new teachers (feiman-nemser, 2001; ingersoll & strong, 2011; youngs, 2007). results further show that the majority of teachers were satisfied with relationships/friendships, and housing. however, the access to health care and shopping causes dissatisfaction. some sites within in our research area have only one health aide worker. physicians only visit periodically, requiring residents to often leave the village for treatment (rosenblatt, casey, & richardson, 2002). teachers need to be informed during the hiring process about those arrangements in order to buy enough medical supplies prior to starting the school year. teachers will also have to judge when and if it is necessary to leave the village for medical help and decide what additional insurance (medical evacuation) is necessary. teachers with complex health concerns may have to reconsider teaching in a remote location. shopping in the arctic is often done online or through periodic trips to an urban area. buying particular items in the rural village may not be possible due to limited selections or may be cost prohibitive (bohi, 2010). districts could provide sample monthly shopping lists and addresses of shipping businesses to new teachers making acclimation more expedient. a high percentage of teachers surveyed indicated that they have not yet made decisions about staying or leaving their current job. this represents good news for efforts to retain stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition 143 effective teachers. teachers reported that often there were little or no efforts made by their schools to retain them. teachers want to know that they are making a difference in students’ lives and looking for work conditions and support structures where they can be effective (boyd et al., 2010). administrative monitoring of school working conditions by implementing opportunities for shared feedback and addressing concerns in a timely manner can improve teachers’ day-to-day job satisfaction (boyd, lankford, loeb, ronfeldt, & wyckoff, 2011). simple actions such as responding to the needs and suggestions of effective teachers, offering career advancement, communicating informal performance evaluations and appreciation of teachers’ efforts and success with engaging students in learning activities, and acknowledging effective work with parents or the community may be first steps to retaining quality teachers. overall, findings indicate that working conditions, leadership, and community integration separate from student-body characteristics are important factors for teacher retention. therefore, improving overall working conditions, leadership, and induction programs may be effective at reducing turnover. teachers with more formal and comprehensive preservice preparation inclusive of student teaching in rural settings may stay longer (deangelis et al., 2013; goldhaber & cowan, 2014; ronfeldt et al., 2013). investments by teacher education programs and school districts in creating such opportunities need to be made. in summary, this study is one step towards understanding the complexities of teachers’ career decisions and the contextual factors influencing such decisions in rural alaska. understanding the career decisions of the educational workforce is essential for designing policies and implementing programs to keep effective teachers rooted in educational careers that support the most underserved students (quartz et al., 2008). our study confirms that in order to become effective educators and to remain at schools, teachers need support (fry & anderson, 2011; kline et al., 2013; winters & cowen, 2013). better communication patterns, honest hiring practices, and shared responsibilities between rural school districts, teachers, community members, and teacher preparation programs need to be established. apprenticeship experiences for prospective school leaders, rural student teaching experiences for pre-service teachers, and supports for principals and teachers while on the job may be effective in reducing turnover (feiman-nemser, 2001; ingersoll & strong, 2011; johnson & birkeland, 2003). however, we caution against a simplistic approach to raising teacher retention rates regardless of performance and fit of teachers in the cultural context of the community. school leadership needs to develop long-term and strategic retention strategies for successful teachers who respond to the cultural context of the community. teacher retention, teacher effectiveness, and student achievement are multilayered and complex issues shaped by the socio-cultural context of the schools, state policies, labor marked forces, and individual connections with students and communities. to develop and retain effective teachers a collaborative and multifaceted support structure reflecting the local context is needed (kaden & patterson, 2014). this study suggests that personal career decisions do not depend on a single factor. policies will require a systems approach that prescribes a blend of solutions tailored for individual school settings. 144 global education review 1(3) limitations and further research archival data are limited to a four-year data collection. findings may not generalize to settings other than alaska and continued longitudinal data are needed to predict future trends. the survey approach relies on teachers’ self-reports of working conditions and community integration has the potential bias that less satisfied teachers misrepresent working conditions and factors related to community integration (wilson, floden, & ferrini-mundy, 2002). such inaccurate self-reporting may bias findings. results provide evidence of complex interactions of variables that contribute to teacher retention. follow-up studies especially at the school level are necessary to investigate such variables in more detail to capture the exact percentages of teachers who leave the classroom for administrative positions, to continue graduate school, or because they are dissatisfied with work conditions. there is also a need to address the relationships between teacher retention decisions, teacher evaluation and teacher quality. a teacher may get laid off for low performance or is just a bad match for a specific school context. certain attrition may actually be helpful for all stakeholders including teachers. other contextual factors such as professional development, collaborative opportunities and administrative support are not included in this study, yet, are likely to be important to teachers. in addition, it is difficult to control for variables of the study that are time dependent. for example, the teacher survey had to be administered at two points in time and teachers’ perceptions about work conditions and career decisions may change during the school year. survey response rates varied between school locations and reflect individual assessments at a point in time. thus, explanations and conclusions have to be drawn with caution. researcher biases may be present despite careful comprehensive analysis of data and interpretations (creswell, 2007). funding authors disclose receipt of the following support for research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: the research reported here was supported by the national science foundation, division of polar programs, through grant # 1203132. references alaska department of education and early development accountability and assessment, (2014). retrieved october 20, 2014, web site: http://www.eed.state.ak.us/stats/. allensworth, e., ponisciak, s., & mazzeo, c. 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(2007). district induction policy and new teachers’ experiences: an examination of local policy implementation in connecticut. teachers college record, 109(4), 797–836. about the author(s) ute kaden, phd. dr. kaden’s education experiences have occurred in such diverse locations as germany, new zealand, the united kingdom, texas, and alaska. her fields of expertise are in science (geosciences/physics) and mathematics education. she actively promotes all fields of stem education and is involved in secondary teacher education and supervision. philip p. patterson, phd. dr. patterson’s current assignment includes recruiting and preparing special education candidates to work effectively in alaska schools. he has over 20 years of experience teaching diverse special and general education populations in urban and rural settings. he has also served as a program specialist and early start coordinator. joanne healy, phd. dr. healy is currently an assistant professor of special education at the university of alaska fairbanks. prior to her current position she was a special educator who taught all grade levels and with students having a variety of special needs in fairbanks, alaska for 21 years. dr. healy’s areas of interest include ergonomics and technology. barbara l. adams, phd. dr. adams is a statistician and educational researcher who worked in rural alaska for over 13 years. she understands the unique context of rural alaska and native education. she has participated in research projects for over 10 years and has a extensive experience in program evaluation. 175 stemming the revolving door _kapha2015revised_final1 footer 175 stemming the revolving door _kapha2015revised_finalno footer 114 global education review 2 (2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tobin, kathleen a. (2015). the quest for educational excellence. [review of the book the global fourth way, by andy hargreaves and dennis shirley]. global education review, 2 (2). 114-116. book review the quest for educational excellence “the global fourth way” by andy hargreaves and dennis shirley by kathleen a. tobin in the global fourth way: the quest for educational excellence, authors andy hargreaves and dennis shirley detail a new vision for education. their proposal is not intended to overhaul existing systems completely; rather, it acknowledges strengths already in place and the contributions of teachers in creating and maintaining quality programs. nor does their vision resemble contemporary reform movements so common today, which favor privatization and are grounded in politics. their expertise and substantive research support an application that may hold a good deal more promise. the global fourth way, note hargreaves and shirley, is a more advanced approach following experiments of the past. the first way of educational change they describe emerged in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when investment in public education was strong and faith in teachers to work autonomously was high. many good ideas came from this era; however, there was no systematic method to exchange ideas or experiences beyond classroom walls. the second way followed in the 1980s, when resources and salaries were confronted by austerity policies and public school teachers met with unprecedented criticism. prescriptive curricular designs paralleled top down management styles and performance-based pay reflected practices in the corporate world. the third way of change in the 1990s embraced more evidence-based methods, increasing data collection and emphasis on mathematics, for instance, at the expense of social studies and other subjects. while there were some benefits to learning gained in each of these decades, the problems have been serious enough to warrant attention. the fourth way of leadership and change, hargreaves and shirley argue, offers positive new directions based on solid international research and a genuine understanding of education. it is based on these values: the quest for educational excellence 115 pillars of purpose 1. an inspiring dream 2. education as a common public good 3. a moral economy of education 4. local authority 5. innovation with improvement 6. platforms for change principles of professionalism 7. professional capital 8. strong professional associations 9. collective responsibility 10. teaching less to learn more 11. mindful uses of technology catalysts of coherence 12. intelligent benchmarking 13. prudent and professional approaches to testing 14. incessant communication 15. working with paradox individual chapters in the global fourth way center on examples of high performance in finland, singapore, alberta (canada), ontario (canada), england, and california (us). each captures the essence of educational models, practices, and issues in the region at large, before focusing on specific cases that support key values in their proposal. for example, in “chapter five – alberta: innovation with improvement,” hargreaves and shirley cite organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) findings regarding canada’s successes (supportive family culture, strong welfare state, high quality teachers) in contextualizing the alberta initiative for school improvement (aisi). aisi’s mission has been to fund teachers, principals, students, and community members in innovation based on local needs. innovation with improvement, local authority, and collective responsibility are core principles of the fourth way, and here the authors give concrete examples of how those areas of their vision might be put into action. the same is true in “chapter eight – california: professional organizing for public good.” hargreaves and shirley describe one of the world’s largest teachers’ unions, the california teachers’ association (cta), and its victories in recent battles with politicians in their efforts to provide quality education for the poorest and most vulnerable children in lowperforming districts. accomplishments of the cta and the demonstrated effectiveness of organizing highlight a number of standards of the fourth way, including professional and political capital, courageous leadership, innovation with improvement, intensive interaction, culture of inquiry, and the role of professionals as intellectuals. in a climate of widespread disrespect for teachers and teachers’ unions in the united states today, it is refreshing and inspiring to see the positive effects of organization and professional expectations on education noted. the entire book is inspiring, but its true strength lies in the authors’ research, detailed outlines and accounts, and concluding chapter detailing specific “pointers for practice.” some readers may criticize the authors’ attention to international cases appearing less relevant to the united states, but at this critical juncture in us education, it is even more essential to study and consider multiple perspectives. hargreaves and shirley are experts in the field of education and demonstrate authentic understanding and dedication to improvement. avoiding the stridency present in current debates over education reform, they seek to inform all sincerely interested in enhanced learning through fearless leadership and enlightened collaboration. 116 global education review 2 (2) “the global fourth way: the quest for educational excellence.” by andy hargreaves and dennis shirley. thousand oaks, ca: corwin, 2012. isbn: 978-1412987868 about the authors andy hargreaves is the thomas more brennan chair at the lynch school of education, boston college, and the elected visiting professor at the institute of education, london. he is the editor-in-chief of the journal of educational change and serves as leading editor of the first and second international handbook of educational change. hargreaves is the cofounder and former director of the international centre for educational change at the ontario institute for studies in education in toronto. dennis shirley is a professor at the lynch school of education at boston college. shirley's educational work spans from the nitty-gritty micro-level of assisting beginning teachers in complex school environments to the macro-level of designing and guiding large-scale research and intervention projects for school districts, states, and networks. shirley was the first us scholar to document the rise of community organizing as an educational change strategy, and his activities in this arena have led to multiple long-term collaborations and a steady stream of speaking engagements and visiting professorships in the united states, canada, ireland, germany, austria, spain, italy, the united kingdom, and japan. about the reviewer kathleen a. tobin is associate professor of history at purdue university calumet in hammond, indiana. she has also served as faculty representative on the indiana commission for higher education and as chair of indiana’s statewide transfer and articulation committee. she teaches u.s. global history and her research includes the history of birth control and population policy. her recent publications include “population density and housing in port-au-prince: historical construction of vulnerability” in the journal of urban history and she is completing “engineering dreams: u.s. chinese student population growth in historical disciplinary context” for chinese america: history and perspectives. international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game 7 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: nancy heilbroner (2014). international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game. global education review, 1 (4). 7-14. international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game nancy n. heilbronner mercy college, new york it seems that every few years, science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem) educational policymakers ring alarm bells. educational experts from a multitude of different nations are concerned with stem education in their homelands, because they fear their students are in a state of decline when it comes to science and mathematics achievement. projecting decades forward, they panic about how this lack of achievement will translate into a reduction in stem productivity and a corresponding decrease in their own national prominence in the world. they double down on their efforts in stem education, but too frequently their efforts result in educators spending the limited classroom time that is dedicated to science on preparing students to take standardized tests. however, international stem achievement is not a zero-sum game in which there must be losers for there to be winners. in a global economy, stem achievement in any nation can improve the lives of people around the world. for evidence, consider norman borlaug, who single-handedly saved millions of lives around the world. in the 1940s, borlaug, an agriculturalist, experimented in mexico with special varieties of hardy wheat that would ultimately produce much greater crop yields. in the 1960s, experts who anticipated massive famines and starvation in asia and the middle east due to a population explosion recruited borlaug to implement his innovative crop techniques, and the result was astonishing. using his methods, crop yields skyrocketed, feeding millions of people who otherwise would have starved. at one time, agriculturalists estimated that borlaug’s wheat produced approximately 23% of the world’s calories. borlaug was awarded the nobel prize in1970 for his accomplishment (scienceheroes.com, n.d.). the salient message from borlaug’s story is that all of the world’s peoples stand to benefit when any scientist from any nation excels; it’s a win-win situation, and yet we continue to consider it a competition, focusing only on the development of our own students and fearing that others may get ahead of them. international stem educational achievement the very notion of stem achievement has become muddled because we frequently confuse and conflate two different constructs: stem educational achievement and stem creative productivity, or the ability of individuals to use their talents to produce something creative or original in their fields (renzulli, 1992). second, we have not fully come to terms with two ______________________________ corresponding author: nancy n. heilbronner, mercy college school of education, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: nheilbronner@mercy.edu mailto:nheilbronner@mercy.edu 8 global education review 1(4) influential factors that will likely impact future stem outcomes across the planet: changes in which nations are the most productive in stem, and the extreme influence of poverty on both educational achievement and productivity. to understand these issues, it may be helpful to consider the following questions: 1. what do we know about stem educational achievement internationally; and, 2. what do we know about stem post-graduate creative productivity internationally? we must also consider whether stem educational achievement leads to stem creativity and productivity, as well as the role that poverty plays in determining educational and occupational outcomes for students. by taking a more nuanced view of these issues, we may begin to better understand the place of individual nations in terms of stem education and achievement. we may also argue that we should begin to consider global achievement rather than national achievement in order to prepare all of our students to take their places in a changing global stem landscape. turning to the first question regarding what we know about stem educational achievement, researchers from different nations frequently use various types of metrics to understand the impact of educational systems on students, especially in the teaching of science and mathematics. to understand international outcomes related to this issue, we must consider two key indicators of educational achievement: international test scores and numbers of advanced stem degrees. international test scores practitioners and researchers use two international assessments in stem to measure educational achievement: the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss), and the program for international student assessment (pisa). however, each of these assessments is influenced by factors external to the classroom, including poverty, stability, and home life. timss in 2011, timss measured science and math outcomes in 63 countries and 14 benchmarking entities, or sub-components of nations (e.g., england is a separate benchmarking entity within great britain). timss assesses both content knowledge and cognitive processes together—students are required to use cognitive processes to apply facts (content knowledge) to explain a phenomenon. for example, a typical fourth-grade-level timss question might be to explain why plants do not need to take in food, but humans do. timss also assesses the integration of inquiry-related practices. results for the 2011 timss assessment indicated that east asian students, particularly students in korea and singapore, scored highest marks at both the fourth and eighth grade levels. the united states ranked in seventh place in fourth grade and 10th place in eighth grade, achieving significantly higher scores at 547 (fourth grade) and 525 (eighth grade) than the scale’s middle score, 500. it is interesting to note the distribution of scores in the top-ranking and lowest-ranking nations, however. in fourth grade, the distribution of scores is much wider within each nation scoring below the mid-point, such as morocco and yemen, than within nations scoring above the midpoint, such as korea and singapore. this wider distribution of scores suggests broader gaps in lower scoring nations between sectors of the student population. of course, there is enormous diversity among these nations in terms of economic advantages, geography, and population. in fact, there appears to be an association between a number of factors external to the classroom and student achievement on the timss in science. parental income and international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game 9 education, as well as resources at home, were reported to play a significant role in test results, as were school-related factors such as teacher preparation, engagement with science, and even school safety (timss and pirls, 2013). specifically, students coming from nations and homes that place an emphasis on science, and who have well-prepared teachers and an abundance of resources, tend to do better on the timss. pisa pisa is one of the most respected of the international assessments. given every four years to 15-year-old students, pisa assesses literacy in reading, mathematics, and science. the results of the 2012 administration have been recently released (national center for education statistics, 2013), and similar to the timss results, pisa outcomes indicate that in every nation there exists an achievement gap between advantaged and disadvantaged. the size of this gap varies from nation to nation, but what is interesting is that the disparities themselves are persistent, and more similar to each other than they are different (carnoy & rothstein, 2013). even in developed countries such as the united states, poverty plays a role in achievement. in a 2013 study from martin carnoy and richard rothstein, the researchers found that the gap between u.s. students and those from the highest-achieving countries on the pisa assessment would be cut in half in reading, and by at least a third in math, if socioeconomic differences were taken into account. however, a few nations are making progress in closing these gaps. for example, the pisa achievement of disadvantaged students in the u.s. has been rising rapidly over time, while achievement of disadvantaged students in countries to which the united states is frequently unfavorably compared—canada, finland, and korea, for example—has been falling rapidly (carnoy & rothstein, 2013). advanced degrees in stem a second indicator of educational quality in stem is the number of students who enter the academic pipeline by pursuing phds, and in this area, certain nations are producing graduates in record numbers. the number of science phds earned in stem overall grew worldwide by 40% from 1998 to 2008 (cyranoski, gilbert, ledford, nayar & yahia, 2011). indeed, many of the established member nations of the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) have produced a surplus of phds that threatens to outpace jobs available in stem, especially academic jobs. in japan, the united states, germany, and poland, for example, the number of phds earned has outpaced jobs available in the academic market. however, non-oecd nations may experience a dearth of academics who will focus on research: for example, egypt is struggling to produce more phds, and these degrees are often not gateways into academic research careers; rather, students in egypt frequently use these degrees to enter civil service careers, and in egypt, graduates frequently enter private industry, not academia (cyranoski et al., 2011). careers in civil service may be personally rewarding, but they are not likely to contribute to stem innovations in the form of research publications, patents, and trademarks. conclusions regarding stem educational achievement to answer the first question, “what do we know about stem educational achievement internationally?” we must begin by acknowledging the enormous impact that poverty and factors external to the classroom have on educational outcomes. students from impoverished countries generally score far worse 10 global education review 1(4) than students from advantaged countries on international assessments, and they are not as likely to pursue more advanced education or to work in research-related fields. what if the next great thinker—the next borlaug, hawking, or curie—struggles to find food and shelter in one of these countries? what if he or she has never attended a day of school? what is the extent of this loss to the child? to our world? changing global patterns of creative productivity in stem another concern is that, even with so much emphasis placed on students’ test scores, it is not evident that the outcomes of the assessments relate in a meaningful way to stem productivity, or the ability of these students to grow up and make meaningful, innovative contributions to stem fields. some nations, such as korea, whose students achieve top scores on international stem assessments, do not produce innovations at the same rate as moderately scoring nations. for example, in 2012 the united states produced 23.1% and 6% of the world’s patents and trademarks respectively, compared with 8% and <1% for the republic of korea. two moderately scoring countries, turkey and china, have experienced the greatest growth in patent submissions (world intellectual property organization, 2013). the reasons for this limited correlation between test scores and stem productivity vary. one reason, previously discussed, is the likely influence of poverty. another reason is likely that these tests measure content knowledge, which is very different from the type of creativity required for innovation. to understand this phenomenon further, it is necessary to consider patterns of creative productivity in stem outputs. one of the major goals of stem education is the cultivation of stem interest and talent in each nation’s young people, in the hopes that they will eventually go on to what renzulli (1992) terms creative productivity, or the ability of individuals to use their talents and abilities to produce something creative or original in their fields. this creative productivity may be measured in a number of different ways, including investment in research and development, as well as numbers of academic papers and patents—and global changes are occurring in this area, as creative productivity disperses across the globe. investment in research and development total investment in research and development varies across countries and economies. however, the 34 oecd member nations that are located primarily in europe and north american have in previous decades dominated research and development. sources of investment include business, government, and higher education; as the financial health of these institutions waxes and wanes across economic cycles, so does funding for research and development. in europe, investment grew by 10% from 20072011, while in the united states, investment remains stagnant, mostly due to a decrease in funding from businesses. in japan, investment has declined. some nations that are not members of oecd but maintain a partnership status are on the rise. for example, partnernation china is experiencing tremendous growthinvestment has doubled since 2007 (oecd, 2013). foreign direct investment (fdi), or investment from other countries that may afford recipient nations opportunities to fund additional research and development, is also moving east. china, for example, increased its inflow of fdi five-fold from 2008 to 2011, and is now the largest recipient of fdi (oecd, 2013). stem research the dissemination of innovative ideas through the publication of academic papers is yet another international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game 11 way to measure and compare stem productivity by nation. non-oecd nations, which have not traditionally been considered publishers of research, are also playing a larger role than in previous decades. for example, china, which again is an oecd partner (but not a member) nation, produced the second-largest number of stem-related academic papers after the united states, which remains the top producer. many of these papers were written by researchers who first collaborated with scholars in oecd nations, typically in the united states. increasingly, rather than remain in the united states, these researchers are returning to their own countries (oecd, 2013). the fact that they are returning make sense, because according to world university rankings (2014), although most toprated universities (30 out of 50) are still located in the united states, for the first time two are located in places outside the united states, such as in the non-oecd nation, china (tsinghua university). however, these universities appear to be experiencing a learning curve in academic publishing, evidenced by the fact that these papers are not always as influential in their fields; when adjusted for number of citations, china lags behind most oecd nations (oecd, 2013). patents in stem an additional indicator of a nation’s strength in the area of stem is the number of patents issued each year. a total of 20 patenting regions exist, and in this regard, the u.s. still holds the dominant position. however, the percentage of patents held by the u.s. has declined over time. for example, in 1963, the u.s. produced 82% of all patents worldwide; in 2013, it produced 49% (u.s. patent and trademark office, 2013). in terms of patents in knowledge-intensive industries such as biotechnology, nanotechnology, and the communication industries, there appear to be geographical hotspots that include the u.s, japan, china, and a number of other nations (oecd, 2013). however, in these industries, japan’s patents have increased from 1998 to 2008 up 17% to 29%, and china also increased its patents in the same period in these areas, particular in biotechnology and nanotechnology, while the u.s. declined from 50% to 34% (oecd, 2013; u.s. patent and trademark office, 2013). whereas the united states and europe once dominated worldwide stem achievement, a trend appears to be emerging that indicates productivity will be more of a globally-based phenomenon. china in particular is rapidly ramping up in terms of stem productivity, and in many ways this is not surprising, because emerging technologies that make it possible to collaborate and communicate as never before may have helped level the playing field, making it possible for researchers from different nations to work together (brown, lauder, & ashton, 2008). and in this case, it may truly be a case of “a rising tide lifts all boats,” for stem innovation is likely to bring with it a boost to each nation’s economy, spurring future innovation and funding for research. winners and losers is there a problem with stem education and future stem productivity? the answer to this question may be that it depends on your definition of problem. in the 20th century, we witnessed scientific marvels unfold at an unprecedented pace. the century dawned without flight, electric lights, modern appliances, automobiles, or telephones. before its end, we had walked on the moon, worked with laptop computers, and thought nothing of flying across oceans. the question of the future concerns all of us, and we worry that declining test scores for our particular nation may mean that we are concerned that our own students will not be capable of producing these wonders. we wonder 12 global education review 1(4) which nations will be “winners” and which will be “losers” in terms of stem—which nation or nations will dominate the world to produce the next generation of scientific advances. as previously stated, the question under consideration actually has two parts: stem educational achievement and stem creative productivity. in terms of stem educational achievement, we focus frequently on student test scores as predictors of a nation’s ability to remain competitive in the stem workforce. however, this was not always the case, and some researchers (e.g., levin, 2012) maintain a more nuanced view of the situation: test scores represent cognitive achievement and are only one metric of a nation’s future productivity (national research council, 1984). other metrics include cognitive traits not measured by tests, as well as non-cognitive attributes such as dispositions, personality, and motivation, and these combinations of traits play out in different ways that result in individual and nationwide achievement (levin, 2012). in terms of stem creative productivity, we are beginning to see the writing on the wall: talent exists in many nations; however, the talent doesn’t always exist where there is need (craig, thomas, hou, & mather, 2011). employers who require stem skills frequently either do not know from which nations they can recruit talent, or they may experience systemic legal or political barriers to recruitment (craig et al., 2011). in a recent report by the oecd (2013), analysts reached three important conclusions (among others) after an extensive analysis of economic data: (a) researchers are increasingly mobile; (b) foreign consumers sustain jobs; and (c) emerging economies are playing a more important role now in science and education than ever before (pp. 13-15). these indicators emphasize the importance of collaboration between nations. based on these facts, instead of focusing on stem test scores, it may be more appropriate for governments to lessen governmental and organizational barriers to international cooperation and to provide high levels of funding for research and development that translate into innovative practices. and rather than focusing exclusively on test scores, educators may wish to decide to nurture the next generation of science students as effective collaborators, teaching them the knowledge and skills necessary to function well in the world of technology, in particular, communications technology. quality of life one final fact must be considered. if the definition of success in stem is more about quality of life for all of the world’s students, then we might agree that we do have a problem. gaps in stem achievement and productivity levels between developed and undeveloped countries suggest that, although the picture is changing, we do not enjoy full participation internationally from a wide variety of demographic constituencies in stem, and this is a loss both to our international community and to young people. stem skills are among the most highly valued and highly paid skills in the labor force; in developed nations such as the united states, for example, stem occupations are expected to grow at almost twice the rate of non-stem occupations through 2018 (american association of university women, 2013) and in india, six-fold growth is anticipated (craig et al., 2011). because students graduating with stem majors earn more than non-stem majors (national math and science initiative, 2013), students with skills in these areas can expect to be highly paid, while students without stem skills will continue, on average, to earn less than their stem counterparts. in a number of countries, we can already see the effects of this career income gap made manifest in the growing disparities between the wealthy and poor. international stem achievement: not a zero-sum game 13 if we agree that this disparity is the greatest problem we face today in stem education, the question becomes what to do about it. rather than promoting educational practices based on global competition for test scores, nations would do well to think about how to increase stem productivity for people around the world. put another way, increasing stem productivity for one nation does not necessarily take away from another nation, but rather raising the level for everyone becomes a win-win situation, a fact certainly illustrated by the story of borlaug and his wheat. specific steps might include the following: 1. research the collaborative practices of nations who are top stem producers, and seek to scaffold the development of these practices in other nations; 2. work to establish and fund a collaborative university system in less advantaged nations; 3. work to reduce geopolitical barriers that restrict the flow of information and innovative practices; 4. work to develop education systems that elevate children out of poverty in less advantaged nations; 5. teach students to think of themselves as collaborators in a global arena of stem innovation; and, 6. provide students with the research and technology skills necessary for them to develop as firstrate scientists and mathematicians into the 21st century and beyond. julia gillard, the first female prime minister of australia, once stated, “my guiding principle is that prosperity can be shared. we can create wealth together. the global economy is not a zero-sum game” (gillard, 2011). the same argument may be applied to the educational practices that ultimately produce leaders and innovators of global economies. education need not be a zero-sum game, and during the coming decades, policymakers must come to terms with the stark reality that for their citizens to prosper, they must have such concern for all of the world’s children. references american association of university women (2013). what we do: science, technology, engineering and mathematics education. retrieved from http://www.aauw.org/what-we-do/publicpolicy/aauw-issues/stem-education/ brown, p., lauder, h., & ashton, d. 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(1992). a general theory for the development of creative productivity through the pursuit of ideal acts of learning. gifted child quarterly, 36(4), 170182. science heroes (n.d.). norman borlaug. retrieved from http://www.scienceheroes.com/index.php?opti on=com_content&view=article&id=68&itemid=116 timss and pirls (2013). timss 2011 international results in science: executive summary. retrieved from http://www.timss.org/ u. s. patent and trademark office (2013). u. s. patent statistics chart: calendar years 1963-2013. retrieved from http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip /taf/us_stat.htm world intellectual property organization (2013). world intellectual property indicators: highlights. retrieved from http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats /en/wipi/2013/pdf/wipo_pub_941_2013_highlights .pdf the world university rankings (2014). the world university rankings. retrieved from http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world 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http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm http://www.uspto.gov/web/offices/ac/ido/oeip/taf/us_stat.htm http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats/en/wipi/2013/pdf/wipo_pub_941_2013_highlights.pdf http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats/en/wipi/2013/pdf/wipo_pub_941_2013_highlights.pdf http://www.wipo.int/export/sites/www/ipstats/en/wipi/2013/pdf/wipo_pub_941_2013_highlights.pdf http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/range/001-200/page/1/order/rank%7casc http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/range/001-200/page/1/order/rank%7casc http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/world-university-rankings/2013-14/world-ranking/range/001-200/page/1/order/rank%7casc 76 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tzohar-rosen, meirav & kramarski, bracha (2014). metacognition, motivation and emotions: contribution of self-regulated learning to solving mathematical problems. . global education review, 1 (4). 76-95. metacognition, motivation, and emotions: contribution of self-regulated learning to solving mathematical problems meirav tzohar-rozen levinsky college of education bracha kramarski bar-ilan university abstract mathematical problem solving is one of the most valuable aspects of mathematics education. it is also the most difficult for elementary-school students (verschaffel, greer, & de corte, 2000). students experience cognitive and metacognitive difficulties in this area and develop negative emotions and poor motivation, which hamper their efforts ( 4tkramarski,3t4t 3t4tweiss, & kololshi-minsker 4t, 2010). the ages of nine through 11 seem to be the most critical for developing attitudes and emotional reactions towards mathematics (artino, 2009). these metacognitive and motivational-emotional reactions are fundamental aspects of self-regulated learning (srl), a non-innate process which requires systematic, explicit student training (pintrich, 2000; zimmerman, 2000). most self-regulation studies about problem solving tend to focus on metacognition; few have explored the motivational-emotional component. this study developed, examined, and compared two srl interventions dealing with two components of self-regulation: metacognitive regulation (mc) and motivational-emotional regulation (me). the study conducted a two-group intervention to examine the possible effects on the self-regulation aspect of student problem-solving ability of increasing one group’s metacognitive awareness, while leaving the motivational-emotional component alone, and of increasing the motivational-emotional awareness of the other group, while leaving metacognitive awareness alone. it also examined the contribution of these components to students’ problem solving and self-regulation. participants were 118 fifth-grade students randomly assigned to two groups. the groups completed self-regulation questionnaires before and after intervention to examine metacognition, motivation, and emotion. students also solved two forms of a 11trithmetic series problems: verbal and numeric. 11tafter intervention, a novel transfer problem was also examined. the intervention consisted of 10 hours over five weeks. following intervention, the groups exhibited similar improvements in all problems. the mc group performed best in metacognitive self-regulation, and the me group performed best in certain motivational-emotional aspects of self-regulation. research implications are discussed. keywords 11tmetacognition 11t, motivation, e11tmotions, self-regulated learning (srl), m11tathematical problem solving introduction research studies have shown that elementary school students have difficulty solving mathematical problems (organization ______________________________ corresponding author: meirav tzohar-rozen, levinsky college of education, tel aviv, israel. email: meiravrozen@gmail.com metacognition, motivation, and emotions 77 for economic cooperation and development [oecd], 2003; verschaffel, greer, & de corte, 000). multi-step problem solving calls for coordination of multiple cognitive actions and experiences, including use of existing knowledge (such as facts, definitions, and competencies) and problem-solving strategies (such as analysis). students have difficulty understanding math-problem texts and perceiving alternate ways of solving math problems, and lack confidence when calculating and verifying solutions (desoete, roeyers, & de clercq, 2003; schoenfeld, 1992). moreover, researchers (including schoenfeld, 1992; verschaffel, greer, & de corte, 2000) have shown that student problem-solving difficulties do not always stem from a lack of mathematical knowledge, but rather from ineffective activation of their knowledge, since they lack the metacognitive skills needed to control, monitor, and reflect on the solution processes. cognitive/metacognitive difficulties cause many students to develop negative feelings towards mathematics, thus hampering learning and achievement (artino, 2009; duckworth, akerman, macgregor, sattler, & vorhaus, 2009; efklides, 2011; efklides & petkaki, 2005). because of such problems in this key subject, the question arises: how can we improve students’ skills and the way they tackle mathematical 11t problems 11t? this research aimed to investigate the efficacy of selfregulated learning components (mc, me) in the context of mathematical problem solving for young students. self-regulated learning (srl) in recent years, the role of srl in education has elicited considerable interest as a desirable aspect of successful learning (for example, schraw, crippen, & hartley, 2006; zimmerman, 2000). self-regulated learning is an active, constructive process involving several components: cognition-metacognition (mc), motivation-emotions (me), and behavior. selfregulated learning allows learners to determine their own learning goals, and to try to monitor, regulate, and control them, while being guided and constrained by the goals and contextual features of the learning environment (pintrich, 2000). most studies of intervention programs that encourage self-regulation when solving mathematical problems specifically focus on mc (kramarski & mevarech, 2003). few explore the way in which direct intervention aimed at developing learners’ me regulation influences learners’ self-regulation and achievement. until now, not many have compared the way these components affect student achievement in mathematical problem solving, or their impact on srl processes. this research compared the contribution of selfregulation involving the mc component and self-regulation involving the me component to learners’ achievements in solving arithmetic series problems, and to students’ metacognitive and motivational-emotional regulation processes. metacognitive component researchers believe that metacognition is especially important for srl (schraw, crippen, & hartley, 2006; zimmerman, 2000, 2008). . metacognition enables learners to plan and allocate learning resources, monitor their own knowledge and skill levels, and evaluate their own learning levels at different points during learning acquisition. metacognition researchers distinguish between two components of metacognition: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. knowledge of cognition refers to what individuals know about their own cognition, or about cognition in general. it includes three different kinds of metacognitive awareness: declarative, procedural, and conditional knowledge (brown, 1987; schraw & moshman, 1995). the term declarative knowledge, which describes what we know “about” things, also includes our knowledge about ourselves as 78 global education review 1(4) learners and about what influences our performance (schraw, 1998). the term procedural knowledge, in contrast, relates to our knowledge about “how” to do things. much of this knowledge is presented heuristically and via strategies. a person with a high level of procedural knowledge is likely to have acquired a large portfolio of strategies and to know how to sequence them well (pressley, borkowski, & schneider, 1987). conditional knowledge refers to knowing when to apply particular components of the previous two types of knowledge to a problem, and why these particular components may be effective. regulation of cognition refers to a set of activities that help students to plan, monitor, and evaluate their own work. • planning involves choosing appropriate strategies and allocating resources that affect performance; • monitoring refers to students’ awareness of their own understanding and performance quality while performing tasks; and, • evaluation refers to the evaluation of sr outcomes and processes. training in metacognitive regulation aims to increase learning competence by providing systematic and explicit guidance to learners as they think and reflect on their tasks (schraw, crippen, & hartley, 2006; veenman, van hout-wolters, & afflerbach, 2006). the classic model of metacognitive regulation in the context of mathematical problem solving is the model developed by polya (1945). polya proposed dividing the problem-solving process into four main stages: 1) understanding the problem. in this stage, the learner examines the known and missing data and tries to understand what she is required to do: for example, provide a simpler formulation of the problem, or use representations such as graphs and drawings. 2) the stage of devising a plan. in this stage, the learner organizes the facts and problem variables and decides which solution strategy is most appropriate. 3) implementing the strategy. while solving the problem, the learner uses proofs to determine whether her chosen strategy was helpful, and weighs alternative strategies. 4) checking the solution. the learner checks her answer while asking self-questions such as: did i find it difficult/easy, and why? how can i reduce those difficulties? can i solve the problem a different way? over the years, programs that provide metacognitive support for solving mathematical problems have been developed (for example, kramarski & mevarech, 2003; kramarski & zoldan, 2008; schoenfeld, 1992). research has shown that metacognitive support aimed at helping students solve these problems may empower their achievements and improve selfregulation skills. motivational-emotional component motivational-emotional regulation refers to students’ thoughts, actions, and behaviors when learning that affect their efforts, persistence, and emotions when performing academic tasks. most researchers believe that motivation regulation is best illuminated by achievement goals theory (ames, 1992; kaplan & maehr, 2002). achievement goals theory suggests that an environment’s goal structure can affect student motivation, cognitive engagement, and achievement (ames, 1992; kaplan & maehr, 2002). goal structure describes the type of achievement goal and most current theory. the theory of achievement goals suggests that there can be two sorts of environment that affect the way an individual’s goals are fostered. an environment that encourages the individual to focus on his or her own mastery of a subject will have instructional practices, policies, and norms which convey to students that learning is important, that all students are valued, that trying hard is important, and that all students can be metacognition, motivation, and emotions 79 successful if they work hard to learn — in other words, the goal is to master the subject (midgley, kaplan, & middleton, 2001; patrick, anderman, ryan, edelin, & midgley, 2001). this contrasts with an environment that communicates that being successful means getting extrinsic rewards, demonstrating high ability, and doing better than others. thus, subject mastery is but a means to these ends; in other words, the goal is to meet some external standard. in the latter sort of environment especially, a less able child may come to pursue neither subject mastery, nor externally-judged excellence, but rather the performanceavoidance goal, in which the child seeks to avoid displaying a lack of ability and attracting others’ negative evaluation (church, elliot, & gable, 2001). of course, there is no clear-cut division among these goals and all three may co-exist, with one degree of strength or another, within the same person. already, for several decades, researchers have been investigating different aspects of motivation and emotion (e.g., bachman, 1970; fennema & sherman, 1976; schoenfeld, 1989; leder, 1982). in recent years, self-regulation researchers have looked at motivation and emotion in parallel (artino, 2009; duckworth, akerman, macgregor, salter, & vorhaus, 2009): examining the effects of positive and negative emotions on the adoption of achievement goals, cognitive processes, and achievements. research has shown that affect guides and regulates cognitive and motivational systems (olafson & ferraro, 2001; pintrich, 2003). it also produces a change in working memory load by occupying cognitive resources that could be devoted to the academic task. emotions affect cognitive processing in various ways: they lead to particular emphases in attention and memory; they activate action tendencies; and they are regarded as functional and playing a key part in human coping and adaptation (zan, brown, evans, & hannula, 2006). emotions also affect certain aspects of self-regulation, including strategy selection. experimental mood research shows that negative affect in particular can lead to inflexible ways of processing information, whereas positive affect can generate creative, flexible, and holistic thinking, which is beneficial for heuristic processing (fiedler, 2001; linnenbrink & pintrich, 2002; pintrich, 2003). indeed, many studies on emotions and mathematics highlight this area as deserving special attention. meta-analysis studies demonstrate that negative attitudes and emotions have far-reaching consequences. these included avoiding mathematics (hembree, 1990); stress (tobias, 1978); sense of hopelessness (verschaffel, greer, & de corte, 2000); and finally, flight at different stages of the solution process (ziender, 1998). researchers indicate that these symptoms already appear in elementary school, peaking in grades five and six (pekrun, frenzel, götz, & perry, 2007). despite the great importance of the motivational-emotional component in relation to srl and achievement, few interventions have been developed to address this combined component. in the present study, we developed a me regulation intervention for young learners in the context of mathematical problems and examined the intervention’s efficacy in terms of achievements in problem solving and srl processes compared to mc regulation interventions. theoretical foundation of the intervention pintrich’s (2000) theory of self-regulated learning adapted for the young student provided the theoretical framework for two interventions comparing the metacognitive and motivational-emotional components of srl. the main principles of pintrich’s self-regulation model are presented in table 1. 80 global education review 1(4) table 1. main principles of pintrich's self-regulation model phase mc component me component pre-learning stage forethought, planning, activation task comprehension and planning solution strategy were examined achievement goals (mastery goal/ performance-approach goal / performance-avoidance goal) and negative / positive feelings towards task were examined. during–learning stage monitoring and control examination of: metacognitive awareness monitoring cognition strategy and strategy efficacy type of goal used in solution was examined. emotions and strategy for managing emotions and motivation were examined. post-learning stage reaction, reflection after solving problems students reflected on the solution and its process emotional reactions at the end of the task were examined and students reflected on their achievement goals. besides pintrich’s theoretical framework, the interventions focused on two key factors, which have been identified as effective in metacognitive regulation intervention, and which the present study extended to include motivational self-regulation. these factors are explicit training and asking self-questions. explicit training in this type of training, the teacher explains the learning strategy to the students, stressing its meaning and importance (otto, 2009; veenman, 2007). students benefit most when they are taught explicit strategies (camahalan, 2006; kistner et al., 2010). this is because the skills needed for self-regulation are not innate and cannot be acquired naturally (dignath & büttner, 2008; 4tkramarski,3t4t 3t4tweiss, & kololshiminsker4t, 2010; masui & de corte, 2005; perels, gürtler, & schmitz, 2005; van luit & kroesbergen, 2006; veenman, van houtwolters, & afflerbach, 2006). self-questioning research in metacognitive self-questioning and mathematical problem solving has suggested that student achievements may be improved by self-questioning techniques (king, 1992; karmarski & mevarech, 2003; mevarech & karmarski, 1997; schoenfeld, 1992; veenman, van hout-wolters, & afflerbach, 2006). the goal of the self-questioning exercise was to increase students’ awareness of their own understanding by encouraging them to practice thinking of questions to ask themselves during and after problem solving. following this, in our research the selfquestioning strategy was extended to the motivational-emotional component of selfregulation and applied to arithmetic series problem solving in the two intervention programs. the two fifth-grade groups were given arithmetic series problems to solve before and after the intervention; they also completed the various sections (metacognition, motivation, and emotion) of the self-regulation questionnaires before and after the intervention. metacognition, motivation, and emotions 81 the study examined two central research questions: 1. will there be differences between the mc and me groups in terms of: 1.1. improving arithmetic series problems (before and after the intervention)? 1.2. solving a novel transfer problem (after the intervention)? 2. will there be differences in the selfregulation components of the mc and me groups before and after the intervention, namely in students’: 2.1. metacognitive regulation (knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition); 2.2. motivation (mastery goals, performance-approach goals, performance-avoidance goals); or, 2.3. positive and negative emotions? method sample the sample consisted of 118 fifth graders (50 percent boys, 50 percent girls) aged 10 and 11. students were from three middlesocioeconomic schools with the same nurturance index (criteria used by the israeli ministry of education). four classes were selected randomly from the schools, and pupils were assigned randomly to the two groups: the mc group (n = 64), or the me group (n = 54). pre-intervention testing found no significant differences between the groups in terms of gender χ ² = .14, df = 1, p > 0.05 or mathematical and linguistic level f(3,103) =. 58, p > .05. the three phases of the study can be seen in table 2. table 2. three phases of the study phase mc regulation me regulation pre-intervention test / questionnaire – prior mathematical knowledge (test) – linguistic knowledge (test) – arithmetic series problems (tests) – meta-cognition (questionnaire) – motivation (questionnaire) –positive and negative emotions (questionnaire) pre-intervention intervention each group's intervention consisted of ten hours, delivered as two one-hour sessions per week, for five weeks. intervention structure was the same for each group, only the content changed. mc regulation while solving arithmetic series problems. me regulation while solving arithmetic series problems post-intervention test / questionnaire – arithmetic series problem, novel transfer problem (tests) – meta-cognition (questionnaire) – motivation (questionnaire) – positive and negative emotions (questionnaire) 82 global education review 1(4) the interventions were taught during the participants’ regular math lessons, and presented by four math teachers trained by the researcher. the researcher-author first met with the four teachers as a group to explain the study design. she then met with the teachers individually to explain the intervention details. this took an hour and a half. the researcher supplied each teacher with binders for all the students in his or her group, along with the necessary questionnaires, tests, and tasks. the researcher was not present in the classrooms during the interventions: an external researcher who was unaware of the research goals assistant was present. finally, the researcher discussed the next stage of the intervention with each teacher at the end of each lesson. table 3 shows the structure of intervention for the two groups. table 4 presents the strategy for mc and me regulation based on pintrich’s model selfquestion approach. table 3. structure of intervention for the two groups session no. mc regulation me regulation 1 a. analysis of a scenario portraying metacognitive processes; discussion of the importance of these processes for learning. b. building an mc selfregulated learning strategy (pintrich 2000). see table 4. a. analysis of a scenario portraying positive and negative emotions, and motivation; discussion of importance of these processes for learning. b. building an me selfregulated learning strategy (pintrich 2000). see table 4. 2-9 a. revision of metacognitive strategy b. participants solve two arithmetic series problems. increasing complexity with each session (for example, see appendix 1). c. discussion a. revision of motivationalemotional strategy b. participants solve two arithmetic series problems. increasing complexity with each session (for example, see appendix 1). c. discussion 10 the teachers of the two groups summarized the intervention and discussed its usefulness with their students. metacognition, motivation, and emotions 83 table 4. strategy for mc and me regulation based on the pintrich model's self-question approach phase mc regulation me regulation pre-learning (forethought) “do i understand the task?” “have i solved a similar task?” “which strategy should i choose?” “how do i feel?” “do i solve problems in order to understand?” “is the problem easy or hard?” during learning (monitoring & control) “is my chosen strategy effective?” “how do i choose a different strategy?” how shall i deal with negative emotions? 1. tell myself “i can do it”. 2. try to relax. 3. take time out. postlearning (reflection) “is the solution reasonable?” “how do i feel”? table 5. reliability of the mathematics tests and questionnaires measure internal consistence test — chronbach's α numerical form of problem .86 verbal form of problem .87 novel transfer problem judges assessed .76 0.92 metacognitive regulation questionnaire knowledge of cognition regulation of cognition 0.64 0.80 motivation questionnaire based on achievement goals theory mastery goals performance goals performance avoidance goals 0.82 0.89 0.73 positive and negative emotions questionnaire positive feelings negative feelings 0.82 0.83 84 global education review 1(4) measures to examine the effect of each type of intervention, participants received arithmetic series problems to solve preand post intervention. there were two forms of problem: a numerical form and a verbal form. students also received a novel transfer problem after the intervention. before and after the intervention, self-regulated learning (metacognition, motivation, and emotions) questionnaires were also administered to the participants. a statistical test for internal consistency (cronbach’s α) was applied, and all of these sets of statements proved reliable. table 5 presents the reliability of the mathematics tests and questionnaires. numerical form of problem problems using this form were adapted from the standardized meitzav exam for the fifth grade, originally developed by the israeli ministry of education (2004, version a). problems were administered preand postintervention, and the numbers were changed. to solve these problems, students were required to compute how each term in the series was calculated and compute the next term. to answer the problem, students were required to indicate either “yes” or “no.” a correct answer scored “1” and an incorrect answer scored “0”. verbal form of problem (see karmarski, weiss, & kololshi-minsker, 2010). problems using this form were divided into three parts. students were required to continue the series, which was presented verbally, and to reach a conclusion regarding the next term in the series. the answer to this problem had to be written as a number, which was a continuation of the series. a score of 1 was given for a correct answer, and 0 if the answer was wrong. novel transfer problem (kramarski & mizrachi, 2006). to examine students’ ability to transfer skills, they were asked to solve a novel transfer problem. this problem included a graph and called for high cognitive performance and the ability to make comparisons and draw conclusions: skills not required previously. an indicator was constructed to score the task. this comprised four scores, 0-3, in which a higher score indicated greater accuracy. two judges assessed the indicator's reliability. metacognitive regulation questionnaire the questionnaire was administered preand post-intervention to examine the effect of the two interventions on participants’ metacognitive regulation. it was based on the junior metacognitive awareness inventory developed by sperling, howard, miller, and murphy (2002) .the questionnaire contained 24 items, which produced two principal factors (brown, 1987): knowledge of cognition (for example: “i learn better when i am interested in a subject”) and regulation of cognition (for example: “i ask myself if i am working the right way when i learn something new”) formulated as statements and scored on a five-point likert scale ranging from “1,” never,” to “5,” always.” every respondent was required to rank each statement according to how true it was for him or her when solving the arithmetic series problems. an answer of 1 indicated little use of metacognitive processes, and an answer of 5 indicated considerable use of metacognitive processes. motivation questionnaire based on achievement goals theory this questionnaire was administered preand post-intervention to examine the effect of the two interventions on participants’ achievement goals (mastery, performance-approach, performance-avoidance). the questionnaire was developed by midgley et al. (2000), and kaplan adapted a hebrew version (see, for example, levi-tossman, kaplan, & assor, 2007). the questionnaire included 19 statements relating to achievement goals, and was used a five-point likert scale ranging from 1,“not true at all,” to 5, “very true.” the respondent ranked each statement according to how true it was for him or her when solving the reasoning problems. statements were divided metacognition, motivation, and emotions 85 into three groups: six statements about mastery goals (for example, “it is important for me to understand clearly what i learn in class”), where an answer of 1 showed a low masterygoals orientation and an answer of 5 a indicated high mastery-goals approach, which is effective for self-regulation processes; six statements relating to performance-approach goals (for example, “it is important for me that students in my class think that i am good at tasks”), where 1 showed low performance-approach goals and 5 indicated high performanceapproach goals, which is less effective for selfregulation processes; and seven statements relating to performance-avoidance goals (for example: “it is important for me not to look stupid at school”), where 1 indicated low performance-avoidance goals and 5 indicated high performance-avoidance goals, which is less effective for self-regulation processes. positive and negative emotions questionnaire to establish the intervention’s effect on the participants’ positive and negative emotions when working on arithmetic series problems, the questionnaire was administered preand postintervention. the basis for this 20-item questionnaire was the hebrew version (adapted by margalit & ankonina, 1991) of the moos affect scale (moos, cronkite, billings, & finney, 1987). a principal component analysis was performed to examine the factors. the analysis found that two factors could explain 46 percent of the variance. two statement categories were identified: the first contained 10 statements relating to positive emotions (e.g., happy, relaxed); the second contained 10 statements relating to negative emotions (e.g., afraid, angry.) the distribution factors was the same as the original one (tzohar-rozen & kramarski, 2013). the questionnaire was formulated as statements and scored on a five-point likert scale from 1-5: 1, “not true,” to 5, “very true.” an answer of 1, for a positive statement, showed a weak positive emotion, while an answer of 5 showed a strong positive emotion; for a negative statement, an answer of 1 showed a weak negative emotion, and an answer of 5 showed a strong negative emotion. results the results analysis will first address the findings for the problem-solving achievements and then examine the findings for the selfregulation processes (metacognitive and motivational-emotional). achievements in solving arithmetic series problems presented verbally and numerically pretest and posttest differences were examined in terms of the research groups’ achievements when solving arithmetic series problems presented either verbally or numerically. to examine differences between the groups, we first conducted a manova to compare the preintervention measurements for the two groups’ performance. the results found no statistically significant difference between the two groups: f(2,115) = 0.40, p > 0.05. a 2 x 2 manova (groups x time) with repeated measurements for time was then conducted to determine whether the learners’ achievements improved as a result of the intervention and to establish differences between the groups in terms of changes between the pretest and posttest. this analysis showed a significant difference in the pretest and posttest measurements: f(2,110) = 267.23, p < .001, η2 = .83. no significant groups x time interaction was found, however: f(2,110) = 0.99, p > .05. thus, there was no difference found between the groups in the change between the pretest and posttest measurements. table 6 presents preand post-intervention means and standard deviations for the achievements for series problems presented verbally and numerically. table 6 shows significant differences between the measurements (before and after) in two indices. the means indicate that both indices improved as a result of the intervention. 86 global education review 1(4) table 6. preand post-intervention means and standard deviations for the achievements in series problems presented verbally and numerically measure preintervention post-intervention f(1,111) η2 m sd m sd verbal 5.27 1.30 9.90 2.10 ***463.16 81. numerical 4.04 2.29 8.30 2.23 ***158.31 59. ***p<.001 post-intervention differences in the groups’ novel transfer problem achievements after the intervention, we examined the ability of the two groups to transfer the skills they had learned to a new task, in this case a novel graph task. the analysis of variance found no significant difference between the two groups: f(2,115) = 2.11, p > .05. preand post-intervention differences in self-regulation components differences in meta-cognitive component the study examined two metacognitive processes before and after the intervention: knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition. there was no significant difference between the groups in these two indices before the intervention: f(2,114) = 2.86, p > .05. a manova to examine differences between the measurement before and after the intervention, and to compare the change in the two measurements for the two groups, found no significant difference between the measurements: f(2,111) = 0.48, p > .05, and no significant interaction between groups x time: f(2,111) = 1.99, p > .05. however, as we see from table 7, the analysis of variance conducted for each measure separately showed a significant interaction in the regulation of cognition index. table 7 shows preand post-intervention means and standard deviations for knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition by groups. table 7. preand post-intervention means and standard deviations for knowledge of cognition and regulation of cognition by groups measure groups time groups x time mc me f(1,112) η p 2 f(1,112) η p 2 preinterv. post interv pre interv. post interv. knowledge of cognition m 3.98 3.99 4.20 4.13 35. 00. 60. 00. sd .50 .61 .42 .58 regulation of cognition m 3.57 3.68. 3.77 3.70 32. 00. *4.01 05. sd .61 .66 .40 .63 *p<.05 metacognition, motivation, and emotions 87 figure 1 presents preand postintervention means for the groups’ achievements in regulation of cognition. figure 1 shows that whereas the mc group demonstrated an improvement in cognition monitoring, the me group showed a slight decrease. simple effect analysis to compare the preand postintervention measurements for the two groups found a significant difference between the measurements for the mc group: f(1,62) = .418, p < .05, η2 = .06. however, there was no significant difference in the me group: f(1,50) = 0.81, p > 0.05. differences in motivation motivation is linked in this study to three types of goals: mastery, performance-approach, and performance-avoidance goals. these measures were examined before and after intervention. a manova compared the two groups before intervention, and a significant difference could be seen between the two groups: f(3,113) = .3.39, p < .05, η2 = .08. analyses of variance for the measures found no significant difference in performance-approach goals: f(1,115) = 7.37, p < .01, η2 = .06. however, measures of the me group’s performance-approach goals (m = 3.19, sd = 1.18) were higher than those for the mc group: (m = 2.63, sd = 1.04). due to these differences, a mancova was conducted to compare the changes in the groups that the intervention caused. indeed, the mancova showed a significant difference in the change in measurements between the two groups: f(3,107) = 2.90, p < .05, η2 = .08. an ancova for each measure showed a significant difference in the performanceapproach goals, f(1,109) = .3.84, p < .05, η2 = .03; and performance-avoidance goals: f(3,109) = 7.89, p < .01, η2 = .07; but no significant difference in the mastery goals, f(1,109) = 0.01, p > 0.05. figure 2 presents the preand postintervention means for the performanceapproach goals of the different groups. figure 1. preand post-intervention means for the regulation of cognition of the different groups 88 global education review 1(4) figure 2. preand post-intervention means for the performance-approach goals of the different groups as we see from figure 2, there was a reduction in level of the me group’s performance-approach goal measurement but no significant change in that of the mc group. indeed, a simple effect analysis revealed that while a significant difference was found for the me group’s performance-approach goal measurement before and after intervention, f(1,50) = 11.15, p < .01, η2 = .18, there was no significant difference for the mc group’s performance-approach goal measurement before and after intervention: f(1,62) = .12, p > .05. in fact, we had expected to see a decrease in the performance-approach goal measurement. the results were similar for the performance-avoidance goals. figure 3 presents the preand postintervention means for the performanceavoidance goals of the different groups. figure 3. preand post-intervention means for the performance-avoidance goals of the different groups metacognition, motivation, and emotions 89 as we can see from figure 3, a sharp reduction occurred in the level of the me group’s performance-avoidance goal measurement, compared with only a slight reduction for the mc group. a simple effect analysis showed a significant difference in the pretest-posttest measure for the me group, f(1,50) = 21.62, p < .001, η2 = .36, but no significant difference for the mc group: f(1,62) = 1.09, p > .05. in fact, we had expected to see a decrease in the performance-avoidance goals measurement. differences in positive and negative emotions preand post-intervention positive and negative emotions were also examined. a unidirectional manova was conducted to determine differences between the groups before intervention, and a significant difference was found between the two groups: f(1,113) = 5.34, p < .01, η2 = .09. the analysis of variance for each measure showed a significant difference in the pre-intervention measurement only for negative emotions: f(1,114) = 4.40, p < .05, η2 = .04. the me group showed many more negative emotions, m = 2.12, sd = 0.85, than the mc group: m = 1.82, sd = 0.65. in fact, we had expected to see a decrease in the negative emotions measurement. as a result of these differences, a mancova was conducted to compare differences in the posttest measurement, with the pretest as a covariant. the mancova showed no difference between the two groups: f(1,108) = 0.51, p > 0.05. discussion the study examined the significance and contribution of two self-regulation components, the mc component and me component, to achievements in solving problems of varying difficulties and self-regulation processes: metacognition, motivation, and emotions. this section discusses the contribution of each group, the mc group and the me group, to selfregulation and problem solving. first, we will discuss the changes in self-regulation in each group. then, we will discuss the problemsolving achievements. the self-regulation processes were examined with regard to the mc component and the me component. with the mc component, the researcher examined two processes: knowledge of cognition (general knowledge of cognition, which provides a metacognitive foundation) and regulation of cognition (regulation and supervision of learning). the study found that the mc group showed greater improvement in regulation of cognition than the me group, and there was no difference between the groups’ preand postintervention knowledge of cognition. these findings make sense, as “knowledge of cognition” is defined as the basis for learning that focuses on general assumptions of cognition (brown, 1987). in addition, studies show that knowledge of cognition develops before children reach school age (schraw & moshman, 1995). there were no differences between the measurements, since the participants were in fifth grade and apparently had already developed this kind of knowledge. on the other hand, regulation of cognition focuses on specific higher complex processes such as planning, monitoring, and evaluation. it seems that the intervention, which targeted mc regulation by providing explicit direct support during cognition regulation while learning (“did i understand the task?” “is my chosen strategy effective?” “is my answer logical?”), fostered the development of higher metacognitive processes, leading to a modest improvement. regarding the me component, the performance-approach goals (learning for the sake of achievement and to demonstrate ability) and the performance-avoidance goals (avoidance of failure) decreased more in the me group compared with the mc group. there were no differences between the groups in the other measures (mastery goal, positive and negative emotions). one may assume that this reduction in the me group is linked to the nature of the intervention this group received, which 90 global education review 1(4) deliberately targeted motivational and emotional awareness by teaching participants specifically to ask themselves evaluative motivational-emotional questions. these questions stressed the importance of understanding themselves when learning (“do i learn to understand?”) and examining emotions throughout all stages of learning (“how do i feel?”). an explicit “i”-centered strategy was also constructed with the students, and was aimed at motivation and emotion management (“i am capable of succeeding,” “i relax and take a break,” “i will read the problem again to try and understand it,” “if i don’t succeed, i will ask for help from an adult or a friend”). this intense, focused training apparently produced a reduction both in the participants’ performance-approach goals, characterized by non-adaptive behavior such as avoidance of challenges and behavior characterized by “helplessness” (midgley et al., 2000), and in the participants’ performance-avoidance goals, which are characterized by performanceavoidance and fear of demonstrating inability. ames (1992) supports this finding, suggesting that an educational environment oriented towards mastery goals reduces performanceavoidance goals. in addition, research suggests that strategies to increase motivation can also help students improve behavioral forms of motivation (boekaerts & niemivirta, 2000; zeidner, 1998). the measurements for the mastery goals (learning for understanding) and the positive and negative emotions showed no difference between the groups. it seems that mc regulation and me regulation produce similar changes in these components. an interesting point arising from this finding concerns the question of whether metacognitive selfregulation positively influences the motivational-emotional processes. indeed, studies have shown that fostering metacognitive awareness leads to improvement in self-regulation processes as a whole; in other words, that it affects both metacognitive and motivational-emotional processes (kramarski & michalsky, 2009; van den boom, van merrienboer, & van gog, 2004). it is possible that the more metacognitive tools a learner has for coping with tasks, the greater will be her desire and motivation for tackling tasks. this finding also relates to and explains the findings relating to achievements in solving arithmetic series problems. recall that in order to assess the contribution of each intervention to learners’ achievements, the participants of each group were tested with arithmetic series problems that were presented in different forms before and after the intervention. they were also tested on novel transfer problems. achievements for both groups were the same for all of the problems, meaning that the mc component and me component made similar contributions to achievement. this is supported by studies demonstrating the contribution of both the mc and me components to achievement (see, for example, schraw, crippen, & hartley, 2006; veenman, van hout-wolters, & afflerbach, 2006). the similarity in the two groups’ achievements can also be explained in terms of the reciprocity between the mc and me components. it seems that when we nurture one aspect of self-regulation, we affect the entire self-regulation process, thus leading to an improvement in the learner’s achievements. this is supported by findings from previous studies examining the relationship between the mc and me components, which found that one positively affects the other. for example, kramarski and michalsky (2009) studied the effects of two hypermedia environments (a system combining hypertext and multimedia) on the self-learning of university students studying teaching: a hypermedia environment with metacognitive instruction, and a hypermedia environment without metacognitive instruction. the results showed that exposure to metacognitive support, which prompted students to ask self-questions, improved the novice teachers’ overall selfregulation capacity (mc and me regulation). a different study, related to the improve program (metacognitive self-questioning metacognition, motivation, and emotions 91 method that engages learners in thinking and reflecting on their learning. the program is implemented mostly in mathematics and science, mevarech & kramarski, 1997), showed that this metacognitive intervention improved third graders’ achievement in solving mathematical problems, boosted metacognitive abilities, and lowered anxiety levels (kramarski, weisse, & kololshi-minsker, 2010). similar findings have also been reported for middle-school students. for example, kramarski and colleagues found that the performance of 15-year-old students who participated in online collaborative learning with metacognitive support improved in terms of self-regulation in general, compared to learners taught under the same learning conditions with no metacognitive support (kramarski & gutman, 2006; kramarski & mizrachi, 2006). it has also been found that support that strengthens learner motivation also improves academic involvement and learning competencies (reschly, huebner, appleton, & antaramian, 2008), and that a correlation exists between self-efficacy and motivation and metacognitive processes (hoffman, 2010). finally, it has also been found that students who believe in their own self-efficacy in performing academic tasks use more cognitive and metacognitive strategies (hoffman, 2010). regardless of previous accomplishments or capabilities, they work harder, persist longer, and keep up their achievements and competencies, even when coping with difficulties, as compared to their peers (pajares, 2008; pugh & bergin, 2006). contribution of study the study offers a theoretical as well as a practical contribution. theoretically, it deepens our understanding of the importance of supporting self-regulation in each of the two components, mc and me, with regard to learners’ problem-solving achievements and self-regulation processes. it also expands our knowledge of the implications of motivationalemotional awareness with regard to learning, which is a little-researched area. the present study was based on pintrich’s (2000) selfregulation model, a theoretical model focusing on the metacognitive and motivational components of self-regulation in adults. the present study extended this model to the emotional aspect of self-regulation while adapting it for the young learner. in practical terms, the study developed two unique self-regulation interventions based on one theoretical model (pintrich, 2000): a mc regulation intervention and a me regulation intervention. as noted, there is a lack of me intervention programs, and the study suggests an effective program that can also be tailored to young learners. both interventions can be useful in teacher training and for training seminars on the subject of selfregulation approaches. these interventions can also be adapted for adults and young learners alike. limitations and future research the study examined the effect of the intervention on mc regulation and me regulation only in relation to solving problems. furthermore, the interventions only comprised 10 sessions, the effects of which were examined immediately after completion. the interventions’ efficacy could therefore be examined in other subjects and in a variety of learning environments. long-term studies would be useful for determining the impact of the different programs and their long-term impact. in the present study, we also only used quantitative tools. we recommend also using qualitative tools such as interviews, and examining self-regulation processes in real time (solving problems aloud). finally, since both the interventions were effective in terms of achievement and self-regulation, it would be interesting to explore the added value for achievement of an intervention combining the metacognitive and the motivational-emotional components of self-regulation. 92 global education review 1(4) references ames, c. 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(2008). investigating self-regulation and motivation: historical background, methodological developments, and future prospects. american educational research journal, 45(1), 166–183. about the authors meirav tzoharrozen is a doctor in education from bar ilan university, israel. her research specializes in selfregulated learning processes in mathematics. she is a lecturer at levinsky college of education and tel aviv university. her main teaching area focuses on students with special needs. bracha kramarski is an associate professor at bar-ilan university. she is the head of mathematics teacher training at the university. her principle area of interest is mathematical education combined with metacognition and self-regulated learning (srl). much of her work is published in prestigious journals and presented at conferences. appendix uan example of an arithmetic series problem smiling faces for gaya's birthday, gaya's parents bought her a new computer game called smiling faces. gaya was very excited about the game and read the instructions straight away. the instructions told gaya that there are different stages in the game and she needs to color on each stage a number of faces that increases equally from stage to stage , as shown in the following example: stage 1: 4 faces stage 2: 5 faces stage 3: 6 faces metacognition, motivation, and emotions 95 a. complete the table below stage number of faces 1 2 3 4 please fill in the numbers in the spaces below: stage 1: ______ + ________ = ________ number of faces stage 2: ______ + ________ = ________ number of faces stage 3: ______ + ________ = ________ number of faces 3. write a rule which describes the relationship between the stage number and the number of faces: the rule is: _____________________________________________ 4. give an example to the rule which describe the relationship between the stage number and the number of faces. ________ ________ metacognition motivation and emotions page 76 metacognition motivation and emotions pagees77-95 the interventions were taught during the participants’ regular math lessons, and presented by four math teachers trained by the researcher. the researcher-author first met with the four teachers as a group to explain the study design. she then met w... examining the relations among student motivation, engagement and retention 23 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: xiong, y., li, h., kornhaber, m.l., suen, h.k., pursel, b. & goins, d.d. (2015). examining the relations among student motivation, engagement, and retention in a mooc: a structural equation modeling approach. global education review, 2 (3). 23-33 examining the relations among student motivation, engagement, and retention in a mooc: a structural equation modeling approach yao xiong the pennsylvania state university hongli li georgia state university mindy l. kornhaber the pennsylvania state university hoi k. suen the pennsylvania state university barton pursel the pennsylvania state university deborah d. goins the pennsylvania state university abstract students who are enrolled in moocs tend to have different motivational patterns than fee-paying college students. a majority of mooc students demonstrate characteristics akin more to "tourists" than formal learners. as a consequence, mooc students’ completion rate is usually very low. the current study examines the relations among student motivation, engagement, and retention using structural equation modeling and data from a penn state university mooc. three distinct types of motivation are examined: intrinsic motivation, extrinsic motivation, and social motivation. two main hypotheses are tested: (a) motivation predicts student course engagement; and (b) student engagement predicts their retention in the course. the results show that motivation is significantly predictive of student course engagement. furthermore, engagement is a strong predictor of retention. the findings suggest that promoting student motivation and monitoring individual students’ online activities might improve course retention. keywords mooc, retention, motivation, engagement 24 global education review 2(3) introduction the large enrollment characteristic of massive open online courses (moocs) has generated excitement and attention (pappano, 2012). a typical mooc attracts around 20,000 students (jordan, 2014b). however, a mooc can potentially accommodate an unlimited number of students because, unlike a traditional classroom, a mooc usually entails minimal student-instructor interaction. also, unfortunately, unlike a traditional class, the student completion rates for moocs are low. the median of mooc completion rates is about 6.5% with most completion rates below 10% (jordan, 2014a). researchers have started to investigate possible reasons for attrition in moocs, most notably by examining student-level variables, such as motivation and social engagement (khalil & ebner, 2014; rosé et al., 2014; yang & rosé, 2013; yuan & powell, 2013). however, studies thus far have rarely gone beyond observational and data-driven research. in contrast, our paper offers a theory-driven, structural model of mooc student motivation, engagement, and retention. specifically, we posit that (a) motivation predicts mooc students’ course engagement; and (b) students’ engagement predicts their retention in the course. we present this study as a means of providing a theoretically and empirically sound model for understanding mooc students’ motivation and how it is related to student behaviors in moocs. the ultimate goal is to provide practical guidelines to online educators for improving mooc retention. literature review what influences mooc retention? jordan (2014a) has gathered the available data from different online sources to explore factors that may affect mooc completion. she mainly studied macro-level factors, especially courselevel variables such as course launching time, total enrollment, and university rank. these were found to be unrelated to the completion rate. course length was the only variable to have a negative correlation with the completion rate. as might be predicted, a lack of time is an obstacle, given that moocs serve as a supplemental, rather than principal, educational experience for most enrollees. as mooc-based credit and degree programs develop, an increasing number of “full-time” mooc students is foreseeable. notwithstanding, “parttime” mooc learners are still the biggest population. more attention has been paid to studentlevel factors in order to understand the reasons for mooc attrition (e.g., khalil & ebner, 2014; rosé et al., 2014; yang & rosé, 2013). most notably, internal and external factors related to student motivation were found to contribute to student dropout rates (khalil & ebner, 2014; yuan & powell, 2013). the internal factors include curiosity and enjoyment, while the external factors entail job-related development and future economic benefit (yuan & powell, 2013). rosé (2014) and yang (2013) have conducted survival analysis on a mooc dataset in order to understand the social behaviors that might be related to student dropouts on a weekby-week basis. they found some aspects of peer interaction were closely related to student retention. generally, students who engaged other students in the discussion and stayed in the discussion for a long period tended not to drop out. in addition, students who participated during the very first week of the course tended to ______________________________ corresponding author: yao xiong, the pennsylvania state university, 225 cedar, university park, pa 16802 email: yzx110@psu.edu mailto:yzx110@psu.edu examining the relations among student motivation 25 remain. socio-cultural theorists hold that learning is a social process in which learners construct their own understanding through interaction with others (e.g., lave & wenger, 1991; vygotsky, 1978). social interactions essential for learning and community building are primarily peer interactions in moocs. “lurkers” or others who do not participate in such mooc interactions are more likely to quit. student motivation, engagement and retention in moocs several researchers are beginning to examine various activity patterns of mooc students, with the goal of creating broad student categories. kizilcec, piech, and schneider (2013) leveraged k-means clustering to examine students in three moocs from stanford university. based on activity data, they found students broadly fit into four categories: completers (students who completed most assignments), auditing (students who did few-to-no assignments but engaged in watching videos), disengaging (students who did assignments early in the course, then later stopped participating), and sampling (students who watched videos only in the beginning of the course). other researchers (wilkowski, deutsch, & russell, 2014) defined four other categories of students: no-shows (students who register, but never participate), observers (students who want to see what an online course looks like or how it is taught), casual learners (students who are interested in a subset of the overall course), and completers (students who do all necessary work to finish the course). another study (hill, 2013) identified five categories of mooc students: no-shows, observers, drop-ins, passive participants and active participants. while categorizing students based on student activity patterns is helpful for descriptive purposes, it provides little basis for understanding how a student’s motivation might influence different interactions with the course. there has been a great deal of research on student motivation in traditional schools and higher education settings, but the study of student motivation in moocs remains thin, despite the broadly-understood acknowledgement that student motivation is necessary to initiate learning and to sustain or adapt behaviors needed to achieve learning goals. the diminished social interaction within an online environment (i.e., a lack of face-to-face interaction between instructors and students) raises questions about students’ engagement and motivation in mooc classes, and how sustaining these may differ from face-to-face learning environments (stewart, 2013). previous studies about online education emphasize the importance of social interaction within a community of learners engaged in course activities and with each other (young & bruce, 2011). as students engage with each other and with course activities, student motivation generally increases (richards, 2011). miltiadou and savenye (2003) stated that interaction may increase students’ persistence in an online course. motivation is particularly important for retention in moocs because participants generally are not required to complete the course, and lack of motivation is a primary reason for students dropping out of a mooc (khalil & ebner, 2014). yuan and powell (2013) argued that there might be different factors that influence mooc students’ motivation level, including “future economic benefits, development of personal or professional identify, challenge and achievement, enjoyment and fun” (p. 9). these factors largely are in accord with the findings of a survey conducted by belanger and thornton (2013), who found that students have different motivation to enroll in a mooc; these researchers identified four relevant aspects: a) to support lifelong learning or gain the subject matter understanding; b) for fun; c) for the convenience of online learning; and d) to experience online education. the different aspects of mooc student motivation accord broadly with research on motivation outside the mooc setting. for example, motivation theories commonly acknowledge two broad categories of motivation, 26 global education review 2(3) intrinsic and extrinsic (amabile, 1993; ryan & deci, 2000). intrinsic motivation entails pursuing a task for the satisfaction, engagement or interest the task itself might provide. extrinsic motivation entails pursuing a task for purposes beyond the task—for example, for pay or to earn a credential. some earlier motivation theories saw these as wholly separate and even at odds with each other (amabile, 1993; deci, 1971), such that extrinsic motivation might undermine intrinsic desire to pursue an activity. however, more recent theories allow for complementarities between the two. for example, ryan and deci (2000) hold that extrinsic motivation spans a range from externally compelled to motivations that become integrated into the self in the presence of social ties and supports for developing competence. amabile (1993) stated that human activity often entails both types of motivation. as an example, she might be both intrinsically motivated by the substance of the article she’s working on and yet simultaneously extrinsically motivated to work on it right away to meet an editor’s deadline. in mooc settings, students may bring intrinsic motivation, including curiosity and a desire for new experiences, alongside extrinsic motivation, including the need to obtain new skills or credentials that might be beneficial for their future study or work. alongside intrinsic and extrinsic motivation is social motivation. for this paper, social motivation refers to social contexts and social interactions that may impel students to engage in the course. ryan and deci (2000) reported that social supports and social contexts can play an important positive or negative influences on motivation. wentzel (1999) argued that social-motivational processes play an important role in driving individuals to achieve certain social goals. social motivation in parallel with academic motivation may also influence students’ academic outcomes (wentzel, 1999). in the context of mooc research, yuan and powell (2013) found that one of the elements of a mooc that motivated learners to participate was an enjoyable social experience along with gaining subject matter knowledge and skills. therefore, the social elements of a mooc learning experience, which are afforded by discussion forums and participants’ use of social networking, may play an important role in students’ motivation. in the mooc environment, social motivation includes students’ feeling of relatedness with peers. this coincides with the notion of “social presence,” which has been studied in the online collaborative learning situations (e.g., gunawardena & zittle, 1997; so & brush, 2008). relative to face-to-face settings, learners in an online environment tend to have a reduced sense of connectedness and belonging, and this potentially impedes online peer interaction and engagement. using survival models, wen, yang, and rosé (2014) found that student motivation, measured by percentage of posts per week, and cognitive engagement, measured by level of language abstraction in forum posts, were significant predictors of dropouts. the results suggest that social interactions, which typically take place in discussion forums and posts in moocs, influence students’ motivation to continue in the course or drop out. drawing on previous literature, we propose that mooc learners’ motivation is comprised of three dimensions: intrinsic, extrinsic and social aspects. this threedimensional motivation model might not be exhaustive; however, we believe it captures the components that most deserve further investigation. furthermore, in accord with existing literature that finds motivation impacts student engagement and outcomes (lau & roeser, 2002; martin & dowson, 2009), we propose that (a) motivation predicts student course engagement; and (b) student engagement predicts their retention in the course. in addition, the three dimensions of motivation correlate with each other. the conceptual model is shown in figure 1. examining the relations among student motivation 27 figure 1. conceptual model method data sources data in the current study were collected from a pennsylvania state university mooc titled introduction to art: concepts and techniques, an eight-week course offered by coursera in 2013. a total number of 37,244 students had participated in this mooc by the time of completion. after deleting those who did not complete the pre-course survey and those who did not participate in any course activities other than registering for the course, we retained a sample with 17,359 participants. the retained sample includes those who have completed the pre-course survey and have participated in at least one activity in the course (e.g., watched a lecture video, completed a quiz, or submitted an assignment). measures and variables the variables are operationally defined as follows in this study:  intrinsic motivation: general interest in taking the course.  extrinsic motivation: taking the course for external rewards, such as earning the course verification.  social motivation: taking the course for connecting with others.  engagement: participation in the course activities.  retention: the length of the period in staying in the course. the model we have devised posits that mooc participants may hold intrinsic, extrinsic, and social motivations. participants’ motivation was measured by five-point likert items in a pre-course survey questionnaire, with 1 indicating that the statement is “not at all important” in the decision to enroll in the course and 5 indicating “very critical.” based on the available information from the pre-course survey, we identified one item measuring intrinsic motivation, four measuring extrinsic motivation, and two measuring social motivation. information regarding student online activities, such as lecture video watching, quiz taking, etc., was extracted from the course data to measure student engagement in the mooc. retention is measured by the number of days between the start of the mooc and the last day of activity by the student. all the items are shown in table 1. in summary, items measuring the three types of motivations are from the mooc pre-course survey, and items measuring engagement and retention are from the course data. examining the relations among student motivation, engagement and retention 28 table 1. measured variables and items variables item intrinsic motivation interest: i am taking the course out of general interest, curiosity, or enjoyment. extrinsic motivation certificate: i intend to earn a statement of accomplishment (or verified certificate) for this course. credential: i am interested in earning a credential. academic: the course relates to my current academic program. job: the course relates to my current job responsibilities or company's lineof-business. social motivation connect: i am interested in connecting with other students interested in this topic. friend: i have friends taking this course. engagement lecture: number of lecture videos watched forum: number of forum posts quiz: number of quizzes completed assignment: number of assignments completed retention retention: number of days between the start of the mooc and the last day of activity by the student data analysis procedures the purpose of this study is to illuminate the theoretical relation underlying student motivation, engagement, and retention in a mooc. in the present study, extrinsic motivation, social motivation, and engagement are fully latent; i.e., variables not directly observed but which can be measured by observed indicators (maccallum & austin, 2000); they are measured by multiple indicators, whereas intrinsic motivation and retention are each measured by only one indicator. we used structural equation modeling (sem) for data analysis, which is a powerful approach to examine the relations among latent variables (kline, 2011). specifically, we used robust meanand variance-adjusted weighted least squares estimation (wlsmv), implemented in mplus 7, to estimate the model, given its robustness to deal with non-normal and categorical data (muthén & muthén, 2012). model fit was evaluated using several prevailing indices (hu & bentler, 1999). different indices reflect various aspects of model fit. according to hu and bentler (1999), the root mean square error of the approximation (rmsea) value should be equal to or smaller than 0.06; a comparative fit index (cfi) value close to 0.95 or higher indicates a close fit, and values up to 0.90 indicate a reasonable fit. further, a chi-square statistic indicates whether the proposed model is significantly different from the data. a non-significant chi-square value indicates good model-data fit. however, chi-square is sensitive to sample size and is more likely to be significant with large sample size (fan, thompson, & wang, 1999; hooper, coughlan, & mullen, 2008). results descriptive statistics table 2 shows the descriptive statistics of the observed indicators. skewness and kurtosis are used to evaluate the normality of the variable distributions (glass & hopkins, 1996). both skewness and kurtosis values should be close to zero if the distribution is nearly normal. the two indicators, lecture and forum, had distributions that departed greatly from a normal distribution. we thus took a natural log transformation on the two variables. the transformed variables (i.e., ln(lecture) and ln(forum) shown in table 2) had much smaller skewness and kurtosis values compared to the original variables. we, therefore, used the two transformed variables in the subsequent analysis. examining the relations among student motivation, engagement and retention 29 table 2. descriptive statistics of the observed indicators minimum maximum mean sd skewness kurtosis interest 1 5 3.65 .954 -.366 -.269 certificate 1 5 4.14 1.033 -1.129 .820 credential 1 5 1.93 1.126 .990 -.055 academic 1 5 1.50 1.000 1.986 2.947 job 1 5 1.59 1.067 1.752 1.981 connection 1 5 2.03 1.011 .761 -.101 friend 1 5 1.26 .709 3.048 9.278 lecture 0 621 40.72 34.085 2.163 15.778 forum 0 765 1.83 12.744 32.128 1483.479 ln(lecture) .00 6.43 3.3012 1.08231 -.871 .126 ln(forum) .00 6.64 .3962 .77315 2.426 6.915 quiz 0 5 1.87 2.166 .549 -1.489 assignment 0 5 .74 1.388 1.875 2.422 retention (days) 1 56 28.65 19.162 -.139 -1.584 results of structural equation modeling the cfi value was .97, which is bigger than the recommended cut-off value of .95. the rmsea value was .06, which is within the acceptable range. the chi-square test is significant (χ2 = 2997.66, df. = 47, p < .001), which might be due to the big sample size. overall, the model fit statistics are satisfactory, indicating the hypothetical model is supported by the current sample. the standardized solution is shown in figure 2. both intrinsic motivation and retention have a single observed indicator. for the latent variables with multiple observed indicators, all the factor loadings are statically significant at a .05 level. for instance, the standardized factor loading from credential to extrinsic motivation was .798 (s.e. = .009, t = 89.328, p < .001). this indicates that one standard deviation unit increase of extrinsic motivation leads to .798 standard deviation unit increase of credential. the corresponding r2 value was .637, which indicates that 63.7% of the variance in credential is explained by extrinsic motivation. this shows that credential is a good indicator of the latent variable extrinsic motivation. notably, social motivation and extrinsic motivation are highly correlated (ϕ = .868, p < .001). this suggests that social motivation is related to extrinsic motivation, even though they are distinctly defined. examining the relations among student motivation, engagement and retention 30 figure 2. standardized estimates of the sem model note: non-significant coefficient is indicated by a dashed arrow furthermore, extrinsic motivation (γ = .260, s.e. = 0.046, t = 5.622, p < .001) had significant path coefficients to engagement. specifically, one standard deviation unit increase of extrinsic motivation leads to .260 standard deviation unit increase of engagement. intrinsic motivation was also significantly related to engagement, though the relationship is small (γ = .042, s.e. = .008, t = 4.932, p < .001). nevertheless, the path coefficient from social motivation to engagement was not statistically significant. the path coefficient from engagement to retention was statistically significant (γ = .764, s.e. = .006, t = 138.014, p < .001), which means that one unit increase of engagement leads to .764 unit increase of retention, controlling for all the other variables. the corresponding r2 being .584 indicates that 58.4% of the variance of retention is explained by engagement. discussion, limitation, and future study moocs have raised the promise of increased access to higher education and learning. however, in contrast to fee-paying students in brick and mortar colleges, mooc enrollees are far less likely to complete courses they register to take. drawing on the literature of motivation, this study examined the contributions of varied forms of motivation to student engagement and retention in a mooc at pennsylvania state university. we found that both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation are significant predictors of student engagement in the course. social motivation, on examining the relations among student motivation, engagement and retention 31 the other hand, is not strongly predictive of student engagement. furthermore, student engagement in the course predicts student retention in the course. the overall findings are consistent with the existing literature in traditional educational settings that students’ motivation for learning impacts their situational engagement, such as classroom behaviors, which subsequently influence their academic outcomes (e.g., lau & roeser, 2002). in general, the findings suggest that promoting student motivation and monitoring student online activities might be a way to increase mooc retention. however, we may need to take a more sophisticated and differentiated approach to promote mooc student motivation, given the broad range of student motivation in participating in a mooc. while the majority of students enrolled in a traditional college are dedicated to earn a credential, mooc students have more diverse intents. one out of four mooc students who indicated a strong commitment to complete the course are reported to finish it (koller, ng, do, & chen, 2013). furthermore, the completion rate among fee-paying students was even higher, which is reported to be 74% for the coursera signature track classes (koller et al., 2013). this implies that the completion rate of the highly motivated student group is much higher than the average completion rate. therefore, it might be fruitless to promote the completion among the student group who do not want to finish the course at the first place. a more practical approach is to identify students with different intents and accommodate them to achieve their respective goals. given that extrinsic motivation stands out as the strongest predictor of student engagement, it is reasonable for mooc designers to provide badges, awards, certificates, or other incentives. as a means of promoting student engagement and retention. for example, the signature track in coursera is a good way to promote student extrinsic motivation and foster student engagement and retention in the mooc. monitoring student engagement in moocs provides another approach that may increase mooc retention. our investigation of this mooc reveals highly skewed student engagement, as reflected in very disparate amounts of participation in student forums. since engagement is associated with retention, efforts to design moocs in ways that spur engagement need to be explored. one approach might be to encourage student collaboration. given the limited assistance from instructors or teaching assistants, building a student learning community might be the solution to increasing students’ engagement in the learning process. such work may enable moocs to realize not only their promise of improved educational access but also improved learning. this preliminary study also raises a number of questions for future work. one need is to develop theory-driven instruments which can be used to explore more clearly the factors that may contribute to, or impede, students’ participation in moocs. for example, in the current investigation, the various constructs of motivation were not equally well represented. for instance, due to the limited items in the precourse survey, there is only one item measuring intrinsic motivation. in addition, we only found a small proportion of variance in engagement being explained by motivation. engagement could be influenced by many other factors that have not been investigated in this study. for instance, student readiness to participate in the online courses, language barriers that a student may face, and other variables related to course design might be explored in the future. future work is needed to address these issues. references amabile, t. m. 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(2013). moocs and open education : implications for higher education. bolton: cetis. retrieved from http://publications.cetis.ac.uk/2013/667 about the author(s) yao xiong is a phd candidate in educational psychology at the pennsylvania state university. her research interests include latent variable models, peer assessment in moocs and applying bayesian methods in educational measurement. hongli li, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of education policy studies at georgia state university. her research focuses on applied measurement and quantitative methods in education. mindy l. kornhaber, edd, is an associate professor in the department of education policy studies the pennsylvania state university. her research focuses on issues of assessment policy, equity, and education reform. hoi k. suen, edd, is distinguished professor of educational psychology at the pennsylvania state university. his research interests include psychometrics, educational assessment and program evaluation. barton k. pursel, phd, is the faculty programs coordinator for teaching and learning with technology, as well as an affiliate faculty member in the college of information sciences and technology at the pennsylvania state university. his research interests reside at the intersection of technology and pedagogy, focusing on the exploration of emerging technologies and their impact on teaching and learning. deborah d. goins is a phd candidate in educational psychology at the pennsylvania state university. her research interests include fairness and bias in testing particularly in relation to language and culture and educational assessment. mooc study article #2 to formatp1-5 mooc study article #2 to format no footer constructions of difference and deficit 7 _____________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: purcell-gates, victoria (2014). constructions of difference and deficit, a case study: nicaraguan families and children on the margins in costa rica. global education review, 1 (2), 7-25. constructions of difference and deficit, a case study: nicaraguan families and children on the margins in costa rica victoria purcell-gates university of british columbia abstract this analysis examines the nexus of marginalization and education, particularly the literacy potential and achievement of young children from socially and politically marginalized communities. drawing on data from a study of literacy practice among nicaraguan immigrants in costa rica and the schooling of the nicaraguan children in costa rican schools, this analysis reveals the ways that constructs such as difference and deficit are constructed within historical, economic, and cultural contexts, for the most part in the absence of empirical evidence. the data used for this analysis was collected as part of a six-month, ethnographic case study of literacy practice within costa rican and the nicaraguan immigrant communities. data came from (a) observations in kindergarten, grade 1, and grade 2 classes in a public school near san josé; (b) interviews with public school administrators and teachers; (c) community observations of literacy practices in costa rican contexts and within the precarios where nicaraguan immigrants live; (d) semi-structured home literacy interviews with nicaraguan participants from one prominent precario; (e) early literacy assessment results for children in the kindergarten and first grade; (f) expert interviews with administrators of ngos who focus on the “nicaraguan problem”; and (g) reading and writing artifacts from the communities and the schools. keywords education; literacy; emergent literacy; equity, marginalization and education, deficit theory introduction what does it mean to be “on the margins” of society and how does that relate to the abiding fact that students who live in families and communities that are “on the margins” do less well in school as compared to those who come from positions of power and status? this analysis examines the nexus of marginalization and education, particularly the literacy potential and achievement of young children from socially and politically marginalized communities. drawing on data from a study of literacy practice among nicaraguan immigrants in costa rica and the schooling of the nicaraguan children in corresponding author: victoria purcell-gates, professor emerita university of british columbia 7180 buckingham blvd berkeley, ca 94705 email: vpurcell.gates@gmail.com mailto:vpurcell.gates@gmail.com 8 global education review 1(2) costa rican schools, this analysis reveals the ways that constructs such as difference and deficit are constructed within historical, economic, and cultural contexts, for the most part in the absence of empirical evidence. the data used for this analysis was collected as part of a case study of literacy practice of the nicaraguan immigrant community in costa rica. this case study is one of more than 24 other case studies that have been conducted under the umbrella of the cultural practices of literacy study (cpls), (university of british columbia. retrieved from www.cpls.educ.ubc.ca). situating the study the study and analysis presented here is based on data drawn from a larger case study of the nicaraguan immigrant community and their young children in the costa rican schools. as such, the data presented in this report reflect the goals and methods of the larger study, which is situated within an even larger project – the cpls project mentioned above. i will briefly describe these layers of context to facilitate the reading of this particular analysis of the construction of difference and deficit assigned to the nicaraguan immigrant community by the costa rican people. the cultural practices of literacy study the cpls project has as one of its focusing goals the exploration of marginalization and educational achievement. other cpls goals include (a) the study and theorizing of literacy as it is practiced within different cultural contexts and (b) the development of culturally congruent literacy instruction, informed by the ways that people within different social and cultural contexts read and write: the types of texts and the social purposes for which each is read and written. each cpls case study addresses specific research questions regarding literacy as it is practiced by adults, children, and within communities and homes, and as the literacy practices reflect the lives (social, economic, cultural, and political) of the participants. many of the case studies also include a focus on the literacy instruction experienced by the children in the families, documenting the literacy activities that are present in the instruction and looking for relationships with practices with which they are familiar from their homes and communities (purcell-gates, 2007). theoretical frames and related research for cpls case studies the case studies within the cpls project implicitly reflect paolo freire’s theories of literacy and liberation (1993). freire theorized a pedagogy that is based on the belief that the true purpose of education should be to facilitate individuals’ achievement of their full potential --their true humanity (mclaren & leonard, 1993; purcell-gates & waterman, 2000). especially relevant to this analysis is freire’s belief that people in power view marginalized people as objects, not fully human. the oppression and control exercised by those in power maintains their monopoly on privilege. this freirean frame provides the basis for the focus on marginalization and schooling for the cpls project and cases studies. the perspective taken by cpls on literacy learning is a socio-cognitive one (purcell-gates, jacobson, & degener, 2004) that situates learning within sociocultural contexts. this perspective views print literacy development in school within the context of literacy practice outside of school in homes and communities. within cpls, we view literacy practice, including the literacy practiced in schools, as cultural practice, reflecting values, beliefs, history, and power relationships (au, 2002; barton & hamilton, 1998; brandt, 2001; fishman, 1988; freire, 1993; moje, 2000; purcell-gates, 1995, 1996; scribner & cole, 1981; http://www.cpls.educ.ubc.ca/ constructions of difference and deficit 9 street 1984 & 1995). further, we embed our study of literacy practice in cultural communities within an understanding of schooling as primarily involved in social reproduction (bourdieu, 1991) and of language as always “language-in-use” within social activity contexts (bakhtin, 1986; vygotsky; 1962; wertsch, 1981). the cpls focus on literacy and marginalized communities is based on the research on the relationships between literacy abilities and economic and political status. the ability to read and write is considered to be essential and foundational to personal and social wellbeing. literacy abilities affect economic, educational, social, and health outcomes for individuals and social groups (kirsch, 2001; institute of medicine, 2004). national wellbeing and development are also highly associated with levels of literacy (coulombe, tremblay, & marchand, 2004). while research confirms that these relationships are not simple, causal ones (graff, 1979; tyler, murnane, & willett, 2000), nevertheless all assert that ensuring equal access to education and effective literacy instruction is a national and global priority (unesco, 2001). examining the research and the data on literacy development and achievement worldwide, it becomes quite clear that children from socially, linguistically, and politically marginalized groups consistently fail to achieve at the same rates as children from main-stream communities (freire, 1993; kaestle, c.f., damon-moore, h., stedman, l.c., tinsley, k., & trollinger, jr., w.v. (1991); unesco, 2001). this achievement gap has never been eliminated since literacy levels were first measured and compared, despite recurring efforts at school and curricular reform. this was the problem addressed by the study: to understand literacy development at the community and school levels and to use this knowledge to create functional and relevant early literacy instruction designed to increase achievement for children from marginalized groups. emergent literacy development the research on emergent literacy, conducted over the last few decades, provides another influence on the cpls focus on the study of literacy use within communities and homes in order to better understand the relationship between sociopolitical marginalization and school success. emergent literacy research has shown that young children begin to learn about literacy within their homes and communities before they begin formal literacy instruction (heath, 1983; purcell-gates, 1995, 1996; schieffelin & cochran-smith, 1984; taylor, 1985; teale & sulzby, 1986). within these home and community contexts they learn values and beliefs about literacy and literacy practices as they experience and participate in them. they acquire cognitive models for how and why literacy is practiced, who is involved in different literacy events, and emergent literacy concepts (purcell-gates, 2003; 2004). children take all of this to school with them when they begin formal literacy instruction. in order to better understand the reported high failure rate of children of nicaraguan immigrants in costa rica, i chose to focus on the early literacy knowledge and abilities the children brought to school with them as well as the literacy practices of their homes and communities. the case study of the nicaraguan community in costa rica one of the major intents of the larger case study was to work collaboratively with the costa rica ministry of public education to explore new ways of designing and delivering instruction in literacy during the early grades. personnel from the ministry aided in finding schools for the research, and a professor at the national university as well as a social activist priest, facilitated access to a nicaraguan community for data collection. the results were disseminated 10 global education review 1(2) by the ministry to all elementary school teachers, their supervisors, all librarians, and all elementary english teachers of the country via a videoconference, featuring my report and the suggested curriculum changes, and through individual presentations to teachers, supervisors, and administrators. thus, this study and report reflected collaborative efforts throughout. i chose to study the underachievement of nicaraguan children in the schools of costa rica from several presuppositions: first, i assumed that the nicaraguan parents and families cared deeply about the education of their children. second, i assumed that literacy mediated the lives of the nicaraguan immigrants just as it does the lives of other communities. third, i assumed that in order for the nicaraguan children to achieve at higher levels in school, the official curriculum would need to be based upon the lived realities of the nicaraguan community, including the ways that literacy is practiced in those communities. thus, my goal was to learn of the community cultural wealth (yosso, 2005) regarding literacy and to use that knowledge to suggest curricular changes that would be culturally congruent within the costa rican context. my goal for the larger case study was to understand literacy development and underdevelopment at the community and school levels and to use this knowledge to create functional and relevant early literacy instruction designed to increase achievement for children from marginalized groups. i sought to describe through ethnographic means: (a) the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical reality of immigrants from nicaragua in costa rica; (b) the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical context of costa rica as the host country; (c) the literacy practices of the mainstream costa rican context; (d) the literacy practices within the nicaraguan community; (e) the literacy practices of the costa rican schools attended by the nicaraguan children; and (f) transactions between the children’s experiences with reading and writing in their lives outside of school – in their homes and communities – and those within their classrooms. methods for the case study i conducted the case study within an ethnographic case study design (barone, 2011; purcell-gates, 2011; yin, 1994). with the belief that marginalization can only be understood in context (after all, one needs a defining context(s) within which instances of marginalization can occur), methodologies that call for documenting and analyzing context – such as ethnography and case study – are called for. while results from such studies cannot be generalized to other contexts, they can provide rich detail and insights that provide ways of thinking about other instances of the issue, in this case marginalization and school achievement. data collection for the case study i sought to describe through ethnographic means: (a) the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical reality of immigrants from nicaragua in costa rica; (b) the social, cultural, political, economic, and historical contexts of costa rica as the host country; (c) the literacy practices of the mainstream costa rican context; (d) the literacy practices within the nicaraguan community; (e) the literacy practices of the costa rican schools attended by the nicaraguan children; and (f) transactions between the children’s experiences with reading and writing in their lives outside of school – in their homes and communities – and those within their classrooms. to address the foregoing foci, i observed one class each at the kindergarten, first and second grade for a total of 150 hours at a school in an area close to the capitol city, san josé. during these observations, i noted ways teachers taught literacy and other content areas, texts they used, purposes for reading and writing, and the general tenor and operations of the school. constructions of difference and deficit 11 at the same time, i noted through observations and field notes how the nicaraguan children were taking from their literacy instruction: how they were making sense of it; what knowledge and understandings about literacy they were bringing to the task of learning to read and write in school; and how were they progressing. i also collected reading and writing artifacts, and during the final month i assessed the early literacy knowledge of the children in kindergarten and grade one with (a) the instrumento de observación de los logros de la lecto-escitura iniciál , the spanish reconstruction of clay’s concepts of print test: conceptos del texto impreso (concepts about print) and escritura de vocabulario (writing vocabulary), spanish version (escamilla, andrade, basurto, & ruiz [1996]). i visited three other public schools near precarios – the “shantytowns” that housed primarily nicaraguan immigrants and that were scattered throughout the san josé metro area and elsewhere in the country -to judge the typicality of the school in which i was a participant observer. for comparison, i also visited a private school near san josé and observed in the kindergarten, first, and second-grade classes. i also interviewed the director, and the kindergarten, first, and second grade teachers of this school regarding their views on literacy curriculum and literacy learning in school. the area of the school where i observed for six months was middle-class and completely costa rican (i.e. it is not the part of the city where foreigners visit and own homes) with pockets of real poverty. the families with children in the school were low/middle to lowincome. the wealthier families in the area sent their children to private schools. i lived in this area in a small home. during my six months living in the country, i also observed and noted the literacy practices in the costa rican social, cultural, and political context. beginning in march (schools begin in february), after gaining access, i noted public literacy practices in a nearby precario, where i also conducted in-home semi-structured interviews of literacy practice. i also conducted interviews of literacy practices in the homes of the nicaraguan and poor costa rican children in the classes where i observed. for this study, the term “literacy practice” refers to both the texts that people read and write and the purposes for which (and contexts within) they read and write them. finally, i visited three other large precarios in the country to assess the typicality of the one in which i was working. to provide essential context for the research, i also interviewed ministry of education officials, teachers, community leaders, and officials of organizations devoted to working with children and immigrant children, in particular, in areas of schooling and human rights. i collected curriculum documents and consulted with university of costa rica and national university psychology and education faculty regarding the literacy curriculum in the country and the socio-political situation of nicaraguan immigrants. i recorded a total of 34 interviews, with a total of 264 pages of english transcripts and 400 pages of spanish transcripts. field notes for textual practices in the costa rican contexts numbered 250 pages; collected artifacts documenting textual genres within the mainstream contexts and social and political contexts of costa rica, nicaragua, and nicaraguan immigrants in costa rica numbered 600 pages (from newspapers, magazine articles, flyers, etc.). throughout data collection, a costa rican assistant, claudia, who spoke basic english accompanied me. the assistant was working toward her credential to teach elementary school, and, thus, provided me with translations when i needed them and with insider knowledge on how schools and literacy curriculum worked in costa rica. a spanish speaker from mexico, located at my university, transcribed all of the recorded interviews in both spanish and english. transcribed talk included that of me, 12 global education review 1(2) claudia, and the participant. thus, the spanish and english transcriptions allowed me to monitor potential disjunctions between what was said by the participant and by claudia, the translator. reports of the findings of this larger case study can be found at www.cpls.ubc.ca under working papers # 13 and #20 in both spanish and english. analysis for constructions of difference and deficit while the larger case study was specifically situated within costa rica and focuses on the nicaraguan immigrants within costa rica, this analysis addresses the larger issue outlined above: what is happening in situations of marginalization that can be understood as related to the underachievement of children from marginalized communities? within this analysis, i look at a phenomenon that arose in the data that i originally mused about as one of “perception,” in this case perception of difference and deficit. for purposes of this paper, though, i am referring to this as “construction” of difference/deficit, with the working understanding that perception is the result of constructions of realities, granting that perceptions of realities reinforce constructions of realities and in the process develop them further. i will further address this thought in the conclusion section. data for analysis the analysis on constructions of difference and deficit, presented in this report, is based on (a) school observations; (b) interviews with ministry of public education personnel regarding the “nicaraguan problem”; (c) interviews with teachers, regarding curriculum and the nicaraguan children in their classes; (d) interviews with directors of international ngos concerned with immigration and immigrant children in school; (e) interviews with university faculty and students regarding the “nicaraguan problem”; (f) interviews with a social justice activist and director of a language school regarding the costa rican context and the marginalization of different cultural groups; (g) interviews with community and church activists who were working with the nicaraguan community; (h) field notes that captured comments and analyses of the “nicaraguan problem” made by various members of the public such as taxi drivers, store owners, doctors, nurses, and neighbors as well as my own observations; and (i) newspaper accounts regarding the nicaraguan situation in general and the education of nicaraguans in particular. i used all of the above sources to triangulate during analysis to explore the ways that perceptions of difference and deficit of a marginalized group contributed to the “nicaraguan problem” in costa rican schools. procedures for analysis i entered all of my field notes, interview transcripts, photos of public texts, and scanned documents into the qualitative data analysis program atlas.ti (2007). atlas.ti is a powerful and versatile tool for qualitative analysis of large bodies of text, graphical, audio, and video data, in any of their most common formats. this program allows researchers to arrange, reassemble, manage, and code all types of collected materials in a systematic way. the program is designed for, or allows, coding, search and retrieval, database management, memoing, data linking, matrix building, network displays, and theory building. during the original coding process for the larger study, i had noted instances of what seemed to me to be misguided, or incorrect, perceptions by informants of nicaraguan adults and children. turning to the analysis for this report, i focused on the code “perception,” adopting instances in the data coded thusly as my unit of analysis. i reviewed all of my data for this code, and broke it into sub-codes that captured the source and type of negative and incorrect perceptions of the nicaraguan community, adults, and children. in addition, i http://www.cpls.ubc.ca/ constructions of difference and deficit 13 reanalyzed the early concepts of print assessment for comparisons of the scores of the nicaraguan and costa rican children. results historical context: costa rica and nicaragua costa rica in the 21st century is central america’s most developed country. it began as one of spain’s poorest colonies, and its history of small farming and independent small business owners reveals itself in its long-treasured cultural narrative of the value of individual effort and focus on human rights. it has no standing army (as of 1948), and instead has invested its money in universal health care and education. it reports the highest literacy rate (97%) in central america, although i could find no explicit operational definition of “literate” in the reports concerning this rate. the country has a long history of democratic process, and recently the voters were becoming more and more restive at the economic consequences of globalization and the impoverishment of their neighbors by the world bank procedures of re-structuralization. nicaragua, in particular, had suffered economically as the result of the revolution during the 1970s and the contra offensive waged by the u.s. that destroyed many of the educational and health initiatives begun by the victorious revolutionary party. in the five years preceding this investigation, nicaraguans had been crossing the border in large numbers into costa rica as economic immigrants, seeking work and basic necessities for their families. this influx, which continues to the current time, has put a tremendous strain on the economy of costa rica, which was already weakened due to global economic events. this has been especially felt in the areas of health and education. as a result, at the time of the beginning of this study, resentment and prejudice had grown within the costa rican population against the nicaraguan immigrants, the majority of whom are illegal in status. the relationship between costa rica(ns) and nicaragua(ns) is complex, and to understand it, one must take a historical view. the nicaraguans and the costa ricans have struggled over a common border since costa rica liberated itself and later nicaragua in 1856 from william walker, a u.s. citizen bent on conquering countries in central america (www.wikipedia.org. retrieved july 7, 2013). this also liberated the san juan river (part of the border between the two countries and the lake which guided the rest of the border). the cañas-jérez treaty gave costa rica free rights of navigation on the san juan river and lake nicaragua for commercial and fiscal purposes, while also stipulating that costa rica could not navigate with vessels of war. it was signed in 1888. during the nicaraguan civil war in the '80s, costa rica provided nicaraguans sanctuary and allowed some camps in northern costa rica. according to arguedas arias (2006), commandante cero planned his assault on nicaragua’s national palace, sparking the uprising that led to the downfall of the somoza regime, from a camp in costa rica. in 2006, the border skirmishes had increased, with, according to costa rican spokespersons, nicaraguans “. . . charging ticos (costa ricans) illegal taxes to navigate on the san juan and prohibiting armed costa rican policemen (to police the border against drug running from nicaragua) from traveling on the river, ” (arguedes, 2006). it was within this historical context that increasing numbers of nicaraguans had immigrated to costa rica as economic refugees, with the nicaraguan economy failing, social services falling apart, and high levels of unemployment in their own country. various university interview participants and local officials offered that u.s. foreign and economic policy was widely seen as largely responsible for this situation. the u.s. contra war, according to http://www.wikipedia.org/ 14 global education review 1(2) this narrative, led to the dismantling of the educational and health programs in nicaragua that had been put in place by the sandinistas and had drained the nicaraguan economy fighting the war. structural adjustment requirements of the world bank for loans to pay off large international debts, as well as the u.s. backed change of government following the contra offensive, dictated the dismantling of many social services (oettler, 2007). thus, families were coming over the border into costa rica from a much inferior educational system and inherent social problems. to marginalize: positioning of nicaraguans merriam-webster's online dictionary (2008) defines marginalize as a transitive verb that means ". . . to relegate to an unimportant and powerless condition within a society or group." i will use this definition along with young's (2000) definition of the noun marginalization as "exclusion from meaningful participation in society" for this discussion. transitive verbs require actors and “objects,” and we will explore who are the actors in this relegation to an excluded space and the ways in which the excluded are, in fact, transformed into objects in the process . as the preceding definitions reveal, marginalization is a social process. in costa rica, the society that is the marginalizer, or the actor, is the costa rican society. during my first weeks in the country, i was given a great deal of information from costa rican informants as to who the nicaraguans were. a sample of these comments appears in table 1. overall, from taxi drivers to government officials, the picture that emerges is one of difference, deficit, pestilence, and criminality. the social tension was high and my positioning as a researcher interested in the nicaraguan community clearly unsettled many people (e.g., my landlord, the real estate person who tried to discourage me from living in the community, teachers and principals who i interviewed, my assistant and her sister, and so on), who found the situation disturbing and dangerous. i was urged by many of these people to avoid walking alone, especially in the downtown (el centro), since, according to them, gangs of nicaraguans, teamed up with colombians, were apt to snatch me off of the sidewalk – kidnap me. my landlord, for example, was appalled that my husband would “allow” me to walk about unaccompanied, as i was wont to do. my colleagues from the ministry of education reflected attitudes that were widely held by progressives and the intelligentsia in the country. they abhorred the xenophobia in their country where they held such high regard for human rights. however, they all agreed that costa rica could not continue to support or begin to encourage the assimilation (and thus the continuing immigration) of nicaraguans. they felt that it was unfair to the educational and health sectors of costa rica and that the differences between the two cultures were too numerous to successfully bridge. within the schools, principals and teachers varied in their public stances toward the situation. some took a personal interest in improving the lives and academic successes of the nicaraguan children. others reflected a more costa rican-centered attitude, seeming to ignore the issues and, at the same time, reflecting and perpetuating the stereotyping and discrimination that so successfully rendered nicaraguan children and their families as “other.” all of the teachers and administrators that i spoke with and observed, however, accepted as fact the assumptions of difference and deficit that held sway in the general costa rican population (exemplified in table 1). according to my informants, the nicaraguan children suffered real discrimination in schools from both other children and from teachers. they did very poorly in school and they were considered a social and educational problem. this was one of the reasons that certain ministry of education people and intellectuals at the universities were interested in this project. constructions of difference and deficit 15 table 1 sample comments that “other” nicaraguan adults and children from costa rican community members focus comments adults/ community "they are thieves, rapists, killers, criminals, offenders." "they are indios, dark-skinned." "they have violent natures." "they don't speak good spanish. you can't understand them!" "they (may) hold a proper id as costa ricans but (people say) 'well, this one is not costa rican' just by the way they speak." "no one trusts them." "they live in appalling conditions in completely overcrowded homes... in burrows in the ground." "there are cases of sexual deviations, incest cases." "they bring drugs and violence to the costa ricans." "the public schools? the problem is the d.... nicaraguans! get rid of them and we'd be fine." "they are taking precious resources from costa ricans. they get 80% of the bonos (low-interest government loans for housing and schooling)." parents of schoolchildren “mothers we cannot count on because they are usually working. no, generally parents work, the mother works ironing a couple of hours here, a couple of hours there, cleaning houses.” "we need to give everything to these children. nicaraguan parents never buy the school materials for their children; it is actually the schools that provide everything." "the mothers do not really pay attention; if the child goes to school or not is something they are not worried about." children "these children's only meal is the one we give them at school." "the children have a lot of social and economic problems and such background affects their achievement at school." "they are much shyer (than costa rican children)." "one of the most important problems for the nicaraguan children is their general knowledge level. they do not arrive in costa rica with the same level as the costa rican children in our schools." "very low educational levels." "they are usually children with bad appearance and with absenteeism problems." "vocabulary! nicaraguan children have a very poor vocabulary." "they always feel different to the other children; they even look different, their personal appearance is different" constructions of difference and deficit 16 constructing identity through the “other” the nicaraguan immigrant population in costa rica had been constructed in such negative ways against a national identity narrative that positions costa ricans in contrast. costa ricans see themselves as people of peace. they brokered peace within other central american countries during the bloody internal wars in the 1980s. their president at the time, oscar arias, was awarded the nobel peace prize for this effort. within this context nicaraguans are positioned as people of violence – paz vs. violencia (bishop, 2008). another national identity is that of whiteness. up until recently, most costa ricans claimed a white identity. many informants told me that costa ricans are different from the rest of central america in terms of their race. this is due, according to popular opinion, to the fact that when their european ancestors came into what is now costa rica they were professional - lawyers, teachers, etc. they did not mix with the indians as in the other countries. this however is not supported by the data. costa ricans are the descendants of spanish soldiers and sailors who did intermarry in the “'new world.” it was only recently that there has been an official recognition that indians, blacks, and chinese exist at all in costa rica, although all three groups have a real presence with different histories (e.g. the chinese were brought in the 1800s to build the railroad). just before i arrived in the country, a major genetic study from the university of costa rica was released that documented that up to 80% of costa ricans have “mixed blood” and that the illusion of whiteness was just that. this identity of whiteness is contra-positioned against the heightened awareness of “dark skin” identified with nicaraguans (sandoval-garcia, 2004). costa ricans also hold a national identity of superiority over other central american countries regarding levels of education, attention to health care, and overall devotion to democratic and civil ideals. this is played out in the negative stereotyping of the nicaraguans as “warlike,” “low and inferior levels of education,” deficient language, and overall filthy living conditions. several people told me that they were coming to fear that nicaragua would invade costa rica (that has no army) to “get the water.” this refers to the pride of costa rica that almost 90% of their water is potable due to their investment of monies in public health and infrastructure. what are the processes through which these contrasting narratives and resulting stereotypes are constructed? recent analyses cited the popular press operating within a context of crisis that exaggerates the impact of nicaraguan immigrants on social services and on crime rates (sandoval, 1997). bishop reports that a study of reporting by the costa rican newspapers la nación and la república, concluded that the press contributed to the negative stereotypes of nicaraguans through sensationalist reporting. "the medias of mass communication frequently issue commentaries which foment xenophobia and implicate nicaraguans in criminal occurrences which, together with the national population's general intolerance, heightens social rejection and discrimination against nicaraguans” (2008, p. 1). an infamous (within costa rica) example of both the depth of the xenophobia and the degree to which the nicaraguans had been positioned as marginalized objects--and the ways that the popular press aided and abetted this process--occurred one day when the public woke up to the front page headlines that screamed that a nicaraguan had been set upon and eaten by dogs while the police watched. as this event was analysed over the next six months, the police countered that they had called for help but had to wait for it to arrive. nicaraguan activists pointed out that letting a constructions of difference and deficit 17 nicaraguan die while waiting for help was more possible in the present atmosphere of hostility than it would have been had the man been costa rican. apparently the murdered man had been misidentified, based on his appearance, as a potential burglar by the owner of the dogs. construction and perception of difference and deficit it was within this context of xenophobia, discrimination, and stereotyping that i observed and documented the educational situation of costa rican and nicaraguan children in the public schools, focusing on one particular school in a middle-class community that served primarily poor costa rican and nicaraguan immigrants (see methods section, above). as i collected and analyzed my data in situ, the reality of construction of difference and deficit began to make itself clear. la escuela la escuela britanica1 is typical of costa rican public schools. it consists, actually, of two schools: a pre-school and a grade 1-6 school. in costa rica, the pre-escolar program is completely separate from the grades 1-12 system. each pre-school is administrated independently, with teachers trained and hired through this separate system. at escuela britanica, the 4 and 5 year-old children entered through a separate gate into a separate building and played on their own playground. access to the elementary school was gained through another locked gate, but the children could see the older children and activity through the metal bars that constituted the gate as well as the perimeter of the entire school property. maestra carmen's kindergarten class sometimes sat out in the garden that lay between the cementfloored playground and the k-6 school. the elementary school consisted of classrooms spread along a one-story rambling building, two wings of which faced into a garden with brightly painted concrete tables and benches, surrounded by lush flowering bushes and plants. the first grade classroom of maestra paola was located in one of these wings. maestra terecita's second grade classroom, on the other hand, faced onto the larger main playground, with its bare earth and broken pieces of playground equipment scattered about. who are the nicaraguans in this class? given the extraordinary amount of focus placed on the physical appearance of nicaraguans by my costa rican informants, i was prepared to tentatively identify the children when i began my classroom observations one month after settling in to my new home and neighbourhood. entering maestra carmen's kindergarten classroom with my clipboard and accompanied by my costa rican research assistant, claudia, i began to look around for children who were dark-skinned and who looked as if their school uniforms were unkempt, whose hair was perhaps unwashed, and who seemed to feel “out of place” (see table 1). i did the same in the first and second grade classrooms. i had decided that i didn't want to ask for a list of nicaraguan children for a while, preferring to look at all of the children first without preconceived notions of who they were and what they were “capable of.” my field notes taken during those first few weeks consisted of tentative “sightings” with such comments as • ". . . nica?2 miguel he was called by the teacher in the clapping song. no one knew his name. he couldn’t respond/ very shy/ tried to disappear." • "there's a little 'scruffy boy' in the corner, tiny, messy appearance, doesn't seem to know what's going on...nica?" 18 global education review 1(2) this continued for about a month, and after the first two weeks, i felt so sure of which children were nicaraguan that i had begun focusing on them for my field notes. i had confirmed my judgments with claudia, my costa rican assistant, who was one of the informants who had assured me that it was possible to spot nicaraguans immediately based on skin color, general appearance, and language (“not proper spanish”). by this time, i had written extensive field notes on a number of children in kindergarten, first and second grade, documenting their responses to instruction, their literacy knowledge – emergent and beginning—and their gaps in understandings and abilities as related to reading and writing. too bad! i had spent a great deal of time and thought focusing, for the most part, on the wrong children. even worse, i had missed documenting literacy learning for the nicaraguan children who were in the classrooms – children who to my eyes blended in seamlessly with the other children, both in terms of appearance and apparent ability. in terms of the tell-tale language differences, i could not judge. while i spoke and understood spanish at a working level, i was not proficient enough to pick up reported dialect differences. that was what claudia was for. to me, they all sounded the same! my error in perception became apparent during the second month of my observations when i began the process of soliciting participants for the literacy practice interviews. i wanted to interview the parents of the nicaraguan children in the classes in which i was observing in order to document, not what the parents do not do in their lives – in their homes and in their communities – regarding reading and writing but rather what they do – what types of texts do they read and write as part of their lives and what life purposes are served by these literacy events? i approached this task of obtaining participants for the interviews by working through the teachers. thus, i asked maestras carmen, paola, and terecita for the names of the nicaraguan parents of the children in their classrooms. they each referred to a list of all of the children in the class with notations of which were costa rican, which were nicaraguan, and which were costa rican with nicaraguan parents3. this was my first indication that all was not as it seemed. in the kindergarten class, not one of the children i had tagged as nicaraguan was listed. they were all costa rican. further, all of the nicaraguan children (there were six listed) had, according to my observations, appeared costa rican, according to the defining characteristics of costa rican children reported previously by numerous informants: (a) socially adept and comfortable, (b) well-fed and dressed, (c) early literacy knowledge and abilities, with (d) skin color lighter than the nicaraguans. this last, i admit, was impossible to determine. there was a range of skin tones among the children in all three classes, from blond and blue eyed to quite dark. it turned out that the blond child was nicaraguan as was the brown-haired one with the freckles. all of my informants from the educational field and several surveys that i had read indicated that one of the problems in costa rican schools was the negative stereotyping and prejudice toward nicaraguan children by the teachers. however, this did not appear to affect the actual instruction provided by the three teachers with whom i worked. i never saw an indication of unfair or unequal treatment of the nicaraguan children. nor did any of the parents indicate to me during private interviews that they felt that this was happening. these teachers were each caring, warm, and responsive to all of the children in their classrooms. however, this does not mean that they did not share in the nationally constructed view of constructions of difference and deficit 19 nicaraguan children as linguistically, cognitively, and culturally deficient and of nicaraguan parents as generally unavailable and not as concerned (as compared to costa rican parents) with the education of their children. this conclusion is based on casual conversation over the period of the study as well as more formal interviews conducted at the end of my time with them. one unforgettable defining instance of the constructed nature of difference and deficit in this study occurred during the process of conducting the literacy practice interviews. working with the teachers' lists of nicaraguan children (i included in this sample the children who were costa rican by birth but not by parentage), i and my assistant visited a family of one of the first grade children. the mother, as was always true for these interviews, greeted us with warmth and offers of refreshment and made us comfortable at the kitchen table. this family, as was true for some of the nicaraguan families from the escuela britanica, lived in a modest rancho and not in the precarios where houses are precariously constructed of scraps of lumber and tin. thus, nothing about the lowses barrio or the house tipped us off that we were not in a nicaraguan home. however, an extremely awkward moment occurred as we were asking about whether or not the mother had a visa or “green card” and thus could be said to read such types of texts. señora espinoza reared back and exclaimed, "we're not nica! we're costa rican! i was born in guanacaste (an area in the northwestern corner of the country, next to the nicaraguan border)." given the xenophobic atmosphere in the country, it was clear that our assuming that she was nicaraguan was very unsettling to her and an insult. we apologized but informed her that her name, and her son's name, were on a list at the school, identifying them as nicaraguan. she vowed to attend to that immediately. we continued the interview, anyway. this instance of misidentification could possibly be explained by skin color since guanacaste was originally part of nicaragua (and the loss of it to costa rica is still one of the issues that rankle in the ongoing tensions between the two countries). however, while señora espinoza was somewhat dark-skinned, her son was not. tellingly, his teacher was surprised and a little shocked when we informed her later that the family was not nicaraguan. so, who were the nicaraguans? it was not patently apparent, using all of the criteria (even the supposedly obvious language difference that i could not perceive as an english speaker did not work in the case of the espinosas) that are called upon to construct difference in this case of costa rica. what about the generally accepted notion that nicaraguan children enter school with low levels of general knowledge and, in particular, vocabulary knowledge, as compared to costa rican children? oscar and luís a little boy named oscar and an even smaller one named luís provide a telling “case within a case” to illustrate the reality of the costa rican/nicaraguan comparative positioning within the classrooms. oscar and luís were both in maestra paola's first grade class. in first grade in costa rican public schools, children learned to read and write for the first time (any explicit attention to literacy is excluded from the preschool curriculum on the theory that pre-school is a time for play and social development only)4. the instruction began on two levels. officially (i.e., described and ascribed in the curriculum), children begin to read and write by engaging in activities referred to as apresto, which roughly translates as 'readiness' work. they practiced drawing circles, connecting dots, tracing, and coloring. this goes on for about two months before they launch into learning the names of the alphabet and the sounds of the vowels and syllables. 20 global education review 1(2) the unofficial point of beginning to read and write, however, was the omnipresent copying from the board. from day one, the children were required to copy the date sentence from the board into their notebooks: hoy es martes, febrero 7, 2006 (today is tuesday, february 7, 2006). they did this four to five times a day; repeating it when the subject matter changed and thus different notebooks were used. by the end of the fourth month, they were copying the date sentence plus four others: my name is .........; the name of my school is britannica school; the name of my teacher is maestra paola. the name of my country is costa rica. this practice is repeated across the grades. when i asked a child who taught him how to make the letters in order to copy the sentences, he just shrugged and said no one; he just copied. when i asked maestra paola during the final interview if the copying was considered part of learning to write, she said, “no, how could it be?” the children didn't know how to write until much later. how did they know how to copy? she didn't know; they just copied. she had never thought about it before. luís was the “little scruffy boy” i had noticed during my first observations. he always appeared sad, never speaking with other children, never looking up from his desk, and never smiling – at least when i was observing him. his clothes were too big for him, and he often didn't have socks on; one could see the soles of his feet through holes in the bottoms of his shoes. he was very tiny, dark-skinned, and always appeared sleepy, with red and sometimes swollen eyes. he never knew what to do. during copying time, he would begin to copy but then slowly stop as if he wasn't sure if he was doing the right thing and couldn't tell if he was finished or not. his notebooks were filled with red exclamations from his teacher, exhorting him to finish his work at home and to practice the letters more! during one exam, i watched him sit in utter bewilderment as the other children followed the oral directions and went to work. the sticking point seemed to be his understanding of the word when maestra paola instructed them to “circle the word....” he was just totally lost! over the course of the five months of my observations, luís was absent an average of two times a week which didn't help the situation. when he did attend, he always sat at the back of the room and basically tried to disappear. i felt very sorry and concerned about him and tried to help him when i could. oscar was a study in contrast. he began school about two weeks late, and so when he entered we were informed as to his background. his mother was blind and so his father had taught him to read and write (at least to 'make the letters’) at home so that he could help her and be more independent when his father went to work as a carpenter. upon entering first grade, oscar could already read at (i'm approximating) about the second-grade level. he fit into the class routines anyway; always sitting in the first seat in the middle row and attending bright-eyed to the teacher and his classmates as he joined them in copying from the blackboard, and coloring, tracing, and circling on the handouts that had to be trimmed and pasted into their notebooks. he liked finishing his work and then jumping up to help others, engaging in conversations and generally enjoying himself. it is a common practice in costa rican classrooms for the children to move about, talking, borrowing materials, helping and commenting on others work during their work time. it is only when the teacher is directly instructing the class that they are expected to be in their seats and quiet. while he was already a reader when he began first grade, oscar’s deep store of written language knowledge made itself obvious during one, somewhat anomalous lesson. it was highly unusual for grade one teachers to engage students in creative composing activities in costa rica. writing in the classrooms always constructions of difference and deficit 21 meant copying or completing worksheets. however, one day, maestra paola surprised us all by announcing to the children that they were going to 'make a story.' they were to break into groups (a totally unfamiliar activity in this allclass instructional context) and then to work together to create a story about a duck or ducks (maestra paola told me later that she had gotten the idea for this activity from a workshop she had attended voluntarily and paid for herself. the choice of ducks for the main character seemed to come out of nowhere but the children quickly took it up. the ensuing pandemonium was truly amazing to behold. while none of the groups had any understanding of how to work as a group to create a story, it was clear that oscar's group was making the most progress. upon closer focus, it became clear that this was so because oscar basically dictated a story to the group. this was a completely oral activity and most of the stories that came from the groups were oral renditions such as, "this duck was swimming in a lake, see, then.... it had babies.....let's see...it had white feathers....it had a beak... and ....that's all." after cutting out and coloring duck masks that they each put on, each group was called up to tell their story, with one member chosen as the spokesperson/teller. one group was sent back to their seats as they couldn't tell anything. most of the groups rendered “stories” like the above. but oscar's group shone! oscar, as the leader, told a story that could have been written and read: "once upon a time, a baby duck was swimming with her mother when suddenly a big, black cloud appeared.”oh no!" cried the baby duck. "it's going to rain and i'll get all wet." the mother duck said, "don't be so foolish, baby duck." your feathers will keep you dry! and so on....." oscar beamed and sat down with his group, happy that he had gotten to do such a fun activity. children indistinguishable by country of origin this study of contrasts highlights a theme that arose in all three classrooms. looking only at the observable evidence of classroom behaviour and performance, it was not possible to differentiate between the nicaraguan children and costa rican ones. oscar was a nicaraguan child. luís was costa rican. the 'defining characteristics' of nicaraguans that all costa ricans cited failed when held under this spotlight. oscar was brown-haired and freckled. he looked 'white.' luís was very dark-skinned. oscar's uniform was always clean and neatly pressed. luís clearly wore hand-me-downs and appeared to have dressed himself each day. his shoes were worn and he was often missing his socks. oscar's father had taught him to read when he was four years old. although he had never attended kindergarten, he was ahead academically of all of his classmates in first grade. "we tell him that his only responsibility is to study, study, study," reported his father. luís was a student who was lost, evidencing very low levels of emergent literacy knowledge. he was failing first grade when i left. while such extreme contrasts did not appear in the kindergarten and the second grade classes, the theme held. the narrative of deficit and difference was not supported by the facts. in each class, the nicaraguan children were represented in the very top levels of performance as well as in the average levels. none of the nicaraguan children in the three classrooms were among the lowest performing, although i am sure that they could be found in other classrooms around the country. early literacy assessments this analysis of the classroom observational data is confirmed by the results from the application of the spanish reconstruction of clay’s concepts of print test: conceptos del texto impreso (concepts about print) and escritura de vocabulario (writing vocabulary) (escamilla, andrade, basurto, & ruiz (1996), spanish 22 global education review 1(2) version, given to all of the children in the kindergarten and first grade classrooms in the fifth month of the school year. the concepts of print assessment, spanish reconstruction, is only normed for first graders. the scores of the first graders (n = 28) in this study revealed a low-average achievement level with the average stanine of 4.57. the scores of the nicaraguan children in this class (n = 7) were higher, with the average stanine of 5.85. however, the average age (7.8) of the nicaraguans was one year higher than for the costa ricans (6.9), reflecting, perhaps, the higher age of school entrance due to migration activity. the age difference was not due to higher rates of grade repetition, confirmed at the beginning of the year when the teacher documented that more than ½ of the class was repeating first grade. while i did not capture how many of the grade repeaters were nicaraguan, the ratio of nicaraguan to costa rican children in this classroom (7:21) supports this conclusion that grade repetition did not account for age differences. working only with raw scores for the results of the assessment of the kindergarten children, the finding of higher concepts of print scores for the nicaraguan children also held: average class score was 7.89 (out of 26 items) with the nicaraguan children scoring an average of 8.25 (range 4-11) and the costa rican scoring an average of 7.77 (range 3-15). discussion many explanations have been offered, and then studied, for the entrenched fact that children from marginalized populations the world over consistently underperform academically as compared to their peers from communities of power and status. among these are (a) unequal opportunities to learn, (b) limited access to educationally relevant resources, (c) ethnic and racial stereotyping, and (d) cultural incompatibility between the home and school culture. while all of these are undoubtedly interrelated, this analysis highlights ethnic and racial stereotyping. the results contribute to previous analyses of the relationships between ethnic and racial stereotyping and school achievement. jackson (2006) explains the influence of ethnic and racial stereotyping on academic achievement by focusing on the motivation and self-concept of the marginalized student: in the education sphere, some individuals from these ascribed caste-like (african-americans; native-americans; mexicanamericans) minority groups have rejected this form of stereotyping by developing coping mechanisms to protect their identity. in so doing, these identity-protection strategies serve to dampen their achievement motivation, which, in turn, results in low academic achievement (p. 2). i, however, point to the nature of the negative stereotype, itself, highlighting the critical distance between the reality of the characteristics attributed to the marginalized and resulting stereotype of deficit and difference from which teachers and other dominant ones in the society develop policy and deliver instruction. clearly, the negative characteristics of difference ascribed to nicaraguan parents and children are more constructed that not. they are not based on data but more on broader issues of fear, xenophobia, perceived (and partially constructed also) national crises, historical enmities, and scapegoating. it is beyond the scope of this paper to fully develop this argument with analysis of the data from costa rica and elsewhere, but i have shared enough of it to call into question the accepted beliefs that (a) nicaraguan parents don't care about education like costa rican parents; (b) constructions of difference and deficit 23 nicaraguan children have extremely low levels of general knowledge, in particular vocabulary knowledge, as compared to costa rican children; (c) nicaraguans look different from costa ricans in ways that signal inferiority (e.g. dark-skinned, dirty/unkempt); and (d) you can't trust any of them as you can costa ricans. in other words, this data challenges the 'difference/deficit' stereotypes. the nicaraguan children were not so different after all from the costa rican children and they certainly did not evidence deficient abilities or knowledge, as least in the area of literacy development and learning. as is apparent, many of these types of stereotypes of deficit and difference apply to marginalized peoples across the globe. perhaps we need to engage in some rigorous observation of young children in classrooms with outside eyes (like mine in the costa rica context) to begin to address these damaging perceptions, or at least replace them with empirical data. in the costa rica case, one might ask what happens to the children from nicaragua who start out so nicely in the early grades. it is accepted wisdom, in the north american context, anyway, that children who start out behind in reading stay behind and the gap only grows (snow, burns, & griffin, 1998). but how to explain children who start out ahead or on par with their more privileged peers but who do less well as they progress through the grades, eventually dropping out at ever increasing rates? the fact that the conclusion that nicaraguan children were doing just fine held across all 3 grades and was supported by the results of the early literacy assessment lends greater credence to the hypothesis that the 'problem' of underachievement of children from marginalized communities lies not in the community marginalized but in the marginalizing community – in their socially constructed perceptions of deficit and difference and in the ways that those constructions impact the instruction provided these children. note 1. this research was supported by the spencer foundation and the canada research chairs program. notes 1. all names are pseudonyms 2. nica is the term used most frequently as a short hand for nicaraguan. while it has symmetry with the term tico that is interchangeable with costa rican and that carries an affectionate connotation for costa ricans, nica carries an underlying negative connotation in costa rica. for this reason, i use only the name nicaraguan to refer to 3. as in most countries, children born in costa rica are automatically costa rican citizens. 4. sources now inform me that this pedagogical principle is beginning to change and that the department of public education is beginning to include more early literacy activities into the pre-schools. references atlasti scientific software. 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(2000). the war on drugs—a war on drug users? drugs: education, prevention, and policy, 7(4), 409-422. about the author victoria purcell-gates, phd, served as a tier 1 canada research chair for early childhood literacy at the university of british columbia from 2004-2013, where she was the principal investigator of the cultural practices of literacy study (cpls). her research focuses on the intersections of community practices of literacy, the persistent failure of schools to successfully teach children from marginalized communities, and promising pedagogical approaches that build on children’s community-based understandings of literacy. as professor emerita, she is currently living in berkeley, california, and serving as a consultant on research design and culturally congruent literacy pedagogy. http://www.cpls.educ.ubc.ca/ constructionspaperfirst page constructionspaper no footer 54 global education review 2 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: de jesus, olga (2015). cultural awareness and global citizenship. [review of the book keys to success, by carol carter and sarah lyman kravits]. global education review, 2 (1). 54-55. book review cultural awareness and global citizenship “keys to success” by carol carter and sarah lyman kravits by olga de jesus keys to success: cultural awareness and global citizenship is a 30-page book written by renowned authors carol carter and sarah lyman kravits. carter is the author and coauthor of 20 books and a speaker at education conferences across the country. she regularly appears on radio, television, and in print discussing today’s topics about student and career success. lyman kravits has also authored and co-authored many books discussing tips for student academic success. such books include keys to community college success, which sets the standard for connecting academic success to success beyond school, showing students how to apply strategies within college, career, and life. in keys to success: cultural awareness and global citizenship, carter and lyman kravits attempt to engage students in a discussion on the importance of being vested with cultural awareness and obtaining cultural citizenship. the authors hope that by the end of reading their book, each student would have explored answers to the following questions: (1) what is cultural awareness? (2) how can i build cultural competency? (3) what is global citizenship? and (4) how can i take action as a global citizen? at the beginning of the text as a way for the young reader to self-reflect on this idea, carter and lyman kravits present a culturally aware global citizen student survey containing 10 statements to be scored from 1 being “never” to 5 being “always.” additionally, the authors incorporated four interactive student activities which consist of: speak it. this is a writing activity in which students are prompted to brainstorm and list 10 words or phrases that describe them. this activity is designed to allow students to expand on their personal perceptions of culture. know it. this is a two part activity in which students have to first complete the culturally competent development survey, on a scale of 1 being “not developed” to 5 cultural awareness and global citizenship 55 being “highly developed.” the second part requires students to plan and take action on building cultural competence. write it. in this exercise, the students are required to do journal entries considering their thoughts on prejudice and stereotypes. students have to describe a personal experience if possible. students have to explain what they learned from the experience and how it informs their dayto-day now. do it. for this last activity students are required to identify their community, community needs and set goals on how they can improve or help address this need. overall, keys to success: cultural awareness and global citizenship is an informative and enjoyable book to read. with the simplicity of the language used and the organization of its content, carter and lyman kravits do an excellent job at capturing the attention of the intended audience. by incorporating midpoint activities, it allows the reader to take small breaks from reading but also serves as a comprehensive mechanism. as a former middle school educator of many years and now a professor in the school of education at mercy college, i strongly believe in and emphasize to my teaching candidates the importance of implementing comprehensive check points during a reading experience. this, as a strategic tool, is very effective with young readers, especially if the reader is an english language learner or student with disabilities. keys to success: cultural awareness and global citizenship is a recommendable text for secondary students. however, it can be a great resource tool for secondary educators who are interested in helping their students achieve a higher level of cultural and global citizenship awareness. this text comes with pearson’s mylab resource tool. mylab is designed to reach students in a personal way by engaging their learning with practical opportunities which lead to assessments that create a personalized study plan. “keys to success: cultural awareness and global citizenship.” by carol cater and sarah lyman kravits. saddle river, nj: prentice hall, 2013. isbn: 978-0-13285023-0 about the authors carol carter is a national and international student success author and speaker. she is a co-author of the keys to success series of student success and study skills textbooks and president of lifebound, a student success and transition company. sarah lyman kravits is a co-author on the keys to success series of textbooks. she previously worked as program director for lifeskills, inc., a nonprofit organization that aims to further the career and personal development of high school students. about the reviewer olga de jesus, ed.d., is a full time faculty member in the school of education at mercy college. dr. dejesus has been an educator for 20 years with expertise in bilingual and special education. she is an active member of the new york state association of bilingual educators (nysabe) and is on the nysed committee designated to establish the standards for the new york state seal of bi-literacy initiative. her most recent publication, english language learners: international undergraduate english language learners' perception of distance learning, has gained international interest. dr. dejesus has presented in austria and has currently been invited to be a member of the oxford round table conference at oxford university in england. 84 global education review 3(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: umpstead, regina, jankens, benjamin, ortega gil, pablo, weiss, linda & umpstead, bruce. (2016). school choice in spain and in the united states. global education review, 3 (2). 84-102 school choice in spain and the united states: a comparative study regina umpstead central michigan university benjamin jankens central michigan university pablo ortega gil university of alicante, spain linda weiss central michigan university bruce umpstead central michigan university abstract this article explores issues of school choice in spain and the united states by examining the roles and functions of centros concertados, publicly funded private schools in spain, and public charter schools in the united states, to provide key insights into the similarities and differences between them. after making a national comparison, this work looks more specifically at a comparison of two regions – comunitat valenciana (valencian community) , spain and michigan, united states. it concludes with a discussion about the applicability of the school choice theoretical framework to both educational systems. keywords school choice, charter schools, comparative education, spain, centros concertados, education policy introduction this paper examines issues of school choice in valencian community, spain and michigan, usa by examining the role and function of spain’s centros concertados (concertados)—publicly funded private schools—and michigan’s public charter schools (also known as public school academies). the paper also explores the reasons why spanish and american communities organize and operate ______________________________ corresponding author: regina umpstead, department of educational leadership, central michigan university, 334 ehs, 1200 s. franklin st., mount pleasant, mi 48859 email: umpst1r@cmich.edu mailto:umpst1r@cmich.edu school choice in spain and the united states 85 these choice schools within the context of the larger national public education systems. specifically, we examine the similarities and differences of concertados and michigan’s public school academies (psas), and how these school models facilitate school choice in their respective countries. school choice continues to be an important issue in europe and in the united states. recent studies have highlighted school choice options and student achievement in england, denmark, france, and spain (albert & garcía-serrano, 2010; glenn, 2007). proponents of school choice claim that choice policies can improve student achievement, enhance diversity, and benefit economically disadvantaged students (salisbury, 2005). studies in spain have addressed the impact of private school attendance on higher educational outcomes (albert & garcía-serrano, 2010), parental demand for concertados (jacott & rico, 2006), and functioning of school choice in spain (villarroya, 2003). however, no work has been done to compare the concertado system in spain with the charter school system in the united states. this research fills that gap. through interviews with individuals working within the valencian region, we explore the spanish government’s support for concertados, the unique features of education provided within these schools, the laws creating them, and how individuals explain them as a feature of school choice. we then compare these findings with a similar discussion about psas in michigan, taken from interviews of individuals working within that system. the spanish educational system the current educational structure in spain was established when spain became a democracy after the 40-year rule of general francisco franco (1936-1975). the spanish constitution of 1978 guaranteed everyone the right to an education with the aim of fully developing human character. spain’s public funding of private education began with the education rights act (ley orgánica del derecho a la educación) (lode) in 1985 (ossenback-suater, 1995-96). the most recent version, passed in 2013, is called ley orgánica para la mejora de la calidad educativa (suaréz, 2013). concertados are allowed throughout spain as part of an integrated network of both public and private schools supported by public funds. spanish educational system structure the spanish constitution established the basic educational rights guaranteed to spanish citizens. four guarantees are particularly relevant to school choice: (1) the students’ right to a free education; (2) the parents’ right to “ensure that their children receive religious and moral instruction that is in accordance with their own convictions”; (3) the individuals’ and legal entities’ right to set up educational centers; and (4) the right of teachers, parents, and pupils (when appropriate) to share in the control and management of the centers (constitución española [c.e.], 1978). the spanish educational system, organized by the law for improving the quality of education (ley orgánica para la mejora de la calidad educativa (lomce)), is divided into four levels: preprimary (ages 3-5), primary (ages 6-11), secondary (ages 12-17), and tertiary (ages 18-22) (unesco, 2012). children must attend school from age six until age 16. net national enrollment (defined as number of students in the theoretical age group for a given level of education who are actually enrolled in that level, as a percentage of the total population of that age group) through the end of secondary education exceeds 95% (unesco, 2012). after completing compulsory secondary education, a student may opt to continue with vocational training or high school (bachillerato) studies. the bachillerato lasts two years, normally from ages 16-18, and confers the credential of baccalaureate (bachiller) (angloinfo, 2015). the correlation between the spanish and united states educational grade levels is presented in table 1. 86 global education review 3(2) table 1 school system levels in spain and the united states by age range age range (years) spain united states 0-3 educación infantil primer ciclo nursery school 3-6 educacion infantil segundo ciclo preschool education 6-12 educacion primaria primary education 12-16 eso compulsory secondary education 16-18 bachillerato post-compulsory secondary education adapted from angloinfo: the global ex pat network: schooling and education in spain (2015). the spanish public school system is primarily composed of three types of schools: (1) public schools, (2) private but state–funded (concertados), and (3) private schools (angloinfo, 2015). public school education is free, although usually there are additional costs for books and materials. beginning in the primary schools, families whose income is below or not far above the minimum wage (established by law in spain) may be able to obtain vouchers (bonos) to pay for books (angloinfo, 2015). concertados have lower fees than other private schools, the most expensive educational alternative. in 2008-2009, public schools educated 67.4% of spain’s pupils, concertados educated 26.0%, and private schools educated 6.6% (government of spain-ministry of education, social policy, and sport, 2015; just landed.com, 2014). government influence on education in spain the spanish constitution of 1978 recognized education as a fundamental right that the government must guarantee. article 27.2 protects the rights of parents to choose the moral and religious education of their children. the lomce, on one hand, provides parents the right to choose their children’s schools, and on the other hand requires concertados to meet the needs of schooling, including the needs of disadvantaged populations, and to offer pedagogical innovation. the spanish constitution requires that both public schools and concertados abide by article 27.2. there must be a public school in every village, but concertados tend to locate in cities where demand for education is higher. at the valencian community during the 2013-14 academic year, 71% of the available student places at public schools were occupied, compared to 87.5% of the concertados. in cases where demand for a specific educational choice exceeds supply, the schools must consider certain criteria: income level, proximity to the parents’ home or employment, and siblings at the same school. these regulations apply to both public schools and concertados (jacott & rico, 2006). schools must also consider children’s prior attendance in preprimary classes at the same school; while only 10% of the total criteria weight, this element affects concertados school choice in spain and the united states 87 in particular. the schools assign priority for admission based on total values assigned. the demand for preprimary schools is especially high due to a shortage of available programs; by the mid-primary level, educational supply equals or exceeds demand. (jacott & rico, 2006) government funding of education in spain differs according to the type of school. public schools (63% of total schools in spain as of 2006) are financed by the autonomous communities. concertados (30% of the total) are usually owned and run by either the catholic church, individuals, or associations, and their core educational offerings are financed by the autonomous communities. private schools are connected to higher tier private institutions such as universities or the spanish catholic church (jacott & rico, 2006). this is a very expensive option for families, as shown by the fact that only a low percentage of families can afford to enroll their children. the united states educational system in the united states, each state has a different educational system established by its state constitution and state statutes. state constitutions typically require the government to establish and maintain a system of public education, and state statutes specify that primary and secondary education (k-12) be provided to all students free of charge (umpstead, pogodzinski & lund, 2007). in the 1990s the charter school movement began, and now 42 states allow charter schools to provide a nontraditional public education to students (nacsa, 2015). united states educational structure the united states educational system can be divided into the same four levels by student age as those in spain. (unesco, 2012) the u.s. compulsory education laws require children to attend school from around age six until age 1618, depending upon the state (unesco, 2012). the u.s. department of education reported that 50,262,751 children were enrolled in public schools in the united states and its territories in 2012-2013 (u.s. department of education, national center on education statistics [nces], 2013). school choice in the united states according to the nces, between 1993 and 2007 the percentage of children attending a public school other than their traditionally assigned public school increased from 11% to 16%. the percentage of children attending private schools also increased (nces, 2009). charter schools in the united states the charter school concept was born out of policymakers’ desire to improve public schools. the idea was that universities, school districts, and other entities could authorize individual schools that would operate independently from traditional school districts. these special schools would experiment with different pedagogies and configurations and would develop models for greater parent involvement and effective school operations (price & jankens, 2015). they would also provide a “choice” for parents who wished to escape traditional neighborhood schools that were consistently failing to make satisfactory progress in student achievement (price & jankens, 2015). the u.s. department of education (2014) defined a public charter school as a publicly funded school typically governed by a group or organization under a contract (charter) with the authorizing entity (nces, 2014). the chartering agency exempts the school from certain rules and regulations; in return, the school must meet certain accountability standards. in 1991, minnesota enacted legislation to create the first 88 global education review 3(2) charter school. by the 2011-2012 school year, charter school legislation had been passed in 42 states and the district of columbia (nces, 2014). charter school funding and services though there are usually philosophical, organizational, and management differences between charter schools and traditional public schools, many of the legal, governance, and instructional requirements are the same (price & jankens, 2015). charter school per-pupil revenue differs widely due to variances in how charter schools are funded by states. in a recent study of charter schools in 21 states and the district of columbia, it was found that charter schools average $2,980 (21%) less in per-pupil operating revenues than traditional public schools (miron & urschel, 2010). charter school finances, however, are hard to measure since many charter schools receive both public and private funds as well as in-kind assistance and resources. bifulco and reback (2011) concluded that charter schools can have negative fiscal impacts on local districts because: (1) operating two systems of public schools under separate governance can create excess costs, and (2) charter school state funding policies can distribute resources to or away from districts (bilfulco & reback, 2011). research questions 1. how do the educational choice systems represented by spanish concertados and michigan charter schools compare in both their motivations and methods for establishing and funding schools, and the roles ideology plays in their operation? 2. in what ways can spanish concertados and michigan charter schools be understood, using a school choice framework that examines the systems’ use of choice, deregulation, and accountability to promote enhanced educational outcomes for students? theoretical framework this article examines the spanish and u.s. educational systems through the theoretical lens of the school choice concept, which consists of three policy levers: choice, deregulation, and accountability (gawlik, 2007). in the united states, a common narrative about charter schools is that they receive more autonomy in exchange for greater accountability relating to educational outcomes. this arrangement differs from that of traditional public schools, where funding is automatic (usually based on pupil attendance or local property tax revenue); educational outcomes do not typically affect schools’ funding or continued existence. in contrast, charter schools must each be authorized by an educational or governmental entity, and each charter must be renewed periodically. charter schools are considered successful if parents continue to choose them as an educational option for their children. the spanish concertado system of agreements (conciertos educativos) operates in a somewhat similar manner. it offers parents the ability to choose state-supported private schools for their children. in exchange for state support, the concertados must follow key financial and curricular requirements, but are not bound by all of the regulations that govern public schools. concertados are also considered successful if parents continue to choose them as an educational option for their children. methodology to compare and contrast spanish concertados with michigan psas, we employed the case study approach. the hallmark of case study research is school choice in spain and the united states 89 the intense study of a case within its context (yin 2009). researchers frequently utilize case studies for exploration and description of understudied processes such as this one. our analysis focused on choice schools in two locations: the autonomous region of valencia and michigan. our data collection techniques included interviews of educational leaders in the valencian community and in michigan. in spain, we spoke with five individuals: two valencian government officials, a spokesperson of a private school education association, a spokesperson from a subsidized school association and an education lawyer. interviews were conducted in spanish and translated into english for analysis. in michigan, we interviewed five individuals: a state government official, two individuals from charter school authorizers, an individual from an educational management company, and a charter school leader. our interview protocol asked a series of questions regarding the creation of the educational system innovations, how schools participate and are funded, and the importance of ideology in general and religion in particular in the schools. we also reviewed the relevant laws and other publicly available materials regarding both the spanish and michigan school systems. because our sample size is small, it is not intended to represent all possible views of individuals within the educational systems examined and its results are not generalizable. instead, it is intended to provide educational researchers and policymakers with insight into fundamental aspects of the two systems. findings—the autonomous community of valencia, spain the autonomous community of valencia, spain the autonomous community of valencia, which consists of valencia, alicante, and castellon, is located on the eastern coast of spain on the mediterranean sea. it is one of 17 autonomous regions of spain, covering about 4.6% of spain’s land mass and having approximately 4.5 million inhabitants, or 10.5% of spain’s population. during the 2014-15 academic year, there were 1696 public schools, 427 concertados, and 640 private schools (vast majority kindergartens) educating 638,000 students ages 3-16 and another 150,000 16-18 year olds. the instructional languages in the schools vary, but lessons are typically provided in a combination of castilian and valencian in this region (valencia trader, 2014); valencian is the catalan language spoken in the southern area of its linguistic dominion. motivation for and establishment of concertados the spanish government’s initial motivation for the concertados was its desire to educate its total population of students. when the lode was passed in 1985, demand for public schooling was greater than what the existing public school system could meet because so many of spain’s children were attending private schools at that time. the government leveraged the country’s extensive private school system by establishing a subsidized center network, providing subsidies for the formerly private schools approved to join the network. today, the system accomplishes the dual goals of meeting the demand for public education and providing parents with choice in their children’s education. one interviewee noted, “the administration … does not have the 90 global education review 3(2) capacity to offer all the needed school places; and … the parents have demanded more school places … [sic] well in private schools, that are publicly funded …so there is a great balance” (government official 1, personal communication, april 2, 2015). any natural person or legal entity is eligible to start a school in spain; however the school is not guaranteed to become a concertado. the school owners must apply to the education department of the autonomous community to be part of the concertado system after the school has been formally established as a private school and is operational. the school must be open for at least five whole academic years before it applies for public funding. however, it can apply for a progressive incorporation to the system of agreement; such an application covers only the groups for threeyear-olds, and then progresses from there. typically, public funding is not available to assist with the school formation process; the processes of establishing a school and becoming a concertado are separate. when deciding whether to grant a school’s request to become a concertado, the education department considers whether the school has been established in an area of need. one interviewee noted that there are no legal barriers to a school becoming part of the system of agreements that govern concertados if the requirements are met. another respondent said that it is more difficult for a private school to become part of the system of agreements in some communities than in others because of the ideologies of the government’s political party. this person reported that, in andalucia, the government has not approved a new position for students in the subsidized schools in 25 years. one interviewee suggested that the government should provide more support for the establishment of new private schools that would like to join the system, noting that “sometimes we look like the poor brother” in the integrated system (association spokesperson 1, personal communication, april 8, 2015). concertado funding the autonomous communities’ education authorities provide financial support for all concertados. the amount depends on the educational level of the particular school. all costs of a basic primary and secondary education (ages 3-16) are covered, and concertados must provide this education to parents for free. the regional government also provides some support for non-compulsory education (i.e., the last two years before university): bachillerato and vocational school. parents supply the rest of the costs of the non-compulsory education for their children. in concertados, the regional government bears the cost of teachers’ salaries, including social contributions, and provides money for the schools’ costs such as administrative and service staff salaries. the authorities pay teachers’ salaries directly to the teachers on behalf of the schools’ owners. salaries are the same as for teachers working in public schools. parents of students who attend concertados can be asked to pay for things such as “school meals, for the bus, for the extra-curricular activities, for sports, and for language learning” (association representative #2, personal communication, april 8, 2015). schools may also co-fund complementary activities by seeking donations from parents. one interviewee explained that most concertados ask for voluntary donations from 15 to 50 euros each month from parents, which most parents pay. there is some ambiguity about financial requirements for parents whose children attend concertados. one respondent suggested that the system could be improved by clarifying the financial contributions that parents must make to support the schools. some parents have filed school choice in spain and the united states 91 complaints that some complementary activities at concertados were not really voluntary or optional as the schools claimed. the law guarantees that basic education will be free, whether public or concertados. when a family refuses to pay for the complementary activities, their children can still study at the concertados school, but it is not an easy path to walk. children are very sensitive to social bias, and being alone while the rest are having lunch or learning english is a source of discomfort. many families in this situation leave the school sooner or later. similarly, another respondent suggested better rules to direct the government’s oversight of the state-supported schools. these concerns are borne out in the actual parent expenditures for students attending spanish schools. according to a press release of the statistics national institute (2015), the average expenditure per year of spanish students in schools for the 2011-12 school year was as follows: lunch (542 € in public and 869 € in concertados); transportation (94 € in public and 515 € in concertados); child care after school hours (286 € in public and 366 € in concertados); complementary activities (79 € in public and 92 € in concertados). although some tout concertados as educating students at up to 50% less cost than public schools, according to a recent study by izquierdo and gonzalez (2015), each unit or group in an average school (18 groups, two per level, nine levels from ages 3-11) costs 72.970 € at a public school and 63.805 € at a concertado: a difference of only 9.165 €. the same article explains that, if the families’ contributions to concertados are taken into account (509 € per child at pre-primary and 298 € at primary, as an average), the cost to the concertados group is higher than that to the public school one. but the fact remains that the autonomous community saves 9.165 € for each group in the concertados system. in fact, this is an example of co-payment where private citizens are subsidizing the autonomous community and not the other way around. regulation and accountability concertados follow most of the same rules as public schools in spain. in exchange, they must provide a free education, report financial information, respect the rules for community participation in education, and offer free, nondiscriminatory complementary services such as counseling, lunch, transportation, and school insurance. (villarroya, 2003). public authorities establish the general education program and make decisions concerning the size of the system, the number of units, suppression or creation of units, and the increases in the number of places in school sites for all schools under the system of agreements. concertados must also follow the government’s calendar, assignments, curriculum, and linguistic policies. accountability for concertados is exclusively financial and curricular: that is, the use of public funding must be justified and the national curriculum must be followed. the fundamental constitutional principles of teacher and parent participation must also be respected by concertados in their decisionmaking. despite having decision-making authority, the school owner must allow for teachers’ and parents’ participation in important decisions, such as how the general curriculum is adapted to the school’s context, how complementary and extracurricular activities are organized, and how school operational issues are handled. unlike public schools, concertados may have a school statement that must be respected by all the families enrolling their children at that school. the statement is usually of a religious nature, typically affirming adherence to catholic values and beliefs. another difference between public schools and concertados is that the school councils at 92 global education review 3(2) concertados are able to establish their own selection criteria for their teachers. based on those criteria, the school owner and principal choose staff to work at the school. teachers must be certified under spain’s teacher training regulations. in contrast, the public school hiring process places all qualified teachers into a regional teacher pool, and jobs are awarded based on examination results. public schools are not able to select their staff members; rather, teachers are assigned by the government. one respondent explained that teaching positions at concertados are considered good options, but they are not as desirable as public school teaching positions. another respondent noted that teachers in concertados work more hours each week, so their salary amounts per hour are actually lower than those of teachers in public schools. teaching positions in both types of schools tend to be permanent, although concertados school councils are allowed to dismiss a teacher. consequently, there is very little teacher turnover in spain. choice: ideology, religion, and competitive advantage the spanish educational system rests on the principles of plurality and freedom of choice. the key to an individual concertado’s success is its ability to differentiate itself and attract students. it does this through its educational mission. a concertado may rely on unique instructional options or other extracurricular offerings to differentiate itself from schools providing only a basic compulsory education. “you always have to have something that distinguishes you from the rest” (association spokesperson 2, personal communication, april 8, 2015). the ideological school statement, or ideario, of each concertado is important to accomplishing the school’s educational mission. ninety percent of the subsidized schools belong to a religious order or are linked to a church or diocese of spain, and have a leader who is a member of that religious order. even when they are not religiously oriented, concertados have specific ideologies that are usually different from those of the public schools. parents typically choose the schools based on ideological positions. one respondent explained that some schools are well known for their academic quality, while others for their athletics. another interviewee noted that parents tend to choose schools that reflect their personal convictions or at which they like the teaching. in contrast, fernandez and perez (2012) reported that parent choice is not so much related to ideology as it is to social class. they argued that parents tend to choose schools with children of the same or higher income level because they believe this will enhance their children’s results and future opportunities. this understanding is consistent with another interviewee’s observations that some parents select schools even if their personal convictions do not match. “very often we see muslim students attending a school with a catholic vision, and both parts—owners and families— accept that this coexistence is possible and no conflicts occur” (association spokesperson 1, personal communication, april 8, 2015). when asked about the differences between public schools and concertados, one respondent explained that the differences are not easily identifiable to a visitor. i have visited a private school … and haven’t found great differences to a public school. i mean, the things that pupils do, apart from the fact that students usually wear uniforms, that you may find a cross in the classroom, and that many of the students may voluntarily take part in a religious celebration. (government official 2, personal communication, april 3, 2015) school choice in spain and the united states 93 several respondents discussed the superior quality of the educational offerings by concertados. three reasons for this high quality were mentioned. first, each school’s unique mission is a source of unity among teachers, providing real strength because everyone is following the same vision. second, families demand high-quality teaching and programming and updated technology from these schools. third, most concertados ask for voluntary contributions by parents to support their curricular offerings. the contention that concertados offer a higher quality education is disputed by some researchers. izquierdo and gonzález (2015) show that the mean scores for mathematics (498 in public schools against 505 in concertados) and reading (499 in public schools against 502 in concertados) are very close when you take into account the sociological factor that public schools include students from all social classes, and concertados enroll mostly middle-class families. low-income parents have in most cases continued to utilize public schools (villarroya, 2003). the reporting of school rankings by valencian educational authorities of the top 20 schools on the standard tests includes 16 concertados and only four public schools, so the data is disseminated to families in a way that favors concertados. greater flexibility from government regulations for the concertados was something mentioned by one interviewee as a way to enhance the functioning of the schools. this would provide them with more liberty to implement their differentiating characteristics that make their schools unique. findings – michigan, united states michigan michigan is a state in the midwestern usa. it is the tenth most populous state and is the largest state by total land mass east of the mississippi river. the total population is around 10 million, with half of those residing in the southeastern part of the state in the detroit metro area. there are 900 public school districts serving 10,000 students ages 5-18 (michigan department of education, 2015). motivation for and establishment of charter schools the motivation for charter school legislation in michigan followed a national conversation in the 1990s around giving parents the ability to choose a new approach to education in their children’s schools. members of u.s. society were becoming dissatisfied with lack of control over major life decisions. from automobile models, to restaurants and coffee shops, choice was no longer just “nice to have”--it became an entitlement. parents were becoming more involved in their children’s education, and the default framework of governmentally operated schools was no longer adequate. parents, educators, and legislators began to seek not just a choice of existing options, but better options. the question of which schools michigan students could attend increasingly became a politically charged issue. prior to the 1994 school choice law, school districts were solely determined by geographical boundaries, and students were assigned to schools based on where they lived. michigan decision-makers were dissatisfied with the educational outcomes of the public school system, and they wanted better choices. a representative from an authorizer provided a perspective of this initial motivation: i believe the initial motivation was the improvement of student outcomes based on the idea that people change their behavior based on market competition, and competition for students would 94 global education review 3(2) encourage schools to establish more adaptive operating practices and meet the needs of students. (authorizer 2, personal communication, april 2015) policymakers were looking for long-term outcomes. establishing a system to compete with the current public school structure would be “some healthy disruption of the traditional public school system” (authorizer 1, personal communication, april 27, 2015). a representative of the michigan department of education supported the assertion that the move to charter schools was not just a move away from the traditional school system, but a strategy to change the overall system: i think the initial impetus was more choice and to send a very thorough message to the traditional public school community that you shouldn't get too complacent. the old business adage that if you don't take care of your customer, somebody else will [sic].” (michigan department of education representative, personal communication, april 2015) funding to provide choice, the michigan legislature created psas. these quasi-public schools are publicly funded, autonomously run schools that provide options outside of the home district’s control. interviews revealed a clear connection between the ability to establish charter schools and the funding structure. prior to 1994, schools were funded locally; tax dollars stayed within the community to support schools. although this had its advantages, such as a community’s ability to increase district funding by voting to levy taxes, there was significant inequity among districts. the difference in annual state aid between the poorest and richest school districts was over $6,000 per student (loeb & cullen, 2004). change came in 1993 with the passage of proposal a, a per-pupil funding model. instead of educational dollars staying local, the funds were collected at the state level and then distributed back to schools based on enrollment. once that framework was in place, charter schools could become a reality. as an authorizer stated, “all [of charter schools being possible] is dependent on the funding actually following the student, not being allocated to the entity itself” (authorizer 1, personal communication, april 27, 2015). although proposal a solved funding inequity, it created instability. one criticism of choice is that schools can no longer count on a specific level of revenue, which significantly impacts their abilities to plan and provide a quality education. proponents of charter schools, however, believe this was by design. by having the money follow the student, parents greatly influence the success of the schools. as stated by a michigan charter school leader: parents will vote with their feet . . . if you are unable to provide what parents want in terms of quality of education, safe nurturing environment, and fantastic graduation rates, preparing the kids for college and life . . . , they will vote with their feet and [enroll] their children elsewhere. (school leader, personal communication, april 23, 2015) many point to the student exodus from the detroit public schools (dps) as policy in action. while there are many reasons why the dps system’s enrollment has declined considerably in the past 20 years, including economy and relocation for employment, there has been a simultaneous boom in detroit-area charter schools. as of the 2014-2015 school year, more students in the city of detroit attended charter schools than attended dps (nces 2014). school choice in spain and the united states 95 despite the financial consequences of choice and competition for some traditional districts, many charter school proponents in michigan say the financial shift was worth it. before 1994, there was little to no oversight of public education in michigan. with authorizers, overseeing charter school contracts, there is now a culture of compliance, assessment, and quality. overall, there is still a mixed view on whether charter schools are worth the overall investment. the bottom line is school performance: are charter schools are performing better than their traditional counterparts? because charter schools were meant to be a better option, their quality and outcomes are crucial ingredients in their longevity. choice: innovation, religion, and regulation and accountability in order for the charter movement to be successful, charter schools must demonstrate they are providing a superior education to that of their traditional counterparts. they should be innovators of education. innovation the main area of innovation is autonomy. allowing almost anyone to start their own school, to try something new, or to invent a new way to educate students is the hallmark of the charter movement. although the process can be rigorous – only around 8% of all applications have been approved since 1994 by one university authorizer – virtually anyone can submit an application for a charter school in michigan to any authorizer. “those authorizers include public universities, the community colleges, the intermediate school districts, and the local school districts. for all of those except public universities, [authorizers] are confined to their geographic regions for where the schools can be located, with some exceptions for cyber charter schools.” (authorizer 1, personal communication, april 27, 2015) this autonomy not only allows for flexibility, but also creates a great deal of diversity among schools; no two charter schools are the same. although there are charter networks, groups of charter schools operated by a common educational service provider, each charter school has its own board of directors and mission statement. charter school characteristics range as widely as the communities in which they occupy. from a fine art integrated curriculum to an international focus, or a trade school to a college-prep program, each school seeks to find its own niche. other programs include a focus on students in various populations, such as dropout recovery, adjudicated youths, adult special needs, and middle colleges. as schools of choice, charter schools need to appeal to parents’ interests and to fulfill the needs of students within the community. one of the main limitations for charter schools when they try to be innovative is the current political environment. as one michigan authorizer noted: at the outset i don't believe the original drafters envisioned the entrenched interests that would come to thwart the competition. to that end, many of the efforts to innovation and improving student outcomes with more innovative means are handicapped by the efforts to prevent the opposition from eliminating the competition and also the opposition's interest in making sure that schools look similar to them. i think the opposition does a good job of making sure that the public wants schools that look like schools, rather changing the paradigm of what expectations are for learning. (authorizer 2, personal communication, april 2015) 96 global education review 3(2) religion in the united states, public schools have been separate from religious affiliation for quite some time (everson v. board of education, 1947). today, any organization in michigan that accepts public funding is required to have policies ensuring that the school and its staff do not promote a particular religious or private belief. the authorizer has a role in ensuring this separation: “by michigan constitution there's a separation that schools cannot be connected. there can't be any public funding to support a religious school that is by [sic] constitution. there's [sic] very clear separation between religion and public schools” (authorizer 1, personal communication, april 27, 2015). some current charter schools were actually conversion schools. former parochial schools transitioned from private school status to a charter school, primarily for financial reasons. it is possible for a private school in michigan to become a charter school only if it ceases operating as a private entity. it must obtain a charter contract from a qualified authorizer, and then reopen as a charter school that meets the legal and contractual requirements set forth in the charter contract as well as all applicable laws. if a charter school uses a building from a current or former church or religious organization, all religious symbols must be removed or covered. regulation and accountability a charter school is a state-supported public school established by part 6a of michigan’s revised school code (mcl 380.501 et seq.). charter schools operate under a contract issued by a state authorizer, or by a designated public educational institution (school district, intermediate school district, community college, or university). charter schools may elect to enroll students in any range of grades pk-12, and may not charge tuition. they cannot discriminate and must have a random selection process if their projected enrollment exceeds their capacity (mde, 2014). accountability of the charter schools is greater than that of schools in traditional districts. in addition to the same regulatory requirements imposed on traditional districts, including academic, fiscal, and operational rules, charter schools have additional requirements set by their authorizers. the level of oversight is determined by the charter contract. a few of our interviews provided additional context for how accountability occurs in the charter schools. a management company official noted the following: michigan compared to other states has a lot more regulations that you got to pay attention to. that’s good because you want to protect the health and safety of kids. but also, at some point, for all the funds that we spend on compliance, those are things that could be spent more directly in the classroom. in some ways it erodes, if you will, some of the premise of charters, that it's going to be the innovative solution . . . and that in exchange for accountability, that your school can be closed down after five years in exchange for having an authorizer paying attention to what you do, you're going to be freed up from some state regs. in michigan, we have all the accountability, all the oversight, but we don't have the freedom that exists in other states. (management company official, personal communication, may 18, 2015) originally, the charter school law of 1994 allowed charter schools a great deal of flexibility in return for performance. dubbed the “freedom for accountability” approach, the law has since been modified to mirror that of the traditional public schools. although there is little difference school choice in spain and the united states 97 in minimum requirements for all public schools including charters, authorizers typically go above and beyond these regulations. holding the ultimate authority, authorizers can hold their schools accountable with actions up to and including charter revocation. as a school leader explained, “in the u.s., some 6,700 charter schools have opened. at least 1,100 of these have closed. the numbers that i've seen are around 15%, so 15% of all charters that have opened have been closed by their authorizers” (school leader, personal communication, april 23, 2015). analysis – the autonomous community of valencia, spain and michigan, united states motivation for and establishment of schools a key difference between the spanish and u.s. school choice systems can be seen in what motivated their beginnings. spain embraced choice shortly after becoming a democratic nation. it had an extensive network of private, mostly catholic schools, that were educating citizens who could afford the fees. the nation turned to choice and developed its system of agreements to effectuate the rights to an education guaranteed to all citizens in its newly minted constitution. it made sense to capitalize on the private network of schools by bringing them into an integrated network of schools wherein they would receive financial support if they agreed to educate the nation’s students while following government guidelines. the turn towards choice in the united states, on the other hand, was part of a movement by consumers demanding more choice. its adoption was also spurred by the widespread acknowledgement of the varying levels of funding and quality of traditional public schools. charter schools began in areas where the quality of the public schools was very low. the intent was to give parents the ability to remove their children from failing schools and to spur competition among schools for students so that the educational quality of all schools would be improved. another key difference is found in the process for establishing the choice schools. in spain, the process begins with an individual or a legal entity starting a private school. the school must be fully operational with a building, staff, and students before it may apply to be part of the system of agreements. if accepted into the integrated educational network, it becomes a concertado and receives financial support for its operation. in michigan, schools do not need to be operational before they are designated as charter schools. in fact, the michigan department of education has provided grants for initiation of new charter schools. individuals or groups may apply to start charter schools. in addition, private or public schools may apply to be converted into charter schools. funding the funding structures for choice schools in spain and michigan are also very different. valencian authorities support concertados by directly paying teacher salaries and providing some funding to schools for operations— estimated to be 50% of that paid to public schools in the region, according to one of our interviewees (or 90% total cost of education according to some researchers). that amount is supplemented by voluntary contributions by parents, usually around 15 to 50 euros a month, to provide complementary opportunities. michigan pays a per-student stipend to its psas of around $7,100 annually, which is the same amount provided to the traditional public schools. in exchange for this money, all instruction must be provided to students for free; however, schools are able to charge fees for sports and other voluntary activities. although 98 global education review 3(2) michigan pays the same base amount for the education of its pupils whether they attend a traditional public or a psa, the state does not provide facilities funding to psas, as it does to traditional public schools. this per student payment system has had a destabilizing effect on some traditional school districts in michigan, most notably detroit public schools because it has contributed to dps’s dramatic loss of students in recent years, moving from 214,000 to 50,000 students. regulation and accountability in both countries, the legal structure of choice schools is designed to provide some degree of flexibility from the traditional school regulations, so they can innovate with their educational missions and their instructional delivery methods. they do have to follow key government educational requirements, however. for example, in spain, schools in the system of agreements must follow the government’s curriculum, calendar, and linguistic policies. in michigan, psas must meet state learning targets, participate in student testing, and report student data. one important contributor to flexibility in spain is the concertados’ ability to select their own qualified teachers. this is different than the system used in the spanish public schools where qualified teacher applicants are assigned to schools without input from the school directors. michigan grants hiring autonomy to both its traditional public and charter schools. school directors in spain find this flexibility an important tool in gaining staff buy-in to the schools’ unique educational missions. michigan psas are held to a higher accountability standard than traditional public schools because they have both government and authorizer oversight. schools operate on limited term charters that can be revoked or nonrenewed if the psa violates the terms of the charter or does not deliver the promised academic results. this high level of regulation creates a tension in the system because psas were incorporated into michigan’s educational system to introduce more educational innovations through enhanced autonomy and flexibility than in the traditional public system; yet all of the requirements limit innovation. choice: ideology, religion, and competitive advantage in both spain and the united states, choice schools need to attract students to survive; they do this in large part through their educational ideologies and the academic results they produce. in both countries, choice schools are known by their unique educational missions, willingness to try the latest developments in education (e.g., incorporating technology into the pedagogy), and marketing of these efforts. in spain, parents select a school based in large part on the school’s ideology, such as its religious nature, or its special focus, such as sports, languages, or academics. in michigan, parents choose psas based on their value propositions (e.g., conservatism, creativity) or their student academic performance. psas must deliver a superior education from traditional public schools in order to be chosen. an important distinction among the countries’ laws regarding choice schools is the role religion plays. the spanish constitution guarantees parents’ rights for their children to “receive religious and moral instruction that is in accordance with their own convictions” (c.e. 1978). the u.s. constitution, on the other hand, guarantees the separation of church and state (u.s. const. art. 1). in practice, this means that spanish concertados maintain their religious character, so students are able to voluntarily participate in religious curriculum, activities, and celebrations. in contrast, michigan psas, even if they were formerly religious schools, school choice in spain and the united states 99 must remove all symbols and references to religious practices in their buildings and curriculum. however, michigan schools are allowed to discuss religion in courses if it is relevant to the curriculum and not done in a proselytizing manner (everson v. board of education, 1947). in spain, religion is one of the most important distinguishing factors for attracting students to a concertado. although some charter schools in michigan maintain characteristics and values that align with specific religious beliefs, students must attend a private school, at their own expense, to receive a religious education. the school choice framework the school choice framework, which considers choice, deregulation, and accountability as policy levers, differs between the systems in michigan and the valencian region. the following table highlights the key features of each system in relation to the choice framework. table 2. comparison of michigan, u.s. and valencia, spain school choice frameworks location choice deregulation accountability michigan, u.s. charter schools (psas) psas offer parents an alternative to the traditional public schools wherein schools compete for children. these schools are supposed to be more innovative in their educational offerings because they have been given more autonomy and flexibility than the traditional public schools. they are held more accountable to the laws that do apply to them and for the academic progress of their students because they have an additional level of accountability from the authorizers. valencia, spain concertados concertados offer parents an alternative to the public school and private school networks by creating statesupported private schools and were introduced at a time in the country’s history where the public school system lacked the capacity to educate all children. although they are much more heavily regulated than private schools, concertados have flexibility from some public school regulations, such as the hiring of teachers, so that they have the ability to create innovative educational environments. this aspect of the choice framework does not fit with our exploration of the spanish concertado system. these schools have more accountability than private schools but the same level of accountability as public schools. 100 global education review 3(2) the choice framework provides a useful way to understand michigan’s charter schools because its system was designed to create innovative public schools around the policy drivers of choice, deregulation, and accountability. the framework does not work as well with spain’s system of agreements for concertados because they were initially designed to solve an educational capacity issue by providing public funding to private schools. in this process, the government created a system that offered parents choice and schools a lower level of regulation than traditional public schools. the accountability lever, although present, is not a driving force for educational innovation in spain, as it is in michigan. rather, it is more of a by-product of including private schools into the government-sponsored regional educational system. conclusion we began this paper with a brief explanation of our interest in comparing spain’s concertados system with that of the michigan charter school program. we then asked and answered two essential questions. first, how do the educational choice systems represented by spanish concertados and michigan charter schools compare in the motivations and methods for establishing and funding schools, and the role ideology plays in their operation? our second question explored the ways spanish concertados and michigan charter schools can be understood using the school choice framework as far as establishment of programs, spain’s program is federally sponsored and regionally funded while the u.s. program is state-sponsored and funded. while this difference is important, we found that the initial motivation behind each system was strikingly different. in spain, federal public funding of private education was an attempt to increase access to the various regions’ high-quality, private schools by lowering enrollment costs for families, especially those families from lower and middle economic strata. in so doing, the law sought to integrate these high-quality schools into the national public school system with limited input from the regions. in the u.s., charter schools were primarily regional initiatives and in michigan, specifically, psas were intended to address inadequate public education—real or perceived—by providing parents with free market choice. choice was intended to drive innovation and improvement in the quality of education throughout the system. regarding ideology, we note that although both types of schools are dependent upon their missions to attract students, concertados in spain are allowed to provide religious education while michigan charter schools, like other public schools, may not. thus most concertados have a distinctive religious character. this feature may be combined with other factors to attract students to attend. charter schools must rely on other characteristics to attract students. we identified strong parallels involving school choice, using gawlik’s school choice concept (2007), with its three policy levers: choice, deregulation, and accountability, as a basis for comparison. we noted a key difference: spain’s system allows public funding of private education, whereas, michigan’s charter schools are most notably public operations. in spain, concertados do provide increased choice to a point, but families must be able afford the fees associated with cost of attending (at least 10% and upwards of 50% of the total cost of education). while the additional fees cannot legally serve as a deterrent to choice, clearly these substantial fees represent barriers to choice. the result is enrollment that favors families with higher standards of living. in comparison, michigan charter schools, cannot school choice in spain and the united states 101 charge fees for educational services or items and are required to provide a free public education. this requirement eliminated direct costs as a barrier to entry, and thus it is not surprising to find michigan charter schools enrolling a greater percentage of students from lower economic strata than do the concertados of spain. the regulatory environments governing both concertados and charter schools are designed to provide flexibility while holding schools to key legal requirements such as curriculum in spain and student learning targets in the u.s. the accountability environments between the two systems differ, however. spain’s concertados are held to the same accountability standards as its public schools while michigan’s psas have an additional level of accountability from their authorizers. ultimately, the comparison between concertados and charter schools can provide policymakers in both countries insight into alternative ways to think about government support for non-traditional public schools from systems that have functioned well over the past 25-30 years. each provides a unique, yet related, set of characteristics that offer educational choice to families. the valencian model has proven especially effective at doing this at a high level of educational quality. although charter schools in the u.s. have many proponents, their quality results have been more mixed. references angloinfo: the global ex pat network: schooling and education in spain (2015). retrieved from http://spain.angloinfo.com/family/schoolingeducation/ burns, c. (2013, july 31). sisd officially dissolves buena vista schools. abc12-wjrt-tv. retrieved from http://www.abc12.com/story/22966432/sisdofficially-dissolves-buena-vista-schools fernández llera, r., & muñiz pérez, m. (2012). colegios concertados y selección de escuela en españa: un círculo vicioso [state-funded private schools and school choice in spain: a vicious circle]. presupuesto y gasto público, 67, 97-118. gawlik, m. a. (2007). beyond the charter schoolhouse door: teacher-perceived autonomy, education and urban society, 39, 524-553. instituto nacional de estadistica [statistics national institute]. (2012, december 28). encuesta sobre el gasto de los hogares en educación [survey of household spending on education]. retrieved from http://www.ine.es/prensa/np763.pdf izquierdo, j., & gonzalez, r. (2015). cumplimiento de los principios de economía, eficacia y eficiencia en la gestión de fondos públicos destinados a la enseñanza primaria en la comunitat valenciana. auditoría pública, 65, 31 – 40. loeb, s., & cullen, j.b. (2004). school finance reform in michigan: evaluating proposal a. in j. yinger & w. duncombe (eds.), helping children left behind: state aid and the pursuit of educational equity (pp. 215-250). cambridge, ma: mit press. mackinac center for public policy. (2006). takeover of detroit schools shows few intended results. retrieved from http://www.mackinac.org/7556 michigan radio newsroom. (2013, july 3). struggling school districts can be dissolved under new law [radio broadcast]. retrieved from http://michiganradio.org/post/struggling-schooldistricts-can-be-dissolved-under-new-law salisbury, d. f. school choice: learning from other countries [commentary]. (2005). cato institute, http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/scho ol-choice-learning-other-countries smith, b. (2013, july 26). inkster schools first to be dissolved; students split across 4 districts. mlive. retrieved from http://www.mlive.com/education/index.ssf/2013/ 07/inkster_first_schools_to_be_di.html sugar, m., & sugar, j. (2013, may). timeline & historical facts regarding municipal financial emergencies in michigan. sugar law center. retrieved from http://sugarlaw.org/wpcontent/uploads/2013/05/emergency-managertimeline-background-facts.pdf u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (2014). the condition of education 2014 (nces 2014-083), charter school enrollment. valencia trader. (2014). information about the spanish schoolsystem. the valencia trader. retrieved from http://www.valenciatrader.com/valencia/valenciasc hools/ spanishschoolsystem villarroya, a. (2003). a look at school choice in spain. mediterranean journal of educational studies, 7(2), 21-36. http://www.ine.es/prensa/np763.pdf http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/school-choice-learning-other-countries http://www.cato.org/publications/commentary/school-choice-learning-other-countries 102 global education review 3(2) zepeda, e. a., marmolejo, f., matthews, d., & parellada, m. (2006). supporting the contributions of higher education institutions to regional development. peer review report: valencia, spain. oced. retrieved from www.oecd.org/…ion/skills-beyondschool/37809394.pdf about the author(s) regina r. umpstead, j.d., phd, is associate professor and assessment coordinator in the department of educational leadership at central michigan university. dr. umpstead’s research interests explore the law and policy dimensions of education issues, pre-kindergarten-grade 12. she has written numerous scholarly articles and two books: professional responsibility for educators and the michigan code of ethics (2010, omni publishers) and preventing special education litigation: eight legal lesson plans (2015, tc press). benjamin p. jankens, edd, is assistant professor of educational leadership at central michigan university. dr. jankens teaches courses in the areas of school choice and charter schools, school and community relations, organizational theory, culture and change, and school and district leadership. his research interests are focused on the leader’s impact on the educational environment; include a broad array of educational reform and policy issues in the k12 setting. dr. jankens has been a teacher, principal, and superintendent of schools. he earned his doctorate in educational leadership from eastern michigan university. pablo ortega gil, phd, is associate professor at the university of alicante, spain, where he is mostly devoted to teacher training. he works full time as head of the education inspectorate in alicante. he is responsible for supervising all the schools in that area, as well as for advising and counseling both teachers and families. linda s. weiss, j.d. ms. weiss’s degrees in early childhood education and educational administration led to a ten-year career in k-12 schools before she attended and graduated cum laude from michigan state university school of law in 2001. she has been a practicing attorney for almost 15 years. she began her doctoral program in educational leadership at central michigan university in 2014. her areas of interest include college affordability, student access and persistence; and research, writing, and editing in both legal and educational contexts. bruce umpstead is managing partner of scaleup education partners, providing strategic technology and data advisory, representation, and business development services in pre-kindergarten through post-secondary education. from 2007 to 2013, he served as michigan’s state “edtech” director. in 2014, he completed a graduate-level, study aboard program in spain through central michigan university’s educational leadership program. his comparative study served as the foundational research for this project. bruce holds a b.a. in public administration and a m.b.a. in finance from michigan state university. http://ccs.infospace.com/clickhandler.ashx?ld=20150410&app=1&c=genieo4a.1&s=genieo&rc=genieo4a&dc=&euip=174.65.140.139&pvaid=9dee4bcc6563466393d2b76e6d753242&dt=desktop&fct.uid=3131389399b9404b99da909b9827cdbb&en=8ldtv8qa6bacjb5nvtu3ypdcztfubuomanncsyis%2f8q%3d&du=www.oecd.org%2feducation%2fskills-beyond-school%2f37809394.pdf&ru=http%3a%2f%2fwww.oecd.org%2feducation%2fskills-beyond-school%2f37809394.pdf&ap=6&coi=771&cop=main-title&npp=6&p=0&pp=0&ep=6&mid=9&hash=420f282dd223da03330e89ab13be5f60 http://ccs.infospace.com/clickhandler.ashx?ld=20150410&app=1&c=genieo4a.1&s=genieo&rc=genieo4a&dc=&euip=174.65.140.139&pvaid=9dee4bcc6563466393d2b76e6d753242&dt=desktop&fct.uid=3131389399b9404b99da909b9827cdbb&en=8ldtv8qa6bacjb5nvtu3ypdcztfubuomanncsyis%2f8q%3d&du=www.oecd.org%2feducation%2fskills-beyond-school%2f37809394.pdf&ru=http%3a%2f%2fwww.oecd.org%2feducation%2fskills-beyond-school%2f37809394.pdf&ap=6&coi=771&cop=main-title&npp=6&p=0&pp=0&ep=6&mid=9&hash=420f282dd223da03330e89ab13be5f60 148 global education review 3(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: heißenberger, petra (2016). leadership for primary schools: an examination of innovation within an austrian educational context. global education review, 3(1). 148-163 leadership for primary schools: an examination of innovation within an austrian educational context petra heißenberger university college of teacher education in lower austria abstract this study examined relationships between the work of innovative school principals and innovative primary schools determined by defining eight areas of school leadership: instructional development, classroom management, school organization, social interaction, personnel development, cooperation, infrastructure and school marketing. a questionnaire was sent out to 658 primary school principals in lower austria. data were analyzed using lime survey, spss© (statistical package for the social sciences), and pasw© (predictive analysis soft ware). to determine to what extent the self-assessment of principals supported the existence of respective areas of innovation, their self-assessment (independent variable) was correlated with the outcomes from the item grouping (i.e., innovation themes). in addition, a correlation calculation with correlation parameters by pearson and spearman was executed. in summary, it must be pointed out that between the self-assessments of the principals and the subsequent self-assessment of school innovation themes no statistically significant correlations were verifiable. this study supports the need for further education and training that can support principals in their role as designers of their schools. key words innovation, principals, primary school, school leadership statement of the problem in the austrian system of education, compulsory schooling starts at the age of six and lasts for nine years. following primary school, students can choose from among two different types of secondary schools – new middle school and grammar school each varying in academic emphases and admissions requirements. upon successful completion of secondary school, students may continue their education by selecting a school that focuses on either general or vocational education. at the age of fourteen they can either stay at grammar school or leave for another year at a polytechnic school followed by a three-or-four-year apprenticeship. ______________________________ corresponding author: petra heißenberger, university college of teacher education lower austria 2500 baden, mühlgasse 67, austria email: petra.heissenberger@ph-noe.ac.at leadership for primary schools 149 school quality is undoubtedly an important issue both nationally and internationally, and the development of a highperforming and innovative school is linked to the leadership skills and qualities of the school leader. in several countries around the world, the school leader’s role entails a heavy focus on instructional leadership, or leadership for learning (stewart, 2013). in ontario, for example, university preparation for school leaders is centered on skill building to support academic instruction. singapore’s approach to school leadership includes recruiting top teachers and placing them into middlemanagement positions, possibly leading to further full-time training aimed at maximizing organizational performance, designing schools, and implementing innovations within a school (stewart, 2013). in austria, the selection of a school leader is a multi-step process that involves the candidate’s attendance at a hearing designed to carefully assess professional qualifications and experience. if successful, the candidate is appointed by the board of education of lower austria. principals may first work in their new position without any advanced training, but are required to take part in an inservice course on school management within their first four years on the job. internationally, the focus on instructional leadership represents a shift in emphasis for school principals whose roles were previously defined primarily through administrative tasks. i am responsible for the further training and education, the school management courses and the school management masters program for teachers and principals in lower austria – that´s why i focus on leadership in my research. i´ve taught in primary schools years before, so i decided to focus on primary schools too. principals always have to implement innovations in schools – that´s why i focus on innovations. research can be very helpful to develop courses and trainings for principals. in austria there will be a constitutional amendment starting in 2019: principals will have to complete a school management course before applying for the job of a principal. the new role of the principal takes on added significance as schools are increasingly faced with the task of preparing students with the requisite knowledge and skills to meet the changing needs of technology-based economies. principals must establish learning environments that foster “more innovative thinking skills, cultural awareness, higher-order cognitive skills, and sophisticated communication, and collaborative skills (suarez-orozco & sattin, 2007). such educational innovations directly respond to the need for flexibility in public education as schools implement a variety of instructional and administrative changes that address the ongoing needs associated with globalization (ellison, 2009). at the core of innovative processes are practices of experimentation and transformation in both instructional and administrative realms (ellison, 2009). the capability as well as the willingness to participate in innovations and to integrate them into the educational system have become modern imperatives. the promise connected with innovations is to change a state of affairs that is regarded in need of improvement. more often than not innovations are put into practice only locally, they have undesired and at times unexpected side-effects and remain on the level of being short episodes. the perception of this problem corresponds with an increasing public, political and scientific interest in innovation and its transfer. the educational sciences also have taken on this complex of topics in its research (bormann, 2011). transfer research examines the way in which innovations spread in the educational 150 global education review 3(1) system and on which conditions such a process depends. so research is carried out to which extent the intensity of cooperation between persons of a social system, the innovation climate and the support of the acting people contribute to their permanent establishment (fussangel & gräsel, 2006). existing analyses of reported transfer successes revealed that in this field above all content-related, personnel and educational predictors should receive attention (nickolaus & gräsel, 2006). in addition, the qualitative integration of an innovative idea in terms of value changes, assumption of responsibility and permanence of the reform idea must not be ignored (gräsel, bormann, schütte, trempler, fischbach & asseburg, 2012). this study deals with the personnel predictors with regard to principals in primary schools: is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria? what are the most important skills of/for innovative school principals? research questions given the ever-changing needs of schools within a global context, how exactly do principals envision and articulate their roles and responsibilities in innovation processes? what styles of leadership support this process? the current research focused on innovation in austrian primary schools, with the intention of strengthening awareness of leadership practices that may facilitate innovation within these contexts. as such, the specific research questions were as follows: 1. how many primary schools in lower austria could be identified as innovative? 2. how do primary school principals in lower austria assess themselves as innovative? 3. is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria? the goals of this research were to (a) examine principals’ influence on the development and implementation of innovative practices in primary schools, and (b) provide an opportunity for principals to reflect on their practice. the study further examined the distinguishing factors in school management that help to determine the differences between schools that are innovative, and those that are more pedestrian in practice. finally, the study sought to determine whether there is a transparent connection between innovative management and innovative schools. methodology research sample the sample for this research consisted of 658 primary school principals in lower austria. in order to locate the contact information for primary school principals, i contacted the board of education of lower austria and searched school homepages using the google search engine. using these methods, i was able to obtain the email addresses for all primary school principals within this geographic region. the questionnaire the questionnaire that served as the basis of this research includes eight areas of school leadership as articulated in the innovation check for schools (ics), a guide developed by members of the university college of lower austria and the university of economics in vienna in 2009.1 the themes of the ics include (1) instructional development, (2) classroom management, (3) school organization, (4) social interaction, (5) personnel development, (6) cooperation, (7) infrastructure, and (8) school marketing. each theme of the ics is defined by leadership for primary schools 151 a question, followed by several statements that respondents are asked to evaluate in terms of the extent to which they agree. for example, the guiding question under the theme of instructional development is “how innovative is teaching at your school?” examples of the likert statements that follow include “we have a variety of teaching methods,” and “we have individual tasks for each student.” the actual questionnaire disseminated to primary school principals is a modified version of the innovation check for schools described above (see appendix a). specifically, additional questions were added in order to (a) collect demographic information on the principals included in the research sample, (b) assess the type and extent of support that principals require, and (c) provide additional space for principals to comment on their work. the questionnaire with nine areas of school leadership was emailed to all research participants. of the 658 questionnaires distributed, 78% were answered and returned. slightly less than half (n = 309) of the principals indicated that they are responsible for only one school site. of this group, 35% worked as a principal anywhere between one and five years; 31%, between six and ten years; and 32% held more than ten years of experience in the field. approximately 40% of those responsible for one school site also reported that they were free from teaching obligations. over 80% of the surveyed principals are female (see table 1). demographic data characteristic value participants (n) 516 gender [%] women 81 men 8 no answer 11 number of years working as a principal 1-5 years 33 6-10 years 27 more than 10 years 29 no answer 12 number of school sites one school 60 two schools 23 three schools 6 no answer 12 teaching obligations not required to teach 45 required to teach 44 no answer 11 table 1. demographic data of research participants. 152 global education review 3(1) statistical procedures and analyses data were analyzed using lime survey, spss© (statistical package for the social sciences), and pasw© (predictive analysis soft ware). innovation data were retrieved in the same order in which they were presented on the questionnaire (see appendix a). the first research question (how many primary schools in lower austria could be identified as innovative?) was important to assess the effects of the initiation and acceleration of innovation processes on principals, teachers, and on the school as a system. the second research question (how do primary school principals in lower austria assess themselves as innovative?) helped to identify a broad spectrum of characteristics of innovation in connection to the work of principals. the third and final research question (is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria?) reflected the central theme of this research, as it described the actual project goal: the designation of school innovation areas that are affected by the factor school management. to achieve these ends, i surveyed primary school principals to determine possible innovation potentials in the management of lower austrian primary schools. to assess the degree of innovation for each topic of concern in the questionnaire, a sub-population of schools was formed to test individual topics within the identified spheres of essential innovation themes. the subgroups were counted to determine how innovative schools are in the defined areas (e.g., teaching development, personal development, etc.). certain innovation themes were determined to be essential based on two features: the question quality (unambiguousness) could be classified as very high and the variability (factual existence at the school) could be easily and quickly established. this methodology obviated the respondent’s tendency to mark item groups or individual items too optimistically, as factual evidence of an item’s existence in the school could be easily and objectively verified. in this way, innovation themes were defined as fulfilled if all items of the questionnaire were assessed positively. an auxiliary variable and sub-totalities were formed to determine how many schools were innovative in each area of innovation. additionally, in schools where an area of innovation was processed apparently well, the self-assessments of principals were correlated with the sub-totalities. the sub-totality of the innovation area “development of teaching” i.e. consists of three items that were determined to be very meaningful. this step helped to clarify the extent to which the top-down process of steering school innovation was verifiable. although a bottom-up process has not been proven, the additional step of correlating the self-assessments of principals with sub-totalities helped to prove the force of innovation in topdown-processes. this does not mean that a bottom-up process can be indirectly assumed to have been proven. however, it does specify the areas in which bottom-up processes can be assumed. findings to determine to what extent the self-assessment of principals supported the existence of respective areas of innovation, their selfassessment (independent variable) was correlated with the outcomes from the item grouping (i.e., innovation themes). in order to increase the reliability of the achieved result, two more observations were taken into account. in addition, a correlation calculation with correlation parameters by pearson and leadership for primary schools 153 spearman was executed, which is cited in relevant literature as a frequent alternative to kendall´s tau. the intent was to determine the significance of the random sample between subtotalities 1-6 and the correlated item. as a result of this verification check, it became apparent that there was no relevant relation in case of a further variation of the correlation measurement. in summary, it must be pointed out that between the self-assessments of the principals and the subsequent self-assessment of school innovation themes, no statistically significant correlations were verifiable. research question 1: how many schools could be identified as innovative? principals assessed their schools as very innovative in the area of teaching development. for example, 72% of the surveyed principals were counted as belonging to the group of those schools that fulfill the criteria completely. most principals (65%) viewed themselves positively in the area of personnel development and recognized that the selection and development of personnel are very important determinants for the successful development of each school. approximately forty percent (41%) of the principals identified weaknesses in their leadership in the area of organization of teaching, 47% realized that there were deficits in the area of cooperation, and 48% were convinced that there were deficits in the area of school leadership. it is striking that needs were identified in exactly those areas of innovation where school as an institution is dependent on its local sphere. in primary schools, the organization of teaching always requires flexibility on the part of the parents (e.g., the regulation of lesson times). moreover, cooperation must be gained from those partners, with whom in the school’s view it is desirable. the transfer of functions to delegate tasks to the staff not only means that these are accepted by them, but also that the changed role of school management needs to be adopted from the outside (i.e., parents, local policy) a circumstance that may explain why the values in the innovation area of school organization were so low (54%). with regard to this research question, the following interim result can be formulated: although primary school principals realized that the field of teaching development is the predestined field of innovation, they also expressed the belief that school management alone was not in a position to develop innovations beyond socio-political controlling mechanisms (i.e., supervisory authorities). research question 2: how do primary school principals assess themselves as innovative? the self-assessment data (see table 2) show that principals were very honest in judging their own capabilities and qualities, but they did not always trust their skills as school leaders. when it comes to empathy (i view myself as extraordinarily empathetic) and motivation (i can motivate other people quite well), a rather small percentage of principals (38%) rated these statements as “totally true”. an even smaller percentage rated themselves as conflict competent (22%) (i am quite able to deal with conflicts) and self-confident (21%) (i have great self-confidence). 154 global education review 3(1) statements on self-assessment totally true rather true less true not true no answer i view myself as especially communicative. 51 34 3 0 12 i view myself as very committed. 67 21 0 0 12 i view myself as extraordinarily empathetic. 38 41 3 0 18 i view myself as pedagogically competent. 57 30 0 0 13 i view myself as very able to deal with conflicts. 22 49 16 0 13 i like taking initiative. 48 36 3 0 13 i like challenges. 42 37 9 0 12 i like working in a team. 65 22 1 0 12 i have great self-confidence. 21 58 8 0 12 my organisation competence is outstanding. 42 41 4 0 13 i can motivate other people quite well. 38 46 3 0 13 i like working as a lone fighter. 3 9 43 30 15 table 2. rounded percentages of participants’ responses (self-assessment). in conjunction with the values established in their self-assessment of pedagogical competences, we can derive from the first indication (i.e, “i view myself as very able to deal with conflicts”) that principals do in fact possess these essential traits, but they view these as qualities within themselves that are not yet fully developed. if principals are to develop and facilitate innovations within their schools, they must be able to address their colleagues’ concerns with empathy. additionally, they must demonstrate selfconfidence and the ability to convey their own ideas with full commitment. the results of the self-assessment also raise considerations for future education, training, and recruitment of principals. specifically, they will have to produce evidence of essential leadership qualities such as motivational readiness, ability to deal with conflicts, empathy, and confidence in their own potential. research question 3: is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria? based on the results of this research, it is reasonable to conclude that there is no relation between the work of an innovative principal and the existence of an innovative principal. principals do not promote innovations as their top priority, nor are they averse to them. instead, it seems that the source of school innovation is likely to be found in the staff itself, or is brought in as an impulse from outside the school. in sum, the study does not support the belief that topdown processes are important for the successful development of schools. discussion initiative, independence, competence, selfconfidence, and personal responsibility are leadership for primary schools 155 necessary dispositions for school principals because schools also take on current social challenges for which personal commitment is necessary. when the school leader assumes responsibility for the design of the institutional culture, innovations become a natural, everyday occurrence at school (cf. altrichter & schratz, 1992). this study supports the need for further education and training that can support principals in their role as designers of their schools. this support, amongst other things, should work to strengthen the consciousness and competence of principals as leaders who influence innovation processes in their schools. the design and planning of support include consideration of the following questions: • what kind of school management behavior promotes the innovation of teaching? • what kind of school management behavior promotes innovation of schools in general? • do teaching innovations come into existence independent of the attitude or performance of the principal? • does the school develop independent of the behavior of the principal? • are there factors in the principal’s conduct that inhibit teaching innovations? future research as indicated above, a central issue in this research is the need for further education and training of principals that strengthens their motivational and organizational skills, thus supporting the development and implementation of educational innovations. within the framework of this study, it cannot be clearly demonstrated that principals who assess themselves as innovative have exercised primary influence on innovations. what constitutes an innovative leader? can leadership be trained or taught? the role of bottom-up-processes remain questionable. moreover, innovation processes depend on extra-curricular partners. policies that encourage bottom-up leadership might be as effective as top-down leadership. follow-up projects will examine these questions in greater detail. notes 1. for more information, go to http://www.phnoe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheckschule.html references altrichter, h. & schratz, m. 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(2012). perspektiven der forschung im bereich bildung für nachhaltige entwicklung. in: bmbf (hrsg.): bildung für nachhaltige entwicklung – beiträge zur bildungsforschung. bildungsforschung band 39, s. 7-25. berlin. http://www.phnoe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheckschule.html jäger, m. (2004). transfer in schulentwicklungsprojekten. vs verlag, wiesbaden. malik, f. (2014): führen leisten leben. wirksames management für eine neue welt. campus verlag: frankfurt. http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html http://www.ph-noe.ac.at/forschung/projekte/innovationscheck-schule.html 156 global education review 3(1) nickolaus, r. & gräsel, c. (hrsg.) (2006). innovation und transfer. expertisen zur transferforschung. schneider: baltmannsweiler. stewart, v. (2013). school leadership around the world. educational leadership, 70(7), 48-54. suarez-orozco, m. & sattin, c. (2007). wanted: global citizens. educational leadership, 64(7), 58-62. about the author petra heißenberger, phd, is deputy head of the department of educational management and leadership at the university college of teacher education in lower austria. she has taught in primary school, and currently works with principals and teaches course in school management. her interests include special needs education and therapeutic pedagogy, communication and leadership, human resource management, reflections on one's own role, and active participation in learning communities. appendix a research study questionnaire: leadership for primary schools: an examination of innovation within an austrian educational context i. school site and principal note: your executive status “appointed” or “entrusted” is regarded as equal in this research study. in case you run several school sites fill in the questionnaire of just one school site. 1. in which educational region is your school located? a. educational region 1 b. educational region 2 c. educational region 3 d. educational region 4 e. educational region 5 2. how long have you been managing this school as principal? (if you have previous experience as a principal, include that in your years of experience below). a. 1-5 years b. 6-10 years c. 11-15 years d. longer than 15 years how many schools do you manage? a. 1 school b. 2 schools c. 3 schools 3. as a school principal i am a. released from teaching obligations b. not released from teaching obligations leadership for primary schools 157 4. gender: a. female b. male 5. how much time do you spend on administrative activities at your school and how much on pedagogical activities? note: the sum of these activities should equal 100%. a. administrative activities: _________ % b. pedagogical activities: _________ % 6. how do you view your leadership style? a. mainly staff-oriented b. mainly subject (factually)-oriented c. balance between staff-orientation and subject-orientation (factual orientation) 7. how many pupils currently attend your school at the moment? a. less than 50 pupils b. 51 -100 pupils c. 101 – 150 pupils d. more than 150 pupils 8. how many classes (forms) are there at your school at the moment? a. 1-3 classes b. 4-7 classes c. 8-12 classes d. more than 12 classes 9. how many permanent teachers do you have on staff? note: in case you have a teaching obligation because you are not released from teaching, please include yourself in that number. here, it is about the number of persons, irrespective of how many lessons they teach. a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. 11-15 persons d. 16-20 persons e. 21-25 persons f. more than 25 persons 10. how many teachers with less than 10 years of service do you have at your school? a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. more than 10 persons 158 global education review 3(1) 11. how many teachers with 11-20 years of service do you have at your school? a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. more than 10 persons 12. how many teachers with 21-30 years of service do you have at your school? a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. more than 10 persons 13. how many teachers with 31-40 years of service do you have at your school? a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. more than 10 persons 14. how many teachers with more than 40 years of service do you have at your school? a. 1-5 persons b. 6-10 persons c. more than 10 persons ii. statements on the subject directions: please select the choice that best represents you. self-assessment totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i view myself as especially communicative. i view myself as very committed. i view myself as extraordinarily empathetic. i view myself as pedagogically competent. i am quite able to deal with conflicts. i like taking initiative. i like challenges. i like working in a team. i have great self-confidence. my organisational competence is outstanding. i can motivate other people quite well. i like working as a lone fighter. leadership for primary schools 159 development of teaching: how innovative is the teaching in your school? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i am acknowledged as an expert for quality control in teaching. i advise my teachers on matters related to teaching. i guide discussions about current pedagogical theories and practical models and suggest ways for faculty to integrate them into their teaching. traditional grading (marking) is supplemented through additional methods of performance assessment. as school principal i see to it that new learning material (files, books etc.) are used in my school. as school principal i make sure that new learning and teaching methods are applied in my school. in our school, every single pupil is supported by through individual assignments and special tuition (e.g. supporting students by doing their homework). organisation of teaching: how is teaching and leisure time organized? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) in my school there are blocked lessons (hours). i support the implementation of projects in my school. teaching units and breaks are flexibly organized. in our school there is a wide range of recreational offerings during breaks (play and action activities in the garden). 160 global education review 3(1) school organisation: how is your school organised? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i am working on the development and implementation of common, binding procedures and routines in my school (rules). the cooperation with my district inspector goes really well and he/she is very supportive. i experience rigid structures (e.g. staff decisions, budget allotment) as “applying breaks” in the school system. in our school, responsibilities are unambiguously assigned and made visible (e.g. in a responsibility matrix, a notice …) social interaction: is social interaction important in your school? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i promote a common set of values and norms in my school. i promote cooperation among my teachers within my school. i cultivate a policy of intensive and good communication with the pupils of my school. i maintain intensive and good communication with the parents of the pupils in my school. personnel development: how do your teachers continue their education e. g. in courses/trainings...?” totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i give my teachers regular feedback about their lessons to leadership for primary schools 161 point out areas of improvement and i support them in their activities. i observe the lessons of my teachers on an hourly basis. i observe the lessons of my teachers according to the method “classroom walkthrough.” i have staff talks with my teachers. i suggest targeted further training for my teachers and thus promote their professionalism. teachers who have participated in such further training courses share these information in the faculty. i recognise individual strenghts of my teachers and praise them. i recognise weaknesses and encourage my teachers to work on them. my teachers exchange knowledge and share experience on a regular basis. cooperation: how does your school organise cooperation with external partners? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i enjoy excellent relations with the local community/school provider. (the school provider in most cases is the community or municipality and has to pay for the school building, the heating, furniture, working materials,…). i hold a political office in the local community of my school. 162 global education review 3(1) i hold a political office in another community. my school cooperates with the local kindergarten (nursery school). our school cooperates with external partners (e.g., projects, subject-related lectures etc.) to offer our students insights into areas that lie outside the daily school routine. infrastructure: in what areas of infrastructure does your school excel? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) in my school there is innovative, technical equipment (e.g., data projector, smart boards etc.). the organisation of rooms is innovative (e.g., lighting, oxygen, ergonomic workplaces, various desk arrangements etc.). my school regularly offers a healthy snack to pupils. in my school, a warm lunch is served. school marketing: in what ways do you market your school? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) there exists a written mission statement of my school. the homepage of my school is kept up-to-date. we actively showcase our school actively through targeted activities in public (e.g. public relations, homepage, folders, exhibitions, events etc.) leadership for primary schools 163 school leadership: how do you run and organize your school? totally true (3) rather true (2) less true (1) not true (0) i delegate assignments and tasks to my teachers, providing them with the needs and competences necessary for the execution of their work. i finish all jobs and tasks myself because my teachers have already reached the limit of their stress resistance. in principle, i avoid conflicts. we work on clear aims for our common work. i promote innovations in my school. i regularly attend training courses designed school executives. i am well anchored in a network (school management group, regular meetings in the district, other activities…). i also profit from this network. i practise a reflexive leadership style, asking for active feedback from my teachers time and again. as a school principal which kind of support do you need? ………………………………………………………………………………………………....... …………………………………………………………………………………………………... additional comments: …………………………………………………………………………………………………... ……………………………………………………………………………………………... petra format with footer methodology findings research question 2: how do primary school principals assess themselves as innovative? research question 3: is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria? discussion future research petra format no footer methodology findings research question 2: how do primary school principals assess themselves as innovative? research question 3: is there a connection between the work of innovative school principals and that of innovative primary schools in lower austria? discussion future research children interactions in literacy tutoring situations: children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 41 global education review is a publication of the school of educationat mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.citation: rosemberg, celia r., alam, florencia, & stein, alejandra (2014). children interactions in literacy tutoring situations: a study with urban marginalized populations in argentina. global education review,1 (2). 41-63. children interactions in literacy tutoring situations: a study with urban marginalized populations in argentina celia renata rosemberg national council of scientific and technical research florencia alam national council of scientific and technical research alejandra stein national council of scientific and technical research abstract the study analyzed the conversational exchanges through which child tutors mediated literacy abilities and knowledge with young children in the framework of the project “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program,” that is being conducted in buenos aires, argentina. the analysis considered the conversational moves deployed by both participants in the dyad, as well as the relationship between the tutor and the tutee. likewise, it examined longitudinal variations in the interactions registered between the first tutoring sessions and the tutoring sessions that occurred after one year of the program. the tutoring sessions were video-taped and the different conversational moves deployed by the tutor and tutee were analyzed using an especially developed system of categories. subsequently, the distribution of the categories of the tutee and tutor’s interactional moves in the corpus was analyzed quantitatively. results showed significant longitudinal differences in the quantity of conversational moves: the tutors and the tutees increased their participation in the performance of the activities. the results demonstrated an increase in all the conversational moves the tutors utilized to promote the learning of the younger child tutee and a decrease in those conversational moves that do not promote learning. keywords child tutors, conversational movements, early literacy introduction we analyzed conversational exchanges as 12 and 13-year-olds read to and carried out writing activities with preschool age children. these conversations took place during a literacy tutoring program for children from urbanmarginalized populations (rosemberg, 2009 – ongoing). the program was implemented in the province of buenos aires, argentina in neighborhoods frequently referred to as “villas de emergencia” due to the precarious nature of the neighborhoods’ housing. these “villas de emergencia” are characterized by housing correspondingauthor: celia renata rosemberg national council of scientific and technical research email:crrosem@hotmail.com mailing address; ciipme ptte. perón 2158 – caba – cp 1040, argentina. mailto:crrosem@hotmail.com 42 global educationreview 1(2) mostly built from wood and salvaged materials, and are located in areas with insufficient or nonexistent infrastructure services such as running water and electricity. the neighbourhood is accessed by narrow dirt or cement floored passages. in the city of buenos aires 116,000 people live in “villas de emergencia,” and in the outskirts of the city another 1,114,500 people live in these conditions (statistics of the city government of buenos aires, 2009). the majority of the residents live in conditions of poverty and destitution and are immigrants or descendants of immigrants from the provinces of northern argentina, as well as border countries such as bolivia, paraguay, and peru. as has been observed in other groups of people that belong to minority cultures or have a low socioeconomic level (craig & washington, 2006; nettles & perna, 1997; taylor, 1983), the children in these populations generally have fewer opportunities than their middle class counterparts to access the literacy process at an early age within the family environment. the adult residents of these neighborhoods in argentina have a very low level of education: 59.8% have not been educated beyond primary school (mineduc, 2006), and they do not usually have books, magazines, or other texts in their homes (arrúe, stein, a., & rosemberg, 2012; rosemberg, stein, a., & borzone, 2011). as a result, few of these children participate in family literacy situations, such as a parent and child reading out-loud from a book of stories. a significant body of research (snow & ninio, 1986; among many others) has emphasized that participation in these types of family situations has a positive impact on the acquisition of different skills involved in the literacy process. these skills include the acquisition of vocabulary (sénéchal, lefevre, hudson, & lawson, 1996), the style of written language (morrow & temlock-fields, 2004; snow & ninio, 1986), metalinguistic consciousness (bus, van ijzendoorn, & pellegrini, 1995), and narrative ability (mccabe, bailey, & melzi, 2008). all these skills have been shown to be associated with future school performance (snow, porche, tabors, & harris, 2007). among children living in urbanmarginalized populations in argentina, the consequences of late access to the literacy process are reflected in increased instances of grade repetition (21% in primary school and 39% in secondary school) and dropping out of school (1.5% in primary school and 12% in secondary school) (mineduc, 2009). these indicators demonstrate the difficulty the educational system has had generating teaching strategies that match the needs of these children; strategies that guarantee foundational reading and writing skills. this inability to meet the instructional needs of urban-marginalized students continues throughout primary school. indeed, in these communities, many of the children who do pass through primary school achieve low levels of literacy. even in subsequent grades, many of them cannot read texts fluently; characterized by low levels of accuracy in decoding words, slow reading speed, and inaccurate intonation (hasbrouck & tindal, 2006; hudson, lane, & pullen, 2005). their reading difficulties are made evident by lowlevel performance on national and international exams at the end of primary school and at the beginning of secondary school (diniece, national evaluations; pisa 2006 “science competencies for tomorrow's world: volume 1: analysis”). the project “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program” (rosemberg, 2009 – ongoing) was conducted precisely with the objective of promoting the reading and writing education of children who live in the urban-marginalized populations described earlier. the program is based on the idea that interactions in tutor relationships in which one of the subjects (the tutor) instructs the other children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 43 (the tutee) on matters of which the tutor has more experience and knowledge are not unidirectional. on the contrary, prior research (rosco & chi, 2004) demonstrated that both tutor and tutee can benefit from this type of exchange. in general, prior research on this subject has focused on the impact of tutoring on the development and acquisition of social and cognitive skills. the previous methodologies involved the implementation of a program in which tutors received training with regard to how they should carry out the tutoring (king, staffieri, & adelgais, 1998, quoted in roscoe & chi, 2004), as well as the realization of tutorial situations in natural contexts (graesser & person, 1994; roscoe & chi, 2004). using quasiexperimental methodologies, they compared the performance of subjects of different ages or levels of expertise that collaborated to solve tasks, to the performance of subjects that solved the tasks alone. this research demonstrated that the subjects that worked together obtained better results than those that worked alone. although much research has concluded that subjects learn more when they work collaboratively (guberman & saxe, 2000; kronqvist, 2008; ogden, 2000), there exists some research (fawcett & garton, 2005; forman & mcphail, 1993; gauvain & rogoff, 1989; tudge, winterhoff & hogan, 1996; verba 1988) that shows that in order for the collaboration to be effective, a series of intervening factors must be considered: (a) the persuasive abilities of the more capable partner, (b) the degree of mutual involvement in the collaborative process, (c) the amount and quality of feedback during the correction process, (d) the degree of shared responsibility, (e) a previous relationship between the children, and (f) the amount and quality of verbal interaction. it has also been shown that tutoring efficacy depends on the tutors’ previous training, the degree to which the tutoring program is structured (casanova, 1988, quoted in gensemer, 2000), and on a minimum difference of two years of age between tutor and tutee (berliner & casanova, 1986; palincsar, brown, & martin, 1987; recrut, 1994; schrader &valus, 1990, quoted in gensemer, 2000). we considered the results of these previous works when we designed “from child to child.” we wanted to capitalize on the interactions between children of different age groups in order to generate a social fabric that enables 4 and 5 year-olds to access literacy before they begin first grade in primary school. at the same time, the program generates opportunities for the older children (12-13 yearolds) to develop, in meaningful situations, a greater understanding of the writing system and to improve their abilities as readers and writers (leland & fitzpatrick, 1993). other research that has studied children’s learning in native and urban-marginalized communities (rogoff, 1993; rogoff et al., 2007; stein, & rosemberg, 2012a; stein, & rosemberg, 2012b; rosemberg, stein, & alam, (2013) has shown that in these cultural contexts, interactions between children have an important impact on young children’s development and performance. in their analysis of family literacy situations that were generated in the homes of urban-marginalized populations of buenos aires via an early literacy program rosemberg and borzone (2005) and stein and rosemberg (2012a) demonstrated that siblings and other older children actively participate in these situations and collaborate with the adults. although they do not possess high levels of literacy, siblings and older children are the ones who in most cases read to the younger children and mediate initial writing skills. as maintained by tomasello (2003) and nelson (2007, 2010), learning to write involves not only a certain level of developmental and socio-cognitive preparation on the part of the learner, but also the support of cultural partners 44 global educationreview 1(2) (children and adults). this support structures the learning experience of the child as he or she performs different activities. in these activities, the interactions generate a fabric of social relationships that enables learning--a “zone of proximal development”-(álvarez, 1990; nelson, 1996, 2007; vygotsky, 1978; wertsch, 1991) in which the young child, in collaboration with the more experienced person, can make use of cultural tools, such as writing, sewing, etc., that they will later be able to use on their own. learning is not the direct result of the transference of knowledge from an expert to a beginner, but a gradual process that is produced via participation in these cultural systems of mediated activity (bruner, 1986, 1997; roscoe & chi, 2004; verba, 1998). the important role that social interaction plays in learning has motivated a diverse body of research focusing on the tutoring process between dyads of different ages and levels of expertise that interact to solve a task jointly (juel, 1996; kermani & moallem, 1997; topping & bryce, 2004). a series of studies in this line of research comparing the differences between child-child tutorship and adult-child tutorship (ellis & rogoff, 1982; lacasa & herranz, 1989) have identified the strategies that each member of the dyad utilizes, and the benefits that each situation provides. in general, studies have shown that child tutors use more demonstrations and direct models, and provide a greater quantity of assistance that, in some cases, can lead the young children to carry out the task for themselves; the adults, however, use more directives and, in general, tend to substitute the most complex information (cazden, 1988). for example, ellis and rogoff (1982) compared the teaching strategies used by adults and children in tasks where they were asked to categorize objects related to activities that had different degrees of familiarity for the young children: a typical adult domestic activity and a typical school activity. the results showed child tutors more frequently used non-verbal instruction as opposed to verbal instruction, and they more frequently gave information on specific items as opposed to information related to objects grouped by super-ordinated categories. it was also observed that child tutors performed better when they framed the categorization of objects in the context of the school activity, probably because they were more familiar with this situation. much research on the subject of tutorial interactions focuses on the development of one of the subjects involved in the dyad: the tutor (chi & roy, 2010; greenwood, carta & hall, 1998; roscoe & chi, 2004, 2008; verba, 1998) or the tutee (chi, roy & hausmann, 2008; guberman & saxe, 2000). the results mostly focus on the amount and type of progress achieved by the tutees as well as the tutors. the research focusing on the benefits of the interactive situation for the tutor maintains that the tutors can learn through explaining and monitoring. the results of one study by roscoe and chi (2004) involving university subjects demonstrated that the tutee, through their elicitations, can lead the tutors to carry out a larger quantity of revisions and expansions. moreover, they observed that although the tutors were responsible for introducing the topic, the tutees stimulated the subsequent discussion through their elicitations. in other studies, researchers compared the benefits obtained by dyads with the same level of expertise with dyads of different levels of experience (tudge, 1992; tudge, winterhoff, & hogan, 1996). these studies demonstrated that children obtained better results when they interacted with a child with a higher level of expertise than when they interacted with a child of the same level. this research also indicated that the most profound differences in learning were observed when the child tutee accepted children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 45 and understood the reasoning exhibited by the tutor. the above works were generally centered on the results of the tutoring programs with regards to learning, and although they do pay attention to the forms of collaboration and verbal interaction, they do not analyze in detail the conversational movements that permit the negotiation of the collaboration in the task. research pertaining to conversation analysis (gardner & forrester, 2010; goodwin & heritage, 1990; schegloff, 1992, 2000; schegloff, jefferson & sacks, 1977; sindell, 2009) has developed concepts that could be useful in analyzing the exchanges that permit the realization of pedagogical tasks in tutoring situations. these concepts permit an understanding of the conversational moves, defined as the contributions each participant makes to the exchange (sinclair & couthard, 1975). conversational moves can provide information, give feedback to the other participant, and repair the communication when a problem with regard to mutual comprehension arises. the present work aims to analyze the conversational exchanges through which child tutors mediateliteracy abilities and knowledge to young children, in the framework of the project “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program” that is currently being carrying out in buenos aires, argentina. the analysis considers the conversational moves deployed by both participants in the dyad, as well as the relationship between the tutor and the tutee. likewise, it takes into account longitudinal variations in the interactions that were registered between the first tutoring sessions and the tutoring sessions that occurred after one year of the program. methodology the data we analyzed literacy tutoring sessions that were implemented within the framework of a program where 100 children between the ages of 4 and 5 participated as tutees and 100 children between the ages of 12 and 13 participated as tutors. the program is called “from child to child: a tutor-child literacy program.” the tutoring sessions consisted of a dyad (one older child and one younger child) performing diverse activities together: reading stories, playing games, and doing other learning activities in order to promote the learning of vocabulary and the writing system. the activities designed to develop the learning of the writing system included the writing of one’s own name and other simple words, playing games with rhymes and sounds in order to promote the development of phonological consciousness, and the identification of letters. the activities designed to promote the development of vocabulary presented the young children with synonyms, antonyms, hypernyms, and hyponyms of words that the children had been previously exposed to in the texts, as well as games where they were asked to categorize objects, actions, people, and events according to thematic, spatial, temporal, functional, and taxonomic criteria. we analyzed the interactional process of 27 tutoring sessions. dyads were selected in which both participants had attended all of the workshops and had worked together throughout the program. the young children were aged 4:2 to 5:11, and the older children from 12:2 to 13:11. the children and their families all of the children that participated in the tutoring sessions attended the same educational institution in the province of buenos aires, which receives children aged 3 to 17. the 4 and 5-year-olds attended the kindergarten and the 12 and 13-year-olds attended the middle school. the children lived with their families in “villas de emergencia” in buenos aires and, for the most part, the children’s families were migrants from the north of argentina or from 46 global educationreview 1(2) neighbouring countries such as bolivia, peru, and paraguay. although all the families spoke spanish, there were some differences in the varieties of spanish used. the children’s parents had a low level of literacy and were either unemployed, or had low-qualified and unstable occupations that offered no social benefits. within the homes of the young children, there were neither story books for children, nor books or magazines for adults. the child literacy tutor program the program took the form of bi-monthly workshops. in the first workshop, the pedagogical coordinators and members of the research team, who were specialists in literacy research trained to implement educational projects, instructed the older children on how to carry out the tutoring together. with the coordinator’s scaffolding, the older children read the story books that they would later read to the younger children. first the coordinators read a story to the tutors in order to provide them with a model of fluent reading. afterwards, each tutor read the story out loud to another tutor. the coordinators also explained to the older children how to formulate different types of questions. likewise, they reflected on the vocabulary in the texts and on how to explain the significance of unknown words to young children. in the second workshop, each of the older children read stories to one of the younger children from one of the books in the series “en la casa de oscarcito” (rosemberg & borzone, 2008), and performed the activities and games proposed within the book. this situation is designed in order to promote the young children’s early literacy skills. collection and transcription of the empirical evidence the first session was not recorded because we decided to begin recording after the children had become accustomed to the activities and games that characterize the tutoring situations. the second and third sessions were video and audio recorded. these sessions took place at the beginning of the school year during the months of april and may (initial stage). likewise, the final two situations of the school year were filmed and audio recorded in the months of october and november (final stage). the sessions were recorded by an observer who was familiar to the children. the recordings were then transcribed according to the methodology and conventions of conversational analysis (tusón, 1995). for the purposes of the analysis, we created a literal transcriptof the audio archives. the transcripts were complemented by information from the situational context which consisted of descriptions of the activities and of the illustrations discussed. they were also complemented by descriptions of the non-verbal behaviour that was filmed in the videos, such as gestures and body position. we analyzed 139 activities performed by 27 dyads, 62 corresponding to the initial stage and 77 to the end of the final stage. procedure for the analysis of the data the reading activities and games designed to promote the learning of writing and vocabulary constituted the first unit of analysis. within this unit the minor conversational moves utilized by the tutor and tutee during the performance of the activities were considered. for the analysis of the conversational moves, a system was developed that conceptualizes the different types of conversational moves deployed by the tutor and tutee. the system was developed considering, simultaneously, different theoretical categories that had been elaborated in previous research (beals, 1997; beals & tabors, 1995; goodwin, 2000, 2007; gumperz, 1982, 1984; macbeth, 2004; rosemberg & silva, 2009; schegloff, 1979; schegloff, jefferson & sacks, 1977; tarplee, 2010; weizman & snow, 2001), as well children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 47 as the analysis of the empirical evidence obtained by the constant comparative method (glaser & strauss, 1967; strauss & corbin, 1990). comparing the different conversational moves used by the tutors enabled us to identify the distinctive functions that these moves have in the exchanges. the same procedure was followed in order to elaborate conceptual categories regarding the participation of the tutees in the tutoring situation. this allowed for the development of a system of categories that was adjusted to the empirical information (strauss & corbin, 1990; vasilachis de gialdino, 2006). subsequently, the distribution of the categories of the tutee and tutor’s interactional moves in the corpus of recorded sessions was analyzed quantitatively. differences in the average number of conversational moves between the activities filmed at the start of the year and the activities filmed at the end of the year were identified, and statistical student's ttests were employed to establish the significance of these differences. pearson's r coefficient was calculated to measure the correlation between the conversational moves used by tutors and tutees in the initial and the final stage. the following is the system of elaborated categories, presented with illustrative examples. the tutor’s conversational moves types of conversational moves description example 1. regulation moves in which the tutor directs the conduct of the tutee, and controls their performance in the activity. tutor: {reading the instructions} what part is malevo missing? draw them and write the names ((pointing at the images in the book)) look, here. what’s missing? look. tutee: {looking the other way} tutor: ((touching him on the arm)) look, here. what’s missing? tutee: the ear. tutor: {lee la consigna} ¿qué partes le faltan a malevo? dibujalas y escribí los nombres ((señala la imagen del libro)). mirá, acá ¿qué le falta? mirá. aprendiz: {mira para otro lado} tutor: ((le toca el brazo)) mirá, acá, ¿qué le falta? tutee: la oreja. 2. repair moves in which the tutor attempts to reestablish mutual comprehension. these are moves that involve the recognition on the part of the tutor that a word in their tutor: {reading the story} later the rabbit climbed the mountain and arrived at the magician’s house with the six tiger moustaches and the tail of the monkey. ‘now make me grow,’ ordered the rabbit. the magician thought, ‘if the rabbit did this while he was small, if i increase 48 global educationreview 1(2) speech, the instructions, or the events detailed in the text could be problematic for the tutee due to the word’s imprecision, ambiguity, or the tutee’s unfamiliarity with the word. it also involves an attempt to resolve this comprehension problem in that turn or the following turns. his size, a big rabbit would be very dangerous for the rest of the animals’. the rabbit waited, the magician approached him and caught him by the ears and threw him down the mountain. tutee: who was thrown? tutor: the rabbit, because he pulled off the monkey’s tail and six tiger moustaches in order to be bigger. do you see? ((pointing at the image)) tutor: {lee un cuento} luego el conejo subió la montaña y llegó a la casa del mago con los seis bigotes del tigre y la cola del mono. ahora haceme crecer, le ordenó el conejo. el mago pensó: si siendo tan chiquito el conejo hizo lo que hizo, si lo aumento de tamaño qué no hará, un conejo grande sería muy peligroso para el resto de los animales. el conejo esperaba, el mago se acercó, lo atrapó de las orejas y lo arrojó hacia abajo de la montaña. aprendiz: ¿a quién? tutor: al conejo, porque le arrancó la cola al mono y al tigre los seis bigotes para ser más grande ¿viste? ((señala la imagen)) 3. contribution moves made by the tutor in which additional information is provided to the tutee. 3.1.modeling moves in which the tutor models the desired performance for the tutee. tutor: {reading the instructions} connect the numbers from one to ten and discover what figure they form {end of reading}. you have to do it like this, look ((taking a pen and pointing to the number 1)). you see, here is the dot, you have to connect it with this ((connecting it to the number 2)), you have to do it like this, give it to me, i’ll show you and after, you do it, you have to connect it ((gives the pen to the tutee)). where’s the 3? tutee: ((points to the 3)) tutor: you have to connect it. tutee: ((connects the numbers)) tutor: {lee la consigna} uní los números del uno al diez y descubrí qué figura se forma {fin de lectura}. tenés que hacer así mirá ((agarra children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 49 el lápiz y señala el número 1)), viste que acá está el uno el puntito este tenés que agarrarlo con este ((une con el número 2),) tenés que hacer así, dame que yo te muestro y después seguís, tenés que remarcarlo ((le da el lápiz al niño)). ¿dónde está el 3? aprendiz: ((señala el 3)) tutor: tenés que unirlo. aprendiz: ((une los números)) 3.2. expansion moves in which the tutor provides additional verbal information that expands on what the child says or reads. tutor: {reading the instructions} what things can’t we see in the sky? tutee: the truck, the pencil, the bird ((pointing at the images while naming them)) tutor: we don’t see the bird in the sky? tutee: ah, yes! tutor: when the bird flies we see it in the sky. tutor: {lee la consigna} ¿qué cosas no podemos ver en el cielo? aprendiz: el camión, el lápiz, el pajarito ((señala las imágenes que nombra)) tutor: ¿el pajarito no lo vemos en el cielo? aprendiz: ¡ah sí! tutor: cuando el pajarito vuela lo vemos en el cielo. 3.3. giving the answer moves in which the tutor gives the answer that the tutee must give. tutor: {reading} draw the drawings that start with ta {end of reading} does table start with ta? tutee: ((nods)) tutor: yes. shoe? tutee: yes. tutor: no. cross it out. tutee: ((crosses it out)) tutor: tail? tutee: tail? tutor: yes, it starts with ta. draw it. tutor: {lee} pintá los dibujos que empiecen con me {detiene la lectura} ¿mesa empieza con me? aprendiz: ((asiente)) tutor: sí. ¿zapato? aprendiz: sí. 50 global educationreview 1(2) tutor: no. hacé una cruz. aprendiz: ((hace cruz)) tutor: ¿media? aprendiz: ¿media? tutor: sí, empieza con me. pintala. 4. feedback moves in which the tutor reacts in an evaluative manner, positive or negative, to the intervention of the tutee. tutor: {doing a “connect the dots” activity} five? tutee: ((points at the number 8)) tutor: that’s the number eight. the five is like this, look at the five ((takes a pencil and writes the number 5)) tutee: ((pointing at the number 5 in the activity that they are performing)) tutor: excellent! tutor: {realizan una tarea de unir números} ¿el cinco? aprendiz: ((señalando el 8)) tutor: ese es el ocho. el cinco tiene, así mirá es el cinco ((toma el lápiz y escribe el número 5)) aprendiz: ((señalando el 5 en la actividad que están realizando)) tutor: ¡muy bien! 5. repetition moves in which the tutor repeats his utterance without making modifications. tutor: table ((signalling at the table)) does it start with ta? tutee: ta-ble. tutor: does it start with ta? tutor: mesa ((señala la imagen de una mesa)) ¿empieza con me? aprendiz: me-sa. tutor: ¿empieza con me? the tutee’s conversational moves types of conversational moves description example 1. regulation moves in which the tutee tries to control the sequence of an activity. tutor: we’re going to do this first ((pointing at an activity in the book)) tutee: no, we’re going to do the other one first. ((pointing at a different activity)) tutor: no, not that one. there’s nothing more children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 51 to do in that exercise. tutee: xxx we’re going to say what happened after when the story starts. tutor: vamos a ver esto primero ((señalando una actividad en el libro)). aprendiz: no, vamos a hacer el otro primero ((señala una actividad diferente a la indicada por el tutor)). tutor: no el otro no. el otro no tenía nada para hacer. aprendiz: xxx vamos a contar lo qué pasó después cuando empezó el cuento. 2. verbal responses moves in which the tutee reacts verbally to a tutor’s question. tutor: {reading} what’s the wolf like? what’s the grandmother like? connect it with arrows {end of reading}. who has…the grandmother or the wolf…who has big eyes, like this, big, big eyes? like yours, that are here ((points to the eyes behind the mask that the child has on)) who has them: the wolf or the grandmother? tutee: the wolf. tutor: {lee} ¿cómo es el lobo? ¿cómo es la abuela? uní con flechas {deja de leer y dice} ¿quién tenía…la abuela o el lobo… quién tenía ojos muy grandes, grandes así grandes, grandes? así como los tuyos, que están acá ((le indica sus ojos tras la máscara que tiene puesta)). ¿quién tiene: el lobo o la abuela? aprendiz: el lobo. 3. non-verbal answers moves in which the tutee reacts to a question posed by the tutor using gestures or demonstrations. tutor: {reading} what’s the wolf like? what’s the grandmother like? connect it with arrows {end of reading}. who has…the grandmother or the wolf…who has big eyes, like this, big, big eyes? like yours, that are here ((points to the eyes behind the mask that the child has on)) who has them: the wolf or the grandmother? tutee: the wolf. tutor: good, connect the dots here and here {helps the tutee make the line} and who has small eyes? 52 global educationreview 1(2) tutee: ((points at an image in the book)) tutor: not those, not those {shows the tutee where they should choose from} tutee: ((points in the book)) tutor: the grandmother ((takes the pencil from the tutee in order to make the line)) tutor: {lee} ¿cómo es el lobo? ¿cómo es la abuela? uní con flechas. {deja de leer y dice} ¿quién tenía…la abuela o el lobo… quién tenía ojos muy grandes, grandes así grandes, grandes? así como los tuyos, que están acá ((le indica sus ojos tras la máscara que tiene puesta)) ¿quién tiene: el lobo o la abuela? aprendiz: el lobo. tutor: bueno uní con flecha acá, acá {le ayuda a realizar la línea} tutor: ¿y quién tiene ojos chicos? aprendiz: ((señala unos imágenes del libro)) tutor: no de esos no de estos ((le muestra de donde debe elegir)). aprendiz: ((señala en el libro)) tutor: la abuela ((le toma la mano para realizar la línea)). 4. initiation related to the topic moves made by the tutee that are related to the topic, but that do not constitute a response to the tutor’s previous intervention. tutor: {before reading a story, the tutor shows the tutee the first image} the biggest green planet ((pointing at the planet with the pencil)) tutee: what’s it called? tutor: it’s called the green planet. tutor: {antes de la lectura de un cuento el tutor le muestra la primera imagen} el planeta más grande de color verde ((señalando del planeta con el lápiz)) aprendiz: ¿cómo se llama? tutor: se llama el planeta verde. 5. initiation related with the tutoring situation moves made by the tutee that are not related with the topic of the activity that is being carried out, but that are related to the tutoring situation in general. these moves do not constitute an answer to a tutor: {reading a story} i hope a fox eats these bad chickens, said oscarcito. you see, sometimes the chicken are saved by pure luck, answered tomás. tutee: {interrupting the reading} this! ((points at an image of a chicken that children interactions in literacy tutoring situations 53 tutor’s previous intervention. appears in another activity in the book)) tutor: yes, this is a chicken, but first i’m going to read you this and later we’ll read that. tutor: {lee un cuento} ojalá un zorro se coma esas gallinas malas, dijo oscarcito. mirá que a veces las gallinas se salvan de pura suerte, le contestó tomás. aprendiz: {interrumpe la lectura} ¡esta! ((señala la imagen de una gallina que aparece en otra actividad del libro)) tutor: sí, esta es una gallina pero primero te cuento esto y después pasamos a ese. 6. unrelated initiation moves made by the tutee that are not related with the tutoring situation or the activity, and do not constitute a response to the tutor’s previous intervention. tutor: {reading} it seems like cachilo is thirsty xxx a jug of water to your dog that is looking for something to drink that cachilo never drinks xxx the dog of my story. take my story. read it, mom. tutee: look, she is looking ((pointing in another direction)) tutor: don´t look, don´t look. tutor: {lee} parece que cachilo tiene sed. xxx un tarro de agua a tu perro que está buscando para tomar que cachilo nunca toma xxx el perro de mi cuento. tomá el cuento mío. mamá leelo. aprendiz: mirá está mirando ((señalando hacia otro lado)). tutor: no mires, no mires. results the results of the qualitative analysis of the conversational exchanges produced during the tutoring sessions demonstrated the different types of moves that both participants of the dyad used while they read texts and performed activities that had been designed to promote the learning of the writing system and unfamiliar vocabulary. as mentioned in the methodology, the qualitative analysis enabled the elaboration of a system of conceptual categories that showed the forms and functionality of the conversational moves used by the participants. the child tutors utilized regulatory moves in order to control the participation of the young children: focusing their attention on the activity at hand (“look”, “listen”); fixing the sequence of activities (“first we’ll read the story and after we’ll play this game 54 global educationreview 1(1) where we put the drawings with the words”); determining who is going to do the activity (“will you do it alone or should i help you?”); and regulating specific actions in order to carry out the activity presented in the instructions (“paint,” “write,” “put this with this,” “do it like this”). likewise, conversational moves were observed during which the tutors repeated all or part of a previous emission; for example, an instruction to carry out a task. the analysis also demonstrated that by using repair moves, the tutors collaborated with the young children when they identified problems relating to comprehension. these difficulties may have stemmed from the events narrated in the stories, the dialogues that are included in them, or vocabulary that was unfamiliar or difficult for the young children to understand. likewise, the analysis allowed us to identify contributory moves through which the tutors provided additional or clarifying information, expanded on information provided by the young children, modeled the performance that the tutors were trying to elicit from the young children, or gave an answer themselves that should have been provided by the young children. feedback moves were also identified on the part of the child tutors in reaction to the younger children’s performance. these moves were both explicit (positive and negative evaluations of the younger children’s performance) and implicit (repeating the younger child’s emission). using these moves, the child tutors reacted to the younger child’s participation and tried to help them to continue contributing to the situation; orienting and stimulating them in the activity that they were performing. in turn, the qualitative analysis of the young children’s participation during the tutoring sessions demonstrated that they utilized different conversational moves that permitted them to participate jointly with the performance and sequence of the readings, games, and activities. the analysis also demonstrated that the young children utilized moves of verbal and non-verbal responses to react to the tutors’ interventions (questions, affirmations, or indications). however, the young children did not just adopt the role of responder during the tutorial exchanges. the young children’s active role in these pedagogical exchanges is clearly demonstrated by the initiating moves that they performed during the tutoring sessions. some initiating moves were also observed that were not related to the activity, reflecting momentary distraction on the part of the young child with respect to the pedagogical activity. the results of the longitudinal analysis of the conversational exchanges demonstrate some quantitative differences with regard to the types of conversational moves utilized by both participants in the dyad between the sessions carried out at the start of the year and those carried out at the end of the year. these differences demonstrate that both the tutor and the tutee played a more active role at the end of the year compared to the beginning of the year. figure 1 presents the averages at the start and end of the year of the different types of conversational moves that the tutors utilized in order to help the young children perform specific activities related to the acquisition of the writing system and vocabulary, as well as the comprehension of the stories. 55 children interactions in literacy tutoring situations figure 1 types of conversational moves utilized by the tutors at the beginning and the end of the year as demonstrated in figure 1, there was a significant increase in the tutor’s participation during the final tutoring sessions, reflecting an increase in the average of the different types of conversational moves that the tutors utilized while they shared the reading of a story and aided the young children’s acquisition of different skills and abilities involved in the literacy process. indeed, whereas during the initial stage of the program the tutors utilized an average of 3.71 conversational moves per session in order to regulate the participation of the younger children, in the final sessions the number of regulatory moves increased to an average of 4.39. the average number of moves in which the tutors repeated their own emissions increased from 0.13 to 0.25.the tutors also showed an increase at the end of the year in the average number of feedback moves (1.66 to 2.47). in addition, the repair moves that the tutors utilized increased from 2.19 at the beginning of the year to 3.55 at the end. likewise, contributory moves increased from 2.26 to 2.70. the student's t-tests statistical analysis, with regard to each of the different types of conversational moves between the beginning and the end of the year, shows a significant difference in the quantity of repairs t(137) = 2.20, sem = 0.61, p < .05 and the quantity of feedback t(137) = 2.17, sem = 0.37, p < .05. however, the statistical analysis does not show a significant difference in the quantity of regulatory moves t(137) = 0.94, sem = 0.73, p = .35, moves of repetition t(137) = 0.81, sem = 0.15, p = .42, or contributory moves t(137) = 0.72, sem = 0.61, p = .47. however, the detailed analysis of the tutor’s contributory moves during the tutoring sessions demonstrate significant longitudinal differences when the analysis separates the contributory moves that expand on the tutees’ emissions from those that involve modelling and from the contributory moves that involve providing the answer themselves. this data is presented in table 1. 56 global educationreview 1(1) table 1 change in types of contributory moves utilized by the tutees from the beginning to the end of the year contributory moves beginning of the year end of the year expand 0.56 1.6 model 0.26 0.33 provide answer 0.71 0.56 as observed in table 1, while the tutors increased the average number of moves in which they modelled or expanded on the tutee’s emissions during the final stage of the project (expansions: 0.56 to 1.60 and modelling: 0.26 to 0.33), the contributions on the part of the tutor in which the tutor provided the answer directly decreased (0.71 to 0.56). with regard to expanding moves, these differences are significant (t(112) = 2.33, sem = 0.45, p < .05). this is not the case for modelling moves (t(112) = .22, sem = 0.27, p = .83), nor contributions that involve providing the answer (t(112) = .49, sem = 0.29, p = .63). in keeping with the tutors’ increased participation in supporting the performance of the tutee that was observed at the end of the year, the longitudinal analysis of the conversational moves on the part of the younger child also demonstrates an increase in the different types of conversational moves, as can be observed in figure 2. figure 2 types of conversational moves utilized by the tutees at the beginning and the end of the year 57 children interactions in literacy tutoring situations figure 2 shows that during the final tutoring sessions the average number of moves carried out by the young children in order to regulate the activity themselves increased from 0.21 to 0.43. their verbal and non-verbal responses to the tutor’s interventions increased from 1.52 to 2.34, and 1.03 to 1.12, respectively, and their initiations related to the activity, as well as their initiations related to the tutoring situation, increased from 0.35 to 0.61 and 0.11 to 0.52, respectively. likewise, at the end of the year it was observed that there was a decrease in the average number of unrelated initiations on the part of the tutee (0.21 to 0.16). the student's t-tests statistical analysis detected marginal differences solely in the verbal responses t(130) = 1.90, sem = 0.43, p = .06. the analysis did not detect differences in regulation t(136) = 1.46, sem = 0.15, p = .15, nonverbal responses t(137) = 0.28, sem = 0.30, p = .78, initiations related to the topic t(137) = 0.90, sem = 0.29, p = .37, initiations related to the tutoring session, t(137) = 0.20, sem = 0.09, p = .84, nor in initiations unrelated to the tutoring session t(137) = 0.48, sem = 0.11, p = .63. with the purpose of studying the relation between the participation of the younger children and the tutors during the tutoring sessions, and to establish if both varied in a concomitant way, the correlation between the young children’s verbal responses and the repair and feedback moves that present significant differences between the initial stage and the final stage was analyzed. the correlation analysis demonstrates that during the initial stage the young children’s verbal responses is associated with the tutors’ quantity of repairs r = .33; p< .01, as well as their quantity of feedback r = .57; p< .001. during the final stage, verbal responses are also associated with the quantity of repairs r = .29; p< .01 and feedback r = .35; p< .01, as well as with the quantity of expanding moves r = .26, p< .01. discussion the results of this study showed that the tutors, as well as the tutees, actively participated in the verbal exchanges permitted by the tutoring sessions generated through the implementation of the program “from child to child.” as demonstrated in previous studies that were mostly performed with university students and adult tutors, the active role the tutor and the tutee assume, can, to a great extent, account for their learning (chi, 1996; chi, roy & hausmann, 2007; chi, soler, jeong,fausmann, 2001; graesser & person, 1994). in the recorded exchanges, the 12 and 13year-old children that participated as tutors utilize a variety of conversational moves: they regulate the participation of the younger children while they read stories, play games, and do exercises designed to promote the learning of the writing system; they repair communication when they identify problems in mutual comprehension; they provide or request information from the younger children that expands on the books or on information that the younger child has already provided; they model the performance that they desire from the younger children during the performance of the activities; they provide the answers when the younger children can not provide them themselves; and they provide feedback on the young children’s performance, evaluating them in ways that are both implicit and explicit. the younger children also actively participated during the sessions. on occasion, they tried to regulate for themselves the sequence of the activities and games, they responded verbally and non-verbally to the tutors’ interventions, and they initiated exchanges that were, for the most part, connected with the topic of the stories, the activities, and the tutoring session. after a year of participating together in the tutoring program, the tutors and the tutees increased the extent to which they played an active role during the sessions by increasing 58 global educationreview 1(1) their participation in the performance of the activities. indeed, the results of the quantitative longitudinal analysis demonstrated an increase between the tutoring sessions that took place at the beginning of the year and the sessions that took place at the end of the year in all of the conversational moves that the tutors utilize to promote the learning of the younger children, and in the answers and initiations connected with the activities and the tutoring sessions. in this sense, the results seems to demonstrate that progressively, throughout the year, the tutoring sessions are increasingly constituted in a pedagogical, cognitive, and social context in which the tutee can take greater control over the process of learning, and the tutor can resolve problems of comprehension, and perform the necessary actions in order to correct errors. this is demonstrated by the significantly increase recorded in some of the tutor and tutees’ conversational moves. for example, it is relevant to point out the increase in the repair moves through which the tutors respond to problems in mutual comprehension. these problems are the result of the young children’s difficulty in understanding the precise vocabulary, the stories, and the instructions in the games and exercises. this increase demonstrates that at the end of the year the tutors are able to a greater extent to monitor the reasoning displayed in their exchanges with the younger children, and intervene when they observe a difficulty. as demonstrated by other researchers (graesser & person, 1994), the one-to-one interaction that characterizes the tutoring sessions provides greater opportunities than interactions in a traditional class for the tutor to identify difficulties in mutual comprehension and repair the communication. it constitutes a scaffold for the understanding and learning of the younger child. these interventions that structure the search for a precise word, offering or requesting alternative or appropriate words, as well as the appropriate interpretation of the events and their relation to the stories; that explain the relation between concepts, clarify or integrate information; that provide or request examples, all make it possible to construct and display shared reasoning in conversation. it is precisely this co-construction that generates the tutees’ reasoned interventions, which certain previous studies have demonstrated to be connected to learning (chi, 1996, 2001; fawcett & garton, 2005; graesser & person, 1994). the increase in repair moves demonstrate that the process through which the tutor tries to reach a greater level of inter-subjectivity and mutual understanding with the tutee develops their increasing ability to monitor the conversation as well as the tutee’s learning. as demonstrated by roscoe and chi (2004), the tutors can learn by means of explaining and monitoring. these metacognitive skills are associated with the process of reading comprehension and can therefore benefit the tutors as well as the tutees (cain, oakhill, & bryant, 2004). the increased monitoring performed by the tutor with respect to the younger child’s learning activity is also made clear by the significant increase in feedback moves that the tutor performs. these moves, which imply recognition of the young child’s intervention, entail an evaluative component that is of importance for their performance (tarplee, 2010). as demonstrated by tudge (1992), it is the conjunction of thought in collaboration across the conversation and the obtainment of feedback that to a great extent promotes learning. the tutor’s appropriate consideration of the tutee’s performance permits the tutor to perform contributory moves that expand upon the information or that try to, by means of suggestions, hints, or signs, help the small child provide the information (tarplee, 2010). the results obtained from the longitudinal analysis demonstrate a significant increase at 59 children interactions in literacy tutoring situations the end of the year in the quantity of contributions that constitute an expansion of the children’s emissions. at the same time, the tutors’ reduced the quantity of contributory moves in which they give the answer themselves that should be given by the small child. in this way, more experience tutoring leads to diminishment of moves that hinders tutee’s learning, according to other research (cazden, 1988). in keeping with the pattern of longitudinal variation in the intervention of the tutors, characterized by the significant increase in the repair, feedback and expanding moves, the results of the analysis of the younger children’s moves demonstrates significant variation in the verbal responses that they produce during the tutoring sessions. as demonstrated by chi, siler, jeong, yamahuchi & hausmann (2001) and chi, roy & hausmann (2007), a great part of the efficacy of the tutoring does not only reside in the actions of the tutors, but also in the actions of the tutees. indeed, in the process of responding to the tutors’ interventions, the younger children elaborate explanations and their understanding of the texts that they read, of the meaning of words, and of the functions and organization of the writing system. in this way, the younger children make progress in the literacy process. moreover, the results demonstrate a significant correlation between the repair, feedback and expansion moves by the tutor and the verbal responses of the younger children. as indicated by chi, roy & hausmann (2007), the tutors’ intervention led the tutees to elaborate a response that, in turn, shapes the following intervention by the tutor, who gives feedback and/or expands upon the young child’s response and thus follows the sequence of the development of knowledge. in this way, a “zone of potential development” (vygotsky, 1964) that enables learning is created in the interaction. the pattern of conversational moves characteristic of the tutoring sessions, in which the tutor recovers, expands and amplifies the tutee’s interventions, constitute precisely the condition of possibility for the co-construction of knowledge in social interaction (nelson, 1996, 2007). it is not simply the presence of a more capable partner or the mere communication between the participants in the dyad, but this shared process of constructing knowledge that generates individual learning opportunities during the tutoring sessions (chi, roy & hausmann, 2007). the active process of the co-construction of knowledge about writing that was observed in the interactions between the tutors and tutees can in part be understood by taking into account that these tutoring sessions construct mediation structures (cole & engeström, 2007) that recover and capitalize on forms of interaction that are characteristic of the environment of the urban-marginalized populations. indeed, the interactions between children of different ages, more frequent and important in these populations than in middle income urban populations (arrúe, stein, & rosemberg, 2012; stein, & rosemberg, 2012a), shape the base of the system of activity (cole, 1999; cole & engeström, 2007) through which the experiences of the children with regard to reading and writing are mediated. in this way, “a 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(1998). la mente en acción. buenos aires: aique. about the author(s) celia renata rosemberg , phd, is a researcher at the national council of scientific and technical research at argentina, and a professor at the university of buenos aires. she conducts research projects in the field of early literacy, family literacy and language development and social interaction. florencia alam received a ba in linguistics from the university of buenos aires (uba). in 2011 she completed a master in discourse analysis (uba). she is currently finishing her phd studies in education with a scholarship from the national council of scientific and technical research at argentina (conicet). her research is focused on the study of language and interaction between children. alejandra stein, phd, is a researcher at the national council of scientific and technical research at argentina, and an assistant professor at the university of buenos aires. her research interests focus on early literacy, family literacy and the development of narrative discourse. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f0144341042000262935 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f0144341042000262935 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307/1131758 http://dx.doi.org/10.2307%2f1131562 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080%2f016502598384577 thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 93 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: yukhymenko, m. a., brown, s. w., lawless, k. a., brodowinska, k., & mullin, g. (2014). thematic analysis of teacher instructional practices and student responses in middle school classrooms with problem-based learning environment. global education review, 1 (3), 93-109. thematic analysis of teacher instructional practices and student responses in middle school classrooms with problem-based learning environment mariya a. yukhymenko university of illinois at chicago scott w. brown university of connecticut kimberly a. lawless university of illinois at chicago kamila brodowinska university of illinois at chicago gregory mullin bunker hill community college abstract a problem-based learning (pbl) environment is a student-centered instructional method based on the use of ill-structured problems as a stimulus for collaborative learning. this study was designed to investigate teachers’ instructional practices, and students’ responses to such practices, in middle school classrooms using a pbl environment through qualitative analyses. a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive thematic analyses was employed and applied to field notes and transcripts of video observations of four pbl classrooms. to do so, a codebook was created based on the descriptions of roles of teachers and students in pbl classrooms in literature, and was then applied to inductive codes that emerged from the data. this study identified a number of specific instructional practices of teachers, as well as responses that students might engage in during pbl instructions. being able to articulate these roles is an important step in helping new pbl teachers develop their skills to facilitate student-centered classrooms. keywords problem-based learning, qualitative study, middle school, classroom observation 94 global education review 1 (3) introduction problem-based learning (pbl) is an active, student-centered, and collaborative instructional method based on the use of ill-structured problems as a stimulus for learning (bridges, 1992). in pbl, the instructional method consists of presenting an ill-structured problem scenario that is related to the curriculum, designed to be complex, open-ended, and often interdisciplinary in nature, to students. the problem scenario requires students to develop solutions based on the presented information, consider alternative solutions, and provide reasoned arguments to support their proposed solution. a good context for pbl is a real-world problem that may have multiple solutions, cannot be solved by a simple algorithm, and presents difficulties and complexity to students (brown & king, 2000). the key characteristics of a pbl environment are group work and collaboration. during classes, most of the learning occurs within the context of small groups rather than teacher-centered lectures, and each member of the group supports the others when achieving the group goal and individual outcome. during pbl, individuals see the problem from different perspectives, bringing diversity to the group in the problemsolving process (kelson & distlehorst, 2000). the pbl teacher plays the role of a facilitator who observes, supports, and directs students in the learning process, pushing them to think critically and deeply with minimum interference (jonassen, 2011). unlike a teacher in a traditional classroom, the pbl teacher uses modeling and coaching to show students good strategies for thinking and learning, and eventually dials back some of the support. the teacher plays a critical role, as a facilitator must constantly assemble the resources needed for learning, provide guidance to facilitate student learning, facilitate classroom structure, and provide feedback and evaluation. the pbl teacher scaffolds student learning through asking questions and allowing students to find answers on their own. as students progress with taking on responsibility for their own leaning processes, the teacher’s interventions diminish. students are responsible for their own learning, actively acquiring their knowledge and working with learning resources on a project team (brown & king, 2000). in pbl, students work in small groups collaborating with each other and trying to solve open-ended problems. typically, the groups consist of five to seven students (bridges, 1992). each group member plays an active role by participating equally and figuring out the solutions to the ill-structured problems. as students acquire and exchange information that might be used to find solutions, they become increasingly independent of the teacher. it is the students’ responsibility to gather information, examine the resources, share the views, and find the solutions to the problem. a social aspect of learning is central as students learn through discussion and problem solving in teams while also acquiring collaborative skills. the purpose of this study was to gain an understanding of the instructional practices of middle school social science teachers and students’ responses to such instructional practices in classrooms during pbl instructions. specifically, this study focused on investigating the role of teachers and students in classrooms with a pbl environment using both inductive and deductive approaches to the thematic analysis, as described by fereday and muir ______________________________ corresponding author: mariya a. yukhymenko, phd, visiting research specialist, learning science research institute, university of illinois at chicago, 1240 w. harrison st., unit 1570-e., chicago, il 60607. e-mail: yukhym@uic.edu mailto:yukhym@uic.edu thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 95 cochrane (2006). the following two research questions guided this study: 1. what are instructional practices of middle school social science teachers in classrooms with a pbl environment? 2. what are students’ responses to instructional practices in classrooms with a pbl environment? context of the study the pbl connected to this study is globaled 2, which situates middle school students in an online simulation of decision-making environment focused on critical real-world international issues. globaled 2 is an educational curriculum designed to promote scientific literacy, writing skills in science and social studies, and problem-solving skills (brown, lawless, & boyer, 2013; lawless, brodowinska, lynn, khodos, brown, boyer, yukhymenko, & mullin, 2012). globaled 2 situates students in 16 to 20 social studies classrooms across the country in a wellregimented pbl for one semester. each classroom is assigned to represent a real-world country (e.g., russia, japan, mexico). students in each classroom, or “country,” are further divided into four issue groups, economic policies, environment, human rights, and health in particular. students in each issue group then interact with their counterparts in other “countries”, utilizing educational technologies such as computers with internet connection. the interaction between students is focused on one of the critical world issues, such as water scarcity or climate change. during globaled 2, students in country teams are trying to negotiate a mutually agreeable resolution to the critical issue. globaled 2 is a well-regimented pbl, which has three phases corresponding to preparation, simulation, and debriefing. four weeks prior to the beginning of the negotiations, students learn about the country they are assigned to represent, as well as the other participating countries, focusing on economical, cultural, social, environmental, and political aspects. globaled 2 provides students with many resources about participating countries on the globaled 2 platform. however, students are not limited to using globaled 2 resources and may conduct research and search for relevant information on the internet. the united states is played by undergraduate and graduate students majoring in political science. once the simulation begins, the students participate daily. they are allowed to use computers in schools as well as outside of the school to search for information and communicate within and across the countries. students in each issue group interact with their counterparts through e-mails as well as online live-chat conferences, occurring several times during the simulation. no real names are displayed and no references can be drawn to students’ gender, class, or location. during the active phrase of simulation, all interactions are controlled by simulation controllers, called simcons. simcons monitor discussions, review communications between students, and ensure that students stay “in character” of their assigned country. the final phase of the simulation is a two-week debriefing, during which students reflect on what they learned during the simulation and whether reasonable solutions to the real-world problem were found. the learning environment in globaled 2 is centered on the students, which differs from a traditional instructional approach. the students collaborate in small groups, making decisions and trying to find solutions to real-world problems. as such, the teachers’ roles are those of facilitators, providing support and resources to students, observing and directing students’ learning. prior to participating in globaled 2, 96 global education review 1 (3) teachers are required to attend a multiple-day pbl workshop, which occurs in summer prior to the simulation. the goal of the workshop is to prepare teachers to facilitate pbl lessons. the workshop addresses necessary classroom culture components of pbl pedagogy, presents details regarding globaled 2 rules and regiment, and brings theory to practice by requesting teachers participate in a mini pbl simulation. during the mini simulation, teachers perform roles similar to those that their students will be performing during globaled 2. at the end of the workshop, teachers are presented with feedback and a folder of relevant materials. research approach to determine and describe the instructional practices of teachers and the responses of students, a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive thematic analysis was used. this qualitative analysis allows the pbl instructional practices and patterns of student learning to emerge as the data is examined. qualitative methods such as these are well-suited for examining emerging patterns when there is not yet an established body of literature regarding the types of practices and processes associated with pbl. thematic analysis is the search for and extraction of general patterns found in the data through multiple readings of the data. fereday and muir-cochrane (2006) described thematic analysis as “a form of pattern recognition within the data, where emerging themes become the categories for analysis" (pp. 3-4). the process of thematic analysis involves examination of data and identification of themes that are central to the description of the phenomenon (daly, kellehear, & gliksman, 1997). themes identified during careful reading and re-reading of the data become the categories for analysis. the identified themes were analyzed using a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive analyses, which incorporates both the deductive, a priori template of codes, and the data-driven inductive approach. as described by fereday and muir-cochrane (2006), a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive analysis involves six steps. the first two steps occur sequentially; whereas, steps three through six occur concurrently, involving iterative and reflexive processes, and requires the researcher to go back and forth during the analysis process. the first two steps focus on developing a codebook to employ in deductive analysis and testing its applicability and reliability. the next two steps involve performing inductive and deductive analyses of the data. the fifth step concerns connecting codes and themes that emerge during inductive and deductive analyses. at this step, some similarities and differences are identified across the data. the final step is corroborating and legitimating coded themes. to do so, the previous steps are scrutinized by performing several iterations of the text-codesthemes interactions to ensure that the clustered themes are representative of the initial data analysis and assigned codes. the codes are connected with each other, while themes are further clustered, resulting in identification of the core themes, and assigned brief phrases. deductive analysis deductive analysis is used to develop and test theory qualitatively and allows for systematic testing of the theory with a wide variety of cases. there are multiple sources of theory, including previous research and theoretical concepts, professional and personal experiences, and knowledge of persons and situations that are the focus of research. deductive analysis is an efficient way to analyze the data as it is informed by an established conceptual framework and sensitizing concepts, or based on the act of preliminary coding of a small portion of the data. in order to perform deductive analysis, first the thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 97 codebook is developed and then it is applied to the data. the codebook serves as a data management tool for organizing segments of similar text to help interpretation of the data and provide evidence for the credibility of the study. typically, deductive codes in the codebook are based on theoretical framework and developed prior to initial reading of the data. this approach is called template approach. however, sometimes the codebook can be based on a preliminary scanning of the data in addition to a review of the literature (crabtree & miller, 1999). in this case, the data are scanned and any additional codes are added to those ones that are based on literature review. only a piece of the data is used to analyze in a preliminary manner and no exhaustive or comprehensive analysis of data is taking place during the second approach. the codes in the codebook are identified by the name, definition, and description and may be organized by broad code categories depending on research method and research questions. next, the applicability of the codebook to the raw data is determined and the reliability of the code is tested. to do so, a small portion of the raw data is selected as a test piece and coded using the codebook to check for the applicability of the codebook. next, an independent researcher codes the same piece of data to compare the results. when noticeable differences exist, the codebook should be modified and step two is repeated. once the codebook is developed and its applicability and reliability are tested with a small portion of data, it can be used for deductive analysis of the raw data. to do so, the data are read and placed under the codes or themes developed a priori. inductive analysis inductive analysis of qualitative data is mostly used in social science and health research (thomas, 2006). basic inductive analysis is a technique of qualitative analysis that involves reading raw data and making sense of it by deriving categories, themes, and sometimes even a model. the primary goal of the inductive analysis is to allow research findings to emerge from the recurrent and prevailing themes in the data (thomas, 2006). in opposition to deductive analysis, inductive analysis allows researchers to develop the theory that emerges from the data. deductive analysis implies testing existing theories, assumptions, and hypotheses that investigate whether research findings are consistent with the literature review. inductive approach to analysis is goal-free, in which the role of a researcher is to describe what data actually inform about and not just what is expected to derive from the data. inductive analysis involves the following three purposes: (1) reducing diverse raw text data into brief summary findings; (2) establishing clear transparent and defensible links between summary findings and research objectives; and (3) developing a theoretical model of the raw data that displays the underlying structure of the data (thomas, 2006). in general inductive approach, research questions are focused on the core meanings evident in the raw text data that are relevant to research objectives. the brief summary findings derived from the diverse raw text data are merged to create meaningful themes and categories relevant to research objectives. the results of inductive analysis are presented through description of the most important themes and categories. before performing inductive analysis, the data need to be cleaned and prepared by editing the text and applying a common format to all data files. then, codes should be created. according to charmaz (2006), creating codes involves “categorizing segments of data with a short name that simultaneously summarizes and accounts for each piece of data” (p. 43). codes 98 global education review 1 (3) could contain actual language of the participants, called in vivo codes (harry, sturges, & klingner, 2005), or can be paraphrased. creating codes is essential to begin an analytic accounting for the data as codes show that the data were selected, separated, and sorted. the next step involves the creation of categories that contain meaningful units of text segments. during this step, the raw text data or transcripts are read several times by the researcher. the primary purpose of this step is to identify common categories and themes and create definitions for each category and theme. thomas (2006) suggested that there are two levels of categories or themes: more specific and more general, which were labeled as lower-level and upper-level categories. often, lower-level categories emerge from in vivo coding, whereas the upper-level categories are based on the critical and evaluative reading of the text data. unlike quantitative coding, qualitative coding allows for one segment to be placed in multiple categories at early stages of inductive analysis (thomas, 2006). inductive analysis is an iterative process with the raw data read and re-read multiple times and codes, themes and categories continually defined, refined, clarified, and amended. during the final step of inductive analysis, a researcher should not only familiarize oneself with data, but also gain understanding of the events. hycner (1985) stated that gaining a sense of the whole is essential as it provides “a context for the emergence of specific units or meanings and themes later on” (p. 281). combining inductive and deductive analyses the hybrid approach of inductive and deductive thematic analyses is a thematic coding that allows a balance of inductive coding (derived from the raw data) and deductive coding (derived from theoretical framework). this process empowers researchers to clearly identify how themes are generated from the raw data to uncover meanings central to the phenomenon. for example, fereday and muir-cochrane (2006) used the hybrid approach to gain understanding of how performance feedback among nurses can inform self-assessment related to their competence. after creating a template (deductive codebook with codes and themes), inductive codes are created based on the raw data and the template is applied to the inductive codes. then, the codes are connected to discover themes across the data during an iterative process, and clustered under headings to reflect research questions. methods data sources the data for this study come from observations of four middle school social science classrooms in the state of connecticut. these were four out of the 11 classrooms that participated in globaled 2, a pbl simulation of international decision-making with focus on water scarcity issues, for one semester in fall 2010. prior to the simulation, the teachers participated in a fourday online training on pbl and globaled 2 in july 2010. the training, globaled 2, and pbl environment were briefly described above to provide a contextual understanding of the data collected in this study. the observations of the four middle school social studies classes were conducted and recorded on video in november 2010. at the time of the observations, the teachers had led their classes in a pbl format for approximately two months; and observations were conducted during the interactive phase of globaled 2. the data for the present study include text data of the four classrooms, which consists of the following two portions: (a) transcripts of the four video observations of teachers and middle school students; and (b) field notes taken when watching the four video observations. the two thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 99 portions include data with focus on teachers and students. for the purposes of this study, field notes were not incorporated into transcripts of video observations. specifically, transcripts for each classroom included two separate text files: one text file contained transcript of the video and the other file contained the field notes. nevertheless, both transcripts and field notes were analyzed and research findings were based on both transcripts and field notes, and were integrated together to provide more developed results and assure triangulation. data analysis before data analyses, the codebooks were created separately for each research question based on theoretical concepts, which included upper-level categories combined into themes. once codebooks were created, the raw data were prepared for the analyses, particularly videos were transcribed and structured using a common format. then, analysis was carried out separately for each research question. first, inductive analysis was performed on the raw data to identify in vivo codes. second, deductive analysis was performed applying the codebook (specifically, themes developed a priori) to the in vivo codes obtained based on the inductive analysis. in the third step, similarities and differences were identified based on inductive and deductive analyses. specifically, in vivo codes that did not fall under any deductively obtained themes were identified, further clustered in categories and themes, and had succinct phrases assigned to describe the meanings that underpinned the themes. results first, the codebook (or the template) was created based on the literature review. to meet this goal, three chapters in the problem-based learning for administrators book by bridges (1992) were used, particularly, (1) introducing problem-based learning to students (chapter 2, pp. 19-28); (2) role of instructor in problembased learning (chapter 4, pp. 58-64); and (3) pbl: what students learn (chapter 5, pp. 6587). since this study addressed two research questions, two separate codebooks were created using microsoft word and excel programs. the three chapters were read and re-read, and inductive codes of the roles of teachers and students were created. to note, bridges (1992) suggested that some teachers’ roles are optional during pbl instructions. for example, teachers may choose to assist securing additional resources, provide high levels of positive feedback, or define failures as learning opportunities yet, doing so is not prerequisite of the pbl instructional method. in this study, both required and optional codes were included in the codebook. as a result, the codebook contained 44 codes of teacher’s roles and 29 codes of student’s roles. these codes were then merged into major themes, producing six themes in the teacher’s codebook (five prerequisite and one optional) and six themes in the student’s codebook. next, an excerpt of one classroom’s transcript and field notes were coded using the codebook to test the applicability of the codebook. additionally, a colleague was invited to code the same excerpt to test the reliability of the codebook (the second step in the description by fereday and muircochrane, 2006). the results were then compared, discussed, and the codebooks were refined. the refined codebook of the teacher’s instructional practices in pbl classrooms includes the following six themes: a teacher (1) provides resources to students; (2) participates passively, rather than actively; (3) provides guidance to students; (4) facilitates learning process; (5) provides feedback and evaluation to students; and (6) may provide a positive, non100 global education review 1 (3) threatening learning environment. appendix a presents deductive codes and themes for teacher’s instructional practices in pbl classroom environments, while the codes of optional teacher’s roles are provided in italics. the codebook of the students’ roles includes the following six themes: students are (1) divided into teams; (2) active participants of their learning; (3) learners who manage educational resources on their own; (4) provided with opportunities to transfer the knowledge; (5) increasingly independent and responsible for their own learning; (6) engaged in in selfdirected, collaborative learning. appendix b presents students’ codebook with deductive codes by theme. during the third step, inductive coding was carried out on the text data of transcripts and field notes for each research question. in this study, in-vivo codes were used to create inductive codes; therefore, exact words found in the data were used to name the codes. the aim of using in vivo codes was to ensure that concepts stayed as close as possible to participants’ own words and used their own terms in order to capture key elements of what was described. first, in vivo codes were created for each classroom based on the transcripts of the videos and field notes. then, the codes were grouped by the research question. the first group consisted of all in vivo codes related to teachers’ practices; whereas the second group consisted of all in vivo codes related to students’ participation. then, the codes across the four classrooms were combined and same and similar codes were dropped. as a result, 124 inductive codes of teacher’s instructional practices and 116 inductive codes of students’ responses to teacher’s instructional practices were created. because this study employed the hybrid approach of inductive and deductive analyses, inductive codes were not subsequently merged into themes. during the fourth, fifth, and sixth steps using the template analytic technique as outlined in fereday and muir-cochrane (2006), the themes developed a priori and described in the codebooks were applied to the inductive in vivo codes. analysis was guided by the codebook at this stage but not restricted by the deductively created themes. the process of applying the codebook to the inductive codes was iterative and also not restricted by the deductive themes. during the process of connecting the codes and identifying themes, inductive codes that described a new theme not specified in the codebook were discovered. subsequently, these codes were clustered into categories and broad themes. as a result, four new categories were discovered with regards to teachers’ instructional practices: a teacher (1) encourages students’ engagement through positive, nonthreatening communication; (2) manages the classroom; (3) provides precise directions; and (4) induces students’ future actions. the four categories were further clustered into two broad themes, particularly, teacher (1) engages with students; and (2) restricts students. table 1 provides inductive codes by category and theme that did not fit under any of the deductive themes of a teacher’s instructional practices (research question 1). thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 101 table 1. instructional practices of pbl teachers not presented in the thematic codebook theme category upper-level codes engages with students encourages students' engagement draw attention asks questions (including rhetorical questions) agrees with students jokes manages the classroom moves around the classroom talks to students listens to students restricts students provides precise directions gives precise directions when materials should be ready gives precise directions where students should go gives precise directions how students should split up provides instructions related to when the materials should be done tells students to be quite prompts certain actions tells that students will discuss (without saying what exactly) tells that students will plan (without saying what exactly) tells that students will read tells students they need to start likewise, five additional categories were discovered with regards to students’ responses to pbl instructional practices, particularly, students (1) are teacher-dependent; (2) are subordinated to the teacher; (3) may manipulate location and body; (4) engage emotionally in pbl; and (5) sometimes do not pay attention. the five categories were further clustered in three broader themes. students (1) comply with the teacher; (2) take liberties; and (3) may be off topic. table 2 presents inductive codes by category and theme that did not fit under any of the deductive themes of students’ responses to pbl instructional practices (research question 2). 102 global education review 1 (3) table 2. students' responses to pbl instructional practices not presented in the thematic codebook theme category upper-level codes comply with the teacher are teacher-dependent ask for directions ask the teacher questions use the teacher's materials clarify what they will do are subordinated to the teacher silently listen to the teacher agree with the teacher observing teacher's modeling behaviors take liberties manipulate location and body stand sit with their group members walk around the classroom sit with member of the other group leave the room use hands and arms to express opinion stands up to express opinion engage emotionally laugh or giggle get excited use exclamation intonation (e.g., "yup!") are off topic do not pay attention do not work in the same group talk to their group members on a topic not related to the class findings the purpose of this study was to gain a deeper understanding of the instructional practices used by pbl teachers implementing globaled 2 in middle school social science classrooms environments and the responses of middle school students to these instructional practices. to answer the research questions of this study, teachers and students in pbl classrooms were observed and video recorded during a classroom period in four middle schools. . then, a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive thematic analysis of video transcripts and field notes of four classroom observations was used. as a result, this study confirmed themes described in bridges’ (1992) description of roles of teachers and students in classrooms with pbl instructions, as well as identified additional themes. confirmed themes as stated by bridges (1992), pbl changes the function and role of the teachers. in a pbl environment, the teacher is not the information provider or classroom controller. rather, the teacher facilitates, coaches, and models good problem solving skills for their students. teachers play an essential role guiding students and modeling students’ learning. the findings in this study demonstrated consistency between the teachers’ instructional practices and students’ responses to such practices in pbl classroom environments, as found in the bridges’ (1992) definition. first and foremost, teachers provide thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 103 and assemble resources and educational materials to their students. they distribute research papers and handouts with facts among students, while providing encouragement. for example, while beth was giving papers to a group of students, she said: “and also btw, now and also… (giving papers) just some…. ideas that we can come up with. just some ideas, that’s all.” teachers make sure that students have resources valuable in developing solutions. because globaled 2 is an online pbl that required access to computers and the internet, teachers made sure that the computers were available for students in each issue group. in some schools, each student had access to a computer; whereas only one computer was available for each issue group of 4-7 students in other schools. in the case of the latter, teachers made sure that students used the computer collaboratively: “so, again you know you’re going to have to team up because not everyone has a computer, so, to team up and divide the work your reading, research some things (inaudible). go ahead and jump in and uh and if you have any questions talk to me.” pbl teachers do not actively participate in teaching the class. they minimize the time they spend on giving instructions to the whole class and avoid lecturing students. the teacher observes students’ participation with regards to students’ roles and engagement within the issue groups, contributions to discussions, application of knowledge, and general understanding. this process is especially noticeable in the field notes: the teacher goes around the class, stops next to students in the health issue group in front of their computers. he looks at the screen of students’ computer but stands far so that he does not disturb students. eventually, students noticed the teacher. the teacher is just observing, not saying a word. the teacher assistant approaches the round table and looks at what students in the human rights issue group are writing in their papers. teacher does not serve as a dispenser of the information, but rather as a coach or a tutor to students, by leading students and proposing ideas. when giving ideas to students, the teachers allow students to make their own decisions as to whether or not to use specific materials, stepping down from an authoritative teaching style and giving more freedom and control of the learning to the students. additionally, teachers provide guidance to students, review what students know, suggest how that knowledge can be applied to the problem being solved, ask leading questions, and identify ideas that students may choose to use. when talking to students in the economic policy issue group, thomas led students to think about barter: “everyone has different needs for the people of their land. correct? you guys are dealing with that as you talk; well someone is saying ‘i’m not going to pay you because we need to use our money to help our people eat.’ some places don’t have enough food so conflicting cooperation right now is working on a trade, which is great.” teachers facilitate learning process to students by asking timely questions, checking whether students understand the material, and provide directions if students need assistance. teachers may often use such words as “perhaps” and “possibly” when providing directions to students who need help: 104 global education review 1 (3) “umm...so, what i’m going to ask you guys to do is to log back into uh simulation and go onto the message board there uh and see what you can do to further your policy because again according to the edited negotiations uh try to get some messages out there that will get your point of view across. perhaps, you want to persuade some people to work with your allies uh and to prevent some people who don’t agree with you.” during pbl instructions, teachers ensure a positive classroom environment, facilitating students’ growth and suggesting how students may improve their solutions. pbl teachers provide timely feedback to students and evaluate students’ products for educational purposes. with regards to students in pbl classrooms, they work in small groups. due to the regimen of globaled 2, students in each classroom were divided into four groups according to the four issue areas (economic policies, environment, human rights, and health). each group in the observed classrooms consisted of four to five students. all groups were mixed-gender. during the pbl simulation, students sit in front of a computer and participate equally. students are active participants in their learning. each student has a role. for example, one student can be typing on the computer what other students in the small group are suggesting, as described in the field notes: after the teacher stopped talking, students started actively discussing what they were working on. students in the economic policies issue group are gathered around the laptop. one student (a boy) is sitting in front of the laptop. other students in the group are standing behind him, while one girl is kneeling. all students in the group are deciding what to respond to another “country” and dictating the boy at the laptop the sentences to type. in pbl classrooms, students feel responsibility for what is happening during pbl and for how to find a solution to the problems. they are selfdirected, often independent, and are willing to help all students in their small group. they locate and manage educational resources on their own, being increasingly independent from their teacher. for example, when jarod mentioned that there were not enough computers in his classroom, one girl raised her hand and volunteered her own computer for the use in her issue group. the students work in groups, helping each other and discussing issues related to the project. students not only work collaboratively with members of their own group, but also help members of other groups in their class. they share resources, exchange ideas, discuss solutions, and apply knowledge to the problems being solved. added themes along with similarities between the data and the theory, this study also revealed additional themes with regards to teachers’ instructional practices in pbl classrooms and students’ responses to such practices, compared to bridges’ (1992) definitions of the latter two. two broad themes of teachers’ instructional practices in pbl classrooms and three broad themes of students’ responses to pbl practices were discovered. teachers play an essential role in engaging students and overlooking their learning. while teachers play the role of passive observers of students’ learning, they also engage with students. they walk freely around the classroom and talk to students individually and collectively in small groups; they ask questions, listen to and agree with students. when interacting with students, teachers encourage students’ engagement in a good-humored way by thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 105 telling jokes and asking rhetorical questions or manage the whole classroom by moving around as well as listening and talking to students. as students get progressively engaged with being progressively more independent at searching for solutions, they may also become sidetracked from a central issue. in this case, teachers have to guide students by establishing deadlines and prompting students’ attention to certain activities. for example, thomas gave straightforward directions to students telling them in a very direct way not to pay attention to something or to just abandon the idea: “that’s not the issue, i don’t want to get into that […] shhh… um… i don’t know… um… not now, just not now.” some students’ responses to pbl practices were not indicated in bridges (1992) work. during pbl instructions, students generally comply with the teacher. despite an increasing independence, students rely on the teacher; they use teachers’ materials, ask for directions, and clarify what they need to accomplish, as well as observe, wordlessly listen to, and agree with the teacher: students are silent; they are listening to the teacher while the teacher gives the papers to students (to each of them). one of the students is standing next to thomas [the teacher], not saying much, but occasionally nodding in agreement with the teacher. once the teacher was done talking, students asked: “can we go [to our computers] now mr. r.?” similar to classrooms with a traditional learning environment, students get sidetracked in classrooms with a pbl environment. they may not pay attention to what is happening in the classroom or remain focused on the actual problem presented, even when their teacher emphasizes and show them what they should concentrate their effort on: the teacher is sharing information with students by projecting the webpage on the wall. because the text is too small to be able to read, thomas asks his assistant: “can you zoom it in,” “go and zoom it in,” and “now click it on.” while the teacher is asking his assistant to help with the technology, students are talking to each other about unrelated to the simulation topics. finally, students take liberties. they are allowed to move around the classroom, engage in a conversation related to the project with members of other teams, express positive emotions, and talk to students in other issue groups. sometimes, students get very excited about what their teacher demonstrates and explains. overall, students are generally excited to participate in pbl and eagerly engage in solving the problem. they take an active part in their learning, while still relying on teachers’ instructions. they may get sidetracked, similar to what sometimes happens in traditional classrooms. when this happens, teachers may engage with students to make sure that students are paying attention in a positive, indirect, way by joking and asking rhetorical questions as well as listening to and agreeing with students, and ensuring that students feel empowered about their learning. alternatively, teachers may tell students in a very sharp way to quit doing something and be back on track, using a carrot and stick approach. conclusions teaching is a complex task and even more so in a student-centered environment with a pbl instructional method when teacher and student 106 global education review 1 (3) roles are no longer traditional. this study examined the roles of teachers and students, focusing on instructional practices of teachers in pbl classrooms and students’ responses to such practices. replicating and extending the work of bridges (1992), the present study demonstrated that an experienced pbl teacher ensures a positive classroom environment by facilitating students’ growth and suggesting how students may improve. students become increasingly independent in self-directed collaborative learning while sharing ideas and resources, transferring knowledge actively across domains, and searching for solutions to the given problem. this study identified a number of specific instructional practices of teachers, as well as responses that students might engage in during pbl instructions. being able to articulate these roles is an important step in helping new pbl teachers facilitate effective student-centered classrooms. references bridges, e. m. (1992). problem-based learning for administrators. eugene, or: eric clearinghouse on educational management. brown, s. w., & king, f. b. (2000). constructivist pedagogy and how we learn: educational psychology meets international studies. international studies perspectives, 1(1), 245-254. brown, s.w., lawless, k. a. & boyer, m.a. (2013). promoting positive academic dispositions using a webbased pbl environment: the globaled 2 project. interdisciplinary journal of problem-based learning, 7(1). available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/15415015.1389 charmaz, k. (2006). constructing grounded theory: a practical guide through qualitative analysis. thousand oaks: sage. crabtree, b., & miller, w. (1999). a template approach to text analysis: developing and using codebooks. in b. crabtree & w. miller (eds.), doing qualitative research (pp. 163-177). newbury park, ca: sage. daly, j., kellehear, a., & gliksman, m. (1997). the public health researcher: a methodological approach. melbourne, australia: oxford university press. fereday, j., & muir-cochrane, e. (2006). demonstrating rigor using thematic analysis: a hybrid approach of inductive and deductive coding and theme development. international journal of qualitative methods, 5(1), 80-92. harry, b., sturges, k. m., & klingner, j. k. (2005). mapping the process: an exemplar of process and challenge in grounded theory analysis. educational researcher, 34(2), 3-13. hycner, r. h. (1985). some guidelines for the phenomenological analysis of interview data. human studies, 8(13), 279-303. jonassen, d. h. (2011). learning to solve problems: a handbook for designing problem-solving learning environments. new york: routledge. kelson, a. c. m., & distlehorst, l. h. (2000). groups in problem-based learning (pbl): essential elements in theory and practice. in d. h. evensen, & c. e. hmelo (eds.), problem-based learning: a research perspective on learning interactions (pp. 167-184). mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates, inc. lawless, k. a., brodowinska, k., lynn, l., khodos, g., brown, s.w., boyer, m.a., yukhymenko, m. & mullin, g.p. (2012). the globaled 2 game: developing scientific literacy skills through interdisciplinary, technology-based global simulations. in y. baek (ed.) psychology of gaming. hauppauge, ny: nova science publishers. thomas, d. r. (2006). a general inductive approach for analyzing qualitative evaluation data. american journal of evaluation, 27(2), 237-246. about the author(s) mariya a. yukhymenko, ph.d. is a visiting research specialist in the learning sciences research institute at the university of illinois at chicago, where she works on the assessment team for the project readi and teaches classes on research design in education. she holds a ph.d. degree in educational psychology: cognition and instruction from the university of connecticut (2012). dr. yukhymenko has been a member of the globaled team since 2010. she is interested in quantitative and qualitative methods and assessment techniques applicable to students’ motivation, learning, and the effects of technology on literacy and its acquisition. scott w. brown, ph.d. is a board of trustees distinguished professor of educational psychology at the university of connecticut where he studies learning, http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1389 http://dx.doi.org/10.7771/1541-5015.1389 thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 107 memory, problem-solving and decision-making, and authored over 140 articles and book chapters, and has coauthored three books. he has been awarded over $12m in grant funds for his research, and currently co-directs the globaled 2 project www.globaled2.com. kimberly a. lawless, ph.d. is a professor of educational psychology and language, literacy, and culture at the university of illinois at chicago. dr. lawless studies how individuals acquire and comprehend information from nonlinear digital environments, focusing on how aspects of the learner, the media, and the task influence navigational strategy and learning outcomes. she has procured over five million dollars in grant funding and published over 90 articles in these areas, and currently co-directs the globaled 2 project. kamila brodowinska, m.ed. is a doctoral student in educational psychology at the university of illinois at chicago. she is interested in fidelity of implementation of new curricula and its influence on student learning. gregory mullin, ph.d. is an assistant professor of psychology at bunker hill community college in boston, ma. he received his ph.d. in educational psychology: cognition and instruction from the university of connecticut in 2012 and has been a member of the globaled team since 2009. his research includes the effect of teacher humor and the student-teacher relationship on student interest, motivation, and learning. appendices appendix a teachers’ instructional practices during pbl: deductive codes and themes teacher provides resources to students 1. teacher provides educational materials to facilitate learning 2. teacher assembles the resources, materials, supplies, and equipment needed for learning 3. teacher serves as a resource to the team 4. teacher serves as a resource to students 5. teacher assists in securing additional resources (expertise or equipment) teacher is a passive (rather than an active) participant 6. teacher observes the pattern of participation along content, process, and frequency 7. teacher observes whether students’ participation is relatively high or low 8. teacher observes whether students understand and are able to apply knowledge 9. teacher observes who is talking 10. teacher observes how students’ comments fit into or contribute to the discussion 11. teacher observes project meetings 12. teacher is not a dominant participant 13. teacher gives more and more responsibility to students 14. teacher is involved less as students learn more teacher provides guidance to students 15. teacher does not serve as a dispenser of information http://www.globaled2.com/ 108 global education review 1 (3) 16. teacher is a facilitator, or educational coach, or a tutor 17. teacher guides students’ learning 18. teacher reviews knowledge with students 19. teacher provides guidance to facilitate learning 20. teacher asks guiding questions 21. teacher checks to see if students share these perceptions 22. teacher demonstrates skills 23. teacher asks timely questions 24. teacher clarifies the meaning of concepts 25. teacher answers questions related to the project teacher facilitates learning process 26. teacher assigns roles to students of the project team 27. teacher tones students’ comments 28. teacher provides directions if team needs assistance 29. teacher intervenes if needed (if students are bogged down and spinning their wheels) 30. teacher suggests about how the team may improve teacher provides feedback and evaluation to students to facilitate students’ growth 31. teacher evaluates the participation with a view toward facilitating students’ growth. for example: a. “here’s what i observed....” b. “here’s why it concerns (or impresses) me....” c. “do you see it the same way?...” d. “if so, how might you do that differently in the future, or how might you try to deal with that concern?” 32. when providing feedback, teacher offers suggestions for dealing with the areas in need of improvement 33. when providing feedback, teacher provides a balanced picture of strengths and weaknesses 34. when providing feedback, teacher limits the number of concerns that are identified 35. when providing feedback, teacher discusses the reasoning behind the suggestions 36. when providing feedback, teacher uses neutral to positive tone 37. when providing feedback, teacher poses questions for further reflection by students. 38. teacher assesses team’s final product 39. teacher shares perceptions of what seems to be happening teacher may create positive, non-threatening learning environment 40. teacher strives to creates nonthreatening, supportive environment 41. teacher defines “failures” as leaning opportunities 42. teacher encourages students 43. teacher supports students’ efforts 44. teacher provides high levels of positive feedback thematic analysis of teacher instructional objectives 109 appendix b students’ responses to instructional practices during pbl: deductive codes and themes students are divided into teams 1. students are in groups of 5-7 2. students work together in the group to problem solve and learn 3. students work as member of a project team to solve problems 4. most of the learning occurs within the context of small groups rather than lectures students are active participants of their learning 5. each student has his or her own role 6. there is a team leader in each team 7. each group member participates equally 8. students are leaders in their learning 9. students are dominant participants (not an instructor) 10. students play an extremely active role in a pbl project students manage educational resources on their own 11. students locate resources 12. students examine the resources 13. students use the newly acquired information to resolve problems students are provided with opportunities to transfer the knowledge 14. students have opportunities to use and apply what they have learned previously 15. students are given opportunities to elaborate on what they have learned 16. students write essays about what they have learned 17. students discuss with the teacher the product (when product is ready) students are increasingly independent and responsible for their own learning 18. students are given more and more responsibility for their own education 19. students become increasingly independent of a teacher 20. students individually and collectively assume a major responsibility for their own instruction and learning 21. students are responsible for figuring out how to accomplish objectives of the project 22. students (not the instructor) shoulder responsibility for what happens during the project students are engaged in self-directed, collaborative learning 23. students discuss the information 24. students exchange views about how knowledge and skills might be used to deal with the problem 110 global education review 1 (3) 25. students share with each other what they learned 26. students acquire collaborative or team learning skills 27. students critique one another’s efforts to apply the knowledge 28. students work with learning materials as a project team 29. students develop their product 40 global education review 2(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: espinosa, linda m. (2015). challenges and benefits of early bilingualism in the unites states’ context. global education review, 2(1), 14-31. challenges and benefits of early bilingualism in the united states’ context linda m. espinosa university of missouri-columbia abstract the population of young dual language learners (dll) in the united states has tripled in the last several decades and now accounts for 25% of all children in the united states (migration policy institute, june 2014). many of these children are exposed to multiple languages in the home and the early childhood setting (ece) setting, and the vast majority are u.s. citizens. despite the robust research documenting the extensive capacity of infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to learn multiple languages and the cognitive, social, and linguistic benefits of early bilingualism, most young dlls in the united states do not receive enriched ece that supports their emergent bilingualism. this article reviews the latest research, describes the developmental characteristics of young dual language learners, the similarities and differences between dlls and young monolingual children, the current ece policies and practices toward dlls in the united states, and concludes with policy recommendations at the federal, state, and local levels. keywords dual language learners, early bilingualism, early childhood second language acquisition, early childhood education, bilingualism, dual language learner policies introduction the population of young children who speak a language other than english in the home and are acquiring english as a second or third language has increased dramatically across the united states in early care and education (ece) settings as well as k-12 public schools. many of these children are exposed to more than one language in the home and can be considered emergent multilinguals. these young children who are acquiring two or more languages simultaneously, or are learning a second language while continuing to master their first language are considered dual language learners (dlls). the population of young dlls has tripled in the last several decades and now accounts for 25% of all children in the united states (migration policy institute, june 2014). recent enrollment reports show that in 2011 fifty nine percent of the children served in head start programs were from racial or ethnic minority families, 37% of them were of hispanic/latino origin and more than 30% were dual language learners (office of head start, 2011). this article reviews the latest research, describes the developmental characteristics of young dual language learners, ______________________________ corresponding author: linda m. espinosa, university of missoui-columbia, 30 w. morning glory drive, pagosa springs, co 81147. email: espinosal@missouri.edu challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 41 the similarities and differences between dlls and young monolingual children, and the current ece policies and practices toward dlls in the united states. it concludes with policy recommendations at the federal, state, and local levels. throughout all phases of their educational experiences, from preschool to school entry and k-12 schooling, the educational achievement of dlls has historically lagged behind their native english-speaking peers (espinosa, 2010; rumberger & tran, 2007). a large proportion of young dlls are from immigrant families, and children with immigrant parents are much more likely to experience poverty (40%) than children in the united states in general (20%) (hernandez, denton, & mccartney, 2009). recent studies have suggested that high-quality ece experiences may be especially beneficial to dll children’s school readiness (magnuson & waldfogel, 2005). fortunately, during the past decade, there has been an explosion of research findings that provide a scientific basis for designing expectations, program approaches, and assessment procedures that support the development and school achievement of young dlls. we now know more about how the development of dlls is similar to and distinct from monolingual children, and we have an emerging knowledge base about effective instructional and assessment approaches. at this point in time, we are experiencing both a dynamic shift in the demographics of our youngest americans as well as an expanding scientific basis for designing responsive and appropriate early learning environments. young dual language learners represent multiple language groups, diverse cultural backgrounds, a wide range of family circumstances, and many different countries of origin; this group of children and families are very diverse (winsler, burchinal, tien, peisnerfeinberg, espinosa & castro, 2014). however, all young dlls have one thing in common—they are challenged with mastering the linguistic components of several different language systems during a period of rapid overall development. while some ece professionals maintain that mastering the fundamentals of more than one language during the critical early years is overwhelming for many children, current research suggests that, in fact, all children—even those with special needs—are capable of learning multiple languages from their earliest months of life, and this language challenge benefits dlls in multiple ways. united states’ context of development for young dual language learners in the united states three federal programs fund most of the nationally subsidized services to young children: the child care and development block grant (ccdbg), temporary assistance for needy families (tanf), and head start. states also invest in ccdbg and in some cases in prekindergarten and head start, including early head start programs which serve children from birth to age three. ccdbg provides child care assistance to low-income families and requires state matching and maintenance of effort (moe) funds. individual states are permitted to spend tanf funds directly on child care assistance and/or transfer up to 30 percent of their grant to ccdbg. state tanf moe funds may also be spent on child care. head start is the primary comprehensive early education program for poor children in the united states. it served about 1.1 million children and invested approximately eight billion dollars in 2012 for early educational services. the comprehensive services provided by head start include health, nutrition, social, and other services determined to be necessary by family needs assessments. it has been estimated that this patchwork of federal programs serves less than 50% of the low-income children in the united states who are eligible for and would benefit from high quality ece services (schmidt, matthews, smith, & robbins, 2013). 42 global education review 2(1) in addition to the federal investments, 40 states fund pre-kindergarten programs that provide educational services to an additional 1.3 million children representing expenditures of more than 5.1 billion dollars. these programs provide services to 28% of all four year olds and 4% of all three year olds across the 50 states. in the united states, children with parents who are more educated are much more likely to attend state supported pre-kindergarten programs than those children whose parent did not complete high school (nieer, 2012)1. further, latino and pacific islander children have the lowest participation rates and only a minority of state pre-kindergarten programs in the unites states have been judged to be of high quality (nieer, 2012). in the united states, where a child lives, as well as his family background, is closely associated with ece participation. children in washington d.c., florida, oklahoma, or vermont, are very likely to have public ece programs available, while children in montana, wyoming, or utah, have no access to statefunded pre-kindergarten programs because these states don’t fund public pre-kindergarten programs. federally funded programs for lowincome children and their families such as head start or ccdbg may be available in these states. in addition, states vary enormously in their adherence to high quality standards; only a few states provide sufficient funding to implement programs that require highly qualified teachers and assistant teachers, as well as regular program monitoring and program assistance to ensure consistent quality. socio-cultural context for dual language learners as dll children and families represent many different social, cultural, and linguistic backgrounds, there are important socio-cultural differences within the dll population that influence development across all learning domains. for example, in the united states, children in a bilingual home, are likely to have parents without a high school education, are likely to be growing up under economic adversity, and are likely to be raised in specific cultural contexts that may differ from mainstream u.s. norms. (castro, garcia, espinosa, genesee, gillanders, hammer, laforett, peisner-feinberg, tabors, under review). in addition, it has been found that children with immigrant parents (who are more likely to speak a language other than english in the home) are more likely than those with united states-born parents to live in two-parent families (hernandez and napierala, 2012); immigrant mothers are more likely to be married, less likely to be depressed, and more likely to have larger families than nonimmigrant mothers (mistry, biesanz, chien, howes, & benner, 2008). these socio-cultural factors represent a constellation of strengths and potential risks for children growing up with more than one language in the united states and need to be considered when designing specific educational services. children being raised by foreign-born parents or those whose dominant language is not english also experience unique cultural, linguistic, and parenting contexts that influence their development and kindergarten readiness (castro, et al., under review; perreira, chapman, & stein, 2006; winsler et al., 2014). for example, young children with balanced bilingual abilities have shown some advanced linguistic, cognitive, and social-emotional skills during the preschool years (castro & espinosa, 2014; espinosa, 2013). in order to design the most responsive and linguistically enriching early learning experiences for young dlls, it is important for ece providers to have a good understanding of the unique contexts that shape the development of dual language learners and in which ways they differ from those of monolingual children. in the united states, for most young children from cultural and language minority challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 43 families, growing up with more than one language is associated with low performance on assessments of cognitive development and academic achievement. national statistics and evaluation studies in the united states, for example, indicate that children of immigrants, who are dual language learners, enter kindergarten with academic deficits and often have lower school achievement than those who are native english speakers (garcia & frede, 2010). however, the vast majority of these assessments and academic achievement measures are administered only in english without considering knowledge or skills in languages other than english, or ways of demonstrating knowledge that may be culturally embedded. unfortunately, the confounding effects of poverty and minority status are rarely disentangled from language status so it is often impossible to determine if the lower achievement of dlls is due to the corroding effects of chronic poverty or more directly related to english language skills. in addition, much of the current research does not address the complexity of the developmental context of dlls or offer comprehensive solutions that recognize and build on the potential linguistic, cultural, or social strengths of early bilingualism. recent comprehensive reviews of the literature conducted by the center for early care and educational research dual language learners (cecer-dll) and other recent reviews have revealed limitations in the extant research (cecer-dll, 2011; garcia & nañez, 2011). much of the existing research focuses on the differences between dll and non-dll populations from a deficit perspective and fails to offer developmental frameworks based on normative developmental pathways of young dlls. therefore, findings most often point to deficits in the achievement of dlls when compared to native english speakers and recommendations are focused on interventions to help them catch up (castro et al., under review). in contrast, what we need now in the united states is to re-examine the science of early bilingualism, recognize the unique developmental contexts and characteristics of young dlls without concluding that these differences are deficits, and design instructional and assessment approaches that are responsive to the needs and emerging potentials of young children from linguistically and culturally diverse backgrounds. the science of early bilingualism new noninvasive brain-imaging techniques are allowing researchers to study how the bilingual condition changes brain functioning. for example, magnetoencephalography (meg) is currently being used to study language processing of infants and toddlers. this neuroimaging technique has high operating costs, but is ideally suited to studying language processing because it yields precise data on neural responses to language stimuli, exactly when and in what order specific aspects of language knowledge are accessed, as well as where or in which parts of the brain neural activity occurs. this advanced method of studying how the human brain processes language during the earliest years is providing insights on how specific experiences with more than one language influence the organization of the language processing systems of young dll brains (conboy, 2013). based on this recent research from cognitive neuroscientists, we now know that from the earliest days of life human babies have an extensive and innate capacity to hear, process, and learn multiple languages. in fact, even the youngest babies are able to sort the unique phonology (or sounds) of each language perceived into separate language categories, and by the preschool years bilingual children are skilled in interpreting contextual cues to direct their utterances in the appropriate language to the appropriate person (byers-heinlein, burns, 44 global education review 2(1) & werker, 2010; kuhl, stevens, hayashi, deguchi, kiritani, & iverson, 2006). additional research has concluded that during the last trimester of pregnancy, fetuses are actively processing the unique characteristics of different languages and beginning to make distinctions among them (conboy, 2013). there is widespread agreement in the scientific community that as infants are exposed to two languages and developing their bilingual abilities, they are developing two distinct but connected linguistic systems. it appears that all infants, even those with special needs, have the innate ability to learn multiple languages and that the early years are an ideal time to acquire multiple languages (conboy, 2013). petitto and colleagues (2012) in a series of studies focused on young bilingual children found that bilingual infants (10-12 months old) demonstrated enhanced brain plasticity and increased language processing skills. these groundbreaking studies show that experience with two linguistic systems, no matter how short and regardless of the language pairs involved, changes the way in which language is organized in the brain. furthermore, these functional brain changes are present very early on, after only limited bilingual experience, suggesting that setting up representations in two linguistic systems through exposure to two languages, and not only language production, drives functional plasticity in bilingual children. (barac, bialystok, castro & sanchez, 2014 p. 13). cognitive development of dual language learners very young children who are exposed to more than one language during the earliest years experience certain cognitive enhancements that are discernable as early as seven months of age (barac, et al, 2014; sandhofer & uchikoshi, 2013). recent scientific studies have found that bilingual infants as young as seven months of age demonstrated superior mental flexibility when presented with shifting learning tasks; when compared to monolingual infants, bilingual infants were able to quickly respond to a switch in learning conditions and change their responses. many of the studies of this bilingual advantage have focused on infants’ ability to process and discriminate different speech sounds, which suggests that young bilingual infants may have enhanced attention during speech processing. this particular skill, the ability to inhibit previous learning when conditions change, is usually considered one aspect of executive functioning and is an essential component of school readiness. early bilingualism has also been associated with other aspects of executive function abilities, for example, working memory, inhibitory control, attention to relevant vs. irrelevant task cues, as well as improved language skills (sandhofer & uchikoshi, 2013). as stated above, executive function skills have been identified as foundational to kindergarten readiness and academic success (espinosa, 2013). as infants mature into preschoolers, these advantages in executive function abilities become even more pronounced, especially in tasks that require selectively attending to competing options and the ability to suppress interfering information (sandhofer & uchikoshi, 2013). these cognitive advantages to early bilingualism have been found across multiple language combinations as well as across socioeconomic status (ses) and ethnic/cultural groups. an important finding across studies is that these cognitive advantages have been associated with balanced bilingualism. those children who demonstrate roughly equal abilities in each of their languages show greater advantages than those who are unbalanced, or more dominant in one language. thus, in order to understand the cognitive and linguistic abilities of young dlls, ece providers will need to consider the amount and quality of dll,s exposure to each language (barac et al, 2014). challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 45 language and literacy development of young bilingual children infants’ earliest language learning exposure begins by attending to the sounds of their mothers speech even before birth, during the last trimester of pregnancy. (byers-heinlein, burns, & werker, 2010). they rapidly continue to learn about the sounds of speech and features of language through all their language interactions, in the home, in the community, with adults, with peers, and in their ece settings. these early language learning environments can vary tremendously, from all interactions at home in their non-english language and incidental english exposure in the community to english exposure at home form older siblings and dual language instruction in a formal ece program. thus, the amount of exposure to english can vary enormously across settings from almost none to all language interactions conducted in english. these earliest language learning opportunities are important for ece providers to understand, as both the amount of exposure to and opportunity to learn a second language contribute to the overall language development of young bilingual children (castro et al., under review). all young children in bilingual environments have the potential to become fully bilingual (i.e., learning two languages at the same time, and developing a similar levels of proficiency in each language), (albareda,-castellot, pons, & sebastián-gallés, 2011; pearson, fernandez, lewedeg, & oller, 1997), however, successfully becoming a balanced bilingual will require sufficient exposure and high quality learning opportunities in both languages. although we know that emergent bilingual children require sufficient exposure in both languages to achieve proficiency and to experience the bilingual advantages described above, in the united states this is rarely the case (hoff et al., 2012; marchman et al., 2004). a secondary analysis of the early childhood longitudinal study, birth cohort (ecls-b) conducted by the cecer-dll indicated that in the united states dll infants and toddlers are more likely to be in bilingual care when they are 9 months old, less likely at 24 months and unlikely to receive bilingual ece services once they are 52 months of age, when they are more likely to attend center-based ece (espinosa, burchinal, tien, castro, peisner-feinberg & winsler, 2013). this large nationally representative study shows that in the united states young dual language learners who attend ece programs have fewer opportunities to develop proficiency in both of their languages as english-only instruction is the most common language offered in preschools. this means that young emergent bilingual children in the united states are unlikely to benefit from the cognitive advantages of balanced bilingualism. how are dual language learners similar to and different from monolingual children? as the population of young children who speak a language other than english in the home and are acquiring english as a second or third language continues to increase across the united states there has been a corresponding explosion of research findings on the specific developmental characteristics of dlls. these recent research findings provide a scientific basis for designing expectations, program approaches, and assessment procedures that support the development of young dlls. we now have a better understanding about the development of dlls as well as how dlls’ development is similar to and different from monolingual children. there is also an emerging knowledge base about effective instructional design and assessment approaches for dlls. some features of dlls’ language development may look like speech or language delays. (sandhofer & uchikoshi, 2013). the ongoing challenges of processing more than one language and frequently switching between languages results in a different set of language 46 global education review 2(1) and cognitive strengths and needs for bilingual children than those of monolingual children. (conboy, 2013). young children who are learning through two languages initially make slower progress in each of their languages than monolingual children (sandhofer & uchikoshi, 2013). in addition, they typically have smaller vocabularies in each of their languages than monolingual children, but their total vocabulary size (the sum of what children know in both languages) is frequently similar to monolingual children (espinosa, 2015). young dlls also take longer to recall words from memory and have lower scores on verbal fluency tasks, as their language processing is more complex than that of monolingual children (petitto et al., 2011). most often these differences are temporary and disappear as young dlls become more proficient in both of their languages (conboy, 2013). these are some of the more salient and well-documented differences between dlls and monolingual children, however, it is clear that the experience of being systematically exposed to more than one language during the early years will influence many aspects of cognitive and linguistic development. these early differences in language exposure for dlls result in unique neural connections and pathways that permanently affect the very basic architecture of their brain development (conboy & kuhl, 2011). it is important to remember that these documented differences in the language and early literacy skills of young dlls are just that— differences and not delays! they are a byproduct of the challenges of hearing, processing, and making meaning from multiple language systems during the early childhood years. these findings underscore the need for early care providers to understand the challenges a young dual language learner experiences when processing language, particularly the non-dominant language, and the need to allow sufficient time for the child to come up with a response. wait time is important for all children, but critical for young dual language learners. importance of supporting both languages as mentioned above, very young children have the capacity and, indeed are neurologically prepared to learn more than one language—and they gain cognitively from managing the linguistic processing required when becoming bilingual. however, frequently when very young children are exposed to english in the united states’ ece context for significant amounts of time, they shift their dominant language to english. dll preschoolers who attend englishdominant ece programs often quickly start to demonstrate a preference for using english and become disinclined to continue to use their home language in preschool and in the home (espinosa, 2010). this outcome has been discussed by researchers as first language loss, or a subtractive language experience; in many early care settings in the united states, young dual language learners show first language loss as they become more proficient in english, given children’s limited or non-existing exposure to and use of their first language. as stated by conboy (2013), “. . . it is important for practitioners to look at the long-term outcomes of those effects, and also to consider children’s experiences with both of their languages instead of only focusing on whether second language performance matches that of native speakers” (p. 36). thus, in the united states, increased attention must be given to both english language development as well as to continued home language development in order to facilitate both the cognitive, social, and linguistic benefits of early bilingualism as well as to promote school readiness goals. to summarize, learning a second language during the preschool years--typically english in the united states-should not come at the expense of continued first language development. research highlights the importance of sufficient challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 47 exposure to both languages in order to reap the benefits of bilingualism. frequently, in the united states, educators voice the concern that spending time in any language other than english during the preschool years may delay the acquisition of english or interfere with school achievement (espinosa, 2013). teachers and school administrators often think that they can accelerate english acquisition by early english immersion. however, many studies have shown that dlls can successfully learn two languages, and do not need to give up their home language in order to learn english if that is the goal of the preschool program. there are also promising approaches to promoting english acquisition while also supporting home language maintenance that can be implemented by all ece teachers (espinosa, 2015). it is possible for all ece staff to enhance the language acquisition of dual language learners by adapting instruction to include use of the home language and employing specific strategies that promote english language development. some of these strategies include active engagement of family and community members to present and support lessons in the home language, making sure there are materials in each language as well as incorporating stories and content that is culturally familiar to the children (conboy, 2013; espinosa, 2015). in addition to the benefits of knowing two (or more) languages, there are other reasons for supporting dlls’ home language development. children who become proficient in more than one language experience the advantages described above as well as certain social and economic advantages well into adulthood. in addition, there are developmental risks associated with loss of a child’s first language. children who do not develop and maintain proficiency in their home language may lose their ability to communicate with parents and family members and risk becoming estranged from their cultural and linguistic heritage. dual language learners who are proficient in their first language are able “to establish a strong cultural identity, to develop and sustain strong ties with their immediate and extended families, and thrive in a global multilingual world” (espinosa, 2006, p. 2). thus, there are compelling reasons to actively support the development of young dlls’ first language as well as the acquisition of english. in the united states the approach of systematically promoting the acquisition of english during the early years while also attending to the maintenance of a child’s first language is often described as an additive approach to second language acquisition. in this approach english is not thought of as a replacement of the home language, but as an addition to a primary language that is important for dlls overall development and future success. the research described above, both the cognitive neuroscience and the educational research, fully support an additive approach—almost all young children are capable of adding a second or third language during the preschool years and this multilingual ability confers long-term cognitive, cultural, and economic advantages. finally, it is becoming increasingly clear that the first six years of life are an ideal time for children to acquire a second language, as it is the critical period for language development; it is the period when all young children are actively attending to the sounds, grammar, and meanings of language. thus, there are many compelling reasons to give young dlls opportunities to develop high levels of proficiency in both of their languages because the advantages are significant and life-long. current policies and practices for young dual language learners in the united states in the united states the important elements of high quality early childhood programs that serve monolingual english speakers have been extensively studied over the past 30 years. findings from this extensive research conducted 48 global education review 2(1) with monolingual children have formed the basis for state early learning standards across the united states, assessment tools, as well as classroom quality monitoring instruments and procedures (barnett, yarosz, thomas, jung, & blanco, 2007; camilli, vargas, ryan, & barnett, 2010; dickinson & neuman, 2006: dickinson, 2011; espinosa, 2003; mikulski, 2011). in general, in the united states, research has established the important elements of high quality early childhood programs that serve monolingual english speakers; we know how to reliably assess and monitor these features; and we can make connections between quality features to later school performance. unfortunately, there is not a comparable research base when it comes to ece programs that serve cultural and linguistic minorities in the united states. most of the influential studies of ece efficacy in the united states have either not included dlls as a distinct subgroup or administered language and cognitive assessments exclusively in english. consequently, we are in the early stages of compiling a robust research base that can offer guidance on how to design early childhood services that promote academic achievement in the short and long-term as well as provide culturally and linguistically responsive and effective education for dlls. the scarcity of research evidence in the united states is even greater when focusing on care for infants and toddlers who are dlls. in the united states there are several different language approaches in ece settings. in english-only programs, dll students are expected to learn english from the beginning and any support for the child’s home language is intended to merely help the child cope with an all-english classroom. in these classrooms english is used almost exclusively and most print is also in english. the child may have some english as a second language (esl) instruction, individually or in small groups, to promote rapid acquisition of enough english to comprehend english instruction (espinosa, 2015). in some english preschool classrooms, dll children are offered home language support by support staff or through translations, multilingual materials, and active family involvement practices. however, the primary goal of these programs is the rapid acquisition of english and the attainment of learning expectations in english. in practice, there is much variability in how much support and attention is paid to the home language in english dominant preschool programs (chang et al., 2007). bilingual programs can be transitional, maintenance of home language, one-way or twoway, dual language bilingual programs. in all bilingual classrooms instruction is divided between english and the child’s home language. the goals in a transitional program focus on using the home language to “bridge” into english while in a two-way dual language program a portion of the students are native englishspeakers and all participants are expected to become bilingual and bi-literate in a second language, for dll students it is english and for english-speaking students it is usually spanish. one-way developmental bilingual programs typically include only dll students although they share the goals of bilingualism and biliteracy for the dll participants. bilingual programs also differ in the amount of classroom time spent using english and the non-english language for instructional purposes. the two most common approaches are 90-10 and 50-50. in 90-10 models, students receive 90% of their instruction in a language other than english (usually spanish) and 10% of their instruction in english initially while gradually increasing the amount of english over several years. in 50-50 models the classroom time is divided roughly equally between english and the non-english language throughout the duration of the program (cal, 2003). in the united states it is difficult to determine with any precision the most common type of program model available for challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 49 linguistically diverse children during the early childhood years. while head start does document the racial/ethnic and linguistic status of its young enrollees, most states do not systematically record this information. two recent studies on the early care experiences and developmental outcomes of dual language learners that both used the nationally representative early childhood longitudinal study-birth cohort (ecls-b) data set (winsler, et al., 2014; espinosa, et al., 2013) have shed some light on the early language exposure of dlls. preschool dlls who attend non-parental ece are unlikely to hear their home language used in child care settings—particularly those dlls who attend center-based ece programs. dll families in general and those with mothers with more education are more likely to rely on the informality of relative care as opposed to center-based care; young dlls are more likely to experience interactions in their home language in this type of ece setting. this cultural and linguistic consistency may be one reason dll mothers with more education more frequently choose relative care for their young children. there are several published studies of carefully implemented dual language programs and a growing literature on english language preschool approaches for dll children (barnett et al., 2007; espinosa, 2013). however, when one reviews the state early childhood standards and the state and national preschool program evaluations, it appears that most programs do not implement a systematic approach to english acquisition with careful attention to home language proficiency and development (espinosa, et al., under review; gormley et al, 2005; chang, et al., 2007; head start faces, 2003; early head start evaluation, 2002; rodriguez et al., 1995; winsler et al., 1999). in fact as of 2012, only nine states (az, ca, id, la, me, ma, ms, nj, ny) address best practices for dual language learners in some detail in their guidelines for early childhood education while 20 states mention dlls in some of their developmental domains and seven states do not mention dlls at all. in many states, ece educators are encouraged to respect and incorporate the diversity of families’ languages and cultures into the learning environment as the children make progress in acquiring english. however, almost no states provide detailed guidance on when to introduce english, how much english, by whom and for what purposes. further, few states provide detailed guidance to ece teachers on how to support home language while they are promoting english language development or offer professional development on specific instructional and interaction strategies. the decision of which type of program to offer dll children can be influenced by state regulations, (e.g., proposition 227 in california which severely limits bilingual programs in k12), federal regulations, (e.g., head start child development and early learning framework), program and staff understanding of dual language development, program capacity to support multiple languages, and local parent/community values and priorities. it is clear that almost all ece state and federal policies and guidelines promote approaches that support both english acquisition and home language development as fundamental to school readiness. what is less clear is the extent to which local ece programs are able to implement practices that give equal time, attention, and value to each language. family engagement approaches given the diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds of u.s. families combined with the realities of a monolingual ece workforce and some restrictive language policies, many researchers and policy experts are recommending stronger family engagement practices as a way to support home language maintenance. families can play a critical role in preserving their home language and culture 50 global education review 2(1) (schwartz, 2010). strong connections between dll families and ece programs have also been shown to promote positive academic achievement (halgunseth, jia, & barbarin, 2013). while immigrant and non-english speaking families face many obstacles in forming successful partnerships with schools, there is emerging research on specific strategies that foster mutually respectful relationships between dll families and schools. it is essential that all families be recognized for their strengths and their unique contributions to their children’s learning and achievement. family strengths include their home language(s), their cultural background as well as their personal beliefs, values, and talents. as u.s. ece programs learn to recognize, embrace, and incorporate these strengths, the goals of early bilingualism and biliteracy can be shared between families and educators. when families are viewed as valuable collaborators and sources of knowledge, strong partnerships can be established. bilingual families are a great and largely untapped resource in the united states for promoting dlls’ development and improved academic success. summary and conclusions in conclusion, we have current and compelling scientific evidence in the united states that young dll children are quite capable of learning multiple languages during the early childhood years. in fact, they benefit socially, linguistically and cognitively from the language processing skills inherent in acquiring two or more languages. while all children in the united states need to learn english in order to be prepared for rigorous k-12 schooling, it should not supplant or replace ongoing development of the child’s home language. there is an urgent need in the united states to provide all ece providers with professional development on the characteristics of young dll children, their developmental needs, successful family engagement strategies, and most importantly, specific instructional and assessment strategies that they can implement across ece settings. based on the research reviewed above and these conclusions, the implications for united states’ educational policy at the federal, state, and local level are clear and have been summarized well by castro & espinosa (2014) and espinosa (2013): 1) ece programs in the united states should intentionally and explicitly promote both the english language development (eld) of young dlls and also support continued development of dlls’ home language. all young children are capable of learning more than one language if they receive sufficient high quality input in each language; compelling research has shown that becoming bilingual has long-term academic, linguistic, cognitive, social, cultural, and economic benefits—it is an asset. 2) all state early learning and development standards (elds) should be reviewed to determine if they are appropriate for dlls. if necessary, state elds should be revised to reflect the current research on the development and learning of young dual language learners and eliminate any linguistic or cultural bias to ensure all ece standards are fair, unbiased, and appropriate for young dlls. 3) all ece programs and professional development systems need to systematically integrate the topics of meeting the instructional, academic, social-emotional, and linguistic needs of young dlls. in addition, programs will need support in meeting the needs of dlls with special needs and designing appropriate assessment and accountability systems. 4) explicit policies that support bilingualism for all children whenever possible will promote a globally challenges and benefits of early bilingualism 51 prepared student population should be adopted. dual language programs have proven to be an effective language approach for dll children while also providing many benefits to native english speakers. 5) early childhood programs should adopt family engagement practices that recognize the unique linguistic and cultural strengths of dual language families and learn specific schoolhome strategies that foster important bilingual and biliteracy goals. 6) young dlls should be assessed in each of their languages because assessing the dll child only in english will underestimate the child’s knowledge, linguistic competence and true abilities. this may require investment in recruiting and retaining both a workforce and assessment specialists who are qualified to conduct bilingual assessments. in addition, linguistically, culturally, and developmentally appropriate assessment tools for young dlls across all domains of development will need to be developed. notes 1. education in the united states is funded and regulated primarily by state departments of education. the federal government has a limited role in setting standards or providing funding for prekindergarten programs, therefore each state early care and education system is somewhat unique. references barac, r., bialystok, e., castro d., & sanchez, m. 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(2013). investing in young children: a fact sheet on early care and education participation, access, and quality. new york: nccp. schwartz, m. 2010. family language policy: core issues of an emerging field. applied linguistics review 1, 171–92. doi: 10.1515/9783110222654.171. winsler, a., r. m. díaz, l. espinosa, and j. l. rodriguez. 1999. when learning a second language does not mean losing the first: bilingual language development in lowincome, spanish-speaking children attending bilingual preschool. child development 70 (2), 349–62. winsler, a., burchinal, m. r., tien, h., peisner-feinberg, e., espinosa, l., castro, d. c., laforett, d. r., kim, y. k. & de feyter, j. j. (2014). early developmental skills of diverse dual language learners: the roles of home language use, cultural heritage, maternal immigration, and sociodemographics in the ecls-b. about the author linda m. espinosa, phd, is currently co-pi for the getting on track for early school success: effective teaching in preschool classrooms project at the university of chicago and former co-pi for the center for early care and education research—dual language learners (cecerdll) at frank porter graham cdi at the university of north carolina, chapel hill. she is professor emeritus of early childhood education at the university of missouri, columbia and has served as the co-director of the national institute for early education research (nieer) at rutgers university and vice president of education at bright horizons family solutions. her recent research and policy work has focused on effective curriculum and assessment practices for young children from low-income dual language families. 4 global education review 2(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: steven weiland (2015). open educational resources: american ideals, global questions. global education review, 2 (3). 4-22 open educational resources: american ideals, global questions steven weiland michigan state university abstract educational relations between societies and cultures that begin with benevolent intentions can come to be seen as threats to national autonomy and local preferences. indeed, side by side with the growth since the first years of this century of open educational resources (oer) there has been worry about their impact on global educational development. evaluation and research have lagged behind the steady expansion of access to online resources, leaving estimates of the value of digital innovation to the enthusiasm of oer providers and technology minded educational reformers. the advent of the “massive open online course” (or mooc) has exacerbated the problem, with attention moving toward a form of oer reflecting the enthusiasm of leading institutions in industrialized nations. the american led movement on behalf of the mooc requires new questions about the motives, impact, and future of oer. this essay accounts for the history of oer, culminating in the mooc, including how the latter in particular is an expression of american pedagogical and institutional interests representing belief in the transformative educational powers of the latest communications technologies. criticism of oer and moocs can reflect organizational, operational, and ideological considerations. but it should recognize what they offer when there are few other opportunities for formal learning, and as research demonstrates their uses and impact. keywords open educational resources, moocs, online learning, global higher education introduction educational relations between societies that begin with benevolent intentions can come to be seen as threats to national autonomy and local preferences. indeed, side by side with the growth in the past decade of open educational resources (oer), and particularly since 2012 and the advent of moocs (massive open online courses), there has been worry about their impact on global educational development, named as “cyberimperialism” (ebo, 2001), as a new sign of unequal “power” (rhoads, berdan, and toven-lindsey, 2013), or as pedagogical “neocolonialism” (altbach, 2014). such skeptics see in oer and moocs forms of academic nationalism in the dominance of western providers and too little regard for the local circumstances of users. evaluation of the experiences of learners has lagged behind the expansion of access to online resources, leaving judgments of the value of digital innovation to the enthusiasm of oer and mooc ______________________________ corresponding author: steven weiland, 410 erickson hall, michigan state university, 620 farm lane, east lansing, mi 48824 email: weiland@msu.edu mailto:weiland@msu.edu open educational resources 5 organizations and technology minded educational reformers (baggaley, 2012; bowen, 2013). this article begins with an account of the history of oer, particularly the many kinds of free instructional resources in mit’s opencourseware project, culminating (for now) in the mooc. there is then consideration of a feature of the milieu for the development of the mooc reflecting belief in the transformative educational powers of the latest communications technologies. but the promise, first of oer and now of moocs, has also prompted a cautious view of their global impact. subsequent parts of the article identify categories of inquiry into moocs based on claims made for them and their early uses. the conclusion recognizes signs of development of moocs in accord with criticism of their initial forms but reasserts the utility of asking questions of oer generally in thinking about global networks and what is claimed for technological innovation as a benign force for the public good. forms of “open” conceptually, “open educational resources” is still a young phenomenon whose meaning is evolving along with other forms of “open” activity in scholarly and scientific communications (wiley, bliss, and mcewen, 2014; camilleri, ehlers, and pawlowski, 2014; weller, 2015). the term “open” entered the vocabulary of digital pioneers when they decided that “free,” as in the “free software” movement of the 1980s, was a potential obstacle to development of the internet. these activists saw participation as the better defining principle for software produced outside the conventional marketplace. such an approach, named “open source software,” reclaimed the innovation with attention to its practical benefits, for example in the quality of collaboratively written code reflecting a version of peer review (wiley and gurell, 2009). eric raymond (2001), a leader in the renaming project, made the story of linux’s emergence in the early 1990s into an influential parable for open source software development worldwide. a complementary view of “open” also emerged in the 1990s in order to designate the status of educational and other resources newly available on the internet at no cost to users. called by some “learning objects,” these were envisioned as resources for independent learners but, more important, as building blocks for teaching and learning at all levels of the american educational system (wiley, 2011). thus, “open content” was the phrase used to describe a diverse array of text, images, video, and audio that could be used and repurposed for learning and teaching. but “open content” advocates, wishing to discourage plagiarism, turned to licensing in the organization in 2001 of creative commons (creativecommons.org), now the universally accepted format for registering resources as free, accessible, and re-usable (or “re-mixed” [lessig, 2008]). in the following year mit launched its opencourseware project (ocw.mit.edu) in which the goal was to create a website displaying the resources associated with all of the university’s undergraduate courses (walsh, 2011; as of april 2015 66% of mit’s tenure track faculty was participating, with 2,266 courses published online). since the project began there have been over 113 million unique visitors worldwide. “courseware” was an accurate way to name the variety of resources at the mit site. in the early years most “courses” consisted of syllabi, lecture outlines and notes, exams, and other resources. users could have an experience of the actual course to the degree that they could infer it from working with the online materials. as the project gained the trust and participation of the mit faculty, courses came to be represented by a fuller display of materials, if still considerably short of what we associate now 6 global education review 2(3) with moocs, and even with less well known projects like open yale (oyc.yale.edu) and its carefully recorded courses across the curriculum (42 as of june 2015), most accompanied by online resources. the mit initiative was crucial to the development of “open” in making the image of the course essential to the utility of the resources. some ocw users were educators who saw the resources in the mode of “learning objects” to be made part of their own instructional projects. but many users found in ocw the opportunity for experiences that approximated enrollment in an actual mit course. given the platform it took some imagination do so, but within a decade the idea of opencourseware would blossom in unexpected ways with the development of the mooc, designed as a complete online course inviting cost-free global participation. mit was not alone in capitalizing on the internet for the circulation of free and accessible online educational resources. such was international interest in the phenomenon that in 2002 unesco convened a forum on the impact of open courseware for higher education in developing countries. the result was another variation of “open,” in the now familiar phrase open educational resources, first defined, in the forum’s final report, as “the open provision of educational resources, enabled by information and communications technologies, for consultation, use, and adoption by a community of users for non-commercial purposes.” the oer concept was advanced at a second international gathering (2007) that produced the cape town declaration (capetowndeclaration.org), with its focus on the re-use of “content.” in the same year the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd, 2007) reported at length on oer (giving knowledge for free). the oecd consolidated earlier definitions but in the direction of a broader view of users, if still with “re-use” as the central operational idea. thus, “oer are digitized materials offered freely and openly for educators, students, and self-learners to use and re-use for teaching, learning and research” p. 30). the oecd offered a “conceptual map” representing the new global digital domain. thus, oer could be understood to signify “tools” (as in open source software), “content” (like mit’s opencourseware or collections of teaching resources or “learning objects” like “connexions” [cnx.org] or merlot [merlot.org]), and “implementation resources,” chiefly new formats for licensing (like creative commons). in 2012, at the time the mooc was gaining academic and public attention, unesco recognized a decade of oer development with a paris conference that produced a report on worldwide oer resources and policies (hooser, 2012) and a statement, the paris oer declaration, of now familiar principles and purposes (unesco, 2012). between 2007 and 2012 there was little reason to move beyond the perception of oer as “content” in the form of discrete resources (or, again, “learning objects”) to be used and re-used, by individuals and in collaborative activities, presumably across borders. in the manner of “do it yourself,” integration was up to the aggregating educator, sometimes in the design of a credit bearing postsecondary course, or to the independent learner (or small groups of them) learning outside the framework of a formal course or degree program. an ambitious classification scheme highlights the considerable variability within what might be assumed operationally about “reuse, revision, remixing, and redistribution,” the essential qualities of oer according to all institutional reports (tuomi, 2013). responding to the great variety of sources, forms, and uses of oer, or their extreme “fragmentation,” the european union published a framework for their evaluation, with hopes of establishing a vocabulary based on a open educational resources 7 complex “cycle,” with many “stakeholders, reaching from development to use, revision, and re-use across all levels of the educational system (camilleri, ehlers, and pawlowski, 2014; see also atenas and havemann, 2014). the mooc represented a radical departure in oer, called a “game changer” by influential observers of global higher education and by leading u.s. opinion makers and postsecondary leaders (redden, 2012; brooks, 2012; friedman, 2012; bowen, 2013). “open” as part of the name mooc signifies a level of access to formal postsecondary education that exceeds by far what preceded it in the oer movement. a mooc is more than “courseware,” or the resources that might be made into a course. and what it offers is not meant for “reuse” or “revising” in the manner of discrete oer. with their high profile instructors at leading institutions moocs represent the integrity of the traditional academic course, built on a particular view of the subject organized for instructional purposes. but “open” next to “massive”—in moocs with thousands of students—names new global conditions for teaching and learning, and for relations between institutions, as oer inspired reformers imagine new formats for recognition of achievement and academic credentialing (e.g., in oeru as below). by mid-2015, according to an aggregator (mooc-list.com), there were over 2,000 free online courses available in virtually every subject of the postsecondary curriculum. over half are offered by the best known providers: coursera, edx, and udacity, whose “brands,” reflecting the participation of many of the world’s leading universities and cultural institutions, carry considerable global status. other platforms— like canvas (www.canvas.net) and saylor (www.saylor.org)—make substantial contributions but, as yet, have much lower international profiles. and open yale, with millions of users worldwide, is unaccounted for on mooc-list. its absence signifies the problem of maintaining an accurate view of the world of oer. current global offerings are dominated by what are now called xmoocs, like those of the leading providers featuring a structured syllabus and key design and instructional roles (as in video lectures) for scholars and scientists. they are distinguished from cmoocs, the name given to early examples of the form (beginning in 2008) which are organized in distributed or networked fashion and feature interaction among participants who take primary responsibility for supplying the course content from open sources (see bates, 2014 for a complete account). “polemical optimism” oer and moocs reflect the american case for educational transformation via technology. by 2012, when coursera founder daphne koller delivered a ted talk (with 1.8 million views by june 2015), viewers were invited to believe that not only had she and her colleagues scaled up an innovative online pedagogy but that they had invented it. it would be the task of mooc instructors, she said, to “ignite the creativity, imagination, and problem solving skills” of learners. in effect, the mooc is made part of the narrative of the “new literacies” which gained strength at the same time as the growth of oer. the phrase “new literacies”—sometimes called the “new media literacies” or even “21st century literacies”—refers to the abilities and dispositions required by the latest innovations in communication technologies (jenkins, 2009; davidson [2011] offers the most expansive account of what the “new literacies” should represent; see also rheingold, 2012). they direct us to electronic formats for learning and teaching, and to the “affordances” they offer. according to the city university of new york’s cathy davidson (2011a), “our educational systems, so far, look as if the internet hasn't been invented yet.” http://www.canvas.net/ 8 global education review 2(3) a discourse of global educational transformation typifies accounts of the new literacies and their necessary and inevitable impact on education. it is featured in the macarthur foundation’s digital media and learning initiative, the programs and publications of the online learning consortium (onlinelearningconsortium.org), the postsecondary service organization educause (educause.edu), the new media consortium (nmc.org) which produces the annual and influential horizon report guiding institutions toward adoption of the latest and anticipated technologies, and in the public presentation of ambitious survey research on technology and the internet by the pew research center (pewinternet.org). all make distinctive contributions to the case for adapting teaching and learning to the new literacies while speaking in a single voice about the urgency of such an effort. the report from the u.s. department of education (2010) titled transforming american education: learning powered by technology consolidates these perspectives and spares nothing in its confidence in the digital future of education: “the challenge. . . is to leverage the learning sciences and modern technology to create engaging, relevant, and personalized learning experiences for all learners that mirror students’ daily lives and the reality of their future. . . . the opportunities are limitless, borderless, and instantaneous” (p. 4). if “limitless” describes what can be expected in applications of technology and the new literacies to education then their impact must be transformational—or more. nothing less than a “sea change in thinking, knowing, learning, and teaching” and a “seismic shift in epistemology” are ahead according to harvard’s chris dede (2008). we face a “cambrian moment,” or our own version of the explosion of new life forms 500 million years ago, according to education theorist john seely brown (euchner, 2012). a british study of our prospects sees ahead an “avalanche” of technology-inspired change (barber, donnelly, and rizvi, 2013). mit’s anant agarwal, a leader among mooc providers (at mit and edx), speaks confidently of “democratizing and reimagining education” (kanani, 2014). in enthusiasm for oer and moocs there are signs of what has been named “polemical optimism” in an account of the transformation of 19th century britain by industrial machines when campaigns emerged to inspire confidence in what was presented as an historical inevitability (berg, 1982). from “mutual understanding among nations” to “every single kid around the world” in recalling the decision to launch the ocw project, mit president charles vest (2004) named his institution’s expectations for “spreading knowledge and opportunity.” with educators and students using ocw there will emerge a “web of knowledge that will enhance human learning worldwide.” further, mit’s example will “take root at many other universities and colleges around the world, and they too will be supplying knowledge freely and openly to anyone, anywhere in the world.” vest recognized the “digital divide” but expressed his belief that “the trend toward open knowledge will help bring people of all backgrounds together and promote greater mutual understanding among nations” (p. b20; see also abelson, 2008; iioshi and kumar [2008] in their edited collection reflect the enthusiasm for oer that followed the early growth of mit’s ocw and allied projects). moocs represent new ambitions at the scale of vest’s. when stanford abandoned its hopes in 2011 for development of a new york campus it revealed that for university leaders and influential business supporters there was a higher educational priority in embracing oer. open educational resources 9 technology pioneer marc andreessen, now a silicon valley venture capitalist, urged turning the institution in a new direction: “we’re on the cusp of an opportunity to deliver state-of-the art, stanford–caliber education to every single kid around the world. and the idea that we were going to build a physical campus to reach a tiny fraction of those kids was, to me, tragically undershooting out potential” (auletta, 2012). thus, stanford faculty moved quickly to lead an international effort based on a new online instructional platform to support the mooc. the potential includes financial returns as coursera was organized as a for-profit company supported with substantial private capital. but initial attention has gone to the global response of learners of all ages to the new online opportunities. the platform and initial participation —by leading universities and by students around the world—were rapidly hailed as transformative for global learning (e.g., kamenetz, 2012 and ripley, 2012 in addition to the op-eds by the new york times’ david brooks and thomas friedman cited above). as early as 2007 the oecd had noted that in the view of one university it had studied, whatever institutions might think of oer (if they had an institutional position at all) “the risk of doing nothing when developments were so rapid” should override normal cautionary habits. coursera now (june 2015) includes 121 institutional partners offering over 1,040 courses of different lengths and duration throughout the year. only three years old, coursera has over 13.5 million users. coursera’s courses couldn’t be more different from the “scaled up” online courses offered by the university of phoenix and other for-profits. there the focus is on a standardized syllabus for a course as it is “taught” by a contract instructor. with coursera the scholars and scientists at the partnering institutions produce online courses resembling their campus versions. they reflect the autonomy of traditional academic work and what it yields for idiosyncratic teaching styles in the classroom, or now online. still, according to koller (2011) there is a “personalized experience” in the format for those who enroll in the free online courses. and that acknowledges what students can do to customize their efforts (e.g., repeat video lectures or parts of them as desired) and what they can learn about their performance from instantaneous automated assessments in those courses featuring machine gradable exercises and exams. thus, for koller at least, however many tens of thousands of students might be enrolled in a coursera course, what they get is “individualized.” and, at the same time, moocs will meet the need “to significantly reduce costs while improving quality” (see also koller and ng, 2012). an equally ambitious if smaller project, edx, was jointly organized as a non-profit initiative (also in spring 2012) by mit and harvard, and now (june 2015) includes over 75 institutions and organizations offering over 530 courses, with over 3 million users worldwide. it began as a new version of mit’s opencourseware and was intended to be an international “superbrand” (kolowich, 2012). at its launching, mit president (at the time) susan hochfield, echoing the sentiments of many american educational leaders seeking to account for what they saw as the necessary digital “disruption” of postsecondary education (christensen and eyring, 2011), said: “you can choose to view this era as one threatening change and unsettling volatility, or you can see it as a moment charged with the most exciting possibilities presented to educators in our lifetimes” (carmichael and kaiser, 2012). by 2015 confidence in moocs, while tested by skepticism about online teaching in some sectors of higher education (allen and seaman, 2015), has hardly moderated at coursera and edx, as each expands with new partners worldwide, and thus many new courses. 10 global education review 2(3) the third well-known mooc project, also deriving from the entrepreneurial ethos at stanford (in this case allied with google) is udacity, which features (as of june 2015) nearly 100 courses, with over 1.6 million users, in science and engineering. still, however constrained its offerings, udacity saw itself as a leader in “the beginning of education for everybody.” like the founders of coursera, udacity’s sebastien thrun (of google and stanford) saw in moocs the path to “fixing” higher education, or reducing costs and eliminating teaching styles which ignore technology. or, as it is often expressed in a favored binary of advocates for the “new literacies” (as above): “teachers are not lecturers but coaches.” and the courses they design (for udacity at least) are aimed at the occupational prospects of enrollees. it is “real world skills” that matter the most as these can be discovered in the habits of “net generation” learners elevated to the status of educational models with international roles. as udacity put it on its website: “our students will be fluent in new technology platforms as well as curious and engaged world citizens.” still, only two years after launching udacity, thrun expressed reservations about moocs, particularly in what they offered to students who, presumably, have the most to gain from technological innovation. thrun characterized udacity’s failed experiment with remedial math courses at san jose state university this way: “these were students from difficult neighborhoods, without good access to computers, and with all kinds of challenges in their lives. … it's a group for which this medium is not a good fit” (chafkin, 2013). it isn’t hard to see what that means for claims that moocs will be instrumental in solving the problems of global postsecondary learning. but even in parts of the world where learners are well prepared and well equipped there are very low (about 5%) rates of completion as reported by a university of pennsylvania team in a study using “big data” on patterns of participation (perna, et al, 2013). mindful of udacity’s strengths and of the persistent problem of finding a suitable business model, thrun has recently steered it toward structured programs (with nanodegrees) and professional development, with services requiring fees (porter, 2014). koller herself, in an interview with the technology site tech crunch (techcrunch.com), stated that 2014 was the year when the mooc would “come of age.” she was confident that problems of course completion, the dominance of western countries in course development, and the lagging participation of students in nonenglish speaking countries are all being addressed. indeed, in her interview (in september 2014) koller reports that coursera finds that one third of its students are from developing countries, and new institutional partners from around the world are adding to its online educational opportunities. in mid 2014 edx established a partnership with the queen rania foundation (jordan) to offer courses in arabic and coursera, already with partners in asia, announced an agreement with leading brazilian universities. responding to early criticism of educational parochialism both organization continue to build partnerships with institutions in all parts of the world. doubt to “domestication” plainly, coursera and edx have come to recognize that they are part of the global story of oer which, from the movement’s beginning, and despite enthusiasm for its global impact (e.g., baraniuk and burrus, 2008) has had critics, skeptical about commitments beyond already well educated students in the west who dominated early mooc enrollments. as they gained visibility under the auspices of unesco and oecd, open educational resources featuring adaptable “content” were understood as a global educational breakthrough reflecting these benefits: open educational resources 11 1. oer save money for developing nations, taking the place of expensive local course making. 2. oer foster the exchange of global knowledge. 3. collaborative oer projects support capacity building and help to close the digital divide. 4. collaboration encourages the preservation and dissemination of indigenous knowledge. 5. oer can raise the quality of education at all levels. (adapted from kanwar, kodhandaraman, and umar, 2010) hopes for “exchange” and “collaboration” signified expectations for oer that could reverse many habits of transnational education. still, whatever the intentions of early oer projects (chronicled for american initiatives in walsh, 2011), and the generous interpretations of potential results they inspired, as oer projects grew--in the us and elsewhere--doubts arose about their implementation. mit’s ocw data suggest one reason why. each month the site gets about one million visits worldwide. but the map representing usage shows but 4% of its visits originate in northern africa and only 2% in the sub-saharan region of the continent. the whole of central and south america was at 4%. these figures have been the same for several years. to the degree that oer use from other sources is similar, it is clear what prompted a group of commonwealth of learning scholars to question the innovation’s “sustainability for the global south” (kanwar, kodhandaraman, and umar, 2010). while they registered the potential benefits (as above) and recognized the difficulty of measuring impact and the continuing digital divide, they nonetheless lamented the level of “tangible results.” they traced the problem to the lack of a “clear implementation strategy” and recommend a “process-oriented” approach that encourages local participation in the making of resources and building structure for their adoption. “domestication” for the commonwealth group meant the guarantee of a high degree of local participation at every stage of oer development and implementation, a theme that has continued in today’s criticism of moocs. and even efforts to change the direction of oer projects, represented in scholarly, institutional and international agency debates about them, were too focused on technology [with] rarely any discussion on issues such as stakeholder engagement and the politics of power” (p. 75; for an example of the debate see the contributions by caswell, henson, and wiley [2008] and huijser, bedford, and bull [2008] to a special issue devoted to oer of the international review of research in open and distance learning). others expressing doubt about oer have focused on the potential encroachment of a “market orientation” steering users to fee paying programs, limits signified by the digital divide, and scientific and intellectual parochialism (as below in the critical position, largely focused on moocs, of rhoads, berdan, and toven-lindsey, 2013). with the expanding educational market as a backdrop, can oer be sustained by the movement’s original intentions? and even as access to technology increases, the question remains of the level of digital literacy necessary for effective use of oer. thus, oer and mooc providers should accept responsibility with local partners for meaningful access of this kind (see willems and bossu [2012] and richter and mcpherson [2012] in a special issue devoted to oer of distance education). finally, the full potential for oer, with moocs, depends on more than participation of users, particularly in developing nations. if there are to be genuine gains in global knowledge, they will reflect a disposition not apparent enough among providers. the oecd’s early account of the movement and its potential noted this “paradox” in the academic community: “[it] strongly 12 global education review 2(3) emphasizes the importance of openly sharing research results and building on existing scientific data but at the same time often takes an unresponsive attitude towards sharing or using educational resources developed by someone else” (oecd, 2007, p. 60). that is the theme of several contributions to a collection of commentaries recently published by the international association of universities and featuring the role of oer and moocs in africa and asia (see iau horizons, 20 (1+2); [june 2014] which includes a useful “selective bibliography on moocs, oer, and elearning, 2011-2014”; see also the special issue of online learning [july 2013] devoted to “oer for international, rural, and hard-to-reach populations”). while there is acknowledgement that “developing countries welcome moocs essentially to enhance quality to attain global standards” (varghese, 2014, p. 36), contributors ask questions of oer reflecting different versions of “domestication.” thus, there is a plea for “contextualization” of mooc design to allow for more “praxis-centered approaches to transformative action learning,” in effect altering the “one way flow” [from prestigious american and european institutions] to “the nameless and faceless others” who enroll in the courses (lotzsisita, 2014, p. 29). so too should mooc providers and instructors recognize what the limits in current availability of technology means for capitalizing on all forms of oer, the lack of affordability constituting yet a “further disadvantage” for “those already on the margins of society” (makhanya, 2014). thus, oer and moocs should feature “making the best use of technologies already in place to empower the learners they are trying to reach” (boga and mcgreal, 2014, p. 32). and there is a reminder of the differences between oer licensed for revision and reuse and the restrictive policies of the major mooc providers and what that means for local educators (turmaine, 2014). oer as educational content continues to have many worldwide users, although with data from connexions and merlot, two of the largest sources, it is difficult to tell what their impact is apart from counts of site visitors and page views. at connexions, its resources (widely used in e-textbooks, primarily in the sciences and engineering) have over 2 million users worldwide per month. merlot, which features “learning objects” in all fields, exceeded 600,000 site visitors and 4 million page views by the end of 2014. these are impressive, though for merlot at least, use is primarily among nations with high literacy rates, making it uncertain what role its forms of oer are having in educational development where the needs are greatest. the pace of scholarly publication means that even recent work focuses on oer as “educational content” and its record in reaching its potential in this form, with little variation, in the past decade (or since unesco introduced the phrase “open educational resources”). the continuing problem, identified in a joint unesco and commonwealth of learning initiative launched in 2010 (taking oer beyond the oer community: policy and capacity) is stated this way: “oers will not be able to help countries reach their educational goals unless awareness of their power and potential can rapidly be expanded beyond the communities of interest [in the case of mooc users already holding postsecondary degrees]that they have already attracted.” the pace of oer development presents additional questions. even in advance of the moocs, universities (mainly in the us), began internet posting of video and audio recordings of campus-based courses, and worldwide users turned to them with enthusiasm. a 2012 report from the opencourseware consortium (now the open education consortium [oeconsortium.org]) documents oer activity in this form in over 80 countries. the data classifies motives, ages, and educational and the open educational resources 13 workplace status of users but, understandably, makes no claims for the character and effectiveness of the learning, much less for whether, or how, these oer were “domesticated” for local use. and the timing of the occ report, actually a compilation of surveys conducted by organizations in four countries, meant that moocs, beginning in 2012 and having quickly out distanced other forms of oer, were excluded. so too, of course will the popularity of moocs prompt fresh attention to what “domestication” might mean for local utility and sustainability. the oec website explains relations between oer and moocs. it offers many resources for sustaining the position and uses of the first even as the second continues to be a subject of great public and academic attention. questions of assessment just as there are no comprehensive metrics for the global impact of oer in their initial “content” or “materials” mode, there is no formula for understanding the interactions and the attitudes they prompt between providers and users, the focus having been primarily on the operations of the technology. but contemporary attention to networks as signs of social and economic relations (benkler, 2006) as well as digital ones can suggest troubling patterns and potentials. thus, according to the influential sociologist and theorist manuel castells, global networks can have unwelcome effects, perhaps confirming for some fears of digital imperialism in education: “there are citizens of the world, living in the space of flows [or the activities of networks and their circulation of what is valuable], versus the locals, living in the space of places. because space in the networked society is configured around the opposition of the space of flows (global) and the space of places (local), the spatial structure of our society is a major source of the structuration of power relationships” (cited in kanwar, kodhandaraman, and umar, 2010, p. 74). a faculty participant in coursera, princeton sociologist mitchell duneier (2012), is well aware of how his teaching might be seen by international students: “would my lectures become yet another example of american ethnocentrism and imperialism as i presented my sociological concepts like so many measuring sticks for the experiences of others around the world?” his course (“introduction to sociology”) enrolled 40,000 students from 113 countries. though, as is the case in other moocs, only a small percentage of those enrolled completed the course, there is, for duneier, impressive enough testimony of its impact. he cites a post representing what was happening, he believes, among students far from new jersey: “it has been an incredible experience for me, one that has not only taught me sociology, but the ways in which other cultures think, feel, and respond.” duneier concludes that for his course at least, moocs solve the problem of access. as one of his students told him, it was not a choice between traditional and online postsecondary education. it was “a choice between an online class and no class at all.” similarly, edx and udacity have featured testimonials from students around the world and a prominently displayed photograph at udacity’s website showed a group of african students working together on an introductory computer course. still, a survey of udacity’s leading “meet up locations” (for students desiring in person interaction with other students) revealed that they were places with heavy concentrations of adult learners well prepared in technology. as is well known by now, enrollment in moocs is dominated by students who have already had considerable experience in formal education. and, as is often noted, a significant limitation on oer and moocs in the developing world is uneven access to the necessary bandwidth. even with more 14 global education review 2(3) bandwidth, where the phone is the primary means of connecting to the internet, prospects for learning in some fields at least will be limited by screen size. critics of oer never doubted the need for spreading knowledge and opportunity. but testimony—from mooc leaders and students— is far ahead of data. and thus, even a recent convert to the form of global online learning represented by the moocs, former princeton president william bowen (2013; also the coauthor of several influential studies of postsecondary economics and leadership), registers what virtually everyone says about the research problems facing advocates and antagonists alike. we simply don’t know enough yet about moocs for serious scrutiny of the claims made for their global impact. bowen acknowledges that those actually teaching the moocs “don’t want to be distracted by the need to do careful assessments of outcomes or costs.” but he is impatient with the sponsoring organizations: “there is no excuse for not working now on plans for rigorous third-party evaluations” (bowen, 2013, p. 27). those are now underway, some as part of a major assessment project (straumsheim, 2013; see gӑsević et al., 2014 for an account of themes in mooc research in progress). mooc leaders have from the outset promised near unlimited data from their courses. that has turned out to be, of course, largely related to processes of online learning, or how students interact with digital resources, including performance on machine graded exercises and exams. but, as in most educational matters, understanding the impact of any particular experience of formal learning, particularly if the goal is to influence opportunities in work and careers, and in durable self-development, will require persistence and patience. as agarwal, convinced as he is about the benefits of the mooc format, acknowledges, “we cannot always measure the innumerable reasons and circumstances for why learners seek out an edx course and what their individual corresponding success truly is” (kanani, 2014). that is because mooc research has focused largely on “big data,” or the “clickstream” produced by students and then “event log” analyses (reich, 2015). a complementary approach can display other kinds of data, like uses of course-related communications via social networks outside the mooc platform (veletsianos, collier, and schneider, 2015). assessing the individual performance of mooc students presents its own problems. mooc founders have been like “new literacies” advocates in their contempt for the lecture and the traditional authority of the professor, and in their devotion to “active learning” via “coaching.” but claims for pedagogical innovation and its benefits for online learners in massive courses exceed what can be seen in the first years of moocs, most of which are organized around talking heads, albeit the video presentations are segmented for easier use and they can be watched multiple times. the interactive assessment supplied by the format has been largely limited to the results of automated grading. no doubt students appreciate the instantaneous responses. but to name such a feature part of the “personalization” of the experience is to overstate its likely impact. moving beyond automation in courses in the humanities and social sciences has brought coursera to the solution of peer assessment (another favorite in the “new literacies”), making students—of many ages, backgrounds, and abilities in language--the judges of one another’s learning. what’s most telling about the peer assessment process is its presentation by coursera in the vocabulary of grading, as if that is the goal of the evaluation of student writing, certainly the centerpiece of learning outside science and math. an american professor ordinarily well disposed toward using “peer open educational resources 15 feedback” in her classes believes that coursera’s approach “may be one of [platform’s] greatest weaknesses” (watters, 2012). and recent research on moocs identifies evaluation of student work as one of the form’s most important challenges (e.g., hew and cheung, 2014; admiraal, huisman, and van de ven, 2014; admiraal, huisman, and pilli, 2015). whatever coursera’s premises, cathy davidson (2012), an advocate of the rapid transformation of postsecondary education with technology, finds the courses wanting from a pedagogical perspective, a missed opportunity, in her view, to bring learning up to the highest standards represented in the macarthur foundation’s “new media” projects. others favoring “constructivist” pedagogy see in moocs the betrayal of reform movements in american higher education (toven-lindsey, rhoads, and lozano, 2015). but there is the larger question, dismissed by davidson and other advocates of the “new literacies” and constructivist methods, of the consequences of promising an educational utopia to online students around the world. today’s debate about technology in studies of the brain, reading, and other higher order cognitive skills, indicates a role for online learning in managing relations between the old and the new literacies (e.g, wolf, 2007; carr, 2010; baron, 2015) but demonstrates that there are considerable losses as well as gains. from that perspective there is much to be said, ironically enough, for how old fashioned are many coursera courses, with their complex spoken syntax (in video lectures by accomplished scholars and scientists) and conventional, text-based assignments. but can such virtues co-exit pedagogically with assessment scaled up for convenience—in peer evaluation--rather than in relation to the demands of the course content and, by koller’s own acknowledgement, the desires of coursera to educate the mind for critical uses? whatever the scale of data available from mooc providers, the initial projects of the mooc research initiative (none of which focused on course takers in developing countries), did little to impress critics with what it produced about learning over time (straumsheim, 2014). nonetheless, extensive course-based “data-mining” (the announced goal of coursera, edx, and udacity) may satisfy an esteemed observer of moocs, who has declared that “the real revolution” they represent is an instructional one, in what can be learned from them and applied to traditional courses and hybrid ones. “placing their moocs in the public domain for a worldwide audience will oblige institutions to do more than pay lip service to the importance of teaching and put it at the core of their missions” (daniel, 2012). but john daniel, a former executive at britain’s open university, unesco, and the commonwealth of learning, has also expressed uneasiness with the competitive “gadarene” impulse to offer moocs, and with their “paradoxes and contradictions” and the “hype and myth” projected by many advocates. data on learning may address some questions but others will require attention to what moocs will mean for the order of global postsecondary education, and for the conditions and results of teaching in the new format. in fact, the most recent study of its own courses by edx shows increases only in us enrollments (among the 48 courses studied), prompting this acknowledgment of the limits, thus far, of global impact beyond areas with already well qualified participants: “there is an opportunity to increase the number of participants. . . from underrepresented and underserved groups. . . [and] not only increasing access but increasing equitable access to high quality online learning opportunities” (ho, et al., 2015, p. 5). still, the report turns out to feature the benefits to residential instruction (particularly at mit) of the innovations associated with moocs. 16 global education review 2(3) revenue, recognition, and new institutions gordon gee (then its president) brought ohio state university into the mooc fold even though there was only the dimmest sign that any revenue would come from the university’s participation: “we’re doing this in the hope and expectation that we’ll be able to build a financial model, but i don’t know what it is” (lewin, 2012). even the original mooc providers, well supported as they are, make sustainability a primary question and suggest that it may be seen in a new way. the task is finding a suitable “business model” reflecting (at mit) the scale and cost of maintaining the system and (at coursera and udacity) the investments of silicon valley venture capitalists who typically expect high returns. both are expanding with no sign, as yet, of significant revenue. perhaps the most stable long-term sources of revenue will be what students are now asked to pay for proctored final exams and certificates of completion, or, in the future, “premium” services like direct contact with the faculty. mindful of the dangers in continuing “digital divide” we can ask: how will revenue generating features of moocs influence the public service ideals according to vest of “spreading knowledge and opportunity”? the potential worldwide demand for recognition for successful oer or mooc coursework can be seen as the cornerstone for a re-imagined system of international postsecondary education in which institutions compete for students wishing to aggregate online experiences of many kinds originating in widely dispersed academic locations (kamenetz, 2015). the oeru (oeru.org), a partnership of over thirty institutions around the world, is designed to capitalize on such an impulse by offering assessment and credentialing so that students can earn a degree from one of the oeru partners with open online courses from any of the others, and presumably as the project unfolds, from other sources (bates, 2011). how well such a model is fitted to the autonomy and traditions of institutions like those affiliated with coursera and edx, or to independent oer projects like yale open and carnegie mellon’s online learning initiative, brings us to the question of the prospects (and limits) for collaboration with an organization like oeru. seen as a rich scene of open educational practice (oep), oeru displays, predictably enough, considerable variation in “social learning” and other features of oer (schreurs, et al., 2014). oeru is seeking to overcome the gap in status in global activity in distance education, as in the several well known institutions like britain’s open university, and the uses of open educational resources (particularly moocs) coming from well established and prestigious institutions. at one time vest (2006) imagined a “global meta-versity.” but with the advent of moocs, mit faculty began thinking in a different direction, reflecting what relations would be like between research and new institutions (or reorganized older ones) when the course work for a degree (anywhere) is the responsibility largely of the former, while forms of “certification,” or credentialing, would be left to the latter to support the online high status global curriculum. here is how such a “certificate school”--as it was named in a faculty newsletter as mit’s efforts in edx were just getting off the ground--would advertise itself to students impatient with conventional institutions, or able to enroll in one: “we help you put together a plan that educates you by the best and brightest from all over the world. you learn physics and computer science from mit; philosophy and sanskrit from harvard. art history from yale. [local faculty or those in allied roles] . . . help you through rough spots, to learn with you rather than teach you. . . . once you have gotten through a combination of 32 open educational resources 17 certificates and projects, you graduate. we don’t care how long it takes; take time off whenever you want” (editorial subcommittee, 2012, p. 3). with a “global subject catalog” provided by “star performers,” postsecondary credentialing would be reconfigured in the direction of new hierarchies and institutions to support them. a formal study of its future, building on early faculty speculation, presents mit’s ambitious plans for globalizing its impact, largely via its online teaching, on its own and with edx partners. and that will include, in developing countries, “aggregation” of courses and other education experiences by old and new institutions taking on the tasks of a “certificate school” (institute-wide task force, 2013). there is here the logic of scaling up and efficiency, and a new division of global academic labor responding, presumably, to worldwide claims for the online pedagogical products of research universities and their scholarly stars. daphne koller’s view reflects the american (and global) status hierarchy and the prospects for private goods: “let’s say you’re stuck at some no-name state college in the [u.s.] midwest. now the top 10% of students at that school have the option to take a coursera course that could open a door to being employed at companies like google” (kamenetz, 2012). the mit forecast does not have to be entirely accurate to convey the international impact of a fully developed global system of ocw and moocs, with sharply differentiated national and institutional roles, and faculty ones as well. thus another question for inquiry: is this the kind of local participation or “domestication” desired by worldwide partisans of oer who are nonetheless skeptical of the motives and styles of implementation among providers? even the well regarded kepler university experiment in rwanda (kepler.org), with its uses of moocs and teachers in support roles, appears to represent the fears of those who believe that technology will stall the development of indigenous instructional resources (e.g., kamenetz, 2013). the teachers are “international” and rwandan “teaching fellows.” advocates for this hybrid model see it as a location for capitalizing on expert teaching in the form of the well produced video lectures while providing customized guidance for students. given the demand for higher education in countries like rwanda, can development of local postsecondary faculties capable of producing coursera-like resources, be legitimately postponed on behalf of the futures of students eager for learning and credentials today? kepler’s director says “the greatest threat to national educational systems is not online courses or other innovations. it’s the status quo” (hodari, 2013; see also bartholet, 2013). conclusion: the postsecondary “wild card” research on moocs can test their claims for student learning and what the faculty comes to know about its new digital work. but inquiry owes more to oer partisans and skeptics. it can include attention to the impact of digital teaching in the form of the mooc, to the financing—in production, distribution, and evaluation--of open courses, and to new forms of credentialing and to emerging institutions with roles in it. but the research cannot ignore the historical, economic, and political trends that have shaped the rise and dominance of the world’s leading research universities and brought them, surprisingly enough (or perhaps not so surprisingly considering what is at stake in status and influence), to their roles as prime movers in the development of the mooc. for critics like robert rhoads and his ucla colleagues the oer movement is primarily an expression of economic “neoliberalism” and, as presently organized (in the u.s. at least), has little chance of fulfilling its 18 global education review 2(3) lofty claims for democratizing education across the globe (rhoads, berdan, and toven-lindsey, 2013). thus, moocs can be seen as a diversion from the decline, over decades, of public support for higher education. and the mooc providers, for this group of skeptics, care largely about the epistemology of positivism in featuring learning in science and engineering. the courses themselves, even where they venture into nontechnical fields, also fail the pedagogical test by ignoring the constructivist lessons of recent postsecondary reform initiatives in which “social learning” is presented as the only legitimate format. thus, when the movement is “unmasked,” it will be shown to be all about power, the “hegemony” of the west in the rapidly digitalizing global educational scene, and the absence of any effort to incorporate a “critical” spirit into the experiences of oer and mooc learners. the problem with such a stance is first that it sees oer and the moocs only as a “movement.” true enough, there are shared goals among providers, but what they offer comes from partner institutions, specifically in what individual faculty members decide to teach. in effect, to claim that the mooc curriculum is only a tool for “privatization, commercialization, and marketization” (rhoads, berdan, and toven-lindsey, p. 107) is to say the same thing for what we find on campuses. but rhoads and his colleagues look at oer and moocs from the perspective of scholars of american postsecondary education who have made “academic capitalism” the cornerstone of a wide ranging critique of the 21st century university (as in slaughter, 2004). and foucault (on power) and friere (on pedagogy) are the authorities allowing for suspicion of the motives of the first mooc providers, seeking to advance power with knowledge, and those who are designing courses indifferent to “liberatory” or “transformational” views of teaching and learning. true enough, as shown earlier, educators in the developing world, and advocates in the west, are looking for more participation (or “domestication”) in all phases of oer design and use. such was the primary theme at the international moocs4d conference convened in 2014 by the university of pennsylvania. an indian delegate stated the paradox facing even those projects reflecting the latest innovations in technology: “the disparity in access is getting narrowed down but the disparity in achievement is widening.” getting the most from moocs, and other forms of oer, will mean seeing beyond their introduction as a “stand alone, independent, parallel activity” and building “partnerships” with postsecondary institutions in developing countries (university of pennsylvania, p. 10). meanwhile, moocs, with their origins in elite universities and their largely standardized formats, hardly satisfy american critics. rhoads and his colleagues demonstrate the theoretical discourse that often supports deep skepticism of institutional motives and habits of teaching. but oer and moocs constitute a scene of educational experiment capitalizing on global demand, with broadly based scrutiny if not institutional oversight (e.g., in the activities of the open education consortium). looking at moocs internationally from the perspectives of users, as in the case of the kepler project in rwanda, can yield a different perspective. thus, according to suny’s ben wildavsky: “i find some of the criticism [of moocs] ideological in a way that doesn’t really focus first on the needs of students. . . . we should think about what’s best for people in developing countries. if you let a thousand flowers bloom, then people can pick and choose. we’re in a period of experimentation, which is great, because it means that providers and universities will try different things, and students will figure out what works” (leber, 2014; see also wildavsky, 2014). open educational resources 19 of course, anyone writing about the impact of technology on education is always likely to be working behind new developments. in this case, it is important to recognize how much has happened since 2012 to the coursera and edx catalogues, displaying as they now do partnerships with institutions around the world and courses in virtually every field of the postsecondary curriculum. some in the humanities and social sciences are among the most successful, and they convey precisely the independence of thought and design characteristic of the best on campus university courses (for a recent example, suitably enough devoted to the subject of global higher education, see robertson and olds, 2014). edx has acknowledged difficulties in gaining data of its own of sufficient depth about users’ experiences (ho, et al, 2014). still, there is more variability in mooc pedagogy than is observable in the simple binary, as presented in rhoads et al, of the style of ‘transmission (or “banking” in the vocabulary of friere) vs. teaching that organized around a “participating community” and the making of individual “critical consciousness” (pp. 95, 98; see also glance, forsey, and riley, 2013 and adams, yin, madriz, and mullen, 2014; distance education dedicates the whole of 35(2) to essays on and empirical studies of moocs). finally, there is the problem of what is perhaps the most significant sign of institutional (western or otherwise) power in global postsecondary education. that is, the authority to grant degrees. there are now procedures, via the american council on education, to grant conventional credit for successful completion of some moocs, but few signs (beyond the organization of oeru) that the rapid growth of oer and moocs will actually yield broadly based academic recognition of them. indeed, recent accounts of the online “disruption” of higher education look beyond credits and degrees, anticipating a global movement in the aggregation of “do-it-yourself” digital learning projects (including moocs and other forms of oer). suitable workplace credentials would emerge in an educational market reflecting the limitless opportunities in technology for learning (carey, 2015). rhoads and his colleagues, whatever their predisposition in assessing the early moocs, remind us that no less than traditional educational institutions, innovative educational projects in technology, whatever their ideals (for access, student autonomy, and reduced costs), must be objects of scrutiny. empirical research and philosophical, political, and educational criticism can probe the fate of unesco’s hopes in its 2002 statement naming open educational resources as a significant step in global higher education: “thanks to the confluence of technology and imagination, it is now feasible to recognize that knowledge as a social product can indeed become an international social property” (p. 18). such inquiry could ask what oer and moocs contribute to how we imagine the roles of global research universities. in simon marginson’s (2007) vocabulary that means attention to how “imaginaries”—market based and status driven, and networked and collegial—define what is possible, in their interaction and tension. and recognition of how universities serve the “public good” is essential, though, as marginson sees it, that is in danger of being “locked down” by national preoccupations with markets and status. still, “global public good(s) is the wild card that trumps these limitations” (marginson, 2012). to what degree oer--from its early enthusiasm for “learning objects” to today’s utopianism in the discourse of moocs—meets such a standard is a question that can guide inquiry into the global impact of technology on postsecondary education. 20 global education review 2(3) references abelson, h. 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(2007). proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. new york: harper. about the author steven weiland, phd, is a professor in the graduate program in higher, adult, and lifelong education at michigan state university. his teaching and research focus on technology and higher education, scholarly communications, and adult career development. 122 global education review 3(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dalkilic, maryam & vadeboncoeur, jennifer a. (2016). re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach: an elaboration of the model of relational inclusion. global education review, 3(3). 122-137 re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach: an elaboration of the model of relational inclusion maryam dalkilic the university of british columbia jennifer a. vadeboncoeur the university of british columbia abstract scholars have called for the articulation of new frameworks in special education that are responsive to culture and context and that address the limitations of medical and social models of disability. in this article, we advance a theoretical and practical framework for inclusive education based on the integration of a model of relational inclusion with amartya sen’s (1985) capability approach. this integrated framework engages children, educators, and families in principled practices that acknowledge differences, rather than deficits, and enable attention to enhancing the capabilities of children with disabilities in inclusive educational environments. implications include the development of policy that clarifies the process required to negotiate capabilities and valued functionings and the types of resources required to permit children, educators, and families to create relationally inclusive environments. keywords inclusive education, children with disabilities, inclusive education environments, relational inclusion, capability approach, medical model of disability, social model of disability, international classification of functionings (icf) introduction originally formulated by sen (1985, 1992) as an alternative theory for economics, applications of the capability approach are growing in the field of education, in particular as a foundation for the reexamination of disability within special education discourses, and to challenge dominant perspectives in special education (reindal, 2009; 2015; taylor, 2012; terzi, 2005; 2008; wasserman, 2006). two main models of disability—the medical and the social models— have long dominated the discourses of special education. reindal (2009) identified the main difference between these two models in the way they “explain the interplay between impairment and disability” (p. 156). while the medical model explains an absolute correlation between impairment and disability without the contribution of other factors, the social model identifies the cause of disability in ______________________________ corresponding author: jennifer a. vadeboncoeur, the university of british columbia, neville scarfe building, 2125 main mall vancouver, bc canada v6t 1z4 email: j.vadeboncoeur@ubc.ca environmental factors, cultural attitudes and social arrangements (terzi, 2004). the re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 123 capability approach does not strictly follow either the medical or the social models of disability, but instead views disability as emerging “from the interaction of personal and circumstantial factors” (terzi, 2008, p. 99). as an alternative framework to model disability, the capability approach offers a theoretical perspective grounded in a “theory of justice that attempts to answer the question of equality” (reindal, 2009, p. 158). this article responds to calls by scholars to reconsider the theoretical stance that grounds inclusive education and to propose new frameworks for inclusive education (e.g., slee, 2011, 2013; thomas, 2012; warnock, 2010). our approach integrates sen’s (1992) capability approach with a practical model of relational inclusion (dalkilic, 2014). the first section describes two polarized models of disability that theorize the current practices of inclusive education, as well as alternate models based on a synthesis of the two. the second section outlines elements of the capability approach. the third section discusses the current context of inclusive education and reexamines the potential of reframing inclusive education through the capability approach. the fourth section elaborates a framework integrating a capability approach with practices of relational inclusion (dalkilic & vadeboncoeur, 2016). a brief discussion of implications concludes the article. models of disability scholars have not developed consensus on what constitutes disability, or how it should be defined or measured (mitra, 2006). several models have emerged to address the notion of disability and, among them, the medical, social, and political/critical models have defined disability in competing and contradicting ways, based on different agendas, and serving different purposes (baglieri, bejoian, broderick, connor, & valle, 2011; mitra, 2006; taylor, 2012). some scholars have argued that the existence of multiple models to explain disability is valuable, as a single model cannot define all aspects of disability and may overlook the complexities in the construction of disability, leading to partial and limited understandings (mitra, 2006; pfeiffer, 2001; taylor, 2012; terzi, 2005). others, however, have suggested that in the field of education, practitioners and researchers must be united in a chosen model of disability in order to provide a more equitable form of education to all children (reindal, 2008). descriptions of four models follow: the medical model of disability; the social model of disability; the world health organization’s (who) international classification of functioning (icf) model, and; reindal’s (2008, 2009) socialrelational model of disability. medical model of disability the medical model views disability as the “physical product of biology acting upon functioning of individual bodies” (reindal, 2008, p. 139). based on this model, disability is the problem and the responsibility of the individual: an unwanted condition that needs to be cured or repaired by the individual (burchardt, 2004; mitra, 2006). thus, there is a causal relationship between an impairment—any physical trait limiting certain functions—and the exclusion, disadvantage, and oppression faced by an individual with an impairment (slee & allan, 2001). as such, the impairment must be repaired or normalized for an individual to stop experiencing the disabling conditions that are seen to go hand in hand with disability, such as exclusion. the disability is, thus, the explanation for exclusion (allan, 2010). the medical model of disability has received criticism for its implications in education, especially for the practices of inclusive education (see allan, 2010; reindal, 2008; slee, 2001; terzi, 2004). one implication of this model in education is that it emphasizes “the additionality for the individual child,” meaning it is the child with an additional condition, a disability, who must be adjusted to 124 global education review 3(3) fit into the existing classroom practices, rather than reshaping classroom practices for the child (reindal, 2008, p. 137). a system of inclusive education founded on a medical model of disability defines its purpose as the integration of a child labeled with disabilities into the general culture, or the norm, of the classroom (slee, 2013). the resulting inclusive educational setting utilizes practices geared toward normalizing the child through the regulation of behaviours; paradoxically, exclusion is a consequence of displaying un-assimilatory behaviours (allan, 2010; dalkilic & vadeboncoeur, 2016; slee, 2001). social model of disability the social model of disability emerged from disability rights activism against the dominant discourses of the medical model of disability (reindal, 2008; terzi, 2004). the primary purpose was to move beyond the relationship between a person’s individual impairment and their status of disability as determined by the medical model; the latter being regarded as a direct function of the former (burchardt, 2004). instead, the social model of disability identified the role of “specific social and economic structures,” such as “institutional forms of exclusion” and “cultural attitudes embedded in social practices,” in leading to the “social disadvantages” faced by people with physical impairments (terzi, 2004, p. 141). while the medical model of disability equated a person’s status as disabled with their impairments, the social model redefined disability as a product of social and political practices, attitudes, and structures that resulted in the exclusion and oppression of certain individuals due to their biological characteristics (burchardt, 2004; wasserman, 2006). therefore, the social model situated individuals and the struggles they face within “an oppressive and discriminating social and institutional structure” (terzi, 2004, p. 143). although as many as nine different versions of social models of disability have been identified, each model shares a core assumption: disability is a social construction, rather than an attribute of an individual (mitra, 2006; pfeiffer, 2001). based on social models, disability is different from impairment and can only be overcome by substantial changes in the structure and demands of society (burchardt, 2004; mitra, 2006; wasserman, 2006). for example, an inclusive educational system based on a social model of disability implies the need for structural change in the education system, and particularly in special education; it demands the “inclusivity of the system” and a readiness for the system to be altered, rather than for the child joining the system to be assimilated (reindal, 2008, p. 137). the social model of disability, however, is not beyond critique (terzi, 2004). indeed, the social model has been critiqued by both those involved in disability rights movements, and scholars outside the movement (reindal, 2008, 2009; terzi, 2004). by framing disability as primarily a sociopolitical oppression, the social model of disability lacks an approach to address the “personal restrictions of impairment” (reindal, 2008, p. 141). thus, it fails to explain aspects of disability that are not a result of social interaction and exclusion, but of biomedical conditions (bury, 1996, cited in reindal, 2008). finally, the social model of disability denies the utility of “the concept of normality in the sense of average human functioning” (reindal, 2009, p. 156), further dismissing the role of the nonsocial aspect of disability. international classification of function (icf) the icf was advanced as a “biopsycho-social model” of disability; one that brings together the perspectives offered by the medical and social models (reindal, 2008, p. 138). it has been adopted by the world health organization (who), as well as by some scholars who are critical of other disability models for overre-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 125 individualizing or over-socializing the phenomenon (terzi, 2004). the icf defines disability as a physical disadvantage that is worsened or reduced by social factors. while the social context has a role in the construction of a person’s disability, the role it plays either “facilitate[s] or hinder[s] the individual diversity” (reindal, 2009, p. 164). further, norms are defined under the icf as “activities and roles that are statistically normal or considered positively desirable in the relevant cultural context” (reindal, 2009, p. 164). this definition, however, does not consider the intention of individuals (reindal, 2009). the restrictive nature of impairment, and the dismissal of individual intent, tacitly emphasizes a notion of disability as a disadvantage in accomplishing roles that are deemed desirable, rather than the injustice and oppression faced due to biomedical and social factors. social-relational model the social-relational model of disability has also been proposed as a common ground between the positions set by the medical and social models (reindal, 2008). however unlike the icf, the social-relational model explicitly identifies disability as an axis of oppression. the social-relational model differentiates between necessary and sufficient conditions in the construction of disability, or the definition of a person as being disabled (reindal, 2008). a necessary condition is a physical or biomedical characteristic that leads to a limiting of functions and abilities, or impairment. disability, in this model, must arise from impairment. the identification of a necessary condition for a disability sets the social-relational model apart from the social model; it prevents the reduction of disability to social conditions. the socialrelational model differs from the icf with addition of the concept of sufficient conditions. according to the framework set by the icf, the role of the social context is to determine the extent of disadvantage (reindal, 2009). in the social-relational model, however, impairment is not sufficient to be regarded as a disability. that is to say that the social context determines whether impairments will lead to disablement: a form of marginalization and oppression following impairments (reindal, 2008). impairment is both a necessary and a sufficient condition for disability according to the icf, but the social-relational model requires additional conditions created by the social environment to sufficiently define a disability. the socialrelational model of disability is suited for analyses of education because it considers both biomedical and social roots of disability, while framing disability as an oppression (reindal, 2009). the capability approach the capability approach was developed by amartya sen (1992) “as a set of interrelated theses in welfare economics, particularly on the assessment of personal well-being, poverty, and inequality” (mitra, 2006, p. 236). the approach created a plane on which to discuss equity on a multidimensional scale, and to answer the question “equality of what” within various aspects of persons’ lives (terzi, 2005, p. 449). the capability approach looks at the given rights and freedoms of people as being relational to their ways of being and the extent to which their ultimate goals or values are obtainable given these ways of being. in this respect, the capability approach is conceptualized as a framework for the analysis of issues concerning social arrangements and equity (hinchcliffe & terzi, 2009). there are two main interrelated concepts of the capability approach: functionings and capabilities (sen, 1992). functionings are the various roles or modes of existence that persons may participate in or take on at a given point and the tasks that they may perform in these roles. functionings vary greatly in complexity; from survival-related to wants-related, individually-rooted to socially-rooted, and 126 global education review 3(3) concrete (or material) to abstract (or mental) (terzi, 2005). sen (1992) approached functionings as having both intrinsic value to a person with agency, and a socially legitimized reason to value these functionings, where “a person’s ability to act on behalf of what matters to her or him” (alkire, 2007, p. 163) is defined as agency. capabilities are defined as “real opportunities and freedoms people have to achieve these valued functionings,” or as the set of potential functionings that are achievable (terzi, 2005, p. 449). using this approach, justice is determined based on capabilities, or the extent of freedom that individuals have to choose functionings that they see as valuable to their ultimate well-being among their potential functionings (terzi, 2007). sociopolitical structures must be analyzed based on their allowance of capabilities of all individuals to be expanded for their “well-being and hence for living good lives” (terzi, 2007, p. 758). for an equity-based approach to social arrangements, the capability approach looks at capabilities, rather than needs, within the context of evaluating well-being (norwich, 2014). in determining capabilities, whether individuals have chosen the functionings they value, and achieved those functionings, is taken into account. an equitable society is considered to be one where individuals can “[exercise their] agency in achieving valued aims” (terzi, 2014, p. 487). central to the notion of capabilities is the recognition of human diversity and heterogeneity (sen, 1992). human diversity is defined in terms of: 1) personal characteristics, 2) external circumstances, and 3) “ability to convert resources into valued functionings” (terzi, 2005, p. 450). understanding human diversity requires attention to capabilities and functionings, rather than unmet needs or owned resources, in evaluating the quality of lives (hitchcliffe & terzi, 2009; mitra, 2006). individuals who are in similar situations may differ from one another in access to and/or the amount of resources available for functionings (mitra, 2006; wasserman, 2006). this definition of diversity interprets impairment as a form of human diversity, yet, it centers on how a disability may be constructed through the insufficiency of available resources and barriers in the social environment, leading to the limitation of capabilities and functioning (pfeiffer, 2001; terzi, 2005; wasserman, 2006). scholars have used the capability approach to address disability, through the interplay of three aspects: 1) personal characteristics, such as a physiological impairment, 2) available resources, and 3) the sociopolitical, economic, and cultural context surrounding the individual (mitra, 2006). building from reindal (2008), the capability approach can be used to evaluate disability and disabling conditions by examining the necessary condition of biomedical impairment, the sufficient conditions of resource availability and the social context, and how these conditions limit a given person’s capabilities. in other words, individuals are disabled if they cannot acquire their valued modes of existence and if they cannot perform their valued actions due to the interplay of their physical condition, barriers in the social system, and the resources they possess to help them navigate their lives (mitra, 2006; reindal, 2008, 2009). capability approach as a framework for inclusive education a discussion of inclusive education through the framework of the capability approach follows including: an examination of the context of inclusive education; a description of terzi’s (2014) notion of educational equality, and; an acknowledgement of the need to address children’s agency. re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 127 inclusive education while there is no globally agreed upon definition of inclusive education, it is understood by policy makers and practitioners to be a universal concept (dunne, 2009). the inclusive education movement originated as a response to institutionalized segregation in education, with the intention of integrating social justice practices in education (slee, 2013). despite being a relatively recent educational philosophy, inclusive education was rapidly adapted in policy after its original conception as an educational theory (avramidis & norwich, 2002). one prominent example of this global adaption was unesco’s salamanca statement (1994), although nations such as the united states were already implementing policies like the education for all handicapped children act (eahca) of 1975 decades before the salamanca statement was ratified (o’laughlin, 2013). in such policies, inclusive education was regarded as the practice of educating all children in the mainstream schools that had previously excluded them. for example, the eahca introduced the notion of least restrictive environment (lre) as the right of children with disabilities to be enrolled in classrooms “with their nondisabled peers to the maximum extent appropriate” (o’laughlin, 2013, p. 4). an impetus behind the rapid and global shift in educational policy is the perspective of schooling as a microcosm for societal attitudes and practices. implementing a system of education where all children were included within the same class and treated equitably was seen as a means to a global society in which all individuals coexist (artilles, harris-murri, & rostenberg, 2006; baglieri et al., 2011; terzi, 2014). this humanitarian, social justice oriented reasoning behind unesco’s endorsement of the salamanca statement of 1994, declared the universal principle of all children’s fundamental right to an education “in regular schools” amongst their peers (terzi, 2014, p. 479). inclusive education was seen as a potential remedy for the exclusion of individuals labeled with disabilities from educational environments and, by extension, society in general. based on this understanding, children labeled with disabilities would attend the same school environment as their peers and receive the same education (baglieri et al., 2011; terzi, 2014). despite being conceptualized as a direct extension of social justice and equity discourses, and despite the rapid global adoption of the “inclusive education agenda,” inclusive education has not realized its intended aim of honouring diversity, and welcoming all learners into educational systems (broderick, mehtaparekh, & reid, 2005; slee, 2001, 2014). while not denying the significance of the inclusive education movement in recognizing and reducing the harmful effects of institutionalized segregation, it is important to recognize that the positive intent of inclusive education’s aims do not eliminate the problematic aspects of its practices (terzi, 2014). inclusive education has become synonymous with the practice of mainstreaming: placing students labeled with disabilities in mainstream classrooms, or what baglieri et al. (2011) identified as “fundamentally about issues of place” (p. 2125). the emphasis on mainstreaming appears to assume that the location, a mainstream classroom, generally resolves the problem of inclusivity, rather than continuing to elaborate comprehensive changes to the structure of mainstream schools and classrooms to enable them to be inclusive contexts. one criticism offered is that inclusive education—as a practice of mainstreaming—has been taken up by schools as a solution to students’ exclusion given their divergence from the norm (baglieri et al., 2011; broderick et al., 2005). thus, inclusive education has been represented as an intervention for specific children, and synonymous to special education, rather than a structure for reframing education and enabling the participation of all learners (baglieri et al., 2011; slee, 2001). placement 128 global education review 3(3) practices targeting children labeled with disabilities are employed under the guise of inclusive education, leading to segregation between students as those who are targeted by inclusion and those who are not targeted by inclusion (baglieri et al., 2011). thomas and loxley (2001) noted “inclusive education has to become more than a synonym for special systems in mainstream schools, more than a peripheral dimension to mainstream education” (p. 142). this criticism extends further to how inclusive education has been conceptualized and implemented. beyond asserting all children’s fundamental right to attend school among their peers, policies of inclusive education such as the salamanca statement have remained vague in their approach as to what inclusive education entails (dunne, 2009; terzi, 2014). in addition, inclusive education has been interpreted as a form of in situ intervention to assimilate children to a set of normalized characteristics (baglieri et al., 2011). through behavioural modification practices, for example, children labeled with developmental disabilities are regulated to adjust their behaviours to the norms of the institution. to date, the practices of inclusive education have not been reflective of social justice and equity based theoretical frameworks (artilles et al., 2006; broderick et al., 2005; slee, 2001; terzi, 2014). educational equality responding to the call to reevaluate inclusive education, terzi (2014) introduced the notion of educational equality based on the principle of equal entitlement of all individuals to certain standards of living in their society: social and institutional arrangements, such as those found in schools, must be structured to serve all members of the population in an equitable manner. rather than providing the same resources for all members, the principle of equity aims to provide equal opportunities through equitable treatment of all members of a social arrangement (underwood, valeo, & wood, 2012). the concept of equity dovetails with acknowledging and respecting individual differences: differences that are intrinsic to an individual, differences that are extrinsic or attributed to environmental and social factors, and differences that focus on the conversion of resources to expanding capabilities and, thereby, obtaining functionings. framed by the capability approach, terzi (2014) argued that the level of justice in social and institutional arrangements should be evaluated based on their recognition of individual differences, and the extent to which they provide each individual the opportunity to benefit from resources, given his/her choices and individual differences. education is one of the few fundamental capabilities, essential to human well-being (sen, 1992). school systems, as institutional arrangements, are just to the extent that they provide equal educational opportunities for individuals to approach the level of well-being that extends to a “conception of good life—the life that one has reasons to value” (terzi, 2014, p. 486). a just education should provide children with the capabilities to stand as equals in society, where children have agency in determining valuable functionings (terzi, 2008). in inclusive education, the capability approach may be used provisionally to determine the practices that allow for equitable treatment within school systems by providing children the capabilities to accomplish their valued functionings and stressing the principles of well-being and agency (terzi, 2007). valued and reasonable functionings for young children in previous proposals uniting the capability approach with education, a question has emerged: how will educational professionals determine the functionings children should obtain? (terzi, 2014; underwood, chan, koller, & valeo, 2015; underwood et al., 2012; re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 129 warnock, 2010). education as a social arrangement created on behalf of children and youth may be considered to be difficult to unite with the capability approach as children and youth are often not perceived to be equipped with the ability to decide and communicate their own valued functionings. this is, particularly, the case for young children labeled with disabilities (underwood et al., 2015). even those advocating for education within the framework of capabilities often overlook the agency of children in determining valued functionings in favour of adult decision-making on the matter (see terzi, 2007). indeed, educational professionals are privileged in determining the capabilities that children should expand in their schooling (alkire, 2011). the agency that children have is dismissed as a function of their age and their current stage of neurobiological development: young children with disabilities are not seen as equipped to decide on, or even contribute to the decision regarding the functionings they value, thus educational professionals are granted the right and responsibility to decide on practices that serve their students’ well-being in schools. the dismissal of a child’s agency, given age and development, in determining valued functionings has certain implications that compromise the main promise of a capabilityoriented educational system (taylor, 2013). from a consideration of capabilities, diversity is recognized and highly valued, and agency is considered for all individuals regardless of the unique set of characteristics they may possess. as one example, underwood et al., (2015) proposed a capability-oriented approach for acknowledging children’s agency in determining their own valued functionings. their research, employing a multi-modal methodology— including verbal language, behavioural cues, signs and symbols, drawings, and play—fostered the communication of valued functionings between the children and the researchers. they argued that young children labeled with disabilities are often able to express their valued functionings when provided with an array of methods to express themselves (underwood et al., 2015). this research provided evidence for the possibility of an inclusive education setting that considers children’s agency in determining their valued functionings. in addition to the need to overcome barriers to communication, the structure and framework behind practices in schools may disregard children’s values. a child’s wish may be understood, but declined due to an educator’s understanding of the activities children must do. here, the discussion of valued functionings also incorporates the reasonability of functions. the dismissal of children’s agency leaves functionings in education systems to be selected based on whether they are deemed necessary, ethical, correct, and achievable, as determined solely by adults. the consideration of children’s agency requires that a discussion of reasonability also include the child at hand, alongside educators and parents. while the authors acknowledge that this may be practiced in some early learning settings, based on the first author’s empirical research (dalkilic, 2014) and related literature, this does not appear to be a dominant practice (see todd, 2007). reframing inclusive education: education based on well-being and agency following terzi’s (2014) notion of educational equality, equitable education with the aim of furthering the capabilities of children based on well-being and agency, this section advances relational inclusion (dalkilic & vadeboncoeur, 2016) as central to the development of equitable educational practices to equalize learning and well-being, and discusses the alignment between principles of relational inclusion and the main ideas of the capability approach. the model of relational inclusion emerged from the authors’ empirical research as a practical application of social justice principles in education, and as an 130 global education review 3(3) alternative to current practices of inclusive education (dalkilic, 2014). relational inclusion suggests that inclusive education should both contribute to and be the outcome of an educational system that provides an equitable opportunity to all children to be active agents in their own learning. relational inclusion is founded on five core principles that are closely linked to the capabilities of children within the social arrangement of schooling, attending to diversity and agency including: 1) context and culture responsive inclusive practices, 2) holistic child-focused inclusive pedagogy, 3) inclusion as a spectrum of practices, 4) inclusion as increasing participation in democratic classrooms and societies, and 5) relational ontological practices (dalkilic & vadeboncoeur, 2016). culture and context responsive inclusive practices the principle of culture and context responsive inclusive practices situates inclusive education within the culture and context of the individuals, rather than assuming universal practices can be applied across culture and context. according to this principle, inclusive education practices cannot be defined and universally applied separate from the relationship between a child, educator, and caregiver. instead, the specifics of the situation at hand must be examined in order to proceed with practices that are regarded as beneficial for all members of the educational community. moving away from universal practices is consistent with an approach that attends to capabilities because individuals have different preferred functions from one another, based in their cultural and contextual values. for that reason, an inclusive education based on the capability approach cannot provide a universal recipe for practice. an example from the first author’s practice related to a young child with profound hearing impairment illustrates the disconnect that can occur at times with a universal approach. the standard of care for a child with profound hearing impairment suggests that he/she is provided with the means of sign language communication in early learning settings to suit their needs. however, in the experience of the first author, the parents, who were deaf and communicated via sign language with the child, proposed that minimal or no sign language be used at the daycare so that the child could practice lip reading skills. the parents argued that their valued functioning for the child was to be fluent in lip reading in addition to sign language, as that would be a constituent of her well-being, enabling her to understand the spoken words of peers and adults who did not use sign language. they also made it clear that developing this skill was desired by the child. although this practice was not considered developmentally appropriate and responsive to the perceived needs of the child with a profound hearing impairment, the parents communicated that one of their main goals for participating in the early learning setting was for her to develop lip reading skills to socialize with her peers who were not proficient in sign language. the aim of relational inclusion is to be mindful of the culture and context in determining which practices will expand on the capabilities of children for them to obtain their valued functionings. in short, practices aimed at adding to children’s capabilities to enable them the choice of obtaining valued functionings must be responsive to the culture and context of children and their families. in the previous example, the daycare expanded this child’s capabilities by providing her opportunities for face-to-face verbal communication with adults and peers, involving only minimal signing for accessibility, so that she could practice lip reading skills. holistic child-focused inclusive pedagogy the principle of holistic child-focused inclusive pedagogy further emphasizes the significance of re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 131 the relationships between the child and the educator, and states that children’s identities should be considered beyond their label of disability. just as inclusive education practices should not be assumed to be universal, practices should not apply universally to all children who have been given a particular label of disability. in order to have a child-focused inclusive pedagogy, it is crucial to focus on the involved persons and their relationships with one another: the educator, the child labeled with disability, and his/her family. the emphasis on the whole child and the relationships between individuals adds further context to practices that become inclusive given the relationships between these participants. while the context of our research is early childhood education in canada, it is also important to note that this principle draws upon the acknowledgment of human diversity and the relationship between the capabilities of a person and their valued functionings, and thus requires going beyond the standard individual educational plan (iep) that shapes k-12 education in canada and in the united states. the capability approach places diversity at its center, and notes the uniqueness of human beings. while disability labels may refer to physical conditions that children are described as “having,” different children sharing the same disability label are still vastly different from each other. there are no sets of practices that are guaranteed to provide an equitable education to all children who share the same particular label, as the diversity of children is impacted by a multitude of factors. in order for inclusive education practices to expand the capabilities of a child, the practices must be centered on the child, rather than his/her label. this requires that the relationships between the child, the educator, and the families be used as a foundation to create and evaluate the type of practices that will expand the capabilities of a particular child, given his/her culture and context. inclusion as a spectrum of practices the principle of inclusion as a spectrum of practices aims to deconstruct the polar thinking that dominates current discourses of inclusive education. examples of polarities that frequent the inclusive education literature include classifying practices as inclusive vs. exclusive, and children as typical vs. atypical. binary perspectives assume environments labeled as inclusive are such under all conditions and for all participants; aspects of such environments that may exclude some children, or children under some conditions, go unassessed. a system of education based in the capability approach enables movement away from restrictions imposed by binary thinking by taking an inherently anti-binarist stance. there are no rigid sets of capabilities that have been determined to categorize social arrangements such as systems of education, as either inclusive or exclusive. rather, the capability approach argues for a holistic review of these systems, and evaluates how the system both enhances and hinders the participating individuals’ ability to obtain their valued functionings under specific conditions. within relational inclusion, the capability approach allows for a dynamic assessment of educational practices, as environment or practices are not labeled as being absolutely inclusive or exclusive; rather, they are continuously evaluated and modified for new ways to further expand on capabilities of the children. the capability approach enacted through relational inclusion considers educational practices as a spectrum and open to change in relation to a particular students’ functionings, given that all children are diverse from one another, and that student’s capabilities change over time. diversity in capabilities implies that children have a spectrum of different valued functionings and, thus, require a spectrum of different practices and resources to expand their capabilities. 132 global education review 3(3) inclusion as increasing participation in democratic classrooms and societies the principle of inclusion as increasing participation in democratic classrooms and societies identifies a task of inclusive education to be the recognition of diversity and valuing individual contributions and participation as significant for a democratic society. compatible with slee’s (2001) concept of democracy in education, this principle is opposed to practices that are aimed at erasing children’s personal characteristics as a requirement for them to belong to a classroom that is assumed to be homogenous. drawing on this principle, relational inclusion condemns the excessive regulation of behaviour and the assimilation of the child to fit the existing structure of the classroom through behavioural modification techniques, instead defining democracy in education as a practice of welcoming differences and embracing the heterogeneity of contributors to the classroom culture while working together toward educational goals. increasing participation in education, in many respects, goes hand in hand with terzi’s (2014) notion of educational equality, which is a derivative of the capability approach as applied in education. this principle necessitates that—in order to support agency and diversity—inclusive practices must increase participation in classrooms and societies for the attainment of valued functionings within personal capabilities. thus, the capabilities of children ought to be expanded within a social arrangement that is inherently democratic, and their valued functionings achieved through their participation, without compromising their diversity (taylor, 2013). this principle implies that children can decide and/or contribute to decisions regarding their well-being, and their view should be incorporated into a social system. the role of individuals—from educators, to parents and children—within a social arrangement is to foster a system that provides the resources for all to expand their chosen capabilities, rather than to create a system that requires everyone to ultimately possess the same capabilities, regardless of the value these capabilities may have for the varied individuals (taylor, 2013). our perspective of democracy in education, in short, refers to implementing practices that enable all children to participate in their education without having to disregard the characteristics that make them unique (artilles et al., 2006; slee, 2001). in a democratic education system, it is recognized that children are unique individuals, have varied characteristics from one another, and that the solution to their exclusion is not to shape them with the same capabilities as others, but rather to provide them with the capabilities to obtain their valued functionings. relational practices the principle of relational practices is the foundation of each of the first four principles. this principle suggests that the frameworks currently dominating education based on individualism are a cause for exclusionary and inequitable practices (e.g., slee & allan, 2011). a relational ontology, or a relational way of being, insists that educational professionals see themselves and the children and families with whom they work in a web of relationships that are primary and valued as such. for educational professionals to enable relationally inclusive environment, this last principle suggests that a change in framework to guide the implementation of inclusive education is necessary. as a theory of evaluating equality of opportunities, the capability approach may enable the assessment of policies and practices consistent with a relational approach to inclusive education (see norwich, 2014; reindal, 2009; terzi, 2004; wasserman, 2006). capabilities can be applied to education, as a social arrangement, and the approach can be used to guide inclusive education to create settings re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 133 where children are provided with the resources and practices that allow them to obtain their choice of functionings. in a capability driven education system, the agency of children in identifying valued functionings and the role of families in selecting reasonable functionings for children are surfaced as contributing to educational practices for that particular setting via the relationships between educators, children, and parents as central to the practices of inclusive education. drawing once again from the example of the child with profound hearing impairment, in order for the educator to respond to the child’s needs and interests and the parents’ concern that the child be supported to learn lip-reading, she needed to engage in a number of actions. first, she needed to meet with the parents and the child, to listen to and hear their concerns, and then consider how to organize the classroom. second, she needed to reexamine the standard of care for children with profound hearing impairment in early childhood education contexts and consider attending to the concerns of the parents and interests of the child. third, she needed to find additional time to develop and implement shifts to her pedagogical approach, and then share these with her colleagues at the preschool. fourth, she needed to make an ongoing commitment to this child and her family to undertake a different approach to education (that was contradicted by her own education) that was responsive to the child and parents. fifth, these actions had to be taken with the utmost respect and sensitivity to the feelings of the parents and child, and with consideration of valued functionings and capacities of the child to engage in the world both inside and outside the classroom. taken together, these five principles offer a framework that is theoretically grounded in the capability approach and that guides the reconceptualization of educational practices through relational inclusion. in order for these integrated principles to be applied to inclusive education, however, professionals must be educated in the principles of relational inclusion and in applications of the capability approach that emerge as a function of the relationship between person and context. the implications of these principles go beyond the practices implemented within the classroom to include practices that involve children and their families and, further, to include the policies required to support the education of professionals. although some educators may be involved in this sort of approach incidentally, through teacher education and professional development that is supported by changes in policy, educators will be more able to facilitate the emergence of capability-oriented practices that are based upon their relationships with children and families is they study this approach through teacher education and professional development that is supported by changes in policy. concluding thoughts the aim of this article was to extend the literature on inclusive education by describing an integrated framework based upon sen’s (1992) capability approach and the practicebased model of relational inclusion. the capability approach is particularly useful in analyzing justice and human rights in social arrangements, as it considers how the same amount and quality of resources may impact different individuals, with reference to the achievement of their personal valued functionings within their capabilities (burchardt, 2004). further, we discussed the potential for a capability-oriented inclusive education system through the model of relational inclusion. five principles of relational inclusion were elaborated and were discussed with reference to capabilities, diversity, agency, and well-being. as a flexible model of inclusion that challenges taken-for-granted and universalized practices of inclusive education, this integrated model creates a challenge for 134 global education review 3(3) practitioners and education policy makers, and indicates areas in need of additional research. implications for practice, policy, and future research five implications for practice derive most obviously from the five principles discussed earlier, including the need for the continued development of these principles. for example, which aspects of practice need to change to build relational inclusion across cultures? which aspects of children need to be attended to when relational inclusion is approached holistically? how does the consideration of inclusion as a spectrum of practices change assessment of “inclusive” vs. “exclusive” classrooms and how can it be used to highlight how classrooms vary for different students at different moments in time? how does an approach to relational inclusion support participation in classrooms? what are the characteristics of relationships between educators, children, and families that enable the negotiation of capabilities? while some educators may practice in ways consistent with some of these principles, it is likely to be in spite of educational systems. enhancing these values and capacities—including the capacity to interpret the principles in relation to each child and family, and the expectation that this interpretation will guide engagement with a particular child and family—requires immersion in the model through education and professional development. while enacting the principles of relational inclusion in practice partially requires educators’ initiative and internalization of these values, a structural change at the policy level is required to support educators. we highlight three policy implications to begin building a system within which educators can shift from the conventional principles of inclusive education to the model of relational inclusion. although these policy implications have been thought of with an early childhood education context in mind, we believe that they may also inform k-12 schooling policy considerations. one implication for policy is that universal standards of care cannot be decided upon as baselines for regulation. instead, policies need to be drafted that can be interpreted by educators in relation to a specific child and family as situated by cultural and contextual factors. this would provide the flexibility required and communicate the expectation that educators can and must engage with children and families to design pedagogy. granting further flexibility, and thereby more administrative responsibilities, will require additional changes to support child care practitioners in fostering relationally inclusive settings and programs with the potential to influence a number of aspects of the work of educators, including their workload and the ratio of educator to children and families. these policy implications do not suggest the removal of central regulation by authorities. rather, central regulation must be designed to assess the ways in which these principles are adhered to, and to suggest improvements for given situations, with context and participants in mind. more flexible regulation—rather than universal standards of care—with agency at the level of individual childcare centres, would permit educator, parents, and child to build practices of inclusion that are child and context specific. regulation focusing on the principles of relational inclusion would measure how these principles are actualized, thus ensuring assessment and ongoing revision for the program. to support educators, ongoing professional development and formative assessment of the program through the collaborative effort of parents, children, educators, management, and regulatory authorities is required. these efforts can also be assisted through central regulation. a second policy implication is more rigorous early childhood educator preparation programs. some suggestions include adding a re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach 135 strong theoretical component to education curricula, including the theory and practice of disability models, responsiveness to valued capabilities, and relational ontology. in the long run, the benefit of regulating practitioners’ education and providing an in depth theoretical education is that it can enable the implementation of inclusive education that is context, culture, and participant-responsive. a third implication for policy is that, in order to build relationally inclusive pedagogy to support capabilities, educators must be given the freedom to build closer relationships with the children and families with whom they work. currently a number of factors prevent many educators from being able to engage in more frequent and thorough interactions with children and parents, such as funding for time allotted to work, pupil/teacher ratios, and resources for professional development. these are factors that can be regulated at a policy level without infringing on the flexibility that centers need to build their unique inclusive settings. educational policy should be drafted to provide practitioners with the necessary resources to shape the particular inclusive settings they create. research must be undertaken to examine applications of a capability approach extended through relational inclusion to the structure of schooling, with the recognition that early childhood centres and k-12 schools vary along a number of dimensions, such as classroom and school size, education and experience of teachers, and resources, including funding, time, and location. as a practical framework for capability-oriented schooling, there is a need for further research and, in particular, case studies that define the unit of analysis as the relationships formed between the child, educator, and families (see vadeboncoeur & rahal, 2013). further, the question of the ability of young children labeled with disabilities to contribute to decisions made regarding the reasonability of their valued functionings needs continued theorizing. while this question was partially addressed here, a consideration of how the relationships between different participants of the school system collectively contribute to reasonable functionings so that all members of the collective can benefit, needs investigation. in this article, we suggested that parents are important as part of a collective that assesses reasonable functionings for their children; observing and analyzing their roles will further elaborate this idea and contribute to the development of theory and practice. reframing inclusive education in order to enhance the opportunities for a child to work toward achieving valued and reasonable functionings through practices that are formed relationally may lead to the creation of many different practices. this variation will be an improvement provided that it expands the capabilities of children in achieving their valued and reasonable functionings. the practices of inclusive education that are derived must be observed, interpreted, analyzed, and continually assessed, with input from educators, children, and parents, to ascertain the extent to which children’s capabilities are being expanded through this model. references alkire, s. 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(2015). understanding young children’s capabilities: approaches to interviews with young children. child care in practice, 1-18. underwood, k., valeo, a., & wood, r. (2012). understanding inclusive early childhood education: a capability approach. contemporary issues in early childhood, 13, 290-299. unesco (1994). the unesco salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education. paris: unesco. vadeboncoeur, j. a. & rahal, l. (2013). mapping the social across lived experiences: relational geographies and after-school time. banks street occasional paper series, 30, 1-15. warnock, m. (2010). special educational needs: a new look. in m. warnock & b. norwich special educational needs: a new look (l. terzi, ed.) (pp. 11-46). london: continuum. wasserman, d. (2006). disability, capability, and thresholds for distributive justice. in a. kaufman (eds.), capabilities equality: basic issues and problems (pp. 214-234). london: routledge. about the author(s) maryam dalkilic is a doctoral student in human development, learning and culture in the department of educational and counselling psychology at the university of british columbia. a former school counselor and preschool director in turkey and a childcare supervisor in canada, maryam’s research examines the ways in which ubiquitous concepts, like inclusion and normal development, are incorporated in discourses that exclude and marginalize children with learning differences. a recent publication includes " regulating the child in early childhood education: the paradox of inclusion," in global studies of childhood, published in 2016, by dalkilic and vadeboncoeur. jennifer a. vadeboncoeur, phd, is associate professor of human development, learning and culture in the department of educational and counselling psychology at the university of british columbia. her research interests include learning from young people about their experiences engaging in informal learning contexts, as well as rethinking learning and teaching relationships with educators. recent publications include "recreating social futures: the role of the moral imagination in student-teacher relationships in alternative education," in international journal of child, youth, and family studies, published in 2016, by vadeboncoeur and vellos, and "learning in and across contexts: reimagining education," in the yearbook of the national society for the study of education, in 2014. for some time issues of dealing with ethnic and linguistic diversity in child care institutions have been among the key topics of the professional and political discourse on early child-hood education in the western european countries lost in translanguaging? 23 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: neumann, sascha (2015). lost in translanguaging? practices of language promotion in luxembourgish early childhood education. global education review, 2(1). 23-39 lost in translanguaging? practices of language promotion in luxembourgish early childhood education sascha neumann université de fribourg abstract luxembourg maintains by far the largest proportion of foreign immigrants in europe. this is also reflected in the population of children. about 50% of children under the age of four are foreign nationals. accordingly, the question of how to deal with linguistic diversity represents one of the biggest challenges in the professional debate about early childhood education in luxembourg. the article will refer to this issue on the basis of several insights stemming from an ethnographic study in luxembourgish daycare centers which was conducted between 2009 and 2012 by the working group early childhood: education and care at the university of luxembourg. the study explored practices professionals apply to come up with the superdiverse and translingual environment in order to meet the political expectation of promoting foreign children’s competences before they enter school. based on the empirical investigations of everyday language use in center-based early childhood education, the article will not only characterize two different modes of language promotion (institutional monolingualization in one language and institutional monolingualization in several languages) but also highlight the ambiguities of those language promotion practices which, although facing a translingual environment, are still based on a multilingual standard. keywords early childhood education, diversity, language promotion, translingual, multilingualism, monolingualism, ethnography, inequality introduction the last ten years in luxembourg have brought an enormous increase of non-familial care for children prior to and alongside the school just as in many other member countries of the european union (eu) and the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd). the expansion of the child care system in luxembourg has been part of the national effort for the implementation of the lisbon strategy of the eu which was set up in the early 2000’s. it became effective in luxembourg around the year 2005 with the establishment of the regulations for the so-called maison relais pour enfants (mre) [daycare center]. this development of expanding extracurricular and ______________________________ corresponding author: sascha neumann, université de fribourg, avenue de l'europe 20, 1700 fribourg, switzerland. email: sascha.neumann@unifr.ch 24 global education review 2(1) non-familial early childhood education institutions serves about 79,000 children from birth to 12 years of age, of about 549,000 inhabitants in total (le portail des statistiques, 2014).compulsory schooling starts at the age of four. around 31,000 children in luxembourg are currently not yet of school age (le portail des statistiques, 2014). in 2013, there were about 12,859 ( places allocated to several children in crèches and mres (ministère de la famille et de l’integration [mfi], 2013, p. 122).1 more than 70% percent of the three year olds are attending the half-day, facultative education précoce [preschool] (honig & haag, 2011, ministère de l’éducation nationale et de la formation professionnelle [menfp], 2012a). in just the five years between 2005 and 2010, the number of places for children under four in state operated childcare centers has increased thirtyfold (honig & haag, 2011). the system of non-familial care and preschool education in early childhood education in luxembourg is based on a dual structure in several regards. whereas pre-school education forms a part of the state-organized system of educational institutions, the field of non-familial care is divided according to a mixed economy into a smaller public and a bigger private sector, which in turn includes non-profit and for-profit organizations. the respective share of childcare places in for-profit daycare institutions varies depending on the age group of the children: for children up to the age of four years, commercial crèches and family daycare homes (assistants parentaux/dageselteren) provide more than half of the daycare places (honig & haag, 2011, mfi, 2011). even though the government has made considerable effort to increase the public provision of daycare facilities during the last years, the current availability of public daycare places, in particular for children under the age of four, does not come close to meeting the need. at the same time, the number of private daycare places supplied by for-profit providers has increased rapidly: according to the report of the luxembourgish ministry for family affairs, the percentage increase was 87% in 2010 in comparison to the previous year (mfi, 2011, p. 194) and by about 28% between 2011 and 2012 (mfi, 2013a, p. 125). the rising number of commercial daycare providers is not least a consequence of the system of care vouchers (chèques-services accueil) introduced in 2009 which relieves parents of the costs for extrafamilial care depending on their income. the rapid expansion of the childcare sector resulted in considerable doubt concerning the quality of these institutions (kurschat 2009a, b). because of the public controversy, the ministry of family affairs began to define key elements for a quality development strategy. in the context of this quality development strategy the ministry of family affairs is currently working on a new law for the sector of early childhood education institutions, the intent of which is to establish a uniform standard for the non-profit and for-profit sector of early childhood education in order to create a consistent and independent field of non-formal learning before school age. this is accompanied by and directly linked to the development of a national curriculum for early childhood education practice to be entered into force in 2015. within this curriculum the question of how to deal with (linguistic) diversity in luxembourgish society plays a major role. in luxembourg, nearly half of the children have another than the luxembourgian citizenship (honig & haag, 2011). this also affects the everyday reality in the educational system. the proportion of immigrant pupils in luxembourgish schools amounts to 43.2 percent (ministère de l’éducation nationale, de l’enfance et de la jeunesse [men], 2014a, p.16). for the school year 2012/2013, 60.2 % of the students in primary school admitted to speaking a language other than luxembourgish at home (men, 2014a, p. 102 ). against this background, it is hardly surprising that language promotion is intended to be one of the key elements of the lost in translanguaging? 25 educational and linguistic policy in this country. since early childhood education has entered the focus of national as well as supranational political and professional discussions, challenges of dealing with linguistic diversity have gained a firm position in these debates (see e.g. organization for economic co-operation and development [oecd], 2001, 2006, saracho & spodek, 2010, united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization [unesco], 2006, 2008). this also applies to luxembourg and is reflected in the new national curriculum for the non-formal sector of education before and alongside the school (mfi, 2013b, mfi & service national de la jeunesse [snj], 2013). because of the tremendous diversity and heterogeneity of their clientele, an inclusive and constructive management of differences is also expected from the early educational institutions and particularly from the mres (baltes-löhr, 2009). the article takes up this issue by drawing attention to practices of language use in luxembourgian daycare centers. the empirical findings the paper refers to are from an ethnographic research project conducted in mres which, at first, will be introduced in terms of its general objectives. after that, the argument of the article will be developed in three steps. first, the paper aims to illustrate the background of the general linguistic setting in luxembourg and discusses the various attitudes towards the situation of multilingualism in this country. here, the argument draws attention to how the situation of linguistic diversity is empirically reflected in the political discourse on education and especially on early childhood education. second, the paper will demonstrate how the institutions of early childhood educations try to meet the political agenda of early language promotion in a linguistically diverse society. this will be done by reconstructing how the complex linguistic situation of the country is reflected in different modes of language use and language promotion in institutional everyday life. the third step will, finally, provide some points of reference for discussing the political implications of the current institutional practices of language promotion in luxembourgish early childhood education. the research context: an ethnographic study on language promotion in luxembourgish early childhood education the reconstruction and reflection of language use practices in luxembourgian early childhood education refers to empirical observations and analyses in the framework of the project titled, realities of early childhood education and care: the pedagogy of the maisons relais pour enfants (mre). it was carried out by the research axis early childhood: education and care at the university of luxembourg and financed by the university’s research fund and the luxembourgish ministry of family affairs. in general, the study dealt with the practice of education and care for children under the age of four in the publicly funded daycare sector of luxembourg by examining local institutional everyday life with the methods of ethnographic fieldwork. it started in august 2009 and ended in december 2012. the general political environment of the study must be seen in the vast expansion the daycare sector in luxembourg was witnessing since 2005. in the wake of this vast expansion, the mres were created as a new type of institutions. the mre daycare centers in luxembourg, and particularly the mre-crèche for children under the age of four we were investigating, were both meant to be a general means of increasing the number of places in childcare facilities and to provide a high quality of education.2 against this background, the project can briefly be characterized as a sort of accompanying research, which was settled in the so-called research and development as well as in 26 global education review 2(1) the area of basic research on educational phenomena. on the one hand, the project was expected to give some indication for the ministry to evaluate the success of their institutional expansion strategy. on the other hand, from the vantage point of the researchers the project was also linked to the objective of basically investigating the phenomenology of the pedagogical in early childhood education and the different forms and practices of its representation towards various stakeholders. in this sense, the research interest of the project was to describe the realities of care, focusing on the question how professionals account for their educational significance in light of heterogeneous and at times also contradictory expectations of their services. thus, the study intended to contribute to debates on the educational quality of daycare facilities. in contrast to most other studies on this subject, however, it did not presuppose what education is or should be. rather, we understood education as a task that educational practice has to confront in order to assure as being educational and to represent itself as such in front of its audience. empirically, the study is about practices of pedagogicalization. theoretically, it is about aspects of the institutionalization of non-familial childcare. in this context, our research project also paid special attention to linguistic practices in early education institutions which, in luxembourg, are regularly characterized by a “pluriglossic” language ecology that has a strong influence on the institutional everyday life (kühn & reding, 2007, p. 31). as already pointed out in the introduction to this paper, the biggest challenges (early childhood) education in luxembourg faces are the question of language promotion and the more basic question of how to deal with linguistic diversity at all. so, the request for quality in early childhood actually cannot be separated from the question of language, because language competencies count as one of key factors to the future educational success of children. as linguistic diversity is not only a societal fact, but also regarded as a pedagogical challenge, it is quite evident that linguistic practices can also function as an important medium through which the institutions in the daycare sector will be able to account for their quality in the sense of ethnomethodology, which means to make high quality reportable und observable for the members inside the institutions as well as to audiences from the outside. methodologically, the study was based on an ethnographic research style using participant observation and videography as data collection strategies. in accordance with a theoretical sampling, examinations of the major study took place in six selected crèches and mre during several research phases. all phases included six weeks of intensive fieldwork in which three ethnographers placed themselves approximately three times a week at different sites within the institutional setting of the daycare centers. the data referred to in the following is based on observation in five different classrooms in three different childcare institutions. data analysis was based on field notes and protocols, video recordings, photographs, documents, and artifacts. a detailed overview of the methodology and different findings of the whole study has been published in honig et al. (2013). linguistic diversity and language policy in luxembourgian early childhood education with about 45%, luxembourg has by far largest proportion of foreign nationals in the european union (statistical office of the european union [eurostat], 2013). the main foreign national minority groups in luxembourg are the portuguese (16.5% of the total population), french (6.7%), italians (3.4%), belgians (3.2%) and germans (2.3%) (service central de la statistique et des études économiques [statec], 2014). additionally, there are also lost in translanguaging? 27 about 150,000 frontier workers from france, germany and belgium crossing the luxembourgish border day by day. in addition, luxembourg is also one of the few officially multilingual states in western europe. this means that the (often multilingual) migrants find themselves in a situation of historically evolved trilingualism (berg, 1993). this trilingual setting was already codified in the official luxembourgish language law passed in 1984, which in addition to luxembourgish as the national language, identifies german and french as official legal and administrative languages (langues administratives et judiciaries) (chambre des députés, 1984). these three languages are also represented in different forms and weighting in the national education system. but, in response to significantly increasing migration since the late 1990’s the language situation in luxembourg has also changed (horner & weber, 2008). alongside the three official administrative languages there has been a growing importance of english as the language of international business and the financial sector. icontinuing immigration increased the importance of other immigrant languages as well, primarily portuguese. in addition, the role of french has changed since it shifted from the language of the societal elites to an everyday language among immigrant groups, as well as between residents and cross border commuters from france and belgium. furthermore, the use of the luxembourgish language has also increased in the last decades even though the government did not take any special effort to encourage its dissemination after the language law has passed (such as implementing luxembourgish as a major subject in schools for example). due to the growing use of luxembourgish in the context of traditional and new (social) media, which also pushes forward its standardization as a written language, it is no longer limited to the area of oral communication. the complexity and differentiation of everyday language practices in luxembourg would be underestimated if one conceived of the language setting to be a diverse realm of separate language domains brought to live by, without exception, perfectly trained multilingual speakers. what one encounters in luxembourg, however, is rather a situation of linguistic superdiversity. it is helpful to refer to steven vertovec’s (2007) concept of super-diversity here as it was designed to describe the dynamics and complexity of diversification processes in social spaces which are characterized by a high degree of migration. in this sense, linguistic super-diversity refers to conditions under which different languages do not merely co-exist independently from one another, but rather are affected by a complex interplay of foreign and indigenous languages (bloomaert, 2010, creese & blackledge, 2010, gogolin, 2010). this is, in fact, the case in luxembourg. besides the fact that multiple languages are spoken, the language setting in luxembourg is characterized by spontaneous and permanent changes in the languages coupled with a mixture of different languages. to what extent this varies depends on the differing domains of language behavior (politics, media, private conversation, etc.) (berg, 1993) in which one may find a more or less open competition of different languages (unité de recherche identités, politiques, sociétés, espaces [ipse], 2010, p. 67). against this background, it becomes quite clear that the linguistic situation is not purely bior multilingual. this means, that speakers do not communicate with each other by using different languages separately. instead, they interact in different languages, simultaneously operating between them and crossing their borders. in other words, the speakers are acting as translinguals. the terms translinguality and translanguaging as defined by garcía (2009) describe practices of language use in which the boundaries of different languages are constantly crossed in communication by a so-called code28 global education review 2(1) switching and even a code-mixing to such an extent that a detached observer is no longer able to identify them in proper separation from each other. the term translanguaging has been deployed by garcía to denote the actual language practices of multilingual speakers, not from the perspective of language as a system, but as an everyday experience where diverse linguistic and non-linguistic resources are combined in dynamic and fluid ways in order to make meaning and achieve understanding. in this sense, following garcía, translanguaging means “the act performed by bilinguals of accessing different linguistic features or various modes of what are described as autonomous languages, in order to maximize communication potential” (garcía, 2009, p. 140). though the translingual management of linguistic diversity belongs to the ordinary everyday experience of people living in luxembourg, the societal discourse about the language situation displays a split into two different and opposing positions (ipse, 2010, péporté et al., 2010). on the one hand, there is a strong commitment to multilingualism, which is considered both as a special feature of the luxembourgian society as well as offering an added value for its economy and the cultural life of its inhabitants. in this sense, multilingualism is even often regarded as the ‘true’ mother tongue in luxembourg (berg & weis, 2007, p. 19). on the other hand, multilingualism is also perceived as a risk for the social cohesion and the preservation of the nation’s identity. in this context, the role of luxembourgish as the ‘true’ national language in the narrowest sense is emphasized and it is launched as an effective means to establish the nation’s cultural integrity. the perspective on multilingualism, however, has to be further differentiated, since there are different practical forms of multilingual repertoires and different ideas of multilingualism at stake (fehlen, 2009). on the one hand, there is a more commonsenseoriented vision of multilingualism which is established within the school system. it is based on a monolingualist view of language use in the sense of aspiring to a nearly native-like level of linguistic performance in every official language as well as in english. following this idea of monolingual multilingualism, different socially approved languages are to be learned and used separately while the corresponding competencies should each be applied as perfectly as possible in the appropriate sociolinguistic domain (family, friends, job, public space etc.). but, on the other hand, there is also an illegitimate form of multilingualism. here different languages seem to interfere, no language is supposed to be spoken ‘properly’ and in a correct manner, and the speaking of socially disapproved and economically less profitable languages, for example portuguese, is reflected as a symbol of failed integration, backwardness, and an impediment to social cohesion. from this perspective, the everyday practices of translanguaging are rather regarded as a problem than a solution for dealing with multilingualism in the luxembourgish society. considering the governmental perspective of how to deal with issues of linguistic and cultural heterogeneity in early childhood education, luxembourg does not really differ very much from other central european countries like germany, switzerland, or austria. in luxembourg, migration-related inequality of opportunity in the educational system is also a big issue. this is reflected in the relevant documents informing educational policy as well as in the (few) governmental statements available on this topic. so, for example, the national report concerning the situation of youth in luxembourg (mfi, 2010) confirmed once again what the studies of the program for international student assessment (pisa) had indicated previously; namely, that young people with a lower socioeconomic status, migration backgrounds, and foreign-language parents are most affected by origin-related inequality of opportunity in the educational lost in translanguaging? 29 system (see menfp, 2010, 2012b). especially in light of a highly segregating school system which has repeatedly been shown to re-produce social inequalities as well as high repetition and dropout rates, language promotion in early and preschool education in luxembourg is politically assigned with a strong preventive and compensatory function (achten, horn & schronen, 2009, delvaux-stehres, 2011). in terms of promoting early language acquisition it is especially the luxembourgish language, which as one of the three official languages, is considered an essential ingredient in the formation of a national identity, and also as an important step in accomplishing a successful school career and, importantly, for the integration of immigrants into a multilingual and culturally diverse social environment (berg & weis, 2007). the emphasis is put on the promotion of luxembourgish with the argument that it – once established as a common language – not only eases classroom communication in general, but also prepares children for their alphabetization in german later on, in the first class of primary school (neumann & seele, 2014). in other words, the function ascribed to the luxembourgish language is manifold, which means that the promotion of luxembourgish must be regarded as an attempt to kill several birds with one stone, rather than as a clear and powerful political strategy, for example, of assimilation or stratification. this is especially true since, from the perspective of the government, the goal of promoting the luxembourgish language in order to preserve the national cultural identity does not contradict the aim of fostering the social integration of foreign immigrants. as a historically evolved “upgrade language”, or language to be developed, (in german: ausbausprache), which is characterized by a high disposition to adapt to other languages (scheidweiler, 1988), luxembourgish is considered as a kind of a langue véhiculaire (vehicular language) that facilitates access to the diverse linguistic situation and to functional literacy during the early school years. with this in mind, the promotion of the luxembourgish language should not be seen as an effort to assimilate immigrants into the mainstream society, but should rather be understood as a reaction to the undeniable situation of linguistic super-diversity. this multiplicity of purpose explains why the promotion of language skills in luxembourgish is supposed to be one of the key priorities in early childhood education (freiberg, hornberg & kühn, 2007, p. 210f.), a vision which guided the establishment of the mre daycare form since 2005. their educational mission is, as the ’founding father’ of the mre in the luxembourgish ministry of family affairs, mill majerus, has pointed out for several times, to provide a ”common colloquial language” (majerus, 2008, p. 294) between children of different national origin. accordingly, one of the main programmatic aims and declared educational tasks of the mre is “to foster the use of luxembourgish as the language of everyday communication and as an expression of a common identity” (majerus, 2009, p. 32). promoting luxembourgish as the so-called “language of integration”, therefore, does not only serve communication and understanding inside the institutions, it also contributes to the cohesion of a heterogeneous society as a whole as well as to the preservation of the nation’s identity. against this background, to promote linguistic competencies in luxembourgish within the given multilingual environment is a key challenge to be taken up by the publicly funded daycare institutions in order to prove the politically and professionally ascribed value of early childhood education. this is reflected in the everyday practice of professionals to meet the demands and expectations of parents as well as political and administrative stakeholders in terms of developing outstanding educational ‘quality’ (see honig et al., 2013, p. 22). the 30 global education review 2(1) interesting empirical question is, however, how do early childhood institutions and their professionals actually cope with this linguistically diverse environment, and which strategies do they use in order to meet the demand to establish luxembourgish as the lingua franca for communication as well as a subject of early language learning? between societal multilingualism and institutional monolingualism: language promotion practices in early childhood education an examination of what really takes place in the context of language use in institutional everyday life enables one to draw a more differentiated picture of how the educators deal with the expectation of language promotion in a linguistically diverse environment. in order to come straight to the point, a first important finding of our field observations is that the linguistic landscape in luxembourgish daycare centers is much more diverse and complex than the programmatic narrative of promoting luxembourgish as a common language may suggest. from the perspective of a participant observer, the use of language in the daycare centers is quite similar to the use of language in social everyday life, so that the determination of luxembourgish as lingua franca appears to apply only selectively. such an observation is hardly surprising as the situation of linguistic diversity in luxembourg does, of course, not stop in front of the gates of daycare institutions. based on a questionnaire for the parents, which was also part of our fieldwork, we found up to 14 different home languages that children bring into the everyday life of the mre. among these languages were not only the three official languages of the country (french, german, and luxembourgish) or english but also many others as portuguese, italian, polish, swedish or chinese. the speakers in the early childhood education settings cope with this situation by adapting their language use to the preferences of their communication partners, by switching to english or by acting translingual in terms of allowing more than one language in conversation or switching between different languages. for example, parents’ evenings are regularly offered in a mixture of at least two or three languages. the entries in the so-called ‘walking-diaries’ of children are written in each child's mother tongue or in english. notices with information for the parents are written in one of the three official languages or in english. notices issued by state authorities (i.e. information on flu vaccination) are displayed in the source language of the documents, which in luxembourg is normally french. in the case of emergency instructions, these are sometimes supplemented with handwritten explanations in luxembourgish to avoid possible misunderstandings. what can also be observed is a frequent use of meta-linguistic artifacts, such as handmade ‘traffic lights’ which signal the start and the end of pick-up and delivery times for children in front of the classrooms. considering such forms of communication, one can observe that translanguaging is a kind of a lived principle. in contrast, the determination of luxembourgish as lingua franca seems to be quite artificial, particularly since even educators communicate in several different languages, depending on their individual skills. translanguaging is even present in communication with children and among the children themselves. furthermore, the so-called ‘familiarization phase’ with the parents and their child regularly takes place in the parents’ mother tongue or in english. from the perspective of a participant observer, all the linguistic differences seem to disappear through the diversity of language practices. the corresponding oral translingual practices we observed were especially characterized by frequently switching between different codes or even by mixing them so that the speakers were nearly operating between different languages. lost in translanguaging? 31 this is, for example, reflected in the following statement of a caregiver during a conversation with the researchers (see also neumann & seele, 2014, p. 359): “i actually always try to speak luxembourgish with the children. but sometimes, when they answer in french, i just keep talking in french, without realizing it at all. then, i notice later on: oh, yes i'm actually talking french…it is always so messed up”. how this looks like in the context of everyday interactions can be illustrated by the following sequence during lunch time in a mre: i sit with a group of four children and an educator at the lunch table. laetitia and elena, who are both waiting for their meals, sit to my left. the educator, ingrid, sits next to them on the other side. ingrid asks me in german, if i would also like to eat something: möchten sie auch etwas essen? i say: nein, danke, im moment lieber nicht (no, thanks, not right now). after that, the meals are served onto the plates of the children and they begin to eat. a view minutes later, natalie notices that laetitia’s plate is nearly empty. she asks in luxembourgish, wëlls de nach e bësselchen? (‘do you want a bit more?) laetitia looks at her with a smile in her face and replies in french: oui! (yes). this sequence displays a typical example for language use practices in which several languages are applied without any particular attention to their original distinctiveness. however, such situations are not restricted to the communication between adults or between adults and children but can also be observed during the conversations among children themselves: annabelle opens a picture book and slides her fingers over the animals depicted there. she looks at pierre, points to one of the pictures and tells him excitedly and in french: c'est un cochon! (french, that’s a pig!). pierre looks at her with big eyes and says in luxembourgish: weider! (luxembourgish, go further!) annbelle slides her fingers a bit further, points to the next picture and says: une chèvre! (french, a sheep!). pierre laughs and says, again in luxembourgish: nach weider! (luxembourgish, more further!). all this, however, changes fundamentally when language use is no longer solely based on the objective of mutual understanding, but also directly associated with ambitions of language promotion. this means in general, that two different institutional modes of language use in the multilingual environment of early childhood education institutions must be distinguished. the main line of differentiation runs between such daycare facilities which do not pay any particular attention to linguistic diversity in their pedagogical approaches on the one hand, and such facilities mentioning the task of language promotion and linguistic diversity explicitly in their mission statements. the latter are characterized especially by the fact that they meet the demands of language promotion in the context of a diverse linguistic environment by monolingualizing the language use in institutional everyday life. nevertheless, the enforcement of a monolingual standard of language use also depends situationally on who is actually talking to whom. in light of this, one can recognize that monolingualization also implies a practice distinguishing between children and adults. when adults talk to each other, then tolerance for translingual and linguistically diverse conversation is still predominant. in the communication between adults and children, however, and also in communication among children in the presence of adult professionals, this may not only be completely different, but also dependent on the particular institution and special local 32 global education review 2(1) conditions. in this context, two main variations can be described. speaking luxembourgish: monolingualization in a single language monolingualizing communication with and among children towards a consequent performance of luxembourgish is the most widespread form of so-called language promotion in the publicly funded non-profit sector of preschool early childhood education in luxembourg, and especially in the mre. it is characterized by the fact that at the level of the pedagogical concepts of these daycare centers, the challenge of how to deal with linguistic diversity becomes redefined to the general use of luxembourgish as lingua franca in the communications with children and of children with children. although this is not prescribed by any official law, commitments to the luxembourgish language can be regularly found in the conceptual frameworks of the publicly funded sector. according to these conceptual frameworks, the caregivers are expected to speak luxembourgish with the children and to take care that it is pronounced correctly. this is, however, not about a lack of competence of the caregivers as nearly all of them are themselves multilingual. it rather means that the educational mission is conceptually taken up with trying to meet the diverse language ecology at the institutional level by monolingualizing the linguistic intercourse. for the daily life in childcare institutions, this has the consequence that the family languages are displaced in the domestic private sphere while german and french are left to the responsibility of the school. with the claim of an exclusive promotion of luxembourgish, the daycare sector simultaneously creates its separate educational mission with which it can distance itself from both the school on the one hand side and the family on the other hand side. in these institutions to speak luxembourgish does not only mean to use a specific language – luxembourgish is rather the language which has to be learned and in which should be taught. however, in trying to monolingualize the linguistic intercourse the educators do not pursue a regular plan or an official curriculum. moreover, this kind of language promotion is embedded in everyday interactions between children and adult professionals. this represents the common practice of the promotion of luxembourgish which can be understood as a kind of linguistic naturalization. the educators apply a habit of ‘teaching’ which relies on requesting children to perform their luxembourgish language faculties. if it is spoken by those children who do not do so natively, then it becomes a language through which children are educated. this happens as they are made to ‘learn’ through it in a way that allows the educators to continuously observe the effectiveness of their own interventions. in the end, this leads to intensive practice of language promotion where children are repeatedly admonished to speak luxembourgish, and not only when they speak with professionals in the supposedly ‘wrong’ language, but also when they communicate among themselves in a multilingual way or in different foreign languages. the professionals use an implicit and intuitive didactic whose guiding idea is: luxembourgish is taught through speaking it. this strategy is similar to the experience of indigenous luxembourgish people with their own language acquisition. they learn ‘their’ language not in the classroom, but in everyday family life. in this sense, the use of luxembourgish language is both the aim and the means of language promotion. against this background, it is telling that the use of the luxembourgish language is not intended as serving to solve a problem of understanding at all. put another way, the use of this language is always oriented to the language-promoting effectiveness of its use, and effort to bring it in line with a performative evocation of the children’s ability really to speak luxembourgish. lost in translanguaging? 33 this means that the demand to promote luxembourgish, and to foster its use in daycare settings, is a demand that is targeted especially on children and positions them as those who need to be educated. against the background of the diverse linguistic environment represented in the daycare centers this also means that professionals have to intervene frequently in order to prove the effectiveness of their own practice. “promoting multilingualism”: monolingualization in multiple languages in addition to the claim of promoting the luxembourgish language, there is also a second claim for promoting linguistic diversity in the institutions of early childhood education and care. this argument is not based on legal requirements, but reflects just the other side of the discourse on multilingualism in luxembourg. on one hand there is the reference to luxembourgish as the common language of the nation, on the other hand there is the mother tongue of multilinguality itself which most of the people in luxembourg routinely use in a more or less intensive manner in everyday life (berg & weis, 2007, p 19, ipse, 2010). institutions regarding the promotion of multilingualism as a standard for their educational ambitions work with concepts such as one face one speech and establish an expert for one of the several languages to be promoted in each classroom. in such conceptual frameworks, french, luxembourgish, german and english are the most preferred ones. the professionals explain that they use the concept to meet the linguistic heterogeneity of children, and also ”to introduce some order in the linguistic chaos”. this refers to another, more general dimension of the qualityrelated practices we reconstructed during our investigations in the field: the production of order in the inner everyday life of the institution displays one of the professionals’ key strategies in terms of making their own practice accountable in terms of making it understandable as ‘good’ practice ‘to the outside’ (honig et al., 2013, p. 18). in this respect, the practice of one face one speech has the function of making the claim of language promotion visible in the institutional life. although this approach explicitly promises to foster multilingualism, the strategy of language promotion is, also in this case, associated with the strategy of monolingualizing the children’s use of language. in other words, it is not only about having spoken different languages, it is also about the children having to prove, that they are willing and able to behave in the respective languages in a monolingual way. in consequence, these institutions respond to the challenge of language development in a multilingually structured social environment by monoligualizing the communication with the children. the difference compared to the monolingual promotion of luxembourgish is just that communication opportunities are not obviously limited to one language. however, the professionals pursue a similar attitude: languages are learned through speaking them, which means at the same time that educational success and its professional production can be documented directly in action. conclusions the study of the everyday practice of language use in the state-funded mre has revealed that the challenge of how to deal with linguistic diversity in early childhood education varies in practice in locally different and hardly predictable ways. although the centers which are conceptually engaged in language promotion clearly opt for a strategy of monoligualization, the actual everyday practices are much more diverse and complex. in other words, even if luxembourgish is defined as the one single target language to be promoted, there are always multiple languages at stake. this, in turn, reveals the constitutive tension between the 34 global education review 2(1) programmatic aim of promoting language acquisition as effectively as possible and the in vivo strategies of communication in an environment which is ineluctable multilingual. caregivers are always challenged to reconcile the political goals and public expectations with the practical needs of mutual understanding in every day interactions. depending on whether they intend to promote language learning or rather communicative goals, in any given situation the tension between monolingual agendas and translanguaging practices will be resolved towards either one side or the other (neumann & seele, 2014). this again reveals impressively the real cascade of contingency lying between everyday language use in society, the political agenda of education towards integration, and the established practices of language use on the institutional level. in other words, one can say that the given linguistic landscape in early childhood education reflects nothing else than the ambiguity of the societal discourse on multilingualism itself. however, what does all this mean in regard to the initial question of this article? do the efforts to prepare children for integration in a multilingual social environment by a monolingual approach of early language promotion in the end effectively avoid that children get lost in translanguaging? if this question is to be answered it is also necessary to ask, ”who will be likely to become lost in translanguaging?”. considering the everyday practices of language use, one can say, that it is not the children who are threatened to become lost in translanguaging but professional practice itself. as caregivers are constantly forced to adopt language use to the given circumstances of linguistic diversity by applying ambiguous rules and contradictory routines, it is likely to fail its own concept and linguistic policy. furthermore, and in respect to the children, it should be considered that the modes of language promotion discussed above are characterized by certain ambivalences in respect to their possible consequences, both for the children of indigenous luxembourgish people and for those growing up in foreign-language families. despite the fact that the monolingualistic promotion of luxembourgish provides the opportunity to establish a common language in the everyday institutional context, and also prepare children for the linguistic environment of the first school year, it also creates a special monolingual pedagogical world apart which stands in sharp contrast to the multilingual social reality. one of the consequences of promoting luxembourgish is that institutions unnecessarily miss using for their own pedagogical practice the various resources children bring from their own cultural and linguistic background. another side effect and implication of this strategy is that it separates indigenous from immigrant children in a more strictly than a state with three official languages must do. this means that children with different home languages, or sometimes children from multilingual homes, have to learn to use a second or even a third language actively and regularly at a very early stage in their development. however, these practices are ambiguous for indigenous children, too. that is because, although children of luxembourgish speaking families are supported in learning their home language, all children regardless of their origin only learn to speak luxembourgish and not how to use the language in the luxembourgish linguistic environment of translingual social interactions. this increases the risk for children in luxembourg to get lost in translingualism, not as an effect of translingualism itself but as a consequence of monolingualistic educational practices. what is meant by this is not that children do not learn anything about languages, but lost in translanguaging? 35 monolingualization implies that they first and foremost learn something about how they have to use these languages in the institutional setting of early childhood education. in a similar, albeit less intense manner, this also applies to the promotion of a kind of multilingually oriented monolingualism following the principle of one face one speech. although this principle focuses on the provision of learning different languages, and this is why it at a first glance goes better with the surrounding social reality of linguistic diversity, it also creates a special pedagogical world apart, as it also separates the different languages from each other in institutional everyday life and, in addition, excludes, as well as devaluates, the many other languages existing besides those selected as the ‘official’ ones of an institution. so, if children really become lost in translanguaging (e.g. in terms of linguistic disintegration in the institutional environment or even in the own family), it will not be because of their competencies as individual speakers or because of societal translingualism. it will rather be caused by the monolingualistic treatment of the situation of linguistic diversity as it is established within the educational institutions and the corresponding disregard of the translingual skills of the children. this is also the case with respect to language tests in pre-school age as, for example, the so-called bilan 30 [balance 30] in luxembourg, which although available in different languages, is based on a monolingualistic paradigm of language acquisition. the same argument would not least also apply to a strategy of promoting bilingualism (french and luxembourgish) in early childhood education as it recently has been envisaged from the 2016/17 school year by the new luxembourgish government (see men, 2014b). this is because bilingualism will as well exclude the many other languages at stake in early childhood education and, in this sense, would also represent no more than an extended version of monolingualism. in contrast, translingual practices, as mentioned above, deal with diversity by not transforming it into heterogeneity but by an equal treatment of people with different linguistic behavior which manifests itself in an open and indiscriminate handling of distinctions. for children this would not only give the opportunity to learn that people might be different in terms of the language they speak, but would also provide the chance to experience that diversity is not necessarily an obstacle for mutual understanding. against this background, it becomes quite clear that there is a paradoxical relationship between the idea of early language promotion and its pedagogical implementation through the monolingualization of the children‘s language use. here, monolingualization does not turn out to be a medium of balancing capabilities and opportunities, but rather a mechanism of producing difference. and it is the idea of monolingualism in language promotion itself which creates the preconditions it assumes. paradoxically, however, in making the children’s different backgrounds and language skills more obvious, it also causes the problems it intends to solve (neumann, 2011, 2012). in other words, institutions of early childhood education do not only deal with diversity, but also produce difference. this is because, on the one hand, there are different strategies of dealing with linguistic diversity present in the field, and on the other hand, the respective strategies also encounter different conditions, depending on the origin of the children. the professional practices of language use and language promotion in early childhood do not only reflect the diversity of the luxembourgish society, but also create further potential sources of 36 global education review 2(1) increasing inequality. this is not least the case, as other studies have shown, that children of parents belonging to language minority groups are less likely to attend center-based early childhood education (ishizawa, 2006). finally, the politically intended integration function of early childhood education in luxembourg is more likely to fail than to be fulfilled. by contrast, it would be more promising, following makoni & pennycook (2006), to adapt the mode and the objectives of language promotion to the general sociolinguistic ecology and to the linguistic practices which are common in a respective society. what does this conclusion imply in respect to the further development of language promotion in early childhood education? obviously, the guiding model of monolingualization has its roots first and foremost in traditional language teaching and learning practices in school, and school also seems to provide an abstract but important reference point for language promotion in early childhood education. this means that the more early childhood education understands itself as preparing for school, the more it would tend towards a monolingual norm, and this even in a multilingual country. another implication is that we cannot expect early childhood education to abandon monolingual norms in language promotion when school does not. so the probability of practicing diversity in early childhood education instead of doing difference is more than just a question of the professional skill of caregivers. it is rather a question of designing an educational system which takes seriously into account the societal reality by which it is surrounded. notes 1. the main difference between crèches and maisons relais pour enfants is, that care service offered by crèches just covers the children aged 0 to 4 whereas maisons relais offer care services for children between 0 and 12 years. but there is also another difference: since 2005 maisons relais were established alongside or even competitive to the traditional form of ‘pure’ crèches in order to offer more flexible arrangements of stay and children’s enrolment, what in effect means that they are less expensive for the parents and also provide a more efficient instrument for the strategic management of the intended fast expansion of the daycare sector. at least 80 % of the contact hours with the children in maisons relais must be provided by staff with professional training in early childhood education or social work (oberhuemer,schreyer & neuman, 2010, p. 297). 2. see majerus (2009) for a detailed explanation of the official goals of the mre. author note the author would like to thank nicole hekel who offered valuable support during the process of translating the following thoughts and analyses into the english language. i would also like to thank my former 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[chaos theory]. d’lëtzeburger land, no. 6, february 6. kurschat, i. (2009b). wunsch und wirklichkeit. [desire and reality]. d’lëtzeburger land, no. 14, march 27. le portail des statistiques, grand-duché de luxembourg (2011): population et emploi [population and employment]. retrieved december 15, 2014, from http://www.statistiques.public.lu/fr/populationemploi/index.html majerus, m. (2008). engagement für ‘sorgenkinder’ – aufgabe der ‘maison relais pour enfants’ und kooperation mit der schule [commitment to children-at-risk – mission of the ‘maison relais pour enfants’ and cooperation with the school]. in confédération caritas luxembourg (ed.), sozialalmanach 2008. schwerpunkt kinderarmut & 38 global education review 2(1) bildung [social almanac 2008. focus child poverty and education] (pp. 289-302). luxembourg: saintpaul. majerus, m. 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(2012b). pisa 2012. nationaler bericht luxemburg [pisa 2012. national report for luxembourg]. retrieved february 12, 2014 from http://www.men.public.lu/cataloguepublications/secondaire/etudes-internationales/pisa2012/pisa-2012.pdf mfi – ministère de la famille et de l’intégration. (2010). rapport national sur la situation de la jeunesse au luxembourg [national report on the situation of young people in luxembourg]. luxembourg: ministère de la famille et de l’intégration. mfi – ministère de la famille et de l'intégration. (2011). rapport d'activité 2010 [activity report 2010]. luxembourg: mfi. retrieved november 12, 2013, from http://www.mfi.public.lu/publications/rapportsactivite/rapp_act_2010.pdf mfi – ministère de la famille et de l'intégration. (2013a). rapport d'activité 2012 [activity report 2012]. luxembourg: mfi. retrieved january 14, 2014, from http://www.mfi.public.lu/publications/rapportsactivite/rapp_act_2012.pdf mfi – ministère de la famille et de l’intégration. (2013b). leitlinien zur non-formalen bildung im kindesund jugendalter [guidelines for the non-formal education in childhood and youth]. luxembourg: mfi. retrieved february 22, 2014, from http://www.enfancejeunesse.lu/sites/enfancejeunesse.lu/files/ documents/2013.04.25%20arbeitspapier%20rahmenplan.pdf mfi – ministère de la famille et de l’intégration & snj – service national de la jeunesse. (2013). non-formal education with children and young people. learning in out-of-school settings. luxembourg: mfi. neumann, s. (2011). welche unterscheidungen machen einen unterschied? zur sozialen selektivitat der sprachverwendung in „maison relais pour enfants“ [which differences do really make a difference. the social selectivity of language practices in “maison relais pour enfants”]. zeitschrift für soziologie der erziehung und sozialisation (zse) [journal for sociology of education and socialization], 31, 349-362. neumann, s. (2012). some children are more different than others: language practices in luxembourgian nurseries. qualitative research journal, 12(2), 183192. neumann, s. & seele, c. (2014). von diversität zu differenz. ethnographische beobachtungen zum umgang mit plurilingualität in frühpädagogischen settings [from diversity to difference. an ethnographic view on dealing with plurilinguality in early childhood education]. in a. tervooren, n. engel, m. göhlich, i. miethe & s. reh (eds.), ethnographie und differenz in pädagogischen feldern. internationale entwicklungen erziehungswissenschaftlicher forschung [ethnography and difference in educational fields. international developments in educational research] (pp. 351-365). bielefeld: transcript. oberhuemer, p., schreyer, i. & neuman, m. j. (2010). professionals in early childhood education and care systems. european profiles and perspectives. opladen & farmington hills: barbara budrich publishers. organization for economic co-operation and development – oecd. (2001). starting strong: early childhood education and care. paris: oecd publishing. organization for economic co-operation and development – oecd. (2006). starting strong ii: early childhood education and care. paris: oecd publishing. lost in translanguaging? 39 péporté, p., kmec, s., majerus, b. & margue, m. (2010). inventing luxembourg. representations of the past, space and language from the nineteenth to the twenty-first century. leiden: brill academic publishers. saracho, o. n., & spodek, b. (eds.) (2010). contemporary perspectives on language and cultural diversity in early childhood education. charlotte, nc: iap. scheidweiler, g. (1988). glanz und elend des luxemburgischen. eine mundart auf dem weg zur ausbausprache [the brilliance and misery of the luxembourgish language. a dialect on the way to an upgrade language]. muttersprache, 3, 225-254. service central de la statistique et des études économiques – statec (2014). luxemburg in zahlen 2014 [luxembourg in numbers 2014]. luxembourg: statec. united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization – unesco. (2006). efa global report 2007: strong foundations – early childhood care and education. paris: unesco publishing. united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization – unesco. (2008). the contribution of early childhood education to a sustainable society. paris: unesco publishing. vertovec, s. (2007). super-diversity and its implications. ethnic and racial studies, 6, 1024-1054. about the author sascha neumann, dr. phil., is professor of educational research in the department of educational sciences at the university of fribourg (switzerland) and head of the universities' centre for early childhood education (zeff). before joining the university of fribourg he worked as senior researcher within the research group "early childhood: education and care" at the university of luxembourg and co-led several research and development projects focusing on quality of public funded early childhood education. his main research interests include social studies of early childhood in educational contexts, quality of early childhood education services as well as multilingual education in the early years. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 7 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: benson, fiona & hooton, kate (2014). a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component of a canadian teacher education program: what drove change, what insights were gleaned, and what challenges lie ahead. global education review, 1 (3). 7-62. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component of a canadian teacher education program: what drove change, what insights were gleaned, and what challenges lie ahead fiona benson mcgill university kate hooton mcgill university abstract this paper explores the many and diverse factors that have driven changes to the field-based component of a program of teacher education in a large canadian university over the past 10 years. we look at key contexts of influence to any work in program change; that of internal and external bodies at the institutional level, the operational or program delivery level, feedback from stakeholders in teacher education, and lastly, the research and scholarship in teacher education that provides a framework for innovation and improvement. a significant inclusion in this paper is the perspective on the support at ground level that is required, but rarely acknowledged, to move any change initiatives forward. we present models that capture a decade of change to 4 undergraduate field experiences and 2 graduate level internships that comprise the field component of our teacher education program. we share key indicators of success resulting from these changes, highlight important insights gleaned, and point to pressing challenges that we face as we look to future program evolution that will carry us into the next decade. while this work reflects one single field-based component of a teacher education program in canada, we trust that useful parallels can be drawn by the reader as they contemplate or are in the process of addressing and moving through similar orbits of change and evolution within their own programs. keywords practice teaching, teacher education, program design, field experience, policy, change introduction “there is nothing wrong with change, if it is in the right direction”. winston churchill as teacher educators, administrators and policy makers in teacher preparation programs globally, we are charged with providing society with competent, prepared, effective, engaged, and caring teachers. in order to deliver such exemplary teachers, and to operationalize this shared goal of excellence in teacher education, we are continually looking to evolve our ______________________________ corresponding author: kate hooton, mcgill university, office of student teaching, 3700 mctavish street, montreal, quebec, canada h3a 1y2 email: kate.hooton@mcgill.ca mailto:kate.hooton@mcgill.ca 8 global education review 1(3) programs in order to strengthen and improve them. crucial to that process is change, and while there exist many and diverse factors that drive change in teacher education, i draw on the concept of change defined as “an act or process through which something becomes different” in order to “arrive at a fresh phase; become new” (oxforddictionaries.com) in this report on the evolution of changes wrought, during my 10 year tenure as director, to the field-based practice teaching component of the mcgill university faculty of education teacher education program in montreal, quebec. the importance and usefulness of practice teaching within programs of teacher education is reflected in the words of darling-hammond who describes this program component as "the glue for powerful preparation" (2006, p. 152). using the undergraduate field experiences and graduate internships of my own program of teacher education as a case study, i share what has driven the changes that have been made to these field-based elements over the past 10 years, present key indicators of progress resulting from this work, highlight important insights gleaned, and point to the challenges we face as we look to future program evolution. while this work reflects one single field-based component of a teacher education program in a large urban university in canada – i trust that useful parallels can be drawn by the reader as they contemplate or are in the process of addressing and moving through similar orbits of change and evolution within their own programs. a significant inclusion in this paper is the perspective on the support, at ground level, that is required but rarely acknowledged, to move any change initiatives forward. of note too, is that my efforts to spearhead change over the past decade have been made possible through generous and fruitful collaboration with colleagues in administrative positions in the units and departments that make up mcgill’s faculty of education. i am convinced, based on the evidence from a decade of work, that the successful evolution of the field-based component of a teacher education program cannot be realized other than through a deep appreciation of the critical congruence that must exist between the program and the field. contexts for change change can be reactive or proactive, and can be in response to internal and external factors (fullan, 2007). as our mission as educators falls squarely within the realm of public service, we are responsible to a variety of bodies. at the institutional level, teacher education program change is influenced by both internal and external institutional bodies. at the operational or program delivery level, feedback from stakeholders is key to making relevant and effective revisions and responses. lastly, research and scholarship in education provide a framework for innovation and improvement. to better situate the reader, i provide a summary of the landscape of quebec english language education, and offer some brief insight into the internal and external factors that influence the capacity for change in programs of teacher education in quebec, canada. a brief introduction to english language education in quebec the province of quebec will have reached 8,054,545 by july 1st, 2012. of this population, which is close to 25% of canada’s 34 million inhabitants, some 8 million, approximately 80% are french speaking while 8% are english speaking (statistics canada, 2011). quebec’s charter of the french language (1977), colloquially known as “bill 101”, restricts access to english education by allowing only those children whose parents were themselves educated in english to attend english elementary and secondary schools. as such, most francophones and immigrants to quebec attend french schools. around 50% of quebec’s inhabitants are located in montreal, the urban population of which currently sits at 3,824,221 a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 9 (statistics canada, 2012). with urban centers still providing the strongest draw not only for immigrants but also for those relocating from rural quebec, the province still experiences a vibrant difference between its regional homogeneity and its urban diversity. while this is formally attended to, at least in part, by the province’s 14 french school boards and 9 english school boards, it is still the case that tensions arising from cultural, linguistic and geographical realities make for an extremely intricate educational landscape in quebec (lamarre, 2008). it is also quite clearly the case that, serving as the largest english university in the majority french speaking province of quebec, the role of mcgill’s faculty of education is a complex and evolving one. institutional factors external governance in countries such as canada, with public and mandatory schooling, the criteria as to who can be a teacher are under the purview of each province (nuland, 2011). in the province of quebec, teacher education programs answer to three governing bodies. this creates a rather complex governance structure, which both constrains and drives change. below are highlighted the main directives which influence or demand change in our provincial teacher education programs, from the perspective of those formal bodies. prior to the election of the present government, the parti québécois, in fall of 2012, the quebec ministry of education [ministère de l'éducation, du loisir et du sport (mels)1] was responsible for all levels of educational institutions, from elementary and secondary schooling to cegep2 and university level programs. the mels mandated school curriculum, the quebec education program (qep) implemented in 2001 is currently in place at all grade levels 1 through 11. the qep is competency based, with specific competencies for each subject area, as well as cross-curricular competencies and broad areas of learning which apply across curricular programs. the mels also mandates 12 exit professional competencies to be developed within university programs leading to teacher certification. the professional competencies, in tandem with the qep competencies, determine to a large extent the direction and content of courses within the various streams of our teacher education program, including the undergraduate field experiences and graduate level internships. in fall of 2012, the incoming provincial government divided the mels into two distinct ministries: the mels remained responsible for elementary (grades 1-6) and secondary (grades 7-11) education; and the newly created ministère d’enseignement supérieur, recherche, science et technologie (mesrst)3 is responsible for post-secondary education. as teacher education programs in quebec are offered at the university level, these programs now fall under the jurisdiction of the newly formed mesrt. however as the mels is still responsible for teacher certification (as it pertains to elementary and secondary schools), upon completion of an accredited teacher education program, candidates are recommended by the university to the mels for teacher certification. until recently the only path to teacher certification in quebec was through a 120-credit, 4 year bachelor of education program. while we have long been committed to the idea that a postbachelor path to teacher certification would better serve the needs and situations of certain candidates, it is only recently (since 2010), mainly in response to teacher shortages in key areas such as math and science, that the mels sanctioned the development of a 60-credit master’s level teacher education program leading to teacher certification. mcgill’s resulting master of arts in teaching and learning (matl) is offered unrestricted for allowable subject areas and for certification at the secondary school level and can be completed over a period from 15 months to 5 years (riches, http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ccsqfjaa&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.mels.gouv.qc.ca%2f&ei=nxzxuv_onctuyah6z4cidg&usg=afqjcnhb0y71jfkllx07ws0gvwirfdqbrq&bvm=bv.53899372,d.awc http://www.google.ca/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&frm=1&source=web&cd=1&ved=0ccsqfjaa&url=http%3a%2f%2fwww.mels.gouv.qc.ca%2f&ei=nxzxuv_onctuyah6z4cidg&usg=afqjcnhb0y71jfkllx07ws0gvwirfdqbrq&bvm=bv.53899372,d.awc 10 global education review 1(3) benson & wood, 2013). the length and entry points of the ministry mandated programs provide the structure within which we are obliged to operate. as professional programs, those programs leading to teacher certification are also overseen by an arms-length committee of the mels – the comité d’agrément des programmes de formation à l’enseignement (capfe)4. capfe’s mandate is to monitor quebec’s teacher education programs and to recommend accreditation of programs to the mels (in this capacity, it answers to the mels with consultation requirements with the mesrst). capfe’s main concerns with respect to the design and content of teacher certification, which university programs need to embody in order to be recommended for accreditation, are: 1) evidence of the effective development and assessment of the mels mandated 12 exit professional competencies in courses, field experiences and internships; 2) implementation of l’approche programme (integrated program approach and program to field links) at all levels; 3) positive and effective partnership with the field; and 4) appropriate preparation for the teaching of the qep. internal governance situated within university structures, teacher education programs benefit from the governance, administration and academic structure provided by the institution. at mcgill, a number of internal governance issues affect (or constrain) change in teacher education. the approval process for course and program change consists of approximately six or seven levels. for administrative purposes, course scheduling that includes field experiences and internships needs to be submitted at least a year in advance. this means that planning for change needs to be deliberate and with a view to the future. functioning within this structure often entails reconciling competing priorities. for example, while matching admissions numbers with available field placements and with potential employment possibilities are priorities for program administration, admissions quotas at the university level are tied to budgetary considerations and constraints and cannot necessarily be adjusted. stakeholders in teacher education feedback feedback from our student teachers, faculty and course instructors, university field supervisors, cooperating teachers, school administrators and graduates is key to gauging the effectiveness of our teacher education programs (benson & riches, 2006; riches & benson, 2011a). feedback is gathered in different ways such as town hall meetings, departmental retreats, informal workshops, surveys, questionnaires and online anecdotal feedback forms whereby student teachers can comment on their program and field-based experiences. such feedback has proven to be a rich source of suggestions, ideas and momentum for innovation and change. running pilot initiatives also enables the enactment and gathering of data on field-based change more rapidly while respecting lengthy university internal governance structures. there are other important benefits that accrue when running pilot initiatives such as the potential such initiatives have to effect some immediate change and provide evidence with which to argue for program-side change. pilots also allow for a rapid response to suggestions from the field in a way that strategically supports that crucial partnership (benson & riches, 2010). capacity and state of the field the reality of what the field can bear also precipitates change in teacher education, though the institutional response often lags far behind what is ideal as mentioned above with respect to admissions/enrolment quotas. declining enrolment in quebec’s english schools (bourhis & foucher, 2012), means that finding sufficient student teaching placements is an ongoing a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 11 challenge. further to this, french immersion programming in quebec is ever increasing, thus requiring that our student teachers be able to demonstrate oral and written french language competency at the kindergarten/elementary levels while those student teachers in the secondary program are being asked to teach certain subjects entirely in french. in montreal area school boards, for example, almost 90% of schools are french immersion schools (from early french immersion to bilingual programs). currently pre-service teachers are asked to selfreport whether or not they are comfortable teaching in french (approximately 35% respond ‘yes’) in order to secure sufficient student teaching placements. administrative perspective resistance to change in the field of education has been well-documented (starr, 2011). school administrators’ roles and managerial responsibilities have grown in complexity as they are tasked with implementing frequent educational reforms at the curriculum level as well as responding to the external demands such as the teacher training partnership. in this climate, the strategy of the ost has been to design field-based experiences that are increasingly sensitive to the school’s needs while also meeting our accreditation requirements. these changes are then piloted and implemented incrementally, term by term, using the familiar faces of field supervisors to support buy-in at the school and teacher level. we have learned that all changes create a degree of resistance, and this will not diminish in the future. what makes our ongoing partnership possible is our solicitation of constant feedback that is acted upon and quickly implemented in the next iteration of the field experience and internship. there is an irony at play here – as the next iteration cannot help but present yet more changes to the way that we, and our partners in the field, accomplish our work. universities are not exempt from resistance to change; and the effort required to adapt administrative and technological processes to field changes must also be taken into account when practice teaching models are evolved. as an example, a decision to fast-track the movement of a field experience from september to november might, at first glance, be considered a fairly simple process of making adjustments to the university calendar – which is online and dynamic. the reality however, is quite a different matter. university course dates are normally fixed up to 2 years in advance, so that applying yearly iterative and responsive changes to the dates of field experiences and internships requires sophisticated administrative skill and the time to work within the university’s formal and informal organizational systems. the introduction of a new assessment form to review a lesson plan is another example of a process that involves much collaboration between university service points. this is a form that must be completed and given to a student well in advance of the actual observation of them teaching a lesson. this prompted the creation of fillable online .pdf forms, and required additional training and support materials for the ost staff, field supervisors, school administrators and cooperating teachers in their use. change also presents challenges to resources already stretched thin. an upcoming change to the matl is one such example. previously, both undergraduate and graduate final practica took place in the winter term. as of winter 2015, matl student teachers will be completing their initial internship, while undergraduates will be completing their 4th and final field experience. in a secondary school, with student teachers from both programs, the avoidance of unwarranted, unrealistic and potentially unfavorable comparison is essential. in addition, new and different processes will require, as they always do, administrative innovation, flexibility, and careful oversight in 12 global education review 1(3) order to assure compliance with university regulations and to maintain program standards. the key to successful adoption of change, as in the previous examples, will rely in part, on our ability to manage large and important communication projects while making every effort to minimize and manage any resultant stress this might cause in the program and the field. while these examples point to the administrative complexity of implementing changes in the field, the alternative, status quo and lack of response to changing reality in schools would be more detrimental to our ability to graduate effective novice teachers. our positive experiences in embracing changes and working to create new administrative processes to support them has benefited the organizational culture of the ost, as well as empowering staff to take an active role in identifying process improvements. scholarship and research in teacher education scholarship and research in teacher education provides a framework within which to respond to changes driven by the factors discussed above, and a framework in which to imagine and go beyond what exists. concurrent to those initiatives to gather feedback involving our various stakeholders, we were mandated by the ministry of education to conduct program reviews across the university. in completing the review for our b.ed. programs, input was gathered from the course instructors, representative students from each program, student advisors, and program directors through responses to a set of directed questions. input was also gathered directly from the b.ed. programs student body. finally, an external review of our b.ed. programs was conducted by two experts in the field of teacher education. this initiative was the subject of an article published by riches and benson (2011a). with a view to strengthening the research foundation upon which its teacher education programs are constructed, in 2009 the faculty of education engaged in an extensive research initiative. this work, entitled the undergraduate program revisioning (upr) was overseen by the office of the dean of education and comprised, over 12 months, an in-depth review of current literature on teacher education programs (teps) across north america. among the recommendations emanating from a comprehensive report issued in 2010, those of particular and ongoing resonance to the fieldbased elements of our programs are: • program to field coherence and consistency • cohort model • supported and integrated field experiences • sustained partnerships with local schools • coherent competency based standards of assessment across the program evolution in teacher education has been the focus of attention in faculties of education across canada and around the world for many decades as attempts are made to reconcile what is possible within university contexts with the ever-growing needs of a constantly changing educational milieu (bill and melinda gates foundation, 2013; darling-hammond, 2006; national research council, 2010; zeichner, 2010; zeichner & conklin, 2008). seminal volumes have reported on models of excellence in teacher education (beck & kosnik, 2006; cochran‐smith, feiman‐nemser, & mcintyre, (eds.), & demers, (assoc. ed.), 2008; cochransmith & zeichner, 2005; darling-hammond, 2006) which often echo our feedback from the field, and support initiatives such as cohort structures and theory to practices links through deliberate and concurrent courses and field/internship experiences. there is now a strong sense that teacher preparation must a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 13 provide, along with content and pedagogical knowledge, opportunity for student teachers to examine their beliefs about learning, to consider the social and psychological impacts of their chosen profession, and to develop their beginning teacher identities as role models and interpreters of the educational agenda. while there is no consensus on how this might best be accomplished within the confines of teacher education, the role of reflection in the preparation of teachers is one approach that has been closely examined and heavily documented (korthagen, 2004; schöen, 1983). in 2006 the conseil supérieur de l’éducation du québec (quebec superior educational council) published a document outlining the positive effects of reflective practitioner enquiry. this document includes a recommendation that teacher education programmes encourage future teachers to become aware of the importance of research on their practice (conseil supérieur de l’éducation, 2006). this goal of developing reflective practitioners (marcos, sanchez, & tillema, 2011) is infused in courses across our teacher education programs, and we have adopted a variety of ways, such as the inclusion of reflective journals, portfolios and collaborative action research projects (kalmbach phillips & carr, 2006; mitchell, reilly, & logue, 2009) to encourage the practice of critical reflection among our student teachers. this emphasis on reflective practice is also a cornerstone of how the models of assessment of our undergraduate program field experiences and graduate program internships have been developed. the office of student teaching the office of student teaching is an independent unit of the faculty of education, and is responsible for the planning and implementation of effective field experiences and internships in teacher education, and approaching schools and school boards for the placement of student teachers. structurally, the office is headed by an academic director, who is responsible for pedagogical design and leadership of the field component of teacher education, as well as counselling students, making final grade decisions and enforcing the code of ethics for student teachers as required. the director is supported by an administrator, who is responsible for the implementation of program changes and special initiatives, and who supervises the work of three placement coordinators. the placement coordinators make and coordinate requests with school administrators, and communicate with students regularly regarding their field experiences and internships. the majority of students are placed in partner school boards or private schools in the greater montreal area; all accredited elementary and secondary schools are eligible to receive student teachers. with the exception of teaching english as a second language specialists, who are placed in french schools, students are placed in schools in the english school boards, which offer both english education and french immersion or bilingual programs. a pool of over 100 field supervisors work off-site mentoring and assessing student teachers in their assigned classrooms. primarily retired school administrators and master teachers with substantial practical experience in mentoring pre-service teachers, the field supervisors are hired, trained and supervised by the director and administrator. field supervisors play a critical role in supporting and coaching cooperating teachers in their role as mentors, and in communicating program changes and gathering feedback from the field. the office of student teaching is responsible for securing school placements for the four undergraduate field experiences and two graduate internships. twenty-five b.ed. field experience and four internship course sections were offered in 2012-13. • 1340 undergraduate student teachers were placed 14 global education review 1(3) • 82 matl student teachers were placed • 961 cooperating teachers hosted the student teachers • 109 field supervisors supervised the student teachers • 286 quebec public and private schools welcomed student teachers • 73 students participated in special opportunities or other initiatives promoted by the office of student teaching among the special opportunity placements available to student teachers in their final field experience are: • first nations community placements • distance and international placements in hong kong, china, turks & caicos, dominican republic student teaching student teaching is not a haphazard experience but is carefully structured and managed across our undergraduate and matl programs in order to develop the 12 exit professional competencies as mandated by the mels (see appendix a). it occurs concurrently with course work, including academics, professional seminars and methods courses in such a way that as course content becomes more advanced and sophisticated so too does the carefully scaffolded design of graduated student teaching responsibility in the field. student teachers must show evidence of mastery of all 12 exit professional competencies by the end of their teacher preparation program in order to be recommended to the mels for teacher certification. this professional growth must be appropriately captured, supported, documented and responded to in the field – where theory meets practice under the watchful guidance and expert stewardship of cooperating teachers, field supervisors and school administrators. cooperating teachers and field supervisors share in the critical task of assessing the degree of accomplishment of a student teacher’s development of the 12 exit professional competencies and his/her readiness to proceed to the next field experience or, in the case of the final field experience, enter the profession as a novice teacher and future colleague. to this end, an evolved model of competency-based assessment and the sequencing of the assessment forms have been so designed as to enable professional conversations of greater focus and clarity between cooperating teachers, field supervisors and student teachers – thus leading to increased precision and rigor around what counts as evidence of successful attainment of the required level of mastery of student teaching exit professional competencies. sequence of undergraduate field experiences and matl internships in the 4-year undergraduate b.ed. program, student teachers do a minimum of 25 weeks (kindergarten and elementary, secondary, teaching english as a second language, specialist areas) or 20 weeks (physical education, teaching french as a second language) of field experience over the course of 4 field experiences, and experience a minimum of 3 different teaching contexts in host schools (public, private, alternative, community-service learning, distance and international field experience (4th undergraduate field experience and 2nd matl internship only]). a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 15 in the 2-year (5 to 7 consecutive semesters) graduate m.a. teaching and learning program (matl) student teachers complete a minimum of 21 weeks of internship over the course of 2 field placements. the matl program leads to teacher certification at the secondary level in one of the following qep curriculum subjects: english language arts, mathematics, science and technology, english as a second language, or social sciences (history, geography, ethics). this program was designed and developed to address the evolving needs of the professional education milieu in quebec, and in particular in response to the mels’ request that quebec universities propose an accredited post-degree program leading to teacher certification for currently employed but uncertified teachers. (office of the associate dean, 2010) in 2011, the employment restriction was lifted, and students with a previous degree in a teachable subject but with no work experience as a classroom teacher were admitted to the program. this new clientele necessitated the development of a flexible approach to the first internship; to allow students with no classroom teaching experience to gradually acclimatize to the culture and community of quebec schools, while still attaining the same level of development of the professional competencies by the end of the degree program. field experience 1 •12 days over 3 wks •late november •cohort model •4 days in school •1 day at xxxx for professional seminar field experience 2 •15 days over 3 wks •late april to early may •can choose alternative schools •concurrent professional seminar in evening field experience 3 •64 days over 16 wks •end of august to early december •4 days in school •1 day at xxxx for concurrent seminar and courses field experience 4 •35 days over 7 weeks •mid-february to mid-april •courses and seminar wrap around the fe •students permitted to do fe outside montreal or internationally, alternative schools internship 1 •fall term •weekly evening professional seminar •initial 2-week observation period for students placed with a cooperating teacher •10 weeks/350 hours of teaching internship 2 •winter term •weekly evening professional seminar •cooperating teacher •10 weeks/350 hours of teaching b.ed field experience progression 2012-13 ma teaching and learning internship progression 2012-13 16 global education review 1(3) the following section (1) shows snapshots of former models of each of the undergraduate field experiences 1 through 4, (2) introduces the current competency-based assessment model along with a brief explanation of those tools common to all field experiences (with the exception of field experience 1) and graduate internships, (3), presents current models of each of the undergraduate field experiences 1 through 4 and graduate internships with changes signaled, (4) explains approaches and tools specific to each field experience and internship and (5) summarizes key innovations. undergraduate field experiences: “former models (2004-2009) until 2009 the majority of student teachers in field experience 1 were placed, in pairs, with a single cooperating teacher. they spent the entire 2-week experience observing this teacher’s classroom practice, with very little, if any, exposure to other teachers, classrooms or dimensions of their host school. student teachers were assigned a field supervisor who was available to support the cooperating teacher, but who did not perform detailed assessments or observations of the student in the classroom setting. there was a single formative assessment form completed by the cooperating teacher at the end of the field experience. first field experience (fe1) b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 2 weeks students paired september other courses paused b.ed tfsl all students complete fe 1 at udem 1 week, fall b.ed phys. ed 15 days/3 wks april/may students paired a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 17 second field experience (fe2) in this former field experience model, the student teachers were assigned to a classroom teacher for four consecutive weeks. with the help of the classroom teacher, they would plan and implement whole class teaching, beginning with team-teaching and gradually taking on 40 to 50% of the teaching workload. scheduled in the spring (april-may), the goals of this field experience often conflicted with periods of standardized testing or review of material in schools, leading to difficulty in attaining the required percentage of teaching. the field experience was assessed formatively and summatively by the cooperating teacher, and the field supervisor made one informal visit and one formative assessment visit. b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 20 days/4 wks april/may professional seminar tesl only (evenings during fe) b.ed tfsl all students complete fe 2 at xxxx 15 days/ 3 wks april/may b.ed phys. ed 15 days/3 wks april/may students paired 18 global education review 1(3) third field experience (fe3 in this model, student teachers were assigned to a cooperating teacher for seven consecutive weeks. by the end of this field experience, student teachers should have attained about 75% of a full teaching workload. scheduled from mid-october through november, student teachers were required to quickly take on a high workload percentage, sometimes without gaining sufficient prior teaching and lesson planning time in fe 2. additionally, students did not experience important milestones of the teaching year: classroom preparation before the students arrive, first day of school, parent-teacher interviews in late fall, or the preparation and distribution of report cards. the cooperating teacher completed two formative assessments and a summative assessment, and the supervisor made one introductory visit and two formative assessments. b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe (evening seminar continues tesl only) b.ed tfsl 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe; evening seminar continues b.ed phys. ed 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 19 fourth field experience (fe4) in this, the final field experience in the program, the student teacher was assigned to a cooperating teacher for seven consecutive weeks. as soon as the cooperating teacher judged that the student teacher was ready, the student teacher took responsibility for the selection, planning and implementation of the teacher’s full workload. as in the third field experience, the cooperating teacher completed two formative assessments and a summative assessment, and the supervisor made one introductory visit and two formative assessments. the new competency-based assessment model in 2009-2011, the office of student teaching launched this new model of competency-based assessment. assessment was redesigned to allow for differentiated competency development across the four field experiences and two internships in a manner synchronous to course work (and competency development) in the program. along with redesigned forms, communication materials, visit structures and criteria for said visits, a critical tool in this new model is the “guide to professional competency development” (appendix b) delineating in accessible terms what evidence of competency attainment looks like in practice appropriate to each level of field experience 1 through 4 and internship 1 and 2. this evolved competency-based assessment model makes evaluating a student teacher’s progress more responsive to, and reflective of, the mels professional competencies (government of quebec, 2001). while in certain ways the competency-based assessment model resembles its predecessor, it differs in significant ways. it is a more thoughtful process of assessment and one that b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 35 days/7 wks feb to april intensive courses completed before fe (evening seminar contiues tesl only) b.ed tfsl 45 days/9 wks feb to april intensive courses completed before fe; evening seminar continues b.ed phys. ed 35 days/7 wks feb to april intensive courses completed before fe 20 global education review 1(3) can help make explicit what is often implied in the dialogic exchange between student teacher and cooperating teacher and/or field supervisor. it is a more robust process that benefits all parties and adds value to that already critical professional relationship that is integral to field experience. eventually of course, the most important individuals of all – the students in our schools, have the most to gain from innovations and refinements to the field component of student teacher preparation. the competency-based model was informed by best practices, and tools were designed in a consultative and collaborative manner with input from cooperating teachers, school administrators, field supervisors and student teachers. members from these constituencies were invited to complete a questionnaire on the model at the end of the field experience in which they participated, “i found the information very clear and. . .more helpful in my evaluations than in previous years—the detail and explanation was very welcome.” (3rd field experience cooperating teacher, fall 2011), “it was excellent in that the evaluation form closely followed the expectations outlined by the ministry” (3rd field experience field supervisor). such salient feedback has informed improvement to the competency-based assessment models and tools for every field experience. in each field experience, cooperating teachers and field supervisors are provided with the following competency-based reference materials. • description of tools: instructions for using the assessment forms specific to each field experience. • field experience guidelines: includes assessment schedule for cooperating teachers and field supervisors on left, as well as a suggested weekly progression of tasks for the student teacher. contact information for the office of student teaching, rules and policies for student teaching are found on the back page. • guide to professional competency development in field experience: details target competencies and relevant features for the relevant field experience. includes examples of how the student teacher may demonstrate development of these features, differentiated as appropriate to the field experience year in the b.ed. program. • professional competencies rubric: for use with all forms to assess the student teacher on their evidence of competency attainment based on the mels scale from minimal (1) to advanced (5), as appropriate to the student teacher’s year in the b.ed. program. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 21 example assessment model (field experience 3) tools common to all field experiences (with the exception of field experience 1) are discussed below; please see individual field experience sections for forms unique to each level. formative assessment forms this is a three-part process focused on the observation of one lesson. supervisors and cooperating teachers observe and assess different lessons, with the exception of the 2nd (fe 4) or 3rd (fe 3) formative, which is collaborative, strengthening the team-based approach to mentoring and the links between the university and the field. 1. pre-observation conference the evaluator (cooperating teacher, field supervisor or school administrator [matl]) reviews the lesson plan submitted in advance by the student teacher, and records written feedback, including comments and suggestions before the lesson is implemented and assessed. this is returned and discussed with the student teacher prior to the lesson. the student may choose to make adjustments to the lesson. 2. observation assessment form 1. preobservation (review of lesson plan) 2. observation form (grid to complete based on observing targeted lesson) 3. post-observation conference (anecdotal comments based on lesson) interim report (global progress outside of specific lessons) summative report (development of target competencies) the 3-part formative assessment of a lesson is completed 7 times in fe 3 at regular intervals: field supervisor: weeks 4, 7, 12 cooperating teacher: weeks 4, 7, 12 jointly by both mentors: week 10 the field supervisor and cooperating teacher each complete an interim assessment at the midpoint of the field experience (week ) the field supervisor and cooperating teacher each complete a summative assessment in the final week, based on the formative and interim assessments. 22 global education review 1(3) completed while (or shortly after) observing the student teacher teaching the lesson reviewed in the pre-observation conference form. one observable aspect of the target competency is evaluated per line using the 1-5 competency scale. (please see rubric, available in appendix c) for example, in the domain “foundations (professional competencies 1 & 2)” the evaluator assesses whether the student teacher “is aware of current events and makes connections to curriculum”. 3. post-observation conference form completed after the lesson, and used to indicate suggestions and capture discussion with the student teacher stemming from the “observation assessment form”. evaluators provide written feedback that will enable the student teacher to understand concretely how to go about improving his/her practice and develop as an effective professional. interim report form (field experience 3 & 4) first introduced in fe 4, winter 2012, and then implemented in fe 3, fall 2012, the interim report is a global assessment of the development of competencies not explicitly addressed in the formative lesson observation assessments; collaboration with the school team, participation in school activities, response to feedback, progression of work on the professional portfolio. space is provided for comments on the student’s development of competencies across the four domains. summative assessment form assessment of learning takes place in the final week of field experience. prior to 2009, summative assessment was completed by the cooperating teacher only; the form did not reference the professional competencies, and was identical for field experiences 2, 3 and 4. the cooperating teacher and field supervisor now each complete a summative form; each of the targeted competencies is evaluated on the provided 1-5 scale from minimal to advanced. all forms are submitted to the office of student teaching and individually reviewed. students with weak performance meet with the ost director for remedial suggestions. notification of concern (noc) form this form, piloted in 2006 and introduced in 2007, has since been widely and successfully used across all field experiences. it is a tool that enables supervisors or cooperating teachers/school administrators to signal concern about a student’s pedagogical and/or professional development during field experience. the form clearly articulates the concern(s) and explains clear strategies for improvement and a timeline by which said improvement must be seen and sustained. this procedure allows important communication to be shared in a timely and concrete manner – and gives the student teacher time to correct concerns before they become more serious. the ost director is notified of an imminent noc, is available to advise on its composition, and meets with every student who has been issued an noc. feedback form (general) this form is available should student teachers, cooperating teachers or field supervisors wish to provide feedback on their field experience. this feedback is intended to serve three purposes: • provides the ost with a general assessment of the field experience in question. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 23 • enables a vehicle to comment on and make suggestions concerning specific aspects of the field experience. • provides an opportunity to comment more generally on the ways in which the ost might continue to develop the student teaching component of the mcgill teacher education program. feedback form (student teacher’s comments concerning supervision) this form (not mandatory) enables student teachers to provide a general assessment of their field supervisor. feedback may be anonymously shared with the supervisor at the end of the academic year, to allow them to engage in their own process of reflective analysis. in field experiences and internships (and associated in-program courses), student teachers engage in critical reflection and selfevaluation by evaluating their mastery of the competencies using “self-evaluation competency grids” (see appendix d) and a “yearly competency review” (see appendix e). students chart their development of the professional competencies throughout the program, adding to them after each field experience and internship is completed. each student's professional development is synthesized and written up in an “action plan” (see appendix f) and shared with cooperating teacher(s) and field supervisor during subsequent field experiences and internships. students are responsible for keeping the competency grids, yearly overview and action plan in their working professional portfolio. undergraduate field experiences: current models (2009-2013) first field experience cohort model see appendix h for assessment schedule and forms. b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl 12 days/3 wks cohort model nov/dec 4 days in school, 1 day at xxxx for seminar b.ed sec (sci/ math), music 10 days/2 wks cohort model evening seminar b.ed tfsl all students complete fe 1 at udem 1 week, fall admissions closed, not offered for 201213 b.ed phys. ed 15 days/3 wks april/may students paired 24 global education review 1(3) based on successful outcomes from a funded pilot project successfully undertaken in 2009-10, all students in the b.ed. kindergarten and elementary, secondary, teaching english as a second language and music programs are now placed in host schools in cohort groupings for field experience 1. in this 12 day field experience (monday to thursday, late november to early december, friday back at mcgill for related courses), participating schools receive cohorts of between 10 -15 students. student teachers are immersed in the culture and community of the host school, and, in small groups, shadow many teachers and school professionals across cycles and subject areas for 8 days, and are then assigned a cooperating teacher for the final 4 days. field supervisors meet with their students individually and with the entire student cohort at least twice, fostering a community of practice. school administrators, teachers, cooperating teachers and field supervisors gain a more holistic sense of a student teacher’s suitability and readiness for a program of teacher preparation, as does the student teacher. student teachers are provided opportunities to encounter school experiences that encompass the full range of teaching and learning tasks (in class, resource, admin office, informal school activities and events) that make up the educational experiences of a community of diverse learners. this field experience maximizes early and critical professional development opportunities/insights for student teachers and allows them to experience a broader, richer learning experience than they might when being mentored by a single cooperating teacher. sections of the student teacher’s working professional portfolio (see appendix g) are informed by this field experience as they complete reflective selfobservation assessment grids on their development of the selected professional competencies (see appendix d) and write up an action plan (see appendix f). field experience 1 cohort model contributes to school success by • affirming influence of highly motivated student teachers on entire school population. • enabling greater numbers of school staff to engage and work with student teachers. • strengthening feelings of professional wellbeing among school staff. • encouraging insight and reflection among school staff. • underlining the place, purpose and importance of on-site knowledge to program/course development. • providing students in host schools (including those at risk of dropping-out) the opportunity to spend time with motivated, young student teachers embarking on postsecondary education, and to see modeled the hard work, determination and hope they bring to this pursuit. • cohort model encourages student teachers to reach out to disenfranchised youth in positive, caring ways, even if only for short periods of time – and to gain early important knowledge about “resource” and drop-out prevention programs in schools. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 25 • accessing the energy and help of student teachers across multiple school initiatives. in 2013, in response to field supervisor and cooperating teacher feedback on the ‘1-5’ assessment ranking, a new scale will be implemented, and the fe 1 assessment form simplified. during this short, observational field experience, students’ competency development will be assessed as either “satisfactory”, “developing”, or “undeveloped” (see appendix c). we will solicit further feedback from the field in order to make any necessary adjustments to this new scale, with the goal of implementing it on the interim report in field experiences 3 and 4. an important trend in field experience model changes is the increased role of the supervisor in the mentorship and assessment relationship, particularly in the first two undergraduate field experiences. from one short informal visit in 2004, supervisors are now present with the student teachers for four days over the course of fe 1. additionally, their role in working with the school administrator to create the schedule strengthens the partnership relationship which supports our ability to initiate further changes. second field experience (fe2) see appendix i for assessment schedule and forms. b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 15 days/3 wks april/may evening seminar during fe can choose alternative schools b.ed tfsl all students complete fe 2 at xxxx 15 days/3 wks april admissions closed; not offered in 2012/13 b.ed phys. ed 15 days/3 wks april/may students paired 26 global education review 1(3) this 15 day field experience offers opportunities for the student teacher to work with small groups of students in formal and informal contexts. the student teacher will plan a lesson collaboratively with the cooperating teacher and teach all, or part of, that lesson. orbits of inquiry during fe2 are based on developing selected professional and subjectspecific competencies that include student engagement and learning, classroom management and the “working professional portfolio”. related professional development goals are: a deeper understanding of student learning in small and larger groups, appreciation of the process of effective lesson planning and implementation, awareness of professionalism in formal and informal learning contexts, and meaningful portfolio development as it relates to professional growth, insight and confidence. the decrease in teaching workload from a maximum of 50% to only collaborative planning and teaching of small groups is adapted to the reality of schools in the spring term; as special projects, review sessions or exam preparation are taking place. this change was made possible by the structure of the lengthened third field experience, during which student teachers are able to gradually work up to independent lesson planning and teaching over a 16-week period. third field experience (fe3) see appendix j for assessment schedule and forms. b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 64 days/16 wks aug/dec 4 days in school, 1 day at xxxx for seminar and courses b.ed tfsl 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe; evening seminar continues b.ed phys. ed 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 27 after 2 years of planning, consulting and designing, and a successful pilots in 2006 and 2007 (we are listening! shoulder to shoulder with teachers) the field experience 3 merged model has been program-wide since 2010 (with the exception of physical and health education due to program architecture). the design and structure of field experience 3 is such that all placements are secured in mainstream classrooms. no alternative or distance placements are allowed for field experience 3 given the nature of the synchronous classes in their program and the importance of students demonstrating requisite competence in a mainstream classroom. student teachers begin in their host schools on the same day that teachers return to their schools at the end of august, and before the students arrive in early september (student teachers are allowed to return to the same school for third field experience where they undertook their second field experience. this policy was introduced based on feedback from cooperating teachers, some of whom expressed reticence at committing to mentor an unfamiliar student teacher before the complexity of their own teaching workload assignments was known). during this extended third field experience, student teachers experience the stages of planning and preparation that teachers engage in for a new school year, and benefit from, among many experiences, that singular “first day of school.” student teachers remain in their host schools until early december. student teachers are able to integrate more fully into the culture and community of the school, be viewed as junior teachers, gain a greater insight and appreciation for the cycle of learning of their students and their own professional development, and gain a truer appreciation of the demands of the profession. by the end of this field experience student teachers should be undertaking from 60% to 75% of a full teaching load. student teachers in the elementary program spend tuesday through friday in their host schools, returning to the university for associated courses on monday. secondary student teachers spend monday through thursday in their host schools, returning to the university for associated courses on friday. student teachers are kept in cohort groups in their in-program courses. course assignments are directly linked to field-based work and are designed to ensure, as one outcome among many, that the student teachers address, in a manner appropriate to the field experience/program level, the full spectrum of the ministry of education mandated exit professional competencies. these substantive connections better enable students to enact and internalize the range of theoretical ideas encountered in their program through authentic classroom performance. an additional benefit to this model (as borne out by our research) is that a prolonged field experience, explicitly linking theory and practice, results in novice teachers suffering less transition shock, requiring less early mentoring, and being better able to thrive in today’s challenging classroom environments (benson & riches, 2006). 28 global education review 1(3) fourth field experience (fe4) see appendix k for assessment schedule and forms. student teachers are assigned to a school for 7 weeks. student teachers are expected to be in the final stages of attaining mastery of the 12 teaching professional competencies and will continue to develop their professional portfolio. by week 4, student teachers should be responsible for 85% to 100% of a full teaching load. post-summative assessment, the cooperating teacher and the field supervisor meet with the student teacher to engage in a professional conversation geared to novice teaching, that is designed to be a frank sharing of perceptions, insights and ideas between teachers with varying levels of experience and perhaps differing ideologies. integral to the success of this conversation is the complete absence of any sort of judgmental or evaluative presence/ethos around this conversation. matl internship: development and current model internship 1 this is the first of two matl internships; comprising 12 weeks in a school; an initial observation period of two weeks, and ten weeks of teaching. for student teachers not employed in their own classrooms, the cooperating teacher b.ed k/elem, sec, tesl, music 35 days/7 wks feb/april courses and seminar wrap around fe (evening seminar continues tesl only) alternative schools,, special or distant placement opportunites b.ed tfsl 45 days/9 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe; evening seminar continues alternative schools,, special or distant placement opportunites b.ed phys. ed 35 days/7 wks oct/dec intensive courses completed before fe alternative schools,, special or distant placement opportunites a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 29 will provide written formative assessments as will the mcgill supervisor according to the schedule below. student teachers on contract complete only the ten week teaching period, and will be assessed by the supervisor and the school administrator, or a teacher they choose to delegate as mentor. at the end of the initial observation period (two weeks), the cooperating teacher and supervisor will assess the student teacher’s readiness to begin gradually assuming teaching responsibility. by the mid-point of the internship, all matl student teachers will be responsible, with the support of the cooperating teacher or mentor, for a minimum of 80% of the teaching workload. student teachers will develop all 12 professional competencies, and are responsible for preparing plans for all lessons or units they are assigned to teach. guidance during internship 1 will be provided by the cooperating teacher or mentor and the supervisor, particularly in the areas of differentiation, classroom management, and assessment, which are addressed in greater depth prior to internship 2. see appendix l for assessment schedule and forms. •240 hours (7 weeks if full-time) •2-credit evening seminar •hours can be divided across fall and winter terms as necessary internship 1 2010: all students employed as teachers •70 hours (2 weeks) of observation only before proceeding to teaching •350 hours (10 weeks) teaching •fall semester (2nd term of program) internship 1 2013: a. students with cooperating teacher •350 hours (10 weeks if full-time) •2-credit evening seminar •all hours must be completed in the fall semester (2nd term of program) internship 1 2013: b. students employed as teachers •70 hours (2 weeks) of observation only before proceeding to teaching •350 hours (10 weeks) teaching •winter semester (3rd term of program) internship 1 2015: a. students with cooperating teacher •350 hours (10 weeks if full-time) •2-credit evening seminar •all hours must be completed in the winter semester (3rd term of program) internship 1 2015: b. students employed as teachers 30 global education review 1(3) the models above represent an iterative process beginning in 2010-11 of development based on feedback from field partners (school administrators, cooperating teachers) as well as field supervisors and students. for those students accepted into the matl program with little or no prior teaching experience, we quickly realized, from feedback provided by the host schools and our field supervisors, that these students required additional time in the field before undertaking any teaching responsibilities. we responded by adding two weeks to the first matl internship for those students no matter their prior teaching experience (for instance international teaching experience or experience teaching adults). this resulted in the need to redesign the model and materials for assessment in order to allow for a more gradual exercising and demonstration of the required exit professional competencies. internship 2 this is the second of two matl internships comprising 11 weeks in a school. for those matl student teachers not on contract, the cooperating teacher will provide written formative assessments as will the mcgill supervisor according to the schedule below. student teachers on contract will be assessed by the supervisor and the school administrator, or a teacher they choose to delegate as mentor. matl student teachers will be responsible for a minimum of 80% of a full time teaching workload and for developing all 12 professional competencies. guidance during internship 2 will be provided by the cooperating teacher or school administrator and the supervisor. in addition to the weekly professional seminar, students complete a concurrent applied methods course in their subject area. methods course instructors may request permission to conduct mentoring visits in the classroom during the internship period. see appendix m for assessment schedule and forms. •280 hours (8 weeks) teaching •1 to 3 additional weeks may be added based on progress •2-credit evening seminar •all hours completed in winter term internship 2 2012: all students (employed or with cooperating teacher) •385 hours (11 weeks) teaching •1 to 3 additional weeks may be added based on progress •2-credit evening seminar •all hours completed in winter term internship 2 2013: all students (employed or with cooperating teacher) •385 hours (11 weeks) teaching •1 to 3 additional weeks may be added based on progress •2-credit evening seminar •all hours completed in final fall term internship 2 2016: all students (employed or with cooperating teacher) a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 31 the process of development for internship 2 has also focused on increased supervised practice teaching time. because students are eligible for full teaching certification with no probationary period upon completion of this internship and their program courses, supervisors and cooperating teachers have the option of extending field time by 1 to 3 weeks to ensure satisfactory development of the necessary competencies. in 2013, an additional 3 weeks was added for all students. as shown above, a scheduling change for the ma program will be implemented in 2014-15, (moving the first internship from the fall term to the winter term) in response to feedback from the field that students without prior experience require additional courses to prepare for the challenges of student teaching, and that redistributing the required courses over 5 terms will allow students in both streams to invest the necessary time and effort in their program. indicators of success there are many and varied indicators that point to the success of the changes brought about to the field-based component of the mcgill faculty of education teacher education program. these include positive recognition from our accrediting bodies, invitations from other university programs of teacher education in quebec to present our work, and interest from researchers from national and international universities who come to inquire firsthand into our practices in the field. i shall share indicators of success however, from what i deem to be equally compelling and critical perspectives; the impact of the change initiatives in terms of the support they provide our student teachers in the field, and the positive impact of change to the relations with our partners in the field, without whom we could not do this work. change that supports our student teachers in the field our undergraduate student teachers have a far richer introduction (fe1) to the culture and community of schools. this enables them, much earlier in their program of study, to make informed and realistic choices as to whether this most demanding of professions, teaching, is for them. while it is not easy for a student to decide to leave the program, it is by far less devastating to make that decision in their first, rather than in their third or fourth year in the program. all our student teachers, in both the undergraduate (fe3) and matl (internship 1) programs, experience the stages of planning and preparation that teachers engage in for a new school year, and benefit from, among many experiences, that singular ‘first day of school’. student teachers remain in their host schools for an entire school term and are able to integrate more fully into the culture and community of the school, be viewed as junior teachers, gain a greater insight and appreciation for the cycle of learning of their students and their own professional development and gain a truer appreciation of the demands of the profession. during fe3 and internship 1, there are synchronous in-program classes at mcgill directly tied to the field-based authentic classroom performance. these substantive connections better enable students to enact and internalize the range of theoretical ideas encountered in their program. an additional benefit to this model is that a prolonged field experience, explicitly linking theory and practice, results in novice teachers suffering less transition shock, requiring less early mentoring, and being better able to thrive in today’s challenging classroom environments. since 2006, the bar has been raised substantially in terms of role-expectation and professional dispositions of field supervisors. these individuals are required to be adaptive 32 global education review 1(3) experts in their commitment to ongoing professional growth as the tools and models with which they work and familiarize the field are by definition dynamic and reflecting of best practices in teacher education. students now receive more, and better structured visits from their field supervisors, visits that are not solely for assessment, but meant to develop collegial skill and offer the wisdom and support that these dedicated field supervisors are able to proffer. gone are the days when a field supervisor might wave at a student teacher from the teacher’s lounge and consider that a successful supervisory visit. the reconceptualised models of observation and assessment, supported as they are by guidelines that provide examples of what evidence of mastery of targeted professional competencies looks like in the field, demand that our field supervisors and cooperating teachers are accountable to their student teachers. assessment must be timely and feedback abundant. that feedback must be written, it must be concrete, and it must align to the exit professional competencies being developed at a level commensurate to the field experience or internship being undertaken. feedback must also occur within a reasonable period of time after the lesson has been observed – and that professional conversation is never to be rushed or left incomplete. poor field experience and internship outcomes now cannot come as a shock to a student teacher. the introduction of the notification of concern (noc) asks that concerns, be they professional and/or pedagogical – must be noted, clearly described with examples of the worrying behaviors provided, concrete strategies for improvement provided, and a date by which such improvement must be demonstrated. in surveys run by our undergraduate and graduate governing student bodies, efforts to evolve the field-based component of our program continue to bear fruit as evinced in the data on high rates of student satisfaction with their field experiences and internships. perhaps most indicative of the success of the work of the ost are the positive reports from the field speaking to the professional readiness and adaptive expertise of our graduates now working in schools. while that is an acknowledgement of the effectiveness of the teacher education program as a whole, the significance of the fieldbased component to that finding of professional readiness and exemplary practice cannot be understated. change that sustains positive relations with our partners in the field student teaching is viewed by the office of student teaching as a collaborative venture between partners. the ost privileges its partnerships in the field with prominence placed on the working relationship with cooperating teachers and those in charge of the student teaching dossier. since 2006 there has been ever increasing rigor brought to the selection and professional development of cooperating teachers through closer liaison with school administrators and greater expenditure of resources to address articulated needs in the field. emphasis has been placed on providing professional development in the following areas: assessing the 12 exit professional competencies (using the new models and tools of assessment); differentiating assessment across field experiences and internships; building successful mentoring partnerships; addressing sensitive issues during the mentoring process and, providing effective, concrete and timely feedback. responsive, innovative professional development for our partners that reflects best practices will continue to be prioritized and the ost will continue to involve cooperating teachers in the work of strengthening the field a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 33 component of mcgill’s teacher preparation program. such efforts and collaboration benefit the field, as evinced in data on cooperating teachers’ satisfaction with the models of student teacher assessment, and the increasing demand from schools and boards for professional development that is seen as proactive, timely, relevant and helpful. perhaps most telling of all is the constructive tenor and tone of the day-to-day contact between the ost and cooperating teachers, school administrators and school boards – and the incredible generosity and trust that our field partners demonstrate when they willingly offer their schools and students for yet another of our pilot initiatives. mechanisms and sample feedback in order to effectively assess our programs, a variety of mechanisms are in place to gather feedback from all stakeholders on each new initiative. formal research projects were conducted for the pilots of the merged model third field experience (2006-07) and for the cohort model first field experience (2009), the competency-based assessment model forms were distributed for 4 consecutive terms to all field supervisors and cooperating teachers with an attached survey. the office regularly conducts short polls and questionnaires with teachers, administrators, and field supervisors during professional development days and over email to assess our progress. as well, a form is provided on the ost website to solicit general comments on any aspect of the field experience and internship process. in response to a survey on student experience with the new merged model third field experience in 2007, a student teacher commented that the field experience, “. . . provided me with opportunities that i would not have gained from the regular seven week [field experience]. i was involved in many areas starting from the beginning of the school year such as, setting up the classroom, establishing the stations and centers, planning for the first weeks (and first day) of school, developing routines and resources for the classroom and communicating with the parents. not only was i able to take part… but i was able to implement them and see the results. … [in university courses on fridays] we were provided with knowledgeable teachers, who were principals from montreal school boards. this provided opportunities for my peers and i to ask questions, discourse about our week, including lessons and or problems that may have occurred.” feedback on the pilot initiative for the cohort model for first field experience also demonstrates the progress toward our goal of providing a broader and richer initiation to the field for pre-service teachers. a first year student teacher wrote, “experiencing the many aspects of the culture and community of school allowed me to truly observe the reality of teaching. … i was able to observe different teachers, different group ages, different behaviors, the resources of the school and all the different staff responsibilities and programs of the school. it was truly effective in my understanding of the realities of the profession.” a school administrator noted “it exposes me. . .to the needs of teachers in training. also, it is an improvement to the training program in 34 global education review 1(3) that…it [requires] fe1 students to reflect on the complexity involved in teaching.” challenges while there are many challenges to the work of the ost, the following count among our most pressing. capacity the ever increasing number of student teachers requiring field placements is an ongoing concern. with the introduction, in 2010, of the matl the much needed resources to support this program did not materialize as anticipated. for reasons already reviewed in this paper, our secondary program enrollment remains the same – thus more than doubling the requirement for places in english secondary schools, this in a rapidly shrinking english language education context in quebec. english schools are being closed due to the declining numbers of students – and those schools struggling to attract students are offering french immersion and bilingual programs. while quebec is ostensibly a bilingual province (french is the mandated language of business) many of our local students come to us unwilling to risk being assessed in a french or bilingual field placement – further restricting their access to school placements. students from out-of-province and international students are also attracted to a teacher education program that certifies them to teach in english. pressures on cooperating teachers another challenge to securing placements is the eligibility of a teacher to take on a student teacher. in quebec cooperating teachers must be certified and have taught for five years. the impact of the baby boomer generation is that we have seen a virtual tsunami of teacher retirement. while one positive outcome of this is a slight spike in teaching positions for our graduates, these novice teachers, themselves deserving of early career mentoring, cannot guide a student teacher. it speaks volumes to the trusting partnership that exists between the ost and the field that based on recommendations and additional support from school administrators, we do place student teachers with cooperating teachers with fewer than the requisite five years of teaching experience. yet another layer of challenge is that mentoring student teachers is not part of the teachers’ collective agreement in quebec. to already overburdened and under-resourced teachers, there is no incentive in terms of salary or tenure that comes with being a cooperating teacher. to add to the pressures of being a cooperating teacher, a probationary period for teachers in quebec was removed in 2008. cooperating teachers are acutely cognizant of the part they play as gatekeepers of the profession of teaching in terms of upholding its standards and ensuring that only the most effective practitioners join its ranks. timely access to english materials the reality of french being the official language of government in quebec presents other challenges. it is prohibitively expensive for publishers to print english documents for such a small market – the results being a lacuna of english educative materials being made accessible to our programs in a timely manner. until just recently, the mels provided such translations albeit often very late in the day. that funding has been cut and we are now trying to find ways and means to acquire the materials in english that will enable the ost to assure that practice teaching is reflective of current educational thinking and direction in quebec. faculty involvement an additional challenge to the ost’s work is the very small number of faculty that undertakes the supervision of student teachers. this is not a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 35 surprising in academe where service of this sort is often neither valued nor rewarded as highly as research. most supervision in the field is done by recently retired teachers and school administrators. while there is an obvious benefit to the current knowledge of schools and curricula that those dedicated individuals bring to their role as supervisor, there are clear deficits. one such deficit is that energy is expended having to defend the work of the ost to those in the program and university who simply do not appreciate or understand the field-based component of our program. troubling too is the covert message given to teacher educators within the faculty to invest time in the important work of doing “real” research rather than supervising student teachers in the field. funding accessing funds to provide important professional development to our partners as we introduce new models and materials in the field is a further challenge to the work of the ost. cooperating teachers or their school administrators or school boards receive a small sum of money for each student teacher they agree to mentor. while these monies are earmarked for the pursuit of professional development, schools, understandably desperate for resources that help in their own mission, do not easily relinquish funds to pay release time for their teachers to attend professional workshops offered by the ost. professional development linked to student teaching is seen as being the purview and financial obligation of the university. university budgets being pared down, it is difficult to fulfill the mandated university obligation (as per the mels) to provide this service to our field partners. minority sexual identity teachers helping minority sexual identity student teachers to successfully navigate the field experiences and internships is also a challenge for the ost. their feelings of erasure and insufficient preparation in their program, and the innumerable hurdles and hardships many face in the field are even more pronounced than that of their heterosexual peers (benson, 2010, 2008; benson, smith, & flanagan, 2013; meyer, 2007). compounding this erasure and/or neglect is a relative lack of research into issues of concern to minority sexual identity student teachers in general and to field placement specifically (capel, 1997; downey, 2001; kyriacou & stephens, 1999). addressing the unique experiences and needs of these student teachers has become an important aspect of the work of the ost. disability and the field a final challenge of note is that presented by students entering our teacher preparation program with a range of learning and mental disabilities. in just the past five years, québec’s post-secondary institutions have seen an increase of 143% in students with learning disabilities, attention deficits, mental health issues, or with autism spectrum disorders (conférence des recteurs et des principaux des universités du québec , 2012). while many professional programs, including those of teacher preparation, have successfully accommodated the delivery and evaluation of standard course material for students with learning and mental disabilities, the field experience components of these programs have not necessarily kept pace. these internships, stages, and field placements are largely evaluated by community partners who may or may not be familiar with, or receptive to, the needs of these students who often encounter seemingly insurmountable hurdles when placed in these external professional environments. this phenomenon is mainly due to a paucity of 36 global education review 1(3) information regarding how best to accommodate these more nuanced and flexible skills in the field, if at all (benson, fovet, & flanagan, 2013). the ost is experiencing a dramatic rise in the number of student teachers who present with disabilities requiring ever increasing interventions of support. this reality is causing serious challenges and tensions in the field. the ost has had to devote time and already strained resources to trying (often inadequately) to support busy cooperating teachers in their efforts to mentor a student teacher with a disability. school principals have expressed their concern with the additional demands being placed on their schools and teachers, and the possible negative repercussions from parents. the ost is engaging in more frequent and difficult conversations with these critical partners around transparency and the lack of policy with regard to student teachers who present with disabilities. there is a paucity of research on realistic ways to support schools, cooperating teachers, and field supervisors who are interacting with student teachers with disabilities (severance & starr, 2011) and strategies to increase the likelihood of successful outcomes for these students in the field (harrison & lemky, 2000, 1999). looking ahead future initiatives center on researching and designing ever better mechanisms and procedures to ensure access, understanding, accommodation, support, accountability, consistency and clarity for all the stakeholders involved in the field-based component of the mcgill teacher preparation program. snapshots of key projects underway that will carry us into the next decade include: • developing opportunities in courses and in the field for students to acquire additional expertise with special needs. • securing more opportunities to work with school administrators to find creative ways to lessen the impact to their workload of hosting student teachers, and by extension encouraging their more direct involvement in student teaching when viewed as a collaborative venture between partners. • responding to the shrinking english language education sector in quebec, and subsequently fewer field placements, through creative adaptations of professional learning communities (plc) that, from the perspective of being a cohort of student teachers working within a school, afford stability in terms of being involved in professional-related activity in order to learn together and from each other (brown, collins, & duguid, 1989; dufour, 2004; dufour & eaker, 1998; lave & wenger, 1991). • expanding the work of supporting student teachers who experience transition challenges (program to field) for a range of reasons (minority/at-risk/ populations, mental, health and physical difficulties) in order to better serve these student teachers, the field and by extension, students in schools. this calls for a deepening and expanding collaboration (and publication) with the mcgill office of students with disabilities in order to better serve our students, the field and by extension, students in schools. it also requires the provision of professional development within school communities to integrate and support increasing numbers of student teachers who present with a range of disability and difference (watkinson & chalmers, 2008). a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 37 • re-introducing an online evaluation model which will reduce printing and user timecosts. such a model (based on mcgill faculty of medicine) was originally piloted in 2005 but not welcomed in the field at that time. there is currently renewed interest in the field. • working with our partner school boards to investigate and act upon our shared commitment and areas of responsibility around mentoring novice teachers in the field. • pursuing new and promising offers for international placements and the requisite student funding (benson and riches, 2011; maynes et al., 2012; pence & macgillivray, 2008; riches & benson, 2011b.) • in collaboration with mcgill’s office for students with disabilities and the department of educational and counseling psychology, the ost will develop a statement of commitment that will enable all stakeholders (student teachers, cooperating teachers, school administrators and field supervisors) to share a common vision of expected conduct and performance during field experiences and internships. the statement of commitment will describe a range of desirable dispositions for teachers; those attributes and behaviors that are pre-indicators of success and well-being in the profession. (rinaldo & slepkov, 2012; rinaldo et al, 2009). as a complement to the existing code of ethics for student teachers (see appendix n) this document will be signed by students in their initial year of the program. the development process will borrow from the field of medicine, and other best practices in professional discernment. this important initiative will allow mcgill to better support the potential in every preservice teacher for sound practice in the field. conclusion “there are no shortcuts in evolution” louis d. brandeis it has, perhaps, never been as important for faculties of education to prepare prospective teachers for the multifaceted realities of the classroom and for the challenging role of being a teacher. to achieve these worthy goals is not a task for the faint of heart in the current climate of shrinking resources, professional malaise and fierce competition for jobs. there is consensus across the literature that the interaction between the various theories and practices learned during teacher education programs are bridged at various critical moments that heighten prospective teachers’ appreciation of and ability to manage the complexities associated to the profession. one such unarguably critical bridge is that of practice teaching and there are no shortcuts to making that conduit stronger, better and more secure for its travelers. the office of student teaching will continue to evolve and dedicate its energies, expertise and unflagging dedication to the field-based component of the mcgill teacher education program. it will do this in the full understanding of the authentic collaboration with partners and stakeholders that this sort of research and careful work entails. it will do this with the student teacher always in the foreground. it will do this with the belief that supporting excellence in the professional preparation of student teachers will inform exemplary practice and professionalism in the field. we look forward to what the next decade of evolution heralds for the practice teaching component of this canadian teacher education program. 38 global education review 1(3) notes 1 http://www.mels.gouv.qc.ca/en/home/ 2 collège d'enseignement général et professionnel. an optional post-secondary college system unique to quebec, at a level between secondary school and university. 3 http://www.mesrst.gouv.qc.ca/ 4 http://www.capfe.gouv.qc.ca references beck, c., & kosnik, c. 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(2010). rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in college and university-based teacher education. journal of teacher education, 89(11), 89-99. zeichner, k., & conklin, h. g. (2008). teacher education programs as sites for teacher education. in m. cochran-smith, s. feiman-nemser, & j. mcintyre (eds.), handbook of research on teacher education. (3rd edition, pp. 269-289). mahwah, nj: laurence erlbaum. about the author(s) fiona j benson, phd, is the director of the office of student teaching at mcgill’s faculty of education and director of the ma in teaching and learning. she is a member of the department of integrated studies in education. her areas of teaching and research include teacher education, teacher well-being, professional development, and social justice education. kate hooton is the administrator of the office of student teaching at mcgill university. she oversees the implementation and management of student teaching field placements at the undergraduate and graduate levels, supports policy development and works closely with schools and students. her research interests are in higher education administration. appendices all documents available online at www.mcgill.ca/ost contents a. 12 professional competencies for teacher training (mels) ...................................... 41 b. guide to professional competency development (mcgill ost) ................................ 42 c. assessment scales: 2012-13 (mcgill ost) .................................................................................. 43 d. self-evaluation competency grids (mcgill ost) .............................................................. 44 e. yearly competency overview (mcgill ost) .......................................................................... 45 f. action plan (mcgill ost) ................................................................................................................ 46 g. excerpt from professional portfolio guidelines (mcgill ost) ...................................... 47 h. assessment form and schedule: field experience 1, 2013 (mcgill ost) .................. 51 i. assessment forms: field experience 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) ......................................... 52 j. assessment schedule and forms: field experience 3, 2012-13 ..................................... 54 k. assessment forms: field experience 4, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) ......................................... 57 l. assessment model: internship 1, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) ...................................................... 58 m. assessment forms: internship 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) ................................................. 60 n. code of ethics for student teachers (mcgill ost) ........................................................ 60 http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ig-gi/pop-qc-eng.htm http://www.statcan.gc.ca/ig-gi/pop-qc-eng.htm http://www.mcgill.ca/ost a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 41 a. 12 professional competencies for teacher training (mels) • competency 1: to act as a professional who is inheritor, critic and interpreter of knowledge or culture when teaching students • competency 2: to communicate clearly in the language of instruction, both orally and in writing, using correct grammar, in various contexts related to teaching • competency 3: to develop teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and to the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study • competency 4: to pilot teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and to the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study • competency 5: to evaluate student progress in learning the subject content and mastering the related competencies • competency 6: to plan, organize and supervise a class in such a way as to promote students’ learning and social development • competency 7: to adapt his or her teaching to the needs and characteristics of students with learning disabilities, social maladjustments or handicaps • competency 8: to integrate information and communications technologies (ict) in the preparation and delivery of teaching/learning activities and for instructional management and professional development purposes • competency 9: to cooperate with school staff, parents, partners in the community and students in pursuing the educational objectives of the school or centre • competency 10: to cooperate with members of the teaching team in carrying out tasks involving the development and evaluation of the competencies targeted in the programs of study, taking into account the students concerned • competency 11: to engage in professional development individually and with others • competency 12: to demonstrate ethical and responsible professional behaviour in the performance of his or her duties 42 global education review 1(3) b. guide to professional competency development (mcgill ost) sample page: competency 4, with all features applicable to b.ed field experience 4 and ma internship 2 domain: teaching act comptency 4: to pilot teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study. features addressed during field experience 4 how the student teacher may demonstrate development of these features appropriate to field experience 4 / internship 2 • creates conditions in which students can engage in meaningful problem situations, tasks or projects, based on their cognitive, emotional and social characteristics. • provides students with the resources they need to take part in the learning situations. • guides students in selecting, interpreting and understanding the information provided in various resources and in understanding the elements of a problem situation or the requirements of a task or project. • support student learning by asking questions and providing frequent and relevant feedback to promote the integration and transfer of learning. • encourages teamwork.  employs a student-centred teaching approach and encourages teamwork  is organized, motivates and encourages students throughout the learning process  sets up situations for meaningful learning  reflects learning as a joyful and expansive process  provides students with necessary and helpful resources  helps students find/incorporate/reorder information into their work  gauges student understanding through effective questioning  shows awareness and responsiveness to student confusion  provides timely, insightful and relevant feedback what the student teacher should be able to do by the end of field experience 4  facilitate student learning with purposeful class activities  encourage teamwork  detect and remedy teaching/learning problems competencies targeted in each field experience and internship: undergraduate b.ed program: field experience 1competencies 1, 2, 9, 11 and 12 field experience 2competencies 2, 4, 6, 10, 11 and 12 field experience 3all 12, but with additional assistance for competencies 5, 6 and 7. field experience 4all 12 graduate ma teaching and learning program: internship 1-all 12, but with additional assistance for competencies 5, 6 and 7. internship 2-all 12 a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 43 c. assessment scales: d. 2012-13 (mcgill ost) competency rubric for formative and summative assessments field experiences 2, 3 and 4 5 advanced competency has been fully grasped and integrated into practice the student teacher consistently shows deep understanding of and ability to enact all appropriate features of this competency. 4 thorough competency is being thoughtfully approached and roundly developed the student teacher has a thorough understanding of this competency/ selected features and demonstrates ongoing development in enactment. 3 acceptable competency is being adequately addressed but requires development the student teacher demonstrates an average understanding while showing moderate development in enactment of the competency. 2 partial competency requires considerable development the student teacher experiences some difficulty in attaining an adequate level of proficiency in this competency. 1 minimal competency is not developed the student teacher experiences great difficulty in attaining an appropriate level of proficiency is competency and/or does not understand current expectati or the effort required for sustained improvement. new competency rubric for field experience 1, 2013 s satisfactory competency has been thoughtfully approached and integrated the student teacher has a thorough understanding of this competency/selected features and consistently demonstrates ongoing development in enactment as appropriate to this field experience. d developing competency requires development the student teacher experiences some difficulty in attaining an adequate level of proficiency in this competency, but has started to apply some concrete strategies for improvement based on feedback. implementation may be uneven; however development to ‘satisfactory’ is likely with further experience. u undeveloped competency is an area of concern the student teacher experiences great difficulty in attaining an appropriate level of proficiency in this competency despite feedback and/or does not understand current expectations or the effort required for sustained improvement. 44 global education review 1(3) 7 e. self-evaluation competency grids (mcgill ost) completed by the student teacher at the end of each field experience or internship for each target competency. example: competency 7. social and educational context (7, 8, 9, 10) to adapt his or her teaching to the needs and characteristics of students with learning disabilities, social maladjustments or handicaps. features • facilitates the educational and social integration of students with learning disabilities, social maladjustments or handicaps. • consults resource people and parents to obtain background information on students with difficulties (needs, progress, etc.). • proposes learning tasks, challenges and roles within the class that help students to progress. • participates in developing and implementing individualized education plans. level of mastery by the end of his or her initial training, the student teacher should be able to : • cooperate in the development and implementation of individualized education plans designed for students under his or her responsibility. how have i developed this competency during this course or professional seminar/field experience? what is my current level of mastery? (choose one)* advanced thorough acceptable partial minimal *use the features of the competency (listed above) and the professional competency rubric. name _____________________________________________________ id ________________________ date: ____________________ course name & number (e.g. edec 253) _________________ ps/fe level (circle one) 1 2 3 4 keep these forms in your professional portfolio. you will add to them each year. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 45 f. yearly competency overview (mcgill ost) professional competencies: yearly progress review chart your progress in each of the 12 competencies, based on the detailed self-evaluation sheets. minimal partial acceptable thorough advanced 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 46 global education review 1(3) g. action plan (mcgill ost) action plan to contribute to the goal of preparing reflective practitioners, student teachers will write an action plan at the end of first, second, and third field experience with input from their cooperating teacher and/or the university supervisor. the action plan synthesizes each field experience’s evaluation, links each field experience to the next, establishes goals for improvement, and forms an agenda for discussion between the student teacher, the cooperating teacher and university supervisor at the beginning of the subsequent field experience. for first field experience only (excluding physical education students), the action plan will be completed during the co-requisite professional seminar course. name ____________________________ student number ______________________ b.ed. program: _____________________ field experience: 1st 2nd 3rd i have shown thorough to advanced development in the following professional competencies developed during this field experience: i would like to improve my skills in the following professional competencies developed during this field experience: i will make use of the following strategies for improvement: __________________________________ ____________________________________ student teacher’s signature date this completed action plan is to be discussed with your cooperating teacher and mcgill supervisor at the start of your subsequent field experience. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 47 h. excerpt from professional portfolio guidelines (mcgill ost) contents of professional portfolio, b.ed working portfolio showcase required content description 1st 2nd 3rd 4th table of contents     section dividers or chapters for dvds a table of contents to each (as appropriate) of the 12 professional competencies (pc)     section heading: autobiography: personal/professional intersections and their meanings c.v. / resumé 2 pages  section heading: professional identity: moving from personal to professional as teacher statement of philosophy of education theoretical or philosophical bases or orientations that inform teacher action.     professional competencies pc self-evaluation grids (showing development of the 12 pcs (as appropriate to the level of field experience).     pc yearly overview.   action plan report on strengths and areas for improvement that targets competencies or indicators from one field experience to the next. (fe 1 to fe 4)    professional development plan a plan for professional development goals as a novice teacher (realistic objectives that target competencies or indicators and document strengths and aspects requiring improvement)  self-assessment criteria for showcase professional portfolio an assessment tool for personal use. may be used during peer editing and for discussion/sharing purposes. see below. section heading: teaching and learning: examples and artifacts of classroom performance learning evaluation situations (less) & individual education plans (ieps) design, development, piloting, assessment and reflection on planning for inclusive/ differentiated teaching and learning, that includes multimedia/ technology.   section heading: embracing cultural diversity: critical awareness of the cultural mosaic 48 global education review 1(3) appreciation of the richness and potential of the community of learners, understanding of cultural backgrounds, beliefs, values, influences on teaching and learning responses to articles, readings, reflections on various less etc.     suggested documents to select from the working portfolio for inclusion in the showcase portfolio as indicators of mastery of professional competencies (careful and limited selection) you will notice there exists a natural overlap in terms of materials selected as evidence of competency development. it is up to you to determine how you wish to select materials to showcase your mastery of each of the 12 professional competencies. please make sure to protect the anonymity of any individuals recorded, quoted or in any way mentioned in any of the materials included in the working and showcase professional portfolios competency 1: to act as a professional who is inheritor, critic and interpreter of knowledge or culture when teaching students  cv  letter of introduction  letters of reference (maximum 2 at least one addressing teaching skill, from cooperating teachers, supervisors, principals, volunteer work supervisors, community school teachers/leaders, librarians, camp directors, university professors, etc.)  diplomas, degrees and certificates  evaluation forms from cooperating teachers, administrators and supervisors (selected formative and/or summative and anecdotal showing professional growth and development)  philosophy of education (values, beliefs and views about teaching and learning)  reflections/statement on actions taken that made it possible to understand students’ cultural reality (critical awareness of the cultural mosaic, appreciation of the richness and potential of the community of learners, responses to articles/key thinkers, ongoing professional development etc.)  reflection on professional development in program and field experiences including reflections on selected professional development goals as articulated in less  pc grid competency 2: to communicate clearly in the language of instruction, both orally and in writing, using correct grammar, in various contexts related to teaching  texts intended for students, parents or colleagues a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 49  pc grid competency 3: to develop teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and to the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study  demonstration of subject-related knowledge  plans for meaningful and varied learning situations related to subject-specific competency development (e.g. les, iep)  supplementing less/ieps, e.g. board game, classroom posters, powerpoint presentations etc.  attention to differentiation and appreciation of varied learning styles/multiple intelligences  pc grid competency 4: to pilot teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and to the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study  reflections on personal teaching style  accounts of learning situations that fostered the integration and application of acquired knowledge  student work showing the application of acquired knowledge  photos of students in classes (permissions must be obtained for inclusion of this material in the portfolio)  dvd of teaching (permissions must be obtained for inclusion of this material in the portfolio)  pc grid competency 5: to evaluate student progress in learning the subject content and mastering the related competencies  examples of student work (evaluation focus, criteria, feedback etc.)  methods and tools designed and used to evaluate the development of the targeted competencies  pc grid competency 6: to plan, organize and supervise a class as a way to promote students’ learning and social development  examples of methods of implementing rules of conduct  examples of methods of organizing classrooms (materials, assigned work, resources etc.)  ways that activities were made meaningful to different students  pc grid competency 7: to adapt his or her teaching to the needs and characteristics of students with learning disabilities, social maladjustments or handicaps  examples of teaching strategies for different types of students  accounts of ways of gathering and using information in order to gain a better understanding of students with challenges and to provide them with the necessary support  participation in individualized education plans (ieps) if this opportunity presented itself  pc grid competency 8: to integrate information and communications technologies (ict) in the preparation and delivery of teaching/learning activities and for instructional management and professional development purposes  student work using ict demonstrating the development of competencies  description of opportunities provided to students to apply ict competencies  examples of different types of productions (web pages etc.) 50 global education review 1(3)  pc grid competency 9: to cooperate with school staff, parents, partners in the community and students in pursuing the educational objectives of the school or centre  accounts of participation in school/community projects  photos, dvds and descriptions of special projects (permissions must be obtained for inclusion of this material in the portfolio)  community and volunteer teaching, field trips, school club, etc. (permissions must be obtained for inclusion of this material in the portfolio)  extra-curricular activities (description of serious and substantial involvement in sports, dance, music, dramatics, student projects etc.)  pc grid competency 10: to cooperate with members of the teaching team in carrying out tasks involving the development and evaluation of the competencies targeted in the programs of study, taking into account the students concerned  examples of collaboration and professional involvement with administrators, cts, staff and other members of the school community to plan learning scenarios, develop certain tools  pc grid competency 11: to engage in professional development individually and with others  action plan  various annotated texts from journals, books, newspapers etc.  examples of initiatives taken in the classroom following readings/workshops etc.  reports of participation in workshops at conventions or seminars/ped days and description of their relevance to ongoing professional development  professional development plan (a plan for professional development goals as a novice teacher with realistic objectives that target competencies or indicators and document strengths and aspects requiring improvement)  pc grid competency 12: to demonstrate ethical and responsible professional behavior in the performance of his or her duties  examples of decisions related to student learning, including justifications  examples of decisions related to the evaluation of student learning, including justifications  accounts of projects demonstrating cooperative approaches in the classroom and analysis of impact on students and own professional development  accounts of means used to recognize and address conflicts related to racial, sexual or other forms of discrimination  reflection on connections between own beliefs and values and responsible professional behavior  pc grid  pc yearly overview a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 51 i. assessment form and schedule: field experience 1, 2013 (mcgill ost) week 1 day 1supervisor is present. he or she assists school administrator with orientation, establishes contact with teachers and staff involved and distributes documents as necessary, observes students, provides guidance or answers questions to ensure fe proceeds smoothly. day 2 – supervisor visit: he or she observes and counsels student teachers, assists with organization as necessary. week 2 supervisor visit: he or she observes student teachers and gathers feedback on performance from school administrator, teachers and staff. week 3 supervisor visit: he or she observes student teachers and collaborates with cooperating teachers and/or the school administrator to complete the assessment form. a reference copy of the form is included with these guidelines for school staff; the supervisor has the triplicate form. the assessment form must be co-signed by (1) the supervisor (2) the cooperating teacher/school administrator. professional competency development s d u foundations (professional competencies 1 & 2) makes efforts to get to know and understand school culture and how this affects learning actively observes teacher’s actions and gives evidence of reflection (by keeping a journal, in conversation, etc.) seeks out opportunities to engage with students communicates appropriately, clearly and accurately – orally and in writing social and educational context (professional competency 9) collaborates and participates in activities of the school community supports student involvement in school projects and events professional identity (professional competencies 11 & 12) responds well and promptly to feedback and suggestions is appropriately dressed and well groomed is punctual and reliable supports and treats all students equally and appropriately behaves in a manner expected of a teaching professional discussion with the student teacher about this assessment should be undertaken in a timely manner. comments: i recommend that (name of student teacher)_____________________________________  is ready  is not ready to proceed to the second field experience. signature:_____________________________________________ cooperating teacher or school administrator signature:______________________________________________ mcgill supervisor 52 global education review 1(3) j. assessment forms: field experience 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) week supervisor cooperating teacher 1 introductory meeting (ct, supervisor and student) n/a week 1 report (end of week) 2 formative 1*(on small group work) formative 1* (on small group work) 3 formative 2* (implementation of co-planned lesson), and summative assessment formative 2* (implementation of co-planned lesson), and summative assessment * formative assessments have 2 pages: observation form, and post-observation conference. supervisor or cooperating teacher must be informed in advance of the general nature of the activity to be assessed. week 1 report: assess competency development in the following areas: 5 4 3 2 1 makes efforts to get to know and understand school culture and learning goals seeks out opportunities to engage with teachers and students responds well to feedback and suggestions and adjusts actions behaves in a manner expected of a teaching professional comment, providing explicit examples, on the progress of the student teacher in each of the following domains: • foundations and teaching act (e.g. attitude, aptitude, initiative, organization, participation, professional communication skills) • social and educational context (e.g. extra-curricular involvement, team-work, resourcefulness) • professional identity (e.g. observation and reflection [keeping a professional log], ethical and responsible outlook and behaviour, maturity, dependability and collegiality) formative assessment: professional competency development 5 4 3 2 1 assess based on observation of part or all of a lesson co-planned with cooperating teacher: foundations (professional competency 2) communicates appropriately, clearly and accurately at all times– orally and in writing recognizes and corrects errors in students’ oral and written work teaching act (professional competencies 4 & 6) lesson objectives have been met structures and makes the learning relevant to the students and subject-specific competencies encourages students to work well together sustains a positive, assertive and professional presence *maintains routines that ensure the smooth running of the classroom *monitors, interprets and responds fairly to issues of classroom conduct a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 53 professional identity (professional competencies 11 & 12) behaves in a manner expected of a teaching professional maintains a complete and up-to-date record of lesson planning and postteaching reflection is appropriately dressed and well groomed is punctual and reliable *with the help of the cooperating teacher. discuss the above assessment with the student teacher and record your comments on the postobservation conference form (required). this meeting should be undertaken in a timely manner. 54 global education review 1(3) k. assessment schedule and forms: field experience 3, 2012-13 week supervisor cooperating teacher 1 introductory meeting (ct, supervisor and student) 4 formative 1* formative 1* 7 formative 2*, interim report formative 2*, interim report 10 formative 3* (ct and supervisor observe same lesson and complete forms collaboratively) 12 formative 4* formative 4* 16 summative assessment summative assessment *each formative assessment has 3 steps: pre-observation conference (review of lesson plan), observation form, and post-observation conference. pre-observation conference form: review the student teacher’s lesson plan: 5 4 3 2 1 plans and frames activities with logical progressions of learning within the lesson links the lesson to subject-specific competencies (knowledge, strategies, skills) incorporates current resources and suitable teaching approaches from a range of sources into lesson plan differentiates the lesson to accommodate the needs of students integrates ict (as appropriate) in the design of lesson targets a self-directed specific teaching skill for development comments and strategies for improvement and on-going professional development based on the lesson plan:______________________________________________________________ ___________________. observation form: professional competency development 5 4 3 2 1 assess based on observation of the targeted lesson: foundations (professional competencies 1 & 2) understands the subject and program-specific content to be taught adopts a thoughtfully informed and accessible approach to the subject matter is aware of current events and makes connections to curriculum communicates appropriately, clearly and accurately at all times– orally and in writing recognizes and corrects errors in students’ oral and written work teaching act (professional competencies 3, 4, 5, 6) lesson objectives have been met structures and makes the learning relevant to the students and subject-specific competencies encourages students to approach subject matter in a critical manner and to work well together designs and uses evaluation tools/ feedback to enable/show development of a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 55 competencies acknowledges adjustments as required and makes necessary changes in his/her teaching sustains a positive, assertive and professional presence introduces and maintains routines that ensure the smooth running of the classroom anticipates and solves organizational problems that hinder the smooth running of the class social and educational context (professional competencies 7, 8, 9, 10) effectively implements information and communications technology (ict) (as appropriate) helps students use ict to effectively support learning (as appropriate) identifies strengths and weaknesses of students in a learning situation works to solve problems and support students who exhibit inappropriate behaviours cooperates in the implementation of ieps (if applicable) professional identity (professional competencies 11 & 12) behaves in a manner expected of a teaching professional maintains a complete and up-to-date record of lesson plans (logbook) is appropriately dressed and well groomed is punctual and reliable demonstrates sufficient responsibility so that a class can be entrusted to his/her care post-observation conference form: record comments and concrete strategies for improvement and on-going professional development, based on the observation assessment:_________________________________________________________ _____. interim report assess competency development in the following areas: 5 4 3 2 1 responds well to feedback and suggestions strengths, limitations and strategies for improvement have been identified contributes to the work of the team in an effective manner (including ieps, if applicable) participates in the activities of the school community a professional and up-to-date log of lesson plans and observations on teaching/learning is maintained yes no the student teacher has selected and discussed aspects of their field experience 56 global education review 1(3) to date (e.g. les, evidence of student learning, self-assessments) for inclusion in the working professional portfolio (or logbook for b.ed phys ed) that show evidence of ongoing insight into their professional development. based on your observations, provide your thoughts on the progress of the student teacher in each of the following domains: • foundations and teaching act (subject and subject-specific competency knowledge; student awareness; lesson planning and enactment; student engagement, learning and assessment; classroom management; professional communication and cooperation; maintaining a professional log etc.) • social and educational context (differentiation; use of ict; school/community involvement; team-work and collaboration; innovation, creativity and autonomy etc.) • professional identity (self-observation and reflection; professional development; working professional portfolio; ethical and responsible outlook and behaviour; maturity, dependability and collegiality etc.) summative assessment summation of formative assessments: please indicate the degree of accomplishment of the student teacher’s development of each of the twelve professional competencies; as appropriate for a 3rd year student teacher. the “guide to pc development” and the “professional competency rubric” may be helpful. professional competencies 5 4 3 2 1 1. to act as a professional inheritor, critic and interpreter of knowledge or culture when teaching students 2. to communicate clearly in the language of instruction, both orally and in writing, using correct grammar, in various contexts related to teaching. 3. to develop teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study. 4. to pilot teaching/learning situations that are appropriate to the students concerned and the subject content with a view to developing the competencies targeted in the programs of study. 5. to evaluate student progress in learning the subject content and mastering the related competencies. 6. to plan, organize and supervise a class in such a way as to promote students’ learning and social development. 7. to adapt his or her teaching to the needs and characteristics of students with learning disabilities, social maladjustments or handicaps. 8. to integrate information and communication technologies (ict) in the preparation and delivery of teaching/learning activities and for instructional management and a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 57 professional development purposes. 9. to cooperate with school staff, parents, partners in the community and students in pursuing the educational objectives of the school. 10. to cooperate with members of the teaching team in carrying out tasks involving the development and evaluation of the competencies targeted in the programs of study, taking into account the students concerned. 11. to engage in professional development individually and with others. 12. to demonstrate ethical and responsible professional behaviour in the performance of his or her duties. comments: i recommend that (name of student teacher)________________________________ is  is not  ready to proceed to the next field experience. signature:_________________________________________ cooperating teacher / supervisor (circle one) l. assessment forms: field experience 4, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) week supervisor cooperating teacher 1 introductory meeting (ct, supervisor and student) 2 – 3 formative 1* formative 1* 4 interim report interim report 5 formative 2* (ct and supervisor observe same lesson and complete forms collaboratively) 6 n/a formative 3 7 summative and professional portfolio support visit, coaching conversation summative, coaching conversation *each formative assessment has 3 steps: pre-observation conference (review of lesson plan), observation form, and post-observation conference. the assessment forms used are the same as field experience 3; students are assessed based on their program year. 58 global education review 1(3) m. assessment model: internship 1, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) week supervisor cooperating teacher 1 introductory meeting n/a observation form 2 observation visit and form n/a assessment of readiness to teach 4 formative 1* formative 1* 6 formative 2 formative 2 7 interim report interim report 9 formative 3 (together) 10 n/a formative 4 12 summative and portfolio support visit summative formative (pre-observation conference, observation, and post-observation conference) and interim forms are the same as field experience 3. student teachers placed with a cooperating teacher are also assessed with the following 2 forms: initial observation period (at end of week 1) based on your observations, provide your thoughts on the progress of the student teacher in the following domains: professional competencies 1 and 2 : foundations (engagement, attitude, initiative and participation; professional communication skills, etc.) professional competency 9: social and educational context (school/community involvement; team-work, support and collaboration etc.) professional competencies 11 and 12: professional identity (observation and reflection [keeping a professional log]; ethical and responsible outlook and behaviour; maturity, dependability and collegiality, etc.) assessment of readiness to teach (at end of first two weeks) professional competency development 5 4 3 2 1 foundations (professional competencies 1 & 2) makes efforts to get to know and understand school culture and learning goals makes efforts to observe and understand links between subjects and an interdisciplinary approach to teaching seeks out opportunities to engage with, and listen to, teachers and students seeks out opportunities to better understand the ways in which students relate to school, teachers and learning communicates appropriately, clearly and accurately – orally and in writing a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 59 shows on-going efforts to improve own communication skills teaching act (professional competencies 3, 4, 5, 6) sustains a positive, assertive and professional presence (with assistance of cooperating teacher) maintains routines that ensure the smooth running of the classroom social and educational context (professional competency 9) collaborates and participates in activities of the school community supports student involvement in school projects and events professional identity (professional competencies 11 & 12) responds well to feedback reflects upon teaching role and professional identity is appropriately dressed and well groomed is punctual and reliable behaves in a manner expected of a teaching professional comments: i recommend that (name of student teacher)_____________________________________  is not ready  is ready to proceed to the 10-week teaching period of internship 1. if student is not ready to proceed, a notification of concern form with a remediation plan must be completed by the cooperating teacher and supervisor. signatures:________________________cooperating teacher and_______________________supervisor the summative form for all internship 1 students is the same as the fe 3 summative form,with the addition of a grading key matching the 1-5 assessment scale to the letter grade scale in use in all mcgill graduate studies programs: summation of formative assessments for learning and interim report: indicate the degree of accomplishment of the student teacher’s development of the twelve professional competencies, and indicate a final percentage grade using the key below. key: 5 = advanced 4 = thorough 3 = acceptable 2 = partial 1 = minimal mcgill : a (85-100) a-/b+ (75-84) b (70-74) b(65-69) f (064) 60 global education review 1(3) n. assessment forms: internship 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) week supervisor cooperating teacher 1 introductory meeting 3 formative 1* formative 1* 4 formative 2 formative 2 6 interim report interim report 9 formative 3 (together) 10 n/a formative 4 11 summative and portfolio support visit summative professional coaching conversation assessment forms are the same as fe 3 (appendix j), with the addition of the graduate grading scale as described in appendix l. o. code of ethics for student teachers (mcgill ost) code of ethics for student teachers a. preamble – a student-centred perspective mandate: a joint subcommittee consisting of members from two standing committees of the faculty of education (faculty of education ethical review board and student standing) was created to develop a code of ethics for student teachers and to examine the ways in which this code will be communicated to students, faculty members and educational partners. goals and rationale: the interests of the two standing committees of the faculty of education in promoting appropriate ethical and professional conduct have led us to develop the following code of ethics for student teachers. this code seeks to respond to, and address the following needs: • the code addresses the interdependent duties, rights and responsibilities of student teachers, faculty members and educational partners. • by addressing common issues and needs, the code seeks to articulate and make explicit ethical principles that transcend disciplinary boundaries. these principles reflect the fundamental values that are expressed in the duties, rights and responsibilities of all involved in teacher education. • the code requires a reasonable flexibility in the implementation of common principles. it is designed to help those involved in teacher education, as a matter of sound ethical reasoning, to understand and respect the contexts in which they work and accommodate the needs of others. • the code seeks to encourage continued reflection and thoughtful response to ethical issues. it does not seek definitive answers to all ethical questions or situations. rather, it seeks to outline the guiding principles to ethical conduct and to identify major issues which are essential to the development and implementation of this code. a decade of evolution in the practice teaching component 61 context of an ethics framework for student teachers the principles and norms guiding ethical conduct are developed within an ever-evolving complex societal context, elements of which include the need for reflective action and ethical principles. education is premised on a fundamental moral commitment to advance and construct knowledge and to ensure human understanding and respect for individual and collective well being and integrity. the moral imperative of respect translates into the following ethical principles that assume a studentcentred perspective as articulated in the quebec curriculum reform and competencies outlined for teacher education. b. academic freedom and responsibilities teachers enjoy, and should continue to enjoy important freedoms and privileges. however, with freedoms come responsibilities and ethical challenges. this code of ethics is in keeping with the philosophy and spirit of the new directions that are embedded in the document teacher training: orientations, professional competencies (ministère de l’éducation 2001) and the reflective practice literature. the role of the teacher and the contexts of teaching have changed. thus, new resources (knowledge, skills, attitudes) are required to practice the profession and meet the challenges of teaching and learning in whatever contexts student teachers may find themselves and to engage in professional development individually and with others. c. ethics and law “teaching is governed by a legal and regulatory framework” (meq p. 120). the law affects and regulates the standards and norms of teaching behaviors in a variety of ways such as respecting privacy, confidentiality, intellectual property, competence. human rights legislation prohibits discrimination and recognizes equal treatment as fundamental to human dignity and well being. teachers should respect the spirit of the canadian charter of rights and freedoms particularly the sections dealing with life, liberty and the security of the person as well as those involving equality and discrimination and the education act that sets out the obligations and rights of teachers. d. guiding ethical principles ethical student teachers should respect the following guiding ethical principles: 1. respect for human dignity o speaks and acts towards all students with respect and dignity; and deals judiciously with them at all times, always mindful of their individual rights and personal sensibilities. o respects the dignity and responsibilities of cooperating teachers, peers, principals, parents and other professionals or para-professionals within the school, school board and community. 2. respect for vulnerable persons o respects and recognizes ethical obligations towards vulnerable persons. this principle recognizes that students are in a vulnerable position and that student teachers are in a privileged relationship with students and their families and will always refrain from exploiting that relationship in any form or manner. 3. respect for confidentiality and privacy o respects the confidential nature of all information related to students and their families and will share such information in an appropriate manner only with those directly concerned with their welfare. 62 global education review 1(3) o respects the confidential nature of all information related to all school personnel and will share such information in an appropriate manner. 4. respect for justice o respects and recognizes the right of individuals to be treated with fairness and equity and the importance of avoiding conflicts of interest. 5. respect for safety of students o respects the right of individuals to expect that student teachers will engage in practices that aim to ensure the physical, psychological and emotional safety of students. 6. respect for existing ethical codes and professional standards o respects the authority, roles and responsibilities of the cooperating teacher and agrees to adhere to the responsibilities and obligations for teachers as outlined in the education act, faculty and university handbooks as well as all local agreements by host school boards and schools. 7. balancing harm and benefits o acknowledges that any potentially harmful practices (eg. science labs and physical education activities) must be balanced with anticipated benefits and conducted in a prudent informed manner. formative assessment forms interim report form (field experience 3 & 4) summative assessment form notification of concern (noc) form feedback form (general) feedback form (student teacher’s comments concerning supervision) cochran-smith, m., & zeichner, k.m. (2005). studying teacher education: the report of the aera panel on research and teacher education. mahwah, n.j: lawrence erlbaum associates. a. 12 professional competencies for teacher training (mels) b. guide to professional competency development (mcgill ost) c. assessment scales: d. 2012-13 (mcgill ost) e. self-evaluation competency grids (mcgill ost) f. yearly competency overview (mcgill ost) g. action plan (mcgill ost) h. excerpt from professional portfolio guidelines (mcgill ost) i. assessment form and schedule: field experience 1, 2013 (mcgill ost) j. assessment forms: field experience 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) k. assessment schedule and forms: field experience 3, 2012-13 l. assessment forms: field experience 4, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) m. assessment model: internship 1, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) n. assessment forms: internship 2, 2012-13 (mcgill ost) o. code of ethics for student teachers (mcgill ost) welcome to the new international journal welcome to the new international journal 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: posamentier, alfred s. (2014). welcome to the new international journal. global education review, 1 (1). 1-2. welcome to the new international journal alfred s. posamentier mercy college, new york with the rapid increase of global communication, cultural differences around the world provide a variety of solutions to common problems. through an exchange of a wide range of international ideas – which can evolve from cultural, political, and linguistic differences – we can better address issues of mutual concern. with my involvement in countries such as england, austria, germany, czech republic, poland, and argentina, i became radically aware of how important it is to address analogous educational issues internationally over the past several decades. substantive discussions with key educational decision makers in these countries have provided many new keen insights into local issues – demonstrating the power of international dialogue in approaching educational challenges. as a fulbright professor at the university of vienna a few decades ago, i had the opportunity to meet educational leaders and exchange ideas with them, some of which have led to some interesting programs locally. for example, a new york city science and mathematics teacher shortage that existed from 1998 until 2008 was somewhat abated by bringing about 600 austrian teachers to teach in the new york city public school system. virtual enterprises, a now national program exhibiting entrepreneurship concepts to high school students, got its start when the new york city high school superintendents visited vienna and observed a program called “practice firms,” and had it replicated in new york city. the program has since been extended to hundreds of high schools nationwide. this is just a smidgen of evidence that international cooperation can mutually embellish our educational systems, since in each case countries involved benefited greatly. the question then arises, how can international cooperation be encouraged at the higher education level? having had the good fortune of establishing an quarterly education journal, the new educator, at the city college of the city university of new york, it became apparent that an international journal would be a fine way of linking academics with similar interests, yet from different countries, and with a variety of cultural and political backgrounds. as english has become the lingua franca of the world, it is a lot easier to communicate across borders. despite the common language, there are clear differences in definitions of educational issues. for example, bilingual instruction has different meanings in various countries; inclusion can be interpreted in different ways; and methodology, pedagogy, and didactics are defined variably by country. every field of education can benefit from international 2 global education review 1(1) exchange. this is why we are launching the online journal global education review. each issue of this quarterly journal will be defined by a special topic of general interest to educators. for every article we encourage joint authorship by academics from various countries so that not only is the theme of the article presented, but it will be discussed in a broad fashion taking into account cultural, political and linguistic differences. as with any academic initiative, success depends on the genuine involvement and motivation of the individuals involved in the project. to launch such an ambitious endeavor as creating a new international online journal requires the complete commitment by the faculty of the host institution. therefore, after floating the idea to a number of faculty members, dr. melvin wermuth’s enthusiastic reaction and fine leadership – encouraged further by several colleagues – this online journal began on its path to publication. when the idea was brought to the entire faculty at the mercy college school of education, the unanimous endorsement allowed the project to move forward expeditiously. now, after two years in preparation, the online journal, global education review, is being launched with this first volume. it is our hope that readers will not only find the contents interesting but also useful, since all topics will be covered from a multinational viewpoint – adding a global perspective to the myriad of educational issues the journal intends to cover during the next few years. a wonderful international advisory board has been established to help shepherd future volumes along, so that a broad outlook of topics of international interest will be presented. aside from providing exciting new perspectives to uncommon educational challenges, the journal encourages academics from around the world to co-author articles for future publication in the global education review. one should not lose sight over some really interesting byproducts that can evolve from this journal. new international cooperations between and among academics around the world can not only lead to a myriad of unanticipated research projects, but could also result in some creative new grant applications, which could generate interesting educational findings, leading to innovative educational projects. in short, we hope that this journal will open up an international door to academics around the world, so that we can improve education for youngsters everywhere. we at the mercy college school of education are therefore delighted to welcome you, not only to the inaugural issue of global education review, but also to future issues, which we hope will bring the world closer educationally. about the author alfred s. posamentier, ph.d., is dean of the school of education and professor of mathematics education at mercy college, new york. he has authored or co-authored over 55 books. 94 global education review 3(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: greenberg, jeremy h., lau, wendy & lau, sandy (2016). teaching appropriate play to reduce stereotypy using a treatment package with students having autism. global education review, 3 (3). 94-104 teaching appropriate play to replace stereotypy using a treatment package with students having autism jeremy h. greenberg the children’s institute of hong kong wendy lau the children’s institute of hong kong sandy lau the children’s institute of hong kong abstract students with special education needs such as autism tend to have difficulty with appropriate play skills and leisure time skills. a lack of play may lead to inappropriate behaviors such as stereotypy or passivity. when students have a limited community of reinforcers it may be difficult for educators to find motivators that can be used to teach language, social, academics, and other skills. the present study tested a treatment package in a small group format on the on task painting behavior and stereotypy of four boys between 5 and 12 years old having autism. using a delayed multiple baseline across students experimental design, a functional relationship was demonstrated between an observed increase in on task painting behavior and decrease in stereotypy of all four students as a function of their participation. limitations of the present study were also discussed. keywords autism, conditioning reinforcers, stereotypy, painting, play introduction children with special education needs (sen), including autism, frequently lack functional, ageappropriate play behaviors. without meaningful play skills, children with sen may behave inappropriately and be observed to have high rates of self-stimulatory behaviors known as stereotypy (american psychological association, 2013). in homes, schools, and in their communities, children are expected to play appropriately. play behaviors may include independent or solitary, cooperative, and pretend or imaginary play. in fact, play behavior is included in most assessment instruments that are used by professional behavior analysts to assess young children (bailey & wolery, 1989; partington, 2010; greer & mccorkle, 2013). the research literature in applied behavior analysis is replete with effective strategies and tactics to remediate inappropriate play behaviors and decrease stereotypy (koegel, firestone, kramme, & dunlap, 1974; wahler & fox, 1980; greer, becker, saxe, & mirabella, 1985; nuzzologomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer, 2002). early research in the field used treatment packages with access to toys, punishment, or conditioning reinforcement strategies. _____________________________ corresponding author: jeremy h. greenberg, ph.d., bcba-d, the children’s institute of hong kong limited, 19/f kennedy town centre, 23 belchers street, kennedy town, hong kong. e-mail: drgreenberg@mac.com mailto:drgreenberg@mac.com decreasing stereotypy with students having autism 95 koegel, firestone, kramme, & dunlap (1974) provided one of the earliest applied studies on replacing self-stimulatory behaviors with play behaviors. in their paper, they described procedures that were used with a boy and a girl with autism aged 8 and 6, respectively. play behaviors were observed in the presence of various toys and recorded along with selfstimulatory responses. the children were punished using reprimands such as “no” and were physically held to suppress or prevent the inappropriate self-stimulatory behaviors. although the researchers were successful using punishment techniques, the play behaviors were not maintained nor were they generalized to multiple settings. in an early study by wahler & fox (1980), four boys from 5 to 8 years old were given a treatment package consisting of solitary toy play and time out. all of the boys had been observed to be oppositional and aggressive while at home and in school. behavior contracts were combined with a token economy system. improvements were observed, however, the effects were variable. in response to the variability observed in all four boys after exposure to the treatment condition, the researchers added the time out condition that did reduce the variability and improve the overall durability of the behavior change. in both koegel, et al. (1974) and wahler & fox (1980), play behaviors were improved albeit the effects of their treatment packages were relatively weak and punishment was used. while punishment strategies can be effective to decrease undesirable behaviors, they tend to have unwanted side-effects such as counter control (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007). alternatively, more recent research suggests that strategies based on the principle of positive reinforcement such as conditioning reinforcement or observational learning techniques are preferred. these strategies may be more successful than punishment since they aim to replace undesirable behaviors (passivity or stereotypy) with more appropriate socially significant behaviors such as play and leisure skills (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007; nuzzolo-gomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer, 2002). positive strategies are those that avoid the use of punishment or aversive contingencies to improve appropriate behavior while simultaneously decreasing inappropriate and undesirable behaviors. empirical studies include: self management used to improve play in three children having sen (stahmer & schreibman, 1992), video modelling used to teach reciprocal play skills (dauphin, kinney, & stromer, 2004; macdonald, sacramone, mansfield, wiltz, & ahearn, 2009), and an increase in toy play was demonstrated with toddlers having sen in an inclusive setting by dicarlo & reid (2004). in another study using five adults with developmental disabilities, stereotypy was reduced and effectively replaced through the implementation of a conditioning program that paired toy play with positive reinforcement (greer, becker, saxe, & mirabella, 1985). their study was later successfully replicated by nuzzolo-gomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer (2002) using three preschool students with autism. one study that focused on using a procedure to teach observational learning was by leaf, oppenheim-leaf, leaf, courtemanche, taubman, mceachin, sheldon, & sherman (2012). in their study, leaf et al., (2012) set out to replicate the findings of bruzek & thompson (2007) who found that typically developing preschool children’s preference for playing with stimuli was increased after they observed a peer play with that same stimuli. leaf et al. (2012) showed that an adult could also function as a model and be used to increase a child’s preference for playing with stimuli after an observation period even when the child has sen. singer-dudek, oblak, & greer (2011) used a conditioning procedure that was successful in establishing books as reinforcers. in their study 96 global education review 3(3) using preschool students with sen, an observation period included target students watching another student who received books as a consequence for correct responses. interestingly, the books had not functioned as reinforcers for any of the students prior to the study. in both studies by leaf et al. (2012) and singer-dudek, oblak, & greer (2011), the researchers found that procedures used to condition stimuli as reinforcers were necessary to motivate the students to successfully complete various tasks that were required throughout their school day. indeed, typically developing children have a relatively wide community of reinforcers which is frequently lacking in students with sen (greer & mccorkle, 2003; greer, 2002). schools and behavior analysts could successfully apply procedures that condition stimuli as reinforcers for students with sen. once conditioned, these new stimuli could provide the student with new motivation that could lead to success in school simply because he would have a wider community of reinforcers that teachers can use to teach language (verbal behavior), social, and other academic responses (skinner, 1957; greer & ross, 2008). to expand on this notion and its research base, we chose to target painting as a form of appropriate play. one advantage of painting as a play or leisure time skill is that it is an age appropriate behavior for all children and can occur throughout an individual’s lifespan. painting can be done individually or in groups, and can occur in a variety of settings that makes it an appropriate target behavior that may lead to the generalization of behavior change (stokes & baer, 1977). our review of the research literature for interventions used to teach painting to students or adults with sen resulted in the identification of one study by johnson & bailey (1977). in their paper, painting was one of six activities made available to 14 adult women with sen living in a half-way house. through the use of a token system, the researchers successfully improved a variety of leisure time skills. however, there was no direct instruction or observation of the painting activities, specifically. the purpose of the present study was to test the effectiveness of a treatment package on the painting behaviors of four students with sen and to observe any collateral changes to stereotypy. verbal instructions, modeling, and music were combined into a treatment package in a one-hour small group class format. the students were given the opportunity to paint through regular weekly participation in the program. method participants four children with sen participated in the study. the students were given the diagnosis of autism by independent evaluators prior to the study. all four participants were selected from the population of a non-profit private school program called the children’s institute of hong kong (tci). the teachers used applied behavior analysis (aba) special instruction across all curricula, instructional techniques, teacher training, and behavior management (greer, 2002). the four participants were selected for this study because they each had a limited play repertoire, and music was observed to function as a reinforcer. participants a, b, c, and d were 11, 6, 5, and 5 years old, respectively. all four participants were male. table 1 contains a detailed description of each participant’s diagnosis and skill repertoire. decreasing stereotypy with students having autism 97 table 1 description of the four student participants student age/gender diagnosis verbal behavior milestones verbal behavior analysis (greer & ross, 2008) _________________________________________________________________________ a 11/male autism mands/tacts listener/speaker intraverbal behavior reader/writer b 6/male autism mands/tacts listener/speaker intraverbal behavior emergent reader/writer c 5/male autism emergent listener/speaker mands/tacts intraverbal behavior emergent reader/writer d 5/male autism emergent listener/speaker emergent mands/tacts setting and materials all sessions were conducted in a large room in the school the children attended. the room was 8m by 7m in area, and 2.5m floor to ceiling. for each session, eight easels were placed around the room. the easels were positioned in the rectangular room about one meter apart (see figure 1). the easels were 1m tall and 44cm wide. buckets filled with water were placed on top of a stool next to each easel. a paintbrush was placed into each bucket. water was provided in the bucket so that the students could wash their paintbrush if they wanted to change the color they were using. on top of each bucket was a paint pallet which contained about one tablespoon of acrylic paint in four colors, white and the three primary colors: red, yellow, and blue. a piece of paper measuring 40cm by 51cm was clipped on to each easel at the beginning of each session. dependent variable the primary dependent variable was the percentage of time the participant was engaging in painting behavior. a list of target behaviors, that were counted as on task painting and off task painting, is presented in table 2. two independent observers recorded whether the participants were engaging in painting behavior on a data sheet. only one student was recorded at any given time. 98 global education review 3(3) figure 1. photograph of the instructional setting procedure a delayed multiple baseline experimental design across students with a repeated reversal component was implemented across participants to evaluate the effects of the treatment package on the length of time a participant engaged in painting and their stereotypy. two baselines and two treatment conditions were used. subsequently, two maintenance probe sessions were observed. data were collected across all baseline, treatment and maintenance conditions. during baseline conditions, the student was present in the room with the materials, his teacher, one or two other students, and one or two of the researchers. the participant was not given any vocal instructions or prompts to paint. music was not played during the baseline session. the teacher and observers remained in the corner of the room visible to the participant. other than greeting the participant and handing the paintbrush to the participant, the instructor had minimal to no interaction with the participant. the session began when his teacher positioned the participant in front of the easel and paper. the baseline sessions were 15 minutes in duration. baseline was conducted to measure the amount of time that the student was on task (painting) or off task (stereotypy or passivity). baseline sessions and other treatment sessions were conducted for 15 minutes once every one to two weeks. treatment sessions were led by the instructor. treatment package during the treatment phase, each participant, along with five or six other students were placed in the instructional room with the materials and one to two of the researchers along with the class instructor. each student also had an accompanying aba teacher. the instructor began each session by playing music and instructing the students to perform three simple decreasing stereotypy with students having autism 99 gross motor activities (e.g. show their hands, jumping jacks, waving hands in the air). next, the instructor would ask a student to name a color and to name the secondary color that resulted in mixing two primary colors. following that, the instructor would instruct and model the object that was targeted for painting on that lesson. various objects were targeted made up of simple shapes throughout the treatment conditions (i.e. an animal, christmas tree, buildings). for example, the instructor would say “ok class, today let’s paint a christmas tree.” the instructor would then model how the object should be painted and would describe the simple steps required to paint the object. for example, the instructor would say “let’s draw three triangles and one rectangle at the bottom.” last, the instructor would state the rule “no music no painting” and ask the students to state the only rule of the lesson. this was the sixth and final instruction (learn unit) provided to the students. then, the instructor would instruct the students to begin painting. the short lesson prior to the painting time resulted in a few opportunities to respond (learn units) per session per student. the number of learn units totaled six for each student in each session (albers & greer, 1991; greer, 2002; greer & ross, 2008). verbal praise was provided as consequence for correct learn units (responses) and a simple correction was provided for incorrect responses by the aba teachers. no prompts were provided for any of the six learn units presented. various music was played throughout the session except when the instructor would pause the music fort 5-10 seconds and instruct the students to pause painting, and then resume once the music was played again. the pausing of the music would happen one to two times during each 15-minute session. music played consisted of a range of about three genres including: children’s nursery rhymes, pop music, and electronic dance music. after the brief model and six instructional learn units were presented in each of the instructional sessions, the students were observed for their on task and off task behaviors. data were collected for 15 minutes of each session using a 10-second whole interval recording procedure resulting in a total of 90 10second intervals. researchers used a special wearable brand of accurate digital timers called invisible clock ® ii and began to count from when the participants were instructed to begin to paint and the music was turned on until 90 intervals had been observed and recorded. on task intervals were scored as a “+” on a data sheet and off task intervals were scored as a minus “-“ on the same data sheet. data was not collected during when the music was paused by the instructor. maintenance for each of the four participants, a maintenance probe was conducted one month and two months after the last treatment session. each of these two maintenance phases were identical to the treatment phase. inter-observer agreement inter-observer agreement (ioa) was collected by having two independent observers (the researchers) collect data simultaneously during 57%, 40%, 35% and 67% of the total number of sessions in the study for participants a, b, c, and d, respectively. all of the authors of the study served as data collectors. ioa was calculated by dividing agreements by agreements plus disagreements and then multiplying the quotient by 100. the result was expressed as a percentage. mean and range agreement scores were 93% with a range of (83%, 100%) for participant a, 96% with a range of (90%, 100%) for participant b, 95% with a range of (81%, 100%) for participant c, and 97% with a range of (94%, 100%) for participant d. 100 global education review 3(3) table 2 dependent variables counted as on task or off task painting behavior using a whole interval recording procedure with 10 second intervals _________________________________________________________________________ behaviors counted as on task painting behavior 1. the participant moved the paintbrush in any direction on the paper with the brush coming into contact with the paper 2. the participant dipped the paintbrush into the paint on the paint pallet 3. the participant dipped the paintbrush in the water bucket provided 4. the participant squeezed paint onto the paint pallet from the plastic paint bottles 5. the participant walked towards the bench that contained the plastic paint bottles 6. the participant walked towards their easel from the bench that contained the plastic paint bottles behaviors counted as off task painting behavior 1. the participant was observed to have stereotypy (e.g. hand flapping, posturing, palilalia, rocking, pacing) 2. the participant was observed to be passive or simply stand in front of their easel without painting 3. the participant was not observed to have behaviors consistent with the six definitions of on task behavior _________________________________________________________________________ results student a’s on task painting behavior averaged 13% of the recording interval, (range, 10% 18%) across the four sessions during baseline 1. during treatment 1, painting behavior was increased from an average of 13% in baseline 1 to 51% (range, 44% 56%) without any overlapping data points. in baseline 2, painting behavior decreased from 53% in the last session of treatment 1 to 0% in the first session of baseline 2, with an average of 8%, (range, 0% 19%). painting behavior increased dramatically from 0% in the last session of baseline 2 to 79% in the first session of treatment 2 with an average of 53%, (range, 36% 79%) in treatment 2. during the one-month probe, student a’s on task painting behavior maintained at a percentage within the range of treatment 1 and 2, at 54%, which follows with a slight decrease in the two-month probe, at 43%. student b’s on task painting behavior increased significantly from an average of 4% (range, 0%-12%) in baseline 1 to an average of 44% (range, 6% 67%) in treatment 1. it follows with a decrease of on task painting behavior to an average of 9% (range, 0% 21%) in baseline 2. in treatment 2, on task painting behavior was again increased significantly to an average of 49% (range, 21 – 63). the one-month and two-month probes show more increase in on task painting behaviors with 84% at the one-month probe and 94% at the two-month probe. for student c, on task painting behavior was increased from an average of 1% (range, 0% 3%) during baseline 1 to an average of 37% (range, 12% 60%) in treatment 2. during baseline 2, an decreasing stereotypy with students having autism 101 average of 21% (range, 0% 51%) on task painting behavior was observed. it follows with an increase during treatment 2 to an average of 45% (range, 38% 63%). both one-month and two-month probes shows on task painting behaviors that maintained at a stable percentage as in treatment 2 (one-month probe: 32%, two-month probe: 52%). student d was observed to have zero on task painting behavior during baseline 1. it follows with a dramatic increase to an average of 78% (range, 69% 89%) on-task painting behavior during treatment 1. in baseline 2, painting behavior decreased sharply back to 0%. treatment 2 shows a significant increase to 44%. percentage of on task painting behaviors in both the one-month and two-month probes were within the range in treatment 2 (onemonth probe: 52%, two-month probe: 48%). the results of the study are shown in table format (table 3) and using a visual graphic display (figure 2). table 3 results of the study for each of the four participants across each of the six experimental conditions as mean percentage of on task painting behavior and range of percentage of on task painting behavior baseline treatment baseline 2 treatment 1-month 2-month package package 2 probe probe _________________________________________________________________________ student a mean 13% 51% 8% 53% 54% 43% range (10%, 18%) (44%, 56%) (0%, 19%) (36%, 79%) student b mean 4% 44% 9% 49% 84% 94% range (10%, 12%) (6%, 67%) (0%, 21%) (21%, 63%) student c mean 1% 37% 21% 45% 32% 53% range (0%, 3%) (12%, 60%) (0%, 51%) (38%, 63%) student d mean 0% 78% 0% 44% 52% 48% range (0%, 0%) (69%, 89%) (0%, 0%) (31%, 64%) 102 global education review 3(3) figure 2. delayed multiple baseline experimental design with repeated reversal component and maintenance probes across students a, b, c, and d. conditions include baseline, treatment package, baseline 2, treatment package 2, a 1-month maintenance probe, and a 2-month maintenance probe. the dependent variable included on task painting behavior in each 15-minute session using a 10 second whole interval recording procedure. discussion the results of the study showed that the participants all made educationally significant gains in their on-task painting behaviors as a function of the treatment package. stereotypy and passivity were also significantly reduced. after very low, or as in the case of student d, no on task behaviors, all students made immediate improvement in their on task behaviors except for student b who was observed to have one session in the treatment 1 condition that overlapped with the baseline 1 condition. in the baseline 2 condition, a return to baseline conditions was tested and all four session decreasing stereotypy with students having autism 103 students were observed to have lower or even zero on task painting behaviors when the treatment package was removed. student c’s return to baseline condition was also observed although it was less pronounced and there was more overlap across the treatment 1 and baseline 2 conditions. this could have been due to the observed variability in responding by this student across the study or other interfering variables that were not known by the experimenters such as private events or setting events. another potential variable that may have influenced student c’s variability is that the class was scheduled every other week. the overall duration of time that the data were collected could have affected the stability of student c’s on task painting behaviors. this time variable may have also attributed to the overlap observed across student b’s conditions. similar results were observed in two of the previous studies where stimuli were conditioned and subsequent decreases in stereotypy and or passivity were observed in the participants. in greer et al. (1985) toy play was conditioned as a reinforcing activity which resulted in the dramatic reduction in stereotypy in adults with sen. in a partial replication study, nuzzologomez et al. (2002) showed that after a conditioning procedure using books and toys, preschoolers with sen were also observed to have fewer occurrences of stereotypy and or passivity. we conclude that the treatment package functioned to condition the painting behavior as a reinforcing activity in our four students that subsequently was responsible for the observed reduction in stereotypy and or passivity. on task behaviors that were measured were idemnotic or absolute measurements so although there were no direct measures of off task behavior, if the students were not on task, they were ex post facto off task (johnson & pennypacker, 1993). limitations the instructor could not be available on a daily or weekly basis. school holidays and vacations interrupted the ability of the class to be held on a weekly or otherwise more consistent basis. as stated above, this could have resulted in some of the variability and overlap in conditions for students b & c, respectively. also, we do not know precisely what about the treatment package may have resulted in the painting behavior becoming conditioned as a reinforcer. was it the modeling, the social group piece, or the music? we suspect that music functioned to condition the painting behaviors since it had already been identified as a reinforcer and was a prerequisite for inclusion into the study. music was also played almost continuously and was therefore in complete contact with the target painting behavior. modeling (observational learning) or other reinforcers must be present in order for a new stimulus or activity to be conditioned (paired) as demonstrated by the abovementioned research literature findings. further testing to isolate the true controlling variable can be done to test this hypothesis. to test for the controlling variable, the treatment package components could be applied separately to test their effects on the on task painting behavior of students. furthermore, more qualitative aspects of painting can be assessed, which our study did not attempt to measure. the present study adds to the research using positive behavior interventions in the treatment of inappropriate and stereotypic behaviors in students with sen. even after weeks without the intervention, when the treatment package was reintroduced, on task behaviors in the same range as those in the treatment condition were observed across all four students. these results are educationally significant and further research may be done to identify exactly what variable or variables were responsible for the improvement in our students on task painting behaviors and decreases in their stereotypy and or passivity behaviors. references american psychological association. 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(2009). using video modeling to teach reciprocal pretend play to children with autism. journal of applied behavior analysis, 42, (1), 43-55. nuzzolo-gomez, r., leonard, m. a., ortiz, e., rivera, c. m., & greer, r. d. (2002). teaching children with autism to prefer books or toys over stereotypy or passivity. journal of positive behavior interventions, 4, 80-87. partington, j. w. (2010). the assessment of basic language and learning skills-revised (the ablls®-r). pleasant hill, ca: behavior analysts, inc. skinner, b. f. (1957). verbal behavior. action, ma: copley publishing group. singer-dudek, j. oblak, m., & greer, r. d. (2011). establishing books as conditioned reinforcers for preschool children as a function of an observational intervention. journal of applied behavior analysis, 44, (3), 421-434. stahmer, a. c., & schriebman, l. (1992). teaching children with autism appropriate play in unsupervised environments using a self-management treatment package. journal of applied behavior analysis, 25, (2), 447-459. stokes, t. f., & baer, d. m. (1977). an implicit technology of generalization. journal of applied behavior analysis, 10, 349-367. wahler, r. g., & fox, j. j. (1980). solitary toy plat and time out: a family treatment package for children with aggressive and oppositional behavior. journal of applied behavior analysis, 13, (1), 23-29. about the author(s) jeremy h. greenberg, ph.d., bcba-d, is director of the children’s institute of hong kong. he earned his doctorate in special education applied behavior analysis from teachers college columbia university. he currently resides in hong kong with his wife christine and four children. wendy lau is wendy lau, is currently a teaching assistant at the university of hong kong. prior to her current position she worked as a behaviour analyst providing therapy to children with special needs at home and in schools. sandy lau is sandy lau obtained her bachelor of arts in psychology and diploma in infant development and supported child development from the university of british columbia (canada). she has received her board certified assistant behavior analyst credential since 2013. throughout her professional experiences, sandy worked with children with various special needs in different settings such as home, mainstream school classrooms, special needs classes or the community. she is passionate in helping individuals with special needs integrate into the mainstream schools and their communities. 46 global education review 2(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: albers, p., cho, a.ram, shin, j.,pang, m., angay-crowder, t. & odo, dennis murphy with jung, j., pace, c. l., sena, m. & turnbull, s. (2015). critical spaces for critical times: global conversations in literacy research as an open professional practice and development resource. global education review, 2(3). 46-67 critical spaces for critical times: global conversations in literacy research as an open professional development and practices resource peggy albers georgia state university a. ram cho georgia state university ji hye shin georgia state university myoung eun pang georgia state university tuba angay-crowder georgia state university dennis murphy odo pusan national university, republic of korea jin kyeong jung university of pennsylvania christi l. pace georgia state university mandi sena georgia state university sarah turnbull georgia state university abstract this paper reflects an oer (open educational resources) critical literacy project, global conversations in literacy research (gclr), (www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com), now in its fourth year. gclr annually hosts up to seven web seminars presented by internationally recognized literacy and education scholars. we outline key dimensions of gclr not only as an oer but as an open educational practice (oep) (andrade et al., 2011) that through its design, not only provides open access to scholarship, but also understands the critical nexus among resources, practices and theory. informed by data from a http://www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/ critical spaces for critical times 47 longitudinal study, this paper situates these dimensions within professional development literature, and outlines gclr as a critical space designed for critical times, and the importance of intentionality when accessing oer. like scholars before us, we argue that that availability is not the only consideration when using oer (andrade et al., 2011); oer must be considered in relation to pedagogical considerations and how oer are used as a critical component to online professional development. keywords education, literacy, professional development, web seminars, critical literacy, critical pedagogy, open educational resources, open educational practice introduction gateways to digital technologies have increased teaching and learning opportunities across educational spaces, including web seminars. today’s digital technologies (e. g., blackboard collaborate, facebook, twitter, listservs) make possible open access avenues for sharing and accessing literacy research and practices worldwide (albers, pace, & brown, 2013; leu, kinzer, coiro, & cammack, 2004). central to globalizing spaces of learning are information and communication technologies that enable people from across the world to synchronously engage in a variety of learning and teaching experiences. the educational landscape will shift greatly as more and more people desire realtime, authentic, self-directed, & on-demand learning (simonson, schlosser, & orellana, 2011). the future is now, and we live and work in highly wired and digital spaces whereby open access to resources is much more commonplace (ehlers, 2011), and those with access can click and access innumerable sites to secure information. among the myriad of online learning options, web seminars have become popular avenues for teacher professional development, and are increasingly becoming open educational resources (oer) that anyone with internet access can participate or watch. the title of our paper is an intentional play on words. we operate in “critical spaces,” internet spaces that provide us with immediate access when we need it, and which is critical to the success of our work and thinking. understood in another way, we live in critical spaces by which people across the world access information daily and openly, or what is now known as on-demand access. educators also live in critical times, wherein professional development is organized around such issues as high-stakes testing, and prescriptive reading programs (larson, 2013; shannon, 2013). for us, living in critical spaces and critical times requires that educators and researchers have access to oer, driven by theory and pedagogy, that enable them to work as professionals in highly restricted educational spaces (albers, pace, & brown, 2013). this paper discusses an oer critical literacy project, global conversations in literacy research (gclr) (www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.c om), that annually hosts up to seven web seminars presented by internationally recognized literacy and education scholars. we outline key dimensions of gclr not only as an oer but as an open educational practice (oep) ______________________________ corresponding author: peggy albers, college of education, georgia state university, atlanta, ga 30302 email: malbers2@gsu.edu http://www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/ http://www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/ 48 global education review 2(3) (andrade, ehlers, caine, carneiro, conole, kairamo, koskinen, kretschmer, moe-pryce, mundin, nozes, reinhardt, richter, silva & holmberg, 2011) that, through its design, not only provides open access to scholarship, but also reflects an understanding of the critical nexus among resources, practices and theory. informed by data from a longitudinal study, this paper situates this project within online professional development, outlines gclr as a critical space designed for critical times, and suggests the importance of intentionality when accessing oer. like scholars before us, we argue that availability is not the only consideration when using oer (andrade et al., 2011); oer must be considered in relation to pedagogical considerations. even more importantly for us is how oer are used as critical components to online professional development. global conversations in literacy research: a critical literacy project launched in 2010 as a series of live one-hour open access web seminars, gclr as an oer uses digital technologies to connect with global audiences in an effort to exchange progressive ideas on literacy theory, research, and practice. as a critical literacy project, gclr understands that literacy is a global endeavor with a mission to “connect diverse and global audiences, collaborate and exchange ideas on international issues in literacy, and acknowledges that diverse, multiple and global perspectives are vital resources for changing consciousness around literacy research and practice (http://globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress. com/gclr-mission-and-goals/). as an oer with a critical literacy stance, gclr offers open access to educators, researchers, and those interested in literacy live engagement with internationally recognized scholars of literacy. understanding that financial restrictions and time constraints prohibit many from traveling to professional conferences to participate in such scholarship, gclr aims to bridge this access through online web seminars. supported in part by the national writing project (www.nwp.org), gclr operates with no other outside funding. gclr has been able to continue as an oer because of its critical literacy position, and accessibility to speakers whose scholarship is grounded in critical literacy, who offer their expertise without honorarium. gclr uses blackboard collaborate as a delivery platform to host web seminars. this platform can host thousands of audience members at an individual seminar, and has a “chat” feature in which audiences can participate in discussions. chat and audio features in blackboard allow participants to introduce themselves, and connect with others from around the world. at the end of each series, the gclr team analyzes and reflects on participant and speaker interviews to consider changes that may better meet the interests and needs of its audiences. in its efforts to establish global connections, gclr launched its website in december of 2010 using wordpress, a free hosting site (www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.c om) with information about seminars, the project, and the people involved in the project as well as archived web seminars. the project also added clustrmap, a mapping and tracking widget that indicates from where people access the site (figure 1). http://globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/gclr-mission-and-goals/ http://globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/gclr-mission-and-goals/ http://www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/ http://www.globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress.com/ critical spaces for critical times 49 as of this writing, statistics generated from clustrmap indicate that gclr has had over 36,200 visitors from 161 (out of 196) countries and over 70,000 views of its pages. in august of 2011, gclr started a facebook page and twitter account that to this date has over 700 and 600 followers respectively. in february of 2013, gclr launched its youtube channel (https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucay7ub8 mm5sprnpy6mxl5gg) that houses archived web seminars. across the four years, gclr has provided online professional development via live web seminars to over 6000 people worldwide, and via archived web seminars to over 12,000 people. in total as of this writing, as an oer, gclr has provided online professional development (pd) to over 18,000 people. we suggest these numbers indicate impact. first, literacy is a critical topic in all parts of the world, and those involved in the literacy of children and adults are yearning for oer that may offer suggestions on how to improve reading and writing. second, educators continually search out pedagogical ideas to implement into their educational spaces with an aim to support learners’ literacy development (albers, pace, & brown, 2013; angay-crowder et al., 2014). third, audiences seek opportunities to engage live with international scholars, converse in the chat with others, pose questions about literacy research and practice, and offer up ideas that they wish to share. such open access opportunities for such professional development are difficult to come by, and we see gclr as a critical space for critical times. we now turn to the core principles of critical literacy (edelsky, 2006; lewison, leland, & harste, 2008; janks, 2010) around which gclr is situated. https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucay7ub8mm5sprnpy6mxl5gg https://www.youtube.com/channel/ucay7ub8mm5sprnpy6mxl5gg 50 global education review 2(3) theoretical perspectives grounding gclr while describing pedagogies of responsibility and place, comber, nixon, and reid (2007) argued that in the teaching of literacy, our role as teachers must include expanding our own repertoires of literacy and communicating practices in order to design relevant engagements for our students: “literacy teaching cannot, and we believe it should not, be a content-free zone. we know that there is great potential for students to expand their literate repertoires when they become deeply engaged in acquiring new knowledge about things that matter….” (p.2). we position the work of gclr in critical literacy and pedagogy in which literacy is situated in the larger issues of society. in brief, critical literacy is both a theory and practice, inspired by the work of paulo freire (1970) who sought to emancipate brazilian farmers from the tyranny of their landowners by teaching them to read the underlying meanings of the contracts under which they worked. a significant tenet of critical literacy is to provide transformative teaching (edelsky, 2006) that extends teachers’ own agencies toward countering and teaching against hierarchies that restrict teachers’ professionalism. luke and freebody (1999) called critical literacy the “new basic,” which seeks to support learning that looks deeply at authors’ messages, interrogates commonplace assumptions (e.g., how are mothers and fathers constructed in mother’s and father’s day cards?), includes and values multiple perspectives, and encourages social action and transformation. critical literacy scholars (edelsky, 2006; lewison, leland, & harste, 2008; janks, 2010; shannon, 2011) understand that literacy is not located solely in issues of reading and writing print-based text, but that teachers prepare students to develop literacy practices that engage them in critically examining their world and its assumptions about learning. by teaching from such a stance, students learn from their teachers to interrogate the relationship between language and power, and encourage them to engage in social action to promote social justice. for edelsky (2006), critical literacy entails transformative work that aims to change, or transform, what schools produce. shannon (2011) refers to this as reading with agency, and reading towards democracy. janks (2010) suggests that critical literacy has four orientations: dominance, access, diversity, and design. these orientations take seriously the relation between power and language in literacy education in terms of “maintaining and reproducing relations of domination” (p. 21), and assume that although access to the dominant forms of language is critical, such access sustains language’s power and produces inequitable social relations. diversity, janks argues, is situated not only in social and cultural interactions, but also in discourses that are “linked to wide range of social identities and embedded in diverse social institutions” (p. 23). as people engage in new discourses they acquire new dispositions and alternative ways to understand their ways of being in this world. janks (2010) suggests that design positions people to draw and select from the many resources to construct, interpret, and generate meanings. critical literacy scholars argue that teachers must prepare students not only to read and write, but to develop literacy practices that engage them in critically examining their world and its assumptions about learning, interrogating the relationship between language and power, and engaging in social action to promote social justice (lewison, leland, & harste, 2008). the lead author, a long-standing critical literacy scholar, has worked with a team of graduate students on gclr to understand, critical spaces for critical times 51 design, and organize the project’s activities around a critical literacy framework. as a critical literacy project, gclr attempts to open up dialogic space to anyone who has access to the internet, and provides an opportunity to dialogue with others, pose questions, and to offer alternative perspectives on literacy education and research. from our own work with gclr, we know that when an open and critical space is provided for literacy teachers and researchers to engage with others about issues that matter to them, spaces that transcend geographic boundaries, the potential for transformation of their practice and influence on their students is great. further, with ongoing professional development, educators can expand their students’ repertoire of literacy practices, and provide spaces for them to design and develop projects grounded in their own life experiences. such experiences may contribute to changing inequities in the community and beyond (janks, 2010). cochran-smith, shakman, jong, terrell, barnatt, and mcquillan (2009) argue that teaching from such a critical stance takes on a social justice perspective in which teachers value interactions where they pose questions, and make decisions based upon how knowledge is constructed and interpreted, teaching strategies, skills, methods, and advocacy (e.g., students, community, colleagues). further, teachers think about their work and interpret what is going on in schools and classrooms. oer, oep and professional development: a review of literature without question, social media, mobile technologies, and new pedagogical formats have transformed and significantly influenced how we learn and how we access learning. in a highly connected and diverse world, people from urban to remote areas are establishing new skills, values, and practices in response to changes in life, especially in light of new and emerging technologies. according to internet world stats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm) as of december 31, 2013, of the over 7.25 billion people living in the world, 2,802,478,934 use the internet. since 2000, usage across all continents has increased 676.3%. according to bhavnani, chiu, janakiram, & silarszky (2008), although many in developing and remote areas of the world do not have access to laptops or desktop computers, they are increasingly accessing learning materials through mobile devices, and obtaining learning materials wirelessly anytime and anyplace. further, they are bypassing the wired products in favor of wireless access. in bouchard’s (2011) perspective, new and emergent technologies are shaping and being shaped by how people interact and engage with others virtually, and position knowledge as fluid, multi-dimensional, and immediate. from an educational standpoint, institutions that rely on face-to-face engagement (e.g., universities, trade schools, k-12 schools) no longer “own” learning (kop & fournier, 2010), and oer are increasingly becoming the way to access and download learning materials. initially, the concept of open educational resources (oer) was introduced in 2002 by the unesco forum (2002) who characterized oer as “free access” enabled by “information and communication technologies” and for “noncommercial purpose” (unesco, 2002, p.24). oer make “high-quality educational material freely available worldwide in many languages” (keller & mossink, 2008, p. 13). other scholars like hylén (2006) and wiley (2006) have attempted to define oer in the literature, focusing on its nature of challenges, while others situated oer critically in educational practices (andrade et al., 2011; ehlers, 2011; havermann, 2011; hockings, brett, & terentjevs, 2012). http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats.htm 52 global education review 2(3) hylén outlined several challenges of oer, including lack of awareness of copyright issues, quality assurance and sustainability. first, researchers, teachers, authors and users are less prepared in accessing licensed digital materials than using physical products. second, although there is a preponderance of virtual resources, teachers, students and self-learners find it difficult to match resources to their expectation and relevance. third, what is the longevity of the available resources? hylén argued that oer should be seen “as a part of a larger trend towards openness in higher education including more well-known and established movements” (p. 49). wiley (2006) suggests that oer are defined broadly to include “curriculum materials like lecture materials as well as educational software like computer-based simulations and experiments” (p. 4). although oer have challenges, the more recent and significant question has moved from “where can i find open resources?” to “how should these resources be used?” in essence, oer have moved from issues of availability of resources to issues of practice (andrade et al., 2011; ehlers, 2011; hockings, brett, & terentjevs, 2012). andrade, et al., introduced the concept of open educational practice (oep) that aims to “provide educational opportunities for all citizens” (p. 11), and to extend the “focus beyond ‘access’ to ‘innovative open educational practices’ (oep)” (p. 2). that is, a more important consideration is to what extent will “access support educational practices and promote quality and innovation in teaching and learning” (ehlers, 2011, p. 2). the move from oer to oep begins with oer with an emphasis on how oer can be used, reused, shared, and adapted (ehlers, 2011). thus, scholarship around the pedagogies that use oer is warranted (gurell, kuo, & walker, 2010), and when situated within oep, oer have an “immense” potential to transform the global education landscape (olcott, 2012, p. 283). professional development is a critical necessity in today’s educational environment, and many institutions are struggling to provide appropriate and effective training and professional development (pd) opportunities for faculty and students (vu, cao, vu, & cepero, 2014). the literature in pd provides readers with numerous ways to integrate critical literacy into one’s practices (see for example, harste & albers, 2013; janks, 2010; lewison, leland, & harste, 2008; norris, lucas, & prudoe, 2012; vasquez, 2010; wohlwend, 2011). the aforementioned studies describe how educators can support a critical perspective in classrooms, and a number of excellent examples can be found within. however, we could find no literature that addressed open access professional development situated within a critical literacy perspective. online professional development has been around since the internet (donavant, 2009), and with on-demand access to learning materials, teachers are eager to access alternative and online resources to continue their learning. according to darling-hammond and richardson (2009), effective online professional development offers opportunities for thoughtful and sustained engagement in life-long learning, and a number of studies have been conducted to investigate this phenomenon. thomas’s (2010) dissertation study analyzed the perceptions of 50 educators regarding face-to-face and online professional development. she found that “instructors and online participants indicated that they preferred online professional development to traditional face-to-face professional development” (p. 105). this study also revealed that online professional development participants had an overall positive perception of the effects of the course on their teaching methods. critical spaces for critical times 53 in oer like gclr, albers, pace, and brown (2013), researchers interviewed speakers and participants to understand the challenges and affordances of participation n in web seminars. speakers found it challenging to follow chat comments/questions during their presentation, and two wished they “could see the audience faces.” for participants, web seminars afforded them “an awesome opportunity to hear from an expert,” open access professional development, convenience, and flexibility in terms of viewing live or archived seminars. rich (2011), in a study on webinar instruction, found that participants enjoyed being a part of web seminars largely due the “up-to-date” topics presented, convenience, and that “they learned just as much from the other attendees on line as they did from the presenters” (p. 87). further, in this mixed methods research study, rich found that participants enjoyed learning through technology, while two of the participants integrated webinars into their classrooms. other researchers, like rich, suggest that face-to-face professional development for many educators is nearly impossible due to costs associated with pd (odden, 2011). across studies, emerging themes indicate that online professional development involves opportunities for teachers to share their expertise and experiences, learn from others, and collaborate on real-world issues (albers, pace, & brown, 2013; bolt, 2012; laurillard & masterman, 2010). within the past ten years, the increasingly popular mode of delivery known as “blended learning” (also referred to as “hybrid,” “mixed,” or “combined”) has emerged as the dominant model for combining traditional and face-to-face models in online learning (alammary, sheard, & carbone, 2014; moskal, dziuban , & hartman, 2013). means, toyama, murphy, bakia, and jones (2010) conducted a meta-analysis of over 1,100 empirical studies and found that blended learning was more effective than either online learning or face-to-face. what this means for researchers and educators across the globe is that blended learning most likely will become the delivery choice for most courses in higher education (moskal, dziuban, & hartman, 2013). as an oer, gclr blends the best of both (e.g., live presentations, traditional talks, online methods that allow for interaction with the presenter and audience through chat, white board, emoticons, and discussion rooms, synchronous/asynchronous participation). in terms of web seminars as professional development for literacy teachers and researchers, and the focus of gclr, an increasing number of organizations and websites offer open access, quality professional development that have interactive or collaborative features (bruder, 2013). for example, the professional development builder provides downloadable modules on how to use primary sources for analyzing and teaching. the national science teachers association (nsta) learning center (learningcenter.nsta.org) features online 90-minute live seminars that allow participants to interact with various national experts, authors, and education specialists. the center for learning (www.centerforlearning.org) offers free webcasts, articles, and resources presented by renowned speakers. 0k2ask® (www.teacherfirst.com/0k2ask.cfm) provides sessions for self-directed teacher professional development and exploration. yet, as we have articulated above, although these are oer, it remains uncertain how these web seminars support the pedagogical practices of educators. further, from our search, we have not seen scholarship that addresses sustained quality web seminars as both oer and oep. global populations in increasing numbers are seeking out “on demand” knowledge related to their jobs/careers (van dam, 2012). we suggest the same is true of literacy researchers http://www.centerforlearning.org/ http://www.teacher/ 54 global education review 2(3) and educators. yet, in our search of the literature, we found that the large majority of the studies locate online delivery and design almost exclusively within the context of classroom disciplinary learning (see garcia & hooper, 2011; karchmer, mallette, kara-soteriou, & leu, 2005; lukinbeal & allen, 2007; morrison, 2010), commercial gain (berg, 2008), and business training models (van dam, 2012). further, little, if any, research exists on a study of how web seminars or webinars inform and impact a learning audience. more specifically, we found no research in the area of sustained open-access web seminars that focus around a discipline, in particular, literacy. our search found that organizations offer webinars, but are not sustained in idea or mission (ira, 2010). research about how participation in web seminars—especially those designed to support professional development, that are sustained, focused around a mission and goal—is timely and necessary (albers, pace, & brown, 2013), and can offer insights into open education resources that are high quality, interactive, and collaborative. further, research in this area may offer new possibilities for literacy research and practices by the very nature that they transcend boundaries (e.g., time, space, geography, populations) that otherwise might represent barriers (e.g., cost, travel, time commitment). further, to our knowledge, we know of few studies that investigate the role of oer as professional development or its impact. to this end, a study of an oer project that supports practical ideas, or oep, is warranted and necessary to understand to what extent oeroep offer an alternative approach to professional development that maintains quality and contextualized instruction for educators. and even more critical is the theory that underpins these resources and the practices they embody. gclr as opdp figure 2. gclr model of open professional development and practices resource critical spaces for critical times 55 we position gclr as both an oer and oep, but with a unique focus on professional development, or what we call an opdp, open professional development and practices resource, a project that draws from the best of open educational resources and open education and practice. that is, as an opdp resource, professional development relies on access to open resources, but gclr adds the professional development component that applies to practices, both research and teaching. (figure 2). as an open access resource that values pedagogy and practices, gclr has four critical dimensions to support professional development: 1) theory informs practice; 2) willing participation; 3) sustainability; and 4) interactivity and interaction. while these are our initial thoughts around this model, at the moment of this writing, opdp reflects these dimensions, and recognizes the contributions of oep and oer as critical resources in professional development. as viewed through the model, gclr as an opdp is on-going and represented by parallel circles, with oer and oep running across the four dimensions and draws from both oep and oer characteristics: all are open access, offer resources for learning, and oep, like gclr, focuses on practice. within the opdp model, the focus is on open educational resources, practices, and professional development. open educational resources run as a thread through the gclr model of opdp. we draw from unesco’s definition (2002) to position gclr as an openaccess resource for those with internet access, delivered through information and communication technologies, and with no commercial purpose or gain. gclr, however, does situate itself within a definable theory (critical literacy), and as an open resource, is tailored towards those interested in classroom ideas and research grounded in this theory. open educational practice also runs as a thread through opdp. we draw from luke & freebody (1999)’s concept of teaching as a set of practices that are actually “done -performed, negotiated, and achieved in everyday classroom and community contexts, rather unlike psychological skills, schemata, competencies, and so forth” (http://www.readingonline.org/research/lukefr eebody.html). by professional development, we draw from wei, darling-hammond, andree, richardson, & orphanos (2009) to mean that professional development is an externallyprovided professional resource that contributes to educators’ and researchers’ on-going learning with intent to change their instructional and/or research practice to support student learning. although gclr might be perceived as a “one off” model of pd if someone attends only one seminar, we argue otherwise. with it’s grounding in theory and participants’ choice to attend one or all seminars linked by theory, gclr does not reflect the “drive-by workshop” (wei, et al.). we also suggest that the four dimensions situate gclr clearly within effective pd models—again, defined by wei et al.-and suggest the critical importance of situated, sustained, and interactive pd. we now turn to each of the dimensions of this model of professional development, and present data that we have collected and analyzed across the life of the project to highlight these dimensions. dimensions of gclr as opdp theory informs practice in order to be transformative, theory must inform practice which, in turn, informs theory. short, harste, and burke (1996) argue that theory guides the decisions educators make and which comprise their teaching practices. for educators, it requires conscious commitment to further learning, and understanding of how that learning can better serve their students. for us, the lynchpin in the success of gclr as an opdp 56 global education review 2(3) is a commitment to the theory that guides decisions around gclr, and actions that we take to reflect on gclr as an opdp. since online professional development is increasingly becoming the “norm” for educators, especially with budget-strapped school districts that require on-going learning (kohl, 2012), states like ohio offer, in lieu of face-to-face seminars, “high quality seminars” “at a reasonable cost” (p. 48). the focus of these seminars was to provide a “means of increasing skills and knowledge that were broad-reaching and geographically neutral” (kohl, p. 49). for us, seminars centered on “increasing skills and knowledge” are atheoretical, and that the taught skills and knowledge often are left uninterrogated especially in terms of practice, contexts and populations of students. further, professional development in this case is driven, in part, by consumerism. low-cost professional development will be attractive to teachers because of financial considerations, and not necessarily because of the content. as stated in gclr’s mission/aims page, “as an internet-based project, gclr is grounded in critical literacy…,” gclr as an opdp adheres closely to this theory, and recognizes that “diverse, multiple and global perspectives are vital resources for changing consciousness around literacy research and practice” (http://globalconversationsinliteracy.wordpress. com/gclr-mission-and-goals/). in terms of resources, practices, and professional development, gclr makes intentional decisions about speakers, their interest in critical pedagogy, and how the design of the seminar affords participants opportunity to ask questions of the scholar, and other audience members. careful selection of presenters and their work are critical decisions made by the gclr team when considering the link between theory and practice. to illustrate: each of the speakers presents her/his theory of learning alongside ideas for practice that leads to social action. thus, allan luke presented his four resources model, and followed this with examples of how canadian teachers were taking this model up in their practice. hilary janks discussed the four orientations of critical literacy, and shared how they could be implemented into practice by looking at bottled water as a social issue. audience members responded to these ideas in the context of their own practices, we argue that gclr is grounded theoretically, with speakers addressing issues around research and pedagogy, and that, therefore, participants understand this project as an on-going space of learning, and not just a “one-off” presentation by a scholar. gclr is online professional development in which participants are, as they themselves have explained, “very interested in learning more…” so much so that “[they’ll] be back….” for us, effective online professional development must live the theory that guides its mission and aims, be generative and situated, and design choices around the project’s theory. willing participation another dimension of an effective professional development project is that participants willingly take part in professional development. unlike traditional pd that mandates educators to attend and which is often decontextualized from the participants’ specific needs and interests, educators value choice in professional development that is situated in their own experiences (cochran-smith & lytle, 1999). gclr supports the desire to learn through an array of resources that are self-directed, and educators willingly participate. in our review of interview, survey, and chat data, we have found that several characteristics comprise how and why gclr attracts willing participation. first, gclr web critical spaces for critical times 57 seminars are disseminated through social networking sites including twitter, facebook, youtube, and professional organization listservs. those interested in gclr willingly participate in project announcements, responding with their thoughts, “looks like a great line-up [of speakers]!” “wow, what an amazing slate of speakers this year--gclr is becoming a must-see! congratulations!” as a “go to” site for professional development in critical literacy, participants attend willingly. second, through interviews, participants identified engagement in discussions with others across the world, open access, and disciplinary knowledge as reasons why they willingly participated in gclr seminars. one participant valued the invitation to participate in conversations with others across the globe: “to unite people of varying opinions and philosophical backgrounds. i think it’s a very noble quest to invite. i love the invitation so nobody is forced to do it. so you’re inviting teachers to join in in the conversations.” one participant shared, “i think, [gclr seminars] affirm my knowledge of certain aspects of literacy. it’s also just as empowering to know that there are teachers out there fed up with the whole assessment.” another participant, an educator, valued the opportunity to share an educational experience with her son who was studying to be a special education teacher: “i have a son who is just starting to learn about being a special ed teacher, so i told him about it, and i thought [gclr] would be good for him too. so my son and i watched it together which was pretty cool.” she continued to share the importance of gclr’s open access as a space to learn: “so, that’s another big benefit. most graduate courses aren’t open to a junior in college [her son] getting a teaching degree, so it was kind of cool that anybody at any level of education could get involved in [these seminars].” third, audiences willingly participate because of the speakers and their topics: i am very interested in critical literacy and in research that is transformative. personally, i grew up very middle class, caucasian, and in a homogenous population, community and school. my teaching experiences with marginalized groups of students…is where my passion lies. i saw that [hilary janks] was a speaker, and obviously her interests aligned with marginalized groups and [i wanted to know] what goes on in that area [south africa]. fourth, gclr provides participants with learning that is self-directed, accessible, transformative, and life long. as a teacher of literacy and drama, one participant shared that she was “a big fan of the presenters, so that was a treat to see both of them presenting and sharing ideas. i just had time, certainly, but the biggest thing is that always i’m a life long learner, so i’m interested in always connecting.” another participant particularly discussed how gclr seminars offered expertise that helped her find her “niche” and contribute to the scholarship of literacy: i taught for eleven years. i’m a firm believer that learning never ends and, if something strikes me as interesting, then i should jump at that opportunity, especially with something that is accessible, free, and fits into my schedule. so why not? i also am embarking on this journey of growing as a professional myself, and i need to find where my niche is. i really respect the individuals in the field that have the experience and have that knowledge. i hopefully will find that little niche where i’m going to fit into this big area. 58 global education review 2(3) these examples highlight how gclr, as an on-going opdp, supports participants’ selfdirected learning in which they willingly participate with others to engage in literacy discussions, feature speakers whose beliefs align with their own, and who see the seminars as contributing to their life-long learning which may lead to a transformation of their beliefs and/or practices. sustainability sustainability--as viewed through relevance, quality, and flexibility--is the third dimension of gclr as an opdp. hunzicker (2010) argues that “the most effective professional development processes for academics need to be ongoing, supportive, job-embedded, instructionally focused, and collaborative — and that to be effective and authentic, professional development must be seamlessly integrated with the activities of the academic” (as cited in higgins & harreveld, 2013, p.190). because of the voluntary nature of attendance and participation in gclr seminars, it is more likely that these seminars align with participants’ school and university professional development goals for educators. educators in schools generally are required to do pd to receive credit, and, certainly, teacher educators/researchers are expected to maintain a robust research and scholarly agenda, of which pd is one aspect. gclr offers a letter of attendance for educators to document their fulfillment of their pd requirement. for speakers, these presentations can be added to their curriculum vitas (cv), are publicized through the gclr website and youtube channel (which attracts a global audience), provides them an opportunity to share their new thinking, and (for some) helps them improve their skills in presenting in blended learning environments. other areas that contribute to sustainability are funding, support, and quality assurance (nikoi & armellini, 2012), to which we add “flexibility.” in previous sections, we have discussed the importance of the on-going component of this project, and here wish to emphasize that the seminars, by nature of their quality and flexibility, are critical to participants. speakers and participants both noted that issues of quality drive consideration of the extent to which a project is a “vital” and relevant space that brings together people with common interests. the quality of speakers and range of topics provides participants with choices as to which of the seminars suits their experiences, background, and teaching. speakers are invited based upon their research and commitment to the topic (in this case, critical literacy and education issues), which makes gclr a more sustainable venue for wider audiences. gclr covers a wider range of topics related to literacy practices and learning from l2 literacy practices to multimodal literacy practices. thus, audiences can widen their knowledge to various topics and learn from each other. to ensure the quality of seminars, the gclr research team schedules a “practice” session with the speaker. practice sessions provide a degree of assurance that the seminar goes smoothly, and that any technical problems that may emerge (always a concern in virtual teaching and learning) are ironed out in advance. speakers express necessity of the practice session in their preseminar interviews, and use this practice session as an opportunity to confirm everything they need for the live seminar. in previous sections, we discussed the quality and value of online pd about which participants spoke. in post-seminar interviews, all speakers spoke positively about the quality of gclr, and linked it to its democratizing and transformative potential, some examples: “i think it is critical, i think it is democratizing, i think it’s important, and i critical spaces for critical times 59 think it’s the way of the future. it’s democratizing in a sense that if [a speaker] someone knows is in michigan, this person might never hear him speak, and [the speaker] would have no opportunity to speak to [this person]. that is important to me.” “i think [gclr] is absolutely vital. i think all of the challenges that we’re talking about have to be on our agenda as problems to be solved. i think that it’s the most viable way to democratize education and to preserve the possibilities for real education because public education is being so corporatized, privatized, controlled. it’s in these spaces that parents, teachers, and kids will have some possibility to fight back.” “i think [gclr] is a great idea. your use of social media would be an interesting way of seeing how people who come [to these seminars] hang together across nations, not just individually, and what kind of common interests they have. because you have a curriculum in mind when you meet these people, [it is would be interesting to see] how participants might connect with them in ways that have them act differently or think differently.” as we found, key themes regarding the quality of online professional development relate to its relevance, and its near-seamless integration into educators’ everyday working lives. that these seminars are dialogic and open access supports a democratizing experience, one that may transform the way in which participants “act differently or think differently.” in addition to quality, issues of flexibility are very important to the success of gclr. wiley (2006) argues that in order to sustain an oer, participants must be able to find ways to continuously use and reuse these open resources. we agree, and also suggest that to sustain an online project, there needs to be great flexibility in its design and its use and reuse. in terms of its design, we found that flexibility in viewing is important to speakers and participants, whether it is from a desktop, laptop or mobile device. “on the go” professional development viewed through mobile devices enables participants who may be on the road to participate from their smart phones or tablets. unlike in face-to-face conference and/or professional development sessions where question/answer sessions or follow-up conversations are held after the presentation, in live seminars, participants can ask questions at the moment that a presenter makes a point, and through the chat feature, engage in “discursive asides” (albers, pace, & brown, 2013), or side conversations that audience members have in the moment around a speaker’s point. another aspect of flexibility is that speakers can deliver their talk from anywhere in the world, from home or while traveling. in turn, audience members can view seminars from the comfort of their home by themselves or with colleagues, or click on the blackboard app on their phones/ipad and watch. although time zones present challenges, seminars are scheduled on sunday, flexibly between 11:00 a.m. to 7:00 p.m. (eastern time/usa) to accommodate speakers in their area of the world (e.g., great britain, south africa, hong kong, australia). one speaker remarked in a post-seminar interview that “the nice thing about this kind of media is that we are in our own home. we didn’t have to travel with a lot of expense and effort, and we communicated with a lot of people in a lot of places so i think it is very good use of the media.” another increasingly significant aspect of flexibility in terms of its use and reuse is the launching of the gclr youtube channel. in six months, over 6000 people have viewed its seminars, or 60 global education review 2(3) approximately 1000/month. with time zones a challenge, archived seminars provide a needed flexibility for global audiences. in a recent study with korean teachers of english, odo et al. (2014) found archived seminars to be of great value to non-native english participants. they were able to rewind and view the seminar again in its entirety, and could translate english at their own pace. one of the participants remarked about flexibility in terms of pacing, convenience in watching multiple times, and translation: actually there is not really a difficulty in watching archived seminars. i think it would be harder if i participated in a live seminar. after all, live sessions need a time limitation for me, and it is hard to catch up once i lost the flow. this one, i can watch whenever i want, repeatedly. also, i don’t think i ever participate in social interactions, such as chattings, even in live seminars. so for me, the liveness doesn’t really matter. another participant commented on the challenges for her to read the powerpoint slides and listen to the presentations in english: [due to the quality of the sound], i stopped the archived web seminar and listened one more time. it is usually difficult to read and listen simultaneously. reading powerpoints while pausing the screen helped me understand the web seminar better. i don’t think current korean teachers would be able to fully understand the contents only by listening. i think the subtitles are necessary for korean teachers because they feel more comfortable with reading than listening. if they attend a live web seminar, they cannot pause the video and no subtitles are supported. in projects that are global in nature, and especially in consideration of non-native english speaking participants, archived seminars offer a flexible alternative to synchronous participation and professional development. archived seminars can be used and reused to ensure greater understanding of a speaker's ideas. interactivity and interaction wagner (1994) differentiates between interaction and interactivity. she suggested that “interaction functions as an attribute of effective instruction while interactivity functions as an attribute of instructional delivery systems” (p. 6). she further defines instructional interaction as “an event that takes place between a learner and learner’s environment and its purpose is to respond to the learner in a way intended to change his or her behavior toward an educational goal” (p. 9). for us, both operate in a symbiotic relationship and play an important part in gclr as an opdp. in terms of design, blackboard collaborate, the delivery system, provides participants with features that allow for interaction: chat, emoticons, hand raising, symbols, and white board. participants often use emoticons or hand claps to signal approval or connection to a point/statement made. such features provide opportunities for interaction, especially for those who may feel nervous about writing in the chat area. for us, interaction is an essential component in any learning process as it has the potential to change a person’s way of thinking and acting (shannon, 2011). it is one of the key components of good pedagogy not only in face-to-face communication but also in synchronous/asynchronous online education because it is the fundamental process for knowledge acquisition and the development of both cognitive and physical skills (baker, 1994). however, every interaction does not lead to increased learning. it has to be “meaningful critical spaces for critical times 61 interaction” (woo & reeves, 2007, p. 15) in the sense that it has to promote active learning, and enable active facilitation and higher order knowledge skills (muirhead & juwah, 2004). meaningful interaction is not just sharing personal opinions. instead, the interaction must stimulate the learners' intellectual curiosity, engage them in productive instructional activities, and directly influence their learning (woo & reeves, 2007). in gclr, how do we know that meaningful interaction occurs? or, how do we know whether interaction has affected learning? first, we know that learners communicate actively with various participants including speakers. the questions directed to the speakers are challenging. for example, one participant asked, “dr. street, what do you think about the international tests, such as pisa [program for international student assessment], which try to assess through an autonomous model the literacy "skills" of children in developing countries in order to suggest certain policies?” in another web seminar, a question was directed to speaker joyce king: “i would like for you to discuss why racism is not just an american problem but a global one.” other participants asked follow-up questions, “as a future educator, how do we go about rewiring young children's mindset on race, when they are raised in a home that disregards race?” while speakers cannot always address questions that arise in the moment, participants take it upon themselves to initiate an interactive discussion around such questions through discursive asides (albers, pace, & brown, 2013). examples: p1: i always use the term "enslaved africans" to humanize my ancestors and to never discount their experience and hard free labor...and i don't allow my students to use the word for the same reason. p2: how do we bring white educators to this critical conversation? there is a strong resistance and focus on colorblindness in white educators, mainly. how do we respond to the question (of white educators) [that] “we cannot simply talk about the 'victim' story, but move forward?” p3: the after effects of colonialism are still felt in many countries in the new world. p4: yes, there is so much more that could be said but time is insufficient to address the profoundness of the issue. there is racism in asia, africa, australia, canada, south america and so on. i would be happy to discuss the topic further with any of our [university] students and faculty. meaningful interactions and register situate participants’ experiences as central in the above exchange. p4 identifies racism as a “complex” issue, and encourages further discussion with others who might wish to come to a different understanding. p2 invites participants to consider issues of pedagogy as it relates to white educators. in terms of register, p1 capitalizes “always” to demonstrate a commitment to how particular words shape perspective. interactivity allows for meaningful interaction to occur; participants interact with the features of blackboard collaborate (e.g., chat, white board) to engage in conversation with each other. for interactions to be meaningful to participants’ thinking and practices, these interactions must be situated within the experiences of the participants, driven by the need to know and understand issues, and invite them to think and act differently. a second indicator for meaningful interaction in gclr seminars is that participants may face inevitable conflict situations that arise during discussions: during 62 global education review 2(3) one seminar, a participant commented: “about ccss [common core state standards, a model widely adopted or adapted in the united states]: it is the antithesis of teachers as professionals who fixate belief through inquiry, and builds on an unprofessional stance that teachers (not functioning as professionals) fixate belief through authority. it strikes me as horribly unethical and morally repugnant.” another participant responded: “in the test-crazed world of today, many questions kids are not asked on the tests really show if they understand strategies, not if they're readers. is there a way to prepare them for that which does not damage them as learners?” in such discursive asides, participants engage in meaningful, and at times, tension-filled interactions, by asking critical policy questions that address the conflicts around the status quo. in spite of the conflicts that are brought up, participants actively negotiate internally and socially to solve those situations. one seminar generated many thoughts regarding the ccss as participants commented that it restricts teacher and student creativity and is prescriptive and predictable. one participant responded, “i think interpretation has a lot to do with it. i taught ccss last year and i do not feel that it stifled my creativity (any more than any standards have).” across these discursive asides, participants do arrive at some common understanding about the issue: “i agree. this is our 2nd year and our administration seems to still support creativity within the standards.” meaningful interaction also occurs between participant and speaker, both through the talk and the question/answer session that follows: “your work has made quite an impact on my own work. thank you [dr. cambourne].” “this was a thought provoking talk. i've learned a lot from this series of lectures-and i value the interactive format. thanks again.” “i really enjoyed dr. cambourne's ideas as well as everyone's in the chat!! as a soonto-be teacher, i really enjoyed learning from all of you! as a space of interactivity and interaction, gclr as an opdp hosts events with the intention to transform behavior and perspective towards educational issues. with open access to seminars that invite interaction, participants learn with each other, from each other, and through each other. that is, sustained on-going quality seminars led by recognized experts, with opportunities for global participation and interactions, have the potential to shift perspectives, and move from discussion to individual or collective action. discussion and conclusion with internet access increasing at lightning pace, professional development in oer or other online venues is inevitable. online access and participation will become the new face-to-face “platform” to shift educators’ practices and their perspectives. in this section, we take up the question, so what is significant about participation in web seminars, and why should we take up the challenge to develop strong opdp projects grounded in theory and pedagogy? first, boundaries around where learning occurs are blurred. schools and universities no longer are the sole owners of learning and knowledge. professional conferences no longer hold propriety over hosting internationally recognized speakers. open educational resources, massive online open access courses (moocs), online universities, online degrees, online elementary, middle and high schools, critical spaces for critical times 63 youtube, and the internet, in general, continually feed people’s thirst for on demand learning. what is in question is to what degree do these resources offer the kind of quality assurance and authority that people wish in their learning? we suggest that gclr, as a theoretically grounded and sustained project, offers quality in terms of speakers, and of interaction. that is, participants attend this opdp because of who the speakers are, to interact with others to share ideas, to get pedagogical ideas for their own teaching, and to participant in a common community that supports holistic and critical literacy education and research. second, in this paper, we have identified four key dimensions of gclr as an online professional development and practice (opdp) project that we argue are necessary for effective professional development: must be grounded in theory which informs practice, has willing participation, has sustainability, and allows for interactivity and interaction. in the discussions around oer and oep, we want to emphasize the importance of the pedagogical implications when oer are meaningfully designed, organized, and delivered. as educators ourselves, we understand the need for professional development that is relevant and meaningful. however, in a world where knowledge is immediate and expected, it is critical that among all of the available choices for online educational resources that opdp projects like gclr are available at no cost, and are of high quality. with so many organizations and companies offering professional development seminars, in our review of these seminars, few are offered at no cost and of high quality (as defined throughout this paper) and even fewer are grounded theoretically with identifiable mission and aims. we argue that for online professional development to be effective and meaningful, it is critical that the content and the speakers are aligned within a set of beliefs based on theory, research, and practice. it is through beliefs that practices can be transformed, and learning made more meaningful. willing participation also adds to the effectiveness of online professional development. as adult learners mature, they become increasingly self-directed (ellinger, 2004). that is, they are self-motivated to learn, change, and improve (ellinger, 2004, p.160). online access to professional learning becomes an integral and central process in their lives (roberson, 2005). willing participation in gclr web seminars accounts for participants’ aspiration of learning and professional development, and participants tend to perform in an active, responsible, and determined manner. based on their motivation for selfdirected learning, participants’ willing participation is essential to maximize their learning, to lead their professional development, and to satisfy their needs as life-long learners. bayar (2014) argues that teacher perspectives and voices are important educational resources and the key components of effective professional development (p. 320). in this regard, some participants indicated that taking part in web seminars enabled them to discuss and question, extend their knowledge, apply their meaning to their own contexts, and establish local and global connections around issues of education. more than providing direct skills and resources for teaching, gclr provides avenues to inquiry through their willing participation; this then extends their perspectives. we also argue that sustainability requires both quality and flexibility in both the delivery format and the content of online professional development. speakers and participants appreciate that they can present and view, respectively, from anywhere, and that they can use a range of devices, standard and mobile, through which to participate (e.g., smart phones, 64 global education review 2(3) tablets, desktops). educators will continue to participate in professional development when seminars are relevant, engage them in highly interactive discussions with global others, and offer flexibility in terms of synchronous and asynchronous engagement. especially in a world with hundreds of languages, flexibility in online professional development design delivered in english is crucial for those who speak languages other than english. archived seminars that are open access resources provide just this alternative, and opens up pd to larger and more global audiences. as an open access professional development and practices project, gclr values the pedagogical knowledge that accompanies the expertise that a speaker brings to the seminars. not only must educators have pd opportunities that are open access, but ones that position them as knowledgeable professionals sharing insights, strategies and ideas with each other. gclr has, as part of its design, the interactive chat and question/answer sessions following a speaker’s presentation. such a design affords participants opportunities to discuss ideas, raise questions, and posit perspectives with both the speaker and with other local and global participants. discursive asides (albers, pace, & brown, 2013), as shown in the discussion around racism, allow for both theoretical and pedagogical ideas to emerge naturally and with immediacy. participants pose questions while others respond with ideas and thoughts about an issue. further, the live question/answer session after the presenter’s talk further builds upon the pedagogy reflected in the talk. for hilary janks, the issue of bottled water becomes a way to build inquiry into a literacy curriculum. for allan luke and peter freebody (1999), the four resources model becomes a way for educators to consider language not only as a linguistic resource but also as a critical discourse around which values and beliefs are expressed. this knowing provides educators/participants with ways of rethinking how they teach language, and ultimately how to transform their teaching practices. online professional development projects that feature international scholars whose work is grounded in critical literacy and learning are vital if we are to fulfill the promise of education to transform and make better practices around literacy instruction and research. participants whose perspectives engender a sense of social responsibility to educate children in equitable ways find spaces such as gclr encouraging. they find and communicate openly with likeminded others, ask questions, and seek out new ideas that will reshape their practices. critical spaces like gclr respect the hard work that educators do, and serve not only to maintain the professionalism of teachers, but also to ensure a meaningful learning experience for children across the world. as joyce king (2013) stated in her web seminar, “it’s in these spaces that parents, teachers, and kids will have some possibility to fight back.” note the authors would like to thank the national writing project for the support provided for this work. references albers, p., pace, c., & brown jr., d.w. 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(2007) meaningful interaction in web-based learning: a social constructivist interpretation. internet and higher education, 10, 15-25. about the author(s) peggy albers is a professor of language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. a. ram cho is a doctoral student in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. ji hye shin is a doctoral fellow in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. myoung eun pang is a doctoral student in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. tuba angay-crowder is a doctoral candidate in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. jin kyeong jung is a doctoral student in language and literacy at the university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa. dennis murphy odo is an assistant professor of language and literacy at pusan national university, republic of korea. christi l pace recently earned her ph.d. in language and literacy and is currently a part-time instructor at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. mandi sena is a doctoral student in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. sarah turnbull is a doctoral student in language and literacy at georgia state university, atlanta, ga. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/128515e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001285/128515e.pdf http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1714/2907 http://www.irrodl.org/index.php/irrodl/article/view/1714/2907 http://learningforward.org/docs/pdf/nsdcstudytechnicalreport2009.pdf?sfvrsn=0 http://learningforward.org/docs/pdf/nsdcstudytechnicalreport2009.pdf?sfvrsn=0 http://www1.oecd.org/edu/ceri/38645447.pdf 58 global education review 2 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dry, david d. (2015). dialogues among historians, social studies teachers, and students. [review of the book teaching recent global history, by diana b. turk, laura j. dull, robert cohen, and michael r. stoll]. global education review, 2 (1). 58-60. book review dialogues among historians, social studies teachers, and students “teaching recent global history” by diana b. turk, laura j. dull, robert cohen, and michael r. stoll by david d. dry teaching world history is a difficult task. the vast amount of material covered in the limited timeframe of one or two semesters makes engaging in deep analysis of different regions while crafting a coherent structure to discuss the world as a whole challenging. the situation is complicated further by the fact that students often enter the course with little relevant background knowledge, and that teachers, often narrowly trained in particular historical fields, must tackle material in which they have received little formal training. the authors of teaching recent global history have crafted a useful text aimed at enabling middle and high school educators to surmount these difficulties so they can help students “connect with and deeply understand key events and trends in recent global history” (ix). with one thematic chapter and the remainder focusing on the twentieth century history of a world area/topic, the book is divided into seven chapters focusing on africa, asia, latin america, the middle east, the soviet union and eastern europe, war crimes in the twentieth century, and the us and the world. while most chapters focus on a world region, core themes are identified within each chapter which transcend the regional level and tie the developments in one area into a framework of events happening around the world. as the book’s subtitle—dialogues among historians, social studies teachers, and students—indicates, the book sparks discussion between historians, who provide an overview of integral themes for each region based on recent scholarly work, and teachers, who develop and implement innovative lesson plans to convey those core concepts. each chapter starts with an interview with one or more prominent historians or journalists. the interview format is similar for all chapters and begins with dispelling “common misconceptions” and generally proceeds with a discussion of central historical themes, the most useful chorological structure, and sources or figures instructors might look to in developing dialogues among historians 59 an understanding of the region in question. the interviews are the most compelling portion of book and distill complicated changes in the historical understanding of a region’s place in world history into a set of coherent themes and trends. the heart of the book is the essay section following each of the interviews. groups of secondary school instructors from different schools, most located in new york state, worked in concert to craft teaching units consisting of a number of individual lessons on the basis of the “enduring understandings” and “essential questions” elicited from the interviews. the essay provides a start-to-finish teaching narrative describing the planning, implementation, and results of the teaching units developed. in these essays, the secondary school educators describe any problems they encountered and the successes and shortcomings of the lessons they developed. innovative teaching strategies employed include a material culture comparison of kitchens in the cold war era ussr and us, a debate on who is to blame for current problems in africa, and an examination of us war crimes at no gun ri during the korean war using recently disclosed primary source documents. teaching recent global history is not a stand-alone guide for teaching twentieth-century history, nor does it purport to be. to teach a world history class, much more than the unit lessons outlined in this book will be required. however, the interviews and unit plans contained in the book are a useful treasure trove of lesson ideas, connecting themes, and possible frameworks through which to navigate teaching the expansive topic of world history. the scholars interviewed, and the lesson plans derived from those interviews, provide a possible approach to understanding these regions and their place in the world. although many different approaches are conceivable, the assortment of themes highlighted in the interviews preference political, economic, and military activities as the guiding themes at the expense of discussions of gender, the environment, technological change, and culture, which are conspicuously marginal. middle and secondary school educators will find the lesson ideas included practical and directly applicable to the classroom, and world history instructors at all levels, including college and university professors, will find illuminating insights contained within the interviews. the book is geared toward instructors in the united states, and the book is at its best when bringing forth themes that challenge notions of american exceptionalism, common american stereotypes of muslims and the arab world, and america’s mixed track record with regard to war crimes and spreading democracy around the globe. thus, us history is placed in the context of world events, instead of being positioned as the exception or separate from the rest of the world. overall, teaching recent global history provides practical and engaging approaches to teaching this difficult to navigate field of historical study. the interviews, unit lessons, primary and secondary resources, and synthesis of regional studies with comparative analysis provided in each chapter make the book an excellent companion text for seasoned instructors and those new to teaching world history. “teaching recent global history: dialogues among historians, social studies teachers, and students.” by diana b. turk, laura j. dull, robert cohen, and michael r. stoll. new york: routledge, 2014. isbn: 978-0-41589708-2 about the authors diana b. turk is an associate professor of social studies education and the director of the social studies education program in the department of teaching and learning at new york university’s steinhardt school of culture, education, and human development. 60 global education review 2 (1) laura j. dull is an associate professor and the coordinator of the graduate secondary social studies program at the state university of new york at new paltz. robert cohen is a professor of history and social studies in new york university’s steinhardt school of culture, education, and human development and an affiliated member of new york university’s history department. michael r. stoll is an instructor of education at william jewell college in liberty, missouri and a former high school social studies teacher and educational consultant. about the reviewer david d. dry is a history instructor at asheville-buncombe technical community college in asheville, north carolina and a former high school teacher. 34 global education review 3(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tomal, daniel r. & grant, cynthia (2015). private cloud communities for faculty and students. global education review, 2(3). 34-45 private cloud communities for faculty and students daniel r. tomal concordia university chicago cynthia grant university of colorado-denver abstract massive open online courses (moocs) and public and private cloud communities continue to flourish in the field of higher education. however, moocs have received criticism in recent years and offer little benefit to students already enrolled at an institution. this article advocates for the collaborative creation and use of institutional, program or student-specific private cloud communities developed as a way to promote academic identity, information dissemination, social discourse, and to form a bridge between faculty, administration and students. concrete steps to build a private cloud are described. placing a greater emphasis on meeting the needs of enrolled students versus engaging the masses in a mooc for “edutainment” purposes is recommended. keywords cloud, online learning, learning platforms, educational technology, technology instruction, virtual communities, cloud computing moocs versus private cloud communities according to the educause center for applied research, students expect their instructors to use technology in the learning process and believe technology is “critical to academic success” (dahlstrom 2012, p. 19). however the time, resources, and energy required for these basic supports are limited. institutions must be strategic about whether and how they deliver information to paying students, as well as to those who may access academic resources at no charge. the delicate balance of public versus private access to higher education requires strategic pedagogical investments by academic institutions. public and private cloud communities, including massive open online courses (moocs), continue to flourish in the field of higher education (glancy, et al., 2013; mazoue, 2013). a variety of open online courses have attracted students from around the world to allow convenient and low-cost means to access education. many of the top universities have introduced open-education and allowed the sharing of intellectual content (mazoue, 2013). yet moocs have been receiving criticism in recent years. there is greater ______________________________ corresponding author: daniel r. tomal, college of graduate and innovative programs, concordia university chicago, 7400 augusta st., river forest, il 60305 email: daniel.tomal@cuchicago.edu mailto:daniel.tomal@cuchicago.edu private cloud communities 35 awareness of the difference between the “edutainment” associated with a mooc, and the experience of demonstrable learning that takes place in a higher education classroom with students who are aiming to attain a degree. moocs offer a public access platform to deliver pre-recorded information in an online format to thousands of people at the same time. the median average enrollment in a mooc is 42,844 students (jordan, 2014), while the commonly cited completion rate of all students who enroll in a mooc is less than 10% (rivard, 2013). these public access courses are often created by an institution’s academic “celebrity” (shea, 2014) or “superprofessor” (rees, 2013), and draw non-academic students who often already hold a college degree. these “courses” do not function as a true college level course (i. e. one that is carefully connected to a systematic development of student learning outcomes), but may be a way to market an institution. despite the current trend in open online course delivery, many institutions (especially those who would be unable to attract “masses”) do not need a mooc, at least not as it currently stands as a showcase for upper tier institutions with ample funding to support its creation, marketing, and implementation. additionally, students who are already enrolled in higher education rarely benefit from them. a mooc seldom offers course credit or an incentive for participation among students who are already enrolled at a higher education institution. for students who are paying for their education with the goal to graduate with an academic degree, a private learning community that is tailored to their needs may be a much better fit to aid their experience. the use of private cloud communities in higher education is a pedagogical resource that can be designed and implemented based on the needs of the institution, a specific educational program or track, or target population of students. unlike a public community that is an open access online resource, a private cloud operates within a firewall and offers a more intimate way for students to build a social connection. the critical nature of social connection in an online community is well documented in higher education. increased engagement in learning occurs through online connections between students and faculty when there is a shared intellectual pursuit (lambert & fisher, 2013). benefits include academic success, retention (boston et al., 2009) and decreased social isolation (delahunty, verenikna, & jones, 2014). the content and management of this type of online community is privately owned and managed (in this case, by the academic institution). a private cloud community can take many shapes. examples may include a program facebook page, a linkedin group for a college within an institution, or a wiki for a course. one useful way to design and implement a cloud is through the use of password-protected online resources available only to enrolled students. we propose the creation of a private cloud as a way to promote academic identity, information dissemination, social discourse, and to form a bridge between faculty, administration and students. the use of online platforms is the predominant medium for disseminating information to a wide group of stakeholders in higher education. historically, traditional online technologies have been dependent on digital experts with coding and web-creation expertise. however, the current era of web technologies are collaborative, user-friendly, and typically involve combined resources across disciplines. thus, the dependence on technological experts to create a web page is diminishing. table 1 reflects the transition from traditional technologies to the current landscape of online pedagogies now available to academic institutions. 36 global education review 2(3) table 1 transitions to current online technologies in higher education traditional technologies current online technologies required technological and web design expertise requires minimal involvement by information technologies staff individual expert input collaborative expertise copyrighted content and process open source options high cost low to no cost content driven by administrators student and program based content with this model, greater emphasis is placed on meeting the needs of enrolled students, as opposed to attempting to engage the masses in a mooc for edutainment purposes. it allows us to shift focus from the academic publicity attached to moocs, to resources that can be used to increase the responsibility of education management from the student to the institution. private cloud communities can be created on a small or large scale. for example, an institution may decide to design a private virtual community for each academic major in an undergraduate setting or for student populations such as veterans or parenting students; masters-level programs may elect to create a cloud community for program concentrations, while doctoral programs might use private clouds for the dissertation experience. each of these clouds would contain different content and would be aimed at a different target audience, yet their development and functioning would have similar qualities, as described here. step one: identify technological supports available from the institution at most institutions, private cloud communities are a fundamental aspect of learning management systems (lms). the lms can house the development and delivery of a cloud community for students and is the starting point for building this resource within an institution. each lms requires a systems administrator to be the lead developer, designer, and supervisor of the system. in most cases the systems administrator will be the point of contact and gatekeeper for building a cloud community. therefore, it is imperative that the person spearheading a cloud initiative establish a relationship with this person prior to moving forward with discussions at the institutional level. the systems administrator is responsible for providing technical leadership and operational support for the learning management system, including system configuration, content migration and end-user support. the administrator interfaces directly with the learning management system parent company (e. g., blackboard, sakai, moodle, canvas, desire2learn) and campus stakeholders to define and ensure successful technical implementation and delivery of information to students and faculty. this person is a technical resource who is most likely responsible for developing strategies for evaluating, integrating, private cloud communities 37 and supporting web technologies such as a cloud community. to begin the exploration of this process, the program leadership team might first meet with the lms systems administrator to discuss the idea of how to deploy academic content to degree seeking students, regardless of whether students are attending classes online or face-toface. due to the prevalence of lms use, using the existing platform that is already in place for 91% of institutions in america is an obvious starting point. however, it is also possible to build publicly accessible virtual communities in other open source cloud based tools, such as google drive, box, or microsoft onedrive. the systems administrator can meet with faculty to brainstorm preliminary ideas regarding what one hopes to accomplish pedagogically using technology. in the beginning stages of planning, the phrase “cloud computing” may a foreign concept to the team, which will likely be comprised of faculty who are unfamiliar with instructional technology. however, the systems administrator should have a good grasp on how to explain the availability of information technology resources with the campus. step two: identify costs (if any) to establish a virtual cloud community within the lms there is a fair amount of diversity in the availability, performance, and reliability of course and learning management systems used in higher education. yet, regardless of the system selected for use at a particular institution, lms platforms are universally flexible, customizable to the needs of the institution, and affordable. learning management systems operate using a secure password-protected internet connection. in most cases, registered students must login through the institution’s website to access their account. a private cloud can be designed specifically within an institution so that it is only available to designated users. since information is stored in ‘the cloud,’ there are no hardware or server maintenance costs, making the service a sound, strategic pedagogical investment for institutions to adopt. learning management systems are reported to be easy to manage and require less overhead expense to administer. many do not charge fees on a per user basis (harrison 2012), making it affordable to both large and small institutions. in some cases, the lms may charge for the add-on packages, such as those allowing for synchronous, recordable video chats. while these features are highly beneficial, they require a more advanced, time-consuming level of interactivity and should only be considered if funds are available. for institutions that already have an lms in place, there is likely to be no additional overhead cost related to the use of the existing platform given that most of the major vendors already have this option built into the lms package used by the institution. thus a project such as this is likely to be administratively approved due to the lack of additional operating expenses. however, if an institution must invest in purchasing add-on capabilities to create a virtual community in an existing lms, or if human resources (i.e. the systems administrator) must be devoted to build the community, a costbenefit analysis of the development of the cloudbased community would be helpful to make a case for adding this feature (see table 2). private cloud communities 38 table 2 cost-benefit analysis of a private cloud-based community costs benefits d ir e c t t a n g ib l e 1. equipment (hardware, software) 2. communication to students and faculty 3. project development a. internal staff b. consultants c. expenses for data entry 1. reduced costs of leadership time 2. better coordination of learning experience 3. reduced operating costs (e.g., decreased time spent by administrative offices providing forms and explaining procedures) 4. expanded pedagogical coverage in d ir e c t t a n g ib l e 1. anxiety related to use of information technology 2. faculty time spent providing resources to build cloudcommunity 3. necessary updates to cloud-based resource database 1. improved institutional identity 2. greater clarity for candidates and faculty regarding the program process 3. increased communication across institutions 4. nurture relationships 5. expand development of independent research 6. universal of information to all students and faculty step three: develop the homepage for the cloud community once administrative approval has been granted to develop the cloud, faculty and students should think through key content that could be included on the program or student specific cloud community. first and foremost, focus on the homepage to ground the audience and to set the tone and identity for the private community at the institution. a video welcome is strongly recommended to bring to life the web-based connection to leadership within the program or undergraduate and/or graduate school. the video clip should be short and offer an introduction to the key faculty within the program and to orient the viewer to the cloud community. the institution may have audiovisual services available on campus to assist, or faculty can record brief, professional introductory clips using programs such as windows live movie maker or imovie. most smartphones allow for the creation of videos that can be uploaded to youtube and then inserted on the homepage. alternately, consider posting faculty profiles and photographs of key people involved with students. the ability to “see” program, departmental faculty and administration is an easy way to help nurture relationships through web technology. a well-developed private cloud may even have student specific introductions to foster student-level connections. these steps help personalize an academic experience in a way that cannot be accomplished in a mooc. contact information is a necessity and can all be placed in a column on the home page. private cloud communities 39 students and faculty should know exactly where to call, where to click, and where to go for administrative issues relative to the scope of the cloud; this may include program advising, financial aid, and registration information. some lms platforms will connect directly to registration and email systems so that users can more readily access these services from the cloud. if real-time chat is available through the lms, consider posting a link to “chat live” with program advisers or faculty during certain business or office hours. faculty do not need to be tethered to their computer screens during this time, but can have notifications sent to their smartphones or instant message alerts to let them know someone would like to connect with them. in most cases these chat sessions can be recorded and archived for future student use. these connections offer personalized support to registered students, with the potential for improving their connection to an institution. documents containing frequently asked questions (faq’s) are helpful to post on the home page. for example, the development of faq information sheets for topics in a doctoral program such as the comprehensive exam, elements of the dissertation proposal, and graduation requirements can be posted. this can help build a community of learners and support open sharing across the institution and community. other topics might include writing samples, student counseling resources, and program-specific commonly asked questions. announcements are another logical category to place on the home page for the cloud. the nature of cloud-based computing is that text, documents, rss feeds, and other media sources can easily and regularly be updated or replaced. announcements could contain realtime news regarding students who have successfully completed work, received awards or recognition, secured employment, or acceptance into advanced graduate programs. cloud communities that are housed through the institution’s lms are password-protected and offer a greater level of security and privacy than social media outlets. thus, the community cloud is an excellent place to promote accomplishments of students while they are still connected to the institution. similarly, newsletters, bulletins, or blogs related to an institution, program, or college would be other appropriate documents or links to post on the home page. of added benefit, the very nature of using web-based links on a cloudbased virtual community is that any time public websites are updated (i.e., a departmental blog or website), the link within the cloud will automatically update as well. step four: develop an organizational plan for the cloud the homepage serves as a landing page for basic information and contacts related to the program of study or student population. begin to think about categories of information to include in the cloud-based community. in most lms platforms, these categories will serve as a table of contents or navigation page for the user. each cloud community will have different content and organizational categories. a sample list of categorical tabs for a cloud designed for veteran students is listed in table 3 alongside a potential organization for doctoral students. 40 global education review 2(3) table 3 sample categories for cloud tabs based on targeted student community student veteran cloud categories doctoral program cloud categories student home page student home page veteran education benefits writing resources the yellow ribbon program research help student veteran groups dissertation proposal advising for military and veteran students program timeline counseling resources program forms writing lab comprehensive exam math lab dissertation defense additional tabs can be added or rearranged by the systems administrator or the instructional designer of an institutionally based cloud-community. experienced faculty members know all too well the repeated questions and confusion experienced by students, whether related to academic advising and graduation requirements, the transition from military to college life, the comprehensive exam and more. the importance of developing a strong organizational plan of information to be included on the cloud is intended to decrease the burden placed on faculty so that a large amount of reliable, useful information can be disseminated and shared with others. step five: gather materials for the cloud one of the great benefits of developing a virtual cloud community is the ability to filter relevant, timely, and useful information that can be shared among faculty and students in one collegial place. an extensive, rich pool of information exists on the web that is waiting to be found. yet students may be unaware of these resources and need assistance in determining their reliability and relevance. faculty who provide materials for the cloud can guide students towards scholarly resources relevant to writing of papers, completing course assignments, and meeting program expectations. who can help build a cloud community? it would be best if one faculty member (preferably a program coordinator or department chair) is designated as the resource collector for the assembly of materials to be placed on the cloud. this person should be the point of contact for gathering materials, evaluating their appropriateness in relation to the content focus of the cloud community, to cull out duplicate submissions from various faculty members, and to serve as a point of contact for future requests to add resources. using the organizational plan developed in step four, determine who would be a good source for sharing information regarding each of the tabs to be included in the cloud database. program leaders may want to send out a group email to faculty, staff, and current students with an explanation of the purpose of a private virtual cloud community for the programs, and a list of the main categories. this email should include a request to share web-based links that may be useful for others to access or other personal materials they are willing to share. the email request to faculty should include the organizational plan of categories that will be used to create the cloud. request for best private cloud communities 41 practices, sentinel articles or references, helpful websites, video tutorials, or databases are recommended. faculty holds valuable expertise that can be used and shared by others to aid in the successful completion of a degree program. staff involved with writing assistance available at the institution, statistical tutoring, or programmatic issues are excellent sources of information and should be solicited for input as well. for example, the library or media center may have templates available to aid with writing issues; a tutoring center on campus may have decision trees available for choosing statistical tests needed when preparing graduate theses and dissertations. either of these institutionallybased resources can be disseminated to a much broader student base if they are posted on a cloud. since the cloud is private within the lms, the authors do not need to be concerned about the distribution of institution specific materials to non-registered students. current students can be an excellent source for sharing timely resources and materials that have been useful for their own academic journey—some of which may be unexpected and could possibly expand the predetermined categories. in one such case, students recommended sites for reference management software such as mendeley, end note, and zotero, that the leadership team had not previously thought to include. what to include in a private cloud community the database of information to be placed on the virtual cloud community will encompass a compendium of resources gathered by faculty, staff, and students—most of which will be directly linked to the resource itself that is available fully online to avoid copyright infringement. information to be included typically falls into three categories: programspecific forms, institutional resources, and webbased publicly available materials. program-specific forms are ideal materials to place on the cloud. documents of this nature may include forms for faculty and students relevant to a degree program such as contact or intake forms, enrollment or course completion forms, program sheets, and other administrative documents specific to the institution. if these forms are available on an institution’s main portal, the systems administration may be able to link the cloud to the portal so that any updates to the forms will automatically update on the cloud. using the cloud community to store program documents can reduce the amount of administrative time devoted to sending notices and paperwork to students and faculty. it also ensures that faculty and students will have access to the most current and necessary forms whenever they are needed. institutional resources are unique to each institution of higher education and to each department offering programs and degrees; they are also some of the most valuable resources available to students preparing term papers, theses and research papers. resources might be provided to students regarding the institution’s content and structure guide for theses and research papers, and/or a form-and-style guide specific to writing within a discipline. if these resources do not yet exist, links to academic and research writing guides and publications available online may be reviewed and selected as exemplars to provide direction for the student. content and structure guides are publicly available online and could be added to a cloudcomputing database of resources. some guides are generalizable and can be applied across disciplines. a web search for “guidelines for writing research papers and theses” yields many options available as a pdf. instructor-created resources and handouts that are typically distributed in person may be shared with a much broader audience in the cloud-community. private cloud communities 42 existing faculty-developed materials can be scanned and placed online, while still maintaining the integrity of the original author and affiliation with the institution. a final recommended institutional and discipline specific resource for the private cloud could be sample papers and work of recent students or graduates. for example, graduate level students’ manuscripts can often be retrieved through open thesis and proquest dissertations and theses, and can be extremely helpful for other graduate students to see examples of distinctive work completed by people who have recently graduated from the same program of study. similarly, course papers at the undergraduate level can offer scaffolded learning for diverse students to set minimum expectations at an institution. program directors or chairpersons may want to select a handful of exemplary papers or theses that can serve as a model for other students and post them with their author’s consent. standard practice at most graduate institutions is to have a public defense of the thesis or dissertation. universities that record thesis and dissertation defenses using web conference sharing programs can post webbased links to the defenses on the virtual cloud community to make them available for viewing at a later date. similarly, student-led meetings and organizations may opt to offer the meeting through a web-conferencing program to reach a broader or targeted audience. sharing a link on an internal, password-protected site expands access to these events and serve to introduce students to institutional processes and opportunities. depending on the source material gathered for inclusion in the cloud, additional sub-headings will naturally evolve to be listed under each categorical tab. for example, table 4 illustrates the possible expanded categories for a graduate-level cloud program. table 4 expanded graduate-level cloud categories home resources writing resources welcome institutional resources writing tools and tips introductory video sample forms institutional form and style guide program newsletter directories writing manuals program faq self-management resources literature review courses exam faq study skills resources citation resources department website learning resources writing term papers forms research help program support institution forms qualitative inquiry program guides department forms qualitative analysis recommended books program forms quantitative inquiry consultant database drop/add form quantitative analysis support group admission and completion forms mixed methods program requirements other resources sampling in research critical due dates program resources survey research tools matriculation sources institutional social media action research guidelines credit versus non-credit common literature resources program evaluation materials graduation support private cloud communities 43 how to make the cloud “live” for students and faculty once resources have been gathered, organized, and cataloged, the resource collector will need to re-establish contact with the institution’s systems administrator so that the technological aspect of building a cloud within the lms may begin. in most cases the system administrator will be responsible for the technology and structural framework of the cloud, while the individual responsible for the content will have access and training to maintain the information available on the virtual community. depending on the ease of use of the lms, it may be possible for the resource collector to upload web links and documents directly based on the materials shared by others involved in contributing to the virtual cloud-community. alternately, the resource collector may need to send all files and links to the system administrator to build the community. it is imperative for collaboration between the two parties in order to ensure that the desired pedagogical and academic purpose of the cloudcommunity aligns with the availability of technology in the learning management platform. checks and balances to make the cloud ‘live’ to students and faculty include:  are directions available for how to access the virtual cloud-community for the institution?  is the tab or the link in the lms for the virtual cloud-community accessible through all web browsers?  are all web links functional?  do all documents and pdfs open correctly?  does the home page set the intended tone of the virtual cloud-community?  are categories efficiently organized?  should there be consolidation of categories or expansion of topics and headers?  are there a variety of media on the virtual cloud-community to make it appealing to users? (e.g. videos, tutorials, rss feeds, word/pdf documents, photos) once these items are verified, it is time to make the community available to intended users within the institution’s lms. as previously mentioned, administration will need to determine the audience for who should have access to the community. since this article focuses on a virtual cloud-community that is built into the institution’s lms, and since all faculty and candidates have access to the lms, administration will need to make decisions about who will be allowed to access the community. for example, if the cloudcommunity has been created strictly for undergraduate students who are parents, a selfidentified group of students may be granted access, perhaps through the approval of a group moderator. depending on the purpose and intended audience of the cloud community, some institutions may choose to limit access to certain groups of faculty or students. these administrative decisions need to be clearly communicated to the systems administrator who will likely have the capability to control access to the cloud-community. administrators involved in programs may want to send out a brief email explanation of the cloud to eligible student populations, and a separate email announcement to eligible faculty. a well-written announcement might include a screen shot of how to access the virtual cloud community if it is embedded in the lms, contact information for the moderator, or a hyperlink to the community itself. maintaining the community the value to the institution of the creation and use of a virtual cloud-community to support undergraduate and graduate students and faculty working together cannot be underestimated. the infusion of available private cloud communities 44 technology to support students provides an easy access, cost-efficient, helpful portal into the world of the academic experience. the initial implementation process includes the collection and culling of appropriate web-based resources and documents. yet in practice, this process becomes an on-going activity as the community expands and contracts predicated upon the needs at the time, updating of the links and webinars, as well as a periodic “cleaning” of the existing cloud framework. new, up-to-date, useful resources should be added regularly to a cloud to maintain student interest and ensure the accuracy of content. the resource collector should be mindful of the need to continually add and update materials to the cloud-community. in some cases faculty who did not previously contribute to the development of the cloud may be active users and have excellent suggestions for items and web links to be added. given the web-based nature of a virtual cloud-community, one can anticipate that web links provided by those who helped build the cloud may change or result in an error message. it is pivotal to the success and sustainability of the community that someone at the institution regularly verifies all sources to be sure links are functional. a cloud containing broken, nonfunctional links will result in decreased usage by those who need it the most. preventative measures need to be in place to continually monitor and update content on any web-based resource such as a cloud community. once the managed institutional networks and resources on the cloud are in place, a series of live or virtual sessions with faculty can acquaint them with the cloud community and its content. it is imperative for faculty to “buy in” to the usefulness and importance of the virtual cloud in order for the utility of the resource to be passed on to students. faculty need to know how to access the community within the lms, how to contribute, and how the community can be used in the management of academic work. similar applications through detailed instructions and announcements to targeted student populations are a must in infusing the positive attributes of the cloud community and its essential components for academic success. with the identification and use of appropriate resources and institutional supports, the virtual cloud-community will function with little maintenance, low overhead costs, and great benefit to faculty and students in a program. ongoing evaluation of its usage or non-usage, and specific academic content should be shared across the interested academic partners (faculty, students, the resource collector and systems administrator) for ease of accessibility, content improvement and validity, and whether or not it has made a difference in the academic lives of students. conclusion private virtual cloud-based communities provide a means for institutions to consolidate and standardize information for registered students to help them manage their course work and receive support. the virtualization of resources may help reduce confusion and uncertainty to students and faculty negotiating the open-access experience. the ability for institutions to offer clear information to students all in one place may contribute to improved quality assurance of the learning experience. most importantly, the virtual cloud-community offers a benefit for students to receive program specific support and an informative technological connection to their institution connection, all of which may help promote student success. references abramovich, s., schunn, c. & higashi, r. m. (2013). are badges useful in education? it depends upon the type of badge and expertise of learner. educational technology research and development, 61(2), 217– 232. http://dx.doi.org/10.1007/s11423-013-9289-2 allen, i. and seaman, j. (2007). online nation: five years of growth in online learning. babson survey private cloud communities 45 research group. needham, ma: the sloan consortium. allen, i. and seaman, j. (2011). going the distance: online education in the united states, 2011. babson survey research group. retrieved from http://www.onlinelearningsurvey.com/reports/goin gthedistance.pdf boston, w., diaz, s., gibson, a., ice, p., richardson, j., & swan, k. (2009). an exploration of the relationship between indicators of the community of inquiry framework and retention in online programs. journal of asynchronous learning networks, 13(3), 67-83. carey, k. (2012, april 8). a future full of badges. chronicle of higher education, 58(32). dahlstrom, e. (2012). ecar study of undergraduate candidates and information technology, 2012. louisville, co: educause center for applied research. retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ecar delahunty, j., verenikna, i., & jones, p. (2014). socialemotional connections, identity, belonging, and learning in online interactions: a literature review. technology, pedagogy & education, 23(2), 243-265. di pierro, m. (2007). excellence in doctoral education: defining best practices. college candidate journal, 41(2), 368-375. glancy, d. forsey, m, and riley, m. (2013). the pedagogical foundation of massive open-online courses. peer-review journal of the internet, 18(5) 9-12. harrison, j. (2012). all learning management systems are not created equal. interactyx limited. retrieved from http://interactyx.com/sociallearning-blog/all-learning-management-systemsare-not-created-equal/ jordan, k. (2014). initial trends in enrolment and completion of massive open online courses. international review of research in open and distance learning, 15(1), pp. 133–160. lambert, j., and fisher, j. (2013). community of inquiry framework: establishing community in an online course. journal of interactive online learning, 12(1). mazoue, j. (2013). the mooc model: challenging traditional education. educause review online. mell, p. and grance, t. (2011) the nist definition of cloud computing. special publication 800-145. retrieved from http://csrc.nist.gov/publications/nistpubs/800145/sp800-145.pdf national council of professors of educational administration (eds.) (2007). the handbook of doctoral programs: issues and challenges. connexions: houston, tx. ostriker, j., holland, p., kuh, c., and voytuk, j. (editors). a data-based assessment of research-doctorate programs in the united states. national research council. national academies press: washington dc. rees, j. (july 25, 2013). the mooc racket. future tense: the slate group. rivard, r. (march 8, 2013). researchers explore who is taking moocs and why so many drop out. insider higher ed. shea, c. (april 14, 2014). the new academic celebrity. the chronicle of higher education. smith, s., salaway, g., and borreson caruso, j. (2009). ecar study of undergraduate candidates and information technology, 2009. boulder, co: educause center for applied research. retrieved from http://www.educause.edu/ecar tsai, c., and shen, p. (2014). do open educational resources and cloud classroom really7 improve students’ learning? international journal, 10(1), 89-96. walker, g., golde, c., jones, l., conklin bueschel, a., and hutchins, p. (2007). the formation of scholars: rethinking doctoral education for the twenty-first century. jossey-bass/carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching: indianapolis, in. about the authors daniel r. tomal, ph.d., is distinguished professor of leadership at concordia university chicago. he has authored 19 books, consulted for many organizations, and was a former high school teacher, administrator, and corporate executive. he has testified before the u.s. congress and made numerous guest appearances on national radio and television shows, such as cbs this morning, nbc cover to cover, abc news, tom snyder, chicago talks, cnbc 700 club, and the joan rivers show. cynthia grant, phd, lcsw, at the time of this writing was chair and associate professor of the department of research at concordia university chicago. she is currently the quality improvement clinical manager at arapahoe/douglas mental health network in englewood, co and a lecturer in the school of education and human development at the university of colorado-denver. private cloud communities #3work34-35 private cloud communities #3work no footer welcome to the new international journal 8 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mel wermuth (2014). editor’s welcome to the inaugural issue. global education review, 1 (1). 8-9. editor’s welcome to the inaugural issue mel wermuth editor, global education review it is customary for the editor of a new journal to thank all of the people who helped to make the dream a reality, and this introduction is no different. without the generous help of literally dozens of people, global education review would not exist today. to them and for all of their help, i am grateful. first, thanks to the authors. authorship and publication is the lifeblood of academia, and “the coin of the realm” with respect to promotions and tenure. it is impossible to express in words the debt that we at ger owe to the authors who were willing to take a chance and submit their important work to a journal that had never published. i first suggested the idea of an open access on-line journal to al posamentier, dean of the school of education at mercy college. al’s advice, always very pragmatic, was “why don’t you announce it at a faculty meeting and see what kind of support you get?” the faculty was interested and ever since, al’s personal support has been unwavering. at the conclusion of that meeting, patrick mccabe approached me to say, “i want to help you.” patrick, then a new faculty member, had been associate editor at reading and writing quarterly for fifteen years and with his suggestions and guidance the form of the journal was developed: it would be an international, policy oriented journal, focused on timely topics in the field of education. using the broadest definition of “policy maker,” to include practitioners as well as academics and governing elite, was something of a stumbling block. the articles would have to be data based, but still readable enough to ensure access to the widest possible audience. we hope that you will agree that this challenge has been met. many meetings and conversations ensued with bruce cooper (fordham university) who wrote an introduction to this inaugural issue. thank you, bruce for asking, “what is it going to be about?” then suggesting the title, global education review. thanks, too, to the advisory board who graciously lent their names to this nascent journal, and who selflessly continue to provide support, advice, suggestions and access to their wealth of contacts: dr. maria-luise brownsteiner (university college of teacher education – lower austria), dr. bruce s. cooper (fordham university), dr. anton dobart (austrian ministry of education and culture), dr. curt dudley-marling (lynch school of education, boston college), dr. doris p. fromberg ( hofstra university), dr. r. douglas greer (teachers college, columbia university), dr. ulrike greiner (university college of education upper austria), dr. brigitte rollett (university of vienna), dr. james b. schreiber, (duquesne university), dr. ilse schrittesser javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/80') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/80') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/30') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/115') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/115') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/79') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/79') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/87') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/85') javascript:openrtwindow('http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/about/editorialteambio/84') editor’s welcome 9 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mel wermuth (2014). editor’s welcome to the inaugural issue. global education review, 1 (1) (university of innsbruck). special thanks to doug greer and curt dudley-marling, who gave generously of their time and answered countless questions over the past year and one half. recognition is due to the members of the review board for their timely recommendations and advice, which helps to ensure publication of high quality material. it goes without saying that no peer-reviewed journal exists without reviewers. and the quality of the articles that are published, of course, is dependent on the quality of the reviews. thanks, too, to the faculty of the school of education: the chairs, the theme editors, and the supportive faculty for their help, encouragement and advice every step along the way. tesse santoro of the mercy college libraries gave unstintingly of her time to help me to understand meta data, search engines, and data bases to ensure that global education review reaches the widest possible audience. finally, special thanks are due to erwin epstein, loyola university chicago (emeritus), past president of the comparative and international education society. one of the first questions that he put to me, in the beginning, when i reached out for help was, “what makes you think the world needs another education journal?” thank you, erwin, for putting us on the right track and helping us to answer that question. thank you, dear reader, for logging on and reading this journal. we at ger hope that you will agree that the world really did need another journal. about the author mel wermuth, ed.d., is assistant professor of education at mercy college, new york. john paul college: the professional renewal journey 129 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mundie, pauline & marr, robert. (2014). john paul college: the professional renewal journey. global education review, 1 (3). 129-134. john paul college: the professional renewal journey pauline mundie john paul college robert marr john paul college abstract john paul college, a k-12 school in queensland, australia, recognises the centrality of classroom teachers to the ongoing improvement of student outcomes. the college has implemented a multi-tiered professional renewal and assessment process. these changes of emphasis are the result of significant research and subsequent/associated professional discussion and were supported during the eba decision-making in 2012. the professional renewal process at john paul college guides teachers through a cycle of goal setting (related to any aspect of teacher practice which aims to improve student learning and achievement); ongoing discussion between the teacher and a mentor which determines actions; directed classroom observations (3 per term) and associated pre and post reflection/discussion; leading to application of changed practice toward achieving the criteria of the goals. the principles of the professional renewal program are to:  enhance development along accepted school-wide, team and department goals;  encourage professional pedagogical reflections and conversations with a colleague/mentor;  motivate improved performance and highlight the next steps in a teacher’s development. through the introduction of professional renewal, attestation and exemplary teacher processes, the leadership and teachers of john paul college have achieved an appropriate and innovative balance between self-directed, peer supported/directed and college-wide, strategic initiatives. each member of the teaching team, from graduate to senior leaders are actively engaged in personalised programs of professional growth which is specifically aimed at improved learning and outcomes of the college’s students. keywords education, professional renewal, attestation, exemplary teacher processes john paul college: the professional renewal journey like many educational organisations that are recognised as leaders in their field, john paul college works continuously to be at the forefront of educational change. while more recently focussing on preparing students to be “real ______________________________ corresponding author: pauline mundie, john paul college, john paul drive, daisy hill, quensland, australia 4127. email: pmundie@jpc.qld.edu.au 130 global education review 1(3) world ready,” the college leadership readily acknowledges that its methods of measuring teacher quality and performance have historically been cumbersome and generally ineffective. previous teacher appraisal processes required each teacher to develop a complex portfolio in conjunction with a one-off, self-organised video of teaching practice. while these processes led to an upward movement in remuneration for teachers, they created a culture of inequity, portfolio competition, fear, and widely varying compliance which did not necessarily influence the quality of teaching offered on a daily basis, nor its impact on student learning. such observations regarding teacher appraisal have been widely reported. statements such as, “appraisal is more about judgement…,” and “history tells us that the illconsidered, rudimentary methods of assessing teachers invariably fail with the usual result being a hollow, rubber-stamping, annual compliance ritual which benefits no one and does little to improve teaching and learning” abound (dinham, 2012, p. 9). similarly, the hay group (hay group, 2012) noted: “the 2009 oecd teaching and learning international survey revealed a worrying picture in teacher performance management, whereby systems of appraisal and feedback generally did not recognise teacher’s efforts and successes, or reward or incentivise effective teachers or teaching practices.” in 2012, john paul college celebrated 30 years as an independent ecumenical school catering to students from kindergarten through to year 12, in logan, queensland, australia. john paul college’s strengths are well established in providing rich holistic learning experiences and extensive co-curricular offerings to complement a previously traditional educational programme. considered by many as the regional leader, educationally, in a predominantly low socio-economic region of south east queensland, john paul college has built a strong reputation as a leading educational institution, over its thirty years of existence. in recent years the college, in the context of its motto, “unity, christ and learning”, has gradually transitioned to adopt the international baccalaureate primary years programme and it offers the international baccalaureate diploma programme alongside the state and national curriculum in the senior school. the milestone year marked an acceleration of the quality and depth of engagement of the college as a whole and all teaching staff, in deep pedagogical change. efforts to review and retain successful processes and practices were re-doubled. the year 2013 witnessed the launch of less frequent attestation processes, the recognition of exemplary teacher status, and an emerging professional renewal process. the professional renewal, attestation and exemplary teacher processes were adopted through negotiation in the enterprise bargaining agreement process during 2012. the australian institute for teaching and school leadership (aitsl) has, in recent years, developed the australian professional standards for teachers which are a public statement of what constitutes teacher quality. the standards address the three domains of teaching:  professional knowledge;  professional practice;  professional engagement. the domains are further supported through the identification of appropriate expectations across four career stages from graduate to lead teacher. the standards define the work of teachers and make explicit the elements of high-quality, effective teaching which will result in improved educational outcomes for students in 21st century schools and provide a framework that makes clear the knowledge, practice and professional engagement in each phase of teachers' careers. they present a common understanding and language for discourse between teachers, teacher educators, teacher organisations, professional associations and the public. early this decade, the grattan institute released a paper claiming that “australia's systems of teacher appraisal and feedback are john paul college 131 broken, and students are suffering as a result” (jensen, 2011, p. 3). the paper is based on australian and international research, including extensive interviews with teachers and principals. it proposes a system of teacher appraisal and feedback that is developed and administered at the school level and is based on a measurement of teacher performance against at least four of the following:  student performance and assessments;  peer observation and collaboration;  direct observation of classroom teaching and learning;  student surveys;  360-degree assessment;  self-assessment and external observation. during 2012, school leaders convened a committee, led by the head of senior school and other leaders, with representation of primary and secondary school teachers. the purpose was to review the college-wide teacher appraisal processes, plan a way forward that met national requirements, shift the focus to improving teacher quality, and improve the consistency of teacher performance. the proposals were centred on raising student achievement and more appropriately responding to the learning needs of students in all classes across the college. the committee responded to research that focussed on the positive influence of peers in enacting change. committee members were drawn to statements such as, “it has long been known that the most powerful influence on teachers are other teachers. the best way of exploiting this is through regular face-to-face encounters among professionals that focus on the improvement of teaching and learning” (hargreaves, 2010, p. 23). against this backdrop and as a result of the work of the review committee, john paul college moved, in 2013, to implement a collegewide programme of professional renewal for all teachers. significantly, the new processes have received significant commitment from teachers across the whole college. the changes of emphasis are the result of research by the committee into current professional learning community practices resulting in ongoing professional discussion by members of the school leadership team. the john paul college professional renewal process was adopted through negotiation in the enterprise bargaining agreement process in 2012. the transition to professional renewal has shifted the emphasis from appraisal to mutually supported improvement of practices and subsequently, student outcomes. the sense of commitment to and the initial successes within professional renewal are reflected in statements such as, “in a self-improving school, more control and responsibility passes to the local level in a spirit of mutual aid between school leaders and their colleagues, who are morally committed to imaginative and sustainable ways of achieving more ambitious and better outcomes.” (hargreaves, 2010, p. 23). john paul college teaching teams now have the opportunity to direct and support genuine and sustainable change from within. while conceding the college is a taking a “ready, fire, aim” approach to implementation, school leaders and teaching teams believe it is important to begin the process, avoid procrastination, and modify the process in response to feedback obtained during implementation. the college’s professional renewal policy states, “professional renewal is an integral component of the ongoing process designed to assist staff in personal and professional growth within the college environment.” teachers are supported in professional renewal as the college provides “recognition, resources, support and mentoring of all teachers so that they can develop their performance and achieve their goals.” the professional renewal process at john paul college guides teachers through a cycle of goal setting (related to any aspect of teacher 132 global education review 1(3) practice which aims to improve student learning and achievement in the classroom) including ongoing discussion between the teacher and a mentor which determines actions and criteria to measure achievement in light of the goals; directed classroom observations (3 per term) and associated pre and post reflective discussion leading to application of targeted change in practice. the principles of the professional renewal program are to:  enhance teacher development alongside accepted school-wide, team and department goals.  encourage professional pedagogical reflections and conversations with a colleague/mentor.  motivate improved performance and highlight the next steps in a teacher’s development. these processes and principles strongly parallel the essential elements of the australian teacher performance and development framework “reflection and goal setting – all teachers have a set of documented and regularly reviewed goals related to both performance and development and ways of measuring progress…” “professional practice and learning – all teachers are supported in working towards their goals… evidence should come from multiple sources and should include impact on student outcomes; information of direct observation of teaching; and collaboration with colleagues” (aitsl, 2012 pp 5-6). john paul college also recognises the significance of the australian professional standards for teachers and has embedded the standards into the attestation (proficient) and exemplary (lead) teacher processes. these two key points, proficient and exemplary, of a teacher’s career encourage formal collaboration, reflection and contributions from students, colleagues and line managers. the recent 2013 experience of two of the college’s primary school team leaders, currently engaged in the queensland education leadership institute aspiring leaders project, has supported the professional renewal developments within the college, and provided valuable impetus and modelling in support of members of their teaching team and fellow team leaders. each of the team leaders has engaged in a project which focusses on feedback and professional dialogue to improve pedagogical practice – centred on student learning. team leader a established and prioritised observation, feedback and shared discussion across the year-level teaching team with a specific focus on literacy – reading and writing workshops. factors which supported and enhanced the project included:  creating clear goals for observations and feedback;  scheduling meeting time dedicated to shared discussion with student learning as the focus;  investing time in clear and immediate feedback (same day);  embracing ‘collective’ responsibility for student learning. a number of factors inhibited the success of the project including:  time pressures;  high frequency of observation visits during term one; especially from other areas of the college and  “push-back” or reluctance (teacher defensiveness) to be observed. this required management including the provision of professional learning opportunities, professional reading and the building of confidence in the observation process. team leader b initiated a project using an anonymous survey to collect early perceptions of professional renewal implementation. data included aspects of: length of bservations/visits; frequency of observations by managers; http://www.qeli.qld.edu.au/ http://www.qeli.qld.edu.au/ john paul college 133 occurrence of reflective conversations; and time between observations and the subsequent reflective conversations. team leader b also drew from marzano’s work regarding “what effective leaders do” and implemented the marzano observational protocol snapshot within the year-level team. this trial has narrowed observations toward specific lessons segments, for example, segments that:  involve routine events that might be observed in every lesson, for example, what is the teacher doing to help establish and communicate learning goals, track student progress and celebrate success?  address content, for example, what is the teacher doing to help students effectively interact with new knowledge?  are enacted on the spot, for example, what is the teacher doing to communicate high expectations for all students? both team leader projects are continuing but early indications are very positive regarding the beneficial impact on student learning of structured, focussed lesson observations with prompt and purposeful reflective discussion. through the introduction of professional renewal, attestation and exemplary teacher processes, the leadership and teachers of john paul college believe they have achieved an appropriate balance between self-directed, peer supported/directed and college-wide, strategic initiatives. each member of the teaching team, from graduate to senior leaders are actively engaged in personalised programs of professional growth which are specifically aimed at improved learning and outcomes of the college’s students. the john paul college journey is in its early stages, and the strengths and challenges encountered to date will lay the foundations for our practices into the future. teachers across the college have overwhelmingly welcomed the opportunities to visit their colleagues’ classrooms with a specific professional focus relating to their goals. benefits of professional renewal include:  each teacher identifies three goals linked to (1) the college’s strategic plan; (2) teaching team priorities; (3) an individual preference.  increased levels of informal, planned professional dialogue across the college. observation and reflection have featured visits between primary, senior and the college’s international school.  facilitation of the aspiration for a “seamless holistic learning journey” for all students.  all staff with teaching roles are actively engaged in the process.  increased appreciation of colleagues by peers for quality professional practice.  positive feedback increases motivation to further improve teacher practice.  positive supportive environment has developed across extended teaching teams.  a more open and reflective teaching and learning community.  some previously isolated teaching practice is now more collaborative. challenges include:  the requirement of three visits per term (12 per school year) have placed additional time pressures on all teachers, especially those with full teaching loads.  similarly, time pressures limit the opportunity for the important debrief component of the observation. this requires review in order to maintain the emphasis on quality interventions which will positively influence teaching practice.  the specific nature of primary versus secondary timetables further emphasise the difficulties experienced by some members of the faculty. this inequity of 134 global education review 1(3) access impacts on the availability of colleagues for visits and follow up.  the 2013 methodology permitted self chosen internal buddies for observations and reflection. while this encouraged wide ranging interaction between teachers, there is a need to provide examples of best practice and identify lead practitioners.  the time constraints and scope of the current model does not permit external buddy options. some specialist areas such as learning support and performing arts. instrumental music teachers would benefit from external observations due to the limited appropriate opportunities on campus.  there is a need to increasingly achieve translation of new learning, as a result of visits, into sustainable changes in practice.  the college must move to transparent school review processes to determine outcomes of pilot year. for education at john paul college to reach its potential and have the maximum positive impact on student learning, high-quality teachers and effective teaching are the main requirements. as the first year of professional renewal moves through the third term, teachers and mentors are engaging in culminating activities to reflect on the progress made with observations, conversations and the subsequent implementation of new classroom practices. teachers are embracing the opportunities provided, and valuing the experiences of focussed observations and dialogue in the classrooms of their peers. the challenge now is to build and refine this process, and harness the reflections, enthusiasm and refinements that are coming through. the focus will be on making modifications to the process which feed through to significantly improved teaching and learning in the classrooms. the springboard effect is evident as the teachers feed in their collective energies and expertise, and increasingly seek constructive feedback and engage in meaningful dialogue about their practice. the accumulated data from within these logged reflections and mentor conversations will provide valuable insight as plans are established to improve and further develop the professional renewal process at john paul college. references: hargreaves, d. h. (2010). creating a self-improving school system. nottingham uk: national college for leadership of schools and children’s services. retrieved from http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2093/1/download%3fid%3d1336 72%26filename%3dcreating-a-self-improving-schoolsystem.pdf dinham, s. (2012). national certification of highly accomplished and lead teachers. education review. june 9, 2012. hay group (2012). growing our potential. hay group’s view on implementing an effective performance improvement and development framework for teachers. retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/verve/_resources/growing_o ur_potential_-_hay_-_mar_2012.pdf aitsl (2012). australian teacher performance and development framework. retrieved from http://www.aitsl.edu.au/verve/_resources/australian_ teacher_performance_and_development_framework. pdf#search=australian teacher performance and development framework jensen, b. (2011) better teacher appraisal and feedback: improving performance, grattan institute report no. 2011-3 retrieved from http://grattan.edu.au/static/files/assets/cdbcfbfe/081_ report_teacher_appraisal.pdf about the author(s) pauline mundie is deputy head of primary school at john paul college. robert marr is director of teaching practice at john paul college and artistic director – marching eagles. http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2093/1/download%3fid%3d133672%26filename%3dcreating-a-self-improving-school-system.pdf http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2093/1/download%3fid%3d133672%26filename%3dcreating-a-self-improving-school-system.pdf http://dera.ioe.ac.uk/2093/1/download%3fid%3d133672%26filename%3dcreating-a-self-improving-school-system.pdf http://www.aitsl.edu.au/verve/_resources/growing_our_potential_-_hay_-_mar_2012.pdf http://www.aitsl.edu.au/verve/_resources/growing_our_potential_-_hay_-_mar_2012.pdf http://grattan.edu.au/static/files/assets/cdbcfbfe/081_report_teacher_appraisal.pdf http://grattan.edu.au/static/files/assets/cdbcfbfe/081_report_teacher_appraisal.pdf 56 global education review 2 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: koopmans, matthijs (2015). lessons on whole-system reform. [review of the book leading educational change, edited by helen janc malone]. global education review, 2 (1). 56-57. book review lessons on whole-system reform “leading educational change” by helen janc malone by matthijs koopmans leading educational change sets out to discuss the state of the field of whole-system reform in education in the united states as well as in other countries in twenty-five brief chapters divided equally over five sections: 1. emerging issues in educational change; 2. improving practice; 3. equity and educational justice, 4. accountability and assessment systems, and 5. whole system change. the book is part of teachers college press’ school reform series, which counts 63 titles on the inside cover, including several edited by scholars who also contribute to this volume (andy hargreaves, ann lieberman, and pasi sahlberg). as for the current book, its fifth chapter, entitled “from the periphery to the center,” includes an outline by editor helen janc malone of the book’s orientation: educational policy needs to shift its focus from the externally driven top-down reforms (e.g., those driven by labor market arguments and competitive international rankings) to intrinsically formulated educational goals such as student-centered learning objectives, out-of-school learning experiences, and engagement of all front-line stakeholders (students, teachers, parents, and community) in the reform efforts. to describe such work, some chapters in this book focus on particular countries or regions (china, latin america, united kingdom), while others focus on a particular aspect of educational reform (technology, equity, student assessment). the volume pays due attention to the external input conditions that may vary widely from country to country. examples of such conditions include the difficulty of the educational system in south africa to emancipate itself structurally from the racially charged legacy of colonialism and apartheid (chapter 14); the curricular and systemic changes required in hong kong’s schools after assimilation into the people’s republic of china (chapter 17); and the long shadows of poverty cast on the school systems in latin america as evidenced by high dropout rates both at the elementary and secondary school levels, low graduation rates, and high illiteracy rates leading whole school reform 57 (chapter 15 and 22). and then there are, of course, the obligatory lessons to be learned from finland, where a clear relationship is observed between the prestige of the teaching profession and educational outcomes measured on standardized tests, which parenthetically are deemphasized by its educators (chapter 24). while much of the material discussed in this book is very interesting and valuable, the short length of the individual chapters does not permit more than a sketchy depiction of issues that are inherently complicated. in the foreword, for instance, michael fullan makes the important point that neither top-down nor bottom-up reform efforts can be expected to work by themselves. the better question is how good ideas can be made to travel widely through the system. answering this question invariably brings up other issues pertaining to the problem of change: how does change transpire in systems generally, and in educational systems in particular? there is also the problem of scale: how can we facilitate the spread of desirable changes through all parts of system (classrooms, teachers, school buildings, regions) rather than just some? the book rightly touches upon these issues (see e.g., chapter 6, 7, and 8), but its format does not permit the deeper discussion to which the reader is appetized here. likewise, in chapter 2, hargreaves notes that reform tends to not travel well when cultural and historical background factors differ. yet the reform initiatives described in this book reveal some common threads across national boundaries, such as the professional learning communities in japan (chapter 8), california and canada (chapter 9), and in wales (chapter 21). did these regions and countries learn from one another, or did their reforms simply get them to approximately the same end state? in chapter 3, yong zhao compares the increasing reliance on standardized testing in the united states to the decreasing reliance on such testing in the people’s republic of china. four pages are not nearly enough to substantiate, let alone cover the implications of this very intriguing contrast. additionally, a brief concluding chapter to the book misses an opportunity to meaningfully tie these stories together, but instead provides a workmanlike chapter-bychapter summary of the book’s contents. there clearly is a role to play for books such as these for practitioners and policymakers in need of a quick overview of the lay of the land in international school reform. a more intricate introduction is needed, however, to provoke a debate about whether we, nationally and internationally, are heading in the right direction, or need to re-negotiate the boundaries of our reform paradigm. “leading educational change: global issues, challenges, and lessons on whole-system reform.” edited by helen janc malone. new york: teachers college press, 2013. isbn 978-0-8077-5473-3 about the editor helen janc malone, ed.d., is an educational researcher dedicated to connecting research, policy, and practice in support of student learning and positive development. her work centers on educational change, whole system reform, expanded learning, and k-16 pathways. about the reviewer matthijs koopmans, ed.d., joined the faculty at mercy college in 2011. his scholarship focuses on educational change, cause and effect relationships and the use of quantitative single case designs. teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 45 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: de la garza, katy (2016). pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource: perspectives from teachers in guatemalan rural and indigenous schools. global education review, 3(1). 45-65 pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource: perspectives from teachers in guatemalan rural and indigenous schools katy de la garza teachers college, columbia university abstract this study analyzed challenges faced by teachers in rural and indigenous schools, and the impact of pedagogical mentorship in contributing towards more culturally and linguistically relevant education. using a case from guatemala, this article explored pedagogical mentorship as an in-service teacher training resource for multi-lingual and multi-cultural rural realities. the data was drawn from a qualitative and multisite research study based on participant observation and in-depth interviews. results demonstrated that main challenges included economic hardships, malnutrition, absence or delays in basic government social programs, and superficial teacher training in bilingual intercultural education (ebi). teachers perceived pedagogical mentors as help and support inside their classrooms, where they learned from and collaborated with mentors to strengthen their pedagogical skills, primarily in subjects related to language and communication. mentor visits were scarce and short due to mentorship program designs that failed to consider in their budgets, recruiting practices and curriculum contents; and the travel distances and rural school community languages and cultures. however, findings showed that even with program shortcomings there was a wide acceptance of pedagogical mentorship by all teachers particularly for professional development in bilingual and intercultural education. results suggest that pedagogical mentorship offers an opportunity to enforce the long overdue right for rural and indigenous peoples to quality and culturally relevant education. key words bilingual intercultural education, mentorship, rural education, indigenous language education, multicultural / multi-lingual education, in-service teacher training. introduction rural areas throughout the world tend to have student populations with the lowest school performance, teachers with the least amount of training, and school curricula that are insensitive and or irrelevant to local realities. the social, political, and economic poverty experienced by these rural populations is exacerbated by structural factors that prevent breaking oppressive cycles, and instead reproduce socioeconomic inequalities. one of these factors is the education system in which ______________________________ corresponding author: katy de la garza, 162 clinton street, brooklyn, ny 11201 e-mail: katydelagarzach@gmail.com mailto:katydelagarzach@gmail.com 46 global education review 3(1) populations that are rural, indigenous and/or poor, disproportionately receive lower quality and culturally irrelevant formal education that does not consider their contextual realities (barter, 2008). statistics are more alarming in rural areas inhabited by indigenous populations due to numerous historical and structural factors related to colonial legacies of exploitation and discrimination. inadequate teacher training combined with extreme poverty, the presence of multi-lingual and multi-cultural communities, as well as the government’s inability to provide basic health and education related services, create school contexts that pose great challenges for effective teaching and learning to take place. this article explored these complex contextual realities in guatemala while analyzing teacher perceptions of pedagogical mentorship as an inservice teacher training resource for schools in rural and indigenous settings. guatemala is a predominantly rural country; half of its population is indigenous; it ranks amongst the countries with the lowest socio-economic indicators in the americas (programa estado de la región, 2013). guatemala has experimented with several government and international cooperationsponsored mentorship programs for in-service rural teacher training. mentorship has emerged as a favored model and policy initiative to improve the quality of teaching, making it a current “hot topic” in teacher education and professional development (mullen, 2005). mentorship-related programs for teacher education have been identified in more than a dozen latin american countries. guatemala offers an illustrative case for analyzing its impact and promise for enhancing quality teaching and learning. since the 1990s multiple mentorship initiatives have coexisted in guatemala, many with the specific aim of enhancing the training and professional development of teachers in rural areas and indigenous schools. with regards to teacher education, it was not until 2012 that, after months of heated debates between the government and teachers unions, guatemala finally joined all of the other latin american countries in mandating primary school teacher education to take place at the university level. prior to 2012, primary school teachers in guatemala received their training while still high-school students themselves. consequently, there are currently 100, 000 primary school in-service teachers with only a 3year upper secondary school pre-service education; the government began to focus efforts on how to strengthen the education of those teachers who are in the field (ministerio de educación de guatemala [mineduc], 2011). building on previous initiatives, in 2011 a teacher-training program based on mentorship became institutionalized by government decree under the national system of school mentorship (sinae) to target in-service teachers working in school districts with the lowest socioeconomic indicators. this article explores the educational realities of guatemala’s rural and indigenous school communities, and teacher perceptions on the interactions these realities have with pedagogical mentorship programs. the guatemalan context guatemala is home to 14 million people and it hosts 25 linguistic communities. over 50% of the population live in rural areas and are indigenous peoples. the 36-year civil war the country experienced until 1996, together with structural discrimination and colonial legacies contributed to the current alarming socioeconomic indicators particularly for those who are indigenous, rural, and poor (programa de promoción de la reforma educativa en america latina y el caribe [preal], 2008). guatemala ranks 133 out of 187 countries in the united nations development program’s 2013 human development index, placing it in the lowest position in the latin american region. with regard to health indicators, guatemala’s chronic malnutrition rate is almost 50% and climbs to 70% for the indigenous population, which is the highest in the latin american region and one of teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 47 the top five malnutrition rates in the world (world food program [wfp], 2013). although 50% of the total population lives in poverty and experiences high rates of malnutrition, approximately 20% of the guatemalan population owns 64% of national income, making it one of the most unequal countries in latin america (preal, 2008). with regard to education, the guatemalan government has historically had one of the lowest levels of public expenditure in latin america, averaging 2% of gdp (programa estado de la región, 2013). the inequality represented by the above figures is also experienced in the guatemalan education system where rural areas and indigenous peoples have the highest school dropout and illiteracy rates and the lowest educational achievement indicators (patrinos & velez, 2009; preal, 2008). during the past 20 years, the government has acquired numerous national and international legal obligations such as the guatemalan 1991 education law, the 1995 guatemala peace accords and the 2007 united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, to increase educational opportunities and to enhance the quality of education for indigenous and rural populations. this newfound focus on educational access has resulted in national primary school enrollment rates that are close to 90%. in indigenous and rural areas enrollment rates are close to 90%. high enrollment rates can be deceiving since school dropout rates range between 70% and 80% and only three out of 10 (30%) indigenous students finish primary school (preal, 2008). thus, school completion rates greatly vary when comparing urban and rural schools and indigenous and non-indigenous students. primary school completion rates for urban non indigenous children are close to 80%, while completion rates for rural and indigenous children hardly reach 40% (preal, 2008). moreover, in national language assessments for the third and sixth grade 62.8% of urban students reached proficiency levels while only 41.4% of their rural peers did (murillo, 2007). illiteracy rates also reflect this urban/rural and indigenous/non-indigenous educational divide since guatemala’s illiteracy rates linger at around 30%, but indigenous illiteracy rates range between 50%-60%, with even higher rates for indigenous women and rural populations (lópez, 2009; patrinos & velez, 2009). throughout the school system, indigenous languages are undervalued as a tool for learning and transmitting knowledge (giuliani, 2008) and spanish prevails as the dominant language for most educational, political, and economic activities even though 43% of the guatemalan indigenous population is non-spanish speaking (preal, 2008). the aforementioned socioeconomic and educational inequalities pose great challenges for effective teaching and learning to take place. i found numerous in-service training pedagogical mentorship programs in guatemalan schools intended to increase performance indicators of rural and indigenous students. these initiatives aimed to enhance rural teachers’ academic preparation, promote educación bilingüe intercultural (bilingual intercultural education) (ebi), and improve the quality of education by providing in-school support for teachers through innovative methodologies that took into account multicultural, multilinguistic, and intercultural contexts (mineduc, 2012). ebi is a government policy that is intended to not only to provide bilingual education in guatemala but also to promote interculturality, understood as intercultural dialogue where no culture was dominant over another and where ideologies of superiority are absent (lopez, 2009). since the 1990s ebi became a constitutional right but as this article will present, there is a great gap between theory and practice and mentorship programs can potentially offer a link between the two. 48 global education review 3(1) mentorship programs in guatemala mentorship has increasingly become a worldwide teacher education strategy to address inadequate teacher preparation, increase teacher retention, and enhance student performance. critics of traditional mentorship models for teacher education have highlighted the importance of considering contextual factors such culture and language of the target population (comboni & juarez, 2009; talavera, 2002). in line with this global trend, guatemala has embarked on numerous mentorship programs for primary school in-service teachers to contextualize the national base curriculum, improve basic learning competencies, decrease rural student drop-out rates, increase the implementation of ebi, and strengthen rural education quality indicators. mentorship has been part of the ministry of education’s supervision framework since the 1990s. mentorship was initially used as a control and supervisory tool; the pedagogical component was not a priority. the national department of bilingual intercultural education (digebi) through the departmental divisions of the ministry of education (dideduc) also began mentorship programs with ebi technical advisors (referred to as otebis), which intended to provide in-service training and support to pre-primary and primary school teachers in ebi schools to improve bilingual education quality (de la garza, 2014). since the 1990s, multiple ebi technical advisor mentorship programs surfaced and disappeared, and pedagogical functions were often displaced by administrative and supervisory functions. the instability in funds and goals was mostly due to government administration priorities, ministry of education departmental divisions’ politics, and changes in budget allocations. the country’s 36-year civil war and unstable democratic government led thousands of international and national ngos and cooperation agencies to work in guatemala with the government or in partnership with civil society groups (sridhar, 2007). the international actors have been heavily involved in education and within their education-related projects have supported various mentorship programs using bilingual promoters, mentors, and/or advisors. similar to ebi technical advisors (otebis), these mentorship programs brought by international actors also came and went with the organizations’ funding, varying project length, donor priorities, and national politics (de la garza, 2014). thus, there is a wide spectrum of mentorship programs coexisting throughout guatemala that have as their common goal improving the quality of education in socioeconomically marginalized, rural, and indigenous areas. this research builds on the experience of teachers and mentors in the following four mentorship programs: (1) the ministry of education’s otebi program; (2) pedagogical advisors for the academic program for professional teacher development (padep/d) of the university of san carlos; (3) support program of education quality of the german international development agency (giz); and (4) national system of school mentorship (sinae) program. the most recently active mentorship program was that of sinae. the creation of sinae arose from the need to redesign the ministry of education’s school supervision framework and to support teachers in socioeconomically poor schools improve education quality. in 2010, the government sought the cooperation of multiple stakeholders that included various ministry of education offices as well as collaboration from teachers unions and the national school council and the ministry of education departmental divisions, to rethink the supervision framework and build upon past pedagogical mentorship experiences such as otebi’s, padep and giz programs (de la garza, 2014). after numerous meetings amongst stakeholders, in 2011 through ministerial agreement number 3639-2011, the guatemalan government institutionalized a national, pre-primary and primary school mentorship reform with the creation of sinae. sinae began to execute its program with teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 49 technical support from the united states (usaid) and german (giz) cooperation agencies, usaid through its classroom school reform program (reaula) and giz through its support program for education quality (pace). the system’s main goals are to ensure the application of the national base curriculum, educate students in a comprehensive/integral/ “whole” manner with basic competencies and significant learning experiences, transform classroom teacher practices, enhance education quality in accordance to the sociocultural characteristics of each school community, promote student achievement and learning, and increase the number of student grade completions and next grade enrollments (mineduc, 2012). based on a bilingual and intercultural framework, the sinae mentorship model builds on previous mentorship programs and seeks to improve guatemala’s provision of quality education by providing pedagogical mentorship to teachers in geographic areas with the poorest socioeconomic indicators (mineduc, 2011). within the school mentorship system, pedagogical mentorship is defined by the ministry of education as “the technical action of mentorship on pedagogical practices in public schools which seeks to transform and better these practices” (mineduc, 2012, p. 44). while the definitions of mentorship vary greatly, most explanations of pedagogical mentorship agree that these actions are to be carried out by mentors who were former teachers and that in theory: (1) have between 5-10 years of teaching experience, (2) hold a university degree, (3) have fluency in the language used in the school district they are assigned to, and (4) have substantial knowledge of both the national base curriculum and ebi. while there is no official job description as of yet, the pedagogical mentor’s main functions are to orient teacher practices toward the use and contextualization of the national base curriculum and the ebi model; participate in the design and formative assessment of school and teacher improvement plans and quality circles; promote further teacher knowledge on student learning practices and evaluation through innovative pedagogical strategies; advise teachers in the classroom on the creation and use of improvement plans and ebi materials; and mentor teachers to reflect on their pedagogical practice, departing from their lived experiences within their specific context (digebi, 2012). the mentorship programs that have coexisted in guatemalan rural and indigenous schools have left an impact on teachers’ practice and perceptions on the value and use of pedagogical mentorship. the following section explains the methodology used to explore rural teachers’ challenges, experiences with pedagogical mentorship programs and perceptions of this resource as an in-service teacher training tool that contends to be sensitive to guatemala’s socio-cultural realities. methodology the empirical findings this article refers to are from a qualitative and multisite dissertation research study carried out during a one-year period (2012-2013) of fieldwork in guatemala. the sites and participants for this study were chosen through purposive sampling and were criteria based. the two departments (provinces) of baja verapaz and quiche were selected due to: (1) their high levels of rural and indigenous populations; (2) the existence of school districts that participated in sinae mentorship programs; and (3) they had a more than 10 year history investing in mentorship initiatives. the seven selected primary schools within these two departments were all officially declared rural, considered to be ebi schools by the ministry of education, and had a history of participation in mentorship programs. the number of students in each primary school ranged from 68 to 212; the number of teachers in each school from 4 to 10; and the percentage of students that spoke an indigenous language at home was between 95 and 100. 50 global education review 3(1) table 1 selected departments’ characteristics administrative department rural indigenous language communities mentorship programs baja verapaz 62% 60% achi’, q’eqchi’, poqomchi’, k’iche’, spanish padep/d pedagogical advisors, sinae pedagogical mentors, ebi technical advisors (otebi), and pace-giz pedagogical mentors quiche 59% 83% uspanteko, ixil, sakapulteko, k’iche’, spanish padep/d pedagogical advisors, sinae pedagogical mentors, ebi technical advisors (otebi), and pace-giz pedagogical mentors sources: gobierno de guatemala (2010) and de la garza (2014). the teachers and mentors who participated in the study were part of the selected schools, and voluntarily offered to be interviewed. they agreed to have me as a participant observer in their classrooms. the 33 selected teachers had a permanent position within the ministry of education and had been teaching at the school for at least three years. these characteristics increased the probability of these teachers having had participated in sinae or other mentorship programs. the seven pedagogical mentors were also purposively selected and had served or were serving as mentors in one of the seven schools of the research study. other research participants included 17 government and international cooperation staff related to the mentorship programs. two strategies were used for data collection: interviews and participant observation. while in-depth interviews gave me background information on the teachers’ practice, the pedagogical mentorship model, and diverse perspectives of teachers and mentors; the more than 200 hours of classroom participant observation in grades one through six allowed me to better understand school contexts, obtain information omitted in the interviews, and analyze relationships and behaviors. i lived with local families in the school communities, participated in teacher and community activities, and recorded daily observations. interviews and participant observation allowed me to gain a greater understanding of pedagogical mentorship through the view of the participants (dewalt & dewalt, 2011). to further understand the contextual realities where these mentorship programs were taking place and to analyze teacher perceptions, the research focused on two main questions: (1) what are the main challenges facing primary school teachers in rural and indigenous classrooms? and (2) to what extent can pedagogical mentorship assist in addressing rural teacher challenges? the next sections explore the findings to these questions. challenges in rural and indigenous classrooms it’s 9 a.m. and the children are falling asleep. the teacher asks them if they had breakfast at home and they nod their heads. a little boy asks “when is the atol teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 51 (vitamin enriched corn flour drink) arriving?” the teacher answers that real soon they will have it again and be able to drink it during recess. since the kids are not paying attention and dozing off, the teacher decides to do songs and games in achi’ to wake them up and to help them forget they are tired and hungry. (field notes, february 2013) on my first day of classroom and participant observation at the schools, i encountered the complex rural and indigenous realities of economic poverty, hunger, spanish and indigenous language-use code-switching, and the absence of education and health related public services. these contextual and structural conditions posed numerous challenges for teachers to be able to transform their classroom practices for effective teaching and learning to take place. my observations were confirmed by in-depth teacher interviews where teachers mentioned how their main daily challenges were related to economic hardships, government program absence and language-use issues. the literature on rural schools indicates that poverty and nutrition are recurrent challenges for quality education to take place (see for example ezpeleta & weiss, 1996; monk, 2007). to understand what poverty and malnutrition translates to for teachers and students in their daily classroom practices and experiences, i asked teachers the open ended question, “what are the main challenges for quality education to take place in rural schools?” economic hardships, malnutrition, and government absence all the interviewed teachers provided answers related to economic hardships, malnutrition, and the hunger faced by their students and their families as a main challenge for quality education. the following quote is typical of their responses: parents do not have enough economically so they have to leave for work very early, at 4 or 5 in the morning, and when the child wakes up there is not even a tortilla for breakfast. they don’t have breakfast. they walk a lot to get to school, and so they get here hungry, and they are falling asleep. (interview with carol, april 2013) the need to work teachers explained that the need for all family members to work for the family’s subsistence presented a serious challenge for the education of their students. parents’ and children’s need to work often resulted in lack of parental involvement in the child’s school life, family disintegration, children spending time working instead of studying, and tired and distracted students all of which negatively affect the child’s learning. when looking for the causes of parents’ absence, the most frequent explanations were economic hardships and, more specifically, the difficulty of finding stable jobs for subsistence in rural areas. the economic difficulties and extreme poverty faced by rural and indigenous families led parents to leave their homes to find any kind of low wage labor in order to feed their families. most of the jobs parents find in rural areas are seasonal, and after 12-hour workdays, they get paid approximately $6 or $7 us ($0.50$0.55 us per hour). nevertheless, there are months during the year during which no jobs are to be found, and there is an increased dependence on subsistence farming. not everyone owns or has access to a plot of land, but those who do always have to deal with the unpredictable climate conditions that dictate land production. this creates highly unstable family income that results in a lack of access to basic needs in the household. while internal migration to find jobs is an issue, in recent years economic hardships in the rural areas have created an increasing tendency to immigrate to the united states to seek employment. this immigration is mostly pursued by men and creates another challenge mentioned by teachers: family disintegration. migration frequently leaves mothers or grandmothers in charge of numerous children, farming their small land plot, and selling their produce and/or crafts in local markets. at least 52 global education review 3(1) for the first two years after a family member arrives in the united states they are hardly able to send money back to their families since they must repay the approximately $8,000 (us) that they owe to the coyotes or smugglers who facilitated their movement across the mexican and u.s. borders. immigration is a consequence of the lack of economic resources and job opportunities available in rural and indigenous settings, which in turn has resulted in lack of involvement of both mothers and fathers in the schooling of their children. teachers spoke of the need for children to work as being another consequence of the economic hardships faced in rural and indigenous settings, and a driver of school absences. while there have recently been important increases in school enrollment rates throughout guatemala’s rural areas (preal, 2008), many children work before school and/or after school in their homes, in agriculture, or in the local markets. in impoverished households, the help and/or income brought by children become crucial for family survival. these responsibilities at such a young age, together with deficient nutrition can adversely impact children’s learning and their schooling experience. some of the effects brought about by this need to work, and its associated parent absenteeism, that were mentioned by the teachers and observed during my fieldwork included students not doing their homework or being absent or tired because of their work, students lacking additional resources outside the school-such as books or television-to enhance their education, and students being so hungry that it impaired their cognitive abilities and learning. hunger the most frequently mentioned example of the consequences of the harsh socioeconomic realities of their students’ households was that “children are hungry.” the poverty experienced in the seven school communities created alarming problems of child malnutrition and hunger that directly affected teaching and learning in the rural and indigenous classrooms. all interviewed teachers made reference to the challenge posed by malnutrition, whether they called it lack of nourishment, vitamins, feeding, nutrition, or hunger. teachers in rural and indigenous classrooms said they could not provide quality education because of the current nourishment problem. the nourishment problem the children faced in the seven guatemalan schools, was mentioned by all teachers, and also observed by me in the classrooms. all teachers voiced the challenge that malnutrition and hunger posed in their classrooms and their lack of preparation for dealing with such realities. teachers believed that children’s lack of nourishment affected their mental development and school performance since students were often tired, sleepy, unresponsive, and distracted. the following quote exemplifies the importance teachers placed on the malnutrition of their students, and the negative consequences they thought it had on learning: malnutrition is what most affects learning and also the extreme economic poverty. as a cause of this, children come hungry, they come thirsty, and some are sleepy because of the work they have to do. (interview with rodrigo, march 2013) these teacher understandings are supported by a large body of evidence that demonstrates the negative effects that malnutrition has on learning and educational achievement (see for example bundy, 2011; save the children uk, 2013) and my own observations in the classrooms. the children in the guatemalan classrooms i visited were tired, distracted, restless, dozing, and even falling asleep. according to the ten teachers who had previous teaching posts in urban schools, rural students experienced more extreme economic poverty and living conditions than their urban peers. these teachers also believed that the more severe economic hardships and malnutrition faced by rural children contributed to the lower test scores rural students often receive. teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 53 undependable government programs teachers often mentioned that economic hardships and student malnourishment were further exacerbated by the absence or delay in access to government social programs. by law the guatemalan state should provide education and health related programs and services to the poorest schools. however, the implementation of the government sponsored school feeding and educational materials programs suffered great delays in reaching rural schools. as school principal and teacher beatriz said: “we are already in mid-april and we still have not received the funding for the food or the school materials.” (interview with beatriz, april 2013). the ministry of education is in charge of the national school feeding program; a program that promotes healthy food consumption and school achievement, and aims to contribute to the reduction of malnutrition and chronic malnutrition, to enhance staying in school by providing one nutritional snack a day. the snack covers 30-35% of a child’s daily energy consumption and is to be delivered to prioritized pre-primary and primary schools in guatemala (dirección general de participación comunitaria y servicios de apoyo, [digepsa], 2014). the school year begins in january, and yet by july 2013 less than half of this budgeted amount had been disbursed to the schools due to the government’s financial centralization and bureaucratic procedures. the effects of not having this snack were greatly felt by the teachers and students and they mentioned this is a common yearly practice. the ministry of education is also in charge of providing schooling materials for children and teachers. the complex and long process for disbursement of this financial support program is similar to that of the school feeding program and consequently the seven schools did not receive the funds for school materials until april and may 2013. teachers viewed this delayed support for school snacks and materials as an additional hurdle for effective teaching and learning to take place. teachers felt these delays occurred due to the strong disconnect and lack of understanding of ministry of education personnel about the realities encountered in rural and indigenous school settings. as hector mentioned: “the authorities need to get out of their desks, visit the rural schools and come see our reality…” (interview with hector, february 2013). eightypercent of the interviewed teachers believed education policies and teacher training programs were “urban-centric” (vargas, 2008) or designed in the capital. they also believed that the policies and programs only favored the non-indigenous, did not take into account indigenous culture and languages, and did not consider contextual, cultural, and language realities. the underlying causes for the lack of education quality in the rural and indigenous classrooms were related to structural racism where a system of economic, political, and social institutions has historically excluded the rural areas and indigenous populations from equitable wealth distribution and educational opportunities. this structural racism is like an “undeclared system of apartheid” through which the guatemalan government works, in which rural and indigenous peoples are constantly faced with discrimination and segregation (interview with pace-giz staff, september 2012). the rural and indigenous classroom exemplified this undeclared system of apartheid where economic hardships, malnutrition and government program delivery delays posed difficulties for effective teaching and learning to occur. another area where segregation was experienced by indigenous peoples was in their languages and knowledges, since the dominant culture and language of spanish was favored in teacher education and curriculum content. this issue came to life when analyzing another main challenge mentioned by teachers: inadequate bilingual and intercultural education teacher training. 54 global education review 3(1) the language challenge here we talk about bilingual education but the government does not assist us. the reality is that it does not contribute; we have to see how we can learn to teach the language. . . . (interview with doris, april 2013). in light of numerous research findings that reveal that one of the benefits of mother tongue development is greater proficiency in the second language (unesco, 2008), and pressures from the international community, the guatemalan government has recognized multiple national and international agreements and obligations to a students’ right to be educated in their native language, and to bilingual intercultural education (ebi). the original intent of ebi was to value both languages equally, make the indigenous cultures visible, take into account learners’ prior knowledges and help students to gain a stronger sense of identity (benson & kosonen, 2013). but there is a great lag between policy and practice. a study of bilingual education (patrinos & velez, 2009) showed that roughly 40% of indigenous children in guatemalan schools have access to ebi. however, having access to ebi does not necessarily translate into specific actions of implementation. i witnessed this gap between ebi policy and practice in the seven ebi schools where an average of 98% of the student population had an indigenous language as their mother tongue, and 27 of the 33 interviewed teachers spoke an indigenous language. these statistics might mislead one to think that ebi is occurring in these schools because of its official status, the high number of indigenous students, and the high percentages of indigenous teachers who speak an indigenous language. nevertheless, this was not the case since multiple cultural and structural impediments, such as inadequate teacher training on ebi, beliefs related to indigenous cultural inferiority, and viewing indigenous languages as a problem, remained, and prevented linguistically and culturally relevant education from being enforced in guatemalan rural and indigenous schools. the complexities and tensions that exist with bilingualism and the teaching and learning of indigenous and spanish languages in school make el idioma (the language) the second most frequently mentioned challenge by teachers. when asked, “what about language is the challenge?” the answers were generally related to deficient or absence of teacher education to carry out ebi, disinterest in achieving literacy in an indigenous language, and the lack of exposure and previous knowledge of spanish that rural indigenous children have when they arrive at primary school. the problem we have is that many of us speak the (indigenous) language but we do not know how to write it. nobody showed us how. . . . (interview with indigenous teacher sonia, may 2013) i do not speak k’iche’ and i feel bad because i don’t fit the profile. but what can i do if no one teaches me? (interview with non-indigenous teacher beatriz, april 2013) inadequate training inadequate teacher training in ebi was a main challenge mentioned by teachers when it came to carrying out quality education in both l1 (the mother tongue), which in the case of the seven schools was an indigenous language, and in l2 (second language), which in this case refers to spanish, as mandated by guatemala’s national base curriculum and the national department of bilingual and intercultural education (digebi). the six non-indigenous teachers and 20 out of the 27 indigenous teachers declared being unprepared or inadequately prepared to effectively teach ebi. as evident from teacher sonia’s quote above, indigenous teachers spoke their native language but did not necessarily know how to write, read, or teach it. also, as teacher beatriz explained, non-indigenous teachers were assigned to an ebi school without teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 55 having been taught the indigenous language of the school community. the teachers’ experiences with bilingualism during their pre-service education and in-service training varied greatly amongst the indigenous and non-indigenous interviewees. this resulted in teachers having diverse levels of language skill and knowledge about ebi and to a general feeling of illpreparedness. all six non-indigenous teachers and almost half of the indigenous teachers (who were 31 years of age or older) did not have access to bilingual normal schools (schools for teacher training) for their pre-service teacher education. the expansion of bilingual normal schools gained prominence only over the past 15 years, which created an age gap between those teachers who had bilingual pre-service education and those who did not. at the time when teachers who were 31 years old or older went to primary and secondary school, indigenous students were not allowed to speak their native languages in the classroom since castellanización (teaching of spanish) was the norm. of the 12 younger indigenous teachers interviewed, three of them did not grow up speaking their indigenous language. these teachers were born in urban areas and their parents did not want them to speak the indigenous language in order to protect them from the discrimination they would have to confront for not speaking spanish well. these teachers mentioned having a hard time while attending bilingual normal schools because even though they understood the language from listening to their parents, they themselves did not speak it. in the bilingual normal schools they did learn how to write their indigenous languages but they did not learn to speak them until they had to learn it out of necessity once they were assigned to work in a rural school. the focus of guatemalan bilingual normal schools was on learning how to teach the national base curriculum’s subjects of mathematics, social and natural environment, natural sciences and technology, social sciences, artistic expression, physical education, citizenship, productivity and development, and language and communication in the official language of spanish. the last curricular section of language and communication was where students learned about pedagogical practices in both l1 and l2. nonetheless, according to most teachers, the hours spent learning about the indigenous languages were few and not enough to effectively prepare them for the linguistic realities present in rural classrooms or to teach literacy in both spanish and their mother tongue. the bilingual education experience involving indigenous and non-indigenous teachers varied in objectives, number of training hours, and educational levels; and these experiences created a complex and asymmetrical set of knowledge and understanding of the significance, purpose, and execution of ebi. during the past 15 years, changes have occurred in increased provision of bilingual normal schools for teacher education. teachers acknowledge the change brought by ebi legislation and government recognition of indigenous languages in enhancing indigenous language use in schools. however, teachers perceived that curricular content and practices in pre-service teacher education still did not prepare them effectively for teaching ebi, and in the case of non-indigenous teachers, did not prepare them at all. this (un) changing teacher education contributes to teachers’ feelings of illpreparedness with regards to teaching ebi. attitudes and beliefs teachers’ perceptions regarding the use of bilingualism, and their almost complete lack of mentioning concepts of interculturality, suggests the persistence of perceptions related to indigenous ethnic inferiority, cultural ignorance, inadequate teacher education, and lack of government support and clarity on the purposes and execution of ebi policies and programs. this has resulted in what teachers describe to be a narrow implementation of bilingual 56 global education review 3(1) intercultural education in schools, where l-1 is only valued as transitional tool to the dominant spanish language. these beliefs have also contributed to views of indigenous languages as a problem for school advancement, with learners from non-dominant groups perceived as “deficient, even before they begin their school careers” (benson & kosonen, 2013, p. 2). teachers who perceived language as a problem believed using indigenous languages in the school curriculum prevented rural school children from adequate grade advancement. reasons for this included the great demands that the double workload (teaching and learning l1 and l2) posed on teachers and students. in their view, ebi rural schools required students to obtain skills and content in both the indigenous language and the spanish language. this double workload for teachers and students resulted in not being able to cover all the content and competencies assigned for the grade level, students falling behind, and grade repetition. other teachers argued that rural indigenous students were at a disadvantage compared to their urban peers since rural students usually arrived to primary school with little exposure to spanish and therefore had to begin learning l2 from scratch. teachers attributed this lack of knowledge of spanish to the limited availability of pre-primary schooling opportunities in rural areas; rural students’ and parents’ monolingualism and illiteracy; and rural students’ lack of exposure to newspapers, magazines, books, and television. the “language problem” was perceived as even more pronounced in the rural areas and results from superficial ebi teacher education programs and half-heartedly executed policies. teacher professionalization and in-service training programs may offer a platform for change. contextually sensitive teacher education offers an opportunity to teach indigenous histories, languages, and cultures through additive bilingualism – where both cultures and languages are equally valuedand where government commitments can finally begin to transition from rhetoric to practice. teacher experiences and perspectives of mentorship interview findings and observations revealed that pedagogical mentorship programs could potentially assist in addressing the language challenge, change beliefs of cultural inferiority and superiority, and enhance teacher skills in bilingual and intercultural education. pedagogical mentorship was across-the-board accepted and demanded by all interviewed teachers in the seven schools, as an in-service teacher education resource to strengthen their ebi skills. however, high expectations and threats posed by patron-client relationships and discriminative language structures could defeat its pedagogical purpose and threaten the opportunity to provide more culturally and linguistically inclusive education. mentorship meanings interviews revealed that while teachers have been exposed to various programs of pedagogical mentorship, they developed similar ideas, hopes, and concerns around the concept. teachers described pedagogical mentorship as help and a support that came to their classroom to orient their pedagogical practices. likewise, mentors’ answers were also along the same lines and included, “mentorship means getting close to the teacher” (interview with mentor eduardo, april 2013) and “the objective is to help, orient the teacher to better her/himself in the classroom” (interview with ministry of education staff in baja verapaz, september 2012). additionally, some of their answers focused on the relationship between the mentor and teacher as expressed in comments such as, “it is help provided to the teacher by means of the mentor as his/her equal” (interview with pace-giz staff, september 2012) and “i teach them new things and they teach me” (interview with mentor miriam, april 2013). teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 57 mentors understood that many of the teachers they worked with had many years of inclass teaching experience and in some cases had even more experience than the mentors themselves. they recognized the knowledge both novice and more experienced teachers had acquired while teaching in rural and indigenous classrooms and thus the importance of learning from each other and not just teaching them. both teachers and mentors agreed that the function of the mentors was one of help and support and that the relationship was built on collaboration and walking together down the path of learning. teachers thus viewed pedagogical mentorship as an action where a peer or partner came to help and not supervise them in the classroom. when referring to the pedagogical aspect of mentorship, the teachers understood it as techniques, methodologies, and activities for teaching. there was a general consensus in the teacher and mentor perceptions that pedagogical mentorship meant supporting the teacher in the rural classroom with alternative pedagogical or teaching related techniques and practices. mentor challenges the spectrum of programs teachers were in contact with resulted in different experiences related to the frequency and duration of the mentors visits. the teachers who were most often visited by mentors received a total of ten one-on-one visits, which included a combination of the visits from several programs, while the teachers with the least number experienced only one visit. encounters also varied in duration, with some teachers visited for three hours while others were visited only for 30 minutes. two of the main reasons given by teachers and mentors for these differences were related to the large number of schools and teachers assigned to each mentor; and the lack of extra resources for mentor transportation to the schools. mentor dilemmas pedagogical mentors were each assigned between eight and 25 schools and within them they were responsible for visiting 50 to 100 teachers. these large mentor/teacher and mentor/school ratios posed a great challenge for the mentors since the assigned schools were usually geographically scattered and difficult to access. traveling to and from the rural schools was viewed as a major challenge for mentors since many times they did not get extra monetary or vehicular resources for their mentorship jobs. these high mentor/teacher and mentor/school ratios together with the monetary burden of providing for their own transportation often led pedagogical mentors to choose to more regularly visit the schools that were closer to their place of residence, which often meant the schools closer to urban centers. consequently, i found that the teachers who had received between five and ten visits from the pedagogical mentors were in the two schools that were closest to the municipal capitals, where transportation was less expensive and more frequently available. reasons for visiting these schools included spending less money and time commuting, and not having to begin their journey to school before sunrise to arrive on time. for all the mentors, getting to rural schools took many hours of commute time and required paying high transportation costs, which often led mentors to only visit one school and one teacher per day; thus teachers had diverse experiences with the mentors. areas of support mentorship visits varied in frequency and length but they tended to provide support to teachers in two areas: (1) language and communication and (2) development of classroom materials. these two most frequently mentioned topics also included sub-topics and skills that teachers were mentored in. table 2 summarizes the trends of the pedagogical mentorship areas of support provided to grades 1-3 (cycle i) and 4-6 (cycle ii). 58 global education review 3(1) table 2 mentorship areas of support by grade grade language and communication classroom materials 1-3 cycle i • ebi • basic reading and writing (l1 & l2) • games, songs (l1 & l2) • national base curriculum • learning corners • bilingual posters • use of school context 4-6 cycle ii • writing • grammar improvement in spanish • reading fluency and comprehension in spanish • national base curriculum • posters for math, science, and technology • bilingual posters • use of school context for math language and communication the guatemalan national base curriculum has language and communication as the area where students are expected to develop competencies and learn content in the mother tongue (l1), a second language (l2), and a third language (l3). in the case of the seven chosen schools l1 was an indigenous language (achi’ and k’iche’ respectively), l2 was spanish, and l3 was english. the four main components of the language and communication area for primary school included listening, speaking, reading, and writing in these languages. teachers received pedagogical mentorship in several areas included within language and communication: techniques for bilingual reading and writing, importance of bilingualism for effective learning, methodologies for teaching first graders, understanding of the national base curriculum’s competencies and learning objectives, strategies for reading comprehension, creation of daily reading and writing routines; working in pairs with an advanced and a beginner reader, songs in achi’ and k’iche’ to teach values, and use of old newspaper articles to promote reading, among others. mentors provided ebi-related teaching skills in both languages to teachers assigned to grades 1-3. teachers assigned to grades 4-6 spoke mostly of being helped in enhancing their students reading and writing skills in spanish, as they got ready to go to middle school in urban areas, and there was hardly any mention of l1 (the indigenous language). some of the reasons for this focus on spanish were because many teachers believed that “kids already speak their mother tongue, now is spanish’s turn”. this reality led the united nations special rapporteur for the rights to education to find that 74% of guatemalan children ages 7-12 had access to schooling only in spanish and only 13% in spanish and in a mayan language (lópez, 2014). development of classroom materials the focus given to ebi in the grades 1-3 and to spanish in grades 4-6 was also common in the next most frequently mentioned area of mentorship: development of classroom materials. mentors provided teachers with ideas on how to create classroom materials particularly related to the teaching and learning of reading and writing in l1 and l2 and in math. teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 59 in grades 1-3, materials developed were mostly assigned to “learning corners,” spaces in the classroom with materials and resources, representative of the students’ context and cultural components, where children could develop skills and construct knowledge by playing (mineduc, 2010). some of the resources suggested for these corners included books, games and bingos related to reading and spelling in l1 and l2, materials made from local resources such as corn cobs for counting and learning about mathematical sets, and arts and crafts materials for the students to use and play with. mentors also shared ideas with teachers on how to do posters. i saw these posters in the 33 classrooms; they included signs with the spanish and mayan alphabet, key words and phrases in both languages, classroom values, cleaning committees, and self-attendance sheets, among others (see figure 1). in grades 1-3, the focus of the posters was on ebi, where numbers, animals, values, and days of the week were often posted in both languages. in grades 4-6, the signs’ focus was on science, math, and technology in spanish. few posters were available in mayan languages. figure 1: l1 posters in second grade classroom 60 global education review 3(1) figure 2: use of learning corner corncobs gusano for learning the alphabet incorporating the local context mentors often gave teachers ideas for teaching activities, materials, and games which used the school grounds and the local environment. in grades 1-3, some of the activities i observed that mentors had shared with the teachers included going outside to draw vowels and letters with a wooden stick in the dirt; picking up leaves, sticks, and pebbles for basic math counting and learning colors; and the use of recycled materials such as bottle tops and corn cobs (see figure 2) for basic math and spelling skills. in grades 4-6, the school environment was mostly used for math examples where students identified geometrical shapes on the school grounds and in indigenous women’s traditional huipiles (blouses) and learned distances by using school areas such as the soccer field, hallways, roads, bus stops, or neighboring farms. the quotes below typify these learning experiences related to the use of the local context: i had no idea how to work with first grade and he/she showed me how to work with bottle caps, letters, to do writing strokes in the sand. he/she also brought recyclable materials to do letters and have the children work in pairs so if one cannot do it, the other one can push him/her. (interview with sara, february 2013) in rural and indigenous guatemalan schools, where hunger and late arrival of schooling materials was the norm, these mentor recommended activities considered the local context, provided teachers with new ideas, and undiscovered resources to experiment with. teachers greatly valued the visits of the pedagogical mentors, even though they were short and infrequent. this yearning for mentor visits was clearly expressed in teacher interviews and this acceptance provides an opportunity for professional development in ebi. yearning for mentorship teacher positive perception of pedagogical mentorship was evident. only 7 of the 33 interviewed teachers mentioned having had a negative encounter with the mentors. the unfavorable experiences had to do with mentors who lacked the language abilities to be helpful in their school communities, possessed disrespectful attitudes, or attempted to supervise rather than to help teachers in the classroom. teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 61 nonetheless, when i asked these seven teachers with negative experiences, and the other 26 with positive ones, if they would recommend and/or want pedagogical mentorship to continue in the future, all of them responded positively. even those with bad experiences explained, “i do recommend it, in my case it was that i once got a person who did not have the right preparation” (interview with dina, april 2013). teachers also mentioned that with the exception of those few negative experiences they did want pedagogical mentorship because the mentors almost always brought new ideas and they helped to share them among teachers. there was demand on behalf of all the interviewed teachers for pedagogical mentorship. teacher perceptions also revealed a great sense of promise for pedagogical mentorship to become a resource to enhance and contextualize teaching practices, and for educators to continue their professional growth. teachers enjoyed the mentorship visits they received and they requested that these initiatives offer more pedagogical knowledge on particular topics associated with the realities of rural and indigenous classrooms. these findings suggest that pedagogical mentorship can assist in addressing the rural teacher challenge of inadequate ebi education. mentorship to address the language challenge the areas on which teachers had received pedagogical mentorship were mainly related to language and communication and elaboration of classroom materials. when i asked teachers “what topics would you like to receive support from the mentors to help enhance your teaching practice?” the most frequently mentioned area of support that teachers requested was bilingual intercultural education. ebi the desired areas of support in ebi included: information on how to explain to parents the importance of ebi for their child’s literacy development and cultural enrichment; techniques and methodologies on how to teach l1 without texts; additional songs, stories, and culture related matters in achi’ and k’iche’; and methods for fomenting reading, listening, and writing in the indigenous language. our school is bilingual. we are required l1 [mother tongue-in this case indigenous language] and we really were not trained to teach l1 and we do not have the tools to teach it in the four skills. . . . mentorship could help us. (interview with celeste, may 2013) both indigenous and non-indigenous teachers said that they had not received adequate teacher education or training to teach the four basic language skills of reading, listening, writing, and speaking in l1. while 99% of the children in the seven schools in this study spoke an indigenous language, they did not necessarily know how to read or write that language. moreover, while most indigenous teachers fluently spoke achi’ or k’iche’ as their mother tongue, they did not necessarily know how to read, write, or teach their native language. teachers of all ages, levels, and ethnicities spoke about their lack of training and their desire to learn more about carrying out ebi in their schools. in their view, mentorship was a pedagogical resource that could potentially enhance their knowledge on ebi teaching and learning skills and lead to the provision of more culturally and linguistically responsive education for their student communities. reasons behind the demand why was there such a positive acceptance of the programs and what could be the greater significance of this appeal? underlying factors that contributed to this demand for pedagogical mentorship included the benefits of collaboration, rural teacher isolation, craving for new knowledge, and a need for support in teaching practices that were sensitive to the 62 global education review 3(1) challenges encountered in rural and indigenous contexts. the mentor-teacher dyad in the four pedagogical mentorship programs proved to be more collaborative than hierarchical and represented a learning partnership where both the mentor and teacher were co-learners (awaya et al., 2009). the interviewed teachers valued collaboration. this cooperative partnership, where the mentor had no authority over the teacher in the relationship, was based on assistance, moral support, and knowledge construction. teachers enjoyed the exploration and inquiry the process brought as well as the emotional support, reflection, and action. this feeling of teamwork implied moving beyond transmissive models toward more democratic ones that took teachers’ experiences and context into account. moreover, rural teachers felt acompañados (accompanied) in their daily tasks and this was deemed as comforting in their lonesome profession. teaching can be a lonely profession and in schools located in remote rural areas, where government services are greatly absent, the loneliness intensifies. this isolation is an underlying cause for pedagogical mentorships’ acceptance and demand. the teachers in the seven rural schools constantly mentioned the lack of government and ministry of education presence in their school communities, which resulted in lack of basic health services, delays in the arrival of funds for school feeding programs and school supplies, constant teacher and principal absenteeism to go to the municipal capital to run school related errands, and the creation of a strong dependence and parallel administrative structure with ngos and international cooperation agencies. this reference to government absence was also made by teachers when sharing their difficulties in attending ministry of education training and professional development workshops, since most of the sessions were held in guatemala city or in departmental municipal capitals. instead, pedagogical mentorship provided an opportunity for rural teachers to receive in-service teacher training and to create a space for collaborative learning within their rural classrooms, surrounded by their contextual realities. mentors experienced the daily challenges that rural teachers faced in their multilingual, multilevel, multigrade, poverty stricken schools, and together they tried to develop strategies to improve student learning. the demand for pedagogical mentorship was tied to this aspiration and the fact that the mentoring was provided within the school community. teachers expressed their need and desire to acquire new knowledge about particular subject matter such as ebi. this desire to learn new strategies and skills to more effectively teach bilingualism and interculturality, evidenced the challenges brought by the presence of indigenous languages and cultures in rural schools, for teachers who were ill-prepared to deal with these contextual realities. this plea provides a valuable opportunity for the government to advance its compliance with guatemala’s multiple legal commitments to provide linguistically and culturally inclusive education. looming concerns while teachers shared a sense of hope for what pedagogical mentorship could offer, they also expressed common concerns. interviewees expressed doubts about the future of pedagogical mentorship since they feared that programs’ rhetorical intentions, spirit of collaboration and knowledge creation could be weakened by political power relations. teachers worried that the upcoming mentorship programs would hire mentors who did not possess the right credentials and skills for the job. due to the looming concern over clientelism and political interests infiltrating the pedagogical mentorship process, the positive teacher perceptions and support for pedagogical mentorship also came with specific conditions teacher perspectives on pedagogical mentorship as an in-service training resource 63 for the programs’ effectiveness. the main requirement teachers perceived as essential for mentorship to be effective was language, as represented in graciela’s comment, “i do support pedagogical mentorship but only if the mentor speaks the language”; interview, february 2013). teachers shared a strong concern for the assignment of mentors to these positions that did not comply with the required profile, as the following quote shows: they tell us they will send us a mentor. but many come from desk jobs and not from reality. they do not speak the language; they do not know the rural reality. hopefully, this time it is done transparently with people who know the realities. (interview with hector, february 2013) teachers were also concerned that the program could become politicized, clientelistic in its hiring practices, and be overtaken by partisan politics that would threaten the integrity of the program and the potential of pedagogical mentorship to advance rural and indigenous people’s right to quality education. the government holds a powerful opportunity to change one of the main challenges rural teachers perceived they face: inadequate ebi training. conclusions this case study of guatemala showed that the main challenges faced by teachers in rural and indigenous schools (as perceived by teachers) were economic hardship, malnutrition, absence of government programs and inadequate teacher training for bilingual intercultural education. teachers perceived pedagogical mentors as help and support inside their classrooms primarily in language and communication and in developing classroom materials. the high mentor/teacher and mentor/school ratios, and the long distances between rural schools without compensation for the traveling made mentor visits infrequent and short. also, not hiring mentors that fill the job profile – particularly those that do not have the school community’s indigenous language or that lack training in ebiled to negative experiences with pedagogical mentors since they could not support teachers in their multi-linguistic and cultural classrooms. but even with these program shortcomings, pedagogical mentorship was welcomed by all the interviewed rural teachers. teachers perceived it as a resource and an opportunity to enhance their knowledge of ebi skills, to collaborate in their usually isolated endeavors, and to professionally develop within the school community. teacher understandings and my observations revealed that pedagogical mentorship offers an opportunity for the government to implement the long overdue right to quality and culturally relevant education, by addressing and enhancing ebi training through the mentors. pedagogical mentorship programs alone cannot transform rural and indigenous classrooms. this in-service training resource is just one effort in the required inter-institutional endeavor to provide quality education that includes culturally and contextually relevant curricula, healthy and motivated students, competent teachers, active pedagogies, good governance, equitable resource allocation, and redressing of social inequalities. an “apartheid of knowledge” (delgado bernal & villalpando, 2002), which segregates the rural and indigenous, still persists in guatemalan rural education policies, teacher education, social program delivery and curricular content. the perceived apartheid is not only of knowledge but also of educational opportunity between the indigenous and nonindigenous dominant culture. teachers are interested in learning how to change this state of affairs. this study provided insights into educational inequalities in rural and indigenous schools, and also revealed teacher understandings, including the perceived promise of pedagogical mentorship as an in-service teacher training resource that can assist in the 64 global education review 3(1) transformation of teaching practices and curricular content to contextualize and incorporate rural and indigenous cultures and languages. references awaya, a., mcewan, h., heyler, d., linsky, s., lum, d., & wakukawa, p. 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(2013, january 19). guatemala: overview. retrieved from http://www.wfp.org/countries/guatemala about the author katy de la garza, edd, has worked on international development, social justice and education quality issues in latin america for more than 15 years. she is currently the strategy and innovation officer at televisa foundation, a non-profit that enhances educational opportunities for hispanics in the u.s. previously, she was country director for the nature conservancy costa rica, program manager for the u.s. peace corps rural and community development program in costa rica, and the client services manager for the international microcredit organization pro mujer programs for women in mexico. katy holds a doctorate in education (edd) from teachers college, columbia university; a masters in international development management from columbia university’s school of international and public affairs (sipa); and a bachelor of science degree from georgetown university’s school of foreign service. her research interests and publications focus on bilingual and intercultural education, curriculum and socio cultural relevance, indigenous peoples and schooling, teacher education, gender and curriculum, and education policy. http://www.wfp.org/countries/guatemala 167 de la garza ger guatemala teachers & mentorship with footer the guatemalan context mentorship programs in guatemala challenges in rural and indigenous classrooms economic hardships, malnutrition, and government absence the language challenge teacher experiences and perspectives of mentorship mentorship meanings areas of support mentorship to address the language challenge looming concerns conclusions 167 de la garza ger guatemala teachers & mentorship no footer the guatemalan context mentorship programs in guatemala challenges in rural and indigenous classrooms economic hardships, malnutrition, and government absence the language challenge teacher experiences and perspectives of mentorship mentorship meanings areas of support mentorship to address the language challenge looming concerns conclusions teaching with stories 27 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: frances vitali (2016). teaching with stories as the content and context for learning. global education review, 3(1). 27-44 teaching with stories as the content and context for learning frances vitali university of new mexico abstract undergraduate teacher education program students have the opportunity to work with diverse student populations in a local rural school district in the four corners area in the northwest part of new mexico. the family oral history practicum is a way to connect theory and practice while recognizing the issue that language is not a neutral landscape. what better way to demonstrate this complementarity than through family stories? the goal is to bring an awareness of respect for oral language in relationship to literate language and explore how to balance both perspectives in school culture as prospective teachers. preservice teacher candidates become storytelling coaches and team up with third graders in semester long storytelling projects, collaborating with local elementary school teachers. students' family stories become the content and context for teaching and learning. with a diverse classroom population of navajo, hispanic, mexican, and white students, family stories are the heart and central theme of the project. storytelling coaches learn the nuances of diversity when theory is massaged with authentic experiences of students as they share what they have learned beside their young storytellers and authors. keywords storytelling in education, teacher education, practitioner research, preservice teachers, oral history, rural, new mexico, family stories, oracy, literacy, diversity/equity, teaching writing balancing story in teaching “narrative knowledge is experiential and cultural knowing. it is the best means available for students to organize their experiences and make meaning for themselves.” (cooper and collins in look what happened to frog, 1992, p. 5). teacher candidates in a teacher preparation program are learning the nuances of teaching diverse students through the art, craft, and oral tradition of storytelling. in becoming culturally responsive teachers, stories become a way of building relationships and community in acknowledging, recognizing, and validating students’ funds of knowledge. drawing from students’ family experiences, family stories become the content and context for learning and teaching. relying on the strength of family knowledge as stories, students scaffold their corresponding author: frances vitali, the university of new mexico, 4601 college boulevard, farmington, nm 87402 email: fvitali@unm.edu mailto:fvitali@unm.edu 28 global education review 3(1) literacy competency within the classroom as they are coached by teacher candidates. these young storytellers draw from the rich resources of their family stories for literacy learning. the balance of oracy (listening and speaking; oral, aural) to literacy (reading and writing) is not as recognized or validated in our school culture, which situates literacy above orality. in this way, we are leaving out valuable perspectives and funds of knowledge that may contribute to and inform educational practice for students to learn through their strengths in the academic setting. language is not neutral and writing and reading represent historical, social, critical, and political contexts of a status of power. for example, legally denying certain groups of people the right to read and write and therefore, limiting their equitable access of information, is embedded within the historical fabric of our nation. forbidding others the right to speak their own language in school reveals how power and privilege have been embedded in our school system. from a critical pedagogical perspective, those who are master manipulators of the written word, gain respect within the dominant society. the paradigm of literacy is built upon aural and oral background knowledge. these cultural funds of knowledge are students’ primary knowledge and learning strength. english language arts includes, listening, speaking, reading, writing, and thinking. the efficacy of future reading and writing skills is contingent upon a strong foundation of listening and speaking skills. literacy refers to typographic, chirographic or hypertext reading and writing communication; while orality or oracy refers to aural or oral listening and speaking communication. a more balanced approach to oracy and literacy in our school culture may acknowledge the ever changing diversified landscape in our schools. kabagarama (1997) predicts the future trend of diversity represented in our demographics. by the year 2050, our nation will be a majorityminority, with no one racial or ethnic group predominating (p. 11). oracy and literacy “our species thinks in metaphors and learns through stories.”(mclellan wyatt digital) storytelling and reading require two different cognitive processes. marshal mcluhan (1964) described the power of oral literature as when the eye is subservient to the ear. ong (1982) compares the two processes to the right and left hemispheres of our brain operating distinctively, yet simultaneously. storytelling draws from the right hemisphere of holistic, visual, relational processing; whereas, reading and writing draw from the left hemispheric of more linear, logical, segmented, mechanistic (schlain, 1998). however, both hemispheres of the brain function collectively. ong (1982) describes this tension and complementarity of both sides of our brain identifying western (dominant society) and non-western (nondominant society) perspectives. the matrix in figure 1, adapted from ong (1982), describes the basic complementarity and duality coexisting between orality and literacy (vitali, 2004, p. 55). teaching with stories 29 figure 1 matrix of orality and literacy (adapted by vitali from ong, 1982) orality non-dominant culture field-dependent literacy dominant culture field-independent orality is universal literacy is a recent technology secondary orality has mediated technologies text based (chirographic and typographic) learn by imprinting learn by studying knowledge exists within person knowledge exists within books situational or contextual thinking centered in human action abstract thinking centered around impersonal labeling, itemizing, categorizing oral narratives and organizational structures (mnemonic style, ritual formula, repetition) literal narratives and organizational structures (linear, logical, sequential, abstract) sound incorporates (unifying, holistic, harmonizing tendencies) writing & printing isolates (separate, independent, discrete) knowledge and thinking referential to human activity knowledge devoid of human action or content analytic tendency to take meaning from the whole by separating into parts; concerned with interrelationships synthetic tendency to give meaning to separate elements combining to form a coherent whole; abstract thinking figure 1 matrix of orality and literacy there is complementarity and tension between oracy and literacy, for without literacy, oral stories would be lost. wilson (1997) defines oral tradition, including oral history, as "the way in which information is passed on rather than the length of time something has been told" (p. 103). storyteller judy hooks (personal communication, october 13, 1992) said that when you read a story, students connect to the pictures; when you tell a story, students connect with you. denise hinson (personal communication, may 28, 2010) recognizes the significance storytelling plays in building personal connections of trust and respect among students and teachers, and the effect it has on classroom management. oral communication can be balanced with recognizable equity alongside written literacies understanding the linguistic, personal, and cultural spectrum in teaching of english language arts (l.a.). stories are an integral part of what defines us as human beings and the art of languaging. story as technology “when a day passes it is no longer there. what remains of it? nothing more than a story. 30 global education review 3(1) if stories weren’t told or books weren’t written, man would live like beasts-only for a day. today, we live, but tomorrow today will be a story. the whole world, all human life, is one long story.” (i.b. singer in cooper and collins in look what happened to frog, 1992, p. 8) stories are aural, oral, literary human expressions; human extensions and human technologies designed to explain who we are, how we come to know, how we negotiate meaning, and how we communicate. language is the earliest human technology and stories are a natural extension of who we are as human beings; giving meaning to and extracting meaning from our world. durnin explains elementally, “story is our dna. we are myth incarnate” (personal communication, june 3, 2015). rietz (1988) refers to stories as "a human invention" and "learning 'story' and learning to 'story' involves learning a way of thinking, a way of organizing events and information, a way of knowing" (p. 164). king (2003) truthfully declares that stories are all we are (p. 2). “we live by stories and we live in them. one way or another we are living the stories planted in us early or along the way, or we are also living the stories we planted – knowingly or unknowingly – in ourselves” (okri, as cited in king, p. 153). frank smith (1990) validates that our “thought flows in terms of stories—stories about events, stories about people, and stories about intentions and achievements. the best teachers are the best storytellers. we learn in the form of stories. we construct stories to make sense of events. our prevailing propensity is to impose story structures on all experience, real or imagined….the brain is a story-seeking, story creating instrument” (pp. 62-63). burke and orenstein (1995) document, just as the axe was a tool that changed civilization, so too, the alphabet and the printing press became the most powerful tools for change thus far (p. 75). the ensuing literacies negotiated with computer and digital technologies continue to change, and perhaps, challenge, our cognitive synapses to new levels. “narrative knowledge is experiential and cultural knowing. it is the best means available for students to organize their experiences and make meaning for themselves” (cooper and collins in look what happened to frog, 1992, p. 5). thompson (2007), deschenie (2007), and epstein (2010) prompt our thinking about multiperspectives within the learning environment by reminding us to ask whose voices are we leaving out? in differentiating instruction, learning styles, and multiple intelligences, although common professional knowledge, we fail to realize that orality and literacy, two distinct, yet interwoven communication styles, are very much related. gardner (1993) refers to first knowledge that children learn at home as primary knowledge. when children come to school, they learn secondary knowledge, which could be scaffolded or connected to their primary knowledge. in this way, we tap prior knowledge for learning. as educators how can we better integrate children’s first knowledge or cultural knowledge in the learning process within the context of school? grant and sleeter (2007) reference a “cultural split” when students’ school life is disconnected from their real world (p. 46). stories children bring to school represent who they are and where they come from, while also allowing them to interpret and understand their world. their stories seem to be valuable tools for learning and teaching in the school setting. dual perspectives “people often are powerless, alone, afraid; this is because someone else is telling their story for teaching with stories 31 them: ‘you are stupid. you are ugly. you are undesirable. you are useless.’ through storytelling, you recognize your real story.” (joe bruchac, abenaki) some indigenous students come from a storied place of coming to know their identity, culture, and language through the oracy of language as their first knowledge. according to deschenie (2007): “as no child left behind seeks to shape a more literate society, we must remember that we come from cultures rooted in the power and beauty of oral tradition and faceto-face storytelling” (para. 24). thompson (2007) understands these contrasting views as dual perspectives: the western view: “a gifted individual, such as a shakespeare, out of his own imagination uses the many complex techniques of rhetoric and composition to create a work of art, which we lesser mortals struggle to fully appreciate through a complicated process we call literary analysis.” in the indigenous view, the oral tradition represents "the other side of the miracle of language" as described by momaday in the man made of words: "the telling of stories, the recitation of epic poems, the singing of songs, the making of prayers, the chanting of magic and mystery, the exertion of the human voice upon the unknown—in short, the spoken word." to paraphrase a familiar document, this sounds to me very much like a literature "of the people, by the people, and for the people." (p. 13) wampanoag storyteller gkisedtanamoogk (pronounced geh kis eh tan' eh mook with eh as schwa) explains the complementarity of stories and writing during the writers project summer camp in maine: "storytelling is always an integral part of how indigenous people live their culture so we intended to cultivate cultural norms, to create community as members of the wabanaki confederacy, and thus promote writing as a form of storytelling" (epstein, 2010, para. 20). a diné high school teacher admitted during our summer writing project that cultural knowledge fosters a deeper understanding of writing and pondered if she could use students’ cultural learning to teach writing (lavelda charley, personal communication, june 16, 2010). i pondered why this was even a question to consider for its obvious emphatic yes, of course response, but understood the historical context of recognizing the need to ask such a question posed by this teacher. this teacher’s funds of knowledge were never validated in her school experience. moayeri and smith (2010) identify literacy as a cultural practice with different literacies influenced by culture, communities, and its role in communicating those stories and community values. oral tradition is a worldview, a way of knowing as a “distinctive intellectual tradition, not simply as myths and legends” (moayeri and smith, p. 414), and in comparing traditional knowledge with scientific knowledge, it is often viewed as illegitimate. a disconnect between home/community literacies and school literacy occurs where “literacy is most often taught in schools as decontextualized, technical skills” resulting in “holding back literacy development for children, particularly those whose home literacies are undervalued and ignored by the schools” (dyson, 2003, as cited in moayeri and smith, 2010, p. 409). hanamuxw (in moayeri and smith, 2010, p. 414) acknowledges ways of knowing for first nation peoples as: scientific knowledge as represented in the dominant society; lifeways as experienced in everyday life; and narrative ways of learning through stories. 32 global education review 3(1) in honoring multiple ways of knowing, as culturally competent teachers, we can recognize “whose stories are being privileged and whose stories are being marginalized in the representations of the other” (p. 415). thompson and smith (2009) acknowledge the responsibility of teacher education programs in mitigating native american stereotypes and inaccuracies within k-12 curriculum and teaching practices by engaging teacher candidates in educational and cultural opportunities for their professional learning, as well as doing their homework through background reading. for those who were denied and punished for speaking their mother-tongue language are now using the english language as their alternate language of power, as an instrument of social justice. anzaldua (2007) explains: “ethnic identity is twin skin to linguistic identity – i am my language” (p. 81). the irony is not lost when children were punished for speaking their diné language in boarding schools. however, diné and other native languages became strategic and technological intelligence during wwii with the success of code talkers. literacy enhancements of multimodal and multigenre contexts, supported by current technology, are resulting in a blending and bending of the two, creating a more holistic communication landscape for understanding and relating to the world. the efficacy of future reading and writing skills is contingent upon a strong foundation of listening and speaking skills. as educators, we can support a more balanced approach to oracy and literacy in our school culture. oral storytelling is natural and is an important precursor to writing stories. it follows the developmental way we learn language by listening and speaking first, which leads to developing writing literacy. family storytelling project no one has to tell us, or teach a child, to perceive life in terms of stories; it is what everyone does. the total of facts and figures that we all collect-a few statistics, telephone numbers, birthdays, addresses-is miniscule compared with all the complex stories contained within the brain. (smith, 1990, p. 64) white-kaulaity (2007) reminds teachers that “oral tradition is much more valued in native communities. in fact, the culture is embedded in the language…however, schools and mainstream society often do not accept or consider the value of orality” (p. 561). whitekaulaity encourages the balance of both literacies, for “both types of literacy can work together to educate children to be lifelong learners” (p. 566). storytelling project-stories as content and context for learning rationale smith (1990) affirms that “our stories are the vantage points from which we perceive the world and the people in it" (pp. 64-65). christensen (2000) explains: “as teachers, we have daily opportunities to affirm that our students’ lives and languages are unique and important. we do that in the selections of literature we read, in the history we choose to teach, and we do it by giving legitimacy to our student’s lives as a content worthy of study” (p. 103). christensen engages her students in “sweet learnings” (pp. 23-26) to acknowledge that family experiences and family teachers are valuable assets that they bring to school. for christensen, this is an important message to convey to students: “because i live in a society that honors the wealthy and tends to hold in greatest esteem ‘high status’ formal knowledge, i must find ways to honor the intelligence, common sense, and love that beats in the hearts of my students’ families” (p. 25). teaching with stories 33 the richness of personal stories our children bring to school is the focus of this oral history project. as teachers, we recognize that students who walk through our school doors are walking stories, connected to family members who may be walking encyclopedias of knowledge. recognizing the meaningful and relevant connections of students’ own lives as valid content and rationale for learning, our family storytelling project honors both oral and literate ways of communicating and sharing knowledge. students seeking out their own family stories validated their own sense of belonging and self-identity, and were able to learn the skills necessary for communicating, orally and literary. student family stories become the content and context for learning, which recognizes and validates their own cultural history as christensen (2000) confirms and our practicum experience honors this significant learning and teaching insight. scaffolding teacher candidates in becoming culturally competent educators presents an understanding of the complexity involved in discerning our own biases and cultural perceptions (ladson-billings, 2001). ladson-billings (2001) emphasizes that teachers can be the conduits in connecting “student culture as a basis for learning” (p. 99). backstory in providing our undergraduate preservice teacher candidates with practicum experiences, teaching diverse students, and becoming culturally relevant teachers themselves, the oral family history project started in a fourth grade classroom in a rural school district in northwestern new mexico in 2007, as a university and local school literacy /storytelling collaboration. this project has continued into the present, where we now work with third graders in one classroom within the same school district. each semester teacher candidates, prior to their full time student teaching experiences, are invited to participate in the family history practicum project. participating classroom teachers are graduates of the university teaching education program. all, with the exception of one, were past teacher candidates with the university instructor in the oral family history or storytelling project. during our oral family history practicum project, we focus on the storytelling arts throughout the year. the project begins with the chautauqua oral form of storytelling, following natural language development. chautauqua refers to the adult educational and entertainment movement originating at chautauqua lake, new york, in the late 19th century. chautauqua gatherings became popular throughout rural america throughout the 1920s, whereby the lives of significant individuals were told as first person character accounts (chautauqua: bringing history to life, 2015). children choose a family character to tell the story as that character, which is performed at the culminating storytelling night for family and friends (chautauqua family storytelling, 2010). the following semester mentees scaffold in the storytelling process and write a finished narrative draft about a family hero. their final narratives are bound in books which they read at the culminating author’s chair performance for family and friends. third and fourth graders have written about their cars, pets, siblings, aunts, uncles, and grandparents, some of whom were deceased. preservice teacher candidates connect theory from their methods courses with the practice of coaching in the classroom where students’ family stories become the content and context for writing and reading. presevice teachers become storytelling coaches for their young storytellers (mentees) through the process. their stories become the bridge for negotiating the complexities of cultural competence, cultural relevancy, and cultural 34 global education review 3(1) sensitivity in situ in the classroom, as storytelling is humanized orally through chautauqua performances (semester 1), and later on through writing their own book about a family hero (semester 2). new mexico entry level competencies for diversity and family & community are identified in appendix a. each storytelling coach worked with three to five mentees and each semester’s project was six to eight weeks in duration. sessions ranged from 45 minutes to one hour and fifteen minutes, depending on the teacher’s classroom schedule. storytelling coaches and instructor debriefed following each session; all reflected weekly and planned for each subsequent session. methodology data collected evolved from weekly lesson plans that each storytelling coach presented to their third grade mentees. lessons were designed by the instructor as a guiding framework for coaches, which they could customize and adapt to their respective teaching styles. coaches reflected weekly on a class online blog and/or on their individual web page. coaches also wrote a research narrative about their own storytelling experiences and their perspective about stories in teaching. anecdotal notes were also collected during coaches’ debriefing following storytelling sessions each week. storytelling coaches and the instructor were participant observers during the project. the storytelling project was considered part of students’ curricular english language arts writing standards. as emergent design, themes surfaced while analyzing coaches’ reflections, research narratives, anecdotal notes, and student artifacts (chautauqua characters, written stories, illustrations, family performances, and author’s chair). the project is aligned with writing and oral delivery connected to common core state standards, which is coordinated with the classroom teachers’ curriculum. in establishing common vocabulary in which to talk about story throughout the project, the following story elements are introduced and are used as assessment during the project:  dialogue-character’s voice and language  character description  setting & blocking-place of story and how movement unfolds  monologue & dialogue – what character thinks and feels & what character says to others  experiences-smells, tastes, sounds as if the listener were there  figurative language-descriptive language in telling your story  flashbacks –remembering the past writing workshop processes (zainuddin, morales-jones, yahya, and ariza, 2011) supported the communicative and language experience approaches, where students’ prior knowledge and experience is brought into the classroom through their family stories. working with their stories provided authentic language opportunities, connecting classroom learning with their lived experiences. the writing workshop includes: a. prewriting (brainstorming) b. story drafts c. revising, editing, conferencing d. conference with storytelling coach & peers e. written final story f. culminating performance chautauqua or author’s chair emerging themes “the stories we tell not only explain things to others, they explain them to ourselves.” (donald norman) teaching with stories 35 coaching role storytelling coaches were able to explore beyond the traditional teacher role. coaches recognized their roles as director, facilitator, motivator, as well as learner, alongside their mentees (papert, 2001). building a trusting relationship with students was our primary focus when first introducing the project. introducing ourselves with i am (from) poems helped establish this connection. storytelling coaches introduced themselves with sharing their i am poems and then assisted their mentees in creating their own i am (from) poems. in this way, storytelling coaches learned about their mentees. their mentees shared personal events and stories through conversations during each subsequent session. the relationships formed were strong, trusting, and solid. one of the storytelling coaches, chelsea begay, used her own i am poem as a teaching and learning strategy: once the students started their chautauqua story, i fed them ideas on what they could write and reminded them of my i am poem and the key points they identified. i often used that to help them develop their story as well as using the storytelling elements (character description, dialogue, etc.). furthermore, i often took their pencil and wrote for them as they fed me their ideas. i jotted everything they said. i thought this little tactic was effective because i took into account how much more ideas they threw out there. i figured if they are writing themselves, they worry too much about spelling and grammar. but that seemed the least of their problems when i took the pen. (december 12, 2014) listening role listening to students became an important part of the writing process each week as coaches explored how to make connections and build trust with their new storytellers. graves (1985) asserts: “the hardest thing for teachers, and administrators, to realize the importance of listening to children. when the teacher listens, the children are finding out what they know, learning how to say it, and discovering that another human being really wants to hear it” (p. 128). as teachers the best way to learn is by practice, as graves reminds us. epstein (2010) asks how do we teach strategies for writing by embedding them in oral language? moayeri and smith (2010) suggest: “familiarizing ourselves and valuing the diverse and multiple literacies that students of different cultures bring with them enhances the learning potential of those students and that of the entire class” (p. 415). ladson-billings (2001) describes the responsibility of culturally relevant teachers as those who “learn about the students’ cultures and their communities” by bridging “the divide between the school and the students’ homes… they understand that the interest they show in students’ backgrounds and lives has an important payoff in the classroom” (p. 99). zainuddin, yahya, morales-jones and ariza (2011) explain that the complexities of teaching extend beyond merely understanding learning styles, but more significantly by implementing different learning styles with students that effectively meet their learning needs. storytelling coaches recognized students’ preferred learning styles by working with them and getting to know them through observations and conversations. there were many coaching conversations that supported scribing for students, if the act of writing interfered with the flow of their thoughts. remaining focused on the learning objective of telling a story changed the way storytelling coaches supported their mentees during the process. ryan (niehaus, 2010) reflected on specific strategies he used during the project: 36 global education review 3(1) since i have begun the process of the practicum i have been adapting to my students. i have learned some new strategies in dealing with the students. one strategy i learned was to focus on what is wanted from the student and not to muddle it up with irrelevant tasks. i learned this from getting the students to begin their chautauquas. i would have never thought of having them tell me their stories while i scribed. it is obvious now that the telling of their stories was the objective and to have them write it themselves may have led to students being more concentrated on correct spelling or grammar. (niehaus, 2010) additionally, coaches became aware of how their own cultural values, beliefs, and biases coexist and may sometimes “clash” with the students they mentor (zainuddin, yahya, morales-jones and ariza , 2011, p. 45). accepting multiplicities of cultural, family, and school paradigms are attributes of culturally relevant teaching. understanding which students are field dependent learners and which are field-independent learners informs us of how we should proceed. coaches became aware of differentiating for each of their mentees in their coaching sessions. their stories were more than just fulfilling an assignment; their stories were tied to their identities, language, culture, and academic learning. one coach shared her discovery through collegial dialogue among her peers and with the instructor during debriefing. “i began to steer him away from choosing his brother because his brother is so young and suggested that maybe he choose someone else on his brainstorm list. then he kept coming back to his brother and i realized that i was imposing my own ideas on the student.” it was an insightful moment to connect how our own biases will emerge and interfere in our coaching. this storytelling coach was able to put her own biases aside as she continued to let her mentee own his family hero story. storytelling coach nathan holmes reflected about overriding his concerns with one of his mentees: as they write their chautauqua stories, the students have been deeply mindful of the perspective of the character. this surprised me a little. i learned in the previous workshop not to underestimate the students’ skills, but perspective is a hard concept to grasp, especially for third graders. i can’t help but admire their attention to detail and their focus on getting it right. one student in particular shocked me with his story. he approached me with the idea of doing his chautauqua on his dad’s old mustang convertible. at first i was hesitant to allow this because i thought it may be too difficult for him. i decided to allow it rather than obstruct the storytelling process. i must admit i had my concerns. this particular student has trouble paying attention and following instructions. i soon had my concerns quieted when he presented me with his story. the way he used figurative language and brought the car to life was masterful. i feel his story could be mistaken for one of a student twice his age. (december 11, 2014) learning beside students storytelling coach hanson begay celebrates opportunities to learn about his students during the project: when my students would go on what seemed like tangents, those were the times that i seemed to learn the most about their backgrounds, home life, and cultures. tangents are a form of openness and comfort; and it was during these times http://rniehaus.webs.com/midterm.htm teaching with stories 37 that my students demonstrated our trusting relationship. (december 10, 2014) patricia hill (hill, 2010) reflects about aspects of the mutual learning relationship with her mentees: midway through the project, i have grown in my ability to see past the discomfort of growing. i see further to the benefit. when i am placed in an unfamiliar situation, i can appreciate the fact that i may not know exactly what i will come out with...but i am up for the journey…. my confidence and independence have been bolstered by my involvement with the chautauqua series. the kids i work with push me and i push back and we get on down the road with spring in our step. this surprises me because, yes, i am asking them to do things they do not necessarily want to do. we respect each other and we work for each other. i believe they trust their instincts even when they are aware of entering unchartered territory. they are trusting me that this is fun and it will work out and it will be great! as a teacher in training, that means so much, to see the relationship develop and the learning taking place on so many levels. mary durfey (durfey, 2010) reflects on connecting with her mentees: sharing stories with the children has helped them see connections in stories and give definition to family traditions. it's also helped them experience the art of a good story and the value of details and descriptions that help the reader 'see' what the author sees. another valuable strategy we've used in the practicum is building webs and pulling out the details of our stories. even more importantly is the aspect of connecting and learning from the children, their stories, their experiences as we have discussions. another coach talked about her mentee’s dad who died in a car accident when he was born. he was asked if he listens to stories about his dad who was a marine. when he replied no, he was encouraged to ask the questions that he was curious to know about his father and list those for his interview questions to ask his mother, uncles, and grandparents. the grandparents of this young author thanked the storytelling coach, after the author’s chair, for working with their grandson in telling this story. storytelling coach amber gibson reflected on her overall experience in the project: stories helped students to connect with each other and to build relationships with each other and myself. giving students the chance to share personal ideas and memories helps us as educators to affirm that their experiences and their life has value. storytelling offers a profound way for us to be connected with each other and it is a valuable asset to my future classroom. (december 9, 2014) chelsea akins reflected on the bond of stories with her three mentees: after our time together in the classroom, my trio has come to see me as a source of validation. i have listened to the stories they have told me, whether that had anything to do with their chautauqua characters or not… i absorbed their information, and pinned it to memory. every time i recite back their own memories, they feel a little more confident than they had before and they inevitably decide to share more. their stories are about disneyland, and camping, and how many prairie dogs their dog ate over the 38 global education review 3(1) summer, and the details themselves are almost less important than the connections they are making when they tell those stories. just because they are children does not mean they are any less vulnerable than adults: they need the bonds that come from human interaction just as much as we do. these bonds help validate the ideas and opinions that children have been growing within themselves. we have our own chautauqua stories to share, and we use these to model for our students. not only is the initial connection important, but so is the delivery....when we tell stories, we not only want the kinship that comes with sharing information, but we want a positive connection. working with these students, we not only form natural emotional attachment, but we are also teaching with our stories. (november 21, 2014) storytelling coach hanson begay made connections between his oral traditions and working with his young mentees: as weeks progressed, i learned that my students learned to appreciate the art of storytelling. my students started to engage with each other as they wrote about their character. this reminded me of how my paternal grandmother spoke to me during my adolescence years. my paternal grandmother was a navajo woman who had strong beliefs in the oral tradition. day after day, she would remind me that the worth of what she spoke of could not be found in entertainment or in mere objects such as money, but through her oral message. the beliefs of my grandmother were echoed in the words of barry lopez: “sometimes you need a story more than food to stay alive.” this quote also applied to when i told my students that their stories of their characters mattered and would show their parents and teachers that they can be viewed as students who truly have a story to tell or a treasure to share. nichiren daishonin said: “treasures of the heart are the most valuable of all.” (december 10, 2014) hanson begay further reflected on what he learned from his students: the students i coached pushed me and questioned me, in turn teaching me more than i instructed them. i never knew that students half my age would inspire me to talk freely without judging me….even though i began with modeling, sharing my own personal story through my brainstorm and drawings, my students knew exactly who they would choose for their family chautauqua character. for myself, i was indecisive of the character i wanted to become. my mentees helped me define who i would choose as their inspiration and enthusiasm gave me comfort to express myself beyond this shell of indecisiveness….if the teacher is reluctant to share and tell stories, the students will also display this behavior. storytelling is very personal and therefore there has to be a level of respect in order to allow for this comfort. (december 10, 2014) storytelling coach rachael charleston expressed what she learned from her students about respect for story. my experience with my students has been profound. when they say that storytelling is giving a gift of a story it truly is a gift. these students have learned what it means to put together their thoughts into words and they have learned literary terms about a story… i think that they were the ones that taught me the teaching with stories 39 most. i have learned that all students are different in how they approach story telling. i have also learned that it takes a lot of thinking and deep introspection in order to see things from someone else’s perspective especially when you are trying to tell a story from that point of view. they were hesitant at first to tell the story as the character but then i shared my character with them and i became my five year old daughter. well they really got a kick out of that and then they began to think like their character. they continued to think like them and learn to see from another person’s perspective. these students trusted us with a very important gift of their story. i think it changed my attitude towards storytelling as well because i figured out how important it can be to students and their writing skills. (december 8, 2014) stories are who we are students became actors (freire and macedo, 1987), literally and figuratively, in the chautauqua storytelling process. they were able to “name their world” as they became empowered in giving voice and agency to their own experiences (p. 159). their family stories confirmed and validated that their families and experiences are valuable, as they were integrated and connected, as content and context for learning in school (christensen, 2000; moayeri and smith, 2010). their family stories became counterparts to stories they read in academic books in their classrooms and school library. copies of bound anthologies of their stories were given to the school librarian for circulation in the school library. eventually during the process, these stories become more than completing an assignment. these stories are technological extensions of each student. learning the art and craft of drafting our stories to include: voice, style, organization, figurative language, punctuation, and peer conferences, is the academic goal. how do teacher coaches build trust and invite, wrestle, knead, coerce, lull, entice, conjure, levitate, ameliorate, and humor the space with their young storytellers and authors in eliciting the best possible stories? this is an emotional enterprise where teacher candidates learn more about themselves, in the process of coaching linguistically diverse students, because they have grappled with the messiness, the elegance, and the human propensity that grounds us all our stories. story becomes essential in learning as we rely on children’s prior knowledge, honor their funds of knowledge, and teach in more culturally relevant ways. recognizing normalcy that multiple perspectives exist, with the teacher’s perspective being only one of many, invites opportunities of learning alongside our students on a daily basis. stories are a natural way to enter and sustain the process of teaching and learning in balanced and natural ways. storytelling coach debbie griffifth’s reflection about her students and story: between last semester when we did the hero stories and this semester with storytelling, i learned just how much students are capable of. even if they are shy or think they don't have personal stories, they really do. once they get started they begin to enjoy it and really get into the process. i learned that storytelling is an effective teaching method for ela standards and i would like to think that once i am in the classroom i will remember this experience and incorporate storytelling into my teaching. (december 5, 2014) storytelling coach amber gibson reflected on the power of her mentees’ performance: 40 global education review 3(1) it was great hearing students’ hero stories about the family members that they loved and cared so much about but seeing them perform and act out the character of the family member they love is such a bigger gift than just writing a hero story. (december 9, 2014) storytelling coach hanson begay’s words capture the essence of story in teaching and learning: as i have worked in the schools through tutoring and practicum experiences this semester, i have seen a pattern of what seems to be that learning needs to be focused on assessments. there doesn’t seem to be time allotted or an appreciation that there should be time made for such things as storytelling. a tradition that at one time was the only way to transfer information and knowledge, storytelling has now become a novelty and is slowly making its way back into the schools with the realization of how important storytelling is and how it benefits and enriches all subject areas. as stated in telling tales in school in teaching and learning (koepke, 1990): “children are motivated to work hard because their stories have personal meaning” (p. 32). a standardized test does not hold personal meaning to them, as many assignments i think that are given do not, and therefore students struggle and have a hard time feeling successful. allowing students the opportunity to share of themselves, they are able to find their own connections in their learning and it shows in their growth and progress. (december 10, 2014) rural teaching implications the oral family storytelling project has significant implications in a rural community, where storytelling coaches will become future teachers in the communities where they grew up and maintain family connections. some teacher candidates will teach in the same schools where they were once students. in some cases, teacher candidates will student teach with teachers who once taught them. teacher candidates in our rural school districts tend to be place-based, as a result. therefore, this sense of community is close-knit, familiar and predictable, whereby teachers know parents and their families and may teach multiple generations within one family, over the course of their professional career. on the other hand, experiences may be limited within a rural community, requiring more opportunities to challenge, extend, and be receptive in meeting diverse needs of students who are different culturally, linguistically, ideologically. pedagogically, as teachers, they understand the inherent complexity of stories and appreciation of the writing process, requiring them to write alongside their students as teachers who write and writers who teach. diversity courses are now integrated in teaching preparation programs. the oral family storytelling project is one way to marry theory with authentic practice. teacher candidates are guided and supported within various aspects of teaching the writing process, the value of stories, and how stories are a natural way to build trust and relationships with students, while validating and honoring them as individuals. this practicum project provides teacher candidates with relevant opportunities during their professional teaching program to work with students in authentic ways connecting real life contextual learning. through such a practicum project more preservice teachers validate this career choice as they gain confidence and familiarity in engaging students pedagogically, cognitively, culturally, and linguistically. such an oral family history project provides our rural teachers exposure and teaching with stories 41 practice of grappling with issues of diversity, teaching, guiding, and supporting students, who may be different linguistically, culturally, and/or ethnically. this context provides learning intersections and dynamics for reflecting on their practice, their teaching, their thinking, and their biases, with stories as the backdrop for such reflective practice. grant and sleeter (2007) suggests that teachers “take into account their students’ world forces” of inequity related to ethnicity, gender, socio-economic class, ability, language, sexuality when considering the school curriculum (p. 44). how does the l.a. curriculum interface with students’ lives outside of school, grant and sleeter ask? the oral family history project is a way to bridge this apparent disconnect in students’ lives outside of school with curricular goals within school, thus validating and recognizing their knowledge, experiences, skills, which comprise their stories, as valuable content for learning within the school context. this opens the opportunity for teacher candidates to extend their own learning in the process. (see appendix a.) epilogue treasures of the heart are the most valuable of all.” (nichiren daishonin) how could we have imagined that such an innocent writing project could become so intense and complex, and be such an emotional experience for students, storytelling coaches, and instructors? this represents the relational side of learning grounded in the personal, storied experiences of these children. following the most recent chautauqua family night in fall 2014, i visited the third grade classroom and spontaneously asked students what they thought about their evening performances. i grabbed a dry erase marker in one hand extending it to young storytellers who were interested in talking into the pretend microphone and recorded them with a digital camera in the other hand. i was surprised when each one shared their experience, eventually speaking with tears about what it meant to them and their families. in processing their heartfelt and unpredictable responses, i shared some of the video excerpts with our new mexico bisti writing project (affiliate of the national writing project) colleagues. through a writing prompt, their insight confirmed the efficacy of story and the depth of sharing story with others. they generously gave me permission to include their sage thoughts below: stephen winterstein (june 17, 2014): people expect third graders to write about birthday presents and toys and playgrounds. but when they’ve got a chance to write about real things, and have support to do it, they are every bit as authentic, sincere, and true as any memoir ever published. what if these kids never had an audience for this stuff? i’m certain they meant what they wrote, but without seeing adults’ reactions, would they have ever understood the power of their own words? i doubt it. they need to see grownups’ faces, and remember their own quite obviously flowing emotions. that’s when there’s no arguing about the necessity of good writing. when trace declared his story “excellent,” was there really any doubt about it? had he ever felt that before? and when the bilingual child gave himself an a minus for his spontaneous translation for his mother, was there any question about what kind of standard he had set for himself? they internalized a sense of quality and power, and their families got a glimpse of what can happen. 42 global education review 3(1) michael thompson (june 17, 2014): wow, clearly our family stories, among the most personal of all stories, do matter. i begin to matter at a very young age. i’m glad to see these young writers learn to experience the deep emotions that their writings and their readings have the power to cause. in these videos we see the difficult first stage of learning what kind of unpredictable humanness occurs when we share our stories with the rest of the world. not that our stories do much to change the world. sharing our stories changes us. it makes us feel aware of what we actually care most about in our lives. it reminds us that our depth of feeling parallels the depth of feeling which our fellow human beings must also feel. kristine ashworth (june 17, 2014): writing is so powerful, and not just the act or process of writing. it is the actual verbal expression of a piece that has the most power. time after time after time, adults and children of all ages are so moved by hearing their words spoken and read by their mouths with their inflections that come from inside their heads. when a person writes, it is totally internal until that person reads it and hears what it is, not what they thought it was. “we are chords to other chords to other chords, if we are lucky, to melody.” (joy harjo) references anzaldua, g. (2007). borderlands: the new mestiza. san francisco, ca.: aunt lute books. burke, j. and orenstein, r. ( 1995). the axemaker’s gift: a double-edged history of human culture. new york: putnam’s sons. chautauqua: bringing history to life. (2015). retrieved from http://nmhum.org/chautauqua chautauqua family storytelling. (2010). retrieved from animoto at http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1ha hq?autostart=true christensen, l. (2000). reading, writing, and rising up: teaching about social justice and the power of the written word. milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. collins, r. & cooper, p. (1997). the power of story: teaching through storytelling. boston: allyn and bacon. cooper, p. & collins, r. (1992). look what happened to frog. scottsdale, az: gorsuch scarisbrick publishers. deschenie, t. (november 2007). why we are sticking to our stories. tribal college journal. retrieved from http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/archives/5928 durfey, m. (2010). midterm reflections. retrieved from http://marydurfey.webs.com/midtermreflection.htm epstein, p. (2010). indian education for all: grounded in place and culture. retrieved from national writing project at http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3147, freire, p & macedo, d. (1987). literacy: reading the word and the world. westport, ct: bergin & garvey. gardner, h. (1993). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. new york: basic books. grant, c. & sleeter, c. (2007). doing multicultural education for achievement and equity. new york: routledge (taylor & francis group). graves, d. & stuart, v. (1985). write from the start: tapping your child’s natural writing ability. new york: new american library. hill, p. (2010). midterm reflection. retrieved from http://phill19.webs.com/linguisticallydiverse.htm kabagarama, d. (1997). breaking the ice: a guide to understanding people from other cultures. boston: allyn and bacon. king, t. (2003). the truth about stories: a native narrative. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. koepke, m. (1990). telling tales in school in teaching and learning. retrieved from http://www.edweek.org/tm/articles/1990/02/01/5st ory.h01.html ladson-billings, g. (2001). crossing over to canaan: the journey of new teachers in diverse classrooms. san francisco: jossey-bass (a wiley company). mcluhan, m. (1964). understanding media: the extensions of man. new york: mcgraw hill. moayeri, m. & smith, j. (2010). the unfinished stories of two first nations mothers. journal of adolescent and adult literacy, 53(5), 408-417. doi:10.1598/jaal.53.5.6 nmac entry level competencies for teachers. retrieved from available at http://164.64.110.239/nmac/parts/title06/06.061.0 002.htm http://nmhum.org/chautauqua http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1hahq?autostart=true http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1hahq?autostart=true http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/themag/backissues/winter2007/winter07essay.htm http://www.tribalcollegejournal.org/themag/backissues/winter2007/winter07essay.htm http://marydurfey.webs.com/midtermreflection.htm http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3147 http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3147 http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/3147 http://phill19.webs.com/linguisticallydiverse.htm http://phill19.webs.com/linguisticallydiverse.htm teaching with stories 43 niehaus, r. (2010). midterm reflections. retrieved from http://rniehaus.webs.com/midterm.htm ong, w. (1982). orality and literacy: the technologizing the word. new york: routledge. papert, s. (november 2001). seymour papert: project – based learning: on the importance of learning alongside students. edutopia. retrieved from http://www.edutopia.org/seymour-papert-projectbased-learning#graph6 rietz, s. (1988). using oral literature in the classroom. in j. reyhner (ed.), teaching the indian child: a bilingual/multicultural approach. billings, mt: eastern montana college. schlain, l. (1998). the alphabet versus the goddess: the conflict between word and image. new york: viking (penguin group). smith, f. (1990). to think. new york: teachers college press. thompson, m. & smith, l. (june 2009). ell library american indian reference/resource “must-haves.” retrieved from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2910 thompson, m. (winter 2007). honoring the word: classroom instructors find that students respond best to oral tradition tribal college journal, 19(2), pp. 12-16. retrieved. from http://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2611 vitali, f. (2004). navajo cyber-sovereignty: digital dine’ weaving the world wide web into an oral culture. published dissertation. emporia state university, emporia, kansas. umi number: 118992. white-kaulaity, m. (2007, april). reflections on native american reading: a seed, a tool, and a weapon. journal of adolescent & adult literacy, 50(7), 560569. doi: 10.1598/jaal.50.7.5 wilson, a. (1997). power of the spoken word. in fixico (ed.), rethinking american indian history, pp. 101-116. albuquerque, nm: university of new mexico press. zainuddin, h., yahya, n., morales-jones, c. & ariza, e. (2011). fundamentals of teaching english to speakers of other languages in k-12 mainstream classrooms. dubuque, ia: kendall hunt. related sites chautauqua stories retrieved from http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1ha hq?autostart=true guideline on teaching storytelling: a position statement from the committee on storytelling (ncte). (1992). retrieved from http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/teaching storytelling vitali, f. (2010). educating linguistically diverse students’ webpage index. retrieved from http://fvitali.tripod.com/315sp10.html vitali, f. (2010). tawnne, grace's dog. retrieved from animoto at http://animoto.com/play/vrnp40824q5lytuainf6n g?autostart=true about the author frances vitali, phd, is an instructor at the university of new mexico college of education where she is site coordinator, clinical supervisor, and instructor in the teacher education, education leadership and policy (teelp) department. her research interests include: storytelling in education, teacher education, practitioner research, social justice, critical pedagogy. http://rniehaus.webs.com/midterm.htm http://www.edutopia.org/seymourhttp://www.nwp.org/cs/public/print/resource/2611 http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1hahq?autostart=true http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1hahq?autostart=true http://animoto.com/play/hezndymskvt2bl7jw1hahq?autostart=true http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/teachingstorytelling http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/teachingstorytelling http://fvitali.tripod.com/315sp10.html http://animoto.com/play/vrnp40824q5lytuainf6ng?autostart=true http://animoto.com/play/vrnp40824q5lytuainf6ng?autostart=true 44 global education review 3(1) appendix a new mexico competencies for entry level elementary teachers (excerpt) f. diversity: (1) the teacher understands how students differ in their approaches to learning and creates instructional opportunities that are adapted to diverse learners. (2) the teacher organizes and manages varied learning groups as appropriate in each of the disciplines as appropriate to the needs and/or interests of students and the goals of the lesson. (6) the teacher identifies and develops appropriate responses to differences among language learners. (7) the teacher demonstrates sensitivity to new mexico’s unique linguistic and cultural diversity. g. family and community: (1) the teacher is aware of the culture, history, and values of the community in which he or she teaches. (2) the teacher understands, respects, and values the central role that community and family play in the learning process of a child and will be able to utilize these experiences to enhance learning. (3) the teacher understands that there must be a reciprocal relationship between the school and the community. (4) the teacher values and utilizes the knowledge that all community members have something to contribute to the classroom to assist in the educational process. (5) the teacher recognizes that families and community can be used as teaching resources to enhance learning and children’s self -value. (nmac entry level competencies for teachers) 32 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: braunsteiner, maria-luise & mariano-lapidus, susan (2014). a perspective on inclusion: challenges for the future. global education review, 1 (1). 32-43 a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future maria-luise braunsteiner university college of teacher education lower austria susan mariano-lapidus mercy college, new york abstract the term, inclusion, particularly in the educational setting, is still based on a deficit view. perceptions of ‘dis’-ability create barriers to true inclusion and are often reinforced through higher education training programs. to promote inclusive values, acceptance of individual and cultural differences must be included in all curricula, not solely within special education. the future of a truly inclusive education relies on a cultural shift that supports and nurtures differences, and views success through a lens not focused on standardization but on diversity. the index for inclusion (the index) has been utilized worldwide to support schools, to remove perceived barriers and to establish increasingly inclusive school cultures and practices. the index aids in the creation of a culture that is dedicated to identifying and reducing barriers to inclusion and increases the learning and participation for all students. keywords inclusion, inclusive education, segregation, marginalization, index for inclusion, diversity introduction in order to overcome the deficit view upon which the current understanding of inclusion is based, we must avoid segregation and discrimination as we meet specialized educational needs. a start in this direction is to change the language and the lens through which we view inclusion. in this paper, we conceive inclusion to be the fundamental right of all children and adults to fully participate, and contribute in all aspects of life and culture, without restriction or threat of marginalization. as an extension of this definition, inclusive education must be understood then not as a decision about the placement of students, but rather as a school-wide philosophy dedicated to the spirit and resources needed to truly provide education for all. in recent years increased efforts have been made worldwide to educate traditionally marginalized groups. while increasing the access and equality of students with migrant backgrounds, cultural and linguistic ______________________________ corresponding author: susan mariano-lapidus, mercy college school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 10522 email: slapidus@mercy.edu mailto:slapidus@mercy.edu a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future 33 diversity, gender based differences, students with disabilities, and gay, lesbian, bisexual, transgender and queer students as well as gifted students in educational settings is a move in the right direction, true change cannot happen without first recognizing the value of having such a diverse body of students. we must dedicate ourselves to creating equal opportunities for all to achieve, by deconstructing and reconstructing our cultural and academic expectations, our educational gestalt, and by recognizing various forms of achievement and having an appreciation for what they are worth. currently, the educational worth of students continues to be based on outdated standards (robinson, 2011). educational systems continue to adhere to the notion that the role of education is to imbue knowledge based on classic ideals. robinson (2011) has likened the current educational system in the u.s. to a factory with desirable output being students who are successful on a standardized test. this system is not set up to support a diverse body of students to achieve equal opportunities because it is based precisely on standardizing the means by which students demonstrate their worth. with the growth of global competition, the worth of students has been boiled down to the standardization of a score. high scores have become equivalent with determining who is worthy of participation in our society. access is essential overreliance on test scores to make educational placement and commencement decisions occurs worldwide (heheir, 2002). if high scores on standardized tests are the measure of success, then marginalized students are at an even greater disadvantage due to segregational, educational practices. many students are not given access to the same learning experience or opportunities as other children. separate schools, classrooms, or marginalization within the mainstream setting create different, and often less robust educational experiences, and yet the “worth” of these children is measured by the same standardized test used with every other child. how are these students expected to succeed? heheir (2002) noted “interpretations of what is wrong with students flow from these test scores and seldom give much weight to factors related to opportunity-to-learn, cultural differences, english language proficiency, bilingualism, or current instructional experiences” (p. 54). as evidence of this statement, the new york state education department (2013) reported that as of august 2010 only 27% of students with disabilities in the largest four cities graduated from high school with a regular high school diploma (44% in nyc). as connor & ferri (2007) write, overdependence on segregated settings such as special education classrooms put students at a disadvantage. to move inclusive educational practices forward, children must be permitted equality and access in education at all levels of schooling. it is clear that the promotion of an inclusive school culture requires that all school personnel value diversity and view differences as assets. this sentiment has been echoed around the world. for instance, the traditional paradigm that has underlined and has shaped german (and austrian) education is the assumption that the homogeneity of learners in a group best facilitates individual learning (sliwka, 2010, p. 209). but the shift from homogeneity (students getting the 34 global education review 1(1) same treatment) and heterogeneity (adjustments made to meet different needs) to diversity (differences serving as a resource for individual learning and development) requires not only a structural change, but also a change in how we approach student learning as well as the attitudes of teachers (sliwka 2010). “the deficit-driven, medical model conceptualizations of disability held by educators and administrators actively contribute to limiting the growth and support of inclusion” (connor & ferri, 2007, p. 65). despite major changes in legislation and the growth of the inclusion movement, there exists continued segregation of students with disabilities and a paucity of inclusive classrooms (hehir et al., 2005). we need to seize all opportunities to work against this development. to do this we must begin with teacher and school building leadership training programs. global efforts to face future needs in teacher and school building leadership education include fostering dispositions that view diversity as an enriching aspect of classrooms. the challenge is to train professionals who are proficient in educating a diverse group of students while creating a classroom culture of acceptance and respect for all. future educators “inclusive systems of education are essential to improve the learning environment by deploying skilled teachers, equitably targeting financial and learning support to disadvantaged schools, and providing intercultural and bilingual education” (unesco, 2010, p.2). this responsibility cannot belong solely to teachers and administrators. training programs must be at the forefront of this shifting educational focus. future teachers must be familiar with new forms of knowledge regarding identity and difference that are based on inclusive values (slee, 2001). one example of such a program is at the university of cologne in germany (“school is open” bildungraumprojekt, 2011). scholars there have presented an inclusive conceptual framework to be used with a partner school run by the university. this framework will enable teacher candidates to observe and participate with the university in lesson plan development and classroom instruction with a diverse group of children. the partner school is based on the principals of the canadian equity foundation statement that ensures “that fairness, equity and inclusion are essential principles of [the] school system and are integrated into all (. . .) policies, programs, operations and practices” (toronto district school board, 2000). the school, in conjunction with the university, will work to develop an educational concept that will meet the needs of the heterogeneous student body. it is not enough to change the curricular focus. teacher training programs must also strive towards recruiting teacher candidates with disabilities and with diverse cultural, migrant and other backgrounds. it is imperative that teachers themselves represent the diversity that the philosophy of inclusion calls for. teachers often form their attitudes towards students and schooling, based largely on their own experiences as a student. an effort must be made to counter these largely homogeneous educational experiences by including teachers and administrators from marginalized groups and to create training programs that will provide teacher and administrative candidates with experiences a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future 35 that allow teacher candidates to fully experience diversity (ability, culturally, linguistically, etc.) by studying abroad and observing and participating in schools that demonstrate the best practices in educating a diverse student population. furthermore, teachers in training are segregated with respect to their certification area, and specialized educational pedagogies are reserved for candidates who pursue the area of special education teacher, leaving teachers in the other certification areas (early childhood, childhood and secondary education) with only the most rudimentary understanding of how to instruct a diverse group of students. this problem is demonstrated when general education teachers (i.e., teachers certified in early childhood, childhood or secondary education) are asked about their perceptions of their own ability to teach students with a variety of learning needs. research shows that general education teachers feel unprepared and/or unable to teach students with disabilities (desimone & parmar, 2003; smith & smith, 2000; stahl, 2002), and that they feel that teaching students with disabilities involves additional time and resources that in turn restricts their ability to teach students without identified disabilities (rose, 2001), indicating that teachers are focusing on curriculum and not on pedagogy. “regular classroom teachers learned to view themselves as unprepared for this responsibility. their experience has been that special education resource teachers and educational assistants are the only ones who can accept the responsibility” for teaching students with disabilities (bunch, al-salah, pearpoint 2011, p. 6). this segregation during training may also lead teachers to view students with disabilities less favorably. chalmers and lee (2011), cook (2002), mahar, terras, chiasson, stough and palmer (2001) and gao and mager (2011) found that teachers’ attitudes towards students differed according to the students’ classification of disability, with students with challenging behavior receiving the least favorable rating. the problem continues even as we see more students with disabilities educated in classrooms with non-disabled peers. many children with special education needs integrated in regular classrooms, continue to be taught separately, by special education teachers, inside the classroom (as push in services) and/or outside the classroom (as pull out services) thus continuing to be segregated within the walls of the inclusive classroom. as demmer-dieckmann (2011) wrote, “it is no longer a question of if, but how teacher forces are prepared for inclusive thinking and acting”. it is clear that teachers’ and school leaders’ abilities, and positive attitudes toward inclusion are essential for inclusion to succeed. teacher and school building leadership training programs must take responsibility to change the disjointed way in which we educate our educators and school building leaders. we must create a curriculum that models the unity and collaboration that schools require to meet the diverse needs of students, and we must teach teacher and administrative candidates to view diversity as a valuable asset and not to fear differences. to facilitate inclusive thinking and acting, we must provide all teacher candidates and school building leadership candidates with knowledge about diversity and the pedagogy needed to embark on their practice with confidence. 36 global education review 1(1) consequences of inclusion researchers note that when students are included, they have better academic outcomes than students with identified special needs in special classes (blackorby et al., 2005; villa, thousand & nevin, 2010). improved social acceptance and peer relations (caywood & fordyce, 2006; preuss-lausitz, 2002; vaughn, 1998) and an increase in self-esteem (walther-thomas, 1997) have also been identified. students with hearing or visual impairments, and students with multiple mental and physical disabilities, did not perform better academically when educated in special schools (jan pijl, nakken & mand, 2003). following a review of 12 studies jan pijl, nakken and mand (2003) concluded that inclusion for students with disabilities has to be seen as an important alternative. additionally, participation in inclusive educational programs improves postschooling outcomes. the european commission lifelong learning policy report (2009) notes a positive relationship between educational attainment and employment. in the u.s., students with disabilities in inclusive classes were more likely to “pass state exams, complete high school, attend college, obtain a job, earn a higher salary and live independently” salend (2011, p. 31). conversely, in switzerland eckhart, haeberlin, lozano and blanc (2011) found that attendance in a special school reduced one’s chances of obtaining an apprenticeship, or access to a profession after graduation. walther-thomas (1995) also wrote about the benefits of inclusion to students with no identified special education needs. general education students in cotaught, inclusive classes, enjoyed additional teacher attention, improved academic achievement and increased study skill instruction. furthermore, improved classroom communities were identified (walther-thomas, 1997). jan pijl, nakken & mand (2003) noted that non-disabled students developed a positive attitude towards their disabled peers as a result of an inclusive educational environment, and that overall learning in class improved (jan pijl, nakken & mand, 2003). resistance to inclusive education despite a growing movement towards the model of educational inclusion, a number of vocal opponents including parents, teachers and educational scholars, continue to resist the change. as connor (2008) noted, “scholars and educators satisfied with the existing special education framework felt that the foundation on which they stood was under attack” (p. 16). yet it is precisely this type of training program where the seeds of marginalization and exclusion are cultivated. an additional barrier of parental resistance has also been voiced. parents of children in mainstream schools express concern about the negative effects of diversity in their children’s class and express fears that this diversity will negatively affect the academic achievement of their children. as a result, many parents place their children in private schools (aigner, 2013). speaking as a teacher in an inclusive classroom in the u. s. and as the mother of a child with autism, barr (2008) stated, “it [inclusion] is not appropriate for children who would need a curriculum that is wholly different from the general education curriculum” (p.35). parents cite the fear that inclusive education meant giving up guaranteed specialized educational services for their children who require these services a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future 37 to be successful (lieberman, 1992). these parents view special education not as a service, but as a place. however, matuszny, banda and coleman (2007) found that parents’ perceptions of inclusion were more positive when they had increased participation in the decisions surrounding the educational services that their child received suggesting that inclusive values may be fostered by simply engaging in a dialogue and encouraging equal participation. resistance to inclusion appears largely to be based on two assumptions. the first assumption is that inclusion means a student with a disability educated with nondisabled peers. this exceptionally narrow vision of inclusion, perpetuated by many education professionals, leaves out other vulnerable groups and provides the opportunity to create reasons not to include children based on educational needs. the understanding of inclusion presented here: full participation and contribution in all aspects of life and culture, without restriction or threat of marginalization creates no such barrier. in fact, it is difficult to envision parents or scholars opposing this sentiment. indeed the fear of not getting appropriate accommodations or adequate services for children may be lessened if we can agree that an inclusive vision should hold a much broader view of membership and that services for students are a vital necessity for children to be able to contribute to the greatest extent possible in society. this expanded view of inclusion may provide the shift needed to eliminate the underlying supposition that this place called special education can provide resources that inclusive settings cannot. the fear of denial of needed resources in deference to inclusion leads to the second assumption, inadequate educational commodities, concern regarding shortage of limited resources. educational commodities such as teacher time and attention, tangible resources and physical space are at a minimum in many schools, thus facilitating the perception that students with additional educational needs take more than their share leaving others with less than they need. in the current political and educational climate the need for resources has never been greater. high stakes testing procedures create an additional pressure on schools and teachers to teach more to an increasingly diverse group of students while school funding is being cut back. yet perhaps we can shift the perception that diversity is a drain on resources to the view that difference is an asset in creating a rich and dynamic school environment. reciprocal in nature, inclusive educational practices both foster and reflect the values of a society. the un-convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (united nations, 2008) promoted the political will for inclusive education in educational and social settings of all kind. working towards inclusion entails celebrating differences of culture, ethnicity, gender, sexual education, needs and abilities. with a broadened view of inclusion we may re-conceptualize classrooms as microcosms of our increasingly inclusive society. inclusion is a model of democracy democracy is about valuing diverse communities in society and these values are reflected in schools. “in its deepest sense, inclusion is a model of democracy at work that holds relevance for all of us” (valle & connor, 2011, p.65). by fostering a school 38 global education review 1(1) culture of respect and belonging, teachers provide students with opportunities to learn about and to accept individual differences, and to diminish the marginalization of vulnerable groups. inclusion in education is critical, not only in its relevance to schooling, but also in its connection to the participation of all beyond education (booth, 2011). changing our lens meaningful inclusion cannot be realized until we change our cultural and educational expectations to value numerous forms of achievement to and recognize the contributions of all members of our society. the language a society uses to address social issues is extremely meaningful in understanding how matters are viewed and addressed. terms such as disorders, challenged, suffers are commonly used when discussing persons with academic or educational needs. indeed, it is common in the us to say a student is in special education; however, the language by which we discuss supporting all students is changing. through their work with the index for inclusion (the index), booth and ainscow (2000, 2011) have rejected traditional labels associated with specialized educational needs. the authors instead have replaced the term special educational needs, with that of barriers to learning and participation creating a systematic approach where inclusion meets diversity. thus acquiring competencies to promote inclusive cultures, structures, and practices requires the ability to increase learning and participation for all students and to emphasize these types of competencies in the educational experience of all candidates in teacher training programs (booth & ainscow, 2002, 2011). the index for inclusion the index was developed at the centre for studies on inclusive education (csie) in collaboration with the university of manchester and the christ church university college, canterbury. first published in 2000 it represents the product of three years of development – conducted by a detailed process of research – in 25 schools across england (rustemier & booth, 2005). it was then distributed to 26, 000 primary, secondary and special schools and local education authorities (vislie, 2003). since then it has been adapted for use in many other countries and translated into thirty-seven languages. versions of the index for early childhood, child-care settings 2004 and 2006 and communities 2011 were also published. the third edition (2011) published by tony booth responds to suggestions from colleagues all over the world and extended the work on inclusive values and their implications for curricula construction (booth & ainscow, 2011). the index includes three dimensions; dimension a: creating inclusive culture; dimension b: producing inclusive policies; and dimension c: evolving inclusive practices. these dimensions aid in the movement toward inclusion (booth & ainscow, 2002). each dimension contains statements or indicators against which existing arrangements in the specific school setting can be compared by self-assessment. these help to identify and implement priorities for change. “each indicator is connected to questions which define its meaning, refine exploration, spark reflection and dialogue, and prompt further questions” (booth & ainscow, 2011, p. 13). because the index is a tool to develop a framework it can be used to draw together multiple inclusive a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future 39 policies. “it is through inclusive school cultures, that changes in policies and practices can be sustained” (booth & ainscow 2002, p. 8). planning framework because the index (booth & ainscow, 2002, 2011) supports a dialogue among stakeholders, and uses a participatory approach to self-evaluation, it approximates inclusive development. the index (booth & ainscow, 2002, 2011) provides a tool for developing inclusive schools. “fundamental to the index for inclusion is the creation of a school culture that encourages a preoccupation with the development of ways of working that attempt to reduce barriers to the learning and participation of all students” (oswald, 2010, p. 91). the index presents the most detailed explanation of what an inclusive school should look like (ainscow, 2007). it describes key concepts to support thinking about inclusive school, preschool, and community development and provides two things: 1) a set of indicators describing inclusive education, in terms of cultures, policies and practices; and 2) an approach to school, institutional and community development (braunsteiner & germany 2009a). the index in use “inclusion is most importantly seen as putting inclusive values into action.” (booth & ainscow, 2011, p. 21). while booth widely extended the values from the 2002 edition to the 2011 edition, there is emphasis on five values – equality, participation, community, respect for diversity, and sustainability – that “may contribute more than the others to establishing inclusive school structures, procedures and activities.” (booth & ainscow, 2011, p. 21). these values have to be linked to every action in school, to the curricula, the interactions and relationships between all persons in school and beyond. the index has been utilized worldwide to support schools to remove perceived barriers and to establish increasingly inclusive school cultures and practices. it has been used in the development of policies and practices of schools, institutions and communities (duke, 2009; boban & hinz, 2011; hinz et al., 2012; montag stiftung jugend und gesellschaft (ed.), 2011; norfolk county council, 2012) as well as used to develop and deliver professional development (education queensland, department of education training and employment, 2009). the index has also been utilized to bring together separate institutions, such as school and community or two separate schooling systems, to create unity and to reduce barriers to participation (braunsteiner & germany 2011; braunsteiner & germany 2009a, 2009b). the future of inclusive education educational segregation experienced by people with differences not only induces conditions that lead to poverty, but marginalization itself diminishes the fullness of the individual’s experiences. even the term inclusion, particularly in the educational setting, is based on a deficit view. perceptions of ‘dis’-ability create barriers to true inclusion and are often reinforced through higher education training programs. to promote inclusive values, acceptance of individual and cultural differences must be included in all curricula, not solely within special education. the future of a truly inclusive education relies on a cultural shift that supports and nurtures 40 global education review 1(1) differences and views success through a lens not constructed of standardized test scores. we must educate both our teachers and our students to work collaboratively to celebrate diversity through tools such as the index. taking advantage of an increasing awareness about inclusive education in legislation and policy, we have to share and disseminate information about existing policy and practice. inclusion is “a principled approach to the development of education and society. it is linked to democratic participation within and beyond education.” (booth, 2011) the contribution of diverse stakeholders in the development of a school’s culture and environment must grow. as sapon-shevin (2003) asks, “what kind of a world do we want to create, and how should we educate students for that world?” (p. 26). references aigner, l (2013, march 11). privatschule als ausweg aus dem reformstau [private schools as a way out of 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http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186606e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/186606e.pdf http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml http://www.bmask.gv.at/cms/site/attachments/2/5/8/ch2218/cms1314697554749/konv_txt_dt_bgbl.pdf http://www.bmask.gv.at/cms/site/attachments/2/5/8/ch2218/cms1314697554749/konv_txt_dt_bgbl.pdf http://www.bmask.gv.at/cms/site/attachments/2/5/8/ch2218/cms1314697554749/konv_txt_dt_bgbl.pdf a perspective of inclusion: challenges for the future 43 principals report over time. journal of learning disabilities, 30 (4), 395-407. about the author(s) maria-luise braunsteiner, phd is a professor of special education and inclusion at the university college of teacher education lower austria. she was recently named as the austrian teacher-educationcollege representative to serve on a six-person qualityassurance council of the austrian ministry of education to review and approve each austrian college's newly-developed teacher-education programs. susan mariano-lapidus, phd is an associate professor of special education at mercy college. she earned her ph.d. in health and behavior disorders and applied behavior analysis from teachers college, columbia university. she has been awarded a fulbright scholars specialist award for work in inclusion and inclusive education. demmer-dieckmann (2011). inclusive education requires skills: perspectives of inclusive teacher training. journal of school leader and school supervision, 3, 22-24. retrieved from http://bidok.uibk.ac.at/library/demmer-kompetenz.html 108 global education review 3(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: azano, amy price & stewart, trevor thomas (2016). confronting challenges at the intersection of rurality, place and teacher preparation: improving efforts in teacher education to staff rural schools. global education review, 3(1) 108-128. confronting challenges at the intersection of rurality, place, and teacher preparation: improving efforts in teacher education to staff rural schools amy price azano virginia polytechnic institute and state university trevor thomas stewart virginia polytechnic institute and state university abstract recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers in rural schools is a persistent struggle in many countries, including the u.s. while rural education researchers have long lamented the struggle to recruit and retain teachers, there is relatively little known about intentional efforts to prepare teachers, specifically, for rural classrooms. salient challenges related to poverty, geographic isolation, low teacher salaries, and a lack of community amenities seem to trump perks of living in rural communities. recognizing this issue as a complex and hard to solve fixture in the composition of rural communities, we sought to understand how teacher preparation programs might better prepare preservice teachers for successful student teaching placements and, ideally, eventual careers in rural schools. in this study, we explore teacher candidates’ perceptions of rurality while examining how specific theory, pedagogy, and practice influence their feelings of preparedness for working in a rural school. using preand post questionnaire data, classroom observations, and reflections, we assess the effectiveness of deliberate efforts in our teacher preparation program to increase readiness for rural teaching. in our analysis and discussion, we draw on critical and sociocultural theories to understand the experiences of a cohort of teacher candidates as they explore personal histories, the importance of place, expectations, and teaching strategies for rural contexts. we conclude our article with recommendations for enhancing teacher preparation programs in ways that might result in significant progress toward the goal of staffing rural schools with the highly skilled teachers all students deserve. keywords rural education, teacher education, english education, place-based education confronting challenges 109 “i’m not rural. i don’t know how i will relate to the students.” –jenny jenny’s1 anxiety about teaching in a rural school, as a non-rural native, captures one of many struggles in recruiting and retaining highly qualified teachers in rural schools. her response to a survey, given during her english education program, represents a concern that growing up in a non-rural environment will limit one’s effectiveness as a teacher in a rural school and, thus, one’s sense of preparedness for doing so. this perception, among others, represents one of the many challenges facing rural communities seeking to staff their schools with adept teachers (azano & stewart, 2015). advantages for teaching in a rural school, such as small class sizes and community closeness, fall short as true incentives for recruiting highly qualified teachers (barley & brigham, 2008; monk, 2007), while other challenges related to poverty, geographic isolation, lower teacher salaries, and a lack of community amenities (miller, 2012) seem to trump the potential perks of living in a rural area. we recognize that, as teacher educators, we are not in a position to immediately address these larger challenges. we can, however, engineer significant changes within the construct of our teacher preparation program in terms of preparing teachers for success in rural schools. by enabling preservice teachers to see beyond their apprenticeships of observation (lortie, 1975) and helping them learn to make dialogue, place, and culture the touchstones of their teaching practices, we believe that we can make significant progress toward staffing rural schools with high quality teachers – regardless of where they grew up – who can engage students in meaningful learning experiences. theoretical framework at the center of our english education program is a focus on helping preservice teachers learn to enact a dialogic pedagogy (stewart, 2010), which requires focused efforts by teachers to bring the content being studied into dialogue with students’ lives (fecho, 2011a). russian literary theorist mikhail bakhtin’s theory of language forms the foundation for a pedagogy based on dialogue. his concept of heteroglossia focused on the ways that words and their meanings are shaped by the context and contexts in which they have been used. he argued the “social atmosphere of the word, the atmosphere that surrounds the object makes the facets of the image sparkle” (bakhtin, 1981, p. 277). for bakhtin, words, in living conversation, are directly “oriented toward a future answer-word” (p. 280). the connection causes understanding to be directly linked to response. simply put, understanding and response are dependent upon one another, which means that both the speaker and the listener directly influence the meaning of any utterance. therefore, meaning making cannot occur without this dialogue between speaker and listener. we apply this theory to teaching and learning to highlight the importance of not placing teachers and school-based literacies in privileged positions. instead, we seek to flatten hierarchies and make it clear that preservice teachers and the students they teach have funds of knowledge (gonzalez, moll, & amanti, 2005) that can make learning and teaching dynamic, engaging, and meaningful, while still addressing the curricular demands teachers encounter in standards era classrooms (stewart, 2012; fecho, 2011a). we bring this theoretical underpinning corresponding author: amy price azano, virginia polytechnic institute and state university, blacksburg, va 24061-0002. email: azano@vt.edu http://www.blacksburg.gov/ mailto:azano@vt.edu 110 global education review 3(1) to our work because we believe that connecting curricula to students’ individual cultures is a vital element of teaching and learning, especially in the context of place-based education. maxine greene’s (1978) belief that students should be able “to encounter curriculum as a possibility” (p. 18) guides our efforts as we work to help our preservice teachers craft units. we want them to see content as a tool that helps students think deeply, instead of the content being a decontextualized set of goals to attain. moreover, we believe a focus on place is critical in this process. place-based pedagogy refers to educational practices seeking to tie the realities of place and students’ lives to meaningful instruction, particularly for the purpose of student engagement (azano, 2011). paul theobald (1997) writes about place-conscious education as a scaffold to make meaning of what he also recognized as the “decontextualized stuff” of schooling. this framework shapes our efforts to make students’ lives and individual cultural contexts a starting point for the exploration of literature, writing, and dialogue. our stance although we might not have had the language of these theories at our disposal, we developed these beliefs about learning and teaching long before we became teacher educators as a result of our personal backgrounds and experiences as students in teacher preparation programs. amy grew up in the appalachian foothills of virginia in an economically depressed rural community. her preparation to become a teacher, however, was at a major, urban university, where she eventually began her teaching career. her experiences as an “urban teacher” served as a sharp contrast to having been a “rural student.” trevor had the opposite experience. he grew up in urban maryland and was prepared as an english teacher in rural north carolina, where he began his teaching career in a one-stoplight appalachian town. these experiences significantly influence our beliefs about culturally responsive pedagogy. yes, our place identities and upbringings shaped our knowing of the world. however, our master’s level teaching preparation and early teaching careers in environments significantly different from our “home” environments reshaped that knowing. now, as teacher educators, we understand how crucial it is that preservice teachers understand the nuances of place and culture. embracing and exploring difference the methods courses in our english education program draw on critical (delpit, 1995; freire, 1970) and sociocultural theories (gee, 2008) to facilitate the development of classrooms where “literacy is used to immerse teacher and students in an ongoing reflective conversation with the texts of their lives” (fecho, 2011b, p. 5). we take this stance because we believe that learning is dependent on dialogue. engaging in discussion and seeing meaning making as a collaborative activity engenders possibilities for creativity and wonder to guide students and teachers as they encounter texts in the english classroom. this process is facilitated when teachers build units of instruction and individual lessons focused on conceptual units (smagorinsky, 2008) that engage students in meaningful dialogue and connect their home cultures with curricular goals. as students engage in dialogue with texts and with each other, understanding merges with response to make new meaning. instead of reifying accepted meanings, symbols can be called into question. this dialogic space not only honors the home cultures shaping students’ understanding of concepts, but also provides a critical frame for interrogating how and why those cultural influences shape interpretations. confronting challenges 111 methods context of study this study represents our efforts to understand how teacher educator programs might better prepare preservice teachers for success in rural schools. we have two questions guiding this inquiry. first, what are teacher candidates’ perceptions of rurality? second, how can teacher preparation programs prepare preservice english teachers for success in rural schools? as a teacher preparation program at a land-grant university geographically situated in appalachia, we feel it is our responsibility to address this pressing need in rural communities. we hope by understanding students’ perceptions of reality and how our efforts to prepare preservice teachers for work in rural schools are or are not influencing candidates, that we can make critical decisions in shaping the program to somehow turn the tide on a longstanding and stubborn problem in rural education. english education program and participants we conducted this study with the students in the english education program at a large, research intensive, university in rural appalachia with access to multiple urban and rural school districts. our program employs a cohort model, and preservice teachers typically complete internships in both rural and urban schools in the final year of their program. we recruited a purposeful sample (maxwell, 2005) of students who were in the final year of the program. all 11 students in the cohort, comprised of eight female and three male white students, elected to participate in the study. these students all have a bachelor’s degree in english and are nearing completion of their master’s in education and secondary licensure program in english education. during the fall semester, students were enrolled in two english education courses and a practicum. in the spring, they were completing their student teaching requirement and enrolled in their final methods course. this enabled us to study any potential shifts in their perceptions of teaching in rural schools based on what they were learning in their methods courses and internships. additionally three students (two male and one female) from next year’s cohort, who were enrolled in one of the english education methods courses, completed the pre-questionnaire survey (as described in the data generation section). elements of english education courses during the fall semester, the participants took a course, methods i, focused specifically on instructional design and lesson planning in the english education classroom. during this course, students studied planning practices based on smagorinsky’s (2008) work with conceptual units. this focus was directly connected with seminars discussing derrick jensen’s (2004) text walking on water and fecho’s (2011b) writing in the dialogical classroom in order to scaffold the preservice teachers’ efforts to learn how to teach from a dialogic stance. students were encouraged to question the traditional role of the teacher as sources of knowledge and view themselves as collaborators or co-conspirators in the construction of knowledge (appleman, 2000). from this perspective, the participants crafted lessons and units plans and put them into action during their field placements. also during the fall semester, students were enrolled in teaching adolescent readers (tar) in which amy incorporated a focus on issues related to teaching in rural schools. throughout the semester students were 112 global education review 3(1) challenged to consider how place, as a context for one’s home culture, influences the reading of a particular text. for example, rurality was one of the major themes in the discussion of john steinbeck’s of mice and men. students considered how marginalized places influenced and continue to influence the interpretation of “the american dream.” of note, this is the second course students have taken with amy. in the previous course (comprehension and content area reading), students viewed portions of country boys (sutherland, 2005) and read “ways of being at risk: the case of billy charles barnett” (barone, 1989). this previous experience gave the class a certain context for discussions about rural education. the subject of barone’s case study, “billy charles,” was an expert on coonskins and making turtle soup, and the article described the ways in which the school curriculum failed him. often class discussions would reflect on these texts with a question like, “how would we engage billy charles with this text?” in the final course in our english education sequence, methods ii, we draw upon meyer and sawyer’s (2006) practice of inquiry seminars to engage students in “problem-posing seminars.” as part of our efforts to help preservice teachers make the transition from teacher candidate to practicing teacher, we strive to create opportunities for them to engage in dialogue with one another to address the challenges they are encountering in their student teaching placements. the participants were required to craft lesson and unit plans that put the abstract ideas of a dialogic pedagogy into practice in each of the courses in the sequence. during methods ii, specifically, the participants created lessons focused on writing learning goals that required making connections between the classroom context and students’ lives outside of school. these lessons provided students with concrete experiences of putting this theory into practice and enabled them to work together to think about how to address the complexities they were encountering in their placements. meyer and sawyer (2006) noted the importance of supporting students as they learn to participate in communities of practice that “foster interdependence, peer support, reflectivity, multiple perspectives, and dialogue” (p. 49). we drew on their framework for engaging in inquiry seminars to develop a problem-posing protocol (see appendix a), which would help teacher candidates focus on specific issues and regard their peers as a support network for navigating the challenges they were encountering in their placements. we began this semester by modeling a problem-posing seminar, focused specifically on teaching in a rural school, which we discuss later in this article. this seminar created an opportunity for us to further understand how students were applying the concept of cultural relevance and its application for teaching in a rural school. data generation consistent with our social constructionist theoretical framework, which privileges dialogue and the joint construction of knowledge, we employed multiple modes of data generation to ensure that the participants had multiple opportunities to share their insights and perceptions in three, distinct phases (lincoln and guba, 1985). in our initial orientation phase, we administered a pre-questionnaire during the fall semester (see appendix b) to develop a basis of understanding of students’ perceptions of rurality and comfort level with the prospect of teaching in a rural school. based on what we learned from that initial questionnaire, we moved to our second phase of “focused exploration” by designing a model problem-posing seminar to focus discussion confronting challenges 113 related to a potential challenge of teaching in a rural school (see appendix c). amy attended trevor’s methods ii course and led the first problem-posing seminar as a model early in the spring semester. this seminar was observed and transcribed by a graduate research assistant. finally, at the mid-point of the spring semester, we conducted phase three of our data generation, member checks and closure, by asking participants to write short answer reflections (see appendix d) designed to gauge their take-aways from these experiences. data analysis we employed a recursive method for data analysis and used analytic induction (erickson, 1986) to make sense of the data. after each phase of data collection, researchers first reviewed data individually (after they had been de-identified by a graduate research assistant) and then met to discuss initial observations and to reflect on the experience. once data generation was complete, we conducted another reading of the qualitative data corpus individually and made observations toward emerging themes. data were then formally coded to identify trends in the participants’ perceptions of the affordances and constraints of teaching in rural schools and in their feelings of preparedness to teach in rural schools. we used a thematic analysis (maxwell, 2005) in our coding process to identify salient themes for further analysis. after developing an initial set of categorizing codes reflecting participants’ perceptions of rurality and their own preparedness, we met to discuss data and further examine themes. initially categorized by data groupings (pre-questionnaire, problemposing seminar, and reflections), we used preliminary codes to establish evidentiary warrants for developing assertions (erickson, 1986). we then tested the validity of these assertions by searching for confirming and disconfirming evidence across all data. for example, an initial code of “insider/outsider” was used to describe concerns, like jenny’s at the start of this article, capturing how teacher candidates might feel about teaching in a rural school if they lack first-hand experience as a rural student. however, applied to the data corpus, we found the data did not support this dichotomy and reframed the development of the assertion. for example, we found that despite some students’ feelings as an “outsider,” they were quite adept at offering solutions to a rural challenge during the problem-posing seminar. similarly, they were able to recognize in their reflections that they needed a rural placement to feel adequately prepared to teach in a rural school. rather than “insider/outsider,” an assertion capturing the nuance of cultural experiences and the influence they have on one’s feelings about rurality became a more fitting frame for thinking of this dissonance. students who had experience in a rural school in any capacity felt more confident than those who did not. these more refined codes further delineated thematic understandings of the data, as reflected in table 1. however, those initial codes were maintained as meaning makers that led to the interpretation and application of those refined codes. we then arranged quotes from the participants into tables related to the themes we identified. we used these tables and the themes to further examine the data and consider salient issues in light of the themes we created (riessman, 2008). 114 global education review 3(1) table 1 initial and refined codes initial codes / refined codes interpretation of codes meaning making insider/outsider cultural experience the degree to which participants expressed the belief that they had or lacked first-hand experience, which influenced their perceptions and feelings of preparedness. close-knit community rural benefits the ways in which participants connection to nature identified perceived affordances of working in a rural community. lack of resources rural challenges the ways in which participants low reading ability articulated perceived deficits associated with teaching in a rural community. low expectations student needs the ways in which participants lacking motivation articulated perceived challenges curricular relevance associated with working with rural students. stereotypes stereotypes participants’ understanding of the influence or threat of rural stereotypes. table 1 this process of coding, organizing, and reflecting on the data led to our systematic and exhaustive analyses of the data, from which we developed findings described as empirical assertions (erickson, 1986) in the subsequent section. this inductive approach helped us examine the participants’ perceptions and reflect upon how we might improve our program to better prepare future preservice teachers. findings in this section, we describe assertions from our analyses and provide supporting data from the evidentiary warrants. in keeping with analytic induction, narrative vignettes and direct quotes “make clear the particulars of the patterns of social organization and meaning-perspective that are contained in the assertions” (erickson, 1986, p. 149). our assertions suggest generally that teacher candidates initially regard rural communities as idyllic place, rural schools as having limited resources (e.g., technology), and rural students as having many shortfalls (e.g., motivation). however, their training in a dialogic pedagogy gives them a frame for understanding how they, as english teachers, confronting challenges 115 can address challenges to meet the needs of rural learners. assertion 1: participants’ beliefs about rural communities are grounded in the idyllic rural trope. grounding the assertion in theory bakhtin’s (1981) notion of heteroglossia speaks to a tension or conflict in language and how meanings of that language are shaped by context and contexts. when we applied that lens to the data, we saw a tension in participants’ understandings of rurality and how those understandings are shaped by their own experiences and then reinforced by persistent beliefs that characterize rural life as consistently harmonious. participants described rural communities in ways that were consistent with the idyllic rural trope. for example, kyle said that the rural students he had worked with “had a lot of experiences with land and nature,” which is consistent with trevor’s experiences teaching in a rural school. many of his students wrote about their experiences “coon hunting” in their journal entries in his ninth grade classes. this was also evident in the case of “billy charles” (barone, 1989), who preferred hunting and trapping to school-based learning. these personal and text examples matched ideals described by participants who lacked first-hand rural experience. as robert noted: “if i am to assume that rural students have a connection to nature, then there is a chance for some really powerful nature-based creative writing.” that experience in nature could even be generalized, as katina suggested: “deep down, i think they have a desire to make a deeper connection to the world.” the presumption here is that rural students are inherently more connected to nature than, perhaps, non-rural students. or, that the centripetal forces (bakhtin, 1981) of language and culture create shared and common experiences among people. bakhtin, however, also argued that language and culture are subject to the centrifugal forces that decentralize language, meaning, and, thus, experiences. this process of “centralization and decentralization” (p. 272) results in experiences that are, at once, common and unique. meaning, that while rural students may in fact have experience with nature, those experiences uniquely shape any given student. this heteroglot nature of language and culture has important implications for teachers. understanding the nuances of students’ home cultures is a key aspect of preparing lessons that will be responsive to students’ needs. the idyllic trope at work the idyllic rural trope is problematic not because it erroneously suggests that all rural communities are tight knit, harmonious places, but because it perpetuates a pollyanna view of rurality and disarms efforts to address unique rural challenges. participants in our study consistently identified the rural community as a benefit for teaching in a rural school. having extensive experience in rural communities, we believe this to be true as well. as sienna suggested, an “everybody knows everybody” community can be a benefit. this can have dividends in the classroom. as robert noted, “the rural communities i’ve seen tend to be more group oriented, which could aid to student centered learning.” or, as katy suggested, “they are typically comfortable discussing with their peers as they are likely to know everyone in the class very well.” the challenge then with this perception is that it may serve as a blinder to rural realities and cause frustrations for novice teachers who encounter friction in those schools or communities. consistently, participants relied on this thinking about rural communities, as suggested by dawn who reflected on her 116 global education review 3(1) personal experiences and offered, “i lived in that kind of area for a time. i think the community is closer and parents typically have instilled respect for elders in their children.” there was one discrepant case in which alex reflected on the community as a challenge to teaching in a rural school. he acknowledged that, “remote areas could get pretty lonely, especially for someone just leaving college life.” we found this to be a balanced expectation for work in rural communities. also, we acknowledge that some preservice teachers may simply be more interested in living and working in areas that are not remote. they may decide that city life is the context that suits them best, which is okay. we need good teachers who are able to make connections between content and culture everywhere. we simply want to ensure that we do our best to prepare them for success wherever they choose to teach. based on the perceptions by the other teacher candidates, we conclude here that meaningful exposure to a disruption of this trope would be useful in the context of an english education methods course, thus prompting the focus of the rural-based problem-posing seminar on the community tensions in to kill a mockingbird. assertion 2: participants’ beliefs about rural students highlight issues often related to perceived deficits. when discussing potential challenges to working with any student population, it is easy to focus on what is not present or things that are lacking; this is a natural response to thinking about challenges. this natural inclination is not so problematic or offensive when discussing physical conditions or logistical resources. for example, robert noted that he “would feel better if we designed lessons around ‘low tech’ or ‘low resource’ classrooms” when asked (on the prequestionnaire) about what kinds of activities we could do in methods classes to increase comfort when teaching in a rural school. however, these discussions become fraught with issues and the potential for deficit model thinking to undermine one’s view of a student’s potential when they turn away from resources and begin to focus on the characteristics of a student population. the issue of a deficit model view can be consistently seen in the participants’ responses to the pre-questionnaire. for example, kailey moved the discussion in this direction when she noted, “the students might not be as motivated in class” when asked about perceived challenges to working in a rural school. kailey was not alone in feeling this way. the issue of a lack of motivation was a common perceived challenge amongst the participants. faith echoed this sentiment as she shared the belief that “most rural students struggle with motivation. many times, in my experience, school isn’t a priority because they don’t think it matters”. the goal, then, is to help preservice teachers learn to think about perceived challenges to teaching in ways that will not position students as having deficits—or characteristics that somehow define these students as flawed individuals who need their teachers to “fix” them. during our initial analysis of the prequestionnaire data, we noted this trend in the participants’ responses. although we had spent a good deal of time working with issues of deficit model thinking in our methods classes, these issues were still present in participants’ thinking; we believe this is a natural progression. they were learning to confront issues of stereotypes and perceived deficits, but they were, at this point, novice teacher candidates who were just beginning to wrestle with the challenges they might encounter in working with students who were qualitatively different from them. preservice teachers are, typically, high performing students who bring a unique level of motivation with them to the confronting challenges 117 classroom. in order to provide a scaffold and help the participants begin to think about how to frame their understanding of these challenges differently, the rural problem-posing seminar included a specific focus on “stereotype threat” (aronson & steele, 2005), which is an identified construct explaining under-achievement or failure to reach full potential across multiple populations (e.g., middle school minority students, white male university engineering students and african american students at highly regarded colleges) (aronson, fried, & good, 2002; aronson & inzlicht, 2004; aronson, et al, 1999; aronson, steele, salinas, & lustina, 1998; steele & aronson, 1995; steele & aronson, 1998). additionally, stereotype threat has been documented as a factor inhibiting student performance for those identifying as a “southerner” (clark, eno, & guadagno, 2011). only one participant, dawn, spoke directly to the influence of stereotypes on rural students prior to the problem-posing seminar. in her prequestionnaire during the fall semester, she asked how teachers might aid in helping “break through to kids who constantly hear the rural = dumb stereotype.” therefore, we wanted the problem-posing seminar to serve a dual focus: to create a dialogue about the deficit thinking teachers need to be aware of in their teaching of rural students, and to address the pervasive negative stereotypes about rurality threatening students’ perceptions of their own ability. both undermine and put at risk rural students’ achievement. we believe this intervention was an effective means of helping these novice preservice teachers move in the direction of thinking about the challenges they might encounter differently. we argue that this is one of the chief tasks for teacher educators, and we believe a focus on a dialogic, culturally responsive pedagogy can be an effective way to address this challenge. assertion 3: enacting a dialogic pedagogy gives preservice teachers a frame for understanding student difference. to create an opportunity to discuss these rural issues, we designed and implemented a ruralfocused problem-posing seminar (see appendix c). in doing so, we used to kill a mockingbird as the primary text for confronting issues of rurality in canonical texts, even ones that are revered. we frontloaded the conversation with a short description about stereotype threat: everyone has many identities based on gender, race, age, place, etc. stereotype threat is when there is a situation in which students might feel at risk for confirming a negative stereotype about their social group or one of their identities. research shows that this sort of stereotype threat can negatively affect school achievement. amy described a hypothetical secondary english class in a rural high school. she read to the class: “i am worried the negative stereotypes about rural people in the novel pose this sort of threat to my students.” the protocol document ended with several key quotations for the students to consider as they thought about how to teach a novel that might potentially insult students’ lived experiences. for example, lee describes the novel’s poorest family as having “lived behind the town garbage dump. . . .the cabin's plank walls were supplemented with sheets of corrugated iron, its roof shingled with tin cans hammered flat.” this excerpt is typical of the quotations used on the problem-posing document. the next step in the problem-posing protocol involves having the group ask clarifying questions to help them frame the suggestions they will offer. during this step, the group asked questions about the hypothetical high school students. they wanted to know more information about their socioeconomic status and whether or not these students had 118 global education review 3(1) addressed a book about race before. one participant asked if the class was typically talkative when discussing other novels or topics. these clarifying questions served as evidence for a certain disposition of students wanting to understand context before brainstorming possible solutions. in the next phase of the protocol, students spend 20 minutes, responding to the presenter’s framing questions. it was evident that participants were directly drawing on their experiences from their previous english education methods courses. for example, one student reflected on a learning activity about civil unrest in ferguson, missouri. she said, “i’m thinking about our class activity on ferguson.” this activity, in amy’s teaching adolescent readers, was designed as a model for bringing contemporary, political, and potentially polarizing events into the english classroom in a productive and supportive way. the student generalizing from this classroom experience illustrates student thinking about how to approach stereotypes in a nonthreatening way. another example of this thinking was from a different student who added: can you get them talking about the negative stereotypes? how is this stereotype true? how is it not true? can you talk about negative stereotypes about everything – all negative stereotypes – to promote discussion and make sure no one feels singled out? that might increase comfort and debunk stereotypes. which stereotype might people think about you? which are true and not true? while not necessarily related to issues of rurality, another student described an activity she did about identity, involving the absolute true diary of a part-time indian and of mice and men. after describing the activity, she suggested that it “could work with to kill a mockingbird,” indicating her belief that stereotypes can be addressed in supportive ways. other students suggested similar activities – one called “breaking the wall,” where students participate in a symbolic act of “tearing down” stereotypes. another student brainstormed an idea related to an activity about emmett till. we found this discussion to be reflective of the culturally responsive and dialogic pedagogies modeled in our courses. in fact, one student suggested that the teacher might work to alleviate guilt about race relations, “reminding students that they are not personally responsible for historical events.” another student, however, immediately commented, “but aren’t the ewells and the cunninghams both white?” this was a particularly interesting exchange because it suggests the inherent assumption that rural students lack racial or ethnic diversity. another student suggested “pairing a text that emphasizes place – a poem or story that is appalachian – as a bridge to themes already talked about in the book.” while their awareness of white privilege, guilt and the need for placebased and culturally responsive, supplemental texts are all in keeping with their training as teacher candidates, and illustrates their thinking about understanding the importance of curricular relevance and a connection to home culture, we realized that we may be framing rurality in a rather limited way based on our own experiences and geographic context; something we plan to attend to as we move forward. finally, participants recognized the need for students to make personal connections with the text. they suggested journaling, think-pairshare strategies, and writing place poems, individually or with a peer, before engaging in a full class discussion. one student emphasized the importance of knowing “student backgrounds and where they are from in order to make it relevant.” one of the preservice teachers told a quick story about her student describing killing chickens and commented that chicken killing is “so far” out of how she (the confronting challenges 119 participant) grew up. while many of the participants’ perceptions are consistent with deficit model thinking, this one comment disrupted or challenged that notion. rather, it illustrates that preservice teachers might be coming by these perceptions honestly. meaning, they might simply not know what they don’t know. there’s an important implication here: providing preservice teachers with multiple experiences to reflect critically on their own biases (implicit or otherwise) and pervasive stereotypes about rural people and places may serve as an instructional move to reposition future teachers’ feelings of preparedness for successful teaching in rural schools. to that end, as katina noted in her post-questionnaire reflection, “students may respond differently to literature that would be otherwise overlooked by non-rural students (i.e., racial issues, class issues).” katina’s response demonstrates the potential benefits of helping students think about the importance of teaching from a dialogic, culturally responsive stance. enacting a dialogic pedagogy in her post-questionnaire, faith noted that the rural problem-posing seminar “opened [her] eyes to the way that rural students might respond to stereotypes.” her response indexes the crucial concept that teachers will not be successful in a rural school (or any school context) if they are unable or unwilling to learn about how their students’ cultural contexts might influence teaching and learning. throughout the data corpus, the participants consistently noted the importance of making connections between their students’ lives and the content they would be teaching. for example, jenny shared the belief that “texts need to be relatable” and that “students need to see themselves in the text.” this is, no doubt, a result of the focus on enacting a dialogic pedagogy, which was the foundation of the methods courses. what we find most encouraging about this finding is that it demonstrates that the participants are internalizing the concept that students will reject “teachers and schools that they perceive as hostile, alien, or oppressive to their home-based identities” (gee, 2008, p. 39). kyle’s statement, “i’ve learned that you have to get to know the community and the lifestyle of the student to at least know where they come from,” is indicative of how this group of preservice teachers is thinking about the connection between culture, place, and content. kyle voices a significant issue; preservice teachers need opportunities to participate in field placements in rural environments. in fact, six of the eleven participants specifically stated that they believe spending more time in rural placements would help them feel better prepared to teach in a rural school. while this seems like an obvious solution, it’s not quite so simple. just as seat time in a classroom does not guarantee mastery of knowledge, time spent in a rural practicum does not guarantee that preservice teachers will leave that placement better prepared. those practicum experiences must be carefully planned and structured around a framework that attends to the nuances of culture and place. discussion our work with these preservice teachers highlights the importance of attending to issues of culture and place in the english classroom. it is simply not enough to encourage teachers to build relationships with students and make the curriculum “relevant.” instead, teacher educators must make concerted efforts to dig deeply into the concepts of culture and place to explore how individual differences influence teaching and learning. as james so adeptly pointed out in his reflection, “kids are kids.” while seemingly simple, this sentiment drives at the very heart of our english education program: 120 global education review 3(1) teach the kids in front of you. though limited by a small sample and unique context, what we have chronicled in this paper are our efforts to take novice teacher candidates and scaffold their development, as they learn to frame challenges they encounter differently and enact a pedagogy responsive to the needs of culture and place. we want to make sure that we are preparing preservice teachers to focus on the centrifugal forces of language and culture (bakhtin, 1981) that make each kid just a little bit different. britzman (2003) argued that speaking, “as if there is one monolithic culture of teachers, students or schools, is to take up a discourse that is at once authoritative and impossible” (p. 71). therefore, it’s important for teacher educators to spend time considering how we can structure our programs to make this focus a practical part of the work we do to prepare teachers for success in rural schools. recommendations with this research study, we set out to better understand teacher candidates’ perceptions of rurality and consider how a teacher preparation program might prepare preservice english teachers for success in rural schools. to that end, we conclude our discussion with two recommendations. the first is to undergird a teacher preparation program with pedagogies that can be applied to or generalized in rural communities. we believe that our focus on culturally responsive, dialogic pedagogy with an emphasis on place has prepared our preservice teachers to be resourceful in the rural classroom. this was most evident during the problemposing seminar where participants were both eager and adept at thinking through solutions for rural challenges. the second recommendation is for teacher preparation programs to provide preservice teachers with meaningful teaching experiences in rural schools. when asked how we could better prepare participants for rural teaching success on the post-questionnaire reflection, more than half of the participants responded “more rural placements.” we are committed to this recommendation and are now seeking to place our next cohort of teacher candidates in rural student teaching placements. future research in this area would be in determining the effectiveness of these strategies in preparing teachers for careers in rural schools. coda we are all influenced by our place identities and how and where those identities are shaped – geographically, but also socially and culturally. regardless of where these preservice teachers go on to teach, we feel that an attention to rural settings is worthwhile. life in many rural communities is influenced by generational poverty, government neglect, and in some cases, overt and oppressive corporate manipulations. while often “unseen” by the general public, rural challenges are issues that affect many. in our region of appalachia, mountaintop removal and natural gas fracking are two obvious examples. the point is, even if these teacher candidates never step foot in a rural school, we hope our focus on the inherent worth of rural communities and the need to include rurality in conversations about social justice will have a lasting effect on our students. by putting rural on the proverbial map for these young people, we hope they will teach their future students with a critical consciousness about rurality; that they will quash a “redneck joke” being told in their classroom; that they will bring into question the ways texts (even canonical ones) portray rural people and places; that they will use their training in dialogic, place, and culturally responsive pedagogies to, at the very least, shine a critical light on the issues in rural communities. if they find themselves doing this successfully in a rural school even better. confronting challenges 121 notes 1. all names are pseudonyms. references appleman, d. 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(2012). english teachers, administrators, and dialogue: transcending the asymmetry of power in the discourse of educational policy. english education, 44(4), 375-393. sutherland, d. (2005). country boys. wgbh educational foundation. public broadcasting services. confronting challenges 123 theobald, p. (1997). teaching the commons: place, pride, and the renewal of community. boulder, co: westview. about the author(s) amy price azano, phd, is an assistant professor of adolescent literacy in the school of education at virginia polytechnic institute and state university. trevor thomas stewart, phd, is an assistant professor in the school of education and the program leader for english education at virginia polytechnic institute and state university 124 global education review 3(1) appendix a problem-posing inquiry in an effort to make our seminar meetings a true community of practice, teacher candidates will take turns highlighting problems or issues they are encountering in their placements. consistent with the program’s focus on dialogue and a strong connection between theory and practice, our work here will be centered on moving towards creative ways to address the issues we encounter. these problem-posing seminars will be a chance for us to work together to generate ideas that might offer practical suggestions for improving our practice while maintaining a positive focus. problem-posing protocol 1. using the template, the presenter will pose his or her problem for discussion and open the dialogue by sharing framing questions and a relevant artifact.* (5-7 minutes) *note: if the artifact is something that can’t be easily shared in document form (e.g. a conversation with a parent or student), craft a document that can summarize the experience or conversation. 2. the group will ask any necessary clarifying questions and the presenter will respond briefly. (5 minutes) 3. the group uses the framing questions as a structure for helping to identify possible solutions to the problem that has been posed. the presenter takes notes but does not participate in the discussion. (20-25 minutes) 4. the presenter summarizes and comments on what he or she heard during the discussion—focusing on key issues and strategies for moving forward. (3-5 minutes) 5. the presenter will write a 2-3 page reflection that highlights ways the group has contributed to his or her understanding of the issue and possible ways to address the challenges being encountered. the reflection will also note what steps the presenter plans to take in the coming weeks. in subsequent meetings, presenters will share the results of their efforts to implement the suggestions offered by the group. confronting challenges 125 appendix b english education survey 1. how prepared do you feel (right now) to student teach in a rural school? 2. how prepared do you feel to design and deliver instruction to meet the needs of students in rural schools? 3. what have you learned, so far, that makes you feel prepared to meet the needs of rural learners? 4. what kinds of class activities could we do to make you feel more confident about student teaching in a rural school? 5. what supports, resources, or scaffolds do you think would be most helpful for rural learners in english class? 6. what do you perceive as challenges to teaching in a rural school? 7. what do you perceive as benefits to teaching in a rural school? 8. what do you think are the greatest strengths that rural students bring to the english classroom? 9. what kinds of things do you think rural students might struggle with the most in english class? 126 global education review 3(1) appendix c problem posing seminar focus issue: stereotype threat everyone has many identities based on gender, race, age, place, etc. stereotype threat is when there is a situation in which students might feel at risk for confirming a negative stereotype about their social group or one of their identities. research shows that this sort of stereotype threat can negatively affect school achievement. i just started teaching to kill a mockingbird, and i am worried the negative stereotypes about rural people in the novel pose this sort of threat to my students. i’m not sure if it’s because the topic makes them uncomfortable, but i am having trouble finding ways to get my students to connect with the text. during my attempts to engage the class in discussion, my students are reluctant to address issues of race and class because they are uncomfortable talking about differences. i think it’s important to talk about these issues, but i don’t want my students to feel defensive or targeted. the author illustrates different types of rurality with the most educated (atticus) being the most open-minded – but, even among the rural poor, lee describes farmers as this sort of noble or respectable poor (cunninghams) versus a neglectful or despicable poor (ewells). i just fear that my students have a lot more cunninghams and ewells in their lives than finches. context: i teach 3 sections of english 9 – two are standard levels and one honors section. my students are white and from a mix of middle-class and lower/middle-class homes. regardless of ses, the students are similar in that they grew up in this rural community, as have most of their parents and grandparents. it’s a very insular community with strong traditions. the students are wellbehaved and eager to please. framing questions: • how can i support my students as i ask them to step out of their comfort zones? • how can i get my students, who are mostly white, to discuss issues of race as we read this text? o should i differentiate these discussions for standard and honors students? • how can i engage my students on the importance of place as we discuss this text? • even though tkam is a beloved text, i personally believe it perpetuates many negative stereotypes about rural people (or southern rural people). o should i address this in a meaningful way if i have clear, critical literacy objectives – or is it just too risky? confronting challenges 127 artifact 1: summary of a failed class discussion me: when we first meet walter cunningham, scout says: “he did have on a clean shirt and neatly mended overalls.” in contrast, when we meet burris ewell, scout says: “he was the filthiest human i had ever seen. his neck was dark grey, the backs of his hands were rusty, and his finger nails were black deep into the quick.” why does the author make a difference between walter and burris? (no comments) me: okay, what are the boys reactions when the teacher approaches them about their health issues. as a reminder, walter had hookworms from going barefoot on the farm, and burris had “cooties.” student: well, walter was embarrassed, and burris was mad and defensive. me: exactly. so why is the author giving us two different examples of poverty here? (no comments) note: students just would not engage and seemed uncomfortable so i moved on to the next activity. artifact 2: relevant quotations about rurality related to stereotype threat in maycomb county, it was easy to tell when someone bathed regularly, as opposed to yearly lavations: mr. ewell had a scalded look; as if an overnight soaking had deprived him of protective layers of dirt. . . .mayella looked as if she tried to keep clean. . ." "every town had families like the ewells. . . .(they) lived as guests of the county in prosperity as well as in the depths of depression. . . .no public health officer could free them from congenital defects, various worms, and the diseases indigenous to filthy surroundings." "maycomb's ewells lived behind the town garbage dump. . . .the cabin's plank walls were supplemented with sheets of corrugated iron, its roof shingled with tin cans hammered flat. . . ." ". . .the ewells gave the dump a thorough gleaming every day, and the fruits of their industry (those that were not eaten) made the plot of ground around the cabin look like the playhouse of an insane child. . .a discarded dentist's chair, an ancient icebox. . .old shoes, worn-out table radios. . . ." 128 global education review 3(1) appendix d reflection 1. thinking specifically about the issues related to rurality and stereotypes in the problemposing seminar, how did this experience help you think about teaching in a rural environment? 2. in what ways might this experience have helped you generate practical strategies for working with rural students? 3. what do you see as the benefits of teaching in a rural school? conversely, what do you see as hindrances of teaching in a rural school? 4. thinking about what you’ve learned so far in the program related to teaching students with diverse needs, what else could we do to help you feel more prepared or more confident about the prospect of teaching in a rural school? 174 azano stewart formatted wi footer 174 azano stewart formatted no footer recent trends in globalization scholarship 117 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2015). recent trends in globalization scholarship. [review of the book theories of globalization, by barrie axford]. global education review, 2 (2). 117-119. book review recent trends in globalization scholarship “theories of globalization” by barrie axford by colin everett the end of the cold war, the proliferation of the internet, and neo-liberal trade policies all contributed to a greater sense of global interconnectedness in the 1990s. academics, politicians, and pundits explained these changes in terms of a global identity and a global process of modernization. these worldviews fit under the broad umbrella of globalization. emerging as a major academic discipline in the 1980s, globalization saw its pivotal development take place during the 1990s. as a relatively new field, globalization lacks a basic framework, curricula, methodology, and even an agreed upon definition. like so many other grand worldviews, globalization offers the temptation of being whatever an author claims. depending on the author, the term globalization is either a lens to interpret the modern age or a simple summary of the times in which we live. in theories of globalization, barrie axford presents an extensive collection of the recent scholarship and usage of globalization. axford’s first challenge is presenting a coherent definition of globalization. his book counters the work of justin rosenberg, a scholar of globalization who argues that since theories of globalization lack an “intelligible hypothesis,” almost anything “can be described as globalization or ascribed to it” (19). axford’s answer is to separate the usage and understanding of globalization into three separate concepts: globalization, globalism, and globality. globalization refers to the process and direction of change over time, globalism refers to a set of ideologies ranging from the worship of the free-market to global jihadism, and globality is a “single socio-political space on a planetary scale” (31). axford does not present his own definition or theory of globalization; 118 global education review 2 (2) rather he codifies the major intellectual currents on globalization. seven of the book’s nine chapters analyze recent scholarship on globalization by discipline. axford argues that recent economists have largely ignored the theoretical study of globalization. other than economics, globalization theories have been applied throughout the social sciences. axford starts by examining how political science, geography, and sociology have a traditional reliance on the nation-state and national societies as their dominant lens used to interpret the world. an additional chapter focuses purely on the changing nature of stateness. a major theme in the geo-political framework is the dialectical tension between the perception of static borders and the fluidity of networks built upon social relations. anthropology, with its traditional focus on the bounded local community, has shifted toward an analysis of transnationals, diasporas, deterritorialized ethnicities, and migration. separate chapters are dedicated to geography and concepts of re-spatialization theories of globalization and culture. axford proposes that globalization challenges existing notions of physical and political spaces as being dynamic and not static, as well as the tension between local, national, and global culture. with regard to the study of history, axford details the meaning of world and global history, as well as the historical context for studying globalization. perhaps the most popular appeal of globalization is the appearance of an increasingly global economy and neo-liberal economic policies. while the field of economics, according to axford, has sparing scholarship pertaining to globalization theory, theories regarding capitalism are numerous. but for axford, the study of “globalization as an economic phenomenon and its equation with capitalist expansion still exercises too narrowing an influence on the study of global integration” (176). ultimately, theories of globalization is a difficult book to read. for a general educated reader without a specialized background in the academic fields on which axford focuses, the internal academic debates can be overwhelming. most of the challenges in reading theories of globalization are deeply imbedded in its academic nature. the text abounds in overly long sentences, hyper-specialized vocabulary, and exhaustive coverage of arguments between intellectuals in what is essentially one long, although truly impressive, literature review. the selection of subjects to review, with the exception of capitalism and political science, can seem arbitrary. additional chapters on other fascinating fields like education could have been substituted or added. as a secondary world history teacher, i wanted to read theories of globalization to better understand my course and the economic and political influences of the modern age. i have been exposed to dim-store theorists who present youtube globalization theories (like “shift happens…”), but these usually are driven by a partial reading of journalist thomas friedman (the lexus and the olive tree [1999); the world is flat [2005]) and end in fear mongering directed toward developing nations. i still have not found the book i am looking. for secondary educators and general education undergraduate instructors looking to use recent trends in globalization scholarship 119 scholarship to better inform their own instruction, theories of globalization will be of little value. it may best serve the needs of scholars looking to understand how globalization has been recently interpreted in various social scientific disciplines. therefore, as a summary of the field, theories of globalization offers value to scholars and students wishing to familiarize themselves on the current debates over globalization. “theories of globalization.” by barrie axford. malden, ma: polity press, 2013. isbn 978-0-7456-3475-3 about the author barrie axford is professor of politics at oxford brookes university, united kingdom, and director of the centre of global politics, economy, and society. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts and a history instructor at cape cod community college. part 1.pdf video-based self-observation 63 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creativecommons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mercado, leonardo a. & baecher, laura (2014). video-based self-observation as a component of developmental teacher education. global education review, 1 (3). 63.77. video-based self-observation as a component of developmental teacher evaluation leonardo a. mercado instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna) laura baecher hunter college, city university of new york abstract in this paper, we explore the benefits to teacher evaluation when video-based self-observation is done by teachers as a vehicle for individual, reflective practice. we explore how it was applied systematically at the instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna) bi-national center in lima, peru among hundreds of english as a foreign language (efl) teachers in two institution-wide initiatives that have relied on self-observation through video professional development. in these cases, we provide a descriptive framework for each initiative as well as information on what was ultimately achieved by teachers, supervisors and the institution as a whole. we conclude with recommendations for implementing video-based self-evaluation. keywords video, teacher evaluation, supervision, professional development, peru [video] gave me a lot of information because when we teach we have to take into consideration many aspects. it’s not only what you say or the way you say it, but also if the students that are in that classroom are involved in this learning process. i think that when we observe a video we can see things that were not important to us before. as a consequence the next time that we do an activity we will pay attention not only to our actions but also the effect that we are having on our students. (excerpt from teacher’s feedback) introduction while teachers’ skills are routinely evaluated, the ultimate aim of evaluation is to promote their ability to create an environment that is conducive to learning. supporting teachers’ work are the supervisors, coaches, mentors and administrators who, rather than simply evaluating their performance, wish to provide teachers with the means to develop professionally so they can succeed at fulfilling their complex, highly demanding roles. ______________________________ corresponding author: laura baecher, hunter college, city university of new york, 695 park ave, new york, ny 10065 email: lbaecher@hunter.cuny.edu 64 global education review 1 (3) unfortunately, because the line between formative and summative teacher evaluation is often blurred (danielson & mcgreal, 2000), supervisors may engage in practices that are more evaluative than developmental in nature. this comes at the expense of efforts towards formative supervision that could be much more effective in promoting teacher learning. in this article, we report how selfobservation through video was utilized as a professional development component of formative teacher evaluation. video-based self-observation has shown positive results in pre-service teacher education (kong, shroff & hung, 2009) as well as in the ongoing learning of experienced teachers (sherin & van es, 2005). however, it has not been studied in large-scale implementation as a feature of supervision, nor have the institutional benefits of such implementation been reported. in this paper we describe how self-observation through video has been used successfully with hundreds of teachers at a large bi-national center for english language instruction in lima, peru, the instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna). we describe the reflective processes in which icpna teachers engaged for self-evaluation as well as how video-based self-observation has the potential to foster more collaborative interactions with peers and mentor supervisors. in addition to describing the benefits of video-based self-observation for teachers, we also contend that when selfobservation through video is done systematically among an entire faculty, with the support of administrators and other key stakeholders, it has the potential to bring about positive transformational change at the institutional level. we describe one particular program-wide initiative in which selfobservation played a central role, focusing on: (1) how video-based self-observation impacted the supervision process; (2) ways in which video-based self-observation was connected to improved classroom instruction; and (3) the potential impact of implementing video-based self-observation on institutional practices. we conclude with recommendations and future directions for the role of video-based self-observation in formative evaluation. formative evaluation as professional development when done effectively and consistently over time, engaging teachers in formative evaluation alongside professional development initiatives should ultimately lead to improved instruction and, as a consequence, improved student learning (goe, bell, & little, 2008). specifically, formative evaluation can provide insights on the degree to which a teacher’s repertoire of skills, strategies and techniques are successful at promoting student learning in the classroom. formative evaluations can also help gauge a teacher’s level of preparedness, confidence and motivation, all equally important variables to consider. as teacher evaluation establishes patterns of practice and records of student response, supervisors and administrators can determine if improvement is taking place, to what degree, and the amount of time it is taking, as well as to identify specific needs on the part of the teacher. ultimately, professional development and formative teacher evaluation allow administrators to determine whether the members of their faculty are in the process of becoming the kind of professional the institution wishes to have as part of its faculty. similarly, with appropriate and timely feedback, teachers are better able to decide whether their professional pursuits are line with their personal goals and expectations. self-evaluation as a component of formative evaluation when teachers and teacher candidates encounter external evaluation of their video-based self-observation 65 performance, they unfortunately begin to experience evaluation as political enactment of “control-oriented routines” (towndrow & tan, 2009, p. 285) rather than as a vehicle for professional development. inviting teacher candidates to be evaluators of their own performance could encourage teachers to be active agents in the process (cheung, 2009; cranton, 2001). the use of self-assessment tools in the field of education has been found to be useful in guiding teachers to think about their own standards for quality teaching, helping them to set goals for development, improve their ability to communicate with peers in the profession, and enhance the influence of external agents to bring about change (ross & bruce, 2007). when teachers’ awareness is heightened as to what takes place in the classroom, and they come to understand why it is happening, they are in a better position to articulate their needs and to determine the actions that are most likely to lead to improvement in their instructional practice (gebhard & oprandy, 1999; edge, 2011). support for self-evaluation in learning is based on theories of self-regulation as well as metacognition (zimmerman, mount & goff, 2008). because engaging candidates in the metacognitive task of stepping back to appraise their own performance stimulates self-monitoring (bransford, brown, & cocking, 1999; winne & hadwin, 1998), selfevaluation encourages a more active and selfreliant role in one’s own learning (wiggins, 1998). heightened self-awareness, leading to ever greater self-regulation, has been shown to yield benefits including a greater awareness of the evaluation process and scoring criteria, an increased understanding of the instructional content, and improved performance (davies, 2002; fallows & chandramohan, 2001). teachers who engage in selfand peerevaluation within a collaborative culture that fosters trust, openness and support will more likely find the motivation to develop professionally (hargreaves & dawe, 2011). they may be more amenable to the idea of working to improve their practice than under more traditional approaches to teacher evaluation. furthermore, when professional development initiatives are closely tied to clearly articulated processes for selfevaluation, it can foster self-reliance for ongoing learning. ultimately, tangible support for new teachers can be decisive in their decision to stay in the field or not (ingersoll & smith, 2004; rockoff, 2008). the role of video in selfobservation self-observation through video is well-suited for ongoing teacher evaluation and professional development because the process can provide administrators insights and information related to a teacher’s performance, level of progress, needs, degree of professionalism, and motivation to continue with her or his development towards becoming a teaching professional. more importantly, not only does it assist administrators with their work as guarantors of quality learning, but it provides teachers – the intended main beneficiaries – with a practical means to learn from themselves and their peers. the end result can be more powerful because they become aware of the benefits and results through personal experience. video records of teaching have been used successfully to support reflection in pre and in-service teacher development programs worldwide (kong, shroff & hung, 2009; rosaen, lundeberg, cooper, fritzen & terpstra, 2008; sherin & van es, 2005; welsch & devlin, 2007). for example, a study involving peer video-recording and group discussion of student teachers’ own classroom performance in local schools conducted in ireland showed that these activities exposed 66 global education review 1 (3) pre-service teachers to a range of diverse teaching methodologies and led them to a deeper level of reflection (harford & macruairc, 2008). in a related study by kong (2010), student teachers in hong kong captured videos of their practice teaching through a web-enabled system and conducted self-reflections along four dimensions: curriculum planning and evaluation, pupils and pupil-teacher interactions, discipline and classroom management, and professional knowledge. in this case, a form containing specific items to observe in each dimension and levels of achievement was provided to guide students in their reflections. the researcher found that student teachers generated more and deeper reflective notes after watching clips of their own teaching. more recently, eröz-tuğa (2013) reported that pre-service english language teachers in turkey not only gained insight into their own strengths and weaknesses after watching video records, but displayed conscious efforts to make improvements. the author noted the value of repeated viewing of videos and the importance of clarifying the expectations and the assessment criteria for teaching performance. by harnessing the power of review to “notice, revisit, and investigate,” teachers arrived at a more fine-grained understanding of their performance than with memory-based recall (rosaen et al., 2008, p. 356). furthermore, when teachers have an opportunity to watch and analyze video of their own rather than other’s teaching, they may experience greater motivation and engagement in the activity, further enriching the reflective process. in the following section, we report on the use of video to support self-observation done by teachers as a vehicle for individual, reflective practice. we provide an overview of how it was applied systematically at icpna among hundreds of english as foreign language (efl) teachers, with reference to a particular institution-wide initiative that relied on selfobservation through video for its success. implementation of video-based self-observation educational context founded in 1938, the instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna) is a binational center that promotes the cultural exchange between peru and united states, by teaching the english and spanish languages, the development of libraries, and the diffusion of the artistic and cultural expressions of both countries. with tens of thousands of student enrollments each month, it is committed to excellence in the teaching and learning of english. to ensure the academic study program’s success, it dedicates an enormous amount of time, effort, and resources to immerse, its professional development and training program for novice and in-service teachers. over time, video-based selfobservation has become a pillar for reflective practice and action-on-reflection within the program. introducing video-based selfobservation at the icpna, self-observation through video was first instituted as an experiment in 2001 at one of its five large branches: lima centro (downtown area). initially a novelty among teachers, since they had never participated in such an initiative before, it became highly successful. in the early 2000’s, the branch had close to 100 full-time efl teachers, and participation in the initiative reached 100% thanks to the drive of the academic supervisor entrusted with the project as well as the motivation the part of the teacher participants. it evolved into an institutionwide initiative in 2005, when it became a key component of a fledgling professional development program. today, it is a requirement of novice teachers during their first year, carried out on a monthly basis. video-based self-observation 67 novice teachers are encouraged to alternate the classes in which they are video recorded so as to have a broader perspective on their instructional practice. the camera can be placed in the room to be left recording on its own or the teacher can request the support of a cameraperson for more focused footage. for teachers in their second year, it is no longer required, but remains as an important alternative for professional development among the many that make up the institute’s “professional development menu”. despite its optional nature at this point, however, many teachers keep it as a favorite path to their own growth as elt professionals. since its very beginnings, teachers have never been made to share their videos unless they wanted to. in the case of novice teachers, they are provided with a self-assessment instrument that serves to promote selfevaluation and reflection. however, mentor teachers and mentor supervisors are always available to provide feedback and advice in relation to the class depicted in the video should the novice teacher decide to share the contents. with teachers who have begun their second year at icpna, sharing takes place more often among teachers who also do peer observation but who cannot find the time in their schedules to visit another person’s class. when conflicts in their schedules prevent teachers from going to each others’ classes, they are encouraged to share videos that are normally recorded for self-observation purposes. they are highly commended when they choose to share their videos on their own accord, outside of more formal, institutionalized initiatives. the self-observation checklist shown in figure 1 is introduced to novice teachers gradually as they work their first months at the institute. the form has four sections: instructional practices, critical incidents, key decisions, and the action plan. figure 1. self-assessment checklist for self-observation through video 68 global education review 1 (3) novice teachers are encouraged to work with the sections one at a time. during the second month, for example, they may work with instructional practices first, then with critical incidents in the third month, and key decisions in the fourth. once they have engaged in self-reflection and assessment with all of the sections, they are free to choose whether they wish to use only one, two or all of the sections of the form at any one time. after their first year, all teachers are encouraged to continue using the form whenever they engage in self-observation. it is also important to note that in the end, there must always be an action plan based on their findings. institutional initiative using videobased self-observation at icpna, self-observation through video has not only helped hundreds of efl teachers grow professionally on their own, it has also served a higher purpose at the program and institutional level by contributing directly to organizational change. in this section, we will refer to the 2007 “teacher talk time” (ttt) reduction campaign. in this professional development initiative, self-observation through video provided teachers and administrators with an ideal means to gauge results progressively and make adjustments in regard to the measures being taken to support these projects. the decision to initiate a campaign to reduce ttt in icpna’s classrooms came as a result of an extensive evaluation of the academic study program, faculty, and other aspects that could influence the teaching and learning process at the institute. there was a need to increase student-talk-time (stt) significantly and reduce excessive, nonproductive teacher-talk-time (ttt) as much as possible. the project proceeded through the following stages: 1. development of the campaign and setting of a timeline for implementation. 2. development of instruments, protocols, performance metrics, support systems, and criteria for outcomes. 3. introduction of the campaign to teachers, and collection of their input on the process; training on stt vs. excessive ttt, ttt reduction strategies, self-assessment techniques through self-observation; development of goal statements and action plans on the part of the teachers. 4. self-observations done by teachers at all of the branches. formative postobservation discussion sessions with mentor supervisors and action plan adjustments. 5. first assessment of outcomes and follow-up action plans. 6. final round of self-observations and assessments. 7. culmination of campaign. follow-up teacher training and professional development initiatives. in step 3, for example, the campaign was launched with an in-service teacher development (td) session that presented the rationale for the campaign and the action plan to be followed by each of the stakeholders, most particularly the teachers. the session was presented as follows: • introduction: what are ttt and stt? why is stt good for the program? how is the difference productive and what is excessive ttt? • demo videos: demonstration of two classes: one showing excessive ttt and another one that prioritizes stt. • general campaign strategy: presentation of the ttt-reduction campaign strategy and timeline. • self-assessment stage: description of strategies, protocols, instruments, and desired outcomes. practice with using the stt-ttt self-assessment checklist. • comprehension check activities: activities to make certain that teachers understand the overall message and their role in the process. video-based self-observation 69 the td session was crucial in getting the program off to an auspicious beginning. teachers were able to understand why the campaign was being initiated, their roles in the process, how they could self-assess to make certain they were making progress, and what the desired outcomes were. at the same time, they were informed as to how they were expected to work collaboratively with their mentor supervisors in order to maximize their chances of reaching the ultimate goal. table 1 displays the instrument that was provided to teachers and used as a self-assessment checklist for stt-ttt that could be utilized during video-playback. # behaviors conducive to increasing stt observed behaviors conducive to increasing ttt observed 1. the teacher’s explanations are concise and opportune. the teacher gives long and unnecessary instructions or explanations. 2. the teacher elicits from students when presenting new language. the teacher does not elicit from students enough when presenting new language. 3. the teacher encourages students to ask questions. the teacher asks questions when there is an opportunity for students to do so. 4. the teacher offers students opportunities to summarize and/or paraphrase. the teacher summarizes and/or paraphrases when there is an opportunity for students to do so. 5. the teacher only expresses opinions and facts that are relevant to the lesson. the teacher gives opinions about facts and ideas that are not relevant to the lesson. 6. the teacher encourages students to add information to their classmates’ responses. the teacher adds additional information to students’ responses when it is not conducive to more stt. 7. the teacher encourages students to answer her/his questions as well as their classmates’. the teacher poses questions and then answers them her/himself. 8. the teacher has students do the wrap-up. the teacher does not involve students in the wrap-up. 9. the teacher provides students with enough wait-time and prep/thinking time. the teacher does not provide enough wait or prep/thinking time to students. 10. the teacher refrains from unnecessarily repeating what she/he or the students have said. the teacher repeats unnecessarily what she/he or the students have said. table 1. targeted self-assessment tool for video review 70 global education review 1 (3) this checklist was used by all of the teachers at the icpna regardless of whether their prior performance had been acceptable or not. although the most obvious goal for the campaign was to provide teachers with the means to self-assess and to reduce excessive ttt, an indirect outcome that was sought just as eagerly was to accustom teachers to the process of reflective teaching and action-onreflection, which is deciding to follow-up with an self-inspired activity or initiative that ultimately leads to improved instructional practice (edge, 2011). as a requirement, the entire faculty of more than 400 full-time teachers was required to participate in this campaign. after carrying out the self-observation and selfassessment processes, they were asked to develop an action in relation to a particular point they could improve. table 2 provides an excerpt from a teacher’s action plan used during the ttt campaign. the sample action plan (table 2) illustrates how a teacher identified a particular area in which excessive ttt was made evident in her teaching. she developed a solution alternative, a plan of action to pursue throughout the time allotted to the initiative, criteria for success, and dates for review and completion. in the end, this teacher was able to resolve the issue and make her questioning techniques much more student centered. at the program level, administrators tracked each teacher’s results with targeted observation logs. this log was one of many documents used to track stt and ttt promoting behaviors as seen in the selfobservation videos. teachers would work with their mentor supervisors in order to highlight their repertoire of strategies and techniques that are conducive to increased stt and to identify typical situations in which they may be more likely to engage in excessive, unproductive ttt. over time, the aim was to reduce the tally under ttt and increase the number of notches under stt. as a whole, the ttt-reduction campaign was successful. eighty-nine per cent of the teachers who participated in it were able to identify at least one area related to excessive ttt in which they could improve. problem objective(s) success criteria actions to be taken resources i answer my own questions. during each month, i will make sure i don’t answer my own questions by providing my students with more wait time (8 – 10 seconds) and singling out a minimum of two students to respond with each t-s interaction cycle. the behavior must be observed at least twice during each class session. three times a week, i will reflect to what extent i have achieved my objective. i will verify progress by watching my own videos. this will be tried in one of the three courses i am currently teaching. i will ask my students if they feel they have more opportunities to respond to my questions. notebook, pen, video camera, selfassessment checklist, student feedback form table 2. sample action plan used in conjunction with video review 71 global education review 1 (3) of this group, 94% were able to meet their desired goals within the timeframe allotted to the program. the others were able to achieve their target goals by the end of the year, just a few months later. in the end, self-observation through video was the primary catalyst for promoting self-examination, self-assessment, and self-reflection, all of which eventually led to improving instructional effectiveness and student learning. teacher and administrator perceptions: the value of selfobservation a survey was conducted among 247 teachers and 27 academic supervisors in order to ascertain the perceived value of selfobservation in relation to their professional development goals. a number of questions were asked regarding their experience in the field, years of employment at icpna, use of self-observation, what caused anxiety among teachers when engaging in self-observation, and the benefits afforded. in terms of experience, 27.9% (69) had 1 – 3 years, 18.6% (46) had 4 – 6 years, 16.1% (40) had 7 – 10 years, and 37.2% (92) had 11 years experience. icpna supervisors were a very experienced group: no supervisors had fewer than 4 years of experience, 7.4% (2) had 4 – 6 years, 7.4% (2) had 7 – 10years, and 85.2% (23) had 11 or more years. teachers were asked to provide their impressions of how video-based selfobservation impacted their practices in general, as well as in relation to the ttt campaign. most frequently mentioned was that they believed they came to see aspects of their teaching they were unaware of, when reviewing their lesson on video (203, or 82.2%), which helped them in seeing their teaching strengths as well as identifying areas they wished to improve upon (218, or 88.3%). the two main benefits identified by teachers were reflecting on their teaching (198 or 80.2%) and identifying their strengths and weaknesses (216, or 87.5%). close behind were the opportunity to observe their students’ behavior (141, or 57.1%) and aiding them in making instructional decisions in planning (163, or 65.6%). teachers felt that video review of their lessons aided them in improving a particular instructional strategy (104, or 42.1%) and student production in the lesson (49, or 19.8%). less frequently cited was helping to improve student motivation (16, or 6.5%). here are some statements from teachers about how they benefitted: in order to be a successful educator, it is important to reflect upon one’s teaching. this may include videotaping classes, being observed by a colleague/supervisor, asking for help with a problem or finding new ways to teach a topic. being a reflective teacher is something i have tried to be as a student teacher and plan to continue working on. overall, being a reflective teacher does not require a large amount of time, just extra thought. i hope that i am able to take more time to reflect upon my teaching as i gain experience, because my students and i can only benefit from this. when you watch a video, you have a better chance to see what's really going on with your whole class, something you might not be able to do in the classroom. at a given moment in a video, you can tell, for example, what students are using english and what students are not. this is an area in which self-observation through video has helped me a lot. i consider videotaping as a very useful source of feedback that has helped me realize how efficient my instructions are when these are followed by quick activation (less than a minute) of student elaboration on a task. for example, i might have said,” get into groups of three and make a list of any differences and similarities you find 72 global education review 1 (3) between an english speaking country and ours. you have ten minutes to complete it”. after that i may ask another student to paraphrase my instructions, acknowledge his or her input and get to work. as students gather and start working on the task with lively and confident discussions, i walk around to monitor and provide help as needed…self-observation has also helped me to know if i met the aims established for my teaching and if the techniques i used worked as planned when i see how well my students perform in class and what things do i need to improve on, such as less teacher talking time and increase students participation and elaboration of target language. additionally, it has taught me to work on my body language which expresses a lot of meaning and purpose to my teaching. i realized that i assumed students would produce by just telling them what they needed to do. but watching myself and my students i realized that i have to guide them through it. this was the first thing i realized after i watched my first video when i just started teaching. there are many ways it has helped me in many areas. i think something important is that by watching myself teach, i was able not only to experience being a student in my own class, but also to observe other students' reactions to my teaching. i think this has helped me to focus the activities more towards the students and to consider their needs and learning styles. sharing videos with peers and supervisors. of the total, 65.2% (161) said they generally did not opt to share their videos with others. yet, it should be noted 23.9% (59) shared their videos with their fellow teachers and 12.5% (31) with supervisors. of the total that did share their material, 98.9% found the feedback they got was either very helpful or somewhat helpful. it is hoped that over time this figure will increase since it does reflect to some degree the openness of teachers within the professional community of which they became a part. here are some impressions from teachers regarding the feedback they received from their colleagues after sharing their videos: if sharing with peers, it can help you both to learn and have different ideas for future classes and activities. i just been here for three months, but so far it's been a guide and record of what to keep doing and what to modify even though i did it with a trusted colleague, i was afraid of the feedback i would get. but our discussion was actually very positive and different from what i expected. it helped me focus on aspects of my teaching i hadn’t noticed before, even when doing self-observation. when teachers decide to share their videos, they are taking a risk. they are exposing themselves to the scrutiny and possible judgment of others, leaving their comfort zone, in the hope that the decision will lead to a tangible return. therefore, it is essential for teachers to believe they will benefit from the initiative. sharing of videos with supervisors was less common but close to 18% of those who did so considered their mentor supervisors as the most important source of feedback. about 21.5% (53) of teachers expressed anxiety that video-based self-observation 73 the video might be used for formal evaluation and appraisal purposes. there was a pronounced concern about the presence of the camera in the classroom and the possibility that it would affect the students negatively 65.2% (161). teachers were concerned that the presence of a video camera would influence students, resulting in conclusions that may not actually be representative of their teaching. at the same time, ultimately 68% (168) found the data from their selfevaluations as the most helpful; this could take the form of simply watching the video and identifying helpful segments, using the self-assessment checklist, or the teachers’ own ways to measure their performance. recommendations promoting video-based selfobservation the experience gained from implementing video-based self-observation at icpna suggests that teachers can gather and analyze data about their lessons in order to better understand what they do and why, thus leading the way toward critical selfexamination, planning in relation to what needs to be done as a result, and pursuing consequent action(s) until they meet their own expectations for improvement or change (richards & lockhart, 1996). nevertheless, getting teachers within a professional community to benefit from reflective practice through video-based self-observation may not be possible unless a conscious decision is made at the institutional level to promote it within a well-defined professional development framework. yet, once “buy-in” is achieved among the faculty, self-observation can be implemented progressively. it can begin with a first group or cohort of highly motivated teachers who are known for their willingness to participate in such initiatives serving as models for the rest of the faculty. monetary compensation should never be the sole incentive to participate but rather recognition of others in the community of teachers and, most importantly, fulfillment of one’s own goals for development. what is essential is for teachers to become fully aware of what self-observation can do for them. most will have no idea as to how they teach until they see themselves on video. if the first experience with self-observation is positive and gratifying, it is fair to assume that they will do it again and hopefully include it within their repertoire of regular reflective teaching practices, which is why supervisors should provide all the support that may be needed for teachers to succeed from the very beginning. again, it should be used as a formative measure towards self-improvement and never for summative evaluation purposes. in summary, video-based self-observation could be tried by following these steps: individuals • ask peers about their experiences. • set main goals and objectives for professional development. • establish focus for self-observation. • create self-assessment instrument that suits your needs. • video record your class. • watch several times, alternating whole lesson and segments until focus has been addressed. • carry out self-assessment • develop action plan and/or confirm good practice(s). • follow up and assess final outcomes. groups / institutions • read literature. • acquire equipment. 74 global education review 1 (3) • establish rationale for using selfobservation within professional development framework. • consult teachers on what they know about self-observation and how it could help them. • create self-assessment instruments that suit your teachers’ needs. • establish implementation process, support systems, goals, and deadlines. • train supervisors on how to approach and support teachers. • introduce self-observation to teachers and explain how it can be used and how they can benefit. • follow up and assess outcomes on a continuous basis. sharing videos of teaching with peers when it is not possible for teachers to observe each other’s classes in person when engaging in peer observation or peer coaching, sharing videos originally recorded for self-observation purposes becomes an option worth considering. with appropriate concern about privacy, videos can be exchanged while maintaining a strict adherence to the basic tenets of successful self-observation and peer observation: confidentiality of content; flexibility to choose what content or lesson to share; an opportunity to learn from someone else in a mutually beneficial exchange; focus of feedback or analysis to be decided by the observed party; omission of any explicit or implicit judgment; and having a medium through which reflection and subsequent action can take place (hendry & oliver, 2012; vacilotto & cummings, 2007; willerman, mcneely, & koffman, 1991). in general, videos could be exchanged as follows: • inform teachers about the benefits of sharing their videos, whether it is done as a means of complementing peer observation practices when scheduling difficulties for inclass observation arise or simply as a way to minimize “teacher isolation” and strengthen the bonds offered by the community of professionals to which they belong. • offer information to teachers as to how sharing could take place and reassure them that the content will not be used for any purposes they do not authorize. • confirm that teachers wish to share their videos on their own accord. • offer support and guidance on how peer observation through videos should be carried out in order for both parties to benefit. • remind teachers that they can also share their videos with a supervisor for formative assessment and follow-up. • appraise level of teacher satisfaction with this alternative and adjust support and guidance accordingly. use of videos with mentor supervisors in more traditional organizational settings, academic supervisors are perhaps viewed by teachers with certain mistrust because their role may be mainly evaluative or judgmental in nature, thus having direct implications for the kinds of interactions they may have. we argue that self-observation through video can favor the development of a more horizontal relationship between teacher and supervisor. this should result in a climate of trust and support, which is generally accepted as essential to cultivating a positive attitude on the part of teachers towards their professional development (kayaoglu, 2012; bailey, 2006; pajak, 2003). certainly, it can do much to build serve the interests of improved instruction in the classroom. in order to lay the foundation for a helping relationship between teacher and supervisor that differs from other less productive, strictly evaluative scenarios, a formative role must be assigned to the supervisor. rather than limiting the work of academic supervisors to quality assurance, teacher appraisal, and evaluative class observation, they must also set aside a video-based self-observation 75 significant amount of time – ideally at least 40% 50% to formative class observation and other initiatives oriented towards professional development. when teachers find that the main goal of the academic supervisor sitting in front of them is their own learning and professional growth, an attitude which is often supported by immediacy behaviors and clearly teacher-centered discourse, the very nature of their relationship is likely to change and so is the teacher’s motivation (vasquéz & reppen, 2007; chamberlin, 2000). thus the academic supervisor can become a mentor supervisor, a designation that is actually used at icpna to distinguish roles among staff members. in addition to formative class observations in which the academic supervisor physically goes to the classroom, there is also the possibility having teachers share their self-observation videos with their mentor supervisors or even discussing “unseen observations”, as described before. in either case, the following recommendations should be taken into consideration: • teachers should agree with their mentor on a focus prior to observation of the video. • the mentor supervisor should reaffirm the formative nature of the viewing and subsequent post-observation conference. • the teacher should communicate her/his expectations to the mentor supervisor in terms of the nature of any forthcoming interactions and all desired outcomes. • the teacher should be encouraged to reflect on the entire video or selected segment again. the mentor supervisor’s questions should encourage the teacher to arrive at new understandings and conclusions in addition to what may have resulted from the selfobservation process. • the video should be returned to the teacher once the process has concluded. needless to say, no copies should be made of the video without the teacher’s knowledge and consent. certainly, what is proposed above also applies to having novice teachers share their videos with their mentor teachers. the dynamics, communication protocols, and expected outcomes should be very similar. conclusion in spite of the recognition that genuine reform can only be enacted at the classroom level by teachers exercising their professional judgment, instructional quality assurance and enhancement efforts have focused more on teacher evaluation of a summative (and often punitive) nature as if it were the only recourse available while formative teacher development practices seem to have taken a backseat. rather than achieve the ultimate goal of improving instruction, a working environment that prioritizes evaluation rather than development will most likely have the opposite effect, placing more pressure on teachers and making it difficult for them to take the necessary risks to improve their practice. certainly, performance appraisals are necessary, but there should be a healthy balance that allows teachers to work on and become aware of their progress. however, self-observation must first be a highly personal, reflective endeavor if it is to lead to enhancing the quality of instruction, and higher levels of student achievement. mandating that teachers share their videos with peers or, even worse, an institutional authority, such as a supervisor, could be highly distressing and counterproductive overall. we contend that voluntary sharing is a valid, logical next step to individualized reflection if it is a result of a conscious choice the teacher is in full control to make and if it 76 global education review 1 (3) is done with a clearly formative purpose in mind. within authentic, safe, professional learning communities, video-based selfobservation may serve as a lever for bringing teachers and their supervisors together in a mutually beneficial relationship that can best serve the interests of their institution. references bailey, k.m. 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(2007). developing preservice teachers’ reflection: examining the use of video. action in teacher education, 28(4), 53-61. willerman, m., mcneely, s.l., & koffman, e.c. (1991). teachers helping teachers: peer observation and assistance. new york: praeger wiggins, g. (1998). educative assessment: designing assessments to inform and improve student performance. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. winne, p. h., & hadwin, a. f. (1998). studying as selfregulated learning. in d. j. hacker, j. dunlosky, & a. c. graesser (eds.), metacognition in educational theory and practice (pp. 277-304). makwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. zimmerman, r. d., mount, m. k., & goff, m., iii. (2008). multisource feedback and leaders’ goal performance: moderating effects of rating purpose, rater perspective, and performance dimension. international journal of selection and assessment, 16(2), 121-133. about the author(s) leonardo a. mercado, med, mba is the academic manager at the instituto cultural peruano norteamericano (icpna) binational center in lima, peru. he has been an esl/efl teacher, teacher trainer, certified proficiency rater and program administrator for almost 20 years. laura baecher, edd is assistant professor of teaching english to speakers of other languages (tesol) at hunter college, city university of new york. her research interests relate to teacher preparation and teacher practice, specifically teacher language awareness, collaborative models and the use of video in clinical supervision. part 1.pdf part 2.pdf 26 global education review 1 (2) _____________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: compton-lilly, catherine (2014). a family case study: how money might matter for academic learning. global education review, 1 (2), 26-40. a family case study: how money might matter for academic learning catherine compton-lilly university of wisconsin madison abstract many children living in low-income communities do not face struggles in school. many learn quickly and easily. but for some students, living in a high poverty communities and attending underfunded schools has consequences that can make learning difficult. in this paper, compton-lilly draws on the words of a parent living in a low-income community to explore how economic and social challenges affected the schooling of her daughter over a ten-year period. as the following accounts reveal, ms. rodriguez, an african american, low-income parent, was committed to her daughter’s learning and school progress and brought a thoughtful and informed critique to her children’s school experience that reveals the multiple ways that money affects academic learning. keywords education; socioeconomic; african american; poverty introduction when alicia was in my first-grade class, her mother, ms. rodriguez, maintained that being poor did not affect alicia’s academic and literacy learning. she referenced the experiences of alicia’s four older brothers who did well in school saying, “i been poorer than poor. ok? if that's the case, my kids should be the dumbest little ones on earth.” ms. rodriguez argued that you can always make time to read, “like you can read at night, or like we used to do – [when] we lived in the city we'd read in the train on the bus, so you can, you can always make time.” however, over the course of a ten-year longitudinal study, ms. rodriguez identified a range of challenges related to financial hardships that affected literacy learning and school success. alicia was not a struggling reader. when she was in my first grade class, she was among the best readers in the class. every morning, alicia and her friends would gather in the book corner of the classroom and choose books that they would take back to their seats and read chorally. a few years before alicia was in my class, i had taught her older brother tyreek. corresponding author: catherine compton-lilly university of wisconsin madison 456b teacher education building 225 n mills st madison, wi 53706-1707 email: comptonlilly@wisc.edu mailto:comptonlilly@wisc.edu a family case study: how money might matter 27 like his sister, tyreek was bright and inquisitive. he was interested in everything school offered. tyreek particularly loved books, science, and computers. while over a ten-year period alicia became less-enamored of reading school texts, she remained an avid reader at home and wrote poetry. despite her lack of interest in school assigned texts, alicia continued to demonstrate her abilities with reading as she moved through school. in eighth grade, her mother reported that she could “read her little tail off” and that the school had assessed her at the “tenth grade level.” however, it was also in middle school when alicia’s grades began to drop. for the first time, alicia was getting “d’s” in social studies, english, and gym. despite her literacy achievements, alicia described her teachers as uncaring, and complained about boring assigned texts. alicia’s story is not a story of not learning as much as it is a story of not finding the support that she needed to maintain success in school despite obvious talents, a supportive family, and an interest in reading. the challenges alicia faced were exacerbated by negative assumptions that are often made about children and families of color from poor communities. as will be illustrated below, ms. rodriguez challenged these assumptions. she was a low-income parent who was very concerned about her children’s literacy and school progress. she cared deeply about her children and consistently supported them at school. in addition, she brought a thoughtful and informed critique to her children’s school experiences. this paper is about one family and how the economic challenges they faced intersect with academic and literacy learning. in short, i argue that poverty matters and draw on the voices of family members to identify how and when being poor affects schooling. this analysis reveals larger societal inequities that affect families (e.g., financial challenges, the assumptions made about students and their families, inequitable school resources, dangerous neighborhoods and schools, limited access to students’ dreams). specifically, i draw on bourdieu’s (1986) description of economic capital to explore and explain economic capital for one family. while the names of people and places reported in this paper are pseudonyms, their words and experiences are real. poverty, assumptions and school achievement the relationship between poverty and school learning has been controversial. in 1946, robinson, drawing on research available at the time, argued that there was a lack of “objective evidence” (p. 95) regarding the relationship between socioeconomic status and reading progress. consternation over the relationship between poverty and academic achievement has led to accounts that blame children’s families for the challenges children face with learning at school. fueled by popular media depictions including the 1965 moynihan report (originally titled the “the negro family: the case for national action”), the assumed pathology of poor african american families continues to infiltrate american thought and extend into discussions about achievement in schools. these assumptions were challenged by auerbach (1989) who critiqued family literacy programs which were designed to remediate the parenting practices of low-income parents. she worried that family literacy was being reduced to “performing school-like literacy activities within the family setting” (p. 166) and that these attempts to reform families did not attend to the rich literacy practices that occur in low-income households. in 1988, taylor and dorsey-gaines challenged correlations between poverty, reading achievement, and parenting by highlighting the cases of four children from a 28 global education review 1 (2) high poverty urban community who were “perceived by their parents to be successfully learning to read and write” (p. xvii). while taylor and dorsey-gaines highlighted the success of these children and the agential capacity of families to support their children with academics, they also stated that “the difficulties that confound their lives are shaped into personal configurations of poverty” including “inadequate housing, the lack of essential resources, poor schools, limited access to higher education and restricted job opportunities” (p. 195). despite these challenges, their work revealed how some lowincome inner city families were able to use literacy for a wide variety of purposes. they described family members who demonstrated high degrees of personal literacy but were either not successful in school or did not receive formal education. in short, taylor and dorsey-gaines and others (e.g., cushman, 1998) highlighted the high degree of intelligence, creativity and resilience that family members displayed in supporting their children with literacy learning. similarly, snow and her colleagues (1991) focused on low-income successful literacy learners. the initial study focused on 31 children in grades 2, 4, and 6 and revealed “quite bright prospects” for the children based on their reading progress in elementary school. however, data collected four years later was less promising: “few of the students in the study had continued to make gains in literacy consonant with their abilities. only a small a minority were taking courses that would qualify them for entry to college. several were high school dropouts, and very few planned to go on to training of any sort after high school” (p. 213). snow and her colleagues ultimately argued that american society must make choices that ensure that students’, parents’ and teachers’ goals can be fulfilled. the case studies conducted by robinson (1946), taylor and dorsey-gaines (1988), and snow and her colleagues (1991) all highlight the potential of children from low-income families to thrive as learners. however, general patterns continue to indicate that schools’ success, and accompanying literacy learning are inequitably challenging for children from low-income families and communities (berliner & biddle, 1996; ravitch, 2013; rist, 1978). in 1996, berliner and biddle recognized that nutritional needs, health care, the lack of safe neighborhoods, income maldistribution, and the lack of resources for purchasing books and other materials to support literacy and school learning created academic difficulties for poor families. the challenges faced by students and families in alicia’s school are not unique to the city where i taught. as others (anyon, 1997; kozol, 1991, 2012) have described, poor inner city schools across america lack instructional supplies, books, and equipment including technology. instruction in these schools is often involves cognitively low-level rote learning with little connection to students’ lives outside of school (kozol, 2012; rist, 1978). shannon (1998) argued that poverty and schooling were intricately intertwined as evidenced by historical policies and practices related to iq testing, the content of textbooks, standardized tests, teacher and school expectations, the materials available to students, and the recent implementation of national standards. shannon deconstructed official representations of poverty to focus on the historic and current political and economic interests operating behind ideological arguments. he connected the lack of economic resources in some communities to an accompanying lack of rich literate experiences, opportunities, and goals. shannon argued for a re-reading of poverty that included equitable school funding, respect for students and their communities, and the provision of powerful opportunities for students to read and write their worlds. as he maintained, “reading cannot make us rich, it cannot guarantee power, but it a family case study: how money might matter 29 can help us to struggle for justice, equality, and freedom” (p. 17). taylor (1996) uncovered toxic alliances between low socioeconomic status and minimal literacy learning. she argued that analyzing the relationships between literacy and poverty could provide a tool to challenge representations of the poor and to envision possibilities for alternative educational practices. taylor (1996) specifically documented cases in which texts were used to position people as drug pushers, drunks, welfare frauds, and deficit parents. her descriptions invite readers to see what it’s like to be poor. as shannon (1998) wrote, reading poverty becomes “a way of being with the poor and understanding their lives” as well as a means of understanding why institutions, laws and social practices operate as they do and why these practices and policies seem natural or expected in american society. in their exploration of economic and public policies, danzinger and danzinger (2008) argue for a small set of changes that would significantly benefit women, like ms. rodriguez, who wanted to make the transition from welfare to work. they argue for increasing the minimum wage, subsidizing healthcare, reforming the unemployment insurance program, and providing transitional jobs that would be available to all who wanted to work. in this discussion of poverty, it is essential to recognize the significant relationship between race and social class in america. as evidenced below, ms. rodriguez is clearly aware of this connection. while not the focus of the current article, race matters. in the words of corcoran (2008), “even when african american children are raised in similar economic conditions as white children, they are less likely to be upwardly mobile and more likely to be downwardly mobile” (p. 48). upward mobility is much more common for white people living in poverty than for african american people. having myself grown up at the poverty line and knowing that my white skin has afforded me opportunities and benefits, i recognize that this is not the case for many of my former students. in 2004, i drew on data from my initial round of research with ms. rodriguez and other families to directly challenge the myths that portrayed poor urban families as generally unconcerned about school and literacy learning. in the current analysis, i draw on the construct of economic capital and the words of ms. rodriguez and her children to explore intersections between poverty and learning. an introduction to economic literacy capital sociologists and educators (bourdieu, 1986; luke & carrington, 1997) have used the construct of capital to reveal and examine the ways groups of people and individuals are favored within particular social and economic contexts. while early interpretations of bourdieu described his work as reproduction theory in which disenfranchised populations tended to pass their social and economic status onto their children, later readings have presented bourdieu as highlighting nuances of economic, social, and cultural capital that contribute in complex and interactive ways to future success which is always contingent on the field in which people act and interact (bourdieu, 1990). as bourdieu (1986) explained, the construct of capital makes it “possible to explain the unequal scholastic achievement of children originating from different social classes” (p. 243). bourdieu identifies factors (e.g., ways of talking, acting, interacting; available social networks; access to resources) that extend beyond personal failure or inferiority as the reasons for success or failure within educational, social, and economic fields. in prior work (compton-lilly, 2007), i have applied an analysis of various forms of capital to reading to explore the literacy learning of kindergarten students in a high poverty 30 global education review 1 (2) community. i drew on bourdieu’s (1986) description of forms of capital – economic, social, and cultural – to explore how children and their families were positioned relative to school success. although i agree that the acquisition of any form of capital will serve people assuming that the field in which they operate recognizes and values that capital, in this article, i focus specifically on economic capital and the role it plays on the academic learning in one family. i rely on the voices of ms. rodriguez and her children whose words i have collected over a ten-year period. this article is not intended to be the ultimate account of how poverty affects learning. rather, it presents the voices of members in one family and in particular the words of ms. rodriguez who struggled to do what she believed was best for her children to ensure that they learned to read and graduated from high school despite challenges related to community and school resources. i define economic academic capital as possessions and experiences that require economic investment and are convertible to academic success. in some cases, accessing these resources is contingent on being able to afford housing in economically healthy neightborhoods and thus attending well-funded schools. examples of economic academic capital include computers, electronic educational toys, significant numbers of quality books, and private tutoring. a longitudinal family case study according to saldaña (2003), longitudinal research enables educators to view the breadth and depth of people’s life experiences and to document change. the case study presented in this article followed alicia and her family (pseudonyms are used for all people and places) over a ten-year period. the family participated in the study when alicia was 6, 10, 13, and 17 years old. initially, i was interested in the concepts about reading held by alicia and her family. while literacy remained the focus of the research, over time the scope of the research broadened in response to students’ and parents’ comments about school, teachers, and their goals for the future. alicia’s full case included interviews, classroom observations, field notes, reading assessments, state test scores, and writing samples. in this paper, because i focus on the accounts of family members related to economic challenges, i draw specifically on interview data. all interviews with alicia and her family were conducted in the rodriguez’s living room and were audiotaped and transcribed; field notes were typed following the interviews. i used data analysis programs to sort segments of interviews and field note data into code sets based on patterns suggested by multiple readings of the transcripts during each phase of the project (miles & huberman, 1994). once interviews were coded, i revised, condensed, and combined the codes into categories. i combined code sets that were similar and re-sorted data from particularly large code sets to identify subthemes. codes related to “challenges,” “resources,” “resilience,” “community, and “suburban schools” were among the code sets that contributed significantly to the analysis presented in this article. in addition to the themes identified through the coding of data from each phase of the project, i triangulated the data across research phases and across time by identifying recurring themes, stories, and even language. for example, stories of sharing books recurred during all four phases of the project. likewise, describing teachers as not caring about students and teaching only for their “paychecks” also recurred. this longitudinal analysis allowed me to consider not only accounts offered at particular points in time, but also repeated accounts that recurred across time. challenging a family case study: how money might matter 31 the assumptions often made about children from poor african american families, this account highlights economic challenges alongside ms. rodriguez’s commitment to her children’s education. ms. rodriguez and her children i met ms. rodriguez and her children three years before alicia was in my first grade class, when her older brother tyreek was in my first grade class. alicia and her family lived a few blocks from school, and i would often chat with ms. rodriguez and older sons when they walked tyreek to school each day. three years later, alicia was randomly selected from my current class of first grade students to participate in my doctoral research study. at the time of the study began, rosa parks school housed over 1,200 students, the vast majority were african american and puerto rican children. ninety-seven percent of the children, including alicia, qualified for free/reduced lunch. alicia had four older brothers and a younger sister. the older brothers had attended elementary school in new york city prior to moving to a smaller city. over the course of the interview, ms. rodriguez consistently expressed high expectations for her children. she believed that her actions had longterm effects on her children. alicia’s brothers did well in school and until the final phase of the study. ms. rodriguez is not a professional educator. in fact, people who do not know her might classify her as the quintessential welfare mom. she is a single mother of six children residing in a low-income community. in the past, she has received welfare and has consistently struggled to provide her family with basic amenities including shelter and food. however, ms. rodriguez is much more than a welfare mom. as the accounts presented below attest, she is a savvy thinker and an insightful critic of the ways she has been positioned and treated by schools and in the larger community. challenging the assumptions about lowincome parents described above, ms. rodriguez created a rich literate environment for her children. on my first visit to alicia’s home, her mother showed me a large box of books that she had collected as alicia’s four older brothers progressed through elementary school. the cardboard box, which was large enough to have held a washing machine, was filled with a vast selection of books including discarded library books, old textbooks, dr. seuss books, and paperback trade books. alicia, her younger sister, and her older brothers gathered around the box flipping through books and revisiting their favorites. one of alicia’s older brothers brought a pile of books out from his bedroom and exchanged them for books from the box. collecting and valuing books was clearly a shared literacy practice. alicia’s family was also involved in multiple networks of book circulation. as ms. rodriguez explained, “everybody that i know loves to read.” she described exchanging books with her friends and how that practice was taken-up by her children. when alicia was in fifth grade, her mother described reading the book mama (mcmillan, 1987) that she had gotten from a friend. at a later interview she informed me that one of alicia’s older brothers had read the book “leon snatched my book ‘cause after i read it, he snatched it [and] tells me, i want to read it.” in eighth grade, alicia described reading mama as well as other books that she acquired from her mother, “yeah, my mom gets books and i always have books around.” ms. rodriguez spoke about a book, rockin robin (johnson, 2005) that had recently circulated through the neighborhood. when ms. rodriguez was reading this book, she mentioned to alicia that the protagonist was a bit “crazy.” alicia then picked up the book and started reading it. ms. rodriguez described alicia’s 32 global education review 1 (2) response, “she's like ‘mom! this lady is…’ i was like, wait 'til you get to the other part.” books routinely circulated through networks of friends and neighbors and were often read not only by ms. rodriguez but also by her sons and daughters. in eleventh grade, alicia described getting books from her mother, taking them to school, and her friends reading them. in return, some of alicia’s friends brought her books that she read and passed on. books were part of the social fabric of the family. challenging discourses about the lack of books in poor urban families, ms. rodriguez demonstrated a commitment to literacy learning. her acts of agency are significant as i turn to the challenges ms. rodriguez faced in supporting her children with literacy learning and schooling in her inner city community. in short, this is not a story of a low-income parent who does not care. in contrast, it is a remarkable tale of resilience and resourcefulness. economic challenges that affect academic learning in these times of school budget austerity and discourses advocating for the privatization of services that have been traditionally funded through the public sector, conversations about school funding have been stymied, and critiques of schooling have focused on teacher quality and accountability rather than on shared societal obligations to children. in this article, i strive to deflect our attention away from stereotypes of ineffective parenting and place our focus on larger social issues. to do this, i draw on the words and experiences of ms. rodriguez. while popular discourses encourage the poor to lift themselves up, get a job, and alleviate their economic woes, the words of ms. rodriguez present a more complicated analysis revealing the intersections between community resources, the lack of viable employment, underfunded schools, and race. throughout the study, ms. rodriguez worked low-wage jobs. during the early years, ms. rodriguez completed her child-care certificate and worked as a childcare provider at a local daycare. for a short period of time, ms. rodriguez managed to open her own daycare center, however, challenges with parents and liabilities related to operating the center resulted in ms. rodriguez leaving child care and taking a position as a certified nursing assistant and working in home health care settings. finances over the course of the ten-year project, ms. rodriguez rented two apartments; both were within a one-mile radius of rosa parks school where alicia attended first grade. both apartments had three bedrooms were located on the first floor of older homes that had been subdivided into rental units. the furnishings were sparse – a sofa, a small television, bare floors, and little decoration. i was often there during the dinner hour and the children were often in and out of the kitchen preparing simple meals of pasta, rice, or peanut butter sandwiches. during the duration of the ten-year study, the rodriguez family never depended solely on welfare. however, ms. rodriguez reported that they had in the past. she described their situation when alicia was in first grade. i'm like on cap. . . it's like assistance but it's not um, like welfare. it's better than welfare though because you can work and they help you still... they help me pay the rent. the food and everything else i pay. but i still get my benefit card [health insurance] which is my main reason. a family case study: how money might matter 33 ms. rodriguez was relieved to no longer have to rely on welfare. as she explained, it's like that your life is an open book. cause they ask you questions that you wouldn't believe. . . . one question was when was the last time you had sex? yep, and if you answer yes it's like who with and i'm like why do you all need to know that? it's none of your business really. she believed that receiving welfare had a negative affect on people saying it makes you “want to lie” and “feel degraded.” while she believed that “a lot of people, they sit back and they sit on welfare and just keep collecting their checks,” she adamantly distinguished herself from that kind of people, “i wanted to get off with every inch of my body. i cannot, i hated depending on those people for anything.” when alicia was in first grade, ms. rodriguez identified money as the greatest obstacle to her children attending college. three years later, alicia’s brother who was in high school was concerned about not being able to afford college. he explained, “if i don’t get no scholarship, i don’t know what i’m going to do after that.” james’ older brother p.t. had received a scholarship and attended the local community college. three years after that, tyreek was hoping to attend a private school in new york city, where his father lived, to study electronics and sound mixing. unfortunately, the school was expensive and despite the commitment and efforts of both his parents tyreek was not able to attend; tyreek eventually got into trouble in the neighborhood and was incarcerated. by the end of the project, three of alicia’s older brothers had graduated from high school and two had taken courses at the local community college. one brother was a manager at mcdonalds. a second was doing maintenance work for apartment buildings. the third was living in another state and employed as a bartender; he had landed a couple small acting jobs. all three faced ongoing financial challenges assumptions about students and their families as described above, assumptions are often made about children from poor families (auerbach, 1989; compton-lilly, 2003). low wages, receiving benefits, and living in a high-poverty community affected the ways teachers and other professionals viewed families. ms. rodriguez clearly recognized the assumptions people made about her: a lot of teachers in a lot of schools they figure you live in a low [income community], and they say this is the ghetto right? . . . they assume everybody is on welfare. and they'll say when your mother get her check tell her to buy you so and so. and that's embarrassing for the kid. in response to this situation in which a teacher implied that ms. rodriguez should use her welfare check to purchase gloves for her daughter, ms. rodriguez confronted the teacher and explained the situation that involved ms. rodriguez sharing her own gloves with her daughter. an additional set of assumptions revealed ms. rodriguez’s awareness of assumptions related to race. when i asked ms. rodriguez whether being african american affected her children’s school experiences, she turned to her son, who was in high school and sitting nearby. he immediately responded, “yes.” p.t.: you talking about school and race right? oh yes, it affects a whole lot in my school. ms. rodriguez: yeah, because his school's mostly white anyway. 34 global education review 1 (2) p.t: yes, it is and not to mention there is a lot of prejudice and i've seen all kinds of stuff with that principal. ms. rodriguez: oooh, yeah, your principal is like a real trip. in his school, his principal is... p.t.: . . . a racist ms. rodriguez describes visiting her son’s school and encountering the school principal admonishing p.t. and his friend: i've walked in the school and he was [saying] "all you ones act..." he was yelling at jim [p.t.’s friend]. . . then he went from jim to say something about him (points to p.t.) and i stood behind him [p.t.] and i looked at him i said “what about p.t.?” he was like, “oh nothing, i'm just.” i was like “no, what about p.t.? you was about to say something about my child. what about him? both p.t. and his mother believed that the white students at his school were treated better. years later when alicia was in eleventh grade, her mother worried that being black affected the ways alicia’s teachers treated her, “most teachers in her school, they just, like [they assume] her parents don't work. they stay at home, collecting welfare, doing nothing with their life, but sitting there.” she adamantly explained that this was not the case for her family, i’m not one of those parents that sit at home. don’t act like i don't care about my kids. and that's when they was like, ‘uh, well, we is just asking’ [ms. rodriguez recreates her role in the conversation] ‘no. you got a problem with my daughter you need to call me. you don't approach her. you don’t put your hand in her face, and you don’t, no. but you tell me. i’ll handle it.’ displays of racial prejudice were not limited to school personnel. ms. rodriguez reported that she feared the “police more than anything.” the police had recently stopped two of her sons because they had “looked suspicious with a book bag” walking down the street at night near her apartment. as she explained, “i think being young and black and they figured most young black people are either out there selling drugs or doing drugs and they think because you live in the ghetto, they figure you got to act like the ghetto. but that's not true.” she reported that there have been similar incidents over the years with her teenage sons; thus, she worried about her children’s safety both in school and on the streets. teachers don’t care ms. rodriguez and her children reported that too many teachers in the city schools did not care about their students. leon, who was in high school at the time, reported “teachers don’t care. i know the teachers at [johnson high school] don’t.” ms. rodriguez expressed similar concerns, “the teachers is like, they’re not like when i was coming up. teachers seem when i was coming up that they care. now they seem like they just there for a paycheck.” she worried that the teachers did not respect their students: they want the respect from the kids but they don't want to give that respect. so they want to talk to you any kind of way and then expect you all to sit back and say okay and then you got to be, kids that are practically grown that is looking at you like my mamma don't talk to me like that. in grade eight, alicia’s words reflected her mother’s concerns. she reported that her school was “not really” a good place to learn “’cause the teachers act like they don’t like the kids or they scared of them.” alicia explained “when the kids fight in class, they don’t try to break them up. they don’t. they think that the kids will try to hurt them or something.” alicia believed that schools should “change the way the a family case study: how money might matter 35 teachers act” saying that teachers should “help the kids more and to do their job.” like her mother, alicia highlighted the importance of respect, “they should be respectful if they want the kids to be respectful to them. and they should let the kids be who they are instead of trying to change them.” inequitable school resources across the longitudinal project, several parents, including mrs. rodriguez repeatedly spoke about the differences between suburban and urban schools. ms. rodriguez explicitly named race as being related to these differences: i think school, it mostly leans over to the white people’s side because if you go out in the suburbs and you go to school, [if] you are [walking] across the street to the school, there’s a bus that picks you up and takes you across the street and you can walk right across the street to go to school. i know i have been out there and i watched it. i am like my daughter have to walk a [long city] block. yeah, i think it is very bias. if you have more money, the more education you have [and] the better your education is. when i asked her if she had ever considered sending her children to suburban schools, she said she had, “but it is just i can't afford it.” three years later, ms. rodriguez worried that many kids in the city schools were not reading as well as their peers in the suburbs. as she argued that the kids in the suburbs “have better teachers, better books, better surroundings.” in grade 11, ms. rodriguez felt that the education alicia got “could have been better.” she explained that there’s so many kids in the class so, every day they come home they’s like there was a fight today. and this one said this. you know it's more social than ‘sit down’ and ‘do your work’ and ‘we’re not having this.’” she thought that a suburban school might have been better: i think she'd be more focused on school and than anything. it would be more important going to school to learn not going to school for social [things]. . . in those [suburban] schools they go “work, work. i don’t care what went on in your neighborhood.” for most of the ten-year project, i continued to teach in the same school district that alicia attended. illustrating the types of economic challenges school districts faced, during my final years in that district, i was allocated fifty dollars to purchase classroom supplies for the entire school year; this allocation was intended to cover copy paper and all other supplies. needless to say, my colleagues and i spent a good portion of our salaries on classroom materials. dangerous neighborhoods and schools throughout the ten-year study, mrs. rodriguez worried about her children’s safety. as she reported, “my biggest fear is somebody actually killing one of them.” she explained, “nowadays you have gangsters [who might say] ‘you looked at me wrong’ or ‘you done stepped on my shoes. . . they do[those things or] mistaking you for somebody else or you are with the wrong person.” these concerns about safety became significant in middle school, when alicia spoke regularly about fighting at school while assuring me that she was safe because she had “a lot of friends.” by the beginning of eleventh, alicia’s mother was increasingly concerned. ms. rodriguez thought that a lot of the fighting was caused by jealousy. “one think this one got more than the other one or this one is talking about what this one is doing and something like that. or they talking about this one looks [at], likes her old boyfriend and all that crap. jealousy. jealousy, envy, or what somebody else 36 global education review 1 (2) got. i think it's stupid.” she reported that she was thinking about having alicia change schools. alicia herself remained unshaken, “i'm safe. i can take care of myself. i know how to fight.” later when her mother was not present, alicia spoke more about her friends: i [am] in a club, you know, because i had to help my goons out. you know goons [are the] people that you fight with [alongside]. and friends, i fight with [alongside] my friends. . . we got colors. our color is green. while when asked directly, alicia denied that she was involved with a gang, she later acknowledged that it was a “gang” but continued to maintain that the kids had been “friends since nursery school.” while ms. rodriguez was notably concerned about the situation, she also acknowledged that the group had been friends for years, saying to me “you know most of the kids because they went to rosa parks elementary school.” however, as the school year progressed, the fighting became worse, and alicia and her friends were labeled by teachers and administrators as “gang members.” a teacher at the school had seen alicia and her friends’ names listed on “myspace” and reported this “gang affiliation” to the school administrator. shortly after that alicia was jumped in a school stairwell and a fight ensued. alicia was suspended and placed in an in-school suspension program for the remainder of the school year – from december until june. alicia’s mother was angry and felt that the school officials had made their decision without consulting her. she recreated her conversation with the school officials: ‘you didn't really want to see [alicia]. you didn't want to talk to her. . . . but you're sitting up here telling her what she's gonna do and what she ain't gonna do and what you're not going to tolerate and i'm telling you that what makes you think that she's going to tolerate it?’ and i'm like ‘she's never been suspended, she always got good grades, and then you gonna talk about that if she was 17 at this time you would kick her out of school?’. . . . and i'm looking at him like ‘how you gonna say that, and she never been in trouble. she got good grades.’ but he didn't care. as ms. rodriguez reported, this fight was an isolated incident “she never been in no fight. she has got her grades up, she started getting a’s and b’s.” being placed in in-school suspension for the remainder of the school year affected not only alicia’s sense of self as a student, but it also prevented alicia from graduating with her class as she could not take all the classes she needed for graduation. limited access to dreams despite the challenges alicia faced in school, she had a clear dream for her future. starting in eighth grade, alicia was enthusiastic about becoming a photographer. her uncle worked at a local factory that made and processed the film from disposable cameras. he would bring her disposable cameras and develop her pictures at work. her family agreed that alicia took good pictures. in eighth grade, ms. rodriguez was trying to get alicia a camera. she made arrangements to buy a used camera from a friend, but when that strategy fell through she assured alicia that she would find another way to buy her one. as alicia reported, “i know my mom would get it. . . ‘cause she already told me she’s gonna give me like one of them photography cameras.” in fall of eleventh grade, alicia was finally able to take a photography class. her mother reported that she loved the class. alicia and her classmates made their own cameras and learned to develop film. “[we’d] get to go in the darkroom and all that. it's just so much fun. and he used to give us cameras just to go around a family case study: how money might matter 37 the school taking pictures of like patterns and stuff. and we developed them ourselves.” in alicia’s high school, this photography class was her only option. there was no photography club and alicia could not afford community photography classes despite the city she lived in being an international center for photographic arts. that year, her mother got her a camera for christmas. however on the first day she had the camera, alicia dropped it and it broke. in addition, when alicia was placed in the in-school suspension program, she was no longer able to take her photography course. when i asked her what other career goals she might have besides photography, she reported having no other dreams. access to possibilities extended beyond alicia and her dream of becoming a photographer. as ms. rodriguez reported, recently implemented testing policies made it difficult for many students to graduate from high school. “you got all these kids dropping out because it’s becoming too hard to get out.” she argued that the tests were making some kids “feel like they’s stupid and they’re not stupid.” alicia and other kids attending underfunded schools in poorly resourced communities need opportunities to grow, thrive, and dream; school should be a site of possibilities. living in a poor urban area, attending underfunded schools, and being african american are not separate issues. they are woven together in ways that make the effects of each of these dimensions invisible. teachers and parents are blamed for the poor academic progress of children, obfuscating the real experiences of children and families living in poor communities. as ms. rodriguez’s words attest, poverty matters and takes many forms. part of the invisibility of poverty lies in the accumulation of its multiple dimensions. just living in a dangerous neighborhood, or having a low paying job, or attending an underfunded school alone could be compensated for by a caring parent and a strong attitude. however, poverty has multiple effects that combine to work against even resilient and resourceful families like alicia’s. hope and possibilities: highlighting cultural embodied capital while dominant discourses tend to blame families and teachers for the literate challenges faced by children in low-income communities, the voices of ms. rodriguez and her children highlight disadvantages related to economic academic capital and suggest that responsibility extends beyond teachers and families. larger social issues related to racism: employment, school resources, safe communities, and support for students’ dreams are clearly raised. while economic disparity raises significant obstacles, in this discussion section, i return to bourdieu’s theories to situate this lack of economic capital within bourdieu’s larger discussion of capital which also describes the roles played by social and cultural capital. social academic capital, involves the networks that families can access and use to support their children academically. in alisa’s family, social academic capital was limited and generally bounded by family and friends as illustrated by their book sharing networks. social interactions with school personnel, including administrators and teachers often led to problematic outcomes which could be attributed to assumptions made about families, frustrated teachers, insufficient resources, and the lack of services. however, cultural academic capital was a strength of this family. cultural academic capital refers to dispositions and ways of being, acting, talking, and valuing that align with school success. examples of cultural academic capital were evident in ms. rodriguez’s belief and trust in both literacy learning and schooling. 38 global education review 1 (2) she spoke consistently about the importance of literacy and schooling, modeled the importance of schooling by completing her ged and obtaining both her child care and certified nursing assistant certifications, intervening with school officials when she felt that her children were not being well-served, and emphasizing the importance of getting a diploma. despite the challenges faced by alicia and her siblings, ms. rodriguez consistently demonstrated a remarkable degree of cultural academic capital as she advocated for her children: ms. rodriguez: i'm on them constantly. to do work. (grade 1) ms. rodriguez: see, i come from new york. so, with us it’s [you keep on them]-in new york a lot of times you slip through that system and you just skid. (grade 5) ms. rodriguez: i am so happy that they know how to read cause i refuse to let them push them through school. (grade 8) ms. rodriguez: i’m not one of those parents that sit at home. don’t act like i don't care about my kids. and that's when they was like, “uh, well, we is just asking -” “no. you got a problem with my daughter you need to call me.” (grade 11) her dedication to her children’s academic pursuits included getting a high school diploma: oh, i stay on them and my son knows i don't care if he don't go to college that's one thing but he says he probably end up going to a trade school or something. i think that's fine. but one thing i've always told him. regardless of what you do in life, you gonna have a diploma. i don't care what you do, you gonna bring home the diploma. and they all know that. and they all like you know ma ain't going to let up until we get the diploma, so. let's get it and get it over with. ms. rodriguez described the various things she did to support the school success of her children; she would “write letters, show up at school meetings and talk to the teachers.” as she explained, “you have to be that parent that actually cares and let them know that you care and let them know you’re not going to, they’re not going to push your child through school, just push them on through when they don’t know anything.” alicia’s three oldest brothers all graduated from high school. tyreek was the first sibling not to graduate and his incarceration was a huge disappointment for ms. rodriguez. ms. rodriguez’s resilience was apparent again as she described her concerns for her children. she explained “my biggest fear is failure. yeah, i don't like to fail.” she continued “i don't like people to quit. i can't stand quitters and my biggest fear is that they are going to get up there and say ‘i quit. i don't want to do it no more.’ that's why i am always on [them] you see.” alicia’s older brothers joined the conversation: ms. rodriguez: i don't have a fear. i believe every last one of them are going to make something of themselves. leon: i know i am. tyreek: i’m going to be in charge of the country. ms. rodriguez not only enacted agency of behalf of her children, but she also accessed cultural academic capital (e.g., advocating for literacy and schooling, completing various degrees and certifications, intervening with school officials, highlighting the importance of getting a diploma). while financial limits had real effects, ms. rodriguez was savvy and harnessed available resources. a family case study: how money might matter 39 conclusions and implications over the ten years that i worked with alicia and her family, her mother repeatedly identified fiscal challenges while demonstrating a high degree of cultural academic capital. three significant conclusions can be drawn. first, ms. rodriguez aptly named and critiqued the economic challenges she faced in helping her children to be successful in school. these challenges relate to both economic challenges within the family and challenges related to living in a high poverty community. second, ms. rodriguez provided an account of the experience of raising children in a high poverty community. she identified challenges that are often invisible to outsiders, including teachers. finally, her longitudinal account highlights the agency and resiliency that she brought to the challenges that she faced. she repeatedly demonstrated cultural academic capital through her commitment to schooling and literacy, high expectations for her children, and her continued faith in her children’s abilities and potential. the words of ms. rodriguez and her children invite us to look beyond parenting and teaching as the cause of disparities in academic achievement. as echoed in the writings of kozol (2012), neuman and celano (2012), ravitch (2013), socioeconomic status and the economic health of communities matter. anyon (1997) argued for an “all-out attack on poverty and racial isolation” writing that “until the economic and political systems in which the cities are enmeshed are themselves transformed so they may be more democratic and productive for urban residents, educational reformers have little chance of effecting long-lasting educational changes in city schools” (p. 13). thus the words of ms. rodriguez alert us to essential issues beyond teacher competency and parental responsibility. with these insights i offer two implications related to poverty and learning. i begin with a call to action that extends beyond teachers and schools. as a society we need to recognize that all children and families are entitled to jobs that pay a living wage, safe neighborhoods, well-resourced schools, and access to students’ dreams. as educators, we must continually remind ourselves and others that poverty has real effects on people’s lives. change must include not only reforming schools, but also reforming neighborhoods and ultimately society. this is avowedly political but essential as we consider children’s lives and futures. a second set of implications is evident in the ways ms. rodriguez described teachers and schools. foremost teachers must show students that they care. they need to listen to their students and be respectful of students’ families and situations. in particular, educators must constantly re-examine their own attitudes and assumptions. learning about the challenges that families face is a first step that can lead to helping families to locate resources, address issues in their communities and schools, and have a more powerful voice in their children’s futures. note 1. this research was supported by the spencer foundation. 40 global education review 1 (2) references compton-lilly, c. (2004). confronting racism, poverty and power. portsmouth, nh: heinemann publishers. compton-lilly, c. (2007). re-reading families: the literate lives of urban children, four years later. new york: teachers college press. anyon, j. (1997). ghetto schooling: a political economy of urban educational reform. new york: teachers college press. auerbach, e.r. (1989). toward a social-contextual approach to family literacy. harvard educational review, 59(2), pp. 165 – 181. berliner, d. & biddle, b.j. (1996). the manufactured crisis: myths, fraud, and the attack on america’s public schools. reading, ma: addison-wesley publishing company. bourdieu, p. (1986). the forms of capital. in j. g. richardson (ed.), handbook of theory and research for the sociology of education (pp. 241– 258). new york, ny: greenwood press. bourdieu, p. (1990). the logic of practice. translated by r. nice. stanford, california: stanford university press. carrington, v., & luke, a. (1997). literacy and bourdieu’s sociological theory: a reframing. language and education, 11(2), 96–112. cushman, e. (1998). the struggle and the tools: oral and literate strategies in an inner city community. albany, ny: suny press. danzinger, s.k. & danzinger, s.h. (2008). childhood poverty in economic and public policy contexts. in s.b. neuman (ed.) educating the other america: top experts tackle poverty, literacy, and achievement in our schools. baltimore, md: paul h. brookes publishing company. kozol, j. (2012). fire in the ashes: twenty five years among the poorest children in america. new york: random house. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. national commission on children. (1991). beyond rhetoric: a new american agenda for children and families. washington, dc.: us. government printing office. neuman, s. & celano, d.c. (2012). giving our children a fighting chance. new york: teachers college press. ravitch, d. (2013). reign of error: the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to america’s public schools. new york: knopf publishing. rist, r. (1978). the invisible children: school integration in american society. cambridge, ma:harvard university press. robinson, h.m. (1946). why pupils fail in reading. chicago, il: university of chicago press. saldaña, j. (2003). longitudinal research: analyzing change through time. walnut creek, ca: altamira press. shannon, p. (1998). reading poverty. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. snow, c.e., barnes, w.s., chandler, j., goodman, i.f., & hemphill, l. (1991). unfulfilled expectations: home and school influences on literacy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. taylor, d. (1996). toxic literacies: exposing the injustice of bureaucratic texts. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. taylor, d. & dorsey-gaines, c. (1988). growing up literate: learning from inner-city families. portsmouth, nh: heinemann. literature references johnson, s. (2005) rockin robin. new york: urban books. mcmillan, t. (1987). mama. boston: pocket books. about the author catherine compton-lilly, phd, is an associate professor in curriculum and instruction at the university of wisconsin madison. dr. compton-lilly teaches courses in literacy studies and works with professional development schools in madison. she has a passion for helping teachers to support children in learning to read and write. her interests include examining how time operates as a contextual factor in children’s lives as they progress through school and construct their identities as students and readers. dr. compton-lilly is the author/editor of several books and has published widely in educational journals. a family case study: how money might matter for academic learning catherine compton-lilly this paper is about one family and how the economic challenges they faced intersect with academic and literacy learning. in short, i argue that poverty matters and draw on the voices of family members to identify how and when being poor affects schoo... poverty, assumptions and school achievement an introduction to economic literacy capital a longitudinal family case study economic challenges that affect academic learning p.t.: . . . a racist hope and possibilities: highlighting cultural embodied capital literature references what would madeline hunter say? 5 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: carol burris (2014). what would madeline hunter say?. global education review, 1 (3). 5-6. what would madeline hunter say? carol burris principal of south side high school, rockville centre, new york researcher and ucla professor madeline hunter was the dominant voice on instructional practice during the latter part of the 20th century. her genius was her ability to review the research on effective teaching practices, synthesize it, and then translate it into practices that teachers could use to inform instruction. she had a profound respect and admiration for the profession, and she herself would teach elementary students in her ucla lab school whenever she had a chance. she often said that she hoped to see the day that teaching would be recognized as a complex practice worthy of great respect. i often wonder what she might think of today's emphasis on detailed, prescriptive rubrics, and the evaluation of teachers by test scores. i had the pleasure of being taught by dr. hunter and i suspect that she would be horrified to find that the art and science of teaching has been reduced to a number in many of the evaluation systems now in vogue. hunter only had one absolute rule when it came to teaching. she said that the only thing that every teacher had to do during every lesson was "to think." she was appalled when others insisted that teachers incorporate every aspect of the model she developed into every lesson, trying to turn her model into a checklist. this is not to say that hunter believed that one should "teach on the fly"--quite the contrary. she would often say that it took four times as long to plan a good lesson as it did to teach it. she recognized, however, that the master teacher was the one who could monitor and adjust based on the observation of student learning. she would be appalled by the scripted lessons that can now be downloaded and taught as if all students and teachers were the same. madeline hunter also insisted that the supervision of instruction, which focuses on the lesson observation process, was very different than teacher evaluation. she wisely observed that if teachers saw every observation as evaluative, they would not be as open to coaching, but would instead, hunker down and be on the defense. she was right. in this sort and select era of evaluation we can observe first hand the foolishness of disregarding her advice. ______________________________ corresponding author: carol burris, south side high school, rockville center new york 11570, e-mail carol burris at burriscarol@gmail.com mailto:burriscarol@gmail.com 6 global education review 1(3) this issue makes an important contribution because it presents a variety of perspectives on how we can use the process of supervision and/or evaluation to continue to learn what matters in teaching. the authors do not purport to know all of the answers but rather they enter the dialogue of what effective teaching and productive supervisory relationships might be. hunter believed in research as an integral part of advancing the profession. this issue continues that tradition. about the author carol burris, edd, is principal of south side high school in the rockville centre school district. in 2010, she was recognized by the school administrators association of new york state as their outstanding educator of the year, and in 2013 she was again recognized by sannys as the new york state high school principal of the year. she is a fellow of the national education policy center, a think tank dedicated to high quality research on public schooling. she is co-author of the letter of concern regarding evaluating teachers by test scores, which has been signed by nearly 9000 educators and parents, including over 1/3 of the principals in new york state. 126 global education review 2(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: byker, erik j. (2015). the one laptop school: equipping rural elementary schools in south india through public private partnerships. global education review, 2(4). 126-142 the one laptop school: equipping rural elementary schools in south india through public private partnerships erik jon byker university of north carolina at charlotte abstract this article reports on a public private partnership (ppp) program in south india that provided information and communication technology (ict) to rural elementary schools. the article examined the current status of rural, government-run elementary schools in india by reviewing reports like the annual status of education report (aser) in india. challenges like teacher absences, student drop-outs, lack of electricity, lack of separate toilets for genders, and a lack of teaching resources is discussed. to meet these challenges, the article describes the rise in popularity of india’s ppps. then the article reports on a case study of a ppp, called the ssa foundation, which implemented a “one laptop per school” program in rural areas in the indian states of karnataka and tamil nadu. using ethnographic data from field research, the case study includes a description of how the students in a rural karnataka elementary school use their school’s laptop. the school was situated in a small village where most travel was non-motorized. walking, usually without shoes, was the main form of transportation. a bicycle was considered a luxury. most villagers worked in the surrounding ragi and millet fields; laboring, often with only simple tool blades. wood fires were the main source of fuel for cooking. in this village, the school’s laptop became a prized possession. the case study offers a “thick description” (geertz, 1973) of how the village school’s students used the laptop for learning basic computing skills and for learning english. keywords elementary schooling, educational technology, public private partnerships, rural india, sociotechnical narratives introduction for more than twenty-five years, india’s educational policymakers have shown a strong commitment to the vision of universal elementary education and they continue to craft policy to carry it forward. most recently, the indian legislature started to enforce the right of children to free and compulsory education act (rte). this act, passed by the indian parliament in 2009, legalized the right that all indian children have to a free elementary corresponding author: erik jon byker, university of north carolina at charlotte, college of education building 373, 9201 university city boulevard, charlotte, nc 28223 email: ebyker@uncc.edu mailto:ebyker@uncc.edu equipping india’s rural elementary schools 127 education. rte is the most significant of all of india’s education related national policies (byker, 2014a; national council on teacher education, 2009). rte includes many farreaching, transformational educational reforms related to classroom resources, classroom size, and the professionalization of teaching. rte also empowers indian parents with a legal right to litigate if the rights of their children are not being met in schools. while rte is a strong piece of legislation, there are many educational challenges in india that are barriers to its effectiveness. challenges include teacher absence, student to teacher ratios, and the lack of resources—like chalkboards and toilets (aser, 2014, azim premji foundation. 2004, chudgar, 2009). providing equal access to education in india’s rural schools is one of the most demanding challenges (aser, 2014; azim premji foundation, 2004). for the last decade, an indian nongovernmental organization (ngo), called pratham international, has organized an annual assessment of the status of india’s education system especially in rural areas. the assessment is called the annual status of education report or aser for short. every year thousands of young adults in india volunteer their time to walk from village to village to collect data on what elementary-aged students know about literacy and numeracy (byker, 2014a; iyengar, witenstein, & byker, 2014). aser (2014) found that it was more common for children to drop out of rural government schools compared to urban government schools. high illiteracy rates still persist, especially among girls (chudgar, 2009). additional challenges, like overcrowded classrooms and lack of resources also contribute to the inconsistent quality of education in many of india’s rural elementary schools. for example, of the 15,000 plus schools included in the aser 2014 survey, 24% are without drinking water, 35% are without a useable toilet for the whole school, 45% are without a toilet for the girls, and more than 20% do not have library books (aser, 2014). these numbers provide a snapshot of the realities of rural education in india. perhaps, the most eye-opening of these statistics, though, is the finding that less than 20% of the elementary schools have access to a single computer. computers, while a common tool of the twenty-first century, are a mark of privilege (byker, 2015). computer technology costs money and typically requires a stable source of electrical power to operate. about 20% of elementary schools in india actually have a computer in the school (aser, 2014). although, private elementary schools are more likely to have a computer compared with government run public elementary schools; computers are uncommon even in india’s private elementary schools (byker, 2014a; nuepa, 2011). to address the scarcity of computer technology in india’s rural elementary schools, the indian government has turned to donors and nongovernmental organizations to provide computer software and hardware in rural schools. the coupling of the india government with private organization is called, public private partnership (ppp) programs. the purpose of this article is to examine a case study of a ppp in a rural, government-run elementary school located in state of karnataka in south india. specifically, the article describes the unique approach of the ppp in providing computer technology to the case study’s rural school. the study investigates how the school’s teachers and students use and assign meaning to the computer technology at the school. literature review in india, ppps are becoming increasingly popular. the literature reports ppps are set up to support: educational technology initiatives (chaudhuri, 2012); professional development among teachers (dundar, beteille, riboud, & deolalikar, 2014); and english language learning in rural elementary schools (advani, 2009). 128 global education review 2(4) while computer equipment and hardware are scarce, the indian government makes a considerable investment in educational software through a ppp program called computer assisted learning (cal). in this program ngos provide computer hardware and educational software cds to government run elementary schools. in exchange, the elementary school provides or creates space in their school for a computer lab, called a computer aided learning center (calc). outside of school hours, the calc becomes a computer center, where community residents can pay a small fee and have access to the computers (azim premji foundation, 2008). pal (2009) found over 20,000 active calc projects in india’s rural elementary schools. the calc center often has up to five computer stations set up at each school. pal also found that even though there was a minimal amount of information and communication technology (ict) equipment in the calc, the elementary children reported that they were still eager to learn with the aid of the computer. the literature also shows several corporate sponsored ppp projects focused on preparing india’s elementary teachers to teach with technology. these projects are spearheaded by private computer technology companies such as dell computer, intel, and microsoft (light, 2009; suckow, 2010). dell’s program, called the connected classroom, invests in low cost notebook computers for indian elementary teacher and students to use in the classroom. part of this program includes an online training module for preparing teachers to use the laptops. intel’s initiative is called teach to the future program. this program supports indian elementary teachers with both face-to-face and online instruction for how to teach with technology (light, 2009; suckow, 2010). microsoft’s project shiksha, also called empowering the future project, began in 2002. the project is run in tandem with indian states to equip and advance digital literacy among government-run elementary schools. through project shiksha, microsoft provides inexpensive software, in depth training, and packaged ict curriculum. since its inception, the empowering the future project has reached over 100,000 teachers and 5 million elementary students in india (suckow, 2010). while there are a few studies specifically related to ppps in india, there are calls for more empirical studies in this area (azim premji foundation, 2008; chaudhuri, 2012; dundar, beteille, riboud, & deolalikar, 2014; light, 2009; pal, 2009). much of the research about ppps focuses on describing initiatives (e.g., suckow, 2010) or examining the ppp from the educators’ or ngo’s perspectives. children’s perspectives about the ppp are largely absent from the literature. there are few studies that utilize a theoretical framework in order to thickly describe (geertz, 1973) and analyze findings in relationship to a theoretical framework. this article addresses those gaps in the literature by including the students’ perspectives about ppp and by utilizing a theoretical framework to analyze the study’s findings. theoretical frame the study is framed by the social construction of technology (scot) theory. scot’s core premise is that people give meaning and purpose to technology (bijker, 2010). scot is part of the larger field of social epistemology called science and technology studies (sts). this field examines how the wider social, cultural, political, and economic context frames the meanings that people assign to technology. scot has four main components: 1) relevant social groups, like teachers and students, construct a technology’s meaning; 2) each social equipping india’s rural elementary schools 129 group has unique interpretations about the purpose for a technology; 3) a unitary interpretation for the technology is negotiated among the social groups and that negotiation reflects the social groups’ power dynamics; and 4) the wider socio-cultural context in which the social groups are situated affects how the interpretation for the technology is negotiated and agreed upon. in this case study, the article uses scot as a theoretical lens into the ppp of introducing computer technology in a rural village elementary school that is referred to by the pseudonym, jinka public. the social actors in this case study are the jinka public’s teachers, upper elementary students, and the ngo, which is referred to by the pseudonym, the ssa foundation. the study describes how and why these social groups interpret and negotiate the meaning for computer technology in the rural village where jinka public is situated. the process of the social construction of computer technology at jinka public is called a sociotechnical narrative (byker, 2012; byker, 2014b). sociotechnical narratives are the meaningful descriptions of ways that social groups use and repurpose technology in relation to their wider social context. in sum, using the scot theoretical framework, the article explains jinka public’s sociotechnical narrative in order to illustrate the meanings for computer technology that emerged from a ppp in rural india. using case study method, the study examined two primary research questions framed around the premise of sociotechnical narratives: 1) what is the sociotechnical narrative at the study’s participating school? 2) how and why did that sociotechnical narrative emerge at this rural elementary school in south india? method robert yin (2008) stated that case study methodology is a research design for empirical inquiry that allows for the investigation of complex phenomena of authentic contexts. the strength of case study research design is that it allows the researcher to examine how and why questions. a how question is useful for identifying the processes that social actors use to negotiate and meet their objectives; whereas, the why question is important for understanding the larger context behind the processes. to examine these how and why questions, case study design uses both qualitative and quantitative data sources to describe and investigate the study’s sample population. the sample the study’s sample was drawn from a rural elementary school, called jinka public, which is located 25 kilometers from the city of bangalore in the state of karnataka, india. the target population at the school was fifth grade students and their teachers. the study focused on fifth grade students because they were more likely to have experience with computers than students in lower elementary grade levels. the study’s participants included 11 students, three educators, and the director of the ssa foundation (n=15). the ngo in this article is pseudonymously named the ssa foundation. context of ssa foundation the ssa foundation represents the private side of the ppp through their involvement as a ngo with the indian government. the ssa foundation’s mission is to improve and nurture the development of basic skills in india’s government run public schools through. the foundation’s primary focus is on rural elementary schools in south india states like andhra pradesh, karnataka, and tamil nadu. the ssa foundation is just one example of a ppp that is focused on providing computer technology resources in india’s rural schools. yet, the ssa foundation’s vision for computer technology is unique to india. they believe that 130 global education review 2(4) computer technology works best when it is owned and directly in the hands of the children. the ssa foundation mission is inspired by dr. sugata mitra’s (2002) work with the “hole in the wall” project1. the ssa foundation’s vision for its computer technology program is based on mitra’s research about how computer technology should be a tool to spark a child’s natural curiosity. the ssa foundation believes that even a single laptop in a school can be a valuable resource for collaboration and building basic skills in english. the ssa foundation asserts that the best way for teachers to guide their students’ curiosity is to allow the children to discover computer technology through collaborative ownership for using the laptop (byker, 2012). as part of their partnership agreement with the state of karnataka, the ssa foundation provides computer technology—usually a single laptop and usb drives—to more than 800 rural elementary schools. the ssa foundation calls this initiative their “one laptop per school program.” the ssa foundation provides the laptop on the condition that the laptop is reserved primarily for student use. the foundation also installs free and open source software (foss), like etoys and openoffice, on the school’s laptop. data collection this current study employed qualitative and quantitative methods to compile a case study of jinka public. there were four qualitative data sources: field notes from on-site observations, student focus group interviews, teacher interviews, and collected artifacts. the field note observations were recorded using time stamp notations and an observation protocol to help guide the note-taking. the observation protocol included taking notes about jinka public’s: (1) type of computer equipment; (2) the hours of computer usage; and (3) the student and teacher interactions with computer technology. the student focus group interviews (see appendix a) and teacher interviews (see appendix b) were conducted using a semi-structured interview approach. interview questions included inquiries into the participants’ word associations with computer technology and their perceptions about the purposes of computer technology. artifacts like curriculum documents and the student participants’ computer related assignments comprised an additional source of qualitative data. the study’s quantitative data were made up of questionnaires for the students (see appendix c) and teachers (see appendix d). both questionnaires had basic demographic related questions that were analyzed with descriptive statistics. the questionnaires also included items related to the purposes and perceptions for using computer technology in school. the questionnaires were adapted from two prior surveys (law, pelgrum,& plomp, 2008; vekiri, 2010). data analysis the study’s qualitative data were analyzed using miles and huberman’s (1994) three-step interpretive approach. first, the data were read several times and then coded as part of data reduction. frequencies in the data were identified and analyzed to establish patterns, which were further categorized. second, the data were displayed in visual ways—with charts and figures—to compare, contrast, and probe for additional categories across the artifacts and field observations. third, conclusions were drawn as the categories were organized into themes. additionally, the study used the constant-comparative method (glaser & strauss, 1967) to compare findings. the quantitative analysis was at a descriptive level. descriptive statistics provided the participant’s demographics and “snapshots” equipping india’s rural elementary schools 131 of the participant perceptions of computer technology. theses quantitative data were descriptive and were not meant to infer causality or to imply that the findings are somehow universal. findings in reporting the findings, the article will address the study’s two research questions. in answering the first research question, “what is the sociotechnical narrative at the study’s participating school?,” the article first examines the social context that situates jinka public school. then, the article describes jinka public “one laptop per child” program. the article will move to the second research question, “how and why did that sociotechnical narrative emerge at this rural elementary school in south india?,” with an explanation of the relationship between the ssa foundation with jinka public. rural context jinka public school is a government-run public school that is located about 25 kilometers from bangalore’s city center. the school day is six hours long, starting at 10 a.m. and ending at 4 p.m. jinka public serves about 60 students living in the jinka village. the majority of students live in small, brick and mud dwellings called kutchas. these hut-like dwellings have either a thatched roof or a roof fashioned from pieces of metal. most kutchas in jinka village have a single room and are void of indoor plumbing and running water. food is cooked on a wood fire. even though their dwelling is small, 72% of the jinka public students indicate that their families have a television. all the participants’ families own a cell phone. travel in the jinka village is almost all non-motorized. walking, usually without shoes, is the main form of transportation. a bicycle is considered a luxury. most villagers work in the surrounding ragi and millet fields; laboring, often with only simple tool blades, bending the back and breaking already calloused hands. wood fires are the main source of fuel for cooking. save for the fact that most of jinka’s villagers carry cell phones; the village has an almost archaic quality of life. a quality that is defined by grit and a reliance on low tech tools like the rope that tethers a cow to a fence. those who toil in the fields that surround jinka village are known as the krishikaru or field workers. the krishikaru, who are mostly women, use hand-sickles to chop the ragi grain ears from the plant’s stalk. the grain is pressed into bundles. the younger women, some who have infants tied to their hips, balance the bundles on their heads and transport the bundle to the threshing area. older women working in the fields are burdened with large sheaves of dried ragi stalks. the area around the jinka village is void of any kind of machinery. the work here is done by hand. about 300 people call jinka village, home. yet, home is a loosely understood word, because many villagers are migrant laborers who have to travel from field to field to help with planting and harvesting. other villagers are day laborers who go to bangalore to work on construction projects. the children of the krishikaru and the day laborers make up the population of jinka public school. one laptop school jinka public is a “one laptop” school, which means they have a single laptop that the whole school community shares. as mentioned earlier, the laptop is provided through a public private partnership program with the bangalore based, ssa foundation. the ssa foundation’s “one laptop per school” program supports the school administrator’s effort to maintain consistent attendance among the school’s upper elementary students. the primary use of the laptop is to help teach english language skills through typing and copying of word processing documents. jinka public’s teachers explained that the laptop kept the students motivated to attend school because 132 global education review 2(4) they wanted to use the laptop to practice writing and communicating in english. it was also an incentive for the parents, most of whom were day laborers or seasonal field workers, to keep sending their children to the school. the jinka public laptop is a dell with a 15 inch screen. the laptop operates on a free and open source (foss) system called ubuntu. likewise all of the laptop’s software is foss. example foss titles include: (1) etoys, a programming language for creating images and graphics; (2) openoffice, a foss of microsoft office like applications such as word and powerpoint; (3) stellarium, a planetarium like software for identifying constellations and mapping the stars; and (4) tuxpaint, a childfriendly, painting software program. jinka public’s “one laptop school” program starts at the fifth grade. the school’s fifth grade students share the laptop during their english language class period. additionally, the jinka public’s sixth and seventh grade students are allowed to sign out and take home the school’s laptop. the sign-out system works like a library checkout system. the sixth and seventh grade students sign-out the laptop and get to take it home for one night. they return the laptop to school the next day. the fifth graders in this study, many of whom have older siblings, explained that the laptop is at the place they live about once a week. in fifth grade, the ssa foundation distributes the students a usb two gigabyte (2 gb) thumb drive to store their projects and documents. the usb thumb drive is the property of the student and becomes another source of motivation to raise school attendance. students use their usb drive to save writer (a foss word processor) documents and pictures they create using etoys or tux paint. they also save their report card on the usb drive and short progress reports—written on paper in english—that they take home and explain to their parents. jinka public’s seventh graders are responsible for monitoring the laptop’s battery and re-charging the battery as needed. additionally, the seventh graders are responsible for the laptop check-out system. the jinka public teachers assign one seventh grade student as the laptop leader. the laptop leader is usually a boy who the teachers identify as responsible, confident with the computer, and has an aptitude for speaking english. the laptop leader is responsible for bringing the laptop around the village to whoever checked it out. the laptop leader also provides some basic technical support for all jinka students. sociotechnical narrative jinka public’s sociotechnical narrative, thus far, is that it is a rural elementary school that has one laptop for the whole school to use. the laptop is funded through a ppp program that seeks to improve school attendance and, at the same time, help rural children practice their english through the use of computer technology. sociotechnical narratives emerge from social actors’ negotiated interpretations about a technology. so what are the participants’ interpretations for the jinka public laptop? the case of jinka public, both the students and teachers shared the same primary interpretation about the school’s laptop: it is for typing in english. one of the jinka public teachers explained in this way, “the computer [pointing to the laptop’s screen] is in english. the keyboard is in english. the children learn english to make the computer and keyboard work.” the jinka public teachers emphasized the importance of understanding english as the foundation for operating the laptop or “making the keyboard work.” the pedagogical approach to learning english was based on vocabulary building through copying words. thus, the laptop was seeped in pedagogy of replicating written english words and duplicating diagrams equipping india’s rural elementary schools 133 and murals that were painted on the classroom walls. jinka public’s students and teachers perceived that the use of the laptop garnered many positive outcomes. one outcome was that the laptop was a tool for practicing and developing confidence with english language vocabulary. another outcome was that the laptop’s use also increased motivation to learn english. the teachers explicitly voiced this interpretation through explanations like “the kids want to learn english to make their life better” and “they see that english will help them the most, so they spend a lot of time learning to type in english.” the students echoed their teachers’ perceptions. the students shared how they were motivated to use the laptop to learn english because doing so might mean a better life and a better future. one student explained it this way, “if i use the laptop then i can use faster. then if i learn english from using the laptop, i will have a better life.” discussion jinka public provides an interesting case study of a ppp in rural india. through the lens of sociotechnical narratives, the case study demonstrates how computer technology is used by elementary school students and for what purposes it is being used. in this discussion section, the article unpacks the narrative to explore themes related to the role of the ssa foundation in providing jinka public’s laptop. the article also discusses policy implications within three larger themes of this case study: ownership, scale, and contextual realities. ownership the degree of laptop ownership that the jinka public students had was surprising given that it breaks from the hierarchy that dictates much of india’s elementary schooling—and most of the world’s school systems—where teachers and principals are at the top of the school and students are at the bottom. any degree of student autonomy is uncommon in indian elementary schools, especially in governmentrun public schools, where students are told what to do and do it without question (kumar, 2004; sarangapani, 2003). yet, at jinka public school the laptop was reserved for the students. the study’s teachers acknowledged this fact in their explanation of how students are in charge of maintaining and being in charge of the school’s laptop. the jinka public students and teachers spoke about the laptop as a tool for the students rather than for the teachers. the jinka public students had “ownership” for the laptop; they were responsible for the maintenance and upkeep of the laptop. this narrative regarding the laptop was supported by the ssa foundation. one policy implication of this study is that computer technology can be trusted in the hands of children. policy is often driven by a top-down approach. in education policy, this means that a state board of education or school district institutes rules that all are expected to implement and follow. the ssa foundation flips this policy model by putting the power in the hands of students. while english language learning is the main purpose of computer use at jinka public, a by-product of this intervention is that it transforms the teacher-student power relationship. rather than domination of the teachers’ meaning for the laptop there is a consensus about the meaning; and, certainly, a consensus about the use. indeed, the jinka public students are empowered to use the laptop for learning english. if they have a problem with the laptop, they go to the laptop leader for help. students refer to the laptop as “our laptop,” as if there was a collective ownership. jinka public is an example of the possibilities of when a ppp is oriented toward the good of children student by putting technological tools—for learning english and for developing technology skills—in the 134 global education review 2(4) hands of a child. the policy does not just pay lipservice to children, but actually allows for students to collectively own a tool that they give purpose to through how they use it. scale meets scarcity the case study of jinka public also has policy implications related to scale and scarcity. one of the study’s participants was the ssa foundation’s director, mr. amit, which is the pseudonym used to identify this participant. when discussing the ssa foundation’s vision for their ppp, mr. amit started by describing the scale of india’s government run public schools. he explained that over 80% of india’s elementary schools are government run. yet, government run public school resources and infrastructure are often deplorable. teacher absence, student drop-out, lack of electricity, few functioning toilets as well as the lack of separate toilets for boys and girls, and a lack of teaching materials are issues that are common to government run public schools in rural areas. mr. amit said that supporting government run public schools was a “no-brainer” because these schools have the largest need and serve the largest amount of students. he put it like this, “government run public schools represent the scale of india’s problems and the scale of possibility—we desire to have a sizable impact throughout india’s education system so the best place to begin is with government run public schools.” of course, scale is one of the most important drivers of policy. making a sizable impact is the goal of most policymakers. however, the ssa foundation uses scale as a way to think differently about their ppp and the resources they provide to schools. rather than providing a whole computer lab to dozen or so schools, the ssa foundation provides a single laptop and usb thumb drives to more than 1000 rural elementary school across india. they do this because they wed scale with scarcity. the ssa foundation’s approach to scarcity is to teach students to plan the work they intend to do on the laptop. each student receives a usb drive to save and store personal work. planning, though, is the key part of making the one laptop program work because the students will have already thought about what they want to use the laptop for. the ssa foundation’s one laptop per school program is also a response to the opportunity cost and scarcity of electricity in india’s rural elementary schools. the policy implication is to view scarcity not as a barrier as much as an opportunity for stewardship. ssa foundation chose to provide one laptop for the whole school to use and take care of as a valuable resource. mr. amit made a distinction between the laptop as a learning resource (i.e., a person can use the internet to learn more about a topic of interest) and a laptop as a material resource (i.e., it is manufactured and requires care and upkeep in order to function properly). mr. amit stated that donors and policymakers often forget about the laptop being a material resource. scarcity has the outcome, perhaps unintended, that people—especially children— are better stewards of material resources that are scarce. the provision of only one laptop at jinka public created a perception of the high value in the laptop’s material resource. contextual realities a final implication of the study is that policy must be situated in contextual realities. this is where the conceptual frames of scot theory and sociotechnical narratives can be quite instructive. both of these theoretical frameworks take into consideration how computer technology is used in relationship to its wider social context. context informs purpose. even though the ssa foundation is involved in teacher training and other school development programs (e.g., providing library books and equipping india’s rural elementary schools 135 materials like paper and pencils), their main donor organizations are most enthusiastic about supporting technology based programs. mr. amit shared about how eager donor organizations are to fund computer technology in schools. donors are apt to invest in something tangible, and want to know that their money is going for something that can help students today and in the future. an investment in technology, like a laptop or tablet, seems like a sound investment because it has the potential to be used right away and to prepare a child for the future. mr. amit explained that the contextual realities of schooling in rural villages dictate that a single laptop is a good introduction to computer technology. in rural india electrical power is unreliable. india’s rural schools typically have small budgets for electricity. the school principal is given a certain amount of rupees per month to pay for electricity and when those rupees run out so does the electricity. for a rural school—like jinka public school— to run a ten monitor computer lab they could go through their monthly electricity budget in just five days. mr. amit explained the contextual realities in economic terms, “opportunity cost is an issue related to computers in rural areas. schools often have to choose either to operate the computers for a couple of days or to run lights and ceiling fans for most of the month.” the ssa foundation takes into consideration the contextual realities of the rural locations where their ppps are situated. such consideration does not mean that rural schools are just ignored or neglected. rather, it means that computer technology is smartly distributed so that it fits within the contextual capacity of rural locales. the inclusion of such contextual realities assessment should be the backbone of strong policy. conclusion jinka public offers a sociotechnical narrative of how computer technology was introduced and used in a rural elementary school in india. this sociotechnical narrative examined the context and the challenges of elementary schooling in rural india.. the jinka public narrative includes a ppp that sought to equip students with the opportunity that a laptop symbolizes. such an opportunity included the chance to introduce students to computer technology, while at the same time building english literacy skills. the opportunity was framed around the scale of the need in india’s rural elementary and the scarcity of technological resources. this intervention benefitted students in other ways. many of the jinka public fifth grade students would be identified by the indian government as scheduled caste (sc) or dalits, which means that the students belong to a class that is underprivileged and historically disadvantaged within india. the jinka public students walk to school barefoot. most students live in a one room kutcha where there is no indoor plumbing and food is cooked over firewood. a bicycle, if a jinka public student’s family is lucky to own one, is the main source of wheeled transportation. examining the jinka public sociotechnical narrative from the children’s perspective, the one laptop program provides an opportunity to learn english. by learning english via the laptop, the jinka public students believed that there would be greater opportunities towards the promise, of what their teachers called, “a better life.” a better life meant a life that was not confined to manual labor or working in the fields like their parents; it meant a life that was different than the jinka village environs. india is known for its immense cities like mumbai and new delhi; however,the rural, village life still defines india. more than 70% of indian geography is rural (aser, 2014). siddhartha deb (2011) contrasts india’s urban 136 global education review 2(4) and rural life. he explained that the world magnifies india’s outsourcing industry and computer technology industry as representative of indian life. yet, indian life is centered in the village and largely shaped by an agrarian lifestyle. close to 400 million indians are employed in farming (deb, 2011). this case study shows a sociotechnical narrative of schooling in rural india. ssa foundation’s vision for their laptop program could lead to a life that is different from the jinka village. the foundation’s organizational vision goes beyond just providing laptops, the foundation advocates for the village children. the laptop program is the foundation’s way of equipping the jinka public students not only with english language skills, but also with confidence about using computer, responsibility, and the power of ownership. thus, the jinka public technological frame is informed by the perception that the uses for a laptop can equip students with more opportunities than they may have previously had in rural india. note the “hole in the wall” project was conceived by dr. sugata mitra and his colleagues. they placed a personal computer (pc) in a wall opening near their office building in new delhi, india. the pc had an internet connection and downloaded software programs, but there were no directions about how to use it. children who played near their office began to use and play with the pc. in less than a year, the children learned, on their own, basic keyboard operations, how to use the mouse, and ways to go online to download multimedia. author note funding for this research study was provided by michigan state university. references advani, s. 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(2004). perspectives on learning in elementary schools. plenary address. national conference on leadership in india’s elementary schools. retrieved from http://www.azimpremjifoundation.org/downloads/p lenary%20address.pdf law, n., pelgrum, w.j. & plomp, t. (2008). pedagogy and ict use in schools around the world: findings from the iea sites 2006 study. hong kong: springer and comparative education research center. light, d. (2009). the role of ict in enhancing education in developing countries: findings from an evaluation of the intel teach essentials course in india, turkey, and chile. journal of education for international development, 4(2), 1-15. miles, m. b. & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage. mitra, s. (2002). minimally invasive education: a progress report on the "hole-in-the-wall" experiments. british journal of educational technology, 34(3), 367-371. national council on teacher education [ncte]. (2009). national curriculum framework for teacher education: towards preparing professional and humane teacher. new delhi: ncte. retrieved from http://www.ncteindia.org/publicnotice/ncfte_2010.pdf national university of educational planning and administration, india [nuepa]. (2011). nuepa report: india's 87 percent schools without computers. digital learning, 5(12), 21 -23. pal, j. (2009). my child will be respected: parental perspectives on computers and education in rural india. information systems frontiers, 11(2), 13873326. sarangapani, p. m. (2003). constructing school knowledge: an ethnography of learning in an indian village. new delhi: sage publications india. suckow, m. (2010). no more boundaries: sharing best practices in teacher training, retention, and induction in gujarat, india. paper presented at the annual meeting of the american educational research association, 2010 annual conference, denver, co. vekiri, i. (2008) boys’ and girls’ ict beliefs: do teachers matter? computers & education, 55(1), 16-23. yin, r. (2008). case study research: design and methods (4th ed.). thousand oaks, ca: sage publishing about the author erik jon byker, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of reading and elementary education at the university of north carolina at charlotte. he has conducted ethnographic field studies in england, cuba, india, south korea, and across the united states on how elementary school students use and construct meaning for computer technology. appendix a: student focus group interview purpose: the purpose of the student focus group interview questions is to identify the students’ interpretation(s) for using computer technology. the questions are coded to show how each one aligns to the scot theory:  if stands for interpretive flexibility  s stands for stabilization  tf stands for technological frame 1. why do you use a computer in school? (if – perceived purposes of computer technology) 2. what does a computer help you do at school? (if – perceived outcomes) 3. do you ever have problems with using computers at school? if so, what kind of problems? if not, why not? (if – perceived problems) http://dx.doi.org/10.1108/s1479-3679_2014_0000025010 http://www.azimpremjifoundation.org/downloads/plenary%20address.pdf http://www.azimpremjifoundation.org/downloads/plenary%20address.pdf http://www.ncte-india.org/publicnotice/ncfte_2010.pdf http://www.ncte-india.org/publicnotice/ncfte_2010.pdf 138 global education review 2(4) 4. follow up to anyone who answered yes to question #3: who solves these problems? how do they do it? (if – solving problems) 5. why do you think your teacher wants you to use a computer? (if – identifying the difference in interpretive flexibility) 6. what two activities would you choose to do on the computer (in school) if you had your own choice? (s – examining the stabilization of using computers in the school) 7. what two activities do you suppose your teacher would choose for you to do using the computer? (s – examining the stabilization of using computers in the school) 8. do you think that your use of the computer in school prepares you for the future? if so, how? if not, why not? (tf – technological frame – identifying the future of computer technology) appendix b: teacher interview purpose: the purpose of the teacher interview questions is to identify the teachers’ interpretation(s) of using computers in schools. the questions are coded to show how each one aligns to the scot theory:  if stands for interpretive flexibility  s stands for stabilization  tf stands for technological frame 1. what do you understand as the purpose of using computers in school? (if – perceived purposes of computer technology) 2. what does a computer help you do at school? (if – perceived outcomes) 3. do you ever have problems with using computers at school? if so, what kind of problems? if not, why not? (if – perceived problems) 4. follow up to anyone who answered yes to question #3: who solves these problems? how do they do it? (if – solving problems) 5. how do you think your students might answer the question about a computer’s purpose in school? in other words, why do you think your students want to use a computer? (if – identifying the difference in interpretive flexibility) equipping india’s rural elementary schools 139 6. what two activities would you choose to do on the computer (in school) if you had your own choice? (s – examining the stabilization of using computers in the school) 7. what two activities do you suppose your students would choose to do (at school) when using the computer? (s – examining the stabilization of using computers in the school) 8. do you think that your students’ use of the computer in school is preparing them for a future job or career? if so, how? if not, why not? (tf – technological frame – identifying the future of computer technology) appendix c: student questionnaire purpose: the student questionnaire’s purpose is to generate demographic data and identify students’ perceptions about using computer technology. the questions are coded to show how each one aligns to the scot theory:  if stands for interpretive flexibility  s stands for stabilization  tf stands for technological frame directions: please circle your responses. 1. what is your age? ____________ (tf – demographic data) 2. what is your gender? boy or girl (tf demographic data) 3. which of these items do you have in your home (circle all that apply): a. radio b. television c. computer d. cell phone e. none of the above (tf – demographic data) 4. which of these is used in your home to cook food? a. firewood b. kerosene stove c. gas d. hot plate e. other: ____________ (tf – demographic data) 5. what kind of vehicle(s) does your family own? a. motorcycle b. scooter c. bicycle d. car e. other: ______ f. none of the above (tf – demographic data) 6. how many books (not counting magazines or newspapers) are in your home? a. 1-15 b. 15 – 40 c. 40 – 100 d. 100 200 e. over 200 f. zero (tf – demographic data) 7. how many rooms are in your home? a. 1-2 b. 3-4 c. 5-6 d. 6-8 e. over 8 (tf – demographic data) 8. what items do you own or have? a. bicycle b. book bag c. an ipod d. a cell phone e. none of the above (tf – demographic data) 9. what do you believe is the most important thing which you can do on the computer? 140 global education review 2(4) a. search for information b. create movies/multimedia c. listen to music d. play games e. process information faster f. communicate with friends (email) g. learn basic skills h. other: ________________ (please specify) (if – perceived purpose) 10. what do you believe your teachers would say is the most important thing which you can do on the computer? a. search for information b. create movies/multimedia c. listen to music d. play games e. process information faster f. communicate with friends (email) g. learn basic skills h. other: ________________ (please specify) (if and s – perceived purposes and stabilization of those purposes) 11. what subject matter do you learn best when using a computer? a. reading/literacy b. maths c. science d. social studies e. second language f. other: _____________________ g. none (if – perceived purpose) 12. what subject matter do you learn best without using a computer? a. reading/literacy b. maths c. science d. social studies e. second language f. other: _____________________ g. none (if – perceived problems) 13. i enjoy using a computer in school. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 14. i am motivated to learn in school when i use a computer strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived purpose) 15. i work better with other classmates when using a computer. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 16. i know how to use a computer for school related purposes. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived purpose) 17. my school work and home work are improved because of my computer skills. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 18. i do better in math and science when using a computer. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 19. i do better in reading, social studies, and second language when using a computer. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived purpose) equipping india’s rural elementary schools 141 20. i learn more from the computer than from a teacher. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 21. i am a better student because of computer technology. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcome) 22. what kind of job would you like to have in the future? (please write a short answer) ________________________________________________________________________ (tf – demographic data) appendix d: teacher questionnaire purpose: the teacher questionnaire’s purpose is to generate demographic data and identify teachers’ perceptions about using computer technology. the questions are coded to show how each one aligns to the scot theory:  if stands for interpretive flexibility  s stands for stabilization  tf stands for technological frame 1. what is your gender? male or female (tf – demographic data) 2. to which age group do you belong? a. below 25 b. 25-29 c. 30-39 d. 40-49 e. 50-59 f. 60 or above (tf – demographic data) 3. how many years of teaching experience do you have? a. less than 1 b. 1 -3 c. 4-6 d. 7-10 e. 11-15 f. 16-20 g. more than 20 (tf – demographic data) 4. what is your highest level of education? a. some college b. bachelor’s degree c. master’s degree d. ph.d. degree e. other: ______________ (please indicate) (tf – demographic data) 5. how often do you use a computer at school? (if you answered a, b, or c, please move question 6 and 7) a. daily b. three times a week c. once or twice a week d. i do not use a computer (tf – demographic data) 6. where did you learn how to use computer technology in your teaching? a. self-taught b. professional development at school c. college or university d. a colleague or colleagues e. other: ______________ (please indicate) (tf – demographic data) 7. what is your primary purpose for using a computer at school? 142 global education review 2(4) a. communication (email) b. book-keeping c. creating media presentations (powerpoint) d. entertainment (games) d. research e. other: ____________________ (please indicate) (if – perceived purposes) 8. do you have a computer at home? yes or no (if yes, please answer question 9) (tf – demographic data) 9. what is your primary purpose for using a computer at home? a. communication (email) b. book-keeping c. creating media presentations (powerpoint) d. entertainment (games) d. research e. other: ____________________ (please indicate) (tf – demographic data) 10. what do you believe should be your students’ primary purpose for using a computer at school? a. communication b. use software to practice skills c. create multimedia d. entertainment (games) d. research (searching for information) e. other: _________ f. i do not believe my students should use computers (if and s – perceived purposes and stabilization of computer technology) 11. what subject matter do your students learn best when using a computer? a. reading/literacy b. maths c. science d. social studies e. second language f. other: _____________________ g. none (if – perceived outcomes) 12. what subject matter do your students learn best without using a computer? a. reading/literacy b. maths c. science d. social studies e. second language f. other: _____________________ g. none (if – perceived outcomes) 13. the use of computers has helped to motivate my students strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 14. the use of computers has increased the level of student interaction and collaboration. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 15. the use of computers has positively impacted my students’ learning and achievement. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 16. most of my students can capably use computers at an age-appropriate level. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 17. the use of computer technology has improved the quality of my students’ work. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 18. the use of computer technology can enhance school subject matter like math and science. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 19. the use of computer technology can enhance school subject matter like reading, social studies, and second language? equipping india’s rural elementary schools 143 strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 20. students learn more from a computer than from a teacher. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 21. i am a better teacher because of computer technology. strongly agree agree undecided disagree strongly disagree (if – perceived outcomes) 22. what is the most important thing that you would like your students to know about using a computer? (please write a short answer) ________________________________________________________________________ (if – perceived purposes) 2014-2015 board of review 61 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college, city university of new york krishna bista, university of louisiana at monroe caitlin block, drexel university cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta alisha brown, michigan state university jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york ross collin, manhattanville college arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris david d. dry, asheville-buncombe technical community college nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college william dwyer, stephen f. austin state university, texas cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida 62 global education review 2(1) jessica gallo, university of montana terri l .germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame heather gould, eugene lang college, thenew school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom mark hamilton, education development center, united states helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university ravi kumar, davanagere university, india jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university lawry v. mahon, victoria university, australia gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind,united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, indiana university south bend 2014-2015 board of review 63 claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom maroun naser, stem academy, canada bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas, san antonio newhouse, erica, mercy college, new york nitecki, elena, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey scott schuth, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom harun serpil, university of wisconsin-madison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school good day john ezinwa silas, nnamdi azikiwe university, awka, nigeria kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts melissa parenti, st.john's university do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university elaine marie walker, seton hall university sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark angela webb, louisiana state university steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium 64 global education review 2(1) vemitra momit white, mississippi stateuniversity stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh 2015-2016 board of reviewers 170 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california anne marie connor, michigan state university mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york sefa dundar, abant izzet baysal university, turkey curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya 171 global education review 3(3) neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university brian lloyd heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis christine hunt hjorth, rockaway, new jersey william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska fethi kayalar, erzincan university, turkey hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york allyson krupar, the pennsylvania state university jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college 2015-2016 board of reviewers 172 roseanne vallice levy, mercy college sandhya vishwas limaye, tata institute of social sciences, india sara liviero, university of exeter, united kingdom pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university isolde malmberg, university for music and performing arts, vienna dominic manuel, mcgill university, canada jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york t. lee morgan, university of northern colorado david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university 173 global education review 3(3) gary peters, university of alabama salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york mary podsiedlik, syracuse university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles merethe roos, telemark university college, norway katharina rosenberger, university of vienna, austria thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, austria susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts anita summer, university of vienna, austria sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york mary barbara trube, ohio university agnes turner, university of klagenfurt, vienna, austria karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria brian l. wright, university of memphis linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york 2015-2016 board of reviewers 174 yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 57 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: chun, jina, connor, annemarie, kosciulek, john f., landon, trenton, & park, jinhee (2016). career development for youth with disabilities in south korea: the intersection of culture, theory, and policy. global education review, 3 (3). 57-74. career development for youth with disabilities in south korea: the intersection of culture, theory, and policy jina chun michigan state university annemarie connor michigan state university john f. kosciulek michigan state university trenton landon utah state university jinhee park michigan state university abstract youth with disabilities face difficulties resulting from attitudinal, environmental, and organizational barriers not only in initially accessing and entering school (world health organization [who], 2011), but also as they transition from school age youth to working adults. with a focus on facilitating a better understanding of the issues, challenges, and solutions associated with the design and implementation of career development services for youth with disabilities, this article describes the status quo for students with disabilities in south korea and then discusses career development services that potentially reduce variation, help facilitate optimal career development, and promote future employment opportunities. to accomplish this task, we explore the intersection of culture, theory, and policy in the korean transition service delivery system. keywords youth with disabilities, career development, employment, education, transition service introduction the educational dropout rate for youth with disabilities is disproportionate to that of their nondisabled peers, resulting in difficulties for them in accessing vocational training and employment (mitra, posara, & vick, 2011; who, 2011). while the need to vocationally engage and prepare youth with disabilities for postsecondary education and employment is both intuitive and well documented, barriers to _____________________________ corresponding author: annemarie connor, office of rehabilitation and disability studies, department of counseling, educational psychology, and special education, michigan state university, 620 farm lane, room 401a, east lansing, mi 48824 e-mail: connora1@msu.edu mailto:connora1@msu.edu 58 global education review 3(3) effective implementation exist not just in the united states (benitez, morningstar, & frey, 2009), but also in south korea (lee, 2014; h. seo, 2007). early career interventions within school settings have been shown to improve work outcomes of youth with disabilities (benz, lindstrom, & yovanoff, 2000; harvey, 2002; luecking & fabian, 2000; scholl & mooney, 2003), yet systematic and equitable career development service provision is lacking. this article explores existing and promising career development practices for youth with disabilities from both korean and american paradigms. while the reader will note both distinct and subtle cultural, practice, and policy differences, parallels can be drawn between american and korean theory and models of career development for youth with disabilities. what remains constant across hemispheres are the unique challenges of youth with disabilities to initiate and advance through the stages of career development. regardless of how disability is acquired, or the level of interaction one may have with persons with disabilities, disability remains a part of the human condition (who, 2011). in fact, disability is the one minority group that anyone can join at any point across the lifespan . yet, while universal, disability is manifested in individuals, families, local communities, and society through the lens of culture. the term culture conceptualizes ways of living among groups and encompasses subconscious ways of “thinking, behaving, and believing” (ehrich, 1949). given this quality, the nuances of culture are not readily apparent to outsiders. culture influences everything, not only individual behavior, but also theory, policy, and service delivery. it is at the intersection of culture, theory, and policy that this article examines how model-driven vocational services can support developmentally appropriate, culturally sensitive, and solution-focused services in both u.s. and korean contexts. global status of youth with disabilities and education it has been suggested that disability has a bidirectional relationship to poverty, meaning the presence of a disability increases the likelihood of the individual living in poverty, while someone living in poverty is, in turn, more likely to acquire a disability (who, 2011). this relationship is due to a number of contextual factors such as limited access to education, healthcare, and suitable employment opportunities. regardless, conservative estimates project that 10% of the world’s population possess a disability (levers, 2013), with the number likely higher due to poor reporting or individuals not identifying as having a disability. disability is more common among women and youth (levers, 2013; united nations, 2013; who, 2011), the groups often having limited access to formal educational opportunities. in the united states, students with disabilities are twice as likely to drop out of high school, half as likely to seek out post-secondary education, four times more likely to be imprisoned; and they can expect to face higher adult unemployment rates, leading to poverty rates three times as high as their non-disabled counterparts (national collaborative on workforce and disability [ncwd], 2009). successful employment for youth transitioning from school to work is closely linked to career exploration and development fostered during the school years. in fact, a longitudinal study in the united states by schmidt-davis (2000) found better employment outcomes, increased self-esteem and self-determination, and less need for social security benefits among students who received rehabilitation services, including vocational rehabilitation counseling and guidance, case management, consultation, assessment, and advocacy. other researchers have also linked early transition services and career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 59 interventions with improved outcomes (benz et al., 2000; harvey, 2002; luecking & fabian, 2000; scholl & mooney, 2003). thus, while the evidence supports the value of career development services for youth with disabilities, systemic barriers to service access still exist (benitez et al., 2009). silverstein, julnes, and nolan (2005) described education as foundational to the successful transition to work or higher education. the right to an education is also clearly articulated in the preamble (section v.) and throughout the entirety of the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (e.g., article 8, article 24; united nations, 2006). yet, limited access to education is a concern regarding many youth with disabilities (levers, 2013). from a global perspective, youth with disabilities are often not enrolled, or start school later than peers, and drop out of school at higher rates (groce, 2004; mitra, posara, & vick, 2011; who, 2011). it has been reported that 93 million children have a disability, and many children with disabilities are not enrolled in school for reasons ranging from lack of accommodations to family members feeling that the individual is unable to benefit from education (unicef, 2013). the lack of social inclusion and access to education limits potential occupational attainment later in life (unicef, 2013; wehman et al., 2015). with a dominant ideology that a high quality education is critical for upward social mobility (carter & reardon, 2014), educational achievement is a critical dimension of empowerment, societal participation, and overall human well being (united nations, 2013). unfortunately, youth with disabilities are often segregated into separate classrooms or schools instead of being included in the mainstream educational system (united nations, 2013); or they may simply be viewed as unable to benefit from an education and kept at home by family (groce, 2004). career development theory and transition policy theory provides a useful framework for understanding the complex career development challenges of youth with disabilities. super’s (1980) career development theory is a widely known life-span view of career development. super proposes that career development is a continuous lifelong process of developmental experiences which emphasizes the role of selfconcept in the development of an individual’s career choice and adaptation (savickas, 1997). specifically, super’s theory (1980) conceptualizes transition youth (ages 15-24) within the exploration stage, recognizing their changing aspirations and need for career cruising. for adolescents, this stage is characterized by “trying out” careers through classes, work experiences, and leisure activities. the exploration stage is a time for adolescents to make tentative choices and begin to develop skills that match their aspirations. school is a natural context in which these choices and skill building activities occur. the role of the career counselor is to facilitate exploration while assisting the student in moving toward the next stage of career development (establishment, ages 25-44), while also taking into account what super (1980) termed as lifestyle factors. super’s lifestyle factors are threefold and include environmental factors such as job market conditions and labor practices; situational determinants such as socioeconomic status and cultural factors; and personal determinants which are both biological and psychological, including type, onset, and severity of disability. while career development theory espouses the benefits of counseling as a catalyst for continuous and sequential stage progression for all students and workers, career counseling is particularly impactful and instrumental for individuals with disabilities who may be vulnerable to stage disruption or stagnation (kosciulek & perkins, 2005). 60 global education review 3(3) while models such as super’s theory address the early development of self-concept, attitudes, and learning needs in relation to career development (stage 1: ages 0-14), transition planning is not mandated in the united states until students are 16 years old (idea, 2004). furthermore, transition planning does not necessitate service delivery, such as vocational rehabilitation services, which are frequently not initiated until a student’s senior year of high school. as such, transition policy in the united states does not mandate early implementation of career development services for youth with disabilities. as such, in the united states perhaps culture, and not simply policy, is in conflict with career development theory. through the elevation of autonomy and independence over interdependence, the expectation is for youth to be largely self-directed in their career interests and activities. such an individualistic approach to career development contrasts with collectivist models of transition education in south korea. korean cultural lens cultural lines of distinction may be drawn when comparing the western, individualistic culture of the united states with the eastern, collectivist culture of south korea. similar to other asian cultures, korean life can be described as familycentered and based on principles of confucianism, which emphasizes interpersonal harmony within a prescribed hierarchy (b. kim, atkinson, & umemoto, 2001; kim-rupnow, 2001). the korean cultural emphasis on harmony and order is fundamentally different from the mainstream american cultural emphasis on individualism and self-reliance, and extends to the family, community, and broader society (kim et al., 2001; kim-rupnow, 2001; sue & sue, 2008). fundamentally, koreans “regard family as the basic social unit and consider harmony at home to be the first step toward harmony in the community and in the nation as a whole” (kim-rupnow, 2001; p. 12). in addition to harmony, koreans value hard work, ambition, and education, balanced with humility (kim-rupnow, 2001). while increasingly challenged by the influence of western culture, koreans continue to uphold confucian ideals of respect for elders, good will, loyalty, trust, cooperation, and reciprocity (hur & hur, 1999). within this collectivist construct, koreans view decision-making as a family or community process rather than as an individual privilege, since koreans perceive personal accomplishments as family achievement (b. kim et al., 2001). decision-making based on personal preference, or placing one’s own needs ahead of others, is considered selfish within korean culture (b. kim, atkinson, & yang, 1999; kim-rupnow, 2001; sue & sue, 2008). in fact, it can be observed that the pronoun “my” translates as “our” in the korean language. youth in south korea in regard to youth, koreans deeply value and highly prize academic achievement (sue & sue, 2008). rather than being viewed as dependent, children are seen as interdependent and subordinate within the hierarchical structure of the family (kim-rupnow, 2001; sue & sue, 2008). in turn, parents are expected to support their children’s academic endeavors, often at the expense of their own desires or needs. fitting with the view of family as the primary decisionmaking unit, parents with traditional cultural values make school, career, and marriagerelated decisions for their children (kimrupnow, 2001). whereas american culture in essence allows for the emancipation of young adults from their parents, confucian ideals of filial piety require that adult children care for their elders. filial piety is characterized by children showing respect, honor, and devotion to parents, and making sacrifices for them (b. kim et al., career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 61 2001). stoicism is the norm and children, particularly boys, are discouraged from expressing needs or emotions, which might be interpreted as impolite or even hostile (kimrupnow, 2001; sue & sue, 2008). pang (2000) noted that first generation korean american families struggle with the possibility that children’s exposure to individualistic american practices might lead to family conflict through a disruption of filial piety. culture of disability in south korea in regard to disability, while many koreans view disability as a natural life process, much like birth, aging, death, or the result of medical or psychological causes (h. jo et al., 2011), others see disability as a punishment by supernatural forces including karma or god. further, some koreans believe that a mother’s inability to follow traditionally prescribed practices and avoid taboos causes harm to the developing child (kim-rupnow, 2001). religion and its changing landscape within south korea certainly influences the korean worldview of disability and while a detailed analysis of religion is beyond the scope of this article, it should be noted that confucian philosophy, as well as buddhism and christianity all play a part in shaping contemporary korean religious ideology. thus, the variety and interplay of multiple religions within south korea create complexities similar to those generated in the heterogeneous american religious landscape. families and individuals with a strong belief in disability as a supernatural phenomenon may experience disproportionate feelings of helplessness, depression, self-blame, denial, and anger (ferko, jung, & s. kim, 2010). parents with such fatalistic worldviews typically expect that children with disabilities will eventually outgrow their conditions. consequently, these parents typically do not seek services for their children. in contrast, koreans with “scientific education” seek both western and eastern medical treatments for their children, along with prayer and religious rituals (kim-rupnow, 2001). challenges to persons with disabilities in south korea while legislation designed to improve the lives of persons with disabilities in south korea has been enacted (e.g., the employment promotion and vocational rehabilitation act for people with disabilities, 2000), stigmatization and misunderstanding about disability remain prevalent. in collectivist cultures with conservative values and customs, individuals whose appearance or behavior is outside the norm may receive negative attention, including, at worst, being the target of staring and gossip or being ignored as an outsider and, at best, being overprotected or patronized (chen, s. jo, & donnell, 2004; kim-rupnow, 2001). traditional south koreans believe that disability is caused by supernatural influences (hur & hur, 1999), resulting in families and individuals feeling disempowered, and even depressed when faced with disability (yan, accordino, boutin, & wilson, 2014). in addition, kim-rupnow (2001) cited results of a survey administered in both 1984 and 2000 that indicated that cultural bias against disability in south korea was not improving. over a 15-year period, survey results indicated that an unchanging and large percentage of citizens (approximately 83%) reported that they would rather terminate a pregnancy than have a child with a disability. moreover, appraisals of causation and inferences of culpability are mixed, depending on the nature of the disability. for example, some koreans believe that chronic disability is a form of “payback” for past indiscretion (yan et al., 2014), while acquired disability, particularly while in the service of others, may affect a sense of pride and be attributed to “bad luck” rather than bad actions (national center for the dissemination of disability research, 2011). in 62 global education review 3(3) addition, disability as a result of aging is seen as natural, acceptable, and an extension of filial piety. consequently, individuals and families experience a range of feelings, thoughts, and emotions in reaction to disability ranging from shame and helplessness to admiration and acceptance. while policymakers have made efforts to reshape perceptions of disability, korean culture has been slow to adopt such ideals. for example, basic needs such as accessibility in public spaces continue to be a challenge, leading to the isolation of persons with disabilities. while these examples illustrate generally “unfavorable” attitudes faced by persons with disabilities and their families in south korea, efforts to reduce prejudice and reshape attitudes are underway. for instance, popular korean public television programming showcases stories of individuals with disabilities, offering a glimpse of real struggles and accomplishments to viewers who might not otherwise have the opportunity to interact with persons with disabilities (kim-rupnow, 2001). at the service level, south korea has a system of community rehabilitation agencies that are working toward integration and equality. rehabilitation services in south korea culture impacts rehabilitation service delivery around the globe, persons with disabilities have historically been subject to treatment modalities and service patterns prescribed by a person of authority (e.g., doctor, rehabilitation professional, teacher). since service providers in the korean context are typically responsible for treatment decisions (kim-rupnow, 2001), and service recipients tend to adhere to advice from persons in authority (smart, 2001), a predominantly medical model of care proliferates naturally within the culture. concepts of empowerment and informed choice are relatively new and coincide with american ideals of individualism and self-determination. empowerment has been conceptualized to include five major components: control, competence, responsibility, participation, and future orientation (kosciulek, 2005). while the american approach to rehabilitation philosophy may center these principles on the client, koreans may be unfamiliar with the concept of empowerment and, when they do seek help, are more likely to seek guidance from individuals perceived as authorities (e.g., doctors, nurses, therapists, teachers) by virtue of their education and perceived levels of competence (kimrupnow, 2001) and thus shift responsibility and control to the provider. while the american philosophy of rehabilitation may assess a medical approach as being counter to the mainstream values of informed choice, empowerment, and independent living, (kim-rupnow, 2001), the medical model closely aligns with korean and confucian constructs of filial piety and social hierarchy constructs. within this hierarchy of authority, family members are also important figures, as they play a key role in the selection of services, providers, and potential treatments. thus, it has been suggested that families be included as early as possible in the rehabilitation process to ensure rapport building (kimrupnow, 2001), and potentially empower more decision-making on the part of families and individuals. however, yan and colleagues (2014) caution that facilitating family involvement in service delivery may be problematic in asian cultures due to a traditional view of disability as shameful and under the purview of the family. such attitudes may result in families refusing services they might otherwise benefit from (yan et al., 2014). some cultural norms are changing the development of the world health organization’s 2011 international classification of functioning, disability, and health (icf) and career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 63 trends in south korea are leading to more families and persons with disabilities seeking second opinions and researching multiple options for services and potential treatments. this scenario suggests that global constructs of disability are shifting decision making from authoritative figures to persons with disabilities who are then supported by family, friends, and treatment providers. this cultural shift can be seen in the language used by the korean special education and rehabilitation center for excellence (2001), which outlined the categories of disability used by the helping professions in south korea as: (a) impairments of the body and internal organs; (b) disabilities in intelligence, behavior, or emotion; and (c) handicaps created by society. kim-rupnow (2001) noted that these categories align with the definition of disability used by the u.s. national institute on disability and rehabilitation research. in essence, koreans view disability through not just a medical lens but also as a social/environmental construct. information and education are seen as the most effective means for mitigating potential negative aspects of socially constructed disability in south korea (kim-rupnow, 2001). the korean context with rapid economic growth in south korea, vocational rehabilitation services for persons with disabilities have been developing with a sense of urgency since the 1980s (oh, j.h. kim, rosenthal, & lui, 2005). according to the employment promotion and vocational rehabilitation act for people with disabilities (2000), persons with disabilities are entitled to vocational rehabilitation services to obtain and retain employment. this legislation also mandates that private businesses and governmental organizations sustain a workforce comprised of at least 2.5 to 3% of people with disabilities (oh et al., 2005). however, people with disabilities still experience disparity in employment. in fact, only 36% of persons with disabilities were employed in 2013, compared to the 60.4% employment rate of persons without disabilities (korea employment agency for the disabled, 2013). employment is further compromised for individuals with intellectual or developmental disabilities, whose access to employment may be limited to sheltered workshop settings (h. park, 2013). transition policies in south korea since the mid-1990s the field of special education in south korea has increasingly focused attention on how special education can help students with disabilities both explore their career options and prepare for future careers (h. park, 2013; seo, 2007). the concept of transition was introduced as the “transition from school to adult life, which included the whole realm of adult life such as independent living, leisure activities, integrated community participation and employment” (j. kim, 2001 as cited in y. park, 2014, p.14). transition education and training have been recognized as important in south korea due to limited national vocational rehabilitation support systems. yet, within the educational process, systematic transition services to enhance the skills and opportunities for independent living for youth with disabilities are lacking (j. kim, 2007). to meet this need, the 1990 enactment of the law of promotion of employment of people with disabilities (now the employment promotion and vocational rehabilitation act for people with disabilities) included the term “transition education” and mandated that transition education and services be included in special education curricula throughout the school years (y. park, 2014; h. seo, 2007). the special education law for persons with disabilities and others (2007) specified that schools should have qualified experts, equipment, and facilities in order to provide 64 global education review 3(3) adequate assessment and implementation of self-support training, such as vocational rehabilitation training, daily life adaptation training, and social adaptation training designed to meet the needs of students receiving special education services. while the term “transition” was not used in this legislation, the law clearly referred to the importance of community living, and career and vocational education for youth with disabilities (y. park, 2014). more recently, the act on the protection of rights and support for people with developmental disabilities of 2014 stressed that central and local governments should endeavor to provide appropriate vocational rehabilitation services to people with developmental disabilities so that they are able to develop their full vocational potential. current status of high school graduates with disabilities in south korea unfortunately, despite legislative efforts, vocational education and training have not proved adequate for enhancing the employment and independent living of students with disabilities. according to the ministry of education (2014), 24.8% of graduates from special schools or special classes in general high schools entered post-secondary vocational education programs in special schools; 13.0% attended college or universities, and only 25.2% of all graduates with disabilities were employed. in addition, the unemployment rate of youth and young adults with disabilities in south korea aged 15-29 is two times greater than their nondisabled counterparts (employment development institute [edi], 2010). disparate transition outcomes are even more pronounced for students with intellectual disabilities. despite receiving more special education services than other students with disabilities, students with intellectual disabilities experience a relatively low employment rate compared to peers with other types of disabilities (ministry of education and science technology [mest], 2012). since there have been rapid advances in technology within business and industry requiring the need for highly educated and skilled workers, youth and young adults with disabilities are facing increasing difficulties in obtaining and securing jobs. according to a 2014 special education report (ministry of education), most high school graduates with disabilities were likely to be employed in manufacturing, particularly packaging assembly jobs (23.4%). in contrast, only 7.8% of high school graduates with disabilities obtained office jobs. in order to enhance services for youth with disabilities, in 2013 the ministry of education announced the fourth five-year plan for the development of special education services. this national plan emphasized qualified career or vocational education and increased opportunities to receive quality, individualized, lifelong education with the goal of improving employment and independent living outcomes after graduation. the plan increased the number and sustainability of integrated job-centered schools and also emphasized that school-based enterprises in special schools should give students with disabilities more opportunity to receive vocational training (ministry of education, 2013). south korean transition service delivery post-secondary vocational education programming in special schools after graduation from high school, many youth and young adults with disabilities are not be ready for the transition to adult life, as this transition is often associated with high levels of uncertainty due to limited engagement in vocational activities (i. jo, 1997). in order to prepare youth and young adults with disabilities to live in their communities independently, the career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 65 need to provide curricula and systematic vocational training has become a critical issue in transition education. post-secondary vocational education and training programs have operated since 1995 (y. kim & jeon, 2010). a total of 121 schools currently offer vocational education programs (ministry of education, 2014). post-secondary vocational education training programs offer a combination of focused vocational curriculum, soft skills development, and vocational skills training within the school setting. youth and young adults with disabilities served through the postsecondary vocational program receive training for two or three years after completion of the high school curriculum (h. park, 2013). however, program effectiveness is an unanswered question. generally, graduates of post-secondary vocational programs experience lower employment outcomes, securing mostly manufacturing packaging assembly jobs that are not much different than those achieved by high school graduates with disabilities who did not participate in the post-secondary vocational education program (ministry of education, 2014). potential causes of such disappointing employment outcomes are numerous and illustrate a need for further research. it is unclear whether the quality of program services and supports, characteristics of the applicants, bias among employers, or other unidentified factors lead to such disparate outcomes. however, one study (y. seo, 2013) identified lack of resources (e.g., facilities, equipment for vocational training, and qualified service providers), unspecified vocational education curricula, and limited partnerships with employers as significant shortcomings of postsecondary vocational programs. integrated job-centered schools providing qualified vocational services to students with disabilities who attend general high schools has historically been difficult since traditional schools focus mostly on academic achievement. in order to address this issue, integrated job-centered schools were started in 2010 (yoon, 2012). integrated job-centered schools are operated within select general schools and provide vocational education and training for students with disabilities (song et al., 2012). in 2012, a total of thirty schools were designated as integrated job-centered schools to provide vocational services. these schools focused on providing an array of services both within schools and in the community, including classroom activities (e.g., soft skill training, independent living skill training, and vocational training), business or industry field trips, community based work experiences within rehabilitation centers, vocational rehabilitation facilities, and local businesses, supported employment, follow-up support, and family support (song et al, 2012). special school based enterprises special school based enterprises create work environments that are similar to real business environments but are housed within special schools. the initiative expands opportunities for students with disabilities to have work experiences while still in school to and increase employment outcomes (song et al., 2012). in order to be selected as a special school enterprise, the special school is required to choose a business they would like to operate based on analyses of local community businesses, student skill and ability in consultation with vocational rehabilitation professionals, and provide a revised curriculum that details how vocational training will be provided (e. kim, 2015). students with disabilities in these programs receive vocational training in conjunction with academic curricula. by 2014, there were twenty special school based enterprises under development or in operation (e. kim, 2015). the program plays a role in not only developing vocational skills, especially in 66 global education review 3(3) manufacturing, processing, repairing, and sales, but also in providing financial support to schools from profits generated through the operation of the business (song et al., 2012). community based vocational education and training due to the criticism that traditional special education in south korea does not provide community based work experiences to enhance student post-school employment outcomes and independent living, current transition education has acknowledged the importance of community based vocational education and training (h. park & h. park, 2010). community-based education and training is provided within welfare agencies, vocational rehabilitation facilities, and local businesses in the community so students with disabilities have more opportunities to not only acquire work experiences but also apply vocational knowledge and skills that are acquired in the classroom to real world work situations (h. park & h. park, 2010). issues in vocational education and training programs although most special high schools and special classes within general high schools have implemented a vocational education curriculum for students with disabilities, less than half of the special classes within general middle schools have provided a vocational education curriculum for these students (lee, 2014). as career development is a multi-faceted, complex, and personal process that evolves over a person’s entire lifetime (patton & mcmahon, 2006), vocational education and training should ideally start before high school and be based on individualized career plans that meet individual student needs (lee & h. kim, 2013). lee (2014) recently asserted that youth and young adults with disabilities often have difficulties retaining jobs because of limited training in terms of the meaning, perceived value, and demands of work. current vocational education and training curricula are often perceived as having a job search and skills development focus, while overlooking the need to instill a deeper understanding of career or vocation. offering work adjustment training provides students with individualized situational assessments and training that help students with disabilities develop work attitudes, values, behaviors, and characteristics while fostering their understanding of the demands of work. a variety of approaches, including work adjustment training, field training, and/or workcentered education should be infused into the vocational education and training curriculum to help students with disabilities secure meaningful employment and live independently (lee, 2014). with respect to the perspective of caregivers and teachers on career development of students with disabilities in special schools, both special education teachers and parents of students with disabilities noted that there is often little communication between parents and schools, potentially causing gaps between program goals and individual needs (y. kim, 2009; lee & h. kim, 2013). special education teachers reported difficulties in implementing effective vocational education programs that increased positive outcomes. for instance, y. kim (2009) found that some teachers felt pressured by parents to disregard program eligibility criteria, and include students with severe disabilities in vocational programs. while parents understandably wanted what they thought was best for their children, teachers felt that these parents had little understanding of the training programs. as a result, the studentteacher ratio has increased and limited teacher ability to provide individualized career education and training (y. kim, 2009). teachers also felt that parent demands for other types of skill development, rather than vocational skills, diluted the main purpose of these vocational career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 67 education programs (y. kim, 2009). on the other hand, parents believed training programs should be specifically designed to meet the needs of individual students, acknowledging each student’s different level of learning and skills (y. kim, 2009). according to kim, grouping all students, regardless of skill level or severity of disability, in one class is likely to limit appropriate knowledge and skill development for those students with severe disabilities (y. kim, 2009). parents of students with disabilities also reported limited involvement in the vocational education and training process for their children due to poor access to information on career education (y. kim, 2009; lee & h. kim, 2013). in order to better understand of their child’s career development, parents expressed the need for earlier acquisition of specific information on career development and training programs through active communication with teachers and service providers as well as through parent involvement in the career counseling process. parents perceived that this early career development support from teachers would enable them to help their children maximize career decision opportunities (lee & h. kim, 2013). with limited collaboration among schools, community businesses, and vocational rehabilitation agencies, students have little opportunity to receive community based vocational services, or consequent employment after graduation (minister of science and technology, 2009). moreover, y. park’s (2014) study showed that although special education teachers recognized the importance of transition services, they perceived that the implementation of these services was relatively low. h. seo’s (2007) study highlights a systemic barrier to service implementation: special education teachers felt that they were not adequately trained to provide qualified transition services and rarely performed these services with youth with disabilities. due to the lack of a comprehensive system-wide approach (j. kim, 2007), youth with disabilities tend to be excluded from community participation after high school graduation, becoming isolated in their own homes or rehabilitation facilities. thus, it is necessary to provide such youth with a systematic approach to transition education and training while they are in school and still have ready access to services (j. kim, 2003). specifically, effective career development programming begins in elementary school, continues throughout high school, and is individualized to meet student needs and aspirations (j. kim, 2007; lee & h. kim, 2013). a korean model of transition education and training recognizing the importance of systematic transition services during the school years for youth with disabilities, j. kim (2007) developed a school-based transition education model. the model, which is based on the analyses of several transition models developed in the united states, is applicable to the current educational situation in south korea and sensitive to the complex needs of youth with disabilities. j. kim’s model is designed to guide integrated and collaborative school-based transition education with a focus on enhancing independent living and quality of life. the model consists of two parts: (a) transition education content and (b) transition education application. regarding successful transition and positive post-school outcomes, j. kim (2007) suggested three main transition education outcomes including daily living, career life, and social and leisure life. he also detailed required skill sets for each outcome, organized into four periods of transition education. 68 global education review 3(3) transition education content in the first period of transition education, the preschool period, the model focuses on early diagnosis of disability, intervention, and family support by facilitating overall development in cognition, communication, interpersonal relationships, health, and daily living. the second period, the elementary school years (ages 6 to 11), focuses on daily living skills, prevocational skills, career recognition, and social and leisure skill development. during the elementary school period, it is also important to provide students with community-based education and training designed to develop the ability to generalize knowledge and skills acquired in the school setting to the broader community setting (j. kim, 2007). once students enter the middle school transition education period, which is the third transition education period, individualized transition plans (itp) should be established based on individual performance and interests. in addition to the development of the itp, an individualized education plan (iep) should be integrated in assisting students with disabilities with their career development (j. kim, 2007). during this period, students are encouraged to engage in job search activities, explore career options, and seek relevant information such as requirements, duties, wages, and rewards among careers. in the last phase of the transition education period, the high school years, transition education services should focus on the development of work adjustment skills, specific vocational skills, job readiness training, and placement through collaboration with community based vocational rehabilitation agencies (j. kim, 2007). the education content component of the model represents a theoretical ideal of comprehensive transition service delivery throughout the school years. yet, at the national level, south korea currently has a limited vocational education and service system and, therefore, cannot consistently implement all aspects of kim’s model. while vocational education and training service providers are encouraged to emphasize individualized career development education and training, the implementation of such ideals and related service outcomes are still limited. in relation to career development approaches, limited attention has been given to other variables, such as regional differences, severity of disabilities, and demands of work, that might predict employment outcomes (lee, 2014). moreover, vocational education and training service providers need a stronger focus on the context of employer business and organizational process. the traditional approach of providing educational and vocational services to improve functioning and job skills alone is no longer adequate for achieving successful employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities (chan, strauser, gervey, & lee, 2010). the demandside of employment services (market-driven approach) has been an essential factor for successful employment outcomes (chan et al., 2010). therefore, it is important for south korean vocational education and training service providers to recognize the importance of the demand-side employment approach by identifying and understanding variables and strategies that will be effective in increasing the quantity and quality of employment outcomes for individuals with disabilities (saunders, leahy, mcglynn, & hernandez, 2006). transition education application the application component of j. kim’s model recognizes collaboration needs among employers, relevant agencies and schools as well as the participation of students and their families in the transition education process across the school years. during the school years, transition education and training programs in south korea should be planned and implemented to enhance the development of career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 69 necessary skills. therefore, multiple itps and ieps should be written, describing specific long term and short-term goals for successful adaptation to adult life and identifying the required services and training to help students achieve these goals (heward, 2006). also, an iep team meeting should be held early in every academic year, with the special school teachers, both current and previous year, the student, parents, and other service providers in attendance. during the meeting, the student’s previous iep should be evaluated, and the new education plan as well as teaching strategies should be developed or modified based on the student’s needs (j. kim, 2007). transition assessment could also be conducted as needed to evaluate not only the student’s strengths and weaknesses, but also the environment within which the student will pursue career options and live his or her life (flexer & luft, 2005). in addition, functional curricula should be utilized to provide students with daily living, vocational or job related skills, and social skills training in integrated school environments and community based training. community based vocational education and training not only enables students to experience the various job types in their community, but also promotes employment after graduation (baek, 2005). to effectively provide community based training, j. kim (2007) suggests six steps in the training process: (a) community businesses analysis; (b) contacting employers and selecting a business based on students’ needs and abilities; (c) workplace and job tasks evaluation; (d) planning vocational training program; (e) providing the training; and (f) program evaluation. to facilitate successful career development and transition from school to adult life of youth with disabilities, post-high school vocational education programs can provide additional support in regard to individual student’s needs in conjunction with the abilities required for job performance. in order to facilitate student participation in the community and achieve meaningful education and employment outcomes, ongoing supports and evaluation should also be provided (j. kim, 2007). thus, collaborative approaches that include social and vocational agencies, individual students, families, and employers will mitigate resource limitations and move the korean system of transition toward j. kim’s ideal of a stage specific, individualized, and comprehensive model of transition education and training. implications of the model previous research has supported j. kim’s transition education and training model by showing that several components of this model were effective in enhancing career development and employment outcomes among students with disabilities. for instance, community based vocational education and training had a significant impact on developing and maintaining job related tasks (j. kim, 2014; k. kim, jung, & j.w. kim, 2011). in addition, collaboration between schools, rehabilitation agencies, and employers was effective in improving job preparedness and employment outcomes among youth with disabilities (hwang, 2013; h. park, 2006). another study demonstrated that a work adjustment training program, which was based on the functionoriented curricula, was effective in improving student daily living skills, work skills, and social skills (s.y. jo & s. lee, 2005). while components of kim’s model are currently implemented in south korea, the full implementation of both the transition education content and application aspects is lacking. using only parts of kim’s model is akin to indiscriminately applying only select phases of 70 global education review 3(3) super’s model; key components are lost and the model as a whole loses strength. thus, the full realization of kim’s model can and should guide the development and delivery of transition services in south korea. the significance of transition services for helping students with disabilities pursue independent adult life within their community has been well recognized through previous literature. j. kim’s (2007) transition education model aligns with super’s (1980) original theory and augments it with goals and activities relevant to youth with disabilities in south korea. to better align with kim’s model, vocational education training programs in south korea can be improved by: (a) expanding employment and career options rather than focusing on only limited career options (e.g., the manufacturing industry); (b) providing specialized career counseling (lee, 2014); (c) providing on-the-job training support within community-based settings (kwak et al., 2011); (d) strengthening the qualifications of service providers (y. park, 2014; h. seo, 2007); (e) ensuring family involvement in the process of career development (lee & h. kim, 2013); (f) collaborating among schools, community businesses, and other vocational rehabilitation agencies (lee & h. kim, 2013); and (g) ensuring a more student-centered approach in the career development process. j. kim’s application model recognizes current limitations in the realization of an ideal phase model of transition education and training and offers collaborative strategies as a means to mitigate resource scarcity, such as funding, infrastructure, and qualified personnel so that the phase model could be more effectively utilized in real school settings. in combination, kim and super’s models offer a disabilityrelevant and theoretically sound approach to addressing the complex needs of transition youth with disabilities in south korea. when objectively evaluated, korean models of transition, education, and training show promise in guiding transition service systems towards the realization of earlier and more coordinated efforts of comprehensive, developmentally appropriate, and disability sensitive transition services. at the national level, south korea as well as many other countries have struggled to both implement theory into policy and improve educational and vocational outcomes for transition youth. consequently, it is important that policy-makers work to build a more systematic and comprehensive transition infrastructure, establish clear service delivery guidelines, and increase funding for transition services. moreover, transition related laws in south korea should clearly state the requirements of developing itps and ieps based on students’ specific needs as well as offering collaborative community based transition education and training programs starting from early childhood. in order to guide legislation, policy and practice, future studies are needed to examine the effectiveness of the application of the full model in both special education and vocational rehabilitation service settings. summary acknowledging that youth with disabilities face difficulty succeeding in the transition from school to adult life, and recognizing the value of career development services for youth with disabilities around the world, the current article has explored the impact of korean culture on issues related to disabilities, specifically youth with disabilities. policies regarding transition education and training and current services provided to youth with disabilities in south korea have been examined. the special education law, and other related legislation in career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 71 south korea, address the importance of providing transition services in special education and seeks to provide korean youth with disabilities more opportunities to enhance their employment outcomes and independent living skills. however, despite the current legislation mandating vocational training and transition services, systemic barriers to effective service delivery still exist (lee, 2014; h. seo, 2007). it is important to ensure that students with disabilities receive comprehensive vocational rehabilitation education and training through not only intensive job search and skill development, but also work adjustment training, work-centered education, job shadowing, and internships, all while maintaining congruence with cultural ideals and values. recognizing several challenges in providing effective transition services to students with disabilities in south korea, j. kim (2007) developed a comprehensive transition education model. implementing this model maintains congruence with korean culture and values while pushing for a more systematic 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(2012). an effect of vocational rehabilitation program of integrated school of vocational education on occupational preparation of the mentally handicapped students (master’s thesis). daegue university about the author(s) jina chun, ms, crc is a doctoral student and research/teaching assistant of rehabilitation counseling in the department of counseling, education psychology, & special education, college of education, at michigan state university. her research interests include the career development of people with disabilities, the vocational needs of transition-age and college-aged students with intellectual and developmental disabilities, psychosocial adjustment, quality of life of individuals with disabilities, and multicultural rehabilitation counseling. annemarie connor, ms, otr/l is an occupational therapist and doctoral student of rehabilitation counselor education in the department of counseling, educational psychology, & special education, college of education, at michigan state university. her research and teaching interests focus on interdisciplinary collaboration, the biopsychosocial aspects of disability, and evidence-based interventions that address adaptive functioning and psychological wellness among individuals with neurodevelopmental disabilities, particularly youth. john f. kosciulek, phd, crc is a professor of rehabilitation counseling in the department of counseling, educational psychology, & special education, college of education, at michigan state university. dr. kosciulek's ongoing teaching, research, and clinical interests include the career development of people with disabilities, vocational rehabilitation, theory development, research methodology, and family adaptation to brain injury. trenton landon, phd, crc is an assistant professor of rehabilitation counseling in the department of special education and rehabilitation at utah state university. his teaching and research interests include the professional development and clinical supervision of counselors, issues of social justice, community inclusion and equity for persons with disabilities, and transition of youth with disabilities. jinhee park, ms, crc is a doctoral student and research/teaching assistant of rehabilitation counseling in the department of counseling, educational psychology, & special education, college of education, at michigan state university. her research interests involve psychiatric rehabilitation, working alliance, vocational rehabilitation for transition youth with disabilities, and multicultural rehabilitation counseling. http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/reports/inequalitymatters.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/documents/reports/inequalitymatters.pdf http://www.unicef.org/guyana/sowc_report_2013.pdf http://www.unicef.org/guyana/sowc_report_2013.pdf http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/en/ http://www.who.int/disabilities/world_report/2011/en/ career development for youth with disabilities in south korea p1 career development for youth with disabilities in south korea 4 global education review 3(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: fife, brian l. (2016). renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy: school choice in the early twentyfirst century. global education review, 3(2). 4-22 renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy: school choice in the early twenty-first century brian l. fife indiana university-purdue university abstract the common school philosophy of the nineteenth century in the united states is revisited from a contemporary perspective. is the basic ethos of the philosophy of horace mann and others still relevant today? this question is examined and applied to the conservative advocacy of free markets, individual freedom, and school choice in order to assess the extent to which the delivery of government-supported education is done in a way that upholds the values of the past while simultaneously addressing paramount issues related to social equity, diversity, and social cohesion today. keywords common school philosophy; horace mann; school choice; education vouchers; conservatism; public good; charter schools; accountability; individualism; libertarianism; communitarianism introduction the idea of free public education for all students did not begin with the leader of the nineteenthcentury common school movement, horace mann. prominent americans such as benjamin rush, thomas jefferson, and noah webster, among others, espoused the notion in their writings long before the 1830s (fife, 2013, pp. 28; spring, 2014, pp. 78-79). yet as downs (1974) noted: “the impact of horace mann’s ideas and achievements has been profoundly felt in the educational world at home and abroad for well over a century. few figures in our history have made such a pervasive and enduring impression on american culture and civilization. many of the issues raised by mann are as live and relevant today as they were in the eighteenforties, when he was a highly effective missionary for universal public education.” (preface). while a great deal of scholarship exists on mann’s education philosophy (e.g., makechnie, 1937; foster, 1960; and litz (1975), the central purpose of this article is to highlight the pertinence and relevance of mann’s ideals to contemporary debates over school choice, charter schools, and education vouchers. brief biographical sketch of horace mann horace mann was born in franklin, massachusetts on may 4, 1796. he entered brown university in 1816 and graduated with high honors in 1819. he was admitted to the massachusetts bar and practiced law until 1837. in 1833, he was elected to the massachusetts _____________________________ corresponding author: brian l. fife, department of public policy, indiana university-purdue university fort wayne, 2101 e. coliseum boulevard, fort wayne, in 46805 email: fifeb@ipfw.edu mailto:fifeb@ipfw.edu renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 5 senate and served as president of the senate from 1835-1837, and was instrumental in the creation of the massachusetts state hospital for the insane. in 1837, he left the state senate to become the first secretary of the newly established massachusetts board of education. he served in this capacity until 1848 and wrote 12 annual reports that become highly influential in the common school movement. in 1848, he resigned his position as secretary of the board of education to fill a vacant seat in the u.s. house of representatives. the vacancy was due to the death of john quincy adams, the former president who served in the house for almost two decades after his presidency. mann was an outspoken abolitionist during his tenure in the house. in 1852, mann ran for governor of massachusetts as the free-soil candidate. after his defeat, he became president of antioch college in yellow springs, ohio. he served at antioch until his death on august 2, 1859 (fife, 2013, pp. 13-14). in his final baccalaureate address to students that year, he offered the following challenge to students: so, in the infinitely nobler battle in which you are engaged against error and wrong, if ever repulsed or stricken down, may you always be solaced and cheered by the exulting cry of triumph over some abuse in church or state, some vice or folly in society, some false opinion or cruelty or guilt which you have overcome! and i beseech you to treasure up in your hearts these my parting words: be ashamed to die until you have won some victory for humanity (mann, 1891, volume 5, p.524). indeed, as the champion of the common school movement of the nineteenth century, mann did accomplish a “victory for humanity.” as taylor (2010) put it: although the revolutionary generation spoke of the great need for education in a free republic, it was the generation coming to maturity in the middle of the nineteenth century that solidified the institutional form for meeting this need; horace mann and his colleagues cultivated, defined, shaped, and instituted the common schools as the location for this politically necessary education. these public schools would come to be thought of as the single most critical tool for building civic equality and producing responsible, productive, unified, and committed citizens (p.ix). the common school philosophy is clearly under serious attack from the religious right and the school choice movement. one education researcher put it bluntly: choice, privatization, charter schools, and multicultural education put the final nail in the coffin of the common school. choice, privatization of schools, and charter schools were promoted as a key to improving education and america’s competitive advantage in world markets. during the reagan, bush, and clinton administrations religious conservatives’ support of school choice began to attract a wide audience ranging from liberals to profit-making educational corporations. the basic idea of choice runs counter to the common school ideal of having all children receive a common education that inculcates a common culture and common moral and political values (spring, 2014, p.432). the entire philosophy and ethos of the choice movement are based on dubious perceptions of marketplace capitalism as it pertains to a public good: k-12 education. 6 global education review 3(2) education as a public good with requisite accountability to the people a public good is one where if it is consumed by one citizen, it cannot be withheld from others. in other words, all members of society cannot be excluded from consuming the good or commodity in question (olson, 1965). examples of public goods that typically will not render controversy include national defense/military security, police and fire protection, the criminal justice system, transportation/infrastructure, and the postal system. the common denominator in all of these public goods is that public officials are accountable to citizens and the people can hold their elected officials accountable for their actions and stewardship of the people’s resources. those seeking to privatize goods that have been traditionally delivered in the public sector have done little to address the accountability issue (verkuil, 2007). mann and his fellow visionaries included education as a public good because they felt that it was the only equalizer in a capitalist society, where formal education provided the opportunity for children to be upwardly mobile economically as adult citizens. to his contemporary critics of public education, mann offered the following prophesy: it is known, too, that our noble system of free schools for the whole people is strenuously opposed by a few persons in our own state, and by no inconsiderable numbers in some of the other states of this union; and that a rival system of “parochial” or “sectarian schools” is now urged upon the public by a numerous, a powerful, and a well-organized body of men. it has pleased the advocates of this rival system, in various public addresses, in reports, and through periodicals devoted to their cause, to denounce our system as irreligious and anti-christian. they do not trouble themselves to describe what our system is, but adopt a more summary way to forestall public opinion against it by using general epithets of reproach, and signals of alarm (mann, 1891, volume 4, 298). opponents to the common school in mann’s era sought to undermine it by using hyperbole to advance their own political agenda. how is this different than the school choice movement today? the negative commentary about public education is consistent, then and now, and the lack of tangible evidence about the common/public school experience by opponents is very similar when comparing the 1850s to the 2010s. politically, it has been particularly poignant since the publication of a nation at risk in 1983. ever since the study was made public, choice advocates have advocated their vision of educational reform using free market principles, though the conclusions rendered by the participants in this study have been rebuked as hyperbolic, self-serving, and based on faulty data analysis. in fact, one researcher described the national commission on excellence in education’s work in this manner: as i previously have written, we should consider a nation at risk to be the greatest lie that the state has ever produced regarding our america’s public schools. risk was more than a document. in the first place, it was the most efficacious educational report ever issued by the federal government, judged in terms of the scope and scale of educational reforms that it engendered over the past twenty years. it was also a well-designed and orchestrated propaganda campaign that actually began 18 months prior to its release when secretary of education terrel bell established the national renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 7 commission for excellence in education (ncee). if we examine the tactics of the ncee as they are described by the commission’s executive director, milton goldberg, and senior research associate, james harvey, and if we even minimally analyze the verbiage used in their descriptions of those tactics, we recognize some rather disturbing patterns in their work (gabbard, 2003, p.54). efficiency is an important goal in both the public and private sectors. finite resources must be managed in a plausible manner. yet there are times when there is more at stake than simply an input-output ratio. mann effectively operationalized a conception of free public schools that had been articulated in the late eighteenth century. public policies that permit and promote private entrepreneurs to operate and manage schools (charter schools exist in most states and education vouchers in some states) amounts to a form of outsourcing that poses a number of fundamental challenges in a constitutional republic. as verkuil has eloquently stated: the government exercises sovereign powers. when those powers are delegated to outsiders, the capacity to govern is undermined. a government appointment creates a public servant who, whether through the oath, the security clearance, the desire to achieve public goals, or the psychic income of service, is different from those in the private sector. the office itself is honored. this is why many in our democratic system live in a dual reality, decrying the president, whether it be bush or clinton, reagan or roosevelt, but respecting the presidency; the office of george washington, the first among the heroes of our republic. those offices that fall under the president deserve similar respect. anyone who has served in government, from a buck private to a cabinet official, knows this feeling. and they also know that the public and private sectors have different boundaries. outsourcing tests these boundaries. by doing so, it pushes government to justify delegations of public power in private hands (2007, 1). public education officials should not be in the practice of delegating and abrogating their duties and responsibilities to private officials who are motivated by profit first and foremost. public sector officials are supposed to focus on the promotion of the greater common good as the ultimate policy objective in the course of their duties. values such as justice, equity, fairness, diversity, and equality are those that motivate those in public service the most; can the same be said about their counterparts in industry? is the application of general business principles to education policy reasonable? will it result in a better education system for all students in the country? the values embodied in the business model, including the premise that public goods should be open to competition and privatization, have been in existence since at least the end of the nineteenth century. according to gawthrop, “for well over the past 100 years, public administrators have been admonished to adopt the techniques, to reflect the attitudes, and to embrace the philosophy of their private-sector counterparts. the drive for civil service reform that began in the wake of the civil war was simply the running salvo of a much more extensive and intensive campaign designed to shape the managerial operations of government in the image of the private sector” (1998, 126). a very famous american was instrumental in promulgating this philosophy in the early stages of the progressive era and it has been remarkably durable ever since. 8 global education review 3(2) political science professor woodrow wilson published an article titled “the study of administration” in 1887. in describing public administration during his time period, wilson prophesied that the field of public administration is a field of business. it is removed from the hurry and strife of politics; it at most points stands apart even from the debatable ground of constitutional study. it is a part of political life only as the methods of the counting-house are a part of the life of society; only as machinery is part of the manufactured product. but it is, at the same time, raised very far above the dull level of mere technical detail by the fact that through its greater principles it is directly connected with the lasting maxims of political wisdom, the permanent truths of political progress (wilson, 1887, 209-10). wilson’s emphasis on efficiency during his scholarly career is quite transformational in nature since little has changed since the late 1880s. the importance and special attention to efficiency in public administration and politics, including the delivery of public education, may actually be gaining since the days of woodrow wilson. as gawthrop noted indeed, if the present mood in the united states is any gauge, there appears to be a strong current running in favor of an increased reliance on the private sector for the implementation of public policy. this attitude seems to reflect an enticing conviction that the private sector, governed as it is by clearly focused managerial strategies dictated by an entrepreneurial spirit is more reliable than a commitment by the public sector’s career bureaucracy to the spirit of democracy. the “bottom-line” argument inherent in this assumption is that the pragmatic, “no-nonsense” rubrics of private-sector management are certain to yield greater efficiency, effectiveness, and accountability than are obtained from the kaleidoscopic attitudes and values reflected in the public-sector bureaucracy (1998, 125). the value of efficiency tends to attract undue emphasis to the detriment of others, especially equity and fairness. for about 130 years or so, many have touted the application of private sector managerial techniques to public service as if this were both plausible and prudent. the major shortcoming with this philosophical approach, however, is aptly noted by gawthrop when he concluded that “[t]he ethos of public service, so essential to the spirit of democracy to flourish, can be realized only if directed by a moral imperative bound to the common good” (1998, xiii). the moral imperative in education policy is the promotion of the common school ideal articulated by mann in the mid-nineteenth century. the twentieth century conservative philosophy long after the passing of horace mann, a number of intellectuals in the twentieth century were instrumental in the creation of a theoretical focus on the individual and away from a communitarian notion of the greater common good, albeit in the philosophical tradition of adam smith as articulated in the wealth of nations. in 1776, as thomas jefferson and his colleagues drafted the declaration of independence, smith espoused the plausibility of laissez-faire economics. to him, the private marketplace, with limited interference from government officials through the regulatory process, adjusts to most economic realities. this renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 9 idea has been a dominant paradigm in u.s. history (fife, 2013, 43-5). as hursh (2011) aptly determined: in the united states, neoliberal doctrine is often described and defined as free-market capitalism in which economic prosperity is best achieved through unregulated or free markets, the withering away of the state as the government’s role in regulating businesses and funding social services are either eliminated or privatized, and encouraging individuals to become self-interest entrepreneurs. under neoliberalism, economic inequality does not result from unequal social structures that privilege the already advantaged but instead, from differences in individual choices and efforts. inequality, therefore, is deserved and should not be a concern of government (p.7). this doctrine has had a profound effect on american politics and public policy, as is evidenced by the work of a number of influential conservative thinkers in the twentieth century. modern conservatives such as friedrich hayek, leo strauss, and milton friedman have extolled the virtues of the free enterprise system (fife, 2013, 45-63). hayek (1899-1992) concluded that it was the abandonment of values such as individualism, freedom, and laissez-faire capitalism that led to socialist or fascist oppression and tyranny. he envisioned a substantial divide between a free market economy and one which is socialistic and heavily regulated: the choice open to us is not between a system in which everybody will get what he deserves according to some absolute and universal standard of right, and one where the individual shares are determined partly by accident or good or ill chance, but between a system where it is the will of a few persons that decides who is to get what, and one where it depends at least partly on the ability and enterprise of the people concerned and partly on unforeseen circumstances (hayek, 1944, 101-2). during world war ii, hayek envisioned causality between extensive government intervention in the economy and society and a concomitant decline in individual freedom. in a later work in 1960, he argued that far reaching government intervention in the economy, especially through social programs for the indigent, resulted in negative unintended consequences. his philosophical views were central in the conservatism of ronald reagan in the united states and margaret thatcher in the united kingdom in the 1980s and 1990s. hayek did not oppose all forms of regulation; he perhaps could be described as a minimalist in this regard, at least in the context of the modern libertarian movement. leo strauss (1899-1973) was a prominent neoconservative from the university of chicago. while strauss had similar views to hayek when applied to economic and regulatory matters, he also believed that federal officials should impose their will on the citizens in order to promote a more moral society. neoconservatives, such as george w. bush, perceive themselves as moral crusaders seeking to impose a moral character on the masses in order to promote stability and order. one scholar concluded that: in short, neoconservatism is the legacy of leo strauss. it echoes all the dominant features of his philosophy—the political importance of religion, the necessity of nationalism, the language of nihilism, the sense of crisis, the friend/foe mentality, the hostility toward women, the rejection of modernity, the nostalgia of the past, and the abhorrence of liberalism. and having established itself as the dominant ideology of the republican party, it threatens to 10 global education review 3(2) remake america in its own image (drury, 1997, 178). according to officials at the new york times, strauss was the godfather of the republican party’s contract with america in 1994 that helped the gop recapture both houses of congress. the house of representatives had been controlled by the democrats for forty consecutive years at that time. it was milton friedman (1912-2006) who provided much of the theoretical foundation for the school choice movement today. friedman gained international acclaim for being the leader of the chicago school of monetary economics, and was a member of reagan’s economic policy advisory board. he first extolled the virtues of privatizing schools and other public services in the mid-1950s (friedman, 1955). in an important work published in 1962, he presented a spirited defense of laissez-faire capitalism. not only did private enterprise result in economic freedom but to friedman it was a necessary condition for political freedom as well. government, to him, had two primary functions: first, the scope of government must be limited. its major function must be to protect our freedom both from the enemies outside our gates and from our fellow citizens: to preserve law and order, to enforce private contracts, to foster competitive markets…the second broad principle is that government power must be dispersed. if government is to exercise power, better in the county than in the state, better in the state than in washington (friedman, 1962, 2-3). in a later work, friedman and his wife both touted the virtues of the free market system. they were staunch and unabashed advocates for school choice. though both have passed away, a website in their honor is prominent in today’s school choice movement: the friedman foundation for educational choice (http://www.edchoice.org). the policy implications of the marketbased ideology are quite profound. in economics, conservatives embrace the core assumption that private and parochial schools are better than their traditional public school counterparts. setting aside the reality that the definition of an effective school is typically absent, conservatives generally believe that the private sector can outperform the public sector on a regular and ongoing basis. intertwined with this vision is the basic understanding from the conservative community that if traditional public schools had to compete with nonpublic and charter schools, the overall quality of public k-12 education would be enhanced. yet it is important to remember that the basis of comparison (public versus private) is a complicated phenomenon, as industry officials tend to focus singularly on efficiency whereas their counterparts in the public and nonprofit sectors generally must contend with efficiency, equity, and effectiveness in an omnipresent manner. some critics of traditional public schools have labeled them “government” schools. the great crusader for the common schools, horace mann, believed in the plausibility and morality of schools run by public sector entities. an educated populace was an essential condition in a republican form of government. to mann, education was a public good that had to be provided by public entities that were accountable to the people, not the marketplace as if it were a common commodity. the school choice movement the philosophical essence of the school choice movement is presented in the friedman foundation for educational choice website: “school choice gives parents the freedom to choose their children’s education, while http://www.edchoice.org/ renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 11 encouraging healthy competition among schools to better serve families’ needs. school choice lets parents use the public funds set aside for their children’s education to choose the schools— public or private, near or far, religious or secular—that work best for them” (friedman foundation for educational choice, 2014). the focal point for school choice advocates is individual freedom, which essentially entails the freedom for parents to send their children to a school of choice. there is also a sense that people have a right to profit from choice enterprises. the entire emphasis is on the individual and freedom of choice as a positive feature in contemporary society. in some ways, school choice is popular. in the most recent annual survey administered by phi delta kappa/gallup poll, 70 percent of respondents indicated that they supported charter schools (nontraditional but public schools) and only 29 percent opposed. however, only 37 percent favored education vouchers and 63 percent opposed (phi delta kappa/gallup poll, 2014). clearly, citizens endorse the notion of choice when it is strictly in the public arena; support for it plummets when the notion of using taxpayers’ money to fund parochial and/or private education is entered into the equation.1 yet, popularity is really not the issue here. it is the contention that the individual has the right to choose the school for her or his child, regardless of the implications and consequences for the rest of society. on this subject, mann offered a dichotomy a long time ago. first, he made the following observation about the public’s support of the common school: another topic, in some respects kindred to the last, is the apathy of the people themselves towards our common schools. the wide usefulness of which this institution is capable is shorn away on both sides, by two causes diametrically opposite. on one side, there is a portion of the community, who do not attach sufficient value to the system to do the things necessary to its healthful and energetic working. they may say excellent things about it, they may have the conviction of its general utility; but they do not understand, that the wisest conversation not embodied in action, that convictions too gentle and quiet to coerce performance, are little better than worthless. the prosperity of the system always requires some labor. it requires a conciliatory disposition, and oftentimes a little sacrifice of personal preferences (mann, 1891, volume 2, 408-9). it is important to heed mann’s commentary. while there are americans who rhetorically support the notion of public schools, many who fit mann’s description are passive by definition and not prone to be overly proactive, at least when it comes to politics and elections. the other group that he references may be strikingly similar to choice advocates today, especially supporters of education vouchers: opposite to this class, who tolerate, from apathy, a depression in the common schools, there is another class, who affix so high a value upon the culture of their children, and understand so well the necessity of a skilful preparation of means for its bestowment, that they turn away from the common schools, in their depressed state, and seek, elsewhere, the helps of a more enlarged and thorough education. thus the standard, in descending to a point corresponding with the views and wants of one portion of society, falls below the demands and the regards of another. out of different feelings grow different plans; and while one remains fully content with the common school, the other builds up the 12 global education review 3(2) private school or the academy (mann, 1891, volume 2, 410). a universal belief transcends ideology in the united states. progressives, liberals, moderates, conservatives, and libertarians alike all embrace the premise that education is central to professional and economic development and growth. nothing has changed since the days of mann in this regard. how plausible would it be, given our shared values with regard to the importance of education in the modern world, to further stratify educational opportunities by creating public policies that promote vouchers and charter schools to the detriment of the common schools? what mann articulated by way of vision in the nineteenth century, once manifested with the passage of compulsory attendance laws, still has significance in contemporary society. the vast majority of children in his time attended public schools, and that is still true today. at best, advocates of public education today typically will get a modest level of support from the general public. a vocal minority has always vigorously pursued its agenda, which in both time periods in question, has meant that the politics of self-interest has trumped the greater common good and an intense, well organized group has generally been very successful by some criteria vis-à-vis a generally reticent populace. those who concur with the friedman philosophy are confident that private and parochial schools are generally “better” than their traditional public school counterparts. the problem with this assumption is that it remains largely untested into the early twenty-first century. the basic premise is that if traditional public schools had to be competitive with their private and nontraditional public school counterparts, the overall quality of public education would be enhanced. traditional public school officials would actively seek to improve the quality of their schools so that they could compete with their counterparts in the private and charter school arenas. are these conservative assumptions about public education valid? braun, jenkins, and grigg (2006) conducted a study comparing private and public school students using hierarchical linear modeling. these researchers did not find significant differences between the two groups: in grades 4 and 8 for both reading and mathematics, students in private schools achieved at higher levels than students in public schools. the average difference in school means ranged from almost 8 points for grade 4 mathematics, to about 18 points for grade 8 reading. the average differences were all statistically significant. adjusting the comparisons for student characteristics resulted in reductions in all four average differences of approximately 11 to 14 points. based on adjusted school means, the average for public schools was significantly higher than the average for private schools for grade 4 mathematics, while the average for private schools was significantly higher than the average for public schools for grade 8 reading. the average differences in adjusted school means for both grade 4 reading and grade 8 mathematics were not significantly different from zero (p.v). many promises about education quality are made with regard to the advocates of school choice and market-based competition. the libertarian ideals touted by such scholars as friedman, have the unfortunate consequence of emphasizing the choice of parents as to where their children attend schools as the ultimate objective rather than the creation of a corps of quality schools for all children, regardless of their background, because education is a public renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 13 good guaranteed to all children of all social classes. in short, the libertarian focus on freedom and choice obscures the fundamental fact that education would be allocated based upon a nineteenth century business model that may be harmful and relegates many traditional public school students, particularly those located in poor urban neighborhoods, to second-class citizenship with limited opportunities. peterson (2006) delineated the marketplace philosophy in a number of works. for example, he maintained that: school reform has long been on the nation’s agenda. earlier strategies tried out new curricular ideas, new management techniques, or the commitment of additional financial resources. but, recently, two more sweeping reforms—one holding schools accountable for specific educational outcomes, the other introducing choice and competition—have been placed on the table. the first involves setting state standards and measuring student performance by means of standardized tests…the other option, choice and competition, is less well known, though some believe it to be the more promising reform strategy. it takes american business and industry as the appropriate model for schools to follow. in the private economy, consumers make choices, businesses make profits when they satisfy consumers more than their competitors do, and new inventions constantly drive the economy to ever-higher levels of productivity. choice and competition: it’s the american way—most of the time. (3) arguably, peterson’s latter point is reflective of a capitalist economy, where choice and competition may be suitable for various consumer choices. however, the business model applied to the delivery of education is fundamentally dubious by definition, for it would result in the proliferation of outsourcing, or using private companies to deliver public education. the reliance of the delivery of public education on private, for profit, corporations is dangerous precisely because public accountability will be undermined. accountability does exist in the common schools; teachers, principals, and members of school boards are accountable to the people as well as state and local elected officials. the same type of accountability does not exist in the private sector. it is quite possible, and perhaps even probable, that the goal of efficiency, or profit, will supersede other matters such as social equity, fairness, and education quality. rejecting the politics of individualism americans have long had reverence for what many perceive as rugged individualism; the individual who succeeded in spite of significant challenges has always had particular appeal to many in american society. individualism has been depicted favorably in literature and through the mediums of television and movies. as a result, it is not uncommon in this country that citizens view public policy debates from the perspective of the individual as opposed to embracing a more communitarian perspective. in other words, many people tend to ponder policy proposals in terms of how they may affect the individual and her or his family, as opposed to considering what implications the policy ideas may have on the greater common good. scholars such as hudson (2013) have noted that individualism is part of the american creed: people in most other nations understand their national attachment in terms of a common historical experience, usually common ethnicity, and often religious belief. as a nation of immigrants, the united states contains a diversity of 14 global education review 3(2) people with different histories, ethnic backgrounds, and religions. what has held the nation together is a widely held commitment to the ideals symbolized in the founding events of the nation—the american revolution and constitutional ratification—and the principles found in the documents connected to those events…what are these ideals—the american creed—that define american identity? for the most part, they are the ideals of classical liberalism: limited government, the rule of law, liberty, political equality, and individualism….whereas john locke may have understood liberal ideals to be relevant to the political goals of english gentleman property holders, the american revolutionaries applied them—especially political liberty, equality, and individualism—to all citizens, as is evident in the declaration of independence. the american revolution produced a democratized version of classical liberalism that became the american creed (hudson, 2013, 107-8). rugged individualism has deep roots in american history, and this reality was noticed by alexis de tocqueville when he came to america in the 1830s and used the term “individualism” in this manner: individualism is a reflective and peaceable sentiment that disposes each citizen to isolate himself from the mass of those like him and to withdraw to one side with his family and his friends, so that after having thus created a little society for his own use, he willingly abandons society at large to itself. selfishness is born of a blind instinct; individualism proceeds from an erroneous judgment rather than a depraved sentiment. it has its source in the defects of the mind as much as in the vices of the heart (tocqueville, 2000, 482). americans at that time had a very positive perception of individualism, but tocqueville had significant concerns about this aspect of american life.to tocqueville, individualism taken to an extreme could actually undermine democracy. he maintained that “selfishness withers the seed of all virtues; individualism at first dries up only the source of public virtues; but in the long term it attacks and destroys all the others and will finally be absorbed by selfishness. selfishness is a vice as old as the world. it scarcely belongs more to one form of society than to another” (tocqueville, 2000, 483). he determined that individualism taken too far could denigrate into egoism. a society of egoists does not prioritize the greater common good, if a consensus could be achieved as to what that may entail. to hudson, americans had not yet succumbed to extremist tendencies when it came to individualism in the 1830s. this is no longer the case in the modern era. bellah (1985) and his colleagues documented the growing reality that individualistic tendencies had become extreme in the united states. in their study of middleclass americans, the researchers determined that most citizens defined every aspect of their lives in highly individualistic terms. this is what they reported 30 years ago with regard to their findings of middle-class america: we spoke of the belief of madison and the other founders that our form of government was dependent on the existence of virtue among the people. it was such virtue that they expected to resolve the tension between private interest and the public good. without civic virtue, they thought, the republic would decline into factional chaos and probably renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 15 end in authoritarian rule. half a century later, this idea was reiterated in tocqueville’s argument about the importance of the mores—the “habits of the heart”—of americans. even at the end of the nineteenth century, when establishment and populist visions were the chief antagonists in the continuing argument about the shape of our society, madisonian ideas were still presupposed. the tension between private interest and the public good is never completely resolved in any society. but in a free republic, it is the task of the citizen, whether ruler or ruled, to cultivate civic virtue in order to mitigate the tension and render it manageable. as the twentieth century has progressed, that understanding, so important through most of our history, has begun to slip our grasp. as we unthinkingly use the oxymoron “private citizen,” the very meaning of citizenship escapes us. and with ronald reagan’s assertion that “we the people” are a “special interest group,” our concern for the economy being the only thing that holds us together, we have reached a kind of end of the line (bellah et al., 1985, 2701). choice advocates are politically savvy in their approach of marketing their product, whether it be through vouchers, charter schools, or some other mechanism. they encourage people to focus inwardly. in other words, parents have the right to send their children to “better” schools, regardless of separation of church and state issues, whether choice may result in more segregated schools, whether children from indigent backgrounds may end up doomed to attend dysfunctional schools with insufficient resources, or whether class conflict will actually increase as a result of freedom of choice. we need to develop our capacity to analyze ideas and engage in political discourse in order to meet the challenges of the early twentyfirst century. a rote acceptance of the premise that choice is good, without considering its implications on the republic, is a path that the early founders, mann, tocqueville, and a number of other political philosophers sought to avoid, for a society that is too inward in its worldview is one that ultimately succumbs to extremist tendencies. rugged individualism runs counter to the communitarian sentiment that was famously voiced by john f. kennedy in his inaugural address on january 20, 1961: “and so, my fellow americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country” (american presidency project, 2014). a communitarian approach to public policy debates would reflect the kennedy vision of over a half-century ago: bringing about a better balance between the community and the individual in the united states requires a more communitarian approach to politics. such an approach challenges the libertarian view that individuals are completely autonomous authors of their own existence; instead, it regards people as products of the many communities— from their families and neighborhoods to the national community—in which they live (hudson, 2013, 133). the politics of selfishness and inwardness will not preserve the noble common school ideal. they will certainly destroy it if it is allowed to happen. as grant (2008) maintained, the new social compact of our time is for citizens to understand that they not only have fundamental rights guaranteed to them in a representative democracy, but also that they have equally important responsibilities to their fellow human beings as well. 16 global education review 3(2) two researchers provided the following analytical summary of mann and the common school ideal: in spite of obvious disagreements and conflicts, americans in northeastern and midwestern sections of the country rallied around the concept of “the common school” for several decades after the civil war. democrats and whigs, workingmen and capitalists, and country folk and urban dwellers joined forces in sufficient numbers to create what many considered to be the indispensable institution of american democracy. leaders of the movement, exemplified by horace mann of massachusetts, generated enthusiasm for the idea of the common school by appealing to a variety of motives, not all of which were consistent or compatible. essentially a movement that reflected the values of republicanism, protestantism, and capitalism, the common school revival held out the promise that the educational frontier was an open and promising land itself. the common school movement unleashed a set of ideas and series of trends that are still in motion. schools should be free, not based on fees. they should be open to all, not just a few. they should foster morality and ethics but avoid sectarian entanglements (urban and wagoner, 2000, 118). while the common school ideal still persists in that most children attend traditional public schools, it is under serious strain from conservative free-market advocates who tout school choice as the optimum way to reform public education in america. certainly the objectives of choice advocates are subject to debate, but it is also evident that the libertarian values embodied in the school choice, charter school, and voucher movements all fundamentally miss the mark on one crucial point: education is a public good and it should be addressed as one, otherwise, some rather sobering realities are likely to ensue. education vouchers are potentially very explosive in terms of further stratifying our society. justice stephen breyer expressed this concern in his dissent in zelman v. simmonsharris (2002): the court, in effect, turns the clock back. it adopts, under the name of “neutrality,” an interpretation of the establishment clause that this court rejected more than half a century ago. in its view, the parental choice that offers each religious group a kind of equal opportunity to secure government funding overcomes the establishment clause concern for social concord. an earlier court found that “equal opportunity” principle insufficient; it read the clause as insisting upon greater separation of church and state, at least in respect to primary education….in a society composed of many different religious creeds, i fear that this present departure from the court’s earlier understanding risks creating a form of religiously based conflict potentially harmful to the nation’s social fabric. choice can have profound implications on american society if implemented en masse in a manner consistent with the friedman philosophy. social discord and enhanced levels of religious-based conflict would exact a high price for having more choice in the education sector. charter schools, by definition, are a form of public schools. while they are publicly funded, charter school officials are not bound by the same rules, regulations, and laws that apply to traditional public schools. by definition, there is a fairness question. why should some rules renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 17 apply to some schools, but not others, which are both in the public domain? they do afford more choice for parents, but that choice also comes with definitive associated costs. charter schools have provided a relatively easy path toward the privatization of public education. there is a growing reliance on private education management organizations in the operation of charter schools. in addition, charter schools are more segregated than traditional public schools, and they are less likely to admit children with special needs or whose native language is not english (fife, 2013, 159-162). with regard to charter school effectiveness, a great deal of attention has been focused on two studies conducted by evaluators at the center for research on education outcomes (credo) at stanford university. in 2009, researchers conducted a longitudinal study of more than 70 percent of all charter school students in the united states. they concluded that 46 percent of all charter school students have testing results that are no different than students in traditional schools. while 17 percent of charter school students outperformed their traditional public school counterparts, 37 percent did measurably worse (stanford university, 2009). a follow-up study on charter school performance was published in 2013. the follow-up study reflected an 80 percent increase in the number of students enrolled in charter schools in four years. over 6,000 charter schools serving more than 2.3 million students were included (stanford university, 2013). the researchers who conducted this sizable study which included 27 states and new york city concluded that less than one hundredth of one percent (<0.01 percent) of the variation in test performance in reading is explainable by charter school enrollment. there was no statistically significant difference on math tests between the two groups. though credo officials publicly reported positive gains by charter school students, critics contend that most empirical studies replicate what the credo researchers discovered, that test-score outcomes of traditional public school and charter school students are virtually identical, in spite of the manner in which the study was marketed to media outlets (university of colorado, 2013). the relative effectiveness of education voucher programs, particularly in milwaukee and cleveland, has been the focus of a contentious debate. as hochschild and scovronick (2003) delineated: if vouchers substantially enhanced individual achievement, they would raise legitimate questions about priorities among the individual, group-based, and collective goals of education. but there is no solid evidence that they do. the first voucher program, in milwaukee, has had three sets of evaluators. john witte and his colleagues at the university of wisconsin found over its first five years “no consistent difference” in test scores for students who used the vouchers and a matched set of students who remained in the milwaukee public schools. paul peterson and his colleagues at harvard university used a different comparison group and found statistically significant improvements in the scores of voucher students. finally, cecelia rouse at princeton university used another set of techniques and split the difference— finding improvements in math but not in reading. she also identified a set of milwaukee public schools with small classes that outperformed both the choice schools and other public schools (pp.12627). molnar (1998) also concluded that smaller classes do more to increase student achievement than vouchers. officials at the keystone 18 global education review 3(2) research center (2011) concluded that there was no measurable difference between students in public schools and voucher students and that there was a lack of accountability as it pertained to the use of tax credits for private and religious school tuition. home schooling and virtual schools are other forms of school choice. similar to charter schools, increases in student participation levels have occurred in recent years (fife, 2013, 16768). the emphasis on choice takes the focus away from mann’s vision of common schools. instead of bringing students from diverse backgrounds to provide equality of opportunity for all, to help young people embrace diversity so that they can learn to get along in the modern world, and to help train them to be better citizens in this republic, choice advocates are actually encouraging parents to isolate their children even more. isolation, even if well intended presumably due, in part, to concerns about safety, will do little to make citizens more empathetic and willing to address the policy challenges that exist today and in the future. mann believed that education should be provided to all children evenly. in doing so, he touted a deeply-held american conviction that all children should be given an equal opportunity to succeed in life, regardless of their plight in this world. what children did with the education they were given was up to them. yet there is a key reality that was applicable to mann’s world of the nineteenth century that is as important today as it was then. america is a very diverse country. mann aspired to bring children from very different backgrounds together in the same school, impart knowledge to them, and teach them to be vigilant citizens in a republican form of government. in addition, he envisioned that the students would learn to get along in relative peace and harmony. some seemingly ignore the reality that schools have multiple functions, one of which is to teach and practice tolerance in an ever-changing world. will school officials continue to address this aspect of education when parents choose to send their children to a more homogeneous school or isolate them to a greater extent than is presently the case? renewing the common school ideal in the united states according to mann, the general public should be taxed to fund the common schools but not taxed to fund religious schools. his premise is salient in the early twenty-first century, as some choice advocates embrace friedman’s voucher idea as a way to reform education in the united states: the very terms “public school” and “common school” bear upon their face that they are schools which the children of the entire community may attend. every man not on the pauper-list is taxed for their support; but he is not taxed to support them as religious establishment. but he is taxed to support them as a preventive means against dishonesty, against fraud, and against violence, on the same principle that he is taxed to support criminal courts as a punitive means against the same offences. he is taxed to support schools, on the same principle that he is taxed to support paupers,-because a child without education is poorer and more wretched than a man without bread….but if a man is taxed to support a school where religious doctrines are inculcated which he believes to be false, and which he believes that god condemns, then he is excluded from the school by the divine law, at the same time he is compelled to support it by the human law. this is a double wrong. it is politically wrong, because, if such a man educates his children at all, he must educate them renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 19 elsewhere, and thus pay two taxes, while some of his neighbors pay less than their due proportion of one; and it is religiously wrong, because he is constrained by human power to promote what he believes the divine power forbids. the principle involved in such a course is pregnant with all tyrannical consequences (mann, 1891, volume 4, 312-13). thus, america’s great common school crusader, horace mann, a person of very deep religious convictions, was vehemently opposed to the notion that taxpayers’ money should be utilized to fund parochial education. in recent years, conservative politicians such as former governor mitch daniels and current governor mike pence in indiana, among others, have espoused charters, education vouchers, homeschooling, and virtual education and have blamed bad teachers and teacher unions for education shortcomings, at least from their perspective. any human endeavor can be improved; the principle applies to both the public and private sectors. but the callous and harmful denigration of public education advanced by these elected officials and many others across the country, has serious consequences and not just because taxpayers’ funds are being utilized to fund parochial education. the justices upheld this practice as constitutional in zelman as long as the policy in question provided for public and private school choice. the fact that 96 percent of parents in cleveland chose parochial schools with their vouchers did not matter to the court’s majority because they had the option of sending their children to other public schools. the harm is in the denigration of a public institution, the common school, which is the very foundation of america’s republican way of life. should we abandon a time honored institution such as public schools, without systematic inquiry, in order to promote an ideological agenda when it comes to the education of america’s children? should we participate in the creation of a veritable theocracy, as some fundamentalists believe that religion should somehow be “returned” to the public schools? americans today should consider the advice of thomas jefferson in his famous letter to the danbury baptists. he contended that believing with you that religion is a matter which lies solely between man & his god, that he owes account to none other for his faith or his worship, that the legitimate powers of government reach actions only and not opinions, i contemplate with sovereign reverence that act of the whole american people which declared that their legislature should “make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof;” thus building a wall of eternal separation between church & state (library of congress, 2013). the separation of church and state advocated by jefferson in the early nineteenth century has allowed a very diverse nation of immigrants to live together in relative peace for centuries. this policy has been enormously effective and ought to be preserved for future generations of americans. in reality, there are fundamental implications to school choice, including, but certainly not limited to, social cohesion, promotion of diversity, racial balance, equity and fairness, separation of church and state, and basic republicanism. the great american experiment in democracy is predicated on a simple premise, tolerance. the diversity that exists in a nation with a rich immigration history has been maintained, though certainly not without challenges and periods of strife, past and present. though many groups in human history have experienced social discord and violence for extended periods of 20 global education review 3(2) time, americans have achieved and sustained a diverse republic that is relatively peaceful most of the time. too much inward reflection, under the guise of school choice, is an unnecessary and unwarranted challenge to the relative harmony that has pervaded society a good portion of the time. now is the time for renewal the educator joy elmer morgan once offered the following insight with regard to horace mann on the centennial of his becoming the first secretary of education in massachusetts: in 1837 when horace mann came to the secretaryship of the massachusetts newly-created board of education, a financial panic dominated the nation. fear, greed, and confusion were everywhere. unemployment, misery, and distress prevailed. schools were poor, teachers unprepared and underpaid. the well-to-do were sending their sons and daughters to private schools. they felt little or no concern for the public schools which they thought only good enough for paupers. in such a time people needed especially to place a higher value upon themselves—to attach more importance to the homely virtues and to thinking as a way of life. in 1837 the time had come for an educational revival. horace mann— himself up from the soil—came forward to express the needs of the people in a language so clear that his writings are an important part of the national culture (morgan, 1936, vii). in another book on mann’s life at antioch college, morgan offered this message to the future teachers of america: into your keeping is given a sacred trust—the american school. the free common school is the house of the people; the temple of democracy; the bulwark of self-government. to establish this house horace mann lived and labored triumphantly, even as washington labored to establish the republic, and lincoln to preserve it. it is fitting that the future teachers of america movement should have grown out of the horace mann centennial for you are the keepers of his great purpose, his noble ideals, his unconquerable spirit. may you ever study his inspiring life and follow in his steps (morgan, 1938, 2). for the past several years, economic hardship has been endured by many in this country; in 1837, many americans were experiencing very daunting challenges. in spite of the hardships and vicissitudes of life, mann found a way to put education at the forefront of the political and policy agenda during his lifetime. it was not a simple task, but it was not an impossible one, either. americans today could replicate mann’s sense of mission and purpose with regard to education. a renaissance is in order and we must find a way to collectively renew our commitment to public education and the common school vision. hursh (2011) once commented that “[w]e need to imagine and work for a new future, one in which we rethink and reconstruct the role of government, the nature of the economy, our relationship to the environment, and the purpose of schooling” (p.19). the purpose of public education has not changed since the nineteenth century to a considerable extent, and the common school vision of mann must be preserved for future generations. instead of succumbing to the politics of individualism and selfishness, adults in this country owe it to children today and into the future to protect the common school vision and to uphold the sacred promise of public education. the key to addressing the politics of diversity in this renewing the american commitment to the common school philosophy 21 constitutional republic is to provide equality of educational opportunity for all children. horace mann understood this a long time ago and americans would be wise to resist the lure of the libertarian emphasis on individualism and instead openly embrace policies that benefit society as a whole. after all, deeply entrenched in the american tradition is a notion that many citizens in this country have long cherished, e pluribus unum. notes 1. charter schools are nontraditional, publiclyfunded public schools whose officials are freed from some of the regulations and statutes that apply to traditional public schools. in return for the relaxing of various regulations, charter school officials are presumably held accountable for producing specific results, typically higher standardized test scores that are delineated in the charter, or contract, for each charter school. education vouchers are certificates that are issued by a government that can be utilized by parents who receive them to apply those funds toward tuition at a private school rather than sending their children to an assigned traditional public school. references american presidency project. 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(2007). outsourcing democracy: why privatization of government functions threatens democracy and what we can do about it. new york: cambridge university press. wilson, w. (1887). the study of administration. political science quarterly, 2:2, 197-222. zelman v. simmons-harris, 536 u.s. 639 (2002). about the author brian l. fife, phd, is professor and chair in the department of public policy at indiana university-purdue university fort wayne. his background is in political science and he has published in the areas of school desegregation, school choice, education reform, federalism, electoral reform, and legislative reform. http://nepc.colorado.edu/files/smclasssizes.pdf http://pdkintl.org/programs-resources/poll/ http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/multiple_choice_credo.pdf http://credo.stanford.edu/reports/multiple_choice_credo.pdf http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/ncss%202013%20final%20draft.pdf http://credo.stanford.edu/documents/ncss%202013%20final%20draft.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/07/review-credo-2013 http://nepc.colorado.edu/newsletter/2013/07/review-credo-2013 microsoft word gsfrhy6=g][55-b format[2 final rocket to creativity 19 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dole, sharon f., bloom, lisa a., & doss, kristy, k. (2016). rocket to creativity: a field experience in project-based and problem based learning. global education review, 3 (4). 19-32 rocket to creativity: a field experience in problem-based and project-based learning sharon f. dole western carolina university lisa a. bloom western carolina university kristy kowalske doss western carolina university abstract this article reports the impact of a field experience in problem-based (pbl) and project-based learning (pjbl) on in-service teachers’ conceptions of experiential learning. participants had been enrolled in a hybrid class that included an online component in which they learned about pbl and pjbl, and an experiential component in which they facilitated pbl and pjbl with children in grades 1-9 during a oneweek field experience on a university campus. the goal of the field experience was for teachers to change their practice from didactic to inquiry, and to promote critical and creative thinking in their students. a case study method was used that involved data derived from six different sources: online structured interviews, follow-up telephone interviews, discussion board posts, reflections, course feedback, and observations. the main theme that emerged from the data analysis was the critical role the field experience played in applying theory to practice. sub-themes included understanding the process of implementing pbl and pjbl, mastering the logistics of pbl and pjbl, becoming facilitators, and collaborating with partners. results showed that the field experience gave the teachers the “courage” to experiment with a student-centered methodology. keywords field experience, clinical practice, experiential learning, problem-based learning, project-based learning introduction this study examines the role that a field experience in experiential learning, specifically problem-based (pbl) and project-based learning (pjbl), played in teachers’ conceptions. field experiences, also referred to as clinical practices, are key components of today’s teacher education programs as they give candidates the opportunity to connect theory and practice (darling-hammond, 2006; hammerness, darling-hammond, bransford, berliner, cochran-smith, mcdonald, & zeichner, 2005; ______________________________ corresponding author: sharon f. dole, school of teaching and learning, western carolina university, cullowhee, nc 28723 email: dole@email.wcu.edu 20 global education review 3(4) national council for accreditation of teacher education, 2010; national council for teacher quality, 2011). the traditional approach to teacher education has been to learn theory in isolation from practice and many teachers, once they begin teaching, revert to the way they themselves had been taught. lortie (1975) referred to this as apprenticeship of observation, a term he used to describe the preconceptions of teaching that individuals develop based on their own experience as students for 12 or more years. a number of reforms that began in the late 1980’s sought to design teacher education programs that were more coherent and had stronger links between coursework and clinical practice (darlinghammond, hammerness, grossman, rust, & schulman, 2005). studies have shown that these integrated programs have had greater impact on the conceptions and practices of teachers (darling-hammond, 2000; darlinghammond & bransford, 2005; howey & zimpher, 1989). in her analysis of powerful teacher education programs, darling-hammond found that the clinical experiences in these exemplary programs were tightly tied to coursework in which tasks and problems were posed that could be further explored in the clinical setting (2006). however, field experience programs do not always achieve the objective of integrating theory and practice, and many questions still remain about how they contribute to a teacher’s development (anderson & stillman, 2013; opfer & pedder, 2011). the report on clinical preparation commissioned by the national council for accreditation of teacher education (ncate, 2010) emphasized the importance of “moving to programs that are fully grounded in clinical practice and interwoven with academic content and professional courses” (p. ii) in order to effectively prepare teachers for the 21st century. the ncate report compared a teacher to a family doctor in that the doctor must know the knowledge base of medicine as well as be able to understand his/her patients and their symptoms in order to prescribe a course of treatment that will yield the best possible outcomes (2010, p. 27). similarly, clinical practice prepares teachers to observe, interact with, instruct, and assess students (ncate, 2010). zimpher and howey (2013), agreeing with the recommendations of the ncate report, advocated the establishment of university-based centers of pedagogy “devoted entirely to supporting all practices and innovations, laboratory and clinical, necessary for creating high-quality teachers” (p 409). in actuality, centers of pedagogy are both laboratories and clinical classroom sites. the centers of pedagogy would be sites on campus that could act as teacher-training laboratories that would contain the necessary resources and technology for developing cutting-edge practices. the centers would also be responsible for placing pre-service teachers in schools where all teachers, veterans as well as novices, would benefit from the exchange of ideas (zimpher & howey, 2013). although there is almost universal agreement about the importance of field experience in teacher education programs, many questions remain unanswered about its contributions. most of the research on field experience has focused on student teaching experiences of pre-service teachers in classroom settings (anderson & stillman, 2013). darlinghammond et al. (2005) and zeichner and conklin (2005) concluded that when field experiences are carefully coordinated with coursework and closely monitored, pre-service teachers were more successful in enacting practices in the schools and communities for which they were being trained. however, the same may not be true with in-service teachers. there is a scarcity of research of the effect of rocket to creativity 21 field experiences on in-service teachers such as the participants in our study. likewise, there is a lack of research on the effectiveness of attempts to connect theory to practice in clinical practice sites on university campuses, or, what zimpher and howey (2013) refer to as centers of pedagogy. our research helps to fill the void with its focus on a hybrid course that consists of an online portion immediately followed by a field experience on campus with the participants being in-service teachers. consequently, the purpose of the study was to examine the impact of a field experience in problem-based (pbl) and project-based learning (pjbl) on in-service teachers’ conceptions about using a student-centered methodology. the following question guided our study: how does a field experience contribute to positive conceptions of teachers using experiential teaching/learning models, specifically pbl and pjbl? the field experience and its role in the academically or intellectually gifted (aig) licensure program are described below in detail. following the description of our research methods, the results are discussed in relationship to the effectiveness of field experiences in the preparation of teachers to use experiential learning. the change in teachers’ pedagogy from teacher-centered to learnercentered in their practice was described in a previous article (dole, bloom, & kowalske, 2016). the academically or intellectually gifted licensure program the 36 in-service teachers who participated in this study were all enrolled in the aig licensure program at a university in southeastern united states. the aig program is a 12-credit hour program in which teachers can obtain an add-on license in gifted education. the courses were offered at both the undergraduate and graduate level. if taken at the graduate level, the aig classes could be applied to the master of education in gifted, creative, and innovative education. those teachers who already have masters’ degrees or who do not wish to go on in the master’s program generally take the aig courses at the undergraduate level; thus there can be teachers with different levels of education and experience in the same class. the aig license can be added to any teaching license: elementary, middle school and secondary content areas, special education, as well as counseling. all of the courses were offered fully online with the exception of one course, creative thinking and problem solving, which is a hybrid course made up of a four-week online portion and a one-week field experience called rocket to creativity (rtc). the field experience was held on the university campus immediately following the online part of the class. this was the only class in the aig program that was cotaught, thus modeling the collaboration that we expected the teachers to practice in the field experience. in the online part of the class, the teachers learned how to promote creativity in their students and also learned about pbl and pjbl and then they implemented what they had learned during the field experience immediately following the online part of the class. the teachers had their initial exposure to pbl and pjbl in the methods and models of gifted and creative education course that preceded the creative thinking and problem solving course. three modules of the creative thinking and problem solving course were devoted to pbl and pjbl, with an essential question for each module: what are pbl and pjbl? how do we implement pbl and pjbl? how do we evaluate pbl and pjbl? in each module, students posted their initial thoughts on the essential question. assignments included readings and videos of examples of implementation and evaluation of pbl/ pjbl and reflections and discussion on the discussion board. the major assignment was 22 global education review 3(4) the design of a pbl or pjbl curriculum unit that the teachers could use with their own students. the curriculum unit addressed the following: description of student population, rationale for pbl or pjbl choice, scope and sequence, preassessment of student interest, design and management plan, resources, evaluation procedures, and audience. for the field experience, the instructors of the course placed the teachers in teams of two to facilitate pbl/pjbl with groups made up of five to six children in grades one through nine. teacher teams were chosen toward the end of the online part of the course so that the teams could do some initial planning, such as locating resources. however, detailed planning was discouraged as the objective was for the children to take the lead and the teachers to facilitate. three or four aig licensed teachers who completed the course in the past and were experienced in implementing pbl and pjbl were employed to assist the instructors in observing, giving feedback, and assessing the teams of teachers. these teacher trainers had several years of experience teaching gifted students and education beyond the bachelor’s degree. in fact, one of the trainers has her ph.d. in gifted education, serves as adjunct faculty at the university, and is one of the authors of this article. when the children registered for rtc they were given interest inventories that described broad topics that would be offered, and the children rank the topics. the children were then placed in groups according to the interests expressed in their inventories and their ages. there was a moderate fee charged for registration that was used to purchase supplies for rtc and for the children’s lunches in the campus dining hall. scholarships were awarded according to need. over the 15 years that the class has been offered, there have been a variety of interest groups. select examples of interest groups are listed below: the we-dig archaeology club do you dig the past? learn the techniques of archaeology such as sifting and tracking soil and identifying artifacts. the inventors club did you mention invention? brainstorm a problem, identify many solutions, and design an invention to solve the problem. clown around with animation create animated cartoons, avatars, video games, digital puzzles; the possibilities are endless… costume creators guild learn how filmmakers create costumes for science fiction films. create creatures and costumes for a science fiction movie. typical procedure during the first day of rtc, children brainstorm problems or projects that they can complete during the week. the project or problem can either be individual or collaborative; however, it has to relate to the topic. once they have decided on a problem or project, the children plan a timeline and locate resources on or off campus. the advantage to having the field experience on campus is the access to resources such as computer labs, archaeology lab, forensic lab, museums, and library. the campus is built on an ancient cherokee village and there have been archaeology digs during the summers that the children have been able to take part in. there are also “experts” on campus as well as in the community who are willing to serve as consultants, for example, technology staff, campus police, and faculty. the children can talk via skype or hold conference calls with experts across the country. one group that was rocket to creativity 23 trying to determine whether dragons had ever existed and, if not, why they were an icon across many cultures, was able to schedule a conference call with a paleontologist who had just discovered a new set of dinosaur remains from the dinosaur, dracorex hogwartsia, so named due to the resemblance of the skull to that of a dragon. that conference call led to an additional conference call with the museum curator where the remains were on display. the teachers are expected to be on campus from 9:00 a.m. until 5:00 p.m. they meet in their teams for planning and checking out supplies before the children arrive at 10:00 a.m. the children come at 10:00 a.m. and are there until 4:00 p.m. the teachers meet together as a group with the instructors after the children have left to reflect on the day’s activities and share challenges and brainstorm solutions. the teachers act as facilitators while children plan and implement their projects and activities for the week. the children create timelines and lists of the resources they need for project completion or problem solutions. with the help of the teachers, they also develop rubrics during the week that they use for self-assessment at the end of the week. see figure 1 for an example of a studentgenerated timeline and figure 2 for a student-made rubric. figure 1. example of a student-generated timeline 24 global education review 3(4) clown around with animation question: how do you make stop-motion animation? product: stop-motion video to show parents ok good excellent super excellent (how can we make our video even better?) story  missing two parts (beginning, middle, end)  no problem and solution  missing beginning, middle, or end.  problem or solution – didn’t solve the problem  includes a beginning, middle, and end  has a problem and solution  add more dialogue  add details to beginning, middle, and end characters  movement is not believable  no colors  few details  no feelings  some details (stick person)  slow movement or little movement  some feelings  has feelings  lots of details (look believable)  movement  all characters have a name  arms and legs move  more feelings video  only video  no background  no sound  some pictures and some video  simple background (no colors)  many pictures put together  sound (music or talking)  detailed background (colorful, looks real)  add sound effects  could have talking and music figure 2. example of a student-made rubric the teachers are provided rubrics on collaboration in which they assess themselves and their team partners on the major topics of contributions, taking responsibility, and valuing their teammate’s ideas. they also complete a pbl/pjbl implementation checklist together at the end of the week that covers such categories as authenticity, applied learning, and active exploration. the week ends with a celebration in which family members and friends are invited to see what the children have accomplished during the week. method we conducted this study to understand how rtc impacted the teachers. we sought to answer the following research question: does a field experience contribute to positive conceptions of teachers using experiential teaching/learning models, specifically pbl and pjbl? for the design of the study, we utilized a case study method, a cornerstone for research in gifted education (buchanan & feldhusen, 1991). stake (1981) noted that knowledge gleaned through case studies is different from other research rocket to creativity 25 knowledge in several ways. it is more definitive because the information is vivid and concrete, as opposed to abstract. it is more contextual because experiences are grounded in the setting and the environment. readers bring with them their own experiences and understanding, allowing the findings to be developed by reader interpretation. the reader is able to extend generalizations to populations familiar to them (merriam, 2009). case studies have proven beneficial for evaluating educational programs and informing policy (merriam, 2009). at the foundation of this approach is the search for meaning and understanding. with an end product of a richly descriptive analysis of a bounded system, the researcher serves as the primary instrument of investigation using an inductive investigative strategy (merriam, 2009). a case study explores a contemporary phenomenon within its real-life context (yin, 2008). data collection data was gathered in six ways: structured interviews using qualtrics, an online survey tool; follow-up phone calls; discussion board posts; reflections of teachers at the end of each day of rtc; anonymous course feedback, and observations of teacher trainers and instructors during the week of field experience. the structured interviews included 29 open-ended and demographic questions. half of the questions focused on pbl, and the other half addressed pjbl. the questions covered the following points: (1) a description of how pbl and/or pjbl were implemented in their teaching, (2) if they had used these methods prior to rtc, (3) how the field experience influenced their teaching, (4) how the methods have benefitted their students, (5) how learning these methods influenced their pedagogy, (6) what obstacles they faced when implementing these methods, (7) how they overcame these obstacles, (8) if they would recommend these methods to others, and (9) if they have provided professional development on these methods. they were also given an opportunity to provide further comments. a graduate assistant conducted follow-up interviews with the four participants who indicated that they were willing to be interviewed by telephone, taking detailed notes. she asked for further description of how they used pbl and/or pjbl, how they assessed these methods, if or how they had combined these methods with other teaching/learning models they had learned in their previous coursework, how students had responded to pbl and/or pjbl methods, examples of how the field experience influenced their teaching, examples of how the methods promoted deeper learning in the students, if testing requirements from the state influenced their decisions to implement the methods, and for additional comments. we observed teachers during their time at rtc in several ways. throughout each day, the instructors and teacher trainers rotated from group to group listening to instruction and watching interactions between teachers and students. in addition, we met with the teachers at the end of each day for a large group discussion where they could share reflections about their experiences. in some cases, individual conferences were arranged in order to help teachers who were struggling with aspects of the pbl or pjbl process. for the course feedback, which was separate from the course evaluations, we accessed the students’ anonymous, end-ofcourse posts about the strengths and weaknesses of the course assignments and the field experience. we analyzed data from the past three years. data from course feedback in prior years were not available. participants the structured online interview was emailed twice to 164 graduates of the gifted licensure program. of the 164 graduates, 50 started the online interview. of the 50, five responded that 26 global education review 3(4) they did not use the methods, and the survey ended for them. nine persons abandoned the survey without providing details about their experiences. we decided to use the remaining 36 interviews for this study because all parts of the interview were completed. of these participants, four expressed interest in participating in a subsequent interview, and they became the ones we included in follow-up phone interviews. all but one of the participants was an in-service teacher when taking the course. however, at the time of the survey, that participant was teaching so she is counted as an in-service teacher. of the participants, 18 worked in an elementary school setting serving kindergarten through 5th grade. eight teachers worked in a middle school setting teaching 6th, 7th, and 8th grades, and five worked in a high school setting serving 9th through 12th grade students. four teachers had experience teaching in both elementary and middle school settings. one of the participants was currently working as an aig coordinator for a school system. all but two of the 36 participants who responded to the survey and all four of the follow-up interviewees were white females seeking aig certification in the licensure program or seeking a degree in master of education in gifted, creative, and innovative education. the remaining two participants were white males. the teaching population of the aig program typically mirrors that of the united states, lacking diversity both in race and in sex. in 2008 in the united states, 83% of the teachers were european american, with 85% female in elementary schools and 58% females in secondary schools (aud et al., 2010). data analysis each researcher read the online-structured interviews numerous times before beginning the analysis. we used open-coding (merriam, 2009) to record our first thoughts, and then began to organize these into themes (patton, 2002). in order to establish inter-rater reliability (wetherall, taylor, & yates, 2001), the three of us examined our data at this point. we agreed on themes that emerged from the participants’ comments (seidman, 2006) such as mastering logistics. in order to understand more about specific topics, we corroborated to craft the questions to be used in the telephone interviews. we coded comments from the online and telephone interviews, and created a table with the data. after adding the details to the table, we recorded the number of times each supporting detail was mentioned. to provide credibility for our results, we correlated the results with observations and reflections and discussion board posts during rtc and with course feedback (farmer, robinson, & elliott, 2006). in addition, because all three of us had either cotaught the course or coordinated the field experience, we were familiar with the participants and the context, providing us insider status (wetherall, taylor, & yates, 2001). results the participants offered specific details about how rtc allowed them to apply theory to practice, thus addressing our research question of how a field experience contributes to positive conceptions of teachers using experiential teaching/learning models, specifically pbl and pjbl. four sub-themes emerged under this main theme. students were able to apply theory to practice as they learned about the overall process of implementing pbl and pjbl. in addition, by creating learning opportunities for children who attended rtc they understood the logistics of pbl and pjbl and they grew to understand the role of teacher as facilitator within these experiences. finally, collaboration with peers provided an avenue for the instructors to gain knowledge about what was necessary for successful implementation of pbl and pjbl. rocket to creativity 27 understanding process from our observations and discussion postings in the online part of class, we noted that teachers expressed great concern in the weeks prior to rtc about not having well structured, well sequenced unit and lesson plans in place prior to coming to rtc. hence, we observed and heard about many “aha” moments in our discussions with participants during our observations and group reflection at the end of each day of rtc. many teachers commented on their initial discomfort and subsequent relief as they were able to experience first-hand that children were indeed able to handle not only the process of pbl and pbjl but also handle what the teachers initially perceived as lack of structure. the processes they learned about in the online part of the course weren’t just tucked away in a notebook somewhere collecting dust; rather the processes such as generating and brainstorming ideas, promoting critical and creative thinking, creating timelines and rubrics were put to use immediately. participants gained appreciation and practical understanding of those tools as they were immersed in a teaching experience where the tools were imperative. participants described how the field experience allowed them to understand the overall pbl/pjbl process. one stated, “it gave me an opportunity to apply the theory we learned and see project based learning in action.” another addressed how rtc allowed her to understand how the pbl/pjbl approach could be implemented in a class for gifted students. she stated, “the camp [rtc] helped me understand what projects work best for gifted minds. [the field experience] gave me resources and strategies to try.” other participants discussed how the hands-on opportunity let them understand how to plan for pbl. one said, “going through the actual planning and implementation helped me understand the process far better than just reading about it.” another participant expressed her appreciation for new understandings of pjbl due to the combination of coursework and the field experience. she said, “the course showed me the possibilities associated with projectbased learning and gave me experience in leading students through the process.” teachers described how they modified the pbl/pjbl experiences to their own classroom setting. one participant said, “the field experience really opened my eyes to the possibility of using these types of activities.” mastering the logistics to conduct a pbl/pjbl opportunity for students, there are numerous components that must be in place. it can be challenging for instructors and students to generate problems as well as plans for bringing those problems to solutions and projects to fruition. during group reflections, teachers’ comments about student engagement and motivation in working on problems and projects were numerous. at the start of the week, teachers wondered how they would fill a whole week but by the end of the week, they commented that they and their students were worried that they wouldn’t have enough time. they talked about students wanting to stay late and work through lunch and breaks. they made several comments regarding the importance of the timelines and rubrics the children had generated in keeping the groups focused. one participant expressed her satisfaction with understanding the problem-generating process. she said, “[prior to the field experience], i didn't truly understand how to create problems for students.” another expressed how she was able to generate further units of study. she said, “it helped me to develop new pbl's for my students.” another participant expressed the importance of organization and grouping. she said, “i learned how to organize and group for better learning.” agreeing that she learned the importance of 28 global education review 3(4) organization, one participant added that she also learned the importance of assessments. she said, “it has helped me with long-range planning, and it has given me more options for assessing student comprehension of an objective or unit of study.” using experts to help in the learning process is an important component, as is presenting to authentic audiences. one teacher stated, “allowing the students to share their work with their families was a great experience, as well as working with on-campus experts.” two others described final presentations. one said she appreciated the last day when students presented their projects to parents. the other said, “it was great to see the kids finally put their projects on display the final day.” participants indicated a better idea of how pbl and pjbl can be incorporated in their own classrooms while still accommodating state mandated curriculum. one participant described her recipe for success, “you start with curriculum standards, add application, mix in relevance and authenticity and add in open endedness…” along with understanding the necessary components for pbl and pjbl, participants also described having a better understanding of problems they may encounter. one teacher said, “it also allowed me to consider potential issues i may face when using project-based learning in a public school classroom.” another stated, “i learned how to use it more effectively. the field experience also gave me the opportunity to trouble shoot some of the concerns i had.” becoming facilitators participants appreciated going through the pbl/pjbl process with their students. it allowed them to understand the role they play as facilitators and how the students move from initial concepts to final products. one said: i appreciated experiencing what it feels like to just let students take an idea and run with it! this was scary to me at first, as i like to "plan" things in the lesson, but as we worked through the problem solving i saw the benefits to both the students and to myself. further corroborating this aspect, one participant stated, “i learned that i need to let my students take more leadership in demonstrating their own learning.” another said, “allowed me to see how project-based learning can be student initiated rather than teacherdictated.” participants also described changes in their attitudes toward classroom conditions and in their understanding of the learning process. during group reflections at the end of the day, many of the teachers made comments regarding giving up control. they described their initial discomfort with statements such as “i admit i am a control freak” and “this is so far out of my comfort zone.” subsequently, however, they described their ultimate satisfaction when they learned that giving up the driver’s seat was possible. the follow-up survey corroborated our findings about what teachers had learned about facilitating student-directed learning. one said, “it allowed me to have confidence that students are capable to complete projects in a way without the teacher driving the instruction.” another said, “although, i used it before, i was able to go more in-depth with ideas. also, i learned to allow students more autonomy to explore on their own.” while another said, “it gave me a better feel for letting students take more of a leadership role instead of waiting on me, the teacher, all the time.” one participant described the most important aspect of rtc for her. she said, “learning to let go of the control and to let my campers take charge of their learning.” participants described the impact on students when they have choice and engage in collaborative learning. one said, “i saw the benefits of allowing more student choice in rocket to creativity 29 projects and was reminded of the engagement that occurs when students are working on projects.” another stated, “there is a variety of creative learning strategies the students can use. you give them the choice of how to present their material. they love it.” collaboration participants also described how they benefitted from collaboration during the field experience. one described collaboration as being the best part of the field experience. she said, “working with my partner, she was awesome, and seeing pbl in action.” another described her favorite aspect: “working with my co-teacher and students in a fun, creative atmosphere.” another said, “working with another teacher to discuss ideas and plan together.” other participants noted the importance of daily meetings. she described the strengths of the field experience as being the “teachers and meeting as a group at the end of each day to reflect.” another said she appreciated “the whole group discussions.” finally, two participants addressed the atmosphere of the camp being conducive to applying theory to practice. one said, what was most helpful to me was seeing all of the different groups working on different projects. it is a rare thing to be able to see other teachers in action and to share ideas. everyone is working with their heads down. another participant stated, “having the freedom and flexibility to apply pbl without the constraints of the classroom setting.” discussion experiential learning requires a different structure and teaching style than many teachers are accustomed to. rtc is a field experience that immerses teachers in the world of pbl and pjbl. teachers are required to “try it on” and “wear it around” for a week in a nonthreatening environment that offers the support of veteran teachers. through this experience we watch teachers who are accustomed to teacher-directed practices not only adjust their teaching style to one appropriate to an experiential pedagogy, but to also adjust their conceptions of teaching as well. if the notion of lortie (1975), that teachers teach the way they were taught, is true, then teaching teachers through an experiential approach may have the best chance of ultimately transforming pedagogy. our results reveal that the experience of teaching with pbl and pjbl in a supportive environment changed teachers’ ideas about experiential learning, specifically with regard to what it means to give up control, how to facilitate opportunities for authentic learning, and what the possibilities are for collaboration. giving up control with the heavy emphasis on high stakes assessment and increasing appearance of scripted lesson plans and commercialized curriculum in the united states and, indeed, around the world (ripley, 2013), many teachers fear letting their students take the driver’s seat in the classroom. our data captured this initial trepidation as well as teachers’ increasing comfort level in their roles of facilitators and coaches as their week of experiential learning progressed. trying something new takes a leap of faith that teachers may think they can ill afford in a public school setting. the data from this study indicate that experiencing the results of pbl and pjbl first hand gives teachers the confidence to let go of control. with that confidence, teachers may be more likely to use experiential practices in their own classrooms (dole, bloom, & kowalske, 2016). authentic learning in the current climate of high-stakes assessment and strict curriculum mandates, teachers often claim to have little flexibility in how and what 30 global education review 3(4) they teach (sleeter, 2009). hence, in addition to trepidation regarding giving up control in the classroom, teachers may also have concerns about how experiential learning can accommodate mandated curricula and highstakes assessment. through this experience, teachers learned how to incorporate authentic learning and assessment opportunities with mandated curricula. identifying real problems and projects that serve a purpose, engaging students in assessment of their own work, and providing audiences for student work, puts curriculum into meaningful context and, as our teachers experienced first hand, are highly motivating and engaging for children. collaboration many teachers are used to teaching in isolation (lortie, 1975; sawyer 2007). co-teaching and team-teaching can be difficult for teachers who are used to controlling their own classrooms and lessons. as noted by our participants, one of the most rewarding aspects of rtc was having the opportunity to learn with and from their peers, establishing an appreciation for the power of collaboration. limitations and further research our study focused on a field experience on a university campus in which teachers worked in collaborative teams; instructors and teacher trainers experienced in pbl and pjbl were available to give feedback and an abundance of resources and technology were available, all of which increased the likelihood of the field experience being a positive experience. additional research is needed to compare the effectiveness of various models of field experience for in-service teachers. more research is also needed with culturally diverse teachers as well as students, not only culturally diverse students, but economically disadvantaged and those with special needs. the authors are currently doing research on a field experience held in the school system of eight teachers who completed the aig program as a cohort in place of the field experience on campus. the school system is a small district that has a very culturally diverse student population as well as a high percentage of economically disadvantaged students. the advantage of having the field experience in their own school system was that the teachers were able to facilitate pbl and pjbl with their own student population that differs significantly from the student population of the on-campus field experience, which is primarily white middle class. in addition, teacher education programs need to provide more opportunities for candidates to learn collaborative skills to be effective co-teachers in order to meet the needs of all students (ncate, 2010). although there has been research on co-teaching in inclusion classrooms with one general education teacher and one special education teacher, there has been little research on co-teaching in general education classrooms (bennett & fisch, 2013). our research contributed to the body of research on the importance of connecting theory to practice in teacher education and, perhaps even more significant, to the scarce research on field experience for in-service teachers. this course with its accompanying field experience on pbl and pjbl, or any similar course on experiential learning, could be duplicated across the globe, even in countries where there are fewer resources. teachers may be more creative when there are fewer resources available and what would, on the surface, appear to be a disadvantage could turn into an advantage when doing pbl or pjbl (strawn & monama, 2012). various studies across the globe indicate that educational reforms aren’t successful without changes in teacher conceptions (small, 2014; song, 2015). as our data and other research indicate, meaningful experience may be the ticket to changing teacher’s conceptions and ultimately practice. rocket to creativity 31 acknowledgement the authors would like to acknowledge the western carolina graduate school for their support by funding the faculty research and creative activities award for this project. references anderson, l. m., & stillman j. a. 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(2013). creating 21st-century centers of pedagogy: explicating key laboratory and clinical elements of teacher preparation. education, 133(4), 409-421. about the author(s) sharon f. dole, ph.d., is professor of gifted and special education at western carolina university where she coordinates the gifted education programs. dr. dole’s research interests include culturally responsive pedagogy, creativity, problem and project-based learning, social and emotional issues of adolescents, twice exceptional learners, online teaching and course design, and teaching compassion. lisa a. bloom, is the jay m. robinson distinguished professor of instructional technology at western carolina university. she earned her ed.d. from west virginia university in 1989. she is the author of the text, classroom management: creating positive outcomes for all learners. her research interests include problem-based learning, creativity and classroom management. kristy kowalske doss, completed her ph.d. in educational psychology and instructional technology specializing in gifted and creative education at the university of georgia. she works as an adjunct professor for western carolina university and has been a teacher of middle school students for 20 years. her interests are creativity, problembased learning, mindfulness, and spiritually gifted students. 40 global education review 2(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lee, stacey j. & hawkins, margaret r. (2015). policy, context and schooling: the education of english learners in rural new destinations. global education review, 2(4). 40-59 policy, context and schooling: the education of english learners in rural new destinations stacey j. lee university of wisconsin, madison margaret r. hawkins university of wisconsin, madison abstract the number of immigrant english learners attending schools in new destinations across the us is rapidly increasing. we draw on the sociological scholarship on “contexts of reception” and scholarship on sociocultural approaches to policy to examine the educational contexts faced by immigrant english learners in new destination communities and how these contexts shape their educational experiences. using data from qualitative case studies of rural school districts in wisconsin, we examined local discourses surrounding new immigrant populations, and how they shaped the ways in which local educators interpreted and enacted educational policies on the ground. we argue that policy implementation is influenced by local understandings of immigrant english learners and their educational needs, such that potentially inclusive educational policies become assimilative in practice. keywords education, english learners, educational policy, anthropology and education, rural education introduction the growth of immigrant populations is extending beyond traditional gateway cities as immigrants move to suburbs, small cities, towns and rural areas, especially in the midwestern and southeastern u.s. (marrow, 2011; martinez, 2011; mcconnell, 2006; wortham, 2001; wortham, mortimer & allard, 2009; zuniga & hernandez-leon, 2006). as immigrant populations have settled in new destinations, a growing body of research has focused on how immigrant groups are being incorporated into communities that have relatively little experience with foreign-born populations. with a few important exceptions, the research on immigrants in new destinations has focused on the contexts faced by adults and not on the unique contexts encountered by school-aged children and youth (hamann, wortham & murillo, 2001; wortham, 2001). for school-aged corresponding author: stacey j. lee, 1000 bascomb hall. the university of wisconsin-madison, madison, wi 53706 email: stacey.lee@wisc.edu mailto:stacey.lee@wisc.edu policy, context and schooling 41 immigrant children and youth, schools play a primary role in the incorporation process. what immigrant students learn in classrooms shapes their future opportunities, and how they are treated by their teachers and peers influences their understandings as to where they fit in their new country. our focus in this paper is on the educational contexts, particularly the academic ones, facing immigrant students who are english learners (els) in rural new destinations. we are particularly concerned with how national, state and local educational policies and school district and school-level staffing shape the ways in which schools are responding to immigrant els. because schools and school districts exist within community contexts, we will also consider the impact of community context on the decisions that local educators make regarding the education of immigrant els. thus, we are asking: how are schools in rural communities that are new destinations for immigrants responding to the recent influx of immigrant students who are english learners (els)? how are educational contexts for immigrant els influenced by policy contexts, school district contexts, educators’ professional judgments, and local community contexts? importance of contexts of reception sociologists have highlighted the influence of the contexts of reception – government policies, economic opportunities, societal attitudes, and the presence or absence of existing co-ethnic networks – on immigrant adjustment and incorporation into us society (portes & borocz, 1989; portes & rumbaut, 2006). discussions regarding the contexts of reception have been central to theory of segmented assimilation, which portends that many members of the second generation face serious barriers to upward mobility. writing in the late twentieth and the early part of the 21st century, sociologists of immigration have identified the barriers associated with the hour glass economy, which limits the abilities of poor and uneducated immigrants to find jobs that pay a living wage (zhou, 1997; waldinger, 1996). research shows that many of the lowest skilled and poorest immigrants settled in declining urban environments, which further threatens their path of incorporation (zhou, 1997). sociologists have underlined the importance of co-ethnic social networks in immigrants’ ability to successfully negotiate life in their new communities. despite the obstacles facing lowincome immigrants, co-ethnic social networks have been shown to play a central role in immigrants’ ability to secure employment and have even been found to have a protective effect on immigrant youth in urban environments (stanton-salazar, 1997). dominant group attitudes towards immigrants and immigration further shape experiences and opportunities for immigrants and their children. as many scholars have observed, americans are notoriously ambivalent about immigrants, simultaneously celebrating the immigrant roots of the us and calling for the closing of borders (schrag, 2010; suarez-orozco, 2006). of course, not all immigrants are viewed equally, and research suggests that racial differences account for some of the variation in how immigrants from various ethnic groups have adjusted (stepnick & stepnick, 2009). furthermore, some scholars have found that attitudes regarding a particular immigrant group may change over time in response to economic and other social conditions (portes & fernandezkelly, 2008; ong, 2003). the growing body of research on immigrants in “new destinations” and the research on the “new latino diaspora” has highlighted the importance of regional contexts on immigrant experiences. in her research on latinos in the rural south, marrow (2011) found 42 global education review 2(4) that regional context matters in relation to “assimilation, race relations and political and institutional responsiveness to immigrants” (p. 233). unlike those who settle in established immigrant communities, immigrants in new destinations generally do not find a wellestablished co-ethnic network or ethnic organizations. despite the possible challenges of being isolated from co-ethnic communities, research on the experiences of latinos who have settled outside traditional latino settlements suggests that these new spaces may offer immigrants greater flexibility to negotiate their experiences with the dominant group. wortham and colleagues (2009) asserted, “such locations allow more flexible and sometimes more hopeful immigrant identities. immigrants in the new latino diaspora face both more ignorance and more opportunity than in areas of traditional settlement.” (p. 395). wortham’s ethnographic research in one town with a new and growing latino population suggests that latinos have emerged as a “model minority” in contrast to the more established population of african americans. similarly, marrow (2011) discovered that latinos in the rural south were generally preferred over african americans by employers. as the literature on new destinations suggests, ideas regarding immigrants are influenced by the presence or absence of other racialized minority groups as immigrant newcomers are compared to both whites and groups of color. the literature mentioned above focuses primarily on latino populations, and that is, indeed, the most visible immigrant group to venture to new destination communities. it is, however, not the only immigrant group to do so. in our study, for example, a particular community had a new influx of somali immigrants/refugees. in contrast with latino immigrants, the somali population is black, muslim, and as refugees have limited or interrupted prior education. thus the dynamics around racism, religious tolerance, and perceptions of educational potential are encountered differently (bigelow, 2010; kusow & bjork, 2007). while new destination communities may offer more room for negotiations of identities and positions within the community, it is variable not only by aspects of the particular context, but by the specifics of the particular group. martha bigelow (2010), in her study of a somali diasporic community, noted “… when powerful institutions discriminate against youth based on entrenched xenophobia, racism and islamaphobia, a democratic, plural society in the making has much to lose.” (p.148) importantly, the literature on context of reception highlights the centrality of policy in framing the incorporation process for immigrants. focusing on national and statelevel policies regarding immigration and other policies regarding access to social services for immigrants, sociologists discuss policies in terms of their relative exclusivity or inclusiveness regarding immigrants (portes & borocz, 1989; portes & rumbaut, 2006). while inclusive policies define immigrants as “deserving” of particular services and/or rights, exclusive policies implicitly characterize immigrants as “undeserving” of public services and/or rights (filindra, garcia & blanding, 2011; marrow, 2011). significantly, exclusive policies were associated with barriers to incorporation and more inclusive policies were associated with increased opportunities (filindra et al., 2011). marrow (2011), for example, argued that k-12 education is a relatively welcoming space for immigrants in north carolina because of the “inclusive government policy” regarding the education of all youths regardless of legal status. in contrast to the k-12 policy context, researchers have identified the higher education context as being relatively exclusive because undocumented youth are denied access to federal financial aid (filindra et al., 2011). policy, context and schooling 43 sociocultural approaches to policy although distinguishing between “exclusive” and “inclusive” policies provides a helpful framework for understanding the basic goals of particular policies, it assumes that the goals of a policy will or should determine actions and outcomes in the same way across different contexts. furthermore, although this perspective on policy allows for the possibility that policies may influence attitudes, it does not account for the fact that attitudes may also shape the implementation of policy. this framework reflects the rather deterministic understanding of policies associated with the “technicalrational” approach to the field of policy (hamann & rosen, 2011). in short, the “technical-rational” approach to policy, which dominates policy discussions, assumes a direct relationship between policy and practice, is focused on predicting outcomes, and assumes that policies are rational, objective and scientific (hamann & rosen, 2011; levinson & sutton, 2001). in contrast to those writing from a technical-rational perspective, scholars who apply various sociocultural approaches to policy assume that policies will take shape differently across contexts in response to differences in local cultures, resources and perspectives (ball, 1997; hamann & rosen, 2011; koyama & varenne, 2012; shore & wright, 1997, 2011; sutton & levinson, 2001). ball (1997), for example, asserted that policies define problems, pose solutions and create categories of people, but they do not determine specific actions. similarly, shore and wright (2011) explained “we see policies as windows onto political processes in which actors, agents, concepts and technologies interact in different sites, creating or consolidating new rationalities of governance and regimes of knowledge and power” (2). highlighting the role of human agency, koyama and varenne (2012) described policy as a “productive play” whereby “responses to the policy require deliberate human activity” (158). from the perspective of various sociocultural policy researchers, the line between policy and practice are blurred in such a way that teachers and aides are educational policy actors. according to this logic, policies can be transformed, resisted or embraced on the ground. we will draw on both the sociological scholarship on “contexts of reception” and the scholarship on sociocultural approaches to policy in order to focus on the educational contexts faced by immigrant els in new destination communities. following the lead of sociologists of immigration, we will pay attention to how immigrants are received by locals in five rural communities in wisconsin. we are particularly interested in how long-term residents of these communities make sense of their new immigrant neighbors and how the local response to immigrants frames the work of educators. by engaging the scholarship on sociocultural approaches to policy, we seek to extend understandings of how local educators interpret and enact educational policies on the ground. the study data for this paper was collected as part of a larger mixed method study on the way rural and suburban communities in wisconsin are responding to the recent influx of immigrant students who are english learners. the proliferation of immigrant populations in the state of wisconsin is typical of the proliferation of immigrant populations in new destinations in the midwest, where the majority of recent adult newcomer immigrants tend to have low levels of proficiency in english and limited educational backgrounds (levinson, everitt & jones, 2007). job opportunities in the meatpacking industry, farm work, and construction, along with the affordability of the midwest compared to the west and east coasts, have drawn immigrants to 44 global education review 2(4) the region during the last 20 years (grey & woodrick, 2005; mcconnell, 2004). the growth in immigrant communities in wisconsin can be seen in statewide school district demographics. in 1999, 149 school districts in wisconsin reported having limited english-speaking students, while in 2004 there were 240 districts with lep students, which represents 54% of the total districts in wisconsin (winss)1. the majority of immigrants are latino (predominantly from mexico, but also from central and south america) but the immigrant el population in wisconsin also includes students from africa, southeast asia, asia and eastern europe. in the first phase of our study, we surveyed the roughly 300 districts in wisconsin with el populations to find out the types of programs in place for english learners. based on the 136 survey responses, we identified nine school districts for qualitative case studies. we were not attempting to identify “typical” or “representative” cases, but instead were looking for a range of districts. thus we chose case study districts that reflected a range of differences across: geographic region of the state, ethnicities and languages of newcomers, size and rate of growth of newcomer populations, program models and staffing structures. all districts chosen had experienced a significant increase in their el population within the last 10 years. our case studies included four suburban districts and five rural districts, thereby allowing us to focus attention on how location and local context influenced district responses to els. we conducted 1-2 day observations in these districts during which time we paid particular attention to the discourses surrounding immigrant els, teacher beliefs, the structure of the programming and support services offered, the nature of the classroom instruction, the content of the curriculum, and interactions between students and school staff. in each district, we conducted semi-structured interviews with the designated esl coordinator, principals, esl teachers, bilingual support staff, and when possible other members of the staff. the interviews focused on how educators were making sense of the new immigrant el populations, how they were making sense of educational policies for els and how they were making decisions about how to educate els. we also conducted interviews with individuals at a cesa (cooperative educational service agency; a local arm of the wisconsin department of public instruction) that worked with one of the focal districts, the wisconsin department of public instruction, and wida (world class instructional design and assessment; a national standards and assessment organization that serves wisconsin and other states, in order to understand policy and assessment from an official perspective. finally, we examined local newspapers, policy documents and a number of community programs and initiatives (wedel, shore, feldman & lathrop, 2005). our approach to data analysis involved both inductive and deductive approaches to the data. we worked together to code and analyze the data using both grounded codes that emerged from the data and codes from relevant literature. we developed theoretical propositions through the writing of analytic memos and we sought out evidence that confirmed and disconfirmed our emerging findings (emerson, fretz, & shaw, 1995). in this paper we focused on the way the five rural schools districts in our study responded to the growth in immigrant english learner populations. while we appreciate that there are debates surrounding the definitions of “rural”, our working definition of “rural” includes geographic isolation from major urban centers, and population and/or district’s self identification as rural (coladarci, 2007). our purpose here is to examine the similarities and differences across the five rural districts in order to explore the kinds of educational contexts policy, context and schooling 45 facing immigrant english learners in rural wisconsin. five rural wisconsin communities a largely working class rural community located in the central part of the state, clover2 has experienced a dramatic increase in its immigrant population over the last decade. according to the 2000 census, clover’s population was just under 2000 with 98.6% of the population identified as white/non-hispanic. according to the 2010 census there were 2310 residents in clover, with 73.7% of the population identified as white/nonhispanic and 25% identified as hispanic or latino. mexican immigrants have been drawn to clover because of job opportunities on dairy farms and in the meatpacking industry. the growth in the mexican immigrant population can be seen in clover school district’s population of english learners (22 els in 1999; 45 els in 2003 and 103 els in 2008). when we conducted our case study in 2009 there were 160 els in the district, accounting for approximately 20% of the total student population in clover. located in south central wisconsin, allentown has experienced a modest growth in its immigrant population in the last decade. according to the 2000 census, 97% of the 7800 residents were white/non-hispanic. the total student population for the district in 2009-2010 when we collected our data was 2559 and there were 48 students classified as english learners, compared to 4 english learners in 1999. allentown educators reported that the first mexican immigrants moved to town when a factory moved from chicago to allentown bringing many of the workers to town at the same time. in addition to the mexican immigrants, there were a few asian immigrant families in the community. since we collected our data the latino population in allentown has continued to grow and, according the 2010 census, the hispanic/ latino population is at 4.3%. denton is located at the end of a migrant trail and as such the district has served significant numbers of mexican students from migrant families through a title 1 migrant education program3 for several decades. mexican immigrant families began to settle in denton during the last fifteen years, and in the 2010 census hispanic/latinos made up 29% of the town’s population of 8448, up from 21% of the total population in 2000. the growth in the immigrant population can be seen in the number of els in the denton school district (280 els in 1999; 398 els in 2003; 560 els in 2008). during our research in 2009-2010, native spanish speaking els made up 24% of the total student population. cedar ridge is located in the south central part of the state and it is the largest of the five rural communities in our study. with a total population of just over 15,100 residents in the 2000 census and 16,200 residents in 2010 census, it has many aspects associated with a smaller city (e.g., population density), but district officials consistently referred to their district as “rural.” cedar ridge has experienced a steady growth in its latino population over the last fifteen years. according to the 2010 census, the hispanic/latino population made up 7.5% of the total population up from 4% of the total population in the 2000 census. during the 2009-2010 academic year, there were 215 english learners and nearly all were spanish speakers. by contrast, there were just 28 els in 1999. steward is a small farming community in the northern part of the state. since 2001 steward has been home to a growing somali refugee community when members of the minnesota somali community began moving across the state border in search of work, more affordable housing and educational opportunities. interestingly, teachers, 46 global education review 2(4) administrators and individuals at the local muslim community center reported that the first somalis to arrive in steward were high school students who left minnesota because of concerns regarding their ability to pass the newly instituted high school exit exam. according to the 2000 census, steward’s total population was around 3200 and was 97.7% white. by 2003 there were 400 somali residents living in steward, and in the 2010 census 8.8% of the population identified as african american. according to the wisconsin department of instruction, steward did not report having a single english learner in the district in 1999. by 2003 they reported having 65 els and in 20092010, when we were conducting our research, there were 86 els in the district, which made up approximately 5% of the total student population. isolated, understaffed and overwhelmed: staffing issues across the five districts prior to 2000 the majority of els in wisconsin were enrolled in school districts in urban areas, but more recently immigrant groups have begun moving to suburban and rural communities throughout the state. immigrants who settle in urban and suburban communities in wisconsin enter school districts and communities with established programs for english learners and with some experience dealing with racial and cultural diversity. in contrast, immigrants who settle in rural communities enter communities and schools with little experience dealing with racial, cultural or linguistic differences. like other rural districts, the five districts in our study were under-resourced, isolated, and struggled to recruit and retain qualified esl and/or bilingual staff (berube, 2000). with the exception of denton, where they had a history of working with migrant students, the rural districts in our study were still struggling to establish programs for their els when we conducted our research, which in every case was over five years since els first enrolled. administrators spoke about their difficulty attracting teachers certified in english as a second language (esl)4 and/or bilingual education to live in small rural communities. in several of the districts teachers certified to teach foreign languages were recruited to work with els, and in two of the districts these teachers were in the process of pursuing esl certification. in interviews, teachers reflected on their early improvisational efforts to address newcomer els through after-school homework programs, volunteer tutors from the communities, and peer tutors. in all five of the rural districts the responsibility for els was left to a small number of educators, often as few as two or three individuals for the entire district. these educators were responsible for managing the required assessments of els, teaching classes, working individually with students, communicating with and interpreting for parents, and advocating for els in their schools. the most striking case of this was in clover where one certified esl teacher, one reading specialist and one bilingual aide were responsible for the 160 els in the district. furthermore, the esl teacher mrs. kohl, was the only person in the district with specific training to work with els. according to mrs. kohl, the district has faced significant financial constraints that have hampered the development of esl services, and it also has had difficulty recruiting qualified esl teachers. she expressed significant frustration about being pulled in multiple directions, and feared that some students were simply being overlooked. she explained that as one of the few bilingual adults in the district, she does a lot of interpreting for spanish speaking parents and that her classes were often interrupted because she had to take most phone calls from spanishpolicy, context and schooling 47 speaking parents. in the 2009-10 academic year, administrators brought in a consultant from the regional cesa who advised the clover esl staff to prioritize providing services for els in statemandated tested grades (grades 3 & 10). the consultant also recommended that no services be provided in the lowest grades, as students at young ages would adjust more easily without support. the consultant’s recommendation acknowledged that the esl staff did not have the capacity to address the educational needs of all of the els in the district. as we ended our conversation, mrs. kohl remarked, “as you may notice i am very frustrated with this situation but i keep my hopes up for better days to come.” even in districts where the ratio of certified esl/bilingual staff to students appeared to be reasonable, the staff reported being overwhelmed by their responsibilities. cedar ridge, for example, employed three esl certified teachers for 215 els in the 2009-2010 academic year, but the single elementary esl teacher for the district had to split her time among six elementary schools, which meant that much of her time was spent driving from school to school. in steward there were two certified esl teachers for 86 students, but the esl teachers were entirely responsible for all of the services for the els. while research on successful models for working with els suggests that schools need to have a collective and school-wide investment in working with els, the educators responsible for els in these five districts were isolated in their buildings (bartlett & garcia, 2011). teachers and aides spoke repeatedly about how mainstream teachers assumed that the esl teachers or aides were the school staff responsible for working with els. even in districts that had moved to a push-in model (having language support services delivered in students’ mainstream classrooms), there was an assumption that els were not the responsibility of the mainstream teachers, and esl and mainstream staff did not plan or implement instruction in collaboration. in allentown, for example, one of the esl teachers expressed frustration about the “indifference of the school administrators regarding ells”5 and noted that this attitude made it difficult to get mainstream teachers to attend in-service trainings that focused on els. in four of the districts, we heard that there was no professional development offered that focused on els. similarly, the esl coordinator in cedar ridge noted that the greatest challenges she faced in her work were with “regular education teachers not providing accommodations for ell students.” thus, the limited staff members available with expertise in educating els did not integrate with the rest of the teachers and administrators in their buildings and districts, they worked with the el students in isolation. further, none of the rural districts in our study were located in close proximity to a college or university that offered preor in-service teacher preparation in the area of esl. although we encountered a few teachers with specific esl preparation, for the most part districts utilized foreign language teachers to support els. the districts often used instructional aides; while these staff members may have shared the language and/or cultural background of the students, they did not have academic preparation in the field of education. even the certified esl teachers we found had foreign language as their initial certification, and were not prepared to teach grade levelappropriate academic content. current discourses around effective education for english learners center on notions of integrating language and content development, providing access to and support for learning academic language (defined as the language features, functions, structures and registers that are necessary for academic achievement), and designing curriculum and instruction that is culturally and linguistically 48 global education review 2(4) responsive to learners (garcia & kleifgen, 2010; ovando & combs, 2012; valdes, kibler & walqui, 2014). esl instruction consisted of vocabulary instruction and drill, often delivered through commercial packaged programs. as one elementary esl teacher said, “we work on worksheets from the internet. we focus on letters of the sounds, and building up.” thus isolation describes much of what took place in the local educational context: students were isolated from meaningful academic content in their learning, and teachers were isolated from current discourses about effective educational program models and practices for els. local reception: making sense of immigrant newcomers mexican immigrants and/or the children of mexican immigrants accounted for the growth in the immigrant english learner populations in four of the five districts in our study. as in other communities that have been part of the new latino diaspora, the attitudes towards the latino immigrants in allentown, clover, cedar ridge and denton can best be described as watchful ambivalence (grey & woodrick, 2005; martinez, 2011; millard & chapa, 2004). as in many rural communities across the us, the local populations in clover and allentown have been aging and in decline (grey & woodrick, 2005; millard & chapa, 2004). as younger residents graduate from high school they often leave smaller towns in search of opportunities in larger cities, leaving local industries with a shortage of labor. for rural communities experiencing a decline, immigrants can be an important source of revitalization. in clover, for example, as in many rural communities in the midwest, the new latino population has filled the demand for labor on dairy farms and in the meatpacking industry. latino immigrant children have kept enrollments in clover schools robust even as similar towns struggle to keep schools open. indeed, we heard more than one clover teacher joke about the fact that the “large” immigrant families keep them employed. alongside the recognition of how latino immigrants are helping local economies, however, there is also evidence of some antiimmigrant sentiment in some towns. educators in all of our case districts referred to the fact that some long-term residents feared the cultural and linguistic changes that immigrants brought to their community. in particular, educators in denton, clover, cedar ridge and allentown spoke about long-term residents who were worried about the “problems” associated with “illegal” immigrants. the part-time esl teacher in allentown reported that many of her colleagues made racist comments about “illegal” immigrants and complained vociferously about governor doyle’s proposal to allow undocumented students to attend wisconsin public colleges at in-state tuition rates. in clover, one local politician was particularly vocal in his rhetoric about “illegal” immigrants in the town and across the state, suggesting that “illegal” immigrants were costing taxpayers money and were dangerous. as the els in denton have shifted from being a migrant population to a year-round immigrant population, some members of the local community have expressed concerns about what this might mean for the town and the schools. ms. matthews, the principal of one of the three elementary schools explained that she has had to respond to complaints from some locals about “spending taxpayer money on them.” underneath this complaint is the implicit suggestion that many of the new latino families may be undocumented immigrants, and some locals assume that they don’t pay taxes and are therefore undeserving of a public education. she explained that “family nights” for latino parents had drawn particular attention because locals assumed that taxpayer money was being policy, context and schooling 49 used for special programming for “them.” she noted that once she explained that title 1 money was used for these events and not local money some parents were satisfied. she expressed frustration with what she described as the narrow-minded response of a small but vocal number of locals, suggesting that public schools should serve all students regardless of background. here, we have an example of how the inclusive k-12 policies surrounding immigrants may be influencing the way educators think about their jobs (marrow, 2011). mirroring the discourse of dream act advocates, ms. matthews asserted that undocumented students are blameless children who deserve to be included in the schools. children are thus positioned as sympathetic victims of their parents’ actions and government policies. while latino immigrants were subjected to the discourses of illegality, somali refugees in steward were subjected to the intense racism and islamophobia directed at the muslim community since the attack on the world trade towers on september 11, 2001 (bigelow, 2010; sirin & fine, 2008). journalistic accounts of the somali population in steward have highlighted the cultural differences between the somali newcomers and the long-time steward residents. one public health researcher identified racism as the single most significant health issue confronting the somali refugees in steward (sanders, 2006). according to steward educators, fighting and property destruction were regular problems when the muslim immigrants first arrived in steward. one particularly virulent act of islamophobia involved the desecration of a somali flag after 9/11. joe morgan, a district-level administrator, reported that some white parents took advantage of the state’s open enrollment policy and transferred their children to schools in other districts in the county in order to avoid sending their children to school with muslim students. jennifer johnston, the high school esl teacher, described racial tensions during the early years like this: you had this, you know, somali population and this white population as well as the community issues, and there was hatred, and racism, and religious issues and it was just a nightmare…well what happened was, is that the community started to resent them, they’re like i’m going to move out because there are somalis, or i’m going to open enroll my children because i don’t want them to go to school with somali, you know, with somalis, and it was, you know… but, you know, what i saw at this time was that there were three strikes against them. they were muslim. this was 2001. they don’t know the language and they’re black. prior to all of those things, maybe being black you would have been targeted, but you have all of three of things going against you, not good. in ms. johnston’s account, we hear the ways that race, language and religion came together to mark somali refugees in steward as problematic outsiders. in response to this hostility, ms. johnston and mr. morgan worked to encourage a culture of tolerance by painting somali immigrants as sympathetic victims of a civil war, who possessed strong family values, not unlike members of the larger steward community. although all of the esl/bilingual staff we interviewed across the five districts were dedicated to working with els and expressed concerns about how to support els, there was little recognition of the strengths within immigrant communities and/or the importance of building on immigrant languages or cultures. there was, for example, a fairly unquestioned belief across the staff in all five districts that immigrant parents weren’t involved in their 50 global education review 2(4) children’s schooling, yet most acknowledged not knowing many parents. there was also a uniform discourse around els as lacking language skills and an assumption that educators needed to help them assimilate. in the following quote mrs. anne smithson, the elementary esl teacher for the steward district, talked about her concerns for the somali children. we are dealing with poverty, we are dealing with malnutrition, we are dealing with bottom, bottom, we’re dealing with refugees from war-torn situations. very little schema, they have schema, but it’s very, very...it’s in a little box compared to the other people, you know, even simple things as we talk about light and one of the first things i had to explain some of the pictures and visuals i was using was a birthday party. and they raised their hands, mrs. smithson, what birthday party? well, they don’t celebrate birthday in the muslim faith. they never celebrate birthdays, so then to see all these visuals and everything related anything to a birthday party, they have no schema for that whatsoever. while poverty was an issue for the local somali community, mrs. smithson conflated economic disadvantages with cultural deficiencies. she interpreted her students’ cultural and religious differences as deficiencies that needed to be overcome. in short, she slid from a discourse of sympathy to a discourse of deficiency. significantly, mrs. smithson positioned herself as an advocate for the somali community in steward and she talked about her efforts to convince her fellow teachers to “help” somali children. as our data demonstrated, the esl/bilingual staff in our case districts saw themselves as advocates for the immigrant els. significantly, their advocacy was not limited to academic issues but included efforts to shape attitudes towards cultural, racial and linguistic outsiders. while esl/bilingual staff expressed inclusive attitudes towards immigrant els, they also held deficit perspectives about immigrant els’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds, which led them to support assimilative practices. thus, our research confirms the scholarship that demonstrates that inclusive attitudes and the desire to welcome immigrants do not necessarily lead to cultural and linguistic recognition (turner, 2015) making sense of educational policies: local educators as policymakers the five rural districts in our study experienced an unprecedented influx of els at the same historical moment that no child left behind (nclb) began requiring the annual assessment of and accountability for els. under nclb, els must be included in state assessment of students’ knowledge of academic content. school districts must also assess els’ progress in achieving english proficiency on an annual basis. wisconsin is part of the wida consortium; as a wida state, the wisconsin department of public instruction adopted wida assessments (e.g., access) for the mandated annual assessment of english proficiency in 2006. access is an assessment tool designed to measure els’ social and academic proficiency in english as well as the knowledge of the specific language associated with language arts, mathematics, science, and social studies. in addition to nclb requirements for els, wisconsin’s bilingual-bicultural statute [wis. stats. 115.95] outlines requirements for serving els, but these policies were established in the late 1970’s, when there were far fewer els in the state and most were located in urban districts in the southeastern part of the state. according to wis. stats. ch. 115 95 and pi 13, schools are obligated to support els by establishing a “bilingual-bicultural” program once they meet policy, context and schooling 51 certain enrollment figures. although wisconsin does not mandate a particular type of program, there has recently been an increased emphasis on integrating english learners into mainstream classes with language support offered in the mainstream classroom, which teachers commonly referred to as “push-in.” the increasing support for “push-in” practices comes from both the movement for inclusive education in the field of special education and the critiques of segregated esl classes that have come from the research literature (mcclure & cahnmanntaylor, 2010). recent research on new destination districts suggests that push-in models are being implemented for complex reasons, including accountability pressures, concerns regarding segregation and cost-savings since push-in eliminates the need for additional classroom spaces and reduces the need for additional esl/bilingual staff (castagno, 2009). policy researchers have described wisconsin as a state that emphasizes local control over education (brown, 2008; lowenhaupt, 2015), which makes it a particularly interesting state in which to examine the way educators enact policy on the ground. for example, while wisconsin policy requires that students who score between 1 and 5 on access receive assistance, the policy does not specify the type of services required. rural and suburban districts rely heavily on the network of 12 cesas for information on how to comply with current state policies. cesas serve as a link between school districts and between school districts and the state department of education, and cesas provide services and resources for schools districts, including professional development. one of the first things that we noticed during our data collection was that testing policies were shaping how educators were talking about els and how they thought about their work as teachers. across all five districts, administrators and teachers spoke the language of policy, regularly referring to el students by their access scores. not insignificantly, the emphasis on scores contributed to a deficit perspective on the students, one where the focus was on what students could not do. staff talked described “level 1’s and 2’s” (beginners) as “being high needs,” reflecting a deficit perspective. another example of focusing on what students can’t do was reflected by the esl coordinator in (cedar ridge), who, when talking about ‘low level’ high school els, said, “you know, you, at that level, they’re often not independent enough to break those chunks down while all this information is coming at them,” thus conflating a lack of language proficiency with a lack of independence. and a number of districts discussed modified grades for “lower level” students. while teachers were able to report on the access scores of all of the students in their classes, they did not understand the breakdown of scores the test provided regarding students’ proficiency in specific skill areas (reading, writing, speaking and listening; the overall score being a composite), and often had no other information about the students. for example, teachers had little knowledge about older students’ previous educational backgrounds or literacy skills in their first language. furthermore, across the districts esl staff appeared confused about how to use the scores to make decisions regarding practice. while wida offered professional development opportunities for teachers, esl staff in four of the five districts explained that their districts either didn’t have the money to pay for the wida training and/or they didn’t think district administrators prioritized els enough to spend the money. interestingly, we heard educators in all five districts using testing data to support the move to push-in models for els. in denton, for example, barb mitchell and lynette edwards (elementary school principal and district level 52 global education review 2(4) administrator responsible for esl services respectively), both explained that the denton district had moved away from the bilingual, pull-out model in favor of a push-in model for els in response to testing data that indicated that the previous pull-out and bilingual models were “not working.” mrs. mitchell explained the goals of push-in as being similar to inclusion models for special education students: because, really the idea was you wanted, you wanted our english language learners to look more like our model for special education, which was inclusion. because if you know how you learn english or any other language, you learn it by immersing yourself in that. reflecting an understanding that pull-out services lead els to feelings of marginalization, the district coordinator explained: we can’t teach the kids in isolation and expect them to succeed in a regular classroom because they don’t have that comfort level if we’re constantly pulling them out, they’re... they’re missing instruction from a teacher and they’re not able to interact with peers. and so when they go back into that room, they don’t feel comfortable. as these quotations suggest, the support for push-in reflects the current rhetoric in the academic literature and in the policy world regarding the academic and social benefits of integration for els. the clover school district has also embraced push-in as the official policy for bringing els cultural and linguistic outsiders into the mainstream. indeed, some policy researchers have lauded the clover school district for its commitment to push-in practices for els (odden, picus, archibald, goetz, mangan & aportela, 2007). in a 2007 wisconsin policy report, for example, the clover elementary school principal was praised for his decision to spread the els across the kindergarten classes despite the fact that there were enough native spanish-speaking students for separate esl or bilingual kindergarten classes (odden et al., 2007). in theory, push-in or inclusive models position els and native english speakers as equal participants in the classroom and promotes general education teachers and esl/bilingual teachers as engaging in coteaching (ovando & combs, 2012). in our observations across the districts we found that esl staff continued to be almost entirely responsible for working with els. underneath all the talk of inclusion, we found little evidence that any of the districts had prepared the staff for the inclusion of english learners in mainstream classes. ms. arroyo, the esl coordinator in cedar ridge, expressed frustration about the fact that that mainstream staff don’t view the esl teachers as equals who could provide assistance with instruction and assessment. in our interview with jean short, the high school esl teacher in denton, she described the way push-in worked at the high school level: sometimes i sit just with groups of students in the classroom and um, just talk quietly within that group to try to check understanding with what’s going on in the room, um, sometimes i’m helping them take notes and understand what it is they’re putting down. sometimes, i may take a group of students, you know, i had an english teacher who had a whole group of students who didn’t understand subject-verb agreement. so i did some additional activities with them in the back of the room while she continued on with... so it varies. as ms. short’s description reveals, her current role in push-in classes is largely that of policy, context and schooling 53 an aide who provides assistance to els while the general education teacher focuses on the native english speakers. this not only denies her the status of a co-teacher in the class, but also actually serves to transform push-in to very visible pull-out, as she separates els to work with them in the back of the room. our observation of a 12th grade social studies course confirmed jean’s description of how push-in services were handled in the district. after interviewing jean we followed her to the 12th grade american political systems class where she works with 5 els (all native spanish speakers). she noted that the access scores for the students ranged from 2 to 5 (including 3 and 4). all the students were sitting in rows (17 students total), and all the els sat in the back. the teacher was giving a power point lecture on the electoral college. during the class he called on two white girls sitting in the front row several times and directed conversation to them as well. jean worked mostly with the level 2 boy and also interacted briefly with the other boy. she focused on vocabulary words and told students when to write things down. “you need to write that down10” (i.e., number of electoral votes wi has). it seems that students were probably missing stuff as she was talking to them. the teacher did not interact with the el students or jean at all. (field notes, nov. 6, 2009) as this field note suggests, both els and the esl teacher were marginalized in this example of push-in. although els and native speakers were in the same room, els were not fully integrated into the life of the classroom. rather, they were academically marginalized by instruction that was directed solely at native english speakers and they were physically segregated at the back of the class. ms. short acknowledged the shortfalls of this model, and reported that “some teachers” were resistant to seeing esl teachers as equal partners and that she was often not informed in advance about the lesson plan for the day. she explained that without prior knowledge of the day’s lesson plan she couldn’t “pre-teach” to her els and was left whispering vocabulary words in their ears to try to just keep up. according to mrs. kohl, the esl teacher in clover, many mainstream teachers at the middle and high school levels were resistant to integrating els into their classes and did little to adapt their teaching to meet the needs of els. mainstream teachers in clover have never been required to engage in professional development around els. as we listened to mrs. kohl describe her role in the push-in settings, we were struck by the fact that she and the esl aide were the ones who had to entirely adjust their roles to fit into each mainstream classroom. while the mainstream teachers continued to offer undifferentiated instruction aimed solely at the native english speakers in the class, mrs. kohl and the bilingual aide rushed to assist and translate for english learners during class. while the clover administration appeared to view push-in as a success in and of itself, mrs. kohl and the bilingual aide expressed serious concerns about whether the district was providing adequate support for the 160 els in the district. although push-in is the official policy of the clover district, students who are most at risk for struggling on standardized tests were given support in the form of pull-out services. in recent years the number of elementary school students in the clover district scoring proficient or advanced has gone up, a fact that policy researchers have attributed to the district’s commitment to inclusive practices and to their reliance on the assistance of the local cesa (odden et al., 2007). scholars writing 54 global education review 2(4) from a technical-rational approach to policy might conclude that push-in practices in clover are a success because test scores among elementary aged students have improved. our research, however, highlights a more complicated picture. in contrast to the rosy picture painted by the testing data, mrs. kohl drew our attention to the fact that so many of our ell students are on the d and f list at this time... i was looking at the report the other day and saw that there are two pages of students on the d and f list in the middle school alone, and if i took out the ell students it came down to 17 students. because testing was driving the decisions regarding which students got services, the result was that many els were not getting served. what happens in grades where kids aren’t tested? mrs. kohl suggested that these students were simply victims of the policies. in denton, there was an awareness that many high school teachers had not embraced push-in. in response to our questions about how the transition to push-in was going, mrs. edwards responded and i know some of the...when we had some feedback from high school students last year, you know, like they’ve said when i raise my hand at the end of a lecture and ask, you, can you repeat that one part, i didn’t quite understand it, they get the, well you should have been listening... the kids are like, you know, when i get that kind of response, i will never raise my hand again, you know. as evidence that the district was invested in helping all teachers work with els, she explained, “for two years so far, every staff meeting, they’ve been presenting strategies for classroom teachers to use. and the mantra was, if it’s good for ells, it’s good for everybody.” the fact that administrators in denton recognized that mainstream teachers need ongoing support and training during the transition to push-in is a positive sign. the support for push-in, however, appears to come primarily from assumptions about the importance of cultural and linguistic assimilation for els. and, as implied in the quote, there was little recognition of the need for language-specific support, nor culturally and linguistically responsive instructional approaches and strategies. in contrast to the other four districts, steward was interesting in its focus on creating policy to respond to local issues. this is not to say that the steward staff did not spend time on mandatory testing, and they certainly did talk about efforts to implement push-in. however, they were more focused on responding to local concerns and preparing els to live in the community. for example, the esl staff developed courses specifically directed at the somali high school students, including a “survival skills” class that covered topics such as banking. here, there seemed to be an understanding that the somali youth were likely to stay in steward and continue to work in the “turkey store” (poultry processing plant) after graduation. as we noted earlier, the somali high school students left minnesota because of concerns regarding minnesota’s high school exit exam. as in other states with high school exit exams, the minnesota high school exit exam was designed for native english speakers and is therefore first and foremost a test of english proficiency, which puts els at a distinct disadvantage. somali youth and families migrated to wisconsin because wisconsin did not have a high school exit exam, and they were specifically drawn to steward by jobs in the local meat processing plant. the move to steward reflects the understandings of this population regarding how the minnesota educational policy policy, context and schooling 55 disadvantaged them, and also reflects their determination to be active agents in their schooling (dorner, 2012). significantly, local community members and steward educators expressed concerns about somali students coming to steward to get a high school diploma after failing the high school exit exam in minnesota. ms. johnston stated that she shared the concern about students showing up in january and trying to graduate after just one semester. she and mr. morgan were also involved in negotiating new high school graduation policies directed at somali students. the first policy requires all students to be enrolled in steward schools for two semesters in order to earn a steward diploma. using the discourse of accountability, ms. johnston explained that she supported the two-semester policy because steward educators had to be able to assess whether students “can write or read” before getting a steward diploma. the second policy requires students to demonstrate minimum english proficiency in order to graduate from high school. drawing once again on an inclusive discourse, ms. johnston was quick to point out that this new requirement was for “all seniors, all seniors. not just english language learners.” the students demonstrated their english skills using a portfolio process, which involved being interviewed by community members, administrators and teachers. the involvement of community members in this process is particularly interesting and might be interpreted as a way to give long-time community members a sense of power and control in a changing social environment. as these policies suggest, ms. johnson and mr. johnson’s advocacy did not extend to explicit questioning of the dominant educational discourses that called for assimilation. making sense of the stories the educational contexts facing immigrant els in these five rural districts were shaped by the complex interactions among state-level educational policies and discourses, local community attitudes towards immigrants, staffing and budgets, and educators’ professional judgments. english learners and their educators in our five rural districts faced serious and complicated challenges. although there were differences across the five cases, which make it impossible to talk about a single way that rural schools respond to new populations of els, there were important themes across the cases. across all five districts esl/bilingual staff were isolated and marginalized in their schools, and administrators reported difficulties recruiting certified esl/bilingual teachers. in addition to problems with isolation and understaffing, there was little depth of experience with el issues in any of the districts. in most districts, the responsibility for els was left to a teacher whose preparation and experience had been in teaching a foreign language. while virtually all of them recognized a challenging environment for english learners, and took on an advocacy role for these students, there were few teachers certified in esl, and virtually none with a background that included subject-area academic instruction. we found that the esl/bilingual staff was largely unaware of the current research on integrating language and content, or on additive approaches to working with immigrant els. many of the teachers we interviewed recognized their limitations and confided that they were often overwhelmed by their responsibilities, worried about their students, and frustrated by their general education colleagues. there is a robust body of scholarship that highlights the problems of teacher isolation, including the absence of opportunities for professional growth, emotional stress and attrition (lieberman & miller, 1990; lortie, 56 global education review 2(4) 1975; schlitte et. al,. 2005). and it has long been acknowledged that esl and bilingual professionals in schools usually work in isolation, often being the only educator in a given building specifically designated to work with els. significantly, we found that professional isolation from current research allowed a deficit perspective about immigrant families and a culture of low expectations for els to go largely unchecked. there was, for example, an unquestioned assumption, despite research to the contrary, that els could not engage in rigorous academic learning until they acquired english, which for most educators meant building vocabulary. to be clear, we are not arguing that isolation causes deficit perspectives to emerge, but our data suggests that distance from information and lack of opportunities to engage in meaningful professional collaboration may allow deficit perspectives to go unchallenged. finally, our point here is not to criticize dedicated educators who are overworked and isolated, but to point out that professional isolation has a negative impact on educators and students. although problems associated with the isolation of esl/bilingual educators are not unique to rural new destinations, we are arguing that the situation in rural new destinations is more pronounced. without exception the esl/bilingual staff lived either in the districts where they worked, or in neighboring towns, and thus were part of the local conversations regarding changing demographics. while denton was the only community where there was widespread antiimmigrant sentiment, the esl/bilingual staff in all five communities mentioned that some locals were concerned about the growing number of immigrants moving to their respective towns, and particularly worried about the impact of immigrant els on school resources. the esl/bilingual staff in all five districts reported that many mainstream educators in their districts often held overtly problematic views about els. as our case studies demonstrate, the esl/bilingual educators had to contend with these attitudes when making decisions about how to serve the growing number of immigrant els in their schools. finally, as we have already argued, even dedicated members of the esl/bilingual staff expressed some deficit perspectives about immigrant els. previous research on the educational contexts in new destinations has similarly found that educators may express inclusive intentions towards new student populations and simultaneously hold deficit perspectives towards these groups (cooper, 2009; lowenhaupt, 2010; wortham, mortimer, & allard, 2009; turner, 2015). across all five districts, the language of policy infused the ways the esl/bilingual staff talked about the immigrant els. the performance of els on standardized tests was a particular anxiety for teachers and administrators. as various sociocultural approaches to policy remind us, all policies reflect particular assumptions regarding both the nature of the social “problem” and assumptions about how to solve the problem (ball, 1997; shore & wright, 1997). according to the logic of both testing and push-in policies, the problem is the slow rate of english acquisition among els and the impact of their limited english proficiency on els’ academic achievement. the fact that els speak languages other than english is therefore implicitly viewed as a deficit in need of remediation. not insignificantly, the esl/bilingual educators across the five districts appeared to accept the assumptions regarding the problems defined by current policies. thus, while they expressed concerns about how test scores were used to evaluate schools and criticisms about the amount of time that testing took, none of the teachers questioned the assumption that els were behind and needed to acquire english more quickly. policy, context and schooling 57 as thea abu el-haj (2006) has astutely asserted, current educational solutions reflect three justice claims around integration, equal standards, and recognition of difference. the policies around testing and the current emphasis on push-in policies grow out of educational justice claims around the importance of equal standards and integration respectively. both testing policies and push-in policies can be categorized as inclusive policies, which aim to include els among all other students. as research on testing clearly demonstrates, however, there are often significant unintended consequences of inclusive policies, including the creation of greater barriers for els (menken, 2008). push-in policies, for example, are meant to address the problems associated with segregation, but when integration trumps bilingualism in this definition of inclusiveness the result is practice that is assimilative in nature. because assimilative practices inherently focus on what els “lack” there are no attempts to build on students’ native languages or cultural backgrounds (garcia and bartlett, 2011). testing policies, for example, have encouraged educators in denton to move away from bilingual education in favor of english-only practices (menken, 2008), despite provision for bilingual education in wisconsin policy. as many scholars have observed, assimilationist practices can lead to marginalization and difficulty in school, thereby perpetuating inequalities. our research confirms the importance of understanding educational policies as being nested within and playing out in particular communities. we see the influence of local context in how educators make sense of policies, and we see how policies and community context shape how educators make sense of the educational needs of immigrant els. our research also illustrates that inclusive educational policies do not guarantee that immigrant els will receive meaningful and equal educations. the assumption that inclusive policies will provide educational opportunities for immigrant els fails to recognize that policies are negotiated by policy actors on the ground. inclusivity does not guarantee that students’ linguistic or cultural identities will be reflected in educational spaces. indeed, they were not in any of the focal districts in our study. of course, deficit thinking and the problems associated with assimilative policies and practices are not unique to these five rural districts or to rural new destinations more generally. a vast body of scholarship has pointed to the challenging educational contexts facing immigrant els in urban districts as well. that said, we believe that the issues surrounding professional isolation, both the isolation that esl/bilingual staff experience inside their schools and the isolation from current research, are more pronounced in rural new destinations. furthermore, the lack of established coethnic/immigrant communities in new destinations means that there is an absence of organized community voices to advocate for immigrant els and to challenge deficit discourses. despite the challenges facing these rural new destination districts, there are pockets of possibility in each district in the form of dedicated individuals who deserve more support and professional development for their work. notes 1. limited english proficient, or lep, has long been the favored label for english learners in the us policy world. 2. all names of towns and people used in this article are pseudonyms, in order to protect the privacy of study subjects. 3. title i is the portion of the united states federal elementary and secondary education act (esea), which provides financial assistance to local educational agencies (leas) and schools with high numbers or high percentages of children from low-income families. 58 global education review 2(4) 4. el (english learner) refers to students/people learning english, while esl (english as a second language) refers to a field, a program model, and programmatic and/or course content. 5. english language learner, or ell, is an alternative to english learner (el). while they are synonymous, we have chosen to use el. we use ell only when quoting its usage by participants. author note support for this research was 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(2006). new destinations: mexican immigration in the united states. new york: russell sage. about the author(s) stacey j. lee, phd, is a professor in the department of educational policy studies at the university of wisconsinmadison. her research interests focus on the multiple and complex ways in which race, class, gender and local context influence immigrant students’ opportunities, experiences, and identities; and the role of education in the incorporation of immigrant youth into the us. margaret r. hawkins, phd, is a professor in the department of curriculum and instruction at the university of wisconsin-madison. her research interests are in issues at the intersection of mobility, language and education, with a focus on languages and literacies in and out of school, including classroom, home and community based settings. http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/122/ http://repository.upenn.edu/gse_pubs/122/ 68 global education review 2(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: alemán de la garza, lorena yadira, sancho-vinuesa, teresa & gómez zermeño, marcela georgina (2015). atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) with a relatively high rate of program completers. global education review, 2 (3). 68-81 atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) with a relatively high rate of program completers lorena yadira alemán de la garza instituto tecnológico y de estudios superiores de monterrey (itesm), mexico teresa sancho-vinuesa universitat oberta de catalunya (uoc), barcelona, spain marcela georgina gómez zermeño instituto tecnológico y de estudios superiores de monterrey (itesm), mexico abstract massive open online courses (moocs) have raised high expectations due to their potential for changing the relationship among students and professors, academy, and the general community. the terms “massive”, “open”, “online” and “course” have been redefined and reinvented so many times that it is difficult to offer a wide broad definition to cover the whole of their activity. indeed, these terms may be misleading; for example, the term “massive” generally refers to the number of learners joined, but it does not refer to the equally massive desertion levels that have been associated with such programs. this document presents a comparative analysis for 11 moocs that obtained a terminal efficiency equal to or less than 11% and a mooc whose calculated terminal efficiency was of 22.35%. this last mooc, created as part of a teacher training strategy, was developed at coursera’s platform, and enrolled 10,161 learners from 81 different countries. the obtained results describe the characteristics of the participants, the technological resources, and the tools and the didactic strategies implemented by the instructors. it is concluded that without a correct measurement of the final results, it is not possible to evaluate the success of a mooc; therefore the institutions and consortia must establish indicators to focus the efforts in order to improve the quality of teaching. keywords moocs, terminal efficiency, desertion introduction on november 4, 2012, the new york times declared 2012 as the year of the moocs (massive open online courses), due to the impact that they seemed to promise to bring to the process of teaching and learning (pappano, 2012). since their inception in 2008, this new modality of sharing knowledge has positioned itself between the tastes and preferences of those ______________________________ corresponding author: lorena y alemán de la garza, instituto tecnológico y de estudios superiores de monterrey (itesm), avda. eugenio garza sada, 2501 sur edificio cedes, piso ss1 64849 monterrey (nuevo león) mexico email: lorena.aleman@itesm.mx atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 69 interested in continuous education. however, it was in 2012 when a great tsunami offer of moocs took place (hennessy, 2012), and they became present through a variety of education platforms. from then on, the way of transmitting knowledge, collaborating, and learning has been extended through these courses, which did not replace traditional instructional method, but, rather, complemented face-to-face formats. moocs tend to be geared toward those who seek additional material to strengthen their professional career, update knowledge, and acquire learning about areas of interest, although they also serve those who seek access to preparedness beyond high school education (billings, 2014; desilets, 2013). according to their evolving definition, moocs can be regarded as offering courses through the use of technology, housed in an educational platform, not linked to a formal registration at a certain university, with no deadline to register and no penalty for abandonment (deboerho, stump and breslow, 2014). however, to date, each of the terms “massive”, “open”, “online”, and “course” has been redefined and reinvented on a number of occasions; hence, it is difficult to offer a fully covering definition. usually when using the terms “massive” and “open,” the intent is to indicate that the course will be available to any person showing interest and self-motivation to register. however, these terms usually do not acknowledge the fact that in the same way, and moocs are likely to experience massive departures of participants at any time. it is reasonable to say that those who register as participants in a mooc are individuals who are self-motivated for learning, with varied reasons for electing to participate. due to this component of variability and the fact that participation depends only on them and not on the university faculty who teach them, when measuring the moocs’ success it is necessary to pay particular attention to how the parameter is calculated. in addition, this new method opens the door to be creative in the generation of new metrics to evaluate them (jordan, 2014). in this article, we will use the statistic named terminal efficiency, which refers to the percentage resulting from dividing the total number of participants who received coursera’s declarative of achievement among the total of registered participants (observatorio de innovación educativa, 2014). this paper presents the results obtained when calculating the terminal efficiency for 12 moocs offered between 2013 and 2014 by a renowned latin american university. the results indicate that some of the moocs offered by the university have a terminal efficiency above 6.5% which is the average recorded in the literature (jordan, 2014); however, one of the courses reported an atypical terminal efficiency, when 22.35% of the joined participants completed the course, fulfilled the course’s activities and obtained the declarative of achievement. the detailed analysis for the mooc that had an atypical terminal efficiency is presented. for this course, a description is included of the participants’ characteristics, the technological resources used, and the tools and teaching strategies implemented by the academic staff. the findings suggest that to evaluate the success of a mooc it is necessary to generate metrics other than those employed in the evaluation of face-to-face or hybrid courses. theoretical framework this section presents briefly the concepts which sustain the research. what are moocs? to define the term mooc, we refer to the connectivism and connective learning course 70 global education review 2(3) taught by george siemens and stephen downes in 2008 through the university of manitoba. george siemens is considered the creator of the theory of connectivism, in which students have the freedom to create their personal learning environment (ple) and build the knowledge through their collaboration at discussion and debate forums in a virtual environment (marques & mcguire, 2013). from the beginning, moocs used different technological resources so that participants could learn and be interconnected to collaborate. similarly, moocs were steeped in the philosophy of making knowledge attainable and available to all people through the sharing of content (billings, 2014). the learning theory that supports moocs derives from constructivist theory, which, for virtual learning spaces, establishes that it is through connections and collaborations at educational platforms that students build knowledge (heredia-escorza & sánchez-aradillas, 2013). because of this, learning is seen as a personal and internal process where the teacher will be the person who guides or who will provide the means to learn (lópez-zapico & tascon-fernández, 2013). in the educational field, mobility in communication and collaboration technologies have made a difference in facilitating access to online content; they have also empowered the sharing of videos that enrich the process of teaching and learning (hannon, patton & temperley, 2011). this, in conjunction with the accessibility of smartphones and tablets, as well as the high level of participation in social networks, have been positive factors with regard to the popularity of online education (desilets, 2013). billings (2014) states that the great acceptance of the moocs by the continuous learning community rests in the freedom to choose how much they will be learning; this implies that participants decide their level of engagement with the course based on a personal interest to learn. the author also notes that moocs have been rapidly accepted because they offer collaboration with people from the rest of the world through virtual space, an advantage that the face-to-face courses cannot provide. there are currently various platforms that integrate resources for asynchronous interaction. the vast majority of them had the khan academy and itunes u platforms as models for sharing knowledge. today, the most acknowledged platforms for hosting of moocs are edx and coursera (scopeo, 2013); however, in contrast with the original idea creators of the moocs had, these platforms require registration periods (although registration is open during the weeks that the course is available) and content is under copyright, so it restricts the term "open" (marques & mcguire, 2013). on the other hand, based on the strengthening link between technology and education, as well as the opportunity created by this relationship of learning inside and outside the classroom, deboer et al. (2014), established that the predominant requirements for a course to be considered a mooc are: that it is offered through the use of an educational platform; that the knowledge is available to anyone (i.e. it is not linked to a formal registration at a certain university); there is no limit or restriction for registration, and there is no penalty for abandonment. the authors stipulate that only when these conditions exist, can a course be considered a mooc. terminal efficiency terminal efficiency is the percentage resulting from dividing the number of participants who received the declarative of achievement from the educational platform, by the total of registered participants (observatorio de innovación educativa, 2014). jordan (2014) uses the term atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 71 completion rate to mean the same, and establishes its definition as the ratio between the total number of participants who met the criteria of the course for the declarative of achievement with respect to the total number of registrations. in the research done by deboer et al. (2014), the authors also estimated the completion rate in this same way; however their conclusions suggested that it is necessary to redefine and clarify the way in which the mooc achievement is measured. ho et al. (2014) also suggested the need to rethink the metrics in the mooc’s calculation, taking advantage of the different types of information generated by these kind of courses; for example, the number of accesses to certain video or the number of downloads of a certain document. according to jordan (2014), the average total number of participants of a mooc is around 43,000; of this amount, 6.5% complete the course. the author also establishes that there is a negative correlation between the total number of participants who complete the course and its length; that is, when the duration of the course extends, the number of participants who complete the course decreases. this situation gives rise to the explanation of the following key concept within the theoretical framework. dropout rate the term “dropout” is widely used in latin america to refer to the abandonment of school as a multifactorial situation experienced by students who unregister (rae, 2014). in online education, there are many factors that can influence the decision to leave a virtual learning space, including the level of prior knowledge required, the lack of certain necessary skills to take the course in a self-directed way, a change in the layout, a decrease in the level of selfmotivation, or the loss in confidence at achieving the expected result (milligan, littlejohn & margaryan, 2013). billings (2014) indicates that among the disadvantages of moocs is the lack of sufficient information to identify the causes that lead to fewer than 10% of participants complying with all activities and finishing the course. among the possible reasons the author mentions are the required improvements in the design and implementation of the mooc, uncertainty on the recognition of the acquired learning (by universities and employers) and low adaptability to the e-learning model. on the other hand, ho et al. (2014) estimate the dropout rate as the complement to the percentage of active students on the platform, defining the latter as the ratio between the number of learners who have been active on the course during the last week and the total of registered participants. in addition to the above, the authors state that the dropout rate will be equivalent to the attrition of the course during the given period. as a result of their research, they found that about 35% of participants in a particular mooc never check the contents of the course (momentary motivation for registration). in addition, only 50% of the remaining participants who do view the course’s content actually access the first activity assigned in the course. method the main objective of this investigation is to evaluate the terminal efficiency of the moocs offered by one of the universities of greater recognition in latin america that is seen as a leader in providing distance education. the following sections will describe the context of the research, the applied instruments, the dimensions of analysis and the participant population. 72 global education review 2(3) context possessing an extensive infrastructure to offer online programs, the university housing the mooc under study is a pioneer within the private universities in latin america. this educational institution is governed by five values, three of which —innovation, global vision, and teamwork — are related to the proposed offering of massive open online courses. within this educational institution, much of the teaching staff and information technology personnel already have experience in the generation, management and administration of online courses; thus, creating a mooc was a variant to what they have done previously. the staff knew that within the distance teachinglearning process, the student takes responsibility for self-direction and time management to meet the goal of approving the courses (alemán & gómez-zermeño, 2012; gómez-zermeño, rodríguez-arroyo & márquez-guzmán, 2013). the moocs offered by the university through coursera cover different areas of study, including mathematics, physics, innovation, entrepreneurship, latin american culture and strategic educational management, to name a few. the experience of the personnel involved in the design and implementation of the mooc, in conjunction with the position of leadership that the university occupies, could be two major factors of influence for the terminal efficiency rate, which had an level considerably higher than the average reported in other research, with a calculated terminal efficiency of 22.35%. however, the foregoing has not been proved statistically and must await further investigation. the analyzed courses in this research correspond to the moocs offered during 2013 and until the summer of 2014, all of them housed in the learning platform coursera. most of these courses were linked in some way to one of the face-to-face courses that the university offers, either as a material of self-study to withstand any instructor or as support to the studied material within the classroom. however, they were not closed for registration to only these persons, and because they were offered through the educational platform in a massive and open way, the students at the institute were able to collaborate and share knowledge virtually with participants from all over the world. the aim of the course that presented an atypical terminal efficiency was to strengthen leadership in strategic educational management, taking advantage of technology in the process of strategic planning, shared leadership, collaborative and responsible social participation and evaluation for continuous improvement. the course’s body was made up of four units and aimed at all those interested in the subject. participation in the course did not require previous knowledge. research instruments as stated above, in this research the definition for terminal efficiency corresponds to the percentage resulting from dividing the total number of participants who received the declarative of achievement from coursera, among the total of registered participants (observatorio de innovación educativa, 2014). the source of information is the panel of statistical analysis that coursera offers on its dashboard. atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 73 figure 1. dashboard of the learning platform coursera. since the data required to estimate the terminal efficiency are provided by coursera, the same criterion was used for all the analyzed courses, as the methodology has been standardized, and the source of the data is validated. dimensions of the analysis the educational platform coursera hosted the university’s moocs. this platform offers two different types of declarative of achievement for the participants who complete and approve the course. the declarative of achievement is awarded to participants who approve the course and the declarative of achievement with distinction is given to participants with an outstanding final average. both the criterion of achievement and achievement with distinction are subject to the levels determined by the educational staff involved in the course design. there is a third option of declarative, one with a cost, and its validity is supported by coursera’s process where official documentation validates the identity of the participant. the aim of this article is the comparison of the terminal efficiency among the moocs offered by the university. moreover, we also present a breakdown analysis of the atypical course by type of declarative granted, in order to submit a detailed analysis of the information collected. population and sample the maximum total of enrolled participants in the courses will be used for the calculation of terminal efficiency, being this total of people who signed up and never performed any activity (registration was the result of a momentary motivation), by those who were only reviewing the course content without performing any activity, by those who carried out some of the activities and by those participants who meet the 74 global education review 2(3) criteria required to obtain the declarative of achievement. for the atypical case studied, the terminal efficiency is calculated with respect to participants who remained active during the complete course. results between january 2013 and summer 2014, the university under study and coursera, in conjunction, received 209,871 requests to participate in their 12 moocs. academic authorities of the university indicated that for the august-december 2014 term, the academic institution had around 95,000 students formally enrolled in all the educational programs offered. taking this statistic as reference, the total amount of participants in the offered moocs approximately equals to 220.92% of the total number of students enrolled in the institution. from the perspective of strategic positioning the university is implementing, the main goal of reaching markets not physically attainable has been covered successfully. also it is fulfilling a social commitment to share knowledge and take a position as an innovative university in teaching-learning processes. the findings presented below have been organized in the following manner. first there is a brief description of the atypical course, its subject matter and duration; then the analysis of terminal efficiency for the 12 moocs offered by the university between january 2013 and summer of 2014 is presented; finally, the characteristics’ analysis of the participants of the mooc whose terminal efficiency was the 22.35%. finally, we present the technological resources, tools, and educational strategies of the mooc with atypical terminal efficiency. course description the course with terminal efficiency of 22.35% established as its main objective strengthening the leadership in strategic educational management through the use of technology in the process of strategic planning, shared leadership, collaborative, responsible social participation and evaluation for continuous improvement. the course was divided into four units through which participants strengthened the educational management at their workplace, built a shared vision of school transformation, learned to identify the competencies required to work in collaborative and responsible manner and evaluated through reflection, the improvement in the quality of education. the strategic educational management course was designed with a duration of 6 weeks, from june 2 to july 13, 2014; however, it remained open until august 6 since the participants requested it in order to conclude the activities. comparative analysis between moocs mathematics, physics, innovation, entrepreneurship, latin american culture and strategic management education are some of the disciplines of study that encompass the content of the moocs offered by the university and studied for this research. in equal magnitude of diversity is the rate of terminal efficiency calculated for each of them, results showed rates from 1.2% to the 22.35% (figure 2). atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 75 figure 2. rate of terminal efficiency with respect to the registered total per course maximum. it is important to note that the average terminal efficiency for the moocs offered by the university is 4%, a percentage equal to that documented by the graduate school of education at the university of pennsylvania in their recent research on moocs (penn gse, 2013). leaving aside the atypical case, the terminal efficiency calculated for the rest of the moocs is between the interval of 1.2% and 10.5%. the courses with the lowest and highest terminal efficiency correspond to the two courses with the higher amount of participants: mooc 3 records 35,901 and mooc 10 with 24,262 participants registered. however, although it seems that a 1.2% of achievement for mooc 3 is a low rate, when this percentage is multiplied by the total number of participants at the course, the quantity of 431 participants meeting coursera’s achievement declarative is obtained. figure 3 shows the moocs composition with respect to the 209,262 registered in the educational platform. 76 global education review 2(3) figure 3. percentage of enrolled by mooc with respect to the total number of records in the moocs offered by the university in the specific case of the atypical course that had 10,161 enrolled participants (mooc 12), 2,271 received the declarative of achievement; 506 participants obtained the declarative of normal achievement and 1,765 participants received declarative of achievement with distinction. it is important to mention that for this particular course, the required criteria for receiving the declarative of achievement with distinction included the participant’s compliance with all assigned activities and also a final average equal to or higher than 90%; to obtain the declarative of normal achievement instructors set a final average equal to or higher than 70% and below 90% and the submission of all the activities. with the above information, it can be concluded that with respect to the maximum total of enrolled participants, 17.37% of them presented a high level of commitment to the course, as demonstrating by their attaining the declarative of achievement with distinction; 4.97% of the maximum total of enrolled participants obtained the declarative of normal achievement. in recent studies, one of the most commonly identified issues is the urgent need to define new ways to measure the success of the massive open online courses. both in the article published by deboer et al. (2014) and in the one published by jordan (2014) , the researchers concluded that a better metric for determining the rate of compliance (statistically equivalent to terminal efficiency) is to consider the percentage of declarative of achievement with respect to the registered population that remained active throughout the duration of the course. the learning platform coursera provides the data of total number of students who visited the course’s page; for the particular case of the atypical course (mooc 12), 8,435 participants were registered as continuously active. redefining the terminal efficiency as the percentage of enrolled participants who obtained the declarative of achievement with respect to the total of continuously active registered participants, the atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 77 calculated terminal efficiency is 26.92%. it is also possible to calculate the dropout rate, for this course was of 16.98% since 1726 records showed no activity in coursera (see table 1). table 1. descriptive statistics of the course with atypical terminal efficiency total amount of enrolled participants 10,161 total amount of continuously active participants 8,435 total amount of enrolled participants with declarative of achievement 2,271 terminal efficiency with respect to the total amount of enrolled participants 22.35% terminal efficiency with respect to the total amount of continuously active participants 26.92% characteristics of the participants: the atypical mooc the reported characteristics for the participants of the mooc with an atypical terminal efficiency are calculated from the survey that was part of the registration process to the course. some of the descriptive statistics obtained are: 40.6% are male and 59.4% female; 38 years old is the participant’s average age; 65.1% of the participants reside in mexico (country where the university’s headquarters are located) and 34.9% outside mexico. also, 71.8% of participants have as main professional activity teaching / pedagogical technical advisor and 56.20% work at a public school. finally, 31.1% of the survey’s participants identified themselves that the main reason for participating at the mooc was the desire to upgrade within the model of strategic educational management. see figure 4. 78 global education review 2(3) for the specific case of the atypical course, 96.03% of respondents in the survey expressed their intention of completing the course; this can be taken as an attitude of commitment since they hoped to receive a successful learning experience. that same survey shows that 18.2% of respondents expressed as one of their main expectations to get a certificate of participation in a course taught by the university. this result can be used as an estimate for the institution’s market positioning. technological resources, tools, and instructional strategies of the atypical mooc during the design stage of the mooc with atypical terminal efficiency, special attention was given to generating the technological resources for sharing the course’s contents. the preparation of all the explanatory videos that would serve as a support to the participants required a large amount of time from the designing team. for example, within the technological resources employed in the atypical mooc, animated readings and interactive activities were included. other technological resources within the course were discussion forums, self-assessments or questionnaires, and explanatory videos prepared by the instructors. the technological tools used by participants during the mooc’s collaboration were the ones included at google +; through these, participants generated e-mail accounts, created a profile, formed a virtual community for their school and collaborated asynchronously. the instructors and administrative staff implemented a number of motivation strategies, including focusing on a close communication policy through the course’s announcements section, maintaining close contact with all the participants either through the virtual community or by email, providing reminders of the weekly activities to be done and the due dates. these strategies were used for motivating participants to complete the mooc’s four units. results in this study show that out of the 12 moocs offered by the university, one of them attained a terminal efficiency of 22.35 %. this atypically high terminal efficiency may be due to a number of things; we believe that the special care placed on the mooc’s design, as well as the active communication carried out by the teaching staff during the course, played a big role in achieving it. distance education students often feel alone during their time spent in online courses (kaplun, 2000), hence the importance of applying motivational strategies that let students know they are not alone. mooc 12 provided tools that allowed the interaction between participants and between participants and teaching staff, a key concept in connectivism, as well as a critical element in the learning process in online learning environments. conclusion the presence of educational platforms has led universities from different countries to be part of the philosophy of sharing knowledge free of charge, or at a low cost when a validated certification is expected. offering moocs is often a part of positioning strategies, of attracting national and international talent for projects of educational innovation and social commitment. however, like any other project, there must be parameters to evaluate success. in the case of the moocs, an example of these parameters is the terminal efficiency rate, statistical analysis which is employed by one of the leading universities in latin america, and determined as the percentage of students scoring the declarative of achievement with respect to the maximum total number of registrations. the present document analyzed terminal efficiency for 12 mooc offered by the university and hosted on the learning platform coursera. results show that the terminal efficiency average for the considered courses is equal to the average reported in the literature for completion rate, atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 79 statistically equivalent to the terminal efficiency rate employed by the university. we conclude that overall, the efficiency of the university as a whole is within the standards that the literature indicates. individually, one mooc had a terminal efficiency close to 1% of the total number of participants (more than 35 thousand people), so the academic authorities must assess these findings concerning positioning and image policies. within the statistical analysis, the composition of courses for the 209,871 participants of moocs offered by the university between january 2013 and summer of 2014 was broken down. the analysis for the terminal efficiency minimum and maximum rate in relation to the number of participants enrolled at the moocs showed that a low terminal efficiency expressed as a percentage is still attractive to the academic authorities in terms of total number of participants. descriptive statistics of those who were registered in the course of strategic educational management were reported. among the most noteworthy finds is the terminal efficiency rate of 22.53%, well above that reported by other courses at the same university, or even above that generally reported in the literature (jordan, 2014). the participants’ profile shows that it was a group of people with high interest in the subject matter of the course. therefore we highlight the fact that in the registration survey 98.04% of the respondents expressed their intention to complete the course. on the other hand, when they were questioned for the reasons motivating their participation in the mooc, 36.81% expressed the expectation of obtaining a certificate from the university. an analysis of this atypical mooc allows for the identification of certain specific strategies that likely contributed to its high terminal efficiency. these include a careful process of course design to include attractive technological resources (animated readings and interactive exercises) and the use of practical tools (various google + tools), in conjunction with the different communication strategies that were implemented by the teaching staff throughout the duration of the course, in order to motivate participants to continue engaging with the contents of the mooc and answering the exercises. future research is proposed to expand the knowledge base of how to increase terminal efficiency in a mooc. one area of suggested future research is the statistical validation of the correlation between the initial intention and the terminal efficiency rate. a concern arises due to the fact that instructors and academic staff were involved during the design and implementation stages on motivational and tracking activities for participants. resources were allocated to keep updated announcements and to procure a pleasant and enriching collaboration through virtual communities. the hypothesis to be tested is the positive effect over the terminal efficiency when the course has a faculty committed to the care, attention and companionship of enrollees. also, unlike the proposals of jordan (2014) and deboer (2014), we propose to calculate the terminal efficiency of moocs considering only participants classified in the platform as "committed to complete" and "committed to audit", with the intention of “debugging” the database of registered participants by eliminating the participants that the educational platform reported as "uncommitted", i. e. participants who reviewed a low percentage of the course’s content and also did not carry out the activities assigned. thus, we concluded that to evaluate the success of a mooc, it is necessary to generate metrics other than those employed in the evaluation of face-toface or hybrid courses. massive open online courses have generated great expectations because of their potential to change the relationship between students and teachers, the academy and community in general. this research presents atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 80 important points in that, unlike previously documented in the literature, one of the studied moocs presented a terminal efficiency considerably higher with this information we seek to expand the knowledge base of how to increase terminal efficiency in a mooc, and in this way have an impact on their quality and contribute to the improvement of education. references alemán, l.y., & gómez-zermeño, m.g. 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(2012, november 4th). the year of the mooc. the new york times, ed26 of education life. real academia española [rae] (2014). diccionario de la lengua española (22da ed.). retrieved from: http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=deserción scopeo (2013). scopeo informe nº2: mooc: estado de la situación actual, posibilidades, retos y futuro‖. scopeo informe no. 2 retrieved from http://scopeo.usal.es/wpcontent/uploads/2013/06/scopeoi002.pdf about the author(s) lorena yadira alemán de la garza is a doctoral candidate in the education and ict (e-learning) doctoral program at the open university of catalonia (uoc), spain. she holds a master's degree, with honors, in educational institution administration from itesm, and a bachelor's degree, with honors, in business administration from tecmilenio university, mexico. she has worked as a postgraduate lecturer in the graduate school of education at itesm on master's degree programs in educational institution administration, in education and educational technology. she is a member of the research chair in the school as a knowledge organization. she is the technical http://rieege.tecvirtual.mx/index.php/rieege/article/view/76 http://rieege.tecvirtual.mx/index.php/rieege/article/view/76 http://www.gse.upenn.edu/pressroom/press-releases/2013/12/penn-gse-study-shows-moocs-have-relatively-few-active-users-only-few-persisti http://www.gse.upenn.edu/pressroom/press-releases/2013/12/penn-gse-study-shows-moocs-have-relatively-few-active-users-only-few-persisti http://www.gse.upenn.edu/pressroom/press-releases/2013/12/penn-gse-study-shows-moocs-have-relatively-few-active-users-only-few-persisti http://rieege.tecvirtual.mx/index.php/rieege/article/view/126 http://rieege.tecvirtual.mx/index.php/rieege/article/view/126 http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/ecosystem_for_edu.pdf http://www.cisco.com/web/strategy/docs/education/ecosystem_for_edu.pdf http://moocnewsandreviews.com/what-is-a-massive-open-online-course-anyway-attempting-definition/ http://moocnewsandreviews.com/what-is-a-massive-open-online-course-anyway-attempting-definition/ http://moocnewsandreviews.com/what-is-a-massive-open-online-course-anyway-attempting-definition/ http://lema.rae.es/drae/?val=deserción http://scopeo.usal.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/scopeoi002.pdf http://scopeo.usal.es/wp-content/uploads/2013/06/scopeoi002.pdf atypical: analysis of a massive open online course (mooc) 81 manager on educational research projects of the mexican national council of science and technology (conacyt). she is the coordinator of university extension programs and special projects. of note among these is the higher middle education teacher training program (profordems) and the new teaching profile diploma. teresa sancho-vinuesa, phd, mathematics degree and ph.d. degree in electronic engineering, is associate professor at the universitat oberta de catalunya (uoc), where she has been involved in several positions: academic coordinator of the ph. d. programme in information and knowledge society, research director and vice-rector in research and innovation. she has been visiting scientist at the open university uk (2015). currently, she teaches mathematics for engineers and conducts research on e-assessment, feedback and learning analytics as head of the laika (learning analytics for innovation and knowledge application in higher education) group. nowadays she is the coordinator of the mooc programme ucatx, launched by the catalan government in 2013. she has participated in over 10 technical programme committees and has been reviewer in several academic journals. dr. sancho has authored over 25 academic journal and conference papers, as well as writing two books and several chapters of books. marcela georgina gómez zermeño, phd, holds a doctorate in educational innovation from the graduate school of education at itesm, and a master's degree in information and communication technology engineering sciences. int-citcom, france télécoms higher education. she also holds a bachelor's degree in computer and administration systems from itesm. she is a tenured lecturer at the graduate school of education at itesm on master's degree programs in education and educational technology and in the doctoral program of educational innovation. she is a member of the research chairs in the school as a knowledge organization and innovation in technology and education, and of the mexican education research council (comie). she is the technical manager on educational research projects of the mexican national council of science and technology (conacyt) and the alfa program of the european commission. she forms part of the national system of researchers (sni) level 1. atypical #5to format pp1-8 atypical #5to format pp9-10 atypical #5to format pp11-13 perceptions of current and desired observation practices… perceptions of current and desired observation practices 135 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: romano, vincent a., jr. (2014). secondary teachers’ and their supervisors’ perceptions of current and desired observation practices. global education review, 1 (3). 135-146. secondary teachers’ and their supervisors’ perceptions of current and desired observation practices vincent a. romano jr. st. john’s university abstract the purpose of this research is to provide insight on how to improve current classroom observation practices in order to meet the needs of teachers, promote professional growth, and develop effective supervision practices. this study built upon previous research which identified four key components of a classroom observation process that promotes instructional growth and development: instructional improvement practice, purpose of observation, professional trust, and reflective thinking (ginsberg, 2003; card 2006). these dimensions were used in this study and results were analyzed by teacher, by supervisor, and then compared by teacher and supervisor. the participants in this study consisted of 263 faculty from one junior-senior high school district in nassau county, new york grades 7-12. subjects were asked to respond to a 38 question survey, which asked teachers and supervisors to respond to how frequently they experienced a specific behavior, and how desirable or important they believed that behavior was as an action that would help improve teacher performance. the research showed that teachers and supervisors agreed on important practices that promote instructional improvement of teachers, but they disagreed on the extent to which it existed in their current process. supervisors demonstrated higher scores for existence of practice when compared to teachers. professional trust represented the largest mean change score for existing practice. keywords classroom observation, teacher observation, supervision practices, instructional improvement, evaluation of teaching, professional trust, reflective thinking introduction a wide body of research confirms that the single most important factor to improving student achievement is the quality of the teacher that stands before them each day. as a result, teacher effectiveness is at the forefront of the united states academic agenda. in fact, a major component of race to the top (rttt) legislation is to evaluate teacher effectiveness (e.g., by rating teachers as highly effective, ______________________________ corresponding author: vincent a. romano jr., edd 80 ocean avenue, malverne, new york 11565 email: vrome25.vr@gmail.com mailto:vrome25.vr@gmail.com 136 global education review 1(3) effective, developing, and ineffective) and using the evaluations as a basis for hiring, merit pay, and firing decisions. the stated purpose is to improve teacher effectiveness by conducting classroom observations that provide teachers with constructive feedback. under the current annual professional performance review (appr) regulations, a minimum of 31% of a teacher’s end-of-year evaluation must be based on multiple classroom observations (new york state education department august, 2012). as the new race to the top legislation forces educational leaders to engage in redesigning evaluation processes and criteria, it is important that they look to the research for guidance. the purpose of the author’s research was to provide insight on how to improve current classroom observation practices to meet the needs of the teachers, promote professional growth, and develop effective supervision practices. classroom observation is the key to improvement. as policy makers and educational leaders pursue excellence in education through the promotion of professional development of our teachers, they cannot overlook the potential of the observation process to that development. as marzano stated, “when done well, the process of supervision can be instrumental in producing incremental gains in teacher expertise, which can produce incremental gains in student achievement” (marzano et al., 2011, p. 3). coppola, scricca, and connors agreed, stating that a fully integrated, sound observation process is critical in developing a successful program of instruction, in providing meaningful staff development, and in building a great school. unfortunately, much of the research highlights the ineffectiveness of current observation practices. for example, according to toch and rothman in their report, rush to judgment, teacher evaluation systems throughout public education are superficial, capricious, and often do not even directly address the quality of instruction, much less measure students’ learning. in a recent study conducted by the new teacher project (2009), teacher evaluation and observation practices were heavily criticized. the report found that 73 percent of teachers surveyed said their most recent evaluation did not identify any development area; only 57 percent of novice teachers, who are most in need of feedback, received specific information on how to improve their practice. districts also failed to provide targeted support to the subset of teachers who have had developmental areas identified. less than half (45 percent) of teachers across all districts who had development areas identified said they received useful support to improve those areas. worse yet, 47 percent of teachers reported not having participated in a single informal conversation with their administrator in the year preceding the study about improving aspects of their instructional performance. methods and materials this study built upon previous research which identified four key components of a classroom observation process that promotes instructional growth and development: instructional improvement practice, purpose of observation, professional trust, and reflective thinking (ginsberg, 2003; card 2006). these dimensions were used in this study and results were analyzed by teacher, by supervisor, and then compared by teacher and supervisor. both studies included teachers from suburban long island (new york state) communities. this research broadens previous work by not only analyzing high school teachers’ perceptions, but also the perceptions of their supervisors. differences in perception between supervisor and teacher were compared in using the observation process for the purpose of instructional improvement. perceptions of current and desired observation practices 137 the participants in this study consisted of 263 faculty from one junior senior high school district in nassau county grades 7-12. teachers completed the survey titled “a survey of teacher observation practice” and supervisors completed the “supervisors analysis of their observation practice.” subjects were instructed to respond to each of the 38 items using a fivepoint likert scale by circling the number of the response chosen to indicate the level of agreement or non-agreement with the item. they were asked to circle two responses per question; one response indicated their attitude of how important the item is to the observation process and the second measured their attitude of what is really happening when they are observed. a t-test for matched pairs was computed to determine whether statistical differences existed between qip (questions importance of practice) and qep (questions experienced practice) categorical variables. this was done independently for teachers and then supervisors. a series of independent t-tests were also used to determine if a statistical significant difference existed for category ratings for qep or qip variables between teachers and supervisors. a bonforroni correction was applied to control for multiple comparisons. in a further analysis, a multivariate repeated-measures anova was used to examine for the interaction between the independent group with the within subject variable. the repeated measures independent variable was group (teacher vs. supervisor) and the repeated measures dependent variable was the difference score between the qip and qep category variables. results the t-test for matched pairs revealed a significant difference for both teachers (t(219) = 12.5, p< .001) and supervisors (t(42) = 6.2, p< .001) in that the mean for the existing practice was lower than the mean for the importance of practice on all dimensions except for supervisor-professional trust (t(42) = 2.5, p=.015). supervisors stated that they believed professional trust was important and that it did exist in their current observation process. independent t-tests did not result in a significant difference between teachers and supervisors for the importance of practice category variables ( t(261) = -1.1). however for the existence of practice, there was a statistically significant difference for all variables ( t[90.5] =4.1, p<.001) except purpose ( t[75.1] = -1.8, p=.07), which still showed a trend (p<.1). supervisors demonstrated higher scores for existence of practice when compared to teachers (see table 1). qip_variable teacher supervisor t p total 171.5 (±17.7) 174.5 (±13.4) t(261) = -1.1 ns instructional improvement 45.7 (±4.8) 46.6 (±3.6) t(75.5) = -1.4 ns purpose 43.9 (±5.8) 44.1 (±5.3) t(261) = -0.2 ns professional trust 59.8 (±6.2) 61.2 (±4.4) t(261) = -1.5 ns reflective thinking 22.1 (±3.1) 22.6 (±2.1) t(80.1) = -1.2 ns table 1: total scores between teacher and supervisor groups: importance of practice 138 global education review 1(3) the researcher concluded that teachers and supervisors agreed on important practices that promote instructional improvement of teachers, but they disagreed on the extent to which it existed in their current observation process. supervisors demonstrated higher scores for existence of practice when compared to teachers. professional trust represented the largest mean change score for existing practice. discussion instructional improvement the teachers and supervisors who participated in this study agreed on ten characteristics that an observer must possess in order to promote instructional growth and development of teachers. they stated that classroom observers: 1. need honesty; 2. need to maintain confidentiality; 3. need to use the observation process for the express purpose of promoting instructional improvement; 4. need to use the observation process to advance teachers’ understanding in greater depth all aspects of their lesson; 5. need to use the observation process to encourage teachers to experiment with creative educational strategies; 6. need to use the observation process to encourage teachers to be cognizant of their educational goals, objectives, and/or instructional strategies; 7. need to use the observation process to challenge teachers to identify possible relationships between particular teaching strategies and desired outcomes; 8. need to use the observation process to identify educational resources needed to assist teachers in creating students’ successes; 9. need to create a learning environment that promotes success for all students; 10. need to promote a spirit of cooperation. these findings support suggestions by researchers and practitioners on important factors that contribute to the professional growth of teachers. for example, according to the book “supportive supervision becoming a teacher of teachers,” classroom observation is an integral component of the supportive supervision program, which is designed to guide administrators in their role as instructional leaders. they state the goal of observing teachers is the improvement of instruction through diagnosis and remediation. “observations must be a collaborative effort involving the sharing of ideas, experience, and expertise. to effect growth through the instructional process one must build greater levels of trust with the teacher and always encourage self-analysis and reflection (coppola et al., 2004, pg. 9).” the research on clinical supervision, which has emerged as a major force in educational supervision since the 1960s, has been replete with concepts of collegiality, collaboration, assistance, and improvement of instruction (sullivan & glanz, 2009). most of the literature on classroom observation confirms that the overriding purpose is to improve classroom instruction of teachers, a definition that the supervisors and teachers in this study agreed with. however, the author found that although teachers and supervisors agreed on specific behaviors necessary for instructional improvement, they disagreed on the extent to which it existed in the current process. in fact, findings for question 7, which states, “my observer’s formal classroom observations are used to promote instructional improvement,” represented the largest gap for existence of practice between teachers and supervisors. less than 50% of teachers reported that this goal is almost always the reason for classroom observations, as compared to 72% of perceptions of current and desired observation practices 139 their supervisors. twenty-five percent of teachers reported that this purpose is sometimes, seldom, or almost never the reason for classroom observations (x2 [4] = 11.5, p=.012). these findings have implications for building and central office administrators as they revise and evaluate their current practices. a careful examination of the process, behaviors, and language used by supervisors must be done in order to identify reasons for this discrepancy. perhaps more dialogue and training among supervisors in order to improve consistency and to develop strategies on creating a culture of professional development. one of the most frequent complaints from teachers is that the supervisory process is seldom useful. teachers sit through the preobservation, observation, and feedback cycle, but it does not help them improve their teaching. according to sullivan and glanz (2009), one aspect of the process that limits supervisory effectiveness is a lack of descriptive data and/or the failure to share those descriptive data directly with the teacher. this researcher revealed that 12% of supervisors reported that “expressing feelings honestly” is only sometimes important with 77% reporting that it should almost always be present. in contrast, 98% of teachers stated that this behavior should frequently or almost always exist if instructional improvement is to occur (x2[2] =8.9, p=.012). teachers also expressed a desire for their supervisors to challenge them to identify relationships between particular teaching strategies and desired outcomes, as well as encourage them to be cognizant of their educational goals, objectives, and/or instructional strategies. supervisors must be willing to be honest even if what they are sharing is critical of the teacher, and even more important is to provide teachers with the opportunity to analyze and critically assess their own work. in order for this exchange to occur, the observer must collect evidence of effective and ineffective instructional practices and develop a “lesson plan” on how to assist teachers in discovering this informationmuch like teachers do when preparing to teach their students. purpose of classroom observation in the domain purpose of the classroom observation, survey questions were primarily related to the preconference with teachers. this cooperative time is very important and gives teachers the opportunity to take ownership of their observations. establishing mutual expectations and goals between the teacher and observer helps to foster an environment where teachers can grow (ginsberg, 2003). the main purpose of the preconference is to decide the focus of the observation. whereas the chief purpose of the observation is to improve instruction, it is essential to have the teacher’s perspective on his/her concerns and interests. change and growth occurs most easily if the teacher has a role in providing the focus (sullivan & glanz, 2009). in many ways, the pre-conference is an excellent context for supervisors to “teach teachers” sound lesson planning and successful instructional methodology (coppola, scricca, & connors, 2004). the findings of this study supported that teachers believe these practices are important and should almost always be present, but that they occur less than frequently (t[219] = 12.5, p<.001). supervisors agreed with teachers’ responses on the importance of a preconference (t [42] = 6.2, p < .001). it is important practice and valuable to encourage teachers to mentally rehearse and articulate the lesson to be taught, including the objective, the content, pivotal questions, assessment strategies, and what students are expected to do and learn. for supervisors it is important to engage teachers in 140 global education review 1(3) discussion by asking probing and clarifying questions. professional trust when trust is high in schools, teachers are more likely to make the changes that will help raise student achievement (bryk & schneider, 2003). for example, during the teacher observation and conferencing phases, teachers need to believe that they can frankly discuss what is working in their classroom during observations and take risks by trying out new strategies when teaching to improve their practice. if teachers believe that observers will be overly critical of their performance, teachers are unlikely to go beyond their comfort level during a lesson, especially if they perceive that little margin for error exists (danielson & mcgreal, 2000). the data revealed that both teachers and supervisors view professional trust as an important behavior of the classroom observation process as it relates to the improvement of teacher effectiveness. the respondents in this study indicated the following observer behaviors as necessary in order for classroom observations to promote teacher growth: to respond to teachers with praise; to follow through on commitments made; accept responsibility for his/her actions; demonstrate acceptance of teachers’ ideas; to speak positively about supervision; to take interest in teachers as individuals beyond the role of a supervisor; to continually examine ways to improve his/her observation performance; to support goals that are within teachers’ abilities; to react to teachers in an appropriate manner when they are in need of support; and to listen actively, reflectively, and empathetically to teachers. however, when subjects in this study were asked about the extent to which they experienced the behaviors mentioned above, teachers stated that these behaviors occur frequently, whereas supervisors stated that these behaviors occur almost always. professional trust represented the largest gap (mean score of 7.1) between the perceptions of teachers and supervisors out of all four categories examined t(126.1) = -6.8. contrary to the research mentioned above, teachers in this study expressed a desire to experience a stronger bond of trust with their supervisors. more specifically, teachers described a desire for their observer to take responsibility for his/her actions, to follow through on commitments made, to exhibit an interest in teachers beyond his/her role as a supervisor, to listen actively, reflectively, and empathetically, to express a willingness to support teachers’ ideas, and to react in an appropriate manner when teachers are in need of support. ineffective communication, including individuals’ inability or unwillingness to listen to what people have to say, precipitates isolation among administrators and teachers and creates a feeling of distrust (blase, j 2001). eighty-one percent of supervisors reported that the act of listening actively, reflectively, and empathetically to their teachers happens almost always. when the same question was asked of teachers, only 46% agreed and nearly 10% stated that this behavior seldom, or almost never happens (x2[4] = 19.3, p=.001). similarly, 98% of supervisors described that they express a willingness to support teachers’ ideas. in contrast, 79% agreed and 20% of teachers responded that this conduct sometimes or seldom happens (p=.001). as declared by byrk and schneider, (as cited in alvy and robbins, 2010) who established a connection between the level of trust in a school and student learning, “trust in and of itself does not directly affect student learning, but it fosters a set of organizational conditions, some structural and others social-psychological, that make it more conducive for individuals to initiate and sustain the kinds of activities perceptions of current and desired observation practices 141 necessary to affect productivity improvements.” building and nurturing trusting relationships with teachers cannot be understated. if a feeling of distrust permeates the school culture and teachers do not feel safe, the classroom observation process for the purpose of instructional improvement is rendered useless. building professional trust is a concept that supervisors need to reflect on. as this study indicates, effective supervisors care; they view their teachers as more than just a means to an end. reflective thinking it is now well recognized that few activities promote professional learning as effectively as structured reflection on practice (danielson & mcgreal, 2000). glickman stated the purpose of clinical supervision is to assist teachers to become more reflective about what they do in the classroom (glickman, gordon, ross, 2010). lieberman (1995) reminds us, people learn best through active involvement and through thinking about and becoming articulate about what they have learned. processes, practices, and policies built on this view of learning are at the heart of a more expanded view of teacher development that encourages teachers to involve themselves as learners in much the same way as they wish their students would (lieberman, a. 1995). this study found that teachers and supervisors both agreed on the importance of reflective practice and stated that behaviors encouraging it should almost always be present. however, they disagreed on the extent to which it existed in the current observation process. teachers suggested it was important to ask inquiry questions during the lesson such as “what made you think of that?” in response to unusual questions by students. they indicated that it was important for their observer to help clarify instructional strategies and for their observer to encourage teachers to observe a colleagues’ teaching style. teachers stated these practices occurred less than frequently in their current observation process. this study reaffirms the importance of encouraging teachers to assume responsibility for their own professional development through reflective thinking. as sullivan and glanz point out, we know that even when supervisors gather and share objective data with teachers, rather than encourage dialogue about teaching and collaborative planning, they quickly shift attention to suggestions for improvement. rather than empowering teachers to analyze and critically assess their own work, the supervisors fall into traditional patterns and provide answers (sullivan & glanz, 2009). the body of research reiterated the value of providing opportunities for teachers to observe and discuss effective teaching as an important part of developing expertise among classroom teachers. without the opportunity to observe and interact with other teachers, their method of generating new knowledge about teaching is limited to personal trial and error (marzano et al., 2011). recommendations from this research based on the findings, analysis, and conclusions of this study, this researcher offers the following recommendations to supervisors of teachers: 1. classroom observations should be used to promote professional development of teachers. this practice must be evident in every step of the process. 2. classroom observations should be a collaborative effort between teachers and supervisors involving the sharing of ideas, strategies, and experiences. 3. classroom observation critiques should be supported by evidence. supervisors must provide specific documentation that supports the 142 global education review 1(3) conclusions (commendations and recommendations) drawn from the lesson observed. 4. during the pre-observation conference, supervisors should encourage teachers to clarify their goals, teaching strategies, and student achievement assessment techniques for the lesson to be observed. 5. during the post-observation conference, supervisors should encourage teachers to analyze and self-reflect on their lesson. supervisors need to ask questions and work with the teacher to help him/her recognize what went well and what realms need improvement. 6. during the post-observation conference, supervisors should encourage teachers to compare what they planned for the lesson with how the lesson actually went and to challenge teachers to infer relationships between their decisions and student achievement during the lesson. 7. during the post-observation conference, the supervisor should identify and provide teachers with the educational resources needed to assist in the teacher’s development. 8. supervisors should promote an atmosphere of trust by expressing his/her feelings honestly, maintaining confidentiality, following through on commitments made, and accepting responsibility for his/her actions. 9. supervisors should build relationships founded on trust and encouragement by reacting to teachers in an appropriate manner when they need support, exhibiting an interest in teachers beyond his/her role as a supervisor, using praise when appropriate, and demonstrating an acceptance and a willingness to support their ideas. 10. supervisor should continually examine ways to improve their observation performance. references alvy, h., & robbins, p. (2010). learning from lincoln: leadership practices for school success. alexandria, va: ascd. blase, j., & blase, j. r. (2001). empowering teachers: what successful principals do (2nd ed.). thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. bryk, a., & schneider, b. (2003). trust in schools: a core resource for school reform. educational leadership, 60, 40-45. card, k., jr. (2006). secondary teachers' attitudes toward important and existing classroom observation practices that promote instructional leadership. unpublished doctoral dissertation, dowling college, coppola, a., scricca, d., & connors, g. (2004). supportive supervision becoming a teacher of teachers. united states of america: corwin press. ginsberg, a. (2003). elementary teachers attitudes toward existing and desired classroom observation practices. unpublished doctoral dissertation, dowling college, glickman, c., gordon, s., & ross-gordon, j. (2010). supervision and instructional leadership (eighth ed.). boston: allyn & bacon. lieberman, a. (1995). practices that support teacher development. phi delta kappan, (76), 591-596. marzano, r. j., frontier, t., & livingston, d. (2011). effective supervision supporting the art and science of teaching. alexandria, virginia: association for supervision and curriculum development. new york state education department. (august, 2012). guidance of new york state's annual professional perfomance review for teachers and principals to implement education law 3012-c and the commissioner's regulations. retrieved august, 2012, 2012, from engageny.org/wpcontent/uploads/2012/05/appr-field guidance.pdf sullivan, s., & glanz, j. (2009). supervision that improves teaching and learning (third ed.). thousand oaks, ca: corwin. the new teacher project. (2007). hiring, assignment, and transfer in chicago public schools. retrieved january 3, 2012, 2012, from http://tntp.org/files/tntpanalysis-chicago.pdf http://tntp.org/files/tntpanalysis-chicago.pdf perceptions of current and desired observation practices 143 toch, t., & rothman, r. (2008). rush to judgment: teacher evaluation in public education. retrieved december 19, 2011, 2011, from http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rushjudgment-teacher-evaluation-public-education about the author vincent romano, ed.d, is a principal at a suburban high school on the south shore of long island, new york. he has served as an assistant principal at the high school and middle school levels, as a district-wide chairperson of social studies, and a social studies teacher. he is a staff developer and has presented at various local, state, and national conferences. he received his doctorate from st. john’s university and completed both his master’s and bachelor’s degrees at suny stony brook. appendix a survey instrument for teachers a survey of teacher observation practice all reponses are confidential: please answer all questions on the following pages and return it to the envelope provided and seal it. there is a box in the main office of your building where you can drop it. thank you again for your participation. part i: demographic data 1. current position: _____ tenured teacher _____ non-tenured teacher 2. number of years of classroom teaching experience: ______ 1-3 years (non-tenured) ______ 4-8 years ______ 9-13 years ______ 14-18 years ______ 19+ years 3. education level (check all that apply): ______ bachelor’s degree ______ master’s degree ______ second master’s degree professional degree ______ doctorate degree 4. certification area: ______ business/ family and consumer science ______ english ______ foreign language/ esl ______ mathematics ______ music and fine arts ______ physical education ______ science ______ social studies ______ special education ______ school counselor 5. gender: _____ male _____ female 6. ethnic background: _____ african-american _____ asian _____ caucasian _____ latino _____ native american _____ other 7. primary observer: (individual responsible for majority of your observations) _____ chairperson/director _____ building level administrator 8. type of school: http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rush-judgment-teacher-evaluation-public-education http://www.educationsector.org/publications/rush-judgment-teacher-evaluation-public-education 144 global education review 1(3) _____ high school _____ middle/junior high school 9. a clinical supervision process is used in classroom observations? _____ yes _____ no 10. my classroom observer has the knowledge to discuss the content of my classes with me. _____ yes _____ no 11. my experience in the classroom observation process has helped me to improve and become a more effective teacher. ______strongly agree ______ agree ______ somewhat agree ______ somewhat disagree ______ disagree ______ strongly disagree part ii: survey questions the purpose of this survey is to measure your point of view on classroom observation practices. you will respond twice for each statement. the first response titled importance is measuring your attitude of how important the item is in the observation practice. the second response titled existing is measuring your attitude of what is really happening when you are observed. for the purpose of this survey the word “observer” will refer to your primary observer. the numerical scale is rated as follows: 1 (almost never) 2 (seldom) 3 (sometimes) 4 (frequently) 5 (almost always) importance of practice existing practice 1-almost never 1-almost never 2-seldom 2-seldom 3-sometimes a survey of teacher observation practice 3-sometimes 4-frequently 4-frequently 5-almost always 5-almost always 1 2 3 4 5 1. my observer encourages me to clarify goals for my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 2. my observer discusses the ground rules for the supervisory process. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 3. my observer expresses his/her feelings honestly. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 4. my observer encourages me to understand my thinking regarding all aspects of my lessons in greater depth. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 5. my observer encourages me to experiment with creative educational strategies, teacher and student behaviors. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 6. my observer identifies educational resources needed to assist me in creating students' successes. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 7. my observer's formal classroom observations are used to promote instructional improvement. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 8. my observer attempts to respond favorably to my responses in either the pre-conference or postconference meetings. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 9. my observer encourages me to be cognizant of my educational goals, objectives, and/or instructional strategies. 1 2 3 4 5 perceptions of current and desired observation practices 145 1 2 3 4 5 10. my observer frequently hears from teachers about the spirit of cooperation that exists in our school. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 11. my observer encourages me to clarify teaching strategies for my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 12. my observer responds frequently to me in the form of praise. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 13. my observer maintains confidentiality. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 14. my observer encourages me to identify possible relationships between my particular teaching strategies and desired outcomes. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 15. my observer believes he/she is creating with teachers a learning environment that promotes success for all students. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 16. my observer encourages me to clarify student achievement assessment techniques to be used during my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 17. my observer follows through on commitments to me. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 18. my observer suggest the use of questions such as, "what made you think of that?" in my lesson in response to unusual questions posed by students. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 19. my observer encourages me to clarify the data gathering procedures to be used during my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 20. my observer accepts responsibility for his/her actions. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 21. my observer generally speaks positively about supervision. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 22. my observer encourages me to summarize formal and informal assessments from lessons. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 23. my observer demonstrates an acceptance of my ideas. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 24. my observer exhibits an interest in me as an individual beyond his/her role as my supervisor. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 25. my observer encourages me to recall data supporting formal and informal assessments from my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 26. my observer encourages me to move around the classroom. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 27. my observer encourages me to compare what i planned for my lessons with how the lesson actually went. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 28. my observer encourages me to challenge students to be reflective. 1 2 3 4 5 146 global education review 1(3) 1 2 3 4 5 29. my observer encourages me to infer relationships between my decisions and student achievement during my lesson. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 30. my observer is continually examining ways to improve his/her observation performance. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 31. my observer rephrases, paraphrases, translates, and/or summarizes my ideas. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 32. my observer focuses on my concerns by listening actively, reflectively, and empathetically. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 33. my observer encourages me to recall student and teacher behavior during my formal observation. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 34. my observer encourages me to observe my colleagues teaching style. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 35. my observer helps me clarify my instructional strategies. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 36. my observer expresses a willingness to support my ideas. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 37. my observer supports goals that are within my abilities. 1 2 3 4 5 1 2 3 4 5 38. my observer reacts to me in an appropriate manner when i need support. 1 2 3 4 5 educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 5 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: okilwa, n. s. a. (2015). educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities for improving educational outcomes in northeastern kenya. global education review, 2(4). 5-18 educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities for improving educational outcomes in northeastern kenya nathern s. a. okilwa university of texas at san antonio abstract as a developing country in sub-saharan africa, kenya has fared comparatively well in educating its young people. the new constitution of kenya and various acts of parliament identify education as a fundamental human right and mandates the government to provide basic education for all. consistent with the government’s vision 2030, most political, religious, and civil society leaders recognize education as critical to individuals attaining full potential and then contributing to nation building. however, educational access and equity remain quite elusive in rural and less economically viable areas, such as northeastern. the region and its people have been marginalized for many years, dating back to the colonial era and still remain very undeveloped, under-resourced, and impoverished. given the endemic discrimination and marginalization of the nomadic people of northeastern kenya, harsh geographic conditions, constant migration of the people, and heightened insecurity in the region, there is limited data, information, and understanding of these people’s life experiences. the purpose of this article is to highlight these challenges that minimize educational opportunities for young people in northeastern kenya by reviewing the historic political isolation and marginalization, sociocultural practices (e.g., nomadic lifestyle, female genital mutilation), resource deprivation and poverty, harsh geographic conditions, and poor infrastructure. additionally, the article examines emerging efforts and opportunities (e.g., government and non-government organizations) to improve educational opportunities in the region through the devolution framework in the new constitution of kenya, constituency development funds (cdf), mobile schools, and boarding schools. keywords northeastern kenya, nomads, pastoralists, education, marginalization introduction as a developing country located in sub-saharan east africa, kenya has fared well in educating its young people. the constitution of kenya (2010) and various acts of parliament identify education as a fundamental human right and recognize education as critical to individuals attaining selffulfillment and national development, which are corresponding author: nathern s. a. okilwa, the university of texas at san antonio, 501 w. cesar e. chavez blvd., san antonio, tx 78207. email: nathern.okilwa@utsa.edu mailto:nathern.okilwa@utsa.edu 6 global education review 2(4) consistent with vision 2030 (the constitution of kenya, 2010; vision 2030, 2007). however, the educational vision remains quite elusive for some parts of the country, particularly rural and economically deprived areas. the northeastern region of kenya is one of those areas, home to the cushite communities, e.g., somali, borana, rendille, and gabra. this region and its people have been marginalized for many years, dating back to the colonial era, and remain very rural, undeveloped, under-resourced, and impoverished to date (ruto, ongwenyi, & mugo, 2009). given the endemic discrimination and marginalization of the nomadic people of northeastern kenya, harsh geographic conditions, constant migration of the people, and heightened insecurity in the region–largely due to the failed state of somalia to the east– there is limited data, information, and understanding of these people’s life experiences (abdi, 2010; whittaker, 2012). the purpose of this article is to examine and contextualize the challenges that embody the schooling experiences of young people in northeastern kenya. however, it is impossible to fully begin to grasp the magnitude of educational deprivation of ethnic peoples of the northeastern region without consideration of other mitigating factors. this article examines historic political isolation and marginalization, sociocultural practices (e.g., nomadic lifestyle, female genital mutilation), resource deprivation and poverty, harsh geographic conditions, and poor infrastructure (schools, roads, clean water, health facilities, etc.) as well as their impact on educational opportunities in the region. additionally, this article examines emerging efforts of a number of stakeholders (e.g., government, non-governmental organizations [ngo], religious community) to improve educational opportunities and life outcomes in the region. background the northeastern region of kenya, formerly one of the eight administrative provinces, is currently comprised of three counties: mandera, wajir, and garissa (see figure 1), which were created under the new constitution (constitution of kenya, 2010). the region is a vast land, very arid, including 62% of the arid and semi-arid lands [asal] in kenya, and sparsely populated (kenya national bureau of statistics [knbs], 2008; ruto et al., 2009). eighty percent of the total population in the region is either pastoralist or farmers, largely dependent on livestock for their economic wellbeing. the region supplies about 60-70% of the total livestock in kenya, with some exported to the middle east. due to little rainfall (i.e., 200550mm annually), there is limited farming activity except for a few areas along the seasonal rivers and dams, with minimal potential for meaningful crop production. the area is susceptible to drought that results in low vegetation cover, crop failure, livestock death, food insecurity, loss of family livelihood, and even loss of human lives (chopra, 2009; serna, 2011). in addition, poor management of limited vegetation (e.g., uncontrolled cutting of the few trees and overgrazing) in the region as well as the continuous cycle of settlement and resettlement (or constant migration) – associated with nomadic people – leaves tracts of land bare and exposed to severe erosion, further rendering the land unproductive. during drought periods, pastoralists rely entirely on insufficient boreholes and spring wells to supply water for their livestock and for domestic purposes. the scarce water and grassland resources often lead to tribal tensions and conflict (chopra, 2009; oxfam international, 2006). there are no irrigation-based approaches to alleviate the arid conditions in the northeastern region. educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 7 figure 1. the administrative counties of kenya. adapted from geocurrents maps. challenges to educational opportunities the challenges that hold back the northeastern region are historical, sociopolitical, sociocultural, and socioeconomic in nature. this section will contextualize some of these issues as they relate to education by exploring: the political and marginalization, sociocultural and traditional, and resource deprivation and poverty of the region. political isolation and marginalization the current isolation and marginalization of northeastern region cannot be understood without connecting the present to the past. the contemporary political/government regimes 8 global education review 2(4) seem to have been copied from the playbook of the colonial rule – the british rule. british rule the history of discrimination, isolation, and marginalization of northeastern kenya began with the british colonial rule. the british colonial government focused their resources and their development efforts on agriculturally viable areas, approximately only 20% of the country, which had sufficient rainfall. the colonial government considered pastoralists as less industrious and sometime rationalized taking land from them (arid lands resource management project, [alrmp], 2004). in addition, the british government’s concentration on the development of infrastructure along the railway line was the reason for isolating the northeastern region because it was, and still is, several hundred miles away from the main railway line, rendering the region as economically untenable (mahmoud, 2009). only few essential facilities such as police stations, military bases, and administrative offices were installed. the building of schools became the responsibility of the local communities. formal education was introduced to the people of kenya by european christian missionaries as an evangelical tool (eshiwani, 1985). the missionaries dominated the provision and administration of education throughout the colonial period. most prestigious schools in kenya today are former mission schools, such as alliance high, mang’u high, maseno, kaimosi girls, kaimosi boys, etc. the missionaries favored establishing schools around agricultural areas, adjacent to the colonial settler farms (sifuna, 2005). this strategic decision greatly benefited central kenya and further isolated the northern parts of kenya with harsh climatic conditions and predominantly islamic territory. independence and conflicts unfortunately, even after gaining independence from the british rule in 1963, successive governments perpetuated marginalization of the northeastern peoples (dadacha, 2009). for instance, president jomo kenyatta, the first kenyan president, imposed a state of emergency on northeastern in december 1963, that persisted for 28 years until it was lifted by his successor, president moi, in 1991. in part, the state of emergency was in response to attempts by the ethnic somalis in the colonial northern frontier district (nfd) of kenya to secede from kenya and join with their fellow somalis in the larger somalia republic. the kenyan government dubbed the 1963-67 conflict shifta after the somali word for "bandit", as part of a propaganda effort to scuttle the uprising (whittaker, 2012). during the conflict, the kenyan forces treated the ethnic peoples in the region brutally, leaving an ongoing sense of suspicion, anger, and tension, to the extent that some communities still consider themselves not part of kenya. wagalla massacre in 1984, kenyan forces were dispatched in response to clan-related conflict in northeastern. eyewitnesses’ accounts reported that kenyan troops rounded up close to 5,000 ethnic somali men and executed them at the wagalla airstrip, an action later dubbed the wagalla massacre (british broadcasting company, 2011). this oppression by the kenyan government was a source of pain and bitterness in the minds and hearts of many ethnic somalis which remains today. furthermore, northeastern was a theatre of war as recently as 2012 when the kenyan troops fought with al-shabab – a terrorist organization based in somalia and affiliated with al qaeda (mbaka, 2012). al shabaab’s terrorist activities included bombing churches, abduction of school children, ambushing police stations to take officers hostage, as well as raiding homes and businesses, robbing and killing the owners educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 9 (masters & sergie, 2015). in the most recent attack, april 2, 2015, on garissa university college, al shabaab gunmen massacred 147 people (mostly students) and wounded scores of others (bbc news, 2015). the leaders in the region lobbied hard to acquire the university college so that it could become a beacon of transformation but instead the terrorists used it for massacre. most students enrolled at the college vowed never to return, opting to transfer to other colleges. this level of insecurity has caused tremendous unrest among the residents by additionally disrupting their already complicated lives. lack of development projects the situation in northeastern is further aggravated by the lack of funding by the government for much needed development projects (e.g., roads, clean water, hospitals, etc.) thus making access to basic livelihood very difficult. state resources and development of infrastructure are appropriated to areas where national political leaders have political support or can garner electoral votes, while marginalizing areas perceived to be in the opposition or politically not viable. national leaders have focused mainly on areas with large populations where they are sure of getting many votes during general elections. therefore, central, rift valley, western, eastern, nairobi, and nyanza regions (see figure 2) have received significant national development resources over the years due to their large populations and favorable environmental factors (abdi, 2012; dadacha, 2009). these regions are home to the five largest ethnic groups – the kikuyu, luo, luhya, kamba and kalenjin – which account for 70% of the population in kenya (kurian, 1992; see figure 2). while recognized as an asset, kenya's ethnic diversity has also led to disputes. interethnic rivalries and resentment over kikuyu dominance in politics and commerce have hindered national integration. most political decisions are made to favor certain regions and tribes (those with the power), whereas northeastern bears the brunt of political isolation since the area has always been considered to be of no political value. development theories suggest that there are causal relationships between societies, whereby one society’s development can be at the expense of another society’s underdevelopment (kuhnen, 1987). this is particularly relevant when comparing the underdevelopment in northeastern kenya with other highly developed areas in the country. it is evident that for northeastern kenya, people’s lives during colonial and post-colonial eras have not changed much, as the past and present regimes’ dispositions towards the region seem to be similar (roseberry, 1989). in general, political decisions have grossly promoted disparity in the life experiences and outcomes between nomadic peoples of northeastern and the rest of the kenyan people. sociocultural and traditional practices kenya has about 42 indigenous groups (or tribes) and over 70 distinct ethnic groups, ranging from 20% (kikuyu) to as little as .04% (sakuya) of the population (kurian, 1992). each of the tribes (or ethnic groups) has its own unique cultural and traditional practices, some of which are a barrier to modernity e.g., female genital mutilation (fgm), forced early marriage of girls for “wealth,” and traditional circumcision for boys. the following sections explore the challenges embedded in some of the cultural and traditional practices as it pertains to education and life opportunities for the youth in northeastern. educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 10 figure 2. map of kenya regional division and ethnic distribution. adapted from geocurrents maps nomadic lifestyle due to constant mobility, nomadic pastoralists are likely not to have a place they would consider their permanent home. men are sometimes forced to separate from their families for months as they travel great distances with their livestock. the very mobile lifestyle of families in the region is a challenge to the traditional schooling structure as we know it – schoolhouse, classrooms, desks, teaching equipment, and schedules based on the school year (jama, 1993). children are forced to accompany their families on these nomadic expeditions, several months at a time and cover hundreds of kilometers in cruel jungles, hence unable to attend traditional schools. parents, being mostly illiterate, are also not in a position to support the formal education of their children while in transit. therefore, the only inheritance that parents can pass on to their children is livestock – their only asset. once the children are initiated into youth and adulthood (e.g., circumcision and fgm), they are left on their own to take care of their livestock, to marry and have families, thus eliminating possibility of attaining a formal education (birch, cavanna, abkula, & hujale, 2010). odds are particularly stacked against girls as they are often forced into early marriage and the practice of fgm which adversely impact their opportunities. the nomadic lifestyle has been the tradition for generations; and if there is no change in their life conditions and opportunities, it will continue. due to neglect and marginalization, the kenyan government has not made a concerted effort to develop the region: to either provide alternative sources of income, to irrigate the land to avoid the need for constant movement or to implement innovative alternatives to educating young people as well as the adults in this region. also, given the government disengagement with northeastern people, little is known or understood about pastoralist livelihood. the general government attitude and approach toward nomads has been to narrowly pursue confining these people in tribal villages with a main focus on crop farming (government of kenya, 2011; whittaker, 2012). anderson educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 11 (2005) noted that at the core of this approach is the idea of containing the communities as opposed to improving their lives. it is paternalistic for the government not to consult the nomadic pastoralists to establish their preferences. it leaves contemporary views such as the ‘maasai and their cattle must be separated,’ ‘can a maasai be a maasai without cattle,’ and ‘pastoralism is the problem’ to frame stereotypical narratives associated with northeastern pastoralists (alrmp, 2004; carr‐ hill & peart 2005; oxfam international, 2006). female genital mutilation (fgm) most northeastern communities practice female genital mutilation. the somali community in kenya (and those in native somalia) has practiced the severest form of female genital cutting (fgc), infibulation, for centuries (jaldesa, askew, njue, & wanjiru, 2005). these practices are often embedded in culture and traditions as well as religious beliefs of some communities with the notion that fgm is a rite of passage, helps girls maintain sexual purity, and prepares them for marriage (jaldesa et al., 2005). however, jaldesa and colleagues (2005) report evidence suggesting that fgm practices could be associated with early sexual activity among girls that may result in pregnancy, school dropout, and early marriage. some communities are opting to conduct fgm while girls are still younger (ages 5-7) and less resistant (actionaid international kenya, 2011). reports indicate that there seem to be an increase in the fgm practices among participating communities (kebaso, n.d.). unfortunately, there is no end in sight to the regressive fgm practices. fgm coupled with early and forced marriages have a significant impact on girl-child education in pastoralist communities. girls are relegated to rudimentary home-related chores, a supporting role to the mother, such as, cooking, caring for siblings, and hunting for water that involves walking long distances; education becomes secondary and unattainable for girls. furthermore, it is inherently problematic when communities like gabra hold notions, such as, “god first, then man, then camel and lastly the girl,” (p. 11) – further evidence of the difficulty of advocating for the rights of girls and the need for an education when they are ranked lower than livestock (ruto et al., 2009). similarly, a somali proverb that suggests, “a girl is like a vegetable” (p. 11) has been used to support early marriage (ruto et al., 2009). these expressed attitudes paint a rather grim picture for the girl-child in northeastern kenya and presents a challenge to providing education to girls. whereas, other regions in kenya have made major strides in eradicating the fgm practice, the nrtheastern region has made very little progress, largely due to the connection between the practice and islamic religious beliefs. however, fgm has been discredited as a universal practice associated with the islamic faith (asmani & abdi, 2008; jaldesa et al., 2005). resource deprivation and poverty northeastern is characterized by a myriad of economic deprivation indicators that include poor health, water, and sanitation services; no electricity; inadequate roads, and other physical and social infrastructure; poorly developed, highly ineffective public and community service departments; uneducated population; and limited access to regional, national, and global markets and opportunities (gok, 2012; ruto et al., 2009; serna, 2011). the climate in northeastern region and the factors listed cause the area to be poorer economically and agriculturally (one of the core gross domestic 12 global education review 2(4) product sectors in the country). livestock is the single-most significant source of income, supplying 60-70% of the total livestock market locally with some for export. the prevalence of drought in the area results in water shortage, crop failure, and death of animals, leading to a compromised livelihood (serna, 2011). the lack of food, clean water for drinking and other domestic usage, as well as inadequate sanitation facilities undermines children’s ability to live healthy, quality lives. school attendance is impacted by food scarcity at home, and children are sometimes forced to contribute to basic family resources instead of attending school. northeastern reports the lowest primary and secondary school enrollment (9.8% and 4.8%, respectively), which is associated with a cycle of poverty, remoteness, insecurity, and the nomadic lifestyle (world wildlife fund eastern africa regional programme office & british standards institution, ltd, 2006). the 2008 data (table 1) shows the percentage of the population in the region that have attended school, regardless of level or completion. these are among the lowest school participation rates in the country. the data also indicate gross disparities between males and females, reflecting the discriminate treatment of girls/women. there are serious issues in the region with the primary to secondary to college education pipeline. although there is no data reporting on the number of students joining post-secondary institutions from northeastern, which is problematic, an analysis of the number of students applying for loans from the higher education loans board (helb) is revealing. for instance, only 414 students from the ten arid counties (i.e., baringo, garissa, isiolo, lamu, mandera, marsabit, samburu, tana river, turkana, and wajir – see figure 1) applied for loans in the academic year 2005-6, only a fifth of the students (2,020 ) who applied for loans from nyeri county (higher education loans board, 2009). in the 2008-9 academic year, the proportion seemed to have improved, with 835from northeastern counties applying compared to 2,529 in nyeri. this data indicates a significant disparity, worthy of investigation, between students from the arid areas and nonarid areas (e.g., nyeri) seeking loans for postsecondary education, particularly university education. table 1. percentage of individuals (ages 6+) in northeastern counties who have attended school counties male female total mandera 28.5 2.0 15.2 garissa 29.8 7.8 19.5 wajir 35.5 7.1 21.2 note. source is kenya national bureau of statistics. educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 13 improving educational opportunities in principle, the government of kenya (gok) acknowledges that education is a fundamental right and believes that education can be used to develop human resources and capacity necessary for economic and social transformation (vision, 2030). the kenyan government, especially within the new constitutional framework, seems to promise to address issues of access, equity, and relevance of curriculum and education in general for all students (abdi, 2012). the biggest problem has been the political brinkmanship and corruption in appropriating the limited public resources (gathaka, 2012). northeastern is a true example of the effect of historic government ineptitude and discrimination. given the backdrop of historic marginalization, providing education for all in the northeastern region cannot be achieved without addressing other socio-cultural, political, economic, and healthcare concerns. the effort to change life outcomes in northeastern region cannot be accomplished by just the local counties (e.g., mandera, wajir, and garrissa) or even the national government alone. a multifaceted approach is necessary to comprehensively tackle the complex needs of northeastern people. consequently, educational needs of northeastern people have to be addressed along with the need for adequate food, safety and security, healthcare, political empowerment, economic vitality, and sociocultural activities consistent with modern society. the following section provides some of the viable approaches in improving educational opportunities in northeastern kenya. devolution framework the enactment of the new constitution of kenya on august 4th, 2010, replacing the one that had been in place since independence in 1963, was a major milestone for the people of kenya, one referred to as a rebirth of the nation (creste, 2010). one important aspect of the new constitution is the decentralization of governance from a powerful central government to a localized people-centered management framework. people perceive decentralization as a way to eliminate the long-standing patronizing attitude of the national government, thus changing the way resources are managed. the following communication from the incumbent governor of mandera county, ali roba, is testament to the exuberance for the possibilities of devolution: devolution in mandera county was ‘god sent.’ it marked a new beginning for the county and created a sense of identity and self-worth that inspired new hope for a prosperous future. it also offered an opportunity for the residents to chart out a road map on how to possibly address the problems of marginalization. “devolution is our only hope. we are finally in control of our destiny and we must support all efforts to succeed. we got very scanty resources over the years and now it is a new dawn,” said the county governor ali roba, while marking one year of devolution. (gachanga, 2014, para. 20) the new dawn the governor referred to is exemplified in the difference in budgetary allocations between past and present. for instance, in 2013-14 financial year, the county received ksh. 6.5 billion from the national government, an amount far greater than what the county received in past 50 years before devolution (gachanga, 2014). the money was directed toward security operations (both police and military), food shortage, water scarcity and healthcare in the county. however, due to years of neglect it will take time and a lot more resources to build the necessary infrastructure to impact people’s lives. with regard to education, mandera county government is poised to invest 14 global education review 2(4) in vocational and technical post-secondary education as well as to lobby for a four-year university (gachanga, 2014). also, the county has initiated a free school meals program aimed at retaining students and teachers in school. school feeding programs elsewhere in the country report positive effects, such as improved attendance (ministry of education, 2008). with this kind of promising resource allocation and utilization, there is so much hope in the productive functioning of the devolution government framework. however, skeptics argue that corruption and nepotism are like cancers among kenyan political and government leaders and devolved governance may not make a significant difference in people’s lives (gathaka, 2012). mobile schools the concept of mobile schools is being tested with different communities in northeastern. pilot mobile schools are mostly the initiative of nongovernmental organizations (e.g., oxfam international, aga khan foundation, alrmp, and the catholic church), with limited government involvement (ruto et al., 2009). to realize the full impact of mobile schooling, the schools require enormous resources with total commitment and support from the government and non-governmental organizations (abdi, 2010). research indicates that mobile schooling for nomads has been implemented with success in other countries, such as nigeria (souza, 2006). in essence, mobile schooling is an effort to adapt schooling to the socio‐economic lifestyle of nomadic people by allowing the teacher(s) to move along with students and their families (ruto et al., 2009). in northeastern, school supplies are packed and moved around by donkey or camel. learning would take place under a shade of a tree or a tent, or at a makeshift school at various locations along the migration route; and the teacher(s) would teach different age groups or grade levels during allocated times of the day, allowing children to participate in family business of tending to their livestock (abdi, 2010). the challenges to this unorthodox way of delivering education are numerous: recruiting qualified teachers, tracking progress, commitment from families, funding, etc. moreover, given that kenyan schools adhere to one standard curriculum which is developed by the kenya institute of curriculum development (kicd), with disregard to differences in context, some argue that the curriculum is irrelevant to the unique needs of the pastoral nomads (ruto et al. 2009); consequently, a majority of pastoral nomads may not consider schooling as a worthwhile investment. this disconnect may contribute to parents’ lack of commitment to their children’s schooling. subsidized boarding schools boarding schools are a common practice in kenya, particularly single-sex schools at the secondary level. these single-sex public boarding schools have proved successful in educating youth across the country, particularly girls. the girls are able to leave the distractions of home, often heavily biased against them, and concentrate on their education. many parents, who have come to understand the role of education for social mobility, sacrifice to the last penny and are willing to send their children many miles away from home to a boarding school. however, access to boarding schools remains a challenge for many students because they cannot afford the cost of attendance – the tuition/fees. many of these students are often left out. however, the new constitution of kenya mandates free basic education (constitution of kenya, 2010). the government has defined free basic education to include free primary education and significantly governmentsubsidized secondary education. the problem is the government has not provided a clear funding educational marginalization: examining challenges and possibilities 15 framework for this proposal (daily nation editorial reporter, 2015). providing significantly governmentsubsidized or free boarding schools (both primary and secondary) in the northeastern nomadic lifestyle appears to be a viable option. boarding schools across the country are perceived to provide stability and consistency for students. the schools can provide meals and health programs for students who otherwise may not have access to these services (gok, 2012). the critical goal is to increase enrollment and stabilize attendance, particularly for these very disadvantaged children. a meals program component, for both day and boarding schools, is important in a region that has a chronic food shortage that leads to malnutrition, multiple health related problems, and sometimes faminerelated deaths (serna, 2011). the government acknowledges that school meals programs will positively impact educational access and retention of students as well as of teachers (ministry of education, 2008). health and nutrition are associated with overall educational achievement of school-age children (gok, 2012). in 2012 the government reported that the school meals program provided lunch meals to approximately 2.4 million pre-primary and primary school children in sixty four arid and semi-arid lands (asal) counties and slums within nairobi (gok, 2012). in summary, there are no easy solutions to the complex challenges that face the people of northeastern. the challenges are complex because they are historic in nature as well as economic, sociocultural, political, and educational. the solutions have to match the magnitude of the problem. for example, to provide access to education, the region has to take advantage of the newly adopted devolution framework of governance and to provide funding to mobile schools and subsidized boarding schools. nomadic people should not have to choose between educating their future generation and their long-standing traditional livelihood of herding livestock. conclusion against the backdrop of historic, overt and covert discrimination, marginalization, and isolation of northeastern kenya, a renewed hope has arisen within the framework of the new constitution of kenya. to acknowledge years of neglect of northeastern region, the government of kenya should adopt policies that address the complex challenges of the region. the government should provide reparations in terms of a comprehensive multifaceted policy framework – political, economic, sociocultural, and educational – coupled with unprecedented capital investment in the economic, educational, social, and political infrastructure. in appropriating resources, northeastern should not be treated on the scale as the rest of the regions. however, it is realistic to conjecture that the kenyan government may not have enough resources to make the kind of investment necessary to impact the region. the challenges of improving education and the other aspects of life in northeastern are enormous in scope with no one entity being able to overturn the cumulative disadvantages embedded in historic injustices. collaboration among agencies is necessary. the kenyan government must spearhead a coalition of stakeholders to implement an action-based policy framework for change with willing partners such as the united nations children’s fund (unicef), united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco), world bank, african development bank, oxfam gb, aga khan foundation, alrmp, and religious organizations. the efforts must include the participation and collaboration of the ethnic peoples of northeastern, without whose help the efforts may be viewed as irrelevant and destined for failure. it is time for the voices of the people of the region to be heard, and given the 16 global education review 2(4) opportunity to participate in charting a course for their future. that is why, if done right, there is great hope in the devolved government framework, which has the potential to facilitate meaningful local participation. under the new 2010 constitution of kenya, the devolution framework of governance is based on the principle of efficient distribution of administrative, financial, and political power to the local levels in order to augment the adeptness and efficacy of government (bigambo, 2015). in theory, devolution is supposed to provide opportunity for greater citizen participation in local development and allow the government to respond quickly to local needs. this concept gives hope to many kenyans who have been disappointed by the central government for many years. since independence, the central government wielded much power with no input from the citizens on decisions affecting the country. with devolution’s idea of easier representation and distribution of resources, northeastern people have a chance to actively participate in charting their own course for posterity. the governors of the three northeastern counties need to pursue, with utmost urgency, an aggressive and ambitious economic, education, and security agenda. an agenda that will begin to transform the region particularly give people opportunities for economic viability. providing access to schooling and mandating attendance is critical for building the future. adult education is a worthwhile effort as well. if adults (i.e., parents) are educated, the benefits are good for the children, family, and region. however, there is need to exercise cautious optimism because devolution framework is not a magic wand. if the citizens are not vigilant, the county leaders can consolidate power and easily be corrupted, especially given that corruption is endemic in kenyan political and government structures. without proper accountability, the governors can easily fall into the trap of appointing their cronies – family and friends – to conduct business as usual. furthermore, the pervasive kenyan attitude of honoring and revering their leaders (especially along tribal lines) and not challenging them, has a tendency of emboldening the bad actors. also, most citizens who are illiterate and poor are only concerned about day-to-day survival with very little to do with investing in the future. these and other nuanced factors create concern for fully realizing the impact of devolution governance. however, the hopes of many remain high for this new experiment for kenya. author note i am grateful to james libulele who helped gather the relevant literature. also, thanks to liz shelby and the reviewers for their critical feedback which helped prepare the manuscript. references actionaid international kenya (2011). the status of girls’ education and violence in tana river, kenya: a baseline survey report. retrieved from http://www.actionaid.org/sites/files/actionaid/svags _baseline_survey.pdf abdi, a. y. 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(1992). encyclopedia of the third world (4th ed., vol. 3). new york: facts on file. mahmoud, h. a. (2009). breaking barriers: the construction of a new burji identity through livestock trade in northern kenya. working paper no. 113, max planck institute for social anthropology: germany. retrieved from http://www.eth.mpg.de/cms/en/publications/worki ng_papers/wp0113.html masters, j. & sergie, m. a. (2015). al-shabab. council on foreign relations. retrieved from http://www.cfr.org/somalia/al-shabab/p18650 18 global education review 2(4) mbaka, j. (2012). uhuru kenyatta: kdf will stay in somalia until job is done. standard digital. retrieved from http://www.standardmedia.co.ke/article/200012571 0/uhuru-kdf-will-stay-in-somalia-until-job-is-done/ ministry of education (2008). policy framework for nomadic education in kenya. nairobi, kenya: government of kenya. retrieved from http://planipolis.iiep.unesco.org/upload/kenya/ken yapolicyframeworknomadiceducation.pdf oxfam international (2006). delivering the agenda. addressing the chronic under-development in kenya’s arid lands (oxfam briefing paper no. 88), oxford, uk: oxfam. roseberry, w. (1989). peasants and the world. in: s. plattner (ed.). economic anthropology (pp. 108– 126). stanford: stanford university press. ruto, s. j., ongwenyi, z. n. & mugo, j. k. (2009). educational marginalization in northern kenya. global monitoring report, unesco. retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001866/18 6617e.pdf serna, j. m. (2011). drought assessment north eastern kenya (wijir east, south and mandera). save the children. retrieved from http://www.disasterriskreduction.net/fileadmin/use r_upload/drought/docs/sc%20drought%20assess ment%20report%20%20northern%20eastern%20kenya-%201124%20april%202011.pdf sifuna, d.n. (2005). increasing access and participation of pastoralist communities in primary education in kenya. international review of education, 51, 499516. souza, a. (2006). forum on flexible education: reaching nomadic populations in africa. retrieved from http://www.col.org/sitecollectiondocuments/noma dicreport_a4_web.pdf vision 2030 (2007). retrieved from http://www.vision2030.go.ke/index.php whittaker, h. (2012). forced villagization during the shifta conflict in kenya, ca. 1963–1968. international journal of african historical studies, 45(3), 343364. world wildlife fund eastern africa regional programme office & british standards institutions, ltd. (2006). poverty and environment issues: governance institutions, institutional frameworks and opportunities for communities. poverty and environment initiative: nairobi, kenya. retrieved from http://www.unpei.org/sites/default/files/e_library_ documents/kenya-poverty-environment-issues.pdf about the author nathern s. a. okilwa is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies in the college of education and human development at the university of texas at san antonio. his research interests include educational and life outcomes of disadvantaged or underserved or marginalized students; the preparation of school leaders that support diverse learners; and educational policy. educ marginalization_finaldraft-9.26.15 format copy with footer educ marginalization_finaldraft-9.26.15 format no footer running head: effects of a verbal behavior analysis treament 1 44 global education review 1(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: greenberg, jeremy h. & greenberg, j. christine (2014). it takes two to tango: inclusive schooling in hong kong. global education review, 1 (1). 44-55. it takes two to tango: inclusive schooling in hong kong jeremy h. greenberg the children’s institute of hong kong j. christine greenberg the harbour school hong kong abstract the inclusion of students with autism and other special needs into the general education curriculum continues to be a challenging process for school communities in the united states of america (us) and increasingly abroad. although inclusion is a challenging process for those involved, the global demand is growing. traditionally this initiative has originated from advocates such as parents and communities who represent the students. with enough pressure from constituents of the system, those efforts may be converted into policy through the local education department. the us has led the inclusion movement and many other developed nations have followed suit in recent decades. consequently more and more schools are focused on building inclusive school communities. these programs see the value of a balanced approach that emphasizes curriculum coupled with pedagogy. this paper provides an overview of the history of the inclusion movement in the hong kong special administrative region of china. three main types of school systems in the region are explained, and one successful inclusive school model will be described with outcome data included. multiple factors that affect the development of the inclusion movement will also be discussed. keywords applied behavior analysis; autism; inclusion; inclusive education; hong kong; neurodiversity; special education needs introduction the inclusion of students with autism and other behavior disorders into general education is a constant challenge for the families, educators, and communities confronted with this widespread practice. the issues involved in inclusion were framed in detail years ago by stainback and stainback (1995), calling it a challenging and controversial practice. several factors have been a part of the collective conversation about inclusion in the research literature. those factors include: teacher efficacy (attitudes) (beacham & rouse, 2012; chen, lau, & jin, 2006; harrower, 1999; sharma, loreman, & forlin, 2012), attitudes of school primary school principals (sharma & chow, 2008), the effects that inclusion might _________________________________ corresponding author: jeremy h, greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong, 19/f kennedy town centre, 23 belchers street, kennedy town, hong kong email: jgreenberg@tcihk.org mailto:jgreenberg@tcihk.org inclusive schooling in hong kong 45 have on the regular education students (feldman, 2002; koegel, vernon, koegel, have on the regular education students (feldman, 2002; koegel, vernon, koegel, koegel, & paullin, 2012; rea, mclaughlin, & walther-thomas, 2001), students with severe disabilities (harrower, 1999), and the preparedness of teacher training programs (forlin, 2010; greer, 2002; yuen, westwood, & wong, 2005; forlin & sin, 2010). studies investigating parent experiences with inclusion (tsai & fung, 2009), and applied studies that have improved students’ attending behaviors and social skills have expanded and punctuated the discussion on inclusive education in the us and southeast asia (caballero & connell, 2010; callahan & rademacher, 1999; conroy, asmus, sellers, & ladwig, 2005; greenberg, tang, & tsoi, 2010; owen-deschryver, carr, cale, & blakeley-smith, 2008). although this discussion has spanned across decades, it remains central to the mission of many of today’s schools and communities in the us and, increasingly, abroad. the dialogue and subsequent formation of political policies and practices can be quite polarizing to stakeholders in educational systems and communities. the present paper provides an overview of the history of inclusion1 in the hong kong special administrative region of china (hk). we will briefly outline the three main systems of schooling, and describe one international school’s model in the region with some of its outcome data. additionally, factors affecting the progress of the inclusion movement will be presented. the challenge to include students with special needs into mainstream classrooms is not a new initiative, nor is it a unique challenge faced by the us and other developed nations2. most educators would agree that although the field is still inching forward; there is room for improvement. the earliest forms of federal legislature providing for the education of children having special needs originated in the us with the education of all handicapped children’s act (p.l. 94-142, 1975) and subsequently, the individuals with disabilities education act (p.l. 101-476, 1990). in 1975, children with special needs became entitled to a free appropriate public education (fape) in the least restrictive environment (lre). hence, we suggest that the lre doctrine is likely the source of the notion and initiative to include students into classrooms alongside their general education peers, even those with severe developmental disabilities.3 effective inclusive educational practices in hk and abroad are scarce (poon-mcbrayer, 2004; wong & hui, 2008). on the rise and spurred on by globalization and through the expatriate community overseas, some positive developments in hk in the form of policies towards inclusion have occurred (hksar education bureau, 2008). this is due, in part, to the dramatic increase in students with autism and other behavior disorders that have been observed to affect communities abroad. although other countries have not matched the recent increase in the us to 1 in 88 births (autism speaks, 2012), significant increases have been noted and are difficult to ignore. in spite of the growing need, effective services and inclusion initiatives have been particularly slow going in hong kong and southeast asia, (forlin, 2010; wong & hiu, 2008). of course, autism is but one diagnosis that may pose significant challenges to a given child’s participation in the mainstream curriculum. the hong kong educational system in the 21st century hong kong was handed over by the british to china in 1997, as per their 100-year agreement 4. under the benefits of british common law, hk developed into a powerful financial hub and a modern city of 7 million people. a tri-lingual culture, hk has three languages regularly spoken: english, mandarin, and the chinese dialect of mandarin known as cantonese. there are other small ethnic groups who bring their 46 global education review 1(10) own language and culture to the region; however, over 90% of hongkongers are chinese (hksar, 2013). there are primarily three school systems within the hk region. a brief description of these systems and how they serve students with special needs is described below. there is the local government chinesespeaking system; the english schools foundation (esf) established by the british in the 1960’s to accommodate the english-speaking expatriates residing in the region at the time, and the more-recently developed international schools5. local schools will include both english and mandarin lessons; however the medium of instruction is in cantonese. esf schools teach in english for most subjects and provide lessons in a secondary language such as traditional mandarin. the international schools teach two or more languages, whereas english and mandarin may be obligatory. one characteristic that all three of the systems have in common is that they are all highly competitive and have class sizes that are generally considered by educators to be large. local schools typically have from 30 to 35 students in a classroom (chong, 2012). the esf and international schools charge high tuition and both are plagued by long waiting lists for enrolment. waiting lists are so severe, that they tend to be the subject of debate in the south china morning post, hong kong’s local english newspaper, as well as in the various chambers of commerce. the concern shared by the british and american chambers of commerce and the business community is that the nature of hk’s status as “asia’s world city” is threatened by this shortage of school placements in english speaking schools (chong, 2011; chong & leung, 2011). special education in hong kong historically, the efforts for inclusion in hong kong began back in the 1970’s and 1980’s with the establishment of compulsory education for students with special education needs (sen). subsequently, the united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization (unesco, 1994) issued a policy statement that called for special education students’ access to general education free from discrimination. this began a series of efforts and policies within the hk region aimed at initiating the inclusion movement. those policies include the disability discrimination ordinance set forth by the equal opportunities commission’s code of practice in education (hong kong government, 1996). in 1997, the education bureau subsequently recommended that schools adopt the “whole school approach” to enhance the quality of learning and schooling experience for integrated students (forlin, 2010). a review of special education and inclusion practices reveals a distinctly different picture across the three schooling systems mentioned above. for local students with special education needs (sen), there are about 60 schools in the region. some cater to students with blindness and visual impairments, deaf students, or other physical disabilities. other local schools serve those children with intellectual disabilities and other behavior disorders as well. regardless of the diagnosis or category of student, class sizes range between 8 and 20 students. the teacher to student ratio in primary schools is 1:7 while in the secondary schools; the ratio is 1:9. classes are selfcontained and inclusive educational opportunities are extremely rare or are unavailable to most local students. inclusive opportunities become scarcer for secondary students (forlin, 2010). in the esf system, there are about 15 schools serving a population of approximately 15,000 students. some children that have special needs are successfully taught in the mainstream through the use of learning support teams (lst) and pullout support services. these students participate in regular classes although they may have attention difficulties, or specific learning and behavior disorders such as dyslexia or dysgraphia. children receiving support have individual inclusive schooling in hong kong 47 education programs (iep) with specific learning provisions as executed by teachers or specialists either in a pull-out small group setting or with the teacher “pushing-in” to the class. schools with lst are few in number and they have very limited numbers (less than 200) of students who can receive services from the lst. no lst services are offered for kindergarteners. (english schools foundation, 2013). through the esf system, there is one school dedicated to students with sen. this school serves about 60 students including students with autism. classes are self-contained and may have 1-3 teachers and 6-8 students. traditional special education services are offered through small class sizes, and although goals for individual students or classes may aspire to generalize skills learned to the general education settings, support during inclusion in a regular education school are extremely rare or unavailable for most of the population of students. compared to the local and esf system, the international schooling system in hk is an expensive option for most families. as a result of competitive admission requirements and a lack of school spaces available for expatriate families, admissions policies favor high achieving. students with sen or those with specialized learning provisions such as the iep experience incredible difficulties in comparison with their high achieving peers. in general, international schools in hk are known for being ill equipped to handle students with sen. although there may be an exception to the rule, few international schools cater to students with sen in the manner intended by the education bureau policies. suffice to say, our fair city has a long way to go in its quest for inclusion. to illustrate this point, wong-ratcliff & ho (2011, p. 103) suggest that while inclusion has actually been happening in hk, albeit at a snail’s pace, most educators agree that the actual practice is “far from satisfactory”. factors limiting inclusive education in hong kong in its latest effort, the hk government education bureau produced a guideline titled, catering for student differences: indicators for inclusion (hksar education bureau, 2008). developed as a tool for school self-evaluation and school development, the initiative represents a valiant effort to enhance support services to students with sen. the document provides a series of criteria for a quality education program against which hk schools can evaluate their own attempts at inclusion. the document does a thorough job of providing quality indicators, however it does not provide a structural template or recipe for how these criteria might originate or evolve. further, it does not advise how schools can help to realize the educational potential of students with sen, nor does it delineate how the school improvement process regarding inclusion in general education enhances teacher education programs necessary to meet the demands of the system. we suggest that the document would better serve the constituents of the education system by specifically highlighting and outlining three crucial areas. first, it should adequately define diagnostic criteria for students with sen. second, it should include a review of the research literature yielding effective pedagogical practices resulting in an analysis that should drive teacher education curricula and certification processes. finally, it should hold schools and administrators accountable for the implementation of effective inclusion practices. because the document reads as an optional reference rather than a set of policies that are enforceable by the education bureau of hong kong, it falls short of its purpose. forlin (2010) proposed a series of factors impeding the progress of the inclusion movement in hk. foremost among these factors was the need for stricter guidelines on teacher education curricula and practicum. 48 global education review 1(10) even with recent specific government initiatives designed to teach comprehensive special courses to about 2000 teachers, only 10% may be exposed to this specialized training. it’s no wonder then, that forlin reported that teachers generally feel inadequately prepared to accommodate students with learning provisions in their class, hence contributing to their trepidation when requested or required to provide inclusive opportunities to such students in their classes. another major hurdle to developing inclusive schools in hong kong is the inflexible nature of the educational system itself. in hk and much of the greater southeast asia region, there is a significant discrepancy between the practices of teacher education programs and the needs of the teachers and learners in classrooms. systems charged with teacher education or the administrators themselves may be inflexible, overly conservative, or slow to react to the changing needs of a student population. further, social stigma is a serious consideration that negatively affects cultures both within schools and the parent community, thus affecting the execution of new education initiatives (gartner & lipsky 1987). we suggest that as a leading global city, hong kong ought to take steps to realize its potential in achieving the journey of successful inclusive education to advance the educational system and to emulate those of other developed nations. to elaborate on forlin’s call for enhanced teacher training, it may be prudent for hongkongers to look abroad for teacher education trends and effective practices. well-referenced and effective pedagogical practices such as research within the applied behavior analysis (aba) literature are replete with effective strategies and tactics for various types of learners across a multitude of settings. approaches such as functional behavioral assessment (fba) and fields such as verbal behavior analysis (vba) are becoming commonplace in special education systems of many developed nations. these practices have been at the forefront of the special education and inclusion movements in the us for more than a decade (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007; crossland & dunlap, 2012; greer, 2002; greer & ross, 2008; fallon, o’keeffe, & sugai, 2012). currently, there are no teacher training programs using aba in hk at the university level. nevertheless, a review of the research literature reveals that one successful application using principles derived from aba has been used to improve attention skills of one kindergarten student with sen in a regular education classroom (greenberg, tang, & tsoi, 2010). increasingly, parents are becoming aware of the need for practitioners with expertise in autism, sen, and aba, and their expectations are changing. barriers, whether institutional or individual, do a disservice to the constituents of the system (i.e. children and families). by definition, a system that places heavy emphasis on only the top tier of academic performers overlooks the greater majority. disqualifying or marginalizing strengths in areas not measured by stringently traditional local exams, such as critical and creative thinking so prominent in music, debate and the arts, is a disservice not only to the student in the short term, but to society as a whole. congruence between one’s predisposition and strengths and future job satisfaction and performance has been well documented (derr & laurent, 1989). armstrong (2010) provides a strong argument for how systems that are driven by the narrow-minded perception of what construes academic achievement are at odds with the reality of an already neurologically diverse student population. especially in the more conservative circles of education change comes hard, but change, rothstein (2012) would agree, is here already. as a constant, change is inevitable particularly in the scope of human diversity and learning systems. there is a chinese proverb attributed to philosopher, lao-tzu who said that the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. hk ought to take bigger steps to inclusive schooling in hong kong 49 quicken the pace of that journey, and help to set priorities for its educational systems that seek to respectfully address learning diversity through inclusive education. these changes, if implemented, would help to align the education system in hong kong with those of other developed nations. the children’s institute of hong kong the adage, “necessity is the mother of invention” could not better describe what happened to alter a predominantly monocultural education landscape that typified hk schooling in the late 1990s. when siblings born to an american family residing in hong kong were both diagnosed with autism, the family had no choice but to move back to the united states for a short spell due to lack of appropriate educational options for their children. when job opportunities necessitated their return to hong kong soon after, the parents founded the children’s institute of hong kong (tci) in 2003, the first organization set up specifically for students with autism and other sen. the school was the first to use the evidence-based approach known as applied behavior analysis (aba) (zheng, 2003). experts in aba and autism were imported from teachers college columbia university and the cabas schools (greer, 2002; greer & ross, 2008) in new york to build the instructional foundation one “learn unit” at a time (albers & greer, 1991; greer & mcdonough, 1999; greer, 2002) using state-of-the-art pedagogical practices within a cybernetic system. tci was the first organization with a mission to provide quality one-to-one educational and support services to students with autism or other learning difficulties. beginning with three students, the program grew and expanded slowly from 2003 through 2006. when it was determined that a few tci students with high functioning autism or with only very minimal learning or social difficulties needed a general education placement for supported inclusion opportunities, it became evident that a selfcontained organization with one-to-one services was not enough. students needed to be around their typical peers in order to “practice” skills learned in isolation, and to be monitored through naturally occurring social contingencies during a school day in a school setting (owendeschryver, carr, cale, & blackeley-smith, 2008; poon-mcbrayer, 2004). since its inception, tci subscribed to the early tenet of normalization that, along with the lre doctrine, provides the right ingredients to fuel the inclusion movement (wolfensberger, 1983). the harbour school (ths) was established in 2007 to be a general education school to accommodate students with sen and provide supportive inclusive opportunities alongside typical peers regularly throughout the year because attempts by tci to liaise with other english speaking general education and international schools for a supported inclusion arrangement yielded very little. armstrong’s (2010, p. 182) assertion that “one of the biggest problems is that special education has developed…as a completely separate system from regular education…” alludes to the expected divide that usually describes inclusion arrangements between regular and special education organizations. as the establishment of a regular education mission (ths) in this case resulted from the need to complement, or rather complete, a special education need and vision (tci), we have observed that the result in this case has been a healthily holistic inclusive community without the fragility and imbalance typical of similar general/special education inclusion arrangements. one hundred percent of tci’s 18 students participate in ths with their one-to-one teacher throughout the school day. students have their own individualized schedules, ranging from one or more weekly all-school activities to full-time inclusion. the model has been so successful for some students, that they have been enrolled into ths without the need for their aba teacher 50 global education review 1(10) from tci. through the use of aba strategies and tactics, data-based decisionmaking, and systematic fading procedures, tci has successfully transitioned students into being fully integrated ths students on a regular basis. to date, 10 students have successfully graduated from tci to ths over the school’s five-year history. this translates to roughly 10% 20% of tci students per year. figure 1 shows the cumulative number of students who have graduated from tci to being fully mainstreamed without additional support at ths. admittedly, these data are not large, but given the school’s very short history and small size, just the continuity of having a “light at the end of a tunnel” has been promising to teachers and families all the same. that success, as defined by full graduation from one-to-one support to being fully mainstreamed, has been invaluable and educationally game changing. this is apparent through regular parent testimonials (tci, 2013). due to its unique, “reverse” engineering process, ths has been an inclusive school community from the start. it’s widely known that schools generally start out as general education schools and provide special education provisions as necessary (armstrong 2010). that tci was established first and that ths evolved out of the need for a general education population for inclusion opportunities for tci students is unusual and we believe it to be key to the seamless rapport enjoyed by both populations. stakeholders in the school community from the administration, parents, and the teachers are all tied to the collective mission of building a collaborative, supportive and intensely inclusive school community. both programs measure their successes through the achievement of their students and the continued growth and satisfaction of faculty. a commitment to inclusive schooling has also resulted in the administrative commitment to keep abreast of research-based tactics and curricula. administrators are facilitators in each teacher’s professional growth and learning, which creates a collegial professional atmosphere wherein teacher behaviors are aligned with student needs. this drives professional expertise as systematically acquired by teachers. cabas® schools refer to this relationship as a cybernetic system (greer, 2002), wherein changes in one body or more within an interdependent system result in changes elsewhere within the system. tci’s teacher education program is based on the principles of aba. since the field of aba is constantly changing and evolving, so do the continuing professional development (cpd) experiences of the teachers at tci. one of the ways that the school perpetuates this continuous learning is through teaching and support of teachers’ board certification in behavior analysis6. similar to a mentor and mentee relationship, experienced certified teachers mentor lesser experienced teachers throughout their tenure. modeling, positive reinforcement, learn units, public posting of visual graphic displays, data decision analysis, and personalized systems of instruction are but a few of the behavioral strategies and tactics employed on an ongoing basis at tci (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007; greer, 2002; greer & ross, 2008). tci teachers also participate in cpd trainings with ths teachers to expand their curricular expertise and understanding of the scope and sequence of teaching and learning. in-house policies and training materials were created to ensure systematic application. one example includes the school’s inclusion guideline for teachers that contains a screening assessment, roles and responsibilities for tci and ths teachers, an inclusion procedure checklist, and scenarios for teachers to learn to apply their roles, and initiate the inclusion process for a given student. we believe that the aforementioned systems represent just a few of the innovations that consistently align with forlin’s recommendations (2010). omission of systems like these will result in schools simply failing to inclusive schooling in hong kong 51 forge ahead in their efforts to create and nurture an inclusive school community. more importantly, they will continue to fail children with special education needs and their families. figure 1. cumulative number of students that have transitioned from the children’s institute of hong kong to the harbour school over its five-year history. the harbour school-a model inclusive school community ths has also grown and expanded quite rapidly, into a small but highly effective general education school community. its learning standards align with the us based common core and project american education reaches out7 as sanctioned by the office of overseas schools in the united states and the curricula used to achieve these standards are international. the school’s commitment to sound pedagogical practices and curricular choices are described by the school’s principal, dr. blurton as flexible best practice (e.u. blurton, personal communication, march 3, 2012). ths has been fully accredited by the western association of schools and colleges (wasc). the student-teacher ratio is 7:1 which affords stronger communication between home and school, specific differentiation for a diverse student body which includes gifted, twice exceptional, typical, sen, specific learning disorders, and intense teacher professional development to match. in each classroom, there is one qualified teacher, one co-teacher (an 52 global education review 1(10) individual with a graduate or undergraduate degree in a content-area of expertise). additional faculty members include specialist teachers in the areas of chinese studies, physical education, art and music as well as a full learning enhancement team (len). the len team provides in-house pull-out or push-in support for students with specific learning difficulties within a dyad or small group arrangement. also referred to as “level 1 services,” this practice includes the construction of an iep as well as periodic assessments and reports. students who require additional behavioral support beyond this level receive consult from the tci supervisor who is a bcba and can provide fba, if warranted. students receiving one-to-one services from tci are identified as students receiving “level 2” services. level 2 (tci) students enter the tci program and are assessed to determine acceptable criteria for specific areas of inclusion. for example, students who are academically on par for a given subject are generally included for that subject. students for whom social interaction proves difficult, work on social and behavioral goals within the general education setting during “non-academic” subjects such as physical education, music, art or during less structured times such as recess or lunch. during these times, inclusion is monitored by the ths teacher as well as by the tci one-to-one teacher. opportunities and assessments are provided in which specific goals on the student’s iep can be addressed. some typical inclusion goals might be: responding to academic, social and transitional cues within a group, responding to the ths teacher with more distant proximity, fading procedures for reinforcement from primary to generalized reinforcers, role playing and literacy (i.e., reading, speaking, writing) skills. tci students participate in field trips, whole school assemblies and whole school events and activities such as co-curricular programming, sports day, the winter concert, arts interim, and the talent show as is appropriate for each child and family. ths and tci students and their families develop lasting friendships and socialize outside of school (i.e. birthday parties, play dates) fostering a true atmosphere community. we see this around the school regularly. one of the most successful partnerships between the two organizations is the mentoring program between ths and tci students throughout the social teaching and relationship skills program known by the acronym, stars. ths families volunteer their children for a weekly structured and facilitated play date after school for similar aged pairings between their child and a tci student. though it started out as a mentoring effort to expand social and play repertoires for the tci participant, there is documented research as to the benefits to typically developing students who are involved with students with sen (owen-deschryver, carr, cale, & blakeley-smith, 2008; rea, mclaughlin, & walter-thomas, 2001). in fact, a few ths parents regularly seek out stars mentorships for their child to increase helping, friendship and responsibility skills in their own children. “the school of tomorrow?” research literature in the areas of special education and education policy converge on the subject of maintaining cohesive inclusive school communities (hksar education bureau, 2008; hong kong government, 1996; unesco, 1994). a strategically inclusive education system benefits all members of the community in the sense that it prepares them for the reality of diversity throughout life. schooling systems that focus only on one facet (academics) by which to assess student success do not ultimately prepare students for entering a workforce, partnership or relationship which relies on collaborative give and take as well as depth of emotional and social perspective. a school preparing its students for the 21st century ought to reexamine its definition of diversity and include the neurologically diverse inclusive schooling in hong kong 53 rather than considering only the more obvious factors of ethnicity and social economic status. as these have already been correlated with student outcomes in terms of language and as predictors of success (hart & risley, 1995), a concerted effort to officially consider other dimensions of diversity would direct a more complete means to thorough inclusion. armstrong (2010) states that a more balanced approach to the appreciation of our genetic continuum is important to establishing a culture of acceptance within our societal systems. only with the understanding and respect for the wide spectra of human abilities might we accept that schools committed to teaching anyone within a broader range should be the rule and not the exception. rothstein (2012, p. 101) reported “the neurodiversity movement accompanies an apparent boom in the number of people with mental disorders, especially children.” if so, then any school which does not provide adequately for such learning differences could not be considered as being realistically 21st century in its aims and practices. in short, when it comes to schooling, best practice seems to suggest that there be elements of both general education and special education systems. therefore, we believe that the metaphor it takes two to tango, applies. only a school committed to the learning and development of any and every kind of student within a supportive and diverse community would be preparing its citizens for a successful, rather than a marginal, tomorrow. notes 1. the practice of including or students with autism and other developmental disabilities and/or behavior disorders into mainstream (general education) classrooms and related activities will be referred to herein as inclusion. 2. according to kofi annan, former secretary of the united nations a developed nation is one in which “its citizens are allowed to enjoy a free and healthy life in a safe environment”. examples include: japan, canada, the united states, australia, new zealand, and europe amongst others. 3. for more on special education law in the us, refer to: wrightslaw: special education law wright & wright (1999). 4. for more on the british colony of hong kong see the opium wars or anglo-chinese wars and the treaty of nanking (1842) see j. lovell the opium war (2012). 5. international schools are private, maintain their own standards and curriculum, and generally conduct instruction in english and their language of preference. the french international school teaches english and french, for example. generally, all schools in hong kong provide traditional mandarin instruction. 6. board certification in behavior analysis is attained through the behavior analysis certification board (www.bacb.com). 7. for more information on project aero go to 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(1975). the education of all handicapped children act. washington, dc: u.s. congress. http://www.scmp.com/article/973307/ http://www.spannj.org/pti/researchont http://www.spannj.org/pti/researchont http://www.edb.gov.hk/filemanger/en http://www.edb.gov.hk/filemanger/en http://www.gov.hk/en/about/abouthk/f inclusive schooling in hong kong 55 public law 101-476. (1990). individuals with disabilities education act. washington, dc: u.s. congress. rea, p., mclaughlin, v., & walther-thomas, c. (2001). outcomes for students with learning disabilities in inclusive and pullout programs. exceptional children,68 (2), 203-223. rothstein, a. (2012). mental disorder or neurodiversity? the new atlantis, 99-115. sharma, u. & chow, e. w. s., (2008). the attitudes of hong kong primary school principals toward integrated education. asia pacific education review, 9 (3), 380-391. sharma, u. loreman, t., & forlin, c. (2012). measuring teacher efficacy to implement inclusive practices. journal of research in special education needs, 12 (1), 12-21. stainback, w., & stainback, s. (1995). controversial issues confronting special education: divergent perspectives (2nd ed.). boston, massachusetts: allyn & bacon. the children’s institute of hong kong limited (tci, 2013). testimonials. retrieved 15 april 2013, from, http://tcihk.org/testimonials/testimonials.html tsai, e., & fung, l. (2009). parents' experiences and decisions on inclusive sport participation of their children with intellectual disabilities. adapted physical activity quarterly, 26 (2), 151-171. retrieved 4 february 2013, from academic search premier database. united nations educational, scientific, & cultural organization (unesco). 1994. the salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs education. retrieved from http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/salama_ e.pdf wolfensberger, w. (1983). social role valorization: a proposed new term for the principle of normalization. mental retardation, 21, 234-239. wong, virginia, c. n. & hiu, stella, l. h. (2008). brief report: emerging services for children with autism spectrum disorders in hong kong (1960 2004). journal of autism and developmental disorders, 38, 383-389. wong-ratcliff, m. & ho, kwok keung. (2011). can integrated education meet the needs of students with sen? new horizons in education, 59 (2), 101-115. wright, p. w. d, & wright p. d. (1999). wrightslaw: special education law. hartfield,virginia: harbour house law press. yuen, m., westwood, p., & wong, g. (2005). meeting the needs of students with specific learning difficulties in the mainstream education system: data from the primary school teachers in hong kong. the international journal of special education, 20 (1), 67-76. zheng, x. (2003, december 6). how years of anguish turned to action. south china morning post. retrieved from http://www.scmp.com/article/437056/how-years anguish-turned-action about the author(s) jeremy h. greenberg, phd, is director of the children’s institute of hong kong. he earned his doctorate in special education applied behavior analysis from teachers college columbia university. he currently resides in hong kong with his wife christine and four children. j. christine greenberg is vice principal of the harbour school in hong kong. she earned her master’s degree in special education applied behavior analysis from teachers college columbia university. she completed her bachelor’s degree in elementary education and english literature. http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/salama_ http://www.unesco.org/education/pdf/salama_ http://www.scmp.com/article/437056/how-years-%20%20%20anguish-turned-action http://www.scmp.com/article/437056/how-years-%20%20%20anguish-turned-action lexical range and communicative competence 98 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mewald, claudia (2015). lexical range and communicative competence of learners in bilingual schools in lower austria . global education review, 2 (2). 98-113 lexical range and communicative competence of learners in bilingual schools in lower austria claudia mewald university college of teacher education in lower austria abstract this article discusses the impact of lexical range on the learners’ ability to communicate in english when taught as a foreign language in bilingual schools, and emphasizes the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction. it draws on data from classroom observation, lexis-retrieval tasks, written and spoken performance in bilingual (german-english) and regular school classes at grades 5-8 in austrian secondary schools. results suggest that a wider lexical range results in better communicative competence and fluency and that breakdown of communication in spoken or written performance is more frequently caused by insufficient vocabulary rather than by lack of control or grammatical problems. consequently, insights from cognitive linguistics, the lexical approach, and lexical priming are discussed to justify the concept of vocabulary instruction in contextualized units. taking the scarceness of theoretical and practical concepts into consideration, the need for research on the explicit instruction of vocabulary and metacognitive strategies is fleshed out. keywords vocabulary acquisition, content and language integrated learning (clil), communicative competence, lexical approach, lexical priming, english as a foreign language introduction the rapid growth of international information exchange and inter-continental travel in recent years have increased language contact, language change, and language conflict and thus contributed to make some languages more influential, while others have declined in importance (baker, 2002). thus, language education does not only embrace the task of enabling people to communicate in private, public and professional domains, it also holds the power to influence the status of languages within societies and the acquisition of several languages in plurilingual contexts (cooper, 1989). content based instruction or content and language integrated learning1 (clil) provides an extensive foundation to realize an approach with a focus on authenticity and real-life. for a long time it seemed that authenticity in foreign language (fl) education had been reduced or even lost by putting a stronger emphasis on knowing about languages than on the ability to make use of them in real world scenarios. this situation and the growing need to be able to communicate in an increasingly globalized world gave rise to a greater demand for authenticity in fl education. the desire to improve language ______________________________ corresponding author: claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria, 2500 baden, muehlgasse 67, austria, europe. email: claudia.mewald@ph-noe.ac.at mailto:claudia.mewald@ph-noe.ac.at lexical range and communicative competence 99 learning opportunities for all learners thus encouraged the development of bilingual programs and the implementation of clil in europe. in order to support plurilingualism, a paradigm shift from learning to use languages with native-speaker like perfection, to an objective that aims at communicative, social and intercultural competence was suggested. with successful communication being the goal in plurilingual societies, strategies that enable fast, effective and sustainable language acquisition have become interesting for planning instruction, especially at the beginner level. clil classrooms emphasize the instruction of vocabulary, which seems to bear positive effects on the learners’ communicative competence. therefore, research was carried out to investigate whether a wider lexical range through clil would also result in better communicative competence and fluency. theoretical background research results from cognitive linguistics suggests planned instruction of larger lexical units (boers & lindstromberg, 2008) in the form of chunks of language such as word partnerships (also called collocations) or fixed and semi-fixed phrases to achieve the goal of communicative competence as quickly and effectively as possible. the focus on collocations and phrases as the guiding framework for syllabus design has been promoted in the lexical approach (lewis, 1993) and more recently in a new theory of words and language called lexical priming (hoey, 2005). this work suggests that real communication is essential to fostering motivation in language learning. the desire not only to be able to communicate fact-based, simple information, but also to be able to communicate messages at an intellectual and emotional level, calls for materials and activities to express opinions and attitudes from an early stage in the language learning process. hoey (2005) maintains that collocation plays an important role in lexical priming, which is a potentially personal and unique process. he explains that in the process of understanding and intake, words are mentally primed for collocational use, which is responsible for naturalness. “every word is primed for use in discourse as a result of the cumulative effects of an individual’s encounter with the word” (hoey, 2005, p. 13). primings are neither static nor absolute. any priming is unique because of the “individual’s experience of language, and the primings that arise out of these experiences” (hoey, p. 11). primings may be reinforced, extended or cracked over time. therefore, hoey suggests that learners should be surrounded by authentic input that provides ample evidence for lexical primings to come into existence, and to get built up inductively and yet individually. this should be done in a way that collocations and word associations are encouraged, rather than in lists of isolated words disconnected from all their primings. taking the above into consideration, language education should make use of an individualized, strategic approach to the acquisition of a broad lexical repertoire in order to encourage natural language acquisition in the process of learning so that new language can be used effectively, but without the claim of nativespeaker like perfection (seidlhofer, 2011, p. 187). thus, learners of english as a foreign language (efl) would aim at becoming users of english as a lingua franca (elf), which measures proficiency in terms of its use as a “communicative resource” and not only “in terms of degrees of conformity to ns norms”2 (seidlhofer, 2011, p. 195 & 187). if learners were freed from the need to demonstrate grammatical perfection, especially at the beginning of the language learning process where basic interpersonal communication skills are prevalent, their language awareness and resources from other languages could be 100 global education review 2(2) consciously exploited and made use of without the “fear” of making connections between the languages that might result in temporarily incorrect use (interlanguage). being freed from the inhibiting native speaker competence goal, learners of additional languages would be encouraged to appreciate their ability to put the language they are learning into effective communicative use instead of limiting their output to what can be said or written in an absolutely correct way. this would simultaneously encourage risk taking and a richer and more complex, although not necessarily more accurate, output. seidelhofer suggests that understanding elf “as a naturally occurring use of language” (2011, p. 208) should thus encourage a redefinition of english as a subject. in the light of this re-definition, a new perspective on clil and how to achieve functional plurilingualism should be considered as well. with the focus of efl instruction on successful communication in the early 1980s and the rejection of the grammar-translation and the audio-lingual method, the importance of vocabulary acquisition increased in linguistic and methodological research. nevertheless, how learners can be supported in the vocabulary acquisition process, and how a sustainable knowledge base can be achieved “has remained a sporadically addressed, minority concern” (boers & lindstromberg, 2008, p. 3), and a widely neglected field in research (richards, 1985, p. 176). despite the generally acknowledged importance of vocabulary acquisition through collocations, lexical chunks or phrases in connection with functional language, there does not seem to be common consensus about how to incorporate vocabulary acquisition in a meaningful way into teaching and learning. the common assumption that communicative language education alone would be sufficient to acquire a broad lexical repertoire subconsciously and effortlessly has not been supported by research results; and empirically proven methods or concepts of explicit vocabulary instruction do not exist (boers & lindstromberg, 2008). the neglect of explicit vocabulary instruction seems to have many reasons, the most prominent being the common disapproval of formal grammar instruction and the memorization of lists of decontextualized words (laufer, 2005). moreover, findings from corpus studies3, which collect written or spoken linguistic data to describe languages, or theoretical and methodological implications of approaches such as the lexical approach (lewis, 1993) or lexical priming (hoey, 2005), have not yet shown sufficient impact on teaching. one of the reasons for this seems to be the fact that cognitive linguists have only just started to research and describe “motivation of lexical units,” e.g., the use of collocations and fixed and semi-fixed phrases, for the benefit of language learners (boers & lindstromberg, 2008, pp. 18-19). moreover, apart from theories about memorization, remembering, or forgetting, very little seems to be known about vocabulary acquisition strategies (clark & paivio, 1991; nation & waring, 1997), or how anchoring and lexical priming work in second language acquisition (sla) (hoey, 2005). while vocabulary acquisition in schools still seems to be a linear process based on vocabulary lists that are copied from course books, laboriously memorized, and quickly forgotten, clil classes seem to take completely different approaches that are perceived as more motivating and effective. the following view into clil classrooms with a focus on vocabulary input and output attempts to picture ways of more meaningful vocabulary instruction. data was collected in two studies between 1999 and 2014. lexical range and communicative competence 101 context and methods when lefranc (2000) suggested that bilingual education would become the norm in europe and that it should start as early as possible (i.e., in kindergarten), lower austria was already looking back at a history of four years of bilingual education in sixty-five schools, with a steadily growing number of participants in a school pilot called “english across the curriculum”4 (eac) and an even longer tradition of previous autonomous implementation. the data presented in this article was collected between 1999 and 2004, and between 2009 and 2014 in clil and regular general secondary schools. clil schools used to implement up to five lessons taught bilingually per week on a regular basis. the early sample comprised a purposeful selection of four clil case study schools with varying experience, human and material resources, and demographic profiles; and four regular schools with similar profiles to provide a broad overview of the impact of bilingual education. the later data focused on learners in one of the clil case study schools which had chosen to concentrate on explicit vocabulary instruction. thus, the school was selected to provide information about the impact of the latter. the data for the analysis of the learners’ lexical range is based on a learner corpus5 , i.e., an electronically stored collection of text produced by the learners, which was compiled from a lexis retrieval task, and spoken and written texts produced in rehearsed as well as in spontaneous exercises. the lexis retrieval task was carried out with thirty-six year eight pupils from clil classes, and the texts were produced by seventy-two pupils in clil and regular classes in the early sample; the later sample comprised twenty pupils for the lexis retrieval task as well as for text production. the difference in number and sampling of the pupils in the two studies is a shortcoming in terms of the comparability of results. however, while the first study concentrated on the comparison of clil to regular pupils, the second study was not intended to compare, but to describe the language clil pupils were able to produce after explicit vocabulary instruction. the lexis retrieval task the lexis retrieval task was only carried out in clil classes. this task was not implemented at regular schools because the knowledge base of textbook related words was not of primary interest. in this task the pupils collaborated in triads to avoid shyness or inhibition when working with an unfamiliar person. they were asked to say words, phrases and sentences they could remember from clil lessons in twenty minutes. the items were processed by the researcher and shown on a whiteboard screen, assuming that this would trigger more output. the output generated by the lexis retrieval task was analyzed for frequency and categories using maxdictio (kuckartz, 2003), a software for the evaluation of texts based on quantitative content analysis which helps to create an index of the words used in a text. to categorize the clil-specific items, information from course book analysis, interviews with experts from the case-study schools, and data from observations were used. words used in the english textbooks were separated from clil-specific words and phrases, and the remaining items were then categorized according to subject. items deriving from the pupils’ knowledge of the world (kow6), i.e., words most likely to be known from the real world, as well as international words (computer, mobile phone, to chill out, etc.), were identified by the pupils immediately after the lexis retrieval task and excluded using “stop-lists”, i.e., the words remained in the corpus but they were not counted for frequency in maxdictio. to analyze the data a type-token ratio7 was calculated, i.e., the total number of words, and the types, with and without l1 words was compared with the number of words excluding repetitions, the tokens. 102 global education review 2(2) written and spoken texts data collected consisted of more than two hundred transcribed spoken texts. seventy-two “typical” high, average and weak performances were selected by the teachers to avoid researcher error or bias. the texts were analyzed according to fluency (mccarthy, 1998; mccarthy, 2009), coherence and cohesion (weir, 1998), first language (l1) influence (bialystok, 1991; duran, 1994), sentence length (goldman-eisler, 1972), lexical, grammatical, and phonological accuracy (bialystok, 1982; hammerly, 1991; mccarthy, 1998), the ability to express ideas comprehensibly and effectively, and creativity (the ability to provide divergent ideas or answers) (baker, 2002). to fully understand the complexity of the language used in clil classes, the collected data was supplemented by an examination of the input and output in twenty-five clil lessons. the data was organized as non-participant observation implementing a semi-structured observation plan with attention on space and objects, actors, time and acts including pupil participation, events and types of tasks in l1 and second language (l2), content goals and topics as well as language use (mewald, 2005). the primary focus was on the pupils’ utterances, i.e., their “output”, which was recorded verbatim. thus, the data set delivered both qualitative and quantitative data, which is why a framework to allow for the organization of data in a checklist matrix was developed. all systematized data was summarized to identify recurrent incidents and to develop patterns to identify and to categorize themes and trends. in addition to the complexity of language, the categories included demographic information, classroom organization, task types, error correction, classroom interaction, metacognitive skills, practice, participation, and materials used in the lessons. this article, however, focuses exclusively on the learner’s lexical range and communicative competence. the 2014 sample comprised twenty spoken texts for the same speaking task as used 2004 and twenty-eight written texts from various clil settings to identify the impact of explicit vocabulary instruction. findings from the lexis retrieval task the pupils in the early sample produced an average of 96.36 l1 and l2 items in the lexis retrieval task. with an average of 85.7 items per pupil, the later sample produced fewer words but more l2 tokens (22.9) and types (21.55). moreover, the type-token ratio was clearly higher and the result of 0.94 suggests that hardly any clil related words were repeated. the results also showed that the later sample used more collocations (e.g., alternating current, direct current), chunks (e.g., . . . is made up of, . . . is called, starts . . . and ends . . .), and sentences. table 1. lexis retrieval task: words complete list l2 list l2 list m clil related tokens clil related types type token ratiovii clil related tokens m clil related types m 2004 (n=36) 4,362 3,469 96.36 597 461 0.77 16.58 12.81 2014 (n=20) 1,825 1,714 85.70 458 430 0.94 22.90 21.55 lexical range and communicative competence 103 table 2. lexis retrieval task: words, phrases & sentences edited list words phrases sentences 2004 3,469 3,381 57 0 2014 1,714 1,420 68 30 in the early sample of clil related words and phrases, ten subjects emerged as categories. biology (bio), history (his) and geography (geo) had the most words per category. physics & chemistry (pc)8, mathematics (ma), and information technology (it) included about half as many words compared to the leading three subjects. music (mu) and religious education (re) had twenty-one and twenty-six words, while technology (tech) and art had fourteen and ten words. some types were counted in more than one subject if they were used in polywords or chunks (e.g., global warming / global economy, copper is made up of . . . / india . . . producer of copper). the original variety in subjects was not confirmed in the later sample. it only contained words from bio, geo, his, pc, and ma. the following items exemplify the data produced in the lexis retrieval task: electric current, roughage, fiber, the reasons for the first world war, two thirds of our body is made up of water, a diode converts alternating current into direct current, nato is short for north atlantic treaty organization, large food molecules are broken down into smaller ones so they can pass into the blood, the opposite sites of a parallelogram are parallel and the opposite angles have the same amount of degrees …. (function words were not counted). thus, a larger variety of words was produced in the context of fewer subjects. bio, his and geo again produced the most items in the pupils’ productive lexis. table 3. clil related words per subject nr. of words bio his geo pc ma it mu re tech art 2004 104 104 99 56 55 50 21 26 14 10 2014 123 117 129 67 59 0 0 0 0 0 104 global education review 2(2) findings from text production the pupils’ performance in the communicative tests was analyzed according to a framework consisting of twenty-one criteria9. the framework was developed to enhance consistency in marking and to encourage a holistic approach to evaluation through counting frequencies (words, phrases, sentences, mistakes…), in addition to a more judgmental evaluation of overall performance based on a set of descriptors at five levels with five being the best rating10 (richards, platt & platt, 1997, pp. 141-142). fluency table 4 shows that pupils from clil classes were by and large more fluent than regular school learners, but that the fluency of low achievers did not benefit as much from a clil approach. taking data from observations into consideration it appears that the reasons for the “lack of fluency” in the performances of many low achievers seemed to mirror code-switching strategies which happened naturally in clil classes. teachers and native speakers generally reacted instantly to l1 utterances of the pupils and hardly ever insisted on the use of l2. even in their own statements teachers and native speakers switched the code seemingly intentionally to support understanding. the only request for l2 to be shown in the observations was made by a pupil who (possibly because he was being observed) insisted on l2 during pair work. the same utterance provided another example of a situation which often happened in clil lessons without teacher intervention: pupils would switch the code within a statement, as in “hast du ein sheet für mich?”11 (german words italicized). continuous speech table 5 shows that pupils from clil classes were better in continuous speech, i.e., they spoke more and produced longer sentences than pupils from regular schools. they used fewer german words and interjections although they switched the code more frequently. moreover, clil pupils were more elaborate than their peers at regular schools. they took risks, used conjunctions, and linking words. however, the increased number of words also raised the danger of making lexical mistakes. pupils at regular school, instead, often went for the safest option, saying the simplest things in the simplest possible language thus avoiding incorrect language. table 4. fluency by ability groups (2004) 1st group 2nd group 3rd group clil schools 3.53 2.92 1.78 regular schools 2.58 2.64 1.97 table 5. continuous speech (2004) number of sentences words per sentence code switching after … words % of german words grammar errors lexical errors clil schools 1,374 7.71 73 7.07 596 282 regular schools 1,070 7.03 81 8.55 635 186 lexical range and communicative competence 105 one of the tasks required the pupils to describe georges-pierre seurat’s “bathers at asnières”. while the texts from clil classes demonstrated resourceful use of lexis, variation in sentence structure and creativity; the texts from regular classes were not only shorter, but they also made little use of structures other than “there is” or “there are”. apart from colors, learners at regular schools used just one adjective, while the texts from clil classes were rich in the use of modifiers, e.g., sunny, friendly, happy, sad, shiny, slow, etc. moreover, the texts from regular school classes only used the present tense, while the sample texts from clil pupils included references to the past, relative clauses, and adverbial clauses, as well as the explanation of possible reasons for things observed. generally, the texts from clil pupils demonstrated more variety and they were more elaborate while those of regular school pupils were straightforward and simple. the extent to which clil pupils demonstrated a more resourceful lexical range than regular school pupils also showed in the evaluation of english types (words counted without repetitions) produced by both groups in the spoken texts, and by each group individually. table 6 shows that clil learners used more than twice as many different kinds of words than regular school pupils. only proper names (e.g., danube, new york…) were more frequently used by regular school pupils. comparing the results reflecting the lexical range the clil learners had produced with the number of lexical mistakes made in the texts, it was observed that although clil pupils seemed to have a more relaxed attitude towards mistakes (as observed in the lessons), they produced not just more creative but also more accurate texts. as can be seen in table 7, the clil pupils produced more incorrect words that did not spoil the message, but at the same time the number of missing words was less. table 6. words used by clil and regular school pupils in text production nouns verbs adjectives adverbs proper names other clil schools 175 80 58 14 13 regular schools 67 38 18 25 2 table 7. types of mistakes in clil and regular school classes wrong word no damage breakdown of communication word missing inappropriate word clil schools 147 22 60 2 regular schools 102 24 108 5 106 global education review 2(2) the below text illustrates a sample text from a clil class. “it shows a sunny day in summer and a boy is swimming and some are on the boat. maybe they want to fish. and on the grass there is sitting a boy. he looks very sad. maybe he has got a problem with his girlfriend or at home he’s got problems with his family. on the other side of the grass there are men with a hat on his head and he also looks not very happy. maybe he lost his job or anything happened. and on this photo i see a dog beside a man who is lying in the grass. i see that he is dreaming about something. maybe a girlfriend. he want to marry her. and on the back of the picture there are some flats and houses. there is ah is a beautiful forest at the back and ahm in the bootsteg is noch so a young man who is looking to the water. maybe he’s searching for anything maybe he lost something. and also on the back is there are two men who are very slow and maybe they are hot. and one of them is lying on the floor and is looking on the floor and the other man is sitting on the grass. i think all the people on this picture have problems because they all look very sad. ahm the water is very shiny and blue and the sky is also blue and white and there are a lot of boats in the water and there is one boat with an french flag maybe. it is colored with black. beside one man are lying shoes and clothes and by the other man are also lying shoes and hat and on the backside there are there is maybe a bridge and there are very ahm there a people.” (sample text, clil class; german words italicized). while the above text provides sufficient information about the picture, the following example from a regular school demonstrates how the lack of lexical resources creates a breakdown in communication. with the information from this description one would not be able to identify the picture. “also, i see a lake with very also, äh also she and äh sie she were a boat and children also and i see, no, a dog. äh she was very äh glücklich äh and the men right from the dog äh lay äh liegt on der wiese. äh she was she wollt äh swimming gehen äh swimming go. äh aber the water was too cold and she was very also. she children played and she äh the other children äh shouted to him. äh it is very beautiful and all the all the children and the other äh füllen sich wohl und mehr fällt ma nicht ein.” (sample text, regular school class, german words and fillers italicized). although attempts to produce complete statements in correct structural form were made, the pupil did not succeed in conveying meaningful information due to the lack of the vocabulary which would have been needed in order to do so: …i see a lake with …. (noun missing) …she was very… (adjective missing) …all the children and all the other … (verb missing) …the men right from the dog… (verb missing) apart from one exception all sentences were either initiated by a word from the pupil’s l1 or by an interjection, which suggests that the pupil was not able to produce “language at ease”. additionally, it seems that the pupil had sufficient structure-based sentence starters but did not succeed in their completion. lexical range and communicative competence 107 creative and divergent thinking clil pupils also outpaced the regular school pupils as measured by the number of hints for creative and divergent thinking. clil pupils produced 22.67% more creative or divergent responses in the spoken texts than the regular school pupils. the complexity of language and thinking involved in task achievement are crucial elements of modern fl education and teachers are increasingly interested in finding ways to promote their students’ thinking skills and their language learning. clil is an ideal context for this ambition. if clil lessons encourage explicit vocabulary work in addition to the tasks and their fulfillment, i.e., if content learning is supplemented by explicit language learning, the pupils will most likely benefit from it. therefore, the analysis of texts produced by the 2014 cohort was expected to show better results than the results from the 2004 clil cohort. text production after explicit vocabulary instruction the texts that described georges-pierre seurat’s “bathers at asnières” showed that the cohort with explicit vocabulary instruction produced slightly more but clearly longer sentences. code-switching was not observed and l2 interference only occurred in place names (e.g., nizza vs. nice), which was not counted. moreover, grammar control also improved. sample sentences: “i can see a boat with three people in nice hats. on the boat there is a france, the flag of france, and i think perhaps they are france people. i mean french people, who are maybe celebrating the national holiday.” “the boy who sitting by the water has brown hair and another boy in the water has blond hair and i think it’s spring because, spring or summer, the summer the grass is fresh and green and the trees are green, too. there is a contrast with the gray color of the factories in the back which are …they are pollution, ah, polluting. polluting the air really badly.” text samples show the increased use of compound and subordinate clauses, adjectives and adverbs, but also an increase in clil related words. table 8. continuous speech (2004 and 2014) number of sentences per pupil m words per sentence codeswitching after …. words % of german words grammar errors per pupil m lexical errors per pupil m clil 2004 38.16 7.71 73 7.07 16.55 7.83 clil 2014 40.10 9.32 not observed 0.0 12.25 4.89 table 9. clil related words in texts about the seurat picture (2004 and 2014) nouns verbs proper names 2004 18 4 9 2014 22 8 7 108 global education review 2(2) the 2014 cohort used more cil related nouns and verbs in their description of the seurat picture but fewer clil related proper names (e.g., names of cities or names of rivers in france). especially the clil related verbs had doubled (to contaminate, to dangle, to deduce, to explore, to force, to navigate, to reflect, to vary). the following samples were written by a year eight pupil whose course combined explicit vocabulary work in language and content lessons with process writing, provide examples of increasingly rich and more complex text production. figure 1. sample of the first version of text production lexical range and communicative competence 109 the next sample is the fourth version in a series of process writing which concentrated on accuracy, linking sentences, creating coherent paragraphs, and embellishing the text with adverbs and adjectives. the sample of the fourth version shows that explicit vocabulary work and process writing results in texts that are richer, not only in their lexical but also in their grammatical range. longer and more complex sentences develop through the conscious use of linking words and sentence starters, which derive from a lexical repertoire that is explicitly taught with the goal of aiding learning. this can be seen in figure 3. figure 2. sample of the fourth version of text production figure 3. process writing in a year six clil class (extract) lexical range and communicative competence 110 the data also showed that even younger learners could benefit from explicit vocabulary instruction. the year six pupil was able to use complex lexical chunks such as “a few days ago”, “a crazy-looking creature”, “a slime covered body” or “special abilities” effectively after having been given explicit lexical input. before the intervention the text read like this: “it was a shark. it was very big, had three eyes and a rat tail. it lived in a whole. it ate mobile phones. it was not friendly.” explicit instruction in vocabulary instruction and process writing also resulted in improved performance in creative and divergent thinking. the students created longer texts with more creative ideas and detail. on the one hand, this was a result of instructions given by the teacher, as can be seen in the below feedback on the text in figure 4. on the other hand, pupils had to add detail and ideas to their writing if they were asked to make sentences longer through linking words or modifiers. in most of the cases, this resulted in explanations why things had happened as can be seen in the last sentence in the text shown in figure 3. figure 4. teacher feedback and input in process writing lexical range and communicative competence 111 interpretation data from a lexis retrieval task and a comparison of spoken texts produced by pupils in clil schools and regular schools showed that the additional instruction through bilingual education made the students more resourceful and fluent in l2 production but they also had a tendency to switch to l1 more frequently or to put less emphasis on accuracy than pupils from regular schools. while increased lexical resourcefulness and fluency were certainly considered to be desired outcomes of bilingual education, more code-switching and lack of correctness had to be considered negative results and required reflection. a possible explanation for this phenomenon was seen in the fact that by and large accuracy was more important in the subject english than in clil lessons, where making mistakes was not penalized and only incorrect or incomprehensible content was corrected. this might have encouraged the livelier speech and risk-taking amongst clil pupils. pupils in regular schools produced lexically more restricted but more accurate texts. that the clil learners used more different words, which increased the risk of making mistakes, can be explained by the fact that in communication more meaning is carried by lexis than by grammatical structure. as suggested by lewis (1993, p. 33), a focus on communication should result in increased emphasis on lexis and decreased emphasis on structure, which was observed in clil but not in regular schools. as far as the frequency of code-switching is concerned it can be seen from the pupils’ texts as well as from classroom observation that using l1 and l2 simultaneously occurs naturally and unconsciously with clil pupils and that a “standard” or “strict” evaluation of codeswitching, accuracy or fluency, as might be the case in monolingual english subject lessons, does not exactly reflect the routine of clil learners, particularly not that of low achievers. the same should be considered in the evaluation of continuous speech which indicated that high and average clil learners showed more advantage over regular school learners although low achievers were lagging behind the good results of their peers. this finding seems to confirm helfrich who suggested that “[b]ilingual teaching seems to be very demanding for both learners and teachers, [and] it may be a frustrating experience for average or below average children” (helfrich, 1993, p. 34). moreover, many teachers and principals confirmed that clil should be “voluntary, limited to basics for all learners, while the gifted and talented pupils should get optional supplementary input” (mewald, 2004, p. 470). conversely, baker (2002) argued that especially with young learners or low achievers the impact of bilingual education should not be subject to short term evaluation because some effects could only be observed on a long term basis. therefore, it can be concluded that within the context of lower austrian clil schools the 2004 study provided evidence of the positive impact of bilingual education on the learners’ communicative competence in english. at the same time the 2004 study provided direction for improvement, which was pursued in some clil schools through more explicit instruction of vocabulary. ten years later a much smaller but similar study sought to investigate the impact of explicit vocabulary instruction and its results suggested that teachers were able to lead their learners to a communicative competence that showed no code-switching, an increased lexical range, and also fewer grammatical and lexical errors. this result emphasized the importance of explicit vocabulary instruction and suggested that new developments in learning materials and electronic resources might provide still better results if implemented. 112 global education review 2(2) outlook the grounding of communicative language teaching in genuinely functional and authentic concepts happens naturally in clil classes. communicative strategies supplemented with individualized and explicit vocabulary work through conscious and autonomous training of collocations and phrases in meaningful and contextualized units enables learners to become more fluent and creative in their production. in order to reach this goal, vocabulary has to be learned and practiced in real life contexts, using comprehensible but progressively authentic and accessible content. the fact that input can only lead to intake if it is comprehensible for every user constitutes a potentially difficult scenario in increasingly heterogeneous clil classes. therefore, items that are chosen for explicit vocabulary work should be relevant, appropriate, and linked to their word families, and should include collocations and alternative meanings to create new elements that can be connected to existing ones by the individual learner. conscious and autonomous training in connection with strategic personalization is crucial because lexis that has already been primed in one’s brain can only be added and create a greater and more precise personal lexicon if existing items receive addition, reformulation or even correction and changes though new input. this does not work by using linear vocabulary list. more creative solutions such as lexical notebooks including mind maps, text/dialogue frames, or flow diagrams etc. are necessary to achieve the goal of continuous and complementary (rather than purely additive) lexical development. such solutions open opportunities for personalization by adding what is relevant and necessary for the individual learner over time, which is helpful when it comes to remembering what needs to be learnt, as opposed to copying what is already printed in a course book which does not allow for personalization.. if what needs to be learnt is contextualized and personalized, the chance for intake is higher and the crucial motivation to become a lifelong learner of language(s) is much more likely. students create better spoken and written texts if they receive explicit vocabulary instruction as suggested in clil classrooms, they feel more at ease and they become more motivated to language learning, which also supports plurilingualism. teaching strategies that encourage explicit learning strategies in the learners’ vocabulary acquisition process that employ emergent and ever growing lexical notebooks rather than linear vocabulary lists seem to be powerful aids in becoming better and more efficient language learners. future research, more overt and strategic support in methodology courses, and more targeted material development should thus be encouraged to aid plurilingualism and its ultimate goal: successful communication in plurilingual societies. notes 1. clil, more frequently used in a european context, is used synonymously to cbi in this article. 2. ns – native speaker. 3. corpus (corpora): a collection of linguistic data, either written texts or a transcription of recorded speech, which can be used as a starting-point of linguistic description or as a means of verifying hypotheses about a language (corpus linguistics), (crystal, 1997). 4. the austrian translation for eac was “englisch als arbeitssprache”. the term was replaced by clil in the 1990s. 5. see 3, above. 6. knowledge of the world. 7. a type-token ratio of 1.0 would suggest that none of the words in a set has been repeated. 8. physics and chemistry are taught as one subject. lexical range and communicative competence 113 9. lexical criteria: code switching, error-no damage, error-communication breakdown, missing, inappropriate word; content criterion: wrong statement/information; grammar: tense, verb form, preposition, verb/noun modification, comparison, word order, quantifiers, singular/plural, question words, a/an, articles, relative pronouns; syntactic criteria: complete clause, incomplete clause; pauses. 10. performance criteria: fluency, pronunciation/intonation/stress; content criteria: effectiveness, divergence, and creativity of answers. 11. have you got a sheet for me? references baker, c. (2002). foundations of bilingual education and bilingualism. clevedon: multilingual matters. baker, c., & prys jones, s. (1998). encyclopedia of bilingualism and bilingual education. clevedon: multilingual matters. bialystok, e. (1982). on the relationship between knowing and using forms. applied linguistics(3), pp. 181-206. bialystok, e. (1991). language processing in bilingual children. new york: cambridge university press. boers, f., & lindstromberg, s. (eds.). (2008). cognitive linguistic approaches to teaching vocabulary and phraseology (applications of cognitive linguistics 6 ed.). berlin: mouton de gruyter. cooper, r. l. (1989). language planning and social change. cambridge: cambridge university press. crystal, d. (1997). a dictionary of linguistics and phonetics. oxford: blackwell publishers inc. duran, l. (1994). toward a better understanding of code switching and interlanguage in bilinguality: implications for bilingual instruction. the journal of educational issues of language minority students, 14, pp. 69-88. goldman-eisler, f. (1972). pauses, clauses, sentences. language and speech(15), pp. 103-113. hammerly, h. (1991). fluency and accuracy: toward balance in language teaching and learning. clevedon: multilingual matters. helfrich, h. (1993). bilingual teaching in europe: a survey. in e. h. thürmann, bilingual education in secondary schools: learning and teaching nonlanguage subjects through a foreign language (pp. 28-34). soest: council of europe. hoey, m. (2005). lexical priming. a new theory of words and language. london & new york: routledge. kuckartz, u. (2003). maxdictio. modul zur wortschtzanalyse, diktionärserstellung und quantitativen inhaltsanalyse für maxqda. berlin: verbi software. laufer, b. (2005). focus on form in second language vocabulary acquisition. in s. foster-cohen (hrsg.), eurosla yearbook 5 (s. 223-250). philadelphia: john benjamins. lefranc, m. (2000). opening speech to the international experts’ meeting – bilingual education in austria. graz: european centre for modern languages and zse iii. lewis, m. (1993). the lexical approach. hove: ltp. mccarthy, m. (1998). spoken language and applied linguistics. cambridge: cambridge university press. mccarthy, m. (2009). rethinking spoken fluency. eila, 9, pp. 11-29. mewald, c. (2004). paradise lost and found: a case study of content based foreign language education in lower austria.unpublished phd thesis. norwich: unversity of east anglia. mewald, c. (2005). die beobachtung als methode der datensammlung in der qualitativen bildungsforschung. in f. radits, m.-l. braunsteiner, & k. klement (eds.), konzepte und werkzeuge für foschung in der lehrerinnenbildung. perspektiven für nachhaltigkeit (vol. 3, pp. 74-87). baden: kompetenzzentrum für forschung und entwicklung. richards, j. c. (1985). the context of language teaching. cambridge: cambridge university press. seidlhofer, b. (2011). understanding english as a lingua franca. oxford: oxford university press. weir, c. (1998). communicative language testing. hemel hempstead: prentice hall. about the author claudia mewald, phd, is a professor at the university college of teacher education in lower austria. her scholarship focuses on the teaching of english as an additional language to learners from a very young age to adult learners. her research interests are learner autonomy, clil (content and language integrated learning), language, metacognition and culture in plurlingual classrooms as well as testing and assessment. lexical range of learners in bilingual schools in lower austria-formattedpage 1 lexical range of learners in bilingual schools in lower austria-formattedpages 2-16 78 global education review 1(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: knoll, marcia (2014). using video-based self-assessment to develop effective conferencin . global education review, 1 (3). 78-92. using video-based self-assessment to develop effective conferencing skills marcia knoll hunter college, cuny abstract conferencing is the commonly used vehicle for improving instruction by providing feedback to teachers. however, it is the nature of the feedback given to the teacher and how it is delivered, using effective conferencing strategies and techniques, that will actually involve the teacher in understanding, accepting, agreeing and initiating changes, or make him angry and hostile. this article focuses on defining effective conferencing strategies, and the process that was used to help program participants preparing for leadership certification to practice these strategies in a clinical setting. the leadership program at hunter college prepares educators for certification as school building and district leaders. supervision of instruction for student achievement is considered the heart of the work of the school and district leader. therefore a major focus for program participants seeking leadership certification is on content and practice for conferencing effectiveness. participants learn and practice these skills in simulations, and then implement them by trying out their abilities in the field in real observation and conferencing experiences with a practicing classroom teacher. participants video-tape themselves conducing conferences with their practicing classroom teacher clients following an observation. they then view the video of their conference performance and self-assess their conferencing skills by electronically recording the behaviors they observe using a set of criteria and design a growth plan for the further development of their conferencing skills. keywords teacher supervision, conferencing, leadership, self-assessment, electronic, video introduction there is almost universal agreement that the current system of teacher evaluation in the united states is ineffective. three of four teachers report that their evaluation process has virtually no impact on their classroom practice (duffett, farkas, rotherham, & silva, 2008). the current national practice for improving teacher effectiveness and school performance relies on using more intensive ______________________________ corresponding author: marcia knoll, hunter college, cuny graduate center, 365 fifth avenue, new york, ny 10016 email: marcia.knoll@hunter.cuny.edu using video-based self-assessment 79 supervision and evaluation of teachers. popular models for data accumulation have been implemented across the united states and are used to measure and rate teacher quality. these models use behavioral and archival indices of teacher performance as well as student outcomes as indicators (e. g., danielson, 2007, marzano, 2011). criteria established to evaluate the teacher’s performance in preparation for and during instruction as well as in creating the environment in which instruction occurs are strategically important. however, even though these criteria are helpful in evaluating and grading the teacher, they do not influence the actions of the teacher or cause changes in instruction to be made by the teacher (myung & martinez, 2013). knowing what aspects of instruction need to be changed and improved is the first step. the next major step is to help teachers understand, accept, agree and initiate those changes. supervisors need to skillfully attend to effective conferencing strategies in the conversations that take place after classroom observations to achieve the goal of meaningful improvement in instruction. the conference should provide the opportunity for teacher growth by engaging teachers in reflection on their practice and selfassessment of the results of their instruction (danielson, 2011). ideally, the teacher and the supervisor have professional conversations, share ideas and come to agreement about future actions. however, the conference may not have this result. the reasons may relate to the conferencing behavior of the supervisor and how their conferencing skills contribute to effective dialogue that positively influences the teacher, or to ineffective dialogue that results in antagonizing the teacher. effective conferencing skills employ three aspects of active listening including nonverbal active listening, active listening and interactive listening, which are directed at making teachers feel comfortable, accepted, and understood. in this climate the teacher is validated and encouraged to think deeply about the teaching and learning process without fear of criticism and judgment. this sets the stage to foster teacher growth through reflection by asking questions that focus on instruction, probe for information and clarify intentions. active listening active listening, researched by costa and garmston (2001), supports many of the elements of andragogy, the study of how adults learn, and can be an effective feedback tool when conferencing with teachers (knowles, holton & swanson, 2005). active listening places the focus of the conference on the teacher. the supervisor becomes an effective active listener through nonverbal, active and interactive listening behaviors. the purpose of nonverbal active listening is the expression of caring and interest in the teacher. nonverbal active listening behaviors send the message to the teacher that the supervisor believes him/her to be important, is interested in and cares about him/her. the actions of the supervisor include the following positive body language behaviors: maintaining eye contact, nodding the head, leaning in, smiling and silence; sitting next to or across from the teacher; relaxing the body and turning to face the teacher; leaning forward toward the teacher and moving slowly and infrequently; keeping arms relaxed and open resting on the table, the arm of the chair, or in your lap; keeping hands open with the palms facing up; using your hands to gesture or to lightly touch the teacher; showing expression on the face. these behaviors encourage the teacher to communicate his/her ideas. listening can become difficult at times and it is important for the supervisor to concentrate so that his mind does not wander. thinking while planning what to say or ask next may distract the supervisor’s attention from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/malcolm_knowles http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/malcolm_knowles 80 global education review 1(3) clearly and completely hearing the teacher, and might cause miscommunication. the purpose of active listening is understanding. active listening behaviors send the message, “i am sensitive to your needs and i seek to understand what you are saying.” the goal of the supervisor is to paraphrase, to restate, or to summarize the teacher’s words, and/or make statements that recognize the teacher’s feelings. useful statements include, for example: “so you are saying that…,” “ do you mean…,” “i hear you saying…,” “you are feeling…,” “i can feel how hurt you were about…” the purpose of interactive listening is teacher directed problem solving. interactive listening behaviors send the message that the teacher has the power, the ability and the ideas to solve his/her own problems. the actions of the supervisor are expressions of support such as: that sounds interesting. you know how to… i have seen that work… you had success in a similar incident when… reflection active listening establishes a climate of trust and acceptance that sets the stage for change and growth. reflection moves beyond building teachers’ confidence and validating their efforts. it focuses on teacher directed problem solving and the design of solution activities. these are the actions of professionals who are continuing learners in the process of the art and science of teaching and about themselves as teachers (coster & garmston, 2001). the supervisor’s goal is to help teachers make reflection a habit of the mind in which they engage as a natural outcome of every teaching action. the vehicle for reaching this goal is communicating through asking questions. authentic and sustained growth involves commitment and responsibility, and is therefore in the hands and minds of the teachers. they must own it! however, the supervisor is the agent of the change process. by asking questions rather than being told what to do, the supervisor guides the teacher to examine instructional practices, reflect on his or her effectiveness, and seek ways to help every student to achieve. the total involvement of the teacher in thinking, creating, and designing instructional improvement is therefore critical. ideas the supervisor presents, no matter how good, may be considered not valid or useful because they are not the ideas of the teacher and may get the response, “oh i tried that and it did not work. ” ideas generated by the teacher have a better chance of success because adults do not want to fail. supervisors who use the techniques of active listening help teachers to feel comfortable, and this encourages them to speak openly and professionally about instructional practices. this sets the stage for reflection through questions that focus on particular aspects of instruction, probe for information and seek clarification. focus on instruction questions that focus on instruction ask the teacher to analyze and reflect on specific aspects of instruction. teachers are asked to discuss their impressions and assessments of the lesson. they are also asked to recall data that supports these impressions and assessments. teachers are encouraged to infer relationships between student achievement and their actions. maintaining a focus on instruction prevents the conversation with the teacher from moving to topics outside of the intent of the conference to improve instruction such as laying blame, making excuses and seeking sympathy. questions that maintain this focus on instruction include for example: “what went very well with the lesson?” “what did not meet your expectations?” “what surprised you?” “what student actions demonstrated their using video-based self-assessment 81 understanding of the content?” “how did the strategy you selected produce the outcomes you wanted?” probe for information questions that probe for information ask the teacher to fill in the gaps in statements that were made. teachers are asked to extend what they have said or did to provide more information on the subject. teachers are encouraged to explore the reasons for their decisions and actions and the resulting outcomes. supervisors should not accept the first response of the teacher to their question and move on. instead, they may explore the response to seek a full and better-reflected response. probe questions that elicit a fuller response include for example: “can you explain what you mean?” “have you considered other actions?” “what is the next step you could take?” “are there other ways to accomplish that?” “why do you prefer to. . ?” seek clarification and elaboration questions that seek clarification ask the teacher to explain statements or actions that are not clearly understood. teachers may be asked to clarify generalization or vague statements by using more precise words and terms. teachers are encouraged to think deeply beneath the surface statement that they have made to clarify their real meaning. vague responses should not be ignored. clarification and elaboration questions that elicit a deeper meaning include for example: “why do you believe…?” “what might happen as a result of that action?” “please explain how that might work?” active listening and reflection should be used interactively throughout the conference. skillful conferencing uses nonverbal active listening to send the message that the teacher is important, cared about and the focus of attention. a supervisor with conferencing skills knows when active listening is needed to help a teacher who is feeling defeated, confused, or hurt by conveying the message that “i seek to understand and i empathize with you.” that supervisor with conferencing skills knows as well when interactive listening is needed to validate the teacher and build his or her confidence. a supervisor with conferencing skills also knows that questions that stimulate reflection should be used in every meeting to help teachers focus on aspects of instruction, explain decisions and actions taken, clarify and articulate the problem and propose viable solutions. however, the supervisor should be aware of the level of experience and degree of knowledge of the teacher and use this information to select the conferencing language that will be effective when building the growth plan with the teacher. effective and non effective questions questioning is a skill that requires awareness and practice to be used effectively. teacher involvement in the conference and ownership of the ideas generated and plans created will more likely be achieved when judgmental questions or comments are avoided and questions encouraging reflection are used instead. conference feedback that gives an opinion or value or judgment either favorable or unfavorable destroys the collaborative nature of the conference because the supervisor is placed in an active role as judge and decision maker while the teacher is placed in a passive role. in a collaboration both parties have equal access to judgment and opinion upon which to reflect. consider how judgment or opinion or “i liked” statements can stop communication while reflective questions, especially those that present data can open lines of communication because non-judgmental information is presented for discussion. 82 global education review 1(3) other types of questions that may result in moving the conference in a negative direction include questions that elicit a yes or no response. they shut down the discussion and do not engage teachers in reflection and assessment of the areas being discussed. in addition, leading questions that contain the answer in the question or presuppose a conclusion should be avoided. they rob teachers of the opportunity to reflect and create their own solutions. sample comments/questions that: don’t invite reflection invite reflection judgment / value / opinion positive comment you selected good materials for the lesson. open questions require a reflected response how did the materials you selected to use help you achieve your objective for the lesson? judgment / value / opinion negative comment you lost the attention of many of the students after the first 10 minutes. open questions using data require a reflected response eight students had their heads down, were drawing figures, or doing homework for other subjects at some point during the lesson. why do you think this happened? personal comments “i” i liked the way you moved around the room. open questions using data require a reflected response you changed your position in the classroom five times during the lesson. how do these actions contribute to the success of the students? yes / no questions have you tried that strategy before? open questions require a reflected response what experience have you had using that strategy? double questions how did you feel about that? was it a success? open questions require a reflected response how would you describe your feelings after that happened? leading questions how can posting students’ work on bulletin boards help them to value their work? open questions require a reflected response what could you do to help students to feel proud of their work? using video-based self-assessment 83 description of program, tools and data with the support of the building or district supervisor, each program participant works with a practicing teacher who agrees to work with him or her at the beginning of the semester. program participants have several opportunities to observe and conduct conferences with their teachers using various observation tools such as environment observation, time on task assessment, informal visits and lesson observation. a description of each of these tools, the data collected and how that data may be used follows. observation tools environment observation the structure, activity and organization of the classroom may contribute in many ways to the success of students. it may encourage students to take pride in the work they are doing. students may also take pleasure in being in and working in pleasant and attractive surroundings. pleasant environments lead students to believe that they are cared about and that their well-being and progress are important. those feeling contribute to a positive attitude about school, which results in good behavior and high attendance. data about environments can be collected by looking at three critical aspects of the learning environment. those are: the role of the teacher, the activities of the students, and the organization of the classroom that encourages active student involvement. data is best collected using a tool customized to the environment being observed for example a mainstreamed grade 5 class or an early childhood class for autistic children. a data collection sample designed for an early childhood environment follows. early childhood classroom environment observation form scale: 4=excellent, 3=good, 2=fair, 1=poor assessment: _____ tests _____ tc reading assessment _____ reading conference notes _____ writing conference notes _____ running records _____ homework _____ classwork notes: teacher roles: _____ observes students _____ groups students _____ moves about _____ instructs whole class _____ instructs groups _____ instructs individuals _____ plans instruction _____ controls behavior _____ keeps students on task _____ keeps records 84 global education review 1(3) organization of materials: _____ clearly labeled _____ labeled with pictures _____ neatly arranged _____ easily available _____ organized into centers _____ leveled library _____ homework collection and distribution notes: classroom organization: _____ furniture arranged to suit _____ instructional areas _____ meeting area with easel _____ areas for group work _____ areas for individual work notes: classroom appearance: _____ clean _____ attractive _____ schedule displayed _____ charts for students use _____ students work is displayed _____ teaching points are visible _____ rules clearly posted _____ word wall _____ job chart notes: observations/notes: scale: a=all, m=most, s=some, n=none student activities: _____ individual assignments _____ group work _____ on-task _____ engaged _____ varied modalities _____different levels _____ give/get help notes: student behavior: _____ follow classroom rules _____ move freely when told _____ can easily move around the classroom _____ move quietly _____ respect others notes: teacher _________________________________________ class___________________ date___________________ teacher signature______________________________ supervisor signature__________________________ using video-based self-assessment 85 the data gathered during the classroom environment observation is reviewed with the teacher. it is important for the teacher to think about and understand how the overall effectiveness of his or her environment contributes to or detracts from students’ achievement. the discussion may first focus on areas that can easily be improved such as techniques for checking class work and homework as well as keeping student records. items that require more extensive assistance and time for development such as the creation of learning centers may be incorporated into a growth plan. time on task assessment there is a direct relationship between achievement and students’ continuous focused attention to the tasks involved in learning. the time-on-task review provides an opportunity to focus on each student within a particular class, over a fifteen to thirty minute time frame to determine what each individual student is doing. the data collected provides information about factors that have an impact on learning and achievement. the engagement rate is the first factor and can be assessed by determining the number of students on task and the number of students off task, as well as the nature and frequency of off-task behaviors exhibited by the students and when they occur. productive instruction is a second factor assessed by considering the quality of the tasks with which the students are involved and their appropriateness for the learners. a third factor involves the teacher’s ability to monitor student actions and make adjustments, if necessary to instruction, directions, explanations or materials. the time-on-task review is best recorded using a printed form. the form provides a space to note the type of activity in progress during each time frame. the form also contains a list of areas of student participation. these areas represent on-task and off-task student actions. the list of areas of participation may be modified to suit particular class situations. 86 global education review 1(3) class teacher date attendance______ time began teacher activity key: l (lecture), d (discussion), c (circulating) etc. teacher activity student activity time segment 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 1 0 1 1 1 2 1 3 14 15 *teacherdirected *group assignment *individual assignment *recordkeepi ng **transition **discipline **unoccupied **out of room total on task* total off task** total attending engagement rate total on task = ___ = ______ % on task total attending the space above each numbered time segment is used to enter the code that indicates the activity in progress at that time. these notes will be useful when analyzing the review to relate high and low numbers of on-task or off-task behavior to the activity being conducted. the on-task areas on the form are coded with a single asterisk, and include student actions that are involved in teacherdirected activities, group assignments, individual assignment or record keeping. the off-task areas on the form are coded with a double asterisk and include student actions identified as in transition, discipline, unoccupied or out of the room. tally marks in each student category are used to record each student’s actions. the tally marks can be counted and recorded as a numeral later. every using video-based self-assessment 87 student in attendance that day must be accounted for in a particular area of participation for each time segment. there are a total of fifteen time segments to complete during the time-on-task review. each time segment should take between one and two minutes to complete depending upon the number of students in attendance as well as the amount of activity and action in the classroom. there is a large amount of information to be gathered from the time-on-task review. this information contributes to a growing fund of knowledge that should be used to guide the development of a growth plan that will help each teacher improve the effectiveness of his or her instruction. following the time-on-task review, the data is analyzed. the first area to consider is the engagement rate, that is, the percentage of students considered on task during the time the review was conducted. to find the percentage of students on task, divide the total number of students on task by the total number attending that day in each time segment. the time-on-task review should be discussed with the teacher. the information is important to the teacher as he or she seeks to become more effective. the conference also provides an excellent opportunity to involve the teacher in a professional activity by asking him or her to review the data and reflect on causes, interpretations and solutions. informal visits informal visits are like snapshots of what is happening at a particular point in time in any area of the school. since informal visits are unannounced, include all instructional areas and are frequent, they provide a means of checking the pulse of the school throughout the day. valuable data can be gathered from all areas of the school when making informal visits to determine what actually happening at any is given time in the school day such as during the literacy block or how a school-wide incentive such as active student engagement is being implemented. the tool is also a helpful way to check possible areas of concern, such as a new substitute teacher, or a student new to the school, monitor progress on teacher actions agreed to in a growth plan, identify trouble spots and maintain a visible presence in the building. areas to observe and collect data about include: where are the students and what are they doing? are they active or passive? are they working alone or with the teacher, a peer or a group? are they on or off task? where is the teacher and what is she/he doing? instructing the class, a group, individuals conducting a lecture, discussion, demon stration, observing, assisting, correcting seated or standing with students or apart at the teacher’s desk, the front of the room, a student’s desk what is the teacher’s body language? voice level, tone, expression, actions, gestures how is the room managed and organized? how do students use the room? what is the noise level, behavior? is the room neat, organized? what is the seating arrangement? what is the light quality, temperature and general appearance? what materials are in use? what are the variety and type of 88 global education review 1(3) materials students are using? the data are used as a part of an ongoing monitoring of climate and instruction in the building. discussions with the teachers should be conducted following several informal visits and/or when there are items in need of improvement. lesson observation observation provides the teacher with a view of the classroom seen through the eyes of the observer. teachers can use these images to help them to understand what is happening in their classrooms and then use that information to improve their practice. teachers are usually more open to changing their instructional behaviors after an observer objectively describes their classrooms. there are five phases in the clinical observation process. each phase contributes to raising student achievement as teachers grow in their abilities to plan and deliver effective instruction. the teacher completes a plan for instruction as the first phase of the observation process. this plan provides the observer with an overview of the lesson that will be observed. it also provides the information that will be discussed during the pre-conference. the plan should include a clear statement of the learning objective, the instructional strategies to be used, a strategy to differentiate instruction to meet the needs of all learners, a plan to check for understanding and an effective closure to the lesson. the pre-conference conducted during phase two serves three purposes based on the skills and needs of the individual teacher: communicating with the teacher, assessing the growth needs of the teacher and developing the teacher’s skills. in addition, an opportunity to build rapport and trust with the teacher is provided. during phase three, the observation, detailed objective information about the teaching and learning process in the classroom is gathered. taking objective notes, sometimes called a script, is the best way to record the data observed. all of the verbal and visual actions and interactions taking place in the classroom during the observation are factually recorded without interpretation, value or assumption. these objective notes should include a time line. these are notations of the time as the lesson proceeds, recorded usually in the lefthand margin. this information allows the observer and teacher to review how time was used during the lesson to accomplish the learning objective. phase four provides the opportunity for the observer to review and analyze the recorded notes. all aspects of the teaching and learning process including for example, how time was used, the level of inquiry demonstrated by the questions posed, and how the lesson was differentiated should be included. the observer forms initial impressions and assessments about the lesson observed and identifies data from the notes to support them. during phase five, a conference with the teacher is held. effective conference behaviors include involving the teacher in a dialogue that encourages him or her to speak openly and professionally about instruction and its improvement. the questions asked continuously seek to help the teacher to focus on instruction and reflect on how it can be improved. the responsibility for improvement belongs to the teacher and ideas for how to achieve improvement should, to the greatest possible extent, come from the teacher. the conference ends with the development of a collaboratively developed growth plan for the teacher’s improvement. program participants conference with their participating teachers following the use of each tool to review and discuss the data collected and seek ways to improve student using video-based self-assessment 89 achievement. conducting these conferences provides program participants with the opportunity to further develop the conferencing skills and strategies studied and practiced in simulations during the semester. video recorded conferences the leadership program at hunter college prepares program participants for certification as school building and district leaders. because a major focus of the development of the program participants for school and district leadership certification is on content and practice for supervision for the improvement of instruction there is an emphasis on developing their conferencing skills. this focus led to the development of a strategy to video the conferences conducted by program participants with their practicing teachers and use the videos for reflection, self-assessment and collaborative evaluation of the program participants’ conferencing effectiveness. video recording of the post conference was selected because of video’s welldocumented use in facilitating critical reflection of teaching skills and abilities. the video recording of a feedback conference provides an opportunity to analyze conferencing abilities because it captures the body language as well as the oral exchange between the program participant and the teacher, offering detailed and rich data on the communication process, which permits the viewer access to a personal and authentic learning experience (harford & macruairc, 2008; rich & hannafin, 2009; rosaen et al. 2008, newhouse, lane, & brown, 2007). the video permits the program participant to view his/her performance and observe patterns of behavior, as well as language that should be modified or changed (van es & sherin, 2010, p. 172). viewing the video provides the program participants with the opportunity for a collaborative assessment with the professor and self-assessment of effective conferencing behavior using specific criteria. even with repeated conferencing experiences there is a need for the viewing of the conference to be guided through the use of well-discussed and practiced criteria. without this directed viewing of the conference, candidates may have trouble making sense or having meaningful insights into the conference dialogue and its effectiveness in facilitating teachers’ understanding, acceptance and motivation to work on instructional needs. for these reasons, video was selected as a medium to support candidates’ understanding and design decisions were made to heighten their interaction with the video and the criteria as a support to learning. the criteria used for the self-assessment stated below include the aspects of effective conferencing behavior previously discussed. observable conference actions and behaviors non-verbal actions eye contact expressive face leans in nods active listening paraphrases positive feedback criticizes questioning presents data discusses data elicits thinking probes for more info focuses on instruction focuses on students redirects to topic asks for teacher ideas plan development small talk asks for teacher’s solution tells teacher what to do builds the growth plan confirms the growth plan using video-based self-assessment 90 the last observation of the practicing teacher is a full period lesson observation that requires all of the aspects of a clinical supervision cycle including lesson plan review, pre conference, observation with verbatim notes or a script, an analysis of the script, and the post conference resulting in the development of an appropriate growth plan constructed with the teacher. program participants video themselves conducing post conferences with their practicing teachers following a lesson observation and submit the video to the professor for evaluation and feedback as documentation of conferencing skills and the ability to engage the teacher in the development of a growth plan for improvement. program participants also view the video of the conference and self-assess their conferencing skills by electronically clicking on the behaviors they observe using the criteria presented above and discussed as effective conferencing behaviors earlier in the article. . the marked behavior is then listed to the right as the time frame when it was viewed and heard during the conference. the number of times each conference behavior was clicked is tallied in the last column. in addition, candidates reflect on the experience and design a growth plan for the further development of their conferencing skills. a screen shot of this electronic marking follows. using video-based self-assessment 91 in general, developing effective conferencing skills needs to be practiced and developed over time. the comments of a representative sample of program participants evidence several areas of conferencing that program participants paid attention to and commented on. the ability to ask reflective, non-judgmental and probing questions was stated by several of the participants. a number of the program participants talked about their ability to develop a collaborative growth plan with the teacher. some participants talked about their visible confirmation of the use of active listening techniques. the comments made by some of the program participants as they watched the video of themselves engaged in a conference with the teacher selected for this work and reflected on their performance follow: “the technique of asking questions that don’t have an implied answer is not that easy, but something that is well worth the effort to master. my questioning left me a little unsettled when i reflected on the conference. ” “the area of growth for my personal, professional growth plan is directly related to the questioning skills necessary to be an effective supervisor. until this course, i rarely stopped to reflect on how difficult yet important this is. ” “watching myself with my teacher-client during the growth conference was definitely an experience. i learned a lot about my body language, posture, and tone of voice i use when conferencing with someone. i was happy with the comfortable tone i set from the beginning of the conference with my client. we were sitting in close enough proximity to each other to be able to work together to discuss the data i compiled and develop an appropriate growth plan. ” “i noticed myself using many effective active listening techniques including smiling a lot, nodding in agreement, and keeping good eye contact. i did lean in at one point. i was happy that i did not see myself cross my arms at all because that is something i have been working on. i found myself saying that’s excellent after almost everything liz was saying. i need to refrain from using grading words like excellent, good, or great in situations where i am not grading a person’s performance.” “the questions i asked my teacher client were good and i felt i paced the timing of the conference well. i did some probing such as asking about games that she plays with her students and asking for her thoughts about using specific forms of praise. i can work more in this area and probe for even further understanding at times. i was happy to see myself asking rather than telling. this is another area i have been working on. ” “there were several things i wanted to point out in the data (positive and constructive) that i simply did not address. ” “i effectively used the script to present data from the lesson for discussion. i efficiently bridged into the conversation about the teacher’s lack of engagement throughout the lesson. my tone was warm, open, and welcoming during this point of the discussion.” “i presented the idea of a growth plan and effectively built the plan with the teacher discussing each section specifically. i successfully confirmed each portion of the plan with the teacher including the time frame and evaluation criteria. ” 92 global education review 1(3) “what i am most disappointed about is my lack of probing. i didn’t do enough, “say more about that…. ” “can you reiterate for me what this will look like? i want to make sure we’re on same page. ” “the teacher and i, as observed in the video, developed a growth plan together. i repeated back a few main topics of discussion that we had gone over in our conference, and i asked my client to choose one that seemed like a priority. she chose to focus on clarity of instructions. together, we developed a plan that she will begin to implement immediately. ” these efforts are only a few years in practice but seem promising as we continue to work on preparing supervisors who are able to involve teachers in directing the improvement of their instruction. continued research needs to be conducted in several ways. first, to determine if and how well the growth plans created with those teachers contributed to a significant and lasting improvement in instruction. next, to determine how these conferencing skills develop or change as the participants complete the program and obtain positions as supervisors in the schools. references costa, a and r. garmston. (2001). cognitive coaching: a foundation for renaissance schools (2nd ed.). norwood, ma: christopher-gordon publishers inc. danielson, charlotte, (december 2010/january 2011). evaluations that help teachers learn. the effective educator, 68, ( 4), 35-39) danielson, charlotte. (2007). enhancing professional practice: a framework for teaching (2nd ed.). alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development. duffett, a., farkas, s., rotherham, a. j., & silva, e. (2008). waiting to be won over: teachers speak on the profession, unions, and reform. washington, dc: education sector. harford, j., & macruairc, g. (2008). engaging student teachers in meaningful reflective practice. teaching and teacher education, 24(7), 1884-1892. knowles, malcolm; holton, e. f., iii; swanson, r. a. (2005). the adult learner: the definitive classic in adult education and human resource development (6th ed.). burlington, ma: elsevier marzano, r. (2011). effective supervision: supporting the art and science of teaching. alexandria, va.: association for supervision and curriculum development. myung, j. martinez, k. (july 2013).strategies for enhancing the impact of post-observation feedback for teachers.a policy brief from the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching newhouse, c. p., lane, j., & brown, c. (2007). relecting on teaching practices using digital video representation in teacher education. australian journal of teacher education, 32(3), 5. rich, p. j., & hannafin, m. (2009). video annotation tools technologies to scaffold, structure, and transform teacher reflection. journal of teacher education, 60(1), 52-67. rosaen, c. l., lundeberg, m., cooper, m., fritzen, a., & terpstra, m. (2008). noticing noticing: how does investigation of video records change how teachers reflect on their experiences? journal of teacher education, 59(4), 347-360. van es, e. a., & sherin, m. g. (2010). the influence of video clubs on teachers’ thinking and practice. journal of mathematics teacher education,13(2), 155-176. about the author marcia knoll, phd, is an associate professor at hunter college, cuny. her current research interests are teacher supervision as a way of improving instructional performance and student achievement, and the impact of school climate on school effectiveness. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/malcolm_knowles http://books.google.com/books?id=j6qgshbj7nqc http://books.google.com/books?id=j6qgshbj7nqc http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/burlington,_ma http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/elsevier knoll using electronic copy editedformatpt 1 how is the room managed and organized? what materials are in use? binder1 knoll using electronic copy editedformatpt 1 how is the room managed and organized? what materials are in use? knoll using electronic copy editedformat 2 1 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 3 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 2 1 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 3 knoll using electronic copy editedformat86 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 87-89 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 90 knoll using electronic copy editedformat 91-92 open educational resources and moocs: 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: miller, howard & jay, jordan (2015). open educational resources and moocs: examining the changing face of content delivery in higher education. global education review, 2 (3). 1-3 open educational resources and moocs: examining the changing face of content delivery in higher education howard miller mercy college, new york jordan jay lincoln university, missouri three years ago, in june of 2012, the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) set forth a list of ten recommendations in support of article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights, which had been adopted by the united nations general assembly in 1948 on the heels of world war ii. the universal declaration of human rights is a soaring document that envisions a world where freedom and dignity, safety and security, are viewed as the norm. among the 30 articles that comprise the declaration, the one that is most germane to this issue of global education review is that of article 26, which states that “everyone has the right to education” (united nations, 1948). of course, back in 1948, no one was thinking about the application of this principle to higher education beyond the notion that it must be “equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.” while accessibility to higher education remains a significant issue globally, a vast majority of institutions serving the educational needs and interests of postsecondary students at present are less bastions of meritocracy than they are pathways to knowledge and skills necessary for the workplace and for the possibility of upward mobility that is linked to the kinds of employment that require a college education. by the time of the 2012 unesco world open educational resources (oer) congress in paris, the concept of “access” had become more focused on the delivery of instruction to the widest possible audience. conceptually, that is exactly what the oer movement has been about, the free access to educational tools, resources, and content to the widest possible audience, with a general call for the democratization of higher education. specifically, the world oer congress called for: a. a universal fostering awareness and use of oer b. enabling the use of information and communications technologies c. reinforcing and development of strategies and policies on the use of oer d. promoting the understanding and use of open licensing frameworks e. supporting capacity building for the development of quality learning materials f. fostering strategic alliances for the widespread use of oer ______________________________ corresponding author: howard miller, mercy college school of education, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: hmiller@mercy.edu mailto:hmiller@mercy.edu 2 global education review 2(3) g. encouraging the development and adaptation on oer across languages and cultures h. encouraging research on oer i. facilitating finding, retrieving, and sharing of oer j. encouraging the open licensing of educational materials produced with public funds as editors of this themed issue of global education review, itself an electronic journal that follows the precepts of oer by providing immediate open access to its content in support of a global exchange of knowledge, we issued our call for manuscripts a year ago. we are pleased to be in a position of supporting item “h” from the list above by “encouraging research on oer” and commend readers to the five articles we have selected for inclusion. a good place to start would be with “open educational resources: american ideals, global questions,” in which steven weiland examines the tensions embodied in the struggle between the idealistic goals of oer (and its most expansive manifestation in the realm of moocs, or massive online open courses), striving to promote greater freedom, access, and democratization in the face of barriers imposed by the power mongering that cannot be ignored or easily surmounted over local control of people, information, and access by governments and institutions. the editors wonder, too, whether the values of oer are truly embodied when elite, mostly american universities offer their versions of intact courses – even freely and openly – to all who wish (and have the necessary technology) to avail themselves of them. whose perspective and values are being promulgated, and whose voices are not heard within the grasp of the vast tentacles of the mooc? also examining moocs, though from another perspective, are lorena yadira alemán de la garza, teresa sancho-vinuesa sanchovinuesa, and marcela georgina gómez zermeño, whose article “atypical: analysis of a massive open online course with a relatively high rate of program completers” asks what it is that led one particular mooc that the researchers studied to have a comparatively high rate of success in a field where program completers are few and far between. their research addresses, at least in part, questions the editors share about the impact of moocs in situations where many enter but most do not stay for very long. it may be, as has been suggested, that moocs serve an entirely different and unanticipated purpose and audience than traditional higher education programs, including those that offer their courses online, by allowing an already-existing workforce to hone its skills in a particular area of need or interest. such a purpose may very well fill a niche market, but it is far removed from the goal of making higher education accessible to all. in “examining the relations among student motivation, engagement, and retention in a mooc: a structural equation modeling approach,” researchers yao xiong, hongli li, mindy l. kornhaber, hoi k. suen, barton pursel, deborah d. goins, also express concern at the low retention rates among participants in moocs, and have focused their study on the relationship between participants’ motivation and their engagement and persistence. the editors have long questioned the potential for loss of local autonomy (among institutions, but even more, among faculty) in a scenario whereby higher education becomes a near monopoly of a few conglomerates able to sustain the mooc structure. thus, we are pleased that two of the articles move us from the theoretical to the practical side, and offer models that demonstrate how higher education programs are able to retain the benefits of oers without participating in the rarified atmosphere of the mooc. in “private cloud communities for faculty and students,” authors daniel r. tomal and cynthia grant offer an alternative to moocs, which, owing to their massive size, open educational resources and moocs: 3 require massive infrastructure and technological and academic support. instead, they posit, private cloud communities capture the concept of the mooc while focusing on meeting the needs of enrolled students. in “critical spaces for critical times: global conversations in literacy research as an open professional development and practices resource,” the team of peggy albers, a. ram cho, ji hye shin, myoung eun pang, dennis murphy odo, jin kyeong jung, christi l. pace, mandi sena, and sarah turnbull provides an in-depth look at a web seminar series that draws upon the talents of internationally recognized scholars in the field of education, thereby offering up an extensive array of intellectual resources within a manageable system of infrastructure. finally, this issue also contains a “bonus article” that reminds us of the responsibilities we also have toward improving student learning at the elementary and secondary education levels. titled “mcrel leadership responsibilities through the lens of data: the critical nine,” the article by cheryl james-ward and joy abuyen analyzes the impact of identified school leadership qualities on student achievement. as we conclude our year of reading submissions and preparing this edition of global education review, we want to return to our initial call for papers by encouraging continued research into the use of oers, moocs, and other efforts to move us toward a more universally educated world, in the hopes of contributing to the fulfillment of the goals embodied in the united nations’ universal declaration of human rights. references united nations. declaration of human rights. retrieved august 22, 2015 from http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index. shtml united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization. 2012 paris oer declaration. retrieved august 22, 2015 from http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/multi media/hq/ci/wpfd2009/english_declaration.ht ml about the authors howard miller, edd, professor of education at mercy college, is chair of the department of secondary education. jordan jay, phd, is professor of education at lincoln university, missouri http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml http://www.un.org/en/documents/udhr/index.shtml http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/multimedia/hq/ci/wpfd2009/english_declaration.html http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/multimedia/hq/ci/wpfd2009/english_declaration.html http://www.unesco.org/new/fileadmin/multimedia/hq/ci/wpfd2009/english_declaration.html 56 global education review 1 (1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: brown, alisha m. b. (2014). situating disability within comparative education: a review of the literature. global education review, 1 (1). 56-75 situating disability within comparative education: a review of the literature alisha m. b. brown michigan state university abstract this paper is an inquiry into where the topic of disability falls within the vast field of comparative education research. it explores the extent to which disability is present in comparative education literature, and in what ways it is represented. a review of literature across the core comparative education peer-reviewed journals was conducted. findings show that a limited number of studies in comparative education have examined students with disabilities, though numbers have increased in recent years. additionally, two major themes emerged from the literature: (1) social interpretations of disability, and (2) global versus local. the findings are discussed in terms of implications for inclusive education and future research. keywords disability, comparative education, special needs, inclusive education introduction the field of comparative education is vast and diverse. it has multiple goals, aims, and methods of inquiry (chabbott & elliot, 2003; philips & schweisfurth, 2010). in an attempt to set boundaries on the field of comparative education, epstein (2011) described the difficulty in doing this because the field is conflated with other disciplines, including but not limited to sociology, history, philosophy, economics, political science, and psychology. further, he contended that comparative education is conflated with ancillary fields like international education, global education, intercultural education, and development education, and is plagued with ideological disparity (e.g., marxist interpretations, liberal western interpretations). to add to this ambiguity, epstein described the epistemological line of comparative education scholars as existing on a continuum between positivism and relativism. within the wide breadth of comparative education discourse, this paper aims to identify where the topic of disability falls. it asks whether disability is encompassed by this large field, and if so, in what ways it is represented. thus, the guiding research questions for this inquiry were: 1. to what extent is the topic of disability present in comparative education literature? 2. how is disability represented in comparative education literature? ______________________________ corresponding author: alisha m. b. brown, college of education, michigan state university, 620 farm lane, room 203 erickson hall, east lansing, mi 48824 email: brown248@msu.edu situating disability within comparative education 57 disability defined given that this paper aims to bridge comparative education and the topic of disability, careful consideration was made in choosing a definition of disability that would be internationally representative and culturally sensitive. to reflect an internationally respected understanding of disability, the characterization of disability as outlined in the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) was adopted. herein, disability is defined as, “those who have long-term physical, mental, intellectual or sensory impairments which in interaction with various barriers may hinder their full and effective participation in society on an equal basis with others” (united nations general assembly, 2007, article 1). this definition was selected not only because it reflects an internationally respected understanding of disability, but also because it is inclusive in nature. specifically, the crpd definition is inclusive in that it does not limit the analysis to any particular type of disability, such as cognitive impairment or physical disability. bridging disability and comparative education the primary motivation for conducting this literature review was the belief that research on disability can compliment and add value to comparative education scholarship. in terms of where disability might fit into the field of comparative education, a suitable entry point is work on equal opportunity and access to quality education. this stream of research is quite prominent in the field; in their epistemic analysis of the field of comparative education, cook, hite, and epstein (2004) found that equality in education was one of the top five most frequently named themes in comparative education by the comparativists whom they surveyed. an important question to consider, however, is what specific student populations are included under the equality umbrella. similar to the findings of cook et al. (2004), arnove (2001) also identified equality of educational opportunities and outcomes as a prominent topic when assessing the dominant issues addressed by the field of comparative education which are present in major works of scholarship in the field. going one step further than cook et al., arnove listed women, ethnic minorities, rural populations, and the working class as being especially situated populations for whom this area is most appropriate. in alignment with the abovementioned definition of disability as a barrier to equal participation in society, this article presupposes that disability constitutes another population that should be added to this list of marginalized populations for comparativists researching equality of education to study. given recent global initiatives such as the united nations convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, disability is increasingly being understood as a human rights issue (world health organization, 2011). akin to women, ethnic minorities, rural populations, and the working class, individuals with disabilities comprise a marginalized group whose rights to an education can be in jeopardy. in fact, compared to other marginalized populations studied within comparative education, the vulnerability of individuals with disabilities is exceedingly high. among all of the marginalized populations, unesco (2010) considers disability to be “one of the least visible but most potent factors in educational marginalization” (p. 181). an improved understanding of the scope of comparative education research that has been conducted thus far on individuals with disabilities is vital in order to uncover the potential of this type of work 58 global education review 1(1) and to guide future scholarship. the topic of disability compliments the field of comparative education with its direct relevance to the prominent research subject of equality of educational opportunities for marginalized populations. further, incorporating disability into comparative education research will expand the categories of marginalized populations that has been focused on previously, thereby contributing to the growth and advancement of the field. this article sets out to serve as a starting point in this endeavour by exploring the presence and representation of disability within comparative education literature. procedure a literature review was conducted to address the two aforementioned research questions: 1. to what extent is the topic of disability present in comparative education literature? 2. how is disability represented in comparative education literature? four peer-reviewed journals in the field of comparative education were identified to be included in the literature search using multiple inclusion criteria. first, the journal must be explicitly dedicated to the field of comparative education to meet the primary aim of this paper of situating disability within the field of comparative education. this was determined by reviewing the published aims and scope of journals. second, the journal must be peerreviewed to ensure a high level of academic rigor and accountability. third, journal impact factors were used as a proxy to demonstrate relative importance in the field. the journal must have an impact factor indexed in the institute for scientific information (isi) web of knowledgesm journal citation reports® (jcr®) database. journals identified using these inclusion criteria included the comparative education review, comparative education, compare: a journal of comparative education, and the international journal of educational development. the respective impact factors of the target journals are listed in order of highest to lowest in table 1. table 1 impact factors of target comparative education journals journal title impact factor comparative education review 1.132 international journal of educational development 1.000 comparative education 0.625 compare: a journal of comparative education 0.458 note. journal impact factors were obtained from 2013 release of the isi web of knowledgesm journal citation reports® social sciences edition which includes 2012 citation data (thompson reuters, 2013). the educational resources information center (eric) and education full text electronic bibliographic databases were used to search within the four target comparative education journals for relevant research studies. the search was limited to peerreviewed articles published in the english language, and those published within the past thirteen years (2000 to 2013). this time frame was selected to capture the essence of the situating disability within comparative education 59 current zeitgeist, thereby determining how disability is presently situated within comparative education literature for research question 2. multiple search terms related to disability and the education of students with disabilities were used to capture as many relevant articles as possible. the exact keyword search terms consisted of “disabilities,” “mainstreaming,” “special needs,” “inclusive education,” “inclusion,” and “inclusive school.” boolean logic was applied by using the boolean operator or to retrieve studies that contained one or more of the specified search terms (fink, 2005). applying boolean logic was done to expand the breadth of the search to maximize the likelihood of retrieving all of the articles that discussed disability using any of the above keywords within the target journals. likewise, a truncation character was added to the search terms “disability” and “mainstreaming” to retrieve all possible stems of those keyword search terms. to explain, searching disab* retrieved articles with the keywords disability, disabled, disabilities, or disabling, while searching mainstream* retrieved articles with the keywords mainstreamed, mainstreaming, and so on. after relevant comparative education journal articles which incorporated the topic of disability were identified and collected, the articles were read in their entirety and subsequently coded for shared themes to answer research question 2. themes were developed using a two-step process. step one involved noting initial impressions and creating tentative themes that emerged from the articles after an initial reading of the articles. step two consisted of re-reading the articles and refining the themes based on similarities across the other articles reviewed to develop common themes. this search for themes was guided by applying ely’s (1991) definition of a theme as “a statement of meaning that runs through all or most of the pertinent data” (p. 150). thus, the articles were read and re-read in an attempt to identify which themes emerged to reflect how disability was situated in the comparative education articles, thereby constituting common threads across the studies and their reflections of the topic of disability. results and discussion results are presented and discussed for each of the two research questions. first, research question 1 is addressed by examining findings on the extent to which disability is present in comparative education literature. next, attending to research question 2, the different ways in which disability is represented in comparative education literature is reviewed by exploring the two common themes that emerged from the articles reviewed. the presence of disability in comparative education literature the initial search resulted in a total of 34 research articles: 3 articles from comparative education review, 3 articles from comparative education, 13 articles from compare, and 15 articles from the international journal of educational development. of the original 34 articles, 9 from compare and 6 from the international journal of educational development were excluded from the analysis because a closer examination revealed that disability was not a topic within those articles. to explain, instead of looking at the mainstreaming of students with disabilities, 6 of the excluded articles focused on gender mainstreaming and 4 focused on the inclusion of out-of-school children, child workers, pastoralists, or refugees. the other 5 articles were excluded because although they focused on inclusive schooling and social difference or diversity within educational systems, there was no explicit mention of students with disabilities or special needs as being a form of difference or as members of an inclusive system. so, overall, 19 articles across the target 60 global education review 1(1) comparative education journals were identified as encompassing the topic of disability. in general, the limited number of studies identified suggests that few studies in comparative education examine students with disabilities. the degree to which disability as a topic was present in comparative education literature was enhanced by looking at the relative proportion of articles discussing disability. percentages of the number of articles published on disability in each target journal out of the total number of articles published by each journal from 2000 to 2013 are illustrated in figure 1. additionally, the percentage of the cumulative number of articles published on disability out of the total number of articles published across all target journals is also illustrated in figure 1. all proportions are extremely low, with rates of 0.81% for comparative education, 0.92% for compare, 1.23% for comparative education review, 1.26% for the international journal of educational development, and 1.08% overall. figure 1. percentage of comparative education journal articles published on disability out of total articles published from 2000 to 2013, by journal and overall. it is encouraging, however, to see a relative increase in the number of articles that comparative education journals are publishing on disability in more recent years (see figure 2). this implies that individuals with disabilities, who constitute a group that has been historically marginalized and overlooked, are slowly gaining an increased presence in the comparative education literature. that being said, there is ample room for improvement, and a clear need for future work representing this disadvantaged population. situating disability within comparative education 61 figure 2. distribution of comparative education articles on disability published by year. the representation of disability in comparative education literature of the 19 articles that examined students with disabilities, the ways in which disability was situated within the literature varied. the studies had different research questions and foci, used different research traditions and designs, and produced different findings, all of which are summarized in the appendix. these surface level differences, however, are peripheral to the focus of the present study. instead, this review of the literature was focused on identifying themes which highlight the ways in which disability was represented within the comparative education articles. two major themes emerged from the literature: (1) social interpretations of disability, and (2) global versus local. the first theme is narrower in its scope in that it is specific to disability studies, while the latter is much broader and is a dominant theme in the field of comparative education more generally. the ways in which both themes were represented in the literature will now be reported and discussed. theme one: social interpretations of disability one theme that emerged from the articles reviewed was that disability appeared to be socially constructed and dependent on the particular cultural context(s) where the research took place. in other words, a common thread across the articles was the absence of a universally agreed upon definition of disability that was being uniformly applied in each of the studies. instead, the way in which disability was conceived differed depending on the respective cultural context(s) under study. viewing disability in this manner as a social construct is consistent with a prominent theory of disability studies called the social model of disability, also referred to as social interpretation (abberley, 1987; finkelstein, 1980). thus, theme one has been designated as social interpretations of disability. the meaning of this theme will be elaborated upon below, as will the ways in which the theme manifested itself within the articles reviewed by using illustrative examples. 62 global education review 1(1) the traditional social model of disability focuses on “social biases against people whose bodies function differently than what is considered ‘normal,’ and beliefs and practices resulting from and interacting with biases that serve to discriminate…such practices do more than discriminate; they oppress” (gabel, 2005, p. 4). this social model runs counter to and outright rejects the highly individualized clinical or medical model, in which disability is perceived as innate individual differences. in fact, subscribers to the social interpretation view argue that the medical model focuses on the individual level at the expense of examining larger socio-political processes of disablement (gabel, 2005). within the realm of social interpretation, a cultural element has been set forth by scholars such as peters (2010), who has argued that disability is a phenomenon emerging and resulting from the values and practices embedded within culture. peters pointed to evidence in the small but growing body of comparative disability studies work on the cultural construction of disability. the majority of the articles reviewed here provide additional support to this claim that disability is socially and culturally constructed, and the ways in which they do so are detailed below. comparisons across the articles included in this literature review show that disability is socially defined and conceptualized differently depending on the cultural context of study. one article that illustrates such differences is peters and chimedza (2000). the authors described the zimbabwean idea of the family as a social unit that takes on the burden of responsibility for its members with disabilities. this belief is tied closely to the society’s ideas regarding the cause and treatment of disability. to explain, in zimbabwe disability is viewed as the result of bewitchment by family enemies or as a form of punishment by an ancestral spirit whom is unhappy with the family. as a result, rituals and spiritual ceremonies are held in an effort to cleanse the person with a disability and to dispel the evil spirits from the family. this custom provides the person with a disability support and empathy from the entire family and village, because everyone attends these functions in solidarity to solve a family problem. the collective nature of the burden of disability therefore makes disability a family and village responsibility. peters and chimedza went on to contrast this zimbabwean approach to disability with that of the united states, which they cite as being much more individualistic and paternalistic in nature. the authors explained that in the u.s., disability is viewed as a pathological, innate, individual condition that has to be cured by professionals. so even within a single article, we can begin to see the striking differences between how two cultures (in this case zimbabwe and the u.s.) socially construct and interpret disability. another article that clearly articulated the social construction of disability was that by singal and jain (2012). their analysis of youth with disabilities in india revealed that in terms of individuals’ participation and purposeful engagement, it was not exclusively their impairment that created exclusion, but their socio-cultural and economic realities as well, most notably their gender. singal and jain found that females could successfully position themselves in the role of providers by participating in the traditional gender roles of cooking, cleaning, and managing the house. such participation provided a way for these female youth with disabilities to be accepted into social structures, making their disability not as “disabling” within the given social and cultural context. preece (2002) serves as a nice contrast to singal and jain (2012) to further illustrate how disability is socially constructed within a larger cultural context. preece critiqued the ways that the botswana society constructs images of women, men, race, class and disability. she concluded that the social concept of citizenship is predicated on the situating disability within comparative education 63 idealist notion of a white, middle-class, ablebodied man. thus, women and individuals with disabilities were rendered invisible. this comparison between articles allows us to see how the indian and botswana cultures socially interpret disability, and the different ways that their social conceptions of disability intersect with other social concepts like gender. further illustrations of disability as being socially constructed within different cultural contexts can be seen by looking across additional articles included in this literature review. in terms of what constitutes disability, articles on non-western countries seemed to view disabilities more as visible physical differences, such as sensory impairments and physical disabilities, as opposed to cognitive or emotional differences. a head teacher in tanzania, for example, reported, “difficulties such as attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder and autism do not exist in africa. they are western problems” (polat, 2011, p. 56). similarly, deng and guo (2007) noted that in china some disabilities that are commonly observed in western countries, such as learning disabilities and autism, are neither recognized as disability types by chinese society, nor are they diagnosed as such. additional evidence for differences in disability definitions is provided by bines and lei (2011). in their article, bines and lei discussed how the definitional debates in northern countries are moving away from discrete categories of disabilities towards the broader term, ‘special educational needs.’ their explanation is as follows: although most provisions in southern countries has focused to date on physical, sensory and intellectual impairments, this broader definition is having some impact, including adoption of similar terminology. however, some significant differences remain between northern and southern countries due to differences in health care and technology. (p. 420) an example of a country adopting the broad definition that bines and lei referred to that was represented in this literature review is serbia. to illustrate, kovačević and maćešićpetrović (2012) reported, pupils with special (educational) needs are a broad category including pupils with physical, mental and sensory disabilities, but also the pupils with behavioral disorders, pupils with serious chronic diseases, pupils hospitalized or treated at home for long periods of time, pupils from culturally or socially deprived environments, pupils without parental care, affected by war and other disasters, refugee pupils, displaced and abused pupils, as well as talented pupils. (p. 465) building on bines and lei’s (2011) assertion quoted above that health care and technology influences differences in disability definitions across countries, the literature reviewed suggests that a country’s education system also appears to be another influential factor. the structure of a nation’s education system seems to play an important role in setting the boundaries as to what constitutes a disability and what does not. regarding zimbabwe, chitiyo, changara, and chitiyo (2008) mentioned that little attention is paid to students with emotional or behavioural disorders, largely because the special education services that are available in the educational system focus on four categories of disability: hearing, visual, cognitive, and physical. likewise, deng and guo (2007) 64 global education review 1(1) explained that in china educational services are restricted to three categories of disability: mental retardation, visual impairments, and hearing impairments. in contrast, van zanten (2009) found that in hungary and france the provision for children with special needs was oriented toward pupils with learning and behavioural problems. the classification of children as having special education needs also differs when comparing the u.s. to germany. powell (2009) observed that the u.s. categories refer to individual student disabilities, whereas the german categories refer to educational supports, showing how the american system stresses the medical or clinical model of disability. powell’s portrayal of the individualistic u.s. view of disability is consistent with that of peters and chimedza (2000) reported above. collectively, these examples illustrate the different ways that disability is socially defined and classified across different cultures. theme two: global versus local the second theme that emerged from this literature review was global versus local. this theme is intended to reflect how discussions of education within the field of comparative education exist within global and local discourses. to explain, a dichotomy appears to exist, with some in the field siding more with sociology’s neo-institutionalism or world culture theory, which posits a common global model of modern mass education (e.g., boli, 2005; ramirez & boli, 1987), while others side more with anthropology or externalization, which emphasizes local variation and agency at the national, district, and classroom levels (schriewer & martinez, 2004; takayama, 2010). anderson-levitt (2003) opens the dialogue between these two different perspectives on schooling around the world, encouraging us not to think of them as mutually incompatible, but instead urging that, “if we take seriously both local variability and world culture theory, we recognize that each perspective on its own misses something crucial” (p. 18). similarly, arnove (1999) asserts that a dialectic is at work between the global and the local, and it is important for those in the field of comparative education to understand this interactive process, as well as its tensions and contradictions. within the articles, inclusive education policy and practice was a prominent topic that often revealed how globally circulating ideas are relevant to and intersect with local practices. upon reviewing the literature, i found that much insight into the global versus local dichotomy could be gained by examining the ways in which the articles described and evaluated the experience of education for students with disabilities in particular national and cultural contexts. accordingly, the discussion of the global versus local theme that follows will use the portrayal of inclusive education policy and practice in the literature to illustrate how theme two was manifested. of the articles where inclusive education for students with disabilities was a topic, the majority introduced inclusive education as a global idea in the papers’ introduction and theoretical background sections. for example, before moving into the bulk of his paper explaining a participatory action research project on inclusion in tanzania, polat (2011) acknowledged the significant shift from special education to inclusive education around the globe. similarly, kovačević and maćešićpetrović (2012) opened their paper by referring to inclusive education as a “contemporary concept” before moving to the local level and describing how serbia defines inclusive education. the global theme is also apparent in the article by kendall and o’gara (2007) who also situate their paper within the larger international inclusion discourse by speaking about how the global community recognizes the rights of all children and endorses inclusive education policies like education for all (unesco, 2000) and the millennium development goals (united situating disability within comparative education 65 nations general assembly, 2000). these international inclusion policies and others, such as the universal declaration of human rights (united nations general assembly, 1948), the convention on the rights of the child (united nations general assembly, 1989), the salamanca statement (unesco, 1994), and the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (united nations general assembly, 2007), were also featured in additional articles reviewed, including bines and lei (2011), fleisch, schindler, and perry (2012), lynch et al. (2001), miles et al. (2012), oh and van der stouwe (2008), polat (2011), and powell (2009). furthermore, norwich (2010) explicitly stated how inclusive education as a global force framed his entire study: “this study is set within the international policy context where standards and inclusive education are pursed” (p. 116). thus, it is clear that many of the articles reviewed overtly situated their local work on inclusive education within the global inclusive education discourse. in the majority of the articles, the transmission of inclusive education ideas, policies, and practices from the global to the local was not contested. for instance, polat (2011) explained that the educational systems of most african countries have been influenced by income-rich countries. he noted that this cultural transmission of an inclusive education system creates difficulties in the use and application of terms and concepts like “inclusion,” but never questioned whether such a system should be transferred in the first place. a positive view of exchanges between the global and local was also put forth by miles et al. (2012), who spoke to the facilitation role that alliances and networking relationships can have among disability-focused organizations, nongovernmental organizations, and mainstream development organizations in the development of culturally relevant inclusion policies and practices. bines and lei (2011) also advocated for a global-local partnership, collaboration, and joint commitment, as they recommended localized development approaches in developed and developing countries as being necessary for the success of inclusive education globally. two articles, however, by urwick and elliott (2010) and le fanu (2013), stood out from the others in that they openly questioned and criticized the appropriateness of the global inclusive education movement in particular local contexts, specifically in low-income countries. urwick and elliott argued that the internationalization of educational goals and rights overlooks the diversity of national situations. the authors contested what they referred to as the orthodox view of inclusive schooling. they agreed that national educational systems should provide for all kinds of special education needs, but did not endorse the orthodox view that regular schools should be adapted or reformed to accommodate and support all students with special education needs. urwick and elliott challenged the globally held assumption that inclusion can be effective for all learners in all educational contexts, contending that it applies only to “ideal” contexts instead of “very real” contexts. the context that urwick and elliot based their argument on was lesotho, a low-income country that began with ambitious inclusion goals, but has failed to meet the needs of children with disabilities. they argued that inclusive schooling cannot succeed in the conditions of low-income countries like lesotho because, “although the key principles and values associated with inclusion are widely accepted…political and economic realities often mitigate against its effective operation for all” (p. 146). in the context of lesotho, the nation’s political and economic realities lead to a preponderance of unqualified teachers, large classes, and inadequate facilities, learning materials, and supervisory support. moving to the second article that challenged the global in support of a more 66 global education review 1(1) local focus, le fanu (2013) found that the conceptualization of inclusive education in papua new guinea’s new inclusion policy initiative was primarily an ‘exogenous’ phenomenon (i.e., imposed from outside the country). le fanu’s linguistic analysis of policy documents revealed that the inclusive precepts in the country’s new inclusion curriculum were derived from australian and american texts, thereby prioritizing western education ideology and liberal-democratic values over local cultural ways of knowing and understanding. furthermore, observations of primary schools found evidence of curriculum non-conformity. while papua new guinea’s new inclusion curriculum was designed to promote the democratization, socialization, and systematization of teaching and learning, this study found that teacher practice exhibited hierarchism, atomization, and simplification of teaching and learning. le fanu criticized policymakers for being ‘out of touch’ with local realities and urged the international development community to become more inclusive in their approach by understanding the local social worlds where they operate in order to avoid such disappointing results in the future. overall, analysis of the global versus local dichotomy in the representation of inclusive education revealed that the authors of most of the papers reviewed aimed to situate their work on inclusive education within the global discourse. such authors seemed to assume that the transmission of inclusive policies and practices from the global to the local level was appropriate and desirable. two notable exceptions to this pattern were urwick and elliott (2010) and le fanu (2013), who sided more with the local side in comparative education’s global versus local debate. so while the global versus local theme ran through many articles on the topic of inclusive education, the way in which it was manifested in the articles was not entirely uniform. conclusions the overarching aim of this literature review was to better understand where disability falls within the vast field of comparative education. to engage in this inquiry, the following research questions were addressed: 1. to what extent is the topic of disability present in comparative education literature? 2. how is disability represented in comparative education literature? regarding research question 1, only 19 peer-reviewed articles published between the years of 2000 to 2013 in the leading journals of comparative education were identified as encompassing the topic of disability. furthermore, the percentages of articles published on disability out of the total number of articles published by the comparative education journals reviewed were extremely low, ranging from 0.81% to 1.26% across each journal, and was only 1.08% overall. be that as it may, is positive to see that the numbers of comparative education articles on disability have increased in recent years, and hopefully this trend continues. in terms of research question 2, further analysis of the articles reviewed revealed two central themes: (1) social interpretations of disability, and (2) global versus local. regarding the first theme, comparisons across the articles demonstrated that disability is conceptualized differently depending on the cultural context of the study. examples of the ways in which disability is socially constructed and interpreted in different nations were compared and contrasted, including zimbabwe, the united states, india, botswana, tanzania, china, the republic of serbia, hungary, france and germany. regarding the second theme, most articles that discussed inclusive education for students with disabilities subscribed to an international orthodox view of inclusive schooling. there were a couple of notable exceptions, however, situating disability within comparative education 67 that stressed the importance of considering local conditions. implications for inclusive education the findings of this comparative education literature review have numerous implications for inclusive education locally and globally. concerning the implications of theme one, the ways in which disability was represented in the literature as social interpretations dependent on cultural contexts should be considered by policymakers and practitioners when planning and implementing inclusive education initiatives. croft (2013) noted that the action required to address the injustices associated with disability is situated by the way that disability is defined. the actions associated with inclusive education are no exception. to ensure that quality, sustainable improvements can be made in the inclusion of students with disabilities around the world, reform leaders should take into account how disability is socially constructed by the general public in the context where they are working. failure to do so can result in incongruent educational policy and practice. an example of how divergent social interpretations of a concept related to disability can have negative ramifications of the disconnection between policy and practice is provided by the case of papua new guinea in the le fanu (2013) article. le fanu found that papua new guinea’s new inclusion curriculum was designed to promote the democratization, socialization, and systematization of teaching and learning, but these ideals were not realized in schools. instead, teacher practice exhibited hierarchism, atomization, and simplification of teaching and learning. there were marked inconsistencies between the conceptualization of inclusion in the policy documents compared to that of teachers working in local schools and classrooms. to alleviate this disconnect, le fanu called for more responsive and participatory approaches to be used by international development agencies promoting inclusive education, particularly in low-income countries. the recommendations of this article corresponded with those by le fanu (2013). one way to increase the likelihood that the social conceptualization of disability and the inclusion of this population are in harmony with policy and practice within a given culture is to apply a participatory approach. a participatory framework encourages professional engagement and reflection (dyer, 2005), providing teachers with the opportunity to reflect on the ways they perceive students with disabilities and how they could make improvements in the ways they include these students in their classrooms. likewise, policymakers would have the opportunity to reflect on whether inclusion policies are aligned with local perceptions and address culturally relevant challenges associated with disability. opening the dialogue between policymakers and teachers who are tasked with enacting inclusion policy would afford policymakers the opportunity to make policy informed by local practice, thereby increasing the authenticity of the policy. in turn, teacher pedagogy and classroom practice would be informed by policy that is responsive to their needs, thereby improving the sustainability of the policy. incorporating a participatory approach to inclusive education policy and practice by promoting greater exchange between policymakers and teachers could be advantageous when either creating a new inclusion policy or modifying an existing one. doing so would result in an inclusive education policy that is designed to reflect the social conception of disability and counteract local barriers and challenges associated with disability. considering the implications of theme two, future comparative education research on inclusive education should continue to incorporate multiple global and local 68 global education review 1(1) perspectives. it was positive to see a divergence in perspectives in the analysis of the global versus local dichotomy across the articles reviewed. this finding was aligned with the sentiment of anderson-levitt (2003) and arnove (1999), who stressed the importance of understanding the interaction between the global and the local and seeing the unique value that both perspectives provide. moving forward, it will be important to maintain a presence of global and local perspectives in further studies on the topic of inclusive education in the field of comparative education. additionally, inclusive education policymakers at all levels should be aware of the global versus local dichotomy and should aim to understand how global and local perspectives interact in their respective contexts if they want their initiatives to succeed. turning once again to le fanu (2013), this article criticized how policymakers prioritized exogenous global discourses over endogenous local ways of knowing in papua new guinea’s new inclusive curriculum. le fanu argued that the inclusion curriculum would have been more effective if the policy process incorporated more community involvement and was more culturally oriented. such an insight would not have been possible without broadening one’s awareness beyond the national context to identify how global forces were impacting local educational processes. using a global lens to examine local contexts contributes to a greater understanding of the potential and limitations of educational systems (arnove, 1999). policymakers should apply a global lens as recommended by arnove and as was done by le fanu to identify the possibilities and limitations in their local educational system concerning the inclusion of students with disabilities. limitations and future directions as stated in the introduction, this article serves as a starting point to explore the presence and representation of disability within comparative education literature. consequently, this study has some limitations that should be acknowledged. first, the scope of this literature review was restricted to four comparative education journals. these target journals were selected using stringent inclusion criteria detailed in the procedure section above to ensure a high level of academic rigor, accountability, and relative importance in the field to meet the primary aim of this paper of situating disability within the field of comparative education. while these journals are considered to be the leading peer-reviewed journals in the field, it is possible that additional studies were omitted. future work should extend the present study reviewing research in additional comparative and international education journals beyond those reviewed here. a related limitation is that this review was limited to journals published in the english language for practical reasons due to the language competency of the researcher. it has been acknowledged that english-language journals in the field of comparative education privilege a different set of topics that are communicable in english compared to non-english journals (post, 2012), which applies to the present study. to address this limitation, future work should examine the presence and representation of disability in comparative education journals that are published in languages other than english. a final limitation is the range of years covered by the present literature review. the search was limited to articles published within the past thirteen years (2000 to 2013) to capture the essence of the current situating disability within comparative education 69 zeitgeist for research question 2. future research can extend this work by examining the presence and representation of disability in comparative education journals in articles that have been published prior to the year 2000. an additional element to augment such an analysis would be to compare and contrast how disability has been situated within comparative education literature over time. one might apply a historical perspective similar to munyi’s (2012) endeavour to trace the temporal development and formation of international perceptions towards individuals with disabilities. it would be interesting to see whether the social perceptions of disability identified in the present review of comparative education literature have evolved or shifted over time. overall, the present study found that although disability is not yet prominently featured in the major journals of comparative education, when disability is discussed, it is commonly represented as a social interpretation dependent on cultural context, and policies related to the education of students with disabilities are often positioned within a global dialogue. further research on students with disabilities should continue to be published in comparative education journals to increase the visibility of this marginalized population within the general comparative education academic discourse. additionally, because disability is socially and culturally constructed, work done in this area must clearly communicate to readers how disability is defined in the particular context(s) where the research was being carried out. while this literature review was able to highlight differences in disability definitions across most articles, not all articles provided a definition of disability (e.g., fleisch et al., 2012). when a definition is missing from disability and comparative education scholarship, this limits the interpretation of results reported and the potential for data comparison. thus, future research on disability in comparative education journals should provide clear definitions of disability to avoid confusions in language or terminology, and ultimately meaning. being sensitive to the cultural understandings and interpretations of disability of those directly involved and represented in 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(2011). world report on disability 2011. malta: who press. about the author alisha m.b. brown is a doctoral candidate in educational policy at michigan state university. her interests include inclusive education policy and practice, and educational access for students with disabilities and other marginalized populations. these interests are domestic and international in scope, with a particular focus on southern and eastern africa. appendix summary of articles reviewed study question/focus research tradition research design findings bines & lei (2011) examined issues and challenges of developing countries in terms of disability definitions, data, policies, service delivery, finance, and capacity development. policy and document analysis reviewed national inclusion policies and world vision report on 28 developing countries. differences in healthcare, technology, and definitions of disability and special needs exist between northern and southern contexts. argue for localized approaches to inclusive education development. chitiyo et al. (2008) examined the impact of providing special education services like psychosocial support (pss) to children who are orphaned by aids on their schooling outcomes. correlational design twenty children aged 10-14 years were provided pss for 8 months in four primary schools in rural wards in mberengwa district of zimbabwe. pre and postintervention interviews and observations were conducted. pss resulted in improvements in several areas, including schoolwork during and after the intervention period. http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.htm http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml http://www.un.org/disabilities/convention/conventionfull.shtml 72 global education review 1(1) croft (2013) examined whether a national survey of disability prevalence is a necessary and feasible starting point when promoting the inclusion of children with disabilities in lowand middleincome countries. theoretical document analysis reviewed literature, survey instruments, and international development and research projects to analyze what information is needed about disability in education systems and difficulties in measuring childhood disability. in many contexts a national survey of disability prevalence is not the most useful starting point for educating children with disabilities. deng & guo (2007) examined how chinese local special education administrators (lseas) understand the ideology of inclusive education and the “learning in regular classrooms” (lrc) model. qualitative semi-structured interviews of lseas from one rural district and one urban district of a mid-china province. lseas morally believe that children with disabilities are entitled to the same right of education as their nondisabled peers, but worry about social awareness and acceptance. fleisch et al. (2012) examined the extent to which children aged 5 to 15 in south africa were out of school and the role of disability. secondary data analysis analyzed the community survey 2007 data collected by statistics south africa of 949,105 individuals from 246,618 households. children with disabilities have higher non-attendance ratios than those without disabilities in south africa. kendall & o’gara (2007) examined school and community capacities to care for, socialize, and educate vulnerable children affected by hiv/aids. ethnographic case studies case studies of schools and hiv/aids vulnerable children in kenya, malawi, and zimbabwe. malawi and zimbabwe cases show that elimination of fees, passive open door policies and exhortations are insufficient policy measures to bring and keep these children in school. the kenya case shows that investments in long term, wellresourced local partnerships can be effective. situating disability within comparative education 73 kovačević & maćešićpetrović (2012) examined the problems faced by children with special needs in regular schools, their attitudes toward school, their relations with peers and teachers, and teacher attitudes towards inclusive education in serbia. descriptive study 500 teachers in 20 regular elementary schools in the republic of siberia completed questionnaires about their attitudes towards inclusive education and students with special needs’ achievement, educational problems, and attitudes toward school, peers, and teachers. pupils with special needs are integrated in regular classes in serbia but face numerous educational problems. teacher attitudes towards inclusive education are changing. le fanu (2013) examined the conceptualization, generation, and mediation of inclusion within the new inclusion curriculum introduced in papua new guinea. multi-level case study analyzed curriculum documents using ‘process-tracking’ and ‘inter-textual’ techniques, and conducted extensive classroom observation in two primary schools in the eastern highlands. the new inclusion curriculum was designed to promote the democratization, socialization, and systematization of teaching and learning, but this did not happen in the case study schools. instead, teacher practice exhibited hierarchism, atomization, and simplification of teaching and learning. lynch et al. (2011) examined the training, access to equipment, caseload, and daily duties undertaken by specialist itinerant teachers supporting the inclusion of children with visual impairment. participatory action research analyzed questionnaires and research journals kept over 2-months from 38 professionals in the kenya integrated education program (kiep) from 5 districts. all itinerant teachers reported having some credited training in special education, rural teachers had less access to equipment, caseload size varied and ranged from 0-26 years, and the majority of teachers’ daily duties consisted of managing and teaching their own class at their base school. miles et al. (2012) examined the role of networking in reducing the marginalization of people with disabilities from education in bangladesh. mixed methods semi-structured interviews and focus groups of representatives from disability-focused organizations, selfhelp groups, and inclusive education trainers. building networks between people with disabilities and disability-focused organizations reduces marginalization from education. 74 global education review 1(1) norwich (2010) examined the perspectives of education practitioners in the uk, usa, and the netherlands about whether they recognized a curriculum dilemma of difference for students with disabilities and how they justified their position about the dilemma. mixed methods semi-structured interviews of 132 education practitioners and administrators in the uk, usa, and the netherlands about their perspectives to a curriculum dilemma about the consequences of having a common or differentiated for children with disabilities. a majority in each country recognized the dilemma about curriculum commonalitydifferentiation, that this continued over a decade and that there were similarities across the country in how the dilemma was recognized and resolved. oh & van der stouwe (2008) analyzed the effect of inclusion and diversity in education in a conflict situation in burmese refugee camps in thailand. participatory research conducted inclusion assessment, interviews, workshops, meetings, and collected statistical data from six camps along the thaiburmese border. initiatives to promote inclusion in the camps are happening, but challenges do exist. physical barriers to school facilities make it difficult for specialneeds students to gain access to schooling. peters & chimedza (2000) examined the approaches by disabled people in zimbabwe to educational praxis, and compare the zimbabwean experiences to the growth of the disability rights movement in the united states. critical ethnography conducted field work across zimbabwe. the approach in the united states has historically emphasized transformation of societal values and educational practices through litigation and thus lacks the power of the zimbabwean experience, with its emphasis on transformation through conscientization and its recognition of unity in diversity. polat (2011) discussed the theoretical relationship between inclusion and social justice. participatory action research project involves 8 primary schools in dar es salaam and pwani regions of tanzania and aims to develop an index of inclusion in tanzania. some progress has been made towards inclusive, just, and quality education in tanzania but there is still a long way to go. powell (2009) compared the genesis, expansion, and persistence of special education as a multitrack, separating system in the united states and as a dualtrack, segregating institutional analysis compared german and american special education institutionalization. although the trend toward more school integration and inclusive education is unmistakable, the development remains far more gradual in germany than in the situating disability within comparative education 75 system in germany. u.s. preece (2002) critical appraisal of citizenship and governance in relation to gender, discussing implications for disability. theoretical analysis draws on poststructuralism to examine the relationship between power and discourse in citizenship and governance in botswana. argues for a broader, more inclusive, ethical definition of active citizenship that empowers women and the disabled to play a more active role in governance. singal & jain (2012) examined the participation and purposeful engagement in education of youth with disabilities in india narrative analysis interviews with youth aged 15 to 30 with physical, visual, and hearing impairments with a history of special provisions in education in urban and rural dewas, a district in madhya pradesh, on the impact of education on their lives exclusions faced by youth with disabilities in india were determined by the socio-cultural and economic realities (e.g., gender roles) of their lives, not by their impairment. urwick & elliott (2010) questioned the relevance of the international orthodoxy to include all children with special educational needs in regular schools and classrooms to the educational systems of low-income countries. policy analysis examined an inclusion policy in lesotho, a lowincome country that began with ambition goals but failed to meet the needs of children with disabilities, and then outlines an alternative strategy. argues that low-income countries cannot progress from virtually no educational provision for disabilities to fully integrated provision. specialized facilities and selected schools are necessary for children with disabilities to have meaningful learning opportunities. van zanten 2009 examined how competitive processes affect different school activities, including provision for children with special needs. case studies conducted case studies in 14 schools in six local european contexts (london, paris, lille, charleroi, budapest, and lisbon) for 18months, interviewing teachers and parents, observing meetings and activities, and analyzing school websites and documents. choice and competition can either have positive effects by developing attractive options for special needs students, or negative effects because the most vulnerable schools in the marketplace may not develop policies towards children with special needs to avoid being stigmatized as difficult schools. 96 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mcpherson, ezella (2014). informal in science, math, and engineering majors for africanamerican female undergraduates. global education review, 1 (4). 96-113. informal learning in science, math, and engineering majors for african american female undergraduates ezella mcpherson wayne state university abstract this research investigates how eight undergraduate african american women in science, math, and engineering (sme) majors accessed cultural capital and informal science learning opportunities from preschool to college. it uses the multiple case study methodological approach and cultural capital as frameworks to better understand the participants’ opportunities to engage in informal science learning or free-choice learning. the article demonstrates that african american women have access to cultural capital and informal science learning inside and outside of home and school environments in p-16 settings. this study adds to cultural capital, informal science learning, and global stem education research by allowing scholars to better understand how african american women have opportunities to learn about the hidden curriculum of science throughout the educational pipeline. keywords stem education, african american women, gender studies, global studies, qualitative research, informal science learning, free-choice learning informal science learning informal science learning, also known as freechoice learning, often occurs outside of school settings (falk, 2005). free-choice learning is “self-directed learning that regularly occurs in settings like national parks, nature centers, natural history museums, zoos and aquariums, a wide range of community-based organizations, and through the use of print and electronic media” (falk, 2005, p. 270). additionally, a growing body of research confirms that the majority of informal science learning occurs in museums and/or science centers in domestic and international settings, including africa, china, seoul, germany, and the united kingdom (cainey, bowker, humphrey, & murray, 2012; dohn, 2011; gutwill & allen, 2010; kang, anderson, & wu, 2010; kisiel, 2005; lelliot, 2013; murmann & avraamidou, 2014; parker & krockover, 2013; shin, park, & kim, 2014; stravrova & urhahne, 2010). globally, scholars have also found that parents expose their children to science both inside and outside of the home environment, in places like aquariums, botanical gardens, science centers, and zoos (alexander, johnson, & kelley, 2012; aubusson, griffin, & kearney, 2012; gutwill & allen, 2010; kisiel, rowe, vartabedian, & kopczak, 2012; rowe & kisiel, 2012; zimmerman, reeve, & bell, 2010). ______________________________ corresponding author: ezella mcpherson, wayne state university college of engineering, 5050 anthony wayne drive detroit, mi 48202 email: emcpherso@gmail.com informal learning in sme majors 97 in k-16 settings students engage in informal learning opportunities in laboratories and other settings (buxton, allexsaht-snider, & rivera, 2013; samarapungavan, mantzicopoulos, & patrick, 2008). globally, teachers have traveled with students and their families to museums in order to engage them in informal science learning (crowl, devitt, jansen, van zee, & winograd, 2013; karnezoua, avgitidou, & kariotoglou, 2013; kisiel, 2005). some scholars consider informal science learning to be either entertainment or a form of structured educational learning when it occurs in museum settings (kisiel, 2005). in addition, parents teach or expose science to their children through hands-on learning projects inside or outside of the home and/or during museum visits to the natural history museums (alexander et al., 2012; bamberger & tal, 2007; buxton et al., 2013; rowe & kisiel, 2012; wang, liu, & zhao; 2012). for instance, rowe and kisiel (2012) found that parents taught young children about the types of animals (e.g., fish, mangrove ray, sharks, sea urchins) that they touched in an aquarium. additionally, buxton et al. (2013) showed that parents exposed their kids to science through a series of science workshops that centered on laboratory experiments (e.g., alka-seltzer rocket) and science careers. however, not all students have equal access to science learning opportunities. a small number of recent research studies have examined how underrepresented students have opportunities to learn science in the context of informal science learning environments in the united states (bhattacharyya, mead, and nathanial, 2011; buxton et al., 2013; simpson & parsons, 2009; varelas, kane, & wylie, 2011; wright, 2011). in order to fill a gap in the literature, this study poses the question: how does access to cultural capital provide african american women with opportunities to learn science in informal settings? in order to answer the research question, this article uses the multiple case study methodological approach to demonstrate how undergraduate african american women in science, math, and engineering (sme) majors enjoyed opportunities to acquire cultural capital and to learn science in the context of informal learning environments from preschool to college. informal science learning in primary schools recent studies have examined science learning in everyday life, meaning science learning that occurs inside or outside of the home during early childhood (saçkes, 2014; saçkes, trundle, bell, & o’connell, 2011; siry, ziegler, & max, 2012; siry, 2013) or in primary school settings (alexander et al., 2012; gutwill & allen, 2010; simpson & parsons, 2009; varelas et al., 2011; walls, 2012). scholars who have studied everyday science learning among early childhood participants found that children construct their science learning and science identities based on their social contexts (siry et al., 2012; walls, 2012; zimmerman & bell, 2014). this means that the context determines the extent to which students learn and understand science through individual activities and/or group interactions. the literature on free-choice learning in primary schools mainly focuses on school and home contexts in domestic and international settings. the school context involved students learning about everyday science through class projects (bulunuz, 2013; msimanga & lelliott, 2013; zimmerman & bell, 2014). the students were able to apply their knowledge of everyday science to class discussions that focused on meaning-making, logic, and reasoning. researchers added that focused tasks, connections with students’ prior knowledge, school curriculum, life and/or personal experiences made the museum visits and community activities with science more 98 global education review 1(4) meaningful (bamberger & tal, 2007; zimmerman & bell, 2014). a few studies have examined the connection between race and everyday science learning in primary schools in the u.s., and in puerto rico (gonzález-espada et al., 2014; simpson & parsons, 2009; walls, 2012; wright, 2011). simpson and parsons (2009) conducted a qualitative study on the exposure of african american children and teenagers to informal learning science at jordan academy. they found that african american parents wanted their children to learn science from teachers who were “enthusiastic about science, who implemented hands-on instruction which emphasized science content within real-life contexts, and who positively impacted their children” (p. 317). african american and latino parents also wanted their children to be taught by means of a culturally-relevant pedagogy that focused on developing their racial identities (gonzález-espada et al., 2014; simpson & parsons, 2009). outside of the school environment, researchers found that parents exposed their children to opportunities to learn about everyday science in their home environments (alexander et al., 2012; gutwill & allen, 2010; varelas et al., 2011). in fact, developing an early interest in science influenced children’s later engagement in informal science activities (alexander et al., 2012). these researchers noted that parents cultivated an interest in science by exposing their children to informal learning opportunities, such as those found in museums. however, boys were more likely than girls to have access to such informal learning opportunities. this was true even among boys who were not interested in science. girls were only given free-choice learning opportunities after expressing an interest in science. boys had more chances to participate in everyday informal science learning than their female counterparts. in the same way, african american families helped to engage their children in informal science by participating in everyday science activities at home (varelas et al., 2011; zimmerman & bell, 2014). science experiments included mixing liquids to create beverages or cooking with household items. for instance, in a study of representations of identities among african american children in science in an urban elementary school, varelas et al. (2011) found that science learning occurred in relatives’ homes. relatives also served as role models and/or people whom they could observe participating in scientific investigations using products found in the home. these experiences encouraged african american children to aspire to be scientists or engineers. a study of a spanish-speaking family’s free-choice science learning involved crossing school and home boundaries (ash, 2004). spanish-speaking families spoke in both spanish and english in order to understand science. in this case, informal learning in science referred to learning about science through a coral exhibit in the museum. the family had prior knowledge of science acquired through viewing pictures and other objects. when looking at the coral museum exhibit, the adult family members conversed with the children using both english and spanish. the adult members readily asked questions of the museum experts. this experience socialized the children to ask similar questions in order to obtain important information about the coral exhibit. informal science learning in secondary schools few studies have focused on the everyday science learning experiences of students in secondary schools (bhattacharyya et al., 2011; dohn, 2011; kong, dabney, & tai, 2013; lelliott, 2013; scott, 2014; şentürka & özdemir, 2014). in middle and high schools, the context of learning everyday science was a museum, a informal learning in sme majors 99 summer program, a science center, or a summer camp. in the museum setting, dohn (2011) also found that having a controlled environment can enable students to better understand science. for instance, in the aquarium environment, students learned about everyday science through hands-on experiences, innovative and/or unexpected activities. these experiences created situational interests in science among the high school students. the review of literature above reflects what we know about informal science learning during early childhood throughout high school. however, there are few studies that have examined the middle school, high school, and post-secondary experiences of those who later became scientists. additionally, few scholars (mcpherson, 2012; wright, 2011) have focused on informal science learning among girls, women, and minorities in home and/or school settings as they move through the educational pipeline. hence, this study will attempt to fill this gap in the research on free-choice learning, more specifically among african american girls and women. cultural capital understanding african american women’s exposure to informal science learning begins within their homes. the home environment is the foundation for early-life exposure to science outside of primary and secondary schools. this exposure to free-choice learning experiences and resources is best conceptualized as cultural capital (mcpherson, 2012). cultural capital serves as the hidden curriculum for practices inside and outside of the traditional middle-class culture (bourdieu, 1984: feinberg & soltis, 2009) or nontraditional cultures (yosso, 2006). the early conceptualization of traditional cultural capital involved a class-based study of the cultural tastes (e.g., music, art, museums) of people in the upper social classes (bourdieu, 1984). however, this cultural capital framework omitted an analysis of race and gender (dumais, 2002; lareau, 2003; lareau & weininger, 2003; mickelson, 2003; yosso, 2006). dumais (2002) connected cultural capital to gender, and observed that mothers transmitted cultural capital to their children. she found that cultural capital may be used inside or outside of classrooms. girls showcased their cultural knowledge by scoring high marks in classes, and they participated in cultural activities outside the classroom such as dance lessons, art lessons, and music lessons, reading at the library, concerts, and museum visits. on the other hand, boys might not fully display their cultural knowledge by participating in cultural activities outside of the classroom. critical race scholars (mickelson, 2003; yosso, 2006) added to the debate and discussion on the connections between race and cultural capital by acknowledging that african american students aspire to pursue their dreams despite obstacles, which is the essence of aspirational capital, a non-traditional form of cultural capital. yosso (2006) used a critical race theory perspective to critique bourdieu’s model of cultural capital for omitting the discourse of race. she said that african american communities acquire cultural wealth through specific types of capital, including “aspirational, navigational, social, linguistic, familial, and resistant capital” (yosso, 2006, p. 176). scholarship in the field of sociology of education has contributed research to the racialized discussions of cultural capital in primary and secondary settings. for example, lareau (2003) observed that white and black middle-class parents made efforts to cultivate the talents of their children by engaging them in activities that allowed them to practice those talents. on the other hand, children from working-class and poor families participated in natural growth through informal play activities, which allowed them to become more independent (lareau, 2003; lareau, & 100 global education review 1(4) weininger, 2003). this research highlights the small number of research studies that connect cultural capital to racial groups. cultural capital has also been used as a deficit model to explain why middle class people use specific cultural tastes to socialize children and teenagers for the middle class lifestyle while other parents failed to use those cultural tastes when socializing their children (winkle-wagner, 2006). unlike previous research, banks (2009) used a strengths-based approach to better understand african american women’s persistence in college. she confirmed that african american women make use of various forms of cultural capital (e.g., history, resources, family) that contributes to their persistence in college. waites (2009) found that african american families had legacies of using family members as resources for support for childcare and care of elderly family members, known as intergenerational support. it supports the strengths-based approach within the field of social work. similarly, this research study uses a strengths-based approach to apply the framework of cultural capital to improve our understanding of the opportunities that african american women have to learn science in informal settings throughout their lives. for example, science equity research has reported disconnections between students’ culture, the science curriculum and science pedagogies (lee & luykx, 2006; southerland, smith, sowell, & kittleson, 2007). the science curriculum often centers on a western model that devalues the work of non-western scientists (lee & luykx, 2006). lee and luykx (2006) state: when students do not share the ‘culture of power’ of the dominant society (e.g., western science), teachers need to make [sure] that culture’s rules and norms [are] explicit and visible so that students can learn to cross cultural borders between their home environment and the school environment (p. 90). these hidden rules and norms can be described as a form of hidden curriculum, and this has been noted in cultural capital research (feinberg & soltis, 2009). providing access to information (e.g., cultural capital) allows for students to become knowledgeable about the rules and norms “for classroom behavior and academic achievement” (lee & luykx, 2006, p. 76). in addition, having access to knowledge of the science culture1 provides students with opportunities to learn and perform academically if they obtain the same exposure to the science culture as their peers. furthermore, students who learn the values, rules, and regulations by means of explicit instruction via socialization, learn how to communicate using scientific terminology, understand scientific texts, and engage in projects in research labs (southerland et al., 2007). this can make it easier for students to navigate the science culture and have more opportunities to learn in science communities. the above review of literature shows that cultural capital provides people with access to learning about science. however, what is still lacking in the informal science literature is a connection to the hidden curriculum that will allow african american women to enjoy opportunities to learn science in informal settings through exposure to science-related activities as they matriculate through the educational system. the use of the cultural capital framework is thus appropriate for this study for the purpose of examining access to informal science learning. methodology data collection this research sample was pulled from a larger study on the persistence of undergraduate african american women in hard science majors (e.g., biology, engineering, mathematics, and informal learning in sme majors 101 business) at a predominantly white institution. the national science foundation (2009) defines the hard sciences as including: biology, computer science, earth science, atmospheric science, oceanography, and physical science (e.g., chemistry, astronomy, physics). this study included business as a hard science major, because it requires a thorough understanding and application of mathematical concepts (mcpherson, 2012). sample the multiple cases were the african american women who persisted in hard science majors. college persistence is defined as students making progress towards a degree (pascarella & terenzini, 2005). in this study, success by means of persistence is determined by engagement in upper-level coursework as an upperclassman (e.g., junior or senior) with an undergraduate student status. the eight hard science majors selected for participation in the study were: (1) women who self-identified as african american or black with upperclassman status based on credit hours, (2) women who were also in hard science majors at town university (psuedonym), (3) women between the ages of 19 and 23. these african american women were purposefully chosen to participate in the study. interviews data collection consisted of four structured interviews and journal entries. the interviews lasted from 8 minutes to three hours. the researcher asked questions that focused on their experiences in math and science in primary, secondary, and postsecondary settings. the interviews included questions about how family background impacted their access to opportunities to learn about science and their access to cultural capital. research setting this multiple case study was completed at a predominantly white institution, town university in maytown. town university was chosen because of the undergraduate student population. town university is a researchintensive institution that serves over 30,000 undergraduate students (u.s. department of education & national center for education statistics, 2010). there are slightly more men (over 55%) enrolled at the institution than women (about 45%). the majority of students are white (about 60%), about 28% are minority students, about 9% are immigrants, and about 3% are students of unidentified racial backgrounds. the demographic data suggests that town university is a predominantly white institution with a small pool of minority students matriculating at the undergraduate level. in addition, fewer minority students and women are enrolled in sme majors at this university at the undergraduate level in comparison with their white male and international counterparts (u.s. department of education & national center for education statistics, 2010). moreover, the data show that the attrition of women and minority students in science occurs more frequently during the freshman and sophomore years than during the junior and senior years. this might be attributed to the persistence of women and minority students by way of commitment or a desire to avoid hard science majors. data analysis the electronically recorded interviews were transcribed verbatim. the data were analyzed by question using data displays and memos to derive meaning and find themes. the qualitative data analysis program, maxqda was used to code the data and develop themes consistent with qualitative data analysis (lofland & lofland, 1995). in qualitative 102 global education review 1(4) research the results show that meaningful patterns and trends can be found in the data, and these patterns and trends are presented below. findings on informal science learning in home and school contexts this section reports the findings concerning african american women’s engagement in everyday learning of science through traditional forms of cultural capital at home, school, and in museum settings. this section begins with a discussion of the traditional forms of cultural capital that african american women in sme majors used to help themselves persist in sme fields from primary school through college. informal science learning in primary schools early socialization research shows that some undergraduate african american women who were committed to sme majors became interested in science or mathematics as early as preschool and as late as elementary school (brown, 2011; jordan, 2006; mcpherson, 2012; warren, 2000). in the current study, african american women identified informal science learning as a form of cultural capital acquired in the home or school during preschool or elementary school. when asked to disclose their early memories of science or math, african american women specified their home environments, namely family members, as providing them with access to informal science learning through role models early in life. it was before even i started school. my mom, she was in nursing school. she started school when she had all of us, me and my brothers. she also worked in the hospital before she got her degree. there was ‘the bring your kids to work day’. she brought us to the hospital. . . they let us play with the stethoscopes. i thought that i wanted to be a nurse from that point [on]. probably, because my mom wanted to be a nurse too! (shannon, biology major) probably around fourth grade… the first thing that i can remember…my brother is two years older than me. so he was always two grades above and when he learned something in math he would always come home and say lara. he would be doing problems on a sheet of paper. i would look at it and it would be kind of interesting. ever since then, i have always been ahead in math, because of him. i liked it and i kept on liking it. i just continued with it. that is probably the first thing and the main thing that has kept me in math. (lara, math major) outside of their homes, schools exposed african american women who were children at the time to informal science learning through projects and fieldtrips to museums. these trips to museums provided them with access to cultural capital and further socialization in sme fields through learning about science in these settings. when asked about their early memories of science, rachelle responded: insects and books. i did not like that aspect of science at all. i rarely looked at them. after that i guess. . . simple math and long division. . . for the insects, since i was younger, i went to preschool, pre-k, so three [years old]. we did mini-science [projects] there and i knew that i did not like insects. . . in a manner similar to rachelle, briana stated that elementary school gave her an informal learning in sme majors 103 opportunity to learn about science. when asked about an early memory of science, she stated: the earliest that i can think of was our field trip with the gifted program and going and pretending like you were on a spaceship. we had head controllers and we worked these different machines. it was just so cool to me. i had such a blast. i had so much fun that day. i remember just loving it. this section makes it clear that the home environment, early childhood and/or elementary schools were the foundation where african american females began their informal science learning. these educational spaces were socialization tools that sparked their early interests in science and promoted their continuing interests in science as they moved through the educational pipeline. summer camps in middle school, informal science learning that became cultural capital for african american women was acquired in summer camps. this is reflected in the narratives below. my mom she pretty much put me in summer camps. those trips always took me places, including museums. then sports. . . there was just a mixture of things. (lara, math major) a couple of years, i went to summer school, but it wasn’t summer school to make up classes. it was pretty much a summer camp with the school. it was a half-day school type of thing. they made it more fun so kids would want to go. i remember taking most of the trips to museums during the summer school portion. (shannon, biology major) in first grade was when they started to really say, ‘she’s a smart girl.’ my teacher recommended me for this summer program for gifted kids. . . i’m glad that i did it. . . it was at the botanical garden in south west city. i went there every day and would hang out at the botanical garden and do different experiments and things. . . (jennifer, math major) research on informal science learning among african american children (bhattacharyya et al., 2011; simpson & parsons, 2009; varelas et al., 2011) and adolescents globally (kang et al., 2010; kong et al, 2014; oliver & venville, 2011; shin et al., 2013) is consistent with the above excerpts to the effect that african american girls had opportunities to learn about science on an informal basis through trips to museums and participation in summer enrichment camps. these opportunities allowed for them to develop cultural tastes similar to those of the middle class, as described in bourdieu’s traditional cultural capital framework (bourdieu, 1984). science fairs in elementary and middle school, the teachers of african american girls provided them with access to cultural capital by exposing them to informal science learning through science fairs. narratives regarding this point appear below. . . . we had to invent something. so, i invented a remote [control] finder, but i basically put a doorbell on it. so that when you need to look for it, you push the button and there it goes. (patricia, business major) i remember i did this one with soap. . . i think it was electricity. . . if you put water and then put pepper in it, and then you put static on a plastic comb, you can put 104 global education review 1(4) the comb then close to the water and it’ll affect the water. so i remember that was one. i did the volcano thing. i did about three or four [science fairs] when i was in middle school. . . when i did really well in the middle school science fair, i got an award. . . the award allowed [for] me to go on to do this science program. . . it was again, another thing during the summer [and it was] during the day. . . (jennifer, math major) in a manner consistent with prior research (bhattacharyya et al., 2011; simpson & parsons, 2009; varelas et al., 2011; walls, 2012; wright, 2011) regarding informal science learning for african american children and adolescents, this section showed that african american girls had opportunities to learn about science on an informal basis through science fairs. this scholarship also supports global research (george, 2013; murmann & avaamidou, 2014) on science instructors exposing students to science centers and/or a culturally relevant pedagogy when teaching science in the caribbean and copenhagen. thus, u.s. teachers may be a powerful resource for encouraging an interest in science among african american girls and/or providing them with opportunities to engage in informal science learning inside or outside of school. exposure to science and math through families families provided african american girls with access to cultural capital through free-choice learning in elementary and middle school as well. some examples are below. we find that kind of stuff interesting, and so i bring home something, and he [my dad] just soaks it up. . . he’s helped me with it and then would take it further about what to do with this, and he was the one that would buy the ‘let's think about this’[books]. they sell books with different types of experiments that you can do, which is where i got some of my science experiments from. he was the one that brought them home, and [my brother, him,] and me would go through that book and do experiments just for fun. [it was] not even for the fair, some, just on our own. we’d test different things, and we did, i think, some rainbow thing [and], prisms. . . (jennifer, math major) my mom would always take me and my brother to different types of museums. . . the camps that i went to they also went to museums, the children’s museum of science, the animal aquarium. i have always been at museums and aquariums. also my uncle, my cousin’s dad, he would take us places too, [such as the] museums downtown. (lara, math major) we didn’t have any of that. i did not have any of that in school. i cannot remember the last time i have been to school on a field trip. it had to [be] before junior high when we went to a field trip for a museum. i remember liking the children’s museum of science. i remember little things that we did there, but that is about it. . . my parents took me. i do remember going there with school. i mainly remember it, because my grandmother has the newspaper clippings from me being in the museum. i remember running around and the thing where you can whisper your voice and we heard it on the other side of the room. (simone, engineering major) the above narratives provide a more detailed explanation of informal science learning by showing how african american parents are involved in helping their children to learn about informal learning in sme majors 105 science at home and elsewhere. parents are important because they encourage interest among the talented pool of underrepresented scholars in sme fields as early as preschool and as late as elementary school. these findings add to prior research, which showed that african american parents were involved in their girls’ learning inside and outside of schools (bhattacharyya et al., 2011; brown, 2011; jordan, 2006; mcpherson, 2012; warren, 2000). parents play a major role, but not the one and only role, in what their children learn about science on an informal basis. school field trips school field trips to museums also served as forms of cultural capital that expose african american women to informal science learning. in elementary school, every year we would take field trips to the same museum in central city. [one museum] . . . is similar to a history and anthropology, [or an] archaeology museum. a lot of the exhibits are based on archaeological finds. i went to those museums numerous times in my life both in and out of school. for example, my mom would have her sister come down with her kids and we would all just go to the museum one day. so, i got a lot of exposure to science there. (ashley, biology major) when i was younger, i started going to museums through this after school program and summer camps. we used to take field trips during the school years. . . of course we have been to museums. it is for astronauts. they put us in this astronaut thing and we had to perform some mission and all of the steps, which was really fun. i really liked that. . . (patricia, business major) [we went to] the children’s museum of science. then we would go to the aquarium. we did not go to the art museum, not in elementary school. . . from what i remember, what i liked most. . . [is that] they had an interactive area for younger kids. you could do a lot of stuff, hands-on activities. it was not like pointing and looking at things at what they had displayed. (shannon, biology major) attendance at museums provided african american girls with both hands-on interactive informal science learning experiences and educational experiences, similar to that of students informal learning in turkey pre-school classrooms and science festivals in england (bultitude, mcdonald, & custead, 2011; bulunuz, 2013). this differs from the sort of informal learning research typically found in museums that provide entertainment or educational experiences in the u.s. (gutwill & allen, 2010; kisiel, 2005). student organizations in primary schools, student organizations provided cultural capital by supplying african american girls with access to free-choice learning opportunities. examples appear below. i was in [the] girl scouts, and i remember we went there [the museum] a couple times for that, too. i think [that it was in] fourth and fifth [grade] . . . it was okay. (jennifer, math major) in middle school, i was in the national junior honor society. . . we did volunteer work. it was not too much school-related stuff. it was pretty much like these are the scholars of the school. we worked on community service [projects]. [as] part of 106 global education review 1(4) that we did tutoring for younger students, in whatever subjects that they needed help in. mostly, it would be math. (shannon, biology major) thus, student organizations in middle school provided african american girls with opportunities to learn and engage in informal science learning through museum attendance and/or tutoring others. these findings support scholarship on chinese students who have access to science through free-choice learning opportunities in science clubs in china (wang et al., 2012), informal science learning in secondary schools african american women’s exposure to informal science learning opportunities in high school consisted of tutoring, student organizations, and museums. tutoring tutoring was one form of informal science learning that helped african american women teach other students about mathematics or science. when asked about opportunities to informally engage in science or math, engineering major, simone responded “i had a job tutoring one summer in math…i tutored 8th graders and then i tutored freshmen and sophomores in high school… a lady that was the advisor for my service organization told me [about it].” this passage shows that everyday learning about science occurs outside of classrooms where students learn about mathematics and/or science. hence, informal learning can occur in the form of instruction by students. in this sense, the former learner becomes the instructor and shares their knowledge of science and/or math with other learners. this learning can be seen as a traditional form of cultural capital in which someone helps provide knowledge, or ‘hidden capital’, in order to help others navigate through mathematics and/or science content in k-12 settings. high school student organizations student organizations and clubs also exposed african american female teenagers to freechoice learning by having them work with peers in high school. these can be seen as a form of traditional cultural capital. following are some narratives on rachelle and shannon’s experiences with science and math organizations. i was a part of the. . . science club. i was a regular participant. we did a few conferences. so, i went to those. every other week, we would talk about something interesting. our teacher would show us an experiment that she had. that is about it. [the conferences] . . . were instate at other schools. i don’t remember which schools. some people did an egg drop. i think that i did a mousetrap racecar just measuring how far they went. [they were] just little competitions between everybody. (rachelle, biology major) i was in math champs. . . it is a group for students who are interested in math. you compete against other schools. we met once a month. we would go to competitions and compete with other schools doing math problems. it was not a buzzer type [of] competition, but you would take a test. they would see what school got the highest scores. we had a regional competition that was near. it was 15 miles away. we made it through the regional [competition], we went to state. so, we went to the state competition that was 30 minutes away. it was still in central city. . . that was my junior year. (shannon, biology major) informal learning in sme majors 107 the above excerpts make it clear that student organizations served as hidden forms of traditional cultural capital for socializing african american female teens for advanced studies in mathematics or science in high school, college, and their future careers. this section showed that african american females learned about science outside of classrooms with peers in the same high school clubs or organizations. these findings support scholarship on student organizations that socialize students to pursue education and careers in stem fields (dabney, chakraverty, & tai, 2013; scott, 2014; wang et al., 2012). museum visits in high school, some african american females went to science museums and/or entered science fairs, which gave them cultural capital. museums also exposed them to informal science learning prior to majoring in sme majors in college. simone describes her experience below. i went to the museum every once in a while. usually, it was a free day in the summer. i went to summer camps, but they were not revolved around school. . . i think that i went to a field museum once or twice. this finding is supported by research that tied museums (bourdieu, 1984) and science activities to cultural capital. other scholars (dohn, 2011) have similarly shown that museum visits provided high school students with opportunities to learn about science, which is another example of informal science learning that occurs in high school. informal learning in college in college, traditional forms of cultural capital that provided african american women with access to informal science learning opportunities that included research seminars, research projects, research conferences, and student organizations. research seminars briana’s narrative below discusses her attendance at a research seminar at town university. she states: it was here. it was something about subpolarization, so how cells grow and a particular signaling, pathway. it was very detailed, very biology. . . something that was very over my head. i just wanted to go, because i had never been to one of these. . . i think that i had to do it for a class or something. so i went there, i went up to the professor… it was a good talk. i was just trying to talk to her, [and] compliment her on it. this passage reflects that informal science learning in college offers african american female students’ opportunities to learn and engage in dialogues about science. research projects in addition to research seminars, three african american women participated in research projects, which provided them with opportunities to acquire free-choice learning. ashley and briana describe their research experiences as follows: i am currently doing research with a grad student who is under a professor. . . it is going good, very well. the projects are almost done. i am kinda upset about [that], because i wanted to be under her during the summer. . . she is studying the effects of bpa on the levels of lh and fsh. . . bpa, i don’t know what it technically stands for. it is usually found in plastics. if you buy a water bottle or something, it will say no bpa. it is supposedly linked to adverse effects with the pituitary gland and hormones. so lh 108 global education review 1(4) and fsh are hormones produced in the pituitary glands. we are taking mice and we are doing different experiments and there are different levels of lh and fsh. . . we are looking at bpa. (briana, biology major) [for the senior thesis,] the big thing was learning how to write scientifically. so she [the research professor] has been continuing to give me help on ‘how to’ do that, so that had definitely work and just being able to apply the different things that i have learned to what i am doing in lab. . . (ashley, biology major) in addition, the culture of the research lab matters, particularly for underrepresented populations in sme fields. when asked about comfort in the research lab, all of the women felt welcome. this is shown in ashley’s narrative below. the first time i got there, the professor was really helpful. she was always there; she is in her office just doing work or whatever. . . then the grad students, [and] technicians that might have been there were all very helpful. you could ask them questions and they were willing to answer them. the grad student that i have been working with for the last few years is really good. this excerpt shows how informal science learning in college occurs in research labs. it also discusses the warm and welcoming culture of some research labs. this socialization beyond classroom walls is what helped these women feel comfortable while engaging with peers and/or professors who were members of science communities at town university. this is different than research lab experiences in which women believed they were in ‘chilly’ spaces (ferreira, 2002; justin-johnson, 2004). research conferences a handful of african american women attended conferences or seminars in stem fields. for instance, simone recalled a conference where she presented research. she explained: i’ve done the mcnair research conference. i’ve done two of those, well, three. . . [in mcnair] i did a risk assessment. . . of hazardous waste. . . [i examined] when trains are carrying hazardous waste [and] how likely are they to get [into] an accident and how many people will they affect. [i also explored] . . . what cities [ran] the most risk of that. . . it was kind of the start of one of my professors, a professor i’ve worked with since freshman year. one of his grad students was about to start the project, and i just did an overview of it. . . i worked with the professor from freshman year to second semester of my freshman year to the end of 2010. (simone, engineering major) this example shows that informal science learning occurs in college and during research presentations at research conferences in which students inform other conference attendees about their research experiences and findings from research conducted under the guidance of a professor. the learning that occurs can be thought of as a traditional form of cultural capital, and more specifically as a ‘hidden curriculum’ intended to prepare them for graduate school and/or the workforce. college student organizations this section displays narratives of african american women who acquire cultural capital through informal science learning through participation in student organizations. informal learning in sme majors 109 just the national society of black engineers. . . i was secretary last year, and i serve on committees, [and participated in the] preand post-college initiative. . . so, getting students to come visit the school [who are] interested in engineering. we tutored at [a local middle school]. (simone, engineering major) for science, i am in [an international] club, but we are all science majors. we volunteer, so we don’t do science activities. . . it is pretty much their effort to get medical attention to kids in underserved countries. we are all bio majors or pre-med. (shannon, biology major) student organizations provided african american women with access to learning opportunities in free-choice learning in science environments. they may also promote their persistence in college in sme fields. in conclusion, informal science learning occurs in college settings, such as research seminars and research labs. research conferences and student organizations exposed african american women to free-choice learning outside of the classroom. discussion of findings on informal science learning in p-16 settings african american women have access to traditional forms of cultural capital in p-16 settings. this study’s findings contradict scholars who have posited that girls have fewer opportunities to acquire informal science learning opportunities (alexander et al., 2012; heppner, wao, & lee, 2010; hill, corbett, & st. rose, 2010). however, the results are consistent with prior research (saçkes, 2014; saçkes et al., 2011; siry, 2013; siry et al., 2012; walls, 2012) on informal science learning, and early exposure to traditional forms of cultural capital such as trips to museums and role modeling in the home. these findings also contribute to our gendered and racialized understanding of informal science learning opportunities and cultural capital for african american girls in primary and secondary schools. in k-12 settings, african american girls acquire cultural capital and access to free-choice learning of science in the home environment, museums, science fairs, student organizations and clubs in primary and secondary schools. however, in high school african american female teens had fewer opportunities to engage in everyday science experiences at home like those provided in the home environment in primary school settings. these findings confirm previous research which shows that students in primary and secondary school settings were exposed to informal science learning in museums and/or the home across the globe (alexander et al., 2012; buxton et al., 2013; crowl et al., 2013; gutwill & allen, 2010; karnezoua et al., 2013; lelliot, 2013; murmann & avraamidou, 2014; simpson & parsons, 2009; varelas et al., 2011). finally, this research adds to the literature by showing how cultural capital that is transmitted to african american girls by means of informal science learning in college consisted of involvement in student organizations, research projects, seminars, and conferences. african american women also had access to traditional forms of cultural capital (e.g., research, student organizations) at a pwi, which contributed to their engagement and persistence. these results confirm banks’ (2009) findings that by providing african american women with access to traditional forms of cultural capital at a pwi contribute to their persistence in college. 110 global education review 1(4) conclusions, limitations, and areas for future research cultural capital provides african american women in sme majors with opportunities to engage in informal science learning. early exposure to informal science learning in primary schools and/or the home can help prepare african american women to actively engage in science and/or mathematics in high school and college settings. this research adds to cultural capital and free-choice learning research allowing scholars to better understand how african american women have opportunities to learn about the hidden curriculum of science through informal science settings as they move through the educational pipeline. we also understand how teachers and parents can expose future african american women to traditional cultural capital outside of home and school environments, which is consistent with informal learning among students across the world. limitations this research was a qualitative study with only eight participants, and the findings cannot be generalized to all populations of african american women in sme majors. populations such as teachers, parents, and community members were excluded from this study. so, we do not have a holistic picture of how informal science learning occurred within multiple contexts (e.g. home, school, neighborhoods) among different stakeholders such as peers, parents, teachers, administrators, or community members. areas for future research future researchers should consider conducting a replication of this qualitative study in domestic and international settings. they should conduct a quantitative and/or mixed methods study of one population, or multiple underrepresented populations in order to determine how cultural capital influences underrepresented students’ access to informal science learning opportunities. researchers might consider using multiple types of stakeholders, including peers, parents, teachers, and/or administrators, across the educational pipeline and around the world. implications for practice in primary schools, student organizations and teachers play a role in the socialization of african american girls in sme majors. so, both stakeholders can provide good resources for informal learning in science. globally, teachers who use culturally relevant pedagogies combined with informal science learning can connect everyday experiences into teaching and learning of math and science. this might help increase the talent pool of girls and underrepresented students involved in stem around the world. in elementary and middle school, student organizations may be a means of encouraging and socializing girls and racial/ethnic minorities to pursue the study of science and mathematics in college and beyond, and prepare them for careers in science and/or mathematics. parental and school museum visits may encourage girls and minorities around the world to study mathematics and/or science in high school and beyond. finally, in college professors’ research labs, seminars, and culturally relevant pedagogies can engage more girls, african american girls and women, and minorities in stem. moreover, college students’ exposure to domestic and international, science centers, volunteer opportunities in the community, and student organizations can facilitate the retention and persistence of african american women in stem majors by making them feel included in the science culture. these informal learning informal learning in sme majors 111 opportunities can also teach and socialize them to adjust to the ‘hidden science culture’ that involves students learning about science beyond classroom walls in domestic and international settings. notes 1. the science culture revolves around the teaching and learning within the field through a western mode of thought (harding, 2006; 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(2010). family sense-making practices in science center conversations. science education, 94, 478-505. doi:10.1002/sce.20374 about the author ezella mcpherson, phd, earned her doctorate in educational policy studies from the university of illinois at urbana-champaign. her expertise is qualitative research, stem education, mentoring, academic coaching, k-20 retention, persistence, and graduation for underserved populations her current research projects focus on college student persistence and success for underrepresented populations. http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&searchtype=journal&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a%28%c5%9eent%c3%bcrk%2c+e%29 http://www.tandfonline.com/action/dosearch?action=runsearch&type=advanced&searchtype=journal&result=true&prevsearch=%2bauthorsfield%3a%28%c3%96zdemir%2c+%c3%96+f%29 http://factfinder.census.gov/ http://nces.ed.gov/ bhattacharyya, s., mead, t., & nathaniel, r. (2011). the influence of science summer camp on african-american high school students’ career choices. school science and mathematics, 111, 345–353. doi: 10.1111/j.1949-8594.2011.00097.x brown, j. (2011). african american women chemists. new york: oxford university press. saçkes, m., trundle, k. c., bell, r. l., & o’connell, a. a. (2011). the influence of early science experience in kindergarten on children's immediate and later science achievement: evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study. journal of resea... 2015-2016 board of reviewers 129 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann 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nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university gary peters, university of alabama salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles merethe roos, telemark university college, norway 132 global education review 3(2) thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schittesser, university of vienna susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria the politics of educational reform 103 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any msdium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bosetti, lynn & butterfield, phil (2016). the politics of educational reform: the alberta charter school experiment 20 years later. global education review, 3(2). 103-109 the politics of educational reform: the alberta charter school experiment 20 years later lynn bosetti the university of british columbia, canada phil butterfield connect charter school, calgary, canada abstract in this paper we examine the public charter school movement in the province of alberta, canada over the past 20 years to determine how charter school policy and regulations have limited and controlled the impact of charter schools on public education. specifically we focus on the extent to which charter schools in alberta fulfilled the aims and expectations of policy reformers as sites of research and innovation, vehicles to create competition, and expanded public school choice options for parents, and to enhance student learning and outcomes. based on a critical policy analysis and interviews with stakeholder groups we argue that charter schools in alberta have been a controlled experiment in the introduction of quasimarkets in the public education system. the ministry of education created a regulatory structure permitting a limited number of charter schools to exist at any point in time, and a rigorous approval process that created sufficient pressure to leverage change in public education and expanded choice options for parents; however, the tight regulations have also prevented charter schools from fulfilling their full mandate as a vehicle of educational reform. keywords charter school, alberta, canada, school choice, innovation, market economy, educational policy introduction the purpose of this paper is to examine the public charter school movement over the past 20 years in the province of alberta, canada to determine how charter school policy and regulations have limited and controlled the impact of charter schools on public education. specifically, we focused on the extent to which charter schools in alberta are fulfilled the aims and expectations of policy reformers as sites of research and innovation, as vehicles to create competition, as expanded public school choice options for parents, and as sites to enhance student-learning outcomes. we argue charter schools in alberta have been an experiment in controlled choice in which the ministry of education permitted the establishment of a limited number of charter school authorities (maximum of 15 at any point in time) that created sufficient pressure to _____________________________ corresponding author: lynn bosetti, professor of educational leadership and policy studies, the university of british columbia, eme 3131 3333 university way | kelowna, bc canada v1v 1v7 email: lynn.bosetti@ubc.ca 104 global education review 3(2) leverage change in public education by creating competitive pressures for metropolitan school districts in response to parental demand for more choice. they also broke the monopoly of public education by permitting charter school authorities to operate outside the regulatory constraints of the public school board bureaucracy, and to hire teachers who were not members of the alberta teachers’ association. we begin by positioning charter schools within the public education context in alberta, and explain the theory, logic and expectations inherent in adopting this market-based approach to educational reform. we discuss some of the polemic debates that surround charter schools and influence the socio-political context in which charter school legislation is enacted. in the second part of the paper we take a closer look at the research, position papers and policy documents to examine the degree to which charter schools are achieving the three key aims of this approach to educational reform in alberta: (1) expanded choice and competition, (2) student achievement, and (3) research and innovation. drawing upon interviews with government officials and charter school leaders we discuss the strengths and limitations of charter schools as a mechanism to leverage change in public education. in the conclusion we return to a discussion of the ways charter school policy and regulations have constrained the potential of charter schools from fully realizing their policy reform mandate; however, we note that the regulatory structure has been effective in providing the impetus for metropolitan school boards to be more responsive to parental demand for expanded choice options. methodology we adopted a critical policy analysis approach (gale, 2001; scheurich, 1994; taylor 1997, walton, 2010) to examine the charter school movement in alberta and to understand the political motivations that shaped and framed the evolution of charter schools, their impact as a mechanism for system-wide educational reform, and why they have not burgeoned into a viable alternative stream within the alberta public education system. this approach to policy analysis emphasizes the social context of policy production and takes into consideration relations of power and invested interest in defining and shaping charter school policy and regulations. critical policy analysis examines how policy serves the interests of those who author, interpret, and challenge it as it is taken up in local contexts. it challenges the taken-for granted assumptions about constructs that inform policy, and exposes the effects of policy on the daily operations of organizations (bogdan & biklen, 2003, p. 21). we used this methodology together with market theory (ball, 1993; henig, 1994)1 to inform the content analysis of policy documents and evidence of their impact on the evolution of charter schools in alberta. documents included commissioned reports, stakeholder and government papers, and changes to the legislation that chronicled the evolution of the first generation of charter schools, the regulatory structure used to manage its growth, its impact on the broader education system in the province, and its limitations to effect deep change and innovation in education (alberta education 2010; bosetti, 1998a, 1998b, 2000, 2001; bosetti et al., 2000; government of alberta, 2009; 2011a, 2011b, 2012; johnson, 2013). semistructured interviews were conducted with three government officials responsible for charter schools, and focus group interviews with 20 charter school leaders (principals and superintendents) were conducted to provide insight into the meaning and implications of the impact and challenges of charter schools, as well their future direction. participants were asked to share their experiences and perspectives regarding what they perceived to be the policy agenda for the introduction of charter school legislation into the alberta public education system, how the policy agenda for charter schools came to be defined, the factors that influenced amendments the politics of educational reform 105 to the regulations, and the key political and social factors that shaped the implementation of charter schools. the interviews and focus groups were audio recorded, transcribed and then content analyzed for key themes. we drew upon these interviews to understand the political context for the establishment and evolution of charter schools and the interpretation of the impact of the policy documents and charter school regulations in practice. alberta charter schools: the canadian public education context canada is a diverse nation consisting of ten provinces and three territories. by constitutional design, each province bears sole responsibility for the delivery of education within its political boundaries. the absence of a federal ministry to oversee curriculum, standards, and policy development has resulted in little consistency between regions in terms of educational content and expectations. the public education system in alberta2 consists of 68 public school districts, each governed by an elected board of trustees. the minister of education, an elected member of the provincial cabinet, is responsible for ensuring that all school districts implement the provincially mandated program of studies for grades 1 to 12 and comply with all accountability measures as directed. alberta is the only province in canada with charter school legislation. alberta educational reform agenda: role of charter schools charter school legislation was introduced in may 1994, shortly after a national debate regarding the role of education in preparing graduates to compete in the global knowledge economy (bosetti, 2001). in 1993 the alberta government, concerned with the state of education in the province, commissioned a study of education reform. the report that followed, charter schools: provisions for choice in public schools, identified the absence of competition as the primary reason for the “failure of public schools to provide the level of excellence in education necessary for success in an increasingly competitive society” (cited in ritchie, 2010, p.3). the ministry of education responded with a reform package based on free market principles that included choice, competition and standards-based accountability that created institutional levers to provide “optimal environments and structural incentives to compel schools to improve” (lubienski, 2012, p. 513). along with the introduction of charter school legislation, the government increased funding to private schools, reduced overall funding to public education by 12%, introduced provincial standardized testing and diploma examination, consolidated school boards from 141 to 68, and required schools to establish parent-based school councils (bruce and schwartz, 1997). mindzak (2015) surmised this reform agenda was possible in alberta because a policy window was created through a combination of a general public perception of a crisis in education and a conservative government with 32 years in power, providing the conditions to introduce a neoliberal inspired reform agenda focused on cutting costs and restructuring public services. as part of this reform agenda, charter school legislation was introduced to create “autonomous public schools that would provide innovative or enhanced means of delivering education in order to improve student learning” (alberta education, 2011a, p.1). they were positioned not as a competitive force, but as an “addition to the public education system” and as sites of innovation that would “complement the educational services provided by the local public system” and provide the “opportunity for successful educational practices to be recognized and adopted by other public schools for the benefit of more students” (p.1). only the minister of education has the authority to approve a charter school application in alberta. before assent can be given, charter 106 global education review 3(2) school applicants must engage in a protracted process to demonstrate that the proposed program is not of interest to the local public school board3 and, in addition to numerous other criteria, the teaching and learning model is qualitatively different from any currently being offered through the traditional public school system, and that it demonstrates an innovative educational paradigm (alberta education, 2011a). in this reform agenda, charter schools have five policy aims: • stimulate the development of enhanced and innovative programs within the public education system; • provide increased opportunities for student learning within the public education system; • provide parents and students with greater opportunities for choice within the public education system; • provide teachers with a vehicle for establishing schools with enhanced and creative methods of educational instruction, school structure and management; • encourage the establishment of outcome-based education programs. (alberta education, 2011a, p.5) while charter schools vary considerably in terms of vision and pedagogical foundation across the province, they share some common characteristics. they must provide a basic education as defined by the provincially mandated program of study; students are required to write the provincial achievement tests (pat) and diploma examinations; they cannot have religious affiliation, charge tuition, or discriminate in student admission in the sense they cannot turn students away as long as there is space and sufficient resources to support their learning needs (alberta education, 2011b). charter schools operate on an initial fiveyear performance contract, where at the end of the term an external, government appointed evaluation team reviews the school and determines if it has complied with the legal and financial requirements, demonstrated consistently strong or improving student achievement, fulfilled its stated charter objectives, and has demonstrated parental and community support (bosetti, 2001). the evaluation team makes a recommendation to the minister of education who may renew the term or repeal the charter. established charter schools with a demonstrated record of success may apply to the minister for a 15-year term for their charter. important to this long-term renewal is evidence that the charter school has: a) provided professional development opportunities related to its innovative approach to the rest of alberta’s education community, b) provided professional development opportunities related to its innovative approach to the rest of alberta’s education community, c) met or exceeded appropriate targets as set out in a student outcomes accountability framework, d) achieved student achievement results as good or better than overall provincial results, measured in a value-added manner, e) earned parental satisfaction results better than those of the province as whole, and at least as good as results for schools within public and/or separate boards offering alternative programs and/or catering to the same defined populations, and f) shared with the educational community their research, which evaluates the success of the innovation and identifies reasons for that success with government and educators (alberta education, 2009, p.3). like other public schools, charter schools are required to hire certified teachers, but those teachers are not permitted to be members of the alberta teachers’ association, the professional body responsible for collective bargaining and disciplinary issues for public school teachers in the province. charter schools are eligible for the same per-student grants as other public schools, with the exception of equitable funding for the inclusion of students with special needs. the funding manual for school authorities – 2015the politics of educational reform 107 16 school year (2015) defines multiple levels of funding for schools to support programs that promote quality education for all alberta public school students, however charter schools are denied access to this resource and must allocate funds from instructional budgets to accommodate students with mild and moderate learning challenges. funding for students with severe disabilities requires the submission of supporting documentation to alberta education, with approval of funding only being confirmed at the mid-point of the school year. charter schools are ineligible for transportation grants, and are operated by a not-for-profit society or company, governed by an elected board of directors. to date there are only 13 charter school authorities in alberta, serving over 91234 students representing about 1% of the total provincial student population (alberta education, 2015). many of the charter schools have multiple campuses and report extensive waiting lists for admission, and generally students achieve above average to excellent scores on standardized provincial achievement tests. there are six charter schools in the city of calgary representing 83% of the total charter school enrolment, three in the capital city of edmonton representing 11% of enrolment, and the remaining 6% in the four charter schools located in smaller communities in rural areas (alberta education, 2011b, p.1). recent changes to legislation indicate the government's continued commitment to charter schools as vehicles of educational reform; however, their role and purpose has shifted from infusing competition and diversification of the education market to serving as pilot sites and incubators to research and fine-tune innovative practices (alberta education, 2011c; 2009). teachers, as scholar practitioners, are expected to engage with researchers in universities and polytechnic institutes to design robust investigations into effective practices that improve student success. this is a unique shift in the charter school sector and merits deliberation regarding the implications for established charter schools in alberta in terms of providing choice for parents and educators, and their impact on the larger public education system. unlike the united states, where charter schools have expanded to more than six thousand schools in forty three states, including the district of columbia, representing 6.2% of the total student enrolment in public education (national centre for education statistics, 2015), charter schools in canada have remained a tightly controlled experiment in alberta with a maximum of 15 charter authorities permitted by provincial regulations (alberta education, 2015). polemic debates around charter schools as market based reform support for charter schools in alberta has been mixed, with the tendency of both proponents and detractors to draw upon ideological arguments rather than empirical evidence to support their position (smith, wohlstetter, farrell & nafack, 2011). these polemic debates continue and define the contested terrain in which charter schools are positioned in alberta. the following are the enduring arguments that create the parameters for these debates. charter schools are founded on competitive-market based principles. advocates claim that charter schools can revitalize the public education system by injecting market forces into an “over-regulated, over-centralized public education monopoly with strong allegiance to the status quo and no institutional incentive to improve student performance” (buechler, 1995, p.3). liberated from the bureaucracy and regulatory constraints of traditional public boards, charter schools have the freedom to adopt innovative practices related to teaching and learning as well as organization and governance, in exchange for higher levels of accountability in meeting their charter mandate and enhancement of student learning in some measureable way (alberta education, 2009). 108 global education review 3(2) the persuasive argument put forth by choice advocates is that charter schools “are held accountable from below, by parents and students who directly experience their services and are free to choose” (chubb & moe, 1990, p. 217). the logic behind this assertion is that within the education market, charter school providers will target disaffected, marginalized students with programs to support their academic success, and parents, given a choice, will select high quality schools that reflect their family values and aspiration for their children, withdrawing them from poor performing, unresponsive schools, creating pressure on public school systems to improve the quality of education for all children (ravitch, 2010; wells, 2009). this will result in the “rising tide will lift all boats” effect with a public education system providing more program options to address the diverse learning needs and interests of students and preferences of parents, resulting in overall improved student outcomes and quality of education (kolderie, 2004; nathan, 1996; ravitch, 2010; smith, 2001; wells, 2009). critics of school choice and market based reform reject charter schools as a move towards the commodification of education and the privatization of the public good, and raise concerns regarding equality of opportunity. they argue charter schools drain public resources away from traditional public schools and create a segregated, multi-tiered education system, skimming away the highly motivated and academically capable students, leaving the lower achievers, special needs, and minority students in their neighbourhood public school (alberta teachers’ association, 2011; bosetti, 2000; kachur, 1999). governments and policy makers step away from their responsibility for, and consequences of the choices provided and consumed, while maintaining control of the educational agenda through performance indicators, the mandated core curriculum, and formula funding. debates regarding the goals of schooling are played out at the local level through the competitive effects of school choice initiatives, rather than through political discourse in the public sphere (bosetti, 2000). critics maintain that it is unreasonable to hold parents who advocate on behalf of their children responsible for the education system’s failure to address issues of equity and diversity. they argue school choice in an educational market is not a substitute for government intervention through public policy that ensures the learning needs of all children are addressed (kachur, 1999). in the next section of the paper we take a closer look at the degree to which charter schools are achieving the stated policy aims of innovation, competition, expanded choice options, and enhanced student achievement. innovation and competition: conceptual concerns there are a number of conceptual concerns that need to be acknowledged to make sense of the impact of alberta charter schools in terms of being a vehicle for innovation and competition. there appears to be an implied causal connection made by policy makers between structural reform, such as the introduction of charter schools and the creation of competitive education markets, and innovation in classroom practice that will lead to improvement in student learning. that is, the belief that market competition will stimulate diversification of programs offered by schools of choice, and these programs will be innovative and have a positive impact on student learning. a charter school director comments, i think the idea is that charter schools will address underserved populations and provide choice and competition in a public environment and improve student outcomes…. now we’ve got all these little laboratories, all of these little pilot projects who have been around for 10 or 20 years. what can we learn from them? what can regular public [school] systems and other provinces learn from them? it the politics of educational reform 109 is easy to say we want research, but what does that mean? who does it and funds it? we want to know about their innovation and success, but who defines what is innovative? policy makers assume that parents are seeking innovative practices, when according to some alberta charter school superintendents, what motivates parent’s choice of schools may be the desire for a more traditional approach to education with a focus on direct instruction and basics, or a sense of community to be with likeminded individuals with shared values regarding educational opportunities and experiences for their children (bosetti, foulkes, o’reilly & sande, 2000; o’reilly & bosetti, 2000). not all innovations are popular with parents and educators, particularly pedagogical innovations, which provides justification for some innovations to reside in schools of choice (loveless & field, 2009). furthermore, some see that “the job of charter schools is to satisfy their customers, not to demonstrate to outside analysts that they have devised something never before observed in this galaxy” (finn, manno & vanourekm 2001, p.91). a charter school parent and director stated, “i think choice is the number one driver for creating charter schools. charter schools served our families by giving access to unique programs not available elsewhere. i don’t see research and innovation as the number one priority for parents.” the superintendent of a charter school offering a traditional approach to education echoed this sentiment: “i don’t ascribe to the need for charter schools to be beacons of research and innovation. charter schools need to be beacons of choice. we are de facto research experiments.” given these assumptions, the construct of innovation and conditions that foster innovation merits consideration. schlechty (2009) identified disruptive innovations as those “that are incongruent with existing social systems and therefore require fundamental changes in these systems if the innovation is to be properly installed and sustained” (p. 27). charter schools are promoted as sites of disruptive innovation, with the potential to serve as laboratories to document and research how these innovations have an impact on the improvement of student learning. drawing upon the organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd), the ministry of education considers four types of innovation: product, process, organizational or marketing. in the context of the education sector, a product innovation can be a new or significantly improved curriculum or a new educational software or resources; a process innovation can be a new or significantly improved way of teaching; an organization innovation maybe a new way of collaboration between teachers, or organizational changes in the administrative arena, and, a marketing innovation can be a new way of promoting the innovation or a new strategy to recruit/maintain students (alberta education, 2011b, p.2). regulations governing the operation of alberta charter schools define these innovations as “creative approaches to educational instruction, school structure and management” (alberta education, 2011a, p. 2). a significant challenge in promoting charter schools as sites of educational innovation is that the core concept of innovation is nebulous, subjective and derives meaning from local context (lubienski, 2003). the primary meaning of innovation is that something must be original or new to be innovative. therefore, pre-existing ideas or practices may be combined as part of a charter mandate and introduced into a context where it is experienced as new or different. lubienski (2012) argued, this subjective focus on innovation can dilute the larger push for producing new approaches to teaching and learning by “confusing the diffusion of practices 110 global education review 3(2) with the creation of new ones “(p. 151). change alone is not innovation (daft and becker, 1978), and as one charter school superintendent pointed out “not all improvement is innovative and not all innovation results in improvement” particularly when related to student learning. policy makers want charter schools to be innovative (provide something new), provide a diversification of program options (different) and improve student learning; however, the interpretation of new or different is context specific. the alberta charter school regulations accommodate this distinction in the policy goals where the expectation of the educational services offered by charter schools “will be different from what is locally available, provide enhanced or innovative delivery of public education to students, broaden the range of educational opportunities and enhance student learning” (alberta education, 2011a, p.1). enhanced student success, according to a ministerial order issued in may 2013, means “engaged learning and ethical citizenship with an entrepreneurial spirit” (p. 2). these criteria lean toward diversification of program offerings by providing something new or different as defined by the local context, rather than innovation in terms of novel or original, or defined as measurable improvement in student outcomes. innovation and competition: operational concerns in terms of an agenda for educational reform, this broad mandate for alberta charter schools, together with a restrictive regulatory framework, limits their potential to foster significant innovation and sufficient competition that could affect improvement in student learning. in terms of competition, with the current limit of only 15 charter school authorities in the province, it is unlikely they will create sufficient competitive market pressure to improve performance of school districts in terms of efficiency and effectiveness as evidenced by improved student learning. school district policy and leadership are factors in how a school board will respond to market pressures and adoption of innovative practices. some school boards are committed to the common comprehensive school in which the needs of learners can be accommodated in an inclusive setting, while others are responsive to provisions for choice. for example, in 1974 the edmonton public school board advocated school choice in their mission to ensure that all students achieve success in their individual programs of study, and adopted an open boundary attendance policy. in 2006 they reported “49% of elementary students, 54% of junior high students and 56% of senior high students attending schools other than their designated neighbourhood school” (maguire, 2006, p.20). there are only three charter schools in the edmonton area. in contrast, calgary has six charter school authorities and enrolls 83% of all charter school students; the remaining four charter schools are in rural or semi-rural communities (ritchie, 2010). innovation and competition is further constrained through the charter approval process. those seeking to establish a charter school are required to first approach their local school board to have their application considered as an alternative program of choice in accordance with section 21 of the school act (alberta education, 2011a). the local school board is charged with the responsibility of reviewing the proposal to determine if such a program already exists in their board, or if the concept proposed should be considered as an alternative program. if the board decides to refuse the proposal, the charter school applicants can appeal to the minister of education for authorization. charter school applicants in effect do the work of local school boards in identifying an unmet need, designing a program in response to that need, and demonstrating sufficient parental support for the proposal. the local board may accept and the politics of educational reform 111 implement the proposal as an alternative program or reject it. charter school applicants seldom desire to have their proposal authorized as an alternative program that would operate within the constraints of the bureaucratic structure and regulations of the local school board and the provincial teachers’ union. applicants are motivated to include in their proposals innovations in school organization, structure or administration that contravene public school board policy; thereby making it impossible for the local board to approve the proposal as an alternative program,. for example, some charter schools have adopted forms of merit pay, parent and student voice in teacher evaluation, employment of professionals to complement teaching specialized programs, school uniforms and partnerships with organizations for school facilities. these are forms of innovations that change established practices in how schools are managed, organized and use their resources; however, their impact is localized and likely not sufficient to have a positive effect on the broader public education system, nor to affect classroom practices to improve learning and the quality of education for all students. recent research (butterfield, 2013; linick & lubienski, 2013) highlights a variety of factors that affect a school district’s ability to respond to competitive pressures. these include local school district policy in provision for choice, the level of information and support for parents to help them to select schools, incentives for teachers to engage in and adopt innovative practices in their classroom, and the perspective of district leaders regarding the merit of innovative practices and their willingness to respond to market pressures. school board leaders are more likely to respond to potential competitive pressure generated by charter school proposals they perceive as high quality, and that generate sufficient demand from parents to warrant action. as discussed previously, in the case of alberta charter schools, school boards have a number of options in how they respond to proposals. they can work together with the charter applicants to accommodate the proposal as an alternative program in their board, as has been the case with edmonton public school board. the calgary board of education has taken a different approach, rejecting most applications and establishing their own alternative programs in direct competition with charter schools in the region. not all charter school proposals pose sufficient competition to the public school system; they are niche schools, or represent a program that the local board does not have the capacity or motivation to accommodate. in some cases public charter schools serve as an outlet to address the needs of hard to educate students and disruptive parents in the public education system (bosetti et al., 2000; ritchie, 2010). adoption of charter school innovations the dissemination and adoption of innovative practices fostered in charter schools has a number of challenges. while charter schools have a mandate to share successful innovations and practices with public schools for the benefit of all students, this requirement poses a challenge in a competitive market-based system, where these innovative practices may be the defining characteristic of a charter school that attracts students. competitive pressures aside, consideration needs to be given as to whether these pockets of innovation and success can be scaled up and replicated in other school settings. charter school programs and success may be attributed to a number of factors such as the particular student population or community they serve, the personalities of the teachers and leaders, the school culture or the quality of instruction and resources. therefore, the pedagogical models, and innovative practices may not be easily transferrable to comprehensive public schools, nor reflect the 112 global education review 3(2) values and mission of the district. ravitch (2010) concluded schools are not very good at replicating the success of model charter or regular public schools. while “schools can improve and learn from one another,” real school improvements “occur incrementally, as a result of sustained effort over years” (p. 137). alberta charter school leaders report numerous attempts to invite public school educators into collaborative relationships.5 while there has been some reciprocal professional learning between charter schools and metropolitan school boards, charter school leaders report that at a system level there is lingering reluctance on the part of larger systems to engage in collaborative partnerships with charter schools. as one charter school administrator observed, “the lack of favourable response to our overtures to collaborate early in the school’s history has resulted in the staff no longer seeking those opportunities and becoming increasingly insular in their practice.” berends, goldring, stein and carvens, (2010) argue the highly institutionalized and bureaucratic nature of the public school sector hinders significant changes in instruction and innovative reform, making scale up unlikely. interest groups such as teacher unions, school boards, administrators and other beneficiaries have a vested interest in the institutional status quo (chubb & moe, 1990). the alberta school boards association and the alberta teachers’ association (2011) do not support public charter schools, and create barriers for charter schools by denying them access to, or membership in, their professional association and networks.6 this limits the capacity of charter schools to fulfill their mandate to share innovations and build constructive relationships to benefit public education and improve the quality of education for all students. the alberta association of public charter schools (taapcs) has created opportunities for charter schools to collaborate and share their practices among those in this sector. charter school superintendents as members of the college of alberta school superintendents (cass) attend zone meetings and engage in professional development activities with other public school superintendents in the province. extending from research of charter school leadership practices, butterfield (2013) argued that as the major authorizer of charter schools, it is the responsibility of the ministry of education to create a framework and mechanism for facilitating the diffusion and sharing of innovative practices among educators across the public system, in keeping with the vision of developing engaged learners and ethical citizens with entrepreneurial spirits. charter school leaders identified a variety of political mechanisms local school boards employ to create significant barriers to the success of charter schools. among the most predominant challenges facing charter school authorities is access to adequate facilities that meet the needs of their unique programs and that are centrally located to provide reasonable access to families being served. as facility allocation is a joint responsibility of the alberta government and local school boards, considerable tension emerges when charter schools submit facility requests that will require a board to relinquish an under-utilized building. often the facilities offered are old and out-dated, requiring significant renovation and maintenance. the location may not be ideally suited to support the mandate of the charter (e.g. science or performing arts facilities), or be located in neighbourhoods parents would deem as safe. some charter schools have been successful in leasing facilities from communitybased organizations and foundations, while others must use resources to renovate the space made available through school boards.7 public school boards marginalize students and teachers in charter schools by not permitting them to participate in professional development activities, sports leagues, science fairs, and other extra-curricular activities. in effect, these strategies serve to marginalize charter schools in the public education system, the politics of educational reform 113 rendering them islands of practice rather than beacons of change; thereby limiting their capacity to achieve their full mandate (gereluk, kowch & thompson, 2014). a charter school administrator explains, there is no process for collaboration [with the traditional public school system], no system-to-system relations. we are not part of provincial specialist councils, or big conferences and we are not supported by the ata [the alberta teachers’ association]. in many ways we are kept separate from the sharing that takes place. if we could connect [with the public school system] we would gain a better understanding of how to influence positive change and share effective practices. research and innovation in 2010 the government of alberta released the inspiring education framework that outlined a new agenda for education reform and a shift in the mandate for second-generation charter schools as incubators for research and innovation. this new agenda shifted the focus away from system level reform to a focus on activities that promote learning at the school level through research informed innovation in teaching and learning, core competencies and accountability for learning excellence (alberta education, 2010, p. 34). the significance of research and innovation is emphasized in the following statement: research and innovation will be encouraged and supported as part of a strong education system. education research is integral to all parts of the education system, and all stakeholders will need to collaborate to conduct, interpret and apply research findings. research partnerships will identify and expand our existing knowledge base regarding how students learn and how to facilitate the most appropriate learning environment (alberta education, 2011b, p.2). alberta education envisions charter schools working in collaboration with postsecondary institutions to inform different approaches to pre-service teacher education, and testing of these ideas to improve student success. charter schools would become catalysts for critical thinking about education, and have increased responsibility for disseminating effective education practices. charter school teachers and administrators could play a significant role in the professional development of educators in the broader public education system and offer the opportunity for extended visits for observation or practice. parents and teachers would choose these schools because they are interested in being part of these laboratory schools and subjects of research (alberta education, 2009). while improving student success is the core mandate of charter schools, the focus on the classroom instructional practices and pedagogy that informs improvement in student learning was not highlighted in this revised vision. this lack of specificity may perpetuate innovation related to governance, finance and organization rather than instructional strategies and theoretical approaches to teaching and learning that could be tested, fine-tuned and shared with other educators. alberta education framed research and innovation in the following: each charter could define the scope of the ideas to be explored and the scope of the foundational requirements in basic education, such as alternative forms of the programs of study, different approaches to staffing, other ways to evaluate student success and alternative funding models (alberta education, 2009, p. 2). it is noteworthy that this vision for the second generation of charter schools as incubators of innovation and sites of research is not entirely new. in 1896 john dewey, as a professor at the university of chicago, 114 global education review 3(2) established the university elementary school that became the laboratory school in 1902. he envisioned the school “as a scientific ‘laboratory’ staffed with college trained teachers and devoted to research, experiment, and educational innovation” (knoll, 2014, p. 455). the school was designed to conduct research on education methods centered on the child and experiential learning as an alternative to the traditional methods of drill and memorization. the laboratory school initiated the laboratory movement for teacher preparation and educational research in the usa (jackson, 1990) and in canada. it is not uncommon for faculties of education to have laboratory or demonstration schools in the public education system as settings for pre-service teachers to observe how theory and innovative practice are combined to create effective approaches to teaching and learning. charter schools may not be the silver bullet for education reform, but as designated sites of research, and incubators of innovation they can provide a home for researching effective practices. given the long history of first generation charter schools that were established as schools of choice for parents, there will be resistance from some of these communities to this new research mandate. an administrator of a charter school that has been engaged in research with a local university commented on their experience: “it felt like research was being done to us rather than walking hand-in-hand with us to inquiry into our practice. we do not want to fall into being the guinea pig.” while charter schools have become fixtures in the public education landscape, it will take time and concerted effort to break the barriers to collaboration with the regular public education system and to shift perception among public school educators, leaders and related professional association groups that charter schools have a viable role as incubators for innovation. the alberta teachers’ association (2011) argues there is no evidence that charter schools have been leaders in research or have much to teach public schools. they state, “it is unclear to what extent educational approaches that might succeed in the hothouse environment of a charter school would survive in the real world of public education, where classrooms are increasingly diverse and where schools do not have the luxury of teaching only the students they select” (para. 8). they conclude that providing additional funding to charter schools for educational research, while cutting the funding available to public schools through the alberta initiative for school improvement (aisi), a program that supported innovation through professional development and school based action, “ultimately diminishes the ability of the entire public education system to achieve ongoing improvement and transformation” (para. 8-9). for charter schools to become a lighthouse of research and innovation for public education will require significant support from the ministry of education to ensure they engage in robust research and have opportunities for collaboration with the regular public system. student achievement there is little conclusive evidence from studies conducted in the united states that charter schools are boosting academic achievement in a significant or sustained manner (berends et al., 2010; loveless& field, 2009; lubienski, 2012; smith et al., 2011). in part, this is attributed to problems in robust research design, determining the appropriate comparative group with which to compare charter school outcomes, and whether student achievement can be attributed to innovative teaching practices, student selection, the culture of the school, or a combination of factors. in their review of research on u.s. charter schools, loveless and field (2009) revealed a large divide between advocates and critics of charter schools, with some researchers indicating positive effect, and some indicating negative effect. they concluded, “no matter where the evidence on charter school achievement eventually settles—positive or the politics of educational reform 115 negative--the effect will probably not be large” (p.111). they argued that the real debate about charter schools is ideological and “the empirical evidence on charter schools has not yet settled the theoretical arguments about their existence” (p. 112). ravitch (2010) contended “the enthusiasm for charter schools far outstripped research evidence for their efficacy” (p. 143). there have been few conclusive studies examining the effects of alberta charter schools on student achievement. in 2006 the ministry of education completed a study of the impact of charter schools.8 the results were used to inform a government concept paper in which they drew upon the major findings of the study to discuss their vision for the second generation of charter schools. with regard to student learning they stated, “overall, charter schools appear to have provided enhanced student learning outcomes as compared to similar schools and similar students enrolled in other jurisdiction types” (alberta education, 2009, p.1). in a study commissioned by the canada west foundation, ritchie (2010) discussed the findings of the government charter school impact study and the challenges of comparing the achievement of students in public charter schools that cater to certain kinds of students, with student in the regular public school system. the government study used charter school student achievement on the grade 3, 6 and 9 provincial achievement tests (pat), and compared them with control schools9 in the regular public and separate (catholic) schools in the district in which the charter school was located. the findings indicated that statistically, charter school students performed to an equivalent level or better than students in other schools, “however, there was considerable diversity in student achievement among charter schools” (p.15). for example, students in charter schools that catered to at-risk-youth and english language learners scored lower than students in charter schools for academically gifted. in the grade 6 pats in language arts, charter school students scored significantly better than students in control schools, while there was no significant difference in performance in mathematics. using the same process for grade 9 pats, they found charter school students scored significantly better in mathematics and language arts than their control group (p. 16). the charter school impact study concluded, “over a six-year period, these charter schools added significantly more value to their entering grade 3 students than did the schools into which the control students enrolled” (cited in ritchie, 2010, p. 16). johnson (2013) identified alberta's best schools using student results on provincial achievement tests in math, reading, science and social studies in grades 3, 6 and 9. in his analysis he compared students from public, private and charter schools where he controlled for observed student background (socio economic status). he categorized “good” schools as those where principals, teachers and staff were making a noticeably positive difference to student performance (p.1). his study of 800 schools revealed a disproportionate number of private and charter schools ranking in the upper echelons, and the gap between charter schools and all other schools as large and consistent across all three grades (p. 9). he reasoned this discrepancy may be attributed to charter schools selecting the best students and rejecting weaker applicants, hiring stronger teachers, and alignment of their mandates to the interests of families, and teachers who choose to work in these schools, thereby producing better results (p.9). conclusion it can be argued that charter schools have been a remarkable experiment in controlled choice in alberta and have gained their place as a permanent fixture on the public school landscape. with legislation permitting only 15 charter school authorities to operate at one time (though some have up to seven campuses), and an authorization process that requires applicants 116 global education review 3(2) to first approach local school boards to have their charter considered as an alternative program within their board, the ministry of education retains control over this quasi education market. these limiting factors have created enough pressure for local boards to be more responsive to parent demand and provide expanded school choice options in their districts. the limit on the number of charter schools has prevented them from gaining a critical mass sufficient to becoming a viable alternative stream within the public education system, or to providing a wide breadth of school-based innovative practices. that said, charter schools serve niche populations and offer a variety of educational approaches in novel combinations (differentiated instruction, inquiry-based learning, individual program plans, english language instruction); pedagogical orientations (suzuki method, aboriginal perspectives); and specialist focused programs (arts-based, science focused, traditional learning). they also provide programs for students under-served in the local public education system (gifted students, at-riskyouth, second language learners, and girls). perhaps the key success of charter schools is in providing choice for parents, where likeminded individuals have the opportunity to come together in a common purpose, providing an educational experience for children guided by a clearly articulated framework, as defined by the charter (bosetti, 2000; o’reilly & bosetti, 2000). in many cases charter school pioneers have “united in a voluntary association as a defense against what they perceive to be the tyranny of the unresponsive bureaucratic structure of public education and desire for a direct voice in how schools are run” (bosetti, 2000, p.180). they are bound by their perceptions of shared interests and mutual goals embodied in their active choice of schools (smrekar, 1996). this is reflected in high levels of parental satisfaction and steady demand for enrolment as evidenced by long waiting lists for some charter schools (alberta education, 2011b; bosetti et al., 2000). through the charter evaluation and renewal process some charter schools have undergone a subtle metamorphosis over time, increasing their focus on research-informed pedagogy and innovative teaching and learning practices (baydala, rasmussen, bisanz, kennedy, weigum, & worrell, 2009; pearce, crowe, letendre, letendre, & baydala, 2005; roessingh, 2012). however, u.s. researchers caution, innovation generated by competitive forces is often focused at a level or in areas least likely to improve equitable access to quality education, (linick & lubienski, 2012; smith, wohlstetter, farrell & nafack, 2011). what is significant in the alberta context is the nature of the innovation or change that charter schools provide (structural, operational or pedagogical) and whether that change can be scaled up and adopted in the regular public school context, or if it is most effective taken up in a school of choice that appeals to niche populations. charter schools, decoupled from market ideology, have a role in fostering innovative teaching practices and contributing significantly to the body of knowledge on teaching, learning, and leadership. in order to actualize this potential, charter school teachers, administrators, and directors require adequate government funding and support to engage in school-based action research and nurture sustainable partnerships with post-secondary institutions. a charter school superintendent argued they would benefit from a co-constructed “framework, developed by educational partners, with leadership from the [ministry of education] to support the research mandate.” charter schools adequately funded to engage in research could serve to inform exemplary teaching practices that enhance student success and foster meaningful, evidence-based professional learning for teachers (butterfield, 2013). the deeper understanding of teaching and learning that would emerge from these collaborative efforts would be determined within the parameters of each public charter school, bearing in mind the contextual variables that the politics of educational reform 117 define the uniqueness and ‘niche market’ for which each school is designed. elected officials and government managers need to coordinate purposeful, collaborative professional learning that draws together teachers, school leaders, directors, and parents from across the spectrum of public education, including separate school districts and charter authorities. with a singular objective of enhancing student success and providing opportunities for all students to thrive as ethical citizens and engaged learners with an entrepreneurial spirit, alberta charter schools may yet fulfill a dual mandate as schools of choice and centers of educational research and innovation. notes 1. market theory proposes that competition compels schools to become more efficient, differentiated, oriented towards academic quality, and consumer-driven in order to survive. 2. alberta is a province in canada with a population of approximately 3 million people. the largest urban centers are edmonton, the capital city, and calgary, an economic hub for the oil and gas industry. 3. charter school applicants must first apply to the local school board to be considered as an alternative program. only if the board rejects the proposal can the applicants then apply to the minister for approval. 4. this is based on 2014/15 enrolment data as reported in a personal correspondence with the director of field services, alberta education, july 10, 2015. 5. focus group interviews with charter school principals and superintendents, february 2015. 6. focus group interviews with charter school principals and superintendents, february 2015 7. focus group interviews with charter school principals and superintendents, february 2015 8. alberta education did not release the results of the charter school impact study csis), but reported on the findings in their concept paper. 9. ritchie (2010) reported the control schools used in the charter school impact study were “public or separate schools in the same district with the same, or very close, scores on grade 3 pats to the charter school. the purpose of the test was to see how charter students compared to academically equivalent achievers in differ schools in order to assess the ‘school factor” (p.15). references alberta education, (1993). charter schools: provisions for choice in public schools. edmonton, ab: policy and planning branch alberta government. alberta education (2009). charter school concept paper. edmonton , ab: alberta learning . retrieved from http://education.alberta.ca/media/6389633/abed_c harterschoolconceptpaper_web%20pdf.pdf alberta education, (2015). funding manual for school authorities – 2015-16 school year. strategic financial services sector. school finance branch. alberta education, (2010). inspiring education: a dialogue with albertans. a steering committee report to the honourable dave hancock, minister of education, april 2010.retrieved from https://ideas.education.alberta.ca/media/14847/ins piring%20education%20steering%20committee%20 report.pdf alberta education, (2011a). charter 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(1999). privatizing public choice: the rise of charter schooling in alberta. in t. harrison & j. kachur (eds) contested classrooms: education,globalization and democracy in alberta. edmonton: university of alberta press and parkland institute. knoll, m. (2014). laboratory school, university of chicago. in d. c. philipps (ed.), encyclopedia of educational theory and philosophy, ed. d.c. phillips. thousand oaks, ca: sage 2014. vol. 2. pp. 455-458. retrieved from http://mi-knoll.de/122501.html linick, m. & lubienski, c. (2013). how charter schools do, and don’t, inspire change in traditional public school districts. childhood education, 89 (2), 99-104. loveless, t., & field, k. (2009). perspectives on charter schools. in mark berends, matthew g. springer, dale ballou, & herbert j. walberg (eds.) handbook of research on school choice. 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(pp. 147-165). information age publishing. magurie, p. (2006). school choice in urban school systems: the edmonton experience. society for the advancement of excellence in education, kelowna, british columbia. o’reilly, r. & bosetti, l. (2000). charter schools: the search for community. peabody journal of education, 75(4), 19-36. pearce, m., crowe, c., letendre, c., letendre, m., & baydala, l. (2005). mother earth’s children’s charter school: imagining a new story of school. childhood education, 81(6), 343-348. ravitch, d. (2010). the death and life of the great american school system: how testing and choice are undermining education. philadelphia, pa: basic books ritchie, s. (2010). innovation in action: an examination of charter schools in alberta calgary, ab: canada west foundation isbn 1-897423-61-5 roessingh, h. (2012). family treasures: a dual-language book project for negotiating language, literacy, culture, and identity. focus on the classroom, 67(1), 91-122. shanker, a. (1988). national press club speech, washington , d.c. march 31, 1988 www.reuther.wayne.edu/files/64.43.pdf. scheurich, j. (1994). policy archeology: a new policy studies methodology. journal of education policy 9 (4), 297-316. schlechty, p. (2009). leading for learning: how to transform schools into learning organizations. san francisco: jossey-bass. smrekar, c. (1996). the impact of school choice and community: in the interest of families and schools. albany: ny: suny press. smith, j., wohlstetter, p., farrell, c. & nafack, m. (2011). beyond ideological warfare: the maturation of research on charter schools. journal of school choice: international research and reform, 5(44), 444-507. doi: 10.1080/15582159.2011.624938 taylor, s. (1997). critical policy analysis: exploring contexts, texts and consequences. discourse studies in the cultural politics of education, 18 (1), 23-35. walton, g. (2010). the problem trap: implications of policy archaeology methodology for anti-bullying policies. journal of education policy, 25 (2), 135-150. wells, stuart, a. (2009). the social context of charter schools. in mark berends, matthew g. springer, dale ballou, herbert j. walberg (eds.) handbook of research on school choice. (pp.155-178). new york, ny: routledge. isbnb0-203-88178-8 retrieved from http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&l pg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%2 0wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%2 0charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f =true about the author(s) lynn bosetti, phd is a professor in the faculty of education at university of british columbia. her research interests include school choice, charter schools and leadership in higher education. phil butterfield, edd is an assistant principal at connect charter school in calgary and sessional instructor at the werklund school of education at the university of calgary. his research interests include exemplary educational leadership and exploring the qualities of leadership that foster teacher professional growth and student success. http://www.reuther.wayne.edu/files/64.43.pdf http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&lpg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%20wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%20charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f=true http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&lpg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%20wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%20charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f=true http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&lpg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%20wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%20charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f=true http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&lpg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%20wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%20charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f=true http://books.google.ca/books?id=rxaoagaaqbaj&lpg=pa155&ots=fj6va509ef&dq=amy%20stuart%20wells%202009%2b%20social%20context%20of%20charter%20schools&lr&pg=pa155#v=onepage&q&f=true joint professional development for science and special educators 37 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: brusca-vega, rita, alexander, jan & kamin, colleen (2014). in support of access and inclusion: joint professional development for science and special educators. global education review, 1 (4). 37-52. in support of access and inclusion: joint professional development for science and special educators rita brusca-vega purdue university calumet jan alexander northeastern illinois university colleen kamin northeastern illinois university abstract collaborative professional development of science and special educators leads to improved access and inclusion of students with disabilities. yet, despite poor science achievement of students with disabilities, their increasing presence in general education science classrooms, and research that demonstrates effective teaching strategies for students with special education needs, there have been few reports of joint professional development in the literature. the purpose of the study was to examine changes in the teaching practices of science and special educators, grades 4 to 8, as they completed an intense year-long professional development program designed to promote hands-on, inquiry-based science in their classrooms and expand their instructional repertoires to better serve students with disabilities and other learning problems. quantitative and qualitative measures, including pre and post ratings of teacher classroom performance, action research projects, and teacher self-reports were used to determine changes in teaching practices. findings indicated all teachers showed improvement in the classroom on many elements related to classroom culture, instructional content, and lesson design and implementation, and the ability to adjust instruction. keywords joint professional development, collaborative professional development, teacher professional development, science teaching, disability, special education introduction the individuals with disabilities education act calls for students with disabilities across the united states (u.s.) to have access to the general education curriculum and to be reasonably included in general education environments corresponding author: rita brusca-vega, associate professor of special education, purdue university calumet, hammond, indiana. email: vegar@purduecal.edu mailto:vegar@purduecal.edu 38 global education review 1(4) with their peers (ideia, 2004). data from the u.s. department of education (2009a) indicate that students who receive special education services account for approximately 9% of the school-age population. roughly 80% of these students spend 40% or more time in general education classrooms, following a trend of increased inclusion. students with learning disabilities are most represented, but classrooms may also include students with intellectual disabilities, social/emotional disorders, sensory impairments, and physical or health disabilities. details about students with disabilities in science classrooms, including their number, type of impairment, and how they are served, are unavailable. we can infer, however, that most science educators instruct a small percentage of these students and, subsequently, are responsible for classroom accommodations and modifications as indicated on the individual educational plan (iep). we can also infer that science educators will serve more students with disabilities in the future, accompanied by an increased need for interaction with special education colleagues. in spite of greater inclusion in the u.s. and internationally, promoting the science achievement of students with disabilities has been largely overlooked. schuelka (2013) has pointed out that major international assessments, including the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss), actively exclude students with disabilities, a practice that serves to remove them from critical discourse on achievement and related educational policy decisions. the reasons for this neglect are, on the surface, easy to fathom. students with disabilities comprise a relatively small percentage of students in general education science classrooms. administrators, teachers, and parents may not expect these students to excel in science even under the best of circumstances. in addition, teaching basic literacy and math skills, managing behavior, and/or providing a life skills curriculum often takes precedence over content area instruction in subjects such as science and social studies. a deeper look at the importance of science education for students with disabilities, however, reveals that even benign neglect is damaging. data from the 2009 national assessment of educational progress show that the majority of students with disabilities, even with specified accommodations, fail to reach a basic level of science achievement, a situation that worsens substantially as students get older (u.s. department of education, 2009b). in the 12th grade, 75% of students with disabilities fell below minimum standards, up from 70% in 8th grade and 51% in 4th grade. comparable scores for students without disabilities were 38%, 34%, and 26% respectively in grades 12, 8, and 4, showing a similar but far less dramatic pattern. for college students with disabilities, roughly 11% of the undergraduate population in the u.s. (horn & neville, 2006), lack of science knowledge and skill leads to risk of academic failure and diminishes their chances of obtaining employment and succeeding in science-related careers. there are also negative consequences for students with disabilities who do not continue in higher education. lack of knowledge about science for daily living, such as eating for health and nutrition, conserving energy, and safely dealing with potential household hazards, has longand short-term implications on quality of life concerns including independent living, wellness, and employment. improving the science achievement of students with disabilities is a doubtful goal without the combined effort of science and special educators. science educators are the content and instructional experts in their subject area while special educators excel at using specialized and adapted techniques to suit the needs of individual learners across subjects. joint professional development for science and special educators 39 both types of expertise are needed to address poor achievement. in general education settings, simply including students with disabilities in science classrooms so they have access to the curriculum does not ensure that they will benefit from the content or the content expert. instructional and/or curricular adaptations, with which science educators may not be familiar or may be unable to implement alone, are critical to success. in special education settings, students may have teachers who possess sophisticated understanding of their learning and behavioral needs but have limited preparation in science content and pedagogy. it is the rare science or special educator who can increase science achievement in special needs populations without the benefit of shared knowledge and skills. joint professional development programs a search of the research literature for professional development programs that jointly engaged science and special educators uncovered a small number of studies conducted over the past 15 years. aspects common to all programs included a focus on instructional or curricular adaptations for students with either mild or more significant disabilities; practical, shared experiences with students with disabilities; and either the direct or indirect teaching of science content knowledge and instructional strategies (bargerhuff & wheatly, 2004; cawley, hayden, cade, & baker-kocznski, 2002; kirch, bargerhuff, cowan, & wheatly 2007; kimmel, deek, farrell, & o’shea, 1999; mutch-jones, puttick, & minner, 2012; van garderen, hanuscin, lee, & kohn, 2012). all but one program (i.e., mutch-jones et al., 2012) included a direct emphasis on science learning that was experiential, student-based, and reflective of national science education standards. kimmel et al. (1999), for example, involved teams in traditional content and methodology-based workshops about math, science and technology and in an intensive, interactive summer practicum with students with disabilities. cawley et al. (2002) required teams to participate in and prepare hands-on science learning activities during training and then return to their inclusive classrooms to apply an experiential science perspective along with a plan to enhance the science programs at their sites. bargerhuff and wheatly (2004) and kirch et al. (2007) provided intensive summer residential experiences for teachers where time was devoted to content on disability, adaptive technology, and standards-based science instruction followed by practical experience working with students with sensory and physical disabilities in lab environments and follow-up contact and support when teachers returned to their schools. van garderen et al. (2013) emphasized universal design for learning in a summer institute and practicum. teachers were required to examine barriers and solutions to accessibility and engage in a learning cycle model about science content that could be easily generalized to classroom practice. mutchjones et al. (2012), however, developed knowledge about science content and instruction informally through teacher discourse about science lessons rather than through direct instruction. in this program, the only report of a randomized control study, science and special educators were engaged in lesson study, a professional development methodology from japan that emphasizes a collaborative approach to planning and understanding lessons and anticipating student responses. content on learning disabilities was presented directly to teachers along with training on lesson study procedures. teachers practiced lesson study 40 global education review 1 (4) with summer school students and then continued with project support during the academic year. qualitative and quantitative data collected by program investigators in the above studies pointed to pre-to-post changes favorable to students with disabilities. these changes ranged from specific instructional practices and personal knowledge of teachers, such as switching from traditional assessment of science learning to performance-based measures (kimmel et al., 1999) and the ability to generate multiple accommodations for students with learning disabilities (mutch-jones et. al, 2012), to broader curricular and instructional practices such as implementing student-centered, inquirybased instruction within a co-teaching model (cawley et al., 2002). with regard to student performance, concept development was judged to be greater following the implementation of hands-on, inquiry-based science teaching (kimmel et al., 1999). in the cawley et al. (2002) study, students with behavioral and learning disabilities passed the district science test at the same rate as their classroom peers without disabilities and did not present behavior problems in the co-taught science classroom. in these studies, investigators also mentioned increases in teacher confidence in adapting instruction and willingness to persist in problem solving (e.g., bargerhuff & wheatly, 2004; kirch et al., 2007; kimmel et al., 1999) and transformations in many science classrooms, including the success of experiential science with students with autism (van gardener et al., 2012). concerns included the ability of teachers to continue to apply their new knowledge and skill in typical environments following the training (cawley et al., 2002; kimmel et al., 1999) and, in one study, the apparent lack of increased knowledge of science content and learning disabilities despite increases in the ability to adapt lessons (mutchjones et al., 2012). teaching science to students with disabilities information essential to building joint professional development programs comes from the growing body of literature on teaching science to students with mild disabilities. a number of studies have demonstrated that curricular approaches featuring hands-on and inquiry-based experiences, rather than traditional textbook or other approaches, result in superior outcomes for students with disabilities, presumably because barriers to reading are reduced, concrete experiences enhance conceptual development, and students benefit from discourse with their peers (e.g., aydeniz, cihak, graham, & retinger, 2012; lynch et al., 2007; mccarthy, 2005). an inquiry-based approach was also reported to be successful in inclusive science classrooms where science and special educators engaged in coteaching (brusca-vega, brown, & yasutake, 2011). another focus of research has involved adjusting science materials, curriculum, and instruction to better meet the individual needs of students with disabilities. successful adjustments have included teaching students to use various learning tactics such as strategic note-taking during science lectures (boyle, 2010) and graphic organizers for improving science vocabulary and factual comprehension (dexter, park & hughes, 2011); making changes to print material such as altering readability levels with technology supports (marino, coyne, & dunn, 2010); and using peer tutors in inclusive classrooms (mcduffie, mastropieri, & scruggs, 2009). for students with learning disabilities, the effectiveness of mnemonic instruction and structured inquiry-based environments was shown in a recent metaanalysis (therrien, taylor, hosp, kaldenberg, & gorsh, 2011). an instructional theme to guide joint professional development, based on conclusions by gersten and baker (1998) and joint professional development for science and special educators 41 scruggs and mastropieri (2007), is that improving science performance in students with disabilities can best be achieved by combining a special education oriented direct/explicit instruction model and cognitively-based approaches. purpose and context of the study using a mixed methods case study approach, we followed teachers during an intensive, year-long joint professional development program. we were especially interested in studying how the program affected two aspects of teacher change: specific classroom instructional behaviors and the ability of teachers to plan and execute interventions in an action research framework. the three-year funded project was conceived in response to a call for proposals by the illinois board of higher education to improve the quality of math and science teaching in the state. the goal of the learning together program was to enhance the instructional skills of science and special educators who, in turn, would improve outcomes for the diverse, urban students they served. four tenets support the philosophical framework of the program: (1) students with and without disabilities are responsive to instructional practices that are student-centered, experiential, cooperative, and differentiated to meet individual needs; (2) students with disabilities benefit from instruction in science and should have access to the general education curriculum and well-prepared teachers; (3) students with and without disabilities share commonalities in their learning difficulties, including problems with attention, memory, and language, and these commonalities should inform teacher practice; (4) curricular content and instructional delivery improves when science and special educators share their expertise. specifically, the program focused on shaping teacher practices to reflect (a) reformminded changes in science teaching beneficial to diverse learners, e.g., a student-centered, inquiry-based, experiential approach; and (b) the use of specific strategies and adjustments to meet the needs of students with mild disabilities. the design of the program was informed by research demonstrating key elements of effective professional development, including a focus on core content and modeling of instructional strategies, opportunities for participatory learning and collaborating with other educators, and embedded follow-up and feedback (see archibald, coggshall, croft, & goe, 2011). the program featured integrated science content, reform-based science teaching methods and special education instructional strategies; joint presentations and modeling by science and special education experts; applied classroom activities including action research projects; classroom consults; and planning time for science-special educator school teams. the action research component of the program was included as part of the applied activities to enhance teacher acceptance of and commitment to the program’s philosophy and to provide teachers with skills to address instructional problems. according to zeichner (2003), studies where action research has been used for professional development and examined systematically indicate that the process is transformative and energizing, making teachers proactive problem solvers and helping to create a culture of inquiry among participants. in this program, action research was introduced to teachers and then conducted as the culminating professional development activity with feedback and support from participants and project staff. participants recruitment recruitment efforts were directed toward chicago area school teams of science and special 42 global education review 1 (4) education teachers who served students in grades 4 to 8, including those with disabilities. school and teacher participation was voluntary. teachers received a stipend at the end of the professional development period, and their schools received funds to purchase science materials. the program was designed to include approximately five schools and twenty teachers each year of the three-year project period. schools and teachers across the three-year project period, sixteen k-8 schools from the chicago metropolitan area were represented in the program, including four schools that served only students with serious emotional and behavior problems. five schools served a predominantly african-american student body, five schools served a predominantly hispanic student body, and the remaining schools served an ethnically diverse population. the majority of schools reported that roughly 70% to 99% free lunch eligibility. a total of 58 teachers from these schools participated in the program. the group represented a wide range of ages and years of experience, from beginning teachers in their early 20s to seasoned veterans in their 50s. all but two of the teachers were appropriately certified for the grades and subjects they taught. approximately three-quarters of the group were female. caucasian teachers comprised approximately 65% of the group followed by african-american teachers at 20% and hispanic teachers at 15%. the number of teachers on a team ranged from two to nine, with most schools sending teams of four or five members. of the 58 teachers, 30 were general educators and 28 were special educators. approximately 20 of the general educators were assigned to mostly self-contained classes and were responsible for teaching science, math, and other subjects. of the remaining general educators, five taught primarily science and five taught primarily math in departmentalized settings. the majority of the special educators were involved in teaching science and math to students with disabilities in several ways. they taught small groups or individual students in self-contained and/or resource settings and/or acted as consulting teachers to general educators who had students with disabilities included in their classrooms. professional development providers and setting professional development activities were conducted primarily by university faculty and staff representing earth science, physics, chemistry, science education, and special education, with assistance from museum educators from sci-tech hands-on learning center in aurora, il and the shedd aquarium in chicago. all providers had extensive experience teaching pre-service and/or in-service teachers. activities took place at the museums, local schools, and the university’s professional development center. structure and content of the program during the school year, the teachers participated in a professional development course, which included the completion of action research projects, classroom consults, in-school team meetings, and cross-school meetings. during the summer, they participated in a four-day institute. professional development course instructional strategies for diverse classrooms was a three-credit hour graduate level course devoted to science content and process appropriate for upper elementary and middle school grades and to inclusive teaching methods. approximately ten broad topics were addressed throughout the course, each completed over one or two class sessions. topics included inquirybased instruction, differentiated instruction, waste reduction and the environment, properties joint professional development for science and special educators 43 of water, bio-diversity and water quality in the great lakes, magnetism and electricity, measurement and packaging, and the selection and adaptation of science curriculum materials. a unique feature of the course was the pairing of science content and inclusive teaching strategies within sessions, typically co-taught by a content expert and an instructional expert. for example, in the session on electricity and magnetism, the science expert led the teachers through an inquiry-based activity on electrical circuits followed by a review and clarification of concepts. the instructional expert then modeled how to facilitate understanding and retention of the concepts by using a re-tell strategy. in retell, students repeat their understanding of the concept to each other, usually in small groups or pairs, as others listen and provide corrective feedback. teachers then practiced this strategy and discussed how it could be used in their lessons. teachers were typically assigned homework that consisted of activities such as planning or delivering a lesson using the content and/or strategies learned in class. these were shared and discussed in sessions that followed. if the teachers did not possess the necessary materials for the lessons, they were lent or given to the teachers to use. the course took place over the academic year and consisted of 17 twoto-three hour sessions with the final three months devoted to supporting teachers in the development and implementation of action research projects. action research projects the last two formal sessions of the professional development course were devoted to providing an overview of classroom action research to teachers, presenting samples of action research conducted by teachers that appeared in the literature or had been completed by previous program participants, and discussing ideas. teachers had approximately three months to plan and complete the projects so that they could present their results at the final crossschool meeting of the academic year. written narratives of the projects were required to include descriptions of the problem, literature related to the topic, research methods and intervention, results and concluding remarks. teachers could complete individual projects or work in pairs or teams. depending on their topic of interest, teachers were paired with project staff who mentored them throughout the project development. these interactions occurred by e-mail and/or in-person at the local schools or the university center. other program components over the academic year, teachers were also engaged in in-school and cross-school meetings and classroom consults. teacher teams met at their schools at least twice monthly to engage in reflection about their instructional practices and student achievement. teams were required to set goals, write and submit summaries of their meetings, and keep track of progress on issues identified for improvement. teachers also met at the university center for cross-school meetings at least twice during the academic year so that teacher groups from different schools could share their perspectives and experiences. consulting services of science and special education experts were made available to teachers. for the first cohort, these services were provided only when teachers requested them and usually consisted of an observation of a science class by an expert and one or more consultation sessions. for the two remaining cohorts, based on feedback from the experts and teachers, consultations with science experts were required and a modeling component was added. for example, a science expert would make an appointment with a teacher and model a handson, inquiry-based lesson appropriate to the grade and curriculum, such as a lesson on 44 global education review 1 (4) surface tension. the expert would then consult with the teacher about how to develop these practices in his or her own teaching and act as a resource in the development of their action research projects. in the summer, a four-day institute was held at the university center and at participating museums. the institute served to reinforce and follow-up on course concepts and provide time for in-depth exploration of topics. topics included co-teaching and differentiating instruction. at the request of the teachers, sessions on hands-on math for middle school students were included because teachers were interested in incorporating more math into their science teaching to improve students’ ability to measure and interpret quantitative data. the institute included experiences to illustrate to teachers how local resources could be utilized to enhance science learning. for example, science educators at the shedd aquarium facilitated a water-testing activity for teachers in nearby lake michigan that teachers could replicate with their students. teachers also used time at the institute for reflection and planning for the upcoming year. sources and collection of data two primary sources of data were used to examine changes in teacher practice through a mixed methods case study. first, classroom observations were conducted to document changes in instruction. two formal observations of teachers in the first and second cohorts were conducted, one before and one after the professional development program. each observation was conducted over the course of the science period, usually 45 to 55 minutes. the observation tool used was an edited version of the reformed teaching observations protocol (rtop) (sawada et al., 2000). the rtop was chosen as a model because the items included desired instructional practices in science and math, including experiential and inquiry-based instruction, as well as instructional practices consistent with inclusive teaching, including student-centered learning and a climate of respect. items were rated on a scale of 0 (never occurred) to 4 (very descriptive or characteristic of the lesson). observations were conducted by a single observer who was prepared and monitored by the project’s evaluator using the rtop training guide. the observer, a retired, experienced teacher, described the lessons in narrative and then completed the numerical ratings. second, action research projects were collected and examined qualitatively for evidence of self-reported change in teacher practices and improvement in student achievement and/or behavior in the context of desired instructional practices listed in the rtop. additional sources of data included monthly in-school meeting summaries submitted by teacher teams, pre/post teacher self-reports on instructional and school practices, annual feedback surveys, telephone follow-up interviews with teachers conducted the year after teachers completed the program, and semesterly staff progress reports. these sources were examined throughout the project to respond to concerns and make improvements and to better understand the collaborative process of school teams, classroom and school changes initiated by the teams, and teachers’ personal perspectives of change. findings changes in teacher practices teacher classroom behavior observations conducted prior to the start of the professional development program showed several variables to be characteristic of the participants’ classroom instruction (average ratings between 3 and 4): a climate of respect, encouragement of active student participation, active engagement of students in the lesson, and teachers who showed a firm grasp of the subject area. other variables, including connecting joint professional development for science and special educators 45 lesson content to other disciplines or previous learning, having students make predictions and estimations, and allowing students to communicate their ideas in various ways were not commonly seen (average ratings between 1 and 2). observations conducted after the professional development program showed that lessons had changed to better reflect “reformed” instruction, including increases in teacher patience, lessons that involved fundamental concepts, and allowing adequate time and structure for varied learning styles. (see figure 1.) a two-way analysis of variance (anova) was conducted for each of the 19 variables to determine the effect of the program on the combined group of teachers and to determine differences, if any, between general and special educators. (see table 1). most notably, the analyses showed that teachers significantly improved their ability to teach in reformed ways on all variables with the exception of one, “connected lesson to prior experience”. this was also the only variable for which an interaction effect was found [f (1,30) = 4.70, p < .0382], with special educators making greater improvement than general educators. in post observations, the observer noted more examples of hands-on instructional activities such as experimenting with ways to extinguish fire, making dna models, and constructing circuits. this was especially true for special education classrooms. the observer also noted that teachers incorporated more collaborative learning into instruction and asked questions of students that required them to engage in more planning, executing, and explaining. fig. 1. pre and post teacher observation ratings on rtop items 46 global education review 1(4) table 1. anovas for pre and post teacher observations on rtop items item df ms f p classroom culture teachers acted as resource 30 17.73 17.57 .0002 teacher patience 30 10.76 37.15 .0001 active participation encouraged and valued 28 5.53 14.93 .0006 climate of respect 29 4.41 11.57 .0020 significant talk between students 29 7.34 5.00 .0332 teachers questions triggered divergent thinking 30 13.30 9.57 .0043 students communicated ideas in various ways 31 19.32 11.71 .0018 lesson content students were actively engaged 31 4.00 10.36 .0027 students made predictions, estimations, and hypotheses 26 7.66 4.36 .0466 students used a variety of means to represent learning 29 26.48 13.89 .0008 connections to other disciplines made 30 23.54 17.27 .0002 elements of abstraction included 30 13.15 16.65 .0003 teacher had solid grasp of subject 31 6.37 34.90 .0001 lesson involved fundamental concepts 31 9.81 20.11 .0001 lesson design & implementation adequate time, structure for various learning styles 29 13.18 18.93 .0002 ideas originated with students 29 12.35 8.32 .0073 concepts explained in more than one way 31 7.04 10.96 .0024 lesson designed to engage students as learning community 31 6.59 8.64 .0062 connected lesson to prior experience 30 4.24 3.84 .0593 teacher use of interventions the action research projects provide a deeper look at changing teacher practices. roughly two-thirds of the projects were completed by individual teachers with the remaining third completed by teams of two or three teachers. project topics included co-teaching arrangements between the science and special educator; increasing hands-on experimentation; creating learning stations; implementing selfmonitoring strategies to improve academic and social behavior; and redesigning a science unit to incorporate activities from each of the multiple intelligence areas (e.g., kinesthetic, musical, visual). in their reports, teachers demonstrated that they thought carefully about the relationship of student characteristics and instructional strategies and how the instructional environment could be manipulated for desired outcomes. the three examples presented here show how a special education teacher (crystal) began to use an experiential science approach to improve class grades and behavior; how a general education science/math teacher (diane) incorporated cooperative learning as a means to support student efforts; and how a science teacher and a special educator (gabriela and damaris) used collaborative joint professional development for science and special educators 47 reading and a note-taking strategy to support science literacy with an inclusive class of english learners. crystal’s project. crystal, a certified k-12 special educator, taught in a special school for students with severe emotional disturbance and was responsible for all subject areas for a small group of 7th and 8th graders. she taught science three days a week for one hour in her small classroom, which was not equipped as a lab. science was scheduled at the end of the day and she sensed that one of the reasons for poor behavior and grades in her class was a combination of fatigue and her traditional science teaching methods. she conducted a student survey and decided to make some changes: after providing a questionnaire, many of the junior high students found science to be boring compared to their other subjects. reflecting on the questionnaire, i agreed with them. although i could not change the other science classrooms, i began to think about the changes i needed to make. regardless of the exhaustion that sets in at the end of the day, it was my responsibility to spark their interest the whole day. … with the use of graphic organizers and highly structured handson experiments weekly, i hoped that my students would learn science is related to them and that science can be fun. my goal was for each student to decrease negative behaviors during science and change his/her perception of the class. with that, students would be able to actively be engaged in the class and their overall grade would increase. over the next quarter, crystal worked with her students on understanding scientific practices and conducting experiments. she divided the quarter into two-week mini-units and had the class select science topics and experiments. each unit included activities that linked the new topic to prior knowledge, reading and discussion about the topic, taking turns at leading activities, and hands-on experimentation. at the end of the quarter, crystal found that students earned 95% or more of their points for good behavior and academic work, up from approximately 75% from the previous semester in science. she was especially proud at the end of the unit when student surveys indicated that science had, in the words of one student, gone from “a crashing bore” to “fun and educational.” this project helped me see the things i needed to improve during afternoon instruction. …i learned that i did not have to work at a slow pace and that i needed to change my methods during science. i needed to provide my students the opportunity to act appropriately during experiments, as i provide a well-structured atmosphere. allowing the students to provide their input on what they wanted to learn also helped out. diane’s project. diane was an experienced 4th grade teacher who taught departmentalized math and science classes where students with disabilities were included. peer-assisted learning was not something that diane had incorporated into her teaching, so she chose to adapt a mini-unit on surveys and graphing that her previous students often had a hard time completing independently. diane divided the students into pairs, spent time teaching roles and responsibilities of partners, and gave 48 global education review 1 (4) students a concrete four-step process to guide them through the project. she was apprehensive about possible conflict between students and wasn’t sure what the students with disabilities would be able to add to the learning process: for the most part, my students are seated in groups, but don’t always have the opportunity to work together on a project, so this was a big change for them. right from the start the students were excited, especially when allowed to circulate among peers to survey and collect data. as i observed, i paid particular attention to my special education students. i was careful to select just the right partner for them, and watched to see they were given the same opportunities to complete parts of the activity that they would be capable of doing. recording tallies on the survey chart, filling in the data on the frequency table, coloring in the bars on the graph were perfect for them. they seemed to really feel as though they were being treated as equals, with equal responsibilities. it was great seeing such a high degree of team work and peer collaboration. project staff perceived diane as thorough and concerned but reluctant to try an approach where she would need to relinquish some control of the classroom. by the end of the unit, diane seemed much more comfortable with the idea that students could learn from each other and behave in responsible ways and planned to use more peer-assisted learning in the future: by day 3, the students had completed their graphs and were now able to write up their questions. the students were so interactive with this part of their assignment. they really put their “heads together” to come up with creative, challenging questions. …after the groups finished their questions, they were ready to test their peers. i assigned group pairings to avoid chaos. the two groups would then go off into a secluded part of the classroom and attempt to answer the questions. the groups then came back to share their answers. this was a sight to see. true peer collaboration was happening right in front of me. gabriela and damaris’s project. in this project, a science teacher and a special educator who were both spanish-english speakers initiated co-teaching and literacy strategies to improve the science learning of a 5th grade class of 31 english learners, including seven students with disabilities. the teachers received permission from the principal to re-arrange class schedules so they could co-teach and extend the usual 40-minute science period into a 60-minute period to provide more time for literacy instruction within science. they incorporated collaborative reading and a note-taking strategy in a co-taught unit on astronomy. instruction was conducted primarily in english with support in native language. reading materials were available in both languages. teachers took turns leading the lessons and working with students in small groups. adjustments for students with disabilities were made primarily for the end-ofunit presentations. peers assisted students with disabilities by acting as scribes and students were encouraged to make liberal use of pictures and captions during their presentations. scores on the unit assessment improved for all students. the teachers then presented their project and examples of student work to the rest of the school staff as a model for others. as bilingual teachers interested in supporting language as well as science development, they joint professional development for science and special educators 49 were especially pleased with increased student participation: we observed student interaction through the unit, and noticed that the levels of interaction for bilingual students with and without ieps increased noticeable. since the books were at their reading levels, and in some cases in their native language, these students were now able to fully discuss and participate in the discussions. their participation included illustrations, computer research, and so on. since this was based at their pace and level, the students were then able to research their topic and present their information to the class comfortably. other changes end-of-project self-reports by teachers indicated a greater repertoire of instructional adjustments that could be made for students with disabilities. teachers in the first cohort, for example, provided a limited list of adjustments prior to the project, consisting primarily of modifying tests, giving shorter assignments, and using peers. they ended the project with an extensive list of adjustments that included using technology (e.g., calculators, computers), incorporating pictures and visuals, breaking down concepts, allowing additional time for assignment completion, selecting reading materials at the student’s reading level (rather than grade level), and re-arranging instructional time for small grouping or one-to-one instructional time with the teacher. there was also evidence that teachers came to value collaborating with peers as a result of the project and increased their knowledge as a result of the interactions. prior to the project, teachers reported a low and/or inconsistent frequency of collaborative time for teachers of the same grade or subject area and few special educators reported being included in any collaboration activities. meeting minutes showed that most teams used their time to share experiences with new instructional techniques (e.g., selfmonitoring strategies, concept mapping), and/or solve problems related to one or more students (e.g., ideas for math manipulatives for a student with a learning disability). teams also examined general areas of concern or interest to teachers (e.g., what makes reading in science difficult? what comprises high quality instruction?), sometimes assigning a reading on the topic prior to the meeting for discussion. follow up interviews revealed that some teams and team members voluntarily continued to meet after the project period because of collaborative projects they had started to implement and because they found collaboration to be professionally and personally beneficial. conclusion and discussion the teaching practices of the science and special educators described in this case were positively influenced by the multidimensional year-long professional development process. first, teachers significantly improved their ability to teach in ways reflective of research-based and contemporary ideas about science instruction across the rating categories: classroom culture, content, and lesson design and implementation. yet, in each category, there were characteristics of reformed classrooms and teaching that, while improved, were not well-manifested. these included student-initiated ideas, student predicting and estimating, and student communication of ideas in a variety of ways. had program staff observed classroom teaching more often during the school year, these weaker aspects of the teaching and learning science environment might have been addressed by activities such as modeling or lesson planning. second, teachers showed that they could plan 50 global education review 1 (4) and implement interventions, including adjustments to instruction, for a diverse range of students. student achievement was not directly assessed in this project, but results of the teacher action research projects showed that newly implemented instructional strategies had a favorable impact on academic performance for students with and without disabilities. combining science and special educators appeared to help create an interactive environment that was mutually beneficial, with members of the school teams supporting each other in their endeavors. pairing content with differentiated instructional strategies and providing opportunities for hands-on practice and the exchange of ideas and experiences appealed to both groups: general educators seeking to address state standards with a diverse student population and special educators with responsibility for teaching the content themselves in self-contained settings and/or in collaboration or consultation with their general education counterparts. one challenge to the project was the lack of participation by school principals. an original intent of the project was to support long-lasting change by having school principals invested in this goal. they were informed about expectations for attending cross-school meetings and being an important part of the team, but few participated. most principals appeared to view the project as personal development for the teachers rather than as a way to affect schoolwide change. in follow-up interviews conducted with teachers, there was evidence of continued change in their practices but only a few examples of how the project had changed or benefitted the science, math, or special education programs across the school. these exceptions included two schools in which teachers reported initiating co-teaching as a regular practice in the science and math classrooms as a result of their experiences in the project, and one school where project teachers volunteered to be the first to pilot a district inclusion initiative. in retrospect, required introductory group meetings with the principals and district administrators responsible for science and special education services prior to acceptance of the school teams into the project may have maintained interest and helped principals see how the project goals might interface with school goals. having principals participate in the development of ideas for the action research projects may have been another way to influence whole school change. the dearth of joint professional development programs for science and special educator school-based teams is disappointing considering the positive changes that have been reported in this study and previous programs (bargerhuff & wheatly, 2004; cawley et al., 2002; kirch et al., 2007; kimmel et al., 1999; mutch-jones et al., 2012; van gardener et al., 2012). this is not to say that educators are intentionally excluded from professional development outside their respective fields, but that the focus of typical offerings is not on building a common knowledge and skill base. what seems critical to the development of a joint skill base is the opportunity to practice in typical environments and, especially, the opportunity to practice together. in this study, as in the cawley et al. and the mutch-jones et al. studies, the requirement that educators take what they have been taught and apply it in their science classrooms is an indispensable component of the change process. action research that is supported and shared in the school or district, and collaborative processes such as lesson study, appear to be viable choices for accomplishing change with joint audiences. an effective plan would harness the power of teaming in program delivery and participation and the power of collaborative applied practice. joint professional development for science and special educators 51 references archibald, s., coggshall, j.g., croft, a., & goe, l. 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[data files]. available from the national center for education statistics website, http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard. http://nces.ed.gov/nationsreportcard 52 global education review 1 (4) van gardener, d., hanuscin, d., & lee, e. (2012). quest: a collaborative professional development model to meet the needs of diverse learners in k-6 science. psychology in the schools, 49, 429-443. zeichner, k.m. (2003). teacher research as professional development for k-12 educators in the usa. educational action research, 11, 301-325. about the authors rita brusca-vega, ed.d., is associate professor of special education at purdue university calumet where she directs the online special education graduate program. she is a former special education teacher and is an active advocate for students with disabilities who are learning english as a second language. jan ledonne alexander, ph.d., is director of research & evaluation at the center for college access & success at northeastern illinois university in chicago. she is a former special education teacher and principal. her research interests include college access for diverse students and inclusive education. colleen kamin, ph.d., ltd. has been working in grant evaluations for twenty five years. she uses both quantitative and qualitative approaches. she is currently collaborating with northeastern illinois university, purdue university calumet, the chicago symphony orchestra, and urban gateways. prior to this work, she taught foreign languages in the chicago public schools. bruscavega_edits_mm mw 2 pg 37 bruscavega_edits_mm mw formatted 38-45 bruscavega_edits_mm mw formatted 46 bruscavega_edits_mm mw formatted 47-52 2015-2016 board of reviewers 167 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota abulraman alfaradi, university of tabuk, saudi arabia faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california anne marie connor, michigan state university mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york sefa dundar, abant izzet baysal university, turkey curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign 168 global education review 3(1) melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama william kyle ingle, university of louisville cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri emmanuel jean francois, ohio university yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york amy lachuk, hunter college, city university of new york jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india 2015-2016 board of reviewers 169 dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, indiana university south bend claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles maroun naser, stem academy, canada ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university gary peters, university of alabama salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york 170 gobal education review 3 (1) priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schittesser, university of vienna susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh 2015-2016 board of reviewers 1 2015-2016 board of reviewers 2 2015-2016 board of reviewers 3 124 global education review 2(2) 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, university of missouri-columbia marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom caitlin block, drexel university cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york ross collin, manhattanville college arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris david d. dry, asheville-buncombe technical community college nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college william dwyer, stephen f. austin state university, texas cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania huma zia faran, annual status of education report, pakistan dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign 2014-2016 board of review 125 melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom mark hamilton, education development center, united states helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york ravi kumar, davanagere university, india amy lachuk, hunter college, city university of new york jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma 126 global education review 2(2) dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university lawry v. mahon, victoria university, australia gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, indiana university south bend claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles maroun naser, stem academy, canada ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey mary-lou pagano, mercy college, new york melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york matthew reames, university of virginia 2014-2016 board of review 127 leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schittesser, university of vienna susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuth, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school good day john ezinwa silas, nnamdi azikiwe university, awka, nigeria kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand roseanne vallice, mercy college, new york karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york elaine marie walker, seton hall university sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark angela webb, louisiana state university steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh arlene zimny, mercy college, new york school choice in south africa 33 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ndimande, bekisizwe, s. (2016). school choice and inequalities in post-apartheid south africa. global education review, 3 (2). 33-49 school choice and inequalities in post-apartheid south africa bekisizwe s. ndimande the university of texas at san antonio abstract this paper examines the consequences of the new policies of school choice in post-apartheid south africa and the reasons they have largely failed to achieve greater educational equality – their stated purpose. i argue that the dominant reason for this lies in the continuing inadequate resources of many poor schools and the failure to address them. it draws on the perspectives of parents whose children attend schools in poor neighborhoods, known as the townships. i argue that the resource situation in these schools directly contributes to poverty in their children’s lives; further, the issue of resources is inextricably connected to the larger neoliberal agenda of privatization and markets that has influenced social policy in postapartheid south africa. neoliberalism in education has encouraged school choice as a way to desegregate schools and reform education. i conclude that instead it has continued the marginalization of black children in township schools, and adversely affects their future by limiting their educational opportunities and their right to quality education. keywords neoliberalism, post-apartheid south africa, school choice, township schools, educational equality, educational opportunity, privatization introduction the purpose of this paper is to examine how the lack of resources in township schools fails to redress the historical marginalization of children who attend these schools and makes it likely that these children will remain in poverty. in the south african context, township schools are an equivalent of urban schools in the u.s. however, they not are necessarily in large metropolitan cities as in the u.s. they are schools in large black urban areas and were grossly underserved and segregated by apartheid. they were greatly underfunded and their students were not given opportunities for quality education because of the color of their skin. i am mindful of the various conceptions of what may constitute urban schools in the u.s. (see milner, 2012). my definition of township schools in south africa is consistent with milner’s characterization of urban schools in the us: that of a deep connection with the large population of communities that share similar socio-economic and political contexts (milner, 2012). i argue that inequalities of resources ______________________________ corresponding author: bekisizwe s. ndimande, college of education and human development, the university of texas at san antonio, one utsa circle, san antonio, tx 78249 email: bekisizwe.ndimande@utsa.edu 34 global education review 3(2) among schools in post-apartheid south africa are related to the neoliberal policies adopted in the nation; primarily policies that promote school choice as opposed to addressing issues of resources in public schools. first, i discuss a brief history of education under apartheid, showing how it perpetuated poverty among black communities, including its youth. second, i draw on data from my previous research of school choices of black parents that examines their perspectives about the conditions and experiences of their children, who attend schools that lack adequate resources. they provide clear illustrations of how the lack of resources in black schools impedes educational opportunities for most black children. lastly, i situate these findings within the school choice policies of post-apartheid south africa and show how these have contributed to the perpetuation of poverty. manufactured social inequalities it would be difficult to discuss school choice in south africa without contextualizing it in the apartheid education system that spanned many decades. apartheid was a hegemonic government system designed to enforce racial segregation and the institutionalization of white supremacy (biko, 2002; lodge, 1983; marks & trapido, 1987; mothlabi, 1985). it legislated and enforced racial categories blacks, coloured, indians, and whites which were also stratified in terms of relations to the social structure. this racial classification guaranteed that white supremacy and privilege were maintained, while blacks, indians, and coloured people were treated as second-class citizens. this was the major factor that created and reproduced deepseated social inequalities among communities. one of the laws that (re)produced resource inequalities in township schools was the group areas act of 1952. this act enforced the residential segregation plan of apartheid. on one hand, the majority of black communities in rural and semi-rural areas were forcefully relocated to settlements known as the bantustans, which were arid areas where no industrial or economic activity took place. on the other, black communities in cities and suburban areas such as sophiatown in johannesburg and district six in cape town, were also forcefully removed and relocated in areas that became known as the townships. townships were state-controlled areas on the periphery of the cities. describing the rationale for this forceful removal and relocation, lodge (1983) stated that “johannesburg was proclaimed under the urban areas act: this meant residential areas were to be segregated and blacks (sic) living in predominantly ’white‘ (sic) areas were to be rehoused” (p.93.) seidman (1994) wrote the following about the creation of townships in south africa: by the 1960s, new black townships had been created on the edges of even small south african cities: whites lived near the city center; blacks lived on the edges, often near the industrial sites where they were expected to work (p.235). while this was the apartheid strategy for political control and oppression of black communities, it was also for economic control. as described by lodge (1983), “the group areas act extended residential and occupational segregation and threatened in particular those [non-whites] who owned property or operated business in a ‘white’ (sic) area,” p.42. thus the forced removal of hundreds of black families from economically thriving areas was one of the manufactured poverty crises in black communities that the country would witness for many years to come. under apartheid, education played a major role in creating social inequalities and poverty in black communities. hendrik frensch verwoerd, minister of native affairs in 1950 and school choice in south africa 35 prime minister in 1958, introduced the bantu education bill in the white-only parliament. verwoerd believed that black people should be subjugated through education to support the apartheid ideology. in analyzing bantu education, christie and collins (1984) assert that this system of education was by far the most repressive education system south africa has ever experienced: [it] stipulated that all black schools would have to be registered with the government, and that registration would be at the discretion of the minister. this measure enabled the government to close any educational programmes which did not support its aims…the act gave wide powers to the minister of bantu education, including control over teachers, syllabuses [syllabi], and any other matter relating to the establishment, maintenance, management and control over government bantu schools. (p. 171) christie and collins (1984) further explained that, by 1959, virtually all black schools (except for the few catholic schools) had been brought under the central control of the native affairs department and operated in accordance to the laws of bantu education. while the implementation of bantu education was mainly ideological, it was also economic. it systematically created social inequalities and poverty among the oppressed because it was designed to restructure the conditions of social reproduction of the black working-class, stabilizing a black, urban underclass of semi-skilled laborers in growing industrial cities (fleisch, 2002). in fact, kallaway (1984) argued that bantu education was aimed at shrinking the minds of black children by denying them intellectual challenges: like the segregated and inferior schooling before it, the new system was intended to prepare black children for subordinate positions that awaited them in such a way that they were appropriately equipped with limited skills as well as ready to resign themselves to their exploitation. (p. 94) through both explicit and hidden curricula, black students and teachers were coerced to become docile supporters and transmitters of the state ideology of social inequality (kallaway, 1984; nkomo, 1990). for instance, nkomo argued that bantu education’s aim was “to socialize black students so that they can accept the social relations of apartheid as natural. that is, to accept the supposed superiority of whites and their own ‘inferiority’” (p. 2). this was an ideological state apparatus (althusser, 1971) used to produce hardship and poverty amongst the marginalized communities. it is no surprise that black students had a disproportionately high dropout rate during this time. according to hartshorne (1992), in 1988 alone, 307,000 black students left school, having gone no further than grade four, and approximately 440,000 did not study beyond grade seven. these educational inequalities had a huge impact on the economic and social lives of these children, including the lingering poverty they endured during their adulthood. in the next section i discuss the education policy changes during south africa’s transition from apartheid to democracy. i argue that although the new democratically elected government had good intentions in their education reform policies, the school choice policy has unintentionally perpetuated educational inequalities among poor black communities, whose children attend township schools. school choice, therefore, has obscured the crucial need for the government to 36 global education review 3(2) address the challenges of inadequate resources in schools that serve communities who were historically marginalized. policy changes in post-apartheid south africa the post-apartheid government adopted a democratic constitution (1996) the purpose of which was to transform the long-standing social inequalities of the nation. it instituted sociopolitical and economic changes, including changes in education. since education was crucial (nkomo, 1990; samoff, 2001), the government introduced the south african schools act (sasa) of 1996 which was meant to repeal all forms of discriminatory education and address the needs of schools that were put in poverty by apartheid. the goal was to create a uniform and democratic school system. as samoff (2001) noted: "education had been at the center of the anti-apartheid struggle. its task, everyone agreed, was social transformation” (p. 25). while samoff’s argument is significant, it is important to note wong and apple’s (2003) reminder of the subtle state policy dynamics that can counter an intended goal, no matter how progressive the state’s intentions might be. as in many nations where policies for equality of education are being implemented, new challenges soon emerged. township schools, mostly in poor neighborhoods, that served black children remained entirely racially segregated and lacked educational resources (jansen & amsterdam, 2006; ndimande, 2006; vally & dalamba, 1999). the funding issue became problematic because the government policy to fund all public schools equally turned out to be unfair and biased against historically black schools. these schools were grossly underfunded under apartheid, while historically white schools enjoyed an abundance of resources, and these accumulated differences continued. several scholars (jansen & amsterdam 2006; moll 2000; motala, 2006) have argued that equal public funding of all schools does not necessarily correlate with equity in resources. even with the government’s recent “pro-poor” funding policy, (jansen & amsterdam, 2006; sayed & motala, 2009), inequalities in resources between formerly white-only schools and township schools persist. one may ask, why do educational resource inequalities persist when funding has increased for all schools? ladson-billings (2006) argued that inequalities are not eliminated just because money has been added. she stated that the deficit is so great that equalizing funding is not sufficient to make resources in schools equal. clearly, as i have shown in the historical context, township schools have accrued an enormous education debt which needs to be addressed if resource disparities are to be eliminated or even mitigated. in the south african context, wealthy suburban schools can obtain additional local funding that schools in poor communities cannot (motala, 2006). formerly white-only schools normally charge high school fees that white parents can afford to pay but most poor parents cannot (ndimande, 2006). in addition, they can organize massive fund-raising drives, where wealthy parents donate funds and other school materials, such as computers, printers, laboratory resources—including sufficient money to allow a school to hire additional teachers to cover areas not adequately covered by the full-time teaching staff. hence resources in these schools are abundant in comparison to township schools that charge low fees, and most of their students qualify for free tuition (ndimande, 2006). for instance, some formerly white-only schools in the gauteng province charged an average of r600.00 in tuition fees compared to the r60.00 tuition fees charged in township schools (ndimande, 2005). in addition school choice in south africa 37 there are non-tuition costs of participation in these suburban schools for example, the transportation costs parents have to pay for their children to go to wealthy schools in the suburban areas.1 these and other reasons have resulted in public schools that historically served black children to remain under-resourced, and as a result these schools did not desegregate (ndimande, 2005). while the government’s propoor funding policy intended to address these long-standing resource inequalities, this was limited by education policies that promoted parental school choice. put simply, the school reform policies did not mandate the desegregation of schools, nor did they focus on lack of resources schools in township schools as a priority. instead, education reform policies encouraged parental choice, a neoliberal policy in education reform. although the intention of choice was to encourage desegregation, no white parents chose to send their children to township schools (vally & dalamba, 1999). according to pampallis, (2003), approximately 28% of all south african schools were desegregated; most, mainly black schools, did not desegregate. as pampallis (2003) stated: most of the schools that remain uniracial are schools catering to africans in townships, informal settlements, and former homelands, largely because their paucity of resources makes them unappealing” (pp.153). on the other hand, while some black parents could afford to participate in school choice, there are many who are unable to do so because of their material conditions. neoliberal policies in education focus on consumer choice and competition among individuals and schools (lubienski, 2003). such policies pay little attention to questions of equal opportunity of parents to choose or of schools to compete because of issues of financial ability or lack thereof. hence school choice has obscured the difficulties faced by poor parents and by schools with inadequate resources. of course, this lack of adequate resources has effects on children. as bhorat’s (2004) study of labor market and unemployment trends in post-apartheid south africa shows, schools affected by lack of resources tend to produce poor academic results, which drastically diminished graduation rates. according to bhorat, the drop-out rate is high (47%) among black south african children who attend inadequately resourced schools. this, in turn, reduces their chances of entering college and lessens their opportunities to enter the skilled and white collar labor market. even more troubling is the increasing rate of unemployment amongst students from historically black schools. in the next section, i use data from my previous research to illustrate how inadequate resources in township schools that serve black children perpetuate child underperformance and poverty. i situate these inequalities within the broader neoliberal policies that promote school choice instead of fully addressing the problems in black schools. data from my previous research data from my previous research with black parents in the gauteng province of south africa illustrates school choice policy in that nation.2 historically, these parents were mandated to send their children to township schools. with the new political changes, these parents were now given options to choose their children’s school. the purpose of the study was to examine the parents’ perspectives about school choice policies and the reasons for their choice. most of the parents i interviewed endorsed school choice policies, because they wanted their children to access schools with better resources so they 38 global education review 3(2) could succeed in education. they believed that the success of their children in education would help them escape the poverty of the township. for this review, the data i use here come from working class black parents who told me they wished to participate in school choice but they were not able to do so because of their financial situation. gauteng province is one of the nine provinces of south africa. south africa has a population of approximately 51.8 million, and gauteng is the most populous province, with 12.3 million people (statistics south africa, 2011). it is one of the most ethnically and linguistically diverse provinces; it has mining and manufacturing industries and is a leading commercial and business center in south africa (statistics south africa, 2011).3 in fact, in south africa there is great economic disparity between black and white communities. according to statistics south africa (2014), poverty among black communities was at 40.3% compared to 0.4 among white communities. i interviewed a representative sample of parents with diverse socioeconomic, ethnic and linguistic backgrounds. i interviewed black parents who participated in school choice and those who did not; upper middle class black parents who lived in the suburban areas and those, mostly working-class, who lived in the townships. the sample of parents included a range of educational backgrounds, for example, there were parents who did go to college and parents who did not. the overall findings showed that parent’ choices about their children’s education and views of public schools are complex. the findings showed that the issue of insufficient resources in township school is an undeniable reality and is precisely the reason that all parents wished to engage in school choice for the sake of a better education for their children and their future. this was the overarching reason for working class township parents to wish to participate in school choice. school choice and black parents who live in the townships the majority of the parents who live in the townships that i interviewed did not participate in school choice because of their adverse material conditions. transferring their children to formerly white-only schools in suburban areas costs money, which most of these parents cannot afford to pay. as i discussed in the beginning of this article, the socio-economic conditions in the townships are characterized by social and economic disparities and hardships. recently, there has been increasing unemployment and the first communities to be affected were the townships (statistics south africa, 2014). this phenomenon, of course, is connected to the fact that township schools cannot provide quality education so that the children can have a chance for social mobility. of the township parents i interviewed, very few were employed, and very few were in professional careers. the parents’ household income was minimal. the majority of those employed worked in factories and/or as domestic servants for white families in the suburban areas. in addition, the high unemployment rate meant most parents could not afford to buy an automobile. only thirty three percent of the participants in this group owned automobiles, which in itself is a measure of their low socio-economic status.4 overall, parents in this group represented the typical township socio-economic situation, which is characterized by overwhelmingly poor living conditions, including a high unemployment rate, at 48%, and a low educational attainment of only 20% with high school diploma. school choice in south africa 39 table 1 type of employment number percentage teacher 6 15.38% factory worker 4 10.26% domestic worker 3 7.69% unemployment 19 48.72% other 7 17.95% total 39 100.00% table 1. employment of township parents interviewed. table 2 educational level number percentage university degree 1 2.56% teacher training diploma 2 5.13% high school diploma 8 20.51% secondary education 16 41.03% elementary education 12 30.77% total 39 100.00% table 2. educational attainment of township parents interviewed. table 3 car owners number percentage own car 13 33.33% no car 26 66.67% total 39 100.00% table 3. car ownership among township parents interviewed. teacher 15% factory worker 10% domestic worker 8% unemploye d 49% other 18% university degree 3% teacher training diploma 5% high school diploma 20% secondary education 41% elementary education 31% own car 33% no car 67% school choice in south africa 40 here is a representative sample of the most important things they said. mama nontokozo,5 was born in the township and has three children enrolled in a township school. she said she was not able to engage in school choice because of her financial constraints. she complained about the problem of resources in township schools: we [in township schools] don’t have resources--we don’t have computers. we need resources so that we don’t have to wish to send our children to formerly white-only schools. mama tsidi, who also has 2 children who attend township schools, said: [one] thing that i noticed is the lack of a feeding scheme [in our township schools]. [i know that] children study well on a full stomach and they get motivated to go to school because they know they will get food, too…there are no such facilities for feeding schemes in township schools.6 mama sindiswa said: there is no transportation for children who live far from schools, especially in bad weather. [because of the lack of transportation] small children may be subjected to abuse, especially those who live in far-away sections [of the township]. some parents said they could not participate in school choice. mama zodwa, an unemployed working class mother, is one of them. this is what she said: we do not have money to afford formerly white-only schools. we are unemployed, that’s the reason we do not send our children to formerly white-only schools in the suburban areas. baba dube, one of the few fathers in the interviews, has 3 children and has been unemployed for many years. he said he lost his job when most companies left south africa just before independence in 1994. he said: yes, we wish we could send our children to formerly white-only schools too, but only if we can get jobs and the money. mama vuyisile agrees. she is one of the few parents who is employed but says her salary is so meager that she cannot afford the cost of transferring her children to schools outside the township: it is the same with me, i agree with this brother here, my neighbor. the expenses of sending children to formerly white-only schools are too high for people like us who get less than r2000 a month.7 we don’t have the [financial] power to do that. we could be happy if they [the government] can devise plans so that we, too, could send our children to formerly white-only schools. mama nandi, like most of her neighbors, is unemployed. she echoes others: i would like to send my children to formerly white-only schools, but i don’t have the money, i am unemployed…formerly white-only schools have a much-improved education [because of resources]; it is just the money problem on my part. otherwise i would transfer my children to formerly white-only schools. … [these] schools are very expensive…there is no work and no money…[the] economy is bad…[even] if i had money for school fees [meaning tuition], i wouldn’t be able to afford money for transportation. mama monki, who is employed at a local grocery store where she earns a meager salary to supplement her husband’s income, said: i don’t like the school where my child is currently enrolled—a township school. it is just because i don’t have the money to school choice in south africa 41 send my son to a formerly white-only school. when i asked parents if somebody were to give them money, would they consider sending their children to formerly white-only schools, mama sego said: “we would be very happy if we can get the money to send our children to formerly white-only schools. i would transfer my kids to a formerly white-only school the next day.” mama mapule, who has been sitting quietly in the group said: “ohh yeah, if i had money, i would definitely send my children to a formerly white-only school.” however, there were also parents who, albeit wishing their children to go to formerly white-only schools if they were to get the money, were also critical of biases in formerly white-only schools, including cultural biases. this what mama viki said: i would like to send them [my children] there, but i don’t have the money. but also i am ambivalent about sending them to formerly white-only schools because if you send them there, they might lose [our] culture. some parents said that the uneven resource availability between white and black public schools needs to be addressed. mama thoko said: i would like to send them there, but i am also wondering why can’t they [the government] bring better education here in the township, too”. mama nozipho shared the same sentiments: i would like township schools to match up the level of schools in town [meaning suburban areas]. curriculum 2005 is a promise so we might level up things. then there won’t be any reason to transfer children to formerly white-only schools. discussion it is clear from the statements of the parents that a major issue that impedes the education of their children is the lack of sufficient resources in black schools. their narratives help us to see the contradictions in policies that were meant to ameliorate education inequalities. they show that school choice as a policy does not help their children out of the inequalities and poverty that was inflicted upon them by the apartheid system. school choice is a problematic neoliberal policy that does not address the larger and deeper problems of poverty and social inequalities among the dispossessed groups. i now contextualize the parents’ narratives within three inter-related neoliberal functions that affect education reform in south africa and in other countries. the first context is the international trends in politics that influence neoliberal social policies. the second, is the role of neoliberal policies in post-apartheid south africa and the influence of school choice on education. in the third, i discuss the underlying philosophies that undergird school choice policies and how they impede democratic reforms and their effect on marginalized and poor communities. international trends in education reforms to understand the south african education reform policies, one must situate the discussion within emerging trends in international politics. south africa is not immune to international contexts; some of our educational reforms and curriculum policies after 1994 for example, the outcomes based education curriculum—were largely due to the influence of countries such the united states, britain, australia, and new zealand (jansen, 1999). in addition, the department of education relied heavily on 42 global education review 3(2) overseas consultants to guide education policy reforms. as jansen (2002, p. 204) noted: the role of american william g. spady cannot be underestimated in providing to the department of education a neat and elegant language for making the consumption of obe accessible to practitioners. overseas consultants played a crucial role in developing options for the financing of public education. the role of international consultants is particularly revealing of how international specialists come to influence local policy. christopher colclough and paul bennell were the two influential finance specialists influencing school funding policy.8 hence, some parts of the educational reforms were very much associated with and influenced by the international discourses of economy, race, culture, gender, class, and politics. the economic front in south africa is associated with global economic institutions such as the world bank (wb) and the international monetary fund (imf), with goals related to "assimilation" to the global economic culture, rather than policies that address local economic problems within the local contexts. in fact, giroux (2008) pointed to even harsher realities of the impact of the wb and imf on other nations, particularly poor nations: the restrictions that the imf and world bank impose on countries as a condition for granting loans not only impose capitalist values, they also undermine the very possibility of an inclusive and substantive democracy (p. 4). in the south african context, devan pillay (2002) lamented the following: the [south african] government has to please a range of interests, including its working-class mass base, the emerging black elite, predominantly white big business and its allies, and the global investment community. like other centerleft parties, the anc [african national congress] has found it difficult to avoid the allure of the global economy, and the logic that all economic and social policy has to be subordinated to the need to attract foreign investment to build the economy (p. 24). brock-utne (2000) criticized the policies of the world bank and the imf in the global south.9 she argued that the economic structural adjustment programs (esap) introduced in these countries have done more harm than good. both the wb and the imf supported and promoted the esap. brock-utne (2000) argued that the esap has been presented as a medicine to african countries’ problems, not as the cause of the problem. we [the people of poor countries] are always told that the esap were for the best economic growth in african countries. we are also told that the esap are intended to enhance export growth and subsequently the growth of the entire nation. yet it is also important to remember that the 21st century socio-economic problems of the global south do not exist in a socio-political vacuum. they are connected to the history of colonialism and imperialism of the past centuries.10 neoliberal social policy in post-apartheid south africa a question needs to be asked: how is it possible that a nation like south africa, just emerging from apartheid, associates itself with neoliberal ideologies in its reform policies? bond (2005) argued that even before the dismantling of apartheid, the south african economic landscape had drastically shifted from what he referred to as a popular-nationalist, antiapartheid project, toward the global economic framework largely influenced by the world bank school choice in south africa 43 and the international monetary fund.11 this economic shift subsequently influenced the country’s social policy toward neo-liberalism (bond, 2005; desai, 2002; garson, 2002; gumede, 2005; monbiot, 2004; pillay, 2002). for instance, at the initial stages of the democratic government in 1996, post-apartheid south africa adopted a neoliberal policy called growth employment and redistribution (gear) as the country’s economic policy. according to gumede (2005), this policy recommended the complete privatization of non-essential state owned corporations. this exacerbated the economic hardship of most marginalized and poor people, especially those living in the townships. for instance, when water was privatized, the effects were soon felt when the water rate was increased in the township of soweto (garson, 2002; monbiot, 2004). water supply was cut off for most of the residents whose bills were not paid. although this economic policy was reformed in 2005 and renamed the accelerated and shared growth initiative south africa (asgisa), the underlying tenets of neoliberalism are still its guiding principles. the effects of neoliberal ideology on social policy were soon noticed in education as well. in an article titled “the education business: private contractors in public education,” pampallis (2004) pointed to the white paper of 1987, which allowed the government to engage external educational agencies to undertake tasks previously performed by the national education department. although in 1987 this outsourcing of government responsibility was on a small scale, the role of non-governmental agencies to provide service in the education sector increased after 1994. as john pampallis (2004) stated: after 1994—for reasons different to those put forward in the 1987 white paper…government increasingly engaged external educational agencies to undertake a growing range of tasks previously conducted by the education department or not done at all. these agencies included a variety of education ngos…parastatal organisations such as the human sciences research council (hsrc) and the council for scientific and industrial research (csir), a growing number of new forprofit educational consultancies, individuals operating as educational contractors and university academics. they also included large multinational consultancy companies…contracts are usually given through the process of competitive tender which treat the various agencies on a more or less equal basis (p. 422). the issue of school choice and the insufficient resources in poor schools should be viewed within this public/private nexus. the main agenda of neoliberalism is the privatization and marketing of the public sphere so that individuals must compete for their own social mobility and success (apple, 2001; ball, bowe, & gewirtz, 1994; chomsky, 1999; mcchesney, 1999; lauder & hughes, 1999; whitty, power; & halpin, 1998). it is claimed individuals will be rewarded according to their ability (gillborn & youdell, 2000) to compete in the “free and neutral” terrain called the market. this theory dates back to the writings of theorists and philosophers such as john lock and adam smith, who argued that the market forces will bring prosperity, liberty, and democracy, if unfettered by government intervention (chomski, 1999; eitzen & zinn, 2012; giroux, 2008). as giroux (2008), argued, the neoliberal ideology allows a handful of private interests to control much of the life possibilities of those who are socially marginalized. neoliberalism does not consider the unequal social field of power in which this competition takes place. nor does it recognize 44 global education review 3(2) the historical social exclusions by which the marginalized groups have been disadvantaged. in fact, mcchesney (1999) argued that neoliberalism across the world is opposed to participatory democracy, and helps to create individuals who feel demoralized and socially powerless. for neoliberals, as pointed out by apple (2001), “public institutions such as schools are “black holes” into which money is poured—and then seemingly disappears—but which do not provide anywhere near adequate results” (p.38). such ideologies put lots of pressure on institutions supported by public funds, calling for reductions of support for the common good. the politics of school choice milton friedman, an economics professor at the university of chicago, published an influential essay in 1955 in which he argued that, in order to improve public education, government should not be involved in the running of the schools. instead, the government should only provide funding for education and then allow private agencies to run the schools. friedman’s ideas became popular and have since influenced a number of policy makers and some parts of government.12 chubb and moe (1990) have advanced similar arguments. like friedman, chubb and moe believe that public schools could be run efficiently if handed over to private agencies. they argue that public schools lack strong organizational structures, which is the result of government intervention and people in government who profit from public schools. for the proponents of this discourse, providing school choice to parents is the best way to access better education, where children and parents can become consumers in the education market. as a result of this influence, school choice is rapidly expanding as an education policy to reform public schools in many nations around the world. see, for instance, espínola (1993) for school choice policies in chile; ndimande, (2005, 2006); pampallis, (2003) in south africa; corwin and schneider, (2005); lipman, 2011, 2013; lubienski, (2001; 2003); miron, et al (2012) in the united states; lauder and hughes (1999) in the united kingdom; whitty, power, and halpin, (1998); in england, wales, sweden, australia, and new zealand; windle, (2013) in australia; and yoon (2013) in canada. while this policy is growing in many nations, it is also criticized for its contradictions that (re)produce education inequalities. miron and welner (2012) stated the following: the allure of school choice is, in part, ideological. but the allure is also linked to a very real problem: there exists tremendous variation among neighborhood schools in terms of quality and resources, and access to those neighborhood schools depends on wealth. lower wealthy families are less able to purchase a residence in the catchment (enrollment) area of high resource, high quality neighborhood schools. breaking the link between residence and school assignment would seem a logical way of addressing this problem. p1. proponents of school choice, on the other hand, argue that choice will give parents control (in terms of decisions) over particular schools to the benefit of their children’s education (chubb & moe, 1990). they claim that, in contrast to the traditional public schools where elected politicians have control over education policies, parental control in the form of market-driven schools will make the education system successful.13 this neoliberal agenda for education reform has paved the way for the establishment of private charter schools in the u.s. (i.e., for-profit schools) and public charter schools (i.e., supported by public funds) to compete with traditional public schools (sarason, 1998). school choice in south africa 45 school choice proponents believe that a market-oriented approach will benefit schools and reward parents who could compete “on the level playing field” in which the choice system should operate. this includes competition between schools through national testing systems, national curriculum standards, and the relaxation of certification requirements for teachers (ball, s. j., bowe, r.; & gewirtz, 1994; lauder & hughes; mcneil, 2000; zeichner & ndimande, 2008). however, lubienski and ndimande (2014) offer a counter argument. they argue that school choice and competition are not effective remedies for the intractable social and educational challenges in the 21st century, over which parents have little control. lubienski and ndimande argue that nations with a history of deep-seated institutionalized racial divisions and social inequalities, have seen such policies operate in both intended and unintended ways. school choice takes away the support for the common good and replaces it with competition to get into better schools. since school choice is a competition, it ultimately protects the interests of the wealthy communities and neglects the poor; as is evident in this context where the most affected schools are those that serve black children in township schools. the notion that public education is bad and private is good has been challenged. in the u.s., for instance, research shows very little evidence that school choice or charter schools increase students’ educational outcomes, including the positive social effects of alternative education. in fact, evidence shows the opposite. lubienski and lubienski’s (2014) study shows that public schools actually do better than private and/or charter schools. further, they provide valid criticisms regarding the ability of schools of choice to engineer their criteria for admission, which can have the effect of excluding children by social class, ethnicity or various special needs, and by poverty. social inequalities can be reproduced through such school admission policies. conclusion according to chomsky (1999), “neoliberal doctrines, whatever one thinks of them, undermine education and health, increase inequality, and reduce labor’s share in income” (p.32). statistics for south africa (2014) reports that the relationship between population group and poverty levels is strong, with more than half (54%) of black south africans living in poverty. this can [re] produce poor living conditions for township communities. as i have shown in this article, such poverty-producing conditions are exacerbated by the lack of adequate resources in township schools. although i am critical of the school choice policies that have marginalized the poor people of south africa, i also want to point out the glimmer of hope in this new democracy. reversing long standing policies of racial discrimination that have brought poverty to more than half of the population is a daunting task. although the school choice policy has resulted in unintended inequalities, there are also policies that have been successful in ameliorating inequalities. for example, the children’s rights act of 2008, which has brought back the rights of township children and families that were denied in the past, particularly the rights for provision (swadener & ndimande, 2014). the effort to desegregate schools was a partial victory in the struggle toward equal educational opportunities. but it was susceptible to subtle hegemonic tendencies. apple reminds us (2003) that the processes of discursive and social disarticulation and re-articulation of power partial victories like the desegregation of public schools can be pulled back so that their critical potential gets lost. the creation of the "common sense" around markets and individual success can work in retrogressive ways in which social inequalities are (re) produced, as school 46 global education review 3(2) choice seems to be producing an unintended result in south africa.14 notes 1. i want to thank jonathan jansen who brought this point to my attention. 2. for a detailed discussion of black parents and school choice in post-apartheid south africa, see ndimande (2005). 3. the (johannesburg) sunday times metro newspaper (march 2, 2003) reported a massive influx of families with their children from other parts of the country to gauteng province in search of better economic opportunities. most of these families settled in the township areas. in spite of gauteng being the center of business and industrial manufacturing, the township areas where black people live experience high rates of poverty and unemployment. 4. see tables 4, 5, and 6 for specific statistics. all these statistics are of self-report. 5. all names are pseudonyms 6. although, recently township schools in south africa have started to receive public school feeding schemes under the national school nutrition program. see weaverhightower & robert (2011) 7. the currency exchange rate between the us$ and the south african rand (zar) is approximately 1 usd=r13.97 in september 2015. 8. i am very appreciative of the immense contributions by international researchers and scholars toward the improvement of socio-economic and educational conditions in south africa and in other sub-saharan countries. i am simply raising a point of how the international context and influence has also played a role in shaping local social policy. 9. according to the center for global south at the american university, the global south includes the nations of africa, central and latin america, and most of asia. these are nations who are prone to political, social, and economic challenges, including poverty. accessed, june 6, 2015: http://www1.american.edu/academic. depts/acainst/cgs/about.html 10. walter rodney’s (1972) discussion of this phenomenon is helpful in understanding this socio-political and economic history of the global south. 11. bond (2005) in particular, provides a historical and insightful analysis of these economic policy changes from apartheid to democracy, especially the introductory chapter, dissecting south africa’s transition. 12. see pauline lipman’ (2011; 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(2008a). contradictions and tensions in the place of teachers in educational reform: reflections on teacher preparation in the usa and namibia. teachers and teaching: theory and practice. 14(4), pp. 331-343. about the author bekisizwe s. ndimande, phd, was educated under apartheid education in south africa. he is currently assistant professor in the department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching at the university of texas at san antonio. he is also a fellow at the forum on the future of public education. dr. ndimande’s research interest is in the fields of curriculum studies, educational policy, international and comparative studies, and critical multicultural education, with specific focus on south africa. http://forum.illinois.edu/ http://forum.illinois.edu/ 203-826-3 copy edit-final mw-1 203-826-3 copy edit-final mw-1 no footer transitions between art and pedagogy 39 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: malmberg, isolde (2017). transitions between art and pedagogy: mentoring music teacher novices in austria. global education review, 4 (4), 39-53. transitions between art and pedagogy: mentoring music teacher novices in austria isolde malmberg the rostock university of music and theatre, germany abstract teacher education in austria is currently undergoing a fundamental reform process. investigations into teachers’ first experience in school indicate that the transition from university life to professional life is not smooth for teachers. in the arts, the adjustment seems to be even more complex (de vugt, 2013). artistically well-trained university graduates seem to have difficulty in applying their knowledge and artistic skills. career crashes and a shortage of music teachers in austria are some of the consequences (bailer, 2009). recently i commenced the grounded theory study, mentoring in music, investigating how mentors act in the induction phase, as well as how mentees cope with it. narrative interviews beyond mentors and mentees, expert interviews, as well as group discussions with mentor teams, show that mentoring in music education has to find ways to support trainee teachers’ transition between art and pedagogy since they are two fundamentally different practices (benner, 2001). in this article, i present and discuss two main results of the study: first i show the multilayered status passage (glaser & strauss, 1971) that music teacher novices move through from their identity as music students to their identity as music teachers in schools. second, i suggest and discuss four types of music teacher novices who cope with this status passage in music education differently and how they can be supported by mentors. keywords status passage, praxeology, mentoring in music, music teacher novices, music teacher training introduction the needs of a new music teacher are broad and complex. over the course of the teacher novice’s first year – the induction phase – mentors will find themselves responding to a range of issues. many are developmental and will change during the year. mentors need to be familiar with what the new teacher is likely to be concerned about and struggling with. this chapter introduces the social field of music teacher novices in austria. the purpose is to make explicit the transition from being a student at the music university to being a qualified music teacher, to identify essential elements of this transition and how mentors can anticipate stages of development and provide support to the types of trainees. by aiding mentors general understanding of the mentees’ transition, it is hoped that they will be able to identify the individuals’ key needs, and be in a position to provide effective support through what is a challenging time for most music teacher novices.1 ______________________________ corresponding author: isolde malmberg, professor for music education/music didactics, the rostock university of music and theatre, beim st.-katharinenstift 8, 18055 rostock, germany. email: isolde.malmberg@hmt-rostock.de 40 global education review 4(4) context and starting points music teacher training in austria: high artistic standards in quest until very recently (2015/2016) music teacher training for secondary schools in austria took place at two different kinds of institutions, preparing teachers for two different kinds of secondary schools. music teachers for gymnasiums2 were trained at music universities. music teachers for hauptschulen3 were trained at graduate schools of education. thus, a two level teacher education system exists as well as a two level school system; students either attend a university or a graduate school of education. with respect to learning outcomes and study programmes, the profiles of music universities and graduate schools differ remarkably. for example, in terms of entrance requirements, whilst the artistic requirements at music universities are very high, at graduate schools of education musical skills were barely noticed – pedagogical aspects were emphasized (cf. menet project group, 2009). recently, huge political effort has been put into merging the two teacher training systems for all school subjects (bmukk, 2010). interestingly, when it came to the arts, this merger was not at all a balanced one but was a clear turn towards the standards of the arts universities. as a result, in the future, high artistic standards will dominate the austrian curricula, not only for university graduates, but for all music and arts teacher training programmes. there are positive and negative aspects to this: of course, it seems very useful for future music teachers to receive excellent voice training as well as instrumental instruction – and this training taking place at music universities would stress the quality of the artistic aspect. on the other hand, we know that artistic training is not at all a guarantee of successful music teaching in schools. quite a number of experts in the field even claim that the music teacher should be a teacher in the first place, and not a musician or even an artist (cf. among others bouij, 1998; bernard, 2004; de vugt, 2013). aside from the austrian reform process that renewed questions about requirements for standards regarding teachers’ artistic capabilities, another fact concerns educators in austria: there is an increasing dearth of music teachers. only about two third of the graduates of teacher training programmes at music universities actually start their teaching career, and quite a number of the novices leave school within their first few years of teaching. what is the story behind this? it seemed reasonable to me to examine the status quo of the current music teacher training systems at music universities. i decided to take a deeper look into a crucial period: the induction phasethe passage from university to school-in order to propose a subject-oriented (musical/artistic) view to a great number of non subject-oriented research that is done in austria and the germanspeaking countries at the moment (cf. among others beer et al., 2014; müller, 2010; for overviews: böhner, 2009; czerwenka, 2011; european commission, 2010). until now, in austria the induction has been organised as a one-year school internship after five years at a music university. during this year the novice music teacher leads one class in each of his two school subjects and is mentored by two experienced teachers in each of his/her subjects. the music mentors are group of experts who work closely with the university staff; the interlinking of didactics and school internship characterizes this period. the mentoring programme follows in large part the empowerment approach (cf. arnold et al. 2011) and forms of collaborative coaching (dunne & villani 2007). in this chapter, i argue and present evidence that music teacher novices graduating perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 41 from austrian music universities (i.e., the artistically highly trained ones) suffer from a quite specific clash. this clash derives from the fact that – following the concept of praxeology (benner, 2001) – two different practices are at stake: the practice of art that predominated their studies and the practice of education that dominates school life. next to the well-known ‘praxis shock’ (german: praxisschock) that all novice teacher experience to some degree (cf. van felden & schiener, 2010), the novice music teacher has to deal with the fact that the two practices are rarely inter-related. in the coding paradigm of my qualitative study the most noted category turned out to be: insufficient transfer of the artistic into pedagogical everyday work. benner’s praxeology so, in what way is the concept of praxeology helpful to us? if we observe everyday life (for example at work, at a hospital, a sports gymnasium or at school) we observe a certain social order. these regularities are grounded in implicit rules, in normative behavioural requests or in explicit regulations. we can call these orders practices. practices are performed collectively. social order is organised by these practices, and depending on our experiences we more or less know how to act accordingly (cf. reckwitz 2003, building on goffman, giddens and bourdieu). we, partly unconsciously, use an immense amount of practical knowledge, including bodily performances and routines. how are the arts and pedagogy discussed within the praxeological discourses? dietrich benner in his allgemeine pädagogik [general education] (benner, 1991) distinguished six existential practices: economics, ethics, education, politics, art and religion – the arts and education being two different categories. he explained this as follows: the human being needs to provide and obtain his livelihood by work, by exploitation and care of nature (economics), he has to problematise, develop and recognise the norms and rules of human communication (ethics), he has to develop and design his social future (policy), he transcends his presence in aesthetic representations (art) and is faced with the problem of the finiteness of his fellow men and his own death (religion). a sixth basic phenomenon belongs to it, education, as the human being is in a generation ratio, he is being raised by his previous generations and educates the succeeding generations.4 (benner, 1991, p. 20) benner argued that it is important to see the six practices as belonging to one human meta practice; none of them should have primacy. nevertheless, it is crucial to be aware of their fundamental differences, their own logic. he pointed out that we only can live practices by thorough experience in the real field for a certain time. following benner’s notion that art and education are two fundamentally different human practices, i will now take a closer look into how music teacher novices experience the period of becoming teachers dealing with these two practices. mentoring in music: methodology and scope over the last two years i have undertaken a qualitative grounded theory study called mentoring in music. this study examined the cooperation between mentors and mentees in a viennese music teacher induction programme. building on noraldine bailer’s mixed-method study that displays a summary of aspects and hypothesis on the music teacher career in austria (bailer, 2009) i was interested in the crucial phase of the music teacher novice. i was aiming to get single views, i.e. the perspective of 42 global education review 4(4) concrete social actors. the main research steps unfolded as follows: after several pilot interviews with experts in the field, i conducted narrative interviews with eleven mentees. some of them i talked to during their mentored induction year, some of them one or two years later referring back to their induction. during this, interview period coding, theoretical sampling, contrasting and questioning was carried out in the typical intertwined mode that grounded theory proposes (cf. among others strauss & corbin, 1990, 1996, mey & mruck, 2011). the initial access to the field had a natural creaming-off effect, which i was aware of. initially the participants who came forward were largely those who were interested in telling a successful story or an unusual one. only through contact with this group i was able to access novices with different profiles. subsequently i conducted four group discussions with sets of three to four mentors (following bohnsack et al., 2006, przyborski, 2004). these were mentors who worked at viennese gymnasiums and cooperated with us in the study programme at the university for music and performing arts vienna. i combined some of the results of the mentee study with this later material and refined the outcomes by a members check with the mentors. additionally, i set up a special focus by tracking one mentormentee dyad: i offered reflective discussions to a mentor and her mentee at certain moments in the induction year to become more aware of aspects within the one-to-one interaction. additionally, over one year i moderated a group of viennese music mentors working on innovative mentoring strategies. presenting the results of this action research project would go beyond the scope of this chapter. nevertheless, it is important to point out that i used parts of the transcribed discussions from the action research meetings as additional data for the study since these contained interesting additional as well as confirming aspects. this chapter presents two of the study’s results: the model of the multi-layered status passage of mentees in the next section and the proposed four types of mentees in the status passage in the section that follows. in terms of the methodological problem of typology i followed kelle & kluge (2010) as well as ralf bohnsack’s concept (bohnsack, 2010). bohnsack combines max weber's ideal type construct and mannheim's concept of conjunctive experiential space. status passage of the music teacher novice: identity transition music teacher novices experience an identity transition. at this point two terms need defining: transformation and transition. while transformation means changing of the system as a phenomenon, transition defines changing as a process within a longer period. in their glossary of status passages sackmann & wingens define transition as “change from two states in a process which takes more or less time.” (2001, p. 42, translation by the author). in our particular case, transition is the most appropriate term as it defines the period between graduation from music university to being a qualified music teacher at a secondary school (gymnasium). during a transition, nothing is like before or after. the person is somewhere in between. he/she is living within a constantly moving (processing) and hybrid situation built from aspects of what he/she was before (a music student) and what he/she is going to be (a music teacher). in sociology, we find another term for this phenomenon: status passages. let us look deeper at what the term status passage includes and why it is a helpful concept here. status defines one’s position within a social field. every status that one assumes throughout life – be it as a student, a teacher, a perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 43 performer on stage, a head of department, a trainee or inspector – is temporary. we only hold a status for a certain time. and no matter how well we have installed ourselves within this status, no matter how much we like to be a teacher or a head, we always have to leave the status after a specific period. then we gradually enter a different status. but status not only means a function that defines the relevant field of activity (like teaching or managing) but it also implies a strong set of values that the respective community assigns to it. for example, in some countries the status of a teacher might be relatively high, in other countries or regions it may be quite low. how does this develop? the value of a certain function – i.e., its status – is driven by public narratives (such as onlinecommunities, journalism or political statements); gender aspects can also have a strong influence, for example professions mainly chosen by males have a higher status than typically female professions. status values are quite inert. changes of its value (such as its expiration or increase) only take place relatively slowly. the composite status passage means the time span in which we transit from one status to another. status passages according to glaser & strauss arnold van gennep was the first to publish a study on transitional rites in his book, les rites de passage (1908). in the following years scholars published many presentations and studies on transitions using a variety of terms to explain the character of progression (career, professional biography, socialization processes, changing of identities, identity crisis, trajectory, etc.). finally, in 1971, barney glaser and anselm strauss established a sustainable formal theory in their book, status passage, the so called status passage theory (1971). this theory has been used ever since in education. i will now outline some interesting features of the theory and make use of the status passage theory for my considerations on the character, form and qualities of the of a novice music teacher’s transition period. glaser and strauss, referring to van gennep, describe the status passage as prominently characterised by a two-way relationship between the passage taker (= passagee) and the person who directs, advises, tests and judges the process (= agent of control). the agent of control also ensures that procedures are followed (glaser & strauss, 1971, p. 58). here are some examples of agents of control in status passages of our everyday-life: the priest guiding the financé through the wedding; the teacher conducting final exams for the graduate; or the midwife advising, helping and coaching the woman in childbirth. this two-way relationship is perfectly applicable on the dyad of the mentee and the mentor in the induction phase or internships in teacher training. from music student to qualified music teacher, the mentee in his/her status passage is guided, advised and judged by the mentor (cf. figure 1). figure 1 transition of a music student becoming a school music teacher as status passage status status passage status music student mentee (passagee) qualified school music teacher guided by mentor (agent of control) 44 global education review 4(4) glaser and strauss identified dimensions that are useful for classification of status passages typologically. these dimensions are: reversibility, temporality, shape, desirability, contextuality and multiplicity (glaser & strauss, 1971, p.142). below we focus on the dimension multiplicity. they also expound a number of optional characteristics. by looking at these we can get a notion of the great diversity of status passages and of the many challenges status passages can impose on us (glaser & strauss, 1971, p.4.): a status passage may be unavoidable or not. it may be repeatable. it can be experienced alone or performed together with others or in a cohort. the individual in a larger cohort may not be aware that they are in a status passage. people may know that they are in status passage but may not be able to communicate about it. coping with a status passage may be voluntary or imposed. entering a status passage may require special authorization by an authorised person. the clarity of the signs of the passage can vary depending on the social area. the character of the signs of the passage may be visible or can be rendered invisible by mechanisms of control. the multiple status passage of music teacher mentees evidence in my study showed that the music mentees did not experience a single-track but a multi_track status passage. this means that they experienced several different transitional dynamics simultaneously. the multiplicity is one main fact that renders the transition in this case complex, emotionally exhausting and barely controllable. a closer look at the multiplicity seems to be essential to understand “what the hell is going on here” (quip in grounded theory often assigned to clifford geertz). figure 2 shows the multiple status passage of music teacher mentees. from data coding, six main tracks were extrapolated: status moves in the context of four social situations (in general public, towards heads, in communities of practice and towards peers) and in two essential roles (as musicians and as music teachers). what is important is the fact that more tracks mean a decline of status, and a smaller number an ascent or a balance (see arrows in figure 2). figure 2. music teacher novice’s multitrack status passage and descending/ascending status on the tracks status status passage rise/fall status music student mentee in induction phase qualified school music teacher tr ac k s in general public  towards professional seniors  in the community of practice  beyond peers  as musician  as music educator  perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 45 what are the reasons for the descending, balancing or ascending status in the identified tracks of the status passage? and what kind of support is regarded as helpful by the mentees? let us have a deeper look into the single tracks. general public the first track is the track of the general public. in terms of public perception, the status of the novice music teacher is clearly a step down from student at a university. as a student at an austrian music university one enjoys a remarkably high status, after having passed a difficult entrance exam it is regarded as a privilege to study at an arts institution. people in austria consider music students as talented, hard-working young people who play an important role in upholding austrian identity as the country of music. from this lofty position the music teacher novice enters school to find he has lower status: teachers have painfully lost status especially over the last few years, owing to public narratives such as teacher bashing in online communities, and even by politicians. the following statement is from a female respondent. she is satisfied with her job as a young music teacher and feels successful in her first year in school. she is convinced of her effectiveness in the classroom and receives positive feedback from learners, colleagues and parents. nevertheless, due to the sharp devaluation of teachers in public, which even reaches to her own parents, she is in doubt whether she should remain in the profession. as she states: i would actually just simply call it a personal crisis, whether the teaching profession is really right [...] i just think this critical society bothers me a lot. […] and even my parents only defend my being a teacher towards their friends because they like the idea that their daughter has a long summer leave. but […] not […] because they think that what i am doing is important or good. (female mentee) mentors report however, that mentees do not often talk to them about this negative public opinion; it seems almost like a taboo. here, a rational addressing of the phenomenon and of ways to cope with the societal situation seems important as part of the mentoring. professional seniors with respect to the status of the professional senior (teachers at university/heads and mentors in school) lower status is also the case. at the viennese music university, a comparably participative and empowering teaching attitude exists and music students are often involved in decision making and university politics. entering school, they are struck by the strong hierarchy that exists – and school is very convincing that the novice’s place is at the very bottom of the hierarchy: as stated by a young female teacher: it was somehow maybe really this role understanding. this: that you are now my trainer and i'm just the little girl who has no idea about anything. and now needs to learn. and has to fit. and has to obey. the mentoring situation described above is, of course, problematic for the learning of the mentee. it reminds us to anticipate this, and secure mentor’s training programmes that stress participative methods and the model of a reciprocal mentor-mentee relationship. communities of practice comparing the period at the music university and the period of the first few years at school by using the concept of communities of practice5 (cop) (wenger, 1998) the status dynamics for mentees are various. the cop – as opposed to the peer group discussed below – also includes people of different hierarchical positions, different stages of experience and – since the concept sees the cop as constantly dynamic in terms of positions in the group – people that are 46 global education review 4(4) closer or more distant. there are quite extensive as well as diverse results regarding status inside the cops at music university and at school. i would like to pick out one problematic and one promoting aspect. firstly, the problematic one: it is an advantage to learn to become a teacher inside a school in a safe setting such as an induction phase. yet in terms of cop this can lead to a difficult position: not being a student or a teacher but someone who will probably leave the school after one year may hinder the mentee growing within the cop and understanding how the cop works. as a female mentee respondent stated quite strongly: no one cares a shit that i'm here now, and that everyone is really doing his thing. i've actually always had the impression that [teaching] would be a team-job, but ... not at all. a male mentee described his negative view of the aggressive teacher community that he views as an outsider: relationship, relationship. this is above all, and i was so unaware of it. and i was not aware of how problematic a staff room is. this is really like in a henhouse, that everyone sits together and that the chickens are aggressive and peck each other when they come too close. secondly for the positive aspect: some music mentees experience strong support and soon assume an attractive position in the cop. in these schools colleagues have been keen to work with young musicians, e.g., with popular music skills that that current staff lack, and from the beginning they support them. a young teacher explained: they immediately conveyed: nice that we have young musicians. they employed me everywhere, at school masses and in concerts and so that was cool. they have really been waiting for me to come. to reinforce status in the cop, peer mentoring was described as very helpful as well as attractive (cf. langelotz, 2013) rather than the mentor-mentee relationship. in vienna at the moment a young generation of music teachers is evolving who like to share their expertise and use and develop peer mentoring forms. peers among peers – fellow students or friends –the mentees commonly feel well protected and supported. the sea remains mostly calm. but here too some interviewees experience unexpected negativity. one mentee commented that only her very inner circle recognises her work as valuable. the wider peer group does not support teachers but makes more fun of them: but it's easy even among friends. it's not even so that i can say it’s society, but i can say they are my close friends, it is when i post on facebook, please go with me to the teacher demo, it is about the future of education, they respond: yes, yes, the poor teachers! and i think to myself, well, that can’t be true! (laughs) and they know that i work a lot. and the only one who really defends me, is my friend and my roommate. (female mentee) next to the four social situations just described, we now focus on the two central roles that arise from the two practices art and education: the musician and the music teacher. we can identify two different role attributions that stand in reverse: at music university (inside the practice of the arts) they are mainly seen as educators, at school (inside the practice of education) as musicians. this reversed model is challenging. and how does this affect status? as musician interestingly, only one track leads to a higher status in school compared to university. as a musician, the mentee’s status improves during the status passage. that is easily understandable: at music university, the soloist students are appreciated as artists/musicians much more than the students in the teacher training programme. so, in this respect the perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 47 passage looks forward positively. nevertheless, there can be a catch: in some cases, the music teacher novices feel quite overwhelmed by the fact that they have to “stand in for the music” in their new school. in situations where there are not enough qualified music teachers – due to an overall lack of music teachers in some parts of austria – they can feel in high demand or even overwhelmed by the broad expectations imposed on them as newcomers. as one mentee reported, she is so overwhelmed by all her problems that she loses her enjoyment in making music with the kids. mentees suggest that mentors can do a lot here to support them by helping out with handy material (current pop songs in good transcriptions) and methodical support, as well as a step-by-step learning, are mentioned here. as music educator music is quite low in importance in austrian schools compared to other school subjects. while at university music educators are well recognised in the whole range of study programmes, in schools their prestige as music educators is low. we can detect a descent of status: i think i already talked about that i totally understand that there are subjects where the kids say “you cannot ask things forever from me here because i have problems in english and math,” and “i have other worries than clapping a rhythm.” i deeply understand that. but the recognition of the subject music compared to others i find a problem. (female mentee) again, the mentor can help to gain perspective on the mentee’s own view as a teacher of a less “important” subject. in some cases, a strong mentor had even positioned the subject, music, as a high aesthetic and experiential subject and, by that, of high importance for many children. for an interim summary, we can conclude: mentees in music education school internships have to find their way through a multiple status passage. mentees are barely conscious of the multitrack passage. they seem to make a taboo of some of the tracks. more tracks in that passage offer a descent than an ascent of status. there are individual differences regarding the dynamics of the single tracks. tracks inter-relate: problems or success in some tracks can influence the dynamics of other tracks positively or negatively. if mentors are aware of the multitrack and individually shaped status passage they can offer purposeful support so that mentees can shape their transition more actively. coping with the status passage: four types of passagees the following section draws attention to the coping strategies of music mentees. glaser and strauss (1971, p. 89) described three conditions which affect how mentees cope with a status passage (1) the degree of control that the person has about what is happening in the passage (degree of possible shaping), (2) the importance that the passagee ascribes to the new status (estimation) and (3) how much he/she desires it (desirability). in the study’s reconstruction process, i found four dominant experience profiles and have condensed them into a qualitative typology. for the sake of economical illustration, i illustrate the types only within one case of each type. furthermore, the particular case is not fully documented but only explained by selectively encoded key sequences. the constructed anchor case represents the type – and is not an authentic case. some remarks on mentoring the four types conclude the 48 global education review 4(4) presentation. when looking at the following four types of passagees, again we realise the grounding logic of the two practices education and art. we can read the types as different solutions as to how to deal with the clash. although the first two types seem to have decided to mainly live within either the practice of education or of art, the third and the fourth type represent two different strategies of dealing with both practices: one by integration and the other by non-commitment. we can envision: the educator type, the traveling artist type, the integration type and the open-ended type. at first sight these four types have a lot in common with the tetralemma model (varga von kibéd & sparrer, 2000). the tetralemma has been developed by the german systemic therapists insa sparrer and matthias varga von kibéd as an adaptation of a scheme of indian logic for use in the field of systemic coaching, counselling, therapy and the systemic structure formation. the tetralemma expands the decision-making and action area in case of a dilemma. the person who is in a dilemma (has to choose from two strongly different things: the one or the other) is reminded that there are more possibilities: there is as well the possibility of the one and the other (both) or neither the one nor the other (none). additionally, there is also the free element: none of these and not even that. applying the model to the four types of mentees we could define the one as art, the other as education, both as integration and none as open-ended. looking more closely our types are not as extreme as the decisions in a tetralemma as being the educator type still includes a lot of artistic and so on. we could see the types as embedded somewhere inside the tetralemma. figure 3 four types of music mentees coping with the status passage embedded in the tetralemma model perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 49 the educator type: music as one possible medium to foster children the educator type focusses deeply on all questions of education. for this type, engaging in school and for the learning of children is central and he/she is often interested in innovative educational concepts or even school reform. he/she is prominently addressing school as a (problematic) system and often engages politically or socially at the same time as being a teacher. it seems essential to this type to find a good place in the staff room and he/she is trying to become involved with the community from the very beginning and is quite sensitive as to whether it is possible to find a coherent place in the school community. he/she is quite concerned with the (currently in austria quite negative) role of the teacher in society. the educator type expresses openly the discrepancy between the music university and the school system and often wishes that teacher training had focussed more on “real school life” and in a “hands-on way” (all the quotation marks in this section refer to interview transcriptions). he/she has sometimes felt like a weak musician during the study programme at university and may think that he/she only just passed the entrance exam. in situations where teaching music is difficult for this type, she/he does not leave school but tries to take over more lessons in his/her other school subject. (in austria teacher training for secondary schools qualifies for two different subjects.) teaching and working with children is a core interest for this type “no matter through which medium”. the traveling artist type: music education as a starting point to somewhere else the traveling artist type mainly uses the teacher training programme at the music university as a broad study programme and as a way to receive qualified instrumental and vocal instruction. more or less accidently or “for safety” he/she finds herself now in the induction phase in school. therefore, the induction phase is “completed” more than experienced. he/she always knew that the career should lead somewhere else. parallel to the music teacher programme this type is involved in other musical/artistic study programmes and/or lives a musician’s life outside school that plays a really significant role – it is here and not from school that he/she “draw[s] the inner power from”. when this type stays in school after their induction he/she keeps a comparatively strong identity as a musician and often, henceforth, goes on looking for exits into an artist’s career. the reasons for the clear orientation towards music and the non-identification with music teaching lie in different areas: either the already described deficient image of teaching is strong or one’s own expectations of artistry are not met in working musically with children (“my own artistic claim is an obstacle to staying in school.”). sometimes a general feel of “this is just not me” is expressed. either the induction phase is experienced as an unsatisfying phase by the travelling musician type or he/she is aware of their visiting character and accepts problems since they can be seen as part of a temporary “intermezzo”. it is not worth trying to solve them as they are not relevant for the future. sometimes this type enters school only after quite a number of years as a musician, because, for example he/she now has a family and/or longs for a more stable professional situation. 50 global education review 4(4) the integration type: early and stable focus on music teaching the integration type is the one who manages to integrate both the artistic and the pedagogical practice in a satisfying way. this integration had been the case from very early in his/her studies – in the self-concept as well as in action: from an early stage in the study programme students of this type have chosen teachers or seminars because the focus was on the transition of the artistic and pedagogic into school. content has been targeted, identified as useful for teaching and packed in. of course in school they benefit considerably from this farsighted preparation they imposed on themselves. the decision and focus on their path can stem from earlier experiences: they either entered the music teacher study programme coming from other (musical) study programmes because it had become clear to them that they wanted to be school teachers. or it stemmed from positive or negative role models (“i wanted to make a difference to what i had experienced in school myself…” / “i had the most wonderful music teacher and want to follow in her footsteps”). compared to the other three, this integrated type has the fewest status problems, he/she identifies clearly with the music teacher profession. this type often gets positive feedback from learners, parents, heads and mentors. we can subdivide this type into the pragmatic-integrated and the shaping-integrated type. the first one has achieved a good level of coping and surviving. the second in their induction phase is already targeting future goals for their musical life in school and his/her own development. for example, they aim at founding a choir or a school-band or they want to network with other novice teachers to strengthen the community and to continue learning. the open-ended type: half-confessing with an uncertain ending the fourth, the open-ended, type is deeply ambivalent as to how he/she will use the experiences of the induction phase. this type is often surprised about how school life unfolds, e.g., about the intensity of school life or about the broad range of tasks required of them. likewise, he/she can be surprised by what children are able to do musically (“i didn’t imagine that children in school were so good at singing.”). a weak mentor/mentee relationship can be the reason for and/or can prolong this ambivalence and the nonor half-confessing. as a strongly ambivalent and at the same time challenging situation is not easy to uphold for a long period, this type often undergoes a development after a certain time. some people find a developmental pathway resulting in them staying at school; for others, recognition s grows that their place is not in school. mentoring with regard to the four types for mentoring with regard to the four types we can summarise that the typology can be used to gain an understanding of the underlying motivations of mentees. as with all typologies we seldom find a distinct type in one person, but combinations. also some transitions are possible. looking at the data i can conclude that there is no recipe for how to mentor type one, two, three of four. in my research i saw that, at times, mentors guiding mentees of type one or perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 51 two reacted by trying to foster the missing: the educator type was empowered to act more musically and the travelling artist type to focus more on pedagogy. this may lead to a fruitful development, but not necessarily. furthermore, it can also be very helpful for the mentee to be supported to reinforce their strengths. the open-ended type, of course, poses a significant challenge to the mentor. the mentor can be the midwife for finding the right way into becoming a successful teacher. but maybe with this type the mentor also has to envisage his/her own failure as the midwife into teaching. it seems important especially for the ambitious mentor to see him/herself as guide into a contented life – and that this can as well be outside school. notes 1. the research upon which this article is based was carried out in german, all data has been translated into english by the author. 2. gymnasiums admit 10 year old pupils with good primary grades where they are prepared for university, graduating at the age of 18. 3. hauptschulen admit children with poorer grades from primary school, who attend from age 10-14. 4. translation from german by the author. 5. henschel defined a community of practice (cop) as a group of people "who are linked by a common interest, a common activity or a common endeavor and through social relationships and shared values. the exchange of ideas, insights and knowledge, shared learning and mutual help and support are in the centre." 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(2005). übergangsriten [les rites de passage / the rites of passage ]. 3rd extended edition. orig.: 1909. frankfurt/new york: campus. varga von kibéd, m. & sparrer, i. (2000). ganz im gegenteil. tetralemmaarbeit und andere grundformen systemischer strukturaufstellungen – für querdenker und solche, die es werden wollen. [but on the contrary. tetralemma work and other basic forms of systemic structural constellations for lateral thinkers and those who want to become one.] heidelberg: carl auer. von felden, h. & schiener, j. (2010). transitionen übergänge vom studium in den beruf: zur verbindung von qualitativer und quantitativer forschung. [transitions from school to work: for the connection of qualitative and quantitative research]. berlin, heidelberg: springer. wenger, e. (1998). communities of practice: learning, meaning and identity. cambridge: cambridge university press. about the author prof. dr. isolde malmberg, is professor for music education/music didactics and programme director at the rostock university of music and theatre. and she teaches all teacher training courses. she is chair of the editorial board of the european association for music in schools, and is on the editorial committee of the international journal of music education. her current research interest is researching the transition between studies and career (transfer, mentoring in music). 78 global education review 2(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: xu, shuqin & law, wing-wah (2015). rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china since the late 1070’s. global education review, 2(4). 78-100 rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china since the late 1970s shuqin xu sun yat-sen university wing-wah law the university of hong-kong abstract china has adopted an unbalanced policy for economic development to improve its domestic economy and international competiveness for more than three decades. during this process, rural education has undergone a series of reforms. with reference to compulsory education, this article argues that rural education in china is a pragmatic instrument for the state to expand and improve the quality of urbanization. rural education can be used to serve urbanization, is influenced by the rural-urban disparities brought about by urbanization, and receives urban aid and support in exchange for following state guidelines. due to deep-rooted disparities and long-standing inequalities, effectively financing rural education, rural education still faces challenges and difficulties related to handling urban-based curricula and evaluation standards, recruiting, and keeping qualified teachers, and the outflow of original rural residents. this article concludes by offering an explanation of chinese policy implications for the functions and constraints of state-directed rural education in serving urbanization. keywords rural education, urbanization, rural migration, education policy, china introduction studies of rural education in developing countries, have pointed out that rural education is key to promoting educational equality, transforming a country’s population into an asset for development, improving the local economy and enhancing national competitiveness (deyoung, 1987; unesco, 1993). researchers (chambers, 1983; kallaway, 2001) have become interested in the impact of urbanization on rural education, and have pointed out that rural education has become marginalized, and is dependent on urban education and development. the complexity and dynamics of rural education in china are no exception and have attracted the attention of both domestic and international researchers. since reforming its economy in the late 1970s, china has adopted a policy of unbalanced economic development that allows some areas and people to get rich and to reach co-prosperity ahead of others; this has rapidly led to remarkable economic and social achievements, but has also resulted in rural-urban disparity. research on rural education in china involves many topics, including gender issues (hannum, ______________________________ corresponding author: shuqin xu, sun yat-sen university,no. 135, xingang xi road, guangshou, 510275, p. r. china email: xushuqin3@mail.sysu.edu.cn mailto:xushuqin3@mail.sysu.edu.cn rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 79 2005), the cost and returns of rural education (knight et al., 2010), issues of equality between rural and urban education (hannum et al., 2009; law & pan, 2009), the influence of socialpolitical change on rural education (hannum, 1999) and the urbanization of rural education (ge, 2003; yu, 2008). yet, certain aspects of rural education and urbanization remain underresearched: specifically, the role and function of rural education in promoting urbanization; the channels through which urbanization affects rural education; how rural education is readjusted and reformed to tackle problems brought about by urbanization; and the factors that constrain the development of rural education, especially in the process of urbanization. this article seeks to address these questions. with reference to compulsory education in rural china, this article argues that rural education, as directed by the state’s central government, has dynamically interacted with urbanization. on the one hand, in addition to confronting long-standing inequities, rural education passively promotes and deepens urbanization, as state-designed mechanisms benefit urban education and development by providing financial and human resources that are favorable to urban areas. on the other hand, urbanization brings rural education challenged rural education by bringing it inapplicable curriculum, unstable rural teacher resources, and great loss of rural students and graduates to urban areas. the state tries to exercise macrocontrol to develop rural education in ways that will alleviate such dilemmas, maintain social stability and improve the quality of an increasingly expanding urbanization. however, the state’s strategies for developing and improving rural education are constrained by financial considerations, a series of unsystematically-made educational policies (e.g., rural school financing and planning, programs of rural school teachers and migrant children’s education), and the local government’s modification of policies. to present this argument, this article first reviews literature on the issues of rural education and urbanization to provide a framework for understanding the interactions between these phenomena and the diverse factors influencing them. then, it describes the complex relationship between rural education and urbanization, which is influenced by the state’s strategy of developing and adjusting rural education to serve the needs of urbanization, and by other policies. it concludes with a discussion of policy implications for rural education and urbanization. rural education and urbanization more research on rural education has been conducted in developing countries than in developed ones, for example, the united states (arnold, 2005; deyoung, 1987); moreover, studies on rural education in developing and developed countries generally tend to address different topics. research on rural education in developing countries tends to adopt a macro perspective to discuss such issues as the interactions between rural education and culture, social and political change, gender, and economy (graham brown, 1991; kallaway, 2001); studies on rural education in developed countries, on the other hand, often use a micro perspective to explore teaching and learning methods, classroom conflicts, school leadership in rural schools (arnold, 2005), the relationship between rural schools and their communities, new technology in education (deyoung, 1987) and issues of education for minority groups (ayalon, 2004). despite these differences, the findings from studies in both developing and developed countries suggest that rural education is relatively inferior, when compared to urban education, and faces more staffing, financial and instructional problems (deyoung, 1987). 80 global education review 2(4) the increasing concern about rural education in developing countries results from the promotion of universal education, and a growing emphasis on the need to transform rural populations into human capital. education, as advocated by human capital theorists (e.g., schultz, 1963), helps students to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to earn higher wages and to improve productivity. developing rural education thus is useful for enhancing rural dwellers’ quality of life and for reducing rural poverty (atchoarena & gasperini, 2003). moreover, it also improves the national economy (unesco, 1993) and contributes to the efficiency of urbanization (chambers, 1983; kallaway, 2001). urbanization, at its initial stage, is the process of withdrawing massive amounts of labor and other inputs from rural agricultural activities and concentrating them in urban areas for nonagricultural activities; it often accompanies industrialization in most countries (champion, 2001). education can contribute to urbanization by facilitating the exodus of literate rural people with the skills and knowledge necessary for promoting industrialization and other aspects of urban development (atchoarena & gasperini, 2003). studies of urbanization, and of rural education in the process of urbanization in particular, have addressed the urban-rural disparity. chambers (1983, p.4) described urban and rural areas in terms of a core-periphery system; urban areas form the core, which is “rich, industrialized and high status,” while rural areas constitute the “poor, agricultural and low status” periphery. rural and urban development are not separate, they are interactive; however, extant research has emphasized the unidirectional contribution of rural education to urbanization. antrop (2004) has pointed out that urbanization in its early period features a pattern of growing urban centers exercising different kinds and degrees of influence on the peripheries, though specific models vary. the prestige and power of the core are reinforced by its ability to attract and keep resources and professionals (chambers, 1983; strange et al., 2012). beaulieu and gibbs (2005) claimed that the development of urbanization through rural education involves a pattern of brain drain: in the initial state of urbanization, urban areas draw both talented young rural people (who would otherwise have served their local rural areas) and local resources invested in the education of these youth to urban areas. kallaway (2001), for example, criticized that rural education is placed in an inferior position in the course of urbanization, and that educational policies ignore specific problems in rural education. china has also witnessed increased ruralurban disparity and rural dependency on urban development in the process of expanding urbanization since the late 1970s (wen & wen, 2007). two approaches to urbanization have been debated in china: the transforming rural areas into urban places approach (fei, 1986), and the establishing metropolises approach (rao & cong, 1999). the central government has claimed to support the former, but has mainly adopted the latter in practice by pursuing a policy of unbalanced development (i.e., allowing some places and people to become wealthy ahead of others). this policy provides urban places, especially those in china’s eastern region, with more privileges, resources and opportunities, thus reinforcing rural-urban disparity (li, 2008). similar to urbanization reviewed in the general literature, urbanization in china, at its initial stage, also experienced massive rural laborers’ migration to urban areas and an expansion of education for providing human resources for urbanization. research on rural education in china has pointed out that rural education is marginalized and has become dependent on urban education and urbanization (ge, 2003; qu & wang, 2012; wei, 2004), as reflected in three interconnected dimensions. first, compared to urban education, rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 81 rural education is confronted by more dilemmas, in terms of funding, teachers and infrastructure, and is always lower in quality (ge, 2008; hannum, 1999; law & pan, 2009). second, rural schools, are forced to implement urbanized curriculum content that was based on urban culture and life (yu, 2005), and to adopt pedagogy applied in urban schools (ma & tang, 2004). both the urban-based curriculum content and pedagogy are not applicable in rural schools, for the former is distant from rural students’ and teachers’ experience and different from rural school culture, while the latter needs welltrained teachers and sufficient facilities that are both lacked in rural schools (yu, 2008). urbanbased rural education, according to chen (2007), serves china’s urbanization by deviating from status quo rural traditions and culture. third, despite receiving a backward and inappropriate education, rural students are required take the same academic examinations as their urban peers, and as a result have less access to top universities in china (yang, 2006). the extant research focuses on the gap between and the policy-directed inequality of rural and urban education, but does not fully examine how the state guides the relationships between rural education and urbanization; specifically, it does not address how the state defines the role of rural education in promoting urbanization and serving the development of urban education, in what ways urbanization influences rural education, or how the state uses the achievements of urbanization to aid rural education in a manner calculated to deepen urbanization, cope with the social conflicts brought by rural-urban disparities and enhance ethnic minorities’ identification with the state. this article seeks to fill this gap. the context of urbanization and rural education in china in china, an urban area is an administrative concept used to refer to cities where various levels of government are located (national people’s congress, 1989). china’s government has been led by the communist party of china since 1949, and can generally be divided into the central government (zhongyang zhengfu) and local governments (difang zhengfu). the former is headed by the state council and includes ministries related to areas of national administration, such as the ministry of education (moe), while the latter category comprises five sub-levels: province, municipality, county, district or township, and village (ranked from highest to lowest) (national people’s congress, 2004). the first four levels of local government are located in urban areas (including municipalities directly under central government leadership, cities at the provincial, prefectural and county levels, and the downtown portions of counties and towns), while village governments are located in and directly administer rural areas (national people’s congress, 1989). although urban areas were initially planned and divided for administrative purposes, they are usually much wealthier and more developed, and have more advanced transportation and infrastructure than rural areas in the same jurisdiction, as will be discussed later. moreover, in addition to their geographic division, the chinese state further divides rural and urban areas through its household registration policy (hukou zhidu), which was enacted in the 1950s to impede the internal migration of rural and urban populations (national people’s congress, 1958). the policy divides the population into agricultural and nonagricultural categories and provides the latter with more privileges than the former (hereafter, the term rural residents will be used to refer to those with agricultural household registration) (chan & zhang, 1999; law, 2006). under this policy, residents who hold agricultural household registration, but who live in urban areas, do not and cannot enjoy 82 global education review 2(4) the same social welfares (including medical care and education) as non-agricultural residents in the same city. while china’s rural and urban areas both are remarkably developed, the country’s ruralurban disparity has expanded since deng xiaoping’s coming to the power in late 1970s and his promotion of a series of social and economic reforms shortly thereafter. the economic reforms that helped promote urbanization were the product of three major strategies. the first strategy was the establishment of a market economy, which including inviting multiple investors to become involved in china’s economy and introducing the concept of domestic economic competition. the state, since the late 1970s, has opened that market to non-state sectors, including foreign and individual investment and private enterprise. in so doing, the non-public ownership sector (i.e., enterprises that are neither state-owned nor -controlled) has grown from 1% of china’s gross domestic product (gdp) in 1978, (national bureau of statistics of china, 2008) to more than 40% in 2014 (li, 2014). the second major strategy involved gradually adjusting china’s economic structure by giving the country’s secondary and tertiary sectors (i.e., manufacturing and services) priority over the primary sector (agriculture/ raw materials). as a result, the contributions of the primary, secondary and tertiary sectors to china’s gdp changed from 28.2%, 47.9% and 23.9%, respectively, in 1978 (zou, 2008), to 10%, 43.9% and 46.1%, respectively, in 2013 (national bureau of statistics of china, 2014b). moreover, the growing importance of the secondary and tertiary sectors, both of which are laborintensive and urban-based, resulted in increased demand for labor in those sectors and attracted even more rural residents to work in urban areas. the third strategy was the forcible introduction of a policy of unbalanced economic development. the policy prioritized the development of urban areas and eastern coastal cities (e.g., shanghai, guangdong province, zhejiang province) by attracting investment to and increasing support for those areas. as a result of this policy, the income gap of between eastern, middle and western residents, as well as that between urban and rural residents within each region, became quite large. in 2010, for example (zou, 2012), the per capita net income of urban residents in eastern china (the highest) was about 1.49 times that of urban residents in china’s middle and western regions, while the per capita net income of eastern area rural residents (the highest) was 1.84 times of that their counterparts of china’s western region (the lowest). the per capita net income of urban residents in china’s eastern, middle and western regions was, respectively, 3.16, 3.14 and 3.92 times of that of rural residents in the same region. the interplay of the state’s economic policy, the prosperity of and greater opportunities found in urban areas (especially eastern urban areas) and the state’s strategy of easing restrictions on rural-urban migration flows has driven rural residents into urban areas to seek employment in labor-intensive factories and service industries, high technology industries, or transnational corporations. the percentage of urban residents (i.e., those who live in urban areas for more than six months in the same year, even if they have a non-agricultural household registration) in the overall chinese population increased from 17.92%, in 1978, to 52.6% (or about 712 million of 1.35 billion) in 2012 (national bureau of statistics of china, 2013b). in 2012, 263 million urban residents were migrant workers, and 88.6% of these worked in urban areas at or above the county level (national bureau of statistics of china, 2013a) to confront the social and economic challenges brought about by unbalanced economic development, the chinese state, since the beginning of the 21st century, has adopted a rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 83 number of strategies to develop rural areas, especially rural areas in its middle and western regions. these strategies include the developing of the west regions (xibu da kafa) movement, and programs urging urban areas and china’s eastern region to enter into partnerships with, or to provide aid to rural and western areas of the country. the central government also increased its financial support for rural areas and reduced peasants’ financial burden through such initiatives as its tax and fee reform (shuifei gaige), which cancelled some compulsory taxes and fees previously levied against peasants (state council, 2003). however, the disparity between rural and urban areas has not yet been bridged, leading the state, under xi jinping (2012-), to propose the further urbanization of rural areas by integrating and balancing rural and urban development (the communist party of china central committe & state council, 2014). in addition to social inequality and ruralurban disparity, china’s urbanization has led to an increased disparity between rural and urban education. rural students account for a large portion of china’s nine-year compulsory education (i.e., primary and junior secondary school education), with 46 million students enrolled in rural school, in 2012 (department of development and planning of ministry of education, 2013). the influence of urbanization has created three types of rural students at the nine-year compulsory education level: rural students who live with their parent(s) in their hometown; rural leftover students (nongcun liushou xuesheng) cared for by non-parental guardians (e.g., grandparent(s)) in their hometown while their parents work as rural migrant workers; and rural migrant students (nongmingong suiqian zinv) who live with their parents in urban areas, away from their hometown. in 2012, there were 22 million leftover and 13 million migrant students, accounting for 17% of primary and 10% of junior secondary students, nationwide (department of development and planning of ministry of education, 2013). the government adopted four strategies to address rural-urban disparity. the first strategy was to expand education to reduce rural residents’ illiteracy and enhance their educational level. to facilitate rural students’ access to school, many new rural schools were established; each village was required to establish a primary school, while those villages with considerable territory and sparse population were asked to provide teaching stations for students up to the fifth grade. in addition, in 1986, legislation made universal nine-year compulsory education mandatory (national people’s congress, 1986). this law was immediately implemented in china’s eastern region and in urban areas above the county level, and then expanded to counties and towns in 1995. rural areas were allowed to institute universalizing compulsory education on an ad hoc basis. in 2011, the government claimed that the goal of universal nine-year compulsory education had been achieved (zhai et al., 2012). the second strategy involved reforming the financing of education to reduce the central government’s fiscal responsibilities; one way of doing so was to extend the policy of unbalanced economic development to education. first, the government invested more heavily in domestic economic development than in education (including rural education); a goal of investing 4% of gdp in education was established in 1993, but was not achieved until 2012 (zhao, 2013). second, more financial resources were directly and indirectly allocated to urban education than to rural education. urban education was given primary development attention, because it had been assigned the mission of supporting china’s urban economy and was intended to become a model for rural education (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 1986). in addition, financial power was decentralized by 84 global education review 2(4) the introduction of “level-by-level local responsibility and management” in basic education, which transferred the central government’s responsibility for financing education to local government, and required local governments to raise and allocate funds for education in their jurisdiction through multiple channels (communist party of china central committee, 1985). the third strategy was to re-establish the “key school” program at all educational levels. key schools were primarily based in urban areas (county level or above), had fewer students in each class and were provided with more funds, better facilities and buildings, and morequalified teachers (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 1984). teachers at key secondary schools, for example, were required to have a tertiary degree, received a higher salary and had more opportunities for promotion; one-third of these teachers were experienced teachers with good teaching records, who had been reassigned from non-key schools. key schools were criticized for increasing inequality among schools, so another term (model school – shifan zhongxue) was adopted to describe the state’s emphasis on developing schools with good teachers and facilities. no matter what they were called, key schools favored urban students, who were thought most likely to further the development of urban society. the fourth strategy was to re-adopt the practice of distributing students who finished their compulsory education into one of two further education tracks. the first track involved vocational and technical education to prepare students to enter the labor market, and included vocational senior secondary schools (zhiye gaozhong), specialized secondary schools (zhongdeng zhuanye xuexiao) and skilled worker schools (jigong xuexiao). the second track offered students a general senior secondary education intended to cultivate students for higher education. the emphasis on these two tracks was unbalanced. from 1980 to mid-1996, vocational and technical education was emphasized and received the lion’s share of state institutional and financial support (he, 2009). over that period, the number of first-year students in vocational technical schools increased almost five-fold, from roughly 714,300 in 1980, to 3.8 million in 1996, while the number of first-year students in general senior secondary schools decreased from 3.8 million to 2.82 million (department of development and planning of ministry of education, 1997). after 1996, however, general senior secondary education was provided with more development opportunities, and the number of first-year general senior secondary school students began to outpace the number of first-year vocational and technical school students. between 1996 and 2012, the number of students enrolled in general senior secondary schools tripled, while the number of students enrolled in vocational and technical schools increased by only 40% (department of development and planning of ministry of education, 2013). despite its vigorous promotion of domestic economic and social reforms since the 1980s, the communist party of china (cpc), china’s sole political party since the prc’s 1949 founding, has allowed very few political reforms to emerge (law, 2011). on the contrary, it has used its program of economic and social reform to reestablish the legitimacy of its leadership, and to perpetuate its dominant position in china (deng, 1979). the cpc has remained the sole decision maker regarding china’s reforms, and has consistently stressed the party’s supreme status and the central importance of its authoritarian rule, rather than expand democracy. the cpc has, for example, continued china’s dual leadership system, which has enabled the party to control virtually all areas of life in the prc since 1949. the first aspect of this system is the administrative line, theoretically rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 85 headed by national people’s congress (npc), while the second is the political line, theoretically led by the national cpc congress; in reality, both are directed and controlled by the cpc central committee, specifically the politburo of the cpc central committee (national people’s congress, 2004; 17th national congress of the cpc, 2007). the cpc also enacted the national security law, ostensibly to ensure china’s political, economic and social stability and security, but actually a means of using those concerns to legitimize its leadership role, maintain its political stability and perpetuate its ruling status (law, in press). the cpc’s strategy of developing rural education while promoting urbanization in different periods also reflects its focus on maintaining political stability, as will be shown in next section. the complex and dynamic relationships between rural education and urbanization in china the relationships between rural education and urbanization in china were reflected in four related dimensions: the state’s oscillation between decentralizing and centralizing the responsibility for financing rural education according to the needs of urbanization; contradictory rural education planning and implementation, which claimed to use rural education to serve rural development but developed rural education based on urban strategies; unstable rural school human resources, which fluctuated between the brain drain of original rural teachers due to ruralurban disparity and the unstable brain gain of university graduates and temporary urban teachers mobilized by the state; and, the flow of rural school students and graduates to urban society. financing rural education for urbanization: centralization versus decentralization the first pattern of relationship between rural education and urbanization was the state’s financial strategy of directly and indirectly using rural education to serve urbanization. in the late 1970s, when the state introduced economic reforms that resulted in the expansion of urbanization, it invested the main portion of its limited financial resources in urban economic and social development, leaving rural education fraught with problems due to insufficient funding. while this urban development focus led to remarkable social and economic achievements over the next three decades, the resulting urbanization also brought about unequal social problems; in order to address these problems, while still continuing its goal of expanding urban areas, the state has recently begun to focus more attention on rural development, including rural education development, than it had previously. the state’s practice of decreasing funding for rural education to allow increased investment in urban development and education can be seen in two state-prescribed approaches to financing education. the first approach involved decentralizing responsibility for financing education to allow the central government to focus its limited financial resources on economic development, which mainly occurred in urban areas. to increase its capacity for economic investment, the central government, in 1994, introduced its new system of tax sharing (fenshuizhi), which transferred the fiscal income of local government at various levels to the central government, leaving them a small portion of tax income to finance local concerns, including education. this effectively increased the funds available for urban education, which cultivated talented people to serve the needs of urbanization, and decreased funding for rural education, as the financial capabilities of the 86 global education review 2(4) various levels of local government did not match with their responsibilities (law & pan, 2009). higher-level governments located in urban areas had more fiscal income, but their responsibility for financing education was usually limited to the schools in the city in which the government was located; the government could thus provide more funds to urban education and allocate educational allowances to the residents under its direct jurisdiction. by contrast, township and village governments, at the bottom of the administrative hierarchy, had the least tax income, but bore the most responsibility for raising and allocating funds for rural schools (state education commission, 1992). rather than providing more financial support, the central government directed rural governments to explore new ways of developing their local economy that would enable them to support education through self-reliance (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 1994). local governments, following the example of the central government, began to divert funding earmarked for education, using it instead for local economic development and related areas of responsibility that could quickly yield results (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 1995), leaving the poor peasants to pay for rural education (renmin jiaoyu renmin ban) to (re) construct school building, buy teaching facilities and provide teachers’ allowance. the peasants who shouldered a heavy financial burden paid for education through three ways (ma, 2000). the first way was paying for their children’s tuition and miscellaneous fee (xue za fei). the second way was paying 1.5% to 2% of their per capita net annual income as educational surcharge (jiaoyufei fujia) that was calculated and charged by village government. the third way was donating money for constructing or renovating school building and buying school facilities, which will be presented more in next paragraph. these ways not only increased peasants’ financial burden, but also failed to provide sufficient funds for rural education. the state’s second approach involved introducing multiple investment mechanisms (charging additional fees, running school businesses and encouraging social donations) to fund education. as discussed above, urban residents’ per capita net income was significantly higher than that of rural residents; therefore, the additional fees urban schools charged urban residents were higher than those charged by rural schools. in addition, urban schools, being located in urban societies that featured high levels of commerce and industry, could also generate additional income by running school businesses; rural schools could not, as they had no market in which to sell such goods or services. urban schools also received a higher level of financial support from diverse stakeholders for such reasons as charity, appreciating the school, helping their offspring get educational in the school or building up relationship with local government. these stakeholders included individuals, companies and other donators, and all of them had more disposable income than their rural counterparts. for example, in 2000, individuals and social groups donated almost rmb 114 billion in educational funding, but only rmb 26 billion of that amount went to rural education and most of which was contributed by peasants (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 1995). owing to a lack of funding, rural schools, especially those in remote poor areas, suffered strains. they did not have sufficient funds to provide sound physical facilities for education, either by constructing adequate new buildings or by renovating old or dilapidated existing school buildings. rural schools also found it difficult to pay the salaries of and to provide adequate allowance to teachers, which resulted in their constantly losing existing teachers and having to recruit replacements. qizhou county in hubei province in middle region of china, for example, rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 87 could pay its formal teachers only 65% of their salary, while community-sponsored teachers were paid rmb 250 per month, and substitute teachers were not paid at all (zhou et al., 2003). to cope with these problems, the central government, at the beginning of 21st century, introduced three major strategies for increasing funding to develop rural education. the first strategy reshuffled the financial responsibilities of various levels of government (law & pan, 2009), shifting primary responsibility for raising and allocating funds for rural education from village and township governments to county and, ultimately, provincial governments (state council, 2005), meaning peasants were no longer called upon to donate money to support local education. the resulting shortfall was compensated for through the fiscal transferring payment (caizheng zhuanyi zhifu) program, a special fund for improving rural education that was allocated by the central and provincial governments on a proportional burden-sharing basis (national people’s congress, 2006). county governments were assigned the responsibility of establishing special funds for paying teachers’ salaries. the second strategy reformed fee-charging by the 2001 introduction of a “one-fee system” for the poorest rural areas, which was later extended, in 2004, to rural schools in china’s middle and eastern regions (ministry of education et al., 2004). this system limited schools to charging student fees only once a semester, and stipulated that the fee charged must be based on the per-student budget established by the provincial government. the system was intended to ensure that funds were fully allocated to rural schools and to reduce peasants’ financial load regarding their children’s education. the third strategy was to increase financial investment in rural education. it first surfaced in the central government’s “two exemptions and one subsidy” policy, which exempted students from paying textbook fees and miscellaneous expenses and subsidized school boarding fees. then, in 2006, the central government began to provide free nine-year compulsory education in schools in western regions, allowing those students to get school boarding subsidies and free textbooks and exempting them from miscellaneous fees (national people’s congress, 2006). moreover, the central government also mobilized urban schools and schools in the eastern region to provide funds and free teaching materials to schools in the western region, especially rural schools. by 2003, schools in 12 eastern cities had donated rmb 280 million to western schools (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2004). although rural schools had access to more funds due to the new financial system and increased investment, they were still confronted by challenges during the reform process. first, in the process of increasing its investment in rural education, the central government tried to reduce costs by combining the teaching stations, schools, students and teachers scattered among several villages into larger schools (chedian bingxiao) (state council, 2001). by 2010, 65,000 rural junior secondary schools and 302,000 rural primary schools (including teaching stations) had disappeared (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2005). this movement resulted in larger classes at the merged schools, more resource shortages, and eroded rural culture. it also increased the financial burden on families sending their children to distant schools, and made it more difficult and increased travel time for students to go to school. students who previously would otherwise have gone to local teaching stations or schools now had to attend primary schools an average 5.4 kilometers from home or secondary schools an average of 17.4 kilometers from home (yang, 2011). after more than a decade, this movement was finally stopped in 2012 (state council, 2012). second, though total funding for 88 global education review 2(4) rural education increased, per capita funding for rural students remained lower than that of their urban counterparts. third, though new and modern facilities (e.g., computers, music room, and function room) were provided to rural schools, they were seldom used in teaching because the schools did not have enough teachers to organize activities and the teachers they did have did not know how to operate modern technology or use it for teaching purposes (wu, 2006). more problems related to rural teachers will be presented in the next section. rural education reform: selfcontradictory and urban-based the second pattern of relationship between rural education and urbanization concerned the contradictions of rural education, in terms of goals, curriculum and evaluation. rural education was designed to serve the needs of rural and agricultural development, but was either provided with insufficient resources to do so, or was based on urban experience. the first contradiction was that, while the entire state was in the midst of an urbanization trend, rural education had long been tasked with serving rural and agricultural development needs and improving peasants’ standard of living (ministry of education, 2010; ministry of education & ministry of agriculture, 2001); rural students were expected to work in their rural hometown after graduating. two approaches were adopted to promote rural development through rural education. the first required rural junior secondary school students to learn agricultural knowledge and skills. in the 1980s, rural junior secondary schools were required to provide agriculture-related subjects or to place some final year students into classes that specifically taught agriculture (communist party of china central committee & state council, 1983). in the new curriculum reform, begun in 2001, rural junior secondary schools were required to allocate 300 teaching hours to two or three agriculture-related subjects, and to award students who passed these subjects green certificates (lvse zhengshu) which was proof that the awarded students had learned the government prescribed agricultural knowledge and skills (ministry of education & ministry of agriculture, 2001). the second approach to serving rural development through rural education was implemented mainly through vocational and technical schools (deng, 1978; pang, 2006), despite the fact that these institutions were generally designed to benefit urbanization, rather than rural development. first, students who enrolled in majors relating to agriculture and rural development were not well trained in urban development, and did not promote rural modernization (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2000). second, to encourage students to study in vocational and technical schools, the state offered to change their agricultural household registration to a nonagricultural one, which meant providing them more social welfares (he, 2009). third, the state shifted its emphasis from vocational and technical secondary schools to general educational schools to cultivate more talented people capable of supporting modernization and urbanization. fourth, to attract students and help them to get jobs, vocational and technical schools provided only majors that were popular in urban markets (he, 2009). fifth, rural students were not interested in a rural vocational and technical secondary education that could not help them earn more than rural migrant workers earned in urban areas, or that made them less competitive in urban job markets than higher education graduates (pang, 2006). the second contradiction was that the curriculum provided to rural students was based on urban experiences and transmitted an urban culture that marginalized the rural culture with rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 89 which rural students were familiar. by analyzing the drawings and themes in chinese language textbooks provided to rural primary school students in 1994, yu (2005) found that content concerning rural life and culture focused mainly on landscapes, animals and plants, while urbanrelated content addressed a richer range of information, including architecture, interpersonal relationships and modern technology; moreover, the number of textbook drawings and themes that focused on urban life increased with the grade level. the chinese state tried to solve the problem of urbanizing the rural curriculum by prescribing a three-level curriculum—national, local and school—during the curriculum reform initiative it began in 2001 (state council, 2001). however, this reform merely aggregated the inferiority of the curriculum provided for rural students and promoted its further urbanization (wei, 2004). on the one hand, rural schools, lacking funds and teachers as shown in the previous two sections, and were not capable of implementing local curricula or developing school-based curricula, which were also challenges for urban schools. on the other hand, the national curriculum, which was based on urban experiences, became more challenging from a rural education perspective. a remarkable amount of national curriculum content referred to concepts familiar to urban students (e.g., computer and multimedia, mcdonalds, supermarkets), but strange to rural students and teachers (wei, 2004). moreover, many suggested student activities (e.g., visiting the zoo and collecting information from internet) and teaching materials (e.g., videos and video players) could not be organized or accessed in rural schools (wang, 2007). the third contradiction was that rural students, despite having been provided inferior educational resources and unsuitable curriculum content, were evaluated using urban criteria; they took the same examination their urban peers did to determine whether they could pursue further study after finishing their compulsory education. due to increasing ruralurban disparity, rural students became less competitive in entry examinations for senior secondary schools and universities (yu, 2008). a sample investigation of 16 universities showed that the percentage of freshmen coming from rural areas decreased from 72% in 1982, to 48.3% in 2010 (wang, 2013). the percentage of rural students in top universities had also decreased, to even lower levels; in tsinghua university, for example, rural students fell from 21.7% of total enrollment in 1990, to 17.6% in 2000 (yang, 2006). to maintain social stability and harmony, the chinese state tried to increase the proportion of rural students, using three strategies (dong, 2013). the first strategy was to request that universities lower their university entrance exam score requirement for students from the country’s middle and western regions. the second strategy involved designating some eastern universities to recruit rural students; fudan university, a top chinese university located in the eastern coastal city of shanghai, introduced a policy of recruiting outstanding rural students, and admitted 200 such rural students in 2014 (dong, 2014). the third strategy was to provide programs for recruiting rural students into key-point universities, such as the free normal university program discussed in the previous section. despite these strategies, rural university graduates continued to be at a disadvantage in the labor market, leading to a perception that higher education yielded low returns; this, together with the multiple unfavorable situations in rural education, discouraged many rural students from pursing further study (liu, 2015). 90 global education review 2(4) the quality and mobility of teachers in rural education: brain drain versus brain gain the third pattern of relationship between rural education and urbanization concerned the brain drain of rural teachers to work in urban areas and the state’s subsequent brain gain strategies for mobilizing urban human resources to work in rural schools. in addition to lacking funds, rural schools were short of teachers. this shortage was intensified by the outflow of (potential) rural teachers to urban areas that were more developed and that offered job opportunities that could provide a higher salary and a richer life experience. the state, beginning in 2000, established programs to encourage graduates with tertiary education experience to teach in rural schools and to mobilize teachers in eastern and urban areas to aid western and rural schools. the brain drain of rural teachers occurred in two ways. first, in-service rural teachers were attracted to urban areas where there were more opportunities to earn more money. the first large wave of rural teachers leaving for urban areas took place in the late 1980s, when the market economy in urban areas began to show its advantages (li, 1999). this trend continued due to the fact that rural teachers’ salaries, already low and often defaulted upon, were increasingly lower than those of teachers working in urban areas. in 2004, when county governments were first commanded to pay teachers on time, experienced rural teachers received a basic salary of only about rmb 2000 per month; by contrast, migrant peasant workers who worked in big cities could earn around rmb 6000 per month (ouyang, 2014). in qichun county of hubei province, more than 800 teachers quit their jobs within a single sixmonth period, and most went to work in urban areas (zhou et al., 2003). rural teachers flowed to urban area in three ways: by abandoning their teaching positions and working as factory workers, construction workers or entrepreneurs in more urban areas; by securing teaching or administrative positions at schools in more urban areas (in 2014, for example, nine outstanding teachers from a rural junior secondary school in wugang county of hunan province left to take up teaching positions in urban schools (yang et al., 2015); or by continuing to work in rural schools, while commuting as manual laborers at weekends or during holidays (ouyang, 2014). the second way in which the rural-urban brain drain manifested occurred when graduates who had been expected to teach in rural schools instead found jobs in urban areas. until the 1980s, students from normal school and colleges (universities) could be coerced by the government to teach in rural areas; once the government began to afford them greater autonomy in their job choices, however, they increasingly chose to work in urban areas. in addition, normal schools, which recruited junior secondary school graduates and were the major provider of rural primary teachers, were marginalized or upgraded to be normal college when the state shifted its emphasis from vocational education to higher education, in the 1990s. this policy resulted in the supply of teachers to rural schools falling dramatically, as graduates of normal colleges generally were able to use their academic degrees to find jobs in urban areas. in response to the shortage of teachers, rural schools, especially those that were isolated or poor, were provided with large numbers of community-sponsored teachers (minban jiaoshi) and substitute teachers (daike jiaoshi) who could be untrained and unpaid teenagers; however, these still could not satisfy the rural demand for quality teachers. communitysponsored teachers were not authorized personnel (bianzhi renyuan) who enjoyed stateprescribed allowances and salaries; rather, they were graduates recruited from public schools rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 91 and paid by a combination of government allowances and funds raised from local communities; if they wished, they could upgrade themselves to become teachers and authorized personnel (state education commission, 1995). in 1980, there were 3.4 million communitysponsored teachers in primary schools (61.4% of all primary school teachers) and 3 million in junior secondary schools (30.1% of all junior secondary school teachers) (liu, 1993); a large portion of these taught in rural schools. unlike community-sponsored teachers, who had stable positions, substitute teachers were temporarily recruited by specific institutions, were paid a significantly lower salary, and did not receive state allowances. in 2002, there were 580,000 substitute teachers in rural schools, accounting for 9.6% of all rural teachers. communitysponsored and substitute teachers, despite making contributions to rural education, were criticized for lowering the quality thereof. the state adopted two major brain-gain approaches to improve the quality and number of rural teachers. the first approach consisted of reducing the number of teachers who were not authorized personnel. the moe (later the national education commission, 1985-1998) used four methods to clean up and improve community-sponsored teachers in the 1980s and 1990s (state education commission et al., 1992). first, in 1986, they stopped recruiting community-sponsored teachers; then, they transformed qualified teachers who passed examinations into authorized personnel, transferred less qualified teachers to nonteaching positions, and dismissed unqualified teachers. by 2000, there were almost no remaining community-sponsored teachers. as for substitute teachers, most of whom had been recruited when community-sponsored teachers left or when rural teachers fled to urban areas, the moe decided to eliminate them altogether, beginning in 2001 (state council, 2001). this initiative was criticized for seriously reducing the number of available teachers in poor rural schools, for disregarding the important contributions substitute teachers had made to rural education, and for showing a lack of consideration for their welfare (chen, 2010). the second approach centered on preparing and recruiting university (college) graduates to work in rural schools, and involved three main programs. the first urged university (college) graduates to volunteer to be rural educators, under such state initiatives as calling university students to serve for western areas (daxuesheng fuwu xibu jihua), enacted in 2003, and three supports (supporting education, agriculture and hygiene) and one alleviation (alleviating poverty) (sanzhi yifu), which began in 2006. to entice graduates to join this program, universities, endorsed by the moe, offered to exempt graduates who volunteered for a two or three-year term of service in western and rural areas from having to write their master’s program entrance examination. the second program, begun in 2006, recruited university (college) students to be special post teachers for rural primary and junior secondary schools in western and middle regions (tegang jiaoshi). special post teachers were contracted to work in designated schools on a three-year basis (ministry of education et al., 2006); 59,500 university (college) graduates were recruited in the first three years of this program (wang, 2007; wu & bian, 2010). the third program, begun in 2007, offered a free normal college education to students from western and middle regions, in exchange for their agreeing to work in their home province for 10 years (including at least two years in rural schools) after graduation. these three programs had three similarities. first, they were all funded by the central government, which afforded rural education volunteers a small allowance, paid special post teachers a salary equivalent to that of teachers who were authorized personnel, and 92 global education review 2(4) gave students who accepted free normal education an annual allowance of rmb 6,000, and exempted them from paying tuition or boarding fees. the second similarity was that, despite the levels of financial support they provided, these programs were not attractive to students and graduates. in 2011, only 4.1% of first-year graduates of the free normal education program worked in rural schools (tian et al., 2011). special post teachers treated their position as a temporary job and tried to find other positions (e.g., civil service or urban teaching positions) during or after their term of service (jiang, 2008); in chongqing municipality, for example, 76.9% of special post teachers polled planned to quit their jobs (wang et al., 2013). rural education volunteers only needed to stay in rural schools for two or three years, and seldom went to the most distant rural schools. the third similarity was that schools and county governments frequently defaulted on the salaries of both the free normal education program graduates working in rural schools and special post teachers, and failed to endorse them as authorized personnel who could enjoy more social benefits (wu & bian, 2010). the third approach concerned requesting urban schools to provide intraand interprovincial partnership aid to rural schools. one method involved sending urban teachers to rural schools to provide inter-provincial partnership aid (duikou zhiyuan). from 2006 to 2008, four provinces mobilized a total of 15,000 teachers from townand county-level schools to aid rural schools within those provinces, while another 22 provinces sent 5,000 teachers from townand county-level schools to aid their rural schools (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2009). the second method urged schools in china’s eastern region to prove intraprovincial partnerships to schools in the country’s middle and western regions. three thousand teachers from eastern schools were sent to western areas in 2003 (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2004). to ensure urban teachers’ participation, some local educational authorities informed newlyrecruited and existing urban teachers that they must first provide aid to rural schools in order to become senior-level teachers (department of education of henan province, 2015). the third method centered on providing in-service training for aided school teachers and administrators through schools visits and training courses. almost 4,000 teachers and school administrators were invited to visit eastern schools between 2000 and 2003 (editorial board of educational yearbook of china, 2004). the national in-service training for teachers in primary and secondary schools program was enacted, in 2008, to provide free training to rural teachers and school leaders through on-site or distance training programs provided by normal universities and other authorized training centers in urban areas; around 4.7 million rural teachers had attended this program by 2013 (chai, 2014). inevitable loss of rural students and graduates to urban areas the fourth pattern of relationship between rural education and urbanization involved the flow of rural students and graduates to urban areas. rural students who dropped out of school, finished compulsory education or had more education experiences tended to work in urban areas. rural students who studied in urban areas and had degrees tended to find jobs in urban areas where they could realize improved social mobility and, especially, transform their household registration from agricultural to nonagricultural. rural education, though inferior, still sent rural elites to serve urban development through the mechanism of education (yu, 2008). in the early 1990s, 24% of formal migrants who obtained household registration in beijing did so through higher education institutions (liu, 1992). the graduates of vocational and technical rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 93 schools who worked in urban society before 1996 also received non-agricultural household registrations and became urban residents (he, 2009). most tertiary institution graduates from rural areas tended to work in urban areas; an investigation of 15 universities in four provinces indicated that 93% of tertiary students from rural areas preferred to work in urban areas above the county level (teng & miu, 2010). in addition, rural students who did not study in urban areas or did not have tertiary degrees were also attracted to urban areas, due to the cancellation of migration barriers between agricultural and non-agricultural household registration (liu & yu, 2012), mainly becoming migrant workers who performed poorly-paid, menial jobs. there were 269 million such migrant workers in 2013 (national bureau of statistics of china, 2014a), and their efforts contributed to china’s urbanization by speeding the construction of basic urban facilities, improving the quality of life for urban residents, and increasing their own family income, which in turn furthered the urbanization of rural areas (liu & yu, 2012). despite migrant workers’ contributions to urbanization, children who lived with their migrant worker parents in urban areas did not enjoy equal access to education with their urban peers, due to the interplay of household registration laws and the slow implementation of government policy. first, although more and more migrant workers’ children lived in urban areas since the 1980s, ensuring their education was not a significant government priority until 1996. second, although migrant workers’ children stayed in urban areas, their education was still deemed the responsibility of their original local government, due to the limitations of household registration, from 1996 to 2001. during that period, migrant children could not take advantage of the nine-year compulsory education in the public schools of their host city unless their parents paid a large temporally schooling fee (jiedu fei) (communist party of china central committee & state education commission, 1991). third, although responsibility for providing education to migrant workers’ children shifted to the host government and public schools in the host city in 2001 (state council, 2001), the children were still not welcomed by urban public schools. this was because the state council neither changed the decentralized education financing system, nor did it provide enforceable measures and sufficient resources for accepting migrant students in public schools, effectively giving local educational authorities license to reject them or charge them high fees. expensive fees at public schools meant that migrant workers instead sent their children to cheaper, unlicensed schools, where teachers were insufficient and unqualified, and where facilities often did not meet basic government standards. the government tried to eliminate such unlicensed schools, as they were illegal. the state council finally increased financial support for urban public schools to enable them to accept migrant workers’ children, and required urban schools to treat them equally, charge no additional fees and provide subsidies for those with financial difficulties (ministry of education et al., 2003). the entry of migrant workers’ children into urban public schools, however, challenged both the children and the schools. urban public schools complained that enrolling migrant students strained schools’ human and material resources, increased teachers’ student administration burden and lowered schools’ academic level. as for the migrant workers’ children, their first dilemma was that they were not allowed to enter public schools where they lived unless they first met those schools’ admission requirements. for example, the admission requirements established by the municipal government of nanjing, an eastern city in jiangsu province, stated that migrant 94 global education review 2(4) workers’ children must have resided in nanjing for more than one year and that their guardian(s) must provide proof of stable employment (education bureau of nanjing, 2013). the second dilemma confronting migrant workers’ children was the discrimination they suffered in urban public schools. migrant workers’ children in one shanghai school were restricted to specific areas of the school building and playground to segregate them from urban students, studied in different classes and played different games on the playground (wu, 2010). the third dilemma was the issue of the university entrance examination. despite that cross-provincial migrant workers’ children could have opportunity of studying in urban schools away from their home province, they were not allowed to take the university entrance examination in a province where they did not have household registration without first satisfying several oppressive requirements of the family (ministry of education et al., 2012). the requirements included that the migrant student’s family must have legal and stable job and residence in the host city, and bought the host city’s social insurance for years, which were too demanding for migrant workers who usually had great mobility (ministry of education et al., 2012). in other words, students were educated in one place, but required to take another province’s examination, despite the fact that that examination was different than what they had prepared for and would not test what they had been taught. because the university enrollment scores for students in different provinces differed, students from some places (e.g., beijing and shanghai) could successfully enter university with lower scores (zhang, 2010). policy implications for the development of rural education during urbanization rural education can be a means to improve rural residents’ quality of life, promote rural development, and enhance national competitiveness. however, during the process of urbanization, rural education, especially in developing countries, has increasingly been shown to be inferior to urban education in the same country. with reference to compulsory education in rural china, this study has examined the historical development of the role of rural education in the urbanization process promoted by china’s efforts to develop its economy and maintain social stability. it has identified patterns in the state’s strategy of defining rural education to serve urban development and expanding urbanization. unlike some studies (e.g.,antrop, 2004; ge, 2003; qu & wang, 2012; wei, 2004), which claimed that rural education was dependent on and passively influenced by urban education, this article has demonstrated that the marginalization of rural education was designed by the state to allow it to concentrate its fiscal resources on developing the country’s urban economy and to provide human resources for urbanization. unlike beaulieu and gibbs’s (2005) view that urbanization drained the local elites trained by rural education, this study argues that urbanization attracted both rural elites and unskilled rural workers. rural education’s contribution to urbanization was directed by state development policies in different periods and constrained by practical considerations. moreover, the experiences and struggles in china’s rural education development provide a useful means of understanding the complex, dynamic intertwined relationship among the state, rural education and urbanization. this has three main policy implications for rural education in developing countries during the process of urbanization. first, the state was the key actor in dedicating rural education to serve the needs and goals of urbanization. urban development and the expansion of urbanization in china were planned by the state and enacted through specific, targeted economic and social rural education and urbanization: experiences and struggles in china 95 reforms. the state first limited the resources available to rural education to further the development of urban areas and urban education by enacting a policy of unbalanced economic development. this policy helped china make remarkable progress in terms of its domestic economic development and greatly expanded its urbanization, but resulted in increased rural-urban disparity, both in terms of economic development and education. next, the state left rural education to fend for itself, and provided it with an inappropriate curriculum; at the same time, it allowed urban areas to use their economic superiority to attract rural education elites, outstanding teachers and it failed rural students in order to serve the needs of urban development. finally, when the state of rural education became a barrier to further urbanization, the state transferred financial resources and mobilized human resources to aid rural education, and confronted long-standing dilemmas in an effort to resolve the inferiority of rural education. second, in the process of urbanization, the state’s emphasis on the importance of rural education was neither in accordance with trends in population mobility and social development nor favorable to rural education. the case of china shows the conflicts inherent in positioning rural education during urbanization. the first conflict was that, despite shifting its emphasis from the primary economic sector (agriculture/raw materials) to the secondary and tertiary sectors (manufacturing and services), which are necessary for urbanization and require skilled workers and professionals, the state continued to encourage rural education to cultivate rural students (who constitute a large portion of chinese students) capable of modernizing chinese agriculture. the second conflict was that, despite emphasizing the role of rural education in the modernization of agriculture, the state did not provide sufficient financial or human resources to allow rural students to acquire knowledge and skills relating to agriculture; instead, it provided an urbanbased curriculum and evaluated rural students using criteria that favored urban students. being influenced by these conflicts, rural education failed to cultivate students who were capable of modernizing agriculture and enhancing its competitiveness. on the other hand, it did help those who succeeded at the urban-based evaluation to become more socially mobile and to live in urban areas, and it also cultivated unskilled and less-educated workers and service staff to further the process of urbanization. third, the planning of rural education must systematically consider the interplay of rural education policy and other policies. the struggles and difficulties resulting from the chinese state’s efforts to plan rural education show that policy-makers should consider the following three policy issues: the first issue is that rural education is constrained by other social policies supported by the state. china’s rural education was influenced by the state’s policy of unbalanced economic development, and by china’s household registration system, which provided non-agricultural residents with more privileges, effectively blocked rural-urban migration, and inhibited the provision of equal education to migrant workers’ children. despite having explored ways of educating migrant workers’ children for almost two decades, the chinese state has continued to divide students based on household registration. another social policy affecting rural education is the authorized personnel system, which provided rural teachers in the system with a stable job and higher salary. the system helped the state eliminate substitute teachers, who were important to rural teaching, and discouraged teachers recruited through the state’s schemes for supporting rural education. the second issue concerns the consistency and appropriateness of rural education policies. first, to facilitate the implementation of new rural education policies, the state should 96 global education review 2(4) simultaneously review, and update as needed, its other education policies, so as to avoid conflicts. the case of china’s rural education has shown that the state’s policy on rural education did not match its general education policies. for example, the state asked host cities to provide education for migrant workers’ children in 2001, but continued its decades-old decentralized financial responsibility system, which did not provide adequate financial support to the host cities; the host city governments were thus neither willing nor able to accept migrant workers’ children in their public schools. next, rural education policy should be made by carefully examining the unique demography and geography of the targeted rural areas. to reduce the cost of rural education, the chinese state arbitrarily enacted policies abolishing teaching stations and merging schools with few students, while neglecting to consider the impact of such issues as sparse populations and the lack of convenient transportation in remote rural areas. similarly, its policy of eliminating 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(2008). zhongguo jingji fazhan he tizhi gaige baogao: zhongguo gaige kaifang 30 nian [report on china’s economic development and institution reform in china: 30 years of reform and opening-up (19782008)]. beijing: social science academic press (china). zou, d. (2012). zhongguo jingji fazhan he tizhi gaige baogao (no. 5) [report on china’s economic development and institutional reform (no. 5)]. beijing: social science academic press (china). about the author(s) shuqin xu is a lecturer in the school of education at sun yat-sen university. her main research areas include school leadership and citizenship education, curriculum of citizenship education, education and social change in china wing-wah law is professor in the faculty of education at the university of hong kong. his main research areas include education and development, globalization and citizenship education, education policy and legislation, education reform and chinese societies, music education and social change, and culture and school leadership. after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? 23 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: laitsch, dan (2016). after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? global education review, 3 (2). 23-32 after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? dan laitsch simon fraser university, ca abstract in 1955, milton friedman authored a foundational paper proposing a shift in funding and governance mechanisms for public k -12 schools, suggesting that parents be awarded tuition vouchers that they could use to pay for private sector education services for their children, rather than relying on government provided neighborhood schools. friedman theorized three cases in which such a system might fail, requiring greater involvement of the government in the education system: the presence of a natural monopoly; substantial neighborhood effects; and a breakdown in free exchange. this article examines these concerns by applying more than 25 years of school choice research in an attempt to answer the question, “ after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold?” findings cited in this article suggest that friedman was correct to be concerned about possible deleterious effects that may arise from a privatized system. keywords neoliberalism, free enterprise system, government role, privatization, public policy, school choice, charter schools introduction tuition voucher programs have been in place in the united states since the mid-1800s. both vermont and maine have programs in place that offer families tuition vouchers to use at public or private non-parochial schools, if they live in a locality that has no available public schools. in 1955 (and again in a 1962 revision), milton friedman put forth a more modern proposal to expand such programs and bring the power of the market to bear on the public school system.1 his proposal launched what would become an ongoing effort to reform and privatize the public school system in states across the united states. as of 2013, 18 states and the district of columbia had some form of publicly funded tuition voucher (or tax credit) system in place (american federation for children, 2013). the shift of congressional control to republicans as of 2015 has re-energized efforts to expand choice programs within those and other states (sen. tim scott discusses school choice, 2015; layton, 2014; republican national committee, undated). before substantially increasing efforts to privatize public schools, it is worth reflecting on the theoretical foundation for the school ______________________________ corresponding author: dan laitsch, simon fraser university, surrey campus, 25013450 102nd avenue, surrey, b.c., canada v3t 0a3 email: dlaitsch@sfu.ca mailto:dlaitsch@sfu.ca 24 global education review 3(2) choice movement, using research findings to examine the outcomes of the movement thus far. when he proposed tuition vouchers in 1955, friedman mapped out a careful series of conditions under which government should take responsibility for using tax money to pay for a system of public schools. after establishing a compelling interest for government support of a public system, he next considered whether it was necessary for government to also run the schools, or whether the government could instead fund a program that would funnel public funds through parents to pay for a system of privately operated schools. after concluding that such a system would indeed be feasible (and desirable) he explained specific market failures that might require government intervention in the education sector—outcomes that could create a compelling need for a stronger government role in the management of schools. at the time, friedman dismissed these potential outcomes as unlikely, but held open the possibility that such evidence might arise once programs were put in place. voucher programs (like those envisaged by friedman) have now been in place in the united states for over 20 years. while these programs have largely been local in nature, or limited to specific populations (e.g., high poverty or special needs students), other countries (such as chile and sweden) have well-established national programs. in addition, a number of other marketoriented reforms have been created based on friedman’s initial supposition that governments should fund, but not administer, schools. for the purposes of this paper, such programs also include charter schools. charter schools are government-funded schools that are “chartered” to deliver educational programs independent of public school administrative structures. charter schools may be run individually (so-called “mom and pop” schools), or by large scale providers—educational management organizations (emos). these programs (in the u.s. and internationally) have generated significant bodies of research that can allow us to revisit friedman’s 1955 proposal, examine the system he envisioned, and apply research findings to the concerns he dismissed at the time. context in his 1955 article, “the role of government in education,” friedman presented the case for public education, and then described the role that government should play in such a system. he defined, generally, the reason for government involvement in any economic activity, and identified three special cases where government involvement is justified: the presence of a monopoly; neighborhood effects; and paternalism (who should make the educational choices for children). in 1955, he determined that these situations were not a substantial risk. seven years later, without explanation, he reduced these three cases to only two by dropping concerns related to natural monopoly in a revised version of the article (friedman, 1962), although he did speak to “technical monopoly” in much the same way. i have chosen to focus on friedman’s original 1955 work primarily because he never addressed why he dropped “natural monopoly” from his list of concerns. additionally, even in the revised version, friedman discussed the problem of “technical monopoly,” suggesting that whether one calls it a natural or technical monopoly, the presence of a monopoly is a concern that government should address. finally, in searches of scholarly research databases, friedman’s 1955 article is much more frequently cited, suggesting it serves as the foundational article on school choice as far as the research community is concerned. in the article, friedman “takes freedom of the individual, or more realistically the family, as [society’s] ultimate objective, and seeks to further this objective by relying primarily on voluntary exchange among individuals for the after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? 25 organization of economic activity.” as such, “government's primary role is to preserve the rules of the game by enforcing contracts, preventing coercion, and keeping markets free.” (p. 124). while these are the ground rules put forth by friedman (and other market theorists), he also noted that there are at times justifications for greater government involvement in organizing economic activity. education for citizenship an important piece of friedman’s work--one that is frequently either overlooked or ignored, perhaps due to its simplicity--is his definition of the purpose of public education. he noted that, “a stable and democratic society is impossible without widespread acceptance of some common set of values and without a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge on the part of most citizens” (p. 124-25). as such, he identified two important principles of public education: introduction to a common set of values, and a minimum degree of literacy and knowledge. this goal of a citizenry with a common set of values and basic level of literacy and knowledge remains central to his proposal, in particular stemming from his discussion of neighborhood effects, but also important when considering the “paternalistic concern for children” (discussed below). government intervention in economic activity according to friedman, there are only three major grounds on which government intervention in economic activity could be justified (1955), and all three stem from actions that restrict voluntary exchange among individuals. the first is the presence of a monopoly or another market imperfection that would prohibit the voluntary exchange required for market competition. the second is the existence of neighborhood effects. the final reason for government involvement would be limits to free exchange caused by a lack of clarity regarding the objectives of the public schools. neighborhood effects result when “the action of one individual imposes significant costs on other individuals for which it is not feasible to make him compensate them or yields significant gains to them for which it is not feasible to make them compensate him” (p. 124). essentially, it is impossible to quantify or obtain remuneration for the value individuals receive from the social stability that results from a commonly educated citizenry. free exchange may be limited by “ambiguity in the ultimate objective,” what friedman calls a ”paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals” (p. 124)—in other words, the ability of the chooser to select a school or curriculum that will achieve the purposes of public education: an individual educated in a common set of values to at least minimum academic standards. therefore, if within public education there is a monopoly, substantial neighborhood effects, or challenges achieving the public purposes, then according to friedman increased government involvement can be justified to address these conditions. monopoly a monopoly exists where voluntary exchange is limited by the lack of provider options. this may be due to geographic challenges or the expense of starting a new business. utilities are frequently used as an example, since (for example) creating parallel infrastructure for delivery of electricity would be both unwieldy and expensive, naturally limiting the number of potential providers. as friedman noted, in rural communities, the number of potential customers may be too small to make the presence of multiple providers economically viable. the choices in such cases, according to friedman, would be unregulated private monopoly, state controlled private monopoly, or public operation. interestingly, friedman’s solution to this 26 global education review 3(2) problem was to suggest a hybrid approach: that the monopoly is allowed to exist, but that vouchers are provided to allow competition to arise where providers see a market. as he noted, “governments would continue to administer some schools but parents who chose to send their children to other schools would be paid a sum equal to the estimated cost of educating a child in a government school, provided that at least this sum was spent on education in an approved school” (p. 130). two related questions then arise. first, where privatization has occurred, would public funding eventually lead to a return to government involvement? in other words, in privatized delivery systems, would the function of the government as the funder ultimately lead to re-regulation of the private sector, losing the competitive benefits choice advocates theorize as the primary justification for privatization? second, within the concept of a monopoly, there is another force at play that isn’t specifically addressed by friedman, but still may influence the behavior of the system. in education, the consumer is compelled by the state to access the education services offered by the state (or other providers). in such a case, the way in which the market system in the competitive arena evolves may differ from that of a typical market economy. what the research says how do the market and system evolve? the two questions that arise from the challenge friedman presented are: 1) in systems where the market has been opened, does the market respond by providing substantial new options; and 2) if the market does respond as theorized, how does the system evolve? there is evidence to suggest an increase in the number of private schools over the past two decades. in 1989 there were 26,712 private schools in the united states, expanding to 28,996 as of 2006 (us department of education, 2006). while central cities and rural areas saw declines in numbers, there was substantial growth in urban areas (from 7903 to 11,775). similarly, while the number of religious schools expanded by just 0.7%, the number of nonsectarian schools grew by 44%. interestingly, the number of students enrolled in private schools increased only slightly between 1990 and 2006, and by 2009 total enrollment had actually declined overall (us department of education, 2012). school choice options also include more than attendance at private schools--in the united states many parents (depending on locality) can choose to enroll their children in charter schools, magnet schools, or other public schools outside of their catchment area. research suggests that these options also expanded considerably in the 1990s and early 2000s (bielick & chapman, 2003; linkow, 2011). the proliferation of school choice options over the past twenty years suggests that at least part of the friedman’s theory—that the market will respond to demand if consumer choice is expanded—is supported; however, friedman’s concern that choice will not expand in geographically isolated and rural areas is also supported by research (us department of education, 2006). legislators are still working to change school funding systems, making it difficult to state with any confidence if the expansion in options is sustainable or simply a shortterm response to recent policy changes. that said, there is some data collected that suggests some of these choice options may eventually be consolidated under corporate and nonprofit management organizations, ultimately limiting choice and potentially leading to the presence of private monopolies in some areas. for the past 13 years researchers have been collecting data on for-profit and notforprofit educational management organizations (miron, et al., 2001). emos manage one or more schools within the choice sector and range from organizations focused on individual schools to after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? 27 large conglomerates (such as mott macdonald) and publicly traded publishing houses (such as pearson, plc). currently 35% of all charter schools are run by emos, enrolling 42% of all charter school students. large emos manage the bulk of for-profit charter schools (70.7% are operated by 14 large emos) while 79% of non profit charter schools are run by large or medium sized emos. in the voucher sector, there is research to suggest that small private schools are more likely to fail than larger schools (ford, 2011), adding to concerns about how the market might ultimately respond to privatization of education services. it will be interesting to see how the sector grows and consolidates over time, and if the concept of multiple providers is sustainable. similarly, the legislative framework under which these schools run changes as political changes bring in new policy priorities. schools participating in choice programs frequently experience shifting requirements regarding accountability, funding, student eligibility and data reporting, and some programs, such as the one in milwaukee wisconsin, have seen a return to greater government regulation as they evolve (rubelen, 2006). neighborhood effects friedman makes a strong case for the public funding of education, noting that a stable and democratic society requires that citizens have a set of shared values and a basic level of literacy and knowledge. he notes that because of this, the education of each child also benefits the broader society, contributing to the welfare of others even though the contribution cannot be quantified. this, he noted, results in substantial neighborhood effects in as far as educational outcomes vary across localities. to compensate for these neighborhood effects, friedman suggested requiring a common curriculum, through the provision of public education. rather than requiring parents to pay for this education (something he is sympathetic to but rejects as not feasible given differences in family sizes and resources), friedman argued that education is a valid function of government. while he uses neighborhood effects to justify imposition of both a common curriculum and public funding, he breaks with the current system by suggesting that public funding does not by definition require public management--in other words, governments should be able to fund educational institutions though provision of tuition vouchers to parents for use at the institutions of their choice, as long as “schools met certain minimum standards such as the inclusion of a minimum common content in their programs” (p. 127). “one argument from the ‘neighborhood effect’ for nationalizing education, according to friedman, is that it might otherwise be impossible to provide the common core of values deemed requisite for social stability” (p. 128). he continued, “schools run by different religious groups will, it can be argued, instill sets of values that are inconsistent with one an other and with those instilled in other schools; in this way they convert education into a divisive rather than a unifying force” and that, “the link between the financing of education and its administration places other [private] schools at a disadvantage: they get the benefit of little or none of the governmental funds spent on education;” however, “elimination of this disadvantage might...strengthen the parochial schools and so render the problem of achieving a common core of values even more difficult.” (p. 128). a final point raised by friedman regarding the potential negative outcomes resulting from neighborhood effects is that of exacerbated class distinctions, i.e., when given choices, parents would choose to send their children to school with children from similar backgrounds, reducing the “healthy intermingling of children from decidedly different backgrounds” (p. 129). even in 1955, friedman was aware of the potential for a voucher system to be used to maintain class and ethnic distinctions. in a 28 global education review 3(2) lengthy note within the chapter he discussed the move by some localities in the southern united states to use vouchers as a means for maintaining a segregated school system. while he noted that he initially thought this was a mark against his proposal, after further reflection he maintained that the importance of freedom to choose trumped the integration of schools. he stated, “under [a choice] system, there can develop exclusively white schools, exclusively colored schools, and mixed schools. parents can choose which to send their children to. the appropriate activity for those who oppose segregation and racial prejudice is to try to persuade others of their views; if and as they succeed, the mixed schools will grow at the expense of the non-mixed, and a gradual transition will take place.” (pg. 131). a full critique of friedman’s view that segregated schools are acceptable, and his general view that market economies are colorblind (friedman, 1962) is beyond the scope of this article, but is highly contested in both law (brown v. board of education, 1954) and education scholarship (coleman et al., 1962; laitsch & rodi, 2004; wells, 2014). for the purposes of this article, i focus on his emphasis that government administration of the schools may be required if research suggests that neighborhood effects are exacerbating class distinctions that serve to break down the “common core of values deemed requisite for social stability” (p. 128). further, the research cited here includes the impact of market choice on class and racial segregation to test friedman’s assumption that “the widening of the range of choice under a private system would operate to reduce both kinds of stratification” (p.129). if research shows that privatization serves to exacerbate economic and racial segregation, then it may be appropriate for government to intervene. economic and racial stratification research regarding economic and racial stratification is available for some forms of largescale school choice in the u.s. (specifically charters and open enrollment). the available research suggests that choice programs in the u.s. do generally result in greater economic and ethnic stratification (ben-porath, 2012; bifulco, ladd & ross, 2008; d’entremont, & gulosino, 2008; garcia, 2008; jacobs, 2013; koedel, betts, rice, & zau, 2010; mickelson, bottia, & southworth, 2008). this trend is supported by research in other countries, where vouchers are much more widely used and firmly entrenched in the educational system (levin, 1998). research on chile’s voucher system has found that the voucher systems has exacerbated inequities, with public schools serving more disadvantaged, lowincome, and indigenous students than private voucher schools (elacqua, 2009; elacqua, & de gobierno, 2006; gonzález, mizala, & romaguera, 2004). additionally, within chilean voucher schools there is further stratification linked to differences in tuition levels (elacqua, 2009; elacqua, & de gobierno, 2006). recent research looking at outcomes in sweden has also found that choice policies resulted in a large increase in social and economic stratification (söderström & uusitalo, 2010; wiborg, 2008). free exchange and paternalistic concern while friedman identified the concept of “paternalistic concern for children” as important, he spent little time in his essay discussing the problem or the solution. he noted that, “the third [challenge] derives from an ambiguity in the ultimate objective rather than from the difficulty of achieving it by voluntary exchange, namely, paternalistic concern for children and other irresponsible individuals.” (p. 124). in other words, the primary beneficiaries of education are not able to exercise voluntary exchange in a manner that accomplishes the goals of public education. friedman turns to parents as the primary caregivers and identifies them as the individuals who should be allowed to exercise choice on behalf of their children, after 60 years, do the arguments for k-12 vouchers still hold? 29 although he acknowledges that “such a procedure rests on expediency rather than principle. the problem of drawing a reasonable line between action justified on these paternalistic grounds and action that conflicts with the freedom of responsible individuals is clearly one to which no satisfactory answer can be given.” (p. 124). this doesn’t mean that this issue disappears, however, or that there isn’t research that we can use to interrogate the problem. if as friedman has identified, the primary purpose of the public schools is to establish a citizenry with a common set of values, a basic level of literacy, and understanding of a specific body of knowledge, then the choices made by consumers in a market based system can be evaluated with regard to their impact on these outcome goals. in other words, do parents choose schools that will further friedman’s stated goals of literacy, common curriculum, and citizenship, or do they have other reasons for choosing their child’s school? a major cornerstone of market theory is that consumers have access to the information that will allow them to make the “best” choices. in this case, do parents have access to enough information about the schools they are choosing to make the best choice? social outcomes looking into the research on social outcomes associated with the use of private school vouchers results in a complex picture. this is particularly true in that many programs are designed to target specific groups of people, encouraging them to make choices they might not otherwise make. even so, we can get a general sense of the stated and observed behaviors of families who choose schools. while research shows that parents are generally more satisfied with their choice in school (wolf, 2008), it also suggests that parents are likely to choose the schools for other than academic reasons, including religious affiliation (denessen, driessena & sleegers, 2005; fleming, cowen, witte, & wolf, 2014; ji & boyatt, 2007), social class and race (lacireno-paquet & brantley, 2008). other research finds that while most parents state that they choose schools for academic reasons, their observed behavior is that they chose schools based on peer composition in terms of race and class (lacireno-paquet & brantley, 2008; wells, 2014). in effect, parents don’t choose for societal gain, but for personal gain, suggesting friedman’s concern—that privatization will lead to increased fragmentation of society—may indeed be true. when looking at the type of information available to parents making school choices, there is no standard data reporting system for school characteristics or achievement information, particularly with regard to private schools (and charter schools). in many cases, parents rely on informal networks or the advertising and marketing materials provided by schools. research looking at the issue of charter schools, in one urban area, has found that these schools tended to present information to parents that targeted particular student groups, again further fragmenting schools (wilson, carlsen, & rivera, 2015). other research suggests that parent access to quality information varies by ethnicity and income, and that their choice varies based on the type of information they are able to access (yettick, 2014). finally, research in sweden found very little standardized information (or even academic information) in school informational material (johnsson & lindgrin, 2010). conclusions and recommendations this article is not intended to provide a definitive review of school choice research, nor is it intended to argue the veracity of the arguments friedman put forth in his foundational essay. rather, the goal was to apply the available body of research to the specific concerns raised in that essay. when friedman made his proposal to 30 global education review 3(2) shift management of public schools from the public sector to the private he identified three challenges that could prove detrimental to such a shift: the presence of a monopoly that prevents choice; the presence of substantial neighborhood effects that work to break down the common educational experience needed for to support a stable and democratic society; and the inability of the consumer (students) to fully exercise voluntary exchange. while not definitive, research suggests that there are substantial concerns in each of these areas, suggesting that the move to a privatized system may ultimately harm the public purposes of education as outlined by friedman. in particular, there are important challenges regarding the societal fragmentation along economic and ethnic lines, and the presence of a monopoly—particularly if the trend toward consolidation of privatized educational services through emos continues. a major purpose for shifting to a privately run system was to expand choice and competition by increasing the number of providers and decreasing the amount of governmental oversight, management and regulation. early findings from the recent expansion in education choice in the united states suggests that while options have expanded over the past 20 years, there may be underlying trends in corporate consolidation that may work against the initial diversity in options over the longer term. advocates of expanded school choice should think carefully about the design of the programs they propose. in the past, concerns largely focused on empowering the choice of participants, and not the outcomes of that choice. the research highlighted here, and the concerns raised by the foundational work of milton friedman, suggest that choice advocates need to also consider the outcomes of choice programs, and take seriously concerns related to the weakening of the broader public purposes of education. notes 1. friedman’s chapter focuses on both general education and vocational education, with vocational education serving as the branching off point for a discussion related to higher education. the current article only looks at friedman’s arguments as they pertain to governance of the k-12 system. references american federation for children. 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(2015). shaping high school choices: how charter schools appeal to particular students, in context matters: how social, legal, and professional settings affect charter schools and school choice. paper presented to the 2015 annual meeting of the american educational http://books.cat-v.org/economics/capitalism-and-freedom/ http://books.cat-v.org/economics/capitalism-and-freedom/ http://books.cat-v.org/economics/capitalism-and-freedom/ http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/op190.pdf http://www.ncspe.org/publications_files/op190.pdf http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/who-chooses-schools-and-why. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/who-chooses-schools-and-why. http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/emo-profiles-10-11 http://nepc.colorado.edu/publication/emo-profiles-10-11 32 global education review 3(2) research association, chicago, il. wolf, p., gutmann, b., puma, m., kisida, b., rizzo, l., & eissa, n. (2009). evaluation of the dc opportunity scholarship program: impacts after three years (ncee 2009-4050). washington, dc: national center for education evaluation and regional assistance, institute of education sciences, u.s. department of education. available ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20094050/pdf/20094050.pdf yettick, h. (2014). information is bliss: information use by school choice participants in denver. urban education. published online before print september 24, 2014. available: http://uex.sagepub.com/content/early/2014/09/23/ 0042085914550414.abstract about the author dan laitsch, phd, is associate professor in the faculty of education at simon fraser university and a scholar with the sfu centre for the study of educational leadership and policy. he is co-editor of the open access peer reviewed international journal of education policy and leadership (www.ijepl.org), and is active in the american educational research association special interest group on research use. dr. laitsch’s research interests include the use and misuse of research in teaching, policymaking, and issue advocacy; and neoliberal education reforms (specifically high stakes accountability and assessment, and the privatization of public school systems). http://www.ijepl.org/ ger 10 31 tgw.docx what is stem education? 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: marrero, meghan e., gunning, amanda & germain-williams, terri (2014). what is stem education? global education review, 1 (4). 1-6. what is stem education? meghan e. marrero mercy college, new york amanda m. gunning mercy college, new york terri germain-williams mercy college, new york introduction the term “stem”, an acronym for science, technology, engineering and mathematics, has come to the forefront of international discourse in education, industry, innovation, and competition. the term is used with students from preschool to post graduate levels, and to describe careers in the respective fields. the national science foundation (nsf) in the united states began using the term “smet” in the 1990s to describe the fields, but an nsf program officer noted that the acronym sounded too much like “smut,” from her objection, “stem” was born in 2001 (donahoe, 2013; sanders, 2009). since then, definitions of stem have been unclear. for some, stem refers to education and careers in the hard sciences and mathematics, for others, social sciences and other related fields are included. some authors argue that “agglomerating dissimilar technical skills,” into the catchall phrase leads to a “confusing picture” (donahoe, 2013). even professionals surveyed in stem fields do not seem to understand what the acronym means, often assuming it is related to botany or research on stem cells (bybee, 2010). similarly muddled definitions of stem in school settings, and ideas about what good stem education looks like, are leading to confusion and disagreement. at times, stem is simply used as a way to discuss the four disciplines. at other times, authors stress the importance of integrating the fields (morrison and bartlett, 2009). as academics in the fields of science and math education, we wonder: what are the skills that students need for stem subjects and stem careers? how do we ensure that all students, regardless of race, ethnicity, ability, language, gender, or location, succeed in stem classrooms around the globe? how should we focus our resources toward that end? research in truly integrated stem education is rare, likely because the stem disciplines are not typically integrated in schools. worldwide educational systems have typically been discipline-specific; students take singularly focused content courses, with little interdisciplinary work. in this issue, our authors offer diverse perspectives on science, technology and mathematics education, with a focus on underserved populations including african american women in the stem fields, students ______________________________ corresponding author: meghan e. marrero, mercy college school of education, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: mmarrero3@mercy.edu mailto:mmarrero3@mercy.edu 2 global education review 1(4) who do not speak the dominant language, and inclusive classrooms. why is stem education important? the demand for stem workers is an explosive phase. but apart from the world of work and productivity, the need for stem education is dire on a personal level as well. worldwide, technology abounds. health crises increasingly focus on the spread of life-threatening illness. climate concerns and extreme weather surface repeatedly in news and politics. whether citizens are trying to understand how the latest airport screening technology works or how mosquito nets prevent malaria, every person needs some level of stem education. the necessity of this exposure is not limited to understanding germ theory or how tsunamis form, but studies have shown that learning in stem fields is linked to increased critical reasoning and logical thinking (sadler & zeidler, 2004). in this issue, morrison-love (p. 15) examines the importance and methods for teacher education to promote transfer of knowledge for solving complex stem problems. he explores some of the ideal conditions for the development of these abilities and addresses the residual results on student confidence and independence. all people need stem understanding in order to make sound decisions for themselves, families and their communities (tate, jones, thorne-wallington & hogrebe, 2012). denying anyone this piece of their education is tantamount to discrimination (tate, 2001). we cannot deprive certain members of our society the tools to make good decisions based on their race, class or level of access. it is important that we not only explore how marginalized groups can be reached to develop stem understandings, but also that we share best practices for educating our teachers to prepare them to teach stem content and practices so that all students may learn. in this issue, bruscavega, alexander, and kamin (p. 37 in this issue) examine collaborative professional development for science and special education teachers with a focus on meeting the needs of all students in their classrooms, resulting in positive outcomes for both teachers and students. stem understanding and exposure for all students will not only benefit them personally, but will benefit the world, as more engineers, doctors, scientists, and mathematicians grow out of the increased exposure. surely, many untapped talents exist, due to the simple lack of accessibility to stem education. stem fields inherently require some level of creativity and personal influence in terms of what is of interest to study; how these studies should be conducted; and how results will be shared. by including all members of society (increased numbers of women, minorities, marginalized groups within countries, for example) more diverse research and knowledge will be shared, for the betterment of all. varied perspectives and data fuel robust innovation. through the internet, it is possible to share information and work like no other time in history. nancy heilbronner’s editorial (p. 7 in this issue) argues that global stem talent need not be an international competition. when nations work together, we achieve improved results. solving the 21st century issues of sustainability, for example health, climate change, access to freshwater, will require strong stem education of students in all nations and international cooperation (johnson, 2012). varied voices from all corners of the world can only add to our depth of knowledge and fodder for solutions to the ever-increasing problems of the 21st century. perspectives on the "stem workforce crisis" is there a lack of able stem workers? it seems to depend on who you ask. the lack of “stem talent” has been discussed worldwide. in the united states, a recent study found one jobwhat is stem education? 3 seeker for each thousand openings in stem (st. louis community college, 2014). norway, a country with many natural resources, reports that there are not enough skilled professionals to fill the need for engineers and other technical jobs (johnson, 2013). in india, it has been found that although the country produces the most engineers worldwide, “only 25% of them are readily employable” (craig, thomas, hou, and mathsur, 2012, p. 2). the lack of employability is attributed to outdated curriculum and dearth of innovation (nasscom, 2013). the same report notes that in the united kingdom, businesses are struggling to find employees with the technical skills they need, and that there is a “global shortage” of stem phds. on the other hand, others suggest that the lack of available talent is an exaggeration. some us studies find that the number of undergraduates studying in stem fields has actually increased, and that the number of stem majors from underrepresented groups in the united states, for example, latinos and african americans, has increased by more than 50% (gonzalez and kuenzi, 2012). other studies note surpluses in some stem fields, and unemployment rates in highly-touted stem “shortage areas” that are similar to other fields (metcalf, 2010). the urban institute, a usbased non-partisan research group composed of ten centers, published a study not only disputing the perception that american college students are lagging in mathematics and science achievement, but also concluded that colleges graduate far more scientists and engineers than are hired each year (lowell, 2007). in china, apple was able to find and employ 8,700 industrial engineers in just 15 days to oversee iphone manufacturing in 2007 (duhigg & bradsher, 2012). the volume and availability of that number of engineers is astounding. in our search for international research or data on the stem crisis, we found a number of blogs and news articles making observations about the supply of stem workers in a number of countries. however, a lack of policy documents and peer-reviewed research calls to question the existence of hard data to justify the commentary. understanding how varied nations support the development of stem graduates is important for the continued development of stem fields. nahar arshad (p. 53 in this issue) investigates the level of efficiency in the use of money to increase student achievement in mathematics and science in 16 non-western countries to drive work-place-ready graduates. their study helps us understand how we define and analyze efficiency and productivity in education. stem skills are a transferable set that are readily useful to all citizens. while mathematical calculations can help balance a budget or help us to understand discounts and charges, the value of logic and analytical skills are even more valuable for everyday thinking. understanding the nature of science or the engineering design process can influence how we think about the world around us and inform personal decision-making. effective communication, creative thinking and problem solving are consistently hailed by employers as the most important skills of their best team members. stem educators must think further about building stem practices at all levels of education in order to assure achievement in these areas and lifelong critical thinking skills. for example, tzohar-rozen and kramarski (pp. 76 of this issue) examine the social and emotional implications of learning and understanding mathematical problem solving. they address the critical ages for mathematical problem solving skill development and the impact of attitude and emotion on mathematics achievement. their study asks: what is the distinction between metacognitive and motivational-emotion self-regulatory processes and what is the impact of each on the learning of mathematics at this critical age? 4 global education review 1(4) composition of the stem fields trends in mathematics and science achievement suggest that underperformance is disproportionate in subpopulations of students, including students with special needs, students who are not native speakers of the dominant language, and non-white students. the overrepresentation of white males in stem careers illustrates the urgent need to diversify the workforce (landivar, 2013). while the subjects of mathematics and science are readily associated with stem, designing solutions requires the type of creativity that comes from diverse perspectives. there are initiatives and grants focusing on the recruitment of minority groups to increase exposure and spark interest in stem, but as the workforce grows increasingly diverse much more support is required to ensure that those who may not have been interested in stem are both exposed and encouraged to major and persevere in the field. two well-documented issues with women in science are the high rates of attrition, or “leaky pipeline,” first in pursuing college stem majors and next in the workforce upon the childbearing years (raymond and brett, 1995; brainard and carlin, 1997; beasley and fischer, 2012). advancements in all fields would be bolstered by increased participation from these untapped talent pools. ezella mcpherson’s article (p. 96 in this issue) illustrates the importance of early experiences for developing life-long stem learning in the minority population of africanamerican women. these experiences became sources of cultural capital, leading to stem careers. this research indicates how diverse perspectives may provide clues for minority groups’ and women’s retention and persistence in the stem fields. in discussions of stem education, language is often overlooked as a barrier; nonnative speakers of the dominant language, in any country (ball, 2010) are often underserved. for instance, a study in the netherlands found that turkish-dutch and moroccan-dutch students fall behind their monolingual dutch peers, beginning in preschool and persisting into primary school and beyond (scheele, leseman, and mayo, 2010). in the united states, latino students who are native spanish speakers do not pursue and persist in stem careers at the same rates as their white peers (anderson and kim, 2006;) wills, reuter, gudie, hessert, and sewall’s article (p. 114 of this issue) seeks to understand how disparities in achievement manifest in madagascar. they present a case study that documents the barriers to student success in mathematics and science in developing countries and how language becomes a factor in mathematics and science achievement in a multilingual community. knowing that outside factors influence the priorities of the educational system, their work takes into account the impact of the political climate and structure on mathematics and science achievement. naslund-hadley, parker, and hernandez-agramonte (p. 135 of this issue) explore how a mathematics intervention in paraguay may help ameliorate the divide between classes and the different languages spoken in the same region. they note the importance of fostering pre-mathematics skills in preschoolers, as studies show that students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds that do not build these skills often struggle in mathematics later in their educational careers. this pilot study shows promise for educating young children in bilingual settings using audio and arts-based lessons in two languages to engage these early learners in mathematics. teachers around the globe struggle to meet the needs of their students who represent different cultures and to contextualize stem learning for these students, while studies indicate that using students’ home language might result in a richer understanding of stem concepts (e.g., clarkson, what is stem education? 5 1992; setati, 2008; ball, 2010; ewing, cooper, baturo, sun, and matthews, 2011). in the united states, the department of education (2000) found that only 27% of teachers felt “very well prepared” to meet the needs of students with limited english proficiency. dellacarpini and alonso (p. 155 of this issue) seek to understand how the preparation of teachers of english language learners (ells) impacts the achievement gap of bilingual students and monolingual students who speak the dominant language. they investigate how teachers are prepared to support ells in the united states and how we can prepare secondary mathematics and science teachers to more effectively teach these students. this study outlines which methods are most successfully integrating content and language in mathematics and science classes. stem: global issues and regional perspectives through this special themed issue of global education review, we sought to bring varied voices to the forefront, highlighting issues in the four disciplines of stem, as they affect different nations around the world. all of the studies in this volume have a common thread of examining how stem education may be developed to be accessible and appropriate for all learners, worldwide. each context is different, but the articles share the same goal of illuminating a piece of how stem education might be made accessible for all learners. the authors’ ideas bring up many questions about how to meet the needs of stem learners, and how their work might look in different contexts around the world. understanding how these issues affect each of us, in our own nations, can shed light on making stem education accessible to everyone. as highlighted in heilbronner’s editorial, we will all benefit from shifting to a more global, rather than nationalistic mindset. references: anderson, e. l., & kim, d. (2006). increasing the success of minority students in science and technology (no. 4). washington, dc: american council on education. ball, j. (2010). enhancing learning of children from diverse language backgrounds: mother tonguebased bilingual or multilingual education in early childhood and early primary school years. early childhood development intercultural partnerships, university of victoria. beasley, m. a., and fischer, m. j. (2012). why they leave: the impact of stereotype threat on the attrition of women and minorities from science, math and engineering majors. social psychology of education, 15(4), 427-448 brainard, s. g., and carlin, l. (1997, november). a longitudinal study of undergraduate women in engineering and science. in frontiers in education conference, 1997. 27th annual conference. teaching and learning in an era of change. proceedings. (vol. 1, pp. 134-143). ieee. bybee, r. (2010). advancing stem education: a 2020 vision. technology and engineering teacher, 70(1), 30-35. craig, e., thomas, r. j., hou, c., & mathur, s. (2012). where will all of the stem talent come from? accessed 11 september 2014 from http://www.accenturehighperformancedelivered.co m/sitecollectiondocuments/pdf/accenture-wherewill-all-the-stem-talent-come-from-final.pdf donahoe, d. (2013). the definition of stem. ieeeusa today’s engineer, december 2013. accessed 11 september 2014 from: http://www.todaysengineer.org/2013/dec/stemdefinition.asp duhigg, c. and keith b. (2012, january 21). how the u.s. lost out on iphone work. the new york times. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/app le-america-and-a-squeezed-middleclass.html?pagewanted=all&_r=1&. ewing, b. f., cooper, t. j., baturo, a. r., sun, v., & matthews, c. (2011). contextualising the teaching and learning of measurement in torres strait islander schools. in proceedings of the 1st international conference of stem in education 2010. stem-science, technology, engineering and mathematics in education. gonzalez, h. b., & kuenzi, j. j. (2012). science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) education: a primer. csr report for congress. accessed 5 september 2014 from http://fas.org/sgp/crs/misc/r42642.pdf johnson, j. (2013). the wilting stem: talent shortage in norway. accessed 8 september 2014 from http://trace.tennessee.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?artic 6 global education review 1(4) le=1003&context=utk_geogpubs&seiredir=1&referer=http%3a%2f%2fscholar.google.co m%2fscholar%3fstart%3d90%26q%3dstem%2be ducation%2binternational%2bglobal%26hl%3den% 26as_sdt%3d0%2c33%26as_ylo%3d2010#search= %22stem%20education%20international%20global %22 johnson, r. (2012). international stem education for global sustainability. in weber and duderstadt (eds). pp 153-164. global sustainability and the responsibilities of universities. london: economica. landivar, l. c. (2013). disparities in stem employment by sex, race, and hispanic origin. education review, 29(6), 911-922. lowell, b. l., & salzman, h. (2007). into the eye of the storm: assessing the evidence on science and engineering education, quality, and workforce demand. urban institute (nj1). lucas, t., henze, r., & donato, r. (1990). promoting the success of latino language-minority students: an exploratory study of six high schools. harvard educational review, 60(3), 315-341 metcalf, h. (2010). stuck in the pipeline: a critical review of stem workforce literature. interactions: ucla journal of education and information studies, 6(2), article 4. retrieved from: https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zf09176 morrison, j. & bartlett, b. (2009). stem as curriculum: an experimental approach. education week. 8(23), 2831. nasscom (2013). hope on the distant horizon. accessed 7 november 2014 from http://www.nasscom.in/hopeon-the-distant-horizon-56386. rayman, p., & brett, b. (1995). women science majors: what makes a difference in persistence after graduation?. the journal of higher education, 388-414. roberts, a. (2012). a justification for stem education. the technology and engineering teacher. may/june 2012, 1-5 sadler, t. d., & zeidler, d. l. (2004). the significance of content knowledge for informal reasoning regarding socioscientific issues: applying genetics knowledge to genetic engineering issues [electronic version]. wiley interscience, sanders, m. (2009). stem, stem education, stemmania. the technology teacher, 68(4), 20-26. scheele, a. f., leseman, p. p., & mayo, a. y. (2010). the home language environment of monolingual and bilingual children and their language proficiency. applied psycholinguistics, 31(01), 117140. setati, m. (2008). access to mathematics versus access to the language of power: the struggle in multilingual mathematics classrooms. south african journal of education, 28(1), 103-116. st. louis community college (stlcc). (2014). the state of st. louis workforce report. accessed october 2014 from http://www.stlcc.edu/workforce-solutions/stlouis-workforce/reports.html tate, w. (2001). science education as a civil right: urban schools and opportunity-to-learn considerations. journal of research in science teaching, 38(9), 1015-1028. tate, w. f., jones, b. d., thorne-wallington, e. & hogrebe, m. c. (2012). science and the city: thinking geospatially about opportunity to learn. urban education 2012 47: 399-433 u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. teacher preparation and professional development: 2000, nces 2001–088, by basmat parsad, laurie lewis, and elizabeth farris. project officer: bernard greene. washington, dc: 2001. meghan e. marrero, edd, is an associate professor of secondary education at mercy college, where she teaches courses in science methods, assessment, and oceanography. her research interests include stem teacher education and ocean literacy. amanda m. gunning, phd, is an assistant professor of secondary education at mercy college, where she teaches courses in science methods and general education. her research interests include stem teacher education with a focus on self-efficacy. terri germain-williams, phd, is an assistant professor of secondary education at mercy college, where she teaches courses in elementary and secondary mathematics methods, assessment, history of mathematics and problem solving. her research interests include mathematical modeling and mathematics in underserved populations. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/6zf09176 http://www.nasscom.in/hope-on-the-distant-horizon-56386 http://www.nasscom.in/hope-on-the-distant-horizon-56386 126 global education review 3 (2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: marrero, meghan e. (2016). core competencies and strategies for effective leadership. [review of the book the teacher leader by daniel r. tomal, craig a. schilling, and robert k. wilhite]. global education review, 3 (2). 126-128 book review core competencies and strategies for effective leadership “the teacher leader” by daniel r. tomal, craig a. schilling, and robert k. wilhite by meghan e. marrero the teacher leader, written by three experts in educational leadership, is a resource covering many aspects of teacher leadership in today’s schools. the authors introduce the 192page book as a guide for “leadership topics that are essential in developing the knowledge and skills needed for educators to be successful school leaders” (p. xvii). it succinctly covers many major areas of school leadership, including topics such as identifying leadership skills, motivating teachers, selecting new staff members, teacher evaluation, and managing change. each topic is grounded in several organizations’ standards for teacher leadership, including the national council for accreditation of teacher education (ncate), the educational leadership constituent council (elcc), the interstate school leaders licensure consortium (isllc), the national education association (nea), and the teacher leadership exploratory consortium’s teacher leader model standards, all of which are included as appendices. in fact, each of the nine chapters is introduced with learning objectives correlated to these standards, and, following a summary, concludes with a case study with a problem related to the chapter’s content, along with exercises and discussion questions. the book distills many topics covered in the courses of an educational leadership degree or certificate program into a reference guidebook. the authors are quick to point out potential legal and ethical issues a teacher leader may encounter, e.g., related to hiring practices, and other issues one may encounter in the field. the book’s tone is straightforward and practical. the authors provide real-life examples of the ideas they discuss, many figures that illustrate models and theories, and concepts that underpin the content. for instance, in “chapter 6: communicating, collaborating, and evaluating,” there are several figures to stress important communication tips, strategies, and pitfalls, as well as one that illustrates the core compentencies and strategies for effective leadership 127 “teacher leader-employee conflict needs model.” these figures appeal to different learning styles and encourage readers to consider the text in different ways, and serve to highlight important ideas. the teacher leader would be most useful in a graduate course for prospective school administrators, i.e., those seeking to be department chairs, or as a reference guide for those new to the job. there are chapters and segments of chapters that discuss real-life situations pertinent to teacher leaders. one could, for example, return to chapter 6 prior to an evaluation meeting with a teacher, for practical tips on how to conduct the conference most effectively, and strategies for communicating with a teacher whose performance is in need of improvement. if a teacher leader were about to engage in a coaching session, there is a succinct description of effective strategies for coaching and mentoring in chapter 4, including a figure that outlines eight steps for an employee coaching session, and another on defense mechanisms that might be demonstrated by the teacher receiving constructive feedback. if used in a graduate course, the case studies and exercises are well designed and useful. the case studies outline real-world problems and ask readers to respond with a product that applies the chapter’s principles to a practical setting. for instance, the case study in chapter 9 provides sample data that illustrates the achievement gap between subgroups of students (i.e., white, general education students as compared with students of color, those with special needs, and those with limited english proficiency), and asks the reader to develop several aspects of school improvement plans to address the disparities, including a parent action plan. these exercises would prove quite valuable in a graduate course to stimulate discussion and develop skills necessary for teacher leaders to effect change in their schools. the book’s major weakness is that it is grounded in a narrow, traditional view of a teacher leader who is essentially a school administrator. more modern views of teacher leadership include more informal roles for teacher leaders, where leadership is distributed throughout a school, and defined in different ways. a review of the literature in the field described three main types of teacher leadership: “organizational-level work (e.g., membership in a site-based decision-making council) to professional development work (e.g., mentoring) and instructional-level work (e.g., action research)” (york-barr & duke, 2004, p. 257). of the three, the teacher leader makes some connections to professional development and instructional-level work, but the focus throughout is on organizational-level work, where teachers are taking on formal leadership roles. these are useful to organizational teacher leaders, but very little attention is paid to teachers who are solely in the classroom, leading in more informal capacities. there are whole sections concerning hiring staff (e.g., interviewing and selecting candidates), evaluating teachers, and managing educational resources (e.g., budgeting), which are irrelevant to many teacher leaders, and the narrow perspective is clear throughout the book. for instance, in chapter 7, the authors state, “to be effective, teacher leaders need the staffs that they supervise or coach to invest in the changes they are advocating” (p. 118). many teacher leaders do not formally supervise and coach at all, yet can be effective leaders and advocate changes in their schools and districts. the title would seemingly suggest that all types of teacher leadership would be addressed, not solely administrative roles. informal leadership by teachers can include leadership functions from within a teacher’s classroom, including 128 global education review 3 (2) contributing to positive school culture, collaborative planning, and contributing to peer motivation (harris, 2003). in summary, the book is a reasonable reference for those new to the school administration profession, but probably not for those seeking to lead from their classrooms. references harris, a. (2003). teacher leadership as distributed leadership: heresy, fantasy or possibility? school leadership & management, 23(3), 313-324. york-barr, j., & duke, k. (2004). what do we know about teacher leadership? findings from two decades of scholarship. review of educational research, 74(3), 255-316. “the teacher leader: core competencies and strategies for effective leadership.” by daniel r. tomal, craig a. schilling, and robert k. wilhite. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2014. isbn: 978-1-47580745-5 about the authors daniel r. tomal, ph.d., is a professor at concordia university, chicago teaching educational leadership. he is a consultant and an author of twelve books, including action research for educators, challenging students to learn, resource management for school administrators (with craig schilling), managing human resource and collective bargaining (with schilling) and leading school change: maximizing resources for school improvement (with schilling and margaret trybus), and has made guest appearance on many national radio and television shows. craig a. schilling, ed.d., is an associate professor at concordia university, chicago teaching education finance, law, human resources and school business management. he is author of resource management for school administrators (with dan tomal), managing human resource and collective bargaining (with tomal) and leading school change: maximizing resources for school improvement (with tomal and margaret trybus). he has served on a number of state and national associations and spoken at state, national, and international conferences. robert wilhite, ed.d., is a professor and the department chair for leadership at concordia university, chicago. he teaches educational law, instructional leadership, supervisory practices, and school evaluation change processes. he is a former elementary, middle school, and high school principal, associate superintendent for curriculum and instruction, and superintendent of schools. he has recently published articles on homeless students and adaptive leadership. he has also facilitated training programs for the midwest principal center and consulted with school districts across northern illinois. he currently serves on the illinois licensure board, principal review panel, evaluating the design of university principal preparation programs in illinois. about the reviewer meghan e. marrero is an associate professor of secondary education at mercy college, where she directs two large grant programs, one of which focuses on teacher leadership. 97 global education review 2 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge (2015). philosophies of education from the past and present. [review of the book classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education by steven m. cahn]. global education review, 2 (3). 97-101. book review philosophies of education from the past and present “classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education” by steven m. cahn by helge wasmuth classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education is the second, slightly expanded edition of steven m. cahn’s same-titled book first published in 1997. cahn is a renowned editor of philosophical texts who has published more than 20 essay collections and anthologies over the last four decades. the collection’s purpose is to collect writings on education by leading figures in the history of philosophy as well as recent thinkers. thus, it consists of two parts: “classic theories” and “contemporary issues.” in this new version, cahn included new translations of works by plato and aristotle, and expanded selections from john locke, jean-jacques rousseau, immanuel kant, and john dewey. he also added eight new essays: mary wollstonecraft’s a vindication of the rights of women is the only new piece in the classic section, while selections on various topics (such as school vouchers or home schooling) are added as part of the contemporary readings. further, cahn removed previously included selections from michael walzer’s spheres of justice and gareth b. matthew’s the philosophy of childhood. spanning almost two thirds of the book, the first section, “classic theories,” is the more extensive part of the collection, even if only nine authors are presented. it includes complete and selected texts from classic authors like plato, aristotle, john locke, jean-jacques rousseau, immanuel kant, wollstonecraft, john stuart mill, alfred north whitehead, and john dewey. dewey’s thinking is represented most extensively, with selections from three of his works that comprise more than a quarter of the first part’s page count (the child and curriculum, experience and education, and a selection of democracy and education). plato is also represented with three texts (meno and selections from protagoras and the republic). other classic pieces include selections from aristotle’s nicomachean ethics and politics, rousseau’s emile, and whitehead’s the aims of education. these classic authors are introduced with essential biographical and contextual philolsophies of education from the past and present 98 information, as well as a short explanation of the selected work’s importance. overall, the classic texts cover timeless educational issues, like moral education, teaching methods, child development, female education, and the aims of public education. the second part, “contemporary issues,” is divided into three sections: schools, teaching, and curriculum. it is comprised of complete works and selected text from 21 authors reflecting on various current issues, including home schooling, open education, pragmatism, analytic philosophy, feminism, and multiculturalism. the selections present the thinking of several representative philosophers of education, such as nel noddings and maxine greene. however, this part also includes selections from authors like michel foucault and richard m. rorty to represent the thinking of philosophers, which is of significance for the field of education. compared to the classic authors, each text is only introduced briefly. the first subsection of contemporary readings, “schools,” consists of different selections that are related to the broader topic of schooling. it includes a piece on summerhill by a.s. neil, a justification of homeschooling by patricia heidenry, and a reflection on the meaning of open education by kieran egan. further, cahn added two selections to this edition on two current educational policy issues: one on school vouchers by joseph s. spoerl and one on school choice by jeffrey r. henig. the first subsection concludes with selections on democratic education by amy gutman and moral education by israel scheffler. altogether, cahn has included an eclectic range of topics regarding schools in general. the second and third subsections are more consistent, even if both still cover various topics. the “teaching” section deals with questions such as what teaching is and the role of a teacher. it begins with two analyses of how teaching can be distinguished from other forms of learning or activities by paul h. hirst and by john passmore, followed by an older essay on the role of the teacher by jacques maritain. the next two selections, excerpts from foucault’s discipline and punish and paulo freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed, deal with the question of how teaching and education can be (mis-)used as a means to control students. noddings’ caring subsequently emphasizes the importance of the relationship between student and teacher, while the subsection ends with a text by cahn on a teacher’s three major responsibilities. overall, the second subsection grants an insight in various important questions regarding the meaning of teaching and being a teacher. the selected works in the third subsection, “curriculum,” discuss the question of which content should be taught in the classroom, with a focus on liberal education and multiculturalism. sidney hook’s text advocates for liberal education’s importance in higher education and defines the elements of such an education, while john searle’s piece summarizes the debate between traditional liberal education and multiculturalism. a further selection from martha nussbaum addresses how liberal education can help create citizens in a multicultural world, while an essay from greene deals with the importance of multiculturalism and what it means to live in a pluralistic society. rorty’s hermeneutics, general studies, and teaching does not explicitly focus on the question of what to teach and how; instead, it focuses on how an educational setting should be designed to help students understand that it is necessary to strike a balance between platonism or vulgar relativism by defining a “community.” a selection from jane roland martin serves as a reminder of the fact that a curriculum is always something constructed and therefore changeable, depending on its context and purpose. the third subsection ends with a piece from wm. theodore de bary on how the asian 99 global education review 2 (3) classics can be included into the curriculum. as a whole, the third subsection is a broad collection that presents various topics. a book on readings in the philosophy of education always seeks to answer the allimportant question: what is philosophy of education? this question is currently of particular interest, as the status of philosophy of education seems ambiguous. it is possible to speak of the “decreased visibility and influence of philosophy of education on the community of ‘educators’” (burbules, 2002a, p. 257), while at the same time philosophy of education seems to be “more intellectually dynamic and robust now that it has even been” (burbules, 2002b, p. 349). thus, a book on philosophy of education should provide a clear orientation about what philosophy of education actually is. is it an applied branch of philosophy, the reflections of “great” philosophers on education, does it mean forming a teaching philosophy such as pragmatism, essentialism, or constructivism, or does it refer to the reflection on educational issues from a philosophical perspective? what constitutes philosophy of education and how does it differ from the common thinking about education, teaching, or learning? what distinguishes trivial philosophy of education from the exceptional one that needs to be included in such a collection? does it need to be academically (philosophically) credible or relevant for educators? and, why do we need philosophy of education at all? cahn does not answer these questions explicitly, nor does he offer a clear statement on what philosophy of education is. for him, at least according to his short introduction, the question “what should be the goals of education?” lies “at the heart of philosophy of education” (p. 1). to respond to this question, and the many questions that lead to this answer—such as how do we learn? what is human nature? or how should society be organized?—future teachers need to study philosophy of education carefully. an in-depth and thorough understanding of these issues cannot be arrived without philosophy of education. but cahn’s selections evidently provide another answer to this question. interestingly, the answer varies between the classic and the contemporary section. the classic theories undoubtedly represent standard reference points in the intellectual history of the field. the selected authors, perhaps with the exceptions of wollstonecraft and mill, are no surprise and can be found in many similar readers.1 plato, aristotle, locke, rousseau, kant, and dewey are authors routinely included in such collections for an obvious reason: they represent the reflections on education by well-known philosophers. however, are such authors selected because of their specific and outstanding educational thinking, their genuine ideas about education, or because such famous philosophers can give credibility to the field of education? kant is a good example. why is kant’s lectures on pedagogy included in such a collection if, as cahn admits, kant’s “writings in education have been curiously neglected” (p. 153) and he has been without much (maybe even any) influence in the field of education? is kant represented because his ideas on education are so exceptional that every future teacher should be familiar with them or because it proves the importance of philosophy of education, if one of the greatest philosophers has thought and lectured about education? would it not be more helpful if students read about the educational ideas of a philosopher such as johan friedrich herbart, whose pedagogical method had a huge impact on teaching? the same could be asked about johann heinrich pestalozzi and friedrich froebel, to continue with german-speaking thinkers. both may not have been philosophers of education in the narrow sense, but their reflections on education have shaped the way we think and design education today. why include philolsophies of education from the past and present 100 mill, who, as cahn again confesses, “did not write a book devoted to the philosophy of education” (p. 185)? would students not, at least american students, benefit more from reading william heard kilpatrick or—if one wanted to introduce a thinker in opposition to dewey—herman horne? the latter certainly shows the issue of such selections: which individual’s names and ideas have withstood the test of time and deserve to be included? such a decision can only be subjective and shows the editor’s preference. but even if one may disagree with some of cahn’s selections as classic readings, at least it gives an answer to the question about what philosophy of education is. after reading the first part, one may tend to assume that it refers to the reflections on education by more or less “great” philosophers. as previously alluded to, the second part, focusing on contemporary issues, leads to a slightly different conclusion in this respect and provides a different answer to the question of what constitutes philosophy of education. the authors are not selected as representatives of certain philosophical positions; in fact, some can hardly be called philosophers of education at all. rather, they are participants and contrasting voices in current educational debates. philosophy of education in this sense addresses a diversity of issues with varying methods. however, such an approach is not necessarily contradictory to the current status of educational philosophy, as the work done by philosophers of education seems to be enormously eclectic today. far less agreement exists about what philosophers of education do when they think and write about education—it “is what those who write it and teach it say it is” (chambliss, 2009, p. 251). while cahn’s selections correspond to such an understanding of philosophy of education, it is arguable whether all of the selected pieces have real philosophical weight. although he has included reflections from philosophers like foucault or rorty on education, as well as work by relevant philosophers of education (like noddings and scheffler), some articles can barely be called philosophy of education. heidenry’s home is where the school is, which first appeared in the new york times magazine, is one example. regardless of whether one agrees with cahn that this reading can spark an interesting discussion between students, does this criterion mean that the work is philosophy of education? altogether, this leads to the impression that contemporary philosophy of education is hardly more than a debate club for current educational issues, especially compared to the first part focusing on classical thinkers. a further reason seems to render the second part more controversial. cahn did not include any real contemporary work. instead, most of the included writings pre-date the mid1980s. for example, maritain’s education at the crossroads is from 1941. the most recent articles on school choice and school vouchers are both from the 1990s. such selections demonstrate issues with using older work. while both discuss the topics carefully and deeply, it is questionable whether they are representative examples of the current debates about school choice and vouchers. the meaning of these terms has changed over the last decades, especially their use and associated aims in educational policy. such changes should be considered in the selected essays. hening’s article, in fact, anticipates many of the problems that have come with the idea of school choice. however, a more current reflection on this topic seems more appropriate as part of a contemporary reader. both the lack of philosophical weight and contemporary relevance leads to the question why current authors in the field of philosophy of education— like nicholas c. burbules, d. c. philipps, mary ann raywid, or harvey siegel, just to name a few—are not included in this section. 101 global education review 2 (3) finally, a few remarks on the book’s editing should be added. it is striking that contemporary authors are only introduced with a few sentences, while the work’s context and importance are explained insufficiently. perhaps cahn wanted the texts to speak for themselves, which has its own value. however, additional information regarding the piece’s history or origins, context, and significance, as well as the authors’ intentions, would have been helpful. especially for readers who may not be familiar with the authors, such additional information would have been highly valuable. furthermore, the degree of insufficient editing is surprising for such a renowned editor. cahn does not always provide the year or place of the selection’s initial publication. for example, regarding de bary’s asia in the core curriculum, he only includes the indication that it has been “reprinted by permission of the author” (p. 447). this is aggravating, as the imprinted asia in the core curriculum is not identical with de bary’s article of the same name published in 1996 in education about asia (volume 1:1, pp. 19-25). another example is searle’s traditionalists and their challengers, which is an abbreviated version of “is there a crisis in american higher education?” published in the january 1993 issue of the bulletin of the american academy of arts and sciences (vol. xlvi). a more thorough bibliographical reference would have been desirable, as it would have enabled students to continue their study of the authors’ ideas independently more easily. while it is the purpose of such a reader to provide students with quick access to important articles, they should also be encouraged to work academically. regardless of the issues mentioned earlier, classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education is an adequate choice as a first insight into the philosophy of education. for undergraduate or graduate students, it is a good introduction to this discipline. for advanced learners, the various topics included in the contemporary part of the reader are useful to help familiarize themselves with lesser known voices or opinions. furthermore, since classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education is a collection of primary source materials, it enables the reader to gain insight into the original work of some of the most significant thinkers in the philosophy of education, instead of providing some form of summary of their thinking. notes 1 see: r. curren, ed., philosophy of education: an anthology. malden, ma: blackwell, 2007. bibliography burbules, n.c. (2002a). the dilemma of philosophy of education: “relevance” or critique. part one. educational theory, 53 (3), 257-261. burbules, n.c. (2002b). the dilemma of philosophy of education: “relevance” or critique. part two. educational theory, 53 (3), 349-357. chambliss, j.j. (2009). philosophy of education today. educational theory, 59 (2), 233-251. “classic and contemporary readings in the philosophy of education.” edited by steven m. cahn, 2nd ed. new york: oxford university press, 2012. isbn: 978-0-19-978306-9 about the author steven m. cahn is professor of philosophy at the city university of new york graduate center. about the reviewer helge wasmuth is an assistant professor in the department of childhood education at mercy college. he previously held positions in higher education in germany and switzerland. his scholarly research interests include the history of early childhood education, philosophy of education, and early childhood education and innovative teaching methods in online learning. 28 global education review 3(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: walker, zachary & musti-rao, shobana (2016). inclusion in high achieving singapore: challenges of building an inclusive society in policy and practice. global education review, 3 (3). 28-42 inclusion in high-achieving singapore: challenges of building an inclusive society in policy and practice zachary walker national institute of education, singapore shobana musti-rao pace university abstract building an inclusive society in which all people can participate effectively and live together requires understanding inclusive education and its impact on the social order. as countries of different regions face the vast array of challenges unique to their educational systems, it becomes apparent that inclusive societies are intricately tied to social inclusion policy initiatives and developments in education. governments are becoming increasingly aware of the need to review their educational systems as they attempt to define what an inclusive society is and how to make inclusion truly effective. singapore is a unique example of a country that has the resources and the vision, but currently lacks an educational system designed to fully include individuals with special needs. although singaporean students consistently score near the top in science, math, and reading achievement on international assessments, many students with special needs still receive their education in schools separated from their mainstream peers. in 2004, prime minister lee hsien loong discussed a new vision of singapore becoming an inclusive society that embraces all individuals with special learning needs. in this manuscript, the authors provide a brief history of singapore and its education system and explore how pm lee’s vision of an inclusive society has shaped practice and policy in singapore schools in the last decade. specific ideas and next steps for creating an inclusive singapore for individuals with disabilities are discussed. keywords inclusive society, inclusion, singapore, education, special needs, social inclusion, education policy introduction building an inclusive society in which all people can participate effectively and live together requires understanding the importance of an inclusive educational system and its impact on development as a key principle to attain and sustain a quality education for all (unesco, 2009). as countries of different regions face the vast array of challenges unique to their educational systems, it becomes apparent that inclusive societies are intricately tied to social _____________________________ corresponding author: zachary walker, national institute of education, singapore e-mail: zachary.walker@nie.edu.sg inclusion in high-achieving singapore 29 inclusion policy initiatives and developments in education. governments are becoming increasingly aware of the need to revisit their educational systems as they attempt to define what an inclusive society is and how to make inclusion truly effective (opertti et al., 2013). in order to create inclusive educational systems, it is imperative to first acknowledge what inclusion means for society and for students in schools. the definition of inclusive education has long been debated (ainscow, dyson & weiner, 2012), and it may be best to think of inclusive education as the foundation for building an inclusive society. in order to establish an inclusive perspective, it is important to also understand what does not constitute an inclusive education. according to opertti and colleagues (2013), inclusive education is not advocating for resources, basic infrastructure, technology or equipment, nor is it merely adjusting the curriculum to make learning easier, introducing new professional development for teachers, or requiring a class on students with special needs for pre-service teachers. instead, opertti, walker, and zhang (2013) frame their discussion on inclusive education around four core ideas that were developed and established by international governing bodies. the first core idea as indicated in the united nations declaration of human rights in 1948 views inclusion from a rights-based approach and posits that all individuals have the right to an education. influenced by the 1994 salamanca statement and framework for action on special needs, the second core idea brought attention to creating optimal learning conditions for children categorized with special needs. six years later at the world education forum in dakar, senegal, the definition of “education for all” was expanded to include any individual who was marginalized by the education system (third core idea). finally, in current literature and policy, inclusive education not only includes improving the capabilities of entire education systems, but also emphasizes that these systems deliver a quality education for all (fourth core idea). therefore, it is helpful to think of inclusive education as a framework that supports the teaching and learning of the skills and attitudes required to support a diverse population of learners. in addition, teachers and learners in inclusive environments have the opportunity to practice those skills and attitudes through interactions with a diverse population including learners with and without disabilities. these four core ideas should assist education leaders and policymakers in creating coherent and comprehensive systems (halinen & järvinen, 2008; savolainen, 2009; thuneberg et al., 2012). unfortunately, inclusive educational policies are often victim to long-standing attitudes and structures that inhibit and delay progress despite well-intentioned plans and public pleas. for example, inclusive policies and practices are often left to departments/divisions of special education and the focus is primarily on educating students with disabilities in mainstream schools (amadio, 2009; amadio & opertti, 2011; cedillo, fletcher, & contreras, 2009; garcia-huidobro & corvalán, 2009; opertti et al., 2013). in most parts of asia, inclusive practices have been limited mainly to students identified as having special needs, generally those with physical and/or mental disabilities, as well as refugees (unesco-ibe, 2008; zagoumennov, 2011). the dakar conference of 2000 promoted the visualization of inclusive education as a dual-part process in which both equity and equality are prioritized. 30 global education review 3(3) the fact that more individuals with disabilities are receiving schooling is noteworthy, but it is also important that the schooling they receive is equal to their non-disabled peers and of high quality (opertti et al., 2013). as the united states learned in the landmark case of brown vs. board of education “separate but equal” may be satisfactory in theory but may lead to substandard practice (brown vs. board, 1954). although it has been well-documented that exclusive education is rarely equal, equitable, or of high quality, scholars point out that inclusive policy is still not adopted or accepted by many educators and societies (fuchs & fuchs, 1994; brantlinger, 1997; sebba & sachdev, 1997). in fact, many “educationalists resist the idea and some disability-focused organizations argue for separate and specialist services” (opertti et al., 2013, p.166). the decision about what is equitable for students with disabilities is key to creating long-term policies and procedures (roegiers, 2010; opertti, 2011). in this paper, we provide a brief history of singapore and its education system, specifically the history of special education service delivery. we discuss current issues and challenges that face singapore in becoming an inclusive society and offer some recommendations on how inclusive education can play a role in making singapore a more inclusive society. we frame these challenges and opportunities under the umbrella of the five policy priorities that opertti and colleagues (2013) identified as critical to the development of inclusive societies. these five priorities include (a) creating a common societal understanding of inclusive education, (b) promoting fundamental mindset changes, (c) restructuring schools to provide comprehensive support to all learners, (d) addressing expectations and needs of all learners through an inclusive curriculum, and (e) empowering inclusive teachers to address the diversity of learners. education in singapore the global drive to promote inclusive education is progressively spreading across countries in the asia-pacific region (forlin, 2010) and spurring governments to reconsider education policies that discriminate against children with special needs. this is especially true in a young nation like singapore where the education system is continually evolving to keep up with the rapid globalization of the world (tan, 2008). singapore’s ministry of education (moe) is the governing body responsible for the formulation and implementation of education policies. the leadership in singapore has constantly and consistently emphasized that the people of singapore are its only natural resource (gopinathan, 2012; lim & nam, 2000) and that the mission of the moe is to shape young people who will, in turn, guide the future of the nation (moe, 2015). as a result of the government’s focus on developing its people, the moe has responded to the growing demands of a global economy with several initiatives. the “thinking schools, learning nation” initiative unveiled in 1997 resulted in a heavy focus on teacher training and professional development (goh, 1997). subsequent initiatives such as “teach less, learn more” (moe, 2005) and the current model for professional development, called “teacher growth model” (moe, 2012) emphasize the need for capacity building at all levels of the educational system. the “teach less, learn more” initiative focused on helping teachers and schools to master the fundamentals of effective teaching so that students are engaged, learn with understanding, and are inclusion in high-achieving singapore 31 developed holistically beyond solely preparing for tests and examinations (moe, 2010). the teacher growth model places a heavy emphasis on personal learning communities (plc’s) within schools and situated professional development led by teachers themselves. singapore currently spends close to usd $8 billion on education, accounting for more than 20% of total government expenditure (ministry of education, 2013). starting with a focus on providing basic literacy for the masses in 1960’s and 1970’s, the socio-economic revolution in 1980’s led to a focus on efficiencydriven education in which students attended schools based on their perceived aptitudes and abilities (song weng, walker, & rosenblatt, 2015). the priority placed on education has helped singapore become one of the world’s best performing educational systems (learning curve, 2015). singapore is now recognized as a world leader in education as singaporean students continually achieve high scores in mathematics, science and language in international comparisons such as the program for international student assessment (pisa), trends in international mathematics and science study (timss), and progress in international reading literacy study (pirls) according to the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) (oecd, 2011). despite these rankings singapore continues to practice a dual education system in which students with special needs are educated in separate environments (lim & nam, 2000). history of special education in singapore after independence in 1965, the governmental education system in singapore paid little attention to the education of those with disabilities or special needs. to fill the need, charitable organizations created special schools that provided more intensive instruction and provision for students with disabilities (lim & nam, 2000; poon, musti-rao, & wettasinghe, 2013). as the nation continued to flourish in the 1980’s and 1990’s, more attention was paid to the academic success singaporean students were having and an unplanned but ongoing separation occurred between those who learned in traditional ways and those that did not. slowly, singapore formed a dual education system that is now divided into two categories: mainstream schools and special schools (poon et al., 2013). mainstream schools are traditionally comprised of typically developing students while special schools are responsible for educating students with disabilities. the moe and national council of social services (ncss) currently support 13 volunteer welfare organizations (vwo) in the administration of 20 special schools (moe, 2015a). as shown in table 1, the special schools differ in programs and curriculum designed to cater to distinct disability groups (e.g., autism, visual impairment, multiple disabilities). in 2012, the moe released living, learning, and working in the 21st century: a special education curriculum framework (moe, 2012) providing special schools with a common curricular framework for service delivery. use of the framework is not mandated, however, and teachers and schools can use a separate curriculum or plan their own based on student needs. 32 global education review 3(3) table 1 special schools in singapore voluntary welfare organisation (vwo) school disability groups age group association for persons with special needs (apsn) chaoyang school mild intellectual disability; mild autism 7-12 years old delta senior school 718/21 years old katong school 7 18 years old tanglin school 13 18 years old metta welfare association metta school 7 18/21 years old presbyterian community services grace orchard school 7 18 years old movement for the intellectually disabled of singapore (minds) fernvale gardens school moderate intellectual disability; autism 7 18 years old lee kong chian gardens school towner gardens school woodlands gardens school asian women’s welfare association (awwa) awwa school multiple disabilities; autism 7 18 years old rainbow centre rainbow centre margaret drive school rainbow centre yishun park school cerebral palsy alliance of singapore (cpas) cerebral palsy alliance singapore school (cpass) multiple disabilities 7 18 years old autism resource centre (singapore) pathlight school autism 7 18/21 years old autism association (singapore) eden school 7 18 years old saint andrew’s mission hospital (samh) st andrew’s autism school 7 18 years old canossian daughters of charity canossian school hearing impairment 7 14 years old singapore association of the visually handicapped (savh) lighthouse school visual impairment; autism; hearing impairment 7 18 years old singapore association for the deaf singapore school for the deaf hearing impairment 7 18 years old table 1 http://www.apsn.org.sg/ http://www.apsn.org.sg/ http://www.apsn.org.sg/ http://www.apsn.org.sg/ http://www.mettaschool.edu.sg/ http://www.go.edu.sg/ http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.minds.org.sg/sped.html http://www.awwa.org.sg/ http://rainbowcentre.org.sg/ http://rainbowcentre.org.sg/ http://www.rainbowcentre.org.sg/special_education.html http://www.rainbowcentre.org.sg/special_education.html http://cpas.org.sg/ http://cpas.org.sg/ http://cpas.org.sg/ http://www.pathlight.org.sg/ http://www.edenschool.edu.sg/ http://www.saac.org.sg/ http://www.saac.org.sg/ http://www.canossian.edu.sg/ http://www.lighthouse.edu.sg/ http://www.ssd.edu.sg/ http://www.ssd.edu.sg/ 33 global education review 3(3) singapore’s move to inclusion the most recent change in singapore’s journey to inclusion can be attributed to two major events in this millennium (poon et al., 2013). first, prime minister lee hsien loong decreed “all communities will progress and no one will be left behind… we must also have a place in our hearts and our lives for the disabled, who are our brothers and sisters too” (lee, 2004). although a dual system in singapore still exists, pm lee’s declaration generated increased discussion about how to accommodate students with special needs in mainstream schools. the moe responded by focusing on areas such as teacher awareness, compulsory pre-service training on special needs and increasing the number of specialists in schools. the prime minister’s decree encouraged a shift from the practice of restricted learning environments for students with special needs to a more open and conscientious mainstream system (nonis, 2006). the second major event contributing to singapore’s pragmatic move to an inclusive society occurred when the 2007-2011 enabling masterplan was released (steering committee on the enabling masterplan, 2007). the masterplan made six key recommendations for special education. these recommendations included: (a) the moe taking over both early intervention and special education, (b) a more purposeful and deliberate assimilation of students with special needs into educational settings that integrate the dual education system, (c) the development of better prepared schools and staff, (d) increased funding of support services such as sports groups, volunteer organizations, and other community services, (e) improved delivery of education, support, and training to empower families and caregivers, and (f) a more intentional focus on transition planning and management within schools. in summary, the 2007 enabling masterplan ensured that human and financial resources were better dedicated to early intervention, to support for teachers and caregivers, and to transition planning – all critical areas for creating an inclusive society and ensuring that individuals with disabilities have a productive and beneficial future for both themselves and society. the move to inclusion resulted in increased support for students identified with disabilities in mainstream schools. the national institute of education was contracted to conduct both the teachers trained in special needs (tsn) and the allied educator-learning and behavioral support (aed-lbs) programs. the aed-lbs program, launched in 2004 is comprised of a one-year training for individuals interested in supporting teachers in the classroom. the tsn program was launched by the ministry of education in 2005. the tsn program requires 10% of primary teachers and 20% of secondary teachers from mainstream schools to complete a three-course sequence over an academic year, to help students with learning disabilities (moe, 2015b). each course lasts three full days and is fully paid for by the ministry. however, the dual education system still exists and it is important to acknowledge the issues surrounding this system and the challenges it poses to making singapore an inclusive society. issues and challenges to inclusive education in singapore ainscow and miles (2008) contended that inclusive education requires mainstream schools to have an inclusive orientation, recognizing that no differentiation should be made among students. the same sentiment resonated at the 2008 international conference on education, where over 100 ministers of education and 153 countries endorsed inclusive education “as a 34 global education review 3(3) general guiding principle to strengthen education for sustainable development, lifelong learning for all and equal access of all levels of society to learning opportunities” (unescoibe, 2008, p. 3). more recently, the unesco education for all monitoring report (unesco, 2010) emphasized three broad sets of policies for guiding inclusive education policy including: accessibility and affordability, learning environment, and entitlements and opportunities as benchmarks for integrating inclusive educational policy (unesco, 2010). although these policies are helpful, there are also many issues and challenges when viewing inclusive education as a pathway to inclusive societies. the issues and challenges that are most prevalent in singapore include: (a) the cultural and institutional barriers that prevent the democratization of educational opportunities, (b) a curricular and pedagogical focus on standardized assessment scores, and (c) a teacher training program that does not provide adequate training on supporting and developing individual learners within the classroom community for pre-service teachers entering the profession. a closer look and understanding of these challenges is important for moving forward. cultural and institutional barriers as lim and nam (2000) point out, the dual system in singapore is a significant barrier to the integration of people with disabilities. although many of the policies and procedures implemented in singapore were meant to help build a country that could flourish and develop its human capital, these policies minimized opportunities and excluded individuals with disabilities from mainstream education. for example, exempting students from the compulsory mainstream education and allowing them to attend special schools only deepened the divide between mainstream education and special education (poon et al., 2013). in addition to these existing institutional barriers, cultural beliefs and attitudes towards individuals with disabilities exacerbated the problem. singapore prides itself on having a society in which people from four major races – chinese, malay, indian, and eurasian – live harmoniously. despite such rich diversity, “the most troublesome barriers to inclusion come from entrenched values, attitudes and behaviors that disdain and/or disregard the idea of a just society; that do not recognize or accept diversity as key foundation of a more inclusive and cohesive society, and that do not consider the scope and implications of glaring social and educational gaps as a priority issue” (opertti et al., 2013, p. 160). lim and choo (2002) pointed out that disability, in singapore, is considered by some as a personal tragedy and a private burden to bear. traditionally, the care of people with disability is considered the responsibility of the family with institutionalization as a secondary alternative (komardjaja, 2001). integration of people with disabilities in mainstream society can play a critical role in overcoming these institutional and cultural barriers. for example, thaver, lim, and liau (2014) reported that pre-service teachers with training in special needs and those with the most contact with people with disabilities displayed significantly more positive attitudes towards inclusive education than teachers without training or experience working with people with disabilities. inclusive societies are built when institutional barriers, such as the dual education system, and cultural barriers, such as beliefs and attitudes, are overcome by thoughtful, deliberate planning. with gradual changes brought about by the government, singapore joined 132 other countries in committing to equal rights and dignity for people with disabilities through the united nations convention on the rights of people with disabilities (ministry of social and family development, 2013). while this is inclusion in high-achieving singapore 35 certainly progress, in order for attitudes to change it is important to begin exposing children early to those with disabilities through an inclusive school system, and continuing on to vocational, leisure and recreational, and other environments. curricular and supporting barriers for students in inclusive schools national exams are part of the compulsory education in singapore. singaporeans take great pride in national examination results and there is a sense of overwhelming pressure for the children, teachers, and parents when exams are administered each year (ang & huan, 2006). although mainstream teachers are encouraged and willing to support students with special needs in classes, the emphasis on covering curricular content in preparation for the national exams does not provide adequate support to students with special needs. whereas mainstream teachers are being trained to work with students with special needs as part of the teachers trained in special needs (tsn) program, large class sizes (i.e., 1 teacher: 35-40 students) do not provide the academic and learning supports students with disabilities need to succeed in mainstream schools. progress has been made in the introduction of accommodations for examinations (extra time, larger font, use of keyboards, etc.); however, there is still a stigma associated with using these accommodations as notations are made in the student transcripts that results on the exam were obtained under special conditions (poon et al., 2013). even though mainstream schools are thought to be “inclusive”, what “inclusive” means is debatable when students with disabilities are not supported with the daily supports, personnel, and pedagogy needed to succeed in a system based on high-stakes examinations. teacher training another way to understand the disparity between the education of mainstream students and students with special needs is to examine teacher preparation and training in singaporean schools. admission requirements to the national institute of education (nie), where all teachers are trained, are very high for a mainstream teacher. there are three ways to become a mainstream teacher: (a) receive a 2-3 year diploma, (b) complete the one-year postgraduate diploma in education (pgde) if already a bachelor’s degree holder, or (c) receive a four year bachelor’s degree (b.a. or b.s.) in education. all prospective mainstream teachers are strongly encouraged to pursue a bachelor’s degree. conversely, the path to becoming a special educator is not nearly as difficult or comprehensive. an individual who wants to teach students with special needs can either become a special school teacher (sst) working in a special school as a lead teacher or an allied educator learning and behavioral support (aed-lbs) at a mainstream school. together with mainstream teachers who have been trained in the tsn program, aed-lbss support students with mild special needs (e.g. dyslexia, autism spectrum disorders, and attention deficit hyperactive disorder) studying in mainstream schools (moe, 2014). in either case, a diploma in special education (dise) via nie’s dise program is required. the dise coursework focuses on child development, pedagogy, and understanding high incidence disabilities. graduates of the dise program have the skills necessary for identifying disabilities, diagnosing and assessing strengths and weaknesses of students, and planning interventions. however, the dise is only one year long and is the only qualification moe requires to teach students with special needs. in essence, for students who need the most support, teachers are required to only complete 36 global education review 3(3) one quarter to one third of the training received by their mainstream counterparts. another way to examine the level of support offered to students with disabilities in singapore is to consider resources to support the early identification of a disability. the child development program has increased the number of students in preschools who are identified as having a disability (ho, 2007), but there is a shortage of trained early childhood educators who are available to work with young children with special needs. in addition, a waiting list to be assessed remains for school age children due to the limited number of moe educational psychologists available to provide the free diagnostic tests (poon et al., 2013). typically, a practicing psychologist from the public or private sector conducts psychoeducational testing and determines disability diagnosis using evidence-based assessments. the availability of professionals to identify and diagnose individuals with special needs in the public or private sector can be limited and a challenge, especially for families who cannot afford to pay for a private sector psychologist. efforts for earlier screening of students in the early elementary years and timely diagnosis is needed. in order to build inclusive schools, it is important that the training provided for teachers and support personnel for teachers with disabilities is equal to that of mainstream teachers. to ensure equality, the number of qualified special educators must be sufficient and the rigor and quality of the training they receive must be equivalent to mainstream teachers. inclusive solutions and ideas singapore is making progress and is continuing to move forward in its quest for an inclusive society. as the education system continues to evolve, the five policy suggestions by opertti and colleagues (2013) are important to consider. we will use these five priorities as the starting point for suggestions on how to create a more inclusive environment in singapore. creating a common societal understanding of inclusive education as opertti and colleagues (2013) asserted, it is important for countries like singapore to build a common societal and cultural understanding of inclusive education in order to democratize education. foreman (2001) stated that inclusion involves educating students with, or who are atrisk for, learning disabilities in the same educational setting as their non-disabled peers. in order to create an inclusive educational system and help society to better understand inclusivity, the first recommendation is to eliminate special schools and, instead, provide a continuum of services within the mainstream school system under the management of moe. creating a cohesive system where all students are educated together could include a combination of resources including personnel, funding, and space allocation, among others. it is clear that a dual system of education where students with disabilities are excluded from the mainstream system, delays the formation of an inclusive society. a broadened conceptualization of inclusive education includes a completely different perspective regarding those who learn differently and accepts that the fundamental problems reside in the educational system itself, rather than in children who do not fit into the system (opertti et al., 2013). promoting fundamental mindset changes as discussed, entrenched values, outlooks, and actions remain the biggest barrier to creating an inclusive environment. individuals in inclusive societies accept diversity as a key foundation for a unified culture in which social and educational gaps are filled with understanding, contact, and compassion. one step in helping pm lee and singapore’s inclusive vision to become a reality inclusion in high-achieving singapore 37 is to offer more employment options for those with disabilities. data are not reported on the employment of individuals with disabilities in singapore but anecdotal accounts from those in the field report that employment is dismally low and that the only opportunities for individuals with disabilities are in sheltered workspaces. one rarely sees individuals with more severe disabilities in mainstream society including public transport, shopping malls, and public areas. as pm lee noted, all singaporeans are brothers and sisters and it is important that individuals with disabilities are given the opportunity to engage in work and play with their fellow singaporeans. restructuring schools to provide comprehensive support to all learners inclusive education emphasizes the need to support the personalization of education and overhauling the traditional one-size-fits-all approach. therefore, as schools become inclusive and special schools are eliminated, it is important to offer a continuum of services to meet the needs of all learnersincluding those with and without disabilities. specific examples include supports for the following: pupils’ welfare pupils’ welfare includes the physical, psychological, and social well-being of all students. with a high-stakes, exam-driven society, the number of children seeking psychiatric help has risen dramatically (poon, c.h., 2012). there have been reports of children as young as 10, 11, and 12 years-old committing suicide after the results of the exams. students who fail the primary school leaving exam, commonly referred to as the psle, for two years in a row are routed into a vocational track at the age of ten. however, the number of these students who failed because a disability went undiagnosed, or because of the lack of comprehensive support in mainstream schools is unclear. providing more comprehensive support for the physical, psychological, and social wellbeing of all students may help to create a more inclusive society where all individuals are appreciated for who they are as people beyond their academic performance. physical infrastructure inclusive schools have facilities that accommodate children with disabilities and provide barrier-free access in classrooms. many singapore schools are in multi-level buildings. it is important that parents and students are informed about the facilities available and teachers are trained in how to create a safe, accessible classroom for all learners. early support singapore has recently launched important and impactful initiatives focused on early childhood education, providing early childhood education to all children, and to recognizing high-quality early childhood educators (early childhood development agency, 2014). one example includes kidstart, a program designed to proactively identify low-income and vulnerable children and provide them with early access to health, learning and developmental support before they turn the age of six (early childhood development agency, 2016). compulsory education begins for children above six years old and is provided by schools managed or funded by the moe. schools should provide early intervention supports for young children and for students who begin to face learning challenges as soon as those challenges arise. it is important that singapore also trains early childhood educators to identify and support students who may have disabilities as early identification is a key to supporting these students academically and socially. 38 global education review 3(3) specialist provision all students with special needs should have ready access to highly qualified special education teachers. specifically, existing special schools could be transformed into inclusive education resource centers to serve mainstream schools in the neighborhood. the transformation of these resources would allow qualified special educators and the resources used in special schools to be available to all learners. addressing expectations and needs of all learners through an inclusive curriculum an inclusive curriculum does not lower standards but it is uncommonly flexible about how students reach those standards and is accommodating to all learners. inclusive curriculums encourage inclusive pedagogy that creates options for students to choose “how, where, and with whom they learn” (florian & black-hawkins, 2010, p. 821) and respectfully accommodate to a student’s needs. as discussed by opertti et al. (2013), it is important that standards are not lowered for students, and that a high quality education is offered to all students regardless of their individual differences. inclusive curriculums focus on providing a framework for learners that does not “track” them, but instead allows an individual and his family to choose a path that will be most beneficial to them. the living, learning, and working in the 21st century currently offered, but not mandated, by the moe may be most appropriate for any number of students. the mainstream curriculum is very demanding academically and may not be useful to all students. combining the curricula and extending course offerings so that all students and families can select which courses and supports are most appropriate for the student is critical to establishing an inclusive learning environment. empowering inclusive teachers to address the diversity of learners teachers ”make policy” in class as their decisions determine what the class experiences (fulcher, 1999). it is imperative that policymakers recognize the impact teachers’ perceptions and attitudes can have on student achievement, behavior, and self-esteem (brophy & good, 1974). however, teachers cannot deliver a new paradigm of inclusion unless they are informed about and convinced of the rationale, aim, strategies, and content of inclusive education. to enable teachers to make appropriate pedagogical decisions for individuals with disabilities, they need to be more fully prepared before entering the teaching profession. instead of only focusing on retroactive tsn training for mainstream teachers, mainstream teacher preparation should include substantial and robust coursework on disability and pedagogy. in addition, special educators must be held to the same standards and have the same opportunities as mainstream teachers. currently, it is possible to become a special educator in a special school or to become a support teacher in a mainstream school with one year of training. the current one-year preparation program for special educators is only able to provide introductory knowledge at best and the disparity between qualification, pay scale, and in-service training between special educators and mainstream educators reinforces the idea that teachers of students with disabilities are not as valued as mainstream teachers. after serving time in the field, mainstream teachers are provided a range of opportunities for furthering their education and professional development including funding programs for further degrees. conversely, the options for special educators to receive further training are limited and special educators are only eligible to receive funding upon written request on a case-by-case basis. highlyinclusion in high-achieving singapore 39 qualified special educators can support students with high needs and offer mainstream teachers support as co-teachers in the classroom. requiring a bachelor’s in special education and including classes about students with special needs for mainstream educators would help to improve the quality of all students in singapore’s schools. conclusion as an educational leader in southeast asia, singapore has the opportunity to lead by example. due to financial stability, a sterling reputation in education, and the country’s small size, singapore has the potential to expand its role as a world leader in education by prioritizing inclusive education. however, a national, school-wide collaborative approach is necessary in which special education in recognized as a part of the general education framework, with an emphasis on collaboration between professionals and families of students with disabilities or other special educational needs (brownell, ross, colon, & mccallum, 2005). while moving to a fully inclusive school system would be a massive shift and would take time, it is necessary for students with and without disabilities to grow up, play, and learn together if we hope to create an inclusive society. in order for inclusion to become a reality, moore (2009) stated that individual prejudices against persons with disabilities have to be eradicated. one way to help eradicate these prejudices is for students to learn about each other through the interaction that well-designed school settings can provide. as lim, thaver, and slee (2008) describe, the inclusive rhetoric used by singapore provides a strong rationale for schools to be more inclusive of children with disabilities. the challenge is changing the dream into a reality that becomes part of daily practice across all sectors and aspects of singaporean life (lim et al., 2008). progress towards inclusive education will only take place when policymakers and educators understand the complexity of the four connected core principles of inclusion: that all individuals have a right to education; 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(2011). broadening the concept of inclusive education in the commonwealth of independent states. in: interregional and regional perspectives on inclusive education: follow-up of the 48th session of the international conference on education (pp. 85–93). geneva: unesco ibe. about the author(s) zachary walker, phd, is the head of pedagogical innovation and development and an assistant professor in the early childhood special education (ecse) academic group at the national institute of education (nie). he has taught and advised in the united states, asia, europe, central america, the caribbean, and with unesco’s international bureau of education (ibe) on educational policy. shobana musti-rao, phd, is an associate professor in special education at pace university¹s school of education. her research interests include academic and behavioral interventions for students with mild to moderate disabilities in inclusive settings. http://www.mcys.gov.sg/enablingmasterplan/mainreport.html http://www.mcys.gov.sg/enablingmasterplan/mainreport.html http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/policy_dialogue/48th_ice/confinted_48-5_conclusions_english.pdf http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/policy_dialogue/48th_ice/confinted_48-5_conclusions_english.pdf http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/user_upload/policy_dialogue/48th_ice/confinted_48-5_conclusions_english.pdf 6-7 final ger_0331 format p.1 6-7 final ger_0331 format p2-end promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 15 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: morrison-love, david (2014). promoting transfer and an integrated understanding for pre-service teachers of technology educations . global education review, 1 (4). 15-36. promoting transfer and an integrated understanding for pre-service teachers of technology education david morrison-love university of glasgow abstract the ability of pre-service teachers (psts) to transfer learning between subjects and contexts when problem solving is critical for developing their capability as technologists and teachers of technology. however, a growing body of literature suggests this ability is often assumed or over-estimated, and rarely developed explicitly within courses or degree programmes. the nature of the problems tackled within technology are such that solutions draw upon knowledge from a wide range of contexts and subjects, however, the internal organization and structure of institutions and schools tends to compartmentalize rather integrate these. providing a knowledge base and strategies to enhance psts’ awareness of and skills in transferring knowledge may allow for a more integrated understanding to develop. the importance of developing this ability to transfer knowledge is heightened as psts will, in turn, be responsible for developing the similar capabilities of their future students. this paper begins by considering problem solving in technology education and some of the issues associated with learning transfer. thereafter, a framework and strategy for better integrating learning between courses is described and forms the basis for developments in an initial teacher education degree programme for technology education. provisional data from evaluations and psts’ work indicated a positive effect in enhancing their thinking and additional data collected in the form of questionnaires, interviews and course work further illuminate this finding. it is argued that the development framework and approach enhances psts’ mental models of teaching technology and offers a significant step forward in promoting skills in the transfer of future learning between subjects; something increasingly critical for 21st century stem education. keywords learning transfer, problem solving, teacher education, technology education, pre-service teachers problem solving and transfer in technology education introduction savage and sterry (1990), argue strongly that problem solving has been identified by many as the central method through which students learn about and gain an understanding of technology. ______________________________ corresponding author: david morrison-love, school of education, st. andrew’s building, 11 eldon street, glasgow, g3 6nh. email: david.morrison-love@glasgow.ac.uk. 16 global education review 1(4) the skill of problem solving is also a critical thinking skill necessary for addressing issues related to technology and for developing effective solutions to practical problems (custer, valesey & burke, 2001). “design and problem solving are essential components of technology and technology education” and that this forms a distinctive characteristic of this subject area (potter, 2013, p.69). research exploring problem solving continues to expand our understanding on its role and execution within technology education (hong, chen, wong, hsu & peng, 2012; tseng, chang, lou & hsu, 2013; middleton, 2009), signifying not only that we have much still to learn, but also that it constitutes a critical capacity for psts of technology education to develop proficiency in, both as developing technologists and as a future teachers in the field. this paper explores shifts that have occurred in the thinking of psts after taking a course developed to enhance skills in knowledge transfer and problem solving. a framework for enhanced transfer was developed from a detailed review of literature, and was used as a basis to develop a course-based intervention. a twostage data gathering approach was employed and findings in the areas of confidence, understanding, transfer skills and mental models of teaching are reported in terms of psts as developing technologists and as developing teachers. in this context, shifts in thinking and mental models are seen in a similar manner to the concept of shifts posited within the theory of transformative learning (mezirow, 1997). knowledge transfer there are two key areas of consideration and challenge associated with bolstering the types of knowledge, skills and capacities necessary for effective problem solving in technology. technology education encompasses a comparatively broad range of problem types and contexts. twyford and järvinen (2000), discuss the fact that these range from very well-defined problems with single, known answers to openended problems in which a range of solutions are possible. as well as cultivating expanded social interaction, more open-ended problems tend to broaden the ranges of knowledge and experience school students are required to draw upon (twyford & järvinen, 2000). an alternative distinction in relation to context, can be found in the three-part typology of problems in technology education offered by rasinen, virtanen and ikonen (2012) in which problems have either one or a small number of solutions, are everyday life or real problems, or appear in the form of abstract problems where the intention is to develop problem solving skills. it is not unreasonable to argue that this variation in problem definition and context, in conjunction with learner characteristics, will heavily influence the type of problem solving activity that is undertaken in response. second, dixon and brown (2012) discuss the fact that school students fail to make connections and transfer skills between subject areas and that, according to a report published by the committee on science, this is because there are insufficient opportunities for them to engage in authentic problem solving that prepares them for that which they would encounter outside of school (committee on science, 2007). the typology offered by rasinen et al. (2012) certainly suggests a strong role for technology in addressing this. structurally, such transfer between different subject areas within a learning activity can be seen as acting horizontally; henceforth referred to herein as horizontal transfer. though the term is prolific, it is noted that connotations of the word transfer suggests a clean, objective shift from one place to another, something banks and plant (2013) discuss this with respect to neighboring subjects such as science. they note that it is overpromoting transfer and an integrated understanding 17 simplistic to regard scientific knowledge as simply applied in technology; and that, in many cases, objective scientific knowledge plays a very minor role and that it is continually recontextualized to reduce its abstraction until it is no longer useful in facilitating a practical outcome. the idea that knowledge is not simply applied is echoed by helms jørgensen (2011) who argues that rather than being transferred, knowledge is actually transformed. banks and plant (2013) concurrently point out that, in technology, knowledge is often drawn from a range of domains, including economic and social, and that technology teachers often assume that transfer from these happens quite readily, which is not the case (dixon & brown, 2012). kilbrink and bjurulf (2013) convey a similar message through discussion of vocational learning. they highlight transfer from the learning environment to the workplace as critical, but that this is made problematic because schools attach different values and purposes to the learning than workplaces do. this is considered herein as vertical transfer. despite this being sought after to maximize the utility of learning in general, it is particularly salient for technology insofar as the subject has the capacity to reflect authentic practice (potter, 2013). it is clear then that technology, as a curricular area, offers notable potential in providing authentic problem solving contexts that can foster students’ abilities to make meaningful links and transfer learning. indeed, learning within such contexts, with the potential to afford students a more integrated understanding of subjects and domains can be seen as integral to stem education in general, and in equipping students to engage with the demands of future jobs in related sectors. it is, however, an ability to transfer learning into different contexts that cultivates just such an understanding, and this has been shown to be often ineffective and challenging (brown, collins & duguid, 1989; perkins & salomon, 2012); and readily presumed by many educators to occur automatically (alexander & murphy, 1999). notably, such challenges with transfer were shown by mccormick (2004) to feature specifically within areas of technology education, many of which the psts in this study will go on to teach. the examples cited demonstrate that some task contexts can mask understanding and inhibit students linking knowledge. the value of skills for an integrated understanding a number of studies have attempted to identify factors that affect people’s ability to transfer what they have learned between subjects and situations in formal educational settings. barnett & ceci (2005), argue that task, learner and organizational features all contribute to the transferability of that which is learnt. engle, lam, meyer and nix (2012), for instance, argue for expansive rather than bounded framing of tasks to promote positive transfer, however the organizational features cannot be underestimated. from the outset, both schools and universities have an internal structure that exerts a strong tendency to compartmentalize subjects and learning, something that laporte and sanders (1993) attempt to address. they attempt to break down these boundaries through an integrated model of stem education in which technology classes act as the host context for the application of learning from other subjects. this rationale supports learners developing a more integrated understanding, and allows students to build skills in the application of knowledge from a broad range of areas. this is critical if learners are to develop viable and successful technological solutions. 18 global education review 1(4) the value of such skills is recognized more broadly for a range of school curricula. though discourse is on-going, yates and collins (2010) and whitty (2010) cite growing trends in emphasis upon building students’ critical skills, problem solving, and authentic, interdisciplinary, cross-subject learning. as argued by maclellan (2005), further education has a responsibility to properly prepare college and university students for professional working environments and, if such skills are to be fostered effectively within our students, it is firstly necessary to develop them within the psts who will go on to facilitate their learning. askell-williams, murray-harvey and lawson (2006) argue that strong, transferrable mental models are essential for psts and this is recognized as central for 21st century technology and stem education. arguably, this also centralizes the importance of transfer beyond the formal educational setting. enhancement of transfer as previously alluded to, an emerging body of research suggests transfer of learning between contexts is often difficult. clancey (1995) illustrates that much of this difficulty appears linked to the constructivist tenet that, in many ways, learning is situated or tethered to the context in which it was first learnt. kirsh (2009) argues that in order to break through this, learners are required to identify conceptual hints and cues that facilitate the creation of links (p.291). that being said, there are some instances in which transfer occurs more readily because contexts are seen by learners as characteristically similar. perkins and salomon (2012) refer to this as low road transfer and note that it requires far less cognitive effort to initiate. by contrast, they define high road transfer as comparatively challenging and manifest between contexts that are largely dissimilar. despite perkins and salomon citing the development of better search strategies as integral to successful high road transfer, there are a number of other factors that literature has been shown to bolster positive transfer effects. such effects are further explored below and form the basis of a framework for enhanced transfer upon which the intervention1 for this study was designed. transfer: embedding and motivation it is often the case that courses in both schools and universities assume that the learning will be readily applicable in a future context and do not discuss the concept of transfer with students. indeed, even when not assumed, thomas (1990) notes that transfer is often only discussed at the very end of the course and, moreover, that this is ineffectual. thomas argues that transfer should explicitly permeate, and be embedded throughout the course such that students can engage with it from the onset. likewise, and in reference to transfer in technology education, jones (1997) argues that transfer is both complex and should be taught as part of technological practice. having an awareness of transfer itself, however, may be insufficient. lim and johnson (2002) argue, as with many aspects of learning, that people must recognize the value in and be motivated to want to transfer learning. a study carried out by kontoghiorghes (2002) examined transfer in the work environment and found that the expectation that what was learnt should be transferred was a prominent motivator. transfer: authenticity, structure & deep learning stein, isaacs and andrews (2004) argue that transfer is enhanced when the native learning experience is authentic in terms of students’ personal meaning-making and the world beyond the course. notably, this can be seen as broadly analogous to the concepts of personal authenticity and cultural authenticity as defined promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 19 by murphy and mccormick (1997) for problem solving in science and technology education. these notions can be seen to bridge the aforementioned requirement to value transfer with one of the definitive characteristics of technology education. in technology education, authenticity has been explored on a number of levels (see snape & fox-turnbull, 2011) though herein, it is argued that the promotion thereof requires that three task requirements be met. first, that learning is initiated by a problem situation (rather than learning that leads to tackling a problem). second, that this problem is genuinely problematic to students, and lastly, that the solution is characteristically technological. though clearly relative to the solvers’ experience, frensch & funke (1995) offer a valuable distinction in considering what satisfies the state of being genuinely problematic. following an extensive review of european research, they assert that problems are either implicit or explicit. in the former, solvers have a fairly good notion of the type of thing that must be done to address the problem (such as comprehension-check exercises found at the end of a textbook chapter), whilst the latter are largely instransparent, which involve fluctuating problem states and complex, nonlinear activity (p.18). alongside task authenticity, halpern (1998) suggests that future transfer can be more easily achieved by shifting the emphasis in the original learning to account more for the procedural and structural aspects rather than the substantive content. though this may compliment elements such as the aforementioned use of hints and cues, a balance is required to ensure this is not at the expense of learning about the associated body of content. failure to do this may give rise to an incomplete or fragmented understanding. both macaulay and cree (1999) and halpern and hakel (2003), argue that transfer is less likely to occur when people only gain a surface level understanding of the subject. this is because a deep understanding is necessary for them to cultivate meaningful connections or recognize cues for applying what was learnt in different contexts. whilst on one level, this presents a degree of tension; a depth of understanding is likely to better facilitate the recognition of contextual similarities. notably, fleer and march (2009) discuss evidence that more authentic pedagogical approaches by teachers in science promote pupil engagement; which, in itself, is arguably a prerequisite for engendering deep learning. with regard to teachers themselves, jones and moreland (2004) reported that enhanced knowledge for primary school teachers engaging with technology led to explicit consideration about how they could actively help younger students improve learning transfer. transfer: extension, translation and forward planning as part of an extensive review of transfer evidence, merriam and leahy (2005) argue that, where possible, the opportunity should be provided for university students to extend learning forward into the workplace as a way to increase positive transfer. on a similarly pragmatic level, halpern and hakel (2003) also advocate developing skills in taking what was learnt in one format, and translating it to another. in the context of teacher education, this shares a great deal with the development of didactic transposition (see chevallard, 1988) where the form the information is translated into is deliberately engineered to fit the target context. somewhat linked to this is also the opportunity to explicitly plan for future transfer. gardner and korth (1997) extend the previous notions of embedded transfer beyond the task boundaries and argue that explicit planning forces students to conceptually link that which they have learnt to a new context, and in doing 20 global education review 1(4) so take cognizance of its opportunities, characteristics and constraints. analytical focus of this study the intervention within this study is the preparatory course entitled “integrating technology,” which was developed based on the existing body of research in this field specifically to enhance psts’ skills in transfer and promote more integrated understanding. specifically, this paper addresses the following research question: “what shifts have occurred in the thinking of pre-service teachers of technology as a result of engaging with a preparatory course designed to develop an understanding of transfer and skills in solving authentic problems?” broadly congruent with horizontal transfer and vertical transfer, this will ultimately be explored in terms of the psts as: (i) developing technologists, and (ii) future teachers of technology education. methodology in order to provide valuable insight to this learning and teaching intervention, a qualitative interpretive approach was employed. this allows for a rich description of phenomena to be generated and the exploration of psts own social construction of their experiences. the interpretation and analysis herein was based upon responses from open-ended questionnaires, in-depth semi-structured interviews (see appendix) and submissions of course work2. in addition to triangulation among three data sources, three strategies were integrated into the research design to insure permeating rigor, rather than only post-hoc assessments thereof (morse, barrett, mayan, olson & spiers, 2002). firstly, two stages of data gathering allowed for on-going analysis of the first to inform on and shape the second in adherence to the principle of theoretical sampling (boeije, 2002). moreover, this allowed for a rich description of the phenomena of interest to be developed and helped bolster the credibility of knowledge claims (gall, gall & borg, 2003). secondly, the validity and accuracy of findings and interpretations were scrutinized and refined using member checks carried out with participants during the data gathering stage and following the analysis. where member checks were carried out, individuals’ responses and the associated analyses were mapped so that they were readily identifiable by participants. thirdly, a peer debrief with an academic staff member outside of this study was held following the analysis of data in which themes, coding and findings were scrutinized, questioned and where necessary, refined. data gathering and procedures all ten psts participated in the first data gathering phase in which they completed a twopart questionnaire. the first part contained a series of open-ended questions encouraging the psts to consider, as fully as possible, their engagement with the integrating technology course, instances of challenge and changes in how they think about problem solving and their future role as a technology teacher. the second part required responses to a number of questions using likert scales. in the second data gathering phase, in-depth individual interviews were conducted with six participants to further explore initial findings from the questionnaires. during these interviews, participants’ experiences and responses to parts of the questionnaire in relation to transfer and integration were explored in greater depth. five interviews were held face-to-face, and due to changing participant circumstances, one interview was conducted via telephone. findings from these interviews, combined with evidence from student work, allowed the understanding of salient themes and points of promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 21 interest to be deepened and corroborated within and between each source. all six interviews were held in accordance with the criteria laid out by gall et al. (2003), digitally recorded and lasted between 26 and 43 minutes each. to bolster face validity, it was stressed to participants throughout the interview that responses should relate directly to their experience of the intervention course only. recruitment of study participants the target participants were first-year preservice teachers who had undertaken the integrating technology t1 course as part of the bachelor of technological education degree programme at the university of glasgow, scotland. these were the only cohort of undergraduate students who had undertaken this course. psts were approached to request their participation, issued with a plain language statement describing the study and given the opportunity to raise any questions. they were then issued with a consent form and told that their participation was entirely voluntary with no incentives offered. they were told that they could withdraw at any point without the requirement to provide a reason and that their choice to participate or not would have no bearing upon their experience as a student. fifteen from a possible eighteen students gave consent for their submissions of work to be included, though only ten students engaged with both phases of data gathering and hence form the resultant sample for this study. the study was carried out in accordance with the british educational research association ethical guidelines and was approved by the university of glasgow ethics committee. overview of sample the sample consisted of six female and four male students, all of whom are referred to using pseudonyms through. the age range of the female participants was 18 to 19 years. the age range of the male participants was 18 to 20 years. all of the participants were in their first year of study of a four-year honors programme and all, bar one, entered that programme straight from high school. the integrating technology course dealt with the engineering systems dimensions of technology and only one participant within the sample had experience of this subject area from high school. all participants had previous experience in drawing, graphics and design subjects. none of the participants in the sample had undertaken a course that specifically explored problem solving. intervention and synopsis of student learning experience in order that the intervention did seek to promote transfer skills, an original conceptual framework, shown in figure 1, was synthesized by this author from the key findings of the literature review. this framework provided a research-informed basis for developing courses, which enhanced the likelihood of students autonomously applying the skills and content learnt in different contexts and was directly employed in the design of the integrating technology course. the key findings from the literature review were broken into ‘course attributes’ that shape and characterize the overall course, and ‘task affordances’ that account for opportunities that should be made available to students within task design. the framework does not dictate that all such characteristics be embedded in all facets of the course, but does allow for them to be considered and intelligently integrated on a number of levels of course development. 22 global education review 1(4) figure 1 framework for enhanced transfer derived from literature review the intervention developed as part of this study was based upon this model and is unique insofar as students develop their understanding of transfer at the start of the process, rather than attempting to develop it retrospectively in courses at a later stage in their degree programme. the framework incorporates elements recognized to enhance the likelihood of both horizontal and vertical transfer, as grounded in research (perkins & salomon, 2012; kirsh, 2009; thomas, 1990; jones, 1997; lim & johnson, 2002; kontoghiorghes, 2002; stein et al., 2004; frensch & funke, 1995; halpern, 1998; macaulay & cree, 1999; halpern & hakel, 2003; gardner & korth, 1997). the integrating technology course ran during the second semester of the participants’ first year course for roughly 11 weeks. it was designed to maximize the conditions for horizontal transfer in years two and three of the degree programme and engender a more integrated understanding as well as vertical transfer to contexts beyond their degree. as such, it sought to provide psts with skills, strategies and confidence to solve authentic technological problems; explicitly teach problem solving, contexts, and transfer; and force them to initiate search strategies in response to a complex problem. some evidence of this type of activity is discussed by for psts in stem subjects by brears, macintyre and o’sullivan (2014). in addition to general analytical tools for evaluating and decision making, two core strategies learnt as part of the course were the woods model of problem solving (woods, 2002) and morphological analysis/synthesis (adviu, morina & ramadani , 2012). these served to explicate structure over content. during the first three weeks, lecture sessions and critical reading and response tasks allowed psts to build up an explicit understanding of some of the difficulties with problem solving, transfer, and contexts as evidenced in the literature; this made considerations about transfer explicit from the outset (thomas, 1990). during this time, it was explicitly explained to psts that the approaches learnt within this course were being developed to help them the facilitate transfer required during sections of projects within the design and promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 23 integrating technology courses in years 2 and 3. following an exploration of theory, psts wrote a professional practice statement exploring how they would plan for the future use of these approaches as teachers (gardner & korth, 1997) and consider how to translate them into the school context. the main body of the intervention required psts to tackle a largescale, explicit problem (frensch & funke, 1995) in mixed groups of approximately five. in this task, they had to design, to a systems level (banks & plant, 2013), a drinks dispenser where the volume of liquid dispensed is proportional to the amount of money a customer puts in. this was developed as it was likely to be genuinely problematic and a successfully integrated solution would require a sufficiently deep understanding of the contributory technological systems involved. moreover, the communication of their solution would require many of the approaches students are expected to engage with in school; albeit at a more demanding level. upon completion of the problem solving task, psts were given the choice to amend their practice statements. all groups completed the task successfully. data preparation & analytical approach questionnaires, interviews and coursework submissions were imported into nvivo. however, rather than being transcribed as is found in most studies, interview data were coded and analyzed directly as digital waveforms. as graphical representations of the recorded audio in terms of time and amplitude, the waveforms did not allow for key word searches to be performed and responses could not be visually scanned for meaning, as with transcriptions. this approach did, however, allow the number of interpretive stages to be lowered and, as discussed by wainwright & russell (2010), retained closeness to the data that, on balance, offered greater analytical benefit. given that data were auditory rather than visual, it is acknowledged that the nature of the analytical process employed here differed from that experienced with exploring transcriptions. the use of digital waveforms in this capacity was also pragmatically and technically appropriate as the study targeted a deeper, thematic level of analysis and did not seek descriptive frequencies of words and phrases. a provisional analytical pass was used to code broad themes in the questionnaires and to describe and highlight sections of responses within the interview data. an immersive phase was then undertaken which developed through a number of stages informed by the emergence of themes of interest that arose through coding to, collapsing, merging and re-defining a series of nodes (or coding labels) within nvivo. this process was iterative and repeated until nodes were seen to appropriately reflect the data to which they were assigned. the process was continually informed through the use of descriptive, contextual and reflective memos within the software3, the themes, explored within the findings section, included: shifts in confidence levels and independence during problem solving; a deeper and more integrated understanding; and feeling better equipped to transfer learning and shifts in psts’ mental models of technology teaching. given the extended answers within both the questionnaires and interviews, both data sources were analyzed as a narrative (riessman, 1993) and triangulated with coursework submissions using the constant comparative method (zhang & wildemuth, 2009). findings here, the findings are presented in two successive sections. in the first, key findings from the questionnaires are presented whilst the second describes a more in-depth exploration of these through the interviews and related data sources. 24 global education review 1(4) findings obtained from questionnaires with responses of ‘definitely agree’ and ‘mostly agree’ (see appendix) taken as positive, all psts considered themselves to be better equipped to tackle future problems as a result of engaging with this intervention. all, bar one, reported that they were more capable and confident in applying learning to complex problems than they were before. not only do these findings suggests a strong procedural and affective benefit for an integrated understanding, but nine out of ten psts also reported that they gained far more knowledge than expected about the technology involved given that they did not receive lectures on this. this was corroborated through the project submissions. participants reported that solving explicit problems was not something generally encountered in school4. differences cited by psts recognized the process of solving explicit problems as far less prescriptive, with little to no prior knowledge and no known answer. two psts also described the problem solving as “less linear,” with one arguing that whilst their experience in school “was a very linear path to problem solving, finish one aspect then move on to the next,” this required continual “bouncing between planning and evaluating and researching.” there was also evidence of an associated shift in the required level of independent learning. these perceived differences are arguably symptomatic of a more authentic problem frame and that although psts were armed with a number of strategies from the learning within the first section of the course; they had to make decisions on where and when these would be most productively employed. nine psts reported limited to extensive use of the strategies given, with only one choosing not to explicitly employ these at all and simply work through the problem more reactively, drawing on his existing experience. additionally, there were a number of challenges reported by psts, which included: “trying to find a balance between research and problem solving,” “working out when enough research has been done,” and “constantly having to cross reference with each other in order to link up each part.” there were also more specific difficulties related to the electronics and complexity of integrating systems for “money and drinks together to perform the needed task.” the most prominent issues, however, were associated with initiating problem solving and strategies such as breaking up and synthesizing parts into a viable concept. in relation to this, one pst reported that: “this was very challenging as we began to really look into all the separate parts of the problem and define where we would go with them. as we began to do this, we found numerous directions in which we could go and trying to select the correct path for each part was difficult as there were so many parts and so many paths for each and they all had to link up at the end.” this suggests that active engagement with search strategies in response to this type of problem can quickly give rise to notable complexity. though daunting, a number of psts described the role of strategies in managing these complexities and, given that no preparatory lectures were given on the substantive technology involved in the problem, it was interesting that only two psts cited a perceived lack of knowledge of electronics as a difficulty. finally, it was evident psts felt that they had developed their thinking about how to approach complex problems and, though challenging, that such processes could help students build confidence in problem solving. some of these responses are illustrated in table 1 in which participants are numbered and named in instances where they also took part in an interview. promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 25 table 1 pst responses for problem solving & student confidence development of thinking about problem solving bolstering students confidence “this course has taught me there are different techniques to problem solving that make problem solving clearer to understand, i.e., morphological analysis and flow charts.” (pst 3) “. . . it will give the [students] confidence to believe that there are ways in which to tackle problems rather than to sit and be completely stuck with a problem or issue.” (pst 4) “from now on i would use the strategies taught in this course to help me when problem solving.” (pst 2) “i would allow them to take a fresh approach to problem solving which may encourage them to try new things.” (pst 6: sam) “this course has really made me think about different ways to approach a problem and shown many ways to split problems up and solve individually will help make the whole process easier.” (pst 10: gemma) “i think it would benefit [students] as it makes them think of new ways to approach ideas and problems.” (pst 10: gemma) “it has also made me think about how these strategies have been devised with how the brain functions and processes information.” (pst 8) “it will give the [students] confidence.” (pst 4) participant comments reveal an extended and deeper understanding of problem solving for the psts themselves and, moreover, that it may have the potential to open up new avenues of thinking for their future students. in summary, the questionnaires provided insight into four main areas: firstly, the psts generally perceived shifts in their confidence and independence in learning. secondly, it seems that they developed their understanding via a less linear path with challenges in judging the depth of research and integrating knowledge towards a solution. thirdly, there was evidence that search strategies, seen as supportive for transfer, were indeed being initiated as part of this process. lastly, that there was evidence of a perceived benefit to their future students engaging with this type of thinking. findings obtained from interviews a number of in-depth interviews were held to explore, in greater depth, each of the four areas identified from the questionnaires. the first three of these pertain most prominently to the psts as developing technologists, whilst the latter begins to reveal considerations relating to them as future teachers. in the following section, these themes are explored using the 26 global education review 1(4) interviews as a core data source with findings corroborated at key points using evidence from the questionnaires and submissions of coursework. psts as developing technologists. this perspective considers the development of psts own technological skills, understanding and capabilities within the subject domain and apart from those capacities they will develop to teach this. under this focus, three emergent themes of confidence, deep and integrated understanding, and knowledge and use of transfer were substantiated in greater depth through the interviews. within the first theme, it became clear that confidence and independence were associated with aspects such as self-realization, reliance, overcoming demand, and systematic thinking. in the second, there was evidence psts did indeed achieve a deeper and more integrated understanding of the technology than expected and were required to interlink concepts and thinking. lastly, the third theme revealed several cases in which transfer had become more globally autonomous moving beyond evidence of simply initiating search strategies. each of these is now discussed. positive shifts in pst confidence and independence. it became clear from both the questionnaires and interviews, that engaging with this form of explicit problem solving had notably increased pst’s confidence, both with regard to problem solving and, as a learner in general. this was true for all bar one of those interviewed, but there were variations in the ways in which confidence grew. gemma, for example, stated: “i feel like... i can do a lot better than i thought i could;” something echoed by others including laura, who stated “i think my expectations of myself have changed. i think i expect a lot more of myself based on that [experience of course].” these comments suggest that, for some psts, engagement with this form of learning activity has the potential to alter the perceptions they hold of their own capabilities. there was also evidence of shifts on a more specific level. gemma, for instance, felt that the deeper level of learning she achieved gave her more confidence within group decision making processes. it was also clear that, where there was evidence of positive shifts in confidence, there were also positive shifts in associated levels of independence. the questionnaires indicated that all, bar one, psts responded positively, indicating that they now felt more able to make independent decisions during problem solving. further to this, the association between increased confidence and independence was exemplified by both kristy and sam: “i think it’s made me more able to go away and do things . . . individually, like. . . i don’t need to be in a group or things like that. . . i can go away and say, like, systematically i need to do this, this, this, this and this, and then figure it all out by myself. . . i don’t think you need as much contact time with people. . . ” (kirsty) “i now know that i can, even if it is just a little bit at the moment, i can go independently and learn about something new.” (sam) indeed, it was clear that nearly all of the psts interviewed had experienced a swell in confidence and an altered view on their own problem solving capabilities. indeed, this was evident to varying degrees in all ten of the questionnaires. among these, one pst said he felt more confident in approaching problems and another stated: “i have surprised myself as to how easily it can be understood [new and complex technological problem] when the systems are in a different context and are broken promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 27 down.” in her interview, laura also stated that she “surprised” herself insofar as she did better in the intervention than she thought she would have. the exception to this lay with richard who, on reflection, felt that it did not really add or take away from his experience as a learner. instead, he felt the biggest boost to his confidence came with passing his first year exams and school placement. though richard shared a similar experience to other participants, the effect of the intervention in some areas, such as confidence, was not as profound, perhaps due to the fact that he had entered university from work, rather than from school. what emerged from all the data, was that where a growth in confidence was reported, it stemmed largely from nature of the activity that arose in response to the explicit problem, coupled with the resultant implicit level of demand and challenge. as indicated in the questionnaires, this was experienced by psts most profoundly at the outset. during interviews, the problem solving task was described using as range of terms including, “challenging,” “complex,” “novel,” “intimidating” and, at first, “confusing.” sam estimated that it perhaps took two or three weeks to establish what was working. gemma, in both her questionnaire and interview, said that she struggled to grasp the concept that there was no single correct answer and also noted that their initial distributed approach to the problem changed to a more serial method in that face of increasing complexity: “to begin with, what we thought to do was. . . take the problem, split it up into what, kind of, were the main parts, and then work from there; but then we discovered that when you tried. . . once you got into, like, a main part, there were loads of other parts and we found that quite difficult. so we just kind of took each bit step-by-step and worked that out between all four of us and then moved on, and we found that easier.” for these psts, success in a high-demand task positively shaped their confidence. that being said, it was also noted by laura that the risks associated with such high-demand tasks require a balance: “. . . it was good, but at the same time it was so intimidating. . . and if it’s really. . . if you’re really not comfortable with that i think it could go the exact opposite way. . . and it could completely crush your confidence and think i just can’t do anything!” this illustrates a critical consideration in planning for appropriate support and facilitation of psts undertaking this type of learning. similarly, one pst noted that for students, this type of learning could “be a challenge as they would be very used to being handed information that they just need to organize.” further strategic considerations to mitigate this were voiced within interviews. both kirsty and robert, for example, described building up students’ experience and skills with smaller scale tasks. integrated understanding, breadth and depth of knowledge. in addition to gaining confidence, there was evidence of a shift to a deeper and more integrated knowledge from problem solving. all six students agreed with this, though developed it to varying degrees. the first reason for a more integrated understanding could be linked to the non-linearity and interdependence between parts of the solution. as sam explains: 28 global education review 1(4) “. . . you can’t just read stuff. . . how it works, you’d actually have to know why it works. . . . especially, sort of, like in the brief we were given. because everything was interlinked, you needed to get to the deepest part of what you are trying to understand so they all mesh.” this implicit dependency between different systems engendered a requirement that students know enough to understand how they interact with each other. indeed, the main project submissions confirmed that, in most instances, students did achieve a suitably detailed knowledge to successfully integrate the different systems involved in the solutions. the idea of an internal dependency and interaction was further encapsulated in a description given by gemma of an almost snowball-like effect developing as the problem solving progressed: “. . . originally you would automatically think of the main things needed done, whereas now i think i would go into more depth and think, well, if i’m doin’ that, i can also do this, and then i can also look into this, and then this can be brought in and that can brought in. . . ” of note here, is that there is a balance instigated between the breadth of knowledge that has to be developed, and meeting the required depth to facilitate integration. the core mechanisms underlying this were search strategies; and three of the six students felt these had improved. it was also clear that the nonlinear activity was instrumental in the development of a more integrated understanding. this was confirmed by all six interviewees. moreover, there was evidence that strategies such as woods’ problem solving model (woods, 2000) were instrumental in both promoting and supporting this. in his questionnaire, stuart describes the woods model of problem solving as something he referred to “meticulously” throughout and asserted that “it helped guide me, at the beginning, when i was initially daunted and kept me on the right track throughout.” similar points were made by laura, kirsty and gemma during the interviews and it was noted in seven of the ten questionnaires. in laura’s case, reference back to the strategies made her feel less intimidated, but sam tended to resort to “old ways” when progress appeared slow. in contrast to this, kirsty noted a renewed focus on strategies in times of challenge, and went on to allude to the dependency between different elements of the problem: “instead of you just going: here's what i need to do, and going away and finding it out and writing it down, you're having to actually learn one thing to figure out another thing and use that again.” arguably, the discovery of such dependencies is part of process that affords a more integrated understanding to develop. despite the variance noted, all interviewees agreed that the non-linear process of solving an explicit problem forced them to make connections and gave them a more integrated understanding of the technology involved. it was reported by stuart that the experience has significantly improved his understanding of problem solving. transfer of learning. all six of the students interviewed felt that they had gained skills that would help them transfer learning between subjects in the future; though this was more so for some than for others. richard stated that there were some skills that could help and that he could now see where links might occur in promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 29 subjects such as design, mechanics, electronics and math. sam re-iterated this and also added that it would “depend on the task structure,” which suggests he may still see context as a mitigating factor. for the other four students, skills for transfer were seen to gain significantly greater traction. gemma, laura and kirsty each reported that they were already using these approaches and strategies in other subjects and making connections. in gemma’s case, this was improving her understanding within sections of the design course, and when asked directly if she felt these strategies would help her transfer knowledge from other subjects into a problem solving context, laura stated: “i think it has helped a lot… definitely, because i think that’s one of the first things i started to think about... especially when we were writing the essay; i think that tied a lot into it.” the significance of this is twofold. firstly, it suggests that students have altered their approaches and thinking with regard to problem solving and transfer and, secondly, the strategies are being initiated autonomously by the students. similar evidence of examples of transfer activity was found in a number of revised practice statements. within this, students stated: “i found myself using high road transfer which involves searching for connections between contexts” and “our electronics background was used to aid in the design of our coin mechanism.” whilst this is encouraging for future transfer within the degree programme, surprisingly, kirsty also stated that following the intervention, she found herself consciously applying some of the strategies learnt to solve problems outside of the formal educational setting of the university. such problems included decorating her flat, which can be seen here as an example of far transfer. similarly, stuart offered insight into how a combination of skills in information searching from a variety of sources and having to draw knowledge together has helped him in problems requiring far transfer. this was further confirmed in his group submission which explicitly evidenced transfer from previous learning within school and from another first year electronics course within his degree. psts as developing teachers of technology education. finally, though it was evident in the questionnaires that ptss regarded such thinking as important to school students, further exploration revealed a range of more detailed considerations and potential shifts in future approaches as classroom teachers. all six interviewees agreed that the completion of a professional practice statement was effective in allowing them to plan forward and consider how they might translate approaches learned into their professional workplaces. statements made in interviews revealed students’ explicit intent to: “encourage the promotion of both near and far transfer;” “introduce real life scenarios into the coursework;” “prioritize growth mind-set within lesson plans.” sam noted during his interview that this was unlike anything he had done before and said he would definitely look to build up students skills in “this type of thinking.” within one submission, he further argued for the use of “a mix of concepts” as a teacher including the woods problem solving model, morphological analysis and explicitly “identifying the context of a problem in order to transfer knowledge from another area and apply it.” this was quite widely reflected in both the questionnaire and coursework submissions wherein one pst argued they would explicitly teach students about learning, context and transfer, and another stated: “transfer is fundamental to learning, so i would include more methods of transfer and emphasis that a 30 global education review 1(4) combination of different methods leads to much more successful learning.” this amounts to a significant shift in this psts thinking with regard to the largely linear and implicit evident with many of the participants. richard noted that the experience will mean he seeks to give students “more freedom to explore” within problem solving task such as design. this could arguably offer benefits in terms of independent learning and creativity. for many psts, the benefits to their future students of solving more explicit problems and an understanding of transfer issues appear to have been assimilated within their mental models of technology teaching. the academic practice statements that were completed by all psts as part of their coursework indicated that all of them described changes to their thinking in one or both of these areas. the interviews, however, revealed more emphatic examples. gemma argued that this approach would “alter the way they [students] think” and laura described how she was already exploring ways of using it with students when she was on her next teaching placement. stuart this approach may be quite demanding for junior high school students, but stated that, for older students, he would “definitely be looking at every opportunity . . . to kind of, give them a flavor of explicit problem solving” and approach it by teaching both strategies and learning transfer to students. discussion this study focuses on exploring the development of a more integrated understanding for psts of technology education by building an understanding of learning transfer within the context of authentic problem solving from the onset, rather than retrospectively. specifically, the study addresses the question: “what shifts have occurred in the thinking of pre-service teachers of technology as a result of engaging with a preparatory course designed to develop an understanding of transfer and skills in solving authentic problems?” this was explored both in terms of psts as developing technologists and as future teachers of technology education. findings from the analysis of open-ended questionnaires, in-depth interviews and course submissions highlighted positive shifts in psts’ perceptions of: (i) their confidence, independence in learning and capabilities, (ii) the level of integration and depth of the understanding gained, (iii) their understanding of, and skills in learning transfer and, ultimately, their mental models of technology teaching. evidence revealed positive shifts in pst’s confidence, both as problem solvers and as learners in general. while this included, inter alia, confidence in group decision-making, it was often also associated with more independent learning and a shift in psts self-expectations. indeed, aspects of this are reported in a number of other studies in stem education. positive shifts in learner confidence, autonomy and independence are described by schmude, serow and tobias (2011); yoon, woo, treagust and chandrsegaran (2012), and temel, (2014). dunlap (2005) describes similar findings associated with a capstone course accompanied by positive shifts in students’ perceptions of their own capabilities as learners. importantly, however, this study demonstrates that such shifts can be achieved in the early stages of students’ degree programmes. in this intervention, this was the result of successfully navigating a genuinely complex and explicit problem (also reflected by schmude et al., 2011), that demanded a less linear approach where strategies served to mitigate complexity and support learning. arguably, the promotion and nurturing of such confidence and self-realization early on better places psts to develop their technological capability and expertise over time, and in a range of subject and project contexts. promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 31 findings from this study also demonstrated that psts were indeed able to build up a sufficient and more integrated understanding of the technology involved as a function of the problem solving process. although other research (hmelo-silver, 2004) has found merit in more academic approaches, the level of understanding achieved by psts in this study was sufficient and appropriate to achieve the type of integrated systems thinking previously argued by banks and plant (2013) to be essential for teachers of technology. although this suggests that a yet deeper knowledge and understanding might be achieved by more traditional approaches, the gains in problem solving are regarded herein as more powerful in promoting technological thinking for the 21st century. in this study, search strategies and an explicit knowledge of transfer featured heavily within the work of the psts. findings show that psts feel more prepared and capable of transferring learning between subjects in the future (horizontal transfer). though transfer has been observed within other problem-based learning studies (brears et al., 2014; massa, donnelly & hanes, 2013), this is often measured within the task of interest. significantly, this study revealed evidence of the independent and autonomous initiation of transfer to contexts and situations beyond the task of interest. cognizance of the assertions made by macaulay and cree (1999) and halpern and hakel (2003) would suggest that this intervention armed psts with a sufficiently deep level of understanding of learning transfer that they took ownership over and modified their own approach to learning. though this study did not involve a large number of participants, autonomous transfer outside of the intervention strongly suggests that for some psts, a transformative shift in thinking has taken place (mezirow, 1997). though further research is required, the most likely explanation for autonomous initiation of transfer lies in the fact that transfer was fused explicitly with problem solving from the start of the process, rather than retrospectively or implicitly. finally, reflection and explicit opportunities to plan forward helped psts to consider their own mental models of technology teaching in view of both learning transfer and problem solving (vertical transfer). findings revealed positive shifts in thinking for all participants in a range of areas from explicitly developing students transfer skills, to skills in solving explicit problems, pupil confidence and mind-sets. this is again indicative of changes in thinking on a transformative level (merizow, 1997) and suggests notable potential for a hybrid approach, guided by the framework in figure 1. explicitly combining learning about learning transfer with skills development in authentic problem solving, might better equip psts to teach students to initiate transfer and develop a more integrated understanding between topic and subject areas. this is considered essential for learning within 21st century technology and stem subjects. limitations rather than having a very large sample and a small number of variables, this study utilized a small sample with a large number of variables. sample size was necessarily constrained because by the comparatively small number of psts involved in the integrating technology t1 course explored in this study. subsequently, this paper does not claim that findings are fully generalizable. rather, it provides important insights into the types of experiences psts might need to allow them to successfully deliver 21st century skills, and to help students foster a more integrated understanding between stem subjects. furthermore, the sample demographic was determined by the degree programme rather 32 global education review 1(4) than by design choices within this study and it was outside the scope of the study to identify and investigate all instances of autonomous transfer following the intervention. future research a longitudinal study would allow for exploration of how psts’ mental models shift with developing experience of problem solving and include more detailed investigation of instances of autonomous transfer between subjects in their degree programme. there is also scope to explore the ways in which this is carried forward into their work as professional teachers including use of the framework in figure 1 as a basis for promoting this through course development. indeed, wider use of this original framework within other studies would allow for a greater understanding of its effectiveness and facilitate possible refinement. given that this study necessary focused on a small number of participants, exploring the extent to which these findings are reflected with subsequent or larger student groups would strengthen the consistency of findings. implications though problem-based learning is widely established within medical education, this is not so in teacher education. though small-scale, this study contributes to the growing body of evidence about the effectiveness of such approaches in the field of stem education. the significant insights offered by this study suggest there could be considerable potential in fusing an understanding of learning transfer throughout contexts for solving explicit problems in technology. use of the framework in figure 1 to achieving transfer in the vertical sense can allow psts to develop specific skills associated with gaining a more integrated understanding between stem subjects. engineering this in the vertical direction can allow them to actively shape their mental model of teaching such that this might be subsequently developed for their future students. this approach offers notable potential in developing skills for 21st century stem education. notes 1. the intervention is a first year undergraduate course entitled “integrating technology”designed to foster an understanding of and skills in transfer, contexts and problem solving in a technological context. the wider context for this intervention is discussed in the methodology. further detail about this course is available from the author upon request. 2. student submissions analyzed within this study included: (i) individual professional practice statements in which students planned practice based on research and theory, (ii) group project submissions for the technological problem tackled, and (iii) revised practice statements upon completion of the problem solving task. 3. more information about the analytical approaches employed with the nvivo software package are available from the author on request. 4. this is regarded as symptomatic of the nature of the technology subjects experienced by the sample. graphic communication (engineering drawing) is far more prevalent, for this sample and the country, than engineering science based subjects. in instances where high school students engage with design subjects, this is often still tackled in a sequential manner. author note the author wishes to thank mr. lee dunn for his role in the peer debrief and critique of this study. promoting transfer and an integrated understanding 33 references adviu, s., morina, r., & ramadani, 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(2000). an evidence-based strategy for problem solving. journal of engineering education, 89(4), 443–459. yates, l., & collins, c. (2010). the absence of knowledge in australian curriculum reforms. european journal of education, 45(1), 89–102. yoon, h., woo, a. j., treagust, d., & chandrasegaran, a. (2014). the efficacy of problem-based learning in an analytical laboratory course for pre-service chemistry teachers. international journal of science education, 36(1), 79–102. doi:10.1080/09500693.2012.727041 zhang, y., & wildemuth, b. m. (2009). qualitative analysis of content. applications of social research methods to questions in information and library science, 308–319. about the author david morrison-love, phd, is a member of the curriculum, assessment & pedagogy research and teaching group in the school of education at the university of glasgow, scotland. his research interests focus mainly upon classroom level learning and teaching in technology and stem subjects and he delivers lectures and courses in this and related fields. david is a fellow of the higher education academy and is involved in a number of funded projects in both research and consultancy roles. appendix summary of questionnaire questions & interview themes questionnaire questions q1. when and how did you make use of the theories/strategies explored in the first three lectures? if this did not happen, describe any other key strategies used and when you used them. q2. please describe, as fully as you can, what you did to make the problem manageable and ‘solvable’? q3. please describe, as fully as you can, the three most challenging points during the problem solving process. any and all issues associated with group working should constitute one of the three points. q4. describe, as fully as you can, the main ways (if any) in which this approach to problem solving was different to problem solving you have experienced at school or in previous learning situations. q5. please describe, as fully as you can, if and how this course has changed the way you think about problem solving. q6. this approach to problem solving was intended to develop your own in tackling complex problems. please describe, as fully as possible, any of the skills or strategies involved in this that you think you need to develop more in the future. q7. please describe, as fully as you can, whether you think this process offers any benefits and/or challenges for school [students] of technology education. q8. please describe, as fully as possible, the ways in which this course has altered your image of what you will be and do as a secondary school technology teacher. 36 global education review 1(4) agreement questions scale: definitely agree | mostly agree | neither agree nor disagree | mostly disagree | definitely disagree q9. i feel i am better equipped to tackle future problems as a result of going through this process. q10. i am more able to make independent decisions when problem solving than i was before. q11. i am more confident and capable of searching for and applying new information and learning to a complex problem. q12. given that this course focused on process over content, i have learnt more than i thought i would about the technology involved. interview themes part a: validation and extension questions specific to responses given by the interviewee to their questionnaire. part b: common themes to all interviewees (with indicative questions): theme 1: authenticity of problem structuring the effects of presenting the problem at the beginning of the course with no learning having taken place about the substantive content. theme 2: transfer of theory to practice the degree to which students were aware of associated theories they had learnt about coming into play during the problem solving process. how were these manifest? did they consciously instigate these in response to challenges or specific events? did they appear naturally? theme 3: orientation, scoping & framing how did the students go about orientating themselves with the problem situation? how did they generate focus in response to the problem situation? theme 4: overcoming challenge & search strategies where did challenges arise and what was done to overcome them? how and when did you decide to initiate search strategies? was this difficult? how and when did you make use of tutor support? theme 5: perceptions of problem solving skills in what ways did this approach reflect or differ from those you have experienced previously in school. how, if at all, has this altered your own approaches to solving problems? what are the key benefits this process has given you? theme 6: mental model of teaching technology how has this process changed (if at all) your idea of what teaching problem solving in technology should involve? how would you cultivate similar skills in pupils? what is critical for pupils to understand? morrison-love (edited dml) mw10-14 formatted pt 1 morrison-love (edited dml) mw10-14 formatted pt 2 global perspective on experiential learning the global perspective on experiential learning 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ramaswamy. sudha & ramaswamy, priya (2016). global perspective on experiential learning. global education review, 3 (4). 15. global perspective on experiential learning sudha ramaswamy mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy wilkenfeld speech language and learning center, houston, tx the underlying premise of the experiential learning philosophy is that students learn best through educational experiences which are driven by hands-on engagement and reflections on these experiences. as it relates to graduate learning, experiential learning is a process through which students develop knowledge, skills, and values from direct experiences outside a traditional lecture-based setting. learning through experience is not a new concept for the higher education classroom. most notably, john dewey (1938), piaget (1970), carl rogers (1983), and david kolb (1984), to name a few, have provided the foundation for experiential learning in the context of learning theories. from the perspective of graduate teacher education, experiential learning encompasses a variety of activities including internships, research, and work experiences in educational settings. well-planned, supervised and assessed experiential learning opportunities can stimulate academic inquiry so that the knowledge acquired in the classroom setting can then gain relevance. in this issue of global education review, we have examined various research studies that have engaged the broad topic of experiential learning. in “the use of video self-monitoring embedded with mentorship,” lina slimtopdjian, who has seen the increasing enrollment of children with autism in school settings, believes that “teachers must incorporate specialized teaching strategies to address the unique educational and behavioral challenges facing children diagnosed with autism.” in the article, slim-topdjian first highlights the important role that experiential learning opportunities play in bridging the link between didactic coursework and on the job training. then, relying upon the data gathered by observing six female teachers instructing three to five-year-old children with autism, she advocates the benefits of video self-monitoring (vsm) and mentoring to enhance teacher performance. interestingly, slim-topdjian’s data reveal that teachers who combined vsm with mentoring showed the “greatest and most consistent improvement” as opposed to those who did not. in “rocket to creativity,” dole, bloom and doss make their case for the importance of connecting classroom based theory to practice in teacher education; the goal of field experience, after all, the authors argue, is for teachers to change their practice from didactic to inquiry in order “to promote critical and creative thinking ______________________________ corresponding author: sudha ramaswamy, mercy college school of education, 555 boadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: sramaswamy@mercy.edu 2 global education review 3(4) in their students.” in particular, they “examine the impact of a field experience in problembased learning (pbl) and project-based learning (pjbl) on pre-service and in-service teachers’ conceptions of experiential learning. their study focused on a field experience on a university campus in which teachers worked in collaborative teams and where instructors and facilitators experienced in pbl and pjbl were available to provide thoughtful and timely feedback; however, the authors posit that even teachers who do not have access to experienced instructors and facilitators could turn the dearth of resources into advantages if they engage in pbl and pjbl. in “a connected space for early experiential learning in teacher education”, authors yu and hunt explore some of the more subtle factors that influence the outcomes of even the more carefully constructed field-based experiences in teacher education programs. their setting is project connect (pc), an innovative after-school program initiated by the collaborative efforts of university-based teacher education programs and a local school district to create early experiential learning opportunities for pre-service teachers. the observations of yu and hunt are broadly consistent with several earlier studies which have indicated how “an after-school program which was established as a required component of education courses for pre-service teachers and which took place in a school building would have positive impact on the transformation of pre-service teachers ’identity, skills and dispositions.’” however, the authors argue that such impact was not related merely to the built-in features of such a program but also greatly influenced by logistical factors such as the previous knowledge and ability of the pre-service teachers and also the support and feedback built in to the afterschool program. in “implementation and impact of experiential learning in a graduate level teacher education program: an example from a canadian university” authors hill and macdonald express the value of experiential learning but apparent lack in empirical evidence demonstrating if and how a particular pedagogical methodology can move teachers toward actual transformation of teaching practice. their study begins with acquiring a sample of twelve portfolios at the end of the semester, across two cohorts, learning in the early years and supporting diverse learners. teachers are asked to demonstrate their growth by writing learning statements which are then analyzed using in vivo coding methods that allow the authors to systematically assign categories to the portfolio data that are probed for demonstration of transformation of teaching practice. they highlight the value in this process, which allows broader focus on the overall teacher experience and process rather than content. while the authors highlight the value of understanding the transformation process on teaching practice, they conclude that understanding the impact of teacher inquiry on the environments that serve as learning sites for those teachers is of equal importance and warrants further understanding. in “free operant field experiences,” lee mason makes the case for using observations in a “shaperspace” to augment the training of special education teachers to address the needs of students with autism spectrum disorder (asd). the idea of shaperspace was inspired by a model of field experience called “makerspaces,” organizations in which members sharing similar interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) gather to work on select projects. the distinguishing characteristic that separates the shaperspace from other models of field experience is the the global perspective on experiential learning 3 emphasis on free-operant conditioning. by differentially reinforcing free-operant responses, the shaperspace accelerates the evolutionary process of learning. “both evolution and behavior are predicated on a cycle of repetition, variation and selection.” to promote repetition, shaperspaces use inquirybased instruction to make the most important features of teacher/child interactions more relevant. variation is achieved by emphasizing functional outcomes over structural form, and selection is done by the pbas who come into contact with natural contingencies of their behavior. ultimately, mason explains, shaperspace reverse engineers outcome to methodology to maximize variation and promote selection by consequences. mukeredzi provides an international perspective to the discussion by examining teacher training in the context of the zimbabwean government’s efforts to provide education for all (efa). in “teacher professional development outside the lecture room,” mukeredzi explores the professional development experiences of professionally unqualified practicing teachers (pupt) in rural secondary schools, and concludes that pupts primarily experience their learning outside of teacher education institutions (teis) through interactions that are non-formal, informal and experiential. zimbabwean pupts, the author explains, are practicing, possess content knowledge from undergraduate degrees, and have teaching experience; however, they do not have a professional teaching qualification. lacking the formal teaching training, the development of pupts is enhanced greatly from supervisory support and formal feedback from school management. since not all zimbabwean rural school systems have the resources to provide supervisory feedback, mukeredzi argues for schools to build in programs that constantly and tenaciously bring teachers together to promote professional learning from peer to peer interactions. finally, the author highlights the benefits that teachers gain from teacher-parent interactions, and observes that these interactions are essential to the professional development of zimbabwean pupts. craig willey and paula magee, in “clinical experiences and mediational activities in urban teacher preparation: learning and critical consciousness,” explore the topic of urban teacher development in their two-year fieldbased training program. specifically, they discuss how clinical experiences (ces), when augmented with corresponding mediational activities, augment the development of prospective teachers (pts) in their pursuit of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for urban teaching. willey and magee make it abundantly clear that the ces do not automatically lead to deeper knowledge of children or the development of critical consciousness amongst the pts; however, their data lead them to believe that the overall effect was positive, and that the challenging ces led to growth towards culturally relevant teaching practices. this was particular true when the ces were accompanied in tandem with thoughtful and skillful mediation. critical teacher educators, the authors argue, “must assume responsibility to monitor the pes as well as extract the benefits from and thrive within the environments within which the pts operate. in “thinking as someone else,” helge wasmuth discusses the learnings from a fledgling alternative learning project that was conducted in an online course at a teacher education program over a three-year period. since it is impossible to simulate all the complex realities that occur in every day classrooms, the teacher educators used experiential learning methods to simulate teaching moments with the 4 global education review 3(4) prospective teachers. as part of the online course, the students were asked to create avatars, and think and act as their avatars when faced with challenges. by experiencing what it means to be someone else, the program hoped that prospective teachers would better understand the ambiguity of educational issues and that the role matters in making decisions. however, wasmuth shares how several prospective teachers struggle to “stay within character” because they “simply decided to think as their opposites” or were simply unable to articulate their difficulty. despite the challenges, the author seems intellectually open to the view “that the whole project is a meaningful way to go beyond traditional learning” but concludes that the avatar project is one approach that has to be proven to be successful. in “out of my comfort zone: understanding the impact of a service-learning experience in rural el salvador”, paula j. beckman and lea ann christenson present the findings from a “qualitative case study designed to explore the impact of a two-week servicelearning experience in el salvador on students’ perceptions of its impact on them personally, professionally, and their global awareness.” from a personal development standpoint, the study abroad experience was carefully structured to interact with faculty that accompanied them and to maximize contacts with local communities. for instance, faculty stayed alongside students with a host family, shared meals with students and provided guest lectures along the way. on the personal development front, the authors observed that the experience “helped pre service teachers develop multicultural awareness and skills while working with children – skills that the potential to inform future professional practice.” beckman and christenson also posit that immersion in foreign environments has the power to influence students’ adaptability, a skill that is crucial for teachers and social service professionals. finally, the authors found that the study abroad program had an impact on students’ level of global awareness. in “immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning: cohorts, learning communities, and mentoring,” jordan jay and howard miller critique three existing models of teacher preparation programs that immersed their candidates in experiential learning, and then propose a potentially more sustainable model. the authors examine three existing models of experiential learning programs – those involving cohort groups, learning communities, and mentoring” -and grant that the current approaches are successful in developing “high quality beginning teachers”. however, they assert that these programs are unsustainable in the long run when financial support for new teachers is tapered or reduced and due to the shifting needs/priorities of the school districts to address topically urgent needs. recognizing the important role of experiential learning, the authors argue that academic programs should integrate more experiential modules in their curriculum and that school districts should offer specialized programs to assist beginning teachers through partnerships with teaching preparation programs. jay and miller claim that “it would require very little expenditure of time or money to establish such requirements,” but by so mandating, school districts would allow the new teachers to develop “de facto cohort and learning communities” by themselves. not only would such a program capture the essential elements of cohorts, learning communities and mentoring, they would be self-sustaining. references the global perspective on experiential learning 5 kolb, d.a. (1984) experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, n.j.: prentice-hall. rogers, c. r. (1983). freedom to learn for the 80's. new york: charles e. merrill publishing company, a bell & howell company. piaget, j. (1970). science of education and the psychology of the child. new york: orion press. about the author(s) sudha ramaswamy, phd, is an associate professor at mercy college and fulbright recipient in the scholarly area of teacher education. dr. ramaswamy teaches graduate level courses in early childhood special education and applied behavior analysis. she also functions as mercy college’s primary contact for the behavior analyst certification board and teaches in the program in applied behavior analysis. she is a board certified behavior analyst with extensive experience working with children who have developmental disabilities. prior to joining mercy, dr. ramaswamy had several years of clinical experience in the applied setting beginning at the fred s. keller school in yonkers, new york. she also had clinical experience at the hawthorne country day school manhattan annex as well as functioned as the education coordinator and program coordinator of the annex program for 2 years. priya ramaswamy, phd, bcba, m.s. ccc-slp, is a speech and language pathologist at wilkenfeld speech language and learning center, in houston, texas. she received her doctoral degree in the biological sciences from johns hopkins university and holds a masters in communication sciences and disorders from the department of biobehavioral sciences at teachers college, columbia university. she previously graduated summa cum laude in biology and phi beta kappa from barnard college. she currently works with children with a focus on language and articulation disorders. dr. ramaswamy is also a board certified behavior analyst with a background in working with children who have developmental disabilities in both public school and private settings. her research interests include pediatric feeding and swallowing disorders, and the collaboration between the fields of applied behavior analysis and speech & language pathology. 108 global education review 4(2) 2016-2017 board of reviewers charlene sue aaron, illinois state university nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria noura alquatarneh, san diego state university faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna jessica ball, university of victoria, canada ignacio barrendchea, university of miami marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, israel caroline adele bligh, leeds beckettuniversity, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york anne marie connor, michigan state university derek copp, good spirit school division, saskatchewan, canada tara grey coste, university of southern maine shelly lynn counsell, university of memphis, tennessee oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha brian d. denman, university of new england, australia jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university kristy kowalske doss, western carolina university alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris gernot driesiebner, university of graz, austria nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college dawn richards elliott, texas christian university elizabeth joy erwin. montclair state university claudia fahrenwald, university of education upper austria aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york matthew c. fleenor, roanoke college, virginia 109 global education review 4(1) melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university, arizona jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom barbara hanfstingl. alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria bjoern hassler, cambridge university, uk laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university brian lloyd heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university lauren merrill jackson, american university rosalind james, university of new england, australia cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota teresa ann johnson, jackson-madison school district, jackson, tennessee sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska fethi kayalar, erzincan university, turkey hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville manuela b. keller-schneider, zurich university of teacher education, switzerland shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york allyson krupar, the pennsylvania state university olympia kyriakidis, san diego county office of education jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, newyork eric w. layman, indiana university, bloomington kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand 2016-2017 board of reviewers 110 carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington simone lehrl, university of bamberg, germany susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college sandhya vishwas limaye, tata institute of social sciences, india sara liviero, university of exeter, united kingdom pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma thomas luschei, claremont graduate university, california dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university michelle malecki, world vision org. isolde malmberg, university for music and performing arts, vienna dominic manuel, mcgill university, canada jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, newyork daniela martinek, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio silvester g. mata, university of houston, tx tata j. mbugua, university of scranton patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university, florida becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, university of massachusetts, lowell katherine merseth, rti international claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia maria boeke mongillo, central connecticut state university nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york t. lee morgan, university of northern colorado tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban university of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california, los angeles bernie murray, ryerson university, ontario, canada mariano narodowski, universidad torcuato di tella, buenos aires giselle e. navarro-cruz, california state polytechnic university, pomona evangeline n. nderu, rti international bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey do-yong park, illinois state university 111 global education review 4(1) patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota kari f. pawl, concordia university, chicago emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york benjamin piper, rti international christine eva plaimauer, university of education upper austria mary podsiedlik, syracuse university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york teresa ann quackenbush, mercy college, new york sibylle rahm, otto-friedrich-university of bamberg, germany sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia johannes reitinger, private university college of teacher education of linz, austria konstantina rentzou, european university of cyprus, nicosia, cyprus melia eileen repko-erwin, university of colorado, boulder leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles merethe roos, telemark university college, norway katharina rosenberger, university of vienna, austria rose ann rudnitsky, mercy college, new york thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, austria susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsin-madison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school jessica simon, babson college carolina snaider, teachers college, columbia dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university deepa srikantaiah, urc university nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts anita summer, university of vienna, austria clodie tal, levinsky college of teacher education, tel aviv sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york mary barbara trube, ohio university agnes turner, university of klagenfurt, vienna, austria karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college, new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria brian l. wright, university of memphis 2016-2017 board of reviewers 112 linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh kai zhou, the state university of new york at albany umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria 176 global education review 3 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jordan, kathy-anne (2016). a diversity doctor’s best lessons from the campus. [review of the book taking on diversity: how we can move from anxiety to respect by rupert w. nacoste]. global education review, 3 (4). 176-177. book review a diversity doctor’s best lessons from the campus “taking on diversity: how we can move from anxiety to respect” by rupert w. nacoste by kathy-anne jordan in taking on diversity, rupert w. nacoste examines the struggles and emotions related to our encounters and interactions with diverse others and provides strategies to facilitate peaceful intergroup relations. neodiversity is the term he uses to describe the various social markers of difference—race, class, religion, ability, sexual orientation, and so on— that we encounter on a daily basis and the anxiety that often results from interacting with others who vary from us in terms of one or more of these markers. neodiversity, then, not only describes the current social landscape, it refers to our encounters with difference across a variety of contexts, and therefore requires that we learn how to adapt; specifically, it requires change in how we think about and respond to diversity. at a time when students on college campuses across the united states are posting photos of themselves in blackface, and college administrators are responding to an overall increase in racial incidents and protests, nacoste’s work provides a valuable contribution to a much-needed conversation on race and underscores the importance of teaching young people how to accept and respect, rather than simply tolerate, diverse others. troubled by the language of hate that youth tend to use in their interactions with each other and their apparent indifference and lack of awareness regarding the implications of their hate speech, nacoste, a professor of social psychology, declares that his calling is to help “penetrate that thick fog of dangerous confusion” in order to prepare his students for the neodiversity that confronts them. he sees his role as helping them shed the baggage of lies and misinformation they learned about the history of race relations in the united states, and also helping them to effectively negotiate the sometimes challenging terrain of intergroup relations. describing the motivation for his current work on diversity issues, nacoste recalls “people get ready,” his favorite curtis mayfield song from the 1960s. the song signaled the arrival of a train where faith was the only ticket needed to 177 a diversity doctor’s best lessons from the campus board and change was the final destination. nacoste’s abiding faith in the change he envisions is evident throughout this text, which centers on the experiences of his students in a course he developed on interpersonal relationships and race. at the beginning of the semester, he forewarns them of the difficult days ahead and the pain involved in the “real psychological learning” that would take place as they progressed through the course; he queries them about the concerns and questions they hope to engage (e.g., navigating racial differences in a workplace, living with a member of another race, why racial groups tend to divide into cliques, why muslims become stereotyped as terrorists, why people internalize their stereotypes)—or their “neodiversity tensions and anxieties,” as he puts it. he comes to realize that many have been traveling on the wrong-line train, where false teachings pervade. nacoste’s approach to teaching has earned him the respect of his students because it is infused with passion, life experiences, and personal values; he also provides a safe space for honest, open dialogue, which is extremely important in a classroom of over fifty neodiverse students discussing sensitive topics. in his course on interpersonal relationships and race, students learn historical truths about america’s racial past, which replace the sanitized and “sales pitch” versions of american history— commonly taught in middle and high schools— that breed ignorance, insensitivity, and intolerance. he believes that in order to understand intergroup relations and issues in an american context, it is first necessary to understand america’s racial history, since race serves as the prototype for intergroup matters in this country. one course assignment involves reading and responding to the text blood done sign my name, which deals with the 1970 murder of a black man, henry marrow, at the hands of white men who were ultimately acquitted by an all-white jury. students respond to this text with a range of emotions that include anger, horror, disgust, sadness, and disbelief, but they do not fall apart or lose pride in our nation, as nacoste observes; instead, they ask “what about now? what mistakes are we making that we can stop making, right now?" in preparing his students for the neodiversity that confronts them, nacoste also teaches them about the social psychology of interpersonal/intergroup dynamics, where they learn to evaluate and respond more effectively to the intergroup tensions that emerge when people from different backgrounds interact with each other. through first-person narratives included within each of the eight chapters, the book offers a brief, but candid glimpse into the minds of young people as they struggle to understand and resolve the dilemmas of diversity within their own lives. although the work mainly focuses on the experiences of college students, readers will immediately recognize that the book offers useful insights that can benefit all of us. “taking on diversity: how we can move from anxiety to respect—a diversity doctor’s best lessons from the campus.” by rupert w. nacoste. amherst, ny: prometheus books, 2015. isbn: 978-1-63388026-9 about the author rupert w. nacoste is alumni distinguished undergraduate professor of psychology at north carolina state university (ncsu), where he has also served as the vice provost for diversity and african american affairs. at ncsu, he is the recipient of numerous awards for teaching excellence, including the 2013 unc board of governors teaching excellence award. he is the author of making gumbo in the university and has lectured frequently on diversity issues. about the reviewer kathy-anne jordan, ed.d, is associate professor of education at mercy college in new york. her research interests include racial disproportionality in special education and inclusive education. 4 global education review 3(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: beckman, paula j., abera, nicole, sabella, thomas, podzimek, kimberly & joseph, lenisa (2016). from rights to realities: confronting the challenge of educating persons with disabilities in developing countries. global education review, 3 (3). 4-27 from rights to realities: confronting the challenge of educating persons with disabilities in developing countries paula j. beckman university of maryland college park nicole abera university of maryland college park thomas sabella university of maryland college park kimberly podzimek university of maryland college park lenisa joseph alfred university abstract the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) has been the catalyst for countless national policies around the world which focus on increased participation of individuals with disabilities in educational and community settings. despite these national and international policies, most children with disabilities in developing countries are out-of-school. this manuscript examines local factors which make it difficult to address the needs of individuals with disabilities in developing nations. we begin by describing the link between global poverty and disability and a summary of relevant international agreements. we then describe common barriers to the realization of these agreements that have been reported in a number of studies. in addition to relevant literature on this topic, we highlight examples that have emerged from studies conducted in el salvador, ethiopia, and liberia to illustrate salient issues about the topic. the studies revealed some common barriers to educational access that are consistent with the relatively limited literature conducted in local contexts. recommendations for addressing these challenges include focusing on public acceptance and awareness, seeking community voice, connection, and support, providing training that is practical, functional, and widely available, investing in systems for transportation, and improving the overall quality of programming. keywords disabilities, developing countries, inclusion, low and middle income countries, local realities from rights to realities 5 introduction in an effort to address the needs of individuals with disabilities around the world, the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd) has been ratified by 160 countries and has spurred the adoption of national policies designed to assure that individuals with disabilities have the ability to participate in a broad range of educational and community settings. despite this commitment, there is widespread consensus that progress has been too slow. an estimated 90 percent of school-age children with disabilities in developing countries are excluded from the education system (filmer, 2008; world health organization, 2011; unesco, 2015). disability remains a better predictor of out-of-school status than gender, socioeconomic status or rurality (unesco, 2015; filmer, 2008). the problem is particularly acute in low and middle income countries where an estimated 80 percent of the one billion individuals with disabilities live (barron, & ncube, 2010; united nations development programme, 2013). the need is critical, the challenges are complex, and, if not addressed, the goal of universal education cannot be realized. to achieve the aims of crpd as well as the newly articulated sustainable development goals (sdg), it is critical to better understand the complicated and intersecting array of barriers that prevent children with disabilities from full educational participation. the purpose of this manuscript is to examine local factors in developing countries that contribute to this challenge. throughout this paper, we use the terms “developing countries” and “low and lower-middle income countries” interchangeably. while there is some variation with respect to these definitions in the literature, the world bank describes a developing country as “.. one in which the majority lives on far less money—with far fewer basic public services—than the population in highly industrialized countries.” they include as examples countries “…where the populace is often hungry and sorely lacks education, where there is a large knowledge gap and technological innovation is scarce” and “where health and education systems are poor and/or lacking and where transportation, potable water, power and communications infrastructure is also scarce…” (world bank, 2015a, faq, “about development,” para a). both low and middle income countries are included in this description. the world bank (2015b) further defines a low-income country as one in which the gross national income (gni) per capita was $ 1045 or less in 2014 and a “lower-middle income country” as one in which the gni was between $1046 $4,125. we begin by providing general information regarding the link between global poverty and disability as well as a brief summary of relevant international agreements. we then describe common barriers to the realization of these agreements that have been reported in a number of studies conducted in low and middle income countries. in addition to relevant literature on this topic, we highlight examples that have emerged from studies conducted by some of the present authors in three countries (el salvador, ethiopia, and liberia) to illustrate salient issues. we end with recommendations which could be of use in addressing these challenges. poverty and disability people with disabilities are among the most marginalized people in the world (baron & nuebe, 2012). not only do the vast majority of persons with disabilities live in developing nations, evidence suggests they are more likely to live in poverty ______________________________ corresponding author: paula j. beckman, phd, department of counseling, higher education and special education, 3214 benjamin building, university of maryland college park, college park, maryland, 20742 email: pbeckman@umd.edu 6 global education review 3(3) (braithwaite, carroll, mont & peffley, 2008; filmer,2008; mitra, posarac & vick, 2013). disabilities can be both a consequence of the “cumulative deprivations of poverty” (filmer, 2008, pp 149) and a contributor to poverty since the poor use more of their income to obtain services, and disability can prevent individuals and their families from generating income (mitra, et al., 2013; mont & viet cuong, 2011; world health organization, 2011). as a result, the world health organization (2011) concluded that, “…disability may increase the risk of poverty, and poverty may increase the risk of disability” (p.10). in addition, children and youth with disabilities are less likely to attend school (croft, 2013; filmer, 2008; unesco, 2014). the world bank has estimated that of 115 million children who were out of school, 40 million had disabilities (world bank, 2003). anastasiou & keller (2014) analyzed data from 143 countries to identify factors that contributed to large disparities in access to education using structural equation modeling. they found that 77.3 percent of the variance in special education coverage was accounted for by gross national income per capita, adult literacy rate, educational variables, and expected years of formal schooling. moreover, in a study of household surveys from 14 developing countries, filmer (2008) found that the gap in schooling between children with and without disabilities starts at grade one and continues to widen – even for countries that have achieved relatively high overall enrollment rates. in considering these conclusions, it is important to note that overall disability prevalence rates vary widely across countries, making cross-country comparability difficult and that the data are particularly weak in lowincome countries (croft, 2013). mont (2007) found that, “reported disability prevalence rates from around the world vary dramatically, for example, from under 1% in kenya and bangladesh to 20% in new zealand” (p. 1). this is accounted for in part by differences in definition and identification procedures. as an example, in liberia, podzimek (2014) found that many liberians believed that the only types of disabilities that exist are blindness, deafness and physical disabilities; anyone with a cognitive disability was simply, ‘crazy’. in a participatory action research study designed to develop an inclusion index, polat (2011) found that in addition to assessment issues, definitions of disability influenced prevalence rates – such that in tanzania, albinism is considered a disability whereas one head teacher described attention deficit disorders, autism and hyperactivity as “western problems” that don’t exist in africa (p. 56). in el salvador, learning disabilities and speech and language disorders are not considered disabilities for purposes of statistical reporting at the national level (mined, 2015). moreover, it also appears that the availability of programs and services may be associated with higher reporting rates (filmer, 2008). thus, an estimated 13 percent of public school students are reported to have a disability in the united states (national center for education statistics, 2015), where there is a broad array of public services and a nation-wide child-find system. by comparison, low and middle income countries often report lower educational participation rates (abera, 2014; podzimek, 2014; sabella, 2015)1. historical context: establishing the right to education the lack of school participation for children and youth with disabilities is alarming, particularly since these out-of-school rates persist despite a history of international agreements intended to establish their right to full school participation. the historical trend in international policy development began with the universal declaration of human rights in 1948 and proceeds through a series of international agreements to the present day with the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (crpd). this historical progression has been described extensively elsewhere (elder, 2015; winzer & mazurek, 2014) and is outlined in table 1. from rights to realities 7 table 1 international protocols related to individuals with disabilities protocol year key provisions universal declaration of human rights un, 1948  formed basis for international norms and standards concerning persons with disabilities (un, 1998, p.1)  established right to education  informed subsequent international agreements convention against discrimination in education unesco, 1960  advocated for education rights for all persons with disabilities declaration on the rights of mentally retarded persons un, 1971  advocated for education rights for all persons with disabilities declaration on the rights of disabled persons un, 1975  advocated for education rights for all persons with disabilities sundberg declaration unesco, 1981  established right of young children to be included in regular education settings  addressed need for early intervention  emphasized role of prevention world programme of action concerning disabled persons (1982) tallinn guidelines for action on human resources development in the field of disabilities (annexed to above in 1989) un, 1982 un, 1989  highlighted the high incidence of disabilities in developing countries  encouraged governments to awaken consciousness of potential gains from including persons with disabilities  urged governments to remove obstacles to full participation convention on the rights of the child un, 1990  focused on basic human rights of all children  established right of “mentally and physically disabled children” to receive education in a manner conducive to social integration (article 23) jomtien world declaration on education for all (efa) unesco, 1990b  urged countries to intensify efforts to make education for all a reality 8 global education review 3(3) standard rules on the equalization of opportunities for persons with disability un, 1993  stated that equitable access to education for those with disabilities should be “an integral part of the education system” (article 3.5)  encouraged the moral and political commitment of governments to take action toward equalization of opportunities for people with disabilities.  intends to be an instrument for policy-making and a basis for technical and economic cooperation between countries related to people with disabilities.  the 22 rules cover all aspects of life of people with disabilities and include preconditions for equal participation, target areas for equal participation, implementation measures, and monitoring. salamanca statement and framework of action on special needs education unesco, 1994  stated that “human differences are normal and that learning must accordingly be adapted to the needs of the child rather than the child fitted to preordained assumptions regarding the pace and nature of the learning process” (unesco, 1994 p 7) dakar framework for action world education forum in dakar, senegal unesco, 2000  served as a follow-up to the world declaration on education for all (efa)  established consensus that the world made negligible progress in meeting world’s basic education goals  established six international “education for all” goals to be met by 2015 convention on the rights of persons with disabilities un, 2006  asserted importance of ensuring that individuals with disabilities enjoyed all the rights, privileges and freedoms as others. table 1 these international protocols, which have largely been developed by agencies in highincome countries, have been successful in leading some countries to adopt domestic policies establishing the rights of persons with disabilities to education. the crpd has been particularly important. this international treaty was adopted by the united nations in 2006 and establishes the human rights of persons with disabilities around the world. it is intended to protect the dignity of individuals with disabilities. it specifies their rights across a variety of areas including education, health, work and employment, among others and provides a framework for implementation of those rights. the rights of persons with disabilities are also implicit in the recently adopted sustainable development goals (sdgs). the sdgs were recently adopted in the united nations to serve as a post-2015 development from rights to realities 9 agenda designed to “ to end poverty, hunger and inequality, take action on climate change and the environment, improve access to health and education, build strong institutions and partnerships, and more.” the fourth goal is focused on education and is designed to “ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning” (un, 2015, goal 4: education). although the concept of inclusive education is broadly conceptualized in the sdgs, it is widely acknowledged that it is impossible to achieve the goal of “education for all” without addressing the needs of children and youth with disabilities. unfortunately, international frameworks are not always suited to the social, cultural, economic, and political climate of individual nations (bayat, 2014b; beckman, 2014; elder, 2015; joseph, 2013; polat, 2011). even wellintended domestic policies do not assure that persons with disabilities can actually take advantage of their rights, particularly in underresourced countries that are confronting other domestic challenges. although few follow up investigations have been conducted to determine whether member states actually implemented given suggestions, when opertti and belalcázar (2008), studied inclusive policies in eight regions on behalf of unicef, they found that policies in all regions related to inclusive education were almost never fully implemented. they noted that the situation “…gives rise to the risk that ‘inclusive education can become rhetoric of education reform (opertti and belalcázar, 2008 p. 124).” thus, while the suggestions and frameworks for international policy implementation reviewed have been powerful, they also offered the opportunity for what stubbs (1997) termed “indefinite procrastination (p. 1)” as the documents all encourage action if the states had resources. with this in mind, polat (2011) argued that “…there is a danger of generalizing and adopting concepts without analyzing local contexts and perceptions. such a situation would render subsequent policies and strategies ineffective… (p. 56).” similarly, anastasiou & keller (2014) have argued that globalizing educational policies regarding inclusion frequently neglect critical factors “…contributing to the gap between rich rhetoric and poor reality(p. 364).” thus, to achieve educational participation for individuals with disabilities in developing countries, there is a need to understand the reasons that so many school-age children with disabilities do not attend school. croft (2013) has suggested that a better way of understanding national needs is to begin at “lower levels of the education system” to “break the link between disability and poverty (p.240).” approach to better understand the ways in which local realities serve as barriers to even the most wellintended policy initiatives, this paper integrates the individual work of four researchers conducting independent studies at the university of maryland as part of a group of researchers focused on the education of persons with disabilities in low and lower-middle income countries. specifically, we conducted a secondary analysis of in depth case studies conducted by each of the present authors in one of three countries: including el salvador, ethiopia, and liberia. these countries were selected because individual authors had access to cooperating programs and because they are each classified as a low income (ethiopia and liberia) or lower-middle income country (el salvador) by the world bank. while the specific focus of each of these studies was slightly different, all three countries were sites of independent case studies using ethnographic methods conducted by the present authors. as a result, raw data was available from interviews 10 global education review 3(3) and observations available which could be used as a basis for a secondary analysis. in el salvador, we draw on findings from three separate studies. the first was an ethnographic case study focused on parent perceptions of education in a small rural village (beckman & srygley 2014a, 2014b, 2015a; srygley, 2013). the other was a mixed methods study focused on teacher attitudes about inclusion in one rural department (sabella, 2015). the third is based on the preliminary findings from a study of parents of children, youth, and adults with disabilities in three rural villages (beckman, 2014, 2015). from ethiopia, we draw on the findings of an ethnographic case study intended to examine the beliefs and practices of early childhood teachers toward children with disabilities (abera, 2014). in liberia, podzimek (2014) conducted a case study examining quality of life issues for children with disabilities who attended a special educational center in monrovia. each author began by searching major data bases to identify existing literature related to their topic which had been published in peerreviewed journals since 2004. data bases included eric, education research complete, eric, psycarticles, psyccritiques, psychology and behavioral sciences collection, psycinfo, socindex and jstor . to better understand the ways in which local realities serve as barriers to even the most well-intended policy initiatives, we reviewed studies that focused on education, services and/or general treatment of individuals with disabilities in low and middle income countries. after conducting an initial literature review, each author conducted in-depth, case studies using ethnographic methods. the length of the field work in each country varied and ranged from three to ten months living and working in-country. all studies employed a process of multiple interviews with key informants (all were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim) as well as observations in classrooms and/or community settings which resulted in on-going field notes. in each study, transcripts and field notes were coded using a process of in vivo coding; codes were then combined to create larger categories which became the key themes of each individual study. all used strategies of prolonged engagement, member-checks, peer debriefing and triangulation to assure their study’s trustworthiness and credibility as recommended by creswell (2013). based on the findings of these studies, we identified a set of common, preliminary themes that emerged repeatedly as obstacles to the ability of children and youth with disabilities to receive education and other services. using these preliminary themes as a guide, we each returned to our data to code and identify relevant examples of each theme. the resulting themes were then integrated with existing literature identified in our literature reviews to highlight the common nature of these themes across a number of low and lower-middle income countries. challenges in low and middle income countries from the preceding overview it is clear that the combined presence of disability and poverty in low and middle-income countries results in a disproportionate number of children with disabilities who are out of school, many of whom receive no services at all. in this section, we discuss common local issues which hinder progress toward educational participation for children and youth with disabilities. the quality challenge regardless of whether children do or do not have disabilities, overall educational quality is a widely acknowledged barrier to achievement and is, in general among the foremost concerns of the international community as it moves to from rights to realities 11 address stalled progress in achieving both the efa and mdg goals (unesco, 2014). while international efforts to achieve these goals have helped provide access to primary education for a growing number of children, the task is not complete and there is widespread consensus that there needs to be more emphasis on quality (unesco, 2014). the quality issue is massive and of particular concern in low and middleincome countries. altinok (2012) reported data on learning outcomes suggesting that in many developing countries students are not acquiring even the most basic skills. of the 250 million children who still cannot read, write, or do basic math, 130 million of those are actually in school (unicef, 2014). moreover, educational quality is of particular concern when it comes to already vulnerable children and is believed to disproportionately affect children with disabilities (winzet & mazurek, 2014). while a full review of the quality challenge is beyond the scope of this paper, it is an ongoing problem which undermines efforts to serve children with disabilities and facilitate their participation in inclusive settings. for those with disabilities, the need to remove barriers to participation, adapt curricula, materials and equipment as well as to assess and address individual learning needs is complicated by more general challenges. general quality challenges include: inadequate facilities; deteriorating, sometimes dangerous infrastructure; lack of electricity, water and sanitation; lack of books, didactic materials and equipment; overcrowding; high student-teacher ratios; teacher absences; and lack of teacher training (opertti & belalcázar, 2008; polat, 2011; unesco, 2014). the myriad of problems facing public education systems in low and lower middle-income nations adds a layer of complexity to the goal of providing education and accommodations for those with disabilities. the story of a small mountain village in rural el salvador (beckman and syrgley, 2014a, 2014b, 2015; syrgley, 2013) illustrates the way such issues can impact student learning. the authors studied the village, la secoya2 for an 18 month period, conducting focus groups, openended interviews with parents, children, teachers and ngo personnel as well as conducting observations in the classrooms. the school in la secoya had two teachers who served 60 children from preschool through grade six. holes in the roof permitted rain to flood classrooms during the rainy season. these concerns had been reported to the ministry of education more than a year before, and at the time of this study, had not been repaired. although the latrines had been recently replaced because they were old and unsanitary, the new ones were too shallow, which contributed to a stench, and they were too large for younger children who were at risk for falling in. one father described the school as “neglected” and “a thing forgotten” (srygley, 2013, p. 89). while neither families nor teachers knew why, researchers speculated that chronic underfunding of education in addition to the size and remoteness of this small school were at least part of the explanation. teacher absences in la secoya were common; in one 60 day period one teacher was absent for 19 days. with no system for providing substitutes, class was either canceled (sometimes after the children had made a long walk up a mountain) or children arrived to a handwritten “lesson” taped to the wall which they were told to copy. in some instances, grades were combined or a teacher would move between different classrooms, leaving one of the classrooms unattended. there were few books and virtually no other didactic materials. classroom management was poor with children wandering in and out of class at will, sometimes playing marbles, climbing trees outside or playing in the trash pile during lessons. discipline methods included shouting, humiliating children, and corporal punishment (e.g., hitting children, pulling their ears). 12 global education review 3(3) far across the globe, podzimek (2014) conducted a case study of a school in liberia that served children with disabilities. teacher absences were a problem in the public school here as well. because liberia lacked a nationwide banking system, teachers had to leave the classroom for up to a week to travel to get a paycheck. schools for children with disabilities basically became orphanages which had numerous quality challenges. one participant described them saying, “all these [boarding] schools maintain unacceptable standards as far as education, as far as security, as far as abuses, as far as care, they should be closed (pp. 69 70).” a single, government school for children with disabilities served children with visual impairments and it became more of a poorly run, government orphanage, than a school. abera (2014) reported that teachers in an inclusive early childhood program in the capital of ethiopia lacked basic teaching materials. one teacher pointed to the lack of materials, noting that teachers had no guide or reference materials to help them teach appropriately. a school director noted that children with disabilities were often excluded from regular schools because of a lack of resources. such contexts do not meet the most basic needs of children in general, let alone the needs of children with disabilities. croft (2013) has argued that “….disabled children are likely to be particularly badly affected by poor quality schooling. a dearth of textbooks or poor quality chalkboards will, for example, affect all children’s education, but they are likely to disproportionally impact the ability of deaf children and children with low vision to learn (p. 236).” examples that illustrate croft’s point are numerous: books in braille will almost certainly not be available in a classroom that has no books at all; a child who needs routine and structure to address attention needs will not thrive in an environment in which teachers are absent and where children enter and leave classrooms at will; and a child who needs someone to assess individual learning needs will have difficulty getting that in overcrowded classrooms with teachers who have no access or knowledge of classroom assessments; and most certainly, children who are being abused and neglected will not thrive. thus, in considering the education of students with disabilities in developing countries – it is clear: the challenge beneath the challenge is the general quality of education. children with disabilities need high quality educational environments that include flexible curriculum strategies which can be adapted to the needs of various learners, classroom based strategies to identify needs of struggling learners, access to relevant learning materials; a responsive curriculum that fosters relevant and participatory learning (croft, 2013; elder, 2015; unesco, 2014). teacher training central to the issue of quality is teacher training. one of the most consistently identified challenges to better serving children with special needs is a lack of available personnel who have the training to work with them effectively (johnstone & chapman, 2009; polat, 2011; opertti & belalcázar, 2008; unesco, 2014, 2015; who,2011). indeed, even in the united states where there has been a longstanding effort to promote inclusive education and active efforts to identify and provide services to children with disabilities, lack of training is consistently identified as a key barrier to inclusion (lieber, et al, 2000). in developing countries, the lack of trained teachers and other personnel is particularly stark, with some countries, such as the ivory coast, lacking any teacher training programs (bayat, 2014b). and unesco (2014) noted that the effort to address the high student-teacher ratios that exist in some countries by hiring people without training jeopardizes educational quality in other ways. from rights to realities 13 the lack of qualified staff and the need for training emerged in some form in all of the countries in which we conducted investigations. for example, the school in la secoya described previously, faced a myriad of quality challenges – with the quality of the teaching staff being one of the most serious. outdated teaching practices which emphasized rote memorization and copying predominated. teachers had no training to work with children with disabilities, no way to assess individual needs, few strategies for helping struggling learners and few skills in behavior management. the treatment of a young girl with learning disabilities, sarita, illustrates the harm that can result from such inadequate teaching skills. sarita had failed fourth grade and so her mother, juanita, explained that she had “accepted” that to help sarita learn the teacher “hit her hard” (srygley, 2013, p. 97). however, one day the teacher became frustrated with sarita and locked her in a bodega (storeroom). not knowing how long she would be locked in the dark room, sarita became so frightened she started screaming as well as throwing and destroying objects. once released, she ran home. the teacher did not want sarita to return, and sarita refused to go back to school. this incident highlights, in dramatic fashion, the negative impact that a teacher’s lack of skill can have on educationally vulnerable children. while not all of our studies described such abusive and painful stories, all found that lack of training was tied to concerns about serving children with disabilities. in his study of teachers’ attitudes toward inclusion conducted in rural el salvador, sabella (2015) used a mixed methods design which included a survey of primary school teachers, a series of classroom observations and individual interviews with key informants, including teachers, school directors, ngo leaders, an inclusion specialist working for mined and a department representative of mined. while teachers understood there was a national policy which gave students with disabilities the right to attend school, they viewed themselves as insufficiently prepared to address the needs of this population. only eight of the 43 teachers reported having any training in disability or inclusion. their concerns were similar to those that have been described elsewhere they feared that students with disabilities would take too much time or could be disruptive and that they as teachers were unprepared to teach. moreover, the lack of specific disability definitions, the unavailability of assessment instruments, as well as lack of knowledge as to how to use them was a source of frustration. although a book provided to teachers for the school census provided ten categories that teachers could use to identify types of disability, teachers had never received training regarding the characteristics of these disabilities. even in situations where some training had been attempted, teachers felt that it was inadequate. in ethiopia, abera (2014) reported that there was a national mandate that teachers take a course focused on special needs which was part of the 2006 education sector development programme. however, participants described the course as largely theoretical and agreed it did not give them practical skills. one participant stated, “if i had more practical skills training for teaching children with disabilities and resources such as books and teachers guides i would be more successful in teaching all of my students (abera, 2014, p. 100).” the director of a special school for children with intellectual disabilities from the same study described her impressions of teachers’ preparedness to teach children with disabilities saying, "that’s not [enough training]! it’s not because they are taking only one; as a common course they are only taking one. i know that all primary school teachers they went through that course. whenever 14 global education review 3(3) they take that course, it is only one course. they are not capable to support these children with disabilities. for example, the types of disabilities are too much. even they cannot differentiate the children. theoretically they can learn it at school. even students of special education who are in college and universities, they are learning theoretically very well. but what they lack is practical skills. practically, whenever they have to differentiate, they don’t have the practical knowledge. one course is not enough for teachers (p. 133)." teachers described children with disabilities as “naughty”, “lazy”, “disruptive”, and “not smart”. many said they needed to be “pushed more” or that they needed “discipline” (p. 147). finally, in liberia, podzimek (2014) reported that in the ngo in which she conducted her study, there were only two people who had any training related to disabilities. there was little training available and, the ministry of education would not permit teachers to attend training if took place during work hours. an employee from an international development agency that was trying to train liberian teachers noted that even when inservice training was offered, teacher trainers did not have the time to complete the module on children with disabilities within the time frame provided by the government. thus, although the need to accurately identify and assess individuals with disabilities is a critical component of providing services to this population, teachers in developing countries have little training and few if any strategies to assess individual learning and social needs and to develop adequate accommodations for those needs. reconsidering accessibility even the best trained teachers cannot be help however, if children are not in school because they cannot access it. in developed countries, concerns about accessibility usually center on the ability of children and youth to access schools, classrooms, places of employment and other public buildings. in developing countries, these concerns are often overshadowed by larger issues which extend far beyond the extent to which school buildings are accessible. additional barriers are found in the home and community, in the ability of children to get to a school or to any kind of a therapeutic program as well as the accessibility of the school itself. accessibility in home and community when families and whole communities lack even the most basic infrastructure such as roads or water, day-to-day life presents major obstacles that are rarely encountered in more developed nations. preliminary reports from a study focused on families of persons with disabilities in economically impoverished, rural areas of el salvador illustrate how difficult it can be for families just to provide care for their children at home (beckman, 2014, 2015). in one village, lucia, a smiling, highly social 18 year old with physical disabilities could not walk and spent most of her day sitting in a plastic chair or in a wheel chair that had been provided by an ngo. the cobblestone road leading into her village was in ill-repair – a mix of protruding rocks and holes. it required residents to walk or, very rarely, get a ride in the back of a truck. the array of small homes made of adobe, metal, and cinderblock were scattered and connected by a few winding paths. these conditions made it difficult for lucia to move around or leave. she rarely left home, had never been to school, and spent most of her day waiting for someone from the family to come home. daily tasks such as using the family’s outdoor latrine required from rights to realities 15 someone in the family to carry her up three steep stairs. in the same village, 20 year old benicia had been born with hydrocephalus and had also been given a wheelchair by an ngo working in the area, but it did not fit through the entrance to her family’s tiny adobe shelter. while her mother had hoped the wheelchair would be useful to take benicia out of the house, it was difficult to maneuver across a rutted, rocky path to visit relatives who lived nearby. when benicia was born, her single mother took her to a local hospital for physical therapy, but that had become increasingly difficult as benicia got older because she could no longer carry her. like lucia, benicia had never been to school and could no longer go to physical therapy in a nearby town. her mother fed the family by raising corn and beans in a rented milpa (field) and had a job at an agriculture cooperative in the nearest town, so she often had to be away from home, something that was a particular concern because benicia had seizures that were not completely controlled. when both her mother and teenage brother had to be away from home at the same time, they placed benicia in a position so that she did not injure herself if she had a seizure and asked neighbors and family members to check on her. in liberia, podzimek (2014) found that many parents who had children with physical disabilities reported that although their children enjoyed helping them in the kitchen, parents forbid them to work there for fear they would get hurt. some families wanted the special center to have a boarding school so that their son or daughter could live there rather than at home because families didn’t feel equipped to care for their child at home. just having access to a home was difficult for some families; one family had been evicted because the property owner discovered that their daughter, terri, had epilepsy. the eviction cascaded into further difficulties: terri’s mother had to work longer hours selling fish in the market and finally stopped sending terri to school because she could not walk with her and was afraid terri would get lost. distance and transportation for individuals like the young women described above, accessibility in school is of little consequence, if they cannot get to school in the first place, a challenge that individuals with disabilities often face in low and lower-middle income countries (unesco, 2014; world health organization, 2011). in every study that we have conducted in rural el salvador (beckman, 2014, 2015; beckman & srygley, 2014, 2015; sabella, 2015; srygley, 2013), distance and transportation were barriers because they made getting to school or other activities difficult, timeconsuming, and costly. since people with little income typically go to and from work, school, the market, clinics and other activities of daily life by walking, standing in the bed of crowded flatbed trucks, hitching a ride in the back of a pick-up, or riding overcrowded public buses, mobility issues are an immediate obstacle. the problem is difficult enough for all families when children are young, but becomes unmanageable as those with disabilities become older, bigger, and more difficult to move or carry. additionally, in el salvador, prior to 9th grade, school is half day. though some more populated schools have both a morning and afternoon session (serving different children), morning sessions start at 7:30 am requiring children who live far from school to rise before dawn and begin their daily journey in the dark. the cost of transport presents yet another barrier for families that cannot afford the fare, particularly if they have multiple children in school or must do this every day. if another family member needs to accompany the student, it not only doubles the cost, but can require an hour or more of travel each way – requiring families to choose between that and earning income. in such cases, parents who faced the 16 global education review 3(3) choice between school and the family’s survival usually removed the child from school. for lucia and benicia’s families, going to school or a medical or therapeutic appointment required their single mothers to physically carry their grown daughters down a steep, narrow, trail and eventually to an unpaved road where they would have to walk at least a half an hour to a bus stop. the wheelchair was impossible to manage on the trail and difficult at best to manage on the unpaved roads. to catch the bus or a truck, they needed to climb aboard the vehicle with the chair and their daughter, and then get their daughter from the bus stop to a hospital, clinic or program where they could receive services. once there, public clinics and hospitals often required long waits in crowded corridors. while parents might overcome one such obstacle, the combination of distance, difficulty and cost was often more than they could manage on a regular basis and most of the parents we interviewed eventually gave up. similar conditions were found by sabella (2015) in his case study of an economically impoverished rural department in el salvador. of the 43 teachers who responded to his survey, 11 identified distance to school or lack of transportation as barriers to inclusion. many teachers felt that the special school was a better option because they did not have sufficient training; however, they acknowledged that the difficulty and cost of getting to the closest special school for most children in rural communities was too much. the closest special school was in the department capital which was 20 to 30 minutes by bus along the main road. many rural families lived an additional 30 minute to 1 hour walk from that road. when asked why children might not go to the special school, hector, a teacher who lives in the department capital and was proud to own a motorcycle which he rides 25 minutes to his school each morning said that children don’t go “because of the distance and the economic resources of the family.” in the same study, sabella met a teacher, elena, on the side of the road where she gets off the bus early in the morning and accompanied her on remainder of her hour long journey to school. they walked across corn fields and slid through gaps in the fences to arrive on a dusty, rocky path. from there, they climbed up a hill to get to her school. elena thought that educating children with disabilities in the community where they lived could be good because the cost and time for parents to take them to this school was too difficult. similarly, when an inclusion support teacher in the department was asked about children who might not attend school, she responded that the distance to any school could be a problem. her school was on the main road that connects the municipality to the department capital and served children from various communities. for many children, school could only be accessed by unpaved roads that wind over and around the hills and fields of the rural area often at least a half an hour walk. in la secoya, 14 year old sarita was one of two children in her family who had learning disabilities. her 23 year old brother had dropped out of school many years before without learning to read and write. after family removed sarita from school in la secoya, her mother, juanita, wanted to send her to another school in a nearby town which was for children with disabilities, but she had neither the money nor the time to do that. the situation for children in rural ethiopia is similar where an estimated 80 percent of people live in rural areas and have no access to education (abera, 2014). many children are outof-school because the distance from home to school is too great or because they need to work to generate income (teferra & altbach, 2004). at the time of abera’s study, few educational programs in ethiopia served children with special needs. most schools serving children with special needs were private and located the capital. in addition, the majority of programs for from rights to realities 17 children with disabilities only served children who were blind or deaf. likewise, in liberia, podzimek (2014) reported that the lack of paved roads and distance to the school made it difficult for children with disabilities. one participant with a physical disability could walk, but had difficulty because his legs bowed in and his knees knocked together. walking from the school to his father’s workplace was challenging, requiring multiple stops to rest and he had to be carried over an unstable “bridge” that he would not be able to navigate alone. sometimes when he walked alone his shoes were stolen. accessibility at school in high income countries, accessibility at school typically refers to either physical access to the school building and/or access to the curriculum. physical access refers to infrastructure changes (e.g. ramps, wider doors, adapted bathrooms) that maximize the child’s ability to participate. access to the curriculum generally refers to a range of modifications and accommodations to lessons and activities so that the child can participate in teaching activities offered to other students (e.g. availability of adapted materials, communication boards, etc.). both types of accessibility present challenges in poor countries. unfortunately, for countries that have difficulty maintaining even the most basic school infrastructure, concerns about accessibility for children and youth with disabilities is often last on the list of priorities for schools. in such a context, the likelihood of acquiring funds to make the building accessible for students with disabilities is unlikely. examples of school-based accessibility problems were found in all of our studies. for example, a preschool teacher participating in the sabella (2015) study had a classroom that was several steps down the hill from the bathrooms, which was also a flight of stairs down from the school entrance and main classroom building with no ramp for children with mobility difficulties. similarly, the participants in abera’s (2014) study reported that school buildings and facilities did not effectively include children with disabilities. the director of a special school noted that while government-run, general education schools were supposed to be inclusive they “are not appropriate or supportive of children with physical disabilities” (abera, 2014, p. 144). she further described these schools saying, "the government says that it is inclusive, but when you enter in one school compound, even starting from the compound [the school gate] it is not inclusive. it is not inviting. even the road and, nowadays this four story building, is not accessible for them. and it is hindering the children from school. (p. 144)" participants felt that teaching children with and without disabilities in the same environment was best for students “only when schools have the appropriate resources for children with disabilities, including accessible facilities and accommodating learning environments (p. 144).” and, in liberia, podzimek (2014) described a newly built school that did not have ramps or latrines. the students were forced to go to the bathroom in the bushes nearby. another public school had one ramp to the school, but the principal reported that the ramp was too steep for a student with a wheel chair to go up on his or her own. attitudes, beliefs and social stigmatization while many of the barriers to participation described above are physical and educational, deeper beliefs and cultural practices are among the most pervasive factors that contribute to social exclusion (abera, 2014; bayat, 2014a, 18 global education review 3(3) 2014b, 2015; elder, 2015,kalyanpur & gowraman, 2007; polat, 2011, sabella, 2015; teferra & altbach, 2004). the complex nature of such belief systems has been well-described by bayat (2015) who emphasized the importance of the connection between how people in a culture view disability and the subsequent treatment of individuals with disabilities. in describing her ethnography concerned with attitudes toward people with disabilities in cote d’ivoire, she noted that there are common beliefs which derive from a “folk religions ” (p. 4) worldview (e.g. animism) that explain phenomena in terms of natural spirits -including understanding of the source of all problems and disharmony. from this perspective, illness and disability are seen as caused by an evil spirit, bad behavior, or a curse. she described the concept of a “snake child” through the stories of participating professionals and parents. in some parts of the country, some motor and intellectual impairments (such as the hypotonicity associated with down syndrome and some other disabilities) were explained by the view that the children were “snakes” (also as “cursed”, “evil”, “a witch") because of the motor delays they exhibited (e.g. lack of head control, crawling in order to move) or because they behaved in ways that the villagers didn’t understand. bayat suggests that this worldview may explain the treatment of individuals with disabilities who are sometimes abandoned and left to die or even killed. those who survived were allowed to live in the community “without any noticeable human dignity (p. 8 ).” even teachers expressed doubt as to whether the child had real emotions, interests or capacity to learn. although nearly all of her study participants claimed that they did not believe in the concept of ‘snake children’ any longer, many simultaneously acknowledged that they accepted it because the majority of others in the culture did. perhaps indicative of this view, 93 percent of the participants acknowledged that they disciplined and taught children with disabilities using methods such as “beating” and “shouting” (p. 8). similar contradictions were identified by abera (2014) who found that beliefs regarding persons with disabilities in ethiopia were often “complex and conflicting” (abera, 2014, p. 105). there, disability is often seen as a curse from god or an evil spirit given to a person by an enemy (teferra & altbach, 2004). some families were ashamed to have children with disabilities, and lived their whole lives at home without their neighbors ever knowing they were there. teachers in her study acknowledged the presence of “traditional” beliefs regarding notion of evil eye, curse, a punishment, or witchcraft as common explanations for disability in ethiopia. although most indicated they “reject this belief” (p. 135), many did not rule out supernatural causes. like bayat (2015), abera also found that teachers’ views about the nature of disability were often tied to spiritual beliefs and ultimately to the treatment of individuals with disabilities. in this case, however, the school was sponsored by the ethiopian orthodox church which taught that persons with disabilities were “children of god requiring pity or alms (p. 103).” the need for pity or alms sometimes led to the belief that persons with disabilities needed charity and did not need education or social services. abera observed instances of teachers giving alms to those who were begging. in one case, a teacher who had indicated that she rejected traditional beliefs was still careful not to touch a person with disabilities as she was giving alms. when asked, she explained that people did not touch beggars so they would not get sick. other participants described instances in which children were deliberately injured to provide a source of income from begging. additionally, abera described a widely held belief that a child could become ill or disabled if a family member failed to fulfill religious obligations and that “…evil spirits or the devil can attack a person not wearing a crucifix or traditional amulet from rights to realities 19 containing herbs under their clothing… (p. 108).” even though all teachers at abera’s primary site had taken a required course at a local university where they had discussed the causes of disabilities, all wore such crucifixes. another noteworthy finding was that even when teachers ascribed natural or genetic causes to visible disabilities such as visual, hearing and physical impairments, children with less visible impairments were often described in more derogatory ways as “lazy”, “naughty”, “not smart”, even when teachers were open to their participation in a general education classroom. additionally, some families were so affected by the stigma and social exclusion associated with disability, that they considered allowing children to die. one participant described the story of a family in a rural area of ethiopia who deliberately left the child near a live electrical wire, saying "what can we do? we can’t kill her. she is eating. she is toileting here. she can’t go to school. we are helping her. she is dependent on us. if we kill her we are criminals. but if unintentionally she touches this electric shock she might die. we prefer this opportunity (abera, p.130).” likewise, podzimek (2014) found that although the special school she studied in liberia aspired to inclusion, parents of children without disabilities would not send their children. here too, religion had a strong influence in that some liberians also believed that the disability is the manifestation of a curse placed on the family for past wrong-doings. parents took children to spiritual healers “to solve the problem of disability (p. 197).” in general people with disabilities were viewed as unable to do things independently and in need of charity. even in this very poor country, the only people begging were those with disabilities. families commented on the money their children brought home from begging with one participant describing the money as a sign of love from the community. many children in the school had been overtly discriminated against. for example, prior to attending the center, one child roamed the community, where he was accosted or attacked. he often had his shoes or cane stolen. his father finally stopped buying his son shoes without holes because they were just stolen. and as described previously, terri’s family was evicted from their home because she had epilepsy. in el salvador, while sabella (2015) did not find that disability was believed to be a curse, one ngo staff member who ran afterschool programs for children in rural villages, described a family from her small village who had a baby with down syndrome. she said, “they did not want people to know, for fear of rejection or fear that they will make fun… they think it is a disease, a sentence for life… they see it as a punishment from god.” another professional who provided tutoring and therapy to children with disabilities through a different ngo said, "the society really stigmatizes people with disabilities. then this often makes the family feel protective of the children… out of fear. because of this lack of knowledge about people with disabilities, they do not go to school. and because of the disability, the family says, why they going to go? what will they learn?”" a representative from the ministry of education said of families of children with disabilities who did not go to school that they saw their child as “…rare, something strange and therefore they must, hide them really, and must be stash them away.” summary while these studies each had a somewhat different focus and were conducted in different countries, they revealed remarkably similar challenges which are consistent with the relatively limited literature that has been 20 global education review 3(3) conducted in local contexts. they do much to explain why it has been so difficult to address the needs of individuals with disabilities despite the existence of international initiatives focused on universal education. it is important now to move to the next step, in which targeted efforts to address local challenges are initiated. recommendations many of the overarching issues that face individuals with disabilities in developing countries are all too familiar issues of public acceptance, physical access to school, and better preparation for teachers. while similar issues are confronted by wealthier nations, in developing nations, the intersection of poverty, disability, and culture creates a complex set of interrelated challenges. while international declarations have set a foundation of good intentions and protocols have spurred some action, these are not sufficient to address the challenges that exist in the poorest countries around the world. the global campaign for education (2014) has emphasized that education must be “equitable, inclusive, and free” to achieve universal education and has emphasized the need for concrete steps to “…overcome all forms of discrimination, including those based on disability, gender, race, ethnicity, religion, language, sexual orientation and/or socioeconomic status (p 1).” the question for the international community is how to grapple with the disconnect between this laudable goal and formidable local challenges. bayat (2014a) argues that, given the challenges that face most of the world, inclusion as we think of it in economically developed countries such as the united states is “not within reach for the majority of the world (pp 278).” she makes a case for what she describes as “inclusion in small measures (pp 278)” to help create equal access to education. in this section, we identify five areas in which steps to overcome these barriers may prove useful. focus on public acceptance and awareness at its core, the participation of individuals with disabilities in schools and communities requires that their rights are acknowledged and respected, that their abilities are recognized, and that barriers to their social and educational participation are removed. communities are not likely to do any of these things until negative cultural perceptions of disability are addressed. polat (2011) has noted that values, culture, and attitudes can be as much of an obstacle to the participation of persons with disabilities as lack of resources and that changing such attitudes in the community as well as among professionals is an essential component of achieving inclusive education in developing countries . whether lack of acceptance is grounded in deeply rooted cultural and religious beliefs or simply represents a lack of understanding as to how persons with disabilities can participate, there is a need to create a positive vision that promotes understanding and acceptance. in the united states, public awareness campaigns have been used successfully to promote a range of domestic agendas. similar campaigns which shine a light on misunderstandings associated with disability could be a positive step towards promoting empathy and social acceptance. opertii and belalcázar (2008) argue that awareness is necessary to change exclusionary practices and promote sociocultural change. additionally, abera (2014) suggests that that raising awareness about disabilities may lead schools and professionals to develop better ways of identifying children with disabilities so that they can gain access to services. with this backdrop, how can public awareness campaigns be used to promote such acceptance? bayat (2014a) recommends directing community awareness campaigns on multiple audiences, including typically developing children, parents, teachers, as well as community and business leaders. though from rights to realities 21 messages and delivery platforms must be adapted to local settings, a number of different dimensions could be targeted. where people fear that disabilities are contagious, the result of a curse, or where people believe that those with disabilities should be hidden away or feared, campaigns focused on better understanding the causes of disabilities and reducing fears may reduce the stigma and shame experienced by individuals with disabilities and their families. such campaigns might highlight abilities and contributions of those with disabilities rather than on what they cannot do. other campaigns could be directed specifically at persons with disabilities and their families and might focus on their rights as well as on information as to how and where they can find services and other forms of support. seek community voice, connection, and support while participation in school is one form of inclusion, it is also important that children and youth with disabilities can leave their homes, know their neighbors, have friends, participate in the life of their village, and find protection and support within their communities. elder (2015) notes that without buy-in from communities, “unrealistic mandates handed down from bureaucrats will be ineffective (p. 23).” like public awareness campaigns, other forms of intervention must be grounded in local priorities, concerns, and conditions in order to be effective. the importance of obtaining community input and engaging community members in subsequent planning has been advocated by a number of authors who have written about services for children with disabilities in low income countries (bayat, 2014b; elder, 2015; polat, 2011). assuring participation in community life might be a more immediate way to address issues of social and educational exclusion than an exclusive focus on inclusion as it is defined and practiced in wealthier countries (bayat, 2014b). for children in remote areas, the need for locally based alternatives to promote social participation is essential and may serve as a step to full inclusion. non-formal education has been described as a potential pathway to educational inclusion (opertii & belalcázar, 2011; unesco and unicef, 2015). the la secoya community in el salvador offers an example of the importance of such opportunities. although both sarita and her brother had learning disabilities, both had failed numerous times in the local school and had eventually dropped out of that school. however, both were active and regular participants in the "biblioteca". this small rural community library was sponsored by an ngo and served by a local mother who received monthly training and support from the ngo staff. it provided books, computers, and educational activities at no charge in a community where none of these were available. activities at the biblioteca were participatory and fun. the library was also inclusive in that they supported academic achievement while not dividing children according to grade or ability. a variety of other mechanisms have also been suggested, such as establishing resource centers in rural areas or adapting communitybased rehabilitation models, all of which focus on the importance of engaging families and community members as well as training local personnel to carry out programs (charema, 2007). additional options might be to adapt a process that has been described and recommended by numerous authors, that is to create circles of support for persons with disabilities and their families (elder, 2015; falvey, forest, pearpoint & rosenberg, 1997). working together, participants might support their friends, family members and neighbors by as accompanying a child to a local event, protecting them from being bullied or ostracized, inviting them to community 22 global education review 3(3) functions, working together to build a ramp, making friendly visits to the family, and so on. since the extent to which such strategies are useful depends on local circumstances, actors at the grass roots level must be engaged in the planning process. an interesting approach was described by elder (2015) who described the use of a “country-centered plan” in kenya. this plan was modeled off of the person-centered plans that have been adopted in the united states which “puts the individual with a disability at the center of the strength-based planning process (p. 23).” the goal of elder’s country-centered plan was to develop cooperation between governments, schools, communities in kenya and which focused on strengths, challenges, short and long-term plans of action. in addition to being useful at a country level, such a process might be further adapted to small communities to get at the challenges that are unique to that particular community. for example, while la secoya shares many problems that are common in el salvador, several characteristics of the community create a specific set of conditions: it is situated near the top of a mountain; families are spread between five “neighborhoods” which are somewhat distant from one another and vary in terms of the extent of the poverty; the village has a social structure that is based in neighborhood and kinship networks; the school suffers from multiple quality issues and the community was resettled after a civil war that forced many villagers to fight or to flee. the strategies that may be needed to promote community participation in this context may differ from a community located in the heart of san salvador and may not be fully understood by officials in el salvador’s ministry of education. provide training that is practical, functional, and widely available it is difficult to find any literature focused on inclusion of children with disabilities that does not cite the need for training and personnel preparation both at the pre-service and inservice levels (charema, 2007; opertti and belalcázar, 2008; polat, 2011; unesco, 2014, 2015). however, the focus of such training is critical. in our own work (abera, 2014; sabella, 2015), in countries as diverse as el salvador and ethiopia, informants consistently expressed a need for training designed to help them assess children’s specific needs and then address those needs in the classroom. practical training in the use of classroom-based assessment, participatory teaching strategies, classroom management, and positive behavior management would help teachers meet learning needs for all the students in their classroom. in addition, teachers need strategies to help them address specific functional, behavioral, communication and learning needs of children (e.g., using pictures and signs to communicate, identifying alternatives to disruptive behaviors, structuring the environment). in addition to the content of training, another issue is the availability of training. in some instances trainings were described in which only one person in a school was permitted to attend (sabella, 2015). in others, special education training had only begun to be offered and/or required for trainees at in recent years, so teachers who had been working for many years had not had a special education course (abera, 2014). in liberia, no training was offered because of the lack of teachers in the country made it essential to get prospective teachers through training programs rapidly and in the area of disabilities would require too much time. additionally, the ministry of education would not let public school teachers attend training during school hours, nor would they pay teachers to attend on the weekends from rights to realities 23 (note: teacher pay was a big issue in liberia because teachers had not been paid for a while after the conflict ended). moreover, in remote areas it may be difficult for teachers to attend training that is located in larger cities and so strategies are needed to create training platforms that are widely available and easy to access (e.g., internet based training, video examples, etc.). further, when non-formal approaches are used as a means to educationally and/or socially include children in communities, training should be extended beyond the classroom to grass-roots leaders, staff, students, volunteers and other participants in community-based programs. invest in systems for transportation for children to take advantage of trained teachers with practical skills, they have to be able to get to school in a way that is safe, affordable and realistic for families. unless and until the issue of transportation is addressed head-on, this barrier alone will keep another generation of children with disabilities (as well as many without disabilities) out-of-school. international organizations and governments in poor countries must tackle this issue, set goals, and develop financing strategies. without that level of commitment to making transportation available, we cannot achieve the goal of education for all. conversely, while such high-level commitments are essential, waiting for economically impoverished countries to make such investments will likely keep children with disabilities trapped in a life of isolation and exclusion. short-term answers can be found in some of the other suggestions identified previously such as including the development of community-based options such as informal education programs and community-based rehabilitation programs. other options may include home visiting programs or mobile programs. community-based planning such as those that were described previously may bring to light other opportunities as well such as other students or parents that might be willing to accompany a child with a disability to school or might develop methods for supporting the participation of students with disabilities in educational and therapeutic programs through transportation sponsorships. a word about quality the current emphasis on improving the overall quality of education is as essential for children and youth with disabilities as it is for those without disabilities. whether the need is for infrastructure investments, resources and materials, or well-trained teachers, it does those with disabilities little good to be included if they are being included into a system that cannot meet the learning needs of children without disabilities. croft (2013) noted “this paper argues that given current pedagogy and resources in many low-income countries the pragmatic ‘twin-track approach of both general quality improvements and some specific interventions will be needed to include disabled children in learning (p. 236).” the work to improve overall educational quality is complex, and encompasses many of the recommendations described previously, albeit at a more generic level. this includes a focus on teacher training, the addition of sufficient and current educational resources, as well as the overall improvement of infrastructure. conclusion while the rights of individuals with disabilities have been established through a series of international agreements and the subsequent adoption of domestic policies, in many countries, there is a substantial gap between these initiatives and their implementation in much of the world. in low and lower-middle income countries, most children with disabilities 24 global education review 3(3) are still out-of-school and isolated, leaving the goal of inclusive education, at best, elusive. making education and social services available to this population requires that the international community take concrete steps to confront a complex array of interrelated barriers that range from overcoming stigmatization to transportation to the quality of the education they receive. now that the rights of individuals with disabilities have been established, it is time to turn to the task of identifying specific, concrete steps to realize these rights such as promoting public acceptance through locally tailored public awareness campaigns, the inclusion of local, community-based voices in understanding specific needs and generating solutions, training for teachers that is practical and functional, investment in systems of transportation to get children to school and other public services, and addressing larger issue of overall quality so that the programs in which children with disabilities participate are likely to genuinely support them and their families. notes 1. examples from the countries highlighted here include el salvador where the ministry of education reported that 16,309 children with disabilities were enrolled in school in 2013 out of a total student population of 1,720,639 or slightly less than one percent (mined, 2014, p. 26, p.8). in ethiopia, abera (2014) noted as of 2010 three percent of students with disabilities attended school. additionally, in the liberian 2010-2011 school census reported that there were 10,931 out of a total school population of 1,542,398, again, less than one percent (podzimek, 2014). 2. all names of persons and locations within countries are pseudonyms. author note the authors wish to thank the fulbright program and the international partners cassie stern memorial for support provided for this research. references abera, n. 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(2011). world report on disability. malta: world health organization. http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/97892406852 15_eng.pdf about the author(s) paula j. beckman, phd, is a full professor in the department of counseling, higher education and special education at the university of maryland college park where she is also an affiliate member of the latin american studies center. she specializes in working with young children who are at risk for or have disabilities and their families. she is particularly interested in the needs of children and families living in low and middle income countries. nicole abera, phd, has worked in the field of special education for 15 years as a teacher, researcher, teachercoach and school leader, and spent several years in ethiopia working in schools and training teachers to better support young children with disabilities. she conducted her doctoral research project, “teacher’s beliefs and practices toward children with disabilities in ethiopia”, during a nine-month fellowship in ethiopia sponsored by the us department of state’s fulbright program. she is especially interested in improving teacher preparation around special needs education in africa. thomas sabella, phd, has worked as a teacher, trainer and researcher in classrooms in the united states, latin america and asia. he completed his phd in 2015 at the university of maryland, visiting rural schools of el salvador to survey and interview teachers regarding their attitudes toward inclusion of students with disabilities. he identified the need for improved training and increased resources to meet the needs of local children with and without disabilities. kimberly podzimek, phd, is a doctoral graduate of the university of maryland, college park, college of education in the program in higher education, student affairs, and international education policy. her doctoral research focused on post-conflict, international development and special education in liberia. dr. podzimek specializes in working with adolescent youth with special needs and their families. she has a specific interest in low-income communities in urban areas. lenisa joseph, phd, is visiting assistant professor of special education at alfred university. her research interests are in the area of early childhood and special education policy and early intervention services for young children at risk and those with disabilities. http://web.worldbank.org/wbsite/external/extsitetools/0,,contentmdk:20147486~menupk:344190~pagepk:98400~pipk:98424~thesitepk:95474,00.html http://web.worldbank.org/wbsite/external/extsitetools/0,,contentmdk:20147486~menupk:344190~pagepk:98400~pipk:98424~thesitepk:95474,00.html http://web.worldbank.org/wbsite/external/extsitetools/0,,contentmdk:20147486~menupk:344190~pagepk:98400~pipk:98424~thesitepk:95474,00.html http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-and-lending-groups#low_income http://data.worldbank.org/about/country-and-lending-groups#low_income http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789240685215_eng.pdf http://whqlibdoc.who.int/publications/2011/9789240685215_eng.pdf rights to realities ger submission -disability issue final 8-27-15 p1 rights to realities ger submission -disability issue final 8-27-15 p2-end 114 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. barriers to student success in madagascar abigail r. wills the ladybug project inc. kim e. reuter the ladybug project inc. temple university arleen a. gudiel the ladybug project inc. temple university bryan p. hessert the ladybug project inc. temple university brent j. sewall temple university abstract various indicators suggest that math and science students in many developing countries are lagging behind their counterparts in other nations. using madagascar as a case study, we aimed to: (1) evaluate the effectiveness of education among those enrolled in science and math programs at primary, secondary, and university institutions; and, (2) understand barriers to student progression through the education system. to that end we conducted 63 semi-structured interviews in june and august 2012 with science and math teachers in five population centers, across all three levels of both public and private school systems. we found that crowded classes, limited resources (pedagogical and infrastructural), an average student range in age of seven years per classroom (suggestive of grade repetition and/or late school starting age), and discontinuities in the language of instruction explain why teachers estimated that almost 25 percent of their students would not finish school. although most secondary and university teachers taught the sciences only in french, they estimated that just one-third of students could fully understand the language. there were also urban-rural and publicprivate disparities. teachers in urban areas were significantly more likely to teach using french than their rural counterparts, while public schools also housed significantly larger classes than private institutions. while resource equalization will help to resolve many of these disparities, improved early training in french and increased local autonomy in designing appropriate curricula will be necessary to tackle other shortfalls. keywords international education; school policy; development; literacy; class size; africa. barriers to student success in madagascar 115 introduction there is evidence of numerous social and economic benefits that stem from educating a population (for example: lowered crime, glewwe, hanushek, humpage, & ravina, 2011; ; improved health and fertility reduction, kremer & holla, 2009; democracy and strengthened institutions, kremer & holla, 2009; economic growth, gylfason, 2001; technological advancement, kremer & holla, 2009; heightened worker productivity and income, manacorda et al., 2005). the healthrelated benefits of education have been particularly well-documented. for instance, the median age of first childbirth rose in accordance with the proportion of young people attending secondary school in developing countries between 1980 and 1995 (arnett, 2000; noble, cover, & yanagishita, 1996). furthermore, the demographic and health surveys program (dhs), which collects nationally representative household survey data in over 90 countries, found a 24 percent reduction in child mortality among women with primary-level education compared to those with no schooling (pritchett, 2001). nations that invest in education also tend to experience increases in import penetration and foreign direct investment (manacorda, sanchez-paramo, & schady, 2005). accordingly, hanushek and woessmann (2008) found a strong positive relationship between nation-specific international achievement test scores and economic growth. to reap the benefits of educational attainment, some countries – especially those in sub-saharan africa – have made extensive efforts to increase enrolment, especially in primary school. these endeavors have led to some notable successes. for instance, 57 percent of appropriately aged children started primary school in sub-saharan africa in 2010 (easton, 2014; unesco, 2012), a substantial increase from 1960, when just one in four children went to school (gulati, 2008; unesco, 1993). nonetheless, some subsaharan african countries that have invested heavily in schooling continue to experience slow economic growth and development (hanushek, 2013; oyelere, 2007). for instance, the inflation-adjusted gross national product per capita was no higher in nigeria in 2000 than in 1960 (gylfason, 2001; world bank, 2000). one explanation for this is that education systems in some countries are ineffective, and thus students gain few skills by attending school (oyelere, 2007; pritchett, 2004; sanchez et al., 2012). recent evidence from international assessments in math and science (hanushek, 2013) suggests that children in many developing countries are lagging behind their counterparts in other nations. despite increased enrolment, students in very lowincome countries (e.g., many in southern asia and sub-saharan africa) tend to perform badly on standardized tests and thus are held back in school and/or drop out earlier than their counterparts in developed nations (glewwe & kremer, 2006; glewwe et al., 2011). for example, in 1999, grade-eight south african students scored half as well on third international mathematics and science study (timss) tests as south korean students (glewwe & kremer, 2006). such clear disparities in educational achievement between countries have often been overlooked during the development of school policy. for instance, the millennium development goal (mdg) for universal primary education (sanchez et al., 2012; world bank, 2012) – a high-profile strategy introduced by the united nations in 2000 to orient development efforts to reduce poverty, disease, and illiteracy in countries across the globe– focused on enrolment, not educational quality (agrawal, 2014; hulme, 2007; united nations, 2012). a number of factors that influence academic achievement and could explain the poor performance of children in developing countries have been identified. these include ______________________________ corresponding author: abigail r. wills, mpingo conservation and development initiative, po box 49, kilwa masoko, tanzania; tel.: +255 786 354 058. e-mail: abigail.wills@mpingoconservation.org 116 global education review 1(4) an assortment of school, class, teacher, student, and community characteristics (glewwe & kremer, 2006; pangeni, 2014; urquiola, 2003). for example, if teachers struggle to convey basic information effectively to larger groups of pupils (glewwe et al., 2011), this may negatively affect student performance, especially if the classrooms experience more disruptions due to their large size (breton, 2014; glewwe et al., 2011; pangeni, 2014). efforts to reduce class size and increase pedagogical resources are among the more prominent initiatives to improve education. student learning increased in rural bolivia when class size was kept below 35 students, suggesting that limiting class sizes may be a worthwhile investment (urquolia, 2003). nonetheless, high student-teacher ratios are commonplace in developing countries, where government expenditure on education is often low, which results in limited funds for infrastructure (school buildings) and sufficient numbers of trained teachers (glewwe et al., 2011; gulati, 2008). furthermore, students from poor rural communities often cannot afford learning materials that have been shown to enhance student achievement (glewwe & kremer, 2006), yet may not be available in underresourced schools. the rapid expansion of the education system due to increased enrolment has placed additional strain on educational resources (agrawal, 2014; glewwe & kremer, 2006; pangeni, 2014). finally, low-quality education may be self-reinforcing, as students who do not learn are often forced to repeat grades (manacorda, 2012), thus further increasing student-teacher ratios and stretching available pedagogical resources. for various reasons, students in rural schools in developing countries are at a disadvantage when compared to their urban counterparts. governments in developing countries typically invest more heavily in urban educational institutions where the potential returns are higher (in bolivia, urquiola, 2003; and nepal, agrawal, 2014). in addition, fewer teachers and under-qualified teachers with little subject-specific knowledge and/or few years of experience are often assigned to rural schools (glewwe & kremer, 2006; urquiola, 2003). assignment of underqualified, inexperienced teachers reduces public expenditures because qualified teachers, many of whom are from urban centers, frequently require additional financial incentives to mitigate the social costs of remote living (mcewan, 1999, for example, distance from family and difficulty finding a spouse; glewwe & kremer, 2006; mcewan, 1999; urquiola, 2003). experienced teachers may also have sufficient seniority to request transfers to wealthier, urban areas and schools which they view as more desirable places to live and teach (spaull, 2012). these decisions compromise the quality of rural instruction and thus negatively affect student achievement, often resulting in high dropout and repetition rates in rural schools (glewwe & kremer, 2006; pangeni, 2014). an additional challenge for students in many developing countries is that they are taught using colonial languages, which are often different from students’ mother tongues (bolivia, uroquolia, 2009; sub-saharan africa, including madagascar, glewwe & kremer, 2006; dahl, 2011; glewwe & kremer, 2009). the need to learn a second language in addition to learning the content of a course contributes to the disparity in the percentage of children who complete school compared with those who enroll (dahl, 2011; glewwe & kremer, 2009). the need for students to learn a second language in school is more pronounced in poorer, remote locations (brock-utne, 2001; kremer & holla, 2009) where inhabitants speak using local dialects and do not have adequate opportunities to learn colonial languages (dahl, 2011; uroquolia, 2009). such findings have led many authors (breton, 2014; hovens, 2002; mcewan, 1999; urquiola, 2003) to recommend several key steps – decreasing class sizes, increasing resources available to schools, investing in rural schools, and improving efforts to support students whose native tongue is different from the language of instruction – as means to barriers to student success in madagascar 117 improve educational outcomes in developing countries. however, support for these steps is not universal, and research to date has revealed mixed (and sometimes conflicting) findings (breton, 2014; pangeni, 2014). for instance, after a review of educational studies in developing countries, glewwe et al. (2011) concluded that class size has no effect on student achievement. in fact, students in larger classes often perform better, although this may simply be a result of greater enrolment in schools where student achievement is higher (glewwe et al., 2011). in addition, although more learning materials enhance student achievement, the relative importance of different types of resources (pedagogical or infrastructural) on student retention (and ultimately years of schooling) varies by location and student gender (glewwe at al., 2011). this complicates designing effective and cost-efficient school policies. furthermore, while rural schools often underperform relative to urban institutions, this may result in part from parental response to perceived quality gaps. specifically, students who perform well academically are often sent by their parents to live in locations where schools are perceived to be better. although this behaviour may benefit the student, it could also decrease average student performance in rural schools, thereby reinforcing perceptions of poor school quality. thus, the best policy options to improve student learning under different social, institutional, and geographical scenarios are complex and not yet fully understood. using madagascar – one example of a country facing challenges as it struggles to improve science and math education – as a case study, we sought to improve understanding of the hurdles students face as they progress through the education system; and, we develop suggestions to mitigate these hurdles. it is likely that the information learned through studying the malagasy education system can be used to understand similar problems in other sub-saharan african countries (and, potentially, developing nations elsewhere), especially those which are excolonial. specifically, we aimed to (1) evaluate the effectiveness of science and math education among students enrolled in primary, secondary, and university institutions; and, (2) understand barriers to student progression through school. we focused on rural-urban and public-private differences in class size, age range of students, teacher training and experience, french language comprehension, and available resources as factors that may affect the quality of instruction and therefore inhibit student success. we focused on science and math, as they are subjects that are tested nationally and are often regarded as helpful to students’ educational prospects. success in these topics is also important nationally, as the skills they support are necessary for industry, academics, and governance. on the basis of past literature on education in developing countries as a whole, along with the low aggregate indicators for educational performance in madagascar relative to other countries (undp, 2013), we expected to find that: (1) large class sizes would be prevalent across all types of educational facilities; (2) high rates of student grade repetition would be prevalent among all classes; (3) teachers of math and the sciences would often have limited qualifications in these subjects; (4) low levels of comprehension of the language of instruction among students would be cited as a key factor affecting their educational advancement; (5) insufficient infrastructural and pedagogical resources would be cited as major barriers to math and science education delivery; and, (6) these hurdles to educational advancement would be more prevalent in public than private schools, and in rural compared to urban locations. methods malagasy education system madagascar has a population of 21.9 million, 33.2 percent of which is concentrated in urban areas (undp, 2013). the median age is 18.2 years, and a large proportion of the populace consists of school age children (undp, 2013). in addition, 92 percent of people in madagascar live on less than 2.00 usd per day 118 global education review 1(4) (schwitzer et al., 2014). despite widespread poverty, the proportion of appropriately aged children entering the education system in madagascar is increasing; the net intake rate of the official school age population to grade one of primary school was 63.78 percent in 2003, but rose to 82.48 percent in 2008 (world bank, 2012). this could partially be due to the elimination of fees associated with attending public primary school in madagascar in 2002 (world bank, 2008)1 the government has also undergone reforms that involve hiring a large number of contract and temporary teaching staff (glewwe & maiga, 2011). despite these recent improvements to educational policy, several indicators suggest that many children are not learning effectively in school. for instance: (1) in 2009, over one fifth of primary school students repeated grades, and only about one third (35.38 percent of females and 33.80 percent of males) persisted to the final grade (world bank, 2012; undp, 2013); (2) only 64 percent of the population aged 15 and up is considered literate (unesco institute for statistics, 2009); (3) students have persistently low test scores (glewwe & maiga, 2011); (4) many students do not pass key exams and therefore do not matriculate into secondary school, especially in rural locations (glick et al., 2005); and, (5) only 45.8 percent of the population are satisfied with education quality in madagascar (undp, 2013). the malagasy primary and secondary school system covers 12 years of education. within madagascar, grade levels are referred to interchangeably by their french and malagasy names. standardized tests are taken at the end of the fifth, ninth, and 12th school years (cepe, bepc, and baccalauréat, respectively). this is shown in table 1. year in school french education system malagasy education system 1st 11ème: course preparatoire 1 t1 2nd 10ème: course preparatoire 2 t2 3rd 9ème: course elementaire t3 4th 8ème: course moyen 1 t4 5th 7ème: course moyen 2 t5 cepe (certificat d’etudes primaires èlèmentaires) 6th 6ème 7th 5ème 8th 4ème 9th 3ème bepc (brevet d'etudes du premier cycle) 10th 2nde 11th 1ère 12th terminal year a: literature major d: sciences and languages major c: mathematics and physics majors baccalauréat table 1: the malagasy primary and secondary school system 119 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. the malagasy primary and secondary school system covers 12 years of education, with students generally starting school at the age of five. . hereafter, for simplicity, we refer to grade level by year, i.e., the first year of school would be the first grade, as opposed to using the french or malagasy nomenclature. in madagascar’s public school system, there is one test at the end of each trimester. in order to progress to the next grade level, a student must: (1) pass at least one of the tests; and (2) achieve an end-of-year grade (calculated by the combined scores of all three assessments) that exceeds a given threshold. in addition to these assessments, students face nationwide standardized exams at the end of the fifth, ninth, and 12th school years; they must pass these exams to progress to middle school, high school, or to graduate from high school, respectively (table 1). although primary school teachers are permitted to instruct using malagasy language, the government requires that french be the main language of instruction in secondary and university-level institutions (brock-utne, 2001; dahl, 2011). all students enrolled in university courses must pass a french language test after their first year of instruction. social surveys we conducted semi-structured interviews (rietbergen-mccracken & narayan, 1998) with primary, secondary, and university science and math teachers in five population centers of northern madagascar (figure 1; table 2) from june 29 until august 11, 2012. the sampling locations (settlements positioned along the route national 6 road, which runs south from antsiranana) were chosen to represent an urban-rural gradient from a city of 87,569 (antsiranana) to a village of 500 (mahamasina; table 2). population estimates, the number and type of school institutions present, and the number of teachers interviewed were recorded for each settlement. we attempted to interview at least two teachers per institution, while also maximizing the number of establishments from which the sample was drawn. all interview materials were reviewed and approved by the temple university institutional review board (protocol number 20644, may 2012), and we secured permission from school directors to conduct research at all k-12 institutions prior to the onset of data collection. figure 1: map of northern madagascar, where the research was conducted. the locations of the five survey towns are indicated using stars. roads are depicted with black lines. teachers were approached in their workplaces, where they were introduced to the study using face-to-face recruitment. interviews were scheduled with teachers if they: (1) agreed to participate in the research; (2) taught math or science as a subject; and, (3) were over the age of legal consent (18-plus years). respondents chose their preferred interview times and locations, along with the language (french or the local malagasy dialect) in which the questions were 120 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. population center human population number of teachers interviewed public primary schools private primary schools public secondary schools university/ technical schools antsiranana 87,569 36 6 7 7 2 ambilobea 56,427 8 nd nd nd 0 aniverano norda 15,000 9 2 3 1 0 ambondromifehy 2,500 9 2 2 1 0 mahamasina 500 1b 1 0 0 0 table 2: population estimates for our study sites.2 aresearchers visited two public secondary schools in ambilobe and only one of the two public primary schools in aniverano nord. bonly one teacher was present in mahamasina. administered. interviews were conducted after written consent was obtained by two field staff (one american researcher and one malagasy translator). population estimates for our study sites, are shown in table 2. estimates are based either on published data or on estimates given to us by the elected president of the local town or village. the number of public/private primary, secondary, and university institutions in each population center, as reported to us by locally elected officials, is also indicated. we conducted teacher interviews in every institution, except where noted otherwise. “nd” stands for “no data.” during the interview, respondents were asked about their own qualifications and training, as well as the hurdles they, their colleagues, and students faced in the education system (the survey instrument is in the supplementary materials). we asked each teacher to indicate the age range of students in his or her classroom and used this value as a proxy to quantify rates of grade repetition. teachers could not provide accurate age-range data for previous years, which meant that we were unable to calculate variability at the respondent level, and therefore used standard deviations as a measure of variance in the data. given the trade-off between data accuracy and statistical relevance, we chose to analyze the age range of students because it: (1) was easily and accurately reported by teachers; and, (2) it allowed for comparison between individual respondents, instead of requiring us to aggregate data at the school or town level. we also obtained information relating to additional characteristics (gender, language of instruction) of the interviewed teachers to better understand the structure of the school system. in instances where it appeared that a teacher misunderstood the intent of a question, clarity was provided while refraining from asking leading questions. respondents were also probed on their responses and encouraged to discuss topics that were important to them. as such, data collected during the standardized interviews were supplemented by information gained through these informal conversations. data analysis percentages and means with standard deviations were generated to summarize the demographic characteristics of the sample, as well as to characterize institutional and classroom-level student-teacher ratios; the age range of students in each classroom; teacher barriers to student success in madagascar 121 qualifications, and on-the-job experience; the most common language of instruction used by teachers; the percentage of students estimated to be fluent in french; and the percentage of students estimated to progress to the next grade level3. the data did not conform to the assumptions (normality and homogeneity of variance) of parametric tests. therefore, nonparametric tests were used to identify differences between: (1) primary, secondary, and university institutions; (2) public or private schools; and, (3) sampling locations. pearson’s chi-squared tests were used to analyze variation in the primary language of instruction most commonly used by science and math teachers operating at different academic stages, types of institution (public or private), and sampling locations. the test was also used to determine differences in the gender distribution of teachers employed in public and private institutions, and at different academic stages. kruskal-wallis rank sums tests (a nonparametric test equivalent to anova) were used to analyze the change of quantitative values between data with three or more categories. specifically, the test was used to substantiate differences between academic stages in respect to the: (1) teachers’ qualifications and experience; (2) percentage of students estimated to be fluent in french; (3) average age range of students per classroom; and (4) percentage of students estimated to progress through to the next grade level. in addition, kruskal-wallis rank sums tests were used to examine how sampling location (town) was associated with: (1) teachers’ on-the-job experience; and (2) the percentage of students estimated to be fluent in french. in cases where kruskal-wallis rank sums tests were significant, a post-hoc test, the steel-dwass multiple comparisons test, was used to determine where differences between groups were apparent. wilcoxon tests (a nonparametric equivalent of a t-test) were used to verify differences between public and private institutions in respect to class size, teacher experience, and the percentage of students estimated to be fluent in french. the test was also used to determine if teacher experience differed between sampling locations. finally, when both the independent and dependent variables were quantitative and continuous, significance between the variables was examined using a simple linear regression. a simple linear regression was used to examine whether the number of students and teachers as well as the subsequent studentteacher ratio in each institution was a function of the population of the town in which it was located. a simple linear regression was also used to substantiate whether variations in the size of classes taught by teachers were a function of the academic stage in which they were operating. values of human population and class size were natural log-transformed prior to the analysis so that the data would meet the assumptions of parametric tests (normality and homogeneity of variance). results we completed 64 interviews: 25 teachers at the primary level, in all five population centers; 28 at the secondary level, including middle school and high school, in all population centers except mahamasina; and, 11 university educators in antsiranana (table 2). the gender of teachers interviewed shifted significantly from primary to secondary school (pearson’s chi-squared test: x2 = 8.54, p = 0.013), with females comprising 93 percent and 50 percent of the sample, respectively. the interviews lasted a mean of 14 ± 2 minutes (range: 7 – 75). three teachers in antsiranana refused to participate, and nobody ended an interview prematurely. in a few cases, as noted in the individual results below, not all respondents were asked the full set of questions. classroom size and age range of students on average, teachers instructed science and math classes containing 68.36 ± 52.71 pupils (range: 8 – 256, n = 84); this number increased significantly with the level of the course (simple linear regression: f2,70 = 122 global education review 1(4) 13.9544, p < 0.0001, r2 = 0.19834, n = 71). however, after excluding university classes, which were typically large (169 ± 58 students, n = 13), the number of students in k-12 classrooms did not change with the level of the course (simple linear regression: f1,57 = 1.0531, p = 0.3092, r2 = 0.019, n = 58). the mean age range of students per class was 6.95 ± 2.73) years (range: 2 – 12, n = 61; table 1. this increased significantly with the level of schooling (i.e. primary [5.73 ± 2.04 years, n = 23], secondary [6.36 ± 2.22 years, n = 24], or university [10.18 ± 1.89 years, n = 11]; kruskal-wallis rank sums test: x2: 19.32, p < 0.0001). university-level classrooms contained a more diverse age range of students than both primary and secondary ones (steeldwass multiple comparisons test: p = 0.0001 and p = 0.0005, respectively). primary and secondary school classrooms did not differ from each other in this respect (steel-dwass multiple comparisons test, p = 0.6930). teacher qualifications and experience we recorded educational qualifications for 79.69 percent of the 64 science and math educators interviewed(n = 51; in antsiranana, aniverano, and ambondromifehy). the average primary school teacher had not graduated from secondary school. primary school teachers (n = 19) had received 10.94 ± 1.68 years of schooling. this increased to 14.33 ± 3.69 years, equivalent to two years of university education, among secondary educators (n = 18). university-level teaching staff had the equivalent of eight years of university education, 20.00 ± 0.00 years (n = 11). these differences were significant between primary and secondary school teachers (steel-dwass multiple comparisons test, p = 0.0048), primary school and university teachers (steel-dwass multiple comparisons test, p < 0.0001), and secondary and university-level educators (steel-dwass multiple comparisons test, p = 0.0006). teachers had been employed in their current positions for an average of 11.65 ± 8.28 (range: 1 – 33; n = 60) years. this decreased significantly with the level of schooling (kruskal-wallis rank sums test: x2 = 6.7130, p = 0.0349), with primary, secondary, and university teachers having operated in their current roles for 14.86 ± 10.03 (n = 22), 9.08 ± 7.94 (n = 26), and 7.80 ± 3.29 (n = 10) years, respectively. language of instruction we asked 31 (48.44 percent) of the 64 teachers we interviewed, in four of our five study sites (excluding ambilobe), to identify the languages that they used to teach math or science (figure 2). teaching using solely malagasy language only occurred at the primary school level. conversely, secondary school and, to a lesser extent, university teachers taught primarily in french, yet clarified using malagasy when their students did not understand. the proportion of educators choosing to teach in malagasy, french, or in both languages differed significantly between primary, secondary, and university institutions (pearson’s chi-squared test: x2 = 10.70, p = 0.015). despite french being the dominant language of instruction at secondary and university levels, teachers estimated that only 30.56 ± 34.36 percent (range: 0 – 100 percent, n = 58) of their students were fluent in the language. in addition, all of the teachers who cited a lack of french comprehension among students as a reason why they would not progress through, or complete, school (16 percent, n = 9 of 55 respondents) taught at the secondary or university level. the percentage of students estimated by their teachers to be fluent in french increased significantly from primary (5.47 ± 12.44 percent, n = 21) to secondary (30.86 ± 27.17 percent, n = 23; steel-dwass multiple comparisons test: p = 0.0002) school, and again once secondary school students matriculated into university (82.27 ± 20.41 percent, n = 11; steel-dwass multiple comparisons test: p < 0.0001). 123 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. figure 2: the language of instruction in math and science classes, as cited by teachers of primary, secondary, and university level institutions. additional barriers to student progression through school teachers at all levels were asked an openended question about any other problems that they felt were impeding their ability to provide effective science and math education to their students. insufficient school supplies (n = 15) and facilities (n = 12), including the need for a laboratory (n = 11), as well as a shortage of teaching staff (n = 9) and the need for a library (n = 6), were the most common inhibitory factors mentioned. additionally, five respondents cited insufficient teacher training, student food insecurity, and the absence of a water fountain on school premises as issues. other respondents stated the need for teachers to help students appreciate education (n = 4), school toilet facilities (n = 3), a french course for students (n = 1), more desks (n = 1), and a security fence (n = 1). university professors also noted that the campus was not safe (n = 1); the library did not have enough books, computers, or internet access (n = 1); and there was almost no money for faculty research (n = 1). teachers estimated that just over three quarters (75.79 ± 21 percent; range: 20 – 100 percent) of their students would choose to enroll in the next grade level upon completion of their respective courses. this did not change significantly between academic stages (primary, secondary, and university; kruskalwallis rank sums test: x2 = 3.0896, p = 0.2134). fifty-five teachers gave reasons why students did not progress through, or complete, school. the most common explanations were poverty (38 percent, n = 21), lack of comprehension of the language of instruction (i.e., french; 16 percent, n = 9), and a lack of student knowledge (10 percent, n = 6). other reasons (as cited by at least three teachers) included teacher absenteeism, student absence, student pregnancy, student psychology (i.e. students believe that they will fail anyway and therefore do not seek higher education), unstable national governance, insufficient school materials, and a lack of parental interest (either in higher education or in the students generally). every primary and secondary school teacher indicated that, while 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 malagasy both languages french pe rc en ta ge o f t ea ch er s ( % ) language of instruction primary secondary university 124 global education review 1(4) number of students number of teachers student body age-range primary school antsiranana (n = 5) 451.8 (214 to 863) 8.25 (4 to 12) 11.40 ± 02.07 aniverano (n = 4) 310 (219 to 521) 9 (6 to 12) 14.33 ± 2.52 ambondromifehy (n = 4) 349 (220 to 523) 5.5 (4 to 7) nd mahamasina (n = 1) 170 2 15.00 ± 0 combined primary and secondary school antsiranana (n = 5) 531.2 (210 to 1250) 17.2 (5 to 34) 17.00 ± 4.24 secondary school ambilobe (n = 2) antsiranana (n = 2) nd 940 (363 to 1517) nd 18 nd 10.00 ± 0 aniverano (n = 1) 1143 29 14.00 ± 0 university antsiranana technical school (n = 1) 150 28 nd university of antsiranana (n = 1) 3800 nd nd table 3: mean number of teachers and students at each type of institution at each location. they prepare students for cepe and bepc exams, these are administered only at specific centers to which students must bear the cost of commuting by bus. one teacher cited a fare of 2.50 usd. during informal conversations, teachers explained that student grades on the three other standardized tests which are also used to determine if they should progress to the next grade level tend to increase (n = 9) or decrease (n = 3) throughout the academic year; two respondents explained that student performance could fluctuate during this time. the mean number of teachers and students enrolled in each type of institution in each sampling location is shown in table 3. not all schools could provide all of the information requested. however, in cases where more than one institution provided estimates, the range of the data is indicated in parentheses alongside the mean values. the mean age range and standard deviation of the student body in each institution, as reported by teachers, is also listed. finally, the number of schools that provided us with the information is indicated in parentheses alongside the study site name. “nd” indicates that no data were available. 125 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. disparities between urban/rural and public/private institutions the average number of students and teachers per institution, by educational program, and by location, is summarized in table 3. institutional student-teacher ratios in primary and secondary schools did not change with the natural log of the populace of each settlement (simple linear regression: f4,19 = 2.412, p = 0.213, r2 = 0.085, n = 20). public k-12 schools did, however, have significantly larger classes than private institutions (containing a mean of 100.41 ± 66.05, n = 34 and 41.94 ± 24.58, n = 39 students respectively; wilcoxon test: x2 = 19.89, p < 0.0001). they also employed significantly fewer male teaching staff (6 percent and 62 percent of math and science teachers in public and private institutions were male, respectively; pearson’s chi-squared test: x2 = 9.16, p = 0.011). primary and secondary school teachers in urban population centers had completed more years of schooling than those in rural ones, though not significantly so (wilcoxon test: x2 = 1.2892, p = 0.2562). for instance, teachers in urban antsiranana had received 13.14 ± 3.79 years of schooling (range = 8 – 20), compared with those in rural ambondromifehy, who had completed just 10.33 ± 1.58 years of education (range = 8 – 12). similarly, private k-12 schoolteachers had completed more education (13.40 ± 3.87 years, range = 0 – 20, n = 15) than their public school counterparts (11.75 ± 2.18 years, range = 8 – 17, n = 16), though this was also not significantly different (wilcoxon test: x2 = 1.1778, p = 0.2778). the length of teaching career differed significantly between k-12 educators of public (17.11 ± 10.40 years, n = 19) and private (9.44 ± 6.77 years, n = 23) schools (wilcoxon test: x2 = 8.79, p = 0.0124). this did not change significantly between towns (kruskal-wallis rank sums test: x2 = 2.6678, p = 0.6149), though respondents in the most urban study site (antsiranana) reported the longest teaching careers (12.06 ± 9.63, n = 34). k-12 private school teachers were less likely than those in public schools to teach in malagasy (10 percent of private school teachers and 42 percent public school teachers taught using malagasy; pearson’s chisquared test: x2 = 3.91, p = 0.14). this is shown in figure 3. the probability of respondents at any educational level using french or malagasy to address students in the classroom also changed by location (pearson’s chi-squared test: x2 = 22.845, p = 0.009). additionally, primary school students in urban areas were more likely to be taught the sciences in french; 28 percent of primary school teachers in urban areas (antsiranana and ambilobe) reported french as the only language of instruction for the sciences. by contrast, zero percent of primary schools teachers in more rural towns (ambondromifehy, aniverano nord, and mahamasina) taught the sciences using only the colonial language. a smaller percentage of public k-12 school attendees were estimated by their teachers to be fluent in french (8.75 ± 17.46 percent, n = 20) as compared to those enrolled in private institutions (19.43 ± 21.91 percent, n = 22; wilcoxon test: x2 = 4.4752, p = 0.0344). schools in the three largest cities contained the largest percentage of students estimated to be fluent in french (17 percent in antsiranana, n = 25 respondents; 28 percent in aniverano nord, n = 9; and 14 percent in ambilobe, n = 7). by contrast, just four percent (n = 9) of pupils in the rural village of ambondromifehy were considered to be fluent in french. these 126 global education review 1(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wills, abigail r., reuter kim e., gudiel, arleen a., hessert, brian p. & sewall, brent j. (2014). global education review, 1 (4). 114-134. figure 3: the language of instruction used by k-12 teachers in the public and private school systems in madagascar. estimates did not differ significantly (kruskalwallis ranks sums test: x2 = 7.7627, p = 0.0512). the proportion of students estimated to progress to the next grade level (75.79 ± 21 percent; range: 20 – 100 percent) did not change significantly between public and private institutions (kruskal-wallis rank sums test: x2 = 0.3053, p = 0.5806), or by geographic location (kruskal-wallis rank sums test: x2 = 8.6535, p = 0.0704), despite a number of disparities in respect to indicators of educational quality. discussion as we expected, classrooms in the malagasy education system were typically large. each pupil, on average, was instructed in classes that numbered more than 67 students. this is a concern given that increasing class size in colombia from just 20 to 53 students reduced fourth-grade science and math test scores by 16 percent compared to the international average (breton, 2014). the large class sizes recorded in our study can make teaching more difficult (breton, 2014). in developing nations, overpopulated classrooms often adversely affect student achievement more than other school characteristics, such as teacher education and experience, or the availability of pedagogical resources (breton, 2014; glewwe et al., 2011). thus, the allocation of additional funds to reduce class size would likely greatly improve educational outcomes in madagascar and other countries facing the same issue. nonetheless, reducing class size is expensive (hattie, 2005), and therefore might not be economical in comparison to other interventions to improve student learning, especially in locations where education funding is low, such as developing countries. in accordance with our second expectation, the teachers we interviewed often managed classrooms with a large age gap between the youngest and oldest pupil (seven years on average); this difference increased at later grade levels. these results suggest that grade repetition is occurring and/or that some malagasy children are starting school at a later age than others. in addition, they suggest that grade retention efforts are not working as a 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 malagasy both languages french pe rc en ta ge o f t ea ch er s ( % ) language of instruction public private barriers to student success in madagascar 127 means to deter poor student performance in madagascar. this is supported by the fact that, on average, teachers interviewed in our study estimated that 25 percent of their students would repeat a grade or drop out of school, and thus would not advance to the next grade level. thus, it is not clear whether the practice of forcing poorly-performing students to repeat grades is a beneficial policy option (manacorda, 2012). this is because, although the threat of being held back in school can provide a strong immediate incentive for students to do well, it might also result in higher student-teacher ratios and/or increased dropout rates. enforcing grade repetition could lead to particularly high dropout rates in areas that lack incentives for students to invest in attaining an education (handa, 1999), or where there are fewer social pressures on students to continue with school after being held back. this is often the case in poor rural locations. rural students in developing countries might also underperform, despite trying hard in school, due to factors beyond their control, for example, poverty and/or having limited time for homework because much or all of out-of-school time is devoted to household chores. these problems are likely to be exacerbated by grade repetition because, as children get older, they may be subjected to pressure to contribute to household income (sabates et al., 2012). under these circumstances, grade repetition, along with late school-starting age, may be a precursor to non-completion (sabates et al., 2012). students might also be deterred from continuing with school by the necessity of paying for transportation to take standardized tests; the 2.50 usd bus fee cited by one teacher in our sample is equivalent to approximately two days of income for 92 percent of malagasy people (schwitzer et al., 2014). grade repetition might also indirectly lead to poor performance and/or higher dropout rates if students (and/or their parents) become demoralized as a result of being held back in school (manacorda, 2012). teachers in our sample noted that some students believed that they would fail and therefore struggled to progress; forcing students to repeat grades is likely to reinforce this mentality. being held back by one year increased the likelihood that a pupil would drop out of school by 60 percent in bangladesh (sabates et al., 2012). similarly, repeating more than one grade was negatively associated with math performance in poorer primary schools of south africa (spaull, 2012). viable alternative policy options to grade retention exist, with many having been shown to improve student performance in developing countries. for instance, some countries (e.g. nigeria and the seychelles) have eliminated grade retention in favor of automatic promotion (unesco, 2012). furthermore, informal and inexpensive remedial education benefitted disadvantaged children in india (manacorda, 2012). therefore, automatic promotion, coupled with consistent monitoring of student achievement and additional support mechanisms to prevent them falling behind their classmates, could be effective at reducing dropout rates in developing countries (sabates et al., 2013). consistent with our third expectation, some science and math teachers were underqualified. the average primary school teacher, in particular, had not completed high school, and presumably faced similar obstacles to learning in school as we documented for the current cohort of malagasy students. nonetheless, these malagasy teachers were more educated than those in some other developing countries. for instance, in northeast brazil in the 1980s, 60 percent of rural primary school teachers had not even completed primary education (glewwe & kremer, 2006). furthermore, given that the malagasy primary school teachers in our sample had been employed in education for an 128 global education review 1(4) average of 14 years – double that of university educators – their lack of formal qualifications could arguably have been mitigated by on-thejob experience. thus, teachers in madagascar, on average, had a combined period of training and work experience that was relatively long. nonetheless, the adequacy of their training and the extent to which on-the-job experience contributed to the quality of instruction they provide remains unclear. as per our fourth expectation, the teachers we interviewed considered insufficient french language skills among malagasy students to be a key factor inhibiting educational achievement. furthermore, respondents at all of our study sites claimed that secondary school and university teachers were not able to speak french well enough to educate students in french, despite being legally required to do so (brock-utne, 2001; dahl, 2011). current limitations in french language abilities have probably been exacerbated by historical shifts in the official language of primary and secondary education in madagascar, which changed three times between french and malagasy from 1896 to 1992 (dahl, 2011). similar processes have occurred in other developing countries (e.g. rwanda; steflja, 2012). in addition, as noted by one interviewee, math and science classes are taught almost exclusively using french. this may be because pedagogical materials for advanced math and science instruction; as well as web site content, international journals and conferences; are more readily available in french (relative to malagasy). thus, reducing the language barrier by training teachers to communicate effectively in french could increase student success and learning rates in these topics. in madagascar, french language skills are considered essential for educational and professional advancement (dahl, 2011). such sentiments may arise because french is commonly used as the principal language for communication in many government offices and for other higher-paying jobs. therefore, knowledge of the language that will be most prevalent in the workplace during a student’s later professional career is likely to improve his or her prospects. opportunities to acquire skills perceived as valuable for professional advancement can also incentivize households to invest in education (handa, 1999; harmon et al., 2000). nonetheless, the difficulties that french language instruction may impose on students – especially students from rural areas, who are often unfamiliar with the language – should be acknowledged. students who are taught using a second language may greatly benefit from assistance in learning to understand it effectively. for instance, students (primarily rural children and girls) benefitted from participating in bilingual programmes in nepal, where classrooms were more stimulating, interactive, and relaxed (hovens, 2002). furthermore, pupils in niger who started learning in their mother tongues could read and write better, even in the second language (hovens, 2002). these findings suggest that facilitating a gradual transition across grade levels from the use of a local language to that of the professional one may be more effective than complete immersion in the professional language at a certain point during a child’s formal education. pedagogical materials (e.g. textbooks) can improve student achievement at little cost (glewwe et al., 2011; kremer & holla, 2009). however, consistent with our fifth expectation, several teachers noted that such materials were hard to procure. infrastructural resource limitations were also frequently problems throughout the school system, and insufficient resources (pedagogical and/or infrastructural) make teachers’ jobs more challenging (mcewan, 1999; sharma et al., 2013). nonetheless, where resources are lacking, teachers can make student learning more enriching in different ways, both inside and outside the classroom. for example, they barriers to student success in madagascar 129 could promote cooperative learning by incorporating group assignments into the syllabus (sharma et al., 2013) and they could replace rote learning with problem-solving exercises. such innovations should be designed carefully to ensure that they are wellstructured and implemented strategically in accordance with local contexts and needs (sharma et al., 2013). for instance, in rural locations where students and their households are often preoccupied with livelihoodsustaining activities, it will be necessary to assign homework that can fit around or be conducted alongside these responsibilities. including parents in educational planning may be beneficial as it might enhance parental interest in schooling and their willingness to help their children with homework. in bangladesh, students who asked for and received help from their parents were nearly 50 percent less likely to drop out than those who asked for but did not receive help (sabates et al., 2013). in support of our final expectation, it is likely that public school students had a different educational experience than did those attending private institutions, where there were notably more male employees with less experience. classes were also smaller in private schools. this could be the direct result of fees associated with attaining a private education (wietzke, 2011), which may result in classrooms containing primarily wealthier children. this social exclusion is exacerbated in madagascar, where private institutions tend to occur in wealthier urban settings (wietzke, 2011). math and science teachers in the public schools we sampled were less likely to instruct in french, which might be why significantly fewer of their students were estimated to be fluent in french. despite numerous disparities, the same proportions of students were estimated to progress through public and private schools. also as expected, teachers at rural schools in our study faced unique challenges in educating their students. we found that there are fewer incentives for households in remote locations to invest in schooling. this is because rural students often lack local options for secondary or university education (as evident from our dataset, table 2; handa, 1999). in addition, a large percentage of the rural labor force in developing countries is engaged in low-skill primary production jobs (glewwe et al., 2011; gylfason, 2001; oyelere, 2007). furthermore, although we found that science and math classrooms were more crowded in urban settings, the lower studentteacher ratios in rural settings did not necessarily indicate better education in rural areas. this could be because children in rural locations, who typically live in households that are worse off socioeconomically that their urban counterparts, are needed to assist in agricultural tasks and therefore are simply not going to school (urquiola, 2003). the teachers we interviewed highlighted financial and food insecurity as reasons why they struggle to educate students effectively. these are common concerns for rural families in developing countries (hannum et al., 2014), and often result in parents taking students out of school during certain seasons (e.g. during rice harvests) to assist with domestic chores and/or earn income to meet family needs (glewwe & kremer, 2006; glewwe et al., 2011; pangeni, 2014). this practice could explain why malagasy teachers in our sample raised student absence as an issue, and why some observed that student performance fluctuated throughout the year. by not attending school, it becomes more difficult for rural inhabitants to find higher-paying jobs and to progress out of poverty (gylfason, 2001). nonetheless, certain interventions can counteract pressures to take children out of school to earn money (glewwe & kremer, 2006). for instance, the provision of mid-day meals reduced student absenteeism, increased enrolment, and significantly increased the number of years of education completed by students in india 130 global education review 1(4) (dreze & kingdon, 2001; agrawal, 2014). however, this might not be an appropriate solution under all circumstances. glewwe et al. (2011) found that the provision of meals in schools in developing countries positively affected student test scores in just six out of 13 cases. this highlights the need to design interventions that are locally appropriate. conclusions and recommendations our study indicates that students in science and math classes in madagascar – similar to those in other developing countries – are subjected to large class sizes and may be frequently repeating grade levels. students often also lack the language skills needed to learn course material and advance professionally after completing school. in addition, science and math teachers in madagascar – while having a relatively extensive combination of formal education and professional experience – may lack advanced training in their subjects, may have inadequate french language skills to teach students in french, and be limited by insufficient access to teaching materials. finally, educational experiences may differ between private and public schools, and between rural and urban locations, in madagascar. our study indicates that there are at least five aspects of the education system that could be targeted to improve the effectiveness of science and math instruction in madagascar: (1) classroom size; (2) grade repetition; (3) resource availability; (4) french language skills; and (5) educational disparities. first, reducing class sizes in madagascar – although it may not be financially feasible for all subjects (hattie, 2005) – could be especially beneficial for mathematical disciplines (breton, 2014), or in urban areas where larger classrooms are found. second, following successful programs in other countries (manacorda, 2012; sabates et al., 2013; unesco, 2012), grade repetition could be eliminated in favor of automatic promotion supplemented by informal remedial education. third, increasing the supply of pedagogical materials to schools could also help improve student learning. fourth, there are several ways to address the lack of french language skills among students and teachers in madagascar. to increase student understanding of science and math topics, we suggest either: (1) bilingual science and math education starting in primary school; or (2) facilitating a gradual transition from malagasy to french throughout the education system, thereby eliminating the sudden language switch that occurs between primary and secondary school. to increase the ability of teachers to communicate in french, we recommend that schools: (a) take steps to enhance existing teachers’ skills in the language and place additional weight on french skills as a condition of employment for new hires; and (b) train teachers to facilitate a gradual transition from using native to professional languages across grade levels, while also providing effective math and science education. rural public schools – where teachers were less likely to instruct in french and students are less likely to be exposed to colonial languages in their day-to-day lives – should not be overlooked when implementing such procedures. nationwide teacher education programs have been recommended as a means to overcome inequity between rural and urban communities in developing countries in asia (sharma, et al., 2013). resource equalization across schools, such as the p-900 program in chile, is also likely to reduce rural/urban disparities (manacorda, 2012). it should be noted that, where formal investment in teacher training is not available, informal interventions – such as discussion groups and workshops – may be cheaper, yet effective, alternatives (sharma et al., 2013). fifth, local or regional interventions could target disparities in educational quality. at present, most developing countries enforce barriers to student success in madagascar 131 single, centralized curricula (glewwe & kremer, 2006). these are beneficial in that they often provide common minimum standards and can be adopted by schools that otherwise lack the resources to develop their own curricula. they are also likely to make it easier for students and teachers to adapt following transfers to new schools. however, given the heterogeneity in educational background, school quality, language, and the external pressures faced by students in different regions, designing single curricula that are appropriate for all students is difficult, if not inappropriate (glewwe & kremer, 2006). thus, we support greater local control of educational systems, which has already been granted in some areas (e.g. in the case of non-formal education centers in india and educo schools in el salvador; glewwe & kremer, 2006). in general, cross-country evidence points towards positive outcomes from devoting resources to local governments to allow for local autonomy and collaboration in educational decision-making (provided that there is an accountability system in place; glewwe et al., 2011; sharma et al., 2013). this approach could also lead to – and benefit from – more community participation in the education system. finally, we encourage continued education-related data collection efforts across madagascar; baseline data which could be used to assess and target interventions to improve the quality of science and math education in the country was lacking or outdated. for instance, many teachers and school directors could not provide accurate estimates of enrolment rates at their institutions, while government education officials – in some cases – could not provide us with the number of schools and students in their precincts. these data, along with more detailed information regarding student learning, are needed in order for the malagasy government and social development agencies to design effective, decentralized support programs to supplement science and math education in the country. notes 1. we could not find comparable data on intake rates prior to this date. 2. population estimates were obtained from: ilo program; 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(2011). universal primary education, private schooling and interreligious inequality: the case of madagascar. second draft. rethinking development in an age of scarcity and uncertainty: new values, voices and alliance for increased resilience, 19 – 22. university of york.downloaded march 16, 2013 from http://eadi.org/gc2011/wietzke-492.pdf. world bank. (2000). world development indicators 2000. world bank, washington, dc, usa. world bank. (2008). the challenge of expanding secondary education and training in madagascar. africa region human development department. working paper no. 141, washington, dc: the world bank world bank. (2011). world development report 2011 conflict, security, and development. .washington, dc: the world bank. downloaded march 16, 2013 from http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intwdrs/re sources/wdr2011_full_text.pdf. world bank. (2012). world development indicators 2012. washington, dc: the world bank. acknowledgements we thank patric banaike, edwin peterson, and sthelastine rasoanirina for logistical and translation assistance. we thank the communities of antsiranana i, mahamasina, aniverano nord, and ambondromifehy for their hospitality. this research was completed in partnership with the ladybug project inc. and with guidance from the temple university institutional review board. we thank dr. melissa schaefer for her assistance in editing this manuscript. this material is based upon work supported by a national science foundation graduate research fellowship under grant no. (dge-1144462) to ker, a philadelphia louis stokes alliance for minority participation scholarship to aag, and a national science foundation grant (deb1257916) to bjs. any opinion, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. we dedicate this paper to the memory of bryan p. hessert, who died while the manuscript was being reviewed. about the authors(s) abigail wills has researched subsistence use of mangroves in northern madagascar and currently works on communal forest conservation and rural development projects in tanzania. kim reuter’s interests include education, public health, and conservation issues in subsaharan africa. 134 global education review 1(4) arleen gudiel has a bachelor’s degree in biology and is interested in conservation and community development issues internationally. bryan hessert graduated with a degree in economics and focused his career on advising students at the university level, first as a peer advisor and later as a liberal arts academic advisor. brent sewall’s research focuses on the ecology and conservation of threatened vertebrates and forest and cave communities in sub-saharan africa and north america. the ladybug project is a us-based nonprofit organization that has been undertaking small education and healthcare outreach programs in the african countries of equatorial guinea and madagascar since 2010. the ladybug project inc., 401 w. dauphin st., enola, pa, 17025, usa figure 1: map of northern madagascar, where the research was conducted. the locations of the five survey towns are indicated using stars. roads are depicted with black lines. table 2: population estimates for our study sites.2 aresearchers visited two public secondary schools in ambilobe and only one of the two public primary schools in aniverano nord. bonly one teacher was present in mahamasina. figure 2: the language of instruction in math and science classes, as cited by teachers of primary, secondary, and university level institutions. figure 3: the language of instruction used by k-12 teachers in the public and private school systems in madagascar. microsoft word social studies book review 120 global education review 4 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: beilinson, orel (2017). social studies for the twenty-first century. [review of the book social studies for secondary schools: teaching to learn, learning to teach by alan j. singer]. global education review, 4 (1). 120-121. book review social studies for the twenty-first century “social studies for secondary schools: teaching to learn, learning to teach” by alan j. singer by orel beilinson       accumulating in its pages over 30 years of experience in the classroom and in research, social studies for secondary schools is a masterpiece and true textbook for studentteachers and young teachers of social studies. it combines the standard “teacher education” textbook, mixing rich practice with some theoretical background based on a personal educational philosophy, with a “self-help guide” or “cookbook”—even at times a workbook—that seeks to give young teachers a platform through which they can mold their character as a social studies educator. it is worth mentioning early on that social studies for secondary schools is written in the light of “democratic education” that follows “the traditions of maxine greene and john dewey” (8). in adopting this philosophical approach to education—one that is generally consistent with the way public (and private) education is heading—this text encourages building “democratic communities” in the classroom, calls for pluralism in opinions and a variety of experiences, and endorses active learning and critical engagement with the material, often blurring the line between academic study and personal exploration. after the first chapter, which serves as a general introduction, the five subsequent chapters (chapters 2-6) are grouped under the title “thinking about social studies.” chapter 2 focuses on history, introducing key concepts of historical thought and the historical profession in a way that can be (and should be) applied to the classroom, such as the nature of historical facts and the work of the historian. chapter 3 offers a more holistic view of the social studies and social sciences, linking history, economics, and other disciplines, while emphasizing the integrative nature of the “bigger picture” that this subject matter provides. chapter 4 assumes a more applied character, bridging the theoretical foundations and assumptions of social studies for the twenty-first century 121     social studies with the classroom for the first step of teaching: planning your goals. the following chapter discusses the “political” dimension of teaching social studies and beyond (in a manner that makes the title of this chapter misleading). consequently, it brings to the floor such questions as “should teachers discuss their opinions in class?” and “how can teachers empower students?” the last chapter in this section discusses curriculum planning. the second section of social studies for secondary schools is about “preparing to teach social studies.” while the last section of part one ended in curriculum planning, the first chapter of this section (chapter 7) takes the individual unit as its subject; the second chapter (chapter 8) subsequently covers the individual lesson. finally, chapter 9 discusses activity-based lessons. each chapter in this section, even more than the sections before it, is full of practical suggestions, full-length samples, and a lot of freedom, encouraging each teacher to develop his or her own ideas about teaching and different classroom practices. the last four chapters are grouped as “implementing your ideas.” chapter 10 discusses “controversy-centered, thematic, and interdisciplinary units.” it is followed by a section focusing on project-based learning (pbl). chapter 12 centers on assessment. the book’s last chapter provides a thorough treatment of classroom resources, ranging from computers to movies to fair use of copyrighted materials. the discussion of computers in the learning process, however, should be updated as many more possibilities now exist, including kahoot and edmodo, while some sites mentioned in the chapter are no longer active. overall, this is an excellent starting point for new social studies teachers. with its emphasis on classroom practices grounded in theory, it is ideal for teachers still fashioning their identity as educators who seek guidance in developing healthy, learner-centered social studies classrooms. its unique format, blending features of textbooks, cookbooks, and self-help guides, reflects the author’s extensive experiences in the classroom and makes this book especially attractive for teacher training programs. however, it also works as a self-study book. one striking omission in social studies for secondary schools is the “technological turn” in education. one would expect such a book to elaborate much more on the options available to educators made by recent technological advances, starting with “online activism” and culminating in “flipped lessons.” nevertheless, it is perhaps the only disappointment in over 400 pages of tips, tricks, and scholarly analysis of educational issues in social studies of the highest quality. consequently, this omission does not significantly impede the overall quality of this volume. “social studies for secondary schools: teaching to learn, learning to teach.” 4th ed. by alan j. singer. new york: routledge, 2015. isbn: 978-0-415-82658-7 about the author alan j. singer is professor of secondary education and coordinator of social studies education in the department of teaching, literacy, and leadership at hofstra university. about the reviewer orel beilinson is the principal and a lecturer of history/social studies at harari college worldwide.   88 global education review 3(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mukeredzi, tabitha grace (2016). the “journey to becoming”: pre-service teachers’ experiences and understandings of rural school practicum in a south african context. global education review, 3(1). 88-107 the “journey to becoming” pre-service teachers’ experiences and understandings of rural school practicum in a south african context tabitha grace mukeredzi durban university of technology, south africa abstract that rural schools suffer from issues of hard to staff and harder to stay has been well documented in extant literature. however, the literature seems to indicate inadequate teacher preparation for work in rural schools. literature also demonstrates that teaching in rural settings ostensibly requires relevant knowledge and skills to cope with various eventualities, and complexities in those contexts. one way to cope with these complexities is for teacher education programmes to adequately prepare pre-service teachers for work in rural environments. this paper reports the experiences and understandings of 15 bachelor of education student teachers who took part in a four-week residential teaching practice whilst living alongside the community in a rural south african setting. the researcher sought to understand their experiences and conceptions of rural school teaching during their professional journeys to becoming professionals through this form of residential practicum in a rural setting. the pre-service teachers’ daily reflective journals and audio-taped collaborative reflection sessions constitute the data of evolving constructions of the value of this rural residential practicum towards their understanding of rurality, rural teaching and rural life as they develop as teachers. the paper illustrates that exposure to rurality in teacher preparation promotes better understanding of rural issues and pedagogy, dispelling myths and misconceptions and, broadening students’ career prospects in these settings which may ultimately foster interest in country teaching. keywords rural, teaching practice, pre-service teacher, experiences, rural teacher education project, introduction recruitment of high quality teachers is seen as critical for the future of rural education provision globally (adie & barton, 2012). internationally, many rural schools face pressures of hard to staff, harder to stay quality teachers than their urban counterparts (arnold, newman, gaddy, & dean, 2005; eppley, 2009; green, 2009; kline, white & lock, 2013; lingam, 2012; lowe, 2006; miller, 2012; mitchell, de lange, balfour & islam, 2011; monk, 2007; mukeredzi, 2013; pennefather, corresponding author: tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban university of technology, indumiso midlands campus, po box 1334, durban 4000, south africa email: mukeredzit@dut.ac.za mailto:mukeredzit@dut.ac.za the “journey to becoming” 89 2012; white, 2006). this impacts the quality and equity of educational outcomes for rural learners and communities creating a big challenge for many education systems (arnold et al., 2005; green, 2009; lock, 2008; mitchell et al., 2011; sharplin, 2002). it however does not appear that preparing more teachers is the solution to this staffing crisis, rather a re orientation of teacher education curricula and a focus on how teachers for rural communities can be more effectively prepared is the key. extant literature (adie & barton, 2012; islam, 2010; 2011; mitchell et al., 2011; moletsane, 2012) confirms that measures to effectively prepare teachers for positions in rural and remote schools need to be addressed by teacher education. research into rural and remote education (adie & barton, 2012; balfour, 2012; halsey, 2005; islam, 2012; mitchell et al., 2011; pennefather, 2011) supports this claim, blaming teacher education for not doing enough to equip pre-service teachers with the skills and knowledge required for rural and remote school teaching. the implementation of such strategies and programmes in many teacher education systems has tended to be haphazard and limited (sharplin, 2009). south africa is no exception. islam (2010), arguing for rural schooluniversity partnerships, points out that teacher development is fundamental to changing south african rural education. such partnerships would contribute to pre-service and in-service teacher professional development and, promote the rural as attractive and not deficient, inferior, and undesirable (balfour, 2012; mitchell et al., 2011; moletsane, 2012; pennefather, 2011). in light of this, teacher education institutions need to envision alternative ways to generate interest and supports for development of teachers for rural and remote settings. one way to address the crisis is for teacher education programmes to expose pre-service teachers to the realities of living and teaching in rural contexts during teacher preparation. this may help broaden their career prospects in these settings and ultimately develop interest in country teaching. this paper reports on experiences and understandings of a cohort of 15 bachelor of education pre-service teachers, generated within a specific rural school-university partnership initiative adopted in a teaching practice (tp) design striving to address teacher preparation for rurality as its rationale. the model was designed to prepare cohorts of between 14 and 20 student teachers annually, to work alongside practicing teachers in rural schools, and to promote better understanding of rural issues and pedagogy (islam, 2010), ultimately fostering interest in rural school teaching. the rural school-university partnership initiative entitled the rural teacher education project (rtep) set out to examine alternative tp models of placement to service the specific educational and learning needs of rural schools (balfour, 2012). contrary to traditional practices where single individuals are attached to a school during practicum, these pre-service teachers were placed at one school, shared residential facilities alongside the school and lived in a community of both teacher educators and fellow students. the aim of this paper is to explore their experiences and understandings during their journeys to becoming (feiman-nemser & buchmann, 1989) during tp within a large cohort in a rural school. it addresses two questions: how do pre-service teachers experience rural school tp? how do they understand these experiences as they become teaching professionals? this research is distinctive as it involves a group of pre-service teachers experiencing tp in one rural school and living alongside a rural community, in a commune of peers and teacher educators. the communal living arrangements and the structured opportunities for personal and collaborative reflections were intended enhance students’ learning, reflection and reflexion on their experiences and conceptions within the context of their rural practicum. reflection here 90 global education review 3(1) implies standing “outside” and analysing one's experiences, while reflexion represents looking “inward” inside oneself during the analysis. the rural teacher education project (rtep) the rtep was a rural school–university partnership initiative of the faculty of education in conjunction with rural schools in the northern districts of kwazulu-natal province of south africa. kwazulu-natal is the second largest province of south africa both in terms of population (10.27 million after gauteng 12.27 million) and land area. it comprises large rural areas and, large parts of previous homeland areas across the province (punt, 2008). “homelands” are deep rural areas in which native black south africans were forced to live by the apartheid government (wedekind, 2005). one of the few such partnership projects in south africa, the rtep was first piloted in 2007, since then has annually taken cohorts of students to experience rurality in these districts. this paper explores the 2012 cohort. while teacher education programmes in this institution did not discriminate against rural school tp placement, it was not a requirement that pre-service teachers be placed in such schools, but they were expected to experience practicum in both resourced and underresourced contexts (mukeredzi & mandrona, 2013). consequently, student teachers sought placements in urban schools where transportation and accommodation were easily accessible. the rtep was born partly to counter this urban bias, trying to re-orientate teacher education in the university’s education faculty to rural schools as vital sites for pre-service teacher learning thereby cultivating interest in rural teaching. the project combined research and teacher preparation approaches to explore ways of making teaching/learning significant and, professionally developmental by placing groups of pre-service teachers to work in rural school settings with practicing teachers (islam et al. 2011). the project goal was to make teacher educators and pre-service teachers aware of the challenging but stimulating or exciting possibilities of rural education, and to prepare teachers for rural school teaching, generating knowledge through mentorship, classroom practice and reflection on teaching experiences and the rural context (mitchell et al., 2011). in conceptualizing this partnership project balfour, mitchell, and moletsane (2008) theorized that understanding the subjective perceptions of south african rural youth could be helpful to teachers. islam (2011) noted that partnerships can contribute to teacher preparation, particularly for rural schools, as they can provide an entry point for supporting teachers, learners and communities, and be a development path for young people who choose teaching as a career particularly in rural contexts. such contextbased rural school–university partnerships can be solutions for making teacher education more responsive to rural school educational needs (islam, 2011, pennefather, 2011). moreover, collaborations could also shape perceptions and attitudes towards rurality and professional development of new teachers. the cohorts of pre-service teachers had an opportunity to experience rurality within the context of their residential tp in rural schools through this partnership. specifically the rtep goals were to enable trainees to: first, to experience teaching and learning in a rural school living working with experienced teachers and community members; second, to understand the realities of life and work in rural contexts by living alongside the community; third, to contribute to educational development in a rural school; fourth, to gain first-hand opportunities to observe and talk to rural based teachers about rural life and teaching practices; and fifth, to establish and build networks with the “journey to becoming” 91 teachers within their specific subject specializations in rural schools; and sixth, to offer pre-service teachers from the city an introduction to rural schools (rtep recruitment brochure, 2012). the south african education system categorizes learning stages into phases. foundation phase refers to grades r to 3, intermediate phase grades 4 to 6, senior phase grades 7 to 9 and, further education training (fet) phase grades 10 to 12.the rtep was widely publicized in the school of education and pre-service teachers formally applied. to be selected, they had to: express enthusiasm for teaching in rural schools; be in second, third or fourth year of study; be in senior phase or further education and training. additionally the had to specialise in one or two of these subjects: technology, management studies, english, computer studies, mathematics and science.. pre-service teachers specializing in foundation phase teaching and able to speak a little isizulu were also considered. isizulu is the local home language and the language of learning and teaching at foundation phase level in this district and most rural districts in kwazulu-natal province. for efficient in-field coordination, the project team required on-site leadership, thus, at least two advisors were appointed, one with a phd in teacher education. that is how i joined the rtep in 2011. at the time i was a resident post-doctorate with a phd in teacher education and originally from zimbabwe. in the advisor capacity i saw myself as both insider and outsider regarding my interactions with the different groups within rtep. these identities were flexible depending on the activities or the day. many times though, it felt like i was in between, i was not a south african national and, i came as an add-on to the research activities five years after the rtep had been running. advisors and student teachers were accommodated at a guesthouse close to the school. they helped drive students to and from school every day and remained at the school to provide on-spot guidance and support. the rtep leaders created this form of residential arrangement to promote a sense of professional community among students and teacher educators while professionalizing the experience through individual and collaborative reflections and academic mentorship (mitchell et al., 2011). every evening on school days, i led students through debriefing and reflection sessions. although i was an authority figure in this sense, many times i felt vulnerable. i had to understand the operations of a school which was transitioning from private to public school governance before assisting the pre-service teachers to navigate that rural setting. again, i was dealing with students of multiple races, experiences, cultures and backgrounds (see appendix). the situation was further compounded by the fact that i neither understood nor spoke the local language, isizulu. the rural context in south africa the concept of rurality remains complex and difficult to define. hlalele (2012) pointed out that defining rural evades those who try to understand it because of its ambiguity and the fallible comparison with urban settings. generally all rural areas are confronted with social ills like disease, poverty, low literacy levels, low learner achievement, inadequate facilities and services, unfavourable policies and, low self-esteem of those who live and work there due to conceptions that living or working in rural settings is low-grade (johnson & strange, 2009; myende & chikoko, 2014; pennefather, 2011 ). balfour et al. (2011) add that rurality is concerned with space, isolation, community, poverty, disease, neglect, backwardness, marginalization, depopulation, conservatism, racism, resettlement, corruption, entropy and exclusion. these challenges lead to associating rurality with deficiencies and disadvantage (balfour et al., 2011; moletsane, 2012). 92 global education review 3(1) rurality in this study is understood as synonymous with remote. the term remote area refers to an underclass model describing a notion of rurality in social development (chikoko, 2011). consequently rurality signifies social disadvantage on the people under discussion. chikoko adds that people in such settings are usually socially excluded, fully or in part from active participation in national mainstream socio-political activities. in south africa, other features of rurality include low literacy levels among adults and low quality education in schools. defining rural, wedekind (2005) explains that during the south african apartheid, the land act group areas’ act of 1953 and separate development act policies forced native black south africans to live in deep rural or homeland areas. the former homelands are characterized by poor infrastructure, services/facilities and, either considerably dense homesteads or villagestyle settlements. today the poorest and least developed south african rural communities are located in the former homelands of eastern cape, limpopo and kwazulu-natal provinces where conditions of poverty and underdevelopment are depicted by the poor education quality available there (gardiner, 2008). thus, most south african rural schools are deficient in learning and infrastructural resources, basic services and facilities. having been disregarded as sites for development for a long time, south african rural schools and communities compete with urban areas for resources (teacher development summit, 2009). lacking in resources, infrastructure and human capital, rural areas have in some instances deteriorated to such an extent that they are not seen as an attractive choice for a teaching career or for living (mitchell et al., 2011). a thriving economy, adequate health facilities, and quality education are often nonexistent, contributing to poverty, illness, and lower literacy levels. hugo, jack, wedekind and wilson (2010) discovered that schools were without toilets on site and more than 50 learners used one toilet, there was no source of electricity or water source near or on site, making schools rely on borehole or rainwater harvesting. the south african government through the many policy initiatives and the establishment of the rural education directorate currently acknowledges rural education as priority (michell, et al., 2011). however, moletsane (2012) lamented that rural education still remains plagued by substantial challenges. mukeredzi and mandrona (2013) attributed this to issues around implementation and links between rural realities and government response which remain unresolved. this is notwithstanding that many school-age children reside in rural settings. the world bank (2013) reported that approximately 40% of the south african population is located in nonurban areas, and in kwazulu-natal province approximately 54% of the population of resides in rural areas (statistics south africa, 2011). gardiner (2008) added that kwazulu-natal has about 3 000 rural schools accommodating over 1 000 000 learners. this suggests that providing quality education to rural areas contributes to developing a democratic society (mukeredzi & mandrona, 2013). there is strong international cognizance that institutions and schools involved in teacher education should develop strong partnerships for more effective pre-service teacher training and support for rural school teaching appointments (haugalokken & ramberg, 2007; multi-site teacher education research project, 2003). teacher education should form partnerships with learning sites, engaging in collaborative reflective practices, continuously examining and challenging existing practices and theories to generate new philosophies consistent with contemporary south africa (samuel, 1998) and the call for teacher preparation for rural contexts. such partnerships could help make teacher education more responsive to rural school contexts while the “journey to becoming” 93 shaping perceptions and professional growth of a new crop of teachers (islam, 2010). rtep assumed that the cohort model of tp could be an effective way of fostering partnerships and the development of teachers for rural teaching. haugalokken and ramberg (2007) distinguished between two partnership models: where cooperation is controlled by the teacher education institution; and a cooperative model where there is equal partnership between schools and the teacher education institutions. the latter, is the type of model the rtep wanted to establish. the research site in 2012, the rtep was taken to masiwa (pseudonym) combined school approximately 150 km north of durban, for the first time. a combined school is a school that combines primary and secondary sectors under one principal, with two deputy principals as operational leaders. this school presented a perfect choice due to its combined structure which enabled placing the entire cohort under one roof. the school was centrally located within rural village settlements and had a total enrolment of approximately 1450 learners, 850 in primary and 600 in the secondary sector. due its location; at the centre of many densely populated villages and, with no other school nearby, masiwa inevitably serviced a large enrolment as it drew its students from multiple villages. all the rtep pre-service teachers were placed at this school for their practicum. the school exhibited a particular appeal/charm, ethos and culture: good discipline, cleanliness and orderliness, neatly dressed and respectful learners, a calm and business-like approach to teaching/learning. these qualities were not extraordinary given the catholic governance under which the school had been, often linked to autocratic leadership practices. the principal lamented under-resourcing noticeable in large classes; grades 8–10 with 70–80 learners. office space was in short supply, consequently the rtep team was accommodated in the school library. although this arrangement was ideal for student consultation and support, it somewhat created distinct communities: one for students and the other for school staff. again a joint staffroom would provide students another way of ascertaining how things worked within the rural school community, as it was in such situations that they would most ably gain insight into the rituals, routines and jargon of the rural school and, would learn both from listening and speaking as legitimate members of the school. each student was attached to at least two mentors. mentors were expected to offer preservice teachers moral, social and professional support through demonstration lessons, and lesson observations and feedback to enhance their development. other school staff would support their learning and integration into the rural school life. mentor selection was done by the school and, student-mentor partnering was based on subject specialisation. method a qualitative research design was adopted for exploring experiences and understandings of rural school tp for a cohort of 15 purposively selected b.ed. pre-service teachers. ten were female and five were male. their biographical data shows diversity in teaching phase, specialization, year of study, race, age and gender. there was one white, three indian and 10 black students (table 1). this diversity was valuable for additional tiers of support. their mean age was 23.4 and the actual ages ranged from 19 to 40 years. 94 global education review 3(1) table 1 participants’ biographical data st(udent) race age gender phase level specialisation 1 black 24 m fet 4 accounting, bus management 2 black 40 m fet 4 english, isizulu 3 black 20 f fet 2 english, arts/drama 4 black 32 f fet 4 accounting, english 5 black 21 f fet 4 english 6 indian 20 f fet 4 maths, biology 7 indian 21 f fet 3 biology, history 8 black 20 f f/phase 2 all f/phase subjects 9 black 21 f fet 3 biology, nat science 10 black 32 f f/phase 4 all f/phase subjects 11 black 21 m fet 3 mathematics, isizulu 12 black 20 m fet 4 physics, mathematics 13 indian 20 m fet 3 computer science, accounting 14 white 19 f fet 2 biology, sports science 15 white 20 f fet 2 geography, sports science table 1 preparation for tp although pre-service teachers were prepared for professional practice in their undergraduate programmes, the rtep mount additional, oneday workshops for students and school-based mentors separately before commencing the fourweek tp. these workshops were intended to build positive, supportive relationships with the school and expose both mentors and students to the university expectations of mentoring support during practicum. the school principal and two school-based mentors attended the students’ workshop to discuss the school’s expectations of pre-service teachers during tp and to enlighten them on some of the contextual issues around rural school teaching. however, in retrospect, these one-day mentoring workshops tended to be insufficient for translation into effective mentoring practice. at the conclusion of the students’ workshop, i requested the pre-service teachers to document their reflections on the workshop including their views and understandings of rural school tp responding to guiding questions below. before using these questions, i asked one of the rtep leaders for comments and, then piloted them with five students. in each case modifications were made. again, before and after using the questions for the first time with students, i discussed them in great depth to obtain their perspective. all these efforts were intended to enhance rigor.  how did it go?  what did you experience? how did you feel? (satisfied, bored)  why did things happen that way?  what does all this mean to you personally and professionally?  what could have been done differently?  what are your understandings/views about tp in a rural school? the “journey to becoming” 95 these questions provided a framework for students’ individual and collaborative reflections. data generation and data sources throughout tp, pre-service teachers were required to engage in daily journaling of their thoughts, observations and experiences, and would draw on these recordings during collaborative reflection sessions. the collaborative conversations were held between 16h30 and 19h00 on each school day and all were audio-recorded. students would reflect more broadly on teaching/learning in the rural classroom and on rurality itself, sharing their experiences and views about rurality, their teaching activities, describing, cross-examining, and interrogating them. such engagements would promote their ability to articulate and justify what they were doing; evaluate their lessons, approaches and language, successes and failures, their own learning therefrom, and what they would do differently. engaging in rural school teaching exposed pre-service teachers to the challenge-filled reality of the south african education context and, through continuous reflection on classroom and contextual activities, attitudes, and experiences, pre-service teachers built a deeper understanding of what it meant to be a teacher in a rural setting (mitchell, et al., 2011). in retrospect, compelling students to articulate and reflect on their classroom experiences may be viewed as a way of getting them to conform to the rtep requirements which approach could be regarded as producing some form of contrived collegiality (hughes, 2012) to comply with the normative expectations of classroom reflection and action and/or project participation requirements. the data for this paper was drawn from students’ reflective journals and transcripts of the audio-recorded collaborative reflection sessions. the prolonged engagement in fieldwork, the steps taken in the research procedures to ensure the perspectives of these participants were authentically gathered, accurately interpreted and represented in the findings through verbatim quotations giving them their own voice, enhanced rigor. again, while participants were aware that they were being video-recorded during collaborative reflection sessions, the recorder was employed discretely with their knowledge. further, the thick descriptions provided and data triangulation also helped to enhance rigor. the notion of thick description derives from the tradition of interpretive ethnography in anthropology, and involves “deep, dense, detailed accounts” of a phenomenon of inquiry with particular consideration of the context(s) in which it occurs. the purpose of thick description is that it creates verisimilitude, statements that produce for the readers the feelings that they have experienced, or could experience, the events being described in a study. thus credibility is established through the lens of readers who read a narrative account, and are transported into a setting or situation (lietz & zayas, 2010). data analysis data were analysed through content analysis. content analysis involved carefully and systematically examining and interpreting particular texts to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings (plunkett & dyson, 2011). i read transcriptions several times and listened to audio tapes over and over to determine themes, while comparing and contrasting them. i then repeated the process with all transcripts, re-examining the data and selecting quotes that represented each theme while ensuring fitness and representation across specialization, gender and race. the quotes would reveal and confirm participants’ accounts of their experiences and interpretations of their views about tp and working in a rural school. 96 global education review 3(1) data analysis was also informed by mauthner and doucet (2003) who suggested that the “interplay between our multiple social locations and how these intersect with the particularities of our own personal biographies need to be considered at analysis stage” (p. 419). students often deeply expressed analytical and fundamental experiences, but these recordings and collaborative reflection reports, remained mediated and obligatory objects. hence, may not genuinely epitomize students’ experiences as these activities were built into the rtep design requirements. again, the presence of teacher educators and peers may have mediated the quality and kinds of issues reflected on. however, the engaging and immersive analytical approach that i adopted to understand students’ accounts, and the synthesis of the often implicit tensions within a tp environment, augmented the analysis and provided another way of enhancing rigor. findings the aim of this paper was to explore a cohort of students’ experiences and understandings of practicum in a rural context through two questions: what are the pre-service teachers’ experiences of rural tp? how do they understand those experiences? in presenting findings, participants are identified by codes (e.g., st1). fears and worries about rural school tp pre-service teachers’ views about tp in a rural school at the end of the preparatory workshop generally indicated vague expectations of what teaching, working and living in a rural school looked like. three students acknowledged a lack of understanding of rurality and rural teaching highlighting only blurred views from media and word of mouth from peers. others had some idealized picture of tp in a rural school like “welcoming teachers”, “helpful staff and students, my university peers being empathetic, friendly and caring,” “a friendly residence,” “i don’t think i will be lonely”. others expressed concerns such as, “very demanding mentors,” “unsupportive mentors,” “teaching practice in a rural school is scary,” “i may have difficulties when i am far away from home,” “some dirty environment, with paper and clatter.” others who believed that distance from the city would limit access to resources indicated by such comments “i am worried about resources, rural schools are poor in resources and technology – it’s difficult to teach with few resources,” “it will be hard without adequate resources, teaching is poor without them.” the predominantly urban dwellers were concerned about understanding students from different economic, social, cultural and linguistic backgrounds. they envisioned “difficulties communicating with students in english,” “students who do not understand english,” “some unfriendly students,” “poorly disciplined and hard to manage students,” “difficulties motivating and controlling students.” “where anything goes, nobody really cares.” most of these concerns were erased after interacting with and experiencing the rural context. connecting with the rural context pre-service teachers were surprised by how much learners understood and spoke in english, the official language of teaching and learning in the school. st6: i am surprised that these learners understand and speak english. the following comments imply notions of viewing rural learners from a discourse of deficit. discourse of deficit broadly refers to erroneous beliefs that rural students are deficient or lacking in many respects including speaking english. this general overbearing discourse of insufficiency perceives rural school teaching as inferior and undesirable the “journey to becoming” 97 (pennefather, 2011). this realization of learners’ linguistic ability probably impacted positively on their conceptions and, attitudes towards rurality and rural learners. others commented on the environment: my first impression – this school structure and environment are well kept, no litter that you can see anywhere, all windows intact, children well behaved and in clean uniforms, all wear shoes. (st1) tp here is the most important way of making you know about teaching and learning in a rural school because you experience it ... you see it for yourself. (st7) nobody can tell me about a rural school because i now know it. (st16) these experiences offered the pre-service teachers, particularly from urban and township backgrounds, a hands-on introduction to rurality and first-hand opportunities to observe and talk to rural-based teachers and learners about rural life, learning and rural teaching practices. comments also suggested an appreciation of the rural experience. pre-service teachers generally expressed satisfaction with the way things were organised in the school and how they were received. some comments made were: “the welcome by the principal made us feel wanted in this school” (st12) and “the way individual mentors welcomed and introduced us to various classes and, held meetings with us, made the excitement to teach here even more” (st5) “everybody is warm, welcoming” (st13). pre-service teachers in the 3rd and 4th year of study commented that the overall welcome by the school was a factor that gave them confidence as they indicated that they had not experienced that in their previous practicums. however, two students met with their mentors but had unfruitful meetings: “i was introduced to my mentors, but as a first day of term, they requested that we meet the following day because things are a little chaotic” (st11). another three were frustrated by not meeting with their mentors. st8 in the evening session complained: i did not meet my mentors. it’s annoying, i don’t know who they are. it made me feel like a stranger and, unwelcome which makes me nervous. … the principal and head of department didn’t know where they are. making students feel welcome to the school on the first day is critical for placing them in good stead particularly in unfamiliar rural contexts (sharplin, 2002). sentiments also suggested some unpreparedness on the part of the school. dates had been communicated in advance and a reminder sent to the school a week before our arrival. while this was an official school day, where all staff were expected to attend, it was not clear whether management was aware of some of the teachers’ absences. looking back however, getting students to commence tp on the first day of term may not be such a good idea. generally, pre-service teachers commented positively about being viewed as colleagues, for example st3 recorded: you feel good being treated as professionals, as members of staff, able both to learn from them and also to contribute the expertise that you have. negative emotional experiences usually exist when there is a distance between individuals, for instance where pre-service teachers feel a sense of loss or are devalued. preservice teachers’ comments revealed that they were valued. their situated identity (putman & borko, 2000) also emanated from performing some out-of-class roles. st9 commented: 98 global education review 3(1) being assigned netball trainer to prepare the team for a big district competition was huge…. you learn to discipline learners outside class. in my previous tp no one ever talked to you or thought you were capable of doing anything. st 4 said: i am proud of myself, being able to lead assembly with my lecturers and the whole school watching, taking charge, controlling everything, it was a good learning experience. the ways in which pre-service teachers engaged in the many school activities often had a significant impact on both student teachers and school-based teacher educators. “fitting in” was important as often both pre-service teachers and the school used professional placements as opportunity to assess “fitness” for purposes of future employment. murphy and angelski (1997) noted that the "ideal" rural teacher is certified to teach more than one subject or grade level, teaching students of diverse abilities and, supervising extra-curricular activities. students’ experiences helped to dispel some of the myths and misconceptions about rural education and rural schools. one misconception is related to a deterioration of moral values, neglect for discipline and low motivation to learning in rural schools (kiggundu, & nayimuli, 2009). at the end of the preparatory workshop many students had expressed misapprehensions about poorly disciplined and hard to manage students, students who did not peak/understand english, who were unfriendly and difficult to control or motivate, an absence of a culture of teaching and learning, where anything goes, nobody really cared. these mistaken beliefs may have emanated from lack of knowledge/experience about rurality. from their interactions with learners and teachers and, through engagement in teaching and out-of-class activities, preservice teachers began to challenge those misconceptions. however, pre-service teachers acknowledged the value of preparation and commitment to teaching. the kids are disciplined and, eager to learn, some are really sharp. as a teacher you need to be well prepared for your class, once you are prepared you enjoy working with kids . . . this is a school in which i would gladly accept a position (st7). i was amazed at how respectful learners are towards new people, i felt very welcomed. (st6) a real eye opener to see how much learners appreciate education in rural areas. (st9) another generally accepted notion that was challenged was that effective teaching could not take place in under-resourced schools. while they acknowledged that performance resources (which enhance/change how teachers can accomplish teaching tasks e.g., overhead projector) and pedagogical resources (which focus primarily on transforming the teacher’s competencies e.g., reading materials) (putnam & borko, 2000) were vital for effective teaching and learning, they confirmed that underresourcing should not be an excuse for poor teaching. st11 recorded: it’s about creativity and innovativeness to teach effective. yes the rtep experience is opening us up to life and teaching in rural schools. i have seen that in rural areas resources are few …i now know how to improvise…i can teach effectively with minimum resources, all you need to do is think through your lesson, prepare and plan for it. while some students experienced some challenging discipline related situations, they viewed them as learning opportunities: the “journey to becoming” 99 there are a few kids driving me insane daily, but that’s how a normal classroom is set up. this will help me in the future because experience is what you get when you don’t get what you want, had these kids all been well behaved every time, i would not know techniques to discipline them. (st5) ideally the teaching role requires willingness to give both personal skills and professional knowledge, and a person who can mediate possible issues of conflict, invoking strategic knowledge (shulman, 1987) while remaining focused and maintaining a harmonious classroom environment. however, three second year students pointed out that four weeks was too short to understand complexities of rural settings. st3 documented: “four weeks is too short, you can’t be conclusive about rurality and its demands.” such sentiments may have been influenced by many factors, for example, this was their first teaching practice. connecting with the classroom the pre-service teachers were generally surprised by the effort teachers and learners put into their work, despite the limited resources. a number had assumed that learners were lazy and lacked motivation and, teachers were uncaring. these assumptions were challenged by an increasing understanding of the context and the barriers to learning faced by learners and teachers. many indicated that interacting with rural teachers and learners, teaching and being in the classroom were valuable opportunities to experience and understand rurality, rural teaching and rural life. for example st10 commented that: you learn a lot by doing the teaching, it’s fantastic. the most exciting thing is actually being in a rural classroom, working like a teacher, feeling how rural teaching and life are like, being part of it, teaching rural children, seeing the effort of teachers and learners in school work … really amazing. this was a good tp, a mind-blowing experience. i would jump at an opportunity to teach here if there is good accommodation. the pre-service teachers also viewed classroom practice as exposing them to the teaching profession and the nuances of practicing in a rural school. some described it as good preparation for the future as st4 said: the classrooms are small with lots of learners. i am sitting with 71 in 8a. it’s a challenge but i have to grab the bull by its horns and make it work, and i will. in the future i’ll be a teacher and this is what i am going to be faced with. so let me gain experience and perfect it. connecting with mentors many (10) of the pre-service teachers commented that they had enjoyed support and collaboration with their mentors. they acknowledged the value of the mentors’ professional knowledge and experience from the way they explained and justified to pre-service teachers how they organized and worked in their classrooms. a 3rd year student, st16 recorded: “these experiences make you question and reflect on your thoughts and attitudes”. the preservice teachers had expressed some anxieties about demanding expectations coming from mentors. these anxieties were challenged. some of those who had good mentors considered themselves fortunate because of the amount of support they received. the way they described their mentors demonstrates the value that they attached to mentoring relationships. i was very, very lucky, i gained valuable information from my mentor that will not only benefit me now but throughout my teaching career, how to move learners from what they know to new stuff. i think 100 global education review 3(1) tp also really depends on your mentor. (st1) the relationship i have with both my mentors is great, we learn from each other. they ask me to reflect on my lessons and their lessons. this experience has taught me that good mentoring really exists in these rural schools. (st11) we sit down before my lesson, i tell her what i am going to teach, my methods and everything. then after i have taught she asks me to think about my lesson and say how i feel it went and then we reflect together and discuss. it’s a good relation actually with both mentors. (st3) evidence suggests the current conceptualization of mentoring built on collegiality in the relationship (shank, 2005). generally the prime aim in giving oral feedback is to get the student to actually identify their strengths and weaknesses, the things they were happy with and those they would do differently in the future. thus, mentoring should help students not only to manage the learning, but also to explore, interpret and explain the how and why of what happened which then flows naturally into the next stage of the teaching cycle, (re)planning of the next lesson. while the majority of students had beneficial mentoring experiences, five reported minimal learning from the process. some mentors appeared to either have had a narrow view of “good” mentoring practice, or they lacked effective mentoring skills and an understanding of student teachers’ professional learning needs as they did not offer useful guidance. she was motherly if you know what i mean, very supportive, but she did not give me any developmental feedback about any of my teaching she would just say you are doing great. (st14) evidence suggested that these mentors appeared to believe that their role was essentially to provide emotional support. often, it was difficult to draw a line between being motherly and being a mentor who promotes mentee’s development into the teacher they want to be. other mentors did not allow their mentees enough time to observe them teaching: my mentor is not giving me enough time to observe. he should allow me to observe to see how things are done, not just make me teach, telling me what to teach and how to teach, his own approaches. (st9) often students wanted mentors to act as role models, effective practitioners who they could look up to and emulate. observation offered student teachers a great deal of learning and, a quick means to acquaint themselves with the teaching and then to know how to tackle it continuously. the mentors’ expert knowledge and personal experience provided them with ingredients for their own practice. evidence further implied that some mentors still practiced the craft apprenticeship approach of tp which required student teachers to do exactly as they were told by their mentors and what they see their mentors do. mentors should not “impose,” nor should they dictate the content of students’ classroom activities or the teaching methods (maynard, 2000). there were some mentors who were reluctant to hand their classes over to student teachers. st6 reflected: my mentor doesn’t want to give me more opportunities to teach alone, he does not seem to trust my ability, rather he just wants to teach with me, i really enjoyed it today on my own and i feel that the learners also had some fun. it was common for mentors to be concerned about how their learners were taught the “journey to becoming” 101 as the above comment reflects. rather than regarding pre-service teachers as knowledgeable colleagues, they viewed them as intruders who did not possess much teaching knowledge. connecting with peers and viewing self tp experiences that included peer collaborative reflection and mentoring provided opportunities for pre-service teachers to engage in integrated, structured interactions in which they could discuss the challenges posed by the diverse contextual conditions in their classrooms. students saw collaborative reflection meetings as vital for helping them reflect and reflex on their teaching and, the rural context as whole. st16 recorded: they help me deal with situations that i face during the day in the classroom. i suggest solutions to problems but they confirm them before i go to class. seemingly, collaborative conversations promoted a shift from individualistic to collaborative thinking and behaviour as students appeared to look up to peers to confirm their proposals and tentative solutions to problems. this participation also seemed to help in reimagining the “self,” seeing themselves in the bigger picture and, what that meant to them personally and professionally. st4 wrote: i now believe in my teaching ability. my peers encouraged me with ideas and comments. this made me confident. i can now talk comfortably in the group and say my mind. i have never felt like a teacher before, i realize this is where i should be. to me teaching is where i have been called, a life career … i do not mind where i am posted next year, even in a rural school. practicum generally provided authentic contexts where students experienced realities of teaching and confirmed whether or not they made the right career decision. others saw participation in the cohort as good preparation for classroom challenges in the future, as st11 commented: peers will ask you to think harder on your stuff. you have to say what you should have done differently before they give suggestions. this makes you learn. if they just give you answers you don’t learn, you won’t think. … makes you develop confidence to think and tackle your problems … that’s what a teacher should do, when we go out there you cannot be running to a colleague’s class every time you have a situation and in rural schools sometimes you are alone in the specialization. these pre-service teachers saw collaboration as having enhanced their selfconfidence through encouragement and teaching ideas. it apparently improved their personal dispositions as teachers, including selfawareness and empathy with different viewpoints. they became able to bring out the best in themselves through engagement in genuine dialogue (mukeredzi & mandrona, 2013). genuine dialogue requires ability to listen empathetically, look for common ground, probe ideas compassionately, opening up to new ideas, identifying challenges and acting as a critical friends irrespective of gender, race, cultural background or social class of participants. this makes equity a key feature (prince et al., 2010) as discussions occur irrespective of these human elements. discussion data revealed that pre-service teachers’ experiences and conceptions revolved around their connections with the rural context, learners, mentors and, peers. before commencing the practicum, many pre-service teachers’ had vague and somewhat negative views, understandings and expectations 102 global education review 3(1) of what teaching, working and living in a rural school was like as many had no prior experience. most of their concerns were wiped out after experiencing the rurality. the pre-service teachers (8) who had anticipated linguistic problems with learners had anxieties dispelled because learners understood and spoke english. sherwood (2000) lamented that many stereotypes about what rurality and rural education entails still exist, with expressions related to the unsophisticated, inferior intellectual capacity and backward nature of rural learners and their lack of knowledge regarding technological gadgets. such stereotypes associate rurality and rural learners with educational and social deficit, deficiency and needs (moletsane, 2012; pennefather, 2011). participants were also pleasantly surprised by the clean and well maintained school environment, the teaching/learning culture and the way they were welcomed into the school, contrary to prior misconceptions related to moral values, discipline and motivation to teaching/learning in rural schools that they had. such myths and misconceptions were dispelled after interactions with learners and teachers, and engaging in both teaching and out-of-class activities. adie and barton (2012) contended that teacher education and first years of teaching are a critical time for disrupting entrenched assumptions of rurality. all student teachers testified that they enjoyed and gained valuable learning experiences from classroom teaching. this kind of hands-on learning is what mclaughlin (1997) cited by mukeredzi & mandrona (2013) described as teaching/learning for understanding, which is an effective way to learn how to teach particular learners in particular contexts. it may also be that the allencompassing context created by the school setting and the support the rtep team offered promoted the pre-service teachers’ confidence to enjoy their classroom practice and rurality. many of the pre-service teachers commended teachers and learners for the effort they put into their work, despite under-resourcing, dispelling misconceptions about laziness and lack of motivation in rural teachers and learners (kiggundu, & nayimuli, 2009). they also gained better understanding of resource complexities in rural contexts but argued that under-resourcing should not be an excuse for poor teaching (islam, 2012). mentoring can be an effective catalyst that enhances learning through reflection as student teachers learn about the “self” in context. many pre-service teachers praised their mentors for providing curriculum guidance, observing lessons and offering constructive critique and feedback about teaching methods, and enhancing their reflection, contrary to their prior anxieties and apprehensions about demanding mentor expectations. however, mentoring should not only help student teachers to analyze and reflect systematically, after the lesson, but also during the teaching itself (reflection-in-practice, close to the action) (du plessis, 2013). the pre-service teachers who experienced ineffective mentoring had expected their mentors to be critical, giving them specific guidance regarding what they needed to do to improve their teaching in addition to offering them emotional support. while they appreciated the sentiment and the support, offering students emotional support alone is often a source of frustration as what students need is constructive criticism and development of own teacher identity (hyland & lo, 2006). students often expect mentors to recognize that they are individuals who need their own teacher identity and own teaching style. a few students (two) experienced problems of finding “themself” as a teacher as their mentors bombarded them with their own ideas. such mentoring approaches often leave students quite overwhelmed by the the “journey to becoming” 103 suggestions wondering whether they should do that or go ahead with their own ideas. as the university would require mentor assessment reports, this meant that it was only at the end of their placement that mentors would articulate any concerns about their practice. some ineffectiveness in mentoring may result from ignorance and lack of clear understanding of the concept of mentoring, being unaware of the mentoring roles, and lack of coherence between school sites and the university (nyaumwe & mtetwa, 2011). such factors influence some mentors’ approaches to developing professional skills like reflection on student teachers’ teaching because, generally, they are not trained or supplied with a blue print on how to conduct their mentoring duties (gershenfeld, 2014, maynard, 2000). some mentor teachers may merely be experienced classroom teachers without a capacity for training others. mentoring is not necessarily a natural activity, but rather requires making components of the teaching processes visible, and breaking down the complex teaching approaches into step-by-step instruction for preservice teachers (mukeredzi, & mandrona, 2013). again, rural school teachers often do not participate in many staff development programmes, nor have access to a variety of professional development activities like their urban counterparts (islam, 2011). these mentors were exposed to a once-off university mentor training workshop. it seems this one-day workshop was inadequate to equip them with the appropriate skills. tp is widely recognised as potentially stressful, more so in rural contexts where other challenges are already at play. the underpinning rationale for collaborative reflections methodology was to provide students an extra layer of support through regular discussion and reflection on their practice and experiences. prince et al. (2010) concluded that an important characteristic of professional learning for teachers is that it must be collaborative, ongoing and deeply embedded in practice. engaging preservice teachers in collaborative critical reflection can heighten the problematic nature of teaching practice making it more observable to them (olsher & kantor, 2012). generally, students saw this as vital for developing confidence and celebrating success (prince et al., 2010). student teachers encounter numerous classroom challenges, it therefore becomes necessary to be able to recognise when things go well. confidence is a multidimensional concept related to self-esteem, self-efficacy and, optimism which promotes self-belief in positive achievements, persistence and, self-awareness (prince et al., 2010). it thus, enhances the ability to make judgements on how well, or whether, we can do something which is an important factor in the classroom as it affects pupils’ reactions to instructions and communications. conclusion and implications this paper explored pre-service teacher experiences and understandings generated within the context of a rural school-university partnership model attempting to address teacher preparation for rurality. while it may be improbable that a deep sense of rurality developed in a four-week practicum, data seems to suggest that these pre-service teachers developed an understanding of rurality which dispelled some of their myths and misconceptions seemingly broadening their career prospects in these settings, which may ultimately promote interest in rural school teaching. when rural tp is purposefully organized to provide pre-service teachers opportunities to experience and develop their own symbolized stories, then space is created to reconsider and disrupt previously held myths and misconceptions of rural living and teaching. adie and barton (2012) suggest that such 104 global education review 3(1) experiences may prompt the process of “ruralization of the mind”. pre-service teachers need to be immersed in rural contexts, with opportunities to reflect on their experiences to prompt imaginations of new possibilities for themselves and new possibilities for linking curriculum to local contexts wherever they may teach. however, such experiences may remain artificial unless students are purposefully involved in reflecting and adding to experiences and understandings by engaging with theory and hearing diverse experiences from other contexts. islam et al. (2011) and islam (2010) argued for teacher education focused on preparing pre-service teachers for understanding rurality and on ways of delivering quality education in rural communities. given the diversity in the south african schooling context, it becomes imperative that teacher preparation focuses on quality education delivery for diverse contexts. consequently, the onus is on education faculties to prepare willing and able teachers for rural schools. this small research based on a highly structured model has strong theoretical underpinnings for designing rural teacher preparation. it appears pragmatically unsustainable for replication to scale given the resources involved. consideration of a tp model that places groups of students in rural schools, with structures for collaboration and reflection could be a feasible starting point. limitations while i acknowledge that communal living arrangements with and continued presence of peers and teacher educators provided space for learning, this may have limited the students’ experiences. again, the presence of teacher educators and peers during collaborative reflections and the sharing of journal entries with teacher educators may have influenced the kinds of experiences reflected upon. notwithstanding, students often intimately expressed analytical and fundamental experiences, the journal records and collaborative reflection reports, were mediated and mandatory objects. thus, they may not be a true reflection of students’ experiences as these activities were rtep design requirements. further, getting students to articulate and reflect on their classroom experiences might be seen as a way of getting them to align with the rtep requirements and such processes often create some form of “contrived collegiality” (hughes, 2012) to submit to the normative expectations of classroom reflection and/or project participation requirements. however, the immersive analytical strategy that i employed to understand students’ journal accounts and, the synthesis of the implicit tensions within a tp environment, augmented the analysis and enhanced rigour. acknowledgements i am grateful to the rtep leaders for enabling me this invaluable opportunity in particular, i am very thankful to professor relebohile moletsane the jl dube chair for rural education and my post doc mentor for her unfailing support and encouragement throughout my research activities. references adie, l., & barton, g. 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(2009). working document of the teacher development summit: perfecting the art of teaching. pretoria: department of education, republic of south africa. about the author tabitha grace mukeredzi is a lecturer and coordinator at the durban university of technology in the adult education unit, faculty of arts and design. her research interests are in teacher education, teacher professional learning and development, rural education and, mixed mode/distance education methodologies. global early childhood policies 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge & nitecki, elena (2017). global early childhood policies: the impact of the global education reform movement and possibilities for reconceptualization. global education review, 4 (2), 1-17. global early childhood policies: the impact of the global education reform movement and possibilities for reconceptualization helge wasmuth mercy college, new york, usa elena nitecki mercy college, new york, usa the field of early childhood education is being emphasized in an unprecedented way, with much public, political, and academic attention focused on the importance of the early years. brain research has drawn global attention to the potential of early childhood education and provided our field with the approval of a “real” science, although the insights and application are quite often over-simplified and over-stated (bruer, 2002; moss, 2014; sayre, devercelli, & neuman, 2013). with social and political attention focused on the great potential of the early years, providers in the public and private sector have been clamoring to meet the needs of young children, extending to the public provision of universal pre-kindergarten. while this advocacy for children and recognition of our field is refreshing and should make us content, why is it that so many experts, professionals, and scholars in the field of early childhood education and care (ecec) are concerned about the current state and development of their field? or, as peter moss asks: “what is not to like about this story?” (2014, p. 26). although our field has received recognition and subsequent funding, the reason for such attention is troubling, as it is mainly rooted in economic theory and neoliberal thinking, which is often reductionist and singular in its viewpoint. neoliberal thinking has trickled into our field without much resistance and is impacting the policies and practices of early childhood care and education (ecec), the result of which is, in our view, policies and practices misaligned with the goals of early childhood education (although this is debated, too). ecec may have more attention, but is it for the right reasons and are we going into the right direction? or are we being manipulated for economic and political purposes, resulting in negative consequences not only for our field, but at the expense of children’s well-being? the reason for this double issue of the global education review is to explore how the global education reform movement (germ) has affected both policy and practice around the world. the first issue will focus on policy, and the focus of the second issue will be practice. ecec has the attention of those in power, but is being utilized as a means of economic and political gain, not for the child’s well-being, even though that is a politically appealing motivation to set forth. the single, undisputed narrative is about quality and competition in our current ______________________________ corresponding author: helge wasmuth, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 1022 email: hwasmuth@mercy.edu mailto:hwasmuth@mercy.edu 2 global education review 4(2) capitalist system. this seems to be the only way most policymakers and many scholars and professionals view the field. however, this dominant way of thinking needs to be questioned. we believe that our field is in need of alternative stories and a democratic, scholarly, and professional dialogue about the purpose of early childhood education and care (moss et al., 2016; urban & swadener, 2016). our issue is an effort to do this, by allowing those from various countries tell their stories, hopefully to provide a glimpse of an alternative to the current germ narrative. germ: a global trend the major reason for discontent with the current state of early childhood education and care is an unease with the prevailing way of thinking about and organizing of ecec: the “story of quality and high returns, the story of markets” (moss, 2014, p. 6). it is the worldwide trend described as “global educational reform movement,” (germ), recently popularized by sahlberg (2011) and his influential book, finnish lessons. germ is not a formal global policy program, but “rather an unofficial educational agenda that relies on a certain set of assumptions to improve education systems” (sahlberg, 2011, 99). these assumptions are rooted in neoliberal thinking, and the values and assumptions it clearly embodies (dahlberg & moss, 2008, 5). as roberson pointed out: “global education reform movement policies have neoliberalism in their dna” (2015, 11). in the eyes of germ supporters, early childhood education is “a world built on relationships of competition, contract, and calculation; inhabited by a breed of autonomous, flexible and utility maximising individuals; and actualised through markets, individual choice and technical practice” (moss, 2014, 17). as almost anything in neoliberal thinking, early childhood education is simply perceived as any other market, a commodity, an object of social investment that can be “purchased as a means to high returns (individual, corporate, societal); or as the object of market transactions between parentconsumers and provider businesses” (moss, 2014, 67). such thinking is the very antithesis of education as a public good meant to serve as the foundation of an educated citizenry. even though germ is not a formal policy program, there are common features, although their implementation may look different in various countries. these features include (moss 2014; robertson, 2015; sahlberg 2011; sahlberg 2016):  the first feature is the standardization of teaching and learning. the focus is on learning outcomes and it is assumed that “setting clear and sufficiently high performance standards for schools, teachers, and students will necessarily improve the quality of desired outcomes” (sahlberg 2016, 177).  the next feature is the increased focus on core subjects, such as literacy and numeracy. the performance on these subjects is seen as an indicator of student and school success. other subjects, such as science, the arts, and health education, are neglected and not seen as important: germ views tests as the only way to measure ‘important’ subjects.  this leads to the third feature: testbased, high-stakes accountability. schools, as well as teachers, are evaluated based on their performance on standardized tests with clear consequences in the form of rewards and punishment. both have to compete: the schools for students and the teachers for merit pay and job stability.  to achieve this end, another feature is necessary: teaching for predetermined learning outcomes by using prescribed global early childhood policies 3 curricula. it is the “search for safe and low-risk ways to reach learning goals” (sahlberg 2016, 178). standardization is attempted by detailing the delivery of lessons and evaluating with predetermined measures, without consideration of local, cultural, or individual differences. such control is viewed as necessary to assure success.  in addition to controlling the curriculum, there is also an increased demand for control over teachers. teachers are neither trusted nor granted professional autonomy. this general distrust is often accompanied by attacks on teachers’ unions, which are described as the enemy of students and only interested in maintaining benefits for their membership. at the same time, there is a push for lowering the requirements for teacher certification and demanding faster (and cheaper) paths such as the global teach for all network. this seems to be counterproductive for improving the quality of a school.  another characteristic is the transfer of administrative models from the corporate world. reform ideas are not developed from within by considering unique characteristics of the educational field or the local community, but are lent from the corporate world as a packaged solution to “fix” a school.  the seventh feature of germ is the call for parent choice regarding their children’s schooling. this puts schools in the position of having to compete for students, setting the stage for privatization. parents should have the right to choose the “ideal” school for their children. vouchers are often viewed as the avenue to achieve this goal.  perhaps the most worrisome feature is privatization. privatization outsources the provision of government services to independent operators, whether nonprofit or for-profit. in the field of education, it can take the form of nonprofit (such as charter management organizations or cmo) as well as for-profit (educational management organizations or emo) school management. this trend moves education away from the goal of a public good for all citizens to a commodity to be sold in the marketplace to those who have the means and access. education is turned into a market to make money.  related to privatization and the reliance on corporate world models, education delivery and its measurement have become dependent on technology. there is push for technology, such as tablets as a means of learning and assessing very young children, even if the consequences of such technology in the early childhood classroom are questionable. the problem is not with these features, per se; most experts and professionals would probably not argue against standards, competence in numeracy and literacy, nor assessment – but in “the over-preoccupation with these elements” (robertson, 2015, 14, emphasis added). even worse, these benign elements are accompanied by more troublesome features such as competition, high-stakes testing, and performance-based pay, all of which are clearly problematic and destructive in the educational field. the excess of standardization, testing, and control of schools and teachers, damages children’s learning and detracts from the goal of fostering the child’s well-being – something we will discuss in more detail in the second issue. while scholars and practitioners may have varying opinions regarding these 4 global education review 4(2) features of germ, the foundation of the movement is problematic for sure and warrants examination. human capital theory as the foundation of germ germ is rooted in human capital theory (hct). the idea is that “the economic productivity of individuals over time and the situations in which it might be maximized [has] undoubtedly contributed to a rethinking of macroeconomic policies for education” (penn, 2010, 51). since the american economist and nobel laureate james j. hickman highlighted early childhood intervention as an especially effective economic investment, this “story of quality and high returns” (moss, 2014, 19) has been become attractive for policy makers worldwide (moss, 2014; penn, 2010). the most common rhetoric is that “high-quality ecec programs are an investment in human capital that will lead to innumerable societal gains and strong economic returns in form of reduced cost for social and educational remediation and a more productive workforce” (nagasawa, peters, & swadener, 2014, p. 284). the belief is that these interventions will reduce negative outcomes, such as unemployment, crime, teenage pregnancies, and numerous other social ills, and at the same time improve positive educational and economic outcomes. each individual simply needs to acquire the skills, knowledge, competences, and attitudes that strengthen his or her productivity (moss, 2014, 19). that is the reason that we need “high quality” ecec (whatever this means) is not because children have a right to a satisfying childhood, but because we have to invest in them as future, productive citizens in a competitive global economy. although this logic seems reasonable and it is often argued that hct and germ reduce inequality, two major flaws exist with this perspective. first, hct, while attractive to policy makers, is far too narrow. an investment in early childhood will not solve the vast problems of poverty, poor prenatal care, unemployment, and numerous other social ills, many of which are rooted in inequality. such a narrow economicoriented approach is problematic because it oversimplifies complex problems, marginalizes poverty and inequity, ignores children’s rights, and very often, regards children as “creatures to be manipulated” (penn, 2010, 61). there are never quick and easy answers to complex problems stemming from inequity. ecec is not a fix for all social maladies; rather it has become “part of the problem, the balm to the inflamed conscience” (moss, 2014, p. 68). by framing ecec as the quick, easy, and failsafe solution to society’s problems, other possibilities for real reform have been silenced, while the farreaching effects of inequity fester. secondly, education reform needs to achieve more, beyond the defined academic outcomes. education simply is and must be more than that. as hargreaves has emphasized, educational reforms “should attend to the advancement of the economy and the restoration of prosperity, but not at the price of other educational elements that contribute to the development of personal integrity, social democracy, and human decency. it has to be concerned with the furtherance of economic profit, yet also with the advancement of the human spirit.” (hargreaves, 2009, p.89). it is this other part, the “advancement of the human spirit,” that we feel is being lost through the implementation of hct through germ policies. thus, these “reforms” are reductionist and narrow in their view and do not reflect a sincere interest in children’s overall well-being. rather, the child’s well-being and education are convenient and socially acceptable reasons to support programs that have a less appealing motivation: to shape and control the formation global early childhood policies 5 of children into law-abiding, socially acceptable adults, which are necessary to keep countries economically competitive in an increasingly competitive global market. the underlying motivation of social control of the next generation for economic purposes is masked by the narrative that we must ensure “quality” education for the “proper development” of the child. the impact of germ on early childhood education and care despite the limitations of hct and germ, the ideas have grown quickly and are impacting policies and practices in social welfare, healthcare, and education all over the world. in terms of early childhood education and care, the effects are in direct opposition to what our field was built upon a genuine concern for the child. such thinking and reform efforts are not new; their genesis can be traced to the education reform act, launched in 1988 in margaret thatcher’s england (sahlberg, 2011, 174). in 2001, hargreaves stated: a new, official orthodoxy of educational reform is rapidly being established in many parts of the world. this is occurring primarily in predominantly anglo-saxon countries but through international funding organizations such as the world bank and the global distribution of policy strategies, elements of this orthodoxy are increasingly being exported in many parts of the less-developed world as well. (hargreaves et al. 2001, p. 1). however, what is new is the overwhelming dominance of this ideology. currently, such thinking is the only way that many of those in power, especially policy makers, can imagine what ecec is and what its goals should be. alternative narratives are rare and without much impact on practice in the field (cannella, 2008; dahlberg & moss, 2005; dahlberg, moss & pence, 2007; moss, 2014). germ-influenced policies are promoted globally by nationally and internationallylocated education policy entrepreneurs, including government departments, the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd), the world bank, philanthropic individuals and groups, education consultancy firms, media outlets, publishing companies, such as pearson, private equity investors, corporate lobbyists, and especially private corporations engaged in education policy change (robertson, 2015, 10; sahlberg, 2016). as can be seen from the above-mentioned list, germ supporters are an diverse group with different interests. a perfect example exists in the us, where not only conservative republicans, but democrats too, are supporting such policies (ravitch, 2017). support transcends party lines and ideologies. for this reason, it is extremely difficult to understand the rationale of why specific, and sometimes opposing, groups support certain policies rooted in germ ideology. as lafer (2017) asks, regarding the us educational system: but how are we to make sense of these? if a state chamber of commerce advocates the expansion of charter schools, for example, is this because members companies are concerned they won’t have enough skilled labor to hire and see this as a means of solving that problem? perhaps it is because charters are cheaper, and companies see them as a way to cut taxes, or they have financial interests of their own that will benefit from charter industry growth. or is it simply because companies are concerned about american education and support this cause for the same reasons they donate to parks and hospitals? 6 global education review 4(2) whatever the answers may be, these are questions that cannot be answered easily. interests and intentions vary, which makes it even more complicated to fully understand germ policies and the reasoning behind their growth and persistence. variations of germ policy have been adopted in predominantly anglo-saxon countries, such as the us, england, australia, new zealand, and even in a social democracy like sweden. through international funding organizations, such as the world bank, and the global distribution of policy strategies, elements of this reform logic have spread to other countries as well, especially in the less developed parts of the world (sahlberg, 2016). even if many european countries such as france, germany, norway, finland, belgium, as well as japan and singapore, remain distant to the ideology of germ (sahlberg, 2016), certain assumptions have started to trickle into these countries as well. right now, education in almost every country in the world is subject to the overwhelming grasp of germ. the most powerful effect of the imposition of germ, hct, and the economic perspective of ecec as a market is its objectification of the child to be controlled. germ policies are accompanied by “a shared instrumental and performative rationality and a shared belief in leadership, managerial methods and other technical practices” (moss, 2014, 67). in this thinking, children and child services are reduced to “a calculation of economic cost and benefits” (moss, 2014, p. 67). to achieve the goals, so the argument goes, more regulation or governing is necessary because only consistency, continuity, and predictability can assure the success of such a system. new terms, such as “standards,” “accountability” and “effectiveness,” are now commonplace in education policy discourse and have replaced “autonomy”, “trust” or “pedagogy” (sahlberg, 2016). many countries and states have developed new standards, even for the youngest children, and are introducing more frequent assessments and examinations to test students and teachers. professional autonomy is increasingly replaced by the standardization of schooling and education; standards, pre-defined learning outcomes, prescribed curricula, testing and accountability are more and more dominating and shaping the field. the effects of germ have been “weakening or abolishing teachers’ unions, cutting school budgets and increasing class sizes, requiring high-stakes testing that determines teacher tenure and school closings, replacing public schools with privately run charter schools, diverting public funding into vouchers that may be used for private school tuition, replacing in-person education with digital applications, and dismantling publicly elected school boards” (lafer, 2017, 130). essentially, germ is assuming control of our field for economic purposes. altogether, this trend has led to a strong “governing of the child” (moss, 2014). there is no place for the hallmarks of early childhood: uncertainty, experimentation, or unexpected outcomes, for surprise or amazement, for context or subjective experiences. outcomes need to be predicted. everything needs to be effective and based on evidence, even though life is the opposite: messy, complex, diverse, and unpredictable. there is little to no attention paid to the “advancement of the human spirit” (hargreaves, 2009). hillevi lenz taguchi has characterized this process of increased governing: “[t]he more we seem to know about the complexity of learning, children’s diverse strategies and multiple theories of knowledge, the more we seek to impose learning strategies and curriculum goals that reduce the complexities of this learning and knowing” (lenz taguchi, 2010, 14). there is a feeling of discomfort among so many professionals about global early childhood policies 7 the current state of early childhood education. the objectification and governing of young children is narrow, limiting, and potentially harmful. why are we doing what we are doing, even if we know that it is wrong, and we can see that our children are not learning in a meaningful way and are unhappy with being in class and learning? holding germ accountable most professionals in education would probably grudgingly accept germ policies if they actually worked and generated the promised results. in the end, if something works, what can be argued against it? however, this question warrants examination. are children who have been living in countries that are shaped by these policies really learning better or more (or in germ thinking: achieving better on the tests)? are they happier, and do the policies lead to more equity? what if we hold germ policies accountable? it is, of course, impossible to answer such questions with absolute certainty or reliability. as mentioned before, education alone does not have the power to change a child’s outcomes, since many other social factors play a part in shaping their lives. however, many signs point to the fact that germ policies are do not improve young children’s well-being or even learning. do these policies make children happier, healthier or smarter? the answer to such a question, so it seems, must be a clear no (hargreaves, 2009). if children’s well-being is not the goal of these educational reforms, the follow-up question should be, what are the goals and who is benefitting? as lafer asks: “what does it all mean, and where does it all lead?” (lafer, 2017, p.148). first, how do such reforms impact children’s lives in general? children who live in countries shaped by germ policies, so it seems, are not living a very happy life, according to available measures (hargreaves, 2009, p. 93). the uk and us, two of the “most assessmentobsessed anglo-american nations” (hargreaves, 2009, 93), are infamous for ranking at the very bottom of unicef’s list of child well-being in rich countries. after being last and second to last in the 2007 list, both countries still do not perform very well. while the uk has at least risen up to a mid-table position, the us ranked 26 out of 29 in 2013 (unicef, 2013). further, we have anecdotal evidence of a soaring amount of children starting to develop a negative disposition toward institutionalized learning from an early age. many children suffer when attending schools with an exaggerated focus on proficiency in the core subjects and doing well on standardized tests, as the time for recess, socialization, and play is reduced. school probably has not been a place of pure joy and happiness for all children, and institutionalized learning has always been disliked by a number of children; however, the current complaints from children, as well as parents and educators, seem unprecedented. young children learn better when they enjoy what they are doing and have time for recess and to play (bodrova & leong, 2003; miller & almon, 2009). yet, the argument that child-initiated play must be restored to early childhood education is “dismissed and even ridiculed in some quarters. in spite of the fact that the vital importance of play has been shown in study after study, many people believe that play is a waste of time in school” (miller & almon, 2009, p. 1). although it is difficult to measure well-being or blame germ-related policies for poor performance, there is, at the very least, an indication that such policies in the field of health, social welfare, and education are not resulting in a “happier” life, based on the unicef scale. germ policies seem not only make children’s lives more miserable, but they are also counterproductive regarding the major goal: improving learning outcomes. if we look at the 8 global education review 4(2) learning outcomes, which are supposedly reliable, valid, and based on their own measures, the results are not very convincing. evidence from pisa demonstrates that countries that have implemented germ features to varying degrees are facing lower and facing declining student performance (adamson, 2016; sahlberg, 2016). this may, of course, be related to factors outside the educational system, such as child poverty or a non-functioning health system. however, even a country such as sweden, which was number five on unesco’s list of child well-being in rich countries (unicef 2013) and once a model of high-quality education, has faced a tremendous decline in student learning outcomes since it started to adopt germ policies, such as parent choice and privately run schools funded by public money. between 2000 and 2012, sweden’s pisa scores dropped more sharply than those of the other participating countries (adamson, 2016). in 2012, sweden was ranked 28th out of 34 oecd countries in math, and 27th in reading and science, respectively. sweden has declined from a position of being above average for oecd countries to below the average in a short period of time (adamson, 2016). another example is chile. chile’s pisa scores demonstrated a decline between 2009 and 2012 in nearly all socio-economic groups, even the wealthiest and highest performing students in chile scored far below average (adamson, 2016). on the contrary, finland, a country that has not adopted elements of germ in the same way as many other countries, is a consistent high-performer of pisa (adamson, 2016; sahlberg, 2011, p. 181). these results are even more worrisome if we consider that institutions or countries who put an emphasis on doing well on such tests are doing even worse in subjects that are not tested. they often neglect subjects that are not formally assessed, such as the arts, social science, foreign languages, physical education and even writing (abrams, 2016, p. 161; lafer, 2017, 135). in this sense, germ is not only performing poorly on their own measure, but furthermore, damaging the holistic development of children, a topic that will be discussed in a topic that will be discussed in global trends in early childhood practice: working within the limitations of the global education reform movement, the next issue of global education review. altogether, such findings “should capture the attention of policymakers globally leading them to question of whether germ really is the best way to conceptualize change and improve student learning” (sahlberg, 2011, 181). why would we continue with something that is obviously not yielding the desired results? are germ policies at least beneficial in other ways, such as in reducing inequality? this is one of the most popular arguments offered by proponents of school choice: that competition, parents’ choice, and a free market would ensure that all children receive an equal education. there is not much evidence that supports such an assumption (henig, 1995; orfield & frankenberg, 2013). again, sweden is an interesting example. since the implementation of germ policies, inequality in sweden has increased (weale, 2015). currently, sweden, previously at the top of unicef’s overall league table of inequality in child well-being in rich countries, is now positioned marginally above the bottom third (unicef, 2016). as the swedish minister of education in 2015 pointed out: “instead of breaking up social differences and class differences in the education system, we have a system today that’s creating a wider gap between the ones that have and the ones that have not” (weale, 2015). in chile, where the public schools consist mostly of low-income students, and only a few low-income students can afford to attend voucher schools, the dissatisfaction with the poor and unequal educational system led to student-generated global early childhood policies 9 riots in 2011. another example, pertaining to early childhood education and care, is the system in the us, as jones (2017) calls it, a “perfect example of the market-based approach” that only exacerbates inequities because “quality will only increase for those who can afford to pay top dollar.” in the us – even with current initiatives such as universal pre-kindergarten which is portrayed as a first step to providing equal opportunity in early childhood education – high quality education depends on the parents’ ability to spend thousands of dollars for private preschools or have the capacity to navigate the complex system of options. lowincome parents have no choice but to enroll their children in programs that are “within their financial means but often are lacking in quality” (jones, 2017). these children often enter kindergarten behind their more privileged peers. canella (2008) describes the result of such policies as a two-tiered system: “early childhood education has played a role in the construction of a two-tiered system and in the continued segregation of diverse groups of people... perpetuating societal beliefs that particular groups are inferior to others” (p. 159). privatization does not fight inequality, it increases it, but behind the ruse of choice. we do not need more choice and competition. a sustainable solution would call for investing the resources necessary to make all ecec institutions solid and of high quality, but would not create a market with “winners” and “losers.” the phenomena of germ and privatization is also gaining ground in less developed countries around the world, where inequality is even greater. again, the promise is that privatization will improve education for all children. so-called “low-cost private schools,” a term that summarizes “schools that target relatively poor households by offering education at a low cost, but also in most cases, often low quality” (each rights, 2017, p. 12), are expanding and offering new opportunities. lowcost private schools have developed over the last few years in many developing countries worldwide, such as india, pakistan, nigeria, ghana, kenya, malawi, south africa, tanzania or uganda (pedró, leroux, & watanabe, 2015,). features of such low-cost private schools are similar in all these countries: low fees, but also poor infrastructure; multi-grade; and low-paid, young teachers often recruited from the local community with minimal qualifications who must follow prescribed curricula. the idea is to keep prices affordable for low-income families (pedró, leroux, & watanabe, 2015). however, most families cannot afford to pay these fees, so they have to forego basic needs or cannot send all of their children to these schools. as a result, female children are predominantly not send to school. privatization in the global south has become a huge concern. recently, liberia has outsourced all primary and pre-primary schools, opening the door to a far-ranging privatization of its educational system. the push for privatization looks more like a modern form of colonization and exploitation than a sincere investment in children or in the development of sustainable educational systems. the outsourcing of educational systems to private providers without adequate regulations is viewed by many human rights and child advocates as a threat to the right of education (each rights, 2017; the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights, 2016). the oxford review of education recently published a whole issue on non-state actors in the global south, in the same year the human rights council adopted a resolution that urged all states to “address any negative impacts of the commercialization of education” (the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights, 2016). other un human rights bodies, such as the un special rapporteur on the right 10 global education review 4(2) to education, also raised serious concerns regarding the explosive and unregulated privatization of education in less developed countries. courts in uganda and kenya have ordered the closure of schools run by bridge international academies, a global chain of low cost schools supported by illustrious names such as bill gates, mark zuckerberg, pearson, and the word bank, because they violated educational norms and standards in these countries, a fact that speaks volumes (the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights, 2017). sylvain aubry of the global initiative for economic, social and cultural rights has stated that the privatization of education in these countries “raises serious human rights concerns that must be dealt with urgently” (the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights, 2016). it seems very unlikely that such efforts will solve the issue of poor children who cannot access schools. on the contrary, it may even increase segregation and reinforce inequalities in educational opportunity. in such countries, germ features and especially privatization work as “catalysts for social inequalities” (pedró, leroux, & watanabe, 2015, p. 5). overall, the persistence of germ, despite its poor outcomes related to both learning and well-being, has only perpetuated existing inequalities, both within countries and worldwide. not only does inequality exist within countries, but such privatization of education has led to increased inequality between countries. why germ policies cannot fix the problems of educational systems-and maybe don’t want to germ is not doing well, as defined on its own measures; it seems to not contribute to children’s happiness or their learning, and it exacerbates inequality. germ policies simply do not work. this does not really come as a surprise to anyone who knows a little bit about ecec. many germ features clearly contradict research and what we know about how children learn, how schools work, and how to achieve the goal of providing good education for all children, not only the “winners” of a competitive market. a stark example is the germ-based endeavor to weaken teacher education. well-trained and experienced teachers are much more successful in supporting student’s learning. to push for inexperienced and minimally trained teachers does not make any sense if the goal really is to improve the educational field. for exactly this reason, lafer (2017) called the educational reforms “an evidence-free zone of public policy” (p.139). they not only have little or no evidentiary basis, they are also extremely unpopular and opposed by the majority of people (lafer, 2017, p. 130). the problem with germ policies extends beyond the fact that they are not very successful. the entire foundation of the approach is flawed. as samuel e. abrams in his book education and the commercial mindset (2016) described convincingly, privatization does not work in a field like education. education systems “do not fit the commercial model because of a particular type of ‘market failure’” (abrams, 2016, 175). it is ironic that one economist after the other has revealed “clear boundaries to the business model” (abrams, 2016, p.171) because they understand that education is a field in which markets cannot work alone and intervention is required. yet, educational policies are still pushing for such reforms based on this flawed application of the business model. free, private markets will not solve the problems that education systems face. the assumption that germ policies can improve educational systems as a whole is a bad idea rooted in misconception about how economic theory is applied. as global early childhood policies 11 abrams points out: “privatization accordingly amounts to a flawed response to state failure, not a solution. the solution calls for investing the resources necessary to make all neighborhood schools solid in the way all neighborhood schools are solid in middleand upper-class suburbs, with well-paid teachers, good working conditions and smaller classes” (strauss, 2016). many germ features are based on this mistaken conception, essentially assuming that education can be a private, not a public, good. parent choice and school competition create a situation in which there will be winners and losers. there are parents who find and get the right institution for their child (and parents who will not). there are schools that will “succeed” because they offer the right product (and schools that will not). however, education is both a private good and a public good, an important aspect of a functioning democracy and we need a system that provides excellent education for all children, not only for the winners of such a competition. the goal needs to be an educated citizenry and this can only be achieved by a shared investment, because public goods “cannot benefit anyone without benefiting everyone” (abrams, 2016, 184). there are certain public goods that simply cannot be privatized without damaging a society, and education is clearly one of these areas. if germ policies are not working, based on a mistaken application of the market approach, and seem to defy common sense, the important question is: why is there such strong support for the persistence of these policies? what is the intention of its supporters, if it is not the child’s well-being? such a question is not easy to answer, especially because the intentions may vary and because there are, without question, individuals and organizations that implement germ features by acting in good faith. however, for us, it seems that those acting in good faith are unaware that the purpose of their work with children has been hijacked. lafer (2017), in his book, the one percent solution, concluded convincingly that the underlying goals of many germ supporters are rooted in economic motivations. while he only analyzed the reform movement in the us, his findings likely hold true in other countries as well. we think it is important to raise these questions, so that all professionals in the field of ecec can reflect upon their implications. it is worth mentioning lafer’s explanation regarding the teacher and school evaluation: we must look for an underlying rationale that makes sense of these not as contradictory but as complementary policies. high-stake tests are designed to undo tenure and close public schools. as that is accomplished, a new education system will emerge, which runs on cheaper high-turnover instructors who follow canned curricula geared around test preparation and thus have no need for the levels of professionalism aspired to by previous generations of teachers (lafer, 2017, 148). we believe that there are many reasons for the persistence of germ policy, ranging from well-meaning professionals simply complying with their funders’ or superiors’ requests to those seeking economic gain by profiting from the educational “crisis.” for this reason, we need to ask, cui bono: who is really benefiting from such policies? alternatives to the germ narrative although this depiction of the current state of our field seems dark, there is hope. ecec is receiving much attention, so it is the perfect time for our voices to be heard. 12 global education review 4(2) what can we, the academics in our field, do? it is important that we are not manipulated by all of the attention and follow the “trends” in our field. we must show why many of the advocated policies are not only failing, but will damage children and our field. we have to actively deconstruct many of the myths surrounding germ policies. we do not have to accept the troubling reductionist approach of germ, which has blocked out other stories and voices without much resistance and reduced ecec to a formula for school readiness. as cannella (2008) pointed out, “educational truths have been constructed and accepted as universal without critique or recognition of the political power context from which they have emerged” (p. 159). however, we believe that it is not sufficient to simply criticize such policies. we need to seek alternatives, create new narratives of early childhood education and care, we need to develop “real utopia” (moss, 2014). the loss of a utopian vision is actually one of the negative effects of germ that is not realized or even problematized. germ has resulted in a dominant and very narrow way of thinking about early childhood education and care, its goals, and its implementation; a way of thinking about ecec in economic terms: high quality, efficiency, proficiency, accountability – in the language of germ. as tony judt (2009) in his famous speech what is living and what is dead in social democracy? asks: “why is it that here in the united states we have such difficulty even imagining a different sort of society from the one whose dysfunctions and inequalities trouble us so? we appear to have lost the capacity to question the present, much less offer alternatives to it. why is it so beyond us to conceive of a different set of arrangements to our common advantage?” too often we feel that exactly the same could be said about early childhood education and care, not only in the us, but increasingly worldwide. this is why we think that such an issue of global education review is necessary. we need to question the status quo; we cannot simply continue to ask if certain methods or approaches are efficient and working. of course, quantitative research has its value and is important; however, what is missing is the ability to question whether the current state of ecec makes sense in the first place. what is not asked is how ecec could be or what it should look like. missing are bold and innovative visions of childhood or how ecec could support happy, curious children. moss has summarized some of the questions that are missing, but would be absolutely essential to ask to change the current state of our field: “what is [...] the ‘diagnosis of our time’? what is our understanding or image, of the child, of the educator, of the early childhood center? what does education mean?...what are the purposes of education? what are its fundamental values? what ethics?” (moss, 2014, p.14). due to the increasing dominance of germ policies, such questions are not asked nor even perceived as important anymore. in our eyes, this narrow-mindedness of current research and thinking in ecec is one of the most troubling negative effects of the dominance of germ. it is important that we find alternatives. we must listen to other voices and hear the stories of those who have seen a glimpse of what ecec would look like with less germ influence. that does not mean that traditional research and academic work should be ignored and dismissed; we think that a real dialogue from various perspectives is of utmost importance. however, a real dialogue requires both sides to listen. during the current period of transformation and growth in our field, we must ensure that our field is not manipulated to serve economic or political purposes. scholars and global early childhood policies 13 researchers have a unique role to play and can contribute to a real dialogue, whereby a renewed commitment to generating high-quality scholarly inquiry has the potential to reconceptualize the field (hatch, 2014, 45). early childhood communities around the world need to raise their voices and start a democratic, scholarly, and professional dialogue (moss et al, 2016; urban & swadener, 2016). as dahlberg & moss (2005) have pointed out, this is a critical time in our field: we are at a historical moment when we need new inspiration about the meaning of education; inspiration that can help us to contest neoliberalism and managerialism, with the great value they attach to instrumentality, calculation and the autonomous subject, and their powerful technologies for governing and subjectification. inspiration that can confront what we have termed the dominant anglo-american discourse in early childhood education, with its universal and normative thinking and totalising practices that smother difference through giving the teacher possibilities to possess, comprehend and govern the child (dahlberg & moss, 2005, 92). our issue is a response to this call within the field to share scholarly inquiry, as it relates to germ, its impact on policy, and the potential for alternatives. with peter moss, we believe that early childhood is “in need of transformative change” (2014, 73). such change begins with listening to the stories and viewpoints of all stakeholders involved, not only those in power or in privileged positions. there has been little outrage or widespread reaction to germ policies, which are not only ineffective based on their own measures, but have also resulted in inequality and works against a child’s well-being and happiness. organizations such as reconceptualizing early childhood education (rece), and voices like bloch, cannella, dahlberg, moss, pence, pinar, silin, and others have provided an outlet for such stories. in response to oecd’s international early learning study (iels), there is a growing voice within the early childhood community “to raise concerns about its assumptions, practices and possible effects...in the hope that early childhood communities around the world will raise their voices, and that the oecd will enter into dialogue with them” (moss et. al 2016). we agree with these voices that question the status quo, call for reconceptualization, and encourage others with alternative stories to do the same. the authors in this issue present alternatives and critiques of the germ infusion into early childhood policy and raise questions and issues that provide a glimpse of what early childhood education could be, and should be. we are honored to open this issue with a statement from mathias urban, professor of early childhood studies and director of the early childhood research centre at university of roehampton in london. he outlines very clearly the programme for international student assessment (pisa), and its application to preschool. urban details the iels, the so-called “baby-pisa,” and its lack of evidence regarding standardized testing of young children, as well as the disregard for diversity. urban calls attention to that fact that there are alternatives to iels in its current form and calls for a “meaningful, contextualised learning initiative, conducted in respectful and participatory ways.” urban’s piece is an excellent example of questioning germrelated policies at their foundation, instead of complying through blind implementation, without realizing the unintended consequences. in incredible parenting with incredible years?: a foucauldian analysis of new zealand government perspectives on parenting and 14 global education review 4(2) their implications for parents and educators in early childhood education, shil bae conducts a critical analysis of the incredible years program in new zealand, demonstrating that it (re)produces the economic/neoliberal discourses as the desirable norm of parenting, thus reinforcing the existing power relations in society. bae’s work, from a post-structural approach, examines what and how issues are framed in parenting policy through foucault’s notion of “governmentality” and “discursive normalisation.” by unpacking discourses of parenting produced by incredible years as an accepted parenting programme, bae explores how this concept of “truth” in parenting influences the everyday life of families, evidence that germ has even infiltrated family life. bae argues that this notion of a curriculum for parents provides only a limited understanding of the issue and intensifies inequality and injustice, providing insights for reconceptualizing our understanding of parenting. when the germ hosts the antidote: the surprising new birth of israel's anti-germ pre-k policy, written by gadi bialik & noa shefi, examines how israel’s educational system has resisted germ influences, using a conceptual framework that highlights a more complex, hybrid, or dual outlook at germ. since the 1970s, israel's educational policy has been undergoing a change generated by the neoliberal agenda, eventually adopting the main characteristics of germ. their research focuses on a recent pre-k policy formation process that set out as germ-like in nature, but nevertheless ended up with anti-germ characteristics, providing an example of local resistance to germ influence. the authors analyze the main factors that generated the new anti-germian reform, which present possibilities for questioning germ-influenced policies. melio repko-erwin conducts a critical literature review synthesizing empirical and theoretical research centered on us kindergarten from 2001-2016. in was kindergarten left behind? a critical review of kindergarten as the new first grade in the wake of no child left behind, she examines the complicated nature of teaching and learning in kindergarten with implications for research, policy, and practice since the passage of no child left behind (nclb) in 2001. connecting nclb’s increased emphasis on standards and accountability to issues of kindergarten readiness, the role of academics, play, developmental appropriateness in kindergarten, and changes in kindergarten literacy instruction, she examines the complicated nature of teaching and learning in kindergarten and how germ’s emphasis on accountability can backfire. the united states is a prime example of germ policy and the influx of reforms intended to elevate students’ academic standing in a global economy. stefan faas, shu-chen wu, & steffen geiger analyze in the importance of play in early childhood education: a critical perspective on current policies and practices in germany and hong kong describe how the national education systems in germany and hong kong have been shaped by international reform movements. they discuss how each system, with its own tradition and unique features of early childhood education, has reacted differently to the external pressure of changing and reforming the system. their analysis shows how important cultural settings are. the focus is on play and how play is understood differently in each context, and how that understanding informs each country’s reaction to external reform movements. the authors point out that such policies cannot simply be transferred one from country to the other without considering the specific context and that reform movements will have different effects in national education systems. global early childhood policies 15 in the last piece, charlotte ringsmose explains the changes in the nordic countries, which have been model educational systems in the past. in global education reform movement challenging nordic childhoods, ringsmose explores the challenges facing early childhood education in nordic countries in an era of increasing globalization with focus on accountability and academic competition. in denmark, the social pedagogical tradition has been part of the culture in early childhood for decades, but the country is experimenting with more structured learning approaches. ringsmose explains the threat to their social pedagogical tradition and presents this danish example as an alternative to the schoolification of the early years, which is evident in so many other countries. our hope is that this issue joins with others to hold germ accountable and present alternatives to the status quo, which is clearly not working. public attention is focused on our field, so let’s make the most of it. “policymaking...in early childhood, is rarely rational and considered, but a circular process whereby a government reacts to the immediate crises of the present” (penn, 2011, p. 28). as politicians continue to simplify society’s problems with an easy solution of trying to control the complexities of ecec, let us respond to our immediate crisis of the present: that our field is being manipulated at the expense of children’s well-being for economic and political purposes. what can we possibly do to stop the global force of germ? as scholars and practitioners in the field, we are in a position to call attention to the impact of such policies and what really works in our field. “the job of academic and intellectuals...is to analyse policies and their rationales, to be sceptical. this is particularly necessary in a relatively new and emerging field of endeavor like early childhood services” (penn, 2011, p. 29). the aim of our issue is not to present a singular alternate view, but one of many, to be considered in ongoing dialogue with all stakeholders about the nature of our field and to envision early childhood in a post-germ era. references abrams, s.e. 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(2017). don’t like betsy devos? blame the democrats. retrieved on june 19, 2017 from: https://newrepublic.com/article/142364/dont-likebetsy-devos-blame-democrats robertson, s.l. (2015). what teachers need to know about the ‘global education reform movement’ (or germ). in: little, g. (ed.) (2015). global education ‘reform’. building resistance and solidarity, 1017. manifesto press sahlberg, p. (2016). professional autonomy, trust and collaboration in educators’ work. philosophy of education society of great britain. annual conference new college, oxford 1 3 april 2016. retrieved on may 26, 2017 from: http://www.philosophy-ofeducation.org/dotasset/bc4f09b5-a27f-4306-99663aa1fa2cf12c.pdf sayre, r.k., devercelli, a.e., neuman, m.j. (2013). world bank investments in early childhood: findings from portfolio review of world bank early childhood development projects from fy01-fy11. draft, march 2013, mimeo. strauss, v. 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(2015). it’s a political failure: how sweden’s celebrated schools system fell into crisis. the guardian. retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/s weden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education about the authors helge wasmuth, phd, has been an associate professor in the department of childhood education since 2011. prior to his position at mercy college, he worked in various position in higher education in germany and switzerland. dr. wasmuth received his phd in educational science from the university of tübingen, germany. his scholarly research interests include the history and philosophy of early childhood education, current issues in early childhood education, and innovative teaching methods in online learning. he has been interviewed by unesco’s international institute for educational planning as an advocate for age-appropriate early childhood education and play as a means of learning. he will be featured in a documentary on the history of kindergarten and friedrich froebel. elena nitecki, phd, is an associate professor in the department of early childhood and childhood education at mercy college. she has higher education teaching experience in the fields of early childhood education and social work. prior to teaching college, elena held positions as a pre-school teacher and a social worker in medical and early intervention settings. elena earned her doctoral degree in urban education from temple university and holds master’s degrees in both education and social work. her research focuses on various topics related in early childhood education and teacher education. http://receinternational.org/rece-comment-on-oecd-iccps.html#sthash.hu4zxt27.dpbs http://receinternational.org/rece-comment-on-oecd-iccps.html#sthash.hu4zxt27.dpbs https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education https://www.theguardian.com/world/2015/jun/10/sweden-schools-crisis-political-failure-education 62 global education review 4(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: azano, amy price, callahan, carolyn m., brodersen, annalissa v., & caughey, melanie (2017). responding to the challenges of gifted education in rural communities. global education review, 4(1). 62-77. responding to the challenges of gifted education in rural communities amy price azano virginia tech carolyn m. callahan university of virginia annalissa v. brodersen university of virginia melanie caughey university of virginia abstract there are both achievement and opportunity gaps for low-income students when compared to their economically advantaged peers; and, for rural students, these gaps may be even more pronounced. in this manuscript we draw from our ongoing work in a five-year federally-funded, jacob k. javits grant focusing on promoting gifted education in rural schools. to address issues of under-identification of gifted students in these settings, and to investigate ways to maximize achievement, we established an alternative process for identifying gifted students in rural schools; and we created units integrating place-based pedagogy within an evidence-based curriculum model as an intervention. finally, we discuss preliminary findings from the pilot year and first half of the second year of the study documenting success in augmenting the pool of identified students and engaging teachers in implementing the curriculum. perhaps more importantly, we document lessons learned and more global takeaways for the field. specifically, we discuss the influence of deficit thinking with regard to rural schooling (and subsequent recognition of gifts and talents), the risk of generalizing rural to all rural places, and the nuances of rural poverty not captured in commonly used metrics, such as free and reduced lunch. keywords gifted education, gifted students, rural education, gifted students’ rural education, place-based pedagogy, rural schools, under-identification, achievement gap, opportunity gap introduction according to young (2003), 42% of all public schools in united states were in small towns/rural areas, and 30% of all public school students attended them. currently, 40% of students attending rural schools attend a school where more than 50% of the students are eligible for free and reduced lunch (nces, 2014). corresponding author: amy price azano, virginia tech, school of education, 303 war memorial hall, blacksburg, va 24061 email: azano@vt.edu mailto:azano@vt.edu responding to challenges 63 nationally, the overall percentage of students attending schools in this free and reduced lunch category is 44% (nces, 2014). the national school lunch program (nslp), however, is only one metric for understanding how low-income, gifted rural students may lack opportunities. rural schools also tend to have fewer specialists for gifted education services, limited resources and program options, fewer research opportunities and field trips, and lack of services provided by programs such as magnet schools, university programs, and academic contests (burney & cross, 2006; cross & burney, 2005; hebert & beardsley, 2001). magnet schools (schools in which gifted students are bused to central sites for instruction) are difficult to implement in rural settings because of long distances for travel; university based programs where students attend either after school or on saturday are lacking because of the rarity of universities in rural settings; and academic contests (such as future problem solving or odyssey of the mind) in which school teams compete against one another are difficult to orchestrate because of small numbers of gifted students in a given school. as a result, while scholars acknowledge both achievement and opportunity gaps for low-income gifted students when compared to their economically advantaged peers, for rural students, these excellence gaps may be even more pronounced. in this article, we present a description of a federally funded grant designed to mitigate some of the challenges for gifted education programming in rural schools, promoting place (place, literacy, achievement, community, and engagement) in rural schools. the goals of the project are multidimensional. our first goal was to increase the number of identified gifted students in rural gifted school divisions. our second goal was to impact the language arts achievement of identified students; our final goal was to positively impact affective outcomes (e.g., increase student engagement in learning; increase academic self-efficacy; increase growth mindset; and decrease stereotype threat). we present preliminary data from the first 18 months of implementation, documenting success in augmenting an alternative identification process, and on the ways in which challenges were (and were not) successfully addressed in creating and implementing an alternative curriculum, and lessons. promoting place uses place-based language arts instruction to promote literacy skills in historically underserved high ability rural youth. promoting place focuses on reading and writing in an evidence-based curricular model that combines three successful components of curriculum for gifted students (callahan, moon, oh, azano, & hailey, 2015). to advance the achievement of gifted students of poverty in rural schools, we first had to identify a larger pool of gifted students; in many schools in rural settings only 1 or 2 students are identified per grade level (and sometimes none). the project structured its identification process around the concept of opportunity to learn put forward by david lohman (2013). opportunity to learn is based on the assumption that students from certain subgroups (e.g., english language learners (ell), minority students, students from poverty) do not have access to the same resources or experiences as the majority population, and hence, should not be compared to the majority population when determining their aptitude and achievement, but rather, should be compared to others who have the same opportunity to learn. identification of giftedness is then based on local norms – in the case of project place comparing scores of students to scores of other students in their schools rather than to national norms. the second stage of the project is to expose students to a curriculum developed in accord with the clear curriculum model modified to incorporate the principles of place-based education (callahan, moon, oh, azano, & hailey, 2015); and the final component is interventions to reduce stereotype threat (alter, 64 global education review 4(1) aronson, darley, rodriguez, & ruble, 2010) and increase a growth mindset (dweck, 2006) for rural students. concerns in rural gifted education the opportunity gaps for rural gifted students are increasingly being documented (azano, 2014; plucker, 2013; stambaugh & wood, 2015). these gaps are reflected in every aspect of gifted education, including identification, programming, staffing, professional development, and policy, and become obvious when comparing levels of funding for gifted programs. in the state of virginia for example, where our project is situated, drastic differences in achievement and per student expenditures go hand in hand. for example, in 2014 when we began our grant, fairfax county public schools (fcps) allotted $10.6 million for its advanced academic program, with a per student expenditure of $241.28 (retrieved from http://www.fcps.edu/fs/budget/documents/app roved/fy14/programbudgetfy2014.pdf), which is more than twice the per student expenditures of their rural counterparts in mathews county public schools, a rural district in the commonwealth, which allocated $15,000 for all gifted program services (retrieved from http://www.mathews.k12.va.us/text/fy14_ame nded_adopted.pdf), with a per student expenditure of $102.04 (leann hunley, personal communication, june 13, 2014). by comparison, fcps budgeted $804,085 just for their primary talent development program. further, in virginia, low-income students performed poorly on the 2009-2010 third grade reading standards of learning (sol) test, with a pass rate of 75%, which is below annual yearly progress (ayp) standards. of this 75%, only 27% passed at an advanced level (virginia department of education, 2010). not only are gaps financial in nature; rural students, particularly those in low-income areas may come to school with certain experiential deficits. geographic isolation, a defining criterion of rural spaces, means that many rural students have often not traveled far from their commonly insular communities. not only are opportunities for travel minimal without public transportation, access to museums or libraries may be limited. even when plans for gifted programs are in place, we have found that rural school districts struggle to provide sufficient teaching resources (azano, callahan, missett, & brunner, 2014). to complicate this issue further, federal policies have shifted the focus of title i funds to larger districts resulting in funding cuts to 10,800 rural schools (lockette, 2010). federal legislation ensures that special education services are available to eligible students; however, gifted students do not have comparable mandates. hence, gifted resource teachers are often vulnerable to budget cuts tied to staffing levels and program funding (merrow, 2004). also, there are community considerations that influence the overall experience for rural learners; and rural education researchers have examined the complicated issue of aspirations for rural students and schooling’s role in whether students stay in or leave their rural communities, a significant factor for rural gifted students (see carr & kefalas, 2009; corbett, 2007; howley, howley, & showalter, 2015; and petrin, schafft, & meece, 2014). reading and writing for the rural gifted gifted students often exhibit characteristics that suggest the importance of altering the depth and complexity of learning within the curriculum and instruction they are provided (e.g. faster rate of learning, greater content knowledge, ability to grasp abstract and complex ideas earlier); yet specific interventions for reading and writing are lacking in the literature on rural gifted education. the common core state standards, national council of teachers of english (ncte), and others provide grade level literacy standards; however, gifted students often reach or surpass those standards prior to responding to challenges 65 them entering the grade for which they are recommended, making the issue of determining appropriate outcomes for students with higher abilities even more difficult. developing literacy interventions in rural schools for highly able learners is an especially daunting challenge. in efforts to increase the number of low-income rural students taking difficult coursework, burney and cross (2006) found that there are still many unknowns about rural gifted children of poverty, that the different circumstances and values of these students must be taken into consideration when both identifying and creating services for them, that these students often require additional support in order to overcome deficiencies in self-efficacy, self-esteem, and self-concept, and that the climate in rural schools and their educational policies may keep students from advancing academically. we developed promoting place to address not only literacy outcomes but also these nebulous issues of self-efficacy, local culture, and stereotype threat. there are few empirically tested resources for providing advanced level writing to highly able rural students. in promoting place we attempt to address this gap by implementing a language arts curriculum developed in reference to an evidence-based model (callahan, moon, oh, azano, & hailey, 2015) with modifications for rural students using principles of place-based education for gifted and high potential rural learners in third and fourth grade. efforts to minimize challenges an alternative identification process promoting place applies modified strategies for the identification of gifted students, curriculum adaptation and development, and delivery of both the curriculum and noncognitive interventions to rural gifted students in high poverty rural schools. the development of the modified identification process is in response to an underlying concern raised in the gifted literature regarding the use of inappropriate instruments and identification processes in the identification of gifted students from historically underrepresented populations. underlying many of the concerns is an appropriate match between the underlying abilities and potential measured by the instruments used in the identification process and the curriculum to be offered (such as of nonverbal assessments that do not offer validity evidence) (callahan, renzulli, decourt, & hertberg-davis, 2013; lohman, 2013; worrel, 2013). promoting place focuses on improving the recognition of talent and achievement of underrepresented students in language arts by eschewing the use of non-verbal tests because of the lack of validity in predicting success in verbal achievement, and instead, identifying gifted students using the opportunity to learn paradigm proposed by david lohman (2013). we administered the cognitive abilities test (cogat) verbal (a measure of verbal aptitude) subtest to all second grade students in participating schools and applied local norms relating to socioeconomic groups rather than national norms in making selections for the program (lohman & hagan, 2005). this is a relatively new concept, but its efficacy in identifying additional groups of underrepresented populations has been documented in the madison metropolitan school district (2013). in addition to local norms on the cogat, we used teacher ratings collected on the scales for rating the behavioral characteristics of superior students (scrbcss) (renzulli, siegle, reis, gavin, & reed, 2009; renzulli, et al., 2013) as part of the identification process. while the srbcss has been researched and the reliability and factorial validity of the scales are adequate for identification purposes (renzulli & smith, 2010), teacher rating scales have been demonstrated to be more accurate and valid when teachers are provided training (johnsen, 2013). hence, prior to having the teachers rate students, promoting place staff provided 66 global education review 4(1) professional development on use of the scales and on ways the traits described in the scales might manifest in rural students. students’ nationally-normed and locallynormed scores on the cogat-verbal were entered into student profile data collection templates with teacher ratings on the reading, motivation, and creativity subscales on the srbcss1. a committee comprised of administrators, teachers and project staff identified the high potential rural students of poverty to be included in the project based on the profiles created. of note, this process occurred after the rural districts employed their own identification processes for identifying gifted students. the process used by the project increased the number of students in low-income rural schools eligible for gifted education beyond those identified by the local identification process. while it may appear that the project implementation would, by virtue of its nature, result in increased numbers of identified students, it turned out not to be such an easy sell. even though the concept of expanding the pool of identified students had been agreed upon by those school districts signing on to the study, the process of applying local norms and expanding the pool ultimately required convincing a broader base of school personnel (and even school boards) that their more restrictive criteria for identification resulted in overlooking talented students, and giftedness was not limited to students who represented traditional conceptions of giftedness. the curriculum the project has also responded to the need for validating curriculum for gifted learners in rural settings. four fully developed language arts place-based units (2 per grade level at grades 3 and 4) were provided to use in teaching literacy skills while respecting and integrating the unique experience of life in rural america. as noted above, these units are based on the clear curriculum model which has been documented as effective across pull-out and special school settings in a national study of two units based on the model using a cluster randomized design (callahan, moon, oh, azano, & hailey, 2015). place-based clear curriculum the clear model was developed as a framework for curricular and instructional modifications for gifted students based on the critical components from tomlinson’s differentiated instruction model (2001), renzulli and reis’ (1985; 2000) schoolwide enrichment model, and kaplan’s depth and complexity model (2005). tomlinson’s work is based on the belief that students should be at the center of their own learning, and learning environment, and hence, incorporates multimodal forms of continuous assessment to elicit student data critical for curricular and instructional planning and adjustment. the underlying assumption is that gifted or high-end learners are not a homogenous group, but are quite different from one another in specific levels of background knowledge, understanding, interests, and learning profiles in any given discipline or even within a unit of study. the schoolwide enrichment model (renzulli & reis, 1985, 2000) emphasizes creative productivity, opportunities for students to work with the tools and methods of practicing relevant “real-world” projects in an area of interest. kaplan’s curricular modification concepts are structured to build layers of challenge and meaning onto standards-based learning opportunities through elements of depth (big ideas, language of the discipline, details, patterns, rules) and complexity (multiple perspectives, interdisciplinary connections, unanswered questions, ethical issues, changes over time) (kaplan, 2005). the clear model integrates the components from these models with five foundational elements of curricular development. the five elements are: continual formative assessment, clear learning goals, data-driven learning experiences, authentic products, and rich curriculum. each of these responding to challenges 67 elements is considered as crucial for promoting student engagement and enhancing student learning (gallagher, 1997; kaplan, 2005; renzulli & reis, 1985; tomlinson, 2001; tomlinson & mctighe, 2006; wiggins, 1998). the clear model units for third grade were designed around learning goals that are meaningful, important and, clear (see azano, 2013, for a full description of the model). while the effectiveness of the clear model has been documented (callahan et al., 2015), the units were not designed to be responsive to the needs of rural learners. to ensure that we reflected the rural communities in which the units were to be tested, we surveyed all elementary teachers of treatment districts asking questions about their particular place and what in fact made it rural. this information was used to modify the four language arts units in poetry, folklore, research, and fiction. researchers in rural education have delineated several components that situate education in place and contend that learning tied to where a child lives is equivalent to learning in a place that matters (azano, 2011; corbett, 2009; theobald, 1997). connections to place, proposed by haas and nachtigal (1998) include five components: (a) location: where we live ecologically, (b) civics: where we live politically, (c) worth: where we live economically, (d) connection: where we live spiritually, and (e) belonging: where we live in community. these connections to place prioritize local knowledge; and advocates of improved place-based rural education seek ideologies and curricula that reject the intended normalization of common standards and, instead, support and honor the unique characteristics of where children live and attend school. place-based pedagogy, which grounds learning in “local phenomena and students’ lived experience” (smith, 2002, p. 586), responds to the challenges in educating students in rural settings by promoting curricular relevance for rural students. place-based advocates contend that rural students are deeply tied to locality by their “sense of place” or a constructed reality “informed by the unique experiences, histories, motives, and goals that each of us brings to the spaces with which we identify” (hutchinson, 2004, p. 11). further, budge (2006) suggested that place-conscious pedagogy should capitalize on anti-oppressive education, arguing that certain characteristics—including poverty and geographic isolation—have created apathetic rural students who often question the reasons for attending school. thus, all aspects of the content, process, and product dimensions of the units based on the clear model have been considered as potential for making the place connections with the goal of altering that attitude toward school and schooling. increasing a growth mindset and reducing impact of stereotype threat to counter ways in which rural students might feel marginalized, we also considered two recently identified constructs used to explain under-achievement and failure to reach full potential: mindset (dweck, 2006) and stereotype threat (aronson & steele, 2005). the effect of a fixed mindset has been demonstrated at multiple age levels and across multiple samples, and stereotype threat has been demonstrated across multiple populations including gifted populations (e.g., middle school minority students, white male university engineering students, and african american students at highly regarded colleges) (aronson, fried, & good, 2002; aronson & inzlicht, 2004; aronson et al., 1999; aronson, steele, salinas, & lustina, 1998; steel & aronson, 1995; steele & aronson, 1998). stereotype threat has even been identified as a factor inhibiting student performance based on identification as a southerner (clark, eno, & guadagno, 2011). blackwell, trzesniewski and dweck (2007) demonstrated that simple interventions can be effective in altering mindsets in adolescents. in a study of “brainology” (a program based on dweck’s model of mindsets), 68 global education review 4(1) boehm (2012) found that when challenging instruction was combined with completion of a program to increase growth mindset, mathematics scores were increased in seventh grade students (compared to students in a control group who did not complete the program). within the gifted education field researchers have identified a combined fixed and growth mindset as characteristic of adaptive gifted adolescents (ziegler & stoeger, 2010). for this project we assessed mindset and developed interventions aimed at a healthy and productive blend of fixed and growth mindsets that orient students toward success, capitalizing on the development of potential and success through hard work. because prior interventions (alter, aronson, darley, rodriguez, & ruble, 2010; aronson, fried, & good, 2002; good, aronson, & inzlicht, 2003) have not focused particularly on younger students, gifted students, or rural students, we adapted the work to this age level and population. our work includes translating the principles of prior effective interventions and applying them to the rural, elementary, gifted population. identification, curriculum development and providing interventions in the pilot stage of our study we asked two key questions: 1. could we convince school districts to expand their conceptions of giftedness and implement a non-traditional process for identifying students? 2. could we create curricular units based on a model with documented effectiveness in the general gifted population that would reflect quality of placebased learning that would engage students in rural communities who were identified through traditional and non-traditional processes of identification and that could be modified according to the differences in place across rural communities? all of the school districts in the project are classified as both rural and high-poverty. in the initial pilot year (2014-2015), two districts participated – one as treatment and the other control. in year two (2015-2016) of the grant, we added an additional eight school districts. in the forthcoming year, we will add our final cohort of four additional districts for a total of 14 participating districts. our pilot treatment district had four elementary schools with approximately 52% of their students on free and reduced lunch. the students in these schools consistently performed lower than the state average in language arts (virginia department of education, 2011). one gifted and talented specialist serves the four elementary schools. in total (excluding salaries), the county allocates approximately $14,500 in total for the gifted program to cover testing, materials, and supplies for nine schools (elementary, middle and high school). the county also has a lower median household income ($39,299) than the state median income ($59,372) with more of its population living below the poverty line. in the first year of the study, all second grade students (“cohort 1”) were screened for giftedness using the process described above, and students were identified in the 4 treatment schools and 2 control schools in a matching district2 at the end of the school year. this resulted in adding 8 students to the pool of identified gifted students in the treatment district and 6 students to the pool of identified gifted students in the control district. during their third grade year, the students in the treatment group received instruction using two language arts units: poetry and folklore. in their fourth grade year they will participate in two additional units: fiction and research. students in the control group participate in the existing gifted program with no alterations to programming. we have completed a second round of identification in our pilot schools and have expanded to eight additional districts (see results in table 1). all students in the treatment groups will participate in the four units of instruction. two of those units are described below. responding to challenges 69 table 1 identified students by cohort year rural school division number of students in school division number identified by the school division number of students added number identified by school division number of students added cohort 1 cohort 2 1 1101 17 8 15 10 2 2102 9 6 3 11 3 1203 6 16 4 2204 15 12 5 1205 6 4 6 1206 2 15 7 2207 2 11 8 1208 16 21 9 2209 6 8 10 2210 27 8 poetry unit: the magic of everyday things in the poetry unit our focus was on increasing students’ knowledge and understanding of different forms of poetry while simultaneously expanding their comprehension and writing skills. we selected a title that reflects one of the big ideas of poetry: poetry helps readers to see the extraordinary in ordinary experiences. each objective in the poetry unit reflects one or more of the following: (a) student attainment of essential knowledge about poetry and literature such as literary devices and figurative language, (b) student understanding of relevant key principles about poetry and literature, and (c) student development and demonstration of writing, reading, and skills relevant to poetry and literature. within the unit, state and national curriculum standards are the basis for multiple opportunities to learn ways to connect with the bigger, more abstract ideas expressed in poetry. the units further enhance students’ word knowledge, reading comprehension strategies beyond the baseline level of the standards, and guide students in applying those skills to writing poems based on understanding how words draw and paint mental images. students’ study of imagery where they deconstruct and demystify poems through exploration of different forms and identification of distinct literary devices inherent in poems leads them to the writing process. students’ writing processes are guided by writing prompts and with a variety of poems relevant to students’ lives. place is integrated throughout the lessons through both content and the specifics in the student activities. for example, students read rural-themed poems, such as “what cows know” by susan blackaby, “at blackwater pond” by mary oliver, and “fishing” by a. e. stallings, among others. place is then integrated throughout the lessons. for example, in a postcard activity, in which students think about the compact nature of language in poetry, they are guided to choose clear, descriptive, and concise language to write a postcard. the lesson directs teachers to have an assortment of postcards from local landmarks or a variety of pictures that could be used to represent local places, events, historical sites, and so on, or students can bring in their own 70 global education review 4(1) pictures. students then write a note about a place they feel best represents the place they live. students engage in authentic learning by creating poems shared in writing workshops where the learning experiences focus on students’ engagement in writing, peer reviewing, revising, and presenting their poems to an audience. students become explorers of their own experiences and the experiences of others, as they read and write poems in which concrete details reveal larger, more abstract ideas. as a culminating “real life product” as defined by renzulli, students create a poetry anthology, which serves a summative assessment in which they organize and demonstrate their knowledge, skills, and understanding of poetry, as well as the habits of mind necessary for authentic work in poetry. for example, many students included their place-based “so much depends upon” poems (modeled after a lesson and activity of “the red wheelbarrow” by william carlos williams). poems included topics such as a chicken, well, deer, and another about a barn: “so much depends / upon / a yellow barn / covered with metal roofing / beside / the healthy crops.” the unit guides teachers to use a variety of assessments such written pre-tests and exit cards for making instructional decisions effectively. the data from the assessments are used to guide those decisions specifically in such domains as guiding grouping arrangements, choosing instructional strategies, making pacing adjustments, and organizing/creating extra support or challenge to meet the diverse learning needs of advanced learners. the unit as a whole exemplifies best practices in developing curriculum and instruction for gifted students in that it effectively translates the recommended principles into the language arts content area. it also provides advanced and conceptually challenging, in-depth, distinctive, and complex learning opportunities for gifted students while at the same time addressing the learning standards in the reading–literature, writing, and language strands within the ccss english language arts standards and incorporating principles of place-based education. research unit: exploration and communication the research unit is structured to guide students in learning to derive information from, analyze, and evaluate a variety of nonfiction texts and to expand student skills in research, writing, and the use of reading comprehension strategies. using the metaphor of researcher as explorer, the unit activities first provide students with direction in how to identify general areas of interest and then how to translate interests in an area, person, or topic into authentic research projects. students set out on a ‘‘knowledge expedition’’ by posing initial research questions, then identifying, organizing, and evaluating information from different categories of nonfiction texts. in doing so, students are encouraged to consider place topics as a focus of their inquiry. for example, in the first lesson of the unit, students complete an interest inventory, which is a scavenger hunt in their bedroom, house, or neighborhood, in which they’re asked to explore what is important to them. in the following lesson, as students share their explorations, the teacher is provided direction in using the data collected to help students find a place-based interest related to living in virginia (consistent with grade-level state standards). for example, (excerpted below): the idea of the exploration is to have students find topics that genuinely interest them. at the conclusion of this activity, students should have 3 – 5 topics of interest related to virginia. for example, a student who found a musical instrument might be responding to challenges 71 interested in the history of appalachian music. a student who wrote about a family heirloom may be interested in how their family came to this region of the state. development of an appreciation of multiple perspectives on a topic and development of an understanding of how perspective shapes the way we interpret and share information serve as overarching goals throughout the unit. further, students learn how to share their findings with a specified audience using clear and meaningful ways of communication through writing and speaking. the lessons involve students in the comprehension of texts, and writing for communication as emphasized in the reading– informational texts, writing, and language strands of the ccss, not only in fourth grade but also throughout elementary and secondary english language arts. additionally, the lessons give students the opportunity to work with ideas that suit their individual interests and draw from the rural experience. as the culminating experience (also used as the summative assessment), students design and conduct a research project, which they share with an audience of students, parents, and teachers at a classroom ‘‘research gala.’’ the project represents the ultimate learning goal of understanding that research is an organized and systematic strategy for finding answers to important questions and that communication of findings to an authentic audience is a critical component of the research process. as such, the learning process incorporated in the unit with multiple layers of depth and complexity allows students to be informed consumers and producers of knowledge. both units are infused with directions to the teachers on mitigating stereotype threat and increasing a growth mindset by reinforcing effort while praising quality and aptitude as well as pointing to growth resulting from increased effort. in addition, during the first summer all students in the treatment groups participated in a computer based webquest focusing on growth mindsets and stereotype threat, allowing for interaction with a larger peer group of identified gifted students and a greater sense of community that is often absent from the lives of rural gifted students. preliminary findings while findings relative to impact on achievement and the affective variables noted above are premature at this stage, we feel it is important to discuss the lessons we are learning now. the purpose of the promoting place in rural schools project is to advance the achievement of gifted students of poverty in rural schools by developing (1) an identification process for rural learners, (2) place-based language arts units in accord with the clear curriculum model, and (3) interventions to reduce stereotype threat and increase a growth mindset. project goals to this stage in our work have focused on (a) implementing an identification process to identify increased numbers of gifted students in rural schools, particularly those who are of high poverty; (b) developing high quality, place-based 3rd and 4th grade language arts curriculum based on the clear curriculum model; (c) adapting effective strategies to increase a growth mindset and reduce the impact of stereotype threat in identified rural gifted students; (d) increasing achievement in reading and writing by identified rural gifted students; and (e) increasing student engagement and self-efficacy. identification process to address this goal, we identified three objectives for the beginning years of the project: (1) to validly assess all 2nd grade students with the cognitive abilities test –verbal (cogat) in 10 school districts (2 pilot districts and 8 additional districts); (2) to obtain reliable and 72 global education review 4(1) valid teacher rating on the scales for rating the behavioral characteristics of superior students (srbcss); (3) to create student profiles for review by the project staff and the school identification committee, and identify an additional pool of non-traditional students to be added to the gifted program in each district. in order to meet this goal effectively, we found ourselves in a position of needing to first understand the various identification processes within each of the participating districts and communicate the big ideas of the grant in order to facilitate buy-in. to that end, we hosted an orientation workshop with superintendents and gifted education coordinators to review the grant and logistics for identification. also, we created and modified srbcss training by adding additional examples and ideas about gifted characteristics in rural and/or low-income students. at the time of this report, identification meetings have been held with all participating districts to discuss student profiles. to develop the profiles, we enter cogat scores based on local and national norms student information and srbcss into one data file, removing students from the file who score below the 75th percentile on both the cogat and all categories of srbcss, based on locally or nationally calculated norms as well as district and classroom norms on the srbcss. we then group remaining students into the following categories: (1) 90th percentile score on both cogat and srbcss, (2) 90th percentile score on cogat only, (3) 90th percentile score on cogat, 75th percentile on srbcss (4) 75th percentile on cogat, 90th percentile srbcss, (5) 90th percentile on srbcss only, (6) 75th percentile on both cogat and srbcss, (7) 75th percentile score on cogat only, (8) 75th percentile score on srbcss only. these data are then presented to school staff with an ensuing discussion to identify additional students for each district’s gifted education program. in these meetings, we have learned that many rural districts are eager to meet the needs of their low-income and underrepresented students, while also giving consideration to the local community, school politics, socioeconomic discrepancies across schools in a district, and limited resources. however, we have also discovered that the myths surrounding who is gifted, particularly as they relate to the use of national norms and conceptions of gifted students as genius may still prevail even when districts face the reality that they have failed to identify any gifted students at all in one or more schools. these competing values make the task of convincing schools that they are not watering down their gifted program when using alternative strategies, a major challenge. while the theory and practical advice offered by scholars on the importance of expanding conceptions of giftedness to more accurately serve all potentially gifted students is powerful in academic circles, the practitioners who fear negative responses from parents that the program will be watered down or criticism from teachers in the general education program who claim “that child can’t really be gifted” need further evidence to gain acceptance and recognition by teachers as gifted. the responses of the students to the curriculum added credibility to the argument that these students did have potential and added powerful, persuasive evidence in conversations with district leaders. the first was noted in the testimony and specific examples from the teacher in the pilot treatment group about the quality of products (for example, poems) created by the students meeting project standards—but not school district standards for identification. the second was the teacher’s descriptions of positive engagement by all students to the curriculum and her particular notes on the blossoming of the alternatively identified group in the activities (e.g., through examples of responding to challenges 73 responses to activities calling for analysis of the meaning of poems). development of a high-quality, placebased clear curriculum to adapt and develop high quality, place-based 3rd and 4th grade language arts units based on the clear curriculum model, we had three objectives: (1) to collect community data from teachers in treatment districts to identify relevant topics for place-based instruction; (2) revise existing clear units to include placebased materials and determine content validity; and (3) develop an additional place-based clear unit for 4th grade students in the treatment group. in year 1, the research team developed a survey responding to the need for validating curriculum for gifted learners in rural settings. the survey was distributed to all elementary school teachers in the treatment districts in year 2 to validate that the placebased content and activities met the various rural locales represented in the districts newly added to the study. experts in gifted education and place-based education reviewed 3rd and 4th grade units to determine content validity with the clear curriculum unit and place-based pedagogy. additionally, growth mindset components were developed and embedded throughout all four units in the curriculum. all units were judged to be essentially good reflections of the clear curriculum and placebased pedagogy by experts in those fields. minor adjustments to the curricular units were made based on the experts’ feedback. the most striking lessons, which reinforced our earlier assumption, are that rural communities are not homogenous (e.g., farming is not necessarily a characteristic of rural communities), teachers now are not necessarily residents of the rural community so may not be knowledgeable about students’ lives in their communities, and technology has greatly broadened the rural students’ experience in some, but certainly not all communities. the research team also developed an observation protocol based on tomlinson’s “differentiated instruction observation lookfors” (2001) and the “classroom observation protocol,” an instrument which had been developed by university of virginia staff based on the work of maker and nielsen (1996) and the 2010 pre-k-grade 12 gifted programming standards (national association for gifted students). we are currently implementing the protocols in treatment and control classrooms. fidelity logs for the 3rd grade units were created in year 1 and data on fidelity from the pilot year reveal that the teacher was able to implement the curriculum as it was developed, which included giving her the leeway to make adjustments as data on her students might indicate a need for more scaffolding, a faster or slower pace, or supplemental resources. the teacher in the pilot year carefully documented those changes; each one reflected fidelity to the model’s principles. the teacher’s openness and willingness to share her experience in implementation has been invaluable in improving the curriculum and in encouraging others to participate in the project. our investment of time in a pilot with the opportunity to communicate often has paid off in helping us reach other districts. the third grade units have been judged by experts and by the teacher in the pilot to be reflective of the curriculum for third grade, but reflecting the standards at a higher level with engagement through the use of place in the construction of lessons. further, we have found that the students identified through alternative strategies are as engaged and productive as those identified through traditional standards. the only students who have not continued in the program thus far are students who have left the district or who have had other mitigating 74 global education review 4(1) circumstances in their lives that precluded continuation in the gifted program. growth mindset and stereotype threat to address the adaptation of effective strategies for increasing a growth mindset and reducing the impact of stereotype threat in identified rural gifted students, we had three major objectives: (1) gather pre-assessment data on third grade identified students using scales developed in year 1; (2) develop an intervention to address stereotype threat; and (3) establish reliability and validity of mindset and stereotype threat instruments. in addition to pre-assessing students using the scales developed under this goal, we developed a webquest mindset intervention piloted in the treatment district in the pilot year. as we did with the curriculum, we embedded stereotype threat into the intervention. at this point we have not revised/adapted measures to the midelementary school level and established reliability and factorial validity of the measures, but will not be able to assess post-intervention change on mindset or stereotype threat until next year. at the writing of this manuscript we are also still a year away from post-testing students on measures of achievement in reading and writing, engagement, and self-efficacy. conclusion despite the issues and challenges of myths surrounding gifted students and gifted education we have been able to convince schools of the importance of expanding their identification processes. perhaps most significant in getting buy-in for the identification process were 1) changing the orientation to one in which students would be viewed as students who were exceptional relative to their peers, and 2) providing multiple real-life examples of students from rural environments who exhibited gifted characteristics and providing examples of gifted characteristics displayed in non-traditional ways. the project has also validated our assumptions that rural communities are unique places, and it is inefficient and ineffective to plan interventions and curriculum based on stereotypic or even generalizations across communities. the place surveys revealed that southwest mining communities of virginia provide dramatically different experiences and orientations than the fishing communities of the eastern shore or the farming communities of the rural northwest orchard communities. place has different, unique characteristics in each setting and the possibilities for engaging students with place-based curriculum are dependent on recognition of those differences. however, using a high quality curriculum with that attention to difference has demonstrated, thus far, that students will be engaged and will produce high quality products in language arts recognized by teachers and the community. more importantly, the teachers in the project thus far have been able to change their mindsets to include all students in the project – both those identified by district procedures and those identified by the alternative processes as equal partners in the learning process. the pilot treatment teacher was an exemplary example of a teacher who could identify extraordinary production in children’s analysis and in their writing. it was apparent that the curriculum provided her opportunities to see talent by challenging students to think and to create beyond the parameters of the standard classroom curriculum. hence, it was by virtue of repeated opportunity for students to exhibit talent that talent was recognized and any deficit perceptions were overcome. responding to challenges 75 notes 1. scaled scores of district-wide ratings and for teachers’ ratings within their classroom are both provided for consideration in recognition that teachers vary widely in their leniency in ratings. 2. school districts were randomly assigned to treatment and control conditions. the district was assigned rather than schools because in most rural areas one teacher of the gifted serves all schools and we needed to avoid a treatment “bleed” effect. funding the research reported here was supported by the u.s. department of education, under the jacob k. javits gifted and talented students education program, through grant gm10148. references alter, a., aronson, j., darley, j. rodriguez, c., & ruble, d., n. 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(2010). research on a modified framework of implicit personality theories. learning and individual differences, 20, 318-326. about the author(s) amy price azano, phd, is an assistant professor of adolescent literacy at virginia tech where her research focuses on rural gifted education, place-based pedagogy, and the literacy needs of rural youth. dr. azano teaches graduate-level literacy courses to preservice teachers and doctoral students and serves as co-principal investigator on a 5-year, jacob k. javits department of education grant seeking to improve gifted education for rural learners. she is co-author of a language arts curriculum series for gifted students with prufrock press. carolyn m. callahan, phd, is currently the commonwealth professor of education at the university of virginia where she teaches classes in gifted education and serves as principal investigator for the national center for research on gifted education and project place, focusing on the identification and provision of services to rural gifted students. she has been recognized as outstanding professor of the commonwealth of virginia and distinguished scholar of the national association for gifted children. dr. callahan has published over 225 articles and 50 book chapters on topics in gifted education. annalissa v. brodersen, phd, is a research associate with the national center for research on gifted education and project place at the university of virginia. her research interests include p-12 gifted education policies and practices, rural education, and intersections between p-12 gifted education and higher education. melanie caughey is a graduate research assistant at the university of virginia, where she is completing her ph.d. she worked on adapting the clear curriculum model for the javits project promoting place in rural schools. ms. caughey also serves as the academic coordinator for the saturday and summer enrichment programs (sep) and has worked with the national center for research on gifted education (ncrge). http://www.doe.virginia.gov/ a global view of rural education 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gallo, jessica & beckman, paula (2016). a global view of rural education: teacher preparation, recruitment and retention. global education review, 3(1). 1-4 a global view of rural education: teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention jessica gallo university of montana paula beckman university of maryland rural education remains an area of great concern for policymakers and the people who populate rural areas worldwide. some researchers have argued that although rural and urban schools often have much in common in terms of levels of poverty and lack of resources, the bulk of the current educational literature is directed at an understanding of urban school districts (e.g. barrett, cowen, toma, & troske, 2015; beeson & strange, 2000; bouck, 2004). however, the literature on rural education also asserts that there are qualities unique to rural sites that demand increased attention in the field of educational research (arnold, et al., 2005; beeson & strange, 2000; eppley, 2009; khattri, et al., 1997). considering that a large portion of the world’s schools are located in rural areas, it is important to attend to the unique needs of rural teachers and students. the issue is important both within the united states and around the world. in the united states alone in 2003, more than half of the nation’s school districts and more than a third of the nation’s public schools were in rural areas (provasnik, kewalramani, mclaughlin coleman, gilberston, herring, & xie, 2007). despite these statistics, national education policies often do not fit with the needs and material circumstances of rural school districts (eppley, 2009; gagnon & mattingly, 2015). in her critical policy analysis of the 2001 no child left behind act, for example, karen eppley (2009) found: the only response from policy makers to rural schools regarding highly qualified teacher mandates thus far has been the socalled flexibility provision, a misdirected and inadequate attempt to mitigate the law’s effects in rural schools. instead, rural educators need to provide clear explanations to policymakers about what constitutes a highly qualified rural teacher, and provisions to laws need to account for corresponding author: jessica gallo, department of curriculum & instruction, the university of montana, pjwec 101, 32 campus drive, missoula, mt 59812 email: jessica.gallo@umontana.edu mailto:jessica.gallo@umontana.edu 2 global education review 3(1) the distinct differences needed for high quality instruction in diverse rural communities. (p. 9). without policies tailored to the unique context of rural schools and communities, ensuring equity of access, resources, and opportunity in schools across the united states becomes a difficult task. the importance of this issue is also striking at the international level. globally there were still 121 million children and adolescents out of school in 2012, despite the progress toward the 2015 education for all (efa) goals for universal access to education (unesco, 2015). although there has been progress in reaching these goals, it is clear that there is much left to do and that educational quality remains a challenge. the rural-urban gap is particularly acute in developing countries and is reflected in a variety of areas including adult literacy, pre-primary education, primary school completion and the likelihood that a child will transition from primary to secondary school (2015 global monitoring report). while multiple factors have been implicated in addressing global concerns about education (e.g. concerns about infrastructure, overcrowding, lack of textbooks and high quality learning materials), at every turn, issues related to teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention are among the most widely acknowledged barriers to solving the quality challenge. a wide-ranging evaluation of rural educational research in the united states conducted by arnold, newman, gaddy, and dean (2005) identified nine priority topics for future research. teacher quality, especially as it relates to the recruitment, development, and retention of teachers in rural contexts, was among the areas of identified need. in 2011, the unesco institute for statistics (uis) estimated that around the world, two million new teaching positions were needed to ensure universal primary education by 2015, and by 2030 the worldwide demand for teachers would rise to 25.8 million. unesco acknowledged that the shortage of teachers was an obstacle to reaching the education for all (efa) and millennium development goals (mdg). the unesco strategy on teachers 2012-2015 emphasized the importance of teacher preparation and building a high-quality teaching force in countries hampered by the lack of teachers (unesco strategy on teachers, 2012, p. 2). moreover, the lack of qualified teachers contributes to other concerns related to educational quality such as overcrowding and high pupil/teacher ratios. efforts to address the lack of teachers – such as hiring teachers that are not trained in national standards – further contribute to problems of educational quality. the 2013/2014 efa monitoring report emphasized the importance of investing in teachers, noting that “in around a third of countries, fewer than 75% of primary school teachers are trained according to national standards. and in a third of countries, the challenge of training existing teachers is worse than that of recruiting and training new teachers” (unesco, 2015, p. 5). with these concerns in mind, the articles in this issue of global education review address the important topics of teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention in rural education. a number of the abstracts we received in response to our call for papers for this issue tackled these three topics, a testament to the prevalence of these concerns and the efforts to address them in rural school districts around the world. lois meyer’s article “teaching our own babies: teachers’ life journeys into community-based initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico” focuses on a teacher preparation program dedicated to the education of babies and very young children and that builds on the local wisdom and practices related to child development. in valuing each teacher’s life story and experiences, meyer finds http://www.uis.unesco.org/education/pages/teachers-statistics.aspx http://www.unesco.org/new/en/education/themes/leading-the-international-agenda/education-for-all/efa-goals/ a global view of rural education 3 that the teachers bring vital local knowledge of language, culture, and learning to their communities. similarly, frances vitali’s work with preservice teachers in northwestern new mexico celebrates the power of a family literacy project to deepen and expand teachers’ understandings of the diverse oracy and literacy practices of the school community. in preparing the preservice teachers to listen closely to their students’ life stories and inviting family members into the classroom, the preservice teachers are better prepared to be culturally relevant teachers of linguistically and culturally diverse children. in this issue, we include two articles that examine the potential of mentorship programs to support and enhance in-service teachers’ practice. katy de la garza examines a teacher mentorship program in rural and indigenous guatemalan schools. while her study finds inequalities in mentorship based on access, depth of knowledge, and cultural constraints, she argues that pedagogical mentorship offers possibilities to support teachers when it is included as part of a larger picture of preparing and sustaining rural teachers. anni lindenberg, kathryn henderson, and leah durán examine the role of mentorship in combination with math content videos to promote education in rural primary schools in nicaragua. of particular importance here is the role of this model in providing for collaboration, mutual support, and flexibility in applying the intervention model to specific classrooms as well as in the building of pedagogical knowledge. two articles by mukeredzi and by azano and stewart highlight the importance of preparing preservice teachers to more fully understand rurality as a context for their teaching. in tabitha mukeredzi’s article “the ‘journey to becoming’: pre-service teachers’ experiences and understandings of rural school practicum in a south african context,” she describes a practicum for preservice teachers embedded in rural schools and communities. she finds that an immersive rural school experience challenges the future teachers’ assumptions about rural schools and students. teacher education programs focused on preparing teachers for rural school contexts, she argues, are key to rural schools’ recruitment and retention difficulties. similarly, amy price azano and trevor stewart argue that preservice teachers need opportunities to apply and think through how to make their curricula relevant for rural students and communities in their article “confronting challenges at the intersection of rurality, place, and teacher preparation: improving efforts in teacher education to staff rural schools.” with teacher education courses that attend to issues of place and culture, the preservice english teachers in this study become more conscious of and responsive to rural concerns. finally, teacher retention in alaska is the central concern of “stemming the revolving door: teacher retention and attrition in arctic alaska schools” by ute kaden, philip patterson, joanne healy, and barbara adams. in this study the authors find that the factors that impact retention are complex and intertwined, and a strong structure of school and community support for teachers is an important component. regardless of the complexity, however, the authors argue that school leaders need to develop an individualized and strategic plan to retain and support their rural alaskan teachers. taken as a whole, these articles reflect the diversity and the complexity of rural educational contexts while also promoting a deep appreciation for the particular challenges that rural school districts face in effort to prepare, attract, and retain highly qualified teachers. a common thread running through these articles is the centrality of cultural relevance in the rural school curriculum and pedagogy. the need for cultural relevance highlights the important understanding that rural school communities 4 global education review 3(1) have unique needs and structures that require specialized preparation and retention methods. with a deeper understanding of the characteristics and qualities of the rural communities, teachers will be better able to successfully teach and meet the local needs of the communities, moving us closer to the goal of ensuring quality education for all. references arnold, m.l., newman, j.h., gaddy, b.b., & dean, c.b. (2005). a look at the condition of rural education research: setting a direction for future research. journal of research in rural education, 20(6). 1-25. barrett, n., cowen, j., toma, e., and troske, s. (2015). working with what they have: professional development as a reform strategy in rural schools. journal of research in rural education, 30(10), 118. beeson, e., and strange, m. (2000). why rural matters: the need for every state to take action on rural education. journal of research in rural education, 16(2), 63140. bouck, e.c. (2004). how size and setting impact education in rural schools. the rural educator, 25(3), 38-42. provasnik, s., kewalramani, a., coleman, m.m., gilbertson, l., herring, w., and xie, q. (2007). status of education in rural america (nces 2007-040). national center for education statistics, institute of education sciences, u.s. department of education. washington, dc. eppley, k. (2009). rural schools and the highly qualified teacher provision of no child left behind: a critical policy analysis. journal of research in rural education, 24(4), 1-11. khattri, n., riley, k. w., and kane, m. b. (1997). students at risk in poor, rural areas: a review of the research. journal of research in rural education, 13(2), 79100. unesco (2012). unesco strategy on teachers (2012-2015). retrieved from http://en.unesco.org/themes/teachers unesco (2015). efa global monitoring report: education for all 2000-2015 achievements and challenges. paris, france: unesco publishing. unesco institute for statistics (2015). sustainable development goal for education cannot advance without more teachers. montreal, canada: unesco publishing. about the author(s) jessica, gallo, phd, is assistant professor of literacy education in the department of curriculum and instruction at the university of montana. before joining the faculty at university of montana as a teacher educator, jess taught high school english in two rural school districts in wisconsin. she has been a national writing project teacher leader since 2008 and is a former co-director for the rural wisconsin writing institute, a site of the fox valley writing project. her current research focuses on disciplinary literacy, rural education, and teacher preparation and development. paula j. beckman, phd, is a full professor in the department of counseling, higher education and special education at the university of maryland college park where she is also an affiliate member of the latin american studies center. she specializes in working with young children who are at risk for or have disabilities and their families. she is particularly interested in the needs of children and families living in low and middle income countries. 70 global education review 4(3)    global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lehrl, simone, kluczniok, katharina, rossbach, hans-guenther, & anders, yvonne (2017). long term persistence of preschool intervention on children’s mathematical development: results from the german model project “kindergarten of the future in bavaria.” global education review, 4 (3), 70-87.  long term persistence of preschool intervention on children’s mathematical development: results from the german model project “kindergarten of the future in bavaria” simone lehrl university of bamberg katharina kluczniok university of bamberg hans-guenther rossbach leibniz institute for educational trajectories yvonne anders freie universität berlin abstract the present study examines how attending the german model project “kindergarten of the future in bavaria” (kidz), which provided 138 children (aged 3 to 6) with traditional preschool stimulation combined with cognitive and domain-specific stimulation, is associated with children’s competencies in mathematics over time to age 12 compared to a control group of 53 children. controlling for child and family background measures, attending kidz was positively associated with mathematical competencies at the age of 12 compared to the control group not attending. those effects are mediated through grade and preschool quality. furthermore, results showed that preschool quality was associated with higher competencies in mathematics at age 12, even when controlling for numerical skills at preschool and primary school age. the results suggest that preschool quality influences mathematical development over and above those effects detected previously in preschool. thus, the academically oriented high-quality preschool intervention, kidz, lays not only the foundation for a good start in school, but also for later development in secondary school keywords kindergarten of the future in bavaria (kidz), preschool, mathematical competence, primary school, mathematical development, global education reform movement, germany, developmentally appropriate play activities introduction mathematical problem solving is an essential skill required to participate in society as it is linked to better social, health, and economic outcomes (oecd, 2016). mathematical skills are acquired long before formal schooling starts for instance as children begin identifying numbers, shapes, and spatial relations (krajewski, nieding, & schneider, 2008; duncan et al., 2007; geary, hamson, & hoard, ______________________________ corresponding author: dr. simone lehrl, otto-friedrich-universitaet bamberg, lehrstuhl für elementarund familienpaedagogik, an der weberei 5 (erba), zi. 04.083, 96047 bamberg email: simone.lehrl@uni-bamberg.de 71 global education review 4(3)    2000). in addition to the resources within the child, e.g., working memory or executive functioning (geary, hoard, byrd-graven, nugent, & numtee, 2007; krajewski, nieding, & schneider, 2008), the learning environments that the child encounters play a crucial role in shaping children’s mathematical competence development throughout the educational system (bronfenbrenner & morris, 2006; lehrl, kluczniok, & rossbach, 2016). after the "pisa shock" of the 2000s wherein german students achieved only at the oecd average in all academic domains (baumert et al., 2001), the quality of the german education system was questioned. in addition to primary and secondary school, preschool education1 was also in the spotlight of public and scientific discussion. one result was change to the german preschool system (e.g., qualification of personnel, introduction of educational plans, strengthening the role of education in preschool versus care). these changes can be seen as a consequence of the global education reform movement. how these changes impacted practical work in preschools and child development in germany cannot be finally estimated. there is, however, accumulating evidence that high-quality preschool education is one of the ways to raise children’s academic outcomes, especially in mathematics (anders et al., 2012; barnett, 1998; lehrl et al., 2016; melhuish, sylva, sammons, siraj-blatchford, taggart, & phan, 2008; see for an overview melhuish et al., 2015). some of the limitations of these studies are that there is substantial variability across the studies regarding the target group (e.g., universal preschool vs. high-quality intervention for disadvantaged children), the persistence of preschool effects (effects within the preschool period vs. beyond), the type of activities researched (teacher-directed activities including instructional techniques versus child-directed activities including activities integrated in daily routines), and the type of quality measure (global quality indicators like responsive teaching vs. domainspecific quality indicators like instruction in mathematics). generally, there is evidence that preschool quality effects of universal preschool on mathematical outcomes are still present at the age of 11, 14, 15 and 18 (sammons et al., 2008; vandell, belsky, burchinal, steinberg, & vandergrift, 2010; vandell, burchinal, & pierce, 2016); that attendance at high-quality interventions for disadvantaged children is effective for children’s academic outcomes during the preschool phase and later for social and life-coping skills (see barnett, 2011 for an overview); that effects of teacher-directed, instructional techniques on academic competencies seem to fade out after the preschool period (anders, 2015); and that quality measures focusing on the domainspecific quality of instruction in preschool classrooms show higher effect sizes for mathematical development than measures focusing on global preschool quality (anders et al., 2012; lehrl et al., 2016; sylva et al., 2006). to date, however, no study has examined how an intervention focusing on child-centered implicit learning through integrating academically oriented activities into daily routines that targets all children irrespective of disadvantage might influence academic development beyond the preschool years. hence, the present study investigates how participation in a high-quality german preschool model project (called “kidz – kindergarten of the future in bavaria”) that aimed to promote children’s mathematical skills in developmentally appropriate play activities during daily routines in preschool was associated with mathematical competencies in secondary school at age 12. long term persistence of preschool intervention 72   specifically, the present study analyses whether (a) kidz attendance is positively associated with mathematical competencies at age 12 and (b) whether pathways from project attendance to adolescent mathematical competencies are mediated by preschool quality. different approaches to preschool instruction when comparing preschool effects, one challenge is to disentangle effects of preschool attendance, quality of the preschool stimulation, or attending a special program/intervention. theorists assume that preschool attendance impacts children’s development through the quality of interactions taking place in those settings (bronfenbrenner & morris, 2006). when studying effects of attending universal preschool or a special program on child outcomes, preschool quality might serve as a mediating variable. thus it must be asked, which components should an intervention contain to be of “high-quality”, especially regarding mathematical development. in general, there are two different approaches to promoting children’s mathematical competencies in preschool. first, there are specific trainings that are highly formalized, teacher-directed, and use a lot of instructional techniques such as work sheets. such trainings are carried out in specific planned hours focusing on small groups of children (e.g., children in the final year of preschool; children at risk for later school failure). some researchers showed positive effects of such early training programs for mathematical development during preschool through grade 1, indicating higher mathematical competencies for the intervention group compared to a control group without the specific training program (krajewski, nieding, & schneider, 2008). longer-term effects of such programs haven’t been found yet. second, there are interventions that are informal, child-centered, and implement techniques that are integrated in the daily routines and normal course of preschool life and include all children. traditionally, in germany, this approach is an integral component of nearly all preschools. hence, interventions following such a child-centered approach are particularly popular (kluczniok, rossbach, & große, 2010) and have higher acceptance within preschools. interventions focused on integrating academic content regarding mathematics and literacy into the daily activities of children via number game play resulted in short-term advantages compared to a control group (ramani & siegler, 2008; ramani, siegler, & hitti, 2012; hauser, vogt, stebler, & rechsteiner, 2014; hirsh-pasek, michnik golinkoff, berk, & singer, 2008; jörns, schuchardt, mähler, & grube, 2013; donie, kammermeyer, & roux, 2013). moreover, such a play-based approach was significantly associated with higher gains in mathematical competencies when compared to a teacher-centred intervention (hauser et al., 2014; jörns et al., 2013; donie et al., 2013). several other programs, where playing number games was only one part of the whole program, also revealed substantial increases in mathematical competencies by using a wide range of numerical activities, including board games, simple arithmetic problems, monetary activities, number-related projects, numberrelated songs, and books and computer games that focus on numbers (arnold, fisher, doctoroff, & dobb, 2002; griffin, 2000; 2004; klein & starkey, 2004; starkey, klein, & wakeley, 2004). furthermore, studies on the effects of implementing “developmentally appropriate 73 global education review 4(3)    practice (dap)” (bredekamp & copple, 1997) or the “enriched curriculum” (walsh, mcguinness, sproule, & trew, 2010) that integrate such play-based, child-centered, and integrated activities to a comprehensive curriculum give important insights as to how such promotion approaches, which are also part of the model program kidz, are associated with child outcomes. results of meta-analyses are sobering as they reveal low or no positive effects of implementing dap or the enriched curriculum on academic outcomes (van horn, karlin, ramey, aldridge, & snyder, 2005; mcguinnes, sproule, bojke, trew, & walsh, 2014). however, effects were found on different motivational and socialemotional domains revealing that children in dap or the enriched curriculum benefit in terms of their learning effort and well-being (van horn et al., 2005; walsh et al., 2010). that there have been no effects found on academic outcomes might be partly explained by the implementation fidelity of the curriculum or the realized quality of the processes in classrooms. thus, having a stronger focus on the processes within such programs and especially on the quality of those processes might be a valuable approach. the preschool quality and its effects on child development educational quality children experienced in their learning environments is considered to be of crucial importance to the development of their academic skills, but the definition and measurement of preschool quality that impacts child development is very challenging (for an overview of the quality debate see pianta, downer, & hamre, 2016). a research-based approach is to conceptualize preschool quality as the variables that affect children’s development (pianta et al., 2005). in the centre of this approach is the child’s wellbeing, specifically, their safety needs, health, intellectual stimulation, and social exchange (ecce-study group, 1997). these needs can be met by providing responsive and warm interactions between teacher and child, developmentally appropriate stimulation towards the child, and a safe and stimulating spatial material surrounding (nichd eccrn, 2002; pianta et al., 2005; kluczniok & rossbach, 2014). this quality model is based on the assumption that quality is measurable by standardized observational instruments (e.g., class, ecers) or questionnaires for parents and staff. in international longitudinal studies, standardized observational instruments are often used to analyze the impact of preschool quality on child outcomes. in the present study, we also follow this quality model and, consequently, measure preschool quality with standardized observations in preschool classes. the few existing longitudinal studies show that higher preschool quality is associated with better academic (including mathematics) outcomes at age 8 (lehrl et al.; 2016; hill, gormley, & adelstein, 2015), age 11 (sammons et al., 2008), age 12 (lehrl et al., 2016), age 15/16 (sylva et al., 2014; vandell et al., 2010), and age 18 (vandell et al., 2016). lasting effects of high-quality preschool programs have been found in evaluation studies of high-quality early interventions for disadvantaged children in the us (barnett, 1998; camilli, vargas, ryan, & barnett, 2010; gilliam & zigler, 2000; for an overview see yoshikawa et al., 2013). for instance, the results of the perry preschool program (schweinhart, montie, xiang, barnett, belfield, & nores, 2005) show long-lasting effects for the intervention group in various domains (e.g., higher high school graduation rates, better cognitive outcomes, lower special education for mental impairment). the long term persistence of preschool intervention 74   benefits of participating in the early intervention programs reach even into adulthood up to the age of 40 years (schweinhart et al., 2005). furthermore, evaluation studies of the head start program suggest positive child outcomes in various domains including cognitive, health, and socioemotional development. for example, the head start impact study (u.s. department of health and human services, administration for children and families, 2010) showed positive effects on child outcomes in language and literacy during preschool but these benefits mostly dissipated by the end of grade 1 (so called “fading-out-effect”; for more information, see barnett, 1998). for mathematical skills, a significant impact of head start could only be found at age 3. these findings are in line with a recent meta-analysis of 57 head start studies (shager, schindler, magnuson, duncan, yoshikawa, & hart, 2013) indicating that head start is effective in improving children’s short-term cognitive and achievement outcomes (see also puma, bell, cook, & hyde, 2010; puma et al., 2012). duncan and magnuson (2013, p.120) summarize after reviewing 84 programs that “most early childhood education studies that have tracked children beyond the end of the program treatment find that effects on test scores fade over time.” effects of interventions might fade out over time for several reasons: if non-participating children catch up (e.g., by receiving more investments), or if participating children forget the material they learned or the skills they developed (hill et al., 2015; jacob, lefgren, & sims, 2010). fade out effects might be observed, as well, if measurements are not appropriate or implementation quality was not sufficient (pcerc-preschool curriculum evaluation research consortium, 2008). barnett (1998) questioned the fading out of early effects and saw methodological reasons for the misinterpretation of these studies (e.g., lower instructional quality in elementary schools for intervention children). he concluded that all the early model programs have long-lasting effects on school achievement and school career without the need for additional support during a student’s school career. taken together, research evidence produces a mixed pattern of results. on the one hand, the studies investigating universal preschool and quality effects on academic outcomes suggest better outcomes for children attending high-quality preschools. on the other hand, the results of high-quality preschool programs suggest that effects of these interventions disappear in the long run. thus, more empirical research is needed. the german preschool system the following remarks are necessary to develop an understanding of the current german early childhood education context because the german preschool (‘kindergarten’) is different from preschool concepts in many other countries (e.g., us, england, france). generally, the oecd (2006) differentiates between two types of preschool systems: “social pedagogy” (e.g., germany, norway, sweden), and “readiness for school” (e.g., uk, france, and the us). german preschools apply the social pedagogy tradition which means that preschool phase is seen as a broad preparation for life and the foundational stage of lifelong learning. countries adopting the readiness for school approach focus on cognitive development in the early years, and the acquisition of a range of knowledge, skills, and dispositions (oecd, 2006). german preschools – even if they are considered the elementary level of the general education system – do not belong to the public educational system (rossbach, 2009). they are 75 global education review 4(3)    part of the youth and social welfare department. following the shock of the poor german results in the first pisa survey, some changes to the german preschool system were made. beginning in 2004 official curricular guidelines were introduced in all 16 federal states of germany, rather late compared to other countries (e.g., sweden 1998, england 1999, 2000, and 2002, norway 1996 and 2005; for an overview see oecd, 2006). these guidelines emphasise the promotion of cognitive and (pre)academic skills. this is a relatively new element of early childhood education policy in germany and it challenges the german preschool tradition radically as the promotion of socio-emotional skills had been prioritized previously (rossbach, 2009). furthermore, a national agreement on the basic principles for early child care and education curricula (e.g., teacher role, view of the child) was adopted in 2004 and this became the framework for the federal state specific curriculum guidelines. the guidelines are not mandatory and there is no national inspection system to monitor the implementation of the guidelines as is common practice in other countries (e.g., the early years foundation stage in england; melhuish, 2017). in most federal states the childcare providers are responsible for ensuring the quality of provision, and are free to choose how this is achieved. traditional elements of charity and social care still dominate german childcare provision (mischo, wahl, hendler, & strohmer, 2012). in addition, in the last 10 years a great variety of supplemental programs focusing on domain-specific stimulation have been developed and implemented, especially in the domains of language/early literacy, mathematics, and science (including kidz, komm mit ins zahlenland [let’s visit numberland] (friedrich, & galgozy, 2008), haus der kleinen forscher [little scientists’ house] (anders & ballaschk, 2014). there are, however, some concerns about academic stimulation in preschools as it is feared that such academic preschool education might result in disadvantages in other developmental domains (e.g., socio-emotional). these concerns are rooted in the tradition of german preschools focusing more on the stimulation of social than of cognitive skills. until now, only a few of these educational programs have been subject to rigorous empirical evaluations. regarding the structure and financing of german preschools it can be said that most preschools are center-based, state subsidized, and community or welfare led organizations. so far, a small but a rising number of for-profit organizations are involved but most organizations remain non-profit or public. parents pay a fee (in some federal states income-related) depending on the hours of the child’s preschool attendance (about 5–20% of the overall cost). however, in some federal states the final preschool year immediately before transition to elementary school is free of charge. in general, german preschools are voluntary, but most preschoolers (91%) start at the age of three years (autorengruppe bildungsberichterstattung, 2016; oecd, 2015) before starting formal schooling at about age six. usually, preschool classes are composed of several age cohorts. thus, the age of children within one class often ranges between 3 and 6 years, or even between 1 and 6 years (rossbach, 2009). class size is about 25 children, with one or two caregivers per classroom (regulated by law in each federal state, and varying across states). with regard to teacher training, the german preschool teacher education used to be highly standardized. it required assisting staff to complete two year’s vocational training, and certified teachers to finish an additional three-year course. in order to implement long term persistence of preschool intervention 76   domain-specific stimulation in preschools and to raise the rate of academically trained preschool teachers, a number of applied universities have been offering more bachelor degrees in early childhood education since 2008, as academically trained preschool teachers are quite common in other countries (for an overview of profiles of professionals in early childhood education and care see oberhuemer, schreyer, & neuman, 2010). however, the percentage of preschool teachers with a college or university degree in german preschools is still low (2014: 5.3%, bockfamulla, lange, & strunz, 2015) compared to other countries. the model project „kindergarten der zukunft in bayern – kidz“ the kidz project received public support because of the first results of pisa and pirls, which documented lower competence levels of school-aged children in germany than expected or hoped; a higher value was set on systematic academic and domain-specific stimulation and preparation for school in preschools than in decades before. however, a deficit exists with regard to empirical evaluations of such educational programs and their effect on children’s development. kidz was one of several intervention programs developed to focus on systematic academic and domain-specific stimulation. kidz provided children (aged 3–6) with traditional preschool stimulation (e.g., ideas of froebel) referring to all developmental areas combined with more academic and domain-specific stimulation and school preparation (e.g., literacy center, science area, role play area). the main phase of kidz spanned from 2004 to 2009. in this time period, kidz was funded by the bavarian state ministry of education, the bavarian state ministry of labor and social welfare, family affairs, women and health, the foundation stiftung bildungspakt bayern and by the bavarian industry association vbw. afterward, there were follow-up studies analyzing mid and long term effects of this model project funded by the jacobs foundation. kidz was conducted in three preschool centers with three preschool classes in each center. each preschool worked with one primary school. the selected preschools were all located in the federal state of bavaria and largely reflected bavarian preschools with respect to the socioeconomic status and migration background of the families and children involved. several features characterize kidz; however, the following are most important for this paper. first, kidz is a child-centered approach focusing on all children and all age groups in preschool (mixed age classes). kidz follows a broad understanding of the goals of preschool education for children. that means that preschool education aims to develop knowledge and understanding and this also includes metacognitive competencies. children should also achieve a socio-emotional willingness to learn and their interests and motivations should be further developed. second, the more traditional preschool processes (e.g. the ideas of froebel) are enriched with (not replaced by) domainspecific stimulation. a special feature of kidz is that this comprehensive domain-specific stimulation of preschoolers’ emergent skills in literacy, mathematics, and science is not primarily carried out in specific planned hours but is mainly integrated into the daily routines and normal course of preschool life. kidz tries to be balanced in its approach to the use of such situations and the use of specific teacherled efforts to stimulate children in an effort to always integrate the learning into developmentally appropriate activities. for this purpose, many hands-on materials for teachers 77 global education review 4(3)    were developed by experts in the field of early childhood education and implemented in special training for the kidz teachers in literacy, numeracy, and science to enhance their content knowledge in these domains (e.g., kidz-handbuch [kidz-handbook], stiftung bildungspakt bayern, 2007). third, special emphasis was put on the cooperation between preschool and elementary school. unique to the kidz project is a system of team teaching where each classroom is staffed by two preschool teachers (as is the rule in bavarian preschools) as well as an elementary school teacher. this integrated approach to teaching offers the opportunity for sharing concepts and materials and thus should ensure the highquality of domain-specific stimulation in preschool and should facilitate smooth transitions for children as they later enter elementary school. fourth, from the beginning of kidz, an empirical evaluation in a quasiexperimental longitudinal design was implemented in order to overcome the lack of research considering the effectiveness of preschool programs in germany. the present study against the background of the somewhat conflicting results of universal preschool studies and high-quality program evaluations, and the lack of research of long term effects of preschool programs and preschool quality, especially in germany, the present study investigated whether (a) kidz attendance was positively associated with early adolescent mathematical competencies at age 12 and (b) whether pathways from project attendance to adolescent mathematical competencies were mediated through preschool process quality. method sample and procedure the evaluation of kidz was designed as a longitudinal quasi-experiment where treatment and controls were not randomly assigned. children entered kidz classes or comparison groups at age three, on average, and they were expected to start elementary school three years later. the model project kidz started with classes in preschools that had (voluntarily) applied for participation (some degree of self-selection). preschools of the comparison group had to be comparable with regard to several criteria (especially location and class composition) to the kidz preschools, and were preferred as a comparison group where a similar motivation and openness to reform could be assumed. therefore, comparison groups were selected that had participated in the piloting of the bavarian educational plan shortly before and have, thus, shown a high degree of engagement and motivation. furthermore, these preschools had, at that time, experienced a lot of training. all preschools, preschool classes, and target children in the intervention group as well as in the comparison group were followed in a longitudinal design which was comprised of five measurement points in annual intervals representing the whole preschool period. two further measurement points evaluated kidz effects at the end of first and second grade, and yet another one measurement point in grade seven. at all measurement points children were tested and extensive data from parents and preschool teachers was collected. in addition, global and domain-specific preschool quality was observed every year by external experts. at the first measurement point, the intervention sample consisted of 138 children drawn from nine preschool classes in three centers. the comparison group consisted of 53 children long term persistence of preschool intervention 78   drawn from seven preschool classes in 2 centers. the proportion of children with migration background is almost twice as high in the comparison group (24% versus 13%). the overall attrition from the first measurement point (191 children) to the seventh measurement point (83 children) amounted to 56.5%. the attrition rates in the intervention group totaled 62.3% (a loss of 86 children) and 41.5% (a loss of 22 children) in the comparison group. when comparing dropout and participating children, no differences among the predictor variables emerged (t-test, p-level .10). the drop-out was mainly due to families having changed residence without notifying the research group or not being able to make time for data collection. at first glance this attrition rate seems quite high, but it is important to keep in mind that the study was running for more than 10 years in different settings (preschool, primary school, secondary school). similar dropout rates are reported by other longitudinal studies like the biks-3-10 study (drop-out rate from preschool to grade 4: 48.9%, homuth et al., 2014) or the ecls-k study (dropout rate from kindergarten to grade eight: 52.0%, tourangeau, nord, & sorongon, 2009). age 12 outcome: mathematical competencies mathematical competence was assessed by the demat6+ (goetz, lingel, & schneider, 2013) which is a curricular valid standardized test including three subtests in the domains of arithmetic, geometry, and written math problems. the test consists of 32 questions. the test was administered individually. the dependent measure was the number of correct responses (max = 32; min = 3; m = 14.6; sd = 6.7). we used raw scores in the further analyses. treatment variable a variable was built representing the participation in kidz (model group) or not (control group). the sample consists of 72.3% participants in the model project kidz. quality of the preschool preschool quality measures were based on observational ratings conducted in the first, second, and third preschool year when children were three, four, and five years old. quality was assessed during a four-hour visit of the preschool in the morning by trained observers using a german version of the ecers-e (rossbach & tietze, 2007; sylva, siraj-blatchford, & taggart, 2003). the ecers-e includes four subscales, the quality of learning environments for verbal literacy, mathematics, science literacy, and caring for diversity and individual learning needs. since the present study focuses on the domainspecific and general effects of domain-specific quality with a special focus on children’s mathematical skills, the subscale mathematics was used in the present analyses. the subscale includes four items which refer to activities and resources supposed to foster children’s mathematical skills like counting, comparing, measuring, etc. the scores range from one to seven with one indicating inadequate quality, three minimal quality, five good quality and seven excellent quality of preschool. correlations across the measurement points were low to moderate, indicating change over time, presumably due to the potential changes in classroom composition (e.g., vacant places become available to the next group of three year olds after the summer break) during and between the preschool years, which is quite common in german preschools (kuger et al., 2015). for the present analyses we averaged the three measurements of the quality indicator to create one scale representing 79 global education review 4(3)    preschool quality in the mathematical domain throughout the whole preschool phase (m = 3.7, sd = 1.0). numerical skills during early and middle-childhood children’s numerical skills at the end of preschool are considered by using the standard scores on the subscale arithmetics of the german version of the kaufman assessment battery for children (k-abc; melchers & preuss, 2003) (m = 18.2, sd = 3.6). the scale measures children’s skills in counting, identifying numbers, knowledge of shapes, and understanding of early mathematical concepts like addition or subtraction. to measure mathematical competencies in adding and subtracting in elementary school, a standardized test of arithmetic skills (heidelberger rechentest (hrt), heidelberger calculation test, haffner, baro, parzer, & resch, 2005) was given. for the present study, the number of correct responses combined for the three subtests focusing on number fact knowledge and simple mental arithmetic have been considered (m = 18.0; sd = 5.0; see lehrl et al., 2016 for further information). child and family background variables comprehensive data on child and family background variables were collected by standardized questionnaires and interviews developed by the research team for the purpose of the evaluation, which were administered to parents. based on the literature (hartas, 2011) and after careful preliminary analyses, for the current study we selected the following set of variables as controls for possible selection bias. descriptive statistics are depicted in table 1. gender, age in months, type of school (secondary school vs. other school types), grade (five-eight and maternal education (certificate for college or university entrance vs. no certificate) were used as child and family background predictors with potential influence on children’s competence development. in addition, the experiences in the learning environments at home and at elementary school were accounted for. the early home learning environment (hle) is comprised of a composite score created by averaging the parent reported frequency of six education related parent–child activities in the home and out of home in accordance to melhuish et al. (2008). activities include reading to the child, letter games, number games, language games, drawing/building, and visiting the library. frequency could be rated on a 6-point-scale ranging from 0 = never to 5 = daily (cronbach’s alpha = .67). instructional quality in mathematics in 1st grade of primary school was rated during observations of two or three lessons (45 min each) on one day in the morning whenever mathematics was taught in grade 1. the scores range from one to seven with one and two indicating low quality, three– five medium quality, and six and seven high quality. the scale includes items such as “positive culture of handling mistakes”, “transparency of lesson’s goal”, “quality of the tasks/problems”, “freedom of thinking/communication”, and “illustrative material to create mental images” and was shown to be predictive for arithmetic development during primary school (lehrl et al., 2016). statistical analyses to examine whether preschool quality is associated with early adolescent outcomes in mathematic skills at 12 years of age, pathway models were run using mplus version 6.1 (muthén & muthén, 2008-2013) testing for direct effects. if direct effects are found, we long term persistence of preschool intervention 80   examine in addition, whether child outcomes at preand primary school mediate these associations by testing indirect effects. the analyses account for missing data through fullinformation maximum likelihood (fiml; arbuckle, 1996) based on the data for all 191 children originally recruited for the study. descriptive characteristics can be seen in table 1. table 1. descriptive characteristics of the sample % m sd mathematical skills at age 12 (demat 6+) 14.64 6.74 preschool quality (ecers-e math; 1-7) 3.69 0.95 treatment (1=model group, 0=control group) 72.3% model group mathematical skills at end of preschool (kabc arithmetic) 18.24 3.64 mathematical skills at primary school (hrt; math fluency) 18.03 4.97 age (in months) 143.31 5.13 early hle (1-7) 3.06 0.80 grade (5-8) 5.94 0.57 instructional quality of elementary school (mathematics) (1-7) 3.96 1.07 type of school 72.3% secondary school mother’s educational level 36.2% university degree gender 50.3% male 81 global education review 4(3)    results pathway models predicting mathematical competencies in secondary school (age 12) from kidz participation the first model contains the pathway model in which age 12 outcomes in mathematical competencies were predicted from kidz participation while controlling for family and child background variables as well as the home and primary school learning environments. table 2 shows the standardized path coefficients for this model (model 1). results indicate that kidz participation is significantly associated with mathematical competencies (b = .22, p < .05) at age 12 suggesting that children in the kidz group show better mathematical outcomes at age 12. regression models predicting mathematical competencies in secondary school (age 12) from preschool quality the second set of analyses contains pathway models in which age 12 outcomes in mathematical competencies were predicted from preschool quality in three separate models, while controlling for family and child background variables as well as the home and primary school learning environments. table 2 shows the standardized coefficients of those models (model 2-4). results indicate that preschool quality is significantly associated with mathematical competencies (model 2: b = .42, p < .05) even when controlling for mathematical competencies in preschool (model 3: b = .37, p < .05) and primary school (model 4: b = .24, p < .10) at age 12 suggesting that higher preschool quality is associated with better mathematical outcomes at age 12. as treatment effects diminish when controlling for preschool quality, indirect effects of project participation via preschool quality was tested via pathway modeling and showed significant effects (b = .20, p < .05). table 2. associations between program attendance, preschool quality, and mathematical competencies at age 12. model 1 model 2 model 3 model 4 b b b b mathematical skills at preschool age .19+ .10 mathematical skills at primary school .34* grade .34* .25* treatment (1=model/0=control) .22* -.20+ -.20+ preschool quality (ecers-e math) .42* .37* .24+ r² .41 .50 .63 .67 note. b = standardized regression coefficient; effects controlled for child’s gender, age, maternal education, early years hle, type of school attended, instructional quality of the primary school; *p < .05; + p < .10 long term persistence of preschool intervention 82   discussion the present 10-year follow up study on the effects of an academically oriented preschool intervention on academic development addressed two major questions: (a) is attendance positively associated with early adolescent mathematical competencies at age 12? (b) are pathways from attendance to adolescent mathematical competencies mediated through preschool process quality? participating in kidz and mathematical competencies at age 12 a relatively consistent finding across decades of childcare research is that preschool quality is related to children’s academic outcomes (see melhuish et al., 2015 for an overview). the present study extends this huge body of research by showing positive longer term associations between preschool quality and mathematical competencies measured approximately seven years after the children had left their preschools. kidz participation was indirectly associated with adolescents’ mathematical functioning via preschool quality indicating that a highly academically oriented preschool intervention is able to increase preschool quality which in turn predicts child outcomes in the long run. previous long-term studies have focused on high-quality interventions aimed at children at risk because of poverty or low birth weight. the current findings suggest that the quality of preschool experiences can have long lasting effects in a socio-economically diverse sample. results also reveal that children profit from high preschool quality over and above the effects detected earlier on preschool numerical skills (kluczniok, anders, sechtig, & rossbach, 2016) or primary school numerical skills. by providing children with high-quality domainspecific stimulation and beyond, kidz shows lasting effects on academics that are crucial for children’s further success. the high quality experiences in the kidz preschools appear to boost children’s mathematic development, persisting to secondary school. possible mechanisms behind this association might be that children in high-quality preschools “learned to learn,” for example, through better approaches to learning like motivation, enjoyment of learning, and learning effort. thus, kidz seems to provide children with high-quality domain-specific stimulation that lays not only the foundation for a good start in school but also for later development in secondary school. the present study reveals evidence for the lasting effects of preschool quality on children’s mathematics development through age 12. these results of kidz have to be seen against a broader perspective of other findings (not reported here) that show that kidz does not have negative effects on children’s emotional development e.g., joy of learning and well-being (kluczniok et al. 2016). thus, in response to the concern that children’s socioemotional skills may be neglected at the expense of their cognitive skills when they attend academically oriented preschool programs, the kidz findings demonstrate that such trade-offs need not occur. taken together this study provided important insight with regard to the mastering of transitions in school careers and the findings make a strong case for enhancing preschools’ process quality. what can we learn from preschool projects like kidz? the kidz results contribute to the ongoing debate on how to enhance and manage preschool quality in early childhood education and care in germany. the findings of long-term effects on children’s development have great importance to the argument for investments in early childhood education and care. in particular, the domain 83 global education review 4(3)    specific stimulation integrated into appropriate play activities in preschool seems to be a successful approach to enhancing preschool quality and child development. the kidz program differs from academic and standardized learning via specific training programs because the program is for all children and all age groups in preschool, independent of children’s skills, and is not primarily carried out in specific planned hours. moreover, kidz adopts a comprehensive domain-specific stimulation of preschoolers’ emergent skills in literacy, mathematics, and science that is mainly integrated into the daily routines and normal course of preschool life. in addition, kidz tries to ensure a balance between such situations and teacher-centered efforts to stimulate children in a developmentally appropriate way. thus, the combination of traditional preschool education, referring to all developmental areas, enriched with domain-specific stimulation of the children appears to be beneficial for child development. in the context of the german debate, the lack of negative effects of early academic stimulation on children’s emotional development is also a key message for the political debate on further directions of early childhood education and care. compared to other curricula and programs in germany, kidz is more oriented towards stimulating cognitive competencies and advancing children’s knowledge and understanding in several domains. this, however, can only be done if, at the same time, children’s socioemotional willingness to learn, interests and motivation, and value orientations are considered. concerns that such a play-based academic preschool education might result in disadvantages in other developmental domains (e.g., socio-emotional) are therefore unfounded (kluczniok et al., 2016). to conclude, kidz represents a successful way of promoting preschool quality and also highlights successful directions of professional development for preschool teachers who have been broadly qualified with content knowledge in different domains (e.g., literacy, numeracy, science) during the kidz project. limitations and avenues for further research although the present study has a number of important findings, there are also some limitations. first, the sample was a small, regional sample in bavaria, although there was enough power to detect findings. a second concern is the attrition rate over time. in the kidz group the attrition rate totaled 62.3% and 41.5% in the control group. the drop out was mainly due to families having changed residence without notifying the research group or not being able to make time for data collection. at first glance this attrition rate seems quite high, but it is important to keep in mind that the study was still running after more than 10 years in varied settings (preschool, primary school, secondary school). similar dropout rates are reported by other longitudinal studies like the german biks-3-10 study and the ecls-k study from the us. the next steps of our research involve further analyses of the lasting effects of kidz related to other developmental domains, e.g., socio-emotional developmental aspects like coping with life, and joy of learning. by doing so, the importance of kidz can be extended to other important developmental domains. notes 1. in this article, we use “preschool” as a term for institutional child care for ages 3 and above, prior to school entry. in contrast to other countries (e.g., the us kindergarten), the german “kindergarten” is an institutional setting for all children from age 3 up to the start of elementary school which usually begins the age of 6 long term persistence of preschool intervention 84   (for more details see chapter “the german preschool system)”. references arnold, d. h., fisher, p. h., doctoroff, g. l., & dobb, j. 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(2013). investing in our future: the evidence base on preschool education. new york, ny: foundation for child development. about the author(s) dr. simone lehrl, is a researcher at the university of bamberg. her research interests are the conditions and impact of the quality of early years learning environments. dr. katharina kluczniok, is a researcher at the university of bamberg. her research focuses on the concept and the impact of early years learning environments. prof. dr. hans-guenther rossbach, is a professor at the university of bamberg. his research focus is on longitudinal studies in early childhood education and especially the impact of preschool quality on children’s development. prof. dr. yvonne anders, is a professor at the free university of berlin. her research focus is on quality in early years learning environments, and conditions and impacts of professional development of early years practitioners. 342-lehrl_edgalley work p1 342-lehrl_edgalley work no footer influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 147 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: drajea, alice j. & o’sullivan, carmel (2014). influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda, 1 (3). 149-166. influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda alice j. drajea trinity college dublin carmel o’sullivan trinity college dublin abstract this article investigates the effect of parents’ literacy levels and family income in uganda on the quality and nature of parents’ involvement in their children’s primary education. a mixed-methods study with an ethnographic element was employed to explore the views and opinions of 21 participants through a qualitative approach. methods for data collection included observation of family routines and practices, semi-structured interviews with parents and children, and review of relevant documents. vygotsky’s socio-cultural historical theory and the feinsteinian concept of intergenerational transmission of educational success offer the basis for the investigation. findings indicated a significant relationship between parents’ income and literacy levels and the quality of support to their children’s education. household poverty emerged as a major obstacle to educational success for children across the three socio-economic categories of family studied. compromised lack of time for parent-child interaction proved to be the main obstacle as parents spent significant hours in non-academic matters for the day-to-day survival of their families. parental illiteracy showed negative associations with children’s literacy competence and subsequent success in primary school. keywords literacy, parents, rural uganda, poverty, achievement context of the study the study was conducted in the rural district of moyo, located in the north western part of uganda known as the west nile region. this is a region lacking in many development indicators including educational excellence in both primary and secondary sectors. other features of this region include; remoteness from major urban centres, a challenging political and socio-economic history, and poor infrastructure. background of the study in order to understand the motivation behind this study, a personal story of growing up in rural uganda is a good starting point. i was born in a small mountain village of gwere-luzira in metu sub-county in the ________________________________ corresponding author: carmel o’sullivan, head of school school of education, room 3128, arts building trinity college, dublin 2., ireland email: carmel.osullivan@tcd.ie 148 global education review 1(3) district of moyo, 12 km from the river nile in the west nile region. it is a remote area, which is about 500 km from the capital city, kampala. comparatively, my parents were more educated than the other parents in the village and therefore they were employed and earning salary. my mother was a qualified primary school teacher, dad’s college certificate enabled him to join the police and later he served as a prison warder. they spoke the language of both home (ma’di) and of school (english), and other languages including kiswahili, acholi, luganda and lugbara, languages of the places where they had studied and worked. with such educational background and exposure to life, my parents had a knowledge of the school system and they understood the challenges of schooling from their own experience, and directly and indirectly passed those values onto us, their children, perhaps, as delgadogaitan (1990) noted, even “without realising it.” since my involvement in teaching between 1995 -2004 in the west nile region, the needs of students became apparent to me. their struggles with the language of school (english), the lack of basic school materials, the lack of school fees, omitting lunch because there was no food at home, and their struggles with health issues, and so forth, prompted my current research interest, which explores the important relationship between parents’ educational levels and literacy skills, and their children’s performance in primary school. these years of teaching made me realise how privileged my siblings and i were compared to most children in the village due to our parents’ socio-economic status, which was a direct result of their level of education. it therefore makes more sense to me now when studies continue to suggest that parents’ education not only makes a difference in their own lives, but also in their families’ and the society in which they live and serve (unesco, 2006; feinstein, duckworth, & abates, 2008). the literature is replete with references to research, which proposes that when parents are educated, the pattern of influence on their children’s education and life in general tends to be different from parents with low or no formal education (feinstein, et al., 2008). the literacy and poverty paradox the relationship between the level of a person’s education and poverty seem to be inter-twined. internationally, unesco (2006) and the world bank (2009) found a strong positive correlation between literacy and poverty. the world bank (2009) observed that a lack of income and essential goods and services still exists in the poorer regions. unesco (2011) reveals that the poorer regions of the world, namely subsaharan africa, and south and west asia also show the lowest literacy rates. further, observation has shown that 1,115 million people in the developing countries live in poverty, that is below the upper poverty line of $370 purchasing power parity (ppp) (meier and rauch, 2000). of these, 630 million people (18%) of the total population of the developing world was designated extremely poor, that is they consume less than $275 per annum, being the lower poverty line (meier and rauch, 2000). although global poverty has been on the decline since the 1980s (meier and rauch, 2000), efforts to reduce poverty have been hampered, especially in the poorer regions by such factors as poor health and a lack of education. according to the world bank (2009), these factors deprive people of productive employment and are likely to impact negatively on school aged children, especially when parents are neither literate nor employed, and live below the poverty line. there exists evidence that family poverty is closely associated with family influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 149 instability, unemployment, and alcoholism, which can potentially impair children’s educational attainment (lauder, brown, dillabough, & halsey, 2006). theorists argue, for instance that financial security within the family plays a key role in how parents and their children make decisions about educational choices and provision. this is related to the socio-economic status of the family, which in turn is greatly influenced by the education level of parents. inspired by the notion that parents’ education has a direct effect on family income (feinstein, et al., 2008), it can be hypothesised that parents’ education levels and family income combine to influence children’s school achievement. according to feinstein et al., (2008) this can happen in two ways: through direct parent-child interaction, and indirectly through parent cognition and family resources, including such things as the “distal family factors”, “internal features of the family environment” and “proximal family process” (p. 46). consequently, dolton, asplund, & barth, (2009) posit that the acquisition of human capital has been and still is seen as a main route out of poverty, both for the individual and for society as a whole (see unesco, 2006). thus, checchin (2006) asserts that “countries with higher educational achievement are also characterised by lower differences in educational achievement in the population” (p. 5). this implies that persons with higher levels of education are more likely to find employment and, owing to increased wages, educated parents with higher incomes are able to provide for their children’s education, and thereby increase their children’s chances of successful school attainment (brown and iyengar, 2008). hence, checchin’s (2006) suggestion that income inequality tends to be lower in countries where average educational achievement is higher. this suggests that literacy skill acquisition, especially for parents, can be an advantage in alleviating household poverty. impact of income on educational attainment the focus on income in the relationship between poverty and educational achievement has been challenged in recent years (field, 2010; goodman & greg, 2010). it is argued income is only one aspect in accounting for the experiences of children in the school system (ward, 2013). however, the impact of lowincome on children’s cognitive development is well documented. evidence shows that low income children lag in cognitive development and lie one year behind in vocabulary when they enter school, with long-term consequences: ”such early gaps may affect low-income children’s attitudes towards school and their aspirations for school attainment” (waldfogel & washbrook, 2010, p. 36; see also lauder, et al., 2006). in addition, there is evidence that poverty, in terms of family resources, has a powerful influence on children’s ability to respond to educational opportunities (eden, 2013 in ward, 2013); blanden & gregg, 2004). poverty, in terms of low family income affects children in several ways: • the absence of learning habits and experiences at home; • a lack of access to computers; • a lack of a sense of self-esteem through appropriate interactions with parents; • poor housing; • an unhealthy diet; 150 global education review 1(3) • possible mental health issues within the family; • domestic violence; • the stress associated with low pay or unemployment. (eden, 2013, p. 35) these all make it potentially difficult for children to see themselves as positive learners (gottfried & gottfried, 1989). low income is likely to affect a parent’s sense of being able to provide their children with the same advantages as those in the more affluent households. the parents who are stressed about money and employment, working unsocial hours in more than one job, are likely to have less time to provide their children within an environment conducive to good educational outcomes (blanden & gregg, 2004). from these reviews it is widely recognised that if pupils are to maximise their potential from schooling they will need the full support of their parents (desforges & abouchaar, 2003; feinstein, et al., 2008; brown & iyengar, 2008; unesco, 2005). this may differ from country to country, but the education of parents appears to be a strong underpinning factor. impact of income on educational attainment in uganda similar to the studies reviewed above, nongovernmental organisations such as the literacy for adult basic education (labe) in uganda found close links between the literacy skills of parents and increased parental support to children (labe, 2011). the lack of literacy owing to poverty is negatively linked with reduced parental support to their children (nyamugasira, angura, & robinson 2005). education policy for universal primary education (upe) until 1997, parents in uganda had to pay fees for all of their children’s schooling. under the national resistance movement (nrm) leadership, the government of uganda took over the payment of tuition fees leaving parents with the responsibility of providing children with other educational requirements such as school uniforms, exercise/text books, pens, pencils, school lunch, and funds for school development (uganda education guidelines, 2008; mfped, 1999). while the reform was generally welcomed, parents in rural districts such as moyo in northern uganda still face significant challenges in keeping their children in school, with many children being excluded owing to a lack of resources to keep them there (lubangakene, 2013). primary schools in poor rural and urban slum areas characteristically have high rates of absenteeism and multiple repeats of classes (nape, 2011), with early pregnancies among girls and early marriages being a common practice (kasirye, 2009; waldfogel and washbrook, 2010). these practices lead to a high dropout rate of pupils before the completion of primary schooling (unesco, 2005). the situation is further aggravated by poor family economic status, low pay to civil servants, unemployment and high levels of illiteracy (mfped, 1999). uganda’s population of 33,425 million (unesco, 2010) is characterised by high levels of illiteracy, leading to high levels of unemployment and poverty (mfped, 1999; meier & rauch, 2000). table 1 shows the mean monthly income in uganda, correlated with level of education. the table shows that wages increase with the level of education. although this survey was conducted about ten years ago, the situation in uganda has not changed appreciably. influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 151 table 1: mean monthly wages increase in uganda across education levels education level mean income (ug shs per month) mean income (euro per month) no formal education 25,000 7.80 primary education 74,000 23.13 secondary education 94,000 29.38 specialised training 239,000 74.69 source: adopted and modified from uganda national housing household survey lmis 2002/2003. ugx (current exchange rate) 1 euro =3,200 the figures indicate that individuals with specialised training earn almost ten times as much as those with no formal education. in rural uganda, it is estimated that only 8% and 31% of the population live in permanent and semi-permanent dwelling units respectively (mfped, 1999). a two to three roomed house with brick walls, a corrugated iron roof and a cement floor, without electricity, indoor toilets, or water on tap (typical of northern rural uganda, is regarded as a good house, with the particular benefit of providing space for children both to study and to sleep. by contrast, most lowincome parents in this area will have a oneroomed hut where the family cook, recreate, sleep and keep their belongings. in such an arrangement, when children are above the age of seven (male or female), it is a common practice for them to sleep with the children of the neighbours separate from their own house. usually, the girls would sleep with their grandmothers, and if there are no grandmothers, they would share a hut, referred to as adra jo, which means “granny’s hut”, with other girls of the village. it is uncommon for the younger boys to sleep with their grandfathers because he might have a second wife, and so they would sleep in a separate hut with the older boys. in the moyo district in uganda, the majority of the rural population live below the international poverty line, on less than $1.25 a day (meier & rauch, 2000). the status of persons in the labour market in uganda illustrates that literacy and poverty are inseparable (lmis, 2006). the 2006 survey indicated that people in the rural areas who are working are more likely to be poor than their counterparts in urban areas (40% as against 11%), while in the predominantly rural northern region of uganda – the location of this study an estimated 60% of working people are described as poor, compared to only 19% in the central region [city area] (lmis, 2006). furthermore, people with no formal education are more likely to be counted among the working poor than those with primary education (55% as against 39%) (lmis, 2006). against such stark statistics which continue to prevail in the 21st century, a study to examine the lived realities and opinions of families from the west nile region of moyo district in uganda was conceived with the direct intention of exploring the triadic relationship between parents’ levels of education and literacy skills, their potential to earn an income, and their ability to support their children in primary school. it was hoped to be able to engage directly with families themselves, to experience their world on a day-to-day basis and to elicit their opinions about the impact of their own situations in terms of education levels and financial constraints on the degree of success their children experience in primary education. 152 global education review 1(3) this investigation is therefore informed by vygotsky’s socio-cultural historical theory (vygotsky, 1978; rogoff, 2003). this theoretical perceptive makes explicit the connection between the social, cultural and literacy practice in the home setting through the interaction between parents and children. vygotsky views human development as inseparable from human social and cultural activities (kozulin et al., 2003). the importance of cultural tools such as language, literacy, mathematical systems and memory devices in the development of higher mental processes (palmer, 2001), lend this theory adaptable to this particular inquiry associated with human society in northern uganda. the concepts of mediation and zone of proximal development (zpd) (kravtsova, 2009) are deemed necessary for a child’s learning and must be aided by adults appropriately, and fits well with the current investigation. the transferability of knowledge from parent to child as demonstrated in the study of feinstein et al., (2008) in the uk further elaborates the vygotskian theory which underpins this study. according to feinstein and colleagues, such social and cultural values inherent in the theory of vygotsky, including literacy and educational behaviours, are effectively transmitted if parents are educated. the merging of vygotsky’s theory and the model of intergenerational transmission of educational success required a methodological design which was capable of tapping into the natural setting of human society and which is described in the section below. methodology the study employed a mixed-methods design with an ethnographic element to explore the views of parents, educators and pupils regarding the impact of parents’ literacy and household poverty on children’s educational success (mason, 2006; bryman, 2008; o’leary, 2010). the investigation relied more on a qualitative approach owing to the natural setting – the home environment and everyday activities of the participating families, specifically focusing on the pattern of literacy activities taking place between parents and their children (sarantakos, 2013). insights from hogan et al. (2009), who described qualitative research as “a multifaceted approach that investigates culture, society and behaviour through an analysis of people’s words and actions” (p. 3), further convinced the researchers of the authenticity of a mixedmethods design for the current study. the following research questions guided the methodology: 1. what is the relationship between parents’ education and literacy skills with levels of household poverty, and what influence do they have on their children’s achievement in primary school? 2. what evidence exists in the family of literacy related activities and resources as a result of the parents’ education levels and what influence do these exert on the development of their children’s literacy skills and subsequent achievement in primary schooling? 3. what challenges do parents face in supporting their children’s education? for this reason, a mixed-methods design with an ethnographic element (bryman, 2008; sarantakos, 2013) was used to explore the views of parents, educators and pupils regarding the impact of parents’ literacy and household poverty in the home setting on children’s educational success. semi-structured interviews, participant observation, document analysis, and questionnaires were used for data collection with parents, children, and senior community members. this is shown table 2. influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 153 table 2: methods used for data collection participants method activity duration parents semi-structured interviews family home setting 40-45 minutes participant observation family home setting 2-3 days per family visit document analysis school and external children questionnaires school setting 40 minutes semi-structured interviews family home setting 30 minutes participant observation family home setting 2-3 days per family visit document analysis home and external senior community members questionnaires family home setting 40 minutes semi-structured interviews family home setting 35 minutes data from interviews and family ethnography were used to assess the relationship between parents’ education and literacy and poverty levels, and its mediating impact on the form and extent of parents’ involvement in their children’s education. findings were grouped under headings related to the parents’ educational/literacy skill levels in relation to their occupational status. further data were collected using indepth on-site interviews, document analysis, and questionnaires (boeije, 2010; sarantakos, 2013), from responses of 21 participants (9 couples [parents], 9 children and 3 senior community members) studied across three sites (urban, semi-rural and rural). questionnaires were used as an initial tool to gather data from educators and children, while parents were specifically administered interviews since some parents were illiterate. the interviews and observations were conducted in the homes of the families studied. procedure the main study involved data from 119 participants but only 21 are referred to in this article. this sample includes members of families who were visited at home in three sites: urban, semi-rural and rural in the moyo district from july 9th through september 14th 2012. the 21 participants comprised parents (n= 9), children (n=9) and senior community members (n=3). the sample included families with different educational and socio-economic backgrounds. i was the sole data collector since i spoke the same language as the participants. i spent between 2 and 3 days and nights living with each family, sharing in their daily activities, household chores, field work, food preparation and recreation in the evenings. this provided an invaluable opportunity to get to know each of the nine families well and to be able to experience and document the literacy related environment in which they live. the families had been identified by the head teachers in the schools which their children attended, and represented the diverse sample of parental education levels and socio-economic standing that i was interested in exploring across the urban, semi-rural and rural divide. three families in each location type, representing high, average and low literacy levels were selected and invited to participate in the study. detailed information about the purpose of the study, its aims and the format of the extended site visit was explained to the families by both the head teacher and by me, before permissions were granted. the study operated according to the ethical standards of the school of education at trinity college, dublin. 154 global education review 1(3) the home stay visits allowed a unique opportunity to observe the extent of parentchild interaction over a number of days, and to see first-hand the range of literacy related materials available for use by both parents and children in the home. it also facilitated the opportunity to conduct a semi-structured and recorded interview with the parents, and also separately with the children during quiet moments in the day. the children had previously completed an in-depth questionnaire in school about their own performance and the potential of their parents to support them academically, personally and materially while in primary school (phase one of the study). no payment of any kind was sought or offered, but i brought a little sugar, corn flour, and sometimes locally smoked fish as a gift to the households to help in supporting the families during my stay. at the end of my home visits, some families offered me some gifts that consisted of fresh sweet corn, smoked fish and live chickens. because moyo district does not have public transportation except for buses leaving the district for kampala city once each day, i had to use the current common means of transport in the country, the motorbike taxi, locally known as the boda-boda. this means of transport was more convenient than using vehicles because it could penetrate and negotiate the narrow village footpaths up to the compound of these families, which other vehicles could not. sometimes, deep in the semi-rural and rural areas, i had to finish my journeys on foot when crossing sections of streams such as amua and airo that had no bridges. the order of reporting starts from families where parents were categorised as professionals with high levels of literacy skills, and includes three senior community members. this sample is marked a and the individual families are labelled a1. the semiskilled parents with average literacy skills are marked b and the individual families labelled b2. the unskilled parents with limited or no literacy skills are marked c, and the individual families labelled c3. my observation report is woven into the overall report while retaining the family labels a1, b2 and c3 respectively. responses from pupils are also annexed to each category of family under which they belong. fictional names have been assigned to all respondents. the children selected for inclusion in this study were all attending primary six (p.6), and ranged in age from 11 to 18 (as a result of having repeated classes, started school late or dropped out of school periodically for financial reasons). findings a. category of professional parents with high level of literacy skill this category involved one health worker (a female nurse in the urban area), one health worker (female nurse in the rural area), and one male secondary school teacher (in the semi-rural area). three senior community members, one from each site are included in this sample because they lived in the villages with the families under research and had high literacy skills. all three are retired members of the community with education backgrounds; the two men (one in the urban and one in the rural areas) were initially teacher educators, and in their later careers served as district inspectors of schools (primary), while the female (from the semi-rural area) was a primary school teacher. when asked if there was a link between parents’ education/literacy levels and household poverty which in their opinion would be likely to influence a school going child, the responses of all participants in this category were consistent. across the three sites, they all acknowledged an association between parents’ education and literacy levels and household poverty which is likely to influence a school going child. a common element in all of their responses is that these parents regard their education and literacy skills as a tool that has influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 155 overcome poverty in their families. this is specifically expressed in the following data. regina, the female health worker in the urban area reported: ….my parents valued education even though they did not go far with education. they encouraged me to go far with education so that i can support my own family in future…like now, the father of these children is out of job at the moment, but the children do not feel the difference because i am able to provide both for their well-being and education. what i am able to afford is because of my earnings from the job i believe it is as a result of my education. i also keep telling my children, my own parents suffered – digging, and doing all sorts of things to get money in order to send me to school. but for you [my children] i have built for you a house [permanent house], i want you to aim high, be able to drive your own cars tomorrow… felix, the secondary school teacher (in the semi-rural area) appreciates his level of education because: …. [i am] able to pay school fees not only for my children from the salary i get from teaching but also the children of my late brother. my father had three wives and we were 18 children in the family but despite their lack of education, they worked hard in the garden, those days, haaah! growing cotton…, and mum brewed nguli [local beer] to educate us. i tell you, if you had lazy parents those days, you get nowhere with poverty. i remember, my father often said, ‘let illiteracy remain with us [parents]’. that is why now i am a teacher, even though the salary is low, at least, i am able to care and educate my children. rosanna, the health worker (nurse in the rural area) likewise acknowledged that there is a link, and that being educated made a significant difference to her life and family. like the parent in the semi-rural context, she was able to pay her children’s school fees through her salaried job as she reported: …my education lessened my problems,….my colleagues who did not succeed dropped out of school early at primary level and got married earlier. the difference – i can get whatever i like, i can go to the bank and ask for credit for my small project, which the uneducated cannot because they are not earning. you see, sister being uneducated has multiple disadvantages like you cannot help your child when she/he is defeated in homework – you can get wrong information, like dates about your children’s birth, you may fail to administer right medicine with right doses, which may lead to unnecessary deaths, and so on…. regarding less educated parents, john, the retired school inspector in the rural area, reported that pressure of poverty forces families to: …. overwork their children with fieldwork, sending them to work in the ‘shambas’ [swahili for garden]. these roles lead to school dropout rates especially in rainy season hah, first, you plant the beans, tend the cows… the deputy commissioner for primary school in uganda who was interviewed as part of this study, supports the claim about less educated parents tending to overwork their children in specific terms. he recalls the slogan among the illiterate parents in bugandaland as saying to their children in luganda (language of the baganda): … na soma wa, in other words, ‘i did not go to school but are you [children] not feeding? can’t i support you?’ therefore, education is not necessary…. the illiterate are also renowned for sending their children to early marriages. they see their children as sources of wealth and labour. sometimes there are forced marriages all in pursuit of bride prize. in this way, the illiterate parents are responsible for high rate of dropout of children in our primary schools by valuing wealth over education. 156 global education review 1(3) this sentiment is illustrated by anthony in the urban area, formerly a school inspector in the 1970s, who recalls his childhood life lived in poverty in the 1950s: …i started school at the age of 11. until then, i was tending the family animals, a role assigned to boys not girls. when i saw that there was no attempt to send me to school because my relatives would like me to grow up and get married, i started digging my shamba of cotton. my uncle took pity and came to help me. the first produce earned ush 15/= (equivalent of 0.005 cents) of which i spent only 5/=(3/= school fees, 1/= sukuleke (pyjamas) and 1/= flannel) and i gave the remaining 10/= to my father to buy his favour in order to let me continue with schooling. we used local herbs such as leaves of pawpaw and gmbangiri for soap. gmbangiri is a kind of fruit from a tree, which looks like maize cob but reddish in colour. when it matures you plucked the red stuff and used it for washing your clothes, and it foams very much like soap. that is my struggle to get education. he expressed a particular view about the dangers of poverty in the current moyo town and described them as worrying: … there is increased number of night clubs such as the agana complex. girls are particularly being lured by men who have money, they buy these girls things which some parents are not able to afford. …in my observation, this tradition of letting teenage children sleep on their own in a separate hut is an added disadvantage… you, as a parent, you do not know what these children are doing. one obvious activity, unsupervised is, sneaking out for night discos, videos and the result is – behavioural problems, dropping out of school, unwanted pregnancies, teenage motherhood, sickness; notably, hiv/aids, these days, etc…. moreover, some of the government officials who are supposed to ensure order and law are the ones corrupted by money. they receive money from these disco operators and thus allow the disco to operate. the responses from these professional parents link education directly to employment opportunities and the benefits gained from it. however, there is a worrying trend developing in the urban area, particularly supported by some educated individuals who, owing to corruption, are supporting activities which are potentially detrimental to the education of school going children the night discos and video machine venues, for their own personal and material profit. in addition, there seem to be more disadvantages to children who do not have sleeping places of their own. cornelius, guardian in the rural area reported: ….in most cases girls at stella’s age (primary six child) sleep with their grandma [in one roomed hut] where they do not feel confident to study because of lack of space to study. but if they have their own room, they can feel free to read and talk about their school work. on a positive note, all six professionals interviewed acknowledged that there is an increasing change of attitude amongst the less educated parents. they claim that the majority of the less educated parents have begun to realise the benefits of education from observing other families. they argued that now more than ever, they desire their children to be educated, though they face very serious challenges of illiteracy and poverty which hinder the extent of the material and holistic support they can provide to enhance the education of their children. this is summarised in the words of the deputy commissioner at the national level who reported that the majority of: ….illiterate parents have confessed, ‘since i have not gone to school, so let my children go to school and get the education we did not get’. three professional parents attested that although their parents had low or no level of formal education, they endeavoured to educate influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 157 them in order to ‘stop the generation of illiteracy’ (felix in the semi-rural area). pupils from a1 families the three pupils (celine, nila and lily) interviewed in this category all repeated classes before primary six (p.6). they attributed their repetition of classes to a lack of knowledge of the english language (the language of instruction), lack of textbooks and storybooks for personal reading and, above all, to personal factors such as a lack of motivation, fear of guardians and teachers, and laziness/lack of concentration. only one of the three pupils (in the urban area) had a room to herself while the other two slept with their siblings which meant they did not have study spaces of their own. all three testified to the importance of parental education in supporting their work at school. b. category of semi-skilled parents, with average education and literacy skills levels this category of parents completed either ordinary level of secondary education (“o” and “a”) or they started but dropped out of school but they have no qualification in any skill. the study established that this category depended on casual jobs without written contractual documentation except ben who is in the defence forces. they will be referred to as mike (a builder), ben (a soldier), and cornelius (a civil servant) (in the urban, semirural and rural area respectively). in response to the question of whether or not, there was a link between parents’ education and literacy skill levels and household poverty which is likely to influence a school going child, their responses were striking, identifying a positive correlation between these factors but lamenting the very real challenge they face as a result of not having sufficient formal education. mike (in the urban area, a self-trained builder after “o” level, with no particular qualification) acknowledges the link between education and poverty but he believes if he had a committed and faithful partner it would make a significant difference despite being unemployed. he reported: …i can read notices on the way and in places. i can’t do things like carpentry without education or manage building and carpentry calculations. but moyo doesn’t offer much opportunity for job, there are two problems with semiskilled jobs: payment is irregular and very low. this is because we often make agreement verbally...verbal agreement is tricky, you know. secondly, i lack tools, they are expensive otherwise, i could do joinery. for this reason, i have to travel to do on and off jobs in south sudan. without a specific point of reference, two of the respondents in this category, mike and cornelius reported that they sometimes find themselves spending long hours (8 hours or days) looking for jobs and when such jobs are found, the pay is minimal which can hardly sustain the family. one parent’s lament, ‘i do not have valid papers’ sends a strong message. in this way, their casual employers become manipulative because the job contracts are done verbally. however, cornelius, who initially worked with a non-governmental organisation (ngo) mobile telecommunication company and now works with local government reported a positive side to job seeking. he reported that moving from place to place in search of work sometimes has some advantages: …because of the type of my job i have penetrated in places like eremi, abeso, pe’ecoa in the mountains of metu to erect telephone masts where i also learned how to grow vegetables from the people. due to the mountains, the people there practice intensive agriculture unlike in my own area along the nile where the land is flat and abundant. these movements have made me to compare life styles of people i have met with me. it has made me to both appreciate my own and learn from other people how i can do certain things differently. 158 global education review 1(3) nevertheless, generally, the semi-skilled parents report facing significant domestic and marital problems; these ranged from financial, unemployment, broken marriages, big family sizes, and a lack of time to spend with children. ben’s family (in the semi-rural area) presented a typical example of such marital and domestic difficulties. he serves in the national army and reported that despite having a regular job in the army, it is poorly paid and that he could be transferred any time, from place to place, which does not allow him to spend time with his family. at the time of the interview, he was 300km away from home and so i had a telephone interview with him as his wife (illiterate as she admitted) declined to answer further questions apart from responding to greetings. ben has five children born to three different wives, two of whom had left him and the current wife has two children, while also caring for the other three children left by the previous women. similarly, cornelius (in the rural area), who works with the local government 50km from home after having worked with different ngos in the district shares in this predicament of being semi-skilled. cornelius completed senior four, but when the civil war struck in the early 1980s, it interrupted his study. he is newly married without children but he is supporting five children belonging to his sisters whose marriages all failed due to alcoholism and some customary laws. he reports: …my main worry is the movement of this child (helen), between three homes; from home here to her father in the town, to her mother, and back here. moreover, i do not know what times she goes to see her father and what she does while there. since i am not always at home, i have not monitored what times she actually returns home or whether she actually goes to school. despite the lack of time, i intend to meet the father about this so that if he thinks he can take care of her, she should move totally to his home. cornelius, a civil servant, reiterates the mobile nature of his job which blends in with the general description of the semi-skilled parents, and prevents them from monitoring their children’s activities. however, what he did not reveal was the customary sanction (revealed by helen’s father in a separate interview) which was placed on the child’s father and which does not allow him access to the home where she lives with her uncle cornelius and grandmother. he cannot have the custody of his children alleged to have been born in an incestuous relationship. in this situation, while helen’s uncle takes on the unprecedented financial burden, she grapples with the emotional and physical traumas, which inevitably affect her education. pupils from b2 families the three pupils observed in the semi-skilled families all repeated classes before grade six; francis (urban) repeated grades 3 and 5, martin (semi-rural) repeated grades 2 and 5 and helen in the rural repeated only class 5. this data in this category is more heavily characterised by repetition of classes because these pupils reported getting no help from their parents. the reasons cited by these pupils for repeating classes included: • being overworked at home; • lack of school fees, which resulted in being sent home and missing classes; • being left to mind the home instead of going to school; • mistreatment from step parent(s); • lack of the english language; • inadequate provisions such as paraffin for studying and other scholastic materials such as exercise books, pens and pencils, maths set etc., and; • lack of conducive environment for study (sharing room with other children). influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 159 some of these points are expressed in the written words of the pupils as below: (dina, pupil, semi-rural area) (helen, pupil, rural area) two important aspects emerge in these writings. first, the standard of language (english) clearly indicates and confirms pupils’ reports that they face difficulty in expressing their ideas in the english language. at primary six, despite curriculum requirements, they are not competent in handling tenses, spelling and punctuation. this is compounded by the fact that the semiskilled parents are reported by their children as neither having the time, the resources, nor the willingness to assist their school going children in their academic work. the pupils reported that they think their parents’ education is important for their academic achievement for the following reasons, that: • “parents can tell them the importance of education”; • “parents can be able to help them in their homework”; • “parents can be able to afford to buy scholastic materials”; • “parents can provide food”, and; • “parents can be able to treat them when sick”. these pupils reported that they wish all parents had sufficient education and literacy skills so that they can assist their children in school matters. c. category of parents who are unskilled labourers, with low or no level of literacy skill the study established that this sample of parents is poorly positioned in relation to their children’s education. it was observed that the lack of literacy and household poverty were the dominant hurdles they reported as having to contend with. george (unskilled labourer in the rural area), is a fishmonger in the river nile and a peasant farmer. he reported that there is a significant difference between educated parents and less educated parents. according to him when asked to describe his own illiteracy status, he said that “… illiteracy is like being blind”. the main occupation of this category of parents is agriculture. they reported that with the increase of population in the settled areas, family fields are located at a distance ranging from 4-10km from their homes. both parents spend long hours (6-12 hours or several days at a time) in the field; digging, planting, weeding, harvesting, and gathering wood for use at home (cooking), and the surplus is for sale. the surplus of farm produce such as cassava, sorghum, sweet potatoes, peas and vegetables (onions, okra, egg plants, tomatoes, and some fruits: mangoes, avocado, pawpaw, oranges and banana, etc.) is often sold to get money to buy non-farm items such as soap, paraffin for lighting, salt, sugar and to support the general welfare of the family needs. adam (urban area, unskilled labourer) engages in trade (buying goats and reselling them to the town butchers), while angela, (a single mother of six in the semi-rural area) engages in brewing nguli or marwa (local liqueur and beer). both of these parents reported that the money gained from these activities is minimal; it cannot meet the needs of their school going children. . one of the 160 global education review 1(3) senior community members, john (rural area) recalled his experience with his father: my father was a fishmonger; he also hunted hippopotamus and other animals in the river nile. when he got the fish, he took it to yumbe (a neighbouring district) for sale, a distance of over 50km either by bicycle or on foot. on two occasions, i followed him to collect money for my school fees and i got nothing. this experience highlights the considerable struggle reported by the unskilled parents, who are predominantly engaged in agricultural activities, petty trade and are illiterate. when asked what they did with their leisure time, the response was prompt from angela: …you are fatigued you want to rest with friends – do my hair, family responsibilities and usually travel to attend funerals of relatives. as for assisting their children in school, she reported the hindrance of illiteracy in many ways: …hmmm, the problems of being illiterate are so many, especially, when you are alone…see, i am unable to check the work of my child even though i know she needs my help… yes, i can distinguish between a cross and a tick of the red pen of the teacher but i can’t justify if the teacher is honest or not. the sample interviewed also reported other aspects of being a parent who is illiterate and faces the following difficulties: • unable to read to your child; • no knowledge about the required books for the child, • socially confined; • no proper job opportunities; • constantly digging in the field; • frustrating experience of financial deficit; • restricted travel because of language limitations, and; • limited participation in school activities, for example, pta meetings. pupils from c3 families the three children of the unskilled parents with no or limited literacy skills, and irregular employment all reported having repeated classes before arriving to primary six. adam’s daughter zina in the urban area spent 5 years repeating classes; she repeated p.4 three times and p.5 twice. although she did not state the reasons for her repetition when asked about what support would help her to improve her grades, she noted that she expected the following from her parents: (zina, pupil, urban area) in the semi-rural area, pupil dina (daughter of angela, who herself stopped in p.2) reported that she thinks education is important, but when asked if she thinks her mother’s level of education can help her in her academic work, she stated: (dina, pupil, semi-rural area) according to dina, her mother over works her (she is the only girl of six children) and does not help her in the work. ‘work’ here refers to both other domestic chores and to her schoolwork. dina repeated classes 3 and 5 before entering primary six. in the rural area, joel repeated only primary one and in the same vein, reported that his parents’ level of education is not influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 161 helpful because both parents are illiterate. however, he expects his parents: (joel, pupil, rural area) joel’s concerns cover multiple needs for a school going child, ranging from school requirements, nutrition, study time at home and parental advice. the pupils’ expectations of their parents suggest that they do not have adequate resources for their schooling at home. this was confirmed during my home visits and the main reason was the lack of money and poverty. the data found that all parents and educators interviewed reported that parents, regardless of their levels of education, are eager for their children to do well in school in order to secure a better life and opportunities. however, those in the semi-literate and illiterate categories reported facing common challenges related to illiteracy and household poverty, which result in: • reading neither to their children nor for themselves; • lack of time, for individual children’s needs; • not helping children in their homework due to a lack of time and literacy skills; • rarely visiting school to discuss their children’s school progress; • inadequate provision for children’s school requirements due to low income, and poverty; • an over-burdening engagement in activities for the survival of the whole family, instead of focusing on academic matters with their children, • illiteracy as a hindrance between parentschildren interaction on academic and school matters, • an expectation from work colleagues to spend leisure time [educated parents] out with friends rather than with family; • children spending most of their time separated from adults, including parents, and • children rarely interacting with parents due to cultural values. these reported challenges present significant implications for the school going child in the moyo district of northern uganda. discussion while parents in this study were willing to be involved in the education of their children, in practice, illiteracy and low levels of living standards, generally reported in the rural district, compromised parent-child interaction time. parental employment outside of the home presented two perspectives: on the one hand, it brought in money to the family, but on the other hand, it was disadvantageous, as parents had to be away from home for long periods, taking into account that in moyo district professional jobs are located in the urban centre areas. while survival was the main reason for parents’ employment outside of the home (paid or unpaid), it denied parents and children time for educational interaction, the balance of time being spent in most cases on non-academic chores and activities. in part, the cultural norms where children are not often engaged in conversation with parents in these communities are an added disadvantage to parent-child interaction. thus, the balance of parental resources in terms of time, money and interaction devoted to children is minimal at best and, as reported in this study, does not enhance the primary school children’s academic development or achievement. furthermore, as literacy activities tend to be consistently underplayed in the family setting as was evident during site visits, there appear to be no role models for children to emulate. in contrast, modern symbols such as social centres, and tools such 162 global education review 1(3) as radios, cell phones and videos appear to be replacing the absence of parental involvement in family homes and in wider society, but unfortunately they are adapted in ways that seem to reinforce the traditional values associated with such activities as dance, music and oral forms of leisure rather than engagement with text or language for educational or developmental purposes. the data from the family site visits revealed that while the situation for the educated and consequently professionally employed parents is considerably better than the other two categories of participants in this study, they still face challenges with regard to time constraints. they are not able to fully support their children in school. their homes however featured greater evidence of a literacy rich environment than the other participants, and the materially better off parents were able to provide greater space and resources to their school going children, and encouraged them to achieve in school in order to get a good job as was the case with regina (urban area) and felix (semi-rural area). for instance, regina’s daughter, celine was the only one who had her daily timetable posted on the wall in their living room. there was also literacy related evidence available in the house, which included a radio, a calendar, a clock, posters about health and a box full of a variety of books and printed text. some of these printed materials belonged to her parents. above all, celine had her own sleeping room, while the children of the other professionals in the semi-rural and rural areas, though they had separate huts for their children, they had to share them with their siblings. in contrast, the data showed that the children of the semi-skilled and the unskilled parents had no such items in their homes. there was little evidence of their [professional] active engagement in their children’s schoolwork. their willingness, nevertheless in assisting their children was undeniable. regina (urban nurse), who at the time of my home visit was on maternity leave was able to spend all the time with her children at home. i noticed her asking her 9 year old and her 12 year old daughters about their mock examinations as soon as they arrived back home from school: “what exam did you do today?”, “what questions came?”, “what answers did you write?”, “did you complete all the questions?”, and so on. the children in turn asked her to explain some of the questions they were not sure about, for example, the 9 year old told her mother that she did not answer one question in her social science paper because she did not understand what the word ‘importance’ meant in the question, ‘what is the importance of roads?’ in the evening, the family read some texts from the bible in both the local language (by the grandmother to the children) and in the english language (by regina to the children) and later the two children read the same texts in both languages. the reading sessions were then followed by storytelling after supper. this indicated clearly that professional parents are willing to help their children in their school work if they have time. conversely, i did not witness any of the less educated parents engaged in literacy related activities such as reading, writing and educational conversations about school with their children even when they were doing work together. during my visits to these categories of families, i noted that parents mostly gave instructions and orders to children: ‘zina, peel the potatoes’ (urban), ‘dina, collect the cassava when the rain comes’ (semi-rural), and ‘joel, do not forget to bring in the goats before dark’. as for the home learning environment, there was no comparison with those in the homes of the professional parents. for instance, i witnessed a two year old girl (unskilled rural family) fiddling with a maize cob as her toy baby. she was requesting her grandmother to tie the cob on her back as the local women do with their babies. this activity reflects how the socio-cultural values and influence of parental education and family income on children’s education in rural uganda 163 norms inform children’s development and points to the importance of how homes rich in cognitive stimulation can help children to imitate what adults do and thereby develop their social and educational potential. in this case, the child was using, and was encouraged to use the resources available as she does not have the real toy baby to play with. this led to some valuable opportunities for oral language development, but her grandmother did not actively engage with her during this extended play activity. overall, the implications of this data for the school-going child are many. firstly, where parents are not practicing reading, either to their children or for themselves, it suggests an absence of practical literacy activities in the family. additionally, when parent-child interaction does not take place, either due to a lack of time (professionals at paid jobs), money (semi-skilled and unskilled) or illiteracy (unskilled) parents, the practice of writing and reading are alienated from day-today activities in the home. this may not only reduce a pupil’s creativity and thinking, but also affect his/her academic achievement by not being able to meet the standard of reading and writing required for academic purposes as demonstrated in this study and as already alluded to in various other studies (unesco, 2006; feinstein et al., 2008; desforges and abouchaar, 2003; brown and iyengar, 2008; unesco, 2005). secondly, the high levels of semi-literate and illiteracy among the parents studied posit the problem of unemployment and underemployment, both leading to low incomes and household poverty in over two thirds of the sample reported here. this agrees with reports by the ministry of finance, planning and economic development (mfped, 1999; unesco, 2006), that where the quality and productivity of labour are low, so are salaries and wages. as indicated by the world bank (2009), low income parents are unable to provide holistic support to their school-going children, including meeting basic needs such as food, shelter, clothing and good quality education as recommended by the government of uganda (lubangakene, 2013). this posits the demand for a new way forward. recommendations arising from this study, two types of recommendations arise: a practical short-term suggestion and a longer-term recommendation are deemed appropriate in alleviating parents’ challenges in providing support to their children in the face of literacy and poverty challenges. these proposals were mooted by the participants in their interviews. local income generation (short-term) the semi and unskilled parents could engage in other income generating activities that may not take them far away from home. activities such as growing of vegetables, though labour intensive, could be time saving, if they are grown near to the home so that the children can also participate in the activities and spend more time with their parents after school. furthermore, horticulture does not require a large piece of land and so this may be conducive with the increasing population. intervention (long-term) a number of suggestions were noted in this category. first, the government should ensure a salary increase for civil servants, improve infrastructure, sensitise parents through local leaders about the value of education and launch a country-wide adult education programme. secondly, it was proposed that parent-parent partnerships need to be developed between parents with high education and literacy skill levels and those with low educational backgrounds at community level so that parents get to help each other in relation to the education of their children. conclusion the study established a strong relationship between parents’ education, literacy levels and 164 global education review 1(3) poverty in terms of household income as having a significant impact on the educational achievement of children in primary school. it is recommended that if poverty was reduced and parents’ education and literacy levels increased, the gap between the illiterate and literate parents could be narrowed. when parents are educated, particularly about the value of spending dedicated time with their children, showing an active interest in their school work and related activities, and speaking, reading and writing with them, it may substantially improve their children’s chances of achieving to the best of their individual abilities in school. raising the educational levels of parents has benefits not only for the individuals but also for their families and the wider society. apart from parents’ education and literacy skill levels, it was evident that there were other variables in the home setting that influenced the educational achievement of children. for example, the presence of significant other members of the family such as older and literate siblings, and grandparents, which could serve to create a rich home learning environment that is capable of enhancing cognitive stimulation and the child’s own contribution to his or her education. nevertheless, these findings confirm feinstein et al.’s (2008) assertion that the effect of income on children’s achievement can be an effect of prior parental education, which this study has shown has a mediated positive effect on children’s educational outcome overall. the educated parents are aware of the problems and the advantages of education, but the reality of their lives and the financial challenges they face restrict them in prioritising time for education with their children. the semi-literate and uneducated are aware of the broader benefits of education, but are not fully aware of the level of interaction that is required to support and encourage their children. this is mediated by harsh financial realities as well. there is evidence of an overly heavy burden of responsibilities on parents that are work related. this was noticeable across all socioeconomic bands in the study, but the culture of meeting one’s work colleagues after work for socialisation purpose was reported by those in professional employment, and placed further demands on these parents’ time and limited 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(2013). a student’s guide to education studies (3rd ed.). oxon: routledge. world bank (2009). atlas of global development: country poverty assessments (2nd ed.). washington: collins. www.wds.worldbank.org world bank (2009). atlas of global development: world development report. washington: collins www.econ.worldbank,org/wdr/ about the author(s) alice j. drajea (shs) is affiliated with the religious order of the sisters of the sacred heart of jesus in uganda with its base in south sudan. she is a doctoral student at the school of education in trinity college dublin. her research interests include literacy, poverty and children’s attainment in school. carmel o’sullivan, phd, is the head of the school of education, trinity college dublin. her research interests are in the areas of arts education and autism spectrum disorder. http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/tableviewer/document.aspx?reportid=121&if_language=eng&br_country=8000&br_region=40540 http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/tableviewer/document.aspx?reportid=121&if_language=eng&br_country=8000&br_region=40540 http://stats.uis.unesco.org/unesco/tableviewer/document.aspx?reportid=121&if_language=eng&br_country=8000&br_region=40540 http://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=4&programme=12 http://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=4&programme=12 http://.sutton_trust.com/public/documentts/1sutton_trust_cognitive_report.pdf http://.sutton_trust.com/public/documentts/1sutton_trust_cognitive_report.pdf http://www.wds.worldbank.org/ http://www.econ.worldbank,org/wdr/ carmel o’sullivan, head of school school of education, room 3128, arts building trinity college, dublin 2., ireland unesco (2008). global monitoring report. unicef: info by country world bank: world development indicators. 2tuhttp://www.unesco.org/uil/litbase/?menu=4&programme=12u2t [16 april 2013]. opportunities to learn algebra 29 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: ayieko, rachel angela (2018). the relationship between opportunities to learn algebra and student’s algebra achievement: a comparative study. global education review, 5 (3), 29-56. the relationship between opportunities to learn algebra and students’ algebra achievement: a comparative study rachel angela ayieko duquesne university abstract the article provides a report on the comparison of opportunities to learn algebra and eighth grade students’ algebra achievement in three countries: botswana, singapore and the united states. the study used student and teacher data from the trends in international mathematics and science study (2011 and 2015). by using a multilevel regression analysis, the study presents the models within the three countries of the relationships between opportunities to learn algebra and eighth-grade students’ algebra achievement of the recent timss cycle. the findings indicate that the opportunities to learn algebra are context specific and align with the expectations of the curriculum guides from the governing bodies within the countries. also, the study shows that students who learned particular algebra topics in the early grades had significantly higher algebra scores in the timss 2015 assessment. in particular, students who had been taught properties of functions and simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions before eighth grade in the united states had significantly higher scores. also, singaporean students who had been taught simple linear equations and inequalities and simultaneous equations had higher algebra scores. implications for policy and research are discussed. keywords curriculum, algebra achievement, achievement, trends in international mathematics and science study (timss). introduction the technological advancement in the 21st century will require greater numbers of more graduates with fluency in science technology engineering and mathematics related fields (graham, frederick, byars-winston, hunter, & handelsman, 2013). notably, computer technology expertise, advanced sciences, economic and mathematics-related fields require graduates with fluency in the use of symbolic notation as a tool (nofre, priestley, & alberts, 2014). symbolic notation in mathematics is taught in the algebra strand of mathematics in middle school and is introduced by some teachers in the early elementary school years (blanton & kaput, 2005; macgregor & price, 2003). in the united states, moses and team (1989) introduced the algebra project with an aim of making algebra available to all students in cambridge, massachusetts. they argued that access to algebra would provide _______________________________ corresponding author: rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university, 106a canevin hall, 600 forbes ave., pittsburgh, pa 15282 email: ayiekor@duq.edu mailto:ayiekor@duq.edu 30 global education review 5(3) students with a smoother transition to high school mathematics, and in turn provide a gateway to college entry. therefore, success in learning algebra in elementary school may be viewed as a civil right for all students because of its importance in learning high school mathematics, college entry, and its application to various fields in the present technological age. the teaching and learning of algebra is a challenge for teachers and students (kierian, 2007; rakes, valentine, mcgatha, & ronau, 2010). across nations, content guidelines and expectations differ on grade levels for teaching algebra and the depth of coverage (e.g., chin et al., 2012; common core state standards initiative [ccssi] 2010; kesamang, mudongo, keatimilwe & botaane, 2012). therefore, a comparative analysis of the opportunities to learn algebra before high school, and relating these learning opportunities to students’ algebra mastery is a step towards demystifying the learning of this component of mathematics. a cross-national analysis provides a broad scope for considering the possibilities of the influence of the opportunities to learn the algebra content on students’ mathematics achievement. this study drew on the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) 2011 and 2015 data to examine the changes in the opportunities to learn (otl) algebra, and eighth-grade students’ algebra achievement in three countries with markedly different timss achievement scores: botswana, singapore, and the united states. further, the research focuses on the influence of the recent otl algebra on students’ algebra achievement across the three countries. the questions guiding the study: (a) how did the opportunities to learn algebra and students’ mathematics achievement differ between three countries in 2011 and 2015? (b) what was the intended and implemented algebra curriculum in elementary and lower secondary school in 2011 in the three countries? (c) what is the relationship between opportunities to learn algebra and eighth-grade students’ achievement in algebra across the three countries in 2015 while controlling for students’ background and gender? the selection of each country in three continents considered: the language of instruction, previous timss achievement scores, and curricular differences. these three countries use english as the language of instruction. similar to having a coherent and rigorous curriculum like other higher-achieving nations, singapore is unique in asia for having classroom instruction conducted in english, and the curriculum materials provided in english (wang-iverson, myers, & lim, 2010). botswana is one of the two sub-saharan african countries that took part in the timss-2011 and 2015 that uses english as the language of instruction. south africa, which is the other african country that participated in timss in the two cycles was not selected because the language of instruction is either english or afrikaans. for this reason, botswana was preferred because of single english language policy for instruction. the united states is unique as a country because it consists of several states that all use english as the language of instruction and therefore provides variation in education policies that may exist among the different states. the timss achievement scores were also used to select the countries for inclusion in the study. singapore has consistently posted a high score on international assessments at the eighthgrade level (mullis, martin, & foy, 2008; organization for economic cooperation and development [oecd], 2010). therefore, information from a high-achieving nation serves as a benchmark for lower achieving nations, such as botswana. botswana is one of the african countries that has shown steady economic and political stability and is unique in providing educational resources to the entire school-aged population. however, with all these opportunities to learn algebra 31 positive attributes, it still posted a low score in both timss math assessments. curricular differences are also worth noting as a factor for selection of countries. singapore and botswana all use a national curriculum, whereas in united states the state education and the local school district agencies decide on the curriculum and accountability measures that are aligned with the standards shared across the united states. beginning in 2010 the united states began to transition to a national curriculum and by 2015, 43 states, four us territories, and the department of defense education had adopted the common core state standards (national governors association of best practices & council of chief state school officers [nga & ccsso], 2010; malley, neidorf, arora, kroeger & american institutes of research, 2016) international comparisons may provide vital information for policy and practice even though countries may have different cultural patterns, beliefs, educational structures, curriculum, and expectations (desimone, smith, baker, & ueno, 2005; schmidt et al., 2001). this study compared the in-country relationships in three countries rather than making comparisons of the relationships across the selected countries, i.e., in each selected country the opportunities to learn algebra were analyzed as cases and the comparisons of the relationships between these opportunities to learn and algebra achievement within the countries then compared. this largescale comparative study across varying contexts, both within and between the three countries, allows for a broader consideration of influencing factors on student achievement and provides a more extensive generalization of findings. the similarities and differences of factors related to student achievement across contexts, which are not usually apparent, can be illuminated using such a study. theoretical perspective the theory guiding this study draws on the opportunity to learn (otl) framework. the literature provided is organized by first discussing the otl framework. otl is also elaborated in regard to the intended curriculum and implemented curriculum. following is a summary of studies on algebra learning as well as those on the relationships between otl algebra and student achievement. included in the literature are discussions on the connections between the documented studies and the presented research. opportunity to learn carroll (1963) introduced opportunities to learn in the proposed dimensions of the model of learning. according to carroll, the otl dimension falls within the external conditions that can be adjusted to improve learning. otl was defined as “the amount of time allowed for learning” (carroll, 1963, p. 26). the expanded definitions of otl are the intended time allocated to learn or teach a topic in the national curriculum guides or reported by teachers. it is also the proportion of teachers in a country covering the topic (schmidt et al., 2001) or the relative emphasis on a specific topic (floden, 2002). floden (2002) elaborated that the time teachers plan to spend teaching a topic is another measure of otl. in addition, the time teachers actually spent teaching a topic or the time a student is present when learning a topic is measured as an otl. otl is also the degree to which a student engages in specific instructional activities (floden, 2002). schmidt and colleagues (2001) and floden (2002) categorized otl into the intended or the implemented curriculum. the intended curriculum includes the content standards used to guide instruction, whereas the implemented curriculum represents the percentage of instructional time spent or teachers’ reports on 32 global education review 5(3) coverage of a topic (schmidt et al., 2001). similarly, floden (2002) added that the intended curriculum includes the topics scheduled to be taught in a school year or the time a teacher sets aside to teach the topic. in addition to schmidt and colleagues (2001) summary of the implemented curriculum as an otl, floden (2002) included the count of the textbook pages on the topic, the teacher’s report on the emphasis of the topic in relation to other topics (floden, 2002). floden (2002) stated that otl is also the academic learning time which is the time that students are engaged in learning or the estimated time students complete a given task successfully or paying attention. other definitions of otl include approaches to teaching experience (blömeke & delaney, 2014; schmidt, blömeke, et al., 2011; schmidt, cogan, & houang, 2011), access to qualified teachers, resources for learning, and the goals set by instructors (oakes, 1990). otl is a focal area of study in international comparisons (floden, 2002) and was found to be positively related to students’ mathematics achievement (floden, 2002; schmidt et al., 2001; törnroos, 2005). this study draws from floden (2002) and schmidt and team’s (2001) otl that is categorized as the intended and implemented curriculum. in particular, the intended curriculum for this study is the schedule or time for an algebra topic to be taught in a school year. the implemented curriculum is the teachers’ reports on the coverage of an algebra topic. otl might explain the variations in student mathematics achievement across nations that can inform policy decisions on curriculum preparation and promising opportunities that make significant improvements in students’ learning. algebra learning scholars have found that teaching algebra in the early elementary grades (grades 1-5) is possible and critical to students’ success in learning more advanced algebra in secondary school. knuth, stephens, blanton, and gardiner (2016) suggested the infusion of algebra in mathematics learning in the earlier grades. in particular, the use of variables, introducing the equal sign as relational instead of an operation, and functional relationships were taught with notable success among third-fifth grade students (knuth et al., 2016). early studies on algebra learning document positive outcomes with the introduction of functional thinking in lower elementary (e.g., martinez & barbara, 2006; tanışlı, 2011; warren, cooper, & lamb, 2006). notably, the nature of selected mathematics tasks (bjuland, 2012; gardiner & sawrey, 2016) and approaches to teaching algebra (chan, 2015; whitin & whitin, 2014) enabled first and fourth grade students to engage in functional thinking and algebraic reasoning. similarly, blanton, stephens, knuth, gardiner, isler and kim (2015) reported that third grade students who were engaged in an early algebra intervention were able to correctly interpret the equal sign as a relational symbol, represent unknown quantities using variable notation, use a structural approach to solve selected tasks, and represent relationships of variables using covariational reasoning. according to blanton and team (2015) the algebraic reasoning the third graders exhibited were critical benchmarks for the development of algebraic thinking that often proved to be a challenge for students in the middle grades and beyond. one of the factors related to the learning of algebra is the opportunity to learn. therefore, a focus on the grade level when students learned or were taught algebra tasks could explain the advantages of their success at the eighth-grade level. this study adapted the conceptualization of otl used by floden (2002) and schmidt et al. (2001), which is the percentage of instructional time spent on the topic and the curriculum opportunities to learn algebra 33 offered. specifically, this study compared the otl algebra content of mathematics in two years (2011 and 2015) in the three countries. otl algebra in the three countries the curriculum for teaching algebra varies across the selected countries. in botswana, the mathematics curriculum in algebra is concentrated in the upper primary (grades 5-7) and lower secondary (grades 8-10). in upper primary suggested algebra topics include using algebra to communicate numbers, number patterns and arithmetic sequences, solving and simplifying linear expressions (masole, gabalebatse, guga, pharithi, 2016; botswana examination council, 2016). in lower secondary the algebra curriculum includes simplification of algebraic expressions, expansion and factorization, evaluation and formulae for numeric values, and formation and solving linear and systems of equations using real-life situations, patterns, and sequences (barungwi, cele, mudongo, morake, & hlomani, 2008; masole, et al., 2016; ministry of education botswana, 2010). in singapore, algebra content in the primary (grades 1-6) includes algebraic expressions with one variable and lower secondary (grades 7-8) includes quadratic equations, linear inequalities, simultaneous equations, linear equations, algebraic expressions and formulae, rate and speed, algebraic manipulation, and set language and notation, functions and graphs (chee et al., 2016; quek et al., 2008; ministry of education singapore, 2007). at eighth grade, a substantial section of the mathematics curriculum is algebra (kaur, 2008). however, in the united states, the curriculum guides vary across the different states and school districts (keene, 2008; malley, et al., 2016). in algebra, the curriculum topics in middle school (grades 6-8) include numeric values, algebraic patterns, geometric patterns or sequences, powers of expressions containing variables (national council of teachers of mathematics [nctm], 2000). other topics include evaluating expressions for a given numeric value, simplification and comparison of algebraic expressions, using expressions to model situations, simple linear equations, simultaneous equations, and multiple representations of functions, function properties, radicals and integer exponents (keene, 2008; malley, et al., 2016). while the united states in america claimed to adopt the common core state standards of mathematics in 2011(nga & ccsso, 2010), the instruction provided in this study followed nctm standards. figure 1 summarizes the hypothesized relationships of this study (including the background variables: gender and academic resources (background). students’ gender and academic resources (background) are used as control variables because they are factors that have been found to influence student academic achievement. the students’ background variables are a socio-economic measure, a term introduced by carnoy (2015), which includes parental level of education and the number of books in the students’ home. i hypothesize that those students who have had the otl various content areas of algebra in before and at eighth grade have higher algebra achievement, controlling for their background and gender. 34 global education review 5(3) figure 1. the hypothesized relationships between the otl algebra and eighth grade students’ algebra achievement. method data and sampling the study used data from timss 2011 and 2015. timss 2011 and 2015 are the fifth and sixth cycles of the timss comparative assessment of mathematics and science around in the world, respectively. these studies are cross-sectional surveys of information about the teaching and learning of mathematics cross-nationally in the fourth and eighth grades of school. the fourth grade was considered as the students who have been in school for four years beginning from first grade with a mean age of at least 9.5 years. similarly, students sampled for the eighth-grade study have been in school for the last eight years and mean age of at least 13.5 years (laroche, joncas & foy, 2016). the data were collected through a disproportionate sampling procedure in which whole classes were selected after dividing the target population into strata (olson et al., 2008). the schools were sampled in each of the strata in the first stage and then the classes within the schools in the second stage. stratification improves efficiency, makes estimates more reliable, and allows for differences in sampling based on the population years (laroche, joncas & foy, 2016). the variables used for stratifying the samples were agreed upon by consultation between the national research centers of the participating countries and statistics canada (mullis martin, foy & arora (2012); mullis, martin, foy & hooper (2016) timss aims to get a 100% participation rate for the sampled schools and classes. the sampling team set the required participation rates at 85% minimum for the schools and 95% for the classrooms, or a combined participation rate of 75% years (laroche, joncas & foy, 2016). for each of the sampled schools, two schools were identified as replacement schools in the specified stratum. in order to cater for the differing sizes of the schools and classes and non-participation, unique sampling weights were introduced (laroche, joncas & foy, 2016). the sampling weights were calculated for each grade and study and were taken into consideration during any timss analysis. the timss data was collected from students, teachers, principals, and education representatives in the participating countries. algebra achievement students' background (otl) algebra topics taught before eighth grade (otl) algebra topics taught at the eighth grade level opportunities to learn algebra 35 background information was collected from the students and their teachers. in addition, the students and their teachers responded to questions about the learning and teaching of mathematics. information about the curriculum was obtained from education representatives in each of the participating countries. the principals in the participating countries provided information about their schools. in sum, 45 countries and 14 benchmarking entities participated in 2011 and 57 countries and 7 benchmarking entities in 2015. the information gathered from the data informs policy and practice towards the improvement in teaching and learning of mathematics and science. the study focused on three countries, botswana (n=5400 in 2011; n=5964 in 2015), singapore (n=5927in 2011; n=6116 in 2015), and the united states (n=10,477 in 2011; n=10,491 in 2015) that participated in the timss -2011 and 2015. the international association for the evaluation of educational achievement (iea) had national research coordinators from each of the participating countries conducting the survey. the target population was students, and their teachers, who were classified by the international standard of classification of education to be in eighth grade or its equivalent. in botswana, the ninth-grade students responded to the eighth-grade survey but in singapore and the united states the eighthgrade students were the respondents in the study. the study relied on the students’ and teachers’ self-reports on the opportunities to learn specific algebra content and the amount of time devoted to teaching algebra and the students’ algebra achievement. table 1 presents a description of the variables used in the study. analysis the first two research questions required descriptive information of the otl algebra and eighth-grade student mathematics achievement information in the three countries. research question one: “how did the opportunities to learn algebra and students’ mathematics achievement differ across the three countries in 2011 and 2015?” this research question was answered using means, standard deviations that illustrate the variations in otl and students’ mathematics achievement in the three countries, and a one-way anova to test for differences in the means. the analysis included mean differences by country and a combination of data from 2011 and 2015 with mean difference tests conducted where appropriate. these analyses were conducted using the iea international database analyzer (idb). the idb analyzer was used to merge the files for the three countries and for descriptive analysis of the merged data. this software is a plugin used in the spss1 (ibm corporation, 2012) platform that considers the complex sampling in selecting the appropriate weight and correcting for the standard error. descriptive information on teachers’ reports about when they intended to teach specific algebra content as well as the percentages of teachers whose reports included when they taught specific algebra content was used for the analysis of the second research question: “what was the intended and implemented algebra curriculum in elementary and lower secondary school in 2015?” data was collected from respondents in the respective countries providing information on the intended curriculum and data available from the timss database. research question three, “what is the relationship between opportunities to learn algebra and students’ achievement in algebra across the three countries?” was examined using a multi-level regression analysis. this analysis 36 global education review 5(3) table 1 variables used in the study main variable variables type description opportunities to learn algebra (intended) intended grade algebra topics should be taught ordinal from the curriculum questionnaire the respondent selects when topic is intended to be taught. the respondent in this case is either the curriculum director or the principals in the selected schools. opportunities to learn algebra (implemented) algebra topics taught ordinal teacher reports on whether topics were taught before or at eighth-grade. time spent teaching algebra and other topics ordinal the teacher reports what percentage of time they will have spent teaching algebra and other topics by the end of the school year†. student achievement mathematics achievement continuous students’ achievement in mathematics content of algebra, data and chance, geometry and numbers. gender students’ gender dichotomous students gender used as a control variable socio-economic status number of books in the home continuous a proxy variable selected to be used as a measure of the students’ socio-economic status. highest parental level of education mother and fathers’ level of education given using the isced classification † the categories answered are: mostly taught this year, taught before this year, and the topics not yet taught or just introduced. in this study the responses are recoded such that mostly taught this year and taught before this year were the percentages considered. opportunities to learn algebra 37 technique is useful because it considers the cluster sampling. in particular, the sampling design, weighting, and the mathematics achievement given in the form of five plausible variables (foy & olson, 2008; rutkowski, gonzalez, joncas, & von davier, 2010) was considered using hlm2 software (raudenbush & bryk, 2002). the student level variables were set at level 1 and the teacher variables at level 2. level 1 (student level) algebra achievementij = β0j + β1j*(genderij) + β1j*(number of books in the homeij) + β1j*(parents education level ij) + rij β0j is average algebra score in institution j. the variables represent the groupmean centered independent variables that include the covariates at the student level. the beta coefficients represent the slope or the corresponding change in algebra score for every unit change in the covariates. the error of the prediction of the equation is represented by rij. level 2 (teacher level) model 1: β0j = γ00 + γ01*(otl algebra before eighth grade2-6j) + u0j model 2: β0j = γ00 + γ01*(otl algebra at eighth grade6-10j) + u0j the otl variables are the grand mean-centered independent variables at the teacher level. γ00 is the grand mean algebra score of the sample in the country. u0j is the random error for deviation of group intercept with the overall intercept. this analysis was run separately for the two cycles. results mathematics achievement in 2011 and 2015 in the timss study, each student answered a few items from the more extensive pool for mathematics assessment. the limited responses of the students were used to generate an ability distribution for each of the students, from which five plausible values calculated (rutkowski et al., 2010). the analysis provided the combined plausible values for each student found through the use of the idb analyzer. figure 2 presents the graph of the differences in mathematics achievement scores in the content areas over the two years. 38 global education review 5(3) figure 2. mathematics achievement scores in 2011 and 2015 in the four topical areas (mean plausible values). a descriptive analysis of the scores by average math scores between the two timss cycles, content areas, and between countries indicated that there were differences in the students’ scores worth mentioning. in 2015 the average students’ mathematics scores was higher( (m=512.19, sd 115.34) than in 2011(m=507.62, sd =108.58), t(44, 103) =-4.284, p<0.001. that is, a combination of the math scores in 2011 and 2015 were significantly different. a further analysis of each content area for the three countries combined also indicated there was some significant differences. in particular , the combined mathematics scores in numbers were higher in 2015 (m=517.05, sd 118.79) than 2011 ( m=509.19, sd 114.08), t(44,103)=-7.085, p<.001). a comparison of the mean mathematics scores for the three countries revealed that botswana had the lowest mean grade when compared to the other two countries, whereas singapore had the highest scores in all the mathematics topics among the three countries in both cycles. botswana had a significant lower average score in all mathematics content areas in 2015 when compared to the united states (p<.001) and singapore (p<.001). algebra was the content area in which the eighth-grade students in botswana and singapore had the highest mean scores in 2011(406.81 and 614.47 respectively) in all content areas within the countries. in 2015 the eighth-grade students in botswana still had the highest mean content score in algebra (399.82), but the eighth-grade singaporean students had their highest mean content score in numbers (628.95). in the united states, the highest mean score was in data and chance in 2011(527.86) to algebra in 2015 (524.86). finally, the students in the united states and singapore maintained the lowest mean grade in geometry content. notably, in botswana, the eighth-grade students lowest mean score shifted from geometry in 2011 (380.68) to data and chance in 2015 (373.56). although algebra was the 0 100 200 300 400 500 600 700 a lg eb ra d at a an d c h an ce g eo m et ry n u m b er s a lg eb ra d at a an d c h an ce g eo m et ry n u m b er s a lg eb ra d at a an d c h an ce g eo m et ry n u m b er s botswana singapore united states s co re s in m e a n p la u si b le v a lu e s 2011 2015 opportunities to learn algebra 39 content area in which students performed highest in botswana, the general performance in algebra was significantly lower (p<.001), when compared to the other two countries. otl (intended curriculum) the second research question was an inquiry of the intended and implemented curricula in 2011. in this section, the report provides a descriptive summary of the intended curriculum as analyzed from the timss data base, collected through the curriculum questionnaire in which the principals or the curriculum directors responded. the intended curricula in botswana, singapore, and the united states indicate the algebra topics were taught at, and introduced at, different grade levels. for instance, simultaneous equations should be taught at the eighth-grade level in all three countries. simplifying and evaluating expressions was to be taught from grade six onwards in botswana and singapore, but to be taught only at the sixth-grade level in the united states and some sections of the topic to be taught at the fourth-grade level in botswana. notably, the singaporean curriculum expectations emphasized that patterns and sequences were to be taught all eight years from first grade, but to be taught from third grade in botswana and fourth grade in the united states. the other algebra topics were taught in the upper elementary grades and taught at subsequent years, but the grade levels at which the topics were first taught differed. a summary table of the topics and the grade levels when topics were to be taught is summarized in table 2. table 2 intended algebra curriculum grades 1-8 in botswana, singapore, and the united states algebra topics country grades 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions botswana x x x x singapore x x x united states x simple linear equations and inequalities botswana x x x x singapore x x united states x x x simultaneous (two variables) equations botswana x singapore x united states x numeric, algebraic, and geometric patterns or sequences (extension, missing terms, generalization of patterns) botswana x x x x x x singapore x x x x x x x x united states x x x x x representation of functions as ordered pairs, tables, graphs, words, or equations botswana x x x singapore x x united states x x x x properties of functions (slopes, intercepts etc.) botswana x singapore x x united states x x x 40 global education review 5(3) implemented curriculum algebra topics taught before eighth grade the percentage of teachers that reported teaching various algebra topics before eighth grade changed between 2011 and 2015. in all three countries, the proportion of the students’ teachers who taught simple linear equations and simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions before eighth grade increased markedly between the years 2011 to 2015. in particular, the percentage of teachers who taught simple linear equations increased from 13.79% to 18.85% in the united states, 31.62% to 40.39% in singapore, and 16.09% to 19.49% in botswana. similarly, the percentage of teachers who reported that they taught simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions increased from 18.75% to 29.87% in the united states, and 28.69% to 48.41% in singapore. also, there was an increase in the number of singaporean (13.88% to 24.7%) and botswana (15.37% to 18.72%) teachers who reported they taught multiple representations of functions across the two cycles. however, there was a decrease in the percentage of teachers who taught patterns and sequences in the united states (36.08% to 21.43%) and botswana (50.46% to 40.38%). finally, there was an increase in the percentage of teachers who reported teaching simple linear equations from 2011 to 2015 in all three countries. that is, there was an increase from 13.79% to 18.85% in the united states, 31.62% to 40.39% in singapore, and 16.09% to 19.46% in botswana. algebra topics taught at the eighth-grade level most of the algebra content was taught in the eighth grade in the three countries but with lower percentages of teachers teaching particular topics in the three countries in 2015. specifically, a decreased percentage of teachers across the three nations reported teaching simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions at the eighth-grade level (76.91% to 68.75% in the united states, 71.31% to 51. 59 in singapore, and 52.16% to 46.16 % in botswana). notably, there was a drop in the percentage of teachers that reported having taught simple linear equations and inequalities (55.22to 40.14%), numeric, algebraic, and geometric patterns (44.04% to 32.18%), and simultaneous equations (32.77% to 16.59%) at the eighthgrade level in botswana. however, in the united states, there was an increase in the percentage of teachers that reported having taught representations of functions (80.74% to 88.42%) and simultaneous equations (58.45% to 79.73%) at the eighth-grade level. finally, the highest percentage of teachers that reported that they taught properties of functions at the eighthgrade level (89.53%) was in the united states, whereas botswana had the lowest percentage (30.88%). these results indicate the otl the different algebra topics that represent the implemented curriculum as reported by the students’ teachers differed in the three countries. also, most of the algebra curriculum seemed to have been implemented at the eighthgrade level as shown by the higher percentage of teachers who reported when they taught the algebra topics. figures 3-5 provide summaries of the otl various algebra topics before and at the eighth-grade level. opportunities to learn algebra 41 figure 3. percentage of teachers who reported having taught specific algebra topics before eighth grade in 2011. 16.09 15.37 8.95 40.16 50.46 31.62 13.88 4.45 28.69 65.81 13.79 8.17 4.6 18.75 36.08 0 20 40 60 80 100 simple linear equations and inequalities multiple representation of functions simultaneous equations ( two variables) simplifying and evaluating expressions numeric, algebraic, and geomeric patterns properties of functions percentage of teachers united states singapore botswana 42 global education review 5(3) figure 4. percentage of teachers who reported having taught specific algebra topics before eighth grade in 2015. 16.09 15.37 8.95 40.16 50.46 31.62 13.88 4.45 28.69 65.81 13.79 8.17 4.6 18.75 36.08 0 20 40 60 80 100 simple linear equations and inequalities multiple representation of functions simultaneous equations ( two variables) simplifying and evaluating expressions numeric, algebraic, and geomeric patterns properties of functions percentage of teachers united states singapore botswana opportunities to learn algebra 43 figure 5. percentage of teachers who reported teaching specific algebra topics at the eighth-grade level in 2011 and 2015. 55.22 40.14 40.74 36.11 32.77 16.59 52.16 46.16 44.04 32.18 30.88 63.41 58.29 77.71 69.75 84.77 86.19 71.31 51.59 29.77 26.07 66.76 75.93 78.33 80.74 88.42 58.45 79.73 76.91 68.75 54.28 56.41 89.53 0 20 40 60 80 100 simple linear equations and inequalities-2011 simple linear equations and inequalities-2015 multiple representation of functions-2011 multiple representation of functions-2015 simultaneous equations ( two variables)-2011 simultaneous equations ( two variables)-2015 simplifying and evaluating expressions-2011 simplifying and evaluating expressions-2015 numeric, algebraic, and geomeric patterns-2011 numeric, algebraic, and geomeric patterns--2015 properties of functions2011 properties of functions2015 percentage of teachers united states singapore botswana 44 global education review 5(3) relationships between otl algebra and students’ algebra achievement in 2015? the 2015 data contributes information on the most recent relationships between otl algebra and algebra achievement in the selected countries. a multi-level model of the relationships between the otl algebra and students’ algebra achievement in 2015 is presented in tables 4 and 5. table 4 is the unconditional model of the algebra achievement, and table 5 provides the multi-level models of the relationships between the otl algebra and algebra achievement within the three selected countries. the tables include the values of the beta coefficients and the standard errors in parenthesis. the intra-class correlations (icc) is the ratio of the between-class variation and the total variance in algebra achievement (𝐼𝐶𝐶 = 𝜏00 /[𝜏00 + 𝜎2]). the icc values for algebra achievement in the three countries are above 0.1(see table 4) and therefore it is permissible to use a multilevel model (raykov & marcoulides, 2012). the icc values provide information about the variation of algebra achievement scores between the students’ teachers. table 4 unconditional models of eighth grade students’ algebra achievement in 2015 variables botswana singapore united states intercept 401.39*** (3.12) 619.95*** (4.43) 523.12*** (3.35) variance components variance between students’ teachers 1023.34 5899.96 3859.75 variance between students 5116.87 1948.86 3594.20 icc 0.17 0.75 0.52 ***p<.001 opportunities to learn algebra 45 table 5 relationships between otl algebra and eighth grade students’ achievement in algebra in 2015 variables botswana singapore united states model 1 model 2 model 1 model 2 model 1 model 2 intercept 399.38*** (3.28) 399.60*** (3.25) 619.31*** (3.89) 619.62*** (3.73) 524.92*** (3.25) 524.38*** (3.20) female 23.08*** (3.58) 23.08*** (3.81) -.53 (2.99) -.53 (2.99) 3.79** (1.85) 3.79** (1.85) number of books in the home 2.42 (2.07) 2.42 (2.07) -.25 (1.23) -.25 (1.22) 8.92*** (.89 8.93*** (.89) fathers educational level 4.29*** (.85) 4.29*** (.93) .51 (.32) .51 (.32) 1.06 (0.78) 1.06 (.78) taught before eighth grade numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns 11.80 (6.80) 1.38 (8.74) -14.69 (8.31) simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions 7.47 (7.03) -7.67 (8.92) 18.18** (8.38) simple linear equations and inequalities -4.30 (11.40) 63.41*** (9.84) 15.71 (10.02) simultaneous equations 17.39 (16.33) 56.23** (17.96) -5.92 (18.52) representations of functions -1.82 (10.87) 22.24 (12.79) -6.98 (16.09) properties of functions -10.88 (13.41) 2.92 (12.68) 54.64** (20.97) 46 global education review 5(3) taught at eighth grade numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns -10.11 (6.54) -3.07 (8.78) 15.81** (6.97) simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions 8.01 (5.61) -1.32 (8.33) 23.86** (7.50) simple linear equations and inequalities -5.95 (5.55) -50.32*** (9.10) -13.47 (8.74) simultaneous equations 16.60 (8.86) 74.45*** (10.14) 27.67** (9.96) representations of functions 8.39 (5.97) -17.24 (9.94) -.05 (12.19) properties of functions 6.77 (7.27) -13.08 (9.63) -22.13 (14.23) variance components and fit index 𝓧𝟐 909.89*** 876.48*** 14046.0*** 12.702.99*** 7561.04*** 7534.21*** *p<.05, **p<.01, ***p<.001 the findings from the multi-level modeling of the relationship between the otl algebra and students’ algebra achievement indicate that particular relationships were context-specific, and the relational patterns differed across the three countries. the interpretation of the relationships is reported by first considering the associations between otl algebra before the eighth-grade and students’ algebra achievement. next, is a discussion of the relationships between otl algebra at eighth grade and students’ algebra achievement. all these relational findings are controlled for gender and the students’ academic resources(background) at home. teaching algebra topics before eighth grade the findings indicate there were differing patterns in the relationships in all three countries between otl algebra before eighth grade and the students’ algebra achievement. specifically, students in singapore whose teachers reported they taught simple linear equations and inequalities before eighth grade had significantly higher scores (β=63.4, p<. 001) when compared to those who did not learn this algebraic topic or were taught the topic at the eighth-grade level. further, the singaporean students’ whose teachers reported they were taught simultaneous equations before eighth grade had significantly higher scores (β=56.23, p<. 05) opportunities to learn algebra 47 than those who had not been taught the topic or had this otl the eighth-grade level. in botswana, students whose teachers reported that they had been taught numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns, simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions, and simultaneous equations had higher scores than those who had not been taught the topic or were taught in the eighth grades. in contrast, students whose teachers reported they had taught simple linear equations and inequalities and properties of functions had lower scores when compared to those who had not been taught the topics or had been taught at the eighth-grade level. notably, all the relationships between the otl algebra before eighth grade and students’ algebra achievements were not significant in botswana. in the united states students whose teachers reported having taught some algebra topics before eighth grade had significantly higher algebra scores. mainly, students whose teachers reported having taught simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions and properties of functions at the eighth-grade level had significantly higher scores (β=18.18, p <. 05 and β=54.64, p <. 05, respectively). these scores were compared to students who had either not been taught the topic or who experienced this otl at the eighth-grade level. however, those students whose teachers reported they taught numeric, algebraic, and linear patterns and simultaneous equations before eighth grade had lower scores in the united states. teaching algebra topics at the eighthgrade level across the three countries, the pattern of relationships between otl algebra topics and students’ algebra achievement differed but were similar for two algebra topics. the relationships between otl simultaneous equations and students’ algebra achievement were positive in all three countries and significant in singapore (β =74.45, p<. 001) and the united states (β =27.67, p<. 05). that is, students whose teachers reported that they had been taught these topics at the eighth-grade level had significantly higher algebra scores when compared to those who had not been taught these topics. in contrast, the students whose teachers reported that they had been taught simple linear inequalities at the eighthgrade level had significantly lower algebra scores when compared to those who had not been taught this topic or had been taught it at an earlier grade, for the singaporean students (β=-50.32, p< .001). notably, there was a significant positive relationship between otl numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns and students’ algebra achievement in the united states (β=15.81, p<. 05), but that relationship was negative in botswana and singapore. finally, there was a significant positive relationship between otl simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions and students’ algebra achievement in the united states (β=23.86, p<. 05). in other words, the students whose teachers reported that they had been taught about patterns at the eighth-grade level in the united states had significantly higher algebra scores when compared to those who had not been taught the topic at the eighthgrade level, whereas in the other two countries the students had significantly lower algebra scores. the other relationships between otl representation of functions and properties of functions had differing patterns in the three countries and were not significant. 48 global education review 5(3) discussion the purpose of this study was to investigate the changes in the otl algebra in three selected countries in 2011 and 2015. additionally, the study also focused on the relationships between the otl algebra topics and eighth-grade students’ algebra achievement in the most recent timss cycle, 2015. the investigations were done using the timss (2011 and 2015) data. the findings from the study suggest that over the two cycles, there was an increase in the percentage of the eighth-grade students’ teachers who reported that they had taught particular algebra topics before and in eighth grade. further, across the three selected countries relationships between otl various algebra topics and eighth grade students’ algebra achievement had differing patterns within the selected countries. following is a discussion of the findings considering the country policies and earlier studies. opportunities to learn algebra botswana there was a significant increase in the percentage of the eighth-grade students’ teachers who reported that they had taught, simple linear equations and inequalities and simplifying and evaluating expressions before eighth grade in 2011 and in 2015. however, the proportion of teachers who reported they taught numeric, algebraic, and geometric patterns before eighth grade was significantly lower in 2015. a comparison of 2011 and 2015 data indicated that the percentage of teachers who taught the different algebra topics at the eighthgrade level dropped. in particular, there was a 6% drop in the percentage of students’ teachers who reported they had taught simplifying and evaluating expressions at the eighth-grade, a 15.08% drop who reported they had taught simple linear equations, a 11. 86% drop for those who reported they had taught algebra topics on patterns, a 16.18% drop in those who reported they had taught simultaneous equations, and 4.63% drop for those who reported they had taught multiple representations at the eighth-grade level. the reduced percentage of the students’ teachers who reported teaching these algebra topics at the eighth-grade level suggests that some algebra topics may have been introduced at earlier grades in the later years. the ministry of education in botswana requires teachers to introduce algebra to students through a gradual shift from using numbers to using letters between the fifth to seventh grades. also, students are expected to be able to simplify linear equations and solve algebraic equations using trial and error and substitution methods at the seventh-grade level (kesamang, mudongo, keatimilwe & botaane, 2012). however, from the teachers’ reports, there is still a significant proportion of teachers who had not taught the content before eighth grade. after the seventh grade, students take a three-year junior certificate course during which it is expected they expand their algebra knowledge to include gaussian elimination and substitution to solve simultaneous equations with two unknowns (kesamang, mudongo, keatimilwe & botaane, 2012). at the end of the three-year period, the students should be able to expand and factor linear equations. the findings from this study indicate that more than 50% of the teachers were meeting the requirement of the ministry of education by focusing more on the required algebraic opportunities to learn algebra 49 topics by the time the students had completed their eighth grade. however, it is worth noting that a considerable proportion of the teachers in botswana had not taught the students’ simultaneous equations and multiple representations of functions by the end of eighth-grade. singapore most of the algebra topics were taught in eighth grade. however, between 2011 and 2015, more teachers taught simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions, representations of functions, and simple linear equations and inequalities before the eighth grade. notably, more than 60% of the teachers reported they taught numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns before eighth grade. the expectations from the ministry of education in singapore stress that more algebra should be taught in the seventh and eighth grade. between the seventh and eighth grade students are expected to be able to manipulate algebraic expressions and formulae of linear and quadratic expressions. also, students should have known linear and quadratic functions and simultaneous equations at these levels. further, the teachers are expected to teach linear inequalities with one unknown (chin et al., 2012). however, between first and sixth grade the students should be taught “algebraic expressions in one variable” (chin et al., 2012, p. 807). from the findings in this study, it seems that more of the students’ teachers taught content per the expectations of the ministry of education in the algebra topics they taught before and at eighth grade. the united states most of the algebra was taught at the eighthgrade level. however, before eighth grade, there was a significant drop in the percentage of teachers who reported they taught numeric algebraic and geometric patterns and sequences before eighth grade between 2011 and 2015. in contrast, there was a significant increase in the percentage of teachers who reported they taught simplifying and evaluating expressions before eighth grade between 2011 and 2015. also, there was a 5% increase in the percentage of teachers who taught simple linear equations and inequalities before eighth grade. over the two timss cycles, more than 75% of teachers reported they taught properties of functions and representations of functions at the eighthgrade level. sen, malley, hodson, and werwath (2012) documented that two of the three critical focal areas in algebra for eighth grade include, “formulating and reasoning about expressions and equations, solving linear equation…function concept and using functions to describe quantitative relationships” (p.983). further, learning patterns in algebra were expected between the third and fifth grade, and in the seventh grade (nga & ccsso, 2010). although some states have adopted the ccssm since 2010, it seems that more of the students’ teachers taught numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns at the eighth-grade level even though the intended curriculum indicated from fourth grade onwards. in sum, in the three countries, the teachers’ reports indicate a possibility of a shift in the emphasis of particular algebra topics across the grades over the years between 2011 and 2015. in particular, there seemed to be more emphasis on teaching numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns in singapore and botswana before eighth grade. the difference in algebra achievement may be attributed to the shift in the 50 global education review 5(3) emphasis of the various topics in the grade levels. a discussion of the relationships between otl algebra topics and the eighthgrade students’ algebra achievement would provide more information on the influence of the otl. relationships between otl algebra and algebra achievement the findings from the multilevel model of the relationships between otl algebra and eighth-grade students’ algebra achievement suggest that the grade level for teaching algebra topics mattered. specifically, the students whose teachers reported having taught them simple linear equations and inequalities and simultaneous equations in the singapore before eighth grade had significantly higher scores than those who had not been taught these topics or had these otl at a later grade. similarly, in the united states students who had been taught properties of functions and simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions before eighth grade, had significantly higher scores. particular topics taught at the eighthgrade level could have positioned some students at an advantage in their algebra achievement. for instance, eighth-grade students whose teachers had taught (i) numeric, algebraic, and geometric patterns (ii)simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions, and (iii) simultaneous equations at eighth grade in the united states, performed significantly higher. in contrast, the eighth-grade students who had been taught simple linear equations and inequalities at eighth grade in singapore had lower scores, whereas those who were taught simultaneous equations at the same level had significantly higher algebra scores. these findings support the notion that, learning some algebra topics in the early grades could be more advantageous for students, such as the singaporean case for learning simple linear equations and inequalities. the higher scores in algebra achievement in singapore and the united states could be attributed to the approaches used to teach the algebra topics and the systemic policies allowing for teaching the topics earlier. for example, numeric, algebraic, and geometric patterns were to be taught from the fifth through eighth grade in the united states and from the first through eighth grade in singapore. however, the intended algebra curriculum indicated that topics that incorporate patterns were to be taught from the third grade through eighth grade. chan (2015) reported using manipulatives such as pattern blocks increased the understanding of algebraic patterns in early grades. a sequential development using representations from concrete to visual and then to symbolic supported students in identifying patterns and making generalizations (chan, 2015). although the data did not indicate the approaches used to teach algebra, it is probable that there could have been particular approaches used to introduce this topic in singapore and the united states that were different than those used to teach the students in botswana. perhaps these approaches to teaching could have made the difference in students understanding of the algebra topic. these findings support previous findings by blanton and kaput (2004) in which they reported that students in early grades could understand covariation and functional thinking in algebra. from the multi-level model, the findings show that in the united states, students whose teachers reported they had taught properties of opportunities to learn algebra 51 functions before eighth-grade had significantly higher scores. although the descriptive findings showed that only 6% of the students’ teachers in the united states reported teaching this topic before eighthgrade, their students had significantly higher algebra scores. gardiner and sawrey (2016) found that with the intentional selection of tasks, the promotion of functional thinking is possible amongst first graders. likewise, the teacher moves that foster persistence through effective questioning were found to be effective in teaching the discovery of patterns and the relationships between variables (whitin & whitin, 2014). in sum, the findings show that functional thinking in the early grades can be of advantage for students’ success in algebraic thinking. implications for practice and research these findings indicate that students enter high school with different algebra competencies within countries. notably, some of these gaps in their algebra knowledge may or may not be filled during high school. in botswana, students are taught less algebra in the elementary years than in singapore and the united states. as indicated in this study, some of the algebra topics can be taught at the lower grades. perhaps using particular instructional practices and problem-solving strategies make this possible. in the literature (e.g. gardiner & sawrey,2016 ; whitin & whitin, 2014), algebraic thinking can be promoted in lower elementary school grades. perhaps what would be beneficial is promoting approaches to teaching algebraic thinking amongst pre-service and in-service teachers. in particular teaching simple linear equations and inequalities, topics on patterns, numeric, algebraic and geometric patterns, simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions, and functional reasoning are some topics that should be discussed in pedagogy-related professional development forums. most important, is selecting cognitively demanding tasks (smith & stein, 2011) that allow for students to develop conceptual understanding of these algebra topics and developing strategies that promote algebraic thinking. further studies that examine how secondary teachers fill algebra knowledge gaps in high school mathematics should be investigated. also, studies of the otl algebra based on student backgrounds might provide insights on which students are not learning the early algebra and the effects of these gaps on their continual success advanced mathematics. the findings point to the need for further research on the instructional strategies used in the singapore countries for teaching simultaneous equations and simple linear equations and inequalities in before eighth grade that were related to a significant higher algebraic score. also, the pedagogy related to the successful learning of functional representation and simplifying and evaluating algebraic expressions before eighth grade in the united states is an agenda for research. therefore, otl various algebra topics points out an important factor that should be considered in educational policy. for example, there is a need for more discussions and research on (a) important topics to be learned in algebra; (b) investigations on the coherence of the algebra curriculum at the elementary levels in the schools across different countries; and (c) the time needed to teach algebra in early grades and middle school. finally, the need for professional development on approaches 52 global education review 5(3) to teaching algebra in the earlier grades using research-based methods of instruction. notes 1. spss is a software package used for statistical analysis that works on windows and macintosh operating systems. it is presently produced by ibm. 2. hlm software is used for analysis of a hierarchical linear model. these models 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(2001). why schools matter: a cross national national comparison of curriculum and learning. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. 56 global education review 5(3) sen, a., malley, l., hodson, c., & werwath, t. (2012). the united states. in i.v.s. mullis, m.o. martin, c. a. minnich, g. m. stanco, a. arora, v. a. s. centrino, & c. e. castle. timss 2011 encyclopedia: education policy and curriculum in mathematics and science (vol. 2, pp. 975–995). timss & pirls international study center, lynch school of education, boston college. retrieved from http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss201 1/downloads/timss2011_enc-v2.pdf smith, m.s., & stein, m.k. (2011). five practices for orchestrating productive classrooms discussions. reston, va: national council of teachers of mathematics. tanışlı, d. (2011). functional thinking ways in relation to linear function tables of elementary school students. the journal of mathematical behavior, 30(3), 206–223. törnroos, j. 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(2014). building squares and discovering patterns. teaching children mathematics, 21(4), 210–219. about the author rachel ayieko, phd, is an assistant professor in mathematics education in the department of instruction and leadership in education. her research interests include exploring the teaching practices that promote conceptual understanding of mathematics, algebra teaching and learning, teacher quality, and the opportunities to learn to teach and learn mathematics using large-scale data sets and classroom observation schemes. her recent research focuses on the relationships between the opportunities that pre-service teachers have to learn to teach elementary school mathematics and their knowledge and beliefs about teaching and learning mathematics using the international teacher education and development study of mathematics (teds-m). http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/timss2011_enc-v2.pdf http://timssandpirls.bc.edu/timss2011/downloads/timss2011_enc-v2.pdf school choice policies and practices 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: allen, ann (2016). school choice policies and practices in the united states, south africa, spain and canada. global education review, 3 (2). 1-3 school choice policies and practices in the united states, south africa, spain and canada ann allen ohio state university school choice. it is seemingly both reasonable and right to provide options for parents to choose the school their children attend. proponents of policies that favor school choice argue that school choice creates equity in access to quality education, and that the competition created from parents actively making attendance decisions will necessitate improvements and innovations in schools across the board. poor-performing schools, in other words, will not attract students. however, school choice research across the globe indicates that the implementation of school choice is much more complicated than the theory allows. from a public policy perspective, the implementation of school choice creates significant tensions in the delivery of primary and secondary education to all students. as noted in the articles in this journal, these tensions appear to transcend countries and continents, and include concerns about access to quality education for all students, segregation effects, and the influence and power of private organizations in public education. the public policy challenges raised by these tensions include questions about the use of the market as a mechanism for the provision of public education, and the barriers that competition creates to equity and innovation. despite these concerns, school choice programs appear to be popular among policymakers. in this issue of global education review, authors discuss school choice policy in south africa, spain, canada and the united states. we begin by examining some of the fundamental questions regarding the purpose of public education and the philosophies that undergird different approaches to its delivery. both brian fife and daniel laitsch consider important historical and philosophical underpinnings of school choice in the united states. fife presents an examination of the common good approach to public education advocated by horace mann and others, in light of today’s push for greater choice and a market approach to public schooling. fife considers whether mann’s basic premise that education is a social good, one that should be available to all children and paid for by all citizens, is still a relevant model today. ultimately, he concludes that market approaches to education place the common schools approach at risk, and that if, in fact, all children are to receive a quality education, mann’s proposal is still worth defending. similarly, laitsch examines the idea of vouchers, as envisioned by milton friedman more than 50 years ago, as a means of providing government schooling. laitsch argues that the move to focus more on the private good approach to education ______________________________ corresponding author: ann allen, college of education and human ecology, the ohio state university, 301-a ramseyer hall email: allen.952@osu.edu mailto:allen.952@osu.edu 2 global education review 3(2) poses a threat to society’s public goals if care is not taken in the way market schools are designed and governed. laitsch offers cautions regarding the damage the development of large private management organizations as major providers of public education, and a market approach, can do to the neighborhood effects of schooling. tensions are raised again by bekisizwe ndimande, who offers a critical look at school choice in post-apartheid south africa. although policymakers in south africa looked to school choice as a way to create more equity in educational access, ndimande presents his research with parents of children in poor neighborhoods as evidence that the neoliberal philosophy undergirding south africa’s school choice policies perpetuate and exacerbate, not alleviate, the unequal distribution of resources resulting in the segregation and marginalization of poor black children. marytza gawlik looks at the market approach through the american charter school program, examining both strengths and challenges of charter schools since they began in the united states in the early 1990s. with more than 6,000 charter schools in the u.s. and more than 40 states with charter school laws on the books, gawlik points out that charter school policy appeals to a broad range of policy actors for different reasons. using a model of charter schools as a framework for change, gawlik considers whether the charter schools in the u.s. are effectively attending to some long-standing problems with public education, including the ultimate goals of increasing academic achievement and parent satisfaction, and more intermediary goals such as increasing teacher autonomy and creating innovation. gawlik explores the history of u.s. charter school growth, reviews research on the effectiveness of charter schools, and like other authors in the journal, confronts the issue of segregation and other challenges school choice creates for public goals of education. regina umpstead, benjamin jenkins, pablo ortega gil, linda weiss, and bruce umpstead offer a look into two approaches to government funded school choice by comparing the charter school program in michigan in the u.s. with the use of publicly funded private schools in the valencian community in spain. interestingly, as umpstead and her colleagues report, spain relied on publicly funded private schools to help provide public education as the country transitioned to a democratic government. already existing private schools, in other words, provided a much-needed resource for the new government to provide public schooling. in the united states, the development of charter schools came out of an interest to create more choice in schooling and break down what was largely seen as the government’s monopoly on public education. other differences include the role of the federal government in each program, the religious aspect of spain’s private schools versus the freedom from religion in u.s. schools, and the barriers that may exist in attempting to provide government funded school choice. finally, lynn bosetti and philip butterfied, examine the charter school movement in alberta, canada, and suggest ways charter schools might move forward toward the goal of educational innovation. unlike the u.s., canada has taken a more tempered approach to the school choice movement, limiting the charter school program to the alberta province. the program in alberta has been operating for 20 years, with a focus on providing choice in educational programming. as in the u.s., political tensions exist between traditional school districts and charter schools. bosetti and butterfield note that these politics may be holding charter schools back. the authors argue that the potential for charter schools does not lie in their focus on competition but rather on their school choice policies and practices 3 potential role as “incubators for innovation.” though proponents of school choice policies claim that it will improve education through a market approach to education that offers options for consumers (i.e., parents) and pressures suppliers (schools) to improve their offerings, research suggests that competition brings a variety of other issues that policy makers should consider. below are a few of those considerations: • what are the goals for public education and how do new educational policies fit within those goals? • what barriers does a market approach to education create, and how can public policy mitigate or eliminate these barriers? • what mechanisms might a government put in place to ensure quality of all schools? • how can government-funded education provide for choice without exacerbating segregation? • what is the role of innovation in a program of school choice, and how can policy be designed to foster innovation and dissemination of innovation across school types? • what can policy makers and governments learn from each other regarding the implementation of school choice policies? these are just some of the questions raised by the research presented in this issue of global education review. after more than two decades of school choice policies and research on school choice, it is time to for policy makers, practitioners, and scholars to move beyond the promise of the market as a means toward equity, and to delve deeply into the complexities that choice policies create, particularly if we aim to make quality education an option for all students. about the author annallen, phd, is associate professor and program chair in educational policy in the department of educational studies at the ohio state university. her research interests include school governance, charter schools, democratic representation in education, and the intersection of educational politics and policy. she earned her doctorate in educational policy from michigan state university. 88 global education review 5(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: miller, angie l. (2018). the role of creative coursework in skill development for university seniors. global education review, 5 (1), 88-107. the role of creative coursework in skill development for university seniors angie l. miller indiana university, bloomington abstract previous research suggests that creativity training can be effective in academic settings and that teachers, in particular, can have an impact on creativity. furthermore, creativity is one of many transferable skills in higher education that will benefit students when they enter the workforce. this study extends research on creativity training and transferable skills in higher education, using data from the “senior transitions” topical module of the national survey of student engagement (nsse). responses from over 48,000 seniors at 227 different u.s colleges and universities were used to explore curricular differences across disciplinary fields as well as how exposure to creative coursework can predict confidence in numerous skills and abilities. exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis provided support for a measure of exposure to creative coursework, and an anova suggested significant differences by major fields, with arts majors showing a distinct advantage. results from ordinary least squares regression models found that even after controlling for several demographic and institutional characteristics, creative coursework is a significant positive predictor of confidence in several different skills and abilities that are important for adapting to traditional and non-traditional work settings, including creative thinking, critical thinking, entrepreneurial skills, and networking abilities. potential reasons for these patterns of results are discussed. these findings can help to inform curricular and programming enhancements for college students across all major fields, helping to better prepare them for their futures in various workplace settings. keywords coursework, creativity, creative thinking, critical thinking, higher education, major field, skills, abilities keywords coursework, creativity, creative thinking, critical thinking, higher education, major field, skills, abilities introduction creativity is an important element of human cognitive functioning, although not everyone even agrees on the definition (davis, 2004). a basic description of the construct would be any behavior or outcome that is both “novel” and “appropriate” (brown, 1989; runco & jaeger, 2012). many might associate the teaching of creativity with elementary school collage projects or middle school short story skills can be improved in students at a variety of ______________________________________ corresponding author angie l miller, center for postsecondary research, indiana university, 1900 e. 10 st., ste. 419, bloomington, in 47406. email: anglmill@indiana.edu creative coursework 89 educational levels (scott, leritz, & mumford, 2004). creativity is an advantageous skill to develop during higher education, as it can transfer to traditional workplace settings as well as benefit those embarking upon an entrepreneurial journey through self employment or starting a business. therefore, further exploration of how exposure to coursework that emphasizes creative thinking can influence confidence in other transferable skills provides valuable information for researchers and practitioners in the field of education and beyond. creativity: environmental influence although some see creativity as an internal construct, there is also evidence that one’s environment can impact creative expression. research suggests that authority figures can have an influence on creativity. the effect of parents on creativity has been explored in younger populations (meador, 1992; jonsson & carlsson, 2000), but studies have also examined particular behaviors of teachers that may decrease or increase creativity (baloche, 1994; smith, michael, & hocevar, 1990; sternberg, 2010). for example, smith and colleagues (1990) found that high-anxiety test instructions were related to lower creative performance scores in high school students, while baloche (1994) found that the regular use of problem solving activities, open discussions, and flexibility in lesson plans related to higher scores on creative performance at the end of the school year. even relatively minimal adaptations of task instructions can influence creative output, such as directions to generate more ideas (paulus, kohn, & arditti, 2001) or to explicitly be more creative (rietzschel, nijstad, & stroebe, 2014). additionally, types of tasks assigned in educational training programs (fabricatore & lopez, 2013) and temporal requirements like deadlines and time pressure (agypt, rubin, & spivack, 2012) can have both direct and indirect effects on the creative climate. furthermore, classic research from amabile (1983, 1996) suggests that several aspects of the surrounding situation, including the presence of rewards, competition, restriction in choice, and the expectation of evaluation, can all have a detrimental impact on creativity. since all students, ranging from pre-school to postsecondary, have frequent interactions with instructors in classroom settings, it is reasonable to believe that teacher behaviors could be having similar influence on creativity at the various educational levels. the environment can also impact creativity on a broad level. from a wider perspective, research suggests that curriculum reform across an entire country (hong kong) led to growth in creative thinking across different cohorts, even when matched for other characteristics (cheung & lau, 2013). more general environmental effects can also have a negative influence on creativity, as kim and hull (2012) found trends using a national u.s. database to suggest that anti-creative school environments are negatively correlated with creativity scores, which also affect the likelihood that these creative students will drop out of high school. additionally, there is also evidence that socioeconomic status (ses) can play a role in creative performance, as dai and colleagues (2012) found evidence for a “creativity gap” between upper-middle class students and those in impoverished school districts in the u.s., even when other important characteristics like school size, student-teacher ratio, english proficiency, and ethnic composition were held constant. the influence of environment on creativity, therefore, extends past the individual students, 90 global education review 5(1) cumulating in creative growth or deficit for the overall population, so it is essential to investigate the nuanced role of the environment in creativity across all levels of education. creativity in higher education a wide variety of studies in education and psychology demonstrate that creativity training is effective, especially in academic settings (pyryt, 1999; scott et al., 2004). many different curricular programs and methods are available for use with various types of students and across numerous content areas (hummell, 2006; maker, jo, & muammar, 2008). however, the majority of the research on the effectiveness of direct instruction in creativity takes place in k12 settings, and most studies on creativity training for college students are restricted to laboratory settings and can be lacking in ecological validity. these training sessions can involve instruction on brainstorming (dugosh & paulus, 2005), perspective-changing heuristics (butler & kline, 1998), planning techniques (osburn & mumford, 2006), and variations in instructional style (ruscio & amabile, 1999). some research exists on creativity training in more naturalistic higher education settings, but it is often specific to individual content areas such as science (dehaan, 2009; crowe, dirks, & wenderoth, 2008), design (lau, ng, & lee, 2009), physics (kohl, kuo, kowalski, & kowalski, 2011), and engineering (cropley & cropley, 2000). furthermore, it is often assumed that creativity is inherently taught in the fine and performing arts (azzam, 2009), although the empirical evidence for this can be mixed (moga, burger, hetland, & winner, 2000). there are multiple approaches concerning the integration of creativity into the higher education experience. numerous benefits emerge for both faculty and students with the inclusion of flexible, open-ended assignments for undergraduates, allowing them to creatively express a variety of concepts and ideas pertaining to an individual course (halpern, 2010). entire courses can even be focused on the academic study of creativity, for example, plucker and dow (2010) developed a semesterlong course for undergraduates on the nature of creativity, and found that this course not only raised awareness of the construct but also altered previously held attitudes toward creativity, and expanded preconceived notions of who and what could be considered creative. however, higher education institutions should also be cognizant of current elementary and secondary trends for a culture of accountability and standardized testing that may inadvertently work as a barrier to the creativity of their incoming students (beghetto, 2010), as they have been habituated to an emphasis on multiple-choice test performance for virtually all of their prior formal education. they may be less comfortable with the ambiguity of creative assignments and instead prefer more passive assessments with “right” and “wrong” answers, even though these are often less engaging. it should also be noted that cultural differences within the education system can play a role in how creativity is perceived and expressed (nui & sternberg, 2003; zha, walczyk, griffith-ross, tobacyk, & walczyk, 2006). the cultural influence of eastern/confucian and western/socratic frameworks do affect the student experience within higher education (tweed & lehman, 2002), although it should also be noted that comparing these two educational philosophies as a mutually exclusive dichotomy may be an oversimplification (ryan & louie, 2007). unlike k-12 settings, when students get to their university studies there may be great creative coursework 91 differences in their curriculum, even at the same institution. at the higher education level, students select a major, and thus the content of their studies becomes more focused on preparation for a future career. therefore, it is not surprising that variations in creativity have also been studied among different disciplines. previous research indicates that vocational interests in college students are related to creativity (kelly & kneipp, 2009). other studies demonstrate that various types of creativity, such as artistic and scientific, differ between music and engineering majors (charyton & snelbecker, 2007), while levels of creativity differ between business majors and english majors (eisenman, 1969). additionally, students with investigative (i.e., social and hard sciences) and artistic (i.e., visual and performing arts) majors are higher on the personality trait of openness to experience, as well as self-reported creativity (kaufman, pumaccahua, & holt, 2013). this evidence for the connection between creativity and career choice or major suggests that these constructs may be having a circular influence on one another and that major should be considered when looking at creativity within a higher education setting. transferable skills creativity is not the only skill that can benefit students in their future careers. an important argument for higher education is the need to develop transferable skills that will increase workplace success (evers, rush, berdrow, 1998; tait & godfrey, 1999). recent debate over policy and effectiveness has encouraged reflection from educators and other invested parties on how to best prepare students for jobs (baker, 2009). while some acquired skills are considered discipline-specific, many “transferable skills,” such as problem solving and effective communication, are applicable to a wide range of academic majors (bradshaw, 1985; kemp & seagraves, 1995; stasz, 1997) and these skills are considered essential within the context of a liberal arts education (pascarella, wang, trolian, & blaich, 2013). some research further distinguishes between transferable “soft skills” such as critical thinking, communication, and creativity, and “hard business knowledge” concerning specific content, with evidence that employers desire both kinds of competencies (andrews & higson, 2008). although not every single skill acquired during one’s higher education experience will transfer to the workplace (stasz, 2001), institutions must still prioritize their efforts to prepare students to enter the workforce and become contributing member of society (beard, 2009). given the current economic realities, institutions of higher education are under considerable pressure to produce a return on investment through capable, productive graduates (collins, 1996; bogue & johnson, 2010) and an emphasis on transferable skills is increasingly important (billing, 2007). the idea of acquiring skills for workplace success may be implicit in the structure of higher education, but over the last three decades, there have been substantive changes in the job market and in the relationships between employers and employees. compared to the past, it is now much more common for workers to take on many different jobs, often in multiple fields, over their work lives, and this results in less traditional careers that are progressively selfdesigned, with workers exerting more control over their own career paths across their various jobs (cornfield, campbell, & mccammon, 2001; kalleberg, 2011). given these fluctuating patterns in work and the economy, entrepreneurship is a transferable skill that is 92 global education review 5(1) gaining more and more relevance. essig (2009) argued that entrepreneurship should be taught across the curriculum in the same way that “writing across the curriculum” was stressed in the 1980s, and need not be limited to students in business-related disciplines. continuing with this perspective, watson (2012) suggested that entrepreneurship should not be conceptualized solely as creating a new business. instead, entrepreneurial skills encompass creating, innovating, and the ability to make tangible connections between entities. this expanded conceptualization of entrepreneurship is more closely aligned with the rising trend for workers to independently adapt their careers with self-employment, project-based or “gig” work, and freelance work. even employees on more traditional paths in large companies can be rewarded when they are able to think and act entrepreneurially. furthermore, managers within those corporations are encouraged to display entrepreneurial skills as a means of establishing their worth and in turn increasing the company’s value (smith, 1997). given this demand, curricular programs featuring entrepreneurism as a way to combine career self-management and new venture development are growing in popularity and serve to connect field-specific skills and more general practical knowledge (hong, essig, & bridgstock, 2012). as previously discussed in relation to creative thinking, it is important to consider institutional experiences and skill development by discipline, as results may differ greatly depending on major (williams & van dyke, 2008). one example of a field where transferable skills play an important role in potential career success is the arts. arts programs are often criticized for a failure to prepare students for the “real world” of work (cantor, 2012). one european study found that practical business and management-related (i.e., entrepreneurial) skills were greatly underemphasized within arts curricula (bauer, viola, & strauss, 2011). additionally, working artists cite the necessity of being able to “learn on the fly” and utilize networking abilities (smilde, 2008). within the arts economy, there are higher rates of selfemployment, and therefore those studying the arts need explicit information related to marketing, budgeting, taxes, and strategic planning (haase & lautenschlager, 2011). despite this lack of entrepreneurial skills, arts majors may have an advantage when it comes to other transferable skills. pitt and tepper (2012) found that arts majors were much more likely than business and science majors to say their coursework encouraged them to be creative, to take assignments in multiple directions, to make connections across classes and topics, and to further explore something about which they are curious. the current study given the previous research findings, there is a need for further integrating creativity in higher education settings. moreover, there are several other transferable skills, such as entrepreneurism, that are increasingly important for graduating students to develop for eventual success in the workplace. the current study explores these constructs through an investigation of several patterns in creative coursework and confidence in various skills among university seniors. what are some components of creative coursework, and are they consistently related? are there differences between majors (in the degree to which students are exposed to these components), and if so, are they in the expected directions? finally, how does exposure to creative components predict creative coursework 93 graduating seniors’ confidence in various skills that are needed for future career success, including creative thinking, entrepreneurial skills, networking skills, and critical thinking? are there significant relationships between creative coursework and skill confidence, even after controlling for other student and institutional characteristics known to influence student development and the overall university experience? methods data source this study uses data from the 2015 and 2016 senior transitions module of the national survey of student engagement (nsse). nsse is an annual survey administered in the spring semester to first-year and senior students at four-year colleges and universities across the u.s. to assess student exposure to and participation in effective educational practices (mccormick, kinzie, & gonyea, 2013). institutions can elect to append additional questions to the survey by selecting from several topical modules. the senior transitions module explores seniors’ post-graduation plans, links between academic major and future plans, and confidence in skill development. this study used responses from over 48,000 seniors attending 227 baccalaureate-granting institutions. approximately 65% of the seniors were female, 84% were enrolled full-time, 67% were traditional age (i.e., less than 25 years old), and 48% were first-generation students (i.e., neither parent/guardian holds a bachelor’s degree). about 63% of the respondents were white, 6% were asian/pacific-islander, 8% were africanamerican/black, 9% were hispanic/latino, 7% identified as more than one race/ethnicity group, and 6% identified with another racial/ethnic group (e.g., native american) or preferred not to respond. selfreported academic major was grouped into 11 different major fields: arts (6%); humanities (6%); biological sciences, agriculture, and natural resources (10%); physical sciences, mathematics, & computer science (5%); social sciences (14%); business (17%); communications, media, and public relations (4%); education (8%); engineering (8%); health professions (17%); and social service professions (6%). these characteristics are fairly consistent with the overall patterns for nsse respondents (nsse 2015 overview, 2015; nsse 2016 overview, 2016). the average institutional response rate was 29% in both 2015 and 2016. measures the variables of interest were taken from the seniors transitions module, specifically focusing on two sets of items. the first set of items asked students “how much confidence do you have in your ability to complete tasks requiring the following skills and abilities?” this set included a list of 10 different skills: 1) critical thinking and analysis of arguments and information, 2) creative thinking and problem solving, 3) research skills, 4) clear writing, 5) persuasive speaking, 6) technological skills, 7) financial and business management skills, 8) entrepreneurial skills, 9) leadership skills, and 10) networking and relationship building. the second set of items asked students “to what extent has your coursework in your major(s) emphasized the following?” this set included a list of 4 different types of activities: 1) generating new ideas or brainstorming, 2) taking risks in your coursework without fear of penalty, 3) evaluating multiple approaches to a problem, and 4) inventing new methods to arrive at unconventional solutions. the response options 94 global education review 5(1) for both sets of items were a 4-point likert-type scale: 1) very little, 2) some, 3) quite a bit, and 4) very much. the survey instrument also collected demographic information from respondents, which was then combined with institution-level data. because certain demographic and institutional characteristics have been shown to impact student development in college (see mccormick et al., 2013; pascarella & terenzini, 2005), they were included as grouping and/or control variables in some analyses. analyses to explore the construct of creative major coursework, factor analysis was used to determine scale properties for the four items focusing on creative activities. exploratory factor analyses (efa) were conducted on these items to identify a reliable measure of creative coursework. as a follow-up, a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) was conducted using the suggested factor from the exploratory factor analysis results. since the items produced a reliable measure of creative coursework (see results section), this scale served as the dependent variable in a one-way anova to investigate potential differences between academic majors. the 11 major categories were included as the fixed factor. all anova assumptions were met, with the exception of a significant levine’s test suggesting unequal variances. therefore, games-howell post-hoc tests were used to determine specific group differences for significant anova models while correcting for multiple means comparisons. to explore potential relationships between creative coursework and confidence in skills, a series of four ordinary least squares (ols) regression analyses, controlling for certain student and institutional characteristics, were conducted. ols regression was chosen due to the ordinal nature of the dependent variables and the appropriateness of this method for testing theory with real-world data collected outside of manipulated laboratory settings (field, 2009; tabachnick & fidell, 2001). in each of the analyses, the creative coursework score was entered as the last step predictor variable by itself. selected student and institutional characteristics were entered as step one of the models, as previous research (pascarella & terenzini, 2005) suggested that there are differences in student engagement and educational experiences for students based on these characteristics. the student-level characteristics included were sex, transfer status, enrollment status, first-generation status, age, sat/act, race/ethnicity, major, grades, and percentage of online courses. control (private/public) and size were included as the institutional-level characteristics. all categorical independent variables were dummy coded prior to entry in the model (table 1). based on the literature on transferable skills and the changing economy, four relevant skills were selected as outcome variables for the models: 1) creative thinking, 2) critical thinking, 3) entrepreneurial skills, and 4) networking. the variance inflation factor (vif) values for each predictor variable in these regression models were all well below 5 (ranging from 1.0 to 2.8), suggesting that multicollinearity was not an issue in the models (field, 2009). creative coursework 95 table 1. independent control variables and values variable description student-level first-generation status a 0 = at least one parent earned a college degree or attended some college; 1 = neither parent attended college race/ethnicity american indian or alaska native; asian; black, african american; hispanic, latino; pacific islander; white b; other race/ethnicity; multiracial; prefer not to respond sex a 0 = female; 1 = male transfer status a 0 = not transfer; 1 = transfer sat/act converted equivalent percentile age continuous variable enrollment status a 0 = part-time; 1 = full-time percentage of courses taken online continuous variable (0 to 100) earned college grades mostly as b; mostly bs; mostly cs major field artsb; humanities; biological sciences, agriculture, & natural resources; physical sciences, mathematics, & computer science; social sciences; business; communications, media, & public relations; education; engineering; health professions; social service professions; other; undecided institution-level institution size (in thousands) continuous variable (.46 to 40.21) control 0 = public; 1 = private a coded as a dichotomous variable (0 = not in group; 1 = in group); b reference group 96 global education review 5(1) results factor analyses to determine a scale of creative coursework exposure, the sample was randomly divided into two even sub-samples. the first half of the sample was used in the exploratory factor analysis (efa), and the second half was used to conduct the confirmatory factor analysis (cfa). results of the efa (using maximum likelihood estimation with orthogonal rotation) suggested the four items all loaded on one factor and produced a sufficiently high cronbach’s alpha of .878 (mcmillan & schumacher, 2001; for efa details see table 2). following up with cfa, the 1-factor solution showed good model fit (χ2 = 47.430). because traditional measures of model fit are sensitive to sample size, a variety of other fit indices were considered as well (hu & bentler, 1999). these indices also suggested good model fit, even those that are more conservative indices of model fit (table 3), and all path coefficients were significant. the standardized regression weights were all significant at the .001 level and showed adequate strength of factor loadings (ranging from .73 to .89). overall, the fit indices, cronbach’s alpha, and regression weights suggest a good subscale for creative coursework. therefore, scores for the factor were created using a 60-point scale, in order to be consistent with the established engagement indicator scoring already used with the nsse core survey items. this was done by converting the response sets to 60-point intervals and then averaging the rescaled items. consequently, a score of zero would mean a student responded at the bottom of the response set for every item in the scale, while a score of 60 would mean that a student responded at the top of the response set for every item in the scale. thus, a higher score on the scale means a higher level of exposure to aspects of creative coursework. table 2. creative coursework scale: exploratory factor analysis details factor loadings fyssr07a generating new ideas or brainstorming .749 fyssr07b taking risks in your coursework without fear of penalty .766 fyssr07c evaluating multiple approaches to a problem .839 fyssr07d inventing new methods to arrive at unconventional solutions .874 cronbach’s α .878 note: kaiser-meyer-olkin statistic = .827; maximum likelihood χ2 = 373.532, p <.001; factor 1 eigenvalue (2.95) explains 73.8% variance table 3. confirmatory factor analysis: model-fit results for senior students n gfi cfi rmsea (c.i.) pclose model statistics 23,855 .999 .999 .044 (.034, .055) .798 note: gfi = goodness-of-fit index; cfi = comparative fit index; rmsea = root mean square error of approximation. strong model fit is reflected by gfi greater than .85, cfi greater than .90, rmsea less than .06, and pclose greater than .05. creative coursework 97 table 4. means and standard errors for creative coursework scale by major mean standard error arts 43.560 .321 humanities 40.465 .320 biological sciences, agriculture, & natural resources 34.854 .243 physical sciences, mathematics, & computer science 35.533 .338 social sciences 38.227 .205 business 36.390 .188 communications, media, & public relations 41.252 .397 education 40.499 .272 engineering 33.952 .271 health professions 37.325 .186 social service professions 40.006 .321 anova results suggest that there were significant differences between majors for creative coursework, (f(10,43823) = 107.405, p < .001, 2= .024). means and standard deviations are provided in table 4. games-howell post-hoc analyses (table 5) indicated that arts majors had significantly higher scores than all other majors. furthermore, communications, education, and humanities majors also performed relatively well, with scores significantly higher than biological science, physical science/math, social science, business, engineering, and health professions majors. engineering majors were the lowest of the group, with scores significantly lower than all but biological science majors. these differences were not entirely unexpected, but important to note that major does have an impact on aspects of creativity that are present during coursework. however, the relatively low percentage of explained variance (partial eta squared) suggests that major is not the sole contributor to these differences, nor are major and exposure to creative coursework redundant variables. 98 global education review 5(1) table 5. games-howell mean differences by major arts hum. bio. sci. phys. sci. social sci. bus. comm. educ. engin. health prof. soc. serv. prof. arts -3.905* 8.706* 8.027* 5.333* 7.169* 2.308* 3.061* 9.608* 6.235* 3.554* hum. -3.095* -5.611* 4.932* 2.238* 4.074* -.787 -.035 6.513* 3.140* .459 bio sci. -8.706* -5.611* --.679 -3.373* -1.537* -6.398* -5.646* .902 -2.471 -5.152* phys. sci. -8.027* -4.932* .679 --2.694* -.858 -5.719* -4.967* 1.581* -1.792* -4.473* social sci. -5.333* -2.238* 3.373* 2.694* -1.836* -3.025* -2.273* 4.275* .902 -1.779* business -7.169* -4.074* 1.537* .858 -1.836* --4.861* -4.109* 2.439* -.935* -3.616* comm. -2.308* .787 6.398* 5.719* 3.025* 4.861* -.752 7.300* 3.927* 1.246 education -3.061* .035 5.646* 4.967* 2.273* 4.109* -.752 -6.548* 3.174* .493 engineering -9.608* -6.513* -.902 -1.581* -4.275* -2.439* -7.300* -6.548* --3.373* -6.054* health prof. -6.235* -3.140* 2.471* 1.792* -.902 .935* -3.927* -3.174* 3.373* --2.681* soc. serv. -3.554* -.459 5.152* 4.473* 1.779* 3.616* -1.246* -.493 6.054* 2.681* - *significant difference (p < .05) after bonferroni adjustment for multiple comparisons ols regression models the results of the regression models indicate that exposure to creative coursework has a statistically significant, positive effect on confidence in all four of the selected skills even after controlling for other student and institutional characteristics. specifically, seniors with more exposure to creative coursework reported more confidence in their creative thinking, entrepreneurial, networking, and critical thinking skills. for each model, even though many other predictor variables were significant, creative coursework was the strongest predictor (β = .306 to .369) and contributed between 8.7% and 12.8% of the variance. model summary statistics are reported in table 6, and individual beta weights for all models are reported in table 7. overall, the predictor variables accounted for 15.9% to 19.8% of the total variance on confidence for the selected skills. given the adjusted r2 and δr2 values, including the creative coursework scale in the model had important explanatory power. table 6. model summary statistics for ols regression f df sig. adjusted r2 δr2 creative thinking 138.611 32, 23330 <.001 .159 .126 entrepreneurial skills 180.506 32, 23273 <.001 .198 .087 networking skills 149.373 32, 23274 <.001 .169 .128 critical thinking 149.775 32, 23358 <.001 .169 .110 creative coursework 99 although the main research question found support for the connection between exposure to creative coursework and confidence in skills, several other patterns of note also emerged upon examination of the control variables. some of these patterns were not surprising, such as majoring in business as a strong positive significant predictor of entrepreneurial skills (β= .269; p<.001). additionally, with arts majors as the referent group, many other majors (biological science, business, education, and health science) were negative predictors of creative thinking (β= -.024 to -.037; p<.01 to .001) and positive predictors of critical thinking (β= .019 to .127; p<.05 to .001). an interesting pattern emerged for standardized test scores, which were positive predictors for confidence in creative and critical thinking (β= .124 and .195, respectively; p<.001) but negative predictors for confidence in entrepreneurial and networking skills (β= -.085 and -.073, respectively; p<.001). this suggests that more traditional academic success does not necessarily transfer to all types of skills. furthermore, higher grades were positive predictors of confidence in critical thinking, creative thinking, and networking, but not for entrepreneurial skills, again calling into light a contrast between traditional markers of academic success and potentially important career skills. another noteworthy finding was that a higher percentage of online courses was positively related to confidence in entrepreneurial skills (β= .031; p<.001), perhaps because both completing online courses and starting one’s own business both require relatively higher degrees of self-motivation. finally, there was a consistent pattern for sex, with males being more confident in all selected skills (β= .014 to .124; p<.05 to .001). this is of particular interest, given that with independent samples t-tests, females have higher skill confidence. therefore, in this case it is especially important to have all of the other demographic and institutional variables in the model, as this provides a more complete understanding of the trend. table 7. ols regression models for skill confidence: standardized beta coefficients creative thinking entrepreneurial networking critical thinking std. β sig. std. β sig. std. β sig. std. β sig. step 1: student demographics male 0.046 0.000 0.124 0.000 0.014 0.028 0.087 0.000 first-generation status -0.013 0.049 0.002 0.697 -0.019 0.003 -0.004 0.568 age 0.044 0.000 0.007 0.316 -0.022 0.001 0.048 0.000 act/sat score 0.124 0.000 -0.085 0.000 -0.073 0.000 0.195 0.000 race: american indian1 0.009 0.126 0.013 0.024 0.000 0.988 0.004 0.547 100 global education review 5(1) race: asian1 -0.066 0.000 0.010 0.102 -0.028 0.000 -0.077 0.000 race: black/african american1 0.015 0.022 0.042 0.000 0.023 0.000 0.021 0.001 race: hispanic/latino1 -0.006 0.354 0.000 0.980 -0.024 0.000 -0.003 0.594 race: pacific islander1 -0.007 0.218 -0.003 0.618 -0.002 0.718 -0.007 0.217 race: prefer not to respond1 0.006 0.346 0.022 0.000 -0.006 0.305 0.006 0.352 race: other race/ethnicity1 -0.002 0.743 0.011 0.060 0.002 0.733 0.004 0.461 race: multi-racial1 0.019 0.002 0.009 0.112 0.008 0.213 0.007 0.222 step 1: college experiences transfer status 0.008 0.210 0.018 0.004 -0.031 0.000 0.009 0.163 enrollment status -0.013 0.044 -0.003 0.603 0.008 0.190 -0.007 0.257 major: humanities2 0.009 0.284 -0.043 0.000 -0.035 0.000 0.088 0.000 major: bio sci.2 -0.035 0.000 0.008 0.383 0.017 0.089 0.079 0.000 major: phys. sci.2 -0.011 0.162 -0.005 0.504 -0.015 0.074 0.059 0.000 major: social science2 -0.001 0.894 0.034 0.001 0.043 0.000 0.127 0.000 major: business2 -0.030 0.003 0.269 0.000 0.132 0.000 0.070 0.000 major: comm.2 -0.002 0.793 0.029 0.000 0.069 0.000 0.037 0.000 major: education2 -0.030 0.000 -0.016 0.059 0.020 0.022 0.019 0.025 major: engineering2 -0.008 0.406 0.063 0.000 0.043 0.000 0.074 0.000 major: health prof.2 -0.037 0.000 0.035 0.000 0.060 0.000 0.064 0.000 major: soc. serv. prof.2 -0.010 0.199 0.013 0.074 0.034 0.000 0.060 0.000 major: other2 -0.024 0.003 0.037 0.000 0.042 0.000 0.029 0.000 major: undecided2 -0.027 0.000 0.011 0.062 -0.003 0.651 -0.005 0.393 college grades-mostly b’s3 -0.047 0.000 0.010 0.110 -0.020 0.002 -0.061 0.000 college grades-mostly c’s 3 -0.039 0.000 0.002 0.793 -0.035 0.000 -0.054 0.000 percent of online courses -0.005 0.472 0.031 0.000 0.010 0.099 0.000 0.956 step 1: institutional characteristics private institution 0.004 0.604 -0.009 0.231 -0.004 0.585 -0.007 0.335 institution size -0.003 0.694 -0.016 0.034 0.011 0.147 -0.006 0.416 step 2 creative coursework 0.367 0.000 0.306 0.000 0.369 0.000 0.343 0.000 1 reference group: white 2 reference group: arts majors 3 reference group: college grades-mostly a’s note: significant coefficients are bolded creative coursework 101 discussion there are several noteworthy results from this study that contribute to our knowledge of creativity and its function in higher education. exposure to creative coursework is an important construct to assess, and the factor structure that arises from the seniors transitions module items confirms that the various components of creative thinking are indeed related. many empirical studies have demonstrated that through the incorporation of creativity training programs in educational or laboratory settings, increases in creativity are possible (pyryt, 1999; scott et al., 2004). the various components of creative thinking included in these items suggest that explicit creative instruction can be reliably measured, even without the use of the word “creativity” appearing in the items themselves. it is imperative to have a robust measure of exposure to creative coursework before any further conclusions can be made regarding the relationship of the construct to other aspects of the educational experience. therefore, the factor analyses were an essential first step in the exploration of how creative coursework can impact skill development, providing a solid base on which to conduct further quantitative analyses. the preliminary comparisons across major fields found patterns consistent with previous research. arts majors were significantly higher on exposure to creative coursework, with the hard sciences and engineering falling near the bottom of the pack, which is not entirely surprising based on the cultural presupposition connecting creativity and the arts (azzam, 2009; runco & bahleda, 1986). people perceive the artistic and creative identity to be somewhat synonymous, and therefore one might expect those choosing to major in the arts (and who have artistic ability) to be more receptive to creativity-related course tasks and assignments as well. other studies that have compared majors on creative behaviors and interests have found similar advantages among arts and humanities majors (charyton & snelbecker, 2007; eisenman, 1969; kelly & kneipp, 2009; miller & smith, 2014). this increased exposure to creative coursework may be especially valuable for arts majors, as they are more likely than all but business majors to have plans for starting their own business someday, and more likely than all other majors to plan for eventual self-employment (miller, dumford, gaskill, houghton, & tepper, 2016). developing their approaches to creative thinking will be important in achieving success along their nontraditional career paths. however, major may have a more complicated relationship with creativity, as pre-existing tendencies might play a role in choosing a certain major (kaufman, pumaccahua, & holt, 2013), and then advanced study in that field may reinforce and strengthen these tendencies. given these differences between majors, it is imperative to take them into consideration when examining the relationships between creative coursework and other constructs, including confidence in skill development. even after controlling for major, as well as several other demographic and institutional characteristics that are known to influence the educational experience, creative coursework was still able to significantly predict confidence in several crucial transferable skills. not surprisingly, exposure to creative coursework was a significant positive predictor of confidence in creative thinking skills, explaining 12.6% of the variance even after controlling for other factors. however, creative coursework was also able to explain just as much of the variance in confidence in networking skills (12.8%), as well as non-trivial amounts for critical thinking (11.0%) and entrepreneurial skills (8.7%). these transferable skills are all important for students 102 global education review 5(1) to have and can promote success in their future careers. not only will students be more marketable to employers (stasz, 1997), with an ability to adapt to the changing needs of a fastpaced economy, but those taking the more nontraditional routes of self-employment and owning their own business can directly benefit from these skills as well (watson, 2012). the significant findings for the other variables in the models also provide further support for the use of comprehensive models when exploring these types of constructs within higher education settings and beyond. more recently, there has been a call for enhanced entrepreneurial training for arts majors, and a strong argument for curricular revisions has led to some changes in policies (hong et al., 2012). given their future career plans, this addition to the curriculum should have positive impacts on career outcomes for those majoring in the arts. however, exposure to creativity training can be beneficial for all majors, not just those in the arts. as creativity is an increasingly vital skill, colleges and universities have taken explicit steps to promote it both across disciplines (american association of colleges and universities, 2010) as well as within specific fields such as engineering where it is seen as essential but potentially lacking (abet, 2011). exposure to creative coursework is a significant predictor of confidence in not only creative thinking, but also critical thinking, entrepreneurial skills, and networking skills. changes in the global job market and in the relationships between employers and employees have made these skills even more necessary, and today’s students (who are tomorrow’s workers) may find themselves in need of these diverse and adaptable abilities (cornfield, campbell, & mccammon, 2001). advances in the speed and type of communications have global implications, and workers may be reliant on others from all around the world to inform their work. even those students that take a more traditional career route after graduation can derive value from participating in creative coursework and applying these skills in their non-work lives, as research suggests a link between creative engagement and well-being (csikszentmihalyi, 1996). limitations although there are many informative aspects of this study, there are some limitations to note. first, although the sample includes a wide range of students attending multiple institutions, it may not be representative of all students at all universities. since participation in nsse is voluntary for institutions, they are neither selected randomly nor do they create a representative sample of institutions, although they generally mirror the national picture of u.s. higher education (nsse 2015 overview, 2015; nsse 2016 overview, 2016). the lower response rate could also be a potential source of bias in the sample, although previous research suggests that studies with lower response rates can still maintain adequate response representativeness (fosnacht, sarraf, howe, & peck, 2017; lambert & miller, 2014). furthermore, given the research design, this study was unable to test for causal relationships between creative coursework exposure and skill confidence. the results can only confirm whether or not these constructs are associated. finally, while this research has the advantages of large sample size and ease of online data collection, it does rely on self-reported measures, which may not always be objective. however, most studies looking at self-reports of students in higher education suggest that selfreports and actual abilities are positively related (anaya, 1999; hayek, carini, o’day, & kuh, 2002; pike, 1995), and social desirability bias does not play a major role in student responses for surveys of basic cognitive and academic behaviors (miller, 2012). creative coursework 103 future directions & conclusions despite these limitations, there are many noteworthy contributions of this study. these findings provide a springboard for future research on the topic. longitudinal research might explore the continued benefits of creative coursework for these graduating students, following up to investigate both their own and their employers’ (or clients’) perceptions of how they are using transferable skills in their careers. additionally, it is important to replicate this research with samples outside the united states, as educational systems and curricular structure vary greatly across the globe. the field may also benefit from case studies or action research that focus on selected institutions that are performing well when it comes to creative coursework and the development of transferable skills, noting specific practices that others who are seeking to improve in these areas might adopt. in general, the results suggest that increased integration of creativity into coursework is beneficial for students across academic disciplines. arts majors are currently at an advantage for exposure to creative coursework, but even students in non-arts fields can gain from elements of creativity in the curriculum. faculty in all departments could be encouraged to include more open-ended research and inquiry projects on topics of interest (renzulli, 1986), as research indicates that these have a variety positive outcomes, not only in elementary and secondary education but also at the undergraduate level (syer, chichekian, shore, & aulls, 2013). additionally, institutions could begin to develop innovative interdisciplinary curricula that encourage creative potential (dohn, pepper, & sandgren, 2005). a first step in these curricular adaptations might be “retraining” students on the idea of having more than one single right answer, emphasizing that more than one right answer can exist and that learning takes place during the process of trial and error. incorporating elements of creativity into coursework for all disciplines can have further impact on confidence in skill development, as the 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(2006). the impact of culture and individualism-collectivism on the creative potential of american and chinese adults. creativity research journal, 18(3), 355-366. doi: 10.1207/s15326934crj1803_10 about the author angie l. miller is an associate research scientist at the indiana university center for postsecondary research. she does research and data analytic support for the national survey of student engagement (nsse) and the strategic national arts alumni project (snaap). her research interests include creativity assessment, the utilization of creativity in educational settings, factors impacting gifted student engagement and achievement, and survey methodology. 360 milller galley 3-23 1-12 360 milller galley 3-23 13-14 360 milller galley 3-23 15-end american cocktail 167 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2014). a “colored girl” in the world. [review of the book american cocktail: a “colored girl” in the world, by anita reynolds with howard miller]. global education review, 1 (3). 167-171. book review a “colored girl” in the world “american cocktail” by anita reynolds with howard m. miller by eric martone american cocktail is the memoir of anita reynolds (1901-1980) emphasizing her life during the 1930s. since the era was one of limited opportunities and inequality for africanamericans in general (not to mention women), reynolds’ life rubbing elbows with many of the era’s celebrated cultural figures—including james joyce, ernest hemingway, e.e. cummings, claude mckay, gertrude stein, charlie chaplin, douglas fairbanks, picasso, matisse, man ray, and coco chanel—was certainly unique. despite such associations, reynolds’ name vanished into obscurity as she assumed her ordinary life as the century progressed. the book’s title stemmed from a phrase reynolds’ frequently employed to describe herself due to her mixed racial ancestry, but she also applied it to a short story collection by f. scott fitzgerald in a 1922 book review included among the appendices. the book includes over 50 pages of introductory material from patricia williams and george hutchinson focusing on the memoir’s value within american history. of particular interest was “a note on the text,” in which we learn that reynolds composed her memoir during the 1970s while married to a hotel owner and working as a psychologist and professor in the caribbean. hutchinson details the extraordinary story of the manuscript’s development, including reynolds’ eventual collaboration with howard miller (then a young teacher and tenant). the forgotten manuscript came to be stored at howard university, where it remained buried until hutchinson stumbled upon it while researching harlem renaissance writer nella larsen. the first part of the memoir, set primarily during reynolds’ early years in los angeles, presents much information about the complexities surrounding the early twentiethcentury middle-class african-american experience. much of this information stemmed from her family’s role as private hosts for visiting african-american intellectuals, since many hotels refused to serve them. through global education review 1(3) 168 these interactions, reynolds noted the divisions amongst such intellectuals at the time, as african americans struggled to be treated equally, as represented by w.e.b. du bois (a family guest) and booker t. washington. further, since reynolds’ relatives lived across the united states, family visits provided her ample opportunity for fascinating comparative commentary on african-american experiences in the west coast, midwest, and east coast. growing up, reynolds demonstrated her desire to live life to its fullest and on her own terms. not only did she have her first orgasm with another woman and some early love affairs with the likes of ralph bunche, she also began a short acting career that illuminates early african-americans’ contributions to film, including the limited and subservient hollywood roles they were expected to play, and she danced on broadway. the bulk of the memoir documents reynolds’ time abroad (mostly france, north africa, and england, with sojourns to spain and italy). in 1928, she used the money her father intended for support of her studies to go to paris. there, louise bryant, who had chronicled the russian revolution with husband john reed, became her “fairy godmother,” introducing her to many americans in paris. she soon met artist man ray, her “dutch uncle” (115, 127). her life abroad was largely impacted by her series of three (relatively) steady significant others. consequently, this section of her memoir can be informally divided into three parts: the kristians tonny years, the charles seller years, and the guy de chateaubriant years. it was primarily through her relationship with artist tonny that she met notable artists working in paris, as well gertrude stein, who in turn introduced her to prominent literary figures. through such associations, reynolds contemplated becoming a writer and traveled to morocco to get her creative juices flowing. in morocco, reynolds superficially identified brewing colonial tensions and westerners’ exploitation of the local population. what she found most striking and enjoyable, however, was tangier’s cosmopolitanism. reynolds subsequently moved to england with new beau, charles seller, an english military officer. although married, their union lacked legal validity since seller’s first wife had never consented to a divorce. reynolds eventually left charles to head to spain at the onset of its civil war. she then returned to france. she later fled france during the german invasion by entering spain, where she boarded a boat to america. the memoir essentially ends in the early 1940s with her flight from germancontrolled france. supplementing the memoir are background notes and two appendices containing selections of reynolds’ publications and family correspondence. throughout her account, reynolds seems incredulously to be in the right place, at the right time. the memoir runs similar to the adventures of young indiana jones, the future fictitious adventurer-archaeologist, chronicled in a 1990s television series. set in the early twentieth century, indiana jones just happened to meet nearly every important global political and cultural figure that existed. reynolds’ memoir is, of course, not a fictional account, but many of the prominent names she drops within her memoir were at best acquaintances or individuals she met passingly at a social event. consequently, it was likely hindsight that has ascribed significance to these encounters. yet, name-dropping may have been a family habit as dubious filial traditions connected her and her family to historical figures like anita garibaldi and napoleon.1 nevertheless, reynolds’ observations about her encounters with celebrated individuals, partially because of her background, are interesting. reynolds’ memoir reflects the party-going, carefree attitude she then espoused. as a young adult experiencing continued freedom from american cocktail 169 parental supervision, she experimented with her identity and enjoyed what life had to offer her. she was sowing her wild oats, although the fact that she was a woman—rather a man—doing this during the 1930s (and an african-american one to boot) made her actions exceptional. her refusal to wed a specific racial identity or political ideology contributed to her experiences’ uniqueness by allowing her to move amongst different social circles. however, she traveled and lived in her own world, inconsistently demonstrating interest in what was going on around her. as reynolds admitted, “i leave it to the historians to record the exterior events of the time” (229). her memoir can thus sometimes appear shallow or artificial. what reynolds did have, however, was a penchant for describing places and locations. while these details come at the expense of historical contextual information, they nevertheless help recapture a bygone era. therefore, the memoir is a valuable piece of social history, “a study of manners” (8). american cocktail, while an engaging memoir, is also a potentially useful supplemental source for educators seeking to incorporate a human perspective to courses focusing on twentieth-century global events and transformations. shifts in scholarly focus since the memoir’s composition have made it highly relevant to current humanities and social science courses. during the 1990s, for example, paul gilroy’s monumental the black atlantic popularized notions of an atlantic region— forged by the social, cultural, and economic links established through the atlantic slave trade and new world empires—that could be studied historically by way of various disciplines. as the front matter asserts, reynolds associated with the likes of her cousin, langston hughes, and claude mckay, “whose forms of intellectual vagabondage have been at the center of many constructions of black transnational experience” (18). reynolds’ memoir thus illuminates connections between black intellectuals within the atlantic region and some of her opinions toward these developments. at the same time, growing public awareness of globalization, expressed after the cold war’s demise, encouraged scholars to think in broader regional or transnational terms. the atlantic region as a topic of study became popular among academics, and is now a widely accepted unit of analysis. reynolds’ story, a self-described “distillation of my memories of growing up a ‘colored girl’ in the united states, europe and north africa” (57), thus encompasses the atlantic region and makes various transnational connections and observations. reynolds’ views also reflect global (or cosmopolitan) sensibilities and burgeoning conceptions of global citizenship, that “the world’s getting smaller and smaller, all people are being mixed up—whether they want to be or not” and that the world needs to “get together” and form “one big family” (20, 35). some examples of the type of material educators could use to incorporate global connections within their humanities and social science curricula can be found by examining reynolds’ controversial views on racism, nonwestern peoples and cultures, and ottoman slavery. the positions she upholds do not correlate with those some might expect of her on the basis of her racial background, revealing how gender and/or class complicate matters. reynolds’ notion of racism was based on her american experiences. in relation to the united states, western europe, devoid of institutionalized racism, seemed a land of equality. as a result, she claimed that in paris she “had been accepted,” for there was “no discrimination” (113-114, 129). she was able to forget about “the disagreeable facets of american life…i was not reminded [daily] of the horrors of american lynchings” (128). thus, she felt “embarrassed” when the wife of africanamerican actor paul robeson—who enjoyed a successful career in england—criticized british race relations. as reynolds wrote, “she kept intimating that the british had the same color prejudice” as americans, but “she surely would global education review 1(3) 170 never have been invited to an american bridge party with women of that class” (174). nevertheless, in england, reynolds is called a racial slur and she encountered the idea that “people who live in hot countries have thickened skulls and can’t think as well”—a notion she light-heartedly dismissed as english quirkiness, rather than a reflection of wide-held erroneous western beliefs about why africans and people of black descent were intellectually inferior (172, 193). reynolds enjoyed defying convention and deploying her mixed racial exoticness to her advantage, but she was nevertheless frequently subjected to forms of racism from acquaintances and lovers in which she was perceived as an object possessing certain exotic and sexual traits based on her appearance. these countless incidents are described in her memoir without identifying them as such. for example, her lover guy de chateaubriant told her that she “was his dream of the island child come true, the creole, the exotic girl of the [caribbean] islands who could live with him in france in a civilized world and yet retain all the charm of the jungle” (224). one would never guess, based on her memoir, that western europe, particularly england and france, witnessed numerous race riots in the decades to come. reynolds’ perception about her treatment abroad was, however, commonplace amongst other african americans then visiting europe. primitivism and african art/culture became fashionable as a reaction against the modernism that had led to the devastation of the first world war. africanamericans, linked to these primitive and african stereotypes, were often welcomed as exotic guests. this was why the french in particular were more ready to accept reynolds’ “being part cherokee or negro or métisse than they were an american” (129). only after world war ii, when increased numbers of caribbean, african, and asian migrants began pouring into western european countries on a permanent basis did a more recognizable form of racism reveal itself. african-american writer james baldwin, for one, was quick to observe this in france during the 1960s.2 reynolds’ opinions toward african and non-western cultures and peoples are equally controversial. although her english husband became a staunch anti-colonialist, reynolds maintained the notion that despite how “evil the colonialists might be, they had something to offer [technology and “modern” civilization] (177). at a party, reynolds castigated a “colonial” criticizing the hypocrisies of france, the united states, and england, responding: “i told him he didn’t know what he talking about, that he didn’t even know what the rights of men were, having experienced the enlightenment of the europeans only secondhand, until they had taught him. now he was using that enlightenment as a stick with which to beat his teachers” (217). such beliefs suggest a prejudiced conviction in western culture’s superiority and, consequently, the inferiority (i.e., backwardness, or primitiveness) of nonwestern peoples and cultures. finally, in morocco, reynolds naively accepted what her “arab friends” told her, namely that slavery there was “different from that of slavery in the west…[slaves’] treatment and their lives were governed by islamic law. unlike slavery in the west, the koran dictated that these slaves were to be part of the home.” yet, these slaves were still purchased against their will from sub-saharan africa, viewed as property, forced to work against their will, and harshly punished for disobedience. further, reynolds noted that when grown up, the girls “became concubines of the male members of the family” against their will or without recourse to resist (144-145). reynolds emphasized the existence of law codes as evidence of a more humane form of slavery, but codes had existed to govern western colonial slavery since the 1600s and slaves smuggled into europe could often american cocktail 171 petition for their freedom. 3 reynolds’ acceptance of these local arguments was perhaps in part based on a need to justify her own possession of a slave, a “gift” she accepted while living there (149). like her life, which defied expectations, reynolds’ views defy easy classification. in the real world, things are rarely black and white, and reynolds symbolizes the complexity and contradictions inherent in the human experience in which gender, race, and class play key overlapping roles in shaping our identities in the social era in which we live. as such passages suggest, reynolds’ memoir provides educators with a wealth of material that teachers can use to supplement global or transnational topics in their humanities and social sciences courses. as a result of this flexibility and uniqueness, american cocktail is highly recommended for educators seeking to invigorate their curricula with a personal primary account of the early twentieth century. notes 1 reynolds retells a family story about how she was named after anita garibaldi (wife of italian revolutionary giuseppe garibaldi), who had allegedly befriended her grandmother in boston (75-76). anita garibaldi died in 1849; reynolds’ grandmother was born in 1850 (22). although the couple’s granddaughter, also named anita garibaldi, lectured in boston, it was after reynolds’ birth. family lore also linked her to napoleon bonaparte, emperor of the french (58, 60). napoleon i’s brother, jerome, spent time in america during his youth and married. the marriage was later annulled to allow a more advantageous match. according to reynolds’ family tradition, her grandfather was the illegitimate child of jerome’s american son or grandson from his first marriage (304). 2 see: tyler stovall, paris noir: african americans in the city of light (new york: mariner books, 1996); michel fabre, from harlem to paris: black american writers in france, 1840-1980 (urbana: university of illinois press/illini books, 1993); eric martone, ed., blacks in european history and culture (westport, ct: greenwood press, 2009); james baldwin, the pride of the ticket: collected nonfiction, 1948-1985 (london: michael joseph, 1985), 174-175. 3 see: sue peabody and sheila grinberg, eds., slavery, freedom, and the law in the atlantic world: a brief history with documents (boston: bedford/st. martin’s press, 2007). “american cocktail: a ‘colored girl’ in the world” by anita reynolds with howard m. miller. ed. george hutchinson. cambridge: harvard university press, 2014. isbn: 978-0-674-07305-0 about the authors and editor anita reynolds was an actress, dancer, model, and psychologist. howard m. miller is professor of education at mercy college, dobbs ferry, new york. he was working as a teacher on st. croix in the 1970s when he met and befriended anita reynolds, from whom he rented a cottage. using his skills as a former journalist, he assisted her in shaping her memoir into a book, but broad public interest in the african-american experience was confined largely to stories of triumph over adversity, or those of well-known figures. it is only recently that the varied experiences of middleand upper-class african americans have come to the fore. he is still fascinated by reynolds’ story because—at a time when racial segregation was the norm—she was most comfortable with a lifestyle that allowed her to live and move about freely among both races. george hutchinson is professor of english and newton c. farr professor of american culture at cornell university. about the reviewer eric martone is assistant professor of history/social studies education at mercy college, dobbs ferry, new york. he received his phd in history from stony brook university. his books include the encyclopedia of blacks in european history and culture (2009), the black musketeer (2011), and mercy college: yesterday and today (2013). 84 global education review 2(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: roy-campbell, zaline m. (2014). teaching english as a ‘second language’ in kenya and the united states: convergences and divergences. global education review, 2 (2). 84-97 teaching english as a ‘second language’ in kenya and the united states: convergences and divergences zaline m. roy-campbell syracuse university abstract english is spoken in five countries as the native language and in numerous other countries as an official language and the language of instruction. in countries where english is the native language, it is taught to speakers of other languages as an additional language to enable them to participate in all domains of life of that country. in many countries where it is an official language and language of instruction, which includes former british colonies in africa and asia, students tend to use english in specific domains, particularly school, as most communication outside of school is in the local languages. these are two contrasting contexts for enhancing english language skills. in both settings there are concerns about students’ difficulties in developing adequate english proficiency to successfully learn content through that language. focusing on the united states and kenya, this article considers the similarities and differences in the content of english language instruction for secondary schools, in both environments and the types of challenges students encounter in the learning of english. this article broadens the understanding of what it means to teach english language for academic purposes and provides a framework for creating and evaluating teaching and learning materials for speakers of other languages who are learning through the medium of english. keywords language of instruction, academic language, english language teaching, kenyan english, english language learners introduction english, one of the dominant world languages, is spoken in five countries as the native language (australia, canada, england, new zealand and the united states of america), what kachru (1985) has referred to as the inner circle. it is also used as an official language in numerous other countries where it is an imported language, the outer circle (kachru, 1985). these countries include former british colonies in africa and asia. since english is used in the outer circle, alongside multiple indigenous languages, its role differs from that of countries in the inner circle, as each country has its norms of communication (crystal, 1997). in countries where english is the native language, english is taught to speakers of other languages as an additional language to enable them to participate in all domains of life of the target ______________________________ corresponding author: zaline m. roy-campbell, syracuse university, school of education, 200 huntington hall., syracuse, ny 13244 email; zmroycam@syr.edu teaching english in kenya and the united states 85 country; in many outer circle countries students tend to use english in specific domains, particularly formal education, since most communication outside of school is in the local languages (kioko & muthwii, 2001). these are two contrasting contexts for teaching english language skills. in both settings there are concerns about students’ difficulties in developing adequate english proficiency to successfully learn academic content through that medium, particularly at the secondary school level (calderón, 2007; short & fitzsimmons, 2007; sure and ogechi, 2009). this article considers the similarities and differences in the content of english language teaching for secondary schools in both environments and the challenges faced by students for whom english is an additional language. it focuses on the united states, as an example of an inner circle country that educates large populations of students who are learning english as an additional language, and kenya, which exemplifies an outer circle country that uses english as the language of formal education. the purpose of this article is to broaden the understanding of what it means to teach english language when it is needed to access academic content. it provides a framework for creating and evaluating teaching and learning materials for speakers of other languages who are learning through the medium of english. although the focus is on the united states (u.s.) and kenya, countries with which the author is familiar, the issues this article addresses are pertinent for other countries that use english as the language of instruction for speakers of languages other than english, as it offers an alternative way of viewing the teaching of english. english language teaching in kenya kenya, which has more than 40 indigenous languages (termed mother tongues), has two official languages, english and kiswahili. official educational policy states that the first three years of schooling (class one to three), should be in the mother tongue, or the indigenous language spoken in the respective catchment areas where the schools are located; and that in class four, english is used as the medium of instruction (nabea, 2009). students begin learning english as a second language as a subject at the beginning of primary school, class one, although some schools students begin instruction in english from class one because they want to give their students a head start with the language (gathumbi, 2008). research has found, however, that most kenyan students are not sufficiently proficient in english at the end of class three to effectively learn content in english in class four (bunyi, 2008; gathumbi, 2008). additionally, kiswahili (the national language and mother tongue of a small section of the population) is also taught as a subject from class one, so that most students after class 3 are learning content through english at the same time that they continue to learn kiswahili language as a subject. since all the subjects, with the exception of kiswahili, are taught in english, kenyan students learn english language while using the english language to learn the curriculum. unlike some former british colonies where english is the language of wider communication, kenya has a language of wider communication other than english, since all students learn kiswahili as a subject throughout primary and secondary school. many kenyans, therefore, rarely use english outside of school. young people communicate with each other in their 86 global education review 2(2) mother tongue, kiswahili, or sheng (kioko & muthwii, 2001). sheng, a language form developed by young people in the urban areas of kenya, includes words from english and kiswahili, mixed with the mother tongues and utilizing kiswahili morphosyntactic structure (mbaabu & nzuga, 2003). teaching english as an additional language in the united states similar to kenya, students who enter school in the u.s. from countries that do not speak english, learn english language while they learn the school curriculum in english. many schools in the u.s. provide such students, termed english language learners (ells), with english language support services offered by specialized teachers of english to speakers of other languages (tesol), referred to as english as a second language (esl) teachers. students are classified as beginner, intermediate or advanced, in terms of english as a second language (esl) proficiency based on their performance on a placement test, and receive esl instruction to develop english phonology, vocabulary and syntax along with the four language domains: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. however, they spend most of their school day in general education classrooms learning content with teachers who typically have not received any preparation for working with students who speak languages other than english. in elementary schools, ells are typically pulled out of their regular general education classrooms in small groups by esl teachers for specified periods of time each day. in middle and high school ell students receive additional english language instruction as one of their class periods, alongside the academic subjects, mathematics, science, and social studies. some schools provide sheltered instruction in the content areas, which entails lowering the linguistic demands of the content and providing additional language supports to make the content comprehensible to english language learners (chamot, 2009; echevarría, vogt, & short, 2013). some schools in the u.s. have transitional bilingual education programs, where students are instructed in their native language both in the content areas and in native language arts in the first three years of primary school, with additional daily esl instruction. at the end of those three years, they transition from instruction in their native language to full content instruction in english, and native language instruction is dropped. this is similar to what occurs in many primary schools in kenya. a few schools in the u.s. have dual language programs, where english language learners and speakers of english as a first language develop literacy in their first language and the additional language simultaneously, and learn content through both languages (torresguzmάn, 2007). the common factor in both the kenyan and u.s. contexts is that students are taught content subjects while developing english language proficiency. divergent experiences of learning language and through language the primary difference between english language instruction for students whose native language is not english in the u.s. and in kenya is that most pupils in kenya are introduced to english collectively, in their first year of primary school, whereas english language learners in the u.s. come from a wide diversity of educational backgrounds with varied degrees of exposure to english. when students enter schools upon arrival in the u.s., they are typically placed in grades commensurate with their age, without regard their educational background. in some cases they may had have prior exposure to english as a subject, or even as a language of instruction. at the other extreme are students who have had interrupted prior education in teaching english in kenya and the united states 87 refugee camps and are not literate in any language. they may have had very little, if any, previous exposure to english. in both countries, some students continue to struggle with english in upper primary school grades into secondary school. in the u.s., on a 2013 national assessment of reading comprehension, only 4 percent of eighth grade ells scored at or above the proficient level compared with 38 percent of native english speakers (nces, 2013). there is a category of english language learners in the u.s. termed long term english learners. these are students who have been in the u.s. school system for more than 6 years but who have not yet developed proficiency in english (menken & kleyn, 2010). though many may appear fluent in spoken english, they struggle with their academic subjects which are taught in english (calderón & minaya-rowe, 2011). sure and ogechi (2009) have found that by class eight, in kenya, some students are unable to communicate effectively in english. considering that the language of instruction, english, significantly impacts students’ success in other subject areas (kioko & muthwii, 2001), these students enter secondary schools at a disadvantage (gathumbi, 2008). this sparks questions about what constitutes proficiency in english. identifying english language proficiency language acquisition differs from language instruction in that the latter is more formal and systematic (krashen, 1988, 2003). some people acquire additional languages in their natural environment, through interacting with speakers of those languages, similar to acquisition of their first language, a process which is typically needsbased. in multilingual countries many people, including some who have never gone to school, speak two or more languages in order to communicate with members of their community who do not speak their language. though they may have oral proficiency in multiple languages, they may not be able to read or write any of the languages, as these skills are not a necessary part of their communicative needs within that community. it is important to recognize that language proficiency is not monolithic. a student can be proficient using english to interact with an english speaker in casual conversations but not proficient in using appropriate language in the classroom to talk about mathematics or science (bailey, 2007). formal instruction is necessary to develop reading, writing and more advanced oral/listening skills, whether in the first or an additional language. this process can be viewed as a second language learning-acquisition continuum along which speakers move from the pre-production to advanced levels of proficiency, approximating a near educated-native-speaker command of the language (krashen, 1983). yet, not all language learning leads to that advanced level of proficiency. cummins (2003) has identified three dimensions of language proficiency which second language learners develop concurrently at various stages of the continuum: discrete language skills, academic language proficiency and conversational fluency. discrete language skills include the alphabetic principles (blachman, ball, black, & tangel, 2000), language conventions, and syntax, with vocabulary development as an essential part of each of these dimensions. academic language comprises complex linguistic forms at increasingly demanding conceptual levels. students can have different proficiency levels in each of the four domains: listening, speaking, reading, and writing. their conversational fluency may be stronger than their reading skills or the reverse. proficiency is related to the amount of practice one receives in specific domains, and can be impacted by instruction (elly & mangubhai, 1983; fielding & pearson, 88 global education review 2(2) 1994). there is a strong correlation between reading proficiency and the amount of reading a student does (krashen, 2003; postlewaite & ross, 1992), as through extensive reading students develop strategies for constructing meaning from texts they have not previously encountered (cummins, 2003). another dimension of english language acquisition relates to the variety of the language english speakers acquire. mcarthur (1998) has outlined a circle of english which includes eight broad varieties: american, british, canadian, australian/new zealand, african, east asian, south asian, and caribbean. within each variety there are localized dialects spoken in different countries, e.g., kenyan english, singapore english, indian english, jamaican english, and zimbabwean english. these indigenized forms of english incorporate functions which differ from those in native english speaking contexts (chisanga & kamwangamalu, 1997; mutonya, 2008) as they accommodate the communicative needs of the respective societies (kachru, 1997). kioko and muthwii (2001) have highlighted the discrepancy between the formal british english that has remained the targeted language of instruction in kenya since the colonial era, and the sociolinguistic reality in kenya, where the “nativised kenyan educated variety of english” incorporates aspects of the local languages into the way english is used in the society (p. 208). implications for teaching schoolbased english literacy since second language learning is directly related to language teaching, a crucial question which arises is, “what does it mean to teach a second language?” language teaching is an organized activity involving choices of what to include (limitations and grading), since it is unrealistic to consider teaching the whole of the language—all of the vocabulary, syntax, usage, in all aspects of life (halliday, mcintosh & strevens, 1964). in order for language teaching to be successful, it must be related to the purpose for which one is learning the language. within the context of schooling, what it means to teach english is determined by the learning standards or syllabi that have been endorsed by the educational hierarchy of the country. in the u.s., the professional organization for teachers of english to speakers of other languages (tesol) has established english language development (eld) standards which programs across the country draw upon in planning the teaching of english language learners (ells) (tesol, 2006). some states, such as california, (cde, 2012) and new york (nysed, 2004), have their own set of eld standards, while other states use standards developed by a consortium of states, called the world-wide instructional design and assessment (wida, 2012). english language learners are also expected to meet the english language arts standards developed for the general school population. currently in the u.s., there is a common set of standards (adopted by 45 states), the common core state standards (ccss), that determine what counts as teaching english from grades 1 through 12 (common core state standards initiative, 2010). these are a set of anchor standards with specificities developed along a progression for each grade level, where each standard is taught at increasingly complex levels as students move through the school system from kindergarten to the end of high school (grade 12). countries in the outer circle that use english as the language of instruction, such as kenya, have english language syllabi that list the specific components of the language to be taught. in kenya, there are separate syllabi for primary and secondary school. table 1 provides an overview of the english language standards or syllabi in the u.s. and kenya. teaching english in kenya and the united states 89 table 1. overview of standards for teaching english as a second language in the u.s. and kenya content of english teaching in the u.s. content of english teaching in kenya english language development: (tesol) ells communicate for:  social, cultural and instructional purposes  information, ideas, and concepts necessary for academic success in: :: english language arts; science; social studies; mathematics common core english language arts anchor standards:  reading for information  reading literature  foundational skills: grades 1-4 :: vocabulary, syntax  writing  listening and speaking  language skills  language patterns :: relevant sentence structures  vocabulary  listening :: and respond appropriately to information  speaking :: use correct pronunciation, stress, intonation to be understood, to convey information  reading :: understand instructions, to access information and to read widely for pleasure  writing :: express own ideas meaningfully and legibly note. extracted from the common core state standards initiative (2010); tesol (2006), kenyan primary and secondary school syllabi (kie, 2002a,b). english language teaching in the united states english language instruction for speakers of english as a first language in the u.s. typically begins with formal instruction in the alphabet. since children have been using english from the time they began to speak, many native speakers of english come to school as fluent speakers of the language but have not learned how to read or write it. the first two years are focused on helping students to recognize words in print (decode) and to write words (encode) which they can aurally recognize and pronounce. this is one factor that distinguishes early english literacy development for native speakers of english from that of ells. students learning english as a new language, whatever the age, will need to learn the alphabet (depending on their first language) as well as to develop basic vocabulary and syntax of english. they must receive ear training to aurally discriminate sounds which may not exist in their first language, and instruction in the proper articulation of sounds, words, intonation and stress (initial oral skills), as well as vocabulary development to attach meaning to new words they encounter. these are skills which all newcomers to english in the u.s. must learn, whether they enter school in first grade or ninth grade. the eld standards focus on language for everyday communication and language of the major subject areas: science, social studies, mathematics and literature (tesol, 2006). they are scaffolded along proficiency levels, from beginner, or early emergent users of english, to advanced, or proficient users of english. the wida standards specify five levels 90 global education review 2(2) of increasing proficiency—beginning, emerging, developing, expanding, bridging—with the proficiency level referred to as “reaching” (wida, 2012). in the context of schools, proficiency is determined by performance on standardized language proficiency, such as the new york state english language assessment test (nyseslat), and access (developed by wida). each student can score at the beginner, intermediate, advanced or proficient levels. when newcomers to the u.s. enroll in schools, they are typically given a placement test to determine their initial english proficiency level. they are tested each year to determine their progress until they test at the proficient level. in the case of the nyseslat, the four language domains are tested, but the results are paired by listening-speaking and reading-writing strands. reviewing results of the nyseslat in an urban school district, i noted that some students tested at the beginner level in reading and writing but at the advanced level in speaking and listening, as well as the reverse. this is not an anomaly as students may be fluent in spoken english, but not have sufficient resources for reading and writing academic registers (cummins, 1980). to be considered proficient, students must score at the proficient level on both the listeningspeaking and reading-writing strands. english language teaching in kenya in kenya, students begin english language learning with ear training to identify english sounds (initial listening skills) and instruction in the proper articulation of sounds, words, intonation and stress (initial oral skills). they are also taught to decode through identification of phonemes and words (initial reading skills) and scripting the alphabet, word formation, sentences (initial writing skills). these basic skills are pre-requisites for communication in the language, and the first two years of primary school are spent practicing these skills, incrementally, along with vocabulary development. by the third year, kenyan students are expected to use the skills they gained the previous two years to respond to simple stories read to them, read simple stories, and to write answers to simple questions about the stories they hear and read (kie, 2002a). by the end of the third year they are expected to be ready to learn the school curriculum in english. the kenyan secondary school english syllabus adopts an integrated approach to teaching english, merging the teaching of literature with the teaching of language skills. it also focuses on the four domains. for listening and speaking there is an emphasis on pronunciation drills and listening comprehension exercises, as well as oral literature, with role play, debates and presentation of oral reports and drama. for syntax, the focus is on helping students to understand how language works and is used in different contexts. literary texts provide the focus for reading while writing is related to helping students develop their ideas clearly and effectively, using the grammar they learn (kie, 2002b). while the kenyan secondary school english language syllabus focuses on providing students with english language skills, one area that is not explicitly addressed is academic literacy, or literacy in the subject areas in which students use english as the medium of instruction, an area that is highlighted in the tesol english development standards used in the u.s. this omission in the kenyan syllabus implies that developing the skills and dispositions delineated in the kenyan syllabus will automatically equip students with the necessary skills for understanding the language needs in the respective content areas. however, lyster, (2007) pointed out that english language development should include instruction in the teaching english in kenya and the united states 91 types of academic language students encounter in their content classes. identifying language needs across the curriculum cummins (1980, 1984) has distinguished between two types of language proficiency: basic interpersonal communication skills (bics) and cognitive academic language proficiency (calp). bics refers to those skills necessary for communicative competence, i.e. vocabulary, grammar and rules for appropriate use of language in daily communication. in the context of learning english as an additional language in a country where english is the native language, it usually takes 3 to 5 years for students to become as fluent as their native english speaker peers (collier, 1995; wongfillmore, 1991). because many students in kenya do not typically interact with native english speakers, it may take some of them even longer than five years to develop bics in english. calp refers to higher order language skills necessary for academic success. this typically takes 5 to 10 years to develop (collier, 1995). bearing in mind sure and ogechi’s (2009) observation that by class eight some students are unable to communicate effectively in english, it is reasonable to assume that they would encounter challenges in coping with the academic english demands of secondary school, particularly since these skills must be explicitly taught to ell students (carrasquillo & rodríguez, 1996; cummins & yee-fun, 2007). halliday’s (2007b) conception of culture and context is helpful in understanding the language demands of the academic content areas. he draws on christie’s description of school as a cultural context in which “curriculum genres” emerge from the language systems of the various registers of education (p. 288). part of the english teacher’s responsibility, he contends, is to help students understand and produce language of the different subjects. highlighting the three types of language—prescriptive, descriptive, and productive—halliday (2007a) emphasizes productive language as the most important for language teaching, but recognizes the importance of descriptive and prescriptive language as essential knowledge for the teacher to draw upon in developing their pedagogy and selectively explaining to students where helpful. macken-horaik, (2002) has drawn upon halliday’s proposed connection between social context and text meaning in her employment of the constructs of genre, field, tenor and mode to contextualize interpretation and production of text in formal school learning. she uses genre to refer to the social purpose of a text and field to identify the subject matter of the written language. in her description of how a secondary school teacher applied the model in focusing on the language features in scientific text, she noted the teacher’s crucial role in organizing learning experiences for the students to initiate them into the linguistic demands of the genre. this case provides an illustration of halliday’s construct of descriptive language as the students were engaged in the use of metalanguage to guide their understanding. assisting students in developing awareness of specific language needed to engage in the academic functions required by the different content areas is an important aspect of the linguistic and academic proficiency necessary for academic success (dutro & moran, 2003). in learning the language needs associated with specific content areas, teachers can identify the vocabulary and sentence patterns necessary for communicating specific content. as hernández (2003) pointed out, this can provide english language learners with purposeful content for language use. when language is used as the medium for accessing knowledge, the language embodied in the content is implicit. in focusing on the content area as an object of instruction in the english 92 global education review 2(2) classroom, teachers can make this language explicit (hernández, 2003). employing halliday’s systemic functional linguistic theory schleppegrell (2004) draws a distinction between school-based texts and everyday language. she contends, academic texts make meanings in ways that that are informationally dense and authoritatively presented. at the same time these texts embed ideologies and position readers in ways that can seem natural and unchallengeable (p 44). in this respect, school-based texts require a different set of linguistic resources than everyday language, and this becomes increasingly complex as students move from primary school to secondary school and into higher education. schleppegrell purported that this does not come naturally as a part of language development; students need to be taught these registers. students have differential access to this form of language depending on their language background or prior experiences. focusing on academic language in school provides this access to all students. learning language and learning through language: implications for elt although learning subject matter through english implicitly involves learning the english language, this is not always made explicit in the context of school. the english language standards and syllabi outlined above for the u.s. and kenya, emphasize language learning—the four domains, plus grammar and vocabulary—to enable communication through the language. these skills and competencies facilitate learning through english as the language of instruction; however, they do not automatically address the varied needs of language use across the curriculum and understanding the registers of the different disciplines. in the u.s., there is some focus on the academic language of the school subjects, with emphasis on literacy across the curriculum. for ells, the wida framework has expanded upon the tesol standards to illustrate how they could be implemented in schools (wida, 2012). aside from identifying five levels of english proficiency, the wida framework distinguishes three levels of academic language: word/phrase (vocabulary usage), sentence (language forms and conventions), and discourse (linguistic complexity). for each language domain, the wida framework provides an example of how each of the three levels of academic language could be addressed at the various language proficiencies for each grade and for each of the major academic subjects (wida, 2012). the kenyan syllabus does not make reference to academic language needs, other than the language of literature, as part of the integrated syllabus. recognition that success in school, particularly at the post-primary school level, where the language of textbooks tends to be dense and abstract, is related to proficiency in academic language, provides insightful implications for the english language curriculum in kenya (francis, rivera, lesaux, kieffer, & rivera, 2006). this is particularly significant when one considers that in kenya, student academic performance across the curriculum on the secondary school standardized tests has tended to be below 50% in all subjects. kenyan students’ mean scores in 2010 were: english, 39.77; history, 45.84; geography, 46.15, for mathematics, biology and chemistry in the 20s (knec, 2011). the other factor in kenya is that english is not widely used outside the classroom (kioko & muthwii, 2001). taking this into consideration, highlighting academic language is one means of focusing on english language instruction in the classroom and the variety of ways in which it can be used to enhance the teaching english in kenya and the united states 93 teaching of content subjects. just as the current integrated syllabus in kenya uses literary works as the content for english language instruction, selected texts from other subject areas could also be used as instructional texts to practice english language skills and competencies. identifying academic english though all teachers should be teachers of literacy, since they are using language as their medium and require students to be literate in their respective areas, this does not always occur. even in the u.s. many content teachers do not feel equipped to teach literacy, as they separate knowledge of their discipline from the language skills used to represent it. this takenfor-granted knowledge, i.e., implicit knowledge, needs to be made explicit. students need sophisticated vocabulary skills to successfully negotiate content-area classrooms. one common feature in english vocabulary which may cause confusion for some students is polysemy. within the various subject areas, some words that are used often in everyday language have very specialized meanings which may differ across content areas. for example, the word cell has multiple meanings in different domains:  a microscopic structural unit of an organism (biology),  a single unit for conversion of energy (science)  a small unit within a political organization (social studies),  a unit of a spread sheet (mathematics),  a portion of the atmosphere that behaves as a unit (geography)  a small room, e. g. prison (everyday language) there are many such words that students encounter in different contexts, e.g., plot, power, and right, which can cause confusion for some students if they are not aware of the multiple uses of the words. students also need to understand the demands of function words as they are used across the curriculum, e.g., explain, describe, enumerate, justify, analyze, contrast, evaluate, and illustrate (chamot, 2009). they will encounter these words on formal standardized tests and should have prior exposure to them and practice in using them in assignments. understanding how words relate to each other and can be morphed into different words through manipulation of word parts (roots, suffixes, prefixes) can assist them in building their vocabulary and working out the meaning of new words (word families), e.g., act, action, active, activity, activate. additionally, students encounter complex syntactic features in academic texts, in particular grammatical metaphor, including nominalizations (nagy & townsend, 2012) and embedded clauses, frequent use of passive voice, and use of conditionals (if. . .then) in science and math. students need to have opportunities to see how varied linguistic features occur in texts and use them in writing (xu, 2010). proficiency in academic language includes knowledge of common and less commonly used vocabulary as students are required to interpret and produce increasingly complex language. since it is not feasible to expect students, especially those learning english as an additional language, to know all the words they encounter in academic texts, providing varied ways of categorizing words can be a helpful way of organizing words for them to learn, and increasing their vocabulary. it is not the intent of this article to identify all the aspects of academic language, but rather, to underscore and signal the importance of teachers possessing this knowledge: teachers can identify the features as they appear in texts which their students use. teachers need to have 94 global education review 2(2) this deeper knowledge of language in order to help their students understand concepts in the content areas. kenyan researchers have indicated that teachers have difficulty explicating scientific and mathematical concepts simply and clearly due to their insufficient lexical resources (sure & ogechi, 2009). this should not be surprising since these teachers are themselves also learners of english as an additional language. integrating language and content as an approach to teaching english integrated content and language, an instructional approach where the focus is on meaning in context rather than on form, can assist in developing fluency and accuracy in all four language modalities of listening, speaking, reading, and writing. it utilizes content-relevant tasks to enable the students to build mastery of content knowledge (gibbons, 2003) and facilitate second language acquisition. using excerpts from science, mathematics, and social studies textbooks as reading comprehension passages would enable students to identify and become familiar with different features of academic texts and this could assist them in their content classes. highlighting academic language in the different subject areas would also be a feasible approach to addressing teachers’ inadequate proficiency in english while preparing them to teach english. in teacher education programs, teachers could learn how to categorize english vocabulary in meaningful ways which they could teach their students. teacher education faculty and curriculum developers would need to partner with secondary school teachers to develop teaching resources to implement this approach and best practices. an initial stage in this process would be to identify the academic language demands in the different academic disciplines. conclusion this article has considered an alternative focus for the teaching of english both in the preparation of teachers in teacher education programs and in secondary schools, in outer circle countries where english is the language of education, to encompass the varying needs of students learning english as an additional language. it is grounded in the recognition that because secondary school students continue to struggle with english as the language of instruction, it could be taught more effectively. comparing the english language needs in kenya, an outer circle country, and the u.s., an inner circle country that struggles with educating large numbers of english language learners, provides a rationale for the alternative focus. most kenyan students, and comparable students in other outer circle countries, continue to be english language learners in secondary school, despite eight or more years of studying english and learning content through english. the wida standards framework used in the u.s. provides a model for integrating academic content and language, with attention to the varying english proficiency levels of students. in considering what kenya and other countries that use english as the language of instruction could take from this model, it is important to acknowledge that despite some universals, each country has its own distinctiveness with respect to language. the framework outlined in this article could be utilized by classroom teachers, teacher educators, and curriculum developers in the field of english, to construct and evaluate materials for teaching english at the secondary school level in their specific contexts. although this article focuses on kenya and the u.s., its premise that students should be taught academic language is applicable to other countries that use english as the medium of teaching english in kenya and the united states 95 instruction. research on how to implement such a language policy should, therefore, not be limited to kenya or the u.s. there could be collaborative projects, across countries, looking into how to incorporate understandings of academic language into english language syllabi, and how to develop english language teaching standards with attention to language proficiency levels such as those developed by wida. studies could also examine african, as well as other englishes, considering similarities and differences in the varieties of english used in different countries, and their impact on the teaching of english in the respective countries. the major point of convergence is the notion that in order to improve the teaching of english at the secondary school level and maximize student success, teachers have to acquire the pedagogical knowledge base to help their students access the language in academic texts across the curriculum. this has important implications for the preparation of both elementary and secondary school teachers of english for speakers of other languages and content instruction teachers who teach english language learners. references bailey, a. 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(2007). dual language programs: key features and results. in, o. garcía & c. baker (eds.). bilingual education: an introductory reader (pp 50-63). new york: multilingual matters. wida (2012). world-class instructional design and assessment. the board of regents of the university of wisconsin system. retrieved from wong-fillmore, l. (1991). when learning a second language means losing the first. early childhood research quarterly 6, 323-46. xu, shelley hong (2010). teaching english language learners: literacy strategies and resources for k-6. new york: guilford publishers. about the author zaline m. roy-campbell, phd, is an associate professor and director of the teaching english language learners program at syracuse university. her current research interests include issues of language, culture and literacy in education, preparing effective teachers of english language learners and the intersections between knowledge production and language of instruction. educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 19 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gouleta, eirini (2015). educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa pakistan’s north-west frontier province: practices, issues, and challenges for educating culturally linguistically diverse and exceptional children. global education review, 2(4). 19-39 educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa pakistan’s north-west frontier province: practices, issues, and challenges for educating culturally linguistically diverse and exceptional children eirini gouleta university of macedonia, greece abstract this article presents the case of khyber pakhtunkhwa (kp), pakistan’s former north-west frontier province, and its provincial educational assessment policies and practices. these policies and practices affect millions of culturally linguistically diverse and exceptional (clde) children who live in rural and remote areas, and areas afflicted by conflict and insurgency. the article raises questions about political interference, ethical conduct, and fairness in the administration and marking of the assessments. it discusses efforts for systematic administration and collection of learning assessment data, teacher professional development programs to improve assessment practices, policies which address the educational needs of the diverse students in the province, and challenges and barriers to province-wide sustainable education development. in conclusion, the author offers suggestions and recommendations for policy makers and education stakeholders towards capacity building and improvement of assessment practices for all learners while it attempts to shed light and dispel misconceptions about kp and its people. keywords international education development; educational policy; educational assessment; language of instruction; culturally linguistically diverse and exceptional (clde) children; girls’ education; pakistan; khyber pakhtunkhwa introduction the systematic measurement of student learning outcomes has come to the forefront of the field of education globally, in both developed and developing countries. while the main goal of classroom formative assessment is to inform instructional practices and help improve both student achievement in the areas of the curriculum and teacher adaptation of their instructional methods to meet students’ needs, summative, large scale assessment –when it takes place in addition to formative assessment can give the bigger picture of how an education system works and what its strengths and pitfalls are. it creates the foundation and basis for systemic-wide improvements and educational ______________________________ corresponding author: eirini gouleta, university of macedonia, school of social sciences, humanities and arts, department of educational and social policy, 156 egnatia street, gr-546 36 thessaloniki, greece. email: egouleta@gmail.com mailto:egouleta@gmail.com 20 global education review 2(4) reforms in the areas of education management, monitoring and evaluation, standards-based curriculum development, and teacher professional training. although the measurement of student learning outcomes is increasingly recognized as paramount to improving teaching and learning, it is not an easy task for any country or region. most countries have difficulties implementing and utilizing successfully the results of large scale student learning assessments. however, for developing countries, and especially poor countries or regions afflicted by war, conflict, insurgency, political unrest, and natural disasters, the challenges can be enormous. there are a lot of questions raised when it comes to student assessment and a lot of things to be considered. how are the assessments developed and implemented? are they contextually, pedagogically, academically, culturally and linguistically appropriate for the very diverse student populations who take part in them? are they valid and reliable? how are the results collected, analyzed, and interpreted? and are the assessment data used in appropriate and efficient ways to help improve the education system? this article deals with the assessment policies and practices in khyber pakhtunkhwa (kp), pakistan’s former north-west frontier province. it first gives an overview of the history and status of the national education assessment policy and practice in pakistan to provide background information and the country context within which kp is situated. it then discusses the educational system in kp, its challenges, limitations, and strengths, and presents and analyzes the current instruction and assessment policies and practices in the province. kp, is a conflict afflicted region, with widespread poverty and illiteracy that has been hit the past decade several times by terrible natural disasters and terror attacks, many of which targeted education institutions. it is hoped that, the information, data, and analysis presented here will be helpful to the reader who is interested in exploring this and other similar country/region cases as this province due to the geo-political barriers and security limitations is not easily accessible and therefore is quite under-researched with many unknowns, questions, and perhaps misconceptions. background: education and assessment in pakistan the year 2015 was marked by the millennium development goals (mdgs) as the milestone for achieving universal primary completion for all boys and girls. however, today in the world, there are still more than 50 million out of school children and an additional 200 million in school who are not learning. pakistan, the sixth most populous and the second with the largest muslim population country in the world, is home to six million out of school children while millions of children who are enrolled in school are not receiving quality education. the majority of the out of school children are girls, live in poverty and in rural areas, and belong to cultural and linguistic minorities. pakistan offers a complexity of diversity that has evolved with its history (coleman & capstick, 2012). located at the crossroads of central asia and the middle east, pakistan is considered to be one of the oldest civilizations in the world. as the centuries have unfolded, so have the pakistanis, who represent an array of rich cultures and languages. in fact, according to rahman (2003), six major languages and approximately 60 minority languages are spoken throughout its provinces (punjab, sindh, khyber pakhtunkhwa (kp), and baluchistan) and educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 21 territories (islamabad capital territory, federally administered tribal areas (fata), gilgit-baltistan, and azad-jammu and kashmir). like its people, education in pakistan is multifaceted. the first attempt for formal education in pakistan was brought forth by british colonization. most education during this time was limited to those with the resources to attend school. it was not until after independence from britain in 1947 that the national education conference convened to address and discuss the country’s education challenges. at that time the country had an 85% illiteracy rate. by 2009 pakistan’s literacy rate had made considerable strides with 54.9% of adults and 70.7% of the youth considered to be literate (united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization, 2010). however, behind these literacy rates hide high illiteracy levels of women (for example, it is estimated that female illiteracy rate in fata surpasses 95%) and those living in rural areas and provinces such as kp and baluchistan, where access and opportunity to equitable learning is far less (annual status of education report, 2013). since 1947, numerous educational reforms have been introduced and implemented addressing topics such as literacy, rural and girls’ education, civic engagement and recently, mother-tongue instruction. in the past decade, pakistan has implemented the devolution plan 2000, which gave responsibility for administrative, political, fiscal, and social services to the provincial governments. the decentralization was completed by 2011 and as a result, the provincial governments now handle all responsibilities related to education. this includes teacher training, curriculum development, school operations, and educational assessment. the devolution of the education system has played a great role in how education is organized in the country today. despite the reforms and efforts undertaken, pakistan is still behind and will unlikely meet the millennium development goals’ (mdg) targets (united nations development programme, 2011). types of schools in pakistan formally, pakistani children attend private or public schools, private schools supported with government and donor funds through publicprivate partnerships, or military schools. additionally, children may attend deeni madaris [madrassahs], which are religious islamic schools. there are also non-formal education programs for youth or adults who have had little to no access to formal education as children. despite the availability of a variety of educational institutions, education for pakistani children and youth continue to be a great challenge. only 52% of the children stay enrolled in primary schools until fifth grade and of those not dropping out very few are actually learning (annual status of education report, 2012). enrolment, repetition, and drop-out rates are very much influenced by cultural, societal, economic, and gender factors, distance to school, safety, quality of education (e.g., teachers’ presence and qualifications, studentteacher ratios), and availability of resources (e.g., proper school sanitation and other facilities, boundary walls, textbooks and teacher guides) (united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization, 2010). another contributing factor to access and quality of education is the language of instruction. in most cases, the language of instruction differs from the languages children speak at home. urdu and english are the two main languages used for 22 global education review 2(4) instruction in schools across the country, followed by pashto and sindhi in some areas of kp and in sindh. though promising policies have been drafted for mother tongue instruction in some provinces, little has been implemented to assist those children who speak regional and minority languages (gouleta, 2013). national efforts for educational assessment in pakistan in pakistan, education assessment has been greatly influenced by the years of british colonization (khattak, 2012) and has been designed to measure students’ ability to advance further in the educational system. there are critical, high-stakes examinations at the matriculate and intermediate levels that widely impact and determine the career options of the students. such assessments are conducted across the different provinces through the boards of examinations. the languages used in these assessments vary, though the most common languages used are urdu, english, pastho, and sindhi. most assessments are nonstandardized and not significant measures of learning quality as they measure rote learning and selective study rather than analytical and critical thinking (ministry of education, 2007). assessments for upper elementary grades (5-8) are still in the process of being developed at the provincial level and have yet to be implemented in some provinces. because of the poor quality of the assessment system in pakistan and to improve the measurement of student learning outcomes, the education sector reform (20012005) -and later the national education policy of 2009addressed the need to build assessment capacity at the school, provincial, and federal levels. according to greany and kellaghan (2008, pp. 17-21), the main objectives of a national assessment system are: a) to provide feedback to policy makers, politicians, and the broader educational community on particular outcome measures set as important; b) to report on the learning levels of students based on the general expectations of the curriculum in subjects such as science, math, technology, and life skills; b) to identify the areas of strengths and weaknesses in students’ learning and the levels of performance of particular student subgroups; d) to compare the performance of students between and among education systems at national and global levels as it is believed that education quality is linked with the development of knowledge economies; e) to monitor student achievement over time and identify effects of policy decisions in relation to monetary and other resource allocations; f) to examine the contributing factors to student achievement within and outside of the school; g) to determine the adequacy of teacher professional development, services and resources based on government standards; h) to develop an accountability system for teachers, administrators, students, schools, institutions, and agencies that exercise control over education policies and decisions; and i) to follow international trends or meet international commitments (i.e. to report progress toward achieving the mdgs) or on other education donor requirements (in which case, as the authors argue, national assessment ‘may not be seriously considered in the management of the educational system or in policy making’ (p. 21)). to provide evidence that the objectives of the national assessment are met, assessment data are collected from students and other education stakeholders. they are analyzed, interpreted, and reported on a regular basis (kellaghan, greany, and murray, 2009). this practice provides the platform for the educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 23 educational system to develop effective policies, practices, and reforms for improvement. in pakistan, to fulfill this purpose, the national education assessment system (neas) was established in 2002 with four branches in each of the four provinces, along with the provincial education assessment centres (peac) and the kashmir education assessment centre (keac) to help collect, monitor, and analyze information on student learning. with data that is comparable across regions and over time, neas intended to identify learning assessment gaps and bring about improvements in the curriculum, teaching and classroom support practices. however, as the devolution of the education sector went fully in effect in july of 2011, neas was fused with the capital administration and development (cad) and its leadership and dedication to assessment activities significantly weakened (the world bank, 2009). additionally, as the last quarter of 2013 approached, there were questions of whether or not cad would continue to operate due to its administrative problems and confusion of responsibilities after devolution (aftab, 2013). as a result, currently, the secretary for elementary and secondary education, in each province decides how learning outcomes will be measured. the case of khyber pakhtunkhwa (kp): pakistan’s former northwest frontier province the last population census in pakistan was conducted in 1998 and it is very difficult to provide any accurate current population figures. in 1998, kp had an estimated population of about 17,740 million. of these people approximately 3 million lived in urban centers and about 14,740 million in rural areas (government of khyber pakhtunkhwa, 2015). today, it is believed that the province has over 24,700 million habitants in a geographical area which covers about 74,521 square kilometers (or 28,773 square miles) (united nations development programme, 2011). kp is divided into four geographical regions: the southern zone, the central zone, the north-western malakand region (which is mostly mountainous extending where the himalayan and hindukush ranges meet), and the north-eastern hazara region (which extends to the himalayan and karakorum ranges). the province has both densely (in the urban centers) and scarcely (in the mountains and country side) populated areas. its main economic sources are forestry and agriculture. types of schools, student enrolment and attendance in kp in kp the total number of schools is 37,988. of these schools, 27,207 are public (see table 1) with a total enrollment of 3,763,796 pupils; and 4,219 of the public schools are operating either in rental buildings or tents. the private schools in the province are 6,101 with about 1,304,099 pupils and 4,680 are either deeni madaris or community run and operated schools enrolling approximately 200,185 pupils (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, pp. 14 and 18). there are about 2,677 boys’ schools that operate in mosques and currently, the department of elementary and secondary education is developing a strategy to gradually convert these mosque schools into regular schools (p.16) to help improve their facilities, resources, curriculum, and instructional practices. 24 global education review 2(4) school level male female total primary 14770 7838 22608 middle 1527 1013 2540 high 1229 530 1759 higher secondary 201 99 300 total 17727 9480 27207 table 1. public schools by level in kp despite the aforementioned enrollment numbers, all schools are not accessible or functional to operate and receive students. external challenges such as militant extremists from afghanistan and natural disasters including devastating floods and major earthquakes during the past decade posed heavy economic and socio-political burdens to this region as thousands of schools have been destroyed and millions of people have become displaced (united nations high commissioner for refugees, 2013). moreover, many girls’ schools have been destroyed by militants and families have been threatened with death if they send their girls to school. as of 2012, it is estimated that the total number of schools that have been destroyed in kp by the militants (either partially or fully) is around 734 schools, with 640 of them only in the swat valley, malakand region (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, pg. 26). most recently, the deadliest terrorist attack in pakistan’s history which claimed the lives of 145 people including 132 children took place at the military ran boy’s school in december of 2014 in peshawar, the capital city of kp. in addition to the schools destroyed by militant extremists, the department of elementary and secondary education reports that approximately 3,856 schools have been damaged (either partially or fully) by natural disasters such as earthquakes and floods. and there are thousands of schools that are missing critical facilities (see table 2) such as electricity, water, bathrooms, boundary walls that enable girls to attend schools (p. 17). missing facilities number of schools boundary wall 5,482 water supply 7,432 electricity 10,518 bathrooms 4,458 table 2. missing critical facilities in kp schools educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 25 consequently and despite the resilience of the people of kp, access to education in the province has been a great challenge and a struggle due to the above circumstances. the 2012 annual state of education report (aser) gave a snapshot of the current state of education in kp and not all of its results appear grim. in kp, aser (2012) surveyed 23 of the 25 districts and reported that 84% of children ages 6-16 were enrolled in either state or private schools, with more boys than girls enrolled in school. the highest net primary enrolment rate in the country resides in kp (81%) where 92% of all boys and 68% of all girls ages 5-9 are enrolled in primary school, though only about two-thirds of these students continue their schooling to fifth grade (ministry of education and training, 2013). however, although enrolment rates appear high, it is important to question the frequency of school attendance and whether the children enrolled are present every day in the classroom. teacher and student absenteeism remains an enormous problem in pakistan in general as on a daily basis it surpasses the rates of 13% and 18% respectively (aser, 2012, p. 8). in kp in particular, these numbers are much higher with a teacher absenteeism rate –as anecdotal records suggestbeing above 18% on a daily basis. thus, even if we assume that all children are present in school not all teachers are there to teach them. this reality presents one more example why proxy measures in education do not always give us the whole and true picture of its quality and effectiveness. social, cultural, and linguistic diversity in kp: poverty levels and school expenditures amongst the great challenges, it is in this rural province where pakistan glows with breathtaking landscapes, rich culture, and linguistic diversity. the people of kp are very diverse both culturally and linguistically and the main languages spoken in the province are pashto, seraiki, khowar, kohistani, and hinko. considering the lack of resources, the fragility and conflict the province experiences and the great diversity in landform and climatic variations, one can understand that it is quite challenging for the kp government to address the needs of its people in all areas of human and economic development including education without diversifying policies and practices. kp has of the highest poverty rates in the country, especially in its rural areas. the mdg to eradicate extreme poverty has not only been unmet in this province but the numbers of people in poverty have proliferated. in 2005-06, the percentage of people who lived in poverty was 36%, seven percent above the national average. in 2009-10 the number of people living in poverty stood at 39% with about 25% of the population living below the calorie poverty line (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p. 4). extreme poverty contributes significantly to the province’s inability to meet the mdgs in education, even though the government of kp spends significantly more money per pupil 8,638rs [or about 85 u.s. dollars] than any other province in the country, surpassing them by nearly 1600rs per pupil [or about 16 u.s. dollars] (united nations development 26 global education review 2(4) programme, 2011). in 2011-2012 fiscal year alone, kp spent approximately 21% of provincial expenditures on education pursuits with the plan to increase its budgetary allocation to education up to 30% in the subsequent years. however, the majority of those funds were spent on recurrent education costs (e.g., salaries) while only a low of 4.36% was spent on non-salary education costs (e.g., textbooks, furniture, training, uniforms) (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012): ‘the increasing annual burden for salary on the government exchequer over the years has seriously reduced non-salary provisions and eroded the overall quality of education, as it impairs the ability of the schooling system to maintain meaningful operational credibility in terms of lack of actual inputs required for effective teaching and learning within the classroom’ (p. 103). nonetheless, the province faces great challenges in education. literacy rates are among the lowest in the country with a very high total drop-out rate during the first three years of schooling. from kachi [kindergarten], to pakki [1st grade], to 2nd grade the total drop-out rate rises up to 25% indicating that these children are eventually added to the pool of the illiterates in the province (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p.19). the overall literacy rates in kp have risen about 16% in the past 12 years making a very slow improvement of about 1.33% annually (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p. 15). and in 2009, it was estimated that the population average literacy rate in kp for those above 10 years old was 50%, about 7% less than the national average). for females in the same age group, the literacy rate was lower estimated at 31% compared to a 45% at the national level. with such diversity and complexity, the role of education in kp and how education is implemented bring about more challenges than what may be faced in other provinces of the country. and it is in this light that we ought to see not only the challenges to literacy development and quality of education but also the educational assessment practices used so far and the efforts being made to improve the assessment system in the province. educational assessment in kp: policies and practices in kp, educational assessments have taken a different path from some of the other provinces, as about 40% of kp was not colonized by the british, leaving its education goals and assessment untested by western thought. it was not until 1998 that kp first implemented a student assessment system. after few years of implementation, student achievement appeared to fall drastically, mostly due to the restructuring of the education sector in response to the devolution. with the establishment of neas and peac, an original assessment geared toward kp diversity was implemented, though it is unclear how successful it was as results were not clearly reported and given that day-to-day assessment techniques and practices were not typically used in the classroom. due to kp’s weakened government, frequent conflict, linguistic diversity, and social and economic challenges, peac has collaborated with international aid agencies such as unicef, educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 27 the canadian international development agency (cida), literacy for all (lfa), other donors and development partners, and the provincial education sector reforms unit (esru) to find appropriate measures to assess and evaluate student learning outcomes. with such assistance, peac had conducted four cycles of national achievement testing in collaboration with neas but such implementation of the assessments faded away after the devolution. furthermore, kp adopted the national curriculum of 2006 but to date, only about 50% of the new textbooks have been developed leaving students and teachers with a curriculum largely unmatched with both textbooks and learning assessments (peac, n.d.). today in kp, schools and their teachers internally assess students in grades k-8 mostly through the use of results-based measures. at the classroom level, summative assessment tools exist, but are rarely used by teachers in primary and lower secondary grades, mostly due to their lack of knowledge on how to assess students at the classroom-level. in grades 9-12, summative assessments occur in assessment centers under the auspices of the board of intermediate and secondary education (bise). these assessments are not diagnostic in nature and they have been used to either promote students to the next grade level or retain them. they have been used as a measure for teacher accountability but again it is not known what steps are taken or if there is a process in place when a school is failing or performing below expectations. moreover, the math and english assessments are intended to measure the impact of the assessment training that has been provided for the teachers, and are not used to measure student learning competencies. however, the math and english assessments can advance or graduate the students to the next grade level. currently, there are plans to expand this type of assessment to fifth and eighth grade. the existing assessment practices create questions of fairness in the administration and evaluation of the exams in regard to ethnical conduct. anecdotal evidence raises issues about students’ cheating during the exams, political interference from local influential individuals on creating false and higher results, and accounts of corruption and even bribery especially when it comes to the board of examinations at the matriculate level. in addition, lack of resources and appropriate test-taking conditions (see figure 1) make examinations a real challenge for both teachers and students. in addition, little has been done to create assessments that inform instruction and prepare teachers to create and administer such type of assessments. the relationship between assessment data and student outcomes needs to be considered; assessment data should not only inform student outcomes, but also inform curricula and improve pedagogical practices. figure 1. administration of examinations in boys’ middle school. educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 28 because educational assessment in kp has been a ‘stand-alone activity’ (kellaghan et.al., 2009, pg. 21), ‘separate from and with little connection to other educational activity’ the findings of the assessments are underused. other reasons that have been suggested for underusing assessment data (kellaghan et. al., 2009) and would apply in the case of kp are: ‘inadequate involvement of stakeholders in the design and implementation of an assessment; failure to communicate findings to all in a position to act; lack of confidence in the findings of a national assessment; political sensitivity to making findings public; failure to devise appropriate action following and assessment at the level of general policies; [and] failure to devise appropriate action following a national assessment at the school level’ (pg. 22). kellaghan et. al. (2009) assert that the above reasons for underusing assessment data is usually found when assessment is carried out by external agents or at the request of donors (pg. 23) which is very much the case in kp since donor funds given to the education sector are conditional to developing and implementing a reliable educational assessment system. examining the aser reports between 2010 and 2012, it is difficult to interpret the results of the assessment and determine accurately the student learning outcomes in kp. for instance, the districts surveyed in 2010 were only four; but increased in 2011 to 14 districts, and in 2012 to 23. although it is positive that more districts are added every year in the assessment data collection system, it makes it challenging to determine progress as well as how learning assessments are valued and interpreted with regard to student outcomes. data collected in kp by aser does not reveal what specifically has effected changes (positive or negative) in student outcomes and how or if assessment measures have played a role in such changes. one major concern that arises is determining any other factors that inform student learning outcomes, such as in reading. for example, looking at the 2012 aser report it is not evident what the variables which played a role in the increase of reading ability from 2011 to 2012 are. table 3 provides a glimpse of reading literacy across three years of aser data (2010-2012). data collected in 2010 show reading literacy rates among a small sample of districts, based upon two reading indicators. however, when more districts were surveyed, as in 2011 and 2012, the reading indicator rates actually decreased comparing to the 2010 results. year % of grade 5 students who could read a grade 2 level story in urdu or pashto % of grade 3 students who were able to read a sentence 2012 aser report 43% 45% 2011 aser report 32% 31% 2010 aser report 67% 62% table 3. aser survey results on student reading outcomes in kp (2010-2012) educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 29 while it is crucial to examine various components to increase access of education for all and to improve the quality of teaching and learning in kp classrooms, reforming the student learning outcomes assessment system is key to delivering quality education in the province. in monitoring quality in education, it is imperative to use the assessment results effectively and to look beyond proxy measures that most international entities use (e.g., public educational expenditure per pupil; completion and drop-out rates; and number of qualified teachers). even when countries or regions do well on proxy measures, there is evidence that weak and unequal learning outcomes are widespread; for this reason, the global demand from education stakeholders to measure student learning outcomes is steadily increasing as it presents evidence on quality of teaching and learning (walvoord, 2004). kellaghan et. al. (2009) recommend a series of actions that can help avoid the underuse of assessment results and improve the overall quality of the assessment system: ‘integrate the assessment activity into existing structures, policy, and decisionmaking processes; involve all relevant stakeholders in design and implementation of an assessment; make provision in the budget for the dissemination, plan activities, and prepare a number of reports tailored to user needs; ensure that the assessment team has the required technical competence and that relevant stakeholders are involved from the outset; increase the likelihood of making findings public by holding regular stakeholder discussions; integrate national assessment activity into policy and managerial activities, and review findings to determine implications and strategies; [finally] ensure adequate communication of findings to schools, review findings and devise strategies to improve student achievement, and provide ongoing support for implementation’ (pg. 22). improving educational assessment in kp: efforts and initiatives kp has recognized its educational challenges and has been at the forefront of educational change in pakistan. as such, kp is the first province in pakistan to develop an education sector plan (esp) (2012) which serves as a workable action plan for education based on a broader comprehensive development strategy (cds). one of the main goals of the esp was to achieve universal primary education for all boys and girls in the province by the year 2015 and although this goal will not have been actualized by the end of the year, the efforts continue. other main goals are to (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012): promote gender equality; achieve quality basic education for all; achieve 50% improvement in the levels of adult literacy, especially for women; introduce government-financed private school subsidizing for areas with low female enrolment; and reduce rural and urban disparities in education (p.i). among other objectives, the esp addresses the need for family involvement in children’s education by supporting the parentteacher-councils (ptc) in the province. it also 30 global education review 2(4) supports non-formal and community education; adult literacy centers; and teacher professional development for public, private, pre-service and in-service teachers. further, the esp provides to female teachers assistance with transportation to girls’ schools in remote and rural areas; and has led efforts in banning of the corporal punishment in schools. it promotes the inclusion of regional languages in the curriculum. in addition, the esp emphasizes the importance of strengthening the education management information system (emis) to reliably collect, manage, analyze, interpret, and report education data in order to insure transparency, accountability, and efficient use of resources. it is important to note, however, that although the above objectives have been identified as priorities in the esp, to date, very little has been done to meet some of them such as the support to ptc’s for example. and although educational assessment is being addressed in the esp, it is not specified how children will be assessed at different stages and grades and how assessment will be used to inform instruction. the esp describes the assessment system in kp as results-based and differentiates between two types of assessment: internal and external. internal assessment refers to examinations given from first to eighth grade by a special board within the directorate of curriculum and teacher education (dcte). as an indicator for measuring quality of learning in internal assessments has been the promotion rate from one class to the next. from ninth grade and above students take a formal external assessment that is designed by bise. this assessment is also results-based looking at the percentage of students passing the exam (success rate 54% in march of 2011) (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p. 49). teachers’ performance is assessed based on annual school assessment outcomes, a system that ‘affects the quality of education negatively’ (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p. 48). it has been reported that since the 1980s, teachers have been encouraging students to cheat in their exams and that the teachers also served as the examiners. as a result the government had to intervene trying to assess the quality of education. it is understood as described in the esp that assessing students in the end of the year for grade promotion or graduation purposes is not optimal as this type of assessment does not inform instruction. the esp called for the development of a ‘third party’ led assessment for fifth and eighth grades to be developed in phases (p.49). to this date action has been taken on this front. peac developed a fifth grade assessment in four subjects: english, urdu, mathematics, and science. the exam was conducted by an external organization the national examination and evaluation foundation (neef) in the last week of march, 2015. the report of the results is still pending. recent actions in kp have been addressing implementation of day-to-day assessment through teacher training to help build the teachers’ understanding about assessment development and implementation through a year-round classroom assessment. in 2009, the government of kp incepted a new project under peac the multilevel integrated teacher supervision and in-service training system. the project developed teacher and student materials for continuous classroom assessment educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 31 (cca) in the primary grades. it is comparable with up-to-date best instructional practices and has the advantage that gathers data over a long period of time including intervening early to inform instruction and secure that all children learn (peac, n.d). the cca was piloted in six districts (abbottabad, mansehera, haripur, noshera, swabi, and mardan) in grades k-2 and in four subjects: urdu, english, mathematics, and science. the project engaged over 5,700 mentor teachers for three days a month on classroom assessment practices. through the monthly activities with the teachers, the cca pilot project two common challenges were found in assessment practices in kp. these are: 1) teachers’ weak skills in test construction and administration; and 2) teachers’ negative attitudes toward continuous assessment and record keeping approaches. the recommended action has been that attention must be paid on improving kp’s learning assessment system at the school, district, and provincial levels. peac to date has developed assessments for cca for grades one through fifth based on learning standards in four subject areas: english, urdu, mathematics and science and the instruments are now available for classroom use. if implemented properly and systematically, such reform has the ability to increase accountability, transparency and accuracy in reporting the quality of teaching and learning and failing schools can start considering the development of school improvement plans (spis) to aid in the overall assessment of student achievement (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012). it will also allow cross-province comparisons as provinces have been following the same national curriculum. recently, with donor support and following the model from punjab province, peac developed a third grade literacy and numeracy assessment using second grade learning standards in the subjects of english, urdu, and mathematics. the assessment was piloted in april of 2015 and the report with the results is still pending. programs, initiatives and their implications for the education and assessment of kp’s culturally, linguistically diverse and exceptional (clde) children the aser (2012) survey revealed that 20 different languages are used in the households in kp, whereas english, urdu or pashto are the languages of instruction in schools. thus the languages found in the home and the languages used in schools are not always matched, factor which can greatly influence one’s learning. in addition, there are large gender gaps in learning outcomes, with boys outperforming girls across all grades in both reading and math skills. and of the most disadvantaged student groups in getting access to quality education in pakistan are the children who fall in the intersection between gender and marginalization: being a girl, living in poverty, living in an urbanminority or rural area, having a disability, and belonging to a linguistic, religious, or cultural minority (see figure 2) (gouleta, 2014). figure 2. out of school girl in religious minority area educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 32 the education of exceptional children and youth, children with disabilities, and special abilities is not addressed in length in the esp and there are no statistics about the numbers of children in the province with disabilities, the types of prevalent disabilities, and the ways that children with disabilities have access to education –if any. some brief mention in the esp about children with exceptionalities can be found in the section that describes the causes of illiteracy in the province under the paragraph titled ‘physical disability’ (dept. of e&se education, government of kp, 2012): ‘though authentic data of such dropout does not exist yet instances are not uncommon that physical disability such as malnutrition and weak eyesight are some of the causes of dropout. parents and teachers instead of realizing such physical disability resort to corporal punishment. fortunately now there is growing awareness among the parents. teachers are also sensitized during the training’ (p.70). moreover, the esp makes no mention about specific ways to include children with disabilities in the classroom and it does not address any of the issues that concern the education assessment practices that are necessary when assessing children with exceptionalities (e.g. providing accommodations and modifications to accurately evaluate their learning). similarly, there is no elaboration on ways of modifying the curriculum, instruction, and assessment to meet the needs of cultural and religious minority children and of those who live in remote and rural areas and have limited access to school due to distance and other safety factors. according to kp’s education sector plan (2012): [the] 18th amendment has provided an opportunity to embrace far greater diversity in what the provinces can do than ever before …[including the]…liberty to embrace diversity, by reviewing and renewing both the curriculum and the medium of instruction to make them more relevant and support (rather than hinder) the encouragement of learning…[therefore]…regional languages are being introduced (p. 48). a first positive step, in meeting the needs of clde students had started with heightened sensitivity to linguistic minority children and the implications of using their mother tongue as language of instruction in schools. in 2011, the government of kp passed the mother tongue education bill which called for introduction of mother tongue instruction in the schools. with the support of development partners, local communities, religious leaders, linguists and language experts, poets, writers, educators and other stakeholders, the government had begun an effort to standardize the alphabets of the province’s minority languages and pave the road for the bill’s implementation (gouleta, 2013). the issue of assessment with regard to the mother tongue of the students and the implications that this has to accurately measuring student learning had not been specifically discussed. educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 33 despite the very positive movement towards the promotion of mother tongue instruction in 2011, the province has recently developed a language policy –following punjab’s english language initiative (eli) to use english as the medium of instruction. although such political decisions can be popular among education stakeholders including parents, the implications for the education clde children can be disastrous as this is a language that the vast majority of the students and teachers do not speak or understand adequately if any at all. with regard to girls’ education, the government of kp with the support of donors and development partners has initiated several programs and pilot projects to help improve their education opportunities as well as the provision of quality education for rural, poor, and marginalized children. initiatives include the elementary education foundation (eef), a private public partnership established in 2002 to increase enrollment in basic education and the frontier education foundation (fef) established in 1992 to support education initiatives and infrastructure. eef has established about 200 schools, three model schools, and 67,850 learning centers which help reach those in rural and minority areas and give a second chance to education to those who are not of school age any more. other initiatives include the rokhana pakhtunkhwa taleemi programme (2011-12) which focused on the provision of quality education in rural areas by strengthening the private sector, providing financial assistance to parents to send their children to school, creating more jobs for people in those areas, and enhancing community participation (department of elementary and secondary education, government of kp, 2012, p. 22). along similar lines, the stoori da pakhtunkhwa programme supports secondary talented students who come from marginalized segments of the society to study in the disciplines of science and the arts with monthly scholarships (p.22). in addition to government initiatives, donors, development partners, nongovernmental organizations (ngos) and civil society organizations (csos) have developed pilot literacy programs across the province that can inform future initiatives from lessons learned. one example is the literacy boost (lb) project (2009-2010) developed by save the children in kps’ battagram district, allai, tehsil. the project focused on reading interventions, assessment, and working with teachers and the communities to improve children’s literacy skills. with respect to assessment, it was centered around using assessments to evaluate the five core reading skills (i.e. phonemic awareness, phonics and spelling, comprehension, fluency, and vocabulary) in both pashto (the home language of the children) and urdu (the language of instruction). the project involved 10 experimental school sites and 5 comparison schools. results revealed that although the 10 lb schools started significantly lower compared to the control sites (five schools), they outerperformed them in all reading skills and the numbers on the non-readers significantly dropped (67% versus 36% their comparison peers). in addition, the project was proven especially beneficial for girls increasing significantly both their reading skills and learning outcomes. teachers reported learning a lot of instructional and assessment strategies on how to support children’s literacy skills, and parents reported great satisfaction with the program and that they were now able to participate and get involved in their children’s learning. (save the children, 2011). this early literacy project is a good example of how 34 global education review 2(4) systematic and focused instruction and assessment practices that inform instruction along with teacher professional development and parental involvement can help improve young children’s biliteracy skills. discussion and recommendations in support of the province’s efforts to better design, administer, and evaluate educational assessments certain elements need to be in place or become stronger. one essential element is the provision of extensive quality teacher professional development on instructional and assessment methodologies for all students including clde children and children with special circumstances such as living in poverty or in rural and remote areas. in designing, administering and evaluating learning assessments in kp’s primary and secondary classrooms, teachers, head teachers, and school administrators must be knowledgeable and skillful to apply current research-based practices and be fluent in developing and carrying out both formative and summative assessments. technical assistance provided by donors and development partners can specifically aid in teacher professional development through the creation of sound teacher training programs on continuous assessment practices; dissemination of teacher guides for assessment in every school; and expansion of the teacher-mentoring program in all districts of the province by involving the head-teachers in the process of ongoing assessment. at the local level, technical assistance can enable parents and community members to be active participants in the process of assessment. collaboration among the regional institutes for teacher education (rites) can contribute to the professional development of preand in-service teachers and bring teachers’ unions on board as important players for policy development and implementation. another area of importance is the alignment between the curriculum, textbooks, and actual lessons taking place in the classroom with the assessments. so far, although the national curriculum of 2006 has been adopted by the province, only 50% of the textbooks are actually aligned and the availability of teacher curriculum guides is very limited. moreover, curricula that are taught in private schools and the deeni madaris may not follow the national curriculum. thus, there is no uniformity in the content the students are exposed to across the province. considering the variation in the curricula, creating uniform or standardized assessments will not work well because the field will not be leveled for all students. starting assessment cycles in smaller scales -for example at the tehsil or district levelwhile simultaneously training the teachers and trying to bring the textbook-curriculum alignment up to speed may be a better approach to begin assessing student learning outcomes. using oral assessments that examine the five main components of reading for young children preferably in their mother tongue and the language of instruction -similarly to the literacy boost pilot project mentioned above may be beneficial to inform instruction and determine the literacy levels of children early on to allow time and room for improvement. the esp of the province calls for teacher student ratio reduction and if implemented, it will be extremely beneficial especially in the early grades where young children are learning to read and write and obtain their first numeracy skills. in these grades oral assessment is recommended and by maintaining a low number of students in class, teachers can better teach and evaluate their young learners. young children’s literacy skills must be assessed and these measures should be educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 35 developmentally, culturally, linguistically, and contextually appropriate for the diverse districts in kp. a rendition of the early grade assessment (egra) (research triangle institute, 2015) which was piloted in the literacy boost intervention gave insight to expectations for the later schooling years and provided a model of an assessment that can be accessible to the entire province (save the children, 2011). an early numeracy assessment –early grade math assessment (egma) typecan be used to assess young children’s math skills and inform instruction for improvement (united states agency for international development, 2009). peac with the support of donors and development partners has already started piloting an early grade assessment recently at the end of third grade measuring second grade student learning outcomes. given however the great diversity of the student body in kp, it is imperative that the assessment takes in consideration the various student subgroups and incorporates accommodations and adaptions when implemented accordingly. efforts that help create a system of accountability in which districts, schools and teachers are held accountable for students’ achievement from the early years of formal education are necessary. such accountability could be supported with rewards for achievement and disciplinary processes to aid failing schools and/or districts. if assessment is implemented with particular relevance to kp, students who perform well on early grade reading and math measures will be less likely to drop out or fail school. in order, however, to effectively implement early grade literacy assessment in kp, it would be important to pilot the instrument chosen in an array of kp districts to ensure its validity and reliability given the culturally and linguistically diverse population of the province. along the same lines, it is imperative that the new english language policy which calls for using english as the medium of instruction in kp’s schools is seriously reconsidered and modified. children –and especially underprivileged childrenwhose mother tongue is different from the language of instruction fall behind in both the content areas and in english and they are more likely to drop out of school. young children must be instructed in a language they speak and understand in order to develop cognitively and achieve academically. and teachers need to teach in a language they speak and understand in order to teach effectively. one important recommendation for donors and development partners is to provide technical assistance to the provincial government and develop a communication strategy to inform policy makers, parents, the public, and the education stakeholder community in general about the detrimental effects of such policies on children’s learning. assessment in kp must be continuous and inform instruction. as the esp supports, assessment should not be used only for proxy measures such as promotion or retention purposes. such measures have shown to be more costly than employing additional resources to help students perform on grade level (patrinos and velez, 2009). funneling some of these resources into proper assessment measures and training for educators may be proven useful for kp’s education sector as a whole. although important and beneficial, on-going classroom assessment at the higher grades is very difficult to implement under current conditions especially in classrooms with high studentteacher ratios and in multi-level classes. anecdotal evidence reveals that there are schools in kp (and in particular girls’ schools) with enormous numbers of students and only few teachers to teach. in addition, about 45% of the government schools have teachers who are 36 global education review 2(4) responsible for multi-level classes (annual status of education report, 2012). considering the high teacher-student ratio in many kp schools and the multi-level classrooms, new innovative assessment strategies must be piloted to provide additional support in addition to teacher professional development. strategies to be considered may include: 1) training parents and members of the community as teaching assistants; 2) using coteaching effectively during the times of orally administered early grade assessment (one teacher can teach the class while a co-teacher can pull out of the classroom children for testing); and 3) implementing school-to-school support (partnering two neighboring schools and their teachers together to support each other during testing time). by reaching out to the community, parents, and education stakeholders for support allows educational assessment efforts to be holistic and inclusive, rather than operating in a silo. it is also vital to develop a comprehensive standardized, criterion referenced, learning achievement test in subjects such as language (urdu, pashtu, or other depending on the language of instruction), mathematics, science, and social studies for primary and secondary students. and peac has recently developed such instruments for grades one through five–excluding measuring social studies achievement. this set of standardized assessments based on the curriculum –if used effectively-can produce results that can again, inform instruction and allow for district, school, and teacher accountability with regard to student achievement. in creating a sound assessment system, it is recommended to also examine international large-scale exams such as the program for international student assessment (pisa), trends in international mathematics and science study (timms), and progress in international reading literacy study (pirls) as examples of how a standardized assessment encompasses a diverse population (national center for education statistics, 2012). additionally, these assessments provide an international context of what is being studied and tested across the globe at different stages of schooling and will help highlight specific skill sets per grade level. another assessment type example that can be examined in developing instruments for kp students is the new international assessment initiative co-sponsored by unesco’s institute of statistics and the brookings institute, called the learning metrics task force (lmtf). lmtf intends to examine student learning in many countries including developing and emerging countries as opposed to pirls, timms, and pisa which are tailored and priced for developed countries. thus the main focus of this initiative ‘is to catalyze a shift in the global conversation on education from a focus on access to access plus learning’ and to inform a global perspective on assessing learning outcomes (learning metrics task force, 2013). the aim is to measure data that bring in all voices from an array of countries to help us better understand what type of learning is important at the global level, and how these data can help inform us, as a world-community, in better providing education for all. using assessment data to inform instruction and system wide evaluation is critical. kp needs to develop an independent system for data collection, analysis, interpretation, reporting, monitoring, and evaluation of educational assessments. the current monitoring and evaluation system named independent monitoring unit operates under the auspices of the provincial ministry of education and therefore it is not as independent as a third party system would be. while such a system is being developed, data must continue to be collected from all schools in the province. educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa 37 moreover, a new assessment data collection system must be based on sound practices. a good example of such structure is the saber data quality assessment framework (dqaf) for education statistics to which assessment data must have (the world bank, 2014): i. prerequisites for quality: statistical systems should be based on adherence to the principle of objectivity in the collection, processing and dissemination; and ii. other aspects of data quality: integrity, methodological soundness, accuracy and reliability, serviceability, and accessibility. without a truly independent and reliable assessment system based on a quality framework, learning, monitoring, and evaluation practices cannot be carried out with accuracy and efficiency, which may lead the education system in kp not having a true chance for a fair and accurate evaluation and the opportunity to further improve. consequently, children in kp will not have a chance to participate in a fair and effective assessment processes and teachers and education stakeholders will not be held accountable in a fair and just manner. in order to maintain efficient and reliable assessments for all children of kp, the government of the province and its education stakeholders must consider an approach that embraces the communities and yields results that hold teachers, schools, and district education officers accountable for student achievement while considering the backgrounds of the students and incentivizing the teachers to improve the quality of teaching and learning. underutilization of assessment centers, politically appointed individuals in the training institutes, and little to no feedback with the assessments often create major barriers and obstacles in measuring learning in kp’s classrooms. this is especially crucial in rural areas where the majority of families whose children attend public schools have very limited power in the decision making process of implementing any type of assessment and typically have less developed assessment systems than urban centers in the province. conclusion there is no doubt that kp faces more challenges and hardships on a daily basis than most of its provincial counterparts. dealing with poverty, fragility, and constant conflict has played a factor on hindering effective implementation of any education component. additionally, given the socio-economic, urban versus rural, the linguistic and cultural diversity in the province, the children of kp are not offered a fair opportunity for quality instruction and assessment in which their learning can be measured. it is imperative that (gouleta, 2013): ‘the education of culturally and linguistically diverse children must be considered from a holistic point of view, actively involving parents, families and communities, all in the context of pakistan’s sociocultural, ethnic, economic, and political complexity as well as the security situation in the country’ (p. 3). it is easier to create an assessment plan but much more difficult to implement it and ensure that all stakeholders understand its processes. creating an assessment plan that involves consultation with education stakeholders, using assessments that are valid, reliable, and motherlanguage friendly that take in consideration student disabilities and special abilities is critical. by employing strong technical assistance and coordinating with donors, teachers’ unions, ptcs, communities and the government to strengthen and expand collaborative systems (e.g. peac, bise) in all kp districts, the assessment system can become more de-centralized and better meet the diverse needs of learners in kp. 38 global education review 2(4) when it comes to a complex issue such as the improvement of educational assessment in a province with so many challenges, like kp, understanding the whole helps to understand its parts. recognizing existing governmental structures can provide insights on how power and resources in the educational sector are distributed. such knowledge may reveal special interests, incentives and institutions that have the power to enable and/or hinder change in education. lessons from the case of kp can be useful for other countries with similar needs, challenges, and strengths, which try to develop sound assessment systems. in particular, federal countries with national oversight and provincial executive power on education can benefit from kp’s example and efforts to assess student learning outcomes effectively. there is no doubt that despite the obstacles, kp will continue improving its educational system because there are both will and commitment by its government, its education stakeholders and development partners and most importantly by its resilient, enduring, and determined people. the hope of this author is that the province will carefully consider developing a sound educational assessment plan tailored to the needs of its diverse students and that it will continue making progress in its assessment data management and monitoring system to improve the quality of its education system. note support for this research was provided by the u.k. department for international development; hamid naveed khan, former deputy director coordination, education sector reforms unit, elementary & secondary education department, government of khyber pakhtunkhwa; sydney merz, george mason university. references aftab, n. 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(2013). country operations profile-pakistan. retrieved from: http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e487016.html united states agency for international development (usaid) (2009). early grade mathematics assessment (egma): a conceptual framework based on math skills development in children. report prepared by andrea reubens and louis crouch of research triangle international (rti): washington, dc. walvoord, b. e. (2004). assessment clear and simple: a practical guide for institutions, departments, and general education. fan francisco, ca: jossey-bass. about the author eirini gouleta, edd, is an associate professor at the department of educational and social policy at the university of macedonia (uom) in thessaloniki, greece. she previously held faculty positions in the united states at george mason university in fairfax, va and at trinity university in washington, dc. dr. gouleta served as a senior education adviser for the uk department for international development in pakistan and has consulted for and collaborated with international development organizations and agencies. her scholarly research focuses on international education development including education policy and reform; language of instruction, esl/efl, mother tongue based, bilingual/multilingual/multicultural and special education; girls’ education; curriculum development; assessment, teacher education; and counseling. http://www.iea.nl/iccs_2009.html http://www.nwu.ac.za/webfm_send/58399 http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pisa http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/pirls http://nces.ed.gov/surveys/timss http://www-01.sil.org/asia/ldc/parallel_papers/tariq_rahman.pdf http://www-01.sil.org/asia/ldc/parallel_papers/tariq_rahman.pdf http://www-01.sil.org/asia/ldc/parallel_papers/tariq_rahman.pdf https://www.eddataglobal.org/reading/index.cfm http://www.worldbank.org/projects/p077288/national-education-assessment-system?lang=en http://www.worldbank.org/projects/p077288/national-education-assessment-system?lang=en http://wbgfiles.worldbank.org/documents/hdn/ed/saber/supporting_doc/background/emis/framework_saber-emis.pdf http://wbgfiles.worldbank.org/documents/hdn/ed/saber/supporting_doc/background/emis/framework_saber-emis.pdf http://wbgfiles.worldbank.org/documents/hdn/ed/saber/supporting_doc/background/emis/framework_saber-emis.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/271/hdr_2011_en_complete.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/reports/271/hdr_2011_en_complete.pdf http://www.uis.unesco.org/library/documents/out%20of%20school%20adol_en.pdf http://www.uis.unesco.org/library/documents/out%20of%20school%20adol_en.pdf http://www.unhcr.org/pages/49e487016.html educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa-ger submission with revisions 7-24-15-1 formatted ready to publishpage 1 educational assessment in khyber pakhtunkhwa-ger submission with revisions 7-24-15-1 formatted ready to publishno footer the global context of disability 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lang, christine o’rourke, vallice, roseanne levy (2016). the global context of disability. global education review, 3 (3). 1-3. the global context of disability christine o'rourke-lang mercy college roseanne vallice levy mercy college there is no one definition of inclusion in education that fully captures its meaning for individuals with disabilities. however, inclusion is not a “place,” but a philosophy and practice of affording individuals with disabilities the full range of services and resources needed to access an appropriate education such that they make substantial gains in their lives and contribute meaningfully to society. unfortunately, the reality is that disparate opportunities exist for individuals with disabilities across the world. this issue of global education review examines the global context of disability and how in different geographic locations, socioeconomic factors, domestic policy, and disability perspectives impact access to special education services, and the types of resources and interventions available to individuals with diverse learning needs. practices in countries including india, singapore, south korea, hong kong, el salvador, ethiopia, liberia, and kenya were studied and implications for meeting the special education needs for children and adults with disabilities and their families are discussed. in from rights to realities: confronting the challenge of educating persons with disabilities in developing countries, paula j. beckman, nicole abera, thomas sabella, kimberly podzimek and lenisa joseph examine the disconnect between national policies for inclusion and the proportion of individuals with disabilities who are out of school in developing countries. global poverty, among other factors, was cited as one of the primary barriers to accessing special education services in el salvador, ethiopia, and liberia. recommendations for improving conditions for individuals with disabilities such as increased awareness, acceptance, and support, along with accessibility and more functional training were discussed. zachary walker and shobana musti-rao also examined the challenges of fostering inclusion for individuals with disabilities in inclusion in high-achieving singapore: challenges of building an inclusive society in policy and practice. however, as opposed to the poverty-stricken conditions associated with the lack of access to services described by beckman and colleagues, walker and musti-rao identified the same exclusionary practices in singapore, where resources were much more readily available. despite being a high achieving society, the implementation of the nation’s vision for inclusion has been poorly executed according to the authors. the article provides ______________________________ corresponding author: christine o'rourke-lang, mercy college school of education, 555 boadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: clang@mercy.edu 2 global education review 3(3) recommendations for shifting policy into practice in singapore. barriers to inclusion, and access to needed special education services among individuals with disabilities, are also discussed by sandra limaye in her manuscript, factors influencing the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india. limaye explores the challenges in the infrastructure of the educational system in india, parents’ abilities to support their children with special needs, and the overall attitude of society in india towards disability. limaye reported that just 9% of students from a total number of 164.5 million children with disabilities had completed nine or more years of schooling, indicating extremely high dropout rates for high-school students. according to limaye, this trend, combined with lack of vocational training for persons with disabilities in india serves to perpetuate the cycle of poverty and create a greater risk of exclusion from society for persons with disabilities. in career development for youth with disabilities in south korea: the intersection of culture, theory, and policy, jina chun, annemarie connor, john f. kosciulek, trenton landon, and jinhee park also examine the experiences of individuals with disabilities transitioning into young adulthood. while the authors discuss underlying factors that contribute to barriers to school and services for students with disabilities in south korea, they also provide strategies for enhancing career path opportunities in order to facilitate future employment success. investigating the experiences of individuals with disabilities beyond secondary school, melinda eichorn’s qualitative study, haunted by math, the impact of policy and practice on students with math learning disabilities in the transition to post-secondary education in mumbai, india, highlights how the special education practices and policies in mumbai, india do not adequately prepare students for post-secondary success in their paths to earning a college degree. eichhorn’s participants were diagnosed with math learning disabilities, and she specifically looks at the lack of instruction received towards acquiring the prerequisite skills needed to complete college level math courses. policy and practice implications, as well as interventions for high school and post-secondary students, are discussed. specific skills of students with disabilities were also examined by jeremy h. greenberg, wendy lau, and sandy lau in their experimental study, teaching appropriate play to replace stereotypy using a treatment package with students having autism. in this article, the authors investigated the effectiveness of a treatment package to decrease stereotypic behaviors in children with autism spectrum disorder through teaching appropriate play skills. children with asd tend to have limited communities of reinforcers, and the study shows how teaching children to appropriately engage in an activity, such as painting, can function to assist in expanding play repertoires and decrease stereotypy. through this piece, we learn about the success that can be achieved when students with disabilities gain the access they need to high quality, evidence based services. alyson krupar’s article, being untaught: how ngo field workers empower parents of children with disabilities in dadaab, provides further evidence how attainment of goals can occur for individuals with disabilities following the implementation of effective interventions. in this article, krupar examines the role of family members of individuals with disabilities in a refugee camp in dabaab, india, and their abilities to support their children’s needs and rights to attend school. finally, maryam dalkilic and jennifer a. vadeboncoeur’s article, re-framing inclusive education through the capability approach: the global context of disability 3 an elaboration of the model of relational inclusion ties the theme in this issue together by examining various disability perspectives. the highlight of this piece is the authors’ framework for a theory of “relational inclusion” which focuses on “differences rather than deficits.” policy and resource recommendations are provided for supporting the enhancement of the capabilities of individuals with disabilities. overall, the articles presented in this issue of global education review bring forth the struggles and successes faced by families and individuals affected by disabilities, and the role played by circumstances such as poverty, governmental infrastructure, inaccessibility, exclusionary attitudes, family awareness, and the capabilities of diverse learners themselves. findings from the research, and theories presented in the articles serve to inform the direction of global policies and practices to provide opportunities for individuals with disabilities, to access educational resources and services to the maximum extent possible, and to participate fully in educational environments and society at large. about the author(s) christine o'rourke-lang, phd, is the chairperson of the special education department at mercy college. she received her phd in behavior analysis from columbia university, has been a board certified behavior analyst for over 10 years, and is also a new york state licensed behavior analyst and certified special education teacher. she teaches graduate level courses within special education and in applied behavior analysis. she has also taught within early childhood and childhood settings for children with special needs. her concentration within special education focuses on teaching students with autism spectrum disorder. her research interests involve examining social skill repertoires in children with disabilities as well as behavior management strategies for students at risk. roseanne vallice levy, phd, is currently serving as the interim associate dean for academic affairs for the school of education at mercy college. she is an assistant professor in the department of special education. her current areas of research include teacher preparation with an emphasis in secondary education; examining the beginning teaching experiences of special education teachers; and the digital age and its impact on pre-service/in-service teachers and k-12 students. she is certified in special education and social studies and has taught in the special class and co-teach settings. prior to coming to mercy college, she taught for several years at the secondary level. she is certified in special education and social studies and has taught in the special class and co-teach settings. the importance of play in early childhood education 75 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: faas, stefan; wu, shu-chen & geiger, steffen (2017). the importance of play in early childhood education: a critical perspective on current policies and practices in germany and hong kong. global education review, 4 (2), 75-91. the importance of play in early childhood education: a critical perspective on current policies and practices in germany and hong kong stefan faas university of education, schwäbisch gmünd shu-chen wu the education university of hong kong steffen geiger university of education, schwäbisch gmünd abstract in order to reflect international reform movements in a systemand culture-comparative perspective, the following article investigates the early childhood education systems in germany and in hong kong, with reference to the respective social and educational roots, pedagogical development lines, and basic educational approaches. in addition, current developments, policies, and practices are described. the basic structural requirements of the respective systems will be presented, and the different reviews and implementation of international developments in germany and hong kong will be explained. special emphasis is placed on the importance of play in early childhood education. in this context, a current qualitative study of the authors is presented, which examines different perspectives on learning at play. the results of this exploratory study show that the interpretations and discussions of international reform approaches in different cultural settings are sometimes very different. the statements of the german and chinese participants indicate that international developments are assessed primarily in the context of national educational traditions and structures. against this backdrop, it is assumed that international reform movements—despite some assimilations—will have different effects in national education systems. keywords early childhood education, importance of play, international reform movement, cultural comparison introduction under the influence of globalization, education systems—from early childhood education to higher education—have been under enormous pressure to reform. many countries undergoing educational reforms have referred to international research findings and trends to create new pedagogy to meet those trends. some new approaches, such as results-oriented teaching and learning, as well as learning based on prescribed standards, especially in literacy, numeracy, and science, have been increasingly applied, despite objections and resistance to them (hargreaves, earl, moore, & manning, 2001; hargreaves & shirley, 2011; ramberg, 2014). many of these strategies and developments are similar in principle (gogolin, baumert & scheunpflug, 2011), and they ______________________________ corresponding author: stefan faas, university of education, oberbettringer straße 200, 73525 schwäbisch gmünd, germany email: stefan.faas@ph-gmuend.de 76 global education review 4(2) can be summarized as general aspects of international education reform movements. particularly in the area of early childhood education, controversies about the nature of the reform have been observed. the debate in many countries has focused on the question of what children should do in kindergarten (rossbach, 2008; faas, 2016) or on the question of what are appropriate goals for children’s day-care centers (dahlberg, moss, & pence, 1999). the overall direction and thrust of this discussion has been binary. on one hand, the focus was on the specific acquisition of certain abilities and skills in appropriately arranged learning settings, on the other hand, the support of participation, exploration, and self-initiated learning of children was brought to the fore (katz, 1999). in terms of institutions, the discussion has referred to educational institutions of early childhood as places of school preparation and also spaces of play, learning and social integration, based on the individual needs of children. dahlberg, moss, and pence (1999, p. 63) critically described the social construction of early pedagogical institutions as producers “of care and of standardized and predetermined child outcomes” and as reproducers “of knowledge, identity and culture”; in this view, kindergartens enhance “children’s development and preparation for compulsory schooling which includes starting school ‘ready to learn’”. the authors also pointed out that early childhood educational institutions, on the other hand, can be also viewed as forums in civil society, with reference to the reggio emilia approach (see gandini, 1993; abbott & nutbrown, 2001). this debate is still relevant today in current international discourse about the further development of national education systems, which are becoming increasingly more similar. pasi sahlberg (2011), a finnish pedagogue, considered this controversy within the framework of an international reform movement, with particular reference to the school; in his opinion, the focus of education policy has shifted from structural reforms to improvement in education outcomes. this trend has been fostered through the strategies of private foundations, consulting firms, and transnational organizations (e.g., in industrial states, the organization for economic cooperation and development, oecd). the strategies of such institutions have influenced the education policies of nation states with the aim of improving the quality of education systems and practices. according to sahlberg (2015), there are five main types of reform: (1) competition between educational institutions; (2) standardization and common criteria for measurement in the educational context; (3) a focus on teaching subjects such as literacy, numeracy, and natural science; (4) test-based accountability; and (5) free school choice. all of these types are aimed at improving the performance of children, as well as the approximation of national education systems and forms of learning, and ultimately bringing about changes in practices. these changes are mainly reflected in a stronger orientation toward learning outcomes and a stronger integration of classroom assessment, which has also been critically referred to as “teaching for the test” (amos, 2011, p. 330). from the underlying perspective, the approaches and strategies aforementioned are a normative basis for national education systems, but they also contrast in terms of current developments, which in the case of this article are viewed in system and culture-comparative considerations between germany and hong kong. the assumption has been that international reform movements are adapting to education systems and will always be integrated in a cultural-specific context (stromquist & monkman, 2014). the implication is that international reform movements meet with specific pedagogical traditions and roots, which are then interpreted, assessed, and integrated differently, which has had different effects on national education systems. this article will first describe the early childhood education system in germany and then in hong kong, with reference to historical analyses and current statistical data. next, the social and educational roots, the pedagogical development lines and basic educational approaches, and the importance of play in early childhood education 77 current developments, policies, and practices in the context of international reform movements will be examined and discussed. then, the basic structural requirements of the respective systems will be presented; and the different appraisals and implementation of international developments in germany and hong kong will be explained, with regard to the importance of play in early childhood education and reference to a current qualitative study by the authors. this aspect is interesting because the question of what children are supposed to do in kindergarten touches on the question of the role of (free) play for children in early childhood education, and the importance of play in germany and hong kong is traditionally very different. finally, the article will end with a summary and conclusion. early childhood education and care in germany social and educational roots as in other european countries, the emergence of children’s day-care centers in germany has been closely linked to the difficult social situation of mass poverty at the beginning of the nineteenth century. the establishment of public early childhood education institutions aimed to assist poor families by allowing all employable family members to be employed while avoiding accidents among unsupervised children, thereby helping to stabilize household income. the innovation also prepared children for their future poor living situation by means of specific educational measures (erning, 1987). against this background, children’s day-care centers in germany developed first as “emergency facilities” mainly supported financially by ecclesiastical organizations. their main focus was on the welfare of children and families, and the primary concern was the supervision and care of children (erning, 2004; reyer, 2006a). a counterpoint to this utilitarian model was the approach of friedrich froebel (1782– 1852). the starting point for froebel’s conception of early childhood education was as an independent educational task for pedagogical work with young children, and not the care of otherwise unattended children. the didactics and the methodical approach did not simply follow the school model, although froebel paid attention to the question of how early childlike and scholastic education processes could be coordinated. the central reference points of this approach were the children’s activities and their play as the preferred medium of learning (froebel, 1839/1982). from this perspective, the support of children’s play and the pedagogical accompaniment of childlike educational processes by adults represented important elements of pedagogy. on the one hand, the situational aspects of “free play” were taken up and passed on (e.g., in terms of basic experiences); on the other hand, it also involved providing specific activities (e.g., finger games, exercise games, gardening), didactic materials, and specific defined topics and contents (heiland, 2003). child care in an education-related setting was the framework within which the development and differentiation of the preschool in germany took place. at the beginning of the twentieth century, the discussions in this area led to intensive efforts to assign kindergarten as an education system according to froebel’s pedagogical concept which made attendance at these institutions compulsory for all children. at that time, the predominant view was that the education of young children could only be achieved in the immediate vicinity of their mother (reyer, 2006a), so children’s day-care centers were not the rule but rather the exception to be used in an emergency situation for the purpose of social welfare. in the context of social legislation (reichsjugendwohlfahrtsgesetz), which was enacted in 1922 and implemented in 1924, a conclusion was reached in this debate about the legal and administrative position of early childhood education for youth welfare. children’s day-care centers were thus strengthened in their care function and recognized as an independent institution (reyer, 1987). this assignment to the child and youth welfare sector, which still exists today, has shaped the field of early childhood education and care in germany. at the same 78 global education review 4(2) time, the training of staff for day-care centers in germany was uniformly regulated. while the pathways were very different then, a two-year full-time training course was introduced in 1928 (derschau, 1987). development lines and basic educational approaches due to the division of germany after the second world war, the kindergarten system developed in different directions for almost half a century. there were two models of preschool education, and each absorbed the ideas of social welfare and education in different ways. in east germany and the later german democratic republic (gdr), the idea of early learning as a contribution to popular education, and the goal of integrating as many mothers as possible into the work force , were equally important reasons for institutional early childhood education. kindergarten was considered to be the lowest level of schooling and was administratively assigned to the ministry of national education. day-care centers were run under municipal or company management; and for the parents the care and upbringing of the children, apart from a small contribution for meals, was free of charge. early on, there was a quantitative expansion of day-care centers and the establishment of fullday nursing care. by 1975, the attendance rate was over 90% (reyer, 2006b; rossbach, 2005). in west germany, children’s day care was linked directly to the pre-war situation. kindergartens became again part of the child and youth welfare system, with an emphasis on the care and supervision of children (erning, 1997). the daycare centers were predominantly non-profit private, with the church related institutions dominating. the attendance rate, however, remained below 50% until the 1970s in west germany (reyer, 1987). in both east germany and west germany, the training of staff for children’s day-care centers was similar. in both german states, the training courses were housed in specialized schools for social pedagogy, which did not have the same status as academic colleges. the program took three years to complete and included both theoretical subjects and guided practice (liegle, 1990). a rethinking and reevaluation of kindergarten as an educational institution took place in the federal republic of germany in the 1960s within the framework of the discussion on social qualification requirements, equal opportunities, and self-determination in a democratic society. kindergarten was thus decoupled from the family situation, which was regarded as an emergency situation, and evolved into a family-supported educational institution for all children between the ages of three and six years old. in this context, there was a considerable increase in the number of available child-care places in the 1970s and 1980s, as well as an intensive examination of the content and methodical work in preschool institutions. new curricula and didactic approaches were introduced and tested, such as the functionoriented, discipline-oriented, and situationoriented approaches (konrad, 2004; neumann, 1987). the function-oriented approaches were based on “psychic functions” (e.g., perception, thought, creativity, and language). these were considered fundamental for development and education, and for the successful management of social requirements. in this context, the assumption was that the development of these psychological functions was encouraged and supported by regular, isolated practice. correspondingly, training sessions and training units were developed for children’s day-care facilities. in this respect, the function-oriented approaches—with respect to pedagogical forms of instruction—were directed primarily toward promotion and support of children’s learning in order to help them to acquire certain skills and abilities (rossbach, 2005). the discipline-oriented approaches, on the other hand, were based on the structure of different topics and underlying scientific disciplines. the basic assumption was that a system of ordered knowledge was also suitable for pedagogical work in kindergarten in order to systematize the children’s experiences. there was also an age-appropriate didactic mediation of elementary scientific concepts and principles in different areas of knowledge (e.g., mathematical quantities in mathematics) so that the importance of play in early childhood education 79 subsequent levels of education could build upon them. this explicitly addressed the aspect of preparation for school (rossbach, 2005). the discipline-oriented approaches included the demonstration, explanation, and joint elaboration of area-specific topics (treml, 2000). due to their focus on working with practice material, an emphasis on school preparation, and a lack of orientation on the current life situations of children, etc., the function-oriented approaches and the discipline-oriented approaches were strongly criticized from the outset. by the 1970s, the situation-oriented approaches, which did not originate from content to be conveyed but rather from real-life situations, emerged as an alternative approach. with situation-oriented approaches, children acquired competencies that would help them to meet current and future situations. subjective-oriented learning did not take place in isolation, but was always integrated into a concrete context of social applications and relevant everyday situations (rossbach, 2008). for example, dealing with mathematical quantities was not practiced with specific learning units, but instead tested in relevant everyday situations such as shopping, or when playing. the focus was on the support of children in life-related learning opportunities in terms of situation-based learning. with the situation-oriented approaches and their dominant position in practice—in contrast to the function-oriented and discipline-oriented approaches—germany had taken a path which was criticized because it meant a decoupling of germany from international developments (rossbach 2005). with regard to current educational developments, it is implicit that this particular path favors a critical analysis of international reform movements both in disciplinary discourse and in practice, often by referring to the pedagogical traditions in germany (willekens, scheiwe, & nawrotzki 2015). in the further discussion, we will again take up this aspect. current developments, policies, and practices as already indicated above, the situationoriented approaches have shaped pedagogical work in children’s day-care centers in germany in recent decades. the orientation to the life-world of children, with an emphasis on social learning and learning in free play, developed into the general guiding principles of pedagogy in early childhood education. since the mid-1990s, however, this one-sided situational orientation has been increasingly criticized, supported by the results of various school-related comparative studies, such as the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) (baumert et al., 1997) and the programme for international student assessment (pisa) study (baumert et al., 2001). the latter study, in particular, has grown in importance because in comparison to pupils from other oecd countries: (1) german pupils were only mediocre with regard to average reading; (2) the proportion of german pupils leaving school without basic competencies in the areas of reading, mathematics, and natural sciences was comparatively high; (3) the difference between the lowest and highest grades was particularly high; and (4) within germany, there were great differences in the performance of pupils from different social groups, in particular between pupils with and without a migration background (waldow, 2009, p. 476). these results, which were perceived by the german public as “pisa-shock” (gruber, 2006), stimulated a discussion about the education system and led to education reforms in germany in the following years, especially in the field of early childhood education. because germany refused to participate in corresponding longitudinal studies from the early 1970s to the 1990s, the german public was not prepared for these results, which left them surprised and shaken (waldow, 2009). on the other hand, the results of the study were accompanied by a scientific debate in which the quality of the education system and, 80 global education review 4(2) in particular, of kindergarten were increasingly questioned (see tietze, 1998). against this backdrop, the aforementioned criticism of the situation-oriented approach intensified. in particular, the lack of developmental psychological foundations and empirical evaluations, and a decoupling of international developments in this context were questioned. in addition, criticism also focused on conceptual and curricular aspects (e.g., the neglect of cognitive promotion, as well as the decreased assessment of factual learning and its importance in childhood education processes) (rossbach, 2008). in addition, it was argued that the early start of competency development well before the start of schooling, the connection to specific learning areas, and the special importance of early competencies for later learning at school were necessary in order to develop specific competencies in certain areas of education already taking place in kindergarten (sylva et al., 2004). in the following years, extensive reforms took place in the field of german early childhood education, which were linked to various international reform movements: (1) content area curricula was implemented in all 16 federal states in germany in kindergarten focusing on language and literacy, mathematics, and natural sciences, in addition to social learning. this led to a stronger emphasis on area-specific learning in kindergarten, although the concept of holistic and everyday integrated learning was emphasized. in addition, intensive accompaniment of the transition between kindergarten and primary school, close cooperation with parents, and sustainable quality development were defined (standing conference of the ministers for youth affairs & standing conference of the ministers of education and cultural affairs, 2004). in this respect, a certain orientation towards international developments was shown here— the increasing emphasis on literacy, mathematics, and natural science was also described as a central element of international reform movements (sahlberg 2015). nevertheless, aspects which are typical of the german context remained: educational plans and guidelines were not legally binding due to the historically determined anchoring of the early childhood education sector in social legislation, based on the freedom of the organizations, as defined here, to decide on the educational goals and content (diskowski, 2009). (2) changes in practices in children’s daycare centers were also seen. these included, in particular, the intensification and systematization of observation, documentation, and diagnosis of childhood education and development processes (e.g., viernickel & völkel, 2006), the development and implementation of new pedagogic concepts in this context (e.g., laewen & andres, 2007; leu et al., 2007), and a stronger emphasis on specific content areas of education, in particular language and literacy, and scientific and mathematical education. in this context, corresponding specialist didactic concepts and materials were also introduced. in addition, increased cooperation and support of the parents was observed, as well as the introduction of measures of quality development (mischo & fröhlich-gildhoff, 2011). in comparison with international reform movements, it must be taken into account that these changes are not yet equated with a stronger standardization of practice. the individual children's day care facilities also have a great deal of freedom in the choice of methods, observation instruments and concepts of quality development. and in practice, non-standardized procedures are likely to dominate both in the context of observation and documentation as well as in quality development. (3) there was a fundamental further development of the qualifications for early childhood education staff in germany; thus, the teaching content and concepts of the vocational training schools for social pedagogy were significantly changed (mischo & fröhlichgildhoff, 2011). furthermore, in 2004, the first bachelor’s program in early childhood education was launched, as vocational training was no longer adequate to meet the increased requirements in practice (faas, 2013). by 2013, the importance of play in early childhood education 81 67 undergraduate courses at 53 universities and colleges were developed and implemented, some of which were very different in nature. a growing number of master’s degrees has since supplemented this academic qualification in the area of early childhood education. germany was one of the few industrialized countries without specific academic qualifications for working in daycare centers. in 2014, only 5% of all employees in children’s day-care centers had an academic degree, 70% had a degree as an erzieherin (a graduate of a vocational training school for social pedagogy), and 13% had a qualification as a kinderpflegerin (lower level vocational training school). the remaining employees had no specific degree or early childhood education degree (autorengruppe fachkräftebarometer, 2014). in response to these reforms, structural changes are now evident at the level of continuing education and training, as the variety of offers has increased, and there is an increasing focus on competency profiles and quality requirements (müller, faas, & schmidt-hertha, 2016). in addition to the above-mentioned reforms in the german early childhood education system in the last few years, a massive expansion of child day care began in the 2000s—particularly with respect to facilitating a better balance between family and work (rauschenbach, grgic, & meinerteubner, 2016). while in 2007 approximately 89% of the children between three and six years old attended a day-care center, that number increased to 95.3% in 2015. the difference was even larger in the care of children under three years of age: in 2007, only 15.5% of children under three years old attended an appropriate institution, whereas in 2015, 32.9% attended such an institution (ministry of families, 2016; statistisches bundesamt, 2012). in 2015, 33.1% of children’s day-care centers in germany were publicly-owned, 63.9% were non-profit organizations (e.g., churches), and 3% were other independent organizations (i.e., forprofit organizations). this is a peculiarity in germany that has resulted from the history of child care and is responsible for some decoupling from international developments (www.laendermonitor.de). early childhood education and care in hong kong social and educational roots unlike germany, which has a long history of early childhood education, kindergarten education in hong kong emerged beginning in the early twentieth century. at that time there were only a few kindergartens operating in hong kong providing preschool education for children from middle-class families. these kindergartens were sponsored by private or religious organizations (opper, 1992). kindergarten education was not affordable for poor families, so their young children were looked after by older siblings or extended family. before that time, some private primary schools and private tutors also provided formal education for young children from wealthy families. reading and writing were the main tasks for children to learn. some classic texts like sanzijing 三字經 and qianziwen (the thousand character classic, 千字文) were common readings that taught young children to be good people and to live in harmony with others (hsiung, 2000). the texts were embedded with confucian morality (e.g., filial piety and respect for elders) and they were written in triplets or quartets of characters for easy memorization. many of these conventional idioms were recited by chinese parents from generation to generation. however, these child-care settings were not aided and administered by the government at that time. even in the british colonial era the government took a laissezfaire attitude toward kindergarten education, regarding it as a luxury (sweeting, 2004), and thus neglected its development. development lines and basic educational approaches after the second world war, early childhood education expanded because of the influx of a large number of refugees from mainland http://www.laendermonitor.de/ 82 global education review 4(2) china. many refugee parents had to work, and therefore needed kindergartens to take care of their children (wong & rao, 2004). early childhood education was provided to children to prepare them for primary school entrance examinations, which had very few spaces available. in such a milieu, kindergarten education began to resemble formal education, and academic learning was imperative. by 1970, the number of preschools increased dramatically (opper, 1992). this rapid proliferation was affected by the introduction of compulsory and free primary and secondary education in 1971 and 1979 (sub-committee on review of school education, board of education, 1997). nevertheless, regulatory standards for preschool education were not yet established to accommodate the rapid boom of kindergartens. since the 1980s, early childhood education has been publicly observed and nominally administered by the hong kong government, which can be seen in several reports such as the white paper on primary education and pre-primary service (hong kong government, 1981) and a perspective on education in hong kong: report by visiting panel (hong kong government, 1982). since all kindergartens were privately run and were mostly provided by voluntary agencies or private enterprises, some people inevitably regarded them as a business for profit-making. the growth and development of preschool education created a need for the promotion of kindergarten teacher training. however, the government’s attitude toward preschool education was unclear. for example, they questioned the effect and importance of kindergarten education in the education commission report no. 2 (education commission, 1986) and suggested that kindergarten should not be converted into an aided sector. it was not until 1994 that the hong kong government affirmed in its policy address its commitment to improving the quality of early childhood education, although the focus was still on upgrading teachers’ qualifications and training. in the 1980s, the hong kong early childhood education curriculum was a hybrid of eastern and western cultures. it incorporated learning and teaching approaches from european and american societies, such as the thematic approach and the project approach, of which the thematic approach was advocated by the hong kong government (sweeting, 2004). this approach first appeared in the guide to the kindergarten curriculum (curriculum development council, 1984) and was the dominant approach in many kindergartens until recently. the thematic teaching and learning approach referred to the practice of teachers organizing the learning of subject matter around a theme. the teaching themes were closely related to the children’s experiences, and “various ‘subject’ aspects related to these themes [were] taught through individual and group activities” (curriculum development council, 1984, p. 3). however, in practice, the teaching themes were commonly selected by the schools, and they were usually not based on children’s interests and experiences. the early childhood education curriculum was permeated with chinese and confucian values such as conformity and diligence. therefore, drill practices and the printing of chinese and english words were often performed in the classroom, as reported in the quality assurance inspection annual reports from 2000 to 2007 (fung, 2009). it was believed that children learned through such drill practices. children, particularly older ones, often had assignments to complete (e.g., printing chinese characters and english alphabets, counting exercises, etc.). in 1999, the education department—the predecessor of the education bureau (edb) — issued a list of dos and don’ts, which was recently revised (education bureau, 2012). the list states that the lecture form of teaching and drill practices should be avoided; however, these practices still exist. therefore, the child-centered policy has not yet been fully implemented, because it contradicts the traditional cultural beliefs and practices of teacher-directed teaching and learning. requirements to be qualified to teach changed in 2003, when all newly appointed kindergarten teachers were required to possess a qualified kindergarten teacher (qkt) qualification or its equivalent (education and the importance of play in early childhood education 83 manpower bureau, 2002). in the 2001–2002 academic year, the minimum academic entry qualification for kindergarten teacher training was raised from two passes in the hong kong certificate of education examination (including one language subject) to five passes, including both chinese and english (legislative council secretariat, 2005). teachers were trained after the completion of secondary 6 education. to work in kindergartens, teachers had to register with the edb to attain qualified teacher status. as for the qualifications for working in child-care centers (for children 0 to 6 years old), childcare workers were required to complete training courses and register with the social welfare department (swd). kindergarten teachers with a qkt qualification were eligible to register as child-care workers. because the government required kindergarten teachers to have a qkt qualification after 2003, almost all of the teachers were thus trained by 2006/2007. for example, in 2015/2016, 96% of the teachers were trained, of whom 91.2% had a certificate in early childhood education (ece), 4.7% held a qualified kindergarten teacher (qkt) certificate, and 0.1% held a qualified assistant kindergarten teacher (qakt) certificate (education bureau, 2016). a child-centered approach was advocated in the guide to the pre-primary curriculum (curriculum development council, 1996), which stressed the all-around development of children. the performance indicators—for kindergartens (hong kong education department, 2000) also noted that child-centered teaching as an approach should achieve the objectives of constructing knowledge, provoking thinking, developing learning abilities, and fostering positive values and attitudes. in addition, the 2006 guide to the pre-primary curriculum (curriculum development council, 2006) put more emphasis on child-centered learning than any of the previous guides had. particularly, the role of teachers has changed from an authoritarian role to engaging in various roles, such as facilitator, information provider, and learning assessor. however, the early childhood education curriculum in hong kong still tends to be more teacher-centered, in that teaching behaviors are mostly didactic and involve a great deal of structured reading from textbooks and rote memorization of information (chan, 2016). most schools or teachers still established their learning objectives and themes before the semester commenced, and as a result, children’s autonomy, interests, and selfinitiation were found less often in the classroom. each age-segregated class (3 to 4 years old, 4 to 5 years old, and 5 to 6 years old) had about 30 students and two teachers, and the class was usually divided into two groups. whether the instruction was conducted as a whole class or in groups depended on the nature of the activities and space needed. moreover, individual needs were rarely met in such an instruction-oriented classroom. most of the kindergartens used subject-based teaching and learning. english, mandarin, music, computer, and sport were the common subjects, although integrated learning was advocated. in the guide to the kindergarten curriculum (curriculum development council, 1993), an integrated approach was suggested, in which “play,” “learning,” and “care” should be taken into account as a whole in contributing to children’s overall development. politically, hong kong was to meet the international early curriculum development trends, e.g., integrated approach, child-centered, and playful learning approach. however, such a gap between policy and practice created a challenge for practitioners (grieshaber, 2006) because conceptually and practically they were not ready and capable of putting the policy into practice (wu & rao, 2011; wu, 2014). therefore, the child-centered approaches remain unachievable and unattainable objectives. current developments, policies, and practices in chinese culture, play is not traditionally associated with learning. however, the curriculum policy, in the 1984, 1993, 1996, and 2006 curriculum guides, as well as the review 84 global education review 4(2) of the 2006 guide, reiterated and advocated the play-based learning approach, though it was seldom applied in local practice. moreover, the most recent curriculum policy was created in response to local and international practical experiences and research findings from other countries and regions (curriculum development council, 2016). the current version of the guide to the pre-primary curriculum (curriculum development council, 2006) emphasized the role of play in early learning more than earlier versions of the document have. however, a discrepancy between policy and practice has been identified (cheng, 2011). this may be attributed to difficulties in teachers’ understanding or conceptualization of the theories of play and learning or play-based learning, as well as other factors (e.g., school management, transition issues, parents’ concerns and expectations, and cultural expectations and values) (cheng, 2001; cheng & stimpson, 2004; fung & cheng, 2012; wu & rao, 2011). another reason for the decreased consideration of children’s play may be that the provision of early childhood education in hong kong has been heavily influenced by market forces (ho, 2008); in such a highly marketdriven context, parents play a vital role. kindergartens have made great efforts to survive in such a competitive context by meeting parental expectations of academic preparation for primary education. for example, many parents desire schools that give their children more assignments than those that allocate more time for play. therefore, even though teachers may recognize the importance of play, they still hesitate to implement play-based learning because they have to consider the parents’ concerns (wu, 2014), who may regard play and learning as dichotomous and opposites. recently, the curriculum guide, which will be released in 2017, was revised to accommodate to the free quality kindergarten education (curriculum development council, 2016). joyful learning through a play approach is outlined in the review of the 2016 guide to the pre-primary curriculum. as in previous guides, play is considered an instrument for learning. however, in the forthcoming curriculum policy, free play as a context for learning will be advocated for the first time, which is unprecedented; in particular, free exploration in play has been emphasized. in it, it is suggested that teachers provide not less than 30 minutes per day for free play for the half-day program and 50 minutes for the whole-day program. in practice, free play would involve free-choice activities within a scheduled time frame. not all children would have the same amount of time to play freely because only those who finish their assigned tasks quickly would have extra time to play (wu & rao, 2011). the revised curriculum guide provides a clearer guideline on play arrangement than any of the previous guides. however, it may still be a challenge for practitioners to implement play-based learning, particularly when teachers do not associate play with learning, and they conceive and practice them separately (wu, 2014; wu & rao, 2011). the importance of play in germany and hong kong play in different cultural contexts the reforms and developments described in germany and hong kong stand for different responses to international reform movements. in this context, there are some similarities between germany and hong kong. in the field of early childhood education, these similarities include an increase in state investments in early childhood education, efforts to improve the qualifications of the pedagogical staff, an emphasis on the task of school preparation, and under this influence the development of national curricula. further, there are also similar discourses about content (e.g., in relation to the question of what children should do in kindergarten and the importance of free play in this context). on closer examination, however, there are a lot marked differences in the discourses and related reforms, particularly the adjustments made because of national traditions and cultural peculiarities (see stromquist & monkman, 2014). against this background, the educational practice in hong kong seems to be much more closely aligned with developments the importance of play in early childhood education 85 described in the context of the global education reform movement (germ) than in germany. with regard to the importance of play, this aspect is particularly evident. in german early childhood education, for example, there is a long tradition of playing, which goes back to friedrich froebel, and the promotion of playing is still the central element of early childhood education. accordingly, free play takes up the most time in kindergarten. playing and learning are conceived as inseparable in terms of children’s confrontation with their life-world, which leads to elementary knowledge (pramling samuelsson & johansson, 2006). what the child learns, above all, in playing is—play. he acquires the adroitness or adeptness; the ways of behavior; the techniques; the improvisation and the social systems that are required for the appropriate methods of play. the child becomes at home in a life style or aspect of living that is indispensable for humanity (flitner, 1972, p. 51). against this background, the current debate about reforms in early childhood education, as well as a stronger orientation toward school preparation and area-specific learning, is viewed critically. the focus of the scientific debate is, above all, the question of how the cognitive support of children and the early development of competencies in certain areas of content can be combined with the idea of free play. it is undisputed that the school preparation of children cannot be achieved by an earlier implementation of school learning forms (rossbach, 2008). rather, learning at play, freedom in children’s own decisions, selfdetermination, and social learning should continue to be the central elements of early learning. the debate about reforms and the importance of play in children’s day-care centers in hong kong has taken place in a completely different context. in the chinese tradition, play and learning are regarded as two different activities that are juxtaposed. for example, the trimetric classic, a book for children that contains the essence of confucianism, introduced the famous saying “ye jing yu qin, huang yu xi” (“a career is refined by hard work but ruined by play”) and the traditional chinese idiom “qin you gong, xi wu yi” (“hard work makes the master, while play brings no good”). these conventional notions are often quoted when instructing children, which has affected chinese perceptions of play. in chinese classrooms today, play continues to be regarded as not central to learning; instead, it is often used instrumentally by teachers to achieve learning and teaching objectives (cheng & wu, 2013). in addition to these conceptual differences, it is also assumed that pedagogical professionals in children’s day-care centers in germany and hong kong have incorporated different playing and learning concepts (wu & rao, 2011). in the following, a current qualitative study will be presented, which examined different perspectives on learning at play (wu, faas, & geiger, in preparation). the results underline the different cultural contexts of the debate on international reform movements and their implementation. empirical study twenty-eight early childhood education professionals and 12 parents took part in this study. in a first step, 12 kindergarten professionals (six german and six chinese) were interviewed and observed. the semi-structured interviews were aimed at examining their understanding of learning at play. during the observations, the researchers followed the professionals’ instructions to film what they regarded as learning at play episodes. the researchers confirmed the episodes’ content with the educational staff afterwards and edited the video clips accordingly. four representative three-minute videos from each culture, containing the most learning elements at play, were selected. in a second step, applying videocued multivocal ethnography (tobin, hsueh, & karasawa 2009), the selected video clips were shown to 16 other kindergarten professionals (eight german and eight chinese) and 12 parents (six german and six chinese) in focus groups to elicit their perspectives on and understanding of learning at play. before the 86 global education review 4(2) videos were shown, the kindergarten learning approach in hong kong was introduced to the german participants and vice versa. as the german kindergartens advocated education partnership (erziehungspartnerschaft), the educational staff and parents were grouped together for the discussions. however, the chinese parents’ and professionals’ discussion groups were conducted separately because they were used to being interviewed independently. the hong kong groups watched and discussed the episodes videotaped in the hong kong kindergartens first, then those from the german kindergartens, while their german counterparts viewed and discussed the videos in the reverse order. the following research questions of the study were examined in detail: 1. what are hong kong and german pedagogical professionals’ and parents’ understanding and perceptions of learning at play? 2. what are the commonalities and differences? looking at the selection of practice examples for learning at play by early childhood professionals in germany and hong kong, revealed very clear differences, which followed the traditional pedagogy of the respective countries. all of the hong kong examples included activities in a group oriented to collective learning objectives. all the children were included and involved in the activity, and each of them was guided under a teacher’s supervision. the tightly structured activities were rather similar to games, because rules and competition were clearly identified. the focus of play was on learning in the group, whereas the german examples contained only individual activities or activities in small groups based on the children’s aims and psychic needs. to select situations of learning at play in their own pedagogical practices, the german professionals focused on daily activities, and specific learning situations were given much less consideration; in addition, they stressed the importance of the environmental setting and the children’s selfinitiative and self-experience. the german teachers’ professional role was characterized by reacting to the children’s curiosity and autonomy. in contrast, the chinese teachers emphasized a systematic learning approach focused on learning objectives, the rules of play/games, and a specific course of play. … when we [teachers] write a teaching plan, each activity has its objective. that is why we stress the importance of purpose [of play] (hk_teacher_t03). however, the differences between the german and chinese participants were no longer clear with regard to the results of the group discussions: the german pedagogues and parents emphasized again the importance of the children’s own activities and exploration during play. further, the germans judged the chinese play activities as being too teacher-oriented and therefore assumed that they were not applicable to german kindergartens, especially since selfemployment is an important learning factor. chinese teachers’ and parents’ statements were inconsistent: on the one hand, they emphasized the learning approach and the importance of teachers’ intervention and guidance in play. on the other hand, they also saw the importance of children’s self-initiative and self-experience, which are not shown in their children’s play episodes, but in those of their german counterparts. even if they positively evaluated the german play activities in some cases, there were critical voices regarding their transferability to the chinese practice of early childhood education. in particular, the kindergarten teachers believed that it would be difficult to implement the german methods because of time and space constraints and parents’ concerns. i think that children are happiest in the [german] color play among all the episodes. they are most sincere. the teacher intervenes appropriately to teach them more, some deeper things (hk_teacher_t02). i saw teachers’ guidance, children’s participation, and happiness... the most the importance of play in early childhood education 87 important thing is that children get engaged in activity. besides, the teachers’ guidance is clear and children have learned from it. they even can apply it at home. this is authentic learning (hk_parent_f01). the results of this exploratory study show that the interpretation and discussion of international reform approaches in germany and in hong kong are very different. the statements of the german and chinese participants indicated that international developments are assessed primarily in the context of national educational traditions and structures. against this backdrop, it is assumed that international reform movements—despite some assimilations—will have very different effects in the future. these effects and differences appear to be rooted in the past of the countries or in the particular development of the early education system, as well as in the social and cultural expectations arising from this context. conclusion internationalization and globalization have placed educational practices under the constant pressure of comparison based on a universal benchmark, which entails quantification at the expense of local cultural particularity and unquantifiable qualitative aspects of education. certain features and developments, such as university rankings, impact factors of research, pisa, student-teacher ratios, and graduate employment and income, are often used to measure different levels of education. in addition, all of these aspects have a specific impact on the conceptualization and development of early childhood education. the focus is on strengthening the developmentally appropriate practices, the child-centered learning and play-based learning, and early literacy, numeracy, and natural science, which are all emerging as elements of international trends or international reform movements. the current social conditions and the actual needs of society are often not reflected or adequately taken into account (grieshaber & yelland, 2005) in consideration of such international trends in national curricula and education policies. moreover, the ability of national education systems to adapt to international developments has not been questioned enough. rather, the universal effectiveness of specific strategies and measures has been prematurely assumed, especially in light of different cultural contexts. however, there is some empirical evidence in different areas of education that suggest that critical consideration of such assumptions is required (tymms, 2011; maag merki, 2010). against the background of different historical developments in early childhood education, the importance of play in germany and hong kong has been shown in various facets, which should lead to consequences in dealing with international education studies and their results. the results of the observations (videos), interviews and group discussions in germany and hong kong show very different contexts of education and learning and thus very different points of connection for the discussion and alignment on international reform movements. examples for this are:  all of the hong kong videos showed activities in a whole group, oriented to collective learning objectives. the focus of play was on learning in the group, whereas the german films included only individual activities or activities in small groups, based on the children’s aims and psychic needs.  to select situations of learning at play in their own pedagogical practice, the german professionals focused on daily activities, and specific learning situations were given much less consideration. in addition, they stressed the importance of the environmental setting and the children’s self-initiative and self-experience. their professional role was characterized by reacting to the children’s curiosity and autonomy. in contrast, the chinese teachers emphasized a systematic learning approach, focusing on learning 88 global education review 4(2) objectives, the rules of play/games, and a specific course of play.  there were also differences in the opinions on the pedagogical concept of playing. thus, the participants from hong kong emphasized the learning approach and the importance of teachers’ intervention and guidance in play, while the german participants believed that the central aspect of learning at play was the children’s own activities. these results support and lend plausibility to the assumption that the results of international longitudinal studies, as well as subsequent reform movements cannot simply be transferred to national contexts. empirical evidence, in terms of collected data and facts, is significant only through its embedding and interpretation in concrete social or institutional practices (moss & urban, 2010). the described fundamental differences between the education system in germany and hong kong, the structuring and shaping of the pedagogical field, its historical, social and cultural framework, the different meaning and contextualization of terms and concepts e.g., the term "play" – underline this. against this background, in addition to international comparative longitudinal studies, cultural comparative qualitative investigations are needed to focus on the reception, assessment, and implementation of international trends in national and regional practices. with a view to historical developments and normative 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(2011). chinese and german teachers’ conceptions of play and learning and children’s play behaviour. european early childhood education research journal, 19(4), 471-483. about the author(s) stefan faas, phd, is professor for social pedagogy at the university of education schwäbisch gmünd, germany. his research is focused on early childhood education, family and parent education, transformation research as well as internationalization of education and social support. before that time he was working as a scientific assistant at the institute of education at the eberhard karls university of tübingen. shu-chen wu, phd, is assistant professor at the department of early childhood education at the education university of hong kong. her research interests include comparative early childhood education, children’s perspectives, policy, and play pedagogy. steffen geiger is an academic staff member at the department of social pedagogy and early childhood education at the university of education schwäbisch gmünd, germany. his research is focused on international comparison of inclusive education and educational staff with migration background in children's day care facilities. 178 global education review 3 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dwivedi, amitabh vikram (2016). an educator’s guide to bits, bytes, and teaching. [review of the book technology for classroom and online learning by samuel m. kwon, daniel r. tomal, and aram s. agajanian]. global education review, 3 (4). 179-80. book review an educator’s guide to bits, bytes, and teaching “technology for classroom and online learning” by samuel m. kwon, daniel r. tomal, and aram s. agajanian by amitabh vikram dwivedi technology for classroom and online learning provides a comprehensive overview of technology integration in the classroom. three authors—samuel m. kwon, daniel r. tomal, and aram s. agajanian—collaborated on and designed this book for students, educators, technology coaches, and school administrators working in k-12 and higher educational settings. the authors claim that this book will assist teachers and students improve their “understandings of core technology concepts” and enable them to “use and troubleshoot hardware, software and computer networks” (p. xv). to accomplish this, the authors employ a focused approach by addressing specific questions educators may have. some examples are: what are the key security issues for computer at k-12 level? what are the best approaches for teaching and learning? how do computers and networks work? eight chapters, excluding the introduction, are supported with figures, tables, bullet points, and diagrams. each chapter begins with well-defined objectives and concludes with a summary and case study, appended with exercises, discussion questions, and important references. the text also provides four appendices along with a useful index. the table of contents, however, does not explicitly identify which author(s) are responsible for each chapter; one is therefore left to assume that each chapter was written by all three authors. chapter one provides a diachronic account of electricity, computer technology, and electric devices. basic information about software and hardware is given in the later part of this chapter, providing encyclopedia-like details about casing, central processing units, cooling devices, disks, ram, device driver software, firmware, server software, etc. chapter two, “electronics and technology,” provides answers to questions such as: how do computer monitors work? why is a power strip necessary? what happens when you apply power to a smart board? (p. 17). this an educator’s guide to bits, bytes, and teaching 179 chapter essentially seeks to provide clear instructions for new technology users and highlights the fundamental, theoretical knowledge about electronics and technology, while suggesting safety considerations. in the following chapter, the authors deal with computer peripherals, providing an overview of software drivers, interface technologies, and “the basic troubleshooting of peripheral devices” (p. 38). a step-by-step guide to learning about computer peripherals is supported with many illustrations, figures, and diagrams. for a computer and lab teacher, the information covered in this chapter will be particularly useful. chapter four, “computer networking,” explains how to implement wired and wi-fi networks at schools, provides an understanding of network devices and their associated software, and describes different types of network topologies. under network typologies, the authors skillfully explain bus network topology, mesh network topology, ring network topology, star network topology, tree network topology, and hybrid network topology. the simple language the authors use help make this technical knowledge lucid. chapter five, “computing platforms for schools,” covers the topic of computing platforms, explaining them and describing how to identify them. this chapter provides answers to many practical issues, such as if a long service is desired from a computing platform in a stationary computer lab area, which platform would be most suitable, and what are the main “strengths and weaknesses of laptop computers” (p. 84). the subsequent chapter deals with security and maintenance issues. quite significantly, the concepts of risk assessments, assets, threats, vulnerabilities, and annual loss expectancy are discussed at length. the authors also provide useful suggestions and recommendations for maintaining computer hardware and software. chapter seven focuses on the use of technology in teaching and learning activities. the authors provide the main philosophical perspectives on the use of technology for teaching and learning. they highlight the specific categories of computer technologies, such as analysis, visualization, communication, and collaboration. the case study at the end of this chapter assists readers so that they may apply their “understanding of educational technology to a case situation” (p. 144). the last chapter addresses online and blended learning. it describes the strengths and weaknesses of the online learning environment, types of learning activities, technology tools required for online courses, and various approaches that can be used to promote productive peer interactions in an online setting. however, the authors believe that “online learning is still in its early stages of development” (p. 162). overall, this book is useful for all educators and students who use computers and related technology. the technical information, supported with clear explanations and descriptions, makes this text easy to understand. it is a must read for lab teachers, computer coaches, and k-12 computer learners. further, any novice in computers can read it and enhance his/her understanding of computer technology. “technology for classroom and online learning: an educator’s guide to bits, bytes, and teaching.” by samuel m. kwon, daniel r. tomal, and aram s. agajanian. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn 978-14758-1544-3 about the authors samuel m. kwon, ph.d., is a concordia university, chicago faculty member and teaches courses in the educational technology program. his primary areas of 180 global education review 3 (4) research include technology-supported teaching and learning, online learning, and the design of learning environments. he has published many articles on teaching, learning, and the use of technology. daniel r. tomal, ph.d., is a distinguished professor of leadership at concordia university, chicago. he is a consultant and an author of eighteen books and has made guest appearance on many national radio and television shows. aram s. agajanian, ph.d., is a professor and has served as a chair of electronics and computer engineering technology programs in several institutions. his expertise is in the fields of electrical, computer, biomedical engineering technology, and network communications. he has published numerous articles on educational leadership. about the reviewer amitabh vikram dwivedi is an assistant professor in the department of languages and literature at shri mata vaishno devi university in india. 138 global education review 3(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mittnik, philipp (2016). holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools. global education review, 3(3). 138-152 holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools philipp mittnik pädagogische hochschule wien university of educationvienna abstract this article presents arguments in support of teaching about the holocaust and nazism in austria at an early age. to accomplish this, austrian and german elementary school textbooks were analyzed for the amount of content dealing with the holocaust and jews; the results showed that since 1980 the amount of content on the holocaust increased in germany, and to a lesser extent in austria. the article reviews some of the criticism in europe of the term holocaust education and explores some of arguments about why that is. the author argues that moral education and teaching of human rights are important components of, but ought not be the main goal of teaching about the holocaust. the role of austria after world war ii, and exploration of the so called victim myth, prevalent until the 1990s are important to understanding history and to how history textbooks were created. after a discussion of how the holocaust can be taught to elementary and early secondary school aged children, some suggestions are made about approaches to teaching the holocaust to students in these age groups. keywords national socialism, holocaust education, human rights, victim myth, didactics of history, history textbooks, schooling introduction holocaust education is included in most history curricula of the western world (carrier, 2013), but this era is still controversial in austria and germany. hitler centrism is one of the challenges for the didactics of history, because it implies that only one person committed these crimes and cruelties. while it is clear that in austria and germany students already have some prior knowledge of adolf hitler and world war ii, in austria neither politicians nor society want to be associated with this “dark chapter,” therefore the hitlercult (and centrism) is very comfortable for austrians. history textbooks are an instrument that can create identities and deny unpleasant incidents in a nation’s past. one very important goal for researchers is to provide ______________________________ corresponding author: philipp mittnik, pädagogische hochschule wien, grenzackerstraße 18 , 1100 wien, österreich email: philipp.mittnik@phwien.ac.at mailto:philipp.mittnik@phwien.ac.at holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 139 guidance about how the holocaust and national socialism can be taught at the different grades in a sustainable way. this article article presents guidance for teaching this topic at elementary and secondary levels. conclusions at the end of the article present suggestions about what should derived from holocaust education. teaching about the holocaust in elementary schools the teaching of complex topics like the holocaust at an early age generates feelings of uncertainty. what is the right age to confront children with such burdensome content? weninger (1949) wrote that students at a primary level are not able to understand that difficult issue. but according to konevic (2007, p.11) he had no evidence for such a statement. in the following, the author will not provide a simple answer to that question; instead, some ways to deal with this challenge will be explored. while it is possible to live in the united states of america without finding evidence of the history of national socialism, that is definitely not conceivable in austria, or germany. if austrian elementary students live in urban areas they are most likely confronted with monuments, memorial plaques or media reports which relate to this “dark past” of austrian history (as it is often referred to) in everyday life. in austrian elementary schools the topics, national socialism and world war ii, are presented on the occasion of the austrian national day, october 26th. because of the decreasing importance of holiday culture in austria, related textbook representations have been progressively reduced over the last years, therefore resulting in a reduction of the representation of the history of national socialism. students are provided textbooks that contain unreflected data, facts, and pictures which are mostly not contextualized (langer & windischbauer, 2010, p. 47). in 2014 mittnik analyzed all approved austrian textbooks on societal learning/civic education for elementary schools. following the method of mayring, categories were built and a content analysis was conducted (mayring, 1990, p. 14). the categories were:  words: the number of words which are used to present this topic in the textbook.  figures: figures that contribute to the textbook narrative.  hitler: how often the name ‘hitler’ was mentioned.  jews: how often the term ‘jew’ was mentioned.  national socialism (ns): how often the item ‘national socialism’ was mentioned.  holocaust: how often the item ‘holocaust’ was mentioned.  suffering: the suffering of austrians mentioned in the text.  perpetrators: austrians were represented as perpetrators. none of the books analyzed included the terms jew or holocaust. in one of the textbooks the topic did not appear at all. the number of words of text ranged between 39 and 194. in only one book, were austrians presented as perpetrators. 140 global education review 3(3) fig. 1: frequency analysis in austrian elementary school textbooks (mitttnick 2014) in the analyses of contingence (“kontingenzanalyse“) the text templates of comparable issues in the analyzed textbooks were combined and interpreted (mayring, 1990, p. 15). in the textbooks, ideenbuch and schatzkiste, the topic world war ii did not appear. based on these text templates following contingences were built:  mentioning of adolf hitler 1939 (in 2 of 3)  duration of war 1939 to 1945 (in 3 of 3)  austria was occupied by the german reich (in 3 of 3)  austria is going to be part of the german reich (in 3 of 3), even if the correct designation of deutsches reich is used only once. academia is divided whether the holocaust should be taught to 9 or 10 year old children. in 2004 beck and heyl, two german researchers in this field, started a debate on teaching the holocaust at elementary level. some of these arguments are presented in figure 2. in contrast to the positions of heyl, in 2005 the german president, horst köhler, demanded that anti-semitism should be fought by age-appropriate lessons about the holocaust in elementary schools. in austria, however, it is still taboo to talk about this time period with children. even for austrian historians this topic seems to be too complex or too difficult; only one conference was held in austria in 2010 relating to holocauset education. (kühberger & windischbauer, 2010). although von reeken noted that contemporary history is an era which seems to be extremely real for students, it is not represented in the curricula. yet for austria’s and germany’s recent history, the holocaust is the dominating historical topic because of the relevance to present times. (von reeken, 2007). becher conducted interviews with students from elementary schools in switzerland and found that a massive hitlercentrism existed in the beliefs of children in that country. (becher, 2013). hanfland demonstrated in her study that elementary textbook words figures hitler jews ns holocaust suffering perpetrators dem leben auf der spur 39 0 no no no no no no ideenbuch 0 0 no no no no no no meine bunte welt 143 photo (2) yes (1) no no no yes no schatzkiste 77 photo (1) painting (1) no no yes (1) no no no tipi 194 photo (1) yes (1) no yes (3) no no yes holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 141 school aged children have prior knowledge about national socialism, also with an extended and unreflected hitler-centrism (hanfland, 2008). mittnik found in 2014 that these non-reflected notions existed in austrian elementary schools as well (mittnik, 2015) this is shown in figure 3. in that study 142 students of six different viennese elementary schools were asked what they knew about world war ii, using a written questionnaire. as can be seen from the results, the students significantly focussed on the person of adolf hitler. these findings underline the necessity of discussing that history with students. even if we agree with enzenbach, that this topic is too complex or too difficult to talk about with younger students. we have to talk about with our students about this issue in order to avoid potential fears initiated from this historical content (enzenbach, 2013, p. 137). arguments in favor (beck) arguments against (heyl) introducing the topic at the beginning of secondary school is too late due to external influences. students may be overtaxed or even traumatized. implementing this topic is coherent with the curriculum. the topic may potentially destroy the children’s positive worldview. frequently, the students’ prior knowledge about the topic is flawed – teachers can fix that. since children may not have any prior knowledge about the topic, it is not necessary to talk about it in order to protect them. fig. 2: teaching the holocaust at elementary level? (heyl, 1996) (beck, 1998) fig. 3: notions of elementary school students, vienna (mittnik, 2015) 4 4 4 5 5 6 7 12 13 19 39 58 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 n= 142 142 global education review 3(3) historians who were mentioned before demonstrated that the issue “holocaust” is relevant to elementary school aged students, but in austrian and in german academic communities, it is not discussed seriously. one reason could be that the easiest way to escape unpleasant discussions is to mention the topic and avoid an in-depth treatment (friedländer, 1994). in particular, based on the fact that national socialism should be taught differently in a multi-ethnic society like in austria, this view is still not really accepted. in many islamic immigrant families anti-semitism exists on a to a large extent; in some cases there are also sympathies for the national socialist regime. mansour classified three different manifestations of anti-semitism in islamic families. first, conspiracy theories are very popular among young turks. jews are presented as rich, reckless and part of the worldwide neoliberal finance system. the turkish government led by recip erdogan, especially, reinforces these prejudices. second, young arabs link the middle-east conflict to jews. mansour describes this as an antizionistic anti-semitism. third, the islamic argued anti-semitismradical groups of muslims, like the salafists, present the jews as their “biological” enemy, based on controversial passages of the koran (mansour, 2014, p. 49). the didactics of history should be encouraged to take this problem seriously (alavi, 1998). criticism of the term holocaust education the term holocaust education is not accepted in the german-speaking scientific community. in 1995 claussen wrote that the term holocaust, should not be used because it is not part of the everyday language in austria or germany and, as a loanword, not useful in a perpetrator nation. kühner, langer and sigel defined the term holocaust education as a pedagogical-didactic discourse about the teaching about the genocide of the european jews (kühner, langer, & sigel, 2008, p. 78). genocide should also be part of the german language and claussen noted that this term was used already in the middle-ages to ridicule jews (claussen, 1995, p. 21). in addition singular focus on jews is a denial of other victim groups such as homosexuals or romani people. at the beginning of the nazi-terror (in germany in 1933, in austria in 1938) political opponents were persecuted. the largest victim group in the austrian concentration camp, mauthausen, were the russians (marsalek, 1995, p. 144). two german historians listed the murdered people during the period of the national socialism, benz (benz, 1996) and pohl (pohl, 2003). even if the jews had the largest number of victims, it is not appropriate or even professional to deny other victim groups. the publication guidelines for teaching about the holocaust (ushmm, 2015) by the united states holocaust memorial museum (ushmm) in washington d.c. suggested a ten-point checklist to be considered in teaching about the holocaust. however, these suggestions are very general and do not really offer any support for teachers. together with the teacher guidelines (ihra, 2015) by the international holocaust remembrance alliance (ihra) they seem to be the most important resources for teaching about the holocaust in english speaking countries. the us-historian lindquist tried to create a checklist of the most important elements ofsustainable holocaust education, to help teachers to focus on the central meaning. 1) situating the holocaust as a central event in world history 2) defining patterns of human behavior 3) viewing holocaust education as a motor for social and educational change holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 143 of the set of civic values democratic societies are built on. 4) examining the holocaust as a catalyst for fostering intellectual and personal growth in both students and teachers due to the subject’s complexity and the high level of response the topic creates 5) situating the holocaust as a primary focus of contemporary education (lindquist d. , 2008, p. 5). the council of europe (coe) (lecomte, 2001) and e unesco (unesco, 1974) tried to formulate central guidelines for teaching about holocaust. in most cases, the concepts of holocaust education followed three dominant principles:  to counter contemporary racist and anti-semitic sentiment, students have to learn about the cruelties of the nazis  learning about the holocaust will make students aware of the significance of human rights  learning about the holocaust should have value for students’ lives. the american view on the holocaust was described by deckert-peaceman as the americanization of the holocaust. the following points can be seen as a link to it:  correlation between the nazi cruelties and a general moral education  focus on the teaching of values and tolerance, without mentioning genocide  prevention of anti-semitic and extreme right-wing tendencies in society (deckert-peaceman, 2002) many textbook narratives suggest a link between human rights education and holocaust education. the belief is that if students are confronted with the history of the holocaust , human rights will be more relevan for them. however, even the point that holocaust education should have value for the students’ lives has been challenged. according to bloxham, knowing about the genocide could be very important for a better understanding of history, but it may have no value for an individual student (bloxham, 2009). in the german-speaking academic community there are also counter-theses which reject the relationship between teaching about the holocaust and an efficient human rights education. one is, “the history of the holocaust is not suitable for a sustainable treatment of contemporary racism and xenophobia” (ehmann, 2000), the second is that the increasing moralization of the holocaust in education is more preaching than teaching. “ (salmons, 2003). learning about the crimes of the national socialists: obligation in a perpetrator nation? in austria or germany it may be argued that teaching about the holocaust is a moral obligation, and even a pedagogical duty to prepare students of all age groups to reach a fundamental understanding on this time period because of its high societal significance. however, it is acceptable not to work within the two aforementioned areas, and there are no alternative concepts or guidelines in germanspeaking academia. in 1943 the allied forces’ treaty of moscow, included the passage ‘austria was the first victim of nazi-germany’ was included but in the same treaty you ist also says that austrians (were also) perpetrators and that a new austria had to bring these persons to justice after the end of world war ii (verosta, 1947, p. 52). however, it was not possible to deal with the war crimes of the austrian society after world war ii.. this political agenda of the government in a very famous speech in august 1945 , leopold figl, the first austrian chancellorstated “seven years did the austrian nation suffer from the hitler-barbarianism. seven years were the austrian people enslaved and oppressed, here was no freedom of speech, 144 global education review 3(3) no possibility to commit to an idea; brutal terror and power forced the people to be subjects of the regime. but the deep belief in nation of austria was a drive for a patriotic resistance carried by all parts of society. in the factories and offices, at the frontline and at home, the people attempted to sabotage the hitler-state. we true austrians were in one front with the soldiers of the allies” (pohnweidinger, 2013, p. 71) . but the de-nazification was not thorough in austria at all (botz, 1996). in the same era, our history textbooks told generations of austrians that a huge number of austrians had joined the resistance and had fought against the nazi-regime. for example, text passages as the following often appear in austrian history textbooks of the 1980s that mention austrian suffering, but fail to mention cruelties committed by austrians: “the failure of stauffenberg’s attempted assassination also meant for our country that the (austrian) suffering had not come to an end.” (scheucher, 1982, p. 32). the textbooks obviously had the purpose of helping to form a new austrian identity to underscore austria’s involvement in this era, some facts help: 10% of all commanders of concentrations camps were austrian, 14% of all ss-members and 20% of the kz-guards were austrian, but austrians accounted for only 8% of the population of the third reich was only. additionally, two out of five death camps (treblinka, sobibor) were commanded by austrians (steininger, 2008), andsome of the most brutal perpetrators were austrians, including adolf eichmann, ernst kaltenbrunner, odilo globocnik andaugust eigruber. even if it can be argued that austria was not a sovereign state between 1938 and 1945, the people of this country as it existed before 1938, had a responsibility for their crimes and for their role in the genocide. whereas in germany there were a proceedings at different courts all over the country where the nsperpetrators were judged. the nuremberg trials between 1945 and 1949 sentenced more than 60.000 people (erdmann, 1999, p. 106). in total, preliminary proceedings were initiated in germany against 172,294 people between 1945 and 2005 (eichmüller, 2008, p. 624); in austria only 17% of the accused were sentenced (hanisch, 1994, p. 423). prior to1986 very few people openly discussed the role of austrians in the nsregime. however, in 1986 kurt waldheim, an austrians people party (övp) candidate for the austrian presidency was accused by the popular austrian news journal, profil , , of having been a member of the ss and of the wehrmacht (kontanko, 1986),. the opposition party, the social democrats (spö), used that fact to talk about austrian collective memory. for the first time in austria, 40 years after the ending of world war ii, this election opened a broad discussion about the cruelties committed during that period by austrians. also in the united states of america this issue was also very controversial in the united states of america. the new york times published an article, accusing waldheim of having been a member of the sa (tagliabue, 1986). though kurt waldheim was elected president of austria, the usa set him on the “watchlist”, making it impossible for him to enter the united states. no politician from a western state came to his inauguration; waldheim was completely isolated (gehler, 1996, p. 41). the election of waldheim to austrian president brought the discussion about austrians past “to the middle of austrians society” (gehler & sickinger, 1996, p. 632). the ensuing discussions gave rise to the first serious controversy about austria’s part in the third reich more than 40 years after the end of the war (uhl, 2001). it was no longer possible to maintain the position that austria was the “first victim of the german reich.” it has taken years for this change of perspective about austria’s past to find its way into austrian history textbooks. holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 145 modern austria is one of the richest countries in the world, but there are still problems with democracy or the principle of equality. in 2014 a survey documented that 29% of austrians want to have a strong political leader (´führer`) who could rule without a parliament and 56% of austrians do not want to discuss national socialism and world war ii (rathkolb & ogris, 2014). the didactics of history are neither able to solve this problem, nor is it the job of the profession to find the reasons, but these facts highlight the importance of creating new perspectives of teaching this topic. these realities underscore the importance beginning academically supported holocaust education at an early age to educate a society that does not sympathize with authoritarianism or the nazi regime. curricular aspects of teaching the history of national socialism though teaching about the holocaust is not required in austrian elementary schools, , in lower secondary (10 to 14-year-old students) it is. each history teacher has to teach the topic. in contrast tro the united stated, austrian curricula are uniform nationwide. the history curriculum for lower secondary, comparable to the american middle school, prescribes following mandatory content:  national socialism as an example of a totalitarian regime  ideology, propaganda, mobilization of the youth, persecution, organized mass murder, resistance  jewish life before and after the holocaust  world war ii  commemorative cultures (bmbf, 2015) as in germany, a national uniform curriculum does not exist in the united states. there are states new jersey, for example, where the topic is mandated in the curriculum, but in other states there is no requirement for teachers to address it. in the curriculum of new jersey it says: “every board of education shall include instruction on the holocaust and genocides in an appropriate place in the curriculum of all elementary and secondary school pupils. the instruction shall enable pupils to identify and analyze applicable theories concerning human nature and behavior: to understand that genocide is a consequence of prejudice and discrimination: and to understand that issues of moral dilemma and conscience have a profound impact on life. the instruction shall further emphasize the personal responsibility that each citizen bears to fight racism and hatred whenever and wherever it happens” (n.j.s., 2015). learning about the holocaust and teaching about human rights. in the austrian academic community it is disputed if curricula are the approprate instruments to modify or improve teaching. in austria’s lower secondary, unqualified teachers frequently have to teach history because of a lack of teachers. if they are not interested in history, they do not use the textbooks for what they have been designed as a teaching support. in such a scenario, students have to learn the textbooks contents, chapter for chapter, without reflection.. in the higher grades( age 18) the questions for the final exams in history have been analyzed and most of them are aligned with the contents of the textbook. at this point it is important to note that teachers in austria are able to write their own exam questions for their own students. so, in theory, they can emphasize their own interests. questions about national socialism were formulated very often, but, predominantly, textbook narratives dominate exams (mittnik, 2014). the basis of teaching: history textbooks so it seems that history textbooks could be the instrument to change lessons. they are 146 global education review 3(3) constructions of history and designers of public knowledge and they are a political issue. knowledge and values have been defined by historians in order to be passed on to future generations (lässig, 2010). in austria, textbooks for students are the most important teaching support for history lessons, because every student gets his own textbook for each subject every year, with costs borne by the state. in austria there is an approbation committee for all textbooks. this committee decides if a textbook can get access to the market. the members, predominantly teachers of the subject, define what content must be included in textbooks. if content which is favoured by the commission is missing, the book will not be approved. so, teachers paid by the federal ministry of education , not researchers, determine the most important issues and central methodological basic approaches.. this situation was improved in 2010 when new guidelines which defined a high academic standard was commissioned by the ministry (krammer & kühberger, 2011). an important issue for this commission to deal with was the topic of austrian resistance against the nazi-regime. in most austrian history textbooks prior to 1990 almost as many pages were devoted to resistance as to the genocide of jews. this could give students the impression that resistance against fascism was as important as the cruelties of the nazi regime. in fact, very few people were active in the austrian resistance movement, but hundreds of thousands were perpetrators. the proportion of pages devoted to “resistance” and “genocide”in contemporary textbooks in germany has changed very clearly. in austria the numbers of pages devoted to genocide and resistance is almost the same as in the textbooks of the early 1980s, while in germany it has changed considerably. this is shown in figure 4. the quantitative inquiry of textbooks (fig. 4) shows the comparison of the topics genocide and resistance in austrian (henceforth abbreviated as a 1 to a5 for the books of the early 1980s and g1 to g5 for the german books). a 6 to a 10 are current austrian books, g6 to g10 are the current german books. the numbers in the cells represent the amount of pages in the corresponding books (mittnik, 2015, p. 82). german books resistance genocide on jews austrian books resistance genocide on jews pages pages pages pages g1 4 4 a1 2 4 g2 3 5 a2 2 1 g3 1 5 a3 4 5 g4 5 3 a4 3 2 g5 4 6 a5 1 average 3.4 4.6 average 1.4 2.6 g6 4 13 a6 2 3 g7 3 7 a7 2 6 g8 4 14 a8 2 8 g9 4 4 a9 4 4 g10 4 8 a10 3 5 average 3.8 9.2 average 2.6 5.2 fig. 4: quantitative inquiry of textbook pages relating to the issues resistance and genocide on jews (mittnik, 2015, p. 91) holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 147 it is remarkable that already in the books of the 1980s these issues are higher represented in german books than in the austrians. the german history textbooks try to offer a lot of more information. teaching about the holocaust in lower secondary grades in austria, krammer (nes) made five suggestions for teaching the holocaust in history lessons. these are:  provide information about the past and differentiate between factual judgement and value judgement  avoid emotional approaches to learning  intensive guided discussion by teachers to develop“correct” attitudes are counterproductive  an “overdose” of a topic is problematic and counterproductive. teachers should strike a balance  narrations of ns-history must be reorganized in history lessons (krammer, nes) though simple, these suggestions represent important principles to be considered when teaching the history of national socialism. the following concepts by lücke and brüning are also under-represented. accordingly, history lessons which include that content should be:  planned: to develop historical knowledge, it is necessary to provide history lessons that structure the prior concepts of students  students-orientated: learning about that era should contribute to a historical identity, despite increasing sociocultural diversity.  productive: to counteract increasing ns and holocaust-lethargy, actionorientated learning is sugested (lücke & brüning, 2013). these two examples demonstrate the problem in the german-speaking academic community. respectable historians attempting to establish minimum standards for teaching the holocaust, are so unspecific that they are not very helpful for history lessons. in austria and germany, national socialism is extremely sensitive; so no historian wants to create teaching guidelines that would not be accepted in academia. von borries concluded that especially on this important issue history lessons often do not engage students in a deep intellectual or emotional discussion. the consequence is superficial processing in this field (von borries, 2005, p. 113). henke-bockschatz identified three goals for history lessons about national socialism which could serve as guidance for the production of new textbooks. textbooks should enable students to:  acquire knowledge about the rise of the nsdap and the followers of the nsregime  understand which acts of cruelty people at that time have committed and create empathy for the victims  fight against a renewal of similar contemporary political movements and ideologies and resist them (henkebockschatz, 2004)  pingel asked questions about teaching the history of the national socialism in all grades. the questions represent important considerations for educators but he provides no answers. how can emotional overload be avoided?  what explicit lesson preparation do teachers need to speak about gas chambers?  who should dominate the view of the past: perpetrators or victims?  how can students be taught, that the system was enabled by the large number of bystanders in the society? 148 global education review 3(3)  is it possible to talk about other victim groups, without relativizing the suffering of jews?  can the national socialism be compared to other genocides in history without calling the singularity of the holocaust into question?  can jews be portrayed as people, not only as victims? good textbooks should also present the pre-holocaust life of jews,i.e., they were part of austrian or german society. (pingel, 2002) the fundamental rights agency (fra) of the european union provided a “toolkit” to offer didactic approaches to teaching the holocaust. the european perspective that fra suggested empasized:  raising awareness of the ideological background of the national socialist discrimination and extermination policy  centrality of the personalization of history o victims o perpetrators and accomplices to murder o bystanders  escalation of discrimination and persecution  human rights as a frame of reference for the analysis, reflection, discussion and the educational process  interdisciplinary approach  age-appropriate approach (fra, 2009). glanz provided 10 instructionally oriented suggestions for teaching the holocaust from an american standpoint (glanz, 1999). lindquist also criticized aspects of american holocaust education. he and suggested five basic instructional approached for teachers, to teach this topic (lindquist d. h., 2006) (lindquist d. h., 2008). which issues are seen as particularly important varies with the nation, though there are similarities, and differences in suggested didactic approaches. in austria or germany the view of the perpetrators and comprehension why such tragedies could happen should be essential; in the united states or great britain the link to a human rights education in order to avoid these historical mistakes appears to be crucial. however, it seems impossible to frame didactical approaches which will be valid in all societies worldwide. a new national process should be initiated to define the central principles for teaching the holocaust. to start this discussion a preliminary proposal is offered below. conclusions what are appropriate steps to narrow adaquate teaching of the national socialism in austria? to start with the elementary schools, the following are guidelines about how the teaching of holocaust education might be presented, successfully, in elementary schools:  individual cases: show students the individual suffering, without dwelling on cruelties. talk or read about children of their own age, who lived at that time and be prepared to talk with students about death and murder. develop connections to the present, as with stories about exile and refuge.  anti-semitism: the increasing number of anti-semitic criminal acts in austria and germany demonstrates the importance of this issue. combat student prejudices by explaining the nature and purposes of stereotypes. point out that we import arabinformed anti-semitism because of immigration.  austrians as perpetrators: explain the historical truth that previous generations committed many war crimes, without speaking about them in detail, we have to emphasize societal responsibility. dispell the myth that holocaust studies in austrian elementary and secondary schools 149 most of austrians were involved in resistance movements.  contemporary significance: explain the approach of austrian society towards events of the past as many isues are important today, including the use of language, the awareness of public space and, the importance of an efficient judiciary and democracy. also, children need education in human rights. in order to achievethe goal of a more reflective learning experience about national socialism for elementary school aged students, three general principles are relevant. firstly, students should develop empathy for the victims of that time and should be able to understand the suffering of people in the present. secondly, and probably most important, is to develop interest for era in elementary schools. many students by the time they are 14 have the impression that they have a broad knowledge of the holocaust and that the topic is boring (lücke & brüning, 2013, p. 167). it is necessary to dispel these impressions by creating interest among students. thirdly, it is essential to present this topic to students in a way that helps them to recognize the significance for austrian society. students should learn about their own national history, even if it is sometimes unpleasant, and it can be done without moralizing or shocking them with pictures of cruelties, in order to achieve the goal of a more reflective learning experience about national socialism for lower secondary school aged students, the following general principles are relevant:  prior knowledge: build on the prior knowledge of students. determine what gaps in knowledge exist and which issues students are already familiar with. if for instance, students make comments like “hitler built the highways” or “not everything was bad back then” or “he had the right solutions for jews,” teachers should discuss such statements seriously and present concepts that work against these prejudices. if students are apprehensive or afraid and they start to cry when teachers talk about national socialism, teachers should recognize that they are not able to extend their knowledge because of affective factors.  limit focus: teachers should focus on 8-10 topics dealing with this part of history, including the genocide of the european jews, and the youth movements of the nsdap, it is necessary to limit the content in order to to avoid superficiality, provide focus, and in depth discussion teachers should also plan to allocate sufficient time as it is not possible achieve even a brief overview of the history of national socialism i four to sixperiods.  nazi support: teachers should attempt to explain why austrians predominantly supported the nazis. even if there are no satisfactory answers the question should be discussed with students. the explanation that unemployment was extremely high and that austrians and germans were unsatisfied with the political situation cannot allowed to stand unchallenged, for example, there are no “führers” in contemporary greece or spain, where more than 50% of the young people are unemployed?  contemporary historical connections: create connections to contemporary historical events. define the ns-history not as part of the past but as part of our time. visit memorials or monuments related to national socialism with students. talk about single persons in the past and create common biographies to current persons. discuss the middleeast conflict with students. antisemitism is often based on criticism of the state of israel.  hitler-centrism: do not argue in history lessons that hitler committed 150 global education review 3(3) these cruelties. adolf hitler was the leader of a political movement. it is absolutely necessary to speak about the perpetrators who were part of the society. by focusing on hitler it is easy to forget that these crimes were committed by persons who survived the war, living, in very many cases, a normal life, without any conviction. summary the article shows some scientific insights of the discussion, at what age the teaching about the holocaust should begin. the early historical learning seems to be important to encourage empathy and an early understanding of human rights. the analysis of austrian elementary textbooks make clear that the content of world war ii and the national socialism is mentioned in nearly all textbooks, but the presentation can be defined as superficial. in transition to the lower secondary the claims in historical learning should be increased. even if the high importance of the history of the national socialism for austria is undoubted, there are only a few amount of didactical approaches how to teach about the holocaust. after presenting them a catalogue of didactical principles was created to suggest how, in future textbooks could present that topic in a professional way. references alavi, b. 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(2007). handbuch methoden im sachunterricht. baltmannsweiler: schneider hohengehren. about the author philipp mittnik is an austrian political scientist with a focus on history and political didactics . he is the field coordinator and director of the centre for civic education at the university of education vienna (ph wien). https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/%25c3%2596sterreich&usg=alkjrhgkzdhxgqpuvpumvc6deuz26fyq4w https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/politikwissenschaft&usg=alkjrhj4g4gtfezee6_ng8vlcfutet7fea https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/politikwissenschaft&usg=alkjrhj4g4gtfezee6_ng8vlcfutet7fea https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/geschichtsdidaktik&usg=alkjrhgsyfidzowaqz15bahupms_rflupg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/politikdidaktik&usg=alkjrhj7x5h5iy55lfq5-_gih4bwoiexyg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/politikdidaktik&usg=alkjrhj7x5h5iy55lfq5-_gih4bwoiexyg https://translate.googleusercontent.com/translate_c?depth=1&hl=en&prev=search&rurl=translate.google.com&sl=de&u=https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/p%25c3%25a4dagogische_hochschule_wien&usg=alkjrhh8lmicl0trwvdfoqegehar9grjow using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 5 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ball, jessica & wangchuk, karma chimi. (2015). using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ to guide the development of sustainable early learning programs in the kingdom of bhutan: aspirations and challenges. global education review, 2(1), 5-22. using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ to guide the development of sustainable early learning programs in the kingdom of bhutan: aspirations and challenges jessica ball university of victoria karma chimi wangchuk royal university of bhutan abstract a national study on demand for early childhood care and development programs in bhutan found strong support for development of a new early childhood care and development (eccd) sector. a wide range of stakeholders participating in the study, including ministries of education and health, post-secondary institutions, private preschool providers, community management committees, parents and children, emphasized the goal of preschool to promote success in english-medium formal education. promoting cultural traditions was also a priority, while developing children’s proficiency in home languages was hardly mentioned. the study highlighted the changing needs of bhutanese families in the current context of increasing urbanization, dual career parents, and a shift from extended to nuclear family homes. recommendations derived from the study encouraged a made in bhutan approach to eccd policy, programs, and professional education. subsequent to the study, the national education policy included plans for implementation of eccd covering children from birth to 8 years old. to ensure the sustainability and cultural congruence of new programs and investments with the kingdom’s gross national happiness policy, a gross national happiness commission screened and approved the new national education policy, which the ministry of education is charged with implementing. the emergence of an eccd sector in bhutan points to the role that national aspirations and value-driven policies and review processes could play in maintaining language diversity and transmitting culturally based knowledge. keywords bhutan, gross national happiness policy, early childhood care and education, preschool, culture, linguistic diversity, local funds of knowledge, language of instruction introduction first steps towards a system of public and private early childhood care and development (eccd) programs in bhutan are poised to ______________________________ corresponding author jessica ball, school of child and youth care, po box 1700 stn csc, university of victoria, bc. v8w 2y2, canada email: jball@uvic.ca 6 global education review 2(1) provide a boost to young children taking their first steps towards structured learning and social engagement outside their homes. preschool and lower primary education that is child-oriented and parent-involving is a new approach for teachers in bhutan that goes hand in hand with the country’s shift to democracy in 2008. other social changes, including the growth of nuclear family households, urbanization, and recognition of the importance of the early years for securing the country’s future with a generation of young people who have been supported from birth to achieve their full potential through education, have also given impetus to increased role of out-of-home early learning and child development programs. as with every new initiative in bhutan, proposed expansion of early childhood provisions must be considered from the point of view of the government’s efforts to preserve traditional values. these include an emphasis on culturally-based practices that protect and promote the central role of the family in child rearing, which is one of the four pillars of bhutan’s unique gross national happiness policy. this article describes the emerging eccd sector in bhutan, and the influence of the country’s gross national happiness policy upon decision-making about sustainable development of programs for young children. this article is based on a recent national scoping study of eccd in bhutan led by the authors and carried out with the participation of key partners in bhutan involved in an emerging eccd sector. the study confirmed the need for a made in bhutan approach to professional development for eccd practitioners and to the design of eccd programs, in order to support the cultural and linguistically diverse population of young children and their families. however, the practical details of how this training and program delivery will be done have yet to be formulated. to date, the ministry of education has a draft policy governing eccd, which has yet to be endorsed by the government. drawing upon the example of bhutan, where approaches to early childhood programs are only now being conceptualized and delivered on a pilot basis, this article highlights the potential for national, value-driven policies and associated project review processes to inspire and guide the development of professional education courses and programs in order to sustain and protect the country’s rich environmental, cultural and linguistic resources. context demographics the kingdom of bhutan is a land-locked, wholly mountainous country tucked into the eastern himalayan mountains. according to the government national statistics bureau, based on the population and housing census of 2005, the projected population for 2014 is 741,822 people (royal government of bhutan, 2007). until very recently, bhutan was one of the most isolated countries in the world, with a ban on internet and television until 1999 and limitations on foreign tourism. historically bhutan’s closest links have been with tibet in terms of trade, culture, language, and religion. the country has now turned more toward india for trade, and there is an influx of immigrants and migrant workers, as well cultural, economic and material influences from south asia. bhutan was never colonized by britain, but after it lost the duar war in 1865, bhutan was forced to sign a treaty giving british india control of its foreign relations until 2007.1 these relations resulted in considerable british and british indian influence. for example, when public school was introduced in the 1960s,2 the education system was modeled on the british system, and english was introduced as one of two languages of instruction (along with dzongkha). cultural diversity there is a general understanding within bhutan that the country is fairly homogeneous in terms using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 7 of culture. this is an intriguing perception given that the population is demographically very diverse in terms of ethnicity, religion, and language. buddhism is the state religion. buddhist texts, written in ‘ucen3, are sacred. reportedly, approximately two-thirds of the population practice drukpa kagyupa or nyingmapa buddhism, both of which are disciplines of mahayana buddhism. the remainder is mostly lhotshampa4 and practice hinduism. bon, the country’s animist and shamanistic belief system revolves around the worship of nature and is rarely practiced exclusively, but permeates many people’s belief systems and daily practices. the nation has a strong sense of identity that has flourished due in part to its high altitude, landlocked isolation, and, historically, fears of invasion by tibet and colonization by britain. there is a common need to create livelihood and provide mutual support in a uniformly rugged and harsh mountainous environment where most people live in small isolated villages, often with no road access. inter-ethnic marriage is common, and many families have family members who speak different languages and dialects, and perhaps the national language dzongkha. communities typically have members who are from different ethnic groups. the country is also strongly unified by its support for the national philosophy of gross national happiness and by its adoration of the monarchy. linguistic diversity there is no majority language in bhutan. dzongkha was declared the national language of bhutan in 1961, and one of the criteria for naturalization is that a person can speak and write dzongkha (royal government of bhutan, 1969). it is estimated that there are between 19 and 24 languages of bhutan (van driem, 2007). all are members of the tibeto-burman language family, except for nepali (lhotshampka), which is indo-aryan, and english (van driem, 2007). according to a study by van driem commissioned by the royal government of bhutan (1993), in the early 1990s the most frequent home languages of the population were: dzongkha (24.5%), spoken mainly in the 8 western districts of bhutan; lhotshampka (24%), spoken mainly in southern bhutan, tshangla (21.2%), spoken mainly in eastern bhutan, and bumthapkha, khengkah, and kurtop languages (12.3%), spoken mainly in central bhutan. an independent survey by sil international (2006) suggests recent shifts in the distribution of home languages including: lhotshampka (35.7%), dzongkha (21.5%), tshangla (18.6%), and bumthapkha, khengkha, and kurtop languages (10.8%). reasons for dzongkha being declared the national language even though it is spoken by a fraction of the population are historical and pragmatic: dzongkha was the language of people who held political and religious power when the state was founded and, unlike other indigenous languages in bhutan, it has a writing system. the primary medium of instruction in primary schools is english, but all children are expected to learn to speak, read and write dzongkha. as a result of the language-ineducation policy, many people in bhutan are bilingual or multilingual at a conversational level, as they are immersed in a variety of languages and dialects from a young age. as well, due to inter-ethnic marriage, many families have diverse language speakers within the extended family and the hamlet in which they reside, including parents and grandparents who speak different languages with their children. gross national happiness policy5 bhutan gained international attention in 1974 when the fourth king, jigme singye wangchuk, in his coronation address declared that gross national happiness (gnh) (gyalyonggakidpelzom) was more important than gross domestic product as a measure of the nation’s well-being. the kingdom gained even more attention for 8 global education review 2(1) including this unique philosophy in the constitution of the kingdom of bhutan: article 9, principle of state policy, section 2 states: “the state shall strive to promote those conditions that will enable the pursuit of gross national happiness.” gnh holds that happiness is the ultimate purpose of human progress and development. while the policy asserts that each person must cultivate happiness within themselves, the royal government of bhutan sees its role as creating conditions that will enable individuals to achieve happiness. overwhelmingly, the government and the people of bhutan are united by an intense valuing of their pursuit of happiness. a metaanalytic study of over 100 studies of happiness around the world, encompassing 80,000 participants, found that the population of bhutan is the happiest country in asia, and the eighth happiest in the world, despite widespread poverty and illiteracy (white, 2006). the survey pointed to the landlocked himalayan kingdom’s beautiful mountain scenery, isolated culture and strong sense of national identity as reasons for the contentment of its citizens. by comparison, its neighbour, india, ranked 125th. the united states ranked 23rd and canada ranked 10th. according to the centre for bhutan studies in bhutan (n.d.), the emphasis on happiness as a foundation for social policy is deeply rooted in bhutanese history. bhutan was unified and fortified in 1637, and a social contract, declared in bhutan in 1675 stated that the happiness of all sentient beings and the teachings of the buddha are mutually dependent and that laws must advance the happiness of all sentient beings. the legal code of 1729 further required that laws must promote the happiness of all sentient beings (thinley, 2005). the current king has stated that “gnh is more important that gnp and is the guide for state’s primary role in society.” the gnh policy is structured by four pillars, including: (1) sustainable and equitable development; (2): environmental conservation; (3) cultural promotion; and (4) good governance. gnh policy includes nine domains: psychological well-being; standard of living; good governance; health; education; community vitality; cultural diversity and resilience; time use; and ecological diversity. these domains are elaborated in terms of 72 measurable gnh indicators (gross national happiness commission, 2008). the gnh policy is very much a centrepiece of deliberations from community-level management committees, to district-level planning and priorities, to national policy decision-making, strategic planning, and investments. a gnh commission uses various screening tools to deliberate about proposed reforms or new projects in every sector (gross national happiness commission, 2008). the gnh commission has oversight of the education sector, and has recently engaged in a series of reviews of proposed developments of the early childhood care and development sector. education in bhutan education is referred to as the noble sector in bhutan and has always been a state responsibility, with the royal government providing all the services and resources from pre-primary (kindergarten) through 12 years of formal schooling (after which scholarship is provided on merit up to the university level). the country has its own national curriculum from kindergarten through class 12. with increased enrolment and schools, the system is hard-pressed to ensure quality in the provision of education services. for this reason, in 2010 the ministry of education launched a massive nation-wide education reform initiative called educating for gross national happiness, to be realized through building green schools for green bhutan: “the initiative is expected to restore much-needed integrity and honour to the education system while at the same time helping internalize and advance the country’s unique using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 9 vision of gyalyonggakidpelzom” (ministry of education, p. 1). monastic education system monastic education is the oldest system of education in bhutan and plays a very important role in bhutanese society. compared to monastic education, the system of modern, secular education, governed by the ministry of education, has experienced more prominence since it was introduced in the 1960’s as part of the country’s plan for socioeconomic development. monastic education is administered by the ministry of home and cultural affairs and looked after by a central monastic body (zhung dratshang). in 2013, there were 388 monastic education institutions with 12,389 novices (ministry of education, 2013). there is no stringent admission age for children to enter monastic schools and some are admitted as young as five years of age. the language of instruction in the monastic institutions is choeked6 (sanskrit) and dzongkha. recently, basic english, mathematics and information technology are taught in monastic schools. similar to the modern education system, monastic schools (lobdra) are organized into primary, middle and higher secondary, each divided into grades with different subjects according to grade level and examinations at the end of each grade (dargye, n.d.; dorji, 1991). there are also monastic colleges (shedra). modern education system children enter the formal school system at six years of age, when they commence pre-primary, which is somewhat akin to kindergarten. according to the gross national happiness commission (2013), nearly all (98.5%) of children enroll in primary school; 78% complete grade 6, and 60% complete grade 10. the youth literacy rate (15-24 years) is 86%, while the adult literacy rate (15 years and older) is 55%. the ministry of education is promoting the introduction of eccd to provide youngsters with a transition to formal school and to promote school readiness. the official language, dzongkha, and english, are the languages of instruction in preprimary and primary 1, with english being the medium of instruction for the rest of formal schooling. the majority of curricula and text materials are written and taught in english, while dzongkha is a subject of study, with the exception that environmental studies is taught in dzongkha in the first three primary grades. according to an eminent scholar in education (namgyel, 2014), english has been the main language of instruction since the beginning of modern education in bhutan in the 1960s, to suit the country’s aspirations for socio-economic development and international business. transitioning from home languages to dzongkha and english poses a significant challenge for children who have different home languages, and many students perform poorly in academic studies because of their inability to cope with a language of instruction that they have difficulty mastering. home dialects and languages may be used by teachers initially to help children decipher text material provided in dzongkha and english, but children are expected to transition to the official languages quickly. many primary and secondary schools have a language policy requiring students to converse only in dzongkha and english during school hours. the unique cultural traditions and philosophy of bhutan are very evident in school settings, activities, and forms of interaction. for example, every school day begins with a wholeschool assembly up to 30 minutes long, during which children stand to sing the national anthem and to recite and listen to prayers led by the school principal. children learn about local flora and fauna and how to take care of the environment. every school has a garden tended by children and often by parent volunteers as well. children bring country foods from home in 10 global education review 2(1) traditional containers and sit in small groups to share lunches and conversation; many children are joined during lunch by parents or grandparents. the concept of being a green school and living sustainably is taught and often reinforced with slogans and sayings painted on exterior walls. children wear uniforms designed in the traditional bhutanese styles for males and females. most children with disabilities remain with their families and are welcomed at school if they can get there. most communities do not provide transportation for school (many children walk to school on paths through fields and forests). children with significant sensory, physical or mental impairments are taught in special schools for some time before transitioning to mainstream classrooms in their hometowns and villages. rapid social change bhutan is undergoing rapid social change: it is one of the newest democracies in the world; it is rapidly urbanizing with an anticipated quadrupling of the urban population over the next decade, along with the associated increase in urban poor. until very recently, nearly all children lived a pastoral existence with their extended families in rural and remote settings where they had been steeped in buddhist religion, indigenous knowledge about how to live on the land, and the culture and language of their particular ethnic group. many families are shifting from extended family units and collective farming to nuclear families, and to work beyond the village, which involves moving or commuting to towns and the capital city of thimphu. traditional lifestyles and associated early socialization experiences are radically changing, as the country opens up to globalizing influences through widespread access to the internet, increased exposure to foreign tourists, and expanded trade relations with india and other technologically advanced countries. as well, there is steady growth in women’s participation in the workforce beyond the home and farms, resulting in a need for alternative child care provisions. one exception to these national trends is the very small population of children of yak herders who live with their extended families as nomads. along with the overall growth of nuclear family households and urbanization, there is growing recognition of the importance of the early years for securing the country’s future with a generation of young people who have been supported from birth with health care, early stimulation, and preschool education to achieve their full potential. these shifts have pointed to the potential for an increased role of out-ofhome early learning and child development programs. inception of eccd eccd policy under the 11th five year plan for the country (2014-2018), the ministry of education established a national education policy which also includes a policy on eccd. the national education policy passed the gross national happiness commission’s policy screening test and is awaiting the cabinet’s approval. as with every new initiative in bhutan, proposed expansion of early childhood provisions must be considered from the point of view of the government’s efforts to preserve traditional values and must also be congruent with gnh values and principles. these include an emphasis on culturally based practices that protect and promote the central role of the family in child rearing, which is one of the four pillars of bhutan’s unique gross national happiness policy. the goal of protecting and sustaining the central roles of local cultural teaching and learning and family-based care for children may appear to be incongruent with the concept of out-of-home care for young children. like many countries around the world, in bhutan, the government and families face difficult choices arising from the movement of many families away from extended family using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 11 homesteads and into towns and cities, and an increase in dual-earner families. these social changes have increased the acceptability of outof-home care as an alternative to traditional childhoods. the eccd policy supports a four-pronged strategy to: (1) promote sound parenting and child care practices for young children through home and family based interventions using the mass media and non-formal education centres; (2) promote early stimulation of infants and toddlers through health care centres; (3) promote and support early childhood care and development centres (i.e., preschools) run by the private sector, civil society organizations, corporate bodies, and the ministry of education with assistance from unicef and save the children, in order to enhance early learning opportunities for children aged 3 to 5 years, and (4) support interventions in schools to improve teaching and learning practices, particularly in the first two years of primary school, to help children aged 6 to 8 years to maintain and increase gains made through eccd programs and services, and also to enhance the readiness of schools for young children (choden, 2013). under the government’s 10th five year plan (2009-2013), the ministry of education established an eccd unit within its department of school education as a nodal agency for all matters related to eccd, with the mandate to plan, coordinate, and implement eccd plans and programs. this unit has established eccd program guidelines, created advocacy materials and resource packages to support eccd implementation. as well, in 2010, this unit convened a group of in-country advisors to review, adapt, and ultimately adopt the u.s. based early learning and development standards (elds) with its standard domains, including: language and communication, cognitive/intellectual, approaches toward learning, physical health and motor development, social and emotional development. the bhutan group added a country-specific domain: moral, spiritual and cultural development. although the elds has not yet been implemented, the ministry of education hopes that they will serve as aspirational principles to guide development of the sector, including new professional development courses (choden, 2013). eccd programs the eccd policy supports the introduction of centre-based eccd programs. by the end of 2013, 7% of boys and girls in bhutan were enrolled in an eccd program (gross national happiness commission, 2013). nearly all children’s first exposure to group settings for learning occurs when they enter formal schooling at six years of age. the government’s 11th five year plan has set 10% access to preschool as a target for 2014-2018. the quantity and categories of current programs are shown in table 1. table 1. centre-based preschools in bhutan in 2013 type of eccd no teachers boys girls total male female total community 82 1064 1024 2088 1 115 116 ngo funded 27 71 77 148 0 9 9 workplace 9 126 148 274 0 20 20 private 47 697 628 1325 11 174 185 total 165 1958 1877 3835 12 318 330 (annual education statistics 2013, ministry of education, thimphu) using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 15 these programs are overseen by the district (dzongkhag) education officers, preprimary teachers trained in a step by step eccd approach and by three eccd program officers within the ministry of education. as shown, programs include roughly 82 community based preschools in rural settings, nine workplace based eccd centres, 47 private eccd centres, and 27 eccd centres across the country that are run by non-government organizations. to date, none of these programs are regulated, although the physical infrastructure (facilities including building, toilets, outdoor play space) must be licensed by the ministry of education. there is no standard curriculum, mandated program components or model, nutrition requirements, or standard set of resources. community based (i.e., publically funded) preschool ranges from five to seven hours per day. this is often preceded and followed by a long walk from home and back, typically in small groups accompanied informally by an older sibling, parent, or grandparent from the children’s village. ministry of education policy stipulates that children’s journeys to and from school–including preschool children– do not exceed one hour of walking each way. in community eccd centres, the government pays for children to attend. in workplace based eccd centres, the employee pays a nominal fee for children to attend. in ngo centres, the ngo pays for children to attend. in private eccd, parents pay for children to attend. eccd practitioner training as yet, there is no professional development system to produce a cadre of well-qualified eccd practitioners or leaders. for their 11th five year plan, the ministry of education has set a target of recruiting secondary school (class 12) graduates to work as full-time practitioners in eccd programs with a basic one year certificate in eccd, followed by a diploma, degree and graduate degree in eccd. these are aspirations: there are currently no accredited courses or certificate, diploma or degree programs in eccd in bhutan. however, the royal university of bhutan has agreed in principle to introduce accredited eccd programs if funding can be found to develop and deliver them. currently, unicef provides financial and technical support to lecturers at paro college of education, which is part of the royal university of bhutan, to develop courses for a two-year post-secondary diploma program in eccd. some community-based eccd practitioners have no training at all (and often have not completed secondary school) and some have participated in short-term (e.g., 10 days) new eccd facilitators training and a three to five day eccd refresher course provided by the ministry of education and save the children. these short courses are generic training packages developed by western eccd specialists and delivered by the ministry of education. there is no culturally specific content and, apart from pointers on how to make local learning materials from local materials, there is no guidance on how to incorporate local funds of knowledge, languages, cultures, family skills or parents’ goals for their children’s development. study of the emerging eccd sector from 2011-2012, a national study was conducted to assess perceptions of the need and goals for eccd programs in bhutan, their desired characteristics, and the associated need for development of professional capacity to design, operate, and monitor eccd programs. the study was led by the co-authors, along with a study team that included representatives of four partners in the study: the royal education council, the royal university of bhutan, the ministry of education, and the ministry of 16 global education review 2(1) health. at the time of the study reported below, conducted from 2011 to 2012, there were about half the number of eccd programs as there are today as shown in table 1. to date, this is the only known study of eccd in bhutan conducted with bhutanese partners and scholars. the study was supported by the open society foundation (www.opensocietyfoundations.org/). over 200 individuals were surveyed and/or interviewed for the study. at least one practitioner from every community-based preschool program in the country completed a questionnaire sent to them by mail (most programs have only one practitioner). ten practitioners from some private preschools also completed the questionnaire. as well, the study team interviewed representatives of government institutions (ministry of education, ministry of health, national commission for women and children); autonomous institutions (royal education council, royal institute of health science, royal university of bhutan), nongovernment organizations (save the children, unicef, loden foundation, tarayana foundation, draktsho vocational institute, and the respect education nurture and empower women organization), and key individuals including dzongkhag education officers and village head-men. focus groups meetings were conducted with over 100 parents and with preprimary school teachers. the team also engaged over 40 young children in a number of villages in conversations about their wishes and needs in regards to going to preschool. the design and interpretation of the study paid close attention to the country’s overarching gnh policy as the end product of development, asking interviewees for their views on the importance of the policy and their ideas for implementing the policy in the context of eccd. the study found that parents, community level governing bodies and leaders, government and non-government actors, and private nursery and preschool providers strongly supported expansion of centre-based programs for young children. their main reasons for supporting this new concept were, respectively: (1) to provide safety and care for children while parents are working; (2) to enable children to learn, especially english and dzongkha alphabets, before starting formal schooling; and (3) to provide socialization outside the home. a made-in-bhutan approach to professional education in eccd the broad study of eccd confirmed parent and community demand to develop the eccd sector. the eccd policy within the national education policy requires a professional education system for front-line practitioners to deliver a spectrum of infant, toddler, and preschool programs. partners in the scoping study agreed that development of a professional system of career-laddered certificate, diploma, degree and graduate courses on early childhood care and development is timely. this will help to ensure the quality of an array of programs and services for young children and their families. paro college of education in the royal university of bhutan was identified as the best place to start to deliver the professionalization program. leaders in the development of the eccd sector are acutely aware of the value and need to bring local funds of knowledge into early learning curricula, and to preserve and cherish long-held cultural and religious traditions through the early childhood programs. at the conclusion of the study, a made in bhutan approach to post-secondary education in eccd, conceived by the study team, was resoundingly endorsed by government and university representatives. conceptually, this bi/multicultural approach emphasizes the benefits of incorporating the best of the west while http://www.opensocietyfoundations/ using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 17 affording a central place for local knowledge, values, and practices in professional training and early childhood programs. the aspirational vision informing this made in bhutan approach is one of children continuing to develop their strong identification with and knowledge about the land, their families’ religion, cultural traditions, and forms of social interaction, while also benefiting from some formal instruction and opportunities for socialization beyond their home and village. support for a made-in-bhutan approach suggests that bhutanese leaders in education and community development are exercising caution about importing fully elaborated, prescriptive, brand name pedagogical approaches, early learning curricula and resources in order to ensure that the country can sustain its long-held cultural traditions and indigenous knowledge, and support children’s pride in who they are as bhutanese citizens. bhutanese scholar pedey (2013) warned that in the absence of capacity for eccd in bhutan, the government and private practitioners rely on external consultants who know little about the cultures and languages. the attendant risk of importing western approaches to the exclusion of local goals for children and local funds of knowledge is very high. a balance must be reached, as the made in bhutan approach identified in the study reported here underscored. incorporating gnh into eccd leaders in developing the eccd sector in bhutan have pointed to gnh as a national philosophy that could provide direction for development of the sector (choden, 2013; pedey, 2013). pillar 1: sustainable and equitable development: economic development for all bhutanese  learn about fairness  want only what we need pillar 2: environmental conservation: care for nature and others  appreciate the importance of the environment  do not use non-degradable items pillar 3: cultural promotion: preserve wisdom of an ancient culture  respect parents, extended family, neighbours  labour for the good of all: classroom, playground and toilet cleaning and beautification  incorporate bhutanese folk tales and stories pillar 4: good governance: good citizenship  resolve conflicts peacefully  do everything in a democratic way  be honest using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 15 discussion this section explores the potential for congruence of the current approach to eccd with the gnh policy in bhutan. school readiness was the most recurring objective of eccd identified by participants in the study reported here. similarly, documents and discussions by the ministry of education identify school readiness as the main aim of eccd, underscoring the potential of eccd to contribute to the country’s pursuit of the millenium development goals and education for all. the gnh policy, especially pillar 3, enshrines the importance of preserving the wisdom of an ancient culture, including the central role of the family in caring for children. when families shift from extended to nuclear units, and when women’s traditional roles as primary caregivers shift to roles in the labour force outside the home--as they are all over the world-various non-traditional arrangements to care for young children must be found. to promote a country’s economic development objectives, citizens often expect that public funds should be directed towards supporting alternative child care arrangements. this situation does not necessarily call for centre-based care or early learning programs such as preschool or kindergarten. preschool is not child minding. there is a significant difference between child care programs, which is an approach to providing group care for children when family members are not available, and preschool or kindergarten, which are generally oriented towards promoting optimal child development and learning. in many countries, the state seems all too willing to take over the family’s role in caring for children through various forms of institutional based care, including centre-based infant care and preschool programs when there are high numbers of children who do not enroll in school or who fail early grades, governments often respond to a push from international organizations to establish early learning programs for children who have traditionally learned at the hearth and side by side with adults in their agrarian villages. yet research shows that centre-based programs for young children do not yield cognitive gains and can produce social behaviour problems if the programs are not of high quality (peisnerfeinberg & burchinal, 1997). moreover, centrebased programs can erode the responsibility of extended family members and villages to care for children (swadener et al., 2000). as well, some countries have found that provision of preschool as a form of child care does not always result in increased maternal participation in the labour force (cascio & schanzenbach, 2013; fitzpatrick, 2010). this outcome was suggested during the national study in bhutan, where mothers, and sometimes fathers, were often seen at community-based preschools waiting for their children all day--perhaps because of the hour long walk each way to drop off and pick up their children. at the present time, bhutan has chosen to explore centre-based preschool programs with explicit early learning objectives that appear to focus on learning the rudiments of dzongkha and english. as noted, there is little to no training for preschool facilitators, and facilities are often extremely basic. the centres provide new opportunities for children to socialize with other youngsters beyond their home villages, but preschool facilitators lack training, mentorship and supervision to ensure that children’s social interactions are constructive. as well, there is often only one facilitator for a group of up to 20 children. (in large classes with two cofacilitators, there are no arrangements for substitutes if one is unable to come to work). although strongly discouraged by the eccd unit in the ministry of education, the use of traditional ways of disciplining a child, including corporal punishment is acknowledged, particularly when the eccd facilitator has not received practitioner training. without training, a holistic curriculum that reflects elements of the 16 global education review 2(1) ghn philosophy, or quality assurance, it is reasonable to ask whether the emerging eccd sector would do better to support (at least on a pilot basis in a mixed-model approach) a villagelevel, family daycare model, where one caregiver or family within a village is supported with training, mentorship, supervision and remuneration to care for village children in their home or a nearby facility. family based daycare would seem to be more congruent with the gnh policy, with its emphasis on the family’s role in caring for children and maintenance of cultural traditions, and could also provide longer hours to cover the time that dual career parents are at work or in the fields. the choice of centre-based preschool in bhutan seems to be driven by the perceived need to introduce children early to the rudiments of the two languages of instruction they will be required to master when they transition to formal schooling. what are the potential subtractive effects of early learning programs in bhutan? home language proficiency the national education policy in bhutan does not comment on the language of instruction to be used in eccd. according to the chief program office for eccd in the ministry of education in bhutan (gyeltshen, 2014), eccd practitioners are encouraged to use children’s home languages and not to restrict their interactions to english and dzongkha. the reality, however, is that one of the main activities in centre-based eccd in bhutan is rote recitation of the letters and sounds of english and dzongkha. a majority of participants in the study emphasized the value of centre-based preschool experience for facilitating children’s acquisition of dzongkha and english so that children do not lose their first three years of primary school struggling–and often failing–to learn english and dzongka. virtually no one identified support for ethno-minority linguistic proficiency. reasons given for this emphasis were that: (1) children’s transition for formal schooling will be facilitated by becoming familiar with the two languages used in primary 1; and (2) it is widely understood that there are no orthographies for other languages spoken in the country. demand for preschool in the majority language of instruction in formal school is also extremely common among parents and educators around the world. in bhutan, the effort to promote school readiness in both private and community-based preschools visited by the study team largely consisted of children’s engagement in teacher-led rote recitation and copying of the letters and sounds of the dzongkha and english alphabets and numbers with few instances of learning through play. lack of support in eccd for facilitating children’s proficiency with their home language is increasingly common in preschools around the world and a potent source of language loss around the world, with the attendant loss of cultural knowledge and diversity. this lack of support reflects parent demand, teacher recruitment and training practices, and international pressure to measure children’s learning in early grades using standardized early learning measurement tools, such as early grade reading assessment, that do not take into account uneven learning trajectories when children are gaining proficiency in two or more languages. this is especially so in settings where there is no option to participate in formal schooling that offers instruction in the home language, so that supporting acquisition of the majority language of instruction is part of becoming school ready. the rapidly changing situation in bhutan brings to the fore some of the possible trade-offs in a country that aims to use early childhood programs as a vehicle to improve readiness for a modernized school system. the main trade-off that appears to be imminent in bhutan is children’s opportunity to become fully proficient in their home language and, potentially, a using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 17 second language that is the lingua franca of their geographic region, and to use this language in their formal learning journeys. a large research literature has shown that children’s first language is the optimal language for literacy and learning throughout primary school (unesco, 2008a). indeed, some educators argue that only those countries where the learner’s first language is the language of instruction are likely to achieve the goals of education for all. unesco has encouraged home language instruction in primary education since 1953 (unesco, 1953). in its report, strong foundations: early childhood care and education, unesco (2007) highlights the advantages of mle right from the start. for example: children are more likely to enroll and succeed in school (kosonen, 2005); parents are more likely to communicate with teachers and participate in their children’s learning (benson, 2002); girls and rural children with less exposure to a dominant language stay in school longer and repeat grades less often (hovens, 2002; unesco bangkok, 2005); and children in mle tend to develop certain types of cognitive flexibility and mentalinguistic awareness earlier and better than their monolingual peers (e.g., bialystok, 2001; cummins, 2000; king & mackey, 2007). yet, bhutan is one of many countries around the world that insist on exclusive use of one or two privileged languages, while excluding other languages (arnold, bartlett, gowani, & merali, 2006). a common understanding in bhutan, attested to by the findings of the study reported earlier, is that parents demand eccd programs that have as a primary goal teaching their children english and dzongkha to save them from early school difficulties and failure. this parent demand is understandable, given the language challenges that children will face upon school entry. however, whether parents would demand english and dzongkha acquisition as eccd goals if formal schooling offered home language based multilingual education (mtbmle) is a moot question. in many countries, when mtb-mle is offered for formal schooling, parent demand for eccd programs to focus on acquisition of dominant languages sometimes shifts to demand for eccd programs to play a role in maintaining and developing children’s proficiency in their home language (ball & mcivor, 2013). this seems a likely scenario in many parts of bhutan, where cultural continuity and happiness with who one is and what one has are superordinate values. it is not hard to grasp all that may be at stake for ethno-linguistic minority children in bhutan and for the nation as a whole from neglect of ethno-linguistic diversity in the context of formal learning. outcomes may range from children developing low self-efficacy as learners when faced with the need to learn english and dzongkha as soon as they enter school, not being able to succeed in learning tasks, teachers feeling overwhelmed by children’s inability to participate, early experiences of school failure, not becoming fully literate because of struggles to master two new written languages, and so on. for those children who do succeed, perhaps through a language transition program that helps them to acquire dzongkha and english, there is still the risk of subtractive effects of schooling whereby children fail to become linguistically competent members of their local communities and lose the ability to access their cultural heritage. while some children may continue to develop proficiency in their first language while succeeding in school in english, this does not happen automatically. in other countries where outcome research is available, studies show that many children who speak non-dominant languages and dialects do not become fully proficient in their home languages, resulting in an inability to communicate about more than mundane matters with parents and grandparents. in other countries where this situation exists, there is rapid depletion of the nation’s repository of languages and dialects and the cultural 18 global education review 2(1) knowledge that is carried through them. in bhutan, avoiding this kind of cultural loss is the stated purpose of the gnh policy and implementing commission. there is a growing literature describing circumstances, resources and models that are working around the world to successfully support learning of ethno-linguistic minority children through home language based, multilingual education (mtb-mle) (e.g., benson & kosonen, 2013; yiakoumetti, 2012). this literature is beginning to answer questions such as:  under what circumstances and with what resources can mtb-mle be an effective, additive approach whereby children become proficient in their home language while laying the foundation for learning in additional languages?  what are the costs and benefits of alternative approaches in varying situations and at different levels, from the individual, the family, community, school, region, and nation?  what are meaningful yet efficient ways to measure costs and benefits? what are the implications of mtb-mle for recruiting, educating, and mentoring teachers and teacher assistants and for creating and evaluating curricula in diverse language classrooms?  what are the contributions of family and community in formal and non-formal mtb-mle, and how can these be measured? investment in a coordinated program of research could advance knowledge about such questions in order to inform national language in education policies, teacher training, and local approaches to language of instruction in formal and non-formal education. a coordinated program of research in bhutan could advance knowledge about these kinds of questions in order to inform national language in education policies, teacher training, and local approaches to language in education in formal school and in eccd programs. research is also needed on steps that can be taken in eccd programs and during the transition to school to prepare children meaningfully for the mix of language(s) they will need to acquire for success in primary school. given the important role of family members as children’s primary caregivers and first teachers in bhutan, leaders in eccd could explore how to involve community members with diverse language skills in eccd programs and in primary schools. there is a need to develop and evaluate strategies for training eccd facilitators and lower primary teachers to be effective in mtb-mle classrooms. in many countries, education authorities raise objections to allowing education to encompass non-dominant languages, with similar arguments used to justify restrictive language in education policies. the most common argument in bhutan is that there are no writing systems to support the development of literacy in any languages in bhutan besides dzongkha and english. however, two of the languages, lepcha and nepali, are written languages with literacy traditions in other countries. as well, there is the potential to develop orthographies for bhutan’s other, unwritten languages. a small indication of this potential was gleaned by the authors when they engaged a group of teenagers who were using their phones to text in tshangla (sharchop)--one of the languages, spoken by between 18.6% and 21.2% of the population, especially in the eastern region, that is purported not to have orthography. while phone texting hardly approximates the development of orthography, this encounter hints at the potential for an unwritten language to become a medium of textbased communication. elsewhere in the world, steps are being taken to create orthographies for oral languages in order to ensure their survival and so they can become languages of learning in formal education. the tibeto-burman languages of bhutan were not documented until recently, with the exception of dzongkha, which has a native using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 19 literacy tradition in bhutan. the government of bhutan is now advocating for the creation of tibetan--or dzongkha--or tibetan-like (ucen) orthographies for its endangered languages (hyslop, 2011). many of bhutan’s languages are endangered including: 300 brokkat speakers, 5000 brokpa speakers, 1100 layakha speakers, 1000 khampa tibetan speakers, 1000 dakpa speakers, 1000 chali speakers, 1000 ‘olekha speakers, and 1000 gongduk speakers – to name a few that are in the endangered range (sil international, 2006). around the world, along with increasing recognition of language endangerment and of the cultural knowledge and identity that is lost when a language dies, there is increased interest and investment in creating orthographies for unwritten language endangerment (cahill & rice, 2014). for example sil international holds annual symposia on this topic, and has numerous projects to assist minority language groups to develop written versions of their languages and to deliver education in these languages (malone, 2004) literacy in an endangered language can strengthen a language’s vitality, raise the perceived status of the language, make it possible communicate in new ways, preserve cultural knowledge, and make it easier to disseminate certain types of information, such as health information, agricultural innovations, and education. language documentation methodologies have improved, and are aided by new technologies. this can be a complex undertaking and requires specific technical expertise on linguistic and non-linguistic factors that need to be considered in order to represent an oral language (adams, 2014). however, it can be done and is especially urgent in the face of imminent language loss in almost every country in the world, including bhutan. an example of this is the work of hyslop (2014), who worked with the dzongkha development commission in bhutan to develop a preliminary roman and ucen-based orthography for kurtop – one of bhutan’s endangered languages. investment in the process of developing orthographies for at least the languages in bhutan that are spoken widely, such as tshangla (unwritten lingua franca of eastern bhutan) would be congruent with the gnh policy, especially pillar 3, which promotes preservation of the wisdom of ancient cultures. languages are the vehicles for expressing and preserving cultural knowledges. this is intangible cultural heritage--traditional and indigenous knowledge, beliefs, and practices that are time-tested, forged through the experiences of generations and expressed with often-unique concepts and expressions of a common tongue. respect for multiple languages broadens the base of knowledge from which everyone can draw, contributing to a global knowledge repository. some governments regard home languages as subversive to national unity. indeed, national unity is reportedly one of the motivations for establishing dzongkha as the national language (van driem). however, this outlook is contradicted by studies that show that non-dominant groups whose languages and cultures are respected rather than repressed will be more loyal to the state. as unesco director general irina bokova underscores: “recognizing local languages enables more people to make their voices heard and take an active part in their collective fate. the protection and promotion of home languages are keys to global citizenship and authentic mutual understanding.” many linguists, educators, and world leaders agree that perhaps the greatest threat to home languages is posed by education systems that refuse to use them as languages of instruction or even as subjects of study. in the context of bhutan, where there are nineteen distinct languages, promoting children’s acquisition of their home language, dzongkha and english through formal education would help to ensure a sense of social inclusion and ethnic pride, sustainability of local knowledge, and communication within the country and on 20 global education review 2(1) the global stage. other countries in the region, including thailand, cambodia, and the philippines, have new national language polices that support processes to recruit and train home language teachers and to develop home language textbooks and other learning materials, including sometimes creating an alphabet. one step that is being implemented in bhutan is to ensure that eccd practitioners and teachers who speak a particular language are assigned to teach in the communities that also speak that language. inclusion of multiple cultures and languages bhutan has many rich cultures to draw upon and strong commitment to respect for all sentient beings and the connections among beings in the natural world and in families and communities. this recognition of interdependence, enshrined in the gnh policy, encompasses values and beliefs that are pertinent to the well-being of young children, their families, and communities. while policy based on a holistic approach has been a pervasive term in eccd and in education in general, the mutual interdependence that is reinforced throughout the pillars, domains, and values of bhutan’s gnh policy provides a depth and breadth of understanding and scope that could be highly instrumental if it was applied to the design, delivery and monitoring of eccd and professional development programs. this can also help to guard against an over enthusiastic reach for models and curricula from outside the country, as so often happens when a country identifies resource gaps that it quickly wants to fill. one step to make eccd curriculum consistent with gnh philosophy is to revive the age-old tradition of story-telling and to incorporate folk tales and local literature. with globalization and the advent of television, hindi and english cartoon characters have become very popular with bhutanese children. reviving and strengthening the status of cultural folk heroes and stories (e.g., ap wang drugay, meme heyley heyley and others) could be pursued through the development of children’s books, cartoon serials, and other learning resources. using the gnh policy to guide and enable development of the eccd sector will ensure that cultural traditions and epistemological knowledge residing within bhutan’s multi-ethnic, multi-lingual communities is explicitly considered and incorporated in the evolution of policy and in eccd teaching and learning. conclusion this article highlights what might be sustained and what might be sacrificed through the introduction of centre-based eccd programs as this formerly isolated himalayan kingdom opens up to hegemonic and homogenizing forces of globalization. the foregoing description of the emergence of an eccd sector in bhutan points to the role that national aspirations, embodied in a superordinate, visionary policy like gnh, could play in promoting social inclusion, language maintenance, and preservation of culturally-based wisdom. as bhutanese scholar pedey (2013) states: “the goal of the bhutanese education system is to prepare children to be gnh graduates. this goal requires foundations to be laid from the early childhood period.” providing scope for multiple languages of instruction, including dzongkha, english and students’ home languages, right from the start in eccd, can enrich and empower the next generation to uphold the pillars of gnh while becoming global citizens, leading to a more sustainable future. notes 1. the treaty was revised in 1920 and 1949, and concluded in 2007. 2. until the 1960s, the only formal education available in bhutan except for a handful of private schools was through buddhist monasteries. using a policy of ‘gross national happiness’ 21 3. ‘ucen is the tibetan-based orthography derived from brahmi in the 7th century c.e. 4. formerly people from nepal who settled in bhutan before 1950. 5. for information on gnh visit: http://www.gnhc.gov.bt/wpcontent/uploads/2013/04/gnh-faqspdf.pdf; http://www.gnhc.gov.bt/; http://www.bhutanstudies.org.bt/ 6. the liturgical, religio-philosophical, language of the dharma. references adams, l. 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(ed.) harnessing linguistic variation to improve education. rethinking education vol. 5. bern: peter lang. about the authors jessica ball, mph, phd, is a professor in the school of child and youth care at the university of victoria in canada. she is a specialist in the cultural nature of child development. she was the external lead in the study reported in this article. she has a strong commitment to protecting cultural and linguistic heterogeneity in the face of the homogenizing pressures of globalization and especially the dominance of english as the language of formal education. she has worked on three continents, most recently focusing on strengthening local capacity for culturally-grounded and multilingual early childhood care and development programs. she has published, consulted, and presented extensively on the manufacture of marginalized childhoods through laws, policies and practices that exclude ethnic minorities, indigenous people, girls and differently abled children (www.ecdip.org). karma chimi wangchuk. m.ed., is a bhutanese lecturer at paro college of education in the royal university of bhutan, where he is part of a team developing the first postsecondary courses in early childhood care and development. he was the bhutan team leader for the study reported in this article. he is a member of the sharchop ethnic population and grew up in a remote himalayan village, experiencing firsthand the importance of learning one’s cultural traditions and mother tongue. he is deeply committed to ensuring retention of cultural traditions, indigenous knowledges, and spirituality through early childhood care and education practices as bhutan opens up beyond the himalayas to the global arena. http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/ http://www.arnec.net/ntuc/slot/u2323/ecd%20conference%202013/arnec%20ppt%20iii.pdf http://www.arnec.net/ntuc/slot/u2323/ecd%20conference%202013/arnec%20ppt%20iii.pdf http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=dzo http://www.ethnologue.com/show_language.asp?code=dzo quality of community based ecd in malawi 28 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: shallwani, sadaf, abubakar, amina, & nyongesa, moses k. (2018). the quality of learning and care at community-based early childhood development centers in malawi. global education review, 5 (2), 28-46. the quality of learning and care at community-based early childhood development centers in malawi sadaf shallwani firelight foundation, usa amina abubakar pwani university, kilifi, kenya moses k nyongesa kemri/ wellcome trust, kilifi, kenya abstract this exploratory study examined the strengths and weaknesses in the quality of early childhood care and learning at selected community-based childcare centers (cbccs) in malawi, and aimed to understand underlying challenges and opportunities that may be addressed to improve quality and ultimately children’s outcomes. classroom environments and interactions were systematically observed at 12 cbccs. early childhood caregivers were surveyed, and in-depth interviews were conducted with key informants from the community. areas of relative strength at the cbccs included the physical environment, adultchild interactions, and inclusiveness. however, the cbccs struggled substantially with the quality of learning and play opportunities; the availability of play and learning materials; and the quality of instruction for literacy, numeracy, and science. underlying challenges that emerged from surveys and interviews included the cbccs’ reliance on unskilled and volunteer caregivers, lack of materials, lack of food for children, and lack of interest from parents in the cbccs. a fundamental strength was that in almost all the communities, key stakeholders were aware of the challenges, were motivated and committed to improving quality at their cbccs, and had already taken actions to address specific problems. cbccs in malawi hold tremendous potential to provide early childhood services to the most vulnerable children; however, communities need to be supported to improve the quality of learning and care at these centers to maximize the benefits for children’s development and long-term outcomes. keywords community-based organizations, early childhood development, early childhood education, malawi, quality in early childhood education introduction in sub saharan africa (ssa), large numbers of children face substantial barriers in achieving their developmental potential, including multiple risk factors such as infectious diseases, malnutrition, and chronic poverty (walker et al., https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ quality of community based ecd in malawi 29 2007; walker et al., 2011). in fact, ssa has the largest proportion of children failing to reach their developmental potential (mccoy et al., 2016). early childhood development (ecd) programs aim to provide developmental support for children in their early years of life so that they can acquire the necessary skills for realizing their potential (agbenyega, 2013). the benefits of quality ecd programs hold great potential in ssa. indeed, quality ecd programs have been associated with increased literacy levels, improved school enrolment and achievement, enhanced developmental outcomes, and better adult outcomes such as improved productivity (f. e. aboud, 2006; melhuish, 2011; melhuish et al., 2008; peisner‐feinberg et al., 2001). in recognition of the key role played by ecd programs in enhancing childhood outcomes, the recently agreed upon sustainable development goals (sdgs) include two specific ecd targets for children younger than 5 years: meet developmental milestones [indicator 4.2.1] and participate in organized learning before primary school [indicator 4.2.1] (black & hurley, 2016). in recent years, many countries in ssa have recently prioritized ecd in their reform agendas. groups such as the working group on early childhood development (wgecd), at the association for the development of education in africa (adea), help shape policies that integrate approaches to supporting child development (adea, 2017). of the 47 countries in ssa, at least 23 already have approved national intersectoral ecd policies, and another 13 have drafts (vargas-baron & schipper, 2012). kenya in particular has been recognized for its large-scale national ecd program serving children from different socio-economic, cultural and religious backgrounds (okenga l, 2013). key factors contributing to the success of the kenya ecd program have included community involvement and ownership, government involvement and support, decentralized training systems, and strategic support by multiple development partners. nonetheless, several factors still impede the effective implementation of ecd programs in most countries in ssa. to start, inadequate public investment has been made in ecd in many african countries (munthali, mvula, & silo, 2014). to fill this gap, communities in many ssa countries have come together, often with the support of community-based organizations (cbos), to establish and run ecd centers to improve their children’s developmental and educational opportunities. these community-based ecd programs hold tremendous potential for promoting children’s development and learning in their earliest years. however, through both government-supported and community-based programs, the quality of the learning and care available to children in ssa remains a core challenge. in malawi, for example, research has found the severe challenges in both the sustainability and quality of ecd centers (neuman, mcconnell, & kholowa, 2014; ozler et al., 2016). if ecd programs are of low quality, they are unlikely to produce the desired child and family outcomes (britto, yoshikawa, & boller, 2011). thus, it is crucial to examine the quality of learning and care in ecd programs in different parts of ssa, and to consider how best to support communities, cbos, and governments, to improve quality and child outcomes. corresponding author sadaf shallwani, director of learning and evaluation, firelight foundation, 903 pacific avenue, suite 307a santa cruz, ca 95060, usa email sadaf@firelightfoundation.org mailto:%20sadaf@firelightfoundation.org 30 global education review 5(2) this paper presents findings from an exploratory study conducted to examine the quality of learning and care at a sample of community-based childcare centers (cbccs) supported by cbos in malawi. community-based childcare centers in malawi malawi, a landlocked country in south-eastern africa, remains one of the poorest countries in the world, with a human development index (hdi) of 0.418, ranking 170 out of 187 countries (united nations, 2017). almost 75% of the population earns less than 1.25 usd per day. people experience high levels of vulnerability, including poor nutrition and high prevalence of hiv/aids (10.6%). life expectancy stands at about 54.8 years. malawi’s population is growing at a rate of 2.75% and is expected to exceed 29 million by 2030 (united nations, 2017). vast numbers of children in malawi are vulnerable as a result of chronic poverty, malnutrition, and oprhanhood. approximately 13% of malawian children have lost one or both parents, almost half of them due to hiv (attenborough, 2012). additionally, many of malawi’s one million orphaned children live in poor communities (attenborough, 2012). malawi further experiences frequent famine which has led to food shortages and contributed to high rates of malnutrition among children. the united nations children’s fund (unicef) reports that around 46% of children under five are stunted, 21% are underweight, and 4% percent are wasted (unicef, 2010). unicef’s 2014 multiple indicator survey reported that only 60% of malawian children aged 35-69 months are developmentally on track (bakilana, moucheraud, mcconnell, & hasan, 2016). however, there were large differences based on socio-economic differences (bakilana et al., 2016) suggesting that more children in rural poor communities were likely to be off track developmentally. in this context of large numbers of vulnerable children, particularly in rural and poor areas, many communities in malawi have come together over the last few decades to establish and run community-based childcare centers (cbccs). a national survey found 5,665 cbccs in malawi, mostly initiated by civil society organizations (csos, 45%) or by communities themselves (42%) (munthali et al., 2014). these cbccs serve over 400,000 children, including orphans (21.9%) and children with disabilities (3.5%). most of the cbccs were initially set up to provide care and nutritional support of the children, and were not focused on educational outcomes. however, in response to changing demands from parents and communities, as well as increased awareness among csos of the importance of early learning, greater attention is being given to responding to children’s early development and learning needs (michelle j neuman, mcconnell, & kholowa, 2014). many cbccs are managed by cbcc management committees, which include representation from parents and other community members; however, these committees vary in how functional they are. three key strengths of the cbcc model have been described as: (1) its reliance on community ownership and involvement; (2) support and investment from community-based organizations (cbos); and (3) the cbccs’ linkages with other local services such as health facilities, primary schools, and child protection committees (wame, 2017). however, the cbccs also struggle with extremely limited resources because of inadequate investment from the government and high levels of poverty at community levels (wame, 2017). quality of community based ecd in malawi 31 the role of community-based organizations in ssa, as in much of the world, cbos emerge in response to identified local needs and generally remain rooted in their communities. their unique position allows them to transect different layers of ecosystems shaping children’s lives – the family and home, the school and broader community, local and regional civil society, and local and national government and policy. in recent decades, cbos in ssa have played a leadership role at the grassroots level in implementing community-based ecd programs. they provide or support communities to provide services to the youngest and most vulnerable children. because of their grassroots and local positioning, they are often able to reach communities and children ‘at the last mile’ – those that are not reached by larger nongovernmental and civil society organizations. in malawi in particular, cbos play a crucial role in mobilizing communities to establish many cbccs, and provide ongoing training and support to ecd caregivers and cbcc management committee members (wame, 2017). the support of a cbo can be crucial in sustaining cbccs, which are otherwise fragile and can fall temporarily or permanently out of operation for several reasons (neuman, mcconnell, & kholowa, 2014). however, cbo staff themselves have indicated that they need additional knowledge and training to more effectively work with the communities so that that the cbccs can provide high quality care and learning. indeed, cbo staff, visitors, and communities themselves have frequently noted that there is much improvement needed in the quality of learning and care at the cbccs in malawi. for cbos to work with communities to develop improvement plans, it is important to understand the key quality issues at cbccs as well as underlying challenges and opportunities at the community level that may be addressed to improve quality and ultimately children’s outcomes. frameworks for quality in early childhood development programs as we sought to examine the quality of learning and care at cbccs in malawi, we were guided by the ecd framework articulated by the world bank’s systems approach for better education development [saber-ecd] (neuman & devercelli, 2013). this framework describes four types of process elements that are important for quality in ecd programs. structural variables involve aspects such as the physical environment, the teacher-child ratio, and the availability of equipment and materials. caregiver variables include the level of education and training that the caregivers have, the mentoring and supervision they get, and the compensation they receive. program variables comprise the curriculum, daily routine, the intensity of the program, parent involvement, and health and nutrition inputs. finally, process variables examine caregiver-child and childchild interactions. picture of the quality of learning and care available to children. moreover, we are aware that ecd programs do not operate in isolation – they are influenced by and interact with the communities within which they exist. the total environment assessment model for early childhood development (team-ecd; siddiqi, irwin, & hertzman, 2007), is a framework that builds on the bio-ecological model (bronfenbrenner, 1977) to understand the environments and interactions that play significant roles in providing nurturing conditions to children in the earliest years of life. the team-ecd framework is organized by interacting and interdependent ‘spheres of influence.’ these include the 32 global education review 5(2) individual sphere – representing the child and her/his characteristics – at the center of the model, the family and home sphere, the neighborhood or residential community sphere, the relational community sphere, the ecd services sphere, the regional environmental sphere, the national environmental sphere, and the global environmental sphere. this study was guided by both the saberecd and the team-ecd frameworks as we sought to examine and understand the quality of learning and care at ecd centers. our measures examined different aspects of quality within the ecd program – including structural, caregiver, program, and process variables, while also examining the perceptions and interactions of parents and other community members with the ecd centers. these measures will be described further in the method section. study objectives the objectives of this exploratory study were to assess the strengths and weaknesses in the quality of learning and care at a sample of cbosupported cbccs in malawi, and to understand the challenges and opportunities underlying the observed quality of learning and care that may be addressed to improve quality and ultimately children’s outcomes. specifically, we sought to understand: 1. the quality of early learning environments and experiences – including the physical environment, interactions in the classroom, inclusiveness, program and curriculum, and learning activities (language and literacy, numeracy, free play, and group work). 2. caregivers’ qualifications, compensation, and perceptions – including their education and training, their years of experience, their level of financial compensation for their work, and their comfort handling different teaching activities (e.g., teaching math, facilitating song and movement, etc.). 3. key stakeholders’ perspectives on the learning and care provided to children at the cbccs – including what they perceive to be the goals of cbcc education, the challenges faced by cbccs, and what their community has already done to address some of the challenges. method this study was a collaboration between the learning and evaluation team at firelight foundation (led by author ss) and a team of east african academic researchers (authors aa and mkn). firelight wanted to understand strengths and challenges in the quality of cbccs supported by the five cbo partners they fund and support to work on ecd in malawi. the primary purpose of the study was to inform the design of a firelight initiative to build the capacity of cbo staff and ecd caregivers at cbccs, thereby improving the quality of learning and care received by children. to reduce bias in observations and analyses, and to protect the confidentiality of individual participants, the academic research team (authors aa and mkn) managed all data collection and analysis. table 1 summarizes the data collection activities, aims, tools, and sample used in this study. these are also described in more detail below. this study underwent ethical review and received approval from the malawian national commission for science & technology, committee on research in social sciences and humanities (protocol no. p.02/16/82). quality of community based ecd in malawi 33 table 1. summary of data collection activities, aims, tools, and sample used in study activity aim tool sample classroom observations measure quality of environment, interactions, and activities in ccbc classrooms measure of early learning environment classrooms at 12 ccbcs surveys assess cbcc caregivers’ background training, working conditions, and perceived competencies teacher questionnaire 13 cbcc caregivers qualitative interviews elicit key informants’ perceptions of challenges facing ccbcs in-depth semistructured interviews 12 parents 8 cbcc caregivers 6 members of the cbcc management team sample this study was carried out at 12 cbccs in rural communities located in the mangochi, machinga, and neno districts of southeastern malawi. a collaborative process with cbo staff was undertaken to purposefully select cbccs for participation in the intervention and study, with the aim of bringing in both struggling cbccs as well as cbccs with clear potential for growth. this sampling strategy was considered appropriate since the primary purpose of this study was inform learning and program improvement. there was only one classroom in the cbccs that were visited; this classroom was the classroom observed. some cbccs had more than one caregiver; in most cases, the caregiver most involved in the teaching and care of the children was surveyed. at one cbcc, two caregivers were both significantly involved in the teaching and care, and both were surveyed. thus, 12 cbcc classrooms were observed, and 13 cbcc caregivers were surveyed with teacher questionnaires. key stakeholder interviews were conducted with convenience samples of 8 cbcc caregivers, 12 parents, and 6 cbcc management committee members, spread among the 12 cbccs. all adult participants provided written informed consent. as part of the informed consent process, participants were told that this study was being initiated by firelight foundation, the funder supporting the cbo working with their cbcc. this may have influenced their acceptance to participate in the study. however, efforts were taken to assure them that participation was completely voluntary, that the results would not affect the cbo’s funding, and that the study was intended to understand challenges and strengths of cbccs and how to improve their quality. measures measure of early learning environment (mele) the mele tool was used to observe classroom activities. the mele, a 50-item observational measure of pre-primary settings, was developed by experts with the backing of international organizations such as the brookings institute, unicef & united nations educational 34 global education review 5(2) scientific and cultural organization institute for statistic (unesco), and the world bank(unesco, 2017). the items are adapted versions of other commonly used quality measures and modified for use in lowand middle-income countries (lmics). the mele has been used and validated in other african countries such as kenya and uganda (f. aboud et al., 2016). the mele tool was chosen after considerable thought and research, for a number of reasons: (1) the tool uses items that have been tested extensively for reliability and validity; (2) it has been developed specifically for use in low and middle-income countries, and has been validated in other sub-saharan african contexts; (3) the tool is both current and relevant, and particularly useful to monitor progress over time; and (4) it covers a range of elements contributing to quality. table 2 lists the domains assessed by the mele along with sample items for each indicator. table 2. domains assessed by the measure of early learning environment (mele) tool domain number of items sample items physical environment and hygiene 10 • the area around the school is clean/hygienic • covered classroom space is adequate for the number of attending children doing today’s activities adult-child and child-child interactions 8 • adults are verbally responsive to child-initiated questions or comments • there are behavioural indications of a negative environment between teacher and children inclusiveness 6 • program shows evidence of encouraging enrolment and participation of all ethnic, religious and gender groups • children of different learning needs and levels are catered to program and curriculum 3 • the daily routine, seen today, has a mix of activities including play (indoor, outdoor), arts & games (e.g. stories, songs, rhymes, art, games), and instructional (e.g. teacher-led language, math) language and literacy 5 • children are introduced to reading and/or writing letters • adult reads an age-appropriate illustrated storybook with text numeracy and mathematics 6 • children read and/or write simple numbers • operations on numbers by adding or subtracting nature or science 2 • material from the natural or technological world is accessible free-choice indoor play 6 • children have access to different interest centres during indoor play (e.g., blocks, sand & water, books, art, games, dramatic, music) • dramatic or imaginative play materials are accessible arts and games as group activities 4 • age-appropriate gross motor games are supervised and led by an adult usually outside • art (may consist of drawing, colouring, clay, paint, or other) quality of community based ecd in malawi 35 to implement the mele, trained observers spend the whole morning (usually 3-4 hours) at the ecd center, observing the classroom environment, activities, and interactions. the indicators are rated on a scale of 1-4, with 1 representing very low quality and 4 indicating the highest quality desired. individual indicator scores are averaged in each domain to generate a domain score. domain scores are averaged to generate a total overall score. a rating above 2.5 is generally considered acceptable quality, while a score above 3 is considered good quality. teacher questionnaires teacher questionnaires were conducted with cbcc caregivers to gather information on their years of experience, level of education, training received in early childhood education, compensation for their services, and comfort level handling different subject areas. in-depth interviews in-depth interviews were conducted with key stakeholders to gather a deeper understanding of community perspectives on some of the challenges faced by the cbccs, and insights on communities’ ‘readiness’ to engage with the challenges around quality at the cbccs. key stakeholders were asked questions around: (a) what are the goals of cbcc education? (b) what are the challenges faced by the cbccs? and (c) what have communities done thus far to meet the challenges they face? for the first question area (a), in most cases, we needed to rephrase this question as several interviewees did not seem to immediately understand what was being asked. in the simplified form of the question, we asked key informants why they or other people in the village brought their children to cbccs. appendix 1 provides a copy of the interview protocol. procedure data collection was carried out over a week, led by two researchers (authors aa and mkn) who had been trained and achieved inter-rater reliability in classroom observations using the mele. they were assisted by two malawian research assistants who provided translation support, contributed observations, and took detailed notes during all activities. two data collection teams were formed – each including one researcher (aa or mkn) and one malawian research assistant. the data collection teams worked separately, each visiting different cbccs to observe classrooms, survey teachers, and conduct key informant interviews. to ensure reliability and consistency in scoring, the mele observations and scoring were discussed and consensus was reached after each cbcc visit. data analysis descriptive analyses (means and standard deviations, or frequencies and percentages) were conducted on the quantitative data – the mele scores and the responses on the teacher questionnaires. audio-recordings of the key informant interviews were transcribed verbatim in chichewa or yao, and then translated into english. after in-depth reading and reflection on the transcripts, an initial coding of a priori and emergent themes was conducted by the academic researchers (authors aa and mkn). one researcher (author aa) then conducted the final stage of coding in nvivo 10 software (qsr international ltd, southport, uk). final coding decisions were discussed between the two researchers and consensus was reached. results quality of early learning environments and experiences overall, the quality at the 12 observed cbccs was found to be very low (m = 2.16, range 1.92 to 36 global education review 5(2) 2.54). when domains were examined separately, important trends emerged; these are discussed in the following sections. physical environment relatively speaking, the physical environment was an area of strength for most of the cbccs (m = 2.89, sd = 0.31). the cbccs were generally clean with adequate toilet facilities and safe drinking water. however, none had any of the children’s work displayed on the walls, and many had hazards outside the classroom such as open cooking areas close to the children’s play area. interactions the cbccs also scored relatively well on adultchild interactions (m = 2.48, sd = 0.32). the research team observed generally positive interactions between children and adults, caregivers praising children for correct answers, and few instances of children being beaten or abused. despite the generally positive observations, there were still areas for improvement; for example, caregivers relied heavily rote teaching and learning practices in their instructional interaction with children. inclusiveness the cbccs had strengths and challenges in different aspects of inclusiveness (m = 2.36, sd = 0.26). in general, most of the observed cbccs had good representation of children in terms of ethnicity, religious groups, and gender. moreover, many cbccs had a child with a disability attending the class. however, the cbccs struggled with catering to children’s different learning needs, including enabling the active participation of children with disabilities. program and curriculum the cbccs generally scored low on program planning and daily routine (m = 1.89, sd = 0.38). most of the centers scored relatively higher on having a varied daily routine that includes many child-led activities. in general, children frequently engaged in singing and movement activities. they also had opportunities to engage in age-appropriate gross motor activities; however, active adult participation was lacking during these activities. the cbccs had relatively lower scores on artwork and the use of rhyme. overall learning the cbccs also generally scored low on different dimensions of teaching and learning. for language and literacy (m = 1.33, sd = 0.23), most cbccs did not provide children opportunities to read age-appropriate illustrated storybooks, learn new vocabulary, connect language/literacy learning to past learning, and use writing instruments. there was some reading and/or writing of letters by children. for numeracy (m = 1.32, sd = 0.18), all or most cbccs did not provide children with opportunities to use objects to learn math concepts beyond enumeration, learn addition and subtraction, connect numeracy learning to past learning, and learn about shapes. the cbccs also scored low on free-choice indoor play (m = 1.92, sd = 0.59). while almost all the cbccs had time allocated for free play, most of them did not use this time effectively. the cbccs had strengths and challenges in different aspects of group activities (m = 2.38, sd = 0.69). however, overall, very few cbccs provided time for group work. caregivers' qualifications, compensation, and perceptions cbcc caregivers had an average of five years of experience (range 2 to 16 years) in teaching at the cbcc level. most of the caregivers had very limited education, with 76 % of them reporting that they had not completed high school. most (85%) of the caregivers had not received any training in early childhood education. those who had been trained had gone through quality of community based ecd in malawi 37 relatively short courses (between three and ten days). most of the caregivers were volunteers, with 76% of them reporting that they received nothing in compensation. among those who were paid, they earned between 3 to 14 us dollars a month. most of the cbcc caregivers reported that they were comfortable with handling activities relating to dancing and movement, singing, music and play. they were less comfortable with handling the subject areas of science, math, language and literacy. cbcc caregivers reported that they needed the most advice and help on teaching math, science, health and nutrition. key stakeholders' perspectives the findings from the in-depth interviews were analyzed and are presented here according to the three main questions we sought to answer. what is the goal of cbcc education? when asked about the goals of cbcc education, or why people in this village bring their children to cbccs, responses focused on children getting ready for primary school. additional goals included children learning literacy and numeracy, and improving their cognitive development. in all the communities visited, key stakeholders indicated that they bring their children to cbccs so that they can be prepared to go to primary school – including adjusting to school routines and not being afraid. “i bring my child here so that they do not have difficulties when they go to primary school and also the teachers should not find difficulties with them.” parent of child attending a cbcc so that when in primary school, the child should not be afraid (of going to school).” parent of child attending a cbcc they (children) start coming here, so that they are not afraid when they start primary school. cbcc caregiver learning literacy and numeracy was another reason given for wanting to bring children to cbccs. learning the vowels, alphabet, counting and reading were some of the key skills that were reported to be very important for children to acquire. a child who just stays at home would not know that there are alphabet letters in school. cbcc caregiver in all the communities visited, stakeholders reported that taking children to cbccs meant that these children would experience improved cognitive development, expressed as the child becoming “clever” or “intelligent.” we expect that the child who comes here would be more intelligent compared to other children who would just come from home (directly) to enroll in primary school. parent of child attending a cbcc it helps the child grow in their mental development. parent of child attending a cbcc what are the challenges faced by the cbccs? the most frequently mentioned challenges for cbccs were the heavy dependence on volunteer caregivers, the lack of trained caregivers, the lack of adequate teaching and learning materials, the lack of food provision, and teaching and learning materials, lack of food for the children, and lack of interest from parents not prioritizing early childhood care and education. 38 global education review 5(2) dependence on volunteer caregivers most of the cbccs centers depended on caregivers who worked on a voluntary basis. for those who were paid, the pay was too little to meet their day-to-day needs. the use of volunteers was seen to contribute to various other problems, which are discussed here. in all the communities we visited, the key informants noted that quite a number of the people who volunteered to be full-time caregivers were poorly educated as they had not even completed primary school. our caregivers don’t have enough knowledge – they have never been sent to learn so that they get high quality education, and some of them as well have not gone far with their education so that’s another problem. cbcc management committee member these comments were corroborated by our observations in the classrooms where we noted that several learning materials had grammatical and typographical errors. additionally, during some of the lessons, the caregivers did not correct wrong responses given by the children, suggesting that they themselves may not have been knowledgeable about the correct answer. another problem was that caregivers sometimes failed to show up to teach and care for the children at the cbccs, sometimes for as long as a full month especially during the planting season, necessitating the closure of cbccs. at a few cbccs, caregiver absenteeism was so common that the centres would regularly be closed for two or three days per week. in some cases, parents complained that the caregivers were routinely late, resulting in inadequate time for children to engage in and benefit from teaching and learning activities. several cbcc caregivers that we talked to noted that offering services voluntarily negatively impacted their quality of life in various ways. not surprisingly, a key challenge was the lack of income which affected their economic status and their ability to contribute towards their families’ needs. this affects us as we are just being used without being paid anything. and there used to be a lot of us (caregivers) here and a lot of them quit as they saw that they were not getting financial benefits. but still for those who are present here, we do encourage each other to continue working here, as they (the children) are still our children. but still it’s so painful as we see our colleagues quitting this work as it is for free. cbcc caregiver some cbcc caregivers reported feeling humiliated in their communities – e.g., being laughed at. community members assumed that the fact that they volunteer so much time to care for other people's children must mean that they have nothing useful to do for themselves. this gave the cbcc caregivers a sense that their work was not valued. we leave a lot of our own work (e.g., household work) and we come here to the children without being paid, and a lot of people from the community look down on us and say that we have nothing to do and yet they are the ones sending their children here. cbcc caregiver lack of trained caregivers related to the above discussed lack of compensation for caregivers, key stakeholders in all the communities visited noted that the caregivers at their cbcc have little or no training in teaching children. consequently, they lack the necessary skills to impart knowledge to quality of community based ecd in malawi 39 children. caregivers themselves were also cognizant of this challenge. it’s is true that we don’t have trained teachers, and there are only two who were trained which means that the rest weren’t, and the training was just a short one and they did not acquire enough knowledge. cbcc caregiver lack of teaching and learning materials in all the communities we visited, there was a general feeling that teaching and learning materials in the cbccs were insufficient. caregivers noted that while they were generally encouraged to make their own low-cost materials using local resources, many of the materials they were able to make were not durable. the lack of important learning materials was seen to contribute to poor educational outcomes. whenever the kids are here, they need to be given something to write on, maybe a slate because they just write on (unclear), they just write down, they don’t know how to write when they graduate from here. parent of child attending a cbcc lack of food provision in almost all the communities we visited, stakeholders mentioned that one of the main reasons children attend the cbccs is to get food. when there was no provision of food such as porridge, neither children nor their parents were as incentivized to participate at the cbccs. for example, one caregiver noted that the numbers of children at the cbccs dropped drastically when there was no food being offered. maybe children are getting little food here and the food is not enough. parent of child attending a cbcc parents not prioritizing early childhood care and education in several communities, it was noted that most parents did not give any priority to early education and needed a lot of encouragement to bring their children to the cbccs. additionally, stakeholders whom we spoke with believed that many parents did not contribute funds towards the cbcc because it was not a priority for them. parents do many things, like some tell the children not to go to school and they tell them to go and raise cattle, or they tell the children to stay at home to help take care of the babies. cbcc caregiver what have communities done to meet the challenges they face? in almost all the communities we visited, stakeholders noted that they had spent time and effort to find solutions to their challenges – most of the time very specific challenges. some of the actions they had undertaken taken included moulding bricks for building the centers, constructing toilets, and school committee members going to class to observe how the caregivers were doing. most of the communities had convened stakeholders to discuss and address some of the challenges faces by their cbcc. moreover, most of the communities had implemented the action plans they had drawn through these fora. we therefore surmise that these communities within which the cbos are both keenly aware of the challenges in quality at their cbcc and highly motivated to participate in improving the quality of the cbcc’s care and education. however, it is also clear that the communities need investment and support for this process. for example, when one cbcc management committee felt that the quality of education was decreasing at their cbcc, a committee member decided to sit and observe 40 global education review 5(2) the teaching and learning activities in the classroom. however, without the required knowledge and skills, this member was hardly able to identify the problems and provide constructive criticism to help the cbcc caregiver improve the quality of teaching. discussion our objectives in this exploratory study were to examine the strengths and weaknesses in the quality of learning and care at selected cbosupported cbccs in malawi, and to understand underlying challenges and opportunities that may be addressed to improve quality and ultimately children’s outcomes. these findings were used to guide the process of building cbo capacity around ecd quality, as well as to inform cbos’ own discussions, plans, and actions with their communities around improving cbcc quality. a key weakness in this study was the relatively small sample size, which requires that caution be taken when considering generalizing the findings beyond the communities we visited. moreover, the findings would have been strengthened with the inclusion of children’s perspectives on the quality of their cbccs, as well as data on their developmental and learning outcomes. however, due to several challenges, we could not include child data at this time but will work towards it in the future. a key strength of this study was that it used multiple methods – including direct observations of early childhood classrooms, questionnaires, and qualitative in-depth interviews, to evaluate the quality of care and learning at the cbccs as well as to develop a deeper understanding of underlying challenges and strengths that could be addressed or built upon to improve quality. moreover, we spoke to several key informants including parents, cbcc caregivers, and cbcc management committee members, and found that in general their perspectives, across different communities, tended to converge. this strengthens the validity of our findings. keeping in mind the limitations and strengths of this study, we focus our discussion here on three key themes from our findings: the strengths and challenges in the quality of care and learning at the cbccs, the volunteer caregiver system at the cbccs, and the engagement of community stakeholders in addressing challenges at their cbccs. quality of early learning environments and experiences at cbccs overall, the cbccs struggled considerably with the quality of learning and care in their classrooms. this is consistent with previous research that has found challenges in cbcc quality (e.g., ozler et al., 2016). most of the cbccs visited had relatively good quality physical environments. there has been limited research on the role of a high quality physical environment in resource-poor early childhood settings (ferguson, cassells, macallister, & evans, 2013); however, we believe we can reasonable presume that it is beneficial for children’s safety, hygiene, and health. the mele tool used in this study specifically evaluates aspects of the physical environment as they relate to water, sanitation, and hygiene (wash), and there is indeed a strong evidence base on the importance of wash for child development (ngure et al., 2014; richter et al., 2017; sudfeld et al., 2015). it is thus encouraging that the cbccs had relatively good physical environments, although continued efforts are necessary to improve the quality further. the cbccs included children from different backgrounds, ethnicities and religions, and with and without disabilities. however, they generally did not adjust or customize their teaching and learning activities according to this diversity, and particularly struggled to include children with disabilities effectively in classroom activities. this is critical from a rights and equity quality of community based ecd in malawi 41 perspective: each child has a right to quality care and education (convention on the rights of the child; united nations general assembly, 1989), and there is limited benefit to including children from different backgrounds and with different abilities if systems and supports are not available to appropriately facilitate their learning and development. the interactions between cbcc caregivers and children were found to be generally positive. this is crucial, as previous research has found that positive teacher attitudes and supportive classroom environments have positive effects on young children’s adjustment, retention, and learning (abadzi, 2006; hamre & pianta, 2005; shallwani, 2016; united nations children’s fund & united nations educational scientific and cultural organization institute for statistics, 2014) while harsh environments can be detrimental (talwar, carlson, & lee, 2011). where the cbccs struggled most is perhaps one of their most fundamental roles – in the actual teaching and learning activities and interactions in the classrooms. teachers relied heavily on rote learning, children had limited opportunity to engage in meaningful literacy and numeracy activities, free play was not effectively facilitated, and children had limited opportunities to collaborate with each other. the school effectiveness literature has consistently found that the type and quality of instructional support that the teacher provides is the most fundamental factor in young children’s learning (abadzi, 2006; hamre & pianta, 2005; hattie, 2009). other research in malawi has similarly found teachers’ struggling with instructional effectiveness at cbccs (ozler et al., 2016). considering this, it is crucial to strengthen teachers’ capacities and strategies to effectively facilitate children’s learning. volunteer caregiver system at cbccs while this study explored challenges in quality quite broadly at the cbccs, we were struck by the number of challenges that were perceived to be linked directly or indirectly to the system of volunteer ecd caregivers at the cbccs. community stakeholders seemed to attribute many of the challenges at the cbccs to the volunteer system – indicating that if caregivers were paid a standard amount, the quality of the cbccs would improve. indeed, a recent study carried out in malawi and south africa reported that children who participated in communitybased ecd programs where caregivers or teachers were compensated had higher selfesteem and better educational outcomes, than those who attended programs where caregivers worked without pay (tomlinson, sherr, macedo, hunt, & skeen, 2017). where teachers were paid had better educational outcomes and higher selfesteem. this evidence strengthens the case made by community members in our study, and underscores the need to discuss and address this matter. the challenges relating to the volunteer caregiver system described by community stakeholders fell into two broad areas: (1) the lack of skills, knowledge, and strategies among the cbcc caregivers to provide effective early childhood care and education for young children; and (2) the reduced motivation, attendance, and retention of the caregivers in terms of their presence and engagement with children at the cbccs. the need to build instructional and facilitation capacities and tools among teachers was discussed above. however, the volunteer system at the cbccs results in this additional risk – that cbcc caregivers, even once trained, may not have the working conditions that enable them to thrive in their roles, and they may in fact move on to pursue other employment opportunities – those that enable them to have more financial stability and quality of life. the use of paraprofessionals, such as community health workers, to provide essential services to vulnerable communities is not uncommon in many lmics. however, there is increasing recognition globally that such 42 global education review 5(2) community-based paraprofessionals need training and skills development, as well as supportive working conditions – including compensation, teacher-to-child ratios, working hours, etc. it is thus crucial to work with the cbos, the cbcc management committees, the caregivers themselves, and the parents, to identify and implement improvements to the cbcc caregivers’ working conditions. community engagement at cbccs overall, the commitment and engagement of community stakeholders – cbcc caregivers, cbcc management committee members, parents, community members, and cbos – towards supporting and strengthening cbcc services in their community was a fundamental underlying strength. for example, while the challenges in the volunteer system do need to be addressed, the fact that cbcc caregivers have thus far been willing to give so much of their time and energy working at the cbccs without any pay is a testament to their care for and commitment to their community’s children. similarly, cbcc management committee members, parents, and community members have been actively engaged in identifying and addressing challenges at the cbccs. however, these community stakeholders sometimes lacked the necessary skills and expertise to effectively address the issues. communities themselves are in the best position to identify challenges and opportunities, develop and implement solutions, and evaluate the effectiveness of those solutions in their communities. this combined with the clear readiness of the communities in this study to be involved and to act to improve their cbccs, compels cbos and other institutions to design, develop, and implement quality improvement interventions hand-in-hand with key community stakeholders, in order to be both effective and sustainable in the long-term. conclusion this study contributes in a small but important way to the growing knowledge base on the quality of community-based ecd programs in ssa, and in malawi particularly. our study highlighted core strengths and challenges in the quality of learning and care at a small sample of cbccs in malawi. the most fundamental gap in quality was in the ecd caregivers’ capacities to teach and facilitate learning effectively among the children. among the underlying issues that were uncovered, many challenges seemed related to the reliance on unskilled and voluntary ecd caregivers. as discussed earlier, the potential impact of ecd programs is considerably thwarted if the programs are of poor quality. however, efforts to improve the observed environment and experiences at cbccs may not directly translate into improved child outcomes – as found by a recent study in malawi (ozler et al., 2016). the findings from that study suggested the challenges faced by cbccs require more holistic and intensive interventions – more effective in improving teaching strategies, but addressing contextual factors outside of the cbcc classroom, such as parent engagement. the findings from our study indicate that while communities coming together to establish ecd centers such as cbccs is a tremendous opportunity, they and the cbos working with them need to be supported to improve the quality of learning and care at these centers to maximize the benefits for children’s development and long-term outcomes. moreover, grassroots cbos hold great potential in reaching and effecting change in the different community ecosystems that can improve children’s developmental outcomes, and their work is more effective when it is informed by the realities, challenges, and strengths of their cbccs and communities specifically, and in the region more broadly. quality of community based ecd in malawi 43 notes 1. this paper draws from and builds on a presentation shared at the annual conference of the comparative and international education society held in atlanta, georgia, usa in march, 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(2017). communities supporting young children in malawi: the community-based child care centre mode. paper presented at the annual conference of the comparative and international education society,, atlanta. about the authors sadaf shallwani, phd, currently serves as director of learning and evaluation at firelight foundation. sadaf’s background and experience are in child development, social work, and early education, and she has worked in various majority world contexts, including pakistan and east africa. sadaf’s interests and expertise lie at the intersections of early childhood development and wellbeing, contextuallygrounded and socially-conscious research, and community-driven learning and action. amina abubakar, phd, is an associate professor in psychology and public health at pwani university, kenya and a research scientist at the kenya medical research institute/wellcome trust research programme. she is also an honorary fellow at the department of psychiatry, university of oxford, uk. a focus in her work is the development of culturally appropriate strategies for identifying, monitoring and rehabilitating at-risk children. moses kachama nyongesa, msc, is based at the centre for geographic medicine research (coast), kilifi, kenya. he is mainly interested in studying the co-morbidity of hiv and mental disorders in children and young people, and the impact this has on their quality of life and scholastic achievements. appendix 1: interview guide instructions to interviewee: we are looking into the education system at the cbbcs and want your opinions on whether it is succeeding in educating children to become productive and contributing citizens. we want to explore not only your personal opinions but how you see others in the community supporting the education of all its children. 1. i want us to start by discussing the reasons why people in these community bring their children to cbcc centres? what do you hope to achieve or rather what do you hope your children will gain by being in these centres? 2. in your opinion are the cbccs currently achieving their goals? do you think the education children are receiving at these centres is contributing towards them achieving these goals? 3. what do people here think are the causes of inadequate education? http://www.uis.unesco.org/library/documents/global-initiative-out-of-school-children-education-africa-2013-en.pd http://www.uis.unesco.org/library/documents/global-initiative-out-of-school-children-education-africa-2013-en.pd http://www.uis.unesco.org/library/documents/global-initiative-out-of-school-children-education-africa-2013-en.pd http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/44/a44r025.htm http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/44/a44r025.htm 46 global education review 5(2) probe: blame parents, blame national or district government, insufficient opportunities to learn, poor resources, teachers in adequately trained. 4. how can children in this village become better educated? probe: get more involved in the school management committee, leaders can mobilize parents to get more involved, support the teacher and resources of a pre-primary program, raise funds. 5. are there any other issues related to the cbccs that you feel are important that have not been discussed today? 160 global education review 5(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: jukes, m. c. h., gabrieli, p., mgonda, n. l., nsolezi, f. s., jeremiah, g., tibenda, j. l, & bub, k. l. (2018). “respect is an investment”: community perceptions of social and emotional competencies in early childhood from mtwara, tanzania. global education review, 5 (2), 160-188. “respect is an investment”: community perceptions of social and emotional competencies in early childhood from mtwara, tanzania matthew c. h. jukes1 prosper gabrieli2 nkanileka loti mgonda3 florentina s. nsolezi2 grace jeremiah4 jovina j. tibenda5 kristen l. bub6 abstract education programs in africa increasingly aim to develop and measure social and emotional competencies. however, assessments are typically adapted from those developed in other continents and are not derived from local perspectives. in the current study, we conducted focus groups and individual interviews with teachers, parents and students in 4 randomly selected rural primary schools from mtwara region in tanzania, 3 of which had recently begun participation in a pre-primary education program. the aim was to understand the social and emotional competencies in early childhood that participants viewed as important for school and for life in general. compared to existing frameworks of social and emotional competencies, participants placed more emphasis on aspects of social responsibility, for example respect, obedience and being an attentive listener. individual competencies such as curiosity, self-direction and self-belief were valued more by teachers than parents and seen as most important for success at school. in general, most social and emotional competencies – even individual competencies were discussed in terms of social relationships. findings have implications for how cultural values are considered in assessment, curriculum design and parent and community engagement around pre-school education. keywords education, assessment, preschool education, social and emotional competencies, early childhood, cultural values, africa, tanzania introduction there has been a recent growth in the implementation of pre-primary programs in low-income countries and evaluations of these programs, which require measurement of aspects of children’s development and learning. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 161 global education review 5(2) the assessments used in these evaluations are initially conceived and designed elsewhere, however. few assessment exercises begin with an in-depth investigation into how domains of child development are perceived and valued by the local community. this paper reports such an investigation in the mtwara region of tanzania to understand the similarities and differences between community perceptions of child development and those included in international assessments and frameworks. the study focuses particularly on social and emotional competencies. the context for our study is the usaid tusome pamoja pre-primary program, which is being implemented in 2 districts in the mtwara region of tanzania. the program is being evaluated in part using the measuring early learning quality and outcomes (melqo) assessment (anderson & sayre, 2016). this is an international assessment adapted and piloted for use in tanzania. however, there are two ways in which it may not be optimally adapted to the context. first, the assessment is intentionally designed to be international and so focuses on commonalities rather than differences among contexts. second, the assessment has its origin in research, conceptual frameworks and other assessments used in western countries. some have argued (henrich, heine, & norenzayan, 2010) that educated populations in western countries are not only unrepresentative of the species, but that they are outliers on the spectrum of human behavior. how might an assessment developed from such populations be inappropriate for use in different contexts, such as in low and middle-income countries? assessments may fail to include domains of development that are important for adaptive functioning in the home, community and school in different contexts. similarly, domains can be conceptualized differently in each context. even when assessments target appropriate domains, those domains may manifest differently by context; that is, competence in a given domain may be demonstrated by different behaviors from one context to another. the importance of these issues has been demonstrated in the development of culturally grounded assessments of mental health in africa (betancourt, speelman, onyango, & bolton, 2009; betancourt, yang, bolton, & normand, 2014). social and emotional competencies the current study is focused on social and emotional competencies because they are increasingly seen as important for children’s education and yet studies addressing them in lowand middle-income countries (e.g., wolf et al., 2017) are few. we also hypothesize that the development of social and emotional competencies has a strong cultural component and so contextually relevant research is particularly important in this domain. we use the term competencies to describe behaving effectively in a given situation. because competencies are typically comprised of skills, abilities and knowledge, they tend to be more complex (they may involve a combination of several skills or abilities) than skills or abilities alone. for example, the competency of making friends may involve the skills of understanding emotions and communication. thus, identifying the appropriate set of skills, abilities, and knowledge that comprise a competency in a context is important for understanding and supporting children’s development. several frameworks exist to conceptualize social and emotional competencies with much overlap between them. a widely used framework has been developed by the collaborative for academic, social, and emotional learning (casel, 2017) based on a review of the research in this area (osher et al., 2016). in this ______________________________ corresponding author: matthew jukes, rti international, 3040 east cornwallis road, p.o.box12194, research triangle park, nc 277092194, usa email: mjukes@rti.org 162 global education review 5(2) framework, there are five sets of interrelated social and emotional competencies, each comprised of a range of skills, abilities, and knowledge (osher et al., 2016, p. 646): selfawareness, self-management, social-awareness, relationship skills and responsible decision making. our study focuses on the role of social and emotional competencies in the adaption to school and for academic success (durlak, weissberg, dymnicki, taylor, & schellinger, 2011). this is because our research aims to inform assessments used in the evaluation of pre-primary programs. it is also because we hypothesize that the key differences between valued competencies in tanzania and western countries will, in part, be reflected in the differences in competencies, skills and abilities required for success at home and at school in rural areas in tanzania. social and emotional competencies in sub-saharan africa to understand whether and how children’s social and emotional competencies may differ in the study location, we need to understand the contextual factors that shape development (goodnow, 1988; harkness & super, 1992). children’s behavior is shaped directly by their learning environment and by cultural values (greenfield, 2009; 2016; keller et al., 2006), both of which are influenced by the sociodemographics of society. in the context of this study most families are subsistence farmers. in this mode of economic activity, families benefit most from large numbers of obedient children who can farm the land (levine et al., 1993). this contrasts with knowledge economies in which families benefit more from investing in the education and independence of a smaller number of children. notwithstanding considerable diversity in culture and context around the world, the contrast between subsistence agricultural societies and educated, industrialised societies (henrich et al., 2010) is useful for identifying differences and similarities in the factors shaping children’s development (greenfield, 2009; 2016; lancy, 2014). greenfield (2016) reviews the aspects of agricultural societies that are most important for shaping children’s development. agricultural societies have a collectivist (rather than individualist) culture; families have many children with several generations living together; they have age-graded authority and contextualised (rather than abstract) thinking; they provide more social guidance and more criticism (rather than praise and support) to children; and family obligations are key. the consequences for social and emotional competencies are that children are to have more respect, obedience, shyness, empathy, a desire to fit in, cooperation, and ascribed gender roles than those in educated and industrialised societies. in sub-saharan africa, much published evidence on children relates to cognitive rather than social and behavioral domains of social and emotional competencies. lancy (2014) notes that children in farming communities have attention that is ‘wide-angled and abiding’ rather than focused and fleeting. results of sustained attention assessments (clarke et al., 2008; halliday et al., 2012; zuilkowski, mccoy, serpell, matafwali, & fink, 2016) suggest that children in africa, unlike with other abstract cognitive tests, perform at or above western norms. similarly, in zambia, poor rural children performed better than wealthier children on an attention task, in contrast to all other domains in the test battery (zuilkowski et al., 2016). however, cognitive skills are not the highest valued competencies in rural african communities. in uganda, cleverness has overtones of cheekiness and cunning (white, 1998). rural communities in uganda associated intelligence with being slow, careful and active whereas teachers associated intelligence with speed (wober, 1972). a substantial body of research points to the value placed on social 163 global education review 5(2) responsibility (serpell, 2011) by communities in africa, including aspects such as respect, obedience, and cooperativeness (bissiliat, laya, pierre, & pidoux, 1967; dasen et al., 1985; fortes, 1938; grigorenko et al., 2001; serpell, 1993; super, 1983). self-control is a social and emotional competency that may differ across cultures. in educated and industrialized societies, control in young children predicts a range of long term outcomes (moffitt et al., 2011). in zambia, young children were relatively successful at a delayed gratification task (zuilkowski et al., 2016) and poorer children were better able to delay gratification than wealthier children. the explanation for this may be partly that children in rural areas are more used to being obedient to adults. social and emotional competencies at school in sub-saharan africa if children in subsistence-agricultural societies develop different competencies from those in industrialized-educated societies, there may be implications for a child’s transition to school because the social and emotional competencies encouraged at school may be at odds with those developed at home. for example, schooling may promote behaviors, such as questioning adults, that could undermine values of respect and obedience (greenfield, quiroz, & raeff, 2000; jukes, zuilkowski, okello, & harris, 2013). one study in the gambia (jukes, zuilkowski, & grigorenko, in press) found that children who started – but did not complete – primary school were seen as less respectful and obedient that those who do not enroll in school at all. similarly, in mexico, (chavajay & rogoff, (chavajay & rogoff, 2002) mothers who had been to school were less likely to engage in cooperative problem solving with children as compared with mothers who had not been to school. lancy (2014) notes several aspects of childhood in subsistence-agricultural communities that may contrast with the culture of schools: persistent direct questioning is rare and questions are used only to find out information you do not know, rather than to assess someone’s knowledge; learning is often from siblings rather than adults, by observation rather than instruction, and involves little verbalization and few why questions; averting one’s eyes is respectful but may be interpreted by teachers as a lack of attention. however, some findings point to the compatibility of the values of subsistenceagricultural communities and schooling. intriguing research from zambia found that social responsibility was a better predictor of long-term success in school than cognitive ability (serpell & jere-folotiya, 2008) for girls, although both domains predicted the educational success of boys. there is a clear need to investigate further the social and emotional competencies that help children to succeed in school in subsistenceagricultural communities, particularly in subsaharan africa. the aim of this study was to identify competencies that are important for children’s education in tanzania and to identify contextually relevant behaviors that exemplify these competencies. this study is the first step in a research program to develop assessments of social and emotional competencies that are underrepresented in current test batteries. the primary research questions were: 1) which social and emotional competencies are seen as important for children’s general development in mtwara, tanzania? 2) which social and emotional competencies are seen as important for children to adapt to and succeed in school in mtwara, tanzania? several secondary research questions were aimed at understanding perceptions of social and emotional competencies in more depth and understanding the potential for pre-primary education to support the development of social and emotional competencies. these questions included: 164 global education review 5(2) 3) which behaviors demonstrate a given social and emotional competency? 4) how does the competency develop with age through early childhood? 5) what do parents and teachers do to support development of the competence? 6) is the competence equally important for boys and girls? methods research design the current study followed a grounded theory approach (pidgeon & henwood, 1996) in which we used qualitative data from participants to construct conceptual categories representing local perceptions of social and emotional competencies. the research was not driven by hypotheses, but we nevertheless had some expectations about the study’s findings. for example, we expected that parents’ and teachers’ perceptions would differ from published social and emotional competency frameworks, broadly along the lines outlined in the introduction. however, we intended our research to be agnostic about the extent of those differences in order to document them as objectively as possible. interviews were conducted by four tanzanian university lecturers. none of the interviewers had lived or worked in the study region. interview questions were guided by daily conversations among the four researchers and with the first author, a british education researcher with 20 years of experience in tanzania and some previous experience conducting research projects in the study region. population, participants and sampling technique the study took place in mtwara region, in the south of tanzania, separated from mozambique by the ruvuma river. the region is divided into nine districts with a regional population of just over 1.2 million in the 2012 census (tanzania, 2013). the capital of the region is mtwara town, which was developed in the 1940s as part of the failed tanganyika groundnut scheme. the economy of the region is based on subsistence agriculture and cashew nuts as cash crops. the town has a deep-sea port and has seen recent foreign investment in support of offshore oil and gas exploration. mtwara was ranked the 15th region out of 25 in primary school leaving examination (psle) pass rates in 2013 (poralg, 2014). three of the four participating schools were selected from mtwara rural (two schools) and tandahimba (one school) districts where the tusome pamoja pre-primary program had just been launched. a fourth school was selected from nanyamba district where the pre-primary program was not taking place. in all cases, the schools were chosen at random from a list of all schools in the district. the participating communities were typical of the region. they were mainly from the makonde ethnic group and mainly muslim, with a minority of christians. they were subsistence farmers, growing cassava, maize, peas and millet as food crops and cashew nuts and sesame as cash crops, supplemented by small-scale animal husbandry. all villages had mobile phone access, but electricity was widespread in only two of the four villages. table 1 summarizes basic information for the four schools. performance in primary school leaving exams is ranked nationally in two groups – schools with more than 40 pupils taking the exam (school 1) and schools with fewer than 40 pupils sitting the exam (schools 2, 3 and 4). all four schools performed more poorly in 2016 than in 2015, representing a trend across mtwara region. for example, school 4 dropped from the 7th percentile to the 85th percentile nationally. 165 global education review 5(2) table 1. summary information about participating schools primary school leaving exam percentile preprimary program grade 7 cohort size, 2016 total enrolment village population distance from mtwara town 2015 2016 (km) school 1 13th 42nd yes 64 916 3536 40 school 2 18th 76th yes 30 411 1257 35 school 3 48th 74th yes 18 188 1335 120 school 4 7th 85th no 25 245 1746 80 school 1 was established in 1948 when it served as a middle school during british colonial rule, giving it a significant role in the history of secular education in mtwara region. the village it serves is also the largest of the four villages in the study and the only one with a secondary school. in general, this village had the highest level of public services among those in the study, including widespread well water and electricity. the village is about 15 km from a cement factory, which provides minimal employment to villagers. school 2 was the second largest school we visited and a similar distance from mtwara town as school 1. school 2 also had electricity and was close to the cement factory. school 3 was founded in 1973 and was the smallest school we visited and the furthest from mtwara town. there was no electricity in the village and few public services. there was a secondary school available to primary school graduates in the neighboring villages. school 4 was founded in 2007 as part of efforts to increase access to basic education. before that, children in the village walked around 5 km to a neighboring primary school. the school has only four teachers to cover seven classes. students graduating from the primary school could attend a secondary school in a neighboring village in the same ward. it is important to understand the nature of classroom instruction and student-teacher interactions in this region. most teachers are posted to their schools and are frequently from other districts or regions in the country. in preprimary school and the lower grades of primary school, all lessons are taught by one teacher. instruction typically takes place with the teacher at the blackboard and children seated in desks, if available, or on the floor. all communication is initiated and controlled by the teacher. children talk only when prompted by the teacher or when reporting conflict among them. teachers use extensive repetition and questions are directed at whole groups more than at individuals, in part because of large class sizes. group responses by the class are sometimes followed by children raising their hands and being individually selected to repeat the answer. children are also selected to come to the front of the class to answer a question out loud to the class or to write something on the board. few pre-primary teachers are trained, which results in them spending more time managing pupils’ behavior than in teaching and learning. professional development for teachers in the tusome pamoja project has focused on encouraging teachers to check for understanding among pupils, to be a facilitator of learning and to practice activitybased learning, allowing pupils to incorporate home experiences in their learning. teachers are encouraged to develop learning areas in their 166 global education review 5(2) classrooms to promote child-centered and playbased learning opportunities for children. participants and data collection methods participants were parents, teachers and pupils from the four selected schools. focus groups discussions were conducted in single-sex groups based on our previous experience that women were reluctant to talk in the presence of men. we conducted four focus groups with a total of 61 male parents and five focus groups with 34 women. we conducted individual interviews with four male parents and five female parents in the first school and decided to rely solely on focus groups with parents as they were a more effective method of generating useful qualitative data. we conducted individual interviews with 16 male teachers and 11 female teachers across the four schools. a total of 80 students were interviewed individually after taking part in a group session to draw pictures of their experience of starting school. ten students – five boys and five girls were selected from each of two classes in all four schools. our sampling strategy aimed to provide a degree of representativeness but also helped to ensure that we included some of the relatively few children who made good interviewees. in each class, we randomly selected five of these students and asked teachers to select another five students who were more likely to provide detailed information in response to our questions. in the first school, we interviewed ten children from each of standard i and ii (the first two years of primary school). children in standard i provided very little information and so we switched to interviewing standard ii and iv in subsequent schools. children in pre-primary were considered too young to provide useful information in interviews. instead we asked older children about their experience of starting both pre-primary and primary school. the adequacy of the sample size was monitored by assessing data saturation in the list of competencies provided by adult interviewees. when no new competencies were generated in interviews with the third and fourth schools, we concluded that data saturation had been achieved (fusch & ness, 2015). procedure consent ethical review of the research was conducted, and approval was obtained from the rti committee for the protection of human subjects (proposal no. 0215203.000.002) and from the tanzania commission of science and technology (permit no. 2017-121-na-2016-313). all adults gave informed consent and students gave verbal assent. interviews and focus groups teachers and parents were interviewed by two researchers, with one asking most of the questions and the other making detailed notes. all adult interviews were recorded using a portable digital audio recorder. the approach to interviews was developed through pilot work in which we explored different questions to find those that elicited the most useful responses. the interviews focused on two central questions: 1) what are the qualities that you would like your children/pupils to develop in life? 2) what are the qualities that help a child to succeed at school? the term competencies– as discussed in the introduction – is the most accurate term in english to describe the focus of our research. this term was not easy to translate into kiswahili. instead we used two words in kiswahili, which roughly map onto the english word qualities or character. the first word was sifa, which means character or reputation, and can also be used to mean praise. this term was sometimes additionally clarified as sifa za 167 global education review 5(2) kimalezi (character resulting from upbringing) and sifa za kimwenendo (the character relating to one’s conduct). the second word used was tabia, translated as behavior, character, disposition or habits. less frequently, we used mwenendo (conduct) and matendo (actions). interview guides contained several probes for each of the two main questions (see appendix a). in addition, all four interviewers were closely involved in the conception and design of the study and could guide questioning in the desired direction. the aims of the first two questions were to elicit as many qualities or competencies as possible. additional questions were asked of each competency mentioned by interviewees. the questions sought to understand the competency further by probing for behavioral examples, asking why the competency is important for life and for schooling, asking how the competency developed with age and what parents and teachers do to develop the competency. from the second school onwards, we added a question asking respondents to list their top five most important competencies mentioned. a key aim of additional questions was to generate enough behavioral examples of each competency to aid analysis. to ensure that all competencies were fully described, in the third and fourth schools we asked respondents direct question about competencies for which we had fewer behavioral examples even if they had not mentioned these competencies in their interview. we compiled a list of qualities mentioned and assigned them numerical codes, which were used to label notes in the field. at the end of each day we reviewed new competencies mentioned by respondents and discussed whether they warranted a new code or could be combined with existing terms. interviews with students addressed the second research question concerning the competencies required to adapt to and succeed in school. data collection from students began by giving them paper and colored pencils and asking them to draw two pictures – one of something that made them happy in their first days at school and one of something they found difficult. this strategy was somewhat informative, although some students told us they simply produced something they felt capable of drawing. the drawing session at least helped students to feel more comfortable with the research process. individual interviews (see appendix b) followed the group drawing session with one interviewer per student. no recording device was used; responses were recorded in detailed notes. students were asked to explain their drawing and to expand on the factors that they liked and disliked about their first days of school as well as the things that surprised them. additional probes were included to ensure that students discussed their experience in the classroom as well as at school in general. probing children about their classroom experience was particularly important as the very first days of school were often concerned only with enrolment of students and other administrative issues and little classroom instruction took place. two interview questions elicited the most relevant information for our research. the first asked children what they had learned at home that helped them in school. the second asked them what advice they would give a younger child about to start school. in both cases, responses helped us understand how the school experience could be designed to support the development of children’s competencies valued by parents and teachers and to understand the competencies that children saw as important for being successful at school. data processing and analysis data were entered from written notes into a microsoft excel spreadsheet. audio recordings were used to supplement written notes and to resolve any ambiguities. data were entered such that each line of the spreadsheet contained information about one competency mentioned in response to a given interview question. for each competency, the following information was 168 global education review 5(2) entered into the database: behavioral examples; information pertaining to how competencies are nurtured; how competencies are helpful for schooling; verbatim quotes; and other information. all data were entered in kiswahili with an accompanying english translation. analysis of the information was conducted by competency. only competencies spontaneously mentioned by respondents – rather than prompted by interviewers – were included. each researcher was given responsibility for analyzing all the information relating to one competency. the first step in this analysis involved assessing the accuracy of coding to ensure that information was attributed to the right competency. second, researchers assessed the accuracy of translations from kiswahili into english. these first two steps provided quality assurance in the coding and translation of data. the final step involved writing a narrative analysis for each assigned competency. this analysis used behavioral examples and other information to infer the meaning of each competency in the eyes of respondents. researchers also provided summarized information from participants addressing each of the six research questions described above. in addition to the narrative analyses, we also calculated the number of interviews (individual or focus group) in which competencies were mentioned. the frequency analysis was conducted separately for each question and overall for all questions (excluding questions where interviewers prompted respondents to discuss certain competencies). a second quantitative analysis was conducted at the level of example behaviors for the competencies. one aim of this analysis was to identify commonalities among competencies. all behaviors were given unique codes by the four tanzanian researchers. each researcher then reviewed the others’ codes and merged similar behaviors into a single code. analyses were then conducted to assess the number of behaviors shared by any given pair of competencies. pairs or groups of competencies were then identified where a high proportion of the total number of behaviors were shared between the two competencies. this analysis helped to understand the meaning of the competencies and to identify similarities and redundancy among them. the first author used the quantitative and qualitative descriptions to group and categorize competencies and integrated narrative analyses to produce the descriptions below. results frequency of competition we first present the results of the frequency analysis. table 2 shows the number of interviews and focus groups in which competencies were mentioned by teachers, parents and students and the number of teacher interviews and parent focus group discussions in which the competency was rated as one of the five most important competencies for children. six competencies were mentioned most frequently by all three groups and also rated as important: respect, attentive listener, obedient, cooperative, clean, polite and humble. discipline was mentioned more by teachers and parents than children but was rated as the most important competency by 8 out of 21 teachers and 4 out of 10 parent focus group discussions. some competencies were emphasized more by teachers than parents. for example, selfmotivation was rated as important in 10 individual interviews with teachers but by only 1 parent focus group. eight teachers rated curiosity as important and four rated self-belief as important; these two competencies were not rated as important by any parent and each was mentioned by only one student. parents were more concerned about trustworthiness than teachers, with 4 parent focus groups, but no teacher, rating it as important. 169 global education review 5(2) table 2. number of interviews or focus groups with parents, teachers and pupils in which each competency was mentioned and rated as important. mentioned in interviews rated as important english kiswahili parent fgd (13 fgds) parent interview (n=10) teacher (n=23) pupils (n=80) parent fgd (10 fgds) teacher (n=21) respectful mwenye heshima 11 6 16 39 5 6 attentive listener msikivu 11 10 17 12 4 5 obedient mtii 11 8 15 16 8 3 cooperative anayeshirikiana 8 1 14 20 2 4 clean msafi 9 3 11 19 1 4 polite, calm and humble mpole /mtulivu 8 4 12 13 1 3 self-directed anayejituma 5 4 15 5 1 10 hardworking mwenye juhudi / bidii 8 2 10 14 0 3 disciplined mwenye nidhamu 7 4 13 3 5 11 curiosity mdadisi 6 1 17 1 0 8 clever mwerevu 6 2 7 1 0 1 love of parent/teacher anayependa wazazi/waalimu 4 2 5 6 1 2 trustworthy mwaminifu 9 2 1 3 4 0 understanding muelewa 6 2 5 0 2 0 funny mcheshi 5 1 6 0 0 0 courageous aliye hodari 4 1 7 0 0 1 time management anayejali /tunza muda 2 1 6 5 1 3 self-aware anayejitambua 6 1 3 1 1 1 confident, self-belief anayejiamini 2 0 8 1 0 4 persistent asiyekatatamaa 4 0 6 0 1 0 sociable mchangamfu 4 2 3 2 0 3 has fear of god mwenye hofu ya mungu 2 2 5 0 0 1 seeks understanding mfuataliaji 3 2 3 0 1 4 truthful msema kweli 3 2 2 0 1 1 careful makini 3 0 4 0 0 0 smart/decent nadhifu 1 2 3 2 0 0 creative mbunifu 2 0 4 0 0 3 daring/risk-taking mthubutu 1 0 4 0 0 1 civilized, calm mstarabu 3 0 0 4 1 0 wise mwenye busara 3 0 1 1 1 0 has goals mwenye malengo 1 0 3 0 0 2 knowledgeable mwenye maarifa 2 0 1 1 0 0 tolerates hunger mvumilivu wa njaa 1 0 2 1 0 2 hospitable mkarimu 0 2 1 0 0 0 makes friends anayejenga marafiki 0 0 2 1 0 0 170 global education review 5(2) defining and categorizing competition through an analysis of commonalities in the behavioral examples given by respondents, we grouped sets of competencies together. the first clear group of competencies we termed social responsibility. this category included four of the most frequently discussed competencies – attentive listener, obedient, disciplined, polite and humble – that had many behaviors in common. each competency had between 16 and 22 behavioral examples and each pair of competencies in the group had between 4 and 7 behaviors in common. in addition, these competencies had some behaviors in common with less frequently mentioned competencies, providing some evidence that many social and emotional competencies share some commonalities. for example, the trustworthy competency had a few behaviors in common with the social responsibility competencies. all ten behavioral examples of self-awareness also appeared in attentive listener and all three behaviors under time management appeared in obedient. the second group of competencies we termed social relationships and included competencies that involved interacting with others but were not part of the social responsibility competencies. examples included cooperation and being sociable. a final category we termed individual competencies, consisting of competencies that can be demonstrated independently of other people. it included competencies emphasized by teachers more than parents such as curiosity, self-belief and selfmotivation. the following description of participant responses is organized by these categories. social responsibility as discussed above, social responsibility competencies were mentioned more frequently than others and shared many behaviors. attentive listener (msikivu). the kiswahili word msikivu literally means listener but implies someone who is attentive and responsive in listening. msikivu is someone who, when told something, understands and pays attention to what they have to do. behaviors include listening to instructions and paying attention in class. however, an attentive listener must also provide evidence in subsequent action by fulfilling assignments and providing the correct information when sent with a message. attentiveness helps a child to take in whatever is being taught, process it and put it into practice. several respondents highlighted how listening to elders can help children avoid problems in the future. some parents and one teacher illustrated the concept with a popular rhyming proverb “asiyesikia la mkuu, huvunjika guu” translated as “he/she who does not listen to elders will break a leg (i. e., face difficulties)” (school 2, fgd 1; school 3 teacher 4). other parents used the saying “asiyefunzwa na mamaye atafunzwa na ulimwengu,” meaning “he/she who is not taught by his/her mother will be taught by the world” (school 3, fgd 1). obedient (mtii). obedience can be displayed in a few different ways. first, children can follow orders from elders, and agree to being sent on errands. teachers and parents said that obedience did not mean to obey or to conform to instructions blindly. children should comply with “positive” instructions only (school 2, fgd3). second, children show obedience by following norms and customs – school rules, their roles and responsibilities and tanzanian culture in general. third, children show obedience by participating in daily routines, such as doing chores at home. 171 global education review 5(2) discipline (mwenye nidhamu). discipline was rated as the most important competency by parents and teachers. one parent illustrated this importance using a kiswahili idiom: “mtoto ni nidhamu,” meaning “a child is discipline” (school 3, fgd 1). discipline had behaviors in common with many other competencies. when probed, teachers were unable to give examples of behaviors that were specific to discipline that were not also examples of respect and obedience. qualities associated with discipline included being an attentive listener, being calm and humble, giving respect to elders and others and being obedient with instructions. parents and teachers told us that being disciplined is vital for success in life and school. polite/humble (mpole) and calm (mtulivu). the qualities of being polite and humble and being calm were closely associated in discussions with teachers and parents. they also overlapped with civilized (mstaraabu). several individual characteristics were associated included with these competencies. a child who is easily angered and fights is not calm and polite. a child who is nervous is also not calm. the competency was principally demonstrated through behavior towards others and included reference to other competencies – a polite, calm and humble child is also obedient and respectful. respect (heshima). respect did not have as many overlapping behaviors as the above four competencies but was frequently mentioned when defining those competencies. behaviors that were specifically associated with respect included greeting elders; “receiving” (kupokea) elders and teachers, meaning to meet them as they arrive and carry their bags and books; dressing decently; and raising one’s hand before speaking in class. respect is also signified by the absence of contempt for others and by not using abusive language. respectful children also work diligently and are self-directed. parents had a saying in the makonde language to emphasize the importance of respect, which translated as “a respectful child will live a long and happy life” (school 3, fgd 1). school 3 had a signboard nailed to a tree saying “heshima ni akiba,” meaning “respect is an investment.” our interpretation of the social responsibility competencies is that each one has unique attributes, but the group has many commonalities. the competencies are all demonstrated by children who fit in and do what is expected of them. they relate to one’s responsibilities within a social group and are not concerned with individual expression. social relationships cooperative (anayeshirikiana). cooperation was defined mainly in relation to other children. cooperative children play well with their peers, they share food and play-things with them and do not fight. these behaviors were also included in the competency making friends. parents said, “a mean child has no friends” (school 2, fgd 1). cooperative behaviors towards younger children were also mentioned including protecting them from danger and reading stories to them. according to parents, cooperation is a useful competency because it helps in solving problems together and in doing collective farm work. sociable (mchangamfu). for parents and teachers, the goal of being sociable was to achieve harmony and cooperation with others. specific behavioral examples include being talkative; being an extrovert; smiling and being joyous; being bold, for example in answering questions; taking part in sports and games and avoiding self-isolation. some other behavioral examples were closely related to respect and obedience, such as fulfilling responsibilities willingly, working wholeheartedly and greeting elders. 172 global education review 5(2) funny (mcheshi). as with being sociable, being funny was seen as helpful in cooperating with people and building relationships with peers “so that they elect you their leader” (school 1, parent 2). children who are funny like making jokes, they like working in groups and are slow to show contempt to others. loving teachers and parents (kupenda wazazi na walimu). a frequent comment from all adult participants was that children should love/like (kupenda) their teachers and parents. this is demonstrated by “receiving parents with joy” (school 4, fgd1) when they return home, carrying bags for parents and teachers and sharing food and gifts. respondents described this love as the basis for cooperation. trustworthy (mwaminifu). trustworthy behaviors include following orders and the absence of transgressions such as avoiding stealing things and returning change after being sent to buy something. this is one of few competencies that was mentioned and valued more by parents than teachers. truthful (mkweli). truthfulness was closely related to being trustworthy. according to teachers and parents, trustful children are open and straightforward in talking, have selfawareness and know when to correct their behavior and avoid bad company. teacher and parents emphasized different relationships between truthfulness and bravery. teachers mentioned that children who are fearful may say anything to avoid punishment. brave children tell the truth regardless. parents discussed how fear of punishment can encourage children to tell the truth. individual competencies curious (mdadisi). curiosity was the competency mentioned most frequently by teachers. according to them, curious children ask many questions, they like to learn new things, they investigate things they do not know, they observe and make deductions about things before sharing with others. some curious children will ask to borrow books from teachers. because of these behaviors, curious children are in a position to give responses in class that are different from those of other children. examples of curiosity came mainly from teachers. one said that her child asks a lot of questions based on logical reasoning: “my son is very inquisitive, one day he asked me: mom if all people in the world were of the same sex, would the population stop increasing?” (school 1, teacher 1). another teacher said, “a curious child will say to his friends ‘let’s catch a grasshopper and observe how it breathes” (school 3, teacher 2). curiosity was mentioned less by parents. one parent said: “in our villages curious pupils are very few, most of our people are devoted to religious teachings of islam, there is not much attention given to such education in our families”. we asked adult respondents if curiosity was incompatible with discipline or obedience. the response was that there are two forms of discipline discipline due to fear and discipline associated with questioning. they discouraged the former as it makes children obey everything without reasoning. a child who is both obedient and curious is the ideal. seeking understanding (mfuatiliaji). the literal meaning of the kiswahili term here is one who follows up. the competency was closely related to curiosity. example behaviors include being ready to ask teachers or parents to inspect their notebooks for feedback, working fast so that they can submit their work to teachers for feedback and “seeking clarification from teachers, parents, and even headteachers to ensure that they get an answer to puzzling questions” (school 4 fgd 1). self-belief (anayejiamini). self-belief was valued more by teachers than parents. example behaviors include asking and answering 173 global education review 5(2) questions, participating in groups, leading others, being sent on errands, helping others and being helped themselves and doing voluntary assignments. courageous (hodari). courage was described in a similar way to self-belief. one teacher said, “a courageous pupil will pick up a piece of chalk very easily and lead others in solving a problem … even without my pointing at him/her” (school 4, teacher 1). similarly, “a pupil who dares to follow teachers in the office or outside the classroom and asks questions is courageous” (school 4 teacher 1). teachers said that courageous children do not give up easily, citing the saying “sikubali hadi niweze,” meaning “i will never give it up until i manage” (school 1, teacher 1). as with self-belief, courageous children are not afraid to ask for help. courageous children thrive in a competitive environment and always want to be first in the class. daring (mthubutu). daring was closely related to courageous. example behaviors include being eager to learn new things at school and from one’s environment, expressing oneself freely and confidently, being transparent and having nothing to hide, standing out among their peers and giving unique answers to questions. self-directed (anayejituma). in kiswahili, the verb to send someone (kumtuma) is understood to mean sending someone on an errand. the reflexive form of the verb kujituma literally means to send yourself on an errand and is translated as ‘self-motivated’ it is exemplified by initiating or volunteering for a task or doing a task, such as washing school clothes, without being told to do so. parents also gave examples of this competency that involved accepting orders respectfully and without complaining. self-directed was one of the competencies most frequently mentioned and rated as important by teachers. they said that a child who showed this competency could study by themselves, can study topics beyond the syllabus, and can ask questions voluntarily, even outside the classroom. teachers also said that children, who were punctual, looked after their school equipment and helped elders in completing tasks were self-directed. hardworking (mwenye juhudi). the examples given of children being hardworking all related to being self-directed in learning. the examples included children who study voluntarily, are motivated to learn, who sit down and read by themselves after school, plan time well and asks questions to teachers even out of the classroom. clever (mwerevu). although we did not direct respondents to consider only social and emotional competencies and to ignore cognitive abilities, clever was outside the list of ten most frequent competencies mentioned by parents and teachers. only one teacher and no parents rated this as an important competency for children to have. respondents said clever children can understand easily, follow instructions faithfully and are eager to learn. relatedly there were only three mentions of the importance of being knowledgeable (mwenye maarifa). the only example given of this competency was that a knowledgeable child is one who “does the right things” (school 1, fgd 1). understanding (muelewa) was also mentioned but no examples of this competency were provided. careful (makini). a careful child makes no mistakes when carrying out instructions; they understand what they are directed to do and do it. this competency was sometimes mentioned together with mtaratibu meaning slow and careful, or measured. one teacher quoted two proverbs to illustrate this: “haraka, haraka haina baraka” translated as “‘quickly, quickly’ has no 174 global education review 5(2) blessings” and “chelewa ufike,” meaning “‘late’ will get there” (school 4, teacher 3). careful children are also punctual. persistent (asiyekata tamaa). the kiswahili term use for this competency translates literally as not to lose desire easily. parents and teachers gave several examples of persistence. persistent children always stay ontask until they finish and “refuse to go to sleep until the task is done” (school 1, fgd 2). they do not give up easily; they overcome challenges and work to find solutions to problems. persistent children “do not become angry or discouraged when failing to find the answers to questions or when getting low marks.” (school 4, teacher 1). they will ask tireless questions until they understand a certain concept. to have goals (kuwa na malengo). one parent focus group said that it was important for children to have a goal of who they want to be after schooling. they mentioned that this competency is relatively new in the local culture. one teacher talked of the importance of learning from successful people and developing a habit of learning from them. clean (msafi). the competencies of clean and smart/decent (nadhifu) had considerable overlap. a clean child is one knows how to wash themselves, has clean clothes and keeps the environment clean by sweeping the compound and avoiding littering. a smart/decent child wears smartly ironed clothes that cover their bodies appropriately. parents said they didn’t like seeing a boy indecently dressed (kuvaa mlegezo) or girls with short dresses. fear of god (hofu ya mungu). fear of god was not mentioned as frequently as many other competencies, but those who discussed it placed great importance on it, saying that a fear of god led to positive development of all competencies. similarly, pursuing other competencies, such as truthfulness, can be an example of god-fearing behavior. one parent and one teacher quoted the proverb “msema kweli ni mpenzi wa mungu”, translated as “the one who speaks the truth is a friend of god” (school 4, teacher 1; school 1, fgd 1). a god-fearing child prays a lot and worships god, for example in church or in the mosque. god-fearing children are obedient, care for others, do not use abusive language or insults, follow school rules and can change their behavior in response to feedback. how do competencies help children in school? we gained preliminary insight into the competencies that help children at school by examining differences in participant responses when we asked them “what are the qualities you would like your child/student to develop in life?” and “what are the qualities that help a child to succeed at school?” several parents responded to the second question by saying that the competencies that helped children in life were the same ones that helped them in school. these comments are supported by an analysis of the relative frequency of parent responses to the first two questions: no competency was mentioned much more frequently in responses to question 2 compared with question 1. by contrast, teachers’ responses differed significantly between the two questions. curiosity was mentioned by 17 teachers as being important for school but by only 4 teachers when initially asked about the importance of competencies for life in general. there were similar increases in frequency in response to the second question for being an attentive listener (16 teachers mentioned this relation to schooling versus 10 in relation to life in general), being self-directed (15 vs. 6), being hardworking (10 vs. 2) and having self-belief (7 vs 4). these four competencies were also those that were mentioned more frequently and valued more by teachers than by parents. among competencies that were less frequently mentioned by teachers, 175 global education review 5(2) a few were also mentioned in connection with schooling rather than with life in general: time management; courageous, clever, seeking understanding and having goals. we also asked parents and teachers directly how different competencies helped children in school. some responses referred directly to learning processes. curiosity can help a child to “learn more” (school 1, teacher 1). being an attentive helps a child to take on board whatever is being taught, process it and use it to improve their knowledge. when pupils are polite and calm in class they can remember what was taught to them. several other competencies were identified as important for expanding the range of activities and experiences available to children. teachers said children who were daring and courageous were able to confidently engage in new learning activities. being selfdirected allows a child to learn in a variety of ways to widen his/her understanding. seeking understanding helps a child to learn many things and acquire the experiences they need in life. pupils who are persistent have the ability to work on many tasks, which gives them a range of experiences required for life. parents and teachers frequently mentioned the importance of accepting feedback and changing one’s behavior in response. this behavior was mentioned in connection with being an attentive listener, being truthful, being obedient and having a fear of god. this behavior was perhaps behind the comment from a teacher that “talking freely and being transparent are important behaviors for learning and for studying in particular” (source needed). certain competencies help success at school by building relationships with others. respondents said that a respectful child is favored by teachers and fellow pupils and therefore easily gets help in the class. similar comments were made about trustworthy pupils. teachers also said that when a child is curious it makes their work easier. in that way, “teachers will love the pupil and give them special attention in class” (school 2, teacher 2). children’s perspectives on the competencies that help them in school we analyzed responses from children relating to the second research question concerning the competencies that helped children adapt to school when they first arrived and the competencies that helped children to succeed in school once there. adapting to school the most common response about the positive experience of starting school related to other children: meeting friends, playing games with them such as football, netball and jumping ropes. one child said, “i felt happy to have new friends” (school 2, pupil 5). children were also excited to be learning to read and write and to be getting educated in general. one said, “i love school because i want to be a doctor or a teacher” (school 2, pupil 3). several things in the school environment made children happy. some children said they liked the chairs, desks, blackboard, books and pencils in the classroom. other children liked the school gardens, which looked attractive, and trees from which they could get fruit. a few children said they were happy about their teacher. one said, “i was happy to meet my teacher, i love her deeply from my heart” (school 2, pupil 3). the most common surprising or unpleasant things about starting school related to teachers and other children. some children feared the teacher and many said they didn’t like being punished or hit by their teachers. children were surprised at how many other pupils there were in the school or their class. some had not seen that many people in one place before. children said they didn’t like arguing with other children, aggressive pupils and those who fought with them or hit them. many children listed things in the school environment that frightened them, including a tree used for traditional 176 global education review 5(2) rituals, snakes, flowers, a court near the school, a window, electric wires, a telephone transmitter and a water tank. many of these things were unfamiliar from their villages. only a few negative responses related to learning. some children said they found writing difficult. one child said, “at first i found it difficult to sit at a desk” (school 4, pupil 1). competencies for school success children told us indirectly about the competences and behaviors required for school success in two ways. children reported on the things they did at home that helped them in school and the advice they were given by family members about their behavior at school. children also told us the advice they would give to younger children who were about to start school. a key piece of advice was to respect teachers, to “receive them” (meet them and carry their bags), to obey them and to listen to them attentively in class. many children stressed the important of being polite and humble (mpole), and calm (mtulivu) in class. this was the advice they had for other children and also the advice they got from home: “my grandmother told me to be polite and humble in school, and so i am” (school 2, pupil 3). one child said, “i was so polite, and all the teachers loved me” (school 3, pupil 2). several other children mentioned that the result of their behavior was that teachers “loved” them. often, being calm was mentioned alongside the importance of avoiding bad behavior. children told us that students should not talk too much, should not be arrogant, should not stare at people, should avoid abusive language (e.g. “do not insult someone else’s mother,” school 1, pupil 2) should not fight or annoy others, should not steal or feel jealous of others’ belongings. children frequently mentioned the importance of having positive relationships with others. children’s advice to younger peers was “to love teachers” (school 4, pupil 2; school 3 pupil 1) and “to love others and play and chat with them” (school 4, pupil 5). one child said, “when you love your schoolmates they will love you too and you will feel good in your soul” (school 2, pupil 3). children were also told to be disciplined, and study hard so that they become knowledgeable. children advised their peers to “love writing and reading” (school 4, pupil 2). children advised others not to be lazy. a few mentioned the goal of studying hard – in one case to help parents later and in another “to succeed in life” (school 2, pupil 1). some advice revolved around being on time for class – not to be outside class when lessons are going on, to return promptly when sent on an errand and to arrive at school and go home on time. other individual competencies were mentioned less frequently. one child advised others to be confident and two children mentioned the importance of being intelligent. many children mentioned being clean and smart, bathing oneself and applying body oil, washing clothes and keeping the school compound clean. one child said, “being clean and smart helps me to understand better in the class.” (school 2, pupil 5). another said they tried to “be clean to avoid corporal punishment” (school 1, pupil 1). how do competencies develop at home and school? parents and teachers were asked directly about the origin of competencies. in general competencies were seen as being innate or else developed or affected by home life. for example, some parents said that respect is inborn: "you know you are not responsible for children's souls. it was put by god himself, so it is their own decision to be what they want” (school 1, fgd 1). however, other parents said that respect may be affected by having good or bad companions, in appropriate upbringing or parental separation. family break-up was a common theme in understanding the development of children’s competencies. for example, parents discussed how children differ 177 global education review 5(2) in their level of attentiveness. this was attributed in part to the fact that divorce is common in the region, which disrupts families and leads to poor nurturing of children. a frequent conversation among the parent focus groups was for one respondent to claim that a competency was in place at birth and for others to point to the role of children’s upbringing. this exchange took place for the competencies of both self-motivation and curiosity. respondents told us that some competencies developed from others. one parent said, “discipline is the genesis of other children’s qualities” (school 1, fgd 2). others said that when a pupil is disciplined s/he will have all the other qualities needed for success. another said that “attentiveness is like a ‘safe box’ where all other qualities are found” (school 1, fgd 1). similar comments were made by parents about how fear of god underpins all other qualities. parents and teachers also discussed how their own behavior can make a difference to children’s competencies. many respondents mentioned the importance of a child’s upbringing. one teacher said, “children start off with good behavior which is then corrupted by a poor upbringing” (school 1, teacher 4). providing a role model and examples to children is important. parents and teachers mentioned this strategy regarding respect. parents also mentioned this in relation to being truthful and civilized. parents and teachers also developed competencies, such as being polite and respectful, with verbal guidance, for example explaining to children the consequences of being disrespectful. some parents said that politeness and calmness can be developed through giving children chores to do at home. reprimanding children can help develop respect. both parents and teachers said they need to use physical punishment to ensure children are obedient. other parents cautioned against the use of physical punishment, saying “when a teacher is too strict, children will develop a bad character” (school 1, fgd 1). other punishments to encourage children to behave and greet people properly involved denying them meals. parents and one teacher quoted a proverb “mkaidi hafaidi hata siku ya idd,” translated as “a disobedient child will not be given rewards even during festivals (when giving children food and gifts is common)” (school 4, fgd 1; school 3, teacher 4). as a last measure, some parents threatened to incarcerate them in the village government office. both teachers and parents saw an important role for school in developing children’s obedience. one teacher said, “teaching is a vocation and a call from god. teachers need to fulfill their roles to mold children to be obedient’’ (school 1, fgd 1). teachers said they dealt with misbehavior by sending cases to a class teacher or headteacher, by using punishments, such as corporal punishment, and sending for parents to discuss suspending a child from school. teachers gave several examples of how school can help develop curiosity. for example, teachers can relate what they learn at school with their home environment, they can conduct field trips, provide opportunities for children to ask questions and to show appreciation for those who ask questions, ask children difficult questions which will make them think critically and give them frequent assignments. one teacher said, “i discourage children from using the makonde language at school to promote their curiosity to learn things in using kiswahili” (school 3, teacher 2). school can develop children’s cooperation by allowing them to work in groups. teachers also spoke of their attempt to encourage pupils to interact with each other and be sociable. some teachers said they did this through jogging, the morning parade and other physical exercises. others said that pupils are given freedom to take part and interact in the morning parade activities. some parents said that they wanted 178 global education review 5(2) morning parade to be a daily routine as it is a source of discipline, respect and other qualities desirable for pupils. gender and age most competencies were seen as important for both boys and girls, with a few exceptions. most parents told use that girls need to be more obedient than boys while teachers generally considered obedience to be equally important for both sexes. several parents felt that boys should be more socially active than girls, and that boys should be more hard-working. a few parents expressed the opinion that boys are more self-directed than girls and achieved a higher level of understanding. one parent expressed the opposite opinion – that girls were more self-directed than boys. participants were asked how competencies developed with age from four years old to eight years old. in general, participants said that competencies developed with age. this was mentioned in relation to obedience, politeness, attention, trustworthiness and curiosity. some competencies – such as trustworthiness – were described as being absent at four years but developing by eight years. however, one parent said that you could see a child’s qualities, even at a young age. this was described with a weather analogy: “you can tell it is going to be a good day from early in the morning” (school 1, teacher 1). some competencies were thought to decline with age. teachers said that older children can be less self-confident than younger children and added that younger children can be more motivated and hard working. other competencies manifested differently with age. for example, “with cooperation at age 4 they play together at age 8 they work together” (school 1, fgd 1). discussion the aim of this study was to characterize tanzanians’ perspectives on the social and emotional competencies children should develop and those that help them in school. we were particularly interested in perspectives that differed from those discussed in literature from western societies. the study was not a comparative one, and we were unable to find studies in the western countries that used a methodology like ours. thus, our analysis contrasts the findings of this study with our interpretation – based on experience and literature – of the competencies valued in the western countries and that underpin the design of social and emotional competency assessments currently in circulation. the most apparent difference between responses in this study and the conceptual classifications of social and emotional competencies used to date was the overwhelming focus by adults in mtwara on social responsibility. this was apparent in several ways. first, the competencies mentioned most frequently and valued most by teachers and parents were those associated with social responsibility, including being an attentive listener, being obedient, disciplined, polite and humble, and respectful. these competencies are demonstrated by children who fit in and do what is expected of them. the focus on social responsibility is well documented in subsaharan africa. it is perhaps surprising that the focus on social responsibility persists even when respondents are discussing the competencies that promote learning. parents especially said that the qualities of respect, obedience, attentiveness, and politeness were key to children’s learning. for example, paying respect to the teacher can help a child receive more attention and support. second, it is worth noting that respondents were not initially directed to restrict their answers to social and emotional competencies rather than cognitive competencies. interestingly, cognitive competencies were not mentioned frequently and did not feature in the ten most mentioned competencies. 179 global education review 5(2) third, even though we categorized several competencies as individual, those competencies were typically mentioned in the context of social relationships. for example, curiosity is an individual competence that has the potential to help an individual learn more about the world independently of others. respondents acknowledged this function of curiosity but also discussed its role in developing relationships between teachers and pupils. curious pupils make teachers’ work easier and consequently teachers will favor them in class. similarly, confidence may be seen as a quality that aids self-reliance and yet respondents also discussed this competency as helping cooperation; confident children are more able to help others and ask for help themselves. being sociable was seen as a means for ensuring harmony and cooperation with others. some behavioral examples of being sociable included “fulfilling responsibilities willingly” and “working wholeheartedly” which closely relate to social responsibility. similarly, being clever and knowledgeable was defined by some as “doing the right things.” fourth, children’s references to their behavior in the classroom were focused on the response of the teacher. some children were pleased that teachers “loved” them because of their behavior. advice given to other children to pay attention to the teacher was often motivated by the desire to avoid punishment. only two children mentioned the goal of learning at school and for one of them this goal was to support their parents in the future. it is not clear whether this finding is evidence of the cultural value of social relationships at school or that young children are particularly concerned with pleasing their parents and teachers. it is also worth noting that some children did mention that they enjoyed reading, writing and drawing in class. however, taken together, these findings do suggest that social responsibility and social relationships loom large when adults and children discuss both interpersonal and individual competencies required for success in school. a second theme in the responses we observed is that teachers and parents valued different competencies, consistent with other research in africa (wober, 1972). the difference emerged in responses to questions about the competencies that were important for school. teachers mentioned curiosity, being an attentive listener, self-directed and hardworking and having self-belief more in connection with schooling than they did in connection with life success in general. although parents also valued being an attentive listener, the other four competencies were mentioned significantly more frequently by teachers than parents. one parent implied that devotion to islam left little room for curiosity in children’s upbringing at home. these competencies valued more by teachers than parents are all concerned with individual development and learning more than with social responsibility. one interpretation of the difference between the competencies valued by teachers and parents is that schools require a different set of competencies than those valued by the community. using the theoretical framework presented in the introduction (e.g. greenfield, 2009; greenfield, 2016) one could argue that the values of schooling become integrated into society in general when education is widespread and becomes critical for economic productivity in the society. in this transition many values change, including a shift from social obligation to individual development. culture in rural mtwara has yet to make this shift and, until it does, there may be differences in the cultural values endorsed at home and at school. the conclusion that the culture of school and home are at odds is plausible and supported somewhat by our data. other interpretations are possible, however. even in societies where education is widespread, there are differences in the way that teachers and parents assess a child’s behavior (stanger & lewis, 1993; winsler 180 global education review 5(2) & wallace, 2002). perhaps parents focused on obedience in discussions because they have more opportunity to observe their children demonstrating this competency as compared with curiosity. but when questioned directly on this issue, parents told us that children should ideally be both obedient and curious. in figure 1 we present our analysis of how responses from participants in this study mapped onto the casel (2017) framework of social and emotional competencies. this analysis gives us some initial understanding of the similarities and differences between mtwara, tanzania and educated/industrialized countries in the conceptualization of social and emotional competencies. the most valued competencies in this study fell into the category of social responsibility. this category mapped somewhat onto the casel category of social awareness, although our respondents placed little emphasis on competencies such as empathy and perspective taking. the second category of social relationships mapped quite closely onto the casel category of relationship skills. the casel framework includes two sets of individual competencies: self-management and self-awareness. in general, we found that respondents in mtwara placed less value on individual competencies, compared with social responsibility and social relationships. most mentions of individual competencies came from teachers. consequently, we had only included one category of individual competencies in our analysis. nevertheless, those competencies that were mentioned map quite closely to those in the casel framework. being self-directed (mtwara) is closely related to self-motivation and selfdiscipline (casel). goal setting is also mentioned in both our research findings and the casel framework. the competencies of curiosity, carefulness and persistence were mentioned by our respondents and are compatible with the self-management category of the casel framework, although they are not highlighted in this framework. competencies of impulse control and stress management were not mentioned by respondents in the study. the self-awareness category also had commonalities with findings from the current research. in fact, the competency of self-awareness was mentioned by several parents and teachers, although all the behavioral examples given were also common to being an attentive listener. this raises the possibility that the term had a different meaning for respondents in our study. other competencies mentioned by respondents – self-belief and courage – map onto the casel constructs of self-efficacy and self-confidence. finally, we note that the casel category of responsible decision-making was omitted from the figure because it did not map well onto responses from our respondents. to summarize, there is a good deal of overlap between the responses of participants in this study and the competencies outlined in the casel framework. respondents differed mainly in placing a greater focus on social responsibility as compared with other aspects of social awareness and as compared with individual competencies. one caveat to this conclusion should be mentioned. figure 1 compares the responses of parents and teachers in one context with the results of research and expert analysis in a different context. the importance of some competencies in the casel framework– such as self-control (moffitt et al., 2011) – emerged from years of research on children’s behavior rather than from the perceptions of parents and teachers in the us or elsewhere. it’s likely that the application of expertise and a systematic research program in tanzania would produce a different conceptualization of social and emotional competencies from the one suggested by our respondents. 181 global education review 5(2) figure 1. the relationship between findings from the current study and the casel (2017) framework of social and emotional competencies. bold text indicates competencies mentioned frequently or rated as important. limitations there are a few limitations to our research. our findings are based on interpretations of seven individual researchers and are filtered through their beliefs and prior experience. it is worth noting that this study was motivated by the belief that assessments of social and emotional competence should be tailored to context. it is possible, therefore, that we tried harder to find differences, rather than similarities, between existing frameworks and the perceptions of the study participants, despite making efforts to guard against this outcome in our research process. second, we note that the task we gave our respondents – conceptualizing and defining the competencies they valued – was not something with which they had experience. our perception was that respondents, particularly parents, struggled to give precise definitions of competencies. based on the behavioral examples, it appeared that some parents grouped several positive competencies together, reasoning, for example, that an obedient child tends also to be respectful and disciplined. this kind of reasoning sometimes made it difficult for us to differentiate among competencies. furthermore, some example behaviors appeared to refer to the causes or consequences of a competency, rather than a demonstration of the competency itself. for example, parents mentioned “having a good upbringing” (cause) and “will have a good life” (consequence) as example behaviors of some competencies. the study was not designed to have external validity. we hypothesize, however, that the findings from this study will have relevance to other subsistence-agricultural communities in sub-saharan africa and beyond, based on the theoretical framework presented in the introduction (greenfield, 2009; greenfield, 2016; levine et al., 1993). some findings will be specific to tanzania and others will have relevance only for mtwara region. we recognize that the culture of the region, as with all cultures, is changing. our focus on subsistence agriculture as an explanatory variable in this 182 global education review 5(2) culture becomes less appropriate with increasing participation in schooling and with diversification of the economy in mtwara. however, subsistence agriculture still predominates in the region and to the extent that change is taking place, we anticipate that some cultural factors are slower to change than the sociodemographic factors that give rise to them. implications our findings have implications for research and practice in three areas: assessment, curriculum and community engagement. for assessments of social and emotional competencies, our research suggests that emphasis should be placed on the construct of social responsibility for assessments conducted in tanzania and in other similar contexts. further research could help understand the relative importance of this and other constructs for the development and education of children in tanzania. for example, research could help understand which social and emotional competencies are most predictive of academic success. our research findings are relevant to the design of curriculum in two ways. first, our findings point to the needs young children have when adapting to life in school. responses from students in our study suggest that many aspects of the school’s physical and social environment are unsettling for them. these findings support the approach of the recently launched tusome pamoja pre-primary program, which allows for children to visit the school and meet new classmates. second, our findings suggest some ways in which it would help to develop the social and emotional competencies of children in school. for example, responses from students suggest that relationships with teachers and other pupils are a source of stress. children fear corporal punishment from teachers and bullying and abuse from other pupils. other programs in sub-saharan africa have had some success in improving interactions in school (torrente et al., 2015). the curriculum of usaid tusome pamoja provides opportunities for children to develop social and emotional competencies. for example, pupils’ sense of responsibility is developed through a class committee and “circle time” is used to involve pupils in cooperative work, and to allow them to interact with one another and to give expression to their feelings. finally, the study has implications for efforts to engage parents and communities in their children’s schooling, which are widespread across the continent (majgaard & mingat, 2012). our findings suggest that parents and teachers emphasize different social and emotional competencies of children. parents focus less than teachers on individual competencies of curiosity, self-direction and self-belief. education programs could help parents understand the importance of these competencies in their children’s schooling. such an approach could also help efforts (rti international, 2016) to encourage parents to engage with their children in certain ways in the home – for example by asking them questions – that are designed to support children’s development and education. tusome pamoja uses circle time as an opportunity for parentteacher interaction. such interactions could help parents understand the competencies that will help their children succeed in school. in conclusion, we note that very little scholarship on human development in subsaharan africa is rooted in a local understanding of key concepts. nsamenang (2006, p. 295) argues that in the african worldview the “seminal concept is socio-genesis, defined as individual development that is perceived and explained as a function of social, not biological, factors.” this conclusion is consistent with our findings, in which social responsibility and social relationships were seen as central to all social and emotional competencies that children need in life and in school. taking this worldview into account has the potential to improve the quality of assessment and program evaluation and can 183 global education review 5(2) be the foundation of an education system that works with and not against cultural values of those it serves. notes 1. matthew c. h. jukes rti international 2. prosper gabrieli university of dodoma 3. nkanileka loti mgonda university of dar es salaam 4. florentina s. nsolezi university of dodoma 5. grace jeremiah st. augustine university of tanzania 6. jovina j. tibenda usaid tusome pamoja 7. kristen l. bub university of illinois authors’ notes 1. this research was supported by the early childhood development strategic investment fund of rti international and by the usaid tusome pamoja program. 2. we would like to extend special thanks to the mtwara regional education office, the district education offices of mtwara rural, tandahimba and nanyamba, and the headteachers of the schools involved in the study for making this research possible. we would also like to thank the parents, teachers and students of the four participating schools for generously giving their time to discuss their views with us. references anderson, k., & sayre, r. 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(2016). dimensionality and the development of cognitive assessments for children in sub-saharan africa. journal of cross-cultural psychology, 47(3), 341-354. doi:10.1177/0022022115624155 about the author(s) matthew jukes, phd, is a fellow and senior education evaluation specialist at rti international. matthew’s current research addresses culturally relevant approaches to assessment of social and emotional competencies; improving pedagogy through an understanding of the cultural basis of teacher-child interactions; and frameworks to improve evidence-based decision-making. matthew holds a phd in early childhood development from oxford university. previous positions include associate professor at the harvard graduate school of education and senior director of research, monitoring and evaluation at room to read. prosper gabrieli, phd, is a lecturer at the college of education in the university of dodoma, tanzania. prosper holds a phd in education from dodoma university. previous positions include assistant coordinator in the language supportive pedagogy project and a researcher in the enscience project in tanzania. prosper has teaching experience in secondary schools and interested in science education, teacher education and classroom research. nkanileka loti mgonda, phd is a lecturer in the school of education, university of dar es salaam. he teaches and supervises postgraduate research. his areas of research and teaching include: teacher professionalism and ethics, life skills and character education and foundations of education. nkanileka holds a phd in teacher education from leipzig university germany. currently, nkanileka is an associate editor of the journal “papers in education and development.” florentina nsolezi, ma, is an assistant lecturer in the department of psychology, school of education and phd candidate at the university of dodoma, tanzania. she holds a ba in educational psychology and ma in education from the university of dar es salaam. her research interests are in educational psychology and child development. grace jeremiah, ma, is an independent research consultant. she holds a master degree in economics from university of nairobi. previous positions include lecturer at st. augustine university of tanzania in the economics department. she has also worked with tgnp (tanzania gender network program) mtandao as coordinator of participatory action research in morogoro, tanzania. she is also part of the tamasha (taasisi ya maendeleo shirikishi kwa vijana arusha) team. jovina tibenda, m.ed., is a senior program specialist in research at the rti international-tusome pamoja program in tanzania. currently jovina oversees operational research designed to understand what works well and what are the barriers to implementation with the aim of improving program effectiveness. jovina holds a masters of educational administration from ohio university. previous positions include director of monitoring evaluation and research usaid funded programtmarc tanzania marketing and communication kristen bub, edd, is associate professor of educational psychology and developmental sciences division chair at the university of illinois urbana-champaign, college of education. her research interests are in quantitative methods and developmental antecedents of social, emotional, academic, and physical health outcomes across early and middle childhood. she has a doctorate in human development and psychology from harvard university. 186 global education review 5(2) appendix a interview questions for parents key research question: what are the non-academic characteristics that children need to succeed at school in rural mtwara note that interview questions for teachers were very similar and largely involved replacing the term children with pupils. 1) what are the qualities that you would like your children to develop in life? ungependa mwanao ajenge sifa za namna gani maishani? possible prompts: a) what are the qualities you would like all children to develop ungependa watoto wote wajenge sifa zipi? use “sifa za kimalezi”, “sifa za kimwenendo” b) what are the characteristics you would want for your child ungependa mwanao ajenge tabia gani? ungependa mwanao awe na matendo yapi? c) what are the differences between a good child and a bad child? tofautisha kati ya mtoto mwenye sifa nzuri na sifa mbaya d) (describe how you would want your child to behave) e) how would you want a child age 4 years to behave? how would you want a child age 8 years to behave? ungependa mtoto wa miaka minne awe na tabia gani? ungependa mtoto wa miaka minane awe na tabia gani? f) (what kind of qualities would make a child successful in life? – use as a probe if they are not answering well) ni sifa zipi zinamwezesha mtoto afanikiwe maishani? g) read the list of qualities back to parents. ask them, which of these is the most important for a child? list the top 5 in order. wasomee wazazi hiyo orodha ya sifa. waulizee, “niambieni ipi kati ya hizi sifa ni muhimu zaidi ili kufanikiwa”. list the top 5 in the order they are mentioned. h) are any of these qualities more important for girls than boys? are any more important for boys than girls? je, kuna sifa yeyote kati ya hizi ambazo ni muhimu zaidi kwa wasichana kuliko wavulana? kuna sifa yeyote ambazo ni muhimu kwa wavulana zaidi kuliko wasichana? 2) what are the qualities that help a child to succeed at school? ni sifa gani unadhani zitamwezesha mtoto kufanikiwa vizuri shuleni possible prompts: a) what are the differences between a child who succeeds at school and one who doesn’t? tofautisha kati ya mtoto anayefanikiwa vizuri shuleni na yule asiyefanikiwa? b) (how do these differences look like on day 1 of school?) tofauti hizi zipoje kwa siku ya kwanza shuleni? 187 global education review 5(2) if the question focuses on cognitive abilities ask, “what are the behaviors, attributes, character of children who succeed at school”? if the interviewee focuses on cognitive abilities, ask “ni tabianitabia au mwenendo gani ya watato wanaofanikiwa shuleni?” c) (is your child doing well at school?) mtoto wako anafanya vizuri shuleni? d) what are the things that children do at home that help them adapt to school? ni mambo gani mwanao anafanya nyumbani yanayomsaidia kuzoea maisha ya shule? understanding key terms 3) return to the key concepts raised above. for each one ask: a. give me examples of when children aged 5-8 show this quality? naomba mifano ya watoto wa umri kati ya miaka 5-8 wanaoonesha sifa hii? the behavior should be specific and generalisable. (i) it is specific and observable. if several people observed the child, they would agree whether the behavior has been performed or not (ii) it is generalisable. every child has the opportunity to perform this behavior. (iii) does a child aged 5-8 perform this behavior b. keep probing until you get something specific and generalisable. ask for more examples. check whether the behavior is appropriate for young children c. why is it important for children to develop this quality? kwa nini ni muhimu watoto wajenge sifa hii? d. how do you help children develop this quality? utamwezeshaje mtoto kujenga sifa hii? e. (why does this quality help children at school?) kwa nini sifa hii inamsaidia shuleni? f. (how do children at age 4 show this quality? how will the same same child demonstrate this quality at age 8? jinsi gani mtoto wa miaka minne anaonesha sifa hii? jinsi gani mtoto huyo huyo ataonesha sifa hii akiwa na umri wa miaka minane? akifika miaka kumi na mbili sifa hii itabadilikaje? g. ask if not answered by d how does school help your child to develop this quality? shule inasaidiaje mtoto kujenga sifa hii? h. (if you want get from a behavior to a competency try asking: why do some children have this behavior and others don’t?) ni kwa nini baadhi ya watoto wana hii tabia na wengine hawana? the questions will be asked of each quality identified in the first phase of research 4. je, unadhani _______________{mention other sifa} ni muhimu kwa watoto a. give me examples of when children aged 5-8 show this quality? naomba mifano ya watoto wa umri wa miaka kati ya 5-8 wanaoonesha sifa hii? the behavior should be specific and generalisable. (iv) it is specific and observable. if several people observed the child, they would agree whether the behavior has been performed or not (v) it is generalisable. every child has the opportunity to perform this behavior. 188 global education review 5(2) (vi) does a child aged 5-8 perform this behavior b. keep probing until you get something specific and generalisable. ask for more examples. check whether the behavior is appropriate for young children 5. how have these competencies changed over time? je, unadhani sifa hizi hubadilika vipi jinsi muda unavyoenda/miaka inavyoenda? jinsi mtoto anavyoongezeka umri? appendix b interview questions for students please ask the teacher to leave you for this part. explain that we want the children to be free to draw whatever they like without showing to the teacher tafadhali waruhusu waalimu kuendelea na shughuli zao. waeleze kwamba tunahitaji wanafunzi wawe huru zaidi kuchora wanachokitaka bila kuwaonyesha waalimu. we would like you all to draw two pictures for us. in one picture draw something you enjoyed in your first week at school. something that made you happy. in the second picture draw something you found difficult. we will collect the pictures later. they are just for us – we will not show them to the teacher or your parents. tuanataka mchore picha/michoro miwili. picha/mchoro ya kwanza ioneshe kitu ulichokipenda/ulichokifurahia siku za mwanzo ulipofika shuleni. kiwe ni kitu ulichokifurahia. kwenye picha ya pili chora picha/mchoro wa kitu kilichokutatiza. tutakusanya picha hizo. tutazichukua na hatutawaonesha waalimu au wazazi wako. 1. ask the children about the pictures to explain what they have drawn. waulize wanafunzi waelezee picha/michoro waliyoichora. 2. (how did you feel on your first days at school (or preschool)? ulijisikiaje siku za kwanza ulipofika shuleni (au chekechea / madrassa / awali)? if they did not answer these questions already ask: 1a) what did you find easy in your first days at school? what about in the classroom? 1b) what things did you find difficult in your first days at school? what about in the classroom? wasipoweza kujibu haya maswali waulize zaidi: nini kilikuwa rahisi siku za kwanza kuwa shuleni au darasani? na ni kipi kilichowatatiza/kilichowakwaza? shuleni au darasani? 3. what upbringing did you have at home that helped you for your first days at school? ni malezi gani uliyoyapata nyumbani ambayo yamekusaidia siku za mwanzo shuleni? 4. on your first day at school what things surprised you? what things were you not prepared for? ni vitu/mambo gani vilivyokushangaza siku za mwanzo shuleni? ni mambo gani unadhani hukuwa umejiandaa kukutana nayo? 5. if you were giving advice to a younger sibling or friend who is about to start school, what would you tell them? ukipewa nafasi yaku mshauri mdogo wako ambaye anakaribia kuanza shule, je, utamshauri nini? 6. (what advice would you give a younger child about how to do well in school?) utamshauri nini huyu mdogo wako ili aweze kufanya vizuri katika masomo yake hapa shuleni? 56 global education review 4(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: erwin, elizabeth j. (2017). transparency in early childhood education: what the west can learn from australia’s focus on wellbeing. global education review, 4 (3), 56-69. transparency in early childhood education: what the west can learn from australia’s focus on well-being elizabeth j. erwin montclair state university abstract the landscape of early childhood education and care has become unrecognizable in many countries, particularly in the west. there is an increasing pressure to focus on outcomes over process, prescribed curricula, standardized assessments, and unrealistic academic expectations for young learners and the adults who work on their behalf. this shift in educational practice has become a harsh reality for many young children, families and educators. the purpose of this paper is to challenge these mounting pressures through an in-depth examination of how early education and care in australia places well-being as one of the top priorities for young children. australia was deliberately identified for this analysis because of international acclaim received for its highly praised national early childhood framework as well as the steadfast and visible commitment to education and care for its youngest citizens. using multiple contexts and narratives, three key features are described that demonstrate how early education practices in australia counter western beliefs about who children are and how they learn. these three features are: (a) a strong sense about holistic well-being, (b) truth about place, and (c) living in harmony with the natural world. ideas for global education reform are proposed as one way of joining with other voices to protect young children across the world. keywords early childhood education, young children, global education reform introduction the world is witnessing increasing pressure to focus on outcomes over process, prescribed curricula, standardized assessments, decreased play and increased academics for young learners and the adults who work on their behalf. the challenges faced in the west, particularly in the united states, may be the result of growing external forces in which educators have little influence. for example, ravitch (2014) suggested that under the guise of school reform, public funding is now given to private corporations and entrepreneurs, who typically possess and hire persons with limited to no knowledge or experience in education. ______________________________ corresponding author: elizabeth j. erwin, montclair state university, college of education and human services, department of early childhood, elementary and literacy education, graduate programs in inclusive education, 1 normal avenue, montclair, new jersey 07043. e-mail: erwinel@mail.montclair.edu mailto:erwinel@mail.montclair.edu transparency in early childhood education 57 this shift in educational outlook, particularly in the west, has become a harsh reality for many young children, families, and educators across the globe. silin (2014) further noted “now the threats are coming from outside: the demand for an increasingly academic curriculum by politicians and policymakers, the insistence on easily quantified and measurable results, and the incorporation of early childhood classrooms into elementary schools” (pp. 53-54). these external challenges, which are typically, but not exclusively, driven by political or corporate power, are having an impact on the field in ways that are unprecedented. the early childhood field, which has been somewhat protected from assessment-related pressures endured by researchers and educators of older students, is now forced to shift its focus from the socialemotional and cognitive lives of young learners to the demands and burdens of constant assessment (adair, 2014). around the world childcare costs are not automatically covered by individual states or countries. in the united states, costs for childcare is not covered by federal or state funding, and many families elect to keep their young children at home since it can be more cost effective than working and paying for childcare services. although some families send their young children to private childcare or family day care centers, other families opt to send their 3-5 year olds to preschool programs that may be publicly funded by states such as head start,1 special education,2 or other funding sources that offer block grants3 to states. state licensing is required for every child care or preschool program although this can vary greatly. early childhood programs can also seek professional accreditation through meeting standards from the national association for the education of young children children in the united states typically start formal schooling at age 5 years when they enter kindergarten. a lead pre-school – grade 2 teacher working in a public school is generally required to hold a bachelor’s degree or master’s degree, although a teacher in a private setting might only be required to hold an associate’s degree in early childhood education. despite the lack of affordable childcare across the united states, there remains equally pressing issues about the overall climate in early childhood education and care. the growing dilemma this paper explores several key ideas related to early childhood education and the global education reform movement for this special issue including (a) current dilemmas in early childhood education such as teacher-directed instruction, standards-based curriculum, and developmentally inappropriate expectations, b) ideas for what successful practices in response to the global education reform movement look like, and c) alternative educational understandings for school readiness. as the field experiences ongoing pressure to increase focus on academics, implement prescribed, teacher-directed curricula and participate in standardized and other assessments, it appears that there is an emerging set of abcs. these new abcs represent unrealistic expectations for early childhood programs to “assess, behave and conform” (erwin & robinson 2015). similarly, some may notice a similar set of abcs for young children that emphasize “accountability, behavior and compliance.” as with traditional and often academic notions of young children learning their abcs, these newly emerging abcs , reflect the same limited assumptions about how young children learn and what they need to thrive. this may not be a problem experienced solely in the west even though that is where much of the concern about early childhood care and education exits. over a decade ago, fleer (2003) suggested that since many english58 global education review 4(3) speaking countries share similar beliefs, histories, values, and practices, a western view of early childhood has emerged over time and is now considered typical and customary. across the globe, values shaping educational decision-making echo the beliefs embedded within society. some of the mounting expectations (i.e., standardized assessments, restricted opportunities for play, increased academics, teacher-directed instruction, and prescribed curriculum) faced by early childhood educators can be seen as a mirror for societal values emerging in the west (i.e., uniformity, speed, outcomes). more specifically, these western values are likely propelled by an underpinning desire for accumulation or “more” a culture dominated by the accumulation, not just of wealth but also of concepts, ideas, actions, knowledge, and more. in fact, many of us from the west seem to be perpetually busy doing the things we feel we need to do in order to have the things we believe we need to have. while on this treadmill we miss the present, we fail to simply be here, to be mindful. (dachyshyn, p. 36, 2015). as troubling as this pursuit of accumulation may be, these values appear to be shaping education for young learners in the west and could threaten early care and education globally. global threats to early childhood education and care are being challenged. resisting dominant discourses related to young children is not new. the notion of reconceptualizing early childhood education emerged in the early 1990s from work done by researchers in multiple disciplines (e.g., anthropology, sociology, philosophy) who were confronting issues of equity and power in early childhood practices, theories, relationships, and institutional structures (bloch, 2014). twenty years later o’loughlin (2014) argued to those who challenged notions of “…normative childhood, linear development, and prescriptive pedagogies, often artfully disguised as student-centered and humane education, might take seriously the need to articulate a comprehensive critical alternative vision to the status quo” (o’loughlin, 2014, p. 66). although the global trend of increased academics and unrealistic expectations for young children is growing, there are strong, collective voices in the west, and beyond, resisting dominant discourses about the current state of early childhood education (block, swaderner, & cannella, 2014; iorio & parnell, 2015); as well as confronting the notion of what is quality in early childhood education, particularly how it is constructed (moss & dahlberg, 2008). to shed light on and transform the current challenges in early childhood education and care, a powerful and lasting momentum is required. seeking answers the underlying intention of this paper is to voice resistance and to propose a global call to action to counter the growing pressures in early childhood care and education. through an indepth examination of how australia positions well-being as a top priority, we can begin to reframe practices in the west about who young children are and how they learn. australia was deliberately identified for this examination because of the international praise for its well respected national early childhood framework as well as the steadfast and visible commitment to its youngest citizens. it was the notion of accumulation that first led me to ponder how to resist the dominant discourse around the growing challenges faced in early childhood care and education in the west. australia’s national curriculum framework, early years learning framework (eylf): belonging, being and becoming (australian government department of transparency in early childhood education 59 education, employment and workplace relations, 2009), continued to receive international respect and acclaim. eylf embraced a clear vision which recognized that “fundamental to the framework is a view of children’s lives as characterised by belonging, being and becoming. from before birth children are connected to family, community, culture and place” (australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations, 2009, p. 7). the notion that children are deeply connected to the world in which they live is not inconsequential or isolated in the eylf, but rather transparent and an anchoring belief that is thoughtfully embedded throughout the entire guidelines. another noteworthy reason australia has gained global respect regarding eylf, is the steadfast holistic focus on children’s identity and well-being. for example, the eylf identifies five learning outcomes or expectations for children from birth to five years of age that clearly articulates who young children are and acknowledges how and where they live in the world. the learning outcomes in the eylf declare that children: (a) have a strong sense of identity, (b) are connected with and contribute to their world. (c) have a strong sense of wellbeing, (d) are confident and involved learners, and (e) are effective communicators (australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations, 2009). not typically observed in dominant discourses in early childhood in the west, although visible throughout the eylf, was a deliberate and integrated focus on ecological well-being and sustainability (i.e., a deep respect for the natural world and commitment to the long term survival of the planet), as well as citizenship and personal agency (i.e., autonomy, inter-dependence, and influencing events and the world through decision-making). although these ideas are acknowledged by many educators and are not necessarily new in the west, they are the cornerstone to australia’s approach to learning for young children. further, these elements stand in stark contrast to the recent push for academics, standardization and uniformity in the west. even though some inadequacies have been identified regarding the eylf (krieg, 2011; peers & fleer, 2014; sumsion et al., 2009), australia maintained a clear commitment to protect and care for all of its young children. it is for these reasons, among others, that i made the decision to pursue my sabbatical in australia and learn firsthand about their early childhood care and education for its youngest citizens. the inquiry process spending 5 weeks in australia for my sabbatical provided an unprecedented opportunity to examine policies, practices and discourses in a concentrated and uninterrupted way. haraway (1988) asserted that all production of knowledge needs to be situated and that “translation is always interpretive, critical and partial” (p. 589). this work was influenced by my background as an able-bodied, highly educated, middle class female, who has lived all my life in the united states with economic, social, cultural and other advantages. the goal of this sabbatical leave was to study early childhood education policies, practices and discourses in australia. most of the five week visit was spent in two geographically diverse states, victoria and new south wales (with the majority of time spent in metropolitan melbourne to become immersed in its beauty, rhythm, landscape and diversity). there were many planned interviews as well as informal and impromptu experiences, with individuals and in groups, which provided a multi-layered context for understanding how australia approaches education and care of young children. meetings were arranged with families, educators, scholars, researchers, university faculty, university students, 60 global education review 4(3) administrators, senior policy officials and others responsible for the lives of children birth to five years. in the field, time was spent touring and conducting in-depth observations in three different programs responsible for young learners; holidays, scheduling constraints and other factors prevented visits with even more schools. in addition, i conducted an in-depth review and analysis of documents including, but not limited to, current research and literature, policy statements, welcome packets and brochures from schools, university course syllabi (referred to as unit guides), and child-generated products. i attended several faculty meetings as well as several university classroom lectures for undergraduate students pursuing an education degree, and was also invited and delivered a guest lecture in one undergraduate course. throughout the 5 weeks in australia, as well as the 4 months following my return to the u.s., i reviewed on an on-going basis extensive field notes, school documents, journal articles, research summaries, cultural artifacts, video, photographs, and other relevant information that led to a rich contextual understanding of early childhood care and education. the iterative nature of the process provided me with meaningful and frequent opportunities to reflect on what i was noticing, as well as to form questions and impressions that deepened this inquiry. for example,, when i was introduced and it was explained why i was in australia, responses such as, “don’t think we got it right we still have a long way to go,” “we are not where we want to be" “we are experiencing the same pressures with regard to academics,” and “there are still many contradictions here,” reflected a combination of humility and frustration at the slow progress made. there was a consensus that the road to excellence and equity for all young learners was still unfolding. although not to the same degree, australia seemed to be experiencing some of the same tensions around early childhood education and care experienced by the west, although they appeared to be overcoming these mounting pressures. i came to understand how australia was able to sustain a focus on what matters most in the lives of young children despite current pressures faced by some of their global neighbors: there was a clear alignment between early childhood teacher preparation and classroom practice. in other words, there was alignment between what prospective teachers were learning in their university classrooms, and how these very same practices and principles were reflected in classrooms of young learners. this observation regarding the alignment between higher education and classroom practice in early childhood, helped to create a contextual understanding about how the investment and interest in children were consistent across practices, perceptions and narratives. examples of this transparency is discussed in the next section. although i spent time at one university, numerous materials, articles and research from a variety of university teacher education programs across australia informed and reaffirmed my observations. in addition to the parallel between teacher education and classroom practice, there was another pattern that shaped my initial impressions about early education and care in australia. there was consistent acknowledgment and application regarding deep engagement with materials, interactions and experiences. specifically, learning (for both children and adults) was understood as a process of deep inquiry that was not bound by time but rather approached by discovering multiple layers as opposed to a cursory, hasty or surface-level examination. within this framework of alignment between teacher education and classroom practice as well as from a perspective of deep engagement, the rest of this paper describes three key elements which shaped impressions about what transparency in early childhood education 61 australia deemed as most important for young children. engaging deeply in what matters most there were three key features that demonstrated how early education practices in australia reflected a solid understanding of who children are and how they learn: (a) a strong sense about holistic well-being, (b) truth about place, and (c) living in harmony with the natural world. a strong sense of holistic well-being first, i noticed that educational narratives and practices concerning citizens in australia, particularly the youngest, reflected a central emphasis on well-being from a holistic perspective. i observed that well-being was not only uniformly considered significant in the lives of young children, but was actively encouraged and supported across environments and with people responsible for care and education during the early years. well-being was simply a natural part of the cultural fabric and embraced as a core value, particularly at the policy level. for example, from a national perspective well-being was identified as one of the five key learning outcomes of the early years learning framework (eylf), acknowledging a strong and holistic interdependence between health in mind, body and spirit (australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations, 2009). specifically, holistic health was at the core of australia’s national policy demonstrating an unquestionable priority placed on an interconnectedness to learning and well-being during the early years. holistic approaches to teaching and learning recognise the connectedness of mind, body and spirit. when early childhood educators take a holistic approach they pay attention to children’s physical, personal, social, emotional and spiritual wellbeing as well as cognitive aspects of learning. while educators may plan or assess with a focus on a particular outcome or component of learning, they see children’s learning as integrated and interconnected (australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations, 2009, p. 4) further, the eylf curriculum guidelines identified the concepts of belonging, being, and becoming as the cornerstone in young children’s lives, leaving little doubt about the significant role that an integrated, holistic approach to health played in early childhood education and care. in one school’s literature, the multidimensional nature of well-being was emphasized including domains of cognitive, emotional, social, physical, and spiritual wellbeing. similar philosophies were echoed across all programs. the concepts of belonging, being, and becoming will be discussed later and in more detail. although belonging and becoming are essential concepts, i wish to cast light on being because this notion presents one of the greatest challenges for many in the west. i noticed that in classrooms time and space were not constrained in australia, as they often can be in the west, so children had unlimited opportunities to investigate, create, discover, and to simply be in the present moment. in one children’s center, the children were getting on their shoes, sun block and sun hats to go outside and one child spoke up. child: “i don’t want to go outside” teacher: “that’s fine. the other children want to go so we can leave the door open in the other room and you can stay with them. and i can keep this [outside] door open to still see you” 62 global education review 4(3) the teacher honored the child’s choice to remain inside and at the same time assured the child she was not alone or forgotten. this was one example how children can often make decisions about where and how long they wanted to engage in their desired activities with no pressure to conform to what the rest of the class was doing. in addition to acknowledging the importance of social and emotional health, the early years learning framework also stressed children’s independence and participation in “tak[ing] responsibility for their own health and physical well-being” (australian government department of education, employment and workplace relations, 2009, p. 32). this transparent focus on how physical well-being was as valued as social-emotional health, was consistently demonstrated across settings not only in writing but in daily practice as well. in addition, the eylf supported the idea that young children were capable, dependable, and responsible for learning how to take care of themselves. the eylf also advocated that resilience is necessary for teaching children to manage daily stress and risks. teaching children specifically how to live a healthy life was a value that was clearly articulated in the eylf: “learning about healthy lifestyles, including nutrition, personal hygiene, physical fitness, emotions and social relationships is integral to well-being and confidence (p. 30). further, it was customary to observe this value about living healthy across early childhood settings. children routinely tended to the vegetables, fruits, and/or herbs in their large, beautiful gardens, as well as preparing and enjoying meals from these bountiful spaces. another observation about well-being throughout my observations in australia was that young children were positioned as capable of making informed decisions and sufficiently trustworthy to handle risks. these impressions were the rule, not the exception. in one early childhood center outside melbourne, children aged three and four took turns to make their way across a considerable running creek by stepping on large rocks which served as a bridge amid the high level of water. one teacher positioned herself in the middle of the “bridge” and extended her hand only when children requested assistance or looked uncertain. there was an underlying assumption, not dominated by notions of safety, that children had the competence and confidence to assess risks and cross the creek. this is just one example of how children’s emotional as well as physical wellbeing was encouraged and supported. in another’s children’s center, there was an outdoor, open and fairly large, fire pit that was used often with children. in both centers, children were taught and encouraged to use authentic tools such as hammers and saws that were not hidden in bins, only accessible to adults, but available for all children to use. children, in cooperation with teachers or family members, co-designed and created from scratch upholstered chairs, pillows, bookshelves and other useful furniture for the classroom, in addition to beautiful crafts and artwork. there seemed to be a fundamental belief that young children could be trusted to handle authentic real-world learning experiences early on to navigate the world in which they live. a strong sense of well-being was naturally and consistently threaded into the fabric of daily experiences physically, socially and emotionally. truth about place during my sabbatical in australia, one of the most striking observations was how a deep understanding of place shaped discourses and practices for, with and about young children. an understanding of place was not new to australia, and yet in the west there is little if any consideration of place. the notion of place in australia continues to evolve and is transparency in early childhood education 63 conceptualized as a much broader construct than simply land, geography and terrain. across early childhood settings and university environments, there was a transparency about the truth regarding place, particularly its indigenous historical, social, and cultural roots. massey (2006) suggested “an understanding of both place and landscape as events, as happenings, as moments that will be again dispersed” (p. 46). duhn (2012) suggested that although there is still much uncertainty about what place is and who constructs place; generally for most people, “place is where everyday life happens” (p. 103.) duhn further explained that within early childhood pedagogy in order to ensure for place to be understood and to receive the substantial attention it deserves, there must be a fundamental repositioning of the child only with regard to place to the child’s entanglements as they relate to place. in other words, place must be contextualized within an interconnectedness of all living beings and things. there was a deliberate intention to honor place across a variety of early childhood contexts, and most noticeably in the acknowledgement of, and interaction with indigenous stories, culture, ceremony, history, and ways of knowing. my impression was that it was generally standard practice to recognize publicly the true settlers of the land and the ancient wisdom that still lives on. for example, at one university i observed an acknowledgement of the rightful settlers and traditional owners of the land: the aboriginal elders written on the first page of unit guides (e.g., course syllabi) as well as a verbal statement made by university faculty at the beginning of classes and meetings. in addition, this public acknowledgement about place was also visible upon my visits to parliament as a written document publically displayed in a prominent location in the entry way visible to everyone who entered. this public recognition of place was not done in a superficial or mechanical manner but acknowledged in a deep and meaningful way. in another example, a children’s center in melbourne, jindi woraback, was bestowed an aboriginal name that means to join/unite. this early childhood program was formally named in a traditional aboriginal ceremony by the wurundjeri people who make up part of the kulin nation. jindi woraback consciously and proudly embedded indigenous cultural and philosophical traditions within its school walls. the school philosophy of the jindi woraback children’s center, victoria australia, see below, articulated a strong public and transparent recognition of place.  jindi woraback children’s center acknowledges the wurundjeri people as the original custodians of the land on which the center operates.  the community of jindi woraback believe it is important to build effective respectful partnerships with children and families from indigenous and nonindigenous communities. o we believe children have the right to: o maintain connection with their land and country, o access education that strengthens their culture and identity o access education programs so that they become empowered to achieve to their fullest potential. at the jindi woraback children’s centre an unwavering commitment to place did not stop at the name; there was a reconditioned aboriginal garden under construction with native plants, vegetation, and artifacts in which children had researched, designed, planned and co-created with adults. indigenous crafts, fabric, books, dolls, toys, games, puzzles, artwork, photographs, and stories were accessible for children’s enjoyment and interaction in the 64 global education review 4(3) classrooms, hallways, and outdoor spaces. children and adults alike consistently demonstrated profound respect for and interaction with place across all early childhood contexts. living in harmony with the natural world there was one last element demonstrating the value australia places on well-being in early childhood: the deep and respectful connection to the natural world. i observed a visible commitment to honoring nature and all living beings within higher education as well as early childhood classroom practices that extended far beyond acknowledging local geography, environment or ecology. it was almost as if there was a continuous, respectful and evolving interaction with all living things, including the earth, which simply appeared to be a way of life. i witnessed belonging, becoming and being within the natural world at every turn. there are countless examples that demonstrated how nature and all living beings were at the center of what and how children learned each day. the natural outside world served as the curriculum, space and materials which shaped children’s investigations, inquiry and discoveries. wood blocks which were handcrafted from trees in the local environment and art materials were purposefully selected from local resources in the community. stones, leaves, rocks, bark, dirt, water, glass, sticks, insects and other living and non-living items were brought from the outside in or were investigated directly in the natural habitat. there were no plastic or synthetic toys, games, books or materials as far as i could tell. in one school, the welcome orientation packet specifically stated: “being connected to environment and community is key. your child will play in natural environments, including areas such as our rock garden, veggie garden and bali hut.” in every school i visited, children spent a large part of the day outdoors. a deep engagement and interaction with natural elements was strongly encouraged, and not necessarily limited to time or space. in one children’s center i observed an outdoor mud kitchen that consisted of a play stove and table where children could wander freely. there were also indoor bins filled with dirt and children could access water, dirt and mud when they wanted. there were multiple ways that children engaged with natural elements found in the environment that were simply a natural part of classroom routines. across settings children’s natural artwork was implanted into the physical structure of school buildings leaving a lasting imprint of beauty. gathering together around an outdoor fire pit or assuming responsibility to care for school grounds were just a couple of examples of how nature and its life force were an integral part of children’s daily lives. positioning children as responsible and capable citizens within their local classes as well as larger global community was another common observation about living in harmony with the natural world. in one children’s center brochure, the philosophy statement noted “…with teachers prioritizing learning ‘in, about and for the environment’; the aim being to connect children to the natural world and to their responsibility for maintaining the health and beauty of their kindergarten, local community and in turn the planet.” in another children’s center, young learners were solely responsible for raking the leaves on their entire school grounds in the autumn, then they would enjoy jumping and playing in the mounds of leaves they collected. in another children’s center, the director shared with me her recent decision to stop using the dryer for children’s sheets after washing them. she decided not to use the dryers at the school and hang the sheets transparency in early childhood education 65 outside to dry. despite feeling uncomfortable about the “messiness” of how it looked, she was determined to keep the sheets outside even if visitors arrived because of her and the school’s unwavering commitment to sustainability. this and other deliberate decisions honoring the interconnectedness within and beyond the natural world was demonstrated in both philosophy and practice throughout my visit. in sum, there were multiple and rich ways that illustrated how practices and philosophy in australia reflected a high priority on who children are and how they learn. the narratives and observations witnessed in australia, particularly around a strong sense of well-being, the truth about place and living in harmony with natural world, represented genuine, transparent core beliefs. young children were seen as capable human beings. the focus on health in both body and mind reaffirmed a holistic perspective of children’s well-being as well as clear alignment between educational narratives and practices for australia’s youngest citizens. acknowledging the truth about place reinforced the idea that the connection to place was a deep, authentic and evolving process. living in harmony with the natural world illustrated how children were positioned as responsible citizens who have important connections with the living and nonliving world well beyond the classroom walls. these practices, which were embedded within a culture that valued deep engagement and connection, demonstrated a profound respect for all living beings as well as the environment (which many would argue embodies a life force). the concepts threaded through australia’s national early childhood curriculum guidelines, belonging, being and becoming, serve as a reminder to the west that there are alternative ways of knowing, being and living. many of these ideas are also rooted in new zealand’s landmark and world-renown early childhood guidelines, te whāriki, which recently celebrated its 20th year anniversary (ministry of education, 1996). a collective voice for global education reform the purpose of this paper was to confront growing tensions and challenge the western culture of accumulation in early childhood education by examining how australia places a top priority on who children are and how they learn. in the last section of this paper, i offer ideas about how we might consider embedding some of these powerful lessons from australia into western philosophies, narratives and practices in early childhood education and care. a global call to action, as initiated in this special journal issue, requires conscious, collective action to transform systems and create a brighter future for our youngest citizens. sahlberg (2006) argued that, in order for a global movement to be successful, economic competition is necessary. sahlberg further suggested that one way education reform movements within and across countries can contribute to this global effort is by fostering cooperation within schools as opposed to competition as the primary pathway to affecting change, even though cooperation appears to contradict the intended outcome of economic competitiveness. expanding on the idea of co-operation versus competition, i believe that young children can and should contribute to the conversation on social change. many in the west would agree that the purpose of early childhood education is not to make young children compliant, coerced, or conforming. nor is the intention of early education to transform children into skilled test takers or to enhance evaluation scores through rote memorization. instead, it can be argued that the aim of early education is to help young children to discover what it means to belong 66 global education review 4(3) and to be capable citizens of the classroom, the local community and the planet. as such, the recommendations below reflect the idea that children partner with adults when it comes to social change, particularly global action. although the notion of children as change agents is not new (sapon-shevin, 2010), the research and literature on young children and social action from a global perspective is limited. framed within the constructs of being, belonging and becoming from the early years learning framework, i propose the following as one way of continuing the conversation. unpacking the gift of presence one of the most powerful and long-lasting ways the west can begin to return to a genuine focus on well-being in young children’s lives is to experience a cultural shift. in this way, a repositioning of societal or cultural beliefs and practices would provide individuals across disciplines and around the world to instill the notion of being present. weaving presence into the cultural fabric of an early childhood classroom, school or community can potentially replace the drive for accumulation (of time, interactions, space, skills, outcomes). incorporating the concept of being present disrupts the need for constant motion and activity by embedding stillness, calm and simply being (without doing) as an integral part of a young child’s life. being fully present in each moment is one of the greatest treasures children can experience at an early age. when the focus is not on doing, young learners can be fully aware and engaged in the here and now and experience a deeper understanding and respect for the world that surrounds them. erwin and robinson (2015) pointed out young children are naturally mindful, and therefore adults need to step aside and minimize the risk to children who may become distracted (like adults) when there are too many demands or interruptions. if adults do not respect the here and now in a young child’s life, then it is likely that the child may not have adequate opportunities for reflection, solitude, contemplation and silence. further, the significance of the present moment for young children is greatly diminished when master narratives focus on early childhood education as preparation for the future (evans, 2015; kessler, 2014). in australia’s early years learning framework, being is critical for young learners: being recognises the significance of the here and now in children’s lives. it is about the present and them knowing themselves, building and maintaining relationships with others, engaging with life’s joys and complexities, and meeting challenges in everyday life. the early childhood years are not solely preparation for the future but also about the present. (p. 7) as such, it would seem most natural to embed the core value of being present across early childhood environments, discourses and practices. it may be time to re-examine another paradigm related to being present that has been rooted in early childhood education and care for decades. in response to the special topic on early childhood education in this issue: the global education reform movement and maintaining a developmentally appropriate (dap) focus, i offer an invitation to re-examine the notion of dap being “maintained.” perhaps there are other considerations regarding dap in terms of paradigm shifts. could there be alternate ways of thinking about learning and young children? how is the importance of being present reflected (or absent) in dap? are there children or contexts in which dap does not adequately reflect who children are? in light of considering global education reform, how does dap work for all young children across the world? for transparency in early childhood education 67 example, linear ways of thinking about development or advancement may limit adults’ perceptions of learning, particularly for children across all aspects of diversity (i.e., economic, social, cultural, ability, gender identity, linguistic, religious). could there be educational ways of considering contextual variables and children’s learning? in other words, what are the implications of dap for children who take diverse paths, time frames and ways to flourish or whose cultural influences play a profound role in learning? although this notion of challenging dap for young learners is not new or unique (block, swadener & cannella, 2014), how might we engage in deeper conversations and unpack the notion of presence to re-examine well-being from a global perspective? belonging to and becoming global citizens of the world in addition to the concept of being, the importance of belonging has shaped australia’s early years learning framework and is worth examining here. the importance of belonging is deeply embedded throughout the early years learning framework although an understanding of how to incorporate this idea into early childhood environments is still evolving. there are some concerns about how belonging is framed, specifically related to the politics of belonging (stratigos, bradley & sumsion, 2014; sumsion & wong, 2011). although there are many questions that emerge around this idea of belonging such as “who decides who belongs” and “at what point does belonging happen,” the fundamental principle of belonging is a deep sense of connection. quite simply, connection is at the very essence of well-being in childhood. the concept of belonging and membership in early childhood is not new or novel and extends back at least quarter of a century. specifically, for young children with disabilities the importance of being a valued member was at the center of understanding and enacting inclusive educational practices. although the knowledge base on belonging and membership focused generally on young learners with disabilities in classroom communities (erwin & guintini, 2000; kliewer et al, 2004; nutbrown & clough, 2009; schnorr, 1990), the notion of belonging and citizenship has become more encompassing and extends far beyond the classroom walls. as illustrated in australia’s early years learning framework: experiencing belonging – knowing where and with whom you belong – is integral to human existence. children belong first to a family, a cultural group, a neighbourhood and a wider community. belonging acknowledges children’s interdependence with others and the basis of relationships in defining identities (australian government department of education, employment and workplace (2009, p. 7). the importance placed on belonging across multiple contexts is the cornerstone of the early years learning framework which acknowledges that children have a shared responsibility to engage, respect and understand the communities in which they belong. situated as global citizens, young children acquire roots and wings as they navigate their understanding of the world in which they live. duhn (2014) explained that young children “develop roots (a sense of belonging), and also wings (a sense of becoming) to further explore the self in the world” (p. 226). as children deepen and expand their understanding of themselves as well as the world around them, this sense of becoming is perfectly aligned to belonging to communities and being a global citizen. becoming reflects this process of rapid and significant change that occurs in the early years as young children learn and grow. it emphasizes learning to participate fully and actively in society 68 global education review 4(3) (australian government department of education, employment and workplace, 2009, p. 7). in short, the notions of belonging, being and becoming as described in the early years learning framework can serve as one place to continue to counter western tensions in early childhood education. positioning young children as the global citizens they are, recognizes the intersection of belonging, being and becoming during the early years. the underlying intention of this paper was to voice resistance and propose a global call to counter the growing pressures in early childhood care and education faced in the west. this in-depth examination of how australia positioned early childhood education provides one possible solution for re-framing western master narratives and practices in early childhood education and care. the attention to and transparency of well-being appears to be the common thread that unites australia’s focus on holistic well-being, the truth about place, and living in harmony with the natural world. the emphasis on well-being provides an important context for recognizing young children as the capable global citizens of the world that they are. notes 1. head start is a federally funded program for children who are deemed socially and economically in need. 2. special education is funded by federal legislation specifically for preschool. 3. a block grant is money to state and local governments from the federal government or other sources for use in general areas of social welfare that states may allocate according to local needs. references adair, j. k. (2014). agency and expanding capabilities in early grade classrooms: what it could mean for young children. harvard educational review 84(2), 217 -278. australian government department of education, employment and workplace (2009). belonging, being & becoming: the early years learning framework for australia. canberra: commonwealth of australia. retrieved from https://www.coag.gov.au/sites/default/files/early_y ears_learning_framework.pdf bloch, m. n. (2014). interrogating reconceptualzing early care and education (rece) – 20 years along. in m. n. bloch, b. b. swadener, & g. s. cannella (eds). reconceptualizing early childhood care and education (pp. 19-31). new york: peter lang publishing company. bloch, m. n., swadener, b. b. & cannella, g. s. (eds). (2014). reconceptualizing early childhood care and education (pp. 19-31). new york: peter lang publishing company. dachyshyn, d. m. (2015). being mindfulness, heartful, and ecological in early years care and education. contemporary issues in early childhood, 16(1), 1341. duhn, i. (2014). being and becoming cosmopolitan in early childhood curriculum: ‘roots’, ‘wings’ and cosmopolitan citizenship. global studies of childhood 4(3), 224-234. duhn, i. (2012). places for pedagogies, pedagogies for places. contemporary issues in early childhood, 13(2), 99-107. erwin, e.j. & robinson, k. r. (2015): the joy of being: making way for young children's natural mindfulness, early child development and care, doi:10.1080/03004430.2015.1029468 erwin, e. j. & guintini, m. (2000). inclusion and classroom membership in early childhood. international journal of disability, development and education, 47(3), 237-257. evans, k. (2015). reconceptualizing dominant discourses in early childhood education: exploring readiness as an active-ethical-relation. complicity: international journal of complexity and education, 2(1), 32-51. fleer, m. 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(1990). peter? he comes and goes…:” first graders' perspectives on a part-time mainstream student. research and practice for persons with severe disabilities. 15:231-240. silin, j. (2014). through a queer lens: recuperative longings and the reconceptualizing past. in m.n. bloch, b. b. swadener, & g. s. cannella (eds). reconceptualizing early childhood care and education (pp. 53-62). new york: peter lang publishing company. somerville, m. & williams, c. (2015). sustainability education in early childhood: an updated review of research in the field. contemporary issues in early childhood, 16(2), 102-117. stratigos, t., bradley, b. & sumsion, j. (2014). infants, family day care and the politics of belonging. international journal of early childhood, 46, 171–186. sumsion, j., barnes, s., cheeseman, s., harrison, l., kennedy, a. & stonehouse, a. (2009). insider perspectives on developing belonging, being & becoming: the early years learning framework for australia.” australasian journal of early childhood 34 (4), 4–13. sumsion, j. & wong, s. (2011). interrogating ‘belonging’ in belonging, being and becoming: the early years learning framework for australia. contemporary issues in early childhood, 12(1), 28-45. about the author elizabeth j. erwin, edd., is professor and graduate program coordinator of the programs in inclusive education at montclair state university in new jersey, usa. core values that have shaped dr. erwin’s research and teaching over the past 25 years are inclusive education, familyprofessional partnerships, self-determination, and promoting mindfulness and well-being in early childhood settings. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1359183506062991 final_erwin ch#2 ee edits to format work p1 final_erwin ch#2 ee edits to format work no footer microsoft word ger meyer formatted rev 88 global education review 4(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: meyer, lois m. (2017). resisting westernization and school reforms: two sides to the struggle to communalize developmentally appropriate initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico. global education review, 4 (3), 88-107. resisting westernization and school reforms: two sides to the struggle to “communalize” developmentally appropriate initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico lois m. meyer university of new mexico, albuquerque abstract in 2011, indigenous initial education teachers in oaxaca, mexico, for the first time participated in an alternative teacher professional development effort (called a diplomado) to initiate communityappropriate bilingual programs for pregnant mothers and infants under 3 years old. collaborating with parents and village authorities, the goals were indigenous language revitalization/ maintenance and quality initial education, prioritizing communal values and indigenous (non-western) socialization practices. the teachers conducted various research tasks, one of which the photographic and narrative documentation of young children’s spontaneous learning opportunities in their communities is analyzed here. a finding of this study is that even very young infants in their spontaneous activities display early indications of responsible actions toward others that develop into caring for community. this effort to communalize initial education faces two intense oppositional pressures in mexico today. for decades federal school policy has imposed on indigenous teachers and communities westerninfluenced views of developmentally appropriate ecec, such as age grouping in care and school facilities and prioritizing teacher-organized and supervised activities. for rogoff (2003), the imposition of western views of ecec denies the cultural nature of human development. in oaxaca, only the western view counts; the indigenous perspective has been officially marginalized. recently, another layer of imposed federal and state school reforms places indigenous teachers at risk. now teacher preparation, hiring, and retention will be assessed by national standardized tests of teacher professional knowledge, without consideration for rural life experience, knowledge of community practices, or indigenous language competence. this article describes the status of communalized ecec programs in oaxaca given government repressions, and teacher resistance to these repressive school reforms. keywords education, education policy, educational reform, indigenous education, ecec, bilingual education, teacher education, oaxaca, mexico, community-based education, diplomado introduction this article reports a recent effort in rural indigenous oaxaca, mexico, intended to transform institutional practices of early ______________________________ corresponding author: lois m. meyer, department of language, literacy & sociocultural studies, hokona 140, college of education, university of new mexico, albuquerque, nm 87131. email: lsmeyer@unm.edu “communalizing” initial education 89 childhood education and care (ecec), not with the goal of better aligning them with global reform efforts focused on standardization and increased academics – quite to the contrary, it resists these efforts. neither does it seek blindly to import western views of “developmentally appropriate practices (dap)” involving play, arts, music and child-initiated activities – these, too, are held up for scrutiny. the ecec effort in oaxaca resists both of these externally imposed orientations, prioritizing instead local, indigenous values and communal child socialization practices that too often are overlooked and even denigrated in favor of imported definitions of dap. the agents of change in this transformational effort are teachers of indigenous initial education (who work with pregnant mothers and infants 0 to 3 years old) as part of a broad-based pedagogical movement to reconstruct intercultural bilingual education in the state of oaxaca, based in the indigenous values, priorities and communal practices known locally as comunalidad. as the mexican state with the greatest indigenous population, oaxaca has endured both historic and present repression inflicted on its original peoples; at the same time, rural teachers in oaxaca have a history of struggle alongside indigenous communities to defend educational and other rights. the reasons to struggle are varied and urgent. seventy-five percent of the municipalities of oaxaca are considered highly or very highly marginalized; almost half of all mexican municipalities that are highly marginalized are located in oaxaca. according to the 2010 census, two million oaxacans speak one of over 50 indigenous languages or language variants;1 a majority of these indigenous language speakers live in oaxaca’s rural, impoverished communities. more than half of the municipalities export laborers to large urban centers, to the fields and maquiladoras of the northern mexican states, or to the u.s.2 in 2013, 12% of mexico’s 223,144 basic education schools had no water and many had no functional bathrooms or lighting (bacon, 2013); such schools dot the oaxacan landscape. consequently, along with hopes for improved job possibilities, pursuit of educational opportunities for their children motivates oaxacans to abandon their rural communities and emigrate abroad. in march 2001, on the occasion of its 27th anniversary, the coalition of indigenous teachers and promoters of oaxaca (plan pilotocmpio)3 publicly denounced the situation of indigenous education in the state: “education in indigenous communities is in complete abandonment. intercultural bilingual education only exists in political rhetoric, and the authorities seem either ignorant of this situation, or disinterested” (soberanes, 2003b, p. 6). this public denunciation of educational abandonment in oaxaca was the result of a powerful process of consciousness-raising by the coalition’s own teachers. soberanes (2010) comments: “for many years, we teachers of indigenous education have been instruments of education policies that have tended toward the disappearance of original peoples by enabling their incorporation, assimilation, or integration into the dominant mestizo culture” (p. 105). recognizing their participation, both conscious and unconscious, in this grim educational reality, and with the intent of constructing together with local communities a transformed indigenous education, in 1995 plan pilotocmpio began the pedagogical movement, an inclusive effort of children, parents, teachers, committed intellectuals, communal authorities and other community members, broadly focused on constructing educational alternatives that respond to the needs and conditions of life in the indigenous communities of oaxaca (soberanes, 2003a; soberanes, 2003b; soberanes, 2010). 90 global education review 4(3) the pedagogical movement provides the philosophical foundation of the diplomado4 in community-based initial education, described here, a ground-breaking professional development effort intended to prepare indigenous early educators as teacherresearchers to document, celebrate, and incorporate into their own teaching the communal child socialization practices of the rural indigenous communities where they teach. literature review “communalizing” indigenous ecec in oaxaca, comunalidad is the term used to designate the collective communal governance structures, values, priorities and practices of indigenous communities (martínez luna, 2003). according to maldonado (2002; 2004), comunalidad is the historic foundation of indigenous life, identity and cultural resistance. this pervasive sense of communal belonging is the culmination of a continuous, profound process of civic formation by means of which villagers, virtually from birth, are collectively socialized beyond individualism or family priorities to absorb communal responsibility into their personal values. in 1995, in response to indigenous and teacher union pressure, comunalidad was written into the state education act as the fourth guiding principle of educational practice (martínez luna, 2010). still, despite its fundamental importance to indigenous existence and identity in oaxaca and its presence in state law, comunalidad has had little impact on the system of public education in the state, a system that, although supposedly decentralized from federal to state control in 1992, still retains for the secretariat of public education (sep) in mexico city virtually unlimited control over administrative and curricular decisions that affect all school levels, including initial education. in recent years, two efforts in oaxaca to legally mandate and institutionalize comunalidad in public education – the “plan to transform the education of oaxaca (pteo)”, a joint collaboration in 2012 between the oaxaca state institute of public education (ieepo) and oaxaca’s powerful teachers’ union affiliate, section 22 of the national union of education workers (snte); and in 2014, a proposed new education draft law crafted from 383 proposals for education reform generated in public forums statewide – were legislatively ignored. instead, the national, normative approach to schooling, tightly controlled by the sep, pays scant attention to minoritized, local priorities such as indigenous comunalidad. this disparagement of the “local” in favor of federal assimilationist policies is not surprising. the cultural rights and priorities of minoritized indigenous groups within the mexican nation have historically been marginalized and discounted. in multiple international agreements, most recently the un declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples (undrip) in 2007, the mexican nation promised to respect the linguistic, cultural, territorial and other rights of indigenous peoples within its national territory and to grant them educational autonomy. these promised rights are foundational to the struggle for culturally appropriate initial education in indigenous mexico. yet over and over again the mexican nation has demonstrated that indigenous educational autonomy is an empty promise, and that the yawning gap between promise and reality in indigenous education that has endured for decades, if not centuries, continues unabated today. resisting westernized “developmentally appropriate practices” significantly, oaxaca is not alone in the effort to resist standardized, universalized definitions of “developmentally appropriate” ecec and to “communalizing” initial education 91 pursue localized educational priorities. for several decades, international investigations by both western and non-western researchers (tobin, wu & davidson, 1989; wollons, 2000; rogoff, 2003; tobin, hsueh & karasawa, 2009; tobin, arzubiaga & adair, 2013) have documented highly distinct approaches to the education of young children in diverse countries around the world (e.g. china, japan, the u.s., vietnam, russia, israel, turkey, france, mayan guatemala), while also acknowledging the historical and political contexts which have contributed to these diverse approaches. tobin (2005), an “unreformed cultural relativist,” contends that national standards such as those that promote low student-teacher ratios, multicultural and bilingual education, and mediation during children’s disagreements, may be appropriate in the u.s. however, [t]hese standards become a problem when we lose sight of the fact that they are cultural and contextual and not universal…; when they are applied, imperialistically, to systems of early childhood education outside of our country; and when they are imposed on communities within the united states who do not fully endorse the values and beliefs of the dominant culture. (2005, p. 426) according to tobin, u.s. educators must “challenge our taken-for granted assumptions that quality standards are universal, generalizable, and non-contextual” (2005, p. 424). rogoff concurs, and strongly advocates for a way to accomplish this provocative challenge: engage in, or at least be familiar with, “cultural research,” that is, research documenting child development and socialization processes as they occur outside of westernized u.s. settings (2003, p. 7). citing scores of international child development and socialization studies, including her own documentation across decades of infants’ learning processes in indigenous mayan guatemala, she succinctly and unambiguously states her view: “human development is a cultural process” (rogoff, 2003, p. 3). for example, there are vast differences in community “time tables” of expectations for children’s participation during childhood, such as the age at which children are entrusted to care for younger infants or to use potentially dangerous implements. however shocking or dangerous one community’s “time tables” may seem to another community, such as our own, rogoff’s message is clear: expectations for child development are deeply and historically embedded in, and inherently appropriate for, their local community and cultural context. (2003, p. 4) significant cross-cultural research, then, supports the effort to localize initial education, or in oaxaca’s case, to “communalize” it. community-based priorities for child socialization and early education problematize universal assertions about “what is known about how young children learn best,” or generalized judgments about what practices and curricula are “not developmentally appropriate.” in oaxaca, western assumptions about developmentally appropriate practices in early education are resisted in favor of promised, though rarely granted, community educational autonomy. resisting mexico’s federal school reforms in global diplomacy, mexico appears to agree with tobin’s and rogoff’s views regarding the critical importance of, and the human right for, locally and culturally relevant early education for young children, especially in indigenous and other minoritized communities. but by all indicators, mexico’s many signed international agreements regarding culturally respectful early 92 global education review 4(3) education are little more than official rhetoric, for the nation neither reflects in education policy nor practices in the field what it internationally preaches. instead, it imposes federal “school reforms,” including constitutional amendments and labor reforms that abrogate teacher contractual agreements and restrict and standardize who can teach and how instruction is to be implemented. in 2013, mexico’s ruling party, the pri, orchestrated expansive reforms to the mexican constitution, with particular focus on education. according to the government, the reforms “reconfigured the structure, planning, operation and evaluation of the national education system, ratified the right of every individual to receive an education, and defined the state as the responsible entity to guarantee this.”5 however, according to oaxaca’s dissident section 22,6 the reforms’ intentions are to privatize public education, with consequences that are pervasive and debilitating, not only for teachers, but for mexican society as a whole, and especially for impoverished indigenous communities. for example, with the reforms, public school teachers’ hiring, promotion and retention are now based entirely on standardized test scores, with little if any consideration for local needs or teachers’ communal funds of knowledge. massive teacher firings based on standardized test scores have begun and are anticipated to increase. the reforms have serious implications for civil society, as well, according to section 22 lawyers. the government has announced that 100,000 small rural schools will disappear through school consolidations, to be replaced by larger and arguably better-equipped schools often located considerable distances from the children’s homes and communities. parents are expected to pay school utility bills and are responsible for facility upkeep and repairs. and crucial for this study, efforts are in place to eliminate initial education as an education level throughout the mexican school system. according to bacon (2013), u.s. corporate and financial interests are deeply invested in these education reforms: a network of large corporations and banks extends throughout latin america, financed and guided in part from the united states, pushing the same formula: standardized tests, linking teachers’ jobs and pay to test results, and bending the curriculum to employers’ needs while eliminating social criticism. in addition to global corporations such as coca-cola and ford, and giant media networks like televisa, groups that lobby for these reforms in mexico and latin america receive assistance from the world bank, the us agency for international development, and the interamerican development bank. while the massive and politically aligned mexican national union of education workers (snte) supported these federal reforms, the dissident democratizing segment within the snte, called the national coordinator of education workers (cnte), immediately called for teacher resistance. oaxaca’s section 22 is a leader within the dissident cnte, and its teachers, reinforced by considerable parent and civic support throughout the state, have taken to the streets and the courts since 2013 to resist, temporarily managing to hold back implementation of some of the reforms in the state, but at considerable cost. their strategies include pedagogical proposals such as the pteo, judicial efforts such as legal challenges to the law, defense of incarcerated protesters, and criminal investigations of teacher disappearances and assassinations, and political efforts like the proposed but rejected state education law prioritizing comunalidad, as well as massive marches, blockades of highways, “communalizing” initial education 93 government buildings or commercial centers, and sustained strike encampments.7 the state and federal governments have responded brutally, militarizing with thousands of armed troops states like oaxaca where the resistant cnte is active, “disappearing” teacher union leaders or arresting them and banishing them to federal prisons in distant mexican states, retaining teacher union leaders’ salaries and freezing union bank accounts, violently destroying strike encampments, and arresting and killing protesters, whether teachers or community members. still, resistance to the immense structural reforms continues today in oaxaca, despite police militarization and intense psychological warfare conducted against the protesters by a massive media campaign. according to fernando soberanes,8 veteran section 22 activist and one of the drafters of the proposed but legislatively rejected education law, comunalidad has not been defeated – due to oaxacan teacher and civic pressure, a new education law recently passed by the state legislature still retains some elements of comunalidad that deviate from the mandates of federal school reforms. how has initial education fared given mexico’s education reforms and the ensuing teachers’ union resistance? in the 25 years since the establishment of mexico’s program of indigenous initial education (preii), successive policies have focused on this early educational level, culminating in a reform in 2010 that produced new curricular guidelines (dirección general de educación indígena, 2010). despite these new policies and curricular designs, no attention has been given to soliciting community input in order to discern minoritized perspectives on early childhood socialization for mexico’s diverse indigenous population, or to reorient teacher education toward communal perspectives, values and practices. in mexican states without strong dissident cnte and civic resistance, indigenous early education has been under intense threat of elimination. far from prioritizing, encouraging, or even permitting that the fundamental indigenous values of comunalidad influence initial education or any other education level, recent mexican education reforms rigorously pursue an accelerating agenda of homogenization and standardization in the preparation and evaluation of both students and teachers, under the banner of global competitiveness and “increased opportunities for all.” despite powerful teacher and community resistance to the imposed reforms, there presently exist no institutional opportunities in oaxaca for professional preparation of initial education teachers in ways that reflect the diversity of the state’s indigenous challenge. teacher preparation for “communalized” initial education purpose and goals of the diplomado faced with this professional development void, and committed to pursuing the principles of the pedagogical movement, in particular to work collaboratively with communities toward an alternative education based in comunalidad, in 2011 plan piloto-cmpio planned and implemented the diplomado in communitybased initial education, the first professional development effort in oaxaca focused specifically on indigenous early educators and officially financed and accredited by the state public education system. the commitment to develop the diplomado grew out of plan piloto-cmpio’s assessment that the government, despite multiple international agreements to the contrary, was committed through its policies and actions to assimilationist approaches rather than local autonomy in its work with babies and 94 global education review 4(3) toddlers and their parents in indigenous communities. official approaches to the education of these very young children, which international funding agencies frequently encourage and support, focus on ‘re-training’ indigenous parents, especially mothers, to abandon communal childrearing priorities and practices in order to adopt practices promoted by western theories of child development. individualism and the acquisition of the spanish language are unquestioned assumptions and priority outcomes of these official assimilationist programs” (soberanes, 2010, p. 110). the goals of pp-cmpio’s diplomado were: (a) to enrich the communal knowledge of the young teacher participants; and, (b) to provide participants with necessary research skills to investigate, document and honor local community practices of child socialization and children’s learning processes, including language acquisition; in order, (c) to collaborate with communities on the creation of an authentic, alternative, bilingual, and communityappropriate initial education. these goals contrast starkly with universalized assimilationist priorities for initial education; instead, they prioritize communal perspectives on early infant socialization. in an effort to concretize multiple international agreements signed across the years by the mexican nation, the diplomado sought to provide initial education teachers with the knowledge and skills required to research indigenous children’s communal contexts, language usage, and processes of learning. these rural communities suffer high rates of emigration and increasing loss of their indigenous languages in younger generations; nevertheless, they often retain communal practices of infant socialization vital to the continuation of their indigenous cultures. research design research questions the research questions embedded within the goals of the diplomado were: 1. how can young, inexperienced indigenous teachers with no professional teacher preparation be equipped with the knowledge and skills to value, investigate, and document child socialization practices and young children’s learning processes in their local indigenous community? 2. what are the local socialization practices by means of which each community “teaches,” and young children learn, the communal practices, values and mutual obligations of comunalidad, including use of the local indigenous language(s)? 3. how can educators collaborate with community members to transform indigenous initial education, so that “developmentally-appropriate” ecec is understood to incorporate and prioritize local practices, including indigenous language use, through which communities socialize young children into comunalidad? structure and methods plan piloto-cmpio’s diplomado lasted 12 months (july 2011july 2012) and involved 200 intense contact hours in multiple weekend and two summer workshops, as well as consultation visits to the teachers in their communities. taking seriously the diverse indigenous locales and communal practices across the state, many diplomado sessions were spent introducing participants to various qualitative “communalizing” initial education 95 research methods that they then employed to gather information about specific child socialization practices and young children’s language and learning processes in their particular community of practice. these research methods included: autobiographies of the teachers’ own linguistic and educational histories; surveys of language use in homes and the community; interviews with mothers and grandmothers; biographies of infants, with particular attention to pregnancy and birth practices; documentation of community events, including obligatory, unpaid communal labor carried out for benefit of the community (called tequio in oaxaca); and photos and narrative explanations of infants’ spontaneous activities. in their final portfolios of research evidence, the teachers submitted the results of the data collection tasks they had carried out in their local community, accompanied by signed confirmation by community and educational authorities that the tasks had been successfully completed. participants all diplomado participants were indigenous females, mostly in their early 20s, representing 7 of oaxaca’s 16 indigenous ethnolinguistic groups. in the end, 35 participants submitted the required portfolio of research tasks in order to be considered “completers” and receive oaxaca state institute of public education (ieepo) accreditation for the diplomado. all 35 completers had lived for years in rural indigenous communities of the state; however, only 27 were first language speakers of their indigenous language. seven indigenous languages were represented among them, including diverse variants of these languages. twenty-eight of the 35 completers (80%) consented to have their portfolios analyzed. consented completers’ quoted texts are accompanied here by their indigenous ethnicity, and with only one exception, the participants also requested that their real name and the name of the community where they serve be included. the one who requested anonymity has been given a pseudonym. analysis of infants’ spontaneous activities in communities only one of the portfolio research tasks is analyzed here – photographs that the teachers took of spontaneous activities of infants and preschoolers inside or outside their home, or in multiple sites in the community, along with teachers’ narrative explanations of each photograph.9 by spontaneous activities, we mean activities that the infants carried out on their own, without teacher planning or apparent parental request, and which the teachers documented photographically and described through field notes. the present study complements an earlier study in this journal (meyer, 2016) in which participant teachers’ linguistic and educational autobiographies were analyzed. the timing of the diplomado and of this analysis of photos and narratives deserve comment. the year-long diplomado formally ended in 2012, before the federally orchestrated education reforms of 2013. still, rumblings of impending changes were apparent, though uncertain, throughout the diplomado, causing uncertainty and urgency among participants and facilitators. the present analysis of photos and commentaries took place in fall 2014, after federal education reforms were ratified by the mexican congress. their ratification began a massive and continuing movement of resistance by the cnte nationally and by section 22 in oaxaca (resulting in several civilian deaths in oaxaca in june 2016). as this analysis was underway, my colleague analysts, who are committed activist members of section 22, were 96 global education review 4(3) constantly called on to participate in cnte meetings and protests. various reflections could be made about the timing of this data analysis process within its political and educational context. i only offer here my profound respect to the diplomado participants who committed time to investigate the activities of infants in their communities as part of their portfolio tasks during this tumultuous time, and to my co-analysts, plan piloto-cmpio pedagogical committee members, who managed to rob time from their resistance efforts to focus attention on urgent communitybased pedagogical concerns during a period when their own professional futures and educational priorities were profoundly at risk. findings research question #1: how were the participants prepared as teacherresearchers? before describing the analysis itself, an explanation is warranted as to how these novice indigenous teachers were prepared in the diplomado with the research skills to photograph and narrate the spontaneous activities of very young children in their communities in their effort to “value, investigate, and document child socialization practices and young children’s learning processes in their local indigenous community” (research question #1)? today studies that document and analyze the daily activities of young children are familiar, though various researchers caution that most of these are conducted in western cultural settings (greenfield et al., 2003; rogoff et al., 2007; rogoff et al, 2010). both western bias and cultural blindness have promulgated the belief that individualistic, academic and western assumptions about infant development and child socialization are “universal,” impacting the field both nationally and internationally (tobin, 2005; hedge & cassidy, 2009; fleer, 2003). however, in recent decades researchers have studied the daily activities of children of different ages in diverse cultural contexts, identifying “activity scenes” that include those who interact with the children, the motivations of all present, the cultural scripts that influence the scene, and indications within the interaction as to the cultural purposes, values, beliefs and goals of all actors (e.g. remorini, 2013; rogoff, 2003; rogoff et al., 2007). these studies, often conducted by anthropologists and psychologists, have found notable differences between cultures, including if and when children are separated into age groupings, or how often they have opportunities to observe and even participate in the daily activities of adults in their worksites or in community tasks and encounters (rogoff et al., 2010; rogoff, 2014). international studies have also contrasted the learning processes and environments of children who “learn by observing while pitching in (lopi)” in collective, community-based and familial activities, with those who learn mainly through westernized, school-based “learning through assembly-line instruction,” where adult guidance and control is prominent (rogoff, 2014). most international studies reviewed for this analysis were conducted by researchers who are recognized academics, some of whom are not native to the country or cultural context they study. often they have research expertise and advanced degrees from western academic institutions. the present analysis differs in several important ways from the studies just described: 1. all the teachers whose photos and descriptive commentaries of children’s spontaneous activities are analyzed here were born in oaxaca, though not necessarily in the community in which they now teach. none were strangers to the local context or to the children and families they documented, as all were working in the “communalizing” initial education 97 community directly with the children when they submitted their portfolios. some had worked in their present community for a few months, others for several years, and some were native to the community. 2. twenty-seven of the 35 completers identify themselves as fluent speakers of their indigenous language, though not all speak the local language or variant of the community where they teach. even those who do may not use the local language with the children (an important distinction), instead opting to use spanish with families and children alike. many factors complicate language use in these indigenous communities. the community may be multilingual, with families that speak diverse indigenous languages, only one of which the teacher speaks. or the teacher may be assigned to a community outside her linguistic region. also, given pervasive indigenous language loss in these communities, it is not unusual today that the children may have little exposure to the indigenous language in their home, making spanish their stronger and preferred language. (there is some evidence of this in the language use documented in the photo narratives.) all of the teacher participants, regardless of their proficiency in an original language, were proficient and literate in spanish, the language in which the data in their portfolios were documented and submitted. 3. the teachers did not “set up the scenes” they documented by introducing new and unfamiliar activities or toys into their encounters with the children. to the contrary, our interest was to record the spontaneous activities of children wherever these occurred, to note any materials they chose to use and any dialogues with others that ensued, in an effort to identify these youngsters’ informal processes of learning in their communities. 4. these teachers had no previous formal academic training to conduct research. the research strand of the diplomado, which this author facilitated, prepared them to carry out various qualitative research methods pertinent to their work in the community, including interviews, linguistic surveys, and ethnographic observations, among others. they were prepared to do so during diplomado sessions in a cyclical and applied way. that is, after a preliminary orientation to each data collection method, the participants returned to their communities to apply the method and record their data. at the following diplomado session, they shared their data in small working groups or in plenary sessions in order to refine their documentation, aided by comments and suggestions made by their colleagues and the facilitators. sharing and comparing data from indigenous communities across the state initiated a collective process of reflection and analysis that itself reflected the diplomado’s commitment to comunalidad. 5. each portfolio included two letters attesting to the validity of the documentation submitted, one written by the teacher’s educational supervisor, the other by a village authority. these letters certified that the research tasks carried out by the teacher were recognized and approved in both the educational and communal spheres of her work. the research processes described above characterize “practitioner action research,” a specific form of qualitative research deemed appropriate for the purposes of the diplomado 98 global education review 4(3) and its participants (stringer, 2013). practitioner action research seeks concrete changes in teachers’ practices, as they reflect and theorize based on the documentation which they themselves have collected in their community with communal approval; their reflections are then shared in their research community in order to deepen, refine and socialize their discoveries. during the diplomado, participants engaged in the continuous cycle of reflecting, theorizing and acting that constitutes practitioner action research, with the goal of addressing real community problems and transforming their pedagogical practice in ways that both respect and reflect local indigenous comunalidad. to honor the depth and quality of diplomado participants’ research accomplishments despite their youth, teaching inexperience, and lack of academic credentials, they will be called “teacher-researchers” throughout the rest of this paper. significantly, three of the four analysts of these photographic data – julian jiménez ramírez, lilia martínez pérez, and javier mendoza almaráz are plan piloto-cmpio teachers and members of the coalition’s pedagogical committee. they, too, are oaxaca natives and indigenous language speakers, who differ from the teacher-researchers only in their multiple years of teaching experience in the field. the fourth analyst (this author) is an applied linguist and bilingual educator who has collaborated with plan piloto-cmpio for more than 17 years and who was involved, along with the other analysts, in planning and implementing the diplomado. as the only proficient english language user, and with plan piloto-cmpio approval, all translations of cited data into english are hers. research question #2: what are the practices and processes whereby communities “teach,” and young children learn, the practices and priorities of comunalidad, including use of the local indigenous language(s)? the following analysis is based on careful attention to the submitted documentation of only one of the research tasks in the final portfolios submitted by the 28 consenting teacher-researchers: photographs of young children’s spontaneous activities wherever in the community these were encountered, and the teacher-researchers’ narrative field notes accompanying each photo. the photographic and narrative documentation, along with several other research tasks submitted in the portfolios, intended to answer research question #2: what are the local socialization practices by means of which each community “teaches,” and young children learn, the communal practices, values and mutual obligations of comunalidad, including use of the local indigenous languages? as we poured over the accumulation of photos and narratives documented in the portfolios, the scenes of young children’s spontaneous activities began to differentiate themselves in significant ways. first, we found examples of young children’s careful observation of everyday adult activities happening around them, while they seemingly remained on the periphery, without actively participating. we then identified a second large collection of photos where children engaged directly and actively with people, objects and natural materials in their local environment. here we distinguished three types or moments of young children’s direct action, which we have identified in this study as a trajectory of informal active learning. in type 1 actions, the children observe and imitate an action as it is being carried out or modeled in their presence. “communalizing” initial education 99 in type 2 actions, children imitate an action spontaneously at a later time and in a new context, that is, independently, without the immediate presence of the modeled action. a third type or moment consists of creative actions by even very young children, which display their ability to generate novel solutions to immediate contextual problems and to mobilize the will to act, seemingly no longer merely imitating others. our trajectory of informal active learning confirms rogoff’s concept of young children “learning while observing and pitching in (lopi)” (rogoff, 2014), while further distinguishing distinct, observable lopi types or moments. the presence of the narrative field notes allowed us to identify a third, smaller set of spontaneous learning processes in these communities: learning through direct, physical action in culturally unremarkable settings, but now accompanied by oral dialogue (“scaffolding”) with someone older, often but not always an adult. finally, and much less prominent in the photos, were very limited data displaying young children’s presence and learning during tequio scenes of collaborative community labor, a photographic absence initially puzzling to us as researchers, as we will explain below. learning through attentive observation many studies of the daily activities of young children in non-western communities, especially those of rogoff and her collaborators, document that the children witness and intently observe, and may “pitch in on,” daily tasks and activities of adults (rogoff, 2003; rogoff et al., 2007; rogoff et al., 2010; rogoff, 2014). the phenomenon of attentive observation of the activities happening around them was very evident in the oaxacan photos and commentaries, though preschool children did not always join in on the activities they observed. photo after photo across communities captured young children carefully observing activities in many settings: daily tasks carried out by their parents; forms of play or childcare of older siblings; games played by or with their young peers; community events; use of various utensils in the home, garden or field; and care of animals. significantly, most of these photos show children observing home or community activities that are significant economically to the family or community, such as women planting and tending crops, or men harvesting fish to take to market. one example of many such photos was described by nancy piamonte sumano in the huave coastal community of huazatlán del río, san mateo del mar, tehuantepec, a community known for its waist-loom textile weavings: “here the mother is weaving a napkin. the little girl carefully observes the process of the activity her mother is doing.” of particular interest to the analysts were a few photos where the children are attentively observing collaborative tequios, oaxaca’s term for unpaid collaborative labor on behalf of the community. by witnessing tequios, from a very early age the children learn to appreciate the importance of shared work for the benefit not just of one’s own family, but of the community as a whole. a photo and narrative of a collective tequio task was provided by élvia torres chávez in the mixtec community of san juan diquiyú, tezoatlán, huajuapan de león: “here we see how the mothers gather to clean the patio of the school. […] standing nearby, we see the little girl watching the mothers; this is how this activity gets transmitted to future generations.” such tequio tasks and preschoolers’ presence during them were only infrequently documented in the submitted photos, as we will comment below. 100 global education review 4(3) learning through direct, physical action with people, objects and natural materials in our analysis of photos, there are numerous examples of young children who not only observe especially family activities that occur around them, but who also involve themselves directly and physically in these activities, what rogoff (2014) calls “pitching in.” it is apparent from the narratives accompanying the photos that participation by the young ones is permitted, even encouraged, and perhaps at times expected by the adults and older children. preschool children’s involvement takes various forms, occurs in a variety of settings, may be accompanied by diverse persons, and incorporates the use of a variety of materials. the little ones actively participate in mundane tasks and cultural celebrations within their homes: they help clean the family garden and cornfield, they participate in fiesta preparations, they sweep the house, water plants, help plant seedlings. in these tasks, they employ a variety of objects and materials, such as natural materials (soil, corncobs), common utensils (broom, empty yogurt containers, cup, box), animals (donkey), cultural materials (figures in a christmas manger scene) and very few commercial toys (ball, rattle, doll). after carefully studying and organizing the photos submitted in all 28 portfolios, we propose that the children in their activities display a trajectory of informal active learning, involving three distinct types or moments of learning in action. there appear to be two initial types of imitated activity: the first, imitation by the child in the moment and in the presence of the imitated action; the second, imitation at a later time, in a new context, without the presence of the imitated action. the following example displays the first type or moment of imitated activity on our trajectory of informal active learning. in virtually all the type 1 photos, the little ones imitated family members’ or acquaintences’ actions in order to “pitch in” and collaborate on everyday chores. here galdina santiago pérez describes a visit the initial education children made to a home in their mixtec community of nuevo tenochitlán, putla villa de guerrero: “we visited a mother who was stripping kernels off corncobs when we arrived. with great confidence, the children joined in with her, stripping the cobs of their kernels.” type 2 imitated actions are those reproduced at a later time and in a new setting, without the immediate presence of the action previously imitated. these independent actions apparently result when children have observed and imitated the same action so often as it is being modeled in their presence that now, in a new setting and without a visible model, they remember how to carry out the action by themselves, and appear to feel a desire or responsibility to do so. this second type of imitation signals a significant learning leap, displaying the young child’s capacity to remember what had been modeled and imitated earlier and to reproduce it independently at a later time in a new setting. it also may indicate a nascent sense of “communal responsibility,” that is, the need and desire to take action on behalf of others, or the whole group. hildeberta martínez vásquez, a triqui teacher-researcher in the community of san juan teponaxtla, putla villa de guerrero, documented this example of type 2 imitation: after everyone had left the classroom, eleazar (2;5) noticed that the floor of the classroom was very dirty. without anyone telling him to do so, he decided to grab the broom and sweep the floor. i asked his mother if he did that at home. she said yes, that they had to buy him a small broom, that everything his mother does he wants to do. i was surprised “communalizing” initial education 101 because he collected all the trash. this made me realize the influence it has on children how they are taught at home and how they participate in household tasks. in many photos, preschoolers were engaging independently in actions they had certainly observed countless times around them in their everyday settings and most likely had imitated alongside adult models previously and frequently. often, as with eleazar above, these were routine household tasks, though the preschoolers were also seen to weed the family’s cornfield, water the garden, feed birds and chickens, and carry firewood. the photos suggest that commonplace family and cultural tasks tended to be those infants chose to reproduce spontaneously, even in their self-selected “play.” in one case, threeyear old yoemí imitated her mother symbolically in her play, carefully wrapping her doll following local tradition and singing her “baby” to sleep with lullabies. in another case discussed below, when their imaginary car needed repair, a twoyear old and his preschool older brother accessed their father’s professional tools to make the repair. the portfolios provide scarce evidence of infants’ spontaneous activities that are technologically or imaginatively distant from their local “here and now.” it is clear that observation and imitation are pervasive in these children’s learning. still, in some photos and accompanying commentaries the teacher-researchers record very young children adding a new and creative twist to something previously learned, displaying another significant learning leap the possibility that the children are self-initiating creative actions in response to immediate contextual situations. these examples of selfinitiated creative actions became type 3 on our trajectory of informal active learning. maría luz monjaráz alonzo documented a two-yearold taking responsibility to “shoo away” a hungry intruder to her mother’s garden in the zapotec community of san isidro, cozoaltepec, santa maría tonameca, pochutla: little leidi (2 years) encountered her dad’s donkey roaming about nearby. suddenly the donkey came over to eat the plants her mom had planted near the house. since leidi and her brother edwin always water the plants in the morning, they take care of them and don’t let the donkey eat them. learning through direct, physical action, but now accompanied by oral dialogue with someone older, often an adult some teacher-researchers included narrative evidence of what vygotsky (1987) called the “zone of proximal development,” that is, the difference between what the child can do for herself without help or guidance, and what she can do with support from the more advanced linguistic and cognitive skills of someone older (“scaffolding”). often, but not always, the more mature person is an adult, such as the child’s parent, uncle, aunt, or neighbor, someone with more knowledge who deepens the child’s understanding by asking or answering questions. triqui teacher-researcher hildeberta martínez vásquez witnessed a bilingual conversation in san juan teponaxtla, putla villa de guerrero, between eleazar and his mother while the child swept the house. here the mother instructs the child on how sweeping should be done and where to deposit the trash. (this is the same child described earlier as he spontaneously applied his much-practiced sweeping skills, unrequested, to clean his classroom floor): when i arrived at the house of eleazar (2;5), i found him sweeping. while he swept, he chatted with his mother in 102 global education review 4(3) spanish. his mother spoke to him in mixtec, saying that he should sweep from inside the house to the outside. and when he finishes, he should put the trash in its place. scaffolding is not always or only provided by adults. the portfolios included some examples of older siblings or peers offering linguistic and cognitive scaffolding to younger children. triqui teacher-researcher bicki fernández guadalupe admits to being “really surprised” by a play scene she witnessed between two siblings in the community of san juan teponaxtla, putla villa de guerrero. here the older brother scaffolded his two-year-old sibling in their shared symbolic play as they repaired their imaginary “car”: without letting him know, i observed little isaí (2;4) in his home. he was playing with his five-year-old brother. what i could see is that they were playing at repairing their car. i noticed that from their father’s tools – he’s a taxi driver they had grabbed a jack and cables. according to them, their car was in really bad shape. and what i could manage to hear is that the five-year-old said to isaí, “change the oil ‘cause it’s no good anymore.” isaí responded, “yes.” and they spent about half an hour playing. i was really surprised by what these little ones were doing. it is notable that in most of these dialogic exchanges, the older persons, often the mothers, encourage the children’s curiosity not by setting aside what they are doing to engage in childfocused play, but rather by entering into and extending dialogue about their mundane adult daily tasks, and in the process enrich the infant’s language skills, cultural knowledge and awareness of their communal world. rocío aparicio ortiz miramar documents such a mother-child dialogue in a coffee orchard, a setting that is at once familial, communal and commercial in her mixtec community of santa maría yucuhiti, tlaxiaco: little emely (2;6) is with her mother as she cuts coffee beans from the trees, an activity in the community that parents teach their children. the little girl is very interested and entertained in this activity. while they cut coffee beans, the mother chats with the little girl, and emely asks her questions: “why are the coffee beans red? why don’t we collect the green beans? why is coffee sweet? why don’t we eat the beans?” among others. how do these dialogic interactions differ from the activity scenes described previously in our description of the trajectory of informal active learning? incorporating dialogue, these scenes illuminate the importance of the conversations that mothers and others who are older engage in with the preschoolers while together they participate in routine activities in their homes and communities. in most cases the activities themselves are similar or identical to those described earlier, consisting of everyday household or community activities involving ready-at-hand implements and tools, not childspecific toys. they differ only in that interaction and oral dialogue is engaged in with an older person. research question #3: how can educators collaborate with community members so that “developmentally appropriate” indigenous initial education is understood to prioritize and incorporate community practices of comunalidad? our third research question sought to investigate how educators and community members together might “communalize” “communalizing” initial education 103 indigenous initial education. if, as maldonado (2002; 2004) has suggested, the pervasive sense of communal belonging and shared responsibility which surpasses individualism or family priorities in oaxaca’s indigenous communities is instilled virtually from birth, how could initial education teacher-researchers observe, document and learn from this profound process of collective civic formation in order to nurture it in their own teaching practice, rather than seeking to standardize or westernize the early education they provide? given the diplomado’s transformative pedagogical purpose, the photos and commentaries analyzed above initially puzzled, even troubled, us as analysts: why was it that the spontaneous activities of young children documented in these 28 separate oaxacan indigenous communities overwhelmingly captured preschoolers acting alone or in small groups, such as in pairs or with a few family members? in oaxaca’s indigenous communities, individuals or families are sanctioned if they isolate themselves from others; all are expected to participate and contribute to the whole, according to their age, gender, and physical health. so why was broader collective, communal life not more evident in these photographic data? in a few rare photos, only one of which is described here, communal life and young children’s presence in it are readily apparent. in the mixtec community of guadalupe llano de avispa, santiago tilantongo, nochixtlán, teacher-researcher gabriela león santos records a collaborative tequio task (cooking the hearts of agave plants, called magueys, to make the alcoholic drink, mezcal). gabriela documents how the men of the community employ this communal event as a “teachable moment” for the children: everyone is gathered around a large oven where the ripe maguey hearts were buried so they would cook. this is done every year during these months (march or april) because then it is taken out of the village to sell during the fiesta of holy week. this maguey, when cooked, can be chewed, it’s a traditional sweet, and mezcal can also be extracted from it. here all the men help each other light the oven. children from the elementary school also help carry the maguey hearts to the oven. the photo shows how the children observe the activities that occur in this process, everything that’s being done. and they ask their dads how they do it. this is good because the fathers say that this is an activity that is a custom done every year and that it should not be forgotten, and it’s better that we teach our children so that it will be preserved. before the maguey hearts are ready to be cooked, when they are green, young children don’t get involved because the maguey has a very sweet juice that makes you itch if it splashes on your skin. in this activity pregnant women don’t participate because it is said that if they help or if they stand next to the oven, they will give “the evil eye” and the maguey won’t cook. it will stay a light coffee color, and when chewed it will make your mouth itch. the maguey stays in the oven for five days so that it is well cooked and delights people’s taste buds. various elements of comunalidad are evident in gabriela’s commentary: i) there is communal knowledge and wisdom (what the teacher-researchers tend to call “beliefs and customs”) that influence how community members of different genders and ages participate; ii) there may be certain risks involved in young children’s participation in these communal activities, but rather than being 104 global education review 4(3) excluded, their participation is watched over and guided; iii) there are opportunities for little children, along with others, to observe, listen, participate, converse, and inquire, as well as possible limitations to their participation; iv) the community understands that its collective activities, together with oral commentaries that accompany them, are teaching something important that the children need to learn if communal life is to be sustained. here we differ from other studies conducted in non-western communities, where few examples are reported of oral, explicit communal “teachings” provided by adults to children (rogoff, 2003; rogoff et al., 2010). the four analysts spent time conjecturing why so few photos of shared communal events like this appeared in the portfolios. it is highly likely that these tequio events occurred often in the communities, and that young children were present at them along with everyone else, as educating younger generations into communal tequio obligations is a priority. together we hypothesized explanations: perhaps older children and adults at the scene who were more active and verbal (as in gabriela’s description above) drew the teacher-researcher’s attention away from the less participatory preschoolers; or perhaps the teacher-researcher felt some discomfort in documenting community events involving adults and older children who might not grasp why their actions and utterances are receiving attention; or perhaps the teacherresearcher herself was too involved as a community member in the event to remember to document it. these, or others, could be possible explanations, but we will not know without further investigation. however, careful reconsideration of our own analytic findings led us to see that our disappointment at the lack of photos of communal tequio events was likely cultural blindness on our part. our findings clearly document infants in these communities intently observing adult activities (e.g. a mother weaving; mothers cleaning the school patio; fathers harvesting fish to sell). increasingly, these young infants “pitch in” to help accomplish many of these everyday tasks through guided, and then spontaneous, participation (e.g. stripping kernels off corncobs; sweeping the floor at home with guidance, then spontaneously in the classroom). at times the infants’ participation involves new, likely unrehearsed, actions in the moment to creatively problemsolve, often on behalf of others (e.g. shooing a hungry donkey away from mom’s garden). and when there is dialogue with someone older, the talk tends to be about why and how the tasks of the family and community are best accomplished (e.g. repairing a car; harvesting coffee beans). rarely did the portfolios offer evidence of infants playing with commercial toys; their symbolic play involved no princesses or superheroes, only cars to repair and baby dolls to swaddle and lull to sleep with traditional lullabies; there was no evidence here of planned parental play or video games. in the end, with transformed communal eyes, we saw that these developmental changes in infant participation and “pitching in” on family and community tasks most likely are moment-by-moment instances of the pervasive, incremental process of civic formation toward communal belonging and shared responsibility that begins in oaxacan indigenous communities “virtually from birth.” the familial scenes documented by the teacher-researchers of infant participation in mundane tasks were themselves evidence of the intimate, unremarkable, takenfor-granted process whereby infants were learning comunalidad through participation in acts of communal concern and responsibility toward others. “communalizing” initial education 105 discussion: “communalizing” developmentally-appropriate ecec in december 2014, plan piloto-cmpio organized a gathering of the diplomado participants, their educational supervisors, and newly hired early childhood educators in their schools. one purpose of this gathering was to share our analysis of young children’s spontaneous activities and our proposed trajectory of informal active learning, and to request feedback. one revelatory reflection displays the tremendous chasm between communal practices and informal learning processes, on the one hand, and formal, teacherplanned “school reform” mindsets, on the other: “i don’t take into account the activities that the children do in their homes and in the community; what matters to me are the activities that i want to implement with the children.” we acknowledged to the group our surprise that few of the teacher-researchers included in their narratives rich details about dialogue and language use that likely occurred in the scenes they photographed. one of plan piloto-cmpio’s goals in organizing the diplomado had been to prepare these novice early educators with skills needed to provide quality bilingual education, and to this end continuous attention was given to strategies such as dialogic scaffolding for strengthening or revitalizing the indigenous language of the community. the three examples included earlier of dialogic interactions between little ones and their mothers or siblings, dialogues that can be seen to scaffold these young learners in important linguistic and cognitive ways, were among few such examples in the portfolios. when exposed to these samples and our findings at the gathering, one teacher-researcher commented, “i have paid very little attention to the chats that mothers have with their little ones and to their importance in the children’s learning.” we suspect that such dialogues do occur in the communities, even if few were documented in the portfolios, but this requires further documentation. a final teacher-researcher reflection is shared here: “this analysis of the spontaneous and communal activities of little ones in our communities makes me ask myself: how should this information impact my teaching work with these children?” in essence, this is a personalized recasting of our third research question: how can educators collaborate with community members to transform indigenous initial education, so that “developmentallyappropriate” ecec is understood to incorporate and prioritize local practices through which communities socialize young children into comunalidad? the portfolios evidence some advances in plan piloto-cmpio’s efforts to “communalize” indigenous initial education in oaxaca, in some communities if not in all. perhaps most significantly, consciousness about the importance and possibilities of communityappropriate ecec has been raised, and specific local efforts by some diplomado participants have been implemented and defended, despite intense negative pressures on two fronts: imported culture-bound western perspectives of “developmentally-appropriate practices” prioritizing play and planned adult interventions, and mexican standardized, federally imposed school reforms. whatever continuing questions remain, like tobin (2005) and rogoff (2003), these teacher-researchers now recognize that they have the right and communal obligation to augment rather than supplant the important funds of knowledge and learning the children acquire spontaneously and informally in their indigenous communal contexts. facing continued government 106 global education review 4(3) repression but fortified by civic, cnte and plan piloto-cmpio support, their goal remains to construct together with parents and communities a transformed initial education based in indigenous comunalidad. now more than ever they understand that nothing less is required if their communities’ languages, communal lives, and human and indigenous rights are to be honored and defended. notes 1. available on datos.cipaz.org, 8 february 2010, as cited in “plan para la transformación de la educación de oaxaca (pteo),” state institute of public education of oaxaca (ieepo) and section 22 snte/cnte, oaxaca de juárez, oaxaca, january 2012, p. 7. 2. benjamín maldonado alvarado, public presentation, albuquerque nm, june 2015. 3. plan piloto-cmpio has three institutional “faces”: (i) since 1978, it serves as a statewide public school district, known as plan piloto, part of the system of indigenous education of the state institute of public education of oaxaca (ieepo), with about 1400 indigenous teachers in more than 450 rural bilingual schools throughout the state; (ii) in 1982, it was recognized as local d-1211 of oaxaca’s section 22 of the national union of education workers (snte), and a key leader in the dissident national coordinator of education workers (cnte); and (iii) in 1990, it legally incorporated as a civil association (ac). 4. a diplomado in mexico is an officially accredited academic experience devised to address a specific educational need. 5. unidad de normatividad y política educativa. (2015). política nacional de evaluación de la educación: documento rector. november, 2015. 6. mayem arellanes cano, lawyer in the legal department of sección 22, in a public presentation in albuquerque, nm, november 2016. 7. mayem arellanes cano, lawyer in the legal department of sección 22, in a public presentation in albuquerque, nm, november 2016. 8. personal communication, january 4, 2017. 9. this analysis of photographs and narratives, conducted collectively by three members of the pedagogical committee of plan pilotocmpio and this author, has been reported previously in a spanish language anthropological publication in peru (jiménez, martínez, mendoza & meyer, 2015). the present article, the first to report this work in english, draws on the earlier analysis while adapting and updating the previously published article. references bacon, d. 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(1989). preschool in three cultures: japan, china, and the united states. new haven cn: yale university press. unidad de normatividad y política educativa (2015). política nacional de evaluación de la educación: documento rector, november 2015. vygotsky, l. s. (1987). thinking and speech (n. minick, trans.). en r.w. rieber y a.s. carton (eds.). the collected works of l. s. vygotsky: vol. 1. problems of general psychology, 39285. new york: plenum press. wollons, r. (2000). kindergartens and cultures: the global diffusion of an idea. new haven ct: yale university press. about the author lois m. meyer, phd, (ucla, applied linguistics, specialties in second language acquisition, and language education) was a bilingual professor for 11 years in the department of elementary education at san francisco state university, focusing on urban education. in 1999-2000, she spent a year as a senior fulbright researcher in oaxaca, mexico, researching teacher education for oaxaca's rural, marginalized communities and schools. since 2000, she has continued her close collaboration with plan piloto-cmpio as a bilingual professor in the department of language, literacy and sociocultural studies in the college of education at the university of new mexico in albuquerque. microsoft word yonkers galley no footer 98 global education review 4(1)       global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wermuth, esther & quezada, edwin m. (2017). development and implementation of an administrative internship program. global education review, 4 (1). 98-115  development and implementation of an administrative internship program esther wermuth mercy college edwin m. quezada yonkers public schools abstract this article describes the development and implementation of a pilot program to prepare teachers seeking new york state certification as school district administrators, by assigning them as administrative interns to a school district. the superintendent of a large urban school district and the director of a college program to prepare school district administrators partnered to design a pilot experiential course in which candidates for a master’s degree and state certificate would have an opportunity to develop skills and learn by experiencing situations that support new learning (kolb, 1984), to take the place of an existing internship course for eight candidates. the dual purpose was to provide an authentic learning experience for the candidates and to provide actionable information for the superintendent for improvement of the district instructional program. to identify areas of academic concern, the candidates reviewed the new york state district report card1, conducted research, and interviewed district personnel in order to be able tomake actionable suggestions and recommendations to the superintendent that might result in academic improvement. findings and recommendations to inform district improvement efforts and for improvement of the existing course were presented to the superintendent and his administrative staff. recommendations are included. keywords authentic learning, experiential learning, school administration, school district improvement, supervisory internship. introduction new york state requires candidates for administrative certificates to complete 250 hours in a supervised internship as part of their academic preparation to earn a certificate permitting them to serve as school district administrators. the superintendents of two large urban school districts in new york state were invited by mercy college faculty to help to design and pilot an experiential administrative internship course that would provide an authentic experience for interns (kolb, 1984) and, possibly, provide actionable information based on their findings and reflection (schon, 1983, 1987) for the superintendent to use to improve the academic performance of students in the district. one of the superintendents2,3 _________________________________ corresponding author esther wermuth, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522. email: ewermuth@mercy.edu development and implementation of an administrative internship program 99      recognized the need for the district to identify areas of strength and areas of concern in order to improve student performance. he agreed to welcome the eight interns, and to permit them to review reports and to interview administrative personnel as part of their research to make suggestions for improvement to the instructional program. the superintendent arranged for the department of human resources to process applications to permit the candidates to serve as interns. methodology program design the superintendent and the college program director met to discuss the needs of the district and of the college, to identify activities for the students which would provide an authentic learning experience for the students, satisfy state requirements and also provide a benefit to the district. agreement was reached for the administrative candidates to work directly with the superintendent and his administrative staff on issues of academic concern. the agreement was that eight candidates seeking new york state certification as district administrators would serve as district interns, and work directly with the superintendent and his administrative staff to identify and study issues of academic concern. each intern, required to complete 250 hours under their supervision, was required to review the data from district’s new york state report card and select an area of concern to conduct a research study. the eight interns, paired in dyads, were to meet and interview administrators in charge of the designated areas, and propose recommendations and suggestions supported by literature that would be helpful in strengthening those areas in need of improvement. the superintendent's administrative staff participated in planning sessions with each dyad as needed over a period of four months, and arranged interviews for the candidates with the administrators in charge of each area. they were available to answer questions and to provide support to the candidates throughout the internship. description of the candidates the eight candidates were all registered in a mercy college master's degree program leading to new york state certification as school building leader and school district leader. all were certificated, experienced teachers. seven were women, two hispanic, three of color, two white; the eighth was a white male. their ages ranged from mid-thirties to mid-fifties. all of the candidates at the time of this internship were serving as practicing teachers. all had administrative duties assigned to them within their respective schools, in addition to the usual teaching load. two of the candidates were employed in the district under study; the others were teachers in the new york city school district. the three women of color were luanne4, a high school biology teacher and dean; naomi, a reading specialist in a middle school; and karen, an english as a second language (esl) teacher in an elementary school. margaret, an hispanic woman, was an esl coordinator, and anne, the white woman, was a special education coordinator, both working in the same school. harriet, an hispanic woman, was a reading specialist in a charter school. joanne, a white woman, was a school coordinator in a charter school that was located within the district. john, the white male, was a special education coordinator in a district middle school. john and joanne were employed in the district under study, and the others were employed in the new york city school district. the candidates formed four dyads to conduct their studies: luanne (biology), and karen (esl); naomi (literacy), and harriet (literacy); anne (special education), and margaret (esl); john (special education); and joanne (supervision). data about the candidates, how they paired, and their employment is summarized in table 1. 100 global education review 4(1)   table 1 candidate data, pairing, and employment dyad intern race gender district employed current assignment dyad i anne white f nyc special education coordinator dyad i margaret hispanic f nyc esl coordinator dyad ii harriett hispanic f nyc charter school, reading specialist dyad ii naomi black f nyc middle school, reading specialist dyad iii luanne black f nyc high school biology, dean dyad iii karen black f nyc elementary school, esl teacher dyad iv joanne white f yk charter school, school coordinator dyad iv john white m yk middle school, special education coordinator table 1 candidates description of the district at the time of the study, the district employed over 15005 teachers, and provided services to over 26,000 students from diverse backgrounds in grades prekindergarten through 12. over 80 percent of the student population consisted of a minority racial/ethnic group: 56 percent hispanic; 19 percent black; 7 percent asian/pacific islander; 1 percent multi-racial; 17 percent white. three-quarters of the student population were economically disadvantaged; twelve percent of the student population were english language learners (ell); and sixteen percent were students with disabilities. table 2 summarizes the number of students and the ethnic breakdown of the student body. special learning needs of students is presented in table 3. average class sizes6 were substantially higher in the district than statewide; 25.9 and 22.5 respectively. the classroom teacher to student ratio of 16.6 was also higher than the statewide ratio of 12.5 students per classroom teacher. pupil-teacher ratio and class size is shown in table 4. with less than a quarter of students achieving proficiency on the new york state english language arts (nys ela) and math grades 3-8 assessments, student achievement scores were below statewide averages. nevertheless, student growth was comparable to statewide growth with nearly 6 percent more students achieving proficiency on the nys ela exam in 2016 than 2015 and nearly 1 percent more students achieving proficiency on the math exam. graduation data tell a similar story growth has been significant and relatively stable over the past three years, yet achievement is too low. for example, 75 percent of the 2011 student cohort eligible to graduate in june of 2016 did so; this is a 4 percent increase from the prior year. however, of this graduation cohort, only 15 percent were designated college and career ready, as measured by the ela/math aspirational performance measure.7 superintendent’s administrative staff the superintendent's administrative staff included an assistant superintendent; an executive director for language acquisition/bilingual/esol/lote; an executive director for school improvement, an executive director for secondary education; and a director for academic and behavioral interventions. development and implementation of an administrative internship program 101     table 2 number of teachers, students, student ethnicity number ethnicity teachers 1500 students 26,000 student ethnicity hispanic 56% black 19% asian 7% multiracial 1% white 17% table 2 student ethnic breakdown table 3 percentages of economically disadvantaged, english language earners, students with disabilities student needs economically disadvantaged 75% english language learner 12% students with disabilities 16% table 3 student learning needs table 4 pupil-teacher ratios, class size and state-wide averages pupil-teacher ratio average class size yonkers 16.6 25.9 new york state 12.5 22.5 table 4 class size, pupil teacher ratio procedure the superintendent and his administrative staff hosted the initial meeting with the program director, who also taught the interns, a second professor teaching the course, and the eight interns. the superintendent distributed the district report card, and asked the eight interns, who formed four dyads, to study the new york state district report card data to select areas of concern that would be of interest to them and to the district. each dyad reviewed the report card data and presented their intentions to the superintendent. the superintendent, his administrative staff, and the interns discussed the approach to follow to investigate each area of concern; literature and readings were also suggested and discussed at that time. the superintendent assured the interns that the district administrative staff would be made available to work with them. the candidates were asked to prepare a list of questions for the administrators. 102 global education review 4(1)      the interns began with a review of the literature in the identified area of academic concern and developed a rationale for study with questions based on the district report card data. they worked with the director of academic and behavioral interventions to set up interviews with the administrators in charge of the respective areas to gain an understanding of and insight into the problem, as it differed from school to school and grade to grade. they were able to evaluate the problem from a global perspective, incorporate the research findings with outcomes from schools that had employed successful techniques, and combine their expertise and experience in the designated areas to arrive at conclusions and recommendations that would have positive impact on the area of weakness and ultimately have positive impact on student achievement. the director of academic and behavioral interventions scheduled interview sessions for the candidates with administrators in charge of the areas of concern. after each interview the dyads transcribed their notes. conversations continued with these administrators throughout the internship. each dyad summarized its findings and discussed the suggestions and recommendations with the administrative team. at the final session, each dyad presented their findings in a power point summarizing their findings to the superintendent and his administrative team, highlighting the data, the method of investigation and the suggestions and recommendations for improvement. dyad’s focus each of the four dyads identified a specific area of concern from the new york state district report card to conduct its investigation. the four dyads and the areas they chose to focus on were:  dyad i anne and margaret area of concern: students with disabilities and english as a second language (esl) students' performance on the new york state english as a second language achievement test (nyselat) grades kindergarten to grade five.  dyad ii naomi and harriet area of concern: grades three-five reading proficiency.  dyad iii karen and luanne area of concern: proficiency on the english language arts (ela) exam for limited english proficient (lep) students.  dyad iv joanne and john area of concern: the impact of the district response to intervention program (rti) on grades 3-5 measures of academic progress assessment.  based on data made available to them on the new york state district report card, each dyad developed a list of questions for the administrators. the area studied by each dyad is summarized in table 5. each dyad's study is reported separately. table 5 area of concern studied by each dyad dyad area of concern dyad i students with disabilities; esl test performance, grades k-5 dyad ii grades 3-5 reading proficiency dyad iii ela test performance, lep students dyad iv impact of rti program, grades 3-5 table 5 dyads and area of concern 103 global education review 4(1)   findings, recommendations and suggestions dyad 1 dyad i, anne and margaret, found that only a small percentage of students categorized as students with disabilities (swd) and esl, in grades kindergarten through grade five scored commanding (passing) on the nyseslat (new york state english as a second language achievement test) though the percentage in grade four was slightly higher. the results are shown in table 6. the questions they asked after reviewing nyseslat results for students with disabilities and esl students were: 1.why is there only a small percentage of swd/esl students in grade kindergarten through fifth grade scoring commanding on the nyseslat? 2.why is the percentage slightly higher only in grade 4? after examining the test scores and interviewing district administrators, they agreed that quality professional development efforts could enhance student achievement. they decided to create a plan for professional development targeting general education teachers who have english language learners in their classrooms. based on a review of relevant literature, the decision was reached to develop a professional development series that would focus on topics which have been shown to be effective in improving learning outcomes for ell’s:  developing effective questioning techniques based on bloom’s taxonomy (toolbox for planning rigorous instruction, 2009) in order to develop student’s higher order thinking skills, and to assist teachers to create strong questions for students at the appropriate depth of knowledge for the student.  helping teachers to understand the importance of linking formative assessments to instructional decisions (hess, 2006) (hess, 2016) (black & william, 1998).  building a culture of collaboration to meet the needs of ell students by using peer mentoring, recognizing that mentoring models for new teachers are often ineffective for experienced teachers (d’abate & eddy, 2008).  enhancing teacher-to-mentor transformations by introducing content knowledge and strategy building to promote changes in the prospective mentors’ own practice.  training teachers in the use of collaborative peer mentoring in order to prepare prospective mentors “to respond effectively to “mentorable moments’” similar to how teachers respond to teachable moments (spezzini, austin, abbott & littleton, 2009).  help teachers to listen attentively as colleagues discharge emotions about an unknown, and empathetically encouraging theme in self-discovery (díaz maggioli, 2004), recognizing that collaborative mentors can share what works for them and, in turn, provide personalized pd on effective ell instruction.  train teachers to use authentic learning experiences and inquiry to enhance learning (wells & gordon, 2001) (galileo.org, 2016). 104 global education review 4(1)      table 6 new york state report card from the year 2014-2015 nyseslat results grade number of esl/swd students pct. commanding level kindergarten 53 2 first grade 46 2 second grade 49 4 third grade 66 2 fourth grade 49 8 fifth grade 67 1 table 6 number of esl/swd students at each grade and percentage passing (commanding) dyad ii naomi and harriet of approximately 1900 students in grade three, the scores on the english language arts (ela) exam showed a high number of students attained a level one score for the 2014 school years. this high concentration comprised the black african-american and hispanic-latino students. in 2014, 52% of the black africanamerican student population and 53% of the hispanic/latino population received a level 1 score. in the 2015 school year, there was a slight change with 46% of the hispanic students receiving a level 1 score, while the african american remained at 52%. these data showed a significant number of students were unable to read at grade level. ela results are shown in table 7. as a result of analyzing the data from the district and interviewing district administrators about the reading programs in use in the district elementary schools, and the strengths and weaknesses of those programs, it was decided to target the methodology currently implemented in the district literacy program. we decided to focus on strengthening existing methodology and suggesting additional methods to improve the effectiveness of the literacy program in grades three to five. dyad ii findings, recommendations and suggestions the importance of professional development (pd) for teachers on reading instruction has been underscored by the amount of funding provided by nclb (ncee, 2008) and while it has been reported that 80% of classroom teachers receive on average 24 hours of pd per year, it has not been found to be sufficient and that there is little focus on subject matter in it (hill 2007) (fletcher & lyon 1998). one strength of the reading program was that it supported the entire population of students, both english and spanish, and the program extended its learning to meet the needs of the community in both english and spanish. professional development was provided to teachers to demonstrate the best practices for implementation in the classroom. however, more professional development specifically in reading should be provided, and it is recommended that the amount of quality professional development in reading be increased. additional interventions/programs should be implemented to meet the needs of struggling communities, such as special needs, english speaking and ela. development and implementation of an administrative internship program 105     active participation from the school community and parents was also visible. lobbying was conducted in an attempt to provide the district with the financial support needed to implement the necessary programs. however, there was no evidence that sufficient data were collected to determine if the programs in use were successful. casey, robertson, williamson, serio & elswick (2011) have noted the importance of evaluating the effectiveness of school-based interventions, and the efficacy of using on-line databases to support efforts in implementing evidence-based reading interventions was suggested by coffee, newell & kennedy (2014). it recommended that school committees be formed to assess effectiveness of existing literacy programs. they should identify and address reading problems in grades one and two (jacob, elson, bowden, brooks & armstrong, 2015) (ncee, 2016). research by o'donnell and kirkner (2014) suggests that students would benefit from the addition of intervention programs for students with special needs and limited english speaking ability. the district should review different reading programs such as core ready, and computer based reading programs such as myon, (myon.com) i-ready (curriculumassociates.com) and achieve 3000 (achieve3000.com) that stimulate readers because they are based on the students' levels of interest. they should also consider other programs such as sasf (sports and arts in schools foundation) https://sasfny.org/) a program, which would provide interventions for leveled reading after school. mcmaster (2013) suggested that whole school re-culturing programs may help with the development of more inclusive value orientated schools. dyad ii’s suggestions for reculturing include surveying to determine how to involve parents more in the learning process to work with struggling readers. additional suggestions include inviting families to the school to observe how reading and writing skills are taught in the classroom, sharing articles on literacy topics in school and class newsletters, and using family and community members as reading partner volunteers and guest readers. more intensive strategies include referring families of students who need extra assistance in reading or writing to community agencies that provide services outside of school, and the use of family and community members as reading and writing tutors for students. a parent coordinator should be considered to participate in the district's literacy initiatives. professional development is provided to teachers twice weekly, and all teachers receive assistance (modeling and coaching). school committees should be formed to review data starting with grades one and two to identify weaknesses as early as possible in order to address the weaknesses. table 7 grade 3 english language arts (ela) exam for 2014 and 2015 by race/ethnicity year black african-american hispanic-latino 2014 52 53 2015 52 46 table 7 percentage of students scoring 1 (lowest) on grade 3 english language arts (ela) exam 106 global education review 4(1)   dyad iiikaren and luanne area of concern proficiency on the english language arts (ela) exam for limited english proficient (lep) students recent data show that the percentage of proficiency on the ela exam amongst lep students is extremely low across grades three to five. the data on the district report card show that in 2014 and 2015 only 1 % was proficient in grade three, 2% in grade four, and 1 % in grade five. the results are shown in table 8. after analyzing the data from district report card, the individuals responsible for supervising ela programs were interviewed. the interviewer asked three questions:  what of evidence-based resources, for literacy, are currently being used for grades 3-5?  is there a protocol for choosing resources to help limited english proficient students achieve proficiency on the ela exam?  are there schools, within the district, that have a high-level of limited english proficient students who have achieved proficiency on the ela exam? this dyad decided to review the current resources implemented in the district literacy program for lep students. the review focused on strengthening the existing resources that have produced positive literacy results for lep students, also suggesting alternative resources to improve the effectiveness of the program. the purpose is to help lep students master the ela examination by strengthening their literacy skills through improvement of the district's use of resources. dyad iii findings, recommendations and suggestions  use data to drive instruction use the most recent data from current programs to make changes for improvement for the next school year's program. if a program is ineffective, it needs to be replaced.  evaluate if "journeys" is the best program for lep students. “journeys” is the most widely used balanced literacy program in the nation, with research and data-bases affirming its efficacy, however reading programs must be evaluated to determine its efficacy for this population so evaluation is in order (casey, robertson, williamson, serio & elswick, 2011).  we suggest assigning students to a tier, based on their needs and abilities, and tracking their progress as the first step in investigating why "journeys" doesn't seem to be working to impact student achievement. this should help to identify subsets or pockets where it does not seem to be effective. among the areas to be investigated in this regard to evaluate the quality of implementation in each school and classroomperhaps the problem lies not in the program, but in the way that it is being done. while "journeys" may be a good program for some students, it may not be effective for lep/enl students, in addressing their proficiency levels on the ela assessment. investigating the implementation of the program in each school's classrooms would be helpful in modifying the program to address students' needs. table 8 grade 3 lep students’ english language arts (ela) proficiency in grades 3-5 in 2014 and 2015 year grade 3 grade 4 grade 5 2014 1 2 1 2015 1 2 1 table 8 percentage of lep students scoring proficient on english language arts (ela) exam 107 global education review 4(1)    there are established protocols that have been shown to be effective in second language reading acquisition. protocols that have been shown to be effective in second language reading acquisition include repeated reading, assisted reading, phrased reading, modelling reading, guided reading, echo reading, paired reading, shared book reading, fluency development lesson, fast start, and readers’ theatre (yildirim & rasinski, 2014).  set up a district-wide literacy committee to standardize a protocol for enl instruction. review the quality of professional development for teachers of enl students. work with school administrators to support enl teachers in methodology and materials.  once the district-wide committee standardizes the program for the enl population, they must continue to track their achievement in all academic areas in each of the schools. on-going monitoring of the data will identify areas of instruction that need modification and revision.  set up school literacy committees to suggest how to address the needs of the enl students. the importance of involving the entire community in this effort cannot be minimized. whole school and family involvement have been shown to be effective in encouraging hispanic families, especially new immigrants (o'donnell, & kirkner, 2014). restructuring for family involvement, can be helpful as shown by mcmaster (2013) who suggested ways to identify indicators to help with restructuring and suggested several workable models. a questionnaire designed for the purpose of building partnerships among schools, families and communities has been developed by the ohio department of education (ode, 2016) which may be appropriate for yonkers. dyad iv joanne and john -area of concern the impact of district response to intervention program (rti) on grades 3-5 measures of academic progress assessment achievement in mathematics and english language arts in grades three-five declined between 2014 and 2015 in the district as measured by the measure of academic progress (map) assessment. rti is the approach used in the district as the model for improvement of reading. in theory, rti is thought of as a valuable model for schools because of its ability to provide appropriate learning experiences for all students and aids in the early identification of students as being at risk for academic failure. research has proven that students need and profit from a precise match of their current skills and abilities with the instructional strategies and choices provided within the classroom. this study examines the response to intervention (r ti) model currently being used in 3 district elementary schools in grades three to five in the fourth most populated city in the united states. this study seeks to determine if there was a noteworthy difference in assessment scores of students who received tier ii rti interventions compared to those who received tier i interventions. the study also seeks to examine procedural methodologies and the effectiveness of the systems currently in place. how does the pupil support team address student need? how is movement from tier to tier determined? how are teachers and support staff utilized when implementing the different tiers? it will also examine which changes/improvements can be implemented within the district to make rti more efficient/effective for students, teachers, and support staff. surveys were conducted. dyad iv findings, recommendations and suggestions the results of this study show that students are being assessed with the map assessment three 108 global education review 4(1)      times a year in a consistent manner. all three schools have access to the map data system to analyze and use the information. the results of the school surveys show that administrators and teachers understand the importance of rti and attempt to make a good faith effort to implement the rti model. however, there is little evidence that supports that all three tiers of the model are being used with fidelity throughout all three schools. it is evident that schools have access to different resources and materials which include the number of teachers and administrators. the district has not yet identified a progress monitoring tool for student response to interventions in terms of level of performance and rate of progress. the use of rti strategies has had some success for the sample schools analyzed. the use of pupil support team meetings to address academic concerns and implement rti based groupings indicates a positive trend within the three sites. although there are inconsistencies within the schools that need to be addressed, the results show that schools are making strides with implementation and addressing student deficits. based on a survey of the targeted schools, the administrative teams are in agreement with the effectiveness of r'ti based strategies. the survey of the three schools has highlighted an important finding. "all staff have received initial training or professional development relative to initial administration of screening methods at their respective grade levels" this particular question on the survey received inconsistent responses indicating the need for further professional development (kratochwill, volpiansky, clements, & ball, (2007). overall the data show that the use of r'ti strategies has led to successful results within the district public schools. one recommendation is that these data and information should be used by all principals when staffing their schools. in order for rti interventions to be effective, the schools must be adequately equipped with highly qualified support staff to deliver supplemental instruction (sanger, 2013). sanger also emphasized the importance of progress monitoring to track student progress and monitor growth. she proposed, and we concur, that the district develop an rti manual to foster consistency across the district when implementing rti, and that a similar manual be developed for individual schools for principals to distribute to their staff. reflections karen's reflection my experience within this new internship research project was the best experience i've had in the program. i was able to look at current data, investigate a problem, research and find possible solutions that could help a district that needs lots of educational help. it was also a great experience to work with people in a district that were open to change and willing to hear our discoveries. the process of interviewing members of district was eye an opener and made me realize that as an educator i need to always be at the forefront of research and developing new ways to implement solutions that could help our struggling students margaret's reflection i started this reflection by looking back at how i began this course. i have worked for the new york city department of education for my whole career (16 years), many district level policy decisions and the general function of the school district office were foreign to me. school board meetings are few and far between and decisions usually come down from the chancellor. i looked forward to gaining greater knowledge about governance and policy through the district’s perspective. as we approach the end of the course, i believe i have gained greater development and implementation of an administrative internship program 109     knowledge not only about how the district works but the importance of using data and research based questions when making decisions. i also think our work in the district allowed me to look at the bigger picture in administration. decisions at this level must be based on the data, researched and followed up on. choosing a small sub-group to focus on allowed for a more in depth project and hopefully an impact for those children. our goal was to help the english language learners who are also special education students reach proficiency on the nyseslat. after speaking with the executive director, language acquisition/bilingual/esol/lote she commented that our work will go directly to helping the common branches professional development for the upcoming school year. without anne as my partner, the guidance of the executive director, language acquisition/bilingual/esol/lote and the program director, none of this would have been possible. i am grateful for this internship experience and feel the program has successfully prepared me to dive into this grand field of school administration. harriet's reflection after a thoughtful reflection of my experience researching data regarding the district report card i was informed of a variety of academic practices. these practices were in regard to student deficiencies, academic effectiveness, and possible solutions for the future. i noticed that perhaps by reaching out more to the parents, allowing those who are not involved, to begin to have a voice. after carefully reading and discussing evidenced-based research, teachers can make improvements in areas that may be lacking. most importantly i learned that research and collaboration with other colleagues is an effective measure in itself to provide students with a more authentic learning experience. further, after hearing presentations from my classmates, i noticed how effective research can be when attempting to solve problems, and develop more ways to assist in creating a more effective means of education for children to meet challenges, as well as increasing assessment performance. john's reflection the leadership program assisted me in developing my leadership skill set and overall approach to education in general. the coursework has exposed me to elements within education that were previously unknown to me. the program also reinforced several key concepts such as the need to have welldeveloped people skills, open and clear communication, and to approach all decisions with what is best for the children. the two areas of the program that standout for me and allowed me to succeed were the faculty as well as the internship experiences. the faculty had a wealth of knowledge they were very adept at sharing, and were always approachable. the internship experiences allowed me to apply the knowledge gained within the classroom. they also allowed us to develop our own unique leadership styles. the internships also allowed us as future leaders to practice and develop those important people and communication skills. i am 'very grateful for the educational/professional experiences afforded to me through participation in the leadership program luanne's reflection finally, it was here, the first day of classes. i was ready to hear what i had already heard before, 250+ log hours, follow all of the elcc standards, save all artifacts and build a 6000page portfolio in the process. i entered the office sat down, rolled my eyes and said to myself, "here we go again." to my surprise, as the program director began to explain the course, it was the exact opposite. what she proposed for us to do this semester was new, unexpected, and brilliant. it was a refreshing twist on the norm and piqued my interest as soon as she began to 110 global education review 4(1)      explain the requirements of the course. she asked us to do research! real research, that could actually be used to help students in an entire school district. we were all definitely on board and couldn't wait to embark on our new adventure. i really have to say that i learned tons of valuable information and gained a wealth of knowledge of what it's truly like to be an administrator. this has been my best experience at this college thus far and i hope this continues to be the new administrative internship protocol. the knowledge gained from this one experience will definitely be used throughout my upcoming years as an administrator and i am thankful to the program director for taking a chance with something new. i always admire those who go against the grain and try new things. true leaders are willing to go out on a limb to do what they feel will be best for those whom they are leading. therefore, it only seemed fitting that the program director would teach this course. she had taught me how to be a leader just by leading me, and i am grateful to her. naomi's reflection after completing our "pilot" school district leadership program, i started to jot down important notes to use for my future endeavors. articles such as "exploring the implementation, effectiveness, and cost of the reading partners programs" by r. jacob, d. elson, b. bowden, c. armstrong (2015) and "big jump in students reading scores" by greta palmberg and kendra rask, stood out to me the most. the articles stated, gave me a profound look on issues that are continuously surrounding our administrators, staff and students. "exploring the implementation, effectiveness, and cost of the reading partners programs" spoke about the implementation of academic programs and how the programs are only as successful as you make them. the district superintendent acknowledged that program implementation was the problem they faced as leaders. it is important to keep track of implementation of all programs in order to see if that program is best for the learning population. staying consistent with the time dedicated to a program is needed to determine the success of the program. so as a future administrator, setting aside scheduled time for training of the materials, with use of the materials, continuous collection of data, and ongoing review and revision of the program are all instrumental to the success of each program. this sdl internship allowed me to understand all aspects of becoming a superintendent. it also helped me to identify areas of critical value such as parent involvement, and establishing an environment of a cohesive unit, which supports administrators, teachers, staff, students, parents, and the communities to ensure the progress of the children. i hope this program continues to provide other students with the learning experience it has provided me. anne's reflection "suspecting and knowing are not the same" rick riordan, the lightning thief. i find this quote sums up my experiences at mercy college. prior to diving into the administration field, i suspected about what should be done. in education today many suspect about what can be done. i feel i am ready to take on the challenge of administration and know what to do. i have the understanding and the knowledge to go forth. i have the program staff to thank for that. joanne's reflection as i sit here and reflect on my experience, i feel a great sense of pride and accomplishment. i can remember sitting in on our first session and reviewing the syllabus with the program director and the other students in my class. her vision for the course and expectations for our research project were very clear. once class was dismissed, the excitement i was feeling quickly development and implementation of an administrative internship program 111     faded and sheer panic and fear started to creep in. how was i going to accomplish all of this work and meet all of the expectations? working a full time job as a quasi-administrator, being a mom of two little ones, and taking another district level course was only going to add to the work load and stress i was already feeling. studying district level information in a classroom is one thing, however being able to apply that knowledge and information to real life situations is completely different. after meeting with the district superintendent and being paired up with the director, behavioral and academic interventions, everything began to fall into place. this internship provided me with the opportunity to support what i was learning in my district level classes by allowing me to put my knowledge to work. i can officially say i have district level experience in evaluating programs and creating a districtwide rti manual. in addition, i was able to tap into a network of professionals that can offer references, advice and information about new job opportunities and professional development. this internship allowed me to expand my background and understanding of how a school district operates making me more marketable to a possible employer. college faculty member’s reflection on may 16, 2016 eight administrative interns in the school building/district leadership master's degree program met with the superintendent of district schools and with several members of his senior administrative staff including the assistant superintendent, the executive director, language acquisition/bilingual/esol/lote, the executive director, school improvement, the executive director, secondary education and the, director of academic and behavioral interventions. these eight interns were part of a group of twelve who participated in a unique program in partnership with district schools. the interns each engaged in authentic research, based upon the academic needs of the district, and conducted detailed interviews with district personnel to explore best practices. as their culminating activity, each team of two interns shared its power-point presentation, highlighting the research, findings and recommendations from the research project each conducted. one of the issues raised, for example, concerned the functionality of the journeys literacy program, a program presently in use in district schools, and the possible reasons why it succeeds better in one school than another. the fact that the students picked up on this type of subtle issue is a credit to them. anne's and margaret's presentation was comprehensive and presented great ideas, which the administrative staff can utilize in their future staff development efforts. john and joanne really did a great job analyzing the data. they studied the question concerning the effectiveness of the district rti model within three schools as measured by map assessment for the 2015-2016 academic year. they discovered that each school has access to different resources, which may be a major factor influencing consistency of program delivery. karen and luanne focused their study on the low language proficiency among lep students across grades three through five. they recommended that a committee be formed to develop a district-wide standardized protocol for enl instruction. they also recommended that a review of the type and quality of professional development given to enl teachers be conducted. harriet and naomi suggested that district schools should focus on the literacy needs of their first and second grade students in order to build a strong foundation, which would serve to decrease reading deficits as students progress through the grades. they further recommended that programs to improve parental involvement, especially involving the families of struggling readers, be implemented. 112 global education review 4(1)      judging by all the questions and responses, the interns' presentations were very well received by the superintendent and his administrative staff. this was truly an excellent and authentic learning experience, one that would serve as an invaluable and unique addition to the internship training program. program director’s reflection it is not usual to see excitement on students' faces when a professor introduces a course on the first day of class. however, observing the reactions of eight candidates enrolled in their final administrative internship course for the master's degree program, i was greeted with shouts of joy and screams when i shared the connection made with the superintendent in district to pilot this new approach to their administrative internships. the superintendent welcomed these candidates as interns into the district to work directly with his administrative staff to review reports to identify areas of concern, and through their research processes, come up with recommendations for the district to consider for implementation. the students couldn't believe what a great opportunity they were being offered, work with real people, real problems, conduct an authentic research study. they were in awe. as the teacher and partner of the superintendent and his exemplary administrative staff, this pilot was a unique initiative. the superintendent gave of his time and committed his administrative staff’s time to work and support these interns, individually and in groups, for a period of over four months. for the first time, candidates felt that their work had meaning, purpose, and importance. they were accepted as members of the district and treated in a highly professional manner. their work, while challenging, was needed. the superintendent and his administrative staff anticipated the results of their studies for consideration of implementation in their schools the interns raved about this approach and said the college must adopt this model. this unique experience will be indelibly imprinted in the minds of our eight interns. they and the college are most grateful to the superintendent and his administrative staff. the experiential administrative internship pilot was deemed a success and will be replicated in future administrative course offerings. superintendent’s reflection educators often speak about the value of authentic learning. i am one who strongly believes that authentic learning is diminished in classrooms unless the leaders responsible for creating this environment are offered the opportunity to learn utilizing this approach. this is especially true when one works with underrepresented students in a large urban community. the model described in this article offered candidates an opportunity to engage in authentic learning, research and practice. partnering with mercy college allowed eight interns an environment to study, research and offer recommendations that, if implemented, will result in improved student achievement outcomes. in addition, this approach empowers future school leaders to engage in a model mired in action research and authentic learning. these are the leaders needed in today’s schools. as a superintendent, i have the responsibility to shape future leaders. as a result of this internship model, mercy college and yonkers public schools accomplished this goal. we were intentional, determined, and laser-focused on providing interns with an intern model wherein their recommendations were put into practice in the district. their research and recommendations focused on student subgroups and instructional areas that present enormous challenges including students with disabilities and english language development and implementation of an administrative internship program 113     learners whose reading proficiencies present challenges that may be addressed through an authentic response to intervention program. this model is aligned with the latest research on school leadership and must be afforded to all future candidates. the mercy college yonkers public schools leadership lab is a valuable opportunity for those committed to changing the way business is done in urban schools. summary and recommendations the interns began with a review of the literature in the identified area of academic concern and developed a rationale for study with questions based on the district report card data. they worked with the director of academic and behavioral interventions to set up interviews with the administrators in charge of the respective areas to gain an understanding of and insight into the problem, as it differed from school to school and grade to grade. they were able to evaluate the problem from a global perspective, incorporate the research findings with outcomes from schools that had employed successful techniques, and combine their expertise and experience in the designated areas to arrive at conclusions and recommendations that would have positive impact on the areas of weakness and ultimately have positive impact on student achievement. paired into four dyads they lived the internship night and day, calling upon each other to explore as many ideas as possible to come up with the best recommendations as administrators. the interns presented their research papers in thesis format, five chapters comprising the rationale/ questions, the review of the literature, the methodology, the findings, and conclusions-suggestions and recommendations. in addition, at the culminating session each dyad presented a power point that summarized its study to the superintendent, his administrative staff, two professors and the eight interns. the discussion focused on the interns' findings and the suggestions and recommendations that would best address these areas of concern, for possible follow-up and implementation. their work was of superior quality with two dyads going beyond to design a handbook and manual as exemplars for the district. even though the internship ended, the four interns continued working on these tools to completion, the interns, the professors, the superintendent and his administrative staff evaluated the pilot administrative internship program. interns wrote reflections of their experience. the value for replicating this model for future interns was considered. the thread throughout the four research projects is the need to increase pedagogical efforts to improve literacy in grades three to five. they suggest early intervention, grades one and two, before mastery of literacy and math skills are assessed in grade three. the focus on the general population in grades one to five needs to include focus on the other subgroups of children: children with special needs, children with limited english proficiency, and children for whom english is a new language, to give them their respective requisite supports. they found that teachers were not adequately prepared to handle literacy and math issues with children coming from these populations, and suggested alternative approaches, materials, resources, tools to be shared in the on-going professional development sessions and put into practice and monitored. professional development requires consistent follow-up with modifications and changes to bring the teachers up to level of effectiveness. the implementation of these policies and best practices must be standardized throughout all the schools in the district, and observed, assessed, and modified on an on-going basis. another recommendation is to form working committees with members from each school to assist district administrators with monitoring and modifying the programs 114 global education review 4(1)      throughout the schools in the district on an ongoing basis. they also suggest setting up a district literacy committee for ongoing review. the suggestion was made to increase parent involvement in the early grades, by inviting parents to observe literacy activities in the classrooms to give them the skills to implement with their own children. they recommend extending these literacy efforts to the entire community. notes 1. the report card is the new york state education department’s public report of educational data. data is reported for all students and schools by gender, race, ethnicity, language status for attendance and achievement in language arts and mathematics for grades 3-8. 2. yonkers is the fourth largest city in new york state, with a population of 200,000. the district in this study was the yonkers public schools district. the district serves 26,000 students in 40 schools (numbers rounded). 3. dr. edwin m. quezada, superintendent of schools. 4. all intern’s names are pseudonyms 5. retrieved from nysede irts 2014-15 pmf report accessed at: http://p12.nysed.gov/1rs/pmf/2015/2015p mf-counts.pdf 6. average common branch class sizes in 2014-15 retrieved from http://www.p12.nysed.gov.irs/pmf2015/201 5avg-class-size.pdf 7. the ela/math aspirational performance measure is a performance measure aligned with collegeand career-readiness that reflects the consensus among admission directors in new york state's twoand four-year colleges that students who are well prepared to enter college without the need for remediation score at least 75 on t h e english regents examination and 80 on a regents mathematics examination. retrieved from http://www.regents.nysed.gov/common/re gents/files/documents/meetings/2011meeti ngs/may2011/511p12ccrd5.pdf references achieve 3000. retrieved from (http://www.achieve3000.com/). black, p. & william, d. 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(1984). experiential learning: experience as the source of learning and development. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. url: http://www.learningfromexperience.com/images/up loads/process-of-experiential-learning.pdf development and implementation of an administrative internship program 115     kratochwill, t. r., volpiansky, p., clements, m., & ball, c. (2007). professional development in implementing and sustaining multitier prevention models: implications for response to intervention. school psychology review, 36, 618-631. mcmaster, c. (2013). building inclusion from the ground up: a review of whole school re-culturing programmes for sustaining inclusive change. international journal of whole schooling, v9 n2 p1-24. retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1016788 my on. retrieved from (https://myon.com/). ncee. (2008). impact of two professional development interventions on early reading instruction and achievement. retrieved from https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/pubs/20084030/ ncee. 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(1987). educating the reflective practitioner: toward a new design for teaching and learning in the professions. san francisco: jossey-bass spezzini, s., austin, j.s., abbott, g. & littleton, r. (2009). role reversal within the mentoring dyad: collaborative mentoring on the effective instruction of english language learners. mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 17:4, 297-315 doi: 10.1080/13611260903284382. the impact of a collaborative family involvement program on latino families and children's educational performance trenton public schools. (2009). toolbox for planning rigorous instruction. retrieved from http://www.trenton.k12.nj.us/downloads/052bloom-16-17stemsforinstruction1.pdf undergraduate business mentoring program. mentoring & tutoring: partnership in learning, 16(4), 363-378.). retrieved from http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/13611 260802433692 wells, g. (2001). action, talk & text: learning & teaching through inquiry. new york, ny: teachers college press what’s gone wrong in america’s classrooms. stanford, ca: hoover institute press, 1998: 49–90. yildirim, k. & rasinski, t. (2014). reading fluency beyond english: investigations into reading fluency in turkish elementary students. international electronic journal of elementary education, v7 n1 p97-106 oct 2014. retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej1053598 about the author(s) esther wermuth, edd, is associate professor and chair of the department of educational leadership at mercy college. her current research interests include competency based preparation for principal preparation programs. edwin m. quezada, edd, is an experienced educator with 29 years of experience in urban education. in his long career, he has worked as a teacher, counselor, human relations facilitator, assistant principal and principal of middle and high schools as an authentic leader who values collaboration and research-based models of instructional leadership. he has been a central office administrator since 2013 and is currently the superintendent of new york's fourth largest school district. implications of lead poisoning 153 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: susan m. schultz (2014). international implications of lead poisoning: past, present and future. global education review, 3 (3). 153-164 international implications of lead poisoning in school aged children susan m. schultz st. john fisher college abstract the united states and the world health organization have worked to decrease lead exposure in children, but despite these efforts lead poisoning continues to exist in industrialized and developing countries. prevention is the only way to preclude the health, academic and behavioral problems that occur due to the effects of lead. public awareness remains a critical factor in prevention as the problem has not gone away, yet research on the effects of lead poisoning on school aged children is largely absent in educational journals. the effect of lead poisoning on health, academics, and behavior is reviewed. keywords lead poisoning in children, lead poisoning effects introduction despite efforts by the united states and the world health organization to decrease lead exposure in children, lead poisoning continues to exist in industrialized and developing countries. lead poisoning has long range effects on children, physically, academically, and behaviorally. a small amount of lead toxicity can cause physical harm and is associated with learning and behavioral problems. while blood lead levels (blls) have continued to decrease in industrialized/developed countries there is disparity among race and socioeconomic status. lead continues to pose a major health hazard to developing countries with marginalized populations, where 90% of children with elevated lead levels reside. population-wide loss of iq points from lead exposure leads to decreased productivity and loss of earning potential. what are the effects of lead poisoning and how does it occur? wick (2013) reports lead exposure causes irreversible cognitive and neurobehavioral abnormalities that reduce iq. schwartz (1994) estimates a 2.6 point decrease in iq for every 10 pg/dl. even low levels of 3-8 can cause mild iq decreases and/or attention deficit disorder. effects of lead exposure can also be growth related, as children exposed to lead are typically smaller sized than same aged peers. lack of energy, lack of appetite, anemia, neuropathy, central nervous system damage, seizures, delayed development, learning problems, behavior problems, and/or renal dysfunction are additional effects that can occur (center for ______________________________ corresponding author: susan m schultz, ralph c. wilson jr. school of education, st. john fisher college, 3690 east rochester avenue rochester, new york 14618 email: sschultz@sjfc.edu 154 global education review 3(3) disease control and prevention, 2015). lead poisoning occurs by swallowing or inhaling a substance with lead. lead gets into the blood stream and the body stores it in organs, tissues, bones and teeth. lead poisoning can occur suddenly when an individual is exposed to a large quantity of lead, but it usually builds up in the body slowly over months or even years, as seen in children exposed to small amounts of lead over time (center for disease control and prevention, 2015). research shows that lead can also be transmitted prenatally (o’malley & o’malley, 2015; ris, dietrich, succop, berger, & bornschein, 2004). in industrialized countries, products imported from countries that do not regulate or enforce lead guidelines continue to expose consumers to lead. products such as candies, toys, children’s jewelry, mini blinds for example may not be on consumers’ radar as a health concern, but may contain lead. drinking water can also be contaminated when lead leaches into the water as it flows through lead pipes, solder, valves or brass fixtures. the most common sources of children’s lead exposure occur from paint chips or dust even when paint is not peeling, and from contaminated soil. when paint becomes old or worn from activity like rubbing (such as doors, windowsills, painted cupboards or stairs), lead paint can get ground and scattered, and dust and soil can become contaminated. the same happens when paint is disturbed during remodeling or destruction (center for disease control and prevention, 2015). children who play on porches can be exposed to porch dust containing lead (wilson, dixon, jacobs, akoto, korfmacher, & breysse, 2015). parents may also bring home lead particles on their clothing, or bring scrap materials home from work environments (construction, repair shops) or hobbies (fishing weights, bullets, or stained glass). exterior dust can be tracked in or blown in, contaminating floors and surfaces. communities with high traffic areas and/or industrial pollution may have soil contaminated with lead (center for disease control and prevention, 2015). children under six are most at risk because they crawl on the floor, often put their hands in their mouths, and may eat non-edibles. young children experience more significant effects of lead as growing bodies absorb lead at a higher rate, and children’s brains are developing quickly throughout the time when they are most likely to be exposed (o’malley & o’malley, 2015). what are acceptable lead levels? any amount of lead can cause toxicity, and even low levels are associated with learning and behavioral problems. subsequently, in june 2012, the center for disease control (cdc) decreased the reference value from 10 micrograms to a marker of 5 micrograms per deciliter (5 pg/dl). evens (2012) posits that often the assigned level by the cdc is interpreted as an acceptable or safe level of lead that does not warrant action or concern, unduly allowing children to continue to be exposed to lead. additionally, the cdc threshold levels are considered as benchmarks by other agencies “when setting action levels for lead in dust, water, food, consumer products and in other environments” (p. 116). although guidelines vary by country, any amount of lead can cause toxicity, and even low levels are associated with learning and behavioral problems. subsequently, in june 2012, the center for disease control (cdc) decreased the reference value from 10 micrograms to a marker of 5 micrograms per deciliter (5 pg/dl). currently, over 450,000 children in the united states have blood lead levels greater than 5 micrograms per deciliter. evens (2012) posits that often the assigned level by the cdc is interpreted as an acceptable or safe level of lead, that does not warrant action or implications of lead poisoning 155 concern, allowing children to continue to be exposed to lead. additionally, not all countries follow the cdc guideline. germany set a more aggressive guideline at 3.5 micrograms per deciliter (3.5 pg/dl). in contrast, canadian researchers o’grady and perron (2011) claim “canadian public health discourse portrays this [lead] issue as a problem of the past or a us problem” thwarting public concern, however, they explain political power struggles resulted with health canada as the “dominant authority, thereby regulating important research initiatives to obscurity and also shaping a vastly weaker regulatory response to lead than occurred in the united states” leaving no legislative protection for canadian children (p. s176). canadian lead issues were thought to be a problem of the past since lead was removed from paint and gasoline; however, children are still living in lead contaminated environments. o’grady and perron assert canada has “unfinished business with leadbased paint” (p. s182). further, monitoring in canada is inconsistent or non-existent across communities, and when monitoring does occur, higher guidance levels of 10 micrograms per deciliter identify less lead exposed children. taylor, winder, and lanphear (2014) assert policies that aim to keep lead below a particular bar are “obsolete and will inevitably fail to protect children from the toxic effects of lead” (p. 114). taylor et al. state that in australia, there is overwhelming evidence that the lead level set (10 pg/dl) is too high, and “procrastination on this issue will be the thief of an equitable and healthy start to life for australia’s lead exposed children” (p. 116). lead poisoning and academic achievement the results from ris et al. (2004) investigation indicates prenatal exposure to lead has an impact during the early years particularly for males in the area of attention and visuoconstruction (fine motor visual-spatial awareness and construction), with effects diminishing by the end of preschool, while postnatal exposure for both males and females has more long term wide range developmental effects. other studies show that even low levels of lead poisoning in early childhood can impede education in the elementary school years, and also contribute to the achievement gap. the objective of miranda, kim, overstreet galeano, paul, hull and morgan’s research (2007) was to determine if blood lead levels in early childhood were related to educational achievement in elementary school, as measured by end of grade testing. using the same sample population, they linked blood lead level surveillance data from a state registry in north carolina to later academic achievement, controlling for limited english proficiency. they assert positive blood lead levels in early childhood are related to lower educational achievement, with more impact being noted in reading than mathematics. they also noted that a higher proportion of black children had higher lead levels, stating “lowincome and minority children are systematically exposed to more lead in north carolina and nationally” (p. 1247). evens (2012) also notes that lead poisoning rates are consistently reported to be higher in urban geographic areas across the united states. zhang, baker, tufts, raymond, salihu, and elliott (2013) assessed the long term effects of early childhood lead exposure by linking surveillance data from the detroit public health department and academic achievement, more specifically, standardized test scores in grades 3, 5, and 8, adjusting for racial and socioeconomic disparities. their data set consisted of 21,281 students (8831 in grade 3, 7708 in grade 5 and 4742 in grade 8). the sample was 56% male, and 91% black. zhang et al. found a significant association between lead exposure and the academic achievement scores as measured by 156 global education review 3(3) the meap, a standardized test taken by michigan public school students from elementary through junior high school. applying multivariate logistic regression analysis to determine the effects of childhood lead exposure in respect to math, science, and reading scores, they found the response relationship suggests the higher a student’s blood lead level was in early childhood, the worse he or she performed on the test. their study also showed that lead levels less than 5 pg/dl was still adversely associated with academic achievement. significant is the fact that their study looked at affects at grade 8, demonstrating that early lead exposure can have long term effects on cognitive outcomes. though the focus of studies tends to be centered on urban areas, lead poisoning can occur in any geographic location. thatcher, lester, mcalaster, horst and ignasias (1983) conducted one of the few studies with a rural population on the eastern shore of maryland. their sample of 149 children were primarily white (124), with 68 of them being males and 81 females. although all students were in the public school system, participants were recruited via newspaper advertisements and with cooperation form the somerset county board of education. the researchers were unaware of each student’s academic standing and cognitive abilities. psychometric tests were administered, with children 6 to 16 assessed using the wechsler intelligence scale for children (wiscr) and the wechsler preschool and primary scale of intelligence administered to 5 year olds. in addition, the wide range achievement test (wrat) was used to assess school achievement; the motor impairment test (mit) was administered to assess gross body coordination and manual dexterity, and the purdue pegboard test to assess fine motor movements. groups were established based on academic standing of gifted, normal, low achievers, and very low achievers, based on each child’s wisc-r and wrat scores. using hair sample taken from the nape of the neck, thatcher et al. discovered, by using regression analyses, a systematic and strong relationship exists between the concentration of lead in children’s hair and their intelligence test performance. they assert that cognitive function is “affected before any signs of gross motor impairment are seen” (p. 355). exposure to low levels of lead affected cognitive processes; however, motor movements were not affected, leading the researchers to believe cognitive functioning “seem to be more sensitive indicators of the effects of low levels of lead” (p. 358). lead poisoning and behavior the treatment of lead exposed children study enrolled 780 urban children exposed to lead from four geographic areas (baltimore, newark, philadelphia, and cincinnati), measuring blood lead levels in the children periodically between age 2 and 7. at age 5, the conners’ parent rating scalerevised (cprs-r) was administered, and at age 7, the behavior assessment system for children (basc) was administered. controlling for iq, data showed that lead exposure was associated with behavior problems, with “increased risk for teacher rated externalizing and school behavior problems and parent rated behavioral symptoms index” (chen, cai, dietrich, radcliffe, & rogan, 2007, p. 654). the effects of lead poisoning on behavior have been documented to go beyond the childhood years. in a longitudinal study conducted by dietrich, ris, succop, berger, and bornschein (2001), they found both prenatal and postnatal lead poisoning was associated with antisocial acts and delinquency. the researchers recruited 216 adjudicated delinquent youths from the cincinnati lead study. in a case control study, they found these youth had significantly higher concentrations of bone lead implications of lead poisoning 157 than a control group of socio-demographically youth from students who attended high school in pittsburg. the subjects, between 15-17 years of age, and their parents reported increased frequency of delinquent acts, not associated with other risk factors. wright, dietrich, ris, hornung, wessel, lanphear, ho, and rae (2008) followed lead exposed children into young adulthood. in cincinnati, ohio, they compared the arrest records of 250 individuals aged 19-24, whose families were recruited at birth for the study, between 1979 and 1984. prenatal blood exposure was measured in the late first or early second trimester, and the children were measured first quarterly, then biannually, through age 6.5 years old. arrest records were obtained from hamilton county spanning from age 18 to the participants current age. the sample was largely african american (90%), with relatively equal amounts of males and females, with 73% of the families having the lowest or second lowest socioeconomic status as measured by the hollingshead four factor index of social position. the researchers identified a total of 800 arrests, with 108 for violent offenses, with no significant difference by sex, demonstrating “an association between developmental exposure to lead and adult criminal behavior” (p. 732). the researchers’ question whether “one factor in the disproportional representation of africanamericans in crime statistics could well be the historically higher exposure to lead in these communities” (p. 101). needleman, mcfarland, ness, fienberg, and tobin (2002) conducted a similar study of 194 adolescents aged 12-18 in alleghany county, pennsylvania, and did not find delinquent behavior confined to one race or ethnicity. their data showed an “association between lead at asymptomatic doses and adjudicated delinquency” (p. 716). why and where does lead poisoning occur? industrialized countries despite initiatives by the united states to ban lead from paint in 1978 and from gasoline in 1996, lead poisoning still remains a problem in the nation today. childhood lead exposure occurs in industrialized countries, where poor government decisions and environmental accidents have negatively affected or potentially affect the well-being of their children. simply overlooking geographic pockets where there are residual high levels of lead is also problematic. accidental exposure the gold king mine waste spill in 2015 created an environmental disaster near silverton, colorado when workers accidentally released three million gallons of mustard yellow colored toxic waste water from the mine into cement creek, a tributary of the animas river. the acid mine waste water contained lead, and other metals and toxic elements. the environmental protection agency (epa), who took responsibility for the spill, was criticized for not letting the residents of colorado and new mexico know until the day after the spill. local residents were warned not to drink, bathe in or fish in the waters. environmental impact included contaminated wells in flood plains, and fishing, farming, and implications for animals including livestock until sedimentation dilutes the pollutants. although the mustard color of the water disappeared, invisible toxins remained. the epa continues to monitor the water, irrigation waterways have been flushed and water has returned to pre-spill levels. while short term consequences have been addressed, the long term effects are yet to be determined (chief, artiola, wilkinson, beamer, & maier, 2015). in april 2014, in flint, michigan, as a cost saving measure, the state switched the water 158 global education review 3(3) supply for the city of flint from lake huron to the flint river. the decision proved dangerous and costly to the residents of flint, exposing over 100,000 residents (over 9,000 children six and under) to lead and other contaminants when corrosive flint river water caused lead to leach from pipes and fixtures into the water. data collection indicated lead levels doubled and in some cases tripled in toddlers who were tested. the city of 100,000 no longer has a grocery store, which compounds access to clean bottled water. as exposure to lead has a long term effect, local pediatrician hanna-attisha (in ganim and tran, 2016) states: if you were to put something in a population to keep them down for generation and generations to come, it would be lead. it's a well-known, potent neurotoxin. there's tons of evidence on what lead does to a child, and it is one of the most damning things that you can do to a population. it drops your iq, it affects your behavior, it's been linked to criminality, it has multigenerational impacts. there is no safe level of lead in a child. (http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/11/healt h/toxic-tap-water-flint-michigan/) disproportionality by income and race in the united states, there are disproportionate numbers of children who test positive for lead poisoning by income and race. although strides have been made over the last 40 years, racial disparities remain firmly intact. with the dwindling of public resources, lead poisoning is placed low on public health and education agendas. currie (2005) indicates that poor and black children are more likely to demonstrate unsafe lead levels, “increasingly correlated with minority status, poverty, and residence in decaying older neighborhoods” (p. 125). zhang et al. (2013) assert that a significant number of properties in low income areas have been poorly maintained, and “inadequate attention to this issue may lead to the reemergence of this preventable environmental problem, turning the clock back on years of national, state, and local successes” (p. 72). further compounding the problem, waterhouse and smith (2015) report that the state of indiana is not on target to meet the goal to eradicate lead by 2020. “the state continues to fall short of the federal minimum screening guideline, which requires that all medicaid recipients be tested” but indiana “consistently tests fewer than 36% of medicaid recipient children” (p. 100). additionally, indiana uses the higher guideline of 10 pg/dl, and according to waterhouse and smith (2015), this undercuts the number of children identified as being exposed to lead in the state. this demonstrates the inconsistencies evident in lead screening and interpretation of guidelines, as well as supports the assertion that lead poisoning is placed low on the public health agenda. indiana also focuses on lead based paint; however, much of the exposure to the children in the state comes from soil-based contamination. evens (2010) states that children who were born outside the country or those who lived outside the country within six months before their blood tests also showed particularly elevated risks for lead poisoning, in comparison to their u.s. born peers (p. 19). the cdc (2015) also reports that parents may rely on home remedies of medications from foreign countries that are not regulated for lead. examples of such remedies are greta or azacon, a hispanic remedy for upset stomach, litargirio used as a deodorant especially in the dominican republic, and ba-baw-san, a chinese herb used to treat colic. ghasard, a tonic used in india and daw tray, a digestive aid used in thailand, as well as other traditional cultural medicines and remedies have all been traced back to cases of lead poisoning (mayo clinic, 2015). http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/11/health/toxic-tap-water-flint-michigan/ http://www.cnn.com/2016/01/11/health/toxic-tap-water-flint-michigan/ implications of lead poisoning 159 developing countries while blood lead levels (blls) have continued to decrease in industrialized/developed countries, they continue to pose a major health hazard to marginalized populations, as 90% of children with elevated lead levels reside in developing countries. population wide loss of iq points leads to decreased productivity and loss of earning potential. attina and trasande (2013) report an estimated total cost of $977 billion of international dollars lost by low and middle income countries based on the “relationship between lead exposure and dose-related decrements in iq score, the latter in turn being associated with decreased lifetime earning power” (p. 1099). public awareness of the harmful effects of lead are low in many of these communities, and the rest of the world is not paying attention (kessler, 2014). sources of lead exposure can come from environmental circumstances such as living near lead mining, smelting, battery recycling, or gold-ore processing plants. despite some mine closures, scavenging of metal scraps in abandoned mines and wastes continue to serve as sources of metal pollution. in kabwe, the capital of zambia’s central province, extensive soil contamination from lead-zinc mining poses a significant health hazard (yabe, nakayama, ikenaka, yohannes, bortey-sam, oroszlany, muzandu, choongo, kabalo, ntapisha, mweene, umemura, & ishizuka, 2015). yabe et al. report that few studies investigating the impact of mining and processing plants in developing countries occur. their study focused on identifying high lead levels in children under the age of seven who need medical intervention, in two towns where high blls were found. the townships were selected due to high levels of lead in the soil, likely due to vehicle traffic and mine dust. of the 246 children tested, all had alarming blls of toxicity, eight children demonstrating levels of 150 through 427 micrograms per deciliter, well above the guidance level of 5 micrograms per deciliter (yabe et al., 2015). in nigeria, more than 400 children died, and others were left with numerous long-term neurological impairments as a result of gold-ore mining and processing. exposure to lead dust through ingestion and/ or inhalation caused widespread outbreaks of childhood lead poisoning in nigeria villages where gold-ore processing occurs (yo, dooyema, neri, durant, jefferies, medina-marino, de ravello, thoroughman, davis, dankoli, samson, ibrahim, okechukwu, umar-tsafe, dama, & brown, 2012). as the world-wide demand for gold has increased, rural communities have adopted small scale gold ore processing. yo et al. (2012) investigated an outbreak of lead poisoning in children in two rural nigerian villages. in these villages, 25% of the children under the age of five died from confirmed lead poisoning in the previous 12 months, with 82% experiencing convulsions before death. in response, their “objective was to rapidly identify and prioritize villages with childhood lead poisoning for interventions” (p. 1451). they collected indoor environmental samples from household floor dust from areas in villages where children ate and slept, and outdoor environmental soil samples from public areas. one hundred thirty one villages were identified, and the team focused on 114 of them due to time and logistical restraints; however 40 of these villages were not visited due to poor road conditions that made them inaccessible. yo et al. (2012) assert that the environmental impacts of small scale gold-ore processing are often overlooked, illustrating the need for monitoring and prevention. even with interventions such as public education about ways to reduce lead exposure, recontamination can occur when exposure factors are not eliminated (p. 1454). 160 global education review 3(3) prevention is multifaceted cost-benefit analysis gould (2009) completed a cost-benefit analysis in the united states. in a study that reviewed a cohort of children ages six and under who were exposed to lead based paint, she compared the cost of hazard control against the benefits of risk reduction (health care, lifetime earnings, special education, and the direct costs of crime). gould determined, “given the high costs of societal costs of inaction, lead hazard control appears well worth the price” of targeted early interventions (p. 1162). comparing the range of state surveillance data and national surveys against a range of costs of prevention and control, she estimated the cost of hazard control to be between $1-11 billion, far less than benefits reduction estimates (health care$11-53 billion; lifetime earnings$165-233 billion; tax revenue $25-35 billion; special education$30-146 billion; attention-deficit disorder$267 million, and direct costs of crime$181-269 billion), representing a net savings of $181-269 billion (p. 1162). awareness as awareness about the implications of lead poisoning is spread by the world health organization and other international health organizations, many countries are attempting to decrease lead exposure. research in pakistan demonstrates the need to further explore sources of lead, after lead in petrol has been eliminated, but other sources such as lead based paints, traditional health care remedies, occupational hazards, lead in water sources, and cosmetics continue to be a major source of elevated lead levels among children. further, maintenance of houses is relatively poor (kadir, janjua, kristensen, fatmi, & sathiakumar, 2008). kadir et al. report that it is difficult to garner a complete picture of the status of lead exposure in pakistan as most studies were a result of convenience sampling. attempts to decrease lead exposure occurred in china in 2011 with the implementation of strict lead control policies, state chen, huang, yan, li, sun and bi (2014). china’s childhood lead levels were significantly higher than developed countries, and chen et al. (2014) assert lead poisoning still remains a common public health problem. lead mines, lead processing plants, electronic waste recycling centers, and wire rope factories were cited as potential causes of lead exposure for children living near these sources. chen et al. followed 106 children, ages one through 14 years old, each with a median time of four years of residence near a wire rope factory in the zhuhang subdistrict. environmental sampling included dust and soil sampling, vegetable and rice sampling, and drinking water sampling to measure lead exposure before and after lead usage control policies were implemented. chen et al. posit there is widespread “disregard for environmental control” in lead related industries “in pursuit of economic growth” leading to weak and limited control by some local governments in china. chen et al. found that strict lead pollution controls on the wire rope industry demonstrated success in decreasing lead levels in children living near wire rope factories, and “given the high childhood bll in china, strict environmental control regulations in leadrelated industries should be implemented to prevent lead poisoning in millions of chinese children” (p. 12935). li, cao, xu, cai, shen, and yan (2014) agree that although the chinese government has made strides in improving and preventing lead poisoning, “lead pollution and its adverse effects are still common in china” (p. 116). zhang et al. (2013) asserts that delayed or missed identification of children with elevated lead levels impacts school achievement and their health. newman, lowry, mall and berger (2013) discuss an “environmental health gap,” noting that medical students and pediatricians “report implications of lead poisoning 161 low self-efficacy regarding environmental history taking, discussing environmental exposures with parents, and finding diagnostic and treatment resources related to environmental exposures” (p. 9). ris, et al. (2004) alert us to the effects of prenatal lead exposure. consistently completing an environmental assessment of expectant mothers and young children would identify children who are at risk of lead exposure sooner. ducatman (2002) states that it can take greater than 10 years to turn over one half the body’s stored lead, as lead in hair, nails and teeth has a very slow turn-over rate, which emphasizes the importance of early identification. maintaining a healthy and well balanced diet is important for all children, regardless of locality, in the fight against lead poisoning. children who have insufficient calcium, iron and zinc tend to absorb more lead (currie, 2005). simple hand washing before eating can also cut down on lead particles being transmitted to food, or children placing contaminated hands into their mouths. caregivers of young children should teach proper hand washing techniques that, hopefully, will carry over into other environments. furthermore, consumers who are completing minor home repair projects should take care against exposure to lead. attempting to remove paint by sanding generates a large amount of small particles, and painting over it may not seal in the lead. removal of lead paint should be supervised by a lead safe certified contractor, who will dispose of hazardous waste appropriately, according to the environmental protection agency (2014). a list of lead safe certified contractors can be found on the epa website. waterhouse and smith (2015) maintain in the united states, increased funding is necessary to address clean up measures. individuals who live at or near the poverty line “should not be required to channel their limited resources to cleaning up the dangerous mess made by the unrestrained and remediated pollution caused by some of america’s most successful companies” (p. 113). “lead in porch dust can expose children through direct contact or track-in to the home” state wilson et al. (2015, p. 129). in rochester, new york, they sampled 79 homes immediately after lead removal and found that the lead levels on the porches increased significantly, immediately after work was completed elsewhere in the home, but not on the porch. they assert that inadequate clean up after lead hazard removal can create areas that are more hazardous after the work was completed than before it was done. wilson et al. advocate for guidelines or standards to be set for porch lead dust post clean up, “so lead hazard control activities do not inadvertently expose children to hazardous levels of lead dust” (p. 135). parents should also stay informed of product recalls, staying alert by checking the food and drug administration website, searching for product recalls related to lead. another way to stay informed of product recalls is by searching www.recalls.gov website. parents and consumers can search this site specific to lead. summary lead poisoning in childhood remains a critical health concern despite public awareness. given what we know about lead poisoning, researchers posit that the primary way to control for it is through prevention, as not only does exposure to lead affect school readiness, academic functioning, and behavior, it can have long term consequences for health and wellness (currie, 2005; evens, 2010; miranda et al., 2007; schwartz, 1994; thatcher et al., 1983; wilson, et al., zhang et al., 2013). according to kessler (2014), public health workers in the united states, who have been working to decrease lead levels across the nation, simply assumed that the rest of the world had followed suit. however, http://www.recalls.gov/ 162 global education review 3(3) lead based paints continue to be freely sold in at least 40 countries, and although lead in gasoline/petrol has been eliminated in many countries, the residual effects of leaded gasoline remain. recommendations the most critical factor in decreasing childhood lead poisoning is making the public aware of the adverse effects of lead exposure. while there are best practices for testing for lead exposure, there is little repercussion for not adhering to the current laws. mandatory screening at school entry would identify additional children, but harmful effects of lead may have already occurred during the preschool years. routine screenings during well baby exams are the best possibility for early identification. equipment and testing supplies, however, can be costly and not readily available at all pediatricians’ offices, resulting in many children falling through the cracks. school personnel must address the needs of students affected by lead poisoning, and work with families to raise awareness as well as facilitate community connections regarding prevention and cleanup. although recent literature can be found in health and medical journals, the absence of current literature in education data bases alludes that it is no longer on the radar of educational researchers. considering the educational and societal implications, the lead problem warrants our attention. the most significant impact on the war on lead will require eliminating exposure to lead contaminates. this will require enforcing regulations and funding for cleanup, including appropriate disposal of lead toxins. ogunseitan and smith (2007) assert that the return on the investment of lead hazard control is significant. the benefits derived from lead prevention in the long run could save billions of dollars per year. though over time, costs of remediation can be 220 times higher than estimated costs of prevention, the upfront expenses associated with lead hazard control are of concern to tax payers and politicians who do not realize immediate benefits (jones, 2012), and are overwhelmed by the potential costs. legislation, however, can only be effective as a primary prevention strategy if consistently implemented. rogers, lucht, sylvaria, cigna, vanderslice, and vivier (2014) did not find consistent implementation due to non-compliant rental properties and properties with exemptions. subsequently, decreasing lead poisoning will require a collaborative and coordinated effort from parents, pediatricians, school personnel, housing authorities, nutritionists, and community organizations, with support and funding from local, state and national governments. working as a team, the challenges of lead poisoning can and must be addressed. references attina, t. m. & trasande, l. 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(2012, october). childhood lead poisoning associated with gold ore processing: a village-level investigationzamfara state, nigeria, october-november 2010. environmental health perspectives 120(10), 1450-1455. zhang, n., baker, h. w., tufts, m., raymond, r. e., salihu, h., & elliott, m. r. (2013). early childhood lead exposure and academic achievement: evidence from detroit public schools, 2008-2010. american journal of public health, 103(3), 72-77. about the author susan m. schultz, ed.d, is an associate professor/ graduate program director in the department of inclusive education at st. john fisher college in rochester, new york. her research interests include the long term effects of lead poisoning, students with disabilities transitioning to college, and social media. 70 global education review 3(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mason, lee l., andrews, alonzo, rivera, christopher j. & davis, don (2016). free-operant field experiences: differentially reinforcing successive approximations to behavior analysis through a shaperspace. global education review, 3 (4). 70-83 free-operant field experiences: differentially reinforcing successive approximations to behavior analysis through a shaperspace lee l. mason the university of texas at san antonio alonzo andrews the university of texas at san antonio christopher j. rivera east carolina university don davis the university of texas at san antonio abstract over the past few years an increasing number of schools and community organizations have developed transformative learning spaces referred to as “makerspaces” for research and training purposes. makerspaces are organizations in which members sharing similar interests in science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) gather to work on self-selected projects. proponents of makerspaces highlight the implicit benefits arising from participants’ increased engagement with complex technical content in a voluntary, authentic context. we extend the makerspace concept to applications of training special education teachers to address the needs of students with autism spectrum disorder (asd). applied behavior analysis (aba) has vast empirical support for treating asd. we believe the makerspace model provides a platform for developing a new generation of special education teachers. however, rather than making novel products, the focus is on shaping the behavior-analytic repertoires of special education teachers. in the field of aba, the term “shaping” describes the differential reinforcement of successive approximations to a target behavior. accordingly, we propose the name shaperspace to describe a novel clinical training approach to developing special education teachers who employ research-validated interventions for individuals with asd. the supervision model described in this article is provided, not as a recommendation, but as an exemplar that has developed over four years’ contingency shaping and continues to be refined. we appeal to the reader to consider the shaperspace as a starting point from which skills developed through free-operant field experiences will ultimately be shaped and selected by the naturally occurring contingencies of the environment. free-operant field experiences 71 keywords special education, applied behavior analysis, teacher education, field experience can you tell me, socrates, whether virtue is acquired by teaching or by practice? meno, 380 b.c.e introduction field experiences are considered one of the most influential determinants over preservice teacher development (freeman, 2010; glomb, midenhall, mason, & salzberg, 2009; wilson, 2006). long considered an essential component of teacher education programs (alger & kopcha, 2009), practica experiences serve a variety of purposes, such as bridging research to practice (simpson, 2006), and shaping effective teaching behaviors (engelmann, 2004). in this way, field experiences serve as transducers between declarative knowledge and procedural knowledge (baum, 2005). these field experiences serve as opportunities for practicing educators to refine their skills in the application of evidence-based practices. ensuring that preservice providers can select and implement appropriate interventions has been a difficult task but one that remains of high importance when specifically considering the soaring prevalence rates of children with autism (garland, vasquez, & pearl, 2012). the national professional development center on autism spectrum disorders (2016) has identified 27 research-validated practices, of which the majority are rooted in principles of applied behavior analysis (aba). the success of behavioral treatments (reichow & woolery, 2009) and the positive strides in health insurance reform have led to substantial increases in services provided to individuals with autism (leblanc, heinicke, & baker, 2012). these changes have led school districts to seek out teachers who are dually certified as board certified behavior analysts (bcbas) to address the complex needs of this population (mason, perales, & gallegos, 2013). whether educators are dually certified or not, establishing a significant behavior-analytic foundation may be invaluable. the behavior analyst certification board (bacb) has identified 115 minimum competencies to be addressed throughout the preservice training of behavior analysts. included among these skills is the ability to design and implement the full range of functional assessment procedures, a procedure explicitly stated within the reauthorization of the individuals with disabilities education act when working with children who demonstrate problematic behavior in the classroom. however, “the meaning of functional assessment isn’t entirely clear in the context of the law” (hallahan, kauffman & pullen, 2012, p. 223). consequently, bacb credentials have become increasingly valuable among school psychologists, special education teachers, and teaching assistants (bacb, 2015). after all, behavior analysis itself is the natural science of learning. at a time when psychology was dominated by trial-based research, skinner (1938) had the prescience to examine responding under the individual’s own volition, a methodology he deemed “free-operant”. vargas (2013) recounts the story of her father’s excitement upon discovering this novel procedure for studying behavior: i can easily recall the excitement of that first complete ______________________________ corresponding author: lee l. mason, department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching, the university of texas at san antonio, san antonio, tx 78249. email: lee.mason@utsa.edu 72 global education review 3(4) extinction curve. i had made contact with pavlov at last: here was a curve uncorrupted by the physiological process of ingestion. it was an orderly change due to nothing more than a special contingency of reinforcement. it was pure behavior (skinner, 1956, p. 226). skinner’s operant conditioning, which ascribes control to what happens after behavior occurs, was an extension of pavlov’s (1927) work on respondent conditioning, which explained behavior as the result of an eliciting stimulus. at the time, researchers largely described behavior as a response to a preceding stimulus. through the use of his free-operant procedure, however, skinner was able to demonstrate that largely our behavior is a function of what happens next. “in fact, most of our behavior in the routine affairs of everyday life is clearly operant, in that it operates or acts upon the environment to produce the satisfaction of our basic needs” (keller & schoenfeld, 1950, p. 49, emphasis in original). as is often the case with laboratory procedures, transfer to the applied setting only came much later. research on behavior-analytic intervention for individuals with severe disabilities first appeared in publication in the latter half of the 20th century (cf. ayllon & azrin, 1968; lovaas, schaeffer, & simmons, 1965). these procedures were built upon the foundation of operant conditioning, but focused heavily on trial-based antecedent manipulation to elicit a particular skill before delivering a reinforcer.1 perhaps best known of these early methodologies is discrete trial training, a method of simplifying instruction to enhance children's learning (smith, 2001). “only at certain intervals is the response made possible. this is essentially the trial-by-trial procedure employed by thorndike in his problem-box experiments” (keller & schoenfeld, 1950, p. 55). while effective at developing complex behavior, the treatment gains from these early efforts “have been specific to the particular environment in which the client was treated, substantial relapse has been observed at followup, and no client has been reported as recovered” (lovaas, 1987). gradually, research began to appear on applied behavior analysis in the natural environment (allen, hart, buell, harris, & wolf, 1964; hart & risley, 1975). these free-operant techniques emphasized reinforcing successive approximations over trial-based, antecedent manipulations. for instance, incidental teaching is the process in which the natural environment is strategically set up to include several reinforcing stimuli. these stimuli in return are used to elicit interactions from a learner utilizing operational training procedures. access to these stimuli is only granted when correct behaviors are demonstrated, consequently reinforcing the behavior and producing a positive instructional sequence. research has long supported the use of incidental teaching to improve language skills in students with disabilities as it increases both skill acquisition and generalization (mcgee, krantz, mason, & mcclannahan, 1983). in a comparison of traditional teaching methods vs. incidental teaching mcgee, krantz, mason, & mcclannahan (1985) found that when teaching prepositional phrases to children with autism who had language delays, these students were better able to generalize preposition use across settings, materials, and teachers. moreover, participants were more likely to spontaneously use speech during instruction. allowing a learner to naturally gravitate towards reinforcing stimuli potentially increases motivation for accessing the reinforcer, providing an instructor the opportunity to shape targeted behaviors within a natural context (anderson & romanczyk, 1999). free-operant field experiences 73 despite the many benefits of free-operant learning, these methodologies have only recently gained momentum in higher education, where instruction-based methodologies are still the norm (boyce & hineline, 2002). presentational methods are often reinforcing to the instructor due to their relative efficiency and broad impact, but they often fail to exact long-term behavior change over the learner. skinner (1957) observed that, “the considerable difference between a given state of affairs and the verbal behavior which it comes to control means that, to a listener, verbal behavior lacks the richness, complexity, and detail of ‘direct experience’” (p. 127). vargas (2013) is quick to acknowledge that “unfortunately, presenting is not teaching…. any definition of teaching must include the effect on student behavior” (pp. 4-5). within the course of developing future educators, classroom-based field experiences become critical because they allow preservice teachers and behavior analysts to actively participate in the natural environment. a commonly employed methodology for training preservice behavior analysts (pbas) is behavioral skills training (bst), a trial-based training methodology that consists of four distinct component parts: instructions, modeling, rehearsal, and feedback. researchers have found bst to be effective for training preservice behavior technicians (lerman, hawkins, hillman, shireman, & nissen, 2015). the efficacy of bst has been so profound that the bacb explicitly recommends it for teaching the 115 skills in the task list. despite its efficacy, however, we posit that bst, like the other trialbased methodologies that came before it, may ultimately restrict the student’s repertoire to a collection of tricks (baer, wolf, & risley, 1968). proliferation of the makerspace increasingly, attention is now being given to the phenomenon of making and makerspaces in current culture and educational research (see vossoughi & bevan, 2014). educators and make advocates extoll the pedagogical affordances of making to include greater engagement with, and concomitant learning of, technologically complex production processes (e.g., blikstein, 2013). research indicates that students engage more readily, more intently, and in a more authentically interdisciplinary manner with make projects than classroom practice (e.g., l. martin, dixon, & hagood, 2014; vossoughi & bevan, 2014); making being a more dynamic learning than can ordinarily be achieved through instruction-laden or lecture-based teaching. makerspaces have been posited to positively influence learning in many ways. the literature is replete with examples of successful stem identity trajectories nourished in childhoods rich with making and tinkering. for example, disessa (2001), the physicist and educational researcher, explains that much of his understanding of physics was rooted in early tinkering with household electronics. moreover, making has significantly shaped scientific success stories for individuals not commonly associated with the maker movement. a stark example of an uncelebrated tinkering trajectory is that of b.f. skinner, the father of radical behaviorism, who was an avid childhood tinkerer (skinner, 1985). skinner’s tinkering is a compelling example as he was a lifelong maker, whose making later translated directly to discoveries in the science of behavior. foremost, his discovery of schedules of reinforcement was made possible by his making; namely, the graphs that rendered schedules of reinforcement more observable were discovered through the process of tinkering with the lever press equipment that then generated logarithmic graphs (skinner, 1979). for skinner making was so essential to the understanding of behavior that he required many of his students to manufacture operant conditioning chambers in order to better understand the principles of behavior (skinner, 1979). 74 global education review 3(4) the rat is right lindsley (2013) describes working in skinner’s lab at harvard, trying to reproduce reinforcement schedules from the behavior of organisms (1938): while a doctoral student at harvard, i proudly went to fred skinner with a cumulative record of a rat's lever pressing, showing an extinction curve slightly different from the ones published in the behavior of organisms (skinner, 1938). charlie catania (1991) has recently mentioned how we graduate students would compete with each other to try to find skinner wrong. i expected skinner to say, 'you didn't conduct the experiment right.' but no! skinner said, 'the book's wrong! the rat knows best! that's why we still have him in the experiment!' by deferring to the data lindsley had generated, skinner highlighted the pragmatic nature of behavior analysis. rules and instructions are products of the history of reinforcement of the speaker, and will hold true to the extent that future contexts are extrapolated, interpolated, or stipulated by this history (engelmann & steely, 2004). though rule governance is an effective means of efficiently conditioning behavior, the results are generally less precise than the control achieved through contingency shaping (mason, 2015; skinner, 1969). moreover, reliance on instruction-laden, lecture-based forms of teaching inherently lead to “hoping” for generalized control of the natural environment (stokes & baer, 1977). hope is collateral behavior that results from a discriminative history of lack of control. in situations in which we have control, or can describe the relationship between environment and behavior, we have no use for hope. the distinction between an antecedent and a discriminative stimulus is the degree of conditioning between the two. in teacher education, we can provide various antecedent strategies that allow us to hope for success: didactic instruction about effective teaching practices, placement in a classroom with a strong teacher to serve as a model, etc. hopeful as these strategies are, however, they provide us no information about how the preservice teacher will perform in the future. in other words, we have no data to supplant the need to hope and provide for analysis. in this sense, analysis is the antithesis of hope. as it relates to teacher education, how do we condition pbas to rely on data rather than hope? how do we appropriately condition the pba under the control of student performance, rather than superstition? we propose free-operant field experiences as the solution to such problems. incidental teaching in higher education takes a somewhat different form than that described in traditional research (hart & risley, 1975). specifically, in contrast to the relatively immediate interactions of preschoolers, shaping composite repertoires at the university level requires multiple interlocking contingencies employed across temporally-extended patterns of behavior. incidental teaching in higher education incidental teaching consists of the following steps, which have been extrapolated from fenske, krantz, and mcclannahan (2001) to include a broader range of behavior: (1) arrange the environment to manipulate motivating operations, (2) allow the preservice teacher to identify the structural elements of the curriculum, (3) specify reinforcement criteria, and (4) differentially reinforce successive free-operant field experiences 75 approximations to the target response. here we describe each step as it applies to the shaperspace, which “permits the development of adaptive behavior that otherwise might never have been included in an organism’s repertoiry” (keller & schoenfeld, 1950, p. 186). arranging the environment the first step of incidental teaching is to arrange the environment to manipulate motivating operations. everyday human interactions may be the subject of behavior analysis, but applied behavior analysis specifically emphasizes socially-valid techniques. to this end, the context we have established for training pbas is a university-based verbal behavior laboratory to address the behavioral deficits characteristic of autism and other language disorders. this shaperspace is a 1,363 sq ft room containing a jungle gym with monkey bars and a swing, an exercise trampoline, a slide, a playhouse, and a collapsible tunnel. a toy shelf is located at the entrance to the space, and centered in the room are three rotating towers with clear bins full of age-appropriate toys. along opposite walls of the laboratory are six 4’x7’ work areas, three on either side of the room. each work area includes a rectangular table with three chairs, and is separated from the adjacent workstation by a toy shelf filled with opaque colored bins. most critical to the shaperspace are the eight children with autism and other language disorders who are invited each semester from the community to receive upwards of 75 hours of behavior-analytic intervention focusing on strengthening verbal behavior. this intervention is performed by graduate students accruing supervised field experience hours necessary to sit for the bcba exam. the pbas who volunteer their time to accrue hours in the shaperspace are assigned to work with a student for the duration of the semester. ninety-minute sessions are conducted monday through thursday for approximately 13 weeks. given the relative short duration of services for children who participate in our program, we primarily focus on conditioning proportional levels of stimulus control over verbal behavior. depending on the student’s present level of functional performance, this may include selection-based responding, topography-based responding, stimulus equivalence, or equitemporal reciprocity. individuals whose verbal behavior is under proportional levels of control are often described as fluent. in contrast, individuals whose verbal behavior is under disproportionate levels of control are frequently described as autistic. our narrow, yet ambitious intervention efforts afford multiple opportunities for pbas to develop a complex behavior-analytic repertoire based upon the 115 tasks identified in the bacb fourth edition task list (bacb, 2012). most importantly, it does so within the context of the natural environment. his acquisition of a behavior-analytic repertoire is supported through the use of three documents: (1) the bacb task list, (2) the bacb experience supervision form, and (3) one or more project plans (see appendix a). each weekly supervision period begins on monday morning before the children arrive with two hours of group supervision. prior to this meeting, pbas have filled out their project plans, identified the task list skills to be covered over the course of this project, and validated their intervention procedures through a self-identified behavior-analytic reading. the structure of supervision skinner (1974) described creativity as multiple histories of reinforcement coming together to solve a novel problem. in this sense, group supervision fosters such creativity. the purpose of the group supervision meeting is to review each student’s progress towards their individualized objectives, and collectively discuss each other’s self-directed project. within 76 global education review 3(4) the context of addressing the long-term student goals, our pbas are bound to encounter numerous obstacles. these may include addressing the student’s behavioral excesses (e.g., aggression, stereotypy, tantruming, etc.), inadequate progress towards instructional objectives, difficulties establishing a discrimination, failure to generalize, among others. prior to coming to the group supervision meeting at the start of the week, pbas are expected to have selected a particular problem on which to focus for the week, and, with the help of the project form, engineer a behavioral solution to that problem. to address these issues within the group setting, we strongly encourage a socratic method of inquiry to accentuate the variables important to the behavior analyst (i.e., under what circumstances does the behavior tend to occur? what is the student doing in place of the target response? or, what do you suppose is maintaining that behavior?). this kind of inquiry points the pbas toward solving the problem and promotes discussion amongst them, thereby allowing multiple opportunities to shape their verbal behavior as well. specifically, the group supervision meeting focuses on the first two blanks on the project form. while summarizing their student’s overall progress, the pba is expected to explain the problem they have encountered with a succinct, parsimonious statement. here, it is the primary objective of the supervisor to ensure that: (1) the problem is conceptualized as a behavior problem; (2) the problem is socially significant; (3) the size of the project is appropriate, and similarly, that attention does not drift to other related projects; and (4) the objective describes the relationship between the pba’s behavior and the student’s behavior. the functional objective directs the pba to focus on the end result of their respective interventions (i.e., what is it that we want the student to do?) and chain backward from there. an important component of the functional objective is describing the circumstances in which the student emits this response. specifically, what will the pba be doing to support behavior change? additionally, both pre-current and prerequisite behaviors should be discussed, and the pba may need to determine what approximations need to be reinforced to establish the context for the target behavior. specify reinforcement criteria as part of developing their plan, the pba should identify which skills from the bacb task list they are going to address over the course of the project, and identify a behavior-analytic research article to support their use of a particular methodology. using the article as a guide, pbas are asked to create a fidelity of implementation checklist specifying the steps of their intervention (see appendix a). within the context of the group supervision meeting, supervisors may probe about the details of the checklist (tell me why you think that step is necessary?), but refrain from giving explicit instructions (instead, you should….). throughout the weeklong supervisory period, the supervisor uses this treatment fidelity checklist when directly observing teacher/child interactions as part of everyone’s individual supervision. the objectives of this aspect of the supervision process are two-fold: (1) to measure fidelity as an independent variable (are they saying what they are doing?), and (2) to measure fidelity as a dependent variable (are they doing what they are saying?; pinkelman, 2014). the shaping of a behavior analyst at the end of each weekly supervision period, pbas submit their project plan(s) and supervision forms, along with their notebooks and graphs for review. at this point, particular attention is paid to the last three blanks of the free-operant field experiences 77 project form in conjunction with the recording procedures and data collected by the pba. this aspect of supervision focuses on the selection of adequate recording procedures and visual analysis of the data. the supervisor may ask the pba questions that focus on the data collection procedures, as well as the visual analysis and interpretation of the student’s data. rather than yoking their activities through the use of prefabricated data-sheets and procedures, pbas are encouraged to develop novel techniques for data collection and analysis. in other words, emphasis is placed on functional outcomes over structural processes. this aspect of the behavior-analytic repertoire is again developed through guided inquiry from the supervisor, the verbal community provided by other supervisees, as well as through direct contingency shaping through interactions with the student. for instance, one group of supervisees worked together to develop a method of momentary time sampling in which they printed stimuli on index cards, laminated them, and then used grease pencils to record the occurrence of targeted behaviors throughout the session. similarly, another pba developed a pie graph, which only scarcely appears in the behavior-analytic literature, to display the relative rates of reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive stimulus control over her student’s intraverbal repertoire. more important than the methodology employed is that the procedures are behavioral and the pba is analytic in describing the results of the intervention, two current dimensions of aba. while this free-operant methodology provides the opportunity for great success, it also has the potential to fail. at this stage of supervision, it is not uncommon for pbas to come into contact with the natural punishing contingencies of data-based decision making. for instance, a pba may have collected frequency data to record tantrums, which is problematic because tantrums may vary in dimensions such as duration and magnitude. consequently, the graph of this data may not accurately represent the amount of challenging behavior displayed by the student. learning within the shaperspace to clarify the types of activities that go on in the shaperspace, we offer an example of a graduate student project. katie was a public school teacher in one of the largest districts in the area. she had taught special education for five years and had recently completed a master’s degree encompassing a course sequence designed to meet the content requirements to sit for the bcba exam and approved by the behavior analyst certification board (bacb). district regulations, however, prevented her from accruing field experience hours in her classroom. so katie volunteered her summer at the shaperspace to accrue 300 supervision hours. she was assigned to work with michael, a six-year-old boy with asd who showed proficiency in the basic verbal operants, but whose intraverbal responding was insufficiently conditioned under abstracted stimulus control. during the group supervision session, katie explained that michael was making progress towards many of his objectives, but inconsistently responded to whquestions. the supervisor’s inquiries induced group deliberation about the antecedents and consequences surrounding this behavior, and ultimately led katie to re-examine the data she had collected for michael. specifically, the results of a relational operant analysis showed weak levels of responding to both symmetrical where (swhere) and transitive who (twho) questions, in addition to intermittent responses to transitive where (twhere) questions. to katie, this begged the question: to what extent does fluency building of twhere questions concomitantly enhance swhere responding, due to 78 global education review 3(4) the commonality of both being where questions, and/or twho responding, due to the commonality of both being combinatorially-entailed? to address this problem, katie developed a behavioral objective of conditioning abstracted stimulus control over michael’s intraverbal responses to whquestions. her intervention, fluency building, stemmed from cihon’s (2007) synthesis of research examining the effects of precision teaching on intraverbal responding. from this article, she engineered a 16-item treatment integrity protocol to guide michael’s intervention. katie’s own fidelity checklist was used by the bcba supervisor to provide her with feedback on her interactions with michael throughout the week. only brief coaching was provided on the treatment protocol prior to putting it into action. the goal was not to ensure that the “perfect” intervention was put into place prior to employing it, but to allow katie to come into contact with the natural contingencies of running an imperfect plan. consequently, the supervisor looked for specific deviations from the protocol throughout the week, and again rather than offer suggestions urged katie to reflect on these digressions. for example, katie had initially planned to use an errorless learning procedure to condition stimulus control over twhere responses. in practice; however, she ended up using a highprobability (high-p) request sequence across reflexive, symmetrical, and transitive stimuli respectively. the supervisor asked her first whether or not she was following the protocol as written to determine if she was aware of the departure from the protocol. he then inquired about the change in procedure: what caused it? why had she initially selected errorless learning? do the data support the use of the use of one error correction procedure over another? how would you describe michael’s acquisition of twhere responses on your increased use of the high-p request sequence? finally, at the end of the supervision period, katie turned in her data sheets and graphs. at this point she was asked to defend her selection of measurement systems and recording periods, and to describe the change in michael’s intraverbal responses to swhere, twho, and twhere questions in terms of level, trend, and variability. in completing this project, katie demonstrated bacb competencies a-13, b-03, d-09, d-13, e-06, e-09, f-04, g-05, j-05, and k-04. the supervision form was then completed with katie, and used as a basis for any final discussion of the project. prior to leaving, she picked up a new project form to be completed by the start of the next supervision period. conclusion the distinguishing characteristic that separates the shaperspace from other models of field experience is the same characteristic that separated skinner (1938) from his predecessors: an emphasis on free-operant responding. the importance of free-operant learning in higher education has been recognized for decades, so it is somewhat surprising that this practice is only now emerging as a methodology for training behavior analysts. keller (1968) accounted for free-operant learning in his personalized system of instruction, the components of which can be found in the shaperspace. lindsley (1996) echoed this call for free-operant responding and credits his own students for advancing the field of precision teaching further than he could have alone: “i learned from my students and gave them the highest compliment by rapidly adopting their discoveries and distributing them nationwide in symposia and workshops” (pp. 212-213). unfortunately, student learning is too often yoked by the “knowledge” of the teacher. both evolution and behavior are predicated on a cycle of repetition, variation, and selection (baum, 2005). by differentially reinforcing free-operant responses, the shaperspace accelerates this evolutionary free-operant field experiences 79 process of learning. to facilitate replication, we use inquiry-based instruction to make the critical features of teacher/child interactions more salient: why were some of your exchanges with your student more effective than others? describe the context(s) for the effective interactions, and contrast this with the context(s) for the ineffective ones. variation is achieved by emphasizing functional outcomes over structural form. for example as previously mentioned, rather than training the use of a particular data sheet, we ask pbas to develop their own: define the target response. is your intervention designed to strengthen or weaken this behavior? is the student’s response topographically uniform? will you be recording continuously? how will you record the occurrence of the target behavior? variation is critical when replication no longer works. when a current response no longer accesses reinforcement, previously established behavior may resurge. a response built through contingency shaping provides a history of approximations to serve as the basis for a novel solution (lattal, 2016). rulegoverned behavior, on the other hand, is established without this contingency history. consequently, when a rule-governed response fails to contact reinforcement there is no foundation for resurgence, and the development of a new solution may be arrested if not all together averted (lattal, 2016). finally, selection is done not by the supervisor, but by the pbas who come into contact with the natural contingencies of their behavior. again, this can be facilitated through inquiry: what were the benefits of using duration over frequency recording? what were the costs? how might you decrease resistance to extinction in similar situations? we now ask that the reader pause for a moment to recognize that the examples provided above are merely echoic and transcriptive behavior on our part to demonstrate some of the questions that we have asked our pbas in the shaperspace. it would be a mistake to attempt to replicate these questions exactly as they are printed. rather, in the event that this manuscript has produced any type of secondary conditioning over your own supervision practices, we suggest that you allow your own socratic repertoire to be shaped by the natural consequences of inquisition, both productive and fruitless. ultimately, the shaperspace is based upon functional replication by reverse engineering from outcome to methodology in order to maximize variation and emphasize selection by consequences. learning within the shaperspace is authentic, in that it affords direct contact with natural contingencies of teaching. traditionally, pbas have been restricted to mastering a particular skill set. the shaperspace differentiates learning by allowing students to progress at their own pace. by disseminating this model, we aim to further promote the development of behavior-analytic identity. throughout this paper it has been our objective to demonstrate how the shaperspace encompasses the seven dimensions of applied behavior analysis. the final dimension to be addressed is that of efficacy (baer et al., 1968). ultimately the purpose of the shaperspace is to strengthen environmental control over the behavior-analytic repertoire of the supervisee; to condition a discrimination over the human problems for which a behavior-analytic solution is appropriate. this perspective is shaped through the naturally-occurring contingencies that result from applying behavior-analytic interventions and acting as part of a verbal community. as stated above, the shaperspace is applied, in that it addresses problems of demonstrated social significance. it is behavioral, in that addresses human problems as behavior problems. it is analytic, in that a 80 global education review 3(4) change in the dependent variable results from the application of the independent variable, which is described with technological precision. perhaps more so than instruction-based training methodologies, the shaperspace is conceptually systematic, in that the pba-developed interventions arise from the theoretical base of behaviorism. additionally, the generality of shaperspace activities is easily observed across multiple projects. but to what extent is a shaperspace effective in training novice behavior analysts? well, how would you know? what would be your primary measure of efficacy? and for what change(s) in behavior might you be looking? notes 1. it should be noted that some applied researchers adopted free-operant methodologies early on (ayllon & michael, 1959; ferster, 1958); however, these instances are the exception rather than the rule. 2. the pba is asked to describe the student’s behavioral excesses and deficits in behavioranalytic terms. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): c. behavior-change considerations; g. identification of the problem 3. a goal stated in terms of how the pba will modify the student’s environment. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): j. intervention 4. the manipulated variable in an experiment. the treatment or intervention that is employed to address the target behavior as measured by the dependent variable. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): d. fundamental elements of behavior change; e. specific behavior-change procedures; f. behaviorchange systems 5. the system for monitoring procedural integrity. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): b. experimental design; k. implementation, management, and supervision 6. the measured variable in an experiment; used to determine the effects of the independent variable. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): a. measurement 7. definition of the target behavior in observable, measurable terms. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): i. assessment 8. the schedule of observation and recoding periods. bacb task list item(s) characteristically assessed in this section include those listed under the following heading(s): h. measurement references alger, c., & kopcha, t. j., (2009). esupervision: a technology framework for the 21st century field experience in teacher education. issues in teacher education, 18, 31-46. allen, k. e., hart, b., buell, j. s., harris, f. r., & wolf, m. m. 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(1969). contingencies of reinforcement: a theoretical analysis. new york: appleton-centurycrofts skinner, b. f. (1974). about behaviorism. new york: alfred a. knopf skinner, b. f. (1979). the shaping of a behaviorist. new york: alfred a. knopf. skinner, b. f. (1985). cognitive science and behaviourism. british journal of psychology, 76(3), 291-301. smith, t. (2001). discrete trial training in the treatment of autism. focus on autism and other developmental disabilities, 16(2), 86-92. stokes, t. f., & baer, d. m. (1977). an implicit technology of generalization. journal of applied behavior analysis, 10(2), 349-367. the national professional development center on autism spectrum disorder. (2016). evidence-based practices. retrieved from http://autismpdc.fpg.unc.edu/evidence-basedpractices vargas, j. s. (2013). behavior analysis for effective teaching (2nd ed.). new york: rutledge. vossoughi, s., & bevan, b. (2014). making and tinkering: a review of the literature. retrieved from the national research council committee on successful out-ofschool stem learning: http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbass esite/documents/webpage/dbasse_089888.pdf wilson, e. k. (2006). the impact of an alternative model of student teacher supervision: views of the participants. teaching and teacher education, 22, 22-31. about the author(s) lee l. mason, phd, bcba-d, is an associate professor of special education in the department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching at the university of texas at san antonio, where he directs the team center for children with autism and other language disorders. his research focuses on stimulus control ratios and intraverbal equivalence relations. alonzo andrews, ma, bcba, is a behavior analyst in the department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching at the university of texas at san antonio, where he develops interventions to reduce severe challenging behavior and shapes the repertoires of future behavior analysts. christopher j. rivera, phd, is an assistant professor in the special education, foundations, and research department at east carolina university. his research revolves around ways to enhance the academic and functional skills of diverse students with severe disabilities through the use of technology. don davis, m.ed, is a doctoral candidate in the department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching at the university of texas at san antonio. he is focused on behaviorally investigating and articulating the intersections of identity, computer science (cs) education, and makerspaces and their potential affordances for broadening cs participation and interest. https://login.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/docview/1625718237?accountid=7122 https://login.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/docview/1625718237?accountid=7122 https://login.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/login?url=http://search.proquest.com.libweb.lib.utsa.edu/docview/1625718237?accountid=7122 http://autismpdc.fpg.unc.edu/evidence-based-practices http://autismpdc.fpg.unc.edu/evidence-based-practices http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/documents/webpage/dbasse_089888.pdf http://sites.nationalacademies.org/cs/groups/dbassesite/documents/webpage/dbasse_089888.pdf free-operant field experiences 83 appendix a: project form name: ______________________________ date: __________ problem statement2: __________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ functional objective3: _________________________________________________________ ________________________________________________________________________ independent variable4: ________________________________________________________________________ procedures5: 1. ______________________________________________________________ 2. ______________________________________________________________ 3. ______________________________________________________________ 4. ______________________________________________________________ 5. ______________________________________________________________ dependent variable6: _________________________________________________________ response definition7: _________________________________________________________ recording method8: __________________________________________________________ connected space for early experiential learning 33 __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: yu, yong & hunt, jean ann (2016). a connected space for early experiential learning in teacher education. global education review, 3(4). 33-53 a connected space for early experiential learning in teacher education yong yu state university of new york –plattsburgh jean ann hunt state university of new york –plattsburgh abstract carefully constructed field-based experiences in teacher education programs have been recognized as one of the essential conditions for effective teacher learning. most college/university-based teacher education programs, however, are still dominated by the epistemology that academic knowledge is the authoritative source of knowledge about teaching, while spaces outside the college classroom remain the “practice fields.” this study examined project connect (pc), an after-school program designed to create early experiential learning opportunities for pre-service teachers (psts) by bringing together different aspects of expertise from the schools, communities, and universities. pre-service teachers in this study worked with children one afternoon a week in school-based sites during their sophomore and junior years. case study was adopted to assess the impact of the experience on teacher learning and the factors contributing to the effect. multiple data sources, including weekly reflection journals, field observation notes, and an exit survey were collected and analyzed. results revealed participants’ transformation of professional identity, and development of professional skills and dispositions. several factors emerged as important to psts’ learning throughout the experience, including connections between the course and the program, quality of faculty supervision, and systematic reflection. implications for teacher education were discussed. keywords experiential learning, after-school program, early field experience, pre-service teacher education, clinical practice introduction the concept of experiential learning can be traced back to about a century ago, if not earlier, when dewey (1938) proposed that the process of actual experience and education are intimately and necessarily related with each other. carefully-constructed field-based experiences that are well-supervised and linked to course work throughout entire teacher education programs have been recognized as one of the essential conditions for effective teacher learning (darling-hammond, 2010). however, according to zeichner (2010), even though most current university-based teacher education programs have integrated multiple field experiences over the length of the program, the disconnect corresponding author: yong yu, state university of new york –plattsburgh, sibley hall 311, 101 broad street, plattsburgh, ny 12901 email: yyu001@plattsburgh.edu mailto:yyu001@plattsburgh.edu 34 global education review 3(4) between campus and field-based teacher education continues to exist. most college/university-based teacher education programs are still dominated by the epistemology that academic knowledge is the authoritative source of knowledge about teaching. colleges and universities continue to maintain hegemony over the construction and dissemination of knowledge, and spaces outside the college classroom remain the “practice fields” (barab & duffy, as cited in zeichner, 2010, p. 90) where pre-service teachers (psts) are to try out the practices provided by the university. this divide between the campus and field-based components significantly impacts the effectiveness of field experiences in teacher education. this study aims to contribute to the developing body of knowledge about and the practice of early field experience in teacher education by examining project connect (pc), an after-school program designed to create early experiential learning opportunities for psts, by bringing together expertise from the schools, the community, and the university. the purpose of the study was to assess what impact pc has had on psts and what factors contributed to such effect. concept of experiential learning and field experience in teacher education experiential learning is defined as “the process whereby knowledge is created through the transformation of experience” (kolb, 1984, p.38). it is a process where learners are engaged intellectually, emotionally, socially, politically, spiritually, and physically in an uncertain environment where the learner may experience success, failure, adventure, and risk taking (itin, 1997). experiential learning is also understood as a philosophy of education concerned with learning from direct first-person experience and a holistic perspective that goes beyond content to include the construction of knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and transfer of learning (marlow & mclain, 2011). according to kolb (1984), the cyclical model of experiential learning contains concrete experience, reflective observation, abstract conceptualization, and active experimentation. this study used dewey’s conception of experience and reflective learning (as cited in miettinen, 2010) as its framework. dewey suggested that experience can either sustain the traditional or habitual ways of thinking and action, or liberate people from laziness, conformism, and dependence on authority. a primary experience was defined as, “material interaction with the physical and social environment.” while secondary experience was defined as, “a reflective experience that makes the environment as objects of reflection and knowledge” (p. 65). if the primary experience is uncertain or fails, it will generate reflective thinking and learning. in the center of this concept is whether authority-bound and routine ways of thinking and action can be replaced by reconstructive and reflective thinking. reflective experience includes the phases of 1) the indeterminate situation: the habit does not work; 2) intellectualization: defining the problem; 3) studying the conditions of the situation and formation of a working hypothesis; 4) reasoningin a narrower sense; and 5) testing the hypothesis by action. “there is no reflective learning for dewey outside problem, hypothesis and its testing in practice” (miettinen, 2010, p. 67). in addition, the study draws from recent findings about effective field experience in teacher education. according to darlinghammond (2010), systematic reflection and opportunities to retry and improve were two common features of powerful clinical curriculum of several exemplary teacher education programs. other common features of effective field experience included extensive time in the field throughout the program; field experience connected space for early experiential learning 35 tightly integrated with course work; intensive supervision; expert modeling of practice; and diverse students. several other researchers found factors that negatively influenced the field experiences included the divide between the theoretically based knowledge taught in university classrooms and experience-based knowledge in the schools (darling-hammond, 2010); lack of incentive, resources and support for tenure-track faculty to coordinate clinical programs or supervise students (labaree, 2004); disconnect between non-tenure clinical faculty and the campus-based portions of the teacher education program (bullough, dragper, smith, & burrell, 2004); lack of preparation and support cooperating teachers need to successfully mentor student teachers (carrol, 2007; margolis, 2007; valencia, martin, place, & grossman, 2009); and dominant thinking about the role of field experiences as practice field in teacher education (barab & duffy, 2000). in order to make field experience more effective, zeichner (2010) called for a shift of epistemology and suggested creating third spaces that would bring together school and university-based teacher educators and community expertise in less hierarchical ways to create transformational learning opportunities for psts. zimpher and howey (2013) urged universities to establish “centers of pedagogy,” which were “university-based hubs devoted to supporting all practices and innovations, laboratory and clinical, necessary for creating high-quality teachers” (p.409). dewey’s conception of experiential learning, and recent findings regarding fieldbased teacher education provided a comprehensive framework to examine the afterschool program as an early field experience. it is important to keep in mind that simply placing psts in a field-based context does not guarantee opportunity for experiential learning. an experience is non-reflective if it does not include problem, forming a hypothesis and testing it in practice, or if the campus-field disconnect remains. after-school programs involving pre-service teachers in this study, the term after-school program is used to refer to programs which begin when the regular school day ends to serve children who attend that school. such a program can be housed in a school, a community organization, or university. there is an abundance of research literature about after-school programs in the united states. due to the nature of the current study, only programs involving the participation of psts were reviewed. research found that participating in an after-school program, either as a required component of an education course or on volunteer basis, had a positive impact on psts’ professional abilities. after participating in the programs, psts experienced increased teacher efficacy toward teaching science (cone, 2009) and reading (banks, dunston, & foley, 2013), and reported better understanding of reflective experience (kalchman, 2015). katz and colleagues (katz, mcginnis, hestness, riedinger, marbach-ad, dai, & pease, 2011) found that voluntary participation in afterschool programs that were not connected to a specific coursework brought positive changes in psts’ attitudes and beliefs about science, as well as to their professional identities. it helped them to shift away from didactic, lecture-based teaching and begin to recognize the importance of incorporating hands-on, inquiry-based, and collaborative activities in science instruction. however, in other programs, psts struggled with giving up control and not giving the answers when implementing inquiry instruction (cartwright, 2012). birggs and mchenry (2013) noticed that working in the community setting helped psts realize that teaching was not just a transmission of information but a moral act of compassion and understanding. they also 36 global education review 3(4) developed skills to cope with children’s frustrations. participation in after-school programs that serve children from culturally and linguistically diverse communities provided the opportunity for psts to develop their own multicultural competencies. in cone’s (2012) study, participants expanded their simplistic perception of diversity and began to see it as a resource to be utilized for teaching. kalchman (2015) discovered that psts gained better understanding of the children in urban settings, and came to recognize both needs and strengths of these children. tinkler and tinkler (2013) found that weekly interaction with children from diverse cultural backgrounds helped psts see themselves as other, become aware of the imperative of the other, and move toward social justice. similarly, fitts and gross, (2012) noticed that psts who participated in tutoring bilingual children gained a better understanding of basic concepts related to second language acquisition, more positive attitudes towards bilingualism, an appreciation for children’s linguistic capital, and more nuanced understandings of bi-cultural identities and the funds of knowledge. of the above-mentioned after-school programs, those connected to a specific course were more structured than programs that were not. most of these programs offered substantial and recurring experiences of planning, teaching, and reflecting. in many cases, course instructors served as field supervisors who mentored the participants and provided regular feedback that inspired reflection and growth (banks, dunston, & foley, 2013; cone, 2009, 2012; kalchman, 2015; tinkler & tinkler, 2013). effective characeristics of the after-school programs in diverse settings included scaffolding critical reflection through questions and conversations, modeling and explicit discussion of culturally responsive pedagogy, and extensive one-on-one interaction with children (bennett, 2012). in addition, according to tinkler and tinkler (2013), psts’ attitude was found to mediate the impact of their experience with an after-school program. some psts who began the course with openness to diversity further broadened their understanding of these topics and ideas. other psts who were less open acquired some awareness that understanding and addressing diversity was important to their continued growth as future teachers. pre-service teachers who expressed negative feelings toward the experience felt they did not learn much from the field experience. several researchers (fitts & gross, 2012; tilley-lubbs & kreye, 2013) found that coherence and connection between the after-school programs and coursework also contributed to psts’ experiences. fitts and gross (2012) noted that the field experience developed to provide opportunity for working with ells did not prepare psts for success when it was situated in a general survey course or a research class. they suggested that psts would have benefitted more if the experience had been connected to a method courses. one of the challenges reported about these after-school programs was time. briggs and mchenry (2013) found that time restraints prevented a critical, reflective dialogue about race and privilege to be held during the process of a voluntary participation in an after-school program in a low-income neighborhood. because psts who volunteered in the program did not meet regularly within one class, and the researchers did not have sufficient time to engage psts in more discussion about race and privilege, the outcome of the experience relied significantly on individual participants’ exposure to multicultural issues. pre-service teachers who took university classes that interrogated these topics while volunteering in the after-school program were more reflective, while others were only able to work with children in a more holistic atmosphere without interrupting their own white privilege. tilley-lubbs and kreye (2013) noticed that time constraint also challenged faculty supervisors collaborating across connected space for early experiential learning 37 disciplinary areas in after-school programs. it took more time to plan and provide feedback when faculty collaborated with each other than if the task was done individually. in addition, participants’ class schedules were different enough to make it hard to schedule out-of-class meetings for co-planning. the literature offers valuable information about the impact of after-school programs, the factors related to the influence, and the challenges. however, most of the after-school programs in the related literature were created as a community or service learning project through personal connection with schools and communities. it is not clear how similar or different the impact of a structured after-school program established by the collaborative efforts of university, schools and local community would be. this study will assess such a program. this study explored the following questions: 1) what impact does the after-school program have on psts, and 2) what characteristics contribute to the impact of the program. project connect: the afterschool program project connect is an after-school program under a five-year contract between the university teacher education program and a local school district starting in 2012. its goal is to provide psts early field experience through offering service to children in the local community in an after-school setting. it runs for two and a half hours every day after school ends from 2:30 pm to 5:00 pm. the program takes place in three elementary buildings of a small-city school district in new york state. according to new york state education department data (nysed, n.d.), in 2013-14 school year, 89% of the k-12 public school students enrolled in this school district were white, 7% were black or african american, 3% were asian or native hawaiian/other pacific islander, 0.5% were american indian or alaska native, 0.4% were hispanic or latino, and 0.3% were multiracial. in addition, 20% students were classified as students with disabilities, about 1% were english language learners, and 53% were economically disadvantaged. according to the materials published at the university website, the teacher education program in this study is a nationally accredited program “designed to prepare competent, qualified, and caring teachers for tomorrow’s schools”. the program’s, focus is on knowledge of content, knowledge of pedagogy, and professional skills. the professional education faculty has developed a body of agreed-upon common themes, to serve as a framework for the design of various degree offerings. these themes include content in context, learning environments, technology, assessment, critical thinking and problem solving, recursive learning, collaboration, modeling, and multicultural competencies. pre-service teachers participating in pc are enrolled in the 4-year grades 1-6 childhood education program or the 5-year grades 1-6 special & childhood education program. all education courses in the programs require certain hours of early field experiences prior to student teaching beginning in year one. project connect is one of the early field experiences. when it first began in 2012, the psts participating in the current study were sophomores. when the psts register in an education course, they also register for pc, a non-credit lab requirement, in which they work with children for the equivalent of two and half hours one day a week throughout the semester. the daily structure of pc consists of a short outdoor or gym activity, snack break, adult-supervised home work time, a responsive classroom afternoon meeting, an inquiry-based activity, and finally, a choice time with options of gym/outdoor activities, reading, or board games. all psts in pc work with a group of approximately 10 children, individually or in collaboration with peers. pre-service teachers in their first year of training are engaged in 38 global education review 3(4) observing and assisting the secondor third-year psts; those in their second year of training coplan and co-facilitate activities with their peers; and those in their junior year of training work with children independently and/or mentor a firstor second-year pst. at the time of this study, project connect is staffed by a full-time coordinator and three part-time site directors. the coordinator and site directors are certified school teachers, all with a master’s degree in education. in addition to managing the program and communicating with parents on daily basis, the coordinator and site directors are expected to support psts by modeling, mentoring, and intervening when necessary. pre-service teachers’ course instructors serve as their faculty supervisors in pc. method this study chose to examine pc located in one of the three sites. case study was selected as the research method because pc satisfied the criteria for case study. according to stake (as cited in merriam, 2002), case study is “a choice of what is to be studied… a bounded system, a single entity, a unit around which there are boundaries” (p.178). project connect is such a system, which has boundaries of time (e.g., after school days), space (e.g., location) and components (e.g., number of participants) (merriam, 2002). the site examined in the current study was situated in a k-5 elementary school building of a small school district in the state of new york. at the time of the study, the after-school program in this particular site was serving 86 children. participants forty-one (41) psts who were enrolled in the two sessions of an integrated elementary methods course participated in pc at this site throughout their junior year. among these psts, three were male, 38 were female; 39 were white, one was caribbean, and one was asian american, adopted and raised by white parents. as junior-year education students, these psts had the responsibility to plan their day of pc, including an afternoon meeting, an inquirybased activity matching the grade-level standards, and other entertaining activities for the “choice time” at the end of the day. lesson plans were due a week before they worked in pc to allow time for feedback and revision. the psts were also required to keep a weekly reflection journal of their experience in pc. the guidelines below were provided to support psts’ reflection: 1) describe what you did today in pc and what your students do. 2) what worked? how do you know it worked? why do you think it worked? 3) what did not work? how do you know it didn’t work? why do you think it didn’t work? 4) what changes would you make if you have opportunity to do it “next time”? why? 5) how did your planning support your teaching? did you need to make any adjustments during your teaching? why or why not? data collection and analysis data were collected from three sources: 1) field experience reflections collected by course instructors weekly during the participants’ junior year; 2) an exit survey at the end of the participants’ junior year administered by the assessment manager of the department; and 3) field notes of observation taken by course instructors. in the survey, psts were asked to describe their experience in pc and respond to several open-ended questions. these questions included: what does it mean to be a successful teacher in pc? what have you learned in pc? what support did you receive from your course instructor? what support did you need from your course instructor? the survey was distributed online. connected space for early experiential learning 39 the statistical data were analyzed using spss. the narrative response was analyzed qualitatively by the researchers, who were instructors of the two sessions as well as supervisors of the psts participating in this study. an inductive investigative strategy was used in the process of data analysis (hatch, 2002). the researchers began the process by removing psts’ names and reading the reflections independently, identifying domains, and searching for themes and relationship across domains. next, the researchers reviewed the results of each other’s text analysis before they came together to compare and contrast the themes that emerged from the psts’ reflections as well as excerpts that supported the themes. this process was repeated with participants’ response to the open-ended questions in the exit survey, and the field notes. finally, findings from each of the three sources of data were reexamined and triangulated in order to answer the research questions. limitations and bias statement while case studies can include quantitative and qualitative data, this study is primarily qualitative. the researchers were also the participants’ course instructors and field supervisors. the researchers were aware of possible biases in interpretation of the data, particularly because of their participatory roles in pc. in order to enhance the validity of the study, the researchers collected, analyzed and triangulated, multiple sources of data by both investigators (merriam, 2002). in addition, peer examination, a strategy which required the researchers to analyze data, first independently and then collaboratively, was employed to maintain the level of consistency and dependability of the results. regardless of the efforts to ensure the trustworthiness of the study, the findings of this study described below were psts’ experiences told through the perspective of the researchers. the researchers hope that the description is rich enough for readers to determine to what extent their own situation matches the research context, and whether the findings can be transferred (merriam, 2002). findings thirty-three out of 41 psts participating in pc at this site responded to the exit survey. analysis of the data showed that 54.5% psts were satisfied or very satisfied with their experience in pc, 6% were dissatisfied or very dissatisfied, while 39.4% felt neither satisfied nor dissatisfied. at the time of the study, 24 psts worked in pc alone, nine worked with one or two other freshman or sophomore psts. on average, 45.5% psts spent 4-6 hours a week planning for pc; 30.3% spent 1-3 hours, and other 21.2% spent 7-9 hours. one pst mentioned that it took them at least 30 hours a week to plan and revise a lesson for pc. the findings of the study are described below to answer the two research questions. research question 1: what impact does project connect have on pre-service teachers? analysis of psts’ weekly reflection, response to the exit survey, and observation notes revealed that participation in pc impacted psts in the following ways. professional identity the transformation of the psts’ perception of their professional role as a teacher was one of the most salient themes that emerged from data analysis. in the early entries of psts’ reflection, there was much concern that “children won’t like me,” and “i want to be their friends.” in addition, early observation notes indicated that some psts were hesitant to respond to children’s misbehavior for fear of “they will get mad at me.” many psts addressed the students using “honey” and “sweetheart.” it was not uncommon to find lower-grade children climb all over some psts during a read-aloud or snack 40 global education review 3(4) time or field trip on an early release day. this sense of self as “friends” gradually changed through the year to one that thinks, talks, and acts more like a teacher. in the exit survey, psts expressed that being a teacher meant to connect with the student and building a strong relationship put children first and plan to their interests create a consistent environment keep all the children engaged in the learning have a plan to follow daily but also have a backup plan use a firm voice when needed and a calm encouraging voice when not know how to work with different types of learners learn about students and plan according to their strengths and areas of growth need to be open to changes willing to spend a majority of free time planning effective lessons working effectively with peers providing students opportunities to explore their own wonderings one pst’s response in the exit survey revealed the change of thinking about self as a teacher: before i felt like i was babysitting and more of a friend. now i feel like a teacher. i can grab and redirect students’ attention in different ways, and teach! i learned that there should be a boundary between a teacher and students. it is more important to engage children in learning something they are interested than trying to be kind all the time. the following excerpt from a pst’s reflection entry indicated that the pst was thinking like a teacher. katie finished the project while other children were still busy working on theirs. she asked me if she could pick up a book to read. i agreed. now i realized that sometimes some students could do quicker than others and that’s something i need to be prepared for. next time i will bring several books, maybe related to the topic, or plan an extra activity, or just have students elaborate on their thinking. professional skills another impact pc had on psts was the development of professional skills such as creating a learning environment, planning and teaching a lesson, and classroom management. learning environment was recognized as important to student learning at the beginning of and during pc. in the exit survey, many psts were proud that they learned how to create a safe and welcoming environment, through bonding with students and community building. the excerpt below from a pst’s journal displays connecting with a fourth-grade student during activity time. nila was very interested in the pattern. so i spent some time with her to show how it worked. she managed to do it all by herself in the end and was really proud that she mastered the task. she is a very smart girl. we talked a little and she told me: “you know, i’m a little crazy sometimes. sometimes i just lose my mind.” i had to laugh at this and told her that’s fine. i sometimes lose my mind too. it happened to everyone every once in a while. she smiled at me and said: “that’s ok, because usually i find it again after a short while.” another pst reflected on watching a third-grade boy struggle to fit into the afterschool group and realized more community building was needed in order to create an connected space for early experiential learning 41 inclusive environment. the excerpt below captured the thinking: the original plan for the activity was that the children make the chain and give it to a friend. the children, however, didn’t like the idea at all. they all wanted to keep theirs. jason told me he didn’t like anyone in the group anyway, and nobody liked him. therefore, he wanted to keep his for himself. i tried to find out why he thought that way, and told him it could help him make some new friends this way. but then, before he could even start making his chain, he got picked up already. i think we need to build stronger relationship and to help children like jason feel included. there are really different characters in this group, and i really hope to be able to bring them closer together. the problem described in this excerpt was brought to the attention of other psts working with the same group of children. in order to solve the problem, the third-grade team met on a weekend, and decided all five of them would go to pc one day to dedicate the afternoon to community building, discussing expectations and rules and participating in trust-building activities. like the ability to create a supportive learning environment, lesson planning is another professional skill that psts were able to improve in pc. in addition to readings and activities about lesson plan in class, psts were provided a lesson plan template adapted from backward design. feedback was given before a lesson plan was taught in pc. yet it was the repeated experiences of planning, revising, and teaching multiple lessons that helped psts understand concepts of learning outcomes, assessment evidence, and learning process. a pst described their learning process in the exit survey: when planning for pc last semester, or even earlier this semester, i would search online. i would find a fun activity at pinterest or youtube, and think of an objective that could go with it. i did not understand why we had to plan backward from the learning outcomes rather than the activity, or how an objective was different from the process. i even blamed my students for not paying attention when the activity did not work. it was frustrating, until one day i caught myself asking “what do i want my students to learn?” while looking at the standards. i think i got it! another pst talked about the importance of connecting to students’ interest and knowing the content. he wrote: i have learned the importance of understanding students’ interest and planning to it in order to maintain their attention and engagement. i have learned the importance of knowing your content when it comes to teaching a specific subject. there is often a lot of research that comes into play while planning a lesson. i also learned how to connect my lessons across content areas, particularly how to integrate literacy in a number of ways. unlike the aforementioned skills, classroom management came up as a crucial topic early in the year. pre-service teachers realized they could not even manage a small group of five or six students. they were frustrated and demanded attention to classroom management. one pst wrote: it took me long to finally get my students sit in a circle. but they kept talking to each other and didn’t pay attention to my directions no matter how loud i was. i did not know what else 42 global education review 3(4) i could do. i wish someone could be there to show me. to help psts build their skills, both course instructors introduced the responsive classroom system, and conducted several book studies regarding teacher language, positive discipline, and establishing rules and routines. as the year moved on, psts’ reflection started to show less evaluative and more description. here is an excerpt toward the end of first semester: we officially started to use the awful scale. i don’t think the 2nd-graders fully understand it yet. they understand that 1 means not a big deal and 100 is something really major, but i am not sure if they know what situation is considered a 1. one girl came up to me and said so-and-so said “blah blah blah” to her. i asked her where that would be on the awful scale and she said a 1. so i asked her if it was worth telling me. she said “no, but, but…” so i told her since it’s not something awful they need to figure it out themselves. the problem was solved a lot quicker than me sitting down and talking to both students. i think the scale will eventually be an extremely effective idea, but it’ll take a few weeks for them to completely understand the meaning of it. in psts’ response in the exit survey, classroom management was the biggest learning shared by many. responding to what they have learned in pc, one pst wrote: i definitely learned about how to manage a large group of students, especially when having some behavioral problems. i am now able to gather students’ attention without raising my voice which sometimes was what i really wanted to do. i learned how to calm down when stressed and surrounded by shouting students. i also learned that it is important to use a teacher voice and not proceed with a lesson if the students are not listening. pre-service teachers also reported that knowing the content and students’ needs, and planning accordingly, were critical to keeping behavior issues at minimum. here is a pst’s response in the exit survey: i have learned that knowing what you teach and having planned activities that connect to students’ strengths and needs is the key to success. in addition, if you have activities or lesson plans that all intertwine with each other in a meaningful way, the children will stay more alert and engaged in what you are teaching them. the researchers noticed that psts’ changes in the above three skill areas were correlated with each other. building relationships and community building led to a healthy learning environment, which would likely to have fewer behavior issues. similarly, effective planning would keep children engaged and save the teacher from spending time handling behavior problems. confidence of teaching stronger sense of self as a teacher and improved professional skills are connected to psts’ increased confidence about their teaching abilities. this change was expressed in the psts’ exit survey as a sense of being prepared, successful, or more comfortable. for example: my experience has gotten progressively more positive as time has gone on. in the beginning i was very nervous when being in the field, but by the end of the experience this semester i found myself very comfortable in the connect setting. i feel that this semester was very successful because i had a lot more information going into connected space for early experiential learning 43 the teaching and felt much more prepared to be with a group of students than i had in the past. pre-service teachers also conveyed greater confidence when sharing more realistic view of teaching. one pst wrote: through project connect i have learned that there is hardly a time in teaching where everything is going to work out perfectly. i feel like this was good experience in classroom management, and i take pride in the fact that i have all of this experience with classroom management at this point in my college career. it is clear that psts’ belief in their teaching ability was inter-connected to their growth in other areas. pre-service teachers’ confidence was almost always accompanied by connection with the students, clearer rules, routines and expectation, and better lessons. all these changes influenced how psts saw themselves as teachers. teacher dispositions overall, the impact of pc on psts’ attitudes, values, and beliefs was mixed. many psts’ earlier experiences in pc were described with such words as “nervous,” “stressful,” “frustrated,” and “overwhelming.” as the year unfolded, language including “eager,” “excited,” “can’t wait to see how it goes,” and “it will be better” appeared in some psts’ reflections. these psts recognized pc as “a great opportunity to work with children,” “a useful experience to try different things and change around lessons if they're not working.” one pst wrote in their reflection: every day is getting better for me. it is slowly getting better, but it is getting better. every day is a learning experience where i know i will make probably a multitude of mistakes, but i will learn from them. a lot of teaching is trial and error and working with kindergartners i know this occurs a lot. i take it for what it is though and try to change it to make it better because that will truly make me better, which will then make my students better. i am now always eager for project connect because i can use the new learning experiences and knowledge that i have gained last time and throughout the week to make my afternoon and the children’s afternoon go absolutely great! it is worth noting that two psts’ attitude remained consistent throughout the process. at the beginning of the year, one of them wrote: it (project connect) is nothing like a regular classroom! it has been stressed to keep them (students) occupied during the activity, because they generally don’t listen tentatively to our instruction. there are many days when they are respectful and it really makes the day bright, but it is hard to make that a constant occurrence. the other pst stated: they (course instructors) need to understand that project connect and their class aren’t the only things that we have to do and the work load is at max capacity. i personally struggled getting everything done and balancing out the rest of my life. i felt like i was drowning in the fifteen-page lesson plans, twenty page reflections and all my other work plus outside school life like a job and sports and friends. although these psts are exceptions, it is important for teacher educators and administrators to be aware and understand their experiences. it was assumed that pc was a powerful program and that all psts who participated in it would develop positive 44 global education review 3(4) dispositions about teaching. the different experiences of some psts indicated that more work was needed to understand what contributed to the change or lack of change regarding psts’ attitude, and to improve the effectiveness of this early field experience. one consistent change among psts was their attitude toward uncertainty and unpredictability in teaching. participants expressed that “not everything will go the way you plan it to,” that “your plans are going to change a lot,” and that “you need to be flexible with this.” one pst reflected: i learned today that teachers always have to be flexible and open for change. if i would have insisted today that the rules stay as was, it would not be fun or effective. but because i let the children work together as a group and they came up with some changes, it ended up being a really fun activity for everyone! these rules will really mean something since children are part of the process to create them. such learning was also demonstrated through psts’ attitude toward taking risk and learning from mistakes. one pst shared: i felt that it is ok to make mistakes in project connect because it’s a learning process. i’m able to test things to see what works and what doesn’t work, then go back and try again after making some changes. it’s making me more prepared for my future classroom. in addition to the above mentioned changes, psts’ attitude toward feedback evolved over time. at the beginning of the year, many psts were defensive when getting feedback from the instructors. some viewed constructive feedback as “negative,” and demanded feedback that was “more positive.” toward the end of the year, they gradually became open. some even took initiative to seek feedback. pre-service teachers stated in their reflections that “being a teacher means you are receptive to feedback that might be hard to hear, and being willing to improve.” “sometimes it was a little harsh but it was useful.” analyses of the observation notes and psts’ reflections showed some evidence that psts’ multicultural competencies were developing. for example, the first-grade team shared in class that a boy who kept introducing himself using different names – one day as “monkey,” another day “cat,” and yet another day as “david.” the whole class laughed at the story and commented that the child was trying to get attention. the course instructor advised the team to learn more about the child’s background. in the following week, the instructor read the book name jar to the whole class. the team shared what they found out about the boy, whose parents were immigrants from africa. in the follow-up discussion, psts said that they never knew how an immigrant child could struggle with their cultural identities. they said they would have considered it as a behavior problem. another pst described a difficult situation to which they did not know how to respond. one situation that i was really overwhelmed with was during the afternoon meeting. when the children had a chance to talk to each other, sam started making faces, pulling his eyes up and saying he “looks chinese.” i wasn’t sure what i should say to that, if i should stop him and tell him this is not appropriate, or if i should better ignore it to not give him the attention he was trying to get. i also wasn’t sure why exactly he did it, if he knew what he was doing. did he do this to be mean to will and ava, or was he just trying to be funny. sam was a white child. will and ava were asian americans adopted from korea when they connected space for early experiential learning 45 were infants. the pst was aware that sam’s behavior was inappropriate and unacceptable, but did not know how to respond at that moment. the pst’s later reflected that though the child could have been pulled aside and asked why he acted that way, he also wondered how to turn the situation into a learning moment for the whole group. pre-service teachers’ lesson plans toward the end of the year started to include objectives to increase children’s cultural awareness, such as snacks around the world and understanding hearing disability, and how sound travels. despite emerging evidence of multicultural awareness, little evidence in the exit survey spoke to psts’ improved ability to work with children of diverse cultures. research question 2: what contributes to the impact of project connect? in order to answer the second research question, the researchers examined the relationships across themes that emerged from psts’ reflections, researchers’ observation notes, and the exit survey. the following factors were found to be associated with the impact described in the previous section. campus-field connection the connection between the course and pc contributed to its influence on psts in two ways. pre-service teachers constantly referred to and applied what they learned in the college classroom while working with children in pc. for example, when reading the book positive discipline, many psts were skeptical of the idea that reward-punishment was not an effective way to discipline. they were wondering why schools, including the one where pc was housed, were still using the practice if it did not work. one day a second-grade boy in pc wrote something very inappropriate on his peers’ journals. as a punishment, he had to stay in the cafeteria and for the rest of the day. the pst working with the group later reflected: i was too embarrassed and did not know what to do, so i sent him to the site director. looking back, i realize that keeping him in the cafeteria for the rest of the day is not a logical consequence of writing something inappropriate. it won’t help him understand why his behavior is not acceptable. a natural consequence could be having him erase his writing in every journal he wrote and apologize to his group members. the campus-field connection also contributed to psts’ learning when their experience in pc had a significant influence on the instructors’ decision to make adaptations in the college classroom. for example, when the instructors noticed that psts struggled with effective teacher language, they decided to do a book study on the power of our words. one pst reflected following the book study: it has always been a challenge for me to find my “teacher voice.” i struggle with finding a happy medium between speaking too nicely, talking to my students as if they are my peers; and sounding too mean, speaking to my students in an authoritative manner. i found myself using a nice, but firm tone more often this week than last. more importantly, i was able to name children’s strength using reinforcing language, and give clear instructions to redirect their attention when children have gone off task. this is important to me because i realize that once i am able to develop this teacher language, i will have better control over my classroom, and gain more respect from the students. such learning would be difficult without the repeated cycle of learning-applying-learning between the field and college classroom. as the success of pc depended on meeting the needs of both the children it served and those of the 46 global education review 3(4) psts, the campus-field connection made it possible for psts to take responsibility for the process of knowledge construction, instead of relying on professors and the course as the only source of knowledge. supervision and mentoring supervision and mentoring by faculty and staff involved in pc was consistently mentioned as important by psts. the supervision went beyond observation in the field, extending to lesson planning, teaching, and handling behavior issues. one pst reflected on the experience of going to the instructor for comments and suggestions for lessons. faculty seems to be genuinely there to help you when you have questions and concerns. i've always felt very comfortable going to my professor to talk about a lesson that i thought might have needed to be changed. she has always been open with new suggestions and that always seems to work out. i feel that the faculty wants us to get the best experience that we can out of project connect and this is shown from the amount of support they give us. sometimes, psts reached out to other people when they needed help. one pst wrote in his reflection: i sometimes meet with my peers after class to discuss lesson plans, concerns and more about project connect. if something wasn’t working or i was stuck on what to do, there was always someone available, whether it is the coordinator, my professor, the site director, even teachers that work at the school. i was never left alone or completely lost. if i needed help, i had to reach out. providing effective feedback was part of the supervision and mentoring process. in order to help psts benefit more from feedback, the instructors planned specific activities to help psts to better understand the concept of feedback, types of feedback, and conditions needed for feedback to be effective. meanwhile, the instructors also made sure their feedback was clear, descriptive instead of evaluative, and balanced between strengths and needs. in addition, one-on-one conferences were held with psts who tried to plan a lesson “correctly.” or who believed getting feedback meant, “i did not do a good job.” all these strategies were used to help psts overcome resistance to feedback another aspect of mentoring was modeling. due to lack of funding, project connect was not able to involve any school teachers. therefore, it relied on the university course instructors and the pc staff to mentor the psts. having a faculty or pc staff as a mentor was important to psts, especially when things were out of control, or when immediate intervention was needed to prevent possible “damage.” one pst reflected how he benefited from having the professor model during pc. the great part about working with my professor for a little while was that i saw some things she did that worked really well. she would say “if you can hear me raise your hand” until everyone was quiet and raising their hand. she also brainstormed with me about how to deal with a particular boy who constantly touches other children. she suggested i try to have him sit down next to me, or give him something to occupy his hands…. hopefully he would stop eventually. it most psts became very nervous when faculty, the site director, or the coordinator stopped and sat down with his group. they felt the pressure of being watched and evaluated. having a group of children sitting and watching increased the stress level. pre-service teachers were concerned that children would see them as connected space for early experiential learning 47 incapable if an adult intervened, and that therefore they would lose control over the group. the following excerpt described how mentoring was done in a way that was less threatening and stressful. i really enjoyed having mike (the coordinator) today because he would on occasion whisper something in my ear that i had not thought of to say. he did this in a way where i still felt that i had control over the group so that was nice. when tyler was coming down the hallway by himself to join our meeting, mike told me to greet him with a “nice to see you!” because he didn’t usually get commentary like that. mike also told me to remind tyler before sitting down to keep his hands to himself. tyler didn’t really want to listen to me at the time, but i found that his behavior during the meeting was unlike any other! he was great. guided reflection oral and written reflection every week, guided by the conversation in class and a set of questions, turned out to be a powerful tool. it helped psts examine what happened each time they worked in pc, as well as their own thinking about the experience. reflections kept the instructors informed of what was going on in pc and the areas that needed to be addressed. written reflections collected over the year provided evidence of psts’ professional and personal growth. in the beginning and early months of the year, psts’ reflections were short, about half to two thirds of a page, and contained mainly description of what happened. their “reflection” was limited to a single-sentence statement without supporting evidence, and occasionally what they would do differently with the materials. toward the end of the year, the psts’ reflection grew to 2-3 pages long on average, with some extending to 4-5 pages. the content became richer, including detailed descriptions and more in-depth reflections. sample excerpts included in this article spoke to the role of guided reflection in promoting reflective and critical thinking. in spite of the benefits, the researchers noticed several challenges. firstly, when asked what they had learned from pc in the exit survey, no pst mentioned improved ability to reflect as a professional growth. secondly, throughout the year, psts expressed very mixed attitudes toward reflection. they said they “hated” writing reflections, however, they also wanted to get more feedback on their reflection. some psts did not see the value of reflective practice or its impact on teaching. one pst commented: i received feedback on my reflections, but i was not observed often, which in a way made me upset. i would have liked feedback on my teaching not on how well i was able to write because in the end it is about the teaching not the reflection. this pst’s comment is related to the third challenge, i.e., time and workload. finding the time to sit down and record their thoughts about pc on a weekly basis could be difficult for psts. moreover, the course instructors struggled with reading psts field reflections and providing constructive feedback in a timely manner every week, in addition to reviewing multiple drafts of lesson plans, and having a full teaching load. it was hard to ignore that time restraints and unrealistic workload could undermine the power of the program. logistic factors rather than direct contribution to the impact of the program, data analysis showed that logistical factors, including time, space, and scheduling could function as mediators. time seemed to be the biggest challenge. pre-service teachers reported difficulty finding time to plan and collaborate outside the class. similarly, because 48 global education review 3(4) faculty were assigned full load of teaching, they struggled with finding sufficient time to fulfill their dual role of course instructor and early field supervisor satisfactorily. in addition, the limited physical space available to psts and children frequently raised issues in pc. according to the contract, pc could use the school cafeteria, the gym (when there were no scheduled activities), the library, a computer lab, and the art room. considering that pc served 86 k-5 children on a daily basis, each of these spaces had to house multiple groups. the situation was a challenge for classroom management, and it increased the possibility of behavior and safety issues arising. another factor that mediated the impact of pc was scheduling. theoretically, psts were assigned to work with children in pc one afternoon a week, which meant school children in each group worked with five different psts over the course of a week. even though the grade-level team was required to co-plan for the week, and to keep each other informed of what they did and how their day went, the inconsistency was hard to ignore. the instructors piloted scheduling creatively the second semester, encouraging psts who could work in the field every day for three consecutive weeks instead of one day for 15 weeks. it worked well for some psts and significantly improved consistency for the children, but not for those who participated in sports, or who still had to take courses in their concentration areas. it is imperative that more innovative strategies were needed in order to make pc a more positive experience for both psts and the children it served. discussion, recommendations, limitations, and implications the findings regarding the first research question were consistent with the literature that after-school programs provide opportunities for psts to develop professional identity, professional skills, confidence of teaching, and teaching dispositions (banks, dunston, & foley, 2013; cone, 2009; katz, mcginnis, hestness, riedinger, marbach-ad, dai, & pease, 2011). while previous research found that psts’ attitude was a factor that mediated the impact of an after-school program (tinkler & tinkler, 2013), this study found that participating in pc did not cause all psts’ attitude to change. some psts’ attitude changed over the year from skeptical to welcoming and valuing the experience as a learning opportunity, but some others remained fairly resistant throughout the experience. looking through dewey’s concept of experiential learning, the researchers noticed that all psts had the primary experience, which allowed direct interaction with the children, peers, faculty and staff, and the physical environment. problems occurred in the course of the experience when psts’ teaching knowledge failed to support effective practice in pc. interestingly, such failure or uncertainty gave rise to secondary and reflective experience for some psts as dewey suggested, but not for all. weekly reflections showed that when psts analyzed the problems, many were able to see both the internal (e.g., lesson planning, classroom management skills, and effort) and external causes (e.g., structure of pc, faculty/staff support, time and/or space). informed by their own reflection, these psts focused on what could be done instead of what could not be done in their future planning, accompanied with more research on the content and children, as well as feedback from peers, faculty, and pc staff. through the cycle of planning and testing of the plans, these psts’ knowledge of teaching was re-constructed and developed. several psts, on the other hand, attributed the problems to factors that were external and not controllable, for example, pc was nothing like a regular classroom; children were not always respectful; and workload was unreasonable. these psts’ reflections focused on suggestions for change of the external factors rather than specific actions they could take to connected space for early experiential learning 49 improve. their lesson plans might incorporate feedback from instructors, but when testing of a plan did not lead to immediate solution of the problem, beliefs in external causes seemed to be reinforced. as the reconstructive and reflective experience never truly occurred to these psts, previously established thinking about teaching remained. another finding that drew the researchers’ attention, was that pc had limited impact on psts’ multicultural competencies. upon reexamination, researchers noticed that psts seemed to perceive cultural diversity as difference of race and language. for most psts, the children they worked with in pc were not racially and linguistically diverse. they might not have felt the need to apply what they learned about diagnosing and adapting to the needs of diverse learners. even for psts who did have racially and/or linguistically diverse children in their group, they might not know how to adapt to these children’s needs due to their own limited experience attending schools that served predominantly white, mono-lingual, and middle-class students. they probably never experienced culturally competent teaching as a student and never had an opportunity to observe such practice as a pst. according to darlinghammond (2010), “it is impossible to teach recruits how to teach powerfully by asking them to imagine what they have never seen or to suggest they ‘do the opposite’ of what they have observed in the classroom” (p.42). if developing psts’ ability to work with diverse students is one of the objectives for pc, they need to be taught how to do so in coursework or see what this is like in practice. the findings related to the second research question showed that campus-field connection, supervision and mentoring, and guided reflection were important factors contributing to the impact of pc. similar to darling-hammond’s (2010) and zeichner’s (2010) studies, the universityschool/community partnership enabled psts to apply the knowledge and skills they learned in pc, as well as to highlight problems and needs which informed what and how the methods course was taught. in other words, psts initiated an inquiry-based and constructive learning process through their experience of working with children. however, the connection with the school and community was fairly limited. project connect was not able to hire any school teachers due to limited funding. several community agents were involved throughout the year in pc, offering such activities as healthy choice of food and wood work. unfortunately, these activities took place concurrently, in parallel with psts’ planned activities. although psts sometimes interacted with school teachers and/or community people in the school building, these interactions were social by nature, which did not afford many opportunities for psts to access the practicebased knowledge existing among the school teachers and community experts. because expert modeling of practice was an important component of successful field experience (darling-hammond, 2010), it needs to be included in the future to make pc a truly transformative experience for psts (zeichner, 2010). the study revealed a complex relationship between different components of an early field experience and its impact on psts. consistent with the literature, it was found that course instructors served as early field supervisors who mentored the psts and engaged them in systematic reflection, had positive impact on their professional growth (banks, dunston, & foley, 2013; cone, 2009, 2012; darlinghammond, 2010; kalchman, 2015; tinkler & tinkler, 2013). nonetheless, their influence was mediated by such logistical factors as scheduling, time, space, and availability of human and material resources. time and availability to observe the psts; to review lesson plans and reflections, and to provide timely feedback directly influenced whether all psts 50 global education review 3(4) benefited from faculty’s supervision. when a pst was placed in pc tuesday afternoon at the same time that the instructor was scheduled to teach another course, that pst did not have the opportunity to be supervised and mentored in the field. when these external elements intertwined with psts’ internal factors, such as perceptions of and attitude toward field experience, the effect of an early field experience like pc could be even further diluted. given the complicated nature of such an early field experience, considerations should be given to not only program features but also to other factors, particularly the needs of psts and children, in the process of designing and assessing the program. based upon the findings, the researchers made the following recommendations: 1) provide an informed early field experience. in addition to providing information about the after-school program and spending time on scheduling and lesson planning, prepare the psts by engaging them in discussion about the role and process of experiential learning, particularly one that takes place early in a teacher education program. help psts understand early in a teacher education program how working directly with children in a variety of settings, including regular classroom and nonclassroom contexts, contributes to knowledge of teaching. introduce dewey’s concept of experiential and reflective learning via the cycle of problem, hypothesis, and its testing in practice. offer extra support to psts who struggle with seeing both the external and internal causes for problem encountered in the field. guide them to recognize factors they can work on, which are controllable and can change over time. 2) create opportunities for developing multicultural competencies in both course work and field experiences. darling-hammond (2010) contended that, “no amount of coursework can, by itself, counteract the powerful experiential lessons that shape what teachers actually do” (p.42). to bridge the gap between theory and practice, the researchers suggested that an early field experience, which allows psts to see expert practice of teaching diverse students, be integrated as a component of a course with a focus on developing psts’ multicultural competencies. in addition, assignments which require psts to interact closely with children from diverse cultural backgrounds will help psts examine their previously constructed biases and stereotypes. another strategy is to bring into the college classroom teachers who have demonstrated culturally competent teaching in diverse settings. the teacher education program has alumni teaching in diverse urban classrooms. it would be of great benefit for the psts to hear these alumni share their experiences and to learn from their struggles and success. 3) include community experts as a major source of knowledge in the afterschool program. in pc, community experts typically offered activities to one group of children while psts worked with others. it would be a powerful learning opportunity to invite these experts to explain the activities to the psts and let them facilitate the activities. they could then move from one group to another to supervise and mentor those psts. it will be of greater benefit if psts could participate in the planning process. if we believe knowledge from the community is an connected space for early experiential learning 51 important source of learning to teach, then community experts should be included in the process of planning, revision, and evaluation of such an afterschool program. 4) optimize logistical factors to maximize the impact of the program. the researchers recommend that credits be assigned to pc to honor the importance of experiential learning as well as the work of psts and faculty, possibly by treating it like the lab component of a natural science course. it is also imperative to manage scheduling in a way to ensure that all psts have equal opportunity to be mentored by their supervisors. it may also be helpful to offer instructor credit release to supervise psts working in early field experience like pc. finally, getting support from classroom teachers and building leadership to obtain more spaces during pc. if psts and the children they work with could use a classroom, even for part of the afternoon program, the pressure for space and the potential for problems that space limitation may cause can be significantly eased. this study has several limitations. one is that it examined aggregated data on common themes and relationships across different data sources, instead of the transformative experiences of individual participants. examining individual pst’s experiences in pc might have provided more nuance about how changes happened or why they never happened to some psts. another limitation is that the study did not include faculty’s views about experiences in pc. pre-service teachers could have totally different experience if their instructors believed that academic knowledge was the authoritative source of teacher knowledge (zeichner, 2010). the last limitation is that the study did not include other two sites, where pc might be organized differently, and hence had different impact on the psts. the researchers, therefore, do not encourage any generalization based on the findings. in spite of the limitations, the study shed some light on the university-based teacher education practice. it offers an important option for programs striving to provide psts early experiential learning opportunities. in addition, the study contributes to the existing knowledge of experiential learning by revealing the complexity of its process, in which logistical features and/or internal factors such as psts’ attitude toward and perception of field experience can mediate the impact. moreover, findings of the present study imply that an authentic campus-field connection not only affords opportunity for psts to work with children in school or community settings, it also allows access to practice-based knowledge constructed by classroom teachers and community experts. finally, this study indicates that pre-student-teaching field experience in different settings may have impact on different aspects of psts’ professional growth in different stages of a teacher education program. future research can explore the roles of early field experiences in a variety of settings in the process of learning to teach. conclusion project connect is an innovative after-school program initiated by collaborative efforts of university-based teacher education programs and a local school district to create early experiential learning opportunities for preservice teachers. the program was named so with the expectation of connecting campus with the field, and theory with practice outside the college classroom. the purpose of the study was to examine what impact this structured afterschool program had on the professional growth of pre-service teachers, and what characteristics contributed to the impact. consistent with the previous studies about after-school programs, 52 global education review 3(4) the findings of this study indicated that an afterschool program which was established as a required component of education courses and took place in a school building had positive impact on the transformation of pre-service teachers’ professional identity, skills, and dispositions. however, such impact was not only related to the built-in features of the program, but was also mediated by the logistical factors and manifested with individual differences. the study gave a glimpse of the complicated process of experiential learning in teacher education. participating in a field-based learning experience, which afforded the repeated cycle of problem, hypothesis, and its testing, did not necessarily lead to learning. through the primary and secondary experiences, every step could be influenced by so many internal and external factors. perception of field experience could result in a positive or negative attitude; a pre-service teacher’s motives could drive them to attribute a problem to internal or external causes; previous knowledge, ability, and support could help them form a reasonable or unrealistic hypothesis; and in addition to all of these, effort or lack of effort could influence the result of testing hypothesis, which would change or reinforce the initial attitude and perceptions. as a result, learning may happen for some preservice teachers but not others; or it may happen sometimes but not all the time. project connect is like a newborn that has taken its first step. this step is far from being perfect – more effort is needed to bring on board the participation of school teachers; community expertise has to be not only present, but accessible to pre-service teachers; and needs of all pre-service teachers are yet to be understood and adapted to. it is hoped that the findings of this study can help the program grow stronger and more effective. as there is little research about after-school programs integrated as a required early field component in teacher education courses, it is hoped that this study can serve as a catalyst for more future research on early experiential learning in teacher education. references banks, j., dunston, y. l., & foley, t. e. 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(2013). experiencing the other: the impact of service-learning on preservice teachers’ perceptions of diversity. teacher education quarterly, 40(4), 41-62. valencia, s., martin, s., place, n., & grossman, p. (2009). complex interactions in student teaching: lost opportunities for learning. journal of teacher education, 60(3), 304-322. zeichner, k. (2010). rethinking the connections between campus courses and field experiences in collegeand university-based teacher education. journal of teacher education, 61(1-2), 89-99. zimpher, n. l., & howey, k. r. (2013). creating 21st-century centers of pedagogy: explicating key laboratory and clinical elements of teacher preparation. education, 133(4), 409-421. about the author(s) yong yu, edd, is an assistant professor in the literacy education program at state university of new york at plattsburgh. her research interests include early experiential learning experiences in teacher education and multicultural children’s literature. jean ann hunt, edd, is an associate professor in literacy education. she also serves as a program leader and the writing coordinator for teacher education at suny plattsburgh. https://data.nysed.gov/lists.php?type=district 92 global education review 4(2) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ringsmose, charlotte. (2017). global education reform movement: challenge to nordic childhood. global education review, 4 (2), 92-102. global education reform movement: challenge to nordic childhood charlotte ringsmose aarhus university, denmark abstract the international comparison and competitive focus on (academic) performance, together with the growing awareness that early years impact children’s learning and development in education as well as over a lifetime, has resulted in heightened political interest in the learning of the youngest children. politicians take action to achieve what they assume to be most effective approach, resulting in more centralized control, and more structured learning approaches introduced to children at still younger ages (brogaard-clausen, 2015: brehony, 2000: moss, 2013). in the nordic countries1 there is a general concern for early years and the challenges facing early childhood education and care in an era of increasing globalization, with focus on accountability and academic competition (ringsmose, kragh-müller, 2017). in denmark, the social pedagogical tradition has been part of the culture of early childhood education for decades. in the social pedagogical tradition, relationships, play, and children’s influence are considered of key importance, and as the child’s natural way to learn about, and make sense of the world. it is considered that children learn and explore through play and participation embedded in the culture. recently, the ministry of education has discussed more focused learning plans, and has tried out a program with more structured learning approaches. the gradual changes, together with the possible political action, are changes seriously threatening the social pedagogical tradition with more school-like, and more structured ways for children to interact. the purpose of this article is to present the danish example as an alternative to the schoolification of early years that we see in many countries. keywords global education reform movement (germ), danish education, nordic social pedagogic tradition, early childhood education, developmentally appropriate practice introduction the international research community has pointed to high quality environments as important to young children’s development, both in the short and long term (huntsman, 2008; pramling-samuelson, 2008; heckmann, 2006; eppse, 2015). although it is also debated what constitutes high quality (woodhead, 2007), research reveals that a high quality early environment positively affects children’s learning, motivation, and school readiness, enabling children to gain more from schooling in the long run term (eppse, 2015, schweinhart et al., 2000; bauchmüller, et al., 2011). quality of early environments is especially significant for ______________________________ corresponding author: charlotte ringsmose, school of education, aarhus university, tuborgvej 164, dk-2400 copenhagen nv, denmark. email: e-mail: cr@edu.au.dk challenge to nordic childhood 93 children growing up in disadvantaged environments (heckmann, 2006, eepse, 2015). as a consequence, more countries, politicians and stakeholders are making early childhood education and care a priority, and they are looking to research to make informed decisions for early years. when it comes to the question of what is a high quality environment, childcare research points to the importance of educated professionals, child-adult ratio, group sizes and other structural aspects that influence the qualities that are important for children’s wellbeing and development (huntsman, 2008), and to the importance of investments in early years (oecd, 2006). however, there is a disagreement of what quality in childcare involves. researchers express concern about the child’s right to enjoy childhood, and not to just focus on what the child is “becoming” (kraghmüller, 2013). across the oecd countries two different approaches have been identified: the central european and nordic “social pedagogical tradition” and the french-english “early education approach” or “the readiness for school tradition”. the two can be seen as different curriculum emphases: one with a focus on broad developmental goals, and the other with a focus on skills and school-like learning areas (oecd, 2006). in an era of global competition, the readiness for school tradition is pointed to as a powerful one with a focus on skills and schoollike learning areas (oecd 2006 p. 63). it is carried by american (english-language) research to all countries, and also it holds out the promise to education ministries of children entering primary school already prepared to read and write, and being able to conform to normal classroom procedures.” (oecd, 2006 p. 63). countries and/or organizations that publish the most research internationally2 also have the potential to influence policies and practice to a greater extent and alternative practices such as the central european and nordic “social pedagogical tradition” with a focus on broad developmental goals (oecd, 2006) might not be explored. with the politicians being informed by research, alternative “philosophies” are under threat by this dominance in research of the early education research tradition. this imbalance in the exchange of knowledge may result in politicians reaching the conclusion that teaching and structured learning approaches are necessary in order to support children’s learning and development which is not the case. this article draws on the danish experiences where the social pedagogical approach has been an integrated part of early years learning based on the developments in the 19th century with a holistic approach to children’s learning and development. the aim is to explore how the social pedagogical tradition, together with the investments made through society in early years, benefits children’s learning and development. the social pedagogical approach, together with a broader view on how societal investments that are found in the nordic welfare state societies (unicef benchmark figure 1 page 5 in this article) form children’s learning and development. the increased focus on the importance of early years combined with the focus on accountability and academic competition has resulted in danish politicians regarding focused learning plans for childcare, with specific targets for professionals. this can be seen as the paradox of the global movement pointed to by the english professor peter moss of the university of london, (tonsberg, 2012). why are danish politicians looking to other countries when they aim to develop childcare and raise performances? he also pointed to the problem of schoolification, which is school being introduced to children at an increasingly younger age, asking “why?” what do schools have to offer to children in early years? challenge to nordic childhood 94 welfare states care for the child peter moss (tonsberg, 2012) pointed not only to the important pedagogical traditions, but also to the fact that the danish system has been developed in conjunction with the development of the welfare state over the past 40 years, which means that it is well structured, an integrated part of the culture. this together with the investments through the welfare model has resulted in higher numbers of educated professionals in childcare than in most countries (60% bear a degree). also subsidies that allow all parents and children to access the same quality of childcare, increases enrollment rates, which, in turn, has a positive effect on equality – giving children and families in different income levels the same opportunities. he noted that in some countries childcare is only for the wealthy people whereas the children in more disadvantaged families do not have access (for comparison see figure 1). one would think that this has to do with how wealthy the country is, but this is not the case; quality care is also a matter of priority (the economist intelligence unit 2012). in denmark, equal access to childcare/public facilities is important for creating a more equal society (tonsberg, 2012). ninety-eight percent of the children age 3-5 are in childcare in denmark. ninety percent of the 1-2 year olds are in childcare. this was experienced by the north american mother and housewife kristen podulka (podulka, 2016). she was surprised moving to denmark to find that not only did the state provide a subsidy for her children to attend nursery, but also that she was encouraged to do so both by the state and by other parents. one of the arguments she heard from another parent was the same as in airplanes to provide herself with oxygen before helping others meant that she would help both herself and her child by providing herself with time, and the child with the opportunity to play with other children. with a different cultural background coming to live in denmark, she was surprised; she was also surprised by the extent of the difference in how children were encouraged to be independent and adventurous. this example illustrates some of the cultural differences between children’s lives and upbringing in different cultures. what would be obvious to a dane might not be obvious to people from other countries. in denmark, it is part of a normal childhood to be in full time care, partly due to the high percentage of both men and women in the workforce, which is one of the highest in the world (oecd, 2016), but also because of the trust parents have in the care the children receive when they are away from home. childcare is considered good for both the child and the parent (bupl, 2006). the need for childcare grew because more women entered the workforce and the concurrent development of the welfare state which resulted in the state gradually taking responsibility for establishing places, guidelines, and resources for childcare (kristensen, hamre, bayer, 2015). childcare has become a right to all parents and children, and the state provides public funding and subsidies for all regardless of income. due to the welfare state, a maximum of 25% of cost is paid by the parents and less than 5% of nurseries are privately run (pedersen, h. bupl, 2011). nurseries are open, on average, 51.7 hours per week (bureau 2000). this does not imply that all children are in childcare for approximately 50 hours a week; the long opening times simply provide the flexibility that working parents need. because of the trust between the childcare facilities and the parents, childcare enjoys a strong foundation in the welfare state. childcare allows parents to work, and children to grow, enjoy childhood, and to play with other children. the welfare state investments are high in early years in the nordic countries, and no doubt early investments are important to children’s learning and development. a group of researchers from the us (dr. amity niemeyer, dr. kevin r. bush, dr. jon patton, dr. doris bergen, 2012) conducted an examination of the relationship between maslow’s deficiency needs and academic achievement. the factor most challenge to nordic childhood 95 significantly related to achievement outcomes was access to health and dental care, demonstrating the importance of considering children’s lives in a broader sense, and to understand the opportunity for growth through a broader societal view. children growing up in the nordic countries grow up in societies which provide them, and their parents with good opportunities the nordic countries present themselves as countries with high focus on investments in families and early years. the countries have a one-year period of maternal/paternal leave. all families have access to the same level of quality childcare facilities. the countries have low poverty, which is very important for children’s growth, and also the countries present a higher investment of gdp than most other countries. this also has to do with the long tradition of childcare and the high numbers of both men and women in the workforce. in this unicef benchmark, the nordic countries stand out with the willingness to invest in children and families. . fig. 1. unicef benchmark challenge to nordic childhood 96 in the nordic countries, children have access to health and dental care. in addition, the accessibility of childcare due to the economic subsidies given to the childcare sector by along with measures that promote equality guarantying that all families have a certain level of income all children have access to good healthcare, housing and a certain standard of living – and that everyone has access to education starting in early childhood – is significant for children’s learning and development. equality is important for children’s learning and development. countries that do well have high equality (social progress index) providing children and families protective factors as well as it grants them good opportunities for growth. economy as well as the people gain from a more equal society such as the nordic countries. (wilkinson, r., & pickett, k. (2009) providing children and families protective factors as well as providing good opportunities for growth. it is not only access to health and dental care, and not only the investments in early years, but also that children grow up in an equal society in a broader sense. worklife, lifestyle, economy, health and wellbeing is affected by equality. especially access to education benefits the generations to come by growing up in societies with cultural capital. for the society education matters for growth and welfare. “education is a strong investment for the individual as well as society” (aeraadet, 2011). having the early years prioritized is not only connected to the wealth of the country, but also has to do with values and priorities. the ranking benchmarking early education in the study “starting well: benchmarking early education across the world” (the economist intelligence unit 2012) which ranks 45 countries according to the quality of their childcare facilities. is based in comparison of overall early childhood education and care (ecec) provision and quality in the different countries. several high-income countries rank poorly in the study, since the focus is not the wealth, but rather evaluation of the learning that is presumed to take place through children’s participation in ecec. the countries that rank well in the study have the following characteristics (the economist intelligence unit 2012).  a comprehensive early childhood development and promotion strategy, backed up with a legal right to such education.  universal enrolment of children in at least a year of preschool at ages five or six, with nearly universal enrolment between the ages of three and five.  subsidies to ensure access for underprivileged families.  where provision is privatized, the cost of such care is affordable relative to average wages.  a high bar for preschool educators, with specific qualification requirements. this is often backed up with commensurate wages, as well as low student teacher ratios.  a well-defined preschool curriculum, along with clear health and safety standards.  clear parental involvement and outreach.  a broad socioeconomic environment that ensures that children are healthy and well-nourished when they enter preschool. in general, the nordic countries take high ranking in the study. finland, sweden and norway rank. 1, 2 or 3, denmark ranks six. several rich countries have low ranking, e.g., on accessibility, and some countries with financial challenges have high rankings in the study. the czech republic rank number 17, chile rank number 20, the united states number 24, and canada number 26. the study criticizes the fact challenge to nordic childhood 97 that countries with good economies do not prioritize early childhood. the nordic welfare state systems provide high investments in young children in general providing children with equal opportunities. the danish law on childcare up until 2004, there were no national or subnational prescribed guidelines on pedagogic approaches specified by the government or the local authorities in danish childcare. childcare was part of a set of broad-based regulations stating the values of ecec. these are still predominant in the law. the law on child care in denmark (ministry of welfare 2015) emphasizes that childcare must provide a physical, psychological and esthetic environment for the children that promotes their wellbeing, health, development and learning. the following aims are required to be reflected in the locally developed learning plans.  the setting must, in collaboration with the parents, give children care and support the individual child’s allround/holistic development and selfesteem as well as contribute to the child’s experience a good and safe upbringing.  the childcare setting must promote children’s learning and development of competence through experiences, play and pedagogical planned activities that provide opportunity for engrossment, exploration and experience.  the childcare setting must give child codecision, co-responsibility, and understanding of democracy. as a part of this the childcare setting must contribute to develop children’s independence, abilities to commit themselves in the community and solidarity with and integrate in the danish society.  the setting must, in collaboration with the parents ensure a good transition to school, by developing and supporting fundamental competences and the inclination to learn. the setting shall in collaboration with the schools create a coherent transition to school and afterschool provision. in 2004, the pedagogical learning plan was introduced with six learning themes: language, social competences, personal competences, nature and nature's phenomena, cultural expressions and values, body and movement. the individual ecec setting had to both incorporate the overall aims and learning themes set in the law and produce a plan for children between 6 months and 2.5 years and for children between 3 years and school age. local decision making was maintained and the curriculum remained a broader based regulation. the curriculum has been adjusted a number of times; however, the local development of aims and methods remains. the danish curriculum does not in itself imply structured school preparatory activities and it does not detail method or specify goals or assessment of the individual child. for a very short period of three years, from 2007-2010, with language assessment for all three-year-old children, the requirement was changed to a language assessment of solely the children perceived in need of special language support. there has traditionally been a strong resistance to testing young children (ringsmose, c.& brogaard clausen). the only assessment is that once a year the children are interviewed about their opinions on childcare. a commission under the danish ministry of education has developed a questionnaire that can be used when interviewing the children. this questionnaire includes questions to the children about childcare in general, about their relationships to challenge to nordic childhood 98 the other children and friendships, about the teachers (e.g., whether the child like the teachers, feels that the teachers like him/her, whether the teachers listen to the child, scold him/her), and about indoors and outdoors equipment for play and a range of other things. granting children influence. the broad value based goals are part of the social pedagogical tradition. it is considered that learning takes place through play, relationships between children and adults, children’s influence, and the outdoor life as significant which is direct opposite to what we can witness in many systems of early childhood around the world with focus on direct teaching, standardization, and less paly. in the danish curriculum does not imply structured school preparatory activities and it does not detail method or specify goals or assessment of the individual child (ringsmose & brogaard clausen, 2017). in the law it is evident how children’s participation, well-being, social development and learning are equally valued and how they are perceived as a part of supporting character formation, which is positioned as the main aim for children’s lives in the early years’ settings. learning and development in the social pedagogical tradition in the social pedagogical tradition “the pedagogue sets out to address the whole child, the child with body, mind, emotions, creativity, history and social identity. this is not the child only of emotions – the psycho-therapeutical approach; nor only of the body – the medical or health approach; nor only of the mind – the traditional teaching approach. for the pedagogue, working with the whole child, learning, care and, more generally, upbringing (the elements of the original german concept of pedagogy: bildung, erziehung and betreuung) are closely-related – indeed inseparable activities at the level of daily work. these are not separate fields needing to be joined up, but inter-connected parts of the child’s life.” (oecd, 2006 p. 59). the danish early years’ practices are built on philosophies of fröbel and montessori. both theories focus on how children learn and develop based on an understanding of the child’s efforts and strategies to learn and develop, and also on the motivation and eagerness to understand and master. play is considered essential to children’s development and learning (kristensen, hamre, bayer, 2015). for the preschool child, the motivation to interact and communicate does not only focus on connecting with adults, but also on joining peers in play activities (hviid, 2000, karrebæk, 2008). the american researcher judith wagner, who studied childcare in denmark, noticed that danish preschool professionals often protest to being referred to as teachers, because they claim they do not teach children. she explained that this is not what american’s call custodial care, but rather a view of interactions between children as active constructors and adults who care for them. she thinks that what danish early years’ professionals call care is consistent with what american’s call developmentally appropriate education for young children. yet the danish pedagogue would still be uncomfortable with the term teaching; instead, the term learning has become predominant. traditionally the danish pedagogues’ selfperception is that they do not teach but rather care for children, in the understanding of care as 'developing strong relationships with them and engaging them in a democratic community' (broström and wagner 2003). the tradition is based on a broad understanding of learning in which children learn through play and participation. it is a child-centered, socio-cultural approach to learning and development. learning is connected to the child’s experiences in social relationships, body experiences, and experiences with materials as well as with other people. it is challenge to nordic childhood 99 considered that young children do not learn best through teaching, but in everyday life experiences, activities, play, and relationships (hansen, m, 1997). the relationships between the children and between the children and the professionals are considered the core of the child’s ability to grow and thrive. this is supported by research indicating that the relationships between the educational staff and the children are important for the children’s personal, cognitive and social development (who, 2004). the who review reported that the most important factor for quality in childadult interaction is the adult’s sensitivity towards the child’s expression and the adult’s responsiveness i.e., whether the adult’s response to the child’s signals is in accordance with the child’s expression. the who review also shows that the adult’s personality, wellbeing and engagement in the children affect the relationship and thereby influence child development. the oecd’s review of child care services has described the essence of quality care as “a stimulating close, warm and supportive interaction with children”. a similar review in the united states has concluded that “warm, sensitive and responsive interaction between caregiver and child is considered the cornerstone of quality” – a characteristic that is as difficult to define and measure as it is to deliver.” (unicef 2007 p. 21). children develop by engaging in social interaction and joint attention through participation in meaningful activities with adults as well as with other children. shared attention scaffolds the child’s competences and abilities in all areas of development (tomasello, 2003, vygotsky, 1978). joint attention is defined as the phenomenon achieved when two individuals know that they are attending to something in common (tomasello, 2003). the task of preschool curricula is not to teach the children a certain curriculum, but to create opportunities for joint attention and social understanding (carpendale and lewis, 2006: 106). this joint attention happens when adults and children explore together, read a book together, play a game or engage attentively in any other social activity. allowing children to enjoy childhood while learning to actively participate in society and develop the social and cognitive skills and competencies necessary to do well in society. grethe kragh-müller who has studied danish and north american childcare (kraghmüller, 2013) found that the adults in both the american and danish childcarecenters believe that growth-promoting relationships between the pedagogues/teachers and children comprise the most important quality indicator in childcare. in practice, however, the relationships vary. relationships between children and adults appear to be more personal and equal in the danish/nordic tradition than in the north american tradition. interviewing danish pedagogues, she found that they identify attentiveness between pedagogues and children, care and appreciative relationships as the most important aspects of educational quality. when you interview danish parents – and also american parents, for that matter – they indicate that the most important factor is that pedagogues should show that they care for and love their children. and the children themselves, also both danish and american children, say that the most important aspects of a good day in childcare are good opportunities for playing with playmates of the same age, and that the adults are nice (kragh-müller, 2013). recent studies on danish childcare centers reveal the impact of the increased focus on early years which is gradually changing the relationships between the children and the adults with more structured approaches to childcare and more adult directed activities with the children and less play. it is obvious in the centers that there are more materials focusing on learning activities, and less materials for play which may affect the child’s possibilities to have an influence, to play, and to interact with peers through play. this can be viewed as a result of challenge to nordic childhood 100 the influence from the global education reform movement influencing danish childcare towards more school directed activities at the expense of play and personal contact. global education reform movement challenging nordic childhoods the social pedagogical approach to early years learning is challenged with the increased global focus on quality early childhood education, politicians and practitioners take action to achieve what they assume will be more effective. in denmark in 2014 the minister of education who was then responsible for childcare was pointing to more focused learning plans, and also trying out a program with more structured activities in early years (future childcare, 2014). with the structured activities and focused learning plans program we also saw examples of children undergoing pressure while they were being tested to measure their cognitive and social abilities. this was presented in the media, and resulted in a huge debate. the structured program was highly criticized from several parts. the danish union for social pedagogues (bupl) resisted strongly to the program. so did the parents organization (fola), as well as many pedagogues and researchers. the newspapers and television news and debate programs communicated the debates. the resistance was criticizing the narrow goals which as a consequence made the pedagogy look more like teaching, and the pedagogue holding more structured plans a more narrow focus. the strongest resistance was on behalf of the testing, and the narrow understanding of children’s development that can be seen as a result of the test practices. researcher’s supported the debate saying that it was more like laboratory experiments that we left behind 40-50 years ago (http://www.bupl.dk/presse/pressemeddelelser /forskere_i_haard_kritik_af_fremtidens_dagtil bud?opendocument) the critique resulted in partnership lead by the government office involving the organizations, the unions, the researchers, the pedagogues, the parents and the politicians describing the new aims and goals for the learning plans in childcare. this has resulted in a consensus report which is now the common point of action, and which is at the moment debated in the parliament, and may become the new common ground based on the cultural values, and on the foundation of the tradition of social pedagogy. for now, the resistance to the changes was strong enough to stop the program, but the question is for how long. the politicians are strongly influenced by research looking for the “right pill”, and also changes in the social pedagogical tradition are happening gradually. returning to the question of why danish politicians are looking to other countries when they aim to develop childcare. the schoolification approach that is found in many countries in early years has an immediate attraction to politicians in an era of global competition with focus on which countries have the best performing students. although this may seem obvious, the fact is that children do become ready for school in cultures such as the danish with a focus on relationships, play, and children’s influence. young children learn when they play, explore, and participate in everyday activities. in cultures such as the danish where the social pedagogical approach has been an integrated part of early childhood children have become ready for school for many years. the international comparison and competitive focus is an ongoing threat to important values of early childhood. notes 1. the nordic philosophy of early years will be viewed with denmark as an example. within the nordic countries traditions vary, but the countries share the welfare state model, and also philosophies of learning taking place challenge to nordic childhood 101 through play, relationships between children and adults, children’s influence, and the outdoor life as significant. 2. e.g., the environmental rating scales such as ecers-r, ecers-3 and iters-r developed in the us is now used in many other countries. on the official website it says “the scales are used not just in their country of origin, the united states, but world-wide for research, and quality assessment and improvement. international use includes, but is not limited to canada and various countries of europe, asia, and south america. they apply across varied cultures when desired outcomes required for success in a global society, and desired goals for children (downloaded from the worldwide web june 29, 2017 https://www.ersi.info/inpractice.html). references bauchmüller, r., gørtz, m.; rasmussen, a.w. (2011); longrun benefits from universal high-quality preschooling. akf workingpaper brogaard clausen, s. (2015). schoolification or early years democracy? a cross curricular perspective from denmark and england contemporary issues in early childhood 16(4) broström, s., wagner, j.t. (eds.) (2003). early childhood education in five nordic countries: perspectives on the transition from preschool to school. systime academic. carpendale, j.l.m, c.l.lewis (2006). how children develop social understanding. blackwell publishing. hansen, m. (1997) intelligens og tænkning en bog om kognitiv psykologi. åløkke heckman, j.j. (2006): “skill formation and the economics of investing in disadvantaged children”. science, 312. huntsman, l. (2008): literature review. determinants of quality childcare: a review of evidence. centre for parenting & research service system development division. hviid, p. (2000): legekammerater. in, reimer, l.; schousboe, i. & thorborg, p. 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(2015). effective pre-school, primary and secondary https://www.ersi.info/inpractice.html https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm https://data.oecd.org/emp/labour-force-participation-rate.htm http://time.com/4033896/how-to-parent-like-a-dane/?xid=homepage http://time.com/4033896/how-to-parent-like-a-dane/?xid=homepage http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/charlotte-ringsmose(8fa2ca84-fcdc-4cfc-9e1c-ad2ca6bf2043)/publications/comparative-perspectives-on-early-childhood(e2773544-cc04-4281-887e-12ebe3d6889f).html http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/charlotte-ringsmose(8fa2ca84-fcdc-4cfc-9e1c-ad2ca6bf2043)/publications/comparative-perspectives-on-early-childhood(e2773544-cc04-4281-887e-12ebe3d6889f).html http://pure.au.dk/portal/da/persons/charlotte-ringsmose(8fa2ca84-fcdc-4cfc-9e1c-ad2ca6bf2043)/publications/comparative-perspectives-on-early-childhood(e2773544-cc04-4281-887e-12ebe3d6889f).html challenge to nordic childhood 102 education project (eppse 3-16+). ucl institute of education, university college london, birkbeck, university of london, university of oxford https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/u ploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effecti ve_preschool_primary_and_secondary_education_project. pdf.pdf the economist intelligence unit (2012): starting well. benchmarking early education across the world. http://www.lienfoundation.org/pdf/publications/sw _report.pdf tomasello, m. (2003) the key is social cognition. in getner, d & goldin-meadow, s. (eds.), language in mind: advances in the study of language and thought. mit press 47--57 (2003) tonsberg, s. (2012). interview with peter moss. https://ucc.dk/nyhed/udlandet-kigger-misundeligtpaa-danske-boernehaver. university college copenhagen. unicef (2007). child poverty in perspective. an overview of child well-being in rich countries. a comprehensive assessment of the lives and wellbeing of children and adolescents in the economically advanced nations. innocenti research centre. report card 7. who (2004). the importance of caregiver-child interactions for the survival and healthy development of young children. a review. world health organization. department of child and adolsescent health and development. wilkinson, r., pickett, k. (2009). the spirit level: why more equal societies almost always do better. london: allen lane winther-lindqvist, d. (2009a) symbolic group-play and social identity, in wagoner, b. (ed). symbolic transformation: the mind in movement through culture and society. vol. 1, routledge, pp. 249-269 winther-lindqvist, d. (2009). game playing: negotiating rules and identities, american journal of play, vol. 2. nr. 1. strong national museum of play, pp. 60-84 woodhead, m. (2007). changing perspectives on early childhood: theory, research and policy united nations background paper prepared for the education for all global monitoring report 2007 strong foundations: early childhood care and education vygotsky, l.s. (1978). mind in society. the development of higher psychological processeslondon: harvard university press about the author charlotte ringsmose, phd, is a professor and director of research in early childhood education and care at the university of aarhus, department of education in denmark. she does research in the social pedagogical approach to early years, and has published several articles on values in early years education and care. she is the editor of the springer anthology "nordic social pedagogical approach to early years" (springer publisher, 2017). https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effective_pre-school_primary_and_secondary_education_project.pdf.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effective_pre-school_primary_and_secondary_education_project.pdf.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effective_pre-school_primary_and_secondary_education_project.pdf.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effective_pre-school_primary_and_secondary_education_project.pdf.pdf https://www.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/455670/rb455_effective_pre-school_primary_and_secondary_education_project.pdf.pdf http://philpapers.org/rec/getlim http://philpapers.org/rec/getlim http://philpapers.org/rec/getlim https://ucc.dk/nyhed/udlandet-kigger-misundeligt-paa-danske-boernehaver https://ucc.dk/nyhed/udlandet-kigger-misundeligt-paa-danske-boernehaver 164 global education review 3 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: de jesus, olga (2016). embracing the global, ignoring the local in the persian gulf. [review of the book education and the reverse gender divide in the gulf states: embracing the global, ignoring the local by natasha ridge]. global education review, 3 (1). 164-165. book review embracing the global, ignoring the local in the persian gulf “education and the reverse gender divide in the gulf states” by natasha ridge by olga de jesus in this groundbreaking work, education and the reverse gender divide in the gulf states, natasha ridge provides a close examination of the relationship between gender and education in the gulf cooperation countries (gcc) and reveals that women’s participation and achievement in education is rapidly outpacing that of men’s. ridge, referring to this situation as a “reverse gender divide,” examines the roots and causes of this imbalance, as well as its implications for the future. the author further describes how gcc countries, in their desire to be perceived as modern nation-states, have enacted and embraced educational policies that leave no space for local policymakers to acknowledge young male students’ deficits and challenges. in addition to the important implications for educational policy and practice, the author also explores wider social and political issues, such as the impact on the local workforce and the region’s future sustainable development. the 168-page book consists of seven chapters. in chapter 1, ridge provides an overview of the development of mass education in each gulf state. this provides the historical, cultural, and political background necessary to make sense of the present educational situation and gender dynamics. in chapter 2, ridge presents the rise of young females in the region as the result of a widespread and rapid expansion of educational opportunities. chapter 3 focusses on the region’s pursuit of modernity and how it plays a role in enabling the current gender divide. chapter 4 focusses on young males and their educational path since the discovery of oil in the region. the oil issue significantly complicates both the modernization and gender agendas. however, according to ridge, the nationalization agenda has come into greater focus in the last 10 years. chapter 5 examines how efforts made in these countries to create jobs for their nationals and expand their workforce have created a lack of encouragement for males in education. chapter 6 divulges and questions the purpose of education in a society where the demand for work takes away from the embracing the global, ignoring the local 165 value of education for most males. ridge concludes her book in chapter 7 with a discussion about the continuing relevance of gender in the region, particularly for education and labor markets. ridge states that “by taking an inclusive yet critical look at gender; it is possible to reimagine the gulf as a place where both men and women can enjoy unique comparative advantages” (p. 8). overall, the book’s data and research leads to the obvious conclusion that the gender pendulum debate is very much up for renewal. throughout the book, ridge stresses the importance of seeing gender in a more serious way, as there are distractions that can derail observers from the fact that one half of the society is facing challenges with educational success and longevity. the book’s implications have the very real byproduct of retaining males in the education system that will lead to reducing their temptation to disconnect from their communities and be led into radical religious wars, drugs, and other rebellious acts. “education and the reverse gender divide in the gulf states: embracing the global, ignoring the local.” by natasha ridge. new york: teachers college press, 2014. isbn: 978-0-8077-5561-7 about the author natasha ridge is the executive director of the sheikh saud bin saqr al qasimi foundation for policy research. she holds a doctorate of education with a specialization in international education policy from columbia university, new york. her research focuses on secondary education in the gcc and examines topics such as boys' education, teacher quality, and the privatization of education. about the reviewer olga de jesus, ed.d., is an assistant professor in the school of education at mercy college. she has been an educator for 20 years with expertise in bilingual and special education. she is an active member of the new york state association of bilingual educators (nysabe) and is on the nysed committee designated to establish the standards for the new york state seal of bi-literacy initiative. her most recent publication, english language learners: international undergraduate english language learners' perception of distance learning, has gained international interest. she has also presented in austria and has currently been invited to be a member of the oxford round table conference at oxford university in england. being untaught 105 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: krupar, allyson (2016). being untaught: how ngo field workers empower parents of children with disabilities in dadaab. global education review, 3 (3). 105-121 being untaught: how ngo field workers empower parents of children with disabilities in dadaab allyson krupar pennsylvania state university abstract roughly 350,000 refugees, over 90% of them somali, lived in five sprawling camps in dadaab, kenya in 2015. in the dadaab refugee camps, families had unique experiences of disability, education, women’s roles, and involvement with international non-governmental organization (ingo) programming. ingos provided a variety of basic services including education such as the program analyzed here for parents of children with disabilities. many children with disabilities in the refugee camps faced social stigma and lacked access to education. this research draws on practices and literature in family literacy and parental involvement programming to explore how one ngo training sought to empower women learners to send their children with disabilities to school in kambioos, the smallest and newest refugee camp in dadaab. using ethnographic methods, one training program involving parents and children was video-taped. the video was used as a cue to interview field workers about how the training empowered parents, particularly mothers. the study found that empowerment of women through training for parents of children with disabilities centered on parents’ interaction with formal schools and engagement in their communities. keywords dadaab, ingos, parents of children with disability, parental involvement, family literacy, empowerment, refugee, kenya introduction in the kambioos refugee camp in dadaab, kenya, roughly 100 kilometers from the somali border, children with disabilities were not going to school and parents were not aware of the available education services. on a sunny, breezy morning in the camp, a group of 40 parents and children, and four international nongovernmental organization (ingo) field workers gathered for training. shared global connections (sgc),1 the agency in dadaab organizing the training, had recently hired several kenyan teachers with specialization in teaching children with disabilities. sgc staff were eager to begin to make parents aware of the new services that they could access. drawing on this training as an example of parental involvement and family literacy programming, this article seeks to understand how ngo field workers teach and conceptualize empowerment through training for somali refugee women who are family members of children with disabilities in dadaab. to do so, i also investigated disability constructions in dadaab. ______________________________ corresponding author: allyson krupar, pennsylvania state university email: allymk@gmail.com allykrupar@psu.edu 106 global education review 3(3) background the precolonial history of eastern kenya was documented through trade routes that continue today, unabated by drought, forced migration, nor border closure. the british colonial government viewed predominantly somali pastoralists in the region with distrust and interacted with mobile populations with force, “to halt raids by unruly pastoralists into the settled districts, or to prevent them from displacing more tranquil livestock-keepers like the oromo” (cassanelli, 2010, p. 135). since the end of british rule, there has been conflict between ethnically somali eastern kenyans and the kenyan government. beginning with the shifta war in the 1960s, secessionists in the eastern provinces of the new kenyan state fought for autonomy from arbitrary colonial borders. secessionist efforts failed but reinforced the view of the borderlands as wild and uncivilized (cassanelli, 2010). the current kenyan government’s policies towards nomadic somali kenyans and somali refugees in dadaab have roots in this colonial mistrust and conflict. throughout the 1970s, somali refugees began to arrive in kenya fleeing drought. eventually tens of thousands fled the collapse of the somali government under siyad barre in 1991. by the drought in 2011, hundreds of thousands of somalis traversed the arid region seeking sanctuary in eastern kenya. in dadaab, roughly 350,000 refugees, over 90% of them somali, live in five sprawling camps around a central market and the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) compound. in this refugee settlement, which has grown since 1991, families are dependent on education and other services provided by unhcr, which oversees camp operations, and affiliated organizations such as sgc. the extreme poverty in dadaab and the harsh windy, hot, sandy, and flood-prone environment perpetuate difficulties for children to attend school regardless of ability. moreover, many children with disabilities face social stigma, sometimes in the home and often in the community. they frequently are confined to the home with little access to education. international development programming is part of an “enlightenment project” with historic roots and goals of universality, state sovereignty, and western scientific methods (appadurai, 1990; buck & silver, 2013, p. 122). the un’s enlightenment project continues historical constructions of the state as well as “the triumphantly universal and the resiliently particular” (appadurai, 1990, 308). for instance, ngos and the un (co)construct women’s empowerment as a universal goal, such as millennium development goal 3, and localize it in practice (batliwala, 1993). women are targeted in empowerment programming and must navigate between traditional or conservative values, and the enlightenment projects in which they participate (buck & silver, 2013). in the day to day, women balance traditional roles as caretakers, including time consuming household tasks, with new responsibilities and access to resources provided by organizations like sgc (smith, 2004). empowerment’s definition in dadaab and in many refugee settings is part of an international discourse that spans varied definitions from “a synonym for enabling, participating, and speaking out” to an emphasis on individual or community power (murphygraham, 2010, p. 321). functionally, empowerment has been defined as ensuring that refugee women have “basic skills, knowledge, and access to information” so as to “reduce their immediate vulnerability and dependence on outside assistance” related to protecting their families (foster, 1995, p. 2). it also is a personal process, where the learner who is empowered is an active agent or their power, such as selfconfidence, is coming from within (prins, 2008). being untaught 107 empowerment can also relate to family life or being able to make decisions and influence relationships (murphy-graham, 2010; prins, 2008). empowerment is inextricably linked to power, gender, access to resources, social status, and environmental variables. in addition, ngos provide training programs such as the one analyzed here to address universal goals to increase access to education for children with disabilities in line with the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) and the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities. the uncrc includes reference to disability and emphasis on child protection (un, 2004). in addition, the additional protocol ii to the geneva convention calls for educational access for all children, especially in emergencies (un, 2004). international law frames ngo’s practice in dadaab as ngos contribute to and translate legal norms in practice. i defined disability in this research as related to perceived or experienced “physiological or behavioral statuses…socially identified as problems, illnesses, conditions, disorders, syndromes, or other similarly negatively valued differences, distinctions, or characteristics which might have an ethnomedical diagnostic category or label” (kasnitz & shuttleworth, 2001, para. 2). this article examined how disability was constructed in social relations in training for somali refugee women, depending on “societal discrimination and internalized oppression…and on cultural and situational views of cause and cure and of fate and fault” (kasnitz & shuttleworth, 2001, para. 2). sgc localized women’s empowerment related to parental involvement, frequently mothers, in education for children with disabilities in training to increase their likelihood of enrolling their children with disabilities in school. theoretical framework overall, the theoretical framework for this research has roots in critical theory from feminist readings of habermas (meehan, 2000) from which i developed an approach that recognizes intersubjectivities, or one’s felt interconnections and tensions of identity, power, and empowerment in the home, classroom, community, local institutions, and national and international refugee systems. empowerment is defined through individual, collective, and action-oriented approaches focusing on the power to do something with others (stromquist, 2009). empowerment is also related to enlightenment discourses about the role of unhcr and ingos in pursuit of equality in line with mdg3. in line with feminist methods (kindon, 2003), co-researchers in the data collection process defined empowerment, building on definitions cited in the literature while keeping a framework that places the term in everyday relationships of power. through a feminist ethnographic approach, this research highlighted “the everyday experience of people” relating to educational access of “those forced to live on the margins” at the intersection of refugee, gender, and disability, and identity (davis, 2013, p. 27; checker, david, & schuller, 2014). the theoretical framework is contextualized in family literacy and parental involvement literature, particularly considering constructions of disability and goals of programming for empowerment in dadaab. literature review family literacy programming may aim to increase parents’ involvement in their children’s schooling or focus on learning involving multiple members of the family. these programs typically have three (overlapping) approaches, intervention prevention, multiple-literacies, and social change (auerbach, 2005). intervention prevention approaches are often linked with 108 global education review 3(3) “deficit” approaches, or the idea that parents, communities, and other groups require training to increase parental involvement because they are unable to become adequately engaged without it. this approach sees a gap in practice and proposes to fill it by changing how parents act. the multiple literacies approach emphasizes that rather than a deficit, there is “a mismatch between culturally variable home literacy practices and school literacies” (auerbach, 2005, p. 651). finally, family literacy programming using the social change perspective centers the “problems of marginalized people … in a complex interaction of political, social, and economic factors in the broader society rather than in family inadequacies or differences between home and school cultures” (auerbach, 2005, p. 654). since this article emphasizes power, and women’s empowerment particularly, the social change approach is interwoven in my analysis. it is not, however, the only approach identifiable in the training. parental involvement in schools has been cited as one of the main factors influencing school outcomes (carpentieri, 2013). however, parental involvement literature “suggests that changes in families may take considerable time” to impact children’s school readiness, particularly in areas and social environments where educational access is low (carpentieri, 2013, p. 548). much of the literature on family literacy assumes that parents are already engaging in their children’s formal education (schaub, 2010), something that the training studied here did not assume. parents in dadaab and other refugee camp contexts have different expectations for their children that may or may not include formal education. the lack of parent involvement in schools amongst refugee families presents a point of disagreement in the literature, with some scholars arguing that refugee parents are less likely to engage in schools, and therefore value education less, while others argue that refugee parents may have different approaches to school but highly value education (ariza, 2000; lightfoot, 2004; nderu, 2005). in the literature, these arguments relate to populations outside of the protracted refugee camp setting like dadaab. little scholarly literature discusses parental involvement in schooling in protracted refugee camps. another component of family literacy, and parental involvement literature and the training for parents described here, is the gendered construction of parenting. much of family literacy programming emphasizes mothers, who are frequent participants reached by programming (dudley-marling, 2001; gadsden, 2012). i situate parenting, particularly mothering, in the environment in which it occurs, considering all of the influences and social expectations placed on mothers, fathers, caretakers, and children in dadaab. parental involvement in dadaab in programs, such as the one studied here, are further complicated due to constructions of disability. although a full review of literature on disability studies in forced migration is outside the scope of this research, the definition of disability with which i approach the learning environment takes into consideration alternate social constructions of what disability is and how it is experienced by family members. in dadaab, a review of the literature on disability connected the training studied here with mothers’ gendered experiences. devon cone of mapendo international, an organization that worked in dadaab in 2010 remarked that: persons with disabilities, especially children, often face frequent protection problems including being beaten, stoned and facing verbal abuse. often mothers who give birth to children with impairments are abandoned by their husbands who take the other children with them, leaving the mother alone with the disabled child. alarmingly, in dadaab being untaught 109 some of these mothers tie their children to trees when they have to fetch water or conduct other activities. the idea in doing so is to protect children from hurting themselves or running away. in reality, however, these children often become an even easier target for the rest of the community. while unable to escape they are often stoned, beaten and burned, and sometimes sexually abused. (cone, 2010, p. 19) similarly, rachel reilly of women’s refugee commission (wrc), another agency conducting programming and advocacy in dadaab, elaborated on the difficulties women may face while raising children with disabilities: mothers are often blamed for their children’s disabilities and may suffer physical or sexual abuse from their husbands or other family members, and be harassed, stigmatised and abandoned as a result. (reilly, 2010, p. 8) worldwide, women are stereotypically caregivers and in dadaab, motherhood entails responsibility for children’s disability. this literature review revealed critical gaps surrounding refugee parents’ involvement, or lack thereof, in education of children with disabilities. although wrc had conducted similar interventions, as the training studied here, the only data available was from a brief description in an organizational report (pearce, 2014). no studies were found in disability studies quarterly that directly focused on refugee parents’ involvement in the education of children with disabilities. there were studies about parental involvement related to children with disabilities in the united states (u.s.), but these do not take into consideration the unique positions of low resources settings (banks & miller, 2005) like dadaab. available studies have found that children with disabilities were much less likely to enroll in school in “low and middle income countries” (kuper, dok, wing, danquah, evans, zuurmond, & gallinetti, 2014, p. 1). however, there are no known figures of how many refugees are disabled and no systematic or systemic studies of disability in dadaab or other refugee settings (reilly, 2010). this is despite claims that “disability and displacement go hand in hand” with refugees having more risk of “physical and psychological trauma” as well as having less access to health infrastructure to address poor nutrition or injuries (karanja, 2009). disability is traditionally constructed in the camps as a curse, where somali refugees “believe that an impairment is a punishment in response to behaviour of the parents which has offended allah” or that “the person with the disability would harm people if physically able to do so, and therefore allah curses him or her with a debilitating condition as a way of protecting the community” (cone, 2010, p. 19). complicating the social construction of disability as generally negative and a poor reflection on the individual or family, is the high prevalence of disabilities in dadaab and other refugee settings due to the emergency context and trauma (reilly, 2007). the construction of disability in refugee settings in the literature, though limited, reflects the views discussed below of ngo field workers and the necessity of training. in order to overcome some of these obstacles to children’s and persons’ with disability full participation in society, training to improve social integration is often listed as a key factor for improving circumstances (reilly, 2010). part of the emphasis on education is linked with unhcr’s enlightenment goals of equality though inclusion of persons with disability “to raise awareness of disability and attitudes about it and the rights of persons with disabilities” (unhcr, 2011, p. 6). training in ngos often follows a “knowing how” model, where training “leads to 110 global education review 3(3) high proficiency in a specific skill” as opposed to “knowing why,” where learners gain methods to “deal with and solve a broad range of problems” (essenhigh, 2000; moore, 1998). in the project analyzed here, the intent of the training was to teach parents how to care for their children and “empower them” to send their children to school. the training was specifically aimed at women due to the common understandings of child rearing described by cone (2010) and reilly (2010). mothers are assumed to be primarily responsible for their children’s wellbeing and educational access. training is assumed to be a tool for the empowerment of women (malhotra & schuler, 2005). however, much of the use of empowerment in this study focused on the ability to do something, e.g., send children with disabilities to school. conceptions of empowerment in international development and humanitarian programming focus on individual, collective, and action-oriented goals (e.g. stromquist, 2009, 2015). women’s empowerment may involve making decisions in one’s life, family, and community that actively change traditional gender roles (rowlands, 1997). there is a gap in the literature on refugee education and defining empowerment in ngo training that intends to increase parental involvement of children with disabilities in school. methodology in june 2014, i arrived in dadaab to conduct program evaluation for an ingo working in the camps and to do my own research on women’s empowerment. as a scholar/practitioner, i was privileged with the opportunity to work and stay on the unhcr secure compound in dadaab, 10 to 30 kilometers from the refugee camps that sprawled around the town. i was in dadaab with two purposes, personal research and ingo evaluation work. i approached other field workers first as colleagues and then as potential partners in the research process, using snowball interviews to identify programs to study, such as the training for parents of children with disabilities. my colleagues were co-researchers (reason & bradbury, 2001) who took time out of their work to explore empowerment in training with me. sgc staff members at the dadaab headquarters invited me to study the training for parents of children with disabilities as they believed it was an ideal place where i could explore women’s empowerment. i approached the training ethnographically with the classroom presenting a micro-culture with shared norms, a temporal belief system that governed behavior, and larger representations of understood and agreed upon folkways (tobin, hsueh, & karasawa, 2009). i utilized visual ethnographic methods to allow for a multi-vocal data collection with field workers through video of the training and video-cued interviewing. data collection through snowball sampling, i conducted informal interviews with staff at eight organizations working in dadaab, recorded in field notes. through interviews, i gained written consent from field workers at sgc to conduct research in the training. preliminary informal interviews also led me to the realization that all ngo field workers intend to empower participants in programs in the camps. the staff interviewed at sgc suggested i collect data at the training for parents of children with disabilities to better understand what field workers meant when they intended to empower women learners. the program’s emphasis on parental involvement in education and disabilities presented nuances of everyday experiences of life in kambioos. i conducted participant observation during the two months in 2014 (june to august) and the two months in 2015 (may to june) that i being untaught 111 lived in dadaab to better understand field workers’ practice of empowerment in educational programs, the role of ngos in the camps, and the day to day lives of refugees. given security protocols and ingo policy, i could not spend more than three hours in each of the refugee camps in 2014. training was conducted in kambioos refugee camp and hourlong interviews were conducted in the unhcr compound in dadaab and sgc’s compound in one of the other camps. after receiving written permission from field workers and oral permission from learners in the learning environment,2 i observed and filmed the three-hour training. immediately after the program, i reviewed the film following the multi-vocal visual ethnographic method established by tobin (1989) and tobin, hsueh, and karasawa, (2009). through this method, i interpreted and shortened the video of the training program to identify and present different elements of the shared norms in the program, including introductions, lectures, and interactive activities in a 20-minute edited film. i then met with three of the field workers, abdi, george (who had organized and was observing the training without facilitating for much of the time), and hassan,3 for a group interview. we met at the sgc compound in the oldest refugee camp in dadaab. one field worker, alex, was unavailable to meet with the group and i interviewed him individually in a subsequent meeting at the unhcr compound in dadaab where we both resided. during the interviews with field workers, i showed the shortened film and followed the interview protocol (see appendix) to identify whether the video accurately portrayed the learning environment and what particularly was empowering in the training. i also conducted one group interview with women learners and an interpreter. however, due to concerns regarding interpretation, i did not use that data for analysis. data analysis i analyzed data from the video-recorded training and group and individual interview with field workers to identify themes using nvivo. i first entered jottings from my field notes into full field notes, then connected field notes to interview transcriptions. through linking these files, i connected my subjective interpretation of the training with the views of field workers as they responded to different points of the training presented in the film. given that this research investigated parental involvement in the lives of children with disability and women’s empowerment, i specifically searched the data for narratives and descriptions directly related to these themes. i attempted to stay as close to the data as possible, drawing directly on my field notes, interview transcriptions, and visual data. findings overall, my findings focused on the role of education in dadaab, constructions of disability in the program under study, and the nexus of education, disability, and empowerment presented in the educational environment and interviews. in particular, i found that disability’s relationship with education focused predominantly on basic needs and parents’ recognition of the right to educational access. empowerment was defined by field workers as parents ability and knowledge to recognize their children’s needs and rights. the educational program in sgcs primary school compound in kambioos, the training began with a word of prayer, led by an older man who spoke quickly and rhythmically. abdi, unsettled by children on the playground of the primary school outside the classroom, stepped outside to survey the space and ensure that any parents lagging behind had entered the room. abdi interpreted most of the 112 global education review 3(3) training materials while two other ngo field workers, alex and hassan discussed mostly in english, with hassan providing interpretation occasionally. the three discussed the rights of people with disabilities, the importance of children’s ability to take care of themselves (emphasizing hygiene), and in a hands-on activity with learners using a braille typewriter. although men were involved in the program studied here, and sgc recruited men and women, more women were in attendance. men and women sat on separate sides of the room, except for male children who sat with their mothers. the buzzing of talk in somali was ongoing throughout the program. it was unclear if the talk was about the training or other topics, since the field workers who were interpreting did not ask. the room was casual with the woman sitting to my right frequently spitting on the ground and wiping it up with the sole of her shoe. throughout the training, the parents talked, babies cried, people got up, left, and came back seemingly irregularly, and the facilitation and interpretation continued. despite the goal of training that focused on educational access of children with disabilities, the field workers spent the majority of time emphasizing how to care for and integrate children with visual impairments into the home, community, and schools. abdi described the rights of children with disabilities as “cleaning himself, toilet training, … bathing, personal hygiene, and washing” (transcript from training, 17 july 2014). rights translation centered on survival for persons with disabilities, rather than the more specific rights enshrined in uncrc. education the history of education in dadaab informs the purposes of the educational program as well as the facilitators’ goals. hassan (2014) described the role of education in dadaab as the following: the education system in dadaab began in 1992 when the campus expanded from one to three… later on, unhcr…formalized the education system. it was 1996 when the education system was formalized. then during that time there were gradual things ... some of the challenges included girls’ education. the other challenge we had was children with disability, education for children with disability. … the others include the infrastructure of the schools. there were times when children were learning under shade [tree]s. later on we had a sort of classroom and at the moment we have permanent classrooms. and these other challenges that include girls education and education of children with disabilities, there were also gradual changes year after year. (group interview, 18 july 2014) the history of the camps shows a shared experience of “gradual change” from this history of deprivation and humanitarian emergencies to more infrastructure and development. it echoed other stories i heard throughout observation of programs in dadaab about starvation in the early days of the camps, the slow creation of a health system the could respond to the needs of ever increasing populations, and the huge influx of refugees in 2011 following drought in somalia (field notes, june 25, 2014). in hassan’s experience, ngos have been influencing the educational system to gradually include more girls and children with disabilities, which he identifies as his work. sgc runs schools in all of the camps, including kambioos. near the end of the program, hassan concluded with a stirring lecture, (mis)quoting mahatma gandhi, about how it is “better to be unborn than untaught” (field notes, 17 july 2014).4 hassan drew on an earlier lecture that abdi gave the parents: “if you die as a parent or as a leader,…he [your child] will be being untaught 113 independent,” or that their children with disabilities would be left to fend for themselves without their care (transcript from training, 17 july 2014). abdi and hassan referred to the particular survival needs of children with disabilities in dadaab. training content focused on the assisted daily living (adl) practices of parents with information regarding how to bath and care of children’s daily needs. disability focusing on children’s basic needs, disability was framed in particular ways during the training. first, field workers described albinism and the problems faced by albino children. this was not part of the structured facilitation that was described. the digression from the agenda at the very beginning of the training signified, to me as an observer, that the learners in the room, particularly the young woman who had brought her baby with albinism, influenced the direction of the field workers’ facilitation. the field workers discussed how sgc gives students with albinism scholarships to receive education outside of the camps, and transportation to and from school to mitigate the social stigma they face in camp schools. they also described how children with disability access private classes within the blocks that make up the refugee camps. then, they returned to the agenda, defining terms, such as “special needs” and “handicap” and listing 13 types of disability. the list that they presented, albeit abridged, matched the categories listed in the “individuals with disabilities education act (idea)” a u.s. government document outlining special needs education (u.s. department of education, 2004). in the interviews, alex, who led the section on the 13 types of disability, described the list as extraneous information for the learners, since “those are local things that they know” (individual interview, 24 july 2014). for alex, learners knew how to identify disability in somali and in local constructions; describing each of the disabilities, they believed, did not help them to understand their own children. education, disability, and empowerment nexus sgc staff presented the goals of the educational program as empowering parents of children with disabilities to send their children to school. field workers specifically wished to empower to mothers reasoning that mothers “assist” the family, staying with children with disabilities more than fathers, because as our community, the fathers they go and get the daily bread for the family.…we target especially mothers and we train them … to assist those children who are disabled and staying with them. to show how to wash themselves, clean themselves and to go the toilet for independence. … and to do any other personal activity. so mostly the parent is the mothers who we have seen in the [video]. (group interview, 18 july 2014) abdi discussed motherhood throughout the interview, particularly emphasizing caretaker responsibilities for children’s survival, educational access, and the possibilities of independence of children with disabilities. alex complicated motherhood in the training here as linked with disabilities. he described how in kenya, and in dadaab particularly, “we refer to [children with disabilities] as children of the mothers” (individual interview, 24 july 2014). in this way, even the field workers internalized that “we kind of blame the mothers” for disability (alex, individual interview, 24 july 2014). placing the responsibility of children’s education on the mothers, alex explained that if sgc were to train the fathers, the father then “has to go again and teach the mother until the mother accepts to release the child” to go to school (alex, individual interview, 24 july 2014). viewed this 114 global education review 3(3) way, it is almost irrelevant to train the fathers, since they would need to convince their wives of what they learned. alex did not merely remark on refugee parenting practices, but placed himself in this construction of fatherhood as well when he pointed out that “even me, i’m a father, i’m like an absent father, i’m here” in dadaab, rather than with his family (individual interview, 24 july 2014). through discussing the roles of mothers in training, alex reiterated that when “we empower women” the children are “likely to succeed more” (individual interview, 24 july 2014). the empowerment that the field workers identified included the direct learning and encouragement from the training. field workers hope that parents will learn about disabilities and tell their family, friends, and neighbors what they have learned, encouraged to send children with disabilities to school. hassan believed programs that “sensitize the community” for “community involvement, parent involvement” are empowering for parents to send their children to school (group interview, 18 july 2014) abdi added to this conversation in the group interview, returning to the idea that education is necessary for children with disabilities' survival in the camps. “those parents who we have trained” understand disability and “how to train, or how to educate” so that they can train their children to build skills to “work for himself” and “even produce livelihood” (group interview, 18 july 2014). abdi concluded that with this training, children with disabilities who lose their parents or caretakers “can survive still instead of dying because he miss[es] the two parents” (group interview, 18 july 2014). abdi reiterated that it is better to be unborn than untaught, since without education children with disabilities would not be able to survive in dadaab on their own. the field workers believed there was no risk to disempower the learners because once the parents discovered the potential of their children there was no returning to seeing them as unable or incapable. alex believed that the parents “are eager to help their children” and only needed some “small pieces” of information to help them in acceptable ways (individual interview, 24 july 2014). there was no question of whether their work empowered learners, though with limitations. alex was the only field worker who spoke of limitations in the training, and also the only field worker interviewed individually. he was particularly aware of different pedagogical techniques, a factor he attributed to his educational background and his experience teaching blind students, and as a preacher. because of this knowledge, he was critical of the lack of hands-on activities in the adl training. he was also critical of his own teaching, which he thought was unnecessary as he led the lecture on the 13 types of disability and recognized that learners already had ways of identifying disability in the camp. analysis for alex (individual interview, 24 july 2014), disabilities were “local things that” parents already understood to an extent. the change that the field workers sought, or the “empowerment” as they called it, was a process in which parents become aware of their children’s potential and are encouraged to bring them to school. in their view, learners are empowered when they are involved in their children’s lives and as they spread the information they have learned to others, increasing other parents’ understanding. finally, they are empowered when they question the systems in which they live, for example, when organizations have gaps in service to children and parents know how to report those gaps to ensure quality service (individual interview, 24 july 2014). in interviews field workers gave being untaught 115 hygiene, self-care, and other adl activities as empowering for children. children being able to wash themselves in itself is empowering. the field workers believed another component to empowering parents was supporting them to question the quality of schools and to monitor the progress of their children. however, once children are in formal education, many of them are sent to schools far from the camps so they are not ridiculed or harassed because of their disability. although the training has created changes in some lives, it has not eliminated prejudice and stereotyping, nor has it changed community-based notions of disability. finally, the training reflects a larger system of dependency in the camps where parents must rely on unhcr, sgc, and other organizations to access services and to support their children. refugees are dependent on sgc and other organizations to provide teachers, educational access, and other services. alex asked this from the parents’ perspective: “for children with special needs, if he's [the sgc teacher] the only person who's teaching our children, if he goes away, will we get another person? so we are empowering them but our hands are still tied” (personal communication, 2014). once parents recognize that their children can care for themselves and have capacities to go to school, they are reliant on a system in flux, the humanitarian response organizations like sgc working in dadaab. the field workers and content of the training focus on gendered constructions of parenting and disability. local understandings of disability, discussed by alex, also help to frame what the field workers hoped learners would take away from the training. field workers framed their goals of empowerment, in part, related to the enlightenment ideals of ingos but also connected with what they saw as the rationale for the program, as stated by abdi, that it is better to be unborn than untaught. if children with disabilities continue to be denied education their very survival is at stake, particularly given the circumstances many children with disabilities live in throughout the camps regarding abuse. in analyzing the training content, which focused specifically on adl, it also appears that field workers did not believe parents were bathing or taking care of their children’s daily needs that are linked with survival. discussion what occurs in the learning environment is linked to, reflecting, or contesting regular dayto-day ways of being and belief systems of ngo workers including the concept of empowerment. the goals of the training were described in terms of increasing children’s educational attainment and thus productivity in the community, from basic hygiene to independence from parents. the findings of interviews with field workers defined women’s empowerment contextually. empowerment had less to do with parents making decisions in their lives and the lives of their children than ensuring that their children access formal education and could take care of themselves. parents begin to question the systems in which they lived, but they were not led to any conclusions and did not, in this training, develop their own conclusions about how best to change the system when it presented obstacles to the success of their families figure 1 is a flow-chart that shows the development of empowerment from the training). 116 global education review 3(3) figure 1. development of empowerment from training figure 1 shows how field workers construct the empowerment process. first, parents become aware of the rights of their children. second, they learn how and from whom they can access resources for their children. the final constructions are interwoven parents question the services provided, and work with others in their community to ensure adequate services as well as to increase awareness of the rights of people with disabilities. empowerment was also linked to power within the community and classroom, where parents could gain the power to demand educational access for their children and to address grievances. all of the definitions link empowerment to perseverance and survival, with the ideal of supporting parents to create change. the connection to survival and perseverance relate to hassan’s lecture on being untaught. education is not merely necessary for community building, but for children’s and families’ survival. through defining empowerment, field workers linked it to power in the home in terms of knowledge about hygiene and adl that would support parents and their children’s survival. paradoxically, women have power in the family as active agents of change in their children’s lives, but are viewed as powerless and yet responsible for their children’s disabilit(ies). women’s empowerment was discussed as particularly important given that women are the primary caretakers of children with disability. field workers did not make distinctions between women’s and men’s empowerment other than women most likely need more power to have greater impact on the lives of their children. the power dynamics between men and women were not explained nor discussed by the field workers. beyond local settings, the power of parents in the training dissipates as parents may find the institutional setting of the refugee camps to be unresponsive. organizations that provide services such as sgc have limited funding and tight regulations on programming, resulting in programs that may run for a short time and then end abruptly. moreover, the refugee camps in dadaab are technically temporary and unhcr and the government of kenya have vested interests in repatriating refugees to somalia and other points of origin. educational programming for children with disabilities may not be available upon repatriation. thus, parents are dependent on sgc and other organizations to provide educational access and services; meanwhile, they are participating in larger international refugee policies that will eventually lead to their departure from dadaab and loss of sgc provided services. in line with the literature on parental involvement and family literacy, parents became being untaught 117 more involved in community activities in and around their children’s school. first, ‘parents’ in the training studied here were predominantly mothers, supporting international notions that mothers are the first teachers responsible for their “children’s cognitive development” (dudley-marling, 2001). second, field workers believed that parents’ involvement was crucial to the success of children with disabilities, defined as their ability to enter school and become “productive” in society. although field workers may not be familiar with parent involvement and family literacy literature, they presented a practice of intervention prevention as described by auerbach (2005). field workers and training project developers assumed that parents know very little about caring for their children, as evident in the emphasis on adl techniques. the intervention prevention approach was most evident in the lack of field workers’ questions about the current practices of parents, their current hygiene practice, and parents’ specific needs. alex described how he wished to better understand disability from parents’ perspectives, but lacked the time and resources to do so. alex also hinted at multiple literacies approaches in the training through his discussion of the 13 types of disabilities. overall, the field workers approached the training drawing on the u.s. department of educations’ list. there were expectations that parents would want to know about each type of disability. it was assumed that the typology from the west could explain disability in dadaab, regardless of local knowledge of customs around disability. this presumption that the information from the west was superior has roots in sgc’s relationship to un enlightenment projects, as well as reluctance to embrace local knowledge about disability. alex questioned this presumption, recognizing that the parents had local ways of knowing what disability was and of understanding disabilities in their context. construction of disability is one local way of knowing that could be viewed as part of the multiple literacies model, were it considered in more depth in this training. although i approached this research emphasizing power and empowerment, i recognized during my field work that much of the work conducted by agencies such as sgc was not intended to address “complex interactions of political, social, and economic factors in the broader society” (auerbach, 2005, p. 654). the nature of the refugee camps and funding cycles of agencies informed my belief that organizations would not attempt to pursue social change. however, through interviews with field workers, it became evident that part of what the field workers thought was empowering about the training was based on social change and linked with larger interactions. for instance, when alex emphasized that parents could feel empowered to question the teachers of their children and to demand services, he was referring to exerting power in social systems that were outside the domain of the family or school. empowerment may be collective (prins, 2008) as parents encourage others to recognize the ability of children with disabilities and to send children to school. although it is unclear what the collective ramifications of empowerment are from this limited study, it is clear that field workers hope learners have a new understanding of their role in their children’s education and of their children’s abilities. limitations as an adaptation of other visual ethnographic methods to the refugee context, part of the method of this project was iterative and further testing of the tools is necessary. for example, the 20-minute film was a bit long for cuing and reference. field workers were visibly anxious to return to work while watching the video and had to be asked several times to remain in the group interview. shorter clips that directly relate to 118 global education review 3(3) questions could elicit more detailed responses and focus. the connections during the group interview were further complicated due to difficulties of interpretation with learners. it is also important to include women’s voices. when i conducted the group interview with the learners, my field notes were littered with concerns of the parents understanding of my questions: was the interpreter describing this correctly? why was the interpreter summarizing the participants’ points rather than translating their words? was i understanding what they wanted me to? these doubts plague the data analysis of the group interview with the learners. as the method draws on feminist frameworks (kindon, 2003), it would be inappropriate and unethical, to include data that may have been drawn from miscommunication or misrepresentation due to interpretation. further data collection is ongoing with stricter interpretation guidelines, such as word-for-word interpretation as opposed to summaries, and more emphasis on gathering women’s voices through auto-photography and other visual ethnographic techniques address risks in interpretation. this was an exploratory study. follow-up studies and larger samples are needed to increase information about empowerment in ingo training in dadaab as it relates to disability, community implications, and intended social changes. conclusion in the training for parents of children with disabilities, empowerment included parents’ ability to ensure their children’s survival. the training supported this by providing information regarding approaches to childcare and obtaining assistance. field workers linked information dissemination and empowerment with action by encouraging parents to speak with other parents, and by ensuring that all children with disability attended school. for the field workers, empowered parents were those who engaged with the school and community. as parents began to interact with formal education and agencies such as sgc, they were encouraged to ask questions, make demands, and ensure that their needs and rights were met. empowerment as a process of systemic change reflects a critical and social change approach to parent involvement in education and family learning programs. part of this systemic change is engaging parents in their children’s education and parents’ recognition that their children with disabilities can achieve educational and other social milestones. this research connected one training for parents of children with disabilities in dadaab with literature on family learning, parental involvement in schools, and disability studies. the findings are unique in many ways to dadaab, but also could speak to other refugee and low-resource settings where disability is constructed negatively and parents are only beginning to engage in formal education. the empowerment of parents in the training, particularly mothers, connects to power in the home, community, camp, and larger national and international systems in which refugees live. notes 1. sgc is a pseudonym for the organization sponsoring the training used to protect the identity of the field workers and other organizational staff, as well as learners in the training. 2. oral consent is documented in audio recording of the training and confirmed in writing by field workers who interpreted. 3. all names are pseudonyms. 4. walsh (1921) sites the quote “it is better to be unborn than untaught: for ignorance is the root of misfortune” to plato (p. 377). being untaught 119 author note support for this research was provided by pennsylvania state university, ret. i would specifically like to thank lawi malenje for his review and feedback during the writing process. references appadurai, a. 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(1921). the international encyclopedia of prose and poetical quotations. philadelphia: the john c. winston company. about the author allyson krupar is a doctoral candidate in adult education and comparative and international education at the pennsylvania state university. she also is adjunct faculty at american university in the international development concentration of the international relations online masters program at the school of international service and the graduate certificate in project monitoring and evaluation in the school of professional and extended studies. she served as a visiting researcher for ret, with whom she conducted project evaluations on programming for youth and adults in dadaab, kenya while undertaking independent research on women's empowerment. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijedudev.2009.09.004 http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001876/187698e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0018/001876/187698e.pdf http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/comp501.htm http://www.un.org/esa/socdev/enable/comp501.htm http://idea.ed.gov/explore/view/p/,root,regs,300,a,300%252e8 http://idea.ed.gov/explore/view/p/,root,regs,300,a,300%252e8 being untaught 121 appendix group interview questions: irb exempt instrument (with ngo workers) 1. please describe what you see in this video? a. is this a typical day in your class? why or why not? b. what did you want the participants to learn in this class? c. tell me about how learners change after completing the training/ course/ workshop(s) here. 2. please describe ‘empowerment’? what do you think of when you hear ‘empowerment’? a. please describe ‘agency’? what do you think of when you hear the word ‘agency’? 3. please describe how education provides empowerment from this video? how does your class refer to the video) ‘empower’ learners? a. describe an example of when your work does not ‘empower’ learners? why? 4. please describe what a learner from your training or work who is empowered via training would look or act like (from this video or another experience)? how do you know? 5. please describe an empowered woman. 6. is ‘empowerment’ different for men and women? what are the differences? similarities? 7. how do you/ the organization measure empowerment? what would you ask to measure empowerment? 8. do you know of any other organizations who are providing education for women’s empowerment? a. if so, which organizations? b. do you know the staff of those organizations who are involved in this training? c. can you refer me to them? 225-1169-1-copy edit_ak to format p1-11 p12-end the challenge of implementing small group work 123 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: tal, clodie (2018). the challenge of implementing small group work in early childhood education. global education review, 5 (2), 123-144. the challenge of implementing small group work in early childhood education clodie tal levinsky college of education, israel abstract this paper seeks to improve our understanding of the challenges faced by teachers and student-teachers in the process of implementing small group work (sgw) in early childhood education (ece). in light of the discrepancy between the clear benefits of sgw in education – its solid theoretical foundation – and its sparse and poor implementation, we posed the following research questions: (a) what are israeli teachers’ perceptions of and attitudes toward small group work and its implementation in ece? and (b) what do teachers see as problematic or, conversely, helpful in overcoming difficulties related to its implementation in ece? both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed: a questionnaire with closed and openended questions to measure the attitudes and perceptions of thirty experienced teachers, as well as action research documenting the implementation of sgw in two cases. findings showed more positive attitudes toward sgw than toward the feasibility of its implementation, which was frequently associated with drilling skills, rather than discourse that supports the construction of knowledge. difficulties in implementing sgw included a lack of coordinated staff work and the absence of routines and planning of space and time. the action research indicated that the effective implementation of sgw necessitates planning, observation, and documentation of both the interactions in groups as well as classroom management aspects related to its implementation, and that it requires a commitment to the children’s well-being and learning. keywords small group work, cooperative learning, collaborative group work, classroom management introduction small groups engaged in cooperative learning have been recognized for about four decades (gillies & cunnington, 2014) as a form of classroom organization and instruction that enhances meaningful learning in schools _______________________________ corresponding author clodie tal, levinsky college of education, department of early childhood education, p.o. box 48130, tel aviv, israel 61481 email: clodietal@gmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 124 global education review 5(2) (bertucci, coute, johnson, & johnson, 2010; johnson & johnson, 2002; shachar & sharan, 1994; slavin, 2013) and preschools (sum kim & farr darling, 2009; sills, rowse, & emerson, 2016). such groups were shown to benefit thinking and academic achievement in various fields of study – mathematics and science (lazarowitz & karsenty, 1994; lou, abrami & d’apollonia, 2001) as well as literacy and language (slavin, 1996; whiehurst et al., 1988). participation in small, cooperative groups was also found to beneficially affect relationships among children and their learning of strategies for conflict resolution (emmer & stough, 2001). due to the robust evidence of the benefits of small, cooperative group work, teachers around the globe have been encouraged to adopt this strategy (gillies, 2015). in line with this trend, small group teaching has been included in the new horizon reform [ofek hadash] instituted in israeli elementary schools since 2008 and preschools since 2010. groups in society and education social groups are “natural” to human beings. as put by johnson and johnson (2003, p. 579), “humans are small-group beings. we always have been and we always will be.” it is therefore not surprising that various formats of small groups exist in society and education. forsyth (2006, pp. 2-3) offered the following basic definition of groups: “two or more individuals who are connected to one another by social relationships.” kurt lewin drew attention to the fact that social relationships in groups involve interdependence – the understanding that all members of the group “are in the same boat” (brown, 1988, p. 28). to get something done, one must cooperate with others. in educational settings, one finds several types of groups: socially formed voluntary groups of students or teachers as well as planned groups engaged in classroom learning. the planned group work is performed either independently by pupils adhering to teachers’ instructions or guided by teachers. in any case, group work in educational settings is in some cases based on positivist assumptions, having group members work on the improvement of individual skills (figure 1), or having a small number of children listen to the teacher (figure 2). the challenge of implementing small group work 125 figure 1. performing individual tasks sitting in groups photo: anat ben-shabat figure 2. frontal teaching in small groups photo: yfat waxman 126 global education review 5(2) small group work is often referred to as cooperative or collaborative learning, emphasizing relationships and interdependence in groups for the attainment of joint goals. cooperative learning is more than just group work. cooperative learning is organized and managed group work in which students work cooperatively in small groups to achieve academic as well as affective and social goals (jacobs, lee, & ng, 1997). figure 3 shows collaborative group work as opposed to the group seating arrangements in figures 1 and 2 that involve neither cooperation nor collaboration among the children. figure 3. cooperative small group work. photo: yfat waxman the challenge of implementing small group work 127 theoretical foundations cooperative small group work in education is partially based on the idea of dialogism raised by bakhtin – one of the most important theorists of discourse in the twentieth century (robinson, 2011). the notion of dialogism recognizes the existence in human discourse of a multiplicity of perspectives and voices. bakhtin emphasized (1986) that each voice is important and deserves full attention, the goal of the discourse being to maintain communication even when agreement is not forthcoming. this idea also aligns with rogoff’s claim (2003) that children should be perceived as competent and active participants in groups, classes, communities, and cultures. malaguzzi, the ideological founder of the reggio emilia early childhood educational system, also states, “always and everywhere, children take an active role in the construction and acquisition of learning and understanding” (malaguzzi in gandini, 2012, p. 44). cooperative small group work is also based on vygotsky’s socio-cognitive theory (1978), which emphasizes both the social nature of knowledge construction and the importance of discourse, of oral language as a “carrier” and creator of thought. children participating in groups are expected to contribute their evidence-based interpretations to the existing body of knowledge, which are intended to improve the understanding of discussed ideas (bereiter & scardamalia, 1996). the heterogeneous composition of small groups based on the participants’ ability, gender, race, or age is rooted in the assumption that discourse with peers is a central source of learning in groups. indeed, vygotsky proposed (1978) that collaboration with more capable children, in addition to adult guidance, is likely to lead to a child’s improved ability to solve problems. the socio-constructivist rationale of small groups is presented by malaguzzi (1993, pp. 1112): we consider relationships to be the fundamental organizing strategy of our educational system [for young children from birth to age 6]…and we consider small groups the most favorable type of classroom organization for an education based on relationships…the organization of small-group work is much more than a simple functional tool; it is a cultural context that contains within itself a vitality and an infinite network of possibilities. in schools of young children, work in small groups encourages processes of change and development and is much desired by children…interaction among children is a fundamental experience during the first years of life. interaction is a need, a desire, a vital necessity that each child carries within. malaguzzi’s statements summarize the theoretical foundation of small group work in ece, and is considered an organizational context that enables sustained interactions and is the basis of both relationships with and among children and a basis for development and learning. small group work (sgw) and classroom management as noted, cooperative small group work is an organizational context. its systematic use in school and preschool classes depends, among other factors, on the ability and willingness of the teacher to “manage” her class in a way that enables the systematic implementation of sgw throughout the school year, in addition to her understanding of the processes of its operation. the criteria for allocating the children to groups, the number of groups in the class, the place and the time for group work, the division of tasks among staff, and the subjects to be learned, as well as the planning of how these subjects will be mediated to the group, are issues that need to be 128 global education review 5(2) addressed in the process of implementing systematic group work. all these are part of classroom management that includes both perspectives of observing and understanding class work, as well as various competencies – moral leadership, proactive and ecological perceptions of the class, good relations with children, parents, and staff, and self-regulation (tal, 2016). based on evertson and weinstein (2006) and doyle (2006), tal defined moral classroom management as an evolving “metacompetency of the school or preschool teacher with which she creates learning conditions in the classroom – traditionally referred to as order – that facilitate learning among children with diverse learning characteristics and ensure the emotional well-being of all those involved in the process (both children and teachers)” (2016, p. 3). aligned with this definition, the implementation of cooperative small group work needs to be driven by the motivation to create well-being and learning conditions for all children (that is moral leadership) based on the understanding that – as put by malaguzzi above – this organizational context enables educators to promote intimate relationships with and among children. beyond moral leadership, the planning of group work is not possible without activating proactive and ecological thinking that considers the characteristics of children, their families, and the staff, and the available resources such as time, space, and materials. the product of this is likely to be a socio-moral plan (evertson & weinstein, 2006; tal, 2016) of division and activation of all the groups included in the class throughout the school year (see tal, 2006 for an example of this plan). the operation of cooperative, small groups is impossible without the teacher having good relations with the children and other staff. good relations must be based on trust and characterized by listening, respect for the ideas and opinions of others, and the organization of existing knowledge and production of new knowledge based on the participants’ ideas. at the heart of the implementation of classroom management of small groups, the teacher must constantly monitor her decisions and actions, and modify them when needed to better attain her educational goals. gaps between theory and practice although small group learning is not a new pedagogical strategy, and its potential benefits for the emotional, cognitive, and language learning of all age groups are well established, its day-to-day practice in schools and preschools is infrequent and poorly implemented. baines, blatchford, and kutnick (2003) reported in a study about the implementation of sgw in britain that elementary school students rarely worked in groups although they often sat in small groups. kohn (1992) pointed to the difficulty teachers have in systematically implementing cooperative, small group work in their classes due to their reluctance to invest sustained efforts in forming and maintaining the organization of small group work, as well as to their opposition to more open communication between teachers and students. sharan (1986) claimed that the educational system fails to support systematic implementation of cooperative group work. wasik (2008) asserted that cooperative small group work is “probably one of the most underused and ineffectively implemented strategies in early childhood classrooms. small groups are often used without an identified purpose and without careful planning to support the instruction of a specific concept or idea” (p. 515). the research presented in this article addresses the discrepancy between the importance of sgw with its sound theoretical and empirical foundations and its application in educational frameworks. the goal of this research was to understand how teachers understand and implement group work in their practice. two research questions were posed: 1. what are the teachers’ perceptions and attitudes toward the concept of the challenge of implementing small group work 129 small group work and its implementation in ece in israel? 2. what did preschool teachers see as problematic in the implementation of sgw and what did they see as helpful in overcoming difficulties in its implementation? methods both qualitative and quantitative methods were employed to ascertain the perceptions and attitudes of israeli ece teachers toward sgw. the quantitative analysis was based on closed questions about attitudes toward sgw and the likelihood of its implementation. qualitative methods were used to analyze the responses to open questions about the implementation of sgw by the teachers. in addition, two cases of action research performed by student teachers and based on qualitative methodology were analyzed. context and participants the research presented in this article was carried out in israel based on data collected between 2013 and 2016 in the context of the new horizon [ofek hadash] program. new horizon is one of the far-reaching reforms introduced in the preschool and elementary school system in israel at the beginning of the 21st century. one element of this reform is 900,000 individualized hours (small group learning with up to five pupils) added to the public-school system (azulay et al., 2013). the school day in israel starts at 8 am and ends at 2 pm, six days a week. preschool classes for 3-6year-olds have up to 35 children and staff that includes a head teacher who typically works 5 days a week or, a substitute teacher who has an academic degree like the head teacher, the primary assistant who typically works five days a week, and a substitute assistant. the implementation of sgw must take these conditions into account. thirty female teachers and two student teachers participated in the research. the thirty were experienced preschool teachers, all enrolled in an m.ed. program in early childhood education in 2014-16. their teaching experience ranged from 4 to 26 years (m=12; sd=4.99). these teachers were diverse ethnically – 26 jewish and 4 muslim teachers. twenty of the thirty were enrolled in a course about sgw that was designed to enhance their theoretical understanding of sgw and increase their effective practice of it. the students in the sgw class were divided into five groups. each group had to complete an assignment on the theoretical foundations of sgw – in general and specifically in ece – and to collaboratively analyze data collected by each group member over the course of five consecutive days concerning the implementation of group work in their educational settings. two other participants were third-year student teachers enrolled in a classroom management seminar in partial fulfillment of their b.ed. degree in ece. these student teachers conducted action research focused on the implementation of sgw in their fieldwork practice in 2013. in both cases, the student teachers chose to research their own implementation of sgw and both decided, for various reasons, to plan or implement sgw in all their classes, beyond what was required by the teachers’ college. tools and procedures data gathering tools included a questionnaire with two closed questions and several openended questions. the questionnaire was completed by thirty participants in march 2015 – twenty teachers enrolled in the sgw course and ten teachers in the same program, but not in the course. a year later, in june 2016, the same questionnaire was mailed to the twenty who took the sgw course. in the action-research studies, analysis was based on the final seminar paper; 130 global education review 5(2) observations and documentation of events; the children’s art work; and photos of the groups. the questionnaire the closed questions: participants were asked to what extent they agree with each of the following two statements on a ten-point scale (10 = very much agree; 1 = do not agree at all): • i am in favor of small group work in early childhood education. • i believe that small group learning in early childhood education is feasible. the open questions: • write a paragraph that describes small group work in early childhood education. • what do you think of small group work in early childhood education? • what is the rationale behind the use of small group work? • what made you decide to implement small groups in your class? • what kind of groups operate in your class? • how are children divided into groups? • who leads the groups? • are there pre-arranged places and/or times for small group work? • what difficulties do you encounter while implementing small group work? data analysis statistical analyses were performed on the quantitative attitude responses. mean and standard deviations were performed on the questionnaire responses of the thirty students in march 2015 and again on the responses of the ten students in 2016. other tests measured the differences in attitudes, perceptions, and implementation of sgw at two points in time. content analysis was performed on the open questions and on the documents used in the action research to detect common themes related to the teachers’ perception of sgw. ethics the participants gave their consent to use the data. the children in the photos cannot be identified – the photos were either taken from behind or the faces were blurred. results the findings are presented in two parts: (a) teachers’ attitudes toward and perceptions of sgw and their belief that it can feasibly be implemented (examined at two points in time); and (b) the results of the action research – how student teachers coped with challenges as they attempted to systematically implement sgw in their preschool field placements during their third year of studies. attitudes toward and perceptions of sgw and its implementation attitudes toward sgw – initially more positive than a belief in its feasibility data about the teachers’ attitudes toward small group work in early childhood education (figure 4) revealed a significantly more positive perception of sgw than a belief that it can be implemented. a two-tailed test for paired samples showed that the mean of the attitudes that favor sgw in ece is significantly higher than the mean evaluation of the feasibility of implementing it (t (28)=4.06, p<.0004; m1=9; sd1=1.40; m2=7.36; sd2=2.17). significant differences between positive attitudes toward sgw and evaluation of its feasibility were also found when the attitudes of the twenty students enrolled in the sgw course were analyzed (twotailed, paired sample t-test: t (18)=2.22, p,04; m1=8.9; sd1=1.64; m2=7.7; sd2=1.98). interestingly, although most of the data show this same pattern, two teachers gave the opposite response, stating that although it is possible to implement sgw in ece, they do not favor or appreciate it. one of these cases will be presented below. the challenge of implementing small group work 131 figure 4. means of attitudes toward sgw vs. evaluation of possibility of its implementation attitudes: agreement (0 = least; 10 = most) (march 2015 and june 2016) likelihood of implementing sgw – higher 15 months after the course ended figure 4 shows that the teachers who responded to the follow-up 15 months after completion of the small group course have significantly more faith in its feasibility than they had at the beginning of the small group course (a twotailed t-test for paired samples was performed comparing mean attitudes at the beginning of the course and at follow up time, t (8)=2.42, p<.05; m1=7.29, sd1=2.21; m2=8.86; sd2=1.07). figure 4 also shows more favorable attitudes toward sgw at the follow-up compared to the beginning of the course, in addition to the greater belief in its feasibility, though the t-test did not reach statistical significance. the statistical significance of the more favorable attitudes towards sgw and its feasibility at the follow-up compared to the beginning of the course suggests a possible connection with the coursework, and this is supported by the responses to the open questions. however, the number of respondents is low (ten out of twenty), and may reflect the self-selection of respondents based on successful sgw implementation. nevertheless, i consider the effective implementation of sgw by each teacher to be important as it means that in more (of course, not all) preschool classes of teachers who participated in the sgw course, sgw was instituted. to substantiate this, the quantifiable evaluations of two teachers are presented in table 1, as well their replies to the open questions 15 months after the end of the course. these teachers were selected as they show different patterns of improved ratings from the first to the second measurement of attitudes. yael, a preschool teacher whose initial rating bucked the common trend, rated the feasibility of sgw higher (9), but was not convinced it was a good idea (a rating of 5). galit, the other student teacher, gave a more typical high rating to the benefits of sgw (9) and a relatively low rating to its feasibility (7). at follow-up, both student teachers gave a maximum rating of 10 to the importance of sgw in ece as well as its feasibility. the challenge of implementing small group work 132 table 1 two teachers’ evaluations of perceived benefit and feasibility of sgw in ece (march 2015 and june 2016) perceived benefit of sgw perceived feasibility of sgw march 2015 june 2016 march 2015 june 2016 yael 5 10 9 10 galit 9 10 7 10 yael and galit’s comments about what happened following the course shed light on factors that may impact the willingness of teachers to implement sgw and the quality of its implementation: yael: sgw was not part of my daily planning. the preparation i got was lacking in this respect and it was not clear to me how to do the work. therefore, the change this year [2015-16] was substantial. the first thing i learned was that the subject you teach does not matter, but what matters is the added educational value... [after the course] i understood what small groups are and their goals – to form relationships among children and between adults and children...in preschool there is more than learning. children have a lot to tell us, but they’re not allowed to engage in discourse (follow-up questionnaire, june 2016). galit: the course did not provide me with new knowledge about sgw nor did it contribute to my sticking to this approach, as i was already convinced of its benefits. it did help with the classroom management and improved my leading of the learning process…it led to more flexible divisions of the children into groups...it contributed to greater clarity about what homogeneous and heterogeneous groups are and when to employ each of them (most subjects, heterogeneous groups; math, either homogeneous or heterogeneous) when specific children have a hard time with math, i consider individual work with them (follow-up questionnaire, june 2016). yael’s and galit’s summaries suggest that teachers’ views of sgw and its implementation can be changed and that what is needed is both a sound understanding of the rationale of sgw as well as a discourse concentrated on the classroom management aspects of its implementation. the two teachers attribute the changes they experience to the coursework. in both cases, we witness inferences made by the teachers themselves based on the learning conditions in their own environments and decisions on how to better serve the children’s best interest. in yael’s case, she displays an understanding of discourse and the importance of listening to children and forming meaningful relationships with and for them. in galit’s case, she better understood how to use homogeneous versus heterogeneous groups in preschool work, and when to combine group and individual work. sgw – commonly based on positivist thinking analysis of the teachers’ responses to the open questions at the beginning of the course (march 2015) revealed that their use of group work was mostly inspired by a positivist epistemology: they tended to focus their group work with children on measurable skills (e.g., their the challenge of implementing small group work 133 acquaintance with letters, worksheets focused on numbers), and reported that children were frequently divided according to some mapping of academic skills or homogeneous age groups. while many teachers were initially aware of the advantages of the small group in getting better acquainted with each child and forming deeper relationships with the children, virtually none of the respondents mentioned the contribution of the children’s discourse to their learning. most teachers perceived the work in small groups to be an effective strategy. however, all teachers who participated in the course reported that they never dedicated more than two learning encounters to the same topic. sgw was mostly used as a means to enhance specific skills. group membership was not always fixed, but rather teachers formed groups of children in an ad hoc manner. in addition, the motivation to implement sgw was in most (but not all) cases extrinsic, i.e., teachers engaged in group work because of external demands rather than their own belief and interest in group work (ryan & deci, 2017, p. 180). one of the most cited reasons in this study for implementing small group work was the demand by the superintendent, rather than a deep understanding of its benefits to children’s learning and well-being. in preschools in which superintendents seemed more consistent about implementing sgw, it was employed more systematically, and was based on fixed groups and integrating sgw into the daily schedule. lack of an ecological perspective and of proper planning of sgw analysis of the open questions also revealed that not enough systematic and reflexive thinking had initially been given to the classroom management aspects of implementation, such as assigning a fixed time, finding a suitable place, or agreeing upon a division of labor with colleagues. while some teachers (approximately a third of the group) reached agreements with the assistant about the coordination required to perform sgw, in virtually no case was the substitute teacher (who complements the teacher’s work) taken into consideration. lacking was a more ecological perception of the preschool, its entire staff, and the resources that could be used to effectively implement the work in small groups. coping with challenges encountered while implementing sgw to better grasp the meaning of implementing sgw, data from two cases of action research are shown. the difficulties encountered by the student teachers who planned and performed action research were similar in many ways to the difficulties reported by the teachers in their questionnaires. what is special about these cases is that they advance our understanding of the processes of change necessary for the effective implementation of sgw by teachers, thanks to systematic documentation and reflection included in their studies. case 1. redistributing power between the teacher and the children, and organizing group work to ensure the children’s participation this case shows how michal, a third-year student teacher enrolled in a classroom management seminar, dealt in her third year with the question, “how can the participation of all the children be ensured in guided small groups?” michal noticed that in all four small, fixed, heterogeneous groups of 3to 4-year-olds that she created and guided in her fieldwork, a few children regularly did not participate. she decided to thoroughly study the discourse of one of the groups to explore what was preventing some children from participating in the group discussions. the topic she chose to teach was the bible story dealing with the creation of the world. after reading the transcript of the discourse of one of the encounters, michal realized that while she was engaged in a continuous discussion with one of the children, 134 global education review 5(2) two other children were not participating. retrospectively, she defined this as a problem related to her self-regulation, as she allowed herself to act in an automatic manner without reflecting upon what was happening during the encounter itself. analysis of the transcript revealed a further problem: michal noticed that she tended to be dominant in defining concepts, rather than allowing for discussion among the children as the basis for deepening their understanding of concepts such as formlessness in the creation story. despite these initial insights, the group dynamics did not change, and michal sought counseling from the author of this paper who taught the classroom management seminar. counseling was based on michal’s and the lecturer’s joint observation of the video of a group encounter guided by michal. figure 5 is a still from this video, which helped michal come up with possible factors that prevented the children’s participation. two main issues arose while viewing the video – identifying and defining them led to the action plan. one was michal’s tendency to control the situation and discourse by holding the book close to her chest, preventing the children from actively exploring it, and the other was the distance between her and the children and among the children due to the arrangement of the tables: five 3to 4-year-olds and the student sat around two tables. the reason for placing two tables between michal and the children was not clear at that point in time. however, it was obvious that the overall seating arrangement arranged by michal did not encourage the children’s participation. the main goal of the action plan was to catalyze the participation of all the children in the discourse. to attain this goal, michal sought to create more intimacy in the group by removing one table and sitting around the other. she also wrote that she needed to be more attentive to the children during the discourse in order to identify the children’s leads that had the potential to raise and maintain discussion among them. she also thought she might need to meet the quiet children individually before the group encounter, and prepare them for the group work, which might enable these children to feel more comfortable participating. she wanted to find additional ways to encourage the children’s participation without putting pressure on them. michal noted that her action plan reflected a proactive approach based on ecological thinking as well as self-regulation throughout the discourse. figure 5. small group setting as a basis of action research (may 13, 2013) photo: michal solomon the challenge of implementing small group work 135 michal proceeded to implement the action plan. part of that was having an individual discussion with the girl who did not participate just before the group session, which was planned around the subject of how the children spent the weekend with their families. in addition, michal asked the girl to invite the other children to the group encounter, thereby empowering her. as a result, the girl felt confident; she not only participated, she took the lead in the discussion (about two weeks after institution of the action plan). michal also stepped back in this encounter and enabled the group discourse among the children to unfold for about 14 minutes without participating verbally in the discussion. michal also noticed in real time that one of the girls did not share her experiences; in a pleasant voice, she invited the girl to share her weekend experiences with the group, which the girl eventually did. thus, michal not only planned the group encounter in a way that invited discourse among the children, she also acted in real time, during the session, to encourage the quiet children to fully participate. michal was thrilled with the change she wrought, and wrote in her journal, “i could not foresee in any way, and it is unbelievable, how one small action – getting rid of a table and sitting closer around one table – can so significantly impact the dynamics of the group and the children’s participation” (march 25, 2013). as evident in figure 6 below, another major change in the seating arrangement was the location of the book in the center of the table, rather than being held in her hands as in figure 5. this way of arranging the seating served to invite the active exploration of the book; and indeed, the children jumped in and explored. michal wrote that after observing the video of the encounter shown in figure 6, she understood that enabling the children to touch the book not only increased their participation, but also allowed her to adapt herself to which parts of the text drew the children’s attention and how they were interested in exploring them. “i realized that ‘how’ i do things in the group – such as how i present materials and how i organize things – is no less important than ‘which’ subjects i choose to present in the small group session.” the challenge of implementing small group work 136 figure 6. active exploration of the book following the action plan (june 6, 2013) photo: michal solomon as reported by michal, implementation of the action research brought about a change in her perception of the division of power between the teacher and the pupils, no matter what their age. my initial worldview was that i was the supplier of knowledge and my job was to teach. following this research, i now understand that i was wrong. and that learning is enhanced when the children are not passive, but rather emerges from thinking and doing, when the child is active. learning is a process in which the child contributes to its success as much as the teacher. [michal is referencing vygotsky (1978) when she writes that fulfilling the potential of learning and development depends on the existence of full, reciprocal relations/interactions within a group.] following the action research, i modified the extent of my control of the group discourse and allowed the children to take the lead and set the pace of discussion [when to stop and discuss and when to continue], and to be the challenge of implementing small group work 137 involved in the discussion of the subject as much or even more as i am involved…what is needed is for me to be aware and balance my control and the children’s control. thus, change was possible only when i was ready to take one step back and allow for children’s participation (seminar paper submitted september 1, 2013). the action research was, as expected, action-oriented and included changing the seating, meeting individually with the children, and allowing for their participation both by placing the book in the middle of the table and abstaining from verbal feedback. genuine reflections throughout teaching helped her fully grasp the concepts and their powerful impact on practice and people’s lives. in the paper she submitted, michal wrote that she was aware that the action research performed by her as a thirdyear student was only the beginning of her professional path and that real challenges are to be expected as she becomes a teacher in the real world. an informal discussion with michal in july 2017 revealed that, as a first and second grade teacher, she feels fully committed to performing sgw. when teaching first graders and hence working with an assistant, she reported that she regularly performs sgw in her class. however, when teaching second graders, she did not succeed in implementing sgw as she was teaching 32 children by herself. she noted that she regularly asked her school principal for additional help that would allow her to implement sgw in her second-grade class. case 2. integrating sgw as a permanent component of preschool work1 the crisis that led noa, a third-year student teacher, into conducting action research about the implementation of small group work stemmed from the difficulty she encountered in systematically and thoroughly engaging in small group work with more than one small group in her placement. like the other student teachers at the levinsky college of education, noa was responsible during her first two years of study for the guidance and documentation of learning and social processes of one small group at a time. third-year studies brought greater responsibility – guiding two to three small groups (including half the preschool children so that all the children in their preschool placement would be covered by the two student teachers). furthermore, as the preschool director in her placement had been ill, noa occasionally served as a substitute teacher there. the experience of being the leader of the preschool who did not fulfill her duties as a “good” teacher frustrated her and motivated her to perform action research aimed at removing the stumbling blocks that were preventing the effective implementation of sgw. in the process of examining her own and the preschool’s implementation of small group work, noa discovered that her field mentor did not routinely perform systematic small group work. she learned that although the children were divided into heterogeneous groups, the teacher would typically create small groups in an ad hoc manner so that the group composition had nothing to do with the initial declared division into groups. furthermore, small group work was not performed at a prescheduled, fixed time and place. no effort to bring about sustained learning had been done as participants, topics, time, and place would vary. noa’s description of how sgw was implemented in her field placement was very similar to what had been reported by the teachers participating in the first study. one of the insights reached by noa related to how she and her field mentors led small groups, and the need to differentiate between teaching small groups and teaching plenary sessions. this insight informed the analysis of her own practice and ultimately the plan of action she delineated at the end of the first cycle of inquiry. the need to differentiate between 138 global education review 5(2) small-group and plenary teaching led to the following features of her plan of action (developed in late february 2013): 1. establishing group work as a permanent routine involving all children in the preschool. thus, noa assumed a leadership role in planning group work for all the children, not only for the three groups she was assigned as a student teacher. this goal led to the need to set an agreed upon timetable and agenda for the fieldwork day with her fellow student teacher, which would include defining the time and place for the operation of six groups – and this received the field mentor’s wholehearted consent. 2. establishing and maintaining behavior rules to guide the group encounter and discourse; these rules will differ from those governing plenary sessions. one of the rules, besides talking in turn and not interrupting a peer, was to refrain from raising one’s hand to be allowed to talk in the group, thereby developing the ability to integrate into the flow of the discourse. these rules entail giving up power as a group leader and encouraging collaboration among the children. 3. choices about the subject and activity plans must be based on inquiry, discourse, and cooperation among the children. a week after establishing the plan, noa decided with her fellow student to rely on the mentor’s initial division into the six small groups established at the beginning of the school year, but not systematically implemented. they formed a plan that included coordinated hours and space for the six groups during the fieldwork day, taking into consideration the children’s daily activities, and they obtained the field mentor’s approval. noa next considered how to cope with the children’s difficulty in complying with the new rules – convening the group on a regular basis at a set time. initially, she would address individual members and invite them to join, but some resisted. children tended to oppose entry into groups as they were unwilling to discontinue their free-play activities. as a result, noa started to announce at the beginning of each fieldwork day the time and subjects to be learned in each group. she further decided to delegate authority, give up power, and establish the routine by appointing a different child each week to take charge of preparing the setting of the group work and gathering the children for the group encounter. she decided with the children the order of those in charge. another crucial aspect of sgw deals with the creation of learning conditions for all the participants. noa was well aware of this as she related that she wanted to create conditions for inquiry and discourse among the children as opposed to drills or having them perform memory tasks by rote. she chose to discuss with the children the biblical story of creation. noa would teach them the creation verse relevant to each day and encouraged them to make drawings that represented how they understood and imagined each day. as the original biblical verses do not include any illustrations, children had to rely solely on their imagination to draw the contents of the creation each day. at the beginning, noa asked all the children in the group to draw a picture of “formlessness” following a short discussion that defined its use in the bible. the results can be seen in figures 7 (by noga) and 8 (by eden) – these are quite similar depictions of the first day of creation, showing light as the first step from formlessness to order. the challenge of implementing small group work 139 figure 7. formlessness (by noga) figure 8. formlessness (by eden) the similarity in the children’s drawings, revealing the absence of a deep understanding of the subject and a lack of creativity, troubled noa and motivated her to formulate a different plan of action for the group – implemented a few weeks later. this plan meant to encourage the children to discuss among themselves the meaning of the verses noa read, and to stimulate their imagination in an attempt to represent the content in a creative way that uniquely expressed their conceptualization. to that end, following repeated, joint read-alouds of the verses, noa asked the children to divide the days of creation among themselves, each child to depict one day. she deliberately wanted the children to decide how to divide the days of creation among themselves. in addition, she brought to the encounter a variety of art materials – paper, old newspapers, and magazine pages that could be included in the children’s creative work, as well as colors, clay, glue, and scissors. the discourse among the children initially focused on matters of procedure – discourse that uncovered “problems” formulated by the children themselves. for example, they realized that the group had six children, but that there were seven days of creation – so who would do the seventh day? noa encouraged them to find solutions for themselves. the children managed to divide the days of creation among themselves, and after noa refused to draw the seventh day herself, they approached ofek, a boy who did not initially belong to their group and asked him to join them. upon reaching agreement on procedural matters, the children began to perform the artwork related to their biblical interpretation of the creation. the artwork performed by the children following the discussions in the small the challenge of implementing small group work 140 figure 9. the first day (by noga) figure 10. the sixth day (by eden) group reflected their creativity: each made use of different materials, colors and positioning on the paper. figures 9 and 10 show noga’s and eden’s drawings of the first and sixth day of creation…in contrast with the similarity of the girls’ initial drawings (figures 7 and 8). in addition, the casual discussions among the children throughout their artwork led to one of the most interesting and fruitful parts of the entire project. the discussion about the fourth day of creation – the day in which the stars were said to have been created – led the children guided by noa to an extended scientific inquiry into stars. noa’s analysis of the processes involved in her classroom management seminar led to an understanding of how competencies in moral classroom management (mcm) play a role in the successful inclusion of small group work in the overall leadership and management of a classroom. in the daily operation of classrooms, one can expect difficulties and clashes among members of the staff [proactive thinking] regarding both the importance of learning in small groups and the time and space devoted to this activity [ecological thinking]. in particular, clashes can be expected when small group learning is a new initiative that casts doubt upon the more traditional modes of teaching and impacts the division of labor among staff members [ecological and proactive thinking]. as a result, assistants are likely to oppose small group work. successful coping with difficulties is often guided by proactive thinking and the formation of good relations with the staff. the teacher should aspire to create sustained, cooperative relationships [relationships] with her staff and to think in advance of how the small group work might interfere with the regular activity of each particular classroom. she should operate ecologically and plan activities the challenge of implementing small group work 141 for the children not engaged in group learning at any given moment in the different classroom centers. in addition, the teacher should guide the small groups in the space shared by all children [not in an isolated room – ecological thinking] so she can see all the other children [leadership] and they are aware of her presence. (components of the mcm model were added in square brackets by the author.) noa also perceives group work as a developing and learning enterprise, thus inadvertently citing the self-regulation involved in the process of classroom management. throughout the group work, processes of change and improvement are needed. this is because the group, like any person or organization, needs to always learn, grow, and improve. it is interesting to note that michal arrived at far-reaching conclusions related to the nature of productive cooperative group work and its relationship to her own classroom management competencies “bottom-up” – from the analysis of discourse processes in one group. noa on the other hand, felt competent about her guidance of the small group discourse and started her action research by looking at the preschool “top down.” eventually, she analyzed the quality of the small group work, but that was not her starting point. thus, it is vital to notice the importance of action research planned and implemented in each setting following observation, analysis, and planning so that the plan fits the people and the environments of each site. discussion this paper was inspired by a belief in the importance of cooperative small group work, in general, and in early childhood education, in particular, combined with the evidence-based impression that this strategy is not implemented in preschools in israel in ways that are helpful to children’s learning and well-being. the findings presented here help cast light on the processes involved in implementing sgw and are informative as to what can and must be done in teacher preparation and in-service training to reduce the gap between theory and practice. the finding of the significant difference between the positive attitude toward group work, but the lack of belief in its feasibility, indicates that in teacher education at both the preparation and post-graduate (in-service training) levels, we must find ways to convince teachers of the feasibility of this approach. as demonstrated by the change in attitudes of the teachers in the first part of the findings section, it seems possible to persuade teachers to implement sgw. to convince teachers to systematically perform sgw with fruitful discourse among the children, the training of teachers must encompass both theoretical and empirical knowledge as well as an active inquiry into the practice of group work itself. the commitment of teachers to the children’s learning and well-being and a willingness to be reflective and self-critical about their practice are the engine that drives the perpetual search for ways to improve practice in educational settings (tal, 2016). the findings of this study show that effective implementation takes intentional effort. first, it needs to be explored and practiced at the preparation level, not only “taught,” because it takes both knowledge and competency to implement. students need to repeatedly experience sgw and learn how to cope with difficulties encountered in its implementation. student teachers and teachers need to develop “perceived self-efficacy” about their ability to implement sgw. “perceived self-efficacy” is defined as “people’s beliefs about their capabilities to produce designated levels of performance that exercise influence over events that affect their lives” (bandura 1994). bandura (1994) indeed proposed that a principal source of perceived self-efficacy is the experience of 142 global education review 5(2) mastery – of successfully dealing with challenges. noa’s action research, supported by the data obtained from analysis of the responses to the open questions of teachers participating in the first study, demonstrates that being proficient in guiding discourse in small groups is not enough. in order to perform sgw effectively, one also needs to look at and understand the class from a classroom management perspective, i.e., from a bird’s eye view. the implementation of sgw must be thoroughly planned and be the product of coordination and collaboration with staff. joint agreement of the time, place, and division of labor among the staff is needed. there also needs to be a deliberate way to divide the class in groups, and children must learn rituals of small group learning and participation that are different from plenary session learning, as indicated by noa in her research. ultimately, the subjects to be taught must be carefully chosen. the two action-research studies emphasize the need to both establish real discourse in the group by allowing and encouraging children’s participation, and ensuring classroom management that enables the implementation of sgw. the findings of the first study corroborated by michal’s action research indicate that the teachers’ initial perceptions often tend to be positivist and that it takes intentional effort and willingness to give up power in order to allow a discourse among the children to unfold. the two action-research studies presented in the second part of the results section show that the issues and difficulties to be dealt with in order to institute sgw are likely to be different for various classes and teachers. therefore, an action-research approach to practice both at preparation and post-graduate level is needed. teachers always need to be reflective and self critical about implementing sgw as well as other aspects of their practice. the inquisitive approach needs to be led by values, by the commitment to social justice. action research as social justice is founded upon an underlying, inclusive epistemology reflected in collaborative practices and actions (griffiths, 2009, p. 95). action research for social justice defines social justice issues as outcomes, such as recognition and/or the redistribution of voice or power. implementation of the mcm model, in general, and particularly for the sake of implementing sgw, calls for a combination of action-research approaches – both as and for social justice – as the goal of mcm consists of creating well-being and learning conditions for all those involved, children and adults alike (tal, 2016). furthermore, mcm assumes diversity among children and staff along various dimensions, and the social-moral plan – as a central component of the model – prescribes inclusivity in whatever educational practices are involved. thus, the effectiveness of interventions based on mcm is measured by the degree of equity in the distribution of resources – the most expensive of which, in the context of early childhood education, is the adult’s time and attention. time and attention are devoted by educators for the sake of social-emotional empowerment and to enhance learning conditions for all the children. sgw was shown, when implemented faithfully, to attain these goals. to sum up, the good news provided by the findings of this research is that implementation of sgw is possible. the bad news is that it can never be perceived in either preschool practice or teacher preparation as something that can be performed en masse, assembly-line style. sgw is a value-laden enterprise, and moreover teachers need to gradually develop proficiency in guiding groups. guiding small groups in ways that are conducive to fulfillment of their goals – meaningful learning and the well-being of all the children in a class – necessitates thoughtful planning, the leading of dialogue in the group, and classroom management competencies, some the challenge of implementing small group work 143 of which are relatively fixed after their establishment (such as routines and timetable) and others that take continual thoughtful attention and effort. therefore, teacher education needs to include at all levels values and theory-guided practice. adopting an actionresearch, ideological, and practical approach may be helpful in this regard. note 1. case 2 was also presented in tal, 2016, pp. 71-85. references azulay, y., ashkenazi, a., gabrielov, l., levi-mazloum, d., & ben dov, 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(2006). a yearly program plan for teaching social competence to kindergarten children. hed hagan, 1, 70-82 [hebrew]. tal, c. (2016). moral classroom management in early childhood education. new york: nova books. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher mental processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wasik, b. (2008). when fewer is more: small groups in early childhood classrooms. early childhood education journal, 35, 515-521. whitehurst, g.j., falco, f.l., lonigan, c.j., fischel, j.e., debaryshe, b.d., valdez-menchaca, m.c. (1988). accelerating language development through picture book reading. developmental psychology, 24, 552559. about the author clodie tal, phd, is a developmental psychologist who currently heads the master's degree program in early childhood education at levinsky college of education, tel aviv, israel. she has been extensively involved in service training in communities throughout israel. her main areas of research interest are teacher-child and teacher-parent relationships, teachers’ values, promoting children's social competence, classroom management, and teacher-children dialogic discourse, in general, particularly focused on children picture-books. preschool participation effects on early reading skills 85 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: gove, amber, dombrowski, eileen, pressley, jennifer, king, simon, & weatherholt, tara (2018). persistence and fadeout of preschool participation effects on early reading skills in low and middle-income countries. global education review, 5 (2), 85-109. persistence and fadeout of preschool participation effects on early reading skills in lowand middle-income countries amber gove rti international eileen dombrowski rti international jennifer pressley rti international simon king rti international tara weatherholt rti international abstract the adoption of the sustainable development goals (sdgs) in september 2015 marked a new milestone for early childhood education, care, and development. for the first time in the framework of global goals, preschool education was described as integral to children’s school readiness. yet with few exceptions, much of the research on the impact of preschool has stemmed from high-income countries. even fewer studies have examined preschool participation and later learning across multiple countries. this article helps fill this gap by connecting preschool participation to early primary reading outcomes, as measured by the early grade reading assessment. drawing on a unique data set using student-level learning assessments from 16 countries, we use preprimary participation to explain primary school reading skills, including letter knowledge and oral reading fluency. we also model the influence of key demographic variables on these outcomes, including home language and classroom language of instruction (loi). for a subset of six countries with exceptionally rich data, we examine national-level policy and practice to better understand what might explain the persistence or fadeout of the effect of preschool. policy makers and practitioners alike will find these results useful in making cases for improving preschool experiences for children in lowand middle-income countries in the next decade of sdg-related efforts. key words preschool, primary education, early childhood education, reading, school readiness, sustainable development goals, developing countries https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ preschool participation effects on early reading skills 86 introduction the adoption of the sustainable development goals (sdgs) in september 2015 by the 193 member states of the united nations signaled a new era for early childhood education, care, and development (unesco, 2015a). for the first time in the framework of global goals, early childhood education was described as integral to children’s school readiness (gove & black, 2016; unesco, 2015b). specifically, sdg target 4.2 requests countries to ensure that “all girls and boys have access to quality early childhood development, care and preprimary education so that they are ready for primary education.” but what does it mean to be “ready for primary education”? what do we know about how well preprimary programs are preparing children for later success? what evidence should practitioners and policy makers focus on to expand and improve early childhood experiences? with few exceptions (aboud & hossain, 2011; gertler et al., 2013), much of the published research on the impact of preprimary participation has stemmed from high-income countries (campbell et al., 2014; heckman, moon, pinto, savelyev, & yavitz, 2010). few studies have examined preschool and later learning across multiple countries (raikes, devercelli, & kutaka, 2015). this article helps fill this gap by examining the relationship between preprimary participation and early primary reading outcomes, as measured by the early grade reading assessment (egra) (dubeck & gove, 2015; rti international, 2016b). drawing on a unique set of data using student-level learning assessments from 16 lowand middleincome countries, we use preprimary participation to explain primary reading outcomes and answer the research questions outlined above. these results should prove useful for practitioners and policy makers seeking to understand the impact of preprimary participation on later learning levels in lowand middle-income country contexts. literature review with the focus on early learning expanding around the world, preschool participation has also increased, with the global gross enrollment ratio rising from 31 percent in 2000 to 49 percent in 2015 (unesco institute for statistics, 2016). as more countries begin to expand their early education programs, more research is being conducted to better understand the impact of preschool participation on student outcomes. of particular interest is whether the impacts of these investments, including cognitive and noncognitive effects, persist or fade out over time. preprimary participation and later learning outcomes in high-income countries in the united states, early childhood education, or preschool, has emerged as a focus for promoting children’s learning and well-being. in discussions about the success of this aim, two longitudinal studies are often mentioned. the first, the high/scope perry preschool program, looked at at-risk children who participated in a preschool program in the 1960s, and followed them over time to look at how it impacted their lives. they found that those who attended preschool had significantly higher earnings and participated less in criminal activity compared to those who had not, thus repaying $13 (usd) for each $1 (usd) invested in their education (belfield, nores, barnett, & schweinhart, 2006). a second study, the abecedarian project, looked at the impact of child care and preschool on _________________________________ corresponding author amber gove, rti international, 701 13th st nw, suite 750, washington, dc 20005 email: agove@rti.org mailto:agove@rti.org preschool participation effects on early reading skills 87 future outcomes and found that children who participated in their program subsequently attained significantly more years of education and were more likely to go to college (campbell, ramey, pungello, sparling, & miller-johnson, 2002). subsequent follow-up studies of abecedarian participants into their mid-30s revealed substantial health gains, including reduced cardiovascular and metabolic diseases, such as diabetes and obesity (campbell et al., 2014). however, these studies found inconsistent results when it came to sustained impact on cognitive skills. the perry preschool project found that the cognitive advantages of preschool tended to decline over time, with the control group generally catching up cognitively when they entered kindergarten (barnett, 2008). the abecedarian project found similar declines in intelligence quotient over time, with effect sizes decreasing from 0.75 standard deviations (sd) at age 4 to 0.33 sd at ages 15 and 21 (barnett, 2008). one possible explanation for why the cognitive effects of preschool may “fade out” is related to the quality of the schools that students attend as young children and adolescents. using nationally representative data from the early childhood longitudinal study–kindergarten class, magnuson, ruhm and waldfogel (2007) showed that the persistence of preschool effects was tied to both class size and the quality of instruction: preschool gains were eliminated for children who attended kindergarten in small classrooms with high-quality learning experiences but persisted for those in larger classrooms with lower-quality instruction. lowquality middle school experiences were also found to explain why the u.s. department of health and human services’ head start preschool program effects often fade out: eighth-grade students who had participated in head start typically attended middle schools of significantly lower quality than their peers who either did not attend preschool or who had been enrolled in other types of preschool programs (lee & loeb, 1995). the persistence or fadeout of the effect of preschool is a source of debate in the field, generating competing reviews of the evidence between proponents and opponents of the expansion of publicly funded early childhood programming (bustamante, hirsh-pasek, vandell, & golinkoff, 2017). scaled-up preschool initiatives have shown similarly mixed academic effects in different states in the u.s. a recent study of children in tennessee found that preschool actually had a small negative impact on academic achievement in third grade, particularly for english-language learners (lipsey, farran, & hofer, 2015). conversely, a study looking at the impact of full-day kindergarten on literacy skills found that students who attended the program showed significant gains in literacy, particularly hispanic students and those who entered kindergarten with low-literacy skills (gibbs, 2014). a study of the impact of oklahoma’s universal preschool program found similar results, with children attending showing significant gains, particularly in letter-word identification, spelling, and applied programs, compared to the control group (gormley, gayer, phillips, & dawson, 2005). results in high-income countries outside of the u.s. are similarly mixed. in uruguay, a study found small gains from preschool were magnified as children aged, with students 27 percent more likely to still be in school at age 15 (berlinski, galiani, & manacorda, 2008). conversely, a later study in uruguay found that preschool had a short-term positive effect on student performance in the first year of school, but slightly weakened 6 years later (aguilar & tansini, 2012). additionally, a longitudinal study done in the united kingdom found that preschool led to large improvements in cognitive 88 global education review 5(2) assessments at age 7. although these gains diminished over time, they remained significant to age 16 (goodman & sianesi, 2005). a longitudinal study in new zealand also found that preschool had an impact on cognitive skills, particularly on numeracy and logical problemsolving skills (hogden, 2007). many studies have indicated that early childhood education works better for those from high-risk backgrounds, such as minority students and those growing up in poverty. a study of the impact of preschool in boston found that hispanic students showed larger gains in cognitive skills than other students (weiland & yoshikawa, 2013). additionally, an earlier study in oklahoma indicated that hispanic and african-american students showed significant gains as a result of preschool, while caucasian students demonstrated little impact (gormley & gayer, 2005). preprimary participation and learning outcomes in lowand middle-income countries internationally, studies suggest that attending a preprimary school or program is associated with better reading and math skills. two studies on the impact of preschool in bangladesh found that first-grade students who had attended preschool performed better than those who had not, particularly in the areas of reading, writing, and oral math (aboud & hossain, 2011; aboud, hossain, & o’gara, 2008). in cambodia, children with any preschool program experience (home-based, state-run, or community preschool) performed significantly better on developmental assessments than those who had not participated in any early education program (rao et al., 2012). a study in argentina found similar results, with one year of preprimary education equaling an 8 percent increase in mean spanish and math test scores among third graders (berlinski, galiani, & gertler, 2009). similarly, the young lives study in ethiopia found that preschool led to statistically significant increases in cognitive skills, which remained at age 8 (woldehanna, 2016; woldehanna & araya, 2017). other studies have shown that preschool leads to more consistent progression into later grades. in mozambique, a randomized impact evaluation study found that, in addition to individual gains in cognitive, motor, and socialemotional skills, children who attended community preschools were 24 percent more likely than those who had not attended to be enrolled in primary school (martinez, naudeau, & pereira, 2012). a study in zambia found similar results, with a one-year follow-up revealing that 27 percent of students who had not attended preschool were still unenrolled in first grade, compared to only 11 percent of students who had attended (zuilkowski, fink, moucheraud, & matafwali, 2012). a subsequent study found that preschool participation resulted in improved learning outcomes, with an effect size of between 0.20 and 0.65 sd (mccoy, zuilkowski, yoshikawa, & fink, 2017). in addition, a study in uganda found that children exposed to preschool were more likely to be in school, and that children who enrolled in preschool at an earlier age were more likely to persist into higher grades than those who enrolled at a later age (nyeko, pence, & barnes, 2015). finally, a study in ethiopia found that urban preschool attendees were 25.7 percent more likely to complete secondary school than their non-preschool-attending counterparts. similar to the studies in high-income countries, several studies in lowand middleincome countries also found higher gains among children with low socioeconomic status (ses). according to a study of early education in ethiopia, while all children who attended preschool showed benefits, these gains were especially large for children from lower socioeconomic backgrounds (dowd, borisova, amente, & yenew, 2016). in addition to having a higher likelihood of primary school enrollment, students who attended preschool were also less likely to repeat first grade, as well as subsequent grades. in a study of preschool impact in rural preschool participation effects on early reading skills 89 nepal, researchers found that children who attended preprimary school were less likely to repeat first grade, or fail a grade (jaganath, khatry, murray-kolb, leclerq, & christian, 2015). it is unclear what causes this variation of the impact of preschool, both within and across countries. some surmise that preschool is just too late to intervene, given the fact that much of the brain develops before age 3, when many children are entering preschool (richter et al., 2017). others believe that this lack of consistent effects warrants a shift toward focusing on highquality preschool, which would include small class sizes, experienced teachers, and ageappropriate instruction (barnett, 2008). regional variations in terms of enrollment rates and the quality of primary schools may also determine whether initial learning gains persist or fade out over time. estimates of the economic returns to preschool expansion in sub-saharan africa are as high as $33 (usd) for every dollar invested (psacharopoulos, 2014), but this may be in part related to the current low levels of participation. despite the potential solutions to persistent low learning levels offered through the expansion of preschool, the best ways to achieve long-term gains remain elusive. research questions and data given the apparent dearth of information on the contributions of preschool and the persistence of impact in lowand middle-income countries, the present article seeks to fill this gap. the research questions examined in this article are as follows: (1) does participation in preschool improve later reading outcomes? (2) if so, why? what are the characteristics of preschool systems of the countries that seem to have persistent impact on student reading performance? the databases analyzed for this article are populated with data from national and regionally representative egra surveys conducted between 2008 and 2016. developed with united states agency for international development (usaid) support, egra is an open-source assessment of students’ foundational skills in reading and is adapted to each language and country context (dubeck and gove, 2015); full instrument specifications and guidelines for implementation are documented in the second edition of the egra toolkit (rti international, 2016b). during a 15-minute, oneon-one oral interview, primary grade students were asked by a trained enumerator to identify letter names or letter sounds and read aloud common words and a brief grade-level passage. most tasks were timed, with a one-minute limit. students read from a paper stimulus sheet while the enumerator recorded their answers, either on a digital tablet or on paper using a clipboard. the assessment was almost always accompanied by a contextual questionnaire to allow the researchers to better understand the factors, such as home language and reading practices, affecting learning outcomes. detailed information for each country-specific survey, including sampling frame and copies of the survey instruments and questionnaires, are available in data analysis reports for each country surveyed. because the data were collected from students enrolled in primary grades, with the variable for preprimary participation based on student recall, we are unable to answer questions regarding the quality of the assessed students’ preprimary experiences. table 1 summarizes key characteristics of the data sets analyzed for this article, including references to the full reports. 90 global education review 5(2) table 1. summary of country data sets country level of representation year grades no. of students report reference ethiopia regional 2014 2 and 3 2,000 rti international, 2014a ghana national 2015 2 7,311 ghana education service, rti international, & education assessment and research centre, 2016 indonesia project 2014 2 4,812 rti international, 2015b iraq national 2012 2 and 3 1,153 rti international, 2012 jordan national 2014 2 and 3 2,935 brombacher, stern, nordstrum, cummiskey, & mulcahy-dunn, 2014 kenya project 2013 1 and 2 4,222 piper, king, & mugenda, 2016 malawi national 2012 2 and 4 5,240 pouezevara, costello, & banda, 2012 mali national 2015 2 and 4 2,393 rti international, 2015a nicaragua national 2008 2, 3 and 4 6,649 castro, laguna, mayorga, & rti international, 2009 nigeria 4 states: jigawa, kaduna, kano and katsina 2014 2 and 3 2,531 rti international, 2014b philippines national 2013 3 2,463 pouezevara, destefano, & cummiskey 2013 rwanda national 2011 4 and 6 840 destefano, ralaingita, costello, sax, & frank, 2012 senegal national 2009 3 687 pouezevara, sock, & ndiaye, 2010 tanzania national 2014 2 2,266 rti international, 2016a uganda regional 2016 1 and 2 3,720 rti international, 2016c zambia national 2014 2 4,850 brombacher, bulat, king, kochetkova, & nordstrum, 2015 results the following pages seek to answer the research questions outlined above. for both questions, country-level egra data were included in the analysis if the study included a variable on childreported preprimary participation. if more than one egra was conducted in a country, the largest or most recent data set was used. the preschool participation effects on early reading skills 91 egra data we studied were collected during 2008–2016 from children in first through sixth grade, with most of the data sets focusing on those in second and third grade. to answer the first research question, about effects on later reading outcomes, we performed linear regressions for each country using both lowand high-level reading skills as the dependent variable. for low-level reading skills, we relied on either a letter task (scored in terms of correct letters per minute [clpm] or correct letter sounds per minute [clspm]); for high-level skills, we used oral reading fluency (orf; scored as correct words per minute). the models controlled for all of the following student-level characteristics, if available: gender, geographic location of the school (urban/rural), language match of the child to the language of instruction (loi), and socioeconomic status. ses was calculated by dividing the wealth index of child-reported articles in the home into quartiles (dividing all respondents into four roughly equal groups), with the highest ses compared with the lowest ses quartiles in the model. table 2 provides descriptive statistics for each country for each of the variables used in the model. table 2. descriptive statistics by country (in percent) country gender preprimary experience? language socioeconomic status location male female no yes different same low high urban rural ethiopia 51.7 48.3 39.1 60.9 13.6 86.4 32.9 27.9 33.9 66.1 ghana 51.0 49.0 16.2 83.8 49.0 51.0 22.3 26.4 27.9 72.1 indonesia 52.7 47.3 19.8 80.2 47.6 52.4 16.2 31.7 iraq 55.1 44.9 79.6 20.3 25.5 26.7 jordan 46.5 53.5 16.4 83.6 27.6 36.4 65.3 34.7 kenya 49.5 50.5 7.5 92.5 23.2 25.8 82.8 17.2 malawi 49.8 50.2 38.2 61.8 22.8 77.2 20.0 33.0 19.7 80.3 mali 48.3 51.7 71.0 29.0 58.0 42.0 27.7 22.0 nicaragua 47.4 52.6 17.2 82.8 23.2 24.0 69.0 31.0 nigeria 53.5 46.5 64.5 35.5 10.0 90.0 20.6 27.0 philippines 53.0 47.0 16.8 83.2 87.5 12.5 28.7 19.6 rwanda 48.4 51.6 61.3 38.7 4.8 95.2 24.3 20.2 senegal 52.6 47.4 56.6 43.4 18.1 34.2 tanzania 49.5 50.5 19.7 80.3 35.0 8.2 25.4 74.6 uganda 51.1 48.9 23.6 76.4 27.4 25.1 zambia 49.5 50.5 71.8 28.2 26.8 21.8 25.5 74.5 92 global education review 5(2) table 3. effect of preschool participation on letter and word reading skills country clpm† or clspm oral reading fluency attended preschool intercept attended preschool intercept ethiopia† –2.68 24.94*** 1.66 5.55 ghana 1.80** 9.21*** 1.44** 1.88* indonesia† 7.44*** 53.24*** 12.83*** 18.60*** iraq† –0.03 11.08*** –2.40 5.71*** jordan 4.78** 20.99*** 6.23*** 5.38** kenya 0.85 18.22*** 0.20 7.53*** malawi† 0.28 1.01 –0.86 –0.45 mali† 1.68 10.36*** 1.94 3.25*** nicaragua† –0.85 36.81*** –0.94 40.03*** nigeria 1.21 1.13 1.13 0.30 philippines 1.77 15.41*** 8.80*** 46.74*** rwanda –0.15 11.84*** 3.87 10.15*** senegal† 5.33* 25.59*** 5.05 18.25*** tanzania† 2.99*** 1.45* 4.67** 8.23*** uganda 0.93** –0.08 0.19 –0.25 zambia 1.99*** 2.52*** 0.64 1.24 note. clpm = correct letters per minute; clspm = correct letter sounds per minute. † values presented are denominated in clpm. *p < .05; **p < .01; ***p < .001. table 3 presents regression results by country and early literacy measure, using the controls provided in table 2. letter identification (measured by clpm) and letter sound identification (clspm) are lower-level literacy skills that develop before word reading. orf measures the number of words read correctly in one minute from a narrative reading passage, typically developed for the expected reading level of a second-grade student. due to differences in language structure, including word length, there is no universal definition of reading proficiency. in all countries, children were assessed in the official loi, although children’s home language or mother tongue did not always match that language. the data in the “attended preschool” columns represent the difference in scores between students who reported attending preschool with those who reported they did not attend preschool, in terms of the outcome measure of literacy. for example, in indonesia, children who had attended preschool correctly identified 7.44 more letters per minute than a child who had not attended preschool. the “intercept” columns represent children’s average score, holding all variables constant. for example, a child in indonesia who was male, did not attend preschool, resided in a rural area, was from the lowest ses background, and did not speak the loi as the mother tongue, correctly identified an average of 53.24 letters per minute. the intercept can also be viewed as an indication of the preliteracy or reading score of a child at the lowest end of the range. to interpret the results, it is important to consider whether the impact was substantive in addition to statistically significant. for example, preschool participation effects on early reading skills 93 in zambia, children who had attended preschool scored significantly higher than those who had not. however, when we look at the measure of score difference, children with preschool experience correctly identified only two additional letter sounds per minute than a child who had not attended preschool, which is not considered a substantive gain. these results should be treated with caution as they do not account for either the quality of the child’s preschool program or the subsequent primary school. the results of the regression models showed that in half of the countries, preprimary experience had a sustained, significant, and substantive impact on literacy skills of students in second and third grade, even after controlling for gender, language match, ses, grade, and school location. students in both indonesia and tanzania showed lasting impact of preprimary through second grade on correct letter identification, and students in senegal showed impact through third grade. for example, students in senegal with preprimary experience correctly identified 5.33 more letters per minute than students with no preprimary experience. students in ghana, uganda, and zambia showed lasting impact through second grade in identification of letter sounds per minute, and students in jordan showed impact through third grade. for example, students in uganda correctly identified 0.93 more letters per minute than students who had no preprimary experience. countries that did not show a relationship between preprimary and letter identification were ethiopia, iraq, malawi, and nicaragua. countries that did not show the relationship between preprimary and letter sound identification were kenya, nigeria, the philippines, and rwanda. additionally, the regression models showed that students with no preprimary experience in malawi, nigeria, tanzania, and uganda had extremely low scores for letter and letter sound identification skills overall, meaning that students in these countries were not faring well in preliteracy skills in second and third grade. for example, second and third graders with no preprimary experience in nigeria identified, on average, 1.13 letter sounds per minute. these same countries also had extremely low overall preliteracy scores among students in second and third grade even with preprimary experience. for example, students in malawi with preprimary experience correctly identified, on average, only 1.29 letters per minute in second, third, and fourth grades. students in ghana, indonesia, and tanzania showed lasting impact of preprimary on secondgrade assessment of reading fluency. students in jordan and the philippines showed lasting impact of preprimary on third-grade assessment of reading fluency. countries that did not show a significant relationship between preprimary participation and orf were ethiopia, iraq, kenya, malawi, nicaragua, nigeria, rwanda, senegal, uganda, and zambia. additionally, the regression models showed that students with no preprimary experience in malawi, nigeria, and uganda had extremely low scores for orf overall, meaning that students in these countries were not faring well in literacy skills in second and third grade. for example, children in these grades with no preprimary experience in nigeria were correctly reading, on average, 0.30 words per minute. these same countries also had extremely low overall preliteracy orf scores among students in second, third and fourth grades, even with preprimary experience. in addition to modeling the impact of preschool participation at the child level, we were interested in knowing whether the individual-level effect would be moderated by the prevalence of preschool participation; that is, would the effect of preschool be shaped by the 94 global education review 5(2) overall preprimary program participation rate in a given country? figures 1 through 3 show scatterplots of the relationship between the impact of student participation in preprimary programs and the overall preprimary program participation rate. for each figure, we plotted the preschool enrollment rate of the study population against the effect of preschool participation on a child’s literacy score for each of the tasks modeled in table 3. for example, figure 1 shows that jordan had an 84 percent preprimary program participation rate and that students who had participated in preprimary programs were able to identify an additional five correct letter sounds per minute compared to students who had no preprimary experiences. for figure 1, the relationship between the share of students who had participated in preprimary programs and the effect of that participation on letter sound knowledge is neutral; with the exception of jordan, most results hover around the horizontal axis. both letter identification (figure 2) and oral reading fluency (figure 3) indicate a positive relationship between preprimary program participation rate and its effect on later learning outcomes; that is, countries with higher preprimary program participation rates tended to have a positive effect of that participation on later learning. further research into the quality of the programming provided in both preprimary and primary schools is needed, however, before substantive conclusions can be drawn from these results. figure 1. relationship between preschool participation rate and letter sound score effect kenya ghana jordan philippines uganda rwanda nigeria zambia -1 0 1 2 3 4 5 6 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 ef fe ct o n l e tt e r so u n d i d e n ti fi ca ti o n pre-primary participation rate preschool participation effects on early reading skills 95 figure 2. preschool participation rate and letter identification score effect figure 3. preschool participation rate and reading fluency score effect kenya ghana jordan philippines nicaragua tanzania indonesia uganda malawi ethiopia senegal rwanda nigeria mali zambia iraq -4 -2 0 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 ef fe ct o n o ra l r e ad in g fl u e n cy pre-primary participation 96 global education review 5(2) country case studies the results above show varied impact of preprimary programs on later literacy skills in primary school. since countries vary in their levels of investment in early learning through policy and curriculum, as well as in other factors, including teacher–student ratio and loi policies, in this section we take a closer look at six countries to better understand their respective results. as data were collected from students enrolled in first through fourth grade, we were not able to assess the quality of their preprimary experiences; instead, we relied on system-level indicators to better understand the preprimary and early primary experiences of the population of study. table 4 summarizes key country-level factors, including net enrollment rates and the presence of a national preschool curriculum, that may impact the quality of preprimary education, and thus later literacy outcomes. table 4. preschool policy and practice for case study countries country government established preprimary or kindergarten program? year system put into place preprimary program: free or feebased? percentage of children enrolled in preprimary education ratio of students to teacher in preprimary programs percentage of children enrolled in private v. public national preprimary curriculum? year curriculum put into place ghana (egra in 2013 and 2015) in 2007, ghana added two years of kindergarten onto its compulsory basic education program. made policy that each primary school should have a kindergarten attached to it. 2007 free 120.8% (2015) 34:1 (2015) unknown yes, kindergarten curriculum 2004 indonesia (egra in 2014) no, preprimary experience mainly provided by private for-profit and community services (faith-based and secular). not applicable (n/a) fee-based 58.2% (2014) 13:1 (2014) 4% public; 94% private or communityrun no, in development (2015) n/a preschool participation effects on early reading skills 97 country government established preprimary or kindergarten program? year system put into place preprimary program: free or feebased? percentage of children enrolled in preprimary education ratio of students to teacher in preprimary programs percentage of children enrolled in private v. public national preprimary curriculum? year curriculum put into place jordan (egra in 2012 and 2014) as of early 2018, free kindergarten was beginning to be provided in some areas as jordan moved toward making kindergarten compulsory. 2014 free or feebased, depending on area 32.2% (2012) 17:1 (2012) 25% public; 75% private yes, kindergarten curriculum 2007 philippines (egra in 2013) education system includes a full year of kindergarten for all students, made compulsory in 2012. 2016 free 48.2% (2009) 35:1 (2007) unknown yes 2011 tanzania (egra in 2013 and 2016) education system includes two years of preprimary education. government requires each community to establish early childhood development facilities, including preprimary classes attached to primary schools. 2008 free 32.3% (2013) 57:1 (2010) unknown some regions, but not nationwide 2010 zambia (egra in 2014) no, and low coordination among stakeholders to facilitate implementation of early childhood programs. n/a fee-based (private) 17% (2010) unknown n/a no curriculum or policy framework n/a 98 global education review 5(2) ghana we found that the impact of preprimary education in ghana was significant for both low and higher-level literacy skills at second grade, but overall literacy skills were low across students. ghana has shown a strong commitment to improving early reading since its first egra was implemented with usaid support in 2013, but has also encountered many challenges to quality, possibly leading to the low differences between students with preprimary experience and those without such experience. the relationship between preprimary experience and later reading outcomes in ghana was statistically significant but not substantive. students who had attended preprimary programs later identified correctly an average of 1.80 more letter sounds (11.01 letter sounds total) per minute in second grade than those without any preprimary experience (refer to table 2). clspm was low (9.21 letter sounds) at second grade, even for children who did not go to preschool. in addition, students with preprimary experience later read correctly an average of only 1.44 more words (3.32 total words) per minute in second grade on a measure of reading fluency than those with no preprimary experience. orf was very low, with only 1.88 words per minute read correctly by second graders who had not attended preschool. in 1995, ghana introduced free and compulsory universal basic education, which contributed to an enrollment rate in primary education of 82 percent in 2012 (kochetkova & brombacher, 2014). this commitment extended to early childhood education when ghana released its white paper on education reform, which added two years of kindergarten education to the basic education system beginning in the 2007–2008 school year (adamu-issah, elden, forson, & schrofer, 2007). it also included a policy that each primary school should have an attached kindergarten class. as a result, preprimary education enrollment increased from 35 percent in 1990 to more than full enrollment, or 113 percent, in 2012 (likely due to students outside the appropriate age range being enrolled), giving ghana one of the highest gross enrollment ratios in the world (yoshikawa & kabay, 2015). although ghana has made great strides in increasing enrollment in preprimary education, challenges remain when it comes to quality. many kindergarten programs struggle with crowded classrooms, poor infrastructure, and a lack of trained teachers. the government of ghana recognized this issue within its 2003– 2015 education sector plan, which stated that the country “continues to grapple with serious challenges on quality of education” (yoshikawa & kabay, 2015). additionally, it has been estimated that one-third of ghanaian children enrolled in kindergarten are not of the appropriate age, although it is unclear whether they are underage or overage (yoshikawa & kabay, 2015); regardless, it leads to overcrowded classrooms. another challenge to quality in the classroom is the multitude of languages spoken in ghana, estimated by ethnologue at 81 (plus numerous dialects), although 11 local languages have been identified as the main languages of instruction for primary education (simons & fennig, 2017). a 2015 study assessing both literacy and numeracy found considerable variability when the researchers examined the proportion of second graders who spoke the loi outside school, with almost half of students reporting that they do not speak the same language at home as the loi. additionally, the study uncovered that 20 percent of interviewed teachers did not speak the loi for their given school. although these findings were based on reports from early primary—rather than preprimary or kindergarten—educational experiences, it is likely that the challenges of ghana’s multilingual context also applies to 99 global education review 5(2) preprimary education, given the comparison of 11 official lois and the much higher count of other ghanaian languages used at home. these challenges to establishing high-quality preprimary education may be the reason for the small differences in literacy scores found between students with and without preprimary experience. in 2013, rti led a national survey of children’s reading and math skills in ghana, using the egra and an equivalent tool to measure numeracy, the early grade mathematics assessment (egma; see platas, ketterlin-geller, brombacher & sitabkhan, 2014). the sample included 7,923 second-grade students: 4,017 boys (51 percent) and 3,906 girls (49 percent). of these students, most (80.9 percent) said they had attended kindergarten or preschool before beginning first grade. however, while the standard age for second-grade students is 7–8 years of age, the majority of those surveyed (74.8 percent) were 9 years or older, thus overage for their grade. at the same time, only 12.1 percent of students reported that they were repeating their grade. this indicates that while most students were progressing from one grade to the next at a standard rate, most were beginning school at a later age than would be considered ideal (kochetkova & brombacher, 2014). jordan preprimary education in jordan has long been characterized by high-quality, privately run preschools, plus a significant investment in basic education by the jordanian government. we found the relationship between preprimary and later literacy outcomes in jordan to be moderate, however. students who with preprimary experience later identified correctly an average of 4.78 more letter sounds (25.8 letter sounds total) per minute in second or third grade than those without any preprimary experience (refer to table 2). in addition, students with preprimary experience later read correctly an average of 6.23 more words (11.6 total words) per minute in second or third grade on a measure of reading fluency than those without preprimary experience. overall, clspm scores were high (21 letter sounds), even for children who had not attended preschool. however, orf performance was low overall, with only 5.38 words per minute read correctly by secondor third-graders who had not attended preschool. looking more deeply at the preprimary and kindergarten education sector in jordan, we found that at the time of the 2014 egra, jordan was only beginning to make public investments in the preprimary education sector. jordan moved toward making kindergarten compulsory in 2014, beginning to provide free preschool and kindergarten education in some areas. only 25 percent of kindergarten programs were government-supported, but those programs had a low student-to-teacher ratio at 17:1. additionally, although the gross enrollment ratio for primary education was 89 percent in 2012, the preprimary enrollment ratio was only 32 percent, and many students still began formal elementary schooling in first grade (unesco institute for statistics, 2017). in 2012, rti led a national survey of children’s reading (egra) and math (egma) skills. a research team visited 156 public primary schools across jordan. in each school, a second-grade teacher, a third-grade teacher, and 10 students from each of these grades were randomly selected. students were given the egra and egma, and teachers were interviewed about their experience with school. in total, 3,120 students were selected for participation in the assessments and interview. among the students sampled, 83.4 percent reported having attended preschool or kindergarten prior to primary school 100 global education review 5(2) (brombacher, collins, cummiskey, kochetkova, & mulcahy-dunn, 2012). children who attended preschool or kindergarten showed significantly stronger letter-sound association skills, decoding skills, oral reading fluency, and reading and listening skills than those who had not attended preschool. unlike with reading performance, there was no correlation between attending preschool or kindergarten and math performance. indonesia our model found statistically significant impacts of preprimary education in indonesia on both lowerand higher-level literacy skills at second grade and revealed that overall literacy skills were quite high across students regardless of preprimary experience. indonesia’s early childhood programs are provided mostly by communities and private actors, which could mean high-quality learning environments and, thus, a lasting impact later in school. students with preprimary experience in indonesia later identified correctly an average of 7.44 more letters per minute in second grade than those without such experience (refer to table 2). additionally, the overall average clpm score was high in second grade at 53.24 even without preprimary experience, suggesting a strong basic education system. regarding orf, students with preprimary experience later read correctly an average of 12.83 more words per minute in second grade than those without preprimary experience. similar to the findings on letter identification, reading fluency assessment scores were also high for second graders who had not attended a preprimary program, at 18.6 words per minute. as of 2014, indonesia had 50 million students and 2.6 million teachers in more than 250,000 primary and secondary schools, making it the fourth-largest education system in the world (stern & nordstrum, 2014). these high numbers may be due in part to the large youth population: 43 percent of the country’s 250 million people are under the age of 25 (organisation for economic co-operation and development [oecd] & asian development bank [adb], 2015). while the country has reached universal rates for primary school enrollment, it has continued to struggle with the expansion of early childhood education, with provision occurring mainly through communities and private providers (oecd & adb, 2015). preprimary education enrollment rates have steadily increased, and as of 2014, 58.2 percent of children in indonesia were enrolled in preprimary education (unesco institute for statistics, 2014). in 2010, indonesia released its “grand design,” a blueprint for early childhood education that included outcomes, targets, and principles for the expansion of early care and education, with goals to be reached by 2025 (oecd & adb, 2015). additionally, in 2013, the government introduced presidential regulation no. 20 on holistic integrated early childhood development (hi-ecd). this regulation, among other things, created a multiagency taskforce to coordinate implementation of early childhood care and education throughout the country (oecd & adb, 2015). in response, the indonesian government has been gradually increasing investment in early childhood education, but its centers still remain in the minority. in 2014, rti, in partnership with the ministry of education and culture, the ministry of religious affairs, and usaid, implemented an egra in indonesia. two surveys were administered to 4,812 second-grade students across the four proposed “regions” of (1) sumatra and its adjacent islands; (2) java and bali; (3) kalimantan, sulawesi, and its adjacent islands; and (4) the “mnp” region, consisting of maluku, east nusa tenggara (nusa tenggara 101 global education review 5(2) timur), west nusa tenggara (nusa tenggara barat), and papua islands (eastern region) (stern & nordstrum, 2014). the egra found a high correlation between attending preschool and oral reading fluency, with students who had attended preschool reading an average of 20 more words per minute (stern & nordstrum, 2014). philippines in the past decade, the philippines has shown a high regard for education by investing in early childhood education, increasing investment for basic education, and prioritizing a public– private alliance in education provision. not surprisingly, then, the model results showed the impact of preprimary education in the philippines as statistically significant and substantive for higher-level literacy skills at third grade, and also indicated high overall literacy skills across all students. those with preprimary experience read correctly an average of 8.80 more words (55.54 total words) per minute on a measure of reading fluency than students without any preprimary experience. there was no substantive difference between preschool and non-preschool participants for lower-level literacy skills, however. students who had attended preprimary programs identified correctly an average of only 1.77 more letter sounds (17.2 letter sounds total) per minute than those who had not (refer to table 2). in 2012, a full year of kindergarten for all students was made compulsory with the passage of the kindergarten education act, which declared kindergarten education as “vital to the academic and technical development of the filipino child” (republic of the philippines, 2011). the law decreed that kindergarten education would mean “one (1) year of preparatory education for children at least five (5) years old as a prerequisite for grade i” (republic of the philippines, 2011), and that instruction would be given in the child’s mother tongue. additionally, the national economic and development authority’s philippine development plan 2011–2016 included a goal of increasing kindergarten enrollment from its 2009 baseline of 48.2 percent to 100 percent by 2016 (national economic and development authority, n.d.). rti led a usaid-funded national survey of children’s reading (egra) skills in 2013, which included the development and implementation of both a national egra in filipino and english, and a mother-tongue language (ilokano) egra in one region. for the filipino and english egra, a national sample of 2,410 students was selected randomly within six geographic areas of the philippines: northern luzon, metro manila, south luzon, visayas, mindanao, and the autonomous region of muslim mindanao (gove et al., 2015). for the assessment in the ilokano language, 500 students were selected in the one region where ilokano was the predominant mother tongue and where schools were piloting literacy instruction in that language (gove et al., 2015). tanzania we found the relationship between preprimary experience and later reading outcomes in tanzania to be statistically significant for both lower-and higher-level literacy skills at second grade, but we also noted low overall literacy skills in general (refer to table 2). students with preprimary experience in tanzania correctly identified an average of 2.99 more letters per minute in second grade than those without any preprimary experience. however, the overall average clpm score was low in second grade. regarding orf, students with preprimary experience later read correctly an average of 4.67 more words per minute in second grade than those with no preprimary experience. reading 102 global education review 5(2) fluency performance for second graders who had not attended a preprimary program was 8.23 words per minute, as opposed to 12.9 words per minute for children with preprimary experience. tanzania has made a strong commitment to early education in the past 10 years, starting in 1995 when the education and training policy required all 5and 6-year-olds to attend a preprimary program prior to first grade (bakuza, 2014). the subsequent education sector plan (2007) added two years of preprimary education to the education system with the goal of achieving 50 percent enrollment in preprimary programs by 2012 (united republic of tanzania, 2008). next, in 2013, tanzania launched its big results now initiative to guide the country from lowto middle-income status. one of the main strategies for doing so was increasing the investment in education, particularly in the early years (rti international, 2016a). despite this effort, enrollment in preprimary education remained flat between 2013 and 2015, at 32 percent (unesco institute for statistics, 2015). one possible reason is that progress made on the national level was not yet trickling down to local governments, thereby halting progress (bakuza, 2014). another deterrent may have been cost, as parents still had to pay for uniforms, books, and school meals (bakuza, 2014). when students do attend preprimary programs in tanzania, the classes are typically overcrowded, with the average class ratio being 1 teacher to 57 students. additionally, most public schools do not have teachers trained specifically in preprimary education, as there is no higher education track devoted to early childhood education (bakuza, 2014), only an early childhood certificate. rti performed a baseline egra and egma in 2013, the results of which were disseminated at the national level in 2014. a national egra was performed in 2016, which allowed rti to compare student progress over time. in 2016, 73 percent of students interviewed reported having attended a preprimary program, which was a drop from the 80 percent that reported this in the original 2013 assessment (rti international, 2016a). zambia our model revealed a relationship between preprimary experience and later reading outcomes in zambia that was statistically significant for lower-level literacy skills, but findings for higher-level literacy skills were nonsignificant. students who had attended preprimary programs later identified correctly an average of 1.99 more letter sounds per minute in second grade than those without any preprimary experience, but overall the average clspm score was low even among those with preprimary experience (4.51 letter sounds total in second grade; refer to table 2). additionally, students with preprimary experience later read correctly an average of only 0.64 more words per minute in second grade on a measure of reading fluency than those with no preprimary experience, showing a low orf overall of 1.88 words per minute in second grade. although zambia has recently shown a strong commitment to education by adding to the infrastructure, budget, and teacher workforce, many challenges remain in those areas (described below), possibly leading to the small differences between students with preprimary experience and those with no preprimary experience. for example, one of the poorest countries in the world, zambia is also one of the most diverse, with approximately 72 ethnic groups. the official language is english, which is introduced as a subject in second grade. however, there are an additional seven official languages of instruction—nyanja, bemba, lozi, tonga, kaonde, luvale, and lunda—which the ministry of education, science, vocational training, and early education has directed to be 103 global education review 5(2) used for teaching initial literacy, from preschool through fourth grade (brombacher et al., 2015). historically, early childhood education has been offered primarily by private providers, churches, and nongovernmental organizations. zambia has made strides since public early childhood education became a priority in 2004, including the building of 20 model early childhood and education centers and plans for 60 more, the addition of 1,000 teachers, the development of an early childhood curriculum, and the allocation of 0.05 percent of the national budget (unesco, 2015c). however, the percentage of first graders reporting preprimary attendance declined from 15.9 percent in 2004 to 14.8 percent in 2013 (unesco, 2015c). zambia continues to struggle with weak policy direction, the effect of the government’s longstanding nonparticipation in early childhood education, inadequate infrastructure, and underqualified teachers. rti international conducted an egra and egma in november 2014, under consultation with the examinations council of zambia, usaid/zambia, and the british department for international development (brombacher et al., 2015). rti administered a survey to 4,855 second-grade students across all 10 provinces of zambia and in all seven official local languages of instruction. the number of schools sampled was 486; these schools were a mix of zambian government, grant-maintained, community, and private schools (brombacher et al., 2015). discussion the findings from both the regression analysis and deeper exploration of policy and practice trends are promising in terms of the persistence of preschool effects on reading outcomes in low and middle-income countries. in seven of the 16 countries, there was persistent impact of preschool on foundational skills of letter identification or letter sounds; and in five countries, preschool had a lasting effect on oral reading fluency. according to the country case studies, three of these five countries (indonesia, jordan, and the philippines) are middle-income countries with higher levels of quality than many of the other countries studied. the persistence of preschool effects on reading fluency in these countries is extremely promising as it gives policy makers and practitioners a promising pathway to improving student learning outcomes. we found the persistent effect of preschool participation on both letter skills and reading fluency to be present despite the generally low classroom conditions, quality of instruction, and overall student learning levels in many of the countries. we did not detect a pattern in terms of participation rates or overall average results predicting whether effects would persist or fade out, although it may be because our model did not capture issues of school quality or classroom instruction. future efforts should endeavor to further standardize the information collected at both the student and classroom level to facilitate these types of multi-country studies and improve our ability to detect differences. the principal limitation of the present analysis was the assessments’ reliance on student self-reports on whether they had participated in preschool several years earlier. one possible remedy to this challenge is longitudinal data collection that begins in preschool and follows a cohort of students into primary school and beyond. unfortunately, longitudinal studies are extremely rare in low and middle-income countries. the barriers include external funders’ and governments’ reluctance to invest in the requisite 5 to 10 years of data collection, as well as difficulty in tracking students due to the near-universal lack of unique student identifiers. we hope to increase the number of longitudinal studies that track students from preschool into primary and have 104 global education review 5(2) successfully secured funding for one such study in kenya. perhaps the initial promising results presented above, which we found in a good number of countries despite the clear limitations, will increase interest in longitudinal work. what is clear is the urgent need for more research on the ability of preschool to both boost individual student-level learning at the start of primary school and improve the efficiency and effectiveness of classroom instruction in primary education and beyond. the source studies cited above showed that with few exceptions, the average learning levels of students in the early grades of primary school were extremely low. skills that should have been acquired in preschool were only just being mastered in second or third grade, and in many school systems, students were repeating multiple times. we are among those who believe that if done well, preschool can give students a leg up on acquiring the foundational skills that will set them up for success in primary school. the promises made under the sustainable development goals include ensuring that all children have access to high-quality early childhood education that helps them become ready for school. the results above showed that in several lowand middle-income countries, preschool participation has had a lasting effect and helped to increase the likelihood that children would have the requisite skills for later school success. we expect that these results can inform policy makers and practitioners alike. acknowledgements the authors gratefully acknowledge the support of usaid and host country government staff, teachers and students, 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(2015). the evidence base on early childhood care and education in global contexts. background paper prepared for the education for all global monitoring report 2015, education for all 2000-2015: achievements and challenges. paris: unesco. retrieved from http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0023/002324/2 32456e.pdf zuilkowski, s., fink, g., moucheraud, c., & matafwali, b. (2012). early childhood education, child development and school readiness: evidence from zambia. south african journal of childhood education, 2(2), 116–136. https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/15/ 143 about the author(s) all authors contributed equally to this work while employed by rti international, an independent nonprofit institute that provides research, development and technical services to government and commercial clients worldwide. amber gove, phd, is director of research in the international education division at rti. she received a master’s degree in economics and phd in international comparative education from stanford university. eileen dombrowski serves as a program associate on the early childhood development team in the international education division at rti. she received master’s degrees in international and comparative education from lehigh university and in early childhood special education from the university of maryland. jennifer pressley is an education analyst in the international education division at rti. she received a master’s degree in public policy and international development from american university. simon king is a senior education research analyst in the international education division at rti. he received a master’s degree in statistics from texas a&m university. he is currently pursuing a doctorate at the university of college, london—institute of education. tara weatherholt, phd, is a research education analyst on the early childhood development team in the international education division at rti. she received her master’s degree in psychology and phd in experimental psychology from the university of louisville. https://doi.org/10.1111/cdev.12099 https://doi.org/10.1177/0165025415627700 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/15/143 https://sajce.co.za/index.php/sajce/article/view/15/143 a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists 103 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: citron, dassi (2017). a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists. [review of the book the schoolwide enrichment model in science by nancy heilbronner and joseph s. renzulli]. global education review, 4 (2), 103-105. book review a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists “the schoolwide enrichment model in science” by nancy heilbronner and joseph s. renzulli by dassi citron in our current climate of stem and steam initiatives, science education is experiencing renewed interest. there are maker faires, makerspaces, and youtube videos of projects created by young engineers going viral. the release of the schoolwide enrichment model in science: a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists by nancy heilbronner and joseph renzulli is a well-timed compilation of research-based ideas, theoretical constructs, and useful tools directed toward achieving exemplary science instruction in the 21st century. it informs, in layered chapters, ways for teachers to provide guidance for students who have talent in science. this professional text works best for educators who teach in the upper grades (primary through high school), though many of the frameworks could also be adapted to suit students of all ages and proclivities. the contents of the schoolwide enrichment model in science should be slowly savored and will be best used in either a science methods class, or with a professional development team. additionally, heilbronner and renzulli’s text successfully weaves in anecdotes about students of all ages who have done impressive and original work in science. chapter one addresses the theoretical and research-based components that underlie the schoolwide enrichment model (sem). it also provides a summary of this program, which has been used for decades. during this chapter, the authors ask, “how can we develop high levels of interest, engagement, and enthusiasm for scientific inquiry?” this is a timely query; young children seem to have an insatiable appetite for all things scientific, but as they move through grade levels, their excitement often wanes considerably. chapter two discusses the practice of sem. heilbronner and renzulli detail the first 104 global education review 4 (2) delivery service component, i.e., how students are selected. many measures are used: achievement tests, teacher nominations, assessment of potential for creativity, as well as self-nomination and parent nomination. a range of surveys and forms are provided as tools to help with this process. it is important to note that self-reflection—as a learning and assessment protocol—becomes an integral part of both the selection process and the evaluation of outcomes in the final stages of a given project. the second delivery component is a series of curriculum modification techniques that include differentiation, compacting, and increasing the depth of experience for the most gifted students. providing a platform for students to select their own content is an integral part of the program. this fits well with current design theory and complements the notion that learning is most meaningful when it is in the context of real-life problems. they also reinforce the view that the ultimate goal of educators is to replace dependent and passive learning with independence and engaged participation. therefore, teachers facilitate, not lecture. engaging students through activities in science is delineated in chapters 4 through 6. the meat of the sem experience includes the idea that inquiry learning is iterative, and investigations should proceed with the notion that there are no correct or incorrect answers. students develop their investigations through the process of personalizing their ideas, and use of authentic methodology; they conduct their research with the end goal of presenting their findings. students are encouraged to explore and manipulate materials as they create and invent. one embedded anecdote illustrates a particularly meaningful investigation. a fourth grade student had a passionate interest in researching skin disease. he analyzed data and planned a “type iii activity,” posed a question, met with experts, and conducted a study. he designed a comic book to inform children about skin care. after follow-up data was completed, the student appeared on local television with his findings, which eventually led to the development of a corporate skin care campaign. the final chapters concern additional components to consider when implementing sem: compacting and differentiation, cluster grouping, and gifted programs. these chapters include important links to literacy learning. they also address challenges to implementation, along with a detailed discussion of useful technologies to include when using the sem model. although the sem approach joins the ranks of other trends in science education, the authors make no mention of similar initiatives, like the reggio emilia movement, which also incorporates problem-based inquiry (for the early childhood population), and the teachers college ela unit of study on science experiments, where teachers blend inquiry with scientific problem solving through performance tasks. adding additional information about cutting-edge initiatives would serve to inform and strengthen instruction for both gifted and scientifically curious students. nevertheless, heilbronner and renzulli’s well-designed text provides a sound methodological and procedural model with gems of inspiration for all who teach science in the 21st century. it is a rich and varied guidebook for educators who have long scratched their heads and wondered what to do with those curious and gifted young scientists in their classrooms. “the schoolwide enrichment model in science: a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists.” by nancy heilbronner and joseph s. renzulli. waco, tx: prufrock press, 2016. isbn: 978-1-61821-499-7 a hands-on approach for engaging young scientists 105 about the authors nancy heilbronner, ph.d., is interim associate provost and associate professor of education at mercy college, new york. a former science teacher, she researches in the fields of gifted and talented education, as well as science education. joseph s. renzulli, ed.d., is a long-time faculty member of the department of educational psychology at the university of connecticut and was selected by the university as one of its distinguished professors. about the reviewer dassi citron is an adjunct professor in the school of education at mercy college. she previously taught in the scarsdale and east williston school districts in new york. additionally, she worked at the st. bernard's school in new york city as an elementary science teacher. accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 43 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: limaye, sandhya (2016). factors influencing the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india. global education review, 3 (3). 43-56 factors influencing the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india sandhya limaye tata institute of social sciences, india abstract the central and state governments in india have formulated programs and policies over the years for children with disabilities in order to help them to enter mainstream society. however, despite these policies, children with disabilities are amongst the most disadvantaged in terms of access to schooling and completion of elementary education, as their needs are not met effectively. based on my personal experiences, research, and communication with different stakeholders involved in the field of education for children with disabilities over the last 30 years, this paper explores the broader challenges in the current education system with respect to issues of quality of education and drop-out rates of primary students with disabilities. a number of factors that influence the accessibility of education for children with disabilities are presented including: perceptions of parents of children with disabilities and their difficulties in helping their children with disabilities, the general attitude of society, government officials, school staff and infrastructure, inadequate levels of training of key stakeholders, invisibility of disability in community, poverty, lack of acceptance, lack of interest, gender discrimination, lack of awareness, poor physical access, availability of various support systems, and government policies focusing on the education of children with disabilities in specific. keywords india, education, educational policy, children with disabilities introduction education is a right of every child whether she/he is disabled or non-disabled as education equips children to meet the challenges of the life. education involves growing up knowing the environment in which we live in. it is a human right with immense power to transform the environment in which we live, as it is a powerful instrument of social change and often initiates upward movement in the social structure. in order to make education for all a reality, every child must have access to quality education. the unesco convention against discrimination in education (1960) and other international human rights treaties like the universal declaration of human rights (1946), convention on the rights of child (1989), and un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities (2006) prohibit any sort of exclusion from educational opportunities on the basis of sex, ethnic origin, language, religion, nationality, socio-economic ______________________________ corresponding author: sandhya limaye , center for disability studies and action, school of social work, tata institute of social sciences, v.n. purav marg, deonar, mumbai, maharashtra 400088, india email: limaye.sandhya@gmail.com 44 global education review 3(3) conditions, abilities etc. however, millions of children continue to experience exclusion within (and from) education systems across the world. the educational scene in india has undergone major change over the years due to efforts of the government, resulting in the better provision of education. in the context of india’s changing educational landscape, it is important to look at education for children with disabilities critically. this paper is based on my personal experiences, research, and communication with different stakeholders involved in the field of education for children with disabilities over the last 30 years. status of education of children with disabilities according to census 2011, there are 1.2 billion people in india, of which about 833 million people live in rural areas. the total number of children with disabilities is 164.5 million. according to the national sample survey (nss) 58th round (jul.–dec. 2002), 25 percent of the literate population of people with disabilities had received education up to the primary level (five years of schooling), and 11 percent up to the middle level (eight years), while a mere 9 percent had nine or more years. interestingly, enrolment ratios for those with disabilities aged 5 to 18 years in a mainstream school were higher in rural areas than in urban areas. education for children with disabilities in india suffers either in its efficacy, infrastructure, implementation and/or other causes and it is very difficult to find reliable data about the prevalence of disability in india (https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-ofdisabled-children-in-india.html). schooling for students with disabilities in india is conducted in regular schools or in special schools. the special school was introduced in india in the last two decades of the 19th century by christian missionaries. special schools are equipped with the resources to provide education to children with disabilities, and many special schools are concentrated in urban areas. because of the widespread belief that children with disabilities cannot be educated alongside other children, the schools, the special education system was segregated. these schools helped to provide education for children with disabilities, but did not help them to enter mainstream society (https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-ofdisabled-children-in-india.html). furthermore, this special school system has major drawbacks – it is expensive and has only limited reach. in spite of the disadvantages of the special schools and the impact on the lives of the children with disabilities studying in them, the law still provides for setting up of these schools for children with disabilities. ministry of welfare (now ministry of social justice and empowerment) has launched a plan for the establishment of special schools and provides grants to them to run the schools. priority under the scheme is to set up schools in districts where there is no special school at present. at present 240 odd districts in the country have no special schools (baquer & sharma, 2006). presently there are about 3000 special schools servicing children with different disabilities. it is estimated that there are 900 schools for the hearing impaired, 400 schools for the visually impaired, 1,000 for the mentally retarded and 700 for the physically disabled children (bagga, 2007). these schools are registered with the rehabilitation council of india and are allowed to apply for government support. this small number of special schools cannot serve the whole population of students with disabilities (byrd, 2010). zacharia (2000) noted that the philosophy of “integration” emerged which advocated education of children with mild and moderate disabilities in general schools along with others with adequate resource support. but the children under integration method were still treated separately in schools and integration was only https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-of-disabled-children-in-india.html https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-of-disabled-children-in-india.html accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 45 partial. this led to the emergence of the new concept called inclusive education (ie) which argues that all children irrespective of the nature and degree of the disability should be educated in general schools with non-disabled children. it has been introduced in the schools but a lot more has yet to be done (zacharia, 2000). while few professionals would question the appropriateness of including students with disabilities in a regular school, there is a debate about which students should be part of general education classes and how much time they should spend there (lal, 2005 p. 79). more recently, there has been growing awareness regarding issues of access and enrolment of the children with disabilities into the mainstream for their integration into society. integrated or inclusive schools are public schools that allow students with disabilities to attend, but these schools provide limited support for these students. considering the difficulties of accessing special schools, regular local neighborhood schools become viable options open for most children. a vast majority of children with disabilities in india are not getting an appropriate education. therefore, special measures have been taken by the government of india expecting the states to take responsibilities to ensure that within a specified time frame every child, whatever his/her disability, has access to formal or non-formal education. the sarva shiksha abhiyan (ssa) is an indian government programme aimed at the universalization of elementary education in a time bound manner, as mandated by the 86th amendment to the constitution of india making the free and compulsory education of children between the ages of 6 to 14 a fundamental right. there are government efforts through sarva shiksha abhiyan (ssa) teachers to identify students with disabilities who never enrolled in the school or who drop out and provide education for them. it is estimated that india has approximately 35 million children with disabilities but less than one percent have access to appropriate education (baquer & sharma, 2006). education of children with disabilities (cwd) has been a part of policy development in india for the past few decades. the policies of the government of india towards the education of children with disabilities have been reflected in the enactments, schemes and through institutions established for various relevant activities. policy framework for education for children with disabilities india is bound by human rights treaties like the universal declaration of human rights (1946), the unesco convention against discrimination in education (1960), and convention on the rights of child (1989). international policies, related to disability and education such as the un standard rules on the equalization of opportunities for persons with disabilities (1993), the salamanca statement and framework for action on disability education (1994), united nations convention on the rights of persons with disability 2006, biwako framework, have influenced indian policies on education for children with disabilities. the drafting of the new bill for person with disabilities act, (pwd) 2011 which replaced the persons with disabilities act, 1995, is being implemented to fulfill obligations under international treaties and to overcome limitations of the previous act. the bill of 2014 and the on-going amendment of the national trust act and the policy for guardianship that may extend from offering “limited guardianship” to the formation of new support systems are products of this. all these enable persons with disabilities to make decisions and enhance their self-determination. the bill of 2014 promoted the goals of an inclusive, barrier-free and rightsbased society for persons with disabilities. 46 global education review 3(3) the indian constitution prohibits any exclusion from educational opportunities on the basis of sex, ethnic origin, language, religion, nationality, socio-economic conditions, abilities, etc. the preamble of the constitution embodies the concept of social justice and equality of status and opportunity to all the people of india. article 45 of the indian constitution provides compulsory and free education of all children below 14 years and the 86th amendment of the constitution act in 2002 made it clear that education is a fundamental right of every child between the age group of 6 to 14 years. focused efforts to improve education for children with disabilities since independence of 15th august 1947, several efforts have been made to take education closer to children with disabilities. the kothari commission of 1964 stressed the education of children with disabilities (irrespective of the type of disability) being a part of the general education system. the national education policy in 1968 based on kothari commission recommendations, suggested expanding educational facilities for children with physically and mentally disabilities. in 1986, the national policy on education brought the fundamental issue of equity center stage. sector 4.9 of this policy focused clearly on the needs of children with disabilities. this policy also included a provision regarding teacher training for all mainstream education teachers by “ including a compulsory special education component in pre-service training of general teachers” (kohama, 2012:19) in 1974, the ministry of welfare started the integrated education of disabled children (iedc) to promote the integration and retention in regular school systems of students with mild and moderate disabilities. however, the program fell short of its objectives due to various reasons such as a dearth of adequately trained educators, equipment and educational material, coordination among various departments, etc. in 1987, unicef and the governmentfunded national council of educational research and training (ncert) launched the project on integrated education for disabled (pied) that focused on teacher training in order to encourage integration. pied was later amalgamated with the district primary education program (dpep) and sarva shiksha abhiyan (ssa). the enrolment and retention rates spiked, however, the coverage was minimal and only two to three percent of children with disabilities were integrated into regular schools. in 1992, the plan of action (poa) suggested that the children with disabilities who can be educated in a regular school should not be admitted to a special school. even children who were initially admitted to special schools for training in plus curriculum skills should be transferred to general schools once they acquire daily living skills, communication skills, and basic academic skills. this poa was strengthened by the enactment of rehabilitation council of india (rci) act 1992. the main objectives of this act were to establish a statutory mechanism for monitoring and standardizing courses for the training of 16 categories of professionals required in the field of special education and rehabilitation of persons with disabilities. training of special educators and resource teachers that can offer support services to children with disabilities in regular schools is the responsibility of rci. the district primary education program (dpep) of 1995 focused on increasing the number of girls in of primary education. the program’s focus was on quantitative targets and capacity-building of educational administration. very few children with disabilities were integrated due to continued reliance on special schools (alur, 2002 ). the most important legislation for the rehabilitation of people with disabilities was the persons with disabilities act (equal opportunities, protection of rights and full participation) (1995), which covers all the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 47 aspects of the life of a person with a disability education, employment, non-discrimination, health care, social security. the act also required the government to make sure that free and appropriate education would be accessible to every child with disability till the age of 18 years. this act promoted integration of children with disabilities in a regular school, and special schools for those who need such facilities, equipping them with vocational training facilities. it also outlined a comprehensive scheme for the provision of facilities rights from transportation and infrastructure to curriculum restructuring and examination systems. the government passed yet another act, the national trust for welfare of persons with autism, cerebral palsy, mental retardation and multiple disabilities act in 1999, focusing on inclusion and independence by creating barrier free environments, developing functional skills, providing economic rehabilitation, as well as to bring about a change in perceptions and attitudes of others towards persons with disabilities. janshala, community schools program, started in 1998 was replaced by sarva shiksha abhiyan (ssa) in 2002 to achieve universal elementary level education. it is far behind in achieving its intended targets and there is apparently no sign of accelerated political momentum to lend a sense of urgency to the task. a specific feature of ssa is a ‘zerorejection’ policy which suggests that no child having special needs can be neglected nor denied enrolment on the basis of such concerns. the year 2005 saw the most recent and comprehensive policy push from government of india for education of both children and adults with disabilities, in the form of the minister of human resources development’s policy statement in march 2005. this was followed by the development of a national action plan for inclusion in education of children and youth with disabilities. this policy claimed to create opportunities so that children and adults with disabilities were not left out of the government’s plan of action on inclusive education, but gaps remain in what was expected and what was achieved (baquer & sharma, 2006). the central and state governments have formulated programs and policies over the years, offering schemes and facilities to children with disabilities in order to enable them to enter mainstream society. however, despite the presence of these policies, outreach remains inadequate, and the educational needs of many children with disabilities is not met. although the concept of inclusive education has been promoted internationally for more than a decade, multiple barriers remain in india to the full participation of children with disabilities in education. lack of information, combined with discriminatory attitudes towards persons with disabilities at all levels of society, contributes to the continued neglect of their right to education. this partly explains the minimal rate of progress that has been made towards the enrolment and participation in the education process of children with disabilities. the factors are complex and extend beyond the boundaries of the school and classroom. factors influencing the accessibility of educational facilities children with disabilities in india are among the most disadvantaged in terms of access to schooling and completion of elementary education. the world bank report (2009) noted that the people with disabilities are subject to multiple deprivations and that they are the most excluded from education. the report noted that children with disabilities are about four to five times less likely to go to school than the children from scheduled tribes and scheduled castes. due to, school fees, transportation cost and parents not having time to accompany children to school, parents are 48 global education review 3(3) often forced to make a choice between providing education to a child with a disability and without a disability. findings show that the more the severe a child’s disability, the lower the chances of the child attending school. the report also suggested that people with disabilities have much lower educational attainment, with 52 percent illiterate as opposed to 35 percent illiteracy in the general population. illiteracy levels are high across all categories of disability, and extremely so for children with visual, multiple and mental disabilities (and for children with severe disabilities across all the categories). a position paper drafted by the ncert (2006, p. 7) stated that “the office of the chief commissioner of persons with disabilities stated that not more than 4 percent of children with disabilities have access to education”. very little attention has been paid to educating the severely disabled. the enrolment rates are poor, educational performance is low, dropout rates are high (baquer & sharma, 2006). despite having a constitutional, rightsbased policy framework for children with disabilities, there are various factors that have hindered the progress towards increasing access to education. with data showing low enrolment and completion of schooling among children with disabilities in india it is important to understand the challenges. parents perception of parents towards education and disability. parent’s attitude towards children with disabilities and their education can be a key facilitator or a serious barrier to achieving inclusion and participation in a mainstream society. parental perception plays a crucial role in determining the overall growth and development of a child with a disability. social stigma about disability faced by parents is transferred to their children. the understanding of a child’s disability goes through a cycle of shock, grief, and acceptance for the parents. the type, severity, and visibility of disability affect parental acceptance of disability. the parents faced with the diagnosis of disability, are shocked and do not understand its implication. inadequate counseling exists for parents to cope with the shock and to help them to accept their children’s disability. as a result, some parents may be upset due to slow progress of their children. therefore, they might make the child change schools often. some parents may believe that their children cannot be educated like non-disabled children. many parents may be overprotective which may, in turn, affect their child’s educational outcome. lack of awareness about facilities. the government of india has many schemes, policies, programmes for children with different disabilities but such facilities do not reach many families especially those who stay in villages or remote areas. even many regular and special schools are not fully aware about the facilities and they could not provide adequate guidance to the parents. many of the parents are unaware about the admissions, educational aids, vocational training, exam concessions, etc. that lack of awareness of educational facilities prevents parents from giving better education to their children with disabilities. people including parents and school are not aware of funding available to include students with disabilities in regular schools (mondal & mete, n.d. p.64) lack of awareness about disability certificate. children with disabilities did not have a disability certificate because of various reasons such as lack of awareness about the disability certificate, lack of awareness about the place from where to access disability certificate, a lack of awareness about the procedure of it, or even lack of awareness about the uses and importance of the disability certificate. not having a disability certificate also is a reason for many accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 49 parents not enrolling their children in schools because they cannot access the benefits of government’s education schemes. gender discrimination gender stereotypes interact with disability stereotypes to constitute a deep matrix of gendered disability in every culture, developed within specific historical contexts, and affecting those contexts over time. girls with disabilities are at the intersection of various forms of discrimination on the basis of disability and gender in india. parental attitude is changing regarding the value of educating and training girls with disabilities but the prejudice surrounding their ability and value, continue to perpetuate the view that educating them is futile. this attitude encourages parents to deny the opportunity to their girls with disabilities to attend school. many parents prefer training girls to be responsible homemakers and taking care of family members rather than sending them to school as they may also worry about their girls with disabilities being vulnerable in their community. girls with disabilities are not considered an educational investment because they marry into a husband’s family, whereas boys stay with and provide for their extended families all of their life. as a result, 68% of girls with disabilities are not in school. girls with disabilities have a lower enrolment rate in school than boys with disabilities across many sectors: urban vs. rural, by type of schooling, by level of the schooling, and in primary versus secondary schooling (kohama, 2012, p. 32). the district primary education program (dpep) of 1995 focused on the universalization of primary education, primarily for girls. the program’s focus was on quantitative targets and capacity-building of educational administration, and very few children with disabilities were integrated due to continued reliance on special schools (alur, 2002 ). the thrust of ssa was on the closing of gender and social gaps and a total retention of all children in schools. however, not much seems to have changed. one report on women with disabilities in the raichur district of karnataka state indicated that the literacy rate of such women was 7 percent compared to a 46 percent general literacy rate for the state. girls with disabilities have remained invisible both in the writings on gender and on disability. therefore, the needs of girls with disabilities may be more severe than needs of any other group, and have to be addressed in all spheres of education (ncert, 2005). civil society social stigma. children with disabilities in india face stigma since birth due to several socio-religious beliefs. they also have to face patriarchal norms, traditional caste divide and class and religious community differences, thus facing manifold burdens in the process of education. ageold beliefs that if a child has a disability, it is due to child’s or parents’ “karma” (fate) or it is because of sins in the previous birth or that the mother has observed sun eclipse during her pregnancy are still commonly held. the stigma also comes from the influence of mythology and religious belief. in hindu mythology, a person with disability is wicked and useless; and it is better to avoid such people in order to protect nondisabled people. any attempts to improve the life of a person with a disability may be considered as an interference with a person’s “karma” or defiance of the will of allah (mondal & mete, n.d., p. 64). society looks down upon the disability and people with disability affecting the families who have children with disability, therefore the family attempts to deny, hide their child’s disability this is especially true when children have developmental disabilities, such as mental retardation, autism, multiple disabilities. therefore, due to the social stigma or taboo 50 global education review 3(3) associated with disabilities, families might be afraid to send their children to the school. lack of awareness. knowledge is not widespread through society of various types of disabilities and the impact on a child’s development, nor of the need to have special pedagogy to achieve the educational qualification. therefore, parents fail to understand the importance of education for such children and they do not know in what way they can encourage children with disabilities. unnoticeable characteristics of disabilities in the community. the civil society may not recognize disabilities that cannot be easily identified. lacking understanding of such children’s unusual behavior and the challenges faced by them in learning, they label them as “stupid, useless, and mad”. some parents may feel strongly that their children’s slow progress is due to the label. therefore, they may change school often, or they may feel that there is no use to providing education to such children as it will not benefit them, and there is no point in spending money and time on them. bagga (2007) claimed that due to segregation of children with disabilities, the general population does not get an opportunity to interact with them, and therefore may not be sensitized to the needs of children with disabilities. school selection of school. once child is diagnosed by medical professionals, they generally advise the parents to enroll their child in a special school. some medical professionals and other professionals in the field of disability in cities may advise parents to admit their child in a regular school. in this process, i found that many parents are not counseled about the selection of the school, the advantages, and limitations of special schools and regular schools, preparation needed for the child before admission to a regular school as there are fewer facilities for early intervention, especially in rural areas. there are special schools for children having a visual impairment, hearing impairment, intellectual disabilities but they tend to be concentrated in the big cities whereas there are few schools available for children with autism or multiple disabilities or learning disabilities or cerebral palsy especially in rural areas. as a result, parents’ are limited to regular schools where teachers may not know how to teach such children. many special schools test and interview a child with a disability, and his/her parents, and admit based on performance whereas some special schools admit based on vacancy. most importantly, i found that there is no educational counseling provided to the parents in many places, i.e., explaining the implication of disability, the different pedagogy required for a type of disability, or the effort and time required for educational intervention. children with disabilities who come from upper class and educated families are admitted to a regular private school and many regular schools are open to accommodate such children; those who come from lower economic background, may join in a regular municipal school if there is no availability of special school or far from their home. thus, the parental decision of selecting a school is influenced by professional advice, and availability of kind of school near their home. for students with disabilities who never enrolled in school or drop out, there are government efforts through ssa teachers to identify such children and provide education for them. the right to education act. the right to education act (2009) made it clear that every school including private or government or municipal schools must admit 25% of the total strength of that class for children with disadvantaged and weaker section including children with disabilities and provide free and compulsory education till its completion. thus, schools cannot deny the admission of such accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 51 children in their school. quoting section 13 of the rte act 2009, the national commission for protection of child rights (ncpcr) has pointed out that while admitting a child to school, the act prohibits schools or persons from collecting capitation fees or subjecting the child or the parents and guardians to any screening procedure. (http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-andschemes/right-to-education/right-to-educationact). if a school violates the rule, they could be punished with fines. in spite of this act, it has yet to be implemented effectively which leads problems for children to access to school. school issue. traditionally, the schools for children with disabilities are most commonly segregated institutions for those with visual, hearing, intellectually impairment. the special schools are concentrated in larger cities; there are hardly such facilities available in rural especially remote areas. in many cases, children with disabilities in the special schools were less proficient in basic literacy and numeracy skills, had lower expectations about their own capabilities and lacked confidence in social settings. as a result, parents were not motivated to send children with disabilities in the school as they felt that there was no point in sending them to the school. assistive device. many parents are not aware of the importance of assistive devices and many special schools are not able to explain the importance of aids and appliances and how to utilize them for the child’s benefit. in the school for the deaf, for example, teachers may not know how to help a child with hearing impairment to hear with the help of hearing aids. as a result, such children and their parents do not show much interest in these aids, which affects the educational performance of these children. there is a debate about using oral and sign language for learning as a majority of schools and parents prefer oral language. additionally, some parents may find it difficult to obtain such aids and appliances, as availability of rehabilitative services tends to be concentrated in urban areas. further, some parents were not aware of the programs for free aids and appliances based on their annual income. some parents also found that the designs did not help their child to function effectively. negative attitude towards disability and education for children with disabilities. some nondisabled children and teachers show their negative attitude towards children with disabilities in regular school by discriminating, ignoring, bullying, labeling, abusing verbally, and so on. there are few regular schools that try to understand the specific needs of children with disabilities, and to accommodate to them according to their needs, which would motivate children with disabilities and their parents to remain in school. this results in many parents pulling their children out of school. teachers it is of utmost importance for the education of children with disabilities that staff in schools receive training and supervision in order to provide appropriate instruction to students with disabilities. the teacher’s attitude is of utmost importance in the education of children with disabilities because their judgments can have a social, emotional and intellectual influence on the well-being of a child. lack of training and lack of interest. the special school teachers have the training to teach the children with disabilities, but they also need to update their knowledge especially, pedagogy in this field from time to time. unfortunately, many special school teachers are interested securing a good job in government or in a local government school. once they secure such job they lose interest in updating their knowledge, http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act 52 global education review 3(3) developing new approaches, focusing new way to help children to improve their performance. further, the teacher’s training course for special school teachers fails to train teachers adequately to work in an integrated setting (mondal & mete, n.d., p. 65). those with temporary jobs in a private school for disabled children, are trying to apply to other schools, and therefore not paying attention to teaching children with disabilities. the majority of school personnel in india are not trained to design and implement educational programmes for students with disabilities in regular schools (mondal & mete, n.d., p. 65). personnel in many regular schools have negative attitudes towards children with disabilities and some of them are not comfortable teaching such children. lack of sensitivity amongst the teachers itself acts as an impediment to the education of children with disabilities. one of the important reasons for considerably insensitive attitudes of teachers towards children with disabilities may be their total lack of training or exposure in the field. it can be argued that the model being adopted by sarva shiksha abhiyan (ssa) is further deskilling mainstream teachers by assuming that the educational needs of children with disabilities are not the primary concern of the general teacher, rather they need to be addressed by a resource teacher or indeed teachers in special schools. ncert (2006, p. 23) recommended that there is a need to, “gear all teacher education programmes (both pre-service and in-service) to developing the pedagogical skills required in inclusive classrooms”. implementation of an inclusive curriculum would require a number of changes in present day teaching practices, curriculum content, evaluation procedures and available resources at the school level. adapted curricula and learning materials, for meeting the learning needs of children with disabilities both in content and format, are not readily available in most states. this applies both to adaptation of regular curricula and to differences in curriculum between special and regular schools. social access. social access to schooling is important as physical access. it is important that schools recognize the diversity in our situation such as language, caste, class. if the language of instruction in a school in a tribal area is the state language, from class i itself, then the child is likely to find the school environment alienating. (rta ssa final report, n.d., p. 7) the children with disabilities, who come from poor and illiterate families, may not have support to do homework and therefore they may find difficult to take an interest in further studies. the teachers’ own patterns of communication with children, the seating arrangements in the classroom, allocation of work between children, can serve to reinforce (or dispel) societal perceptions about the ‘proper’ role and place of girls and scheduled caste/scheduled tribe (sc/st) and minority community students. thus, ensuring access to schooling is a wider challenge and is not confined merely to opening schools in or near the habitations where children reside (rta ssa final report, n.d., p. 7) difficulties related to school. some teachers may be aware that children with disabilities, due to the presence of impairment may not be able to keep up with the pace of class, but they may not pay attention to such children as the number of students in the class is large, and hence, a child with disability remains neglected. this at times also may result in loss of child’s interest towards education. shortage of special teachers. there are quite many teachers prefer to teach in schools in big cities therefore there is a dearth of special school teachers in rural and remote areas, despite the number of teachers training courses for special school teachers run by government and nongovernment institutes. many special schools do accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 53 not have adequate funds and find it difficult to provide competitive salaries. they pay less salary, which forces teachers to leave; some teachers get temporary jobs in such schools and stay for few years. as a result, there is a shortage of teachers and those who are in such schools, are forced to teach 2-3 classes at the same time, affecting the quality of the education provided to children with disabilities. poverty in india, due to overpopulation, in spite of efforts of the government of india, it is difficult to reduce the percentages of families who are below poverty line. a large number of children with disabilities belong to families that are below the poverty line. disability may be compounded by poverty because it leads to barriers to education and skill development. because of economic hardship, families may find difficult to provide educational facilities including expensive assistive device and it becomes challenging for poor families to send children with disabilities to the school. thus, poverty and disability go hand in hand. the combination of poverty and disability results in a condition of “simultaneous deprivation”. this is a syndrome that sets up barriers to the participation of persons with disabilities in the normal routines and activities of the community, including regular schooling (mondal& mete, n.d., p. 64). accessibility schools are sometimes far from the home and there is a lack of transportation and lack of accessibility of travelling especially in slum areas in big cities, villages and remote areas. there should be all options of education, such as, open schools, regular schools, special schools, nonformal and alternative education systems, available to all children with disabilities but unfortunately appropriate services are rare or unavailable. children with disabilities face barriers if the school is not within their easy mobility and reach zones. within school premises, children face many difficulties in accessing the washroom, libraries, classroom, and playground. although the attitudes toward inclusion of children with disabilities are gradually improving, there appears to be less movement with respect to general community attitudes with regard to building “barrier free environments” in which people with disabilities can move about safely, independently and freely to use the facilities. school buildings in india are predominantly not accessible to people with disabilities; only 18% of ssa schools were “barrier free,” and the numbers are even lower in some states, with 2% in jammu and kashmir, and 6% in bihar and most of the school buildings are already built, and building modifications are expensive in a country that already has resource-starved programs (kohama, 2012, p. 36). however, all schools are not the same in terms of their physical infrastructure or in the quality of teaching. there are differences between rural and urban schools; public and private schools and even within public and private schools. clearly, all children do not have the same learning opportunities. government policies implementation of policy. in spite of central government sponsoring funds, many states in india show a lack of interest in implementing the policy. for example, out of 35 states/union territories (uts), 16 states/uts started implementing of inclusive education of disabled at secondary stages (iedss) which replaced the earlier plan of integrated education for disabled children in 2009-10, 7 states/uts started it 2010-11 and 4 states/uts started it in 2011-12. eight states namely arunachal pradesh, chandigarh, chattisgarh, dadra & nagar haveli, goa, jammu & kashmir, jharkhand and lakshadweep are still not implementing the 54 global education review 3(3) iedss in spite of 100% financial support by the central government. (jhulka & bansal, n.d.) funds issue. many states have not yet furnished the progress reports of the schemes undertaken and they did not submit utilization certificates of funds released; that created delays in the release of additional funds even after the approval by pmeg (project monitoring and evaluation group) to continue further work. (jhulka & bansal, n.d.) lack of linkages between different departments. the government has devolved responsibility for education to different ministries and departments which created issues of lack of coordination, inability to develop a coherent strategy and duplication of efforts. for example, the education of children with disabilities attending special schools is the responsibility of the ministry of social justice empowerment, whereas children with disabilities in mainstream settings fall under the purview of the ministry of human resource department. while the former is financing special schools, the latter is trying to evolve an inclusive approach. this fragmented approach historically adopted by the government in response to the perceived unique needs of certain groups of children underscores an important dilemma. in addition, there is weak coordination of teacher training between rehabilitation council of india and the general teacher training system with respect to special needs, lack of coordination in early identification of children with special needs, and efforts towards convergence between government and ngos/communities. responsibility for teacher training is split between the rehabilitation council of india, which is responsible for the training of special education teachers, and the ministry of human resource development, which is responsible for general education teacher training. this split between the types of teacher training does not promote inclusion at all (kohama, 2012, p. 34). there is an absence of coherent government strategy for promoting inclusive education in many states. however, the experience of states like tamilnadu and gujarat offer cause for hope, with directed strategies for public/ngo partnerships to improve coverage and quality of inclusive education. (world bank report, 2009). severity of disability. the legislature has failed to distinguish between the needs t of children having mild, moderate and severe disabilities and therefore, children with disabilities who could have been integrated into the mainstream schools are denied the opportunity. (bagga, 2007). curriculum. there is a special curriculum designed for children with disabilities to increase accessibility such as language exemption for children with hearing impairment, communication for children with cerebral palsy. when these children enter regular school, they may find difficult to learn the general curriculum. the general curriculum needs to be adapted to the different formats that the special curriculum is available in to make it accessible for children with disabilities. (kohama, 2012, p. 36). recommendations interventions should be effective for children, offer good value for money and be sustainable. this section highlights a range of approaches that can be undertaken to improve accessibility of education for children with disabilities. 1. improving the work on identification of children with different disabilities and promoting overall access to school for them are vital. 2. involvement of different stakeholders such as school, community leaders, government officers, parents having children with disabilities, disabled people organization in facilitating education for children with accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india 55 disabilities by adopting partnership approach. 3. the creation of barrier free environment including provision of ramps, transport facilities for accessibility to school. 4. creating facilities for home based schooling or special education for children with multiple disabilities, deaf-blind and intellectual and severe disabilities who may not be able to attend regular school. 5. organizing teacher training refresher courses for all teachers from private and government school on information on disability, individual educational plans, teaching learning methods to support the education of children with disabilities. 6. addressing attitudinal barriers by community awareness programme on disability and education 7. making it mandatory for representation of parents of children with disabilities in education committee 8. conducting parental education programme such as workshop, training materials to help parents support their child’s learning 9. ensuring coordination with various ministries and line departments responsible for education and spell out each one role for effective implementation of educational policy for children with disabilities conclusion children with disabilities face a number of barriers to achieving their full potential. due to various hurdles, particularly for those who are poor and who suffer other forms of humiliations, the families of these children frequently experience high levels of stress. lack of, or inadequate vocational training creates immense obstacles for children with disabilities to get out of their whirlpool of deprivations. they are more likely to live in poverty and face increased risk of social exclusion. trends in provision of services in india reflect the leading policy predisposition before the 1970s of segregation. however, changing approaches to disability, from the charity model to the human rights model, have resulted in diversity of policy and practice. despite the efforts of governmental and nongovernmental organizations (ngos), there is still a significant need to facilitate access to children with disabilities to educational institutions and to education in general. references: alur, m. (2002). “special needs policy in india”, in s. hegarty & m. alue (eds), education and children with special needs: from segregation to inclusion. new delhi: sage. bagga, k. s. (2007) ensuring disabled people their right to education, india law journal, 1, 4, retrieved on 13th march, 2016 from http://indialawjournal.com/volume1/issue_4/article _by_bagga.html baquer, a. & sharma, a. (2006) disability: challenges vs responses, new delhi: concerned action now and global college press, arizona. byrd, e.s., (2010), india, families and a special school, teaching exceptional children plus, 6 (3) article 6. retrieved on 17th march 2016, from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ej879598.pdf julka, a. & bansal,i..(n.d.) , evaluation of the implementation of the schemes iedss in india, new delhi: department of education of groups with special needs (degsn), ncert, retrieved on 10th july 2015 from http://www.ncert.nic.in/departments/nie/degsn/pdf _files/fp3.pdf kohama, angela (2012). inclusive education in india: a country in transition, retrieved on 18th march 2016 from http://intldept.uoregon.edu/wpcontent/uploads/2012/12/intl-ug-thesiskohama.pdf lal, rubina (2005) effect of inclusive education on language and social development of children with autism, asia pacific disability rehabilitation journal, 16, 1 2005, pp 78-84. retrieved on 18th march 2016 from http://english.aifo.it/disability/apdrj/apdrj105/inclu ed.pdf ministry of human resource development. 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(1996). the persons with disabilities (equal opportunities, protection of rights and full participation) act, 1995. new delhi: government of india. retrieved on 17th july 2015, from http://www.disabilityaffairs.gov.in/upload/uploadfil es/files/pwd_act.pdf mondal, a. & mete, j. 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implementation, government of india. accessed on 16th july, 2015, from http://mospi.nic.in/rept%20_%20pubn/485_final.p df registrar general of india (2011). census of india. 2011. retrieved on 1st july 2015 from: http://www.censusindia.net. rta ssa final report (n.d.) retrieved on 10th march 2016 from http://ssa.nic.in/qualitydocs/rte%20ssa%20final%20report.pdf target study, (2013), education of disabled children in india, retrieved on 17th july 2015, https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-ofdisabled-children-in-india.html world bank (july 2009) people with disabilities in india: from commitments to outcomes, new delhi: human development unit, south asia region. retrieved on 10th july 2015 from http://wwwwds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentse rver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_2009090 2041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box034 2042b01public1.pdf zachariah, job (december, 3, 2000). education of disabled: open the door. retrieved on 18th march 2016 from http://pib.nic.in/feature/feyr2000/fdec2000/f01122 0001.html website sources right of children to free and compulsory education act, 2009 (right to education act) retrieved on 16th july, 2015 from http://vikaspedia.in/education/policiesand-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-educationact about the author sandhya limaye, phd, is associate professor, center for disability studies and action, school of social work, tata institute of social sciences. she is a former rockefeller, fulbright, and erasmus mundus fellow, and has worked with the disabled population in india for the last 32 years. she runs a field action project icbr (inclusive community based rehabilitation), for overall rehabilitation for the people with disabilities from rural and slum areas of mumbai. she has done collaborative research with the university of minnesota on disability and identity. she has published multiple articles based on her research on various issues related to disability. http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/efa-review-report-final.pdf http://mhrd.gov.in/sites/upload_files/mhrd/files/upload_document/efa-review-report-final.pdf http://www.disabilityaffairs.gov.in/upload/uploadfiles/files/pwd_act.pdf http://www.disabilityaffairs.gov.in/upload/uploadfiles/files/pwd_act.pdf http://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/education_journal/7%20education%20of%20children%20with%20disabilities%20in%20india%20concern%20and%20policy%20perpective.pdf http://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/education_journal/7%20education%20of%20children%20with%20disabilities%20in%20india%20concern%20and%20policy%20perpective.pdf http://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/education_journal/7%20education%20of%20children%20with%20disabilities%20in%20india%20concern%20and%20policy%20perpective.pdf http://www.caluniv.ac.in/academic/education_journal/7%20education%20of%20children%20with%20disabilities%20in%20india%20concern%20and%20policy%20perpective.pdf http://www.censusindia.net/ http://ssa.nic.in/quality-docs/rte%20ssa%20final%20report.pdf http://ssa.nic.in/quality-docs/rte%20ssa%20final%20report.pdf https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-of-disabled-children-in-india.html https://targetstudy.com/articles/education-of-disabled-children-in-india.html http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_20090902041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box0342042b01public1.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_20090902041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box0342042b01public1.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_20090902041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box0342042b01public1.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_20090902041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box0342042b01public1.pdf http://www-wds.worldbank.org/external/default/wdscontentserver/wdsp/ib/2009/09/02/000334955_20090902041543/rendered/pdf/502090wp0peopl1box0342042b01public1.pdf http://pib.nic.in/feature/feyr2000/fdec2000/f011220001.html http://pib.nic.in/feature/feyr2000/fdec2000/f011220001.html http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act http://vikaspedia.in/education/policies-and-schemes/right-to-education/right-to-education-act factors influencing the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india formatted with footer good p1 factors influencing the accessibility of education for children with disabilities in india formatted no footer 6 global education review 3(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lina slim-topdjian & genevieve pinto zipp (2016). the use of self-monitoring embedded with mentorship as a medium to enhance experiential learning opportunities and promote critical thinking skills for educators and health science professionals working with children with autism. global education review, 3 (4). 6-18 the use of video self-monitoring embedded with mentorship as a medium to enhance experiential learning opportunities and promote critical thinking skills for educators and health science professionals working with children with autism lina slim-topdjian seton hall university genevieve pinto zipp seton hall university abstract the increased prevalence of autism has created an increased challenge for teachers to incorporate specialized teaching strategies to address the unique educational and behavioral challenges facing children diagnosed with autism. providing teachers with educational training opportunities will promote such learning. in the academic world, experiential learning opportunities are used to provide a bridge between didactic coursework and on-the-job practice that fosters skill acquisition and critical thinking. video self-monitoring (vsm) is one type of learning strategy used in experiential learning environments to develop critical thinking by building on direct experiences, performance feedback (pf), and reflection (r). this study investigated the impact of an experiential teacher training package, consisting of vsm, pf, and r with and without mentoring on sustained and generalized teacher performance of two dependent variables – learn unit (lu); rate of effective instruction (roi). in this exploratory study 6 female teachers instructed seven 3-5 year-old autistic children. teacher performance on lu and roi was evaluated three times: phase 1, after a 2-hour workshop; phase 2, after trainingusing the vsm. pf, r with and without mentoring; phase 3 – follow-up with vsm. pf, r and mentoring removed. findings revealed that while vsm, pf, r appeared to enhance teacher performance and sustainability of procedural integrity, the greatest and most consistent improvement was observed among teachers who received mentoring as opposed to those who did not. practical applications of this experiential learning teacher/educator training package for the advanced education of teachers and health science professionals working with this population are highlighted. keywords training, mentoring, autism spectrum disorders, experiential, video self‐monitoring introduction autism spectrum disorder (asd) is on the rise with 1 in 68 children nationally being diagnosed with asd as stated by the centers for disease ______________________________ corresponding author: lina slim-topdjian, school of health and medical sciences, seton hall university, 400 south orange avenue, south orange, nj 07079 email: l.slim-topdjian@asapprogram.org http://www.shu.edu/ video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 7 and control (cdc, 2014). the increased prevalence in addition to the complexity of the educational and behavioral characteristics associated with asd requires educators to incorporate evidence-based specialized instructional tools and behavioral intervention strategies to meet the needs of children with asd. recently, the 2014 cdc report also identified growing cultural diversity and intellectual disabilities as additional factors that impact children with asd abilities and their educational needs (aap, 2006, updated 2010; croen, najjar, ray, lotspeich, & bernal, 2006; & love, carr, almason, & petursdotir, 2009). increasing students’ foundational and practical knowledge, developing their functional skills and expanding their critical thinking skills are several of the key factors educators seek to develop via their learning environments (pinto zipp, maher, donnelly, fritz, & snowdon, 2016). one way that has been explored as a way of developing student’s practical knowledge and skill application is to engage them in active learning experiences via what is termed the experiential education processes (association for experiential education – aee). experiential learning (education) promotes critical thinking by engaging the learner in a four stage process which begins with reflection, followed by deductive reasoning, then inductive reasoning, and ultimately in analysis (koo & thacker, 2008). haynes (2007) further described the steps associated with experiential learning as: experiencing/exploring (“doing”); sharing/reflecting (“what happened?”); processing/analyzing (“what’s important?”); generalizing (“so what?”); and application (“now what?”). during the experiential learning process, the instructor, mentor or teacher acts as a facilitator in the process who engages and allows the student to share the experience, assess, discover, analyze and reflect upon current and future changes in the learning based on the outcome (wurdinger & carlson, 2010). a theoretical underpinning to experiential learning is negative knowledge theory. negative knowledge theory stipulates that engaging in experiential learning opportunities and reflective processes allows the learner to analyze, reevaluate prior episodic knowledge and experiences, and make decisions by avoiding errors, then selecting those desirable actions to be executed in future situations (dewey, 1933; gartmeier, kipfmueller, heid, & gruber 2008; & hetzner gartmeier, heid, & gruber, 2010). this error recognition learning model fosters what is called an error prevention capacity, whereby the learner develops competent judgment capacity for early detection of the precursors of errors which is shown to promote professional development and expertise, fostering improved competence, new learning and behavioral change (boud, 1999; gartmeier et al. 2008). according to the 10.20.70 learning and development model (lombardo m. m., eichinger, r. w., 1996), 10% of learning happens in formal instruction through lectures and readings, 20% through informal social discussions and practice, and 70% is actualized and retained by experiencing the skill and doing it while receiving feedback and mentorship. not surprisingly, experiential learning environments and the underlying concepts associated with theories describing experiential learning have been used to design learning environments to address the needs of children with asd in the school environment. however, limited evidence was found in the literature addressing teacher/educator training models incorporating experiential learning that addressed the special needs of children with asd. clearly, one of the critical components in the functional, cognitive and social development of children with asd is teacher/educator training (institute of medicine global forum on health professions education, 8 global education review 3(4) interprofessional education for collaborative, 2013; kates-mcelrath & axelrod, 2008; & reid et al., 2005). literature review generally, the literature speaks to individual teacher/educator training procedures which embed experiential learning opportunities and have found positive improvements in teacher performance and procedural integrity (pi) (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007; gresham, 1989; & hagermoser sanetti & kratochwill, 2009). namely, (1) video selfmonitoring (vsm), whereby an individual creates a video tape of him/herself performing a target behavior or function then reviews it to analyze and rate performance and procedural integrity (ahearn, 2010; & pelletier, mcnamara, braga-kenyon, & ahearn, 2010); (2) self-evaluation/selfmonitoring (krause, & stark, 2010), defined as a self-regulated learning procedure that involves having an individual compare his/her performance against a standard or norm and making changes in his/her learning experience based on his/her informed perceptions of the quality of expected performance (kitsantas & zimmerman, 2006); (3) performance feedback (pf) defined as the process of monitoring and evaluating target behaviors against objective benchmarks and having a mentor provide frequent and immediate corrective feedback to the individual regarding these behaviors (codding, feinberg, dunn, & pace, 2005; coding, livanis, pace, & vaca, 2008; kitsantas, et al., 2006; krause & stark, 2010; noell, g. h., slider, connell, gatti, williams, koenig, & resetar, 2005; reid et al., 2006; & wilkinson, 2007); and (4) reflection (r) which involves problem solving and self-analysis of one’s behavior (dewey, 1933; gartmeier et al., 2008; hetzner et al., 2010; janssen, de hullu, & tigelaar, 2008; pedro, 2005; & stoddard, 2002). although teacher/educator training procedures have been shown to be effective in improving teacher performance and increasing procedural integrity, a review of the literature revealed that several limitations and gaps have been noted. these include the following: small sample sizes, disparity in the settings, lack of standardization, varied methodologies in the implementation process, few studies conducting component analysis, inconsistent follow up measures, lack of an established theoretical staff training model, disparity among understanding the construct of mentorship, and lack of studies that utilize component analysis to isolate the influence of mentorship on behavior change. finally, the literature points to the lack of an established standardized teacher/educator training package (leblanc, gravina, & carr, 2009; reid et al., 2005; & reid & parsons, 2006). building upon reid et al. (2006) statements supporting the need for effective teacher training, the authors suggest that a teacher/educator training package that incorporates experiential learning opportunities can provide teachers with self-directed active learning opportunities that will ultimately assist them to foster and promote knowledge building, critical thinking skills, and the functional application of learned skills in children with asd. thus, the purpose of this study was to explore the effect that an experiential learning teacher/educator training package consisting of vsm, pf and r, with and without mentoring has on asd teacher performance as measured by two dependent variables: (1) application of the learn unit (lu) an interlocking three-term contingency that consists of the teaching staff’s antecedent, the student’s response, and the consequence (greer, 2002; greer & ross, 2008; & ross, wilson, goodman, & greer, 2007); and (2) rate of effective instruction (roi) which video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 9 refers to both rates of correct and incorrect lu presentation and reflects on the teacher’s effectiveness of instruction (greenwood, horton, & utley, 2002; & petscher & bailey, 2006). practical and theoretical implications for experiential learning are discussed. methods subjects and setting six female student teachers instructing seven 3‐5 year-old children diagnosed with asd, who attended two private schools utilizing principles of applied behavior analysis participated in this exploratory study (mean age = 32 years; age range = 23 years – 38 years). in this study, student teachers will be referred to as ‘teachers’ and the children who participated in this study will be referred to as ‘students’. variables two dependent variables in this study, (1) lu accuracy and (2) roi, were measured against the independent variable of ptr/mentoring. instrument and material the teacher performance rating scale accuracy scale (tpra) – abbreviated version (ingham & greer, 1992) was used to measure teacher’s performance on the implementation of lu and the roi (digennaro, martens, & kleinman, 2007; leblanc, ricciardi, & luiselli, 2005; & plavnick, ferreri, & maupin, 2010). video recordings of the teacher-student interactions were performed using a canon powershot sx280 12 mp digital camera, which were then transferred via a usb connector onto a laptop for analysis. procedure and design in phase 1 of the study teachers attended a twohour training workshop on the lu and roi, vsm, and scoring procedures (pre-training baseline – workshop). in addition to presenting information in a lecture format, the workshop adhered to the typical four-component protocol of behavior skills training (bst) when teaching new skills. specifically, phase 1 used (1) instruction such as step-by-step instruction and procedural checklist (homlitas, rosales & candel, 2014; howard and reed, 2014; & graff and karsten, 2012), (2) modeling via video and in-vivo modeling (himle & wright, 2014), (3) rehearsal (nabeyama & sturmey, 2010), and (4) feedback (hsieh, wilder & abellon, 2011). the model-rehearsal-feedback was repeated until the student teachers performed with 80% accuracy, over two occasions, on the scoring of lu implementation and rate of instruction, which met inclusion criteria for phase 2 of the study. in phase 2, teachers were randomly assigned to either the intervention or the control group (post-training reinforcement – training: experiential phase-skill acquisition). each teacher in the intervention group was videotaped instructing a student in the classroom for the duration of three minutes. a three-minute observation was selected as it provided a meaningful and non-disruptive presence within the classroom environment (codding et al., 2008; catania, almeida, liuconstant, & digennaro-reed, 2009; digennaro-reed, codding, catania, & mahire, 2010; digennaro et al., 2007; kate & fiske, 2008; lerman, tetrault, hovanetz, strobel, & garro, 2008; & pelletier et al., 2010; & ross, singer-dubek, & greer, 2005). an independent expert rater/observer analyzed each videotaped session on that same day. concurrently, a performance feedback process in line with bst applications was conducted by having each teacher score and rate her performance using the tpra form. the mentor was present during this process and provided feedback and mentoring on the performance outcome following a predetermined formal script and procedural checklist, in line with haynes’s 10 global education review 3(4) (2007) steps of experiential learning. namely, (1) exploring and observing the practical “doing” experience via vsm, (2) sharing and reflecting on the performance observed by scoring and rating the videotaped instruction, (3) processing and analyzing the delivery process of instruction (roscoe, et al., 2006), paired with immediate corrective feedback by the mentor for scoring and self-assessment (nabeyama et al., 2010), (4) generalizing by informing and reflecting on correct as well as incorrect performance (miles & wilder, 2009), and (4) reflecting upon next steps building upon critical thinking skills by delineating strengths and recommendations for future applications. after the performance feedback and mentoring session, the teachers completed a brief written reflection journal responding to three written prompts. corrective feedback in this study consisted of constructive direct feedback and direction, in the form of vocal, written instruction and modeling (reid, 2005), following the model of behavioral consultation (codding et al., 2008; and noell et al., 2005), answering any questions the teacher may have, and posing questions for the teacher to reflect upon during the review session (reid et al., 2005). phase 2 was implemented over four consecutive days and was 15 minute in duration per teacher per day. each teacher in the control group followed the same process, as the intervention group, however, although they were offered the procedural checklist to guide them in their scoring, they did not receive mentoring on their performance feedback. strengths and recommendations were identified by the teacher alone and were written down by the teachers only, following a predetermined procedural script (slim, 2014). in phase 3 (follow-up: sustainability) all teachers were videotaped for a 3-minute teacher-student interaction once every four days over 21 days. the teachers were not required to score their instruction or complete a reflection journal. the independent rater/observer scored the teachers’ performance. data analysis the teachers used the strategy of video selfmonitoring and self-recording to score their performance on lu implementation and roi, following a procedural checklist (appendix a). lu percent accuracy and roi scores were derived using simple algorithmic computations based on the literature (greer, 2002). the rate of effective instruction (roi) was calculated in this study using the following formula: rate of effective instruction = lu correct – lu errors = number of lu/min. duration (minutes) a negative outcome indicated that there were more incorrect lu presentations than correct lu presentations. a positive outcome indicated that there were more correct lu presentations than incorrect lu presentations. preand posttest measures were conducted at every session across all phases of the study. results quantitative data from this study is presented in figure 1 which illustrates the average scores for teacher’s performance of lu and roi for the intervention and control groups in all three phases of the study. video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 11 figure 1. average scores of teacher performance of lu implementation and roi for the intervention and control groups across all phases of the study. only 50% of the participants showed an increase in lu implementation and roi after attending the pre-training workshop. teacher training with mentoring (e.g., experiential learning component) was observed to lead to the greatest improvement with most consistent performance among teachers as noted by averaging the teacher’s scores over the four days. interestingly, all three mentored teachers demonstrated increased scores above 80%, which were maintained over 21 days, whereas following teacher training without mentoring one of the three teachers reached scores above 80%, the other two teachers reached a score of 80% in only one session. moreover, the scores of the teachers that did not receive mentoring demonstrated great variability and were not sustained at above 80% over time. teacher training with mentoring was also observed to enhance teacher performance and procedural integrity with sustainable outcomes (teacher training with mentoring improved by 50%; teacher training without mentoring improved by 15%). table 1 and 2 depict the average scores of teacher performance on the lu implementation and roi for phase 2. 12 global education review 3(4) table 1 mean percent lu scores in the teacher's performance for the intervention and control groups in all phases of the study. teachers phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 control gp. sessions 1,2,3 sessions 4,5,6,7 sessions 8,9,10,11 tc1 48% 49% 70% tc2 73% 61% 71% tc3 80% 88% 86% interv. gp. ti1 79% 83% 96% ti2 72% 79% 89% ti3 36% 66% 94% table 2 mean roi per minute scores in the teacher's performance for the intervention and control groups in all phases of the study. teachers phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 control gp. sessions 1,2,3 sessions 4,5,6,7 sessions 8,9,10,11 tc1 1.4 0.1 2.8 tc2 1.1 1.1 2.4 tc3 2.8 3.2 2.9 interv. gp. ti1 1.5 2.3 3.5 ti2 1.8 2.5 4.2 ti3 -1.3 1 2.2 over time (21 day follow up) procedural integrity of lu presentation and roi showed improvement with mentoring (3/3 teachers who received training with mentoring vs. 2/3 teachers who received training without mentoring). teacher training without mentoring was observed to lead to greater variability in performance and average scores below 80% in lu implementation and roi below 3 instructional trials per minute in two of the three teachers. however, interestingly, and in support of the literature of using antecedent-only methods for teacher training (collins, higbee & salzberg, 2009; greer et al., 2002; and weldy, rapp & capocasa, 2014), learning was observed while engaging in the teacher training alone without mentoring and feedback. overall, teacher training paired with mentoring that is experientially based was observed to lead to consistent and sustained higher scores then without mentoring. tables 1, 2, and 3 depict the video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 13 average scores of teacher performance on the lu implementation and roi for phase 3. table 3 average scores of the teacher performance of lu and roi for the intervention and control groups. teachers phase 1 phase 2 phase 3 control gp. sessions 1,2,3 sessions 4,5,6,7 sessions 8,9,10,11 lu roi lu roi lu roi 67% 1.8 66% 1.5 76% 2.7 interv. gp. lu roi lu roi lu roi 62% 1.1 76% 1.9 93% 3.3 qualitative data extrapolated via themed analysis from daily teacher reflection journals written during phase 2 were used to understand social validity and acceptability based upon teacher perceptions of the experience. specifically, the teachers were asked to reflect on their observed behavioral performance, provide insight and resolutions for providing corrective measures and solutions, and state their impressions regarding the experientially based teacher/educator training package used in this study. this reflective exercise incorporated the notions associated with mindfulness (dewey, 1933) and thus supported one of the constructs of experiential learning (haynes, 2007; & koo & thacker, 2008). it is noteworthy that the teachers’ personal experience and learning was reflected in their comments, namely in their analysis and identification of ways to enhance correct lu implementation and increase in roi over future sessions. overall, the teachers stated that the experiential component of the staff training model was “very inspiring, insightful, rewarding and effective”, “a quality one, based on my observations of positive results in the child's responses and my instruction”, “offers me an opportunity to be accountable for my behavior and room for improvement”, and that mentoring and feedback was “helpful to review together for insight and feedback”, “helpful to point out areas to be improved and corrected”, that it “shows what we do vs. what we think we do”, and that it was “professionally and respectfully handled”. discussion and conclusion the findings of this study exploring experiential learning teacher educator training package using vsm, pf, reflection and mentoring for teachers working with children diagnosed with asd supports mentoring as a positive experience that compliments existing experiential teacher training. these findings extend the experiential learning research findings of lerman et al. (2008) and pelletier et al. (2010) by supporting its use in teacher training and more specifically for those teachers working with children with asd. we suggest that providing experiential learning training opportunities with mentoring for teachers, regardless of the population they teach, may be beneficial in supporting and building the foundational skills needed for long term effective teaching. moreover, based on the teachers’ comments, we propose that the key to this training package is the building of the 14 global education review 3(4) teachers’ self-reflective critical thinking skills and their capacity for error detection and prevention. clinical relevance and implications for educators and instructional personnel and health science professionals working with children with asd many forms of training opportunities are vital. yet, those opportunities embedded in the experimental learning theory that utilize video self-monitoring, performance feedback paired with mentoring and selfreflection, lead to enhanced critical thinking skills required for professional and personal growth as an educator and health science professional. limitations the primary limitations of this study include small sample size, the study design, sampling method and duration of the training protocol. sampling methods participants were recruited using a “convenience sampling” method, recruiting volunteers from two geographically accessible private educational settings. although it is the nature of these kinds of studies to recruit from naturalistic settings to maximize external validity, a convenience sampling method combined with a limited sample size and a small age range selection limit external validity of the findings. the possibility of participants’ observer reactivity the presence of an observer videotaping the teacher-student interactions may have influenced the participant behavior by creating an observer reactivity bias. this bias may be addressed in future studies by having the participants blind to the videotaping procedure, and/or by hiding the camera and placing the videotape behind a one-way mirror. treatment package used this study used a treatment package consisting of the staff training procedures of vsm, se, pf, r and mentoring. a component analysis was not conducted, although mentoring was independently manipulated. therefore, this study did not assess the independent effect of engaging in reflective processes, on teacher behaviors. future studies will need to conduct component analysis to address the effect that a staff training package consisting of vsm and pf has on teacher performance with and without reflection when mentoring is absent. duration of mentorship there are no empirical studies in support of a specific duration for receiving mentorship. future research is needed to identify effective mentorship duration. duration of follow-up phase the duration of follow-up phase might have been an interfering limiting factor. this study conducted follow up over a 21 days. this period may not be sufficient to assess the long-term impact of mentoring on procedural integrity. the literature points to follow-up phases ranging from 1 week to 6 months. future studies should address the differential effects of follow up period durations. future direction this exploratory study provided a platform for future research to further investigate this experiential learning teacher/educator training package when working with children who require different teaching and learning strategies to address their diverse educational and behavioral needs. video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 15 while, the evidence discussed in this study must be considered as preliminary, implementing and assessing the effectiveness of diverse teacher education strategies is critical to effectively address the educational and behavioral problems facing individuals with asd. acknowledgement we would like to thank the teachers for their time participating in the study and who embraced the new learning presented, and the administrators of the schools that have graciously welcomed us to conduct the study at their facility to better meet the needs of the students. we would like to thank all the families who kindly allowed their children to participate in the study and to support the teacher’s education of evidence-based strategies to promote successful student outcome. references ahearn, william (2010). effect of video self-monitoring on procedural integrity. behavioral interventions, 25(4), p. 261-274. issn: 1072-0847 american academy of pediatrics (2006, updated 2010). understanding autism spectrum disorders (asds): an introduction. elk grove village, il: aap. boud, d. j. 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(2005). improving staff performance through clinician application of outcome management. research in developmental disabilities, 26, 101–116. http://adulteducation.wikibook.us/index.php?title=experiential_learning_http://adulteducation.wikibook.us/index.php?title=experiential_learning_https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/international_standard_book_number https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/special:booksources/0-9655712-1-1 javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss%7e%7ear%20%22pelletier%2c%20kelly%22%7c%7csl%7e%7erl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss%7e%7ear%20%22mcnamara%2c%20bethany%22%7c%7csl%7e%7erl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss%7e%7ear%20%22braga%2dkenyon%2c%20paula%22%7c%7csl%7e%7erl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss%7e%7ear%20%22ahearn%2c%20william%20h%2e%22%7c%7csl%7e%7erl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','ss%7e%7ear%20%22ahearn%2c%20william%20h%2e%22%7c%7csl%7e%7erl',''); javascript:__dolinkpostback('','mdb%7e%7eaph%7c%7cjdb%7e%7eaphjnh%7c%7css%7e%7ejn%20%22behavioral%20interventions%22%7c%7csl%7e%7ejh',''); video self-monitoring as a medium to enhance experiential learning 17 roscoe, e.m., fisher, w.w., glover, a.c., & volkert, v.m. 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(2002, 2006). reflective thinking within an art methods class for preservice elementary teachers. hawaii international conference on education 2002. [cited 2006 june 11]. retrieved from: http://www.hiceducation.org/edu_proceedings/shar i%20s.%20stoddard2.pdf. wilkinson, l. a. (2007). assessing treatment integrity in behavioral consultation. international journal of behavior consultant therapy, 3, 420-432. weldy, c.r., rapp, j.t., & capocasa, k. (2014). training staff to implement brief stimulus preference assessments. journal of applied behavior analysis, 47, 214-218. wurdinger, s. d., & carlson, j. a. (2010). teaching for experiential learning: five approaches that work. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield education. about the author(s) lina slim, phd, ccc-slp, bcba, is founding executive director of asap – a step ahead program, llc. dr. slim completed her phd from the department of interprofessional health sciences and health administration at seton hall university and has published on the topic of interprofessional staff training model for teachers working with children with autism spectrum disorder. dr. slim is recognized for her innovative interprofessional collaborative, community-based approach supporting families of children with neurodevelopmental disabilities. she presented nationally and internationally, in the areas of autism, apraxia, interprofessional collaborative practices, parent and staff training. genevieve pinto zipp, pt, edd, is professor of the department of interprofessional health sciences and health administration at seton hall university. dr. pinto zipp received her edd from teachers college columbia university in 1996. she currently teaches management of neuromuscular problems in the doctor of physical therapy program. her research interests focus on, a) effects of performing dual tasks on walking performance and postural sway in children and adults, and b) curriculum design issues including the use of mind mapping and video based cases in professional education for the promotion of clinical decision making skills. appendix a performance feedback script and score form for lu/ec answer with yes or no to the following questions: 1. did you obtain the student’s attention before presenting the antecedent ☐yes ☐no 2. did you present flawless antecedents, including written or vocal stimuli ☐yes ☐no 3. did you wait 3 seconds for the student to initiate a response ☐yes ☐no 4. did you immediately present reinforcement after correct responses ☐yes ☐no 5. did you follow the error correction procedure after incorrect responses ☐yes ☐no 18 global education review 3(4) 6. did you immediately give a correction by presenting the antecedent again, modeling the correct response, and ensuring that students emit the correct response ☐yes ☐no 1) did you abstain from reinforcing the corrected response ☐yes ☐no 2) did you immediately introduce the next learn unit after the modeled corrected response ☐yes ☐no 7. did you move quickly to the next learn unit ☐yes ☐no 8. did you continue this sequence until the predetermined number of lu is presented ☐yes ☐no performance feedback score: total: _____ / 10 = _____ % acc. pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 20 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gastager, angela, bock, anna, patry, jean-luc, präauer, viktoria & fageth, barbara (2017). pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships. global education review, 4 (4), 20-38. pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships angela gastager university college of teacher education styria, austria anna bock university of salzburg, austria jean-luc patry university of salzburg, austria viktoria präauer university of salzburg, austria barbara fageth university of salzburg, austria abstract pedagogical tact, the “translator” from theory to practice, is a complex construct. a theory of tact has been developed and is tested through comparison of novice and expert teachers. one may assume that experienced practitioners are tactful if they are committed. preservice teachers may be assumed to be less tactful than experienced teachers for two reasons: (a) they are not used to teaching and applying theoretical concepts in their internships, and (b) they stick “closer” to the knowledge about theories since they are still studying. billett and smith (2014) proposed that in professional practice an interactive enactment of knowledge is crucial. qualitative differences between novices and experts were reported by berliner (e.g. 2001). in a pilot study conducted in january of 2016 at a new lower secondary school in austria five senior preservice teachers and three mentors were investigated. the preservice teachers and the mentors (expert teachers) were assessed independently for one lesson with stimulated recall. the results were coded along crucial categories in tact situations. direct comparisons of experts and novices from the same field according to the coding system were interpreted as indicators of the validity of the assessment tool to measure tact. to make sure that there is indeed a difference in the experts’ and novices’ actions, the lesson interruption method (lim; patry, 1997b) was used to check tact relevant dimensions. first results showed a statistically significant association between the level of excitement, the level of fun and the level of notice of the surroundings during the learning process due to the estimations in the lim of the participating pupils. keywords theory practice transfer, mentoring, internships, mixed methods, reflective teaching pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 21 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gastager, angela, bock, anna, patry, jean-luc, präauer, viktoria & fageth, barbara (2017). pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships. global education review, 4 (4), 20-38. 1. introduction to research on pedagogical tact mentoring can be seen as the attempt of mentors to support the mentees in translating the theories learnt in college into practical action in educational situations. this is not trivial, since there is a gap between theory and practice, as has been repeated over and over again in the history of research in education (see e.g., patry, 2004): a direct application of scientific knowledge or “theory” is impossible in practice. in the late 18th and early 19th century, very first scientific pedagogues in germany, trapp, herbart, and schleiermacher, addressed this problem. the most discussed approach was the concept of pedagogical tact proposed by johann friedrich herbart (1776-1841) in his lectures in 1802: but in every theorist (…), if he practices his theory (…), there inserts itself quite involuntarily a link intermediate between theory and practice. there is, to wit, a certain tact, a quick judgment and decision, not proceeding like routine, eternally uniform, but, on the other hand, unable to boast (…) retaining strict consistency with the rule, it at the same time answers the true requirements of the individual case. exactly because such a (…) complete application of scientific propositions would require a supernatural being, there inevitably originates in man as he is, out of continued practice, a mode of action, which depends on his feeling and only remotely on his conviction a mode of action rather giving vent to his inner movement (…) than the resultant of his thinking. (1802, in the translation of 1896, pp. 19f.; italics added) herbart’s concept of tact has been cited widely, but herbart gave only some tentative theoretical elements to account for tact. later authors, for example, nohl (1963) and muth (1982) presented more sophisticated approaches. based on these and other elements we developed a comprehensive theoretical conception of tact. the research proposed here aims at further elaborating this conception, and testing hypotheses derived from it. although the theoretical conception of tact as presented in patry (2012) is fairly well developed, it is still incomplete. in particular, our recent theoretical work (e.g., patry, 2009a; patry & präauer, 2014; patry & gastager, 2017) has shown the necessity to integrate additional elements. further, the relationships between the different elements need to be analyzed. to date tact has been assessed empirically in very few studies (e.g., symonds, 1930). the present study, aims at testing hypotheses derived from the improved theoretical conception. it is important to mention already here that we do not claim that the variables addressed here form a comprehensive framework for tact; nevertheless, they are regarded as important, and therefore their analysis will provide a significant improvement of the understanding of the theory-practice transfer. the following issues are taken into account: (1) the first theoretical account of tact to be mentioned is nohl’s (1963) concept of tact as a mesotes relationship (from aristotle’s mesotes: not too much and not too little). other references to “not too much and not too little”, not as explicit as nohl, can be found in muth (1982) and others. the same relationship has been addressed independently from the geisteswissenschaftliche pädagogik1 in the psychological discussion of situation specificity (tentatively in mischel, 1968, chapters six and seven, explicitly by patry, 1991a). while nohl did not relate “not too much and not too little” to ______________________________ corresponding author: angela gastager, university college of teacher education styria in austria, hasnerplatz 12, 8010 graz, austria email: angela.gastager@phst.at 22 global education review 4(4) situation specificity, this became a basic principle of the theory of situation specificity in behavior (see also patry, 2000; 2011). this led to the question whether situation specificity plays a role in tact; although herbart had alluded to it (see hopfner, 2007, p. 139), this issue had not been addressed so far in the theory of tact. as patry (1991a, 2009a) has shown, it makes sense to assume that tactful behavior is situation specific, which can be explained with the principle of “not too much and not too little.” (2) another concept relevant for tact that has evolved in the empiric-analytical tradition is the action theoretical model in which tact has been integrated (patry, 2011). one version of this model which is regarded as particularly relevant is the cognitive-affective personality system (mischel & shoda, 1995), which focuses on six factors (so-called cognitive-affective units, caus): competence (what am i able to do?); perception (what sense do i make from the stimuli i perceive?); expectations (what will happen if i do x? what, if i do not do anything? – here, “not too much and not too little” can be applied); goals and values (what do i want to achieve?); self-regulation principles (how can i control my behavior? which principles do i apply for this?): and emotions (what do i feel?). the caus are regarded as interrelated, and each of them can be activated in function of the situation (situation specifically). (3) according to herbart, nohl, muth, and many others, an action can only be considered as tactful if it satisfies some normative (ethical) requirements. in this conceptualization, the boundaries between descriptive and normative statements have to be considered. the key issue concerning the ethical foundation of tact is responsibility, which means that either the norm used to justify a practitioner’s action is defined by some authority (e.g., the superior like the school principal), or the norm is defined by the practitioner’s own rationally justified values system (moral judgment), including his or her fundamental norms and his or her conscience (oser & patry, 1994). the latter is difficult to assess since often the practitioners are not aware of their underlying norms, and particularly the moral judgment (“why do i apply this ethical norm?”) would require a special investigation (e.g., in the tradition of kohlberg, 1984): the same practical decision can be ethically justified if argued for on a high stage of moral judgment (e.g., based on moral principles; stage 6 according to kohlberg), but inappropriate if reasoned for on a low level (e.g., because if i help the other person, he or she will help me on other occasions – stage 2 in kohlberg’s theory). (4) another tradition is phenomenology, represented particularly by van manen (e.g., 1991; 2015) with his concept of pedagogical thoughtfulness and tact (see below in section 3), which is strongly influencing the concept of the reflective practitioner in internships in education of preservice teachers. van manen emphasized the notion that tact can never be seized comprehensively through social scientific methods, but rather phenomenological principles need to be applied. further, he noted the “kairos time”, which means that in education, we must seize an occasion for doing something – just seconds later, it might be too late (referring to kairos, the ancient greek god of the instant of the moment). “kairos moments are pure, perfect, unpredictable, and uncontrollable moments that possess possibility.” (van manen, 2015, p. 52). in professional mentoring processes in internships for preservice teachers, a multiplicity of different reflective aspects as well as variables associated with the theoretical concept of tact, as seen above, are at stake. we focus in this research on the goal of developing deeper insight into preservice teachers' feelings and thinking in special situations during their teaching, by providing an opportunity for thoughtful reflection. subjective feelings and thinking often remain implicit in teaching. the focus is, hence, on the cognitive-affective personality system (caps) as summarized above (2), with reference to the issue of “not too much and not too little” (1), while the normative (3) and the phenomenological issues (4) cannot pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 23 be addressed here, which does not mean that they are irrelevant. according to herbart, experienced practitioners (in our study, mentors) are not necessarily more tactful than novices (preservice teachers). nevertheless, there are good reasons to assume that experienced teachers are indeed tactful if they are committed. preservice teachers are assumed to be less tactful than experienced teachers for three reasons (see also berliner, 2001, as discussed below in section 3): (a) they are not used to teach and to deal with the problems of applying theoretical concepts or models in practical situations, and (b) they are “closer” to the theories since they are still studying and passing exams etc., which means that they stick to the theories much more than expert teachers who have distanced themselves somewhat in their practical work from the theoretical approaches and models they know from their own studies and further education. on the other hand, novices are more concerned with content matters, which usually are no problem for the expert teachers, and they do not perceive the kairos moments (van manen, 2015) as easily as experts. the assumption is not that the preservice teachers are unable to be tactful, but that they lack experience in acting tactfully in teaching situations, which results in less tactful actions in these particular situations. 2. bridging theory and practice the transfer from theory to practice is a crucial issue in education research, since an important objective of theory-building is to provide elements that might contribute to the improvement of educational practice. before transfer can be discussed, it is necessary to provide definitions of the central terms. a theory is a system of statements that satisfies certain conditions. we can distinguish scientific theories and subjective theories. scientific theories are characterized by (1) a certain generality across different facets (cronbach et al., 1972), i.e., they are not only valid for one single situation, person, behavior parameter, and point in time; rather, validity is claimed for many situations, for the past as well as for the future, behavior parameters, and maybe for several people. the domain validity is not unlimited; rather it is restricted with respect to the different facets: only for some (types of) situations, some periods in the past and in the future, some behavior parameters, and some persons (so-called idiographic theories, for instance, are assumed to be valid only for one single person). (2) the statements are supported through arguments; in terms of dewey (quoted in phillips & burbules, 2000, p. 31; see also patry, 2008) one can speak of warranted assertiveness. the ways in which assertiveness is warranted depends on the epistemological perspective; for instance, empirical evidence can serve for this purpose. (3) scientific theories are subject to criticism, i.e., critical examinations are systematically sought and provided. (4) to satisfy this condition, it is essential that the scientific theories are stated explicitly, i.e., texts describing a given scientific theory comprehensively must be available. subjective theories are cognitions of the practitioners about the world and about themselves (groeben et al., 1988). (1) they have also a (limited) generalizability, but with respect to the theory-practice transfer it is important to note that in contrast to scientific theories, the domain of validity might be restricted insofar the practitioner’s actions are concerned („theories in use” in terms of schön, 1991), since for this, for instance, only situations of direct concern are of relevance. on the other hand, the conditions 2 to 4 for the scientific theories (see above) are not met: (2) the subjective theories are only marginally justified (and often with biased means; furnham, 1988); (3) they are rarely submitted to criticism, criticisms are often denied, and testing theories means the attempt to confirm them while in science, according to popper (1934), the principle is refuting; and (4) they are not explicit, but may be reconstructed („theories espoused”, schön, 1991), with reconstruction involving both a reduction and a construction (addition of new features) with respect to the original subjective theory (patry & gastager, 24 global education review 4(4) 2017). scientific and subjective theories differ substantially also with respect to the content (patry, 2014). practice is an action in a concrete situation. the practitioner considers only the individual case, and he or she has at least some practical goals – in education, these are educational goals. for conceiving the transfer from theory to practice, the general model depicted in figure 1 in which we distinguish three roles is useful for conceptualizing the transfer from theory to practice; the roles may be performed by specific people, but the role of mediator can also be a simple function that is presented here for analytical reasons. the researchers develop and validate the scientific theory. the mediators communicate the scientific theory to the practitioners; this can be done through many different means, among others through textbooks or teacher education. it is important to note that the mediator does not provide the scientific theory as it is, rather it is typically a summary of it with specific foci. the practitioners integrate the theories proposed by the mediators into their own system of subjective theories. based on the full system of subjective theories, on their perception of the given situation, and on the goals, they pursue, they decide on their course of action. the “transformation function” for this is what herbart (1802/1896) called the pedagogical tact (see section 1). the decided action is executed and has an impact (or not) on the environment. this effect is again perceived by the practitioner (feedback). in some cases, action and outcome are assessed in research and may lead to an improvement of theory. according to this model, the following restrictions for the theory-practice transfer are important:  scientific theories can have an impact on action only if they are integrated into the system of subjective theories and if (and insofar) the practitioner capitalizes on them when deciding about his or her action.  scientific theories are distorted when integrated into the system of subjective theories.  the practitioners have other (non-scientific) elements besides the scientific ones in their subjective theories. figure 1. a model for the transfer from theory to practice figure 1. a model for the transfer from theory to practice (adapted from patry, 1999) pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 25 therefore, the theory-practice transfer is jeopardized on two levels: the transfer from scientific to the subjective theories and the transfer from subjective theories to practice. some of the obstacles for a direct application or an easy transfer are mentioned below: category error. a theory is a system of statements. this is a different category (in the sense of ryle, 1970; see patry, 2004) than action, which is what someone does. hence, a direct translation from theory to action is not possible by principle: it would be a categorical error. since both scientific and subjective theories are statements, the problem addresses only the transfer from subjective theories to practice. the generality-concreteness antinomy (following herrmann, 1979, p. 160ff.) states that the more general a statement is, the less concrete can it be. it is particularly acute when social behavior is concerned (patry, 1991b). theories need to be general (this applies to a lesser degree for subjective than for scientific theories), while practitioners need a maximum of concreteness for their decision-making. polytely. practitioners usually pursue several goals simultaneously (goals are addressed in the caps discussed above). usually, these goals are heterogeneous and often incompatible (e.g., patry, 1997a). in scientific theories, however, polytely is almost never addressed, whereas upon request, practitioners say they have multiple goals but have difficulties dealing with them (patry, 2005). again, the transfer from scientific into subjective theories as well as the transfer from subjective theories to practice are challenged, yet in different ways. theory pluralism. practitioners use several theories that they try to integrate (patry, 2012), even ones that from the scientific point of view, according to the concept of kuhn (1962), are incommensurable. in science, following kuhn, there is competition between theories (although there are some attempts for multi-paradigmatic approaches, kornmesser & schurz, 2014), in subjective theories, there is at least co-existence (gastager, 2003). situation specificity. practitioners act specifically to the situation (patry, 2000). when addressing their own behavior, they also claim to act situation specifically (jones & nisbett, 1971), and upon request they provide different subjective theories for different situations (e.g., purzeller, 2009). in science, situation specificity is rarely considered (patry, 2009b). “the situation talks back” (schön, 1991). when we do something, we usually check whether our action was successful or not: we get feedback (patry et al., 2006). scientific statements, in contrast, are usually linear: “if i do x, with probability p, i will get y”, of “for achieving y, i can do x” (bunge, 1967). in subjective theories, feedbacks can be anticipated: “i might try x1 and see whether y results, and if not, i’ll try x2, etc.” unanticipated events. everyday life (including practice) is full of surprises (see above, van manen, 2015), particularly in social situations when one cannot anticipate fully the other people’s behavior. such unanticipated events are seen as random errors in scientific theories, i.e., they reduce the reliability of a statement (and therefore the variance accounted for by theories). in subjective theories, they are typically not considered but upon request the practitioners mention them as important. emotions (also mentioned in the caps) are also very important in practice. many scientific theories account for the impact of emotions on other variables that might play a role in practice, and subjective theories contain statements about emotions as well (e.g., grabler, 2014). the relationship between the three levels has also been analyzed (e.g., hascher & hagenauer, 2016). here it seems that we have the least problems for the bridging between theory and practice. normative requirements. any action has a normative background because it has an impact on other people which needs to be justified ethically. practitioners are also aware of this to some degree (patry, 2014), whereas researchers insist on a strict separation of descriptive and normative statements in order not to commit the naturalistic fallacy (conclusion from is to ought), and according to brezinka (1978), who has been very influential in research in education in the german speaking countries, normative statements must be avoided. as per zecha (1984), they are permitted, provided they are declared as such. 26 global education review 4(4) this list is certainly not exhaustive. these problems and obstacles have different degrees of seriousness, and some are insurmountable by principle (e.g., the categorical difference), while others might be attenuated, although never be solved completely. further, they are interrelated, and so a full theory-practice transfer, or some kind of direct “application” of (scientific) theory in practice, is not possible; instead, the concept of pedagogical tact can be used to account for the difficulties. 3. tact in professional mentoring through the reflective practitioner professional practice is characterized by interactive enactments of knowledge (billet & smith, 2014, p. 735), in which some inter-related attributes or perspectives of teachers influence their practice: the requirements of work, as well as the task, tools, systems, colleagues, and all the negotiations and encounters engaging with these requirements comprise the engagement in practice. furthermore, practitioners‘ engagement in practice comprise the ways and means by which their enactment is enabled and supported. and finally, practitioners’ engagement in practice emerges out of their personal understanding and construal of the goals and requirements of work. these assumptions including all the practical experiences may be said to constitute a personal or subjective epistemology in the sense of the patterns of subjective theories (see above) of practice. a reflective practicum (internship) supports the preservice teacher’s development of professional skills for teaching. according to schön (1987) several features make this process learnable, coachable, but not teachable. a set of determining variables consists of certain features such as design qualities, knowing in action, designing as a creative activity and as a holistic skill, and skillful designing (schön, 1987). as we have seen in section one, van manen (1995, p. 33) advocates a wider and phenomenological sense of tact and reflective practicum. according to him, the literature on teaching and teacher education has shown that professional educational practices cannot be properly understood unless we are willing to conceive of practical knowledge and reflective practice quite differently from the traditional approaches. van manen acknowledges that reflective thinking being important not only as a tool for teaching, but also as an aim of education. he cites dewey, according to whom the sight of reflective thinking enables us to know more about ourselves during the action. reflective thinking converts action that is merely appetitive, blind, and impulsive into intelligent action. the suggestion that teachers need to be reflective practitioners begs the question, what the process of reflection consists of. dewey’s thought (1933, cited in van manen, 1995, p. 33) about the nature of reflection gives us ample opportunity to feel provoked. and van manen (2015, p. 50) postulated that dewey spoke about the need for developing certain qualities or traits of character such as open-mindedness or sincerity, wholehearted or absorbed interests, and responsibility as well as the need for a habit of thinking in a reflective manner. in his newest publication about tact, van manen (2015, pp. 4960) emphasized that knowledge of different reflective methods alone is not sufficient; there must be a union of skilled methods with attitudes for tactful thinking and acting in situations that are of special requirements for teaching. he refers to the kairos time (see above; van manen, 2015, p. 51) and claimed that the active practice of teaching shows the feeling of the teacher, that he or she might act with more or with less thoughtfulness. in teaching, the provocative image of kairos moments might be one that is striking and clarifying the human predicament when something hangs in the balance, e.g., in a difficult critical teaching situation. preservice teachers and/or beginning teachers often seem to feel the tension or the “poor fit” between what they learned about teaching (theoretical knowledge; see also in section two) and what they discover is required in the practice of teaching (van manen, 2015, p. 55), such as how to deal with potentially embarrassing situations. the mentors in internships are seen as experts for reflective acting; that is the reason why they were chosen for this role. expertise as pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 27 a theoretical concept is strongly influenced by empirical research and far away from a metaphoric terminology like the phenomenological sight used above: experts are described and identified as teachers who are both, good and successful. berliner (2001, pp. 463f.) gives many different accounts for expertise, such as: expertise is specific to a domain, developed over hundreds and thousands of hours and continues to develop; development of expertise is not linear. non-monotonicities and plateaus occur, indicating shifts in understanding and stabilization of automaticity; expert knowledge is structured better for use in performances than novice knowledge is; experts represent problems in qualitatively different ways than do novices. their representations are deeper and richer; experts recognize meaningful patterns faster than novices; (…) experts are usually more constrained by task requirements and the social constraints of a situation than are novices; experts develop automatically in their behaviour to allow conscious processing of more complex information; and experts have developed self-regulatory processes as they engage in their activities. (berliner, 2001, p. 464) some of these issues are of interest in our study with regard to tact and hence are considered in the method of the present study. 4. hypothesis training of practitioners yields changes in their understanding of theories and hence a change in tactful behavior. training of experienced practitioners to become mentors who can convey theories and theory-practice transfer to practitioners leads them to apply a closer relationship between scientific and subjective theories. this means that such training enhances the pedagogical tact of the mentors and therefore has an impact on the practitioners’ actions. highly experienced teachers may act more tactfully than novices, however, preservice teachers may indeed be tactful, if they are committed. then again, preservice teachers are assumed to be less tactful than experienced teachers are, e.g., mentors. we introduced the differentiated reasons at the end of section 1 (see above). the hypothesis of the present study is that the developed assessment system (see for an overview in section 5.1) can discriminate between tact of mentors and tact of preservice teachers. this is then interpreted as a sign of validity of the assessment system. this assumption will be used to validate the coding system. and furthermore, it is assumed that the involved pupils discriminate differences by perceiving the diversity in the teaching of the mentors and the preservice teachers. 5. method 5.1 mixed methods and constructs of interest the study follows the main mixed-method principles (tashakkori & teddlie, 2010) using the stimulated recall method (calderhead, 1981) and the lesson interruption method (patry, 1997b). 5.1.1 stimulated recalls for stimulated recall, a practical sequence was video-recorded; immediately afterwards the practitioner was interviewed by asking what he or she thought in situations selected by him or her or by the interviewer from the tape. the data were analyzed using a coding system based on deductive categories (constructs) following the theoretical elements presented in sections 1 and 2. the investigation process consists of two assessment steps (calderhead, 1981; schepens et al., 2007; stough, 2001):  a practical action sequence (e.g., a teacher’s or preservice teacher’s lesson) was video-recorded.  as quickly as possible this recording was viewed by the practitioner and the interviewer. the practitioner – or, if it seemed appropriate, the investigator – interrupted the viewing, and the practitioner responded to the situation (between two interruptions). if needed, the interviewer http://ovidsp.tx.ovid.com/sp-3.10.0b/ovidweb.cgi?&s=geiefphgfmddiifnncnkldobafgdaa00&search+link=%22schepens%2c+annemie%22.au. http://ovidsp.tx.ovid.com/sp-3.10.0b/ovidweb.cgi?&s=geiefphgfmddiifnncnkldobafgdaa00&search+link=%22schepens%2c+annemie%22.au. 28 global education review 4(4) asked additional questions. the interaction between practitioner and interviewer was audio-recorded, transcribed, and content analyzed by the coding system. the analysis will be performed on two levels. as we are currently in the data analysis phase of our study, we will not focus on the content analysis, but will present a few verbal examples of the pre-study to document some of the given statements of the pre-study. the practical action sequence will be analyzed using a general observation system. the focus will be on paraand nonverbal expressions to permit us to combine the qualitative data, or information of the investigated persons, with the quantitative results, as is usual in mixed-method-research (tashakkori & teddlie, 2010). the stimulated recalls will be content analyzed with a content analysis system addressing the constructs of tact. the stimulated recall approach, appropriately used, is quite complex and requires much effort but it yields extremely rich material that permits testing the hypotheses very thoroughly. it also has specific problems that must be addressed. for instance, in such analyses there is the problem of serial influence, i.e. situation 1 (episode n+1) is serially dependent from situation 2 (episode n). on the other hand, it must be emphasized that stimulated recall is not an appropriate assessment tool for comparisons between people (e.g., comparisons of females and males) because the within-person variance, which is the focus of the hypotheses, is much higher than the expected between-person variance. before such comparisons can be done it is necessary to test to what degree tact and the underlying variables are cross-situationally consistent; for this, the tact in at least two practical contexts has to be assessed. finally, it must be said that stimulated recall is very time-consuming for the practitioners. however, many practitioners said in previous studies that they benefitted very much from it: they said that it was like a supervision or an opportunity for reflection for which they usually do not have time. the following categories were used in the content analysis:  subjective assumptions for explanation: how do the interviewees explain the phenomena they encounter? these are subjective equivalents of scientific theories.  competencies (see the first cau in the caps), (e.g. flavell & wohlwill, 1969);  perception (see the second cau in the caps), (hagendorf, krummenacher, müller & schubert, 2011);  goals (see the fourth cau in the caps): what the practitioner aims at in the given situation;  values (see, again, the fourth cau in the caps; see also for instance bakker, 2011): what is important for the practitioner;  self-regulation (see the fifth cau in the caps); this includes deontic normative principles, i.e. ethical principles to be followed independently from the (anticipated) consequences of the action;  emotions (see the sixth cau in the caps);  unanticipated events and the aspects of recursiveness: “the situation talks back, the practitioner listens, and as he appreciates what he hears, he reframes the situation once again” (schön, 1983, p. 131f; see section 1). 5.1.2 lesson interruption method the lesson interruption method (lim – questionnaire) (patry, 1997b) is a technique, which allows the pedagogue to interrupt their teaching sequence at predetermined moments in order to receive a spontaneous and immediate feedback from the learners. usually, the feedback is provided in form of a questionnaire, which is handed out to the students. it may contain questions about the behavior of either the teacher or the students (or both). this method can be an expedient tool to collect certain tact-relevant dimensions, such as emotions or situation specificity. scales of the questionnaire: the questionnaire itself included 13 items. before handing out the questionnaire, they were merged into the following four scales. pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 29 tables 1-4: scales of the lim-instrument scale 1: varying degrees of requirements 1 some parts of this lesson were not challenging enough. none some many all 2 the requirements in this lesson were … always low sometimes low rarely low never low 6 parts of this lesson were overstraining. none some many all 11 the requirements in this lesson were … always high sometimes high rarely high never high scale 2: level of requirements overall 3 altogether in this lesson i felt … underchallanged a bit underchallanged a bit overstrained over strained 7 during this lesson … much was required rather was much required rather was little required little was required 12 for me, learning in this lesson was … easy rather easy rather hard hard scale 3: emotional involvement 4 i found this lesson to be… very exciting rather exiting rather not exciting not very exiting 8 this lesson was … little fun rather little fun rather great fun great fun 10 during this lesson… i forgot everything around me, except learning i forgot many things around me, except learning i thought about many things around me, except learning i thought about everything around me, except learning scale 4: cooperation 5 the teacher made sure that important decisions were made together by the whole class (like deciding on the rules for an assignment). very sometimes little very little 9 concerning the cooperation of the pupils, the teacher… fostered it very much fostered a little did not foster it a lot did not foster it at all 13 the teacher made sure that the students helped each other. very sometimes rarely very little the scale for the items in grey was inverted in statistical analysis so that (1) always equals the extreme negative and (4) always equals the extreme positive pole 5.2 investigation and sample the 99 lim questionnaires were collected between january 14th and february 23rd, 2016. three different classes in three different grades of one lower secondary school in austria were 30 global education review 4(4) table 5: overview for the sample of the pre-study grade no. of surveyed children (mentor / novice) no. of inquiries in the mentor’s lessons no. of inquiries in the novice’s lessons 5th 23 23 5 5 6th 5 5 5 4 9th 24 19 4 1 ∑ 52 47 14 10 table 6: reliability values for the four scales of the lim-instrument cronbach’s alpha scale 1: varying degrees of requirements .08 scale 2: level of requirements overall -.47 scale 3: emotional involvement .76 scale 4: cooperation .74 surveyed. the surveyed students were between 10 and 14 years old. ideally, the lim questionnaires should have been handed out five times in each class. unfortunately, this was not possible, due to time management difficulties. however, the participating teachers handed out the questionnaires as often as they could. table 5 gives an overview of the exact composition of the sample for the performed stimulated recalls in the pre-study. 5.3.1 reliability analysis of the questionnaire a reliability analysis with the proposed scales (see above) was done in spss. the determined cronbach’s alpha values are shown intable 6. due to the low reliability levels of scales one and two, a factor analysis was done in order to find scales that are better suitable. unfortunately, this analysis did not yield the desired results. therefore, the first and second scale were not taken into account and are not considered in the results section below. we also considered what would happen to the cronbach’s alpha values for scales 3 and 4, if items were deleted from the scale: for scale 3, a higher cronbach’s alpha of .810 (as opposed to .756) could be achieved if we deleted item 10 from the scale. this item asks, how much of the surroundings one notices while the learning in the lesson occurs. however, we did not delete this item from the scale, as the scale only consisted of three items and we would have reduced the number of items to two items. the cronbach’s alpha for scale 4 is the highest it can be. we could not achieve a higher value, if any item was deleted. 5.3.2 results for the lesson interruption method to calculate the correlation between the different items on the two remaining scales, scale 3 (emotional involvement) and scale 4 (cooperation), we calculated the means of each item in the scale. we included every item that was present at least once. furthermore, we also tried to find differences between the groups of mentors and students by doing an independent sample t-test. the significance of both the f-test (3: .825; 4: .305) and of the t-test (3: .179; 3: .657) for scale 3 and scale 4 were too high to claim a difference between these groups. therefore, we retained our null hypothesis. pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 31 however, we also looked at the correlations of the items within the two scales and their practical implications. 5.3.2.1 descriptive analysis. the next tables show the descriptive analysis for scales 3 and 4 of the lim questionnaires. the values obtained for scale 3 (emotional involvement), are shown in table 7. all three items for scale 4 were graded at least 97 (out of 99) times. the mean values for all three of them were rather high (3.37 / 3.15 / 3.13 out of 4). therefore, we can conclude that the learners were engaged and focused in all of the lessons. they also had fun learning. the values obtained for scale 4 (cooperation), are shown in table 8. these three items were evaluated at least 98 (out of 99) times. the mean values, again, were rather high (3.31 / 3.26 / 3.13 out of 4). we can therefore conclude that the teachers engaged with the students in making decisions and encouraged them to cooperate with each other and help each other. 5.3.2.2 correlation. due to the small size of the participant sample, we decided to incorporate the practical significance into our findings. the values for practical significance can be adducted, if the sample size of a study is relatively small. as this applies to our study, we will further reference this significance as well. statistically significant results were found regarding the correlation of the items within the scale 3: emotional involvement and scale 4: cooperation. the level of practical significance is presented in table 9. table 7: descriptive data for scale three item item description mean value standard deviation number of measurements (n) 4 level of excitement of the lesson 3.37 .61 97 8 level of fun in the lesson 3.15 .71 99 10 level of notice of surroundings during the learning process in the lesson 3.13 .66 97 table 8: descriptive data for scale four item item description mean value standard deviation number of measurements (n) 5 important decisions were taken by the teacher and by the class 3.31 .71 99 9 teachers’ level of conveyance of cooperation 3.26 .61 99 13 teacher’s level of conveyance of mutual assistance 3.13 .67 98 table 8: descriptive data for scale four table 9: practical significance according to astleitner (2003, p. 51) correlation of the predictor with the criterion ≤0.10 0.15 – 0.33 ≥ 0.37 practical significance low medium high 32 global education review 4(4) the table of characteristic factors regarding the practical significance is an extract of the table created by astleitner (2003, p. 51). the indicator of the practical significance is relevant because statistical significance may provide a mathematical basis for the relevance of minimal effects, if the sample size was big enough and the measured values were scattered correspondently (bortz & döring, 2016), which could be negligible for the everyday practical dealings, just because. on the other hand, a high value practical significance is unsupported if the factor of randomness was not excluded by proper scientific conduct. because individually, both – the statistical and the practical significance – do not indicate valid results, so – ideally – they should be used in cooperation with each other. the practical significance should also be seen in connection with the existing findings in the field; a medium practical significance can be seen as a meaningful finding or as an insignificant one, depending upon which significances could be found in previous studies. table 10 shows the correlation of the items within scale three – emotional involvement. we found a correlation between the level of excitement (item 4), the level of fun (item 8) and the level of notice of the surroundings during the learning process in the lesson (item 10). the correlation between the level of excitement (item 4) and the level of fun (item 8) can be classified as significant; the coefficient of the correlation (.682**) shows a great statistical and practical significance. statistical and practical significance (.527**) was also found regarding the correlation of the level of excitement (item 4) and the level of notice of the surroundings during the learning process in the lesson (item 10). a great statistical significance with a medium practical significance (.300**) is shown regarding the correlation of the items 8, the level of fun, and 10, the level of notice of the surroundings during the learning process in the lesson. this implies that highly engaged students do have more fun in their lessons and also are more focused on the learning matter. table 11 shows the correlation of the items within scale 4 – cooperation: table 10: correlation of the items within scale three scale 3: emotional involvement (4) level of excitement of the lesson (8) level of fun in the lesson (10) level of notice of surroundings during the learning process in the lesson (4) level of excitement of the lesson pearson-correlation 1 .682** .527** sig. (2-sided) .000 .000 n 97 97 95 (8) level of fun in the lesson pearson-correlation .682** 1 .300** sig. (2-sided) .000 .003 n 97 99 97 (10) level of notice of surroundings during the learning process in the lesson pearson-correlation .527** .300** 1 sig. (2-sided) .000 .003 n 95 97 97 **. correlation is significant (two-sided) at level 0.01. pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 33 table 11: correlation of the items within scale four scale 4: cooperation (5) important decisions were taken by the teacher and by the class (9) teachers’ level of conveyance of cooperation (13) teacher’s level of conveyance of mutual assistance (5) important decisions were taken by the teacher and by the class pearson-correlation 1 .488** .552** sig. (2-sided) .000 .000 n 99 99 98 (9) teachers’ level of conveyance of cooperation pearson-correlation .488** 1 .444** sig. (2-sided) .000 .000 n 99 99 98 (13) teacher’s level of conveyance of mutual assistance pearson-correlation .552** .444** 1 sig. (2-sided) .000 .000 n 98 98 98 **. correlation is significant (two-sided) at level 0.01. we found a relationship between the items, important decisions were taken by the teacher and by the class (item 5), teachers’ level of conveyance of cooperation (item 9) and teacher’s level of conveyance of mutual assistance (item 13). the correlation between all three items was statistically significant with coefficients of correlation of .552** (items 5 and 13), .488** (items 5 and 9), as well as .444** (items 9 and 13). this means that all three correlations show a high practical significance as well, and it implies that students who are able to participate in the decision-making process in class show a higher willingness and/or ability to cooperate and help each other. we also did a correlation analysis of the two scales three and four with each other and found a correlation coefficient of .452** (sig. 2 sided: .000; n = 99) – the correlation is significant (two-sided) at level 0.01. this correlation also shows a high practical significance, which implies that a high level of cooperation in the classroom leads to a high level of emotional involvement in the classroom and vice versa. 5.3.3 statements and examples from the stimulated recalls as the analysis processes for the present study is still ongoing, we present verbal statements how the preservice teachers and the corresponding mentors spoke about some tact-relevant aspects in the videotaped lesson. these illustrate, first, the respective constructs of the coding system (see above); it must be mentioned, though, that these are the first codifications. the statements are from three mentors and five preservice teachers teaching the pupils of the sample of the lim questionnaire presented above. concerning the construct, subjective assumption of explanation, one mentor stated: “because this is a number [mathematics lesson] which children cannot understand – but iris (the name has been changed.) has a lunatic ambition and she becomes quickly aggrieved, if she has the feeling to be dismissed. because she wants to know how it works. she feels easily hurt, if i don’t make an effort to explain it.” (code 01). “if peter does not receive his tlc (tender loving care) all the time, he will get no air for breathing and he will cry all the time. if he receives his tlc, he will be working all the time quite well.” (code 01) for competencies, one preservice teacher spoke about the relevance of theories: “why is the theory important as well? well, in sports the pupils should know the different terms for gymnastics, they need not know everything but some things about how it works in sports. (...) 34 global education review 4(4) when i started studying sports at the university of education, i did not know anything from my own schooldays and i had the wish to know more about the terms in physical education. (…) i think if we teach the kids very all-roundly, they will feel good in their later life.” (code 04). for perception, a mentor said: “i don’t perceive, if sarah does not understand right now. well, i am really mindless of it.” (code 01) a student spoke about goals as follows: “the pupils needed the time that we have thought before [in our didactic analysis for this lesson]. the pupils did not have a clue about that.” (code 03) concerning the values in a recorded tactrelevant teaching situation, another mentor said: “i like [it] when the pupils are asking me because this is a sign of confidence. (…) to me, sitting on the floor in a circle is fine. i like to speak with the pupils on the same personal level. that is important to me. (…)the teacher is then not the person who is telling them how it works, because we can reach goals collaboratively and consensually. that’s the reason why i like that.” (code 02) with respect to emotions, a mentor stated: “the kids were leaving the classroom highly satisfied and for me, that’s really a giant pleasure.” (code 01). and finally one statement concerning meta-cognition resembles: “tom adopts a kind of ‘mum-and-dad-role’ in this step and we make no bones about that.” (code 01) 6. discussion in the lim-questionnaire, it is fascinating that there is a statistically identified connection between the level of excitement, the level of fun and the level of notice of the surroundings during the learning process in the lesson due to the estimations of the participating pupils. moreover, the practical significance of the correlation of the “emotional involvement” and the “cooperation” is interesting because we find these concepts in the coding system for the qualitative analysis (material) as well, i.e., corresponding to emotions, values and goals. however, what we can clearly state at this phase of the analysis is that the estimations of the involved pupils show no differences between the mentors/experts and the preservice teachers/novices. the hypothesis, hence, is refuted so far in both the lesson interruption study as well as in the stimulated recall study. full analysis steps will enlighten states concerning the tact-hypotheses. we see in some verbal statements and particularly in the several practically and statistically significant correlations that the theory-practice transfer in terms of tact can be elucidated with both methods through analysis of the data gathered in the way described above. this is a potential for the full study concerning the difference in tact-relevant situations of internships. we want to focus on working out primarily of the verbal material some aspects enhancing the development of the professional self (bauer & logemann, 2012). while the methodological approaches described above seem appropriate, the analysis turned out to be more complex than anticipated. for doing professional and reflective internships, it is important to develop wholehearted or absorbed interests in cooperation with mentors and preservice teachers as well as in cooperation with the pupils on the teaching level in the classrooms (clutterbuck et al., 2012). finally, there remains an aspect that is a difficult challenge especially for practitioners, teachers, social pedagogues and so forth, who are beginning in teaching, communicating, mediating students in tact moments. as van manen stated: yet much of teacher preparation remains stuck in the traditional epistemology of practice and suffers from practical flaws as far as the interactive reality of the classroom is concerned. and as a result of the emphasis on reflective practice in teacher-education programs, preservice teachers have been pressed to live up to the expectation that good teachers are reflective teachers. but they have not pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships 35 always learned where and how the reflective process should enter the life of teaching. some beginning teachers receive the strong message that they should not only be reflective in the pre-active and the post-active phases of teaching but that, in the thick of classroom action, teachers should be constantly thinking about why and what they are doing while they are doing it, constantly considering alternatives to their aims and methods, (…). (van manen, 2015, p. 58). 7. limitations in this pilot study, we gained valuable experiences, and preliminary conclusions were drawn; in particular it was shown that tactrelevant variables can indeed be assessed this way. however, several methodical flaws were identified: 1. although the instruction for the stimulated recall was almost standardized, we got responses of very different distinctiveness. this needs more standardization in function of the theory so that hypotheses can be tested. 2. the length of the units of analysis (situations) varied greatly, but we tried to keep that within a limit. 3. the validity of the coding system needs to be established when we are doing the analysis with the whole data material that we gained in the main study for 34 people, 13 mentors and 21 preservice teachers. notes 1. geisteswissenschaftliche pädagogik (humanities education in english) is a theoretical perspective developed in the early twentieth century that views the reality of education as the result of historical development and takes into account the social challenges of the time. author note 1. this study was supported by the austrian science fund fwf (p27191-g22), operated from 2015 to 2019 at the university of salzburg in cooperation with the university college of teacher education styria in graz, austria references astleitner h. 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(1995). on the epistemology of reflective practice. teachers and teaching: theory and practice, 1, (1), 33-50. van manen, m. (2015). pedagogical tact. knowing what to do when you don’t know that to do. walnut creek, ca: left coast press. zecha, g. (1984). für und wider die wertfreiheit der erziehungswissenschaft. münchen, germany: schöningh. http://www.frontiersin.org/quantitative_psychology_and_measurement/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00018/abstract http://www.frontiersin.org/quantitative_psychology_and_measurement/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00018/abstract http://www.frontiersin.org/quantitative_psychology_and_measurement/10.3389/fpsyg.2011.00018/abstract http://dx.doi.org/10.7220/2345-0258.11.1 38 global education review 4(4) about the author(s) angela gastager, university college professor for science of education and research on pedagogical interaction at the university college of teacher education styria in austria (since 2013); diploma degree education and psychology/ sociology/ philosophy and doctoral degree education (university of salzburg, austria), certified in adult education (university of education in weingarten, germany), studies in gestaltism in counseling in education (salzburg/ graz, austria). scientific assistant and lecturer at the university of salzburg, department of education (until 2009) and school of education (until 2016). anna bock, secondary school teacher and former scientific officer at the department of education (university of salzburg, austria) and at the department of research, knowledge transfer and innovation (university college of teacher education styria, austria). diploma: alpen-adriauniversity of klagenfurt. research interests: cooperation, diversity and team-teaching. jean-luc patry, full university professor, department of education, university of salzburg (austria), (since 1993; emeritus 2015). diploma and doctoral degree: swiss federal institute of technology, zurich; habilitation: university of fribourg, switzerland. research interests: theory-practice transfer; moral and values education; social interaction, particularly situation specificity; research methodology. viktoria präauer, master in educational science at the university of salzburg (austria); researcher in the project “pedagogical tact” at the department of education at the university of salzburg. since 2017 she does mobile counselling in the field of socio-pedagogical family assistance. barbara fageth, researcher in the department of education at the university of salzburg and university college teacher for early childhood education at the private university of education, diocese of linz (austria); research interests: relationship of theory and practice in early childhood education; contingency in educational acting. microsoft word 2015-2016 board of reviewers 3,4 122 global education review 4(1)      2016-2017 board of reviewers     nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, israel caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york anne marie connor, michigan state university oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university gernot driesiebner, university of graz, austria alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college sefa dundar, abant izzet baysal university, turkey claudia fahrenwald, university of education upper austria aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana 2016-2017 board of reviewers 123     candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom barbara hanfstingl. alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university brian lloyd heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university cheryl 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unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: heuser, brian l., wang, ke, & shahid, salman. (2017). global dimensions of gifted and talented education: the influence of national perceptions on policies and practices. global education review, 4(1). 4-21. global dimensions of gifted and talented education: the influence of national perceptions on policies and practices brian l. heuser peabody college, vanderbilt university ke wang peabody college, vanderbilt university salman shahid peabody college, vanderbilt university abstract we examine recent research across countries and cultures in regard to the issues related to the formation of gifted and talented education perspectives, policies, and practices. many modern cultures and subcultures have developed formal and informal definitions of what it means to be gifted and talented, and when we compare the perceptions, policies, and practices across nations, we discover very different constructs of intelligence and ability. these understandings of giftedness and gifted and talented education can be grouped into four binary dimensions, scholarly versus co-curricular capabilities, aptitude versus achievement, nature versus nurture, and individualistic versus collective, that have significant implications for policy and practice. these constructs can serve as a foundation for countries that are looking to formalize or expand their gifted and talented education models or can be used to challenge the norms of established systems. we put forward recommendations to address some of the challenges in advancing gifted education cross-nationally, an area that is often assumed to introduce risks of enlarging social inequity. we also provide a cross-national matrix that captures known elements of gifted education policies and programs from over 20 subnational jurisdictions, countries, and world regions. keywords comparative education, gifted and talented education, international education policy introduction well-established gifted and talented education programs offer the possibility of cultivating a society’s most intellectually promising students into a source of exceptional human capital and creative capacity. but such programs, and the protocols that undergird them, are far from universally embraced. national, regional or provincial policies and practices that target gifted students vary significantly in the degree to _________________________________ corresponding author brian l. heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university, 230 appleton place nashville, tn 37203-5721 email: brian.l.heuser@vanderbilt.edu global dimensions of gifted and talented education 5 which they endorse, support and maintain such programs. in countries possessing stronger national cultures of egalitarianism, education policies are often geared toward avoiding academic interventions that could be regarded as forms of intellectual elitism. on the basis of various philosophies and learning theories, some of these systems, often citing compelling empirical evidence for their positions, strongly reject any notions that students should be stratified by ability. there are also systems oriented toward the assumption that only students with learning difficulties require additional forms of support to develop according to their ability (resch, 2014). whatever the rationale, the structural outcomes of such perceptions is generally either a profound under-development or outright dearth of formal, gifted education programs. by contrast, in cultures and systems that embrace differentiated education for gifted students, an expanded diversity of programs is offered and they are typically constructed with greater programmatic refinement and pedagogical sophistication. such programs may differ in terms of whether they are structured as enrichment to the regular school curriculum or as a separate system that operates in tandem to mainstream schooling, but their policies and practices generally prioritize a commitment to engaging learners from all ability levels with appropriately challenging curricula and instruction. these programs will differ in the particular learning content areas they address – and in the requisite selection processes required for participation – but they tend to emphasize domain distinct, cognitive needs of individual learners, rather than the collective. while it is not our goal to reconcile these competing positions, we do hope that this global review of gifted and talented education will advance an understanding of how strongly perceptions of giftedness influence policy and program formation. setting aside the robust body of cognitive science associated with the study of gifted and talented youth1, perceptions of giftedness are largely culturally determined, inseparable from the norms, values, beliefs, and priorities of a people, as well as from the socio-historical and socio-political realities of a country or region (davis, rimm, & siegle, 2010). as such, ways of identifying and nurturing giftedness – in addition to the social and political will to do so – can be considered as primary factors in studies of gifted education policies. notably, minority and historically underrepresented groups in many countries have often been systematically omitted from the same identification considerations as majority populations. such dynamics make studying the experience of these populations in gifted and talented education especially difficult. when thus contextualized, examining how different national systems approach (or avoid) gifted education can provide a basis for future policy and program development, implementation and evaluation. for more than a generation, scholars have noted the diverse definitions and perspectives of giftedness across the globe (gardner, 1983, 1993; vantassel-baska, 2005), and, in this paper, we aim to account for some of the differences in the perceptions, policies, and practices regarding gifted and talented instruction. as ieridou and zumwalt (2013) have observed, the meanings attached to the fundamental concepts and practices of gifted education reflect a dominant western european history, worldview, and value system, as the field has been developed mainly in the united states and western european countries. at the same time, it has been well argued that the strongest current advancement of gifted education is presently outside of these western contexts (ibata-arens, 2012). in this paper, we make a concerted effort to represent as many countries as possible, and we incorporate perspectives from over 20 systems of education: austria, 6 global education review 4(1) beijing, canada, cyprus, england, finland, germany, german-speaking europe, hong kong, hungary, ireland, japan, korea, lebanon, mexico, new zealand, the netherlands, poland, shanghai, singapore, switzerland, russia, taiwan, the united states, the united kingdom, and zimbabwe. we also provide a crossnational matrix of available gifted education policies, program elements, and conceptual bases in these regions (see appendix). in an effort to put forward a more focused account of where systems currently stand in terms of their commitment to gifted education, our discussion is based on research articles published after the year 2000. in selecting our references, we gave priority to those that provide details on how giftedness is defined, identified, and developed within education systems, following what scholars in this field generally deem “a classical description of gifted education” (gyarmathy, 2013). most of available references in this area explore issues related to gifted education in a single country, while a select few spanned different systems or cultures. and while most of these articles used a comparative lens, we found little to no evidence of the utilization of rigorous, systematic, comparative methods. our methodology presents certain limitations. first, because priority was given to those articles that met our selection criteria, it is likely that some countries have been omitted, even though gifted education may be available in such countries. second, as a comparative study of over 20 countries or regions, this paper cannot present all relevant observations, and, thus, we had to prioritize some of the most prevalent phenomena related to gifted education. third, there are variations within many education systems in terms of their perceptions, policies, and practices related to gifted education as well as variations across education systems. in highlighting the latter, we were not able to address some of the more localized variations. fourth, we prioritize the current status of gifted education over its history and development trajectory; however, in most countries, approaches to gifted education are rarely static and have experienced significant transformations over the past several decades. despite these limitations, we hope to provide some meaningful insights into the consistencies and inconsistencies among perceptions, policies, and practices. four dimensions of the global definitions of giftedness the research on gifted education provides an array of definitions of giftedness across countries and world regions, either through secondary analyses of government documents and regulations or through a review of papers based on surveys of local communities or local gifted program guidelines. the majority of the literature focuses on categorizing a culture’s definition of giftedness as either cognitive excellence or exceeding in co-curricular areas, with the latter’s referring to distinction in music, sports, arts, and, in some cases, soft skills, such as leadership, interpersonal communication, decision making, and even religious knowledge. our survey of the literature will demonstrate, that, within this pool of conceptualizations of giftedness, several dimensions exist. each dimension incorporates two somewhat contrasting concepts about what counts as giftedness. in what follows, we draw instances from specific countries and present these global dimensions of giftedness. the first dimension, which is the most prevalent, involves defining giftedness as cognitive achievement and/or aptitude versus defining it as excellence in both academic and nonacademic areas, such as sports, music, arts, and soft skills. most systems, whose numbers are increasing, conceptualize giftedness as exceptional acumen in multiple areas that include both academic and nonacademic subjects. austria, germany, ireland, hong global dimensions of gifted and talented education 7 kong, hungary, korea, the netherlands, poland, switzerland, taiwan and the united kingdom have systems that conceptualize giftedness in this way (casey & koshy, 2013; de boer, minnaert, & kamphof, 2013; ibata-arens, 2012; gyarmathy, 2013; limont, 2012; muelleroppliger, 2014; o’reilly, 2013; resch, 2014; tommis, 2013; weilguny, resch, samhaber, & hartel, 2013; weyringer, 2013). austria, for instance, embraces a multidimensional and dynamic conception of giftedness and talent. according to the austrian government, giftedness is high performance in intellectual, emotional, social, and artistic fields as well as in sports. being talented is viewed as a, “multidimensional and dynamic conception of giftedness and talent, encompassing a person’s overall potential, which unfolds through lifelong learning and development” (resch, 2014, p. 14). in this way, the development of giftedness is understood much more as an iterative process than static quality: it is shaped by the interactions between people’s individual predispositions and the social cognitive influences embedded in nurture (weyringer, 2013). recently, both hong kong and taiwan have moved from narrower interpretations of giftedness as superior academic excellence toward more expansive determinations that include multiple areas beyond cognitive achievement or aptitude (chien and hui, 2010; ibata-arens, k., 2012). in addition to conceptualizing giftedness as involving multiple areas of intelligence, these countries are beginning to perceive that giftedness is not necessarily equivalent to all-rounded excellence but, rather, can comprise more discrete distinction in a single area or cognitive domain. such shifts signal that some of the perception barriers to giftedness are beginning to give way, and that policy makers are rethinking their educational strategies around talent development. the often-assumed exclusivity of gifted and talented programs may be changing accordingly, especially in those systems where people are driven by a belief that many students can excel in one single area out of the many that are incorporated into new conceptualizations of giftedness. in contrast to systems that hold a multidimensional concept, a fewer now hold the narrower definition, at least officially, that giftedness is simply exceptional academic excellence. this remains the case for beijing and singapore (ibata-arens, 2012). a second dimension that emerges from a review of the relevant literature is that of giftedness as aptitude versus achievement. systems that prioritize intellectual excellence as determinative of exceptional talent generally view giftedness as either a high intelligence quotient (aptitude) or as high performance on criterion based, curriculum-related standardized tests (achievement). beijing, hong kong, and taiwan rely predominantly on iq tests to identify students with cognitive excellence (ibata-arens, 2012). the government of singapore, in contrast, believes that only top achievers on curriculum-based standardized exams are eligible to be identified as gifted (ibata-arens, 2012). although both kinds of tests are only proxies for students’ academic talent, this difference indicates that systems vary in terms of how close their conceptualization of scholarly giftedness is to the existing curriculum used in the mainstream education system. most systems, however, do not explicitly make a distinction between aptitude and achievement in their definitions of giftedness. according to ngara (2006), the shona and ndebele cultures of zimbabwe, for instance, regard giftedness as “an aptitude or outstanding ability” in various domains, such as leadership, spiritualism, resilience, and creativity. related to the contrast between aptitude and achievement is a third dimension of giftedness as nature or as nurture. among those systems for which information related to this distinction is available, some believe that people 8 global education review 4(1) are born gifted, but more believe that giftedness is a result of an individual’s predispositions as well as environmental factors conducive to developing the innate ability. the shona and ndebele cultures of zimbabwe (ngara, 2006) are an example of the former, while the cultures of austria, germany, and the netherlands are examples of the latter, emphasizing the importance of nurture (de boer et al., 2013; fischer & müller, 2014; weilguny et al., 2013). in germany, giftedness is defined as an individual’s potential for outstanding achievement, and non-cognitive personality characteristics (e.g., motivation, work attitude) and environmental factors are both considered important in contributing to achievement (fischer & müller, 2014). similarly, the netherlands endorses the belief that talent, as a natural ability, needs to be developed and that the development of this talent depends on a strong, supportive environment. the netherlands also embraces a pro-equity belief that every child has talent and can be outstanding in certain areas (de boer et al., 2013). a fourth dimension, although not as prevalent as the above three, is giftedness as associated with individualism versus giftedness as associated with collectivism. the maori populations of new zealand, for instance, value the collective, or belonging to the group, as integral to intelligence; as such, an individual’s acting out of the ordinary may not be consonant with their understandings of giftedness (mccann, 2005). although most systems struggle with varied notions of, and concerns for, individualism versus collectivism, the maori argue that, because the source of genuine wisdom is the collective, individuals are dependent on the community for their attainment of intellectual ability. that said, and as we will discuss in a moment, this fourth dimension presents itself most dominantly (though also more subtly) in countries that simply refuse to adopt formalized systems of gifted education on the basis of ensuring various conceptions of social equity. these four dimensions certainly do not capture all interpretations or understandings of giftedness across the globe; however, developing an exhaustive model is not our goal. instead, we have created an adaptive framework based on existing literature that fits our selection criteria, hoping that future research on this topic can contribute to validating, critiquing, or adding to this framework for gifted education. in the remainder of this paper, we will demonstrate the usefulness of this framework for analysis by applying it to a review of the policies and programs related to gifted education. first, however, we would like to highlight three important aspects that have emerged from this review of the global definitions of giftedness. first, these four dimensions are not mutually exclusive; rather, they can be viewed as four spectra, along each of which we can position a system. in other words, these dimensions represent four characteristics, or variables, that a single system can simultaneously embody. second, some systems are wrestling with conceptualizations that fall between the anchor points of a dimension, and the distinction between defining giftedness as academic versus co-curricular excellence, aptitude versus achievement, and nature versus nurture are not clear-cut for these systems. for instance, mueller-oppliger (2014) has noted that, in switzerland, although the majority of educators, boards of education, and cantons recognize giftedness as “multiple intelligences” (gardner, 1984, as cited in mueller-oppliger) some school administrators continue to view giftedness from the perspective of academic and intellectual capabilities. third, some countries, such as finland and norway, do not mention gifted education in their legislation at all. for these countries, understanding how giftedness is defined relies on an analysis of the practices and global dimensions of gifted and talented education 9 programs relevant to gifted education; thus, understanding what counts as gifted in these countries relies on their implied definitions. gifted education policies and programs despite a relative absence of strong international policy studies related to gifted and talented education, we were still able to observe consistencies and inconsistencies among perceptions, policies, and practices related to gifted education. the inevitable connotation of giftedness as associated with elitism demands that the tension between equality and differentiation take the center of analyses of gifted education policies and programs, which can lead to the intentional avoidance of formally defining and providing for gifted students in some countries. nevertheless, even countries that do define giftedness are challenged to resolve this tension, particularly as it confronts policymakers. cyprus and japan are examples of history and culture’s calling for a more egalitarian approach in the education system, which translates into an avoidance of special policies and programming for gifted students. as ieridou (2013) explained, with cyprus’s strategic location and history of colonization, nurturing individual gifts and talents was not and cannot be a priority. during colonization, control over the native population was achieved through transmitting approved, specific skills to prepare the native population for their expected submissive roles. the native population, with minimal resources available, assigned to education the critical role of maintaining the cultural identity of the people and unity of the community. in a country whose political and cultural existence has been traditionally under threat, preserving democracy, homogeneity, and national unity are understood as being more vital than emphasizing differentiation and diversity. similarly, in japan, gifted education remains largely an anathema, due partly to the strong cultural undercurrent that dedication to hard work trumps innate ability. further, the notion of giftedness is strongly associated with elitism, as in pre-modern japan, only the children of the samurai class and higher had access to education (ibata-arens, 2012). nevertheless, japan presents a more ambivalent case. despite a mainstream culture that still tends to avoid elitism, the perceived need to remain internationally competitive through continuous research and development has led to a growing emphasis on a strong stem education. the establishment of super science high schools and the selection of students for special learning opportunities, in response to the national cabinet’s call for identifying and nurturing talents in science and technology, is inconsistent with the japanese tendency to value egalitarianism and effort over heredity (ibataarens, 2012; sumida, 2013). such policy shifts are highly nuanced, as the underlying motivation for creating and leveraging these new opportunities seem to possess a nationalistic quality: defending japanese relevance in a new world order that is increasingly dominated by china, india and other developing economies. in other cultures that also wrestle with the tension between the promotion of gifted education and the perception of encouraging inequality, we observed an effort to justify differentiation through a more egalitarian approach of emphasizing individualized instruction, in general, instead of advocating for individualization for the particular group of gifted students. for instance, in austria, despite strong reservations about applying the label gifted, due to the negative connotation of the term elite in the post-nazi regime (ziegler & stoeger, 2007), a variety of supportive initiatives for gifted students have been established in recent decades. the greater effort toward differentiation, however, is driven predominantly by an egalitarian approach of 10 global education review 4(1) emphasizing individualized instruction for all (weyringer, 2013). tirri and kuusisto (2013) argue that the finnish education system can be viewed as highly developed in their approach to gifted education. although it is not referred to as gifted education per se, an education program of differentiation is standard from kindergarten onward. this means that all children are educated according to their individual development and learning needs, which, according to tirri and kuusisto, is the core principal of gifted education. in both austria and finland, provision for gifted learners is, to some extent, achieved through an egalitarian approach of advocating that all students, despite their specific learning needs, need to receive individualized attention and instruction tailored to their development. as a counter to tirri and kuusisto’s argument, what is missing from these cases is evidence that the systems’ approaches to differentiated education address the cognitive, domain-specific learning needs of exceptional students. despite the challenge of reconciling the tension between promoting gifted education and promoting equality, some efforts demonstrate that these two goals are not necessarily in conflict. in 2005, a korean program was undertaken to identify and educate gifted children from socioeconomically underprivileged backgrounds. these students were selected through tests that assessed their critical thinking, rather than through curriculum-based, subject-oriented tests, which are often thought to have a bias toward students of higher socioeconomic status (ibata-arens, 2012). we also have observed the important role that policies can play in the translation of perceptions into practices, sometimes with unintended or inverse consequences. for example, poorly aligned requirements of certain policies, created out concern for social equity, might actually create practical limitations to the provision of more inclusive programs of gifted education. in the united kingdom, for instance, formal policy guidelines define gifted learners as those who have the ability to excel academically in one or more subjects and talented learners as having the ability to excel in practical skills, such as sport, leadership, and artistic performance. however, the policy requirement of using a percentage-based identification strategy, which requests that schools place 5% to 10% of their students on a gifted and talented student register, appears to have been taken as encouragement to utilize test-based, quantitative measurements for creating gifted and talented cohorts in schools (casey & koshy, 2012; koshy & pinheiro-torres, 2013). as a result – and related to the first dimension of our framework – although the education system of the united kingdom appears more aligned with the concept that giftedness incorporates both academic and nonacademic excellence, due to poor policy design, gifted and talented programs currently do not reflect what the majority of people believe is giftedness and, instead, tend to promote scholarly success only. another example is mexico, where, similar to the united kingdom, education policies define giftedness as talent in a variety of areas. yet, although some form of differentiation for gifted students exists within the regular classroom, programming for gifted learners is achieved predominantly through private institutions, advocacy groups and various associations. in this context, harris and sanchez lizardi (2012) noted that private institutions that support gifted children require these children to have an iq of at least 120 to attend, thus promoting only a singular aspect of giftedness. in this case, because private parties are predominantly the administering agency of gifted education, as permitted by the policies, the formal definition of what constitutes giftedness is not necessarily carried over into practice. global dimensions of gifted and talented education 11 globally, the provision of resources from external stakeholders – often business enterprises – plays a fundamental role in funding and administering programs for gifted students. such investments are understood as being strongly reciprocal as they enable enterprises to cultivate and eventually funnel premier talent back into their organizations. in saudi arabia, samba bank, saudi aramco, exxon mobil, and microsoft are directly involved with educational institutes in terms of organizing talent summer camps in science and engineering and funding targeted university programs (aljughaiman & grigorenko, 2013). in finland, nokia funds the advanced mathematics program at a private school, and the students are supported in skill development and training by the nokia research center. consequently, nearly 10% of the students who complete the program go on to work for nokia after their graduation from college (tirri & kuusisto, 2013). given the rising international competition for premium human capital, we anticipate that there will be a proliferation of such private programs in the near future, especially in countries where public support for gifted and talented education is less developed. from perceptions and policies to best practices where national policy agenda setting and resource allocation intersect, advancing a sense of national relevance (even urgency) around talent development has proven highly effective in some instances. the national defense education act of 1958, which can be considered the start of gifted education in the united states, is widely understood to have emerged in reaction to the sputnik program of the russian federation, which sparked the cold war and the superpower race to scientific programs. the korean program for gifted education was brought into focus in 1997, shortly after their monetary crisis with the imf, when the government realized it needed to deepen its commitment to developing higher levels of human capital (ibata-arens, 2012). singapore determined that the number of gifted children in the country was insufficient for future growth and enacted a series of policies to attract gifted individuals through scholarships and other forms of encouragement to stay (neihart & teo, 2013). their “guppies to whales” program attempted to identify outstanding students from asian countries and to provide scholarships conditioned on a three-year work bond after graduation (ibata-arens, 2012). in austria, as a result of the 1962 law of school organization, the uniform supply of educational resources to all nationals became an important benchmark for educational success (weyringer, 2013). it was only in 2009 that a formal law, the general decree on the promotion of giftedness and talent, explicitly provided requests and guidance (although not legally binding) related to gifted and talented education (resch, 2014). in response to increasing demands by parents and educators, the austrian research and support centre for the gifted and talented (özbf) came forward with a systematic approach for the continuous development of gifted education (resch, 2014). countries committed to gifted and talented education often try to balance social concerns for equity and educational purposes with appropriate methods and criteria for student selection. in austria, the achievements of gifted education are highlighted by the link between training institutes, nobel prizes, and olympic gold medals (weyringer, 2013). in russia, approaches to identifying and supporting gifted learners include the matching of students to their interests and abilities through summer camps and educational olympiads (pomortseva & gabdrakhmanova, 2015). the united states administers scientifically validated educational tests, which vary from state to state, that both parents and 12 global education review 4(1) teachers can initiate. taiwan, singapore, korea, and many other countries similarly hybridize screening processes to include a combination of standardized tests and teacher evaluations of student aptitude (han, 2007; ibata-arens, 2012; neihart and teo, 2013). in the most developed systems, the identification of gifted talent begins early with well-established criteria and processes, while other countries, especially those that remain reticent to fully embrace gifted education, continue to be content with lessformal approaches. as we have shown, programs of gifted education can be developed in direct relationship to policies or they can emerge more organically, as permitted by policies. in either case, the crucial responsibility of implementation rests with the professionals within educational organizations. most formally established gifted education programs require some degree of teacher training, knowledge exchange, and continuing education for the enhancement of pedagogy and instructional skills, but these do not always ensure the viability of such programs. while teachers, trainers, and education specialists execute programs of gifted education in accordance with their own level of training, their perceptions and dispositions can serve as important catalysts or barriers. a recent survey in finland found that teachers were concerned about the negative side effects of creating special classes and arrangements for gifted students and were reluctant to do so (tirri & kuusisto, 2013). similarly, in the united kingdom, a significant number of teachers believe that since gifted students are in the minority, any expansion of gifted education programs would represent a waste of already scarce resources that could be dedicated to common improvements (kasey & koshy, 2013). such perceptions, apart from whether or not they are accurate, inevitably shape the environment of the educational system and the priorities of educational staff. not surprisingly, the most prevalent challenges faced by those systems of education that have committed to gifted instruction include inadequate teacher preparation and lack of resources for working with gifted learners. to implement successful models of gifted education, schools must rely on teachers who are both properly equipped and appropriately motivated to engage with gifted and talented programs. and those teachers must be provided with rigorous tools and learning environments in which they can effectively teach. sarouphim (2015) suggests that, for lebanon to develop a successful program of gifted education, lebanese universities need to prioritize the training of all educators to better understand concepts of giftedness in order to identify exceptional students. this suggestion mirrors a central recommendation of casey and koshy (2013), that gifted education in the united kingdom must focus more on teacher development in order to increase knowledge of the appropriateness of gifted and talented education and how best to develop gifted learners. along similar lines, austria and poland provide strong evidence for what seems to be a common training deficiency in many countries: topics related to tailoring instruction to gifted students are rarely addressed in teacher preservice training (limont, 2012; resch, 2014; weyringer, 2013). further compounding these challenges of teacher preparation is the absence of good international data, that could be used for planning related to (1) the number of potential gifted students within national or regional systems and (2) teacher qualifications across various instructional domains of gifted and talented instruction. as countries increasingly seek to gain competitive advantage in the global knowledge economy, expansions and refinements of gifted and talented education are bound to accelerate. the rising importance of discovery in all fields of scientific inquiry also suggests that national global dimensions of gifted and talented education 13 priorities in emerging countries/economies will shift (or continue to shift) from the delivery of rote education in stem fields to cultivating greater numbers of innovative and entrepreneurial minds. the likely accompanying drive to identify and train greater numbers of gifted students could prove to either advance gifted and talented education or dilute its relevance. on the one hand, the more resources countries invest in such programs, the more formalized, appropriate and sophisticated they could become. on the other hand, if education systems expand their practices and programs around overly broad gifted and talented criteria (beyond what cognitive science has determined as legitimately gifted), then there is a real risk that more focused and rigorous approaches to gifted education will be diminished. genuine progress in advancing gifted education, then, seems to necessitate the incorporation of definitions of giftedness into education policies that are both scientifically accurate and socially responsive to varied national contexts. doing so will also require consistent alignments between the formation of gifted education policies and the implementation of programs that respond directly to the pedagogical needs of gifted learners. notes 1. reference the research and scholarship of lubinski, d.; benbow, c.p.; kell, h.j.; petrill, s.a.; webb, r.m.; hill, l.; swiatek, m.a.; o'boyle, m.w.; and stanley, j.c., among many others. references aljughaiman, a. m., & grigorenko, e. l. (2013). growing up under pressure: the cultural and religious context of the saudi system of gifted education. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 307–322. casey, r., & koshy, v. (2013). gifted and talented education: the english policy highway at a crossroads? journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 44–65. chien, c., & hui, a. n. (2010). creativity in early childhood education: teachers’ perceptions in three chinese societies. thinking skills and creativity, 5, 49–60. davis, g. a., rimm, s. b., & siegle, d. (2010). education of the gifted and talented (6th ed.). upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. de boer, g. c., minnaert, a. e. m. g., & kamphof, g. (2013). gifted education in the netherlands. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 133–150. european commission. (2006). eurydice 2006. specific educational measures to promote all forms of giftedness at school in europe. retrieved from http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/specific-educationalmeasures-to-promote-all-forms-of-giftedness-atschool-in-europe-pbec3212332/ evered, l. j., & nayer, s. (2000). novosibirsk’s school for the gifted—changing emphases in new russia. roeper review, 23(1), 22–24. fischer, c., & müller, k. (2014). gifted education and talent support in germany. ceps journal: center for educational policy studies journal, 4(3), 31–54. gardner, h. (1983). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences. new york, ny: basic books. gardner, h. (1984). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences (2nd ed.). new york, ny: basic books. gardner, h. (1993). frames of mind: the theory of multiple intelligences (3rd ed.). new york, ny: basic books. gyarmathy, e. (2013). the gifted and gifted education in hungary. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 19–43. han, k. (2007). the possibilities and limitations of gifted education in korea: a look at the isep science-gifted education center. asia pacific education review, 8(3), 450–463. harris, b., & sanchez lizardi, p. (2012). gifted law, identification, and programming in mexico: an overview for school professionals in the united states. journal for the education of the gifted, 35(2), 188–203. ibata-arens, k. (2012). race to the future: innovations in gifted and enrichment education in asia, and implications for the united states. administrative sciences, 2(1), 1–25. ieridou, a. n. (2013). the need for a culturally relevant approach to gifted education: the case of cyprus. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 323–345. ieridou, a. n., & zumwalt, k. k. (2013). the cultural construction of giftedness and gifted education: a critical historical overview. unpublished working paper. kanevsky, l. s., & clelland, d. (2013). accelerating gifted students in canada: policies and possibilities. canadian journal of education, 36(3), 229–271. http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/specific-educational-measures-to-promote-all-forms-of-giftedness-at-school-in-europe-pbec3212332/ http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/specific-educational-measures-to-promote-all-forms-of-giftedness-at-school-in-europe-pbec3212332/ http://bookshop.europa.eu/en/specific-educational-measures-to-promote-all-forms-of-giftedness-at-school-in-europe-pbec3212332/ 14 global education review 4(1) koshy, v., & pinheiro-torres, c. (2013). “are we being degifted, miss?” primary school gifted and talented coordinators’ responses to the gifted and talented education policy in england. british educational research journal, 39(6), 953–978. limont, w. (2013). support and education of gifted students in poland. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 66–83. maksic, s. & iwasaki, k. (2009). perfectionism of academically gifted primary school students: the case of japan. gifted and talented international, 24(2), 51–60. mccann, m. (2005). international perspectives on giftedness: experimental and cultural observations of iq and creativity with implications for curriculum and policy design. international education journal, 6(2), 125–135. miller, g. (2005). exploring perceptions of giftedness in the cook islands maori community. international education journal, 6 (2) 240-246. mueller-oppliger, v. (2014). gifted education in switzerland: widely acknowledged, but obstacles still exist in implementation. ceps journal: center for educational policy studies journal, 4(3), 89–110. neihart, m., & teo, c. t. (2013). addressing the needs of the gifted in singapore. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 290–306. ngara, c. (2006). indigenous conceptions of giftedness in zimbabwe: a comparison of shona and ndebele cultures’ conceptions of giftedness. international education, 36(1), 46–97. o’reilly, c. (2013). gifted education in ireland. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 97–118. pomortseva, n. p., & gabdrakhmanova, e. v. (2015). gifted education in the republic of tatarstan: new challenges and innovative decisions. journal of sustainable development, 8(5), 218–224. resch, c. (2014). national policies and strategies for the support of the gifted and talented in austria. ceps journal: center for educational policy studies journal, 4(3), 9–30. sarouphim, k. m. (2015). slowly but surely: small steps toward establishing gifted education programs in lebanon. journal for the education of the gifted, 38, 196–211. sumida, m. (2013). emerging trends in japan in education of the gifted: a focus on science education. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 277–289. tirri, k., & kuusisto, e. (2013). how finland serves gifted and talented pupils. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 84–96. tommis, s. (2013). gifted education in the hong kong special administrative region. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 259–276. vantassel-baska, j. (2005). domain-specific giftedness. in r. j. sternberg & j. e. davidson (eds.), conceptions of giftedness (pp. 358–376). new york, ny: cambridge university press. weilguny, w. m., resch, c., samhaber, e., & hartel, h. (2013). promoting talent and excellence. salzburg, austria: özbf. weyringer, s. (2013). gifted education in austria. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 365–383. ziegler, a., stoeger, h., harder, b., & balestrini, d. p. (2013). gifted education in german-speaking europe. journal for the education of the gifted, 36, 384–411. about the author(s) brian l. heuser, edd, mts, is currently an assistant professor of the practice of international education policy at peabody college of education and human development of vanderbilt university. professor heuser is a former us embassy policy specialist in the republic of georgia and currently teaches and researches in the fields of international education and human development, global health, and education policy. ke wang, med, is a research associate with the american institutes for research in washington, dc. she is a recent graduate of peabody college of education and human development with a masters degree in international education policy & management. salman shahid, med, is a graduate student in the department of leadership, policy and organizations at peabody college of education and human development. he is currently a masters candidate in the international education policy & management program. 15 global education review 4(1) appendix cross-national perception/policy/program matrix for gifted education country/ region definition/ conceptualization administering agencies programming for gifted students sources of information identification mechanism tracking and differentiation (by school, by class, in class) acceleration allowed enrichment (in school or out of school/after school)miller austria a multidimensional and dynamic conception of giftedness and talent: high performance in intellectual, emotional, social, and artistic fields as well as in sports; giftedness and talent are processes that result from the interaction between individuals’ predispositions, their ability to shape their own development, and the influences of nurture. federal ministry for education, art, and culture; federal ministry of science and research; the austrian research and support centre for the gifted and talented (founded in 1999). yes. most common is the nomination by a teacher or selfnomination with evidence of aboveaverage school performance or high scores in psychometric tests. yes. individualized instruction is generally emphasized. recent decades have seen greater efforts to differentiate gifted from regular performing students. yes. grade skipping; secondary school students are allowed to take university courses. yes. schools are encouraged to provide special courses for gifted students, summer camps for gifted students, or olympiads for math and science students. european commission (2006); resch (2014); weilguny, resch, samhaber, and hartel (2013); weyringer (2013) beijing iq 130+ chinese academy of science. yes. yes. gifted schools, clustering by class (the establishment of a “shaonian” class), and in-class differentiation. yes. most common is grade skipping and enrollment in universities at a much younger age compared to peers. yes. ibata-arens (2012) canada definition is unclear from the source. according to the authors, where it has existed, canadian policy in gifted education has been permissive, enabling decision makers at the school district or school level to determine who, how, and when special programming, including accelerative options, is offered. yes. shown through policy analysis of all canadian provinces and territories. yes. kanevsky and clelland (2013) cyprus no formal definition in the policies; but, culturally, the idea of celebrating difference in unity with the social group has been emphasized. it is also believed that each child has his or her unique talent. none; silence and inaction among the ministry officials. na. no. recent reform reinforces inclusive orientation, but there is currently no official acknowledgement of students with special gifts. teachers are expected to use the single official textbook for each subject to teach the prescribed curriculum to their students. the given content that needs to be taught within a specific time frame and the high student-teacher ratio, with a single teacher as responsible for all students, make the situation more difficult and leave little room for differentiation. ieridou (2013) 16 global education review 4(1) england gifted describes learners who have the ability to excel academically in one or more subjects, such as english, drama, or technology. talented describes learners who have the ability to excel in practical skills, such as sports, leadership, or artistic performance, or in an applied skill. frequent changes in policies and administering agencies. yes. government’s requirement of using a percentagebased identification strategy was taken to encourage use of test-based, quantitative measurements for creating gifted and talented cohorts in schools. na. na. enrichment outside the classroom (in school) was the predominant way of addressing provisions for gifted and talented pupils. koshy and pinheiro-torres (2013) finland finnish legislation does not explicitly mention gifted individuals, but it can be inferred from practices that the finnish follow a multidimensional definition for giftedness: giftedness is excellence in academic and/or co-curricular areas. ministry of education yes. yes. by school: special, highly selective upper secondary schools in finland that feature art, sports, science, language, and ib, e.g., päivölä boarding school for students talented in math and science. yes. allowed by the basic education act 1998. children can enter schools earlier; upgraded schools allow pupils to advance in their studies within a flexible schedule. yes out of school: classes and summer camps offered by university; students are allowed to earn university credits; the millennium youth camp. tirri and kuusisto (2013) germany an individual’s potential for outstanding achievement. non-cognitive personality characteristics (e.g., motivation, work attitude) and environmental factors are both important contributors to achievement. non-governmental associations; nearly all german states explicitly include gifted education in their education acts. na. yes. some states have special schools for gifted students. yes. enrollment in university courses; early entry; grade skipping. yes in-school and outof-school: competitions, academies, and summer camps; a network of schools offer additional classes for their gifted students. fischer and müller (2014) germanspeaking europe (austria, germany, liechtenstein, luxembourg, south tirol, and switzer-land) an increasing number of governments have incorporated guidelines for educating the gifted into their laws and regulations. na. yes. for example, special schools in germany yes. early school entry; skipping grades; programs that allow groups of pupils to advance more quickly through selected subjects or to engage with university coursework. yes. diverse in-school and out-of-school enrichment programs for gifted students. ziegler, stoeger, harder, and balestrini (2013) global dimensions of gifted and talented education 17 hong kong giftedness is multiple intelligence rather than academic excellence alone (education commission, 1990). creativity is also recognized as a core virtue and a generic skill to be developed in the key learning areas of the curriculum, but there is little guidance as to how it should be implemented. hong kong academy for gifted education; reliance on provision from ngos, tertiary institutions, social services organizations, private training agencies, overseas consultants, and education advocacy groups. yes. yes. clustering by class; sorted into gifted schools; in-class differentiation (inclass differentiation is particularly emphasized). yes. yes. chien and hui (2010); ibataarens (2012); tommis (2013) hungary the official hungarian concept of giftedness involves the interaction of important groups of properties: above-average general abilities, aboveaverage special abilities, creativity, and commitment to the task or motivation. the national council of support for the gifted adopted the following simplified definition in 2007: “thus, individuals can be regarded as gifted if their excellent abilities—as a combination of the above four components—enable them to be capable of highlevel achievement in some area of life”. government— national talent council. gifted education is a designated activity in the public education act; the government designated high priority areas in the 2-year action program for 2011– 2012. na. na. na. na. gyarmathy (2013) ireland excellence in general ability, academic ability, creative thinking, leadership, visual and performance art, psychomotor ability, and/or mechanical ingenuity (special education review committee, 1993). no legislation recognizes giftedness as a special education need. yes. talent search— inviting students to take above-level sat. na. na. no direct funding for schools to accommodate the development of gifted students; programs for gifted students are predominantly outof-school. o’reilly (2013) japan no official definition. the equivalent of the word gifted in japanese, sainou, is associated with the belief that talent can be acquired through education and ministry of education, culture, sports, science and technology (mext); japan’s cabinet has thus far approved yes. for the science high school. super science high school (a small number of students affected); no other formal tracking. na. out-of-school programs for students talented in science; juku (private tutoring that offers students ibata-arens (2012); maksic and iwasaki (2009); sumida (2013) 18 global education review 4(1) nurture. other japanese equivalents for the word gifted, however, imply that giftedness is what someone is equipped with at birth (sumida, 2013). giftedness is also often associated with perfectionism. four science and technology basic policies. the third (2006–2010) and the fourth (2011–2015) were proposed to develop the individuality and abilities of gifted children. advanced and/or accelerated learning opportunities in the form of early education, arts and sports education, and other forms of special instruction). korea excellence in both academic and co-curricular areas. national research center for gifted and talented education, ministry of science and technology, ministry of education; a total of 25 science-gifted education centers affiliated with universities have been established since the law of advancement of gifted education was enacted in 2000. yes. teacher recommendations, aptitude tests, tests of creative problemsolving abilities in math and science, interviews, and scientific experiments. of the school population, 4% are being served under the gifted education system. gifted high schools. yes. special admission to universities for prizewinners from international science and math olympiads. gifted classes as a pull-out program in regular schools; gifted education centers for primary and middle school students operated by universities and school boards. han (2007); ibata-arens (2012) lebanon na; a lack of a fundamental understanding of the construct of giftedness. no. no mention of the education of gifted students in the law. the country lacks measures and assessment procedures for identification purposes. programs for the gifted are essentially nonexistent in the country. in beirut, the capital, a few private schools that cater to students from high socioeconomic backgrounds offer some enrichment programs to high-achieving students. however, these programs are limited in content and scope. sarouphim (2015) netherland s cognitive talent as well as talent in music, dance, sports, arts, language, poetry, and so on. talent as a natural ability that needs to be developed; the development of this talent depends on a strong, supportive environment. every child has talent and can be outstanding in certain areas. department of education, culture, and science. na. programming (differentiation within the classroom and by class within the school) for gifted students is a choice of the individual school. yes. “science focal points”— cooperation between universities and at least 20 primary schools, since 2010, to bring scientific research into the daily practice of the school; enrichment programs in school; pull-out classes; pre-university enrichment program. de boer, minnaert, and kamphof (2013) global dimensions of gifted and talented education 19 poland government and the public: the characteristics of a highly gifted pupil include a high intelligence level, creativity, and a strong motivation for learning. the pupil can display various abilities, such as linguistic, logical and mathematical, visual and spatial, kinaesthetic, musical, interpersonal, intrapersonal, scientific, existential, and spiritual. polish ministry of national education; ministry of science and higher education; ministry of culture with the support of subordinate institutions for artistic schools; universities. yes (before enrollment in specialized schools). yes (the academic secondary school of nicolaus copernicus university has a multistage recruitment process that involves tests and analysis of previous achievement). yes. mostly by school: specialized schools (music, visual arts, dance, or sports); the academic secondary school of nicolaus copernicus university (for academically gifted students—offers enrichment, ability grouping, mentoring, prosocial activities, and opportunities related to university-level coursework, seminars, and so forth). yes. supported by education laws in poland. yes. at the secondary level: interest clubs and additional classes; out-ofschool enrichment programs; olympiads, tournaments, and contests. at the tertiary level: individualized learning plans within the interdepartmental studies program. limont (2012) russia best and the brightest for the advancement of research in mathematics and physics. boarding schools that are independently managed in affiliation with universities of moscow, leningrad, novosibirsk, and kiev. yes. applicants for the school first demonstrate competence by their performance in the mathematics and physics olympiads. most successful students are invited to a summer program at the school, followed by a final selection of students. yes. tracking by school/specialized boarding schools. na. yes. early enrollment in university classes, participation in mathematics clubs and problem-solving competitions, and active participation in regional and national olympiad contests. evered and nayer (2000) singapore exceptional giftedness is identified through four sources of information—a psychological report, achievement test scores, work sample, and teachers’ recommendation. ministry of education, gifted education branch yes. top 10% on achievement exams are eligible to take additional testing. yes. sorted into special schools for domainspecific talents; clustering by class (school-based gifted program in which students follow a special curriculum and proceed directly to yes. subject acceleration— student is placed at a higher grade level in a specific subject while remaining with his or her age cohort for other subjects; early primary yes. camps, carnivals, field trips, and competitions in virtually all domains, with the goal to provide mentoring opportunities for students. ibata-arens (2012); neihart and teo (2013) 20 global education review 4(1) the universityqualifying exams or the ib diploma); in-class differentiation. school admission; grade skipping. switzerlan d the majority of educators, boards of education, and cantons recognize giftedness as “multiple intelligences”: musical, artistic, sports, and social abilities are promoted as well as academic abilities. very few school administrations continue to view gifted education from the one-sided perspective of academic and intellectual capabilities. absence of a national strategy on gifted education, but all 26 cantons have developed their own policies for identifying and cultivating giftedness; most cantons also request each individual school to indicate its gifted education policy. yes. thinking and learning styles as well as aspects of student motivation and self-concept are criteria for the selection. screening is typically implemented in third grade classes and conducted by qualified experts. yes. in-class differentiation; ability grouping. yes. early enrollment in university courses; curriculum compacting. yes. pull-out programs, special resource rooms, and participation in competitions. mueller-oppliger (2014) taiwan initially iq 130+; definition has broadened to include general intelligence, academic character, art, creative ability, leadership skills, and other specialties over time. in taiwan, creativity is a national goal of education policy. chinese association of gifted education. yes. yes. clustering by class (based on intelligence, artistic talent, or athletic talent). yes. yes. teachers put emphasis on curriculum design and teaching methodology but do not feel that they are in an environment that facilitates creative teaching. chien and hui (2010); ibataarens (2012) united kingdom policies encourage schools to consider the variety of gifts and talents demonstrated by pupils, including academic, sport, leadership, artistic performance, or in an applied skill. some teachers had decided to ignore the policy requirement of making a percentage list of gifted and talented pupils and opted to use a strategy that focused on recording individual pupils’ specific abilities and interests in different areas. gifted and talented coordinators at local and school levels are responsible for implementing the requirements of national gifted education policies; termination of national policy in 2011. yes. prior to 2011, the policy stipulated that 5% to 10% of each cohort are to be placed on a gifted and talented register at the school; thus, educators predominantly used national or school test results. yes. ability grouping in both primary and secondary schools for core subject areas; in-class differentiation is not emphasized as much as are pullout programs. yes. in practice, some schools offer acceleration— mostly in the form of providing accelerated content. yes. summer schools, subject workshops, online activities, and pull-out programs are how most schools provide gifted education. casey and koshy (2012) zimbabwe shona and ndebele cultures, na. na. ngara (2006) global dimensions of gifted and talented education 21 (indigenou s population ) according to survey data, endorse the belief that giftedness is inborn, is an aptitude or outstanding ability relative to the average person, has a spiritual element, and involves expertise in various domains (including leadership). there is little evidence of gifted programming. the author (ngara) advocates for a selection mechanism through which outstanding ability, creativity, expertise, consistency of behavior, spiritualism, inspiration, and achieving success against odds and adversity are all tenets of giftedness. mexico those who stand out in the social and educational environment in one or more of the following areas: science, social-humanistic, artistic, and physical ability. private institutions, advocacy groups, and associations. yes. after a psychoeducational evaluation, students are permanently identified as gifted; some private institutions use iq tests. yes. differentiated learning within the regular classroom na. yes. harris and sanchez lizardi (2012) new zealand (the maori) the collective, belonging to the group, as integral to intelligence. good memory, good communication skills, skills in the performing arts, good knowledge of the bible, and carefully reasoned understanding of right and wrong. na mccann (2005); miller (2005) heuser galley approved heuser galley approved-no footer microsoft word 403-1711-1-rv ce approved 14 global education review 4(3) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jones, denisha (2017). when all else fails, we must protect childhood. global education review, 4 (3), 14-16.  when all else fails, we must protect childhood denisha jones trinity washington university failure is difficult to accept for many people. competition and winning are so engrained in our individual psyches that there is often little room to accept failure. although we know that some failure is necessary to eventually reach success, we tend to shy away from accepting that our efforts have resulted in failure. does accepting failure mean we give up? not necessarily, but it does mean that we must rethink our approach and determine what can be learned from our failures that can help us as we move forward. perhaps when we accept failure, we make space for success to find its way into our actions and strategic plans that follow. well, it is time to acknowledge we have failed at preventing the global education reform movement (germ) from infecting public education. moreover, as we admit to this failure, we must develop a new plan to move forward that takes what we have learned into account. we must protect childhood. some might question whether it is fair to say we have failed. those active in the fight to stop the privatization of public education are likely not ready to declare our work a failure. they may be willing to concede that we are not winning some of the battles, but retain hope that we may eventually win the war. however, the truth is that for now, we have failed. we have failed to stop the expansion of school choice that threatens the existence of public schools through the proliferation of charters and vouchers. in the united states, most school-age children are educated in traditional public schools, but given that the new secretary of education, betsy devos, is a strong proponent of school choice, we can expect to see this trend reversed in the future. school privatization is a tool for standardization, which is one of five features of germ (sahlberg, 2012), and although it may be progressing slowly in the united states, we have failed to stop it from taking root and undermining the foundation of public education. we have failed to stop another feature of germ-test-based accountability systems, which punish and reward schools and teachers based on student achievement on standardized tests. the opt-out movement developed as a way to resist test-based accountability by encouraging parents, students, and teachers to opt-out of high-stakes standardized testing. the growth of the movement has threatened the ability of some states to test 95% of all students mandated under federal education policy, and this led the department of education to issue warning letters to 12 states in 2015 (strauss, 2016). this might seem as though we are winning, especially since the new every student succeeds act (essa) includes language that protects the right of parents to opt out, but it also maintains the 95% testing requirement. ______________________________ corresponding author: denisha jones, college of arts and sciences, trinity washington university, 125 michigan ave. ne, washington, dc 20017 email: jonesdeni@trinitydc.edu when all else fails, we must protect childhood 15 states may be able to choose the type of tests they administer to children, but test-based accountability is here to stay. so this is another fight that we have failed to win. in addition to failing to stop accountability through standardized testing, we have also failed to stop the push down of developmentally inappropriate standards onto young children. the common core standards, adopted by most states, impose expectations on young children that are out of step with their development. and although some states have decided to drop the standards and/or drop either of the two assessments related to them, the push for more rigorous academic standards for young children remains a cornerstone of education reform. early childhood experts continue to voice their concern over the harm these standards cause to young children, to their ability to self-regulate, and to develop a sense of efficacy as learners. these concerns go unrecognized by policy makers, legislators, and business leaders who draft and mandate standards for all young children. when we are shown the research on how kindergarten is the new first grade and preschool is the new kindergarten, we have to recognize our failure to stop developmentally inappropriate standards from invading early childhood education. there are still more ways that we have failed. we failed to stop the deprofessionalization of teaching by preventing fast-track teacher preparation programs like teach for america that use underprepared young people as teachers in the neediest schools. we have failed to stop the assault on public education through school closures in communities of color. we have failed to stop racist school discipline practices that suspended 42% of black boys from preschool in the 20112012 school year (u.s. department of education office of civil rights, 2014). we must acknowledge these failures so we can understand the limits of our collective efforts and decide how we can refocus our energies towards a future that will lead to more successful outcomes. my first suggestion is to change the narrative around germ and the attacks on public education. attacking the accountability movement and the push for tougher standards has proven to be a losing strategy. our insistence that these measures harmed student development and learning has branded us as unwilling to be held accountable for ensuring that all students can achieve. the more we resist test-based accountability and inappropriate reforms the more we are branded by the corporations and privateers as resistant to innovation. the narrative must be changed. we must convey clearly that we want the same thing every citizen wants: to protect childhood. not childhood innocence from being exposed to controversial topics and issues, but actual childhood. the time that children have to be young and to learn and develop. the special period of life that provides every person with the foundational skills to develop their personality and build their potential. a test can never measure what a child can become and children should not be exposed to certain ideas and knowledge based on their zip code. we must reframe our fight in a way that no one can put forth a valid objection. protecting childhood is goal many can support because most of us agree that childhood is a unique time of life that deserves to be separated from the adult years. along with changing the narrative, we must make protecting childhood a nonpartisan issue. the assault on public education is not just a conservative attack by republicans against liberal democratic education. the truth is the democratic party aligns with many aspects of germ, and many democratic leaders are supporters of choice, privatization, and testbased accountability. we cannot win if we continue to work under the assumption that we are engaged in a partisan fight. as we rebrand 16 global education review 4(3) our message, we must make sure that it is put forth as a nonpartisan one that everyone can support. we can learn from other special interest groups that advocate for their members through nonpartisan lobbying, such as the america association of retired persons (aarp). their policy agenda involves advocating on issues that are important to their members, but they maintain a nonpartisan focus which allows them to experience success instead of failure. advocating for elderly members who pay a fee for representation is different than advocating for the protection of childhood for the most vulnerable members of our society who have no voice. but both must be presented as nonpartisan issues that all can support. lastly, we must emphasize why it is so important to protect childhood. why should others care about the state of childhood? we need to make it clear that protecting childhood is a matter of national security. it may seem farfetched to invoke such nationalistic rhetoric, but the truth is the future of the united states of america depends on our ability to protect childhood. we cannot produce capable leaders who can take on global problems if we allow childhood to become an experimental playground for corporations and social engineers. solving the global climate crisis, responding to overpopulation, eradicating world hunger, and curing global diseases are tough issues that require competent individuals to work collectively to engender new solutions. we have the best chance of producing citizens capable of leading the future when we protect the childhood of all children. in conclusion, we must learn from our failures and develop a new strategy that promotes the vision of early childhood education we seek. the reggio emilia philosophy of early childhood education developed after the devastation of world war ii and with a desire to rebuild a society free from oppression. this effort resulted in a world-renowned approach to educating young children that posits the image of the child as capable and strengthens the role of teachers, parents, and the environment in working collectively to support the growth and development of young children. perhaps we can learn from our failure to stop germ and develop a philosophy centered on the protection of childhood that is nonpartisan and driven by the necessity to ensure national security. giving up is not a solution and doing the same thing we have always done and expecting different results will only lead to more failure. when all else fails, we need to protect childhood. references sahlberg, p. (2012). global educational reform movement is here! retrieved from https://pasisahlberg.com/global-educationalreform-movement-is-here/ strauss, v. (2016, january 28). u.s. education department threatens to sanction states over test opt-outs. washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/answersheet/wp/2016/01/28/u-s-education-departmentthreatens-to-sanction-states-over-test-optouts/?utm_term=.783eb103bf9c united states department of education office of civil rights civil rights data collection. (2014). data snapshot: early childhood education. retrieved from https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/docs/cr dc-early-learning-snapshot.pdf about the author denisha jones, phd, is an assistant professor in the college of arts and sciences at trinity washington university. dr. jones began as a kindergarten teacher and then a preschool director before spending the last 12 years in teacher education. dr. jones is active in the fight to stop the corporate takeover of public education, organizing and speaking at numerous rallies, marches, and conferences. she is a board member and administrator for the badass teachers association, inc., united opt out national; and she is on the advisory board of defending the early years. her research interests include developing critical consciousness in pre-service teachers, organizing activist research projects that challenge the privatization of public education, and leveraging the intersection of public policy, social movement lawyering, and critical social justice education to dismantle the neoliberal assault on public education. creating cultures of fear 189 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: counsell, shelly, lynn, & wright, brian l. (2018). high-stakes accountability systems: creating cultures of fear. global education review, 5 (2), 189-202. high-stakes accountability systems: creating cultures of fear shelly lynn counsell university of memphis brian l. wright university of memphis abstract a phenomenological case study by counsell (2007) explored and investigated the phenomenon of what happened as florida’s a+ plan intersected with the life histories of one beginning african american female third grade teacher and one veteran white female third grade teacher at demographically different school communities in one florida school district. habermas’ theory of communicative action served as an instructive framework used to examine and contemplate two key emerging trends based on lived experiences of the various social (communicative) actors. in addition to the beginning and veteran third grade teachers, other participating social actors included third graders, their parents, other third grade teachers and school principals at the beginning and veteran teachers’ schools as well as urban school teachers and personnel at urban schools in the same school district. across the different social actors at each respective middle-income, low-income, and high-poverty school community, the emerging trends and patterns revealed: (a) a continuum of moral and ethical dilemmas specifically and (b) an overall continuum of fear in general. social actors’ varied lived experiences with fear in relation to high-stakes testing illuminated the following: (a) a fear of speaking out; (b) a fear regarding children’s emotional welfare; (c) fear as it intersects with race; and (d) a fear of taking the test. from these testimonials, the continuum of fear toward the fcat (according to third grade student reflections), proved to be the most serious (if not detrimental) consequence of florida’s high-stakes accountability system. these insights can help guide and inform future accountability decisions under the new every student succeeds act. keywords educational policy, accountability, assessment, equity, social justice introduction the every student succeeds act (essa) signed by president obama on december 10, 2015 restores the responsibility for determining how to use federally required tests for accountability purposes to individual states. the essa is designed specifically to ensure that states (a) set high standards that prepare children for college and career; (b) maintain accountability for designating resources to struggling students and _______________________________________ corresponding author shelly lynn counsell, university of memphis, ball hall 412b, 3798 alumni ave, memphis, tn 38152 email: slcnsell@memphis.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 190 global education review 5(2) schools; (c) develop strong systems of school improvement; (d) preserve annual assessments without crowding out teaching and learning; and (e) increase young children’s access to high-quality preschools (executive office of the president, 2015). along with the widely accepted accountability measures employed by most states (i.e., english-language proficiency, graduation rates, and state achievement test scores) the new federal education law mandates that states must incorporate at least one “other indicator” as a key measurement at the student level (blad, 2017). in light of this latest quest by the federal government to improve accountability and increase student achievement, it is crucial for state legislators, school administrators, and educators to reflect on the teaching and learning outcomes that resulted (both anticipated and unforeseen) from nclb, race to the top, and state-related education legislation and how the “lessons learned” can now guide and inform future accountability decisions under the new law. throughout his presidency, president obama held fast to his convictions that every student deserves a world-class education. since the new law’s overarching goal is to increase all children’s access to an excellent education (needed to achieve social justice for all learners), states must then consider what kinds of assessments will (and will not) best support and advance high-quality learning and teaching. by doing so, states can use the negation to inform the affirmation, that is, what not to do (assessments that impede quality teaching and learning) are then used to inform what to do (assessments that support quality teaching and learning). klein (2017) reports that while 16 states and the district of columbia have thus far submitted state essa plans none have been approved by the department of education. congress has further eliminated regulations created during the obama administration to help clarify parts of the law (with encouragement from the trump administration), resulting in less clarity and more confusion. as a case in point, this article examines the impact of florida’s a+ accountability system on teaching and learning and what it meant for different learners and school communities. the insights gained can then be used to guide and inform the development of future state assessments and accountability systems that help to ensure that every child has access to an excellent education that can in turn, increase the likelihood of social justice for all learners, particularly in urban settings. habermas’ theory of communicative action helps us to understand and explain how social systems (like public education) employ rationalized steering mechanisms to operate and manage organizations (such as public schools) in order to accomplish specific goals, outcomes, and mandates (e.g., increasing achievement based on test scores; using retention practice to end social promotion). florida’s system rationale for education has historically placed a heavy reliance on scientific assumptions that uniform measures can be developed and applied in order to substantiate direct evidence of student learning, teacher effectiveness, and school quality (stone, 1999). yet, ignored in this reliance on scientific assumptions are concerns about unfairness, which sadly, have not “altered the use, misuse, and abuse of tests for (mis)judging the abilities, capabilities, and potential” (ford & helms, 2012, p. 188), of our nation’s children, but particularly those children from nondominant communities. when education systems overemphasize limited measurements (test scores) to determine achievement regardless of individual lifeworld school cultures (the taken-for-granted meanings, goals, values, beliefs and lived experiences concerning schools, educational philosophy, learning, and teaching practice), the likelihood that disconnect, conflict, and opposition between systems and lifeworlds will result (counsell, 2007; counsell & wright, 2015). if the creating cultures of fear 191 system succeeds in overwhelming the lifeworld, transposing the lifeworld rationale with the system rationale, and thus making the lifeworld subservient to the system, lifeworld colonization is complete (habermas, 1987). a full continuum of experience: turning educational lifeworlds upside down a phenomenological case study habermas (1987) insisted scientific knowledge and data alone is insufficient when constructing the full realization of the human experience (and unknown human potential). phenomenological studies (schram, 2003) investigate the meaning of the lived experiences of small groups of individuals as it pertains to the concept or phenomenon of interest (in this case, how different teachers respond to high-stakes testing). as teachers encounter practice in the present, they inform their experiences with past and possible future perspectives that translate into an individual’s stock of lifeworldly knowledge. since no two teachers’ stock of lifeworldly knowledge are identical, teachers will likewise respond to high-stakes testing differently, thus revealing a continuum of experience and response across teachers (as well as other social actors) within and across school communities. in order to study social phenomenon, the investigator must seek opportunities to: (a) observe human behavior; (b) examine social actors’ multiple lived experiences; and (c) recognize language, through which meaning is constructed and conveyed (dialogue and reflections) as the central medium through which meaning is constructed and conveyed (schram, 2003). this phenomenological case study traced the history of two different teacher’s instructional practices across curricular content areas in light of high-stakes testing according to “intentions that contribute to it and give it character and direction” (mcewan & egan, 1995, p. 180). teaching practices were revealed by: (a) participant interviews, (b) classroom observations, and (c) student products. the following sections describe and discuss the participants/school sites, data collection, and interpretive frames used to understand the phenomenon related to instructional practices and learning. participants and school sites counsell (2007) completed a phenomenological investigation in one large school district in florida to examine what happened as the life histories of one beginning african american third grade teacher and one veteran white third grade teacher intersected florida’s high-stakes accountability system and what this meant for learners and teaching practice at different school communities. the african american beginning third grade teacher participant (with less than 5 years teaching experience) taught at a lowincome school (62.8% enrolled in free/reduced lunch program) with a larger transient school population. the third-grade student demographics at the beginning teacher’s school included 40 percent white, 31.9 percent african american, 18.8 percent hispanic, 1.7 percent asian, and 9.9 percent multiracial. the white veteran third grade teacher participant (nine years of teaching experience) taught at a middleincome school (only 14.2% enrolled in free/reduced lunch program) with a largely nontransient school population. the third-grade student demographics at the veteran teacher’s school included 81.4 percent white, 11.7 percent african american, 4.4 percent hispanic, 1.1 percent asian, and 1.4 percent multiracial. the veteran teacher’s school had always ranked as an a+ school based on fcat scores (with the exception of only one b ranking in 1999-2000) since the inception of florida’s a+ education plan for school reform. the beginning teacher’s school has experienced ongoing struggles, earning an a+ ranking in 2002-03, and 200407; a b ranking in 2003-04, 2007-2010, 2011-12, 192 global education review 5(2) and 2013-14; and a c ranking in 1998-2002, 2010-11, and 2012-13. additional participants (three third grade teachers, 143 third graders, 11 parents, and two school administrators at the beginning and veteran teachers’ schools as well as one urban pre-k teacher, one urban guidance counselor and one retired principal in the same urban school district) provided perspectives and insights in an effort to help illustrate how the full-continuum of their lived experiences with florida’s high-stakes testing were impacted. data collection and analysis a constant comparative method (bogdon & biklen, 2003) was used to collect and analyze ongoing data throughout the study. when two entities like schools and teachers are compared and contrasted, this can potentially lead to a rank and sort that positions one school or teacher over the other. for this reason, a comparative method helps the investigator to better understand the curricular decisions and pedagogical practices used by each teacher and what this meant for learner opportunities and outcomes within the context of their individual school cultures. teachers’ curricular decisions were informed by, but not limited to, what they believed were possibilities and constraints as they navigated and negotiated the various steering mechanisms (institutional policies and practices aligned with state standards) and accountability measures (test scores). the point of qualitative inquiry, as noted by eisner (1998), is to attempt “to understand what teachers and children do in the settings in which they work” (p. 11). by comparing and contrasting teachers and schools, the goal is to “learn about individual classrooms and particular teachers in ways that are useful to them” (eisner, 1998, p. 12) and further help to guide and inform policies and practices nationwide. data was obtained through unstructured, open-ended interviews with all adult participants. student narrative essays by 143 third-graders at the beginning and veteran teachers’ schools were written on the friday prior to fcat administration. classroom observations of language arts and math lessons and student products were collected during one week in each of the beginning and veteran teachers’ classrooms after fcat (counsell, 2007). three interpretive approaches were used to organize, examine, and analyze emergent themes and categories. the key approaches included: (a) summary sheets for adult interviews (clarke, shore, rhoades, abrams, & miao, 2003); (b) matrices of interpretive categories conceptualized from raw data (miles & huberman, 1994); and (c) the eventual triangulation (structural corroboration) of data sources based largely on teacher interviews, classroom observations, and student products (eisner, 1998). findings and gained insights based on the collected data, the emergent trends and patterns in the counsell (2007) phenomenological study revealed: (a) a continuum of moral and ethical dilemmas specifically and (b) an overall continuum of fear in general. social actors’ (teachers, administrators, parents, and third graders) varied lived experiences with fear in relation to high-stakes testing illuminated the following: (a) a fear of speaking out; (b) a fear regarding children’s emotional welfare; (c) fear as it intersects with race; and (d) a fear of taking the test. from these testimonials, the continuum of fear toward the fcat (according to third grade student reflections), proved to be the most serious (if not detrimental) consequence of florida’s high-stakes accountability system. according to the obtained data in this phenomenological study, the system of highstakes accountability overwhelmed the lifeworld at the low-income and high-poverty schools, transposing the lifeworld rationale with the system rationale, and thus making the school creating cultures of fear 193 lifeworlds largely subservient to the high-stakes accountability system, and thus, the lifeworld colonization was complete as it pertained to teaching practices and student learning experiences. a continuum of moral and ethical dilemmas examining different social actors’ lived experiences across school communities in the counsell phenomenological study revealed a correlation between the extent of academic struggle and the extent of how communities responded to high-stakes testing. in other words, “the greater the ‘perceived deficit’ lifeworld needs of the school community (e.g., high student mobility/transfer rate, low socioeconomic status, ethnic diversity) the greater the response by teachers and school administrators to make instructional and curricular accommodations designed to specifically increase test scores” (p. 262). since social actors’ perspectives also varied within individual school communities, a continuum of agreement/disagreement with the curricular and instructional responses likewise occurred. when school communities responded collectively in ways that individual members disagreed due to lifeworld beliefs and convictions about learning and instruction, moral and ethical dilemmas resulted. can too much of a good thing really be bad? the white veteran teacher worked at a middleincome school with an 81 percent white student population in which parents actively volunteered at school and partnered to support the school community. her school historically ranked as an a+ school and as a result, teachers expressed less pressure, greater autonomy, and empowerment to continue using the curricula and practices employed by educators prior to florida’s a+ plan and the fcat. the veteran teacher wanted to believe that florida’s highstakes testing resulted in positive outcomes such as narrowing the achievement gap; early identification for intervention; increased parent and educator awareness of individual learning styles and needs; raising expectations for all learners; and using assessment data to inform and guide instruction. the flip side of this optimistic worldview is the counterview that, if taken to the extreme, the approaches (steering mechanisms) become more coercive and punitive (and developmentally detrimental) in nature. the veteran teacher simultaneously feared that a failure to use assessments, curricula, and teaching practice in developmentally appropriate ways could potentially lead to a misdiagnosis of add (attention deficit disorder) and learning disabilities due to developmentally unfair expectations and practices. similarly, an overemphasis on test scores (as the all-powerful steering mechanism) could de-emphasize extracurricular activities that promote social, emotional, physical, and language (communication) development in favor of academic tutoring. in general, the veteran teacher exclaimed, we’re blasting the academics, but we’re forgetting that children need to grow socially, emotionally, and cognitively. we got a whole person here, not just a brain. we got hearts, and feelings, moods and emotions, and needs. and at what expense are we developing the cognitive? what expense to the child? what are they missing out on? (p. 145 & 146) as the newest version of an accountability system and steering mechanisms, the essa offers examples of “other indicators” like school climate and student engagement as possible accountability measurements (blad, 2017). some advocacy and interest groups have urged state legislators and bureaucrats to adopt more “whole-child” factors (a lifeworld perspective of developmentally appropriate practices and learning) to help reshape (or redirect) education 194 global education review 5(2) systems and steering mechanisms toward a greater lifeworld view; the same sentiment shared by the veteran teacher above. can children miss what they don’t know? the african american beginning teacher in the counsell phenomenological study had just taught three years in third grade under the guise of florida’s third grade mandatory retention based on fcat reading and math scores at the time of the study. the student population at the beginning teacher’s school experienced greater mobility and diversity. many of the beginning teacher’s parents worked multiple jobs that meant they had less time to help the beginning teacher meet their children’s learning needs; maintain ongoing communication with the teacher and school; and volunteer to support the school’s efforts, programs, and events. from the beginning teacher’s perspective, the kinds of activities children enjoy most (such as large group projects) were the learning experiences and teaching practices her students experienced the least in her classroom. she insisted that, while teachers were readily aware of the instructional compromises made, students were essentially ‘none-the-wiser,’ asserting, “i don’t think they know because you can’t really miss what you haven’t had” (p. 127). to illustrate her point, she suggested that students couldn’t ‘miss’ science projects if they have ‘never experienced’ science projects. clearly, the teachers at the low-income school faced many difficult choices and anguished over how the florida’s a+ plan’s system rationale for teacher and student accountability based on test scores impacted teaching practices, curricular decisions, and subsequent learning opportunities and experiences for students. in fact, the dilemma faced by the african american beginning teacher regarding her selection of teaching practices and instructional decisions in response to the system rationale of accountability based on test scores within her school’s increasing high-stakes culture (as described above) is not uncommon or an isolated experience, particularly for african american boys. the national institute for early education research (2007) determined that low-income children representing historically marginalized groups like african american children are the least likely to receive high quality educational experiences. stipek (2004) similarly found that didactic, direct instructional teaching dominated by isolated facts and basic skills within negative (coercive and generally punitive) social climates are prevalent in lowincome schools serving minority populations. children from historically marginalized groups in low-income urban classrooms who are disproportionately subjected to skill-drill instruction and teacher-directed, text-based learning may in turn, become easily bored and less inspired than children experiencing high quality education opportunities and experiences promoted at the veteran teacher’s middleincome school. classroom cultures most often experienced by african american boys in particular, according to emdin (2016) can best be described as “oppressed places” fixated on rules and discipline. classroom settings that fail to intrinsically motivate learners that are too often encountered by african american children have higher rates of disciplinary action (barbarin, 2013) with low-warmth and highconflict learning atmospheres (split, hughes, wu, & kwok, 2012). when the education week research center surveyed 634 teachers to gauge what they think should be measured to help assess school quality, teachers ranked socialemotional learning (23 percent) and student engagement (19 percent) as important “other indicators” (blad, 2017). this emerging trend seems to suggest a growing opposition to the system’s overwhelming emphasis on test scores without consideration of learner motivation, inspiration, enthusiasm, innovation, and creativity that are associated with high quality teaching and learning. creating cultures of fear 195 research has likewise demonstrated pervasive trends that indicate low expectations, a predominant colonized worldview by the system rationale of accountability for african american boys that continues to persist (hallinger, bickman, & davis, 1996; mckown & weinstien, 2008) and is ever-pervasive when learners’ aptitude, capability, and academic potential is largely derived from the rank and sort steering mechanism of standardized test scores. as noted by counsell & boody (2013), the pygmalion phenomena, based on the work by rosenthal & jacobson (1968) demonstrated clear correlations between high teacher expectations and increased student intellectual growth and performance compared to lower teacher expectations leading to lowered growth and performance. elementary teachers’ tendencies to harbor lowered expectations for african american boys may help to explain the pervasive academic achievement gap experienced by african american males that is only further exacerbated within high-stakes testing culture and system rationale of accountability with the most dire consequences for low-income, urban schools largely populated by african american students. most dire consequences for the most vulnerable children educators and school personnel at urban schools in counsell’s phenomenological study described struggles and challenges that were even more dire than those described by the beginning teacher. according to one white female pre-k teacher at a high-poverty urban school, her school’s response to florida’s a+ plan and subsequent high-stakes testing steering mechanisms served to subvert the developmentally appropriate lifeworld view of the whole child with a colonized developmentally ‘inappropriate’ worldview driven by the system’s accountability rationale for kindergartners and teachers: kindergarten teachers taking down centers (blocks, housekeeping); limiting social and communication skills; limiting building experiences and talking about it; less problem solving; and more seatwork. recess trend is that in a lot of schools, recess is not allowed anymore – no recess after lunch at a lot of schools. there are developmental repercussions for no recess/outdoor play. all [children] learn the same thing at the same time and [schools] penalize anyone for not knowing. (p. 255) the pre-k teacher’s professed counter worldviews are similar to the veteran teacher who warned that while high-expectations are great – unfair developmentally inappropriate expectations are detrimental. as a result, this pre-k teacher chose to leave kindergarten ‘in protest’ after a 32-year career. this veteran prek teacher refused to succumb to the system rationale of accountability based on test scores; the colonized worldview of kindergarten academic rank and sort; and the subsequent teaching practices and curricular steering mechanisms like the mandated 90-minute reading block in her kindergarten class. altogether, the system rationale of accountability and the resulting colonized lifeworld view of rank and sort achievement based on test scores created a moral dilemma that the pre-k teacher could not accept or resolve. she pleaded, “it’s killing them! no joy anymore in kindergarten!” (p. 255). like the kindergarten teacher at a lowincome urban school, a white female guidance counselor at another high-poverty urban school described similar ‘perceived’ disparities with a deficit worldview of life experiences and circumstances: our kids don’t come from a print rich environment. high-income kids have a 30,000-word vocabulary and emergent skills – not our kids. nutrition and exercise another factor – no access. no 196 global education review 5(2) major grocery store within walking distance of school. convenience stores contribute to obesity / malnutrition. now punishment for circumstances beyond child’s control! (p. 253) as this guidance counselor (and others) have suggested, a complete disregard for differences across learners while simultaneously holding all children, teachers, and schools accountable to the same standards, has essentially resulted in punishing children (and entire school communities) for having the aforementioned differences, albeit deficit views. a continuum of fear as noted earlier, different social actors’ lived experiences across school cultures and communities suggest that, “the greater the (perceived) lifeworld needs of the school community, the greater the response in making instructional and curricular accommodations designed specifically to increase test scores” and satisfy the system rationale of accountability. social actors’ lived experiences likewise reveal that the greater the colonization of the lifeworld perspective (as conceptualized by habermas, 1987) by florida’s accountability system rationale, the greater the likelihood that various social actors experience fear in relation to highstakes testing. essa enables states and districts to decide how to intervene in their lowest-performing schools that largely serve historically marginalized groups (klein, 2017). however, returning student and school performance measurement decisions (steering mechanisms) back to the states does not necessarily guarantee that individual states will enact education policies (steering mechanisms) that will increase every child’s access to an excellent education (with a lifeworld whole child approach) that will in turn, better achieve social justice for individual learners. civil rights advocates are concerned that the u.s. secretary of education betsy devos and the trump administration will not take a critical and careful review of state plans (accountability systems and steering mechanisms) needed to ensure that student performance in struggling schools is adequately addressed using high quality teaching practices, learning experiences, and opportunities. hence, it is imperative to take into account the past lessons learned, according to the most relevant stakeholders – children, parents, and teachers. fearful to speak out research by nichols, glass, and berliner (2006) demonstrated important trends that suggest that poorest states and those with greater numbers of students of color adopt more punitive accountability policies (steering mechanisms), like florida’s mandatory third grade retention, compared to states with largely white and more affluent student populations. furthermore, correlation analyses conducted by nichols et al. (2012) revealed a relationship between highstakes testing pressure and student achievement in 25 states (florida was not included) that suggested pressure to raise test scores is significantly and positively correlated with state poverty index. this means that, for the nation’s poorest children, teachers working in lowincome schools nationwide indicate that they feel greater testing pressure as a result of highstakes testing accountability systems in contrast to their more privileged contemporaries working with affluent populations, much like the beginning and veteran third grade teachers in this phenomenological study. not only has the system rationale of accountability colonized the worldview of education achievement based on test scores, an even more pervasive worldview of deficit, disparities, and disadvantage is colonized for struggling schools in urban communities where skill-drill and direct-instruction practices predominate as the best approach to narrowing the ongoing achievement gap according to biased standardized test scores. as noted by ford and helms (2012) “the notion that tests are colorblind, neutral, and unbiased measures is a creating cultures of fear 197 fallacy. [moreover] adopting an assumption of equal opportunity to learn is naïve and an excuse to absolve decision-makers of accountability for the improper use and abuse of tests” (p. 187). throughout the completed interviews in the counsell study, a ‘fear of ramifications for speaking out’ echoed among school employees at all levels. out of sheer frustration, the pre-k teacher admitted, “a lot of teachers are as outraged as i am but don’t join fcar (florida coalition for assessment reform). they don’t speak out. it amazes and dismays me a lot” (p. 258). the inner-city guidance counselor was likewise not surprised by the lack of response by principals and offered the following explanation: principals are fearful of speaking out. due to possible repercussions, they feel they cannot speak out to the press as a school employee without approval only as a private citizen. that’s how government builds fear through intimidation. you mucked it up...now just shut up and do as we say. (p. 258) she added, “there’s immense pressure on you if your district does not conform or promote fcat and end social promotion at every grade level” (p. 258). the guidance counselor felt morally compelled by her professional beliefs (and lifeworld view of teaching and learning) to speak out and held all professionals culpable as participants (even if passive-compliant) for failure to speak up in opposition. fearful of children’s emotional welfare in the counsell phenomenological study, two third grade parents from the beginning teacher’s low-income school, eight third grade parents and one fourth grade parent from the veteran teacher’s high-income school also agreed to be interviewed. white parents of ‘struggling’ readers in particular (i.e., children with ‘below’ grade level performance) at the middle-income school experienced fear toward retention (considered the most dire steering mechanism by these parents) and high-stakes testing. unlike school district employees, these parents had no reservations about speaking out and they indicated no fear of possible ramifications. unfortunately, parents at the low-income school lacked the financial resources (fiscal steering mechanisms) like the parents at the middleincome school, who were readily prepared to resort to private schooling, if necessary, to avoid negative consequences (such as mandatory retention) for their children that would result if they failed the fcat. one white mother shared that her son was sent home during fcat math with a headache. she was adamant that her son never experienced migraines prior to third grade. as a pharmacist, she expressed clear concerns that children’s text anxiety would lead to increased medications for young children. fear’s intersection with race while this guidance counselor expressed an outward concern and empathy for the unique challenges faced by many of the children at her urban school, she continued to employ a deficit worldview of the community she served, due in large part to the fact that her school’s families live far below the poverty line in a community with a higher crime rate. absent in this teacher’s deficit worldview is the consideration of race as a factor that tends to circumscribe the schooling experiences of students of color, in particular, african american students, in favor of the belief that ‘economic class’ is the main culprit in a society that believes itself to be post-racial. the guidance counselor further recounted that the daily life of these children and their families included, “fear of eviction and homelessness; fear of abandonment by parents; fear of drive-by shootings; fear of illness; fear of going to bed hungry; and fear of abuse. kids are at war!” (p. 256). for these third graders, mandatory retention meant their school was no longer a ‘safe haven’ from fear. 198 global education review 5(2) fearful of the test-taking experience any continuum of complex lived experiences with high-stakes testing must include what third graders were thinking, saying, and feeling as well. third graders in three classes at the middle-income school and six classes at the lowincome school in the counsell phenomenological study were provided with a sheet of paper with the typed question, “how are you feeling about next week (february 27-march 3) at school?” on the friday prior to fcat week. this query was designed specifically to first, determine whether children were thinking about the fcat as a high-stakes steering mechanism, and if so, what was their range of thoughts and feelings toward the fcat and retention? a statistical analysis of the 143 student narratives completed revealed that 87 students explicitly referred to taking the “fcat” or “test” (e.g., “i feel nervous about the fcat. it might be hard”). another 53 students made references related to pass/fail or other comments suggesting a focus on fcat testing (e.g., “how am i feeling a little excited to past third grade”) for a total of 140 students or 98 percent; only three students’ comments were unrelated. the most frequent emotional identifier used by 79 students was ‘nervous’ for a 55 percent statistical response rate with over 70 percent of the third graders expressing some level of fear toward the fcat. along the continuum of fear, children who expressed the most serious levels of nervousness, anxiety, or stress wrote comments such as, “so nervous, very scary, or nervous wreck” at one end of the spectrum. feelings of confidence were indicated by comments like, “confident, not scared, or feel smart” at the opposing end. despite the confidence expressed by some children, the assumption that tests, as a scientific steering mechanism that objectively measure something of importance about the person, such as cognitive and academic abilities, continues to undermine the intellectual and personal development of millions of children (ford & helms, 2012; toldson, 2012). students’ responses (as illustrated below) revealed a full continuum of fear toward the fcat and retention across third graders at both the beginning teacher’s low-income and the veteran teacher’s middle-income schools irrespective of ses, gender, reading level, language, or race. third graders most fearful responses included: child 1: “i am feeling so scared and nerves [sic]. help!” child 2: “i am feeling so nerves. and may be a little excited. but a lot of scared! please help me mrs. ____!” child 3: “i am feelling like a nevis rek [sic]. though part of me wonders what it’s like. i feel like my world has be terned [sic] up side down. it is very scary. the more informashon [sic] i get the more i’m skerd [sic]. i don’t want to take the teast [sic].” child 4: “i’m scared! i’m nerves [sic]! i don’t want to fall agian! i don’t want to be the oldest kid in the class!” third grader 1: “i fill like an nevis [sic] reck [sic]. like thars a knot in my stumik [sic], mist [sic] in wheth [sic] butrflis [sic] and a frog.” (p. 243) while 66 percent of the beginning teacher’s class participated in the free/reduced lunch program, only 16 percent of the veteran teacher’s class participated as well. in spite of this difference, 15 out of 19 students (79 percent) in the veteran teacher’s class and 15 out of 17 students (88 percent) in the beginning teacher’s class indicated some level of fear toward the fcat and retention. clashing worldviews of education after the counsell phenomenological study was completed, both participating elementary schools earned an a+ ranking (steering mechanism) for that calendar year. in the veteran teacher’s third grade class, one student creating cultures of fear 199 with special needs earned a level 1 fcat reading score and all remaining students earned level 3 fcat reading scores or higher. at the beginning teacher’s school, 13 third-graders (approximately 10%) earned level 1 reading scores; it is not known whether any of these students were from the beginning teacher’s class. the middle-income school continued to earn consecutive a+ rankings while the lowincome school earned a b ranking in 2007-2010, 2011-12, and 2013-14; and a c ranking in 201011, and 2012-13 since the study. which lifeworld view matters most? the counsell (2007) phenomenological study’s examination of different social actors’ lived experiences with florida’s high-stakes testing accountability system across demographically different school cultures and communities revealed the emergence of a full continuum of human experience with the various steering mechanisms that are further complicated by issues of race, class, gender, ability, language, and disability. while distinct and definitive trends and patterns clearly emerged across the different groups in the study, there is no singular description, illustration, or consensus regarding high-stakes testing accountability systems and steering mechanisms across all actors and groups. the many complexities are best understood as an ongoing continuum of lifeworld experiences and worldviews about teaching and learning, individually and collectively within, and across groups. historically, american public education was created to serve and benefit white, middleclass children largely at the exclusion of other groups, namely, african american children. corporate industry’s worldview of education has always focused on the demand for an educated workforce. the ongoing partnership between public education and industry has long existed and has been a largely prosperous relationship, particularly for white america. the parents, who actively opposed florida’s high-stakes testing, were white, middle-class working parents at the middle-income school who had benefited economically from their own public education experience. for various reasons however, their own children struggled in reading. the system that previously served and worked well for these parents as learners has now placed their own children at-risk for failure. the african american mother at the lowincome school did not fully benefit from her public education experience (or have the same access to an excellent educational experience) to the same extent as her white counterparts at the middle-income school; a concern expressed by president obama throughout his presidency. she worked more than one job to meet her family’s financial needs. this mother’s efforts to ensure her child’s access to a high-quality education that would in turn, lead to greater financial opportunity and mobility, was an ongoing struggle and reality, with or without high-stakes steering legislation, laws, or mandates. steering mechanisms in the form of educational mandates, policies, and procedures have long been employed throughout this nation’s history to direct social systems to support the capitalist economy. test scores have been a powerful steering mechanism used to track predominantly white students into honors classes, stem (science, technology, engineering, and math) courses, and gifted classes while overrepresenting marginalized groups (including african americans and hispanics) in special education classes. the balance of power in our capitalist society has always favored the corporate business worldview of education. even if federal and state legislation (steering mechanisms) include language that declares an outward lifeworld view intended to increase every child’s access to an excellent education, this goal will never be realized as long as states and school districts continue to employ rank and sort steering mechanisms according to 200 global education review 5(2) standardized test scores based on meritocratic assumptions about ability and performance. failure to embrace a whole child worldview that guarantees every child equal access to high quality educational experiences will in turn, continue to contribute toward an ongoing deficit worldview of learners in urban settings used to justify teaching and learning inequities and disparities with subsequent life outcomes that in the end, trumps any sincere attempt to fulfill social justice for everyone. in stark contrast to the white middle-class parents in this study, african americans and their descendants worldwide have a universal legacy of cultures of fear, historically forced to endure, survive, and overcome realities (deficit worldviews and steering mechanisms) that other privileged groups would declare intolerable and unacceptable. the essa returns the responsibility for performance measurement to states and school districts. as noted by daria hall, the interim vice president for government affairs and communications at the education trust (an advocate for poor and minority students) warns that civil rights advocates must keep an eye on essa implementation: we have to be really cautious because we know that states have a long track record of not making tough decisions when it comes to the interest of low-income students, students of color, englishlanguage learners. if states are going to walk away from those students, we are going to lose whatever progress we’ve made with those students, who now make up the majority of our public school population (as cited by klein, 2017, p. 3) the recent national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) report, task force on quality education (2017) openly acknowledges the education nightmare faced by a multitude of parents and families in low-income and working-class african american communities (much like the african american teacher’s school and other urban schools described in the counsell phenomenological study). the historical plight of african american families’ ongoing struggle within ill-suited educational systems were never created nor developed with black children in mind. as a result, it is imperative that both traditional and charter systems going forward are accountable and transparent about the quality of teaching and learning experiences they provide to the communities they serve. regardless of whether assessments and accountability systems are relegated by the federal or state legislatures, accountability assurances and steering mechanisms must employ authentic student performance measurements that serve to promote and support high quality teaching and learning needed to ensure that all learners have access to an excellent education. if we fail to heed the lessons learned in states like florida, history will continue to repeat itself and as a country, we will again, fall short of our national goal to increase all learners access to high quality education and the desire to achieve the ultimate worldview of social justice for everyone. about the author(s) shelly l. counsell, edd, is an assistant professor and early childhood education program coordinator in the department of instruction and curriculum leadership in the college of education at the university of memphis. her research and publications examine a range of early childhood education topics related to constructivism, diversity, inclusion, democratic learning communities, reflective cultures of practice, inquiry teaching, and early stem. in addition to high-stakes testing, she has also used habermas’ theory of communicative action as an instructive framework to examine special olympics, head start, and early/emergent literacy. current research projects focus on collaborative partnerships designed to improve stem/steam and language development/emergent literacy pedagogy and practices with early childhood inservice teachers, preservice teacher candidates, and young children within diverse, high quality public school classroom and early childhood program settings. creating cultures of fear 201 brian l. wright, phd, is an assistant professor of early childhood education in the department of instruction and curriculum leadership in the college of education at the university of memphis. his research and publications examine the role of racial-ethnic identity in the school achievement of successful africanamerican males in urban schools prek-12. his current research projects include high quality early childhood education programs for all children, but especially those children living in poverty, culturally responsive and responsible school readiness for african american boys (preschool and kindergarten), literacy and african american males, african american and latino males as early childhood teachers, and teacher identity development. he is the author of the brilliance of black boys: cultivating school success in the early grades with contributions by shelly l. counsell. references barbarin, o. 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(2012). editor’s comment: when standardized tests miss the mark. journal of negro education, 81(3) 181-185. 54 global education review 4(4) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: riebenbauer, elisabeth, dreisiebner, gernot & stock, michaela. (2017). providing feedback, orientation and opportunities for reflection as key elements for successful mentoring programs: reviewing a program for future business education teachers. global education review, 4 (4). 54-69 providing feedback, orientation and opportunities for reflection as key elements for successful mentoring programs: reviewing a program for future business education teachers elisabeth riebenbauer university of graz, austria gernot dreisiebner university of graz, austria michaela stock university of graz, austria abstract the introduction to teaching is critical for novice teachers. near the end of their master’s program, students of business education and development in austria spend one semester at an assigned school. they are introduced to teaching, while being assisted by peer students, mentoring teachers, and a companion course. mentors receive special training and preparation in advance, thus contributing to a high quality mentoring program. the program is organized threefold: (1) providing feedback, (2) opportunities for reflection and (3) career orientation. the purpose of this paper is to assess key elements of successful mentoring programs and to question which competences of mentors contribute most to the success of those programs. between 2012 and 2015, 188 persons (student teachers and their mentors) responded to an online survey at the end of their mentoring program. additionally, data from a study (1,245 questionnaires) regarding the student teachers’ perception of their own competence was utilized, allowing for a comparison of student teacher confidence in their abilities before and after the mentoring program. the present results provide insight into the key elements of successful mentoring programs; both from a student teacher’s and mentor’s perspective. during the semester, students showed an increase regarding their self-perception of their professional competences. it was found that students and mentoring teachers valued feedback after each lesson more than feedback in regular meetings. opportunities for reflection (e.g. exchange with peer students, learning diaries) were considered helpful. the mentoring program helped students to decide whether to become a teacher or not. keywords key elements of mentoring, student teaching, competence development, reflection, business education and development introduction mentoring activities and opportunities for collaboration with peers are important for the career orientation of novice teachers (smith & corresponding author: dr. elisabeth riebenbauer, department of business education and development, university of graz, 8010, universitätspl. 3, 8010 graz, austria. email: elisabeth.riebenbauer@uni-graz.at mailto:elisabeth.riebenbauer@uni-graz.at 55 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities ingersoll, 2004). this paper assesses the key elements of a mentoring program as implemented for students of the master’s program, business education and development, during their semester of student teaching. business education and development (bed) is a university program with polyvalent purposes in austria. at the universities of graz, innsbruck and vienna1, it is implemented as a master’s program which takes five semesters and provides professional preparation (1) for the teaching profession at higher and medium level secondary vocational colleges as well as (2) for other professions related to the field of business administration (slepcevic & stock, 2009). however, although students of bed may become business teachers, there are differences to other programs of teacher education: first, students of bed need at least two years of professional practice in a field other than teaching (e.g., accounting, management, human resources) after they have completed their degree and before they are admitted to a teaching position at school. second, the teaching practice – a form of school internship – is integrated towards the end of the bed master’s program, with a higher number of lessons spent in the classroom (180 lessons in total) and a more densely structured mentoring and accompanying program – which results in a master’s program of five semesters instead of four semesters. in accordance with an edict of the austrian ministry of education, the teaching practice takes one semester at a higher and medium level secondary vocational college. the ministry defines the following objectives: students of business education and development are supposed  to use their knowledge, abilities and skills with regard to educational science, business didactics, teaching methodology and business administration in real school life situations,  to internalize confident and competent behavior with regard to classroom management,  to meet the organizational challenges of everyday school life in compliance with legal requirements,  to independently design and execute competence oriented lesson plans and  to gain comprehensive insight into various not-directly-teaching-related activities of teachers (austrian ministry of education, 2011). bed students at the university of graz go through their teaching practice with a peer student. they start with about two weeks of observing and analyzing the lessons of their mentors, the classroom dynamics and the school reality. the training is planned to provide teaching experiences where students gain confidence and develop competent behavior by planning and executing teaching sequences or isolated lessons. the main part of the practice consists of stand-alone teaching, in which students plan their own lessons independently over a longer period of time, conduct them alone, or in the presence of their mentors, and evaluate their own progress (riebenbauer & stock, 2012). the mentors are experienced teachers who are chosen by their school principals and the supervising authority. they participate in a three semester training course including selfreflection, coaching, peer review and supervisory activities. after the initial training, they engage in further annual training. the aim of accompanying the students during their semester of teaching practice is to optimally mentor and prepare students for their future occupational field. the mentoring program as newly implemented within the bed master’s program in 2011, focuses on feedback, reflection and professional orientation – with all three aspects being provided by mentoring teachers at school and in a companion course at the university. the focus of the university course is on scientific mentoring, group reflection of individual experiences, and linking of theory and practice. as pedagogical expertise and professional competence cannot be gained without profound reflection (arnold, 2005), adequate instruments to support competence 56 global education review 4(4) development and reflection have been embedded such as learning diary, evaluation grid for competence development and eportfolio. due to the multiple purposes of bed, the mentoring program also provides orientation for the students to help them to decide whether to take up the teaching profession at all. this paper aims to identify key elements of a successful mentoring process by analyzing the theoretical background, the process, and the perceptions of student teachers as well as of mentoring teachers. for this purpose, results from an accompanying study of student teaching and from an accompanying study of the eportfolio implementation in the bed master’s program at the university of graz are presented and discussed. literature review caine and caine (1997) identified four core qualities that enable future teachers to cope with arising challenges of learning and teaching: (1) self-efficacy based on authenticity, (2) the ability to build and maintain relationships to support selforganization, (3) the ability to connect subjects, discipline and life and (4) the capacity to engage in self-reflection to grow and adjust. korthagen and vasalos (2005, p. 47) noted, “reflection is currently a key concept in teacher education.” as a consequence, the willingness and capacity to reflect should be fostered early and sustainably within the professionalization process of teachers (stock, riebenbauer, & neuböck, 2015). korthagen introduced the cyclical model alact to support student teachers’ reflection on practical situations at school as well as their behavior, skills and beliefs during these situations. alact is named after the first letters of its five phases of reflection: action, looking back on the action, awareness of essential aspects, creating alternative methods of action and trial. the purpose of the alact model is to structure the reflection process of the novice teacher and enable systematic guidance by an expert (korthagen & kessels, 1999; korthagen & vasalos, 2005). beginning teaching experiences are very challenging and the experience is crucial for novice and student teachers. they often have high expectations concerning the benefit of teaching practice phases especially with regard to their professional socialization and further competence development. in contrast, some experts doubt positive effects of these school internships or claim necessary criteria for a sustainable learning process during student teaching phases. such criteria to ensure sustainable student teaching might be compulsory learning objectives, cooperation between universities and schools, competent support and guidance of the students through mentoring teachers, integration into school routines and staff, professional discourse between experts and novices and the connection of different internships and accompanying seminars (hascher, 2006). the implementation of support through mentoring teachers is also requested in the austrian national education report. experienced mentors are generally role models who can assist beginners experiencing difficulties and foster experiential learning through reflection phases (mayr & neuweg, 2009). mentoring model mentoring has the potential to generate several benefits for mentees, mentors and schools; however, it may also have the potential to harm, if a systematic mentoring program and adequate framework conditions are missing (hobson, ashby, malderez, & tomlinson, 2009). awaya et al. (2003) suggest understanding mentoring “as a relationship rather than a role with a set of preconceived duties” (p. 45). they stress the unique relationship between mentor and student teacher based on trust, respect, sharing expertise and moral support. the general aim of mentoring is to provide professional support while entering the teaching profession. the theoretical concept behind the bed mentoring program in graz is based on the three-level-mentoring of niggli 57 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities combining relevant action levels with corresponding forms of communication (2001; 2003). 1. the first level is the level of practical action respectively, the visible teaching performance in class. the mentoring for this level focuses on the knowing-how to teach in order to optimize teaching skills and behavior in classroom. the core of the mentor-mentee-communication is feedback, which is provided immediately after the lesson held and in weekly mentoring sessions. 2. the second level is the level of communication. the knowing-that, meaning the background knowledge behind visible actions including scientific and educational theories, is kept in view. the dialogues between mentees and mentors concentrate on reflection in the form of reflective metacommunication to differentiate planning ideas, to integrate educational theories and to analyze the students’ competence development. 3. the third level of mentoring is the level of personal development which is approached by person-oriented coaching. the potential, strengths and weaknesses of the mentee are at the center of the mentoring process with a focus on orientation for career choices by clarifying knowledge about the professional self of the novice teacher. nigglis’ three-level-mentoring provides appropriate incentives via feedback, reflection and coaching for the further development of the students’ professional, social and personal competences. the several forms of communication in this model enable novice teachers to link their individual teaching experiences with their theoretical knowledge and their innate beliefs (winkelbauer, 2013). mentoring tools additional corresponding mentoring tools or instruments were developed for the implementation of this mentoring approach in the bed teaching practice in graz. the objective was to foster intensive reflection of one’s own learning and acting – an inner dialogue to analyze one’s own learning progress and performance during student teaching, supplemented by the external view of experts. three instruments – evaluation grid for competence development, learning diary, and eportfolio – were used in the mentoring sessions at school and in the companion course at university. evaluation grid for competence development this tool enables documentation and analysis of development of the student’s competence over the teaching semester by comparing internal and external assessment. the grid covers a comprehensive list of essential topics and competence areas related to teaching such as lesson observation, preparation, classroom work, learner’s assessment, contribution to everyday school life and teacher personality. strengths, weaknesses and potentials are discussed by comparing the self-image (student) and the external perception (mentor) during and at the end of the semester (riebenbauer & stock, 2012, 2013). learning diary students maintain a learning diary via the learning platform moodle over the entire duration of the student teaching. the entries are initiated by pre-formulated sentences and cover expectations, personal learning objectives, first impressions at school, individual teaching methodology, experiences with performance assessment, teacher personality and professional orientation. the students received twofold support with the diary: an external coach gives personal feedback on their reflections by asking additional questions, and the lecturer of the companion seminar at the university analyzes the results anonymously for a group reflection in the seminar (riebenbauer & stock, 2012, 2013). 58 global education review 4(4) eportfoliobed students in graz create an electronic reflection and development portfolio over the entire course of studies. the purpose is to help students to become aware of their own learning processes and results by visualizing and reflecting on their progress to acquire competence throughout their studies. this eportfolio (or epf) is embedded in the curriculum with three seminars at the beginning, middle and end of the studies. these seminars are organized by an external coach from the academy for new media and knowledge transfer who supports portfolio work and reflection processes by individual and group feedback. additional aims are to prepare and follow up the teaching experiences in order to bridge the theorypractice-gap as well as to facilitate the transfer from university to professional life and to promote lifelong learning (riebenbauer & stock, 2012, 2013). reflection as key component for career guidance the semester of student teaching plays a crucial role in the professionalization process of future business educators – regarding their competence development as well as regarding the decision whether they want to choose the teaching profession. one aim of the semester of student teaching is to provide career guidance to the students of the bed master’s program whether to enter the teaching profession, or not. since the bed master’s program serves polyvalent purposes, students may work as a teacher or as a qualified worker in the field of business administration. important factors for this decision are the student’s beliefs whether he or she is suitable for the teaching profession, i.e., the person’s own efficacy expectations. according to bandura (1977) one’s own efficacy expectations depend on one’s own previous accomplishments, experiences from the observation of others (in this case: mentors, peers), verbal persuasion and an emotional linkage to the topic. social cognitive theory (bandura, 1986) states that learning from the model of other persons (in this context professionals or peers) is crucial for developing one’s own vocational choices. getting the students to reflect upon their previous accomplishments and their experiences from observing other people therefore is considered a key component of the mentoring program as implemented into the bed master’s program. research methodology the current research utilizes data from two different studies: (1) a study of student teaching at the department of bed which evaluates the mentoring program for young business educators at the end of their master’s program, and (2) a study of students’ selfperception regarding their competences before and after their semester of student teaching as documented by self-reflections in their eportfolios. (1) accompanying study of student teaching the study of the student teaching semester includes two perspectives: (a) student teachers, i.e., the students within the bed master’s program who are currently in their semester of teaching practice and (b) mentoring teachers, i.e., the teachers who supervise the students at their training schools. bringing together both perspectives allows for a better evaluation of the mentoring process, since it takes into account that various actors and institutions are involved: while the student teaching itself takes place at selected schools outside the university, there is an companion course held at the department of bed, where students have the opportunity to exchange and discuss their practical experiences in sessions guided by two proficient educators. all activities of the accompanying study are coordinated via this course. procedure at the end of their student teaching, students are asked to complete an online questionnaire about their personal perception of the 59 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities companion course at the university, the sequence of events during their student teaching semester (e.g., activities at their first day in school), their mentoring teachers at school, their teaching companion at school (i.e., their peer student in the bed master’s program) and the instruments applied to assist their competence development (e.g., learning diaries). mentoring teachers receive a modified version of the questionnaire, which is supplemented by questions regarding their mentored student teachers and their own need for advanced training. the questionnaire is sent at the end of the semester to all students in their teaching practice semester and to all mentors who are supervising those students.2 students as well as mentoring teachers remain completely anonymous. because it is not possible to identify individual students, the online study is neither an instrument for evaluation nor for surveillance of students’ and mentoring teachers’ activities; the purpose is to evaluate and to further develop the mentoring program. participants the online questionnaire was sent out to students and mentoring teachers in the winter term 2012/13, summer term 2013, winter term 2014/15, and summer term 2015. ninetyseven students completed the questionnaires during this period. this represents a return rate of 97.98 percent. ninety-one mentoring teachers responded, which represented a return rate of 57.24 percent. however, this does not imply that 91 different mentoring teachers contributed to the survey, since some mentoring teachers were active supervising students in more than one semester.3 limitations although the anonymity of the survey should result in a smaller number of socially acceptable answers, this approach brings a limitation concerning data analysis. to gather data both from students’ and from mentoring teachers’ perspective would theoretically enable a comparison of both perspectives on an individual level. due to the anonymity of the participants only a semester-wise comparison of the perspectives is possible. another limitation is linked to the timeframe of the survey: the prime objective of the mentoring program was to assist students’ competence development and reflection without spending too much time completing questionnaires, only a single survey was conducted at the end of each semester, leading to the disadvantage that students might not have detailed memory about important aspects during the beginning of their practice phase. (2) accompanying study of the eportfolio-implementation within their eportfolio, students reflect upon their competences and record their most distinctive competences in written form. the epf-work is closely integrated into the curriculum for the bed master’s program and is mandatory for all students. therefore data from the accompanying study of the epfimplementation allows for close insight into students’ self-perception of their competence development. procedure within their first, third, and fifth semester, students visit designated courses at the department of bed where they reflect upon their competences under the guidance of a professional epf-coach (dreisiebner, riebenbauer & stock, 2017). at the beginning and at the end of each of these three courses, the students complete questionnaires in order to evaluate the implementation process of the epf and to reflect upon their recent competence development (see figure 1). each student creates a code to be used for all six questionnaires to enable tracking of the competence development of each student while granting anonymity to the participants. 60 global education review 4(4) figure 1: research design and sample size of the epf-accompanying study. adapted from stock and winkelbauer (2012, p. 52). participants starting in 2011 (stock & winkelbauer, 2012), the study includes all students in the bed master’s program. up to the summer term 2016, 1,245 questionnaires were completed by the students. due to the research design, students complete questionnaires before beginning student teaching (i.e. at the end of the third semester) and after they have finished student teaching (i.e. at the beginning of the fifth semester). these questionnaires q 2.2 (n = 229 students) and q 3.1 (n = 137 students) are the focus of this paper, since they enable a direct comparison of students’ self-perception of their own competences before and after the teaching practice. limitations the study relies on data voluntarily provided by the students via answering questionnaires, instead of relying on the content of the students’ individual portfolios. students’ portfolios remained anonymous although they would allow for a deeper insight into students’ selfperception of their competence development. in addition, the epf does not represent a formal (self-)assessment of students’ competences. the epfs as well as the questionnaires of the accompanying study rather contain students’ self-perception of their competences than measuring their actual competences. findings the aim of the research presented within this paper is to assess key elements of successful mentoring programs and to analyze which competences of mentors are critical to the success of mentoring programs. after a semester of teaching, students of bed have a higher perception of their professional competences, indicating the success of the mentoring program. students as well as mentoring teachers identify fast and informal feedback and opportunities for reflection provided to them as valuable for their competence development. (1) assessing the impact of the mentoring program. measuring the impact of a mentoring program with respect of the competences of an individual student is a complex task, since competences as defined by weinert (1999) cannot be measured directly. according to weinert (1999) competences are learnable cognitive skills, which include the ability to solve specific problems, but also the motivational, social and volitional readiness to do so. therefore, observations can only provide information about the students’ performance, but not about their competence level. however, data from the accompanying study of the epf-implementation allows for an observation of students’ selfperception of their competence development. in particular, new competences attained during the semester of student teaching, and shifts in 61 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities students’ self-perception of their most distinctive competences are considered. the findings reported in the accompanying study only represent an excerpt of the total findings of the epf-implementation (slepcevic-zach, riebenbauer, fernandez, & stock, 2015; stock, 2010; stock & winkelbauer, 2012). new competences obtained during sudent teaching the questionnaires completed at the end of each of the three epf-courses asked students to name their newly discovered competences during their recent epf-work. these competences were later classified into the four competence dimensions according to peterssen (2009): social competence, self-competence, methodological competence and professional competence.4 figure 1 shows the proportions of newly found competences according to the four competence dimensions from q 2.2 (i.e., the semester before the teaching practice) and q 3.2 (i.e. the semester after the teaching practice). the absolute number within the bars represents the average number of competences specified by each student claiming to have obtained new competences since the last epf-session. the length of each bar represents the share of the specific competence dimension among the whole competence spectrum of newly obtained competences. an average student5 discovered 0.58 new competences at q 2.2 and 0.52 new competences at q 3.2. at q 2.2 students reported the largest share of newly obtained competences within the dimension of professional competences (0.26 new competences per student), whereas they discovered a relatively smaller number of competences in the dimension of methodological, social and self-competence. two semesters later at q 3.2 this proportion changed: students reported more social competences and less professional competences that at q 3.1. figure 1: number of newly found competences for an average student. 0.09 0.09 0.11 0.11 0.12 0.16 0.26 0.17 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% q 2.2 q 3.2 s h a re o f n e w ly o b ta in e d c o m p e te n c e s a m o n g t h e w h o le c o m p e te n c e -s p e c tr u m professional competence self-competence methodological competence social competence s tu d e n t te a c h in g 3rd semester 4th semester 5th semester 62 global education review 4(4) at q 2.2, 45 out of 229 students reported newly found professional competences. most of these competences are competences in the field of pedagogic or didactic. at q 3.2, 19 students reported to have found new competences since q 2.2 within the dimension of professional competences. all of these newly found competences were competences regarding pedagogic or (subject) didactic. the newly found methodological competences were also linked to the semester of teaching practice: most students reported an increase in the ability to present content. during their third semester, students intensively work on their professional competence (e.g. accounting and business administration or planning lessons for business subjects). therefore, they achieve relatively more professional competences at q 2.2. by the fifth semester, students have reached the end of the master’s program and therefore discover fewer new professional competences. this suggests that students are well prepared with respect to professional competences when they enter into their semester of student teaching, and that this semester, rather, helps students to acquire new self-competences such as learning readiness, stress-resistance, endurance and tolerance. students’ most distinctive competences within every questionnaire of the epf-study, students were asked to identify their most distinctive competences. in general, students identified three competences as their most distinctive ones. the average number of the students’ self-perceived most distinctive competences during the third semester (q 2.1, q 2.2) and the fifth semester (q 3.1, q 3.2) is reported in figure 2. the numbers in the bars represent the average number of competences reported by the students for a specific competence dimension. the length of a bar represents the share of this competence dimension among the other competence dimensions. figure 2: number of competences of an average student from q 2.1 to q 3.2 (aggregated to the four competence dimensions) 1.0 0.9 0.8 0.9 0.5 0.5 0.5 0.6 1.1 0.9 1.0 1.0 0.3 0.4 0.7 0.6 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% q 2.1 q 2.2 q 3.1 q 3.2 s h a re o f c o m p e te n c e d im e n s io n s o f a n a v e ra g e s tu d e n t professional competence self-competence methodological competence social competence 3rd semester 4th semester 5th semester s tu d e n t te a c h in g 63 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities during the semester of student teaching, students’ perception of their professional competence and self-competence increased. the largest increase from 0.4 competences per student to 0.7 competences can be found in the dimension of professional competence. the selfperception of students’ social competence remained almost constant in the period between the third and the fifth semester. due to the structure of the curriculum of the bed master’s program, all students completed their semester of student teaching between q 2.2 and q 3.1. however, extracurricular activities (such as starting to work at a tax consultancy agency alongside their studies) could affect the self-perception of one’s competences. since no further seminars were scheduled within the curriculum of bed during the semester of student teaching, the increase in professional and self-competences may have originated from the semester of student teaching or from extracurricular activities. after one semester of student teaching, the students of the bed master’s program reported an increase in self-perception of their professional and self-competences (as shown in figure 2). however, students reported at q 3.2 to have discovered primary social and selfcompetences as new competences since q 2.2 (as shown in figure 1) – although these competence dimensions showed little increase as seen in figure 2. based on mentor observations in the accompanying course, the following explanation is offered: students begin their semester of student teaching well prepared in professional competence, and the student teaching helps them to recognize their existing professional competences. therefore after their semester of successful teaching, when asked about their most distinctive competences, students have a higher perception of their professional competence than before. in addition, the students might have discovered new competences (e.g., within the dimension social competence) since q 2.2, but they might not necessarily count them among their most distinctive competences. (2) key elements of successful mentoring programs to identify key elements of successful mentoring programs, students and mentoring teachers were asked to respond to an online survey. both the companion course at the university as well as the mentoring activities at school were assessed. figure 3 illustrates which elements of their mentoring teachers’ supervision were considered as helpful by the student teachers. feedback as critical component during their semester of student teaching, students received feedback on their lesson planning, their in-classroom work, as well as on their contribution to general school-activities and their teaching-personality. the student teachers valued most feedback provided immediately after their teaching lesson. seventyseven percent of the students agreed that direct feedback proved helpful; 73 % agreed that the fact that their mentors always took time for their requests was helpful. these items [1] and [2] – reported in figure 3 – represent situations in which the mentor interacted with the student on a personal level, in which students received feedback on their teaching performance or in which the mentor discussed their concerns directly after the lesson. items regarding the role of the mentoring teacher as a role model concerning his specific competences were considered as less helpful by the student teachers. students considered their mentors’ professional and social competence to greater impact than their mentors’ didactical competences. the evaluation grid for competence development represents a tool to provide structured feedback during two designated meetings of the students with their mentoring teachers. in comparison to the feedback directly after the lesson (which was evaluated most helpful), this mentoring element received lower ratings by the students. 64 global education review 4(4) figure 3: helpful mentoring elements – student teachers’ perspective. from the student teachers’ perspective, direct feedback and individual supervision are important aspects to ensure their own competence development. mentoring teachers and student teachers largely agreed about the key elements of successful mentoring programs. mentoring teachers received the same items, but were only allowed to respond to the four items their assigned student teacher profited most from. table 1 shows which elements were considered most helpful by the mentoring teachers and contrasts these results with the student teachers’ perspective. for the student teachers’ perspective in table 1, only the answers for agree were compared. mentoring teachers likewise stated, that the most helpful elements within their mentoring were direct feedback to the student teachers after each lesson and their high involvement regarding students’ requests. fifty-two percent of the mentoring teachers considered weekly meetings at scheduled times as helpful. however, since students valued the direct and individual feedback more, students placed less importance on meetings at fixed times than their mentoring teachers. 15% 16% 38% 46% 46% 54% 54% 58% 61% 64% 73% 77% 39% 40% 33% 34% 33% 32% 29% 27% 27% 21% 18% 15% 22% 24% 19% 13% 14% 10% 8% 8% 6% 8% 5% 4% 16% 16% 4% 7% 3% 6% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% [12] [11] [10] [9] [8] [7] [6] [5] [4] [3] [2] [1] agree rather agree rather not agree not agree no answer [1] direct feedback after the lesson held [2] the mentor always took time for my requests [3] reliability of the mentor [4] social and self-competence of the mentor [5] professional competence of the mentor [6] subject didactical competence of the mentor [7] possible solutions for problems being discussed [8] feedback in the next meeting with the mentor [9] methodology of the mentor [10] embedding of meetings with mentors into the weekly timetable [11] discussion of the evaluation grid for competence development in the middle of the semester [12] discussion of the evaluation grid for competence development at the end of the semester 65 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities table 1 helpful mentoring elements – mentoring teachers’ and student teachers’ perspective. mentoring teachers student teachers direct feedback after the lesson held 80% 77% the mentor always took time for my requests 75% 73% possible solutions for problems being discussed 58% 54% social and self-competence of the mentor 56% 61% professional competence of the mentor 53% 58% embedding of meetings with mentors into the weekly timetable 52% 38% reliability of the mentor 52% 64% subject didactical competence of the mentor 48% 54% methodology of the mentor 44% 46% feedback in the next meeting with the mentor 40% 46% discussion of the evaluation grid for competence development in the middle of the semester 23% 16% discussion of the evaluation grid for competence development at the end of the semester 19% 15% the item discussion of the evaluation grid for competence development is not as accepted as other mentoring activities as shown in figure 3 and table 1. the discussion of the grid aims to enable a comprehensive reflection of the competence development over the teaching semester by comparing the self-image of the student with the perception of the mentor. the suggestions for improvement range from shorten or simplify the grid, to demand a compulsory application of the grid and a better introduction into the use of the grid for mentors and students. providing opportunities for reflection as key component in addition to the mentoring program at their assigned school, students are provided with opportunities for reflection during the companion course at the university. figure 4 shows which elements of the companion course were considered as helpful by the student teachers. the perception of the mentoring teachers is not reported here since they do not regularly attend the companion course. seventy-nine percent of the students considered the exchange of experiences with colleagues to be helpful for their professional development and career orientation. among the components of the companion course which were considered as helpful by the students were legal and organizational information regarding student teaching, guest lectures by skilled educators, and reflection in their learning diaries. additional items underscored the importance of providing opportunities for reflection: regarding individual self-reflection, 87.63 % of the students considered the learning diary with its coaching as supportive (answers: agree, rather agree). reflection during student teaching was deemed very important with 88.64 % of the students responding “agree” or “rather agree” to questions about the importance of reflection. 66 global education review 4(4) figure 4: helpful elements among the companion course. implications for teacher education and conclusion the education and development of business teachers in austria includes a required minimum of two years of business practice before entering the teaching profession and the integration of teaching practice into the bed master’s (or diploma) program. despite these differences, the mentoring program during the first teaching experiences is largely comparable to other mentoring programs in teacher education: students observe lessons of experienced mentors, plan and perform their own lessons, and receive feedback on their professional, methodological, social and selfcompetence, in addition to attending a companion course. the results of the study of student teaching, conducted from 2012 to 2015, showed that students considered feedback as helpful, and that they preferred to receive it immediately after teaching a class. it was also found that students require informal exchange with their mentoring teachers and peers, but not within a regular schedule. the learning diary as an instrument to foster reflection during student 16% 22% 24% 30% 40% 40% 45% 49% 51% 79% 31% 42% 48% 47% 42% 40% 34% 38% 32% 14% 32% 26% 25% 16% 13% 16% 19% 10% 16% 0% 20% 40% 60% 80% 100% [10] [9] [8] [7] [6] [5] [4] [3] [2] [1] agree rather agree rather not agree not agree [1] exchange of experiences with colleagues [2] legal and organizational information regarding student teaching [3] guest lectures [4] learning diary [5] possible solutions for problems being discussed [6] problems could be discussed openly [7] reflection talks at the end of the semester [8] connecting theory and practice [9] portfolio regarding the student teaching semester [10] research-based exploration 67 providing, feedback, orientation and opportunities teaching was also considered as helpful by the majority of the students. based on the experiences with the teaching semester and on the results of the accompanying studies, the following implications for teacher education and mentoring programs can be derived: 1. shared strategy and close cooperation of all stakeholders are central factors of a successful start into teaching. even if novice teachers, mentors and their schools, universities and school authorities have different daily needs and problems, they follow the common goal of developing good new teachers (riebenbauer & stock, 2012). 2. mentoring teachers constitute the core of a mentoring program. mentors have to satisfy the above mentioned desires of the novice teachers; they have to be flexible to give feedback fast and constructively (as indicated in figure 3), should offer time and show reliability. as a consequence, a careful selection, an adequate mentoring education and continuous further development are essential for the success of mentoring (hascher, 2006). 3. instead of simply fulfilling a role, mentors can develop a valuable relationship with the mentee to support him/her “in their journey to confidence and competence” (awaya et al., 2003, p. 56). in order to avoid uncontrolled and unconscious learning, a structured mentoring program is necessary. this can be complemented by mentoring tools or instruments which promote feedback, reflection and career orientation. since daily pressures of work often provokes quick solutions, these tools should assist the mentor and mentee to maintain focus on comprehensive professional development by reflecting on situations that seem to require quick responses and reflecting on the underlying issues (korthagen & vasalos, 2005). however, as the data from the discussed studies show, these tools have to be embedded well into the program, accepted by mentors and mentees and addressed both at school and in the accompanying university course. 4. novices appreciate the exchange of teaching experiences with colleagues. informal networks at schools or in companion courses, as well as the potential of a peer in the sense of a critical friend could be used more systematically in order to discuss problems and possibilities. 5. it is advantageous for a professional development program to continuously evaluate and improve the mentoring program and the companion courses and tools. evaluation studies – as the ones presented within this paper – consider the novices’ and mentoring teachers’ perspectives. as the data are reported and discussed with the mentors at future training sessions, the results enable the initialization of a cooperative quality development process which can consequently contribute to a successful start into the teaching profession. notes 1. at the university of linz, business education is organized as a ninesemester diploma program. 2. an important aspect of the accompanying course therefore is to coordinate the cooperation between the schools, student teachers, mentoring teachers, the supervising authority and the department of bed: e.g. students report which mentoring teacher (out of a pool of qualified mentoring teachers) they have been assigned to. this sharing of support activities enables to concentrate within the accompanying course on the mentoring process instead of administration. 68 global education review 4(4) 3. the questionnaire for mentoring 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(2012). eportfolioimplementation in the master’s program of business education and development. international journal of business education. (152), 48–55. weinert, f. e. (1999). concepts of competence (definition and selection of competencies: theoretical and conceptual foundations – deseco). max planck institute for psychological research. munich, germany. winkelbauer, a. (2013). lehrerin werden – berufseinstieg von wirtschaftspädagoginnen: eine theoretische und empirische analyse des einstiegs von wirtschaftspädagoginnen in den lehrerinnenberuf aus professionstheoretischer perspektive (dissertation). karl-franzens-universität graz, austria. about the author(s) dr. elisabeth riebenbauer is an assistant professor at the department of business education and development at the university of graz, austria. gernot dreisiebner, mmsc is a junior researcher at the department of business education and development at the university of graz, austria. dr. michaela stock is a full professor at the department of business education and development at the university of graz, austria. 146 global education review 2(4) 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria mahmoud al-odeh, bemidji state university, minnesota abulraman alfaradi, university of tabuk, saudi arabia faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware mojdeh bayat, depaul university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada alpana bhattacharya, queens college city university of new york caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom cendrine bomboko, george washington university caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte jon callow, the university of sydney, australia hoyun cho, capitol university, ohio lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california anne marie connor, michigan state university mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york arthur francis corvo, loyola university of maryland jen scott curwood, the university of sydney, australia robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha margo delli carpini, morehead state university jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york anton dobart, austrian ministry of education alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york sefa dundar, abant izzet baysal university, turkey curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college cavwell r. edwards, indiana university of pennsylvania dr. aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign 2015-2016 board of reviewers 147 melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya rebecca ann galeano, florida state university neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university sarah elizabeth hinshaw, george mason university janie d. hubbard, university of alabama william kyle ingle, university of louisville cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri emmanuel jean francois, ohio university yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york amy lachuk, hunter college, city university of new york jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york using student-centric technology for educational change 148 tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university gaurav malik, university of east london, united kingdom jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york ezella mcpherson, indiana university south bend claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles maroun naser, stem academy, canada ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university gary peters, university of alabama salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york 2015-2016 board of reviewers 149 priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles jessica f. riccio, teachers college, columbia merethe roos, telemark university college, norway thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schittesser, university of vienna susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school kenneth simonson, university of cincinnati robin m. smith, state university of new york at new paltz dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york patisepa tuafuti, university of auckland, new zealand karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh we need meaningful, systematic evaluation 18 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: urban, mathias (2017). we need meaningful, systematic evaluation, not a preschool pisa. global education review, 4 (2). 18-24 we need meaningful, systemic evaluation, not a preschool pisa mathias urban university of roehampton a preschool pisa if you thought an international organisation committed to promoting economic growth was an unlikely candidate to intervene in your local preschool, think again. the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) has an established history of showing an interest in education systems of its member states. this interest has manifested itself most prominently in a series of international standardised test for 15 year olds – the programme for international student assessment (pisa) and the global angst its rankings and league tables has created. how does your country’s school system fare in relation to finland or south korea (in all due respect to finnish and south korean readers of this piece)? the oecd has now announced the launch of an international standardised assessment programme for five-year-old children, the international early learning and child wellbeing study (iels). according to the recently set up website (http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international -early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm) the programme will assess four “early learning domains” (emerging literacy, emerging numeracy, self-regulation, empathy and trust). assessing each domain, we learn, will take “approximately 15 minutes” using a “tabletbased” test. further “indirect assessment of children’s skills will be obtained from parents and staff through written and online questionnaires.” additional information will be provided by “the study administrators (sic) observations.” an international consortium has been contracted to administer the study, consisting of the australian council for educational research (acer)1, the international association for the evaluation of educational achievement (iea)2, and capstan3, and a timeline has been announced: the study will go ahead in the “northern hemisphere” in 2018, the “southern hemisphere” in 2019, followed by “quality control and analysis” and “report” in 2019-2020. the process of publishing more detailed information on the oecd website also saw changes to the project: earlier announcements of a pilot (which could have been evaluated) were removed and the title of the study was changed from the original international early learning to international early learning and child wellbeing study. however, the acronym remains the same (iels) and there is only fleeting reference to well-being on the website and accompanying documents. if this initiative has escaped your attention, you are in good company. despite having consulted with government ______________________________ corresponding author: mathias urban, university of roehampton, froebel college, london sw15 5pj united kingdom email: mathias.urban@roehampton.ac.uk http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm mailto:mathias.urban@roehampton.ac.uk we need meaningful, systematic evaluation 19 representatives of 16 countries in a “scoping group” since 2012, little to no information about the initiative has been shared with the international early childhood community. the lack of information and absence of any meaningful consultation with early childhood professionals and scholars has been pointed out repeatedly. an article published in contemporary issues in early childhood by peter moss and co-authors in august 2016 was first to ask, “did you know about this?” (moss et al., 2016). until today, based on my own and colleagues’ experiences from talking with practitioners in many countries, the answer is a resounding “no.” several publications have expressed concerns about iels, its underlying assumptions, the process, and the implication – for young children as well as for the early childhood profession. shortly after moss’ article in ciec, beth blue swadener (arizona state university) and i published a paper titled democratic accountability and contextualised systemic evaluation. the piece was published in international critical childhood policy studies (urban & swadener, 2016) and on the website of the reconceptualising early childhood education (rece) network (receinternational.org) and signed in support by nearly 200 academics, professionals and activists from over 20 countries. other critical publications in various national and international contexts followed, e.g., alan pence’s baby pisa (pence, 2017) and margaret carr, linda mitchell and lesley rameka’s piece on iels and te whāriki (carr, mitchell and rameka, 2016; mackey, hill and de vocht, 2016). there is an update on recent developments in the current issue of ciec (moss & urban, 2017). i summarise the key arguments below. garbage in – garbage out? young children and standardised assessment don’t go well together one of the key methodological concerns about iels is its apparent disregard for any evidence that suggests caution is appropriate when using standardised testing of young children for international comparative purposes. in the us, a country with an established history of highstakes testing, studies consistently show the low reliability and validity of standardised tests of children, especially in contexts of large-scale comparison (meisels, 2004, 2006; meisels & atkins-burnett, 2006; madaus & clarke, 2001; raudenbush, 2005). referring to these arguments we have argued that the findings from iels will be “largely meaningless due to their disconnect with and disrespect for diverse, locally embedded approaches to early childhood education and care” (urban & swadener, 2016, pp 7, 8). while the collection of child-based data on a global scale, in order to produce pisa style country rankings and league tables raises serious ethical questions (see there can only be one below) it also points to other critical aspects of iels. not least that it is a waste of resources and a missed opportunity as it will draw attention away from meaningful local and international initiatives to create in-depth understandings of complex early childhood systems, develop meaningful systemic evaluation and support much-needed improvement of experiences and outcomes for all children. the oecd must be aware of the existing meta-analyses of standardised test results of young children. that it keeps pushing ahead regardless lead us, in our 2016 article written on behalf of the reconceptualising early childhood education network, to ask whose interests are served by rolling out iels: promoting and rolling out standardised assessment and comparison approaches regardless of overwhelming evidence that 20 global education review 4(2) they cannot achieve their stated goals raises the question whether political and corporate profit interests are being privileged over valid research, children’s rights and meaningful evaluation. (urban & swadener, 2016, p. 7) there can only be one (way of teaching children)? iels’s disregard for diversity and children’s rights iels in itself is not the problem. or, more specifically, it is only a small aspect of a much bigger global problem. as we have pointed out repeatedly, iels is another step towards drawing early childhood into a global standardised assessment framework that is unable (unwilling!) to see children’s experiences in the education system through any other lens than the one provided by pisa. the oecd is open about the connection. the iels “call for tenders” states that information gathered from children at preschool age will eventually provide information on the trajectory between early learning outcomes and those at age 15, as measured by pisa. in this way, countries can have an earlier and more specific indication of how to lift the skills and other capabilities of its young people. (oecd, 2015, p. 103) what is stated here as an intention for the future has immediate consequences today. this is evident, for example, in a recent e-mail exchange with a colleague in a country that has become of interest for the oecd. both the country and the colleague shall not be named in this piece. what can be said is that the country in question has recently adopted a highly ambitious integrated policy framework for early childhood, based on a holistic and rights-based understanding of public responsibility for all young children. a meeting was called by the country’s ministry of education, to discuss the direction of education policies with a delegation from the oecd. at that meeting it was made clear that the country’s commitment to holistic child development should be abandoned, and resources focused on improving the country’s pisa score instead: dear mathias [xxxx] is trying to be accepted by oecd. they did a study about education in [xxxx]. they presented as results […] the big gap of [xxxx]ian children related to other countries. they insisted a lot that the study demonstrated that children are not learning what they need because their performance was very low. […] the key issue is the discussion between human development vs. scholarly objectives related to meeting international standards. in the background all is about pisa´s test and [xxxx]ian results in order to be accepted in oecd […] they argue that children are wasting time with play, arts and literature. (personal communication, 2017, my emphasis) the oecd’s commitment to ensuring that children in participating countries no longer engage in wasteful activities like play is only one, albeit striking, example of its disregard for the diversity of possible approaches to culturally embedded educational and child rearing practices. the united nations declaration of the rights of indigenous peoples (drips) explicitly recognises the right of indigenous peoples to diversity and to education “in a manner appropriate to their cultural methods of teaching we need meaningful, systematic evaluation 21 and learning” (article 14), and to “dignity and diversity of their cultures, traditions, histories and aspirations which shall be appropriately reflected in education and public information” (article 15). the oecd’s tunnel vision continues at an operational level. according to the iels website, children’s perspectives will only be sought after the tests have been completed. children will be asked if they liked the assessment activity, its content and different aspects. these debriefing sessions will be used to ensure children’s well-being during the assessment but also to provide valuable feedback about the assessment material and procedures. in addition, children will be asked about their favourite learning activities in different settings. (http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/interna tional-early-learning-and-child-wellbeing-study.htm) apart from this post-fact assessment, there seems to be no intention to engage with children before the test. there is no indication that children’s (or practitioners’) consent to participate in iels will be sought. to base a research project on assumed (instead of informed) consent would be met with astonishment – and rejection – by any university ethics committee, as any research student will know. the oecd seems to have exempted themselves from such standards. the curious incident of the evidence in the night-time as moss et al (2016) and others have pointed out, the oecd has chosen to take a highly selective approach to evidence that informs the field of early childhood at international level. the organisation adopts a particular paradigmatic position which might be described as hyper-positivistic… the oecd is free to choose its position. however, it should be aware that it has made a choice and taken a particular perspective. it should also be aware that there are other choices and other perspectives. yet on both counts it shows a total lack of self-awareness (moss et al., 2016, p. 346) this undeclared paradigmatic position persistently denies that other positions exist, and have indeed existed for many years. over the past 25 years reconceptualist scholars have contributed to a rapidly growing body of research and knowledge that offer alternative – postcolonial, critical, feminist, indigenous, transdisciplinary – understandings of what it means to educate and care for young children: “such research and knowledge is rendered invisible by oecd, its existence not even acknowledged” (moss & urban, 2017). more specifically, as moss et al., (2016) remind us, the oecd chooses not to engage with any scholarship critical of pisa. critical points raised by morris (2016), alexander (2010, 2012) and others are similarly relevant to testing 5 year olds for international comparison. “national education systems”, robin alexander (2012) reminds us, “are embedded in national culture.” which explains why “no educational policy or practice can be properly understood except by reference to the web of inherited ideas and values, habits and customs, institutions and world views, that make one country distinct from another” (p. 5). similar arguments have been made by the oecd itself in the first two starting strong reports (oecd, 2001, 2006): ecec policy and the quality of services are deeply influenced by underlying assumptions about childhood and education: what does childhood mean in this society? how should young children be reared and educated? what are the purposes of education and care, of early http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/international-early-learning-and-child-well-being-study.htm 22 global education review 4(2) childhood institutions? what are the functions of early childhood staff? (oecd, 2001, p. 63). how great expectations in washington are dashed in oakland (wellington, berlin and dublin) if governance theory has shown one thing it is this: no one does as they are told. ever. that topdown implementation of policies doesn’t work has been at the centre of research into the governance of complex systems (like education systems) for many years – hence the title of this section, in reference to a classic paper by pressman and wildavsky (1984). however, the entire oecd operation seems firmly grounded in a firm belief that it is possible to transfer policies from one context (country, culture) to another, and to implement them without distortion. the naivety of this “implied model of enlightened policymakers objectively and rationally applying lessons from other countries” (moss et al., 2016) has been pointed out by paul morris (2016). but even a model that doesn’t work in the first place can be (ab)used for other purposes. as morris notes there is a wholly unsurprising tendency for policymakers to view such comparative data on pupil performance as an expedient resource, which serves a primarily symbolic role in the theatre of politics and provides a massive source of evidence, from which they can hunt for correlations to legitimize their own ideological preferences. (morris, 2016, p. 11) the great expectations nurtured by the oecd in relation to iels are being dashed already in many countries – as they refuse to take part in the initiative. critical statements are being published in new zealand, germany, ireland, belgium, the uk, to name just a few, drawing on our arguments (moss et al., 2016; urban & swadener, 2016; moss & urban, 2017) and building resistance among scholars, professionals and activists. an international critical coalition is beginning to take shape. tina, you’re not our friend. there are alternatives to the ‘dictatorship of no alternatives’ at a recent meeting at the oecd headquarters in paris to discuss iels we were asked if we were opposed to quantitative methods. this, of course, is a) not the case and b) not the point. what we are opposed to, when it comes to evaluating the workings of complex, diverse, and culturally embedded support systems for young children and their families, is to be told that there is no alternative to standardised assessment and decontextualised measurement. we are strongly supportive of evaluation – not least as a way of holding governments and ourselves to account. we are also convinced of the importance of learning with and from others in international contexts. the oecd itself has shown that such approaches are possible. the landmark starting strong i+ii studies (2001, 2006) are examples of a carefully designed and conducted exploration of early childhood systems in 20 countries, based on respect for diversity. my own international work (as that of many others) draws on the leadership provided by john bennett and his co-authors in starting strong i+ii. what we have come to understand is that early childhood care, education and development services and practices are at their best when they are developed and supported as part of a competent system (urban, 2012; urban, vandenbroeck, van laere, lazzari, & peeters, 2012; vandenbroeck, urban, & peeters, 2016). there are alternatives to iels in its current form and i have no doubt the we need meaningful, systematic evaluation 23 international early childhood community would be supportive of a meaningful, contextualised leaning initiative, conducted in respectful and participatory ways. notes 1. acer is an “independent, not-for-profit research organization”; its mission is “to create and promote research-based knowledge, products and services that can be used to improve learning across the lifespan” (www.acer.org). acer led the management of pisa in 2006 and 2009. 2. iea is a netherlands-based “international cooperative of national research institutions, government research agencies, scholars and analysts working to evaluate, understand and improve education worldwide” (www.iea.nl). iea has a long history of providing international comparative assessments in education, including the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) and progress in international reading literacy study (pirls). 3. capstan is a belgium-based company that provides “linguistic quality control” for multilingual projects (www.capstan.be). the company has been involved in pisa since 1998. references alexander rj (2010) ‘world class schools’ – noble aspirations or globalized hokum? compare 40(6): 801–817. alexander rj (2012) moral panic, miracle cures and education policy: what can we really learn from international comparisons? scottish education review 44(1): 4–21. carr, m., mitchell, l. and rameka, l. (2016) some thoughts about the value of an oecd international assessment framework for early childhood services in aotearoa new zealand. contemporary issues in early childhood 17(4): 450–454. madaus, g. f., & clarke, m. (2001). the adverse impact of high-stakes testing on minority students: evidence from one hundred years of test data. in g. orfield & m. l. kornhaber (eds.). raising standards or raising barriers? inequality and high-stakes testing in public education (pp. 85–106). new york: the century foundation press. meisels, s. j., & atkins-burnett, s. (2006). evaluating early childhood assessments: a differential analysis. in k. mccartney & d. phillips (eds.), handbook of early childhood development (pp. 533–549). oxford: blackwell publishing. meisels, s.j. (2004). should we test four -year olds? [commentary]. pediatrics, 113(5), 1401-1402. meisels, s.j. 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(2015). call for tenders: international early learning study. retrieved from http://www.oecd.org/callsfortenders/cft 100001420 international early learning study.pdf pence, a. (2017). baby pisa: dangers that can arise when foundations shift. journal of childhood studies, 41(3), 54-58. pressman, j. l., & wildavsky, a. b. (1984). implementation: how great expectations in washington are dashed in oakland : or, why it's amazing that federal programs work at all, this being a saga of the economic development administration as told by two sympathetic observers who seek to build morals on a foundation of ruined hopes. berkely, ca: colegio nacional de ciencias políticas y administración pública: fondo de cultura económica. raudenbush, s. (2005). newsmaker interview: how nclb testing can leave some schools behind. preschool matters, 3(2), rutgers university: national institute of early education research. http://www.acer.org/ http://www.iea.nl/ http://www.capstan.be/ 24 global education review 4(2) urban, m. (2012). researching early childhood policy and practice. a critical ecology. european journal of education, 47(4), 494-507. doi:10.1111/ejed.12012 urban, m., & swadener, b. b. (2016). democratic accountability and contextualised systemic evaluation. a comment on the oecd initiative to launch an international early learning study (iels). international critical childhood policy studies, 5(1), 6-18. urban, m., vandenbroeck, m., van laere, k., lazzari, a., & peeters, j. (2012). towards competent systems in early childhood education and care. implications for policy and practice. european journal of education, 47(4), 508-526. doi:10.1111/ejed.12010 vandenbroeck, m., urban, m., & peeters, j. (eds.). (2016). pathways to professionalism in early childhood education and care. london and new york: routledge. about the author mathias urban, phd, is professor of early childhood studies and director of the early childhood research centre at the university of roehampton, london. his research interests unfold around questions of diversity and equality, social justice, evaluation and professionalism in working with young children, families and communities in diverse socio-cultural contexts. he is an international research fellow with the velma e. schmidt critical childhood public policy research collaborative, a member of the pilis research group (primera infancia, lenguaje e inclusión social), chair of the decet (diversity in early childhood education and training) network, president of the international froebel society and a member of the aera special interest group critical perspectives on early childhood. 34 global education review 4(1) _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: fu, tian (2017). wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity: a social and cultural explanation to the underdeveloped gifted education in china. global education review, 4 (1). 34-44. wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity: a social and cultural explanation to the underdeveloped gifted education in china tian fu capital normal university, beijing, p.r.china abstract today it is accepted that the development of gifted and talented children is important to enable a nation to compete successfully. in china, though the estimated number of gifted children reaches 20 million (chu, 2012), gifted education has seldom received sufficient support. the objections to gifted education always suppress suggestions that support programs for gifted students when educational policy is drafted. starting with a historical review of the gifted education programs and policies in china since 1978, this paper discusses the main reasons for lack of support for gifted education in china from social and cultural perspectives. i conclude that the long-lasting ideology of egalitarianism, the overwhelming pursuit of educational equity and the dominant ideology of socialism have significantly hindered the development of gifted education. driven by such beliefs and ideologies, the concept of giftedness and gifted education, the relationship between egalitarianism and elitism, and between equity and equality, are often severely misunderstood, which not only harms existing gifted education programs, but suppresses the potential for open discussion about the implementation of gifted education. finally, i propose how gifted education should be framed in the future educational reform scheme in china and other countries with similar cultural and social environments. keywords gifted education, gifted and talented students, china, egalitarianism, educational equity, socialism introduction today, it is widely acknowledged that gifted and talented children are valuable assets for a nation’s development and excellence. an increasing number of nations have placed a strong emphasis on gifted education as they have recognized the importance of developing top students for global competition (fischer & müller, 2014; sękowski & łubianka, 2015; vantassel-baska, 2013), especially in such advanced fields as science, technology, engineering and mathematics (stem). however, in china, the largest developing country in the world, gifted education has seldom gained sufficient policy attention and public support. the current gifted education programs are poorly framed with very limited range and influence. public understanding of gifted _________________________________ corresponding author tian fu, department of educational studies, elementary education college, capital normal university, room a-413, no. 23 baiduizi, shoutinan road, haidian district, beijing 100037, p.r.china email: futian@cnu.edu.cn wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity 35 education is mixed with bias and prejudice (yang & wang, 2009). the objections to gifted education stifle any supportive voice in drafting an educational policy agenda. an official report in 2010 estimated that there were 202 million school-aged students in china (chu, 2012). assuming that the percentage of gifted children is usually around 10 percent of the entire population, there should be 20 million gifted children in need of gifted education to develop their potential to the fullest. though the definitions of giftedness and gifted education vary (harty, adkins, & sherwood, 1984; renzulli, 2002; steenbergenhu & olszewski-kubilius, 2016), researchers have reached some agreement on a number of typical qualities of giftedness. for example, brodbelt (1979) suggested that six abilities and characteristics have been professionally identified to categorize gifted persons: intellectual ability, academic aptitude, creativity, leadership skills, psychomotor ability, and skill in the visual or performing arts. a widely used category of giftedness in china emphasized comprehensive knowledge base, long attention span and good memory, intellectual curiosity, rich imagination, and an ability to solve problems and the ability to think creatively (zha, 1986). more recent studies provided more complicated frameworks to understand talent and giftedness, with an interplay with culture and values (olszewski-kubilius & thomson, 2015; sternberg & davidson, 2005). but overall, creative productivity has been recognized for its potential contribution to societal development in an era of globalization (reis & renzulli, 2010). starting with a historical review of the gifted education programs and policies in china since 1978, this paper discusses the main reasons why gifted education has not been well accepted in china from social and cultural perspectives. by illustrating the omnipresent impact of egalitarianism, educational equity and socialism, this paper can shed light on deepening the understanding of the function of external policy environment on gifted education, leading us to further consider how to design and implement efficient gifted education programs in a developing society with underlying cultural and ideological obstacles. a historical review of gifted education programs and policies in contemporary china the chinese government launched its first experiment of gifted education in 1978 (li & delisle, 1990; phillipson et al., 2009), largely as a policy tool to eliminate the negative consequences of educational policies that existed during the great cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976. from then on, academic discussion and a few notable examples of gifted education emerged at both national and local levels. based on an analysis of the relevant legislation, government regulations and policies of the past four decades, three major modes emerged as ways to implement gifted education programs and policies in china. chronologically, they were: (1) “key school” and “key class” at every school level; (2) “opportunity class” in a small number of top universities and high schools; and (3) a new national plan to train top-notch innovative talent called “everest plan,” which only involved a few selected high schools and universities. the main characteristics and flaws of each mode are described below, with an emphasis on how such programs are funded and how gifted students are identified and educated respectively. the ideologies behind each mode are also briefly discussed. key school and key class the first experiment of formal gifted education in contemporary china was initiated in 1978, as one of the mechanisms to correct the educational policies driven by the extreme egalitarianism and anti-intellectualism of the great cultural revolution (phillipson et al., 2009; zhao, 2014). in 1977, xiaoping deng, the most influential central leader of the era, suggested that developing education required 36 global education review 4(1) ability to “walk on both legs,” a metaphor of promoting mass education and gifted education simultaneously. according to the strategic plan he proposed, it was necessary to build “key schools” in the nation in primary, secondary and post-secondary education respectively, using tests to screen and to recruit top students with the greatest potential at each school level. all funded by the government, those key schools were usually staffed with experienced leaders and teachers, and provided with sufficient educational resources, advanced teaching strategies and optimized learning environments. they were expected to cultivate elites and professionals in all fields, especially in subjects such as stem, which was critical for national development at that time. the basic logic behind the key school policy derived directly from china’s economic development strategy, which was in effect since the late 1970s. with limited resources available, it was reasonable, and even inevitable, to devote some of the best resources to a few most talented people, cities and regions1. from 1978 to 1993, the ministry of education released a series of regulations that created key schools at different school levels nationwide, with a focus on primary and secondary schools (chu, 2012). driven by the same utilitarian logic, it soon became common in schools to build their own “key class” that gathered top students in each grade, as well as the best teachers and learning resources. no statistics are available to accurately estimate the exact number of key schools and key classes, but they have rapidly expanded to the entire country and become a very common phenomenon in the centralized educational system. seemingly, as the widest and most influential means of implementing gifted education in china, the practice of establishing key schools and key classes looks very similar to the modern mode of gifted education in other countries. grouping gifted individuals together, permits them to study better with challenging peers at an appropriate pace. some research has confirmed the long-term and short-term benefits of such grouping to the gifted students (kulik & kulik, 1991). in china, the key school and key class policy did achieve some success in selecting and cultivating top students. however, its policy effect was severely compromised for several reasons. echoing the common difficulties that other countries encountered, the first reason involves how to identify giftedness and gifted children. in reality, standardized test scores are normally used as the major, if not the only, criterion to evaluate eligibility for key schools and classes (li & delisle, 1990). the key elements of giftedness, such as critical thinking and creative productivity, are neglected in the screening system, which utterly undermines the actual effect of gifted education. we certainly cannot say there is no correlation between test scores and talents or giftedness, but there exist many so-called gifted underachievers who do not meet those stereotypical expectations (roach & bell, 1989), and therefore are ignored by the key school and key class policy. second, tailored curricula and teaching strategies for gifted students in key schools and classes is usually non-existent. the “acceleration” and “enrichment” modes are the usual practices employed for gifted students. while “acceleration” allows schools to accept students younger than the typical age limitation and “enrichment” usually provides students with more books, materials, lectures and academic competitions (li & delisle, 1990), the teaching methods and content for the gifted students are not notably different from methods and content provided to ordinary students. third, students in key schools and classes are assessed by the same periodic examinations as ordinary students, which explains why key schools and key classes have become standardized test-driven. differing little from ordinary schools and classes, the teaching and learning processes in key schools and classes, including teaching strategies, class materials, learning modes and curricula, are focused on wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity 37 preparing for the standardized tests. the quality of such schools and classes is also judged by the number of graduates accepted by leading universities and colleges. though a small percentage of key schools actively implement advanced educational experiments, trying to enlighten students’ creativities and innovations, the test-driven environment has already undermined the ultimate goal and essence of gifted education. so in fact, the key school and key class policy is a superficial form of gifted education, since it gradually deviated from its original purpose, which resulted in unexpected detrimental outcomes. numerous studies in china and other countries have documented that students’ demographic information, especially familial socio-economic status (ses), is highly related to their school performance (bradley & corwyn, 2002; hannum, 1999; sirin, 2005; whyte, 2010). the key school and key class policy has contributed to the enlargement of the educational gap and the social gap in china by filtering elite students by test scores. upward social mobility through education for disadvantaged and impoverished students has become harder than usual. meanwhile, as the best educational resources have been drastically accumulated in key schools, such policy has also increased the development gap among different schools and universities in the last two decades. key schools have become much stronger and more competitive than other ordinary ones, which then severely harms educational equity, leading to widespread corruption when enrolling new students every year. bribery is often used by parents in order to send their children to those schools and classes. therefore, while the revised compulsory education law in china of 2006 forbade the establishment of new key school and key class, the gap between existing key schools and ordinary schools will not naturally narrow down for a long time. opportunity class the second means of providing gifted education in china is called “opportunity class.” certain universities and colleges were authorized to set up special classes for under-age juveniles with superior intelligence and talents. the first opportunity class in the country was started in 1978 by the university of science and technology of china (chen, stevenson, & lee, 1994). in 1985, new legislation by the ministry of education designated twelve leading universities, including peking university and tsinghua university, to open their own opportunity classes (phillipson et al., 2009). the ages of the students enrolled in those classes normally ranged from 11 to 16. however, for various reasons, all the universities cancelled their opportunity classes so far, except for university of science and technology of china and xi'an jiaotong university. partly as supplement to the key school and key class policy, opportunity class is more like the authentic form of gifted education program since it is designed and implemented with clearer focus on giftedness and talents. students are screened for admission and evaluated routinely by multiple scientific and comprehensive measurements, including academic and non-academic performance, intelligent and non-intelligent outcomes, psychological and physical status, and so on. nevertheless, compared with enrollment in nationwide key schools and classes, the number of students enrolled in university-based opportunity classes is negligible. in zhejiang university, one of the leading comprehensive universities in china, only around 150 students enter the opportunity class every year. putting all the participating universities together, the number of freshmen every year is still under one thousand (chu, 2012). the opportunity class policy also inspired some primary and secondary schools to set up special classes for young students with extraordinary intelligence. in 1984, tianjin experimental primary school started the first 38 global education review 4(1) opportunity class at primary school level in china. this was copied by dozens of other top primary and secondary schools. the typical model used in those opportunity classes was the popular “acceleration” model, pushing the students to complete six years’ of curricula in four years. so far, some schools have reported experiencing gains in cultivating students’ critical thinking, logical reasoning and creative innovating. however, just as with universitybased opportunity classes, the very small number of participating schools has resulted in no significant impact on the national development of gifted education, especially considering that most of the schools are located in several modern big cities. everest plan the above two modes of gifted education have diminished in the first decade of 21st century. however, largely in response to increasing public doubt about the quality of mass higher education, gifted education has gained new attention of policymakers in the last ten years. in july 2010, the ministry of education released a landmark policy scheme, the national medium and long-term educational reform and development plan (2010-2020), which called for cultivating each student’s unique strengths and potential, and developing those accordingly. at both national and provincial levels, multiple strategies for gifted education have been quickly implemented. the most influential approach was introduced in 2009, when a new national project, experimental plan of cultivating outstanding students in basic subjects, also known as the everest plan, was officially initiated. starting with eleven top chinese universities with strong specialties in science and engineering, the intent was to select top students in mathematics, physics, chemistry, biology, and computer science from high schools every year. special funds were allocated by the central government to pay for the best instructors with focus on international perspectives, learning environment, scholarship, research grants, and so on. the students in this program were expected to grow up to be future leaders in those subjects. those universities were given full autonomy to choose their selection standards, training strategies and assessment methods. to date, the number of participating universities has increased to twenty. accordingly, many provinces have updated their educational development plans with a new focus on cultivating creative and talented youths. in several developed regions like beijing and shanghai, a few high schools have already made significant progress in enriching their curricula and teaching methods to meet the governmental requirements for gifted education. comparatively, all the efforts under the everest plan look even closer to the ideal type of gifted education. nevertheless, the major flaw still lies in its very small range of influence. only top schools in big cities, most of which were previous key schools with abundant educational resources, played active roles in this new movement of gifted education. for the rest of the regions and schools in china, the plan has had little response and effect. in summing up, in china in the past 40 years, the three major modes of providing gifted education programs and policies that support them have several features in common. first, some fundamental questions about gifted education have neither been answered nor examined in practice. the definition of giftedness, or the criteria for identifying gifted children and assessing qualified gifted education are still under debate (yang & wang, 2009). second, it is the government, not the public that advocates for gifted education. that suggests that the existing gifted education programs are framed mainly for the benefit of the country, instead of the gifted individuals. third, the range and actual effects of gifted education policies are always restricted, especially when compared with the huge number of gifted students in the country. such policies are usually labelled as educational experiments, despite the fact that wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity 39 follow-up action has seldom been taken afterwards. fourth, the implementation of gifted education in china has been heavily influenced by the traditional standardized testing movement, which shackles the creativity of every aspect of those programs, and especially contributes to the underrepresentation of the gifted population (ford, grantham, & whiting, 2008). the implementation of gifted education in china involves contradictions. some politicians and researchers periodically address the strategic significance of gifted education at the national level, but the experiment of gifted education diminishes over time and is constantly lacking public support. educators acknowledge the importance of gifted education for gifted students, but meanwhile feel apprehensive or even hostile to gifted education in practice. this paradox echoes the ceaseless debates on the advantages and disadvantages of gifted education globally (heller, 2005; phillipson et al., 2009; wollam, 1992). though the value of developing giftedness is accepted in an era of globalization, gifted education faces multiple philosophical and practical challenges, especially from the perspective of egalitarians (mazie, 2009). to achieve an applicable trade-off, the causes of the paradox need to be fully revealed. in china, the reasons are not limited to the technical difficulties of identifying and caring for each student’s special needs, interests and potentials under current test-driven educational system, but deeply rooted in the broader cultural and social environment. understanding the gifted education paradox from cultural and social perspectives as in many other countries, gifted education has not received enough support in china for complicated reasons. but from the cultural and social perspectives, three contributing factors are especially noteworthy: advocacy of gifted education violates the long-lasting tradition of egalitarianism, harms the presumption of educational equity, and more politically, challenges the ideology of socialism by its implicit preference for individualism. egalitarianism versus elitism from the cultural perspective, the ideology of gifted education is in conflict with the longlasting tradition of egalitarianism in china. in his classic work the analects, the most important chinese philosopher and educator, confucius, once commented, “people are concerned about the uneven distribution of wealth over poverty.” the old saying illustrates the essence of egalitarianism deeply rooted in chinese culture. in such an ancient society of centralized bureaucracy, equal distribution was strongly desired when public good or social wealth was allocated. the great cultural revolution from 1966 to 1976, in particular, pursued the ideology of egalitarianism in education to the extreme, with the utopian fantasy of eliminating all of the distinctions between education and other vocations and creating a type of new education that was politically, intellectually, and physically integrated with other social enterprises (cheng & manning, 2003). as one of the dominant civic ideologies, and a core demand of the impoverished social class, the influence of egalitarianism goes beyond the field of education and permeates most open discussions in the public sphere. it has even been used as the ultimate goal of most violent revolutions in chinese history in the past twenty centuries. as the major pathway for upward social mobility, access to education, especially superior-quality education, was subject to the principle of egalitarianism, which laid the solid foundation for chinese imperial examination and the entire centralized educational system. regardless of personal background, every student was guaranteed equal opportunity to study at will and take the exam. in this sense, egalitarianism was the key to maintaining social stability. as mass schooling developed into a 40 global education review 4(1) powerful social institution in the last century, it affected the ideology of egalitarianism and social justice, too. education has functioned tacitly as a comprehensive mechanism to promote egalitarianism by enriching people’s knowledge and attitudes about egalitarianism and equity, especially between races, ethnicities and genders (shu, 2004). correspondingly, educational resources are expected to be allocated equally among all eligible citizens. through the lens of egalitarianism, it is easy to look at gifted education as a specific form of elitism, since it asks for disproportional allocation of all types of educational resources and reserves much richer and better resources only for gifted students. that is why advocating for gifted education often evokes strong public opposition. some scholars argued it is misleading to believe gifted education is equivalent to elitism (olstad, 1978). nonetheless, as long as criteria to identify students with real giftedness is absent, and the entry to gifted education is decided mainly by standardized test scores, it is hard to differentiate gifted education from elitism, especially in a society such as china where large social and economic disparities exist (whyte, 2010). students from elite families would have more chance to take advantage of those opportunities, reinforcing the common impression that gifted education is an excessive abuse of public resource for private needs. theoretically, egalitarianism and gifted education are not mutually exclusive. in affluent societies egalitarianism is even associated with higher average educational achievements (condron, 2011). but in reality the concerns about gifted education often oscillate between the two poles of equality and excellence (heller, 2005; wollam, 1992). in developing countries like china, the pursuit of excellence has to defer to egalitarianism, with equal educational rights of the majority taking priority. educational equity versus educational equality from the social perspective, gifted education has rarely won much support from the public because it results in spoiling educational equity. in a society where social and educational inequalities have become the major threat to the stability of the nation in the last two decades (kanbur & zhang, 2005), any policy agenda that may further aggravate the socio-economic gap will not receive support. unfortunately, the emergence of gifted educational programs has raised many direct challenges to educational equity. chinese researchers usually define educational equity by a classical approach, taking school as a given entity and focusing on the question of who gets into school (mingat & tan, 1985). such definition manifests an essential call for equal educational opportunity. baker and friedman-nimz (2004) categorized equal educational opportunity into three ways: horizontal equity, fiscal neutrality and vertical equity. what programs like gifted education attempt to achieve is vertical equity, implying unequal treatment of unequals. however, constrained by the trend of egalitarianism, educational equity in china is usually equated as horizontal equity, which requires equal treatment of unequals. many critics in china are concerned that those gifted education programs may serve as a haven for upper-middle-class students (chu, 2012; yang & wang, 2009), as much empirical evidence has shown (gallagher, 1995). as mentioned above, the widespread key schools and key classes did result in systematically ruling out the underrepresented groups and enlarging the social and educational gap existing in the population. students in key schools and key classes were treated highly preferentially compared with their ordinary peers. furthermore, in line with previous research literature from other countries that shows that minority groups are constantly underrepresented when identifying gifted wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity 41 children (moore, ford, & milner, 2005; winsler, karkhanis, kim, & levitt, 2013), in china, the limited opportunities to high-quality education are unfairly distributed, particularly based on students’ individual and family background. under these circumstances, gifted education programs inevitably exacerbate social conflict by putting disadvantaged groups in even worse positions, resulting in embedded and lasting discrimination against disadvantaged students and minorities. actually, no matter what form of gifted education programs is applied, in china the selection process always lacks sufficient representation because of the small range and strong preference for advanced schools and regions. gifted students from rural areas or from the underdeveloped central and west area of china are provided little access to qualified schools and classes. the opportunity class policy and the everest plan mainly benefit advanced cities. the qualities of key schools are not even comparable between cities and countryside, or between the east and west. therefore, without national criteria to identify gifted children, and to provide equal access of all eligible students to those programs, gifted education programs will mainly benefit a few elite gifted students, formulating a straight violation of education equity in the population of gifted children. advocates of gifted education may argue that gifted education agrees with the principle of educational equality, instead of equity. but the difference between those two concepts is often misunderstood in china. in contrast with educational equity, educational equality is usually used in a more comprehensive sense in china. it requires differential treatment on a reasonable basis, implying the infusion of diversity issues (chu & yang, 2008). educational opportunities and resources should then be allocated to individuals based on their special needs. gifted education programs then could be viewed as an ideal way to respect and cultivate students’ special needs and benefit them substantially (ford, moore, & harmon, 2005). but from this perspective, it is even harder to justify gifted education in china. it is understandable that some people’s special talents and potentials deserve better exploitation and maximum usage. but as some researchers remark, all students at all ages have relative talent strengths, and it is the schools’ responsibility to identify and nurture them (feldhusen, 1998). every child deserves some type of education tailored for his uniqueness, otherwise the principle of educational equality would be violated. however, it is apparently an unfeasible task in chinese society at this time. egalitarianism and educational equity do not necessarily prevent individual difference. some researchers even argue that schools cannot be truly egalitarian unless they acknowledge students’ differences (winner & karolyi, 1998). but the differential treatment should be concentrated on assisting and compensating the disadvantaged students, for example emotionally and physically handicapped and bilingual students, not only cultivating the gifted ones. as another old chinese proverb says, “it is the right thing to offer others fuel in snowy weather, but not to add brilliance to one's present splendor.” socialism versus individualism the implementation of gifted education programs has an underlying assumption of individualism (maccurdy, 1960). gifted education programs are not just needed to help children with special talents to learn and to excel; they are entitled to appropriate education designed for their special needs. cultivating the talents of these children is an exhibition of respecting individuals’ human rights. however, this assumption is hard to defend under the chinese mainstream ideology of socialism that favors public interests over individual rights. since the founding of the people's republic of china in 1949, education has been strictly required to serve the majority of the mass population, and the modernization of china (wang, 2009). gifted education usually gains its 42 global education review 4(1) support when it is believed to be associated with national competition and long-term development. meanwhile, when a society has an overwhelming faith in collective efforts over individual talents, appeals for the legitimacy of specialized gifted education will be undoubtedly suppressed. that explains why the major modes of gifted education policies and programs in china are always proposed and encouraged by the government, not the public. post-mao china has adopted many new strategies such as privatization and market based reforms to cope with the challenge of globalization, which also brings significant reforms to education governance and policies (mok, 2005; zhao, 2014). but the ideology of socialism still permeates every aspect of education along with the centralized curriculum structure, teaching materials, instructional strategies and examination systems. the essence of socialism is taught systematically through moral education, integrated curriculum and various school activities. schools are deprived of autonomy to develop their local and schoolbased gifted education programs. a school environment of individualism can hardly be established, which hinders the public awareness of the value of gifted education. conclusions and recommendations fifty years ago, adler (1967) noted some correlation between economic cycles and public interest in gifted education in the united states. he argued that during the period of depression, special education for the gifted students was equated with special attention for the privileged, which is undemocratic to some degree. what this paper adds to the literature is the understanding that not only the status of economic development, but also the socioeconomic disparities and mainstream ideology within a society lead to serious public doubts and obstacles to the development of gifted education. at the center of such doubts in china lies the pursuit of egalitarianism, educational equity, and a widespread faith in socialism over individualism. in such a policy environment, any proposal for gifted education suffers from strict scrutiny of the public. in fact, people are worried for good and solid reasons. in a developing and highly uneven society, gifted education will easily become another institutional tool for segregation, systematically blocking underrepresented groups from enrolling. the expansion of gifted education may enlarge, instead of bridging, the educational disparities within the society. as the largest developing country, with a sharply increasing social and economic gap, china provides an example illustrating the importance of cultural and social environment to the fostering of efficient gifted education programs. the long-lasting ideology of egalitarianism, the overwhelming pursuit of educational equity, and the dominant ideology of socialism have jointly forged strong barriers for the development of gifted education. while addressing the importance of external environment, this paper does not suggest that it is unnecessary or impossible to promote gifted education in a contemporary developing society like china. but it does suggest that certain strategies have to be carefully adopted first to reduce the tension between gifted education advocates and the discontented public. theoretically, a legitimate gifted education program should be based on two minimum standards: the students must be really “gifted,” and the education must be able to satisfy their needs and capacities. otherwise the eventual outcome of gifted education would be equivalent to elite education. so first, the problem of how to identify giftedness and gifted children directly determines the social acceptance of gifted education. for china and other similar developing countries, it is important to establish comprehensive and scientific standards for such programs in order to select students with real gifts and talents (johnsen, 2012). as traditional measures such as standardized test scores and iq test are rarely wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity 43 practical in evaluating gifted students (gallagher, 1998), more accurate instrumentation, and assessment skills that can fully take every talent into account, have to be developed. second, the curricula and instructional modes for gifted students need to be better structured at each school level, with specific emphasis on different types of talent. third, accelerating the process of legislation can help secure equal access to gifted students from all over the country in response to the pursuit of educational equity. finally, maintaining a delicate balance between developing mass education and gifted education is a difficult but vital policy goal for china and other developing countries which also are in need of sufficient educational resources. without an expansion of high-quality mass education for the public, gifted education can hardly overcome the ideological barrier of egalitarianism and win its firm standpoint in the future educational policy scheme. notes 1. the economic plan at that time required development of the eastern part of china first, because it was more urbanized and had much more advantages (such as 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(2014). who's afraid of the big bad dragon: why china has the best (and worst) education system in the world. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. about the author tian fu, phd., is an assistant professor in the department of educational studies in the elementary education college at capital normal university, beijing, china. his research interests include education policy analysis and the causes, patterns and consequences of social and educational inequality. gifted students of color 45 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wright, brian l., ford, donna y., & young, jemimah l. (2017). ignorance or indifference? seeking excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education. global education review, 4(1). 45-60. ignorance or indifference? seeking excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education brian l. wright the university of memphis donna y. ford vanderbilt university jemimah l. young university of north texas abstract lack of access to gifted education is prevalent, yet preventable for black and hispanic students. years of data from the office for civil rights and national reports reveal that deficit thinking, prejudice, and discrimination must be at work, thus compromising the educational experiences of gifted students of color. in this article, the authors share data on under-representation in the u.s., along with contributing factors and recommendations. they rail against both ignorance and indifference explanations, calling instead for accountability and deliberate efforts to desegregate gifted education with both excellence and equity as the driving force. we define equity as being fair, responsive, and impartial, especially for those who have the fewest resources and least advocacy, and who have experienced structural inequality due to historical exclusion. we hope readers will learn from the u.s. context and use that which is relevant for their nation’s context. keywords gifted education, under-representation, students of color, black students, hispanic/latino students, equity introduction while u.s. schools have become more diverse today than at any other point in our nation’s history, students of color in general, african american and hispanic students in particular, continue to be concentrated in racially and economically homogenous schools where access and opportunity to gifted education, advanced placement (ap), and international baccalaureate (ib) courses are limited and virtually nonexistent (ford, 2013a, 2013b; orfield & frankenberg, ee, & kuscera, 2014; orfield, kucsera, & siegel-hawley, 2012). ap is a program in the united states and canada by the college board; the classes offer college-level curricula and examinations to high school corresponding author: brian l. wright, the university of memphis, college of education, 3798 walker avenue, memphis, tn 38152 email: blwrght1@memphis.edu mailto:blwrght1@memphis.edu 46 global education review 4(1) students. american colleges and universities may grant placement and course credit to students who obtain high scores on the examinations (see https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse for a detailed description of ap classes and offering). the international baccalaureate aims to develop inquiring, knowledgeable and caring young people who help to create a better and more peaceful world through intercultural understanding and respect. the organization works with schools, and governmental and international organizations to develop challenging programs of international education and rigorous assessment. these programs encourage students around the globe to become active, compassionate and lifelong learners who understand other people from different backgrounds (see http://www.ibo.org/en/aboutthe-ib/facts-and-figures/). this persistent school segregation, we argue, limits access and opportunity to gifted education, ap, and ib courses and is a direct reflection of historical and contemporary residential segregation (lipsitz, 1998). this said, the motivation to desegregate schools, specifically gifted education, advanced classes and, by extension, neighborhoods is hobbled by genesis amnesia (from pierre bourdieu as cited in ogilvie, 2004), a concept and practice that explains how, especially in regard to indigenous and colonized peoples, we often forget the beginning. as in the case for indigenous and colonized peoples’ histories, there is also stubborn ignorance regarding our nation’s racial history with respect to the practice of schools and testing to rank and sort individuals based on perceived talent and ability (e.g., gould, 1981). evidence of this historical and conventional ignorance or indifference can be found in de facto explanations that suggest segregated schools (neighborhoods) are an accident of economic circumstances, demographic trends, personal preferences, and private discrimination (lipman, 2011; lipsitz, 1998). similar logic that ignores evidence to the contrary is the eugenics movement (e.g., galton, 1883; herrnstein and murray; 1994) that convinced some professionals and laypersons to accept the ideology that being well-born and highly intelligent are characteristics possessed only by a select number of people. this movement and ideology have not only been used to justify the unequal allocation of a quality education to students of different races, but also to protect gifted education for a relatively small number of students -namely white and middle class. reliance on iq (intelligence quotient) and testing continue unabated, to some extent, to support these assumptions and practices (see fischer et al., 1996; ford, 2013b). in an attempt to interrupt this ignorance and/or indifference in order to achieve excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education, we challenge past and present hegemonic ways of knowledge production, validation, and dissemination that gives currency and legitimacy to certain racial groups as “naturally” having gifts and talents. guided by this view, our intent of this article to challenge and dislodge the notion that measured intelligence used as the primary or exclusive criteria for identification and entrance into gifted education is neither equitable nor indicative of best practices, which focus on comprehensive assessment, rather than testing. instead of using limited measures of students’ ability and sorting students accordingly -separating the gifted from the giftless – we argue that schools must recognize, validate, and cultivate potential, talent, and https://apstudent.collegeboard.org/apcourse http://www.ibo.org/en/about-the-ib/facts-and-figures/ http://www.ibo.org/en/about-the-ib/facts-and-figures/ gifted students of color 47 ability in all students in general, and students of color in particular. to do the latter is to make a concerted effort to challenge the ignorance and indifference surrounding this coveted educational and social space to achieve excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education. the diversification of such educational opportunities would afford students of color a just opportunity to fully develop their unique talents and skills, while expanding common notions of what it means to be gifted. we define and discuss the terms ignorant and indifference with respect to gifted education (and, by extension, ap and ib classes), followed by a discussion of gifted education as virtually a white space reserved for a select few intelligent students. next, we present an overview of the under-representation of students of color in gifted education as documented by the office for civil rights (ocr). we then discuss the impact of these data regarding equitable opportunities for non-white students gaining access to gifted education. finally, we offer a set of recommendations for achieving excellence and equity in gifted education. demystifying ignorance and indifference in gifted education ignorance can sometimes be characterized by a lack of knowledge and described as a state of being uninformed (see cho & decastroambrosetti, 2005). however, not knowing by choice or circumstance does not necessarily mean an inability to learn or to know. based on this definition, ignorance is not necessarily a steady condition. there are those who emerge from ignorance into a space of knowledge, understanding, and wisdom. that is, ignorance can be overcome and revised just as attitudes, beliefs, and practices regarding who is in possession of gifts and talents across race, class, and gender can be challenged. while sometimes misinterpreted and equated with stupidity, ignorance is not necessarily synonymous with a lack of education, wisdom, intelligence, competence, or knowledge. as discussed previously, segregated schools and, by extension, segregated neighborhoods are not mere examples of ignorance, but an active racial steering practice borne out of slavery and jim crow. per allport’s (1954) degrees of prejudice, one must distinguish between avoidance and discrimination. white flight, which can be seen in the creation of suburbs and gifted programs, is one example of avoidance that results in segregated communities and programs. people are entitled to live where they choose; however, creating policies, procedures, and laws that do not allow people of color to live in suburbs and to participate in certain programs can be tantamount to discrimination. thus, to ignore is to be ignorant and to be ignorant is to engage in an active and sometimes intentionally conscious state of not paying attention (e.g., genesis amnesia) in order to maintain the status quo (social order). in summary, ignorance is not a stagnant construct, but rather a mental state perpetuated by choice and/or circumstance. indifference, on the other hand, is apathy. it is a psychological situation centered on a lack of compassion, sympathy, empathy, or concern. indifference, in relation to the underrepresentation of students of color in gifted education, highlights a persistent lack of concern, despite the preponderance of evidence to the contrary that demonstrates inequity in the referral and identification process of those from under-represented groups notwithstanding issues pertaining to retention (see ford, 2013a, 2013b; ford, 2015). unchecked indifference has 48 global education review 4(1) the potential to encourage individuals to remain distant from a situation, challenge, conflict, or confrontation, not caring, in this case, that there has historically been and continues to be limited racial diversity in gifted education programs in u.s. schools. we assert, therefore, that to be indifferent to this persistent lack of equitable access and opportunity to gifted education is to engage in an active and conscious state of aloofness and inattention in order to maintain the status quo. taken together, ignorance and indifference seem to bleed into one another; however, when one considers the kind of ignorance associated with under-represented students of color in gifted education in u.s. schools, it is not necessarily the unconscious kind, “thought of as a gap in knowledge, as an epistemic oversight that easily could be remedied once it has been noticed” (sullivan & turana, 2007, p. 1). while this kind of ignorance exists in abundance, there is the manufactured ignorance (conscious) that we argue is not simply based on innocent gaps in knowledge, rather it is an example of ignorance “actively produced for purposes of domination and exploitation” (p. 1). exclusion can be added to this manufactured ignorance. this kind of ignorance, we contend, has little to do with a simple lack of knowledge, emptiness or even a passive state; rather, it is situated and situational with historical roots in the eugenics movement that protected intentional negligence with respect to historically marginalized groups. this kind of historical ignorance and indifference brings us to the unpacking of this invisible [and we argue, visible] backpack of white privilege (mcintosh, 1988) with regard to the poor referral and identification process of under-represented groups in gifted education. in the sections that follow, we provide various examples of ignorance and indifference and some ways in which they have been constructed and perpetuated in gifted education. this active production of ignorance and indifference explained herein has been maintained for the sole purpose of keeping gifted education as a relative white space. a space that refuses to allow under-represented groups access to the spectrum of gifted education programs (see ford, 2013a; ford, 2015). moreover, this active production of ignorance and indifference supported by a system of inequitable institutional practices has been strategically used to protect the ignorance and indifference of the racially privileged and by extension giving them a license to remain ignorant, oblivious, and arrogant regarding who belongs in gifted education programs. black faces and white spaces gifted education programs, as alluded to previously, have long been a white space -overenrolled by white students, taught by white teachers, and protected by white middle class parents (kohn, 1998; sapon-shevin, 1996). historically, advocates for greater numbers of black and brown faces in gifted and advanced programs have been confronted by white power brokers or establishments that view difference as a deficit and uphold biased views of intelligence that maintain the white enrollment status quo (baldwin, 1987; frasier, 1987; hilliard, 1990; torrance, 1974). the numbers reveal the magnitude of segregated gifted programs under the guise of ignorance as opposed to indifference. since 2002, the u.s. department of education’s office of civil rights (ocr) has collected data on school districts as documented in its civil rights data collection gifted students of color 49 (www.ocrdata.ed.gov). each year, the ocr has found that black and hispanic students are under-represented in gifted education. the most recent ocr data collection was during the 20112012 school year in which, black students comprised 19% of students enrolled in public schools across the country but only 10% of black students were identified as gifted. this is equivalent to almost a 50% discrepancy. while representing 25% of students, hispanic students comprise only 16% of students in gifted classes, roughly a 40% discrepancy. this equates to the under-education of approximately 500,000 hispanic and black students. the wide disparity of under-representation is not new to gifted education. rather, this has become indicative of gifted educational spaces. one is hard pressed to find a district where under-representation does not exist, yet it is protected under so-called ignorance and, thus, deemed to be unintentional. regardless of whether the school enrollment is majority black, hispanic, or mixed race, gifted education programs represent a white space in public schools, akin to segregation. the remnants of these segregated spaces are echoed in secondary classrooms (i.e., ap and ib classes) and beyond (e.g., colleges and universities, employment opportunities). according to the u.s. department of education and the office of civil rights, the pipeline to ap and ib classes and elite colleges is also racially segregated. this is problematic because these spaces are often filled by students with access to gifted programs. ocr data reveal that ap and ib classes are extensively white (see http://ocrdata.ed.gov/statenationalestimation) consequently, opportunities to enroll in ap classes are limited and end up being racially identifiable. teachers and counselors are school level gatekeepers because they operate with relative autonomy. as a result, equitable access and opportunity for under-represented students are hindered due to teacher and counselor biases, ignorance, indifference, or all three. this is habitually manifested in under-referrals and “well-intentioned” discouragement when black and hispanic students express interest. ford, grantham, and whiting’s (2008) review found that all studies examining teacher referrals to gifted programs revealed under-referrals of black and hispanic students and over-referrals of white students. grissom and redding (2016) found that even when black students have the same profile as white students, white teachers still under-refer them. this pervasive pattern begs the question -is this ignorance or indifference on the part of educators who have the authority to refer, who have the power to open or close doors to gifted education, ib and ap classes, and related opportunities? racial steering of white middle-class students into gifted education (and ap and ib) is supported by narrow definitions of giftedness based primarily on iq scores and traditional theories of normative development based on high-income whites that subvert the promise, potential, and possibility of black students, especially boys, being referred to gifted education (wright, ford, & walters, 2016). as a result of these definitions and traditions (most of which have not been culturally responsive), the strengths and cultural assets of non-white students that tend to manifest in their attitudes, beliefs, values, and practices go unrecognized and unsupported in school as a viable pathway to gifted education (ford, 2010, 2013a, 2013b). despite unique and brilliant experiential and cultural funds of knowledge, black and brown faces are denied access to gifted spaces, as noted below. http://ocrdata.ed.gov/statenationalestimation 50 global education review 4(1) access denied: students of color and gifted education a closer look at the contextual factors mentioned above, as these intersect with race in relationship to the significant underrepresentation of students of color in gifted education, raises two important questions: (1) how do race and culture directly impact students’ access to learning opportunities in a racially stratified society? and (2) what are ways in which schools and individual teachers can deny or limit students of color access to gifted education and advanced curricular materials? these and other questions are explored in the remaining sections of this article. sample strategies and resources grounded in equity and excellence are provided to increase students of color access to gifted education. to repeat, we define equity as being fair, responsive, and impartial, especially for those who have the fewest resources and least advocacy, and who have experienced structural inequality due to historical exclusion. we also provide a formula designed to quantify equity, in order to highlight these inequities. gifted education definitions and a perspective on culture between 1970 and 2001, the u.s. department of education adopted six definitions of giftedness. however, the only explicit mention of culture within these six definitions does not appear until 1993. this early mention of culture was colorblind because it failed to capture complexity in a non-essentializing way. thus, the absence of the nuances and complexities of culture in definitions of giftedness is cause for concern when consideration is given to the belief that culture is fundamental to understanding learning and development (banks, 2001; lee, 2007; nasir & hand, 2006; nieto, 2009). for example, research on the achievement and learning of students of color tends to define culture as a system of meanings and practices, cohesive across time, which individual members carry with them from place to place (gutiérrez & rogoff, 2003; young & young, 2016). the problem with this view of culture is that it characterizes individuals as somewhat passive carriers of culture. based on this view, culture is simply a set of rituals, beliefs, and fixed traits. such an operational definition of culture contrasts with the concept of culture used to describe and explain the gifts and talents of under-represented populations that often go unnoticed in schools. culture with respect to gifted education is produced and reproduced in moments as people do life. from this standpoint, culture is both carried by individuals and created in moment-to-moment interactions with one another as they participate in (and reconstruct) cultural practices. this more fluid definition of culture is requisite to the current discussion. drawing on this conceptualization of culture, we assert and concur that gifted students are children and youth who possess outstanding talent, perform or show the potential for performing, at remarkably high levels of accomplishment when compared with others of their age, experience, or environment. further, we submit that giftedness is multifaceted, as are the solutions to increasing access. these children and youth exhibit high performance capacity in intellectual, creative, and/or artistic areas, and unusual leadership capacity, or excel in specific academic fields. they require services or activities not typically provided by schools. outstanding talents are present in children and youth from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all gifted students of color 51 areas of human endeavor (u.s. department of education, 1993). this culturally responsive definition of giftedness is essential to the diversification and desegregation of gifted classrooms. in light of the claim put forth by the u.s. department of education, an emphasis on potential and talent development is both critically necessary and equitable in every nation. talent development – the focus on early identification and potential, and ongoing supports – has the capacity to recruit and retain under-represented gifted students. the culturally responsive 1993 definition addressed two historically ignored or trivialized notions specific to culturally and linguistically diverse students: (1) gifted students must be compared with others not just by age, but also experience and environment and (2) outstanding talents are present in students from all cultural groups, across all economic strata, and in all areas of human endeavor. this definition calls for much needed and long overdue attention to local and preferably building norms. specifically, gifted students need to be identified and served in every school building. challenging definitions and theories of giftedness definitions and theories of giftedness are normed and conceptualized on middle-class whites (ford, 2013b; sternberg, 2007a, 2007b). hence, the system inherently serves and privileges its target population. such theories of giftedness have been operationalized primarily and almost exclusively by intelligence tests and achievement tests, respectively. in the majority of schools, students must obtain an iq score of 130 or higher to be identified as intellectually gifted and/or they must score at or above 96th percentile on an achievement test. this system is based on the belief that giftedness is synonymous with intelligence and achievement, and that both can be measured validly and reliably with standardized tests, regardless of culture and other demographic variables (e.g., income), and irrespective of exposure and opportunity. commonly cited opportunities to learn, such as teacher quality, rigorous curriculum, student academic engagement, and high expectations are absent from many classrooms serving large populations of culturally and linguistically diverse students (boykin & noguera, 2011; delpit, 2012; howard, 2014). thus, when access is determined almost exclusively on colorblind and decontextualized cut scores and tools, students of color are placed at a substantial disadvantage. such assumptions and criteria trivialize and ignore the importance of culture, language, and experience on test performance, which were rightfully noted in the 1993 federal definition. tests and other instruments (checklists, nomination forms, etc.) must be selected with the culture and language of students in mind, along with equity. to do otherwise is to shortchange gifted students of color who are every bit as capable as white students. rethinking the referral and identification process for gifted education to increase the number of under-represented students of color (e.g., black and hispanic) in gifted education will require more than good intentions. good intentions alone will not equip educators with the ability to see potential where they do not expect to find gifts and talents. for example, some teachers hold negative stereotypes and inaccurate perceptions about 52 global education review 4(1) the promise, potential, and possibilities of students of color to engage in superior academic performance (e.g., grissom & redding, 2016). these negative stereotypes blind teachers from the brilliance of black and hispanic students that emerges from their different cultural and experiential perspectives. much can be learned from the early research of fitz-gibbons (1974) to improve the teacher referral and identification process for placement in gifted education of underrepresented students of color, who relative to the teacher referral process, concluded this: one might hazard the generalization that when teacher judgments are relied upon for placement or identification it is likely to be the child who does not relate to the teacher who gets overlooked, despite the fact that his achievements and ability are equal to or higher than those of the students recognized as bright. (pp. 61-62) to repeat, evidence of this mismatch between teacher and student is cited in the research of grissom and redding (2016) who found, even when black students had equivalent scores on relevant achievement measures compared to their white peers, underidentification remained. this pattern of indifference persisted when controlling for other background factors, such as health and socioeconomic status, and characteristics of classrooms and schools. they concluded, that one of the mediating factors was teacher discretion. in contrast to this persistent pattern, they also found that ethnically matched black students were more likely to be identified and placed in gifted programs by black teachers. the effects of ethnic matching are further explained by the higher expectations expressed by black teachers. hence, we argue that an equitable referral and identification process is critical to avoid the pervasive shortchanging of underrepresented students of color with regard to identification and placement in gifted education. in the next sections, we describe and explain two formulas to increase the numbers of underrepresented students of color in gifted education to safeguard claims of “ignorance” under the guise of indifference. gifted under-representation formula and equity allowance formula several statistics can be used to analyze disproportionality or representation discrepancies. here we utilize the relative difference in composition index (rdci) to quantify disproportionality (e.g., see ford, 2013b). the rdci for a racial group is the difference between their gifted education composition and general education composition, expressed as a discrepancy percentage. a guiding question is: “what is the difference between the composition (percentage) of black or hispanic students in general education compared to the composition of black or hispanic students in gifted education?” guided by this question, this formula permits educators to compare discrepancies. a discrepancy is significant when under-representation exceeds the threshold determined legally and/or by decision makers. racial quotas are illegal in the u.s. thus, it is important to acknowledge that equity thresholds are not racial quotas. with quotas, group representation in school enrollment and gifted education enrollment is proportional; meaning that if black or hispanic students comprise 50% of a school district (state or even gifted students of color 53 school building), they must comprise 50% of gifted education enrollment. this is not the mechanism employed with equity thresholds. after sharing several explicit examples using the rdci, we present an equity allowance formula to help determine whether under-representation is beyond statistical chance – whether the imbalance is primarily influenced by humanmade obstacles (e.g., subjectivity, deficit thinking, prejudice) and, thus, possibly discriminatory (see ford, 2013a, 2013b; valencia, 2010). the rdci for underrepresentation is computed as [100% (composition (%) of black students in gifted education) / (composition (%) of black students in general education)]. using decimals yields the same results. black and hispanic students are underidentified at an alarming rate. each year, over 500,000 black and hispanic students combined are not identified as gifted (ford, 2010, 2013b; ford, 2015). table 1 presents the national civil rights data collection (crdc) for 2006, 2009 and 2011. historically, black students’ underrepresentation has ranged from 43% to 47%; for hispanic students, the range is from 31% to 37%. under-representation is a national problem that exists in the majority of states and school districts for black students (see ford & whiting, 2008b; grissom & redding, 2016). table 1. black and hispanic students: under-representation in gifted education nationally (2006, 2009, 2011). national enrollment gifted enrollment under representation percent 2006 black hispanic 17.13% 20.4% 9.15% 12.79% 47% 37% 2009 black hispanic 16.17% 15.4% 9.9% 11.3% 43% 31% 2011 black hispanic 19% 25% 10% 16% 47% 36% source: (u.s. department of education, office for civil rights, civil rights data collection, 2006, 2009, 2011). see http://ocrdata.ed.gov http://ocrdata.ed.gov/ gifted students of color 54 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wright, brian l., ford, donna y., & young, jemimah l. (2017). ignorance or indifference? seeking excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education. global education review, 4(1). 45-60. based on the data in table 1, we pose the following questions to inform the application of the equity allowance formula: as described in ford (2013b). “when is under-representation significant?” “how severe must underrepresentation be in order to require changes?” “how severe must under-representation be to be considered discriminatory?” while considering these questions, recall that when the percentage of under-representation exceeds the designated threshold in the equity allowance formula (also called equity index), it is beyond statistical chance; therefore, human error is operating - attitudes, instruments, and policies and procedures may be discriminatory. intent must be considered when examining under-representation, depending on the legislation applied. for instance, the doctrine of disparate impact holds that practices may be considered discriminatory and illegal if they have adverse impact on students regarding a protected trait. protected traits vary by statute, but most u.s. federal civil rights laws (e.g., title vi) include race, color, religion, national origin, and gender as protected traits. despite these protections the burden of proof remains. under the disparate impact doctrine, a violation of title vi of the 1964 civil rights act may be proven by demonstrating that an instrument, practice, and/or policy has a disproportionately adverse effect on black and hispanic students. thus, the disparate impact doctrine prohibits school personnel from using a facially neutral practice that has an unjustified adverse impact on members of a protected class. a facially neutral employment practice is one that does not appear to be discriminatory on the surface; instead, it is discriminatory in its application and/or its effect (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/disparate impact). the practices common to gifted education require further examination to redress possible discriminatory practices. the equity index (ei) provides a contextualized lens to guide these investigations. used in a decontextualized way, the rdci is insufficient for determining inequitable and/or discriminatory under-representation. thus, the rdci should be used and interpreted within the appropriate context. the ei helps to provide sufficient context. calculating the ei requires two steps. step 1: [(composition (%) of black students in general education) x threshold of 20% = b. this is abbreviated as c x t = b.] step 2: [(composition (%) of black students in general education) b = ei. this is abbreviated as c–b=ei. for example, black students were 19% of school enrollment in 2011, the ei using a 20% allowance would be: b is 19% x 20%=3.8% and ei is 19% 3.8% = 15.2%.]. thus, black students should represent at minimal 15.2% of students in gifted education in the u.s. however, the percentage for 2011 is 10% nationally. the under-representation for black students is not only significant, but also beyond statistical chance, suggesting that racial discrimination is operating. to achieve the minimal equity goal, educators must increase black students’ representation nationally by at least 5.2%. this is presented in table 2. the goals for hispanic students also appear in table 2. our nation’s gifted programs are racially segregated, as conveyed by data presented in table 2. using the aforementioned formula yields a similar result for hispanic students, but not to the same degree. as a nation and educational system, we are far from fulfilling the mandates of brown v. board of education of topeka, 347 u.s. 483 (1954) in gifted education. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/disparate%20impact gifted students of color 55 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wright, brian l., ford, donna y., & young, jemimah l. (2017). ignorance or indifference? seeking excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education. global education review, 4(1). 45-60. table 2. black and hispanic students’ under-representation and equity allowance index nationally (2006, 2009, 2011) year black hispanic national enrollment gifted enrollment percentage of underrepresentation equity allowance goal 2006 black hispanic 17.13% 20.4% 9.15% 12.79% 47% 37% 13.7% (increase from 9.15% to 13.7%) 16.32% (increase from 12.79% to 16.32%) 2009 black hispanic 16.17% 15.4% 9.9% 11.3% 43% 31% 12.9% (increase from 9.9% to 12.9%) 12.32% (increase from 11.3% to 12.32%) 2011 black hispanic 19% 25% 10% 16% 47% 36% 15.2% (increase from 10% to 15.2%) 20% (increase from 16% to 20%) source: ford (2013b) recommendations for changes regarding under-represented gifted students of color the potential of too many black and hispanic students remains untapped because they are denied access to gifted classes supported and protected by ignorance on the one hand, and indifference on the other hand. prejudice, stereotypes, and deficit-oriented paradigms contribute to segregated gifted programs (which violate the principles and mandates of the civil right act of 1964 and brown v. board of education, 1954) that are sorely inadequate at recruitment and retention (ford, 2013b; ford, 2015; valencia, 2010). mcfadden vs. board of education for illinois school district u-46 56 global education review 4(1) (2013) reminds us and must compel us to continue advocating for students of color, that discrimination is not only unintentional ignorance, but also intentional, and that discrimination in gifted education perpetuates segregation and indifference. the professional will and accountability to eliminate manufactured barriers (e.g., conscious ignorance), to challenge the status quo, and to advocate for under-represented gifted black and hispanic students is crucial. the following recommendations are offered with this perspective in mind. analyze and disaggregate underrepresentation data attitudes (ignorance, prejudice, deficit thinking, indifference and racism) and inequitable policies and practices must be recognized, scrutinized, investigated, confronted, and interrupted to address the indifference surrounding the recruitment and retention of under-represented students of color in gifted education. the following questions can be used to redress the problematic aforementioned policies and practices, and instruments: ● how do screening and referral processes account for the representation of black and hispanic students at the district and state level? ● how pervasive and severe is underrepresentation? ● which factors mediate underrepresentation (e.g., ignorance; indifference; subjectivity and prejudice in beliefs, attitudes and values; subjective instruments, such as checklists and nomination forms; biased and unfair tests; discriminatory policies and procedures)? ● which policies and procedures moderate under-representation (e.g., reliance on teacher referral or checklist versus school-wide grade level screening: parent/caregiver referral or checklists: designated cutoff scores; grade at which gifted programs begins; ongoing screening; convenience and location of testing sites; modes of communicating in neighborhoods)? ● are procedures in place to identify educators who persistently under-refer black and hispanic students? how are they supported, educated, trained, and held accountable? ● how effective are family referrals for under-represented students, and what support mechanisms are in place to increase awareness and knowledge? determine equity allowance goals after studying the magnitude and root causes of under-representation, equity goals must be set to desegregate gifted education. we propose using the 20% equity allowance (ford, 2013b). the equity allowance acknowledges that giftedness exists in every racial group. students’ experiential and cultural funds of knowledge and opportunities to learn are not always equally and equitably distributed. the equity allowance is a quantifiable metric that accounts for differences and injustices, thereby opening doors for many non-white students who might otherwise not be identified and served in gifted education. moreover, the formula safeguards claims of ignorance that typically can be described as indifference to those who are not part of the status quo. collect data on the experiences of gifted black and hispanic students what are the experiences of former and current black and hispanic students in gifted education? examine the intersections of gender, class, and race by disaggregating data. disaggregate data by gender and income – what are the gifted students of color 57 experiences of males compared to females, and low-income students compared to middle and high-income students? multiple data collection methods should be employed. for example, surveys, interviews, focus groups, and case studies should all be utilized to gather data from students and families regarding how their experiences can be useful for both recruitment, retention and to disrupt ignorance and challenge indifference. it is essential to study the implicit and explicit motivating factors that support persistence in gifted classes. aside from families, peers, educators, and the community there are other unique socializing agents that warrant further investigation. ● do students feel welcome in gifted classrooms? ● do teachers, counselors, administrators, and other school personnel affirm gifted black and hispanic students? ● how do gifted black and hispanic students find ways to excel rather than exist in gifted education? ● how supportive, involved, and informed are their families in order to serve as advocates and cultural brokers? evaluate and promote preand in-service teachers’ preparation in gifted education despite their responsibility for referrals, nominations, and teaching gifted students, educators remain under-prepared in gifted education. gifted education preparation is essential and can take place via coursework, degree programs, and professional development (conferences and in-service workshops). training must be perpetual and substantive, which means targeting equitable identification and assessment instruments, policies and procedures, and development -affective, psychological, academic, social, and cultural (ford, 2010, 2011; young, 2009). another issue that deserves similar attention is the absence of educators of color in gifted education programs (e.g., teachers, counselors, administrators). the preparation of current and future educators to teach in gifted education calls for meaningful consideration of culturally responsiveness as a preferred disposition in education in general, gifted education in particular. culturally responsiveness and teachers culturally responsive educators are adept at motivating all gifted students, and understand that students of color may face more challenges than their white classmates and peers, as already noted. they recognize the importance of multiple forms of motivation. successful teachers of gifted black and hispanic students motivate and affirm students -cognitively, academically, socially-emotionally, and culturally. cultural competence and culturally responsiveness are one in the same for effective teachers of gifted students of color. evaluate and promote cultural competence among teachers educators who lack cultural competence risk misinterpreting or worse undermining the educational experiences of black and hispanic students, and thus contribute to segregated gifted education programs. formal, substantive, and comprehensive multicultural preparation helps ensure educational equity (banks, 2010, 2015). professional development on culture and cultural differences must be ongoing and beyond surface level applications. professional development activities should include defining and understanding culture and cultural differences without a deficit orientation, recognizing how culture impacts teaching and learning, testing and assessment, and classroom environment (e.g., relationships with teachers and classmates, classroom management). field experiences, participation in community events, 58 global education review 4(1) and family visits are opportunities for educators to discover the unique funds of knowledge present in gifted students of color. again, it is vital that educators connect with students’ cultural practices; that their work is culturally responsive and affirming. increase the demographics of black and hispanic teachers in gifted education white teachers comprise a significant proportion of the education profession (kena et al., 2014). nationally, whites comprise 85% of teachers, black and hispanic teachers each represent 7% of teachers, and asians are 1% of teachers. thus, students from every racial and cultural background continue to graduate without ever having a black or hispanic teacher, counselor, school psychologist, and/or administrator. the representation of teachers of color in gifted education is even more disproportionate, where black teachers are practically invisible (ford, 2011). is this due to “ignorance” or indifference or both? culturally and linguistically diverse teachers can and do serve as cultural brokers, role models, mentors, and strong advocates for black and hispanic students (delpit, 2012; gay, 2010; grissom & redding, 2016; ladsonbillings, 2009). thus, their presence in gifted education is equally necessary. summary and conclusion in brown vs. board of education (1954), the u.s. supreme court ruled that segregating children on the basis of race was unconstitutional. this landmark court ruling signaled the end of legalized racial segregation in our nation’s schools, overruling the ‘separate but equal’ principle set forth in the 1896 plessy v. ferguson case. yet, ignorance and indifference to safeguard the practice of segregation endures in schools and gifted education classrooms. in the mcfadden (2013) ruling, the presence and persistence of intentional and unintentional discrimination in gifted education was brought to light. this court ruling serves as a reminder that discrimination is alive and present in gifted classrooms. while other districts may not have been found guilty of intentional discrimination, it is clear that de facto and/or de jure segregation is operating – unintentionally and intentionally – in many school districts all under the guise of “ignorance” when what is really operating is a type of indifference to the status quo. gifted education professionals must abide by the spirit and law of brown v. board of education (1954) regarding desegregating classrooms, programs, and services in principle and practice. despite small steps in the right direction, under-representation remains and these strides have been insignificant and inequitable. educators must be proactive, deliberate, and diligent about eliminating intentional and unintentional barriers to recruiting and retaining students of color in gifted education -to desegregating and integrating gifted education (see griggs v. duke power, 1971). this article ends with five primary takeaways and several additional discussion questions to challenge claims of ignorance and indifference. primary takeaways to create equitable gifted programs and services for all nations include: 1. denying access to gifted education, whether intentional or unintentional, leads to – under-identification; 2. to improve access to gifted education for under-identified black and hispanic students, educators must determine equity goals and how they will make changes to meet the goals despite the challenges; 3. decreasing under-identification requires culturally responsive and equity based policies, procedures, instruments, and gifted students of color 59 attitudes; 4. extensive training and preparation in gifted education cannot occur in isolation, but must be complemented by extensive training/preparation in culturally competent education; and 5. families and communities must be supported in order to advocate for their culturally and linguistically diverse gifted children. home-school collaboration is necessary to reach this goal. further questions to ponder for equitable gifted education: 1. how might an over-reliance on tests to identify gifted students limit the access of students of color? 2. calculate the percentage of underrepresentation in your district for black and hispanic students. why does underrepresentation exist? 3. what is the equitable goal for underrepresented students in your district? 4. what are the shortcomings of teacher referrals for culturally and linguistically diverse students and how can such referrals be improved? 5. what are five or more culturally responsive strategies that should be implemented to improve access to gifted education for black and hispanic students overall and in your school district? 6. what are 3-5 equity or access related topics that should be discussed in professional development and coursework with gifted education teachers and other educators? conclusion when ignorance and indifference persist, the needs of gifted students of color, their gifts and talents, remain unnurtured. currently, thousands of gifted students of color remain unidentified, undereducated, and miseducated. envisioning and creating gifted education as a space that recognizes and supports the intellectual gifts and talents of black and hispanic students will require educators be deliberate and intentional about critically examining their own attitudes, beliefs, and practices concerning underserved populations in a concerted effort to redress the absence of their untapped gifts and talents. a critical examination and disruption of this trend will require attention and consideration to those important structures that limit access and prevent equity in gifted education. many of the most salient structures were addressed in this article as stubborn artifacts of gifted education that are problematic and impede progress toward desegregation of a space that remains segregated. recommendations for policies and practices to dismantle these structures are also provided. however, as discussed in this article many obstacles and challenges remain before equitable change(s) can occur. in conclusion, we challenge readers to an introspective selfassessment of their own ignorance and/or indifference as it pertains to this matter. it is our hope that this article provides sufficient knowledge to inform and challenge both ignorance and indifference. ignorance and indifference cannot and should not prevent students of color from realizing the full potential of their gifts and talents. for as dr. maya angelou once said “a bird doesn’t sing because it has an answer, it sings because it has a song”. many under-represented students of color have a song, but the question is, will we let them sing? 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(in press). responding to culturally unresponsive teaching: a systematic review of culturally responsive teaching self-efficacy using confidence intervals. journal of praxis in multicultural education. about the author(s) brian l. wright, phd, is an assistant professor of early childhood education in the department of instruction and curriculum leadership in the college of education at the university of memphis. his research and publications examine the role of racial-ethnic identity in the school achievement of successful african-american males in urban schools prek-12. his current research projects include highquality early childhood education programs for all children, but especially those children living in poverty, culturally responsive and responsible school readiness for african american boys (preschool and kindergarten), literacy and african american males, african american and latino males as early childhood teachers, and teacher identity development. donna y. ford, phd, is professor of education with joint appointments in the department of special education and in the department of teaching and learning at vanderbilt university. she conducts research primarily in gifted education and multicultural/urban education. specifically, her work focuses on: (1) recruiting and retaining culturally different students in gifted education; (2) multicultural and urban education; (3) achievement gaps; (4) minority student achievement and underachievement; and (5) family involvement. she consults with school districts, educational, and legal organizations in the areas of gifted education, advanced placement, and multicultural/urban education. jemimah l. young, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of teacher education and administration at the university of north texas. she actively engages in the preparation of pre-service teachers to meet the needs of all their students. particular research interests include the investigation of alternative cultures and multicultural education. her specialization includes culturally responsive teaching, achievement of children of color, urban learning environments, educational technology, as well as the sociology of education. using student-centric technology for educational change 143 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, nicole j. (2015). using student-centric technology for educational change. [review of the book “disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns” by clayton m. christensen, curtis w. johnson, and michael b. horn]. global education review, 2 (4). 143-145. book review using student-centric technology for educational change “disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns” by clayton m. christensen, curtis w. johnson, and michael b. horn by nicole j. martone in this expanded edition, authors clayton m. christensen, curtis w. johnson, and michael b. horn present a compelling argument in disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns to disrupt the current educational system through the use of student-centric technology. the book’s layout chronicles the lives of several individuals—a veteran teacher (mr. alvera), a newly appointed principal to a new building (dr. allston), and some very different students (maria, rob, sam, and doug)—discovering in their own way that the current mold of a one size fits all approach to education is not working. their stories are presented as brief anecdotes at the beginning of each chapter, where a new dilemma is brought to light or resolved, and serve as segues into each chapter’s topic. for educators and students today, these individuals’ lives are very real in that the everyday trials and tribulations they face are nothing new to the challenges seen in the field. the authors assert that this model of standardization failing these individuals— “categorizing students by age into grades and then teaching batches of them with batches of material”—was influenced by the early industrial factory system. by introducing grades and having a teacher focus on only one set of students of the same academic proficiency, “teachers could teach ‘the same subjects, in the same way, and at the same pace’ to all children in the classroom” (p. 35). due to the homogeneous model, educators struggle with engaging all of their learners and are discovering the importance of technology’s role in tapping into students’ interests. it is no doubt that many students do not have their interests met and developed in their current academic spheres. the authors begin by looking at different philosophies of education throughout history, starting with the old school-house model of heterogeneous groupings; to the model throughout the industrial revolution and progressive era, with the introduction of vocational training; to the turn of the century, 144 global education review 2 (4) with the direct-instruction approach (which, they point out, is still used by many today). the authors clearly indicate that one major thing is missing from all current and previous educational philosophies—individualized instruction, where every student learns at his or her instructional level, at his or her own pace, and even with material that he or she is interested in. this notion of individualized and differentiated instruction is not new to educators, yet the authors propose that the current educational challenges with meeting differentiation’s demands can be better sought through online, student-centric learning experiences. the authors subsequently compare education’s infrastructure to a business model, explaining why schools are failing as a nation, especially with meeting the demands of no child left behind and standardization. they emphasize their arguments with examples of how businesses failed to adopt new approaches and focused on building their current clientele, creating products to support existing markets. this, they claim, made economic sense at the time, even if the current market called for something different or more innovative. christensen, johnson, and horn discuss that “cramming what should be a disruptive innovation into an existing marketplace is fraught with expense and disappointment because new disruptive technologies never perform as well as does the established approach in its own market” (p. 79). but, unfortunately, when a new, more in demand, and cheaper product came along, those businesses failed to compete and thus collapsed. the authors emphasize that this is the current situation in education. to them, it essentially boils down to supply and demand, and the current supply is not meeting the demand or need. this is presented through the authors’ “jobs-to-be-done model,” which is new to this edition (p 175). students, the authors suggest, need to have a reason to hire school. what is demanded of education is the need for more personalized, relevant instruction that cannot be met the way that schools are traditionally designed and organized. the authors thus state an obvious dilemma: “[b]ecause students have different types of intelligence, learning styles, paces, and starting points, all students have special learning needs. it is not just students whom we label as having disabilities” (p. 34). what they propose is to customize and tailor learning experiences for each student through online, student-centric course offerings to motivate all students to learn. with their arguments, the authors have hit on something significant: we live in a very technology driven society and the educational realm is not immune to its existence. the authors address a way to better support students academically because we are, essentially, a nation at risk and something must be done. they have tapped into something—namely, the need to integrate technology in a more meaningful, purposeful way— that has received some attention and should be looked at more closely. their course of action would change the framework of schools, which can make many stakeholders uncomfortable. however, education does need to evolve with the times, and meeting the students’ needs in a more innovative, targeted way should be a priority. nevertheless, the authors fail to address some significant holes, particularly in regard to the practicality of implementing their theoretical vision. they mention that by 2019, 50 percent of students will be taking online courses. further, by 2024, 80 percent of students will be taking online courses. these predictions seem too lofty. the authors also do not address the legislative realities involved when making significant educational changes, especially when the allocation of funds, or the change thereof, is using student-centric technology for educational change 145 involved. the authors state that online coursework is more affordable, but they do not break down the exact costs. they assert that “costs will fall as the market scales up,” emphasizing that online, student-centric course demands will increase and supplement classes where there are teacher shortages (p. 101). such a situation, they claim, would allow teachers to give students more individual attention (p. 73). the new educational environment that the authors envision thus presents new roles for teachers. while seemingly fine for courses in subjects lacking qualified teachers, what will eventually happen to courses where live teachers are available? they also mention that students can take courses at their own pace, at individualized levels of instruction, and the courses which interest them. this raises various questions: how can courses be tailored for all students in this way? do we not still have to ensure that all students meet the same graduation requirements? is this going to work logistically? further, online courses like the ones the authors mention can have complications. as the authors assert, “online learning works best with the more motivated students” (p. 100). even with customized programs, problems can exist with students’ attentiveness and ability to finish courses (p. 100). many students and parents may end up requesting live, face-to-face teachers because students can have trouble keeping up with the work and understanding it. overall, this text informs policymakers, education reformers, administrators, and teachers looking to support their k-12 students’ varying academic needs when preparing them for career and college readiness. it also potentially informs post-secondary institutions looking for ways to address issues with remediation that seem to plague many of our country’s schools. many post-secondary schools offer courses online or in hybrid format, so it is no surprise that more k-12 schools may begin to offer online courses or blended online experiences in the years to come. “disrupting class: how disruptive innovation will change the way the world learns.” by clayton m. christensen, curtis w. johnson, and michael b. horn. 2nd edition. new york: mcgraw-hill, 2011. isbn: 9780071749107 about the authors clayton m. christensen is the robert and jane cizik professor of business administration at the harvard business school, and is widely regarded as one of the world’s foremost experts on innovation and growth. he is author or coauthor of five books including the new york times bestsellers, the innovator's dilemma and the innovator's solution. michael horn is the co-founder and executive director of the education of innosight institute, a non-profit think tank devoted to applying the theories of disruptive innovation to problems in the social sector. tech & learning magazine named him to its list of the 100 most important people in the creation and advancement of the use of technology in education. he holds an ab from yale and an mba from harvard. curtis johnson, once a teacher and later a college president, is a writer and consultant. he was head of the public policy research organization that launched the idea of chartered schools and chief of staff to former governor arne carlson of minnesota. co-author of three books on how metropolitan regions have to adapt to new realities to be successful places, johnson is a partner with the citistates group and the managing partner of education evolving, a project of the center for policy studies. he is a graduate of baylor university with a phd from the college of education at the university of texas. about the reviewer nicole j. martone is a doctoral student at lesley university in cambridge, massachusetts specializing in educational leadership. she is also the ela instructional leader at shepaug valley school in washington depot, connecticut and a lecturer in the arts and humanities division at naugatuck valley community college in waterbury, connecticut. 2015-2016 board of reviewers 187 2015-2016 board of reviewers nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, israel caroline adele bligh, leeds beckett university, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york anne marie connor, michigan state university oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha jodi lynn denyszyn, university of texas at austin jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college sefa dundar, abant izzet baysal university, turkey claudia fahrenwald, university of education upper austria aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york danielle forbes, university of illinois at urbana champaign melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya 190 global education review 3(4) neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university heather gould, eugene lang college, the new school for liberal arts jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong costel grigoras, the sorbonne university, paris e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom barbara hanfstingl. alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university brian lloyd heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis christine hunt hjorth, rockaway, new jersey william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska fethi kayalar, erzincan university, turkey hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville manuela b. keller-schneider, zurich university of teacher education, switzerland shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york allyson krupar, the pennsylvania state university jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, new york kerry maree lee, university of auckland, 2015-2016 board of reviewers 191 new zealand carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college sandhya vishwas limaye, tata institute of social sciences, india sara liviero, university of exeter, united kingdom pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university isolde malmberg, university for music and performing arts, vienna dominic manuel, mcgill university, canada jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, new york eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, ashland, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, st. john’s university, new york claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico evan michael mickey, indiana university, bloomington mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia maria boeke mongillo, central connecticut state university nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york t. lee morgan, university of northern colorado david morrison-love, the university of glasgow, united kingdom tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban univerisity of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california los angeles ilham nasser, george mason university bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey melissa parenti, st.john's university, new york do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin 190 global education review 3(4) community college, minnesota karl f. pawl, concordia university, chicago diana payne, university of connecticut emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university gary peters, university of alabama salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york christine eva plaimauer, university of education upper austria mary podsiedlik, syracuse university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york sibylle rahm, otto-friedrich-university of bamberg, germany sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia johannes reitinger, private university college of teacher education of linz, austria konstantina rentzou, european university of cyprus, nicosia, cyprus leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles merethe roos, telemark university college, norway katharina rosenberger, university of vienna, austria thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, austria susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsinmadison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university kris stewart, university of wisconsin, madison nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts anita summer, university of vienna, austria sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york mary barbara trube, ohio university agnes turner, university of klagenfurt, vienna, austria karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh eugenia villa-cuesta, adelphi university, new york sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college , new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium vemitra momit white, mississippi state university stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york 2015-2016 board of reviewers 191 sandra williamson-leadley, university of otago, new zealand gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria brian l. wright, university of memphis linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria 66 global education review 3(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lindenberg, anni, henderson, kathryn i. & durán, leah (2016). using technology and mentorship to improve teacher pedagogy and educational opportunities in rural nicaragua. global education review, 3(1). 66-87 using technology and mentorship to improve teacher pedagogy and educational opportunities in rural nicaragua anni lindenberg the university of texas at austin kathryn i. henderson the university of texas at san antonio leah durán the university of arizona abstract this study used ethnographic methods to understand factors influencing the implementation of an educational intervention combining short math content videos with teacher training and mentorship in high-poverty primary schools in nicaragua with implications for rural school reform. educators in rural schools in latin american face serious obstacles to improve classroom instruction and pedagogy, including lack of resources and overcrowding. research suggests an over-reliance on input-output models in which inputs (e.g. teacher salaries, textbooks, technology, computer labs, numbers of classrooms, etc.) are expected to produce particular outputs (student retention, lowering drop-out rates, increasing graduation rates, etc.); however, studies show that regardless of the resources, much depends on effective use of resources for successful teaching and learning (o'sullivan, 2006; l. s. shulman, 1987). while input/output models provide insights into an educational systems’ economic efficiency, they do not offer insight into what actually transpires inside of a classroom (o'sullivan, 2006). much depends on effective training and use of available resources. though systemic issues in the nicaraguan educational system produced numerous obstacles for the eleven participating 3rd and 6th grade teachers, the educational intervention model supported teachers’ ability to be innovative and grow their practice in four ways: a) increased pedagogical knowledge; b) number of opportunities to collaborate and support one another as a community of teachers; c) flexibility in adaptation of the intervention model to their specific classroom context; and d) use of videos as supportive resources for content knowledge. keywords teacher education, math content videos, nicaragua, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher training, mentorship, rural school reform technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 67 introduction when nicaragua’s sandinista national liberation front (flsn) overthrew the somoza dictatorship in 1979, they inherited a country with a number of severe problems, including the largest per-capita debt in latin america, infrastructure devastated by war, and almost 40,000 orphans in a country of 2.5 million (hirshon & butler, 1983). the new government’s highly publicized priority was a countrywide focus on education including a literacy campaign, an increased education budget, and the construction of schools in rural areas (arnove, 1995). although access to primary school education has greatly increased in the intervening years, educational quality is still a struggle. the ministry of education in nicaragua estimated that of the 93% of children enrolled in primary school, only 43% of them finish the 6th grade, and of those only 41% go on to enroll in secondary school (plan estratégico de educación 2011-2015). a significant percentage of teachers –more that 60% in 1995—are empirícos, or untrained when they begin teaching (arnove, 1995) and the average teacher in nicaragua earns around $185–$226 a month (rogers, 2012). issues of teacher shortage are exacerbated by the poverty wages paid to teachers. escuela normal (teacher education for high school graduates) and teacher education programs at universities struggle to attract sufficient teachers to meet the needs of the public schools (vegas, 2007). consequently, inservice teacher education is particularly relevant as a means of changing teacher practices and improving schools. nicaraguan educators and educationadvocates have begun to explore new solutions to these historical problems. however, fuller’s (1987) description of the state of research in the developing world still largely holds true: few observational studies within third world classrooms have occurred. to date this work tends to be atheoretical … the school effects literature from the u. s. and europe suggests a variety of research avenues related to the social organization of schools and classrooms. but these roads have yet to be traveled by investigators working in developing countries. (p. 288) in this article, we address a dearth of research around the pressing issue of improving school quality in resource-poor contexts like nicaragua. we focus on the in-service development of practicing teachers to identify and describe nicaraguan teachers’ responses to a pilot educational intervention consisting of math content videos, mentorship and ongoing professional development. our central purpose was to explore the ways in which teachers adopt, adapt, or resist outside interventions, to begin to understand the complexities of teacher development in contexts like nicaragua, and better inform future efforts to improve teaching and learning in similar contexts. our two guiding research questions were: 1. what factors prevented teachers or encouraged teachers to take up new ideas in this high-poverty context? 2. how did participation in an educational intervention impact teacher innovation and the development of teacher practices? theoretical framework we understand teacher practices through a sociocultural lens, in which change and growth are mediated by the social, cultural and historical context (l.c. moll, 1990; rogoff, 2003; vygotsky, 1978). drawing on this perspective, we recognized teacher innovation as corresponding author: anni lindenberg, the university of texas at austin, 1 university station, austin, texas 78712 email: annilindenberg@gmail.com mailto:annilindenberg@gmail.com 68 global education review 3(1) a collaborative process. teacher growth occurred in part through interactions with colleagues, mentors, and additional educators mediated by the rural, high-poverty educational context. a sociopolitical lens reveals the ways in which social, economic, or political forces reward or punish teachers (apple, 1990; 2004; giroux, 1998); however, our work built on the assumption that teachers are agents of change, and this change can transpire through dialectical partnerships and collective struggles for humanization (campano, honeyford, sánchez, & vander-zanden, march 2010; freire, 2007). given this theoretical socio-cultural grounding, all three researchers aimed to collect data that centered on and valued the participating teachers’ perspectives and knowledge. interactions between the researchers and teachers during professional development aimed to collect, organize, and analyze local knowledge between schools. all three researchers explicitly tried to position themselves as learners in the interactions alongside an evaluative role. when researchers noticed or recognized an area for professional development (i.e., incorporating a collaborative learning technique), strategies drawing on cognitive coaching were used to ask teachers first what they thought and then have teachers reflect on their own teaching practices (costa & garmston, 1994; ellison & hayes, 2013). this work also draws on theories of pedagogical content knowledge (pck) (carpenter, fennema, peterson, & carey, 1988; mishra & koehler, 2006; shin et al., 2009; l. s. shulman, 1987), which posit that there is a difference between awareness (basic recognition) and knowledge, a deeper understanding that is situated, connected, and more specific. teacher pedagogical content knowledge and teacher cognition are entwined and important to explore in teacher education (l.s. shulman, 1986; l. s. shulman, 1987). one of the central aims of this study was to examine teacher perceptions regarding the relationship between this educational intervention, and their own growth in pedagogical content knowledge. our findings and discussion pay particular attention to the ways teachers navigate both curricular knowledge—materials for teaching and context for teaching—and the constraints around the particular programs or materials that are mandated (l. s. shulman, 1987; lee s. shulman, 2004). review of the literature given the extremely limited amount of empirical research conducted in nicaragua, we considered research on in-service teacher education conducted in latin america and other countries in the developing world. however, this was done with the awareness that countries do not fall easily into a dichotomy of developing/developed, and that there is huge variation between countries that may be categorized as developing. to that end, we looked to research on teacher learning in latin america, as well as some metaanalyses that considered multiple countries with similar challenges. since 1990, the nicaraguan government’s educational reform initiatives have focused on improving educational quality through decentralizing education management and changing teachers’ classroom practices (bruce fuller & rivarola, 1998; mecd, may 14, 2002, september 6, 2006). today all managerial and budgetary autonomy is in the hands of school based councils (consejos directivos). these decentralization initiatives have promoted active-learning pedagogies based in constructivist notions of teaching and learning (edgerton, 2005; mecd, september 6, 2006). one of the primary challenges in contexts like nicaragua is that of access, specifically the ways in which institutions and policies attempt technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 69 to ensure that students have equitable opportunities to quality education. in nicaragua broad swaths of the population have extremely limited access even to primary schooling characterized by lack of access to facilities, qualified personnel, books, technology, supplies, and transportation to school (angel-urdinola & laguna, 2008). teachers in similar contexts in other parts of latin america also face complex challenges such as teaching children in multigrade classrooms (m. t. tatto, 1999). rural teachers in particular are isolated from inservice teacher education and this professional isolation leads to high rates of absenteeism and turnover (m. tatto & e., 1997). moreover, as has been noted elsewhere in the developing world, debt servicing and fiscal austerity measures imposed by organizations like the international monetary fund have often been linked to reductions to the educational budget and declines in teacher quality (arnove, 1995; vegas, 2007). the systemic barriers of teaching in nicaragua were also illuminated through an additional interview with researcher, educator and local educational advocate, josefina vijil. she recognized teacher retention and quality as a problem exacerbated by the positioning of the profession. vijil said: people here become teachers for the sole reason that they’re poor. they opt for teaching as a quick solution, because there are no technical education options to help them get a job. if they fall in love with teaching they’ll carry on, but if not they’ll find another job as soon as possible, or else go to costa rica where they can earn more working as housekeepers. (vijil interview, 8/15/2012) teaching has become a profession for women in poverty. yet, because the demand for teachers has increased, teacher certification has become more relaxed and many teachers are responsible for teaching content that they themselves never learned in school (elvir, vijil, castillo, & castro, 2006; vijil, 2008). according to a qualitative study by naslund-hadley, loeravarela, and hepworth (2014) on cross-country differences between paraguay, the dominican republic, and the mexican state of nuevo leon, the years of teaching experience, training, and pedagogy, in addition to the socio-economic background of the students and schools, influenced student achievement scores on the second regional comparative and explanatory study (serce). employing poorly prepared teachers can result in actively teaching misinformation, exacerbating existing problems. the study found that teachers who had university degrees worked in schools with students that had higher achievement on their serce (naslund-hadley et al., 2014). given constraints, education systems in the developing world, including nicaragua, have tried a wide variety of strategies. vegas (2007) synthesized research across many developing countries, finding a general trend in which increases in educational funding in general, and teacher salaries in particular, were correlated with increased student achievement. when brazil increased educational funding substantially and distributed resources more equitably, student enrollment increased in poor areas, and the gap narrowed between high and low-performing students in achievement on standardized tests. this shift in resources was also associated with fewer over-age students, indicating that students were repeating less and/or were less likely to drop out and re-enter at a later age. teacher performance pay initiatives in bolivia, mexico and chile offered inconclusive evidence, though claiming that money distributed significantly affects outcomes (vegas, 2007). vegas also noted that devolving authority 70 global education review 3(1) to local schools in el salvador and honduras lead to less teacher absenteeism and better parent-teacher relationships, although it did not seem to be directly tied to student achievement outcomes. in a more recent meta-analysis of research on education in the developing world, buchmann and hannum (2001) noted that although spending more on science labs, reducing class size or teachers’ salaries did not seem to increase student achievement, there was strong evidence that spending more on textbooks, libraries and teacher education matters and strongly affected student outcomes. this lead them to conclude that in developing countries, basic material inputs and teacher quality are highly important; much more so than in industrialized countries where these factors may be assumed to be widely available. however, the authors did note that recent studies tend to rely on measures like the timss (third international math and science study) test, and the poorest countries, such as nicaragua, generally do not participate in timss. the meta-analysis conducted by hanushek (1995) indicated that teacher education was a significant and key factor in improving student performance in developing countries, more so than teacher salaries, student-teacher ratios, or per-pupil expenditures. however, reviews of teacher education in the developing world have indicated that teacher education in this context was under-theorized, meaning practice was not up to date with current research on effective pedagogy, and that teachers’ practices did not seem to be effective, leaning towards rote memorization (navarro & verdisco, 2000). moreover, there are serious critiques of teacher preparation programs in latin america as a whole, claiming that the educational theory taught is divorced from practice, and that teachers are not prepared to teach in rural settings or with indigenous populations (villegas-reimers, 1998). additionally, many teachers, especially rural teachers, do not have many opportunities to participate in in-service professional development. teachers interviewed in several research studies often mentioned the need to have more practical in-service courses (navarro & verdisco, 2000). since teachers in contexts like those described above may find their way to teaching through many different routes, there has been a general trend towards increased focus on inservice rather than pre-service teacher education. this trend likely reflects widespread criticism that teacher education programs at universities are impractical and disconnected from the realities of daily teaching. however, in nicaragua and much of latin america, hours of in-service teacher education are often directly linked to salary increases and career advancement. this has created a pressure away from high quality in-service education, as the incentive is for teachers to accumulate credentials and diplomas, and learning or change in practice is incidental (navarro & verdisco, 2000). in mexico, tatto (1999) highlighted one recent example of an in-service program that aimed to change teachers’ practices in order to better reflect constructivist theories of teaching and learning. previous to this initiative, all inservice education had been provided at “teacher actualization centers” run by the government. these centers had low attendance rates and were widely criticized for didactic teaching methods and lack of curricular coherence. in el programa para abatir el rezago educativo (pare) [program to avoid falling behind educationally]; local teams in the four poorest mexican states submitted proposals, and were given materials and training in piagetian developmental theory and constructivist teacher methods. this program was judged successful on technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 71 some accounts, in particular adjusting the curriculum to better reflect the needs of indigenous students and rural teachers. however, tatto (1999) noted the ways in which pare did not achieve its stated goals; namely, teachers were taught via a “cascade model”, with a small cohort of teachers participating in an initial training, who then returned and taught colleagues. this did not prove to be an effective way of disseminating constructivist methods, perhaps because the initial training was carried out via traditional direct instruction. pare was also not able to address weak subject-area knowledge; since, as the author acknowledged, “improving one’s poor knowledge of subject matter requires long periods of sustained study and guidance---something the program could not readily provide” (p. 28). tatto argued that the urgency for fast and massive reforms in mexico may have led to superficial implementation of teacher education reform and compromising of the goals. research on teaching highlights the variability in how teachers understand and enact new reform ideas in classrooms (cohen, 1990; spillane, 1999). the intervention described in this study provided in-service teacher education that emphasized cooperative learning and the use of math content videos. the professional development opportunities were structured to place the teachers as experts, learning from one another and fostering collaboration. in nicaragua, as elsewhere, the most common professional development follows a model of direct instruction in “best practices” (campano et al, 2010) when a ground-up educational approach to reform may actually serve better to empower teachers and students (campano et al., march 2010; freire, 2007). relevant to this study is how teachers adopt and use math content videos, which in the context of nicaragua, requires resources not readily available to teachers because of a lack funding. literature on international donor communities suggest that there continues to be a disconnect between global visions of educational equity and quality with an over-reliance on input-output models (sanyal, 2009). however, studies show that regardless of the resources, much depends on effective use of resources for successful teaching and learning (o'sullivan, 2006; l. s. shulman, 1987). for example, distribution of laptops to children does not guarantee that the children will develop computer literacy (owston & wideman, 2001). lack of educational software or inexperience with the technology can result in student and teacher frustration or confusion (owston & wideman, 2001). evidence suggests that teachers need substantial amounts of time to learn how to integrate approaches using technology in their classrooms (owston & wideman, 2001). while input/output models provide insights into an educational systems’ economic efficiency, they do not offer insight into what actually transpires inside of a classroom (o'sullivan, 2006). this intervention incorporated ongoing professional development and mentorship for participants. in this study, we took into consideration both our observation of classroom practices and teacher accounts of participation in the intervention, specifically how they integrated (or did not integrate) math content videos into their instruction, and how they judged that their participation in the intervention mediated their pedagogical content knowledge. methods data collection and analysis in order to understand teachers’ experience of a technology-based math pedagogy intervention and how it mediated their teaching practices, we used qualitative methods. we sought to understand how participation in this 72 global education review 3(1) intervention facilitated changes in teacher practices both through teachers’ perceptions and experiences of their own learning and observations of teachers in action. to understand teachers’ experience of the program, we conducted semi-structured interviews with all of the participating teachers, the mentor that visited them as part of the intervention, and administrators at two participating sites. these semi-structured interviews included questions that were open-ended in nature and asked teachers to reflect on their experiences in the classroom, at their school, with the content, collaborating with other teachers and their mentors, and as participants in the intervention. these semi-structured interviews (see appendix a for interview questions) were conducted bimonthly over the course of three months (july, august, and december of 2012). we triangulated teachers’ experience and description of their practice with observations of teachers in action. all researchers spent three weeks observing teachers across all of the participating schools. as participant-observers, the researchers entered the classrooms, established relationships and participated in teacher workshops during a three-week period. the jottings taken in the field during observation were later expanded into full fieldnotes (emerson, fretz, & shaw, 1995). in order to extend understanding of teacher practice, these observations were contextualized by the semi-structured interviews with administrators, the teachers, and mentor. we also drew on relevant artifacts such as observation records kept by the teacher mentor and teacher lesson plans. during the initial round of coding (see appendix b for codes), researchers read the entire data set and generated a set of preliminary or “in vivo” codes (glesne, 2006), periodically writing analytic memos to make sense of emerging themes (saldaña, 2012). these analytic memos served to help refine and collapse initial codes into categories and subcategories. all video and field notes were coded collaboratively (adair & pastori, 2011). after initial coding, researchers revisited the original data set to selectively transcribe teacher interviews. data was triangulated (marshal & rossman, 2011) and repeatedly revisited to find patterns, examples and counter-examples using an inductive approach to analysis (glesne, 2006; marshal & rossman, 2011; mertens, 2005). participants and schools the professional development intervention involved eleven teachers (third and sixth grade) and two administrators at five different highpoverty primary schools in nicaragua serving approximately 350 third and sixth grade students combined. on average, there were 27 students per classroom. the teachers and schools were recruited to participate in the program by the sponsoring non-profit organization, fundación uno through their existing networks. participation was voluntary, and ultimately the teachers and schools selected by fundación uno were formed through mixed purposeful sampling based on homogenous grouping factors, convenience, and criteria (emerson et al., 1995). more 3rd and 6th grade teachers volunteered to participate; thus, the organization narrowed down participation to the five schools that had both a 3rd and a 6th grade teacher. the participating teachers each came to their schools with a variety of educational experiences, some having attended teachertraining programs upon high school graduation known as escuela normal, while others held a bachelors or masters degree. pseudonyms have been used to protect teacher and school privacy. technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 73 table 1 participating teachers teacher position school years of experience preparation mari 3rd grade savir 24 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal yvette 3rd grade savir 29 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal tania 6th grade savir 15 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal certified/ diplomado erica 6th grade savir 12 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal fabiola 3rd grade alivah 5 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal laurita 6th grade alivah 5 working towards bachelors/ estudiando licenciatura miriam 6th grade clara 29 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal leticia 3rd grade clara 16 bachelors/ licenciatura masters/ maestría doctoral student/ estudiando doctorado jecenia 3rd grade tambra 18 bachelors and teacher training school/ licenciatura and escuela normal ana 3rd grade julio xxxiii 4 teacher training for high school graduates/ escuela normal elena 6th grade julio xxxii 24 bachelors and teacher training school/ licenciatura and escuela normal table 1 *all names are pseudonyms all teachers were mentored and coached by bella, an employee of fundación uno. bella is a native nicaraguan currently working on her ma of education. she observed teachers at their schools once a week and conferenced with them after each formal observation over the course of the school year. during this time bella would take on a variety of roles, that of a classroom observer, that of an actively participating student, or even that of a co-teacher. additionally, bella led a professional development training/ teacher meeting for the teachers involved in the project once a month. her multi-layered perspective on education 74 global education review 3(1) based on her own schooling experiences in nicaragua, combined with her advanced technological skill-set made her an important asset to the intervention. the five schools served similar populations in terms of low-income students from rural communities. while all schools had access to content videos, it is important to note that they accessed these videos through very different means. at one school, savir, each student had a one lap top per child (olpc) xo laptop and usb video files. the other four schools used tv carts, dvds, usb video files, and/or their computer labs. in three schools, tambra, clara, and julio xxxii, teachers did not have televisions in their classrooms and consequently needed to negotiate the use of a common television. table 2 participating schools school grade level technology to access content videos details savir prek-secondary olpc xo computers/ usb memory sticks of content videos catholic nuns manage the school and work with salaried non-religious teachers/ staff. lunch provided. julio xxxii prek-6 television/ dvd independent private school funded by several non-profit organizations. school provides education to low income children from surrounding areas and parents pay a nominal fee of c$35 a month (us$1.50). low teacher salaries below the national average. alivah prek-6th television/ dvd 40 km from the capital in a lowincome rural area. inhabitants live off of mostly subsistence agriculture. private christian organization/school mostly funded by a church in seattle. breakfast and lunch provided tambra (morning classrooms) / clara (afternoon classrooms) prek-6th television/ dvd (borrowed from principal’s home upon teacher request) parochial catholic school located in el crucero, in managua. students are from low-income households, as well as students who have been unable to continue studying in neighboring private schools due to poor performance or learning difficulties. children pay a small fee for attending. table 2 technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 75 the educational intervention in 2006, the khan academy, a non-profit organization in the united states created a free online education platform with over 3,000 math and science video tutorials ("khan academy math," 2015). these video tutorials were created using recorded audio of direct instruction paired with screen-casting technology of an electronic blackboard to capture a teacher using their whiteboard to provide instruction ("khan academy math," 2015). the videos provide short segments of step-by-step instruction incorporating formulas, equations, doodles, and diagrams to show multiple ways of solving math problems. khan academy videos can be viewed by students independently, can be used by teachers to flip the classroom, or can be used as a foundation for scaffolding other opportunities for guided, collaborative, and/or independent practice. the organizations website also provides a progress tracking platform, practice exercises and other resources for educators. the khan academy educational platform has attracted widespread attention for its potential to provide high-quality content instruction, and inspired fundación uno to pilot an educational intervention centered on math content videos to be viewed by teachers and students using donated televisions and dvd players or one laptop per child (olpc) xo computers. fundación uno paired the math videos with a series of professional development opportunities and weekly mentorship. the 300 math videos were selected because they met the nicaraguan content standards for third and sixth grade (e.g. arithmetic operations, multiplication, fractions, decimals, measurements, etc.). of the videos selected, some had already been translated into spanish by the khan academy while others were translated by fundación uno. combined with teacher trainings, the intervention sought to improve teacher pedagogy while increasing student academic success in math. fundación uno designed, funded, and implemented the educational intervention. the researchers collected, analyzed, interpreted the data, and wrote the research report independently. teachers at participating schools took part in a one-week intensive professional development at the beginning of the school year designed to support the growth of their pedagogical content knowledge. to this end, they were supplied with math content videos, which were drawn from the khan academy video collection. the videos consist of short segments of direct instruction on a wide variety of math topics. bella, the teacher mentor, and program facilitator reviewed and organized all of the videos in order to align them with the ministry of education’s scope and sequence for 3rd and 6th grade. as part of the training, bella introduced a number of interactive activities and lessons to complement the videos. following the training, she visited each site weekly to observe and coach teachers in their math instruction. bella also provided regular teacher trainings and collaborative lesson planning opportunities throughout the school year. she specifically focused her coaching and professional development on lesson structures and activities that were interactive and participatory. this stemmed from her observation that math instruction as a whole tended to primarily consist of traditional methods in which students copied algorithms from the board and solved (or failed to solve) them independently. a note on researcher positionality all three researchers spoke spanish fluently which facilitated data collection and rapport with participants. researcher one is a white female who was raised in nicaragua which provided additional knowledge of local culture and customs. researcher two is a white female who taught and lived in mexico for five years and researcher three is a latina female. all three researchers were hired by fundación uno for 76 global education review 3(1) the purpose of evaluating the intervention. while this created the potential for a possible conflict of interest, researchers explicitly told the organization they would report both positive and negative findings of the intervention prior to agreeing to participate in the evaluation. given that the project was a pilot for a larger scale intervention, the researchers felt welcome to notice and describe challenges and failings as well as successes. findings teachers perceived that systemic issues in the nicaraguan educational system, such as low salaries and lack of resources, produced numerous obstacles for their professional growth and use of educational intervention. educator buy-in and the intervention model itself further influenced the ways teachers took up (or did not) aspects of the intervention. amidst these conditions, we identified several findings, which indicated that the educational intervention model supported teachers’ ability to be innovative and grow their practice. salient among these findings was: a) teachers reported increased pedagogical knowledge from participation in teacher trainings and program mentorship; b) teachers appreciated increased opportunities to collaborate and support one another as a community of teachers; c) teachers were flexible in adaptation of the intervention model to their classroom context; and d) teachers perceived the videos as valuable and supportive resources for pedagogical content knowledge. conditions mediating teacher innovation systemic barriers several teachers expressed the sentiment that they were being taken advantage of by the educational system in which they worked, negatively impacting their motivation for participation in the intervention in particular and in professional development generally. numerous teachers expressed the sentiment that they were not treated like professionals. for example, due to budgetary issues, accounting problems, and government corruption, teachers at one school explained that they did not receive paychecks for multiple consecutive months. there is a clear connection between systemic barriers and teachers’ motivation to improve their practice and content knowledge. teachers described how their inconsistent salary payments lowered their motivation to participate in the intervention because under those conditions “no tienes ni un sentido” [you don’t feel anything] (jecenia interview, 8/2012). bella, the teacher mentor and program coordinator, also perceived the impact of the working conditions and broader context on teachers’ motivation to learn: they haven't gotten paid … i feel like they don't really have any motivation to change what they've been doing because they're kind of like, ‘you should be glad that i even come!’ so to take the extra time to put dvds and watch them and plan a lesson and try to change their teaching completely, i feel like they don't have the motivation. (bella interview, 6/13/12) bella noted that there was a “combination of reasons why” the implementation of the intervention was challenging, but then described how “other problems” including how larger structural issues further influenced the teachers’ motivation to participate in the intervention. aware of the relationship between the economic conditions and teacher attitudes, bella also noted that nicaraguan teachers are not only the worst paid teachers in central america, but they are also among the worst paid professionals in nicaragua, earning less than 60% of the average wages for other jobs (rogers, 2012). teachers’ consciousness that they were not accorded respect or compensation as professionals technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 77 seemed to negatively impact their desire to participate in professional development. importantly, economic constraints and other structural problems were not always associated with low motivations. some teachers expressed a high commitment to their own professional growth alongside regard for the importance of teaching to the community. for example, fabiola, a teacher at alivah, noted, “aquí no es un salario muy grande, tenemos que reconocer que es un proyecto social y estamos limitados a lo básico.” [here, the salary is not big. we have to remember that this is a social project and we are limited to the basics] (fabiola interview, 8/2012). here, she acknowledged that teaching was not well-paid, but noted its importance to society. thus, despite the structural barrier of low-pay and missed payments, teacher commitment to education as a form of social work mitigated, in multiple cases, the negative impact on teacher motivation. intervention ownership teachers articulated a lack of ownership that created difficulty in implementing the new teaching practices introduced as part of the intervention. in several cases, teachers did not feel they were in control of the resources or decisions regarding their practice. for instance, a common sentiment expressed by teachers was a sense of lack of control over the grade level they were asked to teach. for example, one teacher noted that she felt particularly disenfranchised when, after 25 years of working as a pre-k teacher, she was switched into a 6th grade classroom by her administration despite her reservations and protests. at the time of the study, she perceived this change to be a significant barrier to her development of pedagogical content knowledge. she expressed that prioritizing learning the content of the sixth grade curriculum prevented her from focusing on issues of pedagogy. although several teachers attributed similar lack of ownership and autonomy as obstacles to their professional growth, teachers who valued the intervention described themselves as better positioned for innovation and development. for instance, jecenia regarded the intervention as an opportunity to grow her practice and empower herself as an educator. se ha interesado por darle armas al maestro con que defenderse, con que pelear la batalla. y lo más interesante es que no estoy pagando ni un costo. eso es el logro mas grande, yo no estoy pagando nada solo poniendo mi disposición. [it has interested itself in giving teachers the weapons to defend themselves, with which to fight the battle. and the most interesting thing is that i’m not paying a thing, there is no cost. that is the biggest gift, i am not paying, only putting myself forth]. (jecenia interview, 8/2012) jecenia associates being a teacher in nicaragua as being in “la batalla” [a battle]. she powerfully depicts the tools she receives from the intervention as “armas” [weapons] with which to fight. teachers who perceived professional development as a useful tool for their own purposes sought authentic and deep changes in their classroom tasks and discourses (spillane & jennings, 1997). jecenia proudly admits that although many of her nephews studied at the university, she was the first of her family. “saqué una doble carrera en pedagogía y administración escolar” [i double majored in pedagogy and school administration]. though she studied to be a principal, she explained that she feels called to the classroom instead by, “ese sentimento, te enamoras” [that feeling, you fall in love with it]. strong identification with teaching and a professional identity as a teacher contributed to her interest and ability to try out new teaching practices (ladson-billings, 1994). 78 global education review 3(1) another teacher, leticia, similarly valued the intervention as a useful tool, and welcomed visitors into her classroom. she asked for suggestions towards her development as a teacher. she believed that feedback is key to growth (leticia fieldnotes, 8/2012), and expressed an interest in pursuing her growth in pedagogical content knowledge. she perceived teacher education as an investment in herself and in her students, and consequently saw the math content videos as a tool for her own use. mentorship mentorship was identified as an important and helpful process by all of the teachers participating in the intervention. this observation is consistent with the literature that highlights the need for interventions in developing countries to go beyond an inputoutput model to provide guidance for implementation (o'sullivan, 2006; sanyal, 2009; l. s. shulman, 1987). teachers spoke highly of bella’s mentorship. in a rural, highpoverty context with multiple systemic barriers, two aspects of bella’s mentorship style were central to her success: a) co-construction of knowledge; and b) hands-on intervention. bella valued the knowledge of the local participating teachers and approached her mentorship as a facilitator to co-construct knowledge and pedagogical growth. for example, during both the initial teacher training and ongoing professional development, bella coconstructed activities with the teachers to supplement the math content videos. in other words, rather than tell the teachers what to do when showing a specific video, she facilitated the discussion through cognitive coaching to have teachers come up with activity ideas on their own (costa & garmston, 1994). teachers turned paper bags into bolsitas de tesoro [treasure bags] filled with multiplication problems for student independent practice, empty cereal boxes into game boards, repurposed trash into classroom corner stores with prices, and old take-out menus were repurposed and used to simulate the dining experience and paying of bills. bella served as an intermediary to share these ideas across school contexts. bella’s hands-on approach to mentorship also appeared to facilitate her success. as noted, teacher training and professional development generated ideas that could be directly applied to the classroom. bella then was a participant observer in each teacher’s classroom. the degree to which bella participated in a teacher’s classroom varied based on individual teachers needs. in some classes, bella took over the lesson completely to model an activity, while in other classes she took a more peripheral role, only stepping in when the teacher requested. in all cases, bella met with the teacher following the lesson to discuss how it went. multiple teachers specifically stated their appreciation of how she created an opportunity for them to reflect on their practice. one teacher summarized her experience: siento que fue un éxito dado que son oportunidades donde el docente realice un papel tanto en teóretico como práctico, excelente los videos y los materiales facilitados por el proyecto, la supervisión excelente dado ayuda, al mejor al docente.” [i feel the program was a success that gave us, the teacher, the opportunity to take on a role that is just as theoretical as practical, the videos and materials were excellent, the supervision was excellent and helpful, all to better the teacher]. (contact summary transcript 12/14/2012) this demonstrates how bella’s mentorship style afforded teachers skills to transfer theoretical and conceptual ideas into practice. in other words, she facilitated the teachers to take on a role “tanto en teóretico como práctico” [just as theoretical as practical]. this achievement technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 79 was facilitated through the combination of valuing local teacher knowledge and engaging teachers in discussion of their teaching practices. innovation and development in teaching practices pedagogical knowledge most teachers highly valued learning new instructional strategies and implemented collaborative learning activities practiced during the professional development training in the form of scaffolded lessons and interactive activities. for example, laurita, a 6th grade teacher, creatively had her students take measurements of several ingredients to make pinolillo, a traditional nicaraguan beverage, as a lesson on proportions. she then asked children to come up with their own definition of “proportion.” afterwards, she had the students watch the khan academy video in which examples and explanations were given regarding proportions and measurements. bella noted that students seemed unusually animated, and that this lesson departed dramatically from the typical pattern of rote memorization and individual problem-solving she had previously observed. leticia, a third grade teacher, used the videos to teach more advanced topics once she realized that her students had mastered multiplication (e.g. how to multiply three digit numbers and how to divide decimals). another teacher, yvette, used a 2-5 minute video clip on a daily basis, assigning her students exercises and the task of re-watching the math videos at home on their olpc xos. she also created math centers, activities using decks of cards to enhance multiplication skills, and a classroom pulperia [corner store] from empty bottles, cans, and other market objects as relevant learning tools. additionally, she discovered a math program on the olpc xos called tux math that allows the students to practice the skills she taught. she began to regularly plan a video lesson followed by practice with tux math. yvette, identified by bella as one of the strongest teachers, also collaborated with the other 3rd grade teacher in sharing her ideas and lesson plans for the content videos. teachers attributed increased student engagement and increased student learning based on participation in the intervention. this included not only content from the videos, but also pedagogical strategies from their workshops and interactions with bella. researchers also observed high student engagement during lessons implementing the videos and collaborative instructional strategies with a few exceptions. however, teacher’ classroom management was strongly related to the effective use of videos. for instance, at savir, one teacher created systems in which the olpc xos and videos were being used efficiently. she had all students play the video at the same time, whereas in other classrooms students did not play the videos on their computers at the same time, and consequently the audio was mismatched and loud, while students were offtask and distracted (fieldnotes, 8/10/12). in this case, the teacher had organized routines and expectations around laptop care; most students brought their xo. she set the expectation that all kids bring their laptops already charged, holding them accountable. she modeled her own use and care of her laptop. in other classes with the olpc xos, teachers reported that children did not always have a charged laptop, and so could not participate (fieldnotes, 8/10/12). in the cases of schools without the olpc xos, teachers used a television paired with a dvd. this too reflected skill on the teacher’s part in organizing an effective learning environment. in one field observation, the researchers noted that as the khan math video played one student sat in front blocking the screen for the first 15 seconds. it wasn’t until the teacher paused the video and moved the boy blocking the front row that other students were 80 global education review 3(1) able to see the teaching demonstration (fieldnotes, 8/9/2012). in another classroom, a teacher was seen un-pausing the video and accidentally putting it on a different video (fieldnotes, 8/8/2012). both cases demonstrate the intervention depended on the teacher rather than the technology for success. teacher collaboration innovative and creative teachers have forged supportive relationships with other teachers, both in the program and outside of the program. for example, jecenia has given fellow teachers from different schools not participating in the intervention her khan academy dvd to copy. she also acted as a mentor to a 6th grade teacher, miriam, another teacher participant, who had been struggling to move beyond teachercentered instruction. jecenia consistently shared lessons and ideas with miriam. yvette also recounted that after the professional development, teachers were reflective and would regularly come together to ask one another “¿cómo viste estas cosas, y que te parece, que hiciste, que empleaste?” [how did you see things, what did you think, what did you do, what have you implemented?] (yvette interview, 8/2012). other times they would meet with teachers who had not been involved in the educational intervention. she recounted the power of collaboration afforded by the intervention and professional development and mentioned how teachers from other schools would join them for meetings and would often voice wishing they were part of the intervention. to help these teachers, they would discuss the khan project and share their materials, dvds, and pedagogy. yvette explained, “por eso le llamamos “inter-capacitacion” [that is why we called it “together-training”] (yvette interview, 8/2012). the co-construction of knowledge and sharing of resources builds their teaching communities. together they supported one another in growing both their individual teaching practice and that of their larger community. they identified the educational intervention as one of value and whose resources were worth sharing. during one of the teacher trainings, seven teachers from another grade level, though not involved in the program, came to take part in the sharing of ideas. these teachers asked if the program could be expanded to include them (yvette interview, 8/2012). this contributed to an understanding that interaction with others is essential in learning how to teach, as noted by abrego, rubin, & sutterby (2006). at other schools, the teachers met to watch videos together and plan lessons. “están intercapacitandose entre ellas … yo se que es un proyecto nuevo, pero van a haber resultados.” [they are training one another … i know this is a new project, but there will be results], shared an alivah administrator (cecilia transcript, 8/2012). teachers who were more advanced pedagogically shared their creative ideas with other teachers, while teachers with stronger content knowledge sought to support their peers. 5.2.3 intervention adaption videos have been used in multiple ways as content for teachers and students, family learning, and disseminating resources. in the case of the educational intervention teachers have used the videos in a variety of ways. some examples include: a) teachers lending the dvd to other teachers not involved in the intervention; b) several schools expressing a desire to expand the program to other grades; c) parents watching the videos for their own knowledge and to help their children; and d) teachers watching videos for their own content knowledge or to learn different pedagogical methods. as shared by an alivah administrator: lo que se está hacienda se adapta, si hay algo, toman la idea del video y lo que pueden hacer es adaptarlo a su realidad. technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 81 si el video cumple con las expectativas del maestro entonces trabaja con el video, pero si solo hay algo nada más del video retoman lo que les servé.” [what is being done is adaptation. if there is anything they can take the idea of the video and what they can do is adapt it to their reality. yes, if the video meets the expectations of the teacher then they work with the video, but if there are just a few things, they can take out what will serve them]. (cecilia transcript, 8/2012) this administrator spoke to the ways she has seen the videos used towards local adaptation (“they can take out what will serve them”). she perceived teachers as agentive and creative in their use of videos, responding to the needs of their students and their own particular social, cultural and economic context. similarly, another teacher recounted how she used and adapted the videos in reponse to her needs: “estaba viendo el tema de el día de mañana entonces yo tenia que ver primero el video para ver si se relacionaba, si era si pues perfecto hacerlo y si no hacerlo alguna innovaciones.” [i would look at the theme for tomorrow so i would first have to watch the video to see if there was a relationship, if they were related then perfect to use and if not then i would make some innovative adjustments] (yvette transcript, 8/2012). this teacher not only used the educational intervention videos to adapt her math curriculum, but also found ways to use the video resources available from the khan academy to supplement other subject areas. she did not feel constrained by the educational intervention materials; rather, she saw the videos as tools at her disposal. furthermore, another teacher explained how the professional development trainings facilitated her growth. porque las matematicas todo el mundo le tiene miedo. en otras palabras, para mi las matematicas son sencillas, pero he visto que uno puede ser creativo. todos vemos lo malo de la matematica, solo ven los numeros y los numeros y los numeros, pero para mi me ha despertado la creatividad y ir mas alla. estar en el proyecto es un gran logro para mi. el beneficio es mio, yo soy la que salgo con mi maleta llena. el proyecto ha venido lo primero a las escuelas que necesitan recursos. [this project, for me, has helped the nicaraguan teacher because it has facilitated mathematics. i see it as facilitation because the whole world is afraid of math. in other words, for me math is easy, but i’ve seen that one can be more creative. we all see the negative in math, we only see numbers and numbers and more numbers, but for me it has awakened creativity and going beyond. being in this project has been a great accomplishment for me. the benefit has been mine, i am the one that gets to leave with a full suitcase. the project has first come to schools that need resources]. (jecenia transcript, 8/2012) here, her final line (“i am the one that gets to leave with a full suitcase”) highlights her view of herself as possessing new skills and tools to deploy in the context of her school and students. moreover she saw her experience as contributing despite serious structural, political and economic barriers to her professional growth, she expressed a sense of expertise, growth and agency. agency implies interest and ownership of the outcomes; people who act with personal agency act with concern, interest, aim, purpose, intent and motivation (holland, 1998). jecenia and other teachers acted agentively and creatively here, drawing on all the resources available to them to improve educational outcomes in their community. 82 global education review 3(1) implications and scholarly significance of this study under the difficult conditions described above, numerous teachers prevailed and continued to show up and teach their students, while other teachers resisted through strikes and/or nonparticipation. while taking on additional work in the form of changing their pedagogical practices was unappealing for those who already felt taken advantage of by the school system, a select group of teachers identified some degree of change in their teaching practices as a result of the professional development and access to the videos. looking at both teacher resistance and teacher engagement highlights the critical influence of individuals and communities. the content videos were not a panacea or easy fix for structural problems, but they did serve as an important tool in teachers’ “battles”. we have much to learn from these teachers who were open and committed to improving their classroom instruction despite significant local challenges. preliminary results indicate the potentially critical role teacher ideologies play in teacher responses to professional development and resulting pedagogical choices. for instance, the teachers making innovations and trying new things in their classrooms were open to feedback, attended voluntary trainings, felt a kinship with bella, and sought to collaborate with others regarding their practice. these teachers also found the videos to be a resource from which they could pull and adapt as needed to their classroom context. the teacher trainings have been opportunities to shift away from rote and reductionalist instructional transmission of knowledge towards collaborative sharing of multiple subjectivities in order to exchange “funds of knowledge” (l. c. moll & greenberg, 1990). through fostering relationships of trust, building rapport, coming to know teachers and their lived experiences, a deeper understanding and appreciation for the human experience can be gained which in turn has served as a powerful resource within the classroom (gonzález, moll, & amanti, 2005). the results of this study indicate that technology, no matter how innovative, does not by itself lead to widespread changes in teacher practice in rural primary schools. not only is there a gap between teachers who are trained in the use of the technology from those who are untrained, but also an additional gap exists between teachers who embrace and those who resist technology specifically and in-service education generally. major systemic changes in nicaragua are needed in order to support teacher’s motivation to change as well as their ability to change. lastly, our findings suggest the critical role of building human capital. in the study described above, change in teacher’s practices reflected not only access to technology, but time learning from each other and from bella. in this study, change occurred in isolated individuals and schools rather than the pilot program as a whole, suggesting that the social, economic and cultural context of individual schools and communities played a critical role in teacher learning. this indicates that further attempts to use technology to support education in nicaragua and other developing nations should consider how to mitigate the effects of larger systemic barriers like salary freezes and strikes as well as address issues of access to resources (materials, technology, televisions, dvds, etc.). further iterations of the study will consider what made some teachers take up new methods and technologies despite the significant barriers to doing so. moreover, research on professional learning communities indicates that learning in a collaborative, non-hierarchical context can reduce experienced teachers’ resistance to change and innovations (van dreil, technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 83 verloop, & de vos, 1998). such professional development structures can also facilitate growth in teachers’ confidence in the value of their own content and pedagogical content knowledge and increase their interest in trying out ideas from colleagues in their own classroom (adams, 2000; borko & putnam, 1996). this suggests that the structure of the professional development should be modified to further increase teacher ownership of pedagogical innovations. training programs should include up-todate pedagogical education methods and techniques linked to the curriculum in ways that are authentic and relevant to the teachers and students. untrained teachers are on average younger than certified teachers; this provides an opportunity to develop policies to target these teachers, which are likely to remain in the system for a longer period of time (angelurdinola & laguna, 2008). additionally, economic incentive programs aimed at keeping the best teachers within the educational system would help decrease attrition rates (elvir et al., 2006). reforms of the existing salary structure for teachers and then defining incentives according to education, training, experience, performance, specialization, and geographic location are also imperative. acknowledgements we would like to thank the participating teachers and administrators for their time and dedication to their students and schools. we admire their openness and desire to grow their practice in order to better meet their students’ needs. we would also like to thank the team at fundación uno for their hard work in making this educational intervention a reality and their continued determination to grow and develop this project, acknowledging specifically the work of bella, who traveled at times up to four hours to meet with teachers to provide support and mentorship. and robert whose management and leadership skills made the tumultuous feel seamless. josefina vijil, we would also like to thank you for your dedication to education and social justice. you are a role model who donates time and energy not only as a consultant for the project, but towards educational reform in nicaragua. lastly, we would like to thank the khan academy for their open platform of math content videos, without which, the intervention may not have ever come to fruition. salman khan, your ted talk was the impetus that got this project going. references adams, j. e. 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(1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, massachusetts: harvard university press. about the author(s) anni lindenberg, graduated with a masters degree from the department of curriculum and instruction (language and literacy studies) from the university of texas at austin and with a masters of education paired with a teaching credential from the multicultural urban education (muse) program at the university of california, berkeley. her research interests include teacher education, particularly how teachers and students together design literacy practices that are transformative. she has presented at the american educational research association (aera) conference and the literacy research association (lra) conference. she currently teaches high school english language arts at the ann richards school for young women leaders in austin, texas. kathryn henderson, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of bicultural-bilingual studies at the college of education within the university of texas at san antonio. her research focuses on bilingual education, dual language learning, langauge ideology, and language planning and policy. she has presented at the american educational research association (aera) conference, the american association of applied linguistics (aaal) conference, and the center for advanced research on language acquisition’s immersion conference. leah durán, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of teaching, learning, and sociocultural studies at the college of education within the university of arizona. her research focuses on bilingualism and biliteracy. she has presented at the american educational research association (aera) conference, the literacy research association (lra) conference, and the national council of teachers of english (ncte) conference. 86 global education review 3(1) appendix a interview questions 1. tell me a little bit about your school 2. tell me a little bit about the training 3. how have you seen teachers include these ideas in their teaching and curriculum? how have you included these ideas in your teaching and curriculum? 4. what have you noticed about the participating schools/ teachers/ yourself prior to the training, during the training, after the training? 5. why do you think the teachers volunteered for the training? why did you volunteer for the training? 6. tell me a little about yourself. tell me a little about the other teachers you work with. 7. how would you describe the professional development training? (what did you see? what did you hear? what types of things did you do? how did you/the other teachers respond?) 8. how do you think the experience of taking part in the professional development training has influenced or not influenced the decisions you or other teachers make in the classroom since the training? 9. what are some of the constraints? how do the teachers navigate those constraints? technology and mentorship improve teacher pedagogy in nicaragua 87 appendix b code list 1. professional development 2. mentorship model 3. student interaction 4. teacher application of facilitator’s suggestions 5. effect of having observers in the classroom 6. classroom attendance 7. positioning/ structure of desks 8. engagement 9. mentor intervention 10. local adaptation 11. brainstorming 12. video use 13. factors contributing or detracting to video use 14. resources 15. supplemental/ supportive technology 16. home situations 17. student personal needs (emotional needs) 18. parental involvement 19. professionalism 20. teaching strategies 21. issues with technology 22. obstacles 23. supportive structures 24. change in practice 25. assessment/ performance 26. novelty 27. positive attitude 28. positive experiences 29. teacher motivation 30. student learning 31. teacher pedagogy “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 127 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge (2016). “thinking as someone else” using avatars in teacher education and the challenge to think and act as someone else. global education review, 3 (4). 127-145 “thinking as someone else” using avatars in teacher education and the challenge to think and act as someone else helge wasmuth mercy college, new york abstract this article discusses an alternative learning project that was conducted in an online course at a teacher education program from fall 2012 to fall 2015. as part of the course, students had to create avatars, an alter ego, and think and act as their avatars when faced with educational issues. the project strives to overcome challenges that teacher education programs have to take into account when preparing students to become teachers. a qualitative research study was conducted in order to find out more about the students’ thinking and learning in this innovative approach of the online class. results of the study and the implications for the project will be discussed. keywords avatar, experiential learning, innovative teaching methods, teacher education, alternative teacher education project introduction teaching aspiring teachers, in particular what it means to be a teacher, is complex. thus, teacher education programs must strive to support their students in understanding and experiencing the complexities of being a teacher in order to prepare them for the realities of the classroom. while it is impossible to simulate all the realities in a higher education classroom, teacher educators need to try by using experimental learning and teaching methods. this paper describes a project that attempted to overcome these challenges. in the following, the project and its necessity will be described briefly (1), subsequently the research question and method will be explained (2), and initial results of the study will be discussed (3). in conclusion, thoughts on the impact of the study’s results on the future implementation of the project will be presented (4). the avatar project necessity and project’s course teacher education programs tackle complex problems. they must prepare future teachers for making the leap from theory into praxis (darling-hammond & baratz-snowden, 2007) and assist them in examining “their taken-for granted-beliefs” (feinman-nenser & norman, ______________________________ corresponding author: helge wasmuth, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 1022 email: hwasmuth@mercy.edu 128 global education review 3(4) 2000, p. 737) about what it means to be a teacher. teacher education programs need to help their students to understand the complexity of teaching and being a teacher. unfortunately, such programs often fail in regards to this task (darling-hammond & baratz-snowden, 2007; leaman & flanagan, 2013). the complexity of teaching cannot be understood simply through lectures or readings on this topic. aspiring teachers need to experience what it means to be a teacher. thus, teacher educators are faced with the challenge of creating an authentic classroom (leaman & flanagan, 2013). they need to go beyond traditional higher education teaching methods and implement experimental learning methods that engage students in meaningful ways and stimulate academic inquiry. unfortunately, it is difficult, or rather almost impossible, to create such a realistic learning environment that prepares future teachers satisfactorily. the result is that new teachers often feel unprepared and overwhelmed when faced with an actual classroom. traditional teaching and learning methods, lectures and conventional assignments do not sufficiently prepare students. why is this so? it is helpful to outline at least a few of these challenges, as it will at the same time demonstrate the necessity and meaning of the avatar project. when we think of teacher education, we have to recognize that teaching and the classroom is a place filled with human beings (and their emotions), and that learning is connected to emotion. but feelings and affect are normally not taken into account in higher education (noddings, 1996). usually, educational issues are discussed in an abstract way, without considering what they really mean for individuals. “in western thought, affect and emotion have been distrusted, denigrated or at least set aside in favor of reason” (noddings, 1996, p. 151). emotions and feelings are not valued; rather they are neglected and almost seen as damaging. what we learn in higher education is that we need to be objective and that emotions should not be guiding our decisions, because they impair our professional judgment. emotions and affect are viewed as “signs of unprofessional demeanor” (noddings, 1996, p. 151). however, this perspective limits students’ learning experience and their understanding of what they are studying, as it reduces their engagement. emotional responses are an important part of the overall learning process and should be valued (volk, 2012). the understanding of human beings differs from other objects of study, because individuals have feelings and intentions, as well as values, and all these have an impact on their behavior. if we want to understand learning and how to teach better, we need to understand human behavior as well. instead of ignoring it, emotions need to be considered and valued, especially when they are part of the phenomenon the students learn about, as in the case of teacher education. the understanding of human behavior “comes from trying to put oneself in the other person’s shoes, from trying to discern how others think, act, and feel” (patton, 2001, p. 49), so it follows that it is important to support students in acquiring such an ability. teachers need empathy, the capacity to “understand the stance, position, feelings, experiences, and worldview of others” (patton, 2001, 52); a capacity that needs to be practiced. thus, teacher education programs need to offer appropriate learning opportunities. the avatar project offers such an approach towards learning. just as noddings (1996) argued for stories in teacher education, this project goes beyond the usual abstract and rational discussions. the avatar project constructs a place where conflicts and thoughts, reform ideas, and their consequences, are not abstract concepts to be examined and analyzed as an academic exercise, but as personal and emotional encounters. using avatars supports students’ understanding of the fact that teachers, principals, parents, and children are individuals “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 129 with feelings, and that these emotions have an impact on the decisions they make. since the students do not think and act as themselves, but as their avatars, they must apply other perspectives to clarify and expand their own thinking. they have to “think outside of the box” and develop new ways of examining their values and assumptions. trying to be someone else also helps students realize that educational situations can be ambiguous, and that the role of the stakeholder, be it a teacher, principal, parent, or child matters, and that it is essential to the decisions that are being made. in education, most situations are not “black” or “white” and decisions are not always straightforward. students need to understand that there is not always a clear answer to a problem. creating a scenario such as in the avatar project helps students to understand that various stakeholders feel, think, and act differently and that opinions need to be considered in a school context, and that such decisions have an impact on real people. thus, teaching and learning become more real to the students – as much as this is possible. teacher educators should consider the challenges outlined above. one way to create a more realistic and engaging learning environment is the use of “avatars,” i.e., asking students to create unique characters in order to investigate and experience real world scenarios from different points of view. such an approach has been used successfully in studying history (sheffer, 2009; volk, 2012, 2013), and recently in teacher education as well (wasmuth, 2015; wasmuth & pind-rossnagel, 2015). i used avatars as an ongoing course assignment of an online course, “introduction to early childhood education.” the project was developed in the fall of 2012 and was used with seven different classes since then. in total, 118 students have participated, acted and thought as their avatars, and provided feedback on the project1. so far, it seems that the project enables students to better understand the complexities of being a teacher (wasmuth, 2015; wasmuth & pind-rossnagel, 2015). ninety-three percent of the students who provided feedback at the end of the course described the project as an interesting and meaningful learning experience. the avatar project seems to be a way to go beyond traditional learning and teaching, a promising way to create a more realistic and meaningful context that permits students to experience what it means to be a teacher (wasmuth & pindrossnagel, 2015). how does it work? students create an avatar and then think and act accordingly. an avatar, usually translated from sanskrit as “incarnation”, but more accurately means “appearance” or “manifestation”, can be understood as the user’s alter ego (merriamwebster). a person, here a student, creates a new identity and starts to think and act as this character. thus, students are forced to present their ideas about educational scenarios from the perspective of their avatar – they put themselves in someone else’s shoes. approximately three weeks into the semester, students receive detailed information about the project (wasmuth, 2015). subsequently, the students have to “give birth” to their avatars and create unique personalities. to achieve this goal, students are provided with only a few basic facts about their avatars: the age, gender, occupation, and the number and age of their children, if any. no additional information is provided regarding the avatar’s personality, as the students should have the freedom to create a personality they can relate to: a character they like or dislike: the principal they loathed, the teacher they admired, or the teacher they hated wholeheartedly – this is the students’ choice. “giving birth” is the most important part of this assignment. the students have to decide, from the start, what kind of person they want to be. once their avatar is “born”, there is no way back, or at least that is 130 global education review 3(4) what i tried to achieve with this project. for this reason, the importance of this first step was emphasized increasingly and the students were encouraged to think carefully about their avatar’s personality before presenting to the class. so far, “giving birth” has been one of the most fascinating parts of the project, and while the results in each class were very different, each time they were surprising in their own way (wasmuth, 2015). once the avatar is “born”, the students need to think and act as he/she would; or at least they need to try. i remind them continually to speak with the voice of their avatar and not with their own, that the project’s purpose is not about what they think, but what their avatar thinks. thus, all entries in the online course are published in the name of the avatar and i am the only one who knows the real identity of the avatar until the end of the project. the anonymity is an important aspect of the project because it gives the students the chance to present perspectives that are uncomfortable for them without the fear of being judged (wasmuth 2015). after the students introduce their avatars, they receive a new topic every second week. the topics cover important issues that need to be understood by future teachers in the field of early childhood education. some of the topics are considered controversial. examples of controversial topics are tragedy at local school, new tests for early childhood education, the new teacher annual professional performance review (appr), governor signs bill allowing armed teachers in the classroom, new reward system, or spanking. the students have approximately seven days to post their avatars’ opinions; sometimes it is sufficient to write a statement, sometimes discussions between the avatars are encouraged. research interest and research method initially, the project was meant to be fun and i wanted to create an assignment that was different compared to the traditional assignments in most teacher education programs and online courses. instead of letting the students simply write another paper, i wanted them to experience something new. while i had anticipated that such a project would support the students in their personal and professional development, i was surprised by the project’s potential for meaningful learning. after the first cycle, it became clear that the avatar project could be more than a normal assignment. one indicator was the students’ engagement, which was more passionate than usual (wasmuth, 2015). further, as mentioned earlier, the students’ feedback at the end of the project has been very positive so far. ninetythree percent of the students enjoyed the project even if they were initially hesitant or thought it would be more work, – something that cannot be said about too many assignments. more important, many described the project as meaningful and thought that it prepared them for their future role as a teacher (wasmuth, 2015; wasmuth & pind-rossnagel, 2015). as one student said, “at first i wasn’t crazy about the idea of this project. after the discussions were posted it was way more interesting than i could ever thought. i had to think like a principal would. it was fun to write in someone else’s point of view, especially a principal.” what turned the project into a meaningful learning experience? as stated before, it is essential that students think thoroughly about their avatar’s identity in order to be able to act and think as this personality later. however, it was immediately clear that many students had “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 131 difficulties staying in the role and acting as their avatars. instead, students replied with their own opinions. one of the students wrote, “it was a challenge to be able to put myself in my character’s shoes with some of the educational issues that were presented each week. there were times i debated and struggled to write my own opinion, but was often reminded that it was not about me, but that of a parent who was struggling to understand all the educational changes his twin girls were undergoing.” i had not really anticipated this struggle, but found it quite interesting and started to wonder: how were the students actually creating their avatars and how did they manage (or not) to stay in role? to find out more, i added more specific questions to the general feedback questions following completion of the online course such as, were you really able to think as your avatar or did you express your own opinion? was it difficult to think about these issues from a different point of view? when did you stop being your avatar and why? many students clearly stated their struggle to reply as their avatars during the course of the project. one student explained, “for many of the topics, i was able to separate my own opinions from my avatar, but it wasn't necessarily easy! there were many times that i felt that my avatar character could easily bend to my own personal opinions in order to speak more on a point, but i felt a conflict in doing this as my avatar character dug their heels in deeper and deeper into their character with every passing topic.” by falling back into their own thinking, students jeopardized the whole experience. but why was it so challenging for many of them to stay in role? were the ones who were successful using specific strategies that enabled them to think as their avatars? and which situations made it so difficult for them to continue being their avatars? to get a better understanding of the phenomena, more specific research and data needed to be gathered. to compile further data, a qualitative approach seemed to be the best choice (merriam/tisdell, 2016; patton, 2001; wolcott, 1994). according to strauss and corbin (1998), qualitative methods “can be used to obtain the intricate details about phenomena such as feelings, thought processes, and emotions that are difficult to extract or learn about through more conventional research methods” (p. 11). for a project that values emotions, qualitative research makes sense because qualitative data can describe, capture and communicate the students’ experience of the project in their own words (patton, 2001). qualitative research helps to understand how people interpret their experiences, how they construct their world, and what meaning they give to their own experiences (merriam/tisdell, 2016). qualitative research methods typically produce a wealth of detailed information about a small number of students, their learning, and their thinking (patton, 2001). hence, to understand how students created their avatars’ personalities, and why they struggled with thinking and acting as those, a qualitative method was chosen. various qualitative research methods exist that enable the researcher to collect the data needed to better understand the thinking of students. a method widely used in education is grounded theory (bryant/charmaz, 2007; charmaz, 2007; corbin/strauss, 2008). grounded theory is a specific research methodology introduced by sociologists glaser and strauss in 1967 and is now applied in all disciplines and fields of practice (merriam/tisdell, 2016). in grounded theory, the researcher assumes “an inductive stance and strives to derive meaning from the data. the 132 global education review 3(4) result of this type of qualitative study is a theory that emerges from, or is ‘grounded’ in, the data hence, grounded theory” (merriam/tisdell, 2016, p. 31). despite its popularity, limits and challenges need to be considered (thomas/james, 2006). grounded theory as qualitative research claims that theory is built from “inductively analyzing a social phenomenon” (merriam/tisdell, 2016, p.7). real grounded theory claims to produce substantive theory. while i was interested in analyzing a social phenomenon, i did not aim to generate a substantive theory. theory, understood as “as a set of statements telling us something new about the social world and which can be proved or disproved by empirical investigation” (thomas/james, 2006), was not my research goal. i simply wanted to understand my students better. thus, i am offering a narrative in order to learn more about my students’ way of thinking during the avatar project. in other words, i do not claim to do grounded theory, but drew heavily from its ideas. i am also not following the specific procedures of grounded theory, which still seems legitimate, as the analytic thinking process in qualitative research should be “relaxed, flexible and driven by insight gained through interaction with data rather than being overly structured and based only on procedures” (corbin/strauss, 2008, p. 12). hence, while i am referring to the systematic strategy for analyzing any data set provided by grounded theory, i am not claiming that i am doing grounded theory and that my result is a substantive theory. to get a better understanding of my students’ thinking and learning during the project, i contacted ten former students and asked if they would participate in a study by answering a questionnaire. interviewing participants is a common qualitative research method that permits the exploration of particular topics of interest and enables the participants to describe and reflect upon their experiences (charmaz, 2006; gubrium/holstein, 2012; kvale, 1996). interviewing encourages the interviewee to share rich descriptions of phenomena while leaving the interpretation or analysis to the investigators. thus, interviews contribute to a body of knowledge based on the meanings that the project experience held for the participants. as the project had been part of an online course, i conducted the interviews online. online interviews have become popular tools for data collection (james/busher, 2012). researchers have taken face-to-face approaches to interviewing (gubrium/holstein, 2012; kvale, 1996) and modified them for the online environment (james/busher, 2012). online interviews can produce a wealth of data about people's experiences, thoughts, and feelings from their perspectives. for the study, asynchronous online interviews were used, interviews that are carried out in a time-lapsed manner. the result of such a mailed questionnaire are elicited texts, i.e., the involvement of research participants in writing the data (charmaz, 2006). elicited texts generate data that resemble interview data, but with the disadvantage that researchers cannot modify or reword a question once they ask it. there is also no immediate possibility of following up on a statement (charmaz, 2006). it is also more challenging to collect in-depth data through online interviewing because repeated interactions and a closer reflection of the interview issues are not possible, and interviewees mimic and reactions cannot be observed (james/busher, 2006). still, online interviews seemed the appropriate choice, as many of the online students did not live close to the campus. an advantage of online interview is that it enables the students to think carefully about their answers, which can produce more thorough answers, which was important for my research interest. “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 133 the students i contacted were participants of the project in the two semesters previous to the research study. i contacted only students from these two semesters because i was assuming that their memories of their avatar’s lives would still be vivid. the students were not picked randomly, i chose students who had developed interesting characters and/or who had expressed difficulties with staying in role. one example is a student that stated, “there were a few posts like the gay teacher one where i just had to put my own opinion and morals […]. it was such a challenge to think outside of my own mentality but i really enjoyed it.” further, i only contacted students who had enjoyed the project, experienced it as meaningful and/ or as a good preparation for becoming a teacher. while this of course limits the students’ perspective on the project, it is justifiable as such students represent the majority of the participants (wasmuth, 2015). in the initial contact, students were informed about the research purpose, promised that their participation would be anonymous, and that their statements would be used to illustrate and find out more about certain aspects of my research interest. after the students agreed to participate in the study, they received an open-ended questionnaire (attachment a). open-ended questions are part of a less structured interview strategy, in which the interviewee is more a participant of meaning making than someone from which information is retrieved (dicicco-bloom/crabtree, 2006). open-ended questions permit the researcher to understand the project as seen by the participants (patton, 2001). due to my research interest, i had to specify the questions, which predetermined the students’ points of view. however, the goal was to keep the questions as open as possible. more open questions such as “how did you feel when you answered as your avatar” would probably have revealed more the participants’ feelings and thinking, but might have provided less insight in my specific research interest. thus, such guidance was necessary and warranted. the questionnaire had two parts. the five questions of the first part referred to the challenge of creating an avatar’s personality and acting accordingly, while the three questions of the second part referred to a specific topic, the issue of spanking. the students were informed that they were permitted to only answer those questions that they felt comfortable with, and that they should write as much as they deemed necessary. they were further informed that the research was not about “right or wrong answers” and that they should write what they thought and felt. students could also take as much time as they needed to answer the questions. out of the ten students contacted, nine agreed to participate and eventually seven students answered the questionnaire. the participation of only seven students meant a very small study, but since the aim was to understand the students’ thinking and their feelings, a small sample and limited data do not necessarily pose problems (charmaz, 2006). the objective was not to generalize findings to a broader population, but to explain a specific phenomenon, and samples of this phenomena were, hence, sufficient (corbin/strauss, 1990). after receiving all responses, the data coding started (charmaz, 2006; corbin/strauss, 2008; holton 2007). coding “means naming segments of data with a label that simultaneously categorizes, summarizes, and accounts for each piece of data” (charmaz, 2006, p. 43). through coding, the researcher defines what is happening in the data and begins to grapple with what it could mean. to start, i conducted a phase of initial coding, naming each line or segment of data (charmaz, 2006; holton 2007). after a comparison of the codes, a phase of a focused coding followed, using the most significant and frequent initial codes to sort, synthesize, integrate, and organize the data 134 global education review 3(4) (charmaz, 2006). the most important results of this process will be presented in the following chapter. “thinking as someone else” – the students’ interpretation as said earlier, teacher education programs need to help their students to understand the complexity of teaching and being a teacher, and in order to be successful in this task, the programs need to overcome certain challenges. students need to develop and practice the capacity to “understand the stance, position, feelings, experiences, and worldview of others” (patton, 2001, 52). one way to practice this skill is to put oneself in other’s shoes. students also need to “think outside of the box” and develop new ways of examining their values and assumptions in order to realize that educational situations are ambiguous. while the avatar project seemed to be an innovative teaching method that could support students in developing these abilities, it also became clear that students had difficulties in staying in role and acting and thinking as their avatars. to learn more, i wanted to find out how students created their avatars, if they used certain strategies to think and act as their avatars, and in which situations they were not able to stay in role and why. in the following, the most revealing findings of the coding process will be described. the participants’ replies discussed included the benefits of the project’s anonymity or their feelings when they received feedback or criticism, but the analysis will focus on the responses that were closely related to my research interest. since it is the students’ interpretation of the project, i draw heavily on their original quotes, so that student voices can be heard. the students’ responses varied to a great extent. while some participants answered every specific question, others gave more general feedback on their experience as their avatar without answering each question. together with their initial feedback, the responses represent the analyzed data. the most interesting findings will be presented in the following. “giving birth” – developing a background story as mentioned earlier, “giving birth” is probably the most interesting part of the whole project. the students’ creativity was constantly surprising and many developed background stories full of details (wasmuth, 2015). while thinking about why students struggled to stay in role, i asked myself: how do they create their avatars? are they using strategies and do they determine which kind of person they want to be from the beginning? and how can it help them to act as their avatar during the further course of the project? it is interesting to compare two responses from students creating avatars with the same background information: female, 19 years old, parent, one or two children to see the differences in how the students created their avatars. i had not chosen these two participants for the research because they had the same background information (which was, as i realized later, the case with two other research participants as well), but based on their interesting avatars and engagement in the project. however, it is interesting to know if and how the background information influenced the elaboration of the avatars’ personalities and the students’ interest in the project. the first avatar, sanaa2, introduced herself as following, “hello. so sorry i am late with my post, but i have two jobs and sometimes don’t get in till after midnight, and by then i am too tired to be thinking about posting on some blog, but my girlfriend told me it was welcoming and safe here to post how i feel, so here goes: my name is sanaa “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 135 harper-levine. i am a 19-year-old single parent. life has not been kind to me. when my parents discovered that i was pregnant, my life changed dramatically. it did not matter that my lover was a professor at our local university. what mattered was that i was unmarried and had a secret relationship with a non-white, married individual. both school officials and surprisingly, my parents, dismissed the fact that i was an honor student on scholarship. thus, both the school and my so-called ‘liberal’ parents kicked me out. the term ‘it takes a village’ took on new meaning for me because my ‘village’ became a group of strangers who not only encouraged me and gave free lodging to both me and my child, but assisted in providing all the tools i would need to ‘see the light at the end of the tunnel’. it is true that i made a mistake in judgment, and all of my so-called ‘smarts’ obviously excluded common sense. however, i never dreamed that we would live in a shelter run by a group of ‘seasoned survivors’ for an entire year and to this day. now, i am enrolled in a community college, learning a skill that will allow me to obtain gainful employment and, with the help of the new school i go to, i found a job that though good (i’m a temp) cannot support both me and my child, which is why i work two jobs and don’t have time for hobbies. during this time of extreme stress, i learned that there are all kinds of prejudice: against women in general and single women with children in particular; and, worst of all.......the willingness of “the powerful” to believe that a young person who is in serious trouble desperately wants to climb out of the barrel and move up the ladder of success. i am a living witness that, despite all odds, success is possible. achieving it requires a unique something within each individual that will keep them going no matter what the obstacles may be. i now have two jobs, and working on moving on my own and my little boy, jaeson, (he’s 4 years old btw) is attending a great montessori day care program. there are those who will say that my story is the exception and not the norm. not so. i submit to all readers that anything is possible despite all obstacles. if you have hope in your heart, a will to succeed, and angels to help guide your way, never looking for a hand out, but a hand up.........then success is in your future!!” as can be seen, sanaa introduced herself with a long and fascinating background story that included an affair with a married professor, an unwanted pregnancy, getting “kicked-out” by the parents, and living in a shelter. at the same time, sanaa was described as a smart and strong personality, having been an honor student with a scholarship and now being in two jobs while attending community college. obviously, the participant invested a lot of time in creating an avatar she was interested in and must have cared about. when asked about how she created the avatar, the sanaa answered, “i tried to think like the nineteen-year olds i see now, but this one had a little bit more on her plate because she was a single parent and had many more responsibilities than the average person her age. i wanted her to be strong but sometimes naïve about certain things that a 19-year-old wouldn’t possess at such a young age.” right from the beginning, a clear idea of the avatar’s personality existed: strong, but also a bit naïve because of her age, and somehow disappointed by her life experience. the other avatar’s name was isamar. she introduced herself in the following way: 136 global education review 3(4) “hello everyone, my name is isamar maldonado. i am 19 years old. i am currently working as an administrative assistant at a private doctor's office. also, i am going to school at night to earn a degree in nursing. it seems that i am always juggling around with all of the things i have to focus on in my life. i am always doing something: working, going to school, homework, and spending time with my babies; let's just say that i do not have a lot of ‘me’ time. i am a single mother of two beautiful children. my son is 4 years old and is in pre-k. my daughter is 1 and does not go to school yet. sometimes, i wonder how i am able to do all that i do but i know the answer to that: my mother. my mother has been my rock since even before i was born. my munchkins and i live with her. she is my full-time babysitter. she loves the fact that she gets to have a helpinghand in raising her grandchildren. she watches jasmine while i am at work. i am able to take my big boy jordan to school but she picks him up. the days i don't have class at night, are my favorite. i am able to go home and actually do ‘homework’ with jordan, have dinner with my family, get him ready for school the next day, tuck him into bed, and read him a goodnight story. i wish i was able to be more involved with his life at school, but with my schedule it is pretty much impossible. i love him and jasmine so much, and i just want to give them the best life they can have.” like sanaa, she is a single mother. but isamar has a very different background story. she is very close to her mother and receives a lot of support from her; altogether, she seems to be much more content with her life. like sanaa, she seems to have a strong personality, she is working in a doctor’s office and attending school at night; thus, creating a strong personality seems to be important for both participants. interestingly, she is not mentioning the father(s) of her children at all. when asked about developing the avatar, isamar replied, “at first, when i ‘gave birth’ to my avatar, i originally went with the concept of a married 19-year-old, whose husband was in the military, and a mother of 3year-old twins. after some thought, i changed her into a single mother of 2, a 4year-old son and a 1-year-old daughter.” again, it becomes clear that the student put a lot of thought in the process and even modified the initial background story to develop an interesting avatar character. these two cases are only examples, but it seems that many students really made an effort when “giving birth” to their avatars. not only did they develop elaborate background stories, they also thought about their avatar’s personality traits. as earnest, a 42-year-old teacher, explained, “i wanted to allow freedom to make future choices, but also be as detailed as possible to give my character some structure to work within. i thought it was important to give him a rich background story, but also put him in a new context and environment so he could be a little uncomfortable.” it is quite interesting to look at these characteristics in more detail. who am i? – the avatars’ personalities when asked, all of the study’s participants were able to indicate concrete personality traits as well as personal/professional attitudes and beliefs that they wanted their avatars to possess. let us take a look at earnest again, “even though he was only middleaged, for whatever reason, earnest would “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 137 be politically conservative, have a stern tone, and a deep respect for authority figures and the system. i had intended for his personality to be firm and unwavering, coming from his professional experience, however, he often got stuck in logical reasoning and did not always easily decide on a side to take for certain issues.” earnest was supposed to be “firm and unwavering”, a teacher who “would really believe in classroom management and creating law-abiding citizens”, but also someone who is “conflicted”, looking for more information and thinking carefully about a case before making a decision. when asked about it, it was important for the participant to make clear that such a personality was not her/his own. “the conservatism and ‘respect for authority’ that earnest had is different than my own personality, as i often challenge existing practices and try to take fresh perspectives on issues.” as can be seen in the example above, one way for a participant to decide on an avatars’ personality traits and beliefs is to reflect on the participants’ own characteristics and opinions. four out of seven of the participants chose such an approach. sanaa provides an example, “some of the attitudes married my own when i was that age, and some of the beliefs i had were parallel to my own.” isamar, the other 19-year-old single mother, followed a different approach, “i wanted to really step out of my own comfort zone and create a person whose ideals were somewhat different from mine but in a sense had the same passion, independence, and responsibility as i do.” however, her starting point for creating the avatar’s character was, again, her own attitudes and ideas. further, she also had a clear idea of the avatar’s personality, “i wanted her to be ‘fiery’ and not afraid to express her feelings or thoughts. i wanted her to be a strong independent woman, who regardless of being a singlemother, she was capable of achieving all of her dreams: work, school, and motherhood.” not all participants chose such a strategy. instead, the other three thought about the personality that an “ideal” principal or teacher in their opinion should possess. one example is mario polanco. he described himself in the following way, “hi all, my name is mario polanco; i am 55 years old and a principal in a public elementary school in the south bronx. i have worked in the same school for the past 30 years. i started as a first grader teacher for 10 years; i then worked as an esl teacher for 5 years before i became an assistant principal followed by becoming the principal. i have been the principal of the school for the last 10 years. i am married to a high school english teacher and we have two daughters, ages 22 and 16 […].” again, we can see a rich background story, this is actually only the first paragraph of a post that comprises 1002 words. there was also a very clear idea about the avatar’s personality, based on the background story, “i chose a very direct, straight forward and stern personality for my avatar because i felt that someone who has been in the system for 30 years has seen an incredible amount of changes over the years, must be flexible in order to work with all the changes he has experienced.” but in this case, the personality traits and beliefs were not developed by reflecting on the 138 global education review 3(4) student’s own beliefs and characteristics, but by thinking about the role and tasks of a principal, “he also needed to have a strong personality in order to be able to excel and grow within the school from a teacher to an assistant principal and finally to the principal. i feel that principals often face many difficult decisions and challenges where they are caught between their staff and doing what is required of them. a principal needs to be authoritative, respected and in turn may not always be liked and in this case i feel that’s why principals need to be very transparent in their decisions. i wanted my avatar to be very honest, direct, fair and strong.” two more participants used the same approach. richard webber, again a male, 55year-old principal, stated, “the way i decided what kind of personality my avatar was going to have was by thinking of the type of principal that i would want for an elementary school to have. i thought about the characteristics in which i felt a school principal should have and i went from there.” starting from the idea of an “ideal” principal, these participants wanted to create an avatar with “strong leadership skills, reasonable, understanding, fair, responsible, and someone who cared about the staff and students.” to sum up: while creating their avatars, the participants chose different approaches to “give birth” to their avatars and to equip them with personality traits. however, two questions remain, did the participants also use strategies to decide how their avatars would think and react when faced with different educational issues and how did the participants try to answer in a way that was consistent with their avatars’ personalities? remaining true to the avatar – developing strategies while analyzing the data, two different strategies became evident. the first one is related to the idea described above, equipping the avatar with the personality traits of an “ideal” principal/teacher. peter froebel, a male, 57 years old head teacher was developed this way, “i decided to go with an understanding, realistic, and kindhearted teacher. i decided on this personality because i wanted to create someone who was similar to a teacher that i admired.” in this case, the admiration for a real teacher led to the avatar’s personality. as before, both principals were created in a similar way and the participants continued to use this strategy to make the avatars’ decisions. but how did the participants try to remain true to their avatar’s personality? when prompted to react to the educational issues presented in the project, richard webber explained that he had “to keep reminding myself to separate my thoughts from the thoughts of my avatar.” instead, the decision how the avatar would think was based on “considering how i believed principals would have handled the different educational issues.” mario polanco was also an “ideal” principal due to “the disposition and attitude that i described for my avatar are qualities that i hope to obtain.” yet, this participant added another component to the strategy by considering the positions of all stakeholders and, most importantly, the students’ well-being, “i made sure to think of what the school district or superintendent would want the principal to do, what the parents would want the principal to do and then what the staff would want the principal to do. then after thinking about all of those opinions, i finally would think of what would the principal feel would be the best for the child and that was how i would “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 139 come down to a final decision and reaction.” two participants used a different strategy that can be described as “thinking the opposite.” one example is earnest. while the participant also tried to “think like an old man”, more important was the intention “to answer questions completely opposite from my own views.” while this strategy was used throughout, it was modified because “if i had been oppositional only for opposition’s sake, it would not have been truthful to the character.” again, it shows how thoroughly the participant thought about the avatar. the replies, even if they were supposed to be opposite of the participant’s opinion, had to be realistic for the avatar’s own personality traits and beliefs. isamar decided in a similar way, “i decided that i would look at each issue from my point of view, and then find an opposing viewpoint, which would become my avatar’s point of view. i wanted to step out of my own shoes and view each topic from a different light, that way i could better understand others.” again, we can see a strategy that has been described as “thinking the opposite.” if such strategies were in place, why did the participants struggle to retain their avatar’s roles when faced with the educational issues? thinking as someone else – the struggle with being the avatar i originally started the research because i wanted to find out more about why it was so difficult for many students to stay in their avatars’ roles. the gathered data regarding this question was less than revealing. while i learned a lot about the participants’ ideas, strategies, and motifs, i still do not have a much better understanding of why this was so difficult for the students. instead, i am not sure if they were really struggling at all. the two participants who discussed their struggle in more detail, explained that they had difficulties supporting an argument that they did not agree with, even if their avatars had held such a particular view. as earnest explained, “for the gold star post, i had to try so hard to answer this one! i personally do not believe that kids should be motivated to learn by stickers and prizes. […]. however, i knew earnest would really believe in classroom management and creating law-abiding citizens. […] for the gold star post that i mentioned before, it was especially difficult when my professor replied to my initial post! i was honestly really frustrated with trying to support an argument that i didn’t’t believe in when an aspect of it was called out by my professor!” for earnest, it was the most difficult part “to further justify counterpoints that were raised in comments, when i personally agreed with them, but my avatar did not.” richard webber said something similar, “it was a bit of a struggle trying to be someone else because not only do you not have any insight as to what stands professionals in those situations make, but if you strongly disagree with something that they may have agreed with, then it’s hard trying to stand for something you do not truly stand for.” these participants felt that it was difficult to remain true to the avatar’s character and ideas when they disagreed with the avatar’s opinion and had to defend an argument they did not believe in. richard webber’s explanation touched on another aspect that made it difficult for some participants to answer with their avatars’ voices. he explained, 140 global education review 3(4) “it was difficult to stay in the role of my avatar because i wasn’t sure if how i responded to situations was the way that a real principal would have.” even if this argument sounds somehow convincing, it still does not answer the question why the participant was not able to create an answer that fit the avatar’s personality. altogether, it seems difficult for the participants to express their struggle and the reasons for the difficulty. interestingly, the interviews did not reveal the struggle that i had anticipated after reading the initial feedback of the whole classes. the participants’ answers were very mixed regarding this issue. some mentioned a struggle, but it seems as if the students were more successful in acting as their avatars as originally thought. one example is isamar, “at first, i thought it would be weird or really hard, but once i figured out a system of thinking as myself, and using that a starting point to come up with an argument for the opposite position, this really made the whole process a lot easier.” it seems as if they were more able to remind themselves that it is not about their ideas. mario polanco provided a good example when he explained, “in certain instances it was difficult to stay in role because when i would first read the scenarios my initial reaction was my own so i often had to take a step back and think from all angles.” for this reason, he was able to state: “i honestly feel that i answered as my avatar in all of the posts.” for sanaa’s creator it was also “very difficult not to put my own beliefs in many of the responses because the character has not experienced all the things i have at my ripe old age of 47, even though i do see sprinkles of my values throughout the commentary.” although these participants answered from time to time as themselves, overall, it appears that they were able to stay in role. others indeed explained that it was very difficult for them to forget their own beliefs. as peter froebel explained, “it was difficult at times to step out myself and think through my avatar. i really tried to pretend that i was him, an experienced teacher. although i was pretending to be someone else, i think that i stuck to most of my beliefs as well and did not really get far away from them.” he further explained that it was difficult to him to voice a different opinion because of his own experience, “one time was when i was describing the ‘reward system’. i think that i spoke as myself here because this is something that i have had experience with and it was successful for me. being that i had experience with this type of reward system, i wanted frobel to agree with it as well.” again, it showed that it was difficult for many students to think outside the box. conclusion one of the main reasons for doing research on students’ activities, assignments, and projects, or in short student learning, is to understand, document, and generate public knowledge about how students’ learning can be supported best (freeman, 1998). in the following i will discuss some of the findings and how they can help to address some of the general challenges in teacher education described earlier, as well as specific issues of the avatar project. my main research questions were why did the students struggle to stay in the role of their avatars, which strategies they used to stay in role, and when and why were they not able to do so? “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 141 the research study did not reveal as much as hoped about the students’ difficulties with staying in role, but it clearly helped to better understand the participants’ motifs and approaches to the educational issues, and therefore how this assignment should be implemented to be meaningful. what became very clear is that he students think deeply about their avatar and the avatar’s personal traits, and that they invest the time to give birth to an intriguing personality. how are they able to put themselves in someone else’s shoes? the analysis of the participants’ responses revealed two strategies used to act and think as the avatar: “thinking the opposite” and “thinking about an ideal teacher/principal.” while both strategies seemed to be helpful in deciding what to say and what to write, both strategies also had weaknesses in regards to the idea of being someone else. the latter was normally a personality that was close to the students' own personality, as most students would give an ideal avatar personal traits they already possessed or would like to possess. they were thinking about what they saw as an ideal teacher and of course this was normally not the opposite of their own behavior or teaching style. while such a reflection can be helpful, it can lead (in an extreme), to only writing one’s own opinion. this is exactly what one participant did throughout the whole project – she acted as herself: “i fell [sic!] like throughout the entire time i would be responding as myself.” while this was, of course, legitimate, as such an approach was never prohibited, it is questionable to what extent that approach supports the students’ learning. after all, the project’s goal was to help students to understand that other stakeholder could think and feel differently about educational issues. i had never anticipated that students would actually simply write their own opinion all the time, as this would make the whole exercise irrelevant. i knew that they were struggling, but not to such an extent. however, after reading this statement, i realized that this could be the case quite often. to make the project meaningful, a stronger emphasis should be placed on the idea that students need to create an avatar personality that is different to their own. otherwise, it is not certain that they can realize what it means to be “in someone else’s shoes.” while the other strategy, the one i have called, “thinking the opposite,” seems to be more promising, it is also not without challenges. as said, one of the project’s main objectives is to help students to experience what it means to be someone else. they also need to understand the ambiguity of educational issues and that the role matters when making decisions. very often, there is no simple right or wrong. due to their different backgrounds, experiences, and interests, people think differently about such problems and the project aims to develop empathy, the capacity to “understand the stance, position, feelings, experiences, and worldview of others” (patton, 2001), 52). however, if you use your own thinking as the starting point for the avatar’s thinking, can you really be open to experience what it means to be and think as someone else, an almost impossible task anyway? you still start with your own ideas and you think about others from a superior vantage point of authority, but do not view the opinion of others as equal. further, you fall back to a blackwhite thinking, because the opposite of your own thinking is not necessarily what your avatar’s personality would think. an avatar who would emphasize the importance of strict rules (which could be the opposite of the participant’s opinion), does not necessarily have to support a reward system (which could be again the opposite thinking). why should a complex character always think in black-white categories such a black-white as the opposite of your own thinking? the two same people can agree and 142 global education review 3(4) disagree about certain topics. students should not be “oppositional only for opposition’s sake”, as one of the participants called it. while a strategy such as “thinking the opposite” may help to decide how an avatar has to react, it is questionable if it helps to understand the complexity of human beings and their decisions. again, this is an aspect that could be emphasized or even discussed in the course in order to make the learning experience more meaning. the main purpose for doing this research was to find out why the students are struggling to stay in role and if strategies exist, that help students to stay in role. as said earlier, the study did not really reveal how much and especially why the participants were struggling with answering and acting as their avatars. it seems as if it is very difficult for the students to clearly reflect on this issue. even the participants how realized this problem, were not always able to explain why it occurred. interestingly, while all the other questions were answered by everyone, the following question were not answered by two participants: why was it so difficult to stay in the role of your avatar? if you reflect on it today, why were you struggling with being someone else? while they were able to explain the process of creating their avatars and to describe the personality traits, as well as the strategies, it seems to be more difficult to really understand why it was so difficult for them to always act as the avatar. a good example of this difficulty is sanaa. she was able to give a concrete example of a situation in which she felt she did not answer as her avatar. but when asked regarding the concrete situation with the follow-up question: why did you not answer as sanaa? why was it important for you to share the insights that you have, but that you assume a 19 years old cannot have? why couldn't you answer as sanaa in this case, while you could in others? sanaa again was not able to clarify why she decided not to answer as sanaa in this specific situation. she was able to explain, why a 19 year old does not have the insights to answer in a way as sanaa did in her reply, but not why she had to fall back to her own opinion instead of continuing as sanaa. again, this leaves the question unanswered, why she was normally able to answer as sanaa, but not this time: a question that seems difficult to answer for the participants, even when they are forced to reflect on it. a small study with only seven participants can of course not be significant in terms of deciding if such a teaching method is a meaningful way to go beyond traditional learning. however, the approach seems to be at least promising. students need to be challenged in unorthodox and innovative ways and teaching methods if we want them to prepare for their future role as a teacher. they need to understand the complexity of being a teacher, and the avatar project is one approach that has could be helpful. it seems to be an approach that supports the students in more meaningful ways compared to the traditional teaching and assignments found in many other courses in teacher education programs. the struggle with staying in role is a challenge and it would be helpful to learn more about the students’ thinking and strategies. still, the students are forced to think about their own and others opinions and how these impact their decision making, teaching and learning of children. and this can only help them prepare for their role as future teachers. or, to finish with words of mario polanco, “it was a great exercise to learn to step into everyone else’s shoes and think of how they feel and now decide how best to resolve the situation.” “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 143 notes 1. the number of students who have participated is higher, close to 140 students. not all of the students have finished the course or gave feedback on the avatar project. for my research, i have only included the students who gave me feedback at the end of the course. 2. i will use the avatars’ names when i am referring to the creators of the avatars. these are not the real names of the research participants. references bryant, a./charmaz, k. (2007). the sage handbook of grounded theory. los angeles, london, new dehli, singapore: sage publications. charmaz, k. (2007). constructing grounded theory. a practical guide through qualitative analysis. london, thousand oaks, new dehli: sage publications. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (1990). grounded theory research. procedures, canons, and evaluative criteria. zeitschrift für soziologie, 19 (6), pp. 418-427. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (1998). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. 2nd edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. corbin, j., & strauss, a. (2008). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. 3rd edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. darling-hammond, l., & baratz-snowden, j. (2007). a good teacher in every classroom: preparing the highly qualified teachers our children deserve. educational horizons, 85 (2), pp.111-132. dicicco-bloom, b. & crabtree, b.f. (2006). the qualitative research interview. medical education 40 (4), pp. 314–321. feiman-nemser, s., & norman, p.j. (2000). teacher education: from initial preparation to continuing professional development. in perez, m.-b., brown, s., & moon, b. (eds.), routledge international companion to education, pp. 732-755 . taylor & francis ltd. fremann, d. (1998). doing teacher-research: from inquiry to understanding. heinle & heinle publishers. gubrium, j.f./holstein, j. (eds). (2012). the sage handbook of interview research: the complexity of the craft. 2nd edition. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. holton, j. a. (2007). the coding process and its challenges. in a. bryant, & k. charmaz (eds.), the sage handbook of grounded theory, pp. 265-289. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications james, n./busher, h. (2012). internet interviewing. in: gubrium/holstein, 2012, pp. 177-192. kvale, s. (1996). interviews: an introduction to qualitative research interviewing. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. leaman, l. h., & flanagan, t. m. (2013). authentic roleplaying as situated learning: reframing teacher education methodology for high-order thinking. studying teacher education: a journal of self-study of teacher education practice, 9 (1), pp. 45-61. merriam-webster. simple definition of avatar. retrieved from http://www.merriamwebster.com/dictionary/avatar noddings, n. (1996). stories and affect in teacher education. in: day, c. & lee, j. c.-k. (eds.). new understandings of teacher’s work, pp. 151-163. new york: springer. patton, m.q. (2001). qualitative research & evaluation methods. 3rd edition. thousand oaks, london, new dehli: sage publications. sheffer, e. (2009). creating lives in the classroom. the chronicle of higher education. retrieved from: https://chronicle.com/article/teaching-matterscreating/49211// thomas, g./james, d. (2006). reinventing grounded theory: some questions about theory, ground, and discovery. british educational research journal, 32 (6), pp. 767–795. volk, s. s. (2012). empathy and engagement. using avatars to bring students into history. peerreview, vol. 14, no.3. retrieved from http://www.aacu.org/peerreview/pr-su12/volk.cfm volk, s. s. (2013). how the air felt on my cheeks: using avatars to access history. history teacher 46(2), pp. 193-214. wolcott, h.f. (1994). transforming qualitative data. description, analysis, and interpretation. london, new dehli: sage publications. wasmuth, h. (2015). innovative teaching methods: using avatars in teacher education. rauscher, e. (ed). 144 global education review 3(4) von der lehrperson zur lehrerpersönlihkeit, pp. 391-396. innsbruck: studienverlag wasmuth, h., & pind-rossnagel, s. (2015). avatar – an innovative teaching method? r&e source. open online journal for research and education , 4 about the author helge wasmuth, phd, an assistant professor in the department of early childhood and childhood education at mercy college. his scholarly research interests include developmentally appropriate practices in early childhood education, the history of early childhood education, philosophy of education, and innovative teaching methods in online learning. he has presented on using avatars in teacher education at various national and international conferences. attachment a avatar research project name of the avatar: general i. please think back to the time when you “gave birth” to your avatar. how did you decide which kind of personality your avatar should possess? could you please list some of the characteristics you wanted your avatar to possess? the certain dispositions, attitudes, and beliefs that you chose, were they he same or the opposite of your own? ii. how did you decide how your avatar would think about and react to the educational issues? how did you know what your avatar was thinking in each specific situation? how did you make sure that your answered as your avatar and not as yourself? iii. please read all of your avatar’s answers again. after reading your avatar’s post, can you describe situations when your avatar clearly showed the characteristics you wanted him to posses? in other words, when were your clearly speaking as you avatar and not as yourself? if possible, please state a concrete statement (if you can think of many, please select two or three examples). iv. after reading your avatar’s posts, can you describe situations when you did not answer as your avatar, but yourself? in other words, when were your clearly speaking as yourself and not as your avatar? if possible, please state a concrete statement (if you can think of many, please select two or three examples). can you explain why you did’t answer as your avatar? v. why was it so difficult to stay in the role of your avatar? if you reflect on it today, why were you struggling with being someone else? “thinking as someone else” – using avatars in teacher education 145 spanking i. spanking is a controversial and emotional topic for many. what would you say, did the safe environment and the anonymity of the avatar project enable you to voice a stronger opinion than in a normal classroom or online discussion? can you explain why. ii. in this discussion, did you feel less attacked when someone confronted your avatar’s opinion and statements? was it easier to you to listen to criticism or even accusations? altogether, were you able to realize that you were speaking and being confronted as your avatar, and not as yourself? iii. if you did not agree with an avatar’s opinion, was it easier to confront and even correct/educate your dialog partner because you were not afraid of hurting someone’s feelings? revision wasmuth “thinking as someone else” (helge) wi footer revision wasmuth “thinking as someone else” (helge) no footer incredible parenting with incredible years? 25 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bae, s. (2017). incredible parenting with incredible years?: a foucauldian analysis of new zealand government perspectives on parenting and their implications for parents and educators in early childhood education. global education review, 4(2), 25-39. incredible parenting with incredible years?: a foucauldian analysis of new zealand government perspectives on parenting and their implications for parents and educators in early childhood education shil bae university of canterbury, new zealand abstract this paper takes a post-structural approach, examining what and how issues are framed in the parenting policy, incredible years, through foucault’s (1977, 1980, 1991, 2003, 2004) notion of governmentality and discursive normalisation . by unpacking discourses of parenting produced by incredible years as an accepted parenting programme, it aims to reveal the norm of parenting that is promoted by the current system, and explores how this concept of truth in parenting influences the everyday life of families. the critical analysis of incredible years shows that the programme (re)produces the economic/neoliberal discourses as the normal/desirable norm of parenting, thus maintaining/reinforcing the existing power relations in society. the author argues that this notion of a curriculum for parents provides only a limited understanding of the issue, and intensifies inequality and injustice in the milieu. this paper aims to provide the insights for reconceptualising our understanding of parenting for future policy decisions and effective pedagogy. keywords incredible years, parenting policy, post-structuralism, foucault, early childhood education, (germ) introduction over the last 30 years, neoliberalism has become a new meta-narrative across the globe and contexts (kaščák & pupala, 2011). as global education reform movement and neoliberalism pervaded society on a global scale, the notion of neoliberalism found its foothold in new zealand. under the shared goal of economic competitiveness and prosperity, new zealand has undergone an uncompromising reform process of economic and social policies (roberts, 2007). a larger portion of governments’ fiscal responsibilities in the education, health and welfare sectors has been transferred to individuals, identifying them as private beneficiaries and consumers of these services (roberts, 2004, 2007; roberts & codd, 2010). this political climate has brought significant changes to new zealand early child education policies, redefining what and how children ought to learn. while new zealand early childhood has prided itself for its socio-cultural and play-based curriculum, te whāriki (ministry of education, 1996), the persistent pull of the global education reform movement (germ) has continued to ______________________________ corresponding author: shil bae, college of education, health and human development, university of canterbury, 20 kirkwood ave, upper riccarton, christchurch 8041, new zealand. email: ysb13@uclive.ac.nz mailto:ysb13@uclive.ac.nz 26 global education review 4(2) subtly re-course its direction. between 1994 and 2014, parents and children have experienced radical changes, both in educational contexts and in their everyday lives, as these policy shifts have influenced society’s perspectives on desirable parenting and the responsibilities of individuals (farquhar & white, 2014). a very particular and rigid model of parenting is identified within policy changes: self-managing, economically sound, and functional individuals who are in control of their children’s education and well-being (bae, 2015, 2016). new zealand government’s implementation of parenting programmes such as paft parents as first teachers (ministry of social development, 2006) and incredible years (iy) (ministry of education, 2009) is a good example of this. incredible years, in particular, has been promoted strongly by the centre-right national government since the introduction of the programme in 2009. although trials of the programme in north island and south island had not yet been completed, the ministry of education made an announcement in december 2009 to expand the programme from 1000 parents to 3000 parents per year by 2012. the ministry of education (2014) claimed that these government initiatives support parents “to build positive relationships with their children and develop strategies to manage problem behaviour” (para. 2). since the incredible years (iy) programme’s introduction in 2009, the national government’s target has become even higher: 12,000 parents were to participate by 2014 (collins, 2011). drawing on foucault’s notions of discursive normalisation and governmentality (foucault, 1977, 1980, 2014; foucault, burchell, gordon, & miller, 1991), and aspects of poststructural and decolonising research, the author seeks to disrupt the concept of ‘truth’ in new zealand early years parenting. the purpose of this project is to unpack the values and assumptions that underpin the implementation of iy as an accepted parenting programme in new zealand, and to explore the implications of the discourse of positive parenting for parents’ and children’s lives. this article begins with an overview of incredible years programme, and foucault’s notions of discursive normalisation and governmentality, which is followed by analysis of the norm of modern parenting (re)produced by discourses in iy. incredible years programme based on cognitive behaviour psychology and social learning theory, the iy programme was initially developed by a clinical psychologist and nurse practitioner, professor emeritus carolyn webster-stratton, and her colleagues at the university of washington’s parenting clinic (the incredible years®, 2013a) as a parent training course ‘to prevent and to treat’ children’s conduct problems in the united states (advisory group on conduct problems, 2011; borden, schultz, herman, & brooks, 2010; robertson, 2014; sturrock & gray, 2013; the incredible years®, 2013a; webster-stratton, 2013). the programme offers various parent, teacher and child training courses that address conduct problems. in line with the topic of this study, this analysis focuses on a parent training aspect of the programme. the premise behind the course is giving parents insights into positive parenting principles may support them to change their own behaviours towards their children, thus altering the problem behaviours of the children in these families by modifying the interaction patterns between children and parents (the incredible years®, 2013a; webster-stratton & reid, 2010). presenting reports of various clinical trials as evidence (robertson, 2014; sturrock & gray, 2013; webster-stratton, 2013; webster-stratton & reid, 2010), the developers and the supporters of iy argue that the programme is an efficient tool to prevent “predictable negative consequences” such as violence, delinquency, and substance abuse by these children in incredible parenting with incredible years? 27 adolescence and adulthood (borden et al., 2010, p. 223). however, this argument warrants careful consideration, as evidence-based approaches can be criticised for the gap they leave in our knowledge of the reality of the daily lives of children and families (robertson, 2014). whether iy does provide sufficient, sustainable, and meaningful support for children and families as trial reports suggest still remains to be seen. governmentality and discursive normalisation as the author of this article discussed elsewhere (bae, 2015, 2016), many of foucault’s studies explore the inextricably interlocked relations between power and knowledge, and how they sustain each other (foucault, 1977, 1980, 1988a, 2003). his analysis of a penal system and a mental institution reveals the way that psychology has been privileged over other types of knowledge, and in return it has operated as an apparatus of power (foucault, 2003). in biopolitics, it is the relation between the neoliberal truth and the mechanism of power that captures his interest: the singularity of neoliberal ideas within modern society, and “how far and to what extent the formal principles of a market economy can index a general art of government” (foucault, 2004, p. 131). foucault defined the term governmentality as “the conduct of conduct,” “a form of activity aiming to shape, guide or affect the conduct of some person or persons” (foucault et al., 1991, p. 2). in his notion of government, governmentality concerns not only relations within social institutions and the exercise of political sovereignty, but also private interpersonal relations that involve control or guidance of self and others. governmentality, then, includes the way that social institutions aim to direct the behaviour and thinking of people in society, as well as the ways in which individuals govern themselves (baez & talburt, 2008). through this process of governance, a particular form of reality becomes conceivable, and a specific norm of being is considered more desirable in that social context. the pacini-ketchabaw and de almeida (2006) study provided a clear example of how foucault’s idea can be applied. the researchers in this canadian study explore the way in which the discourses of the dominant language influence immigrant parents’ and early childhood educators’ perception of bilingualism. these discourses from the dominant language group privilege one language over others, and a particular language is imposed as the only worthwhile knowledge to learn and to speak. by unpacking discourses on language learning in the canadian early childhood context, paciniketchabaw and de almeida draw attention to the way in which power and knowledge directly imply each other. the results of this study illustrates that the hierarchical standing of english as the dominant language perpetuates unequal power relations in the context. using foucault’s ideas of the powerknowledge relation and governmentality, bloch and popkewitz (1995) analysed discourses of child development in american early childhood settings. their study showed that the understanding of child development as a biological and universal process is deeply entrenched in a system of reasoning (foucault’s governmentality), constructing the way in which educators perceive children and conduct their teaching. the researchers pointed out that this cartesian-newtonian knowledge of childhood operates as a part of broad power relations by shaping the truth about children and early childhood education. this embedded notion of development, then, “orders how difference was to be understood, classified the normal and that outside of normalcy, what care for children came to mean” (p. 10). they cautioned that this scientific knowledge of children’s development is assumed and naturalised, rather than challenging it and problematizing where appropriate. as the discourses on universal and 28 global education review 4(2) biological developmental stages become entangled with the practice of power in early childhood, the power to judge normal/abnormal childhood is extended and its excessive singularity obscured. applying foucault’s notions as a key tool of the analysis, this article examines subsequent questions: what are the neoliberal assumptions embedded in iy, and how do they support the system of power? how does the neoliberal ideology of iy recodify the soul of individuals in early years and govern their bodies in the milieu? the metanarrative of neoliberalism in modern parenting the principle of neoliberal ideology shares the same premise as the colonising power, presupposing that all human beings are the same. according to this perspective, the ultimate goal in life is to produce, consume and grow in an economic sense (kaščák & pupala, 2011; olssen & peters, 2005; roberts, 2004, 2007; roberts & peters, 2008). the premise relies on the assumption that a responsible and capable citizen of society will naturally seek his/her selfinterest of growth and production, and consequently each individual’s monetary actions will encourage economic development for all. regardless of one’s beliefs and values, all normal individuals must pursue what is considered to be a productive and economic outcome by anglo-european and angloamerican epistemology (moss, 2014; perez & cannella, 2010; smith, 1999). this neoliberal rhetoric places economic growth at the centre of truth, framing desirable subjects as “enterprising and competitive entrepreneurs” in the market economy (olssen, as cited in perez & cannella, 2010, p. 146). because the role of the state is to ensure an economically advantageous environment for all, those who do not demonstrate the specific norm of productivity are considered to be a risk or a burden on society, and thus punishable (foucault, 1977, 2004). applying statistical techniques, this populational reasoning normalises the binary categorisation of normal/abnormal (bloch & popkewitz, 1995). through this view of the world, the unmotivated must be punished and made to conform by state intervention (perez & cannella, 2010). the others with different socio-economic, cultural, and gender backgrounds are “constructed as the abnormal and in need of monetary and/or social, psychological, or educational intervention, assistance, or redemption” (bloch & popkewitz, 1995, p. 15). the effects of neoliberal principles are not restricted to those evident in market relations, but go beyond monetary exchanges. the persistent advance of neoliberalism around the world ensures that the market economy has become “the organising principle for all political, social and economic conditions,” in other words, a governing manual to the subject’s conduct (moss, 2014, p. 64). parallel to the process by which psychology has extended its reach into other sectors with the support of disciplinary power, foucault’s (2004) analysis illustrates the pervading dominance of neoliberal ideology even in non-economic domains. he argues that the problems of neoliberalism arise from this “inversion of the relationships of the social to the economic,” the paradox of justifying the intervention of the state in non-economic fields using economic assumptions (foucault, 2004, p. 240). in particular, foucault critiques the way that american neoliberals apply market economy to understand non-market relationships such as education, marriage and mother-child relationships despite there being little relevancy between them. due to their entanglement with the overall exercise of power, the principles of market economy are projected in the art of government, generalising the form of enterprise in the social bodies (foucault, 2004). everything in both economic and noneconomic spheres is measured or calculated in the economic cost-profit/investment-return incredible parenting with incredible years? 29 grid. this mechanism of power analyses social fabrics to arrange and reduce individuals, so that the subjects and their lives can be managed as a permanent enterprise within a network of multiple enterprises. their private property, social relationships (e.g., marriage, and reproductive functions), and their worthwhile aptitudes are compared with the norm, ranking each individual by economic value. all subjects are individualised as economic units, and distributed for the effective exercise of the totalising power of neoliberalism. many of these neoliberal discourses are present in iy, naturalising the economic calculation of parents’ and children’s performances. the analysis of the project illustrates that iy (re)produces and reinforces a particular or rigid norm of parenting while other values and beliefs in childrearing practice are ignored. the ideology of neoliberalism has become a much contested field of enquiry, not only for its extensive authority in modern society, but also because of the often oversimplified use of the term (foucault, 2004; kaščák & pupala, 2011; lather, 2012; perez & cannella, 2010). contrary to the commonly generalised application of the phrase as a simple monolithic type of market relations in society, neoliberalism in the present day denotes more than a revival of traditional economic theories (foucault, 2004; kaščák & pupala, 2011; moss, 2014; nxumalo, pacini-ketchabaw, & rowan, 2011; olssen & peters, 2005; perez & cannella, 2010; roberts, 2007). neoliberal ideology has taken various forms of manifestation, been combined with other theories and adapted into different contexts (roberts, 2007). for this reason, foucault (2004) argued that it is helpful to approach neoliberalism as a trajectory of market principles influencing the art of government, rather than limiting our understanding of neoliberalism to it being merely a study of market economy. the author acknowledges that neoliberalism is an extensive domain of study that deserves substantial consideration in itself as it takes multiple forms in different contexts. however, due to practical constraints, this article applies the term neoliberalism, rather than the plural form neoliberalisms, and the particular scope of this study focuses on: ways in which neoliberal discourses dominate modern parenting pedagogy, and how they govern the soul and body of children and parents in early years. knowledge as a commodity since 1984, neoliberal ideology has been a relentless force of governance throughout various sectors in new zealand (roberts, 2007). to adapt to the unique environment of new zealand, different elements of theories such as human capital theory, monetarism, public choice theory, agency theory and transaction cost economics were combined with market principles (olssen, as cited in roberts, 2007). the following statements provided by a tertiary education advisory commission clearly illustrated the firm grip of neoliberalism on the new zealand policy direction (as cited in roberts & peters, 2008, p. 44): education provided by tertiary education providers, businesses, and community groups is vitally important to new zealand in building a true knowledge society and achieving the economic benefits for such a society. the quality of our knowledge and skills base will determine new zealand’s future success in the global economy and as a cohesive society. the report emphasized the importance of building the knowledge society and strengthening the educational system for a more confident and prosperous new zealand (roberts & peters, 2008). under the notion of user pays, many policies in education have undergone the reform process that has reconstructed 30 global education review 4(2) knowledge “as a commodity: something to be sold, traded and consumed,” promising a higher status for new zealand in the world economy (roberts, 2007, p. 351). educational institutions (e.g., early childhood settings, schools, universities and other forms of tertiary organisations) have turned into purchasable services that users and consumers can pick and choose for the highest return. in exchange for their investment, students (the users and consumers of educational commodities) expect and demand these services to equip them with skills and knowledge that will provide advantage over others in a competitive employment market. the dominant discourse of knowledge in the last two decades’ educational policies were merged with information and skills (as cited in roberts & peters, 2008), restructuring education as a training ground that armed individuals with expert knowledge and aptitudes for employment. it is this policy climate that brought about the implementation of iy in new zealand. in spite of the innovative production and implementation of te whāriki (ministry of education, 1996), the early childhood curriculum document with a socio-cultural framework, the progress of neoliberalism has not ceased in early childhood sectors. the introduction and implementation of iy is a good illustration of the growing effect of neoliberal ideology in early childhood education. although atawhaingia te pā harakeke (ministry of education, 2001), a whānau training and support programme based on kaupapa māori philosophy and the bicultural context of new zealand, had already been developed and implemented by the ministry of education since 2001, the new zealand government decided to scrap the programme, and introduce iy in its place. the significant issues concerning the implementation of iy derive from its incongruent contexts (i.e., american and clinical background) as well as the way in which it embodies the neoliberal notion of knowledge as a commodity. the programme is registered under a trademark, and marketed in the fashion of a consumable service that prevents and reduces potential risks in individuals’ lives and in society as a whole. all programme materials are owned and strictly controlled by the incredible years, inc., usa, limiting any modification of the content (the incredible years®, 2013b, para. 4). according to the official website, prices for each resource (e.g., dvds, fridge magnets, handbooks, posters, tshirts and stickers) range from us$ 800 to $ 2,000 per programme, and can only be purchased through the owner of the service, the incredible years, inc. (the incredible years®, 2013b). the implementation of iy in new zealand came at the substantial cost of nz$ 7.6 million (robertson, 2014). however, this considerable figure is rationalised with language and terms such as cost-effective, evidencebased, school readiness, quality and universal outcomes (sturrock et al., 2014). under the cover of these ambiguous terms, neoliberal assumptions have flourished and progressed throughout other new zealand education sectors and policy decisions. for example, national standards, the standardised assessment for primary and secondary children, was introduced in 2010 by the ministry of education. this policy change in higher education has meant increased tension and pressure for children, parents and educators in early years, as they must regulate their own and/or others’ performance to satisfy the homogenous learning outcomes. the ripple effect from this policy change in higher education has accelerated the progress of neoliberal discourse in the domain of early education, authorising the scientific and colonising values and assumptions within iy. even though there is an evident conflict between the early childhood curriculum and iy, parents and early childhood educators are expected to incredible parenting with incredible years? 31 foster and train children’s “school readiness,” and prevent “predictable negative consequences” such as violence, delinquency, and substance abuse by these children in adolescence and adulthood (borden et al., 2010, p. 223). children of parents living in poverty, and with conduct problems, are associated with language such as “high risk,” “target population,” “aggression” and “treatment,” while promoting and justifying the iy’s psychological and scientific techniques in nurturing school readiness, academic skills for success later in life (the incredible years®, 2010, p. 1). this discursive shift in policy direction has overturned the values and beliefs that te whāriki placed on co-constructing knowledge with children and parents, replacing them by (re)producing and circulating the commercialised and commoditised norm of knowledge as the regime of truth. according to this understanding of learning, the truth, the only worthwhile knowledge, is waiting out there to be found, to be transferred from the experts to novices, to be mastered and to be purchased. the following statements in te whāriki and iy highlight a stark contrast between the norm of knowledge that is valued by each policy document: te whāriki, principle: family and community – whānau tangata the wider world of family and community is an integral part of the early childhood curriculum. children’s learning and development are fostered if the well-being of their family and community is supported; if their family, culture, knowledge and community are respected; and if there is a strong connection and consistency among all the aspects of the children’s world. the curriculum builds on what children bring to it and makes links with the everyday activities and special events of families, whānau, local communities, and cultures. different cultures have different child-rearing patterns, beliefs, and traditions and may place value on the different knowledge, skills, and attitudes. (ministry of education, 1996, p. 42) the incredible years® evidence based parenting programs focus on strengthening parenting competencies and fostering parent involvement in children’s school experiences, to promote children’s academic, social and emotional skills and reduce conduct problems. (the incredible years®, 2013a, para. 1) incredible years, content and objectives of the attentive parenting programs program one: attentive child-directed play promotes positive relationships and children’s confidence. •responding to children’s developmental readiness program two: attentive academic and persistence coaching promote children’s language skills and school readiness. program three: attentive emotion coaching strengthens children’s emotional literacy. (the incredible years®, 2013c, para. 2) te whāriki acknowledges various values and beliefs of children and parents, and encourages collaborative and fluid processes of knowledge production. on the contrary, the norm of knowledge in iy is somewhat rigid: only academic, evidence-based, scientific, and developmentally appropriate knowledge is acceptable. knowledge production is described as a one-way transfer process of knowledge from experts (e.g., teachers, iy team leaders, adults) to novices (e.g., children, parents) that will prepare children for higher education and consequently a better chance in life. this difference in knowledge discourses in te whāriki and iy indicates that early childhood 32 global education review 4(2) education in new zealand has regressed from its innovative approach to learning back to an outcome-based notion of learning (farquhar, gibbons, & tesar, 2015). it represents how fast and how far the colonising and neoliberal regime of truth has become a governing rationality for the subjects in new zealand early childhood sectors. this neoliberal discourse of knowledge is highly problematic because it appropriates and exacerbates the current hierarchies within the system of power. in the modern neoliberal society, where everything is economically calculable, the values of various knowledge systems may be converted into a costbenefit/invest-return grid (farquhar et al., 2015). for example, all iy team leaders must purchase training programmes run by the incredible years, inc. and be certified by iy. the developers of the programme argue that the “initial investments will eventually pay off in terms of strong family outcomes and a sustainable intervention programme” (websterstratton, 2014, p. 8). this regime of truth provides “a condition of the formation and development of capitalism” (foucault, 1980, p. 133). those who possess the commodity have control over the knowledge economy, ultimately securing their dominant position in the system as well as fortifying the existing mechanism of power. in this way of making sense of the world, knowledge is simply another currency with which to differentiate and dispose of subjects, and it forms part of the disciplinary mechanism used to justify the imbalance and the inequality in society (foucault, 1977, 1980, 1991). only profitable knowledge in the monetary grid becomes visible, ensuring that the holder of this knowledge has an advantage over others. for example, by placing school readiness in a central position among key competencies and learning outcomes for children, the discourses in iy implicitly depreciate early childhood education to a mere training ground for the more important learning that will take place during higher education. because the only knowledge recognised as worthwhile for children in all contexts is an academic form of knowing, other forms of learning experiences in early childhood settings are either dismissed, or need to be recodified closer to the norm of knowledge (e.g., literacy, science, and mathematics). the common and persisting perception of the early childhood educator as a glorified nanny or kind, child-loving lady illustrates this point clearly. both implicitly and explicitly, early childhood educators are often compelled to defend their position as educators (osgood, 2012). to prove professional knowledge and competency as educators and teachers, early childhood educators are pressured to demonstrate expertise (i.e., school-relevant skills) in their pedagogy and assessment processes, interpreting or recoding children’s learning experiences in relation to the set of skills and knowledge that is valued in higher educational settings. another problem with this approach to knowledge and knowledge production is that it masks and validates the singularity of the neoliberal notion of knowledge and the imbalanced power dynamics in the system. as foucault observes, the main objective of the modern governing rationality is a seamless exercise of power, “a universal assignation of subjects to an economically useful life” (foucault et al., 1991, p. 12). throughout recent educational and social policies, including iy, the shared goal of the population is presumed to be economic prosperity with state intervention as a vital apparatus to achieve this (roberts, 2007). these discourses conceal the fact that knowledge construction is fundamentally discriminatory and political, and the way in which it operates as a part of the mechanism of power “to assure the security of those natural phenomena, economic processes and the intrinsic processes of population” (foucault et al., 1991, p. 19). whether one possesses a particular type of incredible parenting with incredible years? 33 knowledge determines the position of that person in societal hierarchies, while justifying or endorsing the privileged status of those with the knowledge. the challenges that individuals face are framed as the end product of their own incompetency, rather than the issues of inequality in societal structures. therefore, it is parents and children who need to invest their own resources to overcome these difficulties. a useful example of this is the manner in which māori children are represented in the ministry of education’s evaluation report in iy (sturrock & gray, 2013). this pilot study pointed out the higher rates of conduct problems in māori children, identifying them as a target group for intervention programmes to reduce “substantial costs in the education, health, justice and welfare sectors” (sturrock & gray, 2013, p. 7). instead of questioning whether or not the current societal structure provides effective support for children and parents with different backgrounds, these discourses divert our attention from the power dynamic to the non-conforming and abnormal aspects of individuals, correlating these with risks and dangers. the discourses in iy associate conduct problems, drug problems, and delinquency later in life with parental deficits such as parental depression, insufficient parental knowledge, and low socio-economic status, claiming that the completion of the course can eliminate these predictable negative outcomes (the incredible years®, 2013a, 2013d, 2013f). child and parents as a commodity foucault (1977, 1980, 2003, 2014) approached the modern governmental rationality as a study of what it means to be governed or governable in a particular society. his studies addressed the way in which subjects are constructed by the mechanism of power either as the normal/economically-useful or the abnormal/burden of society, and what is or can be regulated and controlled by the techniques of power (foucault et al., 1991). once more, foucault is fascinated with the effect of a particular norm of knowledge becoming a regime of truth, and how this dominant norm of knowledge pervades different areas. in biopolitics (foucault, 2004), he explored by what means the notion of homo œconomicus, economic man, is naturalised as the governable subject in modern neoliberal milieu. foucault’s analysis of this governable subject in modern disciplinary society demonstrates that the economic model of the normal and useful body has saturated both economic and social domains alike. through the media (in foucault’s terms, public opinion), polices and institutions, the discourses of homo œconomicus present a desirable citizen of society, and rationalise the state intervention that subjugates and reforms the body of the population (foucault, 2004). foucault (2004) explains this norm of desirable/economic subject, homo œconomicus in his lecture (p. 270): homo œconomicus is someone who pursues his own interest, and whose interest is such that it converges spontaneously with the interest with others…with regard to homo œconomicus, one must laisser-faire; he is the subject or object of laissez-fair…that is to say, the person who accepts reality or who responds systematically to modifications in the variables in the environment, appears precisely as someone manageable, someone who responds systematically to systematic modifications artificially introduced into the environment. these governable, self-interested individuals respond to environmental variables in systematic, scientific and rational ways, and in so doing achieve “an optimal allocation of scarce resources to alternative ends” (foucault, 2004, p. 268). the definition of the term constructs the economic analysis equivalent to any strategic and purposeful conducts that accomplish 34 global education review 4(2) optimal effect with a determinate end. following this logic, all rational conduct can be an object of economic analysis. hence, not only the body of the subject in the market domain, but also nonmarket forms of conduct, as well as the past, present and future of one’s life, are placed under the scope of the modern disciplinary power (foucault, 2004). this school of thought utilises the science of the modern human capital theory to calculate and classify every aspect of human life as a measurable commodity. based on the assumption that all human beings seek the selfinterest of economic prosperity, the modern human theory constructs the subject as capital itself, and education and training as a crucial component to ensure advantage in a competitive global market (fitzsimons, 2015; kaščák & pupala, 2011). once each individual is evaluated in relation to cost-benefit market values in this neoliberal schema, she/he is categorised and positioned as either of two opposite values: economically active subject as a useful body on one end, and those who are not on the other end. because this way of thinking constructs the body, the life and the history of subject as calculable resources or commodities for economic progress, people with mental and physical disabilities are likely to be considered a liability to society, and labelled as broken or damaged goods. disparities between these groups of individuals and the norm are magnified and described in deficit terms, and moral values are attached to these characteristics and natures. even the efficiency of government intervention on the marginalised groups is measured in terms of market economy rather than social justice (fitzsimons, 2015). the desirable, right and proper way of being parents (re)produced by the discourses in iy resonates with this model of the economic individual. the before and during the programme surveys collect the information about the parents’ and children’s history of mental illness, criminality, economic and marital status, and education levels, which, in turn, is applied to identify their economic worth and the degree of intervention required for their reform. when the assumptions of neoliberalism and modern human capital theories are believed to be true, normal and responsible individuals are expected to continue self-improvement and persist with their journey as life-long learners (roberts & peters, 2008). whether it is at the individual or institutional level, these discourses position the knower with privileged and unchallengeable status, normalising the dichotomous and binary worldview (foucault, 1980, 1991, 2004). because the subjects in the power mechanisms are identified and recognised for who they are in terms of their status in hierarchies and what is expected of them (e.g., experts/novice, parents/teachers, adults/children dichotomies and binaries), it becomes increasingly challenging for subjects to question and to resist what is presented as the truth by the system. the result is that it doublebinds parents who are referred to participate in iy from opting out from this supposedly noncompulsory programme for so-called high-risk children and families. the individuals’ choice to attend iy or not is only illusionary, since the deficit labels that are associated with them, as well as the offers and the opportunities for corrective training to overcome these shortcomings impart a subtle yet powerful pressure to take part in the programme and to conform. this is exemplified in the experiences of children and families with non-dominant cultures in educational sectors. being subjected to multiple layers of subjugation and oppression techniques by the modern disciplinary power, the complexity of immigrant parents’ and children’s lives is reduced and categorised according to a one dimensional and linear economic schema, and they are labelled as incomplete, yet-to-be developed/underdeveloped, and abnormal beings. their economic, cultural and political incredible parenting with incredible years? 35 status as the others (strangers in a foreign land) and as passive receivers of knowledge, diminishes the validity of their own heterogeneous worldviews and further complicates their ability to challenge and resist the indisputable truth given by the dominant power. therefore, having been identified as a novice, a stranger in a foreign land, and a yet-tobe master of the knowledge; challenging what is presented as important skills and knowledge by the experts or the knowers (e.g., teachers, iy team leaders, and educational institutions) becomes unthinkable for some children and parents from different cultural heritages. the insistence that education is bound to economics produces a new way of thinking in early childhood. because each subject is a unit of human capital in a knowledge society, a child is constructed to be a future entrepreneur and consumer (vandenbroeck, 2006). the role of teachers and parents is, therefore, to assist, nurture and train the child to be a governable subject, a responsible and productive citizen. this discursive construction of early childhood (re)generates a simplified version of education and parenting pedagogy: producing skilled technicians, or rather, automatons, who perform economic efficiencies with minimum costs/investments (lather, 2012; mitchell, 2005; moss, 2014; nxumalo et al., 2011; osgood, 2012; perez & cannella, 2010). as many preeminent scholars (farquhar & white, 2014; olssen, 2004; osgood, 2012; roberts, 2005, 2009b, 2014; roberts & codd, 2010) have noted in their studies of tertiary education, teacher training and policy production in the modern neoliberal society, one’s critical, inquisitive and reflective abilities are not required and even undesirable in this approach to education as these skills are considered as excess in terms of the cost-benefit grid. calculable/measurable relationships using the metaphor of governing a ship, foucault described how government in modern society is more than ruling over territory (foucault et al., 1991). managing a ship involves not only being in charge of sailors, but also establishing relations between people and things (e.g., cargo, the beat of sailors’ labour, storms, rocks, winds). it is rather, “men in their relation to that other kinds of things, customs, habits, ways of acting and thinking” (p. 93). one’s resources, aptitudes, fertilities, illness and death are the object to be dominated and utilised for maximum economic performance in the system of disciplinary power. foucault (2004) refered to this type of power as biopower, and provided a further example of this in american neoliberal analysis using the child-mother relationship. the quality of time that the mother spends with the child (i.e., psychological benefits), and the care she provides for the physical development of the child (e.g., providing food, a specific way of arranging and imposing eating patterns) are understood and examined in terms of investment. one of the key resources of iy, the piggy bank poster (the incredible years®, 2013f) depicts a palpable embodiment of this notion. the poster urges parents to ”remember to build up your bank account” with a certain type of interacting such as talking, encouraging, attentive, praise, play, and touch. this approach to understanding and distinguishing different kinds of relationships and to examining time as invested capital is supported throughout the programme, (re)constructing a distinctive norm of how quality time with your children should look. iy also provides evident instructions that misbehaviour must be identified and dealt with through behaviour management techniques, for example, actively ignoring the misbehaving child (the incredible years®, 2013d, 2013e). does this mean that parents who do not engage their children in lots of verbal interactions, child36 global education review 4(2) directed play, and physical contacts are falling short of investing their time capital into their children’s development, and consequently impoverishing them? what is also often overlooked is that understanding parents’ and children’s lives through the unrestricted and exceedingly generalised market principle provides inadequate perspectives because it disregards the complex dynamic between individuals and contexts. this is evident in the case of modern parenting. families have become smaller (there is now a higher percentage of nuclear families in the population) and the support that these families have access to is reduced, as more people live in separate households, and church culture and other community support has declined. therefore, the pressure and stress of childrearing have increased when compared with the past, when town or village culture provided a kind of support system around church and kin. globalisation has intensified the pervasive dominance of capitalism in an effective manner across the globe in recent decades putting active economic engagement of the subject on a pedestal. this imposes further pressure on parents to have two incomes, as well as performing the norm of the positive parenting pedagogy. while modern parents are provided with less support, they are expected to deliver more, thus generating optimal productivity for society with the least investment. baez and talburt (2008) claimed that this is how the government’s family policy operates as a “site of intense regulation” in the modern world (p. 25). drawing from foucault’s notion of governmentality which seeks to form, direct, or affect the conduct of the individual, baez and talburt (2008) analysed two pamphlets that were published by the u.s. department of education. the authors argued that this mode of parenting problematises the conduct of children and families, and seeks to channel their conduct to meet particular purposes. without considering the diverse and complex needs and backgrounds of children and families, these policies convert parenting into “a surrogate to schooling” (popkewitz, as cited in baez & talburt, 2008, p. 34), placing home as a centre of the responsibility to train children to be moral and dependable citizens. in this norm of parenting, good/desirable parenting is described as something universal and achievable that is directed at the common good, and if not met, ineptitude in parenting can be fixed through experts’ support and parenting courses run by institutions. the authors contended that this entry of school’s and society’s goals into homes has far-reaching consequences as it normalises a certain notion of parenthood, and silences and excludes other forms of childparent relationships. the findings from macartney’s (2011) study in new zealand resonates with this. by exploring the real experience of her own family and another family with a disabled child, the author illustratedhow this rigid and normalised concept of parenting systematically excluded parents and children with differences. conclusion this article has explored how the modern disciplinary power has increased its effective control over the subject’s bodies by governing or transforming the individual’s conduct in parenting. a very particular and rigid model of parenting is identified within policy changes: self-managing, economically sound, and functional individuals who are in control of their children’s education and well-being. while the support that is given to families by government is reduced, the responsibilities of individuals are increased significantly. by constructing and reinforcing the definitive norm of ‘good/desirable’ parenting, the disciplinary power recodifies the subject’s sense of self and who he/she wants to be (duncan & bartle, 2014). the analysis of this study shows that the dominant discourses of parenting in early incredible parenting with incredible years? 37 childhood policies such as iy construct an economic/neoliberal norm of parenting as the absolute truth, limiting the understanding of early childhood and regulating parenting practices in new zealand. the copious research in the field of early childhood studies and parenting pedagogy which demonstrate concern for the current construction of childrearing practices was investigated throughout this article. these researchers, working across a variety of sectors and contexts, point out that normalising a specific modality of childrearing practice as the only worthwhile knowledge reinscribes inequality and exacerbates social injustice in the milieu (bloch & popkewitz, 1995; burman, 2008; cannella, 1997; cannella & swadener, 2006; cannella & viruru, 2004; duncan & bartle, 2014; farquhar et al., 2015; kincheloe, 1995; macnaughton, 2005; moss, 2014; pacini-ketchabaw, 2007; smeyers, 2008; suissa, 2006; swadener, 1995). this signals the need for different approaches to parenting, which consider complexity and nuance of reality that children and parents experience in daily lives. references bae, s. 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(2014). effective parenting programmes: a review of the effectiveness of parenting programmes for parents of vulnerable children (1/14). retrieved from wellington: http://www.familiescommission.org.nz/sites/default /files/downloads/effective-parenting-programmereport.pdf smeyers, p. (2008). child-rearing: on government intervention and the discourse of experts. educational philosophy and theory, 40(6), 719-738. smith, l. t. (1999). decolonising methodologies: research and indigenous people. dunedin: university of otago press. sturrock, f., & gray, d. (2013). incredible years pilot study evaluation report. wellington: ministry of social development, retrieved from http://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msdand-our-work/publicationsresources/evaluation/incredible-yearsreport/incredible-years-report.pdf. sturrock, f., gray, d., fergusson, d., horwood, j., & smits, c. 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(2010). the incredible years parents, teachers and child training series: a multifaceted treatment approach for young children with conduct problems. in j. r. weisz & a. e. kazdin (eds.), evidence-based psychotherapies for children and adolescents (2nd ed.). new york: guilford press. about the author shil bae is a postgraduate researcher at the university of canterbury, new zealand. shil's research focuses on parenting/family, governmentality, ecological sustainability, and policy analysis in early years. her critical analysis of parenting programme incredible years won the 2016 rae munro award from the new zealand association for research in education. https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/evaluation/incredible-years-follow-up-study/indredible-years-follow-up-study.pdf https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/evaluation/incredible-years-follow-up-study/indredible-years-follow-up-study.pdf https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/evaluation/incredible-years-follow-up-study/indredible-years-follow-up-study.pdf https://www.msd.govt.nz/documents/about-msd-and-our-work/publications-resources/evaluation/incredible-years-follow-up-study/indredible-years-follow-up-study.pdf http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/programs/parent/ http://incredibleyears.com/policy/ http://incredibleyears.com/programs/parent/attentive-curriculum/ http://incredibleyears.com/programs/parent/attentive-curriculum/ http://incredibleyears.com/download/resources/parent-pgrm/preschool-content-objectives.pdf http://incredibleyears.com/download/resources/parent-pgrm/preschool-content-objectives.pdf http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/about/incredible-years-series/ http://incredibleyears.com/research-library/key-research/ http://incredibleyears.com/research-library/key-research/ 168 global education review 3 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2016). strategies for teacher and school leader improvement. [review of the book supervision and evaluation for learning and growth by daniel r. tomal, robert k. wilhite, barbara j. phillips, paul a. sims, and nancy p. gibson]. global education review, 3 (3). 168-169. book review strategies for teacher and school leader improvement “supervision and evaluation for learning and growth” by daniel r. tomal, robert k. wilhite, barbara j. phillips, paul a. sims, and nancy p. gibson by colin everett the focus on teacher evaluation has increased in recent years. a corporate efficiency mindset has accompanied federal funding initiatives like no child left behind and race to the top. under these programs, student performance has been made a significant factor in teacher evaluation. this emphasis has further complicated the difficult task of determining the impact of teacher performance on students and student learning. supervision and evaluation for learning and growth seeks to go beyond the current focus on student performance and instead aims to develop an evaluation system for learning and growth. in this short and readable text, the authors initially focus on differentiating supervision and evaluation. supervision is inherently a formative process of coaching and mentoring. the goal of supervisors is to be like “the conductor of an orchestra” patiently supporting and directing in an effort to improve teacher quality. evaluation, on the other hand, is inherently summative. while supervision aims to be supportive, the ultimate goal of evaluation is making personal decisions that are in the best interest of student learning. the authors try to untangle the competing web of state and professional organizations and their differing teacher evaluation systems. these models include four major professional/collaborative organization standards and several state models. additionally, prominent personalities in education—like charlotte danielson, robert marzano, and kim marshall—all have their own teacher evaluation models that the authors summarize and compare. all of the different state, professional, and individual models have few profound differences. they all contain a shared emphasis on student learning, professional collaboration, and continued professional development. strategies for teacher and school leader improvement 169 like nearly every book on education, the authors continuously seek to distinguish themselves from the world of charlatans who populate the world of educational professional development. rather than one-day workshops lead by “insultants,” the authors emphasize continuous professional learning realized through specific teacher growth plans. practically, these goals are achieved through clear steps and numerous short classrooms visits by supervisors. this general focus on learning gives the intent of creating an evaluation process rather than a series of bureaucratic hurdles and formulaic procedures. supervision and evaluation for learning and growth is an approachable and effective introductory text for educators transitioning into roles as supervisors and evaluators. the chapters are concise and clearly written, and the graphics add to the book’s information, rather than simply summarize the major points of each section. perhaps one of the more valuable features of the book is the chapter case studies. these case studies present real world dilemmas that intersect with the major themes of each section. examples include how to provide meaningful support to both tenured and non-tenured teachers, and taking over as a building principal in a school that has never had a meaningful evaluation system. since the majority of the readers of a text like this will be students, these activities would serve as excellent prompts for learning activities and discussions. the authors do breeze over some of the larger challenges in teacher evaluation, such as determining what qualifies as proficient instruction and how to handle belligerent educators. additionally, a sizeable amount of the book is dedicated to preparing evaluators for selecting the best evaluation system for their schools. while it is certainly beneficial to know about the variety of teacher evaluation models, most of these decisions are made by complex bureaucracies and are beyond the hands of the individual evaluators who are this text’s target audience. overall, however, supervision and evaluation for learning and growth is a concise and valuable evaluation guide for existing and future school leaders. “supervision and evaluation for learning and growth: strategies for teacher and school leader improvement.” by daniel r. tomal, robert k. wilhite, barbara j. phillips, paul a. sims, and nancy p. gibson. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2015. isbn: 978-14758-1373-9 about the authors daniel r. tomal is a distinguished professor of leadership at concordia university, chicago teaching educational leadership. robert k. wilhite , edd, is professor and the department chair for leadership at concordia university, chicago. barbara j. phillips is professor and program leader in the department of leadership at concordia university, chicago. paul a. sims is associate professor and program leader in the department of leadership at concordia university, chicago. nancy p. gibson, phd, is president of the national ascd board of directors, an international education association. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer in the accelerated post-baccalaureate program at bridgewater state university in massachusetts. rural education in a global context 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: beckman, paula j. & gallo, jessica (2015). rural education in a global context. global education review, 2(4). 1-4 rural education in a global context paula j. beckman university of maryland jessica gallo university of montana in september 2015, the united nations formally adopted a 2030 agenda as part of the sustainable development goals (sdg) (united nations, 2015). leading up to the adoption of the sdg, the international education community considered progress in the education sector since the adoption of the 2015 agenda as established by millennium development goals (united nations, 2000), and since 164 countries agreed on six education for all (efa) goals while meeting in dakar, senegal (unesco, 2000). although there has been progress, it is clear that, in many countries, the goal of universal primary education has not been achieved. it has been estimated that “58 million children between the ages of about 6 and 11 years remain out of school and an additional 63 million adolescents (roughly between the ages of 12 and 15 years) are not enrolled“ (woden, bell & huebler, 2015, p. 1). some of these children never start school, some begin late, while still others start and then drop out. moreover, in many countries, lagging scores on international achievement tests make it clear that simply enrolling in school does not assure that children acquire even the most basic skills (unescso, 2014, 2015a, 2015b). the sdg includes 17 sustainable development goals (sdg) to move forward at the end of 2015. the fourth sdg goal is to: “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education and promote lifelong learning opportunities for all” (united nations, 2015, p. 14). it specifies a number of ambitious targets to be accomplished by 2030. among these targets are calls for all children to complete a program of early childhood as well as basic and secondary education, the elimination of gender disparities, the development of vocational and technical skills, the promotion of adult literacy, and so on. the challenge presented by these goals is formidable. not only is the number of children who remain out of school staggering, but progress in reducing these numbers has stagnated since 2007 and, in many countries, children living in poor, rural areas are among the most affected (woden, bell & huebler, 2015; unesco, 2015 ). further complicating this situation, many schools in rural communities do not have equitable access to the resources necessary to support the students they do serve, corresponding author: paula j. beckman, professor, infancy and early childhood, department of counseling, higher education and special education, 3214 benjamin building, university of maryland, college park, md 20742 email: pbeckman@umd.edu mailto:pbeckman@umd.edu 2 global education review 2(4) making it difficult to provide quality education. this issue of the global education review (ger) is focused on rural education because the disparities between children living in urban and rural areas remain such a persistent issue in so many countries (unesco, 2014, 2015). while access to education varies around the world, uis and unicef (2015) estimate that, on average, the out-of-school population is roughly twice as large in rural areas as it is in urban areas (16% and 8% respectively). although the challenges that make educational parity so difficult to achieve vary somewhat from location to location, a number of commonalities have been reported in the literature and are reflected in the articles here. these challenges are often interrelated and multifaceted, complicated by issues of poverty, gender, and in some places, conflict. they range from issues of government policy to practical issues of distance and safety. they frequently involve a lack of the most basic resources (e.g. electricity, sanitation, books) as well as issues of preparing, recruiting and retaining teachers (which are addressed in a second installment to be published in january, 2016). while some of the pressures that rural schools face are not unique to this context, many of the constraints are compounded in rural areas because of a multitude of other factors such as distance or isolation from community resources, policies that are designed for non-rural educational settings, and a lack of understanding about what it means to live and work in a rural place. when we issued the call for papers related to rural education, we were impressed by the response. article proposals from all over the world flooded our inboxes, and we found ourselves marveling at the diversity of the issues impacting rural communities. as editors, we were faced with the very difficult task of identifying the submissions which reflected the range and complexity of the issues that are of concern to the issue of rural education around the world. in the end we decided to create a special double issue to capture the richness and complexity of the field. this first installment features articles that explore issues, challenges, and solutions in rural areas with a particular emphasis on implications for policies and partnerships. the second installment, due to be published early 2016, will take up the important topics of teacher preparation, recruitment, and retention in rural places. the two opening articles in this issue illustrate the complexity and diversity of the issues that affect education in rural areas in distinct parts of the world. for example, okilwa provides an overview of the challenges to educational access and equity in the northeastern region of kenya, with a special focus on issues for nomadic groups. this article highlights the ways in which government policies can interact with issues of poverty, lack of development, distance, political isolation, and cultural practices (such as early marriage and female genital mutilation) and the ways that these issues can contribute to the marginalization of nomadic groups. okilwa also notes the impact that violence and conflict have had on the people of this region. in a very different part of the world and with a very different population, gouleta finds that some of the same issues emerge. in this study, the author considers khyber pakhtunakhawa (kp), pakistan’s former northwest frontier province and the provincial education assessment practices that affect linguistically diverse children in remote areas. the author describes concerns about fairness in the administration of exams, the impact of limited resources and poor testing conditions on performance, and the role of political interference in the process. in addition to the challenge of assessing and educating children in the midst of great linguistic diversity, this article also highlights the way in which conflict, natural disasters, economic, and socio-cultural conditions influence the assessment processes. rural education in a global context 3 linguistic diversity is also an issue in the article by lee and hawkins who provide another perspective on the impacts of policy on linguistically diverse students in their study of five rural school districts in wisconsin, united states. through an examination of local school policies designed to support immigrant english language learners, the authors reveal systemic inequities and challenges of access for ell students and staff. while these districts are relatively wealthy and resource-rich in comparison to a number of other school contexts highlighted in this issue, lee and hawkins’s study shows that the difficulties of professional isolation that the teachers experience in these rural communities compound the challenges to equitable support for this particular population of rural students. rural/urban disparities were also identified by kryst, kotok and bodovski in their examination of data from the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss) for 8th grade science achievement in five post-socialist countries, including lithuania, romania, the russian federation, hungary and slovenia. while the authors found that the students in rural schools had significantly lower science achievement scores compared with their urban counterparts, this difference is not due only to context. rather, this study highlights the importance of socioeconomic status as a factor affecting education for rural students. xu and law address the complex relationship between rural education and urbanization in china. as the chinese government implemented economic policies to fuel increased urbanization, rural areas experienced an inevitable “brain drain” as young people moved to urban areas seeking increased opportunity and prosperity. state financing influenced this process by imposing policies that failed to consider unique demographic and geographic conditions. the authors examine policies and structures that helped and hindered the goal of reinstating a balance of equity between rural and urban areas. addressing the rural/urban disparities described in these studies and in the broader literature requires innovative ideas and programs developed to meet local challenges. several studies included in this issue either describe such innovations or make recommendations for such programs. for example, ngalawa’s description of a primary school in a remote region of tanzania provides a rich description of one rural village and what can be accomplished when local communities organize and empower themselves to promote education for their children. similarly, byker’s description of a public-private partnership that provided a laptop to schools in south india also highlights the power of solutions that are tailored to local needs and empower local residents (in this case, school-children). okilwa emphasizes the need for decentralization of control to meet local needs as well as some nongovernmental initiatives which have focused on the potential of mobile schools to address the needs of nomadic pastoralists for whom traditional brick and mortar schools fail to meet local needs. similarly, gouleta notes the role of nongovernmental organizations in establishing pilot literacy projects. it is particularly noteworthy that most of the solutions recommended by other authors in this issue also focus on the need for specific local solutions. in focusing on the obstacles and successes of rural educational contexts in this and the forthcoming second half of this issue of global education review, the authors provide deeper insight about the impact of rurality on students’ access to education. by comparing the educational contexts of seemingly disparate nations and communities, we highlight the commonalities among them while also pointing out the unique social, political, and economic factors that are so crucial in formulating sustainable educational change. it is our hope 4 global education review 2(4) that readers and researchers will see in these pages some valuable ideas about how we might move strategically toward meeting the sustainable development goals. references uis and unicef (2015). fixing the broken promise of education for all: findings from the global initiative on out-of-school children montreal: canada, unesco institute for statistics. unesco (2000). the dakar framework for action: education for all meeting our collective commitments. paris, unesco. unesco (2014). efa global monitoring report 2013/14: teaching and learning: achieving quality for all. paris, france: unesco publishing. unesco (2015). efa global monitoring report: education for all 2000-2015 achievements and challenges. paris, france: unesco publishing. united nations (2000). united nations millennium declaration. retrieved 10/11/15 from: http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552 e.pdf united nations (2015). transforming our world: the 2030 agenda for sustainable development. retrieved 10/8/15 https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/tr ansformingourworld wodon, q., bell, s. & huebler, f. (2015). out-of-school children: a promise yet to be fulfilled. education for global development. world bank. retrieved 10/11/15 from: http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/out-schoolchildren-promise-yet-be-fulfilled about the author(s) paula j. beckman, phd, is a full professor in the department of counseling, higher education and special education at the university of maryland college park where she is also an affiliate member of the latin american studies center. she specializes in working with young children who are at risk for or have disabilities and their families. she is particularly interested in the needs of children and families living in low and middle income countries. jessica, gallo, phd, is assistant professor of literacy education in the department of curriculum and instruction at the university of montana. before joining the faculty at university of montana as a teacher educator, jess taught high school english in two rural school districts in wisconsin. she has been a national writing project teacher leader since 2008 and is a former co-director for the rural wisconsin writing institute, a site of the fox valley writing project. her current research focuses on disciplinary literacy, rural education, and teacher preparation and development. http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf http://www.un.org/millennium/declaration/ares552e.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/post2015/transformingourworld http://blogs.worldbank.org/team/quentin-wodon http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/out-school-children-promise-yet-be-fulfilled http://blogs.worldbank.org/education/out-school-children-promise-yet-be-fulfilled dimensions and levels of mentoring 5 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: brandau, johannes, studencnik, peter & kopp-sixt, silvia (2017). dimensions and levels of mentoring: empirical findings . global education review, 4(4). 5-19 dimensions and levels of mentoring: empirical findings of the first german inventory and implications for future practice johannes brandau catholic university college of education graz, austria peter studencnik catholic university college of education graz, austria silvia kopp-sixt university college of teacher education styria, austria abstract the lack of evidence-based quantitative studies prevents further progress in mentoring research. in particular, standardized diagnostic instruments facilitating the exploration, evaluation and production of structured feedback for mentors and mentees are urgently needed. the purpose of this study was to investigate the factors and levels that are crucial to the process of mentoring. the study has two objectives: first, to expand the present empirical knowledge of basic dimensions and mentoring styles by developing the first german-language inventory, and second, to examine how the dimensions of the inventory are related to other qualities in the mentoring process. the data were collected at three universities in austria during and after the school practice periods (student teaching) of advanced student teachers who were under the guidance of mentor teachers. over the course of the study, 405 mentees (future teachers) evaluated 205 mentors. in order to gather information on mentoring dimensions, a specially designed german-language questionnaire with 53 items was utilized to assess how often certain mentoring behaviors were experienced. five factors, some of which were validated by independent variables, were identified through an exploratory factor analysis: “professional support”, “collegiality”, “working levels”, “directiveness” and “confidence”. the resulting inventory promoted two objectives: a theory-focused goal to encourage further research on the complexity of mentoring processes; and a practical goal, the creation of a tool for collaborative reflection between mentor and mentee. the results indicated that mentoring must be conceptualized as a professional practice that should entail specific resources and guidelines. keywords mentoring, mentoring styles, mentoring-style inventory, teacher education, professional teacher development introduction researchers have recently begun to investigate possible styles of mentoring. however, previous studies and the literature in general have rarely gone beyond observational and vague conceptual research. the outcomes of mentoring programs have often been discussed (hobson, ashby, malderez & tomlinson, 2009), but individual differences in the implementation of mentoring (or mentoring styles) are rarely considered. on ______________________________ corresponding author: silvia kopp-sixt, university college of teacher education styria, austria email: silvia.kopp@phst.at 6 global education review 4(4) the basis of an extensive review, hobson et al. (2009) concluded that the flexibility to address mentees’ learning needs plays an important role in the success of mentoring, as no one mentoring approach is effective for all mentees. consequently, mentors need to ensure that the roles and functions they perform and the strategies they employ correspond to their mentees’ needs, concerns, individual contexts and current stages of professional development. the aim of the present study was therefore to develop a mentoring style inventory that would enable mentees and mentors to describe and analyze mentoring processes and provide a tool for reflection and feedback in mentoring dialogues. there is a considerable gap in the research with regard to empirical data on identifying different mentoring styles. among the reasons for this lack of adequate data might be the complexity and dynamics of the personal context involved and the need for intimacy and trust as the foundation for mentoring. mentoring relationships can be evaluated in terms of two major types of mentoring functions, namely performance/career-related functions and psychosocial-related functions. mentors differ in their preferences regarding coaching, protecting, role-modeling, challenging, counseling, and so on. to the best of our knowledge, there has been no previous study thus far in a german-language context that has focused on mentoring styles and developed a standardized inventory to compare the assessments of mentees and mentors. following an analysis of the literature in mentoring research and practice, we compared existing inventories of mentoring styles. on that basis, specific items were constructed and (after a pilot study was implemented) tested in a larger sample. the aim of the study was to examine how the mentoring styles identified in the sample correspond to other empirically grounded concepts and how different mentoring styles affect the estimation of learning efficiency and satisfaction with mentoring on the part of mentees. literature review over the last three decades, mentoring has become an important part of professional development in a wide variety of fields, especially in teacher education and the induction period of beginning teachers. with the rediscovery of the immense significance of emotional relationships for the learning process, based largely on the concepts of vygotsky (1978) and the latest findings in brain research indicating that the human brain is primarily a relationship-oriented organ (fuchs, 2009), the historical tradition of mentoring has come to be seen as an essential tool for nurturing knowledge and competence transfer. in recent years, mentoring in teacher education has experienced a paradigm shift that has altered priorities in mentoring practice from an apprenticeship style toward a reflective approach. hargreaves and fullan (2000) described this process of change in teacher professionalism and the implications for changing roles in mentoring. mentoring has thus become an integral part of school development, creating systemic links from initial teacher education to the induction phase and continuing professional development. collaboration, learning partnerships and communities of practice (fischer, van andel, cain, zarkovic-adlesic & van lakerfeld, 2008; howley & trube, 2008, p. 21) are essential aspects of this development. there are also forms of co-planning and co-teaching involved (staub & kreis, 2013). gallo-fox and scantlebury (2016) reported on findings from a longitudinal study in which cooperating teachers co-taught science classes with student teachers: “through co-teaching student teachers, teachers expanded their teaching practice and developed new insights about their teaching” (gallo-fox & scantlebury, 2016, p. 202). similarly, the swiss intervention study “partner schools” focused on problem-based learning in an intense year-long cooperation between prospective teachers and mentor teachers in the context of co-planning and co-teaching (fraefel, bernhardsson-laros & bäuerlein, 2016, p. 205). the findings dimensions and levels of mentoring 7 table 1 changes in the culture of mentoring apprenticeship approach reflective-explorative approach instruction/instructor coaching/facilitator/partner hierarchy collaboration/mutual partnership individualistic focus (“i and my class”)/ teaching development systemic focus (“i and my school”)/ school development classical form of mentoring (mentor-mentee) variety of forms (peer-/team-/e-mentoring, etc.) mentoring before or after student-teaching sessions/classes mentoring during student-teaching sessions/classes (co-planning/co-teaching) face-to-face mentoring professional learning communities modeling (learning by role model) dialogical learning suggested that cooperation involving a mutual partnership (mentor teachers collaborate as equals with student teachers) enhanced the commitment to student learning and resulted in more successful concentration on school goals. currently, pre-service teacher education is in a state of transition from a training model that emphasizes the acquisition of skills and mastery of competencies to a practice-based model that stresses participation, engagement and reflection (hoffman et al., 2015, p. 100). this shift in emphasis does not imply that the traditional approach will not continue to play a role in specific contexts in the current practice of mentoring. table 1 describes the essential changes in the main focus of mentoring for teachers. as an integrative representation of these changes in priorities, a more inclusive definition of mentoring must have a broader focus than one-on-one support: mentoring is a trustful space for the transfer of knowledge and competence in a specific learning context. this definition forms the foundation for our conception of the inventory. in this context, based on their qualitative research findings, trube and wan (2015, p. 57) formulated a concise and synoptic description of the essence of a mentoring relationship: “such a relationship is characterized by commitment and follow through, mutual respect in a climate of trust, and the provision of appropriate resources to support the mentees learning.” similarly, in a qualitative study which investigated the influence of mentor teachers on preservice teachers (izadinia, 2015), the author concluded that when the mentoring relationship was experienced positively by pre-service teachers, their confidence level grew. in addition, various studies have demonstrated how important mentoring is to new teacher development (ingersoll & smith, 2004; ingersoll & strong, 2011; richter, kunter, klusman, lüdtke & baumert, 2011; langdon, alexander, ryde & baggetta, 2014). as langdon et al. (2014) stated (referring to hobson et al., 2009), “nonetheless, there is still insufficient attention in the research to the degree to which the mentor-mentee relationship sparks concern for professional growth and development, not just for mentees bur for mentors as well” (langdon et al., 2014, p. 93). in a recent review of 46 studies that have examined the mentoring/coaching interactions of mentor teachers and pre-service teachers, the authors concluded that teacher education as a whole requires more proactive preparation of mentor teachers, as they are largely unprepared for the coaching role (hoffman et al., 2015). overall, the mentors’ interactions emphasized the planning or instructional actions of the pre-service teachers rather than fostering reflective coaching conversations. an overview of research on teacher mentoring (hobson et al., 2009) indicated that there is a lack of representative, long-term 8 global education review 4(4) studies exploring the influence of certain essential factors of mentoring on the mentee’s successful performance. lynch and madden (2015) investigating a school strategy for improving teacher performance, found that a special “coaching, mentoring and feedback regime” yielded improvement in teaching (lynch & madden, 2015, p. 117). however, relatively little is known about mentors’ professional knowledge, needs and professional development. by means of a qualitative metastudy, aspfors and fransson (2015, p. 75) sought to enhance the understanding of research on education for mentors. the authors’ synthesis of ten studies stressed the importance of systematic, long-term, research-informed mentor education. in their research article, “opportunities and pitfalls in the turn toward clinical experience in u.s. teacher education,” zeichner and bier (2015, p. 23) asserted that the quality of mentoring of teacher candidates in school and community placements is highly variable; more often than not, very little preparation and continuing support are provided for mentor teachers. hobson, maxwell, stevens, doyle and malderez (2015, p. 99) reporting on mentoring in england, made the following recommendations for policy workers: establish a professional status for mentors/coaches, recognize the value of this work, encourage professional expectations for mentor/coach training and development and conduct further research to evaluate the specific impacts of mentoring/coaching on learners. the development of our inventory should support this last aspect of more specific and representative research. there have been a few previous attempts to create inventories of mentoring styles and dimensions, with varying degrees of success and empirical support. fischer, van andel, cain, zarkovic-adlesic and van lakerfeld (2008) developed a concept involving five possible school-based mentoring styles using 25 items rated on a scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree”. specifically, the styles they defined were “letting go”, “active listening”, “advisory”, “prescribing” and “cooperative.” however, this questionnaire has no empirical foundation, as there have been no studies on its use or standardization. with regard to peermentoring in the context of academic studies, the mentor functions scale (noe, 1988) consists of 14 items assessing psychosocial functions and seven items assessing career-related functions. langhout, rhodes and osborne (2004) identified four different mentoring styles in an exploratory study in the context of youth mentoring focusing on the mentoring relationship’s support, structure and activity. in a study by leidenfrost, strassnig, schabmann, spiel and carbon (2011), three mentoring styles were found in a sample of 49 mentors who supported 376 first-year students in small groups. using cluster analysis, these styles were described as “motivating master mentoring”, “informatory standard mentoring”, and “negative minimalist mentoring;” the motivating master mentors subgroup was shown to have a positive influence on success (leidenfrost et al., 2011, p. 347). returning to the context of teacher professionalism, crasborn, hennisson, brouwer, korthagen and bergen (2011) analyzed five aspects of mentoring dialogues using transcriptions in which 112 topics were discussed and 440 mentor teacher utterances emerged. a two-dimensional model of mentor-teacher roles derived from a theoretical analysis of the literature, merid – mentor teacher roles in dialogues (hennissen, crasborn, brouwer, korthagen & bergen, 2008), has also been explored empirically; meaningful differences have been reported with regard to the aspects of mentor teachers’ input and directiveness. the combination of these two dimensions resulted in four mentor roles: the “initiator” role (25% of the sample) introduces topics and uses non-directive skills, the “encourager” role (10%) does not introduce topics and uses non-directive skills, the “imperator” role (45%) introduces topics and uses directive skills and the “advisor” role (20%) does not introduce topics and uses directive skills. the authors did not issue any judgment on the best mentor role, agreeing with the assertion by williams et al. (1988) that a mentor whose approach matches the mentee’s needs will be the most effective. howley, dudek, williams 9 global education review 1(1) and trube (2015) developed an instrument for measuring the mentoring styles of cooperating teachers. the final version of their inventory assessed four styles represented by the following continua: directive to non-directive mentoring, collaborative to non-collaborative mentoring, convergent to divergent mentoring and mentoring that is more or less open to instructional experimentation (howley & trube, 2012, p. 67). the convergence dimension describes the extent to which mentors give teachers opportunities to solve problems, either by tried-and-true methods or in more novel fashions. however, there is a lack of data on how these scales correlate to learning efficiency and other desired outcomes of mentoring. in light of this prior research, it is evident that no instrument to date has considered the dimension of working or the reflection levels of mentoring. mentoring perspectives are rooted in the concepts and myths of learning to teach, such as learning-through-apprenticeship or learning-by-reflecting, which have roots in dewey (1933) and schön (1987). richter, kunter, lüdtke, klusmann, anders and baumert (2013) investigated a sample of 700 german beginning mathematic teachers who participated in a preand post-test study over the course of one year. the authors’ findings indicated that the quality – not the quantity – of mentoring explained the success of the participants’ early careers; moreover, mentoring following constructivist principles rather than transmission-based apprenticeship principles fostered the growth of teacher efficacy and enthusiasm. korthagen and vasalos (2005) viewed reflection as an inward journey on various levels, particularly in the case of core reflection, which occurred when a mentee had a problem that could be easily solved. the authors therefore examined limiting factors at the levels of competencies and strategies, beliefs and implicit theories, identity and the vision of one’s teaching. these levels were first conceptualized by dilts (2010) in the context of neurolinguistic programming. a simpler model of levels is the 3level mentoring framework of niggli (2004): the first level of mentoring is related to executing practical tasks in a certain context (requiring specific feedback), followed by the epistemological level with explanations and background knowledge (requiring reflection) and the accomplishing level, or the personal self (requiring coaching). this is shown in figure 1. dilts’ conceptualization niggli 3-level model figure 1. comparison of working-levels in mentoring based on dilts (2010) versus niggli (2004) professional self beliefs values background knowledge explanation reflection practical actions teaching behavior vision meaning of teaching identity self-images beliefs explanations capability strategy behavior action sequences context dimensions and levels of mentoring 10 thus, in the development of our inventory, the consideration of working levels in mentoring was essential. based on the literature on teacher mentoring and existing inventories, the following research questions were formulated: 1. how many mentoring dimensions can be extracted from the data of the inventory, and what are they? 2. what is the correlation between these dimensions and estimations of learning effectiveness and satisfaction on the part of mentees? 3. how can the style dimensions be validated with other independent measures? 4. how do the mentoring styles identified in this research correspond to other empirically supported styles? method study setting and data sources the first version of the inventory was constructed on the basis of a literature analysis and the adaption of some of the items from the inventory of fischer et al. (2008), in combination with items generated through expert interviews with experienced mentors. an initial pilot test with 30 mentees and 15 mentors showed that the rating of mentoring functions and aspects on a scale ranging from “i agree completely” to “i don’t agree at all” yielded high estimations on the items. to manage this ceiling effect, the phrasing of questions and possible answers were altered. the focus was redirected to concrete actions; for example, the question: “as a mentor, i take a lot of time to give solutions to the mentee.” was changed to: “how often have you presented a solution to your mentee in the last three months?” and was to be answered on a scale from never (= 1) to always (= 6). it also turned out to be important to maintain an unconditional anonymous context, as some mentors refused to participate if they knew their mentees would be evaluating the process along with them. because the estimations of mentors and mentees were subsequently analyzed with the intent to create a more complete description of mentoring processes, the wording of the items had to be especially precise. mentors were asked about their own mentoring practices, whereas mentees were asked about their perceptions of their mentor teachers as mentors. this difference in perspective had to be considered with every item created. for example, item 2 was phrased as “ich lasse meine mentees auch in kritischen situationen selbstständig agieren.” (i let my mentees act independently in critical situations.) for the mentors; mentees were instead asked to evaluate the statement “meine mentorin/ mein mentor ließ mich auch in kritischen situationen selbstständig agieren” (my mentor allowed me to act independently in critical situations). further research is needed to verify that the phrasing of items had no impact on the results. our efforts resulted in 33 items that could be answered from both points of view, that of the mentors and that of the mentees. five additional items were added to the mentee inventory to facilitate an understanding of the mentees’ satisfaction with the mentoring process and its estimated benefits for their teaching practices. independent variables included in the survey were the mentees’ semester in school and the format of their student-teaching program (a single weekly training session vs. a continuous three-week training period), and (for mentor teachers) their students’ semester in school. mentors were asked about their background, including age and years of experience as a teacher and as a mentor teacher. in addition, the questionnaire inquired about any previous mentor training or seminar participation. both groups answered questions on gender and the type of school involved (primary school, lower secondary school, etc.). the instrument also asked both groups to estimate the overall duration of their mentoring meetings and the relative amount of mentors’ and mentees’ talking time during meetings before and after the mentees’ student-teaching sessions. the importance of field experience and the value of learning in the workplace for teacher students are not in doubt. all participating 11 global education review 1(1) mentees did their practical student-teaching experience over half a year with the same mentor or engaged in an intensive program over multiple weeks with the same mentor. the mentors were matched to the mentees by a central manager responsible for the mentoring program at the respective university. however, in this study, it was not possible to identify which mentor was evaluated by which mentee. as noted above, in the pilot test, most mentors clearly expressed their desire to remain anonymous. sample three university colleges of teacher education (two located in the austrian province of styria, one in the province of burgenland) supported the emsi project and allowed the questioning of mentors and mentees (survey period: 01/2015 – 04/2015). the mentees completed their questionnaires during lectures, as this was the only way to avoid interfering with their free time. all participating mentees were in their third or fifth semester. their ages ranged from 20 to 30 years, with a mean of 21.7 years. those who were absent during the lectures in which questionnaires were filled out were asked to return the forms in a closed envelope to the administration of their respective college. a response rate of 85% for the mentee sample was achieved. all mentors received the questionnaire along with an envelope from their mentees. the filled-out questionnaires were returned directly to the administration of their respective colleges to guarantee anonymity. six of the returned questionnaires had to be eliminated because of missing data (e.g., only the first page was filled out). despite the assurance of anonymity, the response rate of the mentors was just 74%. the original sample consisted of 772 individuals: 205 mentor teachers and 567 mentees (see table 2). as the survey was planned as a census for semesters 3 and 5, the representativeness of the data is not in question. of the 205 mentor teachers, 186 (90.7%) were female and 19 (9.3%) were male. of the mentees, 476 (84.0%) were female and 86 (15.2%) were male; the remaining five (0.9%) mentees represent missing data points. the mentors’ age ranged from 26 to 63 years, and their reported experience in mentoring ranged from 1 to 25 years. to remedy the high estimations that occurred in the pilot test, the wording of the items was changed, as previously noted. unfortunately, the data from the main survey also exhibited high mean values and small variances. thanks to our collaboration with highly experienced mentors during the planning phase of the survey, we had some information on the different kinds of mentorship found in continuous practice settings. an analysis of the data showed that the students working in a continuous three-week training period exhibited mean values that were much higher than the group working in the single weekly setting. this led us to conclude that the groups would have to be treated as different samples. we consequently decided to separate out the students working on the continuous three-week schedule. further analysis was then carried out on the data acquired from the remaining 397 mentees. table 2 statistics of the sample semester total 3 5 group mentors 110 95 205 mentees 270 297 567 total 380 392 772 dimensions and levels of mentoring 12 results and interpretation based on the stated goals of the survey, defining mentoring style dimensions had to be the first step in analyzing the data. style dimensions one of the main objectives of this project was description of mentoring styles or dimensions of mentoring styles, with any assumptions supported by empirical data. for this reason, factor-analytical methods were given priority. exploratory factor analysis using principal component analysis resulted in the extraction of five style dimensions. we used the eigenvalue criteria to assess the number of extracted factors and the varimax procedure to ensure orthogonal factor rotation. required assumptions about data eligibility with respect to the method were checked and deemed acceptable (e.g., kmo: 0.95). the analysis yielded a five-factor structure accounting for 62% of the total variance. reliability scores between .61 and .91 (cronbach’s alpha) indicated adequately reliable scales. the five derived scales were labelled “professional support”, “collegiality”, “working levels”, “confidence” and “directiveness”. “professional support” (α= .91, 10 items) reflects the resources that a mentor uses to support a mentee in an expert way; for example,“meine mentorin/mein mentor zeigte mir aufgrund meiner stärken und schwächen nötige entwicklungsschritte auf” (my mentor showed me necessary development steps specific to my strengths and weaknesses). “collegiality” (α= .89, 10 items) represents the personal support that a mentee receives from a mentor; for example, “meine mentorin/ mein mentor behandelte mich als gleichberechtigte partnerin/als gleichberechtigten partner” (my mentor treated me as an equal partner). “working levels” (α= .92, 9 items) is directly linked to the concepts of dilts (2010) and niggli (2004) concerning working levels in mentoring practice; for example, “durch die besprechungen mit meiner mentorin/meinem mentor wurde mir ermöglicht, meine zukünftige professionelle rolle als lehrkraft zu reflektieren” (through the meetings with my mentor, i was able to reflect my future professional role as a teacher). “confidence” (α= .75, 3 items) measures the amount of confidence a mentor shows in the abilities of the mentee; “meine mentorin/mein mentor ließ mich auch in kritischen situationen selbstständig agieren” (my mentor allowed me to act independently in critical situations). the last dimension of “directiveness” (α= .61, 3 items) reflects the rules and guidelines that mentors propose to mentees; for example, “meine mentorin/mein mentor machte mir schon bei der vorbereitung etliche vorgaben” (my mentor has already given me guidelines during the preparation ). this measure reflects the degree of freedom with which mentees are allowed to practice their lessons in student-teaching practice. this final scale is not nearly as reliable as the other four extracted factors, but its high construct validity induced us to accept it as a measure. a second explorative factor analysis was conducted with five items designed to measure the mentees’ satisfaction with the mentoring process and its outcome. the items all met the required criteria with regard to data eligibility, and the extraction showed a single factor that had been the preferred outcome (e.g., kmo: 0.81) and accounted for 68% of the total variance. this five-item scale consisting of items about satisfaction with mentoring and the learning outcome was entitled “evaluation” (α= .88) because of the thematic correspondence in all of its items (examples: “insgesamt waren die besprechungen für meine zukunft als lehrperson sehr lehrreich”, “meine mentorin/meinen mentor im praktikum schätze ich als sehr kompetent ein”). 13 global education review 1(1) table 3 the five style dimensions of the inventory 1) p ro fessio n a l s u p p o rt 2 ) c o lleg ia lity 3 ) w o rk in g l ev els 4 ) c o n fid e n ce 5 ) d irectiv n ess e v a lu a tio n mentees n 397 397 397 397 397 mean 4.43 4.83 4.45 4.43 2.73 4.69 variance 1.12 0.99 1.23 1.32 1.28 1.58 five style dimensions and the evaluation scale the items constituting the evaluation scale were inserted into the questionnaire to measure the mentees’ satisfaction with the mentorship and the learning outcome. their inclusion can be validated through an analysis of the correlative connections with the style dimensions. correlation coefficients between r = .66 and r = .79 indicate a significant statistical connection between “professional support,” “collegiality,” “working levels,” and “evaluation.” in contrast, the negative value of r = -.27 for “directiveness” demonstrated the importance of allowing mentees to practice teaching methods without too many restrictions. with respect to the experience level of the mentees, there was no significant difference in means between the third and fifth semester regarding four of the dimensions of mentoring. for “working levels,” this outcome is not as surprising as it is for “directiveness” or “collegiality,” as the scale measures facets of the competence level of the mentor. in contrast the other two scales measure characteristics that might be expected to change as the student teacher gains experience with more practice. one possible explanation is that the number of objectives assigned by the mentor to the mentee may decrease in the fifth semester as mentees reach the end of their education. it was also expected that the level of “collegiality” would increase over time, as we believed that there would be greater acceptance of more experienced mentees than less experienced mentees by mentors . in fact, only “confidence” showed a correlative trend (t (395) = -1.82, p = .07) whereby more experienced students (i.e., in their fifth semester) exhibited higher levels of confidence due to the mentors’ handling of their mistakes. cluster analysis and analysis of subgroups of mentees to further examine these relationships, a cluster analysis was conducted using ward’s minimum variance method. the number of clusters was determined by a visual inspection of the structogram. the means of the four clustered groups can be seen in table 4. 14 global education review 4(4) table 4 the four clustered groups of mentees the clustering of groups suggests a possible explanation for the considerably lower correlation coefficient (r = -.27) for “directiveness” with “evaluation”. especially interesting is the role of group 2 (g2): this group exhibited higher means for “professional support” and “working levels” and possessed the highest “evaluation” rating, but its assessment in terms of “directiveness” did not differ from the lower-rated groups 3 and 4 (g3 and g4). thus, moderate to high means for “directiveness” did not necessary correlate with lower ratings in the “evaluation” dimension, but a considerable number of mentees preferred fewer requirements and more freedom in teaching. with the significantly lowest mean in “directiveness” (f(3, 393) = 115.23, p < .01), group 1 (g1) was clearly differentiated from the other groups, although the remaining rankings showed no significant divergence. this biggest cluster of students (g1, n = 184) also experienced the most confidence in their relationships with their mentors. although most mentees seemed to be satisfied with mentoring, group 4 (n = 51) did not exhibit the same high means across all dimensions. high levels of “directiveness” may explain this finding, but as group 2 indicates, there may be other reasons as well. validation of the five style dimensions in order to further investigate the relationship between mentor and mentee, the study investigated how the two addressed each other (i.e., informal “du” or formal “sie”). mentees who addressed their mentors (and were addressed) with “du” experienced significantly higher levels of “collegiality” (t(394) = 4.57, p < .01) and “evaluation” (t(394) = 2.20, p = .03), while the level of “directivity” was lower (t(190,06) = -3.58, p < .01). because overall empathy for each other is an important factor in mentoring, it is not overly surprising that a more reserved relationship between mentor and mentee would result in less favorable estimations in certain dimensions. what can be stated, however, is that a less than ideal relationship did not change the mentees’ perceptions of their mentors’ competence and support. this finding reinforced the validation of our mentoring style dimensions; moreover, it demonstrated the willingness of mentees to 1 2 3 4 5 6 p ro fe s s io n a l s u p p o rt c o lle a g u e s h ip w o rk in g l e v e l's c o n fi d e n c e d ir e c ti v n e s s e v a lu a ti o n g1 (n=184) g2 (n=76) g3 (n=86) g4 (n=51) 15 global education review 1(1) assess their mentor fairly without taking their personal connection with the mentor into account. a second measure used to validate the proposed mentoring style dimensions was the relative proportion of speaking time in conversations between mentors and mentees. mentees were asked to estimate their share of speaking time (in percentages) in preliminary and debriefing meetings with their mentors before and after teaching sessions. this proportion may be especially important, as there are significant correlations with “evaluation” (preliminary: r = .23; debriefing: r = .34). more talking on the part of mentees was also correlated with higher levels of “professional support” (preliminary: r = .26; debriefing: r = .37) and “collegiality” (preliminary: r = .32; debriefing: r = .31). discussion and implications for the future the focus of this study was an empirical exploration of the styles of mentoring. based on a factor analysis, five factors were identified, constituting the following style dimensions: “professional support” (10 items), “collegiality” (10 items), “working levels” (9 items), “confidence” (3 items) and “directiveness” (3 items). alpha reliabilities of .91, .89, .92, .75 and (the weakest alpha for “directiveness”) .61 suggest that four of the scales had adequate reliability. because the construct validity of the short scale for “directiveness” is empirically based, and because the data for the measure were found to differ significantly between subgroups in the cluster analysis, the low reliability (cronbach’s alpha) of this style dimension was tolerated. nonetheless, the three items of this scale must be expanded in the next version of the inventory in order to obtain a better characteristic value. furthermore, glickman’s model (1981) suggests that nondirective (directive) mentoring will be more effective with mentees who have more (less) experience. our empirical work identified no significant differences in “directiveness” between participants in their third and fifth semesters but did find significant differences in the style dimension “confidence”, which was higher for those in later semesters. “professional support” was higher for the lower semesters, which makes intuitive sense. the significant influence of the forms of address (the informal second person pronoun “du” vs. the formal second person pronoun “sie”) as an expression of personal distance in communication also confirms the validity of the dimensions. “collegiality” and “directiveness” are dimensions that have been previously confirmed by the studies of crasborn et al. (2011) and howley et al. (2015): “openness to experimentation” in the instrument developed by howley et al. (2015) is equivalent to our “confidence” factor, and “professional support” can be related to the “active-reactive” dimension proposed by crasborn et al. (2011). in addition, “professional support”, “collegiality” and the factor of “evaluation” are significantly correlated with the self-estimated individual speaking time in conversations before and after teaching sessions; this would appear to validate the style dimensions developed through our analysis. it is interesting to note that, in contrast to the perceived individual role in mentoring conversations, the estimated duration of these conversations did not exhibit any influence. additional work is still needed to establish the construct validity of the five mentoring styles identified in this study. future research should seek to enhance our understanding of the meaning of scale scores. for instance, the dimension of “professional support” could have two aspects: support for personal and socioemotional factors, and support related to teaching and expertise. richter et al. (2011) demonstrate that only personal support has a positive effect on professional self-efficacy, but the other aspects reduced the stress experience of mentees. notably, the style dimension of "professional support" was not directly represented in any of the other instruments considered here (howley et al., 2015; noe, 1988; 16 global education review 4(4) crasborn et al., 2011). unfortunately, the instrument developed by howley et al. (2015) could not be integrated into this research, as our inventory had already been completed at the time of its publication. one success of this study was the very strong alpha (.92) exhibited by the style dimension, “working levels”. our study marks the first time that this dimension has been considered in an inventory, and so its impact is all the more decisive. however, to encourage the inventory’s use as a basis for feedback and reflection about preferred mentoring styles, it must be further developed using larger samples of mentors and mentees. limitations several limitations to this study should also be noted. the study was conducted in a particular setting with a special subgroup of the complete sample. the estimations of this subgroup were not markedly impaired by the ceiling effect, which was observed in the sample of mentors and mentees in a more intensive practical training program. this ceiling effect was also found in a sample utilized by hascher (2006), who stated that this idealization of mentors and mentees would be more realistic and relative in the context of longer student-teaching programs. hence, further research is needed to replicate our results in broader settings and specific contexts. similar factor structures were found in the sample of mentors and mentees in the intensive practicum, but the ceiling effects were statistically problematic, especially for the sample of mentors. a questionnaire employing an eight-point or ten-point likert scale could perhaps enable more differentiation. further verification of the scales by means of a confirmatory factor analysis with other representative samples of mentees in specific contexts (two mentors with one mentee, longterm mentoring over months, group-mentoring, etc.) is also necessary. a factor analysis of second order may be of interest for a comparison of our second-order dimensions with the twodimensional model of mentoring developed by crasborn et al. (2011). furthermore, a confirmatory factor analysis of a larger sample of mentors will be necessary to replicate the style dimensions. in an additional limitation, only the characteristics and behavioural data of mentors were considered for estimation by mentors and mentees. it would be interesting to observe how mentors perceive their mentees in terms of their individual competencies and resources. in a further application of the inventory, future research could potentially ascertain whether the anonymous approach applied here can be altered to allow transparent feedback between mentor-mentee systems. it is possible that in such a context, the estimations would be more variable. questions and implications for the future 1. can an objective inventory improve the culture of feedback in mentoring? it is our hope that mentors will learn about themselves by completing the inventory, comparing their answers with the norms and reflecting critically on the resulting profile. mentors could then ask themselves whether their style and approach address mentees’ individual needs as an important factor in the success of mentoring. furthermore, there are likely to be behavioral "tendencies that are unconscious or function in a mentor’s “blind spot” (luft & ingham, 1955). the inventory developed in this study can play an important role in professional training, the preparation of mentors and quality assurance for mentors. in order to provide mentors with feedback on their mentoring behavior, the perceptions of both mentors and mentees should be taken into account. according to martin (1996), the effectiveness of mentors’ behavior is largely determined by the subjective perception of their mentees. consequently, the subjective perception is much more important than the behavior itself. 17 global education review 1(1) in a kind of meta-communication, mentees and mentors could periodically converse explicitly about their perceptions and expectations based on their results in the inventory. the culture of feedback would be reinforced by a team of peers and the systematic use of video-based feedback (christ et al., 2017). however, the effects of feedback would be strengthened by participation in professional learning communities and reflection teams of peers with the use of concrete video analysis. a study conducted by hattie (2013, p. 134) found strong effect sizes with regard to the achievements of pupils for peer-tutoring (d = 0.55) and microteaching with video-feedback (d = 0.88). consequently, a combination of metacommunication based on an inventory and focused video-reflection in teams of peers and mentors, followed by specific microteaching, could represent an effective means of establishing a feedback culture for mentees with a direct influence on pupils’ achievements. so the chance for a peripheral vision (bateson, 1994) to the mentoring system is possible. future research on effective feedback cultures for mentees must combine the best instruments and evaluate them. the 2007 mckinsey report (barber & mourshed, 2007) demonstrated that the responsible leaders of the best school systems stress the meaningfulness of mentoring and coaching for teachers. school quality is much improved when mutual support and feedback are valued principles of school development. the next version of the inventory developed in this research must consider in greater depth the new trends in mentoring, such as mentoring during a lesson (not merely before or after) and the development of mentoring in the context of learning communities (darlinghammond & bransford, 2005; fischer et al., 2009; fraefel et al, 2016). the construction is a challenge because context-sensitive mentoring is not a style by itself, but rather an empathic use of various styles in different contexts, according to the divergent needs of mentees. the further development of the inventory should strive to create a better balance between precision and the necessary flexibility. 2. can a standardized objective inventory improve research on mentoring? research should compare the effectiveness of mentoring programs in a long-term perspective in representative settings. in order to establish standards to promote effective mentoring, more evidence-based research must be conducted. standardized inventories can support the analytical comparison of the effectiveness of mentoring programs and enhance our understanding of the complexity and dynamics of the process of mentoring. more empirical evidence of the positive effects of mentoring is a goal that policy-makers, teacher educators, school leaders, mentees, and the mentors themselves, should all aspire to achieve. credits we would like to thank anita mayer, monika meier, regina maintinger-milowiz, gabriele rogen and charlotte toth-kanyak, graduates of the master program “mentoring – supporting newly qualified teachers” (2012 – 2015) for supporting this research by collecting data. furthermore we would like to thank the catholic university college of education graz, represented by susanne herker, ph.d. and andrea seel, ph.d. and especially the institute for research, evaluation and internationality, conducted by hubert schaupp, ph.d., the teacher training college burgenland, represented by brigitte leimstättner, ph.d., and the university college of teacher education styria, represented by andrea holzinger, ph.d. and erika rottensteiner, ph.d., for the establishment of contacts in the field of practice and for their favorable support in view of the emerging topic of mentoring in an educational context. 18 global education review 4(4) references aspfors, j. & fransson, g. 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(ed.) rethinking field experiences in preservice teacher education. meeting new challenges for accountability. (20 46). new york: routledge. about the author(s) johannes brandau, ph.d., is professor at the catholic university college of education graz and at the university of graz. he was clinical teacher, mentor, clinical psychologist, psychotherapist and coach for over 35 years. his research and publications focus on special education and inclusion, especially adhd, professional work with parents and supervision. peter studencnik, mag., earned his degree in pedagogy and further education at the university of graz. he works in organizational development for rhomberg bau gmbh in bregenz. prior to assuming his current position with rhomberg bau gmbh he was a staff member and scientific assistant at the catholic university college of education graz. silvia kopp-sixt, m.a., is university college lecturer, study programme coordinator and deputy head of the institute of professionalisation in early childhood and primary teacher education at the university college of teacher education styria (phst). she is a former teacher enrolled in special education and inclusive education as well as practical school training and advanced teacher education. her current research focuses on mentoring and inclusive education. dimensions and levels ev format fixed-1 dimensions and levels ev format no footer fixed-1 120 global education review 3 (2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dwivedi, amitabh vikram(2016). practical funding strategies for scholars and professionals. [review of the book grant writingby rekha s. rajan and daniel r. tomal]. global education review, 3 (2). 120-122 book review practical funding strategies for scholars and professionals “grant writing” by rekha s. rajan and daniel r. tomal by amitabh vikram dwivedi grant writing:practical strategies for scholars and professionals, written by rekha s. rajan and daniel r. tomal, provides a cohesive, comprehensive, and clear step-by-step process for understanding grant writing from beginning to end. the book is divided into six chapters of almost equal length, excluding an epilogue. the book is supported with a list of appendices (a-j) in thirty-three pages, illustrating the grant professional association’s code of ethics and standards, public law 106-107 (the federal financial management assistance act of 1999), the privacy policy of the website grants.gov, eligibility for government grants, processes for grant applications, various sample formats, and glossary terms. the authors provide tables and figures to highlight their points, and headings, including notations and reflections for summing up each chapter. in chapter one, “overture: an introduction to grants,” the authors claim that “grant writing is an important, ever-changing filed,” and scholars, university faculty, industry professionals, consultants, and independent researchers can validate their research through securing grants and external funding (p. 1). further, they state that “grant writing is both a science and an art” and this chapter provides an overview of answers to grant-related questionspertaining to what to apply for, where to apply, and how to ask for a grant (p. 3). the writers provide a grant writing conceptual framework, demonstrating links between a grantee’s needs, a funder’s needs, and institutional needs. the chapter also lists some basic definitions of principle terminology and highlights ethical and legal considerations “involved with writing and administering grants” (p. 8). the authors also provide a list of software programs, including wizehive, grants network, regpack, fluid review, flexi-grants, aims, grant manager, grantracks, and grants cloud. chapter two, “exposition: finding the grants,” provides an answer to the question: “where do you find grants?” (p. 14). the authors discuss some of the largest government funded grant agencies, including the national practical funding strategies 121 endowment for the arts, the national science foundation, the national institutes of health, and the us department of education. they also address private and corporate funded grant agencies, including the grammy foundation, the alzheimer’s association, the bill and melinda gates foundation, the spencer foundation, the whitehall foundation, and the american psychological association. the authors suggest that “it is better to start small” (p. 20). further, they emphasize that applicants must have an understanding of the policies and priorities of the funding agency from which they are seeking funding. an applicant must also be mindful of the deadlines and length of time “funding is available” (p. 23). the rest of the chapter provides tips on how to write a letter of intent and how to make a call to agencies’ program officers for help in developing bids for grants. in chapter three, “theme and variations: developing the proposal,” the authors discuss the process of developing a grant proposal. they state that the majority of proposal guidelines ask for an executive summary, a project statement, a purpose and rationale, goals and outcomes, an assessment, and personnel information. the remaining parts of the chapter provide a brief description of these six elements. chapter four, “recapitulation: completing the proposal,” deals with issues related to finalizing the proposal. the authors argue that “grant writing is perhaps the only time when repeating ideas is acceptable and expected” (p. 41). when the applicant’s project statement has been written and revised to meet the funding agency’s specified requirements, the applicant should then build the proposal narrative, including such components as a literature review, a budget, a timeline, and an evaluation and assessment. the final part of the chapter emphasizes the importance of managing the timeline, which “demonstrates how you will implement the grant” (p. 49). the authors provide an example of a backward timeline using a pert chart. regarding assessment and evaluation, the authors suggest the following questions for the applicant to consider when finalizing the proposal: what are the main goals and outcomes of the project? who is involved with implementing/managing the project? and who/what will be the focus of this project? (p. 55). in chapter five, “finale: revising and editing the proposal,” the authors discuss the relevance of editing and revising a grant proposal to help its chances of success. they state that “writing succinctly and clearly are key to successful writing” (p. 70). they highlight several reasons for ineffective writing, tabulating them in 10 points that includeone’s academic background, communication style, the use of hedging and jargon, a lack of planning and editing, the use ofthe wrong tone, the creation of a confusing budget, focusing on the project’s problem rather than solution, and using the passive rather than active voice. they claim that only a persuasive proposal can get a grant and that such a proposal reflects characteristics of effective writing related to structure, tone, composition, movement, format, voice, rhythm, grammar, and illustrations. chapter six, “encore: beyond the proposal,”makes various suggestions for what to do after the proposal is completed. the authors suggest that one should submit the proposal at least a week ahead of the deadline and invite their colleagues to review the proposal beforehand. applicants should also familiarize themselves with the review process and try to reach out to the program officer. last, but not least, “if your proposal is rejected, consider minor revisions and resubmit to another funder” (p. 83). this chapter ends with a positive note, arguing that grant writing is not only an opportunity to gather external funding, but also 122 global education review 3 (2) a venue to build and foster meaningful professional relationships. overall, grant writing is simple in the sense that is clear and straightforward, but it is certainly not simplistic in its content. it deals with language (money) that all nations understand. one noticeable shortcoming, possibly stemming from the fact that the researchers reside in the united states, is that it lacks examples from different countries. if provided the opportunity in a future edition, i hope the authors will include and modify their draft in this regard. overall, however, this is a useful, handy guide for scholars and professionals, faculty members, and researchers, as well as a helpful text for institutional leaders engaged in finding and securing grants. “grant writing: practical strategies for scholars and professionals.”by rekha s. rajan and daniel r. tomal. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2015. isbn 978-1-4758-1441-5 about the authors rekha s. rajan, edd, is visiting associate professor of research and program leader for the master’s in grant writing, management, and evaluation in the division of research and doctoral programs at concordia university, chicago. she is an arts education specialist and holds a master’s degree in early childhood professions from roosevelt university, chicago, a master’s degree in music education, and a doctorate in music and music education from teachers college, columbia university. she has published her research on children’s participation in musical theater and teachers’ use of the arts in numerous peer-reviewed journals. she has also presented her work at national and international conferences. she is the author of integrating the performing arts in grades k-5 and children’s experiences in musical theater. daniel r. tomal, phd, is distinguished professor at concordia university, chicago teaching in the leadership and doctoral programs. he is a consultant, recipient of many grants, and an author of seventeen books, including action research for educators, managing human resources and collective bargaining, resource management for school administrators (with craig schilling), and leading school change (with marge trybus and schilling), and has made guest appearances on many national radio and television shows. about the reviewer amitabh vikram dwivedi is assistant professor of linguistics in the school of languages and literature at shri mata vaishno devi university, india. his research interests include language documentation, writing descriptive grammars, and preservation of rare and endangered languages in south asia. he has contributed research papers to many academic journals. his most recent books include a grammar of hadoti, a grammar of bhadarwahi, and a grammar of dogri. as a poet, he has published more than 100 poems in different anthologies worldwide. his poem “mother” has been included as a prologue to the edited collection motherhood and war: international perspectives (2014). microsoft word review of jacobs and cooper by m. koopmans 118 global education review 4 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: koopmans, matthijs (2017). using data to improve educational practice. [review of the book action research in the classroom: helping teachers assess and improve their work, by sr. mary ann jacobs and bruce s. cooper]. global education review, 4 (1). 118-119. book review using data to improve educational practice “action research in the classroom: helping teachers assess and improve their work” by sr. mary ann jacobs and bruce s. cooper by matthijs koopmans       there are many ways in which research can contribute to the improvement of educational practice, and action research is one of them. action research bridges the gap that typically separates research from practice by having practitioners conduct specific projects to address their own questions and improve their effectiveness based on the answers they obtain. one of the advantages of this type of research is that results are often immediately accessible and have actionable implications. thus, action research is a good tool for making improvements to the field based on evidence. the appeal of action research has not passed unnoticed, and several good texts are currently on the market to explain the rationale and basics of conducting action research, focusing on a variety of environments such as schools, healthcare organizations, and for-profit settings. where this book differs from the others is that both its tone and substance are targeted at school teachers. in one of the opening chapters, the book duly expresses its empathy with the challenges of that profession, and many examples are provided throughout the book about how action research might help address them. examples of some of the topics are classroom management, effective strategies for organizing learning content, exam preparation, student note taking, and the evaluation of student work. the book also contains many tips and advice about how to carry out an action research project, from the development of proposals to the dissemination of findings, and everything in-between. in that way, the book represents a constructive attempt to empower teachers to build a stronger empirical basis for their decisions about instruction and student assessment. the authors present a model called l.e.a.d.e.r. the acronym stands for: looking at a problem, examine what you know, acquire knowledge, devise a plan, execute the plan, and using data to improve educational practice 119     repeat steps as needed. the main body of the text presents an outline of this model, and one full chapter is devoted to each of these six steps (chapters 5-10). while the nomenclature is different here, this cycle is essentially similar to what has been discussed elsewhere in terms of the necessary steps of conducting action research. the starting point of such studies is typically the encounter of a problem on the ground, and the endpoint is that practitioners learn from the data they collected, and repeat the cycle to deal with issues that remain unaddressed, thus allowing for ongoing formative research to improve practice. the book offers vivid examples of how this process might work, including snapshots of student work, an example of a research proposal, a screenshot of an ongoing literature search, as well as an itemized formal planning process. all examples are fully contextualized into educational policy and classroom practice, thereby leaving aspiring practitioners with a good sense of what it entails from a logistic standpoint to conduct this type of research. while the steps described above are helpful in the planning and execution of an action research study, they do not necessarily guarantee its success. there are many ways in which action research differs from conventional research, but one of the essential commonalities is that to be of any use, it needs an explicitly formulated methodology to keep at bay such things as the selective use of results, uncorroborated claims, non-replicable findings, social desirability and other inauthentic data, lack of representativeness of people and settings, spurious causal relationships, unreliable instrumentation, invalid measurements, a choice of competing explanations of extant findings, et cetera. research loses its value if there are problems in those areas. however, instead of providing a methodological framework for designing one’s own study, this book merely provides one for the evaluation of research done by others, a concern that would be tangential to most practitioners. there is very limited or no coverage of such capabilities as how to characterize a distribution of quantitative findings, formulating good research questions or hypotheses (the “questions … [that] can help the researcher in formulating the research questions” on page 69 are not particularly helpful), instrumentation (surveys, observation protocols), or addressing the generalizability of findings across classrooms. aspiring action researchers need support developing such skills, and the absence of a methodological discussion is therefore a remarkable shortcoming of this book, requiring a supplementary text for remediation. “action research in the classroom: helping teachers assess and improve their work.” by sr. mary ann jacobs and bruce s. cooper. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4758-2094-2 about the authors sr. mary ann jacobs, ed.d. is an assistant professor in the school of education at manhattan college in riverdale, ny. she prepares education majors to become teachers for middle and high school students. her research interests include stem education, brain compatible instruction, and effective middle schools. bruce s. cooper is professor emeritus at fordham university, graduate school of education. his interests have long been in private and religious schools, their growth, policies, and government support. a popular book of his is home schooling in full view. about the reviewer matthijs koopmans, ed.d. joined the faculty at mercy college in 2011. his scholarship focuses on educational change, cause and effect relationships, and the use of quantitative single case designs.   microsoft word fwd2_ger_nov2017 galley global trends in early childhood practice 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: nitecki, elena & wasmuth, helge (2017). global trends in early childhood practice: working within the limitations of the global education reform movement. global education review, 4 (3), 1-13.  global trends in early childhood practice: working within the limitations of the global education reform movement elena nitecki mercy college, new york, usa helge wasmuth mercy college, new york, usa in the last issue of global education review, titled “global early childhood policies: the impact of the global education reform movement and possibilities for reconceptualization,” we discussed the unprecedented policies affecting the field of early childhood education and care (ecec) (wasmuth & nitecki, 2017). the global education reform movement, also known as germ, is rooted in economic theory and neoliberal thinking, which is often reductionist and singular in its viewpoint (moss, 2014; sahlberg, 2011), yet it has consumed our field. the trends associated with germ – such as the standardization of teaching and learning, overemphasis of core subjects of mathematics and literacy, test-based high-stakes accountability and testing, prescribed curriculum, privatization, parental choice, and increased control over students and teachers – have infiltrated the everyday practice of teachers and practitioners in the field and remain a deep cause for concern. as nancy carlsson-paige, one of the most renowned american early childhood development experts, expressed it in her acceptance speech for the deborah w. meier hero in education award, regarding the situation in the united states: “so never in my wildest dreams could i have foreseen the situation we find ourselves in today. where education policies that do not reflect what we know about how young children learn could be mandated and followed. we have decades of research in child development and neuroscience that tell us that young children learn actively—they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other kids and teachers, create, invent. but in this twisted time, young children starting public pre-k at the age of four are expected to learn through ‘rigorous instruction.’ and never in my wildest dreams could i have imagined that we would have to defend children’s right to play.” (2015) ______________________________ corresponding author: elena nitecki, school of education, mercy college, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, ny 10522 email: enitecki@mercy.edu 2 global education review 4(3) these trends are reshaping the very essence of ecec. many practitioners struggle with finding common ground between the imposition of germ policies and with what they know is best for young children. this issue examines the implications of germ in everyday classroom and school settings, including how they affect teachers, parents, and children. policy and practice, what dahlberg & moss (2005) called “major politics” and “minor politics,” exist symbiotically and depend upon one another. a democracy needs both. as penn (2011) stated, “to consider policy without being grounded in practice and having ideas about good practice, is also a partial exercise. the trick is to move from one to the other seamlessly” (p. 65). this issue will explore how germ policies have created new trends within the practice of early childhood education in various countries and how some practitioners have found ways to operate effectively within germ’s narrow focus. as we stated in the last issue (wasmuth & nitecki, 2017), we believe that our field is in need of alternative stories and an open, democratic, scholarly, and professional dialogue about the purpose of ecec (moss et. al., 2016; urban & swadener, 2016). this dialogue should extend beyond best practices and effectiveness in meeting measures to include deeper questions at the foundation of ecec, including what is the purpose and function of our work with children? what is our image of the child? what are diverse ways to support a child’s learning? how can different ways of supporting children look in practice? we cannot continue to ask only questions of effectiveness, how to achieve specific and often externally determined goals. instead, we need to challenge this narrow understanding of ecec. this issue is an effort to ask these questions, to go beyond criticism and think about alternatives. we can begin to do this by highlighting stories of how germ policies influence practice in diverse contexts – and how we can think about alternatives and work within their limitations. how germ influences early childhood practice germ policies have resulted in substantial changes in the way ecec operates all around the world. this is especially true in predominantly anglo-saxon countries, such as the united states, england, australia, or new zealand, but even in a social democracy like sweden, germ has changed practice tremendously. in addition, germ policies are increasingly shaping the educational fields in less developed countries, where the privatization of public education remains a cause for concern (wasmuth & nitecki, 2017). what used to be a place for children to socialize, play, and explore together, has become a highly structured, measured preparation for later schooling. academic content has been pushed down into the kindergarten level or even earlier. examples include countries such as australia (barblett, knaus, & barratt-pugh, 2016), iceland (gunnarsdottir, 2014), new zealand (gibbons, 2013), the united kingdom (whitebread et. al, 2012), and the united states (bassok, latham, & rorem, 2016). too often, this is sold as a means of preventing society’s problems through “highquality” ecec, even though such complex social problems do not have a quick fix (moss, 2014). it is the “story of high quality and returns,” as moss (2014) calls it, the dominance of neoliberal thinking, which has resulted in the perception that early childhood education is like any other market, a commodity, an object of social investment that can be “purchased as a means to high returns (individual, corporate, societal); or as the object of market transactions between parent-consumers and provider businesses” (moss, 2014, 67). such thinking is the very antithesis of education as a public good meant to serve as the foundation of an educated citizenry. global trends in early childhood practice 3 this way of thinking is the foundation of the germ movement. specifically, germ characteristics have affected the early childhood experience in these ways: standardization of teaching and learning in many western countries, it is now a given that schools and ecec institutions must have high standards (penn, 2011). these expectations are dictated by professional standards, laws, or accrediting bodies. there is little regard for local context and individual differences, even though the early childhood years are not at all standardized, given the individual and cultural variances that exist. standardization within, but also between countries, excludes some voices and ways of doing things, leaving some groups on the fringes. what can be witnessed currently is the increasing dominance of a certain way of thinking about ecec and how its practice should look. the western idea of “appropriate” ecec is more and more dominating, while local contexts are ignored or even worse, belittled. as urban & swadener warn in regard to the international early learning study (iels), the idea of a “baby-pisa,” an international assessment of early learning outcomes: “instead of careful, culturally and contextually appropriate consideration of the achievements of early childhood systems in diverse countries, and of systemic evaluation of the actual outcomes for children, families and society, iels appears to adopt a strategy that favours largely decontextualised comparison and measurement of narrowly defined predetermined outcomes” (2017, p. 4). in addition, this standardization narrows the curriculum to the point that other important aspects of a child’s experience are ignored. “we now witness uniformity and standardization. . . . creative learning, risk taking, customized teaching and learning, and a culture of shared responsibility and trust have almost no place in the educational systems that are shaped by germ” (sahlberg, 2011). instead, what is happening in many countries is the “schoolification” of early childhood education, the school-like approach of early childhood education with the goal of preparing young children for compulsory school education (moss, 2014, p. 37). teacher-directed learning is on the rise in many of the countries that are influenced heavily by germ policies, simply due the fact that the highest value is placed on the curriculum that is tested. teaching for the test is now commonplace in ecec. over-emphasis of core subjects of mathematics and literacy standardization and its “one size fits all” approach have dominated virtually every educational measure in the field from pisa to the iels (urban, 2017). the focus is primarily on mathematics and literacy, placing little value on holistic development or other content areas. what about an early learning experience that values play, the arts, science, social sciences, physical education, or social-emotional development? instead, literacy, mathematics, and standardized testing have become the focus of the curriculum, while other content areas are vanishing. in addition to this content being emphasized at the expense of other content, critics in various countries worry that the expectations in literacy and math are inappropriate for young children (campbell, 2015; cannella, 2008; carlsson-paige, mclaughlin, & almon, 2015, kamii, 2015). often, teachers are forced to engage in practices that are in opposition with their own beliefs and knowledge about how children learn best: “growing numbers [of early childhood teachers, the authors] are convinced that they’re committing malpractice, that they’re actually doing harm. many have used the term child abuse” (ochshorn, 2017). 4 global education review 4(3) test-based high-stakes accountability and testing educational measurement is not an exact science and with young children, it is even less reliable and valid. some argue that such assessment is actually a mis-measure for younger children (neisworth & bagnato, 2004). such “testing” is almost impossible with some children, yet the reliance on standardized tests, often with high stakes attached, continues to persist. young children are tested earlier and earlier, too often in ways that are clearly not meaningful or age-appropriate. the issue is not assessment in general. it is probably hard to find any expert who would argue against or would downplay the importance of assessment in ecec. there is no question that assessment of young children and their learning is one, if not the most important, tool in a meaningful practice in ecec. findings in different international contexts actually emphasize the importance of assessment and documentation of young children’s learning (carr & lee, 2012; dahlberg, moss, & pence, 1999; leu et al, 2007; rinaldi, 2001). however, such an assessment needs to be meaningful and respect the complexities of learning. the current trend of standardized testing of predominantly decontextualized and meaningless knowledge, often done on a computer, and as a means of an early preparation for taking tests, is the opposite of meaningful assessment. it does not help the teachers to better understand their students in order to support their learning in a meaningful way, but it puts unnecessary pressure on both young children and teachers, with the purpose of collecting meaningless data. such an assessment is not supporting young children’s development, but obstructs the complex tasks associated with assessing, teaching, and learning. prescribed curriculum in order to maintain control and achieve success on these imperfect measures, curriculum has become increasingly narrow, with little space left for the teachers to improvise or be creative. “it appears to be against our better judgment, but the more we seem to know about the complexity of learning, children’s diverse strategies, and multiple theories of knowledge, the more we seek to impose learning strategies and curriculum goals that reduce the complexities of this learning and knowing” (lenz taguchi, 2014, p. 14). in fact, cannella (2008) described a “pedagogical determinism in the field of child development… [that] legitimizes power of covert control” and shapes most of the prescribed curriculum in early childhood. it is alarming that this approach is rarely questioned. is such a goal even desirable and such an approach beneficial for children’s learning and development? standardization, its testing and prescribed curriculum leaves little room for the hallmarks of early childhood: wonder, awe, and surprise, the “essence of early childhood” (moss, 2014). early childhood education is turning into a “trivialised idea of learning and knowledge” (olsson, 2013), instead of natural discovery of the world through the child’s eyes and at the child’s pace. paley (2005) notes that “the expectations for children have become so instrumental and fixed that the potential for surprise is largely gone” (p. 47). without time for these aspects of early childhood, how will children have the capacity to develop into the imaginative, creative thinkers that we need to solve the problems of the future? increased control over students and teachers since the administrative models in education have been largely borrowed from business world, there is a “top-down” model of control. the result is voiceless children (and in some cases, parents) and teachers being degraded and losing their creativity and passion for the field, an “increasingly authoritarian system of governing” (moss, 2014, p. 69) of young children global trends in early childhood practice 5 as well as adults. the complexities and diversity of young children’s lives are ignored and reduced, “the otherness or singularity of the child is grasped, not respected, to make the other into the same” (moss, 2014, p. 42). children are not seen as individuals, but have to match the norms of child development and predetermined learning outcomes. at the same time, teachers, as well researchers, are under great pressure to deliver written accounts of their practice and live up to expectations and standardized norms of what is globally considered to be “excellent” and “best” practice (olsson, 2013). many early childhood professionals know how children learn best, but they find it more and more difficult to provide hands-on, exploratory, and play-based learning activities due to the escalating pressure of having to meet developmentally inappropriate standards (campbell, 2015; dey, 2016; katz, 2015; ochshorn, 2016). as alford et al. (2015) have found, regardless of grade level, teachers are now more likely to use “whole class, didactic, teacher-centered instructional practices”— an approach that “discounts the range of differences and contexts that are present within an early childhood classroom” (p. 10). early childhood settings worldwide nowadays look more like elementary school classrooms. children sit in chairs for far too much time, being forced to memorize meaningless facts, and their stress levels are rising. children are not allowed to be children anymore; instead, they worry about not knowing the right answer and begin hating school from an early age. all of these developments, as so many critics have voiced, are harmful to young children (carlssonpaige, mclaughlin, & almon, 2015; rawitsch, 2016). too often, there is no joy in early childhood settings anymore and the question whether children should be happy when spending their time in such institutions seems to be naive for most people in power, who are making decisions about our field. it is further disturbing that the voices and concerns of experts in the field of ecec are too often completely ignored. a perfect example is the so-called revision of the common core standards in new york state, the home of the editors of this issue. although many similar examples can be found around the world, a local example that is affecting our own personal practice deserves mention. these “revisions” did not take the concerns of experts seriously, despite months of soliciting open comments and expert opinions. rather, such voices were ignored or patronized (ochshorn, 2017; tanis, 2017). the revisions presumably never intended to address such concerns in a meaningful way. it was no more than a rebrand of the old standards. it still ignores the decades of research documenting how young children learn best. as bianca tanis stated to the point: “you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear” (2017). privatization privatization outsources the public good of education to private operators. in the field of education, it can take the form of nonprofit (such as charter management organizations or cmo) as well as for-profit (educational management organizations or emo) school management. this privatization relies on corporate models of operation, and ultimately leads to inequality under the illusion of choice (jones, 2017). lafer explained the result of privatization as increasing inequality: “despite prolific claims to the contrary, corporate-led education reform does not represent an agenda to improve american education or expand the life chances of poor urban youth…the corporate agenda would lead to a divided country, where the children of the wealthy will be taught a broad curriculum in small classes led by experienced teachers, while the rest of the nation will be consigned to a narrow curriculum delivered in large classes by inexperienced staff – or by digital applications with no teachers at all” 6 global education review 4(3) (2017, p. 130). this is not only true for the united states, since examples of privatization are apparent worldwide. privatization does not fight inequality, but actually seems to enhance it. the consequence of inequality and imposition of western definitions of education have become a major issue, especially in the global south, where it has become a human rights concern. the push for privatization in the global south in form of so-called low-cost schools looks more like a modern form of colonization and exploitation than a sincere investment in children or in the development of sustainable educational systems (wasmuth & nitecki, 2017). this trend of privatization is a blatant expression of how the common good of the education of our youngest children has become an open market, driven by profit. the pioneers of privatizing ecec are the western, capitalist countries, such as the us and uk. not only are business models transferred, but also teaching and learning methods, as well as standardized forms of assessment. western conceptions of child development are assumed to be indisputable facts that can be easily transferred to any cultural context. such a western arrogance ignores local ideas and traditions of ecec. such local peculiarities are not valued, but seen as a hindrance to the further extension of their own business model (urban & swadener, 2016). for example, there is a reason why bridge international academies, one of the largest enterprises pushing the privatization agenda in the global south, relies on standardized, prescribed lessons that can be delivered via a tablet and often in english (the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights, 2017). it is not because such an approach necessarily supports the learning in the local context, but rather enables the easy transfer to other countries in “need” of privatization. technology although the use of technology is questionable with young children, it is flourishing all over the world. often summarized as “personalized learning,” technology, especially in the form of tablets, has found its way into more and more early childhood classrooms. the use of technology is described by its promoters as the new “silver bullet,” which will support the development of all children and at the same time will close the achievement gap and fix the problems of many educational systems. however, there is not much reason to believe such bold claims. currently, we do not know very much about what happens in a child’s brain when they use a tablet, simply because it is such a new device and not much research exists. however, it seems doubtful to support optimistic claims because the research that exists shows the opposite. to learn, children need to give meaning to the world by constructing new knowledge, but this cannot be done in front of a screen, which is often an abstract representation of reality. children need to spend more free time playing outdoors, regardless of the weather, making meaning of the real world, instead of sitting in front of a glowing screen playing socalled educational games and apps that are based mostly on inopportune behaviorist and/or transmission theories of learning. children need to read and use their imaginations. children learn best by interacting with people; technology is simply a poor substitute for personal interaction. many experts are concerned that tablets have a serious negative impact on children’s social and physical development. as denisha jones (2017) points out: “what i did not describe is a five-year-old sitting at a computer, watching an animated video while he clicks a mouse to build a train station and has to solve problems by moving the pictures on the screen with the mouse. that is the ‘personalized learning’ promoted today and it has no place in an early childhood classroom.” global trends in early childhood practice 7 most experts would probably not argue against online learning for older students or even occasional well-planned and supported tablet-based activities with younger children. however, this is not what is happening in many classrooms. instead, young children are used as guinea pigs as no one can really say at this point if the overuse of technology has the potential to harm the development of young children. so why is this unsound push for technology happening? education technology is estimated to become a $60 billion industry by 2018 (karadas, 2016). “there is an entire parasitic industry making billions of dollars selling us things we don’t need – standardized tests, common core workbook drivel, software test prep this, and computer test crap that” (singer, 2017). it is a “hoax” (karadas, 2016), that does not aim on helping children, but rather helping the companies to sell their products. how to operate within germ’s limitations so, what can we do in this situation? first, scholars as well as teachers need to see the system for what it is, a field being manipulated for economic and political purposes, as we discussed in the first issue. it is far too easy to do what we are told to protect our jobs and the status quo, or to give up and sneer at the current state of affairs, but then we are part of the problem. as steven singer, a teacher, stated with regards to the use of technology in classrooms: “we didn’t decide to use it. we didn’t buy it. but who is it who actually introduces most of this garbage in the classroom? that’s right. us. we do it. often willingly. we need to stop” (2017). without pointing the finger at teachers, singer clearly has a point by emphasizing that everyone who sees heror himself as an advocate for young children at one point simply needs to take a stance. germ is only one of many viewpoints, one with many flaws. following the ideas and directions of germ blindly means nothing else than doing harm to our children. however, it does not have to be this way. to fully consider the issues, we must seek alternatives. there is hope, if we are willing to think differently. cannella (2008) described this possibility: “to reconceptualize a field in which social justice and hearing the voices of younger human beings is the foundation, we must be willing to go beyond our possibilities, to go beyond the ways we have been taught to perceive” (p. 173). paolo freire’s theory can be applied here. freire discussed the potential of individual action within the “limit situation” (freire 1970, 1985). “limit situations” are “impediments to transforming action,” such as the narrow focus and limitations imposed by germ policies, which create impediments to the transformation we know can occur in early childhood classrooms where play, imagination, and freedom are possible. “limit-situations imply the existence of persons who are directly or indirectly served by these situations, and of those who are negated and curbed by them. . . those who are served by the present limitsituation regard the untested feasibility as a threatening limit-situation which must not be allowed to materialize, and act to maintain the status quo.” (freire, 1985). the status quo is maintained by those who will benefit: those profiting from yet another common good that is privatized. limitations are created on the macro level by policies that standardize, dictate, and assess, and trickle down to daily practice in the classroom. if one simply plays along, then he is complicit. “washing one’s hands of the conflict between the powerful and the powerless means to side with the powerful, not to be neutral” (freire, 1985, 122). teachers and academics who study the field must not wash their hands of these problems, but seek alternatives. freire offered hope of changing this limited structure through dialogue, starting on an individual or 8 global education review 4(3) small group level, which is fertile ground for change. questioning the status quo opens a space for the possible, for “untested feasibility” (freire, 1985). it is similar to what dahlberg & moss call “minor politics” (2005), the “everyday lives of children and preschools” (2005, 15). such minor politics can take a variety of forms and there is potential on this level. things can be changed, as long as the status quo is not taken for granted; if minor politics are understood as a critical thinking “about creating opportunities for seeing matters differently and making loud voices stutter” (dahlberg & moss, 2005, p. 138). what if we tested what is feasible within a world that has its limitations? to question, think differently, and seek hope in these limit situations, we must realize that our field is not facing an “either/or” situation. for example, there is false dichotomy posited between play and academics based on standards (epstein, 2011; katz, 2015; snow, 2011). too often, advocates of play-based learning are characterized as opponents of learning or high expectations. this is definitely not true and it needs to be emphasized. as alford et al. (2015) have written: “the concept of play for young learners has been erroneously portrayed as directly oppositional to the more ‘worthy’ academic counterpart of academic work” (p. 10). riley and jones (2010) would agree that, “learning and play do not have to be contradictory; learning can occur during times of play” (p. 149). we would even say that learning not only can, but clearly does occur during play. play is young children’s means of learning. there is a way to infuse academic learning with play-based developmentally appropriate learning. what needs to be criticized is the way that germ policies have changed the early childhood classrooms, the “schoolification” of ecec, which has resulted in more teacherdirected learning, rote memorization of meaningless facts, and the loss of the arts, music, physical education, and even social studies and science. such criticism is even more important because research clearly shows greater gains from play-based programs than from academically oriented early childhood institutions. longitudinal follow-up studies indicate that while a focus on academics, combined with teacher-directed instruction may produce good test results in the short term, playbased programs that emphasize children’s interactive roles and initiative, while not so impressive in the short term, result in better school achievement in the long term (katz, 2015; levine, 2017; marcon, 2002; schweinhart & weikart, 1993). that is why current headlines such as the new york times’ report supporting flashcards over free play (goldstein, 2017) are so disturbing. such oversimplified reports, that highlight minimal gains in academic performance disproportionately, ignore the decades of research on benefits of play-based learning and contribute to the false dichotomy of play vs. academic (levine, 2017). it is not play versus learning, but play and learning. by setting it up as an either/or, the overlapping influences on learning are not recognized and it creates a motivation to "fix" a broken system. in fact, “binaries are unhelpful because they bind us in a dialectic that provokes resistance and may inhibit change; and also by virtue of our opposition, we may unwittingly reify and confer legitimacy on the status quo we seek to supplant. a third path is needed” (o’loughlin, in bloch, swadener & cannella, 2014, p 65). this third path is the path of untested feasibility – the path that we can travel to navigate the complexities created by germ policies and still foster meaningful and exciting experiences for young children. teachers should strive to maintain fun, play and freedom in our classrooms – and advocate for this necessary foundation. the latter seems of increasing importance; teachers as well as academics in the field of ecec need to see themselves as advocates and act accordingly. global trends in early childhood practice 9 we have the responsibility to ask not only how we can implement such policies most effectively, but we also need to think critically about these practices and what they mean for the children’s lives. while this is hindered in the era of germ, it remains an essential task. teachers still know how children learn best, that they have to be active, that they have to move, use their senses, get their hands on things, interact with other children and teachers, create, wonder, and invent. children learn through playful, hands-on experiences with materials, the natural world, and engaging and caring adults. we have to stand up for such a learning environment; we cannot give this up because some people ask for “rigorous instruction.” in fact, teachers have always addressed much of the content that is now included in many of the new, more rigorous standards worldwide. we just need to clarify how our good teaching is matching up with the standards. there is still a place for “the acquisition of important skills and techniques, for example literacy and mathematics...the issue becomes what that place is, so as to ensure the acquisition of skills and techniques is not at the expense of creating knowledge and living a flourishing life” (moss, 2014, p. 101). we do not have to give up fun, wonder, surprise, and play and replace them with worksheets. we can think of creative ways to infuse the content required in standards into our teaching in a meaningful way. we must find the common ground, the third path, between the standards and play, between standardization and spontaneity. the articles in this issue discuss some possibilities for what a “third path,” or “untested feasibility” can look like. the contributions to this issue are examples of how researchers and practitioners are revealing germ-influenced policies for what they are, controlling, misguided attempts to “improve” ecec, while making a profit on the way. we are honored to open this issue with a statement from denisha jones, a national advisor to defending the early years and assistant professor in the college of arts and sciences at trinity washington university in washington, d.c. she describes the negative impact of germ policies in the united states, as a cautionary tale against the marketization of early childhood services. jones describes the failures of germ policies and calls for the protection of childhood, even as a matter of national security. naomi moland examines how international organizations promote play-based pedagogical approaches in early childhood settings around the world and how local educators respond in sesame street international and the promotion of play-based learning: educators’ discomfort and resistance in nigeria. moland’s case study investigates sesame workshop’s efforts to introduce play-based approaches in nigerian classroom, which presented challenges due to the local and cultural differences. this case study is an excellent example of how western conceptions of child development and education cannot be easily transferred to the global south and that local traditions of learning and teaching cannot be ignored and belittled. maria boeke mongillo’s piece, preparing school leaders for young learners in the us, examines three forces in public education in the united states: the “universal pre-k” movement, the impact of germ policies, and the professional standards for educational leadership, which influence how leaders are prepared, hired, evaluated, and supported in their work. the author describes how these policies compliment and contrast each other, and how germ policies are often opposed to the essence of ecec. this is even more disturbing, as mongillo discussed, because many school leaders lack a background in early childhood education and are not always prepared adequately. she points out that school leaders, if they want to understand and resist the negative impact of germ policies, need to be better 10 global education review 4(3) prepared when it comes to including pre-k within the public school. mongillo’s piece illustrates how complex and sometimes contradictory early childhood policies can be, and how important school leaders are, that are aware of best practices in ecec and advocate for them. elizabeth erwin examines the early childhood practice in australia in making transparent what is most important: how early childhood practices in australia counter mounting pressures faced in the west. even if australia is heavily influenced by germ policies, it has received international acclaim for its highly praised national early childhood framework, as well as the steadfast and visible commitment to education and care for its youngest citizens. erwin describes how some australian early childhood schools have resisted the mounting pressures of germ policies by focusing on the children’s well-being. her article shows how resistance to the dominant discourse can look like, and lead to a practice, that acknowledges and respects the children’s well-being. children’s learning can look differently, and erwin offer ideas how western philosophies, narratives and practices in ecec can be transformed. simone lehrl, katherina kluczniok, yvonne anders, and hans-guenther rossbach represent the context in germany in their study, longer-term effects of a high-quality preschool intervention on children’s mathematical development through age 12 – results from the german model project “kindergarten of the future in bavaria.” their study describes germany’s participation in standardization, accountability, and measurement, which is commonplace in most western countries. the quantitative analysis finds that preschool quality is associated with higher competencies in mathematics at age 12. the inclusion of this article in an issue that looks critically at germ policies and the increasing focus on academic learning in ecec shows the importance of a real and open dialogue. the article shows that play versus learning is indeed a false dichotomy, and that a focus on academics does not necessarily have to lead to inappropriate practice. it also demonstrates the ongoing importance of quantitative research. a real dialogue needs to include all stakeholders in the field who are interested in improving ecec in a meaningful way. in resisting westernization and school reforms: two sides to the struggle to communalize developmentally appropriate initial education in indigenous oaxaca, mexico, lois meyer describes two intense oppositional pressures in mexico. federal school policy has imposed on indigenous teachers and communities western-influenced views of developmentally appropriate early childhood education and care, leaving the indigenous perspective officially marginalized. the author describes the status of communalized ecec programs in oaxaca, given government repressions and teacher resistance to these repressive school reforms, providing a powerful example of the potential for teachers to organize to change the status quo through advocacy and activism. the field of ecec is facing a crossroads. “early childhood policy and services cannot be effective or of high quality as an isolated policy, but are part of a wider social picture” (penn, 2011, 210). the wider social picture is a complexity composed of competing political and economic agendas. although this context is overwhelming, there is hope, “there are always alternatives; that we cannot know what a body can do; that another world is possible; that schools and education can play a part in imagining and prefiguring that world” (moss, 2014, 208). what is needed is a change, but not a change that remains within the same mode of thinking, built upon the germ-based foundation that currently exists. rather, we need global trends in early childhood practice 11 “transformative change” (moss, 2014). a new mode of thinking is needed and stories such as the one in this issue, stories that tell alternative and different realities of ecec as predominant ones, are a start. this issue is meant to call attention to the transformational nature of practice, the everyday work teachers around the world do with young children. perhaps these examples will provide hope, start a dialogue, and test the untested limits of feasibility. “only when we are willing to transform ourselves and our work do we have the possibility of transforming society” (pinar, 1994, cited in cannella 2008). perhaps if we are willing to question, engage in dialogue with all stakeholders, and imagine what is possible, we can not only work within the current limitations, but also find ways to transform them. as practitioners test these areas of “untested feasibility” and engage in dialogue with others, change from the ground up actually has the potential to occur. this is not only of uttermost importance for practitioners, but also for the academia in our field. “we should listen to other disciplines, not only developmental psychology and economics. we need to be “a community of dissensus” (moss, 2014, 189). if we are open to real dialogue, there exists a hope; there is possibility within practice to provide good early childhood within policy constraints. however, there is more to it -if one is willing to go beyond individual practice. teachers may not be able to contest germ policies, neoliberalism and managerialism in an open political context, but there is potential in the “minor politics.” this issue includes examples from teachers who have found ways to operate within the limitations of germ policies and create change, in their practice or through their research. by sharing ideas with other practitioners, what is done in more and more classrooms changes; practice changes. remember, policy and practice are dependent upon one another. “the trick is to move from one to the other seamlessly,” as penn (2011, 65) reminds us. so, what if practice then began to affect policy? after all, practitioners are the experts when it comes to the care of children. as penn (2011) notes, “the care of the very young...may appear at odds with the demands of a competitive economy” (p. 52). so, why don’t we work within the current limit situation, not only to do what is best for the very young, but to change the limitations of our current situation? references alford, b. l., rollins, k. b., padrón, y. n., & waxman, h. c. 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(2011). paradoxes of educational improvement: the finnish experience. scottish educational review 43 (1). 3-23. singer, s. (2017). dear teachers, don’t be good soldiers for the edtech industry. retrieved on september 24, 2017 from: http://badassteachers.blogspot.com/2017/09/dearteachers-dont-be-good-soldiers-for.html snow, k. (2011). debunking the play vs. learning dichotomy. retrieved from: https://www.naeyc.org/content/research-news-youcan-use-play-vs-learning) tanis, b. (2017). you can’t make a silk purse out of a sow’s ear. retrieved on september 25, 2017 from: https://biancatanis.wordpress.com/2017/09/13/you -cant-make-a-silk-purse-out-of-a-sows-ear/ the global initiative for economics, social and cultural rights (2017). kenyan court upholds the closure of bridge international academies over failure to respect standards. retrieved on june 19, 2017, from: http://globalinitiative-escr.org/kenyan-courtupholds-the-closure-of-bridge-internationalacademies-over-failure-to-respect-standards/ urban, m. (2017). we need meaningful, systemic evaluation, not a preschool pisa. global education review, 4(2), 18-24. urban, m., & swadener, b.b. on behalf of reconceptualising early childhood education (2016). democratic accountability and contextualised systemic evaluation. a comment on the oecd initiative to launch an international early learning study (iels). retrieved on may 20, 2017 from: http://receinternational.org/rece-comment-onoecd-iccps.html#sthash.hu4zxt27.dpbs whitebread, d., basilio, m., kuvalja, m., & verma, m. (2012). the importance of play: a report on the value of children’s play with a series of policy recommendations. brussels, belgium: toys industries for europe. about the authors elena nitecki, phd, is an associate professor in the department of early childhood and childhood education at mercy college. she has higher education teaching experience in the fields of early childhood education and social work. prior to teaching college, elena held positions as a pre-school teacher and a social worker in medical and early intervention settings. elena earned her doctoral degree in urban education from temple university and holds master’s degrees in both education and social work. her research focuses on various topics related in early childhood education and teacher education. helge wasmuth, phd, is an associate professor in the department of early childhood and childhood education at mercy college. prior to his position at mercy college, he worked in various position in higher education in germany and switzerland. dr. wasmuth received his phd in educational science from the university of tübingen, germany. his scholarly research interests include the history and philosophy of early childhood education, current issues in early childhood education, and innovative teaching methods in online learning. he has been interviewed by unesco’s international institute for educational planning as an advocate for age-appropriate early childhood education and play as a means of learning. he will be featured in a documentary on the history of kindergarten and friedrich froebel. global education review (4)4 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: elliot, dawn r. (2017). bye-bye teacher-scholar, hello teacher-scholar? possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization. global education review, 4 (4), 70-85. 70 bye-bye teacher-scholar, hello teacher-scholar? possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization dawn richards elliott texas christian university abstract this article develops the claim that the teacher-scholar model (ts), which is used by institutions of higher learning (ihl) to evaluate faculty worktime, is ill-suited for the strategy of comprehensive internationalization (ci). ci aims to enhance global learning by offering academic and non-academic opportunities for greater student engagement with international people and organizations. because of lower transactions and other costs related to non-research academic collaborations with international organizations and people, they have the potential to expose large numbers of undergraduate students to global learning opportunities. nevertheless, because the ts model frequently prioritizes research, this type of collaboration is likely to be discouraged. the basis of research prioritization is the contested association of scholarship with better teaching, and more recently evidence-based practice. this article considers some of the consequences of this prioritization for aspirational learning models such as ci. it proposes an update to the ts model given the conclusion that even in cases where global learning is enhanced, and collaborators’ goals are realized, the ts model is likely to undervalue faculty work, which threatens to undermine the academic component of ci. the proposed update, the teacher scholarpractitioner model, (tsp) is consistent with evidence of complex knowledge flows between practice, scholarship, and teaching. this evidence confirms that like research, practice activities can lead to original knowledge and can inform scholarship and teaching. innovative adaptations to the ts model are explored as guides for advocates of ci. keywords teacher-scholar model, comprehensive internationalization, globalization, global learning, international research collaborations, higher education introduction according to professor david l. di maria, 75% of states in the usa either have, or are pursuing resolutions to internationalize education, (2015). these are in response to globalization; the increased mobility, and interconnectivity of people, goods, and resources. internationalizing education, it is hoped, will prepare students to work and live in this more integrated world. institutions of higher learning (ihl), the focus of this article, have taken up the mantra with the ______________________________________ corresponding author: dawn richards elliott, texas christian university, scharbauer hall 4110, tcu box 297200, fort worth tx 7619 email: d.elliott@tcu.edu mailto:d.elliott@tcu.edu possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 71 strategy of comprehensive internationalization (ci). ci is “a commitment, confirmed through action, to infuse international and comparative perspectives throughout the teaching, research, and service missions of higher education,” (hudzick & mccarthy, 2012, p.2). this article does not explore the appropriateness of the ci response to globalization. instead, it explains why the ci strategy is undermined by the popular ts model. the ts model is a merit system which is used to evaluate faculty work along three dimensions; teaching, research, and service. it is widely recognized that in the ts model research and teaching are weighted more heavily than service, and research is often more heavily weighted than teaching. in recent years, ihl’s have turned to international researchcollaborations. the hope is that these will identify social policies for global development that are scientifically credible. the underlying assumption that research and publications are a causal source of knowledge poses several challenges for new priorities such as ci. compared to non-research collaborations, international research collaborations are longterm in focus, expensive, and subject to powerful regulations. they serve few students directly, mostly those in graduate programs at top-tier research institutions. by implication, international research collaborations are less friendly to scaling global learning across ihl’s. non-research international collaborations while simpler to pursue, and potentially more inclusive are demanding of faculty time. worktime that does not lead to research products and the potential for prestige are less valuable. the undervaluation of faculty worktime can undermine the goals of ci, as it can for other socially-aspirational models of teaching such as service learning, and research such as community based research which can be methodologically distinct. this article which proposes a solution, includes a case study involving: undergraduate students enrolled in an economics class on economic development theories, and another on economic development polices; a haitian nonprofit organization; and thirty ultra-poor persons with disabilities. the next section explores why, even in cases where stakeholder outcomes are achieved, the ts model threatens the ci vision. it makes the case for an update to the ts model, and using the case study illustrates how the proposed tsp (teacher scholar-practitioner) model can be more inclusive in the valuation of faculty worktime. the illustration demonstrates how the tsp model can also protect traditional ideals of scholarship from the marginalization some fear will accompany the more popular, boyerinspired perspectives on scholarship. conclusions include recognition of challenges and suggested changes. comprehensive internationalization meets global learning: a case study ci strives to enhance global learning by helping students acquire the “knowledge, skills, and attitudes...to understand world cultures and events, analyze global systems, appreciate cultural differences,” and “apply this knowledge and appreciation to their lives as citizens and workers,” (hudzik & mccarthy, 2012; aac&u, 2007; hadis, 2005; engberg, 2013). global learning priorities and activities are nothing new for ihl. on-campus curricular and co-curricular activities, the recruiting of foreign students and employees, study abroad, and international service-learning projects all predate the ci strategy. in global health, global learning is hard to avoid; and in social science specializations such as economics, it is becoming harder to avoid global learning as focus and methodologies evolve, (cook, 2010). nevertheless, advocates for ci emphasize the limits of costly programs such as study abroad, and the ad hoc, perhaps untested, efforts by faculty which are also difficult to account for. these efforts, the argument goes, are insufficient for assuring global learning. this is perceived as a problem for students graduating from ihl given recent waves of globalization. the global education review (4)4 72 globalization-induced urgency for ci co-exists with the resurgence of calls for ihl’s to make substantive contributions to society; enhance social justice and support community development through collaborative efforts that promotes citizenship, and reduce inequality, (altbach, 2008; harkavy, 2006; hooper, 2016). from 2013 through 2016 i was part of a team in pursuit of global learning at texas christian university (tcu). this five-year “$2.8million plan was designed to bring the world to tcu and transform learning at tcu by infusing international perspectives throughout the institution,” (kucko, 2005). the plan was linked to quality enhancement accreditation goals (qep). it anticipated student learning through four pathways: ethical interconnected impact, informed and leading edge inquiry, interculturally competent impact, and global community engagement, (qep, 2012; pp. 7). five new qep programs were added to the university’s long-standing study abroad program; global innovator, virtual voyage, visiting scholar, local/global leaders, and global academy. four learning outcomes for program level assessments were prioritized: lo1, students will identify global issues from perspectives of multiple disciplines and cultures lo2, students will discuss critical questions about the impact of global issues on domestic and global communities lo3, students will develop cultural empathy and intercultural competence lo4, students will make responsible decisions about global issues, (qep, 2013). these learning outcomes were expected to satisfy the university mission to educate individuals to think and act as ethical leaders and responsible citizens to the global community. program administrators selected the caribbean for the launch of the qep program and awarded the first global innovator (gi) title to the secretary of state for the integration of persons with disability from haiti. i accepted the accompanying $25,000 gi grant and the associated charge to work to advance the gi’s mission in ways that could achieve one or more of the four learning outcomes for student’s in a development theory and a development policy class i routinely teach. the grant was used to develop a non-research collaboration with fonkoze, a haitian microfinance and development non-government organization (ngo). fonkoze agreed to collaborate on a small pilot involving thirty persons with disabilities using a modified version of their adoption of the graduation program. the modification involved a blending of core features of the graduation program with those of more than budgets (mtb). four core features of the graduation program were used: (1) training in two participant selected income-generating activities; (2) transfer of the assets needed to start the two informal income-generating activities; ( 3) weekly case management; and (4) temporary consumption stipend, (abed, 2015). typically, the graduation program was restricted to able-bodied women who meet the criteria of being ultra-poor and who have dependent children. the untested assumption that disabled persons cannot be successful in the graduation program was a primary focus of the pilot which also included men. the selection criteria included the community-based income selection process of the graduation program and insights from the gi and the disability persons organizations (dpos) in the central plateau of haiti. the pilot also used core features of mtb1, a financial training program created to help homeless and other low-income persons in the dallas-fort worth community save, (elliott, 2009). for the pilot, financial lessons were taught by the paid, mtb-trained case manager. core features of mtb used in the pilot include; (1) saving goals; (2) modest financial awards for saving; and (3) the mtb curricula which was adjusted for context and illiteracy. each participant received a lockbox in which to save. possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 73 savers kept the lock-box and were responsible for its safety, and the case manager held the keys to dissuade impulsive uses of accumulated savings. additional funding was secured from a digicel foundation haiti community grant. the, modest, exploratory, pilot was launched in the spring 2015 for twelve months, six months fewer than the graduation program. the asset training for persons with disabilities also extended to the classroom. involved stakeholders were excited about, and committed to helping students learn about haiti, their organizations, and their approaches to helping vulnerable groups through efforts such as the pilot. the teaching component of the pilot used two additional qep programs (in addition to the gi); virtual voyage, and visiting scholars. through virtual voyage students engaged with the gi and fonkoze staff via virtual classes, and in most cases, they participated in a class screening and discussion of michele mitchell’s documentary, “haiti: where did the money go,” (2012). through visiting scholars, students engaged with international collaborators and university faculty and staff via in-person classroom and public lectures. in addition to the three qep programs, students were required to read a book that exposes them to the reality of living in a developing countries’ through the stories of various true-life characters. this nonqep strategy attempted to humanize many of the development issues discussed in class lectures and it coincided with the ideals of the qep. to account for global learning i created and used a survey instrument to gauge student perceptions. two-hundred undergraduate students from spring 2014 through spring 2016 participated in one or more of these three programs, and fifty-seven participated in all three. the perceptions of these fifty-seven students, seventeen from the development theory and twenty-eight from the targeted development policy class are discussed. although the theory class is less of a match for this type project, because development theory can and sometimes do inform policy i took advantage of its early scheduling to explore the merits of using the project and the book assignment for global learning. anonymously, and with no incentives for participation, twelve of seventeen (71%) theory students voluntarily completed the survey during the last two weeks of the semester at the same time they also completed the standard teaching evaluations. voluntarily, they responded to several statements using a likert inspired scale which was supplemented by visual cues for clarity. the mid-point in this case study, 3, indicated acceptance of the statement. higher numbers signaled increased certainty about the statement while lower numbers signaled rejection, and strong rejection. on the survey the term qep was used to describe the activities in class which were supported by virtual voyage (virtual classes and virtual office hours) and visiting scholars, and the book refers to behind the beautiful forevers; life, death, and hope in a mumbai undercity, (boo, 2014). regarding global development issues (gdi) discussed in class (social exclusion, food insecurity, disabilities, and the roles and limits of ngos in development), on average, theory students believed that the project exposed them to its human dimensions from multiple perspectives, and that this type of collaboration should continue. the average student was certain that their virtual voyage through virtual classes and office hours enhanced their understanding of gdi although less certain responses were more frequent. students and stakeholders’ feedback on the project suggested that virtual office hours were mostly ineffective as conducted, and that three virtual classes might have been too many. student responses to the non-fiction book were favorable with respect to improving their understanding of the human dimensions of gdi, and this time stronger acceptances occurred with greater frequency. the book was also perceived favorably for helping to expose the average student to differences in cultural global education review (4)4 74 perceptions of gdi. most students rejected the claim that the book helped to expose them to the limits of using development models to identify solutions to gdi, and to reduce the abstraction of models. these responses are not difficult to imagine. fiction is associated with greater empathy, (pinker, 2016). the assigned book, though a non-fiction told personal stories of people in ways that like fiction can elicit empathy. outside of the classroom space, students had the opportunity to experience the lives of different characters, navigating their way through many of the barriers to development discussed in class. this probably explains why student responses to using the book to enhance understanding was more symmetrical than responses to the qep activities. there are many challenges with translating empathy into understanding by reducing the abstraction in models which are often divorced from “real world” experiences. in this case the learning link is indirect and uncertain. in addition, using realworld experiences to explain abstract concepts is not widely used in development theory. nevertheless it is not unheard of. one example, and the one that inspired my use of this strategy, comes from w. arthur lewis’ famous article on growth with unlimited supplies of labor. lewis’ 1954 growth model argues that in surplus-labor nations, those where the marginal productivity of labor is low, maybe even zero or negative, investments in the modern or industrialized sector promises a path forward for reducing time spent in low-valued employment and enhancing growth. before presenting the model, readers learn about life in the surplus-labor nation, a strategy i believe helps to make the case for the contentious idea that would later follow. for the remainder of the pilot, global learning outcomes were sought for students enrolled in the development policy class. based on insights from stakeholders from the theory class, the number of virtual classes was reduced to two, virtual office hours which were intended help support learning outcome four (lo4) where students might contribute to the process of problem solving were discontinued, and (lo4) was deemphasized. as in the theory class, student responses were favorable. the average student in a class of twenty-eight with participation rate of seventy-percent felt certain that the qep humanized the gdi discourse; encouraged consideration of gdi from multiple perspectives; and improved awareness of differences in cultural perceptions about problems related to gdi and solutions to these. students could choose to read one of two books: ian smillie’s 2009 freedom from want: the remarkable success story of brac, the global grassroots organization that's winning the fight against poverty or nina munk’s 2013 the idealist: jeffrey sachs and the quest to end poverty. their responses, like those of students in the theory class, suggested that book readings were warranted and their uses should continue. in the case of in-person classroom visitors, students’ response to international guests were stronger than to domestic guests working on similar development issues in terms of their visits enhancing understanding of global development issues. at a program level, the qep envision a developmental approach for students from the point they enter the university, most as a fresh person, to the point they graduate, and it aspires to an 80:50:30:20 learning outcome (qep, 2013). based on its developmental model, the hope is that 80% of student’s will, by the time they have completed their studies, be able to identify global issues from perspectives of multiple disciplines and cultures (lo1). in terms of learning outcome 2, it is hoped that 50% of students would have engaged in activities that discuss critical questions about the impact of global issues on domestic and global communities. learning outcome 3, developing cultural empathy and intercultural competence, is, it is hoped, to be achieved by 30% of students’, and the highest learning bar that aims to help students participate in making responsible decisions about global issues is a dream for 20% of student’s. faculty recipients possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 75 of a qep grant are obliged, as a part of the application process to specify the targeted learning outcomes they anticipate for students at the class level, and to identify the process for achieving these. not unlike the case of the united nations millennium development goals (mdgs) if the aspirations are global (in this case the university) it is not unreasonable to expect that for some countries’ (classes in this case) achievements will be lower than the targeted levels (kenny & sumner, 2012). when, as in the case of the mdgs, aspirations are used as a benchmark of progress, concerns of fairness might be important to consider (easterly, 2009). to gain some insights on what might be reasonable to expect at class level from these type of learning activities, student input was sought on the survey. they were asked to map the learning activities of the class to the three targeted learning outcomes (using qep language), and the mission statement of the university. this mapping can also be interpreted as a crude check on earlier responses which mostly affirmed the learning activities related to the global learning imitative. student responses to this mapping exercise seem to validate the aspirations of the qep. for example, in development studies 75% of students’ report that virtual classes helped them identify global issues from multiple perspectives (l01). perhaps the most important response relates to the assigned book which in helping students discuss the impact of global issues on communities (lo2) and develop cultural empathy (lo3) fared comparatively well. this is important because of the lower costs faculty are likely to experience by assigning books to help achieve global learning outcomes. the majority of students’, 67, 83, and 88% respectively, report that virtual classes and visiting scholars (domestic and international) help to meet the mission of the institution compared to 67% and 52% in the case of the assigned book and documentary. qualitative responses are affirming, (appendix a). bye, bye teacher-scholar, hello teacher-scholar? internationalization is growing on college campuses but for 92% of ihl, international faculty work remains non-tenurable and nonpromotional, (cige, 2012). it is likely true that faculties, long before the ci movement, have sought global learning outcomes for students’ using ad-hoc means. the difficulties, perhaps impossibilities, of trying to account for student global learning in the absence of an organized strategy beyond study-abroad, coupled with the opportunities and threatsperceived and real from economic and other forms of globalization encouraged the shift toward the ci. investments in the ci strategy likely explain observations of growing internationalization. ci advocates seem surprised that faculty work on ci projects are not meritorious. this surprise, which is unfortunate, suggests that they miss the contradictions between the ci strategy and the teacher-scholar model (ts model). the ts model is used on university campuses to evaluate faculty work, and make decisions about tenure and promotion. faculty work is often described by three areas; teaching, research, and service to the university and one’s profession. the contradictions between ci investments and the ts model can help to explain why at most institutions international faculty work is stubbornly unmeritorious. it can also explain the lure of “international research collaborations” and its use by ci advocates as exemplar, tenurable and promotional ci work, (cige, 2012; 15). the surprise and its consequences suggest that advocates, knowingly or otherwise, accept the incentive structure of the ts model and its narrow, contested ideals about the roles of ihl. those who openly support the ts model claim that scholarly work, which is the basis of research, causes better teaching. this underscores the vision of ihl as centers of knowledge creation and sharing, and as a result scholarship, from which knowledge emanates, is a priority for all ihl: not only research-intensive global education review (4)4 76 institutions, but also those that prioritize teaching (ruscio, 2013). under the popular ts model, even institutions that prioritize vocational learning expect successful faculty to engage in traditional research for peer-reviewed publications in field journals, (henderson, 2007). prestige, which matters for a variety of reasons not explored here, is bestowed on those institutions and its researchers that create greater knowledge which presumably advantages them, in sharing with students. despite the popularity of this claim, literature reviews exploring the empirical evidence regarding this causal claim from scholarship to better teaching reveals that it is contested, (prince, felder, & brent, 2007). perhaps worse, the claim is not easily tested and believers are obliged to accept it as an existential truth. because the claim is codified in university policy through the ts model, international research collaborations are an easy but misguided exemplar for ci advocates. the contested claim that research makes faculty more effective teachers, does not extend to practice; the disciplined, exploratory use of existing, and or prospective knowledge in pursuit of solutions to social problems. research, the logic goes, produces evidence-based knowledge which leads to evidence-based practice and more effective practitioners. this propensity for yielding better practice is expected to close stubborn scholarpractitioner gaps which, it is argued, are the fault of practitioners’ who distrust science and scientists and are guilty of engaging in practice with no scientific credibility, (cige, 2012; aniekwe et al., 2012; bertucci, borges-herrero, and fuentes-julio, 2014; giluk and rynes, 2012). this logic necessarily prioritizes international research collaborations and discourages consideration of the limits to achieving ci. indubitably, this self-serving argument marginalizes faculty who specialize in practice, community-based research, or even commercial innovations, (henderson, 2007; viswanathan et al., 2004; nonpf, 2000; nonpf, 2015; pohl et al., 2012; sanberg et al., 2014). beyond the questionable logic that prioritizes research and international research collaborations as the only source of new and sharable knowledge, the exclusivity of the latter is cause for concern. these collaborations are uniquely exclusive because of cost, time, and their concentration at wealthy researchintensive institutions. they offer few opportunities for undergraduate student involvement and as a result global learning for most students at ihl. by contrast are nonresearch collaborations. because they are often small-scale, non-research collaborations are more likely to be flexible and easily used at a wide variety of ihl while also serving the needs of multiple stakeholders. these attributes make them more accessible to undergraduate students and increases the likelihood of realizing the ci vision. nevertheless, despite this possibility and the expressed commitments to and investments in ci, non-research collaborations are undervalued at ihl because of the underlying incentive structure of the ts model which rewards research work and penalizes practice work. these practice-intensive collaborations use methods that do not meet the standards of scientific research, and do not permit generalizations about causal relationships that research work strives to achieve. and yet, as will be discussed more carefully, practice work can yield new, even original knowledge, and its insights can influence the work activities of scholars and community organizations. this makes it increasingly difficult to uphold the myth of the omniscient scholar from whom knowledge flows originate. this is true in business specialties, (mcnatt, glassmann, & glasmann, 2010; schulz & nicolai, 2015). it is also true in poverty-related specialties such as those related to human and country development programs and policies. the possibility that practitioners who are often engaged in aspirations that have important social implications can shape original knowledge possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 77 and direct scholars, also challenge narrow perspectives of the roles of ihl one example is the graduation program whose origin dates to bangladesh in 2002. the successfully scaled program began with one man and a vision and used decades of exploratory, problem-solving practice work outside the walls of research and ihl, (abed, 2015; smillie, 2009). the results and impact on people’s lives were too good to ignore, and within a few years the insights from practitioners caught the attention of scholars from elite research ihl and wealthy donors. several costly research collaborations followed. these sought to explore the merits of this fieldlevel source of new knowledge mostly using randomized or quasi-randomized experiments. these credibility-seeking experiments also suffer from generalizability and they share with practice work important limits regarding practical uses, (deaton, 2010). in an era that has fallen in-love with the idea of knowing what works before investing time and resources, the unequivocal support of the graduation program by esteemed scholars must be comforting for practitioners especially given implications for program funding in recent times, (hashemi & de montesquiou, 2011; banerjee et al., 2015; smillie, 2009; banerjee, karlan, & zimmerman, 2015). and yet, like practitioners because scholars cannot explain why the program works, knowledge gaps have not been filled: is it, as many practitioners believe, the support from case management, or is it the access to resources as economic theory suggest? perhaps training? the real issue isn’t whether practitioners can benefit from scientific knowledge. they can, and not only for validating innovative and novel practice work. it is perhaps not a coincidence that the popular microcredit program of the 1990s originated with an academic economist, and more recently scholars have tamed overzealous claims of microcredit’s ability to reduce poverty and shifting global poverty focus to microfinance and more holistic practice, (banerjee, duflo, glennerster, & kinnan, 2015; banerjee, a., karlan, d., & zinman, j. 2015). research work is and will always be critical, and essential for interrogating the fallacies scholars, practitioners, and others are guilty of starting and or perpetuating. for example, it was contemporary tales of cruel, high-cost moneylenders as the only source of informal microfinancing that helped fuel the race to formalize no-collateral small-valued financial access. these tales are challenged by decades old anthropological research describing 19th century innovations in developing countries which are culturally-embedded, efficient sources of financing, (ardener, 1964). contemporary research and empirical assessments affirm these insights that informal financing is not only varied, and contextual, but also robust, and widely used: by the poor who do not own financial accounts at regulated institutions, the less poor who do, and even immigrants to new, far-away new lands, (ardener, 1964; ardener, 2010; basu, 2011). ultimately, the problem for faculty who choose to engage in practice work is not research, or the lack of it. the problem is the incentive structure of the ts model that suggests, wrongly, that research is the only credible means of knowing. the message from this article is simple and twofold; (1) practice can yield original knowledge and direct research, and (2) practice, like research can be meritorious and promotional because of (1). like engineers, practitioners who can and do benefit from science “needn't wait for scientists to give them the go-ahead” to invest in the process of identifying solutions to pressing social problems, (petroski, 2010). this investment is a valuable component of knowledge creating and sharing, even in cases that do not yield measurable transformational outcomes and impact. in cases of the academic-turned-practitioner that innovated a successful program such as the conditional cash transfer program that originated in mexico, it might be tempting to conclude that scientists make the best practitioners and faculty-led internationalresearch collaborations are the holy grail. this global education review (4)4 78 should be avoided given the large numbers scholars who’ve led practitioners astray, (lustig, 2011). and when they do, with impunity the ts model protects faculty by rewarding counts of research publication with no consideration for their social costs or uses outside of the narrow halls of ihl. because there is no scientific reason to believe that scholarship has a monopoly on knowledge creation and teaching, this article contends that it is time to either say bye-bye to the ts model and the roles of ihl it suggests, or update it. this article calls for updating the ts model. it proposes to leave research and scholarship as they have long been perceived and widely understood at ihl; faculty work time that leads to publishable, peer-reviewed, products using discipline-specific, albeit everevolving, norms of scientific inquiry. this update calls for the addition of practitioner work and work products to join scholarship as a means of creating sharable and reproducible knowledge. the teacher scholar-practitioner model (tsp) aligns with more narrow calls from business faculty for “pracademician” job-types, (mcnatt, glassmann, & glasmann, 2010; pp. 15). although it also overlaps with the broader focus of boyer-inspired efforts, the tsp is an alternative to the vision of a more inclusive view of scholarship, (boyer, 1990). boyer expressed concern, among other things, about the marginalization of faculty who no longer specialize in research over the course of their employment. to capture the value of diverse faculty worktime, he suggested a rebranding of scholarship to include time spent on traditional research, integrating and interpreting knowledge across disciplines, applying and teaching knowledge, as well as the work products from each of these scholarship activities. there is much written about these ideas, too much to be summarized here other than to note the voluminous and mostly positive responses. though few, there are dissenters. perhaps one of the most impassioned warns of a day when boyer’s vision transforms all faculties into scholars. in this new academic world order, scholardom, being a faculty inevitably makes one a scholar. this results in mass marginalization of scholarship, scholarlytalented faculty, and students, (ziolowski, 1996). the only winners in scholardom are faculty who no longer or never did publish original and traditional research products. a second source of concern relates to operationalizing the boyer vision. glassick, huber, & maeroff propose using six common attributes of scholarship to delineate scholarship from non-scholarship, (1997). scholarship is no longer a catch-all for faculty work as concerns about scholardom suggest, but those works which can be identified by: (1) clarity of goals; (2) preparation consistent with meeting goals; (3) best use of appropriate methodology; (4) activities that generate significant, or important results; (5) the means for effective sharing; and (6) opportunities for reflection, and evaluation (pp. 25). relatedly, but more narrowly focused on helping community based scholars meet meritorious standards of original scholarship, scholarship can include worktime devoted to building processes involving “co-learning and reciprocal transfer of expertise by all research partners” using models of “shared decision-making and mutual ownership of the processes and products of the research enterprise, (viswanathan et al., 2004, pg 3). these efforts to account for the diversity of faculty work are producing change that might benefit those seeking innovative learning models that change faculty worktime in ways that cannot be accounted for under the ts model. this is especially true among community and public health professionals. some are innovating models rooted in boyer’s ideas and others unique alternatives, (jordan, 2006). jordan describes the university of colorado health science center’s use of boyer’s vision to include traditional work products from peer-reviewed publications as well as patents, presentations, and external funding in written, video, or computer formats, (jordan, 2006; pp. 6). this possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 79 contrasts with the university of arkansas medical school college of public health. at this ihl worktime related to scholarship is distinguished from practice. in this example of a tsp model, there are different meritorious and promotional specialization tracks: faculty who specialize in scholarship, those who specialize in practice, and those who strive for a scholarshippractice balance, (jordan, 2006; pp.4). nine different criteria determines the products from practice work including publication, and evidence that practice work “has resulted in contributions in policy or program design, lead to new developments in the field or been incorporated to address a problem and will influence (solutions) in the community, has stimulated the work of other researchers or practitioners, has influenced teaching activities, has influenced activities in the community, in other communities or with other agencies or organizations or has resulted in the creation of a new, ongoing partnership to address public health issues in a community (local, state or national),” (jordan, 2006, pp4). progress toward tenure and or promotion can also be documented by reports, presentations, training or seminars, and the multimedia sharing of information from practice work. these examples demonstrate the different pathways to crafting alternatives to the ts model which can evaluate diverse, faculty work that contributes to knowledge growth without undermining the traditional norms of scholarship. they are examples of how to protect the traditional roles of ihls while retaining the ability to consider and adjust to shifting priorities and investments in these. they are reminder that merit models that are rigid and insensitive to shifting priorities can marginalize faculty and programs that are expressed institutional priority. in the rest of this section, the haiti pilot is used in a simple illustration (table 1.) the illustration strives to demonstrate how merit models can undervalue faculty worktime by discounting non-research work products and compromise investments universities make in new priorities such as ci. this illustration adapts nibert, m. (nd) and petersssen & stevens (2013) achievement wok products from faculty worktime which are based on boyer’s four domains of scholarship. in this illustration, only those products that are relevant for the pilot are included. to delineate these work products into faculty work activities, teaching, and scholarship or practice, glassick, huber, & maeroff’s six attributes of scholarship are considered along with traditional boundaries of scholarship and the guidelines from the university of arkansas medical school. in this delineation faculty worktime related to initiating, developing, monitoring, and evaluating the non-research project that displays the six attributes of scholarship, but will not yield peer-reviewed publications can be considered as scholarshipequivalent work, or practice. in contrast to both the ts and tsp models, when using the boyerinspired model work products from the pilot are valued as scholarship under three of the four domains if a peer-reviewed publication never occurs. unlike the ts model, under the tsp model work products that fall outside of teaching activities and traditional or original scholarship, are neither ignored nor undervalued by their inclusion in the low-valued service category. this is because while the tsp model protects traditional ideals of scholarship and teaching, it does so without marginalizing knowledge-creating practice work which in some cases is also life transforming work oftentimes for a few, and sometimes for many. global education review (4)4 80 table 1 valuing faculty work time: an illustration from the haiti case study work time achievement boyer model tsp model ts model 1. peer-review publication 1 scholarship 1 scholarship 1 scholarship 1. intra-academy course report and or presentation 1 scholarship of integration 1 teaching/practice 1 teaching 1. community project 2. project grant 3. ongoing collaboration community organizations 4. mentor students 5. project report/ presentation 1-6 scholarship of application 1, 2, 3,5 practice 4 service 1-4 service 5 service/ignored 1. insights on learning 2. assess teaching/ materials 3. peer assessment teaching 4. presentations/report 1-5 scholarship of teaching 1-3 teaching 4 practice/teaching 1-3 teaching 4 service/teaching/ignored conclusion aspirational teaching models that strive to enhance student learning while doing good for others increase faculty worktime. the ts model makes it difficult to value some aspects of this worktime and this can lead to the marginalization and or outsourcing of aspirational learning strategies from academic units. one example is service learning (sl). today, most sl programs are non-academic and the few academic sl programs that exist are associated with a check-list type approach. this approach encourages shallow learning – learning which fails to interrogate the assumption that sl necessarily promotes both learning and the social good (butin, 2010). in the 1990s when sl was popular, the burdens it imposes on faculty was widely recognized and different solutions were proposed to offset these. these solutions emphasize reducing individual faculty cost but ignored or side-stepped big concerns related to the incentive structure of the ts model. for example, some called for “disciplining” sl, making it subject to the traditions of an academic unit, while others by exploring the advantages of sl, cautioned young faculty and or those who teach classes that are not overtly applied to stay away, (butin 2006; elliott, 2009). the more challenging alternative, to revisit the incentivize structure of ihl, is important if aspirational teaching models continue to be a priority for student learning. incentive structures reveal underlying belief systems. in the case of the ts model, this belief relates to the narrow perspective of ihl as knowledge creators through research, and sharers of knowledge through teaching and presentations of original research works. by contrast, a community-based perspective on the roles of ihl envision organizations that serve local, national, and global communities through teaching and research. this so-called progressive view of ihl is reminiscent of 19th century america when institutions were expected to prioritize nation-building in work activities, (leeds, 1999; boyer, 1990). a return to this view is perhaps essential for designing merit models such as the tsp model. possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 81 and yet, it is not a simple task to change perspectives and a result such change will not come easily or quickly. like most if not all things, the community or nation-needs perspective of ihl is fraught with challenges such as tradeoffs related to specifying and prioritizing needs, (leeds, 1999). the tsp model provides a practical place to start. it can serve as a guide for institutions that believe that its contributions to society are important. examples from community health schools are instructive and the old adage useful to remember: it’s not possible to have one’s cake and eat it. if ihl’s hope to help students learn through engagement with local and international communities while involving faculty, the practice-work that is important for engaging large numbers of students must offer a pathway for faculty success. this pathway will only occur if ihl’s say bye-bye to the ts model and begin the process of updating it based on their evolving roles and responsibilities. author note 1. the title of this article is adapted from dani rodrik’s (2006) goodbye washington consensus, hello washington confusion? a review of the world bank’s economic growth in the 1990s learning from a decade of reform. 2. the non-research collaboration with fonkoze which constituted the case study described in this article was funded from a global innovator grant awarded by texas christian university and a development grant from digicel foundation haiti. notes 1. mtb collaborates with private ngos and public agencies to offer six-week seminars on financial topics that are amenable to behavior changes. classes are taught by trained mtb volunteers who also work within the financial services community and or who have been trained as financial educators. mtb has been the beneficiary of community development grants awarded by comerica bank and wells fargo bank. references aac&u (2007). college learning for the new global century: a report from the national leadership council for liberal education and america’s promise. washington, dc: association of american colleges and universities.retrieved from https://www.aacu.org/sites/default/files/files/leap /globalcentury_final.pdf. abed, s. 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(1996). slouching toward scholardom: the endangered american college. college english 58, 5, 585. about the author dawn richards elliott, phd, is associate professor in the department of economics at texas christian university. her current research interests include development economics, in particular, issues related to the role of the non-profit sector in development and issues related to caribbean development. global education review (4)4 84 appendix a: qualitative perceptions of students the qep was good and the pilot was very interesting. it was good to be involved in something that i could relate what was going on in the classroom. my only thing would be if the pilot was, or could have been further along so that we could really see the progress. i’m not sure calling boo’s book fun is accurate, but i found working with (international ngo partner), hearing speakers, etc. very interesting because it put a face to the importance or relevance to the theories in class. the qep is helpful cause it engages, boo’s book is an awesome read and offers intellectual reflection on global issues, and the speakers/videos help to change up the class pace a bit. i believe both the qep and boo’s book are great tools to understand global issues and why human development is so important. qep was good. enjoyed learning about (international ngo partner) and haiti. really enjoyed hearing ___(qep staff) the qep made me better informed by learning of development. however skype outside of class was not too useful. movie eye opening virtual classes and visiting scholars are really helpful. they enhance our understanding of global issues class gives students a general understanding of how economic development works. more importantly, i now pay more attention to these countries exposure to conditions and economic challenges that other students around the country might not hear about i really learned a lot this semester and thoroughly enjoyed the material really enjoyed virtual sessions and when people visited. i thought it enhance the class. i also think the papers do a good job of keeping you involved in class and broadening horizons on the subjects i think this method of learning is a great idea in the fact that the interactive components of the class help bring light to many questions i had about some of the proposed theories and methods of development that could have otherwise been confusing. the reading and writing assignments ae a great way to make students really make up their own opinions after researching the topics. virtual classes and collaboration makes me want to get involved books give us deeper understanding. movies are the only ones i could see getting rid of. speakers offer outside perspectives, different from professors need to figure out ways students could directly get involved. some of the development stuff is extremely interesting, and a way for students to get directly involved or some other development programs in order to get some experience. i want to help...but how?? qep enhances course content. books, visiting scholars movies all informative. virtual classes good qep meets tcu mission and enhances course content. it provides a different perspective. the books, i learned a lot . movies, a fun learning experience, visiting scholars, enhanced learning qep enhances course content and was fun. books help meet tcu mission, movie screening meets mission, enhance course content, and was fun same for cs enjoyed how you forced us to think critically and to understand the different components possibilities and perils of comprehensive internationalization 85 i thoroughly enjoyed the virtual sessions and movies. visiting scholars were also engaging. the book, i simply did not devote sufficient time in order to really benefit from it. this is one of, if not, my favorite class i have taken at tcu the movie screenings and virtual classes really helped open my yes to the issues with ngos and other cultural development issues/progress. i don’t like the book assignment. the virtual classes and visitors and movies are educational and entertaining the book and movies were very helpful. helped me learn many different perspectives and gained sympathy for how others live. really enjoyed having the speaker on haiti who visit class at the beginning of the year 166 global education review 3 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: afolayan, gbenga emmanuel (2016). the impact of parents and schools. [review of the book “social class and educational inequality” by iram siraj and aziza mayo]. global education review, 3 (1). 166 book review the impact of parents and schools “social class and educational inequality” by iram siraj and aziza mayo by gbenga emmanuel afolayan social class and educational inequality offers another perspective on the complex nature of social disadvantage and the interplay between risk and protective factors in homes and schools with an analysis of the impact of parents and schools—using longitudinal data sets from fifty child and family case studies (cfcs) conducted with 13-16 year olds. the general question the authors pose is, “when and why do some at-risk children succeed against the odds while others make little progress or fall further behind?” (p.8). although the general question this book addresses cannot be explicitly answered due to the contextual realities of each country, the richness and complex relationships that shape the educational and developmental outcomes of resilient and vulnerable children, as exemplified in the book, entail that: a) social class and educational inequality are jointly dynamic; b) parents and schools play pivotal roles in the learning trajectories of their children; and c) external factors such as community, extra-curricular activities, pursuit of hobbies/interests, among others, shape children’s educational experiences. the first chapter establishes the background/context for the study, which includes the working definitions of key concepts (like resilience and vulnerability) and outlines of the book’s major research questions and structure. the following chapter provides bronfenbrenner’s bio-ecological model of human development as an overall framework that provides multiple channels to understand the differences in children’s trajectories and developmental processes, and how close people in their lives and within the macro-system of socio-economic statuses contribute or hinder their experiences and opportunities to engage in proximal learning processes. chapter 3 describes the mixed methods adopted (a combination of quantitative and qualitative data from the effective pre-school, primary, and secondary education project, 1997-2014), and justifies the design and trajectory analyses of the cfsc, which are aligned with bronfenbrenner’s bioecological model of human development. global education review 2 (3) chapter 4 illustrates typical circumstances and experiences in the learning life-courses of two children from disadvantaged socioeconomic status backgrounds and two children from middle-class families from the presented case studies. these circumstances and experiences include succeeding against the odds of disadvantage (demonstrated by steven peterson); not succeeding against the odds of disadvantage (demonstrated by tom white); failing to meet the high expectations of privileged circumstances (demonstrated by marcy stewart); and doing well as expected (demonstrated by imogene woods). the authors also add the parents’ voices to these narratives, thereby making the stories convincing. the enormous courage and doggedness that peterson and his mother demonstrate cannot change the fact that succeeding against all odds (academically) is ridden with joyful and joyless sets of narratives. taken together, these illustrations shed more light into the human narratives that validate or disrupt the established connection between socio-economic background and educational performance. chapter 5 details how children can be the harbinger of their level of academic success. the section is descriptive and factual based on the sampled children’s academic successes or difficulties, as well as their parents and teachers, and other previous works in the empirical literature. the findings reveal that children’s motivational attitudes, cognitive abilities, and other “developmentally generative force characteristics” (like self-regulation, personal competencies, and locus of control) are perceived as potent factors in explaining children’s level of academic success. for example, peterson is decidedly motivated toward learning and school-related tasks. he enthusiastically looks for new opportunities for learning through his peers, his hobbies, close people in his life, and the media. as the authors put it, peterson becomes “a driving force behind his own, personal academic success” (p.125). however, his mother was also instrumental to achieving this success. both chapters 6 and 7 offer more analysis than description about aspects of the family micro-system, parenting, and home learning toward higher aspirations. in these two sections, the authors describe and analyse how parents, despite their social disadvantages, found ways to teach their children about their values and beliefs, modelling and setting patterns of language development at an early age (p.155) in order to prepare their children for the kind of communication they would need to be successful in their educational activities. further, the authors analyse how parents engage their children through the means of effective and adaptive home-learning environments (hles), emotional support, and other activities facilitated by them toward school-oriented goals. chapter 8 explores how school-related factors and the pre-school environment contribute to academic success in the pre-school years. here, the authors argue that teachers, peers, and friends play major roles in inspiring behavioral gains and success in pre-school education and the home-learning environment. the findings confirm the magnitude of combining good quality experiences in the preschool and home to help children “succeed against the odds of disadvantage.” however, connections between pre-school education and the english pre-school curriculum are not discussed as well as one might hope (see p.187). in particular, english pre-school curriculum discourse requires more attention than it receives in the book. it represents the country’s strategy for pre-school education and provides for every english child—without exception— basic literacy, numeracy, scientific thinking, and additional areas of development. this is an important issue and the reader should not have global education review 3 (1) to look elsewhere to understand its proper relevance to the material in this chapter. drawing from the case studies, chapter 9 describes the important roles that schools and parents can play in bridging cultural, social, and emotional capital. it provides case study evidence demonstrating how educational achievement was supported by the “active cultivation” of educational and cultural pursuits (p.229) via children’s involvement in extracurricular activities, through hobbies/interests, religious activities, or involvement with support networks comprised of family friends or extended family members. this suggests that social networks and relationship dynamics cannot be overlooked in the field of educational research. those linking sociological and economic accounts of education find that socialcultural dynamics, which can lubricate the wheels of academic achievement or bring them to a halt, are deeply embedded within educational research (horvat, weininger, and lareau, 2003; lareau, 2003, 2002, 2000). social and cultural capital certainly helps shape children’s educational trajectories by facilitating or disrupting the link between social background and academic success. it would have been more interesting, however, if the authors incorporated social capital theory as part of the book’s theoretical framework (bourdieu, 1986; coleman, 1988), as it relates well with many of the case studies it identifies. in the final chapter, the authors argue for the need of “active cultivation” stemming from the child-rearing practices seen in the low-ses families with children succeeding against all odds. it also promotes and advocates for agency in the form of determination from the children themselves, and emphasizes the profound impact of parents and schools on their learning. all in all, the authors conclude that these factors can help children become active agents in their learning life-courses. social class and educational inequality is well worth reading. it arrives at a time when we need to bring parenting practices and schools back into the post-modern debate about children’s educational achievement. the authors have done substantial research and the book is rich with mixed data sets and empirical literatures that critically explain the major issues it examines. although the book focuses on the impact of parents and schools, the role of government in delivering education in a way that cushions the effects of educational inequality should not be oversimplified in an age of globalization. in the last four decades, for example, many western european countries have made educational reforms aimed at reducing existing educational inequality (bakker and amsing, 2012; wiborg, 2009). these reforms tend to be entrenched in new educational policies, providing states with information on the social distribution of participation in education. this testifies to a more integrative role of the state in the educational pathways of its citizens. while schools have a role to play in children’s learning life-courses, governments, through policies or reforms, still attempt to play a vital role in lessening the educational inequality reproduced and exacerbated by many schools. social class and educational inequality’s conclusion helps meet its goals, but the authors perhaps inadvertently marginalize the government’s role in supporting children’s educational trajectories. nevertheless, the book offers a lucid guide to the broad investigations on which the research is based and makes an innovative and significant contribution to the literature on risk, resilience, parenting practices, and educational achievement from early childhood through adolescence. consequently, the book is satisfactory as a whole and is recommended for use in the classroom. global education review 2 (3) references bakker, n. & amsing, h.t.a. (2012) discovering social inequality: dutch educational research in the post-war era, paedagogica historica, 48:2, 315-333, bourdieu, p. (1986) the forms of capital. in j. richardson (ed.). handbook of theory and research on the sociology of education (pp. 241-258). new york: greenwood. coleman, j. s. (1988) social capital in the creation of human capital. american journal of sociology, 94, s95-s120. horvat, e., weininger, e., & lareau, a. (2003). from social ties to social capital: class differences in relations between schools and parent networks. american educational research journal, 40, 319-351. lareau, a. (2000). home advantage: social class and parental intervention in elementary education. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. lareau, a. (2002). invisible inequality: social class and childrearing in black families and white families. american sociological review, 67, 747-776. lareau, a. (2003). unequal childhoods: class, race, and family life. berkeley: university of california press. wiborg, s. (2009) education and social integration: comprehensive schooling in europe. new york: palgrave macmillan. “social class and educational inequality: the impact of parents and schools.” by iram siraj and aziza mayo. cambridge (uk): cambridge university press, 2014. isbn: 978-1-107-01805-1 about the authors iram siraj is professor of education in the department of early years and primary education in the institute of education, university of london. she is also visiting professor at the universities of melbourne, waikato and with some part-time secondment to the university of wollongong, australia. aziza mayo completed a doctorate at the department for social and behavioral sciences at the university of amsterdam and is currently professor of education at the university of applied sciences leiden, netherlands. about the reviewer gbenga emmanuel afolayan is a doctoral candidate at murdoch university, australia. he holds two master’s degrees, one in development studies from the international institute of social studies at erasmus university rotterdam, the netherlands, and one in public policy and management from the university of york, united kingdom. gbenga completed his undergraduate degree at the university of ibadan, nigeria. his research interests fall in the areas of education and social inequalities, development policies and administration, sociology of education/development, women’s studies, feminist economics, human rights ,and social justice. he taught economics, civic education, social studies, and business studies for more than five years at the federal polytechnic ilaro in ògùn state, nigeria. he has participated in several national and international conferences and is co-editing a book presenting research on global perspectives on development administration and cultural change. citizenship, democracy, and higher education 165 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tobin, kathleen a. (2016). a comparative look at citizenship education in the western world. [review of the book citizenship, democracy and higher education in europe, canada and the usa by jason laker, concepción naval and kornelija mrnjaus]. global education review, 3 (3). 165-167. book review a comparative look at citizenship education in the western world “citizenship, democracy and higher education in europe, canada and the usa” by jason laker, concepción naval and kornelija mrnjaus by kathleen a. tobin preparation for good citizenship has served as a fundamental objective of education in the western world, and has been viewed as an essential component of democracy at least since the early years of the nineteenth century. principled differences have long shaped a complex mosaic of curricular demands for those expected to lead the electorate, resulting in a myriad of courses from philosophy to literature and history, often taught with the intention of elevating participants above the masses for the purpose of governing. as suffrage expanded, the need for a prepared citizenry appeared greater, setting the stage for pedagogical arguments advocating for utilitarian design and practical application for a larger population in an increasingly industrialized society. much expert attention was paid to primary education in this regard, for a comparative few in stratified societies anticipated completing secondary and post-secondary programs. however, by the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries, attention to citizenship was emphasized in higher education—both at the post-secondary and tertiary levels. citizenship, democracy and higher education in europe, canada and the usa dissects citizenship education at the university, crossing regional boundaries and cultures. contributors with expertise in education and the social sciences examine approaches in both eastern and western europe, as well as north america, allowing for significant comparison and contrast. the editors note that canadian and u.s. societies tend to hold their democratic principles uncritically (p. 2), making this collection of critical essays more valuable. in contrast, a greater degree of conscious effort 166 global education review 3 (3) may have influenced citizenship education in western europe, where it emerged from a long history of democratic evolution, and in eastern europe, where educators have worked in a postsocialist climate. the editors have compiled a strong collection of analyses while providing a solid context in tying them together. the book is divided into two primary sections: “foundations and frameworks” and “policy environments.” in doing so, the editors effectively introduce readers first to broad concepts and then to examinations of practice in specific settings. citizenship education is uniquely connected in diametric arguments placing the acquisition of knowledge at odds with utilitarianism, precisely because it includes both. such a view is articulated in chapter 2, “towards inclusive and generative citizenship education” (p. 11). citizenship education is indeed comprised of teaching and learning with the common good in mind. for a century or more, programs have targeted immigrants and some have become increasingly inclusive in their nature. at the same time, especially beginning in the latter decades of the twentieth century, educators have designed more exclusive programs with the intention of preparing smaller groups of future leaders. however, these are much more democratic than programs that predate the modern age of democracy, for the students recruited into them are not born from the elite; rather, they are largely representative of students who have individually demonstrated enthusiasm and leadership qualities. varying models have found their respective places in curricula, serving the needs of participants in governance as well as the governed, with an eye toward developing an educated populace (p. 23), but also toward promoting and expanding democracy. matters of inclusivity in europe have been facilitated by the bologna process, which created common standards and expectations from country to country, and encouraged students to engage in more international studies on a very practical level. this process has introduced students to fundamental principles of citizenship, and it has also made possible greater comparison of curricula across borders, enriching this type of study. while the compilation of essays and approaches shared in citizenship, democracy, and higher education is valuable as a whole, some chapters stand out as particularly enlightening for readers who are new to the topic. one is rhonda wynne’s “higher education student civic engagement: conceptualizations of citizenship and engagement strategies.” here, wynne analyzes recent trends in higher education that serve to redefine the purpose of the university. curricular cores, stated objectives, and desired competencies have placed increasing value on civic engagement, service learning, and social responsibility (p. 61). these new expectations for instruction tend to parallel contemporary initiatives in business engagement and commitment to supporting economic development by supplying intellectual capital (researchers) and prospective employees (students). they come with a price, however, and the traditional worth of gaining knowledge for the sake of knowledge is sometimes lost. this is true not only in professional majors, where a market value might be associated more clearly with certification or degree, but also in the liberal arts and humanities. these areas are essential to the preparation of good citizens, but are not taught solely for the preparation of good citizens. they are more closely identified as areas where pure knowledge is gained, and some purists may see the focus on citizenship and future civic engagement as too utilitarian in principle. some educators reach beyond concepts of governance and the electorate in their considerations of citizenship education and civic citizenship, democracy, and higher education 167 preparation into areas of human rights and social justice. this is described by alok gardia and deepa mehta in their chapter “rethinking teacher effectiveness in democratic citizenship education for ensuring peace.” gardia and mehta cite susan fountain’s 1999 working paper, “peace education in unicef,” in the following definition: “peace education refers to the process of promoting the knowledge, skills, attitudes and values needed to bring about behavior changes that will enable children, youth and adults to prevent conflict and violence both overt and structural; to resolve conflict peacefully; and to create the conditions conducive to peace, whether at an intrapersonal, interpersonal, intergroup, national, or international level” (pp. 90-91). they set aside debates over knowledge and application, and perhaps this is the essence of a peaceful approach to the field of education. more importantly, their analysis includes a discussion of ways in which teachers can prepare to teach peace effectively. this discussion of practice is carried out in more detail in the second part of the book. in chapters 8 through 14, contributors provide case studies (in slovenia, croatia, and spain, for example), quantitative analyses, and reports on methodology used in practice. it is here that the reader can see real life situations in which educators have implemented civic education programs in changing political environments, and tested the effects of those programs. the final chapter, “taking it personally: engaging democracy, human rights and civic participation as the vocations of higher education,” is written by one of the editors, jason laker. laker reflects on his personal experiences in drawing together a wide range of contributions from thoughtful experts, and somewhat laments the challenges of synthesizing such disparate accounts. in addition, he voices concern that the project raised more questions in his mind than it provided answers. but that is often a byproduct of research for all of us, and he should not consider this a negative. his reflection alone sheds much needed light on the world of academia and educational travel, helping to make them less mysterious to those just entering the field. in addition, the work as a whole is indeed worthwhile, and its completion should be regarded as a success. citizenship education itself is beneficial to society, and a collection of perspectives from those who have devoted significant time and attention to it can only benefit the rest of us, regardless of how complex such an approach might be. “citizenship, democracy and higher education in europe, canada, and the usa.” edited by jason laker, concepción naval and kornelija mrnjaus. new york: palgrave macmillan, 2014. isbn: 978-1-137-28747-2 about the editors jason laker is professor and chair in the department of educational counseling at san josé state university, usa. concepción naval is dean of the school of education and psychology at the university of navarra, spain. kornelija mrnjaus is assistant professor of education at the university of rijeka, croatia. about the reviewer kathleen tobin earned her ph.d. in history from the university of chicago and is currently head of the department of history and philosophy and social studies liaison at purdue university northwest. her research and teaching areas include twentieth century u.s. history and latin america, and she has authored books and articles on population policy and education history. she served as faculty representative on the indiana commission for higher education, subsequently chaired the statewide transfer and articulation committee, and is a member of the indiana council for the social studies. she has been interested in all matters related to general education and social studies teaching, and has recently researched citizenship education in haiti. 54 global education review 3(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: hill, cher m. & macdonald, margaret (2016). implementation and impact of experiential learning in a graduate level teacher education program: an example from a canadian university. global education review, 3 (4). 54-69 implementation and impact of experiential learning in a graduate level teacher education program: an example from a canadian university cher m. hill simon fraser university, british columbia, canada margaret macdonald simon fraser university, british columbia, canada abstract teacher inquiry, in which teachers study their own professional practice, is currently a popular form of experiential learning that is considered a powerful tool to bring about effective change in teaching and learning. little empirical evidence, however, exists to explain precisely if and how this pedagogical methodology moves teachers toward transformation of practice. using a grounded theory design, we examined twelve end of term graduate level learning portfolios and administered a survey to 336 inservice teachers enrolled in a two-year graduate diploma program in the faculty of education at simon fraser university, canada. we found powerful evidence that our programs were highly impactful, with 94% of teachers reporting transformative learning within the second year of the program. using portfolio data, we examined the process of the teacher transformations. our findings revealed that teachers’ abilities to interrogate their subjective-objective stance deepened their experiential learning. using three case studies we exemplify how transformative pathways were formulated and conclude with a discussion of the implications of learning through experience, including the value of student-generated learning goals, continuous interfacing of theory and practice, seeing your “teaching” through the eyes of your students, colleagues or parents, and the power of living your research question in the context of your own classroom and school setting. we end the paper on a cautionary note pointing out the vulnerability of programs of this nature in an era of accountability, standardization, quality control, and risk management all of which eclipse approaches that focus on authentic practical problems and student generated solutions. keywords experiential learning, teacher inquiry, in-service teacher education, transformation of practice “an ounce of experience is better than a ton of theory simply because it is only in experience that any theory has vital and verifiable significance” (dewey, 1916/2008, chapter 11, para 8). ______________________________ corresponding author: cher m. hill, faculty of education, simon fraser university, 8888 university drive, burnaby, bc, v5a 1s6 phone: 778 782-4156 email: chill@sfu.ca mailto:chill@sfu.ca implementation and impact of experiential learning 55 introduction experiential learning involves a direct encounter between the learner and the world in which there is a transaction between the subjective experience and the objective conditions (dewey, 1916/2008; heron & reason, 1997; kolb, 2014). according to this perspective, learning is not derived from experience alone but rather the complex interactions between experience, perception, cognition, and behavior (kolb, 2014). as dewey (1916/2008) contended, “to ‘learn from experience’ is to make a backward and forward connection between what we do to things and what we enjoy or suffer from things as a consequence” (chapter 11, para 1). one of the biggest challenges for continuing professional development, such as in-service teacher education, is the cultivation of complex competencies that enable practitioners to be responsive to the demands of specific contexts (queeney, 2000), particularly ones that are constantly changing. within the field of education, a form of experiential learning that is growing in popularity is teacher inquiry, the disciplined study of one’s own teaching practice (cochran-smith & lytle, 1993; 1999; 2009). while teacher inquiry is well established as good teaching practice and considered a powerful tool to bring about effective change in teaching and learning (cochran-smith & lytle, 2009; himley & carini, 2000), little empirical evidence exists to explain precisely if and how this pedagogical methodology moves teachers toward transformation of practice. as slavit and holmlund nelson (2009) asserted, “we still know very little about the results of these kinds of initiatives on teaching, teaching perspective, and student learning” (p. 9). within the faculty of education at simon fraser university, the field programs unit specializes in graduate level, in-service teacher education programs based on a teacher inquiry methodology. anecdotally our instructors and graduates often note the transformative, and profoundly impactful nature of our programs, however, to date we have not systematically studied the experiences of the teacher-learners in our programs. to promote and preserve programs we believe are change agents, particularly during an era of budgetary constraints and increased concerns regarding accountability, quality control, and risk management within institutions, it is important to demonstrate the value of experiential learning offered in our teacher education programs. to this end we endeavor to assess the nature and quality of the experiential learning within our programs and answer the question “what is the impact of self-examination of practice on teacher professional development?”. our research questions include: 1) how does experiential learning, inherent within teacher inquiry move our students (practicing teachers) towards transformation of practice? 2) what pathways enable profound learning to occur? 3) what is the impact of our programs? context for over twenty years, the faculty of education at simon fraser university located within the greater vancouver area in british columbia, canada, has provided unique opportunities for in-service teachers to engage in experiential learning embedded within their professional practice. our programs include various thematic two-year graduate diplomas in education (gde) (e.g., supporting diverse learners, teaching and learning with technology, exploring arts education, learning in the early years), that can ladder into a third year of study culminating in a master of education in educational practice (m.ed. ep). our graduate 56 global education review 3(4) diploma programs are unique in that instructional teams include faculty associates (master teachers seconded from school districts), mentors (practicing k-12 teachers familiar with teacher inquiry), as well as faculty members (university professors with expertise in the theme of the diploma program)1. we enroll approximately 300 to 700 educators annually. to enroll in our programs, applicants must have a british columbia teaching certificate and be engaged in an educational practice, at least part time. our students are primarily classroom teachers (k-12), but also may include administrators, resources teachers, district support teachers, and librarians. the number of cohorts offered by field programs, and the variety of programs provide unique opportunities to study the process and impact of experiential teacher education across diverse contexts. our diploma and masters programs are based on a practitioner inquiry methodology in which teachers conduct self-directed inquiries into their own professional practice (cochransmith & lytle, 1993; 1999; 2009). as part of our programs they engage in multiple field studies, action-oriented inquiry projects, in which they attempt to transform aspects of their practice in order to advance their understanding of teaching and learning, and enable change within their specific contexts. we contend that through selfdirected inquiries within the context of professional practice, deeper understanding can develop than through more traditional transmission-oriented learning. as hobson (2000) asserted, “if you want to try to understand something, try to change it” (p. 8). our pedagogy is experiential in two ways. first, our students develop their professional capacities by reflecting on their efforts to create change within their own classroom and consequences of such actions. the university classroom provides a dialogic space where teachers can unpack, analyze, and question their experiences in this regard. in this way, the cohort serves as a community of practice (wenger, 1998; lave & wenger, 1991) in which colleagues provide critical feedback, supportive encouragement, and act as sounding boards. our gde programs are based on a mentorship model (lipton & wellman, 2001), in which instructors support teacher-learners in developing their own capacities to analyze their beliefs and assumptions, to identify tensions in their teaching, to engage in the critical and disciplined study of their practice, and to advance their professional knowledge. second, we provide opportunities for experiential learning in our classrooms. we endeavor to model effective practice in our own pedagogies, such as differentiated instruction (tomlinson, 2015), holistic learning experiences (miller, 2007), and relational pedagogies (margonis, 2011). we encourage teachers not only to consider how they might adapt and apply these pedagogies within their own practices, but also to reflect on their experiences as students in our classroom, and how these perspectives might inform their understanding of their own students’ experiences in schools (brookfield, 1995). our intention is to be as responsive as possible to the professional development needs of in-service teachers in the province. our curriculum is often co-constructed with school districts, and addresses changes and trends within k-12 education within british columbia, such as the shift to all day kindergarten in 2010. we aim to inform the educational practice of teacher learners through exposure to current scholarship, while adhering to a core pedagogical belief in teacher inquiry as a method of pursuing self-directed questions related to the content presented and their own pedagogical practice. to this end, a parallel structure of nongraded discipline-specific content and theory (2 implementation and impact of experiential learning 57 or 3 credits) is taught in conjunction with a nongraded field study or teacher inquiry course (2 or 3 credits) each semester, over a 30-credit (6 semester) program. to enroll in the program, teachers must be working in the classroom (either full or part time or on-call) so that the content or focus of each graduate diploma can be infused with a reflexive pedagogical encounter through teacher inquiry. our program aims to develop the holistic capacities of the practitioner, that is, interrelated ways of knowing, doing, and being. during all two-year diploma programs, teacher-learners work towards developing program-specific capacities, which are used to guide self, peer, and instructor assessment. common capacities across programs include the development of an inquiry disposition; the ability to engage in critical cycles of action and reflection; an orientation towards praxis; collaborative, responsive and inclusive practices within learning communities; the ability to critically analyze personal beliefs regarding teaching and learning; and leadership capacities. the diploma program is graded on a satisfactory/nonsatisfactory basis to encourage teachers to experiment with new practices and take professional risks, as well as to empower teachers as agents of their own professional development and strengthen self-assessment of practice. although the diploma program is nongraded, the reflective practice of teacherlearners and their field study write-ups are evaluated at the end of each semester when they submit their portfolios. this portfolio is a selfdirected collection of learning, and stands as a synthesis of the students’ field study, discussions, readings and class activities. we place strong emphasis on critical reflection throughout our in-service professional development programs with the belief that this enables an active interrogation of self, theory, and classroom practice during cycles of inquiry (brookfield, 2005; cochran-smith & lytle, 2009; himley & carini, 2000, dana & yendolhoppey, 2014). these cycles of critical reflection are important given the emphasis in british columbia on the use of emergent and responsive approaches that individualize student learning and meet the needs of a diverse student population. with teachers in bc and elsewhere in canada facing high ideals to design and implement individualized curriculum that is “suited to improve student engagement” and life preparation (see ministry of education 2016/172018/19 service plan), there is a pressing need to systematically reflect on classroom experiences and move teaching and learning forward in a way that takes the individual characteristics of the learner into account. simon fraser university has recently undergone an accreditation process, and implemented changes to enhance accountability and quality of instruction, including requiring learning goals or outcomes for each course, and developing standardized course evaluations across the university. further, the addition of risk management protocols in both schools and universities make it increasingly challenging to provide opportunities for authentic experiential learning outside of traditional classroom-based activities. these new institutional practices are at times at odds with our more holistic, experiential, emergent, and self-directed pedagogies and create complexities for us as instructors. our instructional model, which includes faculty members, as well as practitioner is more expensive than other graduate programs, and as the federal and provincial funding to post-secondary institutions decreases and efficiencies are sought, our programs are increasingly under scrutiny. it is within this context that we feel it is important to systemically study the impact of the experiential 58 global education review 3(4) pedagogies within our graduate level teacher education programs. methodology our research design has been informed by grounded theory (charmaz, 2005; corbin & strauss, 2008; glass & strauss, 1967; strauss & corbin, 1990; 1998). in this approach, data analysis has been ongoing, shaping data collection and focusing our understandings as the project progresses. the abductive nature of grounded theory has been critical in allowing us to determine patterns as they emerge from the data to form a working hypothesis with criteria for analyzing the data that is solely based on the student experience rather than constructed a priori. in this way we have allowed the data to speak to us. students in seven different cohorts in our graduate diploma in education (gde) were invited by faculty associates to participate in a self-study of our program area by submitting their end of term portfolios for analysis. the student’s portfolio provides a synthesis of the teacher’s field study, discussions, readings and class activities and often includes a variety of photos, graphics, and narrative forms of representation. within this final assignment, teachers share their growth by developing several learning statements. these statements act to consolidate and highlight their key understandings for the semester. for this paper we focused on portfolio submissions from two cohorts (learning in the early years (ley), and supporting diverse learners (sdl). these cohorts were selected because they were diverse in terms of the discipline-specific content, but offered a consistent approach in teaching inquiry methods, and at the time of data collection both cohorts were in the middle third of the program (ley was in the third semester and sdl was in the fourth semester). portfolios of students who provided consent and were able to submit their portfolios electronically were included in the analysis. (other students consented to have their portfolios included but their representations of learning were more performative in nature and could not be easily converted into an electronic format that would enable an ongoing analysis). in the end 12 out of a possible 49 portfolios from the two cohorts were included in the analysis. using in vivo coding methods we selected verbatim key significant words or phrases that were utilized or coined by the participants to capture the student voice (saldaña, 2009). in this way, we grounded our codes and subsequent categories to the portfolio data. we honored the goal of grounded theory to make use of student voice and let the data speak to us. to this end we did not start with a priori criteria for review of the portfolios but rather looked at the portfolios for the meaning and messages conveyed around student learning by the students themselves. through our own discussion and reflective analysis2 we assigned categories to encompass our interpretation of the meaning of the in-vivo text, and then re-analyzed for content related to methods and elements of experiential learning and transformation of teaching practice. through these collaborative discussions, and after triangulation with our written reflections we were able to generate an understanding of how experiential learning moved our students towards transformation of practice that was deepened through our experiences as instructors. evidence in the portfolio data indicated that our teacher inquiry methodology created powerful professional development opportunities for practicing teachers. we wondered, however, if this finding was consistent across our programs, and we constructed a survey to administer to our entire implementation and impact of experiential learning 59 student population as part of this cycle of generating and testing understandings. the survey, informed by the portfolio data, was administrated to our students in 23 diploma cohorts, representing seven different programs areas (exploring arts, learning in the early years, french immersion/exploring additional languages, teachers as leaders and mentors, integrating technology/teaching technology in a global classroom, teaching and learning in today’s classroom, supporting diverse learners). the research design was cross sectional and the survey was administered to students who were either in their first or second year of the graduate diploma to better understand the large scale impact of our programs. the return rate was 72% with 336 of 467 students completing the survey. this demonstrated the willingness of our students to participate in further survey research at an institutional level. the demographics of the sample reflected the nature of the program offerings at this time (one quarter of the programs were learning in the early years cohorts), and included primarily women (81% female and 19% male) and mature students (mean age = 38). the majority of our students were elementary teachers (66%), nearly one quarter were high school teachers (21%), only 3% were middle school teachers, and 9% were other educators. the population was diverse in terms of teaching experience. fourteen percent had been teaching for three years or less, 34% had been teaching for 4-7 years, 14% had been teaching for 8-10 years, 14% had been teaching for 11-15 years, 12% had been teaching for 16-20 years, and 10% had been teaching for 21 or more years. results from the portfolios through the portfolio data we attempted to develop understandings of how teacher inquiry moves our students to transformation of practice, as well as to illuminate various pathways that enabled transformative learning to occur (our first two research questions). our results focus on three aspects of experimental learning: the catalyst, the direct encounter, and theorization of learning. we draw examples from three case studies, chosen based on their comprehensive descriptions of the teachers’ learning journey, as well as the diverse pathways that they illustrate. catalyst most narratives in the teacher’s portfolios began with a description of some sort of catalyst that led them on their journeys, typically an incongruence or misalignment between their goals, ideals, or values, and their classroom realties. awareness of these incongruencies developed in various ways. the recognition of values or the realization of ideals often stemmed from autobiographical explorations of successes or challenges from the teachers’ own childhoods. new pedagogical possibilities were introduced through scholarship, workshops, colleagues, or programmatic capacities. other catalysts came from teachers’ assessment of unmet needs within their classroom based on their observational or survey data. in the next section, examples will be drawn from the portfolios of risa mclaughlin, andrea waich and amanda zanette3 to illustrate this shift in thinking and mobilization toward cycles of inquiry and reflection. for risa, the inconsistency that catalyzed her learning stemmed from her observation that the type of play occurring in her classroom was not of the same quality as the play described in the articles she had been reading in her diploma program. she valued these perspectives and wanted her students to be “curious, observant and engaged in their play and learning.” what 60 global education review 3(4) she observed, however, was not consistent with her ideals. she wrote, the play was loud, and chaotic. the students were very silly and moved around a lot. their play seemed unfocused and unimaginative. i was questioning: why don’t my students seem more focused? what was missing? a similar catalyzing moment occurred in andrea’s inquiry, with tensions stemming from her assumptions regarding her students’ physical interactions, which she perceived as roughhousing. the articles in her diploma program provided a different perspective, viewing rough and tumble play as an important aspect of development. the catalyst for amanda stemmed from her own autobiographical reflections. imagine sitting in a classroom. all you hear are your thoughts, and all you see are the teacher's lips moving and the teacher walking back and forth around the room. you look at your teacher, to ensure he/she is aware you are trying to pay attention. really you were lost a few minutes into the lesson, which makes it hard for you to listen. finally, the teacher assigns the work. after re-reading the assignment and asking classmates for help, you can always arrive at completing the work. you are never disruptive in class, so the teacher is unaware of the minute amount of understanding you truly have. … this was me, amanda zanette, by grade 12. based on her own experiences as a student, amanda’s goal as a teacher was to “try and reach all learners” in her classroom, in which there were many behavioural issues. although different experiences catalyzed their learning, all of the teachers found entry points that were personally and professionally relevant, marked by an incongruence that needed to be resolved. as kolb (2014) asserted, learning “is by its very nature a tension-and conflict-filled process” (chapter 2). attending to tensions in relation to practice might be equivalent to what mezirow (1990) described as a disoriented event that is necessary to catalyze transformative learning. here however, the liminal space that invites transformation is experiential rather than cognitive. the potential of these catalysts to incite opportunities for learning illuminates the powerful nature of selfdirected, learner specific goals when they stem from personal experience. direct encounters the catalyzing events encouraged teachers to seek direct encounters with the world and reflect on the outcomes. actions were praxis oriented (aoki, 1983), that is, intentional and reflective, infused by scholarship or guided by the teacher’s own tentative theories about what was going on in their classrooms. in the portfolios, teachers described changing their interactions with students, parents or colleagues; their teaching and learning environments; their pedagogy; or the curriculum. for example, risa restructured her approaches to classroom play centres4 in hopes of deepening her students’ play-based learning. center time is feeling chaotic and crazy!! i think it is because all the centers are not open and the students are too congested in a few centers. is it this or are they just not interested in what there is to play with. they seem unfocused and there are lots of behaviours i’m having to deal with. what am i missing? maybe i should try having the kids do a plan before they play to help give them a focus? i’ll try incorporating this into my day plan and see how it goes. implementation and impact of experiential learning 61 these encounters did not always involve change and sometimes focused on engaging in careful observation, seeking more information through surveys, or analyzing students’ work samples. for example, amanda developed assignments for her students and a questionnaire for their parents in the hopes of getting to know her students and to better understand their needs; while andrea closely observed her students at play to better understand what she perceived as roughhousing. in all cases, seeking direct encounters within the context of their practice created a potential site for experiential learning. taking action, coupled with reflection, created an opportunity for experimentation and the theorization of teaching and learning. reflections described in the portfolios included assessing whether the change was having the desired effect, exploring alternatives, documenting challenges, limitations, successes, and unanticipated outcomes, heightened awareness of self-and/or others, as well as making meaning through theoretical lenses. reflections that were particularly powerful in moving teachers towards transformation of practice involved a subjective-objective stance, in which there was a balance between “awareness of self with curiosity and attention to ‘other’” (ladkin, 2005, p. 118-119). as heron and reason (1997) noted, participatory learning involves transactions between our inner world and our external experiences. when i hold your hand, my tactual imaging both subjectively shapes you and objectively meets you. to encounter being or a being is both to image it in my way and to know that it is there. to experience anything is to participate in it, and to participate is both to mold and to encounter; hence, experiential reality is always subjective-objective. (heron & reason, 1997, p. 277) approaches that are overly objective and lack subjective awareness are limited in that internal frames of reference that might inform or skew a direct encounter are not taken into account. approaches that are overly subjective are limited in that they lack external validation of internal representations. provisionally we hypothesized that the type of subjectiveobjective stance teachers take mediates their experiential learning. we observed three different types of experiential learning in which a subjectiveobjective stance was evident in the portfolio data, including active experimentation in which teachers moved toward change within their worlds; critical subjectivity in which teachers attended to both internal and external frames of reference; and collaborative encounters in which understandings and/or practices were coconstructed. these different forms of subjectiveobjective engagement are described and illustrated with portfolio examples below. active experimentation as commonly described in the work of schön (1983) and dewey (1916/2008), experiential learning often involves direct experimentation in which learners actively try to impose change within their contexts and continuously frame and re-frame their understandings based on the willingness of the world to conform to their tentative theories. this active experimentation was evident in risa’s portfolio. she thought that encouraging the children to make a plan before they play might help to give them a focus and would deepen their play. she increased the time that the children were in centers so that they could plan, play and debrief. this first cycle of action and reflection was disappointing in that the world did not confirm to her tentative theory about why her students’ play lacked depth. she 62 global education review 3(4) did not notice much change in the children’s play and consequently sought sources outside of herself to reframe her praxis. she wrote, i brought in my day plan to have a fellow student look at it and we were chatting about centers and she mentioned how she put out particular things to invite the students to explore and i thought about the article by deb curtis on creating invitations for learning. up until this point i thought the play i was looking for and wanting my students to experience would just happen. curtis said: “as i observe their conversations and activities, i get new information for what else to offer to extend the activities and learning possibilities.” risa created invitations5 to entice the children to engage in deeper forms of play-based learning, and observed a stronger alignment between her goals and what was occurring in her classroom. the play is beginning to become more focused and imaginative …these invitations have definitely changed the flow and engagement of my play time for the better. using invitations allows me to incorporate aspects of the curriculum, and still allow free choice. risa exhibited a subjective-objective stance as she engaged in multiple cycles of action and reflection to work towards her goal of emulating the types of play described in her readings. through continuous adjustments to her practice, involving cycles of developing her own tentative theories, testing her hunches, and listening to how the situation talked back (schön, 1983), risa was able to advance her teaching practice by making the connection between her actions and the consequences (dewey, 1916/2008). when risa’s tentative theory about what might deepen the play in her classroom was not supported, she sought suggestions from her colleague and drew upon scholarship to guide her subsequent actions. this example and others suggests that reflections alone may not be sufficient to move learning forward. through exposure to ideas outside of the encounter, risa was able to reframe the problem in a way that produced a more satisfactory outcome. critical subjectivity a second form of a subjective-objective stance evident in portfolio data, involved an openness to encounters in the world while maintaining a critically subjective awareness of self. for example, andrea’s inquiry, catalyzed by her concerns regarding roughhousing, motivated her to carefully observe her students’ play. she was aware of her own frames of reference within this direct encounter, but was able to temporarily suspend her judgment in order to be open to what she might learn. every day after school i see boys roughhousing out on our front lawn. my first instinct is always to go outside and make them stop, since i’m worried they might get hurt. but, what if this is a release for them after having spent all day sitting at a desk? they might need to use this time to express themselves physically, which they can’t do in class. … how do i know how much rough and tumble play is appropriate? or is that up to the students to know? intrigued by pam jarvis’ (2010) theory that rough and tumble play contributes to social development, andrea decided to closely observe and document students engaged in physical play in her classroom. through these experiences, andrea learned to identify play faces, that is, facial expressions that appear threatening but implementation and impact of experiential learning 63 are actually playful, and to differentiate between enjoyable and harmful physical interactions. in this case, the rough and tumble [play] involved not only two boys, james6 and matt, but also two girls, michaela and tessa. the play started out as michaela being a dog and chasing the boys around the carpet, with tessa directing michaela. then michaela decides to tickle the boys …. she grabs onto matt and james does too. james and matt roll around, play fighting while michaela grabs at them. … james has taken one of tessa felts, and she grabs at him and tries to play wrestle with him to get it back. in both cases the students have “play faces” (harlow), and are laughing the entire time. they frequently looked at me while i was filming, probably to see if i would stop them since i normally don’t let them wrestle. it was comforting to see that they could play rougher and not get hurt and still enjoy it. …i now realize that i’ve seen this “play face” many times in my class and i can now accept that it is a good thing. in fact, i’d like to see more of it. in her initial writing, andrea reflected on her assumption that rough and tumble play is potentially harmful for students and on her concern that it violated school rules. she was able, however, to bracket her assumptions, draw from scholarship to make sense of her observations, trust students to mediate their physical interactions, and saw something unexpected – students were not being harmed, but were enjoying the play. here her stance was critically subjective in that she was aware of how her own assumptions influenced her observations. co-construction a third form of experiential learning involving a subjective-objective stance evident in the portfolio data, involved the collaborative development of ideas and/or practices with other members of the community. this stance is exemplified in the writing of amanda, whose goal was to provide opportunities for her students to succeed, which she hoped would address some of the negative behaviours occurring in her classroom. based on survey data from parents and students, as well as her analysis of student journals, amanda realized that her diverse group of students required different ways to engage with texts and communicate their understandings. collaboratively, she and her students developed a template (d.a.r.e) to scaffold comprehension and encourage various formats to represent learning. amanda developed the initial template after reflecting on her own challenges as a learner, as well her data, which gave her more insight into her students’ pedagogical needs. the template was then used, critiqued and revised by her students, producing a final version that was a co-construction of multiple perspectives, and supported learning in unimagined ways. basically, after realizing my students needed to be provided various ways to communicate their understandings, i came up with d.a.r.e. now, please note that i did not begin with d.a.r.e. d.a.r.e is a result of my work combined with my class’ ideas. i wrote up a template for my students to be able to record their ideas … while reading. the template allowed students to make connections, visualize, discuss their work, create questions, show how their thinking had transformed and state the big idea of an article. i started with the 64 global education review 3(4) idea that my students would all be paired up with students who read at a similar level as them, and they would be able to discuss their readings in pairs. the students did this, after i walked them through each step for a full week. later, i told the students they needed to be my teacher as this was an assignment for my course. i asked the students to tell me what was confusing and where i could make the template more clear and interesting. the students had me add pictures, clarify my definitions and explanations. they also suggested that i put the big idea section before transform, because being able to reach the big idea first would help students transform their thinking later. … finally, i had the students get into groups to create a simple name for the worksheet as i had to continuously refer to it as the "reading comprehension sheet". some of the students came up with r.e.a.d, with r still standing for reading and a still standing for asking, but we took the word and turned it around to make dare. this made it more exciting for the class. later, i asked the students to express how d.a.r.e has helped them. the students brainstormed on the board as a class and then they expressed their own learning through their journal. this was very rewarding, as students had learned things that i didn't realize they would learn through their work with d.a.r.e. what makes this direct encounter such a powerful example of experiential learning is that amanda embraced both inner and outer arcs of attention (marshall, 2001, as cited in ladkin, 2005), and brought the classroom community together to work collaboratively to develop a tool to meet their needs. theorizing learning in the portfolios, teachers documented notable shifts in values, dispositions, abilities, identities, and/or knowledge in their end of semester portfolios. unlike mezirow’s (1990) theory of transformative learning in which cognitive paradigmatic shifts can subsequently trigger changes in behavior and identity, transformative experiential learning is more holistic in nature, involving co-occurring shifts in ways of knowing, doing and being. typically, teachers in our programs are encouraged to document their learning in the form of learning statements. through their inquiries teachers, including risa, andrea, and amanda, developed increasingly sophisticated professional capacities as articulated through their learning statements (below). i am learning that in order for the play in my room to become more meaningful and engaging i need to create more invitations for learning, to stimulate the students’ curiosity and get them thinking. (risa) i am learning that rough and tumble play is an important part of play for boys and it allows for their social-emotional development through physical means. (andrea) d.a.r.e helped me realize that students will always understand information in a different way, so we cannot assess students in only one way. i am learning to provide and allow more choices for students to express their understandings. (amanda) implementation and impact of experiential learning 65 while the learning statements in the portfolios varied in comprehensiveness, cohesiveness and quality, working to articulate experiential knowledge in some form is an important aspect of experiential learning. it enables learners to shift from concrete experiences to more abstract theorization that can influence subsequent decision making and problem solving, a challenging aspect of experiential learning (kolb, 2014). further, creating representations of understandings serves to stabilize ideas, enabling them to be subjected to self-assessment and peer review (eisner, 2002). results from survey data to answer part 3 of our question, namely: what is the impact of our programs? we administered a survey to our student population and asked them about transformations they may have experienced in their thinking, teaching, professional relationships, values, or sense of self, based on a list of the most common changes reported in the portfolios, and augmented with feedback from our instructors. realizing that narratives documenting major shifts might be perceived as more desirable in end of term portfolios than other types of learning, we also asked questions regarding experiences of other types of learning that may not necessarily be considered transformative, including restorative7, and affirmative learning and invited open-ended responses. restorative learning involves returning to previously held values, dispositions, or beliefs that have been backgrounded or displaced (lange, 2004), and affirmative learning involves developing one’s ability to name, articulate, explain, or defend values, beliefs and/or practices. we found powerful evidence that our programs were highly influential across cohorts. the vast majority of our teacher-learners, both in the first and the second year of the program, (84% in year 1, and 94% in year 2) reported transformations in their thinking, teaching, professional relationships, values, or sense of self during the semester. in addition, 35% of teachers in both years 1 and 2 reported that they had returned to previously held values, dispositions, beliefs that had been backgrounded or displaced (restoration), and 84% in year 1 and 90% in year 2 reported that they were better able to articulate or defend their beliefs, values, and/or practice (affirmation) (see table 1). there were no statistically significant differences between year one and year two students (p ≤ .05), which perhaps reflects the unique nature of our diploma programs in which the interfacing of theory and practice occurs throughout the program, and teacherlearners engage in multiple field studies, compared to other models of teacher education in which one practicum or action-research project occurs at the end of the program. table 1 self-reports of transformation, restoration, and affirmation. transformation restoration affirmation year 1 84% 35% 84% year 2 94% 35% 90% total 88% 35% 86% 66 global education review 3(4) table 2 changes in thinking, teaching, professional relationships, values, or sense of self as identified by teacherlearners. type of transformation percentage making changes to my practice to be more consistent with my beliefs 47% working more collaboratively with students, parents and/or colleagues 43% diversifying my teaching 37% reorganizing classroom to reflect my values 34% better able to articulate my pedagogy 28% viewing myself as a researcher/inquirer 26% viewing education as a more transformational process than a receptive process 22% viewing students as more capable than before 22% acting as an agent of change in my school/community 16% changing my educational orientation to be more responsive 15% better able to advocate for students 12% viewing knowledge as more holistic 6% the three most common types of transformations identified by teacher-learners on the survey included aligning practice with beliefs (47%), working more collaboratively with students, parents and/or colleagues (43%), and diversifying teaching (37%) (see table 2). aligning theory with practice reflects a shift towards praxis, in which guiding theories and beliefs systems must be identified, enacted and assessed. working collaboratively with stakeholders is consistent with a more subjective-objective stance and a democratic view of education in which all members of communities are empowered as teachers and learners (cochran-smith & lytle, 2009). the diversification of pedagogy is consistent with ministry of education’s goal that bc teachers will be able to support an increasingly diverse student population to develop their individual potential. approximately one/third of teachers in their first and second year of the program reported experiencing restorative learning (lange, 2004) in which they returned to ideals, philosophies, and pedagogies that had been eroded at some point in their careers. inhibiting factors identified included district cultures, the ministry curriculum, norms, habits, educational fads, and lack of time. through reflecting on their professional trajectories, engaging in dialogue with colleagues, experimenting with their practice, or analyzing their own experiences as learners, teachers reported coming full circle with their pedagogies implementation and impact of experiential learning 67 philosophies, and/or values. as one teacher noted, “the ‘every day grind’ can detract from reflecting on your practice... i find my ideals (i.e... classroom as community) coming back and being strengthened.” some reported that their experiences in the program reignited their passion for teaching in general, or enabled them to revisit why they teach in the first place. the majority of teacher-learners, in both the first year and the second year of the program (86%), reported experiencing affirmation of their current ideals, beliefs, values, attitudes, and/or practices. teacher-learners identified four primary ways in which they experienced affirmation: through course-related articles, philosophies, or theories, dialoguing with colleagues, reflecting on their practice, and engaging in inquiry. as one participant noted, “i am better able to name my values and strengths as an educator after reflecting on my 3 field studies.” through affirmative learning experiences, teachers reported being better able to understand, articulate, explain, justify, and/or defend their hunches and classroom practices. some teacher-learners reported feeling more confidence as a result of their affirmative learning experiences, which enabled them to feel more comfortable taking risks. “i am feeling more confident when discussing “learning” with my colleagues. i feel like i am being listened to and respected more by my students' parents which could give me more confidence to assert myself.” discussion and conclusion our research provided important insights into pathways for experiential learning that can move teachers towards transformation of practice. the portfolio evidence demonstrated that tensions rooted in teachers’ own experiences created a compelling incentive for them to deeply engage with the world around them. the typical trajectory of working from catalyzing events within an experiential context allowed an active interrogation of subjectivity prior to drawing on conceptual knowledge. the teacher learners’ experientially grounded and abductive approach within their own teaching contexts generated powerful opportunities for relevant and responsive feedback to occur. embracing a subjective-objective stance advanced practice in important ways, often leading to more nuanced and ethical practices. multiple pathways were evident in this regard including active experimentation, critical subjectivity, or co-construction. reflecting on direct encounters through the eyes of students, colleagues or parents enabled teachers to develop more responsive approaches that were better able to meet the needs and interests of diverse learners, an important expectation of the bc ministry of education (2016/17 – 2018/19 service plan). reflection alone was often not sufficient to move practice forward when goals were thwarted, and teachers often sought input from colleagues and/or scholarship, highlighting the importance of engaging in experiential learning within a community of practice. developing learning statements supported teachers in moving from concrete experiences to the theorization of practice, which could potentially influence subsequent decision making and problem solving. this finding reinforced the importance of formally taking up teacher inquiry as opposed to pursuing other forms of professional learning in which knowledge development may be more transient. teacher inquiry takes teacher-learners beyond trying to change something and moves them into advocacy when they also are charged with having to articulate a rationale for what they are doing and why. this notion of praxis, in which action is intentional and theoretically guided, unites the four modes of experiential learning identified by kolb (2014) concrete experience abilities, reflective observation abilities, abstract conceptualization abilities, and active 68 global education review 3(4) experimentation abilities. programs such as ours, that enable ongoing interplay of theory and practice, create environments that enable powerful experiential learning to occur. indeed, the alignment of philosophies, beliefs, values and practice was a common form of transformation for the teacher-learners in our program. survey and portfolio data confirmed anecdotal reports that our programs were influential, enabling teachers to transform (or restore or affirm) their understandings, practices, relationships, values, beliefs, and/or sense of self. it is important to note, however, that the impact of experiential learning is multidirectional and reciprocal. as dewey argued (1963/1938), “experience does not go on simply inside a person…every genuine experience has an active side which changes in some degree the objective conditions under which experiences are gained” (p. 39). more research is needed to understand the impact of teacher inquiry on the environments that serve as the sites of experiential learning for teachers. we end the paper on a cautionary note, highlighting how our findings stand in contrast to the restrictions that can be imposed, when inservice teacher education is narrowly focused on content rather than experience and process. particularly in an era of increasing budgetary constraints, and growing concerns regarding accountability, quality control, liability, and risk management, we are reminded that we have to advocate for programs that are, seemingly, resource heavy and time consuming when based on authentic practical problems and student generated solutions. often such experiential programs require additional time and resources as instructors walk alongside the learner and mediate material, theory, content and processes with the teacher learner, rather than for or with the teacher-learner in mind. notes 1. the design of our differentiated staffing model, which appoints master teachers with current experience as faculty associates to work with our pre-service and in-service teachers was originally conceived of by dr. john ellis. the gde program was initially developed under the leadership of dr. tom o’shea and pat holborn; however, programmatic philosophies and practices have been developed and refined by numerous individuals over the years. 2. portfolio data were analyzed collaboratively by cher and margaret using the aforementioned in vivo method and later criteria associated with transformative learning (see mezirow, 1990) and experiential learning (see kolb, 2014). initially dr. leyton schnellert, who was an instructor in the supporting diverse learners cohort at the time of this study, also contributed to the analysis. 3. teachers’ real names are used with their permission. 4. centers are a time of free exploration for children in which the classroom space is organized to encourage specific types of activities (traditionally house, blocks, art, and the like). 5. preparing play environments that have a variety of open ended materials, challenges and possibilities for exploration are referred to in the program as “learning provocations.” 6. names have been changed. 7. thank you to dr. michael ling for introducing us to this concept. references aoki, t. t. 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(2015). teaching for excellence in academically diverse classrooms. society, 52(3), 203-209. about the author(s) dr. cher m. hill, phd, is a professor of professional practice and the academic coordinator of the master of education in educational practice program in the faculty of education at simon fraser university. dr. margaret macdonald, phd, is an associate professor and the former director of the field programs unit in the faculty of education at simon fraser university. http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm http://www.gutenberg.org/files/852/852-h/852-h.htm http://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2016/sp/pdf/ministry/educ.pdf http://www.bcbudget.gov.bc.ca/2016/sp/pdf/ministry/educ.pdf 302-1252-2-rv global educationcecmh with footer 302-1252-2-rv global educationcecmh no footer cultivating experimental innovation 73 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: fleenor, matthew c. (2018). cultivating experimental innovation within undergraduate physics majors. global education review, 5 (1), 73-87. cultivating experimental innovation within undergraduate physics majors matthew c. fleenor roanoke college, virginia abstract david galenson's bifurcation of creative types is well-founded across several strata of the traditional fine arts. according to galenson, experimental innovators outwardly express their creativity at a later age after long periods of development. i reason that many of the students in undergraduate classrooms are experimental innovators, since there are rich examples of both experimental and conceptual creativity across a variety of academic disciplines. while physics is often viewed as a discipline overly populated with conceptual innovation, undergraduate instruction within the discipline is historically associated with qualities that hinder creativity, which may be an especially harsh environment for experimental innovators. with the intention of developing a more creative environment, the physics program at roanoke college has cultivated an atmosphere where students have responded with increased participation, increased graduation numbers, and arguably a recovered sense of their innovative potential. to draw connections between the programmatic changes and student response, i first provide curricular and structural examples of implemented measures by the roanoke physics program that accord with the increases observed. second, i offer some philosophical considerations that undergird the pedagogical scaffolding and posture the curricular alterations. these considerations guide the implementations themselves as well as motivate the faculty within the program. third, i extend the inquiry into the boundaries drawn regarding failure, and the question of expertise within the undergraduate science curriculum. keywords science education, science education philosophy, pedagogy, curriculum, physics, creativity development trajectory the proliferation of research studies, both qualitative and quantitative, pertaining to creativity and creative development is personally staggering. consider the partnership for 21st century learning review document on creativity (plucker, kaufman, & beghetto, 2010) with over 2/3 of the 30-page volume dedicated to an annotated bibliography. at our small, liberal arts college, twelve different journals, for which we have an on-going subscriptions, include creativity in their titles. for over 100 years, a two-fold “novel and useful” definition of creativity has emerged from a broad crosssection of creativity studies, as to what defines something as creative (see runco & jaeger, 2012, for a history of this definition). this ____________________________ corresponding author: matthew c. fleenor, roanoke college, 221 college lane, salem, virginia 24153 email: fleenor@roanoke.edu 74 global education review 5(1) two-fold descriptor of creative outcomes, or innovations, frames much of the current research and models, and also extends beyond western studies of creativity, recognizing cultural differences, e.g., chinese values of culture (lan & kaufman, 2013). many models and assessment schema for creative thinking affirm the idea of “local creativity” (both personally and in scope) as a precursor to recognition of novelty and usefulness on a wider scale (see for example, models in kaufman & beghetto, 2009, and assessment in torrance, 1966). while are more numerous practices for awakening, assessing, and developing creative potential in younger populations, fewer practices exist for recovering and sustaining a creative mind and creative potential in older adolescent populations, particularly for undergraduate students in the sciences. in physics education, training at the k-12 levels does not match the training at postsecondary levels due to a lack of properlyequipped physics educators (otero & meltzer, 2017). that is, only 47% of us educators instructing physics courses in high schools actually have a bachelor's degree in physics (cf. fig. 5 in heron & mcneil, 2016). with this disconnect, students' perceptions and preconceived notions about physics learning and practice are potentially distorted, particularly as it pertains to the facets of creativity and epistemological ideas (elby, 2001; hammer, 1994). as sharma, ahluwalia, and sharma (2013) show, this problem of student perceptions finds its way into diverse cultural settings where physics is taught. while physics and physicists are sometimes associated with creative genius (e.g., “einstein” is iconic for such a mind), traditional physics classrooms and/or programs highlighting competition, memorization, and/or distinction hinder the development of creativity and creative potential (national academy of science, 2013). perhaps the manner in which students perceive physics to be learned as a discipline and practiced in the laboratory during the k-12 schooling has curtailed the development of creativity that is integral to the practice of science. within the purview of a well-developed and mature field of creativity studies, as well as a wealth of physics education research with quantitative results, undergraduate physics majors as potential creatives are considered at a four-year, liberal arts college. physics curriculum challenges and alteration at roanoke college are presented in section 2. in particular, i mention those activities recently integrated into the program with the intention of enriching and re-establishing the creative potential of the undergraduate majors in our cohort. in section 3, three streams of thought and research regarding creativity and its development are introduced. the philosophical ideas form a foundation and scaffolding for the types of curricular alteration and the manner in which they were implemented. section 4 extends the inquiry into the boundaries drawn regarding failure and expertise within the undergraduate science curriculum, two necessary elements of creativity. curricular implementation physics education includes pedagogy research and instruction literature at the undergraduate level. two such examples are the physics education research (per, e.g., mcdermott, 2001) movement that focused on research pertaining to pedagogy and learning in physics, and the joint-taskforce on undergraduate physics programs (j-tupp) organization and its documentation (e.g., heron & mcneil, 2016). these avenues and their associated cohorts engaged with undergraduate physics education across a broad spectrum, including individual concepts (hestenes, wells, & swackhamer 1992), cultivating experimental innovation 75 classroom instruction (mazur, 1997), and student expectations (redish, saul, & steinberg 1998). therefore, what follows may not necessarily be novel for undergraduate education nor for physics pedagogy, but it does represent a change for undergraduate physics instruction at roanoke college. incorporating philosophy and ways of thinking into a four-year curriculum in order to elicit creativity is neither easily produced nor easily measured. in honor of the wealth and fruitfulness of creativity research available at our fingertips, quantitative data are offered where possible as supportive not conclusive, and anecdotal elements are viewed as important and valuable. physics education at roanoke changes to our undergraduate program began seven years ago when a physics colleague entered my office and plopped down in an extra chair. we were discouraged about program's future after learning that only about 15 students enter roanoke per year with an interest in physics or engineering (through a dual-degree program at a nearby phd-granting institution). we were so focused on increasing the numbers of incoming students with an interest in physics that we missed the obvious. since the average number of physics majors over the past ten years had been 3.6 +/3.1 students (2003-2012, with one aberrant year of 11 majors), we had overlooked the fact that fostering physics curiosity in only one third of the entering students would nearly double the number of physics majors. we began to entertain the question of “what might our program look like?” if we creatively responded to the students who were already coming to roanoke with an intrinsic interest in physics. that conversation and the resulting questions were advanced by a regular, internal program review process. our physics program faculty met several times as a result of the review and agreed on the planned curricular changes. as a result of these philosophical and curricular changes, the number of physics majors at roanoke has seen definite positive increases in the average number of program graduates (e.g., 7.6 +/4.0 from 2013-2017). instituting change within a curriculum is not an individual escapade; it requires agreement and collaboration from all the physics faculty. in fact, it is also the students themselves that must display an openness to any modifications and additions that are offered. fortunately, the roanoke physics group faculty are collegial, gifted, and committed. the administration of the college is also supportive and does not hinder creative thinking. that said, instituting the opportunity for creativity as described above has much to do with adopting a mindset, committing passionately to that mindset, and then allowing that mindset to permeate the culture. in order to introduce the ways in which the roanoke physics curriculum reflects a commitment to fostering creativity through curricular implementation, the “4p” nomenclature of rhodes (1961) for creative categories is utilized. in his model, “process” is introduced as a separate component along with “products,” “persons,” and “press” (environment). here, the “process” of new curricular elements are introduced is as a means of re-awakening creative thinking within the realms of persons, products, and press. persons the emphasis on persons within the physics program begins with the “group,” rather than a curriculum structure with programmatic guidelines and gatekeepers. although part of a multi-program department (“mcsp” = mathematics, computer science, and physics) the “group” is defined by an amorphous community rather than programs, majors, or research interests. the group structure implies that there are several entry points (and exit 76 global education review 5(1) ways) to the learning of physics. the physics faculty and majors are the primary participants in the physics group, and we all take responsibilities to shepherd research programs, extracurricular science-focus groups, sponsored events, and common spaces. hidden physicist mindset from a more curricular perspective, all physics group faculty are committed to the idea that a focus on the problem-solving nature of physics will benefit our majors regardless of their specific future endeavors. resisting the stratifying epistemology of being a “mathscience person” (which is used frequently by both our majors and our non-majors), the physics faculty views each individual physics major as a unique personal narrative. by this we recognize that each student comes with a previous trajectory that shapes their academic curiosities and their potential contributions to the community. employment statistics show there many “hidden physicists” in society with the high retention of physics majors in the general non-stem workforce (heron & mcneil, 2016; hunt, 2013). in attempting to answer the question, “how might a student integrate physics learning?,” physics group faculty partner with the student to speculate about their own unique future trajectory in a creative and empowering manner. to aid in answering this question, the physics group has recently augmented our curriculum with conversation opportunities. these conversation opportunities are in addition to the close, familial-like advising relationships that we couch in the important language of mentoring. freshman colloquium the freshman physics and engineering colloquium is a half-credit, exploratory course emphasizing overarching themes in physics research and problem-solving. grading for the course is based on completion of assignments and quality of reflections, where the overall grade is assigned on a “pass-fail” basis. we discovered that many of our freshmen entering with an interest in physics never make it to the newtonian introduction to the physics major. by instituting a first-semester course where students of similar interests gather, we began to form a community of learners. because the atmosphere of the course is non-competitive and based on intrinsic interests, we attempt to maximize the creative capacity of each student. although a bit diffuse in the breadth of coverage, the course emphasizes personal qualities (e.g., learning styles, study habits), mathematics (order-of-magnitude estimates, dimensional analysis, algebra), and general physics (fermi problems, modeling, new discoveries, and "physics in the everyday"). throughout the semester, the freshman students are introduced to every faculty member and several different groups of students (e.g., those interested in research, those double-majoring in other fields). since introducing the onesemester colloquium, we have increased our enrollment in the newtonian physics class by almost 100% (2013-2017, 23 +/3, from 12 +/4 in 2008-2012). the course has also helped to form a tighter community that aids in social events, science outreach, and persistence in the major. junior review a second, related addition to our major is the junior review, an informal interview involving at least two faculty members and the individual physics major. here, we are able to partner with the students as they attempt to verbalize the directions in which their interests have heightened and/or waned. questions that invite the student into self-reflection form the backbone of the conversation (e.g., “in what ways has your interest in physics increased cultivating experimental innovation 77 and/or decreased?”). it is also an opportunity to encourage our majors into “high-impact practices” that accord with deep learning: research mentored by faculty, supportive minors and/or concentrations, and off-campus internships (heron & mcneil, 2016). for students who maintain an intrinsic interest in the discipline while not earning high grades, we are able to invite them personally to consider the bachelor of arts route to a physics degree. although students may initially view this route as a sign of failure, we encourage them to view this as a “yes-and” moment in their personal trajectory (alon, 2009). in his ted talk, alon (2013) elaborated on the similarities between improvisation theater and conducting science in that creative thinking is maximized when new avenues of exploration are not hindered by presumptive assumptions (like, “only real physics majors get a bs”). currently, we not only have physics alumni in ms, phd programs and post-doc positions closely-related to physics, but also physical therapy and veterinary schools, ems/firefighter chief, school teachers, and science spokespersons. in a spirit of openness and collaboration, the physics faculty aspire to partner with each student in exploring the unique way(s) that physics education might impact their learning and their future. products traditionally projects often come at the end of the semester as summative applications and/or opportunities to showcase learning. in this way, end-of-the-semester projects symbolize products that demonstrate the learning we expect students to acquire. products within our undergraduate program, and common to most physics programs according to j-tupp, take the form of posters, oral presentations with/out power point, written elements, and/or capstone elements in the form of teaching or building. given the importance of products within the development of creativity, an important goal emerges when a teaching cohort decides how their program handles the assignment, delivery, and assessment of these products. upper-level, in-course projects at roanoke, physics faculty have explicitly included more opportunities for products in the upper-level core curriculum as detailed in our program assessment. each course at the 300 and 400-levels requires either a report or presentation. (obviously, some courses require more.) viewing these student-developed products in a creative way means providing the students with a vision of freedom and exploration. providing them with class-time to brainstorm throughout the semester by pushing some content attainment on-line, either through audio/video or online notes, honors the project assignment as important. inviting the students to choose any connection so long as it is interesting to them gives precedence to the learning itself. placing the importance (and bulk of grading weight) on connections and extensions, allows the students to make mistakes without the accusation of failure (e.g., did the product tie together clearly one concept inside the class with one outside?). i also require nonpresenting students to offer (written) feedback as a sizable portion of their presentation grade. therefore, i can take the feedback and anonymously (and judicially) offer it to the presenter in a meaningful and hopefully encouraging manner, fostering their creativity. two specific examples will attempt to show the potential capability for upper-level presentations: 1. a particular student with a particular interest in engineering was enrolled in a biophysics course. due to our small numbers we are often cajoling students to take any and every elective offered. for the project, the student became enamored with the inherent strength of 78 global education review 5(1) the mantis shrimp arm. rather than just reporting on its suggested impact power, the student built a spring-release arm with wooden dowels and springs. s/he went to the extent of measuring the spring constants of the model and its corresponding impact pressure. then the student worked backward to estimate the spring constant of a similarly-designed system whose impact pressure was equal to the mantis shrimp. in our advanced laboratory course, there are several different project opportunities in a variety of formats. 2. toward the end of the course, the students have the freedom to choose any particular item of interest so long as it pertains to measurement and testing that they themselves have conducted. many students choose a past summer research experience, and there are many opportunities for students to share their newly-acquired expertise. sometimes it is not clear what project students of nominal classroom gpa will choose. there was great delight and interest when one of our weaker academic students presented his/her interest in sound design instrumentation. everyone in the room was captivated by the presentation of quantitative measurements and music samples that the student had collected. as i partner with this student in order to finish the programmatic requirements successfully, an opportunity of previous success exists in order to provide encouragement toward a future possibility of graduation. capstone oral exam science education is often associated with fear of failure, which can lead to hesitation or alteration in pursuit of further knowledge, particularly in physics (haussler & hoffman, 2000). although there are complicated factors that lead to associated feelings, we see these possibilities most in our upper-level majors around the capstone oral exam. ideally at roanoke, this physics interview provides an opportunity for the faculty to gauge the level of attainment for a broad content range. personally, i have experienced my own oral exam at the undergraduate and graduate levels, and from a student perspective it can seem like an interrogation. now, having been on both sides of the table, it seems that professor's intent to help with follow-up questions, borders on the adversarial at times. it has caused the physics group faculty to question the efficacy of the yearly routine. while we continue to employ the oral exam in the capstone course in the major, we now invite students to begin with something they find interesting about physics or its applications. by beginning in a place where students feel comfortable, has been helpful to us to hear what they have learned during their time in the physics major. as they explain, we probe their chosen topic to find the basic physics concepts bubbling up. asking the student, “what forces are at play here?,” or “how is energy exchanged in this system?,” provides a smooth space that disarms fear and invites curiosity where new thoughts might germinate. rather than the content or the problem's solution taking center stage, the interaction centers on the student's aspiration and becoming as a lifetime-learner and an equal community member. cultivating experimental innovation 79 press ('environment') i believe that students will gain confidence in making their own unique path when they see others assuming vulnerability and risk. for this to occur, an environment of empowerment and camaraderie must be introduced to the student. i think this must happen for the student on a personal level (“i am a contributing member of a community that supports me.”) as well as a broad meta-level (“i am one following in a tradition of those before me.”). in the roanoke physics program, we attempt to address both levels in specific ways not already mentioned. science outreach to the public community-building is a significant component of the program already mentioned (e.g., the freshman physics colloquium). another way that we attempt to build community is through student groups and science outreach to the public. while the public's science knowledge is commensurate with similar developed countries, scientific literacy among the general public continues to remain at an intermediate level, particularly about topics pertaining to physics, for example, climate change, nuclear energy (pew research center, 2015). science outreach not only serves the common good by helping to raise awareness at an early age, since most of the outreach is carried out with a k-8 population, but outreach also empowers the undergraduates because they are the master-apprentices. when the roanoke physics group began a concerted science outreach effort ten years ago, most of the events were faculty-organized and led. we felt primarily as though we were burdening students to attend one more thing. because of the fortuitous opportunity of having a series of responsible and eager undergraduate leaders, outreach has been relatively smooth in transforming the outreach program into a student-led effort. as the undergraduates succeed in this role, they are able to take on greater challenges through adding new tools to their repertoire and by communicating directly with community leaders to initiate more opportunities. one highlight was learning about a student-organized outreach completely apart from my planning or knowledge. the event took place early on a saturday morning with several of our undergraduates, and the event included a trebuchet built by two undergraduates as a supplement to the day's activities. it was a great pleasure to receive a warm thank-you note in recognition of the undergraduate's excellent leadership and adept communication. with some of those students now graduated, the tradition is passed onto the remaining undergraduates to continue the outreach for the next year. a second outreach experience pertains to the recent total solar eclipse. because roanoke was not in the path of totality, it was my intention to organize a student trip into an area where the total eclipse could be observed. responding to an email solicitation from regional astronomy faculty, the physics group became the only official eclipse ambassadors at the entrance to a national park in the area. a little fear-stricken myself, and never having led an astronomy outreach of this magnitude, we offered the student experience to observe and to assist others as an opportunity of a lifetime. although not as heavily attended by our majors as i had hoped, the several hundred public were certainly appreciative as they observed the hours before and after totality on the six fullyfunctioning telescopes that the roanoke physics group maintained. because the four current physics majors presented their experiences to many of their peers after their return, the news articles about our ambassadorship and the images of the event will live into the future. experiences such as these provide bridges for new students as possibilities of what might become as a student embraces physics as a major. 80 global education review 5(1) history and philosophy of science as a result of the external review that accompanies our regular internal programmatic review, it was clear that another formative laboratory experience would benefit our physics majors. because our advanced laboratory at the time focused on many experiments associated with modern physics, it was a straightforward process to modify the advanced laboratory course into a modern physics laboratory. however, many questions remained about the structure of the modern laboratory and what would become of the advanced laboratory course. it was a fruitful season of higher-order critical thinking within the physics group faculty. as a result of the developments, physics majors must take a laboratory course that highlights the discipline expertise of each faculty (advanced laboratory) as well as a course that highlights the contextual science histories of famous physicists (modern physics laboratory). it is a common mistake to view eminent scientists in history as those who just “got it” or who were destined for greatness. the linear procession of most discipline-specific textbooks weakens their accuracy of the way that science is actually conducted and/or the manner in which many discoveries actually took place. certainly, that is the manner in which most physics textbooks portray scientists in their biographical sketches (niaz, 2008). this includes textbooks and science history reconstructions presented in latin america and in south america (arriassecq & greca, 2007; niaz, 2011). the history and philosophy of science (hps) provides a great humanizing infusion into the curriculum of the physics major, where students read about scientists and the process of science through a lens of iterative development rather than instantaneous inspiration. in the modern physics course at roanoke, a significant portion of the laboratory section is spent studying the lives of the scientists who formulated the framework for the foundational physical constants that the students seek to measure. physics majors begin to identify with the confessions of great scientists who struggled with self-confidence, personal hardship, and/or cultural biases. as undergraduates understand that great scientists were human too, students can better view themselves along the continuum of development as an aspiring-scientist. philosophical foundations while much of the curricular structures previously discussed were born out of pragmatic concerns over the low number of physics majors, or the manner in which the physics group faculty formed a response to the results of the internal program review, philosophical idealism determined the manner in which the implementation took place. philosophy forms the foundation on which the academic program is situated. philosophy scaffolds the new structures as they are implemented and practiced by the community. the following three philosophers all have a scientific tenor to their thoughts regarding creativity, whether or not they consider(ed) themselves practicing scientists. bohm's creative posture david bohm was a theoretical physicist and a philosopher of science (1917-1992), sometimes touted as one of the greatest american-born, scientific minds. although other aspects of his scientific career may stand out, e.g., he aided in the origination of the concept of the plasma state of matter, bohm is often remembered within the physics community for his reformulation of quantum mechanics as a “hidden variable theory” (bohm, 1952). this novel formulation was not well-received by the physics community, and in fact it was basically ignored along with bohm's professional career as a physicist. as a result of his search for a deeper reality cultivating experimental innovation 81 undergirding all observed processes, bohm spent a considerable amount of his later life and career constructing a framework of holism, the implicate order, which included art, science, and religion. on creativity (bohm, 2004) represents much of his summative yet distilled thought on the topic of human holism as it pertains to the development of a creative personality. bohm's thoughts about the risktaking (activity) required for creativity support specifically the measures introduced above. emphasizing what others have rightly mentioned, bohm doesn't unambiguously correlate intelligence with a creative mind. rather there is an imperative toward a receptive posture framed by humility, vulnerability, and risk. of utmost importance, “a person shall not be inclined to impose her/his preconceptions on the fact as s/he sees it. rather, s/he must be able to learn something new …,” (bohm 2004, p. 4). bohm (2004) further expounds, “real originality and creativity imply … that one is ready in each case to inquire for oneself as to whether there is or is not a fundamentally significant difference between the actual fact and one's preconceived notions that opens up the possibility for creative and original work,'' (p. 7). it is the sensitivity and awareness to something new and different that is really important ''especially when the latter [i.e., the different] seems to threaten what is familiar, precious, secure, or otherwise dear to us,'' (p. 6). closely related to the sensitivity to one's preconceived notions of what is familiar and secure, bohm noted “that we are afraid to make mistakes,” (bohm, 2004, p. 5). whether it be a fear of “the image of 'self',” (p. 5), “upsetting the existing state of affairs,” (p. 21), or “los[ing] my comfortable and safe job,” (p. 28), these can all lead the maturing and more reflective human away from new and different lines of inquiry. according to bohm, the result of this fear is the “mechanical state of mind” which is “atrophied,” “asleep,” and “deadened,” (pg. 20). in bohm's view, the real detriment to creativity is the mechanical habits of thinking and being that propagate from a fear of failure. the narrowing effects of fear on our mental capacities are documented across a spectrum of real-world experiences regarding the creative mind (e.g., catmull, 2014). in summary, bohm's creative keys accord with the recent findings of tyagi, et al. (2017) that link the ability to engage in social risktaking with increased measures of creativity. bohm's imperative to “childlikeness” maintains an openness, a lack of fear, and a love for learning that supersede common social cues for acceptance. the educational and life experiences of undergraduate students provide serious roadblocks to the path that bohm suggests and research supports. in hopes of creating passage, the communal emphasis of the roanoke college physics curriculum begins with valuing equally each individual in the freshman colloquium and extends to a unique learning path through the junior review process. to support the development of bohm's posture for a creative state of mind, there must be a vocabulary and a praxis that provides alternatives to the mechanicalness that oxidizes and calcifies creativity. gilles deleuze invites the potential for such qualities through the language of freedom and flexibility. deleuze's creative vocabulary gilles deleuze (1925-1995) was a french, poststructuralist philosopher who also incorporated a significant amount of scientific terminology into his work (particularly geological and mathematical). though deleuze was perhaps most famous for his volume a thousand plateaus, co-authored with felix guattari, (deleuze & guattari 1987), i have also benefited from his lecture transcript “what is the creative act?” (deleuze, 2004) and the conclusion to what is philosophy? (deleuze & guattari, 1994. as testimony to the depth of thought in deleuze, 82 global education review 5(1) his work has impacted significantly a wide field of disciplines, including psychology, education, political theory, multiculturalism, gender studies, and film criticism. deleuze's affinity for creativity is revealed as it was defined earlier through the “novel and useful” definition since he summarized philosophy as pertaining to the “interesting, remarkable” (novel) “or important,” (useful, deleuze & guattari, 1991/1994, p. 82). as may (2005) has rightly summarized, the importance of deleuze's alternative vocabulary of concepts “lie not within the truth or falsity of their claims but with the vistas for thinking and living they open up for us” (p. 22). these playful yet incisive philosophical vistas encourage a personal flexibility and freedom that foster the creative activity of intellectual risk-taking. flexibility any individual attempting to answer the question “how might one live?” begins (and continues) the journey of “becoming.” this one word encompasses most plainly the landscape of deleuze's conceptual continuum, providing fertile ground for the development of a more creative mindset. in opposition to the stationary “being” of discovery, of something waiting to be found, “becoming” implies incompleteness and flexibility. concretely, deleuze (1962/2008) stated “there is no being beyond becoming … becoming is the affirmation of being,” (p. 23-24). although early development in deleuze used the word “becoming” alone (may, 2003), the potency of the word is captured by deleuze's habit of pairing the “becoming-” prefix with almost any noun (e.g., becoming-other, becoming-woman, becoming-minority, becoming-animal). the creative possibility of becoming was summarized by may (2003): “if the concepts of becoming … work, it will be because … they move us in the direction of possibilities that had before been beyond our ken,” (p. 151). within context, many of our students come from backgrounds where they were labeled as “science and math persons” as the high school curriculum was simplistic and rote. those static associations, “identities” in deleuze's terms, are called into question the first time students fail a test or even can't solve a homework problem. many, especially male students, are thrown into a quagmire of academic despair. alternatively, some undergraduates arrive at roanoke having always thought physics was for “other people,” never having followed through with their curiosity about what might physics contain for them. in the physics group, the word “aspiring” has similar connotations to deleuze's becoming, in the sense that we (faculty and students) are all “aspiring-physicists,” “aspiring-astronomers,” “aspiring-creatives,” and “aspiring-adults.” we have begun a journey and we have not yet arrived; we are becoming. we are aspiring to understand more deeply and thoroughly than we do currently. i use this language about myself as well as the students in order to remind them that i am a person also in process (on nomadic pilgrimage, deleuze might say). the language of incompleteness provides enough flexibility to restore a sense of hope for future student success despite their past history with physics and/or mathematics. freedom while there is perhaps no time in a student's life where more freedom is available, traditional physics curricula, and science education schema in general, maintain heavy dosages of memorization, regurgitation, and formulaic compartmentalization. as mentioned earlier, discipline-specific textbooks at the undergraduate level are presented in a linear format that doesn't accord with the historical process of science. these formats for learning cultivating experimental innovation 83 physics lack creativity and imagination. deleuze described these intellectual and physical spaces as “royal”, “striated”, and “gridded.” it is these sorts of spaces that elicit “information” in the form of “order-words” which lead to “system(s) of control.” within these contexts, students “are told what ... to believe … and not even believe, but pretend like we believe. we are not asked to believe but to behave as if we did” (deleuze & guattari, 1994). as one might imagine, these were not presented by deleuze as creative environments and relationships. against this historical and traditional backdrop, aspiringcreative educators inquire – how does an instructor organize a curriculum that does not issue order-words and information, while still engendering commitment to a particular field so that accurate ideas are produced within the unique individual? deleuze suggested an answer to the question of approach through his introduction of the “pass-word” concept that held out the potential for freedom. deleuze alluded to the manner in which the word is spoken, as well as the context in which the information is provided, as some influence over whether the utterance is an order-word or a pass-word. deleuze and guattari (1980/1987) explain beautifully in the ending to the “postulates of linguistics” chapter: there are pass-words beneath order-words. words that pass, words that are components of passage, whereas order-words mark stoppages or organized, stratified compositions. … it is necessary to extract one from the other—to transform the compositions of order into components of passage. (p. 110) while undergraduate physics curricula present topics in an ordered manner, instructors also recognize the need for freedom of passage into more creative spaces. the manner in which a curriculum is passed from instructor to student, or rather the manner in which the curriculum is shared between apprentice and master, matters greatly in it becoming an order or pass-word (bogue, 2013). metaphorically, it is possible that the undergraduate physics curriculum stands as a judge, sentencing unworthiness to those who are not informed, while controlling those who “believe” or “act as if they believe” to move through the turnstiles onto the next prescripted step of graduate studies. what physics group faculty prefer is that the curriculum accompanies a smooth space and issues pass-words toward a sense of becoming within each individual, while also encouraging original ideas from their own freely-chosen commitment. it is my conjecture that these types of educational programs offer a recovered sense of creative potential and help produce the fruit of experimental innovation. galenson's creative types david galenson (1951–) is an american economist who has undertaken a study of art and creativity through an economic lens. by correlating the peak earning for an artist's work with the artist's age at the time of composition, galenson has popularized a new dichotomy for creative personalities. across several different genres of the traditional fine arts (painting, sculpting, music, literature), galenson argued for a separation between conceptual and experimental innovation. seeking “to record their perceptions” and working “tentatively by trial error,” experimental innovators “generally spend their careers pursuing a single objective” and “build their skills gradually,” (galenson, 2010, p. 6-7). contrastingly, conceptual innovators peak earlier and utilize art as a vehicle “to express their ideas or emotions,” (p. 7). for example, picasso was a visionary painter whose peak-value art was created when he was in his 20's (conceptual), whereas cezanne's most valuable artwork was created when he was in his 84 global education review 5(1) 60's due to his methodical sense of incompleteness (experimental). though this view of separation of creative types along the difference of personalities is somewhat contested (accominotti, 2009), galenson attempted to show its value by the breadth of creative innovation to which it applies. it is not surprising that galenson's primal correlation involved peak public recognition gained (either monetary or commendation) for the innovative art in question. certainly the work of galenson in delineating creative personalities fits fluidly with the physics myth that all future nobel laureates need to establish themselves by age 21. contrary to that myth, in galenson's terms it is a mistake to portray all great scientists as conceptual innovators. nobel scientists like robert millikan could certainly be categorized as experimental innovators, as those whose expertise and recognition emerged from a career of tinkering. while possibly students at roanoke college will never achieve innovation on the scale of millikan, creativity models include localized effects of novelty and usefulness. within the context of small, liberal arts physics education at the undergraduate level, reformulating creativity frameworks to include the responsibility to facilitate, recover, and restore creative processes as it pertains to establishing galenson's experimental innovator type. given harsh circumstances, life experiences, or negative educational environments, the synthesis of these ideas into a small, liberal arts physics program equals onepart family (collaborative), one-part intellectual development (personal responsibility), and onepart balance of broadened possibilities (honor all trajectories). extensions i have tried to show the tangible ways that the roanoke physics program has sought to invigorate the major curriculum in order to facilitate the creative growth of students. to think that this nomadic pilgrimage of curriculum revision only impacts the students and not the instructors would be hubris. below i explain some of the tangible ways this process and this study have impacted my own life and the manner in which i think of myself as “masterapprentice,” including my own continuing journey of “aspiring-teacher.” criterion for failure one of the difficult imperatives to fully embrace at the undergraduate level is the invitation (and possibly the requirement) to fail as a proper means of learning. doing something new always feels risky and uncertain, and ideally we would like for our students to “fail” on the homework but not feel lost, and then learn from their mistakes in order to make amends on the exam. brené brown (2015) reminds us that “feeling vulnerable is at the core of difficult emotions like fear … but it's also the birthplace of … innovation, and creativity” (p. 275). although bohm directed us to place a love of learning before all else, it is difficult to implement that in an academic setting where grades and opinion of others still matter quite greatly. failure is often viewed as a flaw that results in shame, rather than more likely a lack of experience which is expected. brown (2015) comments: “yes, maybe we lost our job or screwed up a project, but what makes that story so painful is what we tell ourselves about our own self-worth and value,” (p. 75). rather than just trying to lean against a fear of failure with only verbal encouragement, allan (2013) issued a challenge to develop cultivating experimental innovation 85 criteria for failure. how do we know when we've given an honest and whole-hearted attempt, one from which failing can be accepted as part of the learning process? i think the following questions properly outline a true attempt at a physics problem: was it an honest effort?; did i try for at least 15 continuous minutes?; did i attempt the problem on consecutive days?; did i look at the units of quantities and attempt to combine terms dimensionally? for future assigned problems at selected points in physics coursework, i plan to ask students to rate themselves on the “failure rubric” provided by the questions above. in a world where it is so easy to be diverted by the next thing, truly attempting something and standing a chance of failing is a worthy alternative to running away from possible defeat. along similar lines, smith college has recently implemented a “failure curriculum” at the liberal arts, undergraduate level (bennett, 2017). the role of expertise within a program of curricular alteration and substitution, and already limited by the liberal arts requirements, there is a valid question about whether or not ample coursework is offered in order to attain mastery and/or expertise. we often tell our physics students that if creativity is breaking the rules (or discovering new rules), then we must know the rules before we can break them. both bohm and deleuze imply that the precursors to creativity, bohm's “flashes of insight” and deleuze's “ideas” arise within a deep and steady commitment to a particular field of study. in a world where academic depth and intellectual rigor are often sacrificed in the name of diversification, is the physics program at roanoke compromising too much disciplinary expertise in order to increase participation? is it possible that the program is hindering the growth of creativity in its majors because there is not an ample amount of expertise offered? these are valid questions that continue to offer counter balance to the current thinking and revising. in sacrificing depth in order to offer an arguably more flexible curriculum, the physics group faculty has placed an emphasis on developing and fostering a creative mindset. as increased participation necessitates a greater number of course offerings it is the hope of the physics group to offer the same curriculum qualities while also adding content depth. conclusions and limitations the physics group at roanoke college has experienced sustained growth in the number of students enrolled in introductory classes, the number of physics majors, and the breadth of majors' trajectories after graduation. this growth coincided with the introduction of programmatic alterations that better establish community, encourage student intrinsic interests, and foster creative thinking about their futures as aspiring-scientists. all of this programmatic implementation was carried out within the context of developing experimental innovation, where students are challenged with openness as to “how might one integrate physics” and to take risks that lead along increased creative avenues. as a physics faculty, we seek to model this posture and mindset within the context of “do with me,” facilitating creative collaboration and partnership. the study is limited by its scope, having shown to be somewhat successful within a narrow timeframe and only at one particular type of college in one instance. while many of the studies reveal tendencies that are truly cross-cultural, particularly with physics education, it is somewhat expected that any alterations along similar lines to these should consider wisely cultural differences (sharma, ahluwalia, & sharma 2013). 86 global education review 5(1) author note this research was supported in-part by the roanoke college faculty scholar program. the author is also thankful for the physics group faculty and the mathematics, computer science and physics department. brent adkins provided useful and enlightening conversation regarding the use of deleuze. references accominotti, f. 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(2017). the risky side of creativity: domain specific risk taking in creative individuals. frontiers in psychology, 8:145, 1-9. doi: 10.3389/fpsyg.2017.00145 about the author matthew c. fleenor, phd, is an associate professor at roanoke college, where he serves as the program coordinator of the physics group. currently, matt collaborates with nuclear physicists on the problem of accurately imaging materials for nuclear security applications. in the classroom, matt maintains that education is a continual process of deepening relationship between knower and known through asking better questions. 69 global education review 5(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: rentzou, konstantina & daglas, georgios (2018). are we ready for integrated ecec systems? greek in-service early childhood educators’ level of preparation for implementing educare systems. global education review, 5 (2), 69-84. are we ready for integrated ecec systems? greek in-service early childhood educators’ level of preparation for implementing educare1 systems konstanntina rentzou european university of cyprus georgios daglas municipality of nikaia agios ioannis rentis abstract greece is one of the many countries, which still utilize a split early childhood education and care (ecec) system. in fact, this dichotomy characterizes not only preschool programs, but also higher education institutions which train pre-service ecec educators. recently, greek government’s organization for ecec organized an open debate for the adoption of a “unified national framework for early childhood education and care”. although this initiative was greeted enthusiastically by the association of childcare workers, the coordinating body of kindergarten teachers and university departments reacted negatively and openly debated childcare workers’ pedagogical competence to assume the educational aspects of integrated ecec systems. in addition, relevant announcements indicate kindergarten teachers’ effort to refuse any connection with care. in the context of the present study a questionnaire was administered to 233 ecec professionals representing all professional groups working in the greek ecec sector to explore their attitudes about the content and the effectiveness of their training in terms of implementing systems that combine education and care. results showed that professional groups believe that they are well prepared in most aspects of ecec theory and practice and revealed significant differences among groups. further, weaknesses in initial education courses were revealed regarding preparation for implementing integrated ecec practices. research results when interpreted in conjunction with reaction to the public debate suggest that greece is not ready to implement an integrated ecec system due to various impediments (political, corporate, discursive etc.) and to the unawareness of what integrated ecec is. keywords early childhood education and care, ecec dichotomy, early childhood education policy, early childhood educators, educare approach, greece. introduction early childhood education and care (hereafter referred to as ecec) can be considered as one of the most fragmented professions since it presents a picture of “inconsistencies, incoherence, parallelisms and discontinuity” corresponding author konstantina rentzou, school of humanities, social and education sciences, department of education sciences, european university cyprus, 6 diogenous str, 2404 engomi, p.o.box 22006, 1516 nicosia, cyprus email: ntinar@hotmail.com https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 70 global education review 5(2) (haddad, 2006, p. 3), both in terms of ecec services and of teacher preparation systems. central to this heterogeneity are not only ideological and historical reasons (haddad, 2006; caldwell, 1989) but also discursive reasons which stem from the “blurring of boundaries between the terms care, development and education” (macfarlane and lewis, 2004, p. 51). as a result, dichotomous ecec systems dominate around the globe. the dichotomous system is grounded in a policy approach that separates care and education, a polarization articulated by age range, with younger children being enrolled in services that provide mainly care (childcare), and older children attending educational institutions (pre-primary), which emphasize preparation for primary school. in such systems there are often different regulatory agencies at national level, divided into ministries; and a formal curriculum normally established only for older children. qualification requirements for staff differ depending on the type of service and conditions of access may vary greatly, with a legal attendance requirement usually only for older children (lindeboom & buiskool, 2013; european commission/eacea/eurydice/eurostat, 2014). the same dichotomy also characterizes the training systems of ecec professionals. in countries with split ecec systems, there is usually a difference between the qualifications required to work with younger children and those needed to work with older children (oecd, 2012). those working with older children have a clear educational or pedagogical role, whereas those working with younger children have a caring or paramedical role (van laere, peeters and vandenbroeck, 2012).the picture is becoming even more blurred since various types of professionals may provide education and/or care to preschoolers and “staff performing similar roles may also have different types of job titles” (european commission/eacea/eurydice/eurostat, 2014, 95). however, the integrated and holistic approach to ecec provision and training attracts increasingly more attention and has become a growing trend. in terms of providing ecec, eu special committees recommend that countries should move towards an integration of ecec governance structures and emphasize an integrated approach to education and care, considering children's needs in a holistic way, to ensure and enhance the quality of these structures (lindeboom & buiskool, 2013; european commission, 2011a; european commission, 2011b; oecd, 2015). in terms of ecec professionals’ qualifications and training, research results underscore the link between ecec quality (oecd, 2012; 2015) and teacher qualifications, including staff who can work within a holistic framework, that understand the concepts of care and education to be interdependent and on equal footing (peeters et al., 2016). the present study explores how well the dichotomous training system in greece has prepared different professional groups working in ecec programs to provide both education and care for preschool children. to meet this aim, we obtained the perceptions of professional groups working in greek preschool settings (both kindergarten schools and infant/child centers) on the content and effectiveness of their early years training course. more precisely, the present study addresses the following research questions: 1. how well prepared are greek ecec professionals on various dimensions of ecec theory and practice? 2. how ecec professionals’ preparedness on various dimensions is affected by professional role? 3. are there ecec professional groups that are better prepared to provide care, and others to provide education? 4. to what extend are ecec professionals prepared to provide ecec programs that combine education and care? research context: the case of greece in greece, different agencies are responsible for providing social welfare, free education and child care and “there is no centralized agency designated to provide care and assistance and to supervise the various services provided by the state” (law library of congress, september, 2007, p. 97). figure 1 presents the structure of the greek ecec system as well as the dichotomy in terms of ecec professionals’ initial training. 71 global education review 5(2) figure 1. organization of ecec in greece in terms of dichotomy in the greek training system we must stress that greece is among the few european countries (france and italy follow a similar pattern) in which two different professional titles are used to “distinguish between similar staff working in different settings” (european commission /eacea/eurydice/eurostat, 2014, 95-96). those working with younger children in infant/child centers are called early childhood educators/childcare workers (vrefonipiokomoi), while those working with older children aged 4 to 6, in kindergarten schools are called teachers (kindergarten). further greece is an exception since the length of preparation for educators and teachers is the same (with different content) (european commission /eacea/eurydice /eurostat, 2014, 95-96). thus, although initially the departments of the higher educational institutions (atei) were named as ‘department of early childhood education and care’ (tmima vrefonipiokomias) currently all three atei departments in greece have been renamed into ‘department of early childhood education’ (tmima prosxolikis agogis) ², following the university departments which are called ‘department of early childhood education’ (tmima ekpaideusis kai agogis stin prosxoliki ilikia) or ‘department of nursery education’ (tmima nipiagogon). so, we have the same length of studies and equivalent titles for early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers. however, atei departments are positioned in the faculty of health and welfare professions, whereas university departments are positioned in the faculty of education. this segregation has resulted into considering atei departments as ones which focus on children’s development and care rather than on children’s education, as university departments do. as macfarlane & lewis, (2004, p. 58) suggested “in foucauldian terms, childcare was strongly governed by the humanist and psychological discourses, which produced society’s view of health and welfare. with respect to childcare, these discourses acted to privilege development over education”. 72 global education review 5(2) the present study: current initiatives for ecec policy reforms in greece although traditionally, greece had a dichotomous system of childcare and early education, in 2016 the government’s organization for ecec organized an open colloquy about the adoption of a “unified national framework for early childhood education and care”, causing a heated political debate. in the invitation to the open colloquy, reference was made to the importance of ecec for children’s overall development as well as to eu member states’ initiatives for unified ecec systems (birth to entry to primary school) (http://www.syriza.gr/article/id/63855/prosklh sh-syriza-proscholikhs-agwghs-nepaideias.html#.vymbw_mltiv). the pan-hellenic association of early childhood educators paece (the association of early childhood educators working in child and infant/child centers), welcomes this initiative enthusiastically and an urgent announcement is published on paece’s website which refers both on the problems infant/child centers face due to the recession and to the need for unifying higher education training systems (atei and universities)(http://www.pasyvn.gr/en/news/3 54-epeigon-enimerosi-melon.html). however, this initiative drew immediate negative reactions from the coordinating body of kindergarten teachers as well as from university departments. the coordinating body of kindergarten teachers released an announcement that referred to a “national monologue” (https://sites.google.com/site/syntonistikonipia gogon/home/oethnikosmonologostouypourgeio upaideias) rather than “colloquy” and suggested that “the adoption of a unified national ecec framework for children 0-6 years old, would degrade the quality of ecec, and that the integration of child care and early education systems, which have distinct roles, would create a chaotic situation in education, the consequences of which would be disastrous for children and for the educational system of the country” (https://www.alfavita.gr/arthron/syntonistikonipiagogon-dihroni-ypohreotiki-prosholikiagogi). other announcements as well see the light of publicity which refer to infant/child centers (as opposed to kindergarten schools) as the place where “the child will go in order to play, to laugh, to eat”, as a “parking place” where we leave children because we do not have another place to leave them. kindergarten is not (as opposed to child and infant/child centers) a place where the child is going to learn songs, games and mess around without meaning and context (http://www.ipaideia.gr/giati-einaikathoristikos-o-rolos-tou-nipiagogeiou.htm) ³. rather surprisingly, university departments also reacted to the government’s proposal for a unified ecec. the department of preschool education at the university of crete uploaded the department’s position about the unification of ecec and the training of “childcare workers” and “kindergarten teachers” (pedagogical department of preschool education, march 28, 2016). according to the department, the unification of ecec would lead to the collapse of both services (kindergarten schools and infant/child centers) and especially to the collapse of the educational services (kindergarten schools) due to the fact that “education will be provided by professionals who are not educators but child-minders….[and] who do not possess the knowledge to carry out the educational work successfully and effectively” (pedagogical department of preschool education, march 28, 2016, pp. 2-3). the rector of the department of preschool education at the university of florina, also sent a letter with the department’s position towards the integration of ecec systems to kindergarten the teachers’ coordinating body (https://www.facebook.com/syntonistikonipiag ogon/posts/1059916647418066). as stated in the letter the integration of two distinct scientific areas is a stimulus for further deregulation and disorganization of professional qualifications and therefore professional http://www.syriza.gr/article/id/63855/prosklhsh-syriza-proscholikhs-agwghs-ne-paideias.html#.vymbw_mltiv http://www.syriza.gr/article/id/63855/prosklhsh-syriza-proscholikhs-agwghs-ne-paideias.html#.vymbw_mltiv http://www.syriza.gr/article/id/63855/prosklhsh-syriza-proscholikhs-agwghs-ne-paideias.html#.vymbw_mltiv http://www.pasyvn.gr/en/news/354-epeigon-enimerosi-melon.html http://www.pasyvn.gr/en/news/354-epeigon-enimerosi-melon.html https://sites.google.com/site/syntonistikonipiagogon/home/oethnikosmonologostouypourgeioupaideias https://sites.google.com/site/syntonistikonipiagogon/home/oethnikosmonologostouypourgeioupaideias https://sites.google.com/site/syntonistikonipiagogon/home/oethnikosmonologostouypourgeioupaideias https://www.alfavita.gr/arthron/syntonistiko-nipiagogon-dihroni-ypohreotiki-prosholiki-agogi https://www.alfavita.gr/arthron/syntonistiko-nipiagogon-dihroni-ypohreotiki-prosholiki-agogi https://www.alfavita.gr/arthron/syntonistiko-nipiagogon-dihroni-ypohreotiki-prosholiki-agogi http://www.ipaideia.gr/giati-einai-kathoristikos-o-rolos-tou-nipiagogeiou.htm http://www.ipaideia.gr/giati-einai-kathoristikos-o-rolos-tou-nipiagogeiou.htm https://www.facebook.com/syntonistikonipiagogon/posts/1059916647418066 https://www.facebook.com/syntonistikonipiagogon/posts/1059916647418066 greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 73 rights deriving from these areas... so beyond that, it does not help either of them also harms those who must serve: in our case children from early age to preschool education. we concur with the stance to maintain clearly separated the two scientific professions. (https://www.facebook.com/syntonistiko nipiagogon/posts/1059916647418066) originating from the reactions described above towards greek governments’ initiative for ecec policy reform, the present study attempts to explore “a problem of the present” (macfarlane and lewis, 2004, p. 51). the present study is unique because it attempts to explore the qualifications of all professional groups working in the two ecec institutions operating in greece, and intends to fill the gap of existing literature by exploring ecec professional groups’ ability to implement integrated ecec systems. as already stated, current policy reform initiatives in greece have brought to the surface a back stair segregation between kindergarten teachers and early childhood educators which persists. prompted by the reactions described earlier we questioned the causes of disintegration and we explored the extent to which the dichotomy between care and education was reinforced by workforce profiles and by each professional groups’ actual qualifications (acquired during their initial teacher preparation program) or on social, political and cultural reasons. this rational stems from haddad’s (2006) argument that “the parallelism observed in the ecec systems is not necessarily a result of the dual origin of early childhood education institutions, and that the integration of services, in the sense of unifying objectives and practices, is not a static, linear concept and does not bear an evolutionist undertone” (haddad, 2006, p. 5). finally, we considered it necessary to explore early childhood educators’ preparedness to adopt educare approaches, since according to starting strong ii report practitioners’ task, whatever their profile, should be geared towards a holistic approach (oecd, 2006). taking into account the greek government’s potential intent to move towards that goal, research about ecec workforce readiness to respond to the requirements inherent to this goal is imperative. method sample data for the present study was collected in spring 2016, employing snowball and convenience sampling techniques. the sample consisted of 233 early childhood educators working in all 13 greek regions. most of the participants (62.9%) worked in preschool settings operating in attica and 13.8% of the respondents worked in settings in central macedonia. of the 233 participants only 3 were male (1.3%) confirming previous research results from greece which highlight the low numbers of male ecec educators (rentzou and ziganitidou, 2009). participants’ age ranged from 18 to 56 years (m = 37.18, sd =8.64) and the years of their experience ranged from 0 to 34 years (m = 12.88, sd = 7.94). as far as participants’ level of education is concerned 25.4% of them had attended postsecondary education institutions which train assistant childcare workers, 43.3% were atei graduates, 28.8% had graduated from universities, 12.1% held a masters’ degree and 4.2% had another educational qualification. participants’ graduation year ranged from 1977 to 2016. in the present study, all professional groups working in all types of preschool settings operating in greece were represented. 20% of the participants worked as main early childhood educators of the classroom, 17.5% worked as kindergarten teachers, 14.17% as early childhood educators, 11.25% as assistant early childhood educators, 10.42% as principals of the center, 9.17% as main kindergarten teachers, 7.5% were students who did their 6-months practicum, and 3.75% had another role (6.25% missing). most of the participants (58.8%) worked in settings operated by municipalities. 28.8% of them worked in public settings, 7.1% in private settings and .08% in other types of settings. turning to the age group with which participants worked, the greatest number of respondents (31.7%) worked with mixed-aged groups. of the respondents working in day care 74 global education review 5(2) centers, 19.2% responded that they implement the operation regulation and 7.9% of them that they implement the internal regulation formulated by the municipality to which they work. on the other hand, 19.2 of the respondents working in kindergarten schools responded that they implement the national curriculum. almost half of the respondents, 40.8%, did not answer the question about the curriculum implemented at their work-site. measures and procedures to examine in-service early childhood educators’ views on the quality of their initial education and training and on how well prepared they feel to work in integrated ecec programs, the authors adopted and adapted items from the questionnaire employed and prepared by the irish department of education and skills (2016). the first author of the paper communicated with the contact person listed in the questionnaire, to ask his permission to translate the questionnaire into greek and to adopt and adapt items. after obtaining consent, using back and forth techniques the questionnaire was translated in greek. the questionnaire developed by the irish department of education and skills (2016) has 5 sections: background information (4 items); your current role in the early years sector (16 items); your highest qualification in early childhood care and education (12 items); extent to which your education and training prepared you to work in early years settings (22 items); and a final section intended to obtain respondents views on broader issues relevant to ecec (5 items). the adapted survey consists of 4 sections. the first section includes 6 demographic information questions. the second section includes 4 questions concerning the preschool program at which respondents work. the third is the main section of the questionnaire and aims at obtaining participants’ views on how well the training program they attended has prepared them on various aspects inherent to ecec theory and practice. items fall under the following 6 categories: “child development” (7 items), “education and play” (18 items), “health and wellbeing” (9 items), “social environment” (6 items), “personal professional development” (5 items) and “communication, management and administration” (4 items). the final section was prepared by the first author of the paper and was intended to explore participants’ views on how well they are prepared to provide programs that integrate care and education, the qualifications needed for someone to work in integrated programs and the changes that should be done, in terms of qualifications and training, in case greece adopts an integrated ecec system. analysis when exploring total sample’s level of preparation, analysis indicated that the sample was better prepared on aspects inherent to child development (m = 4.22, s.d. = .59) and worst prepared on education and play factors (m = 3.85, s.d. = .62). table 1 presents descriptive statistics for the 6 dimensions of ecec theory and practice for the total sample. to explore differences in preparation among groups we employed one-way anova analysis and post-hoc tests. in terms of the ‘child development’ factor anova analysis revealed statistically significant differences among the professional groups only in the factor concerning early childhood educators’ ability to provide for children’s holistic development (f (8, 216) = 2.59, p = .010). post-hoc least significant difference (lsd) tests revealed further differences among groups and showed that childcare workers perceive that they are not as well prepared as other professional groups on certain aspects of the child development category. turning to how well each group of ecec teachers believe that they have been prepared on various aspects inherent to preschool children’s education and play, anova analysis revealed statistically significant differences among participants based on their professional role in the following items: ‘knowledge of underlying theories on importance of play for children’ (f (8,215) = 2.25, p.= .025), ‘knowledge of children’s different styles of learning’ (f (8, 216) = 3.98, p. = .000), ‘supporting children’s greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 75 language and literacy development’ (f (8, 216) = 2.24, p. = .025), and ‘supporting the development of early mathematical skills and numeracy’ (f (8, 216) = 2.13, p. = 0.34). posthoc lsd test revealed significant differences among students who are currently doing their practice and other participants. students feel that they do not have enough knowledge of underlying theories on importance of play for children compared to other participants. lsd test also revealed significant differences at the 0.05 level in the mean scores assigned by assistants (both kindergarten and childcare teacher assistants) and other groups in terms of their knowledge about children’s different learning styles. in terms of participants’ ability to develop, implement and evaluate a curriculum according to lsd test results main teachers of the classroom who are university graduates are better prepared compared to childcare teachers, childcare teacher assistants and students who are doing their practice. thus, analysis indicated that main teachers of the classroom who are university graduates have a better knowledge of the national curriculum /guidelines and how to use it whereas childcare teachers are the least well prepared on this factor compared to kindergarten teachers, childcare teacher assistants and students. as far as the ability to use a range of interaction strategies and methods is concerned, analysis revealed statistically significant differences at the 0.05 level between principals and childcare teachers whereas kindergarten teacher assistants were the least well prepared to introduce a wide variety of educational/play activities and to organize and maintain an appropriate environment compared to all other groups. statistically significant differences were also shown concerning childcare teachers’ ability to support children’ language and literacy development as well as their mathematical skills as compared to principals’, main teachers’ (both university and atei graduates) and kindergarten teachers’ ability. concerning our sample’s preparation to cater for children’s special educational needs, none of the groups are well prepared. interestingly, according to lsd test results, students who do their practice are better prepared compared to principals, main teachers who are atei graduates and kindergarten teachers. the participants of the present study are also not well prepared to use ict to support children’s learning. lsd analysis showed statistically significant differences between principals and main teacher who are university graduates as well as between childcare teacher assistants and main teachers who are university graduates. according to lsd results childcare teachers reported to be more aware of the value of research compared to kindergarten teachers. finally, the mean difference among kindergarten teacher assistants and all other professional groups (except for childcare teachers and students) on the item concerning participants’ ability to develop and implement an emerging program is significant at the 0.05 level. table 1. level of preparation on 6 dimensions of ecec theory and practice category n min max mean sd child development 232 1.86 5.00 4.22 .59 education and play 232 1.94 5.00 3.85 .62 health and well-being 232 1.44 5.00 4.02 .74 social environment 232 1.50 5.00 4.05 .74 personal and professional development 230 1.00 5.00 4.16 .80 communication, organization and management 229 1.00 5.00 4.03 .88 *note. respondents were asked to report on a 5 point scale (1 = we didn’t learn about that and 5 = very well) how well prepared they feel being in each of the items. min represents the lowest score assigned and max the highest score in each item. 76 global education review 5(2) anova analysis also revealed significant statistical differences (p. value ranging from .000 to .006) between groups in almost all items of the ‘health and well-being’ factor. only on the ‘knowledge of child protection policy, procedures and good practice’ and the ‘organization of activities that promote children's physical activity’ items anova analysis revealed no difference between groups. post hoc lsd test revealed significant differences at the 0.05 level among kindergarten assistants and all other groups in the item referring to the knowledge of regulations. turning to hygiene procedures main teachers of the classroom who are university graduates are not as well prepared as those who are atei graduates (both main teachers and childcare workers), childcare assistants and students. kindergarten teachers are also less prepared compared to main teachers who are atei graduates, childcare assistants and students. the same differences among the groups involving kindergarten and childcare teachers were also revealed about health and safety regulations and in children’s principal health and nutritional needs, with the different groups of kindergarten teachers being less well prepared. lsd test also revealed significant differences between kindergarten teachers and principals, main teachers who are tei graduates, childcare teachers, childcare teacher assistants and students in terms of ability to perform first-aid procedures. kindergarten teachers are also less well prepared as far as knowledge of child protection policy, procedures and good practice compared to atei graduates who work as main teachers in the classroom and childcare teacher assistants and less well prepared to organize activities that promote children’s physical activity compared to principals, atei graduates (both main teachers and childcare teachers) and their assistants. finally, lsd post hoc analysis showed that university graduates (both main teachers and kindergarten teachers) are less well prepared to adopt a caring approach as opposed to childcare professional groups (principals, main teachers who are atei graduates, childcare teachers and their assistants and students). table 2 presents how well-prepared participants feel on selected aspects that concern children’s health and well-being based on their professional role. table 2. greek early childhood educators’ level of preparedness on selected health and well-being aspects by professional group health and well-being factors principal main teacher – uni main teacher – atei child care teacher kindergarten teacher kindergarten teacher assistant child care teacher assistant student practicum knowledge of pre-school operation regulations n 25 22 48 34 41 3 26 18 mean 3.92 4.00 3.96 3.91 4.00 2.67 4.35 4.61 sd .90 .75 .92 .96 .80 1.52 .68 .50 knowledge of health and safety regulations n 25 22 48 34 42 3 27 18 mean 4.20 3.77 4.54 4.21 3.67 4.00 4.67 4.83 sd 1.00 1.19 .61 .91 1.26 1.00 .55 .51 knowledge of children’s basic health needs n 25 22 48 34 41 3 27 18 mean 4.40 3.77 4.56 4.24 3.88 4.00 4.59 4.50 sd .76 1.02 .61 .89 1.05 1.00 .50 .78 organization of activities that promote children's physical activity n 25 22 48 34 42 3 27 18 mean 4.32 4.14 4.21 4.26 3.76 3.67 4.37 4.17 sd .80 .64 .65 .66 1.16 .57 .62 .98 ability to take a caring approach (feeding, toileting, nurturing, etc.) n 25 22 48 34 42 3 27 18 mean 4.24 3.55 4.42 4.18 3.38 3.00 4.59 4.17 sd 1.01 1.53 .98 1.31 1.32 1.00 1.01 .78 the number of n under each professional group (e.g. 25 principals, 22 main teachers – uni, etc greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 77 table 3. greek early childhood educators’ level of preparedness on selected social environment aspects by professional group social environment factors principal main teacher – uni main teacher – atei childcare teacher kindergarten teacher kindergarten teacher assistant childcare teacher assistant student practicum knowledge of the importance of social and environmental factors and their impact on children’s holistic development n 24 22 47 34 41 3 27 18 mean 4.21 4.59 4.45 4.32 4.49 4.00 4.41 4.28 sd .83 .59 .61 .63 .55 1.00 .93 .66 ability to establish and maintain appropriate relationships with families n 25 22 48 34 42 3 27 18 mean 4.24 4.05 4.27 4.41 3.83 3.33 4.52 4.33 sd .83 1.13 1.04 .78 1.26 .57 1.01 .90 ability to liaise and maintain relationships in the wider environment n 25 22 48 34 41 3 27 18 mean 3.92 3.73 3.71 3.97 3.61 1.67 4.11 3.78 sd .95 1.20 1.11 .83 1.13 1.15 1.05 1.11 the number of n under each professional group (e.g. 25 principals, 22 main teachers – uni, etc turning to aspects concerning the social environment, anova analysis indicated statistically significant differences between groups based in their professional role in participants’ ability to liaise and maintain relationships in the wider environment (f (8, 215) = 2.18, p.= .030) and in their ability to families’ understanding of and involvement in children’s learning and development (f (8, 216) = 1.93, p. = .057). according to the post hoc lsd test results kindergarten teachers are less well prepared to establish and maintain effective relationships with parents compared to childcare teacher professional groups (main teachers of the classroom who are atei graduates, childcare teachers and their assistants). also, kindergarten teachers are not as well as childcare teacher assistants prepared to support families’ understanding of and involvement in children’s learning and development. thus, kindergarten teacher assistants are the least prepared group compared to all other groups to liaise and maintain relationships in the wider environment. table 3 presents how wellprepared participants feel on selected aspects that concern the social environment based on their professional role. as far as participants’ level of preparation in terms of personal and professional development aspects, is concerned anova analysis showed statistically significant differences between groups in all aspects of personal and professional development with exception participants’ ability to get involved in self-evaluation procedures. in all other items of this category p. value ranged from .001 to .045. lsd post-hoc analysis showed that kindergarten teachers are less prepared at developing the values, attitudes and dispositions appropriate for their role as compared to main teachers of the classroom who are atei graduates but 78 global education review 5(2) better prepared compared to childcare teacher assistants. childcare teacher assistants have also been found to be better prepared on this aspect compared to childcare teachers. further, kindergarten teachers were found to be less selfaware compared to all other groups and to be less able to identify their learning needs compared to main teachers (both atei and university graduates), childcare teachers, childcare teacher assistants and students. finally, lsd analysis revealed that main teachers who are both university and atei graduates are more able to manage their self and take responsibility compared to childcare teacher assistants and students, childcare teachers surprisingly less able compared to students and more able compared to kindergarten teachers, kindergarten teachers less able than principals, childcare teachers, their assistants and students, etc. finally, in terms of different professional groups’ preparedness on aspects concerning communication, organization and management skills, anova analysis showed statistically significant differences between groups only in sample’s ability to work as a team with other professional groups within a service (f (8, 213) = 3.51, p. = 0.01). according to lsd post hoc test results principals are more able than kindergarten teachers to work cooperatively with other groups. childcare teacher assistants and students are also more able compared to main teacher of the classroom who are university graduates as well as childcare teachers, whereas main teachers who are atei graduates are more able compared to kindergarten teachers. analysis also revealed that kindergarten teachers are less able to communicate effectively with children and other adults compared to main teachers who are atei graduates, childcare teacher assistants and students. thus, kindergarten teachers and their assistants are less able to communicate information to parents compared to principals and childcare teacher assistants, whereas childcare teachers are also less able compared to their assistants. participants were also asked to report how well prepared they feel to offer programs which provide only education, only care and programs that integrate both care and education. although the sample is overall well prepared to provide all three types of programs (table 4), anova analysis indicated that based on their professional role participants have statistically significant differences in providing education (f (8, 214) = 3.53, p. = .001), care (f (8, 214) = 10.02, p. = .000) and integrated programs that combine education and care (f (8, 216) = 2.88, p. = .005). post-hoc lsd analysis revealed that principals and main teachers in the classrooms (both university and atei graduates) are better prepared to offer education to preschool children compared to childcare teachers and kindergarten teachers and their assistants. thus, childcare and kindergarten teachers have been found to be better prepared than their assistants. in terms of care, as it was expected, university graduates working both as main teachers and kindergarten teachers, are less prepared than principals, atei graduates, students and postsecondary institutions’ graduates to provide care. finally, students who do their practice and principals were found to be the best prepared to implement an integrated approach which combines education and care whereas main teachers of the classroom who are university graduates had statistically significant differences with all groups working in day care settings. greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 79 table 4. greek early childhood educators’ level of preparedness to provide different types of ecec programs by professional group type of program principal main teacher – uni main teacher – atei childcare teacher kindergarten teacher kindergarten teacher assistant childcare teacher assistant student practicum ability to provide education to preschool children n 24 22 48 34 41 3 27 18 mean 4.33 4.32 4.35 3.91 3.93 3.33 4.41 4.17 sd .76 .78 .66 .66 .75 .57 .57 .51 ability to provide care to preschool children n 25 22 47 34 41 3 27 18 mean 4.24 3.59 4.47 4.21 3.51 4.00 4.59 4.50 sd .87 .90 .65 .77 .89 0.00 .57 .51 ability to organize programs that combine care and education n 25 22 48 34 42 3 27 18 mean 4.04 3.32 4.10 3.94 3.62 3.00 4.00 4.50 sd 1.17 .94 .95 .81 1.01 1.00 1.35 .51 the number of n under each professional group (e.g. 25 principals, 22 main teachers – uni, etc discussion the dichotomy that characterizes ecec internationally is a vicious circle which is fed by societal attitudes towards the role of ecec institutions (rentzou, 2011; 2013), discursive reasons inherent to the segregation of care and education as well as to issues of professionalism in ecec which among others highlight that the lower the educational level the more deprofessionalized it is (peeters, 2012). further ecec structure influences and at the same time is influenced by the training systems available for ecec professionals. the present study aimed at exploring how well prepared various ecec professional groups are to implement programs that combine education and care. the need for this study stems from current policy reform initiatives in greece and especially from the dispute that raised between early childhood educators and kindergarten teachers. more precisely, taking into consideration arguments formulated both by kindergarten teachers and university departments which suggest that early childhood educators are not adequately prepared to provide education and their role is primarily a caring one and based on research finding which suggest that “not only the level of education but also the content of the staff’s educational or training curriculum is important for the level of quality in ecec” (oecd, 2012, p. 147), the study aimed at exploring how prepared all professional groups feel to provide education and care. we purposefully selected all professional groups since in case an integrated approach should be adopted not only early childhood educators should be prepared to provide education but also kindergarten teachers, who seem to separate themselves from caring aspects, should be ready to provide care. results of the present study suggest that the sample is well prepared on all aspects inherent to ecec theory and practice. as it was expected the study revealed differences in level of preparation on various aspects among different professional groups working in greek 80 global education review 5(2) preschool programs. in terms of child development aspects analysis revealed that principals and main teachers in the classrooms (both atei and university graduates) had higher ratings in most items. students were also found to be more well-prepared on several aspects of child development. on the other hand, childcare teachers and kindergarten teacher assistants appear to be the least prepared on various child development factors. participants’ professional role has also been found to predict their level of preparedness on aspects inherent to education and play. kindergarten teacher assistants were the least well prepared on various aspects of education and play. on the other hand, main teacher of the classroom who were university graduates and to some extend principals were more well prepared on issues concerning preschoolers’ pre-academic skills such as styles of learning, development and implementation of the curriculum and children’s literacy and numeracy development, a finding which highlight the more academic focus of kindergarten schools, probably at the expense of play. thus, according to the analysis none of the professional groups is well prepared for catering for different groups’ special educational needs as well as for using ict to support children’s learning. childcare workers’ preparedness on education and play aspects has been found to be in between in most items of the subscale. however, they were found to be ill prepared on aspects concerning pre-academic skills and their ability to provide variety of activities and interaction strategies. analysis showed that health and wellbeing as well as personal and professional development are the factors which are most affected by participants’ professional role. students, childcare teachers’ assistants and main teachers who are atei graduates have been found to be better prepared compared to other professional groups in many items. in addition, as it was expected main teachers who were university graduates and kindergarten teachers were the least prepared on many items of the health and well-being factor. turning to personal and professional development, surprisingly childcare teacher assistants and students had the highest scores in almost all items of the scale whereas kindergarten teachers and their assistants had the lowest scores. in terms of social environment aspects childcare teachers’ assistants were found to be better prepared on several aspects of the factor. finally, in terms of communication, organization and management aspects childcare teacher assistants and students had the highest scores in almost all items as opposed to kindergarten teachers and their assistants which had the lowest scores in almost all items. overall, analysis indicated that university graduates (both main teachers and kindergarten teachers) feel less well prepared to provide care to children. interestingly kindergarten teachers had also lower scores on the item concerning provision of education to preschool children compared to principals, main teachers who are atei graduates and childcare teacher assistants. thus, students had the highest score concerning participants’ ability to provide programs that integrate education and care whereas main teacher who are university graduates and kindergarten teachers’ assistants had the lowest scores. the above results highlight on the one hand the schoolification of kindergarten schools and the emphasis given on preparing children for primary school and on the other hand “a further disembodiment of education, with the body being subordinate to the mind….[a thinking which]… has been contested due to children’s natural learning strategies – play, exploration, freedom of movement, relations and discussions with other children – being less greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 81 encouraged” (van laere & vandenbroeck, 2016, p.1 ). further, research results suggest that kindergarten teachers’ training emphasizes on children’s learning and development for their future school career (van laere & vandenbroeck, 2016), whereas the care component and the holistic development of the child is not addressed. on the other hand, results highlighted various shortcomings on early childhood educators’ training as well. although well prepared on health and wellbeing aspects, deficiencies on child development aspects may also be proven risky for children’s holistic development. according to penn et al. (2004, p. 6) “integration is currently a topical issue in the field of early childhood provision, but there is considerable confusion about how and why integration should be pursued, and what works in what contexts”. both the reactions to the debate organized by the greek government and the results of the present study confirm that hypothesis and suggest that greece is not ready to adopt an integrated ecec approach. the integration of ecec services is not a process that can happen overnight. the existence of split systems creates challenges that require thoughtful consideration to be overcome. first of all, societal attitudes towards ecec services should be explored since according to haddad (2006, p. 4) “the development of a coherent and integrated system depends on how society sees these services”. previous results from greece (rentzou, 2013) suggest that day care centers are considered mainly welfare institutions and that parents of both infants/toddlers and preschool children assign significance to the human factor, as well as children’s care, while less attention is paid to the pedagogical dimension of day care centres, in parents: teachers’ collaboration and to aspects which refer to meeting the needs of educators. further “the integration of care and education needs policy interventions at macro, meso and micro levels alike…the implementation of a holistic view of education should be negotiated with all stakeholders…and be addressed in general frameworks on ecec curricula, initial training and other professional development initiatives” (van laere, peeters and vandenbroeck, 2012, pp.536-537). the reactions of the two university departments to the debate suggest that training institutions are not open to such an effort and highlight the need for the negotiation proposed by van laere, peeters and vandenbroeck (2012). training institutions have a significant role to play in this effort. as already stated greece is among the few counties which have two different professional titles for similar staff working in different settings. either this segregation continues or not (and we would maintain that this segregation is pointless) they should reconsider their curricula. as the results of the present study suggest greek ecec workers need to attend training programs that adopt a “broadly based educare training curriculum as opposed to a discrete education, care or social care approach” (mcmillan, 2009, p. 225). in this context we would maintain that all professional groups working in ecec services should adopt a social pedagogical role which encompasses both care and learning dimensions rather than solely a caring or a learning role. in addition, it seems that university departments follow the old tradition which suggests that infants and toddlers need care rather than education as preschool children, and they do not understand the caring role of education and the educational role of caring. however, according to hayes (2007, p. 9) “there is a growing body of research on the critical value of understanding the nature of care and its 82 global education review 5(2) role and status in a healthy and equitable society”. as already stated central to the dichotomy is the professionalism of ecec sector which is disputed especially for those who work with younger children and adopt caring roles. in this context if we are to adopt an integrated ecec system we will have to face the challenges this will have for the professionalization of the sector and to employ a normative conceptualization of professionalism which is based on a “broad and integrated understanding of care, well-being, learning and pedagogy which values reciprocal relationships and an element of not-knowing” (oberhuemer, schreyer, and neuman, 2010, p. 496). besides, previous research results show that the countries with high ecec professionalism share the following characteristics: integrated ecec; high qualifications (bachelor’s degree); merge of unions (childcare and kindergarten); pay parity with primary teachers; and wording-terminology that merges care and education (peeters, 2012; dalli, 2008). previous research exploring the progress of integration in several countries (kaga et al., 2010) suggests that this process needs to be strong and principled and careful consideration should be given to the conditions needed to achieve integration. further haddad (2006, p. 23) postulates that “an ecec integrated system requires firm political will, state responsibility, and a clear awareness of the comprehensiveness of the functions involved. given these conditions, an ecec policy should, under government leadership, involve all society in a joint and convergent enterprise”. however, both the results of the present study and the reactions to government’s initiatives suggest that this effort is fragmentary and could be characterized as a firework which was cast without prior processing. to conclude, even though greek government’s rhetoric may be “espousing the end of di[tri]chotomisation of care, development, and education” (macfarlane and lewis, 2004,p. 60), it seems that political and corporatist reasons foster the dichotomy that characterizes ecec in greece and ensure its continuity. however, one main question is whether the segregation of care and education caters for children’s needs and whether it is in line with children’s rights. according to hayes (2010) in split systems limited consideration is given both to children’s needs and rights and to the quality of services available. hayes (2010) postulation is supported both by research results from greece which show that the quality of services provided by greek day care centers is of minimum quality (rentzou, 2011; 2015) and by the fact that in terms of child rights environment greece ranks 130-135 internationally (http://www.kidsrightsindex.org/child-rightsenvironment). notes: 1. the term ‘educare’ refers to programmes which offer education and care, simultaneously. caldwell (1989) coined the term ‘educare’ to describe an approach to education that offers a developmentally appropriate mixture of education and care; of stimulation and nurture; of work and play (caldwell 1989, p. 266) 2. after the present study was accepted for publication, other policy initiatives took place. among these initiatives is included the rename of two of the three atei departments, which were transformed into university departments. 3. in the same context a debate has emerged concerning the mandatory nature of ecec (but it is out of the scope of this paper). paece seems to be opposed to the twoyears mandatory nature of ecec and their rational is based on the argument that if the enrollment in kindergarten school becomes obligatory for two years (currently only one http://www.kidsrightsindex.org/child-rights-environment http://www.kidsrightsindex.org/child-rights-environment greek ecec workers preparedness to implement integrated ecec systems 83 year is obligatory) this will enhance the dichotomy that already exists. on the other hand, kindergarten teachers champion that idea but are opposed to the unification of ecec. references caldwell, b. 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(2004). what is the impact http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-11-185_el.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-11-185_el.htm http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/all/?uri=celex:52011dc0066 http://eur-lex.europa.eu/legal-content/en/all/?uri=celex:52011dc0066 http://www.ncca.ie/uploadedfiles/ecpe/education%20and%20care.pdf http://www.ncca.ie/uploadedfiles/ecpe/education%20and%20care.pdf https://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/pdfs/childrensrights-greece.pdf https://www.loc.gov/law/help/child-rights/pdfs/childrensrights-greece.pdf http://www.edc.uoc.gr/ptpe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=600%3apsifisma&catid=1%3alatest-news&itemid=798&lang=el http://www.edc.uoc.gr/ptpe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=600%3apsifisma&catid=1%3alatest-news&itemid=798&lang=el http://www.edc.uoc.gr/ptpe/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=600%3apsifisma&catid=1%3alatest-news&itemid=798&lang=el 84 global education review 5(2) of out-of-home integrated care and education settings on children aged 0-6 and their parents? in: research evidence in education library. london: eppi-centre, social science research unit, institute of education. rentzou, k. (2015). reflections on the quality of the dichotomous early childhood education and care system in greece. childhood education, 91(4), 250258. rentzou, k. (2013). exploring parental preferences: care or education: what do greek parents aspire from day care centres? early child development and care, 183(12), 1906-1923. doi:10.1080/03004430.2013.767247. rentzou, k. (2011). evaluating the quality of care and education provided by preschool centres. an approach by researcher’s, educators’ and parents’ perspectives (unpublished phd dissertation). university of ioannina, ioannina, greece. (in greek). rentzou, k., & ziganitidou, k. (2009). greek male early childhood educators: self and societal perceptions towards their chosen profession. early years, 29(3), 271-279 van laere, k., peeters, j. and vandenbroeck, m. (2012). the education and care divide: the role of the early childhood workforce in 15 european countries. european journal of education, 47(4), 527-541. van laere, k and vandenbroeck, m. (2016) the (in)convenience of care in preschool education: examining staff views on educare, early years, doi: 10.1080/09575146.2016.1252727 about the author (s) dr. konstantina rentzou is scientific collaborator at the european university of cyprus and she has participated as a researcher in greek, cypriot and eu-funded research projects. she has published 30 papers in peer-reviewed journals, a monograph on family engagement in ecec and a co-authored book on the quality of the physical environment of preschool settings. she is the acei country liaison in greece and in cyprus and the world forum national representative for cyprus. konstantina also co-leads the international special interest forum “ecec in eu”. her research interests are in ecec quality, parental involvement and parent caregiver relationships, involvement and recruitment of males in ecec, the organization of the preschool environment and children’s play. georgios daglas, ma, is the general director of preschool education and care department for the municipality of nikaia agios ioannis rentis. he is a preschool educator with specialization in psychology. his interests are in public health services administration, social protection and solidarity. . creativity and pre-service teacher education 5   _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schreiber, james b. (2018). creativity and pre-service teacher education: what you see is what you get. global education review, 5 (1), 5-19.  creativity and pre-service teacher education: what you see is what you get james b. schreiber duquesne university abstract this essay discusses creativity in the classroom, constraints and the lack of creativity modeling in undergraduate teacher education programs, and some simple changes that can be made. this lack of models and modeling of creativity in the teacher education classrooms leads to a lack of creativity in teaching, activity design, tasks, and assessments. issues related to lack of creativity in the education system are discussed from the student, faculty, state, and government levels. introduction “this is a worksheet factory” –olivia age 8 “if we have to present one more poster…” – caitlyn age 20 this essay is both academic and personal. it is the culmination of over two decades in the k-12 system as a high school teacher, department chair, and professor of education. the essay’s genesis stems from a colleague’s daughter who found herself in trouble for passing a note that stated the classroom was just a worksheet factory. i view most classrooms as worksheet dungeons. i begin this essay with a focus on creativity for all students but focus on what is occurring from my perspective in teacher education. i also recognize that i am discussing these topics from a stable education system where teachers show up every day. next, i discuss issues and constraints in the u.s. teacher education system, writ large, related to why more creative environments are not occurring. finally, i discuss changes individual faculty can make in their classrooms to promote a more creative environment. creativity in the context of learning classrooms are micro-environments that are affected by macro-environments (bronfenbrenner, 1977) which provide opportunities for interactions of knowledge and skills reciprocally (bandura, 1977) to create new learning among all the participants. scholars have long recognized the relationship between ____________________________ corresponding author: james b. schreiber, ph.d., duquesne university, school of nursing, 600 forbes avenue, pittsburgh, pa. 15282 email: schreiberj@duq.edu 6 global education review 5(1) creativity and learning (see beghetto, 2016a for an overview). guilford (1967) argued that creativity and learning represent essentially the same phenomenon. i agree that they are interwoven, but they have unique elements. along these lines creativity is part of the learning process and learning can result in creative contributions (beghetto, 2016a, 2016b). more recently, i have been focused on the more subjective experience of creativity (beghetto & schreiber, 2017; guilford, 1967; stein, 1953; vygotsky, 1967/2004). specifically, subjective or mini-c creativity involves the new and personally meaningful interpretations of new experiences, actions or events (beghetto & kaufman, 2007). mini-c is different than big c acts which are revolutionary in nature and the vast majority of people see them as creative. pro-c is a professionallevel of expertise that has been developed after years of deliberate practice-e.g., professional chef or musician. little-c is the creative expressions of the everyday, such as a handmade card for a friend. in the classroom setting, the more subjective mini-c leads to more objective little-c, after feedback from peers and teachers (beghetto & schreiber, 2017). as such, when students learn something new and personally meaningful they are, by definition, engaging in a creative act, mini-c. this process like other more objective creative processes is a combinatorial process (mumford, medeiros, & partlow, 2012; rothenberg, 1996). the creative learning process occurs when students attempt to make sense of a new, discrepant experience in light of what they already know and believe. if successful, the creative combination of the new experience and the learner’s prior knowledge will result in a new and personally meaningful understanding. this argument is in agreement with a long line of creativity scholars and learning theorists that state anytime someone learns something new and personally meaningful they have engaged in a creative process (guilford, 1950; littleton & mercer, 2013; piaget, 1973; sawyer, 2012; vygotsky, 1967/2004). a key feature of mini-c is the micromoment. micro-moments are surprising incidents of creative potential that occur in everyday situations (beghetto, 2013). they are the point where you are off-script and the possibilities open up because there is a difference between what was expected and what is occurring. this is what charles s. peirce (and other pragmatists, such as john dewey) argued as a state of doubt. the creative process that is triggered in these moments of doubt represents a special form of reasoning called abductive reasoning, which in turn can result in creative resolution and the development of a new and personally meaningful understanding. this can be represented graphically (figure 1). figure 1. basic doubt resolution process creativity and pre-service teacher education 7 the schematic represented in figure 1 elaborates on aspects of the creative learning model presented in beghetto (2016a). specifically, figure 1 zeros-in on the more micromotivational and micro-reasoning process experienced by students engaged in creative learning. as displayed in figure 1, this motivational process starts with a discrepant learning stimulus (i.e., something that differs from one’s prior understanding and expectations). if the learning stimulus is not discrepant then it will be ignored or simply incorporated into what students already know. if, however, the learner experiences a discrepant event they are moved into a state of doubt. this state of doubt serves as the motivational engine for creativity in support of learning. as will be discussed in the following section, a state of doubt triggers a special kind of creative reasoning (called abductive reasoning) that when successful allows learners to (at least temporarily) resolve their doubt by generating a new and personally meaningful understanding (arici, schreiber, sugioka, & cunnigham, 1998; cunningham, arici, schreiber, & lee, 2002; josephson & josephson, 1996). importantly, this new understanding is never finalized. it is always open to revision and modification. prior to elaborating on this process of creativity in doubt, it is worth stressing a few key aspects. new and personally meaningful understanding results from this personal creative process. i align with john searle’s chinese room argument (in cole, 2014; searle, 1984) that simply being able to perform a task is not the same thing as having a meaningful understanding. i also recognize that students learn things all the time and can demonstrate a learning performance in a basic behavioral model and others would state the student has learned. but this is far from personally meaningful learning and may simply be from accepted compliance of the student. as searle argued, a person who does not speak a word of chinese could be locked away in a room, receive questions written in chinese through a slot in the door, and using an algorithm, could appear to understand chinese by producing accurate written responses written using chinese characters. the same can be said of the student who memorizes a mathematical algorithm. the appearance of a correct response is not sufficient to make a claim that the student understands the content, task, or procedure (beghetto & plucker, 2006). one of the best ways for students to demonstrate their understanding is to provide a response that is both original (at least in the context of the classroom) and task appropriate (i.e., meets the contextually specific task constraints). the combination of originality and task appropriateness as defined in a particular context represent the core defining elements of creativity (beghetto & kaufman, 2014). a discussion on creativity has to also include a discussion on failure. more recently, failure discussions have mainly occurred in social medial and news reports (e.g., haele, 2016; paul, 2013). failure is important from a cognitive restructuring perspective. when failure occurs, our beliefs about a task, a situation, or a problem, are put into a state of doubt (figure 1). this is a point where the current beliefs and habits do not work and a cognitive restructuring must occur through abduction, and you or the student will think differently after the restructuring. when this restructuring occurs, the beginning of the removal of doubt, the reasoning process begins. when abducting to resolve doubt, peirce termed this experimentation in reference to ways we come to believe. in peirce’s experimentation, one seeks to remove doubt by collecting more and more observations, generating potential hypotheses to account for experience and, finally, reaching a conclusion 8 global education review 5(1) based upon an inferential process. experimentation entails skepticism, openness to alternatives, discernment, negotiation, cooperation, and compromise to fix or stabilize beliefs (cunningham, 1998; cunningham, schreiber, & moss, 2005). this inferential process includes, abduction, induction, and deduction. peirce stated, “deduction is the only necessary reasoning. it is the reasoning of mathematics. it starts from a hypothesis, the truth or falsity of which has nothing to do with the reasoning; and of course its conclusions are equally ideal. the ordinary use of the doctrine of chances is necessary reasoning, although it is reasoning concerning probabilities. induction is the experimental testing of a theory. the justification of it is that, although the conclusion at any stage of the investigation may be more or less erroneous, yet the further application of the same method must correct the error. the only thing that induction accomplishes is to determine the value of a quantity. it sets out with a theory and measures the degree of concordance of that theory with fact. it can never originate any idea whatsoever. no more can deduction. all the ideas of science come to it by way of abduction. abduction consists in studying facts and devising a theory to explain them. its only justification is that if we are ever to understand things at all, it must be in that way.” (cp5.145) when in a state of genuine doubt, we start studying the facts we have, search for information, and devise an explanation to test. this is where we can be our most personally creative and where deep personal learning and understanding can occur. therefore, engagement in the state of doubt and abduction allows for personally creative acts and thoughts. even countries with long histories of exit exams recognize the need for creativity and activity in the classroom (see burns, 2016; bloomer, 2016). but this type of reasoning and the associated creative acts must be valued through the educational system before it will be effective in the classroom. constraints teacher education programs do not promote creative moments in the classroom. education programs should be a place where pre-service teachers have the opportunity to see (i.e., have modeled) and experience, abductive reasoning, personally meaningful creative acts, and develop the skill set to help their students harness their own creativity in their future classrooms. i am not discounting the deep integrated knowledge of the content they need to know. not every day will have creative moments, but allowing for them, let alone designing for them, is desperately needed. i am arguing for creativity as part of teacher education programs (kennedy, 1999), and specifically what the students experience, see, and learn how to do and can be transferred to their future classroom (laboskey, 1994; barone, berliner, blanchard, casanova, & mcgowan, 1996; kennedy, 1999; bullough & gitlin, 2001; korthagen, kessels, koster, lagerwerf, & wubbels, 2001; loughran, 2006). but what are some of the factors from macro to micro levels related to this lack of modeling of creativity? charter school movement failure charter schools, a national macro level movement, were developed under the idea of being test beds of innovation where teachers were to explore new approaches and be laboratories for pedagogy (shanker, 1988). charter schools have not turned into test beds of innovation. as charter schools have moved away from shanker’s original focus, they have no real ability to become test beds of innovation, abductive reasoning, or creativity. these schools should be the ones that are driving creative 9 global education review 5(1) micro-moments, but i have not consistently seen any completely fulfilling this promise. there are “hot spots” such as the west hawai’i explorations academy, but these are few and far between. i think the failure of this major component of the charter school movement has aided in the lack of innovation in the classroom. if charter schools would have become centers of innovation and successful, it would have created pressure or a tipping point for others to move in that direction. state/commonwealth/accreditation rules as every other state or commonwealth, we have basic rules and guidelines that we must meet for the commonwealth of pennsylvania and multiple accrediting groups that create constraints. states do act as gatekeepers of the students who desire to be teachers and the state and accrediting bodies are the gatekeepers for us. the language used is similar to the arguments of “back to basics” education in the 1970’s and its derivatives in the 1980’s. for some who have seen all of this, we see it in aspects of common core. the language used creates an environment where creativity cannot thrive. the reason for the failure to thrive is that state level constraints focus on the structure of the programs (e.g., 4 years, alternative, 5 year) and core courses offered, but do not focus on what is going on with actual experiences (kennedy, 1999). from one perspective, some might argue that it is good for the state education group to not be involved that deeply, the issue is the faculty are spending their time making sure every checklist is met and thus valuable time is removed from developing rich courses. as long as you meet a checklist of requirements then you are doing your job from a gatekeeper standpoint. this does not do much to aid in the development of creative flexible teachers. lack of modeling we learn a great deal of behaviors and skills from watching others (bandura, 1977), especially those in our micro-world (bronfenbrenner, 1977). this was highlighted by dan lortie’s sociological study of teaching, demonstrating that teachers teach how they were taught (lortie, 1975). if there is no modeling of creative moments in pre-service, we will not see them when they are in-service. the “teacher” behaviors and interactions that students have witnessed and experienced from their k-12 experiences and college faculty, explicit vs. implicit or blatant vs. nuanced, provide the foundational schemas and scripts of their future teaching behaviors. then they see the same schemas and scripts in the pre-service programs. though students continually bring the “horror” stories of “bad” teachers, i am not so worried about those. every field has people who are not competent at what they do and are eventually removed in a normal system. i worry about the quiet little nuanced statements and behaviors from former teachers and now their professors that reside in future teachers’ cognitive milieus they do not know are there, and do not realize they are making decisions and executing behaviors based on them (eagleman, 2011). beghetto (2013) discusses how we kill ideas softly; the soft dismissals of student interest or questions that are modeled in k-12 and teacher preparation programs that are most problematic from a modeling perspective. faculty—averse to risk discussions with education faculty members over the past 15 years at work, but mainly at conferences, have rarely included experiences related to mini-c moments or environments conducive to abductive reasoning. when i ask colleagues what they do to move students forward, i hear comments related to pragmatic aspects of course assignments, class sizes too large, or too many meetings; none of which, 10 global education review 5(1) answer the actual question. i was finally confronted this year during a conversation by a colleague about what i did. i gave this story as my answer: i was being observed during that normal once a semester observation and the students were all on the ground trying to figure out how to piece together a learning theory model. all of the parts of the model and their specific roles were sent before class and i brought extra working copies. students had to abduct to a visual scenario of how all these parts worked together to create “learning.” then they had to try and test their scenario with a question such as, “how does someone come to be able to recite the capitals of all the individual united states?” after class, the observer asked me how i came up with the activity. i said, like many others, this type of experience was modeled for me (bandura, 1977) and the development of these activities has been challenged to me by mentors and most importantly my students. the observer also inquired about the risk related to the activity not working as planned. this risk question was a surprise, but made more sense on reflection. there are not a great number of activities or pedagogical risk takers in the field. one must be willing to have a crash and failure to get at some creative moments for the faculty member and the students. there seems to be no thirst for a “pedagogy for risk taking” in creating a supportive rigorous environment (belfiore, auld, & lee, 2005) let alone a risk taking creative environment. therefore, students are not experiencing an environment that allows for that challenge and the creative moments that can come from it. i still see a great deal of safe classes with slides and simple questions that seem to convey the content in slick simplified ways and not allow for the messy cognition and meaning making that is needed. peter norvig who was a director of research at google is quoted as saying (as cited in dolan, 2015 pg., 130) "...powerpoint doesn't kill meetings. people kill meetings. but using powerpoint is like having a loaded ak-47 on the table. you can do very bad things with it" the very bad things are simple bullet point aspects of complex domains. yet, you can break out of the safe power point and be quite creative with it (byrne, 2003). these bullet point power points create very safe easy environments where students can easily comply, take notes and complete a ‘rigorous’ test. this is a pretty easy class to run also. low time and energy commitment and very low risk. this low risk or potential low risk desire, i believe is transferred (price & driscoll, 1997) down to students in pre-service classrooms because it is the same scenario as they have experienced in their previous education courses. for example, openness to exploring an idea that a student has brought up that is connected for the student cognitively in some way, is risk taking. most teachers are not willing to do that and their students watch it happen. the students witness the low risk taking and hear comments such as, “we have to stay on (my) schedule” thus modeling to them that examining such a path is bad teaching behavior. but you can use that micro-moment to stretch the knowledge of the students and have them learn the content. more recently, i am hearing the risk averse comments related to fear of lower student evaluation surveys and the “student-centered” model of education. faculty have stated they fear trying new things because they will get “beaten up” on the surveys. related, many faculty are worried the student-centered focus is leaving an impression that they are a hospitality service industry and anything new or different will get punished. obviously, all of these issues can lead to non-creative environments. faculty-ire initiate, respond, evaluate (ire), i would argue, is the most common if not pervasive system in higher education. in the ire system, the faculty 11 global education review 5(1) member asks a student a question, the student responds and the response is instantly evaluated (mehan, 1979; beghetto, 2013). this is the live version of skinner’s teaching machine (skinner, 1958). it is also the moment when faculty kill any creative opportunity. one reason this pattern is so prevalent is, it is the model faculty probably experienced every day throughout their schooling year. there is comfort and ease using the same model you experienced. a second reason is the old argument “we have so much content to get through, i do not have time to let them figure it out.” it is easy to see why ire can become the default. it is easy, warm, and comfortable. more recently, i have begun to ask faculty if getting to everything is as important as making sure they have x number of key concepts, ideas, or skills, of the course mastered. this line of questioning typically creates a moment of doubt. i have also asked how many hours they have been involved in the content (for me in statistics alone, it is about 12,000 hours in the past decade or so). and then i ask them how many hours will the students spend on this content for the semester (3 hours in class, 3 out of class, 16 weeks is 96 hours). then i go back and ask them what they expect or what they might change to get students farther. most importantly, to me, by using the ire framework, we miss the opportunity to understand the level of knowledge and skills in the domains we teach and we miss the micromoments. those questions, that many teachers get frustrated with are full of formative evaluative information if we just took the time to listen to what was asked and what that means in relation to the objectives and goals of our classes and the student’s mini-c experiences. accountability is all the rage the ire model fits the age of accountability. age of accountability is a macro-level (cultural) factor though it currently affects primary and secondary education faculty most directly in the united states. i left teaching high school mathematics in part because of the disaster that began in 1990 through state legislation for the arizona essential skills. it was in essence a narrowing of the curriculum and what berliner (2011) termed “creaticide”. the current static model of testing on a limited format system does not do much to alleviate the problems with the system and surely does not allow for any creative micro-moments because the sole focus is on those test scores. there is no meaningful focus on learning and what we mean by learning (sarason, 2004). in addition, the testing and accountability focus has driven the rubrics industrial complex as a way to increase test scores. the rubric robots, the “rubotics,” have risen. rubrics are everywhere. ski schools have them, day cares have them, summer enrichment programs have them. i am waiting for a rubric on boredom. rubrics, like many components in education, are not inherently bad or harmful but all have the ability to be bad and harmful, like poorly designed overheads (tufte, 2003). rubrics can help and guide students as they develop knowledge and skills, and can kill any sense of personal creativity. used properly, rubrics provide the right level of constraint that is needed for creativity (ward, 2008). this is also similar to p. berliner’s (1994) argument of thinking like an improvisational jazz player. the music, key, time signature, notes, beat counts etc., provide the frame or constraint. within those constraints, you are free to move and create and be autonomous, take risks-fail and recover. but most rubrics are used to grade and by that, i mean judge and not in a developmentally positive way or to promote learning or more creative moments. it is easy to forget that the student’s perspective of the rubric matters (moss & brookhart, 2012). if the students view it as an evaluation or “pre-grade” then that is what it is. 12 global education review 5(1) rubrics have created a rigid focus and implementation of their use, especially detailed checklist rubrics. i recognize the needs for some rigid checklists (e.g., large airliner flights or heart surgery protocols) due to high risks to individuals. but that is not what i am discussing, those are professionals executing their jobs. i am discussing how the use of rubrics actually decreases teachers’ ability to be professional and turns them in to simply scoring machines. for the students, this is a time for development and learning. rubrics can end up becoming a constraint on creative moments. then there are the uses of the test scoresthe value-added scores. the value-added modeling based scores for teachers created from the accountability (state test) scores. though many have discussed the problems, both technically and sociologically (amreinbeardsley, 2014; guarino, reckase, & wooldridge, 2014; o’neil, 2016), from my perspective they also have added to the risk averse environment for the teachers where worksheets and drill and kill practice reigns supreme in order to increase test scores in order to increase vam scores. i agree with cathy o’neil’s move to put them in her large category of “weapons of math destruction.” scripted curriculums i was fortunate and did not have to teach in a scripted curriculum system or program. there are some positive aspects about this type of system, e.g., consistency in programming if a child were to switch schools or assist a new teacher who is just starting to develop materials. developing materials and plans is time consuming and having a framed start is helpful. from a creativity standpoint, if there is a script, there is little chance of a creative micro-moment occurring or being allowed to occur. scripted curriculums are the safe, baseline, narrow, and risk free version of teaching; just like play dates, day camps, and other structured school-like summer activities are the risk-free summer experience instead of just letting the kids go outside and play. students –risk averse also the students i have had are academically talented. they have high grade-point averages, high sat/act scores and were involved in their high schools and communities. the students also tend to be compliant, which seems like an incredible addition, but is not. i had hoped for a bit more interaction (bandura, 1977) with the course content and with their beliefs and habits. this interaction would lend itself to some interesting contrasts and contradictions thus allowing for creative moments that would help students focus on the learning theory at hand or issues with measuring what they wanted. in addition, i would have moments of doubt and abduction and be a better teacher for it. my high school teaching experience was more of what i had expected at the collegiate level. there were many instances of creative moments as we tried to answer fundamental questions to understand the mathematics at hand. i once taped a cartesian grid on the floor and a curve and told the class to figure out the area-exactly. at the university level, i added a regression analysis activity about grocery shopping by dan meyer to model for the students a more open interactive and creative class. this is an attempt to model how the future teachers can create a classroom room that has the potential for many personally creative moments for student and teacher (beghetto, 2013). but many of them just want to know how to get an a or a high score on the next assignment. my instructional system view assumed students were ready to improvise, talk, discuss, argue, and take risks. pre-service teaching students appear to have an amazing fear of risk taking, that is failure, from experiences within the layers of their k-12 experience 13 global education review 5(1) (bronfenbrenner, 1977). students have tended to be on the more performance-oriented side of the continuum (schraw, 1998). performance orientation focused students are trying to “prove” their competence (schraw, 1998). this focus and the related cognitive and behavioral habits leave little desire for trying something new or engaging in an activity that may fail especially when there are extrinsic reinforcers, grades, involved (amabile, 1985). their comments in class, their use of office hours, and their general engagement all signal that they just want to perform well, not necessarily develop flexible skills and knowledge. in addition to the course experiences, i have experienced dozens of exit interviews for student teachers over the past 16 years. in general, student teachers do not develop or engage in creative activities during their student teaching time period. this is unfortunate because it is simply reinforcing a narrow curriculum and view of teaching. i do understand the survival mode aspect, as i was there once, but it has long-term implications. when one student created an interesting activity, such as poetry stations where students had to write a 7-word poem on a bottle cap, the student was told by a university observer that this is not teaching and she would not be evaluated that day. the students actually loved the activity (she collected evaluative data) and it opened them up to the larger poetry domain. the reaction by the observer, which was reinforcing one model of “teaching” and ignoring what students are “learning,” continues to be a problem. in addition, it reduces student teachers and inservice teachers’ willingness to be creative in the future due to the inherent punishment (risk) in the statement. related to reinforcing one view, i have noticed students’ comments concerning the need to focus on “best practice.” this assumes there is a “best” and ignores the fact that most of it is “what we know now” and many of the “best” are based on seriously limited studies. we have currently supported practices, but not best. but more importantly, it detracts from any chance at seeing a micro-moment because, again, the focus is on the “best” practice of the teacher and not on the learning student. thus, the university faculty are not seeing those micro-moments of personal creativity in their classrooms and therefore cannot model it, discuss it, and develop it so it can be transferred later. the faculty were trained in a right from wrong and good from bad system and their activities and projects sometimes give the appearance of the same “worksheet factory” that occurs in k-12 schools every day. with their overly specified rubrics, they have come out of non-risk taking environments and are creating more non-risk environments. the pre-service students desire low risk environments because they have had to do well on tests, e.g., they want to know the correct answers, and we have enabled them by creating “rubotics” risk free environment. changes i am continually asked to observe colleagues’ classrooms both formally as part of our performance system and informally as part of improvement and development. many of them are excellent in a traditional content delivery sense, but there is an abundance of controlling motivational strategies. you can also see these at the student, teacher, program, school and so on levels. these are also known as:  surveillance, e.g., i will be watching you or we will see what your value added (vam) score, grade, behavior, etc., is at the end of the year,  compliance getters, e.g., if you do x you will get y; if your vam is above x, you get y, and  imposed goals, e.g., goals without a means to get there (you must meet x requirement on your own), and competition (schools with the highest scores get more state money). 14 global education review 5(1) these, obviously, do not increase motivation for the long-term and will not allow for creative moments. there are changes, some small, that can be completed to open up to a more creative moment focused class. what i have noticed in courses designed, purposefully or not, with a self-determination theory (sdt) core, tend to provide more options and have creative moments (ryan & deci, 2000). sdt provides a large frame for examining intrinsic and extrinsic motivation and allows for the interaction between intrinsic and extrinsic motives that are inherent in the individual and act on the individual (ryan & deci, 2000). in addition, sdt allows for the discussion of social development, individual differences, and cultural factors that can assist or impede a person’s progress (reeve, deci, & ryan, 2004). briefly, in social determination theory, there are three core needs (deci & ryan, 2010) that should be occurring in a classroom which will allow for creative micro-moments to blossom. the first, competence is the need to be effective in your environment. essentially, you are being successful and are able to seek out appropriate challenges to demonstrate and expand the skills and knowledge that you currently possess. within your classroom, promoting competence and development in a positive manner can assist in allowing a more creative environment. providing appropriate challenges helps develop competence and moves the learner forward. allowing students to take risks, with a chance to recover, during these challenges will also promote competence and potentially increase creative moments. as students take risks, and sometimes fail, you learn a great deal of where their skills and knowledge exist in your content domain. i provide a pre-test, so to speak, at the start of every semester just to see where the students’ skills and knowledge are at, and adjust from there to get to the right level of challenge. the second, autonomy, is the choice in how the activity works and how to engage in the activity (deci & ryan, 1987, 1992). an early experiment on this topic was lewin, lippit, and white (1939) where boys in an after-school program who were in a “democratic” grouping versus “laissez-faire” grouping were more on task and productive related to the group projects and had better behavior. in my classes, autonomy does not mean the students dictate all the activities, but i do integrate choice and personal/group decision making into the activities. the key is the students have some choice in the activity and not some system or person forcing every aspect of the activity. many assignments in courses are required with specific rules without the students understanding the role or the rules of the assignment. most of the activities or assignments are provided with little student input about the assignment and little engagement about the output. interestingly, if you ask teachers why students do not turn in work, many of the responses focus on a lack of student motivation or laziness (deci, schwartz, scheinman, & ryan, 1981). the focus on laziness seems to fail to acknowledge the perspectives of the student and misses the key aspect about autonomy. if you have to engage in a behavior that you do not want to do, it is helpful to understand why it should be done and how it will develop skills and knowledge within and across domains. it makes it a bit easier to engage knowing that. students are rarely given any explanation or autonomy about the projects. finally, relatedness is the need to develop longterm secure relationships with people. we desire frequent positive interactions with others in warm caring relationships (deci & ryan, 1991). people, especially students, tend to move towards those who provide a caring relationship based on respect. this does not mean, for example, the easy grader teacher, or friendly boss. those are not really positive relationships in the sdt model. we form social attachments 15 global education review 5(1) to people we feel care about us. the bonus is these attachments appear to have positive effects on our emotional patterns and on our cognitive processes (baumeister & leary, 1995). the three of these do not work independently, though they are discussed this way in the literature. when you are working with a boss or teacher and they provide a productive environment, you will be experiencing autonomy, in a safe environment (relatedness), where you can use your skills and knowledge (competence) and develop new ones. when one is missing, the experience is not as strong or functional as it could be. within sdt there needs to be a move away from extrinsic and to intrinsic motivation. extrinsic motivators to action are based on regulating your behavior in reference to an external demand or reward (reinforcement) (skinner, 1938). external motivation is the lowest level of self-determination and is the same as the core aspects of operant conditioning. with external motivation, students engage in the task to get a reinforcer or to avoid punishment. we know that focusing on external reinforcers does not work in the long run and creates perverse behavior patterns (deming, 1994; collins, 2001). intrinsic motivation occurs when you are interested in the activity itself and it satisfies your psychological needs. when i talk to students about dissertations, semester long projects, or becoming a teacher, i discuss the aspects of the activity and choosing the topic or career because you enjoy the activity itself. i am not arguing that is should be your passion, that is a different topic. but they must find it intrinsically motivating. thus, you have to work towards creating class content and activities that become rewarding and developmentally helpful and not just provide a grade for a performance. designing or examining your learning environment when designing a new environment or examining a current one, i start with this simple grid (figure 2). figure 2. autonomy support focus grid 16 global education review 5(1) to create an autonomy supportive environment that can breed micro-moments, one must have solid structure, such as wellcommunicated expectations, procedures, and goals. these will allow for an opportunity to engage in optimally challenging tasks. a lack of structure will create a permissive environment or anything goes environment (lewin, et. al.). the freedom aspect is based on freedom with limits. it does not mean just do whatever you want. a distinction is that a permissive environment is a complete misrepresentation of autonomy-support. autonomy-supportive environments provide an opportunity to complete tasks or engage in tasks with an option for how to engage and sometimes an option for the tasks to be completed all within explicit expectations and goals. think of this as hiring people to do the job, and then letting them do it. controlling environments have high structure but everything is controlled by the boss, teacher, leader, and so on. there is no room for individual choice or decision-making. demanding environments have a great number of “carrots and sticks” (rewards and punishments) but one ever knows what is expected or what will lead to a reward or punishment, which creates the chaos. finally, when people are motived by interest, enjoyment, and the challenge, then we see creative work, not when they are being pressured externally (amabile, 1985). in addition to the type of environment, here are a few ideas that i feel are pretty easy to implement and can adjust the focus of the classroom: 1. have someone come watch your class to see how controlling or “you” centric your classroom is. an autonomy/personal creativity audit if you will. 2. learn to recognize micro-moments and students’ working to connect the dots intellectually. faculty must notice their ire patterns and work to reduce them. 3. focus on what you think you are modeling and try to figure out what you are really modeling. 4. provide more autonomy within your projects, papers, etc., that will allow students more opportunities to expand what they understand. this will provide you a great deal of feedback information on what they are getting out of your class. 5. create juxtapositions. in my research design course, i tend to create activities that cross domains and create some doubt such as using multiple designs to figure out how to win the world’s championship chili cook-off. 6. teach like an improvisational jazz musicianknow your content so well, so deeply, that you can flow with the class and never be out of sync. 7. remember that they are not experts and will not be pro-c by the end of your class. but they should have had their knowledge and skills advanced. 8. let learning be the messy and inefficient process that it is along with opportunities to try something new and fail. 9. constantly question the assumption “teaching causes learning” (cunningham, 2005) conclusion i have pushed hard for many years to increase creative moments and abductive reasoning in classrooms within and across content domains. i have also met a great deal of resistance. many of our largest societal problems will not be solved educating our future leaders in the current model. i am on the fringe and i know it. i do not think we should teach trigonometry anymore or at least not how we do it. we have modeled the same system over the past 70 years and it has not done what we want. there may be more technology in a classroom, there may be a few 17 global education review 5(1) more group projects, but there is very little substantive difference and now we have fewer breaks, arts classes, and recess. this can be seen from first grade to the classrooms for pre-service teachers. but, teachers at the university level can start with little changes which can make a big difference. it is worth the risk and i guarantee your students will still get the content and meet your objectives. epilogue i have recently resigned my tenured full professor position from my school of education. it was time to go. i have put in almost 25 years in the field of education and have been part of the development over 1500 teachers during my time. but the field is still not focused on student learning and development in a deep-meaningful way; most of it is surface level. students, in general, do not get a chance to develop their skills over time, which would make them better employees, citizens, neighbors, parents and so on and we will incur the cost of this for generations. references amabile, t. m. 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(original work published 1967). about the author james b. schreiber, ph.d., is a professor of epidemiology and statistics in the school of nursing at duquesne university. he received his ph.d. from indiana university bloomington in 2000. he has published over 65 articles, reviews, and book chapters along with over 120 national and international conference presentations. he has been the editor-in-chief of the journal of educational research and editor-chair of the journal of experimental education. previously, he was a high school mathematics teacher and department chair, professor of education, and associate dean for teacher education. schreiber galley2 schreiber galley2 p2-end 58 global education review 4(2) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: repko-erwin, melia e. (2017). was kindergarten left behind? examining us kindergarten as the new first grade in the wake of no child left behind. global education review, 4(2), 58-74. was kindergarten left behind? examining us kindergarten as the new first grade in the wake of no child left behind melia e. repko-erwin university of colorado at boulder abstract since the passage of no child left behind (nclb) in 2001, public schools in the united states have witnessed an influx of reforms intended to elevate students’ academic standing in a global economy. the unprecedented federal involvement in education resulting from the passage of nclb has propelled a nationwide movement to standardize instruction, raise achievement levels, and hold schools accountable for improved student outcomes. the kindergarten classroom has not been immune to these efforts. this critical review of literature published within the years 2001-2016 synthesizes empirical and theoretical research centered on us kindergarten post-nclb. connecting nclb’s increased emphasis on standards and accountability to issues of kindergarten readiness, the role of academics, play, and developmental appropriateness in kindergarten, and changes in kindergarten literacy instruction, the author examines the complicated nature of teaching and learning in kindergarten in the wake of nclb, with implications for research, policy, and practice. keywords kindergarten, no child left behind, united states, federal education policy, early literacy, readiness, developmentally appropriate practice many methods and theories have come and gone, yet none has been "proven" to be the best for kindergartners. the often unasked question is, "best for what?" for socializing young children? for teaching the 3 rs? for getting ready for first grade? for eradicating poverty and illiteracy? for stimulating creativity and independence? ...over the years kindergarten has been called upon to do all of these tasks. it still is. —bryant & clifford, 1992, p. 151 introduction in the united states, kindergarten has been an education reform with remarkable staying power (cuban, 1992). inspired by german educator friedrich froebel and his “children’s garden,” the first publically-funded us kindergarten opened in st. louis, missouri in 1873 (dombkowski, 2001). by the 1950s, local, state, ______________________________ corresponding author: melia e. repko-erwin, school of education, rm. 437, university of colorado at boulder, boulder, colorado 80309 email: mere2382@colorado.edu mailto:mere2382@colorado.edu was kindergarten left behind? 59 and federal support for kindergarten— strengthened by its growing public popularity— helped to firmly secure the reform as part of the us public school system (cuban, 1992), with 70% of the nation’s school districts offering kindergarten by 1959 (dombkowski, 2001). by 1986, every state in the nation subsidized kindergarten, at least in part (dhuey, 2011), though at the time of writing only thirteen states and the district of columbia require their public schools to provide full-day kindergarten programs (parker, diffey, & atchison, 2016). in spite of the traction that kindergarten gained and has maintained, it continues to hold a unique and often contested role in united states public schools (bryant & clifford, 1992; dombkowski, 2001). while kindergarten entry marks a significant milestone for most fiveand six-year-olds across the country, kindergarten is only compulsory in fifteen us states (workman, 2014). moreover, though many young children have prior outside-of-the-home learning experiences at preschools and/or childcare centers, kindergarten has traditionally served to bridge these early experiences with the more formal, academically-focused learning environments ubiquitous in first grade classrooms and beyond. yet recent changes in the nature and role of kindergarten have caused some to wonder whether kindergarten is “the new first grade” (bassok, latham, & rorem, 2016; strauss, 2016). this critical literature review synthesizes empirical and theoretical research centered on kindergarten in the united states, focusing primarily on peer-reviewed articles published after the passage of no child left behind (nclb) during the years 2001-2016. because nclb signaled an unprecedented level of federal involvement in k-12 education—resulting in an increased emphasis on standards-based instruction and high-stakes accountability (mcguinn, 2006; meens & howe, 2015)—i wanted to know what links might be made between the onset of nclb and perceived/actual changes in the nature and role of kindergarten. as a literacy teacher educator and scholar, i was especially interested in finding out if and how the increased federal emphasis on standards and accountability has impacted literacy instruction in us kindergarten classrooms. because the provisions of nclb specifically focused on improving academic outcomes for children from high-poverty and minoritized marginalized backgrounds, my review focuses on how these children, in particular, have fared in the wake of this policy. approaching my review from a critical sociocultural perspective (heath, 1982; perry, 2012; street, 1995), i acknowledge that the experiences of students and teachers are shaped by the beliefs and attitudes they hold, which are shaped by the communities and institutions within which they live and operate, as well as their cultural and linguistic practices, personal histories, and ongoing interactions with others (gutierrez & rogoff, 2003; han, 2009; vygotsky, 1978). the questions i ask of the literature reflect my perspective that a policy like nclb has as much influence on teachers and students as teachers and students have on the policy (coburn, 2006; goldstein, 2008; lipsky, 1980; spillane, 2004). understanding this bidirectionality of influence is critical to informing not only how research on a policy is conducted, but what might be done in light of the implications of this research. although kindergarten’s long history as a contested space has been well-documented by others (e.g., bryant & clifford, 1992; cuban, 1992; dombkowski, 2001; russell, 2011), the complicated nature of teaching and learning in kindergarten post-nclb demands greater attention by early childhood researchers. in the sections that follow, i offer my part. this review begins with a brief background of the adoption of the no child left behind act of 2001, in order to provide context was kindergarten left behind? 60 for readers less familiar with us federal education policy. next, i offer a description of the focus of my review. source selection was guided by two primary questions, one focused on nclb’s impact on kindergarten more generally, and one focused specifically on literacy instruction. reading the literature under the guidance of these questions, i was able to connect nclb’s increased emphasis on standards and accountability to: 1) issues of kindergarten readiness; 2) the role of academics, play, and developmental appropriateness in kindergarten; and 3) changes in kindergarten literacy instruction. while finality is a rare find in reviews of education research, i am able to provide readers with a better understanding of where us kindergarten stands in the wake of no child left behind, with implications for research, policy, and practice. no child left behind though no child left behind officially became federal law in january 2002, the groundwork for the policy was laid nearly two decades prior. in 1983, the national commission on excellence in education released a nation at risk, documenting “a rising tide of mediocrity” in us public schools. a nation’s writers went on to lament, “what was unimaginable a generation ago has begun to occur—others are matching and surpassing our educational attainments” (para 1). ironically, while then-president ronald reagan had hoped to abolish the federal department of education during his tenure as commander-in-chief, a nation at risk only further strengthened the role of the federal government in education (guthrie & springer, 2004). eighteen years after the publication of a nation at risk, us congress reauthorized the elementary and secondary education act (esea), also called the no child left behind act, marking the single greatest expansion of the federal role in education policy since the original 1965 legislation (cochran-smith & lytle, 2006; manna, 2010; mcguinn, 2006; meens & howe, 2015). since 1981, when the reagan administration assumed control of the white house, a central theme in us federal education policy has been to improve k-12 academic outcomes in order to ensure that the united states remains intellectually, technologically, and economically dominant across the globe (cochran-smith & lytle, 2006; cuban, 2010; darling-hammond, 2010). although the eighth reauthorization of esea, the every student succeeds act (essa), officially supplanted no child left behind in december 2015, nclb launched a nationwide movement to standardize instruction, raise achievement levels, and hold schools accountable for student outcomes, the effects of which were far-reaching. in 2009, president obama’s race to the top initiative incentivized states to adopt the common core standards, described by bomer and maloch (2011) as “the most sweeping nationalization of the k–12 curriculum in us history” (p. 38). to date, forty-two us states (84%), as well as the district of columbia, four us territories, and the department of defense education activity (dodea) have adopted the common core. in sum, nclb and the state and local policies it has inspired, have been linked to a rise in neoliberal political discourse across the globe, where privatization, free markets, and competition are viewed as the commonsense approach to curing social inequities and ensuring global dominance (hursh, 2007; kerkham & nixon, 2014; lingard, 2010; sleeter, 2012). since 2001, us schools have witnessed an influx of reforms intended to elevate students’ academic standing in a global economy, the kindergarten classroom has not been immune to these efforts. today us kindergartners spend far less time engaged in play-based activities that were once at the heart of the kindergarten experience, and far more time receiving formal was kindergarten left behind? 61 math and literacy instruction (bassok, latham, & rorem, 2016; bowdon & desimone, 2014). while early childhood scholars have critiqued this “academic shovedown” (hatch, 2002), the global education reform movement continues to inform early childhood policy and practice (dahlberg & moss, 2004; dahlberg, moss, & pence, 2007; cannella, salazar pérez, & lee, 2016). concerns about the quality of early childhood education is largely understood in terms of ensuring children’s future economic productivity, rather than supporting their current social, emotional, and developmental well-being. although the shoving down of academics into kindergarten and preschool classrooms has largely been attributed to the standards and accountability movement (brown, 2007; stipek, 2006), since the 1920s, us kindergarten as an institution has struggled “… to define itself both as part of and as separate from the primary grades and as related to but separate from other forms of early childhood education” (dombkowski, 2001, p. 528), particularly in terms of whether academics or play-based learning should be emphasized (bryant & clifford, 1992; russell, 2011). even a cursory reading of the history of kindergarten in the united states would suggest that the kindergarten classroom as a site of curricular and pedagogical controversy is nothing new (bryant & clifford, 1992; dombkowski, 2001), and the years since the passage of nclb have certainly been no exception (russell, 2011). nonetheless, a synthesis of the literature that explores the links between increased federal involvement in us public schools and specific changes in the experiences of kindergarten teachers and students is needed in order to reveal whose interests the policy has (and has not) served. this work is of particular importance for those of us committed to providing more equitable educational experiences for our youngest students. focus of the review in spite of the bipartisan congressional support that led to the adoption of nclb (mcguinn, 2006), the impact and associated consequences of the policy have been nothing short of controversial (pennington, 2007). while a host of scholars have documented the ways in which literacy instruction in elementary school classrooms has changed since the adoption of nclb (e.g., bomer, 2006; dooley & assaf, 2009; dutro, selland, & bien, 2013; valli & chambliss, 2007), the majority of the research has not explicitly focused on kindergarten. this serves in contrast to the increased media attention that kindergarten classrooms have received in recent years (e.g., mclaughlin, carlsson-paige, & levin, 2014; moyer, 2013; paul, 2010; pondiscio, 2015; strauss, 2016). these two observations sparked my interest in conducting a more systematic review, attending to the literature on us kindergarten more generally and kindergarten literacy instruction in particular after the onset of nclb. thirty-seven peer-reviewed journal articles comprised the body of my review, which was guided by the following questions: 1. what links can be made between the increased federal emphasis on standards and accountability ignited by no child left behind and changes in the nature and role of us kindergarten? 2. how has kindergarten literacy instruction in particular been impacted post-nclb? in the sections that follow, i demonstrate the ways in which nclb’s emphasis on improving academic outcomes at all costs has indeed come at a cost, especially for students from low-income and/or culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds—two groups of students that nclb’s provisions purportedly aimed to help. findings are organized according was kindergarten left behind? 62 to three prominent themes: 1) shifting conceptions of kindergarten readiness; 2) the tenuous relationship between play-based learning, direct academic instruction, and developmentally appropriate practice; and 3) the narrowing of the literacy curriculum, with greater emphasis placed on code-based skills acquisition (i.e., decontextualized literacy instruction). kindergarten readiness and “redshirting” understanding conceptualizations of school readiness, and how they may have shifted postnclb, is important for those of us interested in providing more equitable and supportive schooling opportunities for young children. brown and lan’s (2015) meta-synthesis of teachers’ conceptions of kindergarten readiness prior to and post-nclb documents changes in the conceptual frames that teachers historically and currently have used to understand whether or not a child is socially, developmentally, and/or cognitively ready for kindergarten. prior to nclb, kindergarten teachers overwhelmingly interpreted their students’ readiness through a “nativist lens” (brown and lan, 2015, p. 6), whereby readiness was attributed to something within the child (e.g., meisels, 1999; kagan, 1990), and did not depend upon the instruction they received prior to kindergarten. before no child left behind, those children who were identified as not yet ready for kindergarten typically fell into at least one of the following categories: physically smaller than their peers, born in the summer months, exhibiting social immaturity, and/or male (brown & lan, 2015). post-nclb, kindergarten teachers (and policymakers) have placed more responsibility on their preschool colleagues to prepare children for kindergarten (i.e., toward an “empiricist understanding,” brown & lan, 2015, p. 6), interpreting readiness as a quality that preschool instruction should promote. brown and lan (2015) attribute this change in how readiness is understood to the high-stakes standards-based accountability reforms ignited by nclb. however, both the nativist and empiricist understandings of kindergarten readiness discount the interaction between the school context and the child (meisels, 1999), a third conceptualization of readiness held by many preschool educators and early childhood education professional organizations (brown & lan, 2015, citing rimm-kaufman & pianta, 2000 and shaul & schwartz, 2014). nclb and the early childhood initiatives it inspired (e.g., the white house’s [2002] good start, grow smart campaign) place more onus on parents, preschool providers, and the children themselves to make sure that readiness happens, discounting the variables that inform who has access to the kinds of preschools that best prepare children for kindergarten. as such, postnclb there seems to be increased ambiguity among preschool providers, parents, and kindergarten teachers in terms of how readiness is understood, as well as whose job it is to ensure it is cultivated. as high-stakes accountability reforms ignited by nclb have increased expectations for what children should know and be able to do before and by the end of kindergarten (deming & dynarski, 2008; huang & invernizzi, 2012), some parents are choosing to give their child an extra year of preschool instead of sending them to kindergarten when they meet the age requirement (moyer, 2013; paul, 2010). academic redshirting, the practice of refraining from sending a child to kindergarten in the year they first meet the district or state age requirement (bassok & reardon, 2013; deming & dynarski, 2008), has been linked to parents’ efforts to give their children a particular advantage or competitive edge, academic or otherwise (e.g., what graue, kroeger, & brown, 2002 called, “the gift of time”). of course parents’ abilities to make this decision depend was kindergarten left behind? 63 greatly upon whether or not they can afford to pay for an additional year of preschool or childcare, meaning that redshirting is far more prevalent in middleand upper-class households than in low-income households (bassok & reardon, 2013; deming & dynarski, 2008; dobkin & ferreira, 2010). acknowledging this disparity, just how common is academic redshirting, and has the practice increased substantially since nclb? perhaps not as much as the media and previous research has reported. based on data from the 2001 early childhood longitudinal study-birth (ecls-b) cohort, bassok and reardon (2013) estimated that approximately 4-5.5% of children eligible to attend kindergarten waited a year before enrolling. this finding is significant because the 2013 study relied on more recent data than in previous research (e.g., frey, 2005; graue, kroeger, & brown, 2002; lincove & painter, 2006) and because the children within the ecls-b cohort were all born after the adoption of nclb. surprisingly, bassok and reardon (2013) found no evidence to support the notion that developmental and cognitive differences among children impacted parental decisions to delay the start of kindergarten. apart from children with low birthweights, for whom a number of other health and developmental challenges often co-occur (thereby influencing parents’ decisions to delay entry), no significant developmental predictors differentiated children who began kindergarten on time and those who waited a year (bassok & reardon, 2013). however, the authors did observe significant differences in the prevalence of redshirting related to race, socioeconomic status (ses), and gender, with white males from higher ses backgrounds most likely to delay the start of kindergarten. although this finding corroborates earlier studies (deming & dynarski, 2008; stipek, 2002), it contrasts with lincove and painter (2006), who found that white boys from lower income homes were more likely to be redshirted. it is important to note, however, that lincove and painter (2006) based their conclusions on a much older data set (e.g., the national educational longitudinal study of 1988). even though national estimates of the prevalence of academic redshirting are low, these rates likely vary substantially at the state and local levels (bassok & reardon, 2013). moreover, although state funding of kindergarten has been linked to positive outcomes for nearly all subsets of students (dhuey, 2011), some researchers have found that redshirting offers little to no long-term benefits (academic or otherwise), and may in fact be more harmful than helpful (deming & dynarski, 2008; lincove & painter, 2006; stipek, 2002). in other words, while increasing access to highquality kindergarten has generally helped all students in the short and long run, the practice of delaying the onset of kindergarten has shown no definite benefits. this suggests that more localized studies of academic redshirting are needed, particularly to investigate how redshirting may influence perceptions of kindergarten readiness, as well as whether and/or how it may contribute to growing inequities between children from higherand lower-income backgrounds. all work and no play? a review of the research in the area of kindergarten readiness suggests that since nclb, teachers’ and parents’ conceptualizations of readiness have shifted (brown & lan, 2015; deming & dynarski, 2008; huang & invernizzi, 2012). whereas kindergarten teachers of the past were tasked with bridging play-based early learning opportunities to the more formal academic experiences students would encounter in first grade, most kindergarten teachers now expect students to engage with direct academic instruction at the very beginning of their kindergarten year (e.g., russell, 2011). but has was kindergarten left behind? 64 an increased federal emphasis on standards and accountability impacted expectations for what children should be learning while they are in kindergarten, as well as how they should learn it? while other researchers have speculated that this might be the case (e.g., deming & dynarski, 2008), recent research by bassok and colleagues has provided more clarity (see also bowdon & desimone, 2014). early in 2016, bassok, latham, and rorem published a longitudinal analysis of how us kindergarten has changed over a ten-year span. drawing on the early childhood longitudinal study-kindergarten (ecls-k) data set, a nationally representative sample of a cohort of kindergarten students, teachers, and parents followed across time, bassok et al. explored the hypothesis that kindergarten is the new first grade. this study was the first of its kind, utilizing ecls-k cohort data from 1998-1999 and 2010-2011. between the two cohorts of students and teachers, the researchers noted an increased emphasis on direct instruction and skill acquisition, and the reduction in play-based, exploratory learning models (bassok et al., 2016). indeed, the authors found reason to believe that kindergarten today has many of the same qualities as first grades of the past. bassok et al.’s findings support those of earlier researchers who have observed that the academic expectations for us kindergarteners, particularly in literacy, have increased in recent years (e.g., miller & almon, 2009; parker & neuharth-pritchett, 2006). whereas kindergarten was once the place where us children were taught the alphabet and lettersound correspondence, now, at the very least, kindergarten teachers are expected to send their students to the first grade reading simple texts. while bassok et al.’s (2016) study provides convincing evidence that kindergarten content and pedagogy has indeed been influenced by nclb’s increased emphasis on standardization and high-stakes accountability, debates regarding the role of formal academic instruction in kindergarten arose long before no child left behind was signed into law. since the 1980’s, early childhood educators have increasingly advocated for the use of developmentally appropriate practice within early childhood curriculum (i.e., curriculum for children ages eight and younger) and pedagogy (bredekamp & copple, 1997; copple & bredekamp, 2006). developmentally appropriate practice, or dap, has been defined as “teaching decisions that vary with and adapt to the age, experience, interests, and abilities of individual children within a given age range” (copple & bredekamp, 2006, p. 7). proponents of dap stress that deciding whether an instructional move is developmentally appropriate depends upon knowing the student, not a standard (bredekamp & copple, 1997; miller & almon, 2009). many early childhood educators and researchers have argued that the majority of early education academic standards written in recent years have not been created with the developmental needs of young children in mind (bomer & maloch, 2011; goldstein, 2008; hatch, 2002; mclaughlin et al., 2014). hatch (2002) referred to the adoption and implementation of early childhood academic standards as academic shovedown, noting that, “standards-based approaches represent backward movement, designed to force early childhood programs into molds that don't work with older students and are downright harmful for young children” (p. 462). are higher academic expectations and developmentally appropriate practice fundamentally at odds with each other? while some would argue this is a false dichotomy (e.g., parker & neuharth-pritchett, 2006; riley & jones, 2010; snow, 2013), others would claim that meeting the demands of the standards, and simultaneously offering instruction at a level that meets the needs of the whole child is incredibly challenging (e.g., bomer & maloch, 2011; goldstein, 2008). for example, goldstein was kindergarten left behind? 65 (2008) directly connected the changing role of kindergarten to “nclb’s transformation of the us educational climate” (p. 449), with kindergarten now representing the starting point of “a progressing, expanding, non-repeating curriculum of increasing complexity, depth, and breadth” (citing ardovino, hollingsworth, & ybarra, 2000, p. 91). additionally, bomer and maloch (2011) have stated that nclb’s “apparatus of accountability” (i.e., high-stakes assessment beginning as early as preschool) has pushed early childhood educators to instruct in ways that have nothing to do with “the present practices in which the child engages” (p. 40). it is important to point out that opposing standards-based instruction in the early grades does not necessarily reflect early childhood educators’ resistance to having standards. according to hyson (2003), early childhood education has long called upon educators to uphold responsive and developmentally appropriate standards. the objection of many proponents of dap is that most early childhood academic standards do not reflect the ways in which young children learn and develop. as such, “these standards have the potential to pose ‘educational and developmental risks’ for young learners” (goldstein, 2007b, p. 381, citing national association for the education of young children, 2002, p. 2). reflecting on the common core standards [ccs] in particular, bomer and maloch (2011) have asserted: there are probably few primary teachers who think of themselves as directly preparing their children for college and career. most likely, they believe that supporting children in their curiosity about their world, the people around them, and the language in which they are continually bathed is a good preparation for later schooling, college, and career, not to mention for life more generally and everything that’s in it. but that’s not the theory of growth or curriculum that is encoded in the ccs. (pp. 39-40) as stipek (2006) cautioned over a decade ago, attempts to standardize early childhood experiences may do “more harm than good by promoting educational practices that undermine children’s enthusiasm for learning, and, as a result, negatively affect their ultimate academic performance” (p. 456). nonetheless, when it comes to determining whether developmentally appropriate practice can be incorporated into a standards-based curriculum, some scholars are more optimistic than others (bassok et al., 2016; bassok, claessens, & engel, 2014; clements & sarama, 2014). in addition to shifting academic expectations (or perhaps because of these shifts), the amount of time kindergartners are engaged in free or structured play has also received attention from us researchers. despite its many benefits, “…recent years have seen a steady decrease in the amount of time kindergarten classes devoted to play (lynch, 2015, p. 348, citing brownson et al. 2010; frost 2008; meisels & shonko, 2000).” this decrease in time spent playing has been attributed in part to an increased emphasis placed upon preparing young children to do well on standardized tests and to meet academic standards (copple & bredekamp, 2009; hyun, 2003; jeynes, 2006). though some scholars argue that “play is not a luxury but rather a crucial dynamic of healthy physical, intellectual, and social-emotional development at all age levels” (elkind, 2007, p. 4), us school administrators and teachers, feeling pressure to increase test scores, may find it is necessary to reduce the amount of “free time” children are allotted during an already time-crunched school day. as previously stated, many scholars would argue that play and academics are not incompatible. for example, alford, rollins, padrón, and waxman (2015) have written: “the concept of play for young learners has been was kindergarten left behind? 66 erroneously portrayed as directly oppositional to the more ‘worthy’ academic counterpart of academic work” (p. 10). riley and jones (2010) would agree that, “learning and play do not have to be contradictory; learning can occur during times of play” (p. 149). similarly, according to katz (2015): …the traditional debates in the field about whether to emphasize so-called free play or formal beginning academic instruction are not the only two options for the early childhood curriculum. certainly some proportions of time can be given to both of those kinds of curriculum components. but in the early years, another major component of education – (indeed for all age groups) must be to provide a wide range of experiences, opportunities, resources and contexts that will provoke, stimulate, and support children’s innate intellectual dispositions. (p. 2) in spite of this argument, and the fact that many teachers claim to be proponents of dap, alford et al. (2015) found that regardless of grade level, teachers were likely to use “whole class, didactic, teacher-centered instructional practices,” an approach that “discounts the range of differences and contexts that are present within an early childhood classroom” (p. 10). furthermore, parker and neuharthpritchett (2006) found that even though many teachers employ the language of developmentally appropriate practice, they do not always enact these practices in the classroom. alford et al. (2015) specifically linked the use of developmentally inappropriate practices to preparation for testing. according to yoon (2015), “instead of working in tandem, the tests and developmental theories are at odds with each other, specifically in the early grades” (p. 369). nonetheless, parker and neuharthpritchett (2006) remind us that didactic methods and developmentally appropriate methods are not directly in opposition to one another; rather, these are two different instructional approaches that serve two different purposes (citing maxwell, mcwilliam, hemmeter, ault, & schuster, 2001; stipek, felier, daniels, & milburn, 1995). if developmentally appropriate practice, which may incorporate play-based learning, should not be viewed as the opposite of didactic teaching methods, how might we break away from viewing the two as a binary? figure 1, which depicts miller and almon’s (2009) continuum of kindergarten instructional approaches, ranging from highly unstructured free play to highly structured didactic instruction, provides one possible conception: figure 1. continuum of approaches to kindergarten education (miller & almon, 2009). 67 global education review 4(2) according to miller and almon (2009), the optimal educational environment for kindergarten students combines play with a purpose, an environment where children, under the guidance of their teacher(s), can actively experience the world, learning concepts in ways that are meaningful and important to them. snow (2013) would agree with this position. such an environment echoes dewey’s (1938) philosophy of education grounded in experience, particularly the need for continuity and interaction across learning opportunities, as well as the important role of a skilled adult facilitator. from this perspective, the common core standards are addressing only a piece of dewey’s vision, that of offering continuity across learning opportunities, and overlooking how learning opportunities should also be informed by children’s personal and relational ways of being in the world. to close this section, i feel it is also important to clarify the notion of developmentally appropriate practice, as it is somewhat paradoxical in nature. while holding itself at a far distance from standards-based instruction, dap has been built upon a prescribed set of beliefs about the kind of instruction young children need. while on the one hand, this might underscore hyson’s (2003) point that early childhood education has always had standards, moon and reifel (2008), drawing on work from dyson (1995) and genishi, dyson, and fassler, (1994), have reminded us that “‘developmentally appropriate’ practice may not always look the same…in classrooms with diverse children” (p. 50). alford et al. (2015) would add: high-quality early childhood settings consider all the domains of a young child’s development, not just cognition. the need for teachers to individualize and differentiate their instruction in ethnically, culturally, and developmentally diverse environments is all but compulsory. future ece research and practice must utilize a more all-inclusive, farsighted approach towards young children’s learning. ultimately, the answer to providing effective instruction for young children lies in bridging the gap between developmentally appropriate and direct instruction and striking a successful balance between both ideologies and practices. (p. 11) therefore, considering the cultural and linguistic needs of diverse learners adds yet another dimension in this exploration of the changing nature and role of kindergarten postnclb. if developmentally appropriate pedagogy and positive learning outcomes are inextricably linked (alford et al., 2015), is it also possible to teach a culturally and linguistically responsive, standards-based curriculum that meets the social, emotional, and cognitive needs of all children? this seems to be a tall order, even for the most seasoned and successful teacher, and an example of which research (to the best of my knowledge) has yet to locate and explicate. the “science” behind nclb and kindergarten literacy instruction within the context of the kindergarten literacy classroom, it would seem that prior to nclb, children were expected to leave kindergarten ready to read, whereas since nclb, children have been pushed to leave kindergarten already reading (bassok et al., 2016; miller & almon, 2009; yoon, 2015). such a distinction demonstrates the difference between emergent readers, who understand important concepts about print and are experimenting with reading and writing, and early readers who, in addition to possessing a solid grasp of print concepts, have a bank of high frequency words upon which to draw, as well as a growing ability to decode was kindergarten left behind? 68 words that follow predictable sound-spelling patterns (pinnell & fountas, 2007). the expectation that children leave kindergarten already reading can be attributed to the goals of nclb and the adoption of more rigorous academic standards that it inspired (yoon, 2015). among its many ambitious goals, nclb pushed a national initiative, reading first, declaring that all us children should be proficient readers by third grade (white house, 2003). this initiative was largely informed by findings put forth by a group of researchers commissioned by the federal government, the national reading panel (nrp), in their report entitled teaching children to read: an evidence-based assessment of the scientific research literature on reading and its implications for reading instruction (national institute of child health and human development, 2000). privileging reading research based on experimental and quasiexperimental designs (cunningham, 2001), the nrp necessarily reduced reading to a science that can quantifiably be measured. as such, it is not surprising that one of the report’s major takeaways was that effectively teaching reading depended upon explicit instruction in the areas of phonemic awareness, phonics, fluency, vocabulary, and comprehension, with a strong emphasis on the first three in the early grades (bingham & patton-terry, 2013; botzakis, burns, & hall, 2014; paris, 2005). although the conclusions drawn by the nrp received a substantial amount of criticism from leading reading experts (e.g., allington, 2002; cunningham, 2001; paris, 2005), its impact on us classroom practice was highly consequential, as well as its influence on the future adoption of the common core standards (botzakis et al., 2014). post-nclb, federal funding streams were directed toward states and districts that agreed to purchase reading programs and professional development models informed by scientificallybased reading research (teale, paciga, & hoffman, 2007). as such, us teachers, particularly those working with children from low-income and minoritized backgrounds, were pressured to prioritize code-based skills instruction in the early grades (gee, 2013; pearson, 2004; pearson & hiebert, 2010). such a prioritization of decontextualized skills instruction (i.e., street’s [1995] “autonomous model of literacy”) discounted decades of research informed by sociocultural and critical perspectives of literacy learning (e.g., cope & kalantzis, 2013; gee, 2004; 2013; heath, 1982; luke, 2013; the new london group, 1996). central to these perspectives is “an alternative, ideological model of literacy [that] offers a more culturally sensitive view of literacy practices as they vary from one context to another” (street, 2008, p. 4). sociocultural and critical perspectives call for educators to attend to the ways in which power, privilege, and context shape how people conceive of and use literacy/literacies, as much as educators attend to how the acts of reading, writing, speaking, and listening are taken up by any one individual within any one group (e.g., heath, 1982; perry, 2012; street, 1995). in spite of research that has demonstrated the ideological nature of literacy, nclb’s reading first initiative and (more recently) the adoption of the common core standards have equated literacy to academic performance (bomer & maloch, 2011; botzakis et al., 2014), or “the ability to read and write and compute in the form taught and expected in formal education” (street, 1995, p. 107; citing ogbu, 1990). this decontextualized approach to literacy development holds that learning to read and write is contingent upon students explicitly learning the code of the english language (pearson, 2004; pressley & allington, 2014). implicit within this autonomous literacy model is an assumption that there is a right way to interpret a text once it is decoded. one consequence of this model is that children come was kindergarten left behind? 69 to learn that the most important information gleaned from reading is located within the words on the page, not the responses that reading invokes within the reader (or a community of readers). the common core standards are actually more explicit in this regard (bomer & maloch, 2011; yatvin, 2012). researchers have noted that although developing code-related skills is important for future reading success, too much emphasis in the early grades “comes at the expense of emphases on the oral language skills of listening and speaking; skills related to vocabulary, composition, and comprehension” (paris & luo, 2010, p. 316). decontextualized code-based skills instruction can be particularly detrimental for children from culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds, for whom skills instruction without a meaningful context is not only confusing, but counterproductive (herrera, perez, escamilla, 2010; yoon, 2015). additionally, such a narrowly prescriptive response to a perceived national literacy problem overlooks a great deal of research on the social aspects of literacy and meaningmaking (cochran-smith & lytle, 2006), a response that may seem surprising given that “no field has witnessed more synthesis/consensus-seeking efforts [by researchers and policy-makers] than reading, particularly early reading research” (pearson & hiebert, 2010, p. 286). in addition to the overemphasis on decontextualized skills instruction in kindergarten classrooms, yoon (2015) found that the assessment data teachers used were based on conceptualizations of literacy learning as a linear path. such data is necessarily reductionist in view because “language assessments and norm referenced tests simplify language to its basic parts” (yoon, 2015, p. 390). paris and hoffman (2004) have criticized a “one-test-fits-all approach” to assessing early literacy because “a single assessment cannot adequately represent the complexity of a child’s reading development…[and] a single assessment cannot capture the variety of skills and developmental levels of children in most k–3 classes” (p. 205). adding to the problem, the ways in which assessment data are used in early childhood classrooms can prove troublesome for those concerned with educational equity. since nclb, the increased use of standardized assessments in kindergarten classrooms has arguably led to an increased use of homogenous grouping (e.g., ability grouping) to provide at least a portion of students’ daily instruction. catsambis and buttaro (2012), who analyzed the psycho-social aspects of ability grouping, have noted that: [our] findings support what skeptics of ability grouping have said all along; that ability grouping benefits only children in high ability groups… the psycho-social effects of this instructional practice can actually contribute to achievement gaps by race/ethnicity and socioeconomic status that tend to increase as students move from kindergarten to the third grade (citing tach & farkas, 2006; fryer & levitt 2006). thus the research on changes in literacy instruction post-nclb paints a troubling picture for all early childhood educators, but especially those who work with children from low-income and culturally and linguistically diverse backgrounds. while proponents of nclb may have argued that these are the very children the policy intended to support, observations of classroom practice and analysis of assessment data in the wake of nclb suggest otherwise. if kindergarten was left behind, where do we go from here? in her history of early childhood education, beatty (1995) noted, “practice tends to go through cycles, pushing young children too hard and too fast and then letting up again in response to adult concerns’’ (p. 205). in the us, we may be at a crossroads, a point in time when was kindergarten left behind? 70 we must decide just how much we are willing to let up when it comes to demanding that all children meet higher academic standards if we also insist they be taught in ways that reflect their developmental, cultural, and linguistic needs and abilities. perhaps we need to forge a more expansive trail that considers not only what and how our youngest children are taught, but why we send them to public schools in the first place. such considerations will help to reveal whose interests education policies are (and are not) serving. as russell (2011) has noted, “educators are embedded in a cultural environment where ideas are publicly framed and debated, shaping parental expectations, policymakers’ rulemaking, and perhaps educators’ beliefs about what constitutes legitimate professional practices” (p. 259). this literature review supports such an insight. research has yet to offer definitive conclusions or even provide universal examples of how kindergarteners might best be instructed because, of course, the question echoed in the epigraph of this article remains: “best for what?” (and i would add, best for whom?) researchers must devote increased attention to studying the ways in which teachers’ classroom practices represent their response to such questions, and how research might support, challenge, and/or shift this response. policymakers then must use this research, informed by the perspectives of early childhood practitioners, parents, and children, when designing policies that impact our youngest learners. equity-minded policy-makers would be wise to recognize that our seemingly relentless national and global emphasis on standardization, high-stakes accountability, and children’s future economic productivity have only further extended the distance between the have’s and have not’s in our society. this literature review reveals the complicated nature of teaching and learning in kindergarten in the wake of nclb; researchers and policymakers alike must recognize this complexity. kindergarten teachers are faced with the challenging task of meeting academic standards, nurturing children’s social and emotional needs, while also teaching in ways that are culturally, linguistically, and developmentally responsive. students arrive in kindergarten eager and willing to learn, but with vastly different experiences that may or may not have prepared them for the educational context within which they find themselves. parents and families want the best for their children, but unless they are well-versed in the research on child development and early childhood education, they must rely on information provided by others in order to make most educational decisions. many educators and parents—myself included—would agree that the kindergarten classroom into which today’s five and six year olds walk looks and feels very different from the kindergarten of decades past. whether these differences are for the better, or for the worse, depends on who you ask. nonetheless, understanding how kindergarten might better serve all learners has utility beyond helping to resolve differences in parents’, teachers’, researchers’, and/or policymakers’ ideological or pedagogical beliefs. debates centered on education are always personal, because the consequences of ill-informed education policies land squarely on the shoulders of our children. in other words, focusing future research (and policy decisions) on the questions of “best for whom?” and “best for what?” is not only important, but essential. references alford, b. l., rollins, k. b., padrón, y. n., & waxman, h. c. 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[review of the book seven strategies for the assessment of learning by jan chappuis]. global education review, 3 (2). 123-125 book review a standards-based approach to assessment “seven strategies for the assessment of learning” by jan chappuis by colin everett an era of standards and accountability continues in american education. blamed for every conceivable economic and social shortcoming, american public schools have been charged with turning around our culture and country. the current path toward that turnaround is the common core standards. assessment of learning today is in many schools a measure of either the common core, or standards written in the spirit of the common core. the assessment of learning is—in this current context—the assessment of these standards. books like seven strategies for the assessment of learning are designed to help teachers better align their instruction and assessment toward these standards. the goal of seven strategies for the assessment of learning is to provide a practical guide for utilizing assessment as a means to foster students’ academic growth. the book comes in a large reproducible page format. in addition to the text, a dvd containing teacher and student reactions to the book’s processes is included. setting a clear and understandable vision of the learning target is the first strategy that the author presents. to progress this skill, prospective teachers should know that a learning target is “what students are to know and be able to do as a result of instruction” (34). different types of learning targets, such as knowledge, reasoning, skill, and product level targets are modeled. throughout the text, student examples range from kindergarten—“i can hear when music is loud or soft” (45)—to high school—“i can describe where mitochondria and chloroplasts come from” (49). one of the goals of a clear learning target is that it can set the basis for the construction of a workable and student friendly rubric. the creation of a clear and effective rubric is the transition into strategy two: using examples of strong and weak student work. using a rubric, students are encouraged to selfassess and be engaged in the process of defining 124 global education review 3 (2) what constitutes quality work. for the author, a student friendly rubric is written in the first person with student friendly language. the text contains scripts and detailed processes for developing these rubrics for different subjects and grade levels. once the rubrics are in hand, students should be provided with a sample and then individually generate a score with the rubric. students should subsequently share their opinions with the whole class. finally, students should discuss how the work measures against the rubric. in each chapter, about a dozen “activities” are described, such as “keeping a reflective journal” or a “think-pairshare.” the third strategy focuses on providing effective feedback. some of effective feedback’s characteristics are that it is focused on the learning target, occurs during learning, and addresses partial understanding. feedback itself is bifurcated into success and next-step feedback. the author address some practical concerns, like advising against grading as a means of feedback until the “feedback has been acted upon” (104). dialog forms, visual feedback, peer feedback, and student conferences are all examples of feedback covered in this chapter. self-assessment is the fourth strategy and the chapter begins, like most in the book, with a selection of favorable studies that provide research-based support for the chapter’s arguments and points of view. for example, the author launches this chapter stating that research repeatedly confirms that, “when students are required to think about their own learning and articulate what they understand and what they still need to learn, achievement improves” (146). strategies to incorporate selfassessment include moving checkers and buttons (for young students), stars and stairs, checklists, and notes to home. after the selfassessment, students are guided to create a plan as to what the student will do as well as the level of assistance, the when, the where, the materials needed, and finally, an identification of the “evidence the student will use to verify accomplishment” (185). figuring out the needs for focused instruction is one of the essential features of the author’s “feedback loop” that furthers a student’s understanding of the learning target. strategy six continues this sentiment with examples of focused instruction, practice, and revision. the author stresses the importance of practice as an essential part of the learning process and cautions the teacher to only grade summative items and provide penalty free feedback on formative learning items. the usual collection of example rubrics, journals, and portfolios are included in the activity section. the seventh and final strategy asks teachers to “provide students opportunities to track, reflect upon and share their learning progress” (269). various metacognitive approaches, like tracking forms, learning logs, and student led conferences, are suggested and modeled. seven strategies for the assessment of learning is published by pearson education, which is deeply involved in many facets of the field of education. the company strongly supports the common core and its business model revolves around the promotion of those standards and standards-based learning. consequently, seven strategies for the assessment of learning ultimately helps the company fulfill these objectives. the book, which is a practical guide for the ideas the author presents in the general text, classroom assessment for student learning: doing it right, using it well (2012), strictly adheres to the standards-based educational approach, which serves as the basis for its entire program. therefore, it offers no critique of this educational approach. providing alternative a standards-based approach to assessment 125 approaches and outlooks is an essential part of good instruction. the result is that the reader can be left with the impression that the goal of education is to achieve nothing more than the stated learning standard. despite all of the rhetoric of a “student centered approach to assessment,” this approach never allows the student to create any of their own meaning from their education. as with most off-the-shelf programs, the author’s intent is that the reader can take one part of the program or the entirety of the approach. educators who teach courses for preservice teachers on assessment might be disappointed in this book, particularly if they are looking for something innovative or a fresh approach or ideas to supplement what can be found in their existing materials. further, some fundamental concepts of assessment, like creating effective constructed response items or distinguishing effective multiple-choice distractors, were notably omitted. for educators whose compass points toward the standardsbased approach to learning, this text may be quite helpful. however, those who perceive education as having a broader or more diverse purpose might want to look for another guide to assessment strategies. “seven strategies for assessment for learning.” by jan chappuis. 2nd edition. new york: pearson education, 2015. isbn: 978-0-13-336644-8 about the author jan chappuis has been an elementary and secondary teacher as well as a curriculum developer in english/language arts, mathematics, social studies, and world languages. for the past 25 years, she has written books and developed workshops focused on classroom assessment literacy. a nationally recognized expert in the area of formative assessment, she has presented both nationally and internationally. after working at the assessment training institute in portland, oregon for twelve years, chappuis is currently an educational writer and independent consultant specializing in classroom assessment practices that support learning. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer in the accelerated post-baccalaureate program at bridgewater state university in massachusetts. 52 global education review 5(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: layman, eric w. (2018). mixed: educational perspectives from families of east and west educational background. global education review, 5(1), 52-73. mixed: educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west educational background eric. w. layman indiana university, bloomington abstract will my children’s creativity be hindered if i place them within the rigidity of an east asian school? conversely, could my children’s math and science skills benefit from the high expectations of an east asian curriculum and teacher? the purpose of this study is two-fold. firstly, it aims to demonstrate that comparison between eastern and western educational traditions can be framed in terms of a dialectic concerning students’ development, autonomy, learning environment, and curricula. secondly, it is to analyze the substance and effects of this dialectic in the context of 15 families of mixed educational background situated between eastern and western educational traditions. these families in hong kong have access to educational opportunities for their children in adherence to educational styles associated with either eastern or western culture, or a combination of both. this study seeks to illuminate the possible dominance, abandonment, and/or synthesis of cultural background when evaluating schooling options for children in families of mixed educational background. the study finds that these families largely inclined towards educational ideals more associated with eastern characterizations while their children were at the primary level of education. in stark contrast, they unanimously favored western propensities in education when their children were in secondary school and beyond. this study concludes that there may be wider ramifications of this model of intercultural compromise beyond the level of the intercultural family, particularly as it relates to broader global and comparative educational discourse surrounding notions of how creativity and innovation may be fostered in culturally defined educational contexts. keywords chinese learner, intercultural families, east vs. west education, creativity development in education, memorization, rote learning, chalk-and-talk teaching, east asian schooling, high-stakes testing, stem vs. liberal arts education, tiger moms and education framing the east vs. west dialectic in education the purpose of this study is to first demonstrate that cross-cultural notions of creativity development in education have been strongly influenced by debates regarding the four topics of students’ development, autonomy, learning environment, and curricula. thus, comparison between eastern and western educational ______________________________________ corresponding author eric w. layman, educational leadership and policy studies, w.w. wright education building, room 1020, bloomington, in 47406. email: ewlayman@indiana.edu educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west 53 traditions can be framed in terms of a dialectic concerning these four categories. secondly, this study aims to analyze the substance and effects of this cross-cultural dialectic over how to develop creativity and foster academic success in the context of 15 families of mixed educational background situated between eastern and western educational traditions. characterizations of eastern and western traditions in education can be framed in terms of a dialectic consisting of different focal points that some have called attention to as to “what matters” in encouraging academic performance and innovation and creativity in certain educational contexts described as adhering to eastern or western traditions. for each concern regarding students’ educational endeavors, there are two different topics of debate that feature prominently within the east vs. west dialectic in education. the purpose of this paper is not to argue that “eastern” or “western” educational traditions do indeed universally adhere to the characterizations described below, although that may be a worthwhile debate. rather, the paper does assert that these educational traditions have often been framed in cultural terms in recent years, and the efficacy of these educational activities and learning environments has often been tied to the academic performance of students within culturally demarcated east vs. west delineations, and many of these are also relevant to how they influence creative development. the chart below outlines the substance of these debates according to what educationally significant activity students are perceived to be doing, as well as what some perceive to be significant about the educational environment of these activities. for each of these debate topics, the characterization is of east vs. west, or in other words, with the eastern characterization of education on the left of the dichotomy. the categories described in table 1 arose out of a review of both academic literature as well as of popular education discourse, and their formation is further detailed in the following literature review. in addition, although the usage of terms such as “creativity” and “innovation” may fluctuate in definition throughout the literature review as employed by various actors and texts; for the ultimate purposes of this paper creativity will be defined as “novel” and “useful” solutions applicable to specific “social contexts” (dow, 2016, p. 16). the underlying issue that this study seeks to address consists of both a microand macro-dimension. at the microlevel, this study investigates how east/west intercultural couples negotiate disparate table 1: the east vs. west dialectic in education concerns regarding students’ debate topics development memorization vs. deep learning developed intelligence vs. innate intelligence autonomy tiger moms vs. permissive parents chalk-and-talk teaching vs. participatory pedagogy learning environment collectivism vs. individualism uniform requirements vs. diverse requirements curricula stem subjects vs. liberal arts standardized, high-stakes testing vs. diverse evaluation 54 global education review 5(1) educational traditions in order to make educational decisions for their children. at the macro-level, this study argues that the compromise and synthesis exercised by these intercultural couples may be a window to understanding how more global educational trends may also synthesize and reach mutual understanding in the presence of ever-increasing intercultural comparison and exchange. literature review concerns regarding students’ development memorization vs. deep learning does rote learning inhibit creativity? eastern education is often claimed to place greater emphasis on “surface-level” memorization techniques, as chinese students have been “consistently” observed to be more “structureoriented,” as opposed to “depth-oriented,” in their approach to learning, while western education is often thought to have a greater emphasis on “deeper level understanding” (h. cheng, andrade, & yan, 2012). for example, with respect to linguistic representation, in both japanese and mandarin chinese, the word used for “study” and “learn” is pragmatically synonymous in meaning and in usage with “imitate” and “copy” (goodman, 2003, p. 17). educators have argued that too much of a focus on memorization will impede the more necessary acquisition of deeper level of knowledge (c. k. k. chan & rao, 2009; deng, 2012, p. 107). historically, some within china have blamed china’s high rate of illiteracy on “rote learning” and, “in order to place an emphasis on understanding instead of rote learning,” some encouraged a “western pedagogical approach” in place of these “traditional chinese teaching methods” (bai, 2005, pp. 191-192). the education system in shanghai, widely claimed to be one of “best performing in the world” (oecd, 2010), has apparently in part achieved such a status by seeking to “overcome” some of the “problems caused by its cultural heritage” by discouraging the rote memorization techniques typified in traditional eastern schools (k. cheng, 2011, pp. 30-31). proponents of educational reform in japan have claimed that japan wants to “move from a concentration on rote-learning to more individualized, project style teaching” (goodman, 2003, p. 22). however, these memorization techniques have not been considered to be completely without merit, and in japan a curriculum that relies on extensive memorization has been described as the “glory of the japanese education system” (tucker & ruzzi, 2011, pp. 86-87). others have cited memorization as one aspect of the “paradox of the chinese learner” as, despite the extensive usage of these memorization techniques, chinese students still seem to acquire an exceptional degree of understanding of the material, which some claim they simply could not demonstrate had they not attained substantial depth in their knowledge acquisition (kember & watkins, 2010). in response to this, “memorizing and understanding” has been touted as “the key to the paradox,” as chinese students purportedly use these surface-level memorization techniques as a means to gain deeper level understanding, and not as a substitute for it (marton, dall’alba, & tse, 1996). finally, although some have attributed an overemphasis on memorization to a stifling of creative expression, educators from the united kingdom have argued that they should learn from japan that “rote learning...need not be at the expense of creativity but should complement more informal learning” (phillips, 2003, p. 177). mel typewritten text mel typewritten text mel typewritten text educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west 55 developed intelligence vs. innate intelligence do views of innate intelligence inhibit the potential for the development of creativity and intelligence? the “classical view of intelligence” in the west has been one that regarded intelligence as “genetically determined” and a “biopsychological potential” within an individual that can “activated” in certain educational settings (moseley, 2005, pp. 206-207). recently, there have been many challenges to the notion of intelligence as an innate trait, and many of these objections have originated in east/west crosscultural consideration. for instance, in japan, the claim is made that children learn through “imitation and effort, in opposition to the western idea of education wherein the child is seen as having innate abilities which need to be drawn out by the teacher” (goodman, 2003, p. 17), and that in japan “doing well on exams is about how hard you work, not how smart you are” (tucker & ruzzi, 2011, p. 85). some have attributed this notion of intelligence as a skill that can be developed to confucian influence: [d]ifferences in intelligence, according to confucius, do not inhibit one’s educability, but the incentive and attitude to learn does. therefore, although confucius did not refuse to teach anybody who wanted to learn, he would have refused to teach a person who was not eager to learn. (lee, 1996, p. 29) in his book on how intelligence should be regarded as a skill that can be developed, nisbett (2009) further argues the superiority of the east asian characterization of intelligence: there is no mystery about why asian and asian american children work harder. asians do not need to read this book to find out that intelligence and intellectual accomplishment are highly malleable. confucius set this matter straight twentyfive hundred years ago. he distinguished between two sources of ability, one by nature—a gift from heaven—and one by dint of hard work. asians today still believe that intellectual accomplishment…is primarily a matter of hard work, whereas european americans are more likely to believe it is mostly a matter of innate ability or having a good teacher. (p. 158) intelligence as a matter of nurture, rather than nature, is therefore linked to explicitly east asian cultural values and viewpoints, and many are speculating as to whether this may be one reason to explain east asian academic success. in addition, this debate is highly relevant to the topic of creativity, as many researchers have specifically linked the notion of developed and malleable intelligence to “creative achievement” (dweck, 2006, pp. 11-12). concerns regarding students’ autonomy tiger moms vs. permissive parents does strict parenting squash creative development? few publications have ignited such fierce debate surrounding the role of culturally delineated parenting styles, and their relevance towards child achievement as battle hymn of the tiger mother (chua, 2011). chua’s severe and demanding parenting style has been held up in popular imagination as one indispensable consideration in accounting for the academic success of the east asian community, as well as for the lack of competitiveness and excellence in american education (paul, 2011; howard, 2011; alden, 2016, pp. 127-152). however, others have argued that this type of parenting is ultimately destructive towards child development, irrespective of the short-term academic success it may help students achieve (kohler, kilgo, & christensen, 2012; derbyshire, 2011; ritchie, 2011). others have claimed that this type of parenting is a ridiculous, harmful, and misinformed misrepresentation of “chinese” parenting, and that the actual parenting styles 56 global education review 5(1) utilized by asians are far more nuanced and complex (juang, qin, & park, 2013; lui & rollock, 2013). regardless, this idea of culturally influenced parenting practices being linked to academic, professional, and personal success by no means had its initiation with chua’s controversial memoir. the possible relationship between culturally defined parenting techniques and children’s overall well-being was a topic of interest and scholarly exploration also in the years leading up to this contentious chronicle’s release (pong, johnston, & chen, 2010; hayashino & chopra, 2009). moreover, the possible extension of parenting practices into considerations of how they contribute towards the efficacy of authority figures in schools was also an area of interest prior to 2011 (ho, 2001). however, irrespective of when this debate began, or whether or not the debate is accurately labeled as one of “east” and “west;” the evidence of a culturally demarcated discourse on the appropriate demands and expectations placed on students by authority figures is quite apparent. moreover, one of the chief criticisms in the popular debate concerning the “tiger mom” approach to parenting is that it impairs the development of creativity (singer, 2011; ticktin, 2016). chalk-and-talk teaching vs participatory pedagogy do heavily didactic, “chalk-and-talk” teaching methods discourage creativity? the disputed qualities and/or deficiencies of the “chinese” teacher is another fundamental component of the much discussed “paradox of the chinese learner” (mok et al., 2001; j. wang, 2013). this part of the paradox surrounds “behaviorist” and “constructivist” approaches to pedagogy. “behaviorist” techniques are thought to involve passive students and lecturing teachers, and have been claimed to be ultimately less effective when compared to “constructivist” techniques that allow students to be active and participatory in building their own knowledge base. the “paradox” with respect to chinese teachers is that they do indeed appear to require passivity on the part of their students; nonetheless they seem quite effective with regard to student outcomes (watkins, 1996; rao, ng, & pearson, 2009, p. 264). the success of chinese students has indeed led some to wonder if “chalk-and-talk teaching may be the best way after all” (donnelly, 2014). however, some in east asia have seen this teaching style as detrimental to student success. for instance, in 2004 singapore instituted the teach less learn more educational campaign, as it was thought that its students were learning too passively (stewart, 2011, p. 120). others claim that this binary construct of teaching practice is far too simplistic, and that chinese teachers have more sophisticated methods of maintaining students’ attention (ho, 2001, p. 112; cortazzi & jin, 2001). some claim that certain western-produced educational reforms haven’t been as successful in east asia due to fundamental differences in culture, and that teachers in china involve students in their own learning in different ways than in the west (c. k. k. chan, 2001). others have argued that “collaborative” and “peer” learning techniques that require greater student participation and activity are “latent” for chinese students, or have other manifestations than what are seen in the west (tang, 1996; r. w. m. chan & chong, 2012). regardless, a culturally defined pedagogical dialectic is readily apparent. teachers in east asian contexts are perceived to talk more in the classroom than teachers in western contexts, and many are debating as to whether this contributes to, or hinders, student achievement. moreover, this debate has direct relevance to notions of creativity, as “chalk-andtalk” and “traditional” teaching methods have been cited by some to be directly detrimental to the development of innovation and creativity mel typewritten text mel typewritten text mel typewritten text mel typewritten text mel typewritten text educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west 57 (quintin, 2009; omdal & graefe, 2016, pp. 207208). concerns regarding students’ learning environment collectivism vs. individualism do individualistic cultures inherently foster creativity? some argue that east asia has psychological and social orientations that afford greater consideration to their environment, and regard their place in a collective society as having greater importance than their individuality (lew, 1998; sun, 2013). some link this collective psychological and social orientation to their surroundings as one factor of east asian academic success (salili, 1996; hau & ho, 2010). tucker & ruzzi (2011) similarly claim that one cannot begin to understand japan’s success in education without understanding the “influence of traditional values,” especially the concept of “group harmony,” which obligates students to uphold the reputation of their schools and families through their individual actions (pp. 83-84). while they note that one of the chief reasons that japan looks to the west in education is for ideas about how to “teach creativity,” however, they assert this focus of attention to be somewhat misplaced in that: western nations do not teach creativity. they put more value on the individual than on the group, whereas the asian nations place a higher value on the group. in asia, the saying goes, the nail that sticks out gets hammered down. (p. 98) similarly, the claim is that: “the object of japanese education...has never been to train the individual for independent action, but to train him for co-operative action—to fit him to occupy an exact place in the mechanism of a right society” (hearn in phillips, 2003, p. 171). as such, japanese education reform has “advocated greater individualism” (cummings, 2003, p. 33). the concepts of individuality and creativity are hotly debated in japan, as the concept of individualism is linked to “ideas of selfishness,” which has “very negative connotations in the japanese context” (goodman, 2003, p. 16). fundamentally though, rather than a collective mindset being an inherently predisposed trait of asian people, some claim that greater encouragement towards an “interdependent” mindset likewise encourages a “holistic,” as opposed to “analytic,” perspective of surroundings, of which the latter notices and fixates upon items on isolation (varnum, grossmann, kitayama, & nisbett, 2010; nisbett, 2009, pp. 162-168). in other words, if a collective mindset, which enables “holistic thinking,” is indeed associated with higher academic success, or vice versa, then it can and should be trained. therefore, the worth of western practices that place greater emphasis on individuals as a purported means of fostering creativity, and the counter posed eastern practices of priming and cultivating a collective, interdependent mentality, are thus an important consideration in the east vs. west dialectic in education. uniform requirements vs diverse requirements does curricular rigidity destroy creativity in students? in commendation of japan as a “perennial league leader” in international educational system comparisons, tucker & ruzzi (2011) argue that, “japanese students have done so well...because of the curriculum” and that this curriculum has been marked by “very little flexibility” (p. 86). in stark contrast, while nevertheless employing the exact same language of description, cave (2003) claims japanese education is, “perennially in crisis, and perennially in need of reform—at least to many domestic commentators” and “problems tend to be blamed on the same features of japanese education—its supposed rigidity, uniformity, and exam-centeredness” (p. 87). a common 58 global education review 5(1) understanding is that, “western education philosophies often emphasize the importance of creativity at the cost of ‘learning the basics,’ while in japan the emphasis is the other way around” (goodman, 2003, p. 17). also, in possible explanation of east asian success in international comparative exams, the east asian model of a “conducive school disciplinary climate” has been espoused as one likely reason for east asian success in international exams, and thereby perhaps worthy of consideration in non-eastern contexts (ma, jong, & yuan, 2013). similarly, the argument has been made that, “chinese, korean and japanese children are groomed for the demands of schooling before they get there, in a way that western children usually are not” (watkins & biggs, 2001). however, those in the east do not universally share this positive perception of an environment of uniformity and rigidity. zhao (2012) claims that china is “flunking innovation and creativity” with its inflexible educational structure. modern chinese preschools have borrowed ideas from the west in order to incorporate less regimentation (tobin, 2009, p. 80). the need to develop creativity in students is seen as a key area of challenge and change that is being pursued in hong kong, china, korea and taiwan (lei & zhang, 2011). moreover, south korea’s high-pressure, rigid education system has been argued to be tantamount to “child abuse” and an “assault” upon its nation’s young people (koo, 2014). moreover, some in the united states have begun to blame an overly “scripted curriculum” as a “barrier” to the development of creativity in american classrooms (omdal & graefe, 2016, p. 211). however, some in japan have countered that, because of japan’s high ranking on international educational league tables, it is “utterly irrational” for japan to look to the united states for ideas on education reform, particularly with regard to possibly adopting the practice of grouping students according to ability, rather than heterogeneously, as they have been done traditionally in japan. instead, the model of presenting every student with exactly the same curriculum and requirements is maintained (lewis, 2011, p. 243). so, while the west admires the academic success generated in the highly regimented and structured environments of the east, the east also at times looks towards the west as to how to generate creativity and original expression in contexts of individual emphasis, while also considering whether or not to maintain its traditional practices of exacting universal, uniform requirements on students. concerns regarding students’ curricula stem subjects vs. liberal arts do liberal arts curricula effectively develop creativity in students? in illustration of the high regard that many western countries have for east asian prowess in imparting science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) knowledge and skills, the united kingdom has made plans to bring in math teachers from china in order to improve the mathematics performance of the students there (paton, 2014). according to nisbett (2003), chinese historically have not been interested in exploring the unknown, but instead have had a “genius for practicality,” and “have always been far more interested in the pragmatic application of knowledge than with abstract theorizing for its own sake” (p. 8 & p. 40). chinese psychology is said to have a fundamental aversion to “abstract and complex theories,” and instead is “satisfied with surface solutions, order and stability” (zhang & wei, 2011, p. 15). many in asia have considered this to be a deficiency in the asian education model. for example, there has been a call for chinese scholarship to loosen its focus on utility and pragmatism and consider embracing the more western orientation towards an exploration of knowledge for knowledge’s sake (yang, 2011). there has been a educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west 59 push for chinese schools to become more “quality oriented” with a greater focus on “holistic development” (cravens, chu, & zhao, 2011). however, in popular documentaries critical of the american public school system, such as two million minutes and waiting for superman, american students are portrayed as overly self-confident, thoroughly and dangerously unaware of how inferior their math and science skills are relative to their asian peers (guggenheim, 2010; heeter, 2008). however, others have cautioned that an overemphasis on stem subjects is placing students in danger of becoming too narrowly focused in education and ultimately unable to adapt to changing economic landscapes (charette, 2013; collins, 2002). nonetheless, many in the west are claiming that eastern education is setting a better example with regard to stem education (duncan, 2010; jackson, 2012; noguchi, 2016), while many feel that east asian education is not broad enough, thus failing to instill “creativity and character” (chew, 2016). high-stakes, standardized testing vs. diverse evaluation does high-stakes testing quell creative exploration and learning? one of the most widely touted developments in educational restructuring initiated by the west is the use of quantified learning outcomes and high-stakes exams in order to increase “accountability” and “transparency” in pursuit of educational outcomes (world bank group, 2011, pp. 5-6). in support of the results and structure of its programme for international student assessment (pisa), the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) claims that: setting standards and showing students how to meet them matters. most of the high-performing countries have developed world-class academic standards for their students and almost all have incorporated those standards into a system of external examinations that are used to construct clear paths into the workforce and good jobs or to the next stage of education or both. indeed, pisa shows that the existence of such external examinations is positively associated with the overall performance of school systems. (oecd, 2010, p. 104) the no child left behind (nclb) reform in the u.s., “was based on the premise that setting high standards and establishing measurable goals can improve individual outcomes in education” (moore jr., 2012). the reform’s proponents assert that, “accountability systems have been developed almost universally across the states to deal with the aggregate performance shortcomings that are now widely recognized” (hanushek & raymond, 2001, p. 368). negative stereotypes had previously prevented east asian countries from being used as a reference point to guide educational development, but now this has changed due to a sense “crisis” reflected in western countries, and as fostered by their outstanding results in tests like pisa (trohler, 2013). concerning the benefits of these exams, some argue that japan is highly meritocratic precisely because “merit is determined by exams” and to do well on these exams one must work hard over long periods of time (tucker & ruzzi, 2011, p. 85). some argue that a fundamental commonality within east asian countries is not a “vernacular” adherence to confucian values, but rather an adherence towards a high-stakes testing framework (j. l. wang, 2013). however, the benefits of these exams are by no means conclusive, and debated extensively within these regions. within hong kong, there have been inquiries into how students cope with the pressure of these exams and whether or not they should be amended to improve overall student achievement and development (carless, 60 global education review 5(1) 2011). singapore is considered as one of the top performers in education, however it wants to change its “content-heavy curriculum that is reinforced by high-stakes assessments” (stewart, 2011, p. 132). in japan, the criticisms of their long-established assessment system are particularly harsh (hawkins & su, 2003, p. 351), and also goodman (2003) cites dore’s “memorable” and abrasive critique that claims: one has to think of education in japan as an enormously elaborated, very expensive testing system with some educational spin-offs, rather than as the other way around. in order to make the system appear meritocratic, the curriculum has been the same in all schools (public and private); multiple choice examinations have been favored over essays...two main groups, employers and parents...have been pushing for reform of this system for the past twenty years. (p. 20) whitburn (2003) also claims that this highpressure system has been “alleged to be a contributory cause of increasing behavioral difficulties” for many students are unable to deal with the stress of these examinations especially among lower secondary school (p. 152). standardized testing systems are accused of failing to encourage creativity in japanese and korean students in favor of producing students who are “only being good at getting high scores in academic achievement tests” (park, 2013, p. 72). the same is very much true in china as well as its college entrance exam is at the “epicenter” of tension and debate concerning china’s educational reform (ross & wang, 2011). the chinese education system is considered to be too exam-oriented and ultimately inadequate in developing well-rounded students (zhao, 2014a). china, particularly shanghai, is currently considering moving from some of its high-stakes testing practices, and apparently even mulling over whether to opt out of further participation in pisa entirely, despite its massive achievements in that international comparative exercise (zhao, 2013; zhao, 2014b). some have claimed that countries like the united states would be foolish to try and emulate its antiquated traditional assessment frameworks (coppola & zhao, 2012). ultimately, the argument against these tests is that they fail to develop an atmosphere of creativity and innovation and entrepreneurship crucial for students in a rapidly evolving, unpredictable economic landscape (meyer & zhao, 2013; omdal & graefe, 2016, pp. 210-211). intercultural marriage and education foundational to the premise of this study is the quandary as to whether certain cultural elements of education can be synthesized, or whether they must remain as insoluble entities, incapable of adjustment. li (2012) makes an impassioned case for the latter: east asian educational systems were initially eager but clumsy copies of the american and european education systems, which only gave the appearance of western practice. today they are mandating western-style practice (e.g., emulating western children’s freeexploration and creativity on the school ground). as cultural exchange deepens, we have reasons to believe that cultural differences may one day disappear and that we all will reemerge as one culture under the sun...however...research evidence...suggests that the basic patterns of cultural learning models are tenacious and unlikely to melt in grand unification...indeed, despite all these melting characteristics, comparative research on western and east asian psychology, child development, and education has overwhelmingly demonstrated very large and persistent cultural variations that show no signs of educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west 61 disappearing. this evidence casts doubt directly on the forecast that all culturally diverse people would one day become alike under one culture, specifically more like westerners. (pp. 331-332) if this assertion is true, that distinct and irreconcilable eastern and western educational approaches and practices will remain unaffected by increased global cultural exchange, then an interesting testing ground for this claim would be in the context of an east/west intercultural marriage. in his book on intercultural marriage, romano (1988) posits a model of four possibilities of adaptations made by intercultural couples: 1) submission – one partner gives up his/her culture and submits the culture of the spouse, 2) compromise – both partners give and take certain elements of their own culture, 3) obliteration – both partners abandon their own culture and adopt an entirely new one, or 4) consensus – neither partner changes their culture and they both agree to live with their differences (pp. 120-126). in reference to this model, waters (2005) found that many east/west intercultural couples adopted the model of “compromise” with regard to their home customs and lifestyle practices (p. 81). if romano’s model of intercultural marriage can be considered on a global scale and applied to education, li (2012) is arguing above that, contrary to popular opinion, the world is not adopting a “submission” model in sole adherence to western educational models that “mandate…free-exploration and creativity”. rather, globalization is producing a “consensus” model of education in which the east remains as the east, and the west as the west, neither adapting to the other’s practices, but each content to recognize their own indigenous strengths. however, intercultural couples cannot realistically adopt a “consensus” approach when it comes to their children’s education. while this approach may work for other customs that intercultural couples can do separately and individually, such as what to eat for dinner, or what holidays to celebrate; one child simply cannot attend both a western and an easternoriented school for the entirety of k-12 education. if then the assertion holds true that these east/west educational traditions are not able to merge, then it should also follow that the approach adopted by more intercultural couples is one of “submission,” in adherence to either eastern or western inclinations. however, if waters’ findings regarding east/west couples’ lifestyles also holds true for their thoughts and decisions regarding their children’s education, then some level of “compromise” and synthesis between the two traditions should become apparent. research methodology in comparing the educational cultures of “east” and “west,” and with lumping in countries as different from each other as china, japan, south korea, and singapore, it is a danger to present them as “monolithic.” instead, this study argues that within and across cultures, “values are discussed collectively--they have to be examined in the context of individual choices” (mason, 2007, p. 166). indeed, as mason further asserts: [c]ulture is not a fixed entity that shapes the lives of the individuals. it is more accurate to speak of a dialectical process between people and their social environments, which involves also the shaping of the culture by those people as they manipulate its conventional symbols and to create new meanings. (p. 172) this “dialectical process” is of particular importance to this study, as individuals from different educational and cultural backgrounds in an intercultural marriage must form a discussion as to how they will construct a new, joint family culture that can inform and guide education for their children. ultimately in this study, the comparison is not necessarily of the 62 global education review 5(1) cultures of these places, but rather of the mediated perspectives of cultures of intercultural couples as they evaluate the hybrid educational options available to their children, and as influenced by their respective, and combined, cultural experiences. so in that sense, the comparison in this study is a more indirect comparison of cultures, and may more accurately be compared to tobin’s (2009) work on “multi-vocal ethnography.” similar to tobin, this study does not endeavor to analyze these cultural interactions in first-hand fashion, but rather asks others to do the analysis, and then compares their analyses. hong kong presents an ideal location for this study. with centuries spent under chinese jurisdiction, and roughly a century and a half under the control of the united kingdom, “hong kong has always been under the influence of chinese and western cultures” (mok et al., 2001, p. 162). moreover, hong kong has a plethora of educational options available for parents to choose from (yamato, 2003). these options include both local and international options, fully representative of a spectrum of eastern and western educational traditions. participants and protocol the families in this study have one primary characteristic in common. they have one parent with extensive experiential knowledge of a western school system, and the other of an eastern system of education. one spouse has been through k-12 education in the east and the other in the west. individuals educated in north america, western europe, or australia acted as the western representatives in this study. as to their eastern partners, participants from china, hong kong, singapore, japan, and south korea provided their perspectives. these eastern countries/regions were chosen due to their asserted adherence to confucian learning traditions, or shared “confucian heritage cultural background” (li, 2012; lee, 1996; j. l. wang, 2013). a secondary feature: at the time of the study these families have children younger than 18 years of age and were thus considering the diverse educational options available to them, or had needed to do so within the past 10 years. this attribute was included so as to take into account the more recent increased credibility afforded to eastern education models vis-à-vis large-scale international assessments, which have placed east asian educational systems in prominence over many educational systems in the west (oecd, 2010). the 15 participant families were of the following ten combinations: table 2: participant family nationality combinations hong kong & united states 4 families hong kong & united kingdom 3 families hong kong & australia 1 family hong kong & germany 1 family china & united states 1 family china & australia 1 family china & united kingdom 1 family south korea & united states 1 family singapore & united states 1 family japan & united kingdom 1 family educational perspectives from families of east and west 63 the 15 families comprised a total of 31 children. at the time of the study, 14 of those children were 5 years old or younger, and the remaining 17 children were divided fairly evenly between 612 years of age, and 13 and up. in the findings section, each couple is referred to by (c) and a number assigned to them by virtue of the chronological order in which the interview took place. this study used semi-structured interviews as the method of data collection, with 10 open-ended questions sent to interviewees ahead of time in order to elicit free and open discussion (grix, 2004, p. 127). for each of the interviews, the husband and wife were interviewed simultaneously. the interviews ranged from 45-90 minutes in length. all interviews were transcribed in their entirety and then coded according to the various themes of the east vs. west dialectic in education, and also according to instances of intercultural compromise, submission, obliteration and consensus. interviews with these couples of mixed educational background revealed that the east vs. west dialectic in education plays a significant role in their educational decisions. in agreement with waters (2005) finding that east/west intercultural couples adopted a “compromise” approach to daily customs and lifestyle, these families also employed “compromise” throughout their decisions in education for their children. with regard to educational decisions for their children, none from this group elected a “submission” approach in wholesale adoption of their spouse’s culture, or elected to “obliterate” both of their cultural models in choosing a third option foreign to both of them. these acts of compromise often took the form of seeking “balance” and a “happy medium” in recognition of their respective cultural tradition’s strengths at various times in schooling and with regard to different subjects. of particular significance was the overwhelming preference for “local schools” (i.e. eastern-style schools) at the primary level of schooling, while in stark contrast these families desired to enroll their children in an “international school” (i.e. western-style) for secondary school and beyond. findings table 3: individual nationality representation of participants hong kong 9 people china 3 people south korea 1 person singapore 1 person japan 1 person united states 7 people united kingdom 5 people australia 2 people germany 1 person 64 global education review 5(1) interview data as to the acceptability of a more structured primary school experience, while at the same time expressing reticence towards that experience being extended into secondary school: c1 west: one thing that i don’t agree with that i should mention: our son’s local kindergarten gives homework every night. i think, for children in kindergarten--what we’d say is prekindergarten in the us--i don’t think it’s necessary at all. c1 east: i don’t know about that though. i like the idea of homework and the amount of homework the school has been assigning them, which isn’t a lot and takes them on average 15-20 minutes to finish, which i think is totally acceptable. most of it’s like handwriting skills, that kind of work; learn to write letters, chinese characters, simple calculations. for me, it’s just getting them ready for primary school. i was raised in a very similar system. i have no problem with that. c1 west: the teachers here are very centered, they get in front of the classroom, deliver a lot of material and then students take notes and sit quietly, there’s very little interaction, very little communication, there’s not a lot of give or take from the students. a “good lesson” is when the teacher can talk. my experience wasn’t like that; my teachers were very interactive and we did a lot of projects with a lot of engagement and a lot of group stuff, i think that’d be a major difference for us. c1 east: i do agree with that. with secondary education, we’re filled with a lot of information from teachers. we were seldom given assignments which were student driven. i think that’s what the education reform in hong kong has been about lately. as to the importance of instilling a collectively oriented ethos at the primary school level: c6 east: i think education has changed a lot, the school and its respect for harmony. when i was a kid, they really emphasized harmony and how it was very important. but now, maybe because of globalization, the government starts to change the idea, maybe because people want to go abroad and they want to work together with foreigners. actually, when i was in junior high school they already started changing their idea, emphasizing that the individual is very important and maybe now they’ve actually gone back to the original idea that harmony is very important. of course the individual is very important as well, individuality is very important, but because young people actually started to become very selfish, so people started thinking again that actually harmony is very important. c6 west: it’s very important for our son to have an understanding of the asian mindset, like an understanding of manners and etiquette and things like that. ideally, that’s what she would like for our son to get out of the asian primary school. i think it’s also an asian way of thinking, a mentality, a sense of responsibility, a sense of duty, of discipline, just a quite different way of thinking that you wouldn’t necessarily get from an international school. as to the benefits of learning how to deal with pressure in an east asian school, but at the same recognizing the shortcomings of a curriculum that over-emphasizes exam skills: educational perspectives from families of east and west 65 c4 east: i think education’s getting worse, it’s more...occupied, instead of freethinking, like way earlier than i think it should be...but i’ve been thinking that, if we stay in hong kong, at least for me, i’d like them to stay in a local school. but also, i met with the headmaster of their school before they started and said, “getting good grades or doing lots of homework isn’t what we’re after. i’d just like them to work on their social ability.” so, i’d like them to continue in a local school because i do think there’s some advantage to it, to learn chinese language, to know how asians deal with pressure. c4 west: yeah, basically, i have no problem with that idea, c4 east: i think it’d be good if education could model life, and be more like reality. so, they don’t feel like when they’re growing up they’re living in a bubble, you know, they never have pressure, they never need to deal with difficulty. for a local school, i think so many of those schools are very, very stressful. i mean, it’s good to go to a local school because the reason they have tests and exams is to see how they deal with deadlines and stress, and how we as parents help them to channel through it. it’s not so much about grades; it’s more about the character development. so, i think it’s still pretty good to have, to deal with a little bit of pressure. c4 west: yeah, like my school was too easy, so i didn’t even apply myself, i didn’t try that hard. i think if i’d have had more pressure, i’d have applied myself more, because my school wasn’t that hard. as to the benefits of developing memorization skills in primary school, but recognizing its shortcomings when continued to secondary school: c13 east: in local schools, the teacher will tell you everything, and you have to remember it, just memorize it, you have to do a lot of dictation to remember a lot of stuff. c13 west: even though our daughter is in local school for primary, for secondary school, we want her to have a broader thinking, not just to learn facts. on the relevance of creativity and whether schools are preparing students for the “real world”: c4 west: what is the real world looking for or what does the real world need? i think the real world needs creative thinkers who can solve creative problems creatively. i think that’s one side of the asian education system that fails miserably. i mean, look at china, they haven’t created one single thing in the last, how many years? they just copy. so that’s a major issue. also, when we lived in china, a phrase that always drove me crazy was “meiyou banfa” (there’s no way). they would always say that. so, nobody’s thinking of creative ways to solve the problem, they’re just making excuses for them. so, we need to get more creative thinking and creative problem solving in the world. so, is the education system of “pass-this-test,” “get-thisgrade” preparing them for that? probably not. c4 east: i do think this issue is very tricky. i mean, what are universities looking for and what are employers looking for? these are two totally 66 global education review 5(1) different types of people, and it depends on the employer. if you look at high school graduates, i’m not too familiar with the states, but here with high school graduates, they are just looking for robots. so, actually the school prepares them really well for that! just take orders! but, if you say university, i would say that the high school system does not prepare them well for university, at all. because, like, i grew up in a very driven high school, and as soon as i got to university, i needed to make decisions so often, like, what dorm should i take, or what class should i take? and all these things, and i felt like, at the moment, to think back, i never really knew how to know what good decisions really were. and, universities are often about how to write papers, but in my experience, the whole school system from k through 12 was only about how to pass tests, and how to pass exams. so, actually we never really needed to think much. as soon as we got the model answer, we were good, you know? so, i think the schools are not preparing them well in that area. on the initial benefits of an asian primary school despite a lack of encouragement for creativity, and the eventual necessity to change to a western secondary school: c14 east: in the local system, students are required to be very well-behaved, you have to be very quiet in class. there’s not as much encouragement for creativity in local schools. however, the flipside of that is children do learn to be very wellbehaved. they do learn to respect and speak politely to adults. i believe for the primary school sector that’s actually a good thing. we do try to give our kids opportunities to practice speaking in public, creative thinking, to prepare them for the secondary school. c14 west: one of things that worried me with local schools is when i taught english at the university, i could see the effects of local school, especially with children who went there from kindergarten to senior high school. if you have too much rote learning, and too much piled on homework, the kids tend to not like to learn, they tend to hate learning and they tend to just be burnt out. so, that was a big concern of mine as well. but we made a conscious decision, you know, we think primary they can have that rote learning for their advantage to learn language and then hopefully after that they don’t get too turned off on learning. and then in junior high they can switch to a more, so-called, fun curriculum and so hopefully they don’t lose their love of learning throughout the process so that’s another concern that we had. these sentiments were echoed throughout the interviews as these intercultural families expressed a desire for their children to experience the regimentation and structure present within many east asian primary school settings, but also acknowledge that this rigidity and uniformity was not something that they wanted for their children at the more advanced stages of education. moreover, this preference was expressed in their concern that continued placement within the local system, though desirable initially, would ultimately stifle their children’s ability to think creatively, thus leaving them ill-prepared to deal with many of life’s future challenges. therefore, with regard to the earlier questions of whether or not certain characteristics of east asian schooling inhibit creativity, the answer of these intercultural educational perspectives from families of east and west 67 families seems to be quite nuanced. although continued exposure to an east asian schooling environment does seem to inhibit creativity in the long term, placement within this schooling environment in primary school seems to be a preferred option for supplying the raw material of knowledge that can allow creativity to foster in a western-style secondary school and beyond. discussion this phenomenon of a preference for a more structured primary school experience, while also abandoning this strict regimentation later in secondary school and beyond in order to foster creativity, may be indicative of a possible synthesis between these two educational traditions. as huang (2014) notes: why is that, in terms of primary education, chinese kids so easily beat american kids out of the gate, but americans have, in the end, won the most nobel prizes in the world? there are two kinds of knowledge: that which we, as human beings, know and that which we don’t. chinese education creates excellent exam takers while american education cultivates learning explorers. this is an essential difference between chinese and american education. the purpose of...pisa and every other standardized test is to evaluate students’ ability to recapitulate alreadyestablished knowledge. the nobel prizes in scientific disciplines encourage scientists to explore and discover new knowledge. (p. 236) as the world is currently a paradox of an unprecedented amount of knowledge that needs to be learned, while also an unprecedented number of complex and unsolved challenges that need to be addressed in creative and novel ways; certainly the strengths and weaknesses of both models should be considered with a similarly sophisticated assessment as exercised by these couples of mixed educational background. indeed, while some may rightly argue that an ongoing adherence to east asian models of schooling will eventually impair creativity within students; other questions that need to be discussed are: can creativity eventually exist in a university student without the initial investment of structure and discipline needed at the beginning stages of schooling? is there a requisite foundation of knowledge that needs to built through emphases on rote learning, rigid curricula, strict teachers, etc that can then allow meaningful innovation and creativity to ultimately prosper in less structured educational settings? limitations of the study there was no component of my research that evaluated the socio-economic status of these families, which may be an important consideration. in addition, the majority, although not all, of these couples have western fathers and eastern mothers. there may also be some further discussion and research needed as to the possibility of gender roles influencing educational preferences within these families. another inherent limitation of the study has to do with the age of the children within these families. as mentioned above, nearly half of the respondents had children 5 years old or younger, and were thus talking about their plans for their children’s education, rather than their experiences with having them educated. therefore, another interesting line of inquiry might be to follow whether their perspectives and ideals will remain constant over time, or perhaps change, as different challenges are encountered. conclusion this study argues that discourse surrounding eastern and western traditions and practices in education can be framed in terms of an east vs. 68 global education review 5(1) west dialectic in education. this framework highlights certain debates surrounding the concerns over students’ development, autonomy, learning environment, and curricula all of which are related to whether or not these educational factors ultimately stifle or encourage the development of creativity in students. semistructured interviews with 15 families of mixed east/west educational background confirmed that all of these families had given extensive deliberation to the differing cultural options available to them. these parents often shared their respective experiences with each other in contemplation over a desired future for their child. at times, individuals held a negative view of their spouse’s educational background, and at other times, a less than favorable perspective of their own, thus enabling them to consider both the positive and negative aspects of their personal educational upbringing. despite the claim of incompatibility between eastern and western propensities in education, this study suggests that a synthesis of eastern and western inclinations in education is possible. acts of compromise utilized by these couples to take advantage of the relative strengths of their respective culture’s educational practices evidences possibilities of wider ramification, namely that a highly structured, “eastern” primary school experience may be very desirable in allowing for the development of creativity and innovation at a “western” secondary school level and beyond. supplementary information the questions below were all sent to participants ahead of time, and participants also had a copy during the interview: 1) please tell me about your child/children, and particularly about any educational decisions you have made for them so far. 2) can you tell me about the process for how you went about making those decisions? 3) would you describe your own educational experiences as being very different from each other? why or why not? 4) what do you perceive as some of the advantages and disadvantages of the schooling you received in either the "east" or "west"? 5) do you think schooling has changed much since you were in school? if so, what are some of the positive/negative aspects of these changes? 6) if money and other practical aspects were not an issue, what do you feel would be the ideal educational experience for your child/children to have? 7) what do you feel should be the ultimate outcomes of your child's k-12 education? in other words, what skills, knowledge, experiences, attitudes, behaviors, outlooks, etc would you most like your child to possess when they graduate from high school that would make you feel that their schooling had been a success? 8) conversely, are there any experiences from your own time in school that you are keen to have your child/ren avoid? 9) some people say that kids these days are under too much pressure in school, and others say they aren't under enough. can you tell me about what kinds of expectations you feel are appropriate for children regarding studies? 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work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: piper, benjamin, merseth, katharine a., & ngaruiya, samuel (2018). scaling up early childhood development and education in a devolved setting: policy making, resource allocations, and impacts of the tayari school readiness program in kenya. global education review, 5 (2), 47-68. scaling up early childhood development and education in a devolved setting: policy making, resource allocations, and impact of the tayari school readiness program in kenya benjamin piper rti international katherine a. merseth rti international samuel ngaruiya tayari early childhood development program abstract early childhood development and education (ecde) is devolved in kenya, which means that each of kenya’s 47 counties budgets for and implements ecde independently. kenya provides two years of preprimary education to children ages four and five. given scarce resources, constructing facilities and hiring teachers are often principal considerations for county governments. the present study investigated whether and how counties go beyond the basic provision of facilities and teachers to invest in learning materials, expand teacher professional development, and hire coaches to improve the quality of teaching. these results are presented in the context of the tayari ecde program, which was designed to improve school readiness in a cost-effective way. we present qualitative findings from several counties to describe how government bodies invest in additional elements of preprimary quality improvement. we also compare results across counties that do and do not implement the tayari model to understand whether implementation of an effective program to increase ecde quality encourages adjustments in government resource allocations. in addition, we present quantitative results from a large-scale longitudinal treatment and control study of the tayari model, which tested the effectiveness of curriculum-aligned instructional materials and teacher training and support in improving learners’ school readiness in public and low-cost private learning centers. finally, we present policy implications for decentralized government structures responsible for providing ecde, noting how these can be supported and incentivized to increase investments in ecde quality. keywords international and comparative education, early childhood, early childhood education, early childhood development and education, education policy, education decentralization, education governance https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 48 global education review 5(2) introduction evidence of the crucial contribution of highquality early childhood development and education (ecde) to brain development, future academic success, health outcomes, and overall national economic growth has been well established (black et al., 2017; duncan et al., 2007; engle et al., 2011). education policy makers in developing countries, who in recent years have been focusing on the rapid growth of the education system at the primary level, are becoming interested in advancing similar gains in the ecde subsector. these policy makers’ demands for increased ecde provision have occurred in tandem with recent international commitments toward expanded and improved ecde provision, as articulated in sustainable development goal 4.2, which calls for increased access to quality early childhood education for all children by 2030 (emphasis added; united nations, 2016). sustainable development goal 4.2’s joint emphasis on access and quality is notable. it is a misconception that the 1990 world conference on education for all in jomtien, thailand, ignored quality in its push toward increased access to education. in fact, the documentation of the jomtien proceedings specifically focused on quality (unesco, 1990). however, despite the emphasis on quality of education at jomtien, the implementation of the education for all movement routinely emphasized access at the expense of quality (unesco, 2004). it is uncertain how much of the decrease in primary education quality in the 1990s was due to the expansion of the school-going population from the elite to a wider representation of society. in ethiopia, for example, “aggregate enrollments in grades 1–12 rose at a steady pace of about 9 percent a year between 1992–1993 and 2001– 1002; and in grades 1–4, the first cycle of primary schooling, they grew even faster: at 15 percent a year” (world bank, 2005, xxiii). learning outcomes in this period did not improve, and in some measures dropped, as measured by ethiopia’s national learning assessments (federal democratic republic of ethiopia, 2013). thanks to education for all, education was no longer a privilege of the wealthy, yet education quality was tenuous. similarly, sustainable development goal 4.2 has become a rallying cry for ecde advocates and has ignited a global movement toward expanding ecde. as with primary education, the complexities of balancing increased access to ecde with the quality of the ecde provided a crucial challenge in many countries. some national governments have recently enacted policy changes to transition the ecde subsector to decentralized management. for example, in kenya, after the advent of the 2010 constitution (republic of kenya, 2010a), ecde was devolved to the county governments and provision of ecde resources had to occur within the context of scarce local funds for social sectors. ethiopia and china are other examples of large lowand middle-income countries that implement ecde through decentralized technical management and resource allocation. kenya’s guiding policy document for devolved ecde is being developed at the national level and is in the final stages of completion. without completed guidance, county-level ecde officials are unclear about their authority to determine and implement devolved ecde policies. instead, given the fungibility and scarcity of devolved funds, ecde officers often focus on ensuring a reasonable allocation of resources for their subsector. the typical emphasis has been on access: establishing ecde classrooms next to _______________________________ corresponding author: dr. benjamin piper, rti international, 5th floor, the westwood, vale close, off ring road parklands, po box 1181-00621 village market, nairobi, kenya email: bpiper@rti.org mailto:bpiper@rti.org scaling up early childhood development and education 49 primary schools and stand-alone ecde centers and hiring teachers. some counties have invested nearly all their resources on construction and hiring and have had little left to purchase teaching and learning materials or to induct, develop, and support ecde teachers. in fact, countyand national-level officials have continued to disagree on whether the responsibility for hiring teachers is with the devolved counties or with the national level, and several court cases have ensued (see media coverage at macharia, 2016). with limited resources allocated to materials and pedagogical support for teachers, it is unsurprising that the quality of ecde provision in kenya is at risk. in this context, the ministry of education and four counties began implementing the tayari program (2014–2018), with sponsorship from the children’s investment fund foundation and technical support from rti international. tayari, which means “ready” in kiswahili, is designed as a randomized controlled trial to determine the most costeffective ecde intervention that can be scaled and sustained. the tayari external evaluation is studying the impact of three tayari treatment groups in comparison to a control group on improved school readiness. implemented in 2,100 ecde centers and supporting more than 120,000 learners in the 2018 academic year, tayari is testing the ability of the devolved systems in four of kenya’s 47 counties to implement and manage a large-scale ecde quality-improvement program in the context of devolved ecde. in addition, tayari has two studies under way: a qualitative study of counties’ decisionmaking and a quantitative longitudinal tracer study of children’s performance over time. the longitudinal study investigates whether and how one of the treatment arms of tayari has an impact on school readiness,1 as judged by changes in the tested skills of tayari children. the qualitative study measures how the tayari intervention is changing devolved decisionmaking in tayari counties and how non-tayari counties make resource allocation decisions. interviewers have collected data from officers at several levels of the devolved system in both tayari and non-tayari counties. literature review access and quality over the past two decades, education policy makers globally have increased emphasis on ecde, as the scientific community continues to generate convincing evidence regarding the critical importance of the early childhood period in determining later school and life success.2 international aid agencies, such as the world bank and the united nations children’s fund (unicef), are encouraging developing countries to expand provision of preprimary education and to improve the quality of those services (sayre, devercelli, newman, & wodon, 2015; unicef and world bank group, 2016). in response to the growing demand for ecde in their own contexts, and to the compelling scientific and economic evidence about the return on investing in young children (heckman, 2006; mccoy, zuilkowski, yoshikawa, & fink, 2017), several countries in sub-saharan africa have both expanded the provision of quality preprimary education and undertaken policy reforms to achieve this expansion in efficient ways. decentralization and ecde as governments grapple with the goal of achieving universal access to ecde by 2030, parallels to the universal primary education (upe) movement in the late 1990s are instructive. that movement did not sufficiently engage decentralized governments to devise local solutions that would increase access while also improving quality. thus, some countries, such as kenya and ethiopia, are now combining two efforts concerning ecde: decentralization 50 global education review 5(2) of authority and funding to local governments, and the development of guidelines to ensure high-quality implementation. with the global expansion of ecde services, researchers who focus on quality improvements have begun to apply approaches from education systems research to preprimary education (see powers, 2016, on the early learning partnership program). rossiter (2016) summarized the consensus of international literature on six elements of high-quality ecde at the system level. the elements are 1. equitable and inclusive access; 2. curriculum, plus teaching and learning materials; 3. teachers and school leaders; 4. parental and community support and engagement; 5. standards, monitoring, and learning; and 6. systems, financing, management, and leadership (rossiter, 2016, p. 6). countries with scarce education resources and limited capacity struggle to manage all six of these elements of quality and have taken various governance approaches to do so (rossiter, 2016). more specifically, local education systems often have limited financial resources and lack qualified technical personnel to implement decentralized ecde. utilizing the rossiter (2016) framework allows those interested in the impact of decentralization on education quality to examine it systematically. before discussing the present study in kenya, we consider four cases of decentralized governance of ecde systems in the following countries: ethiopia, china, south africa, and zimbabwe. decentralized management of ecde investment in ethiopia the federal democratic republic of ethiopia is a geographically large and populous country of more than 100 million people, governed through a federal system. ethiopia’s federal government develops policies while nine regional governments and two city administrations implement them. funding for the ecde subsector is included in a block grant to the regional level, and regional governments decide how to use that funding in the context of scarce resources in other education subsectors. recent research has examined the implementation of ethiopia’s decentralized ecde policy (woodhead, rossiter, dawes, & pankhurst, 2017). the national-level sector plan for education, called the education sector development programme (esdp) v (federal ministry of education, ethiopia, 2015) has ambitious objectives for expanding access to preprimary education (called “o class”). the plan calls for ecde enrollment of 4to 6-yearolds to increase from 35% of the eligible population in 2015 to 80% by 2020. given ethiopia’s decentralized governance structure, the esdp v does not give detailed instructions on how to achieve those objectives to the regional state education bureaus (rsebs) that implement the policy. the lack of detailed implementation guidance makes sense given the wide range of regional structures in ethiopia; for example, oromia region alone is geographically larger than many entire sub-saharan african countries, while harari region encompasses not much more than the town of harari itself. woodhead and colleagues (2017) concluded that the key factors influencing rsebs’ ability to operationalize the guidance from the national sector plan depended on (a) their preparedness to deliver ecde (i.e., their skills, training, attitudes, and support from the educational apparatus above); (b) their past, present, and future plans for ecde; (c) their training, deployment, remuneration, and supervision processes for ecde teachers; and (d) the available standards and current scaling up early childhood development and education 51 resourcing levels available for ecde classrooms, which in turn depend on the regional allocations of the block grant funding. they also noted that all rsebs faced the same constraints: no budget initially allocated for ecde services, shortage of qualified personnel, little federal guidance on implementation standards, modest financial and human resources available for monitoring and supervision of ecde quality, and a scarcity of trained teachers available to teach o class, particularly in the more remote regions. as the 1994 education and training policy (federal democratic republic of ethiopia, 1994) suggested, and as is the case in any truly decentralized system, each rseb responded to the challenges differently, with some creative solutions. these included drawing upon community resources to construct ecde classrooms; supervising private providers, who served large populations in some regions; developing low-cost teacher training plans in the context of scarce resources for expensive trainings; building stand-alone o-class facilities alongside existing primary schools; and specifically targeting indigenous groups and girls, who were previously less likely to enroll (woodhead et al., 2017). these regionally developed and specific solutions were uniquely implemented across the country. as of early 2018, it is still too soon to measure the impacts of these varied solutions for specific regional problems. nonetheless, understanding the effectiveness of the solutions developed by these decentralized actors will be essential for ethiopia’s improved ecde provision, as well as for other countries learning from ethiopia’s experience. decentralized management of ecde in china china faces challenges similar to ethiopia’s in terms of inequitable access to ecde services and variable ecde quality throughout the country. in china, local governments are responsible for funding and managing preprimary education. this decentralized system of finance has allocated the heaviest financial burdens to the lowest levels of government, particularly county governments in rural areas, and district government in municipalities (wu, young, & cai, 2012), which have the fewest available resources to pay for quality ecde (zhou, sun, & lee, 2017). china’s dependence on local (municipal or provincial) resources for ecde provision has led to worsening regional disparities in both access and quality. for example, in shanghai, the municipal government allocated nearly 8% of its education budget to the preprimary level, which reached an enrollment rate of 98% of 3to 6year-old children (feng, 2017). however, poorer and more rural regions and municipalities, such as zhejiang, devoted much less of their public funds to preprimary education, and, as a result, 80% of services came from private, fee-bearing kindergartens, which placed lower-income families at a disadvantage (feng, 2017). feng (2017) also argued that, in china, with the devolution of responsibility to provincial governments, the central government did not exert sufficient control in terms of regulating the development of preschool education across provinces, among different regions in a province, and between urban and rural areas. the chinese and ethiopian examples show that decentralization can have positive and negative effects. on the one hand, local governments can seize the opportunity to innovate, as some ethiopian regions have done. however, without sufficient ecde-related capacity at the local-government level, innovation is unlikely. on the other hand, depending fully on local financing for ecde provision, as in china, may increase inequality because poorer areas may devote fewer resources to preprimary education, thereby limiting poor households’ access to high-quality, low-cost services (feng, 2017; zhou et al., 2017). 52 global education review 5(2) rapid expansion of ecde in south africa the literature on rapidly expanding ecde in sub-saharan africa provides two recent examples useful for understanding how quality and access are balanced in contexts with limited resources and ambitious goals. south africa formally established a preprimary or “reception year,” grade r, as an integral part of its public primary school system in 2001, and steadily increased ecde enrollment by 11 percentage points per year from 2001 through 2008 (biersteker, 2010). by 2013, south africa’s statistics showed that an impressive 94% of grade 1 learners had attended grade r (department of planning, monitoring, and evaluation, republic of south africa, 2014, p. 49). unfortunately, this rapid expansion of free grade r in public primary schools severely harmed the community-based providers that charged fees. these community-based providers were an important option for many families because they provided a full day of care, whereas the public grade r provided only half a day (garcia, pence, & evans, 2008). of additional concern was that results from early grade reading assessments in south africa during this period of expanding ecde access showed very low basic skills for children entering grade 1 (piper, 2009). this suggests that the cost of diminished quality due to the rapid expansion of ecde might have been similar to the financial cost of the expansion. decentralized expansion of ecde in zimbabwe zimbabwe took a different approach to rapidly expanding ecde services in the country. before 2003, all ecde services in zimbabwe were provided by local authorities, private organizations, nongovernmental organizations (ngos), and religious organizations rather than by the ministry of education. the ministry’s role was setting policy guidelines for the entities that provided ecde services (mangwaya, blignaut, & pillay, 2016). those policy guidelines were not accompanied by systems to oversee the quality of the implementation (mangwaya et al., 2016). quality of ecde was therefore variable, and access was limited to wealthier households, primarily in urban areas. recognizing the need for more uniformity, oversight, and greater access to ecde services throughout the country, the ministry of education undertook a policy revision in 2004. the government of zimbabwe issued a new policy that all primary schools should open at least two preprimary (“grade 0”) classes in 2004, even though the formal primary education system had previously played no role in ecde provision. mangwaya et al.’s (2016) qualitative study examined the implementation of this new policy and the obstacles encountered in the provision of ecde at the school level. the study concluded that although classroom teachers were adequately qualified to implement ecde, school heads were not prepared to support teachers’ implementation of ecde. the researchers also found that insufficient teaching and learning resources and a lack of ongoing teacher support contributed to low-quality ecde provision (mangwaya et al., 2016). the zimbabwe case appears to be one in which the decentralization of ecde was not sufficiently integrated with the additional financial and technical resources required to provide highquality ecde. research questions the literature reviewed above showed several models of decentralized provision of ecde, but they lack consensus on how to balance ecde access and quality—the same problem identified during the period in which primary education rapidly expanded. assuring quality during rapid expansion is even more challenging in scaling up early childhood development and education 53 decentralized environments, given the variability in needs and capacity across diverse geographies, which can potentially worsen inequality. moreover, the literature is relatively silent regarding whether and how high-quality ecde interventions can affect resource allocation at the decentralized level. to fill those gaps, we proposed the following research questions: • rq1: how do education officials at devolved levels in kenya make decisions about resource allocations in ecde? • rq2: how do education officials at devolved levels in kenya make decisions about the implementation of policies regarding ecde quality? • rq3: does the impact of the tayari intervention differ by devolved location? background kenya background kenya is a lower-middle-income country with an estimated population of just over 48 million, with the last census identifying 38.6 million (republic of kenya, 2009). education in kenya is governed by the constitution, which in article 53 affirms the right to free compulsory basic education (republic of kenya, 2010a). the basic education act affirms that basic education includes two years of preprimary education: preprimary 1 serves children aged 4 years; preprimary 2, children aged 5 (republic of kenya, 2013). the ministry of education is preparing to launch a revised pre-primary education policy (ministry of education, kenya, 2017) and ecde is a key part of the national education sector plan (2013–2018), which is the guiding document in the education sector (republic of kenya, 2010b). access to ecde has dramatically increased in kenya in the past decade, as indicated in table 1. as of 2014, the gross enrollment ratio (ger) was 73.6% nationally, with a net enrollment ratio (ner) of 71.8% (ministry of education, kenya, 2014). the gap between the ger and ner was small at the national level and in most of the counties where the data were collected for this study. laikipia county was a notable exception, with a ger 32.4 percentage points higher than its ner, suggesting that late entry into ecde is problematic in that county. table 1 kenya’s gross and net enrollment ratios for ecde, by county and nationally, 2014 county gross enrollment ratio (%) net enrollment ratio (%) embu 50.8 47.5 laikipia 79.9 47.5 marsabit 51.5 50.5 mombasa 66.8 65.9 nairobi 76.2 65.9 siaya 73.5 71.4 uasin gishu 60.8 59.7 national 73.6 71.8 source: ministry of education, kenya (2014). 54 global education review 5(2) table 2 numbers of public and private ecde centers and learners enrolled, 2014 county number of ecde centers enrollment public private total public private total embu 411 236 647 15,920 7,318 23,238 laikipia 317 192 509 22,527 9,232 31,759 marsabit 175 79 254 12,580 4,738 17,318 mombasa 110 586 696 8,030 46,846 54,876 nairobi 213 1,841 2,054 14,793 177,977 192,770 siaya 744 150 894 56,477 8,474 64,951 uasin gishu 498 313 811 39,049 19,455 58,504 source: ministry of education, kenya (2014). the balance of state and non-state provision of ecde differs by urban and rural geographies in kenya. most counties provide ecde to their young children primarily through public ecde centers. table 2 shows that in laikipia, for example, in 2014, many more learners were enrolled in public than private centers. in nairobi and mombasa, the largest cities in kenya, the relationship was the opposite, with more pupils attending private ecde centers than public ones. in any case, these enrollment ratios are higher than those from other countries in the region (mccoy et al., 2017), although the country is now emphasizing the need for increased access to ecde due to greater demand from parents or other caregivers. tayari background the tayari intervention was designed to investigate whether devolved government structures can be supported to improve the quality of ecde, with a focus on costeffectiveness at the devolved level. the treatment design relies on the county governments’ education officers, called ecde coordinators, to provide training to each of the preprimary 1 and preprimary 2 teachers within randomly selected zones and to provide ongoing instructional support to teachers utilizing the new methods supported by tayari. the ecde coordinators use tablets with coaching tools to help them give feedback to teachers implementing tayari in classrooms. the data from those tablets are aggregated and presented in a visual “dashboard,” which the ecde leaders in each county use to manage and supervise tayari’s implementation quality. based on the learning areas in the kenyan curriculum, children are provided with workbooks in language and mathematics to support their daily learning. teachers receive teachers’ guides in language, mathematics, and social and life skills to support their instruction. the teachers’ guides match the learner workbooks to support the teachers’ delivery of each individual lesson in the workbooks, which simplifies teachers’ instructional practice. tayari has supported county-level ecde leaders to improve the quality of ecde provision and to use existing personnel to prioritize quality improvements. this approach scaling up early childhood development and education 55 has resulted in these officers dramatically increasing the proportion of time they spend doing classroom support. it has also helped two of the tayari-supported counties to use their own resources to increase the number of personnel who help with ecde implementation. in laikipia and siaya, the county-level decentralized system increased the number of ecde officers by 10 and 6 respectively; these numbers represent a substantial increase in the officers working on ecde. the two other counties were relatively well staffed with ecde officers before tayari’s implementation. research design the overall design of the tayari program is described in the section above. in this section, we present the research design for the two main data sets used in this analysis. to answer our research questions, we first examined qualitative interview and focus group discussion data collected from devolved ecde leaders in kenya. using a structured interview protocol, the tayari program researchers collected interview data from 51 respondents through in-depth interviews with policy makers at the national and county levels and focus group discussions with technical officers at the county level. the interviews, conducted between november 2016 and february 2017, explored how county-level personnel made decisions on resource allocations, whether a qualityimprovement program such as tayari could have an impact on the allocation decisions made at the county level, and in what ways that impact would be evident. the non-tayari counties were selected by the ministry leadership based on similarities to other counties in terms of their ecde provision and quality; similarly, the counties that would implement tayari were chosen based on the ministry’s view of the status of ecde across the country. for the qualitative study, interviews were conducted by policy experts and monitoring and evaluation staff from the tayari program. the research team interviewed senior officials of the national education system and policy representatives from the four tayari counties and three selected non-tayari counties. among them were national ecde policy leaders, county-level ecde leaders, and individuals who developed and managed the policies regarding ecde at both levels. the interviews focused on the role of the specific officers in overseeing the policy aspects of ecde, included respondents at both the national and county levels, and from tayari and non-tayari counties (see table 3). table 3 sampling of respondents for qualitative data collection area of interest national leaders representatives from tayari counties representatives from nontayari counties policy 2 7 3 technical 2 22 15 56 global education review 5(2) manual transcription of the audio data files was done by research assistants, and the data were coded by tayari senior research staff. the coded data were analyzed using the nvivo qualitative data analysis software. coding of the transcripts was done to ensure that queries were easily run using the nvivo analysis software. in the next section we present qualitative and quantitative data from the longitudinal study designed to estimate the impact of tayari on school readiness. to generate an unbiased estimate, the tayari longitudinal evaluation randomly selected zones of public schools from each of the four counties, as well as low-cost private institutions in the nonformal settlements of nairobi,3 and randomly assigned them to treatment and control groups. all schools in each zone implemented the same treatment, but for the purposes of the longitudinal evaluation, schools were randomly selected for inclusion in the study. the tayari team then followed a set of children from the january 2016 baseline period to the october 2016 midline assessment to determine how their school readiness outcomes changed over time. the resulting data set contains information collected from 2,891 children at the preprimary 1 (4 years old) and preprimary 2 (5 years old) levels at both the baseline and midline assessment, making it one of the largest ongoing longitudinal studies of school readiness in sub-saharan africa. to estimate the effect of tayari on school readiness, we fit a regression model in the stata statistical package. the outcome variable was a composite called school readiness, which indexed school readiness across a set of 10 outcomes that were determined by the ministry of education and an external evaluator. the regression model estimated october 2016 school readiness levels, controlling for school readiness scores at the january 2016 baseline. the parameter estimate on the treatment variable was the causal effect of tayari. we present regression coefficients for the treatment variable in models with and without control variables. control variables included grade, gender, county, and age. in addition, we fit regression models for each grade, for each county, for both genders, and for public and apbet institutions to determine whether the effects of tayari were moderated by these control variables. findings we have organized our findings based on the six elements of high-quality ecde described by rossiter (2016). research question 1: systems, financing, management, and leadership our first research question prompted us to investigate how county-level staff make decisions about resource allocations in the context of decentralized decision-making in kenya. the interview and focus group data analysis indicated that all the assessed counties received unrestricted block grants from the central government to support county functions, including ecde. these block grants depended on a formula that identified population as one of the key criteria. the respondents noted that members of county assemblies (mcas) have the final say in deciding how much money is spent on particular sectors, including ecde. mcas are legislators in the county parliament (i.e., the scaling up early childhood development and education 57 county assembly). one of the roles of mcas is to approve county budgets. although the mcas make the final decisions, there is nominal public participation in the discussions on the county integrated development plans, where technical officers, including those with expertise in ecde, give their input. the interviews revealed that some counties have supplemented the funding from central government with revenues collected at the county level, although the percentage of this funding allocated to the ecde subsector was unclear. table 4 shows the allocation of block grant revenues to the researched counties between fiscal year (fy) 2015/16 and fy 2016/17. to understand how decisions on ecde were made, we examined the process by which the block grant amounts were allocated to particular sectors. the results showed that ecde funds were combined under the education department, which also comprises vocational education—another devolved function. this combination of educational subsectors makes it somewhat difficult for counties to allocate sufficient resources to ecde given that the choices between those subsectors might be influenced by non-technical decisions. one of our key objectives in examining the county-level allocation of resources was to establish the overall amount of resources spent on ecde per county, and then to disaggregate that amount by expenditure type. as mentioned earlier, anecdotal evidence suggested that the predominant expenditure in the ecde subsector was construction, so the data collection team focused on collecting information about construction expenditure by county. table 5 shows the results of the data collected from six of the seven counties.4 the first several rows show expenditures by type. the total row shows how much was spent, and the per student row takes the overall amount spent in the past three fiscal years and divides it by three times the 2014 enrollment figure (latest available data) to give an approximate per student cost during that period. table 4 allocation of block grant revenue to counties in fy 2015/16 and fy 2016/17, in millions of kenyan shillings (kes) counties revenue allocations by fiscal year fy 2015/16 fy 2016/17 tayari counties laikipia 3,449.5 3,722.1 nairobi 12,996.6 14,023.5 siaya 4,995.3 5,390.0 uasin gishu 5,190.9 5,601.0 non-tayari counties embu 3,837.9 4,141.2 marsabit 5,189.5 5,599.5 mombasa 5,197.1 5,608.6 58 global education review 5(2) table 5 county expenditures on public ecde (kes millions) expenditure item embu laikipia marsabit mombasa siaya uasin gishu construction 139.0 23.7 0.0 144.5 280.0 298.6 instructional materials 16.0 0.0 3.0 50.0 0.0 10.0 quality assurance 0.0 0.0 12.2 0.0 0.0 2.6 teacher training 5.0 0.0 2.5 0.1 0.0 2.4 teacher support 2.0 0.0 0.0 0.7 0.0 0.0 health and nutrition 0.0 0.0 33.5 219.8 0.0 0.0 total (kes millions) 162.0 23.7 51.2 415.2 280.0 313.6 per student (kes) 3,392 351 1,357 17,235 1,653 2,677 the disparities in ecde expenditure are striking. mombasa spent approximately 17,235 kes per child during this fiscal year while laikipia spent 351 kes per child. although the block grant was ostensibly based on population, mombasa was spending 49 times as much on ecde per child as laikipia. the four counties that were closest in per child expenditure— siaya, uasin gishu, embu, and marsabit—still had wide disparities, as embu was spending 2.5 times as much per pupil as marsabit. when we considered the types of expenditure, we found that most of the counties spent most of their funding on infrastructure, with construction as a top priority. embu spent 85.8%; uasin gishu, 95.2%; siaya, 100%; and laikipia, 100%. the interviews revealed that investing in infrastructure was perceived to garner political capital for county-level elected officials. therefore, much of the expenditure went into construction of ecde classrooms, as indicated in table 5. notably, mombasa county decided to construct ultra-modern model ecde centers. each model ecde center would have classrooms, offices, a clinic bay, a student play area with equipment, a kitchen, and an eating area. eight such model centers, costing approximately 29 million kes each, were under construction in 2017. this information explains the potentially misleading high per student cost in mombasa, indicated in table 5 as 17,235 kes per student. thus, county decision-makers focused on higher-quality construction covering a far smaller number of children in that year, and in doing so increased inequality between those children enrolled in the model centers and those in other settings. unfortunately, investing in infrastructure alone is unlikely to have a direct and immediate impact on learning outcomes. the county-level expenditure data as well as the recorded interview responses revealed that counties spent minimal or no funding for interventions that could promote improved teaching and learning. for instructional materials, two counties did not budget any money at all, and three other counties budgeted less than 10% on materials. only two counties budgeted for quality assurance, although marsabit invested nearly a quarter of its resources in this area. the counties that budgeted for teacher training did so at 3% or less, and teacher support was absent altogether from four counties’ budgets. only marsabit and mombasa invested in health and nutrition, and the investments were more than 50% of the county ecde budget in both cases. marsabit county, aware of the nutritional deficiencies of scaling up early childhood development and education 59 some of its citizens because of naturally arid lands compounded by a recent drought, leveraged the existing school meals program to provide ecde learners with a nutritious meal. mombasa county, on the other hand, paid to provide 250 ml of milk daily to learners in ecde and those in primary grades 1–3. these investments reflect the realities in each county, both political and practical. in summary, these results showed very modest investment in efforts to improve the quality of ecde. the decision-makers at the county level typically did not see ecde quality improvements as a priority for the governor, to whom they were responsible. research question 2: county-level decision-making teachers and school leaders for our second research question on ecde decision-making at the county level, we found that each of the counties had established ecde departments with full-time, county-paid employees supporting the subsector. there was wide variation in the backgrounds of the personnel employed, with nairobi county having a much more qualified ecde subsector staff. the issue of hiring teachers for ecde centers became contentious because of a disagreement at the national level regarding whether teachers should be selected and paid at the national or county level. in 2016 and 2017, the county governments hired temporary teachers, resulting in wide variation in teacher qualifications and salaries paid to ecde teachers by county, a situation which can lead to teacher turnover due to cross-county transfers. at the time the data were collected, the nationallevel teachers’ service commission was working with the counties to develop schemes of service, which is the kenyan mechanism for clarifying roles and responsibilities for teachers as well as specifying the criteria for their selection and hiring. each county had instituted a minimum qualification for ecde teachers at the certificate level,5 ensuring that each trainee would have exposure to key ecde topics, whether they attended a public or private teacher training facility. curriculum, plus teaching and learning materials when the research team asked respondents to describe the mechanisms for developing, purchasing, and distributing instructional materials for ecde centers, there was near unanimity that the counties were investing very little of their resources in these materials. the selection of materials happened both at schools and at the county level. in some counties, the selection was done through a school management committee; in others, by the county office. furthermore, the language-ofinstruction policy for ecde calls for use of the “language of the catchment area” (or local community), but some schools had chosen materials that ignored the local language policy and were using english instead. most counties had no budget line for instructional materials, and in those settings, material purchases became the purview of individual schools, which often passed along the cost to parents in the form of additional fees. this finding suggests that access to appropriate materials likely was inequitable, since schools with more wealthy parents were likely able to afford more and better materials. standards, monitoring, and learning the findings revealed that most counties had no funds available for teacher training and support. this applied to both initial induction and ongoing short courses or refresher trainings. preprimary teachers were expected to have undergone at least two years of training at either the certificate or diploma level. in-service training was offered during school holidays. although structures had been established to provide ecde teacher trainings and support (a national center for early childhood education, district centers for early childhood education), these structures were not activated after devolution, since their staff had been redeployed 60 global education review 5(2) by the national teachers’ service commission to other jobs. some ecde trainings continued on an ad hoc basis, but the ministry of education has since stated that primary teacher training colleges will be responsible for such training in the future. in short, beyond the trainings and capacity-building programs implemented in donor-funded programs, teachers in the counties had no access to additional ecde training. similarly, none of the counties interviewed had an organized teacher support structure, including a transportation budget that would allow ecde officers to offer classroom-level mentoring and support to teachers. parental and community support and engagement our findings revealed significant demand for high-quality ecde provision. the counties responded to this demand in a variety of ways, as did parents or caregivers. in urban areas, such as nairobi, mombasa, and eldoret town in uasin gishu, demand was growing for what was perceived as high-quality ecde in the informal settlements. respondents indicated that many parents enrolled their children in apbet centers because they believed that the instructional quality was higher than in public schools. this held true even if the physical facilities that the apbet institutions occupied were not much more than a tin roof and bare walls. the countylevel respondents noted that there were “better conditions” in these private institutions, referring to the quality of the teachers and availability of learning materials other than just walls and chalkboards. the study revealed a contrast in terms of what county-level decisionmakers and parents prioritized: the former expressed interest in investing in ecde infrastructure to garner political support, while the latter in fact preferred centers that had invested in better teaching and learning materials (even with lower quality infrastructure). equitable and inclusive access in the health subsector in this section, we have expanded rossiter’s (2016) discussion on equitable and inclusive access to include the health subsector, as we sought to specifically examine how counties engaged with health structures. when the tayari research team asked about the availability of child health programs in the county for ecdeaged learners, they found no counties that were directly implementing child health programs in schools. instead, counties were collaborating with the ministry of health structures and donor-funded ngos operating in their jurisdiction. counties were supporting feeding programs at the ecde level by providing basic meals and milk at the ecde center on an ad hoc basis. although they had limited resources to pay for health register data collection, most counties did not regularly use registers to collect child health data at the ecde centers. the respondents indicated that teachers used exercise books to capture some health data, but the county-level data suggested wide variation in how these registers were being completed. finally, the findings showed that both handwashing and hygiene practices were taught at the county level in ecde classrooms in tayari pilot counties, but the connection between the county-level policies and the ability of teachers in that county’s ecde centers to formally implement these practices was very weak. willingness of tayari counties to change allocations up to this point we have discussed our data using rossiter’s framework (2016) on highquality edce. further analyses sought to 61 global education review 5(2) table 6 numbers of ecde officers, by type of qualification and county counties type of qualification total degree diploma certificate tayari laikipia 7 6 3 16 nairobi 20 9 0 29 siaya 7 0 0 7 uasin gishu 3 3 2 8 non-tayari embu 5 0 0 5 marsabit 7 2 0 9 mombasa 6 2 0 8 total 31 10 3 40 note. all of these are academic professional qualifications. a bachelor’s degree in early childhood education or equivalent in local university takes four years. currently, both diploma and certificate courses take two years in a college. determine whether any of the decentralized ecde leaders suggested that the instructional interventions implemented by programs like tayari would likely have an impact on resource allocation and decision-making at the county level. the tayari theory of change suggests that if county-level officers work with a program like tayari, which focuses on improved instructional quality, then these officers will better understand the impact that their resource allocation decisions can have on education quality. the qualitative interviews indicated that the county governments had established ecde sections and had staffed them with qualified personnel. most of these officers had a four-year university degree in early childhood education, as opposed to a oneor two-year certificate or diploma. as table 6 shows for the end of the program’s first year, tayari counties employed more ecde officers than non-tayari counties. our findings also revealed that the tayari counties had hired even more ecde officers over time, as tayari’s implementation evidently led them, in part, to recognize the importance of classroom support. research question 3: tayari’s results by decentralized location the sections above presented findings related to how decentralized counties responded to technical implementation of ecde in kenya. given the differences in each county’s technical implementation, our third research question prompted us to investigate whether the effect of tayari on school readiness would differ by decentralized location. to answer that question, we fit a set of regression models. the outcome variable was school readiness in october 2016, and we controlled for initial school readiness from the january 2016 baseline assessment. table 7 presents our findings. 62 global education review 5(2) the first two columns present the overall estimates of tayari’s impact on school readiness, with the first presenting the overall impact without control variables, and the second presenting the tayari impact with control variables. the first row shows the effect of tayari on school readiness, which is an index with a score out of 100. the second row shows the effect of tayari on the percentage of children who reached the benchmark of 40% on the school readiness index. the results show that tayari increased overall school readiness by 5.1 index points (p-value < .01), and 9.6% more children met the school readiness benchmark (p-value < .01) in tayari treatment schools than in control schools. the overall estimates were very similar when the model with control variables was fit, with 4.9 index points higher on school readiness (p-value < .01) and 9.3% more children reaching the benchmark in treatment than control schools. tayari improved overall school readiness scores and increased the overall percentage of children reaching the benchmark. the with control variables column shows that the impact of tayari was not sensitive to the inclusion of control variables. the next several columns show that the impact of tayari did not meaningfully vary by grade, gender, or school type. the next several columns were designed to determine whether the impact of tayari depended on the decentralized county. as the results in the public column show, we found that the impact of tayari on public schools in the four counties together (5.2 index points, p-value < .01) was very similar to the impact of tayari on the apbet schools (5.7 index points, p-value < .05). given that the four counties in tayari implemented ecde separately, we also wanted to determine whether the impact of tayari differed for the four counties. we found differential effects by county (we do not share the county names for reasons of sensitivity of the information). county 1 and county 3 had statistically significant impacts on both school readiness (p-value < .05 and p-value < .05) and the percentage at benchmark (p-value < .01 and p-value < .05). county 2 and county 4 had no impact on either school readiness or the percentage at the benchmark. county 2 had estimates similar to those of counties 1 and 3; although they showed statistical significance, the larger standard errors in county 2 made those estimates statistically insignificant. in summary, we did see differences in the impact of tayari across the four decentralized counties and between the public schools and the apbet institutions. (table 7, next page) scaling up early childhood development and education 63 table 7 regression estimates of tayari treatment effects on school readiness (standard errors in parentheses) item without control variables with control variables pp1 pp2 combined class male female public apbet county 1 county 2 county 3 county 4 school readiness (difference in index points) 5.1** (1.4) 4.9** (1.3) 4.6* (2.0) 4.5* (1.9) 7.2** (2.3) 5.2** (1.7) 4.9* (1.3) 5.2** (1.5) 5.7* (2.2) 7.9* (2.1) 5.8 (4.7) 5.9* (2.2) 2.7 (1.9) % at benchmark 9.6** (2.7) 9.3** (2.4) 8.6* (4.2) 7.4~ (4.4) 16.2** (4.9) 7.3* (3.3) 12.2** (3.4) 9.8** (2.8) 10.7~ (5.2) 15.9** (3.5) 12.8 (10.3) 8.8* (3.2) 7.5 (4.7) note. apbet = alternative provision of basic education and training (nonformal) schools; pp1 and pp2 = preprimary 1 and preprimary 2. ~p < .10, *p < .05, **p < .01, ***p < .001. 64 global education review 5(2) discussion the data available from the kenya tayari ecde program provided a unique opportunity to investigate how ecde works in a devolved setting at scale, with resource allocation power devolved to the lower levels of government. we framed our discussion of the results around our three research questions, which considered various factors relating to the implementation of ecde in a truly decentralized system such as kenya’s. the rich qualitative data we collected allowed us to investigate kenya’s devolved system with respect to the qualities outlined in rossiter’s (2016) work. in the areas of systems, financing, management, and leadership, the results showed that expenditure decisionmaking was often done to ensure electoral returns. the interviews and focus group discussions were held just a few months before the county-level elections took place in august 2017, and it appears that electoral concerns heavily influenced how ecde allocations were made. the results also suggested that ecde was a relatively low priority in most of the counties studied. significant disparities existed between counties, with per learner expenditures several times higher in some counties than in others. interestingly, while construction of new ecde centers was the highest expenditure for five out of the six counties researched, the data indicated that parents’ perceptions of education quality were instead centered on teacher quality and education resource materials, areas where the counties invested little if anything. the parental and community support and engagement portion of rossiter’s (2016) framework suggests that a decentralized ecde structure may exacerbate inequalities, as per the china example. wealthier counties and areas within those counties can supplement ecde investments, while the poor and rural counties and portions of counties cannot. rossiter’s (2016) framework analyzes the ways in which ecde decision-making affects teachers and school leaders, and our data revealed important findings on how devolved ecde systems addressed those areas. the findings showed that the counties were quite sensitive to the influence of a tayari-type intervention on the hiring of ecde officers after they were convinced of its potential impact on learning. investing in teachers and improving the quality of teaching seems to be difficult in kenya’s current context, given ongoing legal disputes between the county and national governments regarding who is responsible for teachers. the results showed several findings related to rossiter’s (2016) theme of curriculum, teaching, and learning materials. there were differences of opinion across and within counties as to whether the purchase of instructional materials was a county or school function. given that many counties had no budget line allocated for instructional materials, schools took on some of that responsibility. of course, when schools are required to provide materials, the availability of those materials to learners will be inequitable among schools, and the costs in many cases will be shifted to parents in the form of additional fees. it was also apparent that programs like tayari that provide instructional materials are meeting an area of demand by counties and parents alike, although the long-term sustainability of this investment is of concern. future quality improvement interventions could consider incentivizing county-level investments in learning materials, while also providing technical support. this strategy would call attention to the importance of such investments as meaningful resource allocations. scaling up early childhood development and education 65 one of the most striking findings was the influence of tayari on the allocation of personnel, due to the perception that investments in these staff would improve ecde quality. counties supported by tayari had more ecde officers than control counties, and two counties hired several additional ecde officers before the 2017 academic year based on their experience with the tayari program in 2016. these hires were paid from county resources and their positions became part of the permanent county budget. this increased personnel investment by the counties suggests an additional area of research on how project-based interventions can support decentralized levels in making decisions while also emphasizing learning and quality improvements. it remains to be seen whether the overall allocations of ecde can be changed, whether it is possible to increase ecde investments in contrast to other subsectors in general, and whether it is possible to increase ecde investments focused on quality improvements rather than on access to ecde. the quantitative results from tayari showed not only increased school readiness, but also meaningful county-level differences in program impact. while many programs focus primarily on whether an ecde intervention is successful, these results showed that understanding the specifics of the context is essential in maximizing ecde program impact. while the directionality of the tayari impact was positive in each county, the variation in the magnitude of the county-specific tayari effects points to the continued work required to consider local realities and make adjustments based on the particularities of implementation in decentralized levels in kenya or elsewhere. more research is needed to determine whether decentralized levels of government in kenya innovate and create context-specific strategies (similar to the ethiopian example) to improve quality. while the impact of tayari was similar in public and nonformal settings, the absolute scores showed that outcomes were higher in the nonformal settings, outside of the government’s formal investment. this finding reflects the experience of south africa where outcomes in public grade r classrooms are modest, and raises the question of whether rapid expansion of the public ecde sector might reduce quality. the gap between the quality of public and low-cost private ecde centers may be a cautionary tale for kenya, which should ensure that investments in quality public ecde centers are paramount even as enrollment in ecde rapidly expands. conclusion decentralization affords countries a unique opportunity to improve both the quality and equity of ecde service provision. the findings from this study point to the need for devolved or decentralized levels to allocate increased funding to ecde to ensure government systems establish an effective and coherent ecde system. programs such as tayari can produce evidence on how decentralized governments may utilize their existing personnel and structures to improve ecde quality. this includes entrenching the use of high-quality instructional materials aligned to the curriculum, embracing teacher training and support modalities with a focus on ensuring that teachers effectively teach the curriculum, and improving instructional delivery through coaching and supportive supervision systems within the decentralized structures. the tayari example should be further analyzed to determine whether sufficient autonomy can be given to local, decentralized education structures to promote creative solutions and local ownership, while at the same time setting standards for training quality, instructional support, and decisions on resource 66 global education review 5(2) allocation. the key objective is to ensure that kenya’s children enjoy both high-quality ecde and increased enrollment in the decentralized ecde system. notes 1. we define school readiness as performance on the kenya-adapted version of the measuring early learning and quality outcomes (melqo) assessment, with 10 areas of school readiness combined for an average school readiness metric, inclusive of language, numeracy, executive function, and socioemotional domains. 2. for an overview of scientific evidence around children’s early development, see committee on integrating the science of early childhood development (2000); and the lancet special series on early childhood development in developing 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(2017). scaling-up early learning in ethiopia: exploring the potential of o-class. oxford, uk: young lives, oxford department of international development (odid), university of oxford. http://oro.open.ac.uk/48116/1/yl-wp163woodhead.pdf world bank. (2005). education in ethiopia: strengthening the foundation for sustainable progress. washington, dc: world bank. http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrica/res ources/wp86_ethiopia_edu.pdf wu, k. b., young, m. e., & cai, j. (2012). early child development in china: breaking the cycle of poverty and improving future competitiveness. directions in development series no. 70983. washington, dc: world bank. http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/36378 1468241467640/pdf/709830pub0epi0067926b097 80821395646.pdf zhou, j., sun, j., & lee, d. p. l. (2017). trends in government expenditure in early childhood education in china: practices in shanghai, guizhou and ningshan. in n. rao, j. zhou, & j. sun (eds.), early childhood education in chinese societies (pp. 71–84). international perspectives on early childhood education and development series, child vol. 19. new york, ny: springer berlin heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-0241004-4_5 about the author(s) dr. benjamin piper is the senior director for africa education at rti international. based in nairobi, dr. piper provides technical support to programs in sub-saharan africa, asia and the middle east. he supervises kenya’s national literacy program, the tusome early grade reading activity, funded by usaid, and kenya’s tayari ecde program, sponsored by the children’s investment fund foundation. dr. piper previously led tusome, the (primr) initiative, the national tablet programme, and the primr rural expansion programme. he has worked with rti, the world bank, dfid, unicef, and save the children. dr. piper has a doctorate in international education from the harvard graduate school of education. katherine a. merseth leads the early childhood practice area in the international education division at rti international. she provides strategic and technical leadership for rti’s early childhood education programming and research. her research interests include access to and equity of kindergarten education in lmics. ms. merseth previously worked at save the children us, creative associates and winrock international. she has a master’s degree in international education policy from the harvard graduate school of education. dr. samuel ngaruiya provides policy, management, and technical guidance to the tayari early childhood development program, based in nairobi. an expert in early childhood development and early grade education, he holds a phd in education from the university of nairobi and a master’s degree in child and youth care from the university of victoria in canada. through 18 years of direct experience implementing programs supported by various international organizations, and his membership in the africa ecd network and working group on ecd, he stays closely attuned to global trends and strategic priorities in ecd. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001275/127583e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0012/001275/127583e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001373/137333e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0013/001373/137333e.pdf https://www.unicef.org/media/media_90863.html http://oro.open.ac.uk/48116/1/yl-wp163-woodhead.pdf http://oro.open.ac.uk/48116/1/yl-wp163-woodhead.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrica/resources/wp86_ethiopia_edu.pdf http://siteresources.worldbank.org/intafrica/resources/wp86_ethiopia_edu.pdf http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/363781468241467640/pdf/709830pub0epi0067926b09780821395646.pdf http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/363781468241467640/pdf/709830pub0epi0067926b09780821395646.pdf http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/363781468241467640/pdf/709830pub0epi0067926b09780821395646.pdf 22 global education review 4(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: brown, elissa f., & wishney, leigh r. (2017). equity and excellence: political forces in the education of gifted students in the united states and abroad. global education review, 4(1). 22-33. equity and excellence: political forces in the education of gifted students in the united states and abroad elissa f. brown hunter college cuny leigh r. wishney new york city department of education abstract divisive rhetoric and heated political discourse surround the identification and education of gifted students and lead to opposing philosophical issues of egalitarianism versus elitism. researchers have long chronicled the ambivalence in the united states over the concepts of giftedness and intellectual talent (benbow &stanley, 1996; see also gallagher & weiss, 1979). gallagher (2005) suggested that the two predominant social values reflected in american education are equity and excellence: “the dual and desirable educational goals of student equity and student excellence have often been in a serious struggle for scarce resources. student equity ensures all students a fair short a good education. student excellence promises every student the right to achieve as far and as high as he or she is capable. because the problems of equity have greater immediacy than does the long-term enhancement of excellence, this struggle has often been won by equity.” (gallagher, 2005, p. 32). the ebbs and flows of public perceptions of equity and excellence and political and historical events have significantly impacted the evolution of the field of gifted education in the united states and abroad. in order to understand these influences on the respective “outlier” student, it’s important to consider the context of the country, significant events, overall educational reform efforts and the implications on the education of gifted students. this article provides a backdrop of the united states’ ambivalence towards gifted education as well as provides an overview of a sample of countries as frames of reference. implications for policy and practice are discussed. keywords gifted education, politics of gifted education, international gifted education, equity and excellence introduction the ebb and flow of public perception of equity and excellence, and political and historical events, have significantly impacted the evolution of the field of gifted education in the united states and abroad. to understand these influences on the respective “outlier” student, it _________________________________ corresponding author elissa f. brown, 919 west. school of education, hunter college, 695 park ave, new york, ny 10065 email: elissa.brown@hunter.cuny.edu mailto:elissa.brown@hunter.cuny.edu equity and excellence in gifted education 23 influences on the respective “outlier” student, it is important to consider the context of the country, significant events, overall educational reform efforts, and implications for the education of gifted students. this article provides an explanation for the united states’ ambivalence towards gifted education, and provides an overview of gifted education in four countries as a frame of reference. the countries selected are south korea, singapore, england and finland. the criteria for selecting these countries included elements such as geographical spread, international test comparisons of top students, explicit programming or mandates for educating gifted students or the opposite. additional criteria included population size and gross domestic product as influences on educating gifted students. lastly, public perception regarding serving a country’s brightest students provides context and an additional element for comparison. methodology the methodology employed was a comparative analysis of five countries (n=5). it is qualitative in nature because educational systems are contextually bound and socially constructed. the researchers had no formal hypothesis in mind, other than literature findings about the relationship among policy (educational reform), public perception, and the degree to which programming for gifted and talented students is formalized (finn & wright, 2015; national association of gifted children, 2016; spielhagen & brown, 2008). the researchers visited websites, reviewed laws and policies governing gifted education, and in one case, spoke with an international government official charged with overseeing a country’s gifted education program. finally, consideration was given to countries representing different populations sizes, geographical and gross domestic product (gdp) diversity, and history of educational reform efforts focused on equity or excellence. gifted education in the united states with a population of approximately 324 million, the united states is home to diverse ethnic groups and is the third most populous country in the world. americans identify themselves as 62.6% white, 15% hispanic, 13% black, 4.4% asian, with the remainder being american and alaska native, hawaiian or other pacific islander or two or more races. in 2015, the gdp per capita was $56,300. education is the largest expense in every state budget. beyond state education expenditures, the federal government spent a total of $3.7 trillion in fiscal year 2015 with approximately $154 billion in education spending accounting for 4.2 percent of the entire federal budget according to the national center for education statistics (nces, 2017). the javits act, passed in 1988, is the only federal program dedicated specifically to gifted and talented students, but it does not fund local gifted education programs (civic impulse, 2017). rather, javits funds research and demonstration projects through a competitive grant process. approximately 3.5 million dollars was allocated in 2015 to fund 11 javits grants, representing less than .01% of federal discretionary funding. javits monies, distributed as research grants, are earmarked for research demonstration projects that target traditionally under-represented populations in gifted education. one of the key priorities of javits funding is to reduce the achievement gap for students at the highest academic levels. the excellence gap (plucker, burroughs, & song, 2010) suggested that an achievement gap exists representing differences between subgroups of students performing at the highest levels of achievement on state and national measures. gallagher (2005) suggested that the two predominant social values reflected in american education are equity and excellence: “the dual and desirable educational goals of student equity and student excellence have often been in a 24 global education review 4(1) serious struggle for scarce resources. student equity ensures all students a fair shot at a good education. student excellence promises every student the right to achieve as far and as high as he or she is capable. because the problems of equity have greater immediacy than does the long-term enhancement of excellence, this struggle has often been won by equity,” (gallagher, 2005, p. 32). even the term gifted is value-laden, and, in some school districts is not allowed to be used. confusion over which students to include in the definition of gifted students confounds the problem. harking back to the earliest of researchers on the topic (e.g., hollingworth, 1926; terman, 1925), giftedness was commonly defined as raw intellectual power or simply iq. the term giftedness was synonymous with “intellectual giftedness,” and the pioneering researchers investigated the nature and characteristics of gifted individuals only after setting minimal iq standards for identification. as the field evolved, a sense of elitism and limited access to programming and resources became associated with giftedness and those who were admitted into the “intellectual club” on the basis of their performance on the stanford-binet or wechsler scales. due, at least in part, to this perception of elitism, as well as to a social push to include more diverse students into programs for the gifted, the field began to consider alternative methods and procedures for identifying gifted students and for broadening ways in which gifted students are served. yet, even today, programs for gifted students are frequently under-funded because state and federal mandates often lack provisions to provide appropriate services for those who learn faster than their age-mates (national association of gifted children, 2016). moreover, no coherent or systematic body of empirical research on policies or classroom practices for gifted learners has emerged. for example, despite seventy years of research on the benefits of acceleration, no consistent policy on acceleration exists across the states or, more importantly, systematically implemented in schools (colangelo, assouline, & gross, 2004). gallagher (2004) warned about policy initiatives that attempt to improve education by targeting achievement gaps, specifically citing the “impressive” unintended but negative consequences of no child left behind for students of exceptional ability because of the law’s focus on bringing students up to levels deemed proficient by state standards, without consideration of students who were beyond proficient. in recent years, the needs of students who must be brought up to standard have been so politicized that the concept of exceptionality has come to exclude the exceptional needs of the highly able student. mandated minimum competency testing has created ceiling effects for highly able students, while states provide little or no off-level testing to determine appropriate educational experiences for those who already meet the standards. however, parents and educators seeking to address the needs of highly able students face charges of elitism from beleaguered educational administrators and policymakers. to complicate the matter, where gifted education resides at the state level dictates the funding stream as well as subsequent guidelines and procedures for schools in individual states. a recent state of the states report (national association of gifted children, 2016) revealed that there has always been a lack of coherence and consistency in the location of gifted services at the state level. is gifted education more akin to special education or general education? lacking a satisfactory answer to this question, gifted educators face a professional identity crisis and lack of influence in the educational arena, at large. the tension of equity versus excellence has defined gifted education in the united states for over two centuries. the need to discuss equity and excellence within the context of the united states and other countries is warranted because equity and excellence in gifted education 25 educational reform efforts are intrinsically and explicitly linked to government initiatives, policies, and public perception. leveraging educational reforms for a specific population of students, such as gifted students, in order to provide parity with reform efforts, perceptions, or government initiatives for other groups of students, such as those with special needs and is at the minimum, a challenge; and at the maximum something that may never be achieved in the united states because providing resources or services for gifted students is perceived as elitist (finn & hocket, 2012). even a few researchers outside of the field of gifted education have become proponents of gifted education, citing the nation’s rhetoric toward equity as a failure of the country to value its human capital. an incendiary report from the thomas b. fordham institute (theaker, et al, 2011) brought into sharp focus the decline in achievement among the top students in the united states, those with the potential and demonstrated capacity to excel in school and assume leadership roles in the united states and the global community. this report suggested that the united states’ brightest students are the unintended victims of the lofty goals of no child left behind. they are not making the much heralded “adequate yearly progress” that is supposed to characterize school success, but instead are losing ground when their performance is tracked over time. chester finn, president of the thomas b. fordham institute stated that as a country, americans all lose by focusing on who is gifted rather than on what we can do to nurture intellectual potential: “collateral victims are a society and economy that thereby fail to make the most of this latent human capital.” finn (2013) stated further that, “it's not elitist to pour more resources into educating our brightest kids. in fact, the future of the country may depend on it,” (finn, 2013, pg. 1). he posited seven explanations as to why education leaders and philanthropists fail to take an interest in gifted students. in brief, they are as follows:  the country’s nervousness about elitism.  a widespread belief that "equity" should be solely about income, minority status, handicapping conditions, and historical disenfranchisement.  a mistaken belief that high-ability youngsters will do fine, even if the education system makes no special provision for them.  the definition of "gifted" itself has been ill-defined.  the field of gifted education lacks convincing research as to what works.  whether due to elitism, angst, or a shortage of resources, the gifted education world has been meek when it comes to lobbying and special pleading.  the wishful proposition that "differentiated instruction" would magically enable every teacher to succeed with every child in a mixed classroom. (finn & hockett, 2012). the united states must be concerned with its future workforce in order to ensure its longterm competitiveness, security and innovation (finn & wright, 2015), and paying attention to what we do with our brightest students and what other countries do with their brightest students, matters (organisation for economic cooperation and development, 2014). the united states must ask not only how it is doing relative to gifted education, but given the interdependence of all countries and the global economy, it must consider how other countries fare with their brightest. the u.s. produces a much smaller proportion of advanced students, according to the trends in math and science study (timss, 2015), than our economic competitors (plucker, 2016). table i displays a sample of countries, their population, gross domestic product (gdp) per capita, and national or federal efforts that 26 global education review 4(1) support or impede gifted education. gdp is included in the chart because economists hanushek and woessmann (2015) estimate that a “ten percentage point increase in the share of top-performing students” within a country “is associated with 1.3 percentage point higher annual growth” of that country’s economy. table i: sample countries; their populations, gdp per capita, and federal initiatives regarding gifted education country population gdp per capita funding, regulations, or federal efforts in gifted education united states 324 million $56,300  3.5 million for javits grants  no federal universally adopted definition  no federal mandate to identify or serve  gifted education is not funded  national advocacy efforts s. korea 49 million $36,700  gifted education promotion law (2002)  master plan jointly developed by several government agencies (2008) singapore 5.7 million $85,700  universal screening to all 3rd graders  1% of the population is offered seats in 9 of the country’s gifted education program (gep) programs/schools  the singaporean government sees their gifted students as a national resource in the political and economic stability of the nation (ministry of education, 2016) england 51 million $46,300  no national mandate to identify and serve gifted students  historical political skittishness about gifted education as a way to segregate through social classes  schools are encouraged in their selfreview and planning to include provisions for identifying and servicing able gifted pupils  national advocacy efforts finland 5.48 million $41,200  seen internationally as a “model” in education  equality focus in education; all children, regardless of background, should generally be educated the same  the focus in education is on learning rather than testing  teachers are highly regarded, given huge latitude, trusted to do what’s in the best interests of students, and hold masters degree or beyond 27 global education review 4(1) beyond our borders the next section highlights several countries and the degree to which they support or impede progress in gifted education, by considering the rules and regulations governing the education of the country’s brightest students. the selected countries, south korea, singapore, england and finland, were chosen to illuminate the diverse ways of responding to gifted learners from disparate areas around the world. gifted education in south korea south korea is located in the southern half of the korean peninsula in eastern asia. the educational research organization, the korean educational development institute (kedi) makes it clear that south korean society values and emphasizes educational achievement, particularly in the areas of math and science, subjects that constitute approximately 95% of the country’s gifted programs (korean educational development institute, 2011). competition amongst students – and their families – is fierce, as parents make significant financial sacrifices to ensure that their child is well prepared for high-stakes high school and college entrance exams. on average, south korean parents spend approximately $1,000 a month on supplemental education, including weekend and after-school classes and private tutors (finn & wright, 2015). south korea has made strides in its recent effort to identify and educate gifted learners, particularly in areas deemed valuable to the nation’s future, (korean educational development institute, 2011). on january 28, 2000, gifted education came to the forefront of a national discussion of the state of the country’s educational policy with the enactment of the gifted education promotion law. the law, which went into effect in 2002, to build a firm foundation for a systematic plan for gifted education within the country’s public education system. according to clause 1, article 2 of the law, a gifted and talented person is defined as “an individual who requires special education to develop innate potential with an outstanding talent.” moreover, the government believes that “all members of a nation shall have the right to an education according to their ability and aptitude, to promote self-actualization and contribute to the development of society and nation” (korean educational development institute, 2011). a “master plan” for the promotion of gifted education was jointly developed by various government entities in 2002 and was later readopted, with improvements, in 2008. several programs were implemented under the “master plan.” on the elementary and middle levels, gifted students chiefly participate in stem related after-school or weekend programs, either in their own school or through joint participation with neighboring schools, universities, or government-funded research and public service institutions (korean educational development institute, 2011). few gifted schools or full time gifted classes at this level exist; for fear that competition between families for spots would worsen an already high-stress environment for children. there is a much stronger emphasis on gifted education at the high school level than there is on the primary level and students annually cram to gain acceptance into these highly coveted full-time gifted programs. an overwhelming majority of gifted high schools focus on math and science; areas in which the country’s students have performed particularly well on recent global achievement exams. the south korean government values their highly able students and continues to increase the number and scope of available programs that will serve to nurture a wider range of talents. 28 global education review 4(1) gifted education in singapore singapore is an island city-state located off southern malaysia in southeast asia. singaporean students continuously outperform students from other nations on international achievement exams, with particularly promising data from students in the bottom socioeconomic status (ses) quartile (finn & wright, 2015). the education system, managed by the ministry of education, is divided into three levels, culminating with post-secondary school for those who qualify. education is compulsory at the first two levels, as all students must attend 6 years of primary school and 4-5 years of secondary school. while the ministry of education is making efforts to move away from high-stakes testing, there are still several important exams, which largely determine students’ educational fate (singapore ministry of education, 2016). gifted education in singapore begins in the middle of primary school and continues through post-secondary programs. the ministry of education’s mission statement states that the country is “committed to nurturing gifted individuals to their full potential for the fulfillment of self and the betterment of society” and provides two rationales for the gifted education program (gep), titled “the educational factor” and “the socio-political factor.” the ministry argues that children have varying abilities and deserve an education suited to their pace and needs. moreover, according to the singapore ministry of education, properly nurturing the gifted will help to ensure the small nation’s progress and prosperity (singapore ministry of education, 2016). through its mission to provide educational excellence to gifted students, the ministry also seeks to increase equity in the population of students in the gep, and strategically does not begin testing until the end of third grade. the ministry believes in “leveling the playing field” for all students. that is, it argues that students from lower socioeconomic families will have an increased chance at performing better on gifted entrance exams after three years of primary school, as it recognizes that not all children have the same level of academic exposure prior to the start of formal schooling. gifted testing is universally administered to third graders and consists of english proficiency, math, and “general ability” components. the top 8% of performers on this test sit for another round of testing two months later, and about 550 students receive gep offers, which annually corresponds to about 1% of the student population. students who accept offers are placed into one of the nine gep centers throughout the country. the next top 4% of high performers are designated as “high ability learners” and all schools are encouraged to differentiate their curriculum to correspond to these students’ aptitudes. some schools take this charge very seriously, creating rigorous programs of their own for these students, while others do little to acknowledge these students’ gifts and talents (finn & wright, 2015). at the end of sixth grade, all students, including those in the gep, take the highly competitive primary school leaving exam (psle), which determines their secondary school placement. students in the primary gep are promoted to the secondary gep based on exam results, academic performance, and teacher ratings (finn & wright, 2015). students who remain in the gep can attend one of the sixteen integrated program (ip) schools that offer a school-based gifted education program, which are six-year programs that allow students to proceed to junior college without taking entrance exams (singapore ministry of education, 2016). the singaporean government sees their gifted students as a national resource equity and excellence in gifted education 29 in the political and economic stability of the nation. gifted education in england england is one of four countries that make up the united kingdom (u.k.) and one of the three that make up great britain. the other countries are scotland, wales, and ireland. ireland is part of the united kingdom, but not part of great britain. england’s focus on gifted education is to educate their most able children within the school system. social class in the u.k. is akin to the debate about race in the united states, therefore, educating their brightest students is viewed with skepticism and as a form of segregation by social class. their approach is to build on general education rather than placing gifted education outside of the general education structure (eyre, 2004). from world war ii until the 1970s, england used a form of education known as the tripartite system of secondary schooling. at the end of primary school, students sat for an aptitude test and, based on the results of that test, were placed into one of three pathways; grammar schools, secondary modern schools, or technical-vocational schools. the first, grammar schools, emphasized preparation for university. beginning in the 1960s, the government began phasing out the tripartite system, leaving only 164 grammar schools and 3,500 secondary schools. today, most students attend comprehensive secondary schools much like the united states. currently, no federal policy guides the education of gifted students in the primary and middle years. schools in england have considerable latitude. english schools still have national tests, curriculum, and inspections but educating their brightest students is not a top priority for the government; and much like the united states, the implementation of differentiated curriculum, instructional, and assessment approaches are idiosyncratic. however, the department for children, schools, and families (2008) defines gifted learners as “children and young people with one or more abilities developed to a level significantly ahead of their year group (or with the potential to develop those abilities,” (pg. 31) and produced a guidance document for schools to use in developing effective practices in identifying and serving gifted and talented learners. included in the guidance document are recommendations for including planning for provisions for gifted learners as schools implement the institutional quality standards (iqs), a process of self-review and planning. there are advocacy efforts such as potential plus uk, which was established in 1967 as an independent charity that works with families to support children with high learning potential. the goal is to work with parents and caregivers, versus schools and teachers. another advocacy organization is the national association for able children in education (nace), whose membership is made up of teachers and schools. the organization specializes in supporting teachers to provide excellent teaching and learning for able, gifted and talented pupils. gifted education in finland finland is a northern european nordic country and is world-renowned for its educational excellence. in recent years, finland has often been used as a model for countries seeking to increase their rankings on the worldwide stage. although finland’s recent programme for international student assessment (pisa) scores have declined, students still continue to outperform many organisation for economic development (oecd) countries, including ones that spend far more educating their students (center on international education benchmarking, 2015). 30 global education review 4(1) the country’s education system is rooted in equality: all children, regardless of background, should generally be educated the same, with a particular monetary focus on students who need the most help (finn & wright, 2015). students are placed in classrooms with highly able and well-respected educators, who are given autonomy in their instruction. students are only required to take one national exam (the matriculation exam at the end of secondary school) in the duration of their public school years. the finnish national board of education (fnbe) explains: the main objective of finnish education policy is to offer all citizens equal opportunities to receive education. the structure of the education system reflects these principles. the system is highly permeable, that is, there are no deadends preventing progression to higher levels of education. the focus in education is on learning rather than testing. there are no national tests for pupils in basic education in finland. instead, teachers are responsible for assessment in their respective subjects on the basis of the objectives included in the curriculum (finnish national board of education, 2016). teachers, who hold master’s degrees or higher, are trusted to do what they believe is best for each individual student, but it is the general societal belief that no student should receive “more” or “better” than others. the finnish public school system begins with “basic education” at comprehensive schools (ages 7-16), with an optional one year of preprimary education at age 6. students can then elect to enroll in general upper secondary schools or vocational schools for approximately 3 more years before entering universities or the workforce. parents typically enroll their children in a comprehensive school in their own community, as it is widely believed that most schools, regardless of neighborhood, provide a great education. while the fnbe does not have a gifted education policy and seems to shy away from explicitly differentiating high-ability students from others, parents of “gifted” children sometimes seek out (or create) opportunities that will allow their children to be educated with likeminded children and their families. parents sometimes band together to request specialized classes like latin within their child’s school or apply to one of their city’s specialized arts or music schools (finn & wright, 2015). while not termed “gifted” programs, there are more opportunities for specialized instruction on the upper secondary level, as many schools have strict admissions policies: the selection of students for upper secondary school is based on their grade point average for the theoretical subjects in the basic education certificate. entrance and aptitude tests may also be used, and students may be awarded points for hobbies and other relevant activities (finnish national board of education, 2016). while gifted education is not a priority in finland, it is clear that high-quality teaching is. in 2014, only 20% of those who participated in an entrance exam into teaching preparation programs at finnish universities were admitted (eurydice network, 2014). perhaps the most effective undertaking finland has made is prioritizing the hiring of individuals who educate the country’s students, and entrusting them to properly differentiate for all of their students. equity and excellence in gifted education 31 the united states and the four other countries reviewed each are unique in their approaches toward the way they view and educate their brightest students. there is either a bend towards equity, educating all students; or towards recognizing excellence through specialized programming, funding, or mandates of its brightest students. implications for policy and practice based on a review of contexts in five countries, including public perception, mandates, and value systems about cultivating and sustaining programs for brightest learners, the following implications are important to consider.  gifted education remains a state and local control issue in the united states. due to the vast number of diverse identification measures, programming, funding, and national reform efforts, achieving coherency of curricula, teacher preparation, program delivery, and accountability to provide for the academic and social-emotional needs of gifted students will be difficult, at best.  when there are scarce resources for educational funding in the united states. and globally, conflicts occur over who should be educated. where this is the case, gifted students are left out of the funding allocation and priorities. in other countries, such as singapore and south korea, that are more monolithic with less divisive demands for funding, gifted learners are included within the educational priorities, reform efforts, and guidance provided to schools.  gifted learners are an integral part of the overall student population in any country and therefore, should be thoughtfully and strategically considered part and parcel of any educational efforts, initiatives, and priorities.  public perception and parent involvement serve as important vehicles in any country in serving its brightest learners. if the gifted student population is viewed as vital to human capital and thus national security, programming and funding follow. if serving gifted students is perceived as pulling resources away from the “neediest” students it is viewed as elitist.  this is a relationship between a country’s international test comparisons of its brightest students and a country’s gross domestic product.  countries tend to use different lenses to determine the degree to which gifted students are served. for example, in finland, teacher expertise is seen as fundamental to a strong educational system, thus an effective teacher can meet the academic and social emotional needs of their gifted student population. in south korea and singapore, investing in the brightest children is a way to ensure international competitiveness and cultivate human potential. conclusion the values, traditions, cultures, and politics of countries shape the perception of equity and excellence. unfortunately, the definition of excellence, which should be an objective and absolute standard toward which all students should strive and aspire, has given way to more subjective meanings laden with values and context. equity in school curriculum, instruction, and assessment has become a belief in equality of outcomes and that all students, regardless of their ability levels should receive identical instruction. as gallagher noted, in yecke’s (2005) book, the war against 32 global education review 4(1) excellence, “efforts to offset economic and social barriers to cognitive development will succeed in equalizing academic aptitude only to a certain degree: some students will still learn faster than others, even if the discrepancy between the most and least rapid learners is decreased,” (yecke, 2005, pg. 170). attempts to meet the needs of gifted students in the united states, england, and finland, have been largely thwarted, denied, or ignored due to an overriding philosophical bend toward equity. in every decade, champions for the gifted have introduced legislation, policies, research, and pedagogically sound practices in an effort to provide appropriate challenging educational experiences for these learners. yet, excellence has given way to a definition of equity that has precluded the needs of the ablest learners in the school population. excellence should not be perceived as a group norm; rather, it should be viewed as an individual quest for higher learning seen as in countries such as singapore and south korea. competition is a necessary component in society’s idea of success, but social activists fail to see this when it comes to gifted and talented students. true educational equity cannot disallow opportunities to pursue excellence at appropriate ability levels, areas, and interests for the individual learner. concerns over elitism continue to plague educators globally seeking to provide appropriate services for gifted students and to respond to criticisms of those services (spielhagen & cooper, 2005). will there ever be a time when the united states can embrace all learners, including those who learn content more quickly, understand concepts more deeply, and process information in a more advanced manner? will the united states ever consider replicating elements of other countries programs for gifted students and implementing it within its borders? because the system of education in the united states has largely been relegated to state and local control, programs for the gifted are embedded in school system decisions surrounding curriculum, instruction, and assessment. even when there are national reform efforts that affect all students, such as every student succeeds act (essa, 2015), gifted students are (perhaps unintentionally) left out. educational provisions for the gifted are an integral part of the overall school program, but reform efforts conceptually do not translate to implementing better programs for the gifted (spielhagen, brown & hughes, 2014). when will equitable experiences founded on excellence in research, excellence in practice, excellence in policy, and excellence in funding be employed for all learners, here and abroad? references center on international benchmarking (2015). finland overview. retrieved from http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-oninternational-education benchmarking/topperforming-countries/finland-overview/ civic impulse. (2017). h.r. 543-100th congress: jacob k. javits gifted and talented children and youth education act of 1987. retrieved from https://www.govtrack.us/congress/bills/100/hr543 colangelo, n., assouline, s., & gross, m. (2004). a nation deceived: how schools hold back america’s brightest students. the templeton national report on acceleration. iowa city, ia: the university of iowa press. department for children, schools, and families (2008). identifying gifted and talented learners-getting started (revised may 2008). crown: annesley, nottingham ng15 odj www.teachernet.gov.uk/publications essa (2015). every student succeeds act of 2015, pub. l no. 114-95§114 stat. 1177 (2015-2016). eurydice network (2014). finland: teachers and educational staff. retrieved from https://webgate.ec.europa.eu/fpfis/mwikis/eurydice /index.php/finland:teachers_and_education_staff eyre, d. (2004). gifted education: the english model. warwick university. national academy for gifted and talented youth,. finn, c. e. & hockett, j. a. (2012). exam schools: inside america’s most selective public high schools. princeton, nj: princeton university press. finn,c.e.(2013).http://www.edexcellence.net/commentary/ education-gadflyweekly/2013/january-17/playinghttp://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education http://www.ncee.org/programs-affiliates/center-on-international-education http://www.teachernet.gov.uk/publications equity and excellence in gifted education 33 the-gifted-student-race-card.html finn, c. e. & wright, b. l. (2015). failing our brightest kids: the global challenge of educating high-ability students. cambridge, ma: harvard education press. finnish national board of education (2016). education system. retrieved from http://www.oph.fi/english/education_system gallagher, j. j. (2004). no child left behind and gifted education. roeper review, 26 (3), 121-123. gallagher, j. j. (2005). public policy in gifted education. in s. reis (ed). essential readings in gifted education (vol. 12). thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. hanushek, e. a. & woessmann, l. (2015). the knowledge capital of nations: education and the economics of growth. cambridge, ma: mit press hollingworth, l. s. (1926). gifted children: their nature and nurture. oxford, england: macmillan korean educational development institute (2011). gifted education in korea. retrieved from: http://gifted.kedi.re.kr/khome/gifted/gedeng/histor y.do lord, e. w. & dingle swanson, j. d. (eds.). (2016). a guide to state policies in gifted education (2nd ed). washington, dc: national association of gifted children national center for education statistics (2017). https://nces.ed.gov/datatools/ organisation for economic co-operation and development (2014). pisa 2012 results infocus: what 15-yearolds know and what they can do with what they know. retrieved from https://www.oecd.org/pisa/keyfindings/pisa-2012results-overview.pdf plucker, j. p. (2016). america’s timss results and educational excellence. we’ve exhausted all other options. the high flyer. december 07, 2016. https://edexcellence.net/articles/americas-timssresults-and-educational-excellence-weve-exhaustedall-other-options plucker, j., burroughs, n, & song, r. (2010). mind the (other) gap! the growing excellence gap in k-12 education. bloomington, in: indiana university. center for evaluation and education policy, singapore ministry of education (2016). education system. retrieved from https://www.moe.gov.sg/education/educationsystem spielhagen, f., & cooper, b. (2005). the unkindest cut: seven stupid arguments against programs for the gifted. education week (april 13), 24 (31), 47-48. spielhagen, f. r. & brown, e. f. (2008). excellence vs. equity: political forces in the education of gifted students. in b. cooper, l. fusarelli, & j. cibulka, (eds.). politics of k-12 education: a handbook of theory, applications, and reform (pp. 820-851). mahwah, nj: erlbaum spielhagen, f. r., brown, e. f., & hughes, c. e. (2014). outliers: political forces in gifted and special education. in b. cooper, l. fusarelli & j. cibulka (eds). politics of k-12 education: a handbook of theory, applications, and reform. mahwah, nj: erlbaum. terman, l. m. (1925). mental and physical traits of a thousand gifted children. genetic studies of genius volume 1. stanford (ca): stanford university press. theaker, r., xiang, y., dahlin, m., cronin, j., & durant, s (2011). do high flyers maintain their altitude? performance trends of top students. the thomas b. fordham institute. https://edex.s3-us-west 2.amazonaws.com/publication/pdfs/do_high_flyer s_maintain_their_altitude_final_8.pdf yecke, c. p. (2005). the war against excellence: the rising tide of mediocrity in america’s middle schools. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield education. about the author(s) elissa brown, phd, is a distinguished lecturer and director, of the hunter college gifted center. she is an education policy fellow under the institute for educational leadership. previously, she was the director of teacher & leader education programs and gifted education at the north carolina department of public instruction. from 2002-2007, she was the director of the center for gifted education at the college of william and mary in williamsburg, va. she has served as a state director of gifted education, a federal grant manager, a district gifted program coordinator, principal of a specialized high school and a teacher of gifted students. as a professor, elissa coordinates and teaches the advanced certificate program in gifted & talented at hunter college and has served as an adjunct professor at several universities, including rutgers and duke university. she is a published author in the field of gifted education and presents widely. she lives in east harlem, new york. leigh wishney, ms, is an experienced teacher for over ten years both in general education and gifted education classrooms. currently, she is serving on her school's leadership team to implement best practices in gifted education in her title i school in bronx, ny. she holds a masters in education and a gifted education extension certificate. http://gifted.kedi.re.kr/khome/gifted/gedeng/history.do http://gifted.kedi.re.kr/khome/gifted/gedeng/history.do https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lewis_terman https://archive.org/details/geneticstudiesof009044mbp https://archive.org/details/geneticstudiesof009044mbp https://edex.s3-us-west/ brown 284-1194-3-rv galley footer brown 284-1194-3-rv galley )24( review education global 40 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bialik, gadi & shefi, noa (2017). when the germ hosts the antidote: the surprising new birth of israel's anti-germ pre-k policy. global education review, 4 (2), 40-57. when the germ hosts the antidote: the surprising new birth of israel's anti-germ pre-k policy gadi bialik tel aviv university noa shefi institute for democratic education (ide), israel abstract since the 1970s, israel's educational policy has been undergoing a change generated by the neo-liberal agenda. in this light, it is not surprising that since the 1990s, israel’s education system has adopted the main characteristics of the global education reform movement (germ). in light of this, the current research will focus on a newly born pre-k policy formation process that set out as germ-like in nature, but nevertheless ended up with anti-germ characteristics. using historical-narrative qualitative tools, this paper will portray and analyze the main factors that generated the new anti-germian reform. we will outline conclusions from the israeli case study to create a potential conceptual framework that highlights a more complex, hybrid, or dual outlook at the germ containing its antidote within itself. keywords global education reform movement, germ, pre-k, hybridity, educational policy, policy formation introduction since the 1970s, israel’s educational policy that was characterized by strong social-democratic policy features has been undergoing a change generated by the neo-liberal agenda. thus it is hardly surprising that since the 1990s israel’s education system has adopted the main characteristics of the global education reform movement (germ). in the summer of 2011, it seemed that a shift in the neo-liberal agenda had emerged when a widespread social protest greatly resembling the american occupy wall street erupted. the protester’s demand for social justice yielded a significant reform in israeli public education policy. at its core lay the demand to expand free pre-k education to the age of three. it is important to note that until 2012, in israel, free public education was available for children from the age of five (mandatory kindergarten), with the official age for school attendance starting at the age of six. younger children in israel from birth until the age of three, were and still are, under the care of the ministry of welfare, which supervises daycare facilities and home nurseries. despite relating to the social-democratic demand for social justice, the reform of free public education for three and four year-olds contained clear neo-liberal features such as a voucher program for the delivery of the newly allocated pre-k classes. references to curriculum design and organizational structure of the new, post-protest, pre-k classes also ______________________________ corresponding authors: gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, department of educational policy and administration, israel. ramat aviv, tel aviv 6997801, israel; tel: +972-36437673. email: bialikga@tauex.tau.ac.il noa shefi, the institute for democratic education. tel aviv 149 derech namir, 62507, israel; tel 972-3-741-2729. email: noash@democratic.co.il mailto:bialikga@tauex.tau.ac.il mailto:noash@democratic.co.il 41 antidote the hosts germ the when indicated a germian government perspective. like common neo-liberal and germ governance mechanisms, a private partner was invited to take part in designing and managing the new both the government and the private partner, the joint professional team assigned to design the reform, did so in a manner that was, most surprisingly, characterized by significant antgerm characteristics. using narrative and quantitative tools, this paper will present a case study and analysis of israeli policy formation, and the main factors that generated a reform that was essentially antigermian. the appearance of anti-germ policy characteristics within a germian pre-k educational policy may serve as a fruitful case study for international scholars confronting research fields that are struggling with the adaptation of governance agendas on the spectrum between germ and anti-germ. this case study might also inform the work of international policy-makers. it concludes with possible explanations for the surprising shift in governance. finally, for both international researchers and practitioners, we will use the israeli case study to outline a conceptual framework that highlights a more complex, hybrid, or dual outlook of the germ, containing its potential antidote within itself. conceptual framework a struggle between public governance agendas in education since the late 1970s, two distinctive, dominant and contradictory, school governance agendas have been shaping the arena of public education in israel and elsewhere with variations among different countries. these are recognized by policy education scholars (e.g., adamson, et. al, 2016, ball, 2012; bialik, gibton, & dror, 2016; kwong, 2000; lubienski, 2005), and enacted by policymakers (e.g., le grand, 2005; levin, 2005) and educational leaders at different levels of the education system (e.g., addi-raccah, 2012; whitty, 1997). these two competing governance ideologies represent different moral, political and economic perspectives (glatter, 2002; green, 2005; manzer, 2003) that shape education governance actions such as: decisions regarding political values; commission procedures and regulations, and delivery actions (bialik, 2014; glatter, 2002; green, 2005). the first governance agenda was “committed to a belief in a democratic system of ‘common’ public schools, operated and financed by the government, which provided a standardized curriculum [and] treated everyone equally, irrespective of social class, culture, race or religion” (boyd, 2003:5, italics in original). it was rooted historically in a social-democratic and egalitarian world view, maintaining that the state has a central and active role in the remedy of economic, social, and cultural malformations (barry, 2005; manzer, 2003), enabling mobility and equal participation for all citizens through the delivery and commission of high quality, accessible, free, and equal public education (gibton, 2010). the second governance agenda can be seen from the social–economic perspective as neoliberal (harvey, 2005; ichilov, 2009, 2010). it was a relatively young ideology in the social field holding that: “free markets with little government oversight or ownership would promote competition, improve efficiency, and lead to higher goods and services” for everyone involved in education, just as in other fields of human activity (adamson, et. al, 2016, p. 1). this agenda emerged as a challenge to what its supporters saw as the failures and shortcomings of the social-democratic public governance model, and the ethos of equality it represented. it offered an alternative ethos of equality, and in its midst the greater freedom given to each citizen to succeed on his or her own, following the logic of an equal free-market (harvey, 2005; ichilov, 2009). this agenda was manifested in a set of educational reform efforts, all embodying the neoliberal logic (e.g. “school choice”, “school vouchers”, “charter schools”), handing the formerly public responsibility over to private sector organizations. )24( review education global 42 the neoliberal governance agenda and its underlying social-economic values – productivity, effectiveness, accountability and competitiveness – are the foundation of what was termed by finnish educator and scholar pasi sahlberg in 2006 as the global education reform movement (germ). this was later termed by antoni verger and hülya kosar altinyelken (2012) as global managerial education reforms (gmer). in essence, these are characteristics of reform and change processes globally adopted by many countries; the aim of which was to solve new and old problems more effectively by adopting logics and methods from the private sector. among these characteristics are: standardization via policy, and increased external evaluation of education, based on the belief that defining clear objectives and constantly evaluating them would result in improved quality of education. proponents believed that focusing standards and evaluation on core skills, mainly reading and math skills, would enhance the state’s economic prosperity and success; and that by using traditional pedagogies with “low risk” for the user and decreasing the usage of experimental, progressive pedagogies high results would be achieved. proponents also believed in the use of business-like perspectives and practices as change and achievement catalysts because of the belief in managerialism – the belief in the manager’s ability to solve organizational problems impeding achievement (salhberg, 2006, 2010). the state of israel, discussed in the next section, has also adopted the neoliberal trend of the late 1970’s, as well as its germian characteristics, as part of its educational governance. between social democratic roots and neoliberal education policy– outlines of the struggle for governance of the israeli education system in order to better understand how germ was adopted in israel, one should be aware of the common governance characteristics prior to its adoption. in general, this was social democratic governance with anti-germian characteristics, yet at the same time governance primed for becoming germian (bialik, 2014). several key aspects of the public education system in israel date back to the time of the yishuv – the jewish settlement in pre-state israel, i.e., in the decades preceding 1948. first, as mentioned earlier, the system was based on social democratic principles designed by the founding fathers of israel (e.g., its first prime minister, david bengurion), and especially the leaders of the zionist movement, who had grown up in the socialist world of eastern europe. these roots were manifested in social democratic legislation such as the compulsory education law of 1949 and the state education law (public education law) of 1953. these laws mandated broad and equal access to high quality, free public education, provided by the state. the laws exhibited clear social democratic characteristics; alongside social democratic distributive aspects, they also encompassed pedagogic anti-germian elements, such as defining humanistic, holistic aims in education, while at the same time shaping a teacher figure entitled to a high social status (dror, 2011; raichel, 2008). however, since its very beginning, besides strengthening the social-public dimension of educational activity, it simultaneously relied on the jewish philanthropy system, which played a major role in building the country. various private organizations, such as yad-hanadiv (founded by the rothschild family), were a central source of funding for a much of the activities initiated by the public institutions in israel in general, and the education system in particular. these organizations invested large amounts of money in the emerging public education system; however at the same time they also established their own influence when it came to shaping education policy in israel in general (dror, 2011). in this context, it was not surprising that public policy reports, which would play an essential role in the germ policy formation in the decades to come, also articulated how these 43 antidote the hosts germ the when private financial organizations interpreted public interest when faced with changes in the global economy. another aspect influencing the israeli education system during the early decades (1948-1970) was the great polarization in the public system, which later became fertile soil for the formation of a germ policy. this polarization was ideological (for example, general education as opposed to agriculturalrural education), cultural (according to ethnic groups and countries of birth), national (jewish versus arab education) and religious (secular, orthodox and ultra-orthodox streams). this polarizing diversity resulted in a system which, although public, is in fact composed of semidetached subsystems that have been given relatively broad autonomy, due to coalitional needs of various government parties. this autonomy, supported by patchy, fragmented legislation (gibton, 2010), significantly enabled the development of educational models that exploited this fragmentation and autonomy when adopting neoliberal work patterns for example, the establishment of semi-private schools named specialized schools (with great resemblance to the american charter schools or the uk academy schools) that took advantage of the existence of a semi-public education stream recognized by the israeli educational legislation (gibton, 2010). thus, even though the system displayed characteristics of social democratic and antigerm governance until the late 1970’s, from the outset it also contained “dormant genes” of neoliberal, germian governance patterns of activity. as will be presented in the research findings, the idea of dormant genes (either neoliberal under the dominant social-democratic genes, or vice versa) played a major part in the formation of the surprising case which is the research object of the current paper. governance characteristics of the pre-k education system in israel the israeli pre-k education system represents the tension between neoliberal and social democratic governance. in order to understand it, one must look at the system’s structure. the compulsory education law, legislated in 1949 by the first knesset (israeli parliament), included the right to free education for all children aged five and above. . younger children were not included in the public education system. to this day, pre-k education in israel is divided between two main governmental authorities: the ministry of welfare, supervising day-care facilities and home nurseries from birth until the age of three (delivery supplied by local private ngos); and the ministry of education, which supervises and operates kindergartens for children aged three to six in state education, state-religious education, and special needs education facilities – services which are offered to the public free of charge. it should be noted that, until the current school year (2016), education below the age of three were under the auspices of the ministry of economy, an arrangement in furtherance of its goal of enabling women's employment by providing childcare during working hours (committee for socio-economic change report, 2011). currently, tuition in these day-care facilities is subsidized by the ministry of welfare according to various social criteria (such as mother’s salary, number of siblings, and the children's degree of being at risk); tuition in these institutions is divided between the parents and the state (volansky, sella, asher, 2015). over the years there have been several attempts to expand the application of the education law in israel to include children of younger ages too, thereby transferring them to the supervision of the ministry of education. in 1984, the law was amended to include children from the age of three; however, this amendment was never implemented, because of lack of sufficient government funding. in 1999, another amendment was added to the implementation of the law for three-years-olds-a subsidy for lowincome families and for families in outlying border settlements. in 2013, the government expanded this amendment to the entire population. this step led to a 19% growth in the )24( review education global 44 number of children aged 3-4 in day-care facilities (israeli knesset research division, 2015). during the 2015-16 school year, 477,740 children attended public kindergartens in 17,675 kindergarten classes. the kindergartens operated by the ministry of education are under the responsibility and supervision of the preschool education department, and are divided into two age groups: 2-4 years old (prek) and 5-6 years old (kindergarten), with the official age for school attendance in israel being 6 years old. most pre-k education in israel is not inclusive, and special needs kindergartens operate alongside the mainstream kindergartens for children aged 3-6. the role of the inspectorate division in the preschool education department has been updated over the years in line with the various reforms, and is currently responsible for adjusting the ministry of education’s policy for the preschool system, developing syllabi professional development of educational staff, supervision of education standardization such as reading proficiency, and maintaining optimal conditions according to age characteristics (israeli knesset research division, 2015). yet, although responsibilities have been updated and clarified, when considering resources for inspection we should point out that the ratio of kindergartens per inspector, who also serves as mentor and supervisor for the teachers, is quite problematic – currently 100:1 (and often even more, especially among vulnerable populations), making it difficult for inspectors to properly supervise the activities of kindergarten teachers in practice. among other things, the state comptroller’s report for 2015 recommended redefining the inspectors’ role, decreasing the gap between their formal responsibilities and the ones they are required to perform in practice (israel's state comptroller report, 2015). the report’s recommendations regarding the role of the inspector reflect the tension between the need to strengthen structural and managerial aspects, which characterizes most of the reforms in the preschool domain in israel, and the wish to advance pedagogical valueoriented aspects of education. it should be noted that previous attempts to advance aspects of educational quality in institutions covering birth to three years, and to implement licensing and supervision of facilities, have been unsuccessful (moshel, 2015; rosenthal, 2004) as part of the attempts to increase daycare and home nursery supervision and improve their quality, two recent innovations intended to improve quality should be mentioned. the first was an initiative to establish a preschool national council, a proposal submitted to the knesset in early 2016 and that has not yet been implemented. the second was the implementation of the recommendations to transfer preschool responsibility from the ministry of economics to the ministry of education, a process gaining only partial success, since as mentioned above, responsibility was transferred to the ministry of welfare instead. two features reflecting the tension between neoliberal and social democratic mindsets emerge from the above description of the pre-k education system in israel. 1. lack of government education policy and a prolonged lack of interest in implementing recommendations meant to improve the system’s state and quality. 2. the lending of practical emphasis to the aspects of structuralism and standardization as indices of the quality of preschool education. it is against the backdrop of these complex characteristics of israel's pre-k education system, with their typical neoliberal and germian features, that this case study was conducted. this is a policy formation that begins as just another neoliberal germian maneuver, in the preschool sphere, with a surprising twist along the way. methodology this is a historical-narrative qualitative research, focusing on historical events 45 antidote the hosts germ the when (polkinghorne, 2007). as such, the research procedure initially included documentation of the narrative process as it unfolded. documentation was not conducted in advance as part of the research, but rather as a professional habit of thick documentation of consultation processes, in what was termed by margarete sandelowski as “the impulse to narrate” (sandelowski, 1991, p.161). later on, once we decided to conduct this research, this meticulous documentation enabled us to confirm that the case study was not biased in favor of research needs (see below, in addition to other considerations regarding research reliability). documentation materials included in two field notes notebooks written by the ide (the private partner) the pre-k policy formation chief consultant, and more than 40 field note reports put out by different ide consultants who took part in the process. next, the case study was arranged into a narrative sequence and placed within a historical context. the narrative-historical element that is presented first in the findings section was gathered from various narrative-historical descriptions related to the story period, defined as 2011 onward. in conjunction with the historical narrative and the original case study narrative, we conducted content analysis on the consultant’s documentation data, aiming to highlight the main ant-germian elements evident in the germian policy formation story. the anti-germian elements were analyzed, as will be presented in the finding section, in an “etic” manner (harris, 1976). the “etic” categories chosen were the four categories of action that are typical of an anti-germian policy, as appears in the relevant literature (e.g., shelberg, 2006, 2010): collaboration, transparency, trust and autonomy. the content analysis sought representation of these “etic” features in the documentation data in order to identify anstigermian patterns within the germian policy formutation process. the considerations for the choice of “etic” derived mainly from the consideration that, as harris claimed, “etic” categories possess “high inter-cultural validity” (1976, p. 341). this claim constitutes a significant consideration in content analysis that seeks to draw conclusions whose validity extends far beyond their israeli locality. finally, and in the context of the narrative-historical analysis, a conceptual analysis was performed in order to identify and suggest possible conditions enabling the creation of an anti-germian policy within the framework of a process that bears germian characteristics. regarding research trustworthiness and reliability – it should be mentioned that as a narrative research, it is based a priori on an inter-subjective validity statement (polkinghorne, 2007), making the reader responsible for the mission of naturalistic generalization. as qualitative research, it supposedly relies on trustworthiness and reliability generated by the simultaneous combining of several factors: (a) crossverification between researchers – only one of the researchers was present at the described policy formation process and so during the research process, she was the one in charge of providing the narrative description. content analysis, on the other hand, was done in cooperation, with cross-verification of the external researcher regarding the identification of main narrative themes in the analysis; (b) peer review – the full narrative description, as well as the summative thematic analysis, were examined by external reviewers (creswell & miller, 2000). the reviewers, who were asked to validate the analysis process, were bothstakeholders in the fields of policy and early childhood in israel, such as a senior pre-k inspector in the israeli ministry of education, and colleagues from international pre-k educational research and development organizations such as omep (world organization for early childhood education. where disagreement arose between the researchers and the reviewers, the category was modified until reviewers reached agreement; (c) constructing convincing narrative arguments )24( review education global 46 (perelman, 1982), by separating the historicalnarrative-descriptive process from the presentation of analysis arguments, as we have chosen to do in the findings chapter in the current paper. alongside the narrative text, we decided to offer an additional interpretative text of our own, to be scrutinized by our readers using the convincing argument test as well: (d) a final factor (last but not least) in increasing research trustworthiness is maintaining high ethical awareness. as researchers, our obligation is first and foremost to be truthful. this obligation is also the grounds for various ethical considerations maintained throughout the research preparation. among other things, we requested the approval of the director of the preschool education department of the ministry of education (moe), and that of the head of the early education department in the consulting organization (the private partner) for the purpose of documenting the case study details and writing the research. in addition, we undertook to maintain confidentiality regarding the personal details of all other study subjects, from both organizations, who had taken part in this process. findings in may 2016 representatives of change committees composed of early childhood education inspectors, academics, local authority representatives, and representatives of the teaching staff, presented their conclusions and recommendations for change in policy for early childhood education to the director of the preschool education department in the moe. the broad scope of public stakeholder’s participation, the great trust placed in them for this process and the creative experimental educational methods used to design the policy formation process are anti-germian characteristics that emerged during the work process, indicating that an essential shift had occurred. but it was not only the method of work on the formulation of the policy that had antigermian characteristics; it was also the content of the policy decisions themselves. among other things, they sought to promote pedagogies of the whole child and focus on social and emotional aspects of assessment, at the expense of a focus on quantitative achievements in reading, writing and sciences, as was the case in many germ policies. from a very distinctly neoliberal early childhood education system there began a noticeable movement towards an anti-germian policy, reinforcing the public aspect of the system in the social democratic sense of the term. in the following findings section, part 1 will provide a historical-narrative context beginning from 2011 covering three focal episodes of the ongoing struggle between the clearly germian policy of the preschool education department as part of the moe, and the mostly failed attempts to change the approach. part 2 will present a narrative description and analysis illustrated by original participant’s voices, of the most recent episode that only took place during the 2015-2016 school year, which is the focal issue of this paper. this focal issue also started out as clearly germian: given the background of the new reforms, the preschool education department of the moe joined up with a private entity to formulate a policy. as will be shown below, seemingly the start of a germian story, it in fact became a very surprising policy-formation and policy content process. part 1: 2011-2015 chronicle of the struggle between a declared germian policy and antigermian factors 1.a the summer protest of 2011. the israeli version of ‘occupy wall street’ – early childhood education on the public agenda after long years in the wings in the summer of 2011, israel witnessed the eruption of an unprecedented social protest against the high cost of living. public criticism of the government's neoliberal policy, and the protest that swelled to hitherto unknown proportions, led to the establishment of a 47 antidote the hosts germ the when committee on social and economic change that would examine various areas of life and submit its conclusions and recommendations to the government. the committee, headed by prof. manuel trachtenberg, an economist appointed by prime minister benyamin netanyahu, had 14 members from academia and from the public, and private sectors. it investigated five areas, including making social services accessible to the entire public. the early childhood education system became a test case for the committee, where the conclusion was that the government should take greater responsibility for making education accessible for younger age groups in light of the public’s explicit demand for it. implementation of this recommendation included the opening of about 3,000 new kindergarten classes for three to four year-old children, who had already been included in the education law since1984 with the acceptance of the amendment to the law (which had never been implemented). the committee’s proposals promoting a neoliberal policy, which expressed the social democratic voices of the public evident in the protest, were submitted to the government. six months later these were implemented as system that privatized the operating entities by enabling a vouchers policy to permit private provision of additional public education (bialik, kafri, & livneh, 2013). within a short period, the state absorbed into its civil service some 3,000 new kindergarten teachers, which in many cases did not afford these new educators the necessary professional foundation to provide optimal pedagogy. the short time to implement the recommendations forced the education system to find quick solutions regarding suitable facilities as well as the recruitment and training of educational staff. the emerging educational policy and the long years of a lack of public discourse about early childhood education in general, and for three-year-olds in particular, also influenced the content of the training options, which provided the new educational staff with only partial professional working tools. the social protest and the subsequent policy processes had significant implications. in the context of the purpose of this paper. the most important of these is that throughout its existence, the early childhood education system is hardly mentioned in the official policy papers of israel’s ministry of education (moshel, 2015). moreover, even the papers that did relate to the complexity of the early childhood education system in israel failed to lead to any change in approach, and many recommendations remained unimplemented. through its social democratic voices of discontent, the social protest brought with it a change in the order of ministerial and national priorities on this issue. however, despite the fact that anti-germian social democratic voices managed to promote a significant move, the social protest in fact led to an opposite result. the neoliberal processes and expressions had the upper hand regarding the mode of implementation, leading to another step up in germian manifestations in the early childhood education system in israel. 1.b the meaningful learning reform, 2014– voices of change? shortly after the 2013 general election in israel, and with the departure of minister of education, gideon saar, who had most prominently promoted the germ policy, in 2014, the new minister of education, rabbi shai piron, declared a change of direction. under his leadership, the ministry presented the public with an overall reform in the education system entitled meaningful learning, the aim of which was to “position the system as a decisive factor in the renewal of israeli society thus making it exemplary, and the promotion and professional advancement of the individual” (moe website, 2016). as part of this reform, the moe declared that it sought to provide freedom to the principals as to the form that meaningful learning would take in their schools and to the teachers as to the development of learning content and pedagogies. at every opportunity, the minister repeatedly declared the ministry’s )24( review education global 48 complete confidence and trust in the educators to lead the reform, and he even went as far as to make the extraordinary move of cancelling the national meitzav standardized tests that were supposed to be held that year (the cancellation turned out to be a one-time thing). minister piron’s call to teachers “to pave the way that suits you and build your own practical curriculum, when it comes to the perceptions and principles (of the curriculum) along with your own particular strengths and challenges”, was met with ambivalence by teachers and academic scholars alike. on the one hand, there were voices of change typical of an antigermian policy that stresses holistic pedagogies, empowerment of teachers, increasing trust and so forth; on the other hand, moe officials and inspectors worked to implement this approach with tools which in many instances were typical of the previous policy. the major part of the responsibility for implementing the reform fell on the school principal as part of the managerialistic mindset typical to neoliberal policy. in-service training for teachers did not undergo any significant change in order to prepare them for their role under this new policy, and the entire implementation was characterized by many attempts of the various moe departments and national assessment bodies to quickly produce new, uniform processes of standardization to implement the new pedagogical diversity. moreover, (with the exception of the one-time cancellation of the meitzav tests) essentially the standards policy was never abolished, and principals now had to cope with both. within this reality of a dual policy, with its internal struggle between the seemingly antigermian “tidings” of the new minister and the germian policy guidelines so deeply entrenched in the system, the moe's preschool education department was also required to formulate its own policy, a workable situation within limiting circumstances, that would be compatible with that of the minister. in a step indicative of the confusion of the language of governance, the head of the preschool education department chose to delineate her part in the policy by teaming up with a private partner, thus, in fact, forming a public private partnership representative of neoliberal policy practices. the private partner in question was the early childhood education department at the institute for democratic education (ide), a private educational consulting body, namely a public interest ngo. the ide had been established 20 years prior, and initially focused on accompanying the establishment of semiprivate democratic schools (somewhat similar to american charter schools) and training teachers for these schools. historically, these were selective schools which charged the parents tuition fees in addition to the public funding they received. these schools promoted an entrepreneurial spirit, connecting with the community of parents and advancing the concept of parental choice in education. currently, the ide no longer deals directly with the establishment of charter type schools, and mainly offers systemic intervention programs within the public education system that encourage progressive pedagogical discourse, entrepreneurial initiatives, managerial and educational autonomy, together with the promotion of classic social democratic values such as equality, sustainability, and social solidarity. the new public private partnership’s shared writing of policy materials, brought to the surface the tension between the socialdemocratic and anti-germian educational mindsets, both of which sought to advance the spirit of the minister’s policy on the one hand, and on the other, the neoliberal reality in terms of the existing policy and the very fact of a public-private partnership. within this complex situation, issues were raised that were pedagogical, holistic, and anti-germian in nature, issues that both partners decided to promote. one of the topics which played a central role was the reexamination of the role of the pre-k managerial staff, and especially of the public supervisors, about the required change in the quality of the pre-k pedagogy. between 49 antidote the hosts germ the when reducing regulation and high expectations of the creative processes that would develop in the field, and setting high standards outlined across over 50 targets and standards, managers and teachers were given broad autonomy to implement the policy. this resulted in a heightening of the challenge to the public supervisors in the supervisory process. the report of the state comptroller, which also examined the state of early childhood education, was published shortly after the publication of the jointly written early childhood meaningful learning education policy among other things, the report severely criticized the functioning of the department regarding ensuring the quality of the work of the inspector and the lack of proper training for the demands of the job. in light of all this, collaboration between the director of the moe preschool education department and the ide expanded and now sought also to adapt the role of the inspector to the principles of meaningful learning and thus served as a generator of anti-germian processes in early childhood education. 1. c the ‘second assistant’ reform, 2015– changing the structure of the early childhood education system at the beginning of 2015, a new government took office. the new minister of education, who, unlike his predecessor, did not come from the field of education but from the entrepreneurial private sector, inherited the results of the protest of the summer of 2011.1 in addition to the implementation of the recommendation of the trachtenberg committee to expand government responsibility to three-year-olds and the opening of about 3,000 new kindergartens, there was both internal criticism from kindergarten teachers and their assistants, and external criticism from parents about the number of children per group and the ratio of staff to children in the new kindergartens that had only began functioning the year before. given the voices of public protest, the moe decided to provide a second assistant in kindergartens with over 30 children aged three and four years old. like the adoption of the trachtenberg recommendations, this reform in early education focused on issues of accessibility, structural change and universal mindsets, at the expense of progressive mindsets in terms of the economics, in a manner that represented the neoliberal agenda of the moe under the leadership of the new minister following rabbi piron. unlike the meaningful learning reform described above, an additional assistant in the kindergartens, as well as the dramatic growth in the number of kindergartens, actually added a new burden for the managerial staff and for public supervision. a significant part of the budget for the reform was meant to cater to the rapid increase in the number of kindergartens by changing the structure of the early childhood education system, with a transition from a decentralized system of some 100 or so kindergartens per inspector to a system containing a middle management rank. with the delivery of the reform, it became necessary to submit plans within a short time to modify the allocated budgets. the quickest and most logical solution, from the moe's point of view was to base it on the cluster structures that emerged as a local initiative in two cities bringing together 10 to 15 kindergartens under one geographical (or physical) cluster led by a leading kindergarten teacher. the kindergarten cluster structure appeared in early 2004, to satisfy the needs of the moe inspectors and those of the local authority. it sought to provide a response to issues similar to those the ministry was facing as a result of adding second assistants to kindergartens. the reform budget included the training of some 400 leading kindergarten teachers for a mid-level managerial role, and an update of their pay structure. a managerialist, neoliberal solution reappeared as a solution to the problems created by the public demand as of 2011for high quality and accessible early childhood education. the social protest of the summer of 2011 pushed the public early childhood education system to the forefront of public policy, with the government taking far greater responsibility for )24( review education global 50 the very first time for this young age group. the reforms described above, that arose from the protest constituted an encounter between social democratic and neoliberal forces, which awoke anti-germian dormant genes from their slumber, and even sowed new seeds of this type. as can be seen from the historical description of the struggle between the governance agendas, it seems that neoliberalism gained the upper hand time and again. for example, the rapid recruitment of a large number of personnel without an appropriate training program are typical neoliberal characteristics. beyond placing early childhood education center stage, it seemed that a further demand was being made of the senior policy makers at the moe – the demand for trust. the demand for the public’s trust, and the public demand for their trust in themselves as being able to take advantage of this new and unique opportunity, and to make the most of it for the protesting public. inviting a private organization to be a partner in policy design thus seemed to be a step that would adversely affect public trust in the self-efficacy in leading a new policy, but everyone within the public system was to be surprised. part 2: setting out to write a managerialist response and ending up with…. adding second assistants to kindergartens, together with the training of mid-level management ranks, created an opportunity for ideological and essential change in israel's early childhood education system. in order to enable a broad-scope change process, it was decided that the first year would be devoted to the existing and new managerial roles following the change, while for the following years the goal would be to adapt the training of the teaching staff in the field and to redefine their roles. the first stage was clarification process by director of the preschool education department and its inspectors regarding the long-term potential and goals the change might encompass for the early childhood education system. “what is 21st-century education in the kindergarten? what does it enable? what skills are developed and what does it look like?” these unanswered questions, which invite the kind of in-depth thinking that is uncharacteristic of neoliberal processes created a new space for reflecting on the system. the “opportunity to dream”, as it was described by a member of the inspectors group, a participant in the process, opened up the question of the content, the daily schedule and the physical space of the kindergarten. “an opportunity was created to ask why i do what i do and whether it advances what i want, and not just what ‘end point and one standard’”. in a surprising move, instead of acting as had been customary up till then and rushing to provide an answer for the department's head office, it was decided to add more partners to the dialogue. a small steering committee was set up, consisting of the director of the preschool education department, moe representatives, early childhood experts from the ide and an organizational counselor. the team examined the systemic conditions that would enable a change, the main circles within the system in which it would be proper to act, and the relations and interfaces existing between them. the steering committee as divided into five thematic sub-committees all with the following aim: “to lead meaningful change in the organizational and pedagogical structure of early childhood education as part of the implementation of the second assistant reform.” at the end of six months, the first conclusions were presented by the five sub committees regarding: the roles of the inspectors; the preschool education department head office; the leading kindergarten teachers; the design of the kindergarten space; and working with local authorities. the appearance of anti-germian characteristics were reflected in the process of leading and managing change in how the subcommittees conducted themselves and the conclusions they submitted. anti-germ features such as an invitation to try things out, a deviation from the policy of standards, and 51 antidote the hosts germ the when focusing on the values of trust and dialogue among the ranks promoted holistic mindsets throughout the managerial ranks. proceeding, we will present different aspects of the historical narrative through the prism of the anti-germ categories we analized, using participant's original voices to illustrate it: 1.transparency (of process, and not only of end result( in october 2015, the director of the preschool education department invited all the early childhood education inspectors “to take part in the task force and influence the shaping of the reform and the future of early childhood education.” each inspector could either chair or be a member of one of the committees according to their field of interest. despite the steering committee's fears and doubts about the degree of participation that would actually take place, all five committees were chaired by inspectors who chose the position, and they were joined by a total of 30 inspectors (about one-third of all the inspectors in the country) in the various committees. each committee had to study one aspect of the system and propose a change, to examine “what they want to change and to what beneficial purpose.” the letter of appointment for the committee chairperson stated that they were invited to set out on “a learning process, the results of which are as yet unknown.” the composition of the committees became an issue at the first meeting of the committee chairs. the feeling that this was an opportunity for essential change was in the air, and it was decided, in light of the guiding principles, to include additional stakeholders from the public sector. a call was sent for representatives of local authorities, academic bodies, various divisions within the preschool education department (psychological service, training), to participate in the process. many people responded to the invitation and 10 representatives from the different public bodies were added to each sub-committee. the need for transparency resurfaced in the committees’ recommendations. the committee dealing with the role of the inspector, for example, wrote: “the process of appointments to managerial positions currently takes place in a manner that lacks method and relies on the recommendation of an inspector, and is insufficiently transparent and professional”. this was not the first time that the need to regulate the process of inspectorate appointments had been raised, but there was a sense of primacy in this open and frank process. the decisions about the phases of implementing the recommendations of the subcommittees were also made transparently, as shown by the proposal to postpone the training of educational staff to the second year of the process, despite the difficulty of managing a systemic change at one level and continuing to behave in the field according to existing patterns. 2. partnership (not as a neoliberal maneuver to hand out public responsibility) participation in the committees was voluntary, even though it required three months of intensive work. committee members participated in decisions about the process such as how they would work together, what the scheduling and work methods would be. in a document that collated the products of all the committees it was concluded that “the understanding that the knowledge lies with a variety of officials in the system came up in all the committees” and that this was translated in some committees into interviews with additional officials (from kindergarten teachers to the deputy managing director of the moe), and in some cases, to one-on-one meetings. the initial session was planned to be a festive event to which the participants of all the committees were invited; each committee was )24( review education global 52 given an opportunity to refine the main task before it and present it to the plenary. one could sense the excitement in being part of this unique process from the following comments: “this is the first time after 12 years on the job as a trainer, that my place has meaning in the change process”, “i am so used to fighting the moe (as the head of a municipal education department) ... this kind of meeting offers hope”. during the three months, the committees worked separately, and yet, partnership was a key issue in each and every committee product. a reading of all the committees’ documents revealed that the establishment of a partnership at the various levels in the system was deemed to be a prerequisite for the creation of an organizational culture that promotes holisticdialogic ideas. the summative document of the committee dealing with the new managerial level stated that part of the job of the leading kindergarten teacher is “to establish a learning community of kindergarten teachers that enables peer teaching from work in the field, and the mutually beneficial sharing of ideas”. it also said: “the role of the leading kindergarten teacher invites a strengthening of the partnership between the early childhood education system and the community”. the kindergarten committee dealt with interpersonal partnerships: “children come together to plan and act out ideas by raising topics that encourage shared investigation”, and in the partnerships between the children and the environment: “partnership and involvement of the children in creating the kindergarten and the learning content, in creating learning content and their educational environment in an ongoing dialogue”. the process of putting the documents together by the committee teams was a model of the principle of partnership in creation. 3. trust-based relations each of the five committees was chaired by an inspector who volunteered, with no added economic benefits. the responsibilities of running the committee included the choice of work process, maintaining contact among committee members, meeting deadlines and putting the materials together into a final product. each inspector was accompanied by a representative of the ide to advise her on the work processes, the structure of the committee sessions, and the methods of facilitation. the nature of the partnership with the ide counselors placed the inspectors center-stage as the leaders responsible for the process. making the public figure the leader of the process reinforced the sense of trust the other participants had in each other, in the system, and in the feasibility of the process. the committee member’s feedback on the ide counselors stated: “…counselors who knew how to stay in the background and allow all this to happen.” each committee dealt with the change from a hierarchical structure to a networked structure. the kindergarten committee referred to the need “to shift from dichotomous work to teamwork of the kindergarten staff, and from the hierarchical relations of kindergarten teacher children, to reciprocal relations.” the leading kindergarten teacher committee suggested that a significant part of the role of this middle management level would be “to build relationships within the cluster of kindergartens based on deep familiarity and trust to create a climate and a culture that enable and encourage open discourse”. one of the significant expressions of the desire for change in relations arose from the work of the committee on partnership with the local authorities: “we propose that contact take place as a partnership and not just as cooperation. partnership involves a common goal with joint responsibility for the education of the children within that local authority. it is true that each partner has different powers according to legislation and historic divisions, according to skills, strengths and professional abilities. the choice to handle the discourse between the ministry and the local authority from a standpoint of shared responsibility and destiny will upgrade the level of discourse, reduce the 53 antidote the hosts germ the when tendency to blame each other, and as a result, render the dialogue far more effective. it will be up to them to see that they share the responsibility for the educational process and for the creation of a workplace that is safe and professional for the kindergarten staff.” in order to implement relations of trust, the committee proposed four new joint tasks: defining the educational mindset and shared vision, building a joint pedagogical, administrative, and organizational work plan, implementing and assessing the plan, setting up advisory teams to handle and accompany endcases – crisis management, building and delivering professional development programs (for municipal staff, leading kindergarten teachers, teachers and assistants). over time, dealing with work relationships took on different forms among the inspectors: “suddenly i understood that i cannot talk about trust relations and not trust my kindergarten teachers”, “if i want the kindergartens to allow the children to trust themselves, i have to trust the people working with them”. 4. autonomy (and not as part of accountability) in defining the goals divided between the committees, it was stated that: “at the end of the process, each committee will submit a document containing the guiding principles for the implementation of the recommendations in the specific domain worked on.” reading the work guidelines highlights the autonomy afforded, beginning with the choice of learning/work process through to how the final document was submitted. each committee was asked “to formulate clear definitions …. and within these to maintain a flexible space for practices that are adjusted to suit the community, the kindergarten cluster, the inspector, and the educational staff.” notably, hierarchal standards of supervision were replaced by professional principles: “regularities determined in advance, dialogue with the field, partnership between committee members, discussion with other committees and the production of several drafts for comment, a focus on the future (what we want five years from now) and what is needed now in order to make it happen.” the autonomy of the inspectors arose from the committee outcomes. for example, the role of the leading kindergarten teacher was defined by the relevant committee, which asked for a new layer of professional development and a shift from hierarchical to decentralized knowledge. the committee recommended professional development that stressed aspects of peer learning and sharing of knowledge, challenges and difficulties, unlike traditional learning based on imparting external knowledge. one committee chairperson wrote: “the relief was in the actual task itself, to create a new function, a task that made it possible to move along a continuum of learning from existing models to going wild with ideas and dreams.” the autonomy of the committees to submit new and challenging proposals was backed up by the director of the preschool education department who presented the process at the national conference, urging the inspectors “to believe, to let go and allow … to dream of a kindergarten in which the child can feel, think, desire, be able and actually do.” conclusions– possible explanations regarding the conditions enabling the growth of an anti-germian policy within a germian policy in this section, and in light of the historicalnarrative sections above describing the historical plot of the main forces shaping the framework of the struggle for governance, we would like to propose the two possible explanations for this surprising twist in the plot, and the growth of an anti-germian policy within a germian one. 1. on yin and yangor that the black is already in the white, and vice versa having a public entity approach a private entity to lead an implementation process is a familiar )24( review education global 54 neoliberal feature. in this case, the approach seems to have been made to a private entity with a neoliberal agenda however, in recent years the ide has been emphasizing social democratic characteristics as its public interest vision. the result of this is that the private entity adopted a hybrid approach to the question of governance. similarly, and as presented in the historical overview, israel's moe simultaneously maintained deep social democratic roots alongside a clearly apparent neoliberalism. thus, what emerged is a hybrid form of governance (bialik, 2014) in which each entity has representations of two seemingly contradictory agendas. with the addition of a second assistant into kindergarten classrooms of more than 30 students (the second assistant reform) the first thought was that there was room to invest more in the professional development of early childhood education inspectors. this was not the first time; there had been attempts in previous years to expand the role of the inspector from being purely administrative, to a more pedagogical values-oriented role with increased emphasis on professional development. this time, the blend of the ide and the director of the preschool education department supported the move. professional development dealt with questions such as: who is an inspector who leads pedagogy? what kind of inspector am i? what are my work patterns and what kind of organizational culture do they sustain? the new professional development marked the opportunity to put into practice the educational mindsets and pedagogies of the whole child – mindsets that are part of the hybrid nature of the two sides in this partnership. despite the neoliberal culture that characterized the moe, the preschool education department and the ide were given freedom to experience this kind of professional development. to a great extent, like an encounter between two parents with dark hair who give birth to a blond child thanks to recessive blond genes that they both carry, it seems that the same has happened here. the encounter between both entities in the partnership, working on a relatively “neglected” age group in terms of policy, enabled the antigermian “genes” within the two entities to create an entirely anti-germian outcome. within this understanding lies an important lesson for various spheres of activity: policy is never the fruit of a one-dimensional perspective, and the “black and white” separation of public and private hides the complexity and sometimes hybrid nature of the agendas actually existing in the field (ball, 2012; bialik, 2014; beadie, 2008, 2010). it is actually the belief that the agendas contain seemingly contradictory factors that constitutes the basis for empowering dormant or recessive elements within them. we note that such a complex approach to education policy can be found in approaches that see policy as a complex and vague outcome at the expense of a naïve concept of policy as a linear process that is clear and one-dimensional (for example: ball, 2007, 2012) 2. adoption of initiatives from the field that conveys trustat the expense of encouraging entrepreneurship and competition many years of having no government policy for the 3-4 year-old age group and lack of public interest in early childhood allowed for creative initiatives and solutions in the field. such initiatives actually grew out of the lack of regular supervision. one important initiative of this nature, which developed in two different local authorities in the center of the country was the cluster model, which, given the lack of any clear policy, created a significant middle management level for kindergartens. while shaping the new policy, the moe's decision to warmly adopt the model of middle management, originally a local solution, as the best response to the implications of the second assistant reform, created a sense of deep trust in the early childhood education inspectors. it created a dual reform effort combining top-down and bottom-up efforts. therein lay a message that an experiment and deep educational thinking could eventually come together. this expression of trust might have left 55 antidote the hosts germ the when its mark on later stages and lit up the path to the sense of belonging, efficacy and ownership regarding the further implementation of the process. epilogue and research horizons and limitations the story at the heart of this research is the formation of an anti-germian policy within a neoliberal governance agenda with germian features. the policy formation process has only recently ended; therefore it is, in fact, impossible to tell whether or not the new policy implementation process will bring persistent germ forces back to the spotlight. moreover, since germ policy routines have been utilized in the system for so long, it sometimes seemed that the pre-k supervisors who took part in the policy formation process felt comfortable and at ease with the existing situation. it was not uncommon to hear voices such as “come on…let them tell us what to do already and what the success criterion is.” the pre-k system, in line with many other public systems, has been accustomed in recent years to germ work processes based on inspection, competition and expectations of goal attainment. it is thus not surprising to expect that anti-germian characteristics such as the ones that emerged during the current process, might evoke suspicion and disbelief in the initial stages of implementation, making it difficult to implement the policy with its old-new spirit due to these practical limitations, further locallydriven research is necessary to determine whether and how the new policy implementation process will succeed. in regard to further international research, the insights derived from the israeli case of anti-germ policy characteristics within a fundamentally germian pre-k educational policy, may serve as a fruitful comparative case study for scholars confronting research fields that are struggling between germ and anti-germ governance agendas. notes 1. here we note that, as one may understand from the literature review, between 20112015 we have related to three different ministers of education. indeed, the israeli education system suffers from an accelerated turnover of education ministers in a manner that makes it hard to formulate a policy continuum or a clear strategy. author note 1. the names of the authors are listed alphabetically. the authors contributed equally to this article. acknowledgments this study would not have been possible without the partnership and 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(2012). global education reforms and the new management of teachers: a critical introduction. in: a. verger, h. kosar a., mireille de koning (eds.). global managerial education reforms and teachers: emerging policies, controversies and issues in developing contexts. brussels: education international, 1-18. volansky, a. sella, o. & asher, i. (2015). public policy in early childhood education – survey. israeli ministry of education chief scientist’s office. retrieved from: http://meyda.education.gov.il/files/scientist/ececrev iew.pdf (hebrew) whitty, g. (1997). creating quasi-market education. review of research in education, 22, 3–49. about the author(s) gadi bialik, ph.d, is a teaching fellow at the tel aviv university, school of education, the department of educational administration and leadership; and a research fellow at the ncjw research institute for innovation in education, the hebrew university of jerusalem. his areas of interest include the 'interface' between educational policy and entrepreneurial educational leadership. he leads an experimental systemic reform based on authentic leadership development, along with the ide, the israeli ministry of education and a large israeli lea. noa shefi, m.a., is a drama therapist at the school of creative arts therapies, university of haifa and the head of the early childhood education department at the institute of israeli democratic education )ide). her areas of interest include the tension between vision and practice that exists in organizational roles. she facilitated a national pre-k reform along with the preschool education department in the israeli ministry of education. http://meyda.education.gov.il/files/scientist/ececreview.pdf http://meyda.education.gov.il/files/scientist/ececreview.pdf creativity as a learning competence 35 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jules, tavis d. & sundberg, kelly cebold (2018). the internationalization of creativity as a learning competence. global education review, 5 (1), 35-51. the internationalization of creativity as a learning competence tavis d. jules loyola university chicago kelly cebold sundberg loyola university chicago abstract this study uses a quantitative content analysis of learning competences – as described and prescribed in 21st century frameworks – and those competences evaluated by international assessments to explore the nexus between recommendation and reality. in drawing insights from the theoretical underpinnings of human capital theory we argue, with respect to creativity, that (i) there is a degree of alignment in the prescription and assessment of creativity as a learning competence and (ii) there is a divergence in the way the competence is discussed, which may account for the lack of acknowledgement as a key skill in preparing students for employment in the knowledge-based economy. these findings suggest a discrepancy between recommendation and reality in that the international frameworks consistently place creativity in the top five highest priority learning competences being prescribed while one of the two international assessments examined places it in the top five highest priority learning competences being assessed. based on the discourse examined in the documents, we assert that schools need to adjust how and when creativity is discussed, ensuring it is included in every subject. this will ensure students link creativity and innovation in every subject area and, subsequently, every industry in the knowledge-based economy. by making this shift, schools will help students ensure long-term employability as the knowledge-based economy transforms into the intelligent economy. keywords intelligent economy, 21st century frameworks, international assessments, creativity, learning competences introduction the intersection of education and the economy has emerged as a prominent discourse in the 21st century. in the late 20th century the knowledge-based economy, driven by the need for highly-skilled workers, emerged as knowledge and information replaced manufacturing and physical labor as the primary source of productivity and economic growth (dale, 2005; friedman & mandelbaum, 2011; organisation for economic co-operation and development [oecd], 1996; robertson, 2005; wodak & fairclough, 2010). this shift placed knowledge as the primary driver of economic ______________________________ corresponding author: tavis d. jules, loyola university chicago, 820 n. michigan avenue, chicago, il 60611 email: tjules@luc.edu mailto:tjules@luc.edu 36 global education review (5)1 activity (cussó & d'amico, 2005; dale, 2005; oecd, 1996). in education, the rise of the knowledge-based economy has led to increased enrollment in higher education institutions and to the increase of continuing education and professional development for those already employed. since education is the principal source of knowledge transfer, the systems of education and the economy are linked through the power of knowledge in the 21st century (oecd, 1996). within this context, 21st century skills and competences (broadly referring to communication, collaboration, critical thinking, and creativity or the 4c’s) were viewed as combining the necessary skills needed in the knowledge society that were not dependent upon the use of information and communication technologies (icts) as necessary conditions (oecd, 2008). the existant literature refers to both 21st century competences and 21st century skills. as such, we have chosen to use the term competence “because of its increasing adoption in both political and academic fields” (voogt & roblin, 2012, p. 302). while communication, collaboration, and critical thinking have dictated academic and policy research areas, the role that creativity plays in honing the skills needed in the knowledge-based economy has been overlooked. in fact, creative problem-solving abilities are recognized as a required skill, but the concept of creativity is still disciplinary specific and therefore not generalizable (baer, 2015; im, hokanson, & johnson, 2015). in studying creativity in education, sawyer (2006) made a distinction between ‘‘big c’’ creativity and ‘‘small c’’ creativity. the former speaks to the ability to solve larger problems while the latter articulates how individuals solve everyday challenges. moreover, the oecd (2009) saw creativity as both a functional and learning skill that is needed in today’s intense ict-matured environment, which has been shaped by flexible production and service delivery systems. in other words, 21st century skills combine the necessary competence needed in the knowledge society where the use of ict is not an essential condition. while ict is instrumental in enabling creativity, it is a widely held belief that creativity starts with people. although recent studies have focused on the relation between 21st century skills and digital skills (van laar et al., 2017); how students value creativity as a meta-skill (ahonen & kinnunen, 2015); the nature, measure, and nurture of creative potential in educational settings (barbot, besançon, & lubart, 2015); the manifestation of creativity in content-based and project-based approaches (donovan, green, & mason, 2014); and the reciprocity of students’ creativity and ethical decision making (niepel, mustafic, greiff, & roberts, 2015); however, none of the current works have examined how creativity – as described and prescribed in 21st century frameworks –is evaluated through international assessments. the global knowledge-based economy has furthered globalization whereby geographic barriers, which formerly limited economic activities, are diminished or removed through its basis in technology enabling more communication and therefore more knowledge sharing (friedman & mandelbaum, 2011; oecd, 1996). because of this, national economies, governments, and “international knowledge banks (ikbs)” (jones, 2004) – such as the oecd, the world bank, the international monetary fund, and the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) – and non-state actors – such as environmental groups, human rights activist, and health organizations – are more interconnected and integrated than ever which enables more economic opportunities for both nations and individuals (rizvi & lingard, 2010; the global economy, 2016). the rate of innovation has increased due to deeper degrees creativity as a learning competence 37 of interconnectedness, which is also accelerating the pace at which new knowledge and skills are shaped and desirable (castano, mendez, & galindo, 2016; moloi, gravett, & petersen, 2009; oecd, 1996). these disruptions lead to a knowledge transfer challenge for education, given that knowledge is created faster in the knowledge-based economy than it can be codified in curriculum and textbooks. traditional content delivery methods, such as paper-based textbook and lecture, continuously decrease in efficacy which has led to the development of new formats such as the flipped classroom. additionally, the pervasiveness of technology has eased the acquisition of facts and information causing schools to no longer be the primary agents for the transfer of this type of knowledge (friedman & mandelbaum, 2011; neumann, 2016; simard & karsenti, 2016; voogt & roblin, 2012). this then has led to a shift in how schools prepare students for employment in the knowledge-based economy in that schools are focusing on teaching learning competences in addition to static facts and information (bevins, carter, jones, moye, & ritz, 2012; dede, 2010; moloi et al., 2009). these learning competences are relevant to multiple fields, inclusive of knowledge, skills, and attitudes, and connected to the competent handling of complexity and unpredictability, both characteristic of 21st century workplace activities (voogt & roblin, 2012). with the ubiquity of information and the increased competition brought forth by globalization, the drive for innovation and creation has reached a fevered pitch in the workplace. companies are expected to produce new products and services and revisions to existing products and services multiple times per year to keep pace with the expectations of consumers. regardless of industry or subject area, the perceived drive for creativity and innovation in the marketplace continues to rise. due to the global nature of knowledge and the interconnectedness of national economies in the 21st century knowledge-based economy, student preparation is being prescribed by ikbs, and “educational brokers” – e.g., transnational corporations, civil society organizations, credit rating agencies, consultancies, and publicprivate partnerships – (jules & jefferson, 2016) through different education governance mechanisms, – such as knowledge-based mechanisms, hybrid mechanisms, performancebased mechanisms, and extra-territorial mechanisms – which are regulated by the socalled 21st century learning frameworks (dede, 2010; jules, 2016; robertson, 2005; verger, 2009; voogt & roblin, 2012). thus, these global entities endorse and prescribe frameworks around learning competences that students should achieve to be successful in the knowledge-based economy of the 21st century (dede, 2010; voogt & roblin, 2012). the validity of this assertion is the inflection point for our study. by juxtaposing the learning competences prescribed within international frameworks against the competences evaluated by international assessment frameworks, this study examines the degree to which there is alignment between what is being prescribed and what is being assessed. in what follows, we will first give an overview of international assessments and its linkage to education governance. next, we briefly review the existent literature on human capital theory in the context of the knowledgebased economy and its link to 21st century competences in an era defined by integrated and capital markets. after this, we explain in detail our methodology and findings based on a comparing 21st century learning competences, as identified in international frameworks, against the 2015 testing frameworks outlined in two global international assessments – trends in international mathematics and science study 38 global education review (5)1 (timss) and advance and the programme for international student assessment (pisa). in the concluding section, we sketch out some preliminary conclusions on creativity in the knowledge-based economy that argue the necessity for a precise definition of creativity and its role in innovation in every industry and, by extension, every academic subject area. international assessments and education governance western capitalism shapes today's knowledgebased economy, and its educational developments have been formed by neocorporatist techniques that have hollowed-out the post-colonial bureaucratic state. in fact, the use of new public management techniques (npm) across national educational sectors to engender efficiency and productivity has given rise to the post-bureaucratic state that calls on national educational systems to develop global minded citizens with 21st century skills. the application of npm techniques to national education systems has given rise to several types of governance of education that are being structured by and under the “global education industry” (verger, lubienski, & steiner-khamsi, 2016) as the post-bureaucratic state emerges. within the post-bureaucratic regime or organization, binding decisions are made strategically – which unifies all parts of the system producing binding pronouncements and proving active collaboration with others (heckscher & donnellon, 1994; jules, 2015). this new space in which educational policy now exists is defined by the shift towards transnational modules of governance where the state now “defines objectives and oversees maintenance of the system management […] [and] no longer wants to be seen as the sole provider of legitimate instruction” (maroy, 2009, p. 78). as maroy (2009) noted, the postbureaucratic state has given rise to two models in education governance (i) the quasi-market state – which emphasizes that competition in education expands the service delivery options; and (ii) the evaluative state – where resultsdriven schemes are linked to rewards and sanctions (see also straubhaar, 2016). the knowledge-based regulations of education have given rise to the post-bureaucratic educational state since educational brokers have an enormous amount of influence upon national policy-making. the shift towards this mode of education governance within the post-bureaucratic states suggests that (i) the weberian legal-rational model, which advocates formal organizational structures and mechanisms, is declining, and (ii) there is a tendency towards regional institutional mechanisms steeped in collaboration, cooperation, diplomacy, and implementation (jules, 2016). this implies that with the growth of horizontal governance structures and processes, educational assessments are now global rather than national endeavors that are driven by competition. within the postbureaucratic state, we see the increasing datafication (ozga, 2009; resnik, 2016) of “evidence-based” and “evaluative state” models of policy-making decisions that rely on league tables, rankings, and other international comparative target achievements (ictas). examples of ictas are the international evaluation of educational achievement (iea); international adult literacy survey (ials); programme for international student assessment (pisa); programme for the international assessment of adult competencies (piaac); progress in international reading literacy study (pirls); global monitoring report (gmr); first international mathematics study (fims); second international mathematics study (sims); trends in international mathematics and science study creativity as a learning competence 39 (timss); and teaching and learning international survey (talis) (rogers 2014). additionally, the world bank, the centre for educational research and innovation (ceri), the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) and the united nations development programme (undp) produce their own comparative education surveys and reports that all serve to reinforce the development of global education industry and competitive targets. international assessments are big business today and they can sway policy planners, educational officials, and nation states. the standardized comparison that ictas produce is good for spurring nationally contested reforms or certifying existing reforms. in fact, ictas serve as a platform for “reframing ‘best practices,’ ‘international standards,’ ‘21st century skills,’ or other vague concepts in ways that fit local policy agendas” (steiner-khamsi, 2016, p. 162). at the center of the indicators that ictas use, there is the growing influence of educational brokers who will often recommend neoliberal education governance mechanisms as policy solutions. in recent years, the internationalization of ictas, particularly timss and pisa, has given rise to greater competition as educational brokers now “reaches beyond traditional borders and national and regional identities of its member countries” (pereyra, kotthoff, & cowen, 2011, p. 2) with best practices. thus, oecd-driven schemes such as timss and pisa have emerged as the vanguards for the “governing of knowledge” (ozga, 2009) using performance information schemes that favor some countries, such as finland, while putting reform pressures on other counties who are placed at the bottom of these voluntary rankings. this suggests that education governance is now linked to educational performance indicators and benchmarked through quality assurance and evaluation (qae). thus, education governance is being shaped through data and “comparison for improvement against competition has come to be the standard by which public systems are judged” (grek et al., 2009, p. 120). in this way, 21st century skills such as creativity have now emerged as part of a quadrantile of competences that are defining the movement from the knowledge-based economy towards the “intelligent economy” – the mastering of strategic information, economic security, and influence (revel, 2010). this movement is driven by the emergence of the general agreement on trade in services (gats), particularly mode 4 that targets labor mobility, and the subsequent transition toward servitisation – the drive toward “product-as-aservice providers” (jules, 2016; probst, frideres, cambier, ankeraa, & lide´, 2016). the evolution of the so-called 21st century skills that place greater emphasis on the development of competences and knowledge as opposed to rote learning. this position evolved as it was the view of policymakers that school systems were not training the next cohort of creative leaders. as several scholars advance, the information age was in decline and the conceptualize age was dawning in an era defined as the “global war” for talent (brown & tannock, 2009; pink, 2005). young people began to experience new forms of socialization and social capital through ict developments as the current century demanded a very different set of skills and competence, proponents such as ‘partnership for 21st skills,’ ‘common core group,’ and ‘the teaching of 21st century skills project’ called for a greater emphasis on the competences linked to knowledge management. the principal argument of these pundits was that skills “cannot be taught independently, i.e., outside a particular knowledge domain such as those designated by traditional academic subjects, nor will students be able to apply such skills if they 40 global education review (5)1 lack the appropriate factual knowledge on a particular domain” (oecd, 2008, p. 6). in this way, a competence became defined as more than just a set of skills but was viewed as involving the “ability to meet complex demands, by drawing on and mobilising psychosocial resources (including skills and attitudes) in a context” (oecd, 2008, p. 8). earlier studies have emphasized that “well-designed creativity training programs typically induce gains in performance” (scott, leritz, & mumford, 2004, p. 361). yet, questions have been raised as to if creativity is domain specific or domain general (or something in between) (baer, 2010). however, baer (2015) argued that since creativity is domain specific, it must be assessed in that way. others, such as schmitz (2010, 2013), articulating the domain specificity of creativity distinguished three types of creativity (i) corporeal creativity or ‘‘expressions of the creator’s inner states’’ mackinnon (1962); (ii) hermeneutic creativity – the ability to adapt to situations; and (iii) analytical creativity. in other words, “corporeal creativity deals with atmospheres, hermeneutic creativity with situations, and analytical creativity with constellations” that must be added by the “domain-general factors that are necessary for creativity (e.g., intelligence, motivation, environment)” (julmi & scherm, 2015, p. 156). however, it is widely recognized that human capital within the workforce is pivotal and that organization competitiveness is driven by the innovation capacity and digital skills of its workforce. human capital in knowledgebased economy investment in individual competences dates to the popularization of human capital theory in the 1960s which sought to link education to economic development and theories of modernization (becker, 1962; lauder, 2015). human capital theory states that an increase in productivity is linked to better education, which in turn will afford higher earning power for an individual (haddad, carnoy, rinaldi, & regel, 1990; lauder, 2015; montenegro & patrinos, 2014; psacharolpoulos & patrinos, 2004). at the same time studies sought to understand to what extent an empirically identifiable modern man exists and, if so, what qualities he possesses (gusfield, 1976; inkeles, 1969). by the 1970s, studies (schultz, 1975; welch, 1970) suggested that workforce productivity increased the overall productivity of the organization and thus increasing efficiency. however, missing from the earlier skillsets identified by human capital scholars, was the concept of creativity that dates to the emergence of the so-called 21st century skills framework. in fact, earlier studies that neglected the concept of creativity, concluded that a globally-applicable definition of the modern man exists and that the amount of formal schooling a man has is the single most significant indicator in determining his modernity score (inkeles, 1969). as human capital gained traction, the necessity of education grew, which led to the proliferation of postsecondary schooling beyond what was already compulsory (resnik, 2006; walters, 2004). the acceptance of human capital theory globally is evidenced in the continued demand for higher education services (breton, 2013; spring, 2008; verger, 2009). nations are requesting these services to meet the demand of their citizens to improve their earning potential (lauder, 2015; spring, 2008; tan, 2014; verger, 2009). as earlier studies were based on factory work and physical labor in the industrial economy, it follows that in the knowledge-based economy and society, the competences of modernity would shift to align with the new workplace requirements. human capital theory creativity as a learning competence 41 has been widely criticized. one such criticism is that of credentialism (lin & lin, 2011; walters, 2004). credentialism is the direct result of the proliferation of human capital theory. it is the ever-increasing demand for formal educational qualifications and certificates for employment (lin & lin, 2011; walters, 2004). credentialism proponents argue this is leading to overqualification of skilled workers and driving a deeper divide between socioeconomic groups (lin & lin, 2011; mgobozi, 2004). further criticisms have been levied against the alignment of education and economy globally with the claims of an existing skills gap, whereby entry-level employment candidates are not presenting the skills that employers are seeking (arum & roska, 2010; barber, donnely, & rizvi, 2013; gergen & rego, 2014; kaka, madgavkar, manyika, bughin, & parameswaran, 2014; mourshed, patel, & suder, 2014; van velsor & wright, 2015; yougov survey, 2013). the fear is that without alignment between the competences being taught in educational institutions and the competences being requested by employers, either rates of unemployment and underemployment will continue to rise as more ill-equipped workers enter the workforce. or employers will be required to hire less qualified candidates and lose productivity due to higher training needs to teach the skills they were once requesting as a prerequisite for employment. governments have continued to stress the importance of upgrading human capital through the promotion of access to a wide range of skills and competences. however, employability and the necessary skills needed became linked to international benchmarking viewed as the “basis for improvement… [since] it is only through such benchmarking that countries can understand relative strengths and weaknesses of their education systems and identify best practices and ways forward” (oecd, 2006, p. 18). such pronouncements have led to a sizeable increase in the number of countries, both in industrialized and emerging markets, participating in ictas. while kamens and mcneely (2010) suggest that “by the end of the first decade of the twenty-first century, over a third of the world’s countries will be using standardized tests to assess their middle school and high school student achievement” (p. 6), questions remain as how 21st century skills, particularly creativity is assessed. this cycle of demand for knowledge through education, dissemination of knowledge across geographic boundaries and implementation of knowledge in the workplace by economic actors has led to the emergence of the knowledge-based economy. thus, today’s career competences in the employment opportunities are the modern competences of the knowledge-based economy. methods and findings using the terms organized thematically found in international organizations’ 21st century learning frameworks (hereinafter international frameworks), this study outlines a content analysis of the international assessment frameworks to answer the research question: how are learning competences, particularly creativity as described and prescribed by international frameworks, aligned to the competences evaluated in international assessments in the knowledge-based economy? to answer this question, we chose a quantitative content analysis that enables text, in this case international frameworks, to be analyzed and compared in a quantifiable manner to ascertain its perceived meaning (krippendorff, 2004; neuendorf, 2017). in this way, our quantitative content analysis is “an empirically grounded method, exploratory in process, and predictive or inferential in intent” (krippendorff, 2004, p. 1). by converting text into quantifiable objective 42 global education review (5)1 data points through content analysis, the unstructured nature of text becomes more easily compared between authors and documents, regardless of semantic variations. hence, content analysis provides “objective accounts of what messages were intended to convey or actually contain” (krippendorff, 2004, p. 2). the categories outlined in the international frameworks are the objects to which we determine the frequency and use of in the assessment frameworks. by comparing these two sets of documents using content analysis, the alignment between them should be ascertained. to understand what is being taught and assessed in schools two international assessments – pisa 2015 and timss advanced 20151 – were examined. we focus on analyzing these two assessments since they provide a framework for explaining how different competences guide how teaching and learning unfold in the classroom. pisa 2015 and timss advanced 2015 were chosen to examine what these international assessments have to say about creativity since they were given by more than three-quarters of the current countries in the international system and are viewed as global benchmarks that dictate future educational agendas and reform priorities. moreover, our aim was to holistically look at the evaluative criteria of these assessments and not to focus on their ranking nor the impact of ranking on national educational endeavors (baird et al., 2011; breakspear, 2012; gillis, polesel, & wu, 2016; knodel, martens, & niemann, 2013). pisa, which is coordinated by oecd, was first conducted in 2000 and subsequently every three years after that. pisa tests the skills and knowledge of 15-year-old students worldwide. today pisa counts 84 member countries and in 2015, 28 million students from 72 countries took the two-hour assessment in science, mathematics, reading, and optional assessments in collaborative problem solving and financial literacy that were offered. since pisa aims to measure “performance and information about the learning environment” (pisa, 2017), we sought to assess how creativity, as a 21st century competence, is detailed in the suggested pisa curriculum and guidelines that member states follow in preparing students for the two-hour assessment. while the first timss advanced assessments were done in 1995 and then again in 2011, we chose this framework since timss advanced 2015 – which consists of advanced mathematics and physics – evaluated students in their final year of secondary school, the same age that pisa assesses students. these two assessments were chosen because they offer a varied international dataset. moreover, as noted above, they were testing different competences and the aim was to see how these two international assessments evaluate one particular 21st century skill, creativity. the 2015 test frameworks were analyzed because of the stated minimal changes in methodologies of assessment of both tests from previous years. due to this statement in both assessments’ frameworks, it was decided that inclusion of earlier years’ frameworks would be duplicative and could skew results. both assessments focus on science and mathematics while pisa also included reading and, in 2015, financial literacy. the categories were defined by the international frameworks listed in table 1 and were not mutually exclusive. each international framework labeled competences clearly in its prescription. those competences were aggregated for the purposes of this study and any duplicates, including synonyms, were removed. the result was the comprehensive list of 17 categories (sundberg, 2017). of the 17 categories, two were not present at all in the assessments: perseverance and leadership. the remaining 15 categories were present at least two times in the assessment creativity as a learning competence 43 frameworks. the five most referenced categories were academic mastery, adaptability, critical thinking, creativity, and problem-solving. table 2 represents the frequency counts for the categories. pisa’s framework was more verbose and a longer document, therefore it accounted for more category references than the timss framework. both frameworks possessed the same four most frequent categories, albeit in a different priority order based on frequency count. those four most referenced categories are academic mastery, adaptability, critical thinking, and problem-solving. the fifth most referenced category in the pisa framework is communication while it is creativity in the timss framework. table 3 and figure 1 represent the frequency counts for the categories by assessment framework. table 1. international competence frameworks title author public organization private organization geography date of publication abbreviation assessment and teaching of 21st century skills (atcs) marilyn binkley, ola erstad, joan herman, senta ra university of melbourne cisco, intel, microsoft australia, finland, singapore, us, costa rica, netherlands 2012 atcs iste standards for students susan brooksyoung the international society for technology in education (iste) none unspecified 2016 iste measuring 21st century competencies jim soland, laura s. hamilton, brian m. stecher asia society rand corporation asia, united states 2013 asia society digital transformation: a framework for ict literacy none given international ict literacy panel educational testing service (ets) unspecified 2007 ets 44 global education review (5)1 overview of 21st century competencies and skills maria laura munoz villanueva asia-pacific economic cooperation (apec) none china, chinese taipei, hong kong, australia, new zealand, japan, brunei darussalam, u.s.a, thailand, and peru 2008 apec key competences for lifelong learning none given european union (eu) none european union 2007 eu 21st century skills and competences for new millennium learners in oecd countries katerina ananiadou, magdalean claro oecd none australia, austria, belgium, canada, finland, ireland, korea, mexico, netherlands, new zealand, norway, poland, portugal, slovak republic, spain, turkey 2009 oecd creativity as a learning competence 45 table 2. competence search results category frequency academic mastery 23 adaptability 25 collaboration 2 communication 14 creativity 15 critical thinking 26 decision making 14 global awareness 3 ict literacy 2 information literacy 13 intrinsic motivation 4 leadership 0 life and career 7 lifelong learning 4 perseverance 0 personal and social responsibility 13 problem solving 26 table 3. competence search results by international assessment frameworks category pisa 2015 framework timss 2015 framework academic mastery 15 8 adaptability 17 8 collaboration 2 0 communication 12 2 creativity 11 4 critical thinking 22 4 decision making 11 3 global awareness 3 0 ict literacy 2 0 information literacy 12 1 intrinsic motivation 4 0 leadership 0 0 life and career 7 0 lifelong learning 4 0 perseverance 0 0 personal and social responsibility 13 0 problem solving 19 7 46 global education review (5)1 figure 1. competence search results by international assessment frameworks discussion and conclusion while creativity is referenced frequently in the assessment frameworks examined, its use is unconventional due to the nature of the subjects being assessed. this supports the existing tensions in the field as to whether creativity should be domain specific, domain general, or something in between (baer, 2010). mathematics and science are quantitative subjects with objective realities, which can be clearly assessed using standardized rubrics to ensure accurate and consistent evaluations. creativity, by contrast, is thought of as subjective and qualitative. creativity stems from the word create, as in from an original idea or expression or classified as a “way of thinking” (binkley et al., 2012), “digital competence” (ferrari, 2012), “learning skill” (partnership for 21st century skills, 2008). thus, these assessments highlight that creativity is both conceptual and operational and that it can be defined as having “the skills to use ict to generate new or previously unknown ideas, or treat familiar ideas in a new way and transform such ideas into a product, service or process that is recognized as novel within a particular domain” (van laar et al., 2017, p. 583). in assessing science and mathematics, the use of creativity in the assessment frameworks often references the formulation of a hypothesis or formulation of an equation. moreover, what it means to be creative in the context of the 21st century skills and learning is not defined nationally but internationally by global educational brokers who are the curators and legitimizers of the intelligent economy. today educational brokers are responsible for the growth and diffusion of national and international assessments and are part of what kamens and mcneely (2010) call the “international movement to rationalize — and standardize — educational systems” (p. 15). today, workers are expected to possess skills needed to function in the national and global knowledge networks and innovation system since companies expect that national educational systems will supply the skills 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 academic mastery adaptability collaboration communication creativity critical thinking decision making global awareness ict literacy information literacy intrinsic motivation leadership life and career lifelong learning perseverance personal and social responsibility problem solving pisa timss creativity as a learning competence 47 requirements matched to match labor supply and demand. the analysis shows that creativity, while not one of the top three priorities for either pisa 2015 and timss advanced 2015, is still in the top half of competences expected the assessments measure. this evidence is surprising, given that both assessments focus on math and science, which is not commonly associated with fostering creativity. however, using the literal definition of creativity, in which something is created, the subjects prove to encourage such activity by supporting the creation of hypotheses and the formulation of complex equations to determine the solution to a problem. this implies that international assessments, though the focus on math and science, view creativity as critical for both people and organizations if they are to keep abreast with the latest advancement in their field and innovate products and processes. the changes brought on by digitization in today’s ictdenominated global economy implies that creativity is expected across all job and economic environments, be it the tradition economy – fulltime workers; the ‘freelance economy’ – the ability of employees to work remotely or from home; the ‘gig-economy’ or ‘agile economy’ – temporary and flexible jobs for independent contractors; the ‘open talent economy’ – the use of networks and ecosystems; the ‘sharing economy’ or ‘collaborative economy’– the ability to temporary rent or borrow the assets from peer-to-peer; and the ‘on demand economy’ or ‘access economy’ – capacity to access products and services. while these various economies overlap with each other, our findings reaffirm that as innovation accelerates there is going to be a demand for talent pools and systems that are driven by creativity. the language used in the assessments varies considerably from the language employed in the international frameworks. this difference in discourse is extremely important, as the language being used in classrooms is not the same as is being prescribed. students struggle to understand the cross-curricular applicability of skills, as is made apparent by often heard statements like, ‘why do i need to know this?’ the language used in classrooms is the language that students use in self-talk in their world, including after graduation. it is imperative, therefore, that the discourse chosen to describe skills are the words students should use themselves. in this way, creativity needs to be clearly defined and broadly applied when used in education. its relevance and applicability span all subject areas but often in discussions, its focus is limited to the arts. students need to understand when and where creativity can be applied and is necessary for every subject area, to foster innovation in all industries. with the rise of the use of big data, artificial intelligence, and machine learning in today’s workplace, workers are now excepted to not only have the skills to select knowledge from the vast amount of information that exists, but they are also expected to use it selectively and efficiently in making decisions. in summary, automation and cognitive computing are changing how we work, and organizations are redesigning jobs around these new systems, and the traditional “essential human skills” (knowles-cutler & lewis, 2016) are giving way to data driven organization change. this study set out to identify the extent to which creativity is being taught and assessed, as demonstrated by the international assessment frameworks, as opposed to the degree to which it is being prescribed as a learning competence by the international frameworks. due to the nature of the assessments and the quantitative subject areas they focus on, it was hypothesized the creativity would not be a priority in the assessments. however, it was found that creativity was a higher priority than hypothesized. with the movement from the knowledge-based society and the changing role of information communication towards the socalled intelligent economy, creativity will 48 global education review (5)1 become the most dominant of the current 21st century skills as the new economy requires the ability to manage information that is generated for big data and the datafication of confidential information. unlike the knowledge-based economy that prizes information as a type of cryptocurrency, today’s intelligent economy is stitched together by the web of communications (such as social technologies, big data, machine learning, mobility, and cloud computing) that have emerged during the last decade and is defined by the ability of individuals to predict fast-paced changes and personalized consumer demands that are shaped by capricious market forces. the sort of creativity that will be needed to harness, distill, and re-collate data is beyond the parameters of domain-specific creativity but requires students to have domain-general levels of creativity, something not found currently in international assessment frameworks but something that is demanded by companies. in other words, the skills needs will require individuals to be able to leverage and analyze the readily accessible vast volumes of data online to build new competitive data sets. thus, creativity is needed to harness knowledge, and it is viewed as 21st century skills as it relatess more to needs of today’s labor market 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(2010). recontextualizing european higher education policies: the cases of austria and romania. critical discourse studies, 7(1), 19-40. doi:10.1080/17405900903453922 yougov survey. (2013). good university guide. retrieved from https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_up loads/document/w4o1exrxom/yg-archive-newsuk-results-130813-good-university-guide-b2b.pdf about the author(s) tavis d. jules, edd, is an associate professor of cultural and educational policy at loyola university chicago, specifically focusing on comparative and international education and international higher education. his most recent books include the new global educational policy environment in the fourth industrial revolution: gated, regulated and governed (2016); educational transitions in post-revolutionary spaces: islam, security and social movements in tunisia (with teresa barton, 2018); and rereading education policy and practice in small states: issues of size and scale in the emerging intelligent society and economy (with patrick ressler, 2017). kelly cebold sundberg, m.a., earned her degree in cultural education and policy studies from loyola university chicago. she works on the worldwide and u.s. education teams at microsoft, based in chicago. her research focuses on the intersection of education and employment, specifically the alignment of learning competences and entry-level workforce competences in the global economy. https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/w4o1exrxom/yg-archive-news-uk-results-130813-good-university-guide-b2b.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/w4o1exrxom/yg-archive-news-uk-results-130813-good-university-guide-b2b.pdf https://d25d2506sfb94s.cloudfront.net/cumulus_uploads/document/w4o1exrxom/yg-archive-news-uk-results-130813-good-university-guide-b2b.pdf 196 global education review 5(3) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: van, leap, mao, sokalyan, & cnudde, veerle (2018). improving pedagogical knowledge on rational numbers of cambodian teacher trainers. global education review, 5 (3), 196-211. improving pedagogical content knowledge on rational numbers of cambodian teacher trainers leap van vvob cambodia sokalyan mao vvob cambodia veerle cnudde vvob cambodia abstract despite adequate facilities and several education reforms, most cambodian teacher trainers fail to provide sufficient content knowledge and student-centered pedagogy. many also lack the skills to diagnose preservice teachers’ misconceptions and to propose adequate solutions. dictating lessons with little feedback or applied activities or having pre-service teachers copy off the board for extended periods, suggests lowquality instruction (tandon & fukao, 2015). to tackle this, the flemish association for development cooperation and technical assistance (vvobeducation for development)1 developed a 3-year (20142016) programme in close collaboration with the cambodian ministry of education, youth and sport (moeys). the programme was rolled out in all primary teacher training colleges (pttcs). one of the interventions in this programme aimed at improving both pedagogical content knowledge (pck) and content knowledge (ck) on rational numbers of mathematics teacher trainers, with a focus on 1) mathematics content knowledge, 2) the use of representations to enhance pre-service teachers’ understanding, 3) assessing pre-service teachers’ learning, and 4) addressing misconceptions. a total of 54 mathematics teacher trainers participated in this intervention. their capacity was built through training, coaching, mentoring and try-outs with pre-service teachers. the impact of the intervention was measured through a pre-test post-test design, enriched by qualitative data collected during 97 lesson observations. after the intervention, 91% of the teacher trainers had significantly increased their score on the pck test and 94 % had improved their teaching strategy in at least two of the three criteria of pck. in this paper, the design and impact of the intervention are explained, and suggestions for further research are provided. keywords content knowledge, pedagogical content knowledge, teacher education, misconceptions, coaching, mentoring, teacher trainer, mathematics, pre-service teachers introduction since the end of the pol pot regime, the curriculum of general education in cambodia has gone through several major reforms. in the early 1980s, cambodia’s education systems were restructured, and this progress was marked as the country’s recommitment to socio-economic development and expanding educational opportunity (dy, 2004). ________________________________________ corresponding author leap van, vvob cambodia, phnom penh centre corner of sihanouk blvd and sothearos street building f, room 273 (2nd floor) phnom penh, cambodia email: leap.van@vvob.be mailto:leap.van@vvob.be pedagocical content knowledge of cambodian teacher trainers 197 in the period 1979-1986, the general education system consisted of 10 years (4+3+3): four years of primary education, three years of lower secondary education, and three years of upper secondary education (hang, 2016). in the 1986-1996 period, the system changed into an 11-year (5+3+3) trajectory. from 1996 onwards, the general education system contained 12-years in school (6+3+3). there has been a shortage of qualified teachers throughout these reforms and the recruitment of teachers and teacher trainers was not well-structured. as stated in hang (2016), teacher training in the early eighties consisted mainly of short courses to upgrade the knowledge of former teachers, students and educated individuals who had survived the pol pot regime. the duration of these training courses varied between one and three months. in 1983, the ministry of education published teacher standards for preservice preschool and primary schools. in the first phase, becoming a primary school teacher involved the completion of grade 7 followed by one year of teacher training. due to the lack of teachers, these standards were reduced in some disadvantaged and remote areas to one year of teacher training after completing grade 5 or even grade 3. between 1986 and 1996 the requirements for graduating as a primary school teacher were changed: pre-service teachers needed at least nine years of basic education to enter a two-year teacher training course, for lower secondary it was 11 years plus 2 additional years, and for upper secondary teachers a foundation of 11 years schooling was needed to enter a 3 -year teacher training course. since 1996, the trajectory to become a primary school teacher is 12 years of general education (9 years for disadvantaged and remote provinces) followed by 2 years of teacher training. teacher training centers (ttcs) in cambodia are comprised of four categories: (1) teacher training for pre-school teachers at the pre-school teacher training center (psttc); (2) teacher training for primary school teachers at provincial teacher training centers (pttcs); (3) teacher training for lower-secondary teachers at regional teacher training center (rttc); and (4) teacher training for upper secondary teachers at the national institute of education (nie). the teacher policy action plan (moeys, 2015) is a multiyear plan intended to bring cambodian education into the 21st century. this ambitious plan includes, among other changes, a reform of the teacher training curriculum into a 4-year bachelor, the development of teacher educator provider standards and the establishment of a teacher career pathway, all elements in the educational reform intended to bring cambodian education closer to the inspiring level of several association of southeast asian nations (asean)2 countries. due to the impact of pol pot’s regime and the above described reforms in general education and teacher training, the background of today's teacher trainers at the pttcs is very diverse. some of the teacher trainers started their career as primary school teachers before entering pttc. others finished only lower secondary school (grade 7, or 8 or 9) while some finished upper secondary school (grade 11 or 12) and graduated from the two-year teacher training programme from either pttcs or rttcs. some teacher trainers graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree and continued a one-year pedagogical training at nie. these different levels of qualifications are also reflected in teacher trainers’ understanding of math. research shows different levels of ck and pck. literature suggests that to provide insightful instruction, ck is not sufficient; it requires pck, which involves teachers’ understanding which combines knowledge of subject content, of students’ understanding, and of pedagogy (ball, lubienski, & mewborn, 2001; baumert et al., 2010; kunter et al., 2013; rowan et al., 2001). in addition, there is a significant 198 global education review 5(3) relationship between the pck of primary school teachers’ and grade 3 learners’ achievements in cambodia (ngo, 2013). pck of teachers has the largest impact (of several elements defined as part of ‘teacher quality’) on learning outcomes, even when you control for learner and school characteristics. however, in the lowest quintiles of pupil scores, teacher quality is not as significant as student background or school characteristics in predicting student achievement. these findings strongly suggest that, compared to other elements of teacher quality, teacher pck is a strong predictor of learners’ achievement in mathematics. learners will benefit from having a teacher who is able to identify pupil errors and who has deeper knowledge of mathematical reasoning. in addition, previous studies suggest that teacher training and professional development system for teacher trainers strengthen both subject and pck (benveniste, marshall, & araujo, 2008; kleickmann et al., 2013). despite the evidence of the importance of teachers’ pck for pupils’ learning outcomes, the pck of mathematics teacher trainers in cambodia was reported to be very limited (tandon & fukao, 2015). tandon and fukao (2015) also found that many teacher trainers had even lower knowledge of math than grade 9 pupils, which resulted in limited capacity to diagnose students’ mistakes and to generate effective learning of future teachers. an essential teacher ability is to understand students’ mathematical thinking, including common errors made by students, and the importance of students’ misconception of their progress and achievement in the test (hill, ball and schilling 2008; sarwadi & shahrill, 2014). many teacher trainers did not have the skills to diagnose misconceptions and to propose adequate solutions for their pre-service teachers. low quality instructional methods are still used by many teacher trainers, such as dictating lessons with little feedback or applied activities, and having pre-service teachers copy off the board for extended periods (tandon & fukao, 2015). to tackle this, vvob developed a 3-year (2014-2016) programme in close collaboration with the cambodian ministry of education, youth and sport (moeys). one of the interventions in this programme aimed to improve both pck and ck on rational numbers of mathematics teacher trainers. the impact of the intervention was measured through a pretest post-test design, enriched by qualitative data collected during lesson observations. description of the intervention the vvob-moeys cooperation program was designed to strengthen the quality of pre-service teacher training for primary education in cambodia. this intervention fits in with the overall objective, to strengthen primary school teacher education in order to improve learning outcomes in mathematics for all learners. to ensure the quality of primary teacher education, pttcs play an important role in training the prospective primary teachers. the intervention programme, therefore, included all mathematics teacher trainers from 18 pttcs. the intervention described in this paper aimed at improving both pck and ck on rational numbers of mathematics teacher trainers, with a focus on 1) mathematics content knowledge, 2) the use of representations to enhance students’ understanding, 3) assessing pre-service teachers’ learning, and 4) addressing misconceptions following the concepts of shulman (1986). rational numbers are amongst the most difficult topics in the elementary school curriculum, and teaching that topic requires an adequate knowledge base for teachers to properly deal with students' difficulties, so it was selected for the intervention. a total of 54 mathematics teacher trainers participated in this intervention. the capacity building trajectory started in may 2014 and was completed in august 2016. the course took 23 days consisting of 15-day input training and 8pedagocical content knowledge of cambodian teacher trainers 199 day refresher training. try-out sessions with pre-service teachers were embedded in all trainings. the 23-day course consisted of: • a 5-day module on rational numbers, based on the basic education and teacher training manuals (moeys, 2011) • a 5-day module on how to produce and use teaching aids for math in primary education and a 4-day refresher training • a 5-day module on formative assessments for primary education and a 4-day refresher training the training was facilitated by a core team of 12 experts in mathematics, attached to different departments within the cambodian ministry of education (teacher training department, department of curriculum development, primary education department and provincial teacher training colleges). participants were divided into groups of 25 and 30 participants per two facilitators. pttc management in charge of technical teaching were invited to these training sessions in addition to math teacher trainers. beside sessions on understanding specific math topics, participants had a chance to tryout the content with their pre-service teachers and their peers, to apply peer learning, and to share their experiences during subject group meetings in their own teacher training college. the second part of the learning trajectory consisted of coaching and mentoring sessions, based on lesson observations. the same mathematic core team observed the lesson of teacher trainers in each pttc. after each lesson observation, they provided coaching and mentoring to the teacher trainers to encourages collaborative and reflective practice. coaching allowed teacher trainers to apply their learning more deeply, frequently, and consistently than working alone. each teacher trainer was observed twice during the learning trajectory. the focus of these follow-up visits was on: assessment of learning, addressing the misconceptions, and using the representation in the mathematics lesson. in the meantime, teacher trainers also reflected and translated content of their lessons into how prospective teachers apply the instructional strategies. each observation was a part of coaching process consisting of constructive feedback, following the structures of the 6 feedback steps (moeys, 2016). recordings were also used to analyze the challenges of math teacher trainers; these issues were tackled during the following training or reflection sessions. measuring the impact of the intervention assessment tools 1. pedagogical content knowledge and content knowledge test depaepe et al. (2015) developed the test in line with the cambodian context to gather information about the level of mathematics teacher trainers’ ck and pck. depaepe et al. (2015) defined ck of rational number as conceptual and procedural knowledge about the rational numbers domain, as well as, pck as knowledge of students' misconceptions and buggy procedures about rational numbers and of multiple representations to prevent and/or remedy these misconceptions and buggy procedures. the definitions of pck and ck are in alignment with shulman’s conceptualization of pck (shulman, 1986). the test was composed of 48 questions with 50% pck questions and 50% ck questions. depaepe et al. (2015) distinguished between two types of pck items, namely (1) knowledge of students’ misconceptions and (2) knowledge of instructional strategies and representations. in addition, questions were categorized in two domains of rational numbers: fractions (50%) and decimal numbers (50%). more detailed information is shown in table 1. each item has a maximum score “1”, for an 200 global education review 5(3) entirely correct answer. in case of an incorrect answer, “0” was assigned. on the questions related to operation, answers were scored “1/2” if they were partly correct. this is shown in table 1. 2. lesson observation checklist the forms used to observe lessons consisted of two parts. the first part of the observation checklist captures parts of the lesson linked to each of the following categories: (1) teaching methodologies, (2) teaching aids, (3) learning content and lesson objective (knowledge, skills, attitude), (4) student assessment strategies, (5) pupil’s behaviour (level of involvement and activity), (6) pupil’s learning outcomes (remembering/ understanding/applying/analysing/creating/jud ging) and (7) general lesson characteristics (structure, build-up, etc). the information written down in this checklist was used for the reflection after the lesson. the core team would use written notes as the base for the reflection sessions which followed, including coaching, mentoring and providing constructive feedback. the coaching sessions were structured using 6 steps: 1) introduction, 2) the coaches shares the results of their teaching, 3) coach give feedback, 4) the coach ask the coachees to respond to the feedback, 5) both parties discuss the ways for improvement, 6) round up: remaining questions and making an appointment for the next meeting (moeys, 2016). each session took 30 minutes and gave the teacher trainer the chance to reflect on their lesson and teaching strategy. the second part of the observation form consisted of a scoring grid (see snapshot below). based on the information collected in part one and the discussion after the lessons, the core team gave a score to three selected pck criteria: assessment, misconception, and representation. the assessment part had 4 sub-criteria with a total score of 12, the misconception part table 1 design of the ck and pck test: distinguished subdomains and number of items domain sub-domain ck pck misconception instructio n fractions concept 4 2 2 operations addition 2 1 1 subtraction 2 1 1 multiplication 2 1 1 division 2 1 1 decimal numbers concept 4 2 2 operations addition 2 1 1 subtraction 2 1 1 multiplication 2 1 1 division 2 1 1 total 24 24 pedagocical content knowledge of cambodian teacher trainers 201 had 3 sub-criteria with a total score of 9, and representation had 4 sub-criteria with a total score of 12. the scoring table described clearly what needed to be observed for every level, and for each score. all sub-criteria were scored from 1 to 3, with a score of “1” being the lowest score, “2” the medium score, and “3” the highest score. the table also allowed for adding a justification for the score given, by adding examples in the ‘proof’ column. table 2 snapshot of scoring grid for pck criteria ‘misconception’ criteria code grading scale proof level 1 level 2 level 3 misconceptions b1 the teacher doesn’t pay attention to mistakes. the teacher helps students when they have made a mistake by repeating or referring to procedures. the teacher tries to understand the students’ thinking and helps them by explaining it in a different way. e.g. use of teaching aids to support the weaker students. b2 the teacher doesn’t check prior knowledge on the topic. the teacher checks the prior knowledge of students. the teacher checks the understanding of prior knowledge. e.g. why did you put both fractions on the same denominator? b3 the only questions that are used refer to knowledge. the teacher asks some thinking questions. e.g. why can’t we just add the numerators and denominators? the teacher asks many thinking questions 202 global education review 5(3) pre-post test design all respondents were assessed using a pre-test post-test design on pck/ck. the pretest was administered in may 2014, the post-test in august 2016. both were administered by the core team of 12 math experts under the supervision of vvob project staff. the same team was also responsible for correcting and scoring the test. the testing phase was divided into two parts, the time allowed for each part (24 questions) was 120 minutes. to assure anonymity, vvob collected all pck-test forms and names were replaced by code before the correction process started. in total 54 teacher trainers completed the pre-test, of those only 33 finished the post-test. the attrition was caused by different reasons such as retirement, workplace change, and job promotion. besides assessing the tests, the project team also observed a lesson of each teacher trainer before, during and after the intervention to measure the progress and impact. in total 97 lessons were observed during thethree-year program. the forms used for these observations were the same as the observations tools used during the intervention for the followup visits, but on these occasions, not used with a coaching purpose. the focus of the pre-post observations was on using representations, misconceptions, and assessment. data analysis descriptive and inferential statistics were conducted on data set. percentage and frequency were used to describe respondents’ information background related to the qualifications, years of experience, socio-demographic information, and the progress of achievement scores from lesson observation focusing on how to apply the formative assessment techniques, to addressing the misconceptions, and use of the representation. moreover, another achievement was measured by pre and post-test of pck. a paired t-test was performed to compare the mean score of both tests. achievement was measured to determine if post-test scores increased significantly compared to pre-test scores, at significant level = 0.05 . results as described above the impact of the intervention was measured through a pre-test post-test design; a group of 33 teacher trainers completed both tests. the paired-sample t-test found that the mean of the overall score on the post-test (m=33.2, sd=7.5) of teacher trainers is significantly higher than their score in pre-test (m=27.3, sd=7.5), with significant increase of 5.9 (95%ci: 3.94-7.93, p<0.001, t(32)=6.044). the preliminary analyses show a great disparity between the scores of the teacher trainers. descriptive data analysis showed that female teacher trainers performed better than their male peers in both pre-test and post-test, however this difference was not significant. we also saw that the mean scores of (young) teacher trainers with less years of teaching experience, was higher than their senior peers in both pre-test and post-test. a clarification for this result could be found in the educational background of the teacher trainers. all young teacher trainers had graduated from university with a bachelor’s degree, while most of the senior teacher trainers graduated from a 2-year programme at a teacher training college. 203 global education review 5(3) table 3 mean score by gender, years of experience and qualification categories of participants number mean score before mean score after intervention (sd) intervention (sd) gender male 28 26.8 (8.0) 32.1 (7.9) female 5 28.2 (5.7) 36.6 (5.1) years of experience less or equal to 5 years 6 27.6 (6.5) 35.2 (5.0) equal or more than 6 years 27 27.2 (7.8) 32.8 (7.9) qualification master 10 27.3 (8.6) 35.9 (8.0) bachelor 13 28.5 (7.3) 33.7 (5.7) teacher training certificate 10 25.7 (7.0) 29.9 (8.5) overall score* 33 27.3 (7.5) 33.2 (7.5) *mean score after intervention is significantly higher than before intervention (p<0.001) when we looked closer at the differences between pck and ck tests, we noticed teacher trainers scored better in both on the post-test compared to the pre-test. the paired sample ttest showed a significant increase on both mean score of ck (p<0.001, t(32)=4.165) items with 95% confident interval of difference: 1.03-3.02 and pck (p<0.001, t(32)=5.493) items with 95% confident interval of difference:2.45-5.35 after intervention. we noticed the scores on pedagogical content knowledge items increased much more (t(32)=2.6, p=0.014) , compared to the scores on related to pure content knowledge items. during coaching sessions, teacher trainers indicated that they had more difficulty answering the questions related to pck than the ck items. looking closer at the responses within the pck items, we see teacher trainers struggled more with instructional strategies and representation (mean=6.3, sd=2.7) than explaining students’ misconception (mean=8.0, sd=2.4) after intervention(t(32)=-4.64, p<0.001). more details can be found in table 4. 204 global education review 5(3) table 4 comparison of pck test items and ck test items (pre-test and post-test) test items categories mean score (sd) mean difference (sd) 95% ci p pre-test post-test pck items 10.4 (4.5) 14.3 (4.7) 3.9 (4.1) 2.5-5.4 <0.001* knowledge of students’ misconception 5.6 (2.8) 8.0 (2.4) 2.4 (2.7) 1.5-3.4 <0.001* knowledge of instructional strategies and representation 4.9 (2.3) 6.3 (2.7) 1.5 (2.3) 0.7-2.3 0.001* ck items 16.8 (3.8) 18.9 (3.2) 2.0 (2.8) 1.0-3.0 <0.001* concept 3.9 (2.1) 5.4(1.8) 1.5 (0.4) 0.8-2.2 <0.001* operation 13.0(2.3) 13.1(2.0) 0.1 (1.9) -0.6-0.8 0.7 * statistically significant increase, at significant level  = 0.05 table 5 progress on pck/ck of fractions fraction test items mean score (sd) mean difference (sd) 95% ci p pre-test post-test pck items 4.2 (2.2) 6.8 (2.6) 2.6 (2.1) 1.8-3.3 <0.001* knowledge of students’ misconception 2.6 (1.3) 3.8 (1.6) 1.4 (1.5) 0.6-1.7 <0.001* knowledge of instructional strategies and representation 1.6 (1.1) 3.0 (1.5) 1.4 (1.3) 1.0-1.9 <0.001* ck items 7.8 (2.1) 9.0 (2.1) 1.2 (1.9) 0.6-1.9 0.01* concept 1.7 (1.3) 2.6 (1.2) 1.0 (1.6) 0.4-1.5 0.001* operation 6.2 (1.4) 6.1 (1.5) –0.2(1.4) –0.7-0.4 0.5 * statistically significant increase, at significant level  = 0.05 205 global education review 5(3) table 5 provides a closer look at the differences between progress made related to understanding and teaching fractions compared to teaching and understanding decimals numbers. table 5 shows the scores on both pck and ck items on the questions about fractions. teacher trainers performed significantly better on both pck (t(32)=3.73, p=0.01)and ck items(t(32)=6.9, p<0.001) for fractions after intervention. however, no significant increase was found if we consider the scores for ck items related to operations with fractions. this can be explained by already high scores at the start of the intervention, approximately 6 over the scale of 8, in both pre-test and post-test. teacher trainers had more difficulty with fraction pck items than fraction ck items in both pre-test (t(32)=-7.516, p<0.001) and posttest (t(32)=10.34, p<0.001). however, mean scores of fraction pck (t(32)=6.901, p<0.01) items and fraction ck (t(32)=3.73 ,p=0.01 items were significantly higher after intervention. table 6 shows that teacher trainers performed significantly better on decimal ck items (t(32)=2.548, p=0.016) and decimal pck items (t(32)=2.644 , p=0.013) after receiving capacity development. nevertheless, they still struggled more with pck items related to decimal numbers than ck items in both pre-test (t(32)=-6.888, p<0.001)) and post-test (t(32)=7.104, p<0.001)). teacher trainers performed better on knowledge of students’ misconception (t(32)= 3.954 , p<0.001) after intervention, but they made no significant progress regarding the knowledge of instructional strategies and representations (t(32)=0.99 , p=0.922). the high score of ck on operation with decimal numbers (almost 7 on a maximum score of 8) is remarkable, although it is not statistically significant. table 7 presents the most challenging pck items and ck items for teacher trainers, even they have taken a training course on rational number. the teacher trainers had more difficulty putting the fraction into words, and matching this with the corresponding section in the word problem. this challenge indicated that they had limited knowledge about how to translate reallife word problems into number sentences or vice versa, for example pck item 1 and ck item table 6 progress on pck/ck of decimal numbers decimal test items mean score (sd) mean difference (sd) 95% ci p pre-test post-test pck items 6.2 (2.9) 7.6 (2.5) 1.3 (2.9) 0.3-2.3 0.013* knowledge of students’ misconception 2.9 (1.8) 4.2 (1.4) 1.3 (0.3) 0.6-2.0 <0.001* knowledge of instructional strategies and representation 3.3 (1.6) 3.3 (1.6) 0.0 (1.8) –0.6-0.6 0.922 ck items 9.0 (2.1) 9.8 (1.6) 0.8 (1.8) 0.2-1.5 0.016* concept 2.2 (1.1) 2.8 (1.1) 0.5 (0.9) 0.2-0.9 0.001* operation 6.8 (1.5) 7.1 (1.0) 0.3 (1.4) –0.2-0.8 0.271 * statistically significant increase, at significant level 206 global education review 5(3) table 7 the most difficult questions of pck items and ck items after intervention pck/ck items % correct response pck given: − = 3 1 7 5 4 20 1. indicate and explain for each of the below mentioned word problems whether you would use them in your classroom to contextualize the above-mentioned operation. a) 3 5 of a cake was used by dad. sopheak and sophy eat together 1 4 of the remaining part of the cake. how much of the cake have they eaten? b) to fill a water basin we need 1 4 of a completely filled open well. today the open well is only filled for 3 5 . how much water remains in the open well after the water basin is filled? c) when frying vegetable dad uses 3 5 of a small bottle of chili sauce and 1 4 of a small bottle of soya sauce. how much chili and soya sauce remains? 15.2 2. these are illustrations of elementary students’ solutions. samnang’s solution champey ‘s solution malis’s solution determine the right or wrong solution. in case of a wrong solution, write down the presumable student’s reasoning. 24.4 ck 1. if the rectangle below is 6 5 of the surface of the original shape, draw the original shape. 45.5 2. write down and solve the mathematical operation with fractions that fits the following problem: somaly made 4 5 liter of fresh fruit juice. she gave 1 4 to her mother. how many liter of fresh fruit juice did her mother receive? 45.5 207 global education review 5(3) . 2 in table 7. after intervention, roughly 15% of teacher trainers answered pck item 1 correctly and 45% of teacher trainers correctly answered ck item 2. understanding how to address students’ misconception or difficulties remained a challenge for mathematics teacher trainers after the intervention. as a result, approximately one-fourth of them could explain students’ reasoning or misconception, when students provided a wrong answer. after intervention, roughly 15% of teacher trainers answered pck item 1 correctly and 45% of teacher trainers correctly answered ck item 2. understanding how to address students’ misconception or difficulties remained a challenge for mathematics teacher trainers after the intervention. as a result, approximately onefourth of them could explain students’ reasoning or misconception, when students provided a wrong answer. in addition, teacher trainers had difficulties understanding the concept of 'fraction'. only 45.5% could draw the original shape of 6 5 in the rectangle correctly, ck question 1. to follow up on the progress of teaching mathematics and coach the teacher during the implementation of the newly acquired skills, 94 mathematics lessons were observed by the expert teams. each teacher trainer was observed 4 times (2 times as part of the pre-post test, and 2 times as part of the individual coaching sessions) by a team of two experts. descriptive analysis revealed that scores of the lesson observations gradually increased from roughly 69% of total score of 33 at the start of the intervention to 92.4% at the end. teacher trainers improved most in the field of assessing their students. they also made progress in using representations and detecting students’ misconceptions, but the upward growth trend was less pronounced. the percentage of achievement score in each criterion increased in second lesson observation in comparison with the first. then the achievement score decreased eventually in relation to second observation. the score of the final lesson observation gradually increased in comparison to the previous three. fluctuations in the score of the third observations were caused by an increase of teacher trainers in the cohort. those additional teacher trainers were not mentored and coached by the expert team in the first and second lesson observations so their achievement score from lesson observation were lower than their peers included from the beginning in the learning trajectory. this indicated once more the importance of coaching and mentoring for strengthening teachers’ capacity. teachers also confirmed during the evaluation of the programme how beneficial the coaching sessions after each lesson observation were for improving their future teaching. looking at the data in table 3 and table 6, it becomes clear that the use of representations during math lessons is the most challenging area of pck. teacher trainers underperformed during lesson observations, and on the test items related to using representations. it is encouraging that teacher trainers’ capacity in this area increased compared to their performance at the beginning of programme. discussion and conclusions our findings highlight the urgent need to improve the preparation of future teachers with respect to subject-matter knowledge (ck and pck). we described an intervention to improve teacher trainers’ content knowledge (ck) and pedagogical content knowledge (pck) on fractions and rational numbers. the results revealed gaps in teacher trainers' ck and pck for fractions and decimal numbers. most of these gaps were significantly reduced by the end of the intervention. after the intervention, 91% of the total teacher trainers who were observed by the math expert team had significantly increased their score on the pck test and 94% had improved their teaching strategy in at least two of three criteria (representation, misconception, and assessment). the results 208 global education review 5(3) table 8 progress on mathematics teaching of teacher trainers date follow up number number of lesson observations score achievement of pck areas total achievement (% of 33) represents (% of 12) misconceptions (% of 9) assessments (% of 12) 1. apr-2014 11 (75.0) (58.9) (68.9) (68.9) 2. apr-2015 11 (90.2) (83.8) (85.6) (86.8) 3. jan-2016 36 (83.5) (81.9) (88.8) (85.0) 5..jul-2016 36 (89.2) (91.0) (96.8) (92.4) confirmed the importance of coaching and mentoring as key elements of success in strengthening the capacity of teacher trainers. limitations preand post-tests (as well as the intervention itself) were limited to fractions and decimal numbers. there was no control group, which limits the generalizability of the findings. studies assessing teachers’ competence in other domains are required as well as within the domain of mathematics. the high turnover of teacher trainers during the intervention, made comparison of preand post-test results difficult, as the size of the sample became too small to make certain conclusions. another limitation was the creation of the assessment tool. since no valid pck test was available for cambodian teachers, we used a validated pck test developed by the university of leuven (belgium). giving priority to the reliability of the test, there was little room for modifications of the items, resulting in less opportunity to adjust the items to the cambodian context. translation challenges (dutch-english-khmer) also complicated the understanding of the items for test administrators and the participants. finally, by tailoring the learning trajectory to the needs of the teacher trainers, not all math topics tackled during the training were part of the standard pck test. conversely, some math items included in the assessment tool, were not part of the learning trajectory. it would be interesting for future interventions to study the relationship of pck and ck of teacher trainers with the learning outcomes and teaching skills of pre-service teachers. research has shown that coaching allows teachers to apply their learning more deeply, frequently, and consistently than teachers working alone, and we strongly believe coaching is important to make teacher trainers reflect and adjust their teaching practices. however more research is needed on how coaching supports teacher trainers to improve their capacity to reflect and apply their learning to their work with pre-service teachers and in their work with each other. notes 1. vvob stands for vlaamse vereniging voor ontwikkelings-samenwerking en technische bijstand dutch it means flemish association for development cooperation and technical assistance. 2. the association of southeast asian nations is a regional intergovernmental organization with the purpose of facilitating economic growth, social progress and cultural development that includes ten southeast asian countries. pedagocical content knowledge of cambodian teacher trainers 209 references ball, d. l., lubienski, s.t., & mewborn, d. s. (2001). research on teaching mathematics: the unsolved problem of teachers’ mathematical knowledge. handbook of research on teaching, 4, 433–456. baumert, j., kunter, m., blum, w., brunner, m., voss, t., jordan, a., … tsai, y.-m. (2010). teachers’ mathematical knowledge, cognitive activation in the classroom, and student progress. american educational research journal, 47(1), 133–180. benveniste, l., marshall, j., & araujo, m. c. (2008). teaching in cambodia. washington, dc: world bank. depaepe, f., torbeyns, j., vermeersch, n., janssens, d., janssens, r., kelchtermans, g., verschaffel, l., & van dooren, w. (2015). teachers' content and pedagogical content knowledge on rational numbers: a comparison of prospective elementary and lower secondary school teachers. teaching and teacher education, 47, 82-92. dy, s.s. (2004). strategies and policies for basic education in cambodia: historical perspectives. international education journal 5(1), 90-97. hang, c.n. 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(2013). teachers’ content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge: the role of structural differences in teacher education. journal of teacher education 64(1) 90–106, american association of colleges for teacher education moeys (2011). mathematics. improve knowledge and teaching methodologies for primary schools. part1: numbers, calculation, measurement. how children learn. trainer version. phnom penh, cambodia. moeys (2015). teacher policy action plan. phnom penh, cambodia. moeys (2016). upgrade quality of teaching practice through feedback skill. phnom penh, cambodia. ngo, f. j. (2013). the distribution of pedagogical content knowledge in cambodia: gaps and thresholds in math achievement. educational research for policy and practice, 12(2), 81–100. rowan, b., schilling, s. g., ball, d. l., miller, r., atkins-burnett, s., camburn, e., & others. (2001). measuring teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge in surveys: an exploratory study. ann arbor: consortium for policy research in education, university of pennsylvania. sarwadi, h. r. h. & shahrill, m. (2014). understanding students' mathematical errors and misconceptions: the case of year 11 repeating students. mathematics education trends and research, 2014, 110. shulman, l. s. (1986). those who understand: knowledge growth in teaching. educational researcher, 15(2), 4–14. tandon, p. & fukao t. (2015). educating the next generation: improving teacher quality in cambodia. directions in development-human development. washington, dc: world bank. 210 global education review 5(3) about author (s) leap van, msc, is an education programme coordinator for mathematics education of vvob cambodia. his role is to provide technical support to build capacity of teacher trainers on teaching primary mathematics including stem education in teacher education college. also he is a lecturer of biostatistics of faculty of science and technology at international university, cambodia. he used to be a math-physic teacher at high school for 10 years. ms. sokalyan mao is an education project manager of finn church aid foundation, a finnish non-government organization. she is currently managing two projects career guidance and counselling and the dream school project. she had worked for vvobeducation for development for four years as a programme coordinator. she was in charge of two programmes focusing on mathematics and science including stem. before she worked for development organizations, she was a teacher at a secondary school for 10 years. sokalyan earned her master’s degree in education from the victoria university of wellington, new zealand, and a master’s degree in rural development management from khon kaen university, thailand. ms. veerle cnudde is currently working as policy advisor at the department of foreign affairs for the government of flanders. she worked for 20 years at vvobeducation for development managing and implementing education programs in developing countries, including cambodia, zambia and chile. veerle received her master’s degree in educational science from the university of ghent. her interests and expertise lie in strengthening capacity and ownership to improve the quality of education. 110 global education review 5(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: becker, derek. r., grist, cathy l., caudle, lori a., & watson, myra k. (2018). complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness among preschoolers. global education review, 5 (2), 110-122. complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness among preschoolers derek r. becker western carolina university cathy l. grist western carolina university lori a. caudle western carolina university myra k. watson western carolina university abstract high quality educational settings play a crucial role in preparing a child to enter kindergarten, but little work has explored how outdoor play and complex physical activity outside school and childcare settings promote school readiness among preschoolers. to address this gap, the present study explored connections among school readiness with outdoor play and participation in complex physical activity. parents (n = 107) reported the extent and frequency of time their child spent in outdoor play during a typical week, and what complex activities (e.g., soccer, biking, basketball) the child played over the last year. school readiness was assessed with parent reports on the preschool behavior and emotional rating scale. results showed participating in complex activities significantly moderated the relationship between time in outdoor play with school readiness, with time in outdoor play positively related to school readiness for children who participated in two or less complex activities. for children who participated in three complex activities, time in outdoor play was not related to school readiness. findings offer support that encouraging both outdoor play and participation in complex physical activities could promote school readiness, particularly when opportunities for outdoor playtime are limited. keywords complex physical activities, outdoor play, school readiness, preschoolers introduction while the national association for the education of young children (naeyc) endorses a multi-dimensional view of school readiness (naeyc, 2004), little research has focused on whether preschoolers’ participation in complex physical activities and outdoor ____________________________ corresponding author: derek r. becker, western carolina university, 1 university drive, cullowhee, nc 28723. e-mail: drbecker@wcu.edu complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness 111 play promote the development of early academic skills. early childhood is a crucial time for motor and cognitive skill development (myer et al., 2015), and evidence suggests preschool children who engage in active forms of play have better memory and attention (becker, mcclelland, loprinzi, & trost, 2014; diamond & lee, 2011). however, in a typical school day, preschoolers engage in many forms of play and other learning experiences, yet it is not clear how specific types of activities and play outside of educational settings promote school readiness. therefore, the present study examines the direct and moderated relationship between parent reports of child outdoor play and participation in complex physical activities (e.g., soccer, basketball, dance, gymnastics) on school readiness. complex physical activities can occur both during spontaneous indoor/outdoor play and within organized team sports, with the former being more likely among preschoolers. following evidence with older samples that participating in complex physical activity (i.e., sports) is associated with academic achievement (becker, 2016), and that children who engage in active play have better memory and attention (becker et al., 2014), it was predicted that participating in a greater number of complex physical activities and spending more time in outdoor play would be related to school readiness. we also examined if participating in complex physical activities moderated the relationship between time in outdoor play with school readiness, such that for children who participate in less complex physical activities, the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play will positively relate to school readiness. school readiness and academic achievement school readiness is a multidimensional construct that includes domain general skills related to intellectual and social development (duncan et al., 2007; romano, babchishin, pagani, & kohen, 2010). cognitive skills that promote school readiness often involve executive function, which are cognitive processes involved in the control of goal-directed cognition and behavior (koziol, budding, & chidekel, 2012; miyake, friedman, emerson, witzki, & howerter, 2000). executive function is involved in the development of abstract thought and the formation of rules involved in the learning process (kharitonova & munakata, 2011; snyder & munakata, 2010), and can predict short and long-term academic development. for example, executive function measured in the fall of both prekindergarten and kindergarten predict change in math in spring of the respective academic year (mcclelland et al., 2014). along with executive function, prosocial behaviors that include the ability to understand self and others, cooperate with peers, and regulate emotions are also related to short and long-term academic outcomes. for boys, high levels of aggressive behavior and low levels of prosocial behaviors in prekindergarten are linked to low concurrent emergent literacy scores, with solitary play related to low emergent literacy for boys and girls (doctoroff, greer, & arnold, 2006). children who display more prosocial behavior in kindergarten are also found to have higher math and reading scores in the third grade (romano et al., 2010). given the above connections between school readiness with academic achievement, it is important to examine factors such as outdoor play and complex physical activities that could promote school readiness. outdoor play, complex physical activities, and school readiness the connection between the cognitive and social components of school readiness with outdoor play and sport participation can be found in the 112 global education review 5(2) aerobic activity that could be achieved during play, the complexity of participating in a complex task that taps executive function, and in the social skills that could be developed when interacting with peers. for the former, evidence suggests that children who spend more time in outdoor play are more physically active and physically fit (cleland et al., 2008), with physical activity and physical fitness linked to higher executive function. for example, in a nonexperimental study with children between 9 and 10, higher fit youth showed better executive function and greater activity in brain regions associated with attention and memory (chaddock, erickson, prakesh, chaddock, erickson, parkash, van patter, et al., 2010). higher physically fit children are better able to control their behavior (chaddock-heyman et al., 2013), and show greater prefrontal and parietal activation (chaddock et al., 2012). in preschool samples, active outdoor play is linked to better executive function (becker et al., 2014), with physical fitness also predicting working memory and attention (niederer et al., 2011). evidence also suggests the combination of exercise and cognitive engagement enhance the relationship with executive function (curlik ii & shors, 2013; koutsandréou, wegner, niemann, & budde, 2016), with sports such as soccer, baseball, and wrestling associated with higher executive function (memmert, 2009; nakamoto & mori, 2012; williams & ford, 2008). although the majority of work examining the cognitive benefits of sport participation are with older samples, exposure to the perceptual and cognitive demands of a sport such as soccer, gymnastics, or dance, or sport type activity such as riding a bike, is associated with change in executive function, the retention of motor skills, and increased activation in brain areas involved in executive function (lin et al., 2013; saemi, porter et al., 2012). in work with kindergarten age children, following eight weeks of soccer skills training, improvements in executive function were found for children in both a high and low training group (chang, tsai, chen, & hung, 2013). similar to chang, after participating in a 6-month soccer intervention, children between age 7 and 9 showed improvement in executive function relative to a non-exercise control group (alesi, bianco, luppina, palma, & pepi, 2016). at the same time, both complex physical activities and natural outdoor play often involve peer interactions that could be linked to the development of social skills (bailey, 2006; gould & carson, 2008). for example, in a study with shy children, participation in complex physical activity was linked to a reduction in anxiety and better socials skills (findlay & coplan, 2008). children who participate in sport-type activities also show higher levels of social competence and lower levels of social anxiety (dimech & seiler, 2010; haugen, säfvenbom, & ommundsen, 2013). finally, when comparing both outdoor and indoor play, outdoor play was linked to more peerbased interactive dramatic play (shim, herwig, & shelley, 2001). together, the above evidence suggests that an outdoor environment that encourages the child to be physically active, promotes activities that include a combination of aerobic movement and complex motor skills such as kicking, throwing, or riding a bike, and allows for social interactions could be associated with school readiness. in the present study, we examine if children who spend more time in outdoor play, participate in more sport activities, or some combination of the two have higher school readiness in the fall of the prekindergarten year. the moderating role of complex physical activity with outdoor play and school readiness although evidence points to a direct relationship between outdoor play and participation in complex physical activity with school readiness, complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness 113 it’s also possible that the relationship between outdoor play with school readiness could vary based on the number of complex physical activities a child plays. for example, in work with older children, evidence suggests that if a child plays a high number of complex sports, such that require attention and are played in a shifting environment (e.g., soccer, volleyball), the physical activity required to play the sport (assessed as metabolic intensity), is less related to executive function (becker, 2016). however, when a child plays repetitive sports that require less attention (e.g., running, swimming), the level of physical activity required to play the sport (metabolic intensity) is positively related to executive function. for children in the present study that participate in fewer complex physical activities, it is possible they could achieve a similar level of school readiness if they spend more time in outdoor play. given that motor skills are developing in preschoolers, participating in complex physical activity at a young age could promote school readiness (chang et al., 2013). however, for children who participate in fewer of these activities, it is possible that spending more time in outdoor play could improve school readiness through spending more time being physically active (becker et al., 2014; cleland et al., 2008). thus, it is possible for preschoolers who participate in multiple complex activities, the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play could be less related to school readiness. summary and hypothesis high quality early childhood educational settings play a crucial role in promoting academic skills (vandell, belsky, burchinal, steinberg, & vandergrift, 2010), yet little work has focused on how outdoor play and complex physical activities, both at home and preschool, could promote academic skill development. therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess the relationship between time spent in outdoor play and participating in complex physical activities with school readiness. research question one investigated if children who spend more time in outdoor play and/or participate in more complex physical activities have higher school readiness? drawing on research suggesting participating in outdoor play and complex physical activities are linked to the cognitive and social components of school readiness (becker et al., 2014; chang et al., 2013; shim et al., 2001), it was predicted that the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play and participating in more types of complex physical activities would be positively associated with school readiness. research question two assessed if participation in complex physical activities moderated the relationship between time spent in outdoor play with school readiness? following evidence from becker, (2016), which suggests if a child plays multiple complex sports, the physical activity required to play each sport is less related to executive function, it was predicted the relationship between outdoor play with school readiness would be moderated by the number of complex physical activities a child played; such that for children who participated in less complex physical activities, time spent in outdoor play would be positively related to higher school readiness. method participants participants included 107 children attending preschool in a child development center in western north carolina. children were sampled from a single center with multiple classrooms (n = 6). data was collected in the fall of the prekindergarten year through packets sent home with parents. the average age at the beginning of the study was 50.94 months (range = 36.03 – 114 global education review 5(2) 60.11 months). a total of 54 of the children were female, and 55 were male. the average yearly income of the sample was 45,060 (range = 0 161,710). measures outdoor play the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play was measured by asking parents, “on a typical week, how many hours is your child outside playing?” the average number of hours of outside play reported by parents was 8.00 (range = 0 25). complex physical activity participation in complex physical activities was measured by asking parents on a typical week, if the child participated in any of 8 complex physical activities (see table 1). the average number of complex physical activities which children participated in was 2 (range 0 8), with 83 of the children participating in at least one complex physical activity. the complex physical activity variable was a count of the number of activities in which the child participated in, outside of the formal early childhood educational setting. given that over a third (78.49%) of the sample participated in 3 or fewer sports, children who participated in 4 or more sports were aggregated into one group (see table 1). school readiness the preschool behavioral and emotional rating scales (prebers) is a standard, normreferenced assessment, which measures the behavioral and emotional strengths of preschool children, particularly 3-5 years of age. the scale includes 42 items, which rate on a 4-point likert scale (0=not all like the child; 1=not much like the child; 2=like the child; 3=very much like the child). the prebers includes 4 subscales: emotional regulation (13 items), school readiness (13 items), social confidence (9 items), and family involvement (7 items). the school readiness subscale was used in the present analysis. the internal consistency reliability for the school readiness subscale, coefficients averaged .94 for males, and .95 for females (epstein & synhorst, 2009). table 1 complex physical activities n = 93 activity played sport n did not play sport n sports sport groups n soccer 23 70 no sport 11 basketball 21 72 one sport 27 t-ball 17 76 two sports 18 football 13 80 three sports 19 dance 33 60 four or more 18 gymnastics 22 71 bike 59 34 scooter 33 60 note: played sport = the number of children who played each individual sport. did not play sport = the number of children who did not play each individual sport 115 global education review 5(2) analytic plan direct and moderated connections were examined between complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness. pearson bivariate correlations were conducted on complex physical activity, extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play (hours), and school readiness, as measured by the prebers. a multiple regression was computed to examine the connection among complex physical activities and hours of outdoor play on school readiness. the main effect of complex physical activity and outdoor play was examined in model one, with the interaction between physical activity and outdoor play added in model two. all analyses were completed using stata 13.1 (statacorp, 2013). the percent of missing data ranged from < .02% to .18%, with full information maximum likelihood estimation (fiml) used to address the issue of missing data (schafer & graham, 2002). fiml utilizes all available information and has been shown to produce less biased estimates than listwise deletion (acock, 2012; enders, 2001). outliers were classified as values which were greater or lesser than 3.3 standard deviations from the mean. there was 1 outlier for outdoor play and 2 for family income. both outliers were recoded to the next closest valid value for that measure within +/3.3 standard deviations. one outlier was also found for child age. child gender, child age, and family income were used as control variables for each model. to assess if school readiness was stronger for children who spent more time in outdoor play, participated in more complex physical activities, or if the connection with school readiness varied by complex physical activities, model one regressed outdoor play and sport participation on school readiness. the interaction between outdoor play with sport participation on school readiness was added in model two. results descriptive information for complex physical activity participation can be found in table 1, and descriptive statistics (including correlations) for all variables included in the current analyses can be found in table 2. results for model one showed that the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play was not significantly associated with school readiness (b = .09. p = .374) after controlling for child gender, child age, and family income. however, participating in complex physical activities was positively and significantly associated with school readiness (b = 1.07, p = .015), with children who participated in more complex physical activities showing higher scores on the measure of school readiness (see table 3). 116 global education review 5(2) table 2 descriptive statistics and bivariate pairwise correlations between variables. variables 1 2 3 4 5 6 1. outdoor play 2. sport activity .32** 3. school readiness .17† .26* 4. gender -.11 -.05 -.18† 5. child age -.02 -.02 .26* .06 6. family income .01 .02 .13 .09 -.02 n 93 93 91 107 107 95 mean 8.01 2.41 32.07 51.19 45,060 sd 5.88 1.98 5.89 6.84 35,271 min 0 0 1 0 36.3 0 max 25 8 39 1 60.11 161,710 †p < .10. *p < .05. **p < .01 table 3 regression model results: main effects outdoor play, complex physical activity, and the interaction between outdoor play and complex physical activity with school readiness. school readinessa model 1 model 2 variables b se ß b se ß outdoor playb .09 .09 .09 .47** .18 .46 complex pac 1.07* .44 .24 2.47** .71 .55 gender -2.01† 1.11 -.17 -2.03† 1.08 -.17 child age .26** .08 .30 .27** .08 .32 family income .00 .00 .08 .00 .00 .03 outdoor play* sports – – – -.17* .07 -.59 note. b = unstandardized estimate.  = standardized estimate. se = standard error. †p < .10. *p < .05 **p < .01 athe preschool behavioral and emotional rating scales bthe extent and frequency of time in outdoor play is measured in hours. c pa = complex physical activity 117 global education review 5(2) results for model two revealed a significant interaction between the number of complex physical activities a child played with the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play on children’s school readiness (b = -.17, p = .015) (see table 3). a test of the regions of significance (preacher, curran, & bauer, 2006) to identify the number of complex physical activities within which time in outdoor play was linked with children’s school readiness showed the region of significance fell between 2.57 and 3.06. this suggests that for children who played two sports, more time spent in outdoor play predicted higher school readiness. the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play was also positively related to school readiness for children who played no sports. however, for children who played 3 sports, time in outdoor play did not predict higher school readiness (see figure 1). based on a reviewer suggestion, post hoc analysis were conducted that included an average of the number of hours’ parents reported their child spent playing each complex physical activity (mean = .45, range 0 2.25). this was done to control for overlap for parents who might have reported the extent and frequency of time in outdoor play as being time the child spent participating in complex physical activity. results did not differ when including this variable in either model. figure 1. interaction between extent and frequency of time in outdoor play and complex physical activity participation with school readiness. note: slopes represent the relationship between hours in outdoor play with school readiness for children who participated in 0, 2, and 3 complex physical activities. the extent and frequency of time in outdoor play is measured in hours. 13 14 15 16 17 18 19 20 21 2 4 6 8 10 12 14 sc h o o l r e ad in e ss extent and frequency of time in outdoor play 3 activities 2 activities no activities 118 global education review 5(2) discussion there is a need to understand the role of outdoor learning environments and activities that occur within such environments in the development of academic skills. prior studies have found that cognitive components of school readiness are linked to physical activity (becker et al., 2014; davis et al., 2011) and participating in sports (chang et al., 2013), but the cognitive and academic benefits of outdoor play and complex physical activity are not fully understood in prekindergarten children. therefore, the purpose of this study was to assess if the extent and frequency of time spent in outdoor play, the number of complex physical activities a child plays, or some combination of the two is linked to school readiness. results supported the hypothesis that participating in complex physical activities would moderate the association between outdoor play with school readiness, with a positive association found between school readiness with time spent in outdoor play for children who played two or fewer complex activities. for children who participated in 3 complex activities, time in outdoor play was not related to school readiness, although children in this group showed the highest level of school readiness. results offer support that early care settings that offer children the opportunity to participate in complex physical activities could promote school readiness, but also suggests that a similar connection could be found if children are given time to play outdoors. outdoor environments and the interaction between sports and outdoor play results in the present study showed that complex physical activity significantly moderated the connection between the extent and frequency of time a child spends in outdoor play with school readiness. the nature of the interaction points to a positive connection between outdoor play with school readiness for children who participate in fewer complex activities. this result is somewhat consistent with past work that examined coordinative exercise, team games requiring physical activity, and interventions involving training in a sport skill, such as soccer (chang et al., 2013; koutsandréou et al., 2016; schmidt, jäger, egger, roebers, & conzelmann, 2015). evidence from these studies show the perceptual and cognitive demands of a sport and the shifting game context require attention that could be leading to improved cognitive performance following prolonged exposure. however, the interaction also suggests, as participation in complex physical activities increase (e.g., moving from two to three activities), the association between outdoor play with school readiness becomes flat. this suggests, for children who participate in one, two, or no complex activities, their school readiness scores increase when they spend more time in outdoor play. at a practical level, time spent playing outside likely means that the child is not engaged in screen time. high levels of screen time are linked to lower vocabulary scores, poor interpersonal skills, and lower levels of physical activity (carson, rahman, & wiebe, 2017; hinkley, salmon, okely, crawford, & hesketh, 2012; hinkley, timperio, salmon, & hesketh, 2017). it is possible that children in the present study who spend more time in outdoor play are engaging in less screen time and spending more time being physically active. non-organized physical activity is also linked to higher vocabulary scores (carson et al., 2017), and this is consistent with the connection between outdoor play and school readiness found in the present study. at the same time, children who participated in three or more complex physical activities showed the highest school readiness scores, with school readiness unrelated to the amount of time in outdoor play for these complex physical activity, outdoor play, and school readiness 119 children. this is consistent with results from becker (2016), who found, for children who played more complex sports (e.g., soccer, volleyball), the physical intensity needed to play the sport was negatively related to executive function. further, the highest executive function was found for children who played multiple complex sports at a low physical intensity. it is likely if a child is participating in three or more sports, they are spending time being physically active and interacting with peers, both of which are connected with school readiness. the present study is unique in that it examined multiple complex activities (i.e., sport type activities) in a population where motor and cognitive skills are starting to develop. although the complex physical activities assessed in the present study varied in the level of focus and attention needed to perform the activity (e.g., riding a bike or scooter vs kicking a soccer ball to a friend), they all required motor learning to some degree. as motor skills are developing within this age group (myer et al., 2015), it is possible that learning to ride a bike or scooter, or throw, kick, or catch a ball could be taxing attention and inhibitory control, and improve the cognitive component of school readiness. neuroanatomical connections support this proposal, with the cerebellum, a brain region central for coordination and motor control (marr, 1969), connected to cortical systems involved in executive function (diamond, 2000; stoodley & schmahmann, 2009). participation in sport-type activities is also linked to higher levels of social competence and lower levels of social anxiety (dimech & seiler, 2010; haugen et al., 2013). as prosocial behaviors are linked to higher math and reading scores (romano et al., 2010), it is possible that skills involved in positive social interactions could be developing as children interact with peers both during outdoor play and participation in complex physical activity. together, the intersection among sensory-motor experience, social engagement, and the physical and embodied representation of information could suggest that participating in complex physical activities (i.e., sport type activities) is helping to prepare children for school. limitations and future directions this study revealed connections among outdoor play and participating in complex physical activity with school readiness, but there were also a number of limitations. first, given that this was a concurrent study it was not possible to assess the directionality between outdoor play and participating in complex physical activity with school readiness. it is entirely possible that children with better school readiness select to spend more time playing outdoors or participating in complex physical activity. future work should assess longitudinal connections among school readiness, outdoor play, and participating in complex physical activity (i.e., sports). second, outdoor play, participating in complex physical activity, and school readiness were all derived from parent reports. we therefore could not objectively determine the amount of time a child spent participating in outdoor play or complex physical activity, and future work should objectively assess both. it was also not possible to determine if parents’ responses ignored the time spent by children playing outside when attending childcare. however, given that little research has examined how participating in outdoor play and complex physical activity could relate to school readiness, this study is a starting point for future work in this area. results can also only be generalized to the eight complex activities analyzed in the present analysis. further, school readiness is a complex construct that not only includes children's readiness for school, but also the schools' readiness for the child along with the families and communities' readiness for school (britto, 2012; dockett & perry, 2009; 2014). future work should examine if similar connections are found with other less traditional sport activities and use a multidimensional assessment of school readiness. future work should also assess parents' and teachers' 120 global education review 5(2) attitudes, perceptions, and beliefs related to the role of physical activity in cognitive development. finally, assessing connections among engagement in dialogic book reading, motor skills, and physical activity are also important avenues for future research given there connection to early school readiness (becker, miao, duncan, & mcclelland, 2014; macdonald et al., 2016; mol, bus, de jong, & smeets, 2008). conclusion and implications several important applications can be taken from the present results and applied to work within early care settings. first, educating parents and teachers about the cognitive and health benefits of physical activity could promote school readiness by demonstrating the need to create more opportunities for children to play outdoors. programs aimed at encouraging parents and teachers to get active could also alter attitudes and beliefs about the benefits of outdoor play and increase the overall level of physical activity for both adults and children. children who are given the opportunity to play outside are also likely to engage in less screen time and be more physically active (hinkley et al., 2012). thus, programs with limited sport resources might realize academic benefits by allowing children time to play outdoors. second, offering children the opportunity to participate in complex physical activities (i.e., sport type activities) might also promote school readiness. this could be accomplished by providing informal opportunities for a child to ride a bike, or kick, throw, and catch a ball, or through formal sport instruction. third, the combination of outdoor play and participating in complex physical activity could act in an additive manner to improve school readiness, with programs that integrate both possibly seeing the strongest benefits in preparing children for school. acknowledgment the authors acknowledge the support of a school university teacher education partnership grant from the college 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(2008). expertise and expert performance in sport. international review of sport and exercise psychology, 1(1), 4-18. about the author(s) derek r. becker, ph.d., is an assistant professor in the birth-kindergarten program at western carolina university. he teaches a range of early childhood research methods courses, along with math, science and curriculum. his research focuses on connections among play, physical activity, and sport participation with executive function and early learning. cathy grist, ph.d., is an associate professor and director of the birth-kindergarten program at western carolina university. she has taught courses in assessment and intervention for young children with disabilities in a fully online program for the last 10 years. she is a licensed clinical psychologist who provides psychological and behavioral assessments, as well as interventions for preschool age children in private practice. research interests include preschool personality, assessment, social-emotional competence in young children, behavioral issues, and online teaching strategies and methods. lori caudle, ph.d., is an associate professor in the birthkindergarten program at western carolina university. she teaches a range of early childhood methods courses, including authentic assessment, literacy, environments, and curriculum. her research focuses on the professional development of in-service and pre-service early childhood teachers, with a particular focus on the use of digital tools and/or collaboration to enhance learning. myra watson, maed, nbct, is an instructor in the birth-kindergarten program at western carolina university. she is a former prekindergarten and kindergarten teacher. microsoft word confucian-deweyan learning-everett 116 global education review 4 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2017). a confucian-deweyan learning model. [review of the book the chinese continuum of self-cultivation by christine a. hale]. global education review, 4 (1). 116-117. book review a confucian-deweyan learning model “the chinese continuum of self-cultivation” by christine a. hale by colin everett       china and the united states will continue to be world powers in the 21st century and their views toward education will shape the future of both nations. both these countries have a role in shaping culture, policy, and societal values beyond their borders. approaches and beliefs about the individual and public policy present a tension between these two nations. american education often emphasizes the betterment of the individual and empirical methodologies, while china has traditionally focused its education system on confucian philosophy and preparation for civil service exams. christine hale attempts to bridge education in these two cultures by merging the ideas of john dewey and confucianism. hale dedicates a fair amount of the chinese continuum of self-cultivation to preparing the foundations for the presentation of her synthesized learning model. ontologically, american and chinese traditions are starting from different spheres. western philosophy traditionally defines the self as an isolated cartesian conscious. the self in china is tied to confucianism, where the self is “inextricably connected to the other” (26). for hale, the bridge between these disparate worldviews is american pragmatist philosopher john dewey. for dewey, the self is a “mutually informing shifting of inner-outer landscapes devoid of dualism and the separateness of phenomena” (26). in dewey, hale sees a connection between respect for the individual and a concern for communal values. chinese and american traditions contain differing outlooks toward the mind and knowledge. hale has the difficult task of presenting a coherent summary of confucian philosophy while balancing divergent approaches and beliefs within confucian thought. in confucian metaphysics, knowledge is not “information or facts,” but rather “the inner apprehension of meaning relative to the self and others” (32). a confucian-deweyan learning model 117    as a pragmatist, dewey was not consumed with questions of metaphysics and does not explicitly define the self. hale deconstructs a deweyan definition of the self that “to be united, it must be interconnected with the other empathetically” (65). the betterment of the self is essential to the betterment of the community. for hale, dewey is the ideal synthesis of american and chinese intellectual traditions and a foundation for a future beneficial pedagogy. during a lengthy visit to china in 19191920, dewey saw a new nation eager to modernize. from his university lectures and courses, he was an influence on the progressive new culture movement. for western-inspired reformers like hu shih and liang shuming, education should depart from a traditional study of confucian ideas and focus on more practical concerns. in a letter from 1920, dewey wrote to a friend that “it was not theories and free thought…china needed, it was teaching the people how to improve agriculture and cotton and silk” (81). dewey has had an influence on western-inspired reformers throughout 20th century china. these reformers, however, were not the ones to shape chinese education in the 20th-century during either the maoist era or the era of modern educational reform. this short book, 149 pages (including the index) is supplemented with 14 info-graphic charts that give a visual reinforcement of the author’s main points. these charts would make good presentation aids to anyone looking for a summary of the text in a class on comparative education, the influence of dewey, or chinese educational reforms. much of this book is dedicated to establishing the context to hale’s vision of a philosophy of education based on a deweyanconfucian hybrid. while the context is necessary, the model itself would benefit from more explanation, including its applicability to a global context. the author’s suggested pedagogy for implementing this model (problem based learning) is given only a cursory five paragraphs. this is an area where the author could have more fully developed her learning model. some consideration to an implemented deweyan-confucian learning model, whether from the organizational, curricular, or classroom perspective, would have helped move this model from a theory into a potential practice. “the chinese continuum of self-cultivation: a confucian-deweyan learning model.” by christine a. hale. newcastle-upon-tyne: cambridge scholars publishing, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4438-8525-6 about the author christine a. hale, phd., is an independent scholar in the fields of yijing studies, neo-confucianism, and the philosophy of education. she received her phd from the university of sydney in australia. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer in the accelerated post-baccalaureate program at bridgewater state university in massachusetts.   different analyses, different conclusions 125 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: perry, lindsey (2018). different analyses, different conclusions? : validity evidence from the egma spatial reasoning subtask. global education review, 5 (3), 125-142. different analyses, different conclusions? validity evidence from the egma spatial reasoning subtask lindsey perry southern methodist university abstract as the global development community shifts its focus from improving access to education to improving learning and instruction, the need for instruments that accurately measure student achievement in mathematics and meet technical standards is increasing. this paper explores the importance of collecting high-quality validity evidence that aligns with an instrument’s intended uses and interpretations by discussing a new subtask developed for the early grade mathematics assessment (egma). the egma spatial reasoning subtask was developed by rti international with funding from the united states agency for international development (usaid). to collect validity evidence to support the assumption that the egma spatial reasoning subtask could be used to determine overall student proficiency in spatial reasoning, the items developed for the subtask were pilot tested with 1,426 students in jordan. pilot test data was initially analyzed using item response theory. however, item response theory assumptions were not met, thus, supplemental analyses were conducted using classical test theory. there were differences in the findings using the two different methods, which impacts the interpretations made using this instrument. this paper illustrates the importance of choosing analytic techniques that align with an instrument’s intended use in order to make valid interpretations from the data to inform policy and practice. keywords early grade mathematics assessment (egma), validity evidence, test instrument intended uses, test results interpretation introduction one mathematical topic consistently identified as being foundational for future success is spatial reasoning (learning metrics task force [lmtf], 2013; nctm, 2000; national research council [nrc], 2009). the lmtf (2013) identified spatial reasoning as essential content for all children, including those at the early childhood level, and the nrc (2009) identified spatial reasoning as part of two core mathematical topics for young children. spatial reasoning helps students investigate and navigate their own environment by enabling them to visualize objects and locations from different perspectives and orientations. one _______________________________ corresponding author: lindsey perry, research in mathematics education, simmons school of education and human development southern methodist university, po box 750114 dallas, tx 75275-0114 email: leperry@mail.smu.edu 126 global education review 5(3) reason spatial reasoning is often identified as being critical for students to learn is that students’ ability to reason spatially is highly predictive of overall mathematics achievement in the shortand long-term (gilligan, flouri, & farran, 2017; markey, 2009; robinson, abbott, berninger, & busse, 1996). spatial reasoning also supports number sense (van nes & de lange, 2007) and the development of problem solving (battista, 1990; hegarty & kozhevnikov, 1999; van garderen, 2006). additionally, spatial reasoning is crucial for many careers, such as engineering (olkun, 2003) and medicine (allahyar & hunt, 2003). however, while spatial reasoning is widely cited as being important for young children, few assessments exist that primarily focus on spatial reasoning, and most do not assess all aspects of spatial reasoning. furthermore, the assessments that do exist have not been used in low-income contexts. as the global development community shifts its focus from improving access to education to improving learning and instruction, the need for instruments that accurately measure student achievement in mathematics and meet technical standards is increasing. to fill this assessment gap, rti international developed a spatial reasoning subtask for the early grade mathematics assessment (egma) and piloted the spatial reasoning items in jordan. the purpose of this paper is two-fold: 1) to present information on this experimental measure and the results from the pilot testing, and 2) to discuss how differences in item analysis techniques may lead to different validity conclusions. for the first purpose, one primary research question with two sub-questions was proposed: is the spatial reasoning subtask a technically adequate measure that reliably estimates students’ spatial reasoning abilities? a) does the two-parameter item response theory model fit the spatial reasoning pilot test data with acceptable item parameters and fit statistics? b) is the reliability of the data generated by the spatial reasoning subtask sufficient for the intended interpretation of the subtask? during the investigation into these research questions, analyses from both item response theory (irt) and classical test theory (crt) frameworks were conducted. therefore, in addition to providing evidence for these specific research questions, the second purpose of this paper was to draw attention to the differences between item analysis techniques, the potential differences in interpretations made using these techniques, and the implications of using each method. information about spatial reasoning, the egma spatial reasoning subtask, and validity are included to provide pertinent background and theoretical foundations for these research questions. spatial reasoning spatial abilities are an important component of aptitude and have been researched and investigated for over 100 years (galton, 1883; thurstone & thurstone, 1941). spatial reasoning moves beyond geometric ideas of shape and properties, as theorized by van hiele (1983), and instead focuses on understanding the complexity of one’s environment. while spatial tasks require many different skills, the general consensus of researchers is that spatial reasoning consists of two factors: spatial visualization and spatial orientation (bishop, 1980; mcgee, 1979; nrc, 2009; sarama & clements, 2009). the distinction between these two factors lies in different analyses, different conclusions 127 what is being moved. with spatial visualization, a person mentally visualizes and transforms an image; the visualized image is being moved mentally and the person’s perspective remains stationary. with spatial orientation, a person mentally views environments from different perspectives; in this case, the environment remains stationary and the person mentally moves their own position around the environment. in general, spatial reasoning focuses on mentally transforming objects or seeing these objects from different perspectives. the egma spatial reasoning subtask primarily focuses on spatial visualization skills. this section provides additional information on the construct of spatial visualization and details when spatial visualization develops in young children. spatial visualization spatial visualization is the ability to transform figures mentally (mcgee, 1979). this is a complex mental process that first requires a person to visualize a static image (clements, 2004; kosslyn, 1983), which is similar to a photo (i.e., the objects can be seen but can’t be moved). the image must be maintained and held in the person’s mind, and then the image can be moved mentally to rotate or transform it in some way. spatial visualization can be used to determine if two figures are congruent or to determine if there are hidden parts of three-dimensional figures. spatial visualization has not been as heavily researched as spatial orientation (sarama & clements, 2009), primarily because it is difficult to observe spatial visualization. spatial visualization develops early in life. at first, the images children imagine mentally are static. however, around the age of 4, children demonstrate the ability to rotate objects mentally (frick, hansen, & newcombe, 2013; marmor, 1975). then, at the age of 5, children can translate and reflect images (sarama & clements, 2009). children can rotate images with increasingly complex angles (e.g., 45°) at age 6 and can perform diagonal translations by age 7. while these spatial visualization abilities appear and develop in early childhood, these abilities continue to improve through adolescence (ben-chaim, lappan, & houang, 1988) and into adulthood. spatial structuring one way children demonstrate spatial visualization skills is through spatial structuring tasks. spatial structuring is “the mental act of constructing an organization or form for an object or set of objects” (battista & clements, 1996). spatial structuring entails systematically organizing objects into component parts so that the objects can be enumerated more easily. for example, the volume of a rectangular prism can be calculated by first finding the area of the base and then adding it repeatedly based on the height. this systematic process prevents counting errors that would occur if a child attempted to calculate the volume by counting cubes randomly. spatial structuring is often used to find the area or volume of twoor threedimensional figures, respectively, and to utilize spatial structuring, one typically visualizes the object and transforms it mentally to determine the component parts. egma spatial reasoning subtask in 2013, rti international began the development of a spatial reasoning subtask for the egma. the egma spatial reasoning 128 global education review 5(3) subtask was designed to complement the existing core egma. the core egma is a set of eight numeracy subtasks: number identification, quantity discrimination, missing number, addition – level 1, subtraction – level 1, addition – level 2, subtraction – level 2, and word problems. the egma is an orally and individually administered assessment. the egma was first developed in 2008 by rti international with funding from usaid and is primarily administered to children in grades 1-3 to make summative decisions, including determination of overall student performance and to program evaluation (platas, ketterlingeller, brombacher, & sitabkhan, 2014). the egma has been used in over 25 countries worldwide; however, it is not meant to be used to compare performance across countries. a panel consisting of early mathematics and assessment experts recommended adding a subtask to the egma to test spatial reasoning (platas et al., 2014). to begin development, a literature review was conducted to define the construct and to determine how spatial reasoning had previously been tested. preliminary items were developed, and multiple rounds of pre-pilot testing and cognitive interviews with students occurred. information from these interviews informed the final development of the items. the final development of items for the egma spatial reasoning focused on spatial visualization and spatial structuring of twoand three-dimensional figures. table 1 shows the types of items developed. the spatial visualization items required children to look at two figures to determine if the figures were the same or not the same. children responded by answering, “the same” or “not the same.” to create a range of item difficulties, the number of cubes/squares, the types of transformations, and the angles of rotation varied. the spatial structuring items asked children to determine the number of cubes or squares needed to create a figure. children responded with a numerical value. to vary the difficulty in the spatial structuring items, cubes/squares were hidden or covered. after the final development, the items were translated from english to arabic and pilot tested in jordan. an expert review was conducted to receive feedback on the items after the pilot test was conducted (perry, 2017). four experts in early mathematics education and assessment provided feedback on the items. overall, the experts rated all of the items as mostly to extremely age-appropriate and representative and relevant to the construct of spatial reasoning. however, the experts did raise a few important issues regarding the words used in the items and the ambiguity of some of the graphics. more specifically, reviewers noted that “the same” and “not the same” could be interpreted differently by students, which may impact how students respond to items. additionally, reviewers noted that the potential for hidden cubes could confuse some students on some of the three-dimensional spatial structuring items. these comments can be used during future refinement of the items. even with these comments, however, the experts rated the items highly, noting all items were age-appropriate and representative and relevant to spatial reasoning. different analyses, different conclusions 129 table 1 items developed for the egma spatial reasoning subtask item type item prompt read by test assessor sample items number of items developed for pilot testing spatial visualization threedimensional look at these pictures of objects. please tell me if the two objects are the same or not the same. 17 twodimensional look at these pictures of objects. please tell me if the two objects are the same or not the same. 17 spatial structuring threedimensional look at these pictures of objects. please tell me how many cubes were used to make this object. 17 twodimensional look at these pictures of shapes made with squares. some of the squares are covered. how many squares were used to make this shape? 13 (4 items without squares covered; 9 items with some squares covered) validity the primary purpose of this paper is to present validity evidence collected for the egma spatial reasoning subtask and to investigate how different analyses may impact interpretations about validity. therefore, it is critical to discuss the purpose of validity evidence and how evidence impacts interpretations. before the egma spatial reasoning subtask can be used, the validity of the interpretations made from the assessment must be evaluated. validity is the most important factor to consider when designing or evaluating tests (aera, apa, ncme, 2014). the validity evidence collected must be tailored to the intended uses or interpretations of the assessment, and the international test commission noted that tests should be used “only for those purposes where relevant and appropriate validity evidence is available” (itc, 2001, p. 12). validity is not a property of the test but instead is a property of the interpretation being made using the test scores. therefore, before collecting validity evidence, the intended uses and interpretations of the egma spatial reasoning subtask must be identified. the primary uses of the egma are to determine overall student performance and to evaluate programs. to evaluate the validity of these uses, kane’s argument-based approach to validating interpretations (1992, 2013) was used. in this approach, assumptions or propositions are identified that link a score to its interpretation. then, the types of evidence that can be collected to test those assumptions are identified. for this paper, only one assumption is being tested: the subtask is an accurate measure that reliably estimates students’ spatial reasoning abilities. irt models and reliability estimates were proposed to provide evidence for this assumption. for the full interpretation-use argument for the egma spatial reasoning 130 global education review 5(3) subtask, including all identified assumptions, please see perry (2016). methods to collect validity evidence regarding technical adequacy and reliability, the egma spatial reasoning items were pilot tested in jordan. a non-equivalent groups with anchor test (neat) design (holland & dorans, 2006) was used to allow for item equating. the 64 items were divided among four pilot test forms; four items were used as anchor items and were included on all four forms. each form had 19 items. participants a total of 1,426 students in grades 2-3 participated in the pilot test. table 2 provides additional details about the participants. the participants were enrolled in schools that were selected as part of another rti international project. stratified sampling was used to select the schools; additional details about the sampling methods used can be found in brombacher et al. (2014). one second and one third grade class were selected at random from each school, and 10 students from each class were selected at random to participate in the pilot test. as seen in table 2, numbers of males and females and grade 2 and grade 3 students were approximately equal. most students were between the ages of 7-9. administration trained test assessors administered the egma spatial reasoning subtask to each selected student. item stimulus sheets were used to show students the figures for each item, and ipads were used by the test assessor to reference the script for each item and to record student responses. the test assessor administered two table 2 pilot test participants for the egma spatial reasoning subtask form a form b form c form d total number of students 340 348 369 369 1426 male female 152 188 139 209 176 193 195 174 662 764 urban rural 207 133 275 73 223 146 197 172 902 524 grade 2 grade 3 177 163 170 178 184 185 186 183 717 709 age 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 0 53 157 121 8 1 0 1 28 176 128 14 1 0 0 49 156 149 13 2 0 0 58 147 146 17 0 1 1 188 636 544 52 4 1 different analyses, different conclusions 131 sample items before each section to familiarize students with the directions and with the format of the items. tangible objects were used in the sample items to help students understand the tasks. however, the actual items used twodimensional representations of the figure as seen in table 1. analyses to collect validity evidence for technical adequacy and reliability, multiple analyses were proposed. research question a to answer the first sub-question – does the twoparameter item response theory model fit the spatial reasoning pilot test data with acceptable item parameters and fit statistics? – the pilot test data was analyzed using item response theory (irt). one of the benefits of using irt instead of classical test theory (ctt) is that irt models are sample invariant, meaning that the item statistics do not depend on the sample used in the pilot testing. this is particularly pertinent for the egma since it is used at a large-scale and in many different contexts. the two-parameter irt model was proposed in order to examine both item difficulty and item discrimination. irt assumptions. before applying irt models, two strong assumptions must be checked: unidimensionality and local independence (hambleton, swaminathan, & rogers, 1991). unidimensionality refers to the idea that items test a single construct. local independence refers to the idea that responses on items must only depend on a student’s ability with the latent trait (embretson & reise, 2000). local independence is calculated and checked within the irt framework. to test for unidimensionality, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted for each form of the spatial reasoning pilot test. the analyses were conducted in r using the psych package (revelle, 2015). item loadings above 0.32 were considered acceptable (tabachnick & fidell, 2001). the oblique method of rotation was used, and model fit statistics, including the tucker-lewis index (tli) and root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) were calculated. acceptable fit statistics include tli values of greater than 0.95 and rmsea values of 0.06 or less (hu & bentler, 1999). a parallel analysis was also conducted in r for each pilot test form. a parallel analysis tests if actual eigenvalues differ from random data and is considered to be superior to scree tests or the examination of eigenvalues (ledesma & valero-mora, 2007). the model fit statistics and parallel analysis plots were used to assess dimensionality. because of the exploratory factor analysis (efa) results, irt modeling was not conducted; thus, local independence was not evaluated. research question b to collect evidence for the second sub-question – is the reliability of the data generated by the spatial reasoning subtask sufficient for the intended interpretation of the subtask? – internal consistency estimates were calculated. cronbach’s alpha was calculated in r for each pilot test form. the level of reliability needed is dependent on the types of decisions being made using the data. kline suggested that all assessments have cronbach’s alpha values above 0.7, and ideal values are over 0.9 (kline, 2000). however, if the decisions being made are lowstakes, cronbach’s alpha values can be 0.7 < α < 0.9. since the decisions made using the egma data are not high-stakes (e.g., do not impact 132 global education review 5(3) student placement decisions, teacher ratings), an alpha value greater than 0.7 is desired. supplemental tests. because of the results from research question a and b, additional supplemental analyses that align most closely with ctt were conducted. the percent of correct responses (i.e., p-values) and the item-total correlations for each item were calculated. itemtotal correlations represent the correlation between the scores on an item and the overall score for the subtask. item-total correlations between 0.3-0.7 are considered acceptable (ferketich, 1991). results research question a the results from the efas and parallel analysis plots indicate that the egma spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional. figure 1 shows the parallel analysis plots for the egma spatial reasoning subtask by pilot test form. these plots indicate that there are multiple factors for each spatial reasoning pilot test form. the line representing the actual data should only separate from the simulated and resampled data in one place to represent a one factor solution. these plots indicate that there are at least three factors on each of the pilot test forms. figure 1. parallel analysis plots for the egma spatial reasoning subtask by pilot test form. different analyses, different conclusions 133 the results from the efas are summarized in table 3. one-factor, two-factor, three-factor, and four-factor solutions were conducted. with the one-factor solution for each pilot test form, only 3, 4, 3, and 6 out of 19 items, respectively, have a factor loading greater than 0.32. as the number of factors increases, the number of items with an acceptable factor loading on one of the factors also increases. the only instance when this does not occur is for form d; the three-factor solution has a greater number of items with acceptable factor loadings than the four-factor solution. additionally, model fit statistics also indicate that the one-factor solution is not optimal; the tli and the rmsea are outside of the bounds for desired model fit as suggested by hu and bentler (1999) (i.e., tli ≥ 0.95, rmsea ≥ 0.06). as additional factors are included in the model, the tli and rmsea fall within the acceptable ranges for some forms. taken together, these results indicate that the spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional. however, a clear factor solution is not present. while the four-factor solution appears to have acceptable model fit statistics, except in form c, and, in general, has the most items with acceptable factor loadings, the items do not consistently load on factors based on common characteristics or a theoretical rationale. for example, there are four types of spatial reasoning items. therefore, it might be assumed that each distinct type of item would load on a single factor. however, within the four-factor solution, items within one item type table 3 single factor exploratory factor analysis results for spatial reasoning by pilot test form form factor solution number of items number of items with a single loading greater than 0.32 number of items with all loadings less than 0.32 tli rmsea a 1 19 3 16 0.491 0.065 2 19 8 11 0.836 0.038 3 19 10 9 0.945 0.023 4 19 11 8 0.994 0.012 b 1 19 4 15 0.612 0.080 2 19 9 10 0.718 0.069 3 19 10 9 0.801 0.058 4 19 12 7 0.853 0.050 c 1 19 3 16 0.391 0.126 2 19 6 13 0.631 0.098 3 19 8 11 0.787 0.075 4 19 8 11 0.808 0.071 d 1 19 6 13 0.346 0.107 2 19 12 7 0.674 0.076 3 19 16 3 0.821 0.056 4 19 14 5 0.888 0.045 134 global education review 5(3) load on different factors, and the factors include items from multiple item types. for example, within the four-factor solution for form d, one of the factors includes three-dimensional spatial visualization, two-dimensional spatial visualization, and two-dimensional spatial structuring items. one of the other factors also includes items from all of these item types. from a different perspective, the two-dimensional spatial visualization items, for example, have acceptable loadings on three different factors. therefore, while the four-factor solution has acceptable model fit statistics for most forms and the greatest number of items with acceptable factor loadings, a clear theoretical rationale does not support this factor structure. therefore, since these results indicate that the spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional, irt analyses were not conducted since unidimensionality is a critical assumption for irt modeling. research question 2b the internal consistency statistic, cronbach’s alpha, for each spatial reasoning pilot test form can be seen in table 4; these values range from 0.25-0.61. none of these values indicate sufficient internal consistency (α > 0.7). supplemental tests because of the results from research questions a and b, p-values and item-total correlations were calculated to investigate these items further and can be seen in table 5. table 4 cronbach’s alpha by spatial reasoning pilot test form form internal consistency form a 0.25 form b 0.35 form c 0.17 form d 0.61 table 5 percent correct and item-total correlations for egma spatial reasoning items percent correct mean (sd) item-total correlation mean (sd) minimum maximum all items 73% (24%) 0.30 (0.15) -0.26 0.59 3d spatial visualization 79% (22%) 0.29 (0.15) 0.05 0.59 2d spatial visualization 55% (24%) 0.23 (0.19) -0.26 0.45 3d spatial structuring 75% (21%) 0.38 (0.10) 0.17 0.51 2d spatial structuring 86% (15%) 0.30 (0.12) 0.01 0.54 different analyses, different conclusions 135 the percent correct values are very typical of mathematics assessments, with some items being answered correctly more and less often. the mean item-total correlations waver between traditionally acceptable (i.e., > 0.30) and unacceptable values (i.e., < 0.30). the standard deviations of the item-total correlations are also indicative of a wide range of values. many items were in the unacceptable range for item-total correlations. discussion the results from the planned irt analyses indicated that the spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional. however, since this was surprising, additional traditional item analyses, such as calculating p-values and item-total correlations, were conducted during supplemental testing. the intended purpose of these supplemental tests was to better understand why the subtask was not unidimensional and why items were not correlating well with one another; the analyses were expanded to include methods used in ctt to allow for a comparison of the results between the two methods (i.e., irt and ctt). in fact, some of the results from the ctt analyses seemed contrary to what was expected based on the irt results. in this section, three questions will be addressed: (1) do the results from the two methods of analysis lead to different conclusions about the egma spatial reasoning subtask? (2) why is the method of item analysis critical to consider when making interpretations about results? (3) what are the implications of the results from this study? discussion question 1 do the results from the two methods of analysis lead to different conclusions about the egma spatial reasoning subtask? if examined separately, the efas conducted in preparation for irt modeling and the traditional ctt analyses conducted as supplemental analyses may lead to different conclusions. for example, the efas and parallel analysis plots indicate that the spatial reasoning forms were not unidimensional, and a clear factor structure was not found. this conclusion essentially halts irt analyses and requires a deeper examination into the items and potential refinement of the construct and/or items. however, only looking at the p-values for the items may lead users to believe that the items are performing relatively well. these interpretations are detailed in the paragraphs that follow. the results from the efas and parallel analysis plots suggest that the spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional. the parallel analysis plots and efas for the spatial reasoning pilot test forms suggest that multiple latent factors exist on the subtask, which is problematic for unidimensional irt analyses. while the four factor model included the greatest number of items with acceptable factor loadings and the most acceptable fit statistics, there is no theoretical rationale to support how the items load on the factors in this model. for example, items within one item type load on different factors. factors also include items from multiple item types. theoretically, since items within an item type are extremely similar and assess the same latent construct, they should, for the most part, load on the same factor. therefore, there is not a clear factor structure for the spatial reasoning subtask based on the efa analyses. multiple latent traits are being measured on the spatial reasoning subtask. because unidimensionality is a critical assumption for irt and the spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional, it was not possible to continue with the irt analyses. taken together, these results do not provide 136 global education review 5(3) validity evidence for the technical adequacy and reliability assumption. however, many of the traditional ctt statistics, such as p-values and item-total correlations (see table 5), were in the typical range of acceptable values. except for the twodimensional spatial visualization items, all other item types had mean p-values greater than 70%. if a user just examined p-values of items, many of which were greater than 90%, it could appear that students understand and perform relatively well on the spatial reasoning items. this conclusion may be supported by the item-total correlations. the mean item-total correlations were all slightly above or below the acceptable value of 0.30. many were above the acceptable cut-off and many were below. however, as noted in table 4, the internal consistency estimates ranged from 0.17 to 0.61, indicating poor internal consistency. the internal consistency estimates, which are typically computed within a ctt framework, were not in the acceptable range and support the conclusion from the efa analyses that the spatial reasoning subtask assesses more than one latent construct. while both irt and ctt analyses on the whole are not indicative of technical adequacy and reliability, if certain analyses were examined in isolation, different, albeit unfounded, interpretations may exist. discussion question 2 why is the method of item analysis critical to consider when making interpretations about results? the method of item analysis impacts the interpretations that can be made using the results. while many differences exist between classical test theory (ctt) and item response theory (irt), one primary difference is that ctt is sample-dependent and item-dependent. the item difficulty estimates (i.e., p-value), item discrimination estimates (i.e., item-total correlation), and ability estimates (i.e., raw total scores or percent correct) are all dependent on the sample of students who took the items and the items on the assessment. in contrast, item response theory (irt) is sampleand itemindependent. the ability estimates and item parameters (e.g., b-parameters) are not dependent on the students taking the test or on the items chosen for the test. with irt, students’ ability estimates can be compared even if students took different items on an assessment. irt analyses do require a significantly larger sample size than ctt analyses, which can be a hindrance to using irt. to illustrate the importance of considering sample and item independence when making interpretations, examine table 6, which shows the average percent correct for students for each form, a traditional ctt scoring statistic. it appears that students performed better on form d than the other forms. however, it is impossible to understand the differences between these scores. for example, if all forms had an equivalent number of lowerand higherability students, the items on form a may have been more difficult than the items on form d, as it might appear. however, if the sample for form d was inadvertently skewed toward lowerability students, the items on form d could have been even much easier than the items on other forms (since the students taking form d received higher scores). similarly, if the sample for form d was inadvertently skewed toward higher-ability students, the items on form d may actually be much harder than those on the other forms, even though it may not appear that way. using the ctt method of scoring, comparisons cannot be made between forms without considering the sample and the items on the test. different analyses, different conclusions 137 table 6 average student score by spatial reasoning pilot test form form average student score – percent correct (sd) form a 70% (10%) form b 73% (10%) form c 75% (9%) form d 76% (13%) because ctt is sample and item dependent, irt is a more appropriate method to analyze the pilot test data and to build a final spatial reasoning form, especially since the egma is used widely and with many different populations. if ctt statistics were used to create the final form for spatial reasoning by choosing items from the four pilot test forms, the final form may perform very differently in the field than expected due to the fact that the pilot test statistics were based on a very specific pilot test sample. for example, a form could be constructed to have an average item difficulty of 0.70 and an average item-total correlation of 0.35. however, once the sample of students changes, those estimates could vary greatly, impacting the interpretations and usability of the results. because the egma is used widely around the world, irt is the preferred method of analysis since irt estimates are not dependent on the sample or the items on the assessment. however, since irt has strong assumptions, including unidimensionality, that may be difficult to meet, irt is not always used in the field. this may lead to using ctt statistics and running into interpretation challenges as illustrated above. discussion question 3 what are the implications of the results from this study? one major implication from this study is that since the egma spatial reasoning subtask is not unidimensional, a single score should not be used to describe students’ performance on this subtask. because the internal consistency estimates and the efa analyses suggest that the subtask is assessing multiple constructs, using a single score may be inappropriate. it may be more appropriate to separate the current spatial reasoning subtask into unique subtasks in order to report subscores for the different dimensions assessed. however, since a clear, theoretically driven factor model was not found for the spatial reasoning subtask, additional research should be conducted to investigate how to separate the items into subtasks. one possibility would be to include a subtask and subscore for each spatial reasoning item type: three-dimensional spatial visualization, two-dimensional spatial visualization, three-dimensional spatial structuring, and two-dimensional spatial structuring. since the items within an item type are theoretically similar and were written to assess the same latent trait, subtasks created using these item types theoretically should be unidimensional. preliminary efa results indicate that splitting the spatial reasoning subtask into subtasks based on item type may be promising for further development. table 7 shows the efa results for a one factor solution when each item type is treated as a separate 138 global education review 5(3) subtask. the three-dimensional and twodimensional spatial structuring tasks appear to be mostly unidimensional and have no items with negative factor loadings. many of the fit statistics for the spatial structuring tasks are in the acceptable range. the three-dimensional and two-dimensional spatial visualization tasks, however, have items with negative loadings, and most fit statistics are outside of the acceptable range. while these results indicate that separating the spatial reasoning subtask into subtasks by item type may be promising, not all items are performing as intended and development should continue in order to improve the items. another major implication from these results is that further research is needed in order to understand why the items did not correlate well with one another. a first step to this research may be to re-examine comments from the expert review to understand potential factors that may have impacted item performance. for example, while the expert review revealed that the experts rated the spatial reasoning items as age-appropriate and representative and relevant to the construct of spatial reasoning, points were raised about graphics and language that could be contributing to the suboptimal performance of the items; these points should be addressed in table 7 single factor exploratory factor analysis results for spatial reasoning by item type item type form number of items number of items with a factor loading greater than 0.32 number of items with negative factor loadings tli rmsea 3d spatial visualization a 5 2 2 0.855 0.059 b 5 2 0 0.409 0.120 c 5 2 1 0.282 0.183 d 5 2 0 0.243 0.190 2d spatial visualization a 5 3 1 0.906 0.054 b 5 3 2 0.933 0.103 c 5 2 2 0.998 0.018 d 5 2 2 0.915 0.081 3d spatial structuring a 5 5 0 0.990 0.022 b 5 2 0 0.170 0.138 c 5 3 0 0.625 0.161 d 5 3 0 0.952 0.036 2d spatial structuring a 4 2 0 1.117 0.000 b 4 3 0 1.000 0.005 c 4 4 0 1.009 0.000 d 4 3 0 0.823 0.076 different analyses, different conclusions 139 future item development efforts. first, additional research should be conducted to determine the best graphics to use to assess students’ spatial visualization and structuring abilities. the experts suggested that students may have difficulty determining if hidden cubes or squares were present in the threedimensional and two-dimensional spatial structuring items. currently, students may not believe that hidden cubes are necessary to the structural integrity of a figure or that rows of squares must be complete. referencing previous research on spatial structuring and conducting cognitive interviews may provide insight into how to improve the graphics to prevent confusion about hidden cubes or squares. for example, the three-dimensional spatial structuring tasks developed for a research study by battista and clements (1996) involved complete rectangular prisms, which must have the same number of cubes on each layer. if students are told that the figure must be a rectangular prism, they should recognize that hidden cubes are necessary for the structural integrity of the prism. if the student does not account for hidden cubes, his/her response is based on a misconception, not confusion caused by the graphic. similarly, the two-dimensional spatial structuring graphics (see figure 4) used in a research study by battista et al. (1998) are complete rectangles, which must have the same number of squares per row. again, if students are told that the figure must be a rectangle, there is less ambiguity about the possibility of hidden squares. currently, the spatial structuring items on the spatial reasoning subtask utilize irregular figures. the shading of the graphics should also be examined in order to improve the items. an expert reviewer noted that the shading of the figures, particularly for the three-dimensional spatial visualization items, may cause confusion. the shading of a figure does not remain the same after a rotation. students may consider the shading of faces when determining whether or not the figures are the same. additionally, future research is needed to determine the most appropriate and clear instructions for the spatial visualization items. the language of these items should be clarified to prevent confusion about what constitutes figures as being the “same.” an expert reviewer suggested modifying the item prompt from “please tell me if these objects are the same or not the same” to “if you could hold one of these structures in one hand and one in the other, are there positions in which they would look exactly alike?” an additional suggestion was, “if you could move these structures any way you want, is there a way that you could make them look exactly alike in all ways?” student interviews could assist in determining how to best modify the item prompt to maximize clarity and prevent confusion. after determining how to proceed with possible subscores and refining and developing additional items based on expert feedback and further research, the items should be pilot tested again. then, the technical adequacy of the measures and the reliability of the ability estimates can be re-examined. conclusion the purpose of this paper was two-fold: 1) to present information on the egma spatial reasoning subtask and the results from pilot testing the subtask in jordan, and 2) to discuss how differences in item analysis techniques may lead to different validity conclusions. this study collected evidence to investigate one primary and two secondary research questions: is the spatial reasoning subtask a technically adequate measure that reliably estimates students’ spatial reasoning abilities? a) does the two-parameter item response theory model fit the spatial reasoning pilot test data with acceptable item parameters and fit statistics? b) is the reliability of the data generated by the 140 global education review 5(3) spatial reasoning subtask sufficient for the intended interpretation of the subtask? overall, the evidence collected to support the assumption that the spatial reasoning subtask is an accurate measure that reliably estimates students’ spatial reasoning abilities suggests that future research and refinement of the items is needed before making interpretations about students’ spatial reasoning abilities based on results of the spatial reasoning subtask.. efa results indicated that the pilot test forms were not unidimensional, which halted irt analyses. because of this, the two parameter model could not be used to analyze the data (research question a). the reliability of the pilot test forms was calculated and the estimates were not in the desired range (research question b). while some supplemental ctt statistics, such as item p-values, were in typical ranges, other ctt statistics, such as internal consistency, were not in acceptable ranges. additionally, because of the desired uses and interpretations of the subtask, irt is the preferred method of analysis due to it being sampleand item-independent. future research is needed to investigate the dimensionality of the subtask and ways to refine the items. beyond the egma spatial reasoning subtask, this paper also illuminates the importance of the analyses that are used to evaluate assessments and evaluate the validity of the interpretations made using assessment scores. p-values are one of the most straightforward statistics to run on assessment data; however, p-values may also be one of the most misleading statistics. as noted with the egma spatial reasoning subtask data, the pvalues were in a normal range, and many items had very high p-values. just focusing on these easy-to-calculate scores may inadvertently lead to invalid interpretations about the functionality of these items. in contrast, irt analyses indicated that the subtask was not unidimensional, which suggests that the score from the subtask cannot be used to describe a students’ ability on a single construct. analyses should be chosen based on the purpose of the assessment and must be linked to the interpretations being made. high-stakes assessments, such as those that impact grade progression or student placement, should utilize rigorous analysis techniques, such as irt, in order to collect technical adequacy and reliability evidence. assessments, such as class tests, that have lower stakes and that likely do not meet irt sample size requirements are better suited for ctt analyses. aligning item analyses with assessment purpose will ensure that the evidence collected best supports the interpretations being made. author note acknowledgements: i would like to thank rti international for allowing me to analyze the data from the egma spatial reasoning pilot test for my dissertation, which was a basis for this manuscript. references aera, apa, & ncme. (2014). standards for educational and psychological testing. washington, dc: american psychological association. allahyar, m., & hunt, e. (2003). the assessment of spatial orientation using virtual reality techniques. international journal of testing, 3(3), 263-275. battista, m. t. (1990). spatial visualization and gender differences in high school geometry. journal for research in mathematics, 21(1), 47-60. battista, m. t., & clements, d. h. (1996). students' understanding of threedimensional rectangular arrays of cubes. journal for research in mathematics education, 27(3), 258-292. battista, m. t., clements, d. h., arnoff, j., battista, k., & van auken borrow, c. (1998). students’ spatial structuring of 2d different analyses, different conclusions 141 arrays of squares. journal for research in mathematics education, 29(5), 503-532. ben-chaim, d., lappan, g., & houang, r. t. 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(1883). inquiries into the human faculty and its development. london: macmillan. gilligan, k. a., flouri, e., & farran, e. k. (2017). the contribution of spatial ability to mathematics achievement in middle childhood. journal of experimental child psychology, 163, 107-125. hambleton, r. k., swaminathan, h., & rogers, h. j. (1991). fundamentals of item response theory. newbury park, ca: sage. hegarty, m., & kozhevnikov, m. (1999). types of visual–spatial representations and mathematical problem solving. journal of educational psychology, 91(4), 684–689. holland, p. w., & dorans, n. j. (2006). linking and equating. in r. l. brennan (ed.), educational measurement (4th ed.) (pp. 187-220). westport, ct: american council on education and praeger publishers. hu, l., & bentler, p. m. (1999). cutoff criteria for fit indexes in covariance structure analysis: conventional criteria versus new alternatives. structural equation modeling, 6(1), 1-55. international test commission. 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(2003). making connections: improving spatial abilities with engineering drawing activities. international journal of mathematics teaching and learning, january 2003. perry, l. (2016). validating interpretations about student performance from the early grade mathematics assessment relational reasoning and spatial reasoning subtasks (doctoral dissertation). retrieved from proquest dissertations and theses global. (order no. 10164141). perry, l. (2017). egma spatial reasoning and relational reasoning subtasks: content evidence. in t. a. olson & l. venenciano (eds.), proceedings of the 44th annual meeting of the research council on mathematics learning. fort worth, tx. platas, l. m., ketterlin-geller, l., brombacher, a., & sitabkhan, y. (2014). early grade mathematics assessment (egma) toolkit. research triangle park, nc: rti international. revelle, w. (2015). psych: procedures for personality and psychological research. r package. evanston, illinois: northwestern university. robinson, n. m., abbott, r. d., berninger, v. w., & busse, j. (1996). the structure of abilities in mathematically precocious young children: gender similarities and differences. journal of educational psychology, 88, 341-352. sarama, j., & clements, d. h. (2009). early childhood mathematics education research: learning trajectories for young children. new york: routledge. tabachnick, b. g., & fidell, l. s. (2001). using multivariate statistics. boston: allyn and bacon. thurstone, l. l., & thurstone, t. g. (1941). factorial studies of intelligence. psychometric monographs, 2. van garderen, d. (2006). spatial visualization, visual imagery, and mathematical problem solving of students with varying abilities. journal of learning disabilities, 39(6), 496-506. van hiele, p. m. (1986). structure and insight. a theory of mathematics education. orlando, fl: academic press, inc. van nes, f., & de lange, j. (2007). mathematics education and neurosciences: relating spatial structures to the development of spatial sense and number sense. the montana mathematics enthusiast, 4(2), 210-229. about the author lindsey perry, phd, is a research assistant professor at southern methodist university. her current research interests focus on investigating children's spatial and relational reasoning abilities, developing mathematics assessments for young children, and training educators on how to use data from assessments to make instructional decisions. teaching about world war i during its centennial 181 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2016). teaching about world war i during its centennial. [review of the book world war i for kids: a history with 21 activities by r. kent rasmussen]. global education review, 3 (4). 181-186. book review teaching about world war i during its centennial “world war i for kids: a history with 21 activities” by r. kent rasmussen by eric martone the years of 2014 to 2018 mark the 100th anniversary of world war i. while often overshadowed in history courses by world war ii, the war concluded an era and is often used as a benchmark to signal the end of the chain of events initiated by the french revolution and the beginning of the contemporary era, since it set up many of the conflicts and events that characterized the later twentieth century.1 several films, publications, and teaching resources have been released to coincide with and commemorate world war i’s centennial, including world war i for kids.2 marketed toward students ages 9 to 12 (grade levels 4 and up), the book is useful for educators seeking a supplemental source for teaching upper elementaryand lower secondary-level students about this seminal event in world history. world war i for kids begins with an introduction directing readers to pay attention to significant events, why such events happened, and how they were connected with each other. further, it directs its readers to focus on the kinds of changes the war brought to the world. the book is subsequently divided into 12 chapters, throughout which are a total of 21 learning activities. the first chapter focuses on the complex road to war and includes sidebars on the assassination of archduke franz ferdinand of austria-hungary (the event that triggered the war), prewar military alliances, and american reactions to the outbreak of war.3 the chapter’s activity directs children to make a military recruiting poster to examine how propaganda shaped the war’s early phase. understanding propaganda is significant in itself, but understanding how it occupied a crucial role in the early stages of the war is important on many levels. there was a yearning for the familiar characteristics of a glorious war in the conflict’s opening months. believing the war would end quickly, the press featured romanticized stories that idealized war. as the war continued, attempts to make sense out of a period of change and uncertainty connected events to a broader outplay within civilization. french propaganda, for example, portrayed the war as a clash between civilization and barbarism emerging from two culturally different races; france was cast as a “new 182 global education review 3 (4) roman empire,” repelling the germanic horde as in ancient history. the french were thus not seeking revenge for previous german defeats (like the franco-prussian war in 1870-1871), but rather to deliver humanity from the start of a new dark age.4 this civilization-againstbarbarism paradigm was furthered in academia and literature by writers such as pierre loti.5 such a manipulated nationalist image created a powerful alternate perception of events and the reshaping of history to suit state needs, while dehumanizing germans as the other.6 chapter two focuses on the stalemate that quickly developed on the western front and features sidebars on british nurse edith cavell, executed for helping allied soldiers escape german-occupied belgium; the unusual use of taxi cabs to shuttle soldiers to the western front during the first battle of the marne; and the 1914 christmas truce. the christmas truce of 1914—during which an unofficial ceasefire was called along the western front around christmas allowing french, german, and british soldiers to cross trenches and exchange seasonal greetings and fraternize—is among the most improbable, but true stories of the war and one that continues to inspire peace and goodwill today.7 this event warrants a greater emphasis (perhaps an activity) in a book such as this, due to its popularity as a topic for books for children and young adolescents.8 the activity in chapter two calls for children to write a poem about the war. some nationalists, like french intellectual maurice barrès, attempted to see the war as paving the way for a rebirth of vitality in french culture, which would be brought about by the solidarity and heightened fervor of wartime. such sentiments rang hollow, however, as the war trudged on and men of the younger generation came to be killed in increasingly higher numbers.9 nevertheless, many of the soldiers at the front lines sought to cope with the realities of the trenches by turning to writing, some crafting poems that have stood the test of time.10 many veterans’ poems were published after the war. these poems dealt with life in the trenches, including attempts to make sense of and reflect on the war, as well as adjusting to life afterward. however, veterans of other wars have also written poetry and such poems could be used to examine similar themes over the course of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries to explore the effects of war.11 the third chapter focuses on the horrors of trench warfare and what life was like for soldiers in the trenches. as the war dragged on, buoyant attitudes changed and european writers began to publish “fiction” like gaspard and le feu that portrayed some of the realities of trench warfare. consequently, this chapter presents a sidebar on one of the best-known world war iera novels, all quit on the western front. the chapter’s activities include making a periscope, cooking maconochie stew (a common dish at the front lines), and pressing a flower to send home from the western front. the subsequent chapter focuses on the war’s other fronts, including the fighting on the eastern front in europe and in the middle east, east asia, and africa. its activities include making a world war i scorecard of the battles won and lost in the various regions across the globe. missing in this discussion, however, is the use of colonial troops and labor in europe. colonial soldiers played key roles on the front lines in europe. however, the use of colonial soldiers was controversial and they were largely returned home after the war; the west’s colonial powers were largely not ready for becoming multiracial societies. french writers like romain rolland, for example, related france’s use of colonial labor to ancient rome’s hiring of barbarian mercenaries to quell other barbarians at its borders. such actions would ultimately result in the destruction of european teaching about world war i during its centennial 183 civilization. other frenchmen connected colonial soldiers to the germans, portraying france as fighting both external and internal “barbarians” to preserve french culture.12 the fifth chapter focuses on the weapons of the war, examining how new technologies were used for military purposes. the large number of technological innovations used and the extent of their impact on the war’s conduct make world war i unique. airplane designer anthony fokker argued that wars ultimately benefit society, for governments invest more money in technology than they do during times of peace. after the war, these new scientific advances are often converted from wartime to civilian uses, propelling society’s “modernization.” as a result, material in this chapter can be used to set up interesting discussions not only about whether technology exacerbated the war’s casualties and destruction, but also world war i’s legacies. sidebars in this chapter focus on new technologies used in warfare, including an excerpt from an american soldier’s description of barbed wire and the origin of the term “tank.” activities include a three-minute egg camouflage challenge, in which students attempt to camouflage hard-boiled eggs, and making model gas masks. chapter six focuses on the war at sea and features a sidebar on u-boats. a bitter naval race, particularly between britain and germany, had been a cause of the war, in which powerful new battleships and submarines were used to a greater extent.13 the following chapter examines the war in the air. when world war i began, few could have imagined that airplanes, a relatively new invention, would have had a crucial role in combat. however, they underwent rapid developments during the war and emerged as military weapons of the future. the chapter’s activity calls for children to make a parachute for a toy/figure. chapter eight addresses the diverse roles that animals played in the war. during world war i, animals were conscripted at home to serve military needs and others served as farm animals. however, zoo animals whose homes had been destroyed and wild animals also found their way to the trenches. the chapter includes a sidebar on sergeant stubby and rags, two dogs who served in the war, and activities that include training a dog to carry messages and writing a letter home from the western front. chapter nine explores the united states’ entry into the war. this chapter’s activities include playing a game in which children search for a convoy, learning the lyrics of the war’s most popular song (“over there”), and coining a war slogan. chapter ten examines the home fronts of the various countries in the war. its activities include writing a letter from home to a soldier in europe, examining how much sugar is in your food to explore the effects of rationing, and baking “war bread.” the next chapter examines the end of the fighting and the russian revolution, featuring sidebars on the global influenza pandemic and the american hero, sergeant york. it also includes an interesting perspective-taking activity in which children take on the role of wartime censors as they go through soldiers’ letters back home, and an activity calling for them to read a world war i-era adventure novel. the final chapter focuses on the paris peace conference and the agreements that concluded the war, as well as world war i’s broader legacies. it presents sidebars on us president woodrow wilson’s fourteen points; the last living veterans of the war; and the ongoing “iron harvest,” which refers to the still uncovered explosives buried in the ground on the western front. the paris peace conference’s agreements included the controversial german war guilt clause (in which germany had to claim 184 global education review 3 (4) sole responsibility for starting the war, contrary to historical fact); a huge war indemnity and military restrictions placed on germany; the voiding of italian claims on northern dalmatia; the recreation of poland; the creation of yugoslavia and czechoslovakia; the dissolution of the austr0-hungarian empire; new divisions of the middle east, africa, and asia; and the creation of the league of nations.14 following the war, the west experienced what seemed a return to the belle époque, with a stable currency, thriving economy, and cultural renaissance. golden ages often occur in periods of peace. world war i was falsely perceived as a war eradicating possibilities for future conflict. many countries in the west retreated into isolation, attempting to lull themselves in the world’s false hope that peace would last. veiled in this mentality, the west experienced an intellectual rebirth. one of its greatest modern cultural periods did follow one of its darkest tragedies. the cultural renaissance born after the war was not a “cultural rejuvenation” or the triumph of western culture over barbarism. it was not fostered by war’s positive experience, or the thrill of combat, but rather disillusionment and emptiness. such a cultural outpouring was the result of coping with and making sense of the war. as the war became more desperate, the more significant it seemed to perceive the war as something that could pave the way to a higher civilization, a better and more just world. the efforts and sacrifices of countless men and women were not in vain, for in some way, something positive emerged from all the death and destruction. following in this spirit, the final chapter’s activities for children include visiting a world war i memorial and designing a commemorative postage stamp. in addition to the chapters discussed above, world war i for kids includes a useful timeline of significant events, a glossary of key terms, descriptions of the key personalities of the war, websites for further exploration, a bibliography, and a list of some notable films about (or set during) the war. the films, which date from 1918 to 2011, include some recent films—like the lost battalion (2001), joyeux noël (2005), flyboys (2006), the red baron (2008), and war horse (2011)—and classic films like all quiet on the western front (1930), grand illusion (1937), sergeant york (1941), a farewell to arms (1957), lawrence of arabia (1962), and the blue max (1966).15 missing from this list of films, however, is the young indiana jones chronicles. originally a television series from lucasfilm during the early 1990s, the episodes were re-edited and released on dvd as films. the films follow the title character as he leaves high school to join the belgian army under an alias to fight in world war i. the series had him transfer to different military divisions/fronts in order to focus on different aspects of the fighting as well as the 1919 paris peace conference.16 the use of a protagonist close to the students’ ages, commonly used in historical trade fiction as a way to make social studies more engaging to younger students, makes this series an attractive option for educators. seeing history through the lens of a person roughly their own age helps to arouse in students a greater degree of connection with and empathy for the past. other notable recent omissions include films like fall of eagles (1974), the trench (1999), parade’s end (2012), and birdsong (2012); the bbc’s popular series downton abbey, in which world war i was featured prominently during its first two seasons (2010-2011); and the many films and series released to commemorate the war’s centennial.17 world war i for kids is lavishly illustrated and written in simple language, but its density makes it most suitable for middle school students. its supplements in the front and back matter help make it a valuable teaching about world war i during its centennial 185 educational tool. the book’s coverage of the many facets of the war is impressive. although some of the 21 activities included in world war i for kids would be difficult to impossible to implement in a social studies classroom, the book is overall a useful and engaging supplemental source for educators teaching about world war i. notes 1 see: eric hobsbawm, the age of extremes: a history of the world, 1914-1991 (new york: vintage, 1996); margaret macmillan, paris, 1919: six days that changed the world (new york: random house, 2002). 2 for some examples, see: karen kenney with edward lengel, everything world war i: dig in with thrilling photos and fascinating facts (washington, d.d.: national geographic kids, 2014); g.j. meyer, the world remade: america in world war i (new york: bantam, 2017); ira i. boggs with dallas e. boggs, memories of ira i. boggs: in commemoration of the world war i centennial (mustang, ok: tate, 2015); aeronaut books’ “great war aviation centennial series”; bruno cabanes, the great war and the origins of humanitarianism, 1918-1924 (new york: cambridge university press, 2014); paul edwards, world war i on film: english language releases through 2014 (jefferson, nc: mcfarland, 2016). 3 see: barbara w. tuchman, the guns of august (1962; reprint, new york: ballantine, 1994); war 1914: punishing the serbs (london: the stationary office, 1999). 4 see: michael e. nolan, “‘the eagle soars over the nightingale’: press and propaganda in france in the opening months of the great war,” in call to arms: propaganda, public opinion, and newspapers in the great war, ed. troy paddock (westport, ct: praeger, 2004); leonard v. smith, stéphane audoin-rouzeau, and annette becker, france and the great war, 1914-1918 (new york: cambridge university press, 2003), p.j. flood, france, 1914-18: public opinion and the war effort (london: macmillan, 1990); stéphane audoin-rouzeau and annette becker, le grande guerre, 1914-1918 (france: gallimard, 1998); jean-jacques becker, the great war and the french people, trans. arnold pomerans (1985; reprint, providence: berg, 1993) 5 see: michael g. lerner, “pierre loti as war reporter,” romance quarterly 46 (spring 1999).) 6 the notion of france as the “new rome” was in part a resurrection of its inheritance from charlemagne, crowned roman emperor by the pope in 800. yet germany was equally an inheritor of this legacy, for charlemagne’s empire spanned most of present-day germany as well as france. the classical comparison proved to be more prophetic than anyone knew at the time: just as the german “barbarians” overran the western roman empire in 476, germany overran france in 1940 during world war ii. 7 the numerous books on the christmas truce include: terri crocker, the christmas truce: myth, memory, and the first world war (lexington: university press of kentucky, 2015); stanley weintraub, silent night: the story of the world war i christmas truce (new york: plume, 2002); malcolm brown and shirley seaton, christmas truce: the western front december 1914 (london: pan books, 1999); phil porter’s the christmas truce (london: oberon, 2015) is a dramatization of the event. the film joyeux noël (2005) depicts the christmas truce of 1914. 8 versions for children and young adolescents include: jim murphy, truce (new york: scholastic, 2009); john hendrix, shooting at the stars (new york: harry n. abrams, 2014); john mccutcheon and henri sorensen, christmas in the trenches (atlanta: peachtree, 2006); carol anne duffy, the christmas truce (new york: picador, 2011); hilary ann robinson and martin impey, the christmas truce: the place where peace was found (leeds: strauss house, 2014); aaron shepherd and wendy edelson, christmas truce (olympia, wa: skyhook, 2014). 9 pat barker’s regeneration (1991) is a modern-day anti-war novel mocking the idea that war leads to cultural rejuvenation. set during world war i, it focuses on british poet siegfried sassoon. refusing to fight in a senseless war, he was declared “mentally unsound” and sent temporarily to a war hospital. while he survived the war, his mind was broken and his literary fire extinguished. 10 collections of world war i poetry include: george walter, ed., the penguin book of first world war poetry (new york: penguin, 2007); tim kendall, ed., poetry of the first world war: an anthology (new york: oxford university press, 2014); candace ward, ed., world war one british poets (new york: dover, 1997). 11 see: daryl wise, ed., poems by veterans (woodstock, ny: post traumatic press, 2007); tom burns et al., war and literature: looking back on 20th century armed conflicts (stuttgart: ibidem-verlag, 2014). 186 global education review 3 (4) 12 see: tyler stovall, “the color line behind the lines: racial violence in france during the great war,” american historical review 103 (june 1998). 13 see: robert k. massie, dreadnaught: britain, germany, and the coming of the great war (new york: random house, 1991); robert k. massie, castles of steel: britain, germany, and the winning of the great war (new york: random house, 2003). 14 various territories had been disputed. for example, alsace-lorraine, then under german control, became the subject of french and german propaganda. it had previously belonged to france and contained a mixed franco-german population. the american and british governments favored a plebiscite to determine which country the disputed territory should join, but its return had become a french war goal. french prime minister briand developed a commission to propose clear geo-political objectives concerning the franco-german border and formulate arguments to convince the world that france was not seeking territorial aggrandizement, but rather a fair rearrangement of its national space. this commission’s activities indicate clearly how intellectuals could reshape history for use as state propaganda under the guise of legitimate facts. see: michael heffernan, “history, geography, and the french national space: the question of alsace-lorraine, 1914-1918.” space & polity 5, no. 1 (2001); michael e. nolan, the inverted mirror: mythologizing the enemy in france and germany, 1898-1914 (new york: berghahn, 2005) 15 french director jean renoir’s seminal grand illusion (1937), in particular, reacts against the notion of war as a clash between civilization and barbarism emerging from two culturally different races discussed earlier in this review. rather, the film supports the idea of a common european civilization and joint cooperation. yet differences and loyalties, while not based on culture, revolve around one’s social class. for example, members of the elite, regardless of being either french or german, share a common background and degree of loyalty. consequently, class boundaries are affirmed rather than eliminated. 16 the adventures of young indiana jones: volume one— the early years (2007) includes the world war i-related films “spring break adventure” and “love's sweet song”; the adventures of young indiana jones: volume two—the war years (2007) includes the world war i-related films “trenches of hell,” “demons of deception,” “phantom train of doom,” “oganga, the giver and taker of life,” “attack of the hawkmen,” “adventures in the secret service,” “espionage escapades,” and “daredevils of the desert”; the adventures of young indiana jones: volume three—the years of change (2008) includes the world war i-related films “tales of innocence,” “masks of evil,” “treasure of the peacock’s eye,” and “winds of change.” the dvds also contain much supplemental information on the historical events and key figures indiana jones meets along the way, including scores of documentaries and archival footage. 17 examples include commemorative documentaries; television films and mini-series like battleground (2013), the wipers times (2013), a promise (2013), our world war (2014), 37 days (2014), the passing bells (2014), testament of youth (2014), the silent mountain (2014), anzac girls (2014), the crimson field (2014), gallipoli (2015), the water diviner (2014), when we go to war (2015), batalon (2015), cider with rosie (2015), the scent of mandarin (2015); and the superhero film, wonder woman (2017), which is set amidst world war i. “world war i for kids: a history with 21 activities.” by r. kent rasmussen. chicago: chicago review press, 2014. isbn: 978-1613745564 about the author r. kent rasmussen is the author and editor of more than 20 books, including the award-winning the united states at war and many books on mark twain. about the reviewer eric martone is associate professor of history and social studies education and chair of the department of secondary education at mercy college in new york. he completed his doctorate in history at stony brook university. his most recent book is italian americans: the history and culture of a people (2017). global perspective on experiential learning the challenge of providing gifted education 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dole, sharon & bloom, lisa (2017). the challenge of providing gifted education. global education review, 4 (1). 1-3. the challenge of providing gifted education sharon dole western carolina university lisa bloom western carolina university welcome to this special issue of global education review that explores gifted education. although there is a lack of universal consensus on a definition of giftedness there is some agreement that giftedness involves multiple qualities, not just intellectual ones. gifted education programs vary both among and within countries and who is served in these programs depends largely on the definitions used. the topics explored in this issue include perceptions and policies of gifted education in cultures and countries across the globe; the presumed dichotomy of equity and excellence in countries as different in ideologies as the united states and china; underrepresentation of culturally diverse students, a problem that has plagued the field for decades; gifted education in rural communities; and using a virtual environment for students to pose and share mathematical problems. in the first article, global dimensions of gifted and talented education: the influence of national perceptions on policies and practices, brian l. heuser, ke wang, and salman shahid compare perceptions and policies of giftedness and gifted and talented programs in diverse cultures and countries. in doing so, they discovered very different constructs of intelligence and ability. in their article, the authors make recommendations that address the challenges of gifted education globally; in particular the concept that gifted education increases social inequity. elissa brown and leigh wishney continue the discussion of inequity in their article, equity and excellence: political forces in the education of gifted students in the united states and abroad. the authors present a history of the ambivalence demonstrated by the united states toward gifted education and compare it with a sample of countries including south korea, singapore, england, and finland. they conclude with a discussion of how the needs of gifted students have not been met because of the way excellence and equity have been interpreted. exploring gifted education in the sociocultural context of china, tian fu also addresses equity and excellence in wandering in the shadow of egalitarianism and equity: a social and cultural explanation to the underdeveloped education in china. the author describes how the long traditions of egalitarianism and socialism have hindered the development of gifted education in china. fu concludes the article with recommendations on how gifted education should be framed in china and in other countries with similar ideologies. ______________________________ corresponding author: sharon dole, western carolina university, killian 203c2 cullowhee, nc 28723 email: dole@email.wcu.edu 2 global education review 4(1) in ignorance or indifference? seeking excellence and equity for under-represented students of color in gifted education, wright, ford and young discuss the lack of access to gifted education, advanced placement courses and international baccalaureate for students of color, especially those who are african american or hispanic. the authors present data and describe factors commonly associated with underrepresentation such as deficit thinking. they make a compelling argument that the underrepresentation of students of color in programs for gifted students is the result of ignorance and indifference. they argue that ignorance can change with a desire to become knowledgeable yet is often used as a disguise for apathy, a perhaps more serious barrier when it comes to access issues. the authors call for increased accountability and intentional efforts to desegregate programs for gifted students and make recommendations for addressing ignorance and indifference, concepts that are paramount to solving the problem of underrepresentation of gifted learners of color and equity of access to appropriate programs. in responding to the challenges of gifted education in rural communities, anzano and callahan describe issues of under identification of students from rural areas and their access to gifted programming. these authors describe an alternative process for identifying gifted students in rural areas that involved comparing students to local rather than national norms. they implemented a curriculum model that integrated place-based pedagogy and evidencebased practices and intervened to address both stereotype threat and mindset amongst participants. the authors present results of a year and half pilot using the identification process and curriculum model that helped increase the pool of students identified as gifted and engaged teachers in implementing the curriculum. finally, in differentiating instruction using a virtual environment: a study of mathematical problem posing among gifted and talented learners, manuel and freiman discuss the challenge of meeting the needs of students who are mathematically gifted citing the lack of resources commonly associated with public schools. they describe an innovative project designed to provide enrichment to mathematically gifted students in the area of problem generation and problem solving. their data indicate that students appreciated the opportunity for challenge. the authors make recommendations for providing enrichment in the area of math as well as implications for future research in the area of problem solving. the common thread among the articles in this edition of global education review seems to be the problems that have plagued the field of gifted education from the start, how to identify and serve students who are gifted in ways that are not only equitable but also provide added benefit to children and youth. these issues are compounded in schools with tight budgets and/or geographic distance from resources where resource pooling is difficult. innovative ways of pooling resources with technology as described by manuel and freiman and building the capacity of teachers as described by anzano and callahan help address the issue of providing value added programs. perhaps the more challenging predicament is one of equity and access. as we see from the papers in this issue, equity and access are double sided. on one side, we must consider how students are identified in order to be inclusive of children and youth with gifts and talents from underrepresented groups as wright, ford and young argue. on the other side is the perception amongst some that providing resources for children and youth who are gifted creates elitism and inequity as three papers in this issue suggest (heuser, wang & shahid; brown & wishney; and fu). these problems the challenge of providing gifted education 3 present a call to action for the field of gifted education to not only increase awareness and address underrepresentation head on but to address inaccurate perceptions of what providing gifted education programs means for children and youth who might otherwise succumb to underachievement and the problems associated with lack of challenge. about the author(s) sharon dole, phd, is professor and gifted education program coordinator in the school of teaching and learning at western carolina university. she completed her phd at the university of georgia in special education with concentrations in gifted education and learning disabilities. her research interests include twice exceptional students, social/emotional problems of adolescents, creativity, problem-based and project-based learning, teaching civility and compassion, and online teaching and learning. lisa bloom, edd, is the jay m. robinson professor of instructional technology at western carolina university. she completed her ed. d. in education at west virginia university. her research interests include gifted education, problem based learning, creativity, promoting social and emotional well being of children and youth and instructional technology. 20 global education review 5(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: zhou, kai (2018). what cognitive neuroscience tells us about creativity education: a literature review. global education review, 5 (1), 20-34. what cognitive neuroscience tells us about creativity education: a literature review kai zhou state university of new york at albany abstract recently, an interest in creativity education has increased globally. cognitive neuroscience research of creativity has provided possible implications for education, yet few literary reviews that bridge the brain and education studies have been published. this article first introduces the definitions and behavioral measures of creativity from cognitive neuroscientists’ perspectives and provides a brief overview on the brain regions and neural studies on creativity-related cognitive processes. second, the article examines neuroscience studies on the relationship between creativity and intelligence and discusses the nature side of creativity. third, a comprehensive review of cognitive neuroscience studies on activities that may trigger new creativity thinking is provided, followed by a discussion on the nurture side of creativity-more specifically--how these findings inform creativity education. supportive evidence from research in cognitive psychology and education are also presented. then the article discusses the policy implications of the findings from the literature review as they pertain to creativity skills development in formal education and training. keywords creativity, nature and nurture, neuroscience, skills, educational policy introduction a growing body of literature has emerged on the influence of creativity on individual life and social economic outcomes. research has shown that creativity is rewarded with wage premium (gabe, colby, & bell, 2007), positive affect at work (tavares, 2016), as well as health and wellbeing (greaves, 2006). policy-makers also have noted the critical role of creative workforce plays in transforming industrial economies to technology-driven knowledge economies. new technology-based companies and innovative start-up businesses which depend heavily on creative and skilled workers have a unique share in the economy, producing new jobs and contributing to economic growth of a country (reynolds, 2010). the number of creative entrepreneurs who started small and mediumsized enterprises has grown rapidly, accounting for more than 10% of the labor market workforce in many countries (fairlie & holleran, 2012). florida, mellander, & stolarick (2008) found that the creative class, who represent about 30 percent of the u.s. ____________________________ corresponding author: kai zhou, department of educational policy and leadership, state university of new york at albany, 1400 washington avenue, albany, ny 12222. email: kzhou2@albany.edu neuroscience and creativity education 21 workforce, has significant positive association with regional labor productivity. given the importance of creativity in determining individual and social outcomes, the interests in integrating creativity and innovation development into the education system have been increasing (sawyer, 2006). however, empirical studies have shown that creativity has little or no association with academic achievement (e.g., ai, 1999; balgiu & adîr, 2014). it is therefore possible to say that either the creativity is not accurately captured by behavioral assessments that have been used by psychologists or creativity has not been properly measured by standardized achievement tests in schools. the uncertainty may hinder researchers, educators and policy makers from drawing out convincing educational policy implications from empirical work. only recently, technology opened a door to more direct and comprehensive research on creativity. cognitive neuroscience has emerged as an important approach that allows researchers to understand what happens inside the brain when performing creative tasks. the development of neuroscience may reshape the discussion on creativity education. this paper is organized into four sections to provide an up-to-date review of cognitive and neuroscience research on creativity and discuss the policy implications for creativity education. the first section contains a brief review on the definitions and cognitive measures of creativity, as well as the brain regions and structures in creative cognition processes. the second section updates research findings on the relationship between creativity and intelligence and discusses the heritability of creativity. the third section focuses on the nurture side of creativity and presents neuroscientific evidence on activities that may trigger new creativity thinking. the final section discusses the use of neuroscientific research for policy implications as they pertain to creativity skills development in formal education and training. cognitive neuroscience research in creativity creativity is “the ability to produce work that is both novel (i.e., original, unexpected) and appropriate (i.e., useful, adaptive concerning task constraints)” (sternberg & lubart, 1999, p. 3). boden (2004) classifies creativity into three types: combinational, exploratory or transformational based on the psychological processing features involved in innovative thinking. combinational creativity involves combining familiar things and ideas in a surprising way. an example can be creating a new flavored cake by putting in unexpected ingredients. exploratory creativity is realized by generating new ideas or artifacts within an existing conceptual space based on the established culturally-accepted rules and conventional style of thinking (boden, 2013, p. 6). improving the equipment efficiency by using better materials and creating new music are examples. transformational creativity entails the creation of shocking things and ideas that were “impossible” before, which are beyond the existing conceptual space or specific stylistic limits. for example, the pioneering idea that the earth orbits the sun instead of the sun going around the earth was the result of disruptive creativity in ancient times. exploratory and transformational creativity are both defined within a certain sociocultural space; ideas or artifacts are produced before they are recognized as “creative”. combinational, exploratory and transformational creativity can either appear in one innovative idea or artifact at the same time or separately. cognitive neuroscience depends heavily on analyses of associative pathways and relevance in human brain system during creative behaviors. thus, cognitive 22 global education review 5(1) psychologists and neuroscientists can carefully examine only combinational creativity so far. because of the sociocultural features, exploratory and transformational creativity can only be explained through post hoc testing after the work is valued as exploratory or transformational creative (boden, 2013). exploratory or transformational creativity is far from being stimulable and their occurrence is rare. though cognitive neuroscience studies can compare creative and non-creative individuals on their brain structure or the way of cognitive processing, the studies do not draw any causal conclusion on what factors affect exploratory and transformational creativity. since the value of exploratory and transformational creativity has been more valued by the society, the lack of relevant neuroscience evidence on these two types of creativity makes it challenging to translate the brain findings into educational practice, not to mention initiating large-scale policy changes. yet, the neuroscience approach has made some great contributions to the understanding of combinational creativity processes (sawyer, 2012), providing a good start for crossdisciplinary discussions. neuroscientists use cognitive behavioral assessment of combinational creativity frequently in their studies to identify brain changes while people are engaged in cognitive tasks. the goal is to explain the combinational creativity thinking in a neurobiological way. on the cognitive behavioral level, creativity can be measured by a number of indicators: divergent thinking (mccrae, 1987; runco & acar, 2012), represented by originality (beghetto, 2010); ideational fluency (snyder, mitchell, bossomaier, & pallier, 2004); cognitive flexibility (ghacibeh, shenker, shenal, uthman, & heilman, 2006) and elaboration (takeuchi et al., 2011); convergent thinking in making unique associations and solving insight problems (arden, chavez, grazioplene, & jung, 2010; dietrich & kanso, 2010); and vivid imagination (karwowski, jankowska, & szwajkowski, 2017; roberts et al., 2017). various standardized behavioral assessments on creativity have been developed since the 1950s, among which the most widely used tests include the torrance test of creative thinking (ttct) (torrance, 1972), alternative uses tasks (guilford, 1967), remote associates test (mednick, 1962, 1971), and creative functioning test (smith & carlsson, 1987). in a cognitive neuroscience experiment, researchers adopt a cognitive assessment and ask participants to perform a series of simple tasks. while a person is engaged in a task, brain activities are captured to show what’s happening in the mind. neuroscientists employ electroencephalography (eeg), functional magnetic resonance imaging (fmri), and positron emission tomography (pet) to study brain regions and neurons and explore the neural mechanisms underlying combinational creative thinking (gabora & ranjan, 2013). these technologies sometimes are applied together to provide more thorough understanding of the brain activities associated with cognitive functioning of creativity. the theory of left-brain or right-brain dominance has been widely accepted by educators and policy makers. the right brain has been traditionally regarded as the prime organ that controls creativity and innovation. a number of right-brain training programs that involve art, music and drama, in particular, have been carried out to help young children “stimulate” right brain areas and “strengthen” their creativity-thinking functions. nevertheless, no evidence from cognitive neuroscience has been found that a particular brain area for creativity exists (sawyer, 2012). creativity involves the whole brain. the right and the left hemispheres play a critical but disparate role at different stages of the creative process, and collaborate in different creative tasks, the same as they do for other cognitive neuroscience and creativity education 23 function (sawyer, 2012). when a person engages in creative thinking, the left hemisphere of the brain, which is dominant for analytic and verbal processes, works together with the right hemisphere, which is associated with natural perceptual, whole-pattern, spatial processes (kaufman, kornilov, bristol, tan, & grigorenko, 2010). though some studies have shown that the right and left hemispheres have closer communication and more dynamic collaboration during creativity activities (lezak, 2012, p. 69; whitman, holcomb, & zanes, 2010), creativity results from ordinary mental processes. neural circuits cobrainmbine information in both creative and non-creative way (dietrich, 2004). the prefrontal cortex which is known for its “executive” functions in integrating complex information has been shown to be the central structure to enable higher-order processing, including but not limited to innovative thinking (dietrich, 2004). the prefrontal cortex navigates attention, stores working memory and supports temporal integration (funahashi & andreau, 2013; fuster, 2001). already highly processed information from different sensory modalities is further screened and aggregated for higher cognitive functions, such as flexibility of cognitive control (rougier, noelle, braver, cohen, & o’reilly, 2005), reflective processing (van der meer, costafreda, aleman, & david, 2010), and reasoning (krawczyk, 2012) which are associated with creative thinking. the prefrontal cortex intentionally chooses what information an individual attends to and preserves the selected contents for a period that allows creativity to happen. meanwhile, dietrich (2004) suggested that the prefrontal cortex also acts like a search engine that can retrieve relevant elements from long-term memory stored in the temporal, occipital and parietal lobes (top) area to form new recombinations. brain study scientists have found that individuals who are highly creative are biologically different from those with low creativity. carlsson, wendt, & risberg (2000) revealed that individuals who performed very well on the guilford’s alternate uses creativity test tended to have higher regional blood flow in both the left and right frontal lobes than those who got very low scores, which implied a positive association between activation of frontal cortex and creativity. this positive correlation was also confirmed by gibson, folley, & park (2009) using a near-infrared spectroscopy (nirs) method. the researchers compared creativity and frontal cortical activity between a group of trained creative musicians and a demographically matched control group. the results indicated that creative individuals experienced greater bilateral frontal activity than noncreative individuals while performing divergent thinking. jung et al. (2009) found that the cortical thickness in a region within the lingual gyrus and left lateral orbitofrontal area was negatively linked to creativity, whereas higher cortical thickness in the right posterior cingulate and right angular gyrus was associated with higher scores on a creativity test. scientists also found positive associations between regional gray matter volume (rgmv) and several creativity indicators, such as ideational fluency, combinational fluency, originality, and cognitive flexibility in the precuneus (fink et al., 2014; jauk, neubauer, dunst, fink, & benedek, 2015; kühn et al., 2014; takeuchi et al., 2010). these neuroscientific findings provided evidence that creativity thinking ability is associated with brain structures. however, a snapshot of the differences between creative and non-creative individuals is not sufficient to get an insight of whether highly creative individuals were born with these different brain structures or developed them later in life through education and training. longitudinal investigations are 24 global education review 5(1) needed in the future to provide implications for creativity education and training. nature or nurture? there has long been an argument on whether creativity is a heritable trait or determined by the environment, and to what extent education can foster creativity ability. some researchers claimed that creativity is a subcategory of intelligence (e.g., guilford & christensen, 1973) which has been found to have genetic origin (e.g., posthuma et al., 2002). however, findings on the relationship between creativity and intelligence have been mixed. some behavioral studies have shown that creative individuals are more likely to perform well on general intelligence tests (e.g., barron & harrington, 1981, p. 445). others have found that intelligence is not a good predictor of creativity (e.g., hocevar, 1980; subotnik, karp, & morgan, 1989). individuals who score high in the intelligence quotient (iq) are not noticeably creative (terman & oden, 1959). today, most researchers agree that creativity and intelligence are associated up to a certain point—around an average iq of 120, while correlations in the higher iq is negligible (cho, nijenhuis, vianen, kim, & lee, 2010; sligh, conners, & roskos-ewoldsen, 2005). the current neuroscience literature on intelligence and creativity has further provided brain imaging evidence that intelligence lays genetic foundation for the occurrence of creative processes but is not sufficient to ensure the complex brain to exhibit creativity (haier & jung, 2008). basically, most neuroscientists supported the claims that genetically reflected intelligence is largely responsible for the neural efficiency in the general cognitive functions (fink, benedek, grabner, staudt, & neubauer, 2007; grabner, fink, stipacek, neuper, & neubauer, 2004; neubauer, grabner, freudenthaler, beckmann, & guthke, 2004), whereas environmental factors are mostly responsible for creative quality and output (haier & jung, 2008; sawyer, 2012). since 1870s, twin studies have been used as one of the best approaches to evaluate the heritability of creative abilities. most twin studies based on behavioral cognitive approach failed to reveal convincing evidence of a genetic basis for creativity (sawyer, 2012, p. 181). for example, reznikoff, domino, bridges, & honeyman (1973) administered ten creativity tests to 117 pairs of adolescent twins. the subjects were divided into four groups—28 pairs of identical males, 35 pairs of identical females, 19 pairs of fraternal males and 35 pairs of fraternal females. the researchers didn’t find proof of a genetic component in creative abilities. however, emerging evidence from brain imaging has told a different story. schmitt et al. (2014) conducted a longitudinal study collecting 1,748 anatomic mri scans from 792 healthy twins and siblings. their findings indicated that both genetic and environmental factors had significant contributions to the variance in cortical thickness change in prefrontal cortex, which has been shown to be related to creative activities (jung et al., 2009). some genetic analyses of creativity released recently also supported the existence of the nature side of creativity. reuter, roth, holve, & hennig (2006) proposed the first candidate gene for creativity through a test on 92 healthy caucasian individuals while controlling for intelligence. they found that d2 dopamine receptor (drd2) gene and tryptophane hydroxylase (tph1) gene were associated with total creativity, accounting for 9% of the variance. runco et al., (2011) replicated and extended the analyses to include a test on five candidate genes. they found that ideational fluency scores were significantly related to dopamine transporter (dat), catechol-o-methyltransferase (comt), dopamine receptor d4 (drd4), and tryptophane hydroxylase (tph1). volf, neuroscience and creativity education 25 kulikov, bortsov, & popova (2009) identified the 5-httlpr polymorphism of the neurotransmitter serotonin transporter gene (5 htt) to be associated significantly with divergent thinking. other researchers have also found the genetic basis of creativity-related cognitive factors (e.g., kéri, 2009; smalley, loo, yang, & cantor, 2005). however, though studies have shown a clear genetic basis for some creativity cognitive components, the extent to which the genes contribute to the manifestation of individuals’ creativity is not within sight (runco et al., 2011). the cognitive neuroscience research is still in its infancy. how intelligence and creativity are distinctly or commonly expressed in the brain structures and regions, organization, and networks has not yet been thoroughly researched. the genetic contributions to creativity need further exploration through cross-disciplinary efforts, combining neuroscience with psychology, genetics, molecular biology and others. it’s now generally accepted that all creative activities have a genetic basis. but creativity is a complex phenomenon that involves a large number of behavioral characteristics (treffinger, 2009) and different cognitive processes in various brain regions and structures (sawyer, 2012), each of which have interactions with the environment, the inheritability of creativity is limited to some extent (barbot, tan, & grigorenko, 2013). thus, we have good reasons to argue that it’s possible to foster creativity from a variety of aspects through quality educational practices. findings from brain studies in the near future may allow educators to target those underlying components of creativity and focus effort to achieve creativity education in school (vartanian, 2013). neuroscience and creativity education a substantial amount of evidence has accumulated to show the possibility of enhancing creativity via targeted cognitive education and trainings, most of which came from the analyses of behavioral data (scott, leritz, & mumford, 2004; tsai, 2013). diversifying experiences (ritter et al., 2012), episodic memory activation (madore, addis, & schacter, 2015; madore, jing, & schacter, 2016), improvisation activities (sawyer, 2006; sowden, clements, redlich, & lewis, 2015) and puzzle based open-ended tasks (ramaraj & nagammal, 2017) are examples of creativity training that have been shown to be effective based on behavioral creativity assessments. but behavioral observations in creativity are limited in capturing the exact cognitive processing changes related to educational practices. cognitive neuroscience research that examines both behavioral changes and how these changes correspond to the structural and functional changes in the brain is a powerful approach to provide insights about the intervention effectiveness in education. structural and functional plasticity in the brain in correlation with behavioral changes from education and training has been well documented (vartanian, 2013). for example, hyde et al. (2009) found significant changes in brain structures that are related to musically relevant motor and auditory skills after 15 months of music training. rueda, rothbart, mccandliss, saccomanno, & posner (2005) investigated the efficiency of attentional control training in neural network which involves the anterior cingulate in addition to lateral prefrontal areas. the researchers compared individuals with 5 days training and individuals with different types of no training and recorded the event-related potentials from the scalp during attention network test performance. 26 global education review 5(1) they found that the attentional mechanisms and their neural activities in the brain were malleable through intervention. the training group had significant improvement in executive attention and intelligence. takeuchi et al. (2013) found that a 4-week working memory training program induced changes in functional connectivity and cerebral blood flow involving the default mode network and the external attention system during rest. klingberg (2010) reviewed literature on working memory training effects and suggested that adaptive and extended training in working memory, which is fundamental to creative thinking, can lead to changes in brain activity in frontal and parietal cortex and basal ganglia, as well as changes in the density of dopamine receptor. all these neuroscientific findings have implied that education and training focusing on music, attentional control, and working memory can significantly change an individual’s brain structurally and functionally. it can improve innovation-related cognitive skills, including motor and auditory skills, executive attention, intelligence and working memory. there has been a growing body of research that examines the efficiency of creativityrelated education and training by combining evidence from behavioral effects and the neural system underlying the transfer effects. for more than five decades, creativity education has closely bonded with the arts (sawyer, 2012, p. 391). but criticisms have been raised that the creativity features in the arts education may not be transferable to other domains. results from cognitive behavioral analyses on the association between music or visual arts education and cross-domain creativity were contradictory (hetland & winner, 2004). recently, neuroscientists began to explore the cognitive benefits of arts education, providing evidence from the neural data of biological brain. for instance, lopata, nowicki, & joanisse (2017) compared skilled musicians who had training in musical improvisation with individuals who had no formal improvisation training in their frontal upper alpha-band activity recorded by eeg during creative and non-creative tasks and objective ratings on creativity performances. they found that spontaneous processing of creative ideas can be effectively fostered through formal improvisation training. similarly, fink, graif, & neubauer (2009) investigated eeg activity in professional dancers compared to a group of novices with no comprehensive training in the field during performance of different creative dancing tasks. they found that professional dancers showed more right-hemispheric alpha synchronization then the novices did during improvisation dance tasks but not during imagining dancing tasks. the researchers also measured brain activity of the two groups during performance of the alternative uses test. they found that professional dancers showed stronger alpha synchronization in posterior parietal brain regions than novice dancers when performing the creativity test. these neuroscientific research findings have suggested that formal arts education may enhance creativity abilities, improvisation and generating alternative ideas in particular. brain imaging evidence on non-arts creativity education and trainings have also been documented recently. for example, researchers designed a 5-week creativity capacity building program (ccbp) as a targeted creativity intervention class offered to students at the stanford design institute. the training program allowed participants to experience applied creativity, spontaneity, uncertainty and “failing fast,” the reduction of bias and rapid prototyping through a cycle of five phases— observe, brainstorm, synthesize, prototype and implement, and participants were asked to repeat the cycle when necessary (hawthorne et al., 2014; kienitz et al., 2014). researchers neuroscience and creativity education 27 administered ccbp in parallel with a 5-week language capacity building training program (lcbp) as a control intervention, and measured creativity before and after the ccbp/lcbp training on the torrance test of creative thinking-figural (ttct-f) to examine the effectiveness of ccbp. kienitz et al. (2014) found that ccbp resulted in significantly greater increase in the performance on two facets of creativity assessed in ttct-f— resistance to premature closure and elaboration. hawthorne et al. (2014) illustrated these findings further by investigating the neural correlates of creativity in both ccbp and findlcbp groups as reported. another example is that of sun et al. (2016) who implemented 20 sessions of cognitive stimulation to train individuals on creative thinking. longitudinal analyses in this study showed that at the behavioral level, individuals performed better in both the originality and the fluency of divergent thinking after training. at the neural level, functional changes were found in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex, dorsal lateral prefrontal cortex and posterior brain regions after the training. increase in the gray matter volume in the dorsal anterior cingulate cortex was also observed after divergent thinking training. neuroscience research has provided evidence that some short-term, well-arranged, non-arts creativity education and trainings are effective in improving individuals’ creativity thinking. educators and policy makers may consider introducing some practices into the classroom that were proven by neuroscience and behavioral research to be effective in creativity education. however, studies that investigated the role of a specific creativity training or education play in both behavioral changes and neural manifestations of creative thinking are still very limited so far. as mentioned in the first section of this article, creativity depends greatly on integrated fundamental cognitive abilities developed from daily non-creative activities (sawyer, 2012, p. 158). creative thinking is linked to the activation of brain regions and biological changes that are associated with different fundamental cognitive processing activities, such as attention and working memory. given the multi-facets phenomenon and the complex combination of ordinary cognitive features, many neuroscience implications for educational interventions on creativity improvement came from research focusing on optimizing attention and working memory. behavioral research has revealed that creativity is associated with a wider breadth of attention that allows individuals to collect more information at the same time (kasof, 1997; memmert, 2007). if individuals can attend to more things concurrently, they are more likely to have more diverse and a greater number of elements to combine, connect and construct, increasing the possibility of creative thought (martindale, 1999). creativity has also been found to be related to efficient selective attention that inhibits irrelevant information and facilitates relevant information to boost the production of original and useful ideas (kharkhurin, 2011). thus, cognitive training that helps expand attention and optimize selective attention may lead to better creative thinking (takeuchi et al., 2013). consistent with this notion, liu et al. (2012) provided neural evidence on the potential cognitive benefits of attention training. the researchers investigated the activity patterns in the brain during the creative process—spontaneous lyrical improvisation for individuals who had free-style arts practice and the brain image results suggested that a state of defocused attention may enable the novel generation, characterized by disassociated activity in medial and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices. additionally, in a fmri study, fink et al. (2010) found that cognitive stimulation via idea sharing with 28 global education review 5(1) other people which could have resulted in a modulation of bottom-up attention can enhance originality. this creativity behavioral performance was found to be linked to increased activation in righthemispheric temporo-parietal, medial frontal, and posterior cingulate cortices, bilaterally. although there are few studies that analyze the neural and behavioral data together to examine the effectiveness of attention-creativity training, it’s promising that creativity can be developed through well-designed training focusing on attention. researchers also found that working memory capability can predict a wide range of creative activities based on behavioral observations (e.g., de dreu, nijstad, baas, wolsink, & roskes, 2012; lee & therriault, 2013). recently, vartanian et al. (2013) extended previous research by combining brain imaging and cognitive behavioral approach to examine the relationships between working memory training and creativity. they administered the alternate uses task (aut) creative test in the fmri scanner in both experiment groups who received working memory training and the control group who engaged in a choice reaction time task that is not related to working memory. they found that the experiment group showed significantly lower activation in ventrolateral prefrontal and dorsolateral prefrontal cortices, which are known to be associated with divergent thinking, than the control group, even though performance variance on the aut was not found between the two groups. the results suggested that a short regimen of working memory training can moderate prefrontal cortex neural function in divergent thinking. in sum, cognitive neuroscience literature on the direct effects of training on creativity is limited. however, based on the results from fmri and eeg studies of creativity-related training, researchers believe that it’s very likely to increase neural efficiency in creative thinking through cognitive behavioral interventions (vartanian et al., 2013). brain studies have shown great possibilities in developing creativity through education. implications for educational policy in this literature review, the main findings from the cognitive and neuroscience studies on creativity are the following: (a) creativity is a complex construct defined within a specific sociocultural context and the neural techniques today can only explain a small part of creativity; (b) there is no particular brain area for creativity. instead, creativity depends on integrated activation of brain regions and biological changes that are related to a variety of basic cognitive functions; (c) creativity is heritable to some extent while it can be fostered through education and training; and (d) creativity can be developed through arts education and systematic creativity training programs, as well as targeted training on fundamental cognitive abilities such as attention and working memory. cognitive neuroscience has made significant progress in enriching our understanding of creativity and how to foster creative cognition. it has great potential for playing a role in education reform by providing brain-based implications for policy and practice changes that aim at creating a creative workforce in a knowledge economy. there have been a growing number of countries that prioritize creativity learning in the education system. many countries and regions, including but not limited to austria, belgium, bhutan, bulgaria, czech republic, denmark, estonia, germany, greece, finland, france, ireland, hungary, italy, latvia, lithuania, luxembourg, malta, portugal, republic of korea, romania, singapore, slovakia, slovenia, spain, sweden, uk, canada, and the u.s, have a similar agenda for the arts neuroscience and creativity education 29 and creativity education but they differ in approach (heilmann & werner, 2010; sharp & le metais, 2000; zhou, 2017). for instance, northern ireland and singapore include creativity in all curriculum areas, whereas the republic of korea emphasizes different aspects of creativity distinctively in the objectives of primary, lower secondary education and upper secondary education (sharp & le metais, 2000). in its recent national education framework, malta highlights discovery and creativity in its early education learning objectives. cognitive neuroscience studies have confirmed that educational training can improve an individual’s creative thinking. however, not all educational practices in creativity development have been demonstrated to be effective. so far, many countries depend greatly on arts education to develop individuals’ creative abilities. some countries have integrated arts in other subject areas to reach a broader transferability of creativity skills (heilmann & werner, 2010). as mentioned earlier, a few brain studies have suggested that arts education may enhance creativity in general but current evidence is not sufficient to defend that arts education can generate cross-domain creative cognition skill. instead of teaching creativity through arts education, neuroscience research had implied that general creativity education can be extended to focus on basic cognitive skills development in working memory and attention, which have been proven to be closely linked to creative abilities. despite the fact that neuroscience has continuously provided important scientific implications for educators and policy makers, putting brain-based theory or findings into universal classroom practice is still not near and challenging to reach. many practitioners and policy makers fail to interpret and use scientific facts correctly. a bridge between neuroscience and education is lacking (fischer, goswami, & geake, 2010) and neuroscientific messages are often distorted (howard-jones, 2014). to increase the impact from neuroscience on creativity education policy, it is necessary to communicate brain findings in an understandable way at all levels of the stakeholders and educate the general public (akil et al., 2016). meanwhile, given that creativity is defined within a particular sociocultural context, we will need to collect more neuroscience evidence from different sociocultural backgrounds. currently, solid brain-based international studies that integrate both biological measurements and sociocultural information are very limited. there is a need for policy makers to identify a systematic assessment plan to evaluate curricular effectiveness of culturally different creativity programs. then, educators can collaborate with educational researchers and neuroscientists to create a database that supports evidence-based creativity education. references ai, x. 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(2017). non-cognitive skills: potential candidates for global measurement: zhou. european journal of education. https://doi.org/10.1111/ejed.12241 about the author kai zhou is a senior administrator and research analyst at orange county public schools, florida. she is also a doctoral candidate from the department of educational policy and leadership, university at albany, state university of new york. her articles have appeared in european journal of education, the international journal of higher education research and the unesco global monitoring report. her research interests are currently focused on the relationship between soft skills, education and labor market outcomes. mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 107 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: willey, craig & magee, paula (2016). clinical experiences and mediational activities in urban teacher preparation: learning and critical consciousness. global education review, 3 (4). 107-126 clinical experiences and mediational activities in urban teacher preparation: learning and critical consciousness craig willey indiana university-purdue university indianapolis paula magee indiana university-purdue university indianapolis abstract in a longitudinal design experiment conducted within an urban teacher preparation program, we employed ethnographic and auto-ethnographic methods to investigate the following questions: 1) in what ways do clinical experiences (ces) support prospective teachers’ (pts) development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for urban teaching? 2) how is it determined that adjustments need to be made to the design and facilitation of ces, and what did these adjustments yield in terms of student learning outcomes? the program centers and leverages ces in order for pts to connect theory and practice, particularly an awareness of, and skills associated with, equitable teaching practices. in our two-year field-based program, ces included community explorations, one-on-one and small group work with children, two student teaching practicums, and various school-community events. we describe the process undertaken to maximize the benefits yielded from ces. after working with three cohorts of pts for their entire professional training, we found that: 1) focusing attention on the intentional design and assessment of the mediational activities coupled with ces leads to more nuanced understandings and enactments of culturally relevant teaching among pts; and 2) ces afford pts abundant opportunities to shape complex identities as urban teachers. specifically, we found that clinical experiences and corresponding mediational activities support pts’ understanding of families of color, allow them to recognize and address problematic schooling practices, and strengthen pts’ otherwise fragile critical consciousness. we conclude that strategic interventions can provide clarity for pts around what has been learned, and what is left to be developed. key words clinical experiences, urban teacher education, mediation, culturally relevant teaching introduction prospective teachers’ (pts) clinical experiences have been the focus of research and scholarly investigation for decades. indeed, standard 2 of the council for the accreditation of educator preparation’s (caep) focuses squarely on ______________________________ corresponding author: craig willey, indiana university school of education, iupui, 902 w. new york st. es 3116, indianapolis, in 46202 email: cjwilley@iupui.edu 108 global education review 3(4) clinical partnerships and practice, underscoring the importance and central role of clinical experiences. yet, most of the attention around clinical practices has been on using them, to develop proficiency in pedagogical techniques. at the same time, there is an emerging body of literature around the importance of pts’ development of culturally relevant pedagogy (e.g., ladson-billings, 1995), awareness of oppressive white ideologies (e.g., emdin, 2016), and productive dispositions towards children and families of color1 (e.g., murrell, diez, feiman-nemser & schussler, 2010). less attention, however, has been committed to the examinations of the role of clinical experiences in mediating the sociocultural awareness and productive dispositions of pts. this article reports the findings of a research study designed to measure how intentionally-designed clinical experiences have supported pts to: understand themselves as cultural beings who are situated in racialized hierarchies; understand the critical, sociocultural dimensions of urban schooling; acknowledge and adjust their perceptions of children and families of color, and take steps towards developing an equitable and academically rigorous curriculum and instruction for urban youth. perhaps this study’s most important contribution, however, is to highlight the efforts of the teacher educators to design, reflect upon, and adjust the clinical experiences within which pts engage, and the continually-evolving mediational practices that help pts maximize the meaning to be made of these experiences. prospective teachers’ development of culturally relevant pedagogy the demographics of school-aged children has changed dramatically over the past 20 years, specifically there are more children of color – specifically latinas/os and children whose native language is not english – enrolled in u.s. schools (gandara & contreras, 2009). in fact, 2014 marked the point where the majority of student in u.s. schools were non-white, and white students made up less than 50% of the students for the first time in u.s. history (krogstad & fry, 2014). demographers expect that these trends, towards an increasingly more diverse k-12 student body, will continue for the foreseeable future. at the same time, we have collectively struggled to develop a diverse teacher workforce, and, generally speaking, our largely white teacher workforce has struggled to develop an approach to designing and enacting a curriculum and pedagogy that affirms and reflects the knowledge base of, supports meaningful connections with, and sufficiently challenges, students of color, a significant factor leading to the so-called “achievement gap” (darling-hammond & brandsford, 2005). while some scholars have pointed to the fallacy of narrowly, or exclusively, using measures such as standardized tests to evaluate schools’ and teachers’ success with students of color (e.g., gutierrez, 2008; martin, 2009), we nevertheless know that, as a whole, black and latina/o students have not been provided the highest quality instruction relative to their white counterparts (e.g., flores, 2007; gandara & contreras, 2009; ladson-billings, 2009). numerous factors are identified that contribute to this reality, including persistent deficit thinking around students of color and their families/communities (valencia, 2010), failed social policy (gandara & contreras, 2009), and institutional racism (bonilla-silva, 2013). teachers, most of whom are white and monolingual, and naturally a part of the dominant white culture, have a limited understanding of the ways in which these ethnic/cultural differences play out in school settings (leonardo, 2010). at the same time, mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 109 research evidence is mounting that suggests the important role of affirming language and culture in the teaching and learning process with black and latina/o children (e.g., ladson-billings, 2009; tellez, moschkovich, & civil, 2011), although it does not appear to be clear what kinds of experiences, and with what forms of mediation, support teachers to leverage and honor language and culture in daily instructional activities. we ground our teacher education program in ladson-billings’ (1995) framework for culturally relevant pedagogy (which we also refer to as culturally relevant teaching). we intentionally and explicitly attend to all three tenets that ladson-billings identified in her seminal paper: academic success, cultural competence, and critical consciousness. from early clinical experiences through student teaching, we design our clinical experiences to serve as living examples of how pts can look for ways to be “culturally relevant” in everyday teaching, not just when they are teaching lessons that look “cultural.” it is our goal that pts come to understand the missteps teachers often make when they try to “insert culture into education instead of inserting education in the culture” (p. 159). we stress how a teacher’s actions, language, and instructional decisions all reveal a teacher’s deep understanding, or misunderstanding, of what it means to be a culturally relevant teacher. as such, through this study we explore how pts – again, mostly white, christian, heterosexual, able-bodied and monolingual – come to understand teaching and learning dynamics with urban youth. praxis model of teacher education and mediated activities this project is grounded in cultural historical activity theory, where “teacher learning is necessarily distributed and examined across a minimum of two activity systems in which teacher apprentices document children’s learning trajectories in situ, as well as their own” (gutiérrez & vossoughi, 2010, p. 101); that is, deep teacher learning is dependent on their ability to situate and make sense of children’s thinking and action in the larger sociocultural context and, similarly, examine their [pt’s] own learning and development in light of their histories, experiences, and new ways of thinking. the latter, critical reflective practice, is a key principle in transformative adult learning (brookfield, 2000) and one that has high importance in this study. it is useful to think about pts’ development of culturally relevant teaching practices and perspectives using the lens of activity theory, utilizing many of the constructs put forth by vygotsky (1978), such as mediation, scaffolding, apprenticeship, and organization of learning activities. from this viewpoint, “teaching and learning are socially reorganized around the mediation of dynamic learner identities and include shifts in expert-novice status, dialogic interactions, and the use of innovative mediational tools” (razfar, khisty, & chval, 2011, p. 195). in particular, we use the concept of mediation to describe the process by which the more experienced person facilitates the development of more sophisticated mental processes, which includes the way learners (i.e., pts) can think about or talk about a concept in more nuanced or abstract ways. mediation leads to learning, where learning is defined as the process of becoming a competent member of a community (gee, 2005; gutiérrez, 2002), which, in our case, is a community of culturally relevant teachers focused on treating children of color with dignity and pushing beyond a pedagogy of poverty (haberman, 1991). 110 global education review 3(4) tensions as sites for meaningful learning clinical experiences, and the sense making of those experiences, are inherently tenuous. in many cases, they are unprecedented situations, where unpredictable scenarios arise and unfold. dissonance between pts and child(ren) can surface due to differences in race, culture, age, language, emotional state, social status, and/or power, among other factors. pts experience recurring dissonance in their various interactions with children (see table 2 below). dissonance occurs as they simultaneously learn about systemic racism, oppression, and social stigmatization and marginalization (see table 1 below). for pts, these often happen to be their first encounters with perspectives that deviate from meritocratic viewpoints and the fallacy that democracy describes our sociopolitical arrangements. this simultaneous dissonance, and grappling with new knowledge or perspectives, often leaves pts in a state of disequilibrium, an unclear space where tensions abound between the world they have come to understand and the new reality they are encountering. razfar (2013) argues that, “from a chat [cultural historical activity theory] point of view, learning is often mediated through situated spaces that are filled with contestation and cognitive dissonance” (p. 177). if we accept that tenuous spaces represent the potential to indeed be sites of meaningful learning, then it becomes increasingly important to be intentional when designing the mediational activities, including how we prepare and set up pts to receive feedback and engage in critical reflection. research questions because we are interested in the role and impact of clinical experiences for urban teaching, as well as the maneuvering of the teacher educators to mediate these experiences, we designed this study around the following research questions:  how was it determined that adjustments needed to be made to the design and mediation of ces, and what did these adjustments yield in terms of student learning outcomes?  in what ways do clinical experiences (ces) and mediating activities support prospective teachers’ (pts) development of knowledge, skills, and dispositions necessary for urban teaching? the former question yields a narrative that includes the initial efforts of the teacher educators, the tensions that emerged in working through the complexities of urban teacher development, the adjustments deemed appropriate to mediate these tensions, and the outcomes of these adjustments. the latter question is aimed at understanding the meaning pts associate with the clinical experiences and the affordances of these clinical experiences. together, this data depicts a comprehensive portrait of how one group of teacher educators and pts tried to collectively establish order in a “messy” learning space, and maximize opportunities to grow as urban teachers and urban teacher educators. context and methodological approaches urban elementary teacher education program (uetep) this study is situated within the context of an elementary teacher education program that is committed to, and focused on, developing pts who are critically conscious. we operationalize critical consciousness as being prepared to recognize, confront, and address inequitable schooling practices and structures in urban contexts. as a faculty, we collectively maintain that urban communities possess innumerable mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 111 assets while simultaneously facing particular challenges, and our program is aimed at helping new teachers understand the histories and experiences of urban children, mine and leverage their learning resources, and subsequently develop culturally relevant and anti-racist teaching practices. as white teacher educators we engage in this work after careful consideration of our own experiences in a racialized world. we consistently refocus our work to highlight ways in which racial inequities are realized and we work to expose and reduce, if not eliminate, them through a specific approach to teacher preparation (willey & magee, 2015). this approach positions race at the center of teacher education clinical experiences and coursework. in the uetep, pts are randomly grouped into cohorts of approximately 28 and remain together for the duration of the program. eightyfive percent of the pts are white (~10% of which are male) and 15% are students of color. the majority of pts grew up in suburban or rural areas of central indiana. most pts complete the program while attending school full-time, which translates to being in “class” two days each week from 9:00am-4:00pm, but many of them work part-time or full-time jobs simultaneously. class includes both traditional university courses and embedded clinical experiences (see table 1). during semester 3 and 4 (usually the pt’s senior year), pts complete a total of 16 weeks of student teaching. while the course titles that pts take have not changed much over the past seven years, the foci of these courses have radically shifted to now include: culturally relevant pedagogy (ladson-billings, 1995), white privilege (wise, 2008), structural racism and deconstructing historical schooling processes (leonardo, 2009; valencia, 2010). our program attends to these goals by putting the clinical experiences at the center of our uetep. clinical experiences are maximized by a program structure that has each cohort of pts partner with one urban elementary school, work with a consistent faculty team, and have program faculty supervise all clinical experiences including student teaching. beginning on the first day of the program and continuing through student teaching, pts spend entire days in their home elementary school. this arrangement supports the inclusion of not only explicit and intentional clinical experiences but also helps pts to develop an understanding of the complex nature of the work of being a teacher in an urban elementary school. this is facilitated by discussions with program faculty, who are also in schools with the pts; critical issues such as disproportionate representation of students of color in special education, effects of high stakes testing and inequitable and dishonorable discipline practices, are identified and discussed. the effect of these issues on instructional practices and student achievement are discussed and scrutinized. through placement in one school for two years, pts are able to build relationships with students, teachers, administrators and community members. program faculty intentionally incorporate school activities, teacher meetings, professional development, and communitybased projects into the curriculum as a way to support a critical and comprehensive perspective on what is involved in becoming an urban teacher working towards disrupting injustice and providing equitable and meaningful learning opportunities for youth. we maintain that the clinical experiences are essential if we are to help pts fully understand and realize the potential of urban children. therefore, our program is designed to gauge psts’ growth largely through their performance in planning for, delivering, and reflecting upon their clinical experiences with children. mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 112 table 1 sequence of courses and foci of elementary teacher education program semester 1 (junior year) semester 2 (junior year) semester 3 (senior year) semester 4 (senior year) courses ● math methods (pre-k-2) ● literacy methods (pre-k2) ● diversity in learning ● teaching all learners ● math methods (3-6) ● literacy methods (3-6) ● science methods ● educational foundations ● literacy methods iii ● special education ● 8 weeks of paired student teaching with bi-weekly seminars ● social studies methods ● fine arts methods ● 8 weeks of individual student teaching with bi-weekly seminars cross-cutting topics ● eliciting and capitalizing on children’s thinking ● culturally relevant teaching ● systemic racism ● problematic and marginalizing practices of schools ● re-thinking curriculum ● eliciting and capitalizing on children’s thinking ● culturally relevant teaching (funds of knowledge) ● racialized experiences in schools ● critical perspectives around engagement and participation ● re-thinking curriculum ● teaching as inquiry ● critical literacies, subjectivities, and discourses ● culturally relevant teaching ● social construction of disability and difference ● designing and critiquing instructional approaches for struggling learners ● reconceptualizing inclusion ● multimodal instruction & assessment ● culturally relevant teaching ● teaching as an expression of democracy ● problematic and marginalizing practices of schools mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 113 table 2 clinical experiences and corresponding mediating activities clinical experience what are they? mediating activity literacy and math one-on-one focus student sessions (semesters 1 & 2) five to six sequential sessions (for each discipline) in which pts focus on problem solving and student thinking (math) and emergent literacy and funds of knowledge (literacy) support for session planning; promotion of the focus on children’s thinking; development of analytical skills through debriefing exercises; working towards more expansive views and explanations of children’s behaviors curriculum centers/invitations (semester 1) three iterative, small group facilitations for literacy and three for math; pairs of pts design, implement, and refine a center based on dimensions of children’s early development of number sense and literacy peer and instructor critique of conceptual plan; review of center lesson plan; reflection and accountability for improvements in between each iterative cycle; guidance in the production of documentation panel/notebook asset-based community survey (semester 1) pts spend several hours exploring the local community of their home school. they are organized in groups that focus on community history, resources and experiences. pts are specifically asked to focus on assets and to develop curricular ideas that connect to what they find. additionally they look for evidence of inequities in the communities. instructor facilitates post exploration discussions. during these discussions pts identify their own expectations and assumptions about the community. pts work in groups to develop a multimedia presentation and paper that is shared with the class. school administrators are invited and discuss with pts how the teachers are supported to also explore the community and challenge deficit notions they may have about families and resources. observations (semesters 1-4) periodic observations of classroom teaching that range from helping pts become familiar with instructional approaches (e.g., workshop model) to practices related to student engagement and behavior support arranging a variety of contexts to observe; preparation via developing a lens to focus on certain issues; debriefing around key topics; extending invitations to teachers/staff for and facilitating question & answer sessions community-school events (cse) (semesters 1-4) cses are opportunities for pts to interact with students and families in non-classroom spaces. typically these include: family fun night, stem connecting pts to the community/parent listserv and phone distribution list that promotes events; providing time and space to make meaning of these events. these 114 global education review 3(4) night, istep testing and proctoring, district curriculum fairs, after school clubs, after care programs, front office, lunchroom and dismissal assistance, book fair, hispanic heritage night and others.. psts are required to attend at least three of these events each semester and many attend more than that. events make for productive class discussions regarding biases and stereotypes of urban families. pts are required to draw on these experiences for capstone projects (storytelling) each semester. science inquiry unit (semester 2) eight science inquiry-based lessons are developed by pt teams and taught to groups of 8-10 intermediate age students. the pts are required to reflect on how the lessons demonstrate culturally relevant teaching using the 3 tenets of ladsonbillings (1995). inquiry lessons are reviewed and supervised by the instructor. classroom teachers are invited to provide feedback as well. in-class discussions focusing on culturally relevant teaching and critical pedagogy are facilitated by the instructor. community mathematics exploration (semester 2) three, iterative small group facilitations; curriculum development work stems from a community memberor self-guided tour of the community in which pts become more acquainted with community spaces and explore the mathematical practices of the community arrangement of a community walk led by a community member (e.g., parent); support in interviewing children around their cultural resources; peer and instructor critique of conceptual plan of lessons; sustained dialogue from week-to-week; strategic debriefing paired student teaching (semester 3) pairs of pts complete six days of classroom observations, and then quickly assume full teacher responsibilities for eight weeks multiple informal and a minimum of two formal observations by university (faculty) coaches; sustained dialogue; weekly seminars; support for mentor (classroom) teachers individual student teaching (semester 4) pts individually complete six days of classroom observations, and then quickly assume full teacher responsibilities for eight weeks multiple informal and a minimum of two formal observations by university (faculty) coaches; sustained dialogue; weekly seminars; support for mentor (classroom) teachers mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 115 research design we engaged in an ethnographic approach to this investigation for three reasons. first, we are intimately involved in the research context. not only do we serve as instructors and university coaches of the student teaching experience, but we also think about and co-construct programmatic structures and practices to produce a particular type of novice teacher, one that is socially conscious and prepared to identify and confront inequitable schooling practices, and re-organize teaching and learning environments to serve those children who have historically been poorly served by schools. our teaching, research, and professional responsibilities as faculty are closely aligned with, and afford us unfiltered access to, the context of the pts’ experiences and the corresponding ethnographic data. second, we “loop” with our pts, meaning that we serve in an instructional and supportive role for each of the four consecutive semesters of their professional preparation program. to fulfill this responsibility with fidelity requires us to connect with pts intimately; this affords us the opportunity to understand, as much as possible, the actions and words of the pts. finally, we recognize that, in this case, adult education occurs within a complex activity system (engstrom, 1999) in the elementary school. an ethnographic approach to this research demands that we enlist all possible data sources and techniques to help understand the meaning pts make of their clinical experiences and to what degree we can attribute their development to said clinical experiences. this study takes the form of a design experiment in the sense that the teacher educators have engaged in multiple iterations, or cycles, of the two-year professional program. with each iteration, there are hundreds, if not thousands, of decisions made about what curricular and instructional elements to keep, as well as to identify and to adjust those elements deemed less productive. a significant proportion of our energy is committed to designing ways in which to utilize the clinical experiences as a vehicle to challenge dominant ideologies and question conventional pedagogical practices. by treating each cycle as a design experiment, we were able to make connections between specific clinical experiences and the ways in which these clinical experiences supported the growth of pts. finally, we have utilized auto-ethnographic methods to track and monitor, across time, the critical moments where one, or both, of us recognized that what we were doing did not have the impact that we had hoped for, and where we needed to adjust. data sources within the spirit of ethnography, we have collected multiple forms of data, including field notes and recordings from seminars and student teaching observations debriefing sessions; pts’ lesson plans, projects, and written analyses of readings and clinical experiences; interview data with case pts; mentor teacher evaluations of pts; instructors’ journals and reflective writing after classes, seminars, pt observations, and mentor teacher observations; and correspondence between instructors and pts pertaining to their student teaching lessons. for the purposes of this article, we focus primarily on four data sources: 1) artifacts and dialogue pertaining to instructors’ iterative thinking about mediating pts’ learning from clinical experiences, 2) conversations around student teaching lesson enactment, 3) end-of-program interviews with pts, and 4) end-of-semester capstone projects. 116 global education review 3(4) data analysis our research questions involved different data sources and warranted different analytical methods. as such, we delineated our approach to data analysis according to each research question. research question 1: when were adjustments to ces and mediational activities needed, and what did these adjustments yield? informal and formal mechanisms were used to process the data (i.e., our experiences, actions, dialogue, and subsequent actions) pertaining to this research question. our close working relationship and shared commitment to the development of each cohort over the course of four semesters, resulted in an informal, but effective, analysis mechanism as we regularly discussed issues that surfaced in courses and ces, especially during student teaching. in fact, it was during student teaching when the most poignant issues surfaced, as this tends to be a particularly intense experience for pts. supporting pts’ growth towards culturally relevant teaching is certainly not straightforward; therefore, we utilized collaborative analysis to make sense of emergent phenomena and make decisions about how best to move forward in the short term, as well as with subsequent cohorts. our primary formal analysis mechanism was document analysis (e.g., iterations of syllabi, assignment descriptions, rubrics, and feedback to pts), but also included discourse analysis in that we intentionally dissected and attributed meaning to pts’ words in the (shared) context of the ces and corresponding mediational activities. research question 2: how did ces and mediational activities support pts’ growth? our data analysis process was continuous, involved distinct iterations, and was guided by the principles of grounded theory. we were continually enmeshed in the process of teaching and supporting student teachers; our day-to-day teacher education work was continually informed by real-time data. therefore, it was necessary to develop mechanisms that allowed us to continually process data in a timely way so that we could adjust and re-design mediation for pts as they progressed through the program and as decision-making intensified. this initial analysis of data was done both individually and collaboratively through dialogue. next, particular sets of data (e.g., end-of-program interviews, discussions in seminars, and the end-of-semester storytelling projects) were identified, organized, and analyzed with respect to specific questions. for example, we analyzed the recordings of the seminar sessions with the following question in mind: in what ways does the space and agenda provided in the seminars allow pts to grapple with complex issues of classroom teaching and develop culturally relevant teaching practices? over time, it became clear that we were focused on the same phenomenon, the role of clinical experiences in pts’ development of culturally relevant teaching practices, and that when we listened to pts talk about their own and others’ teaching, we noticed similar aspects of their discourse. still, we decided to, independently, examine the data initially; once initial cycle of data analysis was complete, we conferred, refined codes, and re-coded to focus on emergent themes, but this time with much tighter parameters around what constituted evidence of a particular code or sub-code. in addition, our position as participant observers afforded us intimate knowledge of the context surrounding the interactions among participants. in other words, our interpretations mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 117 of events and participants’ words were enhanced by our regular presence in the school (gutierrez & stone, 1998) and our close working relationships with pts akin to the ethnographic privilege described by prus (1996). finally, audio-recorded data was listened to individually by the two teacher educators. each researcher independently developed codes that reflected what he/she registered as a relevant aspect. after individual analysis, the two researchers conferred in order to reduce the number of codes and refine the codes to fit within parameters that were mutually agreed upon (i.e., consensus was reached on what constituted each code). these codes were then re-applied to the data in an effort to identify the most prevalent themes. through ongoing dialogues and the analyses, much like those found in duo-ethnographic methodologies (e.g., norris, sawyer, & lund, 2012), the two authors of this study were able to arrive at aspects of the teacher education partnership model that appeared to have made the greatest impact on the school children and psts. moreover, we were able to engage in regular dialogue as a means to intentionally interrogate one another’s “lens” and the subsequent meaning each of us made of the data (wells, 2007). findings in this section, we present data and analysis about 1) the mediational activities involved in maximizing development towards culturally relevant teaching; 2) how the clinical experiences contribute to knowledge and skills related to culturally relevant teaching; and 3) the emergent tensions resulting from pts' participation in clinical experiences, and how those tensions were mediated. in order to preserve the integrity of the data, as it is situated in a dynamic social contextual, we present the data in the form of vignettes in an effort to provide thick descriptions (geertz, 1994). each of the vignettes was selected because it struck us as poignant, capturing the essence of a complex developmental issue, while also representing a particularly salient theme. in other words, the vignettes ought not be considered outliers, or exceptional scenarios, but rather representative of recurring situations and especially meaningful learning or sources of tension. mediational activities these first findings stem from the autoethnographic data pertaining to the mediational activities in which we engaged with pts (shared above in table 2). through our own reflective processes, along with our third instructional team member, we arrived at a set of mediational practices that seemed to produce reflection and critical consideration that surpassed results of past cycles of cohorts. this section documents the evolution of our mediational activities, and provides a narrative of how we recognized the need for change and what shape the changes then took. revised meditational activities include: addition of a culturally relevant pedagogy (crp) (ladson billings, 1995) section in all lesson plans over the four semesters of the program; increased focus on crp discussions with pts before and after field experiences; revised crp video assignment in student teaching; and intentional scaffolding of critical readings over four semesters that push pts to consider a more complex understanding and enactment of crp. we first began to concentrate more attention on the clinical experiences almost five years ago. at the time, we were primarily teaching the semester 2 methods courses (mathematics and science) and already had built into our methods courses multiple opportunities to work with children in the intermediate grades, both individually and in small groups. in 118 global education review 3(4) addition, we also had a plan for supporting pts as they planned for and debriefed these experiences, although these were largely intuitive supports, meaning that we were operating from a relatively unrefined space where we designed these supports from what we suspected was helpful. since then, we have iteratively revised the way we support pts in the clinical experiences. we added significant and intentional readings on crp and embedded the real world use of this into lesson plans and field work. it is important to note that we were able to make significant changes after we were iteratively involved in the student teaching experiences. working with student teachers afforded us an opportunity to assess the level of critical consciousness in our pts during their student teaching and seminar discussions. unfortunately, we determined (willey & magee, 2016), that our teacher education program (uetep) was not producing the level of critical development that we assumed it was. as a result, we included the revised meditational activities described here. in addition to the early field experiences, we also, made significant changes to the student teaching seminars. first, instead of meeting as a whole cohort, we split the cohort in half and met with each group every other week. second, we focused the content of the seminars on the pts’ videos of classroom instruction. related to the classroom videos, we found that asking pts to record themselves teaching a “culturally relevant lesson” reinforced shallow ideas of what crp looked like. for example, pts would write lessons that they considered “culturally relevant” and continued to identify this kind of teaching as “different” from “regular teaching.” instead, we wanted to encourage pts to look at their teaching holistically and use a crp framework, specifically the three tenets articulated by ladson-billings (1995), to analyze it. finally, we began to explicitly highlight culturally relevant teaching practices that occurred during both observations and field experience activities. pts began to recognize that these practices were more about teacher attitudes and dispositions, and acceptance of students (e.g. consciously accepting students’ home language), then they were about using only particular curricular resources (e.g. books about children of a particular race). impact of clinical experiences on pts’ critical consciousness in this section, we highlight three developmental domains in which the clinical experiences, including community-school events (cses), were particularly influential with regard to pts’ critical consciousness; those domains are 1) appreciating and understanding families, 2) recognizing problematic school practices that disproportionately impact students of color, and 3) understanding the fragile nature of a critical consciousness. appreciating and understanding families the cses provided opportunities for pts to develop a better understanding of how children’s experiences outside of school might serve as resources to draw upon in instruction. jason, a pt, expressed the value he associated with the cses: the best part of events was seeing parents and talking to parents, i mean, because obviously they are so busy, and other than parent-teacher conferences, which are so tense and talking about test scores, and they’re trying to voice concerns in a 15-minute block, the best part about the community events was mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 119 seeing the parents and seeing the kids in a non-academic level, i mean, that’s a rare opportunity. and, you just learn so much about who they are, and you have that trust. whereas social institutions tend to normalize behavior and customs according to white values and frames of reference (sensoy & diangelo, 2015), jason’s comments suggest that these informal interactions with families (of color) afforded him the opportunity to “see” families in a way that departs from the characterization of, and discourses about, families of color that tend to unfold in schools (e.g., as helpful or not helpful in children’s development; as having educational background that leads to the provision of an “appropriate” home life). his insights also reflect a critique of the limited relationship classroom teachers tend to have with parents, as well as the common and over-simplified “business” in which teachers need to engage with parents (i.e., talking about “achievement”). while jason’s reflection revealed the importance of encouraging pts to interact with families in cses as a means of deconstructing conventional notions and roles of families, he also noted that these interactions can be the impetus for building a trusting relationship with families. further evidence that communityschool events can serve in this capacity is found in the following anecdote narrated by jason: you know, there’s different times where parents call in in the morning, or i saw a parent in the hallway, and they felt comfortable and i felt comfortable just having a conversation with them, talking about anything. a parent will call and say, (interjects) you know we have this policy where if a student comes in tardy, he or she can’t get breakfast. so, a parent has a hard time getting to work on time, drops the kid off in a time crunch, meaning the kid might not have gotten breakfast in the morning [at home], and then he or she isn’t allowed to get breakfast [at school]. so, they felt comfortable asking me, you know, “can we make sure that…” – she’d call in [to the classroom], and i’d answer – “can we make sure he has breakfast sitting on his desk before we get in?” and, you know, it’s things like that, i think, were the result of just being apart of this school and this community. jason’s commentary suggests that he is becoming a teacher who shares the parents’ vision for the care and development of their children. he speaks to the power and importance of interacting and building relationships with families, which leads to interdependence and trust, key components necessary to achieve such a shared vision. recognizing problematic schooling practices that impact students of color an examination of the data around clinical experiences revealed numerous examples of pts recognizing the racialized and problematic teaching practices affecting students of color. we found that, starting with classroom observation in the first semester, the pts were able to recognize certain practices as controversial or troublesome. as pts progressed, pts tended to become complicit in these problematic practices; we view this phenomenon as much a function of the complex sociopolitical landscape of urban schooling as it is of the pts’ or mentor teachers’ inability to recognize the problematic practices. still, with strategic mediational activities, pts ability to notice and talk about problematic practices became more facile. 120 global education review 3(4) as mentioned above, we built our most recent series of seminars around pts’ videos of their teaching. this initiative was designed 1) to serve as a launching point to analyze and discuss aspects of culturally relevant teaching present in the teaching episode, or to serve as opportunities to develop culturally relevant teaching within the lesson, and 2) to generate examples and provide an opportunity for collective analysis of dilemmas of practice that pts encountered. prior to sharing a video, the pt would provide contextual details surrounding the lesson, addressing common questions such as, “who are the students?” “what lessons preceded this lesson?,” and “what are the goals for the lesson?” in a seminar accompanying the final semester of student teaching, alana presented her video. the following vignette illustrates the ease with which pts can become complicit in problematic practices, and, with vigilance and appropriate mediation, pts can generate examples of related (problematic) practices and, as a result, become less indifferent to these practices. alana is working towards a dual license in special education. she is student teaching in a “functional academics” classroom, a multi-aged, self-contained classroom serving children “who have been taken off the diploma track,” meaning that a decision has been made as early as 2nd or 3rd grade that the child is not capable of successfully completing the high school graduation requirements. even though we recognized that making decisions about children’s instruction including separating them from their grade level peers is problematic and often based on faulty assumptions and data, we did not engage in that conversations at this point in time. alana stated that the two 6th grade girls in the video “need to be taught the same concept day after day, because they can’t retain anything,” and that, in the context of mathematics lessons, the girls “have to use manipulative because they need to touch each thing when counting.” alana’s classmate, erin, who also spends time in this classroom, agreed with alana’s assessment of the girls’ cumulative skills. the tone of the description of the girls was unsettling. alana has painted a deficit-oriented picture of two girls that are essentially helpless. this contradicted what we saw in previous observations with these girls, which we pointed out to alana and erin. alana’s description of the classroom and the girls reflects the description of the girls suggested by the mentor teacher, suggesting that alana was susceptible to the dominant, matter-offact narratives that often surround children in classroom like this. “this focus lesson we are about to watch,” alana continues, “will involve a game where the girls will roll a die and move forward that many spaces on a game board. then, they will be prompted to make a given two-digit number with baseten blocks.” alana reiterated that they need to have the blocks in order to touch them while they count. we watch the video. after the video was over, we engaged in a brief conversation about the protocol to follow in order to place a student on the non-diploma track. it was, at best, unclear. we then asked alana if she ever encountered incidents that suggested that the girls were more capable than what the narrative about them implied. alana then confessed that she found the mentor teacher to be unprepared and undynamic mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 121 in her instruction of the students; rather, most of the lessons were scripted, lowlevel, and predominantly skill-based. she shared instances when she asked to do something new, to which the mentor teacher responded, “they probably can’t do that.” alana told us, “i usually just do it anyways.” the video assignment offers rich opportunities to engage student teachers in substantial discussions about critical issues in special education. first, we shared concerns about how classrooms are often not suited to support struggling learners. secondly. we used the video to challenge our pts to consider how the students with special needs have been historically ill-served in regular classrooms and how this history, when left unrevealed leads the teachers in the building to view their students with deficit frameworks. finally, we were able to address how these deficit frameworks translate to reduced expectations and the use of low-level, skill-based exercises. one pt, zandra, drew a parallel to a situation that unfolded at another school in the third grade class where she was student teaching. she told of a new school psychologist who was discussing with teachers the possibility of transferring a student, dajuan, into the self-contained classroom which offered intensive supports. zandra was baffled and angered by this maneuver, as she has seen significant growth in dajuan’s development in the four months she has been with him. she wondered if this was a misguided decision, based on biased analyses and skewed by some behavioral concerns, that will set into motion an educational trajectory that does not tend to end well for children of color. she seemed to be making some real connections between adults’ perceptions, their inability or unwillingness to accommodate certain children, and the ways in which schooling has historically failed particular subgroups of children. this vignette illuminates (at least) two noteworthy realities. first, pts have spent their entire lives immersed in a society normalized by whiteness (leonardo, 2009) and able bodiedness (annamma, 2015). this matters here because pts especially white pts, but also pts of color are susceptible to internalizing dominant narratives about children, particularly children of color who don’t fit the stereotype of how children should behave in school, or who don’t respond to teacher moves that are supposed to work seamlessly; the problem too easily becomes located in the child. these struggles coincide with life-long messages propagating the dysfunction and abnormality of children and communities of color in countless social domains and scenarios. it becomes hard to conjure up alternative explanations for behaviors and interpersonal dissonance. parallels can be drawn in terms of how social institutions handle and talk about disability. in this case, alana seemed to be susceptible to internalizing the conventional wisdom around the shortcomings of all of the children in the functional academics classroom: why they were there and what they were capable of. furthermore, she quickly assimilates this discourse, increasing the likelihood that this narrative about the girls will not be disrupted. second, the most important point is that the problematic nature of the discourse, and all of the troublesome underlying assumptions, were confronted. if teacher educators are paying attention, we will see that problematic assumptions, perceptions, ideologies, and 122 global education review 3(4) discourses about children of color are present in nearly every interaction with pts. being able to detect and skillfully mediate these interactions in a productive way is an elusive challenge facing teacher educators. it speaks to the importance of having an instructional team that depends on one another to share the responsibility and collectively shape tactics for mediating pervasive and potentially harmful viewpoints and discourses. it also underscores how essential it is to create a culture of teaching and learning where pts and teacher educators are able to hear and receive feedback from one another. understanding the fragile nature of a critical consciousness pts often approach student teaching as a space to showcase their abilities as teachers. we found that many pts arrive in teacher education with strong beliefs about their existing skills, including proficiency, and they look to their educator preparation program to validate these beliefs. this is not surprising, given the many years pts spent in schools. many of them are “legacy” teachers, coming from families of teachers who have encouraged the pt, often from an early age, to become a teacher. after pts are introduced to the idea that school inequalities exist, they often take the stance of the “social justice” oriented teacher. while this is a natural first step, many of our pts routinely minimize the efforts needed to be an actual, vocal advocate for students, especially students of color, in public schools. additionally, once they are exposed to the injustices of schooling they are often eager to take on the savior role for students (picower, 2009). despite readings about being the “white savior,” many pts struggle to understand how difficult it is to develop as, and actually be, a critically conscious teacher. as teacher educators we incorporate these ideas, struggles, and narratives into our coursework and early clinical experiences. but, it is often during the student teaching when pts are confronted with the sociopolitical realities of school and teacher talk on a day-to-day basis, that their underlying beliefs about children, emerge. as described above, part of the seminar experience asked pts to share video clips of their teaching and to analyze them through the lens of culturally relevant teaching. we focused not just on adding culture into education but critically analyzing how teacher talk and actions (i.e., cultural competence) support or injure students, especially students of color. after a viewing a classmate’s video, the discussion turned to teachers’ perceptions of particular students, as evidenced by private discourse around and treatment of these students, all of whom were black children. allie felt compelled to share her own story about how easy it was to be consumed by negative teacher discourse in a school, a discourse that blames children for their classroom struggles or particular school dynamics. over the past year and a half, allie proved to be a reflective and thoughtful (white) pt; she frequently made insightful connections between critical readings and school practices, and, in particular, her storytelling projects showed her coming to terms with her own struggles to understand her personal, subconscious biases towards children and communities of color. still, we safely place her in the top quartile in terms of her nuanced understanding of urban schooling and her genuine commitment to representing equitable teaching with children of color. as we have alluded to in this article, knowledge that inequities exist and personal commitments to equitable teaching practices tend not to be sufficient once the pt is situated squarely in the “messy,” complicated social spaces of urban schools. allie reflected on her mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 123 recent clinical experiences, “i was shocked at how quickly i got swept up into the negative talk about kids. i just couldn’t believe how fast i was worn down and pulled into the conversations myself. it was terrifying. if i had not changed mentor teachers, i worry about where i would be.” allie’s comments resonated with the pts in the room. they nodded their heads as they acknowledged the truth in her story. many of them had experienced the same thing; allie provided them with an opportunity to acknowledge and candidly admit it. for us, this marked an important shift in the authenticity of the dialogue represented in seminars. during previous seminars, pts wanted to discuss the problems, but not necessarily with regard to their own actions. historically, it was difficult to help pts recognize within themselves certain, unproductive discourses around children, which required introspective analyses of self. similarly, it is often challenging to help pts to reach the depths of rationale underlying teachers’ behavior, which requires unpacking “conventional wisdom” that often drives seemingly benign school protocols. incorporating the video clips and refocusing the lens on the pts’ work helped the group to shift to analyzing themselves as teachers and recognizing how fragile their passions for student advocacy were. discussion and implications as research findings have long suggested, we found that the clinical experiences do, indeed, matter in terms of pts’ development and understanding of curriculum, instruction, and the social processes of schooling. moreover, and pertaining to the focus of our research, we found that the clinical experiences contribute to pts ability to shed deficit notions of children and communities of color and develop a lens in which they recognize problematic practices and structures within school that have a tendency to marginalize or alienate particular children; in other words, the clinical experiences (and corresponding mediational activities) have helped pts see the inequitable practices and arrangements within classrooms, grapple with these issues, and move towards innovating their own practices that include connecting with children in equitable ways. we conceptualize this process in terms of the development of culturally relevant urban teacher identities, and our data particularly that from end-of program interviews, discussions in seminars, and the end-of-semester storytelling projects reveal that the clinical experiences have led to various ways in which the pts construct themselves as culturally relevant urban teachers. we analyzed this data iteratively for five years. there were countless moments when we had to re-think our approaches to not only coursework, but our design of clinical experiences, too. each time we re-designed and re-launched the clinical experiences, we asked ourselves, “what are we hoping these experiences will help pts ‘see’ or be able to do?” moreover, it is clear to us that clinical experiences, in and of themselves, are not magical; that is, they do not automatically lead to deeper knowledge of children, or the development of critical consciousness. in fact, we know well that if we do not anticipate what might occur during clinical experiences, and intentionally plan for how to mediate pts’ experiences, these same clinical experiences that hold the power to catalyze development could very well galvanize deficit-oriented beliefs about children of color and urban teaching. again, these clinical experiences are neither benign nor neutral. the vignettes and insights from pts reveal the power of field experiences that place pts in 124 global education review 3(4) uncomfortable and challenging settings. it is in these settings that faculty can mediate a better understanding of the dominant narratives around race and equity in schools. while it didn’t always feel like it, the data suggested that the overall effect of these placements was positive, meaning the challenging set of ces led to growth towards culturally relevant teaching practices. tensions inevitably surface in urban ces, where pts are still developing a fundamental understanding of children, the importance of community and cultural knowledge and ways of being, and how to commit to a culturally relevant pedagogy in a time where teachers are asked to get immediate results on a narrow set of skills. there is innumerable dimensions of urban teaching to process and make sense, and this sense-making requires, in addition to a reflective or introspective disposition, thoughtful and skillful mediation from mentor teachers and teacher educators. despite the wide-spread belief that ces matter in pts’ development, it is a mistake to think that ces automatically translate into critical growth. critical teacher educators must assume responsibility of monitoring how pts exist in, derive benefits from, and thrive within, the two simultaneous activity systems (gutierrez & vossoughi, 2010): one where they examine children’s cognitive and social development, and one where they become increasingly aware of their own critical consciousness and sociocultural development. at the same time, it is essential to be honest and explicit with pts about what is reasonable to experience and feel in response to the assortment of clinical experiences they will have. strategic interventions can help provide clarity for pts around what has, indeed, been learned at particular intervals in the program, and what is left to be developed in the final practicum and beyond. undoubtedly, pts will experience a range of interactions with children and adults, and not have the skills or wit to process and respond immediately to each respective situation; coursework alone cannot possibly prepare pts for the variety or intensity of possible school-based scenarios. thus, we underscore the importance of developing a reflective disposition when encountering challenging situations. it is our responsibility as teacher educators to help pts become familiar with and internalize a protocol with which they can evaluate and respond to situations in which they found themselves unprepared. at the heart of urban teacher development is a need to understand ourselves in relation to those we aim to teach. as emdin (2016) reminds us, “...this process [of urban teaching] can be either painful or enjoyable depending on our perception of the learner” (p. 142). while the accountability pressures and neoliberal forces have a very real, tangible effect on urban schools and classrooms, teachers must also find ways to enact creative insubordination (gutierrez, irving, & gerardo, 2013), that is, developing a pedagogy that stems from what they know urban youth deserve. clinical experiences, in tandem with skillful mediation, hold immense potential to bring new light to dark realities that are too often neglected or glossed over in superficial ways. transformative urban teaching in the 21st century demands that we engage directly and intentionally with children, and forge new models to help us all pts, teacher educators, and school staff alike process interactions situated in complex social systems. notes 1. we use interchangeably the terms children of color, black and latina/o children, and urban youth. each of these terms is meant to connote not only the non-white and marginalized status of people of color, but also the specific geography in which they reside, namely, and in this case, the city. mediating prospective teachers’ clinical experiences 125 references annamma, s. a. 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(2011). latinos/as and mathematics education. latinos/as and mathematics education: research on learning and teaching in classrooms and communities, 1. valencia, r. r. (2010). dismantling contemporary deficit thinking: educational thought and practice. routledge. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher mental process. wells, g. (2007). semiotic mediation, dialogue and the construction of knowledge. human development, 50(5), 244-274. willey, c. & magee, p. a. (2015). teacher educators and preservice teachers working through the complexities of whiteness and race in mathematics and science. in n. m. joseph, c. m. haynes, & f. cobb (eds.), interrogating whiteness and relinquishing power: white faculty’s commitment to racial consciousness in stem classrooms. langer publishing. wise, t. (2008). explaining white privilege (or, your defense mechanism is showing). retrieved 9/15/2016 from: http://www.timwise.org/2008/09/explaining-whiteprivilege-or-your-defense-mechanism-is-showing/ about the author(s) craig willey, phd, is an assistant professor of mathematics education and teacher education at the indiana university school of education at iupui. his research focuses on 1) supporting teachers to develop mathematics discourse communities with urban students, primarily latinas/os, 2) barriers and pathways to establishing equitable mathematics classrooms, and 3) the design and mediation of clinical experiences to support prospective teachers' development of culturally relevant teaching. paula magee, phd, is a clinical professor in science education and teacher education at the school of education at indiana university in indianapolis. she is the coordinator for the elementary teacher education program and her scholarship focuses on preparing culturally relevant teachers. she has done extensive work with local urban partnership schools as collaborators in teacher education and as a vehicle to support critically conscious teaching in public school settings. http://www.timwise.org/2008/09/explaining-white-privilege-or-your-defense-mechanism-is-showing/ http://www.timwise.org/2008/09/explaining-white-privilege-or-your-defense-mechanism-is-showing/ http://www.timwise.org/2008/09/explaining-white-privilege-or-your-defense-mechanism-is-showing/ http://www.timwise.org/2008/09/explaining-white-privilege-or-your-defense-mechanism-is-showing/ ger_mediating_pts_clinical_experiences_page 1at wilei magee to publish ger_mediating_pts_clinical_experiences_page 1at wilei magee to publish ger_mediating_pts_clinical_experiences_page 1at wilei magee to publish ger_mediating_pts_clinical_experiences_r1_blinded_final_9_15_16 ce_v2_with footer ger_mediating_pts_clinical_experiences_r1_blinded_final_9_15_16 ce_v2_no footer 78 global education review 4(1) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: manuel, dominic & freiman, viktor. (2017). differentiating instruction using a virtual environment: a study of mathematical problem posing among gifted and talented learners. global education review, 4(1). 78-98. differentiating instruction using a virtual environment: a study of mathematical problem posing among gifted and talented learners dominic manuel mcgill university viktor freiman université de moncton abstract meeting the needs of mathematically gifted and talented students is a challenge for educators. to support teachers of mathematically gifted and talented students to find appropriate solutions, several innovative projects were conducted in schools using funds provided by the new brunswick, canada, department of education. this article presents one such initiative: a collaborative project we developed with two middle school teachers to enrich the mathematical experience of their most advanced students. we worked with 40 students from both schools, involving them in creating mathematics problems using multimedia tools for the cami (communauté d’apprentissages multidisciplinaires interactifs)1 website. we analyzed the richness of the problems created by the participants (manuel, 2010), as well as students’ perceptions of their experiences, collected through semi-structured interviews. students appreciated the experience, and recommended that the project be continued in following years. most of the problems created by students were moderately rich, and included multiple steps, but were similar to those used in classrooms. some students stated that they were more comfortable solving problems than creating new ones, which suggested that they found the task challenging. our results showed that specific programs for students interested in mathematics could provide positive experiences and challenges. our research also suggested that problem posing in mathematics classrooms needs to be investigated in more depth. keywords gifted students, talented students, middle school mathematics, innovation, online problem solving, problem posing, virtual learning environment. introduction: context and issues educating gifted and talented students in mathematics is an unsettled educational issue internationally (singer et al., 2016). the situation is similar within the new brunswick, canada, school system. the aim of the provincial government is to support all students to become _____________________________ corresponding author: dominic manuel, ph.d candidate, department of integrated studies in education, faculty of education, mcgill university, 3700 mctavish street, room 244, montreal, quebec, canada h3a 1y2 email: dominic.manuel@mcgill.ca mailto:dominic.manuel@mcgill.ca differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 79 educated and productive citizens, capable of reaching their full potential (new brunswick department of education and early childhood development, 2011). this mission, however, is not fully realized when it comes to the education of gifted and talent students. a decade ago, mackay’s (2006) provincial report on school inclusion raised this issue. the report presented concerns about the lack of agreement on a clear definition of gifted and talented students, which could be an obstacle to accurate identification. the report also claimed that pedagogical approaches, and the curricula used in classrooms, were not suitable for educating gifted and talented students, and that schools do not provide these students with adequate opportunities to reach their full potential. in addition, mackay argued that, in terms of inclusion, all students have specific gifts and talents that teachers need to appreciate and nurture. however, the existing resources or mechanisms that could provide gifted and talented students with opportunities to excel in their studies and to develop their specific talents were insufficient or simply missing (mackay, 2006). these issues, among others, motivated the new brunswick department of education to develop a provincial education plan entitled kids come first. the goal of kids come first was to support innovative teaching practices that would stimulate students in language arts, mathematics, and science while meeting the specific learning needs of all students, including the gifted and talented (new brunswick department of education, 2007). this plan stressed the need for creating closer collaboration between schools, local colleges and universities to help support innovative practices. a result of this plan was that teachers attempted to innovate and enrich teaching and learning approaches in their schools. teachers received funds to purchase necessary resources, enabling the implementation of these initiatives. the project we describe in this article is one of these endeavors. the project described in this article consists of the efforts of two teachers from two middle schools (grades 6 to 8) located in an urban area, who initiated a collaboration with the local university-based research team, cami, of which both authors were members, to allow their advanced students to experience more challenging mathematics activities that went beyond the regular curricula (barbeau & taylor, 2009). both participating teachers were responsible for organizing school-wide activities for gifted and talented students during the school year. the cami team had been providing enrichment resources in mathematics using an online problem-solving environment. although the cami website was not specifically designed for gifted and talented students, it had the potential to provide richer and more challenging problems than those present in mathematics textbooks (freiman, manuel, & lirette-pitre 2007; freiman & lirette-pitre, 2009). we agreed with the teachers to involve their students in the process of creating new problems for the cami website. besides enriching their experience in mathematics, this type of activity had the potential to enhance students’ creativity, which is an important aspect that should be part of the mathematics curricula (leikin, 2011). in this article, we focus on analyzing the problems created by the students for the cami website and students’ overall perception about the experience collected by means of semistructured interviews. meeting the needs of gifted and talented students in mathematics the difficulty of meeting the needs of mathematically gifted and talented students in regular classrooms is not new to researchers and teachers. mathematically gifted and talented students lose interest in mathematics by the end of middle school because they are not stimulated intellectually by the routine tasks proposed in classrooms, which are perceived as too easy, repetitive, and are solved by applying strategies that students already know and have mastered 80 global education review 4(1) (diezmann & waters, 2004). more challenging tasks are therefore needed to nurture curiosity and to develop creativity and scientific thinking skills in the mathematically gifted and talented (johnson, 2000; taylor, 2008, singer et al., 2016). one possible method to meet the needs of gifted and talented students is to create or pose problems which are recognized as challenges that go beyond problem solving (sheffield, 2008; leikin, 2009). studies also point to the importance of problem finding and investigation activities (rosli, capraro & capraro, 2014) to foster, among other aspects, creativity in these students (singer, pelczer & voica, 2011). few studies, however, have dealt with online mathematical content created by gifted and talented students. we explore this issue in this article. one of the enrichment activities we developed in this study challenged students to create mathematics problems that would be posted on the cami website. while most existing problems were presented as text with pictures or tables, our participants were invited to explore the multimedia tools available on the website, such as the audio and video options that allowed the addition of multimedia components to the text of the problem. these tools were not previously used, so this task was a novel contribution for the website in terms of content (new problems) and the use of multimedia tools (new affordances for the users). at the end of the project, half of the students volunteered and participated in individual semi-structured interviews (with parental consent) during which they shared their experience in the project throughout the school year. we analyzed the richness of the problems created by the students and the data about students’ perceptions of their experiences from the interviews. the following questions guided our study: 1. what types of problems were created by the middle school mathematically gifted and talented students in terms of mathematical content, context and richness? 2. how did the gifted and talented students perceive their experiences in the project? conceptual framework renzulli’s three-ring model and mathematical giftedness as mentioned in the first part of the article, meeting the needs of gifted and talented students is complex and cannot be resolved with simple educational tasks. several types of programs and activities have been developed and are mentioned in the literature as promising options to meet the specific learning needs of these students. among them, problem posing and problem solving seem to remain at the heart of debates, as shown in a recent review conducted by singer et al. (2016). the authors cited joint publications of the national council of teachers of mathematics, the national association for gifted children, and the national council of supervisors of mathematics which suggested the inclusion of an additional standard to the common core curriculum2 focusing on mathematical creativity and innovation. the standard would encourage and support all students in “taking risks, embracing challenge, solving problems in a variety of ways, posing new mathematical questions of interest to investigate, and being passionate about mathematical investigations” (johnson & sheffield, 2012, pp. 15-16). recent studies showed the importance of problem posing for the development of mathematical creativity and talent (singer, ellerton, & cai, 2013). in fact, many years ago, renzulli’s three-ring conception of giftedness inspired many researchers to search for winning combinations of activities to foster high-order mathematical abilities, task commitment, as well as creativity (renzulli, 1986). figure 1 presents his model. differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 81 figure 1. renzulli’s (1986) three-ring conception of giftedness. in later work, renzulli and reis (1997) proposed three independent types of enrichment to differentiate instruction in regular classrooms. type i enrichment activities are general exploration experiences to attract students interested in a topic. type ii activities provide group training that let students practice the skills and acquire the knowledge they will need to conduct their own activities in their field of interest. type ii activities foster creative and critical thinking, help students to learn how to learn, to use advanced level reference materials, and to communicate effectively. type iii activities are individual or small group in-depth investigations of real problems based on students’ interests and skills. such activities provide opportunities for gifted and talented students to investigate different topics (not always taught in schools), and to communicate findings in various forms, such as journal articles, oral presentations, books, or plays (renzulli & reis, 1997). using this line of thought, the collaborating teachers and researchers (the authors) developed type ii and type iii enrichment activities and used renzulli’s framework to investigate students’ creativity in terms of the richness of the problems they created, as well as their perceptions about the project, which we relate to the task commitment. finally, the challenges reported by the students were considered as indicating possible gains in the development of their natural mathematical abilities, which is the third element of renzulli’s three-ring model. creativity and richness of mathematical problems scholars view the concept of rich problems differently. for instance, researchers from the enriching mathematics (nrich) website3 defined rich problems as problems that have multiple entry points, can have more than one solution, open the way to new territory for 82 global education review 4(1) further exploration, and force students to think outside the box and become more creative. stein, grover, and henningsen (1996) described rich tasks as those that ask for high cognitive reasoning from students. piggot (2008) saw a rich problem as one that possesses many characteristics that altogether offer opportunities to meet the needs of learners at different moments, in an environment in which the problem is posed and is influenced by the questions asked by teachers and the expectations from students. to investigate this variety of characteristics, manuel (2010) conducted a review of the literature to determine features or characteristics in the text of problems that could identify them as rich. he argued that a problem is rich when it respects many of the following features found in the literature: it is open-ended (diezmann & watters, 2004; takahashi, 2000); it is complex (diezmann & watters, 2004; schleicher, 1999), it is ill-defined (murphy, 2004), it is contextualized (greenes, 1997), and it has multiple possible interpretations (hancock, 1995). a problem is open-ended if it has multiple correct answers or can be solved using various strategies (takahashi, 2000). though some might argue that open-ended problems automatically bring both multiple answers and strategies, manuel (2010) saw those two criteria as distinct since some problems could lead to multiple answers, but could be solved using the same strategy. a complex problem is one that respects the most of the following criteria: more than one step is needed to solve it (schleicher, 1999); it implicitly or explicitly asks to find patterns, generalize results or make mathematical proofs; it explicitly asks to make different choices and justify them; and it explicitly asks to create other problems or questions to explore further (diezmann & watters, 2004; freiman, 2006). a problem is ill-defined if it is missing certain data (information) which are necessary to solve the problem, and that data can either be found by searching other sources, or it can be explicitly defined by the problem solver (murphy, 2004). additionally, a problem is illdefined if it contains unnecessary data or does not present enough information for solution (kitchner, 1983). a problem with multiple possible interpretations encourages different ways of thinking (can be seen in different ways) about the problem, leading to different possible answers (handcock, 1995). these could qualify them as open-ended. manuel argued that some problems have multiple interpretations, but each interpretation has one correct answer. the contextualized problem is one where the mathematics is presented in real life or fictional situations (greenes, 1997). figure 2 illustrates all characteristics of a rich mathematical problem used as criteria to assess the richness of each problem on the cami website (manuel, 2010). we use these criteria to analyze the richness of students’ problems. differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 83 figure 2. model of the richness of a mathematical problem (manuel, 2010). perceptions and task commitment from the literature, we found multiple views about programs for the gifted and talented from students’ perspectives. for example, adamsbyers, whitsell and moon (2004) reported conflicted perceptions of homogeneous grouping expressed by gifted and talented students. they saw homogeneous grouping as an opportunity to be challenged, and appreciated the opportunities for deeper learning, but also felt a need to be with their peers to socialize. yang, gentry and choi (2012) found that gifted and talented students had more positive perceptions of pullout classes compared to the regular classes. moreover, rawlins (2004) reported that grouping gifted and talented students in an acceleration program did not harm their social development and well-being. gross (2006) found similar results in her longitudinal study on acceleration. doucet (2012) also obtained similar results in his study on students’ perception of an acceleration program in mathematics, implemented in one school in new brunswick. regarding mathematical problem posing, studies reviewed by silver (1994) reported that such experiences increased interest in mathematics, engagement with problem solving, and that they developed a positive attitude towards mathematics in students. another study by silver et al. (1996, cited in brown and walter (2005)) indicated a cognitive commitment in the context of problem posing which is associated with a complex task setting. sharma (2013) 84 global education review 4(1) suggested that posing difficult problems to their friends (that they would not be able to solve) might stimulate creativity in gifted and talented students bringing them additional pleasure along with the task commitment. method participants and project description during one school year, 40 francophone students from grades 6 to 8 participated in the project. the first school had 28 students: 16 boys and 12 girls. eight were in grade 6 (4 boys, 4 girls); eight were in grade 7 (5 boys, 3 girls); and 12 were in grade 8 (6 boys, 6 girls). the second school had 12 students: 11 boys and one girl. eight students were in grade 7 (all boys) and four in grade 8 (3 boys and 1 girl). students were selected by their mathematics teachers, who based their judgment on the student’s academic performance in the regular curriculum in conjunction with in-class observations. the mathematics teachers made a list of students they recommended for the enrichment program. the selected students and their parents made the final decision on whether to participate. the participants were provided with individual laptops, multimedia tools, and software purchased with funds awarded by the new brunswick department of education. this provided students with easy access to a variety of technological tools along with high-speed internet access during the entire project. we worked with students by constructing and enacting enrichment activities on a weekly basis for one hour per week. during this period, students were pulled out of their regular class. we also offered students opportunities to do activities prepared by pre-service teachers enrolled in the undergraduate primary education program offered at the université de moncton, such as measuring the perimeter of a building, a complex task helping them seeing mathematical connections in a real-life context (freiman et al., 2011). the undergraduate students were enrolled in mathematics education courses that we taught. participants came to the university campus to participate in the activities. students also participated in a provincial annual mathematics competition held on the university campus, an out-of-school activity that was shown to be fruitful in the education of gifted and talented students (bicknell, 2012). during the last four months of the school year, students were given the task of creating new problems for the cami website. at the beginning of this task, students participated in three workshops given by members of the cami team. the first workshop was given by the website programmer. students learned how the site was created from both the design and programming perspectives. the second workshop focused on how solutions submitted by members to problems posted on the cami website were assessed, and how feedback was provided to its authors. the last workshop focused on how to create rich mathematical problems. during this workshop, the participants discussed their perceptions of characteristics that make a rich mathematical problem. we did not explicitly train them in creating rich problems, and we did not propose any criteria proposed in the literature. however, it was interesting that students came up with characteristics similar to those suggested in the literature, and also chosen for manuel’s (2010) model of the richness of a mathematical problem. these workshops consisted of group training sessions to support students in developing the skills needed for tasks, as proposed in type ii enrichment activities (renzulli & reis, 1997). following the workshops, participants began their own investigations (according to type iii of renzulli’s model) and created three differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 85 sets of problems. students worked in groups of three or four. they were free to choose the types of problem they wanted to create. those problems were posted on the cami website and could be solved by the members of the virtual community. students worked on problems with autonomy, and also had the opportunity to discuss their work with us. we prompted them with questions to help them to reflect on how to improve their problems and make them richer. the two teachers also helped with this process, and managed all the organizational aspects of the project. originally, three cycles of the activity were planned. the first cycle encouraged students to design their problems in a textual format, which was how problems were posted on the cami website. for the two other cycles, the students were supposed to add multimedia support which could support other students with the reading of the text of the problem (audio) and eventually with understanding its context (video). the use of dynamic web 2.0 tools (audio and video) enriched practices by meeting the “net generation’s” learning style of not only being the users of the online resources but also creators of online content (depover et al., 2008). unfortunately, as the school year came closer to an end, it became increasingly difficult for all students to attend our weekly meetings. some students had to remain in their regular classes for assessments and end of year activities. by the end of the project, all groups created at least one problem (in textual format), six groups succeeded in creating a second problem that included an audio file and one group created a problem that contained a video. in total, 23 problems were created and posted on the cami website. other members could solve the problems and submit their solutions electronically. solutions came from students from all over the province, and elsewhere. this provided participants with opportunities to see how others solved their problems, to analyze the solutions, and to write feedback to the authors of the solutions. in the last part of the project, participants had an opportunity to assess solutions to their problems that were submitted by other members, and to write formative feedback to them. because of the circumstances mentioned above, only 15 participants participated in this portion of the project. at the end of the school year, we collected students’ perceptions about the project by means of semi-structured interviews. the goal of the interviews was to get feedback on the project and determine its impact on meeting the needs of the gifted and talented. all the participants were invited to take part in individual 20 to 30 minutes semi-structured interviews at the end of the school year with one of the authors. nine students (6 boys, 3 girls) participated with parental permission from the first school, and 11 students (10 boys, 1 girl) participated in the second school. the interviews were audiorecorded and then transcribed by a research assistant. during the interviews, participants were questioned on their motives for joining the project; their interests and abilities in mathematics; their experiences in the project in general; the experience of creating problems on the cami website and assessing members’ solutions; their interest in continuing in the project in the following years; and their recommendations for the following years. data analysis for our first research question, we used manuel’s (2010) model to investigate the richness of each of the 23 problems created by our participants. the rubric (table 1) shows if the problem possessed each feature and met the corresponding criteria. the shaded portions represent elements taken away after validation of the rubric. the feature “problems with 86 global education review 4(1) multiple interpretations” and the criterion “problem contains unnecessary data” (feature ill-defined) were taken out since the coders found it too difficult to assess this criterion. the criterion “problem contains insufficient data, which makes it impossible to solve” was also taken out because none of the problems respected that criterion. the two criteria in manuel’s model on missing data (feature illdefined) were combined into one because the coders could not differentiate the two (see * in table 1). we used the rubric to analyze the richness of each problem. we read the problem and then each criterion individually. if the criterion was respected in the text of the problem, we added a checkmark next to it. finally, we counted the number of criterion checked. the sum provided a measure of the richness of the problem. a problem could vary from 0 to 8 in terms of its richness. we also looked at the relative frequencies of each criterion respected in the problems. in addition, qualitative notes were made for each problem to see themes that emerged from the student’s creations, such as the concepts involved and the contexts of the problems. we used this model since the criteria align with the mathematical culture that is implicitly (or sometimes explicitly) defined in the provincial (direction de la mesure et de l’évalution, 2010), national (pan-canadian assessment program, 2010), and international (organisation for economic co-operation and development, 2000) assessments. table 1 rubric used to assess the richness of a mathematical problem feature criterion respected () open-ended problem problem has multiple correct answers problem has multiple appropriate strategies complex problem problem requires multiple steps to get answers problem asks to make and justify choices problem asks to find and explore other questions problem asks to find patterns and generalize results ill-defined problem some or all necessary data or information are missing in the text of the problem* problem contains unnecessary data problem contains insufficient data, thus it is impossible to solve contextualized problem problem presented in a real or fictive situation problem with multiple interpretations problem can be interpreted in more than one way richness of the problem (# of criteria the problem respected) differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 87 for our second question, we used a thematic analysis of the corpus from the interviews (howitt & cramer, 2011). in the following section, we present the results of both analyses. results richness of the problems created by the students the richness of the mathematical problems created by the participants varied from 2 to 6 out of a possible 8 (mean = 3.39, standard deviation = 1.2). on the scale of mathematical richness, seven problems received a score of 2; 11 problems were scored as medially rich – six with a score of 3 and five with a score of 4; the remaining five problems received the highest scores of 5 (4 problems) and 6 (1 problem). the three most respected criteria used in manuel’s (2010) model were contextualized problems (22 problems), problems that could be solved using different strategies (19 problems), and problems that needed multiple steps to find answers (19 problems). the only problem we did not consider as being contextual was one that used a reference to solving a routine exercise problem from a math textbook. all 23 problems required more than one step of calculation to find answers. seven of the problems created by our participants contained missing data. for instance, one group created a problem where members had to calculate the number of days in world war 1 and world war 2 combined. the start and end dates were given in the text of the problem for each war, but the information about leap years was missing, which could make the problem ill-defined. that aspect of the problem could have been difficult to detect. thus, not only did the problem require the identification of missing data, but the solution also required the solver to find a way to obtain that data from non-specified sources. in addition, in two problems, the text asked the solver to make choices between options and to justify the selections. for instance, in one problem, the question asked for a choice of the best type of carpeting for a room in a house based on some given information. finally, in one problem, responders were asked to find a pattern in a sequence of numbers written on a standard chessboard. looking at the mathematics involved in each problem, we noticed that most problems focused on arithmetic concepts. most problems could be solved using the four basic operations. what was interesting, was that in many of the problems the participants could add some relationships between quantities, like “three less than,” “twice as much as,” “one more than.” only a few problems involved fractions, proportions and percentages. the problems that were not focused on arithmetic dealt mostly with measurement or space. most of those focused on finding perimeters (or circumference), area, and time measurement. for one problem, pythagoras’ theorem was needed to calculate the answer. one problem focused on working with patterns. there were no problems dealing explicitly with probability. in was interesting to notice that half of the problems related to measurement also involved arithmetic. the context of those problems was about finding a price for some work on a surface. regarding the context of the problems, we observed three main categories of problems: problems related to students’ everyday lives, problems related to students’ future lives or adult lives, and fictional problems. most of the groups created contexts related to students’ everyday lives and activities. in this category, a 88 global education review 4(1) first theme that emerged was families (2 problems). one of them was to find the number of boys and girls in a family, while another was to find the age of each member of the family. a second theme that emerged was sports (4 problems). the sports involved in the problems included running, biking and hockey. a third theme that emerged was electronics (2 problems). one problem described a battle between two robots, and another focused on getting the correct dimensions for an electronic carpet to be placed in a playroom. the fourth theme that emerged was hobbies (4 problems). shopping was a context that appeared in two problems. the articles that were being bought were things that children are interested in. two problems focused on vacations and on popular music. the last theme that emerged was school (1 problem). this problem referred to the problematic situation of the prices for meals at a school cafeteria. for problems in the categories of adult lives or future lives, we found two themes in context: careers (5 problems), and finances (2 problems). for problems related to careers, the contexts were related to building houses, comparing fields, observing the growth of a tree and a forest. the two problems dealing with finances were related to situations that students could face in their future life. one was on saving money for postsecondary studies, while the other was determining the total salary an employee would make over a period of time. the last category of problems was fictional contexts. there were only two problems in that category. one was inspired by the movie twilight while the other involved a fictional chessboard and royal family. figure 3 is an example of a problem created by a team of three students in grade 7. this problem received the highest score of 6 for richness. the problem is translated from french. since the question of the problem is ambiguous, the problem was open-ended and illdefined. since the popularity of music groups can be defined in multiple ways, the problem thus had multiple interpretations, and multiple solutions. depending on the definition, multiple strategies and steps could be taken to solve the problem. figure 3. example of a problem that received a score of 6 for richness. differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 89 perceptions of students’ experiences in the project three main categories of responses emerged from the interviews: cognitive aspects, social aspects and affective aspects. we found themes that emerged for each category. cognitive aspects three main themes emerged from the data in relation to cognitive aspects. the first one was the need for intellectual challenge. all the students said that one of their main reasons for participating in this project was to get more challenge in mathematics. this finding is well grounded in existing literature, for example sheffield (2008). the second theme that emerged was opportunity to improve their mathematical abilities. a couple of students saw this project as an opportunity to improve their mathematical abilities and to be better prepared for what was to come in following years. the need for challenging tasks, to move faster through the curriculum, as well as having more opportunities to foster mathematical abilities is well documented in the literature on mathematically gifted and talented students (diezmann & watters, 2002; johnson, 2000). the third theme that emerged from the interviews was the opportunity to learn new mathematical content. the participants were expecting to learn something new in the project. the project allowed students to learn new aspects of mathematics that was exciting to them. we suggest that this aspect improved their commitment to the learning tasks, even if they were more difficult. one student mentioned that (quotes are translated from french): yes, this project influenced my attitude. before i came, i thought that math was boring because i was never learning something new or something that impressed me. it was always things that i already knew or just logic. but with this project, we learn new things and i’m just like wow! i never knew that existed. and it makes me love math more. this finding is consistent with the existing literature (wilkins, wilkins & oliver, 2006). one of the new learning opportunities was creating problems. all students said that they liked creating problems on the cami website and assessing the solutions, and they were proud of the work they accomplished. all the participants mentioned that the task provided students with a real challenge that demanded creativity and imagination. one student said, “it was fun. it was a challenge because it is much harder to create a problem compared to solving it. i love difficult tasks. if there is no challenge, it’s boring.” in addition, most mentioned being proud of their final product because they had to think a lot about how to put challenges in the problems they created. one student mentioned feeling proud because her mathematics teacher had the rest of the class go on the website to solve her problem. although creating problems was a new learning experience, when the participants were asked if they preferred creating problems or solving them, opinions were divided. those who preferred solving problems said that they wanted a fast challenge, and it took more time to create than to solve a problem. a few mentioned that they liked reading the ideas of others in the problems, and they did not feel comfortable with the task of creating quality problems. one student said, “i learn better when i am challenged by others, not when i challenge others.” some students seem to have found their problems too easy. students who preferred creating problems gave as reasons that it was more challenging, and that it demanded more creativity. one student added, “i love french and i love to write, create and imagine. and i could choose, if i wanted the problem to be really difficult, or if i wanted to put a trick in it or not.” these findings demonstrate the complexity of problem posing as a mathematical 90 global education review 4(1) and a human activity, reflecting the interplay between cognitive and affective aspects of learning as mentioned by silver (1994). yet, the field of mathematical problem posing remains under-researched and our data pointed to the need to pay attention to its specificity in the context of gifted and talented learners. regarding the next steps of the project, some students said they would like to have enrichment in other subjects, such as science, and to be able to use technology more often during the project. students also asked for special accommodations such as being able to advance faster than other students. in fact, most students would like to be able to work at their own pace and not have to wait for other students to understand the mathematical concepts being taught and practiced in the classrooms. one third of students said that they would appreciate being in a different mathematics course where they could learn new things at a faster rate. one student seemed to feel confident enough in his mathematical abilities and said that he would appreciate skipping a grade if he knew the content in the curriculum. another student said: in our classes, tell our teachers that if we feel comfortable enough with the content that we could do the test before the others. and after, we could work on much harder content. i would love to learn stuff like, i will be in grade 8 next year, and i would like to learn stuff that we learn in grade 9 and higher levels. and i also love to solve enigmas. social aspects three themes emerged from the interviews related to social aspects. the first theme was the opportunity to be in a different learning environment. participants appreciated working in smaller groups. this motivated some to participate in the project. “i loved the fact that we were in small groups. we were like eight people in our group … you can learn better that way.” this finding aligns with the work by diezmann and watters (2002). a second theme that emerged was interactiing with other students in the group. not only was the size of the group a positive aspect for our participants, but most students also appreciated collaborating with other students that have similar learning abilities in mathematics (finding confirmed by doucet (2012)). however, the amount of time did not seem to be enough for the participants. many recommended optional times for enrichment activities and even suggested two hours per week for the project. a last theme that emerged was the opportunities that some activities provided beyond the project. some activities had an impact that went beyond the original goal of enriching the participants’ personal experiences. one student talked about sharing his experience of playing bachet’s game (see applebaum and freiman (2014)) with his friends: when we did that game with the chips, you could take away 3, 2, or 1 and all, when my friends came over, i showed them the game and then we played it and after a while, we changed the rules. we added more chips and took away like 2 to 4 instead. and we were always trying to figure it out to win. affective aspects four themes emerged from the interviews related to affective aspects. the first theme was the student’s motivation and interests towards mathematics. all participants interviewed mentioned that mathematics was one of their favorite school subjects. this was one of their reasons for participating in the project. however, almost all pointed out that the slow learning rate of regular classrooms, and the lack differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 91 of challenge sometimes influenced their motivation and their interest. most of them shared their concerns about the repetitiveness and easiness of regular classroom activities. those same students also said that they did not like doing countless worksheets when they had mastered the concept after doing one simply because other students required more time to learn the concepts. these findings are similar to those noted by feng (2010). a second theme that emerged was the excitement that the activities brought. the participants mentioned appreciating all the activities they had done during the project. however, the activities organized outside of the school setting or with help of the members of the local community seemed to have been the most exciting for the participants. all participants found the visits to the université de moncton rewarding. most found the experience with the cami team very interesting, especially the problem posing experience since it was new when compared to solving problems. the third theme that emerged was the emotions the activities evoked. we claim that the experiences brought various and sometimes strong emotions to the students. when asked about how they felt when faced with a challenging task, most students said that they were frustrated because they did not know how to solve it immediately, but they were always motivated to solve it. their emotions were sometimes strong, but they changed during the process, transitioning from one extreme (frustration) to another (euphoria with success). some students mentioned feeling stupid for not being able to initially solve a problem. one student summarized these points by saying he felt: “frustrated, amused, and a bit mad at the end for not getting it when it wasn’t as hard as i thought it was at first”. this mainly positive feedback supported findings from previous studies, such as vantassel-baska et al. (2004). the last theme, the amount of time allowed for the project, seemed to have been a source of disappointment for the students. while sharing their positive experiences about the project, students were unanimous in saying that not enough time was devoted to the project. they all wanted more than one hour per week, even if they found some tasks were difficult to solve. in addition, some expressed their disappointment when they had to miss a week because they had to remain in class for a test or other activity. all students asked that more time be allowed for this project. they felt that one hour per week was not adequate. when discussing recommendations, all students mentioned that they would be sad, disappointed, and even mad if this project was not available in the next school year. one student said loudly, ”i’m starting a strike! this project is a 10.” overall, when reflecting on their experience, students mentioned that this learning opportunity was amusing and very challenging, and that it gave them the chance to work with other like-minded students that found mathematics easy, with whom they made new friends. a student summed it up by saying that, “it’s not every day that you learn something new and have fun at the same time.” while students’ responses seem to reveal positive impacts related to the cognitive, social and affective aspects, it is the combination of all three that appears to be the “winning condition” for their overall satisfaction with the project. discussion and concluding remarks developing and implementing programs for gifted and talented students is a very complex and dynamic task that is usually well received by students. when involved in such programs, the gifted and talented report feeling more motivated, challenged, and rewarded, with higher intellectual level activities in a stimulating environment that contributes positively to their social and emotional development (reis & renzulli, 2010). however, 92 global education review 4(1) gifted education is a topic that requires particular attention, even after the first decade of the 21st century (reis & renzulli, 2010; singer et al. 2016). according to koshy, ernest and casey (2009), such programs should stimulate the interest of students, and provide exposure to the concepts and ideas of mathematics at an appropriate level of cognitive challenge. the results of our study are aligned with the preceding points. regarding the problems created, the content respected similar criteria to ones mentioned in the manuel’s (2010) model. the mean score of richness was 3.39, which is similar to the score of richness in manuel, freiman, and bourque’s (2012) study of 180 problems created by experts, in which the mean score for richness was 4. the criteria used most often in the problems created for this study were problems with contexts, problems with multiple strategies, and problems with multiple steps. we were not surprised with this result as students are asked to solve these types of problems in their regular classrooms. these types of problems are proposed in provincial examinations in grades 6 and 8 (direction de la mesure et de l’évaluation, 2010). additionally, even though students created most problems in arithmetic, measurement, and geometry, it was interesting to see that students could implement more than one mathematical concept within a problem. the diversity of the contexts used in their problems, especially when half had contexts related to their lives, was also interesting to see. however, it appears more challenging to create more open-ended and illdefined problems that have more than one correct answer, have multiple interpretations, encourage students to find patterns and generalize results, as well as make choices and justify them. it seemed to be more difficult to implement these types of problem, even when created by experienced adults. in fact, these criteria were less frequently respected by experts who created the problems for the cami website according to manuel, freiman and bourque’s (2012) study. this finding sheds light on the importance of increasing opportunities for students and teachers to create and pose rich mathematical problems. more research is needed as to how this can be done and how the cami website could better promote differentiation in its members using renzulli’s (1986) model. manuel’s (2010) model is an alternative way to assess the richness of mathematical problems. the results of this study did confirm limitations of the model. first, the model does not consider the mathematical concepts involved in the problem. this criterion was not implemented in the model because in the cami website, students of any grade can choose to solve any problem of interest to them (freiman & lirette-pitre, 2009). the results of our study lead to a reflection about the importance of the mathematics involved in the problem. for instance, the problem in figure 3 received a high score in terms of richness. however, the mathematics involved in solving the problem involved only basic operations. is the problem then rich? second, manuel’s (2010) model was used to assess the richness of the problems by reading the texts. the model did not consider the various ways in which a problem can be presented to students in a classroom setting. even though some problems received low scores in terms of richness, there are multiple alternatives that can be done in classrooms by opening up the problem, which would make it richer. for instance, one problem consisted of calculating the total price for meals at a school cafeteria if the price of one meal was $3.25. in terms of richness, this problem received a score of 2. however, students in a classroom could investigate with different prices and percentages and attempt to find patterns and generalize results, thus bring deeper mathematical concepts and processes to the task. as for students’ perceptions of their experience in the project, our results highlighted differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 93 multiple aspects. first, gifted and talented students appreciated the experience of being involved in an innovative project in which they could devote part of their school time doing more complex and challenging mathematics in a different way than in their regular classroom. namely, students felt enriched by new and challenging tasks that gave them the opportunity to discover different aspects of mathematics, to solve and create new problems by using technology, and to collaborate with people other than their teachers. these results were similar to those of colangelo and kelly (1983) who found that, compared to other students, the gifted and talented desire to participate in special programs for the gifted and want to spend most of the day working on activities and with other gifted and talented students rather than with general students. they also appreciated the experience of using technology. this supports siegle’s (2005) claim that the internet is the most significant technology available to gifted and talented students. second, several participants found themselves in quite unusual situations when presented with tasks they could not solve after a first attempt. the experience of having difficulty, rarely experienced by gifted and talented students in their regular curriculum-based activities, made some participants confused or even angry, forcing them to persevere to solve a specific task. ernest (1985) explained this effect on cognitive performance and abilities as a result of the interaction in the success cycle which includes a positive effect, including attitude and motivation towards mathematics, effort, persistence and engagement with cognitively demanding tasks, and achievement and success at mathematical tasks. our data supports these findings. third, the participants reflected on the experience of posing mathematical problems and sharing them with others in an online community. this type of learning activity was viewed by researchers as important to the development of creativity in students allowing for manifestation of diverse thinking (felmer, pehkonen & kilpatrick, 2016). in this respect, our data suggested a mixed reaction from the students. while being generally happy with their work and results, many felt that creating good (non-trivial) problems was a difficult task and they did not have enough experience in creating problems and making them more interesting. we also hypothesized that when facing intellectual challenges, there is a need to mobilize cognitive and socio-affective abilities not yet captured in research and practice. more studies are needed to understand this hypothesis at a deeper level. reflecting on the project at a more global level, we can extend our discussion by emphasizing several issues that could be studied in the future. namely, simply stating that the gifted and talented population in public schools is underserved does not provide information regarding the services that must be provided, the form they should take, and how to make isolated opportunities more effective and sustainable. our questions were also directed towards the issue of homogeneous versus heterogeneous grouping for gifted and talented students. according to our participants, working in small groups and not having to wait for other students to complete tasks suited them. some students revealed frustrations about inadequate nourishment for their minds in regular classrooms. this finding corroborates mackay’s (2006) findings. time allocated to the project is another factor to be questioned. namely, providing pull-out services created additional time pressure; many students receiving pull-out services said that the amount of time provided for the project was insufficient. they preferred being able to have more time to work on more challenging tasks. moreover, that time should not conflict with other school-related activities, such as the regular tests they were still required to accomplish. this issue needs to be addressed in the future. 94 global education review 4(1) also, our participants were aware of their learning needs. some requested moving faster through the curriculum while in their classes, or if possible, in a classroom with other gifted and talented students. according to vaughn, feldhusen and asher (1991), there is a small to medium positive effect on pull-out programs on academic achievement and critical and creative thinking, while there is no negative impact on the students’ self-concept. a study from rogers (2002) revealed that gifted and talented students can cover the regular curriculum in three to six months of a school year, and that acceleration is known to be the most effective strategy for those students. the last issue is related to the benefits of self-directed learning, self-esteem, and the wellbeing of gifted and talented students. by participating in our project, several students mentioned their genuine interest in mathematics and appreciated challenging tasks that they could discuss with peers of similar ability who understood their ideas and thus felt able to share their discoveries and be understood. kontoyianni et al. (2010) described gifted and talented students’ self-perception with respect to the five following dimensions: learning characteristics; interest/curiosity; creativity; social-emotional characteristics; and mathematical reasoning. their results showed that the greatest impact on students’ selfperceptions were in the areas of social-emotional characteristics and mathematical reasoning. our findings pointed in the same direction. participants in our project appreciated taking part in the project and having the opportunity to work with others with similar ability, and to make new friends. however, few revealed their perceptions of cognitive and metacognitive aspects related to mathematical reasoning. we need to reflect on this when planning the next steps of the study. overall, although this project was beneficial for the participants, its continuation in today’s school system requires additional financial support, which might be an issue considering budget cuts that the new brunswick schools are facing. doucet (2012) confirmed this reality when he interviewed school principals about their perceptions of an acceleration program that was implemented for one year. his findings revealed that, although the school administrators recognized the importance of such initiatives, that there was inadequate financial support to continue the project. hence, more inclusive options should be considered to meet the needs of gifted and talented students (porter & aucoin, 2012). teachers should implement differentiated instruction inside the regular classroom. according to reis and renzulli (2010), differentiating instruction inside a mixed ability classroom can help meet the needs of the gifted and talented students, while also benefiting other students. the results of our research showed that the innovative project constructed by collaboration of the two local schools and the cami team had a positive impact on participants. the participants appreciated the opportunities that were provided. they also appreciated being in small groups with others who shared similar mathematical abilities. this project gave participants the opportunity to experience real cognitive challenges where they worked diligently to solve the proposed problems. the task of creating problems left all students proud of their efforts, although some preferred solving problems. we believe that the impact of technology and creation of the mathematical problems should be studied in more depth, and with a variety of data (quantitative and qualitative). we also wonder how the regular classroom can be made a richer environment that meets the learning needs of gifted and talented students while supporting them socially and emotionally. notes 1. the name of the website is in french and stands for interactive multidisciplinary differentiating instruction using a virtual environment 95 learning community. over the decade, the site underwent several modifications, such as adding other subject area to the original mathematics and sciences. the website was previously named casmi, which is french for interactive science and mathematics learning community. this explains why the publications we cite had the former name. 2. for more information about common core standards, visit http://www.corestandards.org/ 3. available at: nrich.maths.org/frontpage references adams-byers, j., whitsell, s. s., & moon, s.m. 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(unpublished doctoral disseratin). georgia state university. atlanta, ga. vantassel-baska, j., feng, a. x., quek, c., & struck, j. (2004). a study of educators’ and students’ perceptions of academic success for underrepresented populations identified for gifted programs. psychology science, 46(3), 363-378. vaughn, v., feldhusen, f., & asher, w. (1991). metaanalyses and reviews of research on pull-out programs in gifted education. gifted child quarterly, 35(2), 92-98. wilkins, m. m., wilkins, j. l. m., oliver, t. (2006). differentiating the curriculum for elementary gifted mathematics students. teaching children mathematics, august 2006, 6-13. yang, y., gentry, m., & choi, y. o. (2012). gifted students’ perceptions of the regular class and pull-out programs in south korea. journal of advanced academics, 23(3), 270-287. about the author(s) dominic manuel is a ph.d. candidate, course lecturer, and research assistant in mathematics education in the department of integrated studies in education, faculty of education, at mcgill university. his current research focuses on studying teaching practices and the co-construction of knowledge between teachers and students with inquirybased learning instruction (including problem solving) in mathematics. his other areas of interest include: meeting the learning needs of mathematically gifted and talented students; developing mathematical creativity in students; implementing challenging rich tasks in mathematics classrooms; and using information and communication technologies (ict) in classrooms. since the beginning of his masters in 2007 at the université de moncton, he participated in multiple research projects, wrote and cowrote articles and book chapters, and presented at local, provincial, national, and international conferences in all his areas of interest and other areas. he also worked in local schools where he offered enrichment activities and created an acceleration program for the gifted and talented students, and supported teachers with meeting the learning needs of students who needed extra challenges in mathematics. viktor freiman, full professor at the faculty of educational sciences, université de moncton, new brunswick, canada, ph. d. in computer science teaching. his research is focused on innovations in mathematics education, use of digital technology, problem solving, giftedness and creativity, from interand trans-disciplinary perspective. since 2003 he has been running several online projects on mathematical problem solving. he has several articles and book chapters published on this topic. his recent partnership development project, funded by the canadian social sciences and humanities research council, looks into the development of digital competencies as a lifelong continuum. he is a co-editor for the book series mathematics education in the digital era by springer, since 2014. 304-1431-1-ed ce_dm_vf manuel to format p 1-9 304-1431-1-ed ce_dm_vf manuel to format p 10-18 304-1431-1-ed ce_dm_vf manuel to format p 19-20 50 global education review 3(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gawlik, marytza a. (2016). the u.s. charter school landscape: extant literature, gaps in research, and implications for the u.s. educational system. global education review, 3(2). 50-83 the u.s. charter school landscape: extant literature, gaps in research, and implications for the u.s. educational system marytza a. gawlik florida state university abstract more than 20 years into the implementation of public charter schools, the u.s. experience can inform policymakers and others about how to achieve the best possible results through charter school policies. this paper describes the history and current state of the charter school movement, presents a conceptual model of the charter school system, and reviews the extant research on charter school outcomes. the paper concludes with a discussion of the implications of the findings, reviewed for policymakers and researchers, and a list of remaining research topics in the field of charter school research. keywords charter schools, charter school policies, charter school movement, charter school outcomes introduction charter schools have been in existence in the united states for more than 20 years and the sector has experienced incredible growth over the past decade. this surge is partly due to families and children, particularly low-income families and children, seeking opportunities beyond their traditional public schools because of dissatisfaction with traditional public schools (berends, 2015). teachers, parents and/or community organizations (wohlstetter et al., 2013) started the first generation of charter schools, which began in the 1990s and continued through most of the decade. the first generation charter schools were mostly targeted at students who had not been well served by traditional public schools (wohlstetter, smith & farrell, 2013). early charter schools established specialized curricula to appeal to at-risk students, to special education students, and to english-learner students. the second generation of charter schools, which is marked by the late 1990s and early twenty-first century, sought to address questions of accountability, autonomy, and the effects of charters on district reforms. it was also marked by the development of state technical assistance centers to assist in the expansion of charter schools. finally, with the third generation of charter schools, post 2006, or so, questions about charter schools shifted from whether they would survive, to how to improve quality (because they will persist). it’s important to note that the institutionalization of charter schools is a critical part of the educational landscape because it has _____________________________ corresponding author: marytza gawlik, department of educational leadership and policy studies, florida state university, 1114 w. call street, tallahassee, fl 32306 email: mgawlik@fsu.edu the u. s. charter school landscape 51 attracted state and federal dollars for expansion and turning around of low-performing schools (wohlstetter et al., 2013). while proponents claim charter schools represent an experiment in innovation, the charter school movement is not without critics. some have argued vehemently against these schools because they have not lived up to their promise of improving student outcomes and the school system as a whole. in this review of the literature on charter schools, i examine the research that has been conducted over the last 20 years and highlight the issues that need further investigation. the charter school movement charter schools are public schools that are granted more autonomy than public schools in exchange for meeting certain conditions outlined in a charter agreement; these schools have become a significant part of the american urban education landscape. in 1991, the state of minnesota passed the first charter law in an effort to infuse choice, innovation, and improvement, to address parental dissatisfaction with traditional public schools. minnesota’s charter schools were the result of the state’s long tradition of public school choice, which was welcomed by the state legislature and governors (wohlstetter et al., 2013). since that time, more than 40 state legislatures have adopted laws promoting the development of charter schools. these laws have resulted in more than two million students attending more than 6,000 charter schools throughout the united states (kirst, 2007; center for education reform, 2015). in several large cities such as new orleans and washington, dc, charter schools now represent more than one-quarter of all public schools. five states – california, florida, arizona, ohio and texas – host the vast majority of charter schools in the united states. charter schools are concentrated in urban areas, which are home to approximately 53 percent of all charter schools (gross et al., 2012). this concentration likely reflects both need and demand. individuals are more likely to support the opening of charter schools in areas where student achievement is low and parents want more options. new orleans, louisiana and washington, d.c. are the two u.s. districts with the highest charter school enrollment. more than 70 percent of students in new orleans and almost 40 percent of students in washington, d.c. are enrolled in charter schools and almost all the students enrolled in these charter schools are african american. (national alliance of public charter schools, 2014). charter schools appeal to a broad range of political and ideological groups including neoliberals, neoconservatives, the religious right, parents and teachers in urban areas, and the middle class (wells, grutzik, carnochan, slayton & vasudeva, 1999); however, each of these factions supports charter schools for a different reason (apple, 1996; 2001). neoliberals view charter schools as a way to facilitate school choice and competition whereby their belief in competition is crystallized and choice is the focus irrespective of the consequences. neoconservatives and the religious right are more interested in removing government restrictions via deregulation and decentralization in order to create schools that emphasize moral values and religious teachings. the urban faction, whose members have traditionally been plagued by under-funded and poor-performing schools, views the charter school movement as a way to create better schools for their children. finally, the middle 52 global education review 3(2) class sees charter school reform as a way to augment returns on their investments in public schooling (apple, 1996; 2001). the wideranging appeal of charter schools has, to a certain extent, ensured their survival during party changes in government (wells et al., 1999). the charter school movement is not without critics. diane ravitch has argued that charter schools have not lived up to their promise of improving student outcomes and the school system as a whole (ravitch, 2010). she argued that charter schools have been usurped by privatization and that the charter school movement poses significant dangers to the public education system. “the development of the past two decades have brought about massive changes in the governance of public education, especially in urban districts. some children have gained; most have not. and the public schools, an essential element in our democracy for many generations, have suffered damage that may be irreparable” (ravitch, 2013 p. 179). according to her assessment, the evidence base for scaling up charter school reform through federal policy and programs is weak. other critics such as jeffrey henig, a professor at columbia university have commented that charter schools fall short in contributing to a more integrated public school system (wohlstetter et al., 2013). as he points out, there was some hope that the choice model would lead to a more natural and sustainable integration at the school level and argues that this has not happened. he has also critiqued that there are significant gaps geographically where charters are located and another critic, charles payne of the university of chicago, has supported this line of argument (wohlstetter et al., 2013). similarly to ravitch, both henig and payne point out that charter schools have fallen short of expectations when it comes to student outcomes. the charter concept—a conceptual model of the charter school movement in their review of the charter school movement in michigan, miron and nelson (2002) outlined the essential components of the charter concept. figure 1 presents their model. the left panel includes three policy changes—choice, accountability and deregulation—meant to increase school autonomy; these changes do not stipulate detailed charter school actions, but rather create an “opportunity space” in which charter schools can operate (miron & nelson, 2002, p. 4). in the first policy change, the charter school system allows parents a choice in their children’s education, which supporters argue will improve education via competition (since funding moves with students), so charter and public schools that fail to attract and retain students will be closed. choice also involves a sorting process whereby parents choose the best mix of educational services for their children, which allows each school to focus on a narrow set of educational preferences (miron & nelson, 2002). the second policy change is a new form of accountability in which charter schools must achieve certain outcomes as specified in their charters (gawlik, 2012; fuller 2000; miron & nelson 2002). the third policy change, deregulation, allows charter school leaders to choose which methods they will employ to meet these goals (miron & nelson 2002). the u. s. charter school landscape 53 opportunity space/ intermediary goals structural changes outcomes/ final goals figure 1. structural changes, goals, and outcomes of the charter school concept (miron & nelson, 2002). the central panel of figure 1 lists intermediate goals that delimit the opportunity space in which charter schools can experiment; charter school laws often define such intermediate goals in an attempt to encourage charter schools to use their autonomy in certain ways (miron and nelson, 2002). these goals include greater autonomy for principals and teachers, innovative curriculum and pedagogy, increased privatization of services (e.g., food service, nursing care), innovation in school governance, and increased equity or access to new educational opportunities. the right panel of figure 1 includes the two most common outcomes that serve as final goals within the charter concept: student achievement and customer satisfaction (however, there is significant controversy about which outcomes charter schools should be required to meet) (miron & nelson, 2002). many charter school state laws include a focus on raising student achievement, and authorizers1 often use test scores for accountability purposes (wohlstetter et al., 2013). with regard to customer satisfaction, some school choice scholars have argued that in an open market system, the best indicator of a school’s quality (and thus an important final goal of charter schools) is its ability to attract, satisfy, and retain customers (i.e., parents) (miron & nelson, 2002). in this paper, i review the literature on charter schools using miron and nelson’s conceptual framework of the charter school model. this purpose of this paper is to examine the state of charter schools against these various intermediary and final goals. i draw mostly on literature from education and several specific areas including segregation, innovation and autonomy. first, i outline the methods used to select articles for the review. next, i review the research on charter school outcomes, focusing on student achievement. finally, i discuss the family choice accountability deregulation principal and teacher autonomy innovative curricula/pedagogy privatization governance equity/access to new educational opportunities customer satisfaction parental and community involvement student achievement customer satisfaction 54 global education review 3(2) implications of the extant research for charter schools and the us education system. methods to examine the literature on charter schools, i reviewed research and scholarly studies available that reported evidence on the goals of the reform as outlined by the charter school concept. specifically, to understand where research had materialized across the intermediary and final goals of the conceptual framework, i focused on the seven intermediary goals and the two final outcome goals for my data analysis. following light and pillemer (1984), this review of research attempted to draw from a wide net in accessing every study available on the topic dating from the inception of the reform. in all, 85 published works were collected that dealt with the intermediary and final goals of the charter school concept. published works were compiled through regular and exhaustive web searches, eric searches, and comprehensive literature review of publications focusing on charter schools. of those, a substantial number were not based on systematic observations of charter schools but instead took hardline positions either as advocates or critics; as such, they were not useful in understanding the goals of the reform and were set aside. of those offering evidence on the goals of the charter school reform collected in any systematic manner, none were excluded. consequently, this article analyzes the goals of the charter school reform in 40 studies. together, this broad collection of studies represents the most comprehensive research available on the topic of charter schools and provides a rich set of data. of these reports, 38 have been published since 2000 and several focus on charter schools that have been in operation for several years. studies analyzed used various methods of inquiry to gather data: interviews with teachers, principals, parents and employees, observations, quantitative analysis including survey data and randomized design. the studies were undertaken by a number of organizations, groups, and individuals with a range of interests in charter schools. most studies and reports came primarily from economics and education. please see appendix a for a detailed summary of articles reviewed. final goals or outcomes of charter school reform student achievement while researchers have conducted many studies of student achievement in charter schools over the past 20 years, this research is of varying quality (berends, 2015). betts and hill (2010) explained that this research has improved over the past decade for two reasons: the growing prevalence of value-added analyses of longitudinal student data, and an increase in the number of charter schools holding lotteries for student selection, which allows researchers to employ a randomized design. the question remains, have charter schools increased student achievement? the results are mixed with some studies finding minor effects and others finding no effects. only a handful of studies have found larger effects. according to berends (2015), it depends on the data, location and methods employed. some studies using lottery-based randomized designs have found that academic achievement gains are greater for students who attend charter schools than for those in traditional schools; however, these studies have largely used data from urban centers such as new york city and boston (abdulkadiroglu et al., 2009; 2011; angrist et al., 2011; dobbie & fryer, 2011; hoxby & murarka, 2008; hoxby et al., 2009). hoxby et al. (2009), for example, conducted a longitudinal study of lottery-based charter schools in new york city the u. s. charter school landscape 55 and found that, relative to students in traditional schools, charter school students’ third grade scores for mathematics and english were .14 and .13 standard deviation units higher, respectively. the authors concluded that, with regard to gains in mathematics performance, students who attended charter schools in new york city for a longer period of time (e.g., kindergarten through eighth grade) matched their peers in more affluent suburban schools. these gains led to an 86 percent reduction in the mathematics achievement gap and a 66 percent reduction in the english gap. but the method used for measuring student achievement was criticized since it relied on a statistical model that made it impossible to pinpoint how much of the improvement on tests could be attributed to charter schools (reardon, 2009). reardon assumed that hoxby et al. inappropriately extrapolated the effect of charter schools over time. similarly, in an analysis of students who won and lost charter school lotteries in the harlem children’s zone in new york city, dobbie and fryer (2011) found that in both math and english, the effects of charter elementary schools were large enough to close the achievement gap. charter school students gained approximately .2 standard deviations per year in each subject. abdulkadiroglu et al. (2011) found large positive effects of charter schools in boston. middle-school students who won a charter school lottery outscored lottery losers who attended traditional public schools by .4 standard deviations in mathematics and .25 standard deviations in english. this effect size was large enough to reduce the black-white reading gap in middle school by two-thirds and eliminate the black-white mathematics gap. other studies using a lottery-based randomized design to analyze broader samples of schools have found more mixed effects of charter school enrollment on student achievement (furgeson et al., 2012; gleason et al., 2010). gleason et al. (2010) examined 36 charter schools in 15 states and found no significant effects on mathematics and reading achievement. furgeson et al. (2012) employed lottery-based and quasi-experimental approaches to examine 22 charter management organizations (cmos) and found no significant overall effects of charter school enrollment on student achievement in math. at the organizational level, 11 cmos had significant positive effects, 7 had significant negative effects and 4 had no significant effects. researchers using quasi-experimental methods have found mixed results for the effect of charter schools on student achievement (booker et al., 2007; davis & raymond, 2012; hanushek et al., 2007; bifulco & ladd, 2006; sass, 2006; zimmer & buddin, 2006; zimmer et al., 2009, 2012). studies of this type most commonly show that students in charter schools and those in traditional public schools perform at similar levels. for example, zimmer et al. (2009, 2012) examined charter schools in seven states and found no statistically significant overall charter school effects. the center for research on educational outcomes (credo) at stanford university conducted two of the most important quasiexperimental charter school studies in 2009 and 2013. each study compared the academic performance of students at charter schools and traditional public schools (credo, 2013). the results of the first study (published in 2009) were extremely controversial. the controversy centered on a number of aspects of the study including the methodology and the interpretation of the results. the 2013 credo study included the 16 states that were part of the original study as well as 11 additional states (including florida) (credo, 2013). the expansion of the sample states significantly improved the reliability of the 56 global education review 3(2) findings and strengthened the credibility of the research. the 2013 study included three separate analyses. the first analysis highlighted trends in charter school performance since the 2009 study (credo, 2013) by examining data from the original 16 states to determine whether achievement among charter school students had improved in these schools since 2009 (credo, 2013). the second analysis also focused on the schools in the first cohort but excluded data for schools that had closed since 2009, allowing researchers to measure the overall performance of the schools as compared to their earlier measures (credo, 2013). the third analysis examined newly opened or newly tested schools that were not part of the original study, and thus shed light on systemic advances in the charter school movement that produced stronger schools (credo, 2013). in general, findings from the 2013 study showed aggregate improvements in both math and reading results since 2009 in charter schools. compared to traditional public schools, charter schools in the 27 focal states had slightly larger gains in reading (credo, 2013) and similar gains in math (credo, 2013). but these gains were so small they did not warrant any significance. in the schools included in both the 2009 and the 2013 studies, those in several subgroups—blacks, hispanics, low ses students, english language learners (ell), and special education students—all improved in both reading and math. hispanic students performed well in reading, low ses students performed well in math, and english language learners performed well in both reading and math. because the new cohort of schools served a larger portion of students in poverty and hispanic students (relative to the schools included in the 2009 study), these results were significant (credo, 2013). a clear limitation of the study (as noted in the report) was its focus on only one measure of a schools’ effectiveness: state test scores. in summary, the extant literature reveals a few key findings about the effects of charter schools on student achievement: first, some studies, especially those conducted in urban areas where the need for school reform is greatest, have found significant positive effects of charter schools albeit the methods employed are in question (abdulkadiroglu et al., 2009; 2011; angrist et al., 2011; dobbie & fryer, 2011; hoxby & murarka, 2008; hoxby et al., 2009; reardon, 2009). charter schools have a wide range of effects on student achievement (furgeson et al., 2012; gleason et al., 2010; (booker et al., 2007; davis & raymond, 2012; hanushek et al., 2007; bifulco & ladd, 2006; sass, 2006; zimmer & buddin, 2006; zimmer et al., 2009, 2012). while some studies (such as the credo studies) find a positive but small effect of charter school achievement relative to traditional public schools, these are initial results and must be interpreted with caution (credo, 2013). customer satisfaction the charter school concept posits customer satisfaction as both an intermediary and final goal of the reform. gauging customer or (really) parental satisfaction is critical at every juncture of the reform. while a few studies have examined parental satisfaction in charter school families, the research is sparse. lacey et al. (2006) surveyed students, teachers, administrators and auxiliary personnel in five charter schools in miami-dade county and broward county, florida; the researchers concluded that parents were most satisfied with administrative leadership, high expectations for students and school climate and least satisfied with school resources. solomon (2003) surveyed 11,777 parents in arizona charter schools, asking about the u. s. charter school landscape 57 satisfaction with academic programs, teaching, facilities, discipline, and school mission. parents were most satisfied with the school’s academic program and teaching. the author also asked parents to grade their child’s school using a traditional “a+” to “f” scale; 66.9 percent gave their child’s school an “a+” or “a.” miron, nelson and risely (2002) found similar results in an evaluation of pennsylvania’s charter schools; most parents enrolled their children in a charter school because of the good teachers and high-quality instruction. overall, parents were very satisfied with their school’s education program, but less satisfied with the school’s facilities and financial stability. finally, wohlstetter, nayfack and moraflores (2008) reported the results of an initial survey of potential stakeholder satisfaction for charter schools in southern california. the findings show that, overall, parents reported positive levels of satisfaction with charter schools. in addition the study showed that, parents, especially those whose children attended new charter schools, were only moderately satisfied with school facilities and the support services offered to students, but these concerns were addressed through school improvement efforts as charter schools aged. intermediary goals of the charter school system have charter schools increased principal and teacher autonomy? perhaps the most distinctive feature of charter schools compared to traditional public schools is the significant autonomy granted to principals and teachers. the assumption is that this increased autonomy will lead to improved student achievement by allowing principals and teachers to adapt instruction to the particular needs of their students. recent research sheds light on how much autonomy principals and teachers in charter schools have relative to the faculty in traditional schools, and whether this autonomy has improved the performance of faculty members. gawlik (2008) found that a range of variables can affect the level of autonomy granted to charter school principals. through an analysis of the nationally representative schools and staffing survey (nces, 1999), gawlik identified two significant barriers to perceived principal autonomy: state and district policies. in addition, the type of charter school—start-up versus conversion—affects principal autonomy. principals in start-up charter schools, but not in conversion charter schools, had more autonomy than traditional public schools. finally, principal autonomy is linked to state laws concerning unionization and whether principals have hiring and firing rights (adamowski, therriault & cavanna, 2007). a second goal related to autonomy in charter schools was that teachers would become more involved in school decision-making processes, which would lead to greater commitment on the part of teachers. researchers have compared charter school teachers and their counterparts in traditional schools with respect to decision-making authority over staffing, curriculum and the budget, which are key components of increased autonomy. malloy and wohlstetter (2003), for example, interviewed 40 teachers in six urban charter elementary schools in california and found that in schools where the principal had created a “sense of team” (p. 235), teachers were more involved in decision making. this psychological belief translated into positive behavior because teachers frequently served on grade-level teams to create school-wide initiatives, such as developing a program to boost family engagement (wohlstetter et al., 2013). a case study of four charter schools in california (two start-ups and two conversion 58 global education review 3(2) schools) found that in the two start-up charter schools and in one of the conversion schools teachers reported that they experienced increased autonomy compared to previous employment experience in traditional public schools (gawlik 2007). however, teachers still experienced constraints: teachers from both of the conversion charter schools felt restricted by district oversight, especially with regard to accountability measures, and all of the teachers felt constrained by state-level accountability measures. in addition, several teachers commented that they felt restricted by their cmo. at times, increased autonomy could prove to be problematic. some of the teachers who reported having an adequate level of autonomy had difficulty knowing how to handle this autonomy in the classroom. it was concluded that the charter school system expanded teacher input in the areas of instructional activities, curricular innovation, hiring and evaluating faculty, and budget decisions. crawford (2001) also examined teacher autonomy in charter schools using a survey of nearly 400 teachers working in charter and noncharter schools in colorado and michigan. the author found that the difference in teacher perceptions of autonomy was negligible between the two types of schools. through interviews and observations at a charter school serving sixth to twelfth grade, margolis (2005) found that while teachers enjoyed greater autonomy and had increased decision-making authority in charter schools, they felt this autonomy was a burden and they reported being overwhelmed with both administrative and instructional duties. finally, marshall, gibbs and greene (2001) examined autonomy from the other side—the perceptions of teachers in traditional schools; the authors found that, in general, teachers and administrators at four non-charter elementary schools (n=140) desired more autonomy and believed that charter schools would allow teachers more independence than traditional schools. have charter schools produced innovation in curricula and administration? support for the charter concept is based on the argument that autonomy and accountability will produce innovations in curricula and administration that will improve student outcomes (chubb & moe, 1990; walberg & bast, 2003). lubienski (2003) assessed three dimensions of innovation in charter schools: (1) whether the novel practice is an educational change (a change in curricular content or instructional strategies with an impact at the classroom level) or an administrative change (an organizational-level change that impacts the structural operations of the school but does not affect the classroom); (2) the extent to which the practice is established and familiar or original or unique; and (3) whether the practice appears at the local, state, and national levels. using 56 reports of innovation in charter schools including state-level evaluations and other research reports that provide evidence regarding innovative practices, lubienski (2003) found that organizational, administrative, and structural changes, such as merit-pay for teachers and smaller class size, were prominent in charter schools. in contrast, while lubienski observed a few innovative classroom-level practices (e.g., the use of technology in instruction, individualized instruction), in general, practices referred to as charter “innovations” such as hands-on learning, cooperative learning, or a “back-to-basics” approach, were all strategies that can and often do occur in traditional settings. overall, lubienski (2003, 2004) concluded that there is little evidence that charter schools have produced innovative instructional strategies, the u. s. charter school landscape 59 and that “although some organizational innovations are evident, classroom strategies tend toward the familiar” (p. 416). even america’s most highly regarded charter schools are not very innovative. for example, kipp (the knowledge is power program), which emphasizes strict discipline, a college prep curriculum, and high expectations for students and teachers, strives to meet these high expectations via intensified instruction rather than novel instructional practices. the growth of privatization of charter schools the most visible manifestation of privatization in charter schools is the increasingly visible role of private charter management organizations (cmos) and education management organizations (emos) (miron et al., 2010). cmos (e.g., kipp, yes prep, green dot schools and aspire) are nonprofit organizations that operate like districts; these organizations typically manage multiple charter schools and establish new ones. emos are similar, but are for-profit organizations. the percentage of cmo-managed charter schools increased from 11.5 percent in 2007-08 to approximately 20 percent in 201011. in contrast, the percentage of emo-managed charter schools remained relatively stable during the same time period, even though the number of emo-managed charter schools increased from 441 in 2007-08 to 649 in 2010-11 as the charter school sector grew (national alliance for public charter schools, 2014). the percentage of cmo charter schools making adequate yearly progress (ayp) increased from 62.3 percent in 2007-08 to 66.4 percent in 2009-10, whereas the percentages of emo schools and freestanding charter schools making ayp decreased during the same years (from 53.4 percent to 50.8 percent for emos and from 62.2 percent to 58.9 percent for freestanding charters). although emos claim they raise students’ academic achievement, outside researchers have not reached the same conclusion (horn & miron, 2000; nelson & van meter, 2003). have charter schools increased equity/access to new educational opportunities? proponents of charter schools argue that charters can help alleviate the racial and economic segregation prevalent in the public education system. however, while charter schools might allow poor and minority students to attend schools that were previously inaccessible to them (finn, manno & vanourek, 2000), critics assert that charter schools actually reinforce segregation on the basis of income, race, ethnicity and other categories (miron et al., 2010; arsen, plank & sykes, 1999; cobb & glass, 1999; horn & miron, 2000) because charter schools tend to attract only one kind of student, usually defined racially or ethnically. while all charter schools are obliged by federal law to offer enrollment to any student and to hold a lottery if the number of students seeking to enroll exceeds the number of spaces available (wohlstetter et al., 2013), some studies have maintained that charter schools are able to replicate inequalities via selection methods. ausbrooks (2002) found that more than half of the 36 states with charter school laws at the time were “silent on the issue of geographic boundaries, and those that include provisions include no guidance as to how boundaries may be established without discriminating against certain racial and socioeconomic groups.” (p. 191) in addition, ausbrooks found that almost half of state laws did not address the issue of student transportation, creating a disadvantage for students without their own means of transportation, and nearly three quarters did not address information dissemination, allowing charter schools to market to specific neighborhoods or types of families (wohlstetter 60 global education review 3(2) et al., 2013). these legislative omissions—as well as charges that choice programs were shaped by the middle and upper-middle classes and marginalize low-income and minority families— have fueled claims that charter schools have led to increased segregation (wohlstetter et al., 2013). using panel data for individual students, bifulco and ladd (2007) examined the effect of charter schools in north carolina on racial segregation and black-white test score gaps. the authors found that north carolina’s system of charter schools has increased the racial isolation of both black and white students. the typical african american charter school student attended a school that was more than 70 percent african american, while his non-charter counterpart attended a school that was less than 50 percent african american. the analysis suggests that the asymmetric preferences of black and white charter school students (and their families) for schools of different racial compositions help to explain why there are so few racially balanced charter schools. in addition, bifulco and ladd (2007) found that in north carolina, charter schools widened the black-white achievement gap; the relatively large negative effect of charter schools on the achievement of black students was driven by students who transferred into charter schools that were more racially isolated than the schools they left. renzulli (2006) examined how two factors—segregation at the school level within districts and charter school legislation— predicted black enrollment levels at local charter schools. specifically, the study used the schools and staffing survey charter school data 1999– 2000 (nces, 1999), common core of data, and a unique data set of district test scores to estimate regression models of black enrollment in charter schools on district racial segregation and race provisions in charter school legislation. in addition, the presence of a racial clause in state charter school laws was associated with a higher percent of black students enrolled in charter schools. for example, new jersey’s law states: “the evaluation shall include, but not limited to, consideration of the following elements:…(5) the comparative demographics of student enrollments in school districts of residence and the charter schools located within those districts” (http://www.state.nj.us/njded/chartsch/cspa95. html). florida’s clause, similar to the new jersey clause, is another example: “such students shall be subject to a random lottery and to the racial/ethnic balance provisions which require a school to achieve racial/ethnic balance reflective of the community it serves or within the racial/ethnic range of other public schools in the same school district (fla. stat. ann. § 228.056). findings suggest that the extent of racial segregation in a school district (in which white and black students are more unevenly distributed across schools) is positively correlated with the percentage of blacks enrolled in local charter schools. segregation patterns also differed by region, with charter schools in the west, south, and midwest enrolling higher percentages of white students than charter schools in the northeast. garcia (2008) compared the racial composition of the district schools students left to the charter schools they entered. he found that elementary and middle school students entered charter schools that were more racially segregated than the district schools they left, while high school students entered charter schools with levels of racial segregation lower than or similar to the district schools they exited. garcia also found that racial segregation patterns in charter schools were the result of white flight and black and native american students self-segregating into charter schools that were more racially isolated than the district schools they left. several studies have found a link between parent preference and charter http://www.state.nj.us/njded/chartsch/cspa95.html http://www.state.nj.us/njded/chartsch/cspa95.html the u. s. charter school landscape 61 school segregation (tedin & weiher, 2004; eckes, 2006; ausbrooks, barrett & daniel, 2005); these studies have found that given a choice, the majority of parents send their children to schools with children and families of the same race. in sum, there is current evidence that charter schools systematically exacerbate patterns of racial segregation. the bulk of the research found greater segregation in charter schools than in other public schools and there is little evidence that charter schools are reducing students’ isolation by race. other aspects of the charter school movement the effect of charter schools on teachers unions most charter laws exempt charter schools from state and local collective bargaining provisions. because this exemption threatens the union power base and leaves charter school teachers without representation, teachers’ unions and district-level leaders typically oppose charter schools. several states have made compromises in charter school guidelines to accommodate teachers unions including limiting the number of charter schools allowed, agreeing that charter school employees would be subject to state collective bargaining law, and stipulating that only local school boards could approve charter schools. in each state, after the passage of a charter school law, unions have made attempts to prevent charter schools from opening. charter school closures of the approximately 6,700 charter schools that have opened across the united states, 1,036 have closed since 1992 (center for education reform, 2015). nationally, financial deficiencies are the most common cause of charter school closure, responsible for 42 percent of closures; these deficiencies are most often due to low student enrollment or inequitable funding. charter schools across the united states are funded at 64 percent of their district counterparts. on average, charter schools are funded at $7,131 per pupil compared to $11,184 per pupil at conventional district public schools (center for education reform, 2014). mismanagement is the second most common cause, leading to 24 percent of all closures. nearly 20 percent of closures occur because a school failed to meet acceptable student performance levels. implications of charter school outcomes in this article, i have examined the charter movement and charter schools across the dimensions outlined in the charter school concept. i draw on empirical research to determine whether the goals of the reform were met, were not met, or were mixed, based on study contexts and methods. understanding the conditions under which charter schools are effective will help policymakers and scholars push policy debates forward and assess the strengths and weaknesses of the movement. according to the charter school concept, which emphasizes fulfillment of educational goals, it appears that charter schools are doing well in some areas but not as well in others. this review has implications for addressing student achievement. here the picture is a bit troubling. while there are some reports that produce impressive academic gains, there are several that are not producing gains across the board. charter school proponents contend that the charter schools’ benefits will extend to students in non-charter schools. the belief is that charter schools will serve as public education’s research and development sector, developing innovative practices that can be adopted by other schools, but, as the research demonstrated, innovation is relegated to administrative practices more than curricular practices. despite the fact that charter schools are less innovative than anticipated, most 62 global education review 3(2) charter school parents, teachers, and students are quite satisfied with their choices. any claims made about charter schools must be considered in the context of two important facts about education in the united states. first, while charter school laws and the reform have set out a number of goals of charter schools, there remains much dispute about their relative importance with respect to traditional public schools. for most parents, student achievement is the overriding goal of all schools. the intermediary goals are stepping stones to achieving the final outcome. others recognize the value of student achievement but place more emphasis on customer satisfaction or equity. one of the things that make this debate so difficult to resolve is disagreement over how much weight to give each of the many goals. perhaps the most unexpected development of the charter school movement is the emergence of charter school networks such as cmos and emos as an integral part of the charter school landscape. if the academic success identified in early studies of cmo performance is supported by additional research, it will be important to determine what is unique about these models in terms of their organizational structure and education programs, why are they successful, and whether their innovations can be adapted to the district setting. conclusion and remaining gaps in the literature on charter schools while research on charter schools has produced many important findings over the past 20 years, there is still much to learn. from a policy perspective, questions remain about the relationship between authorizers and cmos: should authorizers treat cmos with a record of strong performance differently in their chartering applications, oversight, or renewal procedures? given the variety of charter authorizing policies, what might be done to help cmos replicate successful models across state lines? should there be a role for federal, state and local policies in facilitating and regulating the scale-up of high-quality cmos? with regard to autonomy, future studies should examine whether charters are actually utilizing autonomy to bring about increased academic performance, or whether the autonomy granted to charters remains unused. exactly how does school-level autonomy—or the perception of autonomy—influence student achievement? in addition, the relationship between autonomy and the growth of charter districts needs further exploration. finally, future studies should address the “black box” of charter schooling to untangle the effectiveness of different instructional approaches—including project-based learning, bilingual education, team teaching, and themebased approaches—on student achievement. moreover, studies should tackle the issues of principal and teacher turnover in charter schools and work to identify effective practices among the leadership. notes 1. the role of the charter school authorizer is to first approve charter applications and then monitor the schools to ensure success. the more organized and active an authorizer is, the more likely problems within individual charter schools will be uncovered and fixed early. authorizers are ultimately responsible for the operational and educational integrity of each charter school they sponsor and for closing any that fail to function responsibly. depending on the state charter school law, authorizers can be local school boards, state boards of education, state universities, state departments of education, or separate independent entities created by law that have as their sole duty sponsoring and overseeing charter schools in the state. 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(2002). what’s public about charter schools? lessons learned about choice and accountability. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. national alliance of public charter schools, (2014). dashboard, retrieved from http://www.publiccharters.org/dashboard/home on may 6, 2014. national center for educational statistics. (1999). public charter school principal questionnaire: schools and staffing survey 1999-2000 school year. washington, dc: united states department of education. nelson, f. h., & van meter, n. (2003). update on student achievement for edison schools inc. washington, dc: american federation of teachers. ravitch, d. (2013). reign of error: the hoax of the privatization movement and the danger to america's public schools. vintage. ravitch, d. (2010). the death and life ofthe great american school system. new york: basic books, 101, 21-30. reardon, s.f. (2009) review of “how new york city’s charter schools affect achievement.” boulder and tempe: education and the public interest center & http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/charterschoolsummary.pdf http://www.educationsector.org/sites/default/files/publications/charterschoolsummary.pdf http://epicpolicy.org/publication/schools-without-diversity http://epicpolicy.org/publication/schools-without-diversity http://www.publiccharters.org/dashboard/home the u. s. charter school landscape 65 education policy research unit. retrieved february 9, 2016 from http://epicpolicy.org/thinktank/review-how-newyorkcity-charter renzulli, l. a. (2006). district segregation, race legislation, and black enrollment in charter schools*. social science quarterly, 87(3), 618-637. sass, t. r. (2006). charter schools and student achievement in florida. education, 1(1), 91-122. solomon, l. c. (2003). findings from the 2002 survey of parents with children in arizona charter schools: how parents grade their charter schools. santa monica, ca: human resources policy corporation. tedin, k. l., & weiher, g. r. (2004). racial/ethnic diversity and academic quality as components of school choice. journal of politics, 66(4), 1109-1133. walberg, h. j., & bast, j. l. (2003). education and capitalism: how overcoming our fear of markets and economics can improve (vol. 521). hoover institution press. wells, a. s. grutzik, c. carnochan, s. slayton, j., and vasudeva, a. (1999). underlying policy assumptions of charter school reform: the multiple meanings of a movement. teachers college record, 100 (3): 513535. witte, j.f. (2000). the market approach to education: an analysis of america’s first voucher program. princeton, nj: princeton university press. wohlstetter, p., nayfack, m. b., & mora-flores, e. (2008). charter schools and “customer” satisfaction: lessons from field testing a parent survey. journal of school choice, 2(1), 66-84. wohlstetter, p., smith, j., & farrell, c. (2013). choices and challenges: charter school performance in perspective. cambridge, ma: harvard education press. zimmer, r., gill, b., booker, k., lavertu, s., & witte, j. (2012). examining charter student achievement effects across seven states. economics of education review, 31(2), 213-224. zimmer, r., gill, b., booker, k., lavertu, s., sass, t. r., & witte, j. (2009). charter schools in eight states: effects on achievement, attainment, integration, and competition (vol. 869). rand corporation. zimmer, r., & buddin, r. (2006). charter school performance in two large urban districts. journal of urban economics, 60(2), 307-326. about the author marytza a. gawlik, phd is an assistant professor in the educational leadership and policy studies department at florida state university. her research focuses on charter school leaders and teachers and highlights issues of autonomy, accountability and succession. appendix a summary of articles reviewed study research tradition intermediary goal focus final goal focus author, date, title economics or education abdulkadiroğlu, a., angrist, j. d., dynarski, s. m., kane, t. j., & pathak, p. a. (2011). accountability and flexibility in public schools: evidence from boston's charters and pilots. economics student achievement: lottery estimates show large and significant score gains for charter students in middle and high school. in contrast, lottery estimates for pilot school students are mostly small and insignificant, with some significant negative effects. charter schools with binding assignment lotteries appear to generate larger gains than other charters. 66 global education review 3(2) abdulkadiroglu, a., pathak, p. a., & roth, a. e. (2009). strategy-proofness versus efficiency in matching with indifferences: redesigning the new york city high school match economics student achievement: the authors analyze a model with indifferences–ties–in school preferences. simulations with field data and the theory favor breaking indifferences the same way at every school –single tie breaking– in a studentproposing deferred acceptance mechanism. finally, they empirically document the extent of potential efficiency loss associated with strategy proofness and stability, and direct attention to some open questions. adamowski, s., therriault, s. b., & cavana, a. p. (2007). the autonomy gap: barriers to effective school leadership, education principal and teacher autonomy: principal autonomy is linked to state laws concerning unionization and whether principals have hiring and firing rights angrist, j. d., pathak, p. a., & walters, c. r. (2011). explaining charter school effectiveness economics student achievement: estimates using admissions lotteries suggest that urban charter schools boost student achievement, while charter schools in other settings do not. using the largest available sample of lotteried applicants to charter schools, the authors explore studentthe u. s. charter school landscape 67 level and school-level explanations for this difference in massachusetts. arsen, d., plank, d., & sykes, g. (1999). school choice policies in michigan: the rules matter education equity/access to new educational opportunities: the report examines geographical patterns of school choice participation among michigan’s state districts, and investigates how schools and districts have responded to the challenges and opportunities posed by choice policies. ausbrooks, c. y. b., barrett, e. j., & daniel, t. (2005). texas charter school legislation and the evolution of openenrollment charter schools. education equity/access to new educational opportunities: this article chronicles the evolution of legislation for texas openenrollment charter schools to their implementation by demonstrating how these schools have (or have not) used their freedom from statemandated requirements to develop innovative learning environments as well as to bring innovative curricula into the classroom. ausbrooks, c. (2002). ensuring that underrepresented student groups have access to charter schools: what states are doing education equity/access to new educational opportunities: describes various provisions in state statutes that ensure underrepresented student groups have equal access to charter schools. includes facilitating student access, student admission, geographic boundary restrictions, and student transportation. provides summary of student transportation provisions in seven state charterschool statutes. also describes what some charter schools are doing to ensure equal student access. gawlik, m.a. (2012). moving beyond the rhetoric: charter school reform and accountability education policy lever: the author examined how local charter school educators respond to the accountability measures being imposed on them. in an effort to understand teachers’ and administrators’ experiences with public school accountability, the author explores how educators in 4 charter schools in michigan 68 global education review 3(2) understand recent accountability mandates withrespect to school reform. gawlik, m.a. (2008). breaking loose: principal autonomy in charter and public schools education principal and teacher autonomy: because various aspects of the school organization matter, this study was designed to determine to what degree principals in both charter and traditional public schools experience autonomy. this quantitative study draws on the 1999-2000 school and staffing survey, and the analyses suggest that there are variations in the degree and amount of principal autonomy experienced across charter and traditional public schools. gawlik, m.a. (2007). beyond the charter schoolhouse door: teacher-perceived autonomy education principal and teacher autonomy: this article presents a study that explores the relationship between charter schools and teacher autonomy. the theoretical framework is based on the charter school concept, whereby three policy levers—choice, deregulation, and accountability—lead to various goals for the charter school. bifulco, r., & ladd, h. f. (2007). school choice, racial segregation, and test-score gaps: evidence from north carolinas charter school program education equity/access to new educational opportunities: in this paper the authors use the experience of charter school students in north carolina to examine how one popular approach to expanding school choice – charter schools - has affected students of different races and socioeconomic backgrounds. in particular, we examine whether and the extent to which black families in north carolina have used the state’s charter school program to attend more integrated schools and how the student sorting induced by the program has affected the racial achievement gap. booker, k., gilpatric, s. m., gronberg, t., & jansen, d. (2007). the impact of charter school attendance on economics student achievement: the authors employ a panel of individual student data on math and reading test performance for five cohorts of students in texas to the u. s. charter school landscape 69 student performance study the impact of charter school attendance. they control for school mobility effects and distinguish movement to a charter school from movement within and between traditional public school districts. they find students experience poor test score growth in their initial year in a charter school, but that this is followed by recovery in the subsequent years. cobb, c. d., & glass, g. v. (1999). ethnic segregation in arizona charter schools education equity/access to new educational opportunities: this study addressed whether arizona charter schools are more ethnically segregated than traditional public schools. nearly half of the charter schools exhibited evidence of substantial ethnic separation. arizona charter schools not only contained a greater proportion of white students, but when comparable nearby traditional public schools were used forcomparison, the charters were typically 20 percentage points higher in white enrollment than the other publics. crawford, j.r. (2001). teacher autonomy and accountability in charter schools. education principal and teacher autonomy: a study was conducted to examine the differences between charter school and traditional public school teachers' perceptions of empowerment, and specifically of decision making and autonomy. the findings indicate that traditional public school teachers in colorado have the perception that they have more decision making opportunities and more autonomy than their counterparts in charter schools, whereas there is little or no difference between the perceptions of charter and traditional public school teachers in michigan. davis, d. h., & raymond, m. e. (2012). choices for economics student achievement: two quasi-experimental methods – fixed effects 70 global education review 3(2) studying choice: assessing charter school effectiveness using two quasiexperimental methods. (fe) and virtual control records (vcr) – were used to measure charter schooling in 14 states and two districts. a head-to-head comparison of the fe and vcr methods used the same charter students to test the fe control (e.g., the charter student's own traditional public school experience) and the vcr for equivalence. the comparison produced highly similar estimates; charter coefficients were identical in sign and significance and of the same general magnitudes. in an analysis of the sampling fractions included in each method using all available tested charter students, the vcr method was found to produce more generalizable results. in the policy analysis, charter school quality was found to be demographically and geographically uneven with only 19 percent of charter schools outperforming their local markets. dobbie, w., & fryer jr, r. g. (2011). are high-quality schools enough to increase achievement among the poor? evidence from the harlem children's zone. economics student achievement: the authors provide the first empirical test of the causal impact of harlem children’s zone (hcz) charters on educational outcomes. both lottery and instrumental variables identification strategies suggest that the effects of attending an hcz middle school are enough to close the black-white achievement gap in mathematics. the effects in elementary school are large enough to close the racial the u. s. charter school landscape 71 achievement gap in both mathematics and ela. they conclude with evidence that suggests high-quality schools are enough to significantly increase academic achievement among the poor. eckes, s. e. (2006). barriers to integration in the mississippi delta: could charter schools be the new vehicle for desegregation? equity/access to new educational opportunities: this study explored the barriers to educational integration in the rural mississippi delta region. in delta county, 1 students have generally been divided between a black public school and an all white private academy. in this current case study, the researcher sought to learn whether a new high-performing charter school, where the three barriers were not present, would encourage racial integration in delta county. through interviews and observations, the current case study explored whether the barriers articulated by white parents in the earlier study were simply rhetoric. the current study found that white parents were still not choosing the charter school, even though no barriers were present. furgeson, j., gill, b., haimson, j., killewald, a., mccullough, m., nichols-barrer, i., ... & hill, p. (2012). education governance: the national study of cmo effectiveness aims to fill the gap in systematic evidence about cmos, providing the first rigorous nationwide examination of cmos’ effects on students’ achievement and attainment. the study includes an examination of the relationships between the practices of individual cmos and their effects on student achievement, with the aim of providing useful guidance to the field. garcia, d. r. (2008). academic and racial segregation in charter schools do parents sort students into education equity/access to new educational opportunities: this article focuses on how parental school choices affect the degree of racial and academic segregation in charter schools. the research design allows 72 global education review 3(2) specialized charter schools? for a direct comparison of the racial and academic conditions of the district schools students exited to the charter schools they entered. parents choose to leave more racially integrated district schools to attend more racially segregated charter schools. simultaneously, parents enroll their students into charter schools with at least the same degree of academic integration as the district schools that students exited. the academic and racial segregation results are then used to test the extent to which students congregate into specialized char-ter schools according to hypothesized patterns. the findings call into question the assertion of charter school advocates that segregated conditions in charter schools are the result of students self-selecting into specialized charter schools. gleason, p., clark, m., tuttle, c. c., & dwoyer, e. (2010). the evaluation of charter school impacts: final report. education student achievement: the evaluation, which the authors conducted in 36 charter middle schools across 15 states, compares outcomes of students who applied and were admitted to these schools through randomized admissions lotteries (lottery winners) with the outcomes of students who also applied to these schools and participated in the lotteries but were not admitted (lottery losers). this analytic approach produces the most reliable impact estimates. but because the study could only include charter middle schools that held lotteries, the results do not necessarily apply to the full set of charter middle schools in the the u. s. charter school landscape 73 u.s. hanushek, e. a., kain, j. f., rivkin, s. g., & branch, g. f. (2007). charter school quality and parental decision making with school choice economics student achievement: this paper uses panel data for the state of texas to overcome impediments to the evaluation of charter school performance and to investigate the quality of charter schools relative to traditional public schools. additionally, it provides a first glimpse at how the availability of charter schools affects the ways in which parents respond to school quality differences. by eliminating the need to move residences in order to switch schools, charter schools would be expected to lead to an increase in the sensitivity of parents to school quality and amplify the competitive pressure on public schools. horn, j., & miron, g. (2000). an evaluation of michigan's charter school initiative: performance, accountability, and impact. education hoxby, c. m., murarka, s., & kang, j. (2009). how new york city’s charter schools affect achievement. economics student achievement: this report analyzes the achievement of 93 percent of the new york city charter school students who were enrolled in test-taking grades (grades 3 through 12) in 2000-01 through 2007-08. the remaining students are not covered by this report for one of two reasons. 5 percent of charter school students in test-taking grades were enrolled in schools 74 global education review 3(2) that opened from 200607 onwards. their achievement will be covered by the next report of the new york city charter schools evaluation project. 2 percent of charter school students in test-taking grades were enrolled in schools that declined to participate in the study. the most distinctive feature of the study is that charter schools' effects on achievement are estimated by the best available, "gold standard" method: lotteries. hoxby, c. m., & murarka, s. (2008). new york city charter schools. economics student achievement: this study addresses two main questions about charter schools in the city. first, who enrolls in new york city's charter schools? and, second, how well are the schools educating students? what we found is that, compared with other students in the traditional public schools, charter school applicants are more likely to be black and poor but are otherwise fairly similar. we also found that charter school students benefit academically from their charter school education. charter school students in grades 3 through 8 perform better than we would expect, based on the performance of comparable students in traditional public schools, on both the math and reading portions of new york's statewide achievement tests. there is not yet a the u. s. charter school landscape 75 sufficient number of charter school students in grades 9 through 12 for us to report achievement effects for this group. lacey, c. h., enger, j. m., maldonado, n., & thompson, s. (2006). charter school accountability: listening to our stakeholders customer satisfaction: stakeholder surveys conducted as part of the development of an accountability and assessment system for five charter schools in miami-dade county and broward county, florida, revealed high positive response regarding high expectations, school climate, basic skills instruction, and monitoring student progress. the lowest overall rating revealed dissatisfaction with charter school resources. five researchers distributed questionnaires to stakeholders, defined as parents, pupils, teachers, administrators, special program teachers, and auxiliary personnel. survey results were generally positive in assessing the schools, programs, teachers, administrators, and relationships between the various stakeholder groups. this study provided the quantitative data needed to form the framework for the development and implementation of an accountability system. lubienski, c. (2003). innovation in education markets: theory and evidence on the education innovation: drawing on organizational and economic theory, this article considers the forces shaping educational innovation in market-oriented reforms. although 76 global education review 3(2) impact of competition and choice in charter schools. reformers assume that competition and choice necessarily lead to innovations within schools, a more complex examination of competitive institutional environments suggests that mechanisms employed by reformers may actually undercut their intended purposes. the discussion highlights the potential for choice and competition to constrain opportunities for educational innovation and to impose pedagogical and curricular conformity. lubienski, c. (2004). charter school innovation in theory and practice: autonomy, r & d, and curricular conformity. education malloy, c. l., & wohlstetter, p. (2003). working conditions in charter schools what’s the appeal for teachers?. education principal and teacher autonomy: this article synthesizes past research findings on the work of charter school teachers and juxtaposes this research with case studies of forty charter school teachers in six urban charter elementary schools. charter schools, with increased autonomy over personnel and budget, are given the freedom to make many decisions related to hiring, salary, and working conditions. in general, charter school teachers work longer hours and receive less job security than colleagues in traditional public schools. in some states, charter school teachers earn significantly less than other public school colleagues. the evidence also suggests, however, that teachers generally enjoy their professional lives in charter schools—their colleagues and the school’s education program. the authors argue that in order to continue to attract and retain teachers, charter schools may need to extend their use of autonomy to improve the working conditions of teachers and ultimately, to extend the life of the the u. s. charter school landscape 77 school. margolis, j. (2005). " every day i spin these plates": a case study of teachers amidst the charter phenomenon education principal and teacher autonomy: this study, in contrast, seeks to provide a detailed, insider account of a charter school. further, by focusing on charter teachers, the research seeks to understand how charter policy is actually lived by those who work closest with charter school students. however, because “charter school laws vary considerably from state-tostate” -and within states run under a wide range of educational philosophies— it is impossible to speak of “charter policy” as a single entity to be experienced by teachers. therefore, this study took a phenomenological stance, focusing first on the original and concrete experiences of teachers in a single charter school, and then later examining these experiences in light of how the school’s charter status impacted teacher meaning-making. miron, g., urschel, j. l., mathis, w, j., & tornquist, e. (2010). schools without diversity: education management organizations, charter schools and the demographic stratification of the american school system. education governance and equity/access to new educational opportunities: the primary purpose of this study is to examine how emos appear to affect the segregation or integration of schools by race, economic class, special education status, and language. this is accomplished through examining differences in enrollment patterns between schools operated by emos and schools run by their neighboring local districts. the shifts in segregative/integrative patterns over time are also examined. in addition, this study explores whether for-profit and nonprofit status, the number of schools operated by an emo, the instructional levels of schools (ele mentary, middle, and high), and the number of years in operation are associated with these patterns of segregative/integrative balances. miron, g., nelson, education customer satisfaction: 78 global education review 3(2) c., & risley, j. (2002). strengthening pennsylvania's charter school reform: findings from the statewide evaluation and discussion of relevant policy issues in 2001, the pennsylvania department of education contracted with western michigan university to evaluate pennsylvania's charter schools and charter school initiative over two years. the study used site visits, work sample review, document review, focus groups, portfolios and surveys to gather data regarding the movement's effectiveness, progress, and impact. the report focuses on methods, descriptions of the reform, charter school startup challenges, finances, student and family characteristics, teacher and staff characteristics, working conditions, professional development, satisfaction levels, innovation, equity, accountability, student achievement, and alternative indicators of charter school quality. overall, charter schools were making modest achievement gains against demographically and geographically similar schools, although the gains were not uniform. charter school customers were generally satisfied with the curriculum and instruction, though less so with facilities and resources. nelson, f. h., & van meter, n. (2003). update on student achievement for edison schools inc. education student achievement: the american federation of teachers compares student performance on state assessments in2000-01in edison-run schools with other comparable school the u. s. charter school landscape 79 sin the state. the methods used to assess student achievement in edison-run schools are the same methods used to evaluate achievement in other public schools. following are some of the aft’s findings: averaged across all states, the typical edison school performed below average. the typical edison school improved modestly after poor firstyear student achievement but not enough tor each average in its comparison group. predominantly africanamerican schools managed by edison ranked well below average compared with other public schools in their comparison groups. there port states that the outlook for edison' s prospects appears mixed renzulli, l. a. (2006). district segregation, race legislation, and black enrollment in charter schools education equity/access to new educational opportunities: this article examines how segregation at the school level within districts and carter school legislation predict black enrollment levels at local charter schools. findings suggest that segregated school districts, those districts where whites and blacks are more unevenly distributed among schools, have a larger percentage of blacks enrolled in local charter schools than districts where schools are integrated. sass, t. r. (2006). charter schools and student achievement in florida. student achievement: in this paper the author utilizes a new longitudinal data base from florida to address three key issues relating to charter schools and student achievement. first, how does the impact of charter schools 80 global education review 3(2) on student achievement compare with traditional public schools? second, to the extent that student performance varies among charter schools, what factors contribute to the difference in performance? third, what competitive impact, if any, do charter schools have on traditional public schools? to empirically analyze these issues the author focuses on student achievement in traditional public schools and charters in florida. solomon, l. c. (2003). findings from the 2002 survey of parents with children in arizona charter schools: how parents grade their charter schools. customer satisfaction: the author surveyed 11,777 parents in arizona charter schools, asking about satisfaction with academic programs, teaching, facilities, discipline, and school mission. parents were most satisfied with the school’s academic program and teaching. the author also asked parents to grade their child’s school using a traditional “a+” to “f” scale; 66.9 percent gave their child’s school an “a+” or “a.” tedin, k. l., & weiher, g. r. (2004). racial/ethnic diversity and academic quality as components of school choice. education equity/access to new educational opportunities: in this paper, the authors use an experimental design embedded in a survey to obtain an alternative measure of educational quality and racial diversity as considerations for household school choice. while both academic quality and race/ethnic diversity had an effect on preferences, academic quality was a more important predictor. they then examined the relationship between preference and actual choice outcomes. racerelated opinions were nonpredictive the u. s. charter school landscape 81 of outcomes, but a stress on high test scores by parents predicted school choice among students who are not “at risk.” wohlstetter, p., nayfack, m. b., & mora-flores, e. (2008). charter schools and “customer” satisfaction: lessons from field testing a parent survey. education parent and community involvement: this article reports on both the process of development and the information gained from a field test of a parent stakeholder satisfaction survey for charter schools and other schools of choice. the survey has been designed to assist schools with recruiting and retaining educational consumers by providing information both for external accountability and internal accountability. preliminary findings from the first stakeholder group surveyed—parents—suggest positive levels of satisfaction with charter schools overall. the findings also reveal that parents, especially those whose children attend new charter schools, are only moderately satisfied with the school facilities and support services offered to students. however, as the charter schools age, these concerns appear to be addressed through school improvement efforts. the authors conclude with a series of lessons for developing stakeholder satisfaction surveys for charter schools and other schools of choice. customer satisfaction: this article reports on both the process of development and the information gained from a field test of a parent stakeholder satisfaction survey for charter schools and other schools of choice. the survey has been designed to assist schools with recruiting and retaining educational consumers by providing information both for external accountability and internal accountability. preliminary findings from the first stakeholder group surveyed— parents—suggest positive levels of satisfaction with charter schools overall. the findings also reveal that parents, especially those whose children attend new charter schools, are only moderately satisfied with the school facilities and support services offered to students. however, as the charter schools age, these concerns appear to be addressed through school improvement efforts. the authors conclude with a series of lessons for developing stakeholder satisfaction surveys for charter schools and other schools of choice. zimmer, r., gill, b., booker, k., lavertu, s., & witte, j. economics student achievement: in this paper, the authors examine charter schools 82 global education review 3(2) (2012). examining charter student achievement effects across seven states. in seven states taking two major steps to provide insights into this debate. first, they use a consistent research approach to examine charter schools in each of the locations. second, they articulate and test the assumptions of our analytical strategy. they suggest that some of the current confusion surrounding the previous research is that researchers have not always clearly articulated the strengths and weaknesses of their research designs. in sum, while the authors do not claim that our study is definitive, they do argue that readers will have greater confidence that any differences in achievement effects across locations are not the result of methodological differences and believe readers will clearly understand the assumptions made in their model. zimmer, r., gill, b., booker, k., lavertu, s., sass, t. r., & witte, j. (2009). charter schools in eight states: effects on achievement, attainment, integration, and competition economics student achievement: the authors set out to grow evidence and inform the debate on charter schools by examining four research questions: 1. what are the characteristics of students transferring to charter schools; 2. what effect do charter schools have on test-score gains for students who transfer between tps and charter schools; 3. what is the effect of attending a charter high school on the probability of graduating and entering college? 4. what effect does the introduction of the u. s. charter school landscape 83 charter schools have on test scores of students in nearby tpss? they examine these questions using longitudinal, student-level achievement data from chicago, san diego, philadelphia, denver, milwaukee, and the states of ohio, texas and florida. teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 183 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: swai, calvin zakaria, & glanfield, florence (2018). teacher-led professional learning in tanzania: perspectives of mathematics teacher leaders. global education review, 5 (3), 183-195. teacher-led professional learning in tanzania: perspectives of mathematics teacher leaders calvin zakaria swai university of dodoma, tanzania florence glanfield university of alberta, edmonton, canada abstract this paper explores the perspectives of mathematics teacher leaders (mtls) on teacher-led professional learning (tlpl). shaped by notions of symbolic interactionism, the study employed a multisite case study design. empirical data were collected through in-depth interviews. the study revealed the practice of tlpl influential in facilitating teacher participation and engagement in learning; encouraging long-term teacher collaboration and interaction; inviting integration of teaching experiences; inviting contextualization of professional learning; and more importantly, in promoting sustainability of professional learning of mathematics teachers. a significant implication of this study is that the education system of tanzania needs to encourage and empower mathematics teachers to become teacher leaders for them to be able to lead and support the professional learning of mathematics teachers within their schools. keywords teacher-led professional learning, mathematics teacher leaders, rural communities, mathematics teachers, tanzania introduction this study aimed at exploring the perspectives of mathematics teacher leaders (mtls) on teacherled professional learning (tlpl) following their engagement in facilitating the professional learning of their teacher colleagues. both the mtls and their teacher colleagues worked in rural primary schools in tanzania. the mtls were primary school mathematics teachers who were identified by their districts as master teachers and who participated in a series of professional learning sessions that were a part of an internationally funded project. a goal of the project was to enable mathematics teachers to become mtls, therefore professional learning sessions were led by mathematics teachers themselves rather than facilitated by educational officers from districts or the ministry of education or by representatives of nongovernmental organizations (ngos). this project goal was consistent with the findings of researchers in tanzania (mhando, ___________________________________ corresponding author calvin zakaria swai, college of education, university of dodoma, p. o. box 523, dodoma, tanzania email: czakaria@ualberta.ca email: calvin.zakaria@udom.ac.tz mailto:czakaria@ualberta.ca mailto:calvin.zakaria@udom.ac.tz 184 global education review 5(3) 2012; komba & nkumbi, 2008) and around the world (hardman et al., 2015). officer-led teacher learning sessions were sporadic, and, consequently, ineffective, leaving many teachers not in a position to continually promote their professional learning. even more, the professional learning sessions in tanzania were conducted at the convenience of the officers who facilitated the sessions (hardman et al., 2015). an emphasis of the internationally funded project was to develop capacity to promote the professional growth of rural primary school mathematics teachers. as participants in the project, the mtls had the opportunity to develop and deliver three different professional learning sessions for teachers in their districts. this paper reports on our study with eight of those mtls. our research was framed by the question: what are the perspectives of tanzanian mathematics teacher leaders on teacher-led professional learning? teacher professional learning internationally and in tanzania new demands have been continuously placed on the work of teachers in schools. one of the demands placed on teachers is for them to become “leaders, educators [of both students and teachers] who can make a difference in schools and schooling now and in the future” (lieberman & miller, 2004, p. 11). similarly, easton (2008) called for teachers to become educators, suggesting that they “must be knowledgeable and wise ... must change in order to get different results ... must become learners and they must be self-developing” (p. 756) throughout their teaching career. aubusson, ewing, and hoban (2009) sent a compelling reminder to teachers, calling them “to be in control of their own professional learning if a change in schools is to be sustained beyond the length of a particular process” (p. 112). increasingly, the research scholarship in mathematics teacher education has equally encouraged mathematics teachers to take charge of their own professional learning and to work together to enrich pedagogical practices (davis & simmt, 2006; neubrand et al., 2009; davis & renert, 2014; balka, hull, & miles, 2010). the national council of teachers of mathematics (2000) through its principles and standards for school mathematics stressed “[t]here is an urgent and growing need for mathematics teacher-leaders ... who can assist with the improvement of mathematics education” (p. 375) in schools. komba and nkumbi (2008) revealed two practices that characterize teacher learning in tanzania. first, the professional learning programs were geared to familiarize teachers with what was new in their work of implementing the centralized curriculum: new materials such as the curriculum, textbooks; emerging policies; and new methods and approaches to teaching. the second was the invitation of primary school teachers to use professional learning programs as avenues for upgrading their teaching qualification. hardman et al. (2015) identified a dominant practice that characterized the professional learning of teachers in tanzania in the early 2010s. the practice was that teachers from around the country convened in zonespecific teacher colleges for their professional learning. the sessions were facilitated by education officers and teacher educators from teacher colleges. hardman et al. found that the facilitators of the workshops and seminars lacked a broader understanding of the realities of teaching in classrooms as some of them had little or no experience of teaching. this situation has the potential to mean that teacher learning was less effective in supporting teachers to enrich their pedagogical practices as it was not teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 185 well-connected to what was happening in classrooms. given these observations, it is entirely fair to argue that, borrowing miles’ (1995) words, teacher professional learning in tanzania was “everything that a learning environment shouldn’t be: ... brief, not sustained, designed for ‘one size fits all,’ ... imposed rather than owned, lacking any intellectual coherence, treated as a special add-on event rather than as part of a natural process, and trapped in the constraints of the bureaucratic system” (p. vii). hardman et al. recommended “the need to move away from ad hoc continuing professional development provision … towards a more longterm sustainable vision of professional development” (2015, p. 604) in tanzania. at the same time, an internationally funded project titled capacity development for mathematics teachers in rural and remote communities in tanzania, (simmt et al., 2011) was being implemented. the project was designed to respond to the feedback from primary school mathematics teachers who reported that they needed to be highly involved in the process of promoting their professional growth and it was designed to respond to the need for a more longterm sustainable vision of professional development (simmt et al., 2011; binde et al., 2013). this paper describes the perspectives of primary school mathematics teachers who were a part of this project and who led teacher professional learning in their districts. methods & conceptual framing we used a multisite case study design (merriam, 2014) framed by symbolic interactionism (blumer, 1969) that suggests that human beings develop meanings out of their interaction with the situation or event through interpretative processes and through social interactions. this study included eight mtls (mazengo and senzini had taught for more than 30 years; pili, gabby, and kenny had taught for more than 20 years; anne 9 years; thea 6 years; and isile 8 years respectively) from different rural primary schools across different school districts in four regions of tanzania. rural schools were located in isolated areas that were far from the district headquarters or towns, and they had a high rate of poverty attributable to low income (united republic of tanzania, 2010). each mtl was a case as they each experienced tlpl in different locations alongside different mathematics teachers. we used an in-depth one-hour semistructured interview in order to gain the perspectives of the teacher leaders. we carefully engaged in reading and re-reading the transcripts to get a holistic sense of the experiences lived by the mtls for our data analysis. we then employed manual coding protocol (miles & huberman, 1994), to generate a list of themes as informed by the research question and related literature through our cross-case analysis. we drew conclusions based on the meanings that emerged from the displayed data and paid close attention to the meanings that each teacher leader attached to tlpl since those meanings were important to the mtls (blumer, 1969). results the work of facilitating the professional learning of mathematics teachers in rural communities in tanzania was an opportunity for the mtls to experience teacher learning from another perspective. five denotative perspectives were revealed out of the thematic analysis of the interview transcripts. the perspectives included tlpl as: participative and engaging; reflective and experiential; collaborative; practical and contextual; and ongoing and sustainable. descriptions of each perspective are provided in the succeeding sections. 186 global education review 5(3) tlpl as a participative and engaging practice the mtls conceived tlpl as a practice that empowers mathematics teachers to become active learners, deeply engaged in the process of their professional learning to improve practice. nearly all the mtls pondered the practice to allow mathematics teachers spaces to wonder and freely express their thoughts, becoming encouraged to participate in learning alongside their colleagues. senzini, for example, explained: the feeling that teachers get when they attend professional learning [session] which is led by a teacher is that of ... our learning is under our colleague, our friend who is ... part of us. so, i think that this feeling makes them not to feel shy to speak their minds. they can talk all that they want as they ... aren’t afraid [of] the leader because he or she is their fellow teacher. i think that this type of professional learning is dominant as it removes the curtain that has separated them from leading teacher professional learning for a long time. the sentiment was echoed by mazengo, who pointed out that the “one thing special about this practice [tlpl] is the fact that teachers cannot stay quiet, sitting down waiting ... [rather], they will do what they think is important and say what they want to say as no one is there to make them accountable for what they say or do during and after the sessions.” even though his thoughts, for the greater length, reverberate with that of senzini, mazengo’s description is more enlightening. it highlights a situation which mathematics teachers are likely to find themselves in when their fellow teacher leads their professional learning. for mazengo, the case would likely be different if an education officer, who could be in a position to make decisions about teacher’s lives, was the leader. as mazengo described, in a tlpl arrangement, teachers do not feel required to necessarily make choices about what to say, what to do, how to do what they are required to do, and at what time they should say and do. from his observations, such aspects are not favored in such a practice, as a teacher leader is not entitled to hold mathematics teachers responsible for the kind of participation they demonstrate during their professional learning. for example, mazengo described what might happen if an education officer would be the facilitator of a professional learning session. the educational officer might say to a teacher, “why have you asked this simple question when you were trained to teach this, and you have been a teacher for many years? you are not an effective teacher at all!” in mazengo’s experience, questions like this, by the education officer hinder active participation of mathematics teachers in the professional learning sessions. with tlpl practice in place, mazengo felt that mathematics teachers realized a friendly environment for them to genuinely engage in learning because the practice was not led by a formal, authoritative leader, but by a teacher colleague. other mtls expressed similar sentiments, claiming the tlpl practice to be influential in allowing mathematics teachers to actively engage in their professional learning unlike different kinds of teacher learning. the mtls were categorical that teachers felt comfortable participating in professional learning when their fellow teacher lead such learning. anne’s comments are illustrative: think about having more than 60 free souls entirely unworried to do what they think could help their students to learn mathematics. well, my teachers were delighted to have me there as they know that i’m a teacher like them, nothing to worry about. so, they engaged very well, others stepping into discussions, others engaging in teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 187 lengthy conversations about what they were learning. i find this practice to give teachers what they want as professionals. a common thread through the mtls’ experiences is that mathematics teachers developed a sense of confidence and comfort in participating in the professional learning activities when lead by a teacher colleague rather than an education officer. teacher leaders are people who do not affect the employment of primary teachers. education officers as professional learning leaders have the potential to affect the employment of primary teachers. this perspective echoed murray’s (2014) views that teachers become profoundly dedicated and more engaged in their professional learning when they realize that they are learning in an environment where they are emotionally, physically, and professionally safe. as senzini’s metaphor of a curtain suggests, tlpl is free from making teachers feel restricted to actively participate in their professional learning. that is, the practice allowed mathematics teachers the freedom to wonder, notice, and freely express what they know, believe, and do while engaging in their learning. such a situation reflects drago-severson, blumdestefano and asghar’s (2013) influential assertion that “[c]reating supportive, relational contexts in which adults can talk regularly about their practice—as well as their values, beliefs, challenges, and guiding philosophies—facilitates self-analysis and can enhance the individuals’ and the school’s practice” (p. 39). tlpl as a reflective and experiential practice the mtls perceived tlpl to allow mathematics teachers spaces to engage in the process of reflection on their practice and, in turn, incorporate their classroom experiences into their professional learning. by having a leader of teacher learning who is more aware of what teachers and students do in practice, as they shared, the learning ultimately dwells, at length, upon careful consideration of what teachers and students experience in mathematics classrooms. kenny, for example, explained further about how the practice is useful in encouraging teachers to reflect and integrate classroom experiences into their learning. having a teacher leading the learning of other teachers makes a big difference. the first thing with that is about what he/she will want teachers to focus on. i think the focus will be on what we do in classes, which is all about teaching and facilitating student learning. so, that’s the essential part of this type of learning of teachers. for us, i remember, we were concentrating on what we have been doing in our classrooms. it’s entirely about our experiences of our classes and how we can improve that. kenny’s comment reflects the idea that tlpl enables mathematics teachers to revisit pedagogical practices they employed in their classrooms to help students learn mathematics. it also reveals his confidence that the practice can help mathematics teachers to genuinely pay attention to their classroom experiences, realizing ways to improve what they do together with the students. for kenny, the focus of teacher learning was on the learning of students and not on other aspects that have little or no connection to what is happening in mathematics classrooms. as well, there was confidence that by participating in tlpl, mathematics teachers realized opportunities to share their experiences of teaching mathematics, as gabby explained: the one thing i like about this [tlpl] is how it makes teachers feel during their learning. there is always flexibility that they cannot find in other initiatives. in our sessions, i do remember them going back to our 188 global education review 5(3) classrooms ... thinking and rethinking about what worked and didn’t work in those places. that was important because they needed to think about what they can change ... for the benefit of their students. here, gabby reported engaging in back and forth movements alongside his colleagues in trying to make sense of what they could do to make a difference in their classrooms. for him, by having a teacher-colleague as a leader, teachers develop the confidence to engage in extended discussions meant to find ways for improving practice. such an observation was echoed by anne, who pointed out that “teachers need ... opportunities to reflect on their experiences of teaching.” she was confident that by having a teacher “leading the professional learning, that’s very possible ... the experiences become the focus for teachers to move forward [a]nd ... the core of teacher professional learning.” other mtls drew on their experiences to demonstrate how the integration of classroom experiences shaped the nature of discussions during their learning sessions. they made it clear that teacher leadership prompted other teachers to candidly share thoughts, opinions, and experiences of teaching the subject in their classrooms. senzini’s comment about how incorporation of pedagogical experience into teacher learning is a natural tenet of tlpl: our sessions were experience-based as most of the teachers talked about the things they do in their classrooms as they were working on tasks that we gave them to complete. the mtls acknowledged the practice to open spaces for colleagues to engage in reflecting on and integrating their teaching experiences into their professional learning. kenny’s comment of “teacher leaders make a big difference” when it comes to inviting teachers to engage in reflective learning is illustrative of this perspective. such a perspective speaks to the notion that teacher leadership creates spaces for mathematics teachers to build on what is happening in their classrooms as they work to promote their professional growth. the mtls are explicit that the practice is powerful in providing mathematics teachers with opportunities to revisit practices they employ in their classrooms but also to make sense of those experiences in moving forward with deepening their pedagogical knowledge. hadar and brody (2016) support this view, maintaining that teachers “[a]s professionals who deal with the domain of pedagogy” (p. 76), it is natural for them to think and talk about their students as well as how they experience their learning. further, hadar and brody assert that “[r]eflection in the community invites feedback and helps others explore new ideas about teaching and moves thinking forward” (p. 68). the assertion, undeniably, reflects the perspective of the mtls. tlpl as a collaborative practice the mtls reported that tlpl is suited to provide mathematics teachers with opportunities to engage in collaborative learning. this conviction was predicated on their conception that when a mathematics teacher led the learning of her or his colleagues, other teachers were likely to feel welcomed to collaborate and freely interact with their leader as well as with each other beyond their learning sessions. for the mtls, such an experience was not likely to happen in traditional teacher professional learning because of the bureaucratic nature of relations between education officers and teachers. pili showed what her experience of facilitating the practice looked like as she narrated: it’s really a different thing to be led by someone whom you share many aspects of the work you all do. when teachers gather teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 189 for their learning and meet a teacher leading the sessions, i think, they simply become comfortable with each other and quickly become friends. so, such friendship enabled them to work together during the sessions. i think that’s the aspect of this process, which i think is good for teachers in our places. pili’s description is quite illuminating when thinking about what mathematics teachers could feel and how they could engage in their professional learning when they find a teacher colleague leading their learning. it shows a process upon which friendship developed among the teachers and their teacher leader, enabling them to engross themselves in collegial learning. pili reported such a social aspect could emerge because mathematics teachers and teacher leaders shared many attributes and experiences related to their work of facilitating student learning of the subject. pili’s observation resonated with those of other mtls, describing mathematics teachers’ collaboration to develop as they see themselves as colleagues belonging to the same profession and teaching in comparable geographical contexts. for the mtls, tlpl did not just bring mathematics teachers and teacher leaders together, but it also enabled them to be and remain in long-lasting networks. for them, these networks were quite advantageous since they allowed teachers to continue working together, and to realize room to support each other in many ways, beyond the professional learning sessions. in the following quote, anne showcases how she continually interacts with mathematics teachers who were in her sessions: i remember one day, which was a market day in our village, and i was just preparing myself to get there to do shopping, i received a phone call from one of my teachers who lives like seven kilometers from here, it’s not like a village really, rather, you can call it a suburb. so, he was very low in his tone. he asked me if i can help with getting a car to pick up his pregnant wife to bring to our dispensary here. so, instead of going to the market, i decided to go to ask someone who owns a car in this village to go to pick up my fellow teacher’s wife. after that then i informed other teachers of our sessions, about what is going on with our fellow. i remember seeing a few of them going to visit her. this is just one of the ways we help and support each other these days. it is evident that collaboration went beyond professional learning sessions, to include non-educational collaborations and interactions. this perspective has the potential to reinforce the educational connections that the teachers have already established and maintain. nussbaum-beach and hall (2012) supported both kinds of collaborations and interactions, maintaining that they make mathematics teachers become connected, finding “themselves not just learning how to be better educators but more tuned-in and effective people” (p. 39) within their schools and local communities. based on the mtls’ experiences, it appears that tlpl produce a friendly and collegial learning environment, which in turn encourages long-term collaboration among mathematics teachers and teacher leaders. such an environment is conceived to emerge as teachers became leaders of teacher professional learning initiatives. the collegial environment is said to encourage teachers to feel more welcomed to actively work together with others during and beyond professional learning sessions. in such a space, as learned from the mtls’ accounts, teachers are encouraged to promote their own professional growth. it is even more clear that the same environment stimulates the resurgence of what guskey (1995) termed, “the naturally occurring relationships among professionals” (p. 121) and what murray 190 global education review 5(3) (2014) suggested, that: “[it] may help create shared professional culture, in which teachers in a school or district develop common understanding of instructional goals, methods, problems, and solutions (p. 17).” tlpl as a contextual and relevant practice the mtls conceived tlpl as a practice which was relevant to the need to improve student mathematics learning. behind such a conception is their observation that the practice provided mathematics teachers with the freedom to contextualize their professional learning. in other words, the mtls considered what teachers learned in tlpl to largely reflect the contextual realities of their pedagogical practices. as kenny discussed: for me, by having a teacher there, i think the discussions will focus on teaching and learning. i don’t expect something else to capture the interest of classroom teachers. it could be different to those pds [professional developments] where teachers are told things that do not have any connection to the contexts of their work of teaching. and that’s because the leaders of those pds ... have not taught the subject for many years. so, that’s why i think this other way [tlpl] is the important thing. in this quote, kenny compared tlpl with other kinds of teacher learning, to better describe the relevancy of the former to teacher professional learning. from his viewpoint, the practice is germane to student mathematics learning, considering that the interest of many teachers is largely about their students and how the students could become successful in learning mathematics. pili is confident that contextualization of professional learning becomes what she called, a “norm” when a mathematics teacher takes the leadership role in teacher learning. for her, “this type of learning is the only way for teachers to solve problems of their classes.” she added, “teachers may decide to throw a math problem there for teachers ... to work on it that she or he struggled to make sense of.” isile used a metaphor of a healing place to describe the tlpl context. isile described the tlpl learning context as a place where mathematics teachers bring classroom ‘diseases’ they have suffered, to get healed through their interactions with their teacher colleagues and their teacher leaders. with such a situation, from his perspective, the practice stands out as not just relevant to the work of teachers but also context-specific, enabling teachers to attend to what is going on in actual mathematics classrooms. it is apparent that the mtls view tlpl as providing mathematics teachers with opportunities to contextualize their learning as relevant to student learning. these perspectives are in line with keay and lloyd’s (2011) observation that teachers “want to focus closely on the specific needs of their pupils” (p. 52). as murray (2014) observed, the practice is pertinent in improving schooling as it can “connect what teachers learn ... with the daily challenges they face in the classroom” (p. 16). as donaldson (2007) described, “teacher leaders have unique opportunities to keep the focus of their collective work on kids, on learning and on the effectiveness of that work” (p. 135). such opportunities encourage teachers to capitalize on what overwhelms their classrooms to improve student mathematics learning. tlpl as a sustainable and ongoing practice for many mtls, tlpl is a sustainable practice that keeps mathematics teachers engaged in the process of expanding their professional knowledge base. the mtls underscored the prominence of the practice in keeping the teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 191 professional learning alive through ongoing discussions and conversations among mathematics teachers. as mazengo explained: this system of learning ... involves leaders and teachers who live in the same areas. for that reason, then, there is a possibility for them to meet in formal or informal situations. so, teachers continue to talk about what they do in classes, what is not going well, and what is going wrong in their classrooms [and] they support one another. mazengo is confident that tlpl is powerful in offering avenues for mathematics teachers and teacher leaders to remain in touch when they return to their classrooms, continuing to engage in collegial dialogues and conversations meant to promote professional growth. some of the mtls, on the other hand, thought the practice provided what was lacking in traditional teacher learning. as senzini explained: the issue that we had in those days is that we didn’t have people to help us when the workshops and seminars were over, and we are back in our schools. i think that was the challenge that faced many of us. you find you need some support on how to apply something you learned, but oh ... you don’t get that support because people who taught us are nowhere to be found. with this new approach to learning, ... it’s very easy to get help from teacher leaders as they are just in schools, if not in this school, you may find one in the next school. drawing from his experience of taking part in different kinds of teacher professional learning, senzini suggested that tlpl is a practice that enables mathematics teachers to continue to receive support and assistance even after the learning sessions are concluded. relatedly, gabby reported seeing the practice to “fill the gap that has stressed teachers for quite a long time.” as he explained, this practice becomes important as “teachers find resource persons [teacher leaders] close to their places and [they] can call them anytime without a formal letter or appointment.” he emphasized further that the practice was well-suited to help mathematics teachers and their teacher leaders to continually engage in supporting and assisting each other as they work to address pedagogical challenges that they face in their classrooms. moreover, anne observed tlpl created a friendly, sustainable, collegial learning environment that invites mathematics teachers to participate in learning. she believed that “the situation in which teachers work with people they know and who are at the same level and close to them influences how they see each other.” for her, “teachers can comfortably work together for a long time when led by people they know as their colleagues.” anne’s comments highlight what could bind mathematics teachers and teacher leaders together during and beyond their learning sessions. with this practice, as she emphasized, mathematics teachers and their leaders become colleagues because of the nature of the treatment of each other during learning sessions. for anne, it’s such a sense of collegiality that makes members remain connected even after departing to their schools. isile described how tlpl is inherently a sustainable activity: since the day teachers in our schools became aware that i’m also facilitating the learning of math teachers in the district, they have been in demand of me for their help. they have been calling me to go to their classes to help them with teaching, and others call me at our staff room to discuss some issues related to mathematics teaching. i have these teachers who call me to co-create teaching aids for their lessons. so, even 192 global education review 5(3) though our sessions are off, i’m still working with teachers. isile was quite confident that tlpl is crucial in encouraging mathematics teachers to continue to engage in learning throughout their teaching career. from his perspective, when teachers take charge of their learning, professional learning becomes a common practice in schools, contributing to improving schooling. consistent with the perspectives of the mtls, donaldson (2007) believed teacher leaders promote continuous teacher professional learning “because the relationships they have with fellow teachers keep them connected” (p. 135) beyond their sessions. summary and discussion the aim of this study was to explore the perspectives among tanzanian mathematics teacher leaders on tlpl. the perspectives included tlpl as: participative and engaging; reflective and experiential; collaborative; practical and contextual; and ongoing and sustainable. our results revealed that the mtls conceived tlpl as a promising kind of teacher professional learning that enables mathematics teachers to experience opportunities to promote their professional growth with a hope to improve teaching and learning practices in their mathematics classrooms. in this section we provide a summary of the perspectives and discuss implications for practice in the tanzanian mathematics teacher professional learning landscape. making sense of tlpl as a teacher professional learning practice one characteristic common to all the mtls who shared their perspectives on tlpl is that they worked in rural and remote schools. such an observation highlights the possibility that their perspectives of the practice was shaped by their experience of working in rural areas where opportunities for attending professional learning programs were relatively scarce. we are certain that such experiences triggered the mtls to view tlpl as powerful in comparison to traditional teacher learning approaches. the former, tlpl is facilitated by teacher leaders who are also rural teachers. the latter, the traditional approaches, took place far from the schools and under the control of education officers who had minimal interactions with teachers after professional learning sessions and who often had minimal, if any, teaching experiences in rural schools. through our interpretation of the mtl’s perspectives, we realized that tlpl has the potential to shift teacher learning from being a onetime, sporadic event to a process that empowers mathematics teachers to promote their professional growth while teaching in their school. one illuminating piece of information from the mtls’ accounts was related to their observation that through the practice, mathematics teachers and their teacher leaders became friends by working together during their learning sessions. it is ostensible that a sense of collegiality was responsible for making teacher professional learning continuing, encouraging teachers to communicate on matters related to enriching mathematics pedagogy. consistent with the perspectives of the mtls, lieberman and miller (2014) believed teacher leaders promoted continuous teacher professional learning because of the rapport they built with fellow mathematics teachers which kept them allied beyond learning sessions. we became aware, from mtls’ experiential accounts, that tlpl was effective in helping mathematics teachers to engage in a powerful process that has the potential to improve teaching and student learning in their classrooms. some teacher professional learning researchers are categorical about what teacher teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 193 leaders can bring in professional learning contexts if given the opportunity to facilitate the learning of teachers. donaldson (2007), for example, noted that “teacher leaders have unique opportunities to keep the focus of their collective work on kids, on learning and on the effectiveness of that work” (p. 135). it is in this sense and the results of our study we are confident that teacher leaders are key in helping teachers develop the capacity they need to improve mathematics teaching and learning. certainly, we learned that the mtls saw themselves as being accessible to their teacher colleagues, in the event those colleagues needed support in untangling pedagogical complexities in their classrooms. implications for practice as revealed in this study, the first step in giving mathematics teachers control and voice over their professional learning is to empower them to become leaders and educators of the learning of other teachers within and outside their schools. the idea is to support their transition to becoming mathematics teacher leaders who can make a difference in helping mathematics teachers to promote their professional growth and thereby improve student mathematics learning in schools. education systems, tanzania’s being no exception, are challenged to embark on empowering mathematics teachers to develop a sense of what it means and takes to work as a leader of teacher professional learning for them to be able to support the professional growth of other teachers. such empowerment is crucial as tlpl is a new practice in tanzania. one more noteworthy implication of this study would be to rethink teacher education curriculum to consider how it might be redesigned to help pre-service teachers attend to the demands of the contemporary landscape of education. teacher education curriculum in tanzania needs to be redesigned in order to provide prospective mathematics teachers with the skills they need to engage in the ongoing work of deepening their professional knowledge. the intent is to allow teacher educators spaces to more explicitly engage in preparing pre-service teachers who could be able to monitor their own professional growth while in schools, so to improve mathematics education in classrooms. in particular, the curriculum might include opportunities for pre-service teachers to become aware of what it means and takes to facilitate the professional learning of mathematics teachers. as such, it could potentially shift the context of where pre-service teachers are educated as well as to expand the knowledge of teacher education as inclusive of people and places not yet commonly considered. conclusion our results are encouraging because of the nature of the perspectives among mtls on tlpl. even though the practice is new in the tanzanian teacher education landscape, the mtls consider tlpl a promising kind of teacher learning that has the potential to help mathematics teachers to be responsible for their professional growth. it was apparent that the mtls saw the practice as valuable in facilitating teacher participation and engagement in learning, encouraging long-term collaboration among teachers, inviting integration of classroom experiences, inviting contextualization of professional learning, and situating ongoing professional learning of mathematics teachers in schools. encouragingly, it is evident that mathematics teachers who served as the mtls relished the opportunity of taking charge of their own professional learning when empowered to understand what it means and takes to lead the learning of other teachers. we believe that a description of the mtls’ perspectives on the practice offers opportunities to practically 194 global education review 5(3) rethink teacher professional learning in tanzania. references aubusson, p., ewing, r., & hoban, g. f. (2009). action learning in schools: reframing teachers' professional learning and development. new york: routledge. balka, d. s., hull, t. h., & miles, r. h. (2010). a guide to mathematics leadership: sequencing instructional change. thousand, oaks: ca: corwin, a sage company. binde, a. l., swai, c. z., & mwenda, n. (2013). capacity development for mathematics teaching in rural and remote communities in tanzania: a baseline study report submitted to the university of alberta. edmonton, canada. blumer, h. (1969). symbolic interactionism: perspective and method. englewood cliffs, nj: prentice hall. davis, b., & renert, m. (2014). the math teachers know: profound understanding of emergent mathematics. new york: routledge. davis, b., & simmt, e. (2006). mathematics-forteaching: an ongoing investigation of the mathematics that teachers (need to) know. educational studies in mathematics, 61(3), 293-319. donaldson, g. a. 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(2014). qualitative research: a guide to design and implementation. hoboken: jossey-bass. teacher-led professional learning in tanzania 195 mhando, e. s. (2012). reflective teacher: essays on education. morogoro: elimu reflective networks. miles, m. b. (1995). foreword. in t. r. guskey & m. huberman (eds.), professional development in education: new paradigms and practices (p. vii-ix). new york, ny: teachers college press. miles, m. b., & huberman, a. m. (1994). qualitative data analysis: an expanded sourcebook. thousand oak, ca california: sage publications. murray, j. (2014). designing and implementing effective professional learning. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. national council of teachers of mathematics. (2000). principles and standards for school mathematics. reston, va: author. neubrand, m., seago, n., agudelo-valderrama, c., deblois, l., leikin, r., & wood, t. (2009). the balance of teacher knowledge: mathematics and pedagogy. in r. even & d. l. ball (eds.), the professional education and development of teachers of mathematics (pp. 211-225). new york: springer. nussbaum-beach, s., & hall, l. r. (2012). the connected educator: learning and leading in a digital age. bloomington, in: solution tree. simmt, e., binde, a., glanfield, f., & mgombelo, j. (2011). capacity development for mathematics teaching in rural and remote communities in tanzania. ottawa: global affairs canada. united republic of tanzania. (2010). national strategy for growth and reduction of poverty. dar-es-salaam: ministry of finance and economic affairs. about the author(s) calvin zakaria swai, phd., is a lecturer in the department of science, mathematics, and technology education at the university of dodoma, tanzania. dr. swai’s scholarly activities and research focus on teacher education, teacher leadership, and curriculum studies. he’s made national and international conference presentations in all these areas of scholarship. currently, dr. swai is actively engaged by the ministry of education, science and technology of tanzania in a 5-year teacher education support project, focusing on revitalizing the quality of primary, secondary, and teacher education in tanzania. dr. florence glanfield, phd, is a professor of mathematics education, and chair of the department of secondary education, at the university of alberta in edmonton canada. dr. glanfield’s research interests explore the experiences that individuals (teachers and learners) as well as collectives / communities have with mathematics and learning mathematics. dr. glanfield collaborates with colleagues in all research projects and has engaged in research with indigenous canadian communities, urban indigenous youth, elementary & secondary mathematics teachers, and primary teachers and teacher educators in tanzania. complicité 43 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: macrae, christina, & arculus, charlotte. (2020). complicité: resisting the tyranny of talk in early childhood. global education review, 7 (2). 43-57. complicité: resisting the tyranny of talk in early childhood christina macrae manchester metropolitan university, uk charlotte arculus manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract this paper is based video data from a project called saltmusic, for young children diagnosed as having “language delay.” the interdisciplinary action-research project was co-delivered by speech and language therapists and early childhood arts practitioners, with children and their parents. addressing a concern that children’s lack of words places anxiety, guilt, and stress upon families, saltmusic explored ways of engaging with children using minimum words, by focusing on playful encounters of bodies responding to a range of materials, objects, and sounds. in this paper, we consider two filmed events from this project. we explore these events through the theme of this special issue, with its emphasis on the “complex intermingling of knowledges” between children, their families, early years’ arts practitioners, and speech therapists. we wish to think more deeply about what happens when adults talk less, and instead use space, sound, materials, and bodies to converse with toddlers. in particular, we turn to the dramaturgical notion of complicité in order to enlarge our understanding of communication and conversation towards a mutually transformative sense of unfolding collective action. in particular, we ask what the potential of the concept of complicité might offer early years’ practice in an era of accountability, where the professionalization discourses of early childhood education are creeping into and infecting parenting discourses. we ask if the concept of complicité might help adults working with young children to resist the domination of word-oriented discourses that eclipse implicit, bodily, and materially attuned ways of relating to the young child. keywords complicité; more-than-words; early years’ pedagogies; speech and language therapy; early years’ arts practitioners introduction in this piece of writing, we (re)turn to two data clips that took place in a series of saltmusic family support sessions in order to think more deeply about early years’ pedagogies. these sessions took place in the priory children’s centre in the east of the united kingdom. we will use the concept of bodily encounters as a way to think more deeply about creating spaces where complex and intermingled knowledges can emerge, and we put this to use as a way to break our habitual recourse to what blum has called “wordism” (2015, p,74; 2017, p.6). using performance practice as a discipline that might foreground the idea of emergent forms of knowledge that do not rely on words, we explore if this might offer us ways of resisting an ever-narrowing focus on vocabulary and talk. in particular, we explore what happens when we use the dramaturgical concept of complicité and apply it to the analysis of the video clips. this concept helps us to think about creating spaces where early years professionals, children, and parents can encounter each other in more-thanwords ways, so that we can take account of affective and collectively produced understandings. in this paper, we explore conversation as a relational act of complicité that may or may not involve words, but where bodies respond in relation to each other. we propose 44 global education review 7 (2) that this can be offered as an antidote to the act of “talking to” or “talking at” children. alongside the notion of complicité, we also develop an idea of understanding as something that is produced by being in the middle of things; in and among. we open by briefly introducing the national (and wider) context of a growing professionalization of parenting (holloway & pimlott-wilson, 2014) that is associated with “talking to your child.” alongside this is a linked, but specific discourse around the professionalization of the early years workforce (georgeson, 2009; osgood, 2006; taggart, 2011). we recognize that behind this current situation are the effects of a long and complicated history of research that has singled out the key significance of the infant/mother dyad as a site of socialization in the facilitation of the child’s capacity to communicate (riley, 1983, p.25). furthermore, we acknowledge that this history is in turn is entangled in colonial recapitulation theorizing where both the development of the child, as well as the evolution of language is conceptualized as progressive from lower to higher, from simple to complex, and animal to human (burman 2017; macrae, 2020; viruru, 2005). because human language is the behavior most deeply associated with truth, reason, and knowing (cannella & viruru, 2004, p.38), this results in not-yetspeaking children being seen as lacking any real knowledge or understanding of the world (maclure, 2013). thus, words have a problematic association with thinking: what is not language cannot easily be considered as thought. it is beyond the scope of this paper to explore this genealogy, and instead our intention will be to engage with this fraught relationship by reflecting on video data from a collaborative project that brought speech therapists and early years performance arts practitioners together in a project that sought to engage with these tensions during a program of family support sessions. one of the authors, charlotte, a community musician, arts animateur, and doctoral student was involved in the sessions, and was behind the camera for the two pieces of video. the other, christina, not part of the project at the time, also has a research interest in young children’s communicative practices and became involved when she worked alongside charlotte to (re)view the video clips in order to think more deeply about how these two events unfolded. having sketched out the national context, we discuss the saltmusic project and its multi-disciplinary methodology. we then (re)turn to two short pieces of video taken during the project. we analyze the videos through the concept of complicité: both exploring how complicité is something that is aligned to the material, as well as to how it is expressed through collective action. we conclude by proposing that, not only is multidisciplinary working productive, but we speculate on the potential of complicité-aspractice as a key concept that could lie at the heart of future multidisciplinary work that includes speech therapists and multi-arts practitioners. talk to your child: the national context and beyond gillies (2014) traces how in the late 1990s parenting began to enter the arena of social policy as an overt focus and has steadily intensified since then (see also edwards & gillies 2004, macvarish et al, 2015). holloway and pimlott-wilson (2014) focus specifically on a growing attention to parenting skills from 19972010 under the united kingdom’s labour government. they point to a series of key policy influences from the identification of parents as vital in relation to children’s outcomes in every child matters (hm treasury, 2003), to every parent matters (dfes, 2007). from this period, complicité 45 under coalition and conservative governments, there has followed an austerity driven “roll back of the state,” where state funded provision of early years services to families has reduced, while the sector has been subject to increasing privatization (lewis & west, 2017). accompanying this there has been a creeping discourse that professionalizes parenting, with implicit understandings of parenting as techniques to be learnt (holloway & pimlottwilson, 2014) accompanying this is a more specific focus on the linguistic repertoires of parents. riley (1983) observes that as child development theory moved from a biological construction of the child to a more sociocultural construction, communication became increasingly significant, sometimes operating as a kind of proxy for the concept of attachment. blum (2017) draws attention to an even narrower focus on numbers of words and vocabulary, chronicling how since 2010, a particular small study measuring the number of words that parents directed at their children (conducted by hart and risley in 1995) has since become a rallying cry in uk and us policy. she charts how this “word-gap” study has been cited as evidence underpinning a rising number of programs that train poorer, less educated parents to direct more talk at their young children (blum, 2017; kuchirko, 2019). blum (2017) calls this “wordism” and critiques the idea that language is words and more words are better. here the individual “word” dominates as the primary unit of analysis in education, and words are “celebrated, counted, accumulated—or found missing” (p. 26). providing a language-rich environment has long been regarded as an essential ingredient of good early years education. however, the new intensity of focus on the word-gap in relation to parents has accelerated a consciousness about the need for words to mediate adult/child relations. this approach is nevertheless debateable. as blum (2017) points out, the adult-directed and child-centered talk so esteemed in the west is far from universal, as worldwide multicultural perspectives show (for example, see brice heath, 1983; schieffelin & ochs, 1986). while this particular focus on adult speech has been intensified through recent global north policy and the media, this compulsion to bring language to children is not new, and can be linked to ways that language is deeply political, and always shot through with power and ingrained colonial attitudes that equate language with knowledge (aveneri et al. 2015; macrae, 2020; viruru, 2001). significant for us is that “many key insights into infant language learning rest on implicit assumptions of how language interactions unfold, assumptions that are based on weird populations (western, educated, industrialized, rich and democratic), and almost exclusively on white middle-income mothers and their children” (kuchirko, 2019, p.550). holding this in mind when unpicking policy discourses that extort parents to “talk to their children,” is a reminder to be aware of how some kinds of communicative and literacy practices may be valued at the expense of others (hackett, 2018). saltmusic the saltmusic project that this paper reports on was funded between 2016 and 2018 by the charity youth music to offer weekly sessions for families with young children (24-36 months) diagnosed by speech and language services as having communication “difficulty” or “delay.” the project was delivered as part of the priory children’s centre’s work with families. the priory was one of the initial 50 trailblazer sure start programmes set up in the united kingdom at the millennium and was run by the great yarmouth community trust. this particular project was an interdisciplinary action-research initiative, co-delivered by speech 46 global education review 7 (2) and language therapists and early years’ multiarts specialists (pitt & arculus, 2018). it was the latest of a number of projects initiated over a 20year partnership between the great yarmouth community trust sure start programme and saltmusic, a multidisciplinary group of early childhood musicians, performance artists, and speech therapists. sure start, a uk policy initiative that started in 1998, had a similar mission to the head start programs in the united states and australia. through this program local children’s centres were funded so that universal childcare, family support, and health services would be offered to families of young children. in the first phase of the sure start local programme, multidisciplinary work was promoted. over the lifetime of the saltmusic partnership, budgets were cut and nationally the core work of many sure start children’s centres have faced an existential threat. sadly, while this paper was being written, the great yarmouth community trust went into liquidation (at the end of 2019) as the result of withdrawal of central government funding for local councils. notwithstanding these gradual erosions to services and resulting reductions in sure start funding, up until this action-research project, saltmusic had managed to continue to work within the core provision to families with young children at the priory children’s centre. it was the close relationships that were facilitated through this long-term collaboration that enabled the creation of playful pedagogies in open-ended family spaces for meeting, being, and learning together. engaging with children’s non-verbal funds of knowledge from the outset the saltmusic, practitioners (an equal mix of early years’ multiarts specialists and speech and language therapists) recognized the potential problematic effects of focusing on the acquisition of words as a child’s principal achievement. they were concerned about how this focus might tacitly be perpetuated by the word-gap and schoolreadiness discourses that constructed the parental role as key in increasing the number of words in their child’s repertoire. the group worried that these narratives might work in counterproductive ways by placing anxiety, guilt, and stress upon parents (especially those of low socioeconomic status, since this group was being singled out as in need of intervention). linked with this, there was a concern that opportunities to engage with children playfully might become hijacked by the imperative for adults to talk to children all the time. furthermore, the group members were concerned that this tyranny of talking (pitt & arculus, 2018, p.12) or “wordism” (blum, 2015, p.74; 2017, p.6) risked ignoring other forms of children’s communicative interaction, rendering their nonverbal funds of knowledge invisible. as an antidote, the saltmusic team deliberately worked using minimal talk and instead focussed on interaction through music, movement, and object play. words, when they were used, were deployed playfully and within a palette of other types of expressive voice play. saltmusic methodology the team used a cycle of reflection and planning as the means by which to share their disciplinary ways of knowing. through this process, which became known as “interthinking” (pitt & arculus, 2018, p.27), they shared specific techniques; for example, drawing on speech therapists “observe, wait, listen” approach (girolametto et al., 1986) and intensive interaction (hewett & nind, 2013). over the years of the partnership a pedagogy of improvisation developed and was central to the saltmusic practice. this involved, to quote lines (2017), “a responsibility within the unfolding ensemble to stay sensitive and also complicité 47 keep exploring. it requires openness, alertness, and attentiveness to sustain creatively” (p. 56). saltmusic strove to be an ethical and emergent practice attending to in-the-moment responses and to the ongoing creative processes produced when bodies encounter other bodies (both human and nonhuman). the starting premise of the sessions was to recognize young children as rhizomic and transdisciplinary thinkers (dahlberg, 2016), constantly making and remaking heterogenous semiotic connections unhampered by language. the practitioners understood that they, themselves, learnt from children and gained greatly in their respective practices through improvising with children. the collaboration sought to explore the question that viruru poses, when she asks, “what is lost when language is gained?” (2001, p.31). the saltmusic project was interested in expressions of thought beyond words and proposed that by attending to what manning calls the minor gesture, this could render tangible how children create “languages that speak in the interstices of major tongues” (2016, p.2). (re)viewing data vignettes this paper is focussed on two pieces of video from the saltmusic sessions which were part of the data from the action-research project led by charlotte and jess pitt. both clips show a two-year-old child who attended the weekly sessions with his dad. he had been referred for speech therapy and he never spoke in the sessions. in the first clip he is near to his father who is sitting on a chair. in this clip we witness an interaction between the child, some plastic cones, a spinning basket, and four adults. a coproduced movement/song is produced as the child spins the basket and the movement is accompanied by singing adults. the song emerges as a striking refrain that seems to have emerged from all the assembled elements, both human and nonhuman. in the second clip, the scene is very different; the video was taken at the end of the same session and the whole group (adults and children) are gathered around a large piece of lycra that is being held, stretched, and gently bounced by outstretched arms and hands. here, the same two-year-old, unexpectedly becomes a key player in the assemblage when he breaks into an improvised, made-up song “the boats are in the sea.” this song emerges as the child watches some small paper boats placed onto the lycra as they bounce up and down with its rise and fall. both these clips have made a great impression on the saltmusic group, and charlotte in particular, over the last few years. not only did the events have a significant impact on the team at the time, but subsequently charlotte has returned to the video clips as a means to explore the potential of music as an affective and rhythmic force (arculus, 2019). here the singularity of the emergence of the child’s song became a significant event. this analysis of the video surfaced the pedagogy and community of improvisation that surrounded the event. in particular, it drew attention to the material affordances of the blue lycra fabric that joined people together through a shared pulse, the song, and the co-produced action responding to the motion of the spinning basket. when the call came out for this special issue, more than words for working with families and children, we saw this as an opportunity to collaborate by returning to the video data once more, and to explore in greater detail the singular unfolding of the two filmed events. we anticipated that we would explore how refrains were produced, sustained, and transformed through a pedagogy of improvisation. however, when (re)viewing the video with the specified theme of “embodied forms of knowing, gut feelings, intuition” and 48 global education review 7 (2) the concept of “withness” as proposed by shotter (2012), we found our attention was redirected. when we focused closely on what happened to the adult bodies in this space of minimal talking, we found ourselves pushed into new directions. giving our attention to the repetitions of both movement and sound when bodies encounter each other, we started to notice how both human and nonhuman bodies became complicit in each other’s motion. complicité as a concept of data analysis our newfound awareness of a complicity that seemed to be produced through encounter, raised new questions about the potential of performing arts techniques in relation the theatrical concept of complicité, and what this concept might unlock if we took it up seriously to think about child/adult communication. complicité is a french term commonly used in street theatre, physical theatre, and ensemble improvisation. it has been popularized as a performance concept by actors who worked with the dramaturge jaques lecoq (whose writings on drama are influential in mime, physical, and visual theatre) and with the british theatre company théâtre de complicité. for actors it means a dynamic, sensed, attuned, force between players; a moving-with. when engaging in performed complicité, the actor’s sense of self becomes blurred and distributed through the group. through playful encounters, processes that lecoq-schooled actor, john wright frames as “finding the game” (2006), players develop complicité and then can improvise together. as kuppers et al. (2016) note in their co-created, community performance research projects: we do not know yet how to speak to each other, how to make art together. the very act of coming together is an experiment. […] we develop our antennae for one another, and then we end in an open-space improvisation […] (p. 221). it is essential for any ensemble in the performing arts (orchestra, dance ensemble, street act) to develop complicité because complicité is absolutely palpable to an audience, as it affects and folds them in, even though they may not know why. we are interested in thinking about how both “finding the game” and complicité are not confined as relationships solely between human actors, but, that they also include materials such as, instruments, puppets, cloth and other props. we will try to work with this concept in tandem with shotter’s (2015) notion of an “ethics of attunement” and “thinking-with.” we will now (re)turn to these two video clips in greater depth in order to explore them through the lens of complicité. event 1: encountering a spinning basket setting the scene: charlotte, a two-year old child, his father, and a saltmusic practitioner are gathered around a large multicolored basket that has been taped onto a lazy susan turntable. also present in the scene are colorful plastic cones scattered on the floor, some of which are in the basket. other people are in the room (including the project researcher, who is sat on the floor observing the session from across the room). the room is also full of other diverse objects and materials—cloth, tubes, balls, and instruments. there is an ambient brian eno soundtrack playing in the background. charlotte has been tasked with recording the event using an ipad, and her usual practice is to keep this short, at around 2 minutes per clip. however, when her attention is drawn by a child standing close to their seated father, she films for longer. the child offers and exchanges cones with the saltmusic practitioner sitting on the floor. this leads to them starting to spin the basket together; charlotte starts to film (this video clip lasts for 6 minutes). what follows is a recomplicité 49 narration of the video. this description was produced through a dialogue and reanalysis between charlotte and christina. this “telling” attempts to story the event so that complicité plays a vital role in the encounter between the child/4 adults /cones and a spinning basket. storying the video clip: the basket taped to the lazy susan is set in motion when it encounters the child’s hand. this encounter, which produces spinning, engenders a found game and an emerging complicité between the child and the basket. the spinning motion of the basket attracts both charlotte’s attention and the saltmusic practitioner sitting next to the child. although charlotte is filming, the spinning provokes a “weeee!” vocalization from her, as she too becomes complicit with the basket’s motion. the drawn-out intonation of her “weee” utterance is an expression of her joining in with the game, entering it while the child continues to push the basket. the child/basket complicité has now been enlarged to include charlotte’s “weee” sounds. the father is watching the child’s encounter. his attention to child and basket is strong and consistent. it is also worth noting that the saltmusic practitioner, the actionresearcher and charlotte have also developed a complicité with each other through playing and working together over time. these assembled bodies are held together in suspension through the different but interconnected threads of complicité that emerge through the seeking and finding of games—games that allow players to enter each other’s encounters in playful ways. the movement of the basket sets the rhythms and patterns in which the assembled bodies become complicit. the enlarging of these rhythms through complicité drive the child’s increasingly forceful gestures, and this in turn increases the momentum of the basket. while this is going on, the saltmusic practitioner has simultaneously started to find a new game with the child/basket/father involving cones (collecting, looking through, and dropping cones in the basket). a minute or so later the researcher, who is seated at a distance from the spinning basket, is drawn to this game-finding and finds complicité by joining in with a refrain of repeated words: “round and round and round and round”—the rise and fall of which follows the movement of the circling basket. her voice is, at the same time, tuned to the eno soundtrack that is playing in the background. all the actors lurch between losing, finding, and playing their multiplicitous, yet connected games. they mostly manage to sustain beingin-relations and within songlines: the various refrains are curious riffs for each other to play off. polyrhythms emerge and the assembled constituent parts fall into momentary grooves through the developing sense of complicité with a spinning basket. materializing complicité through movement “there is no complicité method — what is essential is collaboration, and a turbulent forward momentum” (théâtre de complicité, 2020). we agree that when thinking about how complicité was generated by the spinning basket, movement is indeed a key element. the child becomes complicit with the basket through setting it in motion, and, in turn, adults enter into various complicities produced through and with each other, as well as with the assembled sounds and objects. complicité emerges through and with the encounter rather than through a sense of clear direction or intention. to introduce words that would direct action (“look, you are spinning the basket”) into this ensemble runs the danger of destabilizing the suspended state of play. what becomes important in the seeking of games to enter into with others (both 50 global education review 7 (2) human and nonhuman), is the need to always be ready to recognize when a game is over and to find a new game (wright, 2006). at the same time, it is important to always keep open the possibility of new connections and complicities to break through, or as cross (2005, p.10) might say, to keep intentionality “floating.” on (re)viewing the clips, we are interested in what this sense of complicité might offer in terms of making us think more expansively in relation to the term conversation, opening it up beyond a narrow exchange of words. as christina has noted elsewhere (2020, p.16), the history of the word conversation has an older sense which is linked to residing and dwelling, while the latin combination of con (together) with verser (to turn) takes us to a concept of moving in unison. thus conceived, “our (con)versations are always more-than-human: mattering is a form of (con)versation as bodies move both in relation to matter and in relation to the affective responses of other bodies” (macrae, 2020, p.16). this can be seen as the difference between language in a scientific mode, a formal system which can be measured and taught [“talk to your child”]; and conversation as a relational, affective mode between people, through which they turn and move. this resonates with hackett and somerville’s (2017) proposition that literacies are practices of the body, and with sheetsjohnstone’s (2011) proposal that we “make sense” as we move our bodies (2011, p. 117). to say that “the child drops the tubes into the basket” or “the artist makes a ‘weee’ sound” is as meaningless as extracting a single note from an improvised tune. rather, it is the relation of thinking-with (shotter, 2015) another—the complicité of child and basket, child and father, tube and basket, brian eno and voice, tubes and basket and father, and so much more that holds the event together in a loose and open fashion. the etymological roots of the english word complicity have multiple, overlapping meanings: accomplice, collusion, participation, collaboration, involvement, association, recognition, complicate. it also has links to the middle english word complice, meaning associate; and the latin word complicare, which means to “fold together.” working with these meanings, it might be possible to sense complicité in the movement of the child’s body as it pulses in relation to the speed of the basket, in the tuning of one voice to the brian eno sound track, or the other voice in tone and tempo with the momentum of the rotating basket. in the field of early childhood where the use of words to express oneself is an overarching goal, it is all too easy for certain kinds of complicities to become a threat to the order of things. children who mimic the actions of other children, children’s intimacies with material objects, or adults who respond to children’s moving bodies with mimicry are all instances where often complicité can appear to threaten “normal” behavior. it is of interest that complicity is a concept that is usually seen in negative terms where it is cast pejoratively as ceding of one’s personal responsibility, or as an upending of the normal modes of behavior (reynolds, 2017). we also note that in the english language, complicity is often used rhetorically in political and judicial terms to denote behaviour that breaks rules through transversal actions that undermine behavioral norms (reynolds, 2017). here it is the unspoken—but yet understood—that exists between those involved that is particularly threatening. there is an invisible quality to complicity—it can only be sensed by those playing the game or those paying careful attention. from the outside, saltmusic sessions might look chaotic in the absence of adult direction. visitors observing one of these sessions might initially feel troubled by the lack of a single point of focus: the multiple and often complicité 51 brief encounters, the botched attempts at “finding a game,” and the sense of being not included in games that others were part of. this leaves practitioners in a risky place where they might appear, as shotter says, “unprofessional” or “incompetent” and unable to “account” for themselves to those around “by giving reasons for our conduct” (2015, p.137). davies (2014) describes encounters as an always-evolving story that requires not knowing what is happening or where things are headed. schulte (2013, p.2) conceives of the process of gaining children’s trust as unstable, provisional, multiple, and incomplete, and not something a script or score can be written for; it requires openness, alertness, and attentiveness to sustain. attending to the potential in moments of encounter as a significant aspect of this improvisational pedagogy takes us beyond habit and the already known. there are different levels of complicité between different players but during these thinking-with encounters, talking runs the risk of killing this confederacy in its tracks. event two the boats are on the sea setting the scene: this clip was filmed later during the same saltmusic session as the first. at the center of the event is a large piece of pulsing blue stretchy (lycra) fabric. the room has been cleared, offering a large space for movement. the fabric is held by all the people in the room who are sitting around the lycra, apart from charlotte. lycra has been a veteran in these sessions because of its capacity to do special things through its elasticity and shared pulse as it is held in-common. it also divides the space into an above and a below. storying the video clip: little folded paper boats have been placed onto the stretched material. the boats bounce as the lycra is lifted up and down collectively by the humans grasping it in their hands. the leading artist says in a sing song voice “the boats are on the sea.” there is a “shussshing” vocalization that sounds a little wave-like, and also like a call for quiet. charlotte holds the camera at the far end of the room. as the lycra pulses, it becomes noticeable that the child filmed in the first clip is singing softly. he suddenly raises his voice to sing loudly into the room. his song is extraordinary and beautiful, the tune is complex and it has six words “the boats are in the sea.” in this singing, at once, the “game” is taken to a new level as words are made into song. all are present and complicit in a moment of forward momentum. the blue material continues pulsing and vibrating with a complicité from which the song emerged. the adults join in, taking up the refrain. charlotte’s voice is clearly audible on the video clip. it becomes clear on (re)view that the adults don’t reproduce the child’s original tune—but rather that it is transformed into something else that moves forward wildly with the motion of the blue lycra. as the singing settles into a gentle refrain, the child/blue material/bouncing boats have transformed the song-game complicité into something new. the child does not sing again but collects the little boats from the rolling, swelling lycra-sea. this takes a little time, and all the while the song rolls and swells forward. the human/lycra assemblage is complicit in quietening and stilling a little, which allows the child to gain the last remaining boats. when all are collected, the child places them once more on the sea and this time he gets hold of the edge of the lycra. he then conducts the song forwards through a more vigorous and turbulent up and down movement of the lycra. the song follows accordingly, rising and swelling. 52 global education review 7 (2) bodies in concert and the birth of a tune the child’s song that emerges from the complicité of the group has a soaring power. the song is an “event”; it is an act of creation, a new collective utterance in the world. it is the thing most alive in the room and draws everything towards it. here, as we reflect on our reviewings of the video, we wonder if complicité might be thought of as a knowing to do with one’s participation within a situation, with one’s “place” within it, and with how one might “go on” playing one’s part within it—a knowing in which one is affected by one’s surroundings perhaps even more than one affects them (shotter, 2012, p.3) thus, complicité is a kind of knowing-ness that is akin to having an understanding. an etymological search of the word understanding reveals a complexity of roots that includes “standing among,” and being in-between or in the midst of. pondering these roots brings forth an idea of understanding as an immersive, close, relational quality rather than a passive standing beneath a transcendent knowledge. we consider how the term understanding could relate to the idea of complicité; could we think of the songevent as an understanding that was produced in the midst, through a complicité that was morethan-human? we would like to suggest that when we tactically reduce our words, this can have the effect of making us more aware of emergent ways of knowing that are produced in concert with children, as well as more-thanhuman actants. with regards to the manner in which the song erupted from the child in concert with the pulsing lycra, the bouncing boats, and rhythms of the collective bodies, we notice both “an ‘upward’ emergent pressure from individual knowers as well as a ‘downward’ collective pressure from the collective knowing of the group” (kieren, 2005, p.75). in the case of this particular event, the collective group of people holding the lycra included parents, saltmusic practitioners, and children. following maclure, we also note that while language is “inescapably social,” it also can have an impersonal quality where voices not are not expressions of individual and bounded selves, but instead can be issued forth through a collective enunciation. here maclure, draws from deleuze who suggests that this is a murmuration that emerges through collective voices (2016, p.175). the way the song changes its shape, tune, and tempo is complex and entangled with all the constitutive players in this event, including the lycra and the bouncing boats. we would like to also suggest that children are uniquely positioned to teach us about complicity as a force, since it is a quality that is often supressed as reason and language take hold of us. as duhn notes, very young children, are, perhaps, “less caught up in the illusion of a self that controls and governs than older humans who have learned to see, feel, and think the self and the world in particular ways” (2015, p. 928). they also can be distinguished as having a particular “style” that emanates from a corporality that is attuned to the spaces and objects that they encounter (løkken, 2009). we share maclure’s caution that we should be wary of romanticizing this “wild” element of early childhood (2016, p.179), however with duhn (2015), we do think that the affective alliances infant bodies create with other bodies, both human and more-than-human, might be recognized as capacities rather than as threatening the development of reason and language. it is interesting, as we noted earlier, that the term complicity is generally used rhetorically in negative terms, and certainly the contagious complicities of young children running or shouting in unison are ones that adults are fearful of triggering. however, the point we would like to make is that complicity is complicité 53 neither good nor bad, but rather should be thought of as a force that makes us capable of acting in a multitude of ways. conclusion taylor and blaise (2014) talk about a process that involves attending to ways in which our bodies are set in motion “by the collective body or the body-world” (p. 385). they go on to speculate that to be open to this kind of learning, we need to acknowledge that “we are never operating independently in the world, never acting on intentional agency alone,” and that, instead, “we are moving as a constituent part of a collective worldly body—stirred and affected by our relations with all manner of more-thanhuman others, living and inert, in our common worlds” (taylor & blaise, 2014, p.386). acknowledging these as “situated knowledges” (traffi-pratts, 2019), produced in the spaces that bodies find themselves in as they are set in motion, requires that we take the physical and material qualities of the spaces in which we encounter families very seriously. working with the concept of complicité, borrowed from drama theory, could be deployed as a provocation that brings a different disciplinary knowledge from the performing arts in order to unsettle the dominance of linguistic and cognitive narratives that have come to colonize the field of early childhood education. sumara and davis point out that while the etymological roots of the word complicity share a history with the word complexity, complicity is also about being implicated in something and being an accomplice (1997, p.303). they go on to claim that as an overarching concept, complicity “announces a need to be attentive to one’s participation in events” (1997, p.303). taking up the invitation to become an accomplice to unfolding events as children encounter other bodies could be seen as a way of attempting to reside inside the act of culture-making in order to deliberately resist imposing cultures on families. furthermore, this requires “a willingness and an effort to formulate one’s place in the community […] and reciprocally, to allow that community to become part of the research” (sumara & davis, 1997, p.309). equal to the situational necessity of complicity is its critical relationship to time. complicity is a force that is necessarily produced in the moment; it always is created fluidly in response to the unfolding dynamics of the present moment. this can sit awkwardly in the context of the shadow that is cast by the “school-ready child,” one produced through the policy discourses of data and assessment. this schoolready child normalizes “particular development trajectories” over others through a reduction of complexity in order to create a “hierarchy of unreadiness/readiness” (evans, 2015, p.35). and as pierlejewski points out, this phantasy of the school ready child is a spectre that stops open-ended gaming in it tracks (2019:6). complicité insists on being inside and residing within the time of now. bates reminds us that we should also be “concerned with ‘here and now’ as ‘time–space’” (2019, p.422). so complicité-as-practice reminds us to not only take space seriously, but also that sometimes we should give in to time, obeying the imperative to succumb to time in a world that is so worried about wasting it. with sumara and davis, we concur that relationships of complicity carry forces that are capable of enlarging “the space of the possible” (1997:309). (re)viewing the video from the saltmusic project, we have been struck by how complicité-as-practice was a quality that emerged through the careful, slow, multidisciplinary partnership between speech therapists and early years multi-arts specialists, where respective practices and techniques were shared and transformed. but further, we feel that complicité-as-practice has a potential itself 54 global education review 7 (2) to engender new multidisciplinary alliances, and ones that recognize the capacities and knowledges of children themselves. as a performative tactic that attends to the movement of bodies, it is one that is ripe with possibilities. complicité-as-practice has the capacity to become a force of shared concern and responsiveness that can bring together performance artists, speech therapists, as well as other early years professionals as they work mutually with local communities of families. while parents bring their own implicit and intuitive ways of knowing and responding to children with them, the current climate of assessment, progression, and school readiness shape and limit the expression of these more situated and felt funds of knowledge in favor of explicit expectations. although the notion of complicité emerged unexpectedly as we (re)viewed the video clips from the saltmusic sessions, the surfacing of complicité as a force that opens up, rather than closes down, possibilities for action has been exciting and offered us hope in a time of increasing parental and professional accountability. we suggest that movement-oriented arts practices like dance, music, and drama might align themselves well alongside and in collaboration with early childhood education. in particular, we advocate exploring the potential of complicité-as-practice through forging collaborations between early childhood educators and performance artists. this requires a financial commitment to longterm, situated partnerships that will test potential beyond the short-term, one-off, funded arts project model that has become the norm in uk arts funding. cross-fertilization of health, education, artistic, and parental practices around early childhood takes time and commitment, and collaborative partnerships between health, arts, and educational research funding sources could be deployed to productively bring these practices together. references arculus, c. 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(2006). why is that so funny?: a practical exploration of physical comedy. nick hern. about the authors charlotte arculus is an artist-animateur and has worked with very young children for over 30 years. she is currently a doctoral student at manchester metropolitan university. her doctoral project “more than words” uses innovative film technologies and the temporal arts to understand the complex worlds of twoyear-old children. she has presented, research, arts installations, and workshops nationally and internationally. she is the is the artistic director of magic adventure, an immersive, multi-arts installation project. christina macrae is a research fellow at manchester metropolitan university whose interests lie in early childhood care and education. she has a particular interest in the way that sensation, affect, and movement express a bodily relationship engagement with the world. she has recently carried out an ethnography called “the sensory nursery,” where she has experimented with methodologies that give more weight to materiality, relation, and bodily ways of knowing. she also has experience of working with young children in diverse settings a nursery teacher. http://www.complicite.org/index.php immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning 169 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jay, jordan & miller, howard (2016). immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning: cohorts, learning communities, and mentoring. global education review, 3 (4). 169-175 immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning: cohorts, learning communities, and mentoring jordan jay lincoln university, missouri, usa howard miller mercy college, new york, usa abstract in this article, we present three models of teacher preparation programs that immersed their candidates in experiential learning aimed at bringing together theory and practice. we identify the key components that can be generalized from studying such programs, examine factors that led to their dismantling, and propose a potentially more sustainable model. keywords experiential learning: cohorts, learning communities, and mentoring introduction a continually vexing problem regarding the preparation of teachers has been the challenge of guiding candidates toward making the connection between the academic side of learning to become a teacher and the practical side of the profession. it has long been recognized that the traditional student teaching (also called practice teaching) experience at the end of a program of study has been an inadequate and artificial means of transitioning to the responsibilities and demands of a full time teaching assignment following this closely supervised period. the specificity of any given teaching assignment, the day-to-day decision making, and all of the other often-unpredictable demands on a new teacher make it impossible for any teacher preparation program to fully ready novice teachers for the reality of their first teaching assignment, when mentoring and support are generally minimized or nonexistent. it is foolish to fail to recognize that there are real students who are being taught by those novice teachers; their learning and their welfare are at stake. the more prepared new teachers are to implement their accumulated knowledge about how children learn, the better off those students will be. the medical profession offers its prime directive: primum non nocere, or “first, do no harm,” a key tenet that applies as well to inexperienced teachers, who are prone to doing harm due to a lack of the extensive experiential learning, monitoring and mentoring. a number of teacher preparation programs have attempted ______________________________ corresponding author: howard miller, mercy college, school of education, 555 broadway, dobbs ferry, new york 10522 email: hmiller@mercy.edu mailto:hmiller@mercy.edu 170 global education review 3(4) to smooth the way by various approaches that incorporate experiential learning within the educational program leading to initial teaching licensure and that first teaching position. we will describe three of these programs and identify those factors that made them effective by closing the gap between academic preparation and actual teaching experiences. the first two models discuss alternative route programs – that is, programs that operate by following approved state guidelines pertaining to various alternative licensure pathways, usually temporary ones with clearly defined requirements to insure candidates will eventually meet all of the established standards for full licensure of the kind that those following the traditional course would obtain. these alternative route programs have existed in the us for many years and came about in response to projected teacher shortages and as a means of reining in a growing epidemic of generally unregulated “emergency” teaching certificates. the models of instruction generally follow one of two designs. both require candidates to have an undergraduate degree in a relevant area, and then immerse them in a summer student teaching experience, from which they move directly into their own classrooms for the next two years while pursuing their master’s degree and/or obtaining a level of teacher certification equivalent to that of someone following the traditional route. some of the models subsume the candidates into existing teacher preparation programs (with additional field supervision), while others provide a focused curriculum aimed at connecting theory and practice within a targeted setting. model 1: intern teaching program for college graduates arguably, an internship approach offers the potential for smoothing the way for new teachers and thereby prevent or minimize a great many of the “harmful” errors that a part and parcel of the first-year experience. indeed, such an approach has been implemented by a number of teacher preparation institutions over the years. as one example, co-author howard miller is a graduate of one such program, the intern teaching program for college graduates that was initiated by temple university in philadelphia, pennsylvania, usa, in 1968 (temple university, 1968). this graduate program, which is no longer in existence, was designed to develop liberal arts and science graduates as secondary school teachers. it incorporated two years of full-time teaching and formal campus-based course work. some of that course work was specific to the program; the rest was made up of courses that were part of the existing traditional teacher preparation program. the highly selective program identified candidates with strong academic backgrounds in the liberal arts and sciences. successful completers received provisional teaching certification (i.e., state licensure) and a master's degree. the program began, as many such models do, with an intensive summer orientation that included the equivalent of the student teaching experience that would typically come at the end of a traditional teacher preparation program. interns spent part of the day in a mentored classroom, working, at first collaboratively and then independently, under the guidance of a licensed teacher from the school district, an immersion into teaching one clinical supervisor referred to as a “trial by fire.” immediately following the summer experience, the interns were placed in a full-salaried teaching position, with extensive supervision through weekly visits provided by the university faculty. first-year activities included a weekly seminar on campus and course work focusing on the nature of learning, the school's role in society, and specialized subject teaching methods. immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning 171 model 2: new teacher residency program the new teacher residency program (ntrp), a finalist for the 2009 association of teacher educators distinguished program in teacher education award, was in operation at mercy college from 2002 to 2010 as a collaborative project with the new york city public schools. it was established as an alternate route teacher education program that focused exclusively on preparing teachers for high needs elementary and middle school general education and special education classrooms in new york city. during its years of operation, it graduated some 2,000 teachers. similar to other immersive teacher preparation programs, like temple university’s intern teaching program, ntrp fellows took graduate-level coursework while teaching full time in urban public schools, under the provisions of a temporary alternate route teaching license provided by the new york state department of education. participants in the two-year, thirty-six credit master’s in urban education program were screened and selected by school district personnel and assigned to one of the participating public and private colleges and universities to pursue their course work while serving as full time teachers, starting with an initial intensive summer academic and practical preparation that including mentored classroom teaching equivalent to student teaching. the ntrp employed a cohort model in which the fellows took the same courses in the same sequence over six semesters, including summers, ending with the awarding of a master’s degree in urban education. unlike many such programs, the ntrp curriculum was developed specifically for its students and centered on what it referred to as the six essentials of effective practice. these requisite goals for teachers were measured through corresponding indicators that reflected the program’s student learning outcomes and were aligned with local, state and national standards relevant to teacher education. the six essentials of effective practice were: commitment to learning, deliberate practice, accountability for student learning, teaching the whole student, improvisation, and educational leadership each new cohort of fellows began the program by participating in a summer institute coordinated between the city school district and ntrp. the summer institute aimed to help fellows examine and understand the socioculture contexts of communities they would serve, and to lay the foundation for effective instructional planning for students with varied learning needs, developing a classroom environment conducive for learning, and developing an awareness of the multiple resources available to assist in the teaching and learning process. the summer institute was a true collaboration, with ntrp providing the academic course work, and the school district providing advisory sessions and appropriate summer school classroom placements. during the fall semester, and for the next two years, the fellows continued their ntrp coursework in tandem with their classroom teaching and support from college and school district mentors, supervisors, and advisors. because of the specific nature of the relationship between the ntrp and the new york city public schools, all of the course work was carefully aligned with both new york state and new york city learning standards. a unique feature of ntrp was the use of the learning community model, applied not only to the cohort of participants, but to the instructors as well. ntrp adopted the learning community model of collaboration among the fulltime faculty and the experienced teachers who served as adjunct faculty. in practice, this meant that fulltime faculty members regularly visited the classrooms of the adjuncts who taught many of the sections of the courses, and observed, participated, or co-taught the lessons. adjunct faculty were also 172 global education review 3(4) required to attend pre-semester workshops and several planning meetings during the year. such collaboration among full-time faculty and experienced adjunct facilitators enabled fellows to pedagogically transverse the bridge between theory and practice that is essential to novice inservice educator development. finally, the ntrp program provided field supervisors who worked in tandem with the school district’s mentors to continue ongoing classroom observations and support for the entire two years of the program. to insure the link between academic theory and actual practice, all of the college-based field supervisors took part in 12 hours of initial training and 12 hours of ongoing training, along with an additional 8 hours facilitated by the school district. throughout, both the ntrp and the school district monitored the effectiveness of the fellows and of the program itself through extensive observations and surveys. model 3: clinically rich mathematics teacher preparation program the secondary mathematics education program in the department of secondary education at the mercy college school of education developed and operated the graduate level clinically rich mathematics teacher preparation program, starting in 2011 and running for five years through 2015. it was supported with a $2.4 million grant through the new york state department of education as part of the u. s. race to the top education initiative. the clinically rich mathematics teacher preparation program, coordinated by mercy college associate professor of mathematics education dr. william farber, developed a corps of 50 highly qualified mathematics teachers to work in high needs schools in a nearby school district, located outside of new york city but still within and reflective of the greater urban metropolitan area. the target student population was typical of the region, including those from low-income home environments, representative of racial and language diversity, and inclusive of students identified as having disabilities. the program was built upon a needs assessment that drew on a variety of formal assessment points (national, state, and local test data) and through a planning phase that included representatives from the college and the collaborating school district. as implemented, this was a 14-month, 45credit graduate program that, for the participants, extended over two summers and one academic year, culminating in the awarding of a master’s of science in secondary school mathematics education degree and eligibility for a new york state teaching certificate (contingent on meeting other state-mandated requirements). most germane to the focus of this article, the program integrated college course work with intensive clinical experience in typical classrooms in regular public schools. the program used parts of the existing core secondary education teacher preparation curriculum, along with a set of new courses focused on mathematics and mathematics education content. to assure the connection between theory and practice, candidates met in a weekly colloquium led by dr. william farber, the project’s academic coordinator and associate professor of mathematics education, to discuss problems of practice; to shore up the implementation of their individual objectives (based on their specific school and classroom placements); and to allow the candidates to provide evidence of practice and reflection through the use of video recordings of their teaching, a research paper about current practices in mathematics education, and the development of an inquiry project. candidates were also required to maintain and submit a portfolio documenting their activities. visiting experts, mentor teachers and clinical faculty participated in the weekly colloquia to provide examples and instruction in the application of immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning 173 data analysis in the mathematics classroom, to demonstrate current classroom technology for mathematics instruction, and to share applications of differentiated strategies in mathematics teaching. outside of the colloquia, additional key features included the deployment of a support team of experienced teachers in the collaborating school district, college-based clinical supervisors (all of whom were retired mathematics supervisors from school districts in the region), and a cohort model that allowed for the creation of learning communities among the participants. in sum, the program combined pedagogy and academic content with on-the-job training to ensure a nexus of theory and practice within a highly supportive environment in both the academic and practical realms. teacher candidates worked in a cohort under the close supervision of experienced teachers in the collaborating school district, adjunct faculty clinical supervisors from mercy college who provided up to 22 onsite visits during the academic year, a designated mercy college faculty advisor, and other selected college faculty. as an additional fillip, training was provided to the designated school-based mentors, and mathematics teachers and supervisors within the participating schools were invited to participate in all of the trainings and workshops so as to ensure consistency of effort and implementation across the schools and classrooms. in the end, three cohorts of candidates graduated from the program, and, to date, 45 of those candidates are presently regularly assigned secondary mathematics teachers in public schools. key components of success across the programs we have provided as exemplars, there are three factors that were essential components of their success, and a great deal of research suggests that these are, indeed, important elements to successful experiential learning programs in the field of teacher preparation. the first is the use of the cohort model (branyon, 2008; dinsmore & wenger, 2006; lei, short, smallwood, & wrightporter, 2011; seed, 2008), in which candidates enter the program and take courses together from start to end. cohorts promote collegial support among the participants and serve as a cohesive element, while providing an impetus toward persistence of effort through program completion. the second component is the use of mentoring (bowden, 2014; david, sinclair, & gschwend, 2015; kahraman & kuzu, 2016; owen, 2015; savage, cannon, & sutters, 2015; tillema & van der westhuizen, 2013), especially mentoring that is ongoing, encouraging, collaborative, and thorough. the third is the use of learning communities (botha, 2012; fresko & nasser-abu, 2015; kent & simpson, 2009; meyer (2002); rausch & crawford (2012), whether these follow the ntrp model of coordination between full time faculty and experienced teachers who serve as adjuncts, or are used to promote active engagement of the teacher candidates in their own learning through collaborative efforts. problems with sustainability and alternative model there is ample evidence to show that the models we have described, and others like them, have been high successful in developing high quality beginning teachers through immersive learning opportunities that combine academic preparation and field-based experiences. unfortunately, few such programs have been shown to be sustainable in the long run. typically, these programs and their ilk are designed to meet the immediate needs of critical teacher shortages; when those shortages no longer exist, the necessary support tends to evaporate. cohort groups, learning communities, and mentoring are all financially challenging in the long run. in addition, there is 174 global education review 3(4) a great deal of effort involved in creating and sustaining working relationships between college or university-based teacher preparation programs and school districts with shifting priorities and needs. changes in leadership and the relative willingness of state education officials to sanction alternative programs are also factors that impact the sustainability of such models. what we ask, then, is this: is there a way to incorporate some of these key elements (cohorts, mentoring, learning communities) into a traditional teacher preparation program? what we would argue for is more of a long-term commitment to programs along the lines of these models. that would require the collective will of the institutions, the school districts, the legislators, and the taxpayers – not an easy set of stakeholders for finding common ground. we do note, however, that there is a growing trend afoot in which the courts are ordering the states to live up to their responsibilities by overhauling their inadequate educational systems, as recent cases in connecticut (harris, 2016) and elsewhere demonstrate. any such overhaul would (or, at least, ought to) necessitate a reconsideration of how teachers are prepared. several states, including missouri, where co-author jordan jay teaches, offer specialized programs to assist beginning teachers through partnerships between teacher preparation programs and school districts. these programs require new teachers to return to the higher education institutions for additional workshops and mentoring when they have had actual teaching experience and are more prepared to connect theory and practice. it would require very little expenditure of time or money to establish such requirements throughout the country. these new teachers, who share many common concerns and challenges, would become a de facto cohort and learning community. beyond that, they would be in a position to mentor pre-service teacher candidates themselves, provided they are trained to do so as part of the in-service coaching they receive as new teachers themselves. this is what we offer as our final model, one that is selfsustaining, and one that captures the essential elements of cohorts, learning communities, and mentoring. references botha, e. m. 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(2015). induction seminars as professional learning communities for beginning teachers. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 43(1), 36-48. harris, e. (2016, september 7). judge, citing inequality, orders connecticut to overhaul its school system. retrieved from: https://nytimes.com kahraman, m., & kuzu, a. (2016). e-mentoring for professional development of pre-service teachers: a case study. turkish online journal of distance education), 17(3), 76-89. lei, s., gorelick, d., short, k., smallwood, l., & wrightporter, k. (2011). academic cohorts: benefits and drawbacks of being a member of a community of learners. education, 131(3), 497-504. kent, a. m., & simpson, j. l. (2009). preservice teacher institute: developing a model learning community for student teachers. college student journal, 43(2), 695-704. meyer, t. (2002). novice teacher learning communities: an alternative to one-on-one mentoring. american secondary education, 31(1), 27. owen, h. d. (2015). making the most of mobility: virtual mentoring and education practitioner professional https://nytimes.com/ immersing teacher candidates in experiential learning 175 development. research in learning technology, 231-14. rausch, d. w., & crawford, e. k. (2012). cohorts, communities of inquiry, and course delivery methods: utc best practices in learning—the hybrid learning community model. journal of continuing higher education, 60(3), 175-180. savage, s. l., cannon, d., & sutters, j. p. (2015). the yellow brick road to licensure: mentoring student teachers through the practicum experience. art education, 68(4), 22-27. seed, a. h. (2008). cohort building through experiential learning. journal of experiential education, 31(2), 209-224. temple university (1968). the intern teaching program for college graduates. retrieved from eric database. (ed036478) http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed036478.pdf tillema, h. h., & van der westhuizen, g. j. (2013). mentoring conversations in the professional preparation of teachers. south african journal of higher education, 27(5), 1305-1323. about the authors(s) jordan jay, phd, is professor of education at lincoln university, jefferson city, missouri, usa. howard miller, edd, is professor of education at mercy college, dobbs ferry, new york, usa. the coauthors are frequent collaborators on issues involving the improvement of teacher education programs. http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed036478.pdf (re)connecting pedagogies 38 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: howe, sally. (2022). (re)connecting pedagogies: examining the links between froebelian and common worlds approaches to environmental learning. global education review, 9 (2), 38-50, (re)connecting pedagogies: examining the links between froebelian and common worlds approaches to environmental learning sally howe school of education, university of roehampton (uk) abstract the purpose of this theoretical paper is to examine the links between the philosophical underpinnings of froebelian pedagogy (where pedagogy is understood as the basis on which early childhood practices are developed) and the pedagogy of a recent movement in environmental education for young children; the common worlds research collective. current concerns about environmental damage highlight the importance of finding ways of engaging children with environmental concerns without placing them in untenable positions as “planet savers.” the global reach of the pedagogies under discussion make them valuable platforms for promoting ecological education in the early years. using levels of pedagogical discourse put forward by le grange (2018) – ultimate premises, platform-principles and practice – the paper examines the relationship between froebelian thinking and the common worlds approach. through a discussion of the common philosophical underpinnings, views of children’s agency and relationship with the natural world, i will argue that the common worlds’ critique of pedagogy based on froebel’s thinking and call for a new pedagogy for young children is based on an incomplete reading of froebel’s nature pedagogy, and does not pay sufficient attention to the common grounds on which these pedagogical approaches are basednamely a view of the world as being infinitely connected and the role of education as a means of supporting children to understand their connections with the world as it is, and how they can engage with it ethically. keywords froebel, common worlds, interconnectedness, environmental education introduction the purpose of this theoretical paper is to examine the contribution of two early childhood approaches to environmental education, one – a froebelian approach, which draws heavily on the work of friedrich froebel, considered one of the pioneers of institutional early childhood education and the othera common worlds approach, which is today pioneering approaches to early learning that embrace emergent philosophical and scientific perspectives regarding human and non-human or more-thanhuman relationships (commonworlds.net, 2021). in attempting to redefine the parameters of environmental education in the early years, affrica taylor, a leading academic in the common worlds research collective (cwrc), explicitly critiques froebel’s views of nature and nature education (taylor, 2013). however, a more thorough examination provides several areas of congruence between froebelian thinking and the cwrc. these congruences have not been fully explored and, given the current climate emergency and the importance of developing approaches to environmental education in the (re)connecting pedagogies 39 early years, there is a need to develop an understanding of these links further. this paper addresses this need by making the deep-seated connections between froebelian thinking and the thinking underpinning the cwrc more explicit. the global reach and cultural sensitivity evidenced by both these pedagogical approaches (hutchins 2019, bruce et al., 2019), make them valuable international platforms to promote discussions on environmental learning that will be of interest to researchers and practitioners alike. i am not planning to argue that either froebel’s ideas are better/worse or the same as the common worlds’ approach, or vice versa, but simply to examine where related understandings and goals can enhance and support the uniqueness and importance of early childhood pedagogy in developing awareness of environmental issues and find common grounds for discussion. making common ground is important. because of the increasing incorporation of early childhood education and care (ecec) into a mainstream schooling system dominated by neo-liberal discourses of what counts as education, recognition of ecec as a unique phase of education, and therefore the potential contribution that it can make to environmental education is seen to be under threat (johanson, 2018). in his context, froebel’s pedagogy provided an alternative discourse to the pragmatic view of education as a means of training youth to serve the needs of the ruling classes (brehony, 2010), a discourse that has been adapted and updated over time (nawrotski, 2019). similarly, the common worlds pedagogical approach provides an equally powerful counter discourse to current utilitarian views of education as serving the needs of capitalism (taylor, 2013). building connections between these two early childhood pedagogical perspectives that focus on the interconnectedness of the natural world matters because, as i will argue, it will provide a more powerful political counter to the current dominant neo-liberal focus on individualism in education and beyond. moreover, given the ecological crisis that faces the world, it is imperative that our pedagogies find ways of engaging children with environmental issues not in relation to grand narratives about “stewardship” (taylor, 2017), but in a way that connects children to their environments. i will argue that both froebelian and common worlds pedagogies aim to recognize the importance of developing approaches to ecological pedagogy with understandings of relationships and relatedness at their center (froebel, 1897, taylor, 2019). in doing so, i draw on an understanding of pedagogy that beigi (2021:12) describes as “habits of mind”ways of thinking about, being and doing in ecec. this view of pedagogy goes beyond simply considering the links between theory and practice and is exemplified in the levels of pedagogical discourse put forward by le grange (2018) in his discussion of the deep ecology movement and education. in his article he refers to 4 levels of pedagogical discourse: ultimate premises(i), platform-principles movement (ii), policies (iii) and practical actions (iv). in this paper i will argue that there is common ground for discussion in relation to all of these levels of discourse between froebelian and common worlds pedagogies, but in particular with regard to ultimate premises and practical actions notwithstanding some important points of difference that are worthy of further discussion and exploration. outdoor educationlearning in, about and through engaging in the natural world is one of the fundamental aspects of a froebelian approach to learning in the early years (liebschner, 1992, read, 2012, tovey, 2007, 40 global education review 9 (2) 2017, wasmuth, 2020). froebel’s writing on outdoor learning was wide rangingfocusing on connectedness, movement, risk, challenge and responsibility for the environment (froebel, 1885, 1897). currently, there is an increased emphasis in literature written from a froebelian perspective on the principle of engaging with nature in order to highlight the importance of connecting children to the natural world so that they can potentially understand the value of conservation and stewardship (froebel trust, 2021, bruce, 2021). this emphasis is driven by observable phenomena, backed up by scientific data, which indicate the world is in the process of rapid ecological change that is directly attributable to human action and is causing irreversible environmental damage. the recognition that we live in an increasingly damaged world that will provide challenges for children as they face uncertain futures (taylor, 2017) is a main focus of the common worlds research collective (cwrc), a multidisciplinary network of researchers that have adopted a posthuman, feminist and decolonizing perspective, part of whose area of interest is to consider ways of being with young children that situates pedagogy in “common world” contexts. these contexts focus upon “the ways in which our past, present and future lives are entangled with those of other beings, nonliving entities, technologies, elements, discourse, landforms” (commonworlds.net 2021). according to taylor (2019) this has led to an emerging scholarship that explores ways of working with children, which amount to new pedagogies that align with feminist calls to reassess the scale of human activity and aim for refiguring the way in which humans understand their relationships with the world. in her specific critique taylor (2013) argues that froebel’s pedagogy is based on a world view of externalized nature separated from human society. however, i would argue that this is based on an incomplete reading of froebel’s views on pedagogy and its underlying premises. notwithstanding the difficulties involved in exploring the ways in which multiple philosophies influence, move and change over time and space, there are striking similarities between froebel’s philosophical position and those adopted by the cwrc that seem to derive in some way from engagement with ideas put forward in western philosophy by baruch spinoza (1632-77) i will begin by providing a brief overview of spinoza’s philosophy, and the explore how this is connected to both froebel and the cwrc, examining points of similarity and difference. subsequent sections focus on how these premises inform principles and practice associated with both approaches to early environmental education. ultimate premiseseverything is connected the world, according to spinoza, is infinitely connected as it is all part of a singular substance (which could be understood as either god or nature, or both) nature/god here is understood as the whole of creationfrom cells/protons/quarks to universes and is selfreferential in that it does not need anything else to give it existence (le grange, 2018). substancenature/godis a singularity that, according to spinozan philosophy, has various modesfor example, rocks, trees, planets, animals. according to le grange, spinoza argued modes that exists in multiple form must of necessity be called forth by an external force which binds them together. in other words, far from being discrete objects, all things are made from the same matter, although expressed in different ways and are therefore interconnected. as i will argue in this section, this philosophy of the interconnectedness of all things can be seen the pedagogical understandings of both froebel (re)connecting pedagogies 41 (bruce, 2021, wasmuth, 2020, werth, 2019, joyce, 2012, liebschner, 1992, read ,2012,) and that of the cwrc (taylor, blaise & guigni, 2013, taylor, 2013, taylor & pacini-ketchabaw, 2019: 2), although these do diverge in important ways that need to be considered. froebel’s pedagogy is deeply rooted in an episto-ontology that is derived both from his experiences and from engagement with contemporary philosophies such as panentheism that explored the relationship between nature/god (bruce 2021, wasmuth, 2020, joyce, 2012, liebschner, 1992, lilley, 1967). the first pages of his seminal work, the education of man (froebel, 1885), are devoted to his explanation of the interconnectedness of all living things that bears a marked similarity to spinoza’s explanation, and in particular the unifying mechanism being god. unlike spinoza, however, he does not equate nature and god. for froebel, god’s spirit ran through nature in the same way that an artist’s handiwork is evident in his or her creations. nevertheless, froebel’s writings about nature (always capitalized) demonstrates a perspective that is akin to what latour (2004) describes as a common world or cosmos and includes everythingrocks, stars, plants, animals, including humans, which in itself is very close to spinoza. these are all natureor part of the whole of nature as froebel describes it (fletcher & welton, 1912:106). the notion of part/whole describes the way in which entities are both whole in themselves, but also part of greater wholes, which leads to his principles of unity/community that i will discuss in the next section. far from placing humanity above or apart from nature, froebel was explicit in explaining humanity as part of the natural world; as part of the universe but then also as a whole in its own right stating that: self and object do not exist in a separate strata of being, but form a component part of a total reality, and the pattern of this reality is derived from god for he infuses both subject and object, the world of the mind and the world of nature. everything flows from and returns to a common ground. (lilley, 1967: 9) froebel’s belief in this connection between all things as the “most important law of the universe” (froebel 1899:203) is fundamental to his pedagogy, as the purpose of education was to bring humans to a full understanding of their connection with all other life. he did, however, place humans in a unique relationship with nature/god that has some resonance with the posthuman critiques of human exceptionalism that i will discuss below (braidotti, 2013, taylor, 2013, le grange, 2018). for froebel, humans were the perfect result of a long history of evolution. however, this was not darwinian evolution; ideas about evolution in froebel’s day predated darwinian theories of natural selection and were, according to lilley (1967), more of a philosophical than a scientific concept and are more congruent with a biblical understanding of creation. in man consciousness was raised to a point where humans were in a unique position to fully discover and articulate their connection with the cosmos. for froebel, this was the purpose of education: to treat man as a thinking, understanding being, who is becoming conscious of himself, to incite him to the pure, unviolated representation of the inner law, of the god-like, with consciousness, and self-determination; and to produce ways and means for this 42 global education review 9 (2) representation is to educate man (froebel 1885:20) froebel’s focus on god as the allencompassing unity of creation and his use of the scientific theories of the early 19th century can be problematic for those who engage with a froebelian approach to young children’s learning from a secular 21st century perspective (bruce 2021). however, as tovey (2017) argues, a froebelian approach is both forward and backward looking. forward in the sense that it does not hold on to outdated theories and practices, and backward in aiming to use the knowledge and understanding from the past to deepen our understandings of the present and future. this notion of transition and transformation is explicit in froebel’s articulation of pedagogy as he was clear that the purpose of education was to situate children in their contexts and is central to the revisionist approach to froebelian pedagogy and practice (nawrotski, 2019). connectedness does not just pertain to the here and nowthe education of humankind is about understanding the connection between past, present and future as much as it is about understanding connections in the everyday world. for froebel, the journey towards understanding the relationships in nature/god/humanity was a tripartate journey which involved the individual, their human context as well as the natural context (fletcher & welton, 1912). it is in this vein that i consider the common worlds’ perspective in order to examine the links between their understandings of naturecultures and the role of pedagogy and how these perspectives might connect with froebelian thinking. much as froebel’s pedagogy emerged from engagement with philosophy, science and religion (bruce, 2021, wasmuth, 2020, taylor, 2013). taylor and her colleagues in the common worlds collective draw on multidisciplinary readings, including latour (philosophy), barad (quantum physics/philosophy), braidotti (philosophy), and haraway (biology) to articulate ideas about the interconnectedness of things and of things that have agency (taylor, 2013). taylor, along with other common worlds researchers, takes a posthuman perspective that explicitly positions “children and their learning within inextricably entangled life worlds” (2017: 1448). in other words it is not possible to separate children from their contextshence naturecultures rather than nature as a singularity (latour, 2004). posthumanism explicitly rejects human exceptionalism and places humans and nonhuman others as equal (as on a nonhierarchical basis) – thus the notion of “common worlding” or of living in a more-than-human world (taylor, 2013:80). alongside this shift in perspectives on nature, is the way in which technological and scientific advances have blurred the boundary between the natural and the cultural (braidotti 2013). this thinking rejects dualism, especially the opposition of nature/culture and stresses coexistence instead. as taylor puts it “humans are not the only ones making or assembling the common worlds doing the common worlding” (2013: p80). posthuman positioning of people in a non-hierarchical relationship with the cosmos could be seen as counter to froebel’s view of humans as being uniquely placed to discover or understand their connectedness. however, it is debatable whether froebel’s view equates to human exceptionalism in the way that taylor (2013) describes. although many of froebel’s ideas can be associated with the idealism of the early german romantic movement, matter and matter-realism was an integral part of his understanding (froebel, 1915). he described nature as an organized wholeliving things, things and forces co-existing in relation with each (re)connecting pedagogies 43 other. however, as i have argued, he also characterized human consciousness as being uniquely able to make those connections explicit (hence the purpose of education). froebel’s view resonates with le grange’s point that “human conatus provides for a different form of education than that of the more-than-human other” (2018: 884) for le grange it is this “conatus” or way of thinking and knowing that makes humans ethical agents, and is an argument that sits very easily within a froebelian approach. the notion of ethical agency is at the forefront of the cwrc’s ideas about education. despite the focus on posthuman perspectives, which aim for non-hierarchical intrarelationships between humans and more-thanhuman others, the cwrc is concerned with the education of humans; the importance of understanding and recognizing child-wildlife relations in order to “pursue the question of how we might live well with others that are so radically different from ourselves” (taylor and paciniketchabaw 2019:4). it could therefore be argued that the differences between a froebelian approach and that of the common worlds collective is not necessarily as radical as taylor has suggested. in this section i have attempted to show that there are some key areas of relation between what le grange (2018) calls the ultimate premises of froebel’s and common worlds pedagogieswith some key differences that situate froebel in his time and place and the common worlds collective in theirs. as i have argued, however, a froebelian approach is not one that is static, but needs to consider social, physical, cultural and political contexts, which i have identified as key to a common worlds’ pedagogical perspective. a core difference between froebel’s world and our own, however, is the impact of human action on the earth, which is arguably moving the world into a new geological era that has been unofficially coined anthropocene (national geographic 2021). given these concerns, it would appear that there is an urgent need to ensure that environmental education is a key aspect of children’s learning, without positioning children as “saviors” of the natural world. i would argue that the principles that emanate from the ultimate premise of universal connectedness that underpins the work of both froebelians and a common worlds research collective is an excellent starting point for developing environmentally conscious pedagogies. in the next section, i will look more closely at the pedagogical principles that underpin work with children and discuss what this means for children’s relationships within natural contexts. platform principles movementchildren’s relationships in nature there are three key pedagogical principles that are worth discussing in relation to froebelian and common worlds approaches to environmental education: connectedness, agency and reflection. these principles are what drive practical approaches to work with children outdoors. however, it is in this area that much of froebel’s thinking is contested in taylor’s critique of froebelian pedagogy. in this section, i will first discuss the critique, providing evidence that runs counter to taylor’s position, and then look more closely at the ways in which the principles of both approaches align. doing so will allow for a reasoned theoretical approach to developing environmental pedagogy in the early years that has both historical roots, and contemporary resonance. a large part of the impetus for the common worlds perspective on pedagogy comes from their perceived need to refigure the way in which children and humans are understood in relation to nature. in explaining 44 global education review 9 (2) this need, taylor (2013) positions froebel, alongside rousseau, montessori, louv, the forest school movement and others in a romantic tradition that is understood as eulogizing and sanitizing child/nature relations. taylor (2017) argues that this heritage has led to the view of children as having a natural affinity with nature and that there is a tendency for idealized notions of the “child in nature” to exaggerate the effects of the inherent relationship between children and nature; creating a perspective that free play in natural surroundings will be sufficient to support children’s affinity with nature and their support for environmental stewardship. there is no doubt that froebel’s pedagogy has to be placed in relation to the romantic movement of his time, and that, through his engagement with pestalozzi’s school at yverdon, rousseau and pestalozzi’s work had a marked impact on his educational ideas (leibschner, 1992, weston, 2002). for example, froebel discussed the importance of allowing children to show their natures and for the adults who worked with them to take account of those natures when working with them. so far, this seems to follow the pedagogical approaches of rousseau and pestalozzi. however, as i have argued earlier, froebel’s thinking engages with many different influences and to align him with one specific way of thinking is problematic (bruce 2021, wasmuth, 2020). moreover, as bruce (2021: 84) has argued “much of the original thinking that froebel did in [in relation to nature pedagogy] has been lost.” in these next paragraphs, i will refer directly to froebel’s writings about nature and children’s relationship with nature to demonstrate that this notion of “nature’s child” is somewhat simplistic. the extent to which froebel understood children’s sense of purpose and ownership in/with nature (i will use the capitalization to be consistent with froebel’s own writing) as automatic is questionable. he certainly had a perspective on nature that could be seen as idealized; children, being part of nature, are naturally good (bruce, 2021). a careful reading of froebel’s views on children in nature, however, provide some much-needed nuance to the notion of perfect innocent children in nature. his analogy does not presume that children will automatically be good if they are left to their own devicesfroebel’s close observations of children and his own childhood experiences told him otherwise. his argument could be summed up more as given time and space children will reveal what is good for them, not that they are good by default of being in nature. from froebel’s perspective, humans were capable of making mistakes in thinking that may cause a separation and thus limit the ways in which people can come to know their connectivity (froebel, 1897). according to froebel, children’s engagement with nature is important, but froebel did not argue that children should be let loose in nature and all would be well. quite the contraryhe argued: it is true that the children run about in fields and forests, but they do not truly live in and with nature. they neither feel its beauty nor realize (sic) its influence on the human spirit… little boys often ill-treat insects and animals without any cruel design, in a desire to get insight into their lives and to understand their spirits. if guidance and explanation be lacking, or if this impulse be misunderstood, it may in time harden into ruthless cruelty (froebel 1912: 101). what was needed was thoughtful adults who could support children to come to a realization of their connectedness. it is thus problematic to suggest that froebel believed in (re)connecting pedagogies 45 the concept of nature’s child that may be seen to derive from rousseau and the romantic movement as described by taylor (2013) (and the extent to which rousseau’s emile was so let loose is also highly debatable). furthermore, contemporary froebelian thinking does not consider a view of nature as being utopic or arcadian, but instead acknowledges children’s potential fascination with the rawness as well as the beauty of natural processes (tovey, 2017:67). an ecological perspectivea concern about environmental damage and for cultural sensitivity is apparent in those who write from a froebelian point of view today (bruce, 2021, read, 2019). drawing on similar theoretical perspectives, such as those put forward by barad, for example, tina bruce (2021) emphasizes the need to prioritize the key principle of engagement with nature given the current scale of ecological damage. however, in order to maintain the currency of froebelian tradition, it is important to deepen this perspective somewhat and respect the value that current environmental education initiatives such as the common worlds perspectives on naturecultures has for contemporary froebelian thinking. this is particularly relevant given discussions relating to our current situation; understandings of the impact of colonial violence on indigenous peoples and places and the growing recognition of the uncertainties that can be attributed to climate change and other environmental issues (taylor, 2017). talking and thinking about human/more-than-human relationships is a key principle of the common worlds approach. taylor and paciniketchabaw’s, focus on child/wildlife relationships is a pertinent example. they argue that “this knowledge [of our mortal entanglement with other species] carries a considerable ethical responsibility, not only to find ways to secure the ecological futures of our own children, but the future generations of all other species” (2019, p5). le grange’s perspective is also useful here. he argues that “it is through understanding how nature works that we find out how we are implicated in it, which can move us from a human condition of passivity and reactivity to a better active condition” (2018:883). as i have argued, these contemporary views sit very well with a froebelian perspective. both a froebelian and a common worlds perspective endorse the notion of children’s agency in their relations with nature. what differs is the way in which relationality is expressed, and this seems to be centered on ways in which interand intra-relationality are understood and on the differing emphasis on the autopoietic (self-organizing) and sympoetic (making with) subject. donna haraway, (2016: 50) whose work in the field of biology from a posthuman perspective is explicitly referenced in the common worlds pedagogical work argues that “[n]othing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or self-organizing (sic).” what this means for our understanding of children within the natural (and non-natural) world, is that the world acts on children as much as children act on the world. whilst this may seem to be somewhat axiomatic, given the previous discussion, it does have implications for the emphasis that can be put on children’s autonomous and individual learning and confronts ideas about child-centered learning. in other words, it is not necessarily a question of the independent learner acting on the world, or the world acting on the individual, but the way in which modes (to use the spinozan phrase) act on each other – intra-action rather than interaction (haraway, 2016). whilst a froebelian approach is largely understood as child-centered and focuses on children’s agency within prescribed parameters, 46 global education review 9 (2) there is some evidence of similar thinking in froebel’s own writingshe talks of children living in a world of things which they wish to influence and which want to influence them (froebel, 1885). intended as a guide for parents to introduce babies and very young children to his philosophies about education, froebel’s mother songs (1898) in particular, focus on how children interrelate with their worlds. the subjects of the songs are situated in everyday experiences and moral/ethical concerns. in tick! tack!, for example, the clock is shown to have agency in regulating the children’s lives; the “fishes in the brook” is a moral tale about the importance of respecting the different habitats and ways of children and aquatic life. similarly in a version made for english nursery schools, “the birds and the children” offers a homily on why birds should not be caught and caged (berry & michaelis, 1883). the insight that these songs provide, makes a clear connection between froebel’s thinking and contemporary insights related to posthuman theory. connectedness, agency and reflection can therefore be understood as important principles for both froebelian and common worlds environmental educational approaches. what is also significant, however, is what we do in practice with children and how that is articulated and analyzed. in the next section i will examine a specific aspect of practice walking with childrenthat relates particularly to environmental education and explore the perspectives of researchers and practitioners. environmental education practice walking with children for the purpose of this section i will examine some examples of practice research that are taken from literature that explores froebelian and common worlds’ perspectives on environmental education. froebelian outdoor learning is based on two distinct spaces: the kindergarten garden and the local spaces beyond the garden. helen tovey has explicated froebelian approaches to the nursery (kindergarten) gardenexploring the symbolism and opportunities that a froebelian approach to the garden brings (tovey, 2007,2017), and i do not propose to go into this in detail here, as there is insufficient space to do this justice. instead, i will focus on a few case studies that are based on walking with children in the local area that highlight both the similarities and differences between froebelian and common worlds thinking, and which provide the grounds to extend the conversation between these distinct pedagogies. to reiterate, the purpose of this discussion is not to make value judgements in favor of one or another, but to explore the ways in which practice is articulated and understood from these perspectives and to consider how this discussion might further contribute towards an understanding of environmental education in the early years. two examples are taken from the routledge international handbook of froebel and early childhood practice (bruce et al., 2019), and three examples from feminist research for 21st century childhoods (hodgins,2019), written by members of the common worlds research collective. the practice of walking with children in natural environments, following and developing children’s interests in natural phenomena is common to both froebelian and common worlds’ pedagogies. it is through walking with children that practitioners and researchers are able to pay attention to the ways in which children engage in their environment, how their connection with the more-than-human world are developed. for both of these pedagogical approaches, engagement is automatic, there is no such thing as not engaging with the (re)connecting pedagogies 47 environment. what children and adults who work with them pay attention to, however, is a product of the conversations that they have with children and their own specific interests. the value of risk and challenge from a froebelian perspective, for example, is highlighted in lyn mcnair’s (2019) discussion of one child’s engagement with hills and trees in a forest school setting, alongside the role of the outdoors for providing unique opportunities for adventure, challenge, mastery and embodied experiences in familiar but changing landscapes. in a previous article, mcnair (2012), discusses the connections children make between berries, birds and purple poo, highlighting the potential of outdoor learning for engaging with other beings. similarly, but subtly different, tonya rooney (2019) discusses the way in which connecting with sticks allows children to take risks in exploring ant behaviors from a common worlds perspective. on the one hand, the analysis focuses specifically on the child in nature, and the opportunities for risk taking that this affords, whereas on the other, the analysis focuses on child/more-than-human assemblages. in other words, how children and things/animals/plants combine to support risk taking. agency, from a common worlds’ perspective, is thus shared between human and more-than-human intra-actions rather than agency being a human prerogative based on the affordances of the environment. connection is a further common theme in analyses of walking with children. this is not just about making connection to the natural environment, but also to geo/historical issues such as ma̅ori values of respect for the environment (meade, with fugle & mccaul, 2019), and the impact of colonization in canada (nelson, 2019) and australia (taylor, 2019). similar to ideas about risk and adventure, analysis from the two perspectives is somewhat different, with froebelian approaches focusing on children’s connection with (animals, plants, values), whereas the common worlds’ perspective is more openly political and ecological. however, as i have discussed in the previous section, this approach to analysis and understanding of the world is not incompatible with a froebelian perspective (see bruce, 2021, for example). the practice of walking with children; sharing ideas and paying joint attention to aspects of the world that are of interest, be they rabbits, or birds with purple poo or sticky sticks, provides a valuable platform to engage with children on environmental issues, and to consider our ethical relationships with others, both human and more-than-human. this is not about expecting children to become environmental activists, or “world saviors,” but to enable children to develop an understanding of how they are connected with the world. ultimately, this is the key to froebelian approach to pedagogy and has strong resonance with a common worlds approach as well. the congruences between froebelian and common worlds research collective with regard to premise, principle and practice are clearly recognizable. both engage with the world as it is, and do not shy away from “difficult” subjects such as death or destruction. adults and children develop their ideas together in ways that encourage both to deepen their understanding of their connection with the more-than-human world. however, pedagogy is not just about what we do, but why we do it and how we think about it (beigi 2021). in particular how we think about it. although werth (2019) argues that the spiritual and philosophical aspects of froebelian pedagogy have tended to be side-lined in favor of scientific theories and evidence, there is evidence of a resurgence of interest in froebel’s philosophical roots (bruce 48 global education review 9 (2) ,2021, wasmuth, 2020, best, 2016) that sit very well with a common worlds perspective, albeit with much room for discussion. a froebelian perspective emphasizes responsibility and stewardship (bruce 2021). this is not to do with grandiose ideas of planet saving, but with understanding that our actions and inactions have consequences. not just for us, but for others (including non-human others). the common worlds research collective, on the other hand, freely acknowledges the damage that has been caused by human action, but the role of education and environmental education is not necessarily to take sole responsibility for repairing that damage (because that would raise humans above the more-than human other), but to find ways within our own small compass to live with others and finding ways of negotiating that damage in order to for all (human and more-than-human) to flourish (haraway, 2016), and to allow that the more-than-human world has a role in world recuperation. froebelian practice on the other hand is unashamedly anthropocentric in the sense that it concerns itself with the education of humankind. this is not to deny more than human agency, but the focus is on how we as humans come to understand ourselves in context. to this end, discussions with posthuman perspectives, such as those of the common worlds 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(2002) the froebel educational institute: the origins and history of the college. london: university of surrey roehampton. https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/anthropocene/ https://www.nationalgeographic.org/encyclopedia/anthropocene/ determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 5 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation srikantaiah, deepa, eichhorn, melinda sue & khan, masarrat, emma (2018). determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics: a case study from india. global education review, 5 (3), 5-28. determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics: a case study from india deepa srikantaiah university research co., llc (urc) melinda (mindy) eichhorn gordon college masarrat khan maharashtra dyslexia association, india abstract according to the united nations human development report (2016), poor, marginalized, and vulnerable groups still face substantial barriers to access post-secondary education and employment. these marginalized and vulnerable groups include women, girls, indigenous peoples, ethnic minorities, people with disabilities, migrants and refugees, the lgbti community, and those discriminated because of their socio-economic status (un human development report (2016). increasingly, proficiency in mathematics is required for careers and for solving daily problems in life (starkey & kline, 2008; ramaa, 2015). basic numerical, mathematical, and scientific skills are an important mechanism to further education and to enable individuals to improve their job market potential. the risk of underachievement in mathematics around the world is greatest for students from low-income backgrounds, as well as linguistic and ethnic minorities (ramaa, 2015; national research council, 1989). in india, these factors are compounded by lack of early exposure to math, poor teacher quality, and large class sizes (aser, 2014). although some research has explored difficulties in arithmetic for economically disadvantaged elementary students in india (see ramaa, 2015), the challenges that marginalized adolescents encounter in completing secondary mathematics courses has been largely unexamined. in this qualitative exploratory study, conducted from october 2015 to february 2016, we sought to understand the characteristics of adolescents from socio-economically marginalized communities in mumbai and bangalore, india, and their determination and perseverance to overcome challenges in mathematics and complete their secondary education. in particular, the study followed students who had dropped out of mainstream school and enrolled in india’s national institute of open schooling program to complete their high school education and attempt the 10th standard board exams. results from data collected in the academic year showed that there were multiple factors, including lack of learning foundational skills at the primary school level and the type of intervention provided to complete high school, which influenced the students’ achievement in mathematics. findings from the study inform policy and programmatic decisions for students enrolled in india’s national institute of open schooling program. 6 global education review 5(3) keywords mathematics education, india, resilience, marginalized, adolescents introduction the students who attend the samudra program in mumbai wake up to the sounds in their slum. their fathers are sliding open the doors to their shoe shops adjacent to their homes, their mothers are busy in the kitchen preparing food for the day, and outside rickshaw drivers and other merchants make their way to work. the four young boys and two young girls who participated in our study have different tasks as they start their day. the boys generally run morning errands for their parents, while the girls help out with household work or help their fathers open up the business. the students live in the same neighborhood and are family friends outside of school. the students who attend the parisandra program, in contrast, all attend a boarding school in the outskirts of bangalore. the three boys and three girls in our study come from single parent homes or are orphans. they start their day at 6 am with a morning run, followed by morning tasks including making breakfast, cleaning their school grounds, or maintaining their school garden. for these children their school is their home and part of their education is to take care of the school they live in. parisandra’s students have an opportunity to go home to their family or guardians over the weekend. the students of the samudra and parisandra programs participated in openschooling programs established by the indian government to promote high school graduation of students who have dropped out of mainstream education. the students of both schools not only came from marginalized backgrounds, but also have had inconsistent schooling. having faced many challenges in their lives, from parental death to failing multiple grades or dropping out of school, the students in our study have persevered with resilient behavior and have come to these programs to complete high school. although some research has explored difficulties in arithmetic for economically disadvantaged elementary students in india (see ramaa, 2015), the challenges that marginalized adolescents encounter in completing secondary mathematics courses has been largely unexamined. in fact, adolescents that have dropped out of school have recently been referred to as “opportunity youth,” since they have extraordinary untapped potential. they can be extremely hopeful, despite their challenges (kamenetz, 2015). in our study, we investigated adolescents from marginalized communities in mumbai and bangalore, india, and their perseverance determination to overcome challenges in mathematics and to complete their secondary education. this exploratory, qualitative study, conducted from october 2015 to february 2016, set out to understand how two programs implementing the national institute of open schooling program approach teaching mathematics to adolescents from marginalized communities in mumbai and bangalore, india. the study focused on students who had dropped out of mainstream school and enrolled in india’s national institute of open schooling program in order to complete their high school ________________________________ corresponding author deepa srikantaiah, university research co., llc, 5404 wisconsin ave., suite 800, chevy chase, md 20815 email: dsrikantaiah@gmail.com determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 7 education and attempt the 10th standard (grade) board exams. our study focused on the following research questions: • what are the common characteristics of students enrolled in nios programs, including youth environmental backgrounds? • what challenges have the students encountered in learning mathematics in the past? • how are the national institute of open schooling programs adjusting mathematical instruction to meet the needs of their students? this paper is a descriptive study that explored the results and implications of two programs for students enrolled in india’s national institute of open schooling program. the purpose of this paper is to provide constructive feedback to the programs who are implementing national institute of open schooling programs for marginalized students. although the programs vary in their approaches and address different student needs, this research provides a good basis for further identifying any critical gaps in mathematics education for students who are enrolled in the national institute of open schooling programs. literature review math achievement in india recent international assessments paint a bleak picture of mathematics achievement in india, especially for minority students. in 2009, two indian states, tamil nadu and himachal pradesh, participated in the program for international student assessment (pisa) which is administered to high school students. in mathematics, india ranked 73 out of 74, trailing far behind the other countries which participated such as south korea, singapore, and the united states (anirudh sethi report, 2011; indian express, 2012). india chose not to participate in the 2012 and 2015 pisa cycles and will next participate in 2021 (chopra, 2017). the situation is equally bad at the early grades. the annual status education report (aser) in india showed that approximately 73% of grade 3 students in rural india could not recognize numbers past 9, and could not complete any type of mathematical operations required at their level (aser, 2011). if these students are fortunate enough to stay and advance in school, they acquire basic math skills in 6th standard instead of class 2 or 3 (global partnership for education, 2012). this leaves them years behind their peers in mathematics and science, which can limit their postsecondary education and career options, and take a toll on their self-esteem and motivation. in india, research has primarily focused on challenges facing upper middle class secondary school students in learning mathematics due to learning disabilities (karande, sholapurwala, & kulkarni, 2011; karande, mahajan, & kulkarni, 2009). challenges that marginalized adolescents encounter in completing secondary mathematics courses has been largely unexamined. since there is minimal research on the teaching and learning of mathematics for marginalized youth in india, there is a critical gap in the availability of education indicators for academic development and progression. teacher content knowledge and pedagogical knowledge the level of teachers’ mathematics content knowledge also impacts students’ academic achievement (hawk, coble, & swanson, 1985). however, the training teachers receive in india does not include adequate focus on student understanding in mathematics. teachers often teach by rote memorization, or they recite mathematics operations and/or equations in unison with their class, which does not address comprehension of the subject. research suggests that teachers do this to keep pace with over-ambitious curricula which are inappropriate for students lacking 8 global education review 5(3) preschool or kindergarten education. this method exacerbates the learning gap, leaving many students behind, such as in early grade mathematics (pritchett & beatty, 2012). in addition, poor teacher quality is combined with extremely large class-size and scarcity of in-class learning materials. marginalized communities there are many factors that can work to undermine students’ ability to perform well in mathematics, and many of these are exacerbated when students come from marginalized backgrounds. for example, early exposure, particularly at home, to numbers and simple mathematics informally can set the foundation for success. in organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd) countries, it is common for students to have access to at least one year of early childhood education (oecd, 2017). whereas in countries like india, compulsory education generally begins in 1st standard and students come to school with little or no preparation (srikantaiah & ralaingita, 2014). when students do not have early exposure, it can impact their progress in school and social mobility (brantlinger, 1993; dimaggio & mohr, 1985; lareau, 1989; mcdonough, 1997; srikantaiah 2008; useem, 1992). chronic and toxic stress other factors that can impact students’ ability to learn mathematics include poverty, malnutrition, physical and emotional violence in families, drug and alcohol addiction, and migration, which can all lead to chronic or toxic stress. according to the center on the developing child (2017) at harvard university, a child experiences toxic stress when they have prolonged activation of stress in non-positive environments without adult support. a less severe level of chronic stress can occur when a student endures these environments buffered by supportive relationships (center on the developing child, 2017). students may be exposed to experiences that are so stressful that they are in a state of constant anxiety and unable to cope (zacarian, alvarez-ortiz, & haynes, 2017). when a student’s stress response system stays on high alert, the architecture of the child’s developing brain and organ systems are affected and can cause a host of health, learning, and behavioral problems into adulthood (center on the developing child, 2017). in order to enhance the academic and socio-emotional development of students living with trauma, violence, and chronic or toxic stress, students can benefit from external support and a strengths-based approach1. students need consistent, routine, predictable, nurturing, and stimulating interactions to ease their anxiety and stress in order to focus on learning math (zacarian, alvarez-ortiz, & haynes, 2017). self-determination while the united nations defines “selfdetermination” as the right of a person to determine his own destiny (in regards to economic, cultural, and social development), self-determination for adolescents has been defined as a combination of skills, or components, which enable a student to act “purposefully and planfully” (wehmeyer, 2004, p. 352; wehmeyer, 1994; trainor, 2008). these skills include: making choices, decision making, problem solving, goal setting and attainment, self-observation, self-evaluation, selfreinforcement, self-instruction, self-advocacy and leadership, internal locus of control, positive attributions of efficacy and outcome expectancy, self-awareness, and self-knowledge (wehmeyer et al., 1997; konrad et al., 2007; thoma & wehmeyer, 2005). there is a strong connection between students’ self-determination skills, academic performance, and post-high school outcomes (martin, portley, & graham, 2010). students need self-determination skills in order to be aware of their strengths and weaknesses, to be aware of resources available to them, and to take advantage of and use the resources (cawthon & cole, 2010; chiba & low, 2007; martin, portley, determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 9 & graham, 2010; webb et al., 2008). students need self-determination skills to recognize the potential barriers that exist and to develop strategies to overcome the obstacles (getzel, 2008). students need self-determination skills to advocate for their academic needs, including skills to ask for clarification and help (kosine, 2007). for students facing poor self-esteem due to years of failure and frustration in mathematics and, possibly, lack of adult support, self-determination skills need to be explicitly taught and practiced within a program or curriculum. national institute of open schooling in response to the critical gaps in education in india, the government of india set up the national open school in november 1989. in july 2002, the mhrd amended the nomenclature of the organization from the national open school (nos) to the national institute of open schooling (nios) with the mission of providing “relevant, continuing and holistic education up to pre-degree level through open and distance learning system; contributing to the universalization of school education; and catering to the educational needs of the prioritized target groups for equity and social justice” (national institute of open schooling, 2012, para. 3). with about 2.71 million students enrolled, nios is credited to be the largest open school in the world with significant popularity in the commonwealth countries and in certain other developing and developed countries (national open schooling program, 2012). nios is an autonomous and parallel exam board. however, unlike mainstream boards, students are given the option of selecting the subjects they would like to study and are allowed to take the exams at their own pace. many students do not choose the mathematics or science exams and opt for subjects related to commerce or arts. the nios program started off as a selfinitiated or self-study program where interested students could go to the nearest accredited nios institute and register for a fee. to enroll in nios, students need to go to school until 8th grade and be at least 14 years old. students are provided with subject materials which they can study at their own pace at home or at a designated nios study center. they do not have to be a part of a program or institution to complete high school. initiatives like the samudra and parisandra programs, which are aligned with nios accredited centers, were developed to help students who were completing 10th grade through nios by providing a more structured and supported approach. both of these programs use the nios curriculum. nios has partnered with 853 agencies providing facilities at their study centers. the nios provides resource support such as the adaptation of nios model curricula and study materials to the voluntary agencies. students can go through nios to complete their secondary (10th) or senior secondary (12th) grade levels. nios gives students an option of which subjects to take for their secondary and senior secondary levels – students can take a minimum of 5 out of 28 subjects and at least one language. students are not required to take exams for all subjects through nios. they can also take the exam in any of the scheduled languages of india. students now have the option of taking a vocational education program of nios at the senior secondary stage which includes subjects like computer and information technology. there is no standardization in how institutes or organizations implement the nios program. at samudra, the program focus was on preparing students to enter post-secondary education or pre-university programs without any knowledge gaps. at parisandra, the focus was more on developing socio-emotional skills for the students and building their selfdetermination skills so that they can be independent and self-sustaining after finishing high school (observation, october 3, 2015). another major difference is that students at samudra are expected to take all subject exams, so that they could enter post-secondary education (anonymous program coordinator, 10 global education review 5(3) personal communication, september 25, 2015). parisandra’s students were not expected to take all subject exams, but rather were allowed to opt out of mathematics or science because those subjects are harder. parisandra’s students were encouraged by their teachers to take exams which they knew they could pass without difficulty. the exam subjects included subjects such as data entry, english, social studies. during her interview, kalpana talked about her aspirations to go into the medical field but said, “you need maths for that, aunty” (personal communication, october 3, 2015). kalpana said that mathematics subject exam was too difficult, and she needed to pass the 10th standard. therefore, like the other students at parisandra, she did not take the mathematics subject exam. the variability of how the national institute of open schooling program is implemented creates diversity among the students who graduate from it and their continued education or career paths. unfortunately, there are many misconceptions about students attending nios. in preliminary conversations with potential research partners, educators and program coordinators to whom we spoke, there were different views about the national institute of open schooling program. a director of an orphanage in bangalore mentioned that she didn’t like the open schooling program for the children in her orphanage because it lacked rigor and post-10th opportunities for students (anonymous program coordinator, personal communication, september 25, 2015). however, the national institute of open schooling program provides opportunities to students who would otherwise struggle in a mainstream 10th standard classroom. many of the youth mentioned that the smaller class sizes, pace of the curriculum, and option to not take all subject exams made it more manageable for them to pass the 10th grade (personal communication, october 3, 2015). in actuality, nios is a selfpaced way to attain a secondary school certificate. any junior college or post-secondary institution must accept students that have passed their 10th standard exams through nios. in the 2014 – 2015 academic year, a total of 155,469 male students and a total of 65,622 female students were enrolled in the secondary program. in that year, a total of 100,022 male students and a total of 32,713 female students took the mathematics exams. the fee for being enrolled in a secondary course was 1485 rupees for males and 1210 rupees for females. the fee schedule is subsidized for students from lower castes and those with disabilities (national institute of open schooling, 2012). methodology setting and participants this exploratory qualitative study examined the learning difficulties marginalized youth face in mathematics in two urban mega-cities in india, mumbai and bangalore. mumbai is the most populated city in india and is located in the state of maharashtra. the approximate population of the mumbai metropolitan region (comprising mumbai, navi mumbai, thane, vasai-virar, bhiwandi and panvel) is nearly 21 million, according to the 2011 census (press information bureau, government of india, 2011). it is also one of the most diverse cities in india, attracting indians from other urban and rural areas for employment. the state language of maharashtra is marathi, but due to the diversity of the population, many other languages are spoken. in our exploratory study, samudra staff explained to us that the majority of youth in their programs are originally not from mumbai but have migrated to the city for work. students struggle financially, lack family support, and have inconsistent schooling (samudra content developer and master trainer, personal communication, september 10, 2015). and, often they are working while going to school to help their family make ends meet. bangalore, in the state of karnataka, is the information technology (it) center of india. the state language of karnataka is kannada. because of the it boom over the last two decades, the city population doubled from 4.3 million in 2001 to 8.7 million in 2011 according to the census. the it companies attract people from all over india determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 11 to work in bangalore, including youth. most of the youth migrate to bangalore for work, often times leaving behind their family, and interrupting schooling. youth in bangalore often work while going to school. however, the students in our sample did not work because they attended boarding school. when the students were not in classes, they participated in activities for the school -helping keep the school clean, maintaining the school garden, or mentoring younger students. in both mumbai and bangalore, we explored two research sites: samudra open school for education in mumbai and parisandra in bangalore. both sites are registered with the national institute for open schooling (nios), delhi under the open basic education (obe) program. at samudra, there were approximately 60 students enrolled in the hindi-language section, while approximately 10 students were enrolled in the marathi-language section. many of the students and their families migrated from rajasthan and speak marwadi at home, in addition to speaking hindi. most of the families work with leather and make sandals for a living, living under the poverty line. the students live in mumbai slums, and samudra recruited the students from the slum neighborhoods. to be eligible for the samudra program, students must have passed 4th standard and be older than 14 years old (no age limit). most students entered the program because they migrated to mumbai before they finished their education in rajasthan; or because, if they passed the 9th standard, their parents needed them to drop out of school to work and support the family. some enrolled because they failed math and english in 9th standard, while others failed science. students from samudra were recruited by the program coordinator. the program coordinator visited the slums where the students lived and explained how the program at samudra would give them a second chance at school. the program coordinator told the students that samudra was a friendly environment with small class sizes, and they would not be judged for dropping out of school or failing. the program coordinator emphasized that it would be a safe environment for the students (personal communication, august 2, 2015). when students enter the program at samudra, they are pre-tested in english, language (hindi or marathi), and mathematics. they take a two-month foundational course covering all the basic mathematics they may have missed in their intermittent schooling. the foundational course covers concepts ranging from fractions, to algebra, and geometry. once they review the basics, the students move onto tenth standard material. students may choose to take general math or regular math (which has more algebra and geometry). the majority of students at samudra take general math. later, when students pass the 10th standard exam through the nios program, they can choose one of the three streams in junior college (11th and 12th standard): arts, science, or commerce. if a student takes regular math, s/he can choose to major in science in junior college. if s/he takes general math, options are limited, and s/he cannot major in science. most of the samudra students major in commerce, and the rest major in arts. no students are currently majoring in science (samudra content developer and master trainer, personal communication, august 2, 2015). at parisandra, students come from single family homes or they are orphans. they often have had interrupted schooling or have repeated multiple standards. many of the students are trauma survivors, or have witnessed difficult family situations, and are at-risk for toxic stress. one student said in her interview that she saw her alcoholic father hang himself. students are admitted to parisandra at the request of a family member or guardian, and the maximum age of a student at parisandra is 17. they are not given an entrance exam but have to come from a low socio-economic background, from a single parent home, or bean orphan. they must also agree to live on the parisandra campus. the class sizes are very small at parisandra. only 1215 students are enrolled in each standard and 12 global education review 5(3) class size is no more than five students. in addition, the classes are held in an alternative style: classes are held outside in shaded areas, students are encouraged to sit on the floor, and the lesson delivery is very interactive, giving students more of an exploratory learning experience. parisandra students found out about their program by word of mouth through family, friends, or their community (parisandra program coordinator, personal communication, october 3, 2015). the curriculum at parisandra is not as rigid at samudra. students attend classes in english, mathematics, social sciences, and computers. in mathematics, students are introduced to concepts from the 10th grade curriculum without the pressure of learning the material for an exam or for their 10th board exams. parisandra’s main focus is on socioemotional skills (observation, november 17, 2015). students also participate in art and craft activities, learn how to garden and cook, and engage in sports activities such as football and karate. one of the students interviewed from parisandra wanted to be a classical bharatanatyam dancer, and in an interview, he called himself an “eagle” which means transgender (surya, personal communication, november 17, 2015). to support this student, parisandra brought a dance teacher to the campus. they also allowed this student to speak with a medical professional about sex change operations to enable the student, in case he went this route, to make the right medical choices. parisandra also allowed students to take the 10th standard board exams at their own leisure and in the subjects they preferred. the goal for parisandra’s graduates is to transition to either work or further schooling. most of parisandra’s students enter employment after graduating, some of them continuing to volunteer at the school. some students continue to secondary education in vocational education or commerce. none of the students interviewed in our study mentioned studying sciences, mathematics, or engineering for their future education. sampling we employed a snowball, or chain, sampling strategy to recruit participants. this approach identified cases from people that knew people in a certain environment (creswell, 2007). samudra was chosen as a research site because the lead author had collaborated with the organization on another project and because they also had an open school program. parisandra was recommended as a research site by the lead author’s fulbright host institution. it resembled samudra’s national open schooling program demographically; however, the geographic and program approaches were different. this made researching the two programs interesting and diverse. in order to determine which open school students would be interviewed at each site, we asked the program staff at each location to recommend 6 students that met the following criteria: • adolescents (between the ages of 14 and 18) that have either: o dropped out (gap of more than one year), but have returned through a specialized or alternative program, or o stayed in school, but have had persistently poor school performance (failing or scored 35% in math) • students that have past stressors that may have impacted their learning (center on the developing child, 2017). • students that would feel comfortable expressing themselves in english, hindi, or kannada during the interviews. with the assistance of program staff, 4 males and 2 females from samudra and 3 males and 3 females from parisandra were asked to participate. see table 1 for a brief description of the participants. determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 13 table 1 description of participants mumbai: samudra pseudonym sex age place of birth (state) abhishek male 16 uttar pradesh randhir male 15 uttar pradesh siddharth male 17 rajasthan karan male 14 haryana karisma female 15 rajasthan alia female 15 rajasthan bangalore: parisandra pseudonym sex age place of birth (state) surya male 16 tamil nadu puneet male 16 andhra pradesh ramesh male 16 andhra pradesh kalpana female 16 andhra pradesh vijya female 16 andhra pradesh ramaya female 16 andhra pradesh the lead author was in india collecting data while on a fulbright fellowship and was able to conduct the interviews required for this exploratory study since she is fluent in hindi and kannada. institutional review board (irb) approval was granted by gordon college for this study. procedures data was collected over a period of 5 months from october 2015 to february 2016. we 14 global education review 5(3) gathered qualitative data in the form of collective case studies, or personalized stories on similar individuals, on these 12 students to understand the difficulties they have in learning mathematics (brantlinger et al., 2005). in order to better understand the students’ experiences, the majority of the interview questions were open-ended, focused on the students’ experience with secondary math and their goals for the future. interviews with samudra’s students were all conducted in hindi, and interviews with the students from parisandra were all conducted in english with some kannada. we were also interested in the students’ math skills and proficiency at various points in the academic year. in the first three meetings we learned about the students’ family and educational backgrounds; the focus of the fourth meeting was on students’ ability to solve problems that were included in a 10th standard mathematics textbook in order to learn more about students’ mathematical thinking. the lead author administered two word problems to each student and asked them to perform a “think aloud” in which they verbalized their thinking and strategies (ketterlin-geller, chard & fien, 2008; gersten et al., 2009). students were given unlimited time to complete all math tasks. each problem was on a separate sheet so that the students had plenty of room to show their work. students were shown the problems one at a time and took about 5 minutes to solve each problem. after they attempted to solve the problem, or solved it, the lead author asked them how they arrived at their answer. after obtaining written consent and verbal assent from each of the participants, the on-site researcher conducted interviews. an outline of the data collection is listed in table 2 below. all testing and interview protocols can be found in the appendix at the end of this article. at samudra, the program coordinator was present at the interviews to help with any translation difficulties from hindi to english. the lead author also administered a pre/post-test to the students to understand the baseline knowledge that students had at the beginning of the interviews, and to determine the amount of mathematical reasoning and knowledge gained over the five-month period. the same test was administered for both the pre and post-test. the pre-test and post-test questions were informed by assessments administered by samudra because their program’s pre-test was measured by basic computational and application tasks in a concise manner. the two word problems used in the interviews were adapted from general math textbooks (maharashtra state board of secondary and higher secondary education, 2015; 2015b). the pre-test covered mathematics concepts of: • number recognition -students were asked to recognize numbers and write them in numerical format. • place value -students were asked to recognize the place value of a digit in a number with ten thousands. • word problems -students were asked to solve word problems such as “if ram has 38 pigeons and 19 of them flew away, how many does he have now?” • fractions -students were asked to solve addition and subtraction problems with fractions. • conversions -students were asked to convert between measurements such as volumes, weights, and other units. determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 15 table 2 data collection date data collected october 2015 introductions and pre-test (see appendix) november 2015 interview: students’ past personal and educational backgrounds december 2015 interview: understanding school curriculum – student perceptions of school and community january 21, 2016 solved two word problems while performing a think aloud (see appendix) february 2016 wrap up and post-test (see appendix) in order to analyze the data, we adapted the theoretical framework typically associated with vertical case studies: bray & thomas’ (1995) framework for multi-level analysis (as cited in phillips & schweisfurth, 2008, p. 2223). the 12 case studies were analyzed in the context of the program sites and examined through structures created through social norms, educational practices, and national policies. these structures shape local processes at the sites, as well as possible impact on individual student’s lives (vavrus & bartlett, 2006).after reading through all of the interview transcriptions, we coded responses that emerged from the data, keeping our research questions in mind (creswell, 2007; merriam, 2009). from these categories, or themes, we looked for patterns and meaning across the cases and data (creswell, 2007). figure 1 framework for multi-level analysis (adapted from bray & thomas, 1995; phillips & schweisfurth, 2008) 16 global education review 5(3) results/discussion we sought to understand the challenges the youth faced in learning mathematics in two programs. as discussed earlier, our research was exploratory and, therefore, our results are represented in a descriptive manner illustrating the common life experiences the youth faced across the two programs. the differences were mainly due to programmatic approaches to teaching mathematics, but were also due to their family life, suggesting that students are influenced by the social and educational structures that are present in their lives. we also explored the challenges students faced in studying or solving mathematics problems. the results indicated that there were four areas which impacted how students in our sample performed in mathematics: • toxic stress from living in poverty and family situations; • previous educational experiences, particularly in mathematics; • programmatic approaches to help the students pass the 10th standard board exams; and • solution pathways. toxic stress due to eligibility requirements of the programs, students of samudra and parisandra all came from poor and marginalized backgrounds. their families migrated to urban areas for better financial opportunities. samudra’s youth moved from their home towns to mumbai, some with their families, whereas parisandra’s students were in and around bangalore because either their parents migrated before they were born, or their grandparents migrated to the city. students from samudra migrated mainly from rural areas of rajasthan for work in mumbai. four of the students migrated with their nuclear families, and two were split up. randhir, for example, said he came to mumbai with his uncle and father. his mother and sister joined a year or so later (personal communication, september 25, 2015). in parisandra’s program, students came from tamil nadu and andhra pradesh. although most of parisandra’s students were born and brought up in and around the city of bangalore, their parents or grandparents moved to this area for work in construction, factories, or household cleaning. unlike samudra’s students, five of whom came from families with both parents, parisandra’s students came from single parent homes or were orphans. therefore, they were eligible to live at parisandra’s boarding school. in our sample, all of parisandra’s students came from single parent homes. students of parisandra spoke about trauma in their families more than the students from samudra did. kalpana recounted how her father hanged himself because he was alcoholic (personal communication, october 3, 2015). puneet said his mother worked a lot and was usually not at home. when she was at home, she scolded him a lot, causing him to join neighborhood gangs which eventually got him trouble with the law (shoplifting) (personal communication, october 3, 2015). surya confided to the lead author that he was gay, and talked about the challenges he faced in coming out to his single parent father and extended family. surya felt that his mom would have understood him better (personal communication, november 17, 2015). other students interviewed from parisandra mentioned it was difficult growing up in a single parent home or without parents and how this led them to attend parisandra. they mentioned it as an event in their lives with no external display of strong emotion, such as crying, observed. nor did they want to talk about it in detail except that they missed this family member in their lives. none of the students at samudra mentioned trauma in their interviews, but instead mentioned the financial struggles they determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 17 were experiencing. all of them supported their families in their family business or with other after school work. one of them, siddharth, came from a single parent home. his father was absent in his life, so to support his mother and younger brother he worked after school (personal communication, november 17, 2015). all of the students from samudra also mentioned the lack of role models in their lives and how coming to samudra made up for it because their teachers were great role models. the chronic stress experienced by the students in both programs led them to the national institute of open schooling programs at samudra and parisandra. abhishek remembered being at home after failing the 9th standard and thought that he did not have any other options left. however, samudra’s program coordinator came to his neighborhood and asked him to join samudra and whether he would like this second chance at school. abhishek said it was the best decision he made (personal communication, october 3, 2015). previous educational experiences all of the students interviewed struggled with mainstream schooling. for samudra’s students, all of them mentioned that migrating to a new city, sometimes in the middle of a school year, was particularly hard. the low cost private schools they attended had extremely large class sizes and teachers would often rush through material in order to cover everything in the curriculum. ramesh said that mathematics was “too difficult” (ramesh, personal communication, november 17, 2015) in the lowcost private high school he attended before samudra. “there were over 100 students in my class,” he recalled and that made it challenging for him as he felt his needs were not being met in that educational environment (ramesh, personal communication, october 3, 2015). he dropped out and fell two years behind his peers as a result. alia also recounted a similar story, describing how she felt demotivated in the lowcost private school she attended. she felt “stupid” because she could not keep up or learn properly. she felt the opposite in samudra’s program and said the teachers were very helpful (alia, personal communication, october 3, 2015). parisandra’s students also had difficulty attending the low-cost private schools in bangalore, sometimes encouraged by peer groups who influenced the students to not attend school and to engage in other unproductive activities. all of parisandra’s students had dropped out because they failed a standard or two and were discouraged. four of the students said they did not like their teachers. kalpana said, “it was hard to follow or learn maths from [her teacher]” (personal communication, october 3, 2015). puneet recalled that his bad school experiences were harder because of his peer group. he said his friends discouraged him from going to school and because of that he got in trouble with the law a few times (shoplifting charges) (personal communication, october 3, 2017). all of the students agreed that parisandra’s teachers were much “nicer” than other teachers they had had. due to the challenges the students from both samudra and parisandra faced in their mathematics education – from having to migrate to new areas, to large classrooms, to being unable to follow an ambitious mathematics curriculum – their foundational skills in mathematics were weak and that impacted their self-determination skills. in the example below, a student from parisandra solved the pre-test problem by adding or subtracting the numerators and denominators, showing no conceptual understanding of computation with fractions. in figure 1 below, the student (puneet) added straight across to come to the sum of 8/15 in problem iii. in problem iv, the student subtracted the numerators but added the denominators. unfortunately, none of the students from parisandra could solve this problem on the pre-test. 18 global education review 5(3) figure 2. parisandra student work(puneet, student work, october 3, 2015) additional data obtained from the pre-test showed that students at parisandra and samudra were strong in number recognition and place value. it was difficult to assess their knowledge of word problems, fractions, conversions, and geometry because these items were left blank by the majority of students on test. the concepts students struggled with were those taught in upper primary or early secondary, when they dropped out. samudra’s students, all of whom passed the 10th standard board exams, did better on their post-tests. we noticed improvements in solving word problems, conceptual understanding of fractions, and geometry. only one student still struggled with these concepts -sunil. he did manage to pass his 10th standard board exam; however, he opted to go into a vocational track after graduating high school – a training program to fix hardware on computers. in general, parisandra’s students found the post-test we administered difficult. only two students who completed the post-test, kalpana and ramesh, were accurate with a majority of their responses. the other students still struggled with the same concepts that were in the pre-test. unfortunately, data on whether the students from parisandra passed their 10th standard board exams, or what they are doing now was not made available to the lead author. programmatic differences despite guidelines set up by the national institute of open schooling program, it is important to note the flexibility for implementing the program. the policy outlines that students should be introduced to the content areas in order to pass the 10th standard board exams; however, students had a choice of what subjects they would like to study. in addition, students were not required to take all exams at once, but rather they could space them out. at parisandra, for example, students planned to take one exam paper per month. both samudra and parisandra had small class sizes from which the students benefited. samudra’s class size was around 10 – 12 students per class, and parisandra had only 6 – 7 students per class. in their interviews students from samudra said they preferred the smaller classes. youth from both programs also said that their teachers cared more than the teachers they previously had; this could also be the result of small class size, or better teacher-student interactions. samudra, however, modeled their program very closely to typical 10th standard classes. the program’s director said she wanted the students to easily transition back into postsecondary education or alternative programs. determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 19 therefore, students in samudra’s program took all the 10th standard board exams, which included mathematics and science. to address gaps their students faced in mathematics, for example, samudra’s pre-tests indicated that the students were weak in fractions and division. samudra spent the first three to four months of the school year re-teaching foundational concepts, such as building a strong number sense and mastering fractions and division. parisandra, on the other hand, focused their curriculum on socio-emotional skills. parisandra wanted their students to not only focus on the academic; but, through a selflearning and open classroom approach, they wanted their students to develop emotionally, socially and physically. they wanted their students to have self-determination. parisandra’s teachers would only allow students who were academically capable to take the 10th standard board exams through the nios program. students took the subjects they preferred and at their own pace. therefore, teaching students vocational skills like spoken english was important at parisandra. parisandra did teach mathematics; however, it was not rigorous and did not follow a specific curriculum. teachers followed online guides to teach mathematics and made sure they covered the major topics of the curriculum. one teacher said, “our goal is for them to pass their 10th standard board exams. some subjects are easier to pass than others” (teacher from parisandra, personal communication 2015). subjects which were easier to pass included computers (knowledge of microsoft word, excel, and data entry software). for example, all of the students interviewed opted out of taking mathematics and chose data entry. data entry, they were advised by their teachers, was easier to pass than mathematics. they also decided to space out their exams and not take them all at once. therefore, students from parisandra not only had a choice of which exams they wanted to take, but also when they would take them. although socio-emotional skills are important, particularly for students who have faced so many challenges early on in their lives, there is also a danger of focusing too much on these skills because doing so could interfere with their self-determination or their perseverance to pursue post-secondary education. students at samudra had more of a balance in that they were supported by program staff to come back to school, who understood the challenges they were facing, but at the same time encouraged the students to continue to post-secondary education. the teachers at parisandra, wanted the students to be able to live as productive citizens after they graduated and get jobs. they encouraged their students to pursue their aspirations (parisandra program coordinator, personal communication, october 3, 2105). for example, surya wanted to become a bharatanatyam dancer. parisandra organized dance lessons for him and adjusted his curriculum accordingly. solution pathways we also explored how the students approached problem solving. this was done in part to further understand the gaps they had in mathematics, but also to see their thought processes. after the first two meetings where we learned about the students’ family and educational backgrounds, we asked them to solve problems included in a 10th standard mathematics textbook. we gave the students four problems – two at one meeting and two at another meeting. they were then asked to explain how they arrived at their answer. striking differences existed between the way samudra’s and parisandra’s students approached the problems. as soon they saw the problem, all of samudra’s students wrote down what was given, what needed to be solved, and 20 global education review 5(3) any questions/ approaches they planned to use at the top of their papers. they used the rest of the paper to solve the problem. although only two students from samudra answered the problems correctly, all of them wrote down their logic on how they tried to solve the problem. when the students were asked about the process of solving the problem, they were all able to explain what was given to them, what needed to be found, and their logic for solving the problem. parisandra’s students had a different approach to solving the problems. two of parisandra’s students solved all the problems correctly; however, they didn’t write down anything on their papers. when asked how they solved the problems, ramesh told the lead author, “aunty, don’t ask me…this is the answer.” (ramesh, personal communication, january 21, 2015). kalpana also said, “i don’t know aunty.” (kalpana, personal communication, january 21, 2015). when asked to write down their problem-solving process, they struggled with this too. both ramesh and kalpana scribbled down a few numbers given in the problem and then put down their pencils slightly frustrated. “is this necessary?” is what ramesh kept asking in kannada. after 5 minutes of waiting for them to explain their answers verbally or in writing, we moved onto the next problem. below is an example of a student’s work from samudra where the student wrote out what was given in the problem, what needed to be solved, and how he solved the problem (in hindi). he wrote out what was provided in the problem -that the cost of 10 books is 150 rupees. he then wrote that he needs to figure out how many books he can get for 600 rupees. he showed his work on the right-hand side. he then came back to the center and solved the problem, writing: therefore, 600 rupees would give you 40 books. figure 3. student work from samudra (abhishek, student work, january 21, 2016) determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 21 all the students from samudra attempted the problems given to them; however, other than ramesh and kalpana, students from parisandra could not solve the problems, but also did not attempt them. surya said, “i don’t like math.” (surya, personal communication, january 21, 2015) and changed the topic to what he last learned in dance. in fact, all of parisandra’s students complained a little when the lead author told them she was giving them math problems. in the first three interviews with the students, the lead author spent the entire time talking to the students about their lives and educational experiences. they seemed to enjoy telling their stories. so, when the lead author came to their school the third and fourth time with math problems, they were not happy. puneet said, “i like talking to you aunty…can we just talk?” (puneet, personal communication, january 21, 2016). these types of responses can be reflective of the different family backgrounds students from samudra and parisandra come from. as mentioned earlier, students from parisandra came from broken homes or were orphans; therefore, they acted more attached to the lead author than the students from samudra. the students at samudra also enjoyed the lead author’s company by inviting her to their homes for tea and to watch movies with them. their community support system was stronger – they had both parents at home, and also extended family or friends nearby. when the lead author declined tea or a movie, they were not upset. in conversations with the students from both samudra and parisandra on their understanding of the problems presented to them, and also on their performance on the pre and post-test given to them, we noticed that they were able to recognize numbers fluently. although we were unable to make this connection with our data, previous research showed that students’ experience in their family businesses or outside work added to their informal math skills (sitabkhan, 2012). another interesting finding is that based on the interviews, parisandra students did not see how math could be relevant in their everyday lives, particularly in terms of career options. samudra’s students were better informed. this impacted the student aspirations in the field. none of parisandra’s students wanted to go into stem disciplines, saying it would be too difficult, whereas samudra’s students were aware of where they would use math in their careers. most of samudra’s students decided to go into commerce and understood how math was valuable in this field. abhishek, one of samudra’s highest performing students who performed average for his standard / grade level in mathematics, knew the different stem fields quite well. he said that after much consideration, he was going to study to become a pilot where he would use math and science. conclusion in this exploratory and descriptive study, students shared many personal experiences and factors that impacted their ability to complete their mathematics education, such as poverty, physical and emotional violence in families, alcohol addiction, and migration which can all lead to chronic or toxic stress. as a result, these students chose to complete their education by an alternative route, attending programs adhering to the national institute of open schooling curriculum. both the samudra and parisandra programs guided students through the nios curriculum, rather than a self-study approach; however, their approaches differed due to their different target populations. ultimately, in our sample, students at the samudra program fared better on their 10th standard exams. however, the two programs varied in their approach, with parisandra focusing more on the socioemotional well-being of their students. although students in our sample had different paths to their nios program, including various social and educational structures that 22 global education review 5(3) played a role in their math performance and choice of vocation, students in our study had prasakti (pronounced “prah-sahk-tee,” which in sanskrit means “perseverance”). all students in the study should be recognized for their perseverance to come back to school to pass their 10th standard and complete high school. implications as organizations consider setting up an alternative pathway for high school graduation or completing 10th standard exams, the following implications from this research will help inform programmatic decisions. 1. know your population. students may be at-risk for or experiencing toxic stress and need more external support and a strengthsbased approach. students, overall, benefit from consistent, routine, predictable, nurturing, and stimulating interactions. consider if your students are at-risk for toxic or chronic stress from living in poverty and family situations. 2. assess student prior knowledge. students may enter alternative programs with various degrees of previous educational experience in mathematics. administering an assessment at the beginning of the school year will help teachers know the baseline levels of their students and adjust their instruction based on students’ needs. 3. explore student solution pathways. during the baseline assessment, attention should be paid to the solution pathways that students use to arrive at their answer. students with conceptual understanding should be able to explain and justify their approaches. 4. one size does not fit all. there is no onesize-fits-all program. programmatic approaches to help the students pass the 10th standard board vary. knowledge of the student population and their background experience should inform course offerings. 5. encourage application of mathematics. providing opportunities to apply the mathematical concepts learned and connecting them to daily life would make math interesting and motivate students. for students who may struggle with self-esteem in mathematics and motivation, making mathematics meaningful and applicable to their lives will increase engagement with the subject. 6. there are consequences. be aware of the consequences of the program structure on student choices/tracks in stem. a. four out of six students from samudra entered commerce degrees and one decided to work. b. with commerce degrees, past graduates of samudra’s program have had difficulty finding jobs because of the saturated market in the field. by incorporating these best practices into alternative graduation programs, educational centers can support marginalized youth achieve in mathematics and move closer to their high school graduation goals and have better opportunities for secondary education, vocational education, or employment. limitations of the study and future research this study was conducted with a relatively small sample size (n = 12) and the population was made up of students from only two nios programs. the sample was taken from lowsocioeconomic class sections of mumbai and bangalore, and represents only a piece of the diversity in the country. more research can be done to determine how other nios programs are meeting the needs of their students. also, this was an exploratory 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(2009). human development report. retrieved from http://hdr.undp.org/en/reports/global/h dr2009/ useem, e. (1992). middle schools and math groups: parents’ involvement in children’s placement. sociology of education. 65, 263-279. vavrus, f. & bartlett, l. (2006). comparatively knowing: making a case for the vertical case study. current issues in comparative education, 8(2), 95 – 103. webb, k. w., patterson, k. b., syverud, s. m., & seabrooks-blackmore, j.j. (2008). evidenced based practices that promote transition to postsecondary education: listening to a decade of expert voices. exceptionality, 16, 192 – 206. wehmeyer, m. l. (2004). beyond selfdetermination: causal agency theory. journal of developmental and physical disabilities, 16(4), 337 – 359. wehmeyer, m.l. (1994). perceptions of selfdetermination and psychological empowerment of adolescents with mental retardation. education and training in 26 global education review 5(3) mental retardation and developmental disability, 29(1), 9 – 21. wehmeyer, m. l., sands, d. j., doll, b., & palmer, s. (1997). the development of self-determination and implications for educational interventions with students with disabilities. international journal of disability, development and education, 44(4), 305–328. zacarian, d. alvarez-ortiz, d., & haynes, j. (2017). teaching to strengths: supporting students living with trauma, violence, and chronic stress. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development (ascd). retrieved from http://www.ascd.org/publications/books/ 117035/chapters/the_urgent_need_for_ a_strengths-based_approach.aspx about the authors dr. deepa srikantaiah is a senior researcher with the usaid funded reading within reach project hosted by the university research co., llc (urc). broadly deepa’s research interests are in mathematics, science, and art education. she has extensive experience conducting qualitative research. deepa has worked at the world bank, the global partnership for education, with usaid contractors, nonprofits, universities, and was awarded a fulbright to india (2015-2016). deepa has experience working on global mathematics, reading, and stem education programs; leading professional development programs for teachers and working professionals; building partnerships; and in research and evaluation. in 2017, deepa founded artlight global, inc. a philanthropic organization providing project-based learning in stem and art. deepa’s regional focus is south asia and the us, but she has also worked in east asia and in eastern and southern africa. deepa has a ph.d. in international education policy from the university of maryland, college park. for more information about deepa visit: www.deepasrikantaiah.com dr. mindy eichhorn is an assistant professor of education at gordon college in wenham, ma. mindy currently teaches courses on special education assessment, the iep process, and inclusion, while supervising undergraduate teacher candidates. her research interests are centered on math learning disabilities and how number sense difficulties impact student learning throughout k-12 math education. she is also a mathematics specialist at the boston children’s hospital learning disabilities program. mindy spent more than six years in india as a special education consultant and inclusion specialist. prior to working in india, mindy was a special education teacher in the hartford (ct) public schools. masarrat khan, m.a., cdt, calt, is the chief executive officer of the maharashtra dyslexia association. she holds master’s degrees in clinical psychology and english literature from mumbai university, and is a certified dyslexia therapist and a certified academic language therapist. she is a member of the academic language therapy association, usa, and is registered with the rehabilitation council of india, new delhi, where she has served on the expert panel for learning disability. http://www.deepasrikantaiah.com/ determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics in india 27 appendix pre-test/post-test 1. write the following words in numbers: a. four thousand five hundred b. nine lakh two thousand three hundred and ten 2. write the place value of the underlined number: a. 4, 389 b. 25, 761 3. ram has 38 pigeons, 19 of them flew away, how many pigeons does ram have now? 4. if 1 house gets 2 liters of milk, how many houses will get 70 liters of milk? 5. if 1 pen costs rs. 7, how much do 35 pens cost? 6. solve the fractions below: a. 2/7 + 7/7 = b. 8/9 – 4/9 = c. 2/5 + 6/10 = d. 3/4 – 2/5 = 7. fill in the blanks: a. 1 cm = _____________ mm b. what is the equation to find a triangle? c. am x an = d. 500 grams = _____ kilos e. (9)2 = ______ f. 1 hour = ________ minutes list of interview questions background a. name b. date of birth c. education experience d. where they are from e. family background schooling experience a. can you tell me about your schooling? b. where did you go to primary school? 28 global education review 5(3) c. did your parents or elders read to you at home? d. what type of games did you play at home growing up? e. do you work? what do you do? f. what type of games do you play now? g. what’s your favorite subject in school? why? a. if math and science – why? b. if not, why not math and science? h. what do you learn in math class? (can also inquire about teachers here) i. what do you learn in science class? (can also inquire about teachers here) j. how would you use math or science in the real world? outside of school a. tell me about your daily schedule. b. what time do you go to bed at night, and what time do you wake up in the morning? c. tell me what you do for exercise. d. what makes you happy? e. what makes you smile? f. what makes you laugh? g. what makes you sad? h. if you have a problem in life, tell me how you go about solving it a. who do you approach for help? b. how do you manage stress? c. what do you do to feel calm during a stressful situation? i. what do your teachers do when you are stuck on a problem? how do your teachers help you with challenging problems? math problems the cost of 10 books is rs. 150. how many such books can be purchased for rs. 600? hema purchased a wrist watch and a wall clock for herself. the cost of the wrist watch is thrice the cost of the wall clock. total cost of the wrist watch and a wall clock is rs. 2,000. find the cost of a wrist watch and a wall clock. b-410-article_text-1737-2-4-20171003_7.10.18unblinded_ce_ds_me_response formatted pp1-11 b-410-article_text-1737-2-4-20171003_7.10.18unblinded_ce_ds_me_response formatted galley p 12-end reform of early literacy education in slovakia 145 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: zuzana petrová, zuzana, & zápotočná, oľga (2018). early literacy education in preschool curriculum reforms: the case of post-communist slovakia. global education review, 5 (2), 145-159. early literacy education in preschool curriculum reforms: the case of post-communist slovakia zuzana petrová trnava university, faculty of education, slovak republic oľga zápotočná slovak academy of sciences, slovak republic trnava university, faculty of education, slovak republic abstract this paper describes the development of preschool literacy education in slovakia, beginning with the communist era, when the country was isolated from broader international academic discourse and early literacy research, then the period after the fall of the totalitarian regime up to the present day. it describes how the traditional approach to teaching literacy, relying on an obsolete model of reading and writing instruction taught at primary school, has resulted in preschools having limited capacity to develop children’s literacy. it also explains attempts to reform the preschool literacy curriculum after the fall of the totalitarian regime. the first of these followed slovakia’s most comprehensive education reform act in 2008, but it underestimated the specific role of written language in children’s language and cognitive development and in subsequent academic performance. consequently, the reforms merely reproduced the traditional approach to literacy development within the new format of a decentralized curriculum. the consequences of the 2008 education reform act, and the pressure exerted by the results of international student assessments, resulted in a strong initiative from the academic field to reform the preschool curriculum on an evidentiary basis. the authors of this paper describe how they developed the thinking behind the new preschool literacy curriculum. the paper looks at how this became part of slovakia’s national preschool curriculum which was implemented in 2016, including the process in which the curriculum was reviewed by the institutions of the ministry of education and by professional organizations involved in early childhood education in slovakia. keywords early literacy development, literacy curriculum, preschool education, slovakia introduction student literacy has become a much-discussed quality indicator of national education systems since many countries now take part in international student assessment surveys, such as the program for international student assessment (pisa) and progress in international reading literacy study (pirls). literacy is another key issue in education policy and education reforms, affecting student ________________________________ corresponding author: zuzana petrová, trnava university, priemyselná 4, 918 43 trnava, slovakia. email: zuzana.petrova@truni.sk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 146 global education review 5(2) participation in society and the labor market (baird, et al., 2016; zápotočná, 2010). this is reflected in the european union (eu) education policies which recommend, based on the data collected by pisa, that the proportion of 15year-olds achieving low scores in reading should be reduced to below 15% by 2020 in all eu countries (education and training, 2013). in slovakia, the proportion of young people who lack basic reading skills required for further learning is growing, with the most recent data indicating it is 32.1% (oecd, 2016). slovakia, therefore, has good reason to re-evaluate its school-based literacy practices. literacy is being widely promoted at the education policy level, as is seen in the recommendations of the slovak ministry of education. position statements on the results of international reading literacy skill assessments such as pisa and pirls often indicate high levels of concern. the 2016/2017 academic year was the year of reading literacy, and the state school inspectorate focused on reading literacy practices in its annual assessments. nonetheless, reading literacy practices are poorly implemented in schools, and teachers repeatedly complain of insufficient support from the ministry of education and other school policy institutions. shortcomings in this area include the fact that the education ministry has yet to deliver systematic reform of the national curriculum for slovak language and literature. additionally, many teachers still think teaching reading literacy is the sole responsibility of slovak language and literature teachers. in this paper we explore preschool education and the complicated path to introducing and implementing the new preschool literacy curriculum. the literature shows that effective literacy practices start before the child enters primary school and even preschool, and that insufficient attention to literacy may result in low achievement levels (neuman, 1999; neuman & dickinson, 2003; vankleeck, 1990). however, the initiative to implement a literacy curriculum has not been well received. as we will explain in the first part of this paper, this may be because preschool teachers strongly believe that literacy falls purely within the remit of primary education, and that this belief is deeply embedded in the thinking and attitudes of teachers. in the second part of this paper we will describe the theoretical background of the new early literacy preschool curriculum and the responses to the curriculum from teachers and from the organizations and institutions representing teachers. finally, we will analyze the most frequent comments and recommendations reflecting the traditional approach to literacy that is based on reading and writing instruction. traditional approach to preschool “literacy” education the success of even the best-prepared school reform depends on how it is received by schools and teachers, and on whether schools and teachers are able to incorporate the main ideas of the reform into their everyday classroom practices (fullen, & quinn, 2015). therefore, we may gain a better understanding of the convoluted path of the adoption of the preschool literacy curriculum in slovakia if we explore teachers’ knowledge and beliefs as to what should the focal point of literacy teaching be and the circumstances under which these developed. historically, teachers’ knowledge and beliefs have been shaped by two factors. the first is the fact that pre-primary education is a non-compulsory system consisting of preschools (materská škola in slovak) that provide care for children aged 3 to 6. this system existed outside the national education system until it was incorporated into it in 2008 (pupala, petrová, & mbugua, 2013). in this system the preschools were not considered educational institutions, so preschool teachers needed only an upper secondary school teaching certificate. the main purpose of preschool education was to prepare children for primary school. as far as language skills were concerned, the main task was to ensure children were prepared for the reading reform of early literacy education in slovakia 147 and writing instruction that started in first grade. the second factor is that the first preschool curriculum was published in 1965 and, notwithstanding minor changes, remained in use for over 40 years (uváčková, 2011) until 2008 when a new curricular policy was introduced in slovakia as part of the new education act. over the years many preschool teachers developed strong beliefs about the role of the teacher in preparing children for reading and writing instruction and on the type of suitable activities. they also had firm thoughts as to which age language skills could be most effectively developed. the centralized education policies and curriculum also shaped teachers’ beliefs (brooks, 1991), and under the communist system there was little room for schools and teachers to be creative and reflective in their teaching practices. the preschool curriculum set out detailed tasks (corresponding to educational targets) for the three age groups (3-4 year olds, 4-5 year olds, and 5-6 year olds) in all content areas. these tasks were ready to be used in daily lesson planning. preschool teachers were not required to have any specific pedagogical knowledge to follow the preschool curriculum, so teaching guidelines were published for each preschool-education content area. preschool teachers generally used a whole-class approach, and their role was to ensure that children achieved tasks selected from the curriculum; there was no approved individualized teaching approach. to ensure that the preschool curriculum was strictly followed by teachers and schools, the state school inspectorate was charged with checking that preschool teaching corresponded to the tasks and content set out in the national curriculum. “literacy” curriculum and beliefs of teachers the last traditional preschool curriculum was issued in 1999 (preschool education program, hereinafter referred to as pep). three content areas dealt with preparing children for formal reading and writing instruction in primary school. the first content area, language arts, focused on four aspects of speech development: accuracy in pronunciation and in grammar, vocabulary, and communication skills. the second content area, the arts was a specific unit designed to refine fine motor skills, especially the fine motor skills required for handwriting. finally, the third content area, teaching literature, highlighted the esthetical function of literature and taught children to appreciate and learn through literature. overall, the conception of literacy practice resulted in a “hollow curriculum” (reed, webster, & beveridge, 1995), lacking in explicit literacy practices. children’s access to written culture was limited, both in terms of enjoyment and in experiencing the formal aspects of the printed word and the meaning and functions of writing. it was assumed that preschool children did not have the capacity, motivation, or need to understand reading and writing to any degree, and that they preferred play. it was considered rare for children to have any early literacy skills (guziová, 2010/2011). additionally, to maintain the differences between preschool and primaryschool responsibilities, it was claimed that preschool teachers lacked the necessary professional skills to teach reading and writing. in contrast, primary school teachers had developed these skills, and so were the only teachers who could teach reading and writing. preschool teachers and parents were advised not to interfere (šupšáková, 1991) because interventions by the unqualified could cause harm. because literacy education was not formally part of the preschool curriculum, children who were taught language arts, teaching literature and acquired experience of the oral and written culture, did so as an unintended consequence of the curriculum. as our research has shown (petrová, 2005), teachers did not explicitly include activities to develop children’s literacy and did not think about whether their teaching supported the development of literacy. the centralized preschool curriculum, with its focus on 148 global education review 5(2) developing skills required for reading and writing instruction in primary schools, shaped teacher’s information and beliefs about their role in early literacy education and on the most effective strategies for preparing children for primary school. in 2004, we conducted research to investigate knowledge and beliefs about preschool literacy education as a way of ascertaining which aspects of literacy education were considered central to preschool education, how consistent and influential this knowledge and these beliefs are, and how they tap into the professional identity of preschool teachers. the sample consisted of 60 preschool teachers who were asked to respond to stimulus words (free association) representing the key areas of literacy education. by analyzing these free associations, we were able to construct a semantic map of teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, including non-reflected implicit knowledge and beliefs. subsequently, six preschool teachers with differing amounts of teaching experience and different qualification levels (upper secondary school education certificate or graduate degree) were selected from the sample to take part in an in-depth interview about their teaching practices in “literacy” education (petrová, 2005; 2007). after analyzing the data, we were able to identify four core topics representing the teachers’ knowledge and beliefs on literacy education: 1. the preschool teachers described having official leeway to support speech development in reading and writing instruction. they referred specifically to the way speech development is set out in the preschool curriculum section on language arts which mainly focuses on accuracy in pronunciation and in grammar (use of standard language). the free association analysis revealed the lack of a direct link between the written language and everyday language development activities. the written language appeared in associations referring to books, textual forms, and genres, as a means of expressing ideas and thoughts in writing, and as requiring a knowledge of grammar for mastering the written language. this is part of the primary school curriculum and so is excluded from preschool education. 2. the main method teachers used to support speech development (but also other areas) was accurate use of the standard spoken language, which children were expected to imitate. this was also used to tackle speech problems in children raised in home environments with poor communication. 3. the other method for supporting speech development was repetitionbased activities (for practicing oral-motor skills and reciting nursery rhymes, which were seen as important for achieving accurate pronunciation in learning the names of objects as a vocabularyenhancement method, etc.). even where innovative teaching methods were used (e.g., drama), the role of the teacher was to correct spoken errors. 4. the teachers also explicitly stated that language teaching had a specific position in all content areas of preschool curriculum because communication is the general teaching medium and is used to develop knowledge and thinking. but analysis of the implicit knowledge captured in the free associations indicated that this was mainly declarative-level knowledge as the stimulus word “knowledge” did not generate links to “literacy” education or to teaching practices. the data showed that preschool teachers strongly saw the purpose of preschool education as fostering speech development in children from homes where this received little attention. however, it is worth noting that the research was conducted at a time when the role played by preschool in literacy development was being discussed in preschool education forums reform of early literacy education in slovakia 149 (baďuríková, 2000; kikušová 1997/98; zápotočná 2001; zápotočná & hošková, 2000), and teachers already had access to the literacy development methods disseminated by the orava association, which specialized in the work of meredith and steel (1995) and wide open school, a foundation promoting the step by step preschool program (1999). teachers were also familiar with alternative approaches to early childhood education such as the montessori and waldorf programs (zelina, 2000). however, the research also showed that teachers are strongly influenced by the preschool curriculum, and that familiarity with the preschool curriculum is central to teachers’ professional identity regardless of their education level. the ability to refer to curricular content and to recommend classroom practices involves demonstrating how the activity contributes to fulfilling the tasks listed in the preschool curriculum. national preschool curriculum: first attempt when new national preschool curriculum, state preschool education program – isced 0 (2008, hereinafter referred to as spep) was implemented in 2008, teachers and schools faced the new challenge of having to produce their own school curricula for the first time. this decentralized curricular policy gave preschools the freedom to choose how they would achieve the common core standards set out in the national curriculum. the new national curriculum also included reading literacy (along with mathematical and scientific literacy) as one of the general aims of preschool education, stipulated as the ability to “demonstrate preliteracy skills” (p. 9) forming part of children’s communicative competencies. yet, the great potential that written language and written culture has for learning and cultural development was overlooked once again. the concept of literacy was included in the national curriculum, but it was presented in such a way that it lacked the detail on which competencies should be developed in preschool-age children and how this could be achieved in the classroom. additionally, the national curriculum failed to clearly convey how developing literacy skills could help improve preschooler’s readiness for primary school generally. the common core standards in literacy were selected from the previous preschool curriculum and were simple re-organized in four thematic units of the preschool curriculum (i am, people, nature and culture) in an attempt to update the oldfashioned academic model used in the curriculum. again, the common core standards focused on accuracy in pronunciation and in grammar, the development of vocabulary and communication skills (previously part of language arts), the development of graphomotor skills (previously part of arts) and teaching literature. in moving toward a literacy curriculum, new educational standards, such as “showing an interest in books, letters and numbers, and exploring books,” “ʻreadingʼ a picture story and picture series; and “ʻwritingʼ a picture letter” (spep, p. 26), were included as a platform for discovering reading and writing and exploring the written culture. a statement by the national curriculum editor explaining that “reading” and “writing” are only used as means to express oneself via pictures and to infer meaning from a picture indicated that introducing literacy in to preschool education was just a formal, empty gesture, not part of explicit national strategy of literacy education (guziová, 2010/2011). she stressed that it was developmentally inappropriate for preschoolers to be taught reading and writing; and that even intellectually gifted children rarely explore reading and writing. the implementation of the national curriculum was also challenging because schools and teachers had not been prepared to handle the pressures of the new responsibilities. consequently, teachers simply learnt to live with the increased paperwork, and classroom practices remained unchanged. as teachers had become accustomed to displaying their expertise in preschool education by referring to the 150 global education review 5(2) national curriculum, classroom practices included the continued use of traditional speech development activities, but these were now conceptualized as early literacy practices by the teachers. new conception of early literacy curriculum the first substantial revision of the preschool curriculum undertaken in the post-totalitarian era did not survive more than five years. teachers found the new conceptualization confusing, and the statements and phrases about early literacy development were devoid of meaning. the curriculum failed to provide guidelines for consistent early literacy education. most preschools rediscovered the old curriculum (pep) using it in everyday classroom practice, retaining the new one (spep) as evidence that school and classroom documentation complied with the legal requirements. between the years of 2012 and 2013 the international education assessment results led to increasing pressure on the education policy makers to revise the majority of national educational programs, including preschool curriculum. the favorable political circumstances meant that a team of academics, consisting of researchers with substantial expertise in the preschool education content areas, was able to meet and propose a revision. the preschool curriculum they drafted, following a one-year pilot study, became the new national curriculum pre-primary state education program for preschools, which has been in use in all slovak preschools since september 2016 (hereinafter referred to as nc). the authors of this paper were responsible for developing language and communication, one of the content areas in the new curriculum, and they were careful to ensure that it reflected contemporary theoretical and empirical approaches to language development associated with early literacy education. theoretical and empirical background the theoretical and empirical underpinning of the preschool literacy curriculum was derived from established theories of language development (petrová, 2001), major theoretical models of reading and literacy developed in cognitive psychology (cognitive processing and text-comprehension-based reading models developed in the 1970s), and contemporary approaches to literacy associated with the sociocultural turn (the british school of new literacy studies, street, 1984; and gee, 2004), as well as the vygotskian approach to education (petrová, 2008). the main contribution to literacy theory of these approaches is that instead of understanding literacy as distinct cognitive activity being unique to the individual, represented by traditional approaches to reading, they recognized the significance of the social, cultural, and situational context (zápotočná, 2004). as a result, there was a notable shift away from the established approaches to literacy education in sense of reading and writing instruction to literacy education emphasizing literacy practices and literacy events (street, 1997). these and other changes to the theoretical approach to literacy led to a reassessment of how literacy is perceived in relation to preschool age children and how literacy is developed in early literacy curricula for early childhood education. some other sources that influenced our conception of early literacy education were the piagetian (cognitive-constructivist) perspective represented by e. ferreiro’s (2003) psychogenetic theory of literacy development. ferreiro’s research on conceptualizing literacy, particularly writing and the written language is based on an analysis of pre-conventional writing in children. it was especially instructive because slovak orthography is much closer to spanish orthography than it is to english, which is the reference language of most of the recent literacy research. another concept that informed our literacy curriculum is emerging literacy, which is reform of early literacy education in slovakia 151 the idea that a literacy-rich environment provides children with opportunities and reasons to explore print and writing through spontaneous cognitive activity, leading to the gradual acquisition of literacy (black & ammon, 1992). the ideas inherent in this approach are therefore quite different to those that underpin the knowledge and beliefs of slovak preschool teachers (see above) acquired in an era when the main preschool teaching method was one of training and repetition. we also took account of the notion of the hidden or seamless curriculum (reed, webster, & beveridge, 1995) in our literacy curriculum. the last key theory informing our literacy curriculum is social-constructivism, a vygotskian perspective, a learning approach based on the socially mediated construction of knowledge through interaction with adults in dialogue and discussion that goes beyond the child’s existing capabilities (bodrova & leong, 2006). in early literacy development, dialogue and discussion, as well as the acts of asking questions and seeking answers, constituted the most beneficial aspects of shared book-reading and helped improve text comprehension as part of listening comprehension. while the hidden curriculum enables learning within the zone of actual development, in this spiral curriculum (reed, webster, & beveridge, 1995) this zone is exceeded, fostering “critical literacy” (p. 172). the importance of social transactions in reading is also present in the multidimensional literacy model proposed by kucer (2001). his definition of literacy contains five dimensions—linguistic, cognitive, sociocultural, developmental and educational—which we considered useful to developing a literacy curriculum, especially for pre-primary education. the other model used in our early literacy education is the model of linguistic literacy outlined by ravid and tolchinsky (2002), mainly because it takes into account the importance of linguistic variety, the availability of multiple linguistic resources, as well as the role of metalanguage and linguistic knowledge in developing language and literacy. we also have good experiences of using clay’s (1993) early literacy skills evaluation tools and so we adopted her concepts about print in our literacy curriculum. the above mentioned theoretical approaches and models inspired some of the ideas and projects relating to early literacy development in europe in the 1980s and 1990s (dombey, 1995) and are included in our literacy curriculum to some extent. the content and the structure of our literacy curriculum was mainly influenced by van kleeck’s (1995; 1998) model of pre-literacy domains and stages. like kucer’s multidimensional model of literacy mentioned above, this model represents the wide spectrum of components (abilities, skills, knowledge and experiences) that are part of advanced reading, indicating they can be fostered long before children receive formal reading instruction. van kleeck’s model is derived from the fourcomponent model of the reading process outlined by adams (1990). in this model, reading is cognitively controlled by four hypothetical processors. two of them are connected to the meaning of print: the context processor and meaning processor; and two with the form: the orthographic and phonological processors. van kleeck identifies the preliteracy competency domains associated with each of these processors, such as abilities, skills, knowledge and experiences, that could be targeted at the preschool age. the model also assumes there is a natural sequence in literacy development, beginning with understanding the contextual and meaning components of print (initial stage), progressing to the natural and spontaneous discovery of meaning-to-form relations and correspondence (next stage), and continuing with gradual improvement in processing the form (i.e. the orthography and phonology of the written language). in the last stage, the child —as an autonomous reader at primary school level —will be able to profit from the abilities, experience and knowledge developed in the previous stages of literacy development. the main advantage of this model over many others is its complexity, as it 152 global education review 5(2) systematically covers the wide spectrum of preliteracy competencies. when developing our new literacy curriculum, we also took account of empirical research findings. these provide evidence that the traditional view found in slovak preschool teacher’s beliefs, that primary education should focus on literacy while preschools should simply prepare children for formal learning (the reading readiness approach), has been discredited (neuman & dickinson, 2003). one of the most significant findings is the effect on language development of attitudes to the written culture in the child’s home environment. this is captured by the international literacy assessments (pirls, pisa) and other research such as that based on bernstein’s (1960) theory of language codes, which shows that the acquisition of a more elaborate language code during early childhood has wide-ranging societal consequences for the child. the restricted language code typically found in children from low social status families is associated with weaker school achievement, a lower level of education and reduced participation in society. a remarkable number of studies on early literacy development collected by s.b. neuman & d. k. dickinson (2003; 2011; and dickinson & neuman, 2006) indicate that “children are doing critical cognitive work in literacy development from birth through 6 and that quality instruction makes a vital contribution in these years to children’s success as readers and writers” (neuman & dickinson, 2003, p. 3). this is consistent with research we conducted on a sample of slovak-speaking preschool children using the early literacy assessment tools developed by clay (1993; see also zápotočná, pupala, & hošková, 2003; zápotočná, 2005). language and communication content area on paper in this part we describe the basic structure and the content of the language and literacy section as it appears in the new national curriculum. we explain the ideas behind the common core standards in greater detail, including the success criteria for key achievements in early literacy education, that are also part of national curriculum. i. spoken language • communication conventions • articulation and pronunciation • grammar and standard language ii. written language 1. understanding the meaning and use of written language • exploring the functions of the written language • understanding the explicit meaning of the text vocabulary • understanding the implicit meaning of the text • exploring literature genres, figurative language and narrative conventions 2. exploring and understanding the formal features of written language • concepts about print and exploring print conventions • phonological processes and phonemic awareness • graphomotor skills required for writing figure 1. structure of the common core standards in the language and communication content area reform of early literacy education in slovakia 153 the common core standards (figure 1)1 cover two main areas – the spoken and the written language. the common core standards for written language are more detailed because the nature of the traditional curriculum means teachers in slovakia have limited experience providing a literacy-rich environment in the classroom and of encouraging preschoolers to explore the written language. several of our teaching guidelines are therefore aimed at explaining the unique role written culture plays in developing language and speech, and knowledge and thinking. we recommend teachers use a wide variety of literature genres with the children, including factual texts when introducing classroom activities aimed at ensuring that children gain rich experiences of the written culture. it is recommended that the various functions of the written language be explored in the classroom as follows: as examples of the rich variety of language experiences, of standard, cultured, and highly developed forms of verbal expression (as opposed to relying on standard language use as modelled by teachers); as a means of developing spoken language and communication skills— vocabulary, standard language acquisition, grammatical accuracy, and socially appropriate communication; as contributing to the development of all significant precursors to the area of reading literacy, which can have an impact on school success; as an important source of positive reading experiences, helping stimulate motivation and interest in the written culture and education. providing children with experience of a variety of texts and content is an important means of developing cultural literacy, of exploring the role of written culture in education, and acquiring and developing reading habits and positive attitudes towards education and learning. the common core standards in the national curriculum are: performance standards which set out the knowledge, skills, or examples of behavior that indicate the knowledge or skills to be achieved by the end of preschool. content standards which are detailed descriptions giving teachers examples of classroom activities and methods for achieving the performance standards. evaluation questions for teachers to obtain feedback on how the children respond to the classroom practices and to ascertain whether any adjustments are needed. the following section looks at views within the profession on the process of implementing the curriculum, as expressed in the accompanying discussions. reality of early literacy education it soon became clear that the new curriculum was not going to change teachers’ thinking and that transforming everyday practice would require additional work if what was set out on paper was to be at least partially achieved. documents analyzed to illustrate how the national curriculum was received we collected materials from dozens of lengthy written statements obtained once the two main preschool teacher associations became involved in the process of reviewing of the curriculum. the two associations are the society for preschool education (hereinafter referred to as spe) and the slovak branch of the world organization for early childhood education and care (omep). we also received recommendations and critical comments from individual teachers, groups of teachers, schools, and from institutions involved in education policy (state school inspectorate, hereinafter 154 global education review 5(2) referred to as ssi; the institution for in-service teacher’s education and training the methodology and pedagogy centre, hereinafter referred to as mpc)2. our analysis of the professional discourse reveals the extent to which the traditional approach to literacy education remains deeply embedded in the thinking of the preschool education community and presents a barrier to new ideas. it also indicates that these beliefs and attitudes continue to influence everyday classroom practices. understanding and misunderstanding literacy the most significant challenge we face is getting teachers to understand what we mean by literacy in relation to preschool age. the perception is that the written culture is the domain of primary education. this can be seen in the suggestions on which parts to exclude from the curriculum and what should be put in their place. the state school inspectorate (ssi) objected to the main aim of the content area: “the primary aim in the language and communication education area is to develop the child’s communicative competences at all language levels, making use of the development potential of the written language.” in their position statement they suggested “this aim should be omitted. written language is not part of preschool education!” on the other hand, they recommended adding “... spoken language is primary and most natural”. alongside other references to reading, they also recommended omitting “comprehension of a read text”. similarly, the society for preschool education (spe) stated that: “from the field we know that spoken language should be prioritized”. comments like this were frequent. there were also frequent recommendations about omitting the performance standard relating to text comprehension: “can answer questions that go beyond the literal meaning of the text and can predict events, think up (deduce) content, transfer information from the text to other situations and so on.” it was thought that “to predict events” was an inappropriately challenging expectation. the idea that children “can explain the implied (idiomatic) meanings of simple word combinations” was rejected on the grounds that this requires “knowledge of metaphors (!), taught in secondary schools!” the idea that print-related vocabulary should be introduced (“author, book, book cover, page, text, pictures”) was repeatedly questioned. it was thought knowledge of literature genres was unimportant and that performance standards requiring children to “distinguish between poetry and prose” (or between a “nursery rhyme and a story, or a fairytale” in child’s language), or between “fiction and reallife stories”, and to explore “the narrative structure of fairytales” were inappropriate and pointless. “why should children be familiar with the narrative structure of a fairytale?” (comment from the spe). we also received many comments recommending the removal of references to exploring the functions of the written language. there were frequent suggestions that the performance standard referring to the child’s ability to “explain in simple terms why the written language is important and give basic examples” should be omitted. teachers also thought incorporating writing into classroom activities was pointless (recommended in the content standards): “the teacher could write signs identifying play areas or activity centers in the classroom (library, hand-in, work shelf etc.) and short notices or instructions could be written in capital letters and pinned on classroom notice boards and information areas” (nc, 2016, p. 35). the spe responded to this by asking: “what is the reason for asking teachers to pin short notices or instructions written in capital letters on classroom notice boards and information areas?” elsewhere, they recommended omitting the suggestion that written instructions should be used to help children become independent in their own reform of early literacy education in slovakia 155 activity. the comment “we see no good reason for children to be interested in reading instructions on how to play games” is a good illustration of the failure to understand the idea that writing should be explored or that children can benefit from a literacy-rich environment. it was recommended that concepts about print, and literate behavior generally, should be excluded from the suggested list of knowledge and experiences preschool-age children should gain. “why should a child be able to show where you start reading a text? where you would find the information about the author or the contents of a book? to follow the (left-to-right) direction of print?” (comment by spe). “children have contact with books, but it is pointless expecting them to know where to find the contents in a book; that is content that should be learnt at primary school”. the reviewers’ comments were also consistent with the reproduction of traditional attitudes to writing, what writing is, and the rejection of the idea that writing should encourage even pre-conventional writing among preschools. “why should a teacher encourage pre-conventional writing? discover how you write a short message, word, or story?” (comment by spe). the teachers also questioned why preschool-age children should be able to write their names and rejected the idea this should be promoted: “some children can write their name but only because they want to. it is not right to encourage that in preschool!” the critical response to the suggestion of pinning up picture cards with letters on them to promote invented spelling was so overwhelming that we ultimately decided to omit this suggestion from the curriculum. on the other hand, most reviewers thought the curriculum lacked detailed descriptions on the teaching of graphomotor skills. frequently arguments were: “coordination of vision and hand is an important pre-writing stage”, “this is visionmotor training for writing”. the curriculum does not contain a section on this. reviewers requested “more detailed specification of graphomotor pre-writing stage”, and requirements for “sitting correctly, body posture, the angle of the paper, holding the pencil correctly...”. the methodology and pedagogy centre (mpc) provided the most comprehensive description of what should be included in this section of the curriculum. they requested that “...correctly holding a pen, crayon, brush, scissors...” should be added alongside previous requirements and that “sand, snow and flour” be added to paper as resources for teaching fine motor skills. they also thought the required distance between head and paper should be included in the part on teaching graphomotor skills and wanted many other details to be added to the curriculum. however, teachers have access to a huge amount of materials containing all the required information on this topic. these critical comments and recommendations are a good illustration of how teachers’ knowledge and beliefs, and their negative attitudes to teaching the written language, have not changed much since the fall of the communist regime. understanding teaching and learning the reviewers’ recommendations are also a good example of how teachers perceive learning at the preschool age and how they define their own roles in teaching to support learning. they favored the teaching of graphomotor skills and thought there was a lack of activities for teaching speech development, such as “oral motor skills, breathing, vocal exercises” and the “positioning of articulation organs”. the tendency to view teaching in terms of rote learning can also be seen in the teachers’ attitudes to cognition and knowledge acquisition. learning is seen as the acquisition of knowledge that is then consolidated through repetition and memorizing. the teachers want a method or activities that generates an immediate, observable, and measurable effect. this was why they recommended omitting the standards relating to the experiences children gain3. the role of the state school inspectorate 156 global education review 5(2) (ssi) reinforces these beliefs, since it inspects the process whereby the standards set out in the national curriculum are achieved. it made explicit reference to a “…lack of measurable achievements” in most areas of the national curriculum. this attitude to teaching and learning is also reflected in the comments on the evaluation questions. there were explicit worries that the evaluation questions in the national curriculum could be misused in the ssi’s external assessments. however, the evaluation questions (nc, 2016) are designed to help teachers observe children’s responses to situations, for example: how does the child react to unknown words? does s/he ask if s/he doesn’t understand? does the child like using words just learnt? how does the child respond to the questions asked? does the child attempt to answer even when s/he does not know? what strategies does s/he use when doing so? does s/he guess? does s/he think up answers? does s/he try to remember? (pp. 28-29) these were considered pointless because “the responses to these questions are the child reacting, showing his/her interest but they are useless for assessing which words the child has learnt. teachers should ask which words the children use, what they mean, and at what level.” comments were also made in relation to the evaluation questions (nc, 2016) on the children’s interests: “how does the child respond to educational texts? which topics most interest the child? is s/he interested in finding out about new ones? does s/he like to ‘show off’ his/her knowledge?” (p. 30). one teacher commented: “displaying interest in a particular topic and in educational texts is not a good indicator of reading comprehension, of how well he/she can re-tell the story... they are not related to reading comprehension”. in addition to these examples, there are others indicating that teachers consider evaluation to be a kind of examination, or verification of how well children master the target knowledge or skill, despite this contradicting the main idea behind the national curriculum. thinking hurts teachers’ attitudes are the source of many misunderstandings, worries, and paradoxes. one paradox can be illustrated by one last comment made in relation to the national curriculum that suggested that its creators had forgotten that play is the most important preschool activity. the teachers were afraid that by following the national curriculum, they would be removing the play element from preschools and increasing the cognitive requirements placed on children. some of the comments we received indicated that preschools should be an arena where children are not forced into thinking. “they are children; they should be playing and not thinking, dealing with things! is that what play should be about?” conclusion the response to the national curriculum in slovakia may initially appear disappointing. the many comments and recommendations selected for this paper came from the main preschool teacher associations and school policy institutions and they may not represent the knowledge and beliefs of all teachers. but these bodies have a strong voice in education policy in slovakia and play an important role in sustaining the attitudes and beliefs discussed in this paper. the process of reviewing the new national curriculum was clearly framed as a political power game. successfully implementing this new conception of literacy education – from paper to practice – still requires a great deal of investment in training teachers and preparing teaching guidelines. however, the approaches to early literacy education that this curriculum is built around have been well received internationally, and research in the local language environment and education context should provide satisfactory evidence. we are reform of early literacy education in slovakia 157 currently analyzing data collected during an assessment of the key literacy predictors and literacy of the last generation of children to have attended preschool education programs that followed the “old” national curriculum4, and these will be used for a comparative study assessing the effectiveness of the new conception of literacy education5. notes 1. the common core standards for written language (ii) have been designed to reflect van kleeck’s (1998) model. the first section is about developing meaning in the written language, as represented by the context and meaning processors. children explore the various functions of the written language and gain experience of different genres of children’s literature. in developing their vocabulary and listening comprehension children learn to distinguish between different genres, the structure of the story, and other narrative conventions. by gaining rich experience of the meaning of texts, children also discover the formal aspects of print. the second section of the standards deals with two areas associated with investigating and explicitly learning about these formal aspects of print—the orthographic processor—as they relate to the visual features of the print described in clay’s (1993) concepts about print. the second—the phonological processor—deals with the phonological structure of spoken language and raises phonemic awareness. the final section of the standards was included because children in slovakia are taught a specific form of continuous cursive handwriting which requires fine perceptualmotor coordination and is taught in a particular way. elsewhere in schools that teach block letters, aspects relating to the script, writing and knowledge of letters are dealt with in concepts about print, or the orthographic processor (van kleeck, 1998). 2. we do not identify those who reviewed the national curriculum (the participants) unless the comment or recommendation was part of a position statement issued by one of the main preschool teacher associations (spe, omep) or education policy institutions (ssi, mpc). 3. a good example of this attitude is found in some of the critical comments relating to concepts about print. the reason concepts about print tends to be misunderstood stems from a failure to see that the performance standards relating to this area concern the rich experiences children have of print, not direct teaching. consequently, we witnessed a preschool teacher trying to get the children to achieve this standard through demonstration and explanation, which was reminiscent of a lecture on concepts about print. 4. project vega, no. 2/0140/15: literacy as an enabling mechanism for the social inclusion of children from poor socioeconomic backgrounds and marginalized communities. 5. project vega, no. 2/0134/18: pedagogical impacts and developmental achievements resulting from curricular changes in preschool education. references adams, m. 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(2010). medzinárodné merania čitateľskej gramotnosti a ich význam pre pedagogickú prax [international measures of reading literacy and their significance in teaching]. in ľ. hajduk (ed.), rozvoj funkčnej gramotnosti v kontexte medzinárodných porovnávacích štúdií pisa a pirls, (pp. 51-58). bratislava: štátny pedagogický ústav. zápotočná, o., & hošková, ľ. (2000). možnosti stimulácie gramotnosti detí predškolského veku [options for stimulating literacy in preschoolers]. slovenský jazyk a literatúra v škole, 47, 71-85 zápotočná, o., pupala, b., & hošková, ľ. (2003). the continuity or discontinuity in early literacy development in slovakia. in other ways of seeing: diversity in language and literacy (vol. 1): proceedings of the 12th european conference on reading, dublin, july 1-4, 2001, (pp. 112-118). dublin: reading association of ireland. zelina, m. (2000). alternatívne školstvo [alternative schooling]. bratislava: iris. about the author(s) zuzana petrová, phd., is associate professor of education at the trnava university, trnava, slovakia. she graduated in primary education at comenius university in bratislava (2001) where she also received her phd. degree in education (2005). in 2018 she received degree in philosophy at the trnava university in trnava. main area of her expertise is interconnectedness between (written) language and learning in preschool age with particular focus on early literacy development within vygotskian perspective on education and literacy. she is co-author (with o. zápotočná) of the national early literacy curriculum for preschools in slovakia (in force since 2016). on the international level she is involved in the federation of european literacy associations (fela), and in cost actions is1404 evolution of reading in the age of digitisation (e-read) and is1410 the digital literacy and multimodal practices of young children (digilitey). oľga zápotočná, phd., is professor of education at trnava university, trnava, slovakia. she graduated in psychology at comenius university in bratislava (1980) and received her phd. degree from slovak academy of sciences at the institute of experimental psychology (1988). since 1990 she works also as senior researcher fellow at the institute for research in communication sas, at present as a leading member of the centre for research in education, founded in 2011. her research interests include language and literacy development and education in early childhood. with her scientific works (published about 130 articles including books) she contributes to the reading research from the perspectives of cognitive and sociocultural theories of literacy. her latest works and research projects are aimed at the study of metacognition in reading and reading comprehension, its development and specifically in relation to children from low socio-economical background. 84 global education review 3(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mukeredzi, tabitha grace (2016). teacher professional development outside the lecture room: voices of professionally unqualified practicing teachers in rural zimbabwe secondary schools. global education review, 3 (4). 84-106 teacher professional development outside the lecture room: voices of professionally unqualified practicing teachers in rural zimbabwe secondary schools tabitha grace mukeredzi durban university of technology, south africa abstract attempts to address global pressure to achieve education for all have been hampered by two fundamental challenges in developing countries, namely an acute shortage of teachers and large rural populations in these countries. in addition, qualified, competent teachers shun working in rural settings. while recruitment of professionally unqualified graduate teachers into the teaching profession has become recognized internationally as a way to address staffing rural schools and education for all commitments, there remain outstanding questions regarding how such teachers professionally learn and grow in these rural contexts outside the teacher education institution lecture room. an understanding of how they develop professionally is crucial. this study explored professional development experiences of professionally unqualified practicing teachers in rural secondary schools. a qualitative design was adopted and three-interview series complimented by photo elicitations were employed to explore the teachers’ professional development experiences. data were transcribed and manually analysed inductively utilizing open coding. findings suggest that professional development experiences for these teachers occurred in four sites: school structures, wider professional sites, planned and unplanned gatherings, and the classroom. drawing on concepts of professional development to describe, analyse and understand data, the author illustrates that professionally unqualified practicing teachers in rural secondary schools experience professional development outside teacher education institutions in interaction, through domains of formality and experience: non formal, informal and experiential. keywords rural education, unqualified teachers, professional development, experiential learning, education for all background to the study of late governments have been experiencing global pressure to achieve education for all (efa) goals, consequently nations have made commitments to every child, indeed, every person having access to basic education (mukeredzi, 2009). however, in developing countries, attempts to meet these efa goals have been confronted by two significant challenges. firstly, an acute shortage of adequately trained teachers. unesco points out “rights of children within education internationally are compromised by untrained education systems cannot produce enough new teachers to meet projected demand and efa ______________________________ corresponding author: tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban university of technology, indumiso-midlands campus, po box 1334, durban 4000, south africa email: mukeredzit@dut.ac.za teacher professional development outside the lecture room 85 and poorly trained teachers” (unesco, 2004, p. 138). lewin, samuel and sayed add that “many development targets” (2003, p.133). secondly, many developing countries have large rural populations. in zimbabwe 80% of black zimbabweans live in rural areas (chikoko, 2006) consequently most schools are located in these settings. globally, close to 70% of all school age children are in rural schools (hsrc sa, 2005; unesco, 2004) which creates problems, as qualified, competent teachers generally shun working in these areas. given these global problems, an understanding of these big issues becomes worthwhile. through personal experience of teaching and coordinating the post graduate diploma in education (pgde) in zimbabwe and south africa, governments recruit university graduates into teaching who have no professional teaching qualifications. this coincides with international trends where professionally unqualified graduates are being persuaded to join teaching and given special dispensations to develop them to qualified status (unesco, 2004). the sample group in this study were professionally unqualified practicing teachers (pupts) in rural zimbabwe secondary schools. in this study, pupts are practicing, possess content knowledge from undergraduate degrees, have teaching experience, but do not have a professional teaching qualification. it is the professional development experiences of this category of teachers outside a teacher education institution (tei) lecture room, which is investigated in this study. the pupts were enrolled in an initial teacher education (ite) programme pgde offered by the zimbabwe open university (zou) in order to become qualified. knowing how such teachers professionally develop outside teis in rural schools is essential for reviewing professional development efforts undertaken by institutions, which is vital if quality of teacher education provision is to be enhanced (mukeredzi, 2013). this study sought to understand how the pupts in rural secondary schools professionally develop outside teis. the study addressed one research question: how do the pupts experience professional development outside teis in rural secondary schools? conceptualising professional development professional development is understood as representing the growth of teachers in their profession. villegas-remers (2003) defined it as “a long-term process that includes regular opportunities and experiences planned systematically or unplanned to promote growth and development in the profession” (p.12). in many countries, proposals to reform/transform schools emphasize teacher professional development as pivotal for improving education quality and student achievement (nakabugo, bisaso & masembe, 2011) as the success of any education reform for student improvement hinges on teacher professional development. however, as professional development is context dependent its nature remains diverse (komba & nkumbi, 2008; villegas-remers, 2003). professional development may be initiated by the ministry, school or teachers. hurd, jones, mcnamara and craig (2007) reported centralised government teacher professional development activities in the united kingdom. government funded school initiated professional development activities focussing on particular policies have also been recorded in tanzania (komba & nkumbi, 2008). other approaches have included meetings, workshops, conferences and seminars organised by school subject departments, school-to-school subject clusters and associations (chikoko, 2006). in developing countries, professional development has generally relied on 86 global education review 3(4) government, subject clusters, and associations for disseminating policy initiatives (kruijer, 2010). in south africa however, graven (2004) discovered that government workshops were ineffective, and in zimbabwe, unproductive cascaded professional development workshops were reported (mukeredzi, 2009). these multiplier styles were also adopted in south africa in order to reach many participants within a short period (harley & wedekind, 2005). critics of cascaded models of teacher professional learning argue that such models often have no meaningful impact on classroom practice. there is concurrence on what effective professional development entails. but agreement notwithstanding, a mismatch still remains between speechmaking and practice. hence, merely knowing what constitutes effective professional development is insufficient; what is important is to have it actively embedded in the cultures, practices and structures of schools. similar observations were documented by ono & ferreira, 2010, p.63 who lamented that: “it is not so much about knowing what good professional development looks like; it’s about knowing how to get it rooted in the institutional structure of schools.” this study set out to investigate how the pupts in rural zimbabwe secondary schools professionally develop outside teacher education institutions. in other words, the study wanted to understand how these teachers professionally develop in rural secondary schools. the rural context in zimbabwe defining rural is complex and difficult. coladarci (2007) indicated that there is no singular definition to satisfy the research, programmatic and policy communities that use this concept. some scholars have lamented that rural remains a transient concept dependent on either geographical or demographical conceptions (chikoko, 2008) which often reinforce deficiency scripts like poverty and unemployment (ebersohn & ferreira, 2012; islam, mitchell, de lange, balfour & combrink, 2011; hlalele, 2012; myende & chikoko, 2014). other researchers believe that the elusiveness of the definition emanates from the ambiguity of the term and arbitrary nature of the distinctions with urban which often overlook the contextual differences because school curricula and practices are similar (abd-kadir & hardman, 2007; anaxagorou, 2007; kline, white & lock, 2013). in zimbabwe, the legacy of the colonial rule delineated land into three classifications: first, the former sparsely populated white farming areas, with distinctive developed infrastructure, close to towns and cities, across watershed with rich agricultural farmlands (mlahleki, 1995). second, sparsely populated, black owned small-scale market gardening farming areas located on infertile soils and with limited infrastructure, further away from towns. third, the traditional villagerural, remote, communal lands called tribal trust lands or reserve’ (both descriptors signify derelict land assigned by the colonial government but not owned by the black population) (chikoko, 2006). remote denotes physical road distance to the closest urban area where the geographical distance imposes the highest restrictions (kline et al., 2013). remote is understood from this perspective in zimbabwe and in this study. these remote areas extend for hundreds of kilometres away from towns and former white farms, and are characterized by large tracts of infertile land for peasant farming and animal grazing land portions, further away from the homesteads (peresu, ndundu, & makoni, 1999). rural schools in zimbabwe are positioned in remote villages as described above. generally, class enrolments are small, but schools are severely under-resourced and teachers often have to make-do in order to teach (mlahleki, teacher professional development outside the lecture room 87 1995). however, a positive theoretical potential within the make-do disposition is that this stimulates creative thinking to deal with these resource constraints, consequently creating possibilities for professional learning. an awareness of shortcomings often leads to developing effective mediational interventions which give rise to professional development. the rural communities around the schools are generally poor, which tends to undercut any possibility of schools pooling resources. nevertheless, however, under-resourcing, inclusive of the entire rural atmosphere apparently strengthened the spirit of teacher agency and relational dimensions. again, most of these schools are neither electrified nor do they have piped water. they are far apart and communication facilities like telephone, cellphone or broadband internet are rarely available. this is compounded by limited and undependable transportation; and when transport is available, many parents cannot afford it due to the high charges (mukeredzi, 2009). this forces many school children to walk long distances to the nearest secondary school. working in rural settings has its own peculiar and idiosyncratic challenges. attracting and recruiting qualified teachers to these school settings is difficult. qualified, proficient and experienced teachers often reject rural school teaching posts due to issues of geography, socioeconomic circumstances, ethnic differences and the prevailing views of disadvantage, deficiency and marginalization that conceptualize living and working in schools in rural settings as low grade and detrimental (arnold, newman & gaddy, 2005; pennefather, 2011; miller, 2012). while, problems of hard to staff, harder to stay schools are prevalent the world over (hlalele, 2012; kline, et al., 2013; miller, 2012), the problem is more pronounced in developing countries. mcewan (1999) reported various incentives for rural teacher recruitment in many developing-countries. governments in argentina, bangladesh, chile, colombia, costa rica, egypt, guyana, honduras, jamaica, mexico, nicaragua, philippines, venezuela, zimbabwe and others, adopt diverse recruitment strategies, including wage premiums, subsidized rural housing, special in-service training, and compulsory teacher redeployment to rural schools (mcewan, 1999). thus, the majority of teachers in these rural schools are either unqualified or under-qualified. in 1999, 4,035 of the 8,386 university graduates in the zimbabwean secondary school sector, did not have a professional teaching qualification (nziramasanga, 1999). more recently, majongwe (2013) revealed that the government recruited over 15,000, unqualified teachers to fill teacher gaps following two decades of skills flight in the education sector. consequently, rural schools, mainly staffed with unqualified teachers, performed badly in the 2011 and 2012 ordinary and advanced level examinations (majongwe, 2013). further, chiwanga (2014) reported that of the 98,446 teachers in zimbabwe, 12,713 were professionally unqualified. it was not possible to establish the number of pupts in rural secondary schools, but given the hard to staff, harder to stay issues, and with most of the population located in rural settings, it is unsurprising that most of these unqualified teachers are in rural schools. this suggests that education research to develop strategies in rural contexts may be critical for fostering teacher professional development. rural areas in many countries suffer more than other contexts due to limited research and ill-advised efforts to develop relevant and reliable approaches for improvement of the quality of education (miller, 2012). seemingly, not many devote time to rural issues, nor effectively support the efforts of those who attempt to improve education in rural schools 88 global education review 3(4) and communities. zimbabwe is not an exception, education in rural areas lags behind educational development in other parts of the country. thus, providing accessible, quality education to these settings is crucial. this study investigated how pupts professionally develop in rural school contexts. teacher qualifications and recruitment in zimbabwe teacher education in zimbabwe resides in teachers’ colleges and universities, and knowledge levels vary among practicing teachers (ministry of higher education (mohe) action plan, 2010). the required minimum qualification for primary and lower secondary school teachers (form 14) is an 'ordinary' level academic certificate plus a teachers’ diploma/certificate obtained after three or four years of teacher education in a teachers’ college. teachers for senior secondary (form 5 & 6) require an ‘advanced’ level certificate plus a teachers’ diploma/certificate obtained after two or three years of teacher education in college or, ‘advanced’ level certificate, plus a three-year university degree, and a teachers’ diploma/certificate. teacher recruitment and deployment is provincially centralized (mohe, 2010), but a secondary teacher’s contract may require deployment to anywhere in the province. the pupts explored in this study were employed before enrolling for ite, and registration in the pgde programme required them to have at least two years teaching experience. the zou pgde curriculum three major components comprise the pgde curriculum in the zou: teaching specialization; education and professional foundations; and teaching practice. the educational foundations modules provide the pupts knowledge and skills on theories of learning, curriculum, education management, philosophy of education, school experiences, communication media in the classroom, and research methods with action research project (zou, 2001). the subject specialization modules cover the subjects which they taught or their under-graduate degree subject specialization majors. these modules also include lesson preparation, general pedagogy, and pedagogic content knowledge. the teaching practice module extends over two semesters, and the pupts did their teaching practice at the schools where they were teaching. theoretical framework teacher professional development has been understood in relation to qualified teachers however, in this study it is used with reference to pupts. this study draws on concepts of teacher professional development (villegas-remers, 2003). villegas-remers suggested that professional development is underpinned by a number of characteristics: firstly, professional development is based on constructivism. consequently, teachers are viewed as active learners, who engage in concrete tasks of teaching, assessment, observation and reflection (villegas-remers, 2003). professional development is a social process in which teachers learn from and with others in specific ways. the process is long-term, which acknowledges teachers as life-long learners who learn more effectively from their experiences (learning-in-practice) than from one-off presentations. the central position assumed by the learner (the pupt) in their learning, and the on-going nature of professional development, suggests a strong connection between teachers as learners, teachers in classroom practice, and in the learning of their pupils. in short, being a teacher implies professional development. secondly, professional development is understood as a collaborative process. while teacher professional development outside the lecture room 89 teachers may professionally develop through individual experiences and reflection, their most effective professional learning is understood as occurring in interaction, negotiation and discussion with other teachers as well as with other interested parties, such as parents, administrators and even pupils (villegasremers, 2003). socio-constructivism alludes to individual knowledge construction occurring in social contexts, as learning activities are socially and contextually bound (du plessis, marais, van schalkwyk & weeks, 2010). in this regard the school community, inclusive of cultural and contextual practices, provides the context in which the pupts learn to teach through engagement in socially and contextually determined teacher roles and activities. learning is an active meaning-making process of transforming understandings in interaction; hence, the pupts assume a pivotal role in their learning (villegas-remers, 2003). as emphasis is on making-meaning in interaction with colleagues and the context, learning is not located at a psychological level (in a person’s head) nor does it involve development of passive behaviours, rather it is influenced by external forces and occurs in collaborative engagement. interaction with knowledgeable others, including mentors, colleagues, parents, learners, etc., who support the pupt in knowledge construction, to acquire social meanings of important systems and learn how to utilize them is critical. hence, relational dimensions, interdependence and interaction are vital for productive and successful learning with and from each other. thirdly, professional development takes place within a particular context and is related to the daily activities of teaching/learning (villegas-remers, 2003). thus, the context becomes central to the learning itself and should be designed to support and challenge the pupt’s thinking, assisting them to professionally develop into effective professionals capable of handling real world complexities (du plessis et. al., 2010). learning by doing is emphasized for the pupts to experience relevant activities hence, performing core-teacher roles enables such experiences. fourthly, a teacher is conceived as a reflective practitioner who enters the profession with some knowledge (villegas-remers, 2003). these pupts have an undergraduate degree. thus they will acquire new knowledge and experiences based on prior knowledge. thus, professional development will help the pupts to develop expertise, acquire/improve their theoretical and teaching practices, with trial and critical reflection, and with support and feedback from knowledgeable others (guskey, 2002). methodology participants a qualitative methodology was adopted to investigate how pupts professionally develop outside teis in rural secondary schools. six participants who were in the final year of the pgde programme were purposefully selected. these participants were identified from university biographical data sheets that included geographical location of their schools and schools’ distance from town. pupts were diverse in teaching experience, teaching specialization, age and gender. the mean age was 36 years, and ages ranged from 30 to 43 years (see table 1). 90 global education review 3(4) table 1 biographical details of participants teacher age in years gender subjects taught experience in years before ite class size taught 1 35 male history, geography 9 40-45 2 43 female english, religious studies 7 38-40 3 37 female accounting 9 40-52 4 38 male english, shona (local language) 7 40-45 5 30 female business studies 17 35-40 6 34 male geography 6 40-45 data collection data was collected through individual face-toface interviews supplemented by photo elicitation. informed by seidman (1998) that interview data should involve more than one interview, three series in-depth semistructured interviews were conducted with each participant. participants answered the same questions in a similar sequence. interviews lasted approximately 90 minutes, and were audio-recorded. facilitative communication techniques probing, paraphrasing, minimal verbal response, and summarizing were employed to promote continuous talking. participants responded in english with ease, choosing and using appropriate words effortlessly. the researcher expanded the field notes immediately after each interview and transcribed tape-recorded interviews verbatim to accurately reflect participants’ views. data was cross-verified from different interviews and across different participants and further verified by checking field notes and requesting participants to do “member checking” (cresswell, 2008). the first, interview began with an explanation of the study purpose, a promise of confidentiality, assurance that they could withdraw at any time, and reassurance that all answers were correct. this interview focused on participants’ education and teaching activities, to provide context to their teaching, and to link with activities which demonstrated how they professionally developed in rural schools. the second interview utilized photographs that participants had taken to illustrate their professional development activities. photo elicitation involved using photographs ( or other visual representation) in an interview and requesting participants to comment on the images (warren, 2005). this stimulated direct participant involvement and promoted data collection. p articipants took photographs of their professional development activities illustrating: mentoring and supervision; whole school staff and specialization meetings; subject cluster and teacher professional development outside the lecture room 91 association meetings; lesson preparation, delivery and assessment. these photographs prompted examination and discussion of their professional development practices. the third interview, reflection on meaning, stimulated reflection on their professional development experiences in rural schools. data analysis content analysis was utilized to analyze data. plunkett and dyson (2011) view this process as involving “a careful, detailed, systematic examination and interpretation of a particular body of material to identify patterns, themes, biases, and meanings” (p.37). transcripts were rea d and audio tapes were listened to several times to identify themes relevant to the key question. independent judges were involved to validate themes of relevant meaning as recommended by cohen, manion and morrison (2006). consequently, the author’s promoter acted as the independent judge who read through the interpretations a n d offered an outsider’s perspective on the findings, identifying errors and/or omissions and gave the researcher feedback (mukeredzi 2013). this also enhanced credibility and trustworthiness. subsequently, the researcher counted participants who made reference to particular themes (domains), sites and spaces. this is shown in table 2. bullock (2012) emphasized data representation and analysis that inform findings and interpretations making it transparent to others. in this paper, the author attempted to make data visible by using quotations representative of each theme from audio recorded discussions, and ensured representation across gender and subject specialization. singleton and straits (1999) called this, “… capturing in their language and letting them speak for themselves” (p. 349). findings the study investigated how pupts professionally develop outside teacher education institutions (teis) in rural secondary schools. data suggested that, these pupts engaged in professional development practices in interaction through domains of formality (non-formal, informal) and experience (experiential) in four main situations (school structures, wider professional sites, planned and unplanned meetings and the classroom). firstly, school structures offered professional development spaces through mentoring and supervision, whole school staff and subject specialization meetings. secondly, subject cluster and association meetings, and ministry of education (moe) workshops provided spaces for professional development in wider professional sites. thirdly, informal professional development occurred in interaction through both planned and unplanned meetings; and fourthly, classroom practice provided space for experiential professional development. table 2 provides a summary of responses. pupts are identified by codes (e.g. teacher 1). domains of professional development in the context of this study, professional development at rural school level is understood as usually occurring through four domains (figure 1). 92 global education review 3(4) figure 1 domain-based typology of professional development (mukeredzi, 2009). mukeredzi (2009) defined these four domains as follows: 1) formal domain, offered by a tei, constituting creditable, portable and bankable learning and contributing towards attaining a formal qualification (e.g., pgde). 2) non-formal domain, which may be characteristically planned, pre-arranged, organized and structured either internally or externally to the school but, without direct contribution to a qualification. non-formal learning may be formal in so far as it may be intentional, planned and structured, but noncredit bearing, nor formally portable or bankable, hence not directly contributing to a formal qualification (mukeredzi, 2009). 3) informal domain which is incidental professional development oftentimes picked up from, for example, collegial interactions. 4) experiential domain which involves learning by doing through classroom practice. this study set out to understand how the pupts professionally develop outside the tei from three domains: non-formal, informal and experiential. teacher professional development outside the lecture room 93 table 2 professional development domains, sites and spaces domains, sites and spaces teacher 1 teacher 2 teacher 3 teacher 4 teacher 5 teacher 6 total count non –formal domain – school site/structures  mentoring       6  supervision  n n    4  whole school staff meetings n n     4  subject specialization meetings  n     5 wide professional site  subject cluster meetings       6  subject association  n  n   4  ministry of education meetings   n n  n 3 informal domain – community interactions informal interactions       6 parents-teacher interactions  n  n   4 experiential domain – the classroom preparation and planning       6 lesson delivery       6 94 global education review 3(4) professional development through the non-formal domain school structures: mentoring and supervision all six participants reported m entoring as a major process through which they experienced professional development within school structures. mentoring was viewed as a process involving coaching/teaching, counselling, guiding, developing and nurturing the professional growth of a novice by a person of greater rank/expertise in an organization (kerry & mayes, 1996). collaboration in preparing, planning, teaching and assessment were key among the professional development supports the pupts received through mentoring. p articipants took photographs o f mentoring meetings; others took photographs of or with their mentor. looking at a photograph of her mentor teacher 3 commented: … my mentor is helpful, very supportive, we collaborate. she is my teacher … conducts demonstration lessons, i learn a lot, how to introduce lessons, manage learning, and handle students. … in observing my lessons, we discuss before and after observation, i learn from constructive criticisms, advice and feedback … it makes me re-play my lesson and learn. modelling the lesson enabled learning through mentor-practice, and being observed facilitated learning in three clinical phases: prelesson observation conference, observation, and post-lesson observation conference, as suggested above. in the pre-lesson observation conference, the mentor and mentee address the ‘what’ ‘when’ ‘why’ and ‘how’ of the lesson. the cycle enabled the mentor/supervisor to assist the pupt to learn from his/her own practice and from reflection, which promoted professional development. a teacher is a reflective practitioner (villegas-remers, 2003); and the mentor is someone to emulate, who stimulates his/her growth and development and who provides some sense of what he/she is attempting to become(kerry & mayes, 1996). emphasising collaboration, teacher 4 commented: we collaborate on everything, scheming, planning, teaching, and assessment. he wants me to do a critical self-assessment after each lesson, mine or his before giving his own assessment. … gives both oral and written evaluations. this makes me learn. teacher 2 expressed a similar sentiment: whenever i have a challenge, he helps me. he has mentored me throughout pgde overseeing my development. seeing how he handles students has helped me to grow. collaborative lesson planning enabled the pupt to discover what was taken into account, and in assessment collaboration, promoted joint critical reflection and professional development. further, self-assessment provided evidence of professional learning through constructive selfcriticism, a vital component for professional development. in lesson delivery, mentor or mentee or both, taught different components, which promoted the trainees’ professional development through the joint practice. collaborative teaching fulfilled another mentoring function, where mentor and mentee engaged in specific tasks to foster and enable knowledge and skill acquisition “as equals”. the mentor (nurturer) witnessed ability teacher professional development outside the lecture room 95 development and maturity in the nurtured (pupt) through tasks performed and dispositions displayed. one dimension of overseeing, protecting and nurturing was to ensure a safe, challenge-free environment and caring for both professional and other forms of development. being a mentor also implied being a close friend who provided a shoulder to lean on. in addition to mentoring, four participants highlighted in-school supervision by head/deputy head or head of department (hod) which enhanced their professional development. to illustrate teacher 6 explained: see these lines and ticks, and this comment, the deputy made them assessing my documents. teaching documents are also supervised by the hod fortnightly. … they write comments like here (showing) i learn from these comments, it helps me professionally, i reflect more … the four pupts also alluded to benefiting from lesson supervision by school management. for example, teacher 5 commented: every term i have two lesson observations by hod and deputy/head apart from my mentor. we sit and discuss, i learn from feedback and advice. two pupts indicated an absence of any form of supervision apart from mentor supervision. teacher 2 complained: no, somewhere somehow something is wrong here. … we don’t have such things. we are supposed to be supervised by hod, d/head or senior teacher, but management doesn’t care, they believe we scheme and teach because they gave us scheme books … the mentor tries but she needs back-up by management (laughs). an absence of in-school supervision implied deprivation of the many dimensions of professional development, and a whole repertoire of in-school guidance and support beyond the mentor. again, without in-school supervisory support from management, the quality of mentoring often suffered as management supervision may reinforce and enhance teaching practices. whole school staff meetings four pupts reported professional development through in-school meetings: whole school staff meetings and subject specialization meetings. these pre-arranged and planned learning opportunities often promoted collaborative learning where the instructional leader acted as the facilitator. to illustrate some participants said: i learn from colleagues’ ideas, they impart different ideas, they trained at different colleges, so we have a cross-pollination of ideas around teaching in staff meetings. i benefit, we discuss issues that affect departments and individuals. i learn through that, you ask any questions, they explain. (teacher 3) we gather for staff meetings. yes, i benefit, from sharing, this gives opportunities for sharing views and learning from others. interaction is collegial, which is useful for sharing new insights and ideas. (teacher 4) the teachers, with diverse biographies, backgrounds, experiences, disciplines, knowledges and understandings, created a rich 96 global education review 3(4) environment for cross-fertilization of ideas and sharing of knowledge at meetings. collaboration received emphasis as essential for personal learning since personal mastery and collaborative mastery feed on each other. the aspect of asking and receiving answers also points to personal strength in inquiry, which goes hand-in-hand with effective collaborative learning (villegas-remers, 2003). all this therefore underscores the centrality of teachers learning individually and collaboratively, which graven (2004) defined as double-loop learning. however, teacher 1 highlighted unproductive meetings. he explained: yes, we have meetings every monday at break … he wants meetings, but they are just for announcements and not quite beneficial because he gives the announcements, we do not discuss. teacher 2 also said: no, we have never had any… we are left on our own… something is wrong here … knowledge acquisition was through prescriptions, instructions and announcements for teacher 1. such autocratic tendencies negated cultures of collaborative – interactive professional learning, instead cultivating collective compliance (day, 1995, villegasremers, 2003). the ‘one jacket fits all’ prescriptions and instructions often bind teachers to practices which are unlikely to match their diverse needs and those of their learners. thus, rather than developing conducive environments through structured meetings, for teacher learning and peer support, to broaden their knowledge of classroom practices and of their learners, opportunities were invariably denied. subject specialization meetings five pupts highlighted subject specialization meetings as spaces for professional development which promoted discipline specific professional learning. … at the beginning and end of the term we meet for term planning, then reflection on problems and successes. at half-term it’s sharing and learning from each other, one teacher presents something. we acquire new subject information, it’s developmental. (teacher 5) mclaughlin (2008) asserted that subject specialisations around classroom practice resemble ‘knowledge collectives’ with collaborative responsibility for students’ learning and colleagues’ professional development. dialogues promote acquisition of new knowledge and skills of an active nature as teachers reflect on what they hear, see and practice (villegas-remers, 2003). such collegial sharing implies elements critical for teacher learning where they are not being dictated to, but enabled to engage in interaction, with ample occasions for discussion, critiquing, evaluating, agreeing and disagreeing and, being treated and treating each other like professionals (mukeredzi, 2013). cultures of this nature usually view teacher learning as life-long, which teachers themselves direct, and on which an ongoing part of their professionalism is built. wider professional sites subject cluster and association meetings wider professional sites in this study refer to subject specialisation cluster and association meetings, and moe meetings/workshops through which pupts experienced professional development. all pupts concurred that they professionally benefitted from specialisation teacher professional development outside the lecture room 97 cluster meetings through collaboration, sharing, learning from and supporting each other in planning, teaching and assessment. teacher 6 explained: we exchange information and do seminars. all schools set questions and exchange for students to research and make presentations. you learn from specialization colleagues and students. as language teachers we help each other with difficult topics, set common papers for mid-year and end of year local examinations. when you need material, you ask, they give you. … i benefit, especially me, other teachers tell me how to handle discipline and manage students. (teacher 2) comments such as those above support chikoko (2006) who noted that clusters, as groups of schools within close geographical proximity of each other, share ideas, resources, pedagogies and challenges all intended to improve education quality and relevance in their respective institutions. all these activities led to professional development. school-to-school interdependence enables teachers to transcend their own school and classroom contexts, to meet other possibilities and colleagues confronted with, and solving similar challenges (mclaughlin, 2008). thus, clusters promoted inter-school interdependence and sharing of both material and psychological mediational tools. through this joint work, as reflective practitioners (villegas-remers, 2003) teachers reflected on their own practice and consequently learnt from both own reflection and colleagues’ practices and experiences. four pupts also reported professional gains from subject association meetings. teacher 5 commented: in the geography association we discuss critical teaching and assessment issues. we learn and our students benefit. we get reports on candidates’ performance in previous external examinations which makes us revisit our strategies to prepare students for subsequent exams. workshop content described as ‘critical’ promoted reflection and re-examination of teaching strategies. teachers apparently adopted a test-focussed approach to teaching content and any workshops that dealt with examinations were likely to be regarded highly if they prepared students for external examinations. through this whole process, the pupts developed professionally. two of the six participants were not aware of any subject specialisation associations in their disciplines. for instance, teacher 4 made this comment: “i have never heard anybody talking about this, just the clusters” … (teacher 4). mclaughlin (2008) indicated that effective teacher professional development also emerged from membership in professional associations and communities that transcend institutional and geographical boundaries. such communities converge teachers from diverse backgrounds, experiences and knowledges who have something in common; their subject specialization. moe workshops three participants concurred that ministry workshops were beneficial but they had become sporadic and cascaded. the following extracts exemplify their comments: yes, we learnt a lot ... discuss teaching, examinations, syllabus updates, tackle difficult topics. but this time just the head goes and then trains teachers. he can only 98 global education review 3(4) discuss general policy stuff, content he can’t … (teacher 1) they do not help us anymore; the head cannot tackle subjectspecific information. (teacher 3) it appears as if professional development through moe workshops previously, was valuable, but participants criticised the cascaded approach to training which had then been adopted. cascading approaches to teacher professional development adopted by the government have been criticised for distortion of information (see for example ono & ferreira, 2010; harley & wedekind, 2004). professional development through the informal domain informal interactions participants highlighted informal interactions as a source of professional learning. emphasising professional development through this domain. day (1995) pointed out that informal interactions facilitate checking against bias in self-reporting and selfevaluation and enable school-to-school classroom practice comparisons. school structures and the wider professional sites enabled informal interactions and enhanced informal/incidental professional development within the planned/intended activities and meetings, as this kind of learning sits at the verge of any gathering (mukeredzi, 2009). one pupt commented that: “… just talking to colleagues, you learn something about your job. jaah! … we share teaching experiences and challenges, and discuss solutions (teacher 2). interactions touched their personal and professional lives including school contextual issues, thus learning from experiences and practices of colleagues as the way in which challenges were addressed provided learning for similar contexts in one school. four pupts highlighted teacher-parent interactions as a source of professional development. sentiments by teacher 5 below illustrate: at parents-teacher meetings they examine children’s books, i tell them weaknesses and strengths, they also indicate weaknesses and strengths … i get to understand parents’ attitudes towards educating their children which helps on how to deal with some pupils. contrary to comments by teacher 5 above, teacher 2 indicated school-community boundaries: “we never have such meetings with parents, they don’t come when invited.” however, good teacher-parent relations are effective in fostering teacher professional development, classroom practice and learner discipline (anaxagorou, 2007). such liaison and networking acknowledges parents as complementary educators and knowledgeable ‘others’ which enhances teacher personal and professional learning and heightens school image and standing within the community (bhengu, 2007; villegas-remers, 2003). professional interaction through the experiential domain pupts experienced professional development through the experiential hands-on process in classroom practice, in performing the essential teacher roles. participants talked about lesson planning and delivery, particularly teaching strategies, classroom management, assessment, and reflection and evaluation as some of the practices through which they professionally developed. for example, preparation and planning the immediate translation of the scheme of work into action, showing a summarized version of how the lesson would proceed. the quotation below is typical of teacher professional development outside the lecture room 99 teacher sentiments: i read and summarize concepts from various books, i also ask colleagues, re-visit my scheme, learner activities and teaching strategies, making sure i know what i will do with pupils. this is learning ... (teacher 4) comments such as above suggest some professional development through planning processes as the process involves reading, choosing materials, learner activities and methods/strategies for use in lesson delivery. the comments also suggest interdependence where colleagues are the knowledgeable ‘other’ (villegas-remers, 2003). participants further highlighted professional development from lesson delivery: my work is central to my professional development ... in teaching you learn, you reflect and evaluate your performance, analyze, see your mistakes, what worked or didn’t and why? then take corrective action … learn from mistakes. when marking, i reflect, questioning myself … without selfquestioning, i don’t learn, don’t develop. (teacher 5) the comments depict the cyclical nature of experiential learning, portraying two dialectically related modes of grasping experience: concrete experience and abstract conceptualization, and two dialectically related modes of transforming experience: reflective observation and active experimentation (sternberg & zhang, 2000). from the four-stage learning cycle, concrete/immediate experiences are the basis for observations and reflections. these reflections are assimilated and distilled into abstract concepts from which new implications for action can be drawn which are tested to guide creation of new experiences (sternberg & zhang, 2000). questioning oneself usually creates avenues for viewing thoughts and experiences from new perspectives, and acceptance of theory which emerges out of convincing experiential evidence grounded in practice. pupts may thus, be empowered to think through classroom complexities and practices and, experience positive results as well as personal and professional growth. discussion the study explored how pupts professionally develop in rural zimbabwe secondary schools outside teis. from the data, pupts experienced professional development in domains of formality and experience. within the non-formal domain, professional development occurred in school structures and in wider professional sites. in the informal domain, pupts developed professionally in interaction within the context of planned and unplanned meetings, while professional development in the experiential domain was through hands-on experience in classroom practice. school structures, provided four spaces for professional development: mentoring, supervision, whole school staff and subject specialization meetings. all participants highlighted professional development through mentoring where they benefitted from collaborative planning and teaching, lesson modelling and lesson observations and feedback. mentoring has been publicized as a means of effective school-based professional development and practice where mentees benefit from supervisory guidance, critique, and feedback, and from their own reflection as was the case in this study. villegas-remers (2003) emphasized interaction with knowledgeable 100 global education review 3(4) ‘others’ (mentors, parents, colleagues, etc.) who facilitate and support the pupt’s knowledge construction. in-fact du plessis et al. (2010) argued that “if practice teaching is the most single intervention in teacher professional development, then mentoring is the single most powerful process of that intervention” (p. 328). the pupts seemingly worked with effective mentors who articulated expectations and provided advice, observed them teach, provided oral and written feedback, and further feedback on their self-evaluation of their teaching. mentoring and supervision enabled professional development experiences through three clinical phases: pre-lesson observation conference, observation, and post-lesson observation conference. these phases promoted teacher professional learning from their own practice, from self-assessment, self-criticism and reflection. professional development is rooted in self-enquiry, self-criticism, selfevaluation, and reflection (mukeredzi, 2009); these processes generally involve playing back and thinking about direct encounters with the phenomenon under scrutiny (teaching), rather than merely thinking about the encounter or only considering the possibility of doing something about it. school-based teacher educators in this study helped the pupts to acquire teaching knowledge as a product of their own reflection and self-critique “exploring and critiquing their emerging teaching philosophies and practices as teachers” (olsher & kantor 2012, p.36). these are vital components for professional development given that it is when one admits to own shortfalls, that one opens up to new learning (mclaughlin, 2008). the one pupt who did not have in-school supervision missed out on a whole range of in-school guidance and professional development. from whole school staff meetings, four participants emphasized collaborative learning from the diverse biographies, backgrounds, experiences, disciplines, knowledge and understandings that merged to build an enriched environment for professional interaction, sharing and learning. villegasremers (2003) argued for effective professional development through interaction and debate. inter-departmental meetings seemingly promoted development of collaborative capabilities where teachers were sitting beside, sharing and feeding off each other thus, learning with and from one another, promoting both individual and organizational professional learning (guskey, 2002). two of the six participants had no professional development experiences from joint meetings as their schools did not have such professional gatherings. jointstaff meetings cut across disciplinary boundaries, fostering teacher discussion around pedagogy, often making the pupts think deeply about their practice, and inspiring them to examine their work from a global perspective. an absence of teacher professional gatherings contradicts the social aspect of professional development as the school community, with its structures and practices, is the context in which pupts (as learners) learn to teach through participation in socially and contextually determined activities (villegas-remers, 2003). five participants reported professional development experiences at subject specialisation meetings. subject meetings differ from whole school staff meetings as they involve only teachers in the subject specialization and thus provided space for the pupts to engage in specialized professional development. subject departments resemble ‘talking departments’ marked by an active interchange of professional ideas and information, bound by a clear and shared sense of vision (darling-hammond, 1996). in this study, as professional development experiences emanated from within the specialization, pupts seemingly took advantage of the planned and structured opportunities to teacher professional development outside the lecture room 101 learn specific knowledge and skills from colleagues with particular subject expertise. within wider professional sites, subject cluster and association meetings provided spaces for pupts’ professional development. participants indicated that cluster meetings promoted learning in collaboration, where they shared, learning from and supported each other in planning, teaching and assessment. professional learning was at a collegial stratum where teachers interacted and seemingly developed communities in which the pupts could openly and confidently, non-formally and informally discuss their practice and learn from qualified and experienced colleagues in a trusting and non-threatening atmosphere. four participants also spoke in positive terms about professional development through subject associations which they portrayed as exerting dominant influence in setting national examinations and, subject syllabi. little, (2000) found that subject associations, notwithstanding their nearly invisible position in mainstream professional development literature, are prominent in teachers’ professional lives, shaping teacher attitudes, beliefs and values and exerting influence on teachers’ dispositions to particular policies and reform. professional development through specialization cluster and association meetings are all in tandem with villegas-remers (2003) who emphasized collaboration in effective professional development. the pupts reported that ministry workshops had been beneficial, but had become ineffective due to sporadic and cascaded approaches adopted. teachers reported that when cascaded approaches were used there seemed to be a lack of consideration of the diverse teacher needs, contexts, experiences and countless expectations for effective professional development which aspects promote professional learning and shape teacher attitudes, beliefs and values (ono & ferreira, 2010). data suggested that within the informal domain, participants experienced professional development through informal interactions in school structures and wider professional. day (1995) noted that informal professional development occurs naturally and individuals themselves may not be aware that they are contributing to their professional development. these pupts highlighted informal interaction with colleagues and parents as having effectively contributed to their professional development. however, two participants indicated boundaries between their schools and communities which contradicted findings by kline, white and lock (2013) that school-parents’ partnerships provide a strong basis for community strengthening, teacher learning, and improved student learning outcomes. in the experiential domain all participants indicated professional development in the hands-on processes of classroom practice. experiential learning creates opportunities for engagement in professional development practices around practical knowledge on preparation, planning and organization of the teaching/learning process like: teaching strategies, pupil motivation, time management, classroom and group organization and monitoring (caires & almeida, 2005). generally defined as learning by doing, experiential learning is a meaningmaking process a knowledge construction process of the individual’s experience which occurs in the process of performing corefunctions of being a teacher. it does not require a teacher, neither is it learning about being a teacher or listening to people talking about being a teacher, – rather it is practice in the diverse roles of being a teacher (mukeredzi, 2009). consequently, the teacher reflects on and questions his/her 102 global education review 3(4) performance, beliefs, and organizational modes of practice. oftentimes, practical experiences with positive results promotes conceptual change and acceptance of theory. this effectively occurs through reflection on and about practical experiences. this supports villegas-remers’ (2003) observation that professional development is context dependent and rooted in the daily activities of teaching/learning. a key aspect of professional development which resulted from classroom practice was reflection. participants emphasized critical self-evaluation of and selfreflection on their work and learning from that experience. reflection for these pupts may, for example, result from pleasant/unpleasant experiences in teaching/learning. this is followed by critical reflectiontrying to understand the incident better, explaining to oneself, going through the motions, comparing with previous instances, determining matches and mismatches, self-evaluating and evaluating against some norm, and then developing a way forward based on the experiences of others (e.g., the mentor) who may have had similar experiences. discussion with the mentor, results in further self-evaluation and critical reflection. this leads to crafting new knowledge and beliefs about content, pedagogy and student learning and, consequently, application of this new learning in subsequent lessons (mukeredzi, 2013). conclusions and implications the study addressed the question: “how do pupts experience professional development in zimbabwe in rural secondary schools outside teis.” findings suggest that they professionally develop in domains of formality and experience – non-formal, informal and experiential through four main sites: school structures, wider professional sites, planned and unplanned gatherings, and the classroom. school structures provided spaces for professional development through mentoring and supervision, whole school and subject specialization meetings. in wider professional sites, professional development occurred within cluster and association meetings. these non-formal spaces also enabled informal professional development through informal interactions. experiential professional development took place through hands-on experience in classroom practice. however, some pupts missed out on professional development through in-school management supervision, whole school staff and subject association meetings. no participants had effective professional development from moe workshops. these findings have a number of implications. first, they suggest that supervisory support cultures shape teacher professional development. school management can contribute to improved student learning by supervising and providing meaningful feedback and direction to teachers as this can have a profound effect on the learning that occurs in classrooms. as student learning is the primary function of schools, effective supervision of instruction is one of the most critical functions of school management if equal access to quality educational programs for all students is to be enhanced (guskey, 2002). where professional development practices lack school management support, even the most promising approaches may not succeed. second, findings suggest that to support teacher professional development experiences in rural schools, in-school support should be built into structures that constantly and tenaciously bring teachers together to promote professional learning and development (villegas-remers, 2003). developing cultures, structures and opportunities for promoting in-school teacher teacher professional development outside the lecture room 103 professional development is the responsibility of the school head (graven, 2004). failure to provide for such collaborations deprives teachers of a whole repertoire of professional development as holistic learner improvement is generally achieved from aggregating professional development of individual teachers (guskey, 2002). again, professional development is not an individual process purely located at a psychological level, but it is extremely mediated (mukeredzi, 2013). motivation to learn for the pupt may be intrinsic, but much of his/her professional development is through, with, and from others. hence, the most important aspect of professional development is interaction (villegas-remers, 2003). this implies that school heads need to pay attention to teacher learning individually and collectively. individual teacher professional development is central to classroom practice, learner achievement, and organizational professional development (guskey, 2002). thus, providing occasions for interaction and collaborative learning through staff meetings and other school gatherings is critical. schools with structures and cultures for effective inter-departmental meetings are viewed as institutions in doubleloop learning which foster both teacher professional development and improved student learning through reduction of disciplinary margins (graven, 2004). such learning and sharing is often not marked by disciplinary boundaries but is within a ‘feel equal factor’. in addition, school communities with collaborative learning practices reduce subject specialization boundaries, promote teacher professional development, and enhance student learning as they strengthen and promote—rather than weaken teacher professional learning (day, 1995). by extension, when teachers are brought together to learn with and from one another, they take responsibility for students’ learning as debates are rooted in the shared subject: teaching/learning. third, subject specialization gatherings and associations promote professional development through engagement with colleagues, questioning and observing them, appraising one’s own and others’ practices overtly or covertly (mclaughlin, 2008). interaction provides opportunity to discuss, criticize, evaluate, agree and disagree, without being dictated to but being treated and treating each other as professionals (villegas-remers, 2003). hence, cluster and association networks, meetings and conferences that facilitate teacher collaborative work on their curriculum, listening and engaging in their work should be strongly constituted and supported as they are a vital way of upholding effective teacher professional development and engagement within subject specializations in wider contexts (graven, 2004). fourth, while cascaded multiplier approaches are often adopted due to various constraints to reach many participants in a short space of time (harley & wedekind, 2005) they are based on the type of knowledge teachers must know worth teaching in schools, and characterized by transmission where teaching is “telling”, and learning is “absorption” (ono & ferreira, 2010, p.2). such ‘one jacket fits all’ sets of professional development are ineffective as they are fraught with distortion and often lead to no significant change in practice when teachers return to classrooms (mukeredzi, 2013). ono and ferreira argue that professional development programmes should be participant/learner centered, knowledge centered, assessment centered and community centered to optimize teacher learning. fifth, findings indicate that strong teacher-parent relations are essential for pupts’ professional development. an understanding of 104 global education review 3(4) mechanisms through which parent-teacher linkages promote student academic achievement would point to logical interventions. rural communities where these pupts were practicing were generally poor. poor communities are less likely to be involved in school life than are wealthier ones, and schools in poor communities are less likely to promote parental-school involvement (mukeredzi, 2013). as a result, children who would benefit from parents-school relations are those who are least likely to receive it unless concerted attempts are made. thus, policies designed to promote school-parental involvement in advantaged districts may be ineffective in promoting parental-school relations in disadvantaged communities. understanding each community’s contextual challenges is vital for building and upholding effective parents-school collaborations otherwise boundaries instead of bridges between schools and communities in rural settings will continue to be built. notes 1. zimbabwean secondary education is based on the cambridge 3-tier model. junior level certificate obtained after two years of secondary 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(2001). regulations for the postgraduate diploma in education (pgde) by distance teaching and open learning. harare: zimbabwe open university. about the author tabitha grace mukeredzi is a lecturer and coordinator at the durban university of technology in the adult education unit, faculty of arts and design. her research interests are in teacher education, teacher professional learning and development, rural education and, mixed mode/distance education methodologies. http://unesdoc/ http://link.springer.com/cha when youth dialogue 211 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration liz dawes duraisingh project zero, harvard graduate school of education sarah sheya project zero, harvard graduate school of education emi kane abundance foundation abstract how should educators teach about one of the most complex and pressing issues of our times? this paper presents an empirically-grounded framework to help educators understand the opportunities and challenges of engaging youth around the topic of migration, including migration involving refugees. it stresses the importance of inviting youth to dialogue in ways that involve slowing down, sharing stories, and making connections. the framework emerged from a design-based research study involving an experimental online learning community and curriculum on the topic of human migration. posts and comments involving 140 teens from seven countries were closely analyzed using a modified grounded theory approach that incorporated constructivist principles. 14 interviews with participating educators also informed the analysis. the framework proposes that youth be supported to develop (1) curiosity and engagement about individual migration stories and migration in general, (2) nuanced understanding of the complex and diverse factors that help shape historical and contemporary migration experiences, and (3) critical awareness of their own and others’ perspectives on migration and migrants. a visual representation is provided. specific examples of student dialogue are unpacked to illustrate the framework, with discussion of the following cognitive and affective challenges: “the three o’s” of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. the paper argues that youth of all backgrounds need opportunities to learn about migration in ways that allow them to leverage their various experiences and perspectives and engage with one another in meaningful, authentic ways. keywords migration, migrants, refugees, education, dialogue, intercultural when youth dialogue 212 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. introduction how can educators engage students around a topic that in many parts of the world has become both pressing and contentious, in part because of the sheer number of people who are on the move on our planet (abel & sander, 2014; banks, 2017; migration policy institute, 2017) and in part because of public and media discourse about migration in the global north, that tends to sensationalize or over-simplify migration despite it being an inherent part of human history (marlowe, 2018; suarez-orozco, louie & suro, 2011)? how can educators help young people—including those who have recently migrated—understand the complexity of the topic and the diversity of forces and personal experiences involved? simply put: how can educators help young people to change the conversation about migration? to the authors’ knowledge, the study reported on here is the first to explicitly apply design-based research principles to help build theory about teaching migration via the careful examination of student work and dialogue. like other design-based approaches to educational research, the study simultaneously seeks to develop an effective teaching and learning intervention and use this intervention as a “natural laboratory” to understand the learning taking place and to build theory (anderson & shattuck, 2012; the design-based research collective, 2003; sandoval & bell, 2004). the paper presents an empiricallygrounded framework designed to offer guidance in terms of inviting young people to learn both with and from one another in nuanced ways about the complex topic of migration. while the framework was developed in an online context, the principles put forth are relevant to other kinds of teaching and learning contexts including non-formal ones. the framework proposes that young people be supported to develop (1) curiosity and engagement – regarding migration in general and individual stories, (2) nuanced understanding of the complex and diverse factors that help shape historical and contemporary migration, and (3) critical awareness of their own and others’ perspectives on migration and migrants. challenges are also discussed: what the authors call “the three o’s” of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. it is suggested that youth of all backgrounds would benefit from opportunities to learn about migration in ways that allow them to leverage their various experiences and perspectives and engage with one another in meaningful, authentic ways. in what follows, the need for a pedagogic framework is explained and the context for the research is described: an experimental online learning community called out of eden learn which brings youth together from around the world to engage in intercultural learning experiences. further conceptual framing for the research is provided, followed by the research methods. a visual representation of the pedagogic model, designed to be an orienting tool for educators, is presented and then unpacked using examples of student work. finally, the implications of the study are discussed. the need for a pedagogic framework human migration is an age-old phenomenon and an inherent part of what it means to be human (appiah, 2006; rodriguez, 2012; over _______________________________________ corresponding author liz dawes duraisingh, project zero, harvard graduate school of education, longfellow 433, 13 appian way, cambridge, ma 02138. email: elizabeth_duraisingh@harvard.edu mailto:elizabeth_duraisingh@harvard.edu 213 global education review 5(4) recent decades, the overall scale and scope of people on the move today is unprecedented salopek, 2013). while international migration figures have remained proportionately stable (abel & sander, 2014). behind these statistics are real people, often migrating for very different reasons and facing very different challenges and circumstances. a young man, who had arrived as a child refugee in the united states, returning to liberia to discover his roots and make an impact on his country (shin, 2016); teenage youth fleeing gang violence in honduras and making their way towards the united states border (renaud & renaud, 2015); survivors of conflict in the democratic republic of congo seeking asylum in uganda (bah, 2016); a young girl with a lebanese mother and palestinian father, being raised in a refugee camp in beirut (global lives project, 2009). the complex drivers behind this increase in migration—such as globalization, technological advances, climate change, and new and ongoing geo-political disputes— mean that migration flows are unlikely to diminish anytime soon. included within these migration events are ones less often featured in the news media, such as lateral moves for jobs, or voluntary migration undertaken by those from wealthy countries in the global north. regardless of where they live, young people today are likely to spend their lives in contexts that are shaped, one way or another, by historical and contemporary forces of migration and the interchange of ideas, products, technologies, cultures, and languages. given that many experts believe that education today should help prepare young people to understand and engage in the complex, globallyconnected world in which we all live, young people, whatever their personal circumstances, presumably need opportunities to think in meaningful ways about such an important topic (boix mansilla & jackson, 2011; oecd, 2018; reimers, 2016). there is also a strong moral imperative to engage youth around human migration. despite migration being a constant feature of human history, it is becoming “more and more controversial” (marchetti, 2018), with the receivers’ points of view dominating the normative literature. over the past decades, increasing political and legal barriers have been erected to constrain the flow of people, even as global elites crisscross the world, courtesy of developments in transport, technology, and finance. government policies towards immigration vary by government yet are generally guided by the “market model” which stresses fulfilling labor needs over other considerations. relatedly, many countries have witnessed increased xenophobia and protectionism among voters, who, often fueled by politicians and media sources, may associate migration with international terrorism (boucher, 2018; ngai, 2004). it is imperative that young people are supported to navigate this sensitive topic and interrogate different perspectives, representations, and stories related to it. young people and their educators also need support because, as is often the case with major contemporary issues, the complexity of the topic is rarely reflected in public and media discourse. media representations, and even migration scholarship, contribute to oversimplified stories that dominate contemporary understandings of migration. for instance, a preoccupation with “extraordinary stories of adversity” can lead to the overlooking of everyday experiences (marlowe, 2018, p.2) or “good news” stories (suárez-orozco, louie &suro, 2011). meanwhile, a “crisis model” pervades how refugees are discussed and treated by the law, which contributes to them being narrowly perceived as “racialized criminal subjects and racialized subjects in need of intervention” (vasquez, bosworth & parmar, when youth dialogue 214 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. 2018). suárez-orozco and colleagues (2011) note that perceptions about migration are dominated by a preoccupation with undocumented migrants, even though in the united states, for example, they account for less than a third of all immigration; they claim that the american public is conditioned to associate migration with “chaos, controversy, and criminality” (p.6). more subtly, academics and journalists alike have tended to focus on individual narratives rather than attending to the kinds of broader structural forces that help determine the trajectory of individual migrants, with the effect that migrants tend to be portrayed as protagonists in charge of their own destinies (ibid.). accounts also tend to overlook the complexity of migration at the individual psychological level by focusing on physical location and material well-being; in reality many migrants, including refugees, simultaneously “belong” in more than one place (morley, 2000) and experience rich, hybrid identities and aspirations (dryden-peterson, 2017; facing history and ourselves, 2008, knight, 2011). background to the study: an online laboratory out of eden learn is an online laboratory and research and educational initiative, developed by project zero at the harvard graduate school of education. out of eden learn supports young people to develop essential skills and dispositions for participating in a globally interconnected world. it is grounded in various pedagogical approaches developed at project zero—ones broadly informed by the concepts of slow looking, historical thinking, visible thinking, active learning, and promoting thoughtful peer-to-peer dialogue. out of eden learn is also a collaboration with journalist paul salopek, a national geographic fellow. through his slow journalism project, called the out of eden walk, salopek is retracing, on foot, the migratory pathways of ancient humans across the globe. the online platform engages students from diverse backgrounds to participate in meaningful learning experiences together, in ways that disrupt potential “echo chamber” effects of the internet (pariser, 2011; zuckerman, 2013) while tapping into the opportunities the internet presents for connecting people across difference. students from different locations are placed together into learning groups, each consisting of approximately six classes, to participate in curricula that involve them doing activities in their local communities and then engaging in substantive, asynchronous dialogue on a customized digital platform about those activities. once a teacher registers a class free of charge on the platform and is assigned to a learning group, their students are issued a code to enter into a protected online space. students create their own profiles, using pseudonyms to protect their privacy. they post and comment on other students’ work within their learning group in ways reminiscent of mainstream social media platforms. for this study, all students communicated in english. three core learning principles are emphasized across all out of eden learn curricula. young people are invited to: (1) slow down to observe the world carefully and listen attentively to others; (2) exchange stories and perspectives about people, place, and identity; and (3) make connections between their individual lives and larger human stories and systems. these principles foster the kinds of skills and dispositions that are important for young people to develop in our complex, interconnected, and rapidly changing world, including critical thinking, perspective-taking, online communication skills, appreciation of 215 global education review 5(4) diverse cultures, and nuanced understandings of cultural difference (boix mansilla & jackson, 2011; oecd, 2018). the out of eden learn stories of human migration curriculum was first piloted in the spring of 2016 (dawes duraisingh, august 2016). figure 1 provides an overview of the version of the curriculum experienced by students in this study. the curriculum was intended to leverage the promising pedagogic model and platform of out of eden learn in order to convene diverse youth around the topic of human migration. while the curriculum was designed to be open-ended enough to allow individual students to carve out their own learning pathways and make personal connections to the topic, it also incorporated a significant number of resources involving firsthand narratives regarding migrant and refugee experiences and promoted substantive understanding of the topic. the curriculum seeks to encourage young people to think about migration expansively and in ways implicating their own lives, regardless of whether or not they consider themselves to be migrants. moreover, the curriculum deliberately begins by tapping into students’ own experiences and knowledge about migration in a bid to engage them around the topic. the curriculum progressively becomes more outward looking, with the fourth activity inviting students to learn about or reach out to people they do not already know well; however, as part of the iterative design process, this last activity has since been amended to one that supports students to reflect on and synthesize their learning in ways that reflect the framework presented in this paper. the emphasis on students’ own experiences and connectionmaking accords well with broad studentcentered and place-based pedagogies (crumly, 2015; dewey, 1997; gruenewald, 2003). figure 1 an overview of the stories of human migration curriculum when youth dialogue 216 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. situating the proposed model within a broader educational landscape this section explains how the model relates to existing practices related to engaging young people around the topic of human migration, and how the study design relates to prior theory and research. efforts to engage youth around the topic of human migration numerous individuals and institutions, including facing history and ourselves, migrantas, pulitzer center for crisis reporting, the advocates for human rights, the unhcr, and voice of witness are concerned with developing thoughtful migration-related educational materials that might serve as a counterpoint to the kinds of prevailing public narratives described above and/or invite young people to ask critical questions about migration and how it is represented. voice of witness, for instance, uses oral histories to bring attention to human rights issues; their curriculum introduces migrant voices into classroom conversations about migration as a way to humanize political debates about the issues. similarly, the advocates for human rights immigrant stories curriculum offers lessons based on videos created by immigrants, and provides a historical overview of immigration policy and immigrant experience in the united states as a way to help contextualize and humanize conversations about migration. one notable new initiative, reimagining migration, explicitly aims to shift the ways in which migration is viewed and talked about in contemporary society, in part by providing important historical context and points of comparison. this study is based on an experimental educational intervention that likewise sought to change the conversation about migration among young people but within an online environment that connected youth with one another and enabled them to learn from one another’s stories and perspectives. design-based research approaches enable researchers to explore new pedagogic possibilities in authentic contexts that reflect real-world possibilities and complexities (the design-based research collective, 2003). there is an urgent need to offer young people opportunities to engage thoughtfully around the topic of human migration, and educators need new tools and approaches now. furthermore, this kind of research goes well beyond designing, testing, and/or evaluating a single program or intervention: there is a concern to understand and distill broader principles that could be applied in other contexts and indeed, the pedagogic framework presented here is intended to have wide applicability. the design and research components of out of eden learn are inseparable and will continue to inform one another through ongoing iterative cycles (dawes duraisingh, kane & sheya, 2018 march; 2018 april). related educational theory and research design-based research builds on existing knowledge and research to try to create promising learning conditions before studying what learners choose to do in that environment and then iterating on the design. this study draws on constructivist, learner-centered education principles many of which have been central to and even articulated by project zero where this study was based (e.g., blythe, 1998; gardner, 1985; tishman, 2018; tishman, jay & perkins, 1993). that is, young people are seen to actively construct knowledge rather than passively receive it, and productive learning environments are seen to be ones in which individual students are given opportunities to develop their own ideas and “thinking dispositions” through a variety of modalities. at the same time, the curriculum was influenced by 217 global education review 5(4) research related to progression in historical understanding (ashby, gordon & lee, 2005; lee & shemilt, 2003; 2004) in terms of envisaging what nuanced understanding of migration could look like, and how students might interpret different accounts related to it. given the massive influence of the media and the problematic ways in which migration is often depicted, aspects of the study were also inspired by critical media literature (baker-bell, stanborough & everett, 2017; goldman, booker & mcdermott, 2008; morrell, 2013; morrell & duncan-andrade, 2007). critical media pedagogy equips young people to interrogate the media that surrounds them and encourages them to create and share their own media to tell their stories and those of their communities. the advent of social media and other online venues makes the role of the news media more immediate and far reaching and raises new concerns about the provenance and veracity of so-called news sources; it also provides opportunities for new voices to be heard and may even provide a space for young people to proactively address the impact of having their stories—and the stories of their communities— misrepresented in the news media (baker-bell, stanbrough & everett, 2017; jenkins et al., 2016). the study should also be situated within a broader movement loosely labeled global education or global citizenship education (boix mansilla & jackson, 2011; gaudelli, 2016; hull & hellmich, 2017) and, more specifically, global digital exchange. this trend manifests itself in many ways and to varying degrees in schools and informal learning environments. in this case, the actual topic of migration is one of global relevance. meanwhile, the act of placing youth together in online dialogue reflects the proliferation of global digital exchange programs that seek to connect youth from around the world (e.g., e-twinning, global cities, global nomads, iearn, reach the world). while this study was not designed to embody or promote a particular approach to global education, it is compatible with theories related to the rehabilitated concept of cosmopolitanism (appiah, 2006; hansen, 2011; hull & hellmich, 2017), that seeks to go beyond tolerating difference “to reimagining, appreciating, and learning with it” (hansen, 2011, p.1). indeed, the study’s online laboratory arguably exemplifies what others have dubbed “everyday cosmopolitanism” in that students’ learning is rooted in authentic, ground-level conversations with other youth (hull & stornaiuolo, 2014; james, 2016, september), in ways designed to encourage them to open up and engage with one another. the concept of changing the conversation reflects broader attempts to promote digital media literacy and civic action among youth online (james, gruner & mullen, 2016). it is also informed by efforts to promote greater moral sensitivity and respectful curiosity that can otherwise be conspicuously lacking in online spaces (james, 2016; kreikemeier & james, 2018). methods as noted above, this study adopted a designbased research approach, whereby practice and research were intertwined. the specific data came from three primary sources: semistructured interviews with educators, student post-survey responses, and student work and comments posted on the out of eden learn platform. interviews were conducted with 14 high school educators who had implemented the stories of human migration curriculum: see appendix a for a streamlined version of the protocol. they came from argentina, australia, canada, indonesia, singapore, and seven geographically disparate us states. the interviews were conducted in english via skype, audio-recorded, and transcribed during the spring of 2017. the questions touched on the teachers’ motivations for participating, their own and their students’ learning experiences, and when youth dialogue 218 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. how the curriculum fit into the bigger picture of their teaching. for the purposes of this paper, the transcripts were analyzed to look for signs of resonance with student work and survey responses, and to provide important contextual information regarding how educators were interpreting and implementing the curriculum. one teacher in the bronx, new york, for example, incorporated it into a course on public humanities and also invited her students—many of whom were migrants—to create spoken word poetry about their learning experiences. another teacher, based in utah in the united states wove it into a photography course because he wanted his students to broaden their horizons and learn to listen carefully to other people’s stories. meanwhile, english language teachers in indonesia and australia were looking for compelling ways to help their students develop language skills and engage with a relevant contemporary issue. in all cases, the teachers chose to enroll their classes in the study. it was then up to the teachers if they made participation a mandatory part of their curriculum or something optional for their students. the two learning groups with the highest levels of participation were selected in order to examine student work, out of a total of eight groups: one from fall 2016 and one from spring 2017. the 140 students in the sample, all teens, came from argentina, australia, canada, china, indonesia, singapore, and the united states (five different states). the pseudonymous nature of the platform meant that detailed demographic data were not collected for individual students. however, some students were enrolled in elite private institutions while others attended public schools, and some were in classes that were racially and ethnically diverse while others were in more demographically homogenous settings. their learning contexts included history, social studies, journalism, photography, and english language classes. meanwhile, post-survey responses from 65 students from a variety of learning groups were collected. the post-survey was designed to capture what students thought they had learned about human migration, their overall experiences, and what, if anything, they thought they might now do differently (appendix b). some but not all of the survey responses were by the same students whose work and comments were analyzed. student work from the platform, with all accompanying comments, was exported from the platform—that is, the data were converted from a social media format into a spreadsheet for initial analysis. the student work included their visual and written responses to the activities outlined in figure 1 above, with all posts and comments in english. in total, the authors examined 485 pieces of student work, as well as accompanying dialogue threads. the initial analysis involved the three authors open coding 50 pieces of student work and associated dialogue threads. the coding was loosely informed by a constructivist approach to grounded theory which involved line-by-line coding and using the gerund form to describe closely what the authors were seeing in the data without imposing prior expectations or assumptions (charmaz, 2006). the authors took careful note of what they saw students doing (e.g., making personal connections to peers’ migration stories or critically analyzing news articles) and saying (e.g., stating that they had learned the importance of trying to understand other people’s perspectives or that they now felt motivated to follow migration in the news more carefully). the authors’ analytic approach was inevitably informed by their educational aspirations in that they were likely to notice students doing things that reflected the learning goals of the curriculum design; however, they also wanted to learn about the possibilities of students’ thinking about migration more openendedly and in this sense, the online space served as a laboratory for more naturalistic 219 global education review 5(4) investigation. it is important to note that for practical reasons the data were already collected when the analysis began: therefore, initial analyses could not inform subsequent rounds of data collection as is typically the case in the use of grounded theory. emergent themes were consolidated into an initial codebook comprised of ten primary categories and 44 sub codes. the ten primary categories were as follows: understanding complexity, connection making, expressing interest, awareness of positionality, exploring identity, showing critical awareness, willingness to engage, insensitivity or explicit lack of interest, over generalizations or simplistic statements, and not applying critical thinking skills to sources of information. using this initial codebook, the authors divided up the entire data set by student class and analyzed the data using coding software, periodically meeting to compare findings and review puzzles with the codebook. the 65 sets of survey responses were also divided among the three authors and analyzed in the same way; the survey responses complemented the publicly posted work and comments in that they served as private reflections and yielded insights, for example, into how students thought their perspectives on migration had shifted. the codebook was further streamlined to remove redundancies, with the ten primary categories consolidated into three categories, which at this point were labelled respectful curiosity and engagement, nuanced understanding, and critical awareness, including self-awareness. the codebook contained definitions of the three main categories, the subcodes which the authors believed fell within the scope of and helped explicate each of the three main categories, notes about inclusion and exclusion criteria, and examples of each code. the authors also developed an initial visual representation of the revised codes and subcodes in the spirit of sharing emerging findings with educators and developing a useful tool for them (dawes duraisingh, kane & sheya, 2017, september). next, the authors re-coded their assigned portions of the set of 485 pieces according to the revised categories. 76 pieces of student work were also coded independently by all three authors to establish consistency in coding. while practical limitations prevented the authors from arriving at a precise inter-rater reliability statistic, there was a high degree of consensus among them, with any remaining ambiguities of application being resolved and the codes further clarified and refined. most ambiguities involved the “negative” codes, which involved a judgement call in terms of which comments strayed into overgeneralization, overconfidence, and/or othering, as discussed in a later section below. the pedagogic framework was then revised in light of this further coding (dawes duraisingh, kane & sheya, 2018, march) (figure 2). findings the visual representation presented in figure 2 is intended to evoke the metaphor of a kaleidoscope: the various parts are interconnected and can come together as well as expand or recombine in different ways. the framework is intended as a roadmap or set of aspirations. it is not suggested that every student be expected to demonstrate every aspect of the diagram; however, taken together the elements form a composite of the richest and most encouraging work, comments, and reflections from the data that were analyzed for this study. the diagram is color-coded according to three broad aspects of learning. the pink shapes represent the affective or attitudinal qualities the researchers saw develop among young people as they engaged around the topic of human migration; the blue shapes represent the kinds of substantive understandings they developed; the green shapes convey the dimensions of critical awareness that are when youth dialogue 220 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. figure 2 a visual representation of the out of eden learn pedagogic framework for engaging young people around the topic of human migration (dawes duraisingh, kane & sheya, 2017) important for navigating this topic in insightful and sensitive ways. at the center of the diagram and stretching across it are the core design principles of the intervention, which aspired to help foster the attitudes, understandings, and capacities identified. below the kaleidoscope, in gray, are the three o’s of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering, which were identified as challenges. in what follows, the dimension of curiosity and engagement is first unpacked, in part because the majority of students made comments that reflected this dimension of the framework. next, a synthesis of the potential challenges is presented: the three o’s of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. the remaining two categories 221 global education review 5(4) nuanced understanding and critical awareness are then discussed. curiosity and engagement this category is concerned with students’ stances or attitudes towards the topic. are students asking questions of one another that are respectful in tone and which suggest a genuine desire to find out more about their own and other people’s stories, lives, and perspectives? are they listening respectfully and empathetically to one another, especially when peers are sharing their own or their loved one’s stories of migration? where appropriate, are they actively making connections to their own experiences? the framework takes a broad approach towards students’ actions or intentions to engage, which may or may not be explicitly civic in nature: for example, do students express an interest in getting involved in discussions or debates, learning or sharing more about the topic, or taking some kind of civic action? responds with sensitivity to others’ stories and perspectives this triangle is about being attuned and attentive to what others are saying, as well as responding to them thoughtfully and with respect. importantly, it invokes the act of listening. first and foremost, students responded with warmth and appreciation to one another, recognizing and honoring their peers’ work and expressing genuine gratitude for the opportunity to dialogue. the following examples are typical: “first off, wow. the detail and time you put into the drawing of your personal migration stories is phenomenal!”; “hello mag816! i really enjoyed reading your post! i am amazed at the amount of effort you put into the video!”; “thank you for taking time to read my post and leaving me some comments.” students also expressed admiration and even reverence for students who shared their own or other people’s migration stories, specifically naming what they appreciated. for instance: i find it so interesting that even throughout the hardships you faced, not just with the move, but also your parents’ divorce, that you kept a positive outlook on the journey itself. you were introduced to new people and new things and you embraced that, i admire that so much! sometimes students responded with sensitivity to one another by asking questions to explore an issue and/or consider another perspective: this is a very thought provoking post. i agree with you that borders are a big part of our society today … if you were an immigrant from another country trying to get into america and you had the same name as a known terrorist and they wouldn't let you in, how would you feel? in other cases, their questions seemed designed to elicit deeper emotional sharing. a student said, “it must of [sic] been hard, going all the way from africa to the united states. how was it adjusting to the new environment? why did you move?” or “what was the hardest thing you had to adjust to, the new culture, people, living arrangements, etc.?” in some cases, rather than endorsing a post or asking questions, students responded with sensitivity by pushing back or holding their ground. maintaining a respectful tone, this student expresses disagreement and even raises a moral challenge related to the structural issues that can determine immigrant experiences: i see your point definitely, but i personally do not agree with it... i do agree with your views on legal immigration as opposed to illegal, but i do believe it is important to remember that not everyone has the same opportunities or abilities, and that sometimes it’s necessary to break rules in order to survive. when youth dialogue 222 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. another student respectfully maintains her position when challenged by another student: “i see what you’re saying, but it is still a belief of mine that in a lot of cases, privacy can be based off of fear of being judged. i am just stating my opinion and observations from my life.” recognizes and values personal connections to the topic this component is about more than making connections between one’s own life or family story and those of other people, though that is certainly important and to be encouraged. it is also about feeling part of or included in the bigger and unfolding story of human migration, which in one way or another ultimately implicates us all. there were numerous instances of students making connections, noting similarities, relating empathetically, and saying things like, “your story reminds me of mine.” beyond these more interpersonal connections, students also reported they were now seeing the world and the people in it as connected, making statements like, “it changed my thinking of the world. having heard different stories portrays a sense of togetherness which i never knew before,”[and] “i learned that we humanity need to come together and recognize each other as one.” often students responded to stories by making connections to their own lived experiences. this student connects to another’s story and then goes on to discuss human nature more broadly, as well as her perception of the current political climate in the united states. i really like this story. seeing [your neighbor] overcome all of his odds gave me a wonderful feeling of happiness for him, and i really enjoyed learning more about him (through you!). i too can connect with this on a personal level. in the summer of 2010, my mother fell ill with cancer and i had to move with her temporarily to seoul. i started third grade there, and despite the class being 100% korean, i was bullied a lot during my time there. when an outsider tries to enter a tight-knit community, they can face a lot of hostility and, in your case, potentially abuse based on their appearance. it is a huge obstacle which prevents humans from interacting with each other positively and productively, and with the election of our new president, i don't see that ending any time soon. motivated to take action and/or continue learning about the topic this triangle points to future-looking shifts in motivation or engagement. “engagement” is defined broadly to include things such as keeping attuned to current news stories involving migration, making an effort to be thoughtful and supportive to newcomers, or advocating and/or volunteering for organizations that work with or are run by refugee and migrant communities. some students reported that they gained skills related to taking action. one student suggested that she now felt better equipped to participate in online dialogue: “now i'm better at interacting with people on social media and i have more knowledge of human migration.” most of the evidence for this aspect of the framework comes from individual student survey data. students’ critical engagement with news media was a notable outcome of the learning experience and will be further unpacked below in the critical awareness section. here, the findings focus on students’ inclinations to do something, either new or differently. numerous students reported gaining critical skills which have changed the ways they read and interpret news media: “i now read media outlets with more "caution" knowing that it is important to 223 global education review 5(4) have an opinion of your own rather than having it easily swayed by how media portrays certain issues” or “i read with an open mind and i don't believe everything i read.” meanwhile, some students reported feeling empowered and equipped to discuss the topic of migration with friends and family members for example, “now that i know of this situation i love discussing with my grandparents. this was something i did not discuss before, but now i can do it.” another student expressed that she is more attentive to topics connected to migration and “can give deeper opinions” when she engages in conversations around migration. several claimed that they were now making more effort to engage with migrant students in their school communities. for instance, one student said, because of the current immigration issues in the united states and this learning experience i find myself more involved in the news media and just interacting with the people around me who have different cultures and backgrounds and asking them what they think as well as conversing with them in general about this topic. many students also indicated an intention or desire to take civic action, and even grappled with the complexity of doing so. some specifically mentioned advocating for more action on issues pertaining to the syrian refugee crisis: “i hope president trump sends more people and gets more involved because these arena’t just people, they are human beings just like us and deserve the help we can give them. ”others" spoke more generally about being kind to strangers or newcomers: “perhaps we can offer them a kind word, a smile or perhaps even instructions on other ways to reach their destination if they are in a rush! i think a small action will go a long way!” the following student grapples with complexity and uncertainty and even elicits help from other participants to come up with ways to offer help: i think that it is very important to not just notice what is happening with the refugees, but to show that there is some hope for the migrants. i am wondering though what you think people should do to help these refugees? like many people, i do want to help these refugees, but many people do not understand how to. the three o’s: overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering before proceeding to the positive cognitive aspects of the framework—namely, nuanced understanding and critical awareness—it is important to discuss some challenges associated with engaging youth around the topic of migration and indeed, of engaging them in intercultural dialogue more generally. the authors’ distilled coding categories for these challenges are the three o’s: overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. overgeneralization involves students defaulting to single stories about migration or migrants, making sweeping or vague statements about migrants, and glossing over similarities and/or differences among different migration stories. overconfidence is characterized by students showing a lack of appropriate humility about their own knowledge about the topic, over-asserting themselves as representatives of particular groups, or assuming that their own experiences and/or perspectives are the default. othering, meanwhile, involves a tendency to romanticize or exotify other people’s lives or circumstances or to make migrants an object of pity in uncritical or even disrespectful ways that appear to cross the line from thoughtful compassion. while conceptually distinct, in practice the three o’s are often intertwined. furthermore, overgeneralization, overconfidence, and when youth dialogue 224 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. othering could appear in comments that otherwise reflected the more positive elements of curiosity and engagement, nuanced understanding, or critical awareness. as noted in the methods section, the authors had difficulty reaching agreement as to when a post or comment strayed into the territory of one or more of the three o’s. for instance, given the high number of us students participating in the program, it is perhaps unsurprising that several comments tapped into the idea of the american dream, in ways that could sound overgeneralizing or overconfident. in the following example, the student’s comment was probably intended to endorse or validate a story that another student had shared: “stories like this are always so nice to hear. anyone can make it in america if they work hard, despite hardship; america is the land of opportunity.” however, the comment arguably sounds patronizing, particularly to those who don’t feel that this overarching narrative is representative of their individual experiences. in other cases, it was difficult to distinguish between pity and empathy. one student, describing her growing awareness of migration issues after reading various news articles stated, “i realized how hard life is for these people. i now know that even if this situation seems so unreal, it happens every day.” here there is overgeneralizing at play but the phrase “these people” also puts a distance between herself and the people she has learned about in ways that hint at othering and assume that none of her peers have had direct experience of migration. sometimes students’ comments suggested othering and overgeneralizing in less subtle ways. in particular, students expressed binary ways of thinking about migrant experiences and issues related to migration, often in ways reflective of dominant political and media discourses in the global north. for example, one student set up a binary between what constitutes “desirable” versus “undesirable” migrants: from my point of view immigrants can be a problem as well as a solution it depends of [sic] what kind of people they are, if they have studied and they work to help the countries, they are a solution, but if they haven’t studied and the government is spending the money on people that don’t work and only make problems they are a problem. it is understandable that there would be challenges associated with engaging diverse youth around the complex and potentially sensitive topic of migration. intercultural encounters, while essential, are rife with risk: “misunderstandings, misreadings, and misjudgements are endemic in cosmopolitanminded human interaction, as they are in most forms of communication that come to mind” (hansen, 2014, p.9). some of the associated challenges involve our human proclivity for latching onto single stories (adiche, 2009; kahnemann, 2011), our tendency to favor people like ourselves and stereotype those who appear different, and the cognitive and affective difficulties of perspective taking (boix mansilla, 2015, january; dawes duraisingh, 2015, february). in this study, all communication was in english meaning that english language learners (ells) were not given the opportunity to fully convey the nuance of their thinking in their native languages. for native english speakers and ells alike, linguistic norms or turns of phrase probably created unintended problems. further, the students in this study were in their early to late teens: an age when they are developmentally primed to distill life lessons and establish their own values in ways that can come across as overconfident or even patronizing (erikson, 1968; nakkula & toshalis, 2006). additionally, the immediacy of “insider” first-hand accounts, a feature of this study, can 225 global education review 5(4) lead to an exaggerated sense of learning the “truth” about certain cultures and the replacing of one single story with another. in this context, however, the majority of problematic comments were made about resources such as articles, videos, and other multimedia content that were part of the curriculum, rather than directly to or about other participating students and their stories. nuanced understanding this category is concerned with students’ substantive understanding of historical and contemporary migration. do they show awareness of some of the ways in which the will or determination of individual people interact with much bigger structural forces that are beyond their personal control—for example, climate change, war, economic forces, or religious or political persecution? do students demonstrate an understanding that individual migration experiences or people’s perceptions of migration are shaped by context—be that historical, geographical, political, economic, social, or religious? and do they appreciate that there is great diversity in terms of how different migration experiences play out, both across different contexts and situations and within the same communities or groups of migrants? explores both structural forces and individual motivation this first triangle is intended to represent a broad range of understandings related to the kinds of push and pull factors involved in human migration. the richest student work took account of individual human agency and bigger forces or contexts at play when explaining particular migration stories. for instance, one student described how her mother migrated from albania to the united states, escaping a communist regime that was persecuting her family. her mother had obtained a job at the us embassy because she was an outstanding student; she then succeeded in winning a scholarship to study at a us university. the student’s description accounts both for the broader political situation in eastern europe at the time and the individual lived experiences and desires of her mother. other students shared stories that showed how family friends or relatives were caught up in historical and economic forces that were bigger than themselves, even if they ultimately made some pivotal choices for themselves. recognizes difference and commonality across migration experiences the second triangle points to the wide diversity of migration experiences across humanity, as shaped by different historical, geographic, and political contexts. this aspect of understanding appears to be enhanced when peers from different contexts share stories with one another: students commented in the surveys, for instance, that they had learned from reading different posts that migration experiences can be extremely varied. at the same time, students may notice unexpected resonances across migration stories. students often reflected on the sheer diversity of migration stories. one student described her mother’s largely positive experience of migrating from malaysia to singapore but pointed out: “however, this is not representative of all the migrants. i have been researching about rural-urban migration in china and india recently, and though the migration does allow for more job opportunities, it does have many downsides and impacts on the person and the country.” one student spoke specifically about how the ability to read different stories broadened her understanding of migration: “hello! thank you for sharing about your grandparents’ story! ... it was quite interesting to realise that migration might not always be long term and more about the different reasons why people migrate and what migration is like in other countries.” others drew parallels between the when youth dialogue 226 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. past and present. lambasting the conservative news media in the united states, one student stated, “the refugees today are similar to the refugees escaping nazi germany in the past.” appreciates the complexity of individual experiences the third triangle points to the complexity of how individuals experience migration. individual migration stories can involve a dynamic blend, for example, of loss and gain, fear and hope, and connection to the old as well as adaptation to the new. one student described how her stepmother migrated as a child from cambodia as a refugee from the vietnam war. the journey involved walking to a series of refugee camps until they reached thailand and from there on to the united states. the student describes how that experience still shapes her stepmother’s behavior: “when she was crossing the border, her mother took all their clothes in order to sew pockets in the bands to make sure that they could keep their valuables. yay still sews pockets in her bras to keep her money in.” students often shared stories that reflected the ways in which migrants develop new cultural practices without relinquishing practices related to their heritage. other students shared their own experiences and the complexity of emotions involved. for instance, one student recounted how he left mexico city for a smaller town for his father’s work. however, his parents divorced shortly afterwards and he returned to mexico city. later on, his mother met a man from argentina, got married and they all moved to buenos aires. he commented: “at first i was very shy so it was difficult for me to adapt to the new form of life but even so this journey made me see the different traditions of people and let me make new good friends and i am proud of it.” another student spoke of his family relocating from new york to california for his father’s work at the end of 2nd grade. “moving was probably one of the hardest things i have ever done. i remember it being so hard to leave my friends, house, school and everything i knew.” in this context, some of the richest dialogue was born of students sharing their own life lessons and firsthand migration stories. critical awareness this category is fundamentally about perspective-taking. it is one thing for students to care about migration and to understand its complexity: it is another for them to think critically and reflectively about their own and other people’s perspectives on migration. one aspect of this category concerns critical media literacy: do students show an ability to engage critically and discerningly with media stories and other sources about migration, rather than dealing with them as straightforward pieces of information? do they recognize that understanding other people’s perspectives is challenging and are they sensitive to the limits of their own understanding regarding the topic of migration and people’s migration experiences? are they able to reflect on the ways in which their own perspectives have been shaped by context and experience? some aspects of critical awareness can be difficult for young people, and indeed adults, to develop but it is vital for educators to try to foster these capacities in their students to help them navigate the complexity of the world today. critically engages with news media when completing activities that explicitly invited them to engage in analysis of news media, students responded with different levels of complexity. for example, some emphasized figuring out the “truth” not a trivial task in the current news media climate. for example, one student commented on the way in which “word choice can be manipulated,” adding, “it is really 227 global education review 5(4) kind of scary, because how can anyone really know the truth about immigrants in turkey if articles on the topic voice opinion instead of facts!” meanwhile, other students commented on which kinds of media they believed more trustworthy than others, at times associating level of detail with “thoroughness of facts” or declaring some genres such as oral interviews or videos more inherently trustworthy than written articles. some students expressed awareness of and concern for how media can “dehumanize” refugees and other migrants. others were suspicious of the media or government in a different way, accusing them of hiding or withholding information; others seemed to determine the trustworthiness of news media sources according to their own political assumptions. the most nuanced responses involved students actively considering the specifics of individual pieces: the purpose, intended audience, likely perspective or affiliations of the author, and/or use and effect of particular language and visuals. they analyzed the tone and visuals of specific news sources and how certain moves made by journalists were intended to elicit particular emotions or reactions by news consumers, whether it be sympathy, rage, or indignation. as indicated in the section on curiosity and engagement, some students also reported changing their news media consumption habits and practices. recognizes the importance and complexity of perspective-taking perspective-taking is a crucial aspect of critical awareness that is, students valuing opportunities to try to understand other people’s perspectives, while also being aware that perspective-taking is not a simple task. people’s perspectives are shaped by a complex and shifting combination of factors including personal background, life experiences, social contexts and movements, systemic forces, and interactions with different narratives and perspectives. young people need to be introduced to different perspectives in order to develop new perspectives on their own lives and world views—something that many students recognized as being inherently valuable to them. many students reflected both on the platform and in their surveys that reading other students’ posts alerted them to new things, either in the world at large or in their own environments. one student appreciated the opportunity to learn from a variety of migration stories. “i was able to see different perspectives and other stories that were unique. i was also able to share my own thoughts at the same time. this was a very different experience [to be able to] look at stories through different perspectives of different people.” while the authors believe that young people should be encouraged to try to understand different perspectives, for participants who have not actively migrated themselves, understanding the perspectives of those caught up in forced migration is not an easy cognitive or emotional task. some students acknowledged this difficulty and even expressed reservations on the grounds that they might unwittingly offend; they saw the need to be sensitive and not assume knowledge, particularly given the sensitivity of migration as an issue: i think that it is challenging to discuss these topics because there's always the chance that you might unknowingly say something that offends someone else, but it wasn’t intended that way ... i had to think hard about what i posted in case that it could offend someone, which is the last thing that i wanted. when youth dialogue 228 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). when youth dialogue: a pedagogic framework for changing the conversation about migration. global education review, 5 (4), 211235. exhibits awareness of own position, perspective, and shifts in thinking the content of the third triangle is intended to capture students’ ability and willingness to reflect on their own relationship to and understanding of migration, and how their relationship and thinking may be evolving or developing over time. they recognize that their own perceptions of migration are at least in part shaped by their own identities, backgrounds, and life experiences. one aspect of this dimension is students experiencing or embracing shifts in their perspectives regarding the topic of migration and/or shifts in their perceptions of migrants. for instance, one student left a comment for a peer: “wow i really enjoyed this post! you took this to a unique place that dealt with pressing social issues. i never really considered the negative borders that are around that i can't even see.” another reflected in their survey, “there was one poem that really hit me; it was a poem that took the views from an immigrant and a citizen of the united states and it really spoke to me and helped me realize both sides.” while this comment may oversimplify the range of possible opinions about migration, and refers specifically to the us context, it indicates an openness to looking at the topic from various vantage points. some students spoke about considering individuals in a new way or hesitating to think they know their story: “yes, i think about the students who come to our school from other countries much differently. some of them could have gone through a lot to come here in search of a better life, and i wouldn't even know it.” some reflected on the process of learning, and new habits of mind or attitudes that they developed as a result of engaging with other students around the topic of migration. one student reflected on the impact of a particular exchange: “as a result of my participation in this learning journey, i have begun to make an effort to become less judgmental and more understanding because i, now, have reflected on and realized my bad habit of subconsciously enforcing my own biases on others.” another student said “i feel that my participation in this learning journey taught me to consider the similarities and differences between cultures more so i could look at issues from multiple perspectives.” trying to take account of other or new perspectives sometimes led to shifts in perceptions or previously held assumptions. some students actively used the opportunity to reflect on themselves in new ways, including how their own perspectives on the world had been shaped. one student, for instance, commented in the survey: my interaction with [name] was one that i felt was extremely important because her insights really opened up my eyes, to understand and reflect on my own biases … reading about her experience where her first impression was proven wrong, made me reflect about the times in which i stubbornly labeled people by my first impressions of them. in this case, a peer talking about an impression being overcome provided an opportunity for her to reflect on her own tendency to make assumptions based on first impressions. a few students commented in more meta ways about how their own experiences and cultural context impacted their perceptions of migration. one student noted our limited ability to grasp other people’s experiences: “rules, norms, and boundaries or the ways in which we move around are culturally generated and our perception of what is normal is shaped by the environments in which we grew up.” one student, who personally experienced moving to canada from england, described how culture shock helped him to develop an ability to draw 229 global education review 5(4) comparisons among cultures and to not make assumptions about certain features of life. implications migration is an essential part of being human. yet at this critical moment—one marked by vast numbers of people on the move, divisive rhetoric, and the lightning-quick relaying of opinions and information around the world—it is perhaps more important than ever to offer educators guidance on how to engage youth around this significant yet potentially sensitive topic. this framework, grounded in an analysis of how young people actually responded to an experimental online curriculum that invited them to slow down, share stories, and make connections, highlights some of the opportunities and challenges involved. it is intended as an orienting tool or compass for educators and their students in many different contexts. it invites educators to support young people to develop curiosity and engagement, nuanced understanding, and critical awareness about migration and migrants. it also cautions against the three o’s of overgeneralization, overconfidence, and othering. inevitably the framework has limitations. while the study involved students located in different parts of the world and efforts were made to avoid the curriculum being overly uscentric, approximately half of the student participants were located in the united states, which impacted the types and range of experiences shared. a disproportionate number of resources were also created by organizations situated in the united states, even if they concerned stories taking place in other parts of the world. further research could determine the usefulness and resonance of the framework for educators and students located in contexts not included in this study. while recent migrants, including refugees, participated in the study, the majority of students were learning about migration rather than sharing their firsthand experiences of the kinds of global migration generally referred to by politicians and the media: how would the learning experiences have been different if the majority of participants were recent migrants? in addition, some essential aspects of the framework could be further developed and expanded. for example, it is vital to offer young people ample support and opportunities to analyze media reports on migration and to critically examine the ways in which migration and migrants are represented. students also need learning experiences that foster other elements of critical awareness such as perspective-taking and self-awareness. for contexts in which opportunities for online learning are limited, the framework could be applied to develop strategies for in-person sharing of sensitive migration stories, as well as to promote dialogue around these stories. indeed, further investigation could lead to the development of additional practical applications and pedagogic tools for all aspects of the framework in ways that might complement work that is already going on in the field. the authors believe that the gesture of inviting young people to share their migration stories, and to listen carefully to those of others, has the potential to promote more nuanced, informed understanding of the topic of migration, as well as enhanced critical awareness. in this sense, the study builds on existing and emerging work on global digital exchange to show how such programs can be leveraged to build substantive knowledge about an important and timely topic in ways that draw inspiration from student-centered pedagogies. contemporary conditions demand that young people be given meaningful opportunities to engage around the topic of migration in ways that honor their individual perspectives and lived experiences. young people need to learn both with and from each other so that they might develop the capacity and inclination to both participate in—and more importantly— when youth dialogue 230 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: durasingh, liz dawes, sheya, sarah, & kane, emi (2018). 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(2018). race, criminal justice, and migration control: enforcing the boundaries of belonging. oxford: oxford university press. zuckerman, e. (2013). rewire: digital cosmopolitans in the age of connection. new york, ny: w. w. norton. about the author(s) liz dawes duraisingh is a lecturer at the harvard graduate school of education and a research associate at project zero, a research center at the harvard graduate school of education. there she co-directs several projects including out of eden learn, an online learning community and research project that promotes intercultural inquiry and exchange among school-age youth. she was formerly a high school history teacher, working in england and australia. sarah sheya is a researcher and media specialist at project zero at the harvard graduate school of education where she coordinates the out of eden learn project. she previously worked in the nonprofit sector as a youth program director and educator. her fields of study include multimedia journalism, arab studies, and the arabic language. emi kane is director of programs for the abundance foundation. she has a background as a journalist, educator, and facilitator and has worked with out of eden learn since its inception. http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/between-borders-american-migrant-crisis http://pulitzercenter.org/reporting/between-borders-american-migrant-crisis 234 global education review 5(4) appendix a interview protocol for educators • what initially drew you as an educator to the migration learning journey? was it what you expected? • what would you say were some highlights for you of this learning journey? • were there any particular challenges or disappointments for you? • what has been the biggest takeaway from this learning journey for you as an educator? • i know you were participating in the migration learning journey in the context of ... [e.g., your 11th grade english course]. can you say a bit about how the migration learning journey connected to what you were already doing in the classroom? • did you adapt or supplement the learning journey to suit your learning context in any way? • would you say this learning journey fit in with other learning approaches, priorities or values emphasized at your school – or did you maybe feel that you were going “out on a limb” or even doing something at odds with how things are usually done at your school? • when you told your students about this learning journey, how did you explain the purpose of doing it to them? what was your students’ initial reaction? • how would you describe your students’ level of engagement or interest in this learning journey overall? • were there particular resources or activities or moments of the learning journey that they seemed particularly engaged in? why do you think that was? did anything else particularly engage them? • conversely, which aspects of the learning journey seemed less appealing to them? why do you think that was? was there anything else that didn’t really engage them? • did you notice any differences across students in terms of their level of engagement, interest, or participation? why do you think that might have been? • what do you think your students got out of taking the migration learning journey? • is there anything you think they will carry with them after the learning journey or maybe apply to other areas of their lives? 235 global education review 5(4) appendix b post-survey questions for students • did you learn anything new about human migration by participating in this learning journey? if so, please describe an example of something you learned. what contributed to your learning? please be specific. • was there a specific interaction with another student or other students that felt important to you on this learning journey? if so, please describe. • what aspects of this learning journey did you particularly like or appreciate? (you might want to think about platform design, curriculum activities, specific resources, interactions with other students, or something else.) • based on your experiences during this learning journey, what do you think is challenging in terms of learning about or discussing the topic of human migration? • are you doing anything differently now as a result of participating in this learning journey (e.g., in the ways in which you interpret news media, interact with people around you, interact on social media, talk about migration, think about the world)? please explain. • do you have any suggestions for how we might improve or change this learning journey? • how much do you think you learned about human migration by participating in this learning journey? (likert scale: nothing, a little bit, a fair amount, a lot) • now that you’ve participated in this learning journey, how much more are you following the topic of human migration in the news? (likert scale: no more than before, a little bit more, quite a bit more, a lot more) 8 global education review 5(2) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: navarro-cruz, giselle, emilia, & luschei, thomas f. (2018). international evidence on effective early childhood care and education programs: a review of best practices. global education review, 5 (2), 8-27. international evidence on effective early childhood care and education programs: a review of best practices giselle emilia navarro-cruz california state polytechnic university, pomona thomas f. luschei claremont graduate university abstract in recent years, the united states has made substantial progress in the quality and availability of early childhood education (ece), especially in the areas of special education and ece programs for low-income families. nonetheless, there is room for improvement in terms of access and quality. to improve access and quality in ece, the united states can look to best practices in ece in other countries. a total of 49 sources were reviewed to develop an in-depth understanding of both ece in the united states and international ece best practices. sources were chosen based on relevance and quality and included books, articles, and policy reports. these sources covered the ece best practices in increasing funding, access, and quality. from developed to developing countries, this review provides an understanding of best practices in ece throughout the world that the united states can learn from to enhance ece for the wellbeing of children as well as society. keywords early education, best practices in ecce, us ecce, international ecce introduction in the past decade there has been an abundance of research indicating the importance of early childhood education (ece). an awareness of the importance of school readiness and an increase in the female work force have led to a need to expand high quality ece in the united states (us). the us has gradually extended ece quality and access, but in order to meet the increasing demands and further enhance the quality of care for all children, much more progress is required. international evidence on innovative and successful ece practices can help _________________________________ corresponding author giselle emilia navarro-cruz, early childhood studies program, college of education and integrative studies, california state polytechnic university, pomona 3801 w. temple ave, pomona, ca 91768 email: gnavarrocruz@cpp.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:gnavarrocruz@cpp.edu 9 global education review 5(2) the us improve its ece policies and practices. the objective of this literature review is to inform researchers and policymakers of international ece policies and programs that the us can learn from to enhance access and quality. this paper will begin with a description of the methods taken to conduct the literature review. this review will first focus on the importance of ece and a review of the current ece system policy in the us. this will be followed by a discussion of funding, access, and quality in the us. special consideration to where the us has made substantial effort to enhance ece as well as where the us needs to improve in terms of access and quality is presented. then a brief review of how the us has already looked at international practices to enhance its ece is described by pointing at the implementation of certain international ece philosophies. we then present our review of effective ece practices and policies around the world, focusing on funding, access, and quality. the review concludes with a discussion of how the us can apply effective ece international programs and practices identified in the review and a discussion of the limitations of the review. method we conducted a literature review in order to provide a comprehensive understanding of international ece policies, practices, and philosophies. this literature review includes all studies that met a set of criteria: books, articles and policy reports were selected for the review based on relevance, quality, and empirical nature. we used electronic data bases, including eric, google scholar and jstor; scholar recommendations; articles from journals; and policy reports to collect the data. relevance of the topic was our first criterion for inclusion. we first determined whether the document provided information regarding international evidence of innovative ece practices, policies and/or philosophies. although our focus was primarily on current documents that dealt with innovative ece, we did not limit our research by year, as past evidence in innovative ece is also important. the literature review expanded to include both developed and developing countries to get a wider perspective of ece practices. the quality of the sources played a large role as to whether they were included in the review. the quality of empirical studies was determined through an assessment by the researchers as to whether (1) the methods were justified (sample size, validity and reliability of the measure, and appropriate statistical approach), (2) the research design and analytic strategy were appropriate to our research questions, and (3) whether the study offered sufficient evidence to support its conclusions. we also assessed quality according to whether sources were published in peer-reviewed journals. in the case of non-peer-reviewed policy reports, quality was additionally assessed through the source used to obtain the data (that is, only well-known policy report data sources were used). the empirical nature of the sources was the final factor that was taken into consideration to provide a comprehensive and reliable literature review. the focus on empirical work was used to highlight existing evidence relating to the importance of ece. first, journal articles were included if they offered quantitative and/or qualitative conclusions. second, although policy reports were not peer reviewed they were retrieved from well-known sources in the field (such as unesco, oecd, and nichd) and used for evidence regarding specific country ece policies, practices or philosophies, as well as statistics and current data. third, book chapters that offered empirical evidence and analysis were included. we did not include any sources international ece best practice 10 that presented only opinion or theories, without offering empirical evidence. a variety of sources were used in order to obtain a large range of data regarding the topic. we conducted electronic database searches of eric, jstor, education abstracts, as a well as table-of-contents searches of widely recognized education journals, including child development, early childhood research, applied developmental science, early childhood research quarterly, and developmental psychology. we also searched publications indices of educationally relevant institutions such as the national center for education statistics, unicef, oecd and unesco. we also consulted scholars for suggestions of relevant works to include in this study. scholars were professors in the fields of early education and international comparative education. in total, we identified 46 sources that we reviewed thoroughly to identify the major themes of ece funding, coverage, quality, children with disabilities, child health and wellbeing, immersion ece for children with different language and cultural backgrounds, family, parental, and community role in ece, ece teachers, and pedagogical material. these themes will be discussed below. importance of ece evidence on the importance of ece is important because it can persuade us education decision makers to improve ece policies and practices. ece is profoundly important, as an abundance of research has found that an early start is related to better cognitive, social, emotional, and behavioral development (burchinal et al., 2011; magnuson, meyers, ruhm, & waldfogel, 2004). the quality of experiences in the first three years of life has a lifelong impact on how the brain develops (bredekamp & copple, 1997). furthermore, the academic trajectories of children are established in their early education (entwisle & alexander, 1993; kowaleski-jones & duncan, 1999). for example, compared to children who did not attend high quality ece centers, children who attended high quality ece centers prior to primary school had better reading and math skills in kindergarten and first grade even after controlling for the child, family, neighborhood, and school characteristics (magnuson et al., 2004). in addition, children who received a high quality early education had significantly better school achievement, social adjustment, and grade retention (magnuson et al., 2004). a study conducted by the national institute of child health and human development (nichd), demonstrated that children who spent more time in high quality child care centers in their first five years of life had higher memory and language skills, even after controlling for the quality and amount of non-maternal care the child experienced (nichd, 2002). more specifically, children who attended a quality child care center at the age of three or four demonstrated higher cognitive development and academic skills when compared to peers of their same age (nichd, 2003). evidently, high quality ece is important for all children but it is especially beneficial for children living in low-income households (calman, & tarr-whelan, 2005; hart and risley, 1995). hart and risley (1995) found that lowincome three-year-old children’s vocabulary was significantly less developed than their peers. having the opportunity to enter a preschool program provides children the cognitive stimulating environment and opportunity for interactions with attentive caregivers (bradley, burchinal, & casey, 2001; hubbs-tait et al., 2002). unfortunately, children in low-income families are less likely to be in a high-quality center in comparison to wealthier children (pew research, 2015). 11 global education review 5(2) high quality ece is not only important for children, but also for society as a whole (schweinhart, irish, lombardi, 1993; kagitcibasi, sunar, bekman, baydar, & cemalcilar, 1993; heckman, 2006). the high scope perry preschool study found that children at risk of developmental delays benefited significantly from a high quality early education and these benefits lasted a lifetime and led to less government assistance. children who took part in the program had higher monthly earnings, were more likely to own a home, and were more likely to graduate high school compared to children who did not. the study also found a total benefit/cost ratio of $17.07 for each $1 invested in the program by the time participants turned 40 years old (kagitcibasi, et al., 2009). nobel prize winning economist james heckman (2006) has stated that ece “promotes productivity in the economy and in society at large” (p. 2). he indicated that the return on investment in ece exceeds investment in any other period of human development. barnett (2000) supported these statements by noting that the government expenditure on criminal behaviors for children who received high quality ece was reduced by $95,000 us dollars for a 27-year-old. evidently, high quality ece is important for children and society. understanding the benefits of high quality ece underscores the importance of increasing efforts to enhance access to high quality ece in the united states, as we argue below. ece in the united states the united states has taken gradual steps in enhancing ece for all children but more needs to be done in terms of access and quality. the following section will provide an overview of the triumphs and challenges the united states faces in providing ece funding, access, and quality for all children. funding as the value and need for ece increase, the need for ece funding increases. while efforts have been made by some presidents to increase funding to ece, more needs to be done. in 1990, president bush established the national education goals panel stating that by the year 2000 all children would start school at an earlier age. when president obama entered office, he proposed increasing early learning for children. although there was an increase in governmental awareness, the recession in 2008 had a great impact on federal government aid towards ece (barnett, et al., 2010). total spending by the states decreased, and per child spending declined by nearly $30 million (barnett et al., 2010). by 2014 the economy had recovered, and funding towards early education increased by one percent ($116 million) from 2010 (barnett, et al., 2015). nonetheless, the united states spends less than 0.47% of its gdp on ece, which is less than the oecd average of 0.6% (oecd-us, 2014). funding ece in the us is complex. most ece funding is not handled directly by the federal government, but rather by the states. federal funding is administered by the administration for children and families (acf) in the department of health and human services (dhhs) (kamerman, & gatenio-gabel, 2007). they are responsible for federal programs that promote the economic and social wellbeing of families, children, individuals, and communities (kamerman, & gatenio-gabel, 2007). at the state level, ece is administered by the state agency responsible for administering social services. the federal child care and development fund (ccdf) provides funding to the states to subsidize ece expenses of working parents whose family income is less than 85 percent of the state median income (kamerman, & gatenio-gabel, 2007). international ece best practice 12 funding levels in ece vary from state to state (barnett, et al., 2017). there is more funding for preschool aged children than for children three and under. as of 2015, there were 40 us states that funded preschool, with 29 of these states having an income requirement (barnett, s., carolan, m.e., squires, j.h., brown, k.c., & horowitz, m., 2015). these 40 states fund pre-k programs for four-year-olds. few states make significant efforts to serve children zero to three (not including special education) (barnett, et al., 2017). as of 2000, all states funded some sort of public kindergarten (kagan, 2005), which starts at age five and is an essential introduction to primary school in the us (nces, 2006). in 2010 california established the kindergarten readiness act (sb 1381), which stated that children entering kindergarten had to be five (therefore their fifth birthday had to be before the first day of school). this law also stated that children whose birthday was between the first day of school and the following december would receive a year of what would be called “transitional kindergarten.” transitional kindergarten is free and is taught by credentialed teachers. as of july 2015, teachers who are assigned to teach transitional kindergarten must have 24 units in ece, experience in a classroom setting with preschool age children (comparable to 24 ece units), or a child development teacher permit (california department of education, 2017). better funding for high quality ece programs is essential for the development of the 24.2 million children under age five in the us (forum on child and family statistics, 2016). reaching children younger than five is essential to meeting the growing demand for ece. unfortunately, the us does not provide sufficient services for children zero to five years of age (barnett, et al., 2015). shortage of public investment and dependence on the for-profit market to provide ece services have limited the accessibility of ece programs. as a result, the us as a whole performs weakly on child-wellbeing indices in comparison to european and other northern countries (unesco europe & north america, 2010). access funding is a key component to access as more funds are needed to provide access to ece for all children. access to ece in the united states has gradually increased. prior to 1960 the us government made little effort to prioritize ece programs, as it was uncommon for children to be cared for outside the home (levitan & alderman, 1975). the first federal ece policy emerged in the late 1960s when the war on poverty led to the head start program and the social security act (ssa) amendments of 1967 as a way to target ece shortfalls (barnett, 1993). the importance of ece has increased substantially since the late 1960’s due to an increase in women entering the workforce as well as an awareness of the importance of school readiness that has led to a greater push to access (howes et al., 2006). access to all children is important, but is particularly so for children from low-income households, children with disabilities, and children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds, especially immigrant children. access for low income children while ece is important for all children, it is particularly beneficial for children who live in low-income households (burchinal et al., 2011). while the us has developed programs such as early head start and head start to provide comprehensive education, nutrition, health, social well-being and other services for low income children and families, more needs to be done (gonzalez-mena, & eyer, 2009; love, chazan-cohen, raikes, & brooks-gunn, 2013; kline, & walters, 2016). low income and rural 13 global education review 5(2) communities have limited access to ece as many are considered childcare deserts. childcare deserts are defined as having an absence of an important commodity that results in limited access in the care of young children (dobbins, tercha, mccready, and liu, 2017). although the us has developed programs that provide access to low income children and their families access to ece, not all children living in low-income households have benefited from these programs and therefore an increase in funding is needed to expand access to all children living in low-income households. access to ece for children with disabilities increasing access for children with disabilities is just as important as increasing access for children from low-income households. while the us still struggles to provide access to ece for low-income children, it outperforms others in providing access to ece for children with disabilities. us inclusions in special education policies are noted to be the best among many countries (unesco europe & north america, 2010). the individuals with disabilities education act of 2004 ensured maximum access to the general education curriculum for students with disabilities (us department of education, 2010). as of 2014, there were 729,703 three to five-year olds served under the individuals with disabilities education act (idea) (national center for education statistics, 2015). access for children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds while the us excels in their access to ece for children with disabilities, they do poorly in providing access to children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds, especially for immigrant or displaced children. programs like head start encourage diversity but there is no national guideline that encourages multiculturalism and multilingualism. furthermore, access for immigrant and displaced children is almost non-existent and this is particularly important considering the us receives more immigrants annually than any other country (suárez-orozco, c., suárezorozco, m., todorova, c., 2010). with a large immigrant population, it is increasingly important to provide ece programs for the children of immigrant parents. unfortunately, there is no government support for immigrant and displaced children. when it comes to access, the government does well in providing access to children with disabilities and has made progress in providing access for some low-income children, but much more ece access is needed specifically for children in childcare desert locations, multicultural and multilingual children, and immigrant and displaced children. it is important to note that access to ece is not enough, as it is important that all children receive access to high quality ece. unfortunately, only 10 percent of national ece facilities are identified as providing high quality care (national institute of child health and human development, 2007). quality of ece while greater funding is needed to enhance access for all children, increasing the quality of ece is equally important. in the 1990’s the need to enhance the quality of ece was spreading as states gave subsidy reimbursements to accredited providers. unfortunately, few providers were able to receive such rewards as a large gap existed between licensing and accreditation requirements. as a response states wanted to align quality guidelines and developed a systemic approach to evaluate, enhance, and communicate the quality of ece. this systematic approach was called the quality rating and improvement scale (qris). each state develops international ece best practice 14 its own qris system. providers who take part in qris are given a rating based on the quality of their program; regardless of the rating they receive, they will be provided with continuous quality improvement support. qris is composed of five components, which include providing program standards, support for programs and practitioners, financial incentives, quality assurance and monitoring, and consumer education (qris, 2016). the qris is national and targets childcare centers as well as family childcare homes serving children five and under. although the qris is helping many ece facilities increase their quality, it is limited because it is a volunteer program and only 20 to 50 percent of programs participate (qris & ecids, 2014). in addition to the qris, the us has recommended 10 new quality standards benchmarks for state pre-k, which include: 1. early learning and development standards (elds), 2. curriculum supports, 3. teacher degree, 4. teacher specialized training, 5. assistant teacher degree, 6. staff professional development, 7. maximum class size (20), 8. staff-child ratio (1:10), 9. screenings and referrals, 10. continuous quality improvement system (cqis). these benchmarks have been enhanced and slightly changed recently (barnett et al., 2016). current data has only been collected from previous benchmarks and data has found that only 15 states provided enough per-child funding to meet all 10 benchmarks for quality standards proposed by the national institute for early education research (barnett et al., 2016). furthermore, 40 percent of children nationwide were enrolled in programs that met less than half of the quality standards benchmarks (barnett et al., 2016). quality varies substantially across states, with texas, california, and florida having the lowest quality state preschool standards nationwide. providing clear quality guidelines for all children throughout the us is important for children’s development (barnett et al., 2016). teacher quality a key determinant of ece quality is the quality of teachers (dwyer, chait, & mckee, 2000). providing teachers with the essential training to help children’s early development is important. few ece teachers hold either a credential or a ba degree in the us (phillips, 1994). currently, only state funded ece centers require teachers to hold a teacher permit. research has found that teachers who hold standardized certification outperform those who are not certified in the field (nichd, 1996). in addition to the lack of teachers who hold a credential, far fewer teachers hold a ba degree in ece or child development (bellm, whitebook, cohen, & stevenson, 2005). most research has found that teachers who hold a ba degree in specialized ece training provide higher quality care than those with minimal or no special training (burchinal, cryer, clifford, & barnett, 2002). in order to maintain high quality teachers who are dedicated to the wellbeing of children, teachers must be compensated for their work and dedication. as of 2015, ece teachers were paid an average of $28,570 per year which is just a little over half of what kindergarten teachers earn (us department of education, 2016). additionally, improving ece teachers’ work environment is important to support their ability to apply their knowledge and work diligently. there is substantial evidence showing that working conditions such as high staff-child ratios, class structure, small group size, and administrative support increase teachers’ performance in their teaching (phillipsen, burchinal, howed & cryer, 1997). to enhance the quality of ece, greater funding is needed to support teachers to continue their education and feel adequately compensated for their work. 15 global education review 5(2) the us needs to increase funding so that access to high quality ece is provided to all children. funding is a major obstacle as funding for ece is complex and varies from state to state. funding is key to increasing access and more funding is needed to provide access to all children especially for children in low income and rural communities and immigrant and displaced families. furthermore, more funding is needed to ensure high quality ece for all children. when it comes to quality, the us has made great effort with the qris and state preschool benchmarks, but more effort is needed to improve high quality ece specifically with increasing the quality of teachers. the us can look at international laws, programs, and practices to increase access to high quality ece for all children. enhancing ece by learning from other countries while the united states serves as an exemplar country in providing access for children with special needs, they can learn from other countries as to how to enhance overall ece access and quality for all children. learning best ece practices from other countries is not something unfamiliar in the us as many ece philosophies from around the world have been implemented in the us. childcare philosophies implemented in the us for years the us has implemented international ece philosophies. the three major ece international philosophies that have been implemented in the us are reggio emilia, montessori, and waldorf. these implementations have increased the quality of ece in some centers in the us(hewett, 2001). many ece centers in the us replicated the italian ece philosophy reggio emilia due to its innovative approach focused on preschool and infant-toddler development. this philosophy was developed by loris malaguzzi and the parents of the villages around reggio emilia, italy after world war ii (new, 1993). this is a family centered approach where parents understand the value of educating children at a young age (edwards, gandini & forman, 1998). this philosophy is based on the principles of responsibility, respect, and community. teachers organize class curriculum based on the children’s interest and encourage exploration and curiosity (gandini, 1993). another international philosophical approach us ece centers have implemented is the montessori approach. the montessori approach was first established for children with disabilities by an italian physician and educator, maria montessori (edwards, 2002). this philosophy emphasizes respect, independence, and freedom. it uses selfcorrecting material and mixed aged group classrooms to enhance children’s learning (montessori, 1870-1952). the waldorf ece philosophy is yet another approach that has benefited young children in schools in the us. this philosophy was founded in 1919 by rudolf steiner, an austrian scientist and philosopher (edwards, 2002). this ece approach is seen as a humanistic approach to pedagogy where the goal is to develop children into morally responsible people. an emphasis on the importance of imagination and creativity is core to this philosophy where text books and grading are not necessary (edwards, 2002). these philosophies have been developed with the hopes of providing children with optimal care and education in their early years. while they have set positive examples, they are not implemented throughout the country, but rather are scarce and expensive. in an international study, jalango et al. (2004) emphasize the need for countries to establish a international ece best practice 16 clear philosophy that stresses the value of communities, culture, families, and most importantly, the children. furthermore, the authors emphasize that a country’s philosophy should be “communicated to the public, reflected in daily practice, and revised periodically to reflect advances in understanding about how young children grow and learn” (p. 144). an example of a country that provides a clear philosophy that is well known and established throughout the country is italy, with its reggio emilia philosophy, which has provided many young children with access to high quality ece. international ece evidence the us has already acquired a wealth of knowledge through international best ece philosophies; the next step is to analyze international ece policies and practices that can enhance funding, access, and quality of ece in the us. with the initiative of the millennium development goals (mdgs), education for all (efa), and the sustainable development goals (sdgs), countries throughout the world have developed and enhanced programs and policies in ece (shaeffer, 2016). below we provide an overview of the most innovative and successful practices and policies of ece that the united states can learn from to enhance ece access and quality. first a discussion on best practices in funding ece is presented. this is followed by best practices in increasing access to ece. lastly, a discussion on best practices that increase quality in ece is presented. ece funding funding is important in providing high quality ece for all children. the united states can look at how other countries fund ece to enhance funding in the us. there are different options to increase funding, which include increasing overall gdp spending in ece and public private partnerships (ppp). increase gdp in ece ece funding in terms of percentage of gdp is subpar in the us compared to that of the nordic countries and france (unesco europe & north america, 2010). in contrast to the united states, investment and support for ece in france is exceptional. france spent 0.8 percent of its gdp on ece services in 2017 (which is more than the united states or other oecd countries spent), which allows it to provide universal access and enrollment for three to five-year-olds (oecd, 2017). in addition, cuba is another country that provides sufficient funding to ece as they are able to cover 99.5 percent of ece services through their holistic approach, where children under six and their families are provided with an integrated system that supports the child’s development (unicef cuba, 2010). public-private partnerships another strategy that can help the government raise funds for ece is public-private partnerships (ppp). there are a range of public private partnerships which include servicedelivery initiatives (such as the national board of day care centers in chile), voucher and voucher-like initiatives (such as the pre-primary education voucher scheme in hong kong 55), and private management or operation of public programs (such as the early childhood care and education centers in trinidad and tobago) (araujo et al.,2013; gustafsson-wright, smith, & gardiner, 2016). according to gustafssonwright et al. (2016), such ppps allow for greater flexibility in the delivery and management of education, increase transparency and quality, and improve efficiency. uruguay is an example of how a country can raise funds for ece through public-private cooperation. uruguay 17 global education review 5(2) created estrategia nacional para la infancia y la adolescencia (enia; national strategy for children and adolescents) in order to establish collaboration between the government and other stakeholders to identify specific goals, define management tools, and allocate resources with the goal of protecting the rights of children and adolescents (enia, 2010). its focus was to support children and families’ well-being from birth to adolescence through health care and education access. a third example comes from indonesia. indonesia’s ministry of national education (mone) uses public money to fund block grants that are awarded to villages (sardjunani, suryadi, & dunkelberg, 2007). the goal of these block grants has been to promote the private sector to take part in providing ece services for vulnerable children and families. it provides subsidies to nonprofit organizations and private institutions to increase ece services. with the help of the grant, about 738,000 children below the age of six who live in poor villages have access to ece service (sardjunani, suryadi, & dunkelberg, 2007). these countries serve as examples as to how the us can increase funding for ece while taking into consideration the challenges it may encounter as a very large country with diverse needs. funding is a major issue in enhancing overall access and quality of ece in the united states. international evidence on increasing ece gdp and ppps has helped several countries. the us can learn how other countries target funding issues in ece to support and enhance ece access and quality for all children. access some examples of how other countries are able to expand access to ece include development of laws that enhance access to all children, access for children with disabilities, access to health and well-being, access to parent and family ece resources, and access for children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds including immigrants and displaced children. laws establishing laws that mandate access to ece for all children is an idea that comes from mexico. in 2002, mexico became the first country in the world to establish compulsory preschool education for three to five-year olds and in doing so increased funding for ece (worthham, 2013). this policy allowed 3.4 million children to receive preschool education (worthham, 2013). access for children with disabilities although the us provides little funding overall for ece and does not provide a law that mandates ece, the united states does provide laws that provide access to ece for children with disabilities. even though the us has an adequate inclusion policy and program for children with disabilities, it can always improve. there are several international examples of innovative ece inclusion programs, which include family funding, legal support, and educational support. family funding romania is an example of how a country enhances funding for family who have children with disabilities. the country developed a program for the inclusion of children with disabilities by increasing its social allowance to 100% for families who had children with disabilities (unesco europe and north america, 2010). monthly payments of 400 lei (128 usd) were given to families of children ages zero to two who had a disability (unesco europe and north america, 2010). additionally, the romanian government improved the way they disbursed the money by establishing an automatic payment system so that the families of the children could receive automatic monthly payments. the state also provides families with international ece best practice 18 personal budgets based on the degree of handicap as well as a personal assistant in the case of severe disability (unesco europe and north america, 2010). legal support serbia is yet another country with a strong legal foundation for inclusive policies as they address the education needs of disabled children in their constitution, action plan for children, and primary education law (unesco europe and north america, 2010). serbia’s law on the basis of education emphasizes the importance of providing children with disabilities equal education opportunities as other children, where inclusion is the key component to integrating children (unesco europe and north america, 2010). in addition, the law on preschool education states that young children need to be assessed in a way to place them in mainstream schools. the law promotes availability, democracy, active participation, openness, and development ((unesco europe and north america, 2010). educational support saudi arabia is yet another example of a country that helps children who have a disability, through the down syndrome charitable association (dsca) (unesco arab states, 2010). they provide introductory educational classes for children with down syndrome who are between the ages of three to seven to prepare them for school (unesco arab states, 2010). the purpose of these classes is to help the child become self-reliant and independent (unesco arab states, 2010). there is always room for improvement when it comes to the well-being of ece in young children. such inclusion examples worldwide may help the us enhance its already wellestablished programs and policy for children with disabilities. access to children’s health and wellbeing similar to children with disabilities, the us does an adequate job of providing access to children’s health and well-being with programs like head start and special supplemental nutrition program for women, infants and children (wic). although the us has well established nationwide programs, there needs to be more, as there are about 13.1 million children living in homes with food-insecurity (colemanjensen, a., rabbitt, m., gregory, c., & singh, a., 2016). one of the largest programs to enhance access to children’s health and well-being is india’s integrated child development services (icds) (unesco asia and pacific islands, 2010). icds was developed by the indian government and aids more than 121 million children under the age of six. this program provides preschool education, health and nutrition education, medical checks, immunizations, supplementary meals, and referral services for children under the age of six as well as for nursing mothers (unesco asia and pacific islands, 2010). chile’s crece contigo is yet another example of a program that was established for the well-being of young children (enia, 2010). crece contigo is a child protection system that was established with the goal of monitoring children from birth until the age of five. the program offers services in general education, biopsychosocial development and services for children and their families (unesco latin america, 2010). another program that targets the wellbeing of all children especially low-income children is the dominican republic’s “programa solidaridad” (unesco latin america, 2010). this program addresses nutrition, education, and health care for children zero to five years of 19 global education review 5(2) age. in addition, it promotes pre-school attendance for children who are five years old (unesco latin america, 2010). these programs serve as an example for the us to further improve the health and wellbeing for all children. the key is providing funding for such programs to meet the needs of every child and family. access to parents and family ece resources many programs that provide access to a child’s health and well-being also include family and community support. although this is also an element of head start and wic, there are international programs that clearly focus on providing access to resources for parents, families, and communities. the philippines is a prime example of a country that places parents in the forefront of ece through their national parenting effectiveness service program (gordoncillo et al., 2009). the parenting effectiveness service program was designed to help low income parents, guardians, surrogate parents, and other caregivers improve their skills, knowledge, and views in parenting so that they can enhance their children’s development (gordoncillo et al., 2009). one of the most recognized programs comes from cuba. their program “educa tu hijo” has been replicated in various countries and has national coverage (myers,1995; yañez, 2009). this program helps families understand the development of their children and has increased family involvement in their children’s education (yañez, 2009). in addition, a study of 2,103 children under three years of age that were part of the program found a 97.5% achievement in language, intellectual, emotional, and motor development (yañez, 2009). just like cuba’s program, brazil’s primeira infância melhor (better early childhood) program was established to target parents and community education in ece (scheineder & ramires, 2008). it places parents at the forefront of a child’s wellbeing by giving families access to information about their child’s development (scheineder, & ramires, 2008). another program that was developed to target family and communities for the care of young children comes from romania (unicefromania, 2009). with the help of unicef, romania established a national parent education program to provide social support for romanian parents (unicef-romania, 2009). the programs provided support for first time parents, parent education, and counseling (unicef-romania, 2009). the uk government program sure start is another example of a program that helps incorporate parents and the community in the development of children (unesco europe & north america, 2010). the program emphasizes parental and community development so as to provide young children with the best start in life. sure start has been identified as an effective intervention program that helps young children at risk of conduct disorder by providing parents with the tools to address their children’s disruptive behavior (unesco europe & north america, 2010). many other recognizable programs exist that help families and communities understand and improve the development of children. for example, peru has two programs that help children under the age of three that are at risk of developmental delays called family-based early education programs (pietbaf) and “aprendiendo en el hogar” (unesco latin america, 2010). in addition, uruguay has established a program called “experiencias oportunas” in order to provide information about child development to parents of children younger than one (unesco latin america, 2010). colombia has another program that international ece best practice 20 promotes family and community involvement in ece titled community welfare homes (unesco latin america, 2010). other programs that help families and communities enhance the development of young children include hogain familiar in venezuela, guatemala’s hogares comunitarios and chile’s early childhood improvement program (unesco latin america, 2010). access for children with diverse language and cultural backgrounds in addition to programs with family support, there are innovative programs that provide access to programs and resources for children of different languages and cultures within the country. the us can learn from the variety of educational approaches worldwide that value the language, culture, and diverse knowledge that derive from the multiculturalism of their countries. the us is a multicultural and multilingual country that must acknowledge and embrace its diversity by providing support for these children and their families. countries worldwide have provided examples as to how to support and enhance multiculturalism and multilingualism through curriculum development, laws, and program development. curriculum an example of a country that embraces its diverse population is new zealand. new zealand is recognized for developing a curriculum that accommodates children from different cultures through the government’s early childhood curriculum te whariki, “a mat for all to stand on” (ministry of education, 1996). te whariki was established in order to increase recognition of cultural diversity and regulate ece programs. its curriculum highlights the important role social context plays in children’s learning (ministry of education of new zealand, 1996). in addition, it values maintaining traditional languages and cultures (shaeffer, 2016). laws there are several latin american countries that embrace their multicultural populations by providing multi-cultural inclusion education programs for children. paraguay provides bilingual education for all children throughout their education. its law states that ece should be in the “official mother tongue of the pupil, and the other language shall also be taught in early education, but as a second language” (unesco latin america, 2010, p. 44). argentina also acknowledges the importance of having children learn in their native language and has established a law that states that ece must be intercultural and bilingual (unesco latin america, 2010). uruguay is yet another example of a country that is taking an initiative to accommodate children of different cultures through their general law of education that states that minority and vulnerable groups will be guaranteed equal opportunities in education (unesco latin america, 2010). programs the countries mentioned above set laws that enhance intercultural and bilingual education, but there are countries that are currently establishing programs. paraguay developed escuela viva hekokatúva, bilingual and intercultural education (ebi) to enhance intercultural and bilingual education (unesco latin america, 2010). another example comes from bogotá, colombia, which set pedagogical guidelines for indigenous ece (unesco latin america, 2010). its ethno-education program acknowledges the importance of teaching and learning in the native culture, language, and traditions (unesco latin america, 2010). although various countries incorporate children with different languages and traditions, 21 global education review 5(2) there are very few that explicitly refer to children from migrant families, refugees or asylumseekers. the mexican government does make an effort to acknowledge migrant children through the assistance program for minors in border areas (enia, 2010). this program was developed in order to assist children deported by the us and guaranteeing respect for their human rights (enia, 2010). mexico policy focuses on the children’s psychological and physical health first and later deals with their immigration status. although this policy has been established, the degree to how much of this process is implemented is unclear. quality access to ece for all children is important but having high quality ece for all children is particularly important as access to low quality care may negatively affect children’s developmental outcomes (tough, 2013). while the us has developed the qris and state preschool quality benchmarks to enhance ece quality, these are merely recommendations and more needs to be done as the us measures poorly in ece quality (unesco europe & north america, 2010). there are three main ways in which other countries have increased quality, which include: establishing a national policy on ece quality, developing programs and models that target ece quality, and enhancing teacher training and pay. ece quality policies the us does not have a national policy that regulates quality of ece but rather has a voluntary rating system that provides support for improving quality throughout the us. as a result of the lack of clear regulation guidelines, many centers are poorly equipped, and the quality of education is subpar (barnett et al., 2016). a country that does provide national quality policies is ecuador. in 2006 the government of ecuador established a ruling under their code of childhood and adolescence in order to certify quality (unesco latin america, 2010). the standards set in place regulated infrastructure, site condition, educational nutrition and health, human resources, family participation, teacher qualifications, and educational environment. ece quality programs and models according to unesco, one of the most established quality models that promote quality in ece is chile´s early childhood education board (junta nacional de jardines infantiles) (unesco latin america, 2010). this model hoped to measure the management quality within ece centers and to inform these centers of how to make improvements. the model analyzed six factors: leadership, satisfaction of the school community, financial management and administration, educational management, family and community engagement, and protection and care (unesco latin america, 2010). mexico also provides an example of a nationwide program that enhances quality. the program titled, “intersectoral project on early childhood welfare indicators” developed indicators, which were discussed at a national level, to identify the status of ece in mexico (unesco latin america, 2010). there was a total of 28 indicators with 13 categories that covered issues such as equipment, resources, educational agents, materials, planning, educational processes, curriculum, group environment, supervision, school administration, assessment, and direction (unesco latin america, 2010). ece teachers one of the biggest factors that increases quality in ece are teachers. providing ece teachers with adequate training, salaries, and working international ece best practice 22 conditions is important to ensure high quality ece. the us can learn how other countries have enhanced quality through teacher training and pay. teacher training enhances the quality of a center. new zealand represents a successful model in training the ece workers (unesco europe and north america, 2010). in addition, benin and senegal have almost 100 percent trained staff in ece. also, countries like finland, denmark, sweden, and norway train their teachers to work with children from birth to age six or older (unesco europe & north america, 2010). singapore also takes a strong initiative to improve the quality of ece teacher training (choo, 2009). the singapore government has increased staff requirements for ece teachers. preschool teachers are required to pass five subjects in the secondary school certificate examinations in order to work (choo, 2009). staff training is important to enhance the quality of ece teachers. three specific examples of programs that have been found to enhance staff training in ece include mexico’s preschool curricular and pedagogical renewal programme (pronae), the dominican republic early education strengthening program, and brazil’s initial education program for ece educators (proinfantil) (unesco latin america, 2010). training ece teachers provides them with the knowledge to understand the important development of young children. pedagogical materials for teachers provide a different avenue to increase teacher training. the pedagogical material that is used by educators in argentina provides teachers with a guide for the classroom that seeks dialog with the children (cuadernos para el aula) (ministerio de educacion y deportes, 2017; unesco latin america, 2010). in colombia, libraries and materials to support pedagogical work have been available to teachers in rural and urban schools (unesco latin america, 2010). in brazil, the ministry of education established the referenciais curriculares nacionales para educación infantil (curricular reference for early childhood education) to help child care providers reflect on the goals of ece and how these goals must be viewed based on the country’s cultural diversity (unesco latin america, 2010). jalongo et al. (2004) posits that it is important to understand that materials are determined by the geography, economy, and culture of a country but should ultimately be used to enhance social, cognitive, emotional development while respecting family and cultural values. finally, in order to increase high quality access to all children there needs to be an increase of funding and this funding can then be designated to develop policies, programs, and resources that will enhance the development and support of high quality ece for all children. discussion and conclusion the review of the us ece policies and practices has identified several areas in which the us can strengthen ece. these include increasing funding, access, and quality of ece. worldwide ece policies and programs that have been recognized as best practices were identified as potential programs and policies the us can learn from. the major issue in the united states is ece funding. the us has a complex funding policy for ece with federal, state, and local components where most families end up covering the cost (belfield, 2007). funding determines ece coverage, quality, and access. in order to tackle issues of funding, countries have increased gdp expenditures in ece and developed ppp. with an increase in funding, quality and access of ece may increase, if the funds are well allocated. this literature review found that the us has made much progress in enhancing access to high quality ece for children but there is still a 23 global education review 5(2) lot more the us needs to do to provide access to high quality ece for all children. in terms of access, the us provides some of the best programs and resources for children with disabilities but lacks access for children in childcare deserts and for multicultural children, especially immigrant and displaced children. in terms of quality, the us has made great progress in developing the qris, but participation is voluntary and therefore only a few facilities obtain support to increase the quality of ece. in particular, the us needs to increase quality of ece by increasing teacher pay and training. international examples on quality and access are provided for the us to learn from. although this review discussed best practices in ece in terms of laws, policies, and programs, it did not provide an in-depth analysis of how to establish the programs and policies. in addition, there might be programs that the us already has established in certain states that seem to work and changing a program or implementing one that might fail would waste valuable funds towards ece. furthermore, we must acknowledge that policies and strategies in ece are not necessarily universal due to the cultural variation and needs of each country, as well as different degrees of implementation. vargas-baron’s (2016) case studies from bosnia and herzegovina, brazil, colombia, myanmar, and rwanda found that clarity with policies as they pertain to the needs of that country is key for the success of ece policy and statement implementation. this study found that in order to increase the well-being of children, countries must first establish an ece policy with a participatory policy planning process and then formulate a strategic plan that includes an action plan, all while understanding the needs of the children and families of that country. one example comes from brazil, where policy was built based on research that sought to understand children’s needs and opinions (vargas-baron, 2016). bertram and pascal (2016) also emphasized that there is no one-size fits-all approach and countries must take into consideration their needs. while countries must tailor their ece policies and programs it is important for these countries to acknowledge and understand what other countries have done to enhance the well-being of young children through policies and programs. bertram and pascal’s (2016) analysis of eight countries (chile, czech republic, denmark, estonia, italy, poland, russian federation, and the united states) found that although not one country has perfected ece policy and implementation, they individually provide a guide as to the struggles and triumphs that can be learned from one another in ece provision. greater research is not only necessary in terms of the programs that are already established throughout the world, but also research in areas where there is a lack of support for children who have not been targeted. for example, there are insufficient research, policies, and programs that are designed to help young children from migrant families, refugees, or asylum-seekers. this is particularly important when millions of children and families throughout the world are being displaced from their homes due to wars, violence, and poverty. these children are at risk of health and educational barriers that further impact their well-being. although controversies exist due to legal issues, these children are at no fault and getting the required assistance for healthy development is important. overall the united states can look at other countries laws, policies, and programs to enhance young children’s development. using other countries’ best practices as a basis to improve the overall ece in the united states and building upon what already exists may benefit children, families, communities and the country as a whole. social benefits could include international ece best practice 24 a lower crime rate, an increase in academic achievement, and increased healthy lifestyles. furthermore, by providing a better beginning for children under the age of five, countries will have a better opportunity to compete in a world economy. there are many programs that seem promising for the us to replicate. unfortunately, a major obstacle for the us in implementing any program is funding. some countries have set out examples of how this funding can be acquired, but in addition to funding, their needs to be a greater acknowledgment of the need 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(2010). long-term effects of early childhood programs on social outcomes and delinquency. the future of children, 5(3), 51-75. about the author(s) giselle e. navarro-cruz, phd, is an assistant professor at california state polytechnic university, pomona in the early childhood studies department. her research examines access and quality of early care and education (ece). more specifically her research has focused on international ece, parental choices of ece, latino families and ece, multilingual ece, student and parent access to high quality ece, and funds of knowledge in ece. thomas f. luschei, phd, is a professor of education at claremont graduate university. his research examines the impact and availability of educational resources—particularly high-quality teachers—among economically disadvantaged children. he is the author (with amita chudgar) of teacher distribution in developing countries: teachers of marginalized students in india, mexico, and tanzania (2017, palgrave macmillan). “a town of many” 9 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kalogirou, konstantina, fernée, christianne l., stamenkovic, dewi, & trimmis, konstantinos p. (2020). “a town of many”: drama and urban heritage landscapes as mediums for second language acquisition and social inclusion. global education review, 7 (4), 9-28. “a town of many”: drama and urban heritage landscapes as mediums for second language acquisition and social inclusion konstantina kalogirou cardiff metropolitan university cathays high school christianne l. fernée jean golding institute, university of bristol dewi stamenkovic cathays high school konstantinos p. trimmis department of anthropology and archaeology, university of bristol abstract if the global and multicultural social environments in which we find ourselves nowadays define who we are, then “we,” as social beings, are embedded in various relevant social communities in which we are acting, interacting, affecting, and being affected through our communications. in our case, teachers and learners change and coproduce cultural assets through their daily practices, while they explore, interact, and embrace the already existing local cultural heritage of their new settings. this paper moves beyond textoriented approaches and towards cutting-edge trends in education and second language learning. a new global application is presented which utilizes the recording of urban heritage landscapes as mediums for second language acquisition and social inclusion. the methodology is based on the case study of a coproduced (between teachers and learners) historical area assessment in a diverse area of cardiff city. it shows the benefits brought to the refugee and asylum seeker learners regarding their second language competence levels and the social inclusion they achieved in their local community. through this innovative application, which combines heritage recording with drama in education, learners take the lead in the recording of the urban heritage landscapes, and the teachers focus on the creative and experiential aspect of the learning process through drama. the ultimate aims are to present a new heritage and drama-based way for second language acquisition and social inclusion in the multicultural classroom. keywords drama in education; heritage in education; multicultural classroom; historic area assessment; heritage for social inclusion 1. introduction multicultural education’s origins and foundational ideas are an optimistic and committed response to the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s (bennet, 2001). banks and banks (2010, p. 1) argue that multicultural education is an idea, a movement, and a process whose goal is to change the structure of educational institutions so that all students— male or female, exceptional or not, and those who are members of diverse racial, ethnic, language, or cultural groups—can have an equal chance to achieve academically in school. multicultural education has emerged rapidly and has led to a variety of 10 global education review 7 (4) multidisciplinary inquiry, artistic and literary achievements, social action, and scholarly writing (see adler, 1997). the term "multicultural education" is commonly accepted in britain and in the united states, while "intercultural education" has been used more widely throughout continental europe. however, "intercultural education" as a term is becoming increasingly popular in the united kingdom, partly due to european influence (jackson, 2004). in this paper we will use the term “multicultural education” which will be explored in a british context. multicultural education has been an integral issue for the united kingdom, one that began to evolve in the 1960s with a growing population of immigrants arriving from the west indies, india, pakistan, and bangladesh. in 1970s, multicultural education gained currency, especially through conferences, research, publications, and the media (figueroa, 2004). it peaked in the 1980s when educational theories of multicultural and antiracist education started to rise and the education reform act, with the introduction of national curriculum. was established in 1988 (modood & may, 2001). another significant focus of the british educational system, as showcased by aydin (2013), is the development of the multicultural curriculum with a focus on raising awareness of citizenship. incorporating citizenship education in schools, providing citizenship classes to immigrants, introducing new citizenship tests for naturalization, and organizing citizenship ceremonies are current issues of top priority in many diverse societies (kymlicka, 2011). as a result, the importance of citizenship is one of the topmost items in the agenda of right-and leftwing politicians from over recent years (brooks, 2009). consequently, citizenship education has been incorporated in the british curriculum since 2002 and has made significant contributions to multicultural education in england and wales (figueroa, 2004; jackson, 2004; kiwan, 2011). from a global perspective, multicultural education is facing new challenges in the 21st century due to a global surge of intercountry migration, refugee streams, and first world interconnectivity. as an example, during the first half of 2019, european countries recorded some 297,560 new asylum seekers, nearly a third (94,040) were children. this represents an increase of 21% during the same period in 2018 (unicef, 2020). between january and june 2019, 8,200 children arrived in greece, italy, bulgaria, and spain (35% were girls and 65% were boys). approximately 2,800 of the children who arrived in europe between the same months were unaccompanied and separated. over 70% of these children were registered in just four countries: germany (39%), france (12%), spain (11%), and greece (10%). over 10,400 were being considered for resettlement in europe (unicef, 2020). taking into account that so many of these youth were displaced from their homes and communities and travelled through various mediterranean routes, it becomes absolutely essential to guarantee their access to basic rights such as healthcare, freedom of movement, and education. this research focuses on two challenges that multicultural education is currently facing due to immigration and population movement. the first is the requirement that students acquire an additional, and largely unfamiliar, language; related to this is the challenge they face of understanding and accepting a new culture while receiving little support in multicultural classrooms. the second challenge that the newly arrived students face is the possibility of insufficient human and financial resources in education contexts, including lack of intervention classes, budgetary shortfalls, teachers with insufficient training in “a town of many” 11 11 multicultural educational methods, and teachers who lack appreciation of diversity. the ideas that this paper explores—the introduction of cultural heritage in multicultural education as a medium of promoting language acquisition (challenge 1) and challenging issues of newly arrived migrants social inclusion (challenge 2)—have been developed in the context of banks’ (1995a) five dimensions of multicultural education. banks (1995a) suggests that multicultural educations’ pillars should be content integration, knowledge construction, prejudice reduction, equity pedagogy, and an empowering school culture. this paper moves beyond text-oriented approaches and towards cutting-edge trends in education and second language learning. we present a new global application that utilizes the recording of urban heritage landscapes as mediums for second language acquisition through drama in education. in this work, we highlight the importance of heritage applications in education and show how they can be used to achieve social inclusion, acceptance, and equal opportunities for refugees, asylum seekers, and newly arrived students. 2. aims and objectives the aim of this paper is to present a cultural heritage-inspired teaching method that addresses the aforementioned issues and challenges regarding newly arrived students, such as low academic achievement and difficulties in adjusting to a new cultural environment. according to witsel (2003), teaching and learning is a challenging process, even if students and teachers are of the same economic, societal, and cultural background. thus, students are expected to face some difficulties in progress and engagement in classrooms when students and teachers are from different cultural backgrounds. studies indicate that new arrival students are reluctant to participate in the learning process or even speak in a multicultural classroom because they are being taught in a new environment that is unfamiliar to them (see magos & politi, 2008, for a review). therefore, teachers and students usually encounter difficulties in communication, teaching, and learning because students do not adapt to the new teaching process and learning environment (see landsman & lewis, 2011, for an overview). consequently, teachers have the added responsibility of leading students through this unfamiliar territory towards achievement, inclusion, and ultimately, serenity. to effectively accomplish and address the above two challenges, specialized learning techniques and other educational practices are required (see alsubaie, 2015). this paper meets the above aims through two objectives: a) record the tangible and intangible cultural heritage assets of the butetown and cardiff bay ward in cardiff, wales, uk, and b) utilize and embed heritage into lesson plans in order to facilitate second language acquisition. 3. the theoretical framework cultural heritage is an expression of the ways of living developed by a community; these ways of living are passed on from generation to generation, and include customs, practices, places, objects, artistic expressions, and values. cultural heritage is often expressed as either intangible or tangible cultural heritage (icomos, 2002), and is the core component of the proposed new teaching method due to the plethora of stimuli it can offer to the learning process and the necessary values it can promote. the definition of cultural heritage has evolved throughout the years, starting with the notion of preservation, protection, and valorization of cultural and natural heritage described in the unesco convention of 1972 (unesco 1972), 12 global education review 7 (4) which led to the world heritage list as part of the 2003 unesco convention of safeguarding of intangible cultural heritage which was then followed by the 2005 unesco convention on the protection and promotion of the diversity of cultural expressions (unesco, 2005). apart from the fact that heritage in education could work as a tool for heritage awareness and cultural consciousness, it can at the same time provide the learners with rich and inspiring learning environments that will support and enhance their learning processes (van lakenfeld & gussen, 2011). heritage in education is based on the idea that cultural heritage provides the advantage of experiential learning, which not only aims to form strict knowledge regarding particular heritage contexts, but it also gives the learner the opportunity to acquire a wider range of competencies (lackerfeld et al., 2010, p. 15). the print that humans leave on the different types of cultural heritage assets, tangible or intangible, define their culture and contributes to the creation of a bond which the local people identify themselves and develop their sense of belonging (penna, 2018). a heritage asset is an item that has value because of its contribution to a nation’s society, knowledge, and/or culture. they are usually physical assets, but some countries also use the term in relation to intangible social and spiritual inheritance. inviting the learners on a journey of exploring, identifying, and recording different cultural heritage assets provides them with the opportunity to explore a foreign language through purposeful and meaningful tasks, while simultaneously exploring the cultural context of the given language. they are exposed to formal and nonformal learning, they develop their critical thinking skills, and they receive practical support towards their integration in the local communities. the “town of many” project and the idea of applying heritage for multicultural education is not novel. generally, the topic of raising cultural heritage awareness has been highlighted in various studies (see alkış & oğuzoğlu, 2005; curtis & seymour, 2004; henson, stone, & corbishley, 2004) as it encourages learners to see their surroundings as a lifelong source through which they can access information, define social problems, and achieve individual success (hatch, 1988). researchers and educators have suggested that cultural heritage in education can be utilized in courses such as social studies, history, geography, citizenship, literature, music, and visual arts, among others, and in every level of education (gökmen, 2010; patrick, 1989). because schools and colleges are gradually becoming more diverse, enrolling learners who speak different languages, and those from different backgrounds, cultures, and religions, cultural heritage awareness is increasing in demand. if one of the most important characteristics of cultural heritage in education is to increase students’ understanding about the history and value of their own and others’ natural and man-made environments (curtis & seymour, 2004), then cultural heritage in education can be utilized in educational fields and certainly in multicultural classrooms. many studies discuss the benefit of applying cultural heritage in education in diverse contexts. jacob (1995, p. 339) pointed out that the way in which culture is discussed and understood can have a significant impact on student relations, attitudes, and behaviors. zhang (2019) noted that cultural heritage awareness in the increasingly diverse classroom can lead to greater respect for the different identities that populate that classroom. clemons (2005), through the idea of microheritage, suggested that by understanding aspects of personal heritage, self‐awareness of bias and prejudice can be more easily understood, “a town of many” 13 13 thereby offering opportunity for maturity in appreciation and acceptance of others. 4. methods and materials the methodological framework for this study combines historic area assessment (haa) and drama in education (die). the haa was selected due to the urban character of our chosen heritage landscapes. haa is a historic england methodological framework for understanding the importance and significance of an area, which leads to better preservation of the selected area. haa is commonly used in commercial and redevelopment projects. however, it can also be used for academic study and other educational purposes. for example, haa in education is mobilized as a medium to communicate a heritage context to a group of learners, but in our study, it is used as a tool for learning and embedding heritage into language acquisition (see english heritage, 2017, for an overview on haa). drama in education (die) was first introduced as a term in the 1960s as a way to incorporate arts into the british educational system. some main characteristics include active involvement and collaborative talk, development of learners’ speaking and voice skills, improvement of clarity and creativity in communication of verbal and nonverbal ideas, and enhancement of the participants’ motivation and curiosity (kalogirou et al, 2017). alan plater is quoted as saying “the most valuable asset a nation has is the creativity of its children” (arts council england, 2003) and spolin (1999) advocated that “we learn [better] through experience and experiencing” (p.3). thus, die meets the standards of an effective language teaching tool that can contribute to the communication of a target language and an efficient medium of boosting engagement, fluency, and active participation of learners (kao & o’neill, 1998; stinson, 2008; stinson & freebody, 2006). it corresponds with the principles of active learning while placing value on interaction, collaboration, and studentcentered learning (nicholson, 2009). die supports learners to improve both the clarity and creativity of communication of verbal and nonverbal ideas, while it encourages learners’ active participation, motivation, and thoughts sharing. it develops and consolidates learning and meets broader educational goals (eccles, 1989). multicultural education purposes of language learning can be served by die because of the provision of targeted vocabulary learning opportunities (kalogirou et al., 2017). haa and die provided opportunities for experiential learning. lesson plans reflected outdoor heritage recording exercises and indoor dramaand task-based activities. thus, leading to a four-step teaching method: a) establishing the teaching objectives, b) recording of the heritage assets that can deliver the teaching objective, c) creation of the drama-based lesson plans, and d) delivery of the lesson plans and evaluation. to test the proposed methodology, the sixth form—english for speakers of other languages (esol) classes of cathays high school—was chosen as a case study, alongside the multicultural urban heritage landscape of butetown and cardiff bay ward in cardiff, uk. cathays high is a comprehensive school, serving the heart of cardiff. the school has approximately 152 staff members and 900 pupils. seventy-six percent of the pupils come from ethnic minority communities, with often over 50 nationalities represented in the school; furthermore, over 60% of the pupils speak english as their second language. today cathays high school caters to a full comprehensive mix of students and it can be considered as a multiethnic, multireligious, multilingual, and multicultural school. butetown is a district and community in the south of the city of cardiff. it was originally a model housing estate built in the 14 global education review 7 (4) early 19th century by the 2nd marquess of bute, for whose title the area was named. commonly known as "tiger bay," this area became one of the united kingdom’s first multicultural communities with people from over 50 countries living here by the start of the first world war; they worked in the docks and allied industries. bute road had cypriot barbers, somali cafes, jewish pawnbrokers, and sam on wen’s chinese restaurant and other international businesses (thomas, 2004). some of the largest communities included people from somalia, yemen, and greece, and the influences of these various communities are still evident today (salapatas, 1993). a greek orthodox church still stands at the top of bute street, next to the anglican st mary's church, and near to the noor el islam mosque. butetown, a multiethnic residential dockland community of a few thousand people, was considered the most socially deprived area of the city, and the most stigmatized community in a city blemished by racial discrimination (morgan & trimmis, 2019). 5. the town of many project the “town of many” project aimed to record the urban cultural landscape of butetown and cardiff bay, provide educational resources to facilitate second-language acquisition, and promote social inclusion and british values to refugees, migrants, and new arrival students. the project was mainly funded by the heritage lottery fund and supported by cathays high school, the university of bristol, and the cardiff metropolitan university. the urban heritage landscape of cardiff and the former docklands estate of butetown were ideal sites to support employment and employability in wales, which were the curricular goals during the period that the project was implemented. butetown entails all the necessary target vocabulary about diverse and multicultural communities that house different businesses. the variety of businesses and religious buildings could accommodate the lessons’ needs in terms of different speaking, listening, reading, and writing activities. during the lessons, exam-oriented tasks were implemented, and included job interview practice, completion of job application forms, cover letters, business marketing posters, and more. the lesson curriculum was designed according to the requirements of entry 3 (level 1) of pearson edexcel esol (english for speakers of other languages) qualification, which is accredited on the qualifications and credit framework (qcf, edexcel esol pearson qualifications, 2020) and the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr, levels and europe, 2020). a) establishing the teaching objectives the project focused on teaching a specific set of vocabulary that included twenty-one words corresponding to the topic of employment and employability in wales. the lessons included practice with extracting information from texts, and review of verbs, complex sentences, adjectives, time/ sequence words, connectives. and persuasive language. through these activities, the learners were encouraged to improve their language skills, identify heritage that might be threatened, and propose possible ways of preservation. the teaching activities were designed to address skills and levels set by the cardiff council's ethnic minority and traveller achievement services (emtas) department for the new arrival of speakers of other languages who aim to gain english literacy for use in education, employment, and everyday life. the above department has also prioritized the use of cultural heritage-based teaching resources to ensure availability to english as an additional language (eal) learners. “a town of many” 15 15 b) recording of heritage assets that can deliver the teaching objective the learners who participated in the “town of many” project, with the support of cultural heritage specialists and their teachers, implemented a haa of butetown as the main tool for heritage asset identification and recording. first the learners were trained on the completion of online google forms and then they were asked to complete heritage asset (ha) google forms for butetown. the ha form included open-ended and multiple-choice questions regarding the ha and details about it. it included the asset type (tangible or intangible), asset date, asset characterization, importance of the heritage asset, and, finally, what could be learned from the ha. the personal information of each pupil was recorded using a separate personal information form. the personal information form included the students’ gender, age (category), language spoken at home, ethnic background, religious beliefs, country of origin, and previous knowledge of cultural heritage. after the learners completed the one day in-school training on how to identify assets, completed a desk-based assessment, observation notes, and a bibliography and resources, they were asked to conduct their own fieldwork research of assets. the learners attended outdoor learning activities—corresponding to fieldwork or walk over survey for a professional conducted haa— which included walking around the butetown and cardiff bay area and identifying assets. from the assets they identified, students visited the norwegian church, the greek orthodox church of saint nicholas, and the noor el islam mosque. in these three visits, with the support and guidance of archaeologists and cultural heritage experts, the learners recorded the buildings, took measurements, completed survey forms, took pictures, and interviewed local people. after the completion of the visits, they were asked to complete creative writing tasks, including map design, leaflets, and narrative writing, in order to share their own perspectives about the assets. this way the learners achieved all of the learning objectives. they also developed extra skills in building recording, data management, community engagement, drawing, report writing, oral presentation, photography, and awareness of the important role that cultural heritage assets play for every community. c) design and delivery of dramabased lesson plans the learners completed the research and recorded the cultural heritage assets that they and the teachers contributed to the design of the lesson plans. the lesson plans included real-life tasks and were constructed around purposefully selected notions and functions, serving realworld communicative needs and designed according to what language the learners need. the aim of these lesson plans was to follow an action-oriented approach with purposeful, collaborative tasks in the classroom. through these tasks, that included activities inspired from culture heritage in education, drama in education, and the values of multicultural education, we aimed to develop ambitious, capable learners with creative skills and social and cultural awareness, learners who can collaborate, communicate, and become active citizens in and beyond the multicultural classroom. the lesson structure in the “town of many” project followed the lesson planning that was introduced for the “red lady of the paviland” project and was further developed into the vocabulary acquisition via drama (vad) method (see kalogirou et al., 2016 and kalogirou et al., 2017 respectively). the vad method teaches vocabulary to young second language learners through the medium of drama, specifically the effect of drama teaching techniques on 16 global education review 7 (4) vocabulary acquisition. the vad method is designed for targeted application in conjunction with community language teaching (clt) and task based language teaching (tblt) approaches; the purpose of which is to teach vocabulary in a given context for a specific duration and with clearly delineated objectives (kalogirou et al., 2017). vad combines the emphasis on interaction associated with clt approaches with a focus on nonlinguistic outcomes, which is characteristic of tblt and the imaginative play and rehearsal associated with drama in education (die). the vad method involves a lesson plan with three distinct stages, where students explored the given topic: predrama, drama, and post-drama, mirroring the three phases of a drama lesson (kalogirou et al., 2017). a fourth stage, “via voc,” in the “town of many” lesson planning introduces students to the heritage asset that would later be the main theme of the lesson plan. the new method that includes the four stages introduced to the “town of many” project, is part of the “via culture initiative” (kalogirou & trimmis, 2020). via voc was the preliminary stage of the lesson in which the facilitator/teacher introduced the cultural heritage asset in various ways. namely, it aimed at triggering learners’ curiosity and captivating their interest by utilizing different tools and mediums such as performance, music, video, graffiti, power point, artefact, video game, skype, text, painting, objects, advertisements, posters or leaflets, and many others. this way, the target vocabulary (l2) was introduced in a creative and up-to-date way. pre-drama was the warm-up stage during which the facilitator/teacher introduced the l2 target and allowed the students to engage with the target l2 vocabulary through physical icebreaking activities (e.g., count to 20, guess the leader, see farmer, 2007) such as scanning/skimming texts, listening to quizzes, watching and memorizing games, and completing questionnaires. the aim was to gradually expose students to the l2 vocabulary in a holistic and playful way. drama was the core activity that aimed to offer students real–life and imaginative involvement with the target l2 vocabulary through investigation, problem-solving activities, and information exchange. this was mainly delivered through improvisation (e.g., tableau vivant, role play, freeze frames, see boal, 2002) and the use of target items for both intentional and incidental learning. this way, the active involvement with the l2 target vocabulary in a given and safe context leads to the acquisition of proficiency, which is in fact perceived as a circular process; by performing activities, the user/learner develops competencies and acquires the necessary language skills. post-drama was the closure activity that incorporated digital learning opportunities combined with drama to provide a context for recycling and repetition of the target language items and to facilitate retention and subsequent retrieval (spolin, 1999; stanislavski & benedetti, 2010). in the post-drama stage, the students were expected to explore real–life, short-term, purposeful, collaborative projects with tangible deliverables. a variation of post-drama deliverables could include research and presentation of a topic related to the cultural heritage asset, a discussion or dialogue with arguments, a production of an artistic outcome like a song, a script, a choreography, an advertising brochure, maps, a board game, and many other creative tasks. d) evaluation evaluation of the learners’ progress, achievement, and inclusion was assessed through a vocabulary test, an opinion-oriented evaluation survey, interviews, and verbal feedback that learners shared during the heritage recording “a town of many” 17 17 activities and lessons. the students were assessed the same way that they were taught (see kalogirou et al., 2017) and they took three identical tests. test 1 was implemented prior to the via culture lessons in order to evaluate the gap and/or lack of knowledge regarding the target vocabulary. test 2 followed right after the completion of the via culture lessons to evaluate the progress achieved. test 3 was performed a month after the completion of the via culture lessons to evaluate the progress achieved along with the retention of the target vocabulary. according to a review presented by qian (2008), language testers believed that vocabulary items embedded in full passages in a reading test would create more positive washback and bring vocabulary testing closer to real-life communicative application of english. therefore, a test with a text paragraph that included missing words for students to complete would have more positive implications for the language classroom. the test created to evaluate the “town of many” project’s learning objectives included two types of questions. the first question was a closed type text about the taught topic, butetown, with 11 gaps. the learners had to choose the right word (from the available list) to complete the relevant gap. the second question was a multiple choice one, with nine questions and four options each, which again were related to the taught topic. the test that was designed for the “town of many” project aimed to evaluate all the learners in the same manner (following cohen et al., 2011). thus, all the learners were given these tests prior to their attendance at the interactive dramabased lessons and right after their completion. upon the completion of the second test, students answered an opinion-oriented questionnaire to indicate if they “enjoyed” the “town of many” project, if they preferred the drama-based lesson plans, and if they found the project beneficial for their linguistic and social integration into the welsh society. 6. the “town of many” project outcomes a) demography of the multicultural classroom the sample comprised 20 students, of which 18 were male and 2 were female. all the students were studying full time at the sixth form college of cathays high school. they were studying in the new arrivals department where english is taught as a second language to 16-19year-old students. the participants in this project fell into either the 14-17 or the 18-21 age categories. the first language of each student varied; the most prominent first languages were arabic, followed by kurdish. this was followed by tigrinya, then italian, somali, and vietnamese. pashto/pakhto and portuguese were the first and second languages of one student. the ethnicity of each student followed a similar pattern to that of language, with arab and kurdish being the most prominent ethnicity; this was followed by somali and eritrean. also, the majority of the students identified as being muslim (15, 75%). the remaining students identified as being buddhist, christian, sikh and “other.” b. heritage recording and teaching from the student-led heritage recording, 65 complete heritage assets forms were obtained. these contained 46 different heritage assets, of which 34 (73, 91%) were tangible and 12 (26.09%) were intangible. the most common characterizations of the tangible assets were modern historical building (17, 32.69%), religious building (19.23%), and recreational space (17.31%). the most common characterizations of intangible assets were a song (3, 25%), a festival, a spiritual expression, and language (each 2, 16.66%). the teaching phase of the “town of many” project began with an introduction of the butetown area in cardiff and a presentation of the assets the students have recorded. the pupils 18 global education review 7 (4) were positive and responded by expressing what they knew of these sites or what they wanted to find out about them. then five lessons were delivered based on five of the assets that were recorded by the students. the first lesson, which will be presented here as an example, concentrated on the coal exchange building. the delivery focused upon the pupil’s knowledge and retained the understanding of the ha as pupil led rather than direct teaching. the facilitator wanted to gain an understanding of what they knew of the building or the “coal industry” in order to access prior knowledge. the teacher questioned the pupils to make links between the name and meaning of the words as a way of developing inference skills. the teacher then presented a series of images to further reinforce understanding of the building and elicited responses from the pupils to the images. following this, key words of the topic were directly taught to the students. students were questioned on their understanding and were tested to assess their recall of various words. the prefix “re” was highlighted to embed grammar learning. the pre-drama phase started with a walk-around. the pupils gained an awareness of the space and developed appropriate behaviors for moving around the space. this was taken further by asking pupils to get into groups of the number that the facilitator called out. the pupils visibly enjoyed this and the physical nature of it. a second exercise for the pre-drama part of the lesson plan was to play zip-zap-zop with the class in order to enhance focus and teamwork. for the drama phase, the class was split into two groups and asked to replicate the ha with their bodies as a group. the pupils responded positively and were enthusiastic. following this, pupils were put into six groups and each group was given information relating to a time period of the coal exchange’s life. they read the information as a group and froze to represent the keyword in the text. the rest of the class needed to try and guess which keyword they had. for the post-drama phase, the students went back into two groups and sequenced the history of the coal exchange. after this they plotted the information on a timeline. for many pupils, this was the first time they had worked with an infographic/timeline. c. learning outcomes overall, test scores increased over time (table 1; figure 1). prior to commencing the teaching activities, the initial test results ranged between 0 and 11, out of 21, with a mean score of 3.15 (15%). in the second set of test results, after the completion of the five “town of many” lessons, answers ranged between 0 and 21, with two students obtaining full marks. the mean score was 6.25 (29.76%). the difference between the first and second test ranged between a reduction by 6 marks and an increase in 11 marks, with an average increase in score by 3.1 (14.76). the difference between the second and first test ranged between a reduction by 1 mark to an increase of 11 marks, with an average increase in score by 5.7 (27.14%). the mean score of the final test was 8.85 (42.14%), with the difference between the second and third test ranging between no change in mark to an increase by 8 marks. table 1 mean test scores for each test mean (sd) test 1 15% (16.66) test 2 29.76% (29.06) test 3 42.14% (33.54) note. standard deviation (sd) “a town of many” 19 19 figure 1 all student mean test scores for each test when test scores were divided by gender, table 2 and figure 2 illustrate that male students show particularly limited knowledge of the target vocabulary, with an average score of 13.6%. the female students achieved consistently higher scores throughout the tests, scoring an average of 83.50% and 100% in tests 2 and 3. although these scores could enhance the theory that female students perform better in language learning than male students (ellis, 1994; maclntyre et al., 2002; carr & pauwels, 2006; mori & gobel, 2006), the current female sample is too small to allow us to reach strong conclusions or generalizations. table 2 mean test scores by gender. female (n =2), male (n =18) mean (sd) m f test 1 13.16% (13.86) 47.5% (6.36) test 2 42.06% (14.33) 83.50% (3.53) test 3 57.11% (19.59) 100% (0) note. standard deviation (sd) ● ● ● 15 20 25 30 35 40 test 1 test 2 test 3 test t e s t s c o re ( % ) 20 global education review 7 (4) figure 2 mean test scores for each test by gender table 3 and figure 3 illustrate that students in the 18-21 category achieved far lower scores (9.77%) in test 1 than the students in the 14-17 category (22.18%). this indicates that older students had very limited knowledge and awareness of the target vocabulary about butetown. in tests 2 and 3, both age groups achieved significant progress and retention, but it is evident that younger students (14-17) achieved higher scores in both tests 2 and 3. table 3 mean test scores by age category. categories: 14-17 (n=11) and 18-21 (n=9). mean (sd) 14-17 18-21 test 1 22.18% (19.58) 9.77% (10.19) test 2 54.63% (17.91) 35.89% (14.34) test 3 66.63% (20.22) 55% (25.19) note. standard deviation (sd) ● ● ● ● ● ● 25 50 75 100 test 1 test 2 test 3 test t e s t s c o re ( % ) gender ● ● female male “a town of many” 21 21 figure 3 mean test scores for each test by age group table 4 and figure 4 demonstrate that in test 1, participants from all continents did not know the target vocabulary; transcontinental students achieving the highest scores on average (22%), and european students achieving the lowest scores on average (2.5%). in test 2, the average score of students from each continent increased, with the greatest increase occurring with european students. in test 3, the retention rate generally increased, with the exception of the transcontinental students whose test scores plateaued. again, as in test 2, european students achieved the highest score (64%). table 4 mean test scores by student’s continent of origin. continent: africa (n=6), asia (n=7), europe (n=2) and trans-continental (trans-cont) (n=5) mean (sd) africa asia europe transcontinental test 1 13% (10.75) 19.85% (22.16) 2.5% (3.35) 22% (17.27) test 2 32.5% (9.33) 45% (18.72) 59.5% (16.26) 59% (19.26) test 3 50.66% (14.30) 58.57% (26.02) 64% (16.97) 58.57% (24.77) note. standard deviation (sd) ● ● ● ● ● ● 10 20 30 40 50 60 test 1 test 2 test 3 test t e s t s c o re ( % ) age ● ● 14−17 18−21 22 global education review 7 (4) figure 4. mean test scores by student’s country of origin increase competency on the given vocabulary demonstrates the effectiveness of the method, and students’ responses on the opinion-based survey support this conclusion. before the lesson commenced, all 20 students (100%) answered that they would like to learn more about the history and heritage of cardiff, and 18 out of 20 (90%) felt that learning about cardiff would make them feel better integrated in the new environment. upon completion of the heritage recording and drama lessons, students gave a high average score (4.25 out of 5) to the project. when asked how much heritage and drama helped, they, again, responded with a high satisfaction average score (4.25 out of 5). most of the students mentioned that recording and exploring the cultural heritage of butetown made them feel included and accepted in the city where they now live and noted that the process also helped them to bond with their own past. the latter is justified by the spontaneous correlations they made between cardiff’s cultural heritage assets, their own multicultural heritage, and the diverse communities they represent. from the open-answer questions, we can note that students liked “the lively atmosphere in ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● 0 20 40 60 test 1 test 2 test 3 test t e s t s c o re ( % ) continent ● ● ● ● africa asia europe trans−cont “a town of many” 23 23 the class, the great communication and the sharing of our thoughts and views.” the “town of many” lessons enabled them to “learn the language better and improve their speaking and writing skills.” overall, students found the lessons “interesting,” and they believed that they “helped them a lot to improve their grammar and speaking skills.” finally, the qualitative data we collected on the “town of many” showed that the project achieved both of its targets; enjoyable language acquisition and social integration. 7. discussing the town of many results the overall outcome of the project, based on the formal and anecdotal feedback from the students, is that most of the learners asked for more “town of many” lessons. many of the learners said they enjoyed the outdoor activities with the cultural heritage recording exercises, and they would like to have more similar opportunities embedded into their learning. some of the learners suggested that they would like to have more visits from specialists and further integration of online and digital resources; feedback aligned with the general high satisfaction rate from participants in the digital heritage in education initiatives that they have presented earlier in this paper. on a language learning level, there was a considerable increase in student test scores. vocabulary retention was evident from the final test score results which were higher than the first post-project examination. despite the low number of students, this offers indication regarding the beneficial, inclusive, and effective application of the via culture initiative. the success of the “town of many” project was expected, despite the small number of participants, since the effectiveness of both cultural heritage in education and drama in education are well documented to date (trimmis & kalogirou, 2018; kalogirou & trimmis, 2020; nicholson, 2009; kalogirou, 2016; kao & o’neill, 1998). the “town of many” demonstrated that the combination of heritage and drama can maximize the effectiveness of both fields whilst drawing upon student experiential learning. in the “town of many” project, the drama contract between the facilitator and the participant, which creates a common ground for the educational process, now has a context to build upon. a context—in this case—the urban heritage landscape of cardiff, that is familiar to the students, and one that they can explore further through heritage recording. involving the students in heritage recording helped them also to develop cultural awareness and become active observers of space, time, customs, and the traditions of their surrounding environment. this process promotes social awareness that leads to social inclusion and acceptance of other cultures, languages, religions, values, and beliefs (the same aims as drama, see boal, 2002). additionally, by urging the students to take leadership and choose the cultural heritage assets that they consider as important landmarks, an ownership of the learning process is achieved. it also encourages students to develop their critical thinking, which requires cultivation especially as it relates to young learners (see nicholson, 2009; spolin, 1999). as a result, via culture embraces all five multicultural educations’ pillars that banks (1995a) suggests; it also addresses and meets the needs of multicultural education, citizenship education, and social inclusion, needs that are all of great importance in diverse countries such as the united kingdom. according to magos and politi (2008, p. 98), in order to achieve effective teaching and learning of the second language in immigrant classes, like the “town of many” class, it is necessary to meet some basic prerequisites; social inclusion, provision of 24 global education review 7 (4) support and consideration of the additional difficulties encountered by the specific learners. in the migrant and new arrival classroom, drama can overcome language barriers, create imaginary worlds, and bridge literacy gaps in a more flexible way in comparison to more traditional educational methods. heritage is the key to provide support towards better social inclusion for the migrant students. this paper suggests that it is vital for the cultural heritage, when it is used in the educational process, to be recorded by the students with the help of the educator/facilitator. it is optimal when heritage recording is implemented in the multicultural classroom, because the students are exploring the heritage of the host country themselves and creating a sense of belonging and ownership of the given heritage data. therefore, the imaginary context of education, such as drama or video games, create a context that has been constructed by the students to drive their own educational needs. acknowledgements the “town of many” project was supported by the heritage lottery fund, grant number oh-18-02265. certain activities of the project were also partially funded by the erasmus+ key action 2 grant 2018-1-uk01 ka201047976. authors would 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(2019). educational diversity and ethnic cultural heritage in the process of globalization. international journal of anthropology and ethnology 3(7). https://doi.org/10.1186/s41257-019-0022-x https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991012820552602368/61scu_inst:researchrepository https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991012820552602368/61scu_inst:researchrepository https://researchportal.scu.edu.au/discovery/fulldisplay/alma991012820552602368/61scu_inst:researchrepository 28 global education review 7 (4) about the authors konstantina kalogirou was co-principal investigator of the erasmus+ ka2 via culture, and investigator at the hlf town of many project. she holds a phd in pedagogical drama and eal, and her research interests include applied linguistics, english as an additional language, cultural heritage in education, and drama in education. christianne l. fernée is a bioanthropologist and data analysist. she was an associate researcher for the via culture and town of many projects. her research interests include among others, biomechanics, anthroengineering, cultural heritage applications in the community, osteoarchaeology, and data science. dewi stamenkovic is an english teacher and she was associate researcher for the town of many and via culture projects. she is interested in innovative methods for teaching english as additional language. konstantinos trimmis is an archaeologist and cultural heritage specialist. he was coprincipal investigator of the erasmus+ ka2 project via culture and project director for the town of many. his research interests include among others, digital imaging in humanities, field and cave archaeology, diaspora studies, archaeology of urban landscapers, and the applications of cultural heritage in community contexts. 146 global education review 3(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: beckman, paula j. & christenson, lea ann (2016). “out of my comfort zone”: understanding the impact of a service-learning experience in rural el salvador. global education review, 3 (4). 146-168 “out of my comfort zone”: understanding the impact of a service-learning experience in rural el salvador paula j. beckman university of maryland, college park lea ann christenson towson university abstract this qualitative case study was designed to explore student’s perceptions of the impact of a two-week service-learning experience in rural el salvador. students stayed in an economically impoverished village in rural el salvador and worked on projects that promoted education for children in the village. participants included 15 graduate and undergraduate students. multiple data sources were used to understand these impacts including: open-ended interviews conducted two to four months after the trip; field notes from participant observations in large and small group activities, group reflections; and informal incidents and conversations; review of student journals; student final papers, and daily activity and health logs. while the initial process of adjustment was difficult for some students, all students felt that this experience had an important, positive impact on them. data indicated that this impact occurred in all three major areas addressed in this study, including: personal (e.g., sense of appreciation, gaining perspective, rethinking consumption, clarifying values, and learning they “could do it”/self-efficacy), professional (affirming career choices, ability to work with latino children and families; improving professional skills), and global awareness (e.g., perspectives on poverty and social justice, views of immigration, understanding of the world). the data further indicated a more explicit impact on personal, professional and global awareness of participants who identified themselves as future teachers, thus with a potential positive influence on future children under their care, particularly children who are poor and/or immigrants. findings are discussed in terms of exant literature related to the impact of short-term service experiences. keywords service learning, short-term study abroad, education, el salvador, pre-service teachers, early childhood introduction the student population of public schools across the united states is increasingly diverse. white students now represent 50% of the population, with growing numbers of hispanic students (26 %), a relatively steady number of black students (16%), a greater number of all students living in poverty (nces, 2015). in contrast, the teaching understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 147 force remains mostly white (83%), female (76%) and middle-class (nces, 2015). as a result, there is a need to help teachers develop empathy for students from diverse backgrounds (lam, kolomitro, & alamparambil, 2011). one potential way for pre-service teachers to gain empathy and understanding of other perspectives is by participating in service learning study abroad experiences (lam, kolomitro, & alamparambil, 2011). currently, less than 2.1% of college students from the united states participate in any type of study abroad experience (donnelly-smith, 2009). recent initiatives have increased the number of students going abroad, particularly those choosing short-term programs (six weeks or less); in fact, it is estimated that 56% choose short-term programs (batley & lupi, 2012). although short-term programs have sometimes been viewed as the step child of longer-term study abroad programs due to their origins as summertime vacation experiences (donnelly-smith, 2009), they have increased in popularity for a number of reasons. for students in majors that require multiple, semester-long practicums, (e.g., education and nursing), academic programs tend to be highly structured with little flexibility and students do not have a free semester (or year) to spend abroad. for these students, short-term programs often represent the only option (kostovich & bermele, 2011; smith and mitry, 2013). an additional advantage is that short-term programs are far less expensive than semester or year-long programs, making them attractive from a financial perspective. students often must graduate in the shortest time possible and the expense of a semester abroad with the potential of extending the time at the university past four years is an economic impossibility (donnelly smith, 2009; smith & mitry, 2008). another benefit of short-term programs, unlike longer programs, is that faculty often custom design courses and accompany students which can help alleviate fears of traveling abroad. moreover, when faculty accompany students, they can deconstruct the experience with additional lectures, group discussions and assignments to scaffold students’ experience (kostovich, & bermele, 2011; bately, & lupi, 2012). despite the increasing popularity of shortterm programs, there is limited research focused on their potential impact on students (batey, & lupi, 2012; mapp, 2012). some studies suggest that when short-term programs are paired with on campus classes and activities before and after the program, they have become launching points for multicultural awareness of the educational, social, and political relationships between other cultures and those of the students (crabtree, 2013; donnelly-smith, 2009; kirkland, 2014; phillion, malewski, sharma & wang, 2009). interestingly, phillion et al. (2009) also found that when there is careful planning of the structure, there was no significant difference in global engagement between students in shortterm programs and those in longer-term programs. notably, jia, peyvandi, moghaddam (2011) argue that when short-term programs include experiential characteristics (i.e., authentic opportunities to spend time with local people, participating in local activities) rather than a non-immersive approach (i.e., stays in hotels, guided tours, etc.) the impact of shortterm programs was enhanced. castaneda & zirger’s (2011) findings concur. in their ethnographic study of an experiential three week program in a small town in honduras, where students lived with local families and worked on service projects, the result was increased cultural understanding. they argue ______________________________ corresponding author: paula j. beckman, phd, department of counseling, higher education and special education, college of education, benjamin building 3214, 3942 campus drive, university of maryland college park, college park, maryland, 20742 email: pbeckman@umd.ed 148 global education review 3(4) that short-term programs need to construct programs with sustained contact with the host families and the community to maximize the potential for meaningful learning experiences. the studies that do exist regarding the impact of short-term programs have focused on students in majors outside of education (e.g., spanish, nursing, social work) or unidentified majors (castaneda & zirger, 2011; kiely, 2004, 2005; mapp, 2012; reynolds-case, 2013; smith & mitry, 2013). for example, czerwionka, artamonova & barbosa (2015) conducted a qualitative study of a spanish course in madrid. interviews conducted before and after the program revealed that the students’ experienced a change and growth in intercultural knowledge during their short period abroad. impact on pre-service teachers the literature is limited when investigating the impact of short-term study abroad programs on students majoring in education, and those that exist have primarily focused on the impact of the study abroad experience on the students’ global awareness. for example, phillion, et al. (2009) studied pre-service teachers who participated in a three-week program in honduras. they found that studying abroad provided participants with an important starting point for understanding “the educational, social, and political relationships between their lives and other cultures.” (p. 335). they also found that experiences such as these had an impact on preservice teachers understanding of themselves and how to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students. in a follow up study malewski, sharma and phillion (2012) examined how international field experiences promote crosscultural awareness in u.s. pre-service teachers through experiential learning. this study examined the experience of 49 pre-service teachers during short-term programs in honduras over the course of six years. students volunteered in local schools, took two required courses and visited local historical sites. the authors concluded that experiential learning in an international context played a key role in developing cross-cultural awareness among preservice teachers. they recommended that teacher preparation programs include international field placements with an experiential component as a means to promote cross-cultural awareness and understanding of students from diverse backgrounds. palmer and menard-warwick (2012) reported similar findings in their ethnographic study of preservice teachers taking a one-month course in mexico. they found that the students developed multicultural awareness and skills while teaching children english. the course yielded pre-service teachers who developed a “critical understanding of the systematic nature of inequality in immigrant children's lives” (p. 17), as well as the skills and empathy necessary to effectively teach children learning a second language. similarly, czerwionka, artamonova & barbosa (2015) studied language and cultural learning and revealed that students experienced a change in intercultural knowledge during their short period abroad indicating cultural adaptation via daily life, food and drink, values and politics. summary most of the studies we found regarding the impact of study abroad courses on students studying education have focused on the potential of such courses to promote global awareness. these studies have found that intentionally crafted, immersive, service learning experiences have the most impact on the perspective and world view of pre-service teachers. there are also a limited number of studies which conclude that such courses can build cultural competency and empathy to help students become effective teachers. interestingly, none of the studies explored the impact of these experiences on students’ professional development nor did they understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 149 do in-depth exploration of the personal impact on pre-service teachers. given the limited time that pre-service teachers have to participate in study abroad experiences, it would also be useful to better understand the potential of this option to help students develop their professional skills, as well as its impact on personal and global perspectives. purpose and research questions the purpose of this study was to determine how a short-term, service based, study abroad experience requiring full immersion in rural el salvador would impact participating students. el salvador was selected because the metropolitan area in close proximity to the university has a large and growing population of salvadoran immigrants, and pre-service teachers frequently have salvadoran students in their internships. the present analysis was part of a larger study focused on the nature of the impact on students, and what factors contributed to creating that impact. for the purposes of this analysis, we specifically addressed the following questions: 1) what were students’ perceptions of the impact of this experience on a personal level? 2) what were students’ perceptions of the professional impact? 3) what were student perceptions of the program’s impact on their global awareness? methods this paper reports findings from a larger case study using ethnographic methods to focus specifically on the impact of a two-week study abroad course on participating students. the course was structured as a service-learning experience in which participants lived and worked in a remote mountain village in el salvador on projects related to education. in the two months prior to the trip, students met with course instructors on three occasions and completed a series of assigned readings about the history of el salvador, education in el salvador, and day-to-day life in the village. they were also assigned to one of three work groups, and were required to develop preliminary lessons and activities that they hoped to implement in the village. once in-country, they attended a series of lectures and orientation meetings on issues related to history, education and immigration. group reflections took place two to three times per week throughout the trip. they were structured to address particular issues that instructors and leaders had found important with previous groups and to address issues that emerged during the course of students’ stay in the village. participants participants for this analysis included 15 students; all were female. nine were students in a five-year program culminating in a both a bachelor’s and master’s degree and certification in early childhood special education. two were master’s students specializing in minority and urban education, other undergraduate majors (n=1 per major) included elementary education, early childhood, biology/pre-med, and psychology/pre-med. the students in early childhood special education had their tuition covered by a grant focused on working with students from diverse cultures and required an immersion experience (this course was only one possible option). two students were fluent in spanish, a few spoke some spanish, but more than half had no spanish skills. students ranged between 20-29 years of age; 11 were between 2024 years of age; the remaining four were between 25-29. eight participants were caucasian, two were african-american, three were asian (east indian, korean), one was multiracial and one was latino (brazilian). all of the students except two were born in the northeastern part of the united states; one was born in brazil and one was born in korea. thirteen of the students came from middle to upper middle class families based on the occupations of their parents. all but three had 150 global education review 3(4) traveled outside the u.s. prior to the trip, most frequently europe. eight had visited a developing country previously; three of those had been to mexico, honduras, the dominican republic or el salvador, though none had lived with host families. the decision to participate in this study was voluntary and did not impact student's final grade. procedures we used ethnographic methods as part of a qualitative case study to investigate students’ perception of the trip’s impact on them personally, professionally and on their global awareness. the primary data source for this study was open-ended, individual interviews conducted with students two to four months after they returned (and after they had received their grades for the course). interviews were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim within two weeks of the interview; one student agreed to be interviewed, but declined to have her interview audio-recorded. additional data sources included field notes maintained by the course instructors during the two weeks that students were incountry; journals maintained by students during the trip and submitted as part of course requirements; and final student reflection papers submitted one week after returning to the u.s. we maintained daily activity logs as well as daily health logs based on individual meetings with students every morning regarding their health and overall well-being. in addition, the instructors maintained analytic memos on the process of carrying out the educational projects and the group reflections. participants completed a demographic questionnaire prior to the trip. as recommended by creswell (2013) and other authors, we used multiple methods to assure credibility and trustworthiness. specifically, we triangulated across data sources by collecting information from multiple students. we also triangulated across methods by using multiple methods (e.g., interviews, observations, document review) to obtain data. we also used prolonged engagement, beginning our involvement with students two months prior to the trip and continuing to engage them through post-trip interviews and informal contacts up to four months following the trip. both the informal contacts and post-trip interviews provided an opportunity for member checking. data analysis after data was collected it was reduced and transformed using multiple methods that are common in qualitative research including coding and writing analytic memos (creswell, 2013; miles, huberman & saldaña, 2014). data was analyzed using an inductive, constant comparison process so that key concepts could emerge. investigators independently read and reread transcripts, papers, journals, field notes as well as daily health logs maintained on each student. we used an in-vivo coding process in which chunks of meaningful data (e.g., phrase, sentence or multiple sentences that conveyed an idea or concept or described an incident) were identified and independently coded by using participants’ words wherever possible to form initial codes. as recommended by strauss and corbin (1998), we assigned every possible coding category to each unit of data. during this process we met regularly to review codes, compile them into a central list, and refine them to eliminate redundancies. we met regularly to continue discussing and refining initial codes and group them into conceptually related categories. we continued the process of categorizing and collapsing codes until themes emerged for all research questions. context as part of this course, students stayed in the village of la secoya1, a small village of approximately 400 inhabitants that sits high on understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 151 a mountain about one and a half hours from el salvador’s capital. unless they can get a ride in the back of a local truck, residents who want to go into a nearby town must walk for 45-60 minutes down a mountain and then take the bus. although the village is small, it has five distinct neighborhoods spread up and down the mountain. the center of the village has a church, a cancha (sports field), and a tienda (small store that sells drinks, snacks, etc.). from there it takes another 20-30 minutes to walk uphill to the neighborhoods that are highest on the mountain. the road is mostly dirt or cobblestone and the walk is steep. daily life requires villagers to go up and down the mountain frequently. the village is situated in the middle of beautiful trees and flowers and views from the highest points are spectacular. this mountain was at the center of the twelveyear civil war that ended in 1992; during the war, many residents were killed, fled, or joined the guerilla fighters who occupied the mountain. after the peace accords, some families returned to dig out and rebuild the village, which had been besieged by fighting. although the war ended 23 years prior to this study, many older villagers fought in the war and still tell heartbreaking stories of loss and survival. with the resettlement of the village, it has become an active place, which has received support and attention from local ngos. families primarily survive by doing subsistence farming; others have family members who work in the capital or nearby cities; still others receive some help from family members living in the united states. life in the village is busy and the work is hard with people often walking long distances to work in their milpas (fields). while a few are fortunate enough own the land they work, most rent land. the milpas are perched on the side of the mountain and working the land is strenuous labor, which is almost always done by hand. by 5:00 am the village is already awake and bustling, dogs barking and roosters crowing. most people bathe with cold water from the local river, a community fountain, or with rain water collected in barrels and then use a guacale (a shallow plastic bucket) to pour the water over their heads. more fortunate families have constructed some form of a shower. a few have toilets that flush, though most use latrines. breakfast consists of coffee, beans and tortillas. women or older children carry water from the river or nearby community fountain. clothes are typically washed at the river or at a community “pila” which require women to walk, usually downhill, to do laundry; wet laundry is then carried back up hill. the local elementary school is perched high on the mountain; it has two teachers who cover preschool to sixth grade. teacher absenteeism is common; a previous study documented that one teacher was absent 19 out of 60 days (beckman and syrgley, 2014, 2015; syrgley, 2013). there was a notable lack of infrastructure and resources in the school; few books and virtually no didactic resources. at the time of the study there were holes in the roof and broken windows, so that during the rainy season the school often flooded. at the time of this study, the ngo, which hosted the delegation of students, was also in the process of building a community biblioteca (library). the biblioteca was intended to mitigate the limitations of the public schools as well as provide access to books, computers and a variety of classes and enrichment activities to support learning for everyone from children through adults. at the time of the study, the building had not yet been completed; there was no bathroom or access to water. during the two-week trip, students lived in pairs with village families; as a result, housing conditions for students varied. if the family did not have access to running water, the student did not have access to running water; if families used latrines, students used latrines. families with the fewest resources had homes that were 152 global education review 3(4) one or two room shelters built of adobe, had dirt floors, used outdoor latrines, walked for water and bathed from buckets. students who stayed with somewhat more fortunate families were in houses made of cinderblock with concrete or tile floors, and in rare cases, had indoor bathroom facilities, sometimes with flush toilets and showers; other times with indoor toilets that required users to pour water which had been carried from the nearest water source into a tank. all but the poorest families had a “pila” or large concrete sink. the ngo provided clean drinking water for students during their stay to prevent them from contracting water-borne illnesses. except for two designated meals with their host families, students also ate together at a central location. cooks were local village women who cooked local food and were trained to cook in ways to reduce the chances that students would become ill (e.g., use only the bottled water in the cooking; wash fruits and vegetables with bleached or bottled water, etc.). students walked up and down the mountain – either to get to their work site or to get to the group meals, community activities, group reflections, etc. each day, students rose in time to walk to a central eating location for breakfast by 7:00 am. breakfast always included hot tea and tortillas and, as is common in el salvador, frijoles. in addition, fruit, cereal, bread and peanut butter were made available by the ngo as these foods were more familiar to the u.s. students. the cooks sometimes prepared eggs or pancakes. by 8:00 am, students were working alongside villagers on one of three educational projects. four students and one leader made home visits to families who had infants and young children who they perceived to be too young to attend the biblioteca. these students worked directly with families to demonstrate ways of stimulating the development of the very youngest children. two of the graduate students who had some experience in teacher training worked alongside one instructor and one local leader hired by the ngo to develop and conduct teacher training activities for facilitators (local villagers who were paid by the ngo to work in the biblioteca each day) of la secoya as well as three other bibliotecas sponsored by the ngo. the focus was on giving the facilitators strategies that they could use when teaching the children. the remaining, largest number of students worked directly with children in the biblioteca (library), developing and leading lessons and enrichment activities for the estimated 35 children who attended. the focus was on implementing fun, hands-on educational activities designed to help children overcome the barriers they faced in school – with a particular focus on reading and math. in the evenings and on weekends, students attended presentations on special topics (e.g., immigration, popular education, the history of the civil war) from individuals living in the area which were arranged by the community leaders or ngo. during their stay they also participated in local activities (e.g., fiestas, hikes, dances, soccer games) and other recreational activities organized for the group by the community (e.g., food exchanges, talent shows). to promote students’ understanding of the culture as well as facilitate connection between villagers and students, pairs of students assisted the cooks at each meal preparing food, clearing the table or washing dishes at the pila. students had very little free time from the time they woke up at 6:00 am until they went to bed, and the little they had was spent writing in their journals (a requirement of the course) or catching a quick nap. group reflections were held informally at each meal and formally 2-3 times per week, and focused on what students had learned, seen and done, and their reactions to particular situations or speakers (e.g., listening to the residents of the village describe conditions during the civil war, a thwarted immigration attempt to the u.s., or to understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 153 debrief and update the rest of the group on the various activities being carried out in the village). findings students all indicated2 that living and working in el salvador was an important part of their educational development. teri expressed the general view of students by saying, “…it was an amazing experience…it was really, really a life changing experience for me… probably some of the two best weeks in the last ten years of my life.” and lisa wrote in her final paper “el salvador changed my life more than i could ever imagined…” at the same time most students also described it as “the hardest thing i’ve ever done.” many found the initial days to be challenging, and in follow-up interviews, several described themselves as “out of my comfort zone” – a term that also emerged in journals and was documented in field notes. in part, this feeling came from not knowing what to expect. although a few had been to developing countries previously, they had never lived with economically impoverished families, and found that adjusting to the realities of the challenging living conditions was difficult. many described a sense of vulnerability that came from difficult living conditions, not speaking the language, and being out of contact with family and friends (beckman & christenson, 2015). despite those initial struggles, by the time they returned to the u.s., all students were universally positive about the impact the trip had on them. ellie struggled throughout the trip with various issues (i.e., not sleeping, feeling ill, etc.). in her final paper she explained, “there was much anxiety leading up to this trip personally. i was nervous about every aspect of it…. the next two weeks were an emotional rollercoaster…a driving force for personal growth.” by the end of the trip she declared “this experience was the most worthwhile of my life.” impact “i came home a different way” all participants in this program indicated that el salvador had an important impact on them, a reaction that ellie explained in the words of a catholic nun who had been in el salvador since the civil war and who was one of the guest speakers for the group, “sister maggie says, ‘you come home a different way.’ and i think i definitely came home a different person than i was when i went.” she added, “i feel like, unless you’re there, you don’t really realize how strongly it impacts you.” key themes related to the impact of the trip emerged in all three dimensions that were the focus of this study: personal, professional, and global awareness. personal impact while the personal impact of this experience varied somewhat from student to student, all identified one or more ways in which they were influenced. themes that emerged in this area included: sense of appreciation, gaining perspective, rethinking consumption, clarifying values, and learning they “could do it”/selfefficacy. sense of appreciation by far the most common and consistently mentioned theme was a new sense of appreciation that extended into many different parts of students’ lives. this sense was expressed repeatedly and by all students during post-trip follow-up interviews, reflections, journal entries and final papers. this included appreciation of people in their lives; opportunities they had for education; and for day-to-day aspects of their lives which they had taken for granted. most of these reactions were specifically tied to the nature of this experience, sometimes because of the relationships they observed in the village, sometimes because they had to live without the daily comforts they were used to at home, and 154 global education review 3(4) sometimes because of the needs they observed in the village. sally summed up the sentiment saying, “… i’m blessed, i’m so lucky for every little thing.” during a group reflection kirra noted how staying in a multigenerational household influenced her, “before going on this trip i had taken for granted the people i can learn from. my parents and grandparents and i need to go home and learn from them while i can.” ellie was among several students who found herself being “thankful” for the opportunities she had, “…like being able to go to college, and not having to take five buses and get up really early, and be on the road for two hours just to get to college.” she noted, “…. that’s how i’ve been viewing everything. this is a gift….” despite her own day-to-day frustrations at school she noted, “…at least i have the opportunity to further on my education…people in el salvador would kill …just to be able to go to school and learn something. and i get that every day, so i should make the most of it…” niki also described how a newfound sense of gratitude influenced her approach to her studies, noting, “… instead of complaining, i'm thankful that i can take this course this year, because they don't have opportunity to even go to a university.” students were also grateful for day-to-day things that they had previously taken for granted. ellie noted, “i came home just appreciative of everything. like, being able to use a toilet and flush it without having to dump a bucket of water into the toilet. or washing my hands with running water.” janet concurred, “…. coming back and for the first showers that i took that week, just like appreciating what like just running water…realizing what we do have.” sally also commented, “having a hot shower is a luxury and people really take it for granted.” gaining perspective the new sense of appreciation gave students a new perspective on things that used to be of concern. while the specifics were different from student to student, several reported that their tendency to worry or become upset had changed, in part because they came to know villagers who confronted far more serious challenges on a daily basis. lisa explained, “…the trip definitely helped me to slow down and kind of appreciate the things around me at that moment rather than spend all of my time worrying.” ellie also learned to take things more in stride, saying “…those trivial little things that i worried about before going to el salvador didn’t even matter anymore...i think they’re really unimportant now….” this change became particularly clear to her when she injured her finger near the end of the trip. recalling how she would have reacted previously, she said, “i used to be one of those people that as soon as i had a headache for three days or something, i was convinced i had a brain tumor…i just go to the extreme, the worst case.” she added, “i think the old ellie would have been like, ‘oh my gosh. i just broke my finger.’ i would have just brought this level of drama...” on returning, she decided that “…i’m not gonna freak out about something like that… it has no place.” although specific to individual students, some reported changes in perspective that they found especially profound. ellie described the way this trip helped her with her “trust issues.” the trip helped because, “i didn’t know any of these people [villagers, leaders] going into it. but i had to trust them because they were the ones that knew what was going on; they spoke the language.” she recalled, “there was no time for them to do things to show me that i could trust them…. it was just throwing myself in and hoping for the best… you had no choice but to trust them.” for her doing this had a profound impact. she explained, i came home just being able to trust. that was a really big take away for me… just being able to like, say, ‘well, it’s okay. i can trust this person.’ they don’t have to understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 155 earn my trust, they don’t have to do things to earn it. i can just trust them because they’re a person, and there’s no reason for me not to trust them… i just had this new just idea of what trust is. and it was completely different than when i left.” daniela described a change in perspective about the way she saw her day-to-day life, saying, i can’t even necessarily explain how the change happened, so profoundly, but i was able to just see things in a new light. like, i love working with these kids. i love going to work even though i have to drive an hour, you know? i learned to enjoy that hour…i have the time to maybe think or listen to music, you know? i just try to find the positive in everything. for these students, living in circumstances that were so different than they were used to (e.g., multi-generational household, homes which lacked basic amenities, lack of access to technology) combined with numerous opportunities to reflect (e.g., group reflections, informal conversations with leaders and other students, journals) created a space in which fundamental questions could be considered. daniela found it to be “… almost kind of a spiritual influence…” adding …it was this really free space for everybody just to talk about their backgrounds, and it kind of made me, morph, and re-define, kind of my beliefs… just give me more ideas; more things to think about; more things to want to explore. and it all just kind of ties in about, ‘why are we here?’ like, how do we, like, live, and actually live, and take advantage of the time we have? about the people we have? and what we have? the opportunities we have? rethinking consumption ellie explained how her view of material possessions had changed saying, “… i came home and got rid of half of my possessions.” recognizing how much need she had observed in el salvador, she reconsidered her own needs, … i realized how little you actually need to be happy, and to survive. we don’t need all of the designer clothes, or a million pairs of shoes, or even, honestly, we don’t even need our toilets really. it’s just all of this stuff that we have…not out of actual need for it. niki also found that the trip made her think about consumption, noting, “... if i buy stuff, i always think to myself, ‘is it really necessary, or is it just something that i want because everyone else has it?’ lydie also thought more about the implications of her spending noting that it “…became a very big thing for me…why would i just bother spending money as if it’s nothing? it just made me be more thoughtful, i think, about everything in general.” darcey had a similar reaction, “… we take so much for granted and we’re so wasteful …it bothers me more than it did even before…to see how wasteful people are here…” the only student who did not outwardly appear to have this realization about consumption was sasha, a student raised by a single mother who shared during a group reflection “it is very similar to places i have been to in virginia that have no plumbing.” clarifying values many students described the way in which the experience influenced their values, sometimes challenging them and sometimes affirming them. darcey explained, i find myself wanting to give more in all ways, whether it’s in my teaching or…in everything…wanting to give more, and to encourage, like to open others to what else is out there. 156 global education review 3(4) laila described the experience as reaffirming values that she already had, “…just being grateful …and not judging people”. lydie also mentioned the importance of not judging people in the context of group dynamics, saying, “i would have never really just judged someone right off the bat… i guess it just made it even more so…why people are the way that they are, and then kind of accepting it and trying to find a middle ground…” she also felt that it changed the way she reacted to other people, saying, “i guess like, more of the petty issues…i’ve just kind of chosen to…stray away from those kinds of people that cause more issues than fix them…” finally, in a moment of self-discovery, lisa reflected, i’m very quick to speak and have my opinion heard, but i think on this trip i learned a lot about taking a step back and listening to other people, so being able…to listen to the people in the community and our other classmates just sharing what they knew and the things they had learned… it was nice to just be a listener for once. niki reflected about how the experience changed her values, describing her realization that, “…they don't have enough resources… but from what i observed, they're happier…. the first thing i told my parents when i came back. i was like, "money isn't everything." they were happy, and they were so sweet…” at the same time niki struggled with the way “they treat their animals.” the experience taught her that values are not always so easy to change and to contemplate why. she noted, “before that, i was like, ‘oh, anyone can change if they think that's not the right thing...’” “i could do it.”/self-efficacy several students commented about how important it was that they were able to get past the initial challenges and do something that they found to be difficult. as one of the students who had the most difficulty at the outset, sally expressed a sense of great accomplishment by the end of the trip, “.... you don’t think you can and then when you do it’s like wow, like i did it.” lisa had a similar realization, which she described as changing her view of herself, “it was such a great experience for me to really push myself and to see i could do it, i’m not as much of a high maintenance person as i considered myself to be.” she added, “i think the biggest thing was i learned that i can challenge myself. i can put myself in situations where i don’t know anybody and i don’t speak the native language and i can thrive and i can succeed…” noemi also felt she changed during the trip as she stated in her final paper, “during this trip i learned how to adapt and become open to situations i am not comfortable with.” although tammy had difficulty adjusting initially, she ended the trip feeling accomplished, stating in her final journal reflection, “i feel like my life changed. i feel like i am a new person from this experience. a happier and more confident person.” niki also explained how the trip became something more to her than she originally intended, saying, first, i was like, ‘it's just going to look good on my resume,’ but i feel like it's more than that. yeah, it really makes you look back to what you have done.” approach to technology students on this trip did not have the kind of access to technology that they were used to; they did not have access to wi-fi and the ngo did not permit cell phones and computers. darcey felt the lack of technology helped facilitate her friendships with others, saying, … it was so freeing to pay attention to the person that was in front of you…. people talked; people paid attention. they’re not on their phones and looking up…. it’s a huge help… understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 157 lydie concurred, “… first of all, i loved it.” upon returning she found herself frustrated by the expectation that she always had to be connected when at home, noting, “…. i’ve actually recently decided that i was going to pick one day of the week to turn off my phone entirely…. just completely turn it off…to get away from it…. it’s not a great feeling to always be connected.” janet noted during a group reflection “the interaction [with my host family] without tv is beautiful.” kayla also thought that the lack of technology was important, saying, …i didn't have computer for two weeks… it was hard but i think it was a good life lesson. …it changed me just when i'm out with people. i try not to be so engulfed in my phone and work. i try to actually focus on them and our conversation… professional impact all of the students also described ways in which the program had influenced them professionally. three major themes emerged in this area, including, clarification of career path, approach to latino children and families, and improving as a professional. career path in all but one case, students reported that working in el salvador had caused them to think about their career path in some cases by affirming it, in others by giving them more focus within their chosen career, and in one case, changing it. sally summed this up in her final paper, “after working with the children in the village for the past two weeks, i am extremely certain that a career in the field of special education is right for me.” in lisa’s case, the trip “rejuvenated and solidified” her career choice, “i knew that i wanted to work in a diverse classroom….so this kind of trip helped to further develop my knowledge and experience...” several students found that while it confirmed their career choice, it also helped focus specific interests. as a biology/premed major, niki noted, “i really learned what i'm passionate about …. i was thinking about going into pediatrics, but i wasn't sure…. now, after the trip, i think i really want to work with children. darcey also found a focus that was important to her, i still want to teach, like i always did, young kids…and kids from less fortunate environments...now i want to work even more with that. especially with the hispanic population…to work with not only the kids, but the families; to see how, if we can get them involved, how beneficial it is to the kids, and to the families. similarly, daniela remained quite interested in teaching preschool but found that doing home visits in el salvador sparked an interest in working with families. she explained, ... i just fell in love with home visits, specifically, and working with the families in their homes…seeing where they live, and where their kids experience most of their actual education and growth, you know? and talking about their beliefs about their children; it was just, it was wonderful, and it made me just think infant/toddler. home visits…familycentered teaching… i’m just kind of falling in love with that philosophy… janet liked assuming a leadership role in the biblioteca, saying in her final journal reflection, “…i really learned about my passion to go beyond the classroom, to not just be in the classroom …” she began to feel that “…it could easily be translated back here and after a few years in the classroom.” while it solidified daniela’s career choice and opened up a new focus in her field, she also found it freeing, realizing that she had options and that 158 global education review 3(4) continuing was a choice, “i was just so happy there, and it made me realize how i don’t have to do anything i do; i can change my whole life course, and do a whole new set of things.” teri also found that the trip pushed her in a very different direction. although she arrived in el salvador as an early childhood special education major, by the end of the trip the poverty and lack of access to health care in the village renewed her interest in going to medical school. she said, …it’s kind of given me a little bit more confidence to actually think about what i want to do with my life…it really kind of was one of the big pushes to make me want to change my career and go back to kind of my more biology side. and pursue medical school. this interest was heightened shortly after the trip when she learned that one of the group’s cooks, lena, a 35-year-old mother of two of the children attending the biblioteca had died of an illness that should have been preventable, “… it upsets me so much, you know, and she obviously is not the only one that that happens to.” she added that the trip gave her motivation and confidence, to pursue this goal, “… even if i fail … at least i can say that i tried... a lot of people they never get any kind of chance like that… so i might as well not let it go, or i’m gonna regret it later. approach to latino children and families students overwhelmingly reported that the trip made them more comfortable working with latino children and families and more sensitive to the issues they faced. in her final paper, sally said, “now that i have returned to the united states i hope that i can raise awareness regarding issues that salvadoran families face.” being in el salvador without speaking spanish had helped ellie become more understanding the non-english speaking children students in her class. after the trip, she viewed them as “brave” for continuing to come to school “…one of the biggest takeaways for me, educationally, was just being there and not speaking the language.” she began imagining what it must be like for non-english speaking children when teachers spoke to them in english, …they don’t understand anything… they probably know five words in english, and it’s really overwhelming, and it really takes a sense of courage and bravery to keep coming back to school…. i don’t think teachers really get that…. it’s really intimidating and scary. but they’re doing it! and their parents are doing it! as a special education major, she described the insight she had after the trip when she felt that a little boy in her placement had been wrongly referred to special education, they were going through the iep process, the initial process. and he was non-verbal. and they were saying that he’s just so behind and his parents came in, and, they spoke spanish, so they had a translator…the little boy is talking to his mom and dad…. rattling things off and saying things to them. … this kid can speak, he’s not non-verbal; he just doesn’t know the language….. he clearly is not non-verbal. he’s talking to his parents. he had literally just moved here. and he spoke no english. several students described ways in which their participation helped them better understand how to work with latino children in their classes and their families. for example, lisa observed, “i got a great deal of knowledge about the potential students i will be working with…” she noted that the children she worked with in the biblioteca “loved to do the work at understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 159 the school”, but didn’t necessarily have supplies to do homework and had many other responsibilities at home. she observed that as a teacher that “…made it a little more difficult to place an emphasis on doing something that you don’t have the materials to do.” with all of their responsibilities at home she noted, “i could see it being not a priority because there are bigger things like taking care of your family…” although kayla had little previous experience working with the latino population and spoke very little spanish, she felt that the trip “…gave me a chance to kind of brainstorm different ways that you can still show that you generally care without knowing someone's language.” after the trip, sasha decided to take spanish and found that it helped her work with spanish speaking students in her internship: “…they just light up!” sally felt that it was good to better understand what immigrant families had gone through so that, “…you’re not going to judge your students…you’ll just be more accepting… you’ll be able to teach them better…” darcey noted “…how they [parents] want to get involved, and a lot of times, it’s a language barrier, it’s a work barrier...” daniela, who also began studying spanish when she returned to the u.s., also felt that it influenced her teaching and saw the trip as “…. putting together the whole picture…to actually go to the country that so many people leave to escape…” for kayla, participating on the trip “…made me wanna like give back so i really started volunteering as an esl teacher.” she had been frustrated by the negative attitudes that she had observed toward spanish speaking students, noting “…how hard they tried to get here [the u.s.], and then we just don't treat them well just because they don't speak our language or they live differently.” she realized, “…they wanna learn english so much. they think by learning english, that's what's gonna make them successful so if i can give them, give them that help, that's what i'm gonna try to do.” daniela described how the experience changed her comfort level in working with latino families in u.s. programs and raised her spirits after a bad day: …the next day i had a home visit with a family who, they’re from mexico, and, but it’s this house where there’s about two different families that live in the house, and we’re there to see this little two year old, and being in that house was like, it immediately relaxed me…just hearing the music, and hearing the language, and seeing how everyone interacted, and how friendly everyone was… a lot of people kind of sticking their heads in…to support the child and showing sincere interest, and like, all working together to you know, support that child, and it was like, it just boosted my spirits. this increased comfort level in working with latino students and families was especially important to students because of the shifting demographics of the state in which it is located. for example, 12.6% of the population speaks a language other than english at home, 12.3% of the population is foreign born, and more than half of the state’s growth between 2000 and 2010 is due to growth of the hispanic population (migrant policy institute, 2015). state officials report that between 2000 and 2014 there was an unprecedented 208.9% increase in students identified as hispanic in public schools and many of these students are learning english as a second language (maryland department of planning, 2015). furthermore 2.1% of the total state population is from el salvador (migrant policy institute, 2015). thus, having an understanding of latino families is essential to professions working with the public. improving as a professional in addition to describing how going to el salvador had changed their comfort level in 160 global education review 3(4) working with the latino community, some also described the way it influenced the kind of professional they aspired to be and/or improved their skills. reflecting back on what she had learned from sister maggie, ellie said, i try and just make sure there’s a part of me in every assignment. even writing this iep that is due today... i just wanted to make sure it was a really good reflection of him, because i wanna be the best teacher, the best iep writer that i can be. both kirra and darcey commented on how learning about ‘popular education3’ during the trip influenced their teaching. kirra felt that what they had learned “… is so applicable to any community. it wasn't just la secoya, … even here, even adults." darcey concurred, “i think being there, hearing erica talk, how she[used] popular education in her talk; how it was so interactive… has helped me to want ….to make things more hands on as much as possible…” she was impressed with the use of popular education in the context of el salvador, noting, “…we have so much here. so many materials.” she added, “…if you can make it into something fun and hands on, or a game, i want to try to do that as much as possible. especially with preschool and kindergarten, which is what i wanna do, you know?” during the post trip interview sasha described how working in el salvador helped to build her teaching skills, such as “how to change lessons, how to adapt lessons. some of the lessons were too easy for the kids, so we had to change them on the spot… we just had to do a lot of adapting… it was teaching experience.” similarly, kayla described herself “as a very planned person.” and felt it was good to be in a situation that required her to be more flexible. she felt that the trip had helped her “…team building skills and ability to be more flexible...” teri also felt that it taught her about teamwork, “… i really learned how to kind of rely on other people; to kind of, work as a team to get, like, our common goal done.” lisa said, i learned a lot about my patience as a teacher. …. i was really doubting myself in the beginning when the kids like weren’t reciprocating well but i think through the patience and not quitting my lesson, like just keeping going and they eventually warmed up to me and loved it. global awareness all of the students identified ways in which living and working in el salvador had influenced their view of the larger world. themes that emerged included students’ views of immigration, views of poverty and social justice, and general knowledge of the world. these themes all have application in the future classrooms of preservice teachers. “their hearts are at home”/view of immigration a theme which emerged among all students, consistently and repeatedly, in follow-up interviews, students’ papers, their journals and during group reflections was the way in which the experience influenced students’ views of immigration – sometimes solidifying previously held views, sometimes raising awareness, and sometimes changing preconceived ideas. this occurred in part because they came to know individuals for whom family separation was painful and difficult. for all of the students however, it was the story of danilo, the smart, kind and charismatic employee of the cooperating ngo that gave them pause. danilo told of his struggle to support his mother, his sister and his sister’s children after his father had deserted the family when he was only twelve. out of desperation, danilo finally made the long, dangerous journey to enter the u.s. without documents, only to be caught and deported. the story of this harrowing journey, followed by the pain and humiliation of understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 161 his deportation, impacted everyone. when danilo finished his talk the group sat in silence as his words sunk in and tears ran down most faces in the group. finally, one student started clapping and the rest joined in. the students had much to say about danilo’s story. ellie said in her final paper, “before this trip i knew very little about immigration, and even less about illegal immigration. now, i know how much people risk when they immigrate.” for her, danilo’s story sparked an interest in immigration. she described ways that she was seeking to learn about immigration since returning to the u.s., saying, “i’ve been trying to find jobs for the summer where i would be working with immigrant families. i’m taking a history of immigration class right now…. i’ve found this new passion with immigration.” she said, danilo was also huge, his story had a really big impact on me… it was his story that got me really interested in immigration, and immigration policy… he just had such a heart wrenching story… all the stuff he went through to be put on a plane and sent back… …now i actually have an interest in the immigration side of that. niki, an immigrant herself had a unique perspective to share after danilo’s story. in her final paper she stated, this experience changed my view of immigration after danilo’s talk. i did not know why there were so many illegal immigrants. i had no respect for illegal immigrants because, as an immigrant myself, i knew how difficult it was to get a green card. i thought it was unfair that illegal immigrants enter the country and enjoy the life in the u.s. while others wait for years to get immigration rights. however, after danilo’s story about his immigration, i could understand how financially it is impossible to go through the immigration process. ever after, i had respect for all illegal immigrants because they want to begin a new chapter of life away from the poverty but have no options because they do not have enough money. similarly, for laila, the issue was salient personally, “…because i’m an immigrant”. she was from brazil and had come into the united states with documents, she emphasized the importance of “…not judging people”, commenting, they are just immigrants trying to survive. … i am in the process of becoming a citizen…. i don't want to forget that’s how i came and how everything happened. …. some people don't have the choice. i just got lucky. i had the opportunity to stay here legally… lisa had similar feelings, “… his story was…so eye opening and so helpful in really understanding the kind of hardships that…people endure to try and make a better life for themselves. it’s just incredible.” she noted in her final paper “this … has made me much more sensitive to the various needs of immigrant students.” daniela also described his story as “profound”, saying, “…what he had to go through to get here...he actually went through that… it’s just overwhelming.” darcey viewed danilo’s story as important “…because we got to know him…” knowing him put a face on the immigration crisis. she was particularly impressed with his age, noting, “… he was our age…alone, and the conditions. again, you hear about it, but you don’t always meet someone…it really stuck with me, and all he wanted was to give to his family…” knowing people from the village who had family members in the u.s. led daniela to think of “…how separated families can get, and just, how difficult that must be to then be here...” and consider how it might influence the children in her class and their families. she became acutely 162 global education review 3(4) aware of how painful the separation could be. she reflected on its impact on the family member in the united states, saying, “…their hearts are in their country; their hearts are at home…” several students described ways in which better understanding of this issue made them think about immigrants they encountered in the united states, including those in their school placements. kayla stated in her final paper, “i now understand the struggles that salvadoran immigrants go through just to come to the u.s. to have the opportunity to make money to take care of their families here in the u.s. and back home in el salvador.” sally said that whenever she saw an immigrant in the u.s., danilo’s story made her think, “…what did you go through to be here? ... it’s not like they just appeared here magically everyone has a story.” sasha also reported that danilo’s story was important to the way she viewed the immigrant population in the u.s. because, after the trip, “when i see people who are latino or hispanic, i think about where they came from and some of those people that we met…” after getting home, she found herself looking at immigrants and thinking, ‘where did they come from? what's their story? what's their background?’ and i kind of see more of their culture now…” poverty and social justice living with families in an economically impoverished community also made many of the students reflect on their conception of poverty as well as on issues of fairness and justice. ellie believed the experience changed her understanding of poverty. she lived in a major metropolitan area in the united states and thought she was aware of poverty, but was not prepared for the kind of poverty she witnessed in el salvador. she reflected, ...it’s one thing to hear about the poverty… as soon as we got there, i was ‘wow’… this is completely different from anything here [in u.s.] …there was something about just seeing all these little shacks essentially on the sides of mountains, and driving past tarps which represent people’s homes it was just heartbreaking. darcey summarized her reaction, “i guess, understanding that…no one chooses to be poor.” kayla, who studied minority and urban education, reported that living in the village gave her a different perspective about poverty. she said, “but when you live there and … it was just like i couldn't imagine living like that for so long….” what surprised her the most is that “…they were so happy. so i'm like ... you don't have to have a lot to be happy. and they were making the best out of their situation. so i really respected them but it was tough without running water.” several students were struck by the unfairness of what they witnessed. experiencing the poverty first-hand and what it meant to be without things like running water challenged their basic conceptions of social justice and to question the way governments worked. lydie reflected, …. i don’t know the meaning of social justice anymore, just because…the people that would deserve more they just can’t have it…i just don’t really understand it. none of it seems fair to me…there’s not even a way for them to make their lives better. she summed up her reaction by saying, “so like, social justice…i couldn’t really find any, i was just like, where is it anywhere?” for niki, it raised awareness of issues related to social justice, like education. she recalled, “…i really didn't really care about social justice, because we're fine how we live… after coming back from el salvador she began to view this as unfair and started to think of the role of government in creating the conditions of poverty, saying, “… understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 163 it's not fair for everyone to have different opportunities when it comes to education and just standards of living, i guess. it really depends on the government system, i realized.” learning about the world in addition to immigration and issues related to poverty and social justice, participating in this trip made many participants aware of how limited their knowledge of other parts of the world was. as niki said in her final paper, “this trip gave me an opportunity to see the world beyond my own perspective.” most commented on the lack of knowledge they had about el salvador in general as well as its civil war. others extended this to how little they knew about the world in general and expressed an emerging desire to learn more. for sally, it was basic things, “i had no idea about just like even their… currency or the fact that they use dollars, little things that i had no idea about and so just learning about the country and their history.” she felt this was common, noting “… if you took a survey i bet one out of a hundred people would know about the history of el salvador.” similarly, kayla came away feeling that, despite the growing number of salvadorans living in the area in which she lived, the knowledge of most people in the u.s. was often limited or stereotyped. she observed, “...everyone here has these preconceived notions of how it is in el salvador, how dangerous it is…it was safer in that little community than it is [in her city]." darcey was among several students who commented on how little most people in the u.s. know about the war in el salvador and its impact on the population there. since her return, she worked hard to share that information with others, saying, "…we don’t know about, but it happened. and how it affected them, and how they’re living now. and what their lives are like.” most of the people she knew were unaware of el salvador’s history, “i’ve also been sharing with my friends, too. because they’re like, ‘where were you?’ and i’m gonna say, ‘la secoya’? well what does that mean to them? so… ‘i was on a mountain that was part of the war’…describing the war…" for many students, the u.s. role in that war came as a surprise and a factor that led them to question the news and their understanding of history. after learning this, lydie exclaimed during a group reflection, “we have a lack of knowledge. people [u.s.] do not know!” during the same group reflection tammy said, “i want to teach people that our history is not that neat and nice and we need to learn from it.” after learning what happened from the perspective of some of the villagers in la secoya, darcey noted, “…it has caused me to…not take everything as the media says it…it’s really helped me to pay attention to what is going on in the world more….” lydie said that it helped her to realize how little she knew about the world and expressed her desire to change that. she found herself “… wanting to learn more about what’s going on in the world. i definitely haven’t been as good about it as i want to be… i really just don’t know what’s going on, and it’s not good. so i’ve been trying to keep up.” lisa also realized what she didn’t know about the world prior to her participation on the trip, …we don’t necessarily learn about all of the things that our government has done directly or indirectly to other countries… when we went on that nature walk, or the hike through the mountains and seeing the bombs… knowing that the united states had played a part in funding that was just so crazy to me. after a group discussion kirra stated, “this is not a u.s. issue, it is a human one. no one wants to be reminded of what they did.” she was also impressed by the way the villagers – who had been deeply affected by the twelve-year civil war distinguished between u.s. citizens and their government. in her interview, she 164 global education review 3(4) recalled being told “we don't blame the american people, we blame the american government.” lydie, in her final paper stated “it was weird to me that these people [salvadorians] were being so inviting to us americans who funded a war that destroyed their country and killed so many people.” kirra saw this as “… a very interesting global view of what people see… also how they distinguish americans from the american government, and how they parcel that out.” she now wanted to learn about people in her family and other parts of the world. i think the biggest thing… was the importance of oral history… i was alive at this time of el salvador's history and war. being there and seeing people that have lived it…made me come back to the states and really want to talk to the people in my life who've gone through things…i do want to ask my dad is his response to being drafted for the vietnam war, and how he wasn't picked because he was a student, and how as a new immigrant or not even legalized immigrant at that time, how did that affect him and how did it affect his views on the united states. teri also became conscious of how being absorbed in her studies had led her to a somewhat narrow focus, noting, “i never really have time to sit back and reflect on, on what the world is outside kind of my little circle here…” some of the students indicated ways in which their participation in the trip made them want to learn more about the world. for example, lydie said, “…it made me want to travel more… around the world…now i’m considering more studying abroad during the year, or during the summer, and i wasn’t going to before because of school.” discussion the results of this case study contribute to the growing body of evidence which suggest that short-term study abroad experiences can have a substantial impact on participating students when there is a strategically designed immersion component (kiely, 2004, 2005; jia, peyvandi, moghaddam, 2011; palmer & menard-warwick, 2012), when it is carefully structured (crabtree, 2013; donnelly-smith, 2009; phillion, et al, 2009), and when it maximizes contacts with local communities (batey & lupi, 2012; castaneda & zirger, 2011; czerwionka, artamonova & barbosa, 2015). this program was intentionally designed to include all of the above components. prior to departure, students attended a series of pre-departure meetings and were assigned readings designed to prepare them for their experience in the village. they were also asked to create preliminary lessons and activities based upon specific criteria which they would eventually adapt in consultation with community leaders. upon arrival in the economically impoverished village, students lived with host families. there was rigorous daily schedule which involved direct work in education and activities with host families and other community members. faculty also stayed in the village with a host family, shared meals with students, and participated in activities (e.g., guest lectures, formal and informal reflections) alongside the students throughout the trip. this ongoing contact with students helped faculty work with students to deconstruct the experience and facilitated scaffolding of the experience throughout (bately & lupi, 2012; kostovich, & bermele, 2011). while most students indicated that the trip was difficult at times, particularly in the beginning, by the end of the trip all indicated that it had a positive impact on them in the areas that were the focus of this study. that is, students reported that the experience was the source of considerable personal growth, that it facilitated their professional development, and that it helped them grow with respect to their global awareness. this is consistent with palmer & menard-warwick (2012) who found that a understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 165 service-learning, study abroad experience helped preservice teachers develop multicultural awareness and skills during while working with children – skills that have the potential to inform future professional practice. our findings are also consistent with phillion, et al.’s (2009) study of pre-service teachers, who after participating in a three-week program in honduras, had a deeper understanding of themselves and how to teach culturally and linguistically diverse students. it is also possible that initial difficulties the many of the students in our study had, is in part consistent with trilokekar, & kukar’s (2011) application of transformative learning theory – suggesting that there needs to be a “disorienting experience” (p. 1149) in order to change one’s perspective. in this study, most participants reported at least minor issues with adjusting to the village at the beginning which may have been the catalyst for the impact on their personal, professional and global understandings. when speaking of their own personal growth, all students reported that they became more appreciative of their friends and family, of their living circumstances at home, of the opportunities that they have had, especially their education. students also described ways in which the experience influenced their personal perspective – often in ways that were unique to them as individuals (e.g., learning to trust, be grateful, self efficacy). some students also clarified their values around material possessions, relationships and not judging people. this is consistent with other literature, which has found that short-term study abroad experiences have the power to influence students’ adaptability (mapp, 2012), a skill which is critical for teachers and social service professionals. students also indicated that the servicelearning component of this experience had an important influence on their professional development which is an area that has not received much attention in previous literature. most students found that the trip affirmed their career path, with some indicating that it clarified more specific interests in that path. only one student indicated that she changed her career path entirely – deciding to shift from a career in special education to a career in medicine. most students also described their experience as building their skills in working with culturally diverse children and families particularly latino families indicating that they had a better understanding of this population and a greater level of comfort in working with them (phillion, et al, 2009; palmer & menard-warwick, 2012). the pre-service teachers who participated in this program will be able to use these skills in their placements and most importantly when they themselves become teachers. additionally, by making students aware of ways in which their knowledge of the world was limited inspired many students to broaden this experience, something that will build their skills as future educators. this will be especially beneficial as the demographics of the local schools where they will intern and eventually be employed reflect the demographic of the children they worked with during the study abroad experience (migrant policy institute, 2015). additionally, students reported that their work improved more general teaching skills, helping them adapt lessons, become flexible in their delivery of instruction and the ability to differentiate instruction for the wide variety of ability and age groups of children who attended the biblioteca. this suggests such programs can be an important way to build some of the ‘hard skills’ of teaching – an area which we found no other studies related to the potential of service based study abroad programs. most previous studies, which have included students in the area of education, have been confined to its impact on the more affective skills of teaching (i.e., empathy and respect of different cultures) 166 global education review 3(4) (palmer & menard-warwick, 2012; trilokekar & kukar’s, 2011). finally, consistent with previous studies (batey & lupi, 2012; castaneda & zirger, 2011; czerwionka, artamonva & barbosa, 2015; donnelly-smith, 2009; malewski, sharma, phillion, 2012; mapp, 2012; reynolds-case, 2013; smith & mitry, 2008) we found that this program had an impact on students’ level of global awareness. all participants reported a better understanding of issues related to education, reasons for and effects of illegal immigration as well as the effect of poverty. some of the students reported a new perspective on the role of the united states in the world and made connections to u.s. foreign policy in the past and today. as the group was made up mostly of future educators this finding is especially important. in addition to teaching content, math, literacy, science, etc. educators, especially those working with young children are charged with sustaining and developing a knowledge base and curiosity of the world. this trip provided these future educators more knowledge of the world around them and perhaps more importantly an interest in learning more which they potentially will pass on to their future students. limitations and implications for future research these data reflect a slice of time of one group of students on one specific service learning study abroad trip. because there is not a common characterization of short-term programs it is difficult to compare the impact of this experience across experiences in the literature. the length, location, amount of direct academic content and the extent of immersion in the local context vary greatly in the literature. although this study did follow students after they had returned, gone back to their daily lives in the united states, a longer term follow-up study is necessary to determine if the impacts reported here are temporary or long lasting. it is also important to further explore the process of transformation to better understand what leads to a positive outcome. while we have noted literature indicating that certain structural aspects of the experience can have an important influence, more work is needed to identify other dimensions which contribute to the outcome. trilokekar, & kukar’s (2011) have indicated the importance of a “disorienting experiences” on maximizing the impact programs such as the one described here – further research as to what aspects of the experience – help students move past initial difficulties would be useful in planning and implementing such experiences. rowan-kenyon and niehaus (2011) found that participation in some kind of subsequent activity helped students integrate their learning during the trip. thus, further research needs to be conducted on follow up activities after an experiential learning trip in order to maximize the impact of service learning short term study abroad experience for pre-service teachers. in summary, this study adds to a limited body of literature suggesting that short-term, service-based study abroad experiences can provide students in education with important skills that will contribute to their future success as professionals in the field of education (i.e., understanding of personal, professional and global awareness). notes 1. we use pseudonyms to refer to all students, community members, speakers and specific locations throughout this manuscript 2. unless otherwise noted, all direct quotes are taken from students’ post-trip interview 2-4 months after the experience. 3. “popular education” refers to education “of, by and for the pueblo” (hammond, 1996). it is based on friere’s method of literacy education for impoverished communities understanding the impact of a service learning experience in rural el salvador 167 and ties education to consciousness raising about the conditions of poverty (friere, 1970). references batey, j. j., & lupi, m. h. (2012). reflections on student interns' cultural awareness developed through a short-term international internship. teacher education quarterly, 3, 25. beckman, p.j. and christenson, l. (2015, march). "out of my comfort zone": promoting global understanding through international service learning. presented at the institute for education diplomacy, association for childhood education international, washington, dc. beckman, p.j. & srygley, m. (2014). lena’s legacy: the dream of education in rural central america. childhood explorer. 1(2), 9-11. beckman, p.j. and srygley, m. (2015, march) . the social value of education for rural salvadoran families. presented at the 59th annual conference of the comparative and international education society. ubuntu!: imagining a humanist education globally, washington, d.c. brindley, r., quinn, s., & morton, m. l. (2009). consonance and dissonance in a study abroad program as a catalyst for professional development of pre-service teachers. teaching and teacher education, (25), 525-532. crabtree, r. d. (2013). the intended and unintended consequences of international service learning. journal of higher education outreach & engagement, 17(2), 43-66. castaneda, m. e., & zirger, m. l. (2011). making the most of the "new" study abroad: social capital and the short-term sojourn. foreign language annals, 44(3), 544-564. creswell, j.w. (2013). qualitative inquiry and research design: choosing among five approaches. thousand oaks, ca: sage. czerwionka, l., artamonova, t., & barbosa, m. (2015). intercultural knowledge development: evidence from student interviews during short-term study abroad. international journal of intercultural relations, 4980-99. donnelly-smith, l. (2009). global learning through shortterm study abroad. peer review, 11(4), 12-15. friere, p. (1970). pedagogy of the oppressed. new york, ny: continuum. hammond, j. (1998). fighting to learn: popular education and guerrilla war in el salvador. new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press. jia, w., peyvandi, a., & moghaddam, j. m. (2011). an empirical investigation of the factors influencing the effectiveness of short study abroad programs. international journal of education research, 6(2), 10-22. kiely, r. (2004). chameleon with a complex: searching for transformation in international service learning. michigan journal of community service learning, 11, 5-20. kiely, r. (2005) a transformative learning model for service-learning: a longitudinal case study. michigan journal of community service learning, 12, 5-22. kirkland, d. e. (2014). “they look scared”: moving from service learning to learning to serve in teacher education: a social justice perspective. equity and excellence in education, 47(4), 580-603. kostovich, c. t., & bermele, c. a. (2011). the top ten list: lessons learned from teaching a study abroad course. nursing education perspectives, 32(5), 308310. mapp, s. c. (2012). effect of short-term study abroad programs on students’ cultural adaptability. journal of social work education, 48(4), 727-737. maryland department of planning (2015) public school enrollment projections 2015-2024 retrieved from http://planning.maryland.gov/ migrant policy institute (2015) english language fact sheet retrieved from http://www.migrationpolicy.org/. miles, m.b, & huberman, a.m., & saldaña, j. 2014). qualitative data analysis: a methods sourcebook. (edition 3). thousand oaks, ca: sage. palmer, d. k., & menard-warwick, j. (2012). short-term study abroad for texas preservice teachers: on the road from empathy to critical awareness. multicultural education, 19(3), 17-26. phillion, j., malewski, e. l., sharma, s., & wang, y. (2009). reimagining the curriculum: future teachers and study abroad. frontiers: the interdisciplinary journal of study abroad, (18),323-339. reynolds-case, a. (2013). the value of short-term study abroad: an increase in students' cultural and pragmatic competency. foreign language annals, 46(2), 311 322. rowan-kenyon, h. t., & niehaus, e. k. (2011). one year later: the influence of short term study-abroad experiences on students. journal of student affairs research and practice, 48(2), 213228. rubin, d. l., & matthews, p. h. (2013). learning outcomes assessment: extrapolating from study abroad to international service-learning. journal of higher education outreach and engagement, 17(2), 67-86. sanchez, g. j. (2012). intensive study abroad for firstgeneration college students. peer review, 14(3), 1417. 168 global education review 3(4) strauss, a. & corbin, j. (1998). basics of qualitative research: techniques and procedures for developing grounded theory. (2nd edition). thousand oaks, ca: sage smith, d. e., & mitry, d. j. (2008). benefits of study abroad and creating opportunities: the case for short-term programs. journal of research in innovative teaching, 1(1), 236-246. srygley, m. (2013). education in rural el salvador: a case study on value, quality, and accountability. (unpublished paper, university of maryland college park). trilokekar, r. d., & kukar, p. (2011). disorienting experiences during study abroad: reflections of preservice teacher candidates. teaching and teacher education, 27, 1141-1150. about the author(s) paula j. beckman, phd, is a full professor in the department of counseling, higher education and special education at the university of maryland college park where she is also an affiliate member of the latin american studies center. she specializes in working with young children who are at risk for or have disabilities and their families. she is particularly interested in the needs of children and families living in low and middle income countries. lea ann christenson, phd, is an assistant professor in the department of early childhood education at towson university in maryland. before working in higher education she spent 18 years in california public schools as a kindergarten and first grade teacher, esol teacher and assistant principal. she specializes in the area of the integration of stem with emergent literacy and teacher preparation and professional development. 108 global education review 5(1) _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kristy kowalske doss. (2018). providing opportunities for flow experiences and creative problem solving through inquiry-based instruction. global education review, 5 (1). 108-122. providing opportunities for flow experiences and creative problem-solving through inquiry-based instruction kristy kowalske doss western carolina university abstract in order to compete globally in the 21st century, students must have the skills to design their own projects and understand how to navigate the wealth of information available at their fingertips. one of the most important tools is to be able to investigate ideas and implement a plan of action in order to answer questions that have not been explored. these creative problem-solving skills are essential when students design problems and projects during student-driven inquiry. using action research, instructors evaluated student perceptions and responses to a student-driven inquiry project in an eighth grade honors language arts class. using interviews and observations, instructors investigated students’ attitudes and experiences throughout the thirteen-week unit of study, focusing on student perceptions of the instructional environment. students described engagement with topic and process due to choice and authenticity. they described experiencing flow, the state where students become completely engaged in their work, when challenge, motivation, desire, and drive come together to produce optimal outcomes. themes emerged in how choice influenced the experience of flow during the creative process and how the classroom environment nurtured overcoming obstacles through creative problem solving. keywords creativity, inquiry-based learning, flow introduction understanding how to authentically complete research is an essential tool for students to understand. for this student-driven inquiry project, instructors gave students at least one class period over the course of thirteen weeks to work on individually-designed projects based on a passion or interest. students created guiding questions to craft a proposal for their projects. the proposals included a purpose, intended audience, resources, and a timeline that students pitched to the class before launching their investigation. throughout the process, students worked with mentors, conferenced with teachers, conducted scholarly research, and reflected upon their setbacks and successes. in a culminating celebration, students shared final products in several formats and gave presentations for parents and interested community members. students worked on real-world problems and ______________________________ corresponding author: kristy kowalske doss, western carolina university, 1 university way, cullowhee, nc 28723 email: kristykdoss@gmail.com flow experiences and creative problem solving 109 topics. one student studied research about the brain looking at the role of brain injuries similar to the one experienced by phineas gage. another sought to create an outdoor habitat for his bird in order to alleviate symptoms from a small indoor enclosure. one girl looked at the health benefits of knitting while she learned the process herself. as a result, she made plans to start a knitting class at a local retirement home where she volunteers. other students investigated issues such as problems in public education, the relationship between alexander hamilton and aaron burr, and the validity of climate change. while completing the project, students were able to examine the world around them and reflect on the different stages they moved through in order to create a final product. they assessed their progress on a weekly basis through emails with the instructors or through surveys designed by the instructors. students were asked to address specific topics such as overcoming obstacles, understanding the role of creativity during the unit of study, how flow can influence production, and the effect of being able to select their own topics to investigate. this study is important to consider in terms of global education. inquiry-based instruction has the potential to help students work in real-world ways solving real-world problems. with pressure to prepare students for standardized assessments, educators may be fearful of instructional methods that allow for choice, creativity, flexibility, and studentdirected decision-making. with inquiry-based instruction, standards are often embedded throughout the unit of study and addressed individually rather than being delivered through whole group direct instruction. with the demands of high-stakes testing, educators must be confident that providing authentic learning opportunities will render outcomes essential for helping students be successful in life and those measured on tests. inquiry-based instruction provides skills to help students not only evaluate and solve personal dilemmas, but also issues that impact the community, the environment, and future problems yet unknown (barron & darling-hammond, 2008). literature review inquiry-based instruction is the method behind programs that have emerged over the past several years such as genius hour, passion projects, and 20% time (krebs & zvi, 2016). these programs advocate the allotment of regular class time devoted to a research study based on student-selected topics (katrein, 2016; krebs & zvi, 2016; rush, 2015; simos, 2015). students are expected to gather information from a variety of sources and analyze the data before designing a final product to showcase what they have learned. the inspiration for these programs came from google and other corporations’ initiatives to allow employees time during the work week to explore personal interests, cultivate new ideas, or master new skills (krebs & zvi, 2016). inquiry-based instruction allows students to engage in individual research based on personal interests. students select a topic they would like to research, and the instructor serves as a facilitator, guiding the learning process. problem-based learning (pbl) and project-based learning (pjbl) are closely related to this method. in pbl, the teacher designs an unstructured problem for students to explore and a stakeholder role for students to assume during the investigation (gallagher, 2012; gallagher, 2015). in pjbl, students create products to showcase the information they have 110 global education review 5(1) learned during a unit of study. in all three methods, the instructor provides structure to the experience with check-in points in order to ensure students are gaining a solid foundation of the topic. creating authentic learning environments has long been a recommended method for serving high-achieving students in gifted education. one model, renzulli’s schoolwide enrichment model (sem), includes three stages where instructors provide opportunities based on students’ readiness, interest, and ability (renzulli, gentry, & reis, 2014). in type i and ii activities, the instructors offer exposure to different topics, creative problem-solving, and creative thinking. in type iii activities, students work through authentic problems. products are shared locally and globally. during this process, students develop research skills, problemsolving skills, creative thinking, and decisionmaking skills (renzulli & reis, 1994). using sem has also produced positive results for entire school populations, including culturally and linguistically diverse learners (allen, robbins, payne, & brown, 2016). when schools implement sem or instructors use tools such as inquiry-based learning, pbl, or pjbl in the classroom, they are seeking outcomes beyond the mastery of curriculum. as students investigate answers to their own questions they are immersed in the creative process as they brainstorm issues, navigate the learning process, solve problems, and produce final products. providing opportunities for students to engage in the creative process and to deal with ambiguity in situations allows students to understand how experts maneuver this terrain (gallagher, 2015). ultimately, schools using this method intend to help students understand how to approach a complex problem with the skills to address it with confidence from having worked through the process numerous times themselves (gallagher, 2015; katrein, 2016). in addition, these methods provide differentiation for students as they work through a similar process but with different levels of materials and varying scaffolding provided by the instructor (simos, 2015). as students move through the process, teachers can encourage students to consider what sources they use and how that source contributed to their understanding of the problem (rush, 2015; simos, 2015). this provides the opportunity to understand the research process. instructors can maintain a close connection with each learner by holding individual conferences, communicating through emails, and by having students self-assess using google forms. wholegroup mini-lessons allow the instructor to provide guidance in areas where students have gaps in conducting research. while facilitating these learning experiences, instructors should be aware of the stages students move through during the creative process and allow them the opportunity to spend time in these stages. students are designing the learning experience while they are immersed in it. wallas (1926) noted four stages in the creative process: preparation, incubation, illumination, and verification. the learner is in control during the preparation stage (doyle, 2016) as he or she focuses on the problem and begins to prepare for how to investigate it. during incubation, time is needed to consider the possibilities. this allows for moments of clarity and insights which lead to illumination where the individual has a moment of insight or clarity about the problem. verification occurs as the learner determines outcomes and evaluates solutions in an intentional manner (wallas, 1926). for teachers, allowing students to have flow experiences and creative problem solving 111 the time to step away from learning can be uncomfortable, but it is essential. understanding motivation and emotion within in these contexts is critical (doyle, 2016). an important component in these methods is student choice of topic, product, or process. over the past 50 years, several facets of the creative process have been defined. rhodes (1961) noted four “ps” being person, process, press, and product. person describes traits such as openness to experience and tolerance of ambiguity. process involves divergent thinking and brainstorming. press describes the environmental conditions and stimulation. product looks at the tangible output. gallagher (2015) outlines how other researchers have added to this initial list with potential (jauk et al., 2013), being prepared with a deep knowledge base, having a preference for inquiry-oriented thinking, and being skilled at persuasion (simonton, 1990). sternberg and lubart (1966) added purpose or motivation to the list. gallagher (2015) includes a final “p”, that of passion. passion about the topic prompts emotional engagement, allowing the person to feel encouragement in the face of challenges or obstacles. during an inquiry-based investigation, certain issues may arise. the driving questions students ask may be too narrow or too broad (krebs & zvi, 2016). the instructor should not solve problems for the students, but should use questioning skills to help them make their own decisions (rush, 2015). this aligns with growth mindset, research from dweck (2006) that describes the attitudes and dispositions necessary for overcoming obstacles. opposite of a growth mindset, is a fixed mindset where individuals abandon tasks that prove challenging. at the foundation of this theory is the power of belief that an individual will acquire the skills to be successful if he or she devotes time and energy to grown and learn, especially in the light of potential failure (dweck, 2006). if the learning environment is ideal, students may have the opportunity to be in flow, a state where an individual is immersed in a challenging activity, losing awareness of time and place, with attention completely on the task itself (csikszentmihalyi, 2000; doyle 2016). in this capacity, an individual is intrinsically motivated and less likely to experience negative or critical self-talk. distractions fade away because the desire to gain information or to experiment or to build and create is so strong. the level of productivity is influenced by focus and attention (csikszentmihalyi, 2000; doyle 2016). method the purpose of this study was to explore the student perspective of this type of instructional environment. the following research questions guided this study: 1). what are student perceptions of the instructional environment during student-driven inquiry? 2). how does student-driven inquiry influence creative problem-solving? and 3). does student-driven inquiry allow for experiences of flow for students? thirty students in an eighth grade honors language arts class, english i, in a southeastern school in the u.s. were participants in the study on student-driven inquiry. the requirements to be in this class included high performance on standardized tests (80% or higher), strong teacher recommendation, and high grades in prior classes (a/b). taking this course provided students the opportunity to earn high school credit while still in middle school. of the students, 13 were male and 17 were female ranging in age from twelve to fourteen. 112 global education review 5(1) motivation levels varied among the students. for several of the students, this was the first advanced class they had taken. the assignments, expectations, and autonomy could be daunting at times. other students had been served in advanced settings throughout their school years and yearned for continuous challenge. the majority of students were caucasian with one black female and two hispanic males. one male student struggled with anxiety issues and challenges in written expression connected to issues with autism spectrum disorder. another male student received services for hearing loss. approximately half of the population at the school is eligible for free or reduced lunch. overall, these students worked well together and could be described as curious, creative, social, and opinionated about personal beliefs and world views. an action-research approach was used for this study, a method that allows the researcher to evaluate and reflect throughout the research process (berg, lune, & lune, 2004). data was gathered through observations, discussions with students, student reflections, individual interviews, and focus group interviews. the instructors reflected on their observations throughout the unit of study and met twice a week to talk about their insights. discussions with students occurred in both a formal way, during class where the instructors monitored progress, and informally at other times throughout the unit of study, notably in the mornings where seven of the students met with one of the instructors during a time devoted for students to write the school’s literary magazine. students assessed their progress and analyzed the structure of the process through weekly emails to the instructors and through google forms where they answered questions about engagement during class time. the instructors interviewed 18 students individually and 12 students in small groups of 2-3 students. these interviews were conducted the week after students gave final presentations to their parents and the community. they were interviewed before school or during class for english i or literary magazine. students addressed the following questions during the interviews and focus groups: 1. how did you determine what question to explore during this investigation? 2. was your final product what you envisioned at the beginning of the process? what occurred along the way? did you overcome obstacles? 3. how engaged were you during class time? what helped you be engaged or prevented your engagement? 4. did you use creativity throughout the project? if so, can you describe this in more detail? the study took place over a thirteen-week period. instructors launched the unit by introducing the idea of exploring one topic in great depth. students brainstormed lists of topics they were curious about, ideas that they wanted to explore, and questions that could not easily be answered. after taking time to narrow down ideas, students created driving questions for their investigations. a list of the students’ driving questions with pseudonyms are described in table one. flow experiences and creative problem solving 113 table 1 list of driving questions pseudonym driving question / project description michael how do you build a house? david how can i create a two-dimensional platform (video game)? mark what type of instrument do people enjoy the most after listening to the chorus of a song on each one? susan how can i create videos for a youtube channel? rebekah what causes sleep disorders? alice how do you design an animation? jeremy how can i learn grecoroman style wrestling? brian how can i learn to play a song on the guitar? alex how do head injuries impact the brain and personality? larry how can i create a better habitat for my pet bird? marie how can i help others in need? aaron is climate change real? luke how can i create an app about football teams? warren what is the best airplane design? gretchen which coconut water is the best? james how can i design something using aeronautical engineering? christie what benefits are there for knitting? lisa what is the mandela effect (alternative universes and time travel)? kelly how is power balanced in our government? sarah is dance a sport? natalie how can we improve the environment? ashley how can we improve public schools? lori how can i design and market my artwork-inspirational bible quotes on canvases? carlie how can i learn about graphic design? josh how can i write a short story about the human mind? cynthia how can i learn to take professional-style pictures? selena why were burr and hamilton enemies? isaac is common core math better than prior math methods? patricia how can i create my own cook book? melissa how do i launch my own youtube channel? instructors created a designated time period every week for students to spend on their topics, approximately twenty percent of their instructional time. students made their own decisions about how to spend this time in class. they were given access to technology with laptop computers available. instructors worked as facilitators during this process, asking students questions about their progress and helping students when they asked for guidance. the media specialist provided two lessons for the students on the research process: how to evaluate quality sources and how to use mla to properly cite sources. on a weekly basis, the instructors asked students to either complete a google form or send an email assessing their progress. the instructors continued to use email exchanges to help students solve problems, to offer ideas, and to provide scaffolding for students who were struggling with the process or creating final products. questions asked on one of the google forms can be found in table two. 114 global education review 5(1) table 2 genius hour survey 1. how well do you understand the genius hour project? 2. how many high quality, reliable, helpful resources do you have? 3. how well do you understand what makes a source high quality, reliable, and helpful? 4. where do you get your sources? 5. do you understand what a database is? 6. do you have notes (from sources) that are helping you to answer your driving questions? 7. do you know exactly what you are working towards doing/learning/creating? 8. what are you working towards (what is your product, outcome, impact)? 9. what will your digital element be? check all options that you are interested in using during this process. (google form, prezi, google slides, youtube, pictochart/other infographics, haiku deck, other.) 10. do you have a clear, solid plan for how to present your final project? 11. do you have a bibliography? 12. how creative do you believe your project is? 13. have you encountered any challenges? what did you do to overcome them? 14. have you experienced flow while working on your project? (flow is a feeling of energized focus, full involvement, and enjoyment in the process of the activity.) 15. how well are you accepting feedback and being willing to make adjustments as a result? 16. how much do you feel you are learning/growing as a result of genius hour? 17. what mini-lessons would be helpful to you at this stage? check all that apply. (creating a driving question, using databases, evaluating sources, note-taking, making a bibliography, using a specific digital tool, writing skills, presentation skills, organization, time management, other.) 18. any final questions? comments? concerns? toward the end of the thirteen-week study, instructors provided a lesson on how to complete the required annotated bibliography and process paper. in the process paper, students addressed the following questions: 1. how/why you created driving question/project. how did you come up with your idea? what was your outcome/impact? why was it important/interesting to you? 2. explain your research process. what did you research? how did you find trustworthy, relevant, and useful sources? what did you learn about databases and bibliographies? what methods did you use to take notes and organize information? did you collect any data? 3. reflect on the obstacles, problems, and challenges you encountered. what parts of the process were the most difficult/confusing? what did you do when you felt stuck? did you quit, adjust, change course, overcome, problem-solve? why? how? 4. share your learning, insights, and the lasting effects. what lessons did you learn? how will this experience help you in the future? consider academics but also life lessons and skills. 5. offer recommendations, suggestions, and advice to future 8th graders. how can you be successful? consider what you would do differently or change about your own experience. with the purpose of this unit of instruction being to promote intrinsic motivation and curiosity, students were only graded on certain components: bibliographies, process papers, and written reflections. together, these accounted for twenty percent of the total grade for the class. table 3 shows the rubric used for grading the process paper. flow experiences and creative problem solving 115 table 3 rubric for process paper 10 8.5 7.5 6.5 0 title page (spaced properly) title (about 1/3 of the way down the page) student name genius hour course name teacher name due date perfect 0 mistakes 1 mistake 2-3 mistakes 4-5 mistakes >5 mistakes paragraph 1 how/why you created driving question/project. how did you come up with your idea? what was your outcome/impact? why was it important/interesting to you? way above average thoroughly answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully above average answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully average answers all questions below average does not answer all questions no answers paragraph 2 explain your research process. what did you research? how did you find trustworthy, relevant, and useful sources? what did you learn about databases and bibliographies? what methods did you use to take notes and organize information? did you collect any data? way above average thoroughly answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully above average answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully average answers all questions below average does not answer all questions no answers paragraph 3 reflect on the obstacles, problems, and challenges you encountered. what parts of the process were the most difficult/confusing? what did you do when you felt stuck? did you quit, adjust, change course, overcome, problemsolve? why? how? way above average thoroughly answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully above average answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully average answers all questions below average does not answer all questions no answers paragraph 4 share your learning, insights, and the lasting effects. what lessons did you learn? way above average thoroughly answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully above average answers all questions average answers all questions below average does not answer all no answers 116 global education review 5(1) how will this experience help you in the future? consider academics but also life lessons and skills. intelligently and thoughtfully questions paragraph 5 offer recommendations, suggestions, and advice to future 8th graders. how can you be successful? consider what you would do differently or change about your own experience. way above average thoroughly answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully above average answers all questions intelligently and thoughtfully average answers all questions below average does not answer all questions no answers process paper word count 495-505 words 490-494 or 506-510 words 475-489 or 511-525 words 400-474 or 526-599 words <400 or >600 words bibliography / works cited 5+ sources and all are scholarly >5 sources 5 sources <5 sources no sources annotations kind? how did you get it? verify reliability/relevance? teach/help you to understand? way above average (it is obvious student put effort into the research process and learned from it) above average average partial none mla format (overall) 1 inch margins center & capitalize your title alphabetized bibliography use tab to indent paragraphs double space readable, professional, consistent font size 12 throughout proper header perfect 0 mistakes 1-3 mistakes 4-6 mistakes 7-9 mistakes >10 mistakes for final presentations, the students chose a variety of formats to convey what they had learned. some chose to give motivational/educational speeches, while others created videos or offered hands-on demonstrations. students practiced in small groups and then presented final products to parents and school personnel during a celebration hosted in the evening two weeks after the unit was completed. results students described engagement with topic and with process due to choice and authenticity of the project. they expressed desire to explore their questions outside of school time and noted how they used creativity throughout the process and in final products. themes emerged in two areas: 1). how choice influenced the experience of flow and the creative process and 2). how the classroom environment nurtured overcoming obstacles through creative problem-solving. flow experiences and creative problem solving 117 the impact of choice on flow and the creative process throughout the process, students described what it was like to choose their own topic and driving question to explore. their enthusiasm was apparent in the classroom as they inquired when they would have time to work on the project every week and through conversations outside of the classroom where they shared details with friends. during class discussions, the instructors explained what it meant to be completely engaged in a topic where an individual may lose awareness of the passage of time as he or she follows a line of curiosity that is challenging, not passive. they defined flow as a state where an individual becomes completely engaged in his or her work, when challenge, motivation, desire, and drive come together to produce optimal outcomes. one student described how she felt her level of engagement during class time was directly linked to ownership over the topic. selena shared: when you are researching a topic that you are interested in and have the amount of freedom we did, it is extremely easy to get in the flow and enter a state of being completely consumed in the topic and experience. it was up to us what we did, so it felt like everything we did had a purpose. pretty much every class period, i enjoyed what i did, and got in the flow. i felt educated enough/prepared enough to just go off and do my own thing. i could do what i needed, which made the process easier than when a teacher gives you guidelines and rules. selena went on to describe how the driving question about a topic of high interest was the most important component during the project. she shared: flow is the most important part of this project (in my opinion), and i think i've experienced flow during every session we've worked. flow is important because it goes along with picking the right driving question. i picked a topic that i love in my free time (i was interested in it before this project started), so flow was never really a problem for me. students described the role of enjoyment and how it related to flow. one student described how gratifying it was to be fully engaged, working to capacity, without reoccurring thoughts that she needed to work harder. lisa said: flow is very needed in the process. it’s always nice to get stuff done without actually thinking, "i need to work harder". i've experienced lots of flow, especially in the beginning of the project. sometimes the hour flies by really fast, and i would have a ton of stuff done. although grades were not assigned for how students spent their class time, several described how being completely engaged in a topic could result in higher grades because of the amount of energy and attention a student gives to the topic. for these students, the role of choice influenced the amount of flow resulting in higher-level final products. gretchen described this impact of being in flow: flow is needed in your project, because if you don't have flow it'll be really hard for you to pay attention to your project. if you don't even like the thing you’re doing the project on, and you also don't have flow, then it'll be almost impossible to do the project and get something out of it. for example: if you're working on something in class and you have no interest in it then you probably won't do very good on it and will hate having to do it. if you have flow, then you'll enjoy doing the project even more and will probably get a better grade on it. understanding this on a metacognitive level became apparent in how the students described their experiences. students explained the connection between enjoyment of topic and 118 global education review 5(1) level of focus sustained during the process and the subsequent impact on learning. christie commented, “flow is commonly experienced to a point that we don't want it to end. we are not bored because we are researching what we want to learn about so we experience flow a lot.” kelly said: flow fit into this project because a lot of the time when i was working on this in class i would get so into it and kind of just block everything else out. also i was able to put my focus into something i enjoyed and really stay focused on it and not just having my mind wander while a teacher was talking. other students described how the level of engagement created the desire to continue the project outside of class time. larry said: flow fits in because the project you are doing is most likely something you are interested in, so you are able to stay focused and enjoy what you are doing, and you want to work on it outside of school and get into a rhythm. enjoying your project also gets you to go deeper in research about it or to do whatever it is you are doing so you get better at it and learn new things. students described how flow allowed for increased creativity during the project and when working on other assignments. cynthia said: it is important to have flow while working on our projects. having flow during class or while working on the project at home not only improves the quality of the project, but can also lead to new ideas that can make the project much more creative. i usually have flow in class, being around other people inspires me to work hard at my task. the influence of environment on overcoming obstacles through creative problem solving during the interviews, students made many comparisons between student-driven inquiry and teacher-directed assignments. several explained that the intensity of their interest helped them work at a faster pace than normal and to work through problems. susan shared: i experience flow every time we work on this project. i tend to get a lot of work done and focus better than i normally do. experiencing the flow allows me to work through the challenges i face with my project. the flow helps me work at a faster and more constant rate than normal. students were encouraged to handle obstacles along the way and work through their struggles by conducting further research, contacting experts in their topic or asking the instructors for help. one girl described how she worked through her problem areas. sarah shared: this project is going to have obstacles and turning points. it's part of the process. with any creativity idea or project, there is going to be back fires and road blocks. the brain encounters these because we have to create ideas and there may be, like an algebra problem, a missing variable. like your evidence or just part of the project. when i encounter a problem and i don't know what to do, i have to take a minute. i usually come up with solutions to problems when i'm doing something else. like simply listening to music, or even in a completely different class. if i really do a have an obstacle that i can't overcome i usually go to a teacher or my mom/dad for solutions or to just help to solve the problem. i usually don't like it that much when someone gives me a straight answer. the inspiration for the solution is what helps. flow experiences and creative problem solving 119 specific points of the student-driven process required that students use creativity, specifically with crafting the guiding question, with planning how to investigate the topic, and with the deciding how to display the final product. isaac, who tested math equations, shared, “the creativity comes from choosing what and how we are going to make that project. from my project i used creativity in creating my equation and how i was going to test that equation on people.” other students described how they used creativity in designing items. carlie said: creativity is the biggest piece in this project. your project comes from your passion and what you want to do with it, so you need to explore different creative sides. with my project, i have to use creativity to do my graphic designing. when i make the posters and other things, i have to be in full creativity mode. watching other projects, it is so cool to see the creativity being used, such as animation and unique areas of research. several students described how ownership over the decision-making process was influenced by creativity. rebekah explained, “creativity is very important for this project. there aren't many guidelines to follow and that leaves most of the project up to you. you need to figure out what you're doing your project on and how to present it.” alex said: you can do whatever you want to do for the project, and there are no boundaries. i started doing something, and i changed my mind on what i wanted to do. there is no one to tell me what to and not to do during the project, and i appreciated that. students recognized how creativity allowed them to work through issues when conducting research. jeremy said, “there are some class periods where you are completely stuck, and if you just do something related to your topic, you will find a solution to your problem.” patricia shared: you also have to be able to make changes and be able to work around obstacles and changes you weren't expecting. you might not be able to find a vital piece of information you were counting on, and you will just have to find something close enough and change that component of your project. many students described how they used creativity in determining how to present their final products. sarah said: creativity is one of the most important values you need to use for this process. you have to use creativity on how to present the project, what your target question was, and how to find and get the results of what you're looking for. people don't want to see the same thing. this project gives you a chance to experiment. with the resources you have it's possible to let your imagination run wild. in a regular class you don't get to do that as much. i was creative by having to find facts and not just opinions about dance being a sport, also in the way i'm going to present. students expressed their overall understanding of how to have faith in the problem-solving process. in a final reflection, cynthia wrote: the process is a longer project than standard assignments. the longer the process, the more obstacles may be present and the more turning points may occur. when students encounter obstacles and turning points, they might start to feel less confident in their projects. most will find ways to overcome the obstacles by themselves and benefit from turning points. i personally have overcome obstacles throughout the process. some of my obstacles included citing sources incorrectly, not knowing how to present 120 global education review 5(1) my project creatively, and not knowing where to start (in the beginning). one of my friends was having trouble sticking with a specific topic. she had many turning points over the course of the project about her topic and overcame many obstacles along the way. another student shared his feelings about overcoming obstacles during the project and in other areas of life. lisa said: everyone needs obstacles, pretty much in everything because they make you stronger. i've had obstacles trying to figure out how to present my project. i figured them out and i feel pretty confident on how i'm going to present my project. i really hope i can blow everyone's minds. discussion this study examined how students perceived an inquiry-based project that spanned thirteen weeks. students designed their own research problems and projects to explore. while working on these projects students described being in flow due to their personal connection with the topic of study, an important component in the creative process (csikszentmihalyi, 2000; doyle, 2016). this type of instruction allowed for creativity on a daily basis. students developed an understanding that being creative does not mean working only with arts and crafts, but instead can be seen in all realms of thinking and producing (doyle, 2016). struggles that educators face in traditional classroom settings are often associated with students’ attitude toward topic and students’ ability to maintain focus. in this study, students described a high level of engagement. choice created the opportunity for sustained attention resulting in the possibility of higher commitment to topic and higher quality final products. this corroborates gallagher’s (2015) description of passion as an important process with creative production. helping students develop a sense of awe and wonder about the world around them can be overlooked in educational settings. curiosity is important to promote. students can lose this over the years if assignments do not include personal choice. on a metacognitive level, students were able to explain how they overcame obstacles. they described the use of creative problemsolving during many stages of this project from creating an engaging question to explore, to designing research strategies, to determining an appropriate final presentation format. being able to reflect on this and verbalize how to overcome challenges can help students develop confidence when they encounter problems during the creative process (gallagher, 2015). this has the potential to affect how these students handle setbacks in the future potentially helping to develop growth mindsets (dweck, 2006). during this unit of study, students worked on individual projects where all outcomes were a reflection of their own strengths and weaknesses. they crafted driving questions that had no predetermined answers, were openended, and required critical thinking, essential facets for inquiry (bailin, 2015). they sought guidance from instructors, peers, parents, and experts in the realm they studied, but time management was determined by the individual. students were not working for grades during this time only satisfying their curiosities as there were no correct answers to produce. in addition, assessments did not take the form of a multiple choice test or exam. students addressed standards in research and presentation of information through an authentic method. these tools will be valuable for these students in both personal and professional contexts (bailin, 2015). flow experiences and creative problem solving 121 limitations and recommendations for future studies research for this study was conducted with an english i eight grade honors language arts class, a class typically offered in ninth grade. although motivational levels of students varied, a majority of these students are highly motivated. in addition, these students earn high grades in school and score well on standardized tests. in future studies, students of varying ability levels should be included. this may be especially important for instructors working with learning disabilities and with students struggle in traditional classroom settings. understanding how personal choice impacts these individuals is important for designing appropriate and impactful curriculum. conclusion this study contributes to the research on the benefits of inquiry-based instruction for providing students opportunities to learn essential problem-solving skills. the results show the importance of allowing students choice in assignments. students expressed appreciation for being in control of their research and the decision-making process. while spending time on their projects, they described the power of experiencing flow. they worked on assignments outside of class and continued to invest time and energy on their topics after their final presentations. beyond understanding the power of pursuing a passionate topic, students also focused on overcoming challenges. knowing how to solve problems is an important skill; one that will serve students in all areas of life. as educators work to meet the needs of todays’ learners, allowing for authentic opportunities can provide the pathway for students to acquire the skills to solve local, national, and global 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(1994). research related to the schoolwide enrichment triad model. gifted child quarterly, 38(1), 7-20 renzulli, j. s., gentry, m., & reis, s. m. (2014). enrichment clusters: a practical plan for real-world, studentdriven learning (2nd ed.). waco, tx: prufrock press. sternberg, r., & lubart, t.i. (1966). investing in creativity. american psychologist, 51(7), 677-688. wallas, g. (1926). the art of thought. london, united kingdom: g.j. cape. about the author kristy kowalske doss, phd, is a visiting professor in the school of teaching and learning. she instructs classes in gifted education and special education. her research interests are in problem-based learning and social / emotional issues of gifted and ec students. flow and cps through inquiry-based instruction revised kd nov 2017 format with footer flow and cps through inquiry-based instruction revised kd nov 2017 format microsoft word final mongillo (2nd version) with additional edits by mbmgall preparing school leaders for young learners 37 _________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mongillo, maria b. (2017). preparing school leaders for young learners in the united states. global education review, 4 (3). 37-55. preparing school leaders for young learners in the united states maria boeke mongillo central connecticut state university abstract in the united states there has been a recent movement to expand access to preschool for children aged 3 to 4 through “universal pre-k” in states that fund programs for all age-eligible students. this has caused an increasing number of preschool programs to be housed in public schools and led by principals who often have little or no experience or training in early childhood. at the same time, the global education reform movement (germ) is taking hold and pressuring schools to utilize educational methods that are opposed to best practices in early childhood education. in response to current research about teaching and learning and challenges facing schools, the professional standards for educational leadership 2015 (psel 2015) were created to influence how leaders are prepared, hired, evaluated, and supported in their work. this article brings together these three current forces in public education in the us, and describes how they complement and conflict with each other. the underlying premise of this work is (a) to meet the psel 2015, leaders will need a greater understanding of early childhood education; (b) by understanding early childhood education, leaders will have an expanded framework from which to make decisions about how to address germ; and (c) leaders need to find appropriate ways to respond to germ in order to meet the psel 2015. thus, developing a force of school leaders who understand and support best practices in ece may ultimately improve learning outcomes for all students. keywords preschool education, leadership, global education reform movement, early childhood education introduction in the united states, preschool programs for children aged 3 and 4 vary significantly. children may attend programs housed in public schools, in private or community centers, or in private homes. some children may not go to preschool at all, entering kindergarten at age 5 or first grade at age 6 with no formal schooling experience. the decision to enroll children in a preschool program is made by parents and guardians, and often depends on complex factors such as accessibility, cost, program structure (e.g., full or half day), location, and transportation. though the national association for the education of young children (naeyc) offers accreditation of preschool programs and learning standards for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers, and the individual states have their own learning standards and regulations for early childhood programs, in practice preschool programs vary widely in terms of instruction, ____________________________________ maria boeke mongillo, department of educational leadership, policy, and instructional technology. central connecticut state university, 1615 stanley street new britain, ct 06050 email: maria.boeke.mongillo@ccsu.edu 38 global education review 4(3) continues to demonstrate its importance on later preparation and certification of staff, and resources. there has been a recent movement in the us to expand preschool programs as research learning outcomes for students. as of the 2016-17 fiscal year, 44 states provided some level of state funding for preschool programs and there has been a 47 percent increase in state pre-k funding over the last five years (diffley, parker, & atchison, 2017). many states are considering “universal pre-k,” a model where states support financing of preschool for all age-eligible children regardless of a child’s ability level or family income (colker, 2008), though to date only three states have fully espoused this model (mead, 2015). as this increase in early learning programs occurs, more preschool programs are being housed in public schools and led by public school leaders (loewenberg, 2016; shore, shue, & lambert, 2010; szekely, 2013). public school principals, however, are unlikely to have had any training or experiences with early childhood programs (bish, shore, & shue, 2011; goncu, main, perone, & tozer, 2014; lieberman, 2016; mead, 2011; shore, shue, & lambert, 2010). though state principal licensure standards require a higher level of education and both teaching and clinical experience, the vast majority of school leadership preparation programs, state licensure exams, and certification prerequisites do not mandate familiarity with early childhood topics (clarke brown, squires, connors-tadros, & horowitz, 2014; lieberman, 2017). novice principals suggest knowledge and skills related to human relations, personnel, educational leadership, and curriculum as most important for their work in schools (petzko, 2008), and these areas may need special consideration for ece programs (mead, 2011). adding a preschool program is more complex than simply adding one more grade level, as it requires principals to have an understanding of teachers with different certifications, a distinctive developmental period, and developmentally appropriate practices for designing curriculum, instruction, and assessment (goncu et al., 2014). principals who are charged with leading preschool programs indicate they need more training in areas of ece curriculum and the developmental milestones of young children, appropriate behavioral expectations and disciplinary practices for preschoolers, and in how to provide instructional supervision to their ece staff (bish, shore, & shue, 2011; shore, shue, & lambert, 2010). additionally, principals express concerns about the particular licensing and regulations that pertain to younger students, as well as how to properly interact with the many outside agencies that support families and children (bish, shore, & shue, 2011; shore, shue, & lambert, 2010). though states do require professional learning experiences for school leaders, they rarely focus on helping principals to develop the knowledge and skills needed to strengthen their ability to lead ece programs (lieberman, 2017). while the us is considering expansion of preschool access, the global education reform movement (germ) is taking greater hold and shifting work in schools to learning focused on basics, prescription, standardized testing, and test-based accountability (sahlberg, 2012). sahlberg (2011) described six principles of germ: standardization in and of education, increased focus on literacy and numeracy, teaching for predetermined results, transfer of innovation from corporations to education, testbased accountability policies, and increased governmental control of schooling. these principles conflict with creating well-rounded citizens and sustaining school improvement (robertson, 2015). additionally, these practices are opposed to the traditionally holistic, exploratory, and developmental nature of ece. thus the concern becomes the impact that germ will have on pre-k programs if school leaders do not preparing school leaders for young learners 39 understand the unique learning needs of early childhood students. public educational policy has a significant influence on the practices of principals (provost, boscardin, & wells, 2010), and leaders will have to address germ-related policies in their schools. without familiarity with ece principles and practices, principals may rely on their knowledge of, and experiences with, upper grades as they implement germ-based policies (goncu et al., 2014). given the current social and political climate in the us, leaders may feel compelled to push students to engage with activities and topics that are not developmentally appropriate for their learning needs, may pressure teachers to structure their classrooms, instruction, and assessment in ways that contradict best practices for ece (mead, 2011), or focus on practices to improve standardized test scores (goncu et al., 2014). this gap in school leader knowledge also needs to be addressed if leaders are to meet the professional standards for educational leaders (national policy board for educational administration, 2015), a set of national guidelines for how leaders go about their work of supporting student learning. leaders who are not well-versed in the needs of young learners can neither fully meet the standards nor reach the goal of educating and providing equitable opportunities for all students. connecting ideas about best practices for ece with the professional standards for educational leaders may provide some strategies for educational leaders, leadership preparation programs, and policy makers to respond to the germ in ways that benefit and support all learners. professional standards for educational leaders the national policy board for educational administration (npbea) developed the professional standards for educational leaders 2015 (psel 2015). the npbea is a group comprised of nine educational organizations responsible for the accreditation of leadership preparation programs and professional learning for practicing school administrators in the us. the psel 2015 were created to respond to current research regarding improving student learning and challenges facing education such as globalization and decreasing school budgets. by providing research-based guidelines, the psel 2015 hope to influence how leaders are prepared, hired, evaluated, and supported in their work. the psel 2015 are organized around ten interconnected domains that reflect research and practice-based qualities and values that impact student learning. the standards are as follows: 1. mission, vision, and core values 2. ethics and professional norms 3. equity and cultural responsiveness 4. curriculum, instruction and assessment 5. community of care and support for students 6. professional capacity of school personnel 7. professional community for teachers and staff 8. meaningful engagement of families and community 9. operations and management 10. school improvement the psel 2015 state they are not a list of prescribed actions leaders should take in order to improve student achievement, but rather they are expectations for leaders to adapt and fit into their specific school and district contexts. likewise, they recognize that the implementation of the standards may have particular issues or challenges in different situations, and thus need to be thoughtfully applied. principals who have preschool programs in their buildings may need to consider how ece should influence their understanding of and ability to apply the standards in their daily work. 40 global education review 4(3) psel 2015 overarching theme though the psel 2015 are comprised of ten different standard domains, they are guided by an overarching theme: leaders must focus on supporting the whole child1 and the needs of each individual student. this idea aligns well with ece as preschool teachers generally recognize they are helping students to grow cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally, and this is reflected in most preschool frameworks or standards for learning documents. however, it is unlikely school principals have had exposure to these early childhood frameworks and standards, or to the theories of child development and learning that have shaped the assumptions that form their foundations (bish, shore, & shue, 2011; goncu, main, perone, & tozer, 2014; lieberman, 2016; mead, 2011; shore, shue, & lambert, 2010). this gap in leader knowledge is of concern because school leaders play an important role in shaping the culture of the school, instructional practices, and student outcomes (szekely, 2013), and leaders have been integral to the success of ece programs (ritchie, phillips, & garrett, 2016). developmentally appropriate practice in the us there is a set of guiding principles of early learning put forth by naeyc (2009) called developmentally appropriate practice (dap). these principles are applicable to all aspects of ece across its varied settings. dap connects theories of child development, ideas about children’s social and cultural contexts, and knowledge of individual children into a set of 12 principles for educators to consider when working with children from birth through age eight. the 12 principles of dap (naeyc, n.d.) include: all areas of development and learning are important. 1. learning and development follow sequences. 2. development and learning proceed at varying rates. 3. development and learning result from an interaction of maturation and experience. 4. early experiences have profound effects on development and learning. 5. development proceeds toward greater complexity, self-regulation, and symbolic or representational capacities. 6. children develop best when they have secure relationships. 7. development and learning occur in and are influenced by multiple social and cultural contexts. 8. children learn in a variety of ways. 9. play is an important vehicle for developing self-regulation and promoting language, cognition, and social competence. 10. development and learning advance when children are challenged. 11. children’s experiences shape their motivation and approaches to learning. in addition to the twelve principles, naeyc (2009) provided guidelines to help educators apply dap in their classrooms in five key areas of practice: creating a caring community of learners, teaching to enhance development and learning, planning curriculum to achieve important goals, assessing children’s development and learning, and establishing reciprocal relationships with families. these dap principles and guidelines are largely in contradiction to germ. while dap recognizes that learning occurs when children are provided challenging work and held to high standards, it also notes children develop at differing rates based in part on their individual maturity levels, and experiences. thus, to follow the dap principles and guidelines, teachers have to provide individualized learning experiences for students based upon their needs, readiness, and abilities. germ principles, on the other hand, begin with the understanding that clear and high standards are important for student preparing school leaders for young learners 41 learning, but encourage standardization and homogenization of teaching and learning (robertson, 2015). dap also espouses educating the whole child, understanding that young children need opportunities to grow cognitively, physically, socially, and emotionally. it is the job of the educator to provide learning experiences in the classroom that support all areas of development. germ, however, focuses on basic skills, particularly literacy and numeracy (sahlberg, 2011). further, the emphasis on basic skills opposes the dap premise that young children acquire knowledge and skills through play, i.e., that children learn best when they experience hands-on, engaging activities that tap into their natural curiosity in a social learning environment (morrow, 2009). the teaching of basic skills is often characterized by rote memorization, drills, and completion of worksheets, practices that are inappropriate for preschool children, and which may not be most effective for encouraging student engagement at any level. furthermore, dap recognizes learning as a function of both maturation and experience, noting each child reaches developmental milestones at his or her own pace depending on internal and external stimuli. while there are expected ages by which children typically master certain cognitive, physical, behavioral, and social skills, they are marked by a range rather than a hard and fast age (sousa, 2011). to meet these varied individual student needs, early educators, using a dap approach, work to recognize the range of developmental levels in their classrooms and adjust instruction accordingly. germ expects teachers to use safe, low risk strategies to achieve pre-determined results. it diminishes teacher innovation and creativity, and undermines teachers’ autonomy, which contradicts the belief that teachers are trained professionals who know what is best for the students they encounter in their classrooms every day (sahlberg, 2011). ece teachers, however, require the freedom to create or select the best instructional practices and learning activities, especially given the wide range of student abilities they are likely to face in their classes (goldstein, 2008). dap guidelines also specify the need to use assessment as a tool for planning, instruction, and evaluation. the guidelines support sound assessment that takes into consideration individual needs, such as the cultural contexts of the student or whether a child is an english language learner. additionally, the guidelines encourage the use of multiple modes of assessment including performance-based tasks, teacher observations, family checklists or interviews, and analysis of student work, while germ pushes schools to rely on standardized testing and to measure teacher accountability using test scores (sahlberg, 2011). while this method of calculating teacher effectiveness can be troublesome at all grade levels, it is particularly so in ece. with the focus on the development of the whole child, many skills and abilities are not captured in standardized scores, thus making it very difficult to measure teacher success in terms of numerical testing results. standards not standardization because of the contradictions noted above, some ece groups have adopted a stance that opposes germ and its focus on standardization while remaining committed to high-quality standards for young learners and ece professionals. the tension between the “colliding worlds” (mccabe & sipple, 2011, p. 8) of dap and germ, the apparently opposing forces of what constitutes good individual learning experiences for young children found in ece settings and the pressure for standardization and accountability found in other school settings, often leaves preschool and kindergarten teachers struggling to respond (goldstein, 2008; mccabe & sipple, 2011). ece teachers may feel the fundamental principles that underlie their practices are being called into 42 global education review 4(3) question (mccabe & sipple, 2011). according to katz (2015), however, framing the ece debate around these two issues limits the conversation. the idea of having common goals is not the concern, but it is the types of goals set for children that matter. katz (2015, p. 2) advocated for “intellectual goals” which encourage reasoning, questioning, analyzing, and predicting, over “academic goals” which support learning individual pieces of information that often relate to numeracy and literacy in the early grades. likewise, the naeyc (2002) and defending the early years (dey, 2015) both describe how standards in ece can be a meaningful way to ensure high-quality learning experiences for all children. ece standards need to be developmentally appropriate and assessed in ways that accommodate the many variations in children’s backgrounds, languages, and experiences; developed in conjunction with ece professionals; and implemented in the classroom by well-prepared and supported teachers (dey, 2015; naeyc, 2002). meier (2002) pronounced this idea in the broader educational systems as focusing on standards not standardization. goldstein (2008), conversely, argued that the socio-political factors that influence a child must be incorporated into the classroom in order for practices to be developmentally appropriate. she viewed germ and the standardization movement as part of those larger political and social forces that affect children. thus she suggested the types of teaching practices and philosophies espoused by germ should be incorporated into the ece classroom in order meet a fundamental goal of dap which is to help children learn to navigate their larger world. goldstein (2008) warned, however, that this rationale could be used to justify ece classrooms using the worksheets and seatwork found in upper grades rather than the active, experiential activities that foster the growth of the whole child. to avoid this, she advocated that ece professionals should have a deep knowledge of content and a thorough understanding of how young children learn. this would allow practitioners to make informed and responsible choices about their teaching practices and how they meet the specific needs of their students. furthermore, critics of dap suggest it actually espouses some of the fundamental ideas that underlie germ. like germ, dap has become a globalized model for ece (penn, 2002). by dividing children’s experience into the categories of physical, cognitive, and socialemotional development, dap standardizes (penn, 2002) and “homogenises” children (woodhead, 2006, p. 17). the idea that children pass through specific stages of development discounts the significant impact of society and culture, and the influence a child’s race, ethnicity, gender, socio-economic status, and other factors have on the growth trajectory of a child (woodhead, 2006). it has also led to increased control of ece programs and less teacher autonomy, encouraging a mindset that all children follow similar patterns of development and that they can and should be expected to have similar academic outcomes if the right educational treatment is applied (penn, 2002). though these similarities exist, dap at its foundation supports learning through play and social interactions with peers and adults, opposes rote memorization and standardized testing, and encourages a holistic view of children, all of which contrast germ. the intersection of ece, psel 2015, and germ best practices for ece as expressed in the dap principles and guidelines oppose many of the ideas and assumptions embedded in germ. in order for school leaders to fully realize the nature and quality of work outlined by the psel 2015, they must understand instructional practices that meet the needs of all learners, including those for preschool students. thus, preparing school leaders for young learners 43 providing leaders with a knowledge of dap and other best practices in ece related to children’s cognitive, physical, and social-emotional development, play-based learning, and the assessment of young children may also help leaders discover how to implement instructional practices to respond to germ by adapting ece philosophies and practices for use in upper level classrooms. the importance of leaders understanding ece to fully meet each standard and the way in which fully meeting each standard prevents germ from taking over varies in each of the ten psel 2015. standard 1: mission, vision, and core values “effective educational leaders develop, advocate, and enact a shared mission, vision, and core values of high-quality education and academic success and well-being of each student” (npbea, 2015, p. 9). included in this standard are the ideas that the school’s mission, vision, and core values drive the all efforts of the school and every aspect of the leader’s work. these defining statements are not merely words on paper, but the rationale behind, and impetus for, all school actions and decisions. a key role of any leader is the development of the school climate and culture (peterson & deal, 1998), and the mission, vision, and core values are a visible description of the leader’s ideas of what the culture should be. the psel 2015 also suggest the mission and vision need to be living statements, adjusted to meet the needs of students and the school as they change. one such change in a school and its student population may be the addition of a prek program. according to mead (2012), the inclusion of preschool and kindergarten in the school’s mission and vision statements are an important part of creating an instructional climate and culture that support early learning. principals need to view early learning as an integral part of the larger continuum of learning, rather than as an optional learning experience. to be successful, the young students and their teachers must be valued as equal members of the school community and full participants in all aspects of school life both within and outside the classroom. goncu et al. (2014) suggested that principals are more likely to fully integrate ece into the life of the school when they have a deep understanding of its significance, and that principals who are unable to incorporate ece may harm program effectiveness. creating a comprehensive mission, vision, and core values that include early childhood programs may be one strategy for leaders to mediate the influence of germ. for a leader to fully meet standard 1 if they have an ece program in their school, the mission, vision, and core values must reflect dap and the holistic philosophies underlying instructional practices in ece. if the leader uses the mission to promote academic success and well-being of students, works to strategically implement actions to achieve the vision, and models and pursues the mission, vision, and core values in all aspects of leadership, the leader will be creating an environment and encouraging instructional practices supported by dap. in this way, including ece in the mission and vision can support all learners. standard 2: ethics and professional norms “effective educational leaders act ethically and according to professional norms to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 10). one part of this standard addresses the need for leaders to act in ways that are transparent and fair, and that promote collaboration, trust, learning, and continuous improvement. this standard also regards schools as mechanisms for promoting social justice and equity, and assigns leaders responsibility for each student’s success as learners and as well-rounded individuals. 44 global education review 4(3) in order for leaders to behave ethically in their guidance of preschool programs, leaders must have knowledge of young children’s developmental stages and needs. by advocating for and developing high-quality preschool programs leaders can potentially support positive learning progress and lower the need for expensive interventions later in a student’s academic career (szekely, 2013). the decisions a principal makes about early learning programs under his or her control can have significant impact later in a student’s life. additionally, principals confess they often hire teachers for ece classrooms based more upon personality traits than content knowledge (cook, 2016). this can be especially troubling in a subject like math, where content-specific knowledge and skills follow a linear trajectory (mongillo, 2017). to be successful, ece teachers need to understand how the topics they teach relate to and lay the foundation for more complicated ideas later. also, without a deep knowledge of content, ece teachers may not be able to identify and correct student misconceptions in effective ways. furthermore, principals admit they often hire teachers with broader certification grade spans2 because it allows them more flexibility in moving them to other classrooms as needed from year to year (cook, 2016). if leaders have a comprehension of the significance of early learning and the complexity involved in teaching young children, they may be more likely to make informed and ethical choices about distribution of resources and hiring teachers. to meet standard 2, a leader must act ethically in all areas of leadership, including relationship-building, decision-making, and resource distribution. the six principles of germ oppose best practices in ece, which suggests that ethical leaders will need to be aware of that influence if they are going to meet the needs of each student. germ may have educators pushing children to engage in activities that are not developmentally appropriate, holding them to behavioral standards not aligned to their maturational level, or assessing them in ways that are unable to accurately capture their knowledge and skills. a leader who understands young children and strives to act ethically will support instruction in and hire teachers for early childhood classrooms keeping in mind each young student’s learning needs. standard 3: equity and cultural responsiveness “effective educational leaders strive for equity of educational opportunity and culturally responsive practices to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 11). to meet this standard, leaders must get to know their students’ strengths, diversity, and culture and accept them as assets rather than deficits to learning. additionally, leaders need to challenge stereotypes about and maintain high standards for all students regardless of race, class, culture, gender, sexual orientation, disability, or special status. while having educators approach student diversity as a strength and asset is important for all students, it is especially so for young learners. young children observe the differences among people and form attitudes about different groups (york, 2003). preschool age children are developing a sense of their own and others’ identities, trying to define how they view themselves and others (hendrick & wiseman, 2011). this suggests even young children need access to a culturally responsive and multicultural education to help them develop the knowledge and skills they will need to function in a diverse, global society as adults. additionally, the us has shifting racial and ethnic demographics, with an increasing percentage of non-white people and english language learners (cohn, 2016; us department of education, 2016), and population trends indicate these transformations in the make-up of preparing school leaders for young learners 45 student bodies will be increasingly present in the younger grades before moving their way up through the schools. having a diversity-oriented mindset may help leaders meet standard 3 and address the conflicting messages germ may send. germ demands a standardization of curriculum, instruction, and assessment while at the same time expecting predetermined results. given the diversity of students, these ideas may work against each other. students of diverse backgrounds may approach learning from different perspectives and thus may require other ways to access the curriculum, demonstrate their learning, and achieve the same educational outcomes. principals who understand this can advocate for and support the use of varied, culturally responsive techniques in classrooms at all levels. standard 4: curriculum, instruction and assessment “effective educational leaders develop and support intellectually rigorous and coherent systems of curriculum, instruction, and assessment to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 12). with this standard, leaders are expected to use their knowledge of child development and learning and best methods of instruction to support curriculum, instruction, and assessment practices that are aligned and focused across grade levels. furthermore, it specifies curriculum and instruction should be rigorous, authentic, and differentiated to meet student needs. assessment practices should be valid and developmentally appropriate, with data used fittingly to monitor and advance student learning. of all the standards, this may be the one of most importance for educators to consider when determining the value of principals having specific knowledge of best practices for ece. standard 4 addresses the interactions that happen in the instructional core, defined as students and teachers in the presence of content (city, elmore, fiarman, & teitel, 2009). this is the day-to-day work happening in schools, and where student learning is most influenced. in describing what should be happening in ece classrooms, dap explicitly expresses the importance of play as a vehicle for fostering learning in young children. though adults may view pretend play as relaxing and fun, it is actually an intellectually demanding and cognitively complex task (segal, 2004), requiring children to combine memory and experiences together to make meaning (roskos & christie, 2001). similar cognitive strategies are necessary for literacy and other learning tasks. young learners need to be able to interact physically with the world around them in order to construct knowledge, yet many principals lack an understanding of how to balance play-based learning with other academic activities (lieberman & cook, 2016). the question of how much play should be included in ece arises in part from the impact of germ. principals describe the pressures they feel to reduce time for play in the early grades and instead focus on academic activities (lieberman & cook, 2016), explaining how academic expectations have risen in the early grades. some may also have difficulty seeing that for young children play is learning. since principals create the culture of learning in their schools, allot time and resources for instructional activities, and evaluate and supervise teachers, it is important for them to understand how play in the early grades is a valuable and necessary instructional activity. appropriate mentoring and supervision is an important contribution to ece teacher quality (fulgini, howes, lara-cinisomo, & karoly, 2009). without understanding ece, principals may be encouraging practices that make ece classrooms function like upper grade levels and possibly contradict the support of early learning (lieberman & cook, 2016; szekely, 2013). leaders also need to understand early 46 global education review 4(3) childhood development. mead (2012) suggested that successful leaders of ece programs advocate for an inclusive curriculum that includes the arts, science, physical education, and history, aligning the curriculum and sequence learning across grade levels. doing this makes sure learning progresses from simple to more complex, and from concrete to more abstract concepts. yet, in order to do this work, the leader must understand the developmental levels of young children in an informed and appropriate manner. one germ feature is a preoccupation with literacy and numeracy, a focus on basic skills, but young children need learning experiences focused on the whole child. robertson (2015) argued the focus on basic knowledge reduces student creativity and ingenuity, the types of skills students will need to function as adults in a changing society. for principals to avoid the pressure to focus all learning on formally tested skills like language arts and math, they need to view students from a holistic perspective. understanding and embracing the principles of ece, may help leaders to formulate a mindset that approaches the work of schools from a broader, more inclusive point of view. another aspect of standard 4 is the leader’s role in assessment of student learning. mead (2011) noted successful ece principals are able to work with teachers to collect and analyze data, and then use the data to plan and implement instruction. to do this with early childhood teachers, leaders have to recognize that young children demonstrate their learning in different ways than older students (howard & bornfreund, 2014). while direct assessments of literacy and numeracy skills are useful, to get a full picture of student growth and learning requires assessments across different domains over time. assessments are most accurate and useful when they are embedded into the daily work of young students. germ, however, has a preoccupation with test-based accountability that can drive leaders to expect teachers to use paper and pencil assessments that cannot capture the learning of young children. principals instead need to validate alternative ways of measuring student progress such as performance-based tasks, teacher observations, family checklists or interviews, and analysis of student work. leaders who do this can support teachers in upper levels in using alternative methods of assessment as well, resulting in better learning experiences for all students. standard 5: community of care and support for students “effective educational leaders cultivate an inclusive, caring, and supportive school community that promotes the academic success and well-being of each student” ( npbea, 2015, p. 13). through this standard, leaders are expected promote a culture that ensures students are being supported not only through their interactions with teachers about content, but also with additional services and extracurricular activities that help to meet their needs. the leader needs to work to develop relationships among all members of the school community that support positive social and emotional learning, and also to create a school environment that is safe and supports healthy physical growth. while healthy relationships within the school are important for all students, they are particularly so for young children. young children learn best when they have secure relationships with the adults in the classroom. young children’s development in all areas is profoundly influenced by the quality and stability of their relationships. having nurturing relationships with adults at an early age fosters healthy social and emotional behaviors later in life. in schools, young children who feel they have a positive and caring relationship with their teachers tend to be more excited about school preparing school leaders for young learners 47 and have higher levels of achievement (national scientific council on the developing child, 2004). leaders need to recognize the significance of stable and secure relationships and create an environment that is supportive of the work early childhood educators do. early childhood teachers who are not able to utilize the instructional practices they know are best for young learners, an issue that may arise when implementing germ principles, may leave their placement or give up teaching as a career (whitebook et al., 2009). given the importance of stable, caring relationships for preschool children, staff turnover is especially detrimental in ece. leaders need to have an understanding of this emotional need to support teacher practices, but also to staff ece classrooms and limit class size so there are enough adults to foster deep relationships with each child. standard 6: professional capacity of school personnel “effective educational leaders develop the professional capacity and practice of school personnel to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 14). within this standard, leaders are to focus on supporting teachers and staff from the recruiting and hiring process through to their retirement by offering professional learning opportunities that help all to continually develop and improve their practice. additionally, this standard encourages the development of teacher leaders through distributing leadership tasks and improving the individual capacity of all members of the school community. teachers are the most important schoolbased influence on student learning (hattie, 2012). thus, it is the job of the principal to provide appropriate professional development opportunities to help struggling teachers learn to implement strategies to improve student success, and to help proficient teachers continue to hone, refine, and update their practices. for early childhood teachers, opportunities for professional development should include participation in learning with the rest of the school and in training specifically targeted to address topics in ece. (loewenberg, 2016). they also need to engage in professional learning that addresses instructional planning, curriculum development, and student data analysis both with their own and other grade levels (mead, 2011). ongoing, focused professional development for teachers appears to be especially important for improving teacher quality in ece (fulgini et al., 2009). a particular challenge for preschool teachers in a public school setting is that they may be the only pre-k teacher in the building. they may have access to reading material about best practices and research in ece, but little opportunity to view, reflect on, and discuss actual classroom instruction utilizing strategies that are known to encourage student success (ritchie, phillips, & garrett, 2016). they may have the chance to engage in vertically aligned professional learning experiences with other teachers across the ece kindergarten through grade 3 continuum, but unable to have frequent horizontal conversations with other pre-k teachers. for leaders to meet standard 6, they must have an understanding of child growth and development and of high-quality learning experiences at each age in order to determine how professional resources will be allocated. this will help them decide if school or districtwide professional development initiatives are developmentally appropriate for preschool learners. likewise, they can better determine what unique professional learning opportunities their preschool teachers should have, perhaps looking beyond the school or district to connect single teachers to other ece professionals. additionally, leaders should support teacher leadership. being able to do this, in part, requires leaders to recognize the gaps in their own knowledge. regarding ece at the most 48 global education review 4(3) fundamental level, this means leaders have to understand that young learners have unique learning needs, and that if they are unable to fully discuss and support teachers in meeting those needs, they should offer leadership roles to the ece professionals who can. principals also need to make a purposeful decision to encourage leadership among ece professionals. often early childhood teachers become leaders by default, with little training or support, in part because they are isolated from other teachers (maxfield, ricks-doneen, klocko, & sturges, 2011). in systems where school leaders support ece, create a continuum of learning from preschool through the upper grades, and provide highquality professional development, early childhood teacher leaders are most successful. leaders who provide the opportunity for their ece teachers to observe and discuss best practices on a regular basis can reassure teachers as they continue to use dap to drive their work. this requires principals to work against germ’s reliance on corporations as the best sources of educational innovation as an underlying belief is that businesses and other institutions outside of schools can better determine what should be happening inside schools. germ’s focus on bringing in ideas from outside undermines teachers and deters them from learning from each other. standard 6 expects leaders to empower teachers to engage in continuous learning and improvement. standard 7: professional community for teachers and staff “effective educational leaders foster a professional community of teacher and other professional staff to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 15). standard 7 focuses on creating the conditions and culture within the school to build collective capacity. this standard urges leaders to put in place systems and structures that allow teachers to collaborate on examining student data, providing instructional feedback, and developing practice. it also supports teacherdriven professional learning initiatives that are tightly aligned to actual classroom practice. for school leaders to support pre-k learning environments, they need to envision teaching as a collaborative rather than an isolated practice, and provide opportunities for teachers to engage in planning across grade levels (mead, 2011). leaders need to allow teachers time for shared planning and collaborative analysis of student data as single and multiple grade level teams. additionally, building shared capacity of teachers may help schools make better decisions about how and when to implement germ principles. if the principal can validate the work of ece professionals by including them in the professional learning community of the school, then preschool teachers can model instructional and assessment practices that are more studentcentered. while all practices may not be appropriate for upper grades, many can be scaled up for use with older students. standard 8: meaningful engagement of families and community “effective educational leaders engage families and the community in meaningful, reciprocal, and mutually beneficial ways to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 16). to meet this standard, leaders will look beyond the building walls and create positive relationships and have reciprocal conversations with families and the community about the strengths, challenges, needs, and accomplishments of the school. the leader will utilize community resources and make connections with community partners that can help support student learning. developing quality relationships with parents, families, and communities is important for schools as it has an impact on student achievement and multiple other positive preparing school leaders for young learners 49 learning outcomes (morrison, 2009). these connections to family and community are even more crucial to the success of pre-k programs, as dap is grounded in educators understanding the contexts in which children learn and develop. young children begin learning well before they enter any formal schooling (mead, 2011), and it is up to schools to develop the reciprocal relationships necessary to engage in communication, information sharing, and mutual decision-making to help young learners achieve cognitive, physical, social, and emotional learning goals. for leaders to meet standard 8, it is important for them to understand the specific types of relationships they need to develop to support young learners. principals who are responsible for leading pre-k programs in their buildings need to work toward building trust with families and encouraging a sense of shared responsibility for student learning (loewenberg, 2016). they should help teachers bring parents into the school and communicate with parents outside as well, perhaps considering the use of home visits. additionally, multiple outside agencies are often involved in supporting pre-k students. principals state they feel adept at working with school nurses, counselors, and other support staff, but express concerns about how to manage the different outside groups who may need to be consulted or included in meeting student needs (bish, shore, & shue, 2011). even if their schools do not house preschool classrooms, principals need to develop relationships with the community preschools and early care providers who are sending children to their schools once they reach kindergarten or first grade (bornfreund, 2016; loewenberg, 2016; mead, 2011). forming these relationships can help ease the transition from preschool into kindergarten or first grade for children. community partnerships can also lead to increased communication, a sense of communal responsibility for educating young children, common expectations for student learning and development, and possibly shared professional development experiences for all ece professionals. developing strong relationships with families and the community may also help leaders to reduce the impact of germ’s increase of school control. sahlberg (2011) suggested the focus on data and outside control of schools can force teachers to implement centrally mandated instructional practices or policies that may not be in the best interest of the children in their classrooms. if leaders are having open communication with stakeholders about the strengths, challenges, needs, and accomplishments of the school, leaders and stakeholders may be able to develop more thorough and mutual understandings of what students need to be successful. if all stakeholders share similar ideas about how to support student learning, teachers may feel more freedom to be educational professionals and to use practices that really impact student learning, rather than the latest fad techniques or packaged curricula advertised by corporations. this may be especially important in ece where germ and the push for the use of standardized testing to measure student performance creates pressure downward into ece (lieberman & cook, 2016). parents and community members may think they want to see ece classrooms functioning like those in older grades, but principals who have built trusting relationships and understand ece can explain why young learners need a different kind of learning environment to be successful. standard 9: operations and management “effective educational leaders manage school operations and resources to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 17). standard 9 involves a leader’s ability to manage the physical, financial, instructional, and human resources to support student learning and school improvement. it includes 50 global education review 4(3) understanding and complying with legal and contractual obligations and policies at the local, state, and federal levels, and making decisions to help sustain enrollment. an important part of a principal’s management role is effectively assigning teachers to classroom placements where they can best utilize their teaching strengths. fuller and ladd (2012) found school leaders had a tendency to move stronger teachers to the upper grade levels, especially to grades where students participated in standardized testing. likewise, principals admit to moving weak teachers to the younger grades (cook, 2016). yet there are indications that students who do not master certain skills in the early grades will continue to lag behind. for example, the vast majority of students who are struggling readers in third grade are likely to still be struggling readers in ninth grade (francis, shaywitz, stuebing, shaywitz, & fletcher, 1996). school leaders need to understand the critical role preschool plays in laying the foundation for future learning so they can make informed decisions about how to staff their classrooms in ways that will best support student learning. additionally, to meet standard 9 principals need to know and comply with laws, policies, and regulations. while some legal standards and regulations apply across schools regardless of the grade levels they serve, there may be specific program standards in place within which early childhood programs must operate (darragh, 2010). for example, many states have policies for student-teacher ratios, hand-washing practices, and safety that differ from those for older students. yet these policies vary by state and by program location (horowitz, 2016). in some states preschools housed in public schools are exempt, but in others they are not. a principal needs to know which laws, policies, and regulations apply to their programs so they can make appropriate decisions about staffing, scheduling, budgeting for materials, and assigning classrooms. in managing and monitoring the operations of the school and its systems, school leaders need to be aware of germ’s roots in a market-driven approach to education and the influence it may have on their decisions. sahlberg (2011) suggested applying an economybased mindset encourages schools to focus on competition, efficiency, and productivity over student learning. practices like moving weaker teachers to lower, untested grades can be an indication of this kind of thinking. additionally, if leaders are unaware of the laws, regulations, and policies that apply to ece programs and make decisions based on market-oriented principles, they may encourage or implement practices that put their programs in violation of the laws and potentially put young students at risk. standard 10: school improvement “effective educational leaders act as agents of continuous improvement to promote each student’s academic success and well-being” (npbea, 2015, p. 18). to meet this standard, leaders must evaluate educational trends for applicability in their school settings and balance the political, uncertain, and often competing influences on education. it also instructs leaders to consider school improvement from a systems approach, understanding how all aspects of the school work together to influence student learning. to meet standard 10, principals need to bring together all of the expectations of the other psel 2015 into a clear, consistent, and continuous process to support improved student learning outcomes. to be an “agent of continuous improvement” (npbea, 2015, p. 18), leaders must: implement their vision, mission, and core values; develop the capacity of their staff; promote teacher leadership; work with all stakeholders to form mutual commitments and responsibility for student learning; and focus school efforts on effectively meeting the needs of students (npbea, 2015). for leaders to be preparing school leaders for young learners 51 successful in reaching these goals for young children, they need to have the knowledge of how each of these areas looks in ece. furthermore, principals need to strongly consider the impact of germ on students. as mentioned throughout, germ principles contradict dap and other best practices in ece. though there may be pressure to implement germ’s ideas, standard 10 at its most fundamental level states leaders must have a commitment to instructional practices and systems that foster improvement. in other words, it implies that if germ is not working for students, leaders should refine it or reject it in order to meet their students’ needs. conclusion effective school leadership and high-quality early childhood education programs have a strong link to positive outcomes for students throughout their educational careers (szekely, 2013). while dap principles and guidelines are specifically designed to meet the needs of young learners from birth to age 8, many of the underlying ideas behind them can help educators understand how to structure educational opportunities in contrast to germ. as principals continue the challenging and complex work associated with meeting the psel 2015 standards and responding to the pressures of germ, they will benefit from a solid understanding of ece. if principals are going to meet the goal of improving outcomes for all students, states and school districts need to support those who lead ece programs. one option for states is to require principals to graduate from their preparation programs with an understanding of child development, curriculum for preschool students, dap, and family and community engagement strategies (bornfreund & lieberman, 2016; lieberman, 2017). ryan et al. (2011) propose the development of a set of specific pre-k to grade 3 competencies for school leaders. principals would also benefit from the opportunity to participate in an ece internship or other clinical experience to hone their knowledge and skills. alternatively, states can require elementary teaching experience for leaders who receive a certification that includes ece grades (lieberman, 2017). moreover, states and school districts can offer leaders professional learning opportunities that focus on ece (bornfreund & lieberman, 2016; lieberman, 2017). this type of experience ought to be mandatory for leaders who do not have a background in ece. additionally, states and school districts could find ways to connect principals with early childhood center directors. this can encourage conversation and growth for all ece professionals, and strengthen the alignment across community and school-based programs. also states should take advantage of federal funding opportunities to support this work. the united states recently authorized an educational law with a focus on ece that allows federal money to be used for early education initiatives (bornfreund, & lieberman, 2016). furthermore, lieberman (2017) proposed the development of a system to track elementary principal turnover. the data collected by states or school districts can help pinpoint the areas of concern for school leaders and be used to develop supports that will keep principals in place. the turnover of leadership often interrupts meaningful school reforms. at this particular point in time when the number of ece programs is increasing and the pressures of germ-based policies are pushing down into the lower grades, the need for schools to retain leaders who can consistently implement best practices in ece becomes ever more crucial. failing to make sure school leaders have a deep understanding of dap, child development, and best practices in ece pedagogy and assessment could have a number of implications. to begin with, young children may be asked to engage with learning activities and assessments that are not age-appropriate. germ’s focus on basic skills and standardized testing pulls away 52 global education review 4(3) from play-based learning and authentic assessments. likewise, children may be held to behavioral expectations and exposed to classroom management strategies that do not align with their developmental needs. parents and the community can exacerbate these pressures if the leader is unable to clearly communicate a rationale for why there are differences between ece classrooms and those of older students. additionally, leaders may move stronger teachers to grades where standardized testing occurs. all of these issues can lead to high levels of ece teacher turnover, and when combined these concerns may result in a decrease in ece program effectiveness and limit outcomes for young learners. as put forth in the psel 2015 document, “educational leaders need ongoing support to succeed in a job that is dramatically changing” (npbea, 2015, p.6). as principals’ work changes to include responsibility for preschool programs, they require better preparation as they enter the field and professional learning opportunities as they continue to practice. developing a force of school leaders who understand and support best practices in ece may ultimately improve learning outcomes for all students. notes 1. the term, “whole child,” in the united states, is a popular term that refers to the physical, intellectual, emotional, and social needs of children that may be met in school. 2. in the us it is common for states to issue teaching certificates for a range of grades, e.g., k2, 3-6, etc. a k-6 certification, for example, would encompass all the elementary school grades references bish, m., shore, r., & shue, p. (2011). preparing elementary principals for preschool. principal, 90(5), 20-24. bornfreund, l. (2016). connecting pre-k and the early grades: principals on transitions. retrieved from new america website: https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/13105principals-corner/5.4early-ed-principal4.761d732ad93840d4af845cf8be2d13dc.pdf bornfreund, l. & lieberman, a. (2016). bringing it all together: elementary principals are key to strong prek-3rd grade classrooms. retrieved from new america website: https://static.newamerica.org/attachments/13105principals-corner/5.4early-ed-principal6.4864847e883a435da0f5d59c831650c1.pdf childstats.gov. (n.d.). pop3 race and hispanic origin composition: percentage of u.s. children ages 0–17 by race and hispanic origin, 1980–2015 and projected 2016–2050. retrieved from http://www.childstats.gov/americaschildren/tables/ pop3.asp?popup=true city, e. a., elmore, r. f., fiarman, s. e., & teitel, l. 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(2003). roots & wings: affirming culture in early childhood programs. upper saddle river, nj: pearson. about the author maria boeke mongillo, edd, is an assistant professor of educational leadership at central connecticut state university. she coordinates the ms program in teacher leadership, and teaches across the ms, sixth year, and doctoral programs in the department of educational leadership, policy, and instructional technology. currently, her research focus is on the preparation of school leaders for meeting the unique needs of early childhood students and on the implementation and effectiveness of teacher evaluation models. her past research and publications have focused on developing teacher self-efficacy, particularly for math and science, and on cultivating disciplinary literacy in preschool through high school settings. eps 676 what about elementary level teachers? 203 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: barrenechea, ignacio (2018). what about elementary level teachers: a closer look at the intersection between standardization and multilingualism. global education review, 5 (2), 203-222. what about elementary level teachers: a closer look at the intersection between standardization and multilingualism ignacio barrenechea university of miami abstract the specialized literature in the field of education has not focused in what ways the multilingual classroom setting exacerbates teachers’ tension concerning the need to comply with standards, on the one hand, and the aspiration to embrace diversity, on the other hand. that is to say, there is a need to understand how teachers adapt to confront the tension between standardization and multilingualism. understanding teachers’ experiences will be important to inform policy with regards to the implementation of standardized testing in multilingual settings and how these affect the cultural rights of minority students. the way teachers surf or navigate the tension will inform to what extent cultural rights of ethnic minority students are jeopardized due to the increasing interest in standardization. therefore, the purpose of this grounded study is to explore the adaptive process of elementary teachers in multilingual classrooms as they confront the tension between meeting the educational needs of multilingual students, while complying with the mandated standardization requirements in miami public schools. the study adds to the vast literature on standardized testing by providing information about teachers’ experiences in highly multilingual settings, such in the public schools in miami dade county. key words standardized testing, multilingualism, multiculturalism, teachers, grounded theory introduction standardized tests affect teachers’ teaching strategies and educational experiences in different ways. teachers are pressured to meet state mandated standards, while also serving increasingly diverse and multilingual student populations (steiner-khamsi, 2004). teachers may have entered the profession somehow motivated by the idea of helping a heterogeneity of students (bernaus et al., 2008), but they also have to test and drill students with one-size-fits all instruments in order to achieve homogeneity. as a result, teachers confront a tension between their career aspirations related to embracing multiculturalism, and the need to meet mandated standards that do not account for the needs of multicultural and multilingual students (chick, 2002). teachers are one of the most important factors in students’ achievement (rice, 2003; rockoff, 2004). there is sufficient evidence to sustain _________________________________ corresponding author ignacio barrenechea 6700 indian creek dr. miami beach, fl 33141 email: ignaciob@miami.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:ignaciob@miami.edu what about elementary level teachers? 204 that “policy investments in the quality of teachers may be related to improvements in student performance” (darling-hammond, 2000, p. 1). however, the specialized literature in the field of education has not emphasized in what ways the multilingual classroom setting may exacerbate teachers’ tension concerning the need to comply with standards, on the one hand, and their aspiration to embrace diversity, on the other hand. there is a need to understand what the adaptive process teachers experience to confront the tension between standardization and multilingualism looks like. understanding teachers’ experiences is important to inform policy with regards to the implementation of standardized testing in multilingual settings because teachers are key implementers of education reform, though education specialists many times overlook them (lanier, 1984). in addition, understanding teachers’ experiences may help us to understand how to reduce teacher stress and burnout, and it may also suggest best practices concerning teaching multilingual students. in addition, the study adds to the vast literature on standardized testing by providing information about teachers’ experiences in highly multilingual settings, such in the public schools in miami dade county. therefore, the research question of this grounded theory study is, “what is the adaptive process of third grade elementary teachers in miami dade public schools, whose multilingual students have to sit for the florida standards assessment (fsa)?” specifically, this study will explore the curricular modifications, differentiated instruction and utilization of alternative resources by teachers in miami dade highly multilingual third grade classrooms. the perception of teachers about standardized testing will be also an important element of this study and will be an important descriptive element of teachers’ experiences and strategies. conceptual framework standardization and the exacerbation of stratified knowledge more than thirty-five years ago, anyon (1981) referred to a different form of structural inequality promoted by educational systems. the author argued that school systems stratified knowledge, which exacerbated and perpetuated structural inequalities. anyon found that despite similar curricula, schools serving students from lower socio-economic backgrounds demanded less from students. the dominant narrative, according to anyon, that suggested that poor children were not capable of learning as much as more affluent students, represented another way of social stratification and a manifestation of structural inequalities. in addition, kozol (2005) also claimed that inner-city schools in the united states often focused only on managerial skills, leaving professional skills for ‘richer’ students. anyon (1981) also referred to how schools replicate existing social inequalities by teaching working class students those skills that are appreciated in the types of jobs they could – allegedly – aspire to. unfortunately, both kozol and anyon (1981) showed very clearly how social class determined what students could and could not learn; there seemed to be clear hidden structural forces that perpetuated and reproduced social inequalities in a subtle, yet scary fashion. standardized tests exacerbate the stratification of knowledge. for example, au (2009) argued that “that social studies teachers are feeling the pressures of high-stakes testing, and that these pressures are causing social studies teachers to alter their classroom practices and curriculum” (p. 43), reaffirms that it is usually children belonging to poorer backgrounds who see a more profound shrinking 205 global education review 5(2) of their curricula. thus, standardization promotes the stratification of knowledge anyon referred to by, de facto, determining what some students will learn and what others won’t, given that teachers and children need to focus much more on the basic skills included in the tests. regrettably, as ogbu (1992) suggested, rather than embracing the differences, which arise from the interactions between the majority and minority groups, standardized tests drive for homogenization lead to the imposition of dominant cultures, over those of minority students. standardized tests, as i will explain in different sections of this paper, seem to have an even worse impact on students from lower socioeconomic backgrounds. thus, even when – perhaps – well intentioned, the push towards standardization and homogeneity appears to negatively impact those, whom it is intended to protect. impact of standardized tests on language minority students language diversity is an important issue in current educational discussions concerning minority students. some scholars defend the idea that homogenization of languages promotes a stronger sense of community (hirsch, 1987); this, they claim, has strong reconciliatory and restorative functions in educational systems that host different cultural, social and economic groups. in addition, hirsch stated that there are benefits to the standardization of a national language: essentially, this is a sine qua non requisite to become a modern and industrial state. schlesinger (1991) also warned against the growth of bilingualism, claiming that “bilingualism shuts doors. it nourishes selfghettoization, and ghettoization nourishes racial antagonism” (p. 108). “language is often an essential element in ethnic and cultural identity, so it has particular symbolic importance in terms of group identity” (efa global monitoring report 2011, 2011, p. 169). bederman, in his book on the impact of globalization in international law, argued that “nothing defines culture as much as language. along with ethnicity and religion, language can ultimately delineate and specify a culture. (…) cultures and language are so closely intertwined that there is a strong sense that language must be protected, in order to preserve distinctive cultures” (p. 123). unesco also considered the importance of language and culture as instruments to achieve social cohesion and inter-cultural understanding. for example, in the 2011 efa global monitoring report it was claimed that “schools that are unresponsive to the social, cultural and linguistic concerns of indigenous people or ethnic minorities are likely to be seen not as centres of expanded opportunity, but as vehicles for domination” (efa global monitoring report 2011, 2011, p. 160). hence, if standardization promotes instruction in english, rather than fostering the acquisition of knowledge in the native language of minority students, is not it at the service of cultural domination? does standardization exacerbate the achievement gap? which according to ladson-billings (2009) refers to the discrepancies in standardized test scores as a dichotomy between white and black students, white and latino/a students, white and native american students, and white and recent immigrant students, and others? literature review standardized testing has been vastly studied within the specialized literature in the field of education policy. in order to explain why my what about elementary level teachers? 206 current study is meaningful, i will describe a brief overview of the literature. this will allow me to show an important gap in the literature that needs to be filled. the literature review will cover three main dimensions. first, i will refer to the impact that standardized testing has on teachers’ choices regarding time allotment to areas covered and those not covered – by the test. second, i will refer to the issue of teaching to the test; that is to say, teachers’ strategies to adapt their teaching style to the type of questions included in the test. third, i will refer to studies that have looked at the impact of standardized testing on teachers’ stress level. last, i will explain in what ways my study adds to the existing knowledge in the field. impact on classroom practices more than fifty years ago furst (1963) anticipated that standardized tests implied a risk in the assignment of time to fulfill the schools’ different objectives. this author showed how standardized achievement tests exerted too much control over curriculum, teaching, and learning. moreover, he even mentioned that teachers would end up ”teaching for the test.” unfortunately, as furst envisioned, different strategies to improve tests scores have been used for decades now. in this sense, barickman showed forty years ago that many new york teachers emphasized vocabulary in tenth and eleventh grades because it was commonly held that it was significantly easier to improve regents' test scores on vocabulary, but not on composition (barickman, 1978). in addition, and most recently, koretz (2002) described a work of stecher and baron in which they demonstrated that the assignment of hours to the different subjects was determined, at least partly, by the standardized evaluations. in the case of kentucky, for example, stecher and baron showed that fourth grade teachers were dedicating 5.2 hours per week to science, a subject that was evaluated in that year group by a standardized state test, whereas the fifth-grade teachers were teaching science only 3.5 hours per week because that subject was not tested in fifth grade. inversely, the teachers of fifth grade were assigning 6.4 hours to the teaching of the mathematics, since that subject that was tested that year, compared to 4.9 hours that the teachers of fourth grade were dedicating to the teaching of mathematics, which was not tested that year (koretz, 2000). over the past years, many other studies have also shown how teachers feel pressured to spend more time in those areas included in standardized tests (koretz et al., 2016; darling-hammond & adamson, 2014; elacqua et al., 2016; jennings & bearak, 2014; darling-hammond et al., 2015) there are no studies, though, that explore the impact that the fsa has had on miami public school teachers. the population in the city of miami is extremely heterogeneous; hence, this study would help understand whether teachers, when confronted with a highly multilingual and multicultural class setting, modify their practices and time allotment to test requirements. teaching to the test over the last years, several authors have explored in what ways teachers purposefully tried to prepare their students to test specifics (darling-hammond, 2016; blazar & kraft, 2017; welsh et al., 2016; jensen et al., 2014). for example, hoffman et. al (2001) analyzed teachers’ efforts to teach test-taking strategies. in their study, the researchers reported that teachers in texas public schools spent the last weeks prior to the tests in teaching specific strategies that their students needed. for example, teachers focused on explaining to their students how to mark correct answers in 207 global education review 5(2) multiple-choice questions; in addition, they would also drill with tests from previous years, so that students would apply what they know to the format of the test’s questions. in a similar way, jones et al. showed that teachers in north carolina also reported similar behaviors (jones et al., 1999). while both studies showed interesting results, they failed to fully account for what motivated teachers to focus on particular specifics. that is to say, as the studies were based on surveys, rather than in-depth interviews as it is in my case, the richness of teachers’ rationale is limited. teacher stress there is some research that suggests that the disconnection between the homogeneity imposed from the policy-makers and the diverse cultural reality in classroom setting is stressful for teachers, and it contributes to teacher burnout (berryhill, 2009). teacher burnout is a serious issue in two ways: first, it is important because teachers matter as ends on themselves. second, it is also important because a ripple effect of teacher stress is that it negatively impacts students’ performance; a burned-out teacher can rarely satisfy the learning needs of the students (miller, 1995). within the specialized literature there are several survey-studies that have explored the impact that standardized tests have had on teachers’ stress levels (nathaniel et al., 2016; von der embse et al., 2017; skaalvik et al., 2016; saeki et al., 2015). for example, jones et al., (1999) showed that around 77% of the teachers surveyed, expressed a higher level of stress due to the fact that their students were sitting for standardized tests. similarly, koretz et al. (1996) also explored the phenomenon of teachers stress in kentucky and maryland. in both cases, teachers explained that the standardized test impacted their overall stress level, mainly because they felt that the outcome of their students, somehow determined the perception that school principals would have about them. lastly, abrams et al. (2003) also tried to understand the impact that standardized tests had on teachers’ stress levels. the researchers found that, “in comparison to teachers in low-stakes testing programs, a greater proportion of teachers in high-stakes environments reported feeling pressure from district superintendents, principals, and, to a lesser extent, parents to improve student performance on the state test” (abrams, pedulla, & madaus, 2003, p. 25). according to the research team in this study, teachers perceived standardized tests in florida as high-stakes. therefore, my study will shed some light over the impact that high stakes standardized tests had on miami’s public-school elementary teachers. it would be interesting to understand whether the multilingual aspect of the student population exacerbated – that is to say, if it acted as a moderator – of the level of teachers’ stress. after all, it is not farfetched to hypothesize that multilingualism could represent an additional challenge for teachers’ efforts to prepare all students for the same test in english. in conclusion, even though standardized testing has been vastly studied, my current research would add to the existing knowledge. the idea of carrying out a grounded theory approach is somehow innovative for this particular issue, as most of the existing literature was based on survey studies. in-depth interviews provide richer data than what could be achieved by quantitative studies. in my opinion, the impact of standardized testing on teachers’ strategies is too complex to be captured, in all of its dimensions, by a survey-based study. in addition, the population of the current proposal what about elementary level teachers? 208 is also meaningful on its own. the variegated characteristics of miami public schools pose additional challenges to teachers. that is to say, unlike what happens in states like kentucky or north carolina, the high levels of multilingualism within miami classrooms could require additional adaptive efforts from the teachers. methodology grounded theory focuses on generating – or discovering theoretical ideas of hypothesis from the data – rather than having these specified beforehand -. according to strauss & corbin, “a grounded theory is one that is inductively derived from the study of phenomena it represents” (corbin & strauss, 2008, p. 23). in this study i was interested in exploring teachers’ experiences and strategies. in addition, i aimed at developing my own theory concerning how teachers surfed the tension between standardization and multilingualism. consequently, i believed that in order to discover my own theory, the grounded theory approach would be the most helpful qualitative design. i analyzed the data from the in-depth interviews, at the same time i included more participants into the study. from the start-point i knew that the number of participants depended on the information i gathered from the initial interviews. the idea was to collect data and then analyze it before finishing the data collection. rather than including many participants, i chose to focus on four, but interview them several times. this allowed me to create feedback mechanisms to make sure that my interpretations were accurate; in addition, it also allowed me to explore new facets of the problem, which i had not think of the first time i interviewed each participant. sampling miami dade county provided me a unique opportunity because the student population in many of its schools represents a very high level of demographic diversity. according to the county’s website, miami-dade county public schools is the fourth largest school district in the united states, comprised of 392 schools, 345,000 students. in order to begin my sampling, i identified participants through key informants. key informants are individuals who have knowledge or have experienced the phenomenon of interest. therefore, for this study i approached people i knew from my doctoral program, who then referred me to the participants i included in this study. the size of the sample varies in grounded theory; but this number is usually determined by the principle of theoretical saturation. as mentioned above, rather than including a high number of participants, i chose to focus on four different teachers, who i interviewed at least three times each. in order to triangulate the information, i gathered from the interviews, i also carried out class observations and reviewed official documents from miami dade county, concerning the fsa. interviews in this study, i interviewed four teachers, in depth, at least three times. the interviews’ length ranged from 42 to 81 minutes. all of the interviews were carried out in the month of february of 2017. this was something i strategically thought of, because i wanted to make sure that the time-distance between the interview and fsa test which is administered in , did not affect my findings. all of my participants were female, and their teaching experience ranged from 10 to 21 years of experience; they all worked at miami dade 209 global education review 5(2) public schools and served multilingual students. i named the three participants with pseudonyms: miss hamilton, miss jefferson, miss madison and miss washington. i chose founding fathers last names because i learned to admire how well they surfed the tension between their diverse student population with the push for heterogeneity from miami dade county. data analysis strategy grounded theory is, perhaps, the most popular technique in qualitative analysis. even though many authors agree on the core elements of grounded theory, there is some disagreement as to the particularities of the methodology, as explained above. for example, while glaser and strauss (2009) focused on the idea that theory emerges by constant comparison, charmaz adopted a much more constructivist approach, arguing that the categories and the theory are really researchers’ constructions. i somehow agree with charmaz criticism to the realist approach used by glaser, strauss and corbin; after all, during this process i felt that what mattered was what i, as the researcher, constructed. hence, during my data analysis i followed charmaz’ emphasis on the interpretation of the researcher; i agree with her that how the researcher constructs, interprets and reflexes is key to the grounded theory approach. on the other hand, my coding strategy followed a different route: i was more faithful to corbin and strauss’ a much more prescriptive approach to grounded theory, in which they give very detailed steps that should be followed. i used the codes to categorize the data; within each code there were different dimensions or subcategories. i understood coding as the process of organizing data into categories that were alike. therefore, codes were developed into a code structure. my coding structure was dynamic. there was a progressive move from very descriptive coding to more theoretical type of analysis and coding of the data. as charmaz (2014) explained, “the systematic application of grounded theory’s analytic methods will progressively lead to more abstract analytic levels” (p. 125). the codes created helped me categorize the data that was collected on the ground. it is important to highlight that there is a sequential series or stages in the coding processes of grounded theory stages. strauss and corbin (2008) identify three different stages – charmaz, on the other hand only refers to two -. for this project, i decided to use the typology of strauss & corbin (2008). according to these authors the three stages are open coding, axial coding and selective coding. sometimes, researchers can create a coding paradigm (corbin & strauss, 2008), which helps to visually display the interrelationships of the axial coding. all of this is aimed at building, generating or discovering the theory. following the model used by morrow and smith (1995) in their grounded theory study, during the axial coding phase of the project i came up with this model to try to find connections between the different properties of the codes. each of the boxes in figure 1 contains some of the families of codes. nonetheless, following harry et al. (2005), i would also like to sustain that “any visual representation of a complicated cognitive process is a vast simplification of the way that researchers actually arrive at interpretations” (p. 4). in addition, in the case of my study i tried to visually represent the relationship between the four core categories (or concepts) i ended up having. in each of the colored boxes i have the list of the families i included for that particular category. even though i will describe this relationship in the following section, i include the diagram here, as figure 2. what about elementary level teachers? 210 figure 1. connecting code categories in a coding paradigm figure 2. connecting the four main categories 211 global education review 5(2) findings some of the most common words that i could use to describe the findings are: struggle, discontent, need for change, tension. unfortunately, the findings confirm some of the pseudo-hypothesis i had in my head. in order to organize the findings, i will subdivide this section into four main parts. in the first part i will refer to what i have called “push for homogeneity”; secondly, i will refer to the idea of a “diverse reality”. the third part of my analysis will have to do with the idea of “unwrapping the struggle”. lastly, and in order to provide something more than a pessimistic diagnostic, i will finalize this section with the subdivision “finding a solution”. push for homogeneity over the past years, there has been an increase in the intervention of the district and even the state in everyday life school issues. the teachers i interviewed agreed that the numbers of visits from district representatives have increased over the past years. for example, miss madison explained that sometimes she would receive surprise visits of “district people, state people, the principal, the ap and the math coach; all at the same time!”. miss jefferson explained that the visits were even more often in lowerperforming schools. quite frustrated she explained that in the low performing school where she worked “you have a lot of accountability and so there were people in the building at least once, if not three times a week…”. lastly, miss washington added that “since nclb everything changed, we no longer know who our direct boss is. is it the school principal or do we report directly to the district?” the teachers found many issues with regards to these constant visits. there were some practical problems; for example, teachers felt that when the visits came, their lessons were usually interrupted. many times, district representatives would ask them for the lesson plans or other materials, such as the calendar they were asked to use; therefore, teachers had to stop what they were doing, in order to hand to the visitors, the papers they needed. for example, miss washington noted that before she knew how to organize herself because she knew how she liked things to be; but, now, she complained, she had to think how district representatives liked things to be organized. nonetheless, there were also deeper and denser repercussions of the issue of ‘being observed’. in one of the interviews, miss madison commented that teachers would do anything just to put on a show for the visitors. that is to say, rather than using their own professional judgment they made sure they did what the visitors would have wanted them to do. this is clearly linked to foucault’s idea of the prisoners fearing the constant look from the guards in the panopticon. miss hamilton explained that sometimes her students could not understand the contents that she was supposed to teach during that week. obviously, that put her in a conundrum; one hand her judgment indicated her that she should spend an additional week teaching those contents. nonetheless, on the other hand, she was concerned that if visitors came, they would ask her why she was behind on the pacing guides. this illustrates the linkage between standardization and teacher stress that other existing studies, for example jones et. al (1999), had referred to. the pacing guides were one of the things that received the greatest attention in all of my interviews. i was able to review some of the guides. there were two things that struck me. the first one is the degree of precision as to what had to be taught on each specific day in all schools in the district. the pacing guides have contributed to a sort of regime in which teachers because disempowered relative to those at the district level; teachers’ work became more automatized, as they became obedient followers what about elementary level teachers? 212 of district – or sometimes even state – mandates. even when all teachers knew they were not obliged to follow the guides on a week-byweek basis, they all felt compelled to follow them. as miss jefferson explained, “i know… well the district says it is recommended, but if you go in and you are not in the pacing guides, then ‘why are you not in the pacing guide?’ technically i am not supposed to be, i can choose. but here everyone wants you to follow the pacing guide”. in addition, miss washington added: “i remember an incident with another teacher, she came to crying to me. she thought the pacing guide was wrong, but nobody would hear… she felt powerless!” on the other hand, the other thing that i was concerned with was the fact that the vast majority of the materials that were ‘highly recommended’ to the teachers were from mcgraw-hill publishers. in this sense, though, miss hamilton explained that she felt she had some freedom not to use the materials that were recommended, all other teachers felt it was not worth fighting back against the “highly recommended” materials in the guides. another prominent feature of most of the interviews was the software i-ready. this is a program, which was built for the implementation of the common core. the software offers practice for students and it also generates reports for teachers, based on the students’ performances. amongst the teachers i interviewed there were mixed opinions. while miss madison expressed that she felt the software was very useful as it offered a lot of tools for her, such as lesson plan suggestions to help individual students, miss hamilton did not think it was very useful. in fact, she commented that “some kids do not do well in this program because they don’t like technology, but in the classroom, they do well”. in this sense, miss washington added that she felt her students would just click, without really paying attention to what was in the screens. nonetheless, all the teachers did agree that there should not be so much pressure as to when and how use the software. that is to say, rather than being an imposition, all teachers felt that they should be able to decide, autonomously, how to use the software. rather than seeing the software as an interesting tool, the participants agreed that most teachers in the county now see it as an additional imposition from above; another clear manifestation of the need to homogenize not only the performance of the students, but also the pedagogical approaches of the teachers. essentially, what was very clear from all the interviews is that teachers felt that more and more the macro-level was penetrating their every day practices. the participants agreed that one of the main problems with this involvement was that district representatives were not sensible to contextual factors that affected, for example, students’ scores. for example, miss madison referred to the fact that in the thrust to compare teachers, there was no sense of empathy towards those teachers whose students belonged to very low socio-economic backgrounds, and therefore, did not have private tutoring as more affluent students had. miss madison considered that this was something that was not considered when teachers’ scores were published on public websites. in addition, quite bluntly, miss madison added: “it seems that above nobody cares about the differences. it’s a sad reality… they have the merit pay… the same teacher receives those… they are magnet schools and you are comparing them to schools that serve lowers ses students… you are comparing apples to oranges…” ultimately, teachers experienced standardization and the thrust for homogeneity as a way of de-professionalization. the need to raise scores somehow automated teachers’ roles, forcing them to teach for the test, especially during crunched time. just as koretz (1996) 213 global education review 5(2) showed, miss madison expressed how frustrating being inside the classroom could be, especially when all the focus is placed on test scores. similarly, miss jefferson described she felt constrained; not being able to do teach students what she thought they needed. for example, she explained that rather than moving forward on reading skills, she felt that her students needed one whole year of intensive phonics; nonetheless, she could not do that, because of test requirements. miss jefferson also added she would like teaching to be fun as it used to be; according to her, the push towards homogeneity and standardization took away her enthusiasm with regards to the profession. on a similar note, miss hamilton also reflected on how standardized tests impacted her own well-being; in that sense she added that: “at first, i thought i did not care about the tests, but now i am sleeping less and less, you know? my students say that i am shouting more these last weeks than before. i guess it is because the test is coming and we all have to perform well”. miss washington also added: “i need to teach for the test! that is what my principal expects. if my students fail, i fail. if i fail my principal fails and if the principal fails, we end up working in a failing school!”. therefore, these findings allowed me to better understand other existing studies in the literature, such as the ones of hoffman (2001) and jones et al. (1999) cited in the literature review section, which described that teachers modified their behavior due to standardized tests. diverse reality the push towards homogenization confronts a completely different reality in the classroom of many public schools in the united states, which is characterized by diversity and heterogeneity. most of the teachers explained different strategies they developed in order to surf the tension between standardization and diversity. all the participants in the study agreed that standardized tests have a lot of negative impacts on their students. miss madison, for example, explicitly described nasty situations she experienced in her class: “i had kids who had thrown up before the test… so there goes the test if vomit is all over it! the kids get so filled up that they get anxious… or you have the kids that don’t care and act on purpose to get invalidated…” most of the students that struggle the most with standardized tests are those coming from lower socio-economic backgrounds. there are contextual factors that make these students’ educational experience rougher. miss jefferson explained how some of her students needed to go to school in order to have breakfast. in addition, miss madison also described how many times her students experience dangerous situations in their neighborhood, which do not allow them to concentrate properly. another student characteristic, which intensifies the impact of standardized tests on minority students, is the fact that english is not their first language. miss hamilton explained that some of her non-english speaking students had reading skills in their own native language; nonetheless, that was something the ‘system’ did not recognize. in this sense, she expressed that: “if i could use the spanish book, some of them would be able to do well in a reading test. what are we really testing, you know? many of my students have the reading skills, but they simply do not have them in english. are we testing reading skills, or reading in english?” miss madison noted that non-english speaking students are able to use an englishspanish dictionary. nonetheless, she questioned, what is the use of the dictionary if they cannot read in english? translating most of what about elementary level teachers? 214 the words, she felt, would make it very hard for them to grasp the meaning of a passage. therefore, all the participants of the study acknowledged that non-english speaking students were at a special disadvantage vis-a-vis english speaking one. hence, going back to ogbu (1992), most of my interviewees considered that the current approach to standardized tests, turned these into dangerous instruments that could attempt to suppress cultural diversity. another important contextual factor that talks about the diversity within the student population has to do with their parents’ own educational backgrounds. parental language skills have both direct and indirect impact on the language acquisition of non-english speaking students. sometimes, parents’ usage of the language at home is very rudimentary, this, according to miss hamilton, affects the way in which offspring speak. for example, when referring to a third grader from mexico, miss hamilton explained that: “so, for example, for this little girl from mexico, she tested very low in esol. she has a speech impediment, but it is not really an impediment… it is how their parents speak. it has nothing to do with her education, it is a learnt behavior…” nonetheless, there are other indirect ways in which the parents’ education experience affects the ones of their offspring. for example, miss madison explained that sometimes parents of some of her nonenglish speaking students have more than one job. therefore, even when they would like to prioritize the education of their offspring, they simply cannot do it. in a similar manner, miss hamilton also described that many of her students have parents that want their offspring to move forward, but they do not know how to help the kids. in addition, she adds, unlike other parents with higher incomes, they cannot afford hiring private tutors. lastly, miss washington added that at the beginning of the school year she likes to offer help to her students’ parents, so that they can get more involved in the schooling of their offspring; nonetheless, even though all parents appreciate the help, hardly any make use of it. therefore, it was very clear that the participants considered that standardized tests impact students’ lives negatively, and that the impact was even greater for lower socio-economic and non-english speaking students. miss madison thus claimed that the push for heterogeneity seems to be blind to the high degree of diversity that exists in miami dade public schools. how can we aim at standardization when the playing field has not been leveled? this is a question i will try to address in the discussion section. during my interviews, i was happy to learn that teachers did not stay just with the problem (i.e., the tension between standardization and diversity). i was happy to learn different approaches the participants implemented in order to find a way of minimizing the impact of standardized tests on lower ses and nonenglish speaking students. all participants agreed about the importance of differentiated instruction. during my observation to miss hamilton’s classroom i could see how she used differentiated instruction to give students specific skills they lacked for the fsa. during the differentiated instruction miss hamilton sat with one of the groups, while the other four groups of students learnt on their own. sometimes, miss hamilton assigned one student as the ‘teacherstudent’, other times she would ask them to share their work upon its completion. miss jefferson also pointed that she tried to use differentiated instruction as much as she 215 global education review 5(2) could. nonetheless, she pointed out that it was hard to do it given that she was on her own inside the classroom. unfortunately, all teachers agreed that in the past they used to have more human resources, which facilitated differentiated instruction. for example, miss madison explained that in the school where she worked at, for more than ten years, there used to be three special education teachers in the school; therefore, sometimes she would ask one of them to help her during differentiated instruction. nonetheless, she narrated, that over the years the school ended up having only one special education teacher. therefore, she could no longer count with that help. the struggle one of the strongest phrases i heard during the interviews came from miss hamilton. with teary eyes, she stated: “helping them is a moral responsibility”. what miss hamilton expressed with that phrase is the struggle many teachers, who teach multilingual students that have to sit for state mandated tests, face. teachers, on one hand, want to embrace and uplift students’ diverse multilingual background. all of the participants agreed they would like to help these minority students understand that their multilingualism is an asset, rather than burden. nonetheless, on the other hand, they have to comply with the push for homogeneity generated through standardized testing. teachers thus struggle to reconcile these two issues, which are in tension; but as miss hamilton explained, it is not something easy to resolve: “this is really a struggle. on one hand, i have to keep my job, you know. i have to do what i have to do. but, then i have the children. helping them is a moral responsibility. why should i do something that is not good for them? why not help them as much as i can?” the participants surfed the struggle in different manners. for example, miss jefferson told me she tried not to talk to the kids too much about the test. on the other hand, miss madison and miss washington talked to them about the tests, but minimized the impact it had. for example, when referring to a girl whose first language was spanish, miss madison told me “i had to lie to her, i had to tell her it was not important… and it was important”. all of the teachers expressed they would like more support from their principals when surfing the struggle. notwithstanding, they all agreed that principals are also disempowered and mostly try to align their interests with those of the district. in this sense miss jefferson explained that “sometimes school principals just prefer to do what they are told to do. i understand them, although i do not like that, sometimes”. miss jefferson was also quite empathetic to her principal when she stated that her principal did care about the negative impact that standardized tests had on her multilingual students: “yes, and i think they do, but it is above them because they have pressure from their own superintendent, who asks her ‘what are you going to do to bring your school up’?” all of my participants taught multilingual classrooms (in all four cases the vast majority of the students came from different hispanic countries – some only speaking local dialects – and in the case of miss washington 10% of her students were haitian); in addition, all of my interviewees spoke spanish. therefore, i asked them if they used spanish to help those spanishspeaking students, who were not able to understand english. three of them, miss washington, miss jefferson and miss madison, affirmed they would never use spanish in language arts and/or reading, as it was not allowed. they would only use it when teaching what about elementary level teachers? 216 science or math. nonetheless, miss hamilton taught differently. during my interview with miss hamilton, she explained to me with a guilty voice that she cheated to benefit the kids. that is to say, she told me that several times she spoke to them in spanish, when they did not understand her explanation in english, and also used the spanish version of the reading materials, so as to help her students understand what the passage was about. miss hamilton was not proud of what she did, but she told me that she was “a teacher for the kids and whatever i do i am going to do it to benefit the kids. i am not going to benefit anything else”. when i asked her if she did not think that speaking to them in spanish was just expecting less from them, she answered quite firmly: “i work my butt off. i go home, and i work, and i read, and i have expectations for my kids, ok?” i think, at that point i fully understood not only what her moral responsibility was, but also, what the struggle was all about… the solution most of the interviews revolved around problems. for example, all the participants referred to the negative impact that standardized tests had on their multilingual students, and on them as teachers. in addition, all the participants agreed that there seem to be an increasing trend towards homogeneity, which clashes the diverse reality they have in their classrooms. unfortunately, all the participants also agreed that those responsible of making decisions at the higher levels were disconnected to the reality teachers had, and they seemed not to care about the diverse and specific needs students had. it is fair to say that most of the content of the interviews was quite depressing. after all, i was giving voice to key actors who experienced first-hand the tension between multilingualism and standardization; homogeneity versus heterogeneity! therefore, in order to move beyond the diagnosis and try to think about the treatment, i always ended all the interviews with the same question. i asked all of my participants what they would do if they became the district’s decision-maker concerning standardized tests. i have to admit i was a bit surprised by their responses. the first surprise i encountered was that all teachers agreed they would keep standardized tests. i am originally from argentina; i have worked most of my life there, too. throughout my more than fifteen years of experience in the field of education most teachers working in public schools in argentina and the unions of course – rejected and resisted the spread of standardized testing. therefore, i was surprised that all of them wanted to keep the tests. even though they all agreed upon the idea of keeping the tests, they had different opinions as to what to do with them. for example, miss hamilton said she would not change the tests very much. she knew the tests were horrible on most of the students – especially, those whose first language was not english -; nonetheless, she understood, standardized tests were needed to hold teachers accountable. on the other hand, miss jefferson said that she would keep the tests, but would not make them be high-stakes. that is to say, she would only want tests for comparison issues, to help everybody have a sense where they were, compared to the norm. reminiscing the past, she remembered that: “i, you know… i was brought up here in miami and i am a product of public schools and i remember doing test, but it was more to know where you were at compared to the rest of the school, your classmates. it was not high-stakes… it was more like ‘your child is working at the 76th percentile, that means that out of 100 217 global education review 5(2) students…’ i remember my parents getting those reports, but it was never…” in addition, she also added that she would like to explore much more what other countries were doing with standardized tests. she acknowledged that standardized tests were not really working, as implemented, in the united states, so she wondered: “what is it we are doing wrong? i don’t know! i don’t have the answers! i would like to go to those countries, finland for example and maybe they don’t have standardized tests… but what are they doing? we need to find out! there are a number of things they are doing differently, like the number of hours of school, when it begins and when it ends… i don’t know…” miss madison felt that standardized tests in the upper grades should mimic what was happening in kindergarten or in first grade. that is to say, the test would be useful in drawing a general picture of how things were working, but they would have any teeth, as all high-stakes tests have. in addition, she also proposed using pretesting and posttests. miss washington also expressed the need to imitate what was being done in early childhood education. she thought that tests should be used as one additional element to make a diagnosis of students’ performances and needs. nonetheless, tests, she thought, should be only regarded as an additional indicator, just as important, for example, as teachers’ observations of students’ behavior. lastly, another interesting finding has to do with the idea of disempowered teachers. as mentioned above, it seems that one of the consequences of the push for homogeneity has to do with the deprofessionalization of teachers. if i had any doubts about that, all hesitation was erased when asking this final question. both miss hamilton and miss jefferson looked at me and asked me if they had the power to decide what to do with testing. for example, miss hamilton said: “can i make that decision?” those responses illustrated the idea of disempowerment darling-hammond (2007) has referred to; it became clear to me that teachers have begun to get used to the idea that their voice did not count. unfortunately, teachers have become used to the fact that they have to comply with that they are commanded to do, having little or no say, if they disagreed. all in all, my findings helped me to understand the different dimensions of the impact of the standardization on teachers’ experience. i have substantively explained that there is a clash between the macrosystem, which constantly promotes standardization and homogeneity, and the diversity and heterogeneity that teachers experience in many schools at miami dade county. through these interviews i was able to understand, and thus describe in this paper, the struggle that teachers serving highly multilingual classrooms experience, when confronting standardization. in addition, i was also able to explain what teachers think could be done in order to overcome this tension. discussion and conclusion in this last section of the paper i decided to include three main reflections. the first one has to do with teachers’ fear of being constantly put to the test. the fact of being constantly observed and made accountable for, affects their own well-being. in addition, i also thought it was interesting to link this idea of the growth of standardization to dewey and his conception of the process of teaching and learning. lastly, i also wanted to add a possible solution to the problem. what about elementary level teachers? 218 fearing the look from above foucault (1977) thought that individuals were affected by everything that surrounded them. according to the french sociologist there are structural inequalities that limit individual free will. i believe that teachers are affected by a variety of forces that exist at different levels. that is to say, while teachers’ strategies and experiences are directly affected by the multilingualism of their students, they are also affected by the accountability mechanisms their own school principals could implement in the schools they are working at. teachers seems to respond to different forces that exist in these different levels; unfortunately, many times there is a disconnection between what the macro-system thinks that happens, and what is the reality of the micro system. that is to say, while policymakers at the macro-system seem to value the importance of homogeneity, the micro-system shows that reality is much more diverse and complex. unfortunately, teachers become hostages of this disconnect between the micro and macro levels. an ecosystem is made up of different parts that are interrelated to each other through multiple relationships; consequently, changes in one part of the system affect other parts of it. that is to say, decisions made by policy makers at the miami dade county affect the dynamics of teachers’ micro-system (i.e., schools). within the ecological paradigm, trickett and kelly (1985) introduced the principle of adaptation. as prilleltensky & nelson (2010) explained in their introductory textbook to the field of community psychology, individuals must learn to develop coping mechanisms and learn new skills to fit within the social system. that is to say, rather than becoming docile bodies as foucault would claim, other scholars think that the adaptation principle is a way of balancing what ‘the system’ pretends with what individuals want for their lives. in my study, it became very clear that even when teachers did not agree with many of the decisions being drawn ‘above’, they had to adapt to those policies. why would they do that? simple, because teachers are afraid of the consequences of “being observed.” the destructive power of testing the twentieth century will be known for many things. some will remember it as the century in which men defied the laws of gravity and intensified research in the outer space. on the other hand, many others will stress on world wars and describe the last century as the bloodiest and cruelest centuries of all times. lastly, it could be also stated that during this century there was a clear unification of the idea of nation-state, which was possible due to the spread of some ideals such as nationalism and patriotism. it was during the first world war, when feelings of nationalism were out bursting and during one of the cruelest moments in time, that dewey stated that: “obviously a society to which stratification into separate classes would be fatal, must see to it that intellectual opportunities are accessible to all on equable and easy terms” (dewey, page 68). as a researcher, one of the things that affected me after carrying out these interviews is the question, “to what extent do standardized tests, such as the fsa, allow students to be equally exposed to opportunities not only of learning, but also of showing how much they know?” that is to say, following anyon (1981), i wondered if standardization did not contribute to the stratification of knowledge. after all, it seemed quite clear that the students from the lower socio-economic backgrounds were those that see their curriculum being narrowed. even when national standardized tests can have many different positive outcomes (for example, it could be used as an accountability tool to improve the overall education system), it also has the characteristic of homogenizing students. to what extent is this desirable? 219 global education review 5(2) from gardner’s (1998) point of view, the idea of treating all students as agents that learn in the same way would very likely be atrocious: “we need to take differences among individuals very seriously. rather than teaching all students the same content in the same way, and assessing them in the same way, we now have the opportunity (especially through technology) to individualize education” (p. 24). in addition, standardized tests also affect one other key actor in the process of teaching and learning: teachers. several countries have incorporated merit-based teacher salaries’ reforms, which peg the amount teachers are paid to standardized tests’ results (perazza, 2008). as it was explained above, as standardized becomes more and more high-stakes, teachers are somehow induced to teach to the test and drill the contents of the test (steiner-khamsi, 2004). unfortunately, this creates a tension between their career aspirations as teachers and how they conceive the importance of embracing multiculturalism in the teaching and learning experience and the need to meet mandated standardized tests’ scores. most teachers i know – and in my fifteen years of experience in the field of education i have met a lot of them -, enter the profession because they want to help students. the core of their interests has to do with trying to leave their print on thousands of students they gladly work with. it is fair to say their approach may vary but i am sure most – if not all – the teachers want the best for all their students. teaching is a very demanding – usually underestimated – profession. it takes passion and a true vocation to be able to work as a teacher for many years. that is why i think it is so painful to see the puzzling situation to which teachers serving multilingual students are exposed to, when all that matters is testing! rather than fostering an educational system that promotes the well-being of all its main actors – teachers and students – we have moved towards a depersonalized mode of governing by numbers. in this systems teachers’ voices are not heard. in addition, they are asked to do the impossible: reconcile homogeneity with heterogeneity. setting homogeneity as a goal, implies a whole set of premises, which are at odds with the values of most of the teachers i have met. the teachers i know are interested in making sure that diverse students such as aladdin, mulan, pocahontas, sofia, esmeralda, hercules and tiana are able to learn and to move forward. the teachers i know – and especially those i met – understand that their different students need different things; they are willing to complicate their professional lives by adapting their teaching styles to what each and every student they have needs. they do not do it because they are asked to behave in that way, they do not address the diversity of their students just because they were told to do so during their training. they do it because they feel that “helping them is their moral responsibility.” an alternative route as a scholar, i advocate for the revaluation of local knowledge, as a way of presenting an alternative to the top-down approach in education. i argue that we need to find ways of democratizing the accountability systems in education. if we want to empower minority students, it is important to closely monitor what their needs and interests are. there have been some pilot experiences, for example lingard and a team of researchers worked with the department of education of queensland: the petra initiative. the goal of the project was to find alternative modes of accountability systems – different than the traditional and dominant top-down approach -, in order to empower local educational communities. as described in the website of the project: “the petra team worked with select groups of teachers and students to strengthen school community what about elementary level teachers? 220 relationships through community-based research projects conducted by students, acknowledging the funds of knowledge in communities. the petra project also created a learning commission in the community that took submissions from all of these groups as part of a process towards this new conceptualization [of accountability systems]” in this paper, i referred to the situation of minority students, bouvier and karlenzig (2006) expressed that current accountability mechanisms are incompatible to the aboriginal educational model; therefore, they suggest, “the indigenous knowledge, values and norms that are inherent to aboriginal education, could inform the development of meaningful alternatives that are, it is hoped, much more perceptive of the human qualities of education and the pluralism of modern societies” (p. 29). in the conceptual framework of this paper i have explained the close connection that exists between language, culture and power. in order to prevent the genocide of minorities’ cultures it is important to inject diversity into schools – especially public schools -. in doing so, teachers need to champion the importance of embracing and uplifting multiculturalism. if we want to engage teachers, it is important to hear their voice. research needs to become much more rooted in communities’ needs. the communitybased approach to research promotes the involvement of dissident and usually unheard voices. that is to say, rather than focusing on what the mainstream discourses determine to be ‘truth’, we should go back to teachers’ communities and allow them to teach us what they think is ‘true’ and what is not. that is to say, rather than treating teachers as docile bodies we should allow ourselves, as researchers, to be illuminated by what they have to teach us. scholars such as sleeter (1991) and banks (2007) have argued that multicultural education represents a technology for the empowerment of minority students. i argue that students’ experiences and cultural characteristics need to be represented in all the different stages of the educational process; that does include assessment! assessment tools, which are standardized and centrally administered (either from a national or an international agency), seem to be at a worse position than local communities, so as to make the educational experience more democratic and sensitive towards cultural diversity. on the contrary, if teachers’ communities were allowed to participate in the design of accountability systems, then we would be incorporating those individuals that actually work with those students we are so desperately trying to help. references abrams, l., pedulla, j., & madaus, g. 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(2014). conceptualizing teaching to the test under standardsbased reform. applied measurement in education, 27(2), 98-114. about the author ignacio barrenechea is a phd student at the community well-being program at the university of miami. he holds a law degree from di tella university in argentina, a ma in international education from the george washington university and an llm in international legal studies from new york university. he began his work in education as a secondary school teacher and, then, as an education policy advisor to the ministry of education in the city of buenos aires. he is currently working towards his dissertation, in which he will focus in understanding to what extent servicelearning, involving elite schools’ students and disenfranchised communities, help promote bridging and bonding. 106 global education review 4(2) 2016-2017 board of reviewers charlene sue aaron, illinois state university nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria noura alquatarneh, san diego state university faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna jessica ball, university of victoria, canada ignacio barrendchea, university of miami marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland fiona benson, mcgill university, canada gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, israel caroline adele bligh, leeds beckettuniversity, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york anne marie connor, michigan state university derek copp, good spirit school division, saskatchewan, canada tara grey coste, university of southern maine shelly lynn counsell, university of memphis, tennessee oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha brian d. denman, university of new england, australia jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university kristy kowalske doss, western carolina university alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris gernot driesiebner, university of graz, austria nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college dawn richards elliott, texas christian university elizabeth joy erwin. montclair state university claudia fahrenwald, university of education upper austria aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york matthew c. fleenor, roanoke college, virginia 107 global education review 4(1) melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame charles gleek, lynn university, arizona jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong e. francine guastello, st. john’s university, new york amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom barbara hanfstingl. alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria bjoern hassler, cambridge university, uk laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york stephen j. hernandez, hofstra university brian lloyd heuser, peabody college, vanderbilt university lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university lauren merrill jackson, american university rosalind james, university of new england, australia cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota teresa ann johnson, jackson-madison school district, jackson, tennessee sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska fethi kayalar, erzincan university, turkey hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville manuela b. keller-schneider, zurich university of teacher education, switzerland shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york allyson krupar, the pennsylvania state university olympia kyriakidis, san diego county office of education jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, newyork eric w. layman, indiana university, bloomington kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand 2016-2017 board of reviewers 108 carole k. lee, university of maine at farmington simone lehrl, university of bamberg, germany susan j. lenski, portland state university cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college sandhya vishwas limaye, tata institute of social sciences, india sara liviero, university of exeter, united kingdom pradeep kumar logeswaran, madurai kamaraj university, india dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma thomas luschei, claremont graduate university, california dr. lauren madden, the college of new jersey christine morano magee, the george washington university michelle malecki, world vision org. isolde malmberg, university for music and performing arts, vienna dominic manuel, mcgill university, canada jillian marchant, james cook university, australia meghan e. marrero, mercy college, newyork daniela martinek, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut lee l. mason, university of texas at san antonio silvester g. mata, university of houston, tx tata j. mbugua, university of scranton patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york jennifer c. mccain, morehead state university, kentucky carmen l. mccrink, barry university, florida becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, university of massachusetts, lowell katherine merseth, rti international claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada mohd nahar mohd arshad, international islamic university, malaysia maria boeke mongillo, central connecticut state university nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york t. lee morgan, university of northern colorado tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban university of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california, los angeles bernie murray, ryerson university, ontario, canada mariano narodowski, universidad torcuato di tella, buenos aires giselle e. navarro-cruz, california state polytechnic university, pomona evangeline n. nderu, rti international bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey do-yong park, illinois state university 109 global education review 4(1) patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota kari f. pawl, concordia university, chicago emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york benjamin piper, rti international christine eva plaimauer, university of education upper austria mary podsiedlik, syracuse university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york teresa ann quackenbush, mercy college, new york sibylle rahm, otto-friedrich-university of bamberg, germany sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia johannes reitinger, private university college of teacher education of linz, austria konstantina rentzou, european university of cyprus, nicosia, cyprus melia eileen repko-erwin, university of colorado, boulder leila ansari ricci, california state university, los angeles merethe roos, telemark university college, norway katharina rosenberger, university of vienna, austria rose ann rudnitsky, mercy college, new york thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, austria susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago beng huat see, durham university, united kingdom sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsin-madison saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school jessica simon, babson college carolina snaider, teachers college, columbia dale snauwaert, the university of toledo, ohio vicky spencer, george mason university deepa srikantaiah, urc university nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts anita summer, university of vienna, austria clodie tal, levinsky college of teacher education, tel aviv sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york mary barbara trube, ohio university agnes turner, university of klagenfurt, vienna, austria karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college, new york jim wharton, seattle aquarium stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania carla williams-deazle, adelphi university, new york gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria brian l. wright, university of memphis 2016-2017 board of reviewers 110 linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh kai zhou, the state university of new york at albany umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria fathers’ role, involvement and cultural expectations 1 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: rentzou, konstantina & slutsky, ruslan. fathers’ role, involvement and cultural expectations (2019). global education review, 6 (1), 1-4. fathers’ role, involvement and cultural expectations konstantina rentzou european university of cyprus ruslan slutsky the university of toledo undoubtedly fathers’ role and involvement in their children’s care and education is not a new field of research. on the contrary, fatherhood has attracted research attention since the 1970’s and has gone through several phases, from emphasis on the consequences from fathers’ absence to emphasis on fathers’ active involvement (schoppesullivan, mcbride & ringo ho, 2004). this research indicated that the childfather relationship is not simply an imitation of the child-mother relationship, but develops and evolves differently (planalp and braungartrieker, 2016, p. 135) and has different expectations from the child’s and cultures perspective. however, despite the fact that fathering and father involvement attracts increasingly more attention in the field of early childhood education and development, it is still surrounded by an assortment of conceptual, methodological and policy issues. for instance, although maternal roles are well established, the roles fathers may assume and the construct of father involvement has long been debated (pleck, 2007; schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, & ringo ho, 2004). schoppe-sullivan, mcbride & ringo ho (2004) state that there is not “a single way of approaching and thinking about the study of father involvement” (p. 149). in addition, father involvement is typically measured through mothers’ reports or through child-or teacher-perceptions (charles et al. 2016, bögels & phares 2008) that raise concern about biased reporting and the validity of using third party reports (mikelson 2008). furthermore, although fathers’ role and involvement is changing, “men’s involvement in caregiving has too often been missing from public policies, from systematic data collection and research, and from efforts to promote women’s empowerment” (levtov et al., 2015, 16). today as more women are active in the work force, the role of fathers’ in the daily experience of their children is more important than ever. roles traditionally reserved for mothers are assumed today by fathers, whose role is clearly in transition (o’brien 2004). yet, the differences in roles may also be grounded culturally in that fathers may be expected to play roles different from that of mothers in different cultures, and what constitutes a good father may be highly dependent on cultural, historical and familial ideologies (lamb and tamis-lemonda 2004). the present themed issue aims at delineating the importance, roles, and diverse practices of fathers in different cultures. special attention is given into how existing policies in various countries may affect fathers’ role and involvement. in addition to drawing on research that indicates the amount and type of father investment varies with different developmental stages of the child (lamb, 2010), this themed issue aspires to shed light into how _________________________________ corresponding author konstantina rentzou, school of humanities, social and education sciences, department of education sciences, european university cyprus, 6 diogenous str, 2404 engomi, p.o.box 22006, 1516 nicosia, cyprus email: ntinar@hotmail.com mailto:ntinar@hotmail.com mailto:ntinar@hotmail.com 2 global education review 6(1) fathers are involved in their preschool children’s upbringing, care and education, both at home and at early childhood education and care (ecec) settings. taking into consideration that we do not have a clear picture on fatherhood, as it differs so much culturally, and that changes are needed not only in policies and institutions but also “within data collection and analysis efforts” (letvov et al. 2015, p. 22), the present themed issue aims to highlight relevant research findings, illuminate areas that are in need of additional research, and examine the implications of these findings on policies and practices. in exploring paternal involvement from greek, greek-cypriot and turkish fathers’ and mothers’ perspectives: cross-national differences and similarities, rentzou, golguven, koumarianou and zengin explore if the importance of fathers’ role and their actual involvement are culturally constructed and the differences and similarities between maternal and paternal reports on fathering practices and paternal role. the researchers found statistically significant differences in terms of the role of the father and the parental styles adopted at a country level and in the way fathers are involved at a parent level. in addition, the study revealed discrepancies between paternal and maternal rating, with mother’s assigning lower ratings on actual involvement but higher ratings on the importance of fathers’ role. overall, the study revealed correlations between perceptions about fathers’ role and actual involvement for the total sample as well as for mothers and fathers independently. in addition, the study revealed that father involvement is not only culturally constructed. the parental style adopted by each parent and their social cognitions are correlated with father involvement. the study highlights the need to inform our nomenclature about what fatherhood and father involvement is and the importance of pursuing gender transformative parenting approaches and programs that echo fathers’ needs. in the role of male caretakers and preschool teachers for father involvement in ecec rohrmann addresses the domination of the early childhood development field by women and how this might affects fathers’ involvement in their children’s ecec setting. research and practice from the early childhood development sector indicates that services are dominated by women and are primarily addressed to women and children. this raises several key questions, how do we attract fathers and how do we foster their engagement in their children’s care and education outside the house? male involvement in ecec is of paramount importance. male ecec teachers not only contribute to children’s overall and optimal development, but at the same time they serve as an important contact person for fathers in everyday interaction, since many fathers react positively to male staff. as rohrmann postulates, although fathers do not necessarily need male ecec staff in order to get involved in their children’s care and education in out-of-home settings, and despite the fact that culture may affect such relations, the results do suggest that men can enrich cooperation with fathers in ecec institutions in many ways. in line with the rest of the articles in this themed issue, rohrmann concludes that “working with fathers needs a cultural-sensitive approach combined with gender sensitivity, and this is true as well for research on this issue”. lopez, mcwhirter, rosencrans, giuliani and mcintyre focus on the role and involvement of fathers with children with developmental delays. father involvement with children with developmental delays provides a systematic nineteen article literature review centered on father’s involvement in the education and care of children with delays as well as the implications that fathers’ participation has on children’s developmental outcomes. children with developmental delays have lower qulity interactions with parents due to the increased difficulty of parenting this population. however, father participation with their children can have positive developmental outcomes for the child. it fathers’ role, involvement and cultural expectations 3 is thus paramount that research on family involvement includes fathers roles and interventions as they have a strong impact on their children’s developmental outcomes. by including father’s in the research and discussion, we ensure that they have a direct voice in the process rather than getting secondary reports on father involvement from mothers, children and teachers. in the final paper of this special themed issue, pambas tandika basil takes us to tanzania, africa to the village of kimamba to help us understand the importance of fathers’ involvement in young children’s learning and development in that region. the paper takes on a cultural journey through the expectations and normative roles fathers have undertaken in africa and the policy changes that are changing those roles. fathers understanding of a positive developmental outcome for children was focused on providing food, health needs, clothing and a safe environment. some fathers in this study stated that their role is equal to that of the mother suggesting that they are beginning to reconceptualize their own responsibilities as a parent and caretaker. the paper is an interesting exploration of the cultural expectations of fathers on their own beliefs about the care, development and learning of their children and the roles they play in this critical life long process. the articles included in this themed issue demonstrate that father and male caregiver involvement occurs along a continuum and fathers/male caregivers find different ways to get actively involved in their children’s lives. drawing on research results which highlight that “it is estimated that at the current rate of global progress, it will take 75 years to achieve equality in this work” (heilman et al., 2017, p. 14), the present themed issue seeks to bring to the fore the need for adopting and fostering a gender transformative approach across settings. traditionally, parenting and parenting support programs have been equated to mothering and mothers’ support. the question is where are fathers and other male caregivers in this picture? what role do they have in the family? are they in need of support and how do we address this need? are they welcomed in services addressed to families and to their children? systematic efforts to address these questions are as urgent as never before. references bögels, s., and phares, v. 2008. fathers' role in the etiology, prevention and treatment of child anxiety: a review and new model. clinical psychology review, 28(4), 539–558. charles, p., spielfogel, j., gorman-smith, d., schoeny, m., henry, d., and tolan, p. 2016. disagreement in parental reports of father involvement. journal of family issues, 1-24, advanced online publication. doi: 10.1177/0192513x16644639. heilman b, levtov r, van der gaag n, hassink a, and barker g (2017). state of the world’s fathers: time for action. washington, dc: promundo, sonke gender justice, save the children, and menengage alliance lamb, m. e. 2010 (ed). the role of the father in child development (5th ed.). new york, ny: wiley. lamb, m.e. and tamis-lemonda, c.s. 2004. the role of the father. an introduction. in lamb, m.e. (ed.), the role of the father in child development (4th ed.) (1-5). new york, ny: wiley. lero, d.s, ashbourne, l.m., and whitehead, d.l. may, 2006. inventory of policies and policy areas influencing father involvement. guelph, canada: father involvement research alliance. levtov, r., van der gaag, n., greene m., kaufman m., and barker g. 2015. state of the world’s fathers: a men care advocacy publication. washington, dc: promundo, rutgers, save the children, sonke gender justice, and the menengage alliance. mcallister f, burgess a, barker g, katowallace j. 2012. fatherhood: parenting programmes and policy a critical review of http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02727358 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02727358 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02727358 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/02727358 4 global education review 6(1) best practice. london and washington dc: promundo and the fatherhood institute. mikelson, k.s. 2008. he said, she said: comparing mother and father reports of father involvement. journal of marriage and family, 70, 613-624. planalp, e.m. and braungart-rieker, j.m. 2016. determinants of father involvement with young children: evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study–birth cohort. journal of family psychology, 30(1), 135-146. pleck, j. h. 2007. why could father involvement benefit children? theoretical perspectives. applied developmental science, 11(4), 196-202. schoppe-sullivan, s. j., mcbride, b. a., and ringo ho, m-h. 2004. unidimensional versus multidimensional perspectives on father involvement. fathering, 2(2), 147-163. about the author(s) dr. konstantina rentzou is scientific collaborator at the european university of cyprus and she has participated as a researcher in greek, cypriot and eu-funded research projects. she has published 30 papers in peerreviewed journals, a monograph on family engagement in ecec and a co-authored book on the quality of the physical environment of preschool settings. she is the acei country liaison in greece and in cyprus and the world forum national representative for cyprus. konstantina also co-leads the international special interest forum “ecec in eu”. her research interests are in ecec quality, parental involvement and parent caregiver relationships, involvement and recruitment of males in ecec, the organization of the preschool environment and children’s play. ruslan slutsky, phd, is a professor of early childhood education in the judith herb college of education at the university of toledo. his current research interests focus on early childhood education, quality in early childhood and children's play. ger study abroad for preservice teachers 4 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: morley, alyssa, braun, alisha m.b., rohrer, lodi, & lamb, david (2019). study abroad for preservice teachers: a critical literature review with considerations for research and practice. global education review, 6 (3). 4-29. study abroad for preservice teachers: a critical literature review with considerations for research and practice alyssa morley michigan state university alisha m. b. braun university of south florida lodi rohrer university of south florida david lamb university of south florida abstract this article applies a postcolonial analytical framework to critically review empirical literature on study abroad for preservice teachers (psts). our systematic search of scholarly databases identified 47 empirical studies of study abroad programs for psts in the 2000-2019 time period. our analysis of these 47 studies is driven by the objectives to (a) understand geographic patterns in study abroad of psts, (b) examine the topics, conceptual frames, and implementation of study abroad of psts, (c) explore how study abroad for psts is currently being conceptualized and studied, and (d) critically analyze how these geographic patterns and study abroad programmatic and research trends are situated within broader north-south relations (major & santoro, 2016). using geovisualizations we illustrate patterns in the countries of origin of psts and the countries in which they study abroad. we find that the majority of psts are from the united states and are traveling to countries in the north. when examining the content and programming of study abroad, we find many programs focus on cultivating professional skills for psts such as language fluency for foreign language teachers and intercultural competence. after establishing these patterns, we pay particular attention to the 23 studies in our sample that examine psts traveling to regions in the global south. we conclude by offering considerations for future research and highlighting practices for program design that encourage psts to reflect upon global power differentials and complexities. keywords study abroad; preservice teachers; global competency; teacher education; postcolonialism introduction experiences abroad can equip future teachers with important skills such as global competency, intercultural sensitivity, and foreign language abilities and pedagogies (rahatzad, sasser, phillion, karimi, deng, & akiyama, 2013). given these potential impacts, study abroad programs for preservice teachers (psts) are increasingly offered through teacher education programs (cushner, 2007). this article contributes to research and practice by presenting a critical review of empirical literature focused on pst study abroad programs. to the best of our knowledge, no meta-analyses or comprehensive literature reviews of pst study abroad exist, and therefore this article offers a novel contribution by reviewing, synthesizing, and critiquing this literature base. we identified and analyzed 47 publications featuring pst study abroad in the 2000-2019 time period, and in this article we highlight and analyze geographic, study abroad for preservice teachers 5 programmatic, and research patterns. a postcolonial framework guides our critical analysis of these patterns. after presenting background about study abroad for psts, we introduce the postcolonial framework applied for our analysis. this leads into a discussion of the methods we employed for reviewing literature and analyzing geographic, programmatic, and research trends. our findings section reveals a dominance of programs originating from countries in the global north (north) and carried out through short-term, faculty-led models. we consider the tradeoffs of existing approaches and profile trips that thoughtfully engage with issues of power and privilege. in our conclusion and discussion section, we offer considerations for research and practice. background in recent years, the goal of supporting psts’ global competency has emerged as particularly important due to the increased diversity teachers encounter in their classrooms (zhao, 2010). as cushner (2007) writes, “more than ever, there is the need for preservice teachers to have significant cross-cultural experience that will enable them to teach with, work with, and continue to learn from people different from themselves” (p. 37). in response to this need, faculty in teacher education programs have created new coursework and programming to prepare future teachers to engage with people whose backgrounds and identities differ from their own. the potential of study abroad to deliver intense cross-cultural experiences is perhaps why study abroad is increasingly offered as a promising practice for teacher education programs (rahatzad, sasser, phillion, karimi, deng, & akiyama, 2013). through study abroad, psts can gain unique exposure to diverse populations as well as experience being a cultural outsider. these potential benefits have led to the expansion of study abroad programs for psts in recent years (phillion, malewski, & sharma, 2009). compared to most other college majors, students in teacher preparation programs have relatively rigid course and internship requirements. traditional long-term, immersive study abroad programs are often infeasible for psts due to these requirements. for psts to study abroad, short-term experiences that meet certain requirements of their teacher education degree are often most appealing. these experiences have commonalities with short-term international service learning (isl) trips, as psts may fulfill internship requirements through tutoring or classroom-teaching abroad. given this overlap with isl, our study of pst study abroad is informed by ongoing debates in isl scholarship. international volunteering, or isl, is supported by a range of stakeholders who emphasize “impacts on global equity” and “professional identities” of volunteers (baillie smith & laurie, 2011, p. 545). however, because isl programs frequently involve volunteers of relative privilege volunteering in poorer communities abroad, tiessen (2018) in a recent book urges researchers and program designers to interrogate the extent to which isl perpetuates and/or reduces existing inequalities. for example, short-term programs that emphasize the skills volunteers gain may deepen inequalities through accruing benefits to volunteers rather than host communities (baille smith & laurie, 2011; tiessen, 2018). moreover, programs can inadvertently promote harmful stereotypes about people in the global south (south), and the ways that foreign volunteers “save” them, as onyenekwu, angeli, pinto, and douglas (2017) identify through analyzing teaching abroad programs in africa. 6 global education review 6 (3) isl scholars have also raised questions about the neoliberalization of volunteer programs through an “uncritical pedagogy of development and a heavy emphasis on ‘difference making’ and curriculum vitae building” (griffiths, 2014, p. 205). in a study of canadian youth volunteering abroad, tiessen (2012) finds a “one-directional flow of benefits from the global south to the northern-based volunteers” (p. 1). many isl scholars apply postcolonial theory in order to interrogate these global flows (e.g., onyenekwu, angeli, pinto, & douglas, 2017; tiessen, 2012; 2018). research on the impact of study abroad has followed the growth in pst study abroad programs. this study offers an attempt to synthesize and critique the literature base. we direct our attention not only to u.s. psts (the primary focus of the current literature base) but also to the communities they encounter while abroad and the global power relations within which their experiences abroad (and domestically) are situated. theoretical framework our analysis draws from postcolonial theory. as major and santoro (2016) explain, postcolonial theory is “concerned with how colonial discourses continue to shape ways of talking, thinking, and being in the world” (p. 464). study abroad programs often involve students from “developed” countries going to locations in “developing” countries. typically, these study abroad locations have a long and contested history with visitors from the northern hemisphere—a history marked by exploitative colonial relations, slavery, and hegemony, and with a cumulative effect of accruing benefits to those in the north at the expense of those in the south (nordtveit, 2010; stein, andreotti, bruce, & suša, 2016). postcolonial theory research “critically engages with the legacy of colonisation, and questions whether the global system could not in certain cases be constructed as a second colonisation” (nordtveit, 2010, p. 322). the language of “global south” and “global north” grows out of postcolonial theory and offers a shift away from geographic distinctions dependent on development categories and trajectories (e.g., “third world,” “developing countries”). broadly, the south refers to regions of latin america, asia, africa, and oceania, while the north refers to regions of north america and europe.1 as dados and connell (2012) contend, [this classification] functions as more than a metaphor for underdevelopment. it references an entire history of colonialism, neo-imperialism, and differential economic and social change through which large inequalities in living standard, life expectancy, and access to resources are maintained. (p. 13) thus, the north/south framework invites examinations of relations which perpetuate global inequalities. study abroad, an inherently relational and international experience, lends itself to this way of conceptualizing interactions and geographies. the postcolonial framework is most apt for studying interactions between the north and the south, yet, adopting this framework requires researchers to engage with questions of global inequality regardless of where programming occurs. additionally, scholars have argued that there are souths in the north, and vice versa (agnew, 2001); it may be possible for some students to travel to the south without leaving the comforts and amenities of the north. ogden (2008) terms this model of study abroad a “view from the veranda” (p. 35), because it provides a form of travel where students are largely insulated from their surroundings. metaphorically, students are sitting on a comfortable veranda simply observing the environment rather than participating in it. study abroad for preservice teachers 7 further, ogden (2008) explores the extent to which current trends in study abroad mirror patterns of colonial mobilities. in recent decades, the number of u.s. students who study abroad—particularly through short-term and faculty-led modalities—has grown, and ogden identifies that study abroad program designers are increasingly pressured to provide a study abroad “product” which affords students both excitement and comfort. programs emerging from these pressures often de-emphasize cultural immersion experiences such as language-learning and homestay and spare students the discomfort of feeling like a cultural outsider. likening this to a “colonial” experience, ogden writes, [h]istorically, the practice of colonialism involved the transfer of people to new territories where they lived for extended periods of time while maintaining allegiance to their home country...if an analogy could thus be drawn with education abroad, a colonial system might be described as the infrastructure which supports the privileged position of the student over the local. (p. 40) postcolonial theory offers ways of examining how study abroad perpetuates or challenges power dynamics characteristic of colonialism. the analysis we undertake in this literature review is also shaped by our positionality, defined by hay (2005) as “social, locational, and ideological placement relative to the research project” (p. 290). we approach this research as scholars situated in the north at u.s. universities who engage in applied international work. multiple authors have led study abroad trips in the south and are interested in designing meaningful experiences for psts from the united states and other countries. additionally, each of the four authors is a native english speaker with some limited non-english background (including chichewa, french, polish, and swahili). these language abilities, as well as the dominance of english as a publication language, directed us to manuscripts published in english. our institutional affiliations facilitated access to a vast array of educational research databases and resources to undertake this systematic literature review. method in this critical systematic review of literature, we aim to both describe study abroad patterns for preservice teachers and interrogate how these patterns reflect, trouble, and reinforce colonial power dynamics between the north and south. four objectives drove our analysis: (a) understand the geographic patterns in study abroad of psts, (b) examine the topics, conceptual frames, and implementation of study abroad of psts, (c) explore how study abroad for psts is currently being conceptualized and studied, and (d) critically analyze how these geographic patterns and programmatic and research trends are situated within broader north-south relations. we examined multiple databases for literature from 2000 to 2019. informed by anderson-levitt’s (2017) guide to searching world literature, both open-access and subscription databases were included. we searched the directory of open access journals (doaj), education resource information center (eric), sociological abstracts, and psycinfo in order to retrieve articles spanning a range of disciplines and authorship. we applied search terms that captured study abroad (e.g., “education abroad,” “study abroad,” “study tour”) and preservice teachers (e.g., “teacher candidates,” “preservice teachers,” “student teachers”). appendix a offers comprehensive details of our search in which we retrieved 87 english-language peer-reviewed articles. abstracts were reviewed to ensure articles were empirical studies focused on the topic of study abroad programs for k-12 psts. this review of abstracts winnowed our sample to 47 8 global education review 6 (3) publications, which were then carefully read and analyzed by the authors. appendix b presents our article sample. our research objectives informed how we generated and analyzed data about these 47 articles. to organize the data, a spreadsheet was created with columns indicating specific information, such as the origin and destination country of each study abroad program. we also collected the following programmatic data: program length, model (e.g., faculty-led), program purpose, and activities psts engaged in. to assess how study abroad is being researched, we retrieved information on study methods, samples, conceptual frameworks, findings, and stated implications. for our geographic analysis, we integrated geovisualizations to illustrate patterns of mobility among psts. geovisualization is an umbrella term that describes the integration of many approaches of visualizing and analyzing data, including cartographic and geographic information systems (gis) methods (maceachren & kraak, 2001). this analysis drew from the origin and destination data. for example, one article in the sample by marx and pray (2011) involved psts from the united states (origin) traveling to mexico (destination) to participate in a study abroad program. all origins and destinations were tallied to create world maps illustrating the concentrations of these program locations. in some cases, publications profiled a program with multiple origins and/or destinations. for example, in ma, wong, and lam (2015), students from lithuania, poland, and turkey traveled to germany, resulting in three unique origins and three tallies for germany as a destination. in other cases, multiple publications described the same study abroad program. for example, both malewski and phillion (2009) and malewski, sharma, and phillion (2012) analyzed a study abroad program originating in the united states and traveling to honduras. this example resulted in two tallies for both the united states and honduras because each publication was counted separately. finally, we aggregated trips at the country level because not all publications reported the specific destination within a country. to address our first research objective— understanding the geographic patterns in study abroad of psts—a map was created in arcgis 10.5.1 using data from two sources: (1) global data with country boundaries from the natural earth website (https://www.naturalearthdata.com) and (2) destinations of study abroad programs reflected in the literature reviewed. we selected the winkel ii world map projection to minimize distortions in the map that have traditionally emphasized the size and placement of europe over other regions (harley, 1989). each destination was tallied in order to identify countries with higher and lower concentrations of study abroad programs. the two data sources were converted to map layers in arcgis to illustrate spatial relationships between the sources. the resulting map provides a visual representation of the destinations using a 5point color gradient (green) to indicate the concentration of programs gleaned from the tallies of the published literature. to investigate our second and third research objectives—examining the topics, conceptual frames, and implementation of study abroad of psts, and exploring how study abroad for psts is conceptualized and studied—we drew upon the programmatic data we compiled and organized in our spreadsheet. for the second objective, this included program duration, model (e.g., faculty-led), program purpose, and activities psts engaged in. for the third objective, this included information on study methods, samples, conceptual frameworks, findings, and stated implications. this information was summarized and presented in study abroad for preservice teachers 9 the form of tables, figures, and analytic descriptions with examples to provide descriptive results. we then applied our theoretical framework to this programmatic data to provide a postcolonial analysis. to explore our fourth research objective— critically analyzing how these geographic patterns and programmatic and research trends are situated within broader north-south relations—additional maps were created. we generated two maps using country boundaries from the natural earth website in conjunction with the matplotlib package (https://matplotlib.org/) for the python programming language. the purpose of these maps was to illustrate travel pattern directionality between the origin and destination countries in the literature. to facilitate interpretation, multiple panels were created to illustrate travel patterns within and across the north and south. arrows were used to indicate the directionality of each trip’s country of origin and its corresponding destination. findings in this section, we present results related to geographic patterns, program design, and research on study abroad. we close the findings section with dedicated analysis of our findings through a postcolonial lens. geographic patterns in study abroad for psts the most popular study abroad locations, as reflected in this literature, were in europe and central america. figure 1 illustrates the country destinations for study abroad programs as reported in each publication. a total of five countries—mexico, honduras, australia, england, and germany—hosted more than three study abroad programs and in figure 1 are shaded in darkest green. four countries hosted two or three programs (medium green), and 20 countries hosted one program (lightest green). the countries with no shading did not host a study abroad program in the publications selected for the literature review. only one article (kasmer & billings, 2017) reported on a trip to a country in africa (tanzania). in an additional component of our analysis, we examined how these geographies and mobility patterns are situated within the north and the south. for this analysis, we separated the trips into those involving travel from the north to the north (n-n), from the north to the south (n-s), from the south to the north (s-n), and from the south to the south (s-s). figure 2 presents this analysis, depicting the travel patterns and their directionality between origindestination pairs of the study abroad programs represented in the literature. since not all studies reported the specific location within a country, only the center of the country was used as an origin or destination. figure 2 is divided into four panels to represent travel patterns between the north and south. appendix b, table 4, offers additional details to aid interpretation of figures 1 and 2; specifically, this table lists articles in the sample, countries of origin and destination, and how we coded them as north or south. we find that the majority of study abroad programs originate in the north, such as north america. the concentration of arrows in the top two panels (n-n and n-s) reveals the predominance of u.s.-origin trips within this article sample. many programs originating in the united states (north) had destinations in europe (north) and latin america (south). trips to north america were less frequent. as shown in the bottom panels, south-north (e.g., malaysia-new zealand) and south-south (e.g., hong kong-china) study abroad programs were relatively rare. many trips originating from the south began in hong kong. 2 10 global education review 6 (3) study abroad programs beyond study abroad origins and destinations, we were interested in how study abroad for psts is being developed and conducted. the duration of the study abroad programs ranged widely from 10 days to two years. table 1 summarizes the durations of the study abroad programs for psts in weeks. we found that 22% (n = 11) of the programs were short-term (2 weeks or fewer), 43% (n = 21) were medium-term (3-4 weeks), and 35% (n = 17) were long-term (more than 4 weeks). table 1: duration of study abroad programs duration (in weeks) n % 2 or fewer 11 22.4 3-4 21 42.9 more than 4 17 34.7 note: two articles described multiple programs (dunn, dotson, cross, kesner, & lundahl, 2014; trilokekar & kukar, 2011), and each program’s duration is tallied separately. one article did not specify the duration and is not included in the table (northcote, kilgour, reynaud, & fitzsimmons, 2014). regarding the variety of program activities for psts studying abroad, few programs (10%, n = 7) involved a homestay with a local family. the most frequent program activities were an internship or student instruction component (31%, n = 21) as well as a training or immersion component in the local language and/or culture (37%, n = 25). classroom observations, which were moderately common (22%, n = 15), were often combined with a teaching component, though in other cases they were a stand-alone activity. table 2 summarizes the frequency of the various program activities that we observed across the articles. table 2: study abroad program activities activity n % homestay with a local family 7 10.3 classroom observations 15 22.1 internship/student instruction 21 30.9 language/cultural training or immersion 25 36.8 note: programs may be included in more than one category. three articles did not specify program activities (foster, rice, foster, & barrick, 2014; ; ma, wong, & lam, 2015; macalister, 2016). in table 3, we report on study abroad purposes. while trip purposes varied, in more than one-third of cases, study abroad for psts was driven by an aim we coded as “fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students.” within this category, four articles reported on a trip where the designers of the study abroad program had a specific population of diverse students in mind (beckman & christenson, 2016; menardwarwick & palmer, 2012; nero, 2009; palmer & menard-warwick, 2012). in each of these articles, u.s. psts traveled to nearby spanishspeaking countries to gain exposure to english language learners or specific regions from where immigrants were traveling. for instance, nero (2009) reported on a study abroad trip to the dominican republic for both preand in-service teachers. this trip was developed in order to “enhance understanding of their (teachers’) immigrant students’ culture with a view to transform such an experience into culturally responsive pedagogy” (p. 175). nero, the author of the article, was also the trip leader and conducted this trip with teachers from new york city, writing that the dominican republic was “a study abroad for preservice teachers 11 logical overseas site given that new york is home to almost one million dominicans, the largest immigrant group in the city’s schools” (p. 176). this trip is one example of a program where the purpose and the destination are clearly explicated. another example of a program with an explicit goal is a study abroad trip to mexico which was designed to “facilitate preservice teachers’ ability to articulate a critical understanding of the needs of immigrant and second language learning students in their future public school classrooms” (palmer & menard-warwick, 2012, p. 17). other trips were similarly driven by the aim of fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students, but their rationale is less linked to specific student populations. for instance, greene and vazquez-montilla (2013) discuss a trip that took u.s. psts to hungary with the aim of supporting psts’ abilities to work “within a culturally and linguistically diverse environment” (p. 120). additional purposes include developing language skills and/or language pedagogy, gaining teaching experience (through international student teaching), or considering multiple perspectives in teaching. for the last category, one example came from a trip in which collins and geste (2016) described u.s. psts travelling to australia: “the hope was that this experience would allow the psts to expand their understanding of how others view ‘best practices’ and bring that fresh understanding back to north carolina classrooms.” (p. 15). an additional purpose for pst study abroad trips that appeared in five articles was to develop globallyminded educators. on a trip to sweden, dunn, dotson, cross, kesner, and lundahl (2014) describe a goal of global-mindedness; psts had “an opportunity to gain a broader knowledge of languages, cultures and institutions” (p. 288). table 3: the reported purpose of study abroad trips for psts trip purpose n % fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students 20 38.4 developing language skills and/or language pedagogy 7 13.5 gaining teaching experience 7 13.5 considering multiple perspectives in teaching 5 9.8 becoming globally minded educators 5 9.8 learning about cultures 4 7.7 other 4 7.7 research on study abroad programs many articles about study abroad programs for psts were written by faculty who also served as leaders for the trip; of the 47 studies reviewed, 35 (74%) were written by faculty leaders. this arrangement has many advantages. given their unique role, faculty leaders are wellpositioned to access large amounts of data about these psts; in several instances researchers used email communication, course assignments, direct observations, and student journals as part of their dataset. for example, in an article about 12 global education review 6 (3) a study abroad that took u.s. psts to xingdu, china, zhao, meyers, and meyers (2009) noted that they leveraged application essays, semistructured interviews, journal entries, classroom teaching videotapes, class projects, student presentations, email correspondence, and classroom observation. other articles written by faculty leaders used similar data, oftentimes also including leader notes from participant observation (e.g., beckman & christenson, 2016; kasun & saavedra, 2016; sharma, rahatzad, & phillion, 2013; thomas, 2006). beyond having access to a robust dataset, the unique position for faculty researchers as trip leaders enables grounded reflections on program design. in one article, which involved a group of students from a texas university traveling to mexico, menard-warwick and palmer (2012) analyzed eight student journal entries about the same event. the event involved a discussion between psts and a mother in a low-income neighborhood about the challenges of sending her four children to school. “the opportunity to speak with a woman who has struggled to keep her four children studying against all odds was intended to rupture…deficit viewpoints” (p. 135), the authors write. however, in their journal entries, most of the psts on the trip did not connect this experience with students they may have in the future, with only one pst writing about how this would challenge her as a teacher to consider student home background. menard-warwick and palmer admit to being disappointed, and in their discussion urge teacher educators to structure adequate time for reflection in study abroad programs. they explain that “in a short-term study abroad program, the temptation is to fill students’ time with classes, homework, cultural events, trips, museum visits, and guest lectures. however, learning experiences are only valuable when students have time to fully reflect on them” (p. 135). perhaps because many of these articles are written by and for teacher educators, their focus is decidedly on how study abroad impacts psts. we did not encounter any articles that devoted significant attention to the impact study abroad has on communities, schools, or individuals with whom psts interact during study abroad. researchers of volunteering abroad have argued that host community relationships are of crucial importance to the efficacy and sustainability of programs abroad (e.g., tiessen, 2018). furthermore, examining dynamics with hosts can enable “mutually beneficial relations” between the south and north (chen, 2019, p. 283). this line of inquiry was, however, not wellrepresented in the pst study abroad literature surveyed in this review. as noted in the purpose of study abroad section (see table 3), most study abroad programs aimed to enhance pst competence in some way. relatedly, researchers of pst study abroad predominantly investigated the extent to which this was occurring. several studies employed transformative learning theory, pioneered by mezirow (1978; 1991; 1997), as their conceptual framework (dunn, dotson, cross, kesner, & lundahl, 2014; foster, rice, foster, & barrick, 2014; trilokekar & kukar, 2011; vatalaro, szente, & levin, 2015). these studies examined how individuals encountered and appropriated new ideas and adapted their senses of self. other studies engaged interpretive frameworks to understand how psts made meaning of their study abroad experiences (green & vazquez-montilla, 2013; phillion, malewski, & sharma, 2009; sharma, rahatzad, & phillion, 2013). the majority of articles utilized primarily qualitative data to deeply explore pst experiences during a single study abroad program. one exception is a study that examined several iterations of the same program (sharma, phillion, & malewski, 2011). another study abroad for preservice teachers 13 article stands out for its comparison of a study abroad experience to a domestic classroom learning experience. in a piece titled “esl teacher education abroad and at home: a cautionary tale,” pray and marx (2010) compared changes in attitudes and beliefs among two groups of psts. one group enrolled in an esl class domestically and another enrolled in an esl class that was offered as a part of a study abroad to mexico. pray and marx concluded that the study abroad version of the course facilitated the development of empathy for language learners, but since the psts generalized from their own recent and personal experience of language learning it resulted in misconceptions of language pedagogy. this analysis also revealed that some study abroad programs are particularly wellresearched. this was the most striking with one honduras trip which represented more than 10% of our article sample. six of the 47 articles examined a different aspect of the same pst study abroad to honduras, though often different years of the trip (malewski, sharma, & phillion, 2012; malewski & phillion, 2009; phillion, malewski, & sharma. 2009; rahatzad, sasser, phillion, karimi, deng, & akiyama, 2013; sharma, phillion, & malewski, 2011; sharma, rahatzad, & phillion, 2013). this highlights the need for a broader base of scholarship about study abroad for psts. postcolonial analysis the previous sections’ presentation of descriptive results on pst study abroad enables a critical examination of study abroad patterns through a postcolonial framework. in this section, we investigate how these pst study abroad program and research patterns reflect, trouble, and reinforce colonial power dynamics between the north and the south. the most resounding geographic pattern we observed in this literature base was that programs predominantly involved psts from universities in the north. of the 47 publications we reviewed, 42 (or 89%) reported on trips for psts from the north. while many of these 42 trips were to destinations in the north, a slight majority (23 trips of the 42) involved travel to regions in the south. the preponderance of trips for students from universities in the north can be understood within a broader context of wealth concentrated in regions in the north. study abroad is a costly activity, and its availability and access are invariably linked to wealth at both institutional and individual levels. a one-directional flow of individuals from the north participating in programs in the south has been well-established in isl literature and is mirrored in this literature review (e.g., tiessen, 2012; 2018). however, we found that some pst programs were designed to help psts better understand and support specific populations they encounter in their teaching--such as dominican students in new york city (e.g. nero, 2009). this aspect of pst study abroad complicates a strict one-directional flow of benefit through introducing an idea that participants may travel to the south in order to develop needed language and cultural skills and experience which will in turn help them better serve spanish-speaking immigrant students back in the home context of the north. in our literature review, we also came across a handful of studies profiling trips from the south. the five articles we coded as originating from the south involved the following origins and destinations: psts from hong kong traveling to the destinations of australia, canada, mainland china, new zealand, and the united kingdom (hepple, 2012; ma, wong, & lam, 2015; tam 2016); psts from malaysia traveling to new zealand (macalister, 2016), and psts from turkey traveling to germany (pfingsthorn & czura, 2017). interestingly, the study abroad purposes reported in each of these 14 global education review 6 (3) articles involved developing language skills and pedagogy. the one south-south study abroad we encountered, tam (2016), involved psts from hong kong traveling to mainland china (beijing) for eight weeks in order to gain proficiency in the language of putonghua. hepple (2012) described a trip that emphasized language pedagogy for hong kong psts traveling to australia; the study abroad programs discussed in ma, wong, and lam (2015) involved hong kong psts traveling to english-speaking destinations in order to develop language skills and pedagogy. the program described in macalister (2016) involved malaysian psts residing for two years in new zealand in order to build language skills, and pfingsthorn and czura (2017) described a program where turkish psts—future teachers of english—attended a language institute in germany in order to build english language and teaching skills. in short, the majority of the south-originating trips were driven by the goal of learning english and learning how to teach it. while these trips are designed to serve goals of teacher education programs in the south, it is worth highlighting that they serve to confer the importance of english, a language of the north. while the base of literature on the trips to the south is scant, specific regions had no trips reported on in the literature. specifically, we did not identify any trips with psts from central america, south america, or africa. what this scholarship (and dearth of scholarship) also reveals is that much of the information generated about pst study abroad reflects the experiences of north students, though this specification is rarely indicated in the literature. this invisible hegemony has been pointed out in other areas relevant for scholars of teacher education. for instance, in a critical review of literature on teaching, weber (2007) argues that current scholarship “amounts to a northern conceptual framework about teaching” (p. 294), calling for more studies to examine the needs, goals, and constraints of teachers in the south. though we saw few trips involving psts from the south, 23 of the publications reviewed reported on trips to destinations in the south. the majority of these articles—19—involved psts from universities in the united states. we identified a number of practices which could reinforce ogden’s notion of the “colonial student.” such a student is situated within an “infrastructure which supports the privileged position of the student over the local” (p. 40). the majority of trips were less than one month in duration, which limits opportunities for immersion. only seven programs involved homestay with local families. these short and insulated programs can perpetuate a distance between students and those they encounter in study abroad. additionally, we were surprised that many studies did not justify their choice of location and made little or no mention of power differentials between students and host communities. in one article (ward, henschel heidi, & perez, 2017), the specific location of the study abroad is never mentioned. another publication (northcote, kilgour, reynaud, & fitzsimmons, 2014), reports on a trip where psts from australia traveled to cambodia where they taught classrooms. however, instead of forging partnerships with cambodian teachers, the local teachers surrendered their classrooms to the australian teachers for several weeks. whether this arrangement is beneficial to local students and schools was unexplored in this article, as were the tradeoffs around displacing— rather than engaging with and learning from— local systems. other studies presented on programs that maximized immersion experiences, even in short timeframes. beckman and christenson (2016) described a two-week study abroad in la secoya, el salvador with u.s. psts. el salvador was study abroad for preservice teachers 15 selected due to the growing population of salvadoran immigrants near the university with whom psts engaged. during their two weeks in el salvador, psts lived with families, designed and carried out service learning activities, and participated in group reflection discussions. before the trip, psts were assigned readings on el salvador history and education systems. the authors of the article about this trip found that “students overwhelmingly reported that the trip made them more comfortable working with latino children and families and more sensitive to the issues they faced” (p. 158). beckman and christenson found the homestay especially meaningful for many students, writing that, “living with families in an economically impoverished community also made many of the students reflect on their conception of poverty as well as on issues of fairness and justice” (p. 162). in addition to offering a promising study abroad model, this trip to el salvador represents a variety of programs we came across where psts traveled to specific locations in the south in order to enhance their capacity to support students from these locations. such a program design is particularly useful in disrupting global power dynamics because it encourages psts to build empathy for and greater awareness of subjugated populations—what mahler (2017) calls “economic souths in the geographic north” (para. 2). another promising element of study abroad programs involves close engagement with local teachers. in one article about u.s. psts studying abroad for four weeks in xingdu, china, the american psts partnered with chinese teachers. the authors reflected on the unique experience of four participants who had an arrangement where they shared an office with chinese teachers and lived in the homes of chinese teachers (they were at the “charter school”). comparing these psts’ experiences to psts who had a less immersive arrangement (at the “lab school”), zhao, meyers, and meyers (2009) wrote that, [t]his combination of factors seemed to create a richer and perhaps more comfortable experience regarding collaboration among american pre-service teachers and chinese teachers at the charter school when compared to the experiences of participants working at the lab school. the lab school’s six american participants had large class sizes, their own separate office and home stays with non-teachers. the charter school group communicated and collaborated more frequently with their chinese colleagues in many aspects in and out of school. they were seen designing lessons, sharing teaching ideas and reflecting upon their teaching with chinese colleagues more often. they shared ideas that were more studentand small groupcentered, and they learned from their fellow chinese teachers creative and effective teaching strategies that emphasized wholegroup participation in learning a foreign language...on the other hand, participants at the lab school collaborated more amongst themselves (pp. 310-311). we offer the zhao, meyers, and meyers (2009) and beckman and christenson (2016) programs as two promising examples of study abroad programs designed to enhance engagement between psts and local populations. we argue that programs along these lines can most effectively invite students to reflect upon global power differentials and complexities. in contrast, programs that ignore these complexities run the risk of reinforcing and further reinscribing inequalities. summary of findings in summary, the vast majority of trips (n = 42) originate in the north (such as north america) and take psts to destinations in europe or central america. the study abroad programs range in length from 10 days to two 16 global education review 6 (3) years, with 3-4 weeks as the most common duration (n = 21). the purpose of study abroad for psts most commonly involves fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students (n = 20). oftentimes, the goals of cultivating language skills (n = 7) and pedagogy (n = 7) also animated trip aims. with respect to research about study abroad, we find that the majority of the articles were written by faculty who served as trip leaders (n = 35). this arrangement facilitated access to robust datasets and enabled grounded reflections on program design, but also introduced possibilities of bias and power that were rarely explored. our analysis also revealed that trips originating from the south are most commonly driven by the goal of learning english (n = 5). we also raise questions about local student relations that are promoted through existing models of pst study abroad, and highlight articles by zhao, meyers, and meyers (2009) and beckman and christenson (2016) for offering promising study abroad models for psts. conclusion and discussion our review of 47 articles about study abroad for psts leads to several implications for research and program design, which are offered in the following sections. implications for program design we were pleasantly surprised to find that the majority of programs (78%) represented in the research literature were three or more weeks in duration. of these longer trips, the modal duration was four weeks. to achieve the most commonly stated programmatic aim of fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students, we feel that it is important for psts to spend more than two weeks in the destination country. while the programs lasting two weeks or fewer do provide psts with some experience in another geographic and cultural context, we feel that their ability to meet their desired aims is limited and recommend that program leaders try to maximize program duration to the greatest extent possible given logistical and financial constraints. additionally, maximizing engagement through immersion activities can enable richer study abroad experiences. we were disappointed to find that homestay activities were not very common across the programs. in light of the most commonly stated programmatic aim of fostering intercultural competence and/or skills to work with diverse students, we feel that having an immersive cultural experience via homestays would promote psts’ intercultural competence and encourage program leaders to incorporate homestays when designing programs. on the other hand, it was encouraging to see a moderate number of programs including language/culture immersion or training activities, which nicely aligns with the goal of fostering intercultural competence. likewise, seeing a moderate number of programs involving internship or student instruction opportunities was positive to help realize the aim of building psts’ skills to work with diverse students. having those types of immersive hands-on practice activities can create powerful learning opportunities that psts can apply to their future careers. those designing study abroad programs can turn to promising program models identified in this literature review (e.g., zhao, meyers, & meyers, 2009 and beckman & christenson, 2016) that effectively invited students to reflect upon global power differentials and complexities. the findings of this literature review suggest that study abroad is disproportionately available to psts in the north. additionally, the large individual costs of study abroad in general has historically meant that study abroad is more accessible to affluent students (norton, 2008). study abroad for preservice teachers 17 the cost of study abroad creates sizeable barriers in access, and thus we echo others’ calls for domestically oriented immersion experiences (dunn, dotson, cross, kesner, & lundahl, 2014). recent scholarship on virtual reality also provides intriguing possibilities for leveraging new technologies to promote global connections and competencies. for example, web-based computer simulations like the one studied by myers and rivero (2019) was designed to enhance psts’ global content knowledge, disciplinary skills, and instructional practices, and could be used anywhere there is an internet connection. while study abroad is an exciting and powerful modality for promoting global and intercultural competency, we urge that it be well-justified given its exclusionary and costly nature. implications for research we assert above that domestically oriented immersion experiences may be well-suited for achieving the goals that drive many study abroad programs, and that domestic programming may be more accessible to a wider array of psts. relatedly, we call for research to compare study abroad with these domestic experiences to systematically examine the unique contributions of study abroad in promoting the aims of building global/intercultural competency, developing language skills and pedagogy, and other purposes outlined in this literature review. one existing study which did compare study abroad and domestic programming (pray & marx, 2010) identified that study abroad can lead to misconceptions about language learning, which underscores our call for more research comparing study abroad to domestic programming. another aspect we wish to submit for consideration among scholars of study abroad is the importance of faculty leaders reflecting on their positionality in both leading study abroad trips and leveraging these trips for data. with some exceptions (e.g., nero, 2009), we found that faculty leader authors rarely acknowledged the limitations and power relations entailed in researching one’s students. issues of authority may surface in other studies of programs, though these issues have yet to be well-explored. we encourage future trip leaders to acknowledge and consider their specific positionality in writing about their students’ study abroad experiences. additionally, future literature reviews adopting a postcolonial framework could systematically include non-english language journals. given our language abilities, we limited our search to journals published in english. our study thus did not report on research published in non-english journals, which may include studies from the south. the dominance of particular voices in the literature—namely, english-speaking faculty writing about pst experiences—also reveals that other perspectives are absent. while this literature base features a plethora of trips to different locations, we learn very little from this scholarship about local community perspectives of study abroad experiences. student journal entries are included (as curated and interpreted by researchers), but we do not see psts crafting articles about study abroad. future research could incorporate this need to learn about study abroad from different perspectives. in closing, our postcolonial review of scholarship on the study abroad of psts not only encourages a broadening of perspectives and experiences as represented in the literature, but also as reflected in practice. continued attention paid to global power differentials is needed in program design and research on the availability of study abroad opportunities to psts in the south and in program activities designed to promote intercultural and global competency. 18 global education review 6 (3) 18 figure 1 destinations for pst study abroad programs study abroad for preservice teachers 19 figure 2 travel patterns and their directionality between origin-destination pairs of study abroad programs 20 global education review 6 (3) appendix a search process database review (level 1): n = 86 databases1: directory of open access journals (doaj), eric, sociological abstracts, psycinfo ab(("study abroad") or ("education abroad") or ("learning abroad") or ("study tour") or ("school trip") or ("foreign study") or ("student travel")) and ab(("future teacher") or ("future teachers") or ("teacher candidate") or ("teacher candidates") or ("pre-service teacher") or ("pre-service teachers") or ("preservice teacher") or ("preservice teachers") or ("teachers in training") or ("teacher in training") or ("teacher education") or ("future educator") or ("future educators") or ("pre-service educator") or ("pre-service educators") or ("student teacher") or ("student teachers") or ("education intern") or ("education interns")) and la.exact("english") and peer(yes) ==86 abstract review (level 2): n = 47 abstracts were reviewed and articles were retained that met each of these four criteria: 1. empirical study 2. focuses on k-12 psts 3. non-redundant in the sample 4. focuses on study abroad program(s) 1 three databases were searched using proquest (eric, sociological abstracts, and psycinfo). the directory of open access journals (doaj) was searched manually. study abroad for preservice teachers 21 appendix b articles in sample table 4articles in sample with geographic information author(s) and year of publication country of origin global origin destination country global destination beckman & christenson (2016) u.s. north el salvador south brindley et al. (2009) u.s. north england north chacko & lin (2015) u.s. north england north collins & geste (2016) u.s. north australia north dozier & stephens (2016) u.s. north belize south dunn et al. (2014) u.s. north sweden and france north foster et al. (2014) u.s. north south korea south green & vazquezmontilla (2013) u.s. north hungary north hepple (2012) hong kong south australia north hill & thomas (2005) australia north indonesia south kasmer & billings (2017) u.s. north tanzania south kasun & saavedra (2016) u.s. north mexico south hare landa et al. (2017) u.s. north israel north lupi et al. (2012) u.s. north england north ma et al. (2015) hong kong south united kingdom, new zealand, australia, canada north 22 global education review 6 (3) macalister (2016) malaysia south new zealand north malewski & phillion (2009) u.s. north honduras south malewski et al. (2012) u.s. north honduras south marciano et al. (2017) u.s. north italy north marcus & moss (2015) u.s. north england north marx & moss (2011) u.s. north england north marx & moss (2015) u.s. north england north marx & pray (2011) u.s. north mexico south matthews & lawley (2011) u.s. north australia north mcgaha & linder (2012) u.s. north belgium north medina et al. (2015) u.s. north germany north menard-warwick & palmer (2012) u.s. north mexico south nero (2009) u.s. north dominican republic south northcote et al. (2014)case 1 of a study abroad australia south spain and france north northcote et al. (2014)case 2 of a study abroad australia south cambodia south palmer & menardwarwick (2012) u.s. north mexico south pfingsthorn & czura (2017) lithuania north germany north phillion et al. (2009) u.s. north honduras south study abroad for preservice teachers 23 pilonieta et al. (2017) u.s. north germany north pray & marx (2010) u.s. north mexico south quinn et al. (2011) u.s. north england north rahatzad et al. (2013) u.s. north honduras south salmona et al. (2015) u.s. north australia north schneider & parker (2013) u.s. north england north sharma et al. (2011) u.s. north honduras south sharma et al. (2013) u.s. north honduras south shiveley & misco (2015) u.s. north multiple european countries north tam (2016) hong kong south mainland china south thomas (2006) u.s. north republic of kazakhstan south trilokekar & kukar (2011) canada north luxembourg, austria, and switzerland north vatalaro et al. (2015) u.s. north italy north ward et al. (2017) u.s. north pacific islands south zhao et al. (2009) u.s. north china south 24 global education review 6 (3) 24 notes 1 there are exceptions to these broad regional categories which are primarily characterized by a nation’s income level. for example, australia is located within the oceania region but is commonly considered to be part of the north. 2 in some classifications, hong kong and turkey are labelled as the north; applying this scheme would result in only one of the 47 publications reporting on a trip from the south. references agnew, j. (2001). the new global economy: time-space compression, geopolitics, and global uneven development. journal of world-systems research, 7(2), 133–154. retrieved from http://jwsr.pitt.edu/ojs/index.php/jwsr/article/ view/167 anderson-levitt, k. (2017). comparative education review guide to searching for world literature 2017. comparative education review, 61(4): 832-839. https://doi.org/10.1086/693961 baillie smith, m., & laurie, n. 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(2007). globalization,“glocal” development, and teachers’ work: a research agenda. review of educational research, 77(3), 279–309. https://doi.org/10.3102/003465430303946 zhao, y. (2010). preparing globally competent teachers: a new imperative for teacher education. journal of teacher education, 61(5), 422–431. https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487110375802 zhao, y., meyers, l., & meyers, b. (2009). cross-cultural immersion in china: preparing pre-service elementary teachers to work with diverse student populations in the united states. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 37(3), 295–317. http://doi.org/10.1080/13598660903058925 about the authors alyssa morley, ph.d., is a research associate and instructor in the college of education at michigan state university. her research examines how teachers engage with global influences in their work. alisha m. b. braun, ph.d., is assistant professor of social foundations in the department of educational and psychological studies at the university of south florida. her research explores educational policies and practices related to access to quality education for marginalized children, especially children with disabilities in developing contexts. lodi rohrer, m.s.p.h., is a doctoral student in the educational measurement and research program at the university of south florida. her research interests include the application of statistical methods and geovisualization in education and public health. david lamb, ph.d., is an instructor in the department of educational and psychological studies in the college of education at the university of south florida. he holds degrees in geography with particular emphasis in geographic information system (gis). his research focuses on gis-based methods for analysis and visualization, focusing in particular on movement analysis. 102 global education review 4 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dejesus, olga (2017). preparing learners for the future. [review of the book teaching in a globally connected world by ervin f. sparapani and pamela l. ross mcclain]. global education review, 4 (4). 102-103. book review preparing learners for the future “teaching in a globally connected world” by ervin f. sparapani and pamela l. ross mcclain by olga dejesus teaching in a globally connected world examines the current social, political, economic, and religious climate of the world. it makes projections for the future and subsequently makes suggestions for what the editors and contributors believe educators need to contemplate in order to adequately prepare young people to successfully navigate that future. we live in a globally-connected world, and young people, as they move into the future, need to be prepared to live in that future. schools (and teachers) tend to focus on the present. while this not necessarily a problem, schools (and teachers) must decide what is important to know in the present in order for young people to be successful in the future. ervin sparapani and pamela ross-mcclain’s volume presents a strong case as to why the responsibility of education today must be to prepare learners to live in an unknown future that is global and not as focused on an uncertain present. the authors do a magnificent job in their attempt to (1) provide an assessment of important world issues that are affecting society now and possibly in the future; (2) provide recommendations for transformational school leadership in which all stakeholders are empowered; and (3) subject-specific examples of what teachers can do in their classrooms to prepare learners. the book consists of 17 chapters totaling 218 pages, which are broken up cleverly into three major sections. section one, “a global society: socially, politically, economically, and religiously,” explores the significance of several world issues. the second section, “visionary leadership and parent, student, and teacher empowerment,” addresses the importance of a curriculum supported by educators, students, and parents. section three, “teaching with a future orientation: moving learners to the future,” addresses how teachers preparing learners for the future 103 can use current knowledge to navigate through future situations. sparapani and ross-mcclain state that the 21st-century united states, in addition to being globally connected, is populated with a wide variety of cultural groups; because of this, it is the most diverse country in history (p. xvi). the editors emphasize that culture builds personality, which leads to emotions, attitude, motivation, self-esteem, self-concept, behavior, etc. these personality traits will manifest in schools and classrooms. educators and educational leaders must provide a global perspective that will enable the students to become productive members in future society. as an educator of over 20 years, i can affirm that cultural and linguistic diversity have a strong impact on the teaching and learning dynamic in the classroom. i strongly support and share the perspective of these editors and contributors that the curriculum in teacher education programs must be aligned to reflect a cultural responsiveness curriculum in a globally connected classroom. overall, teaching in a globally connected world is a great resource guide for the reflective educator who understands the profile of today’s learners and that of the future and who wants to empower students to be lifelong learners. “teaching in a globally connected world: preparing learners for the future.” edited by ervin f. sparapani and pamela l. ross mcclain. lanham, md: hamilton books, 2016. isbn: 978-0-7618-6814-9 about the editors ervin f. sparapani is a retired professor of secondary education at saginaw valley state university, university center, mi. he earned a ph.d. in curriculum and instruction at the university of michigan—ann arbor. he believes that teachers, educational leaders, and parents have the responsibility to prepare young people to be critical thinkers and flexible learners that can adapt readily to a global world both now and in the future. pamela l. ross mcclain is an assistant professor at the university of michigan—flint, where she directs the educational leadership doctor of education program. she earned a ph.d. from msu in curriculum instruction and educational policy with a cognate in teacher and staff development. she has been a professional educator for nearly two decades and remains dedicated to supporting educational professionals at all levels in experiencing success in schools. about the reviewer olga de jesus, ed.d., is an assistant professor in the literacy and multilingual studies department in the school of education at mercy college. an educator for over 20 years with expertise in bilingual and special education, she is an active member of the new york state association of bilingual educators (nysabe) and is on the nysed committee designated to establish the standards for the new york state seal of bi-literacy initiative. her most recent publication, english language learners: international undergraduate english language learners' perception of distance learning, has gained international interest. in the summer of 2017, as a fulbright scholar, she presented in vienna, austria on the impact of migration on education and the classroom experience. 107 global education review 4(4) 2017-2018 board of reviewers charlene sue aaron, illinois state university nicole taylor abera, university of maryland, college park olanike adelakun-odewale, lead city university, nigeria noura alquatarneh, san diego state university faye antoniou, national and kapodistrian university of athens, greece noelle witherspoon arnold, ohio state university rachel angela ayieko, duquesne university andreas bach, salzburg university, vienna kaitlin bargreen, western carolina university jessica ball, university of victoria, canada ignacio barrendchea, university of miami marsha denise baumeister, university of delaware derek becker, western carolina university paula jeanette beckman, university of maryland gadi bialik, tel aviv university, school of education, israel caroline adele bligh, leeds beckettuniversity, united kingdom lisa a. bloom, western carolina university sergey bobrakov, horlivka state pedagogical institute of foreign languages, ukraine caroline m. brackette, mercer university, atlanta maria-luise braunsteiner, university college of teacher education in lower austria alisha brown, michigan state university erik jon byker, university of north carolina, charlotte lea ann christenson, towson university pamela m. christian, azusa pacific university, california mi-hyun chung, mercy college, new york veerle cnudde, vvob, belgium derek copp, good spirit school division, saskatchewan, canada tara grey coste, university of southern maine shelly lynn counsell, university of memphis, tennessee barbara cozza, st. john’s university, new york oskar dangl, university of vienna robin l. danzak, sacred heart university, connecticut thomas edward davis, university of maryland monimalika day, ambedkar university in delhi, india yolanda de la cruz, arizona state university indra dedze, university of latvia julie delkamiller, university of nebraska at omaha brian d. denman, university of new england, australia jacqueline m. desanto, hostos community college, new york sharon frances dole, western carolina university kristy kowalske doss, western carolina university alexandra draxler-morsy, formerly education specialist at unesco, paris gernot driesiebner, university of graz, austria nancy dubetz, lehman college, city university of new york curt dudley-marling, lynch school of education, boston college dawn richards elliott, texas christian university elizabeth joy erwin. montclair state university claudia fahrenwald, university of education upper austria board of reviewers 108 aramina vega ferrer, mercy college, new york matthew c. fleenor, roanoke college, virginia melissa diane fowler, the university of alabama wendy helen fox-turnbull, university of canterbury, new zealand daniel komo gakunga, university of nairobi, kenya neal gallagher, socrates preparatory school, florida jessica gallo, university of montana candace gann, university of texas at san antonio terri l. germain-williams, mercy college, new york damiana gibbons, appalachian state university nancy p. gibson, concordia university, chicago amy larrison gillan, saint mary's college at notre dame jeremy h. greenberg, the children's institute of hong kong amanda m. gunning, mercy college, new york douglas ray hainline, university of london, united kingdom barbara hanfstingl. alpen-adria-universität klagenfurt, austria bjoern hassler, cambridge university, uk laura boynton hauerwas, providence college helen m hazi, west virginia university nancy heilbronner, mercy college, new york lora kulakowski hine, cornell university franz alexander hoffmann, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria janie d. hubbard, university of alabama amoy kito hugh-pennie, hong kong association for behavior analysis william kyle ingle, university of louisville flavia iuspa, florida international university cheryl james-ward, san diego state university jordan h. jay, lincoln university of missouri yves m. jeanrenaud, technishe universitat munchen, germany bjorg johannsdottir, california state university, stanislaus stephen lewis johnson, university of north dakota teresa ann johnson, jackson-madison school district, jackson, tennessee sue johnston-wilder, university of warwick, united kingdom kathy anne jordan, mercy college, new york matthew jukes, rti international tavis jules, loyola university chicago bobby kabuto, queens college, city university of new york ute kaden, university of fairbanks, alaska fethi kayalar, erzincan university, turkey hayriye kayi-aydar, university of arkansas, fayetteville manuela b. keller-schneider, zurich university of teacher education, switzerland leanne ketterlin geller, southern methodist university shenila khoja-moolji, teachers college, columbia university namsook kim, state university of new york at buffalo kara louise kirby, kent state university matthijs koopmans, mercy college, new york allyson krupar, the pennsylvania state university olympia kyriakidis, san diego county office of education jayne c. lammers, university of rochester, new york christine lang, mercy college, newyork eric w. layman, indiana university, bloomington kerry maree lee, university of auckland, new zealand simone lehrl, university of bamberg, germany susan j. lenski, portland state university 109 global education review 4(4) cathy leogrande, le moyne college roseanne vallice levy, mercy college sandhya vishwas limaye, tata institute of social sciences, india sara liviero, university of exeter, united kingdom dina lopez, city college, city university of new york tamara newport love, university of oklahoma thomas luschei, claremont graduate university, california christine morano magee, the george washington university kostas magos, university of thessaly, greece michelle malecki, world vision org. isolde malmberg, rostock university of music and theater, germany dominic manuel, mcgill university, canada jillian marchant, james cook university, australia mary margaroni, aristotle university of thessaloniki, greece meghan e. marrero, mercy college, newyork daniela martinek, paris lodron university of salzburg, austria eric martone, mercy college, new york nicole martone, naugatuck community college, connecticut tata j. mbugua, university of scranton patrick mccabe, mercy college, new york carmen l. mccrink, barry university, florida becky mcdowell, eta hand2mind, united states david mcgeary, harris county department of education, texas john william mckenna, university of massachusetts, lowell katherine merseth, rti international claudia mewald, university college of teacher education in lower austria lois m. meyer, university of new mexico mary lou miller, oral roberts university jung kang miller, mercy college, new york angie miller, indiana university, bloomington marina milner-bolotin, the university of british columbia, canada maria boeke mongillo, central connecticut state university nancy morabito, st. john's university, new york t. lee morgan, university of northern colorado tabitha grace mukeredzi, durban university of technology, south africa sara murdock, university of california, los angeles bernie murray, ryerson university, ontario, canada mariano narodowski, universidad torcuato di tella, buenos aires giselle e. navarro-cruz, california state polytechnic university, pomona evangeline n. nderu, rti international laurent gabriel ndijue, the university of hong kong bekisizwe s. ndimande, university of texas at san antonio erica newhouse, mercy college, new york sam nagaruiya, rti international elena nitecki, mercy college, new york victoria nunez, mercy college, new york aki ohseki, mercy college, new york carlos ornelas, universidad autonoma metropolitan, mexico bahar g. octu-grillman,. mercy college, new york mustafa ozmusul, harron university, turkey do-yong park, illinois state university patrice lavette parker, georgia state university eugenia paulus, north hennepin community college, minnesota kari f. pawl, concordia university, chicago emily pendergrass, vanderbilt university lindsey perry, southern methodist university board of reviewers 110 salvatore john petrilli, adelphi university, new york zuzana petrova, trnava university, slovakia benjamin piper, rti international christine eva plaimauer, university of education upper austria mary podsiedlik, syracuse university kevin g. pollock, health protection scotland, united kingdom patricia prinz, mercy college, new york teresa ann quackenbush, mercy college, new york sibylle rahm, otto-friedrich-university of bamberg, germany sudha ramaswamy, mercy college, new york priya ramaswamy, wilkenfeld speech, language, and learning center, houston matthew reames, university of virginia johannes reitinger, private university college of teacher education of linz, austria konstantina rentzou, european university of cyprus, nicosia, cyprus melia eileen repko-erwin, university of colorado, boulder merethe roos, telemark university college, norway katharina rosenberger, university of vienna, austria rose ann rudnitsky, mercy college, new york thomas sabella, university of maryland andrew sanfratello, borough of manhattan community college annie savard, mcgill university pooja saxena, indiana university, bloomington james b. schreiber, duquesne university ilse schrittesser, university of vienna, austria susan marie schultz, st. john fisher college, new york scott schuths, concordia university, chicago sandro serpa, university of the azores harun serpil, university of wisconsin-madison sadaf shallwani, university of toronto maryam sadat sharifian, james madison university saundra louise shillingstgad, university of nebraska at omaha georgios sideridis, harvard medical school jessica simon, babson college yasmin sitabkhan, rti international carolina snaider, teachers college, columbia vicky spencer, george mason university deepa srikantaiah, urc university nick stroud, massachusetts college of liberal arts anita summer, university of vienna, austria calvin zakaria swai, university of dodoma, tanzania clodie tal, levinsky college of teacher education, tel aviv sherri desirea tapp, oral roberts university zoila tazi, mercy college, new york mary barbara trube, ohio university agnes turner, university of klagenfurt, vienna, austria karen vanderven, university of pittsburgh sabrina l.walthall, mercer university helge wasmuth, mercy college, new york amanda watkins, european agency for development in special needs education, denmark steven weiland, michigan state university melvin wermuth, mercy college, new york stephen harry whitehead, california university of pennsylvania gloria lodato wilson, hofstra university manuela wipperfürth, paris lodron university of salzbburg, austria linlin yang, state university of new york at binghamton gina borgioli yoder, indiana university, purdue university at indianapolis yong yu, state university of new york at plattsburgh annettte m. zehler, westat, rockville, md 111 global education review 4(4) jie zhang, the college at brockport, state university of new york yuan zhang, university of pittsburgh kai zhou, the state university of new york at albany umaru mustapha zubairu, federal university of technology, nigeria from assessment to action 6 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: alcott, benjamin, rose, pauline, sabates, ricardo, & ellison, christine (2020). from assessment to action: lessons from the development of theories of change with the people’s action for learning network. global education review, 7 (1). 6-19. from assessment to action: lessons from the development of theories of change with the people’s action for learning network benjamin alcott university of cambridge pauline rose university of cambridge ricardo sabates university of cambridge christine ellison university of cambridge abstract in recent years, much attention has been given to extremely poor levels of learning outcomes in low-and lower-middle income countries. citizen-led assessments have played a vital role in highlighting this “learning crisis.” having developed these citizen-led assessments, members of the people’s action for learning (pal) network are now increasingly devising and implementing actions aimed at tackling the learning crisis in different country contexts. this article documents the process we undertook of developing theories of change with pal network members across 10 countries to inform their shift from assessment of children’s learning to action aimed at raising learning outcomes. the article highlights, in particular, the importance for theories of change to take account of context in identifying appropriate actions. based on their country circumstances, the actions identified by pal network members vary, for example, from using assessment data to influence national government reform, to more localized activities associated with “teaching at the right level.” for appropriate actions to tackle the learning crisis to be identified and successfully implemented, an important lesson from the pal network experience is the need to enable south-to-south learning and adaptation. as such, the article highlights a pressing need for flexible and iterative theories of change that reflect contextual realities. keywords theory of change; citizen-led assessments; global south; learning outcomes introduction the people’s action for learning (pal) network is a leading south-south collaboration in education. it brings together members working in 14 countries across three continents to assess the basic reading and numeracy competencies of children through householdbased, “citizen-led assessments.” network members” citizen-led assessments have played a vital role in identifying a “learning crisis” in low and lower-middle income countries. their use of household-based learning assessments provides coverage well beyond that offered by conventional school-based assessments. for example, by including children who are out of school in the learning assessments, these learning assessments provide a robust evidence base on the most vulnerable children globally. through further adaptations to their learning assessment processes, pal network members from assessment to action 7 have continued to extend the range of children whose learning is acknowledged in educational debates, such as those with disabilities (in pakistan) and those living in refugee settlements (in uganda). by identifying the extent to which children have achieved foundational skills—such as the ability to read a paragraph or divide a three-digit number by a single-digit number— findings from the analysis of learning assessment data have galvanised educational debates within member countries. they have shown, for example, that many children are unable to perform these simple tasks, intended to be achieved after two years in school, even after spending five years in school. in addition to promoting national debate, their methods and findings have also gained traction in global policy fora, as highlighted in the unesco institute for statistics’ handbook on measurement of equity in education (2018) and the international commission on financing global education opportunity (2017), in addition to a range of peer-reviewed academic publications (see, for example: alcott & rose 2015, 2016, 2017; goodnight & bobde 2018; jones & schipper 2015; jones, schipper, ruto & rajani 2014; pritchett & beatty, 2015; singal et al., 2019). building on their vast experience of identifying low levels of learning across a range of contexts, pal network members have been developing a variety actions with the aim of raising learning outcomes. these interventions have been informed directly or indirectly by a theory of change. this article draws on our work with pal network members across 10 countries1 in developing their theories of change for moving from assessment to action more formally, and the implications of this for understanding context-specific reform. the actions included vary across countries, for example, from using learning assessment data to influence national government reform, to more localized activities associated with changing the pace of the curriculum to ensure children at risk of being left behind are able to learn the basics. as such, the article aims to present an understanding of the pathways from assessments of to improvements in learning outcomes in different country contexts. as the article discusses, for appropriate actions to tackle the learning crisis to be identified and successfully implemented, an important lesson from the pal network experience is the need to enable south-to-south learning and adaptation. this highlights a pressing need for flexible and iterative theories of change that reflect contextual realities. the paper is organized as follows. section 2 presents a review of theories of change with the aim of understanding the concept within the academic literature. section 3 introduces our methodology for developing theories of change with pal network members, which drew on participatory approaches to achieve a common understanding for developing a framework to map how assessments of learning could lead to improvement in learning. section 4 presents the approach to developing theories of change across pal network members, and the final section concludes with the implications of the findings for the broader field. understanding theories of change theory of change can be defined as “a systematic and cumulative study of the links between activities, outcomes and context of the initiative” (fulbright-anderson, kubisch, & connell, 1998, p.16). in this definition, the central argument of a theory of change is that it carries the underlying foundations or theory in which programs or policies operate that should lead to the desired changes in outcomes (chen, 8 global education review 7 (1) 1990). in this sense, articulating the underlying theory, as well as the assumptions and any contextual requirements or “enablers,” paves the way for more effective program design, evaluation, and implementation. there are three main types of theory of change (vogel, 2012). first, a policy theory of change focuses on identifying a broad conceptual framework which can be used to focus in on specific activities in a specific context. second, an implementing agency theory of change is used to support decision-making on project implementation. finally, a causal map for evaluators focuses more specifically on issues of effectiveness. while all three types of theory of change differ in terms of their focus, the process of developing a theory of change is essentially the same. this involves working backwards from the final outcome, identification of activities (mechanisms) given a particular situation (context). all theories of change should highlight the assumptions made for the program or policy to change outcomes or the barriers that may stand in the way of the program achieving the expected benefits. there is a debate in the literature as to whether theories of change are actually applications of the advancement of academic theory or a program management tool. historically, the term theory of change was developed in the 1960s, with its origins in program theory. however, in recent years, with the increasing pressure to demonstrate impact and recognition of the complexities and ambiguities of international development work, theories of change have become increasingly associated with the use of log frames as part of program management. originally, log frames were intended to summarize an in-depth discussion about project goals and aims. however, as they have been incorporated into standard practice, they have arguably become used less as a tool for critical reflection and increasingly compiled in order to secure funding. as vogel states, “completing a logframe is now often a mandatory funding requirement, with standardized templates that allow little flexibility. because they are used for management and measurement, log-frames become enshrined into results-based contracts which are then administratively difficult to change” (vogel, 2012, p.19). as such, a theory of change is seen as a response to the need to return to the more robust analysis that the log frame was originally designed to elicit. however, as theories of change have been increasingly adopted as a requirement alongside the development of log frames, they have received similar critiques to those levelled towards log frames (vogel, 2012). an important critique of the development of theories of change for program management is that they have tended to adopt a more standardized approach. this ignores the way in which contextual realities might influence pathways to change, which may be central to uncovering the circumstances in which, and the reasons why, a particular policy or program works. in order to provide further clarity on theories of change, it is important to acknowledge that there are two key questions regarding impact. first, a theory of change is used to determine how successful a policy or theory is in achieving its goals, what weiss (1998) terms “implementation theory.” in addition, they provide an assessment of whether what the program set out to do was the correct response in that context, also termed “program theory” (weiss, 1998). it is the combination of these two aspects that separates theories of change from traditional methods-based approaches or log frames. there is a plethora of terms associated with the use of theories of change. in this paper, we take the approach of pawson and tilley (1997) from assessment to action 9 and focus on the contexts, mechanisms, and outcomes of the theory of change. for this purpose, context refers to the location as well as its associated norms and values. mechanisms are defined as the choices and capacities that lead to regular patterns of behavior. finally, outcomes are defined as the results of a program, whether they are intended or not. methodology given our approach of working in collaboration with pal network members to support the development of their actions, this study’s research design bears some hallmarks of participatory approaches (baum et al., 2006; wadsworth, 2005). we sought to be flexible in integrating pal network members’ divergent perspectives throughout an iterative process in our development of the theory of change model in response to their ongoing feedback (cornwall & jewkes, 1995). the analysis in this article is, therefore, based on a range of activities and points of engagement with pal network members, and combines documentary analysis, interviews, feedback meetings, and participation in pal network events. these took place sequentially as follows. first, pal network members provided documentation about each of their organization’s relevant activities, including theories of change as they had been developed so far. further documents were obtained by the research team from published and unpublished literature. we received initial theories of change for 10 of the 14 pal network organizations. these theories of change were provided either as a narrative or in diagrams, and varied significantly in terms of the approach used, and amount of detail provided. in order to grasp a better understanding of why pal network members differed in their approaches to pathways to impact, members of the research team held two individual interviews each with each of the pal network’s country members, as well as an interview with the pal network secretariat. the first interview took place when members of the research team attended the pal network’s annual meeting in mexico in march 2017. for the interviews, consent was requested from interviewees, recognizing that it was implausible to maintain anonymity given the uniqueness of each of the pal network member’s work. during the workshop, interviewers started by asking the background of the work that each of the organizations was doing prior to engaging with citizen-led assessments and the reasons that led the organization to set up its citizen-led assessment. interviewees were asked to reflect on their ultimate goal in conducting these learning assessments, and the steps and processes necessary to achieve their goal. interviews also focused on specific actions or interventions undertaken by the organization to achieve its aims and the challenges faced. the research team also asked direct questions on the theory of change for the organization, in particular, whether the respondent was familiar with a theory of change approach, the reasons for developing a theory of change, their purpose and usefulness, and if there were any developments in their work that would mean that the theories of change submitted to the research team were no longer valid. interviews were transcribed and examined together with each organization’s theory of change, with the aim of identifying similarities and variations and of proposing a common framework to better understand the impact pathways between assessments of and improvements in learning outcomes. building on this, we produced a generic framework which is depicted in figure 1 (see appendix). this generic framework contains all the common intermediate outcomes through which pal 10 global education review 7 (1) network members move from collection of learning assessment data to identifying actions, with the ultimate goal of raising learning outcomes for children. a draft of this framework was shared with pal network members for their adaptations and, ultimately, their approval. the proposed generic framework contained a sequential progression from the initial need to generate the data, collect citizenled assessment data, and use the data to provide evidence (establishing the scale of the problem) regarding the given country’s learning levels. then, as suggested by many pal network members, this should stimulate debate on solutions, which then would lead into implementation of solutions aimed at raising learning outcomes. our generic framework provided the basic elements for building a theory of change (pawson &tilley, 1997). first, it included the initial norms and values which guided the work of the pal network members, the reasons for identifying relevant actions, and the actors participating in a given stage. this is the context element of the theory of change. it also included intermediate and final outcomes. intermediate outcomes included, for example, the mobilization of citizens, the generation of evidence, or the stimulation of debate for establishing solutions. these were all part of the mechanisms to reach the final outcome: namely, to raise learning outcomes. pal network members were given this generic framework together with a more detailed example of a country theory of change, depicting the movement between the intermediate outcomes of generating citizen-led data on learning to using these data for establishing the scale of the problem with respect to the extent to which children are learning the basics (see figure 2). this theory of change aimed to inform the identification of relevant actions in each pal network member country that would potentially have a direct impact on the ultimate goal of raising learning outcomes. as part of this process, pal network members identified the actions, the actors and, importantly, the assumptions made between stages which are central for building a theory of change. actions identified by members included, for example, ones associated with reforming the teaching and learning process (such as in mexico and pakistan), and aimed at promoting community engagement to mobilize change (such as in senegal). see figure 2 in the appendix for more details. pal network members were requested to provide feedback on whether the proposed stages of the generic framework appropriately reflected how their country team envisaged the process through which the generation of learning assessment data would lead to action for raising learning outcomes. they were also asked to consider how their country’s theory of change would look in comparison to the example provided in figure 2, and if there were any adaptations to be made. on the basis of this, we redrafted each country member’s own theory of change in line with the generic framework, making adaptations where requested. further insights into how the pal network members perceived their work and the underlying theory of change that could explain their activities as a network were obtained during the second workshop, which took place in uganda in may 2018. this workshop was attended by the pal network secretariat and representatives from each of the 10 participating pal network countries as well as the research team. ahead of this meeting, each country member was provided with a revision of their individual theory of change, for which they then provided feedback. the appendix provides examples of narratives associated with individual theories of change that resulted from from assessment to action 11 this process for four country members: mexico, nigeria, pakistan, senegal. the workshop then used participatory approaches to engage with all pal network members, shifting from each organization’s individual theory of change to a common understanding of the underlying principles that make the pal network work for a common aim. the key topics for discussion were selected by the research team based on the feedback already received by pal network members from the generic theory of change. key salient areas included (a) how and when to collaborate with other community and civil society organizations; (b) how to align to local, regional, and national government priorities, establishing the main principles that bring different member organizations together to work as a network; and (c) commonalities, strengths, and actions that drive the pal network towards the goal of improving learning in the global south. information from the uganda workshop enabled us to develop further ideas in terms of how pal network members use the assessment data to choose their actions, and the extent of similarities and differences across contexts. the next section presents the results on the proposed theory of change for the pal network. assessment for action: a theory of change in the initial phase of our work, through the interviews, workshops, and review of existing documentation, it was clear that the large-scale citizen-led assessments carried out by pal network members provided an essential foundation for identifying widespread low levels of learning that required future action. this foundation is created through the process of data collection and analysis (involving citizens and civil society organizations), and it is also created from the findings themselves. in a given country, initiating a citizen-led assessment is an organic, within-country process, driven by a participating organization’s recognition of the need for data on children’s learning. citizens and other key actors, such as government and civil-society organizations, then mobilize to generate the data. these groups are encouraged to discuss the analyzed data, which serves to establish the scale of the problem faced in children’s learning outcomes. as such, the process serves two purposes: first, it provides robust evidence on the need for action in education; and, second, through the shared act of developing and conducting the citizen-led assessment, it also builds engagement for addressing the challenge. figure 3 illustrates the common stages through which pal network members work towards assessment for action (see appendix). given the diversity of country contexts across the global south, pal network members differ in the specifics of their work at each stage from assessment to action and have made adaptations in response to their own context`s constraints and opportunities. for example, bɛɛkunko in mali found that focusing on story-telling methods greatly improved its literacy activities; tpc mozambique has prioritized grassroots community meetings to distribute and discuss findings whereas many other countries have focused more on dissemination with state and national government; and learnigeria sought to incorporate government agencies in the development of its assessment tools to strengthen subsequent government support for its action interventions. regarding the network at large though, five key stages are apparent in its work from assessment for action: (1) initiate: identify the need for data. in recent years, more children are attending primary school across the world. however, there has been very little information on whether or not they are learning. this lack of data has led to the 12 global education review 7 (1) invisibility of millions of children attending school without acquiring the foundational skills that provide the basis for all future learning (unesco, 2014). the majority of existing approaches to obtain learning data at national and global level focuses on standardized schoolbased assessments. these are typically pen and paper assessments, which assume that a child is already able to read and write, and only undertaken with children who are in school, thus omitting the millions of children who remain out of school or attend irregularly. this means that school-based assessments suffer from selection bias and fail to cater to the realities of many children in these countries. to address this, the first step in the pal network’s theory of change identifies the need to collect data that captures the learning outcomes of all children through the use of household-based surveys. 2 in order to identify which children are not learning the basics, the data collected includes information on background characteristics of children such as gender, wealth, where the child lives (whether in an urban or rural area) and, in recent rounds in some countries, disability. (2) mobilize: generate citizen-led data. the majority of existing assessments are administered in schools by teachers, trained enumerators, or specialized education professionals. in addition to ignoring out-ofschool children, this has also excluded parents, families, and community members from assessment processes. a key aspect of pal network assessments is to democratize understanding of the state of education among citizens, and so involve them in data collection, analysis, and dissemination processes. this leads to the second step in pal network’s theory of change. this is based on the assumption across pal network members that, if citizens are not informed about the scale of the problem based on robust, accessible evidence, then they cannot support the process of identifying and implementing solutions. pal network members have therefore identified citizen “volunteers” who are provided with training to collect robust data, at large scale and low cost. (3) analyze: establish the nature of the problem. establishing the scale and nature of low levels of learning is a key step for identifying where action needs to be taken to support those children who are furthest behind. to address this, pal network members produce analysis of assessment data in ways that are easy to communicate and use this to engage key stakeholders—including government, civil society, teachers, and local communities. however, provision of information alone is unlikely to lead to improve learning outcomes (banerjee et al., 2008). for this reason, pal network members then move to the next stage in the process. (4) plan: design solutions. pal network members have used their learning assessment data to identify potential “solutions” for raising learning outcomes in different ways. in some pal network countries, conducting the learning assessment is the first step in the journey towards improving learning outcomes. in other countries, the learning assessment is a standalone process. and in others, they are one of several parallel strategies to encourage citizen engagement with learning outcomes. wherever member countries fit on this continuum of assessment to action, there is broad agreement across the membership that data on learning outcomes needs to be robust, inclusive of all children, simple to understand, and easy to act upon—whether it is their own organization or others who are taking the actions. this relates to the fourth step in pal network’s theory of change. solutions are expected to be based on relevant and recent data; they also need to be contextually-relevant from assessment to action 13 and appropriate, and respond to the immediate learning needs of the child (based on where they have reached in their learning, not where they expected to be according to the school curriculum). finally, solutions should be scalable and sustainable. in addition, the inclusive nature of the assessment process is anticipated to help broaden the scope of who is able to have a voice in identifying appropriate interventions aimed at raising learning outcomes. (5) act: implement solutions. the final step in the pal network’s theory of change is the implementation of assessment-to-action programs. the ultimate change envisaged through the theory of change is the acquisition and improvement of foundational learning skills for all children, providing them with the building blocks for future learning. but an important aspect of the implementation of solutions is that each network member tailors their intervention program according to the opportunities and constraints of their specific context. this is the case even for interventions which seem to be similar in their approach, as for example with “teaching at the right level, an intervention which entails grouping children according to current ability and using pedagogical approaches tailor to each group’s level. this intervention has been implemented in india, pakistan, mexico and senegal (and other pal network members). important differences exist in terms of how each of these network members work with stakeholder groups in their countries to deliver teaching at the right level, as in each context there are different stakeholders with different sets of skills and motivations, as well as sources of funding, to be able to implement actions. there are also important differences in the adaptation of teaching at the right level, and the use of local resources which vary by country (see alcott et al., 2018 for more details). another difference is in the scale at which these interventions are implemented in each country, as some interventions reach national coverage (e.g., in india and pakistan), while others are operating in specific regions or provinces (e.g., in senegal and mexico). for the development of an in-depth theory of change, these factors need to be taken into account. (6) monitoring, evaluation, learning and sharing: although there is a tendency for theories of change to follow a linear pathway, the development of learning and sharing among pal network members highlights the importance of a cyclical process. the dynamic adaptive model of moving from assessment to action implies the need for a flexible and adaptive theory of change. many of the pal network members have therefore established processes for monitoring, evaluation (both external and internal), learning and, importantly, sharing among themselves the success and challenges of implementing interventions. for these purposes, some pal network members collect baseline data, periodically monitor learning outcomes throughout the implementation of the program, and collect data at the end of the program to identify the extent of learning gains over time. such data are used to provide iterative improvements throughout the assessment and action processes, thus helping improve the efficacy of the network’s assessment for action work over time. for example, monitoring and evaluation of interventions in india (such as read india or teacher training programs) have showed significant learning improvements in reading and basic arithmetic for children (banerji & chavan, 2016). community-based activity groups in libraries in india and remedial literacy and numeracy camps in pakistan have contributed in creating learning environments in the communities that encourage children’s 14 global education review 7 (1) sustained learning. additionally, measurement of learning and citizen mobilization has been shown to be an effective way to encourage communities and volunteers to understand a problem and participate in actions to solve it. the learning from these actions has been used among pal network members for the design of actions in other member countries, as well as for informing the global evidence-base on what works to raise learning outcomes. discussion and conclusion citizen-led assessments developed by pal network members have played a vital role in highlighting the extremely poor levels of learning in many low and lower-middle income countries, particularly for children from disadvantaged backgrounds. highlighting the extent of the problem is not enough to combat this “learning crisis” and to move countries towards the achievement of learning for all children. clearly aware of this situation, members of the pal network have been increasingly devising and implementing actions aimed at tackling the learning crisis in their own countries, sharing successful experiences for what works and under which circumstances and supporting other members towards the implementation of context specific actions. through our work in collaboration with pal network members, we developed more formal theories of change, identifying similarities and differences in their approaches from moving from assessment to action, and implications for understanding context-specific interventions. as a starting point, all the countries’ theories of change share a common desired outcome of raising learning outcomes. similarly, a common starting point for their engagement is the desire for robust evidence on learning as a basis for action in education, identified in collaboration with citizens. the assumption is that, unless citizens understand and are informed about the scale of the problem based on robust data and accessible analysis, they will face difficulties in identifying relevant solutions. while there are these similarities in the beginning and end points of the theory of change, the process and mechanisms through which these are reached varies, as actions are planned in consultation with local stakeholders and adapted to context. despite these variations, an important aspect of the theory of change for pal network members is ongoing sharing of experiences among themselves, allowing for feedback loops and adaptations in the process. an important question remains whether the variations in actions are due to a priori analysis of the problem and solution through the development of a theory of change, or post hoc development of a theory of change more formally (as in many cases). our analysis suggests that, even where formal theories of change have not been developed in advance, they are usually implicitly based on one. so the question arises of whether it ultimately matters whether a country has developed an intricate theory of change in advance? having an overarching (relatively simple) theory of change, such as the one identified in this paper, is beneficial, but flexibility and ongoing adaptation of this is vital. we therefore conclude that there is a pressing need for greater recognition that theories of change need to be seen as flexible and iterative tools, allowing for ongoing reflection of contextual realities and sharing of experience in other relevant contexts. from assessment to action 15 acknowledgments research for this paper was funded by the william and flora hewlett foundation. we are extremely grateful for the immense support provided by anum sheikh, mildrade cherfils, maria luisa alonso, pat scheid, the pal network secretariat, and all country members of the pal network. we appreciate their engagement in the process, including their openness with sharing data on detailed costs of their program, and providing ongoing advice and feedback. the analysis and arguments in the paper, as well as any errors, are the responsibility of the authors of the paper. notes 1 the organizations and countries included are aser (annual status of education report) centre (india), aser pakistan, bɛɛkunko (mali), jangandoo (senegal), learnigeria, mia (mexico), tpc mozambique, uwezo (kenya, tanzania, and uganda). 2 children living in nomadic or travelling families, displaced or refugee children, children in care institutions and children’s homes, children attending boarding schools, and children in hospital may not be included in the sample. references alcott, b., rose, p., sabates. r, alonso, m. l., cherfils, m. (2018). experience and lessons of learning intervention programmes across the pal network members. policy paper no. 18/4. real centre, university of cambridge. alcott, b., & rose, p. (2015). schools and learning in rural india and pakistan: who goes where, and how much are they learning? prospects, 45(3), 345-363. alcott, b., & rose, p. (2016). does private schooling narrow wealth inequalities in learning outcomes? evidence from east africa. oxford review of education, 42(5), 495-510. alcott, b., & rose, p. (2017). learning in india’s primary schools: how do disparities widen across the grades? international journal of educational development, 56, 42-51. baum, f., macdougall, c., & smith, d. (2006). participatory action research. journal of epidemiology & community health, 60(10), 854-857. banerjee, a. v., banerji, r., duflo, e., glennerster, r., & khemani, s. (2008). pitfalls of participatory programs: evidence from a randomized evaluation in education in india. nber working paper 14311. national bureau of economic research. banerji, r., & chavan, m. (2016). improving literacy and math instruction at scale in india’s primary schools: the case of pratham’s read india program. journal of educational change, 17(4), 453-475. chen, h.-t. (1990). theory-driven evaluations. newbury park, california: sage publications. cornwall, a., & jewkes, r. (1995). what is participatory research? social science & medicine, 41(12), 1667-1676. fulbright-anderson, a., kubisch, a. & connell, j. p. eds (1998) new approaches to evaluating community initiatives: theory, measurement and analysis. washington, dc: aspen institute. goodnight, m. r., & bobde, s. (2018). missing children in educational research: investigating school-based versus householdbased assessments in india. comparative education, 54(2), 225-249 jones, s., & schipper, y. (2015). does family background matter for learning in east africa? africa education review, 12(1), 7-27. 16 global education review 7 (1) jones, s., schipper, y., ruto, s., & rajani, r. (2014). can your child read and count? measuring learning outcomes in east africa. journal of african economies, 23(5), 643-672. pawson, r. & tilley, n. (1997). realistic evaluation. london: sage publications. pritchett, l., & beatty, a. (2015). slow down, you’re going too fast: matching curricula to student skill levels. international journal of educational development, 40, 276-288 singal, n., sabates, r., aslam, m. and saeed, s (2019). school enrolment and learning outcomes for children with disabilities: findings from a household survey in pakistan. international journal of inclusive education. unesco (2014). education for all global monitoring report 2013/4--teaching and learning: achieving quality for all. paris: unesco. vogel, i. (2012). review of the use of “theory of change” in international development. report commissioned by the uk department for international development. wadsworth, y. (2005). “gouldner’s child?” some reflections on sociology and participatory action research. journal of sociology, 41(3), 267-284. weiss, c. (1998). evaluation: methods for studying programs and policies. upper saddle river, nj: prentice hall. about the authors benjamin alcott is a lecturer at the ucl institute of education. he received his doctoral degree, in education policy, from the university of michigan. his research interests include early years education policy in south asia and subsaharan africa, inequities in learning, and the economics of education. pauline rose is professor of international education and director of the research for equitable access and learning (real) centre at the faculty of education, university of cambridge. her research focuses on understanding and tackling barriers to inequalities in education in sub-saharan africa and south asia. she has extensive experience of working with research teams, policy actors and practitioners in these contexts. ricardo sabates is a reader in education and member of the research for equitable access and learning (real) centre at the faculty of education, university of cambridge. he achieved his doctoral degree in development studies at the university of wisconsin-madison. his research interests include social outcomes of learning, understanding the role of education over the lifecourse for marginalized populations, strengthening accountability for learning from grassroots community engagement. christine ellison is a doctoral candidate in the research for equitable access and learning (real) centre at the university of cambridge. she is also a research associate in the unesco centre, ulster university. her research interests include mixed methods approaches to understanding education inequalities and the political and economic factors driving education policy. from assessment to action 17 appendix figure 1: common stages between assessment and action notes: cla refers to the organization carrying out the citizen led assessment. umbrella organization is the parent organization for the cla. 18 global education review 7 (1) figure 2: a sample inter-stage theory of change from assessment to action 19 figure 3: a theory of change depicting the pal network’s work in assessment for action 213 global education review 5 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: adetunji, adegoke (2018). humanizing k-12 classrooms worldwide through equitable partnerships. [review of the book the global education guidebook by jennifer d. klein]. global education review, 5 (3). 213-217. book review humanizing k-12 classrooms worldwide through equitable partnerships “the global education guidebook” by jennifer d. klein by adegoke adetunji global education, as a field or discipline, is replete with cognitive-affective constructs such as global competency, global sensitivity, global awareness, global self-representation, global consciousness, and global understanding. these constructs perhaps suggest how individuals perceive themselves in this changing world and continuous self-orienting efforts in it (mansilla & gardner, 2007). citizenship; therefore, becomes very fluid as individual identity is either shaped or framed by seamless influences emanating from the global system or globalizing forces (pike, 2000). for instance, identity formation for college students must consist of wideranging experiences, knowledge, and insights in order to be global (chickering & braskamp, 2009). teachers, educators, or global education practitioners may have to grapple with an inexorable conundrum: how to teach global education to k-12 learners, integrate multiple global perspectives and issues into school curricula, aligning classroom teaching with standards (e.g. the common core standards), assessments, and measurable learning outcomes. to address these quandaries: first, educators, teachers, and global education practitioners perhaps need to reflect on their positionality, ideas of global education, and appropriate frameworks that will determine learning strategies and classroom activities. pike (2015) elucidates the two binary ideologies of global education—moral and pragmatic perspectives. pragmatic perspective of global education fosters employability of students through study abroad programs and the acquisition of intercultural and global competencies, whereas moral perspective puts a premium on mutual understanding, commonalities in humanizing k-12 classrooms worldwide 214 domestic and global issues, injustices, and interdependence of humankind in the current world system. the global education guidebook is a compendium of guidance, resources, learning approaches, and frameworks that teachers or global education practitioners can employ in building equitable learning partnerships to help learners develop humanized consciousness of the world and their roles as social actors in it. though mansilla & gardner (2007) demonstrate how a constructivist learning approach can foster co-creation of knowledge (for example, globalization and associated issues), the author presents practical ways that teachers can actively and meaningfully engage k-12 students in learning and participating in global issues through collaborations with their peers around the globe. in addition, it provides many practical ideas teachers can use for community-based projects and collaborations with teachers in other countries. the author helps readers decipher how global issues can be integrated into curriculum or school subjects, assessments, and practicality of global education terms and its cognitive-affective constructs. the core of this book is how to prepare students to thrive in a complex and volatile world, and urgency for global partnerships and educational engagements beyond the usual school curriculum and standards. most importantly, it explicates the integration of global learning into the curriculum and academic goals. the book has ten chapters, and these chapters address a practical dimension (action) of global education: how to assess students’ global competencies, learning approaches in global education/competency, and significance of human and non-human resources. chapters 1 and 2 focus on the contextual (temporal) purpose of global education, with reference to the u.s. military’s description of the world, after september 11, 2011, as a vuca world: “volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity.” thus, these descriptors indicate the urgent rationale behind global and intercultural competency development, as learners may have to work or collaborate across borders that are multifarious in nature—political, cultural, racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, and religious. global education/competency framework, matrix, and domains, and instructional strategies for global competency (project-based learning, problem-based learning, design thinking, understanding, by design, and place-based education) are presented in this part of the book. further, strategies for global partnerships such as classroom-toclassroom exchange, classroom-toclassroom collaboration, classroom-toclassroom co-creation, and non-school partnership can be explored so that education will be humanizing and profound. the author suggests exploratory, participatory, and active learning—servicelearning experiences, hands-on, and realworld problem solving skills. in addition, the quality of topics in global education is judged by human elements, relevance, and appropriateness to the learners’ age group. chapters 4 and 5 are highlights of existing partnership programs or 215 global education review 5 (3) organizations that teachers or educators can join, and these organizations are in two categories: established partnership programs and purpose-based organizations. educators can join purpose-based organizations in order to focus on specific topics or mission, for example the environment or peace building. teachers/educators can find partnerships through organizations that are interested in global education (iearn, irex’s teachers for global classrooms program, international institute of education, fund for teachers, global exploration for educator organization and others). iearn, for example, has a good reputation and a long record of meaningful educational projects to meet teachers’ curricular needs and schedules. these partnerships have to be reciprocal. language and other communication tools are integral parts of global education programs or partnership building. in chapter 6, the author explains how language could become a hindrance to building partnerships, but offers plenty of leeway for educators and teachers. teachers can co-opt interested parents, especially immigrants who are multilingual, into their global education programs. these parents may serve as interpreters, and they can also perceive their languages as an asset to the school. a choice of suitable modern communication tools is also a part of global fluency. a combination of synchronous and asynchronous technologies for communication (wiki, skype, twitter, webex, realpresence, go to-meeting, zoom, blackboard collaborate, and google hangouts) possibly creates humanizing experiences and deep human connections. chapters 7 and 8 address the issues of equity in global education, social justice, and possible ways to avert save-the-other thinking, which becomes a bulwark to equitable relationships. as the author writes, “equitable global partnerships [must be] based on trust, mutual respect, and a shared global collaboration and development” (p.8). teachers or global education practitioners must avoid exoticism—seeing partners as fascinating objects rather than as whole human beings (p. 131). to foster intercultural skills, learners have to see the world through multiple lenses. in particular, chapter 8 concentrates on social justice issues and those challenges teachers may have to deal with, and highlights some practical steps, such as identifying the dominant narratives in the community, balancing individual biases by encouraging diverse voices and resources, and choosing social justice partners thoughtfully. cognitive dissonance is necessary in order to engage topics that are not comfortable, namely race relations, identity, sexuality, and privilege. the concluding chapters (chapters 9 and 10) focus on assessments and “local” partnerships. the author points out some challenges of assessing global competency. many global education goals— skills such as humility, empathy, and open-mindedness— are rather difficult to quantify. however, tcharts are included for helping to make global competencies more concrete. teachers can develop competency indicators (“looks for”s and “listen-for”s) humanizing k-12 classrooms worldwide 216 such as students asking questions more than making assertions, or handling setbacks without blaming their peers. teachers can also use discipline-specific rubrics for global competency assessment within different subject areas (see mansilla & jackson, 2011). quick exit-ticket reflections, journals, capstone projects, and graduation portfolios can be used for the assessment or measurement of students’ growth or competency. thus, abstract learning becomes more concrete for learners and teachers. innovative global education teachers need to include their colleagues, and they can foster a global education revolution. some of these strategies are: developing enthusiasm and administrative buy-in, teaching and meeting the community stakeholders about global education, policy change initiatives in local school districts, ongoing professional development, building global education teams with teachers and administrators who recognize the power of global learning, global fluency through student travel, and fostering a constructive worldview across the community. the global education guidebook is based on the author’s experience. the author describes herself as a product of experiential project-based education, who has acquired a lot of classroom and industry experience teaching english and spanish in central america and in a school for girls. she has also worked as a consultant and teacher coach for various international educational organizations, such as the international institute of education in washington, dc and the center for global education in canada. the book’s target audience are classroom teachers, educators, and global education practitioners, who may be teaching in a k-12 environment or facilitating global education workshops. though scanty, the author aligns her suggestions, worksheets, and other ideas within an existing framework. for example, mansilla and jackson (2011) is widely referenced in this book. however, the global education guidebook may not serve the need of those who are interested in “purely” academic books; it is bereft of sound conceptual or theoretical frameworks on global education. the author disrupts the traditional style of writing academic books by incorporating perspectives from practitioners and teachers (i refer to them as “testimonials”). these teachers have been involved in global-classroom projects, technology-based global connections, etc. the book foregrounds the effectiveness of personal stories. there are several narratives or stories related to teaching global education or intercultural competencies. as the author argues, “storytelling is power; it’s the ultimate democracy” (p. 90). overall, the global education guidebook could be useful for training global competency or for teaching global education topics. those who are interested in global education can also harness numerous resources from the book. references chickering, a., & braskamp, l. a. (fall 2009). developing a global perspective for personal and social responsibility. peer review 11, 4: 27-30. 217 global education review 5 (3) mansilla, v. b., & gardner, h. (2007). from teaching globalization to nurturing global consciousness. in m.m. suárez orozco, ed. learning in the global era: international perspectives on globalization and education. berkeley & los angeles, california: university of california press. mansilla, v.b. & jackson, a. (2011). educating for global competence: preparing our youth to engage the world. new york: council of chief state school officers’ edsteps initiative & asia society partnership for global learning. pike, g. (2000). global education and national identity: in pursuit of meaning, theory into practice 39, 2: 64-73. pike, g. (2015). re-imagining global education in the neoliberal age. in r. reynolds et al., eds. contesting and constructing international perspectives in global education. rotterdam: sense publishers. “the global education guidebook: humanizing k-12 classrooms worldwide through equitable partnerships.” by j.d. klein. bloomington: solution tree, 2017. isbn: 978-1943874637 about the author jennifer d. klein holds a ba from bard college and an ma from the university of colorado at boulder, both in literature and creative writing. her articles have been published in independent school, the nsssa leader, and the educational forum. she also blogs irregularly for a variety of forums. she taught college and high school english and spanish for 19 years, including five years in central america and 11 years in all-girls' education. in 2010, jennifer left teaching to begin principled learning strategies, through which she provides professional development to support the integration of authentic student-driven global learning experiences in schools. she is director of educator development for world leadership school, coaching teachers in global integration and facilitating projects between north american classrooms and schools around the world. she is a national faculty member for the buck institute for education, facilitating workshops on projectbased learning, and she provides strategic coaching to schools involved in takingitglobal's future friendly schools project. jennifer is also central partner in the centre for global education's international video conference programs, delivers professional development workshops for fulbright teacher programs through the institute for international education and the us state department, and is a regional consultant for the center for global education at asia society's international studies schools network. about the reviewer adegoke adetunji is a ph.d. student in the department of curriculum and instruction and a teaching assistant in multicultural programs at purdue university in west lafayette, indiana. refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 93 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: solorio, michelle. (2020). refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education. global education review, 7 (4), 93-107. refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education michelle solorio michigan state university abstract through the ministry of education program programme des écoles integrées (pei) in côte d’ivoire, 26 rural public primary schools may use one of 10 local languages as the language of instruction in grades 13 prior to switching to a french-only system. the purpose of a pei school is to support basic academic skills development and french language acquisition for students who enter primary school with limited exposure to french. students from pei schools demonstrate stronger academic and french language outcomes compared to students from traditional french-only schools. however, neither the pei program nor traditional schools account for multilingualism in the communities they serve nor do they provide language support to non-native students. in this exploratory study, i seek to understand how academic and learning outcomes for refugees and immigrants are supported in different school settings in côte d’ivoire. i observe three classrooms and interview three teachers, one stateless migrant parent, and two refugee parents about pei and traditional schools. while teachers expressed mixed opinions about the benefits of pei schools for non-native students, parents expressed positive opinions despite their limited knowledge of local languages and the lack of local language learning support. observational and narrative analysis reveal that teacher strategies to support students who do not understand the language of instruction vary based upon teaching experience rather than training or available resources. pedagogical techniques include ignoring students, call-response, and individual attention. keywords language teaching, refugee parent preferences, côte d’ivoire introduction côte d’ivoire is home to 60+ local languages yet french, the nonlocal language imposed by the former colonial power, is the language of instruction (brou-diallo, 2011; djité, 2000). despite this, an estimated 43.91% of the population over the age of 15 lacks french literacy (unesco, 2017). the programme des écoles integrées (pei) is a ministry of education program that uses 10 local languages as the language of instruction while simultaneously teaching french as a second language in 26 rural public primary schools in grades 1-3. the purpose of a pei school is to support academic skills development and french language learning for students with limited exposure to french (akissi boutin & kouadio n’guessan, 2013; brou-diallo, 2011). students from pei schools demonstrate stronger academic and french language outcomes compared to students from traditional french-only schools (akissi boutin & kouadio n’guessan, 2013; brou-diallo, 2011). however, the pei model does not account for multilingualism in the rural communities they serve nor does it provide specific language support to non-native students such as immigrants, migrants, refugees, and the stateless. similarly, traditional french-only schools in both rural and urban settings do not provide language support for non-french speakers or account for multilingualism in the communities they serve; instead, the french language is used exclusively in these schools from the first day of school. 94 global education review 7 (4) in this exploratory study of one traditional urban school, one traditional rural school, and one rural pei school, i seek to understand how academic and learning outcomes for refugees and immigrants are supported in different school settings in côte d’ivoire. i do so through classroom observations and interviews with teachers and refugee and immigrant parents. while teachers expressed mixed opinions about the benefits of pei schools for non-native students, parents expressed positive opinions despite their limited knowledge of local languages and the lack of local language learning support. classroom observations revealed that teacher strategies to support students who do not understand the language of instruction vary based upon teaching experience rather than training or available resources. literature language of instruction in sub-saharan africa research consistently shows that students who learn in their own language perform better academically and become more communicatively proficient in a second language that is taught as a subject, yet in many subsaharan african countries, former colonial languages remain the language of instruction (see albaugh, 2014; bamgbose, 2009; prah, 2009). current language of instruction models range from no local language use to local language use only at the primary school level (albaugh, 2014). parent preferences for language of instruction are not uniform across contexts or within countries (see trudell & piper, 2013). for example, all parents in a ghanaian study preferred to send their children to english-only schools (awedoba, 2001), whereas parents in a nigerian study prefer bilingual schools (amadi, 2012). a similar phenomenon occurred in pre-conflict côte d’ivoire, where parents feared local-language use in education was a tactic to ensure that only the elite can access high quality education (djité, 2000). refugee education literature on refugee education is limited but growing (emert, 2013; taylor & sidhu, 2012). refugee education research trends highlight gaps in teacher knowledge about refugee histories and needs (barowsky & mcintyre, 2010; dryden-peterson, 2016; unesco, 2018). the needs that are most researched are language learning needs and psychological needs. there is a plethora of research about the trauma refugees experience (betancourt et al., 2012; hart, 2009), the need for teacher training to support trauma-affected students (betancourt et al., 2012; solorio, 2018; unesco, 2018), and language needs of refugee students (betancourt et al., 2012; unesco, 2018). the 2019 unesco global education monitoring report, released in 2018, highlighted the needs of all migrant students, including refugees, immigrants, stateless persons, and internally displaced students, raising the concern that these students face strong barriers to education. these include language barriers which unesco found to be connected to migrant students exiting the education system. the report also detailed that teachers are ill-equipped to meet the multicultural, multilingual, and psychosocial needs of these students. the language and psychological needs of refugee students often overlap, as trauma is proven to negatively impact various aspects of student learning and thus can also hinder language learning (betancourt et al., 2012; hart, 2009; solorio, 2018). the research demonstrates teachers’ lack of understanding of the diverse educational histories the refugees bring and the lack of refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 95 95 refugee-specific education policies or trainings (dryden-peterson, 2016; taylor & sidhu, 2012), adding to the documented challenges teachers face in supporting refugee youth, as they are uncertain how to address language, cultural, and trauma needs. vulnerable populations in côte d’ivoire. ivorian schools house refugee students, internally displaced students, immigrant students, and stateless students at high levels due to the country’s long history of immigration, two recent civil wars in 2002 and 2011, and wars in surrounding countries such as liberia in 2003 (bah, 2012; chelpi-den hamer, 2011; sany, 2010). in 2014, 24% of the ivorian population self-identified as foreign despite the connection this identity has with civil war tensions (unhcr, 2016). in march 2018, the unhcr counted 1,573 registered refugees, 362 asylum seekers, and 692,800 stateless persons (unhcr, 2018). in the early 1990s, refugee students could enroll in the ivorian education system or in humanitarian-run refugee schools; this dual system was dissolved in 2001 by unhcr request although some informal refugee schools remained (chelpi-den hamer, 2011). challenges integrating refugee students into the formal system were common, especially since the ivorian education system struggles with limited resources, and refugee and stateless students face barriers to enrollment due to their lack of ivorian identity cards (unhcr, 2016). data and methods this exploratory study took place in three contrasting sites in côte d’ivoire so i could compare different language of instruction practices and environments potentially experienced by refugee and immigrant students in the diverse country. i selected a traditional french-only public primary school in urban dyapo,1 a traditional french-only public primary school in rural konvi, and a pei brafé language public primary school in rural konvi. my data consisted of classroom observations, interviews with teachers whose classrooms i observed, and interviews with refugee and immigrant parents of students in the observed classrooms. i conducted thematic and observational analysis on the data. i received irb exemption status from the michigan state university board, obtained research permission from the côte d’ivoire ministry of education and the director of the pei program, and was granted permission from the regional directors of national education (dren) for dyapo and konvi. i met with the school officials and teachers to explain the study, request permission, and recruit participants. one cp1 (first grade) teacher from each school offered to participate. with the aid of the cp1 teachers, i distributed study information to parents and met with the parent group for each school. both processes enabled me to recruit parents from each of the participating classrooms for interviews. i interviewed one teacher from each classroom that i observed and four non-ivorian parents whose children were students in those classrooms. the parent identities were as follows: a stateless father born in ghana living in rural konvi; a refugee father from niger in rural konvi; an immigrant mother from burkina faso in urban dyapo; and an immigrant mother from guinée in urban dyapo. i provided the participants with detailed information about the study and their rights following an irbapproved script. during semi-structured interviews, i asked the parents about their language of instruction preferences and the teachers about the language teaching techniques they use. interviews were recorded and transcribed. 96 global education review 7 (4) i collected classroom observation data through fieldnotes and use of the stallings snapshot observation tool. since this was an exploratory study, i was only in each classroom for one hour. since the students and teachers were aware of my presence, i acknowledge that behavior modification occurred. the stallings classroom snapshot tool is designed to capture teacher behaviors when they are performing at their best in a small amount of time (world bank group, 2015). the stallings tool required me to make 10 observations in a single class period, separated by equal intervals of time. in these observations, i marked what language was being used at that time by the teacher and by the majority of the students, what type of activity was occurring (i.e., academic, social, punishing), what subject was being taught, and what materials were used on a protocol sheet. i collected and analyzed all data in french, but i translated the examples used in this paper into english. i used a thematic analysis approach on the interviews, where i coded the interviews inductively based upon the themes that emerged. i analyzed the fieldnotes from classroom observations through observational analysis using an inductive coding process to identify patterns in behavior. i analyzed the stallings snapshot observation data by calculating the percentage of times that teachers and students used various languages and the percentage of activities that occurred in different languages. findings non-ivorian parents’ language preferences of the four parents i interviewed, two had children in the urban traditional classroom, one had children in the rural traditional classroom, and one had children in both the rural pei classroom and the rural traditional classroom. the urban parents, zuma (from burkina faso) and fatimatou (from guinée), had no prior knowledge of the pei model of education. both rural parents, mawuli (from ghana) and dandou ourfama (from niger), were aware of the pei model since the pei and traditional schools share the same school yard. i gave all parents the same basic information about the pei model since even the rural parents were not aware of all aspects of the program. the parent interview analysis revealed that 3 out of 4 parents in my study support using local languages for instruction in public schools. this general support for local language schooling is surprising when compared to other research in sub-saharan africa (i.e., trudell & piper, 2014), where parents tend to be skeptical of using local languages at school for fear that their children would not successfully learn the official language necessary for success in society. the non-ivorian parents spoke about language use in schools relative to their own identities as non-ivorian. mawuli (rural, from ghana) describes the difficulties he faces as a stateless person with no papers from ghana or côte d’ivoire, expressing fear that his children will be barred from attending school due to their lack of identification papers. he also expressed desire for his children to have an official identity, something he felt would be possible through a traditional french education. he said, all my children are in the french school. we do not speak brafé. that's not our language. if the school teaches french, it’s good. i think that the local language school is pointless for us. maybe if it uses english, since ours is an english-speaking country. if our children learn french and our language, they can work in ghana. the refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 97 97 french way can educate the child. i want our children to learn, we are not here to learn a different language. mawuli views learning a local language as incompatible with his children’s academic learning and their learning of french. his stateless status adds weight to his preferences for an education which will ensure his children have access to formal spaces in côte d’ivoire by learning in the official language. his stateless status in his native ghana may also play a role when he says he might consider sending his children to an english school, as this would grant them access to ghanaian life. contrary to mawuli, who is in a precarious position as a stateless man, dandou ourfama who is a self-proclaimed refugee from niger living in the same rural community expresses support for the local language school. mawuli argued that his children learned the local language from their peers and do not need schooling to aid in their local integration, positioning school as a tool for adopting a national identity; dandou ourfama, who is also in a vulnerable position as a refugee, argues the opposite. although brafé is not his own language, he feels sending his children to the brafé school will allow them to become part of the konvi village community while also enabling them to complete high school. he said, i think it’s very good when children enroll in the brafé school. it is important to speak and understand brafé. we do not know the language. when you are here in konvi, if you understand brafé, your child is going to be okay. we send them to the brafé school so that they learn brafé. the brafé school also provides an element to go to terminale [12th grade]. it becomes possible to understand. a refugee and a stateless person in rural konvi, neither one of whom is a native brafé speakers, each hold different perspectives on using local languages in school. for refugee dandou ourfama, local languages are tools for community integration and academic development, while for stateless mawuli, local languages limit academic development and hinder national integration. for both, school is where relevant language learning occurs. the two urban mothers, zuma (from burkina faso) and fatimatou (from guinée), do not claim refugee or stateless identities, yet their foreign status still provides insight into the opinions of vulnerable immigrant populations in côte d’ivoire. this is possible due to the contentious nature of foreign identities in a country where the recent civil wars were partially rooted in divisions between ivorians and non-ivorians (bah, 2012; sany, 2010). zuma wavers between supporting the pei model and the traditional french model. she views french as an academic language that signals educational status, yet she wants to understand what happens in her child’s school. she says, schools using local languages, i think they’re good. when i say something in my language, no one understands. but it is better to understand french in this country. at school we must use french. our language is used more at home, so that i can understand. if my son is at home, he speaks our language. but at school he uses french, so he can understand a lot. the children must think in french at school. to speak french, you must be educated, and i am not so i don’t understand. you need french or to have someone who can 98 global education review 7 (4) speak your language. we need to talk so we understand. zuma likes the idea of using a local language in school, except she fears that it will come at the cost of learning french—a skill she believes is needed to become educated and to communicate with others. although she does support the pei model, zuma also agrees with mawuli that french should be used in the classroom. fatimatou supported the pei model because “there are many people who do not speak french.” fatimatou claimed that she does not speak french well while expressing concern that “there is no one who can add local languages into schools.” for fatimatou, language of instruction is an issue of general comprehension and allowing non-french speakers the opportunity to go to school rather than supporting french language acquisition. the parent interviews provided insight into the language preferences of refugee, stateless, and immigrant parents. although they did not address techniques to support language learning for their children, their preferences are important to understanding the value they place on sending their children to a local language or a french school. three out of four parents support using a local language in school, because they see local languages as tools to aid in academic growth, french language acquisition, and community integration, and two parents expressed concern that local language use in schools could be detrimental to french language acquisition. teachers and classrooms the teacher interviews and corresponding classroom observations created a link between language preferences and pedagogical techniques. the two traditional french teachers, elodie (urban) and mme djere (rural) did not support the pei model for similar reasons to the parental concerns, while the pei teacher, baako (rural), supported the model due to his belief in its academic potential. the teachers discussed the strategies that they believe they use to support academic and language learning in their classrooms. the two traditional french teachers, elodie (urban) and mme djere (rural) focused on strategies they use to help students learn french, while the pei teacher baako elaborated on teaching strategies he uses with all students regardless of their brafé abilities. mme djere’s stated french teaching techniques included providing detailed explanations, repeating herself, requiring students to repeat after her, guiding their hands as they write, and requiring only french to be used in the classroom. mme djere also explained that she relies upon other students to aid their non-french speaking peers. she believes students learn french through immersion, in an exclusively french environment with peers who can guide non-french speakers to understanding. she says, using french is in their best interest. when they use their language, it’s remedial. they learn french by means of seeing others do it. then their french grows. when i put a sentence on the blackboard, to show a letter with its sound, i explain how it works but there are some who don’t automatically see how it works. there are others who push them to it. when one goes to the blackboard and he does not say the sound, he looks around. he hears others. he repeats them. even if he does not know what he said, he repeats it because of the others. then someone refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 99 99 explains to him what to say. it works. another example is when we write. if he cannot write, i am obliged to take his hand and make it write. once, twice, and then, we erase. mme djere’s belief that immersion and the aid of peers lead to french language acquisition is shared by her urban counterpart, elodie. elodie describes an almost osmosis-like notion of language learning, where students come to understand french through “waves”: when you start in french, there are some who understand and others who don’t. you take lessons in french, even if you’re not following, and you are repeating. you must follow along in french. because the students are cornered in the language, there are like these waves. that can allow us to teach everyone. at first it is difficult. but the children adapt, and it works. in class everyone is always made to listen to french for more than just a lesson. when you are doing a lesson, it is several sentences. we have another child sit with him, one who tells him things in french. someone that tells him like this, like that, that’s not the case. i use dialogues the most. the greetings, i start with the greetings. hello, hello, goodbye, goodbye. it’s little by little that they learn. many are already in the process of learning french before they come to school. but as a teacher you must wait. they are led to understanding. elodie focuses on her educational philosophy that learning french just happens while students learn other lessons, and she points to the specific techniques of using dialogues and peer support. baako, the only teacher with experience using a local language in the classroom, spoke about the lack of teacher training and resources. his focus on teaching challenges, while it cannot provide insight into the techniques that baako believes he uses to support immigrant students in the classroom, sheds light on the challenges that impact what teachers do broadly. what i can say is that teaching in a french school we at least received a lot of training. teaching in brafé, it’s good but it’s not trained. i already know the language, but i didn’t know how to write it, so i had to forge some. i am still motivated. in french at least i had materials. but in brafé we don’t have any documents. it’s a little lower quality in fact, relying on methods of sound. when i teach reading, i am not happy, and i must make do. the teaching is all in brafé. only in language class do we use french. since i have been teaching a long time, i try to use the french pedagogical approach, but in brafé. today, we did the “reading four” lesson. they review the syllables of the sounds of letters. have them write 30 words with the sound “é,” and then write the syllable, “lé.” and that’s how the children find “attie,” a brafé word with similar sounds. once the students find the word, they want sentences. i must improvise. baako discusses the lack of resources and training to teach in a local language. by extension, he is also describing a lack of training for teaching french as a second language, which is part of the pei model. although baako thinks using local languages can lead to better learning, he believes the lack of resources is causing the pei model to be of lower quality 100 global education review 7 (4) than the traditional french model. he fears that the potential of the pei model to support language acquisition and academic learning is not being met, although research shows that pei schools out-perform traditional schools in all subjects including french language (broudiallo, 2011). for refugee and immigrant students, there is another implication to the lack of teacher training described by baako. if the government is unable to provide training for teachers to teach french as a second language for rural ivorian students, it seems unlikely that the government is providing training targeted to meeting refugee and immigrant student needs in all schools. stallings snapshot observation tool data. per the snapshot data, teachers mainly used the designated language of instruction while student language use varied. baako (rural pei teacher) used brafé 70% of the time; during the 30% of instances noted in french, he used short french words interspersed in brafé sentences or he was responding to outside visitors. traditional teachers mme djere (rural) and elodie (urban) used french 100% of the time. students in the rural pei classroom, where the language of instruction is the language of the community, used brafé 100% of the time even though at least one (the child of dandou ourfama, refugee from niger) is not a native speaker. students in the rural konvi traditional classroom used french 80% of the time and brafé 20% of the time, typically for socializing. in the urban dyapo traditional classroom, students used french 50% of the time and local languages the remaining time; like their rural peers, local languages were used to socialize. insights from the observational analysis. mme djere (rural traditional teacher) provided an accurate assessment of the french teaching techniques she uses, while baako (rural pei teacher) and elodie (urban traditional teacher) used techniques they did not describe. all teachers used call-and-response and peer aid to help struggling students. along with the common strategies, there were differences in the ways that teachers interacted with students who were showing signs of confusion or a lack of comprehension. where baako (rural pei teacher) was teaching in the local language, brafé, both mme djere (rural traditional teacher) and elodie (urban traditional teacher) were teaching in the official yet non-local french language. this means that the majority of baako’s students were native speakers and not brafé language learners, compared to all the students in mme djere’s class who are non-native french speakers and french language learners. similarly, the majority of elodie’s class are non-native french speakers, although some students are not french language learners since they only speak french at home. this is an important distinction, one that makes it easier to observe mme djere’s and elodie’s language teaching techniques due to sheer volume of language learners in the classroom. however, it was not observationally clear in any of the classrooms which students were of refugee or other immigrant origin. what these observations can tell us is how teachers might respond to nonlocal students with any migratory history, which has implications for the special and vulnerable populations of interest in this study. i observed more visual cues of noncomprehension in both french traditional classrooms than in the pei classroom. students in the rural traditional classroom were observed opening and closing their mouth quickly to refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 101 101 mimic speaking or otherwise not responding during call-and-response sessions, avoiding eye contact, and trying to get the attention of mme djere for help. the following vignette illustrates mme djere’s typical reaction to these student behaviors: mme djere writes some 2-letter combinations on the blackboard and says the sounds of each. she points to them for the students to say. a quarter of the class raise their hands. mme djere focuses on the sound “lè”: she points to the letter pair without pronouncing it and asks the class to say a word using the sound made by that combination of letters. to encourage them, she asks the students in french, “what do we call this?” while pointing to her lips. the students say something in brafé, and mme djere says in french, “we call these lips,” while writing “lèvre” (“lip”) on the blackboard. the students speak amongst themselves in brafé while mme djere is writing. mme djere turns around and says, “we speak french.” she continues using sounds to identify french words. she points to “mè” and says, “mè like in what word?” the students are quiet, they look down at their tables or out the windows. she keeps asking. a student in the back says “mom” (“maman”), and mme djere responds, “i want her other name, to go with the sound ‘mè.’” students shift in their seats. girls in the front row chat in brafé. mme djere keeps asking, changing sounds occasionally and chastising throughout. “what word goes with the sound ‘lè’? be quiet. what word? pay attention. with ‘lè.’” no student responds to any of these questions, and mme djere answers herself each time. “pay attention. lèvre (lip) goes with ‘lè.’ who can make a sentence with lip?” some students seem bored, others avoid eye contact and shift. mme djere keeps asking questions and answering herself. she again asks who can make a sentence with “lèvre” (lip). the girls in the front draw on the table, a group in the middle chats in brafé, and mme djere repeats her question for 6 minutes. she then provides her own example: “the lips of the virgin are red.” mme djere asks who can write a sentence with “mère” (mother). a girl in the back holds up a board where she wrote a squiggly line. mme djere asks again. she writes a sentence on the blackboard. the students chat in brafé. mme djere writes “a mother” on the blackboard. “who can read this?” she asks. a student in the middle of the room shouts “mom,” and a boy in the back says, “a mother.” mme djere tells the students to write “a mother” on their boards. the students write and quietly chat. mme djere helps a boy in the front by guiding his hand as he writes. a girl next to him draws a squiggle. all the students hold up their boards for mme djere to check. she walks around to check the answers, saying “yes” or “do it again.” she skips the girl who wrote a squiggle, and the girl tries to get mme djere’s attention with eye contact, following her, and raising her hand. mme djere does not speak to the girl. mme djere brings a boy to the front to write the response on the blackboard. she asks the class to raise their boards. all but 10 students copied the words from the board, most had the accent in 102 global education review 7 (4) the wrong direction. mme djere does not address the students who wrote nothing or those who wrote only a few letters. she focuses on the accent, describing the difference between è and é. she tells the students to erase their boards and rewrite “une mère.” she walks around the classroom to check the answers, but only corrects accents. students who did not write anything are not addressed. mme djere looks at the big blackboard where a boy had written “une mére,” and she asks another boy to correct it. she continues to correct accents and does not address the students who did not participate. mme djere often felt the need to respond to her own questions due to lack of student participation. while this cannot be solely attributed to language barriers, it was a typical strategy in this classroom. combined with mme djere’s choice to ignore students who were not participating in the writing task while focusing solely on the students who needed guidance on correct accent direction, it seems that mme djere was more inclined to support students who were demonstrably comprehending the lesson instead of providing extra support to students who were struggling. again, while this cannot be exclusively attributed to language comprehension, the implication is that mme djere teaches as if all students understand french and the material instead of aiding students who do not understand. mme djere did not only ignore signs of confusion or lack of comprehension; she also relied upon peer support. in the vignette, she asked for a student to come to the blackboard to correct another students’ work. the other technique in this vignette is mme djere’s decision to guide a student herself, helping a student make the correct motions when writing. both techniques were ones she described in her interview. asking other students to help their peers and call-and-response are techniques shared by baako (rural pei) and elodie (urban traditional). unlike mme djere, baako and elodie would use call-and-response to gauge student comprehension. where mme djere would quickly move through call-and-response, ignoring lack of participation, baako and elodie would direct call-and-response to portions of the classroom that were not participating to encourage participation. this strategy suggests that baako and elodie were aware of their students’ non-comprehension cues, and they responded by providing localized attention to classroom sections where low participation might indicate lack of comprehension. baako provided the most energetic response, as seen in this vignette: one boy is passing books out to the class. the students socialize in brafé while baako looks through the book. baako says something in brafé, and it looks like he is reading from the book. the students turn their pages. baako walks around the classroom, checking that each student is on the correct page. while he is doing this, some students are socializing in brafé and some are helping others to find the page. baako points to the page in his book and speaks in brafé. he appears to be reading aloud in brafé, but the book is in french, so he must be translating on the spot. the students are silent. baako asks a question in brafé, students say “no” in french. baako speaks in brafé while the students silently watch him. he says something in brafé which must be a question based on the intonation, refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 103 103 the whole class says something together in brafé to reply. baako continues to ask questions in brafé, gesturing and pointing to his head. the students say “no” in french, and baako asks a question with more energy. the students say something in brafé. baako asks longer brafé questions. the student brafé replies get longer. some students are looking down, and baako says, “ben ye wa,” while pointing to his eyes then himself. i think this means “eyes up here” (i later confirmed this). he says, “eyes up here” again, and all students look at him. baako continues to speak in brafé, some students laugh. baako seems to be acting something out while speaking—he is walking around in a funny way, slumping and jumping. the students close their books together and simultaneously turn them over. baako asks a question in brafé, and all but three students raise their hands. a few students shout something out in brafé. baako asks something else in brafé, and some students reply in brafé. this type of question-answer is continued with increasing participation for three minutes. baako is very energetic, getting more energy as he asks more questions, and the student replies have the same energy, gaining energy in the same way. baako asks questions to different parts of the room, so that different subgroups all have a chance to answer. students are responding. in this vignette, baako seems to inject the class with energy, increasing his energy level as a response to lack of participation in an effort to increase participation. while this seems to work, he also shifts his attention to smaller sections of the classroom to check that everyone is participating. although as a non-brafé speaker i cannot tell if the students are correctly responding to his questions, i could see that he was attentive to all his students and eager to make sure that participation was high. he was responsive to lack of eye contact. though his response was to tell students to look at him, which does not support language learning, it does indicate that he is attentive to visual cues and has potential to attend to comprehension based upon those cues. baako’s choice to focus on different sections of the classroom to gauge and encourage participation was a technique that elodie also used in her urban traditional classroom, although she was less energetic. elodie used a more individualized technique, selecting individual students rather than classroom segments to ensure that all students reached comprehension. she also spent more time on one subject; unlike baako and mme djere, who moved through writing, reading, math, and civics lessons in one hour, elodie spent 50 minutes on reading and writing before transitioning to math through a lesson on spelling numbers. the following vignette underscores the attention that elodie pays to her students individually: elodie gets an eggplant out of a bag on her desk and tells the class to observe it without speaking. she asks, “what is it?” and they quietly stare at it. she then calls on one student who correctly identifies it as “aubergine.” she repeats “aubergine” three times, emphasizing the “au” sound with volume. she asks, “what do we hear” in french and the class says “au” then they clap. elodie walks through the rows of students, talking about the sea and asking what has the sound “au” that goes in the sea. 104 global education review 7 (4) one girl says “bateau” (boat). elodie says “yes” and the students clap. elodie continues to walk among the students working on call-and-response for the “au” sound. the students are engaged, responding with sounds and words then clapping. elodie asks a question about different words and hands are raised and responses given: she says a word and asks if the sound “au” is in that word, and students raise their hand for elodie to call on them to respond. when a student answers correctly, elodie and the class clap. when a student answers incorrectly, elodie asks if they are sure. if the student answers incorrectly the second time, elodie asks the class to answer together. elodie walks to the blackboard and writes “aubergine” and “bateau.” she asks, “did we learn about ‘au?’” and the students reply, “yes madame.” elodie points to each section of the classroom, and each section says “au” as a group when pointed to. she tells them all the ways to spell the sound: “au,” “eau,” and “o.” she writes each version on the blackboard while the class watches silently. elodie calls on one girl from the middle to read while pointing to the sounds; the girl comes to the front, points to a sound and says it, repeating for all three versions. elodie calls on a girl from the back left to do this, and a girl from the front right, a boy from the back left. each student does it then returns to their seat. all students’ hands are raised. so far, all who are called on get the sound correct. for every correct answer, the students clap. elodie is mixing up the sections from where she chooses who will read the sound. one boy looks like he is guessing: he is saying the sound without pointing to it on the blackboard. elodie tells the boy to stay and brings another boy up. elodie tells the boy who was guessing to watch while the new boy reads and points. she brings up two more boys and a girl (individually) to read and point while the first boy continues to observe. elodie tells the boy who was observing to try again, and he points to sounds while saying them correctly. the class claps. this exercise continues. the class starts to shuffle but remains silent and the activity continues for 16 minutes. all students were given a chance to come to the front, and all stayed until they got it correct. not only does elodie make sure that all students are individually attended to, she does so with seemingly endless patience. she showed no sense of urgency, making sure that each student participated individually, and each student reached the correct answer before moving from one sound to the next. instead of correcting students, she preferred to allow students to observe others then try again. like with my observations of mme djere and baako, elodie’s classroom behavior does not explicitly explain how she ensures that refugee and immigrant students learn french. however, it is possible to extrapolate that she prioritizes french language acquisition for all her students, regardless of their national identities, by checking on each students’ comprehension throughout the lesson. conclusion and discussion my exploratory study is far from generalizable, as i only cover the opinions of four refugee, stateless, and immigrant parents and three teachers in côte d’ivoire, and i only refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education 105 105 draw upon one-hour observations from three classrooms. however, my study can provide nominal insight and make the case for continued research about the impact of language in education on refugee and immigrant students in côte d’ivoire. in this study, i found that among refugee and immigrant parents, there was varied support for using local languages in the classroom. while the parent data enabled me to understand language teaching preferences of refugee and immigrant parents, the data from the teachers was ripe with pedagogical insights. the differences in pedagogical techniques i observed are not explicitly language teaching strategies; however, since the classes i observed are comprised of native and non-native speakers, there are implications for language learning. immersion was the norm: all three teachers taught lessons entirely in french or brafé with the expectation that students would understand. strategies such as using peer support, call-and-response, and individualized support, were executed with varying degrees of student engagement and participation. teacher responses to lack of comprehension signaled by visual cues were equally varied. while the pei model of school specifically attends to language acquisition, traditional schools do not; however, the lack of specialized support provided to students in either type of school indicates that neither the pei model nor the traditional model is designed to provide pedagogical support to refugees and immigrants. as baako (rural pei teacher) made clear, teachers lack training and resources to teach in local languages. the associated lack of french as a second language training may extend to traditional teachers. the implications for refugee and immigrant students who are language learners can only be assumed, yet the lack of resources and training about language teaching and the whole-class approach to teaching underscores the lack of specialized support provided to these students. notes 1 locations, local languages, and participant names are pseudonyms to protect their identities. acknowledgements this research was funded in part by an ead doctoral research small grant from the college of education at michigan state university, a research enhancement award from the michigan state university graduate school, and a student travel award from the african studies association and royal air maroc. i wish to thank the teachers who opened their classrooms to me and the parents of dyapo and konvi who generously shared their experiences and opinions with me. i appreciate the assistance of dr. azoh, madame diaby, dr. koné, and ariane ndjore, who were instrumental in site coordination and providing feedback. references akissi boutin, b., & kouadio n’guessan, j. 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(2014). whatever the law says: language policy implementation and early-grade literacy achievement in kenya. current issues in language planning, 15(1), 421. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2013.85698 5 unesco institute for statistics (2017). côte d’ivoire – education and literacy. retrieved from http://uis.unesco.org/country/ci unesco (2018). global education monitoring report, 2019—migration, displacement and education: building bridges, not walls. paris, france: unesco. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000 265866 un high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) (2016). statelessness and nationality in côte d'ivoire a study for unhcr, december 2016, available at: https://www.refworld.org/docid/58594d114.ht ml un high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) (2018), cote d'ivoire factsheet march 2018, march 2018, available at: https://reliefweb.int/report/c-te-divoire/unhcrcote-divoire-factsheet-march-2018 world bank group (2015). conducting classroom observations: analyzing classrooms dynamics and instructional time, using the stallings' classroom snapshot observation system. washington, d.c.: world bank. https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/1 0986/22401 about the author michelle solorio recently earned a phd in education policy phd from the educational administration department at michigan state university. she is an independent research consultant with a phd in educational policy and international comparative education from michigan state university. her research interests are language of instruction policies and practices, education in emergencies, and refugee education. https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2013.856985 https://doi.org/10.1080/14664208.2013.856985 http://uis.unesco.org/country/ci https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000265866 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000265866 https://www.refworld.org/docid/58594d114.html https://www.refworld.org/docid/58594d114.html https://reliefweb.int/report/c-te-divoire/unhcr-cote-divoire-factsheet-march-2018 https://reliefweb.int/report/c-te-divoire/unhcr-cote-divoire-factsheet-march-2018 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22401 https://openknowledge.worldbank.org/handle/10986/22401 literacy in a global context 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kabuto, bobbie, and harmey, sinéad (2019). literacy in a global context: educational policy, pedagogy, and teacher education. global education review, 6 (2). 1-4. literacy in a global context: educational policy, pedagogy, and teacher education bobbie kabuto queens college, cuny sinéad harmey ucl institute of education, london this issue of the global education review focuses on how to reimagine, define, and conceptualize literacy practices within an educational setting for a global society. in the call for this issue, we encouraged the authors to define literacy as social and cultural practices that drew upon a range of issues relating to social justice, equity, identity, ideologies, power, and the imagination. through this perspective literacy is more than the sum of reading and writing events; it is a process that employs diverse symbolic tools (i.e. reading, writing, and drawing, etc.) for social and global transformation. the collection of articles in this issue illustrate that social and global transformation includes breaking down global boundaries, both physical and metaphorical, that can separate groups of people as “us” and “them.” in doing so, these articles challenge global standardization. we define global standardization has an ideological endeavor which privileges western knowledge and cultural practices, and ignores the local, cultural, and social needs of groups of people teaching and living in particular contexts. global standardization, in combination with the spread of big corporations and their roles in education (cody, 2014), perpetuates the idea that progress is made by imposing a one-model or a global standard towards teacher education and student learning. the articles in this issue illustrate how no one standard or model of teacher education and pedagogy to support literacy can meet the diverse needs of both teachers and students living locally and globally, or displaced by political factors resulting in migration across nation states. the articles presented in this themed edition of global education review were written by a team of international researchers coming together to create a shared space for inquiry and learning. the collection of articles represents what ernest morrell (2017) described as the “literacy education imperative” that challenges the “growing material inequities between rich and poor, global divisions, and massive manifestations of hatred and intolerance amid rising tides of global populism” (p. 455). to open this issue, denny taylor, in “family literacy provides an effective response to the u.n. sdgs and peacebuilding architecture,” discusses how family literacy initiatives across un member states support peacebuilding and the un sustainable development goals (sdgs). through an analysis of global family literacy initiatives, taylor suggests that family literacy is a conduit for challenging economic inequalities, by providing access to literacy and academic opportunities, and intolerance, by constructing “peace efforts in family settings working alongside children’s caregivers to ameliorate the often-violent circumstances in which they live 2 global education review 6 (2) their everyday lives” (p. 5). taylor illuminates how literacy, situated within a global context through the lens of family literacy initiatives, can have impacts on reducing gender inequality and family violence, and the results of physical, psychological, and emotional traumas from armed conflict and disease. in “reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique: literacy mentoring in hybrid spaces as a transformative practice,” goia et al. exemplify how a team of international scholars and education professionals from moçambique, the united states, and canada came together to create a shared space of inquiry and learning. in combination with albers, flint, and matthews’ article, “professional development, aesthetic experiences, and the possibilities for transformed practices in international spaces,” these articles illustrate how teacher educators can break down linguistic, cultural, and institutional barriers in order to create a community for professional literacy learning. goia et al. provide a framework for rethinking pre-service teacher education as adaptive and practice-based that includes hybrid spaces built around the current structure of the teacher education program in moçambique. they argue that hybrid spaces provide opportunities for innovation in participatory practices in supporting learning to teach. integrating a framework on aesthetic education, albers et al. takes the reader through their experiences in developing professional development with eight kindergarten to third grade teachers in south africa. the authors argue for a critical professional development stance, one in which professional development must be contextualized and respond to the everyday needs of the learners. they suggest that “to approach professional development as a democratic endeavor in international spaces is to introduce materials (e.g., songs, picture books, stories, poems) that speak to teachers’ experiences” (p. 50). these two articles demonstrate the discursive processes that guide teacher education based on the cultural and institutional structures that define the local context of the teachers and students within which teacher preparation occurs. while goia et al. and albers et al. reimagine the preparation of preand in-service teachers within an international context, karsgaard in “reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education?: curriculum critique of a novel study on kielburger’s free the children” and taira in “(in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth in a secondary english classroom” take a critical lens to the global standardization of curriculum. a standardized global curriculum affects, what cambourne (2016) describes, as “not only how people subconsciously think about language learning, but also how they think about teaching language and/or literacy” (p. 21). through standardization, teachers and administrators perceive teaching as a “delivery system” that fills an empty space within the learner’s knowledge (cambourne, 2016, p. 21). cambourne uses the term a discourse of acquisition to describe how teachers and learning are framed through “carefully sequenced-lock-step-teacher-directed” transmission of not only curricular content (p. 21). we expand this notion to suggest that curricular content is never neutral as it also transmits ideologies and beliefs of what it means to be a global citizen. through a close reading of the curriculum unit around free the children (1999), a memoir by craig kielburger, karsgaard illustrates how the standardization of curriculum represents a discourse of acquisition that is a promotion of western ideas, rather than globally and critically expansive. karsgaard poses challenging questions about the nature of global citizenship, social action, and what it means to “raise awareness” about issues of global citizenship literacy in a global context 3 through a curricular unit that is supported by global citizenship education (gce) within the canadian context. in “(in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth in a secondary english classroom,” taira presents a case study of what happens when teachers challenge a discourse of acquisition to support a discourse of meaning making within curricular content. cambourne (2017) describes the teaching and learning through a discourse of meaning making as striving “to create multiple opportunities for their students to engage in continuous cycles of constructing and communicating meanings as they collaboratively address and (try to) resolve real-world problems” (p. 23). studying newcomer transnational youth, many of them refugees, settling in the united states, taira illustrates how curriculum can be re-envisioned to support students in making sense of their experiences of displacement and relocation. focusing on a case study of a “transnational teacher and her students engaged in literacy practices that were potentially informed by their own histories of transnational migration” (p. 77), taira describes how meaningful literacy practices engaged at home and out of school disappeared when “attention to culture and incorporation of diverse texts and perspectives were seen as peripheral to a standardized curriculum” (p. 86). both karsgaard and taira encourage the reader to consider how standardized curriculum can deny students opportunities to both engage in interrogating the notion of global citizenship and to bring their own literate lives as global citizens into the classroom. together, the articles in this issue remind us of the words of maxine greene (1995), who wrote, “we should think of education as opening public spaces in which students, speaking their own voices and acting on their own initiatives, can identify themselves and choose themselves in relation to such principles as freedom, equality, justice, and concern for others” (p. 68). we see this issue as one of those public spaces for reimagining literacy education for a global society. references albers, p., seely flint, a., & matthews, m. (2019). transformation of instructional practice through aesthetic experiences. global education review, 6 (2), 33-54. cody, a. (2014). the educator and the oligarch: a teacher challenges the gates foundation. new york, ny: garn press. cambourne, b. (2016). reclaiming or reframing? getting the right conceptual metaphor for thinking about early literacy learning. in r. meyer & k. whitmore (eds.), reclaiming early childhood literacies (pp. 3749). new york, ny: routledge. greene, m. (1995). releasing the imagination: essays on education, the arts, and social change. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. morrell, e. (2017). toward equity and diversity in literacy research, policy, and practice: a critical, global approach. journal of literacy research, 49(3), 454-463. taira, b. w. (20129). (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth in a secondary english classroom. global education review, 6 (2), 74-93. taylor, d. (2019). family literacy provides an effective response to the u.n. sdgs and peacebuilding architecture. global education review, 6(2). 5-9. about the authors bobbie kabuto is professor at queens college, city university of new york, where she is director of the literacy program, birth6th grade. her research interests include the 4 global education review 6 (2) connections between bi/literacy and socially constructed identities. sinéad harmey is lecturer in literacy education and national leader for reading recovery at the international literacy centre, ucl institute of education (united kingdom). her research interests include describing young children’s literacy development, early literacy assessment and intervention, and teacher professional development. microsoft word moland edits, 09.10.17, moland copyedits, 06.22.17, final_moland_done-en hw 4.3 ce (3).formatted mw global early childhood policies 17 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: moland, naomi a.(2017). localizing play-based pedagogy: nigerian educators’ appropriation of sesame classroom materials. global education review, 4 (3), 17-36. localizing play-based pedagogy: nigerian educators’ appropriation of sesame classroom materials naomi a. moland school of international service, american university abstract this article examines how international organizations promote play-based pedagogical approaches in early childhood settings around the world, and how local educators respond. as a case study, i investigated sesame workshop’s efforts to introduce play-based approaches in nigerian classrooms. in addition to producing a nigerian version of sesame street (called sesame square), sesame workshop trains educators in play-based approaches and has distributed alphabet flashcards, puppet kits, and storytelling games to more than 2,700 early childhood classrooms across nigeria. these materials were intended to support sesame square’s messages, and to foster interactive, child-centered learning experiences. however, teachers often used the materials in ways that reflected more rote-based, teachercentered approaches. data was gathered through observations and interviews in 27 educational sites across nigeria that use sesame materials. findings reveal that teachers’ resistance to play-based approaches was sometimes for structural reasons (e.g., large class sizes), and sometimes related to their knowledge and training (e.g., they were accustomed to drilling the alphabet). i argue that ideals about constructivist, play-based learning are being disseminated by international organizations—alongside contrasting formalistic pedagogical approaches—and that all approaches will shift as they are localized. i question if approaches that are considered universally developmentally appropriate are relevant in all settings, and explore how early childhood educators adapt global pedagogical trends to make sense in their classrooms. i call for international organizations to explore context-appropriate play-based approaches that develop educators’ capacities to help all children thrive, while also incorporating local cultural beliefs about childhood and teaching. keywords play-based approaches, pedagogy, culturally relevant pedagogy, globalization, nigeria, sesame workshop introduction in recent years, international development organizations have increased their focus on developing and expanding early childhood educational opportunities around the world. the united nations sustainable development goal 4.2 (adopted september 2015) states, “by 2030, ______________________________ corresponding author: naomi a. moland, school of international service, american university, 4400 massachusetts avenue nw, washington, dc 20016 email: moland@american.edu 18 global education review 4(3) ensure that all boys and girls have access to quality early childhood development, care, and pre-primary education so that they are ready for primary education” (sustainable development goal 4, 2017). as formalized early childhood education has expanded around the world, debates continue (and take new forms) about the best ways to educate young children. while many experts emphasize the importance of playbased and interactive learning, more academic and teacher-directed approaches are also widespread (davey & lundy, 2011; fuller, 2007). some raise concerns that increasingly rigorous accountability measures are leading to inappropriate academic pressure and testing even at very young ages, and that these practices do not reflect what we know about developmentally appropriate pedagogical strategies (bodrova, 2008; fuller, 2007). international organizations play a role in diffusing various early childhood education approaches. scholars critique a global education reform movement (germ) for exporting market-based accountability measures to education systems around the world (sahlberg, 2014). such reforms are often associated with increased assessment and more rigid, teacherled pedagogical approaches. however, international organizations are also disseminating play-based approaches for early childhood education. this article examines one such organization, sesame workshop, which creates television programs, trains educators, and distributes interactive educational materials around the world (cole, 2016). sesame workshop collaborates with local production companies to create more than 30 international versions of sesame street, which are viewed by more than 156 million children in 150 countries around the world (cooney, 2016; sesame workshop, 2017). sesame workshop also distributes educational materials to schools, community centers, and orphanages (described further below). in nigeria, these materials were intended to support the messages on nigeria’s version of sesame street (called sesame square), such as literacy and numeracy skills, healthy habits, and respect for diversity. in this article, i examine how sesame workshop promotes play-based learning in nigeria, and how educators respond. my research questions are: 1. how does sesame workshop promote play-based approaches to early childhood educators in nigeria? 2. how do nigerian educators use sesame’s play-based educational materials in their classrooms? to answer these questions, i conducted ethnographic observations in two caregiver1 training sessions and 27 educational sites in five states across nigeria. i also repeatedly interviewed sesame teacher trainers and conversed with teachers. findings reveal that many educators struggled to implement playbased learning approaches and sometimes used the sesame materials in teacher-directed ways that promoted rote memorization. these findings echo those of other scholars who have observed educators’ discomfort in african countries with constructivist, learner-centered pedagogical approaches (mtika & gates, 2010; o'sullivan, 2004; vavrus, bartlett, & salema, 2013). studies have documented several possible reasons for why teachers resist constructivist approaches, such as structural reasons (large class sizes, inadequate classroom space, and rigid school schedules) and knowledge and attitudinal reasons (including inadequate training, previous experiences, and cultural beliefs about authority and knowledge acquisition) (schweisfurth, 2011; vavrus et al., 2013). my findings align with these scholars’ findings; i document how structural, knowledge, and attitudinal factors contribute to teachers’ discomfort with play-based methods. however, this study is different in that it highlights global early childhood policies 19 specifically how educators repurpose materials that are designed to be constructivist, and use them in more didactic ways. moreover, this study is unique because it examines these dynamics in early childhood settings, rather than in primary or secondary school settings. many early childhood experts suggest that constructivist, exploratory, play-based pedagogical approaches are particularly important in early childhood settings (bodrova, 2008; lobman & ryan, 2007). the fact that rote-based, teacher-centered approaches persist in early childhood classrooms in nigeria may have a negative impact on young children’s development. on the other hand, this study questions whether play-based pedagogical approaches are logistically and culturally appropriate in all contexts. early childhood experts who speak about pedagogical approaches that are developmentally appropriate suggest that all children go through similar biological stages that require certain pedagogies. however, ideas about child-rearing are culturally bound (lancy, 2015). while it may be impossible to determine what pedagogical approaches are culturally indigenous to nigeria, educators may need to draw from different approaches to find one that best suits their sociocultural context. i borrow from vavrus’s (2009) concept of contingent constructivism to investigate how nigerian teachers adapt western conceptualizations of play-based learning to be more appropriate in nigerian settings. the global diffusion of constructivist and formalistic pedagogical approaches in recent decades, debates about pedagogical approaches are increasingly circulating in international development discourses. as enrollment levels in formal schooling have expanded dramatically around the world, concerns about the quality of learning have become central (barrett, sayed, schweisfurth, & tikly, 2015). a key component of these discussions are concerns about teaching quality, and whether teachers engage in “teachercentered approaches” or “learner-centered pedagogy” (schweisfurth, 2015; vavrus, thomas, & bartlett, 2011). these two pedagogical approaches are linked respectively to formalistic and constructivist educational philosophies (fuller, 2007; vavrus & bartlett, 2012). teacher-centered approaches are often associated with formalistic pedagogical theories that emphasize rote learning, rationalized and standardized knowledge, and teachers lecturing from the front of the room (i borrow the term "formalistic" from vavrus, 2009). in contrast, learner-centered pedagogies are understood as constructivist classroom practices wherein students interact with the teacher in more egalitarian ways, may work in cooperative groups with other students, and construct knowledge through interaction, questioning, and experimentation (mtika & gates, 2010; vavrus et al., 2011). scholars emphasize that these two pedagogical approaches are better understood as a continuum than as absolutes (schweisfurth, 2015) and that many teachers employ “hybrid practices” and “mixed pedagogies” (mtika & gates, 2010). that is to say, there are approaches that are more and less learnercentered, and teachers may utilize different approaches in different contexts and for different purposes (barrett, 2007). the pedagogies that teachers use are intimately tied to cultural contexts, beliefs about authority, and conceptions of knowledge production (vavrus & bartlett, 2012). many international development organizations promote constructivist, learnercentered pedagogies (mtika & gates, 2010; schweisfurth, 2015). reports from organizations such as the world bank and unesco highlight the need for teachers to adopt more constructivist approaches (vavrus et al., 2011). following global trends, many national 20 global education review 4(3) governments are also instituting educational reforms—including teacher education reforms— that promote constructivist pedagogies (vavrus et al., 2013). at the early childhood education level, related recommendations often advocate play-based learning as a foundation for approaches that prioritize children exploring, interacting, and questioning authority (davey & lundy, 2011; subramanian, 2015). some scholars laud the global diffusion of constructivist approaches. in addition to fostering students’ academic learning, they explore how such approaches develop students’ critical thinking skills and their ability to question authority—and that these are important skills for promoting human rights and peaceful attitudes (bajaj, 2011; schweisfurth, 2015; subramanian, 2015). others raise concerns about the global promotion of learnercentered approaches. tabulawa (2003) asserts that while learner-centered pedagogy is often justified in educational and cognitive terms, it should be understood as affiliated with certain economic and political ideals. he connects learner-centered approaches to westernization, neoliberalism, democratization, and capitalism. other scholars, who may be less cynical about aid agencies’ reasons for promoting constructivist pedagogies, still question whether these approaches make sense in all settings (hardman, abd-kadir, & smith, 2008; o'sullivan, 2004; vavrus, 2009). despite global efforts to promote more constructivist approaches, formalistic approaches persist in many countries. particularly in sub-saharan africa, researchers have found many classroom interactions to be based on a “we teach, students listen” (stambach, 1994) model wherein teachers lecture and students are expected to memorize (hardman et al., 2008; moloi, morobe, & urwick, 2008; mtika & gates, 2010; o'sullivan, 2004). scholars explore many possible reasons for why formalistic approaches persist, including teachers’ training and experiences, cultural authority structures and epistemological beliefs, and infrastructural reasons (such as large class sizes and limited materials) (schweisfurth, 2011; vavrus et al., 2013). scholars also document how teachers may be hesitant to use constructivist approaches when students are still assessed in standardized ways (bartlett & vavrus, 2013; schweisfurth, 2015). these concerns are connected to fears that a global education reform movement (germ) is leading to greater standardization, increased assessments, and more stringent accountability measures (sahlberg, 2014). accountability-based reform measures in the u.s. have led to more assessment and standardization—even at the preschool level— leading many early childhood educators and policymakers to focus more on academic versus play-based, interactive pedagogies (bodrova, 2008; fuller, 2007). germ may be leading to more teacher-centered, standardized early childhood approaches around the world. throughout debates about constructivist versus formalistic pedagogical approaches—and who is promoting, appropriating, and resisting these approaches around the world—we have limited knowledge of how these dynamics play out in early childhood settings (for an exception, see subramanian, 2015). debates between constructivist versus formalistic approaches run parallel to longstanding discussions about the best ways to educate young children. fuller (2007) outlines the history and tenets of three approaches to early childhood education. first, the “liberal humanist” approach (drawing on philosophies from froebel to rousseau and piaget) emphasizes constructivist notions, wherein learning occurs when children’s natural curiosities are fostered and children engage in discovery and play to develop knowledge. second, fuller defines a “skilling” approach as the belief that “the upbringing of children should focus on imparting certain cognitive skills and plugging threeand four-year-olds into the classroom’s social routines, getting them ready global early childhood policies 21 for school” (2007, p. 6). the third approach is a “cross-cultural” conception of childrearing, which denies that there is—or should be—one universal way of raising children, and highlights the importance of building on children’s cultural frameworks (2007, p. 7). the “liberal-humanist” and “skilling” approaches, in particular, align with constructivist and formalistic pedagogical approaches, respectively. notably, both “liberalhumanist” and “skilling” approaches adopt developmentalist perspectives—believing that children progress through certain stages. “crosscultural” approaches (related to reconceptualist early childhood theories) critique the concept of “developmentally appropriate,” emphasizing that constructions of “normal” development are culturally bound (cannella, swadener, & che, 2007). vavrus’s (2009) study provides a particularly apt model for this study on nigerian educators’ responses to play-based materials. she conducted ethnographic research at a tanzanian teachers college that promoted constructivism and learner-centered pedagogy. while pre-service teachers in the college seemed to understand and accept constructivist approaches, they struggled to implement them in their own secondary-level classrooms. vavrus explored possible structural, knowledge, and attitudinal reasons for this disconnect. she also observed one teacher who modified constructivist approaches to fit the constraints of his classroom. while he continued to teach in a lecture-based whole-group format, he utilized question and answer techniques that promoted critical thinking. vavrus deemed this practice “contingent constructivism” and emphasized that such teachers “need to be rewarded, not admonished, for recognizing the limitations of [constructivist] methods when conditions do not warrant their use” (2009, p. 310). my study follows vavrus’s (2009) work— and similar work by other scholars (moloi et al., 2008; mtika & gates, 2010; o'sullivan, 2004)— by examining how teachers are trained in constructivist, play-based approaches, and how they use (or do not use) these approaches in their classrooms. my findings show that teachers rarely used sesame materials in the play-based, learner-centered ways that sesame workshop intended. these findings align with several other studies that show incongruences between the learner-centered approaches teachers learn and what actually occurs in classrooms. it is notable that my findings in early childhood classrooms align with findings of studies that take place in primary (moloi et al., 2008; o'sullivan, 2004) and secondary (mtika & gates, 2010; vavrus, 2009) classrooms. we may expect that early childhood educators would be more likely to use play-based, interactive approaches. my findings suggest that formalistic approaches pervade at all levels of education in nigeria. some scholars fear that teacher-centered, rote-based methods may be particularly inappropriate at the early childhood level (bodrova, 2008; copple & bredekamp, 2010). scholars, policymakers, and educators may need to negotiate pedagogical approaches that make sense in nigerian settings but also promote learning among nigeria’s youngest children. sesame international and the promotion of play-based learning sesame street is one of the longest running children’s television programs (on air in the u.s. since 1969), and certainly the most widely broadcast around the world (cole, 2016). television is only one of the platforms it uses to pursue its stated mission to help children “grow smarter, stronger, and kinder” (sesame workshop, 2017); it also creates radio programming, dvds, website/mobile applications, and classroom materials. while international versions of sesame street have aired since the early 1970s, sesame workshop has recently focused more on using the program as a tool for international development. the united states agency for international development (usaid) has funded nine versions 22 global education review 4(3) of the program, and the program’s goals align with international development objectives about promoting universal primary education and girls’ education, combatting hiv/aids and other diseases, and fostering intercultural peace (cole, 2016). in general, research has shown that sesame street and its international versions have been successful in teaching academic skills, healthy habits, and peaceful and tolerant worldviews (cole, 2016). educating children in entertaining, playbased ways has been central to sesame workshop’s approach since the beginning, and these strategies are consistent across sesame’s international programming. sesame workshop researchers have found that co-productions have helped shift attitudes about early childhood education. for example, cole and lee (2016) summarized internal research on sisimpur, the bangladeshi version of sesame street: education [in bangladesh] was often seen as a process of rote memorization rather than engaged, joyful learning (kibria, 2005). researchers noted a shift in these attitudes a year after sisimpur’s broadcast. teachers reported that the series inspired them to be more creative in their teaching […] and parents were more likely to think about parenting as involving active interactions with children than before (kibria, 2006).2 (cole & lee, 2016, pp. 5960) this reporting of research illustrates sesame workshop’s hopes that co-productions can promote creativity, “engaged, joyful learning,” and “active interactions.” similarly, lee et al., (2016) write about how the radio version of the afghan co-production, bagch-esimsim, “helped mothers understand how to treat their children, and to encourage their learning and self-expression” (2016, p. 113). these examples show how sesame workshop staff members and researchers (including local staff) hope that programs can promote playbased learning among young children, and influence teachers and parents to interact with children more creatively. while sesame television and radio programs may influence teachers’ and parents’ approaches, sesame workshop also engages in more direct caregiver training. in the u.s. and around the world, they have created kits with caregiver guides and educational books, games, dvds, and other materials for children. sesame trains caregivers on the use of the materials (as described below in nigeria). such trainings are also intended to teach developmentally appropriate strategies for teaching young children. sesame square comes to nigeria when sesame workshop and usaid decided to create a co-production in nigeria, they were fully aware of the educational challenges there. the nigerian government has struggled to provide adequate education for its population, and regional, ethnic, and gender inequalities persist (moland, 2015b). the fact that nigeria has eight million children out of school—the highest number in sub-saharan africa—reflects nigeria’s massive population (186 million) and relatively low enrollment rates (cia world factbook nigeria, 2017; kazeem, jensen, & stokes, 2010). literacy rates vary largely by region: approximately 72% of nigerians ages 5-16 in the southern regions are literate, as compared to 28% in the northern regions (ndhs, 2011, pp. 44-45). regional boundaries align significantly with ethnic and religious boundaries; northern nigeria is predominantly hausa and muslim, and southern nigeria is predominantly igbo, yoruba, and christian. as a result, regional inequalities map onto other inequalities. for example, christian children are five times more likely to attend school than muslim children in nigeria (kazeem et al., 2010, p. 312). persistent inequalities in nigeria have contributed to ongoing ethno-religious conflicts (campbell, 2013; moland, 2015a). these global early childhood policies 23 conflicts in turn compromise educational access. for instance, the conflict between the terrorist group boko haram and the nigerian government has led to attacks on schools that have killed 611 teachers, destroyed 910 schools, and forced 1,500 additional schools to close (human rights watch, 2016). in northeast nigeria, millions of people have been displaced, and millions of children are out of school. the nigerian government has made commitments to providing preschool education (called crèche, nursery, and kindergarten at different levels) (nigeria national policy on education, 2004). however, such programs are limited in an already under-resourced education system, and fewer than 20% of children attend preschool (fluent research, 2013). in the preschool classes i visited, i noted similar aspects to those other researchers have observed in primary classrooms in nigeria, such as large class sizes, rote-based pedagogical approaches, and limited materials (hardman et al., 2008). amidst these challenging circumstances, sesame workshop staff members (nigerian and american) hoped that sesame square and its accompanying educational materials could help increase young children’s access to education. in april of 2011, the first episode of sesame square was broadcast. with funding from usaid, sesame square creators produced three seasons of 26 thirty-minute episodes each. similarly to other international versions, sesame square teaches about preschool-level academic skills, socio-emotional skills, healthy habits, and diversity and tolerance (moland, 2015a). in the spring of 2012, the nigerian sesame team rolled out the first materials kit: the literacy kit. this kit was a plastic bin (approximately two cubic feet in size) with a fitted lid and a handle. each literacy kit included a story tree mat, a paper puppet set, alphabet flashcards, a children’s book, and instructions for caregivers (described further below). the creation and distribution of these kits was a massive logistical undertaking coordinated by the sesame square team based in abuja (nigeria’s capital city). in the end, approximately 2,700 english literacy kits were distributed to schools, orphanages, and community centers in five states across nigeria. in months that followed, an additional 1,600 hausa literacy kits were distributed in northern nigeria, and 2,700 math/science/health kits were distributed throughout the country. in each of the five states, sesame workshop contracted a regional “master trainer” to conduct a caregiver training. between 40-50 caregivers attended each training, and they each in turn conducted a “step-down training” for at least 10 additional caregivers at their school or community center. in this way, approximately 2,700 caregivers were trained to use the materials, and each of them received a kit for their classroom or center. the materials in the literacy kits are designed to promote creative, child-centered learning. the alphabet story quilt book includes colorful illustrations of characters and scenes from ethnic groups across nigeria, and teaches alphabet sounds and alliteration. for example, the “o” page reads: “oluchi’s okra has overgrown her yard in oyo state.” the puppet set includes 23 laminated paper puppets (about six inches tall) that caregivers are instructed to cut out and attach to wooden supports, as well as background scenes. the puppet kit guide explains, “puppets are a great way to teach children new concepts and tell them stories in a fun and engaging way,” and includes instructions, sample scripts, and character descriptions. the laminated alphabet flashcards (six inches by eight inches) show a capital and lowercase letter on one side, together with a picture of a muppet and lines for the child to copy the letter (crayon markings can be wiped off). the other side shows an object that starts with the letter. for example, the b card has a picture of cookie monster playing ball on one side, and a picture of a ball on the other side. the set includes instruction cards that list eleven 24 global education review 4(3) suggested activities divided into “early learners,” “early readers,” and “advanced readers” (examples below). finally, the literacy kits contain the story tree mat, a large vinyl mat (five feet by five feet) with a picture of a tree on it. each leaf of the tree has an object pictured. for example, leaves included pictures of a school, nurse, duck, bicycle, and so on—almost sixty items are pictured. the kit includes a story tree guide, which explains that it is a floor game designed to help children “increase vocabulary by learning new words, describe/ categorize animals, familiar objects, places, etc., build sentences, narrate events in sequence, creatively imagine stories, and have fun learning!” the guide also tells caregivers what each item is, and gives examples of stories to tell. children are to jump on different leaves as they identify objects or tell stories. for example, a child might jump on a picture of a boy, a woman, a bus, and bananas, and tell a story about how a boy went with his mother on the bus to buy bananas. it is important to note that all of these materials were meticulously created (mostly by nigerians) to be culturally relevant to children across nigeria. the story tree includes a picture of a girl in a hijab to represent nigeria’s large muslim population (approximately 50% of the population) (cia world factbooknigeria, 2017). the y alphabet flashcard has a picture of a yam (a staple food across nigeria), and the puppet kit and the alphabet story quilt include characters from ethnic groups across the country (as depicted by their names and clothing). while the materials were carefully tailored to nigerian cultural groups, however, the intended playbased activities were unfamiliar to many nigerian educators. in order to learn how educators used the materials, i conducted observations in educational settings across nigeria. methods this article draws on data collected as part of a larger study on the production of sesame square. during nine months in nigeria, i conducted interviews, ethnographic observations, and episode analysis to learn how sesame square was localized into the nigerian setting, and how the program taught about diversity and tolerance (moland, 2015a, 2017). i interviewed 35 sesame square staff and 37 educators who use sesame square materials in their classrooms. i also observed meetings and film shoots in the sesame square studios, and conducted textual analysis of all 78 episodes produced thus far. this article focuses on data from ethnographic observations of caregiver trainings and classroom use of the sesame materials. i observed two caregiver trainings (in lagos in february 2012 and in abuja in march 2012), and repeatedly interviewed the master trainers who conducted these trainings (folake and damilola) (all names are psuedonyms). near lagos and abuja, i accompanied folake and damilola as they visited sites to monitor how caregivers were using the sesame materials. i also visited abakaliki, calabar, and kano, and met with the master trainers there, and accompanied them on monitoring visits to sites.3 in total, i visited 27 educational sites that used sesame materials, including one orphanage, one community center, one family center, one ngo, one clinic, and 22 schools. in several schools, i visited multiple classrooms. site visits ranged from thirty minutes to two hours. when we arrived at a site, the master trainer (or one of his/her staff) and i would first speak with the headmaster, and then walk around to visit classrooms. visits were intended (by the master trainers) to monitor how caregivers were using the materials, and it sometimes seemed as though caregivers took the materials out to use them when they saw us coming. headmasters and teachers often believed that i worked for sesame workshop or global early childhood policies 25 usaid, perhaps due in part to my identity as a white, american female, despite my best efforts to explain that i was an independent researcher and was not evaluating them. because my time at each school was limited, i often took photos and videos to guide me as i wrote my fieldnotes each evening. taking short videos allowed me to record verbatim what teachers and students said while using the materials. i also took notes during observations and conversations. to analyze my fieldnotes and interview transcripts, i entered them into the qualitative software dedoose 7.0 and used a combination of deductive and inductive codes. for example, i began with codes based on themes from scholarly literature, such as “materials promote play-based learning,” and added codes that emerged from my fieldnotes, such as “educators worried about theft of materials.” together, my ethnographic and interview data illustrate how sesame workshop promoted play-based learning in nigeria, and how educators responded. training nigerian caregivers in play-based approaches during caregiver trainings, nigerian sesame master trainers taught early childhood educators how to use the materials in the literacy kit. the five master trainers throughout the country were experienced educators, several of whom had served on local or state education boards. most of them also had experience working with international aid agencies such as usaid or the u.k. department for international development (dfid). as such, they had far more exposure to american and british educational approaches than most nigerian educators. folake, the master trainer in lagos, had worked at the lagos state board of education and had decades of experience training teachers and developing curriculum. damilola, the master trainer in abuja, was president of a large association of private schools and ran an elite private school outside of abuja that utilized a british curriculum. as such, both folake and damilola were experienced with constructivist approaches, and were also likely more elite than most of the teachers they trained. during the one-day caregiver training in lagos in february 2012, folake started off by telling the 28 caregivers from nearby ngos and schools that they were going to be very active that day. she led them in a song, and then began speaking about how children learn best: we need to change attitudes. i saw a program on tv that [said that] a child who is not exposed to interactivity in education is doomed. now, subeb [the state universal basic education board] is doing a good thing, starting crèches… [but] i’ve seen some, where the teacher says, “who is running around? put your head on your desk!”that’s not interactivity. (fieldnotes, february 9, 2012) at this point, folake began to solicit ideas from the caregivers about how children learn best. she wrote their suggestions on a piece of chart paper, “children learn when they use materials, learn through role play, models, imitations, interaction, observation, gesticulation, eye contact.” folake also added that children learn when they are inquisitive, ask questions, when they are put at ease, explore, experiment, use their senses, and through a variety of media (fieldnotes, february 9, 2012). folake then directed the caregivers to the sesame square outreach training manual, which includes a page titled, “ways children learn and develop skills during early childhood” with subsections, “learning through the senses,” “learning by exploration and experimenting” and “learning through play” (sesame workshop, 2011, p. 9). they discussed these themes, and brainstormed suggestions for incorporating them. much of the rest of the caregiver training was spent with teachers practicing how to use 26 global education review 4(3) the materials in the literacy kit. for example, folake called up a group of teachers to do an activity with the alphabet flashcards. caregivers attempted the “abc wave” game, wherein alphabet flashcards were distributed to caregivers. as the whole group sang the alphabet song, the caregiver with each letter was expected to raise the corresponding flashcard. caregivers seemed confused at first, but soon mastered the activity. during the afternoon session, she explained how to use the puppets, alphabet story quilt book, and story tree. caregivers had some opportunities to practice using the materials, although time was limited. a similar caregiver training took place in abuja in march 2012. the master trainer, damilola, led the group in a discussion of how children learn, and described three learning styles—auditory, visual, kinesthetic. after a break, she divided participants into small groups to practice alphabet flashcards games. damilola then turned their attention to the puppets, and explained that the puppets could encourage children to tell stories and be creative, and that caregivers could use the puppets to teach all kinds of messages about health, staying in school, professions, and so on (fieldnotes, march 28, 2012). when showing caregivers how to use the the alphabet story quilt book, damilola modeled how to read to children in engaging, dialogic ways that would help build knowledge and vocabulary. afterwards, she reflected with caregivers on how even reading books aloud could be done in ways that encouraged interactivity, imagination, and play. finally, caregivers had the opportunity to practice using the story tree. small groups gathered around six mats. damilola began a story, and then one caregiver from each group continued it. damilola: story, story, story! story, story, story! (caregivers clap and chant along). once upon a time caregivers: time time! damilola (steps on boy picture): there was a boy called ade. ade is a lovely boy, who loves to go to school. one day, he wore his school uniform, his white shirt, and his blue shorts. caregiver 1 (in next group): when he got to school, he met his friend playing ball (steps on ball). and he joined in the playing. but during the playing, he injured himself. caregiver 2: from there, the nurse was called (steps on nurse). the nurse called ade, and he was taken to the clinic (steps on clinic). caregiver 3: at the clinic he was given an injection by the nurse, and he was admitted in the hospital, and stayed in the hospital, and slept (steps on bed). caregiver 4: and then his father was sent for (steps on picture of man), and using a keke-napep (steps on kekenapep, a three-wheeled rickshaw taxi) to go to the hospital and see ade. and they took him back home. caregiver 5: and when they got home, his mommy used the telephone (steps on phone) to call the aunty, to tell the aunty what has happened caregiver 6: when at home, his mother bought him banana (steps on banana) because he loves banana. caregiver 7: and his friend (steps on boy) brought him his homework (steps on books). damilola: okay! nice story! (fieldnotes, march 28, 2012) after showing them how to use the story tree, damilola again explained to the caregivers that this mat could help children to tell stories, be creative, build vocabulary, and have fun. my observations at these two trainings showed me how the sesame master trainers (folake and damilola) taught about interactive, play-based methods—and that caregivers seemed to agree with these approaches, and to global early childhood policies 27 understand how to use the materials in the ways that sesame workshop intended. after the caregiver training in lagos, i asked folake what changes she would hope to see in a school six months after they began using the sesame materials. she responded: i would expect that a child is given a better opportunity to explore… for example, when we are talking about the story tree, there are so many objects probably [children will see] for the first time. so that shows they add on to the wealth of vocabularies that they’ve learnt… the nigerian child is not forthcoming with the use of words…. the child has not been given an opportunity to express themselves. because most times, the teacher would not come to the level of the child. but with these kinds of materials, we see the teacher coming to the level of the child. then there’s lots of interactivity. (interview, february 14, 2012) folake’s expectations echoed those of proponents of play-based learning. she hoped that more interactive teaching methods, combined with more egalitarian teacher-student relationships (“the teacher coming to the level of the child”), would enable children to gain selfconfidence and learn more. as caregivers left the caregiver training, they seemed enthusiastic about using the materials in the literacy kit. as shown above, many of them, when asked, “how do children learn?” mentioned methods that align well with constructivist approaches—they spoke of the importance of play, using the five senses, exploration, interaction, and so on. the fact that caregivers raised these points suggests that playbased approaches were not foreign to them. they were not hearing about such approaches for the first time. as i accompanied sesame master trainers to observe caregivers training additional caregivers during step-down trainings, and using materials in classrooms, there was some evidence that play-based approaches were “trickling down.” for example, at a step-down training near abuja, we saw all the participants stepping on the story tree and telling a story together (fieldnotes, march 29, 2012). at a primary school outside abuja, we observed a caregiver leading a discussion with his peers about the best ways to motivate children to learn (fieldnotes, april 3, 2012). at an islamic school outside of lagos, young children (ages 3-4) were stepping on the story tree and telling short stories. one girl stepped on several different pictures as she said, “this is a farmer. he grows corn, banana, yam, apple, carrots, and tomatoes.” her teacher repeated her story and then invited the other students to “clap for her!” (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012). much more frequently, however, we observed caregivers using the materials in more formalistic ways. despite the fact that caregivers at the trainings seemed to understand and espouse play-based approaches, and seemed to be excited about using the materials, they struggled to implement such approaches in their classrooms. caregivers using sesame materials are caregivers using the materials? after sesame master trainers (including damilola and folake) completed the caregiver training, they visited educational sites to ensure that caregivers were using the materials effectively with children. as i accompanied them on site visits, one concern that emerged frequently was that the materials were not arriving at their intended classroom or not being used afterwards. folake explained to me, “sometimes maybe the head teacher will say, ‘oh, these materials are nice, i’ll take them home so my children can use them.’ and then when we go to the school, there are no materials in sight!” (interview, february 14, 2012). in underresourced contexts where many classrooms do 28 global education review 4(3) not have locks, fear of theft was high. indeed, in one of the preschools where sesame workshop provided a small television and a generator so that children could watch sesame square episodes (as part of a pilot study), thieves had stolen both. when they were replaced, a teacher began carrying them back and forth from his home every day (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012). some schools seemed hesitant to let the children handle the materials because they were worried the materials would get ruined. to avoid the loss or damage of materials, schools often kept the kits locked up in a headmaster’s office, where teachers could check them out (fieldnotes, march 22, 2012). at one school in abakaliki, we saw seven sesame literacy kits stacked in a back room next to boxes of discarded workbooks (fieldnotes, march 26, 2012). it appeared as though they had been forgotten. it seemed deeply ironic that the materials were sometimes considered so precious—because they were so rare—that children seldom got to use them. at other schools, however, we observed caregivers using some of the materials, such as the alphabet flashcards and the story tree. in the visits i accompanied, i never saw anyone using the puppets or the alphabet story quilt book. the reasons for this were unclear, although many of the class sizes may have been too large for children to be able to see the book or to play with the small paper puppets. the story tree and the alphabet flashcards were more popular, perhaps because they had larger pictures and were more durable. caregivers use play-based materials in formalistic ways in several classrooms, we observed teachers drilling the alphabet flashcards, by holding them up one at a time and having children chorally repeat the names of the letters and the objects. in one school outside lagos, folake and i observed an ngo staff member, mariela, visiting the school to use the sesame materials with children. we entered a classroom where approximately 40 children (ages 2-4) were sitting in small plastic chairs in rows. mariela was accompanied by another staff member from her ngo and there were three additional caregivers in the room who worked at the school. she began by showing the children the alphabet cards and using a call-and-response method to say the letters: mariela: here are some alphabet cards. do you like them? all children: yes! mariela: who can tell me what is on this card? a few children: a mariela: good, it’s the letter a. what is it, everybody? all children: letter a. mariela: how many letters do you see on this card? child: two mariela: that’s right, there’s capital letter a, and small letter a. there’s…? all children: capital letter a mariela: and there’s…? all children: small letter a. (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012) after this continued with a few letters, folake encouraged mariela to pass out the flashcards to the children. mariela told the children they were going to play the “abc wave,” a game where they sang the alphabet song, and each child lifted his/ her letter when he/she heard it. she passed out the cards (using two sets, since there were more than 26 children) and had children practice raising their cards. she started singing the alphabet song slowly, but no children raised their cards. mariela asked, “who has letter a?” the three caregivers were walking among the children, trying to find who had the letter a. one of the caregivers found him and lifted him up by the arm. when the boy stood up, three children around him also stood up. “no, no, no,” mariela said, “you sit down!” this continued through letter b and c until folake interrupted: global early childhood policies 29 folake: excuse me, we don’t want the aunties (i.e. caregivers) to probe them. the aunties shouldn’t help them (caregivers laugh). also i see a challenge that the children are different ages. some of them are 2, some of them are 3, some of them are 4. maybe we can divide them into groups? … also the class is too large, it should be divided into groups. okay, you can continue, but please, aunties, don’t help them. mariela: okay, children, let’s start. what letter did we stop with? caregivers: letter c! mariela (to caregivers): don’t say it, don’t say it! who has the letter c? (a caregiver goes to the boy with c and lifts him up by the arm). (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012) mariela, seeing the children’s confusion, tried to begin the activity again and explain it more clearly. the same confusion persisted for several minutes, with children unable to recognize their letters and many children standing whenever a caregiver told one to stand up. after a little while, folake recommended that the caregivers pass out crayons so the children could color the flashcards. each child received one crayon, and they began coloring, although it was difficult for some because there were only a couple of plastic tables. as the children colored, folake pulled mariela and the caregivers aside and asked them why they did not have enough tables for the children to color and write on. the caregivers pointed out several broken plastic tables in the corner of the room. folake again told them that the children needed to learn for themselves, so the caregivers should not always give them the answers (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012). after our visit, i asked folake about her observations. she said it was understandable that some of the children did not know their letters because they were very young, but she was also worried that the children were not going to learn their letters because the caregivers kept giving them the answers and the children were never given time to figure things out (interview, february 15, 2012). the fact that the caregivers in mariela’s classroom continually gave children the answers illustrates pedagogical approaches that may be more concerned with children getting the right answers than with children exploring, discovering, or acting on their own. even when the flashcards were distributed to children in this classroom, the caregivers were still the ones acting, as they found the child with the appropriate letter and lifted him or her up. an activity that was designed to be more playful and child-centered, was challenging for both the caregivers and the children. it is possible that the caregivers continually intervened because they felt they were being evaluated and wanted to make it look as though the children could identify letters. the fact that many children in this classroom stood up whenever mariela told one child to stand up also revealed the habits of the classroom. when the primary mode of instruction was for the teacher to ask a question and for all the children to answer in unison, children were unaccustomed to doing something separate from their peers. the choral response strategy may reflect a more communal way of learning—and may be the only type of instruction possible in a classroom with forty children—but it also makes it difficult to judge if individual children know the answers or if they are chiming along with their peers. this new type of activity was confusing for children. in many classrooms, we observed teachers using the story tree with the children, but in quite different ways than they used it during the caregiver training. the story tree was almost always hanging on the wall, either held up by tape or by two students holding the corners. the teacher would then use a ruler or pointer to point at different pictures. i recorded the following in a classroom in abakaliki, where 51 students (ages 4-6) responded in unison to each prompt by the teacher: 30 global education review 4(3) teacher: this is the story…? all students, chorally: tree. teacher: the story…? students: tree. teacher: what is this (points to banana)? students: banana teacher: what? students: banana teacher: very good. what is this (points to umbrella)? students: it is an umbrella teacher: again! students: it is an umbrella. teacher: what is this (points to yam)? students: it is a yam teacher: again! students: it is a yam. teacher: what alphabet starts from yam? students: yam starts from y. teacher: very good. again! students: yam starts from y. […] teacher: very good. clap for yourselves (students clap six times rhythmically)! (fieldnotes, march 27, 2012) during this activity (which lasted more than 10 minutes) some students responded more loudly than others, but most answered together. this teacher went a little beyond drilling names of pictures by asking what letters different words began with, and what certain objects were used for, but she primarily used the story tree to drill vocabulary. i observed this same activity, with slight variations, in many other classrooms. in a classroom near lagos, with approximately 75 students (ages 5-6), a teacher first pointed to different words and had children repeat them and then asked a few students to come up, one at a time, to say a sentence with one of the words. student 1: i like to go to school every day (points at school picture). teacher: yes, i like to go to school every day. clap for her! student 2: my mommy buys bananas for me every day (points at bananas). teacher: yes, my mommy buys bananas for me every day. clap for him! (fieldnotes, february 15, 2012). in such a large class, all students could not come up to the story tree, but some of the others could see what the child was pointing to, and the teacher repeated the child’s words so everyone could hear. in other classrooms, i observed teachers using the story tree to point to living things (fieldnotes, abakaliki, march 27, 2012), to talk about what letters objects begin with (fieldnotes, calabar, march 22, 2012), and to have children point to different foods (fieldnotes, abakaliki, march 22, 2012). while teachers differed slightly in how they used the story tree, i only saw one school with the story tree on the floor (described above). in all the other classrooms we visited, most students remained in their seats and named objects as the teacher pointed to them. teachers used the story tree in ways that reflected how they were accustomed to teaching. there were benefits to how they used it. in classrooms devoid of resources, where there were rarely educational posters, and teachers often relied on the blackboard and chalk to write words or draw pictures, the story tree offered bright, colorful drawings of 60 objects. it provided a broad list of vocabulary items, including foods, modes of transportation, people, and places. teachers used it somewhat interactively, in that they solicited names of objects from children, and sometimes asked individual children to say sentences or stories. many of the teachers were very enthusiastic, loudly calling out the object names and encouraging students who named objects correctly. nevertheless, the story tree was rarely used in the way that sesame workshop intended: to engage children in play and to help them develop oral language and story-building skills. it seemed surprising that even though caregivers seemed to, at least, somewhat understand the intended use of the story tree global early childhood policies 31 during caregiver trainings, they used it much differently in their classrooms. they took instructional tools that were intended to promote play and creativity, and used them in ways that were often teacher-centered and rotebased. why do formalistic teaching approaches persist? other researchers have observed how formalistic pedagogical approaches persist in many classrooms around the world, as described above—perhaps particularly in developing countries. scholars point to many reasons that such approaches persist, including structural reasons, teacher knowledge and attitudes, and cultural beliefs (schweisfurth, 2015; vavrus & bartlett, 2012). while observing classrooms in nigeria, several of these same reasons surfaced. first, as is obvious in the above descriptions, class sizes were very large in many of the schools we visited. it was not uncommon to see between 40 and 80 students in one room, even in nursery classes. large classes seemed to be more a result of limited space than of insufficient teaching staff. for example, one classroom in calabar had 150 students—75 were facing one direction, and 75 were facing the other direction, with teachers at both ends writing and teaching (separate lessons) from a blackboard. in the classroom where mariela taught (described above), there were 40 young children but three caregivers. it was unclear whether each caregiver was qualified to teach a class on her own, but it might have made sense to divide the children into smaller groups (as folake recommended) if there had been sufficient classroom space. when folake suggested that they take small groups outside, caregivers responded that it might be too hot, and they did not want to get the story tree dirty (interview, february 15, 2012). without smaller classes, it seemed unlikely that teachers would use the story tree in the ways that they were taught. second, caregivers’ formalistic use of sesame materials were likely influenced by their training, their knowledge and beliefs about how children learn, and their comfort (or lack thereof) using new materials and strategies. these various components of teachers’ “cultural politics of pedagogy” (vavrus, 2009, p. 303) were difficult to determine in this study, as it was a multi-sited ethnography with limited opportunities to conduct interviews or repeated observations of the same teacher. however, i gained some insights into teachers’ training, knowledge, and attitudes. for example, folake described some teachers’ habits and training: if as a teacher you’ve gone through the system, the way you were taught when you were in school is most likely to affect how you function as a teacher… [teachers] go to the university, [but] the time that is actually given for teaching methods is limited… so the teacher now goes back to use the lecture method. (interview, february 14, 2012) it is a common refrain from teacher educators around the world: teachers teach how they were taught (cuban, 1993; mtika & gates, 2010). particularly in a country where university systems and teachers colleges are often underresourced and of low quality (moland, 2015b), teachers may have limited pedagogical training—especially in early childhood education. the fact that many early childhood teachers in nigeria have limited training means that they also have limited experience with playbased approaches. as early childhood education access has expanded recently in nigeria, it is unlikely that most teachers themselves attended preschool. when they picture what classrooms should look like, they probably picture the typical primary or secondary school classroom in nigeria, where the teacher stands at the front of the classroom and copies definitions from the textbook onto the board (hardman et al., 2008). 32 global education review 4(3) sometimes, therefore, the sesame materials were confusing to educators. during the caregiver trainings, some had difficulty understanding the different activities they were supposed to do with the materials. they sometimes argued about what objects on the flashcards were, and seemed anxious about using the materials “correctly.” after returning to their classrooms, some were unaccustomed to using the same materials repeatedly to enable students to practice skills. for instance, when folake visited a school near lagos about two months after they had received the sesame materials, teachers told her, “oh, we finished the materials. the kids know them” (interview, february 15, 2012). if teachers were using the story tree to drill children on vocabulary—as we often saw—then it does seem possible that they could “finish” the materials after children memorized all the objects. this suggests that teachers did not understand how materials could be used in ongoing ways to support children’s storytelling, oral language development, and creativity. another point of confusion for teachers was where, exactly, in the timetable they were expected to use the sesame materials. schools had rigid schedules with different periods for different subjects. for example, in a headmaster’s office in calabar, the primary school schedule was written on the board. the school day (monday through friday) was divided into eight 35-minute class periods. the order and subjects of classes varied by day, but across the week, students had the following subjects (some two times, some five times): p.e., moral instruction, health education, math, english studies, basic science, agricultural science, fine art, handwriting, citizenship education, french/local language, social studies, craft, computer studies, music, tourism, and compound work (fieldnotes, march 23, 2012). most of these courses had textbooks, and teachers were expected to “cover” certain lessons on certain days. in several schools we visited, caregivers told us they worried that if they used sesame materials during one of the periods, they would get in trouble with their headmaster or the local education board. a few teachers suggested that they could speak to the education board and ask if the following year’s timetable could include a sesame period in the day, so they could use the materials. these teachers’ concerns echoed those of educators in other studies who worried that utilizing learner-centered pedagogies would prevent them from “finishing” the syllabus and thereby jeopardize their students’ potential success on exams (mtika & gates, 2010; vavrus & bartlett, 2012). it is possible that these various points of confusion led teachers to avoid using materials at all or to use them in formalistic ways. it is also possible that they deliberately chose to use the materials in ways that they believed constituted good teaching, or in ways they believed were best for their schools and students. some educators may have also been concerned about pushback from other teachers. for example, participants at the abuja caregiver training raised concerns that their colleagues (whom they were to train in step-down trainings) might not be open to using the sesame materials. one explained that she worked with teachers in a military school who were very “strict and rigid” and probably would not want to do the activities. another said that the teachers at his school were older and would not want to use new materials. these concerns echo observations in other studies that teachers may hesitate to use learnercentered pedagogies when the school system has a “deep-seated pedagogical orientation” that favors teacher-centered approaches (mtika & gates, 2010, p. 400). teachers who attempt unconventional approaches may be seen to lack competency or authority (vavrus & bartlett, 2012). global early childhood policies 33 conclusion while some scholars raise concerns about a global educational reform movement that advocates more accountability-based, standardized education reforms (sahlberg, 2014), this article demonstrates how international organizations are also disseminating and promoting constructivist, play-based pedagogical approaches. sesame workshop, via its nigerian staff members, trained caregivers and distributed materials that supported play-based learning in early childhood settings. however, in the vast majority of cases, nigerian caregivers did not use the materials in their classrooms in the ways that sesame intended. structural factors, such as large class sizes, limited space, and rigid school timetables made it logistically difficult for caregivers to use the materials in interactive ways. teachers’ limited training in play-based early childhood pedagogies, as well as their prior experiences and beliefs about how children learn, sometimes led them to use sesame materials in formalistic, rote-based ways. their activities aligned more closely to a “skilling” approach to early childhood education than to a “liberal humanist” approach that sesame may have intended (fuller, 2007). these findings echo those of other scholars who explore how global pedagogical trends are “taken up” (or not) in local classrooms (brodie, lelliott, & davis, 2002; vavrus & bartlett, 2012). on one hand, the disconnect between sesame workshop’s intention and the way materials were used could be interpreted as a failure to introduce more play-based approaches. on the other hand, the fact that teachers used the materials in ways that made sense in their local settings can be seen as evidence of teachers’ resourcefulness and their capacity to recognize the logistical limitations of constructivist approaches—and to adjust accordingly. while most teachers did not use the materials in the ways that sesame workshop intended, they did use them in ways that were somewhat more interactive and learner-centered than common pedagogical approaches in nigeria. for instance, the story tree and alphabet flashcards provided bright pictures of dozens of objects that students would not have seen otherwise, offering more visual cues for children learning vocabulary. when teachers invited individual children to come up to the story tree and say sentences or short stories, this fostered student participation and creativity (albeit only for a few children). these could be seen as examples of “contingent constructivism” (vavrus, 2009) or perhaps “context-appropriate play-based approaches”—wherein teachers utilized somewhat more interactive pedagogies that worked within the constraints of their classrooms. on a continuum of learner-centered approaches (schweisfurth, 2015), teachers’ actions were slightly more learner-centered than typical classroom activities, even if they were not as interactive and play-based as sesame workshop intended. the question of what kinds of pedagogies are culturally appropriate—as compared to questions about which pedagogies are logistically possible—is a more difficult one to answer. current pedagogical practices in nigeria are heavily influenced by british educational policies during colonial rule (hardman et al., 2008), and while some scholars advocate reintroducing “traditional african modes” of education (omolewa, 2007), there is limited consensus on what those would look like. moreover, there is a history in nigeria and other countries of people resisting “traditional” education approaches because they believe “western” education is necessary for their children’s economic prospects (omolewa, 2006; zimmerman, 2006). the question of cultural sensitivity connects to questions about what, exactly, is being imported by international organizations. current initiatives to promote play-based pedagogical approaches could be seen as a western imposition, or as an attempted 34 global education review 4(3) corrective to earlier colonial (rote-based) impositions. the fact that some nigerians (i.e. those who worked for sesame workshop) were proponents of play-based pedagogical approaches complicates questions of what is imported—although their elite status and previous experience working for international organizations may distance them from the majority of nigerian educators. amidst these questions, scholars must continue to examine what agency local educators have in adapting or resisting global educational reforms to be relevant in their own contexts. when teachers resist pedagogical reforms such as learnercentered approaches, they reveal the limitations of applying policy and practice from one context into another, even when attempts are made to address cultural considerations. what do the challenges and debates around learner-centered pedagogy mean for early childhood education settings? many scholars and educators believe that learnercentered pedagogy and play-based approaches are particularly important for young children (bodrova, 2008; fuller, 2007; lobman & ryan, 2007). in studies about secondary teachers hesitating to adopt learner-centered approaches, one concern that such teachers raise is that their students are not comfortable with learnercentered approaches (mtika & gates, 2010; vavrus, 2009). indeed, if such students have been educated in classrooms since preschool where formalistic, teacher-centered approaches pervade, learner-centered pedagogies will seem unfamiliar and discomfiting. this provides a possible rationale for including more play-based, exploratory approaches at the early childhood level, if students are to become accustomed to classroom participation and knowledge production that are more learner-centered. some researchers recommend major reforms that will make learner-centered pedagogy more likely to take root in subsaharan african countries, such as changing examinations to be more focused on problem solving than on rote memorization, increasing teacher training, reducing class sizes, reducing the number of subjects required in the national curriculum, and so on (mtika & gates, 2010). these suggestions, while promising, will require significant cultural changes and will take time. in the meantime, working to make early childhood education settings more learnercentered may be a way to start changing teachers’ and children’s orientations towards learning from the beginning of the educational track. scholars who believe that there are universal stages that all children go through, and that educational approaches must be “developmentally appropriate” to these stages, may argue that interactive, play-based pedagogies must be used in early childhood settings—regardless of the cultural context (copple & bredekamp, 2010). advocates of cross-cultural or reconceptualist approaches to early childhood education deny that there is one developmentally appropriate way to teach young children, but would also likely reject formalistic teaching practices as beneficial for all children (cannella et al., 2007). any approach that is brought into a new context needs to be adjusted to reflect local conceptualizations of knowledge production, childhood, and pedagogy. organizations such as sesame workshop may need to explore “context-appropriate play-based approaches” that compromise between global beliefs about the best ways young children learn, yet also take cultural contexts into consideration. notes 1. i use the terms “educator,” “teacher,” and “caregiver” synonymously. sesame workshop uses the term “caregiver” to be inclusive of parents, ngo workers, and other professionals who work with children. most of the caregivers i observed were teachers. global early childhood policies 35 2. the (kibria 2005) and (kibria 2006) are cited in cole and lee’s (2016) chapter as “unpublished manuscripts.” 3. due to security concerns, my time in kano was cut short; 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(2006). innocents abroad: american teachers in the american century. cambridge: harvard univ. press. about the author naomi a. moland, phd, is a professorial lecturer in the school of international service at american university. her research and teaching focus on themes of globalization, multiculturalism, education, and media. mathematics from the beginning 57 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: piper, benjamin, sitabkhan, yasmin & nderu, evangeline (2018). mathematics from the beginning: evaluating the tayari pre-primary program’s impact on early mathematic skills. global education review, 5 (3), 57-81. mathematics from the beginning: evaluating the tayari preprimary program’s impact on early mathematics skills benjamin piper rti international yasmin sitabkhan rti international evangeline nderu rti international abstract given the dearth of research on early numeracy interventions in lowand middle-income countries, this paper presents the instructional methodology and impact results of the tayari program. tayari is a preprimary intervention in kenya (2014–2019) that prepares children aged four and five for entry into primary school by providing materials for students, training for teachers, and continuous in-classroom support. the tayari methodology was built on the kenyan government’s preprimary syllabus to produce instruction that was developmentally sequenced, linked to out-of-school experiences, and supportive of children’s number sense. tayari was evaluated using a randomized controlled trial (rct) and collection of longitudinal data from 2,957 children in treatment and control schools at three time points. pupil assessment items were drawn from a growing body of research on preprimary numeracy in developing contexts, plus instruments and techniques from the measuring early learning and quality outcomes (melqo) program (unesco, unicef, brookings institution, & world bank group, 2017). the impact evaluation of the longitudinal rct results showed statistically significant effects in the numeracy tasks of producing sets, identifying numbers, and naming shapes, while revealing no initial effects in the areas of oral and mental addition. we present recommendations for tayari’s improvement in terms of mathematics instruction, as well as preprimary policy implications for kenya and similar contexts. keywords mathematics, early childhood, evaluation, numeracy, instruction, sub-saharan africa, tayari introduction there is widespread consensus among researchers and practitioners that mathematical literacy is an essential step toward productive participation in society and economic well-being _______________________________ corresponding author: dr. benjamin piper, rti international, 5th floor, the westwood, vale close, off ring road parklands, po box 1181-00621 village market, nairobi, kenya email: bpiper@rti.org mailto:bpiper@rti.org 58 global education review 5(3) (foster, 2010; hanushek & woessmann, 2008; wiest, higgins, & frost, 2007). in addition, there is increasing evidence that mathematical literacy develops very early in life, and early interventions are crucial to support the development of more sophisticated mathematics (duncan et al., 2007; duncan & magnuson, 2011; siegler et al., 2012). despite this awareness, there is a lack of rigorous research from sub-saharan africa about what types of instruction work to build mathematical knowledge with preprimary children. instead, much of the evidence we have on effective teaching practices in preprimary settings comes from western and asian countries. although the number of preprimary mathematics interventions in sub-saharan africa is growing, few describe instructional practices in sufficient detail to add to our collective knowledge of best practices. in this study, we report on the design and impact of the tayari program, a multiyear intervention intended to improve numeracy and literacy outcomes of 4and 5-year-olds. the study was conducted in four counties and informal settlements in kenya. the tayari program prepared carefully sequenced and developmentally appropriate materials for classrooms, including teachers’ guides with daily scaffolded lessons and an accompanying student book. professional development was provided to teachers on how to use the materials, including guidance on incorporating locally available resources into mathematics lessons. the researchers followed up the face-to-face professional development with in-classroom support provided by government officers supporting early childhood development and education (ecde). the program continues to be implemented through government structures at the county level, so if tayari is determined to be highly effective, it will be much more likely that the impacts experienced in tayari can be scaled up (gove et al., 2017). literature review few studies have focused on preprimary mathematics in sub-saharan african countries (amente et al., 2013; hembold, 2014; martinez, naudeau, & pereira, 2013). martinez and colleagues (2013) evaluated an early childhood program developed and implemented by save the children in mozambique. the program employed a community-based model in which communities were given the responsibility to build and staff early learning centers, with support from save the children. as part of this support, community volunteers were provided with classroom materials, training, and followup support to implement an instructional program. numeracy activities consisted of a daily 25-minute math circle, which included “activities to teach children numbers, shapes, time, and dates” (martinez et al., 2013, p. 15). the authors reported that the math activities were aimed at building problem-solving skills and exposing children to foundational math skills. the study used an rct, with 30 schools in the treatment group and 47 schools in the control group. surveys and direct child assessments were administered through a household survey, in addition, for a subsample of students, grade 1 teachers were asked to fill out an observational checklist. the observational checklist revealed that children who attended a community center scored significantly higher on the cognitive development and language measures than children who did not attend a community center, with an average score increase of 12.1 points. there were also significant increases in subskills: for example, children who attended a community center were rated higher by teachers in the skills of one-toone correspondence, counting to 20, and comparing and contrasting numbers than children who did not attend a community center. a direct child assessment administered during the household survey showed that children in the treatment group had scores on problemmathematics from the beginning 59 solving tasks that were 6.4 percentage points higher on average than for the control group. however, no information was reported about the nature of the problem-solving tasks. while the study by martinez and colleagues contributed to the evidence base of the positive short-term effects of an early childhood numeracy program, it did not detail the instructional practices sufficiently to explain how children’s mathematical development was fostered. the authors indicated that children engaged in activities with objects, and that instruction emphasized problem solving, but did not supply enough information to contribute to overall knowledge of best practices in subsaharan african preprimary mathematics classrooms. to shed more light on mathematics instructional practices from the global south, we turned to two preprimary math studies outside of sub-saharan africa. opel, zaman, khanom, and aboud (2012) and näslund-hadley, parker, and hernández-agramonte (2014) both adapted a preprimary math program developed in the us, called big math for little kids (lewis presser, clements, ginsburg, & ertle, 2015). opel et al. (2012) focused on adapting activities from the program and implementing them in nine schools in bangladesh. näslund-hadley and colleagues (2014) adapted the same program in paraguay, using audio to deliver the lessons. both programs showed gains in learning (2.68 standard deviations [sd] in bangladesh, 0.16 sd in paraguay). because both interventions relied on a program that was already established and documented in the literature, we can learn from the instructional methodology that was used to produce the learning gains. for example, opel et al. (2012) described how activities were created that could be implemented in either small groups or larger groups. children were actively encouraged to manipulate objects. the authors described how “one child would make a sequential pattern with colored blocks or foam shapes, and the partner would state the rule and continue the pattern” (opel et al., 2012, p. 106). the authors also detailed how the instruction in treatment schools differed from instruction in control classrooms. more information like that detailed in the studies above is needed from sub-saharan africa to be able to compile best practices in preprimary mathematics. while there is no available published evidence on the impact of ecde programs in numeracy in kenya, a recent study investigated the causal impact of an early primary education program called the primary math and reading (primr) initiative on numeracy outcomes, as measured by the early grade mathematics assessment (egma). the primr program was similar to tayari in that it was implemented using government officers, it focused on practical skills that teachers could utilize, and it supported teachers with teachers’ guides. the impact of primr was larger in grade 2 than in grade 1, with somewhat larger impacts on a procedural index of numeracy outcomes than a conceptual index (piper, ralaingita, akach, & king, 2016). this program was scaled up nationally through the primary education development (priede) program (2015–2019), funded by the global partnership for education. the fact that the impacts of primr were larger in grade 2 than in grade 1 is interesting, but somewhat discouraging for the potential impact of tayari on ecde numeracy outcomes. similarly, the primr results informed tayari’s emphasis on conceptual skills rather than simple procedural impacts on computation, but suggested that the challenge for tayari would be substantial. ecde background in kenya kenya’s basic education act (republic of kenya, 2013) established that basic education in kenya would include two years of preprimary education. the kenyan government’s curriculum 60 global education review 5(3) and education framework includes an expectation for all children to have access to preprimary education. the kenyan constitution (republic of kenya, 2010) gave counties in kenya the mandate to manage preprimary education. county governments manage preprimary education by hiring teachers, providing educational materials, and making capital investments in the preprimary subsector. on the other hand, kenya’s national government oversees preprimary education policy, particularly through the recently created ecde directorate. counties are mandated to adapt the existing ecde policy to suit their local situation, although research suggests that this is relatively difficult for counties to do without the necessary technical expertise required to do so (piper, merseth, & ngaruiya, 2018). the national government has been expanding its role in creating the policy environment for effective ecde interventions in the country. the new ecde directorate has managed the development of a new ecde policy, which awaits an official launch by the government after the rollout of a new preprimary and primary curriculum in early 2018. this policy will ensure that the key ministries that are assigned to various ecde functions are familiar with their role in ecde and reduce overlap of provision of services. the policy will also guide counties in the specific aspects of preprimary education service delivery (ministry of education [moe], 2017). recent statistics have shown that the demand in kenya for preprimary education has grown to one of the highest rates in sub-saharan africa. the overall gross enrollment ratio for early childhood education increased from 69.4% in 2012 to 76.6% in 2016, while the net enrollment ratio increased from 66.9% in 2013 to 74.9% in 2016 (republic of kenya, 2017). kenya provides ecde services through a combination of private, public, and low-cost private providers, increasing the complicated task of managing the diverse sector, but allowing a more flexible approach that meets the needs of local communities. note that low-cost private schools are referred to as alternative provision of basic education and training (apbet) institutions in kenya. although kenya’s enrollment rates have been below the recommended sustainable development goal of 80%, the recent increase in enrollment may partially be attributed to the increasing economic pressure on families, which results in all of a household’s caregivers having to work, therefore compelling them to seek child care services. tayari preprimary program in kenya the tayari program is structured to provide lowcost implementation solutions to the kenyan national and county governments, with the explicit goal of improving preprimary quality, to increase school readiness. school readiness refers to a holistic measure of a child’s ability to successfully learn in primary school. tayari initially was funded by the children’s investment fund foundation (ciff) from 2014 to 2018, and recently was extended to 2019 by ciff. the program is a collaboration among the kenyan ministry of education, technical ecde officers from four counties chosen by the moe for tayari implementation, the ministry of health teams in those four counties, the low-cost private school providers randomly selected by the program (zuilkowski, piper, ong’ele, & kiminza, 2017), and rti international, which has provided technical support to the program. as indicated above, tayari is a preprimary program that supports teachers and 4and 5year-old children. the kenyan curriculum calls these classes pre-primary 1 (pp1) and preprimary 2 (pp2), respectively. the tayari program developed learning materials for both pp1 and pp2, and the implementation of the program in 2016 and 2017 covered both pp1 and pp2 classrooms. in addition to undergoing an external evaluation, tayari also collected mathematics from the beginning 61 longitudinal data from 2,957 children from one of three tayari treatment conditions and the corresponding control schools. the three treatment groups in the tayari program are (1) training & support; (2) training & support + books/teachers’ guides; and (3) training & support + books/teachers’ guides + health. the longitudinal study focused on the second treatment group, which was the intervention that was found during the external evaluation to be most effective (african population and health research center [aphrc], 2018). the advantage of the design of the tayari longitudinal study was that it allowed for an analysis of the impact of tayari through the entire course of the program, as the same children’s baseline scores were drawn from the beginning of their pp1 year, their midpoint scores were drawn from the end of their pp1 year, and their final scores were drawn from the end of their pp2 year. the impacts identified in this paper, then, allow for an analysis of the overall impact of tayari on numeracy learning outcomes from pp1 to pp2. starting in 2015, the tayari technical team worked with teams from the moe, counties, and the government’s kenya institute of curriculum development (kicd) to ensure that the tayari materials and approaches followed the kicd curriculum. this collaboration resulted in the materials used in 2016 and 2017—and evaluated indirectly in this study—being approved by kicd. in addition, the tayari technical design ensured that the training of the ecde officers and support to teachers, both face-to-face inservice teacher professional development and classroom-based coaching support, was provided by county-level education officers—in other words, government employees earning salaries from the county level. to summarize, the training materials, coaching system, teachers’ guides, and learning materials developed for the tayari program were developed by the kicd, moe, and county teams, with technical support from rti. aphrc’s external evaluation results suggested meaningful impact on school readiness in two of the three treatment groups (aphrc, 2018). whereas the program was externally evaluated using a cross-sectional differences-in-differences identification strategy, ciff and the moe also decided to capture a longitudinal subsample of one of the treatment groups, not only to understand whether the program was working, but also to see how skills transitioned within children over time. we present the results of the within-child longitudinal study below. tayari numeracy program tayari has supported several school subjects, according to the kenyan curriculum: language, numeracy, life skills, and social skills. the aphrc evaluations also included a measure of overall school readiness encompassing a range of literacy, numeracy, socioemotional, and executive-function skills (aphrc, 2018). the longitudinal study evaluation expanded beyond the external evaluation in several ways, including incorporating additional numeracy items that allowed for a more detailed analysis of the impact of tayari on children’s numeracy skills. the analysis was drawn from six separate numeracy tasks and an overall numeracy index score. the developers of the tayari numeracy materials followed several core principles. first, all lessons were structured in such a way as to encourage active student participation. second, the lessons were sequenced using a spiral curriculum approach. the spiral approach covers mathematical concepts over time, as compared with a “blocked” approach, where content is presented in chunks (pashler et al., 2007). if implemented correctly, a spiral approach mirrors children’s natural learning styles by frequently revisiting core concepts (son & simon, 2012). finally, tayari lessons focused on giving students opportunities to build conceptual understanding, and attempted to 62 global education review 5(3) move away from rote learning and memorization. this is relevant given the finding that the kenya primr study showed larger impacts on procedural than on conceptual skills (piper, ralaingita et al., 2016). to encourage active participation by students, often in environments with large class sizes and limited physical resources, numeracy lessons were designed in such a way as to enable teachers to facilitate small-group work during every lesson. each lesson in the teachers’ guide was divided into an introductory section; a main activity—consisting of a whole-group and a small-group section; and the conclusion of the lesson, as seen in figure 1. the main task always consisted of one activity, which the teacher first modeled and explained during the whole-class section. this same activity was then carried out by students in small groups, with the teacher providing support as needed to the groups. almost all small-group activities used counters or other locally available materials, and efforts were made during activity design to minimize the diversity of resources, to ease the burden on the teacher of collecting many different manipulatives and other supplies. figure 1. a pp2 tayari lesson for 5-year-olds mathematics from the beginning 63 as described earlier, tayari mathematics lessons were designed using a scope and sequence developed by the moe, kicd, and rti team, based on the spiral approach. key concepts such as number quantity and number recognition were integrated into specific activities, creating a core set of activities. these activities were then repeated throughout the year, with increasing complexity, and based on established developmental progressions. in addition, some concepts were identified for which additional exposure would benefit the children more. for example, counting and shape identification were included as part of daily routines several times a week, given their essential contribution to key numeracy skills. in this way, children were exposed to these skills over time. the annex to this paper contains one week’s worth of lesson plans from the teachers’ guide for the tayari pp2 numeracy program. the lessons were delivered at a rate of one page per day, and focused on the particular behaviors that the tayari teachers had learned to model and practice during their professional development (piper, sitabkhan, mejia, & betts, 2017). the tayari lessons presented in the annex show how the simple activities progressed over time, and the simplicity of the teachers’ materials, such that the lessons both were easy to implement and fostered the development of mathematical skills in children. beyond lesson structure and sequencing, the third core principle of the tayari design aimed to change the environment of the early math classroom from memorizing numbers and procedures, to developing conceptual understanding of foundational topics. number identification, for example, occurred alongside references to the quantity of the number, and often involved comparisons between quantities. addition and subtraction did not use the formal symbols or number sentences, but instead focused on the concepts of putting together and taking away. with shape identification, children observed shapes in different sizes and orientations, and were asked to compare features of the shapes. all of these activities emphasized the development of conceptual understanding rather than memorization. a typical tayari numeracy classroom would have somewhat less procedural practice and significantly more conceptual activities. research questions given the dearth of research on the impact of ecde programs on numeracy outcomes, and given the unique opportunity that the tayari ecde longitudinal study offered, we asked the following research questions: rq1: what is the impact of tayari on preprimary numeracy outcomes? rq2: does the impact of tayari differ by preprimary numeracy task? rq3: do numeracy skills at baseline predict overall school readiness? rq4: if tayari does have numeracy effects, do they persist in grade 1? tayari research design overall design tayari was designed as an impact evaluation, allowing for causal estimates of the impact of tayari’s interventions on school readiness. as indicated earlier, the data presented here are from the longitudinal study within tayari, which followed children from pp1 through the end of pp2; and came specifically from the portion of tayari that was implementing the second treatment, which was shown by the aphrc external evaluator to be the most effective of the three overall tayari treatment groups (aphrc, 2018). tayari, in collaboration with the external evaluator, used the data from the four tayari counties, which had been chosen by the moe, to create comparison groups. all of the zones in each of the counties were eligible for selection into the study, and then assignment into the various treatment groups. the zones 64 global education review 5(3) were randomly selected and selected zones were randomly assigned to the treatment groups or the control group. all of the schools within each zone received the same treatment. this approach had the advantage of being more relevant to the actual situation in countries like kenya, where one zone is staffed by one ecde officer, such that having them all receive the same treatment was more likely to mirror what would occur at a larger scale than would assigning treatments to individual schools. the impact of this research design, statistically, was that it required the standard errors for the impacts to account for the clustering design, thereby decreasing the likelihood that statistically significant effects could be identified. power calculations for the design of tayari’s impact evaluation used assumptions derived from the primr program that was implemented in kenya before tayari (piper, kwayumba, oyanga, & oyagi, 2018). to have a minimum detectable effect size of 0.2 sd, we assumed power of 80%, an ecde center-level intra-class correlation of 0.249, proportion of variation explained by the ecde center covariance of 0.50, 10 pupils for pp1, and a significance level of 0.05. as we show below, some of these assumptions did not hold, and the tools used in tayari were slightly noisier than the early grade reading assessment (egra) and egma tools that preceded it in primr. the research team for the longitudinal study selected a total of 176 schools for the treatment and control groups, and targeted 10 pupils in both pp1 and pp2 (i.e., 20 pupils per school) in the initial data collection in january 2016. if there were more than 10 pupils in pp1 in those ecde centers, the researchers used systematic random sampling to select the pupils for the assessment, which was done separately for boys and girls. evaluators assessed 3,257 children for the baseline assessment, found 2,891 of them in the october 2016 midterm assessment, and ultimately assessed 2,647 of the original 3,257 children during the october 2017 final assessment, as table 1 shows. this resulted in an 18.7% overall attrition rate, which is significantly lower than in previous research in kenya (piper, king, & mugenda, 2016). the attrition was highest in the peri-urban or slum areas of nairobi served largely by apbet schools, which is unsurprising given the transient nature of those areas traditionally. table 1. tayari longitudinal study: attrition results county number of pupils at each evaluation point percentage attrition baseline (jan 2016) midterm (oct 2016) final (oct 2017) control treatment total control treatment total control treat ment total control treatment total laikipia 339 522 861 283 462 745 267 417 684 21.2 20.1 20.6 nairobi 169 211 380 146 179 325 134 163 297 20.7 22.7 21.8 nairobi apbet 334 232 566 262 202 464 240 184 424 28.1 20.7 25.1 siaya 436 319 755 410 297 707 371 270 641 14.9 15.4 15.1 uasin gishu 371 324 695 346 304 650 319 282 601 14.0 13.0 13.5 total 1,649 1,608 3,257 1,447 1,444 2,891 1,331 1,316 2,647 19.3 17.5 18.7 source: piper, kwayumba et al., 2018. mathematics from the beginning 65 tayari study instruments the tayari study included several research tools. relevant to this study are the direct assessment tool, taken by the pupils in a one-on-one assessment with an experienced assessor; and the pupil background questionnaire, which focused primarily on indicators of socioeconomic status. this tool was also administered in a one-on-one discussion. the direct assessment tool was derived from the monitoring early learning and quality outcomes (melqo) tool, which is a recent preprimary assessment tool used in several countries (unesco et al., 2017). for the numeracy area, table 2 presents the numeracy assessments analyzed in this study. for the longitudinal assessments, at all three time points, assessors were selected from a database of experienced assessors who had worked in kenya with rti on egra, egma, and tayari assessments since 2010. assessors were trained for five days, with the numeracy portion of the assessment taking up a significant amount of that training period. assessors piloted the tools in schools in nairobi during the training period, and underwent interrater reliability (irr) assessments. the average irr score for the assessors who undertook the baseline tayari assessment was 96.5%; at midterm, 96.0%; and at the final assessment, 97.0%. data were collected using the rtideveloped tangerine® open-source software application on tablets. data were uploaded from the field daily so that quality control for missing data could be undertaken right away. this was particularly important for the longitudinal study, as it was essential that each pupil assessed in previous rounds also be found during the final study in october 2017. following individual pupils was particularly complicated due to the national elections that were held in august and table 2. numeracy assessment items instrument task description number of items sample task shape naming percentage of shapes correctly identified 3 child was shown different shapes and asked, “can you point to three items that look like a circle?” number identification percentage of numbers correctly identified 20 child was shown numerals 1–10 out of order, then 11–20 out of order, and asked to identify each numeral. producing a set percentage of sets of bottle tops correctly produced 3 child was told, “now we’ll play a game with bottle tops. please give me three bottle tops.” quantity discrimination percentage of quantities correctly discriminated 3 child was asked, “which number is bigger? 8 or 5?” mental addition and subtraction percentage of mental addition and subtraction items correctly solved 2 child was asked, “if you have three balls, and i give you four more balls, how many balls will you have all together?” oral addition and subtraction percentage of oral addition and subtraction items correctly solved 5 child was asked, “if you add 1 and 2, what number do you get?” 66 global education review 5(3) october 2017, as they caused a significant disruption to learning time, and many children were not found in the schools in which they were initially assessed due to the election uncertainty. the attrition rate of 18.7% suggests that tayari’s identification efforts were mostly successful, but the reality is that many of the children who were counted as being supported by tayari had limited exposure to the treatment. however, we present the intent-to-treat impacts in this paper, as they represented the most conservative estimate of tayari’s effects. we conducted reliability analyses of the numeracy assessment tasks presented below to determine internal consistency. simple calculations showed correlations between each of the numeracy tasks, and overall cronbach’s alpha scores of 0.75 and 0.77 for the baseline and final tayari assessments, respectively (kwayumba & piper, 2016; piper, kwayumba et al., 2018). evaluation design and analysis in this section we describe the identification strategy that we used to evaluate tayari’s impact on numeracy outcomes. as shown above, a total of 2,647 students were assessed at each of the three data points for tayari. of these, 930 began in pp1, and therefore were the students on which we undertook most of the analyses, as they were expected to complete the two years of tayari’s intervention. the randomization process and longitudinal nature of this study made the identification strategy simple. each child had numeracy outcomes at three data points. the simplest analysis that we present takes the numeracy outcomes in january 2016 and measures the gains in those outcomes between the baseline and the final assessment in october 2017. the impact evaluation used a simple ordinary least squares (ols) regression model to compare whether there were statistically significant differences between treatment and control children on those gains in numeracy outcomes. the analyses were done in stata using the svy suite of commands. this ensured that the estimates provided were from the weighted sample and therefore would be externally valid to the four counties and apbet settings in which tayari is being implemented. this approach also accounted for the nested nature of the tayari design, and the fact that schools were clustered in zones that were supported by specific ecde officers and where teachers were trained at zonal sites. to obtain a simple measure of numeracy impacts, and drawing from previous research on numeracy in kenya (piper, ralaingita et al., 2016), we created a tayari numeracy index. this index was simply the average of the six numeracy measures presented in table 2 above, which simplified the analysis somewhat. as described above, the basic model fit to provide these impacts was a simple comparison between treatment and control on the gains in the individual items between january 2016 and october 2017, or on the overall index. given that the measures adopted from the melqo tool proved to be somewhat more unsteady than the egra and egma measures before them, and that there were severe ceiling effects to some of the measures, judging by the high scores at the final assessment, we had to include another model with control variables to increase precision. the model with controls included fixed effects for county, since the attrition varied greatly by county, as did learning outcomes. the control model also included a dichotomous variable that differentiated children who spoke the local language of the county within their household from those who spoke either english or kiswahili. this variable had little impact on numeracy outcomes, but since it was included as a key variable for the literacy and overall assessment measures presented in the larger mathematics from the beginning 67 tayari impact analysis, we added it to the longitudinal regression model (piper, kwayumba et al., 2018). findings our first research question investigated whether the tayari program had an impact on numeracy outcomes. we found that tayari improved numeracy outcomes by 0.31 sd in the control model (p-value < .05) and by 0.29 sd in the base model (p-value .07); see table 3. these findings suggest that increased precision is needed for the tayari impact analysis, which was designed to be able to identify a 0.2 sd minimum detectable effect size. the lack of statistical significance in the 0.29 sd effect size in the base model is evidence of the volatility of the tayari melqo-derived measure and also a reason to utilize a model with control variables. a 0.31 sd impact of tayari is substantial. however, the overall impact of tayari did not change between the midterm and final assessments, as the midterm report showed a 0.31 sd impact on pp1 at the october 2016 midterm assessment (kwayumba, piper, oyanga, & oyagi, 2017). our second research question examined whether the impact of tayari differed by preprimary numeracy task. when we used the model with controls, we found statistically significant impacts of 0.25 sd for number identification (p-value < .05), 0.34 sd for producing a set (p-value < .01), and 0.38 sd for shape naming (p-value < .01). we found a marginally statistically significant positive impact of 0.20 sd for quantity discrimination (p-value .07), a marginally statistically significant negative impact of –0.14 sd on mental addition and subtraction (p-value .08), and no impact on oral addition (p-value .73). it appears that the overall tayari index impact masked wide ranges of impacts on learning outcomes in the tayari numeracy program. table 3. impact of tayari on numeracy in base model without controls, and on model with controls measure base model model with controls tayari impact on percentage correct pvalue statistical significance effect size tayari impact on percentage correct pvalue statistical significance effect size tayari numeracy index 5.84 .07 ~ 0.29 6.26 .03 * 0.31 number identification 6.51 .04 * 0.23 6.87 .04 * 0.25 producing a set 12.65 .01 * 0.34 12.63 .003 ** 0.34 shape naming 14.91 .06 ~ 0.32 17.52 .004 ** 0.38 oral addition –1.53 .77 –0.04 –1.82 .73 –0.05 quantity discrimination 7.75 .07 ~ 0.19 6.78 .07 ~ 0.16 mental addition and subtraction –4.95 .07 ~ –0.16 –4.27 .08 ~ –0.14 68 global education review 5(3) when we compared the results of the base model and the control model, we found somewhat increased precision for the overall numeracy index result and the shape naming task, but few changes in the effect size of the impacts, with the control model actually decreasing the effect size of the quantity discrimination item. our third research question asked whether baseline numeracy skills predicted school readiness. we found that the mean numeracy index score at the baseline was 25.6% correct and that initial numeracy skills accounted for 21.0% of the variation in overall school readiness two years later. it mattered much more for the children in control schools, as their baseline school readiness score accounted for 26.7% of the variation in their final school readiness results, as opposed to 11.7% for children randomly assigned to treatment ecde centers. our fourth research question examined the larger tayari longitudinal data set to investigate whether the tayari numeracy effect persisted among children who were exposed to tayari for only one year, and then moved on to primary school. table 4 presents the results of these analyses. the first row is the impact of the tayari numeracy program on the gains in the numeracy results for pupils who began in pp2 in 2016, most of whom would have been in grade 1 in 2017, when the final assessment was conducted. the results show that there was no statistically significant impact of tayari on these children’s numeracy skills, either for the base model (p-value .18) or for the model with controls (p-value 0.18). the next row, for the children who were in combined classrooms (i.e., with both pp1 and pp2 children) in 2016 showed some positive results. in other words, these children began their tayari intervention in 2016 in classrooms that had some pp1 and some pp2 children in them, so some of these children would have received two years of tayari numeracy interventions. table 4 shows that, while the 0.28 sd effect size in the base model was not statistically significant (p-value .10), a similar 0.28 sd effect size was significant in the model with controls (p-value .03), and that the tayari program increased their gains in the tayari index by 6.7 percentage points. discussion the tayari impact evaluation (aphrc, 2018) showed whether tayari had an impact on a range of school readiness skills, and the longitudinal study of tayari examined the pathways of growth for children in an expanded number of skills (piper, kwayumba et al., 2018). the analyses presented in the findings section above examined with specificity the impact of tayari on an expanded numeracy index. we found that tayari improved numeracy index results by 0.31 sd table 4. impact of tayari on numeracy for children who began 2016 in either pp2 or in a combined classroom in base model without controls, and in model with controls base model model with controls cohort tayari impact (percentage points) pvalue statistical significance effect size tayari impact (percentage points) p-value statistical significance effect size pp2 in 2016 4.27 .18 — 0.20 3.30 .18 — 0.16 combined in 2016 6.56 .10 — 0.28 6.70 .03 * 0.28 mathematics from the beginning 69 for children who began in pp1 and would have been eligible to receive two years of tayari interventions. we also found no difference in the magnitude (0.31 sd) of the impact of tayari for those who received two years of the intervention (kwayumba et al., 2017). compared with previous research using rigorous methods to estimate the causal impact of numeracy interventions in preprimary, the tayari intervention’s results were robust and represented a larger scale than that identified in other settings. it points to the potential for impact using the approach to improved numeracy developed and used by the tayari numeracy program, particularly because the numeracy results in tayari were larger than for the literacy program (piper, kwayumba et al., 2018). the overall results discussed above masked meaningful differences in the impact of tayari by numeracy task. as shown above, by effect size, the tayari impact on gains was largest for the number identification, shape naming, and producing a set tasks. the fact that these were the tasks that demonstrated the largest causal impact of tayari can be explained in the context of tayari’s spiral approach, where mathematics content was frequently revisited and presented to children throughout the year. for example, for identification of basic shapes, “shape hunts” and “shape comparison” games were part of introductory activities during a lesson every week. children had the opportunity to identify and describe attributes of shapes presented in different orientations and sizes, and participated in discussions that compared the features of one shape to another shape. similarly, the tayari lessons included weekly activities focused on producing sets, with increasingly larger set sizes being produced as the program progressed. the impact evaluation results showed no impact on the oral addition task. the tayari mathematics program design aimed to move children to conceptual understanding, with little emphasis on procedural tasks; thus, at this age, solving formal addition and subtraction problems was not included in the tayari materials and lessons. instead, there was emphasis on the concepts of putting together and taking away using concrete objects, and supporting children to build flexibility with number combinations. given the emphasis in tayari on the conceptual underpinnings of operations, rather than the predominant memorization of number facts that took place in control schools in kenya, it is surprising that we found no impact on mental addition and subtraction, although the direction of the impact was negative at the .10 level. the mental operations task that showed no tayari effect was focused on the concept of putting together and taking away, which we assumed would have shown an impact given its inclusion in the lesson design. during the analyses of the results of the midterm tayari assessment, the researchers examined whether children took advantage of the opportunity to use concrete objects which were provided to them (bottle tops) to solve the task item. they found that few children actually used these objects, and that while more children from treatment ecde centers used the objects, the difference was small (12.8% compared with 10.6% for one item). it appears that, for some reason, children did not feel comfortable using the concrete materials during the one-on-one assessment. because the lessons emphasized the use of concrete materials to solve simple addition and subtraction problems, it may be that children did not have a repertoire of strategies to solve these problems without 70 global education review 5(3) concrete materials. future revisions of the tayari implementation design should take this into account, and provide children with multiple means to solve a mathematics problem. one of the advantages that the tayari longitudinal study offered to researchers was the ability to examine how initial skills affected growth in skills over time. we were able to fit models that examined whether initial numeracy skills as measured at baseline, when the children were beginning their first month of pp1 (typically at 4 years old), had a predictive relationship with their overall school readiness results. if so, then supporting numeracy skills in ecde arguably would have a meaningful place in the design of future ecde interventions. in tayari, measures of initial numeracy skills predicted 21.0% of the final school readiness outcomes, a meaningful amount. interestingly, numeracy skills in control ecde centers mattered more, as the baseline numeracy skill set predicted 26.7% of overall school readiness, compared with only 11.7% of the variation in ecde centers benefiting from tayari. it appears that tayari was able to reduce the gaps in initial numeracy skills and their predictive relationship with school readiness, and provide more equitable opportunities for school readiness than occurred in control schools. it may be that the simple, repetitive design of tayari lessons gave children multiple opportunities to develop competencies in foundational concepts. this is an encouraging finding, since it suggests that children’s weaknesses at the beginning of ecde and preprimary can be overcome with focused interventions, even in developing countries with limited resources. our primary analytic focus was the impact of tayari on learners who received the full course of the two-year intervention. the availability of longitudinal data allowed us to examine whether just one year of intervention was sufficient for improved school readiness and outcomes. the results showed that, for children who began tayari in 2016 in pp2, and were eligible for only one year of the impact, the effect of tayari faded out by the end of their grade 1 year. this is concerning, given that this population of children was identified with a 0.34 sd effect at the end of their pp2 year (kwayumba et al., 2017). that effect reduced to either 0.20 or 0.16 sd depending on whether the base model or controlled model was preferred at the end of grade 1. sadly, this fadeout effect of ecde interventions on short-term cognitive gains is typical (bailey, duncan, odgers, & yu, 2017; mervis, 2011) one possible culprit in the loss of short-term gains from ecde programs may be a lack of coherence between pedagogy and content in ecde classrooms, and what children encounter in grade 1. in kenya, there is a sharp disconnect between methodology and content between preprimary and primary, starting at the national level with the syllabus, all the way to the classroom experiences of children. note that the longer-term effects of ecde on secondary graduation and future earnings have been well established (mccoy et al., 2017). for tayari, we were interested to know whether this reversal of gains was due to an actual fadeout effect that would affect tayari participants even after two years, or whether it was due to the limited nature of the tayari intervention for those children who began pp2 in 2016, and would get less than one year of intervention total. note that in 2017, all children in kenya were benefiting from the primr math program described above, by way of the priede national scale-up funded by the global partnership for education, which also provided numeracy materials. it showed an impact of 0.2 sd or above on numeracy outcomes (piper, ralaingita et al., 2016). it may be that the equalized access to the priede numeracy program for both treatment and control schools mathematics from the beginning 71 in grade 1 in 2017 was the cause of the washedout numeracy effect from tayari. our findings from the combined classrooms gave us some clues as to how the fadeout effect occurred. there were statistically significant impacts of the tayari numeracy index at the final assessment for children who began in the combined classrooms in 2016, at 0.28 sd for the base and controlled regression models. given that 36.6% of the children in combined classrooms in 2016 still had not moved to grade 1 in 2017, it appears that there were benefits of tayari that required two years to enjoy. future rounds of longitudinal data analysis on growth in numeracy skills in tayari over time should help us to understand the tayari effect more precisely. limitations the tayari longitudinal study was one of the largest ever to use randomization to form treatment groups and to examine learning outcomes in the preprimary education space available in the developing world. while the data are unique and the impact of tayari appears to have been meaningful, the study suffered from several key limitations. first, the overall tayari research design included three treatment groups and a control group, whereas the tayari longitudinal study included only one of those treatment groups and the control group. this means that the growth trajectories of children experiencing the other two tayari treatment groups may differ from the pathways presented in this analysis and in the broader impact evaluation of tayari. fortunately, the external cross-sectional evaluation study examined the impact of all three treatment groups. the results suggested that the second treatment analyzed in the longitudinal study had the largest impact on school readiness, so this suggests that the results identified in the longitudinal study may be an upper bound of tayari impact from the other treatment groups. the tayari program was designed to carefully improve learning outcomes of children in kenya’s public and apbet schools in the four counties. the learning materials developed were structured to improve particular learning skills and create comfort with specific strategies for mathematics growth. the modified melqo tool used for the external and longitudinal analyses was not precisely aligned with the particular instructional strategies of the tayari intervention. as a result, there may be unidentified impacts of tayari on numeracy that are meaningful for learners but were not assessed in the tayari longitudinal study. for example, tayari aimed to increase teachers’ and children’s confidence in doing mathematics, a change that is not easily measurable. on the other hand, the tayari longitudinal study evaluated a broader range of numeracy assessments than did the overall impact evaluation. the primary limitation of the study, from our point of view, was the behavior of the tayari longitudinal assessment tool in general. we found that, at the final assessment in october 2017, many children were experience ceiling effects (piper, kwayumba et al., 2018). the tool’s lack of sensitivity made it more difficult to differentiate successful learners from struggling learners, and therefore to measure program impact, than we initially expected. moreover, we found that some of the assumptions on the intraclass correlation of the tayari learners were violated given this tool behavior. the practical impact is that the tool was somewhat underpowered for the 0.2 sd effect that we designed it to identify. table 3 above showed that the 0.29 sd impact of the tayari program without controls was statistically significant only at the .07 level, when our assumptions were that we would be able to 72 global education review 5(3) identify a 0.2 sd effect at the .05 level. the what works clearinghouse recommends that effect sizes of 0.25 sd be reported regardless of statistical significance (institute of education sciences, us department of education, 2014). we addressed this limitation by including statistical models with control variables to increase precision. a simple model with two control variables (county and language spoken at home) increased precision enough to have the overall numeracy index to be found as statistically significant at the .03 level. note that the inclusion of the control variables did not have a meaningful impact on the magnitude of the tayari effect at either the index or the individual item level. conclusion the tayari preprimary program implemented in kenya is one of the few medium-scale preprimary interventions in place that is testing the ability of approaches to improve school readiness if implemented at scale and through government systems. the advantage of this design is that the programs are more easily scaled up further, if successful, due to their having been tested in real-world conditions (gove et al., 2017). programs like tayari may potentially trade larger statistical impacts on learning outcomes for real-world conditions, not only because the program works with whichever government officer is assigned to a particular geographic location—regardless of their skill level or work ethic—but also because the choice to randomize the treatment at the zonal level rather than the ecde center level requires that the standard errors be clustered at the zonal level, which reduces the likelihood of seeing statistically significant impacts and expands the size of the sample needed. tayari’s program improved the numeracy skills of children randomly assigned to ecde centers supported by tayari by 0.31 sd in the model with controls and 0.29 sd without controls. this effect was nearly the same as the overall tayari effect identified in piper, kwayumba et al. (2018), which was 0.28 sd, with the literacy-specific gains at 0.31 sd. this effect falls in the range of the primr early primary program results previously identified in kenya, which had impacts on numeracy between 0.2 and 0.4 sd, and literacy impacts between 0.2 and 1.0 sd. the results showed that the tayari impact was larger for children who started in pp1 and were assessed at the end of the next academic year, when most of the children would have completed pp2, than it was for the children who started in pp2 and typically would have received only one year of tayari intervention. for those children, the impact was 0.2 sd or less and was not statistically significant. the effect for the children who started in combined classrooms was 0.28 sd in the model with controls, but 0.28 sd and not statistically significant in the model without controls. the combined classrooms may have allowed students to work at their own level, and be exposed to content slightly above what they were able to do according to the kenyan syllabus. the differentiation may have contributed to the slightly higher outcomes for these students. there appears to have been some noise in these estimates, and the basic finding was that tayari’s effect requires two years to be sustained. pp1 and pp2 activities for mathematics were closely aligned. for example, in pp1, a student may identify the number “6” and produce “6” objects. in pp2, students would identify “6,” produce “6” objects, and then compare and contrast “6” to other numbers to build a flexible understanding of quantity. it may be that pp2 students who were not exposed to pp1 activities did not have enough of a base to fully engage in pp2 activities, or children needed two years’ worth of exposure to similar activities. future analyses should determine whether the mathematics from the beginning 73 tayari effect is able to resist a washout effect after those two years. the primr numeracy program’s impact evaluation masked a differentiation in the types of numeracy tasks on which the program had an impact. primr improved procedural tasks more than conceptual tasks. responding to those disappointing findings on the impact on conceptual tasks, the tayari intervention was designed to help young learners understand numeracy conceptually. encouragingly, tayari’s impact was somewhat larger on the conceptual rather than procedural tasks. tayari’s extension will allow for a further data collection point of the longitudinal survey, which will allow us to continue to examine whether these impacts persist through primary school, when children will encounter the priede program; and whether the increased outcomes on the conceptual tasks persist. tayari’s results over two academic years as measured on the numeracy tasks in this analysis showed that the tayari intervention improved numeracy outcomes in statistically significant and conceptually meaningful ways. that these results were identified through a program that works within kenyan government structures and using government personnel in a way that can be sustained is encouraging, as is the cost of less than us$15 per child per year accrued under the tayari intervention (aphrc, 2018). future analyses should examine whether and how these initial effects transition over time and whether the impacts of tayari in numeracy have relationships with later outcomes and skills. in addition, we described the instructional strategies used in the tayari program and highlighted the core principles upon which the program was developed. in doing so, we hope to encourage others to more fully describe their numeracy interventions in ecde environments, instead of simply sharing results, to learn from others working to improve mathematical learning in sub-saharan africa. acknowledgement the authors acknowledge the leadership of the ministry of education in kenya, including the capable staff with expertise in early child development who led the technical implementation of tayari, and the kenyan teachers who implement in classrooms. in addition, we appreciate the generous funding of the children’s investment fund foundation for tayari implementation. finally, we are thankful for erin newton’s careful editorial contributions. references african population and research center (aphrc). 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(2012). early predictors of high school mathematics achievement. psychological science, 23(7), 691–697. https://doi.org/10.1177/09567976124401 01 son, l. k., & simon, d. a. (2012). distributed learning: data, metacognition, and educational implications. educational psychology review, 24(3), 379–399. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-0129206-y unesco, unicef, brookings institution and world bank group. (2017). overview. melqo: measuring early learning quality and outcomes. paris: authors. http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/ 002480/248053e.pdf wiest, l. r., higgins, h. j., & frost, j. h. (2007). quantitative literacy for social justice. equity & excellence in education, 40(1), 47–55. https://doi.org/10.1080/1066568060107 9894 zuilkowski, s. s., piper, b., ong’ele, s. a., & kiminza, o. (2017). parents, quality and school choice: why parents in nairobi choose low-cost private schools over public schools in kenya’s free primary education era. oxford review of education, 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2017.1 391084 about the author(s) dr. benjamin piper is the senior director for africa education at rti international. based in nairobi, dr. piper provides technical support to programs in sub-saharan africa, asia and the middle east. he supervises kenya’s national literacy program, the tusome early grade reading activity, funded by usaid; and kenya’s tayari ecde program, sponsored by the children’s investment fund foundation. dr. piper previously led tusome, the primr initiative, the national tablet programme, and the primr rural expansion programme. he has worked with rti, the world bank, dfid, unicef, and save the children. dr. piper has a doctorate in international education from the harvard graduate school of education. dr. yasmin sitabkhan is a senior early childhood education researcher and advisor in rti’s international education division. in her current role at rti, dr. sitabkhan provides technical support to projects in lowand middleincome countries in early mathematics. her research interests focus on children’s development of early mathematical concepts and instructional strategies to support learning in lowand middle-income contexts. dr. sitabkhan has a ph.d. in education from the university of california, berkeley. dr. evangeline nderu is the chief of party for the tayari early childhood development programme, an initiative of the kenyan ministry of education implemented by rti. her interests include parental involvement in education, mathematics in the early years and incorporating research into policy and practice. her doctorate is in education policy and administration. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612440101 https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797612440101 https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9206-y https://doi.org/10.1007/s10648-012-9206-y http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002480/248053e.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/0024/002480/248053e.pdf https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680601079894 https://doi.org/10.1080/10665680601079894 https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2017.1391084 https://doi.org/10.1080/03054985.2017.1391084 mathematics from the beginning 77 annex. tayari pre-primary 2 lessons from week 4 78 global education review 5(3) mathematics from the beginning 79 80 global education review 5(3) mathematics from the beginning 81 professional development for elementary school teachers 165 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: savard, annie & cyr, stéphane (2018). a waterfall model for providing professional development for elementary school teachers: a pilot project to implement a competency-based approach. global education review, 5 (3), 165-182. a waterfall model for providing professional development for elementary school teachers: a pilot project to implement a competency-based approach annie savard mcgill university, montréal, quebec stéphane cyr université du québec à montréal abstract supporting the professional development of teachers to enhance mathematics learning is an important consideration of global education initiatives. however, designing and implementing professional development depends on the structures in place in different contexts. for instance, some structures involve different roles played by the different actors in the schooling system. thus, school board consultants, principals, inspectors and teachers might be in charge of providing information, coaching, training or educating teachers. those policies and practices are key components when designing and implementing professional development for teachers at a large scale. this article presents an initiative supported by unicef in democratic republic of the congo (drc). in 2015, the drc undertook a transitional approach to school reform by adopting a situation-based approach “approche par les situations (aps)” in the elementary school curriculum. an experimental pilot project to improve teaching and learning mathematics and language arts in elementary school was set up. to this end, learning situations were created and 80 teachers were trained in the use of these situations in class using a waterfall model of professional development. the results indicated positive contributions resulting from the teacher-enacted situation-based approach, but also exposed functional problems of implementing a waterfall model to support teachers at a large scale. our results highlight the challenge of supporting all teachers in a global context. keywords teacher professional development, competency-based learning, situation-based approach, the democratic republic of congo introduction in 2011, the democratic republic of congo (drc) adopted formal strategies for the development of elementary, high school, and professional teaching (2010/2011-2015/2016) in which the general objective was to build an inclusive and quality education system that aimed to increase access to primary school, and to improve the quality and relevance of teaching. the expected outcome was to develop ____________________________________ corresponding author annie savard, department of integrated studies in education, faculty of education,mcgill university, 3700 mctavish street, room 309, montréal, québec, canada h3a 1y2 email: annie.savard@mcgill.ca 166 global education review 5(3) competencies in students with basic education in language and mathematics. the ministry of elementary, high school and initiation to the new citizenship education (le ministère de l’enseignement primaire, secondaire et initiation à la nouvelle citoyenneté (mepsinc)) undertook a revision of the programs of elementary teaching on the basis of a situationbased approach, “approche par les situations (aps).” before extending the new program to the national level, the country conducted an experimental pilot to analyze the impact of the changes proposed by this new version of the curriculum on a sample of elementary schools throughout the country. as part of this pilot, pedagogical materials in connection with the curriculum were designed, and teachers were trained to use this material and on the new elements integrated in the curriculum. the different outcomes of this experimental pilot project were in turn evaluated and analyzed. this article takes into consideration this experimentation and draws up a report on the progress of such a project applied in a context like the drc. we present briefly the national context in dcr prior to discussing the experimental design lead in mathematics. the national context in drc a brief look at the education system as in many african countries, the goal of western missionaries to convert the population was at the heart of the structuring of the educational system of the drc. before the creation of the colonies in 1885 (year of the birth of the independent republic of congo) catholic and protestant missionaries worked in the country. in addition to providing religious christian education, they endeavored to increase the literacy of the population. from 1960 (the year of the country’s independence) through 2000, the republic paid particular attention to the education system in favoring its growth. the wars that devastated the country and economic crises considerably reduced this growth and it contributed to its deterioration (banque mondiale, 2005). the current education system is divided into two entities: a public system managed by the republic, and a private system managed by religious organizations. french is the official language of teaching, but the republic now encourages the use of one of the national languages during the first two years of elementary school (lingala, swahili, kikongo, tshiluba). in elementary schools, the use of school textbooks developed for young congolese by western organizations seems to be a recent trend (confemen, 2011). even with all the measures put in place, the low graduation rate is still problematic. the schooling of the young (elementary and high school), and professional, technical, and university education are major current concerns. improving the quality of the education system the drc initiative seeks to improve the quality of primary teaching and its relevance by adapting the content to the current socioeconomic context. the basis for this initiative is an african reform movement favoring the development of competencies, as prescribed by the program of primary school in africa (unesco, 2009). this program recommends to “pass from an approach to learning based on knowledge to an approach by competencies” (p. 8). in mathematics education, one of the reasons for a shift to a competency-based approach was the poor quality of understanding developed by students. in a study conducted in south africa, professional development for elementary school teachers 167 graven and coles (2017) highlighted the fact that (teachers) looking at the answer without focusing on the strategies used by students could lead to a lack of foundational reasoning. in its document, unesco highlighted the numerous difficulties that the african education system suffers in terms of quality and equity. the report notably mentioned the following problems: • highly academic nature of formal education and lack of pertinence of a large part of its content; • prescribed curriculum at the national level designed as “content to teach,” leaving little space to placement in context and to learning adaptations; • dominance of traditional teachercentered pedagogical practices; • rigidity and closed-nature of formal education, minimal attention accorded to practices that maintain the school learner (p.14) in response to these problems, drc, like a number of african countries, opted for a revision of curriculum in accordance to a competencybased approach (cba). this approach focused on developing competencies in school rather than focusing on knowledge. the movement towards cba has been observed for 15 years in africa. this was noted by bernard, nkengne and robert (2007), “the cba tended to become for a decade an important passage, in fact a standard, in the curricular reform undertaken in africa” (p.3). however, no empirical results supported the cba as the solution to the numerous problems that plagued the african education system. in addition, the cba is a curricular orientation that, if not accompanied by concrete actions on the field, cannot alone claim to improve the learning conditions of students in the classrooms; the structure and the content of the curriculum have only minimal effect on student learning. important factors that play a more fundamental role to support student learning are the material and pedagogical conditions, as well as the effective teaching that students receive (bernard et al. 2007; roegiers, 2008). moreover, even though the cba proposes a structure of curriculum and a curricular vision centered on the development of competencies, it does not prescribe the pedagogical means to attain them. according to bernard et al. (2007), the cba suggests a pedagogical change aiming to improve the practices, however, it leaves the teacher the liberty of choice in his/her pedagogical approaches to suit the expectations of cba. yet, as underlined by dembélé and sirois (2018), the professional competencies of african teachers are variable and can sometimes be insufficient to ensure the decentralisation of strategies adapted by the cba. bernard, et al. (2007, p.24) commented, “furthermore, the cba, relying on the pedagogical talent of the teacher as opposed to the tools that s/he crucially needs, leaves the african teacher, already weakened by a difficult context, more alone than ever in face of the daily difficulties of his/ her profession.” this is particularly true in drc, where teachers teach big size classes, and where so many of them need a second job to live decently. a recent study conducted in north kivu by okito pamijeko and savard (2018) highlighted the need for teachers to learn more about socio-constructivist approaches. the 151 teachers who participated in this study revealed that they were more comfortable with a “show and tell” approach than a more participative approach. in fact, their needs were so huge, that it indicated that their professional competencies were little mastered (okito pamijeko & savard, 2018). as pointed out by pryor, akyeampong, 168 global education review 5(3) westbrook and lussier (2012), “teacher education has been identified as both part of the problem and the solution to the challenge of quality” (p. 410). in addition to these challenges, many definitions of competency exist in the literature. it is possible to find some common points (joannert, 2011), but they don’t all have the same foundation and structure. therefore, it invites different interpretations of the idea of competencies and, consequently, different means to promote its development in students and its evaluation. to this, an imprecision is added on different levels, in terms of the curricular structure proposed by the cba. even though the cba proposes to structure the curricula around competencies, no indication is provided in regards to the specific competencies to develop by discipline and on the connections that those competencies have to have with societal needs (bernard et al., 2007). reports and studies have analyzed the impact at different levels of these reforms of cba in africa and they relatedly analyzed the process of implementation (bernard et al., 2007; cros et al., 2010; roegiers, 2008). a study financed by the french agency of development (agence française de développement (afd)), the african bank of development (banque africaine de développment (bad)) and the international organisation of francophonie (organisation internationale de la francophonie (oif)) to evaluate the process of curricular reformation by the cba in primary school in several african countries reported a number of problems associated with this reform (cros et al., 2010). the study notably reported that for the countries where the reform was sustained until the end, difficulties of implementation and limited impact on teaching practices, and on the systems as a whole were observed. those difficulties included, among others, to short professional developments for teachers, no strategy of communication with the communities involved, absence or insufficient follow-up with teachers, and implementation of the reform in elementary schools, but not beyond that. for other countries, it was difficult to exit the experimental pilot phase and some even stopped implementation because of the difficulties encountered. these problems can be explained by different factors, some that were previously discussed in regards to the imprecision that surround this approach. additionally the complexity of the developing competencies, leads to a number of practical difficulties of implementation (bernard et al., 2007, gauthier, 2013). for instance, cba implies that students should have access to different resources, which can be costly, difficult to find or not accessible. concerning the different reports on the subject, the cba requires the combination of innovative pedagogical principles in contexts frequently characterized by a scarcity of resources and lack of teacher training or preparation. in this context, where there is a complexity of the approaches and delegation to the teachers of the means necessary to put this approach into practice, teacher training in the cba takes on increased importance. however, in the implementation initiatives of the cba in africa, the reports demonstrated a number of important gaps in the plan of teacher training associated with the reform. one of the models used for providing professional development consisted of a waterfall model, which has different layers: the experts at the top train other people, who then train other people, who train other people. usually, the last layer appears in schools, where teachers train other teachers. this model presents many issues, as stated by cros et al. professional development for elementary school teachers 169 (2010), “the trainings provided have a common characteristic: it is a training designed from the top down according to a waterfall model that induces a progressive loss of quality, errors of measures of regulation, and of control. the duration of the training is a lot longer for the trainers and almost nonexistent for the teachers who, however, are the immediate users of the curriculum” (p.17). these gaps, as a consequence, as noted by bernard et al. (2007), provoked an important loss of principles of the cba and a symmetrical increase in power of the principals in this process, who provide sometimes the training. curriculum change and action plan in the face of these obstacles in implementation of this approach in the concerned countries, a reflection is necessary. without rejecting the cba, adjustments need to be brought about on the modalities of implementation of an approach aiming to develop competencies in students. therefore, it appears more and more evident that the solutions do not originate simply from rewriting school curricula or a training for the teachers, but more so on the establishment of a complete action plan of curricular reform at all levels of the school structure: teachers, students, pedagogical materials, textbooks, initial and continuous training, classroom practices, evaluation of acquired knowledge, etc. ideally, the plan has to be accompanied or preceded by an experimental pilot process aiming to evaluate the effects of such a curricular reform on a representative sample before scale-ups (bernard et al., 2007; cros et al., 2010). considering the importance of investment in time, money and resources, such a reform should be based on experimentation to evaluate its pertinence, viability, and efficacy. thanks to such an experimental pilot process, it is possible to put in place a group of adequately trained national experts whose function is to elaborate and to coordinate the implementation of the reform and to ensure its continuity once they leave (cros et al., 2010). it’s through this group of experts that the training can be structured on the national scale (depover et jonnaert, 2014). the experiment in dcr a transitional approach to reform the curriculum with the intent of reforming the school system, the dcr opted for a novice, transitional approach instead of initiating a curricular reform in depth which would have required a complete restructuring of school curricula and pedagogical structures as a whole. the the ministry of elementary, high school and initiation to the new citizenship education (le ministère de l’enseignement primaire, secondaire et initiation à la nouvelle citoyenneté (meps-inc)) of the drc undertook a transitional approach to reform in 2011, beginning with an update of the program of elementary teaching (programme de l’enseignement primaire). the new version of the curricula, like the original one from 2000, proposed objectives to reach instead of competencies to develop. it was enriched with learning situations aiming ultimately to develop competencies. this approach (situation-based approach or approche par situation (aps)) adopted by the drc meant that learning situations should be proposed to students instead of teachers. a learning situation is a situation proposed to students to have them mobilize and use various resources: knowledge, processes, strategies, both material and human. therefore, a learning situation would present some complexity and would be contextualized in 170 global education review 5(3) order to be rich enough. when a person masters a learning situation by mobilising diverse resources, he/she has effectively developed one or more competencies: we would therefore say he/she is competent in this learning situation (jonnaert, ettayebi et defise, 2009; charland et cyr, 2013). the elementary school program in the drc did not aim to impose learning situations on a prescriptive basis, oppositely, they were approached as means to allow the learners to develop competencies. in addition, the curriculum did not describe competencies, but proposed, in regards to the previous curriculum, essential ingredients to the development of these competencies, we are referring here to learning situations. therefore, by adopting this strategy, the drc made the choice to insist less on the rewriting of its curricula as opposed to the implementation of initiatives aimed at improving pedagogical practices of teachers. in fact, the program aimed to be more student-centered. description of the experimental design initiated in 2011, the revised curriculum was a more coherent version in terms of content and organization. to evaluate this transitional version of the curricula, the country put into place an experimental pilot project supported by different partners, and aimed to widen the protocol to the whole country once the process was analyzed and adjusted. this design was supervised by a group of university researchers associated with the international consortium of development in education (consortium international de développement en éducation (cide)) in partnership with the administration of school programs and didactic material (la direction des programmes scolaires et matériels didactiques (dipromad)) of the drc and with the financial support of unicef. globally, the researchers had the mandate of providing technical support to the dipromad of the meps-inc to implement the reform which aimed to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics and languages in the primary school. we will discuss the experimental design lead in mathematics. improving education outcomes in regard to mathematics is an important focus from bilateral and multilateral donors (piper, ralaingita, akach & king, 2016). in fact, improving mathematics in early grades is a worldwide priority (education for all global monitoring report team, 2014; ginsburg, hyson, & woods, 2014), because students’ early number sense skills are considered the greatest predictors of academic achievement (duncan et al., 2007). the aims of the experimental design consisted of implementing the first milestones for the establishment of a curricular reform on a large scale, and to evaluate this approach by different means, with the goal of increasing the efficiency of the reform. efficiency was measured according to depovert, jonnaert, gauthier et d'hainaut (2014) by the relation between the monetary input which are the expenses devoted to the educational project and the output revealed by indicators such as scores of standardized testing. in this instance, the money dedicated to education was not entirely used for education because of the corruption. the schools received less that they were supposed to get to pay teachers, to provide professional development, and resources for teachers to teach better. it thus affected the quality of teaching and impacted students’learning. citing data from unesco (2011), these authors state that the variables that have the highest efficiency factor (impact versus cost) were the availability of school textbooks and the qualification levels of teachers. professional development for elementary school teachers 171 therefore, these data highlight the importance of initial and continuous training of teachers and the availability of basic pedagogical materials, such astextbooks, in order to increase the efficiency of an educational system. these variables are more important for student success than others, such as the condition of school buildings and the number of students per teacher. moreover, the experimental approaches put in place by the drc take into consideration these efficiency indicators and are composed of initiatives at different levels of the school structure that we describe here: (1) formation of a pool of national experts that act at all levels of the structure of curricular reform; (2) training of a pool of experts; (3) writing of pedagogical material for the primary teachers (learning situations); (4) writing of training module for the school board consultants, principals, inspectors and teachers; (5) training of regional school board consultants, principals, inspectors and teachers; (6) testing a sample of developed pedagogical material; (7) evaluation of different approaches. formation of a pool of national experts an approach to curricular reform, whether it is experimental and pilot or national and global, requires the formation of a team around which the different components of the reform are organized (bernard et al., 2007). reforming an educational system implies work on different sectors: the curriculum structure, evaluation tools, pedagogical material, initial and continuous teacher training, school administrators, organization, pedagogical approaches in class, etc. the complexity of this dynamic and the diversity of the sectors effected by the curricular reform are documented in the works of jonnaert, ettayebi et defise (2009). thus, the mandates of such a team are varied and the formation of this team has to reflect the variety of the functions that will be carried out. in the case of the present project, this team had a mandate to write school textbooks using aps, to organize the training of provincial school administrators and to coordinate data collection associated with the process of evaluation of different approaches, among others, and assessing competencies (cba). with this vision, it appeared essential to include teachers, inspectors, school board consultants and school principals who understood the classroom context in order to plan the curricular content for the writing of school textbooks. a university specialist in education, in measurement and in evaluation, joined this group, as well as members of the school’s administrative network. furthermore, the success of such a group, at the light of our observations, passes by the recognition of the permanent status of this team. it is difficult to maintain optimal, regular and constant functioning of such a group if recognition of a permanent status, short or medium-term, is not established. too frequently, the formation of this kind of a group is carried out by mandates to temporary teachers in the education system, resulting in a loss of team members and a lack of continuity in the process, and in the work product. training of a pool of experts the set of elaborated experimental approaches in the context of this work required first, the rewriting of curricula in 2011, and their orientation to the situation-based approach 172 global education review 5(3) (aps), and on the development of competencies. in order to integrate this team in the process, it was essential to train these individuals on the theoretical foundations that were the underlie the curricular revision. therefore, they received training on the situation-based approach (aps), both the theoretical foundations and methodology of elaboration of a learning situation. in this training, they addressed the means of constructing a learning situation from simple beginning data and a context. this methodology specified how to start from an educational intention and a real-life context, and implant useful mathematical concepts to process the learning situation. in this practical training they elaborated a number of learning situations that were submitted to the group for a critical analysis. the goal was to enable the members of this team autonomous in the writing of mathematical situations for teachers to experiment with in class. writing of pedagogical material for primary teachers in the context of this project, it was important to equip teachers with pedagogical material comprised of a bank of mathematical situations which could be utilizes in class throughout the year. these learning situations covered all of the mathematical content targeted by the new version of the curriculum. the use of these learning situations by the teachers aimed to favor construction of knowledge by the student, a larger teacher-student and student-student dynamic, but more importantly, these situations addressed mathematical content across congolese real-life contexts. this approach therefore permitted addressing mathematics according to the perspectives of endogenous knowledge that reframe the prescribed knowledge in the curricula in a reality unique to the country (charland et cyr, 2013; hountondji, 1994). writing of training modules for school administrators and teachers in order to provide material for the trainers, training modules were created. these modules contained essential elements to enable teachers to conveniently treat learning situations in class and to ultimately be able to create their own situations in accordance to their needs. training of regional school administrators and teachers the training process that took place, functioned in accordance to the waterfall model of training. in terms of experimentation, 30 provincial school administrators and 40 teachers in two of the 11 provinces of the country (orientale province and city-province of kinshasa)were trained. in this approach, the training was adapted to the targeted clientele. even though school administrators and teachers underwent the same process of implementation of the reform, the training requirements were not the same. furthermore, taking into consideration the recommendations for this topic (bernard et al., 2007; tehio et cros, 2010), the training, even if they unfolded in waterfall, permitted teachers to participate in the same number of training hours as the school administrators. thus, the training provided to teachers was aligned with the implementation of principles contained in the new version of the curriculum. this training responded more to the practical needs of the teachers, on the other hand, the training provided to school administrators targeted the reform principles as well as aspects relating to school management for supporting teachers in the implementation of the reform, both theoretically and practically. professional development for elementary school teachers 173 figure 1. the waterfall model of training testing a sample of developed pedagogical material the selected teachers implemented three mathematical situations spanning on three weeks for four hours a week for each learning situation in their classes. these teachers were previously trained. this approach permitted teachers to put into practice the situation-based approach and to apply the subject training received. evaluation of different approaches the final step permitted to examination of the whole experimental process. in fact, a range of factors can influence the functioning of a reform in a country like drc. different approaches were evaluated or observed. for instance, in order to collect information on students’ learning, students were provided with photocopied sheets, which they were not used to. teachers also were not acustomed with this material, because they usually wrote something on the balckboard and students copied it in their notebooks. thus, some teachers probably left the students alone with the test, without reading the questions aloud. the evaluation of this approach provided the basis for a series of recommendations to modify the processes and materials before spreading the initiative throughout the country. methods sampling we had different participants for each kind of data collection: the test to teachers, the pre-test and post-test for students and the observations carried out in classrooms. our participants for the teacher test were 40 first-grade teachers and 40 second-grade teachers. they were selected by the inspectors of two of the eleven provinces of the country (orientale province and city-province of kinshasa). students tested were selected at random by the ministry of epsp in kinshasa and kisangani to participate in writing the pre-test and the post-test. thus, five students per class (pre and post-test) were selected for a total of 60 they implemented the new curriculum and the new teaching practices. the leaders came back in their milieu and trained other school administrators and teachers. they trained leaders in different regions of the country. national pool experts inspectors, school board consultants and principals inspectors, school board consultants and principals teachers teachers teachers 174 global education review 5(3) first-grade students (30 in kinshasa ans 30 in kisangani schools) and 25 second-grade students. finally, our participants for the classroom observations were 30 teachers from of the province of kinshasa, selected at random from among the 40 teachers trained. procedures in order to have the most objective outlook possible on these approaches, it is convenient to use targeted and adequate tools for data collection. we first evaluated the level of mathematics knowledge of teachers with a mathematics test encompassing primary grade level mathematics knowledge. we used a second instrument to get feedback of training provided to provincial school administrators and teachers. the training being a fundamental process in an approach to curricular reform, it is essential that the training is adapted to the needs and is accessible to the trained persons. we alsoused teacher observation tools in the classrooms finally, we wanted to evaluate the impact of using learning situations in the classes on the mathematics knowledge of students. to do this, an experimental procedure of preand post-test was employed. each student completed a mathematics pre-test before starting the learning situations in class. this test like the post-test, was built according to a structure processed by teachers. at the end of the three experimental weeks associated with the learning situations, the students then completed a posttest in which the structure was equivalent to the pre-test. instruments for data collection in order to have a just and objective outlook on the impact of the project, different tools for data collection were designed. these tools targeted in turn the students and the teachers. they were administered at different moments throughout the pilot project. the test for teachers a mathematics test was designed to obtain information on the level of mathematical knowledge and skills of the teachers in connection with the elements treated in learning situations. all the teachers who participated in this experimental process completed the test which included 40 first-grade teachers and 40 second-grade teachers. the whole team participated in designing the test.. the test questions did not surpass a grade level equivalent to 4th grade level of primary school, as concluded by the pool of experts. the test presented 15 questions and worth 50 points. the questions focused on arithmetics concepts, including the four operations, fractions, percent and decimal numbers and on geometry and measurement. the observations performed in class during the treatment of experimental situations, the provincial inspectors, who followed the administrator and researcher training of the project by the national pool of experts, observed the unfolding of a learning situation in class and completed an observation grid designed for this purpose. this grid enabled to document the different observable aspects of the teachinglearning process in class associated with the processing of the learning situation. for the province of kinshasa, 30 teachers were observed during the processing of one of their learning situations. the observation lasted around an hour. the pre-test and post-test for students two mathematics tests were designed for first and second grade students (preand post-test) by the whole team including the pool of experts. the tests were constructed according to the same format as the learning situations tested during the experimentation. the learning professional development for elementary school teachers 175 situations proposed familiar contexts for students, where they had to reason in order to find solutions. the tests permitted evaluation of the impact of the use of situations in the classroom, and the teacher training on mathematical competencies of students in relation with the learning situations. the questionnaires of the preand post-test were identical for each year. the pre-test was administered to a selected population by the ministry of epsp in kinshasa and kisangani in may 2015. a post-test was administered at the end of the school year after the use of the material developed. the first-grade teacher read the questions to ensure the comprehension of the statements by the students who then completed the questionnaire. to ensure data entry in the given time, a sampling of received questionnaires was chosen. thus, five copies per class (pre and post-test) were selected randomly for a total of 60 first-grade students and 25 second-grade students. the analysis was performed on a sample of cross-sectional data. results the test to teachers the mean score on this test was 46%. in fact, for the majority of the questions, fewer than 50% of the 80 teachers obtained a correct answer. some success rates were quite alarming (22%, 23% and 26%). table 1 shows the mean scores achieved by teachers on the targeted concepts. table 1 success average of teachers answers to the mathematics test concept points out of 50 average mean arithmetic fractions and decimal numbers 9 22% whole numbers 13 50% addition 5 60% subtraction 7 55% multiplication 3 78% division 3 80% geometry and measurement time 2 23% plane figures 4 26% linear measures 4 26% professional development for elementary school teachers 176 the pre-test and post-test for students because of the cross-sectional nature of the data, an analysis of variance was first carried out in order to evaluate the homogeneity of schools (tables 2 and 3). the tables 4 and 5 present statistical analyses of the preand post-tests given to the students through a within subjects design. table 2 analysis of variance, grade 1 source of variation sum of squares degrees of freedom mean square f-ratio p-value critical value for f between groups 1,166 3 0,388 2,555 0,057 2,662 within groups 23,727 156 0,152 total 24,893 159 table 4 analysis of variance (two-tailed t-test) – grade 1 mean difference t critical value conclusion whole exam – 0,56798 1,99656 not significant situation 1 + 1,98798 2,00171 not significant situation 2 – –0,28888 2,00324 not significant complementary questions – 0,19378 2,00664 not significant table 3 analysis of variance, grade 2 source of variation sum of squares degrees of freedom mean square f-ratio p-value critical value for f between groups 4,392 4 1,098 7,104 2,554 2,423 within groups 26,738 173 0,154 total 31,130 177 professional development for elementary school teachers 177 table 5 analysis of variance (two-tailed t-test) – grade 2 mean difference t critical value conclusion whole exam + –2,08691 2,02619 𝐻𝐻0 is rejected situation 1 + –0,87634 2,02439 𝐻𝐻0 is not rejected situation 2 + –1,43323 2,01808 𝐻𝐻0 is not rejected complementary questions + –1,4639 2,0226 𝐻𝐻0 is not rejected this analysis demonstrates that the data of pre-test (tables 2 and 3) are homogeneous for data from the 2nd grade (p-value = 2,554) but not for the 1st grade (p-value = 0,057). with the within subjects design, it was therefore possible to infer an impact of treatment on the basis of statistically significant results between the results of the preand post-test of the 2nd grade only. the results indicate that, for the students in grade 1, the results of the post-test (45%) was inferior to the results of the pre-test (47%), non-significantly (table 3). for the 2nd grade, the results of the posttest (55%) were superior to those of the pre-test (44%). when the set of questions were considered as a whole, the results were significantly higher in the post-test as compared to the pre-test by 7% (table 5; t(23) = 2,026, p < 0,025). we discuss further those results in the next section. many factors render these results slightly representative of the real situation. the observations carried out in class as a whole, observed that teachers were able to implement the learning situations. first, they all respected the instructions of the situation and the general execution of it as suggested in the teacher’s guide. this observation suggests that the training that they received on the topic of learning situations was well-integrated. the variations from one teacher to the next was observed in their class and in material management and in the moment chosen to distribute the written situations. second, in the rare cases where the teachers did not obtain the learning situations, they were able to design one and to treat it in class during our observations. this supports our remark confirming that the training received by teachers was relatively well integrated, at least for the creation of a learning situation. furthermore, when it was possible, many teachers had access to manipulative materials in order to provide visual representations for the learning situation and to give it meaning. these materials, and the manipulations done on these, equally permit to give meaning to the mathematics and to facilitate the mathematisation of the situation by the students. at this level, we consider that teachers knew to make an adequate connection between manipulation and mathematics. however, we noted certain problems with the majority of teachers in relation to material management or the representations of material 178 global education review 5(3) on the board. to begin, the manipulatives were only used by the teachers in front of the class or by a single student. there was an insufficient quantity of material to permit all the students to manipulate them. even though the use of this material can be a positive aspect of an observed change following the use of learning situations, this type of manipulations carried out by one person in front of the class means that the majority of the students are passive in this approach. this problem is evident because the manipulations were too long. in fact, the manipulations occupied the majority of the time reserved for the learning situation. the manipulations are a means to give meaning to the mathematics and to facilitate its comprehension, but should not overshadow the mathematical activity or the mathematisation of the situation. discussion of the waterfall training the experimental design that was implemented in the framework of this project included the participation of a number of participants from the world of education of the drc (members of dipromad, local and national inspectors, school administrators, teachers from experimental schools, international consultants, educational groups from unicef). as a pilot project, it was necessary to establish a complex mechanism involving synergy between different actors of the education sector. this structure was necessary to ensure the success of the training and the diffusion of the productions but more importantly, to ensure the smooth functioning of the collection of data for analysis that enabling to create a judgment on the efficiency of this project. the data collected for this project highlight a positive impact of the training of teachers on their practice. furthermore, the teachers seem to have abided by the pedagogical practice imposed by the processing of situations. in addition, this impact was marked by the availability of tested pedagogical materials, namely the mathematical situations distributed to all the teachers. this data conforms to the study of the principal factors susceptible to improve the pedagogical practices of teachers: the training of teachers and the availability of pedagogical material (cros & al., 2010; depovert & jonnaert, 2014). clearly, the two-week training provided to teachers did not solve all the problems, notably the management of pedagogical materials during the processing of situations and the mathematical weakness of many teachers. the results of the mathematical test appear extremely problematic to us. they underline mathematical weaknesses in the tested teachers. it means to us that teachers who do not understand mathematics well might have additional challenges to implement our learning situations, where the meaning of mathematics is so important. continuous long-term training processes should be implemented at the national level in order to achieve an expanded and significant effect on the improvement of teacher competencies. other than this aspect of training, what captured our attention was the difficulty for an educational structure of a country such as drc to ensure the smooth functioning of an experimental design containing a large and varied collection of data. for both the observation grid in class and the preand posttests, data collection was problematic. the difficulties were more apparent for the pre-tests and post-tests which permitted the evaluation of the efficiency of situation processing in class on student learning. for example, some teachers administered the pre-test after the situations, and others administered the pre-test and posttest before the situations, therefore invalidating professional development for elementary school teachers 179 the obtained data. in addition, other teachers completed the tests for the students or exaggeratedly guided students in problem solving. we also noticed that certain teachers did not support students enough, mainly those of 1st grad, whose needs were bigger. moreover, some teachers distributed the questionnaires to students without reading the instructions and questions with them. finally, other logistical problems also considerably weakened the validity of data on these tests. for example, during data collection, we proceeded to a random sampling of subjects (5 students per class). furthermore, this sampling was not the same for the pre-test and the post-test. this arrangement of data collection (distribution of different tests, supporting the evaluations in class, in-class observations of teachers) was ensured by the regional school inspectors. moreover, the project highlighted the importance of a close collaboration amongst the different actors. as the whole experimental design was carried out on a constrained time period and at precise moments, it necessitated a considerable availability from the part of the inspectors. these inspectors having important workloads, considering the very large number of schools to supervise, it was sometimes difficult for them to respond in a timely manner to the needs of the project. these problems were reflected in the evaluation process of students and in the teacher observation in class. also, in the framework of the project, we constituted a pool of experts who we trained beforehand. these experts were mandated to participate at different stages of the project (creation of material, training of inspectors and teachers). however, the experts participated punctually in the project having all the administrative functions in parallel. furthermore, in light of our analyses, it appears essential that such a group of experts is able to constitute a permanent entity having for function to ensure the smooth execution of such a project. in this vision, we join the statements of cros et al. (2010) underlining the importance of such a structure in all curricular reform projects. like any waterfall, some water is lost through the process. thus, a waterfall or cascade model for training implies some loss out of the process. some information received by the teachers was not exactly the same as the one provided by the national pool experts. for instance, some teachers created learning situations because they did not receive the one already created for them. other teachers used wrong terminology with students. the terminology presented to teacher was supposed to be used only by the teachers, not by the students. these phenomena highlighted the challenge of training teachers in a short amount of time, without subsequent coaching or mentoring. they also highlighted the complexity for teachers to learn other ways to teach mathematics in another paradigm, while their mathematical knowledge is fragile. conclusion the complexity of this project and the numerous obstacles encountered highlight the importance of an experimental design prior to a complete curricular reform on the national level. in fact, implementing a curricular reform means also supporting the professional development of teachers by involving all the actors in the schooling system: school board consultants, principals, inspectors and teachers. the waterfall model involved all the actors, even if some water was lost in the process of supporting all teachers on a large scale. having a pilot project of reform appears essential in the sense that it prepares the national actors in education to initiate the process of reform of the educational system. initiating a reform implies, frequently, a change in paradigm in the processes of teaching/ learning. competency180 global education review 5(3) based approach has a strong theoretical basis, but it is a challenge to implement it in different contexts. for this purpose, it is convenient to review the school textbooks, the pedagogical guides, the evaluation processes and the pedagogical practices in class in order to have learning situations (aps) that support competencies development. these numerous changes do not take place overnight and are especially well thought. it is not sufficient to rewrite curricula according to new curricular approaches to change the classroom practices, improve the educational system of a country and its efficiency in terms of student success. cba is a framework developed by scholars in a different sociocultural environment. one cannot simply import these ideas without attention to adapting to local contexts. in fact, we recommend that the orientations of the curriculum should be aligned with the school textbooks and material resources, along with teacher training. moreover, a pilot project of implementation of an educational approach, or of a reform, is meaningful only if it can be analyzed appropriately and if its impact can be measured with precision. the follow-up and the evaluation of the design by a group of local experts should not be ignored. also, to observe real and measurable changes of an educational initiative in teachers and students, there should be a certain delay. the evaluation processes have to be spread out on many months if we hope to have significant results of the impact of the project on both the classroom practices and on student learning. finally, too frequently reforms in african countries are implemented at the same time as the training process begins. this reform therefore settles in a fragile structure and it is not possible to put it into appropriate practice. thus, the pilot ensures that the training has a sufficiently viable core to ensure expanded implementation of a new curriculum at the national level. but well before implementing a new curricular approach like the situation-based approach, the african countries, in comparable situations to the drc, should first stabilize the school system with initiatives suggested in our article. an experimental pilot project lead with effectiveness is essential, similarly to continuous training expanded to the whole system and to the establishment of a permanent cell of coordination of its designs. references bernard, j. m., nkengne, a. p. n. et robert, f. 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(1994). les savoirs endogènes: pistes pour une recherche. daka: éditions du codesria. jonnaert, p., ettayebi, m. et defise, r. (2009). curriculum et compétences: un cadre opérationnel. de boeck supérieur: bruxelles. jonnaert, p. (2011). sur quels objets évaluer des compétences? éducation & formation, (e296), 31-43. roegiers, x. (2008). l’approche par compétences en afrique francophone: quelques tendances. bureau international d’éducation de l’unesco. récupéré de: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/use r_upload/publications/working_papers/ currcompet_africa_ibewpci_7.pdf okito pamijko, p. & savard, d. (2018). les besoins prioritaires en compétences professionnelles: perceptions des enseignants et des enseignantes du nordkivu sur leur formation continue. éducation et francophonie. xlv(3), 106127. piper, b., ralaingita, w., akach, l. & king’ s. (2016). improving procedural and conceptual mathematics outcomes: evidence from a randomized controlled trial in kenya, journal of development effectiveness, 8(3), 404-422. pryor, j. , akyeampong, k. ,westbrook, j. & lussier, k. (2012). rethinking teacher preparation and professional development in africa: an analysis of the curriculum of teacher education in the teaching of early reading and mathematics, curriculum journal, 23(4), 409-502, doi: 10.1080/09585176.2012.747725 182 global education review 5(3) tehio, v. et cros, f. (2010). politiques publiques en éducation: l’exemple des réformes curriculaires. étude sur les réformes curriculaires par l’approche par compétences en afrique. actes du séminaire final de l’étude sur les réformes curriculaires par l’approche par compétences en afrique : sèvres, france. unesco. (2009). programme pour l’éducation de base en afrique (beap): répondre aux exigences en matière d’accès, de qualité et d’équité. récupéré de: http://www.ibe.unesco.org/fileadmin/use r_upload/publications/thematic_studies /beap_policy_paper_09_fr.pdf about the author(s) annie savard, phd, is an associate professor at mcgill university in the department of integrated studies in education (dise). her research program focuses on the contribution of mathematical competencies to the development of citizenship competencies such as decisionmaking or critical thinking in regard to financial activities. she is also interested by the professional development of teachers, which brought her to work with different communities of teachers, from nunavik in canada, to romania and several african countries such as dcr, djibouti, mali and rwanda. stéphane cyr, phd, is professor in the department of mathematics at the university of quebec at montreal (uqàm) and ph.d. in mathematics education at université laval (quebec). he works on the training of primary and secondary teachers in mathematics. his current research in this field focuses on developing deductive reasoning and preparatory skills for proof writing among elementary school students and on the development of geometric vocabulary. professor cyr is also interested in the study of video games for elementary mathematics. stéphane cyr is also chair holder of the unesco curriculum development chair (cudc). through the activities of the chair, he has carried out numerous studies on curricular reforms at the primary, secondary and university levels in african countries including benin, togo, guinea, madagascar, senegal, mauritania, niger, cameroun and the drc. the orientation of the research work related to this theme aims at the development of a curriculum reform. http://www.mcgill.ca/dise http://www.mcgill.ca/dise université du québec à montréal introduction the national context in drc a brief look at the education system improving the quality of the education system curriculum change and action plan the experiment in dcr a transitional approach to reform the curriculum description of the experimental design training of a pool of experts writing of pedagogical material for primary teachers writing of training modules for school administrators and teachers training of regional school administrators and teachers testing a sample of developed pedagogical material evaluation of different approaches we had different participants for each kind of data collection: the test to teachers, the pre-test and post-test for students and the observations carried out in classrooms. our participants for the teacher test were 40 first-grade teachers and 40 sec... instruments for data collection the test for teachers the observations performed in class the pre-test and post-test for students results the test to teachers table 1 success average of teachers answers to the mathematics test the pre-test and post-test for students the observations carried out in class discussion of the waterfall training conclusion narrowing the language gap 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schroeder, leila. (2020). narrowing the language gap for africa’s learners: a pathway for change model. global education review, 7 (3), 121. narrowing the language gap for africa’s learners: a pathway for change model leila schroeder sil abstract even a quick glance at international data reveals something troubling: there is an increasing economic and educational gap between africa and the rest of the world. if we look just a bit deeper, we find that economic and educational stagnation may simply be the inevitable outcomes of broad educational failure for millions of rural african children. behind that educational failure is a “gap,” a chasm that most african learners must leap in order to succeed academically to benefit the entire continent. i suspect it is linguistic to its very core. this research follows a backward trail all the way from university level to the point of entry for early grade teaching across africa. it asks three questions: 1) why isn’t l1 reading instruction giving students success in the primary school years? 2) why are students not gaining adequate oral l2 for use as medium of instruction beyond primary? and 3) how might a reading transfer curriculum close the final gap, providing meaningful access to l2 textbooks for all african students? as these questions are answered by current research, the findings suggest solutions. i propose a series of three language-related strategies aimed at closing the education gap—a yawning chasm—for all african youth. keywords language transfer; orthographic distance; linguistic distance; equal access to learning; l1 reading; late exit models; disempowerment; oral language development illiteracy, academic exclusion and poverty enrollment rates for higher education in sub-saharan africa are by far the lowest in the world, at 6% (bloom et al., 2014). the causal connections between lack of education and poverty have long been acknowledged (usaid, 2018; world bank, 2011). these connections are certainly believed by the parents of those children entering sub-saharan africa’s education systems continent-wide, but they don’t seem to understand the power of their own languages to enable learning (muthwii, 2002). educational impoverishment is visible to researchers in three areas: enrollment rates for higher education, academic research across the continent, and a failure to use the languages people speak in children’s education. trudell, schroeder & mercado (in press) carried out an extensive desk review of multilingual education programs on the continent in order to propose any changes which could lead to long-term academic success for millions. this article 2 global education review 7 (3) follows up on the data gathered there, suggesting a series of three macro strategies which could lead to equal access to quality education for millions of young people. 1.1 limited access to higher education enrollment rates for higher education in sub-saharan africa have been found to be the lowest in the world (bloom, canning, chan & luca, 2014; gandhi, 2018). low enrollment in higher education and a lack of academic research papers (bloom et al., 2014) suggest a widespread disempowerment of thousands of language communities across subsaharan africa. sub-saharan africa contains a populace of over 611 million people, speaking 2,368 languages (eberhard, simons & fennig (eds.). 2020). there is a language connection behind these indices, and it can be tracked back from university level to early primary classrooms. unesco data on urban vs. rural access to education is a strong ethnolinguistic indicator of unequal access to higher education for linguistic minorities. the impact of linguistic disempowerment shows up quite clearly in the articles of several africans. kenya (in east africa) provides one example, described in the following paragraphs. kenya’s ethnic groups have historically resided in certain counties, all “ethnically based” (taaliu, 2017). in kenya, colonizers settled first in the gîkûyû area near mt. kenya, good for growing coffee, tea, and cotton. a regional imbalance for equal access to education began there, and its impact is still felt at every level, from primary through secondary school and university. taaliu found that gîkûyû, which represents an ethnic and linguistic group comprising 17% of kenya’s population, enjoy 23.6% of all jobs in the public universities and colleges. ten ethnic groups and their languages take up 96.3% of the total workforce in kenya’s public universities (national cohesion and integration commission, 2016). this means that 36 other language groups are often geographically isolated from higher education. of kenya’s 47 counties, only 20 have a public university or constituent college. seventeen do not have a single one. nairobi alone has five major public universities, so the linguistic isolation of the most rural language groups is obvious. 1.2 secondary level attendance in minority language areas equal access to secondary education for these groups is of course limited as well. students are admitted to high school after sitting for the kenya certificate of primary education (kcpe) exams, following seven years of instruction primarily using the english language. it is predictable, then, that students admitted in county and sub-county secondary schools “have fewer marks” on those exams than those admitted at the prestigious national secondary schools (education for all, 2019). the exam process ultimately leaves those same students unable to enter national level universities as well. 1.3 limited enrollment and attendance in rural primary schools the trail of disempowerment can be followed all the way back through secondary to primary level education, where 88% of children ages 6-14 are not gaining minimum proficiency levels in reading. secondary enrollment is also disproportionately low in rural, ethnic minority areas, paired with lower attendance rates and higher dropout rates. predicting these indicators of disengagement, primary school success rates are lower in rural areas, which house a large narrowing the language gap 3 number of linguistic minority communities (heugh, 2011). another clue to the importance of the language issue can be the hardest to measure: a true passion for learning. disengagement may go deeper than the traditionally embraced concepts of african formal education and be invisible to the authorities who forbid the use of learners’ languages in classrooms (clegg & afitska, 2011 since data-gathering is no substitute for children’s experiences, i include visual data here, gathered during a series of maasai school visits where grade 2 children were so delighted with their l1 reading curriculum that they grabbed the teacher’s big book when he left the room and tried to read it for themselves. grade 1 children also appeared very proud of what they were learning. our l1s, the first languages we hear and speak, often run as deeply as our worldviews and convey human emotions automatically. figure 2 grade 2 maasai students grab a teacher’s book to try l1 reading for themselves figure 3 grade 1 maasai school children enjoy using their language. more importantly for this research, l1 is a proven vehicle for children’s intellectual development (baker, 2006; caldas, 2014; dutcher, 1995). a pathway for change gillies (2014) envisioning a researchbased curricular sequence from preschool through upper primary school (heugh, 2011), i propose that most secondary school students would truly understand their textbooks and be able to write comprehensible essays in the l2 of their countries if given enough exposure to these three language-based knowledge-and-skill sets and the learning strategies listed in table 1. a hoped-for result would be lasting change to the trends described earlier, resulting in greater enrollment in national or international institutions of higher education. the harder-to-measure impact of equal access to higher education for young representatives of thousands of african language communities just might also enable those language communities to use their languages and cultures to support their education and development goals, making sustainable poverty alleviation possible. 4 global education review 7 (3) table 1 the big picture project description long-term indicators sources of verification assumptions overall objective: a pathway to develop children’s l1 and l2 skills as they learn. students will use l2 textbooks well once they begin secondary school. countrywide results: regional national exam averages, secondary school entrance stats and registration for colleges and universities national education institutions at secondary and university level, unesco data, internationally accepted exams national political and educational infrastructures will commit to and strategically support these changes which involve adjustments in multiple levels of teacher training, policy, and practice. purpose: all african children can access learning via a language they speak (and read) fluently. learners grade 17 learn all subjects via their l1. learners grade 17 study oral l2. learners grade 8 transition to reading and learning via l2. see three charts of phases, in figures 4, 5 and 8. national achievement scores of learner cohorts completing grades 1-7 +2 weeks of grade 8 are significantly higher than average. at end of secondary school, average scores on national exams show significant improvement. results: raised exam scores, acceptance into institutions of higher education, raised employment figures. learners progress through the primary grades, displaying superior knowledge, skills and attitudes (ksas) for all subjects, including oral l2. see objectives and results for each phase teachers support the program, parents support the program, politicians, ministries of education (moes) and teacher unions support the program. the author will show that learners’ first language (l1) is currently minimally used to develop children’s cognitive and communicative abilities, including literacy. while normal intellectual development takes place through a child’s language, if that process is suppressed daily in schools, even the ability to acquire an l2 suffers because that l1 hasn’t been developed enough to strengthen oral communication via a second, unrelated one (milligan, 2016). third, even in those coveted l2s, english and french, literacy isn’t really mastered by many, despite the fact that l2 textbooks are usually the only ones used in schools. when african children reach the secondary level, few in grades 1-6 can decode and comprehend english well (walter, 2007). this means they are unprepared to use l2 textbooks for learning, as indicated by comprehension rates between 3040% by grades 5 and 6. trudell, schroeder & mercado (in press) examined twenty five countries, only to find four in which african multilingual education (mle) programs had sufficient power to produce students who could leverage their biliteracy skills to succeed academically in secondary school or to enter universities. of those four programs, only one continues to be supported and implemented today in ethiopia (aaron, 2019; bender, personal comment with permission, 2020; heugh & skutnabb-kangas, 2010; ilboudo, 2010). researchers looked for factors in the success of the aforementioned four programs. factors they were able to identify and study were (a) years of learning via l1; (b) l1 use for textbooks; (c) adequate teacher training; (d) years of l1-medium instruction across the curriculum, except for oral l2 learning; (e) delay of l2 reading instruction until l1 literacy is established; (f) adequate oral l2 skills development; (g) l2 academic skills systematically developed; and (h) l1 as an narrowing the language gap 5 examinable subject. one singular factor was present in all of the programs with successful long-term outcomes: number of years (i.e., 6-8) with l1 as medium of instruction (trudell, schroeder & mercado, in press). they also identified five “less successful” programs for similar analysis. most were missing the features identified above. common weaknesses identified by data-gatherers across africa were inadequate teacher preparation for mle (fafunwa, 1978), lack of esl curriculum development, and lack of government support (trudell, schroeder & mercado, in press). this paper follows those findings with three causal questions regarding long-term success/failure, and proposes a series of solutions. all revolve around the use of language in education. 1. why isn’t children’s l1 reading instruction giving learners long-term success in school? context 1.1: minimal time given to l1 literacy across most of sub-saharan africa, if l1 reading is taught at all, children aren’t getting enough class time to use it for learning (walter, 2003), for cognitive development and selfexpression, or to gain true and lasting fluency and comprehension of texts, even though “firstlanguage literacy is essential to second language reading” (koda, 2005). local, institutional, and infrastructure support for the above is needed. immediate and extended outcomes include children reading l1 well, and learning and communicating content area concepts and vocabulary via their l1 so that their learning is not linguistically impeded but facilitated. phase 1 in an intervention should involve the following activities and intermediate outcomes (see figure 4, which depicts the sequences of activities and their expected results). figure 4 solution: phase 1 phase 1 activities: • preschool pre-reading curriculum development in l1; l1 reading curriculum development, alongside • use of l1 as medium of instruction for decoding accuracy, fluency, and comprehension skills • teacher capacity development for reading instruction, and • l1 textbook development for subjects, grades 1-7. assumption #1.1. strong, researchbased reading methodologies are already in use in some places and can be applied consistently to this context, so essential components of literacy skill development are present from pre-reading onward. the most effective, research-based approaches must be applied in this phase. the following skills, either for alphabetic or alphasyllabic scripts, must be taught: (a) phonological awareness; (b) phoneme-grapheme recognition; (c) recognition of all taught letters/graphemes 6 global education review 7 (3) within the context of l1 syllables and words; (d) ability to identify those syllables within words, blending syllables left to right for quick whole word recognition; (e) various comprehension skills; (f) various fluency skills; (g) spelling skills; and (h) age-appropriate creative writing ability (seymour, 2006). l1 reading instruction should guide learners to recognize chunks larger than individual phoneme/graphemes, because research has substantiated the effectiveness of syllable recognition for decoding fluency. this certainly applies to african languages, often having metered syllables and distinctly enunciated vowels. recognition of a larger “grain size than the single letter will later facilitate transfer to l2 reading, with european orthographies” (fender, 2008). these inputs can significantly affect outcomes of readers in the final phase of this plan. such recognition of syllables as pronounceable chunks can benefit african literacy significantly. strategic syllable practice doesn’t violate the alphabetic principle but uses it to full advantage while avoiding awkward and slow phoneme “blending” in favor of simple, pronounceable consonant and vowel substitution in syllables (lee, 1982; schroeder, 2013). instead of awkward isolation and “blending” of consonants, consonant substitution in simple rhyming activities does the “isolating.” assumption #1.2. adults’ language attitudes have played a central role in implementation of mle programs in africa. in “the impact of language policy and practice on children’s learning: evidence from eastern and southern africa,” barbara trudell says, “education stakeholders and institutional partners must think together and act collaboratively in order that all the crucial features of quality education, including language instruction, may be successfully addressed” (trudell, 2016, p.120). for this reason, there must be coordinated high-level support from national-level african institutions for full l1 literacy skill development, with curricula which develop spelling and creative writing, using a variety of literature. assumption 1.3. the educational infrastructure would also need to recruit sufficient numbers of l1-speaking teachers, and place them strategically in all of the primary grade classrooms affected. 2. why are students not gaining adequate oral l2 skills for use beyond primary level? so much of the potential for success or failure, whether we analyze exams, matriculation rates, or employment stats, hinges upon mastery of l2 literacy and vocabulary. below is a summary of the challenges the authors found in children’s l2 acquisition across the continent. prominent observations from multiple researchers include the following: (a) not enough time for l2 language, literacy, and content; (b) lack of teacher proficiency in speaking the l2; (c) lack of teacher proficiency in teaching l2 language, literacy, and content; (d) lack of curriculum planning for teaching l2 skills; and (e) lack of materials to support l2 reading and content acquisition (trudell, schroeder & mercado, in press). a cross-cutting theme through each of these observations is the issue of linguistic distance, which increases the difficulty of ensuring students have adequate proficiency in the dominant language. context 2.1: language distance the term “language distance” implies geography. the literal distance is certainly measurable, with an ocean between the north american continent, and a distance of 9,881 km narrowing the language gap 7 by air between sub-saharan africa and the british isles. the distance is also great in terms of numbers of people speaking english (or french) in africa. american teachers explicitly teach less than 400 new words per year, following curriculum guidelines (k. walter, 2005). the list is small because the curriculum developers expect children to acquire thousands of words naturally, in their environment. on the other side of the atlantic, african children aren’t immigrants, so they do not see or hear english used outside of schools, unless they live in urban areas. their languages are as distant from ours as the western reader can imagine! the “linguistic distance” (koda, 2005) is discernible in the language family to which an african language or a european language belongs. in the united states, most immigrants receiving esl instruction are spanish-speaking. spanish, like english, is indo-european, from the same language family as english or french. african languages are grammatically and phonologically very different from both english and french. the challenge of l2 acquisition, again, is far greater in africa than it is in the united states, the united kingdom, or france because indoeuropean grammar and phonology and writing systems are very different from theirs. a grammatical example of the distance for africans is the important role of tone for more than half of africa’s languages. for many, tone signals whether a word is subject or object of a sentence, singular or plural, past or future (schroeder & schroeder, 2016.). another grammatical example of the distance is that of affixation. african languages not only use prefixes and suffixes, but also infixes to convey all kinds of meaning, including probability, causation, plurality, tense, or intentionality. westerners primarily use individual words to convey these concepts. bantu languages, on the other hand, spoken by nearly 240,000,000 africans (nurse & philippson, 2003), contain verbs with dense grammatical information (schroeder, 2013). for example, <a-li-ni-pikia>, contains the verb root -pik-, and includes a person marker, a tense marker, an applicative (like an indirect object), and a verb-final mood marker. african languages contain several examples of phonological distance. for instance, a single consonant may be pronounced as a distinct syllable, and that syllable may be an auxiliary verb or a pronoun. other consonants, unlike our consonant clusters, contain consonant sounds pronounced simultaneously rather than sequentially, such as dagbani <gb>, <kp>, and <ŋm> (pazzack, 2013). even melodies or individual tones distinguish meanings in over half of africa’s languages. for the maasai, tone distinguishes singular and plural nouns, negativity or positivity in commands, and identifies the subject and object in sentences (payne, 2012). the phonology of english also makes it “distant” from african languages. consonants are more frequent than vowels in the average english word, but this is not the case for most african words. count the vowels for the same swahili and english words, in bold: examples here from swahili: kuku fikiri kuketi uende taka (13) the same words in english: chicken think sit go (imp.) want (6) context 2.2: lack of curricular planning for second language acquisition we have established that the need for strong oral l2 curricula is very high across the continent. english is rarely explicitly taught to children as a second language beyond ethiopia and eritrea, and the importance of teaching it (listening, speaking, reading, and writing) in the 8 global education review 7 (3) content areas is often ignored (uys, m. et al, 2007; kembo & ogechi, p. 104; orwenjo et al., 2014. there is plenty of evidence supporting use of well-developed curricula, though. teaching an l2 orally, with a focus on vocabulary development, syntax, and grammar has been shown to significantly contribute to reading success in that l2 (lee & schallert, 1997). a reality anywhere in the world where an l2 is a foreign language to most of the population is that learners need plenty of time to acquire vocabulary and grammar and the phonemic awareness required for comprehension (anthony et al., 2009). kelly walter (2003) assessed the academic readiness of eritrean children who had experienced l1 as the medium of instruction through grade 5. she studied all the english-language textbooks for content areas, beginning with grade 6. walter compared data from the eritrean national reading survey and the vocabulary counts from the curricula of grades 2-5 and grade 8. the national reading survey provided results on vocabulary mastery and reading comprehension from a sample of students in each language group for grades 2, 3 and 5. her findings, using relevant correlations, word counts, density and frequency measures, showed clear evidence that the material in the grade 6 curriculum was beyond the level that grade 5 students had attained in relation to vocabulary (walter, 2003). walter’s analysis focused on vocabulary used in grade 6 curricula and related words used in the grades 2-5. results showed a large number of words which would be completely new to grade 6 learners. clearly, they would be unprepared to master thousands of english words for only two subject areas. her conclusion was that 75.9% of the word families used in grade 6 had never been presented in any formal way in the earlier grades. not only that, but it is clear that not all of the word families that were presented in grades 2-5 had actually been mastered. context 2.3: lack of teacher proficiency in using the l2 some attempts at getting teachers ready to teach oral english have been met with difficulty (benson et al, 2010) due to the vastness of the language chasm , yet “everyone” sees the need for access to all the economic and academic doors english opens for african children (wolff, 2006). despite the desire for english communication skills in schools, teacher capacity can’t be assumed. it must be built, step by step. elip, early learners international preschool, was a program in ethiopia which endeavored to do this (british council, 2019). teachers in canada, the united states, australia, new zealand, and the united kingdom are usually l1 speakers of english. but we can’t make that assumption about a continent of over 2,140 living african languages, where relatively few speak it, either as a first or second language according to eberhard et al. (2019). population percentages are taken here from five african non-francophone countries: kenya, with 6% of the population speaking english as an l1; ethiopia, .2%; nigeria, 32%; and uganda, 7%. the case among rural public school children is of course more extreme than that of their teachers. further evidence of the l2 “distance” teachers experience shows up in several countries studied. ugandan teachers had trouble combining advanced subject content with developing students’ english (orwenjo et al., 2014). in kenyan coastal schools, researchers observed that there was an emphasis on oral language skills, but limited opportunities for students to interact with text, and deficiency in teaching letter-sound relationships in english (dubeck et al., 2012). some kenyan teachers did not teach english phonics at all, because they narrowing the language gap 9 didn’t remember it from teacher training (dubeck et al., 2012). tanzanian secondary teachers believed there should be in-service training so they could improve their teaching approaches. primary head teachers also believed that in-service courses for english teachers would help (qorro, 2006). researchers also felt that namibian grade 4 teachers needed additional training in bilingual teaching (wolfaardt, p. 2005). finally, though the need for l2 instructional training is widespread, there is already evidence that such training makes a big difference in student outcomes. south african teachers who received coaching in english as a second language had students with better english listening comprehension and english vocabulary (kotze et al., 2018). a realistic assessment of the “language distance” should be the first step toward bridging the gap. now that the need for oral l2 instruction in many african public schools is obvious, we can examine the effectiveness of such programs in the rare cases where they’ve been implemented. context 2.4 tested and proven prototypes for something better the ile-ife experiment in nigeria gives much hope for a heavy emphasis on oral english before learners are exposed to it in writing: one of the major responsibilities the english teacher had was that of ensuring that the correct staging of the learning process was adhered to. for example, the project had the policy of extensive oral exercises to promote the functional use of oral english and to prepare pupils adequately for reading with good comprehension. but, because reading normally started a few months earlier in the average primary school than was recommended on the project, a great deal of pressure was brought by the parents on the teachers, for reading to begin at the usual time. teachers had to be encouraged by the supervisors to abide by the project policy until the extended oral language scheme could be proved superior. when the first set of pupils eventually began to read and they proved to be efficient and avid readers, the parents relaxed their pressure and the teachers felt more confident to continue with the scheme (fafunwa, 1978, pp. 88). crosslinguistic research shows that competence in the target language accounts for 30% of l2 readers’ proficiency (lems et al., 2017), which is larger than the 20% of proficiency that l1 literacy accounts for, showing how critical it is that learners have strong l2 language skills before they read the l2. droop and verhoeven (2003) note that “because reading instruction strongly builds on oral language proficiency, second-language speaking children may...experience a considerable gap” (p.1). we have described the “gap” between native english speaking countries and african ones as very large indeed. below we explore current attempts to narrow it for primary school children, with the hope that by the time they reach grades 6 or 7 and transition into english only as medium of instruction (moi) in grade 8, they may continue learning in all areas of a secondary curriculum. two kinds of capacity building are essential: 1) proficiency in oral english, and 2) ability to teach english reading and specialized english vocabulary during the primary school years. so phase 2 should involve the following activities and intermediate outcomes shown in figure 5. 10 global education review 7 (3) figure 5 solution: phase 2 phase 2 key assumptions. because of the phonological and orthographic distance of english and french from all african languages, it will be important that no english reading is introduced while children are still learning to decode and process their l1 orthography (classes 1-5), avoiding interference from conflicting orthographies. implementers will insist upon adherence to the plan to delay english reading until a strong transfer curriculum can be introduced (fafunwa, 1978), and until enough oral english grammar can be mastered to support reading comprehension. kusumarasdyati and ramadhani (2018), while recognizing that l1 reading skills promote successful reading in an l2, note that “reading teachers should ensure that the learners’ fl [oral] proficiency passes the threshold level to facilitate the learners’ reading comprehension” (p.5). many researchers have reached that same conclusion: learners need time to master an l2 in order to read it with comprehension. research support for cummins (1976) and toukomaa & skutnab-kangas’ (1977) threshold theory is evident in the literature (e.g., bialystok, 2001; clarkson & galbraith, 1992; walter, 2003). as competence in two languages increases, so do the reasoning skills for the content areas, such as mathematics. cummins’ threshold hypothesis seems to be borne out in the decades of research carried out around the world by the above mentioned researchers and many others. phase 2 activities. esl curriculum development begins with class 2. teacher capacity is developed via college-level and/or inservice training (preferable from british trainers). classroom esl instruction begins at class 2 and continues through class 7. phase 2 outcomes. • teachers or l2 specialists capable of involving children in learning and using english to understand and express themselves in l2. • children progressing in mastering the l2 orally. • their vocabulary and (oral) awareness of phonemic contrasts between 12 english or 16 french vowel phonemes, including 4 nasals (collins & mees, 2013). 3. how might a reading transfer curriculum provide meaningful access to l2 textbooks for all african students? if a strong, fully developed l1 reading program has been undertaken, and the oral l2 has been taught well over several years, students will have the vocabulary and grammar narrowing the language gap 11 background they need, and away they go toward l2 reading. research by laufer (2003) suggests that adult l2 readers must master a base vocabulary of 3000 word families or about 5000 individual word form, in order to reach a threshold level of reading ability. below this level, a reader cannot fully comprehend a typical adult text. at the time of their research, conducted with adult english learners, if a good l1 reader knows around 5000 words in english, he/she will be able to perform well enough to achieve a minimum passing grade on a comprehension test, with 56% comprehension as the standard. context 3.1: there is a big orthographic distance between the colonial languages’ writing systems and those of most african languages. orthography researchers and psycholinguists agree that “transfer can be defined as automatic activation of wellrehearsed first-language mapping procedures, triggered by (oral) second-language input” (koda, 2005). however, african readers face another hurdle to this “automatic” activation. for most recently developed writing systems, there is a fairly close matching of symbols and sounds. english and french orthographies are not transparent, shallow or consistent, because those languages used a roman alphabet to represent their sound systems, and that alphabet did not have enough vowel symbols to represent all their vowel contrasts. this means that children who have developed fluency using a system with fairly close one-to-one correspondence between symbols and sounds must now look at a larger grain size within words and memorize many spelling patterns. in all cases of the example below, the reader must look beyond a simple vowel symbol to a letter or letters which follow it in order to access pronunciation and meaning. figure 6 grain sizes necessary to indicate english short vs. long vowels man main mane champagne pan pain pane campaign ran rain lane reign plan plain plane feign can list 1.1 cain list 1.2 cane list 1.3 duquesne list 1.4 orthographic processing has been shown to contribute to reading fluency for students of either high or low ability, and for reading accuracy in good readers (cardosomartins, et al., 2019; probert & de vos, 2016). for readers of african languages to transfer to a very deep and inconsistently spelled orthography, they will need to make some changes in their decoding and word recognition strategies. rakhlin et al. (2019) noted that “this finding [that readers will need to use new reading strategies] suggests that interventions, particularly for students past the initial phase of reading instruction, should include training for new orthographic processing skills and unitized reading to a much greater extent than is currently done.” these new readers of english or french must now balance their decoding prowess with attention to context clues and memorized spellings for both meaning and pronunciation, using a sub-lexical route to reading (probert & de vos, 2016; randall, 2005). english has 12 simple vowel phonemes (dsf literacy resources, 2019) and several complex syllable onsets and codas. expected problems include consonant clusters, short and long vowels distinctions, and substitution of certain vowel letters, and word-final clusters which often indicate grammatical meaning, such 12 global education review 7 (3) as tense or plurality (randall, 2005). presumably the harder vowel grapheme combinations would follow simple ones, i.e., <ay>, <ai>, <ee>, <ea>, <oo>, <oa>, <ace> and many more (schroeder, 2007). for more information, see cook, 2004; johnston et al, 2009; bear et al, 2012; and tyner, 2012. a significant orthographic feature of english is the fact that virtually none of the vowel letters and sounds of english (less significant for french) match the sounds those letters are given in their l1s. maasai, a nilotic language, is an example of this. the chart below compares the way 5 of our 12 english vowel sounds are written, with the symbols used to write those sounds in the maasai language, which has many more distinct vowel sounds, including tone and length, so this chart gives only a partial example of the contrasts between the ways african languages are written, and english writing (payne, 2008). figure 7 english vowel sound/graphemes vs. maasai vowel sound/graphemes for orthography-related reasons, i suggest a combination of two simultaneous pedagogical approaches: a) treat the english or french orthographies as if they were simple and regular at first, using english cvc short-vowel words in rhyming patterns to build confidence in the decoding abilities they already possess; and b) using global techniques, help l1 readers to transfer their decoding skills to a deeper, more complex writing system such as english or french, while also helping them quickly recognize frequent words which are often grammatical but not simply decodable. optimal age for transfer is around age 12-14, by which time children are strong readers of their own language (koda, 2008; stephen l. walter, 2013) and can understand the l2 enough to gain metalinguistic awareness during l2 reading study (koda & zehler, 2008). a good placement for literacy transfer teaching is at the start of “upper primary” level or “secondary school” so learners and their teachers get off to a running start with a new orthography, all of them understanding the unique orthographic features of the l2. of course, if learners have truly become strong in l1 literacy skills, and have learned oral english fairly well, the job will no longer be as daunting as it sounds. the chasm will have narrowed considerably. the author proposes that if children are given enough time to really read for meaning with fluency, using l1 textbooks for mathematics, social studies, and science, etc., they will have developed strong tools for comprehending and analyzing what they read. this will reduce the effort required to learn via a second language such as english when they reach secondary level. phase 3 activities and outcomes, shown in figure 8 below, should reflect this context. english vowel maasai vowel i or ice ai o ou ay or ai or ace ei uce (cute) iu e or ee ii narrowing the language gap 13 figure 8 solution: phase 3 phase 3 key assumptions. assumption 1. most students, nearing entry to grade 8, have been able to learn via their l1, and can now read content area textbooks with comprehension and fluency. assumption 2. most of these students, nearing entry to grade 8, will have a degree of l2 oral fluency which approaches level 3 or 3.5. they will have mastered most content area concepts with adequate l2 technical vocabulary. assumption 3. these learners will have at their disposal a number of cognitive skills including phonological and morphological awareness, but these are mediated by the structures of their l1 and the target l2. the way words are expressed visually in african languages differs quite a bit from the way l1 words are encoded: clear sound-symbol relationships vs. unique whole-word representations going beyond a simple soundsymbol representation (schroeder, 2013; scholfield & chwo, 2005). recognition of l2 prefixes, suffixes and grammatical words will play an important part in access to meaning (koda, 2005; bear et al., 2012). assumption 4. learners are accustomed to orthographies which encourage dependence upon decoding skill alone. they will now need immediate whole word recognition of hundreds of frequent homophones such as <sea> vs, <see>, <slay> vs. <sleigh>, <to>, <two> and <too>, <would> and <wood> (van berkel, (2004), as cited in cook & bassetti, 2005 p. 109). assumption 5. learners will need to recognize many spelling patterns for the same sounds, within different whole word and syllable patterns (seymour 2006; ziegler & goswami, 2005), such as the different sounds of <y> in <cry> vs. <baby>, as well as <y> as a constituent in diphthongs such as <say>, so an essential strategy will be recognition of spelling patterns/vowel sounds which are letter combinations, such as <at> vs. <ate>, <et> vs. <eat>, and <cut> vs. <cute>. assumption 6. learners are at a threshold for transferring their l1 reading skills to l2, though the l2 orthography will require adjustments of their decoding and word recognition strategies (probert & de vos, 2016; frost & katz, 1992). assumption 7. learners will benefit, as they did for l1 reading, from attending to grain size (goswami, 2008; bear et al, 2012; rixon, 2011), patterns within words and syllables in english. they will have mastered syllable recognition with african words, but for english reading, they will need to distinguish a multiplicity of spelling patterns, as shown in figure 6. since they now speak and understand english, the reading transfer will not take long. rhyming patterns (figure 9) can leveraged for either english or french (schroeder, 2016). 14 global education review 7 (3) figure 9 rhyming drill used to teach english syllable patterns figure 10 matching activity used to develop vowel discrimination assumption 8. learners will also need practice distinguishing visually what they have already learned to hear and use of the spelling patterns studied at the ends of monosyllabic words (seymour, 2006), shown in figure 6 from schroeder (2016). make the european orthography seem regular at first, using rhyming patterns like those in figure 1, because the strength of most african l1 orthographies is their regularity, or transparency. research shows that the “slower average rate of learning to read english” is caused primarily by its orthographic inconsistency (ziegler & goswami, 2005). assumption 9. because many frequently occurring english words are spelled irregularly, recognition of them, especially the grammatical ones, will be presented in a context which forces the reader to memorize their unique appearance. for example, some prepositions are regularly spelled, such as <in> and <on>. but <to> is not. some frequent verbs are regularly spelled, such as <sit> and <jump>. but <come> and <walk> are not. some nouns are regularly spelled, such as <pig> and <pit>, but <shoe> is not. it does not rhyme with <toe> or <hoe>! sight words, which are printed words stored in memory by the reader that can be read immediately without decoding strategies (bear, et al., 2012), should be introduced strategically and gradually. assumption 10. the l2 transfer curriculum will enable the teacher to selfmonitor comprehension and study skills as they are applied to grade 8and 9-level fiction and nonfiction texts. assumption 11. many grade 8 teachers will need some oral l2 retooling to ensure that their pronunciation accurately represents all the vowel sounds of the l2 (smith et al, 2012; goswami, 2006). phonological awareness and pronunciation scaffold auditory discrimination and comprehension of words such as <cat> vs. <cut> and <caught>, and a strong l2 academic vocabulary allows teachers to communicate the content areas well. the “distance” is great on many levels, yet the gap can be narrowed considerably via narrowing the language gap 15 expert teachers and strong curricula. the entry point is learners’ l1, the ideal vehicle for developing their cognitive abilities, alongside 5-6 years of oral l2 instruction. then a linguistically and orthographically focused transitional reading curriculum should close the l2 reading gap. this sequencing of curricula should allow class 1 children to focus on reading their l1 while they continue developing their cognitive skills via their language. it also allows class 1 teachers to focus on one new, highly significant and complex pedagogical strategy: teaching l1 reading, and using that language all day as l1medium textbooks are used for teaching the other subjects. oral l2 instruction, according to this pathway of change, begins in grade 2 and continues for thirty minutes to one hour daily through grade 7, for six years. phase 3 activities. at the start of grade 7 or 8, use a transitional reading curriculum with four streams: (a) recognition of english vowel sounds and their spellings; (b) recognition of english morphology and english sight words; (c) use and review of existing oral esl vocabulary; and (d) higher-level calps comprehension skills, using specialized subject vocabulary and concepts. this curriculum— if implemented for an entire school day for three weeks—could launch successful reading of an l2 which learners can already speak. if it is taught by teachers of every grade 8 subject, as though they were homeroom teachers of one class for the 3-week course duration, those teachers would know what their l2 readers are facing daily when they resume regular teaching of their subjects, and they will possess skills to continue developing new vocabulary in their students. phase 3 inputs. a transfer curriculum should develop the following skills: (a) vowel phoneme-grapheme mapping within syllables or words (anthony et al, 2009) applying l2 phonemic awareness (koda, 2005); (b) rhyming words with initial consonant substitution (rixon, 2011); (c) ability to recognize and decode l2 consonant cluster patterns, especially for l1 transfer from abugida scripts (ahlberg, 2020); (d) a global approach to sight words, always giving them a meaningful context, because many frequently occurring words are grammatical in nature, with little pictureable meaning of their own (for, to, there, were, who, are, you); and (e) connected text with advanced comprehension activities and “reason to read,” so that as learners continually encounter more abstract text, they will have the study skills needed. help will also be needed, due to the orthographic gap, in (a) activities including morpheme recognition with prefixes and suffixes (kearns, 2015); (b) recognition of the larger grain size needed for vowel sounds via spelling skill development involving initial c substitution and patterns such as <ay>, <ai>, <eigh>, <ace>; (c) context clue skill development using cloze and other activities (ehri, 2005); (d) english vocabulary and grammar reinforcement games (visual), and (e) study skills honed with l2 texts adapted from content textbooks. phase 3 outputs. outputs n this phase include a cadre of middle school students who can read their english textbooks with comprehension and problem-solving skill, and can express themselves well in writing. see below for longer-term outcomes. 4. what long-term outcomes should we expect? african youth enter secondary schools able to use their english textbooks for learning. measureable evidence include raised achievement scores, increased numbers of youth qualifying for enrollment in universities, and increased access to the job market after graduation from secondary school. the author proposes a prototype intervention in an african country that includes 16 global education review 7 (3) a complex causal pathway like the one described, which would be implemented in three phases of curriculum development, taking place throughout primary school and the start of grade eight. the midterm outcome of phase 2 should reflect a large proportion of learners entering grade 8 equipped with reading and comprehension skills fully developed via their l1, l2 phonemic awareness (koda, 2005), and vocabulary and communication skills that enable them to learn using l2 textbooks and study all secondary school subjects via the l2. the goal beyond the scope of this program would be for youth to graduate from secondary schools able to use their academic skills for further learning, either formally or informally. beyond that, language communities would eventually be equipped to use their languages to support their education and development goals, enabling sustainable poverty alleviation. dialog and partnership with government /education infrastructure representatives is assumed to precede the three phases described. it is assumed that there would be early opposition from various levels of power in the ministries of education and also from elected officials. if the populace of both rural and urban areas were truly awakened to the economic benefits gained by use of the l1 in education, they might insist upon change. references aaron, m. 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(2020). working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor in english early childhood education and care (ecec). global education review, 7 (2). 75-89. working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor in english early childhood education and care (ecec) éva mikuska university of chichester, uk nikki fairchild portsmouth university, uk abstract technocratic accountability, which is impacting ecec practices in england, is where the government favors evidence-based knowledge to work with children. as a result, the emotional aspect of ecec work and emotional labor have become increasingly complex and are sometimes unrecognized. in this paper we highlight the importance of more relational, connected, and embodied ways to work with young children. analyzing qualitative semi-structured interview data from two projects, we focus on emotional labor using poststructuralist and posthuman affect theory. we use data from the first project to analyze narratives from ecec practitioners, highlighting the relationship between government policies and dominant discourses. the second project notes entanglements with human and other-than-human bodies enacted with affect theory, which reveals embodied other-than-human productions of emotional labor generating alternative ways to explore ecec work. by engaging with these two theoretical and conceptual positions, we offer a different perspective to consider ecec professional knowledge(s) and reveal the ways these can shed an alternative light on professional practice. the resultant analysis allows us to reconsider knowledge-making practices in ecec and challenge existing cartesian dualistic thinking which separates “care” and “education.” keywords ecec; emotional labor; poststructuralism; posthuman affect; relationality; knowledge-production introduction in england, early childhood education and care (ecec) is predominantly part of a neoliberal market model where provision for children between the ages of birth to five (foundation stage) has been driven by a statutory curricular framework, the early years foundation stage (eyfs), and micromanaged by the government regulator (department of education [dfe], 2017; ofsted, 2014). the diversity of the sector is replicated in the different types of non-statutory provision; including private day nurseries, children’s centers, nurseries attached to schools (or long daycare/preschools), and childminders (or family daycare). provision can be sessional or full time for up to 51 weeks of the year as selected by parents. the required qualification to work in these types of settings is a vocational accreditation, which is equivalent to exit-level high school certificates, although academic qualifications have developed to postgraduate level in recent years (dfe, 2017). in england, from the age of five, education is compulsory once the child passes the september after their fourth birthday; they enter schooling for the reception year, which is generally led by qualified teachers who hold either an undergraduate or a postgraduate teaching qualification. pedagogy is traditionally play76 global education review 7 (2) based, where ecec practitioners blend childdirected and adult-led learning both inside and outside the classroom (wood, 2013). however, pedagogy becomes more adult-led as children are prepared to transition to more formal compulsory stages of education. during the 1990s, ecec was subject to market-led models of education that resulted in the expansion of the sector, increased government investment, and introduction of an ecec curriculum (lloyd & penn, 2013). the influx of public money saw the need to demonstrate “quality improvements” and “value for money” (fairchild, 2017). from 2010, successive government reforms have resulted in a curriculum-focused approach where children are regularly assessed against measurable milestones (dfe, 2017). assessment strategies follow children into compulsory education where the standard & testing agency (sta, 2019) of the department for education produced an assessment framework to provide an on-entry baseline assessment of attainment to measure what it details are the key features of a child’s “school readiness.” the proposed baseline framework has generated heated debates amongst professionals, academics, and researchers concerned over its suitability and efficacy (see moss, 2019). these concerns include the worry that the play element of learning has been side-lined in policy, despite arguments that “learning not only can, but clearly does occur during play” (nitecki & wasmuth, 2017, p. 2). the focus on getting children “school ready” has become a key government priority (dfe, 2017). the conceptualization of “school readiness” was framed by ideas that young children must be ready to conform to the specific demands of a defined school routine and curriculum, rather than as a process of cocreating learning spaces and activities, and building relationships (ofsted, 2014). at the same time, ecec provision and the workforce have been judged against the government regulator’s measures of “quality” (ofsted, 2014), which has been determined by the narrow definition of “school readiness” and specific measures of child outcomes at developmental stages (moss, 2017). it has been argued that ecec practitioners’ emotional investment in day-today practices has been taken for granted due to the highly feminized nature of the industry (osgood, 2012). the cartesian dualistic split between the “body” and “mind,” coupled with the view that young children have simple development needs (moss, 2017), have contributed to the perception that ecec work is gendered, low skilled, and low paid (osgood, 2012). for these reasons, the continuity of the conceptual division between “care” and “education” for 0-3 and 3to 5-year-old children remains high on the policy agenda (moss, 2017, 2019). this division has been reinforced with statutory assessment points at age 2 and the end of the foundation stage (dfe, 2017) which further separates the “care” aspect of ecec practice. in this paper, we argue that in achieving the government goal of school readiness and accountability for a child’s progress against the eyfs development goals, there is a possibility that the emotional aspects of ecec practice, such as emotional labor, can become unrecognized (see bradbury & roberts-holmes, 2018). employing data from two qualitative projects, interpreted through poststructuralism and posthuman affect theory, we seek to explore and understand how the emotional aspects of ecec practice can reveal relational, connected, and embodied ways to understand what it means to work with young children. we aim to contribute to the argument of wider definitions of “knowledges,” where campbell-barr (2019) argues for the “plurality of specialized working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor 77 professional knowledge for ecec” (p.134) that not only opens up multiple ways of knowing, but also a consideration of the different ways of knowing and how these might be articulated (campbell-barr, 2017). review of the literature technocratic accountability is based on the application of evidence-based knowledge to work with children (georgeson & campbellbarr, 2015), which may result in the reproduction of school readiness, measurable outcomes, and quality improvements via more adult-led teaching practices (moss, 2017; 2019). in this sense, the emotional aspect of ecec work is not—and cannot— be captured. boler (1999) questioned why professional and scholarly disciplines “erase, denigrate, and devalue emotions” (p. xviii), as this can impact wider perceptions of caring work and reinforce dualistic splits. hochschild’s (1983) influential work, the managed heart, commercialization of human feeling, was the first to address the idea that work is not solely divided between dualisms of mind and body, but may also incorporate significant emotional entanglement. such work entails learning to manage one’s own feelings in order to evoke particular feelings in other people. she argued that, in human life, emotionality is an important function that contributes to successful relationships in which emotional labor is “sold” and taken for granted within the labor market (hochschild, 1983). hochschild’s (1983) ideas have generated debates about emotional labor, especially in work related to care. existing discussions in ecec surrounding emotional labor have focused on the management and expression of emotions (campbell-barr et al., 2015; van laere et al., 2014) and caring work (bolton, 2004; page, 2018; taggart, 2011). for example, elfer (2008) discussed emotional labor in the context of the ecec, stating the following: nursery staff spoke of minimising possible feelings of exclusion, guilt or envy in parents by careful control of information given to them about their child’s day. staff were required to smile and look cheerful when parents were being showed around. there was also the labor managing emotions evoked by parents, sometimes nursery staff being idealised as “loving children and having endless patience” when this is far from the subjective reality (p. 365). there have also been links to practitioner training where colley’s (2006) study showed that emotional labor was taught in terms of how to evoke calmness and happiness, and supress negative emotions in order to provide quality care for children in the nursery. she argued that emotional labor carried costs for the ecec practitioner as it is “controlled and exploited for profit by employers” (p. 15). vincent and braun (2013) argued that expectations for emotional engagement, regulation, and containment should form part of the training for current and future ecec practitioners. official recognition of emotional labor has currently been subsumed into english curricular policy as the “key person” approach, where a practitioner’s role is to promote an attachment with the children in their care (dfe, 2017). furthermore, in literature the emotional aspects of practice have been reflected in the expectations for practitioners to build caring—even loving—relationships with young children (davis & degotardi, 2015; elfer, 2012; langford et al., 2017; taggart, 2011). emotional labor has been explored as a way to understand and question the lived nature of emotional work. indeed, the concept of professional love has been developed to legitimize the ways in which ecec practitioners “love” as part of their role (andrew, 2015; aslanian, 2015; page, 2018) which emphasizes the possible effect that emotional labor may have on ecec practitioners. 78 global education review 7 (2) however, dahlberg et al. (2007) stated that portraying nurseries as a place of emotional closeness where emotional labor is seen as an “intimacy” is faux, and this portrayal can misleadingly combine the public and private spheres of life. they further argued that the nursery should not be seen as “home-fromhome” nor should the ecec practitioner be seen and regarded as “substitute mother.” they strongly argued that the benefit of attending a nursery is that it offers “something different but quite complementary, so the child gets the best of two (home and nursery) environments” (dahlberg et al., 2007, p. 45). they also emphasized the independence of the child by stating that the “young child is born equipped to learn and does not ask for permission to start learning. in fact, the young child risks impoverishment at the hands of adults, and rather than “development, the loss of capabilities over time.” (dahlberg et al., 2007, p. 48). here dahlberg et al. (2007) see the agentic child as a co-constructer of knowledge, identity, and culture, competent and rich in potential, and the ecec practitioner’s role is to complement the child’s experiences. however, the ways in which the ecec practitioner follows and invests their own knowledge, experience, and skills to address a less “competent” child can be seen as a source of challenge. this is because some children do not meet the demands imposed by adults, therefore it can be argued that emotional labor is taken for granted to address the “challenges” that might arise where a diverse range of children attend ecec provision (moss, 2017). there have been wider debates that indicate emotional labor is not openly discussed in the field of education more generally. for example, it was argued that in teaching and learning practices, teachers’ emotional investment to their professional work was overlooked (mikuska & lyndon, 2018). in ecec, acknowledging emotional labor can be just as difficult as it may undermine the process of the professionalization of the workforce (tan, 2014), which, despite government investment in a range of qualifications, is still perceived as a deficit (osgood, 2012). canella (1997) stated that ecec work is linked to emotional labor in the context of the skills mothers “naturally” have, therefore, professionals needed emotional awareness of both themselves and others to be able to effectively engage work related to care (ruch, 2012). the potential expectation for emotional labor as part of the ecec practitioner’s role can conflict with other internalized moral and social expectations of gendered caring work (syed, 2008), and can impact the ways in which the practitioners view themselves and their practice (payne, 2009). the challenge for ecec practitioners remains to find ways of moving beyond deficit perceptions of ecec as emotionally gendered and “natural” for women (o’brien, 2007, 2008). taggart (2011) argued that “…taking control of the professionalisation agenda therefore requires practitioners to demonstrate a critical understanding of their practice as emotional work” (p. 85). hochschild (1983) warned that social status, class, and gender differently distribute the way in which emotional labor is managed, where women in particular are required to do more of the emotional labor type of work than men. furthermore, bolton (2004) debated that the commodification of emotional labor made it a challenge to resist or subvert the need for emotional labor that is often unrecognized. wider dichotomies of care/education, skills/emotions and gendered work have been problematized by lenz taguchi (2007), who argued that power relations promote academic knowledge (predominantly theoretical and masculine) as more highly valued than (motherly feminine) nursery practices. this working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor 79 gendered dualism forms the basis of the skills debate in service and care work where men are generally employed in more managerial or technical roles than women (nixon, 2009). therefore, it can be argued that debates on emotional labor in ecec are nuanced and complex due to the additional development of the organizational requirements of work in settings where both care and education are key components. however, policies that measure children’s outcomes devalue “the labor of love, care, and solidarity” (apple, 2013, p. 16) that underpins the ecec practitioner’s role. the conceptual division between “education” and “care” remains a concern as it drives the ecec practitioner in a particular direction, one that needs to ensure that “no aspect of the child must be left uneducated: education touches spirit, soul, motivation, wishes, desires, dispositions and attitudes” (fendler, 2001, p. 121). this can result in ecec practitioners’ well-being and their emotional investment being disregarded due to government visions for accountability and a future society that creates the child as a selfgoverning subject (dahlberg et al., 2007). methodological approach to investigate the notion of emotional labor and the emotional investment of ecec practitioners, we draw on qualitative data from two projects. both projects investigated the professional practice of ecec practitioners in england and aimed to recognize the wide range of skills and knowledge(s) that their job may require. the first project involved 42 semistructured interviews with ecec practitioners including childminders. analysis of this project provided the foundation to the second, whereby the first project sets the scene on “dominant narratives” of ecec practitioners with the particular focus on the emotional aspects of their role. the second set of data was based on 10 semi-structured interviews with a similar range of ecec practitioners. working with posthumanist theorizations reveal a different view of human emotions within the social and material world and engages with the material (other-than-human) to reveal more-than-human relations (coole & frost, 2010). this offers a way to move beyond purely discursive articulations of “dominant narratives” where “different conditions in which subjectivity can be revealed” (benozzo & gherardi, 2019, p. 4). from a poststructural approach to posthuman affect poststructural approach to data collection and analysis a poststructural approach does not have one fixed meaning, but explores the complex relationship between existing knowledge, “truth,” and power, and the effects of these relationships on the individuals (macnaughton, 2005). it helps to “bring assumptions and things taken for granted again into question, to shake habits, ways of acting and thinking, to dispel the familiarity of the accepted, to take the measure of rules and institutions” (gordon, 2000, p. xxxiv). it also troubles the binary categories such as male/female, adult/child, rational/irrational, making visible the constructive force of linguistic practices and dismantling their apparent certainty (davies & gannon, 2011). this approach claims that personal and political knowledge is guided and based upon individual experiences. weedon’s (1997) work offered a contextualization of exploring experiences using poststructural theory; he stated the following: experience has no inherent essential meaning. it may be given meaning in language through a range of discursive systems of meaning which are often contradictory and constitute conflicting versions of social reality, which in turn serve conflicting interests (p. 33). 80 global education review 7 (2) social reality is thus formed through individuals’ experiences, and locations, in discursive structures which make it impossible to produce one consistent and absolute “truth” (foucault, 1980). since this paper reports on the experiences of ecec practitioners that are formulated through their gendered and caring experiences, and on the ways these ecec practitioners understand their practice, there is no absolute objective “truth”. instead, “truths” are discourses accepted by society as meaningful. our positioning in this paper is not concerned with identifying an authentic “truth” but to highlight, through lived experiences, the complexities of ecec practices. posthuman affect building on poststructural philosophies, a posthuman oeuvre questions the taken-forgranted primacy of the human and their relationship in the world. taylor and gannon (2018) note that this approach requires the human to be decentered and given the same status as other-than-humans. this produces a shift from discrete subjects/objects to reveal corelational constellations of assemblages where connections between bodies produce the flows, forces, and intensities through which “life” is materialized (fairchild, 2019). one of the concepts central to posthuman thinking is that of affect. however, defining affect can be problematic as there are multiple theoretical perspectives and positions (slaby & mühlhoff, 2019). in this paper we employ affect to explore how bodies become modified as they come into contact with, and connect to, each other (gregg & seigworth, 2010; massumi, 2015). affect has been conceptualized as intersubjective and pre-personal (massumi, 2015) and can “influence how we live, interact and work” (pullen et al., 2017, p. 109). however, affect and emotion are co-constitutive, in as much as emotions can be produced as part of the modification of connecting bodies; emotions are episodic “realisations of affect” (von scheve & slaby, 2019, p. 46). although employing terms such as emotion may appear “too reliant on unspecified social and cultural assumptions about what specific terms mean and do” (anderson, 2014, p. 11) emotions can be an expression of the capture of affect (massumi, 2002). by acknowledging fluidity, affect becomes political as bodily transformations unfold where the politics of collective transformation are more than individual human identity politics; they are politics of bodily transformations (massumi, 2015). poststructural approach first set of data findings this section reports on the “dominant narratives” of ecec practitioners that emerged from the 42 semi-structured interviews. the individual stories were thematically grouped for analysis to determine which stories were constructed by which participants and to consider the question “[w]hy this story here and now?” (bamberg, 2016, p. 1294). the investment of the emotional human capital to produce a high-quality professional service was referred to by all participants. the emotional element appeared as part of the “soft skills” (care, love) in feminized work, along with passion for the job ecec practitioners do. it is therefore vital to recognize emotional labor when professionalization in ecec is debated. two dominant themes emerged from data, both addressing practitioners’ emotional investments: one, the emotional cost of leaving a child in the care of others, resulting in ecec practitioners dealing with parents (mainly mothers) emotionality; and two, the connection with some aspects of the ecec practitioners’ (emotional) job, which often goes unrecognized. working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor 81 emotional cost of leaving a child in the care of others …sometimes we need to support the parents during settling in period not the child (hannah) the child is fine, settled well, but her mum is just so anxious. i know, it is natural for a mum to worry, but sometimes it is just too much (lottie) i know that those mums who had to go to work and who leave their children for the first time on tuesday afternoon are quietly suffering, i can really relate to their feelings, feelings of pain and guilt…(charlotte) these examples were just a few that demonstrated the emotional cost of parents leaving their child(ren) in the nursery. the support ecec practitioners offered parents was considered an important part of their role as parents needed to be reassured that their child(ren) were in “good” quality care. these examples show that emotionally engaged work requires emotional labor as part of the recognition of skilled work (payne, 2009), as ecec practitioners perform complex roles that involved balancing parents’ anxiety with providing high-quality care for their children. for example, hannah, a deputy manager spoke about the emotional service she provided for some working mothers. she spoke at length about her personal experience as a working mother, describing how she felt leaving her own children in the care of others. she described her feelings “like a kind of a grief when you hand over your child to someone else to look after her… it was the biggest hurdle i had to overcome.” this example shows the emotional cost mothers need to pay when leaving their own children in the nursery. drawing on her own experience as a mother, her focus was on the support of other mothers in the nursery she runs, who were in the same/similar situation as she was. this action emphasized a dominant discourse of the maternal embodiment in care work (bolton, 2004) and reinforced the widely accepted binary of domestic roles between mothers/fathers or females/males. mothers who are returning to work were engaged more than their children’s father in organizing, planning, and finding appropriate care for their children (o’brien, 2007, 2008). (un)recognized emotional labor you are attached to them personally and professionally. you do feel for them even when you go home especially when some of those children are on the child protection register and stuff. i do feel for them, when i go home, i do worry about them in my head (trudie) when i finished my degree, i was so passionate to change things in the nursery. but my manager didn’t like that, so i had no choice but to leave (barbara) i am still teased by my male friends. they don't really understand why i chose to work in the nursery. for example, when we go to the pub, they would buy me a half pint or say things like you cannot drink more than a pint. they just think that i play with babies all day… (rocky) all these accounts show that ecec work is not solely divided between dualisms of the mind and body, but also incorporates a significant amount of unrecognized emotional work. hochschild (1983), bolton (2004), and taggart (2011) all argued for emotionality to be recognized, as emotional labor is an important part of care work contributing to high-quality services. like trudie, the feel of worry, care, and attachment does not end at work, it continues in a domestic sphere which goes unrecognized. 82 global education review 7 (2) barbara confirms what tan (2014) states, that qualifications increase human capital through knowledge and skills. with an aspiration to hold a higher professional qualification, a positive impact on the ecec staff and services can be produced. this is part of the ecec professionalization process that reverberates with what many interviewees argued, that professionalism has always been linked to developing knowledge. barbara’s selfreflection indicates that the reason for studying was to implement changes in her setting to ensure better outcomes for children. however, this was stopped by her manager, which resulted in her changing her job. feeling undervalued or not recognized, despite finishing a degree, is another form of unrecognized emotional labor that ecec practitioners face, which can result in changing jobs. rocky’s story showed the gender division of labor in the nursery. the normative conceptions of appropriate behavior for males and females, in this case, can be seen as a deviation from the expected behavior for males, because he was doing ecec work that had been described as “play[ing] with babies all day.” in western society, those individuals who do not act according to the dominant requirements of gender, or do not perform within the socially accepted domain of masculinity or femininity, may risk marginalization (canella, 1997). for rocky, this marginalization takes place through his friends, who are questioning his masculinity; but rocky was also a father, a husband, a friend, and a deputy manager. therefore, he was constituted from multiple, and probably simultaneous identities according to his specific contexts driven by a certain time and place. unsettling the dominant discourse of masculinity, where rocky was expected to “drink as a man” and to “do a man’s job” can be achieved by moving away from the binary system of male/female but also by rejecting the idea of the unitary identity. for example, weedon, (1997) argues that this view permits a different understanding of gender, where examining the construction of gender takes place through cultural discourses in which gender is made. this also suggests that by teasing rocky for not doing a “man’s job,” ecec work was seen by his friends for females only. while such relations are (re)constructed, renegotiated, or resisted for rocky, for female ecec practitioners the negotiation sits within “juggling work/home commitment” where 13 of the 42 participants mentioned this as an issue. for rocky, in order to feel valued and confident in what he does for living, considerable amount of self-regulation and emotional labor needed to be invested; this kind of emotional labor goes unrecognized. affective data materializations – second set of data findings the data explored in this section of the paper was generated as part of a sociological review kickstart grant funded project “unsettling early childhood education and care (ecec) classrooms: ecological relations, professionals, and more-than-human subjectivities.” data was collected using a range of methods including semi-structured interviews, non-participant observations, and image elicitation. in this section, we focus on seemingly mundane data fragments which emerged during the 10 semi-structured interviews. the aim was to move beyond discursive constructions of dominant narratives to consider how affective bodies and emotions were entangled in material moments from the interviews. the interview transcripts were subject to close reading whereby we were drawn to data that we felt articulated affective moments of emotional labor. whilst we could have considered an inductive or thematic analysis of this account, we were conscious of some of the working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor 83 materialist critiques of representation that can arrest debate and thinking as it “claims to represent truth or morality” (maclure, 2015, p. 102). we turn to taylor (2013) who encourages researchers to focus on the small and mundane happenings to “pay attention to what we don’t normally see, to what is excluded” (p. 629). “thank you” card this first excerpt is from jane, who works in a medium sized private nursery that could cater for up to 50 children per day ranging between the ages of birth to five. she discussed a “thank you” card she received from parents of children she had looked after in her setting: this [the card]…was from a family that i’ve had all three of their boys, and they love it. do you know what? parents love it. they all come because of our garden, and they all tell us, “we’ve come here because of the garden.” families like that, they love coming back and going “you’re still here!” and as much as that’s lovely, so they like to be able to see the staff…if you strengthen all of that up, the rest naturally follows. and that is our core ethos i guess, and it’s natural, and it’s home from home and it’s comfortable and everyone is, it sounds like we’re all happy and have big cuddles all the time but generally the staff love the children and it’s all professional love and we’re not ones that, our children do get kissed and they do get cuddled and it’s very affectionate because we have a lot of full-timers, they’re in 45 hours a week… i don’t know, i just, when i look at our children…they always develop to their standards, it’s all about potential for them and how we can develop them, and we are very “school readiness” but it’s not, we stick with the primary areas, we try and, yes they do learn maths, yes they do learn english, they do all of that but we make happy, confident children that will talk to anybody and they’re not afraid of people and they’re very sociable children, we’re very much concentrated on the primary areas of the early years foundation stage guidance. the “thank you” card materializes emotions from a range of different perspectives—those of the parents— their love for the setting, the resources, and the way the environment is set up, and the perspectives of the ecec practitioners. a “key person” was incorporated into the eyfs as both a figure for children’s transitions and attachments and for supporting learning and development (dfe, 2017). this dual focus acknowledged the influence of the education/care binary; however, the above excerpt is primarily focused on love and the potential for emotional labor, where ecec practitioners support parents. in this instance emotions are not erased but the “thank you” card becomes a conduit to make visible some of the unrecognized aspects of emotional labor. this raises an important issue for the perception of the importance of emotions and the management of these alongside being a professional practitioner (elfer, 2008; osgood, 2012; taggart, 2011; van laere et al., 2014). however, the debates concerning commodification and academic knowledge (lenz taguchi, 2007) are part of the discussions. jane specifically mentions “professional love” (page, 2018), which reveals the manifestations of the education/care/love debates (campbell-barr et al., 2015; langford, 2019) and replicating the split between professional/personal and mind/ body. this is also exemplified as the discursive nature of school readiness in the eyfs (dfe, 2017). tensions between education and care (apple, 2013; fendler, 2001) are highlighted further when jane considered how the social development of the children is just as important as their cognitive development. in this excerpt, affect flows through the “thank you” card and connects to ecec 84 global education review 7 (2) practitioners, parents, children, and the eyfs curricular outcomes. these flows are produced as the private and professional aspects of jane’s work life are revealed (pullen et al., 2017) where the card was addressed to her personally but made links to her role as an ecec practitioner. this then influenced how she spoke about her and her colleagues’ roles and the ways in which (professional) love is an emotional outcome of the affective relationships (von scheve & slaby, 2019). in this excerpt, jane does not recognize that the emotions felt are erased in her connections with parents, children, and policy; if anything, they are magnified. however, she does start to acknowledge that they may be unrecognized in policy when she links to school readiness. there is also a sense these emotions are reclaimed throughout the excerpt as affective connections that modify the way she perceives the need for education and care to be intrinsically linked (massumi, 2002, 2015). stones and circle time this second excerpt is from christine who was based in a farm setting which took children between 2 years and 5 years old. the children spent most of their time outdoors and could access the whole farm, along with specific areas for them to play and learn with the ecec practitioners. below is a discussion on a stone and how it helped to facilitate a circle time engagement: we had a child with additional needs so the little boy was adopted with his siblings and had had quite a traumatic upbringing and boundaries were not in place and actually…his emotional state could leave him very frustrated, so circle time then was an opportunity to be able to talk about keeping ourselves safe on the farm and building up a trusted relationship…so it had its place…i had a stone, so just a stone, that was found outside and it was painted red and it had a few dots on it…and it was my magic stone and it was always kept in my pocket…it was a magic stone and when we held it we were allowed to talk and everybody else would listen to us because what we have to say was really important, but to be able to listen to the other person we needed to have our stone and have our space first so the stone, had a purpose and the activity had a purpose and we would have to do that before we moved onto a different space on the farm... rautio (2013) considers the power and affective nature of stones for young children. she argues autotelic practices, where the stone is placed in a pocket for no other reason than it produces a feeling, highlights that with the “fleetingness and aimlessness of autotelic practices, we would have to let go of our insistence on long-term accountability, evaluation and controlling of learning outcomes” (rautio, 2013, p. 403). the bodily connections between the emotions of the boy and the need to self-regulate, which are part of the prime areas of learning in the eyfs (dfe, 2017), are palpable. christine maintained a very child-led, play-based pedagogy (wood, 2013) in the farm setting and her professional identity was dependant on the way she resisted aspects of the school readiness agenda (osgood, 2012). in this excerpt, the stone becomes a vibrant affective intensity which modified practice, emotions, and social expectations in the setting. christine has a strong sense of emotional awareness for the needs of the boy and the other children in the setting (ruch, 2012). this shows in the way she employs her own emotional management to connect with the boy and to ensure his peers also made that connection (davis & degotardi, 2015; langford et al., 2017; taggart, 2011). the stone and its autotelic nature make further connections to the school readiness agenda in the eyfs (dfe, working with (post)theories to explore embodied and (un)recognized emotional labor 85 2017), which asks for activities to become more adult directed so that children are ready to transition to compulsory education. however, the affective nature of the stone transforms the circle time from a school readiness activity to a means to connect with magic, emotions, and the farm environment supporting both the staff and children. in this excerpt, christine’s emotional labor becomes visible and is materialized by the stone that drives the activity she had planned. the eyfs, as a curricular body, becomes stretched and deformed as school readiness becomes re-centered on the way emotions are produced in everyday occurrences (von scheve & slaby, 2019). it may be that the ethos of the farm setting was affective in the ways that childled learning was of paramount importance. the stone and christine’s body embraced the emotionality and emotional labor of the circle time activity and of the children who participated. this re-claiming of emotions and school readiness affects a movement of emotional labor beyond the deficit discourses of low professional status and value of practitioners, to a generative and expansive view of emotions and emotional labor as an intrinsic and recognizable part of practice expectations (campbell-barr et al., 2015; elfer, 2012; page, 2018; taggart, 2011; van laere et al., 2014). conclusions in this paper, we explored how emotional labor can be unrecognized in english government policy (dfe, 2017) which has been focussed on technocratic models of school readiness to frame professional practice. research has noted the importance of acknowledging emotional labor as part of skilled professional work (see for example elfer, 2012; page, 2018; taggart, 2011). however, the policy focus of school readiness reveals how practitioners’ desires to “care” are in tension with accountability requirements (bradbury & roberts-holmes, 2018; moss, 2017, 2019). the call for papers asked authors to challenge the mind/ body split which favors a particular type of ecec practice. we have drawn on poststructuralism and posthuman affect theory to instantiate (1) how emotional labor becomes co-constituted and reinforced via dominant discourses, and (2) how paying attention to other-than-human bodies can reveal the affective nature of how emotional labor is materialized. our contribution in this paper allows us to reveal and recognize the multiple and plural ways of knowledge making practice in ecec (campbell-barr, 2017, 2019) which take a more relational, connected, and embodied form. in the literature we explored the complexity and nuances of emotionality and emotional labor in ecec practice, which is in tension with accountability practices which split “education” and “care.” the first set of data sets up some of the dominant discourses of emotional entanglement and employed a poststructural approach. the analysis revealed that in many cases emotional labor is unrecognized in some of the debates that surround the person/private sphere of the ecec practitioner. the second set of data considered the materialization of emotions which included connections to otherthan-human bodies articulating emotions as an affective intensity of emotional labor. these affective connections between human and otherthan-human bodies reveal the more-thanhuman aspect of emotional labor, which acts as a counterpoint for technocratic accountability. we argue that new modes of thinking are needed to consider the multiple discursive and posthuman aspects of ecec practice. our paper offers one way to conceptualize ecec work that moves beyond technocratic accountability practices that we hope will provide an alternative and different perception 86 global education review 7 (2) on the realities of ecec practice. building on the current scholarship that surrounds emotionality and emotional labor, and working with the “post” theories is the way in which we articulate a call for attention to be paid to the emotional nature of practice. we hope the critical theorizations we offer in this paper will engage with wider dialogues and resonate with both ecec practitioners and scholars alike. references anderson, b. 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(1987). feminist practice and poststructuralist theory. 2nd edition. oxford: blackwell publishers. wood, e. (2013). play, learning and the early childhood curriculum. london: sage. about the authors éva mikuska is a senior lecturer in the department of education, health and social science at the university of chichester, uk. her work seeks to broaden current views on early childhood education and care in england with the aims to produce a more generative, ethical, and political way to enact ecec research. her language skills (native hungarian, and serbocroat) and her research enables her work to have synergy with a national and international set of ecec researchers. nikki fairchild is a senior lecturer in early childhood at portsmouth university, uk. her research and publications have two foci: enacting posthumanist and new material feminist theory to extend existing theorizations of professionalism, professional identity, and more-than-human subjectivities in early childhood; and researching with a group of inter-disciplinary scholars to explore postqualitative research-creation and what this might mean for knowledge production. 26 global education review 6(1) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: rohrmann, tim (2019). the role of male caretakers and pre-school teachers for father involvement in ecec. global education review, 6 (1), 26-39. the role of male caretakers and pre-school teachers for father involvement in ecec tim rohrmann hildesheim university of applied sciences and arts, germany abstract the relevance of men in the lives of children is nowadays widely accepted. this overview paper discusses the links between debates on father involvement in the family and strategies for more male professionals in ecec by focusing on what role male ec workers can have for the involvement of fathers in the work of ecec centres and pre-schools. based on a critical gender perspective, the paper gives a broad overview of international debates on the issue, presents empirical evidence, and connects these results to the realms of practice. arguments for a specific role for male ecec professionals in approaching and supporting fathers are presented and critically discussed. it is concluded that the inclusion of male professionals in the ecec work force can contribute to building good relationships with parents and especially fathers. however, gender sensitivity is crucial to overcome gender stereotypes in ecec as well as in the wider society. keywords fathers, early childhood education and care (ecec), gender equality, men, male workers in ecec male caretakers and pre-school teachers „children need men!“ this rallying cry is a common argument for father involvement in the family as well as in the context of strategies for more men in ecec. in what way are these two issues linked? the connection between father involvement and men in ecec was already present in european debates on men and childcare more than two decades ago. however, little is known about the role of male workers for cooperation with fathers. this paper intends to connect the debates on male involvement in the two fields of family and ecec by focusing on relations of male ec professionals with fathers. male involvement in early childhood the relevance of fathers for children’s development in the early years is widely accepted nowadays. there is growing consciousness in societies that fathers are important for their children’s development, and many fathers are present in the lives of their children from early on. however, recent cross-cultural research shows that enthusiasm for active fathering varies between societies, _______________________________ corresponding author: prof. dr. tim rohrmann hildesheim university of applied sciences and arts, germany email: tim.rohrmann@hawk.de mailto:tim.rohrmann@hawk.de mailto:tim.rohrmann@hawk.de role of male caretakers/teachers for father involvement 27 and fathers are highly diverse also within their societies (shwalb, shwalb & lamb, 2013). on the other hand, roopnarine (2013) highlights crosscultural similarities and universal key principles of how fathers are relevant for children’s development and family life. shwalb and shwalb (2014) summarize that the western-style idea of active and involved fathers has reached global attention, “although the extent of this infiltration and men’s responses to these influences varies” (p. 15), depending on contextual factors in different societies. the situation in institutional day care and early education does not mirror these changes. while the importance of fathers’ involvement for the development of children is widely accepted, institutional care for children remains a femaledominated field worldwide, with a proportion of less than 3% men in the ecec work force in most countries. this has been debated for decades in at least some countries of the western hemisphere, and recently there is growing interest in the issue across the world (rohrmann & emilsen, 2015). although cultural factors affect attitudes towards men in childcare and experiences of male ecec workers, research shows astonishing similarities between different cultural contexts (rohrmann, 2015; xu, 2018). connections between male involvement in the family and in educational contexts have been discussed for a while now. in 2008, a special issue of early childhood development and care focused on „men in caring, parenting, and teaching“ (evans & jones, 2008), including research on the situation of male workers in ecec as well as programmes for the inclusion of fathers in early childhood institutions. honig (2008) summarizes that „research on fathering and research on men employed in work with young children in centres and in elementary schools emphasises the importance of positive male engagement with young children for their optimal development“ (p. 665). however, she also points out that the relationship between male involvement and children’s development is complex, and traditional views on the role of men and women in family and society bar the way to more participation of men in childcare and early education. a closer look reveals that arguments for the inclusion of men are varied and sometimes contradictory. the debate on men in education is based on two theoretical understandings of the role of men and women in the lives of children which can be seen as opposite or at least conflicting: the idea that men and women are fundamentally different, and the assumption that men and women are equally capable of caring for and educating children. this issue has been debated in research and in wider society for decades and it is not the aim of this paper to discuss this in depth. however, it must be kept in mind that attitudes towards men and women are deeply rooted in gendered cultural traditions. even if there is research evidence showing that „it is quite clear that responsive sensitive parenting skills can be learned and that parenting is not an innate skill“, as warin (2018, p. 63) summarizes, the idea that raising children is a „women’s task“ persists in many countries worldwide, especially when it comes to very young children. enhancing the contribution of men in the lives of their children is seen as an important task by experts and policy makers around the world (levtov et al., 2015). in this context, many approaches and tools have been developed to engage fathers and promote their involvement in the family. working with fathers has become an important part of professional work with men in education and psychology. this paper focuses on the role of male professionals in ecec for involving fathers. beginning with an overview on policies for more male involvement, and on contradictory arguments for more men in ecec, it presents research evidence on relations between male workers and fathers, and discusses the role of men as professionals in the context of diversity in ecec. it must be mentioned that, in this article, the term “fathers“ comprises „social fathers“, including stepfathers and new partners of single mothers, grandfathers, godfathers or other men 28 global education review 6(1) who take responsibility for children in new types of families. regarding the diversity of systems of ec provision in different countries, qualified caretakers and preschool teachers are subsumed under the term „ec professional“. policies and strategies for male involvement in family and ecec in the 1990s of the past century, a working group of the european commission started to debate the involvement of men in the care and education of infants, focusing on fathers as well as on male professionals in ecec (european commission network, 1993; jensen, 1996). the working group put forward strategies for involving fathers and suggested increasing the proportion of male workers in ecec to 20% (european commission network, 1996). since then, attitudes on the involvement of fathers in the lives of young children have changed substantially due to research results on the relevance of fathers for children’s development (aigner, 2001, fatherhood institute, 2000, lamb, 2010, walter, 2002), as well as to policy developments supporting fathers’ rights and fathers’ involvement in the family in many countries worldwide. nowadays the popular statement „children need men“ (aigner & poscheschnik, 2015) is applied to the role of the father in the family as well as to the inclusion of men in educational institutions. the importance of male „father-figures“ is emphasized especially with regard to the increasing number of children growing up in single-mother homes, be they boys or girls; although research results on a presumed dysfunctionality of single-mother families are controversial (golombok, 2000). at the same time, there have been public debates about the need for more men in educational institutions, especially in the context of a perceived „boys’ crisis“ in schools (foster et al., 2001, hurrelmann, 2012, skelton, 2001). even if there is little evidence for the assumption that more male teachers lead to better results of children in school, many researchers and policy makers are in favour of more men in ec (albeit for different reasons). however, this did not lead to a substantial rise in the proportion of male workers and teachers. although european institutions repeatedly stated a need for more men in the field of ecec (oecd, 2006; european commission, 2011), the number of male workers remained low in most countries. this situation began to change in the past decade, as the issue of men in ecec is discussed worldwide, and campaigns for a better gender balance show some results, at least in some countries (peeters, emilsen & rohrmann, 2015, rohrmann, 2019). to understand the success of campaigns for more men in ecec in the nordic countries and in germany, it is necessary to assess attitudes and legal frameworks regarding male involvement in childhood in these countries. in the nordic countries especially, there is a broad consensus in society about the importance of men taking part in children’s lives. gender equality is enshrined in laws, regulations and curricula, and ecec provision is seen as an important contribution to the goal of a gender equal society (peeters et al., 2015). as a part of this, legislation about parental leave supports fathers’ involvement in family life. sweden and norway introduced a period of fathers’ leave not transferable to mothers more than a decade ago, resulting in a much higher share of parental leave taken by fathers. similar strategies were adopted in germany in 2006, when new legislation introduced two „fathers’ months“ within the parental leave. since then, the proportion of men taking at least a short period of parental leave has increased significantly, from less than 2% before the reform to more than 35% in 2015 (statistisches bundesamt, 2009-2017). a recent report states that 80% of the population support state-funded strategies for father involvement, and research provides significant results for even a short period of fathers’ leave on the quality of fatherchild-relations (bmfsfj, 2017). one of the effects of active engagement of fathers is that they are more often present in kindergarten. this is role of male caretakers/teachers for father involvement 29 especially relevant in the transition of very young children to ecec provision when fathers take parental leave while mothers return to work. strategies for more father involvement and for men in ecec are often brought forward by responsible ministries and national agencies in the context of gender equality. partly due to large state-funded campaigns there are now 9.1% male workers in ecec in norway and 6.2% in germany. denmark has also been successful in promoting a better gender balance in ecec institutions, although in all mentioned countries the proportion of male workers is still below 10% (peeters et al., 2015; rohrmann, 2019; wohlgemuth, 2016). in other countries, the proportion of male ec workers remains low, but, in the past few years, there has been a growing interest in the issue, and several countries have started public campaigns and projects for a better gender balance. in turkey, interestingly, the number of male pre-school teachers increased substantially to 5.8% in the context of the expansion of the whole system of pre-school over the last decade (sak, 2018). this unexpected fact leads to the conclusion that the involvement of men in ecec education might be part of a transformation process in modern societies, which can either be restrained or supported by national and local stakeholders, but it must be understood in the context of a change of attitudes towards gender roles in the wider society. why more men? expectations and contradictions there are many and diverse arguments for inclusion of men in the ec work force (rohrmann 2016a, 2019). one of the most common arguments is that men should serve as role models for boys (brownhill, 2014, 2015; wright & brownhill, 2019). another widespread assumption is that men can bring in something „new“ to ecec, for example by introducing more „masculine“ activities like playing football or using the workbench with children (wohlgemuth, 2016). on the other hand, it is expected that men will perform the same tasks and duties as their female counterparts, maybe even focus on activities traditionally perceived as „female“, to show that caring for children is not just a „female“ role (aigner & rohrmann, 2012). clearly such diverse projections are based on different understandings of gender, ranging from a bipolar concept of masculinity and femininity to concepts of gender equality, or even deconstructive approaches to gender. in practice, it is a difficult task for male ec professionals to balance contradictory expectations. some men tend to find a „male niche“ to assert themselves as men in a field dominated by women, while others resist and openly confront stereotyped attributions (tennhoff et al., 2015, warin, 2015). it might not be surprising, therefore, that some studies show that in gendermixed teams, traditional gendered assignments of tasks and activities can be reinforced even if this is not intended at all (cremers, krabel & calmbach, 2012; aigner & rohrmann, 2012). however, according to recent studies, male and female ec professionals do not differ significantly regarding interactional quality and professional behaviour towards children (brandes et al., 2015, van polanen et al., 2017). at the same time, research indicates that gender differences can be relevant in specific aspects of ecec. brandes et al. (2015) show that men and women react differently in the way they perceive and react to children’s play interests. sandseter (2014) reports that men are more relaxed regarding wild and risky play of children. clearly men are generally more willing to engage in rough and tumble play with children, especially boys; this is true for fathers as well as for male ec workers (flanders et al., 2009; pellegrini & smith, 1998; richartz, 2015; storli & sandseter, 2017). against this backdrop it could be assumed that male ec professionals might be relevant for fathers as well. do fathers need male counterparts in ecec institutions? the growing participation of fathers in family life, and their presence in kindergartens, is indeed one the arguments mentioned in discourses about a demand for more men in ecec (aigner & rohrmann, 2012; 30 global education review 6(1) rohrmann, 2016a, 2016b; warin, 2018). reports from the field confirm that male workers can be important contact persons for fathers in everyday interactions, and even more for specific activities for fathers (rohrmann, 2013). some men place a main focus of their professional work on collaboration with fathers, e.g. organize evening talks with fathers or activities for fathers and children. on the other hand, there are male workers who do not engage with fathers, and not every father feels a bond with a male worker just because he is a man. what do we know about relations between fathers and male ec professionals? research results on fathers and male workers in ecec several studies verify that male ec workers are appreciated by most parents (cremers et al., 2012; aigner & rohrmann, 2012; rolfe, 2005; lyons, quinn and sumsion, 2004; sak et al., 2019). even in countries where traditional gender roles are prevalent in society and male workers are rare in ecec, positive reactions of parents are documented (akman et al., 2014; ho & lam, 2014; rentzou, 2011; toth, 2009; tsigra, 2016). however, these studies usually do not differentiate mothers’ and fathers’ attitudes towards male workers, and the role of male professionals specifically for fathers is rarely discussed. while there are several studies examining fathers’ attitudes towards ecec and their involvement in ec centres (anderson et al., 2015; palm & fagan, 2008), only a few studies focus on the relevance of male workers for collaboration with fathers. in the uk, an exploratory study of lloyd, o’brien and lewis (2003) in the context of the „sure start“ programme revealed that only few programmes focused on the involvement of fathers and, as one of their recommendations, the authors stated a need for male workers. a us survey on fathers’ involvement in early childhood programs (mffn, 2011) built on the recognition of increasing participation of fathers in all areas of their children’s upbringing, including early childhood education and care. despite this interest, several barriers and obstacles remain for better participation of fathers in everyday life in kindergarten. the report states that a vast majority of ec professionals (91.6%) agreed that participation of fathers is „very important“, and fathers were invited to many meetings and activities in kindergarten. however, the actual participation of fathers was much lower, compared to the interest expressed in the survey. as the main reason, professionals (83.7%) and fathers (84.0%) mentioned a lack of time and conflicting meeting dates. however, 43.2% of professionals and 37.9% fathers agreed that a lack of male staff is a reason for the poor involvement of men. interestingly, 26.4% of teachers stated that „reluctance by mothers to get fathers more involved“ (p. 10) limits the work of ec programs to involve fathers. the authors conclude that a lack of male staff is an important reason for the poor involvement of fathers in ec, besides the fundamental problem of the limited time resources of fathers. more male staff, and males qualifying on programs specifically for fathers, are seen as key factors for better involvement: „the presence of male staff members and volunteers provides a cue that this is a male friendly environment where other males are welcome and expected“ (mffn, 2011, p. 16). research from germany, austria and new zealand confirms that many fathers react positively towards male staff (aigner & rohrmann, 2012; cremers et al., 2012). as a male worker in austria put it: „fathers appreciate that there is also a man present – that it’s not only a women’s club, if i’m allowed to say so. ‘cause that’s where men are very, very sceptical“ (schauer, 2012, p. 324). both sides appreciate being able to speak to a person of the same sex, and both ec professionals and fathers feel respected as a man and as carers for children. in germany, 56% of provider managers agreed that male ec professionals are important for collaboration with fathers, while agreement was less among centre leaders (40%) and parents (31%). in a new zealand survey among ec services and teacher educators, role of male caretakers/teachers for father involvement 31 85% believed that involvement of fathers and other men would increase with more male professionals in the centres (farquhar, 2012). an interviewee stated: „when the dads see him, they go straight to him. they stay longer and chat, and they watch him with the kids and just get involved a whole lot more. before we had a male teacher they used to drop their kids off and run“ (farquhar, 2012, p. 9). successful involvement of fathers sometimes appears to be related to specific characteristics of individual male workers. warin (2007) reports an example of a centre that involved men by engaging a local musician to set up a fathers’ band recording nursery rhymes, and songs. similarly, potter and carpenter (2008) mention that the success of a local sure start programme for engaging fathers in ecec was partly due to „the high level of skill and persistence demonstrated by a dedicated fathers worker“ (p. 761). on the other hand, there are fathers who are reluctant to accept men working in ecec, especially when it comes to the care of very young children. this is especially true for fathers who are used to letting their wives do the caring in the family. they may feel confused by a man who naturally does things they themselves would never do at home. research on relations between mothers and male ec professionals provides diverse results. sak et al. (2015) found that turkish female pre-school teachers had better relations with parents than their male colleagues and argue that this is related to cultural factors: „in turkey, it is mostly mothers who become involved in school activities, and they may prefer to interact with female teachers“ (p. 336f.). on the contrary, studies from germany and austria show that male ec professionals can be important for mothers, especially single mothers, as they appreciate having a male person to talk to (aigner & rohrmann, 2012; bvz 2006). aigner and rohrmann (2012) note that male workers report very good relationships with mothers, who like to stay and talk with them, speaking openly about their thoughts and feelings. some mothers seem to find it easier to talk to a male professional rather than a female. this might be connected to the idea that men working in ec institutions could serve as „father substitutes“ for children of single mothers. the authors found that most male professionals as well as mothers criticized such notions and pointed out the professional character of the relationship between parents and ec professionals. however, some young men welcomed the idea: „those who live with [single] mothers, they need male role models, and this is something we as male workers can fulfil well“ (aigner & rohrmann, 2012, p. 427). statements like these clearly show that male workers need to reflect on their role towards children as well as towards mothers and fathers. collaboration with fathers from migrant backgrounds in western societies although there is limited research evidence available on this issue, some authors from european countries highlight the relevance of male ec professionals for fathers from migrant backgrounds. some practitioners’ experience is that these fathers are more open towards male colleagues, and that better contact with them can ease the work of their female colleagues as well. an austrian centre manager summarized her experiences with fathers from turkish migrant background: „yes, i really recognize that they prefer to go to him [the male colleague], they like to talk to him, whereas i had problems because in turkish families, it’s the men who do the talking, and then they have problems with women, and it’s easier [since we have a male colleague]. and it’s more men who come to parent’s meetings” (aigner & rohrmann, 2012, p. 324). other practitioners report that it is difficult for some men to accept female ec professionals as having authority. active interactions with a male co-worker can ease the situation, with the aim of explaining a gender-equal understanding of professionalism in ecec to these fathers, thus strengthening the position of their female co-workers as well. a german centre leader summarized experiences with a male colleague who himself had a turkish 32 global education review 6(1) background: „naturally this really was an opportunity for many turkish fathers to come here and get something off their chest or say something or get into a discussion with him. they knew there was someone who understood their language, and so on. and what’s more he was also a man. they were sometimes surprised. because, in practice, he was on our side (…) but this built already some brigdes“ (cremers et al., 2012, p. 52). such statements mirror practical experiences, but also assumptions that in migrant families, traditional notions of gender are widespread and dominant. this is partly true, although in modern societies, families from migrant backgrounds are much more diverse (jantz, 2013). there are „new“ fathers with migrant background, as well as german fathers with very traditional attitudes towards fathers’ roles (tunç, 2013). moreover, the understanding of the role and relevance of ecec varies from community to community. however, in many cultures worldwide, roles and tasks of men and women in family and society tend to be much more separated when compared to the model of shared responsibility dominant in some western countries. this means that some parents with a migrant background might feel uncomfortable discussing private issues in „public“ with a member of the opposite sex, while others might find it strange to talk about intimate details of childcare with a man at all. in addition, the cultural background of ec professionals is relevant for their ability to understand and to transform cultural attitudes towards gender issues. the results reported above match with research on parents’ attitudes from turkey. sak et al. (2015) note that it is mostly mothers who are involved in pre-school activities, and they therefore prefer to talk to female counterparts in the centre, while male pre-school teachers are perceived as authority figures, similar to the role of the father in the family. different perceptions of the roles of men and women in the family, as well as in ecec, might cause misunderstandings and conflicting expectations between parents and professionals. finally, men working in ecec can be role models for fathers seeking new vocational orientations. it is a common phenomenon that women reconsider their vocational choice when they have children, and start a new career in ecec after a period of parental leave. the above-mentioned new zealand report states that more involvement of men in everyday life in kindergarten can inspire fathers as well to consider ecec as a possible career choice (farquhar, 2012). based on similar experiences in the uk, warin (2018) pleads for recruitment strategies targeted at men who are fathers. working with fathers as a task for male ec professionals as mentioned above, men working in ecec are often struggling to find their role in a femaledominated environment. working with fathers is an important task in the context of collaboration with parents, and engaging in this field can provide male workers with a positive role in the centre’s work. this includes activities for fathers and children, such as outdoor trips or play afternoons, but as well meetings with groups of fathers where they can exchange experiences and discuss educational topics and their role as fathers, including personal reflection. in this context, some projects for more men in ecec in germany have focused on qualifying male practitioners for working with fathers (haas & rams, 2016; marquardt & hessel, 2013). surveys from germany show that in support groups for male ec professionals (which play an important role in retaining and qualifying men in the field of ecec), working with fathers is a regular topic (rohrmann, 2013). however, male practitioners do not agree on the relevance of their gender for working with fathers, as the following quotations illustrate. one male ec professional stated: „in my view, practitioners’ gender is very important. (…) of role of male caretakers/teachers for father involvement 33 course, men are diverse – but gender as a category dominates perceptions“ (koordinationsstelle, 2013, p. 58, translation t.r.). the interviewee viewed male practitioners as „door openers“ for fathers, and pointed to their „double role“ as competitors and role models in relation to fathers. another interviewee stated the opposite: „our experience is that gender is less relevant (…) first of all, the professionalism of practitioners has to be taken into consideration. practitioners need to be able to meet fathers (and, of course, mothers) on an equal level, and with empathy“ (koordinationsstelle, 2013, p. 60, translation t.r.). these examples show the broad range of attitudes towards the role of men working in ecec, which are connected closely to different understandings of gender, as well as the individual self-concepts of men who chose caring for and educating children as profession. discussion male ec professionals are at the crossroads of two debates regarding their relationship to fatherhood. firstly, the relevance of men in ecec is debated against the backdrop of a lack of fathers in families. secondly, working with fathers is seen as an important task for male ec professionals based on the idea that being the same sex makes it easier to connect. although these two expectations are contrary, both share an underlying assumption of a biological polarity between men and women, which is a simplification and not in line with a current understanding of gender. although there are similarities between male workers and fathers, it is necessary to reflect on gender-specific assumptions, to respect individual differences, and to develop an approach of learning experiences that resists the idea of „innate“ personality traits of men and women. warin (2018) insists that responsivity and sensitive parenting skills can be learned and are not based on sex differences. this is true for fathers as well as for ec professionals, and is an important argument for the involvement of men, both in the family and in ecec. on the other hand, existing differences between men and women, including the body and its physical presence, should not be underestimated, especially when seen as a starting point for gender reflexivity and the development of a gender equal society (peeters et al., 2015). accepting differences opens up for new perspectives, and is fundamental for an inclusive conceptualization of ecec. conclusions it can be summarized that gender-reflexive male professionals can play an important role for involving fathers in ecec institutions. this does not mean that men absolutely need male counterparts in ecec staff. all-female teams can do excellent work in involving fathers, while men on the staff are by no means a guarantee of better collaboration with fathers. however, research evidence, as well as practical experience, shows that men can enrich cooperation with fathers (including „social fathers“) in ecec institutions in many ways. the first impression. having men in the team counteracts the impression of kindergarten as a „feminine“ place, and can indicate that men and women are equally commonplace and welcome. male contact persons for fathers. male practitioners can play an important role as samesex counterparts for fathers. at least for some fathers, this may facilitate conversations and professional communication. mixed teams also allow for consultation with parents in „mixed double“ conversations; this is especially important when parenting conflicts between mothers and fathers are tackled. male role models with regard to interactions with children. male practitioners can serve as role model for fathers, showing them how to care for and interact with young children. many fathers wish to build better relations with their children when compared to their experience with their own fathers. especially in the early years they often feel insecure on how to realize this, and are open to suggestions and new ideas. contacts for migrant fathers. in some migrant families it is not common for men and 34 global education review 6(1) women to discuss educational issues together. for these fathers, it might be easier to have a male professional in ecec centres as a contact person. cultural-sensitive and gender-sensitive approaches need to be combined in order to bridge cultural differences. contacts for separated fathers. in debates on single parents, there is little attention paid to the situation of fathers who do not have custody and do not live with their children but would, nevertheless, like to take part in their children’s lives. this may cause uncertainty in ecec staff, especially when the relationship between the parents is conflicted along gendered boundaries. despite this, ecec institutions can be a place where both parents are welcome, with a male worker being the father’s contact person. team leader for activities for fathers. while activities for and with fathers and children can easily be initiated and conducted by female colleagues, meetings and discussion groups for fathers might benefit from being led by man. a male professional can offer a „secure space“ for men, and he himself can participate in such activities as a person who has reflected on his own masculine identity. this might be relevant for discussions on parenting styles, about specific problems of men regarding work-family-balance, or an exchange about experiences with their own fathers. role model for new vocational orientations. finally, male ec professionals can inspire fathers who are in search for new vocational orientations and might be interested in working with children. fathers interested in such a prospect could participate in everyday life in the centre, in voluntary work around the centre’s activities, or even, as a first step into a new vocational career, as assistants or freelance staff for specific activities. limitations and implications for future research and policy development although this paper clearly shows that cultural factors play an important role in gender relations in families, as well as in relationships between fathers and ec professionals, it must be kept in mind that the presented evidence derives from a few projects in a few countries. further research is needed to identify specific cultural factors that are relevant for attitudes towards the involvement of men in the lives of children. to avoid simplifying generalizations, it is necessary to focus the cultural diversity of fathers between, as well as within, societies. measures for a better gender balance must take into account that attitudes towards men in ecec vary due to the diverse cultural backgrounds of families. another limitation of the study is the relatively broad use of the term „involvement of fathers in ecec“. as janssen & vandenbroeck (2018, p. 813) show, there are “subtle yet meaningful differences” in concepts of educational partnering across countries. research on fathers’ involvement in ecec must be contextualized with regard to different orientations towards parental involvement. on the other hand, concepts of working with families in ecec institutions need to include perspectives of men – in the family as well as in gender-mixed teams. to conclude with, working with fathers needs a cultural-sensitive approach combined with gender sensitivity, and this is true as well for research on this issue. keeping this in mind, the inclusion of gender-sensitive male professionals in the ecec work force is a tool for promoting change in gender relations in the wider society, not least by building good relationships with parents and especially fathers. to conclude, gendermixed teams are an opportunity for more diversity, and more diversity is a good starting point for good collaboration with both fathers and mothers alike. references aigner, j. c. 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(more) men in early childhood education and care: an uphill down dale endeavour. lyčių studijos ir tyrimai (gender studies and research), 2015(13), 40–54. retrieved from http://su.lt/images/leidiniai/lyciu_studijos/03_ula.pdf wright, d., & brownhill, s. (2019). men in the early years: building a gender-balanced workforce. london: jessica kingsley publishers. xu, y. (2018). a cross-cultural analysis of gender and practitioner-child interactions in early childhood education and care (ecec) settings in scotland, hong kong, and mainland china. phd thesis, university of glasgow, scotland. retrieved from https://theses.gla.ac.uk/30595/ about the author dr. tim rohrmann is professor of early childhood education at university for applied sciences and arts, hildesheim, germany. he has focused on gender issues in gender issues in children’s development and education in research, practice and policy since 1995, and is currently convenor of an international research network on gender balance in the ecec work force. students as leaders with a global mindset 7 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: acker, deborah r., & bocarro, jason. (2021). preparing students as leaders with a global mindset: a study abroad phenomenological case study. global education review, 8 (4), 7-23. preparing students as leaders with a global mindset: a study abroad phenomenological case study deborah r. acker shelton leadership center and north carolina state university (usa) jason bocarro north carolina state university (usa) abstract research continues to stress the importance for college students to graduate with the skills to be successful as global-minded leaders in today’s evolving workforce. although the typical study abroad programs can address this, critics point to some limitations. first, most study abroad programs are shortterm, limiting students’ ability to internalize and apply cultural context upon their return to the united states. second, although universities and colleges state the importance of developing students' cultural competencies, few have intentionally incorporated best practices for study abroad. the purpose of this phenomenological case study, therefore, was to explore how nine students from six different disciplines perceived a unique study abroad experience, designed to address some of the typical study abroad limitations. this interdisciplinary program was designed to immerse students in three european countries while participating in a formal learning cohort program that incorporated cognitive, experiential, and humanistic methodologies. the study also explored what role cross-cultural partnerships with companies, organizations, and community leaders played in enhancing the students’ application and integration of developing themselves as globalminded citizen leaders in their field of study. data were collected through informal interviews with all nine students and supporting data included field observations, rich text, and results from the global mindset inventory®. utilizing a hybridcoding scheme, researchers found four themes that emerged, supporting the notion that the cross-cultural pedagogical framework enhanced students’ self-efficacy as global-minded citizens, resulting from their interdisciplinary international experiences. keywords global learning; global leadership; interdisciplinary; study abroad; experiential learning; pedagogical practices; international perspectives; critical reflection introduction there is recognition that the world has become more complex, driven by globalization and hyper-connectivity. the recent covid-19 pandemic has highlighted the challenges faced by global leaders as they wrestle with issues both internally and globally. in the face of this complexity and global challenges, many organizations have sought employees with global leadership skills. for example, goldsmith et al. (2003) found that one of the top traits human resource managers from global organizations valued was business leaders who use global considerations for decision-making. however, as data and studies have shown, the demand for these global leadership skills currently outweighs the supply (walker, 2018). thus, as blaise, hollywood, and grant (2012) point out, this has created an urgent need to academically prepare globally competent organizational leaders. employers continue to place an emphasis on new graduates’ need for written and oral communication, teamwork, ethical decision-making, critical thinking, and the 8 global education review 8 (4) ability to apply knowledge in real world settings (hart research associates, 2016). research studies stress vital characteristics individuals need to understand and demonstrate as the workforce becomes more globally complex. these characteristics include (a) a global and local perspective (mind-set), (b) intercultural empathy, (c) adaptability, (e) cross-boundary partnering, (f) self-awareness and assurance, and (g) intercultural decision making (chandwani et al., 2015; cseh et al., 2013; gholba & dyaram, 2016). therefore, providing opportunities for students to experience different cultures while engaging in crosscultural discussions first-hand over an extended period of time can enhance the depth of understanding one can then transfer and apply in future situations when employed (gitsham, 2008; montgomery & arensdorf, 2012). although study abroad opportunities for students continue to expand in higher education, the majority are considered short-term, limiting their effectiveness. deloach and colleagues’ (2021) research supported the argument that the length of time and immersive experiences influence participants’ level of global awareness, specifically related to intercultural competency and interdependence. findings discussed semester experiences that incorporated “multigenre” experiences as opposed to short-term experiences. research suggests that more formalized curricula are necessary to enhance the likelihood of higher order outcomes, like global citizenship, which encompasses social responsibility, global awareness, and civic engagement (tarrant et al., 2014). schattle (2009) states that global citizenship “entails being aware of responsibilities beyond one’s immediate communities and making decisions to change habits and behavior patterns accordingly” (p. 12). the complex issues described above often need to be examined through an interdisciplinary perspective, yet there is minimal research to assist higher education in developing such formal curricular programs to address these concerns. for example, although there is a recognition to develop a new type of global leader to tackle the issues of the 20th century, there is a lack of research that examines both the competencies and formal ways educational programs can better develop these global leaders (montgomery & arensdorf, 2012). this gap in the literature establishes a need for new ways to design meaningful global experiences through interdisciplinary course development and programmatic frameworks to deepen a student’s knowledge to work more effectively and meaningfully with people globally is critical in today’s society. the study sought to understand the experiences of students who were part of a unique study abroad global leadership program. specifically, it explored their experiences in the context of immersing themselves in three european countries while participating in a formal learning cohort program that incorporated cognitive, experiential, and humanistic methodologies. the study also explored what roles cross-cultural partnerships with companies, organizations, and community leaders play in enhancing students’ application and integration of developing themselves as a global-minded citizen leaders in their field of study. the two grounding research questions for the study were as follows: rq1: how did or did not the structural framework of the program influence participants’ growth in global-mindedness? rq2: how did the cultural context and course content influence the participants’ experience as global minded leaders? students as leaders with a global mindset 9 9 the following sections elaborate on (a) higher education’s need to establish study abroad experiences that enhance students’ global-minded perspectives and (b) the current study’s structuring of the program experience to hopefully enhance the opportunity for student self-efficacy related to global-mindedness. theoretical framework although the concept of global leadership theory has existed since before the twentieth century, its definition, best practices, and competencies continue to become more complex as our society adapts to current challenges. mendenhall et al. (2012) defined global leaders as people who build teams through establishing trust and by involving cross-cultural stakeholders and people who are mindful of the geographical and cultural complexities associated with affecting positive change in organizations. over the past few years, corporations, governments, and educational institutions have become more cognizant of the fact that the world is becoming more interconnected. thus, the idea of solving complex global problems may be limited if students are only educated in their own country with little to no exposure to other cultures. competencies to assist with developing global-minded leaders continue to be researched; how students are to develop these skills in a way that will be more internalized and become a part of their personal leadership style has also been the subject of research. furthermore, corporations and educational institutions continue to explore ways to provide people with experiences to better equip them to meet the needs of a global society (henson, 2016). as the world shifts to viewing leadership in a broader global context, it is important for leaders to develop and lead others with a global mindset (e.g., holt & seki, 2012; javidan & teagarden, 2011; walker, 2018). javidan and teagarden (2011) defined global mindset through the global mindset project as: ...the stock of (1) knowledge, (2) cognitive, and (3) psychological attributes that enable the global leader to influence individuals, groups and organizations (inside and outside the boundaries of the global organization) representing diverse cultural/political/institutional systems to contribute toward the achievement of the global organization’s goals. (p. 20) bikson et al. (2003) emphasized the university's need to develop global leadership curricula. furthermore, a university environment provides students with opportunities to combine theory and practice into a comprehensive leadership curriculum (montgomery & arensdorf, 2012). and yet, in today’s society, there continues to be limited curricula to prepare students to be more globally competitive and meet the needs of the workforce. therefore, the current study’s theoretical context focused on the global leadership development ecosystem developed by walker (2018), which considers competencies associated with the global mindset inventory— intellectual, psychological and social capital, as well as learning methodologies to enhance the opportunity for students to experience global leadership self-efficacy. this model’s suggested learning methodologies—humanistic, social, experiential, and cognitive—facilitate increasing student global mindset competencies. what connects the different elements of the model is https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=mansour%20javidan https://www.emerald.com/insight/search?q=mary%20b.%20teagarden 10 global education review 8 (4) the facilitated international experience that promotes student self-efficacy. the global leadership & team decisionmaking minor program participants in the study were a part of a cohort experience with the interdisciplinary global leadership and team decision-making minor at north carolina state university. the general h. hugh shelton leadership center and the european center in prague at north carolina state university partnered to be at the forefront of developing a novel approach to the way in which the academy educates students globally. while being co-taught by a faculty member from north carolina state university and a faculty member from a partnering european university, students were able to immerse themselves for an extended amount of time in three european cultures over the course of a semester. the purpose of this educational model was to maximize the students’ opportunity to study abroad. the model sought to (a) immerse the students in three cultural communities to enable their learning from multiple global perspectives on leadership topics presented through an interdisciplinary lens, (b) support students while implementing new skills and communicating how their learning experiences support their growth as global leaders focused on european and american perspectives. the 15-hour minor allowed students to take one interdisciplinary course on decision-making prior to studying abroad. twelve credits were taken as a cohort, with a capstone course taught at north carolina state university’s european center in prague. two additional countries where students studied were reutlingen, germany and london, united kingdom. the program accepted nine students to participate during the first year. students were from six of the ten colleges on campus— humanities, management, agriculture and life sciences, engineering, exploratory studies, and textiles. there was one second-semester freshman, two sophomores, three juniors, and three seniors. while abroad, the cohort resided together, and participated in the same courses throughout the nine-week program. the capstone course sought to set up expectations for the program experience while helping students to identify, examine, and apply personal leadership competencies within a global context that would assist them in developing a global mindset when leading others in their field of study. prior to arriving abroad, students took a scientifically based instrument, the global mindset inventory®, to pre-assess their knowledge in three areas—psychological capital (quest for adventure, passion for diversity, and self-assurance); social capital (intercultural empathy, interpersonal impact, and diplomacy); and intellectual capital (cognitive complexity, global business savvy, and cosmopolitan outlook). the instrument is a psychometric tool that assesses 35 total capabilities related to global leadership and generates both individual and group reports that provide feedback on the global mindset of participants (javidan et al., 2010). at the end of the program, students were required to take a post-assessment of the inventory and create a virtual portfolio articulating their learning across their courses and the impact of their learning on their professional aspirations. two of the three courses were co-taught by faculty, specifically one u.s. faculty member and one faculty member from the country where the course was taught were represented in each of the two courses. at each location, students also engaged with students from that country. during the courses, students immersed themselves in excursions related to local culture and joined professional organizations to practice applying course content to real-world experiences. assignments required students to analyze and students as leaders with a global mindset 11 11 reflect on content using personal experience and apply their learning to future experiences. data sources and methodology data collection utilizing a combined strategy approach in this study assisted researchers in understanding how the process of the nine-week program was initiated and carried out during spring 2020. this study sought to explore the structural framework of the program and describe how cultural context and course content used within the setting influenced the participants’ experience as global-minded leaders. the structural framework includes the following components: (a) interdisciplinary courses delivered with a strong emphasis on experiential learning and formal guided reflections, (b) a student cohort that resided, traveled, and learned together, (c) international co-instruction, and (d) course excursions to apply content. through this study, the researchers sought—through interactions with program participants— to understand how and what meaning was constructed as a result of the students participation in the collaborative experience (bogdan & biklen, 2003). the primary data collection was the use of a semistructured interview format with all nine students. yin (2017) suggests that interviews are the most important source of data collection for a case study. participants were interviewed through zoom using semi-structured questions. an interview guide was used to formulate a final analysis for the event viewing it holistically that incorporated the participants’ perceptions. it also examined the role of their in defining the overall experience (creswell, 2018). several examples of questions and prompts asked during the interview were as follows: • can you describe the glm experience in your own words? • what about the glm experience surprised you the most? explain. • how would you describe the cohort experience in regard to the intended framework of the program? • can you describe an experience (or more than one) that has broadened your perspective on global leadership, if any (that may not have occurred had they taken the regular leadership minor at ncsu)? the study required all participants to sign a consent form that articulated the purpose of the study, participants’ roles in the study, and how the descriptions of their experiences would be used in the study. at the beginning of the interview, students were informed that the interviews would be recorded. each interview lasted between one and two hours. the interviews were transcribed either through zoom translation with the interviewer going back through the audio to confirm accurate translation of the participants’ responses. there were three interviews transcribed verbatim by a professional agency with the interviewer going back through the recorded video to confirm accurate translation. this additional method aligns with natural transcription, allowing the interviewer to license the participants’ words rather than making assumptions from the transcription themselves. it also allows the interviewer to consider participants’ non-verbal gestures, which can be beneficial to this type of study (oliver et al., 2005). in addition to the interviews, documents were also collected to support the study. documentation consisted of the preand postglobal mindset inventory data and assignments associated with the capstone, specifically the virtual portfolio. 12 global education review 8 (4) javidan et al.’s (2010) global mindset inventory® 76-item (50-gmi related) selfassessment standardized quantitative instrument assesses 35 attributes related to global leadership. table 1 discusses the reliability of the instrument. table 1. global mindset inventory scale reliabilities based on development of the gmi (2007) a report generated for the participants and the group provided feedback on personal and group profiles of global mindset. shaped by the research questions, the global mindset preand post-instrument results, and other supporting reflections provided by students, the study looked at how the program structure supported a more immersive and meaningful learning experience for all stakeholders involved in the experience. creswell (2018) proposes using multiple qualitative research methods to strengthen the data collected in a study. thus, several observational approaches were gathered during the nine-week process to support the primary semi-structured data collected. these included the use of field observations, a researcher journal; a journal for participants; and student photographs. field observations, also referred to as direct observations, consisted of visits to sites and attendance at activities. this technique facilitated the collection of additional information about the meaning of global leadership. because the study was conducted over a period of time, reliability was enhanced as there were multiple opportunities to conduct direct observations at each site. photographic methods also allowed us to record and analyze behavior in its situational context. the use of photography also provided the researchers with time to reflect and analyze student behavior. field observations were done while in the czech republic with the students and through zoom and other social media outlets like groupme (basil, 2011). the uniqueness of the study rests in the university leaders’ desire to engage undergraduates in an extended, interdisciplinary study abroad experience, exposing them to faculty and students from different disciplines and cultures and providing experiential opportunities that ultimately grant students a minor in global leadership and team decision-making. findings from this research provide insights for educational institutions that seek to develop more relevant and innovative experiences to address complex and global challenges. students as leaders with a global mindset 13 13 data analysis procedures to ensure quality within qualitative research, there are eight components to consider— worthiness of the topic, rich rigor, sincerity, credibility, resonance, significance of the contribution, ethics, and meaningful coherence (tracy, 2010). this study incorporated all eight key markers that tracy identifies as important for ensuring quality research. the study explored a current topic that both educational leaders and employers are eager to understand in greater depth. this understanding can help educators design and implement curricula to better develop global minded leaders in an ever-increasing complex society. utilizing natural transcription methods with zoom video interviews and participant reflections and member checking of the data support tracy’s (2010) eight components of credibility markers. furthermore, the framework and stakeholders involved in the study support the sincerity, rich rigor, meaningful coherence, and ethical markers, all of which contribute to quality within qualitative research. the researchers used a hybrid-coding scheme, established by lofland and lofland (2006) and bogdan and biklen (2003), to identify codes and emerging themes in the data collected for this study (i.e., interviews, pictures, documents, and field observation experiences). analysis was conducted through a constant comparative method (marshall & rossman, 2011), consisting of both open coding and axial coding. following transcription of the interviews and open-ended questionnaire responses, open coding served as the first phase in which transcripts from interviews were uploaded into qsr nvivo 12 to find keywords. once keywords were found, we then conducted a thematic analysis following braun and clarke’s (2006) direction to increase the confirmability of our findings. first, the lead author went through the data seeking “repeated patterns of meaning” (braun & clarke, 2006, p. 86). from this process, the first author derived initial themes. this process was repeated to refine the themes before interview transcripts were provided to the second author. this exercise was completed with the purpose of creating an inter-coder agreement to ensure that our themes were reliable (ryan & bernard, 2003). monustakas’s modification of stevick-colaizzi-keen method (creswell, 2018) mutually contributes to the interviewer self-reflection of personal bias, horizontalization, textual description, structural description, essence, and participant account of the phenomenon. finally, to check and maximize the credibility of the findings, we offered the nine students the opportunity to review our initial findings and provide any feedback. two students responded and suggested that the findings aligned with their perspective of the experience. the results from the global mindset inventory® were used as supporting evidence for the themes accrued from the participant interviews, along with the researchers’ original questions related to exploring the structural framework of the program. it also described how cultural context and course content used within the setting influenced the participants’ experience as global-minded leaders. in presenting the results below, we use pseudonyms to represent the students. findings the findings are broken into two main sections. first, we provide themes to establish a response to the overarching research questions. 14 global education review 8 (4) rq: how did or did not the structural framework of the program influence participants’ growth in global-mindedness? rq2: how did the cultural context and course content influence the participants’ experience as global-minded leaders? students described the formal structure of the program and then provided insights related to how the experiential components of the program influenced the development of their global mindedness. analysis of the data revealed several themes associated with the unique structure of the program. these included, learn by doing with formal reflection, valuing diverse perspectives, co-curricular cultural learning opportunities, and challenging their comfort zone. learning by doing with formal reflection the framework of the program design was to provide students an opportunity to learn about global leadership through the lens of educators and community leaders from three countries (as well as their own experiences in the united states) within this cohort experience. the framework design incorporated high-impact experiential learning opportunities for students that included visits to businesses and organizations; current and historical experiences also provided greater context to content taught in the classroom. in addition to the experiential learning opportunities, there were structured opportunities for formal reflections that included discussions and written reflective assignments. for example, alan described one of his assignments where he and his group spent the entire day with the leadership staff of an international non-profit organization. “[if we would have been in america, we would] have still had the opportunity to meet people, but we would not have been able to sit down with these international people and get to ask them questions, visit the businesses that we were able to, especially my visit with the notfor-profit. the value of being in europe was [that] you actually got real world experience on how people act, what’s acceptable to say, what [is] not acceptable to say, so if you’re in a global setting trying to lead a team with different people from different countries, then you have to be conscious of what you’re saying and how they’re [going] to interpret what you’re saying,” the time that was scheduled for formal reflection was identified as a critical component of the experience. one of the aspects the students identified as successful was the manner in which structured reflection in the capstone course was critical. this course was split into two weeks. the capstone course occurred the first and last week of the program. students found that this structure allowed them to engage in significant preand post-reflection and goal setting; it also allowed them opportunities to identify their growth as global leaders. massey noted that week 1 allowed them to think about what they wanted to get out of their experiences, as a group and individually. as she noted, “…shaping up our capstone and getting our heads right on how to appropriately approach the rest of the experience to make the most meaning out of what was to come to have the greatest impact on us [was important].” the opportunity to constantly reflect on the daily experiences was difficult to build into a hectic schedule. as educators, travel and logistical issues can make time scarce as there is a danger of overscheduling without building in time for formal reflection. yet the students valued that time to reflect upon what they identified as profound experiences. for example, as sian noted, students as leaders with a global mindset 15 15 “classes became more about what we learned rather than getting all the material out there and making sure the professor said everything, it was more about what the students internalized and processed.” valuing diverse perspectives most study abroad courses have a limited amount of faculty attached to the course. in this instance, the structure of courses involving international co-faculty from multiple disciplines and the pedagogical practices they implemented also contributed to the students’ learning and growth as global leaders. raj, a senior student described the diversity of pedagogical approaches that allowed them to compare different approaches. “…all professors that were either native to, or weren’t an nc state university faculty and from other countries were great because then we could almost always tell that things were different with them than what we were used to.” mia described how being exposed to the multiple perspectives of different instructors from many different countries in a short space of time added to the learning and continued to challenge their perspectives. “three different places with all different professors made it a valuable experience because we obviously got to see the different perspective of all the different teachers.” the value of being exposed to different perspectives extended beyond the instructors, as students spent a significant amount of time with local students, professionals, and organizations that profoundly impacted them. as sian noted, “i definitely need to value perspectives more. i learned a lot from what [other cultures] learned and said. oftentimes it was their own understandings of social interactions, or how [americans] operated. i would absolutely agree, actually, that this is something [americans] can improve on.” the students felt that the structure of the program (spending time in multiple countries and having time for deliberate and formal reflection) enhanced those benefits. as mia pointed out, “…different perspectives we were exposed to culturally that i think are more valuable than if someone was just in one country the entire time traveling as tourists.” the nature of the formal reflection was critical and the benefits (as well as the challenges) were sometimes felt by students from the host country who engaged in some of these learning experiences. as alan pointed out, “you learned everyone’s perspectives, you saw cultural differences in discussion, [certain cultures] had to structure everything, they had to write what was going on, they had to write what they were going to talk about in order, [yet] we didn’t care at all. [one activity required] connecting dots and this [this student from another culture] was trying to connect the dots and was getting so uncomfortable.” as a result of the cohort experience and interactions with locals in the three countries, students gained a greater appreciation of the importance of learning about one’s culture and the impact it can have on developing mutually respected relationships. the value of learning about cultures will assist them in leading others from cultural and geographic backgrounds. valuing different perspectives and engaging in lots of different conversations to learn about a societal culture was important to the students’ experience. the students acknowledged that 16 global education review 8 (4) putting time into understanding people’s perspectives is hard, yet valuable in the long-run if they desire to be global leaders in the future. for example, harper described how the structure of the program made it both challenging and rewarding because one is constantly placed in situations where there is a need to consider different perspectives. “people have different views so in our program we had to deal with nine different people who had all different experiences, perspectives, different opinions on things, and the going day to day, the random strangers, the different students we would meet, all the different conversations we had from the students from other cultures to the employees we met with, it basically just re-instilled the fact that people think differently.” through the reflection exercises, they were able to recognize that this is a critical facet of global leadership. as sian noted, “global leadership requires a lot more work and dedication than leadership, itself. you actually have to put time into being a better internationally accredited person who can actually understand how [others] feel” the cohort experience encompasses the students’ learning and their formal and informal interactions with students from other countries. students shared how “family meetings” provided them an opportunity to gain perspective from their peers to help them solve problems and make decisions as a group. the cohort experience taught them strategies for communicating and working with others more effectively because they took courses and resided together throughout the experience. co-curricular cultural learning opportunities aside from the global challenges and opportunities this experience provided, the students also recognized the benefits of the interdisciplinary structure of the program. these differences manifested themselves daily but despite these challenges, students recognized the benefits. as mia explained, “it wasn’t just learning from being in a different environment, it was also serving all my [fellow] students because they’re all different people, and learning from how they behaved in an environment like, study abroad was just as valuable.” for example, some of the courses and material were more comfortable for some of the students whose discipline may have aligned with certain aspects of the course whereas for other students, certain experiences or courses felt more challenging. this provided experiences of both tension and growth. as one of the older students, alan, pointed out, the challenge of feeling uncomfortable or having to adapt to uncomfortable situations on a near daily basis often provided some of the most profound growth. as he pointed out, “there’s a lot you have to learn by doing and i think this cohort was the best representation i’ve had in my college career of what real life is like. it’s…messy and…you’re managing personal and professional stuff and you have things going on in your personal life and you’ve got things at work and there’s different kinds of people to deal with, and you’re not always going to be comfortable.” the interdisciplinary nature of the program abroad also provided students a greater depth of understanding for the importance of considering others’ perspectives when working in groups and leading others. this new knowledge emerged through the experiences as a students as leaders with a global mindset 17 17 cohort and through the immersion of local people and places in the three countries abroad. these experiences provided them with insight on how to apply this new knowledge in their desires to communicate and lead themselves and others in the future. the experiences from multiple site visits in different countries also helped the students gain greater knowledge about how other cultures work professionally which in turn transferred to their own consideration for managing and leading others. the opportunity within a relatively short time-period to experience leadership within different countries had a profound impact. as vanessa described, “the different management styles from the different site visits were probably the best part about being able to [travel] country to country and city to city.” the structure of the cohort experience forced the students to focus on building an environment that valued mutual respect, transparency, and working through problems together, even when it may have been uncomfortable. through the experiences, students learned to value humility, listening, and observing others to develop a positive group experience that fosters a growth mindset in order to achieve greater outcomes. they were very introspective in evaluating their own growth in these areas. alan was able to think back to some of the initial capstone discussions of different leadership frameworks and describe how these challenges allowed the cohort to develop as a group and individually. “i think back to the framework of strategic thinking…and just that whole framework of teamwork and leadership and being able to build off each other. i watched each and every one of us grow across the course [of the program].” abby discussed how it is critical for instructors and students to cultivate relationships between students and instructors as “strengthening those relationships, allows you to have deeper class discussions.” another contributing factor that influenced the students’ perspectives were the experiences they had with local leaders, students, and the community, at large. the ability to have extended time in each country also enhanced their ability to identify differences, and, much more, similarities people have across these countries, which was surprising for the students. however, the students realized that any relationship takes time, possibly further emphasizing the scholarship on the importance of study abroad duration. challenging their comfort zone the program was structured to provide students with opportunities to connect their experiences with their own self-awareness. one consistent theme that students discussed was that the program structure constantly pushed them out of their comfort zone. through travels, relationships built, and the learning experiences with local businesses and people, students described the experiences as giving them greater confidence to take greater initiative. for example, a number of students mentioned how they were in the final week of the program when president trump initiated a travel ban and students had to return home as soon as possible. this created a chaotic environment around the world as people scrambled to get on flights. raj described the experience as their “final test” and described how the experiences throughout the 18 global education review 8 (4) course gave them the confidence to navigate the challenges during the pandemic. “the night of the travel ban probably, and it sounds negative at first, but honestly it was such an eye opening moment, a heartfelt moment, i just remember waking everyone up, and everyone being a lot more calm, but very receptive, and there were times when we were laughing and joking…..yeah it was stressful, but it was something that we all enjoyed, and i think we all walked away from that experience learning so much and i wouldn’t want to change that. i just remember being in the hall of the hotel on the first floor, and seeing everyone on their phone, figuring stuff out, working on it together, and everyone did their part, everyone stepped up to be a leader, and it was in a global environment. but if i had to think of one experience that captures the whole thing for me, it was the unity, and sense of growth when we had, when we were figuring stuff out, we could, it felt, i felt very content, and like proud and happy. it was our final test.” many students described the different experiences of being taken out of your comfort zone as uncomfortable but ultimately rewarding. kylie, who described herself as having an organized personality, initially struggled with the change that was a significant component of the program structure. as she described: “i think one thing that was really hard for me on the trip was a lot of the moving parts because i am someone that, like, likes the schedule and likes consistency, who [ph] has a routine. so this really challenged that because we were in a different country, and then would have a different professor, and a different roommate, and would have to pack and get on a plane. so it was like right when i would get used to something or get my way around, it was like, “oh, okay, we’re leaving. we’re changing.” and that was difficult for me because i just don’t think that way. like, some people are really good with change and they need constant change in their life, but that’s not me. [laughs]. so i had to figure out how to be more flexible and adaptable in those situations where you can’t just have, like, a set routine.” despite those challenges, she was able to identify how much pushing her out of her comfort zone on a consistent basis helped her both in the short term and potentially longer term, a critical facet of a global leader in an evolving complex world. “it (the minor) pushed me out of my comfort zone and i had to think in a different way, kind of like a global mindset, right? it was like a different mindset i had to put on my head. and you can’t just do the same thing all the time. you have to be willing to be flexible. it was hard. it was probably more draining for me when i had to be in a different role. i think it will definitely help me with just being flexible and willing to work with different people that i might not be totally comfortable with. because that was something the minor really helped me with was you don’t always have to pick the easy, comfortable route. like, it’s okay to pick the one that might be, you know, out of your comfort zone or a little bit more risky. and it can end up being way better than choosing the safe comfortable route.” the recognition of being willing to take risks had a profound impact on her, particularly when she had to navigate the challenges of returning to the united states. students as leaders with a global mindset 19 19 figure 1. rich text collected from student experiences in the program data supporting themes during the program, students completed a preand post-inventory, global mindset inventory (javidan, 2010) to help them assess their growth in three areas: intellectual capital, psychological capital, and social capital. the intent of the report is to help one understand their approach to working with people from cultural and geographic backgrounds (different from one’s own) and suggests areas of improvement toward a more holistic global mindset. each category focuses on three areas. within intellectual capital, areas assessed focus on cognitive complexity, cosmopolitan outlook, and global business savvy. psychological capital assesses self-awareness, quest for adventure, and passion for diversity. the last category, social capital, evaluates intercultural empathy, diplomacy, and interpersonal impact. a score of one means that the group does not believe they are good at that dimension. a score of four or higher means that the group believes they are good at the dimension largely. although nine students participated in the program, one student selected not to take the preor post-inventory. the results from the instrument are used to compare the qualitative results with quantitative measurements; however, since the study had a small sample size (n=8), statistical significance was not calculated but tendencies in the mean values are reported. referring to the report, the comparison of preand post-data from the inventory supports the themes that emerged from the students’ interviews. in the area of psychological capital, the group’s score went from 3.74 to 4.13. the groups’ score within social capital went from 3.31 to 4.00. the greatest amount of growth assessed was within intellectual capital with a pre-score of 2.91 and post-score of 3.78. based on the information provided in figure 1, the group’s perspective increased in all three categories over the nine weeks of the program with cognitive complexity (intellectual capital) being the highest score (4.33) and global business savvy being the lowest score (3.22). figure 2. mean values for the global mindset pre-inventory in january 2020 and post20 global education review 8 (4) inventory in march 2020 of students in the program. discussion this study focused on the students’ experiences within a formal curricular international experience and asked whether immersive components of the program related to cultural partnerships with organizations and community leaders influenced the likelihood of students’ increasing global-mindedness. the researchers explored two questions: (1) how did the structural framework of the program influence (or not) participants’ growth in globalmindedness, and (2) how did the cultural context and course content used within the setting influence the participants’ experience as global-minded leaders? from the study, four themes emerged as a result of observations, interviews, examination of the global minded inventory, and rich pictures. they were as follows: learn by doing with formal reflection, valuing diverse perspectives, co-curricular cultural learning opportunities, and challenging their comfort zone. from these themes, the researchers learned that formally structured international program designs that incorporate experiences with cross-cultural organizations, businesses, and local leaders will enhance their ability to reflect and apply how they are developing themselves as globalminded citizen leaders. second, students traveling internationally while engaged in a structured, educational framework increases the likelihood that they will experience global leadership self-efficacy because of the humanistic, experiential, and social interactions they experience as a cohort and with locals. furthermore, the incorporation of four learning methodologies suggested in walker’s (2018) model, when used in an international formal program framework, has the ability to increase students’ global leadership competencies (social, psychological, and intellectual) as suggested by the global leadership mindset inventory. some of these outcomes were realized due to the unique aspect of co-teaching with international faculty and the formal learning methodologies across the curriculum, strategies proposed by lehtomaki, moate and posti-ahokas’ (2016) study on enhancing global connectedness in higher learning. the extended time in countries allowed students to take time to process, reflect, and apply learning about cultural context. the structure of the courses, especially the framework of the capstone course, provided students the opportunity to analyze similarities and differences between culture and locations. from our findings, this concurs with walker’s model (2018) that the intentionality and structure of an experience is critical to the development of global leadership self-efficacy and that higher education should create more opportunities to better prepare students for a more complex and global workforce. it also supports recent research findings that suggest that the amount of time students study abroad influences the depth, duration, and intercultural development related to global awareness (deloach et al., 2021). one of the potential limitations of this research is that the students selected to be part of the global leadership minor were a homogeneous group of students (n=9) in terms of age and racial identity. as the recent global black lives matters movement highlighted, global organizations have been critiqued to address issues of racial inequity. data highlights that black students are significantly less likely to participate in study abroad programs compared to their white peers (e.g., lu et al., 2015). thus, thinking about how to diversify the pool of participants’ opportunities in the future will be critical. second, the interviews were conducted students as leaders with a global mindset 21 21 in a short time after the culmination of the experience. it would be interesting to do a longer-term follow up interview to ascertain whether some of the benefits described by the participants were still realized in the longer term. third, students’ international experiences lasted nine-weeks, rather than twenty-five weeks suggested in walker’s (2018) global leadership development ecosystem. although the time abroad was not as long as that suggested in walker’s research, the structure of the program did suggest that it is feasible to experience selfefficacy with at least nine weeks abroad. a benefit of the structured program also provided the opportunity to collect a large amount of data in real time related to the experiences of a unique global leadership program during a global pandemic, which also provided us with relevant insights related to the value of an interdisciplinary, multi-country program. ultimately, the data from the students provided insight related to how to structure future programs. conclusion in closing, the study achieved its overall aim to explore how the program’s structural framework influences students' learning and fosters an experience that likely enhances their development as globally minded leader citizens. research needs to continue exploring the relationship between learning methodologies and how time abroad influences student outcomes in international programs that seek to enhance a student’s global-mindedness. the researcher intends to replicate the case study with a future cohort associated with the program. another study could seek to determine if differences are revealed depending upon the demographics, length of travel time of the cohort, and visits to countries different from those discussed in this case study. quotes from the participants in this study verified the implications previously discussed. with respect to generalizability, the study was limited in its scope since it was a qualitative study, an instrument could be developed to evolve into a longitudinal study on the topic to expand upon similar findings for generalizability. references basil, m. 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(2017). case study research: design and methods (5th ed.). los angeles, ca: sage publications. about the authors dr. deborah r. acker currently serves as the interim director at the shelton leadership center with primary responsibilities for sustaining the department through quality programming, leading the board of advisors, fund development, and special projects related to grants and contracts. she continues her responsibilities as the senior associate director for operations and academic programs in the shelton leadership center, as well as a teaching instructor within university college at north carolina state university. dr. acker is an affiliate member in the graduate faculty in comparative biomedical sciences teaching a course in interdisciplinary leadership, as well as being a part of two grants to establish both an undergraduate and graduate minor in interdisciplinary biomedical team sciences. dr. acker’s general interests include values-based leadership, group/team decision-making, and crossdisciplinary working groups. over the span of her professional career, her expertise continues to focus on the development and training of leadership competencies including meaningful group work, effective teams, decision-making, incorporation of intentional values-based attributes when leading others (honesty, integrity, diversity, social responsibility and compassion), and developing a global mindset. these efforts have resulted in more than 25 years of working in higher education leading sustainable programs, courses and minors to advance generational leaders. as a senior leader, she has successfully collaborated with university faculty, staff and administrators across disciplines to enhance student success as leaders within their field of studies, resulting in current programs, research, courses and minors. dr. jason bocarro is an alumni distinguished undergraduate professor and university faculty scholar in the department of parks, recreation & tourism management at nc state university. dr. bocarro’s research focuses on the intersection of childhood and adolescent health and inactivity that specifically examines the relationship between the built environment and public spaces and human health. dr. bocarro has published over 70 peer reviewed research journal publications and book chapters spanning several disciplines including medicine, sociology, public health, psychology, parks and recreation, exercise science and education. he is also the co-editor of the book legacies of mega events: fact or fairy tales. https://doi.org/10.1353/sof.2006.0023 182 global education review 5(4) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: hos, rabia, & cinarbas, halil i. (2018). learning to teach in a global crisis: teachers’ insights from a temporary non-formal refugee education project in gaziiantep. global education review, 5 (4), 182-193. learning to teach in a global crisis: teachers’ insights from a temporary non-formal refugee education project in gaziantep rabia hos university of the rhode island halil i. cinarbas middle east technical university abstract turkey is home to 1.2 million child refugees whom has been the most vulnerable since the beginning of the syrian conflict, which is considered to be the worst humanitarian crisis of this century. more than 50% of school age child refugees are out of school (unicef, 2017) in turkey. this paper reports one of the findings of a case study of a temporary non-formal education project (learning turkish)1, that focused on supporting 4-6-year-old syrian children with turkish language and literacy development. the purpose of the paper is to focus on the teachers’ and administrators’ experiences in learning to teach young refugees in the time of crisis. data sources include in-person interviews and observations. findings from this study confirm that in times of crisis teachers and administrators focus on being in the moment, teaching in the moment and learning to teach refugee children. teachers and administrators reported that the experience in this project contributed to their teaching and personal development and enhanced their civic responsibility and personal growth. this study also confirmed that improvements are needed in making schooling available to all refugee children and training teachers to work with students who have experienced trauma. one of the limitations of the project was its unsustainability due to funding. the paper concludes with implications for educational policy makers and non-formal education providers. keywords refugee education, non-formal education, early childhood, language learning introduction unhcr identified turkey as the country hosting the largest number of refugees worldwide. as of january 2018, turkey was a home to 3.46 million syrian refugees (unhcr, 2018). of the total number of refugees, 1.3 million are children of school age. as of march 2017, more than 50% of the syrian children living in turkey are out of school (unicef, 2017). there are a few reasons why there are so many children out of school. first, many school-aged syrian children in turkey are forced to work as child-laborers to support their families. second, if families cannot receive the temporary protection card to be a legal resident, then their children cannot be accepted to register for school. third, many children lack the turkish language skills that is required to succeed. some of these reasons are not new. turkish government has been trying to establish policies to address the educational needs of the syrian refugee children. from 2011 ________________________________________ rabia hos, university of rhode island, school of education, 612 chafee hall, kingston, ri 02881 email: rabiahos@uri.edu learning to teach in a global crisis 183 figure 1. refugee children celebrating international children’s day on april 23, 2017 hiçbir çocuk savaş istemez (no child would want a war) bilir ki savaşın ilk günü (he/she would know that the first day of the war,) çocukluğunun son günüdür (would be the last day of his/her childhood) ---cihan demirci (turkishpoet) until 2014 the education policies were developed with the assumption that syrians would soon return to their countries (alpaydin, 2017). however, with the ongoing conflict, more permanent solutions needed to be put in place to integrate the syrian children into the turkish national education system. many nongovernmental organizations along with the turkish ministry of national education (mone) are trying to improve the educational outcomes of the syrian refugee children residing in turkey. gaziantep, located 60 kilometers from the border of syria, has been on the frontline in coping with the influx of refugees in turkey. gaziantep is a home to more than 350,000 syrian refugees as well as more than 50,000 in camps near the city. the municipality of gaziantep has been actively trying to support syrian refugees and putting in place various educational and social programs. educational needs of refugees under the age of 18 are critical and access to education paves the way for a better outlook in life to them (fazel, reed, panter-brick & stein, 2012). education is an essential commodity for refugee children that would enable them to engage with the local community. many of the refugee families live in impoverished areas of gaziantep, where access to education is not available. given the difficulties of establishing education opportunities for refugee children living in gaziantep, this article reports one of the key findings of a case study of a temporary nongovernmental education project for 4-6-year-old syrian refugees. the experiences of teachers involved in this project are explored. 184 global education review 5(4) refugee education in turkey the constitution of the republic of turkey ensures the right to education free of charge in line with the article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights (1948) and the article 13 of the international covenant on economic, social and cultural rights (1966). accordingly, the ministry of national education (mone) in turkey sets policies and is responsible for organizing the schooling system in turkey and taking any necessary precautions to improve and develop “the extent of available resources to protect the rights of everyone, regardless of nationality” (weissbrodt & divine, 2012: 171). thus, the main purpose of education in turkey is to educate a person to become a psychically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually competent individual by respecting human rights and universal ethical values. in addition, education in turkey aims to help students to improve their skills, pursue their interest and eventually be a creative, supportive and contributing member of the society with his/her occupation. turkish schooling system includes early childhood education, primary, middle, and high schools, as well as tertiary education. the compulsory education was 8 years until 2012, yet the duration of compulsory education has extended to 12 years of schooling with the introduction of 4+4+4 single-structured schooling system and early childhood education and tertiary education are not included in the compulsory education. the language of instruction is turkish in turkish schools with a few exceptions. several private national and international schools deliver basic education in english or other languages such as french or german. in addition, providing compulsory education to refugee students is one of the top priorities of mone’s agenda because the civil war in syria caused a mass influx of people immigrating from syria in the last eight years. the influx of refugees caused interruptions or total drop-out for the refugee students (hos & cinarbas, 2017). according to the most recent estimations, the refugee population, who came from syria, in turkey is over 3.7 million and 65% of syrian refugees, of whom 572,000 are children, are expected to stay in turkey even after the war reach a peaceful conclusion (aras & yasun, 2016). thus, there needs a comprehensive work to identify the needs of the refugee children in terms of basic education in the short and long terms and the initial piloting attempts started to initiate educational accommodations at the beginning of 2014 (bircan & sunata, 2015; seydi, 2014; kirisci & karaca, 2014). turkish education system is based on a monolingual approach, therefore even those syrian refugees who attend turkish public schools have a difficult time to adapt due to language barriers. often, the education of the refugee children had been handled by local municipalities. often times, they support local “syrian schools” but they are run on a temporary basis and there is no consistency. according to the open society foundation (2016), mone classified the refugee children’s problems as language, financial, social integrity, and insufficient infrastructure. no doubt that the most important ones are education and language. not speaking a country’s language is one of the most important barriers for schooling and literacy because language is the medium and means of communication and conveying meaning. however, language barrier is not an insoluble problem. the early intervention similar to the one described in this paper to teach turkish to syrian children would increase the schooling potential. the early intervention to language development starts during the preschool period. importance of early literacy for refugee children early childhood education programs positively foster cognitive skills, social and affective maturation, social integration, and readiness to attend a school for the children in the adverse learning to teach in a global crisis 185 environments and improving these skills can help them start schooling on a relatively equal basis compared to their more advantaged peers (burger, 2010; currie, 2001; goldfeld et al., 2016; knudsen, heckman, cameron & shonkoff, 2006) because the significant differences “between the environments of advantaged children and those of disadvantaged children raise serious concerns about the life prospects of disadvantaged children” (elango, garcía, heckman & hojman, 2015: 6). according to the australian early development census; preschool education makes great contribution the five developmental areas; physical health and wellbeing, social skills, emotional maturity, linguistic and cognitive skills and communicative skills and general knowledge. (goldfeld, harvey & grattan, 2016). these contributions are more critical for the disadvantaged children like refugees. however unfortunately, the refugee children in the refugee status cannot receive sustainable and regular education due to the aforementioned reasons above. learning turkish project learning turkish project arose from a discussion of a group of educators residing in gaziantep, who were interested in making a difference in syrian refugees’ lives. they founded the association for the education of the disadvantaged individuals in an effort to put in place various support programs for local syrian refugee children who did not have access to any form of schooling in gaziantep. the founders and the members of the association conducted extensive field visits to identify neighborhoods in gaziantep with the highest number of syrian refugees who did not have access to education. learning turkish project was funded collaboratively by open society foundation and the association for the education of disadvantaged individuals. author i (hos) was the co-founder of the association. in order to address any ethical concerns that may have risen during the data collection, hos was not involved in the implementation phase of the project and only participated as a participant observer/researcher. the purpose of this project was to enhance the refugee children’s turkish linguistic skills in an effort to improve their social, cognitive and affective skills so that they can attend turkish schools, make turkish friends, and be prepared to enter the turkish education system. learning turkish project served 100 syrian children between the ages of 4-6. the children were invited to the project through an advertisement that was launched in the identified neighborhoods of gaziantep. the parents signed up their children on a voluntary basis. parents were not asked of their legal status when they signed up for the project. out of a pool of applicants, 100 children between 4-6 ages were chosen randomly. the duration of the project was 6 months. the project was implemented at a small community center space in the form of a pre-school education and language education for 5 days a week for six months. there were activities for turkish language education. additionally, creative drama, games, art therapy and music education were provided once a week. the three classrooms composed of over thirty children in each were separated by age group, 4, 5, 6-yearolds. theoretical framework turkey has very limited experience with designing programs to educate and integrate migrants or refugees (icduygu, 2015). the icg (2016) report clearly stated that turkey’s temporary protection regime is unsustainable given the conflicts on the country’s borders. thus, a constructive national dialogue on refugee integration and an inclusive definition of citizenship is needed (ager & strang, 2008). the turkish government should develop and implement an organized strategy that includes interests and concerns of multiple stakeholders for syrians. consequently, turkey must sincerely 186 global education review 5(4) consider making syrian refugees feel comfortable in society (kirisci, 2014). in consideration of these issues, this study explored the experiences of teachers and administrators in a non-formal educational context for syrian refugee children. in this context, answers for the following research question was sought: what are the experiences of teachers and an administrator during a short-term nonformal educational program implementation? data sources and methodology data collection the case study method (bogdan & biklen, 2003) was used to gather in-depth data about the experiences of teachers and an administrator with syrian refugee students in the non-formal education project of syrian refugee children residing in impoverished neighborhoods of gaziantep. the data were collected through the duration of the learning turkish project that took place from october 2016 to june 2017. the data sources included: participant observation and field-notes at school and meeting; semistructured interviews and informal conversation with teachers and administrator to capture the rich data about the teachers’ experiences of working with syrian refugee students; researcher journal and classroomartifacts. participants all the interviews were conducted in the turkish language and hos translated them into english. pseudonyms were assigned to the project name and the participating teachers and administrators in order to ensure confidentiality and anonymity. the research design incorporated a variety of evidence and used data triangulation (creswell, 2018; maxwell, 2005; strauss & corbin, 1998), including open-ended questions with in-depth semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and documents to explore deeply the multifaceted social phenomenon that participants faced (glesne, 2011; yin, 2009). each participant was interviewed twice, and each interview ranged from 45 minutes to one hour, and documents and artifacts were collected. weekly observational fieldnotes were taken by hos. researcher journal served as a tool for understanding the experiences of the project participants. data analysis procedures a conventional content analysis approach (berg, 2007) was adopted for examining the transcripts of the in-depth interviews conducted. categories were developed through an inductive process (hsieh & shannon, 2005). in addition, using nvivo-12 software, the researchers created a database for all interviews, field notes, and documents before disassembling data by using open coding to create level one codes upon entry into the database (yin, 2009). triangulation of data and member checking were carried out to ensure the reliability of the data. the analysis process revealed major thematic categories that emerged from the interviews. these themes are presented next in the findings section. findings analysis of the data revealed themes mainly related to issues of teaching refugee children. the main themes that arose were: overcoming challenges and celebrating small accomplishments, understanding the children and their psychosocial needs, and saving the day, learning to teach, develop and contribute to the integration and development of refugee children in society. overcoming challenges and celebrating small accomplishments implementing a project under a climate of state of emergency in the country was not without a challenge for the project team. one of the first challenges was finding an appropriate location that would allow accessibility for the refugee children. with a limited budget provided from the two funding agencies, transportation became too expensive to accommodate. the administrator mentioned: learning to teach in a global crisis 187 “as we took on the responsibility of this project, we failed to take into consideration many expenses such as transportation, rental location, access. the space that we rented was not the most conducive to learning but we did the best we can with limited resources” (administrator interview transcript). the location where the project took place was a small classroom space on the first floor of a residential building. teaching was done in three different shifts in order to accommodate the large classroom size of 30+ children at a time. there were kids sized tables and chairs with lots of early childhood materials in the room. there was a portable large white board, projector and a computer that the teachers often used during instruction. there were drama and dress up materials, pretend play materials, small erasable white boards with markers, legos, playdough, puzzles, arts and crafts materials for the children to use. the classroom was equipped with appropriate materials. the children were engaged in hands-on learning of the skills taught as can be seen on figure 2 below: figure 2. student work children’s class work was displayed around the classroom walls and were sent home to be shared with their families at the end of each week. the children were separated according to age group and each session had age appropriate instruction and activities. the project team worked really hard to organize and implement various events for the families and children. one of the difficulties that they were faced with was space as reported by the administrator: “we wanted to celebrate the international children’s day in april and the end of the project in june where children had prepared a special presentation for. when we asked the public school that was located across from us, the principal told us that he cannot allow us to use the school’s amenities for the event because of the state of emergency. this was disappointing, but we held both celebrations at the public park across from our classroom” (administrator interview transcript). despite the obstacles, the administrator and the teachers found way to celebrate small accomplishments. the teachers and the administrator spent a lot of time online throughout the project in order to implement activities to better help the refugee children. they searched for ways that they could support the literacy and social development of young children and make their transition into the public schools easier. in a way, these teachers and administrator served as advocated for the young children. as seen on figure 1, which is a picture from the international children’s day celebration at the park, the children danced, sang songs in both turkish and arabic, and held 188 global education review 5(4) up posters against the war. their voices were made public. understanding the children and their psychosocial needs the teachers in the study each had degrees in early childhood education and the administrators held master’s and doctoral degrees in education. a common topic that came up in the formal and informal discussions with the teachers was that their prior teaching experiences had not prepared them in dealing with vulnerable group of children like the refugees. for example, sevgi, one of the classroom teachers mentioned: “i feel so limited sometimes trying to meet the needs of children. they just need to be children and not worry about anything else.”(sevgi, informal conversation). from our observations and the discussions with the teachers, the refugee children had been through so much difficulty at such a young age, that they could not access many of the luxuries that many families and children take granted for. ozlem, one of the teachers spoke about how “many of them come to school without having breakfast and eat the snacks that we provide for them. it may be the only meal that they may be having during the day. i wish we can do more for them”(ozlem, informal conversation). additionally, the administrator spoke about her home visits to the children’s homes: “i could not sleep after i saw that 12people lived in a one room basement apartment. the things that we take for granted in our lives are a luxury for some of them. before we try to teach them anything, we need to try to understand their situations be sensitive to their needs” (administrator, informal conversation). teachers’ own self-realization of the situation and their ability to critique and reflect on their practices made it possible for them to be able to make decisions on instruction and support. the experience of teaching in the temporary non-formal context allowed teachers to be able to re-examine their values and beliefs through transformative learning (mezirow, 2000). before making instructional decisions, it was apparent that meeting the children’s basic needs became a priority at many times during the project. all of the teachers and administrators stated similar insights: “i am glad that we were able to provide at least a snack every day for them when they came to school. we also decided to buy clothes and shoes for them because many of them didn’t have anything to wear for the end of the project celebration” (administrator interview transcript). although most of the little syrian children in the project did not directly experience the atrocities of the war in syria, they experienced the obstacles associated with having to leave their countries and families behind, living in poverty in a foreign country whose language and culture is different than their own, not being able to live their childhoods. given that syrian and turkish cultures a similar in essence, the cultural understanding that the teachers had influenced the way they reached out to the needs of the children. the teachers deeply cared about the children and tried to meet their social, emotional, and immediate needs. as one of the teachers shared “before we try to teach them anything, they need to feel secure, welcome and happy. they are children and they need to play happily and not worry about anything else” (ozlem interview transcript). the teachers shared during informal discussions that they received short-term professional development on play therapy and read about it extensively during the project in order to support the children better. one of the teachers shared how she does this: “i hug them, and i comfort them by saying everything will be okay. i try my best to create the healthiest classroom environment that i can with the resources that i have” (sevgi interview transcript). learning to teach in a global crisis 189 as the project was situated in ethical care, meeting the social-emotional needs of children was a priority by the team of teachers and the administrator. they all shared the value of caring relationships. the next theme in the study was what teachers referred to as “living in the moment”, which is discussed next. “saving the day, learning to teach, develop and contribute to the integration and development of refugee children in society.” in times of crisis teachers and administrators focus on being in the moment, teaching in the moment and learning to teach refugee children. although all of the project personnel were educators they realized that they had never thought about the specific needs that refugees may have, therefore all of them had to be flexible in providing the most appropriate and practical education as possible. given the limited amount of time and funding, they found themselves in revising their plans constantly. the project was able to provide ample early childhood materials, teacher’s resource books, and children’s workbooks; however they were not specifically designed to meet the needs of children without turkish language skills. teachers repeatedly mentioned the difficulty of adapting the turkish texts and resources to fit into the needs of the refugee children. for example, sevgi mentioned: “i am constantly planning and revising materials. although we have a long-term plan we refer to, i still need to change things around. sometimes, we need to go slow and spend longer time on certain skills” (sevgi interview transcript). it was a significant challenge that the preplanned curricula did not necessarily meet the needs of the young refugee children. the teachers had to integrate more relevant and practical linguistic input to both support the linguistic and developmental skills of the children. aygul also added: “i feel like the things that i learned when i was training to be an early childhood teacher were not enough. i am learning as i teach the refugee children” (aygul interview transcript). teaching refugee children meant more than academic and social support but going beyond and understanding their individual situation and providing culturally, linguistically, and socially relevant materials. as teachers engaged in “informed and reflective decision” (mezirow, 2000: 23-24) making, they became “critically reflective” (brookfield, 2005: 125) and this led them to become transformative learners. one of the main reasons for the refugee children’s slow language development was their lack of interaction and socialization with other turkish children. the project administrator stated: “from the home visits that we have completed, the children often interact only with other syrian children around their neighborhood. the neighborhoods that they live in are impoverished. many of the turkish families that live in the neighborhood also suffer from poverty so there are limited relations between the two communities. children’s turkish language skills are slowly developing. because they are not interacting with any other turkish children, it makes it more difficult for them to improve” (administrator informal conversation). social interaction plays an important role in language development in the early childhood. even though the young syrian refugee children did not interact with their turkish peers, they were still exposed to language on the streets, at the park, and throughout the project. the teachers and the project administrator reported that the children’s turkish language skills developed immensely during the six-month period that the project was being implemented. along with the children’s language skill development, they also improved in their social, emotional, and motor skills through the many activities that they were engaged in. for example, in one of her observations hos had witnessed that “eva (a student participant), 190 global education review 5(4) who was shy and did not participate at the beginning opened up to raise her hand to speak in class in such a short time” (field note, 02.01.2017). all of the teachers and the administrator regularly reported positive improvements in children’s social and linguistic development. ozlem reported enthusiastically: “despite all the difficulties, when i see the kids smile i forget about everything. i see light in their eyes and that is all that matters” (ozlem, informal conversation). sevgi added, “i really believe we made a difference in children’s lives.” the teachers and administrators were pleased with the overall experience of being part of the project and agreed that it contributed to their professional development as well. aygul commented: “i did not have any experience working with refugee children previously. this project helped me to learn to teach, develop professionally, and really be aware of my duties as a citizen. i had no idea about the needs of refugees that lived in my city and this project allowed me to grow both personally and professionally” (aygul informal conversation). by being part of a short but transformative experience of teaching young refugee children allowed all of the project personnel to become reflective practitioners. teachers and administrators reported that the experience in this project contributed to their teaching and personal development and enhanced their civic responsibility and personal growth. discussion this study focused on the experiences of the teachers and administrators in a non-formal education project for 4-6-year-old syrian refugee children in impoverished neighborhoods of gaziantep. the three themes that emerged as a result of our observations, interviews and field notes were: overcoming challenges and celebrating small accomplishments, understanding the children and their psychosocial needs, and saving the day, learning to teach, develop and contribute to the integration and development of refugee children in society. the temporary non-formal education project for early childhood education was a challenge for the teachers and the administrators but they overcame the obstacles with their dedication and hard work. with the foundation of ethics of care (noddings, 1988), the teachers and administrators got to know the children closely and tried meeting the psychosocial needs of them. through being part of this project, the teachers and administrators became transformative learners which allowed them to shift their outlook into teaching through critical self-reflection (mezirow, 2000). through their own critical lens, the project personnel provided access to early childhood education and a safe welcoming learning environment. many young refugee children are still unable to attend early childhood education, which prevents their integration into the turkish society. because many of these young children live in impoverished neighborhoods with malnutrition and economic difficulties also make it difficult for them to grow physically, socially and emotionally (kirisci, 2014). as bourgonje (2010) states, the psychological problems, malnutrition, and economic difficulties negatively affect refugee children. the project provided the personnel with the opportunity to demonstrate the values of social justice in their teaching and allowed them to develop a greater respect for diversity, equity, care and compassion. there are limited opportunities for refugee children to attend turkish public schools. there are no programs in the turkish public schools that would help syrian refugees to learn turkish (aydin & kaya, 2017). while in many refugee hosting countries in the world, there are additional language courses as they are integrated into the mainstream classes in schools. for young refugee children, there are early childhood programs that support the linguistic and social development of children. one of the reasons for the failure of the integration of the refugees into the turkish education system may be due to the fact that at learning to teach in a global crisis 191 first the syrian refugees were thought to be likely to be returning to syria once the war was over but it is a reality that the syrian refugees may not be able to return home for many decades to come and will become citizens of turkey. needless to say, that there are many humanitarian efforts by various organizations and associations in turkey are working hard to ensure that the basic human rights of refugees are met, including the children’s right to education. early childhood education makes great contribution overall development and wellbeing of children (goldfeld et al, 2016), especially for those that are disadvantaged like refugees. the teachers and administrators in this study were confident in their efforts that they helped to contribute to the development of young and bright refugee children who each had a promising future when provided with the opportunities to flourish. limitations this study is not without a limitation. as with qualitative studies, the findings may not be generalizable but may still be useful given the shortage of research on early childhood education for young refugee children. the context of one city in turkey presents only one case of non-formal temporary education project for young refugees but the purpose of this qualitative case study was not to generalize but produce evidence based on the investigation of the particular context. finally, although hos was associated with the development of the project, potential researcher bias was addressed by not including her on the implementation phase of the project during the data collection and by including the second author (cinarbas) (who was not associated with any of the project phase) to support with coding and analysis of the data. conclusion and implications there are numerous non-formal educational programs to support the integration of refugees into the turkish educational system. learning turkish, was one of these temporary educational programs for young refugee children. this study explored the experiences of teachers and administrators in this project. the findings of this study demonstrated that despite the limitations and challenges, the teachers and administrators focused on being in the moment, teaching in the moment in order to do what was best for the children. there are many barriers for syrian refugees to attend public schools in turkey. the first one is the systematic difficulties that do not allow refugees to register for school. as turkey is the country with the largest refugee children population, there needs to be consistent and equitable opportunities for refugee children to attend school without a question of legal status in the country. the second one is the lack of language education programs that would support the successful integration of syrian refugees into the turkish educational system. in cities such as gaziantep, there needs to be public schools that offer turkish as an additional language courses so that all refugee children attending public schools can catch up with their peers. additionally, the lack of educational policy for the refugees in turkey make it difficult to create uniform and equitable access to schools. finally, teachers in turkish schools do not have the necessary training to meet the needs of increasing number of syrian refugees in turkey. teachers at schools with syrian refugees need to be trained to meet the educational needs of the students. syrian refugee children may not only need academic support but also psychological support as well. teachers and service providers need to be trained in meeting the needs of refugee children who may have experienced trauma due to their experiences of fleeing the war and migration. despite the systematic difficulties in turkey in serving the refugee children in schools, there are numerous efforts that make a positive impact on their lives. more studies on the experiences of implementation of non-formal educational programs need to be conducted to further investigate the impact of these programs. 192 global education review 5(4) notes learning turkish (a pseudonym) was partly funded by open society foundation and donations from volunteers from the association for the support ofthe education of disadvantaged individuals. references ager, a. & strang, a. 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(2009). case study research: design and methods. london: sage. about the author(s) rabia hos, ph.d. is an assistant professor of tesol at the university of rhode island. after receiving her ph.d. from university of rochester in 2012, she taught pre-service tesol teachers at a turkish university in gaziantep, turkey and participated in numerous research projects involving syrian refugees and disadvantaged youth with visual impairments. she was an assistant professor at illinois state university during the 2017-2018 academic year. her research focuses on the experiences of newcomer immigrant and refugee students with interrupted formal education (sife). halil i. cinarbas is a ph.d. candidate at middle east technical university (metu) and works as an efl instructor in ankara, turkey. in his previous studies, he explored experiences of pre-service teachers with visual impairments. his areas of research interests are special needs students and language learning, language teacher education and professional development. http://www.usak.org.tr/analiz_det.php?id=17&cat=365366672#.vwv-4i6qqko http://www.usak.org.tr/analiz_det.php?id=17&cat=365366672#.vwv-4i6qqko https://aciktoplumvakfi.org.tr/dosyalar/yayinlar/on%20the%20brink%20of%20a%20lost%20generation.pdf https://aciktoplumvakfi.org.tr/dosyalar/yayinlar/on%20the%20brink%20of%20a%20lost%20generation.pdf https://aciktoplumvakfi.org.tr/dosyalar/yayinlar/on%20the%20brink%20of%20a%20lost%20generation.pdf https://www.unicef.org/media/media_94417.html https://www.unicef.org/media/media_94417.html https://www.unicef.org/media/media_95183.html https://www.unicef.org/media/media_95183.html enduring lessons for current times 69 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: may, helen. (2022). enduring lessons for current times from a forgotten froebelian foot soldier in aotearoa-new zealand: miss isabel little (1876-1937). global education review, 9 (1), 69-84. enduring lessons for current times from a forgotten froebelian foot soldier in aotearoa-new zealand: miss isabel little (1876-1937) helen may abstract miss isabel little was a scottish infant teacher who immigrated to new zealand in 1912. she was described as a “froebel trained scot from edinburgh” and known around wellington education circles for her “modern methods”. in contrast to known froebelian pioneers, miss little’s historical footprint is light but the few glimpses yield insights useful to consider in current times. miss little is described in this article as a forgotten froebelian foot soldier who, like others were the mainstay of a kindergarten movement that transformed the early education of children. individual and collective advocacy, as demonstrated by miss little a century ago, are evident in current times. the political and pedagogical context of early years education has changed in aotearoa new zealand (nz) but there are still battles to be won. coinciding with the consequences of covid-19 in 2020 was the government’s intended roll-out of he taonga te tamaiti – early learning action plan 2019-2029, creating calls for a strategic rethink: to hasten rather than slow down its implementation. connecting these stories, past and present, was accidental as they collided into the space of the author’s life during a stern lockdown that mainly halted the virus at the border. more broadly they epitomize the stretch and potency of froebelian principles across centuries and places. keywords new zealand, froebelian, teachers, pedagogy, kindergarten, covid-19 introduction froebelian scholarship has been proactive in documenting the advocacy of women who created froebelian spaces across the institutions of education. these visible “movers and shakers” have been honored but less attention accorded the mainly forgotten foot soldiers of the kindergarten movement. they were the significant presence in kindergartens, nurseries and schools for young children, and also agents of change. their presence and actions are in the shadows of the few recorded in the history books (may, nawrotski & prochner, 2016; taylor allen 2017; may & bethell, 2017; palmer & read, 1921). lessons can be learnt from frontline teachers who, challenged rules, mentored others and joined collective action. while the remembered voices of political advocacy and pedagogical innovation are crucial to change (may, 2019), it is the frontline teacher who transforms the theory and rhetoric into practice thus making acceptable, a wider movement of change. the political and pedagogical contexts of early education have changed in nz but there are still barriers confronting the sector on a journey to equal status for teachers, equal rights for children and equitable funding for different early childhood 70 global education review 9 (1) education (ece) services for children from birth to school age at 5 years. a useful exemplar of the stretch of froebelian principles and practices across centuries, continents and places is the routledge international handbook of froebel and early childhood practice (bruce et. al, 2019). the compilation of chapters examine past endeavors of people inspired by froebelian ideals alongside case studies of frontline teachers in current times, often in challenging environments, refreshing and refueling froebel’s ideals and cumulatively forging change. it is the overlapping and interplay of froebelian education across historic times and current times that have enabled its adaptation and indeed survival. miss isabel little (1836-1937) was a froebelian foot soldier and the few glimpses afforded yield insights useful to consider in current times. miss little immigrated to new zealand in 1912 in the wake of another family member. she was described to me as a “froebel trained scot from edinburgh” by miss moira gallagher, a retired teacher i interviewed in 1990 who played a key role in implementing the postwar expansion of kindergarten.1 as a probationary teacher in 1929 miss gallagher had been inspired by miss little, known around wellington education circles for her “modern methods” in the infant classroom. later research revealed more glimpses (may 2011), but it was the opportunity to present a paper at the international froebel society (ifs) conference at moray house in edinburgh that encouraged further investigation, after discovering that miss little gained her teaching certificate at moray house in 1898.2 the conference was cancelled due to covid, but a six-week lockdown provided space to collate and consider the threads of miss little’s life in education (may, 2020). like other froebelians, her activism extended beyond the classroom with glimpses of wider engagement on behalf of women and children in various organizations. colliding into this lockdown space, however, were the realities of the consequences for children and families of covid; but witnessing too the response of the wellington regional kindergarten association, he whānau manaaki, to ensure a kindergarten presence at home for children and support for their families (may & coulston 2021). a background to these happenings was the concern that covid’s economic crisis might delay the implementation of he taonga te tamaiti – early learning action plan 20192029 (elap) (ministry of education, 2019) released in december 2019. the plan was the result of collective negotiations across early childhood groups with a labour–led government, elected in 2017, that promised to reinstate commitments over funding, regulations and qualifications halted and/or undermined by the previous national government 2008-2017. suddenly, due to covid the elap was under threat and a new conversation was needed (dalli, may & meade 2020a, 2020b); thus the collision of stories, past and present, which frame this article in an interplay of policy and pedagogy. some context regarding early education and kindergarten is outlined, firstly from the times of miss little when school was the main frontline of early education, and more recently when most children participate in ece prior to school and kindergarten is one of a range of ece services. more substantively, there is the unravelling of miss little’s story, revealing the ethos of an era that witnessed the growth of a kindergarten movement alongside the infusion of new education ideas in schools (may, 2011). finally, there is commentary on ece politics amidst covid in 2020 and the call for a “reset” (mitchell, 2021). it was the lockdown collision enduring lessons for current times 71 and fusion of past and present that suggested links across time: considering teachers as advocates for children and families, forging innovation in pedagogy, and the resetting of policy agendas. more broadly the overlapping and interplay of these stories suggest the potency and stretch of froebelian ideals and principles across time and place. early years education in nz the idea of the froebelian kindergarten arrived in the colonial settlement of nz in the 1870s, initially within in a few progressive schools. a national school system was established in 1877 for children from 5 years, compulsory from 7 years. children from 5 to 7 years were in infant classes and, except in small schools, under the semi-autonomous oversight of an infant mistress. from the 1880s, several free kindergartens were established by philanthropic organizations as an education experiment to remove children from the streets. while there was pedagogical interest and political support for kindergartens including a small government subsidy from 1909, education policy dictated a demarcation between compulsory schooling and the independent kindergarten movement (may & bethell, 2017). shades of this remain. government now regulates and funds a range of ece services, but unlike schools, they are independent of government ownership run by a mix of private and community-based operators and organizations. unlike schools that only adopted selected kindergarten activities, free kindergartens ran full froebelian programs. by the early 20th century teachers were assimilating ideas from dewey and montessori; abandoning froebel’s more prescriptive activities, although not his broader principles of play and understandings of childhood (may & bethell, 2017). change was harder in schools with large classes that did not allow the movement required of kindergarten or montessori activities. nevertheless, there was a view that regimented schools must change. when george hogben was appointed inspector general in 1899, he set about reforming the curriculum urging that: the important thing is not the amount of things that are taught, but the spirit, character, and method of teaching in relation to its purpose of developing the child’s powers ... we must believe with froebel and other enlightened world’s educators, that the child will learn best, not so much by reading about things in books as by doing: that is exercising his natural activities by making things, by observing and testing things for himself; and then afterwards by reasoning about them and expressing thoughts about them.3 miss little arrived in nz in the aftermath of hogben’s reforms, although the primacy of the 3r’s was still upheld. hogben’s aspirations slowly transformed schooling for young children, a process in which miss little played a part. at an education conference in 1944 the minister of education, rex mason, announced: nothing short of a revolution has taken place in the infant room over the past 20 years. it has my full support. we must agree that the learning of formal intellectual skills is of secondary importance… he should learn to work and play with other children and his mind should be kept lively and eager and full of wonder (mason 1944, p. 16). 72 global education review 9 (1) the “revolution” was an exaggeration nevertheless an era of “playway” at school was endorsed (may, 2011). the conference also determined that kindergarten be fully supported. in 1948 miss gallagher, was appointed the first preschool officer in the wellington head office department of education with a brief to transform the creaking charitable kindergarten movement. kindergartens became a flagship institution across nz. other ece services were gradually established to meet new needs, such as childcare for working mothers, playcenters run by parents, māori language immersion centers, ngā kohanga reo and bilingual pacific islands centers. the political and pedagogical story of these transformations is characterized by advocacy (may, 2019). fast-forwarding to the end of the 20th century and the infant/junior classes had been integrated into the upper primary school and professional links with kindergarten, evident in the times of miss little, had faded. there were other shifts in the ece landscape. after decades of advocacy, firstly by kindergartners, later from childcare, there was the introduction in 1988 of early childhood diploma/degree qualifications equivalent to primary teachers. these cemented the integrity of early childhood pedagogy and integrated kindergarten and childcare understandings of ece, enriching kindergarten pedagogy, albeit with some loss of kindergarten identity. administrative reforms in the 1980s brought childcare under the umbrella of education with a unified regulatory and funding framework, intended to redress inequity across the ece sector and between ece and school, but were never fully implemented (may, 2019). the release of the bicultural curriculum, te whāriki in 1993 (ministry of education, 2017), further enhanced the distinctiveness of early childhood pedagogy. developed in partnership with ngā kohanga reo trust on behalf of indigenous māori, te whāriki translates as a woven mat for all to stand on with many possible patterns. anne meade’s, description is useful (meade, 2019): for over 20 years, the early childhood curriculum te whāriki, has expanded the existing influence of froebel in new zealand’s early education through its four principles… . they are to empower the child to learn and grow; integrate the wider world of family and community in to the curriculum; foster respectful reciprocal relationships for children with people, places and things; and implement a curriculum that reflects the holistic way that children learn. these principles are also found in traditional māori knowledge (p. 127). kindergartens also infused their froebelian roots within te whāriki as a movement underpinned by advocacy for children, social justice, community outreach and including a profession of qualified teachers. froebelian pedagogy is evident too in the emphasis on purposeful play, outdoor environments, creative arts and family engagement. the development of te whāriki and its cross-sector acceptance is a success story of advocacy, foot soldier implementation and collaboration (may & carr, 2016). the current ece political journey colliding into miss little’s story in 2020 is more fraught and a consequence of shifting interests across the political spectrum. after labour’s election in 1999 the ece strategic plan, pathways to the future 2002-2012 (ministry of education, 2002), brought significant gains with the introduction of free ece for 3 and 4 year olds, and the move to 100% qualified teachers, already upheld by enduring lessons for current times 73 kindergarten, but inclusive of childcare. again, the incoming national government in 2008 halted these gains and cut funding to centers that had reached 100%. labour’s current elap (2019-2029) reinstates the cuts and proposes a swathe of initiatives to address historic inequities in relation to the wellbeing of children, the professional status of teachers and access for families. early education has been a political roller coaster with challenges for teachers and organizations in different settings across the century, but there is also continuity in the froebelian legacy. a classroom teacher immediately after miss gallagher’s appointment as preschool officer in 1948 she visited every kindergarten. kindergartens had periods of free play but were still regimented. miss gallagher determined to persuade teachers to introduce more freedom. miss joyce barns recalled the visit: we let the children free because miss gallagher said it was more natural. we didn’t have a timetable, we let them free to do what they wanted. we let the big boys go outside. you could see them sitting on the mat bored to tears. they played outside, nearly all morning and the difference in them! we even let them go to the toilet when they wanted to.4 miss gallagher recounted her own introduction to new education ideas in 1929 when she was a probationary teacher at karori school, wellington, under the supervision of miss little, who miss gallagher said “led the way” for others: there was a wonderful woman called isobel little. she was a froebel trained scot from edinburgh and taught me the whole understanding of children and how they learned. she was doing what was called an activity program. i will describe my classroom. instead of rows of desks i had 3 tables placed around the room. we had matting on the floor and play activity in the morning where children had a free choice. they were fresher then in terms of energy and creativity . . .we had wooden templates of all sorts and sizes, a hangover from montessori; a table with picture books, paper and crayons. we did sewing. there were shelves with curtains, and the children had free access to them. they could do anything we thought would help them.5 inspector’s reports confirm the presence of both women at karori school, but there was little indication of anything radical: the infant department is well organised and efficiently conducted. the physical instruction and rhythmic exercises are particularly good. probationer is receiving careful attention.6 miss little was adept at adjusting her program to fit the expectations of orderliness and competence in the 3rs, however when she left: the inspectors came in the next monday and said, “there is going to be no more of that nonsense.” we were told to get on with the serious business of learning. i just carried on with my wicked ways!7 possibly, the inspectors did not think miss little’s playful program appropriate for a probationary teacher. miss gallagher continued to experiment: allowing more choice, introducing new activities and teaching reading based on the children's interests and drawings. she also invited parents into the classroom. 74 global education review 9 (1) miss gallagher’s recollections provided the clue to miss little’s froebelian training and her ability to inspire younger teachers and manage careful subversion; adopted by miss gallagher and miss barns who later became the principal of the wellington free kindergarten association (wfka). an enquiry to the university of edinburgh yielded isabel little’s moray house records. she had “virtually perfect” punctuality, “excellent skills in teaching” and “exemplary” conduct and was examined on the advanced knowledge of all school subjects. handwritten on miss little’s record are the names of two schools where she taught: musselburgh and stockbridge.8 there are no further clues about her teaching in edinburgh. what prompted miss little to study for national froebel union higher certificate at the froebel educational institute, london, is unclear. a froebel society had been operating in edinburgh from 1894 and the first free kindergarten had opened 1903. the froebel union archives at roehampton university, list miss little as a private student who sat exams prior to leaving scotland in 1912, and her finals in nz later that year.9 the froebel qualification was quite different in focus to her earlier teaching certificate with subjects such as: free expression, educational handwork, practice of education, principles of education along with drawing, singing, hygiene and nature study, reflecting the skills and knowledge of kindergarten teaching.10 miss little next appears in 1914 as an assistant infant teacher at thorndon normal school, wellington, a training school for teachers. for the next six years she gains only a brief mention by inspectors citing miss little’s teaching as “very satisfactory”, “good” and “very good”. an overall report for 1914 noted that, “in all infant classes without exception children are bright and responsive.”11 miss little’s experience and qualifications would justify her appointment to thorndon normal school. prior to 1914 the school had housed the training college and a kindergarten. the kelburn normal school and training college in wellington opened in 1914 and miss dorothy fitch, the thorndon kindergarten and infant mistress, was transferred to establish the new venture that started only with infant classes and in buildings designed to showcase modern methods. miss fitch was active in campaigns for improved conditions for women teachers and young children and a member of the fledgling wfka, suggesting that miss little began her teaching career in nz amidst a lively network of progressive teachers. in 1921, miss little was appointed infant mistress at the hutt district school. the only record of her 2 years there was an inspector’s report stating: “the infant department has a thoroughly sound foundation laid in all subjects. modern methods are used and pleasing progress was made. a fine example of the work is the kind and responsiveness to the little ones.”12 in 1923 t. b. strong, chief inspector of primary schools, criticized the “stagnant educational thought” he perceived in “some quarters” and blamed “certain head-teachers, who had grown out of touch with modern methods” and were “damping the enthusiasm” of new teachers. comparing the qualities of older and newer teaching methods, strong stated: the former made the child the passive recipient, the unwilling storehouse of as much information as the teacher could induce him, or alas! force him to hold. the new methods of teaching aim at securing the co-operation of the child, mainly through the interest that certain subjects possess in themselves, or through the enduring lessons for current times 75 satisfaction gained in acquiring knowledge by self effort.13 miss little would have agreed. in 1924 miss little was the infant mistress at south wellington school and cited in a memoir of elsie andrews (1888-1948) found in the archives of the nz educational institute te tui roa (nzei) union for teachers.14 miss andrews was involved in the women’s teachers association (wta) an affiliated advocacy organization founded in 1901 (burton, 1986), with links to the wellington froebel society and the national council of women (ncw), an umbrella organization for women’s groups. in 1924 miss andrews was the infant mistress at fitzroy school in new plymouth and given leave to observe “modern methods” at kelburn normal school and wellington south where she described: a little scottish woman … in a large room with small chairs here and there around the walls, mats scattered over the floors and no desks. this was a startling phenomenon. “where are your desks?” i asked. she replied, “i pushed them under the school.” she continued, – “on cold mornings i often break one up and burn it”. – seeds of revolt began to burgeon in my soul! (cited in burton, 1986, p. 68). this is a glimpse of a resourceful and defiant miss little. the 1925 inspector’s report gives a hint of her ability to keep onside with inspectors’ expectations: miss little is a capable infant mistress. she secures harmony and efficient work in her department in addition to teaching a large class. her outlook is modern. a fine tone prevails. approved schemes of work are used.15 the 1926 report, however, cites the concern that, “the probationers have not been trained and instructed according to requirements”,16 possibly suggesting that, like miss gallagher at karori, miss little was allowing her probationary teachers too much freedom. miss little left no written records on her education views or experiences, unlike miss winifred maitland, who was appointed headmistress of kelburn normal school in 1915 after the retirement of miss fitch. miss maitland was also a graduate of the froebel educational institute and under her leadership the school gained a high reputation. she wrote: society demands that a child in order to be an effective citizen should be master of the arts of reading, writing and arithmetic. these are, however, only the instruments of education … it is important that they should not monopolise a place on the timetable out of proportion with other equally important aspects (cited in mccallum & sullivan, 1990, p. 27). miss maitland was critical of the schools that restricted “expression unnaturally”, noting too that, “of course the inspectors paid their periodic visits to see that the three r’s, the tools of education, were not overlooked” (ibid. p. 81). like miss little, inspectors gave praise as long as playful methods did not result in poor discipline or lagging in the 3rs. this was the tightrope progressive teachers had to manage. these glimpses of miss little in her prime as an infant mistress provide an insight into her froebelian understandings of modern methods in the early 20th century. miss little may have been forgotten by history, but nevertheless made sufficient impact for several teachers to cite her influence. her classroom legacy was the modelling of new methods, 76 global education review 9 (1) mentoring her staff and choosing battles carefully with education officialdom. community engagement characteristic of froebelian teachers, miss little engaged in a range of endeavors beyond the classroom. she was active in her school community. news reports cite her involvement in fundraising and social activities.17 she gains mention too for establishing home and school associations involving parents in the school beyond the elected few on school committees.18 outside school, miss little was involved in professional associations and social networks, such as the pioneer club established in 1909 because women could not join the wellington club.19 its first president was miss mary richmond who founded the wfka. pertinent to this article are glimpses of her presence in education organizations, shedding light on some campaigns and concerns of teachers of young children. soon after her appointment to thorndon normal school miss little presented a paper on “education in scotland” to the wta published in the dominion (6 june 1914). she described the five free kindergartens in edinburgh noting that, “in the kindergartens and schools of scotland all pictures that were not beautiful had been banished”. this froebelian– like act was about creating spaces for children filled with beauty and nature. miss little’s description of the reforming edinburgh kindergartens would resonate with wellington kindergartners: so many slum children are turned out to the street to play at the age of three … they pick up all manner of evil ... now he is packed into a kindergarten … he dances, sings, plays, goes exploring or walking to the park, where the birds sing and build their nests, see the trees and other delights only hitherto known to the middle-class child. miss little outlined the introduction of new education ideas into scottish schools, echoing beliefs of progressive educators that legislation and philanthropy had failed to solve social problems: many thinkers have decided that the future of our nation is in the hands of the teacher. teachers have become more and more persuaded that the child must be educated through his activities. infant classrooms in edinburgh had no formal teaching for the first six months of school and no “drill”, claimed miss little. there were “periods set aside for story-telling, singing, dancing, games and handwork … we also give time for drawing, allowing at least three periods a week…one for drawing objects, one for nature illustration, and one for story illustrating.” the froebelian influence is again evident and comparable to pockets of progressive teaching in new zealand. under the auspices of the wta infant mistresses groups were established, conducting their own advocacy through submissions, remits and meetings with the education bureaucracy. in 1922 the wellington infant mistresses group forwarded the following remits to wta’s national conference: 1. that in all new infant and main school buildings provision should be made for assembly halls, separate cloak room, and lunchroom, and windows in keeping with modern ideals of education. 2. that the department of education should manufacture and supply enduring lessons for current times 77 kindergarten material as suits nz schools and conditions. 3. that no class in the infant department should have more than 25 children. 4. that the education department recognize the extra qualifications of infant teachers holding the higher froebel certificate.20 one can imagine miss little supporting remit no 4, as she held this qualification. more broadly, the wta focused its concerns on discriminatory employment practices for women teachers including the absence of women school inspectors, a situation not remedied until the 1950s. records show miss little’s attendance at wta conferences, and occasionally speaking; one of the associations many supportive foot soldiers, but she did not assume overly political roles. miss little was also active within nzei, the professional union representing primary teachers. in 1930, she was a wellington delegate to the annual conference and mentioned twice in reports. firstly, in support of a motion to reduce class sizes where, possibly aware of heightened interest in montessori miss little explained as: “one of the outstanding reforms needed in our education system… with children arriving at school when the average child had not learned control.” this was difficult to learn in large classes, claimed miss little.21 the wta and nzei independently and collectively campaigned over class sizes, a task hindered by depression cutbacks in the 1930s, war in the 1940s and a baby boom across the 1950s-1960s. at nzei’s 1930 conference miss little supported an increase in grants to keep schools hygienically clean, critical about the “insanitary condition of many rooms in which children were taught.”22 in the worsening economic situation this did not happen. budgets and salaries were cut. not until after the election of the first labour government in 1935 was there a turnaround in the financial fortunes of schools. kindergarten politics after retiring in 1934 at age 58, miss little was appointed to the council of the wfka, a position she held until her death in 1937. in 1936 wfka established its seventh kindergarten and the few years miss little spent with wfka saw growing support for the movement across the political and education spectrum. miss little was not a key player in the politics that played out, but contributed her skills and connections where needed. she joined the council as the depression years were easing and witnessed the election of a labour government with a transformational agenda of social reform in which kindergarten would have a role. the previous government had removed its kindergarten subsidy in 1931, creating headlines of a “national disaster”.23 this halted all kindergarten expansion but also swelled public support. nzei passed a resolution that, “in view of the results of the work done, the institute regards the relatively small cost as more in the nature of a saving rather than an expenditure.”24 wellington’s evening post launched an appeal and gave space to protest letters, including one from miss richmond emphasizing the progressive ideals of kindergarten work: the free kindergarten council … fully appreciates the serious financial condition of the country... they ask that the subsidy not be entirely withdrawn or we should lose our status as part of the education system, and if we cease to function, many working-class mothers would lose enlightened help at a most difficult time … we plead with the 78 global education review 9 (1) department to reconsider, and not sever completely the tie that binds us.25 peter fraser, who became the minister of education in 1935, reminded parliament of, “the work of the kindergartens in these difficult times in supplying food, fresh air, and sunlight to children for whom parents could not adequately provide.”26 he reinstated the subsidy in 1935 and government support significantly increased thereafter. in 1935, miss little was a wfka delegate to the wellington branch of the ncw27 accompanied by miss maud england, a longtime council member and founder of the branch in 1917. the pair also represented wfka at the ncw annual conference in 1935, and in 1936, were delegates at the new zealand free kindergarten union (nzfku) conference. miss england was an instigator of the union, established in 1926 as national advocacy organization. they made a good team; while miss little was new to the politics of kindergarten, she was experienced in the operations of education organizations. responding to the groundswell of cumulative support minister fraser addressed the kindergarten delegates: i am anxious to know in a practical way, how we can extend kindergarten education what is the scope of your ideas in the future? ... i want to be in a position to judge how far your organisation can carry out the work and whether as at present constituted it can carry it out.28 these were heady times, cut short for miss little who died suddenly in 1937, just missing two significant events she would have attended: wfka’s planned celebrations of the centenary of froebel’s birth and the international new education fellowship conference, that spearheaded an era of education reform. schools were closed and 5000 teachers, including kindergarteners attended. miss little did not witness the subsequent expansion of the kindergarten movement under the department of education in partnership with nzfku, or the extension of play-based programs into all infant classrooms. she disappears from the records, mainly forgotten. her protégée, miss gallagher, with miss england served on the government’s consultative committee on preschool education established in 1945 to plan the blueprint for a professionally run kindergarten service that miss gallagher was appointed to lead. in my interview miss gallagher attributed miss little as the inspirational legacy for undertaking this challenge. the glimpses of miss little’s story provide a window on an era of pedagogical change influenced by an assimilation of froebelian and new education ideals that began in a few classrooms and slowly moved into the mainstream. likewise, there was the advocacy and networking that gradually created space for kindergartens on the political platform. presidential speeches and delegations were important but so too was the staunch participation of foot soldiers such as miss little. politics of 2020 twenty-twenty was a challenging year. while documenting miss little’s story during the lockdown, the impact of covid on ece services was becoming apparent. it was unfortunate timing too that the first year of the implementation of the elap coincided with the pandemic. this halted progress but also highlighted issues as some ece services sprang into action to support staff, children and families while others withdrew. suddenly new times were confronting families and ece services. this enduring lessons for current times 79 could be an opportunity for hastening, rather than slowing down the realisation of the elap. after winning the 2017 election prime minister jacinda ardern called for a “transformational” government, likened to the 1935 labour government. early childhood leaders worked with the ministry of education to develop a holistic ten-year plan: completing the stalled journey to 100% qualified teachers, bridging divides between private and community owned services, redressing salary inequities for teachers, improving staffing ratios for under 3 year olds, tightening regulations around poor quality environments and improving access for families. chris hipkins, minister of education told the sector to “turn the tide” and be “bold” in its proposals (hipkins, 2018). during 2018-19, other education groups gained new funding and large salary increases, including kindergarten teachers who, as public servants, maintained pay parity with primary and secondary teachers. this did not apply to teachers in the childcare sector, left languishing. the minister’s assurance in 2019 was that 2020 was the turn of early childhood. the 2020 budget was released during the lockdown and focused primarily on the covid emergency. there were two early childhood initiatives: the starting salary of degree-qualified teachers in childcare would be the same as their kindergarten counterparts; and funding subsidies for centers with 100% qualified staff, cut under the previous government, would be restored. these were gains, but miniscule compared to the billions of dollars rolled out for the covid recovery, including a fund for socalled “shovel ready” infrastructure projects, such as roads and bridges intended to create work opportunities.29 the promised investment in ece had been diverted, not with the consequences of the 1931 “national disaster” but nevertheless dashing expectations. meanwhile, beneath the political spotlight of covid, lockdown and budget something interesting was happening. some early childhood teachers, in lockdown themselves, were discovering the potential of the home as the site of ece. parents became the frontline educators with support from teachers while the teachers embraced extended roles in welfare support. a documented exemplar is the experience of he whānau manaaki kindergarten association (hwm) operating 102 kindergartens, an expanded organization from the time of miss little when kindergarten teachers were also frontline workers in times of crisis. selective quotations from kindergarten interviewees in this covid study (may & coulston, 2021) are revealing of the mix of advocacy, innovation, courage and commitment from an organization and its teachers that determined kindergarten must remain operational. ceo: we are a kindergarten profession focussed on doing the best for children. this was an exceptional time and we needed to do the job differently using the systems we had but extending further. in the past, children and families came into the kindergarten to contribute their knowledge and experience within the kindergarten environment. the lockdown turned kindergarten on its head. teachers had to enter into a virtual scene engaging with learning happening in the home. te whāriki permeates throughout this. its principles, strands and goals require us to work in holistic ways. teachers found they could do things they never thought they could do and to think about new possibilities (p. 11). senior manager: 80 global education review 9 (1) this was kindergarten in new times. we are part of the community not the other way around. we have to model this. we couldn’t lockdown too. our team knew our families would be struggling. if we don’t run our services what does this mean? (p. 4). teachers: i spent a lot of time making phone calls to see what families needed and arranging deliveries. for some families there was panic. we have a counselling role as kindergarten teachers but this was much bigger. our first job was making sure our kindergarten families were ok and then we considered the kind of kindergarten programme we could offer at home (p. 6). we were encouraging our families to share what they were doing. they started to inspire each other as a kindergarten community of learning. it was a lovely way of connecting and it became a spiral of families and children contributing (p. 8). we were finding more about children’s interests at home than ever before which guided us with ideas so that we could be supporting their learning even if we were not physically there. there were more indepth conversations to make the children’s learning more visible to parents who could see that what they were doing at home was valuable (p. 8). teachers enacted kindergarten traditions of community service. lessons learned by teachers in extraordinary times were that collaborative partnerships with families could be strengthened in new ways. there were political lessons too as covid highlighted the value of early childhood institutions within the social and economic infrastructure. a national survey of the impact of covid on ece centers concluded that “particularly community-based services played a pivotal role in brokering social, health, and financial support for families who needed help…[and] acted as a crucial service supporting essential workers” (mitchell et.al. 2020, p. 5). mitchell suggested the potential for policy transformation, arguing that, “now is a good time to rethink the purpose of ece, to redefine ece as a public good, and to plan and support it accordingly” (ibid. p. 7). mitchell had long-held concerns about the growing presence of privatefor profit ece services operating primarily as a business rather than a service. in the aftermath of the lockdown an election loomed. it was timely to strengthen the case. political opinion pieces (dalli et.al, 2020a, 2020b) promoted the argument that children were the most important infrastructure of society but had been bypassed in the government’s recovery program. fully implementing the elap, supporting children and families in their early years, was as important as economic infrastructure. politicians were reminded that ece “has a blueprint for action that makes it ‘shovel-ready’ for transformation. it is as deserving of new money as roundabouts, road alignments, and bicycle paths” (dalli, et.al 2020a, p.7). in october 2020, labour won a landslide election. the challenge ahead is to convince government that the financial cost of an ece transformation is an essential social foundation for new times. during the campaign labour made a commitment to introduce pay parity for teachers across the childcare sector. it was pleasing that this decades-long campaign had political traction at last, but in the remaining months of 2020 there was no indication that the enduring lessons for current times 81 new government intended to heed the call to hasten the broader aspirations of the elap. there is much work to do, for example, ensuring that the kind of public service and pedagogical innovation demonstrated by kindergarten and others during 2020 (kahuroa, et. al., 2021), benefits all children. hopefully, during 2021 the seeding of such opinions will spark the groundswell needed, as in earlier times, to realize the transformation. covid has shown that the government can be transformational, but this needs to explicitly embrace young children and their families into the economic recovery. lessons of advocacy at the inaugural ifs conference in 2004 at the froebel educational institute, where miss little gained her froebel qualification, i presented an address on the lessons of “being froebelian” for the 21st century. there are parallels with this article. in 2004 i stated: advocacy is a key driver of ece in nz. the roots of this advocacy stem from issues to do with political change, social reform, indigenous maori concerns and women’s rights… since the nineteenth century early childhood advocates have sought to persuade society in general and politicians in particular as to the benefits of early childhood care and education (may 2006, p. 245). the lessons of advocacy had been learnt from 19th century kindergarteners. this paper provides glimpses of its enduring legacy, in the early 20th century in the times of miss little, mainly in school settings, and more recently in 2020 embracing the wider politics of ece including an exemplar of kindergarten in extraordinary times. while the settings and politics of the times are different there are overlapping conversations underpinned by froebelian ideals about teachers, childhood, families and communities. referring to current times, julian grenier writes in the preface to the routledge international handbook of froebel and early childhood practice, (bruce, et. al. 2019): “the froebelian approach is to develop respectful partnerships, to see community and families as assets to treasure, not problems to solve” (npn). this is evident in the overlapping stories in this paper. miss little was no radical despite sowing “seeds of revolt” in elsie andrew’s “soul” but she pushed boundaries in classroom practice and influenced others to do likewise; and beyond her classroom joined campaigns to improve the professional status of teachers of young children and the wellbeing of young children. this remained under the radar of the historical gaze and although she did not live to see later policy developments, she progressed the cause. forging change across later decades within the expanding kindergarten movement including the burgeoning of a diverse ece sector has required high-level political advocacy, most recently negotiating the elap. equally important is the professional role of frontline teachers as pedagogues and advocates for children and families. the exemplar of kindergarten teachers, and others in covid times, practicing new ways of being a teacher, upholds the best of froebelian ideals. the teachers worked below the gaze of daily covid news, nevertheless, their endeavors make visible the potential of early 82 global education review 9 (1) childhood institutions to be transformational in new times. miss little’s story as a froebelian foot soldier was only uncovered in covid times, the fruition of her endeavors are known. in contrast, the consequences of 2020 for early childhood policy are still unfolding as this article is written in the new year of 2021. references allen, taylor allen, (2017). the transantlantic kindergarten: education and women’s movements in germany and the united states. new york: oxford university press. bruce, t., elfer, p., powell, s., with werth, l. (2019). the routledge international handbook of froebel and early childhood practice: rearticulating research, policy and practice. uk: routledge. burton, f. (1986). the new zealand women teachers’ association 1901-1964, unpublished paper, university of auckland, wellington: nzei-trr library. dalli, c., may, h., & meade, a. (2020a). early learning action plan is “shovel-ready” now. space, issue 61, p. 7. (2020b). “let’s get moving’’ commentary on a political opinion piece. the first years: ngā tau tuatahi nz journal of infant and toddler education, 22 (2) 41-43. hipkins, c. (2018). terms of reference. development of a 10-year strategic plan for early learning. http://www.education.govt.nz/assets/document s/ministry/consultations/strategic-plan tor.pdf kahuroa, r., mitchell, l., ng, o., & johns, t. (17 january 2021). children’s working theories about covid-19 in aotearoa new zealand. european early childhood research journal, (pp. 1-16). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.187267 2 mason, h. g. r. (1944). education today and tomorrow. wellington: department of education. may, h. (2006). “being froebelian”: an antipodean analysis of the history of advocacy and early childhood. history of education, 35 (2) 245-262. (2011). “i am five and i go to school”: the work and play of early education in new zealand. dunedin: university of otago press. (2019, 3rd ed.). politics in the playground. dunedin: university of otago press. (2020). “a froebel trained ‘scot’ from edinburgh”: miss isabel little (1876-1937). http://www.ifsfroebel.com/wpcontent/uploads/2020/05/miss-isabel-little.pdf may, h., nawrotzki, k., & prochner, l. (eds.) (2016). kindergarten narratives on froebelian education: transnational investigations. london: bloomsbury press. may, h. & carr, m. (2016). te whāriki: a uniquely woven curriculum shaping policy, pedagogy and practice in aotearoa new zealand. in t. david, k. gooch & s. powell, (eds.), handbook of philosophies and theories of early childhood education and care (pp. 316-326). uk: routledge. may, h., & bethell, k. (2017). growing a kindergarten movement: its peoples, https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.1872672 https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.1872672 http://www.ifsfroebel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/miss-isabel-little-.pdf http://www.ifsfroebel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/miss-isabel-little-.pdf http://www.ifsfroebel.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/05/miss-isabel-little-.pdf enduring lessons for current times 83 purposes and politics. wellington: nzcer press. may, h., & coulston, a. (11 january, 2021). he whānau manaaki kindergartens, aotearoa new zealand: a pandemic outreach in new political times, european early childhood research journal, (pp. 1-14). https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.187267 5 mccallum, j., & sullivan, g. (1990) kelburn normal school 75th jubilee 19141989. wellington: kelburn normal school. meade, a. with fugle, g. & mccaul, c. (1919). a story of froebel’s global reach. in t. bruce, p. elfer & s. powell with l. werth, (eds.), the routledge international handbook of froebel and early childhood practice: rearticulating research, policy and practice (127-131). uk: routledge. ministry of education, (2002). pathways to the future ngã huarahi arataki. wellington: learning media. (2017). te whāriki: he whāriki matauranga mo ngā mokopuna o aotearoa early childhood curriculum. wellington: nz government. endnotes 1 interview, 1990. 2 my colleague kerry bethell first suggested taking several nz kindergarten ladies ‘home’ to scotland and sourced some of miss little’s information. 3 appendices to the journals of the house of representatives (ajhr), 1904, e-1c, p.2. 4 interview, 1994. 5 interview, 1990. (2019). he taonga te tamaiti – early learning action plan 2019-2029. wellington: nz government. mitchell, l., hodgen, e., meagherlundberg, p., & wells, c. (17 august 2020). impact of covid-19 on the early childhood education sector in aotearoa new zealand: challenges and opportunities. hamilton: university of waikato. mitchell, l. (21 january 2021). time for a reset on early childhood education. nz herald, a31. palmer, a., & read, j. (eds.) (2021). british froebelian women from the midnineteenth to the twenty-first century: a community of progressive educators. uk: routledge. 6 school reports 1929, web, eb-w-9, archives nz (anz). 7 interview, 1990. 8 record of isabel little, 8 july 1898’. edinburgh university library archives of the free church training college moray house. 9 email from archivist, kornelia cepok, 8 october 2019. 10 report of the certificate examiners held during the year 1912. office of the national froebel union, pp. 4-14. 11 school reports 1914-1919, web, eb-w-9, anz. 12 school reports 1921, web, eb-w-9, anz https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.1872675 https://doi.org/10.1080/1350293x.2021.1872675 84 global education review 9 (1) 13 ajhr, 1923, e-2, appendix a, p. iii. 14 elsie andrews m.b.e., 1888-1948, typescript, n.z.w.t.a. mss., folder 30, nzei-trr. 15 school reports 1925, web, eb-w-9, anz. 16 school reports 1926, web, eb-w-9, anz. 17 evening post: 22 august 1922, 30 june 1924, 22 august 1924. 18 home and school, evening post, 18 september 1929; a plea for interest, evening post, 30 october 1930. 19 pioneer club activities, evening post, 21 may 1931. 20 evening post, 8 april 1922, 21 an urgent need for small classes, evening post, 13 may 1930. 22 cleaning for schools, evening post, 14 may 1930. 23 a national disaster, unsourced clipping 1931, minute book 1929–33, dunedin free kindergarten records, ms-1986-001, hocken collections, university of otago. 24 appeal for kindergarten, evening post, 10 february 1932. 25 plea for continued recognition, evening post, 12 february 1932. 26 free kindergartens criticism, 25 november 1932, unsourced clipping, scrapbook 1931-1948, wfka records, ms-group 0052, msy 1922, alexander turnbull library. 27 housing question, evening post, 24 september 1935. 28 infant teaching, nz herald, 19 august 1936. 29 newshub, 1 april 2020. https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/04/go vernment-looks-to-fund-large-shovel-readyinfrastructure-projects-after-covid-19-lockdown.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/04/government-looks-to-fund-large-shovel-ready-infrastructure-projects-after-covid-19-lockdown.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/04/government-looks-to-fund-large-shovel-ready-infrastructure-projects-after-covid-19-lockdown.html https://www.newshub.co.nz/home/politics/2020/04/government-looks-to-fund-large-shovel-ready-infrastructure-projects-after-covid-19-lockdown.html (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 74 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: taira, brooke ward (2019). (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth in a secondary english classroom. global education review, 6 (2). 74-93. (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth in a secondary english classroom brooke ward taira university of hawaiʻi at mānoa abstract research documents how transnational youth leverage literacy practices to maintain global connections, identity, and self-worth within learning environments that often fail to honor their cultural and linguistic repertoires. this article extends this research by focusing on the unique practices, experiences, and perspectives of secondary newcomer and refugee students. grounded in transnational, sociocultural, and asset-based frameworks, this article highlights findings from a qualitative case study that explored the literacy practices of transnational students in a ninth-grade english classroom taught by a transnational teacher. analysis of oral histories, classroom observations, and in-process interviews collected over a prolonged period revealed participants’ numerous and varied literacy practices. these practices, however, remained mostly invisible in the school and classroom, surfacing when recruited for narrow curricular and academic purposes. this work offers implications for continued research into the practices of newcomer students and potential benefits of teacher education centered on critical inquiry as a means for creating empowering literacy classrooms that draw on students’ assets, backgrounds, and repertoires to create more authentic and empowering spaces for literacy learning. keywords transnational newcomer youth; refugee students; secondary english; literacy practices introduction recent attention to immigration and its impact on the lives of transnational youth encourages us to examine how migration and connection shape their lived experiences and participation in practices across borders. transnational youth—those whose lives and networks span multiple nations—develop honed global understandings and engage in a range of social and cultural practices across borders (skerrett, 2012). among these practices, literacy plays a critical role in identity formation and issues of inclusion and access. the centrality of literacy in and around peopleʻs lives is well-documented—the ways literacy can empower or regulate (vieira, 2013), confer citizenship and personhood (cornelius, 1991; winn, 2010), and maintain global connections and cultural practices. narratives, in particular, serve as a powerful tool for historically marginalized peoples (diniz-pereira, 2013). stories “humanize us,” delgado (1989) notes, calling us to listen to the stories of individuals to better understand their lives and experiences. the present study of a secondary classroom of transnational newcomer students responds to calls to listen to learners themselves (franzak, 2006; grant, 2016) and attend to what they say about their own schooling and literacies in the hopes of generating opportunities for empowering learning. the study highlights student perspectives, paying close attention to ways students describe their learning, and in doing so, provides a valuable glimpse into the motivations and preferences of those who are the main recipients of our educational system, but are often silenced (grant, 2016). though a growing body of research details transnational students’ rich cultural repertoires, their agency as historical actors, and their (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 75 participation in literacies that span geographical boundaries (compton-lilly, 2008; sanchez, 2007a, 2007b; skerrett, 2015), studies have largely excluded the experiences of secondary students in classroom settings leaving them “overlooked and underserved” (menken, 2013) by schools and by the research community. scholars such as sanchez (2014) also note the need to incorporate the unique experiences of newcomer and refugee students into the larger body of literature on transnational students. this study addresses these issues by incorporating the histories, perspectives, and voices of secondary newcomer students to illuminate how experiences of migration and transnational literacy practices shape classroom learning. review of the literature transnational students face a variety of challenges when navigating american schools, particularly in regards to their access to engaging and challenging curricula and resources, and their ability to participate fully in affirming and empowering educational experiences (ivey & broaddus, 2007; suarezorozco, yoshikawa, teranishi, & suarez-orozco, 2011). deficit perspectives and subtractive processes contribute to their underachievement (campano, 2007; purcell-gates, 2013; valdés, 2001; valenzuela, 1996) and lead to their disproportionate representation in underresourced and under-funded schools (noguera, 2004). further, classrooms and schools often fail to incorporate transnational students’ cultural and linguistic repertoires into their learning (purcell-gates, 2013; skerrett, 2015). schools may even participate in the invalidation and erasure of students’ personal and home literacies (de la piedra, 2010). it is evident that transnational youth face substantial barriers in schools; however, a rich body of scholarship also reveals how these students use literacy, both personally and socially, to affirm their own transnational identities and thrive academically (comptonlilly, 2008; sanchez, 2007b). they may employ literacy practices to navigate home and school spaces (de la piedra, 2010; rubinstein-avila, 2007), contexts that are often misaligned. literacy practices become part of a collection of resources, honed by border-crossing and global movement that students use to cultivate a simultaneous belonging (sanchez, 2007) or “inbetween-ness” (sarroub, 2005) across social spaces. recent research also catalogues transnational students’ creation and deployment of multi-literacies—varied, hybrid literacy practices often used in unofficial contexts for social purposes (skerrett, 2012, 2015; skerrett & bomer, 2011). existing scholarship on multiliteracies presents youth “as skillful and purposeful users of literacy” (skerrett, 2015, p. 366) who employ knowledge of multiple contexts and cultural spaces to form sophisticated transnational understandings. such studies show how non-school literacies may inform the ways transnational students interact with schooling but do not always provide a complete picture of transnational students’ in-school experiences with literacy. classroom studies of transnational students are rare, and a review of experimental literacy research for english learners in the content areas conducted by janzen (2008) indicates that these studies have been heavily influenced by cognitive theories of reading and literacy. missing from these more individualistic cognitive studies, which are focused primarily on reading strategies and vocabulary practice, is an understanding of sociocultural perspectives that reveal social and interactional dimensions of literacy learning for transnational students. qualitative studies that employ sociocultural framings of transnational students’ in school literacy learning offer a means of capturing more 76 global education review 6 (2) fully the complex nature of these practices. existing classroom studies provide some valuable insight into the experiences of transnational students in literacy classrooms. rubinstein-avila (2007), for example, used portraiture to study how a transnational student’s transition to life and high school in the united states changed her understanding of literacy and how her ell designation limited her access to rigorous literacy curricula. other studies noted the effects of school-based bilingual programs (bartlett, 2008) or special out-of-school literacy programs (gutierrez, 2008; pacheco & nao, 2009). these studies provide examples of empowering asset-based literacy instruction occurring mostly outside of the regular school curriculum. the study by barlett (2009) uncovered how performance and achievement discourses within the school culture worked against asset-based approaches to teaching transnational students. a formative experiment by ivey and broaddus (2007), aimed at facilitating reading engagement among recently-immigrated native speakers of spanish, highlighted the importance of understanding students’ motivations for reading, as well as the lack of access many of these students had to engaging classroom texts. together, the above studies indicate that the personal, often self-initiated, literacy practices of transnational youth can help them create and maintain transnational identities and social connections, bolstering them against negative schooling experiences. these studies provide insight into how out-of-school practices might inform in-school literacy learning. studies of transnational students’ literacies in school environments provide some promising results, indicating that opportunities exist for transnational students to interact positively with literacy learning and education more generally. however, there are few examples of these positive experiences occurring in everyday school settings and classrooms with standard secondary curricula. although existing studies provide important information about literacy’s potential to aid students in surviving and thriving in american schools, the current study pushes us to examine the actual classroom experiences of these students beyond technical aspects of language learning. transnational and sociocultural perspectives on migration and literacy in order to attend to students’ personal histories, cultural participation, and literacy practices, the study employed a layering of theoretical lenses to view global movement and how this movement shaped learning in a secondary literacy classroom. transnationalism served as a foundational lens through which global migratory processes—especially participation in literacy and cultural practices that span geographical borders—were viewed as dynamic, ongoing, and multidirectional (petron, 2009; sanchez & machado-casas, 2009). although scholars offer multiple definitions for transnationalism, as it is invoked in the present study, transnationalism was viewed as the ongoing, multidirectional movement, social participation, and/or communication between/among multiple nations and across national borders. this approach aligned theoretically with recent work by lam and warriner (2012), leonard (2013), and sanchez and kasun (2012) by including maintenance of traditions and/or cultural practices from a country of origin as forms of transnationalism. troubling easy and simple assumptions about immigration, transnationalism offered an expansive lens with which to view the richness and dynamicity of lives and social practices that cross borders (sanchez & kasun, 2012). sociocultural perspectives positioned both culture and literacy as embedded in individuals’ participation in a collection of varied, hybrid and (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 77 social practices, and provided a critical lens through which to view power and individual agency (gee, 2008; gutierrez & rogoff, 2003; perry, 2012). formerly understood and approached merely as a set of cognitive skills, literacy, from sociocultural and ideological viewpoints, is comprised of contextually situated social and cultural practices (johnson & cowles, 2013; purcell-gates, 2013). viewing literacy as socially and culturally bound worked against understandings of literacy as a decontextualized and autonomous set of processes and skills (purcell-gates, 2013; street, 1984). sociocultural understandings of cultural practice moved the focus away from categorizing groups of people based on shared nativity and helped the study to position individuals as agents and sociohistorical actors who transform and are transformed by their environments and interactions with others. layering transnational and sociocultural lenses not only helped shape an understanding of migration and its impact on cultural identity and literacy, but also provided a foundation on which to build and use asset-based frameworks that position transnational subjects and their communities as repositories of knowledge and experience (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzalez, 1992; petron, 2009). with the emergence of sociocultural understandings of literacy have come more expansive understandings of how literacy enables and acts on individuals and the ways individuals, reciprocally, act on literacy (brandt & clinton, 2002) in both local and global contexts. transnational literacy studies explore how globalization impacts individuals’ access to literacy, and critically examine how literacy can undermine or reinforce inequality (blommaert, 2008; jiminez, smith, & teague, 2009). as employed in this study, transnational literacies encompassed more than solely reading and writing by including a spectrum of literacy practices that enabled transnational youth to establish and maintain social connections and achieve both personal and academic goals (skerrett, 2012). doing so allowed for a more complete representation of students’ communicative repertoires and helped reveal how privileging written practices might obscure the centrality of spoken and visual literacies. driven by these theoretical frameworks and the spaces that existing research leaves for deeper inquiry into the experiences and literacy practices of transnational students, this study explored the following questions: • what are the literacy practices of a transnational teacher and her students in a secondary literacy classroom? • how do teacher and student perceptions of experiences and histories of movement and participation help to shape these practices? method this article draws from a qualitative case study of a classroom where a transnational teacher and her students engaged in literacy practices that were potentially informed by their own histories of transnational migration and participation in transnational practices. though the teacher played a significant role in the study, this article focuses predominately on student perspectives regarding their rich and varied but often (in)visible practices—those that were surfaced and strategically recruited for curricular purposes, but otherwise obscured by their schooling and curriculum. study design i employed a case study approach to explore the social enactment of phenomena (dyson & genishi, 2005; compton-lilly, 2013)—in this instance, transnational literacy practices—within a localized and contextualized case—a secondary english classroom in a school for newcomer students. the study employed a sociocultural, asset-based lens that directed the focus of 78 global education review 6 (2) inquiry toward literacy practices as they were socially enacted in the classroom. emphasizing the context in which literacy practices occurred provided deep and nuanced contextualization while also enabling a zoomed-in view of day-today literacy practices over time. study context the study took place in a ninth-grade classroom at piedmont school, a school for newcomers located in a rapidly growing diverse metropolitan center in the southeastern united states. in proximity to state-administered and faith-based refugee assistance and resettlement programs, piedmont school served a population comprised entirely of newcomer transnational students, many of them refugees, in grades 3 through 12. the majority of students who attended the school at the time of the study as a result of immigration came predominately from el salvador, guatemala, honduras, colombia, cuba, and mexico. refugee students who attended the school had arrived most recently from the democratic republic of congo, iraq, syria, somalia, and togo. many of these students had experienced interrupted education. students attended piedmont on an elective basis with the requirement that it must be their first year in american schools and english could not be their first language. students could attend the school for one year before transitioning to their district-assigned neighborhood school. at the time of the study, the school had 272 students enrolled. of these students, 48% were refugees and 52% had immigrated for other reasons. within the school, 70 students were in elementary grades, 75 students were in middle school, and 122 students were in high school. the student population represented 45 countries and 39 languages. refugee resettlement created challenges for piedmont as new students arrived at the school continuously throughout the year, but the school maintained ongoing connections to community organizations in order to provide support not only for the students who attended, but for their families as well. participants participants in the study included ms. nelson, a transnational ninth-grade english teacher, and twelve students in her 3rd period english i class. ms. nelson was born in sydney, australia to parents who had themselves emigrated from india. she received a degree in teaching and certification to teach english as a second language (esl) from sydney university. she taught esl for five years in australia in a school that served a large population of english language learners before moving with her husband to the united states in 1999 with the visiting international faculty (vif) program. the students in ms. nelson’s 3rd period classroom—a little over half of whom agreed to participate—were from a variety of countries, but the majority of students had recently emigrated from the middle east and africa and students ranged in age from 15 to 18 years old. the study included oral history interviews with all participants, and these oral histories provided demographic information that informed classroom observations and semi-structured interviews regarding literacy learning and classroom interactions (see table 1). of the twelve students who entered the study, only cassandra exited early due to family relocation. instructional context as a school that served students in grades 312 and included varying class schedules based on grade level, piedmont operated without bells. classes in the high school were on a block schedule of four 90-minute periods per day. although ms. nelson’s lessons differed from day to day, there were some common features of class instruction and general categories of activities that remained constant throughout the semester. a typical day included a warm-up, direct instruction, reading, and an independent assignment. at times, a writing assignment (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 79 would take the place of reading, and these writing assignments most often took the form of expository or persuasive essays. as the semester progressed, more of ms. nelson’s class time became devoted to structured test preparation that included the reading of articles and short stories or essays and answering of multiplechoice questions. the most commonly used texts in ms. nelson’s classroom were printed handouts of poems, essays, articles, and brief works of fiction with accompanying questions. during the semester, students read speeches by dr. martin luther king and abraham lincoln, poems by edgar allen poe, and a variety of nonfiction essays and articles (all provided as handouts). longer works studied in class included romeo and juliet, provided as a bound book that included modern-day translations, and to kill a mockingbird, printed as chapter summaries and given to students as packets. data sources viewing the classroom as a dynamic social system, i was intentional in collecting a variety of rich data sources to adequately capture its complexity (lee, 2012) and generate nuanced understandings of the individuals that made up the class community, their backgrounds and practices, and the processes that permeated the classroom. data sources included oral history, semi-structured interviews, participant observation, written narratives, and classroom artifacts. rather than being used in isolation, these tools purposefully informed each other as means of capturing in-process literacy practices and interactions between the students themselves and between students and teacher. observations. i observed the classroom 3-4 times per week for a semester, creating fieldnotes and post-observation analytic memos. although i primarily conducted classroom observations, i also accompanied the teacher and students to lunch and talked with students during practices for international night (an annual school-wide student art, music, and dance program) and at the final performance. these extracurricular observations informed the zoomed-in daily instructional observations and provided a broader understanding of students’ practices, interests, and social circles. while conducting observations, i noted general classroom events, as well as specific areas of focus such as interpersonal interactions and literacy practices that included, but were not limited to, the reading of curricular and personal texts, storytelling, writing, and class discussions. oral history. inclusion of oral history interviews as part of this case study was based in the belief that personal narrative can deepen our understanding of ourselves and others (cole & knowles, 2001; lewis, enciso, & moje, 2007). oral history interviews with participants began the very first week of data collection, and questions centered on histories of movement and experiences of personal and family literacy practices (e.g. how would you describe yourself and your family? could you describe the place where you grew up? what traditions are important to your family? what kinds of things do people in your family like to read/write/talk about?). these interviews were transcribed and coded. the oral history interviews served several purposes: first, the oral histories helped me to understand the ways that students perceived their literacy histories, their participation in transnational practices, and when relevant, their own histories of transnational movement. additionally, the oral histories encouraged the collection of rich and meaningful data during participant observation and periodic semistructured interviews with students and the teacher. student and teacher interviews. in addition to the oral history interviews, i conducted periodic semi-structured interviews with the 80 global education review 6 (2) teacher and students. focused on the ongoing processes within the classroom, i sought to understand how classroom community members understood their own participation in literacy practices and the ways they believed their perceptions of migration and/or transnational identity might have shaped these practices. the teacher interview protocol and student interview inquired into the ways that the teacher and students engaged in literacy practices individually and socially (e.g. if i asked you to describe the kinds of activities you do in your english class, what would you say? what do you find most meaningful or interesting about english class? what do you read/write in your english class? could you tell me more about what you read/discussed/wrote in class today?). i conducted two extended scheduled interviews with ms. nelson and two scheduled semi-structured interviews with each student who participated in the study. i also held informal conversations with teacher and students throughout the semester, both in class and in extracurricular settings such as international night or during class changes. all interviews were recorded and transcribed. student narratives and products. i looked for opportunities to observe student narratives— both oral and written—that might reveal the “experiences of migrant students, their families, and their communities [as well as] the social, cultural, political, and historical particulars of their everyday life" (pacheco & nao, 2009, p. 35). although i found that the curriculum did not provide opportunities for a wide range of student narratives, i did collect student writing samples and sought opportunities to talk with students about personal narratives they had created in written or digital form. i also took photos of student work samples and documented written or visual projects that students shared with me, such as a biographical narrative personally given to me by moussina, a student from togo, or an art project that ema, a student from the dominican republic, wanted to show me between classes. classroom and curricular artifacts. in addition to students’ written narratives and classwork, i collected classroom artifacts that appeared pertinent to the study of classroom culture, curriculum, and literacy teaching and learning, but were not actual examples of student work. ms. nelson provided me with a digital copy of the pacing guide for english i and permitted me to take photos of artwork or informational posters in her classroom. i also collected artifacts outside of classroom that i thought might inform my inquiry and provide a means of triangulation of data during analysis. these artifacts included photographs of the school, particularly the artwork and messages present in the hallways and cafeteria, as these visuals had the potential to provide insight into the school culture and the messages the school intended for students and parents. i also collected photographs of student artifacts such as student display boards for international night, student generated projects, and artwork that were relevant to the study. analysis data analysis occurred in three stages and primarily involved inductive analyses of interview and observation data. because this study sought to understand ongoing processes in the english classroom, i employed constant comparative analysis (glaser & strauss, 1967) throughout data collection and analyses occurred during and after data collection. data analysis, presented here in a linear fashion, was in practice an ongoing, iterative, and cyclical process. the first phase of analysis occurred during data collection and involved initial pre-coding of data followed by descriptive coding (saldaña, 2009) of fieldnotes and oral history interviews. in this first phase, i compared the oral history (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 81 data to the theoretical and research perspectives that guided my research questions in order to generate preliminary axial codes that would inform subsequent analyses of semi-structured interviews and observational data. i read through the oral histories multiple times to capture the essence of passages or the topic of larger chunks of data and established initial descriptive codes (e.g. migration, cross-border connections, home vs. adopted country). i then generated subcodes from the broader descriptive code of “migration” that included migration: feelings, migration: reasons, plans for continued migration, ending/receiving contexts, usa: reactions to, and feelings about community. in this first phase, i also compared the oral history data to the theoretical and research perspectives that guided my research questions in order to generate preliminary axial codes that would inform subsequent analyses of semi-structured interviews and classroom observational data (see table 2). the second phase of analysis began after analysis of the oral histories was complete and continued during and after the collection of classroom observation data and ongoing semistructured interviews. this phase incorporated all verbal data as well as observational fieldnotes. in this phase, i repeated the process of pre-coding employed in phase one during initial readings of the student and teacher interviews. i reviewed codes for the oral history interviews as these initial codes were intended to inform analysis of ongoing semi-structured interviews. after reviewing the data gleaned from the oral histories, i read through each student’s collection of semi-structured interviews twice to get a sense of each student’s experiences across the semester before moving on to the next collection. i then engaged in line-by-line coding of interview and observational data to generate grounded descriptive codes (corbin & strauss, 1990) as well as emerging axial codes. although analysis of the oral history interviews informed phase two analysis of observation and ongoing interview data, the semi-structured interviews provided new information that prompted me, at times, to return to the oral history data and refine initial codes. for example, in interviews with students, the in vivo code “making a good future” emerged in relation to students’ understandings of motivation and impetus for migration, and this code was combined under the meta-code of “migration.” the third phase of coding began when data collection was complete. i revisited all data sources including oral histories, semi-structured interviews, fieldnotes, and student artifacts, and engaged in second cycle coding where i refined existing codes—grouping, shifting, collapsing, and expanding these codes. in phase three, i also searched across all data sources for patterns, and these patterns were examined and organized according to frequency, correspondence, and substance. from these patterns and using theoretical and empirical literature as a guide, i generated inductive categories, noting their relationships and defining features. during this final phase, i incorporated measures to help ensure validity (creswell, 2007). data sources such as photographs of the classroom, student projects and curricular documents served as confirming (or disconfirming) evidence for categories generated in the third phase of data analysis. as the sole researcher in this study, i relied on multiple purposeful data sources to as a means of triangulation. the extensive time spent with participants also created opportunities to revisit the data in cooperation and conversation with participants (creswell, 2007) and enabled me to seek continual clarification in the hopes of fully capturing their stories and experiences. 82 global education review 6 (2) findings research has elucidated transnational students’ uses of literacy across home, community, and school spaces and how these students’ unofficial and vernacular literacies inform in-school learning and participation (de la piedra, 2010; skerrett, 2012; skerrett & bomer, 2011). congruent with studies that catalogue the literate repertoires of transnational youth, students in this ninth-grade classroom engaged in literacy practices that spanned global contexts. these practices, however, often disappeared in the context of their school and the classroom. as a newcomer school, piedmont was uniquely positioned to support multilingual newcomer students and to provide possibilities for affirming and empowering educational experiences. however, directing attention towards student perspectives on their own literacies and literacy learning revealed how these practices strategically emerged/disappeared and were recruited by the school and teacher to serve curricular and academic goals aligned with standardized instruction. students’ transnational literacies oral histories with students revealed their participation in a range of literacy practices— personal, social, familial, and cultural—outside of the school day. tahmineh, a 16-year-old student from iran who spoke both persian and english, maintained communication with friends and family in iran and engaged in a variety of cultural and literacy practices with her family. tahmineh read widely outside of school and enjoyed hearing her mother tell “famous stories from the shamenah, stories everyone knew in iran.” myat, age 15, migrated with his mother and siblings from a refugee camp in thailand where he had lived since the age of 5. myat spoke burmese and was learning english, and though he rarely spoke in english class, he was a talented musician and performed a song in burmese at the school’s international night. music was a central aspect of his family life: “my family, when we are together, we sing…together, play guitar together.” like tahmineh’s family, myat’s family engaged in a variety of personal and communicative practices that were informed by and spanned transnational contexts. randa, a student who moved from iraq to the united states, enjoyed authoring narratives for transnational audiences. randa was sometimes quiet in class, but she enjoyed writing “true stories” online and used instagram as a forum for writing to and about friends in iraq: “i have a friend on instagram. i asked if she would give me permission to write about her. she has more happening in her life and i write stories about her life in arabic.” friends and followers in iraq served as her audience, and instagram provided a social space where she could share writing in her own language and communicate with friends from home. in addition to writing in more public spaces, students also wrote purely for themselves. moussina, from togo, wrote about herself and her home country. ema, a vocal student from the dominican republic, wrote stories and poetry in spanish, but rarely shared them. she kept her stories and poems private, explaining, “it's hard to show people that kind of thing because it's so personal.” students also read outside of school in their home languages and in english. po, for example, liked to read fantasy novels, and zaki enjoyed comic books and books about sports. myat, in addition to playing music, read texts about mysticism and astrology given to him by his mother and, having left myanmar to live in a refugee camp, also liked to read histories and stories of his home country: “i read astrology things…i like to study history and what happened. burma has an interesting history with (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 83 different kingdoms. many stories and legends.” although students like myat and moussina often seemed disinterested in school reading and writing, literacy practices like these, often carried with them from their home countries, potentially enabled connections to their homes, friends, and families while acclimating to life in the united states. in contrast to these personally meaningful literacy practices, students generally reported their experiences with literacy in schools as impersonal, academic learning situated around standards and academic texts. students employed personal literacy practices almost entirely and exclusively in non-school spaces, and although not every student claimed to read outside of class or to write stories or personal narratives, their personal literacies spoke to their backgrounds, beliefs, and interests. the literacies that students employed, often for social purposes, provided a means of viewing and understanding what students did as purposeful users of literacy outside of the classroom. conversations with students revealed personal literacies that neither emerged frequently nor were invoked by teachers as a means to enhance in-class literacy learning. this is despite how research documents that students from historically marginalized backgrounds benefit from the incorporating and valuing of their non-school literacies into schooling practices (franzak, 2006). (in)visibility of students’ sultural and literacy practices although these students clearly possessed transnational understandings and had lives that included participation in rich and varied literacies, these personal practices were rarely visible in the school and classroom, and only surfaced when strategically sought out by the school and teacher to further academic goals. although culture mostly disappeared at the classroom level, efforts to recognize students’ cultural and linguistic backgrounds did exist at the school level. unfortunately, these efforts often took on celebratory and essentializing qualities that failed to capture the complexity of students’ actual lives and practices. school-wide efforts to provide a supportive and welcoming school culture were evident, but a uniting feature of both the school and english i classroom were missed opportunities to empower students and use their experiences and backgrounds to expand their learning. students shared that the school was a space for them to build relationships with their peers. ema indicated that students at piedmont benefitted from the diversity of its population and the perception that students there shared similar experiences: “what i love about this school is everybody is different and no one is talking about you or judging you cause we all have the same problems…i really love that.” myat explained: “i love all the students, the way they treat each other. we don’t feel like strangers.” as a safe and welcoming environment, the school played an important role in supporting student’s acclimation and development of social networks. however, attention to students’ practices often appeared superficial and disconnected from learning, taking the form of cultural celebration. this celebration was visible in subtle ways, such as the artwork displayed in the hallways. very few examples of student writing, artwork, or self-representations hung in the school. the art room—shown to me by ema, a young artist herself—was filled with shelves of student artwork, but the school walls bore only murals of the world, of countries and their flags, or of young people from various countries in traditional dress. this artwork, presumably meant to represent the diversity of the school, seemed to make the actual backgrounds of the students, their practices, or their own artistic creations less visible. 84 global education review 6 (2) international night (i-night), a program of student performances held in december, seemed to embody the complexities and tensions of cultural representation and visibility present in the school. i-night was a popular school tradition at piedmont, one that brought families and community together to celebrate cultures represented in the school. student performers collaborated on musical presentations or dances. as randa described, “each person is dancing or singing from their country.” students who chose not to perform created display boards and flags for their home countries and presented them before the performances. a conversation with tahmineh, however, revealed underlying complexities: although she moved from iran and spoke persian at home with her family, she was grouped to sing with randa, a student from iraq whose home language was arabic. when asked if she spoke or understood arabic, she said, “no, i just memorized it. i know the meaning of the song because i searched [the meaning] and found it and memorized it.” she shared that her teachers had encouraged her to join the arabic-speaking students so that she would be able to perform. the fact that tahmineh’s participation was not a reflection of her own background or cultural practice seemed to indicate the prioritizing of cultural celebration over intentional efforts to create inclusive educational spaces, ones that might encourage student selfrepresentation. the large group performances seemed to further indicate this possibility. students from togo, kenya, and eritrea were grouped into “african dance” and latinx students from various countries performed “latino modern dance.” the tendency to amalgamate cultural experiences into pan-ethnic representations seemed to confirm a disconnect between the school’s attempts to honor student cultures and the students’ actual lived experiences. efforts to create a positive and inclusive image for the school left little space for visible and authentic incorporation of students’ cultural knowledge and experiences. strategic visibility of student literacies: culture as curricular although piedmont, as a school, made efforts to create a welcoming climate for the students, the absence of meaningful attention to students’ diverse backgrounds also revealed itself in the classroom. observations of ms. nelson’s class revealed a lack of focus on students’ transnational lives and personal goals outside of the curriculum. although the class consisted entirely of recently immigrated and emergent bilingual students, the classroom looked, in many ways, much like other regular high school english classrooms. additionally, classroom activities mirrored those of a typical 9th grade course—students recorded literary terms and academic vocabulary in notebooks and read and analyzed canonical texts commonly associated with ninth grade english (lewis & dockter, 2011). consistent with research on the school experiences of other transnational students, the students in this classroom experienced predominately monolingual, monocultural texts, and a ninth-grade curriculum anchored to the common core state standards and canonical works of literature. their funds of knowledge and global experiences and understandings were rarely viewed as resources for teaching and learning, and these students had limited access to personally relevant and engaging texts, a welldocumented phenomenon in literacy research with transnational students (ivey & broaddus, 2007; lewis & dockter, 2011; suarez-orozco et al, 2011). one of ms. nelson’s attempts to establish connections with students via instruction occurred at the start of school year when she had students write a brief autobiographical narrative in the hopes of getting to know them “through (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 85 their writing.” these student narratives, she indicated, helped her “find out a lot about their background, their family situation, things like that.” within these narratives students described their countries, families, interests, and in some cases, what they liked about their home countries and/or what they liked about america. although these narratives provided ms. nelson with some initial biographical information about students, this was the only assignment observed or mentioned in interviews where students had the chance to write about themselves and their interests. when asked if they had opportunities to write about themselves, students referenced this one assignment, or simply said “no.” although ms. nelson started the semester with the seeming intention of learning more about her students through narrative writing, subsequent opportunities to connect daily instruction to students’ lived experiences and interests were rare occurrences, and when incorporated, seemed to be used as instructional tools or resources to reinforce curricular goals. ms. nelson shared, “i want the kids to share what they know, their background knowledge, their own experiences, so that they can connect it to the text when we start reading,” a reflection that tied the value of student experiences and understandings to the potential for these experiences to help students understand texts and cover standards in english i. thus, the utility of incorporating students’ experiences and knowledge lay in helping them to address writing standards for english i. this is a goal that differed from the more emancipatory forms of literacy that scholars such as pacheco & nao (2009) posited might enable students to articulate identities, reinterpret identities, and/or interrogate social power structures. attempts to draw on students’ backgrounds as a means to achieve curricular goals in english were mostly ineffective. for instance, during a lesson on “hussar song,” a poem about a young soldier who leaves home to fight in a war, students were asked to share what they knew about leaving home and leaving family for an unfamiliar place. students were compliant, but their responses were brief. cassandra, for example, commented that she had to leave her mother and sister in mexico when she came to america, but did not elaborate. prompted by a poem that seemed to have little personal relevance, students appeared disinterested. students knew much about the topic, however, and told me about their experiences in our interviews. cassandra, for example, shared her feelings about living without her mother: my father decided to come to the united states and he brought me and wants me to learn english. it's important because in mexico the school is no good…here sometimes i'm happy, sometimes sad because my mother isn't here. only my father. similarly, myat’s family had to move away from thailand, leaving his father behind: “my father is in a refugee camp in thailand. he is in the army, so he can’t come here. almost every night my father and my sister have a conversation.” randa, too, had family still in iraq, and said, “i was sad [to move] because i miss my nephews and niece.” mari, too, shared, “i miss my family back in pakistan—my grandmother and my aunt and my cousins—i miss them.” shoko conveyed additional complexities of transnational migration and the factors that influenced her family’s move to america: i like being here. sometimes i can say i miss my country but here you have to come and learn new things and get a good education. sometimes i miss my friends…like here, no friends. my friends and sometimes i miss my religion… many things. it was evident from interviews that students were willing to speak about their experiences of immigrating to the united states in the context of authentic conversations, but were not 86 global education review 6 (2) prompted to do so when their experiences were sought out for more contrived and curricular purposes. further, curricular texts were the central focus of meaning making and were not incorporated with the intention of bringing student perspectives and experiences to the surface. ms. nelson’s focus on curricular goals may have limited, rather than generated opportunities, for students to co-create meaning and learning experiences in the classroom with ms. nelson and with each other. although research suggests that conventional, monologic, and largely decontextualized english classes such as ms. nelson’s are not rare (yagelski, 2005), nor are they particularly beneficial for any student. the traditional and standardized structure of her classroom seemed particularly limiting for transnational students who, research also suggests, might have benefitted much more from responsive and relevant instruction. at the classroom level, attention to culture and incorporation of diverse texts and perspectives were seen as peripheral to a standardized curriculum, an issue prevalent in classrooms and school systems across the country (davis & willson, 2015; skerrett & hargreaves, 2008; sleeter, 2011), but surprising in a school specifically designed to support newcomer and refugee students. additionally, in both the school and classroom, cultural knowledge and experiences were often separated from academic instruction (sleeter, 2011) and only rarely was cultural knowledge used to create more meaningful learning experiences. discussion overall, findings that emerged from the study indicated that the students at piedmont used literacy practices outside of english class to participate in transnational communication, engage in identity negotiation and maintenance, to author narratives, and to navigate school and community spaces. in addition to revealing students’ participation in literacy practices beyond the classroom, oral history and interview data revealed the assets that students brought to the classroom via their multilingual resources and abilities and transnational knowledge and experience. beyond more superficial celebration, these students’ understandings, experiences, and resources were rarely recognized nor drawn upon for learning. when strategically made visible, students’ cultural practices and literacies were recruited for specific and often narrow curricular goals, preventing efforts to interact with students as whole beings with experiences, interests, and socio-emotional needs. a unique contribution of this study was its incorporation of classroom-based research to investigate how asset-based teaching that draws on students’ backgrounds and experiences might shape the literacy learning of transnational newcomer students. findings indicated that academic literacy practices aligned to curricular goals ultimately took precedence over what students personally did with literacy in out-ofschool spaces. although the masking of students’ cultural, language, and literacy practices in traditional academic spaces has been documented (de la piedra, 2010; nykielherbert, 2010; skerrett, 2015), this was a surprising finding in a school designed especially for newcomers. rubenstein-avila (2007) in her study of a transnational student transitioning to an american high school, points out how literacy practices can be used by transnational students to negotiate these transitions as well as the overall process of immigration. scholars also indicate the potential for transnational teachers to support transformative education and for the possibilities empowering forms of literacy learning might provide for transnational students. when recognized and used as assets, transnational understandings, literacies, and ways of being can work against deficit (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 87 narratives, allowing students to articulate new and hybrid identities (machaco-casas, 2009; pacheco & nao, 2009). the english i classroom in this study, however, rarely supported this articulation in ways that transcended curricular goals and academic achievement. as a result, students participated in classroom discourses that were limited and limiting in their ability to recognize and draw on their full cultural and literate repertoires. by examining the literacy practices and transnational histories of ms. nelson and her students in both school and nonschool spaces, this study illuminated a spectrum of literacy practices that spanned transnational contexts. although it was evident that these practices existed and were central and meaningful aspects of students’ lives, these practices disappeared in the context of schooling. the power that these practices might have had on literacy learning, as indicated by scholars such as rubinstein-avila (2009), was minimized by potentially more powerful and pervasive discourses of standardization and academic achievement. ultimately, classroom and school literacies overshadowed students’ out-of-school literacies. the experiences of students in this study complicate what we, as teachers and researchers, currently know and assume about transnational students. researchers have suggested that schools and teachers enlist the out-of-school literacy practices of transnational students for the aid of in-school learning and academics. few studies have addressed what then happens in school for these students and the extent to which incorporation of their backgrounds and experiences enables expansive learning opportunities or simply acts as a mechanism for attending to existing curricula. the findings of this study, in part, reorient our focus from improving transnational students’ ability to do american school to rethinking what our goals as an educational community are for these students. implications research would suggest that piedmont, a school devoted exclusively to newly immigrated students, might be a generative space with a learning environment that would honor students’ backgrounds, draw on their various understandings and ways of knowing, and have a positive impact on their literacy learning. however, findings overwhelmingly suggested divides between theory, research, and classroom realities. this may be due, in part, to a lack of classroom research with transnational students and teachers. studies have documented students’ out-of-school literacies and how these literacies might potentially be drawn upon to aid students in accessing academic literacies, but future research might also look into classrooms to see how these literacies are ignored or taken up and what the goals of doing so might be for students themselves. findings from the present study indicated that, on rare occasions when cultural knowledge or experience was made visible, these assets were resources for accessing the curriculum and furthering achievement discourses. this finding indicates a need for continued classroom research on the benefits of attending to transnational students’ literacies, or incorporating their funds of knowledge into literacy instruction generally. specifically, there is a need to clearly understand and articulate the goals of schools and the research community for these students, including how these goals are enacted or addressed in the contexts of schooling. in addition to a need for more classroom studies of transnational studies, future research might also consider the range of needs and experiences that characterize transnational students’ lives in order to add nuance to what we know about them. ms. nelson’s classroom was 88 global education review 6 (2) perhaps uncommon in its inclusion of only newcomer and refugee students, but this study highlights their unique needs and the potential ways schools and teachers respond to those needs. studies of transnational students have largely neglected the experiences of newcomer students, focusing instead on students highly proficient in english (jimenez & gamez, 1996), second-generation transnational students (lopez, 2003), students who migrated but have spent several years in american schools (rubinstein-avila, 2009), or transnational students born in america who regularly traverse transnational boundaries (sanchez, 2007). in addition to current research on refugee students such as that of nykiel-herbert (2010), additional inquiry into the unique experiences of refugee students might also provide nuance to current understandings of transnationalism and schooling. the study also points to potential benefits of teacher education centered on critical inquiry as a means for creating empowering literacy classrooms that draw on students’ assets, backgrounds, and repertoires to create more authentic and empowering spaces for literacy learning. franzak (2006) suggests that teachers become “active examiners of the social, political, and economic contexts in which they teach” (p. 236). doing so will require that teachers actively interrogate their belief systems and their instructional approaches and should “actively promote critical inquiry into the dominance of some literacy values of others” (franzak, 2006, p. 236). districts and schools often provide opportunities for teachers to grow personally and professionally, but might be encouraged to tailor this growth to aspects of teaching not explicitly aligned with curricular goals. opportunities could be included for critical inquiry into potential deficit framings of students and issues of power, inclusion, and access, as well as multicultural and culturally responsive forms of teaching. as districts and schools consider how to best support their teachers, findings suggest that implementing professional development opportunities that support the teaching of diverse and multilingual students might potentially have profound impacts on teaching and learning. this study of the literacy practices of a classroom of transnational students provides new perspectives that contribute to a body of research cataloguing the life experiences, histories of migration, and literacy practices of transnational students and teachers. findings from this study corroborate, expand, and challenge existing theoretical assumptions regarding the teaching of transnational students, encouraging scholars to continue to examine and reimagine literacy learning that not only draws on the transnational repertoires of students, but also expands learning beyond the constraints of standards and curricula. doing so presents possibilities for more inclusive and empowering literacy learning for transnational students. (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 89 tables table 1: participant demographics participant name participant age country of origin languages spoken cassandra 15 mexico spanish, english ema 16 dominican republic spanish, english mari 17 pakistan hindko, urdu, english mika 16 thailand thai, english moussina 18 togo togolese, ewe, english myat 15 myanmar burmese, english po 16 azerbaijan azerbaijani, russian, english randa 18 iraq arabic, english sara 16 mexico spanish, english shoko 18 togo togolese, french, english, dutch tahmineh 16 iran persian, english zaki 16 kenya somali, arabic, swahili, english 90 global education review 6 (2) table 2: examples of phase 1 descriptive codes example descriptive code example data segment from oral histories home country vs. adopted country (initial descriptive code) “between here and kenya, it’s very different here.” (zaki) “my home is not quite city. many buildings. no clean air. no fresh air. big traffic. here, there is really fresh air. nice, like, how do you say, nice environment? everything is green and clean.” (po) “compared to my home (dominican republic), it’s so boring here. you can see nobody out. everybody's inside the house. it's so boring and you just see trees. so boring.” (ema) family practices in america “here, we have a routine where every sunday we watch movies. (subcode grouped under like a rule. sunday movies…because we are together. we don't “social practices”) see the movie if someone is not there.” (sara) “we cook and like we did but here is a new life. every morning my mother, brother, and sister go to a job. i go back home at 5 o'clock. then it's time to eat dinner and we eat together and then we talk. it's important that we eat dinner together and talk and it makes me happy” (mari) transnational communication (axial code) “my friends and family, in togo, i call my them on skype, on whatsapp, every week or maybe sometimes if i have time or if i have money to buy the credits…and i write on facebook and email my friends and sometimes my teachers.” (shoko) “my grandmother and grandfather are in kenya. we talk to them…my mother, every month, she gives money to them.” (zaki) (in)visible literacies of transnational newcomer youth 91 references bartlett, l. 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(2010). ‘betwixt and between’: literacy, liminality, and the celling of black girls. race ethnicity and education, 13(4), 425-447. about the author brooke ward taira is an assistant professor of literacy education at the university of hawaiʻi at mānoa. 94 global education review 5(4) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: koyama, jill p., & ghosh, sowmya (2018). spanning boundaries by building relationships. global education review, 5 (4), 94-114. spanning boundaries by building relationships jill p. koyama university of arizona sowmya ghosh university of arizona abstract an estimated 1.2 million refugee students attend schools across the united states (u.s.). they represent between 35-40% of the total number of refugees in the u.s. yet, we know little about how school districts work with refugee students, most of whom have had significant gaps in their formal education and for whom english is not their first language. drawing on data collected during a three-year ethnography of refugee networks in arizona, which included a case study of one school district’s refugee support department, we examine how the influx of refugee students alters the discourses and practices traditionally associated with school-family-community relationships. framing refugee mentors who work in the school district and their community-based counterparts as “boundary spanners” tushman (1977), we demonstrate how the mentors aim to bridge the boundaries between refugees’ homes and communities and their new u.s. schools. highlighting the complexity of the varied, and often contentious, interactions between the policies of the school, the practices the community-based organizations, and the understandings of the refugee parents, we point to the precariousness of the school-family-community interactions and discuss what boundaries are left unbridged. finally, we offer recommendations for the further development of policies made to influence the formal education of refugees attending u.s schools. keywords refugee students, refugee education policy, school-family relations, boundary spanners introduction refugees—defined as those who have been forced to flee their countries of nationality due to persecution or fear of persecution based on race, religion, political opinion, or membership in a particular social group—confront, and cross, many boundaries, both literal and symbolic. several countries grant humanitarian refuge and aid to migrants, but until 2016 the united states (u.s.), “remain[ed] the top resettlement country” (zong and batalova, 2017). once resettled in the u.s., refugees encounter new boundaries, including the ones between home, community, and schools. we know very little about how they negotiate the boundaries between these contexts or who supports them in crossing these boundaries. as well described by akkerman and bakker (2011), boundaries belong _______________________________________ corresponding author jill koyama, educational policy studies and practice, college of education, university of arizona, 1430 e. second street, tucson az 85721-0069 email: jkoyama@email.arizona.edu phone: (520) 626 1862 mailto:jkoyama@email.arizona.edu 95 global education review 5(4) “to both one world and another” (p. 141), or in other words, they are part of each entity. many boundaries are fluid, temporal, and emergent. we follow star (2010) in defining a boundary as not necessarily an edge, but more accurately as space in which a “sense of here and there are confounded” (p. 603). thus, even as boundaries are constructed and reified through practices and policies within individual entities, there exists a simultaneous need for connections between these particular entities. globally, more than one half of the nearly 21.3 million refugees are under the age of 18 (unhrc, 2015). of the nearly three million refugees who have been resettled in the u.s. since 1975, 37% are school-aged children between five and eighteen years of age and as reported by dryden-peterson (2016), an estimated 1.2 million refugee students attend k12 schools in the u.s. they are a heterogeneous group with different backgrounds and experiences. many, though, speak multiple languages, come from families and communities rich in cultural assets and resources (he, bettez, & levin, 2015), and are eager to learn once resettled in america (koyama, 2015). however, many of these students have experienced interrupted formal education and are also designated as english language learners (ells), and thus upon resettlement, can face academic challenges (birman and tran, 2017; dooley, 2009). additionally, after enduring protracted displacement and often suffering from violence prior to and during their resettlement process, refugee youth have been shown to suffer from poor mental and physical health that can affect their academic engagement (mcbrien, 2005; patel, staudenmeyer, wickham; firmender, fields, & miller, 2017). providing sufficient educational and psycho-social supports for the refugee students can test school districts, which are already experiencing decreasing budgets and limited resources (koyama, 2017; leachman, masterson & figueroa, 2017) and community organizations, which rely on diminishing federal funding. across the links between schools, organizations, and agencies, educational programs and policies vary substantially depending on how the refugees, and their families, seeking education are positioned by their resettlement country (dryden-peterson, 2016) and their new school districts (koyama, 2015). in the u.s., refugee children have the legal right to attend public education. according to the u.s. refugee act of 1980, public law 96212, refugee youth should be enrolled in schools as soon as possible, usually within the first 30 days of their arrival. this requires procuring the necessary documents, including a birth certificate, immunization records, and proof of residency. yet, once enrolled, refugee students, depending on which schools they attend, may have very disparate academic and emotional supports provided to them (koyama, 2015, 2017; mcbrien, 2005). in this piece, we examine how the influx of refugee students in a school district brings community-based organizations that provide refugee support services and local affiliations of international refugee resettlement agencies into greater contact with the formal education system. increasingly, “education policies that promote school-community collaboration…ask school district central offices to help schools collaborate with community-based public, private, and nonprofit organizations” (honig, 2006, p. 357), and as shown in the work of winton and evans (2016), community-based organizations are increasingly influencing education policy and practices. specifically, in the education of refugees in the u.s., the work of community-based organizations and school districts intersect and overlap. for instance, it is usually a caseworker from a refugee resettlement agency who first contacts the mentors in the school district to enroll a newly arrived refugee, and a liaison from a support organization that teaching refugee students in arizona 96 serves as initial translator for the youth’s parents at the school. boundary spanners—in this study, mentors—employed by the school district also extend their work responsibilities within schools to the refugees’ homes and ethnic communities, often meeting with refugee families to talk about their children’s schooling. we pay particular attention to “official” boundary spanners, or those whose job in either a school district or a community-based organization supporting refugee youth requires them to work across at least one schoolcommunity organization boundary. we also consider refugee parents as potential boundary spanners. the boundary spanners share a commitment to the well-being of the refugee children, but “legitimating coexistence is often highly political and sensitive to those involved” (akkerman & bakker, p. 143) as the spanners face different accountabilities in different contexts and are often in competition for resources. drawing on data collected during a three-year ethnography of refugee networks in arizona, which included a case study of one school district’s refugee support department and local refugee agencies, we focus on how the mentors, as well as refugee parents and community workers, aim to bridge the boundaries between refugees’ homes and communities and their new u.s. schools. highlighting the complexity of the varied, and often contentious, interactions between policies and practices of the school and communitybased organizations, we point to the precariousness of the school-family-community interactions and discuss what boundaries are left unbridged. we also interrogate how refugee parents are often not integrated into the schoolfamily-community linkages. finally, we offer recommendations for the further development of policies and practices made to influence the formal education of refugees attending u.s schools. literature review: refugee students, their families, and u.s. schooling there exists disparate bodies of literature on the education of refugee youth. much of what is available centers on schooling and educational programs provided by international organizations, often in refugee resettlement camps (healey & destefano, 1997; mendenhall, 2012). what is known about such education is often presented in reports by the international organizations providing the education, including unesco (2011) and world bank (2005). essentially, this literature points to the need for more funding and greater coordination among agencies, and also to the challenges to sustaining educational programs as the numbers of internally displaced people and refugees rise. according to chapman and nkansa (2006), local support and ownership is essential to the sustainability of any education program initiated by international agencies. a handful of other studies (betancourt, newnham, layne, kim, steinberg, ellis & birman, 2012; halcón, robertson, savik, johnson, spring, butcher, westermeyer, & jaranson, 2004; hyman, vu & beiser, 2000) investigate how refugees attending educational programs/schools in north america experience post-migration stress and trauma—and how that interacts with their schooling. some refugees, like the 338 eighteen to twenty-five year old somali and oromo refugees in halcón et al.’s (2004) survey-based study, continue to suffer after resettlement in the u.s. from issues associated with violence and war, while others are adapting more easily to education, and to their lives in america. based on interviews with sixteen participants and three focus groups conducted with southeast asian refugees in canada, hyman et al. (2000) find that these youth, including the children of refugee parents, are often challenged by the stressor of school, 97 global education review 5(4) among other stressors. most of the refugees reported that the lack of english fluency and familiarity with cultural values demonstrated in canadian schooling felt stressful and intimidating. in their quantitative study of 184 newcomer immigrant and refugee youth, however, patel et al. (2017) find that the youth who were exposed to war experienced greater self-reported anxiety, behavior issues and lower academic achievement in schools than those who were not exposed. based on the survey findings, the exposure to the trauma may have mediated the traumatized youth’s ability to navigate acculturative stressors. an emerging, but small, recent body of literature addresses how american schools can create safe learning environments, supportive curriculum, and culturally responsive pedagogy and leadership. much of this research (bajaj & bartlett, 2017; bajaj & suresh, 2018; bartlett, mendenhall, & ghaffar-kucher, 2017; mcbrien, dooley & birtman, 2017; mendenhall & bartlett, 2018) draws needed attention to how international schools in new york city and oakland educate refugee youth and other newcomers. this scholarship calls for curricular, pedagogical, and assessment approaches that avoid tracking and segregating refugee students, and that also utilize the students’ experiences and language as resources that can be integrated throughout the school day, and in related out of school learning. bajaj and suresh (2018), for instance, demonstrate how oakland international high school excels at leveraging community collaborations, creating meaningful family engagement, and enacting flexible curriculum to meet the refugee students’ and their families’ needs. mendenhall and bartlett (2018) also argue that refugee students benefit from a critical transnational curriculum and note that afterschool and extracurricular programs provide important academic, language, and social supports to refugee youth. similarly, in their qualitative study examining the needs of refugee students in nyc, bartlett et al. (2017) find that the 23 students, 18 of whom attended one of two international high schools, expressed that, in their schools, “diversity is valued, teachers demonstrate support, and many peers establish encouraging relationships” (pp. 117-118). the schools, the authors note, are effective in meeting the students’ needs in part because they use asset-based pedagogy and curriculum centered on heterogeneous student groups. informed by their findings, bartlett et al. recommend that schools should adopt a more fluid understanding of “culture” to avoid the inaccurate and often damaging discourse that refugees’ home and school cultures are at odds. how refugee parents and schools interact has also been shown to be uneven (koyama & bakuza, 2017; matthiesen, 2015). while little literature exists on refugee parent involvement in schools, we know from studies conducted on immigrant parents, that the presence of these parents is often undervalued even though they can be important boundary spanners between the youth’s homes and schools (carreón, drake, and barton, 2005). koyama and bakuza (2017), however, draw on more than two years of ethnographic data on refugees in a northeastern u.s. city, to document how parents, when invited to join with others in schools and community organizations, can advocate for their children and navigate uncertain and unfamiliar education spaces. in contrast, much of the literature shows that the involvement of immigrant parents in their children’s schools is lessened due to the cultural and linguistic differences perceived by both the schools and the parents. researchers (doucet, 2011; valdés, 1996; valenzuela, 1999) have demonstrated that linguistically, culturally, and socioeconomically diverse (lcsd) families are persistently positioned as needing “help” and “encouragement” from schools to become involved in their children’s schooling. doucet, in her study of fifty-four 1.5 and second-generation teaching refugee students in arizona 98 haitian immigrant parents in the boston area, argues that parental involvement is part of a ritual system in which immigrant parents are subsumed “into a dominant, mainstream model of involvement within an inequitable educational project” (p. 404). their involvement is thus defined not only by race, class, and linguistic differences, but also by broader differentials of power between schools and homes. in their study of a twelve-week parent leadership program for latinx parents, bolívar and crispeels (2011) document how opportunities for these parents are usually limited in both quantity and benefit. “furthermore,” they argue, “low-income and non-english-speaking parents seem to benefit little from conventional parent-teacher associations, which seem unable to effectively channel parent power for meaningful participation…” (p. 6). some parents, like the twenty-one chinese immigrant parents living in canada interviewed in dyson’s (2001) study receive superficial and general communications about their children’s progress from the school. further, the conventional avenues that are available to parents, such as parent-teacher meetings, were of little benefit to immigrant parents as communication in these meetings position teachers as the experts and parents as subordinates. for example, in her investigation of silencing in parent-teacher conferences in danish public schools, matthiesen (2015) points out that somali parents are not silent because they respect the teachers, but instead are silenced in the process of the meetings, in which teachers unilaterally inform parents how their child is performing. the mothers in the four families that were followed for 1.5 years in matthiesen’s study saw themselves as advocates for their children, but also wanted to be seen as non-confrontational partners with the schools and teachers. theory: boundary spanners and boundary objects boundaries offer a way to consider the distinction between one entity or organization and another (whitenack & swanson, 201 3). when a school district is one of the entities, there are multiple people, including district and school administrators, as well as teachers, in boundary roles that extend outside of the district. they communicate with others in outof-school organizations and they create, process, and circulate information across these organizations (honig, 2006; stevens, 1999). many of them serve as boundary spanners either consistently as part of their responsibilities or as a result of temporal inter-entity interactions. people who are considered to be “boundary spanners” (tushman, 1977) have been idealistically “characterized by their ability to engage with others and deploy effective relational and interpersonal competencies” (williams, 2002, p. 110). they are optimistically described as creative catalysts and innovators (deleon, 1996); networkers (many, fisher, ogletree & taylor, 2012; webb, 1991), and cultural brokers (trevillion, 1991). we recognize that boundary spanners, who work back and forth across and between groups, organizations, institutions, and societal structures, are quite diverse in their aims, resources, and positionalities. they operate in what can be considered a recognized “shared problem space” (akkerman & bakker, 2011)—a context where problems are addressed collaboratively, although those attending to them may not share exact aims or accountabilities. honig (2006), in her study of school district administrators as boundary spanners, notes, however: [b]oundary spanners’ positions on the organizational margins may be a help or a hindrance. such positions may increase their communication and relationships with 99 global education review 5(4) people outside their organizations…; on the other hand, such marginal positions often limit their communication and relationships with people within their organization… (p. 362). they often lack authority in their own organizations and yet are expected to create and improve connections to other organizations. some have been assigned to do the work of boundary spanning as part of their official responsibilities; others, adept at creating and extending connections, bridge boundaries as part of their daily work. an interesting subset of the literature (e.g. postlethwaite, 2007) on boundary spanning centers on what happens in the boundary space when certain people interact. as described by akkerman and bakker (2011), in their comprehensive review of scholarship on boundary spanners and objects: given a certain problem space, practices that are able to cross their boundaries engage in a creative process in which something hybrid—that is, as new cultural form— emerges. in [this] hybridization, ingredients from different contexts are combined into something new and familiar…. the hybrid result can also take the shape of a completely new practice that stands between established practices… (p.148). one example of such hybridization can be seen through the case study of hmong refugees enrolled in an urban elementary school, in which school-community collaborations lead to the development of academic programs for these students and their parents (rah, 2013). in this example, rah highlights the importance of recruiting hmong american staff and leaders from the local hmong community in assisting with lesson plans, after-school programs and building relations with these students’ parents. we also find some evidence of such hybridization in this study, especially in the mentors’ practices centering on the repurposing of boundary objects, such as learning aides, and on documenting the completion of tasks and student contact hours. boundary objects, which are common to, and used between, groups or organizations “through flexibility and shared structure—they are the stuff of action” (star, 2010, p. 603). as originally conceived by star and griesemer (1989), boundary objects have three characterizing dimensions: interpretive flexibility, material/organizational structure, and scale/granularity. interpretive flexibility, inherent to all objects, centers on the ways in which different individuals and groups of individuals understand, make sense of, and utilize the objects. the materiality aspect of boundary objects draws attention to their nonarbitrary form; they emerge according to the “‘information and work requirements’ as perceived locally and by groups who wish to cooperate” (star, 2010, p. 602). when objects are scaled up, they change into infrastructure or standards through institutionalized practices and processes. lampland and star (2009) demonstrate how standards and boundary objects become inextricably linked over time in particular organizations. methods: gathering and analyzing data data in this paper were collected in an ethnography of refugee networks in arizona conducted between december 2013 and january 2016 by the two authors. within that larger ethnography, the authors, along with two other researchers, conducted an 18-month case study of one school districts that we refer to as desert unified school district (dusd). during the study, the first author also volunteered as an esl tutor at two different refugee support organizations; served on advisory council for the teaching refugee students in arizona 100 hub, a refugee tutoring center; and participated on the strategic planning board for refugee education in arizona. both authors attended staff meetings and events held by the refugee support department in dusd. refugee students in dusd on average during the study, 900 refugees were resettled annually in the study region. fifty percent of those resettled were under the age of twenty-four, and approximately 350 became students each year in dusd. during the study, there were between 771 and 1104 refugee students enrolled in dusd, a large district in arizona with approximately 48,000 students, 62% of whom were identified as “hispanic”. the refugee students came from 52 different countries, with the majority hailing from either bhutan, somalia, or iraq. of the 89 schools in the district, all but 10 had at least one refugee student. two high schools had the greatest percentage of refugee students; 22% of the total refugee students attended one and 10% attended the other. at the time the study began, 38 percent of the total population of refugees had been attending a school in dusd for three years or less. smaller districts adjacent to dusd, private schools, and some charter schools, in the aggregate, enrolled nearly 200 refugee students annually, as well. most of the refugee students had experienced limited, interrupted formal educations, or had even had no formal education prior to being enrolled in schools in these arizona districts. all but a handful were enrolled in english language development (eld) courses. dusd’s refugee services department aim was to integrate refugee youth into schools and help refugee families’ transition to living in arizona. participants during the study, the department was comprised of a director, ten full-time studentfamily mentors (referred to as mentors in this paper) and one part-time administrator. together, they provided a range of educational and social supports. the educational services, such as assistance with school registration, tutoring, and language support were geared to counteracting refugee youth’s initial limited english language ability and intermittent schooling. social supports included, but were not limited to, translating school information for parents, transporting family members to medical appointments, securing mental health services for youth, and providing programs in citizenship and adult english as a second language (esl). these bridged the voids created by disrupted family networks, poor mental and physical health services in resettlement camps, and ethnic-cultural neighborhood segregation. refugee support organizations and agencies there were approximately seventy different agencies, organizations, and groups that offer services to refugees in arizona. some of these have international ties and receive federal funding, such as refugee resettlement agencies, and others are small, often temporal, such as church groups and school-sponsored initiatives. in this piece, we include people in boundary spanning positions affiliated with either one of the three refugee resettlement agencies or organizations that receive state or federal funding. because of their accountability to the state, these entities have policies and procedures that help define and guide the official work of the boundary spanners. however, as demonstrated in this study, boundary spanners, can, and often do, selectively follow the regulations and policies of their organizations in order to get work done. aiming for confidentiality, we choose to use generic names, such as refugee resettlement agency and refugee support organization, to refer to the community-based and government-funded organizations and titles, such as director or 101 global education review 5(4) coordinator, for those working in these organizations. we include them in the findings only to illuminate the interactions with dusd refugee mentors, whose boundary spanning work is the focus of this paper. data collection and analysis all of the 10 mentors and director of the dusd refugee services department completed a survey, participated in semi-structured interviews, and were observed across 10 different schools. in total, nearly 50 pages of observational fieldnotes were collected in dusd. five teachers and five principals who worked directly with refugee students in their schools and ten refugee parents whose children attended these same schools were also interviewed. additional interviews in the ethnography include: 15 staff members of organizations and agencies that provide services to refugee youth and their families in arizona; 12 staff members of three refugee resettlement agencies in arizona, 7 administrators directing state refugee programs, and 5 arizona community activists. all of the interviews were audiotaped and later transcribed. data for the case study were managed, coded, and analyzed primarily by the two authors; the second author served as the project manager for the case study. first-level a priori coding was done according to a set of codes developed by the authors. these etic codes were developed from the initial survey data and emic codes were added after the first few interviews were transcribed. codes were also made to denote descriptive identifying information, such as demographic information, policy, names of documents, and agency information. secondary and tertiary inductive coding were created as needed. the authors reached an 80% intercoder reliability. however, because the two authors spent a great deal of time with the mentors in dusd, we relied on the other research team members, who had spent substantially less time with the mentors, to provide feedback on the analytic codes and confirm the patterns in the data identified by the two authors. findings: support, communication, and interactions the dusd department of refugee services provided academic support and services to the students throughout the day and afterschool. according to tam, the director of the department, there existed two simultaneous goals for the department: supporting refugees academically through high school graduation and helping them, and their families, navigate the formal education system. both of these, she stated, depend on building relationships with the students, their families, and also the schools. the mentors in the department approached these goals by providing academic supports that bridge classes and tutoring; interacting with school personnel to span language and cultural differences; and communicating with refugee families to link schools and homes. mentors also supported entire families in participating in american culture. amy, one of the most senior mentors, noted how while the mentors “number one thing” was “settling and adjusting” students to the new school environment, they also made “sure that they were fed, whatever they needclothing, food. those basic needs” (interview, may 5, 2015). here, we examine the work of the mentors by focusing on the interactions between schools, refugee families, and community organizations and agencies. we present our findings in two interrelated themes, which emerged in our analysis of data. they are: providing academic support and tutoring and interacting with parents and the community. providing academic support and tutoring the mentors in dusd, from our observations, spent much of the school day with the students. teaching refugee students in arizona 102 leonidis and amy, for instance, arrived early daily prior to the start of classes to assist students who did not finish their homework. leonidis explained: “i’m here at 7:30 so if they have problems with their homework they will find me in the morning or after their lunch, so we work together” (interview, march 30, 2015). he also spoke at length about how he would divide his time between being with students in their classes, and then pulling them out for individualized tutoring. leonidis assured us that this was only done at the request of teachers and even principals. this was confirmed in our observations. often, we saw teachers and administrators asking that the mentors work with students, one on one, during class time. working with students individually within classes, the mentors negotiated the boundaries of class instruction and tutoring, as well as those between teacher and student. however, the mentors were, in these classroom situations, often treated like “translators” or “teacher assistants” which denied their expertise. several mentors spoke about how they were often placed in situations by school administrators and teachers in which they were expected to serve as translators. most would translate if asked, but they pointed out that it felt belittling to them. jan explained: “i’m not here just to translate, to be a go between…i’m not at their disposal whenever they need translating…i’m here for the kids” (personal communication, january 11, 2016). tam, the director, acknowledged that “sometimes i get calls when they[schools] need an interpreter. well my staff are not interpreters…. there is a whole other department that does interpreting…but they kind of aren’t sure what the role [of a mentor] is…” (interview, may 4, 2015). the mentors’ seeming resistance to serving as an interpreter or translator for school personnel was part, we learned, of a larger ongoing battle in the district to be recognized for their expertise as mentors and to be differentiated from the interpreters employed in the district. still, as the mentors worked only in select schools that the refugees attended and had their offices in a transitional building at one of the high schools, they were at the margins of the district. they were less visible then translators, who attended many events, who were housed at the main district office, and whose responsibilities were well-defined. the mentors were, however, responsible in schools for “help[ing] other organizational members” utilize information generated by students, families, refugee agencies, and even their own department “by translating that information into forms that the other decision makers may consider accessible and useable” (honig, 2016, p. 361). although not necessarily recognized by teachers and administrators for their exact roles, the mentors were expected to bridge no only linguistic, but also informational boundaries. on several occasions, we observed mentors explaining a refugee resettlement report to a school administrator. conversely, we also documented the mentors summarizing school assessments and education plans of refugee students to caseworkers and parents. they often served as information managers. because of their many roles, mentors were flexible in their daily work, and we observed them working differently with different students each day. as amy, a mentor, explained: “each student’s needs are different” (interview, may 5, 2015) and the mentors differentiated their instruction to students working in small groups and individually. much of the instruction and support, however, centered on developing basic math skills and developing english grammar and vocabulary knowledge. several of the tutors, including jan and amy, created additional study guides and resources for the students to use at home. amy spoke about the depth of her efforts: 103 global education review 5(4) i myself go out to the book store or used book store and buy the study guides and sometimes i laminate it. it may be about history of american. it may be hard for newcomers. of course, i am not that subject teacher, but i wouldn’t have the in-depth knowledge myself, but i am willing to sit down and provide those study guides…. i [even] got an algebra book because from the library but it has been so long that i forgot! i want to go through the entire book because i want to help my students. (interview, may 5, 2015) amy, as shown in this example, took her responsibility of academically supporting the refugee students seriously and we often observed her bringing new resources to the tutoring sessions. when asked about her efforts, amy explained that the refugee families didn’t know where to get the additional materials, but that when she could she would take the parents to second hand stores to show them where she got the math books. that, she noted, helped better integrate the families, as well as garner additional academic resources for the students. spanning the boundary between home and school mentors engaged, throughout the study, in actions similar to those described by amy. jan also created study guides and recycled old math workbooks to use when working with the refugees, but her efforts were not always welcomed. one teacher was adamant that the mentors were “teaching the kids the old way of doing math that just messes them up when i teach them another way in class…it just confuses them” (fieldnotes, june 23, 2015). he asked the mentors to use only classroom materials. this tension between teachers and mentors happened infrequently, but they existed nonetheless, and we observed a jostling for authority in academic matters. while the teachers would defer to the mentors in communications with families and also with socio-behavioral support, a handful were adamant that they, the teachers, should control the content of instruction, as well as the teaching style of the mentors. tam confirmed that there had been some complaints about the mentors’ teachings from a couple of administrators and teachers, but she defended the mentors’ approach, noting that there are many ways to learn math. she also pointed out the precariousness of the mentors’ positions in schools; they weren’t certified teachers nor were they teachers’ assistants, and yet they were “unofficially responsible” for educating the refugees. the mentors, as they aimed to span the classroom and tutoring, were delegitimized as experts. they were often respected and appreciated by teachers for their functional roles, such as sharing information about refugee students’ backgrounds, but they were not seen as educators. providing math supports that were not approved by the teachers were not the “legitimate” or the “right” behaviors for mentors to exhibit. in fact, the mentors were seen as doing something detrimental to the students’ learning by a handful of teachers in the study. mentors did, though, also offer formal afterschool tutoring throughout the school year and held a six-week summer math tutoring program, called the math academy, mondays through thursdays, 9am-2pm, at a dusd school. forty refugee students enrolled in the 2015 math academy. when the mentors were asked why, despite low-enrollments and attendance, they continued the academy, leonidis, one of the mentors, stated: “the children need this. they are so far behind…so we do times tables, arithmetic, division over and over again…memorizing” (fieldnotes, july 23, 2015). observational field notes confirmed that the mentors used repetitive, didactic, teachercentered pedagogies and students would often write nothing on their papers. refugee students often had their heads down on their tables or were staring away from the lesson. leonidis teaching refugee students in arizona 104 reprimanded them and continued his lesson. another mentor, jan, explained that the refugees in the summer program were the “newest in the country” and had “the greatest needs” (ibid). “who?” she asked would help these children. in her mind, they needed the math academy, and by association, they needed to be taught/tutored by the mentors. however, throughout the study, several organizations, including a handful of community groups, and a refugee resettlement agency, offered free tutoring to refugee youth. the hub, the largest of these tutoring programs, offered by one refugee resettlement agency, was centrally located, became well-established, had regular monday through friday evening hours, and offered tutoring and academic support to 40-60 youth per evening. there, middle and high school students received one-on-one or small group tutoring across all subjects, including mathematics, english, the sciences, economics, and history. the majority of students who came for tutoring at the hub attended schools in a district adjacent to dusd, the mountain school district (msd). mostly, with a couple of exceptions, the refugee students from dusd were not among the students utilizing the tutoring center. according to the hub tutor coordinator, dusd unlike msd, didn’t have a partnership with the hub, and furthermore, actually discouraged their students from getting support at the hub. she stated: it’s sad, really sad. we have all of these good things here for them, for free and we are open every evening just for students…they can get help in any subject and we have computers and resources for them too…we’ve heard that tam [the dusd refugee support department director] and the refugee mentors only want their kids to get help from them. really limiting. not right at all. (interview, february 12, 2015). another volunteer concurred stating that his friend, who was a teacher in dusd, was told not to suggest the refugee students in his mathematics class attend the hub because the dusd mentors did not know what kind of academic support the students would receive there. by positioning themselves as the main providers of academic support and tutoring, the mentors, in essence, created a boundary between the district and community organizations. in turn, they limited the refugee students’ access to valuable resources. while we did not find this to be malicious, we did question the mentors’ actions. according to the dusd refugee services director, tam, refugee students wanted to be tutored by the mentors. she explained: when the staff [the mentors] say [to a refugee student], “i am worried about your grades. i need you to go to tutoring,” the majority of them go or “i need to see you before school, after school,” they’ll go. we’ll have students go to tutoring with our staff before they go to tutoring that’s available at their schools. so, they’ll travel away from their school to wherever our staff member is…and if the staff says, “you know i really want you to do this, and these are the times, i am available,” then the kids go there…because the kids know our staff cares for them. (interview, may 4, 2015). during the study, students did travel by bus or walk from school to school to receive tutoring from the mentors they knew best. we also observed the mentors instructing students not to go to other tutoring programs, at their schools or at the hub. according to dante, one of the mentors, the advice was practical, not necessarily proprietary. the mentors knew the students best and the students trusted the mentors because throughout the day, the mentors would travel from school to school (personal communication, may 29, 2015). 105 global education review 5(4) the mentors’ territorial claim over, or boundary guarding of, the refugee tutoring can also be partially explained by the intensification of accountability measures and associated required documentation of “contact hours” at dusd. eight of the ten mentors mentioned that the logging of “contact hours,” especially in the area of “academic support and tutoring” was too time consuming, but necessary to retain their funding and legitimize their work. sara, one of the mentors explained the stress of the additional documentation: you know, i used to like this job more…too much paperwork now. it takes too much time [to enter data every day]. putting contacts in, submitting…too much time. it’s not as much fun anymore…who is this for? the district? the school? for the kids? no… (fieldnotes, world refugee day celebration, june 16, 2015). tam reminded them that they needed to collect data to “show what we do, to prove we are needed” (ibid). sara and jan noted that documenting contact hours at the end of the day took nearly an hour away from actually working to support the refugee students. legitimizing their expertise and position in dusd, where, as we have shown, their work was sometimes challenged or contested, was ongoing work for the mentors. tracking what they did, in 15-minute contact units, served to “incorporate that information into organization routines to advance performance goals” (honig, 2006, p. 360). the logs, themselves, served as boundary objects that not only quantified their daily work with refugees, but also supported dusd accountability structure. it gave the mentors’ work a position in the district and was used to demonstrate that particular goals and responsibilities were being met. as warned by star (2010), boundary objects can reduce actions, behaviors, and interactions into selfcontained, tidy, and transportable units that do not necessarily reflect what is actually being done. boundary objects, like the contact logs, became useful to dusd, but were not at all shared with community collaborators, such as the hub, where they could have been used to supplement the services which were not being provided by the mentors. whether it was to prove their worth or legitimize their positions and expertise with refugee students—or both—the mentors failed to bridge the boundaries between their tutoring program at school and the one offered at hub. it was the most obvious, and repetitious, example of uncross boundaries in our study. according to the hub director, the mentors were acting unnecessarily as gatekeepers, and in doing so, were limiting the academic support received by the refugee students. when asked about this, leonidis responded: “we can’t do everything and they [refugee resettlement agencies] can’t do everything. we let them do what they do, and they should let us do our own” (personal communication, march 24, 2015). no mentor suggested that the students could benefit both from receiving tutoring at school and at hub. further, during the study, the mentors extended their tutoring program to include sessions at the large apartment complexes where refugee families lived. when asked about the home-based tutoring program, the director explained the need for the program: …part of it is that we need to show the numbers, make the numbers as part of grant tracker, which you know marks how we are increasing graduation rates and academic achievement. we need to show, and we do, that we are meeting our accountability measures in contact hours…especially when it comes to academic supports…. tutoring is the main way we do this, other than assisting students during the school day. you know we already have tutoring twice weekly afterschool and the summer math teaching refugee students in arizona 106 academy. the tutoring program in the apartment complexes are just one more way to offer academic support, and to connect with the families…. (email to author 1, march 28, 2015) tutoring programs at apartment complexes were thus convenient and necessary means for the dusd refugee services department to meet their accountability mandates and log “contact hours” to signal their effectiveness as a department, and importantly, to keep their funding. on one hand, tutoring in the complexes certainly blurred the boundaries between schools and homes. on the other, it more clearly demarcated and extended the particular boundaries within in which the mentors were the only tutors. it further legitimized their claim for being the most appropriate tutors for the refugee students in their school district and increased their “contact hours.” tutoring in the apartment complexes also reified their positions as liaisons between schools and families. the tutoring spaces was somewhat ambiguous—an unremarkable and mostly unused community room—except for when the mentors transformed it with teaching materials. books, whiteboards, rulers, and graph paper, while having a different meaning in the schools, retained enough meaning and “interpretive flexibility” to be useful in this new context. interacting with families and communities all of the mentors in the study repeatedly stated that they worked for the refugee students and their families. for example, bin was adamant that he worked for entire refugee families and communities, not just the students in dusd. he stated: “i not only help the student…because if i want to make as strong relation with the family, i have to help even the grandma, the father, the mother, the brother, and the sister, as well” (interview, march 26, 2015). bin’s view of himself as supporting the entire families were echoed by all of the other mentors interviewed. the director, tam, even explained how the “staff is really good about providing their phone numbers [to parents] and they become their lifelines for the families if they have any kind of questions” (interview, may 4, 2015). we saw mentors being called throughout the day by parents and extended family members. dante stated that parents called him in the evening and at night, as well, if something happened with their children. often, he said that the parents do not know where their children are. in those cases, dante says: “at that time, i will call school safety to make sure they know where the student [is]” and provided a detailed account of an instance where a refugee father was adamant that his children were missing after school (interview, march 25, 2015). dante explained: i have two new students who came. they went to [high school name]. they were taking two buses to go to [the school] and it was their first time here in america. when they went there they were lost. and their dad called me a couple of times. “i don’t know where are my kids?” …they took the wrong bus. so, they called me and i called the school safety and they found out…. so that is something we do” (ibid). the story dante shared was similar to others we documented during the study. the mentors were often the bridges as students navigated the paths between families, communities, and schools. all 10 mentors also talked about making home visits. those who worked with elementary students often met the parents when they dropped their children off at school in the morning, but mentors working across the high schools often met parents at home. sometimes, the home visits were to talk to parents about 107 global education review 5(4) particular issues, but other times they were made to see how the families were adjusting, and if there were any problems that might be affecting the children’s schooling. of these visits, dante noted that the parents trusted him. he explained: they know who i am because the first time you go there you register the kids you, you take them to the clothing [bank], then you bring them back and they think oh, this is a good person. they know when you go to school you help them also at school and also the students will tell the parents how we help them (interview, march 25, 2015) throughout the study, we saw mentors easily transitioning between the schools and the students’ homes. the boundaries between the schools and the homes were frequently crossed, even blurred, by the work of the mentors. during the home visits, the practices and the trust developed in the schools became hybridized into new practices in the homes—ones that included the mentors looking after the wellbeing of the parents and families. the education of the refugee students often morphed into educating the parents. many home visits were centered on educating the parents about daily life in america and providing them with information and resources. bin explained the importance of attending to the family: mostly impact the student right here, you know, is because the family is the base, the root of everything in vietnamese family. so, it’s not good, like you have a loosened root plant, you know what i mean. so, and everything change when a vietnamese family come here…everything change because in our society we have one person in charge for the household. it’s mostly the father. they take care of everything… [here, the father’s income is] not enough to support the whole family. the wife have to go to work to make money too... (interview, march 26, 2015). such changes challenge family structures and organization and can have significant impact on the students’ lives and education. mai also emphasized the importance of communication, not just translating information into the parents’ languages, but sharing with them, in multiple conversations, how to negotiate their lives in america, about how to adjust to a new language, and culture. mai said her main role as a mentor was, however, to “ease the students’ lives in the united states,” to help them make the transition to america. she explained: when a new family [arrives] in the country, the resettlement agencies fax us the information and i get to go to the house to do a home visit to do the registration paperwork, to assist the family…after doing the registrations, [i] take them to the clothing bank so that they can be ready for schooling. and the next day, they can start school. so, i transport them from the home to the clothing bank and back. and the, the next day pick them up [and] bring them to school, show them around, tell them this is the teachers, introduce the teachers to them and the class as well, show them the playground, and where they need to be going over to use the bathroom… (interview, april 8, 2015) as described by mai, the mentors served as the main connection not only to schooling, but to american life, for the first few days of the refugee students’ schooling. nam spoke more about the practical things he did to help integrate the students, and their families, to their new home in america. he recounted: teaching refugee students in arizona 108 not to all, but to many of the students, i took them to the library. and i helped them to make library cards and i told them to go to the library at least once in a week [and] be with other people who come there. if you want to talk, they can talk to them without disturbing the environment there. read, that is one thing. another thing i tell students and also families [is] to go to the park, talk with other people, and find out about this place from them because they are from here. there [are]many people who come to the park…if i have to go to the store, i say come with me… and i also show them places like downtown, hospital, post office and different shopping complexes. (interview, march 25, 2015). for nam, supporting the refugee students and their families adjust to life in the u.s. was an important part of his job, even if his actions often extended beyond his actual work hours. this was also true for other mentors, who noted that integrating the refugee students and their families ultimately helped the students feel a greater sense of belonging in schools that would lead to more academic engagement. for instance, jan and sara accompanied refugee students and their families on several trips in the city during the study. they went to libraries, parks and free concerts. they took families to the food and clothing banks and rummage sales. jan said that the refugee agencies were supposed “do these things, but don’t do them very well” and so the mentors did them (fieldnotes, june 12, 2015). in these examples, we see the mentors literally spanning the boundaries of the school, home, and local communities—creating bridges between the families and their new home city and lifeways. the mentors’ work highlights the uncertainty of the boundaries between schools, families, and communities. additionally, the work of the mentors also calls our attention to broader notions of education and social integration. the mentors accepted their “legitimating coexistence” (akkerman & bakker, 2011, p. 143) in and out of schools. they were able to coordinate attending to the refugees’ needs in various contexts, such as food banks and libraries, even in their dusd roles. their ability to work across the boundaries was, as described by the mentors, part of the “routinization” (ibid) of boundary spanners. of course, there were also tensions, and even some contestations over their boundary crossing actions. ryan, a caseworker at a refugee resettlement agency, confirmed that caseworkers and volunteers at the three resettlement agencies also took refugee families, “on public transportation,” to the library, food bank, clothing bank, and parks. he knew that the mentors were also taking families. of this he said: i think it’s a great thing. the more exposure they [the families] get, the better. i just wish they [the mentors] would coordinate with us. our time and resources are so limited that if we knew they were taking a particular family, we wouldn’t rush to do it…the other day, i went to take a man for a haircut and when i got there, i saw he had already gotten one. sara had taken him…wasted trip (interview, april 4, 2016). ryan’s experience represents one of the tensions between the resettlement agencies and the mentors: the lack of clear boundaries, or perhaps, more precisely, the lack of communication around boundary crossing. this example reflects what boland and tenkasi (1995) refer to as “perspective making” or the making clear and explicit one’s knowledge and understanding of an issue, event, or activity by various boundary spanners. the mentors, according to ryan, could let him know when 109 global education review 5(4) they are taking refugee families for services. the caseworkers, according to the mentors, should be checking more closely with refugee families, and if they were, they would know when things had been “taken care of” by the mentors. when asked about the overlapping roles of the caseworkers and the mentors, tam said that there was just no way the caseworkers could do all the work they needed to do with their large caseloads and that she felt the mentors were helping the agencies by working so closely with the refugee families. leonidis added: “as a refugee, i appreciate what the [resettlement] agencies are doing. there are things they can do better…they can be limited (fieldnotes, refugee agency quarterly meeting, march 24, 2015). the agencies, according to the hub director, felt like the mentors often overstepped their authority and provided refugee families with incorrect information that undermined the agencies’ work. mai noted that while the responsibilities and work of the dusd mentors and the caseworkers at the three local refugee resettlement agencies overlapped, there were district demarcations. addressing issues related to formal education for the children were the main responsibility of the mentors, while the education, especially adult english language classes, were the responsibility of the resettlement agencies. mai stated: “i wish it were all together, the schooling for children and their families when it comes to english. they would do better, but it is divided. adults go here, and children come to us” (personal communication, june 12, 2015). she also noted, though, that she and other mentors, including bin, also volunteered to teach the adults esl with several community organizations, and when she could, even in her role as mentor, she would try to teach the parents basic english words and phrases. according to mai, what the agencies could accomplish was restricted by workload and policies. other mentors offered more strict critiques of the federal and state policies that directed, and limited, the work of resettlement agencies. sara was the most outspoken on this topic. when asked what needed to happen at the state and federal levels to support refugees, she responded: educate. educate. educate the people who’re bringing the refugees. start with the [refugee] agency. and they need to have, in my opinion, they need to have a plan for them. money wise, and education for the kids, for them, the parents. (interview, march 31, 2015). sara also acknowledged that refugee resettlement programs were underfunded and were to provide services for only 90 days after the refugees arrive in the u.s. she exclaimed: instead of 90 days. what do they learn in 90 days. and then you bring somebody, and you tell them to work, and i mean to eat, we’re going to give you money and you promise them the world and then on 90 days later, you say, okay you’re on your own. (ibid) sara later commented that despite the restrictions placed on the resettlement agencies, “they could do better” and she argued that if the agencies recognized the mentors as experts in refugee education and integration, they could work more closely together to better serve refugee students and families (personal communication, april 4, 2015). the mentors, in their critiques, were reflective about the lack of institution supports for all boundary crossers who work with refugees. while we saw ways in which the resettlement agencies and the mentors could collaborate more closely, we also documented how, because of their different accountabilities and organizational structures, they were not well aligned. they were, as described by grosjean, teaching refugee students in arizona 110 grosjean, rubenson and fisher (2000), tasked with “building bridges” but being “held differentially accountable” in all the contexts they bridged (p. 463). in particular, the agency was held accountable to the federal refugee resettlement act, which limited the amount of services they could provide, and the time—90 days—in which they could offer the services. the agency was responsible for a myriad of services, including securing housing, medical services, and education. they also were required to provide esl and employment training so that the adult refugees could become economically independent as soon as possible. the mentors were to focus on the education of the refugee students. while they were bound by federal and state education policy, their primary accountability was to the district. their “tracking” system, replete with its database of logged contact hours, was not useful to the agencies. it did not serve as a boundary object, just as the caseload reports of the resettlement caseworkers, which were confidential, could not be used by the mentors. some things just could not be used across boundaries, and this limited the collaboration. concluding thoughts and recommendations schools in the u.s. can play a pivotal role in the lives not only of refugee students, but also their families. in our study, we point to some of the challenges in such collaborations. we also demonstrate the ways in which boundary spanners—in our study, mentors—can, in fact be instrumental in initiating, developing, and expanding the collaborations. the mentors in dusd extended the districts’ support beyond the schools to educate, nurture and care for students of refugee status. while the focus of the mentors was often on improving the academic engagement and achievement of the refugee students, they were also committed to supporting the refugee families integrate into the u.s. as the mentors bridged the boundaries, perceived and actual, between the refugees’ homes and their schools, they aimed to undo misunderstandings held by the families and dispel discriminatory perceptions of refugees in the schools. the extent to which they were able to do the latter is unclear, and was not a part of our study. however, anecdotal evidence suggests that several individual teachers and education leaders in the study became more understanding of the refugee students’ needs after interacting with the mentors. our study further extends the work of koyama and bazuka (2017), who found that when parents of refugee children are involved with decision making at their schools they become better adjusted to navigating the various challenges of an unfamiliar space and become advocates for their children. through their daily interactions with refugees and their parents, school leaders—such as tam, the director in this study—together with the mentors, can also advocate for refugees’ rights by connecting them to local community opportunities that provide them with greater resources and social support. parents of school children are inherently boundary spanners, but their competencies in those roles can be nurtured and supported, as we have documented, by district-level boundary spanners. this is particularly true for parents of refugee and other migrants. the findings from this study illustrate that more must be done in schools to mediate the lack of federal and state policy aimed at integrating refugees, who often arrive to the u.s. with limited local language knowledge, a lack of social connections, and mental and emotional health challenges (betancourt et al., 2012; walick & sullivan, 2015). instead of addressing these as a priority, the federal policy, the refugee resettlement act of 1980, requires that they be quickly employed upon arrival to contribute to the local economy and become 111 global education review 5(4) independent of the u.s. government (koyama, 2013). priorities need to be reordered, and we believe that schools can play an essential role in redefining the measures by which we view and evaluate the resettlement of refugees in the u.s. they can also commit to culturally relevant, newcomer-specific curriculum and pedagogy (bajaj and bartlett, 2017). finally, in utilizing the theory of boundary spanning we show the value of going beyond the confines of a school to nurture interactions between internal and external spanners to engage in collaborations and build relationships that seek to benefit student refugees and their families. additionally, we draw attention to the ways in which boundary spanners are marginalized, and even isolated, in their own organizations—and moreover, how boundaries, even in collaborative efforts, cannot be bridged. yet, we continue to believe that by creating inclusive boundaries within and beyond schools, we will be better attending to the united nations’ forth and tenth goals: 4.) “ensure inclusive and quality education for all and promote lifelong learning” and 10.) “reduce inequality within and among countries” (united nations, sustainable development goals, 2017). by expanding boundaries, those working in schools and policy-makers can make a difference in the lives of refugees who have already suffered so much. in this study, the work of the mentors, as boundary spanners, offer tangible ways in which other school districts can support refugee students and their families. references akkerman, s. f., and bakker, a. 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(2017, june 7). refugees and asylees in the united states. retrieved from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/r efugees-and-asylees-united-states about the author(s) sowmya ghosh, m.ed, is a doctoral candidate in educational policy studies and practice at the university of arizona. her research examines the ways in which global institutions develop their research portfolios through interdisciplinary research, internationalization and diversification strategies. at the ua, she also assesses the transnational education model known as the micro-campus initiative. jill koyama, a cultural anthropologist, is associate professor in educational policy studies and practice at the university of arizona (ua). she also serves as the director of ua’s institute for lgbt studies. her research focuses on the policy and politics associated with civil and human rights and the persistent segregation and marginalization of racial, cultural, ethnic, and linguistic minority children. http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1259 http://epaa.asu.edu/ojs/article/view/1259 https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/refugees-and-asylees-united-states https://www.migrationpolicy.org/article/refugees-and-asylees-united-states addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: sacher, cassandra o'sullivan, cheese, melissa, & richardson, scott (2019). addressing misperceptions of underprepared students: a case study at a public american university. global education review, 6 (4). 1-18. addressing misperceptions of underprepared students: a case study at a public american university cassandra o'sullivan sachar bloomsburg university of pennsylvania melissa cheese bloomsburg university of pennsylvania scott richardson university of houston-clear lake abstract this study examines faculty/staff perceptions of underprepared students as well as the experiences of these students in the college setting. understanding that this crucial population has poor retention, we sought to understand who they were and how the faculty/staff felt about them in an effort to better serve them. while most students surveyed believed their professors wanted them to succeed and were interested in their learning, they also offered insight into areas where faculty could further assist their progress. faculty/staff revealed both positive and negative feelings about underprepared students, often acknowledging feelings of helplessness when working with them. through data analysis of surveys from both populations, we identified key areas of focus on which to build a professional development model. by bridging gaps in faculty/staff understanding through a faculty networking approach, we are working together to become more student-ready in addressing student needs wherever they fall, thus promoting student success and retention. keywords underprepared students; underrepresented minorities; cultural responsiveness; at-promise; faculty/staff networking introduction through the years, educators have been inundated with terms and labels that serve to persuade how they engage. currently, higher education is challenged with retention, admission and identification. having a thorough understanding of an ever-changing landscape of who students are and where they come from is paramount to admission and retention. this also speaks very critically to inclusion and having a diverse workforce. oftentimes, student populations are judged instead of evaluated. the judgment seems to relate to a lack of diversity in visibility and experiences in those tasked to provide leadership to students. it is important that higher education understands that “gone are the days” of myopic views of who students are and where they come from. many students come from circumstances that fail to prepare them well for college or a successful future. if and when these students make it to college, it is up to the institutions to bridge the gaps to success. public access institutions have programs in place to grant opportunities for students who come from disadvantaged backgrounds. for example, educational opportunity programs provide support to disadvantaged students through advisement, tutoring, and mentoring. students in these programs come from groups traditionally underrepresented in higher education: low-income families, first-generation college students, and/or minority backgrounds. since they are academically underprepared, 2 global education review 6 (4) these students require one or more courses in reading, writing, and math to prepare them for college-level coursework. coming from diverse cultural, socioeconomic, educational, intellectual, and linguistic backgrounds, underprepared students need faculty/staff support inside and outside of the classroom in order to achieve. although programs currently exist to work with these students, we have noticed a fundamental disconnect that impedes faculty/staff in best meeting student needs. it is crucially important to heal the fractures, as educators sometimes close our classroom and office doors and teach/advise on our own islands. in this study, we have sought to learn about the misperceptions that faculty/staff have about students, while also investigating the experiences of students themselves, in an effort to transform negative perceptions about underprepared students and their learning potential. literature review from at-risk to at-promise to understand today’s challenges, it is important to note the history of how underprepared students have been represented and served in higher education. in the mid1960s, "at-risk" student programs began to appear on college campuses across the country. these programs were designed to permit a particular level of academic leniency for underprepared black students, who were being admitted into colleges with lower test scores than those of their white counterparts (ballard, 1973). ballard’s concerns were two-fold, as he questioned the "degree [to which] students [were] expected to achieve” along with factors that “would stop this situation from becoming a segregation epidemic in its own right" (1973, p. 90). these programs were put in place to address the special needs of a particular student population, provide opportunities for academic development, assist with basic college requirements, and motivate students towards the successful completion of postsecondary education. some common goals for postsecondary institutions were to increase the retention and graduation rates of students and effectively facilitate the transition from secondary to post-secondary education. thompson (1983) asserted, "as long as educational opportunity programs continue to be maintained, it is reasonable to expect research to be conducted on program effectiveness in achieving high retention and graduation rates for program participants" (p. 3). while “at-risk” programs have sought to help underprepared and underserved student populations, the language used to define these groups has been, until recently, negative and problematic. rios (1996) defined "at-risk" students as those who have a higher propensity to drop out of school, those that lack the motivation and skills necessary to perform adequately, those students who have attendance and/or discipline problems, and those with low self-esteem. chelemer, knapp, and means (1991) described them as "disadvantaged, educationally deprived, .and disproportionately poor from ethnic and linguistic minority backgrounds'' (p. xi). additionally, gordon and yowell (1994) summed up the definition of "at-risk'' students as “a category of persons whose characteristics, conditions of life, situational circumstances, and interactions with each other make it likely that their development and/or education will be less than optimal" (p. 53). finally, the phrase “atrisk” itself is rooted in medical terminology which implies that there is a challenge or circumstance that could threaten the success of a student (norris, 2014). while the challenges of underprepared students must be addressed in order to best support them, none of these addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 3 definitions acknowledge students’ potential, which can be damaging to the perceptions of the faculty/staff who will work with them in higher education. this sentiment is echoed by victor rios, a professor of sociology at the university of california, santa barbara. a first-generation college student who was initially unsuccessful in higher education, rios described his personal challenges with the negativity of the label, saying that since he “was labeled as a risk, [he] was treated as a risk,” creating a “self-fulfilling prophecy” (mckenzie, 2019, para. 12). in his interview with inside higher ed, rios went on to describe his disappointment in how some of his colleagues interact with students and voice the need for the changing of terminology. although resilience comes grounded in scholarly psychology work beginning in the early 70’s, the terms “at-promise” and “at-resilient” identify a more palatable approach for labeling, with a focus on students’ potential rather than deficiencies. following this shift, whiting (2006) describes the need to “break the cycle of poor achievement and school apathy” in black males and offers several suggestions for doing so, including mentoring, multicultural counseling, and community outreach (p. 226). similarly, chaney et al. (2012) urge colleges to view at-promise students as “resources to be cultivated, not problems to be solved” (p. 1). by making this transition in perspective, colleges can provide better experiences for students and ultimately improve retention. teaching with cultural responsiveness much of the body of research on cultural responsiveness comes from k-12 settings, but the principles can be applied to higher education, as these strategies are not agespecific. weinstein, tomlinson-clarke, and curran (2004) discuss five pillars of cultural responsive classroom management (crcm). the first, “recognition of one’s own ethnocentrism and biases,” involves exploring such concepts as white privilege to change the perception that different behaviors from other cultural groups are unacceptable (p. 29). next, “knowledge of students’ cultural backgrounds” can involve asking questions and reading articles about different groups’ cultural heritage to work towards “developing skills for cross-cultural interaction” (p.30). thirdly, to gain “awareness of the broader social, economic, and political context,” educators should reflect on how, traditionally, educational practices can “privilege select groups while marginalizing others” (p. 31); the authors suggest reflecting on instances of student noncompliance and developing strategies to overcome these struggles, such as through conversation and increased faculty/student interaction. the fourth component of crcm, “ability and willingness to use culturally appropriate management strategies,” involves reflection on whether or not treatment to students is equitable as well as appropriate to their cultural norms (for example, when giving praise or critique individually versus in a group setting) (p. 32). the final facet, “commitment to building caring classrooms,” focuses on advancing students’ motivation and achievement, as students perform better when they feel respected; the authors suggest reading about effective teachers and providing classroom activities to help students develop empathy for each other (p. 33). the authors emphasize the complexity of the topic as a whole and recommend training for educators in crcm. debnam et al. (2015) discuss the lack of quantitative research in the field of cultural responsiveness in teaching, noting instead the “overwhelming reliance on teacher self-report” and “substantial lack of outcome-focused research” (p. 535). thus, they created a study that surveyed teachers about their attitudes and self-efficacy while also employing the assist 4 global education review 6 (4) (assessing school settings: interactions of students and teachers) observational tool for trained observers to record and rate behaviors of teachers. perhaps unsurprisingly, teachers selfrated their levels of cultural responsiveness higher than the observers rated them. the researchers found that teachers who utilized cultural responsiveness strategies had higher student engagement, and they also noted low observer ratings of cultural responsiveness in math classes, suggesting that it may be difficult to include the behaviors within that type of instruction. the researchers felt that more work must be done to link specific culturally responsive teacher behaviors to outcomes to inform effective professional development. warren (2013) conducted a study focused on one cultural responsiveness strategy: empathy, which can help teachers “directly cater to the social and cultural needs, norms, realities, experiences, and preferences of racially, ethnically, and linguistically diverse students” (p. 176). the study focused on white female teachers and their interactions with black male students. the subjects were chosen by their supervisors and students as examples of success for working across gender, racial, and often socioeconomic lines to create positive student outcomes. trained observers attended classes to record and code student/teacher interactions. from the results, empathy was shown to “facilitate teachers’ instructional flexibility and risk-taking, establish trusting student-teacher relationships, and support teacher’s ability to intervene proactively to ensure students meet high academic expectations” (p. 175). she provides evidence of teacher/student interactions to demonstrate these ideals and linked them to student results. additionally, warren suggests strategies to build empathy, including “perspective-taking, using students’ social and cultural perspectives to guide subsequent interactions with them, and capitalizing on student feedback to adapt and repeat the process” (p. 178). when educators attempt to utilize empathy in their interactions with students, they advance their cultural responsiveness. to improve cultural responsiveness in preservice social studies teachers, tuncel (2017) conducted an action-research study in which individuals reflected on questions of diversity within their schools, researched different cultures, planned activities to manage cultural differences, discussed ideas with classmates, and reflected on learning. when preparing activities for the study, tuncel focused on four themes: “realizing differences, respect for differences, tolerance for differences, and creating common values” (p. 1325). in coding data obtained from various steps of the process, tuncel separated information into cognitive, affective, and behavioral dimensions. results of the study suggest that, in order to become more culturally responsive, pre-service teachers reflect on their own cultural identities while respecting differences. in their study, averill, anderson, and drake (2015) evaluated a training program where experienced teachers modelled cultural responsiveness strategies and then followed up with “in-the-moment” coaching of student teachers during practiced rehearsals (p. 63). researchers collected videos of teaching rehearsals and coded culturally responsive teaching attempts as well as coaching strategies. the researchers conclude that reflection and discussion of teaching and coaching strategies led to increased connections between theory and practice. advising underprepared students students who need remediation in classes typically require additional guidance from advisors. when students have multiple supports across campus, they are more likely to be successful (hollis, 2009). many universities addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 5 have achieved success with a network system; for example, faculty at murdoch university developed the first year advisor network to help new students achieve success. while the advisor is the central support, students are funneled to appropriate resources. faculty/staff have been trained to understand the system so that they can best help students (kemp, lefroy, & callan, 2013). mandatory meetings between students and advisors have had notable success. students who are underprepared are in need of strong guidance, but they often fail to seek out faculty support. a study by vivian (2005) examined the effectiveness of a program that required students to attend short, casual weekly meetings with the advisor and write a brief reflection of how they thought they were performing that week. these meetings encouraged students; seeing their mentor as a “trustworthy guide” (p. 349) while maintaining responsibility for their own progress may have influenced increased success, as the study group had more positive outcomes than the control group. the present study builds upon the discussed research by exploring perceptions and experiences to inform a professional development model. methodology instrument before we could reach out to faculty/staff to offer support in working with underprepared students, we had to attempt to better understand why students were not succeeding. what were the students’ experiences in the classroom, and what were the faculty/staff’s perceptions of the students? in the spring semester of 2017 at a four-year, public american university, we developed surveys for both populations: one was for underprepared students about their college experiences (appendix a), including such topics as levels of comfort and feelings of support, and the other was for faculty/staff to assess perceptions on cultural competence and the ability to serve underprepared students (appendix b). furthermore, we completed, submitted, and received approval from the institutional review board for our research proposal. both populations were invited to participate in a qualtrics survey via a link sent to their university e-mail accounts during the fall 2017 semester. the student survey was comprised of questions that addressed demographics, selfefficacy, and personal beliefs/experiences. the majority of the questions in this survey required students to respond using a 4-point likert scale: 1=strongly agree; 2=agree; 3=disagree; and 4=strongly disagree. students responded to the remaining questions by selecting their responses from a pull-down menu and writing responses to open-ended questions. the faculty/staff survey asked questions to identify roles at the university, levels and qualities of interactions with students they believed were classified as underprepared, and perceptions of student readiness/competencies. questions included selecting answers from a pull-down menu and responding with text to open-ended questions. participants/sample seventy-nine students responded to the survey sent to all students served by the educational opportunity program. this included 15 males and 64 females. 25 students identified as spanish, hispanic, or latino; 28 white; 26 black or african american; 3 asian; 3 native hawaiian or pacific islander; and 1 american indian or alaska native. in terms of academic standing, 41 were freshmen, 13 were sophomores, 12 were juniors, and 13 were seniors based on self-identification. almost half of the respondents (39) reported themselves as first-generation college students, while 38 said they were not and 2 were unsure. 0 students who completed the survey identified as transfer 6 global education review 6 (4) students. it should be noted that more students than self-selected were classified by the university as first-generation based on institutional data. the survey included the participation of 221 faculty/staff members. this included 82 tenured or tenure-track faculty, 31 adjunct faculty, 16 administrators, and 92 staff members from various divisions including police, facilities, academic and student affairs. 136 reported that they work/interact directly with students, 27 reported working/interacting indirectly with students, and 7 reported no work/interactions, with the rest failing to respond to that question. data analysis the data analysis method used for this study was content analysis. patton (2002) argued that content analysis “refer[s] to any qualitative data reduction and sense-making effort that takes a volume of qualitative material and attempts to identify core consistencies and meanings” (p. 453). according to patton, these core meanings were known as patterns or themes that emerge from the data. once the themes emerged, it was our responsibility as researchers to “develop some manageable classification or coding scheme… which involved identifying, coding, categorizing, classifying, and labeling the primary patterns in the data” (patton, 2002, p. 463). open-ended responses for the student and faculty/staff surveys were coded separately by question. we identified recurring themes within each question with open coding. separately and individually, we read each participant’s response to the question and created initial codes. next, we compared results, adding, condensing, or adapting wording as we felt necessary. finally, with these revised codes, we reread participants’ responses and categorized them appropriately using nvivo 11 statistical qualitative software. results and discussion student surveys though students indicated differences in their college experiences through the likert scale questions, many were very positive overall. nearly half (40) felt well-prepared for college by their high schools, choosing agree or strongly agree, while the other 37 did not, selecting disagree or strongly disagree. still, most (61 of 77) did not find the transition difficult. upon reflection of the role of race in their college experience, students overwhelmingly (75 of 77) responded comfort in working with classmates of different races and usually (72 of 76) felt that they were treated respectfully by professors regardless of race. only 45 of 77 students responded that professors used teaching materials that included members of their racial background, and some (18 of 77) reported feeling uncomfortable in class due to race. our overall findings revealed that most students felt their professors wanted them to succeed and were interested in what they had to contribute to the class discussion. additionally, students wanted professors to provide clearer directions, give support and encouragement, and connect course material to real life. table 1 shows the results for student responses to the following question, “can you identify any teaching techniques that have helped you succeed? list as many as possible, including any specific examples.” the use of the online learning and teaching platform produced the third highest response, falling behind two categories related to learning styles. students identified study strategies/guides and active learning as approaches that contributed to their success. table 2 shows the results for student responses to the following question, “what advice would you give to your professors on how to serve students better?” in addition, students described a number of ways that their instructors could be more helpful to them. for addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 7 example, “always leave room open for discussion and questions. and most importantly, never, and i mean never, read directly from the slides. as a professor or doctor of the discourse, the material should be known inside ‘n out, around, and up and down.” another student replied, “to not be mad at us if we don’t understand.” still another student stated, “don’t discourage them. be supportive. especially if the topic is hard material.” faculty/staff surveys open-ended responses to the staff surveys revealed a myriad of feelings and perceptions about at-promise students. in answer to the question, “what do you believe to be characteristics of students served by the department of academic enrichment? please describe,” negative perceptions emerged that these students were underprepared, lowperforming, unmotivated, and deficient. however, positive perceptions, including that students were energetic, diligent, eager to learn, and motivated, also were recorded by respondents. table 3 indicates popular themes that emerged. a second question that elicited noteworthy responses from faculty/staff was, “in general, what is your biggest challenge in working/interacting with academically underprepared students?” responses (see themes in table 4) often indicated frustration with the lack of students preparedness (i.e., “i want to teach the content… but [students] cannot do the basic reading and writing necessary to engage with the material” and “they are behind the eight ball from the beginning”). however, other respondents championed these students and indicated their frustrations for, rather than with, them (i.e., “i do not consider much to be a challenge, as it is part of why i enjoy working with my students; however, the most challenging aspect has to do more with how others interact with my students”). in response to the question, “in general, what methods have been successful for you in working/interacting with underprepared students?” responses were information-rich, often focusing on the effect of student/faculty relationships and success. many respondents offered tips to build connections with students; faculty referenced triumphs in student success after “listening and getting their full story,” “trying to understand their background/experiences,” and “holding high expectations.” however, some neglected to answer the question and responded instead to indicate their feelings about underprepared students (i.e., “i am frustrated as to how these students got into my classes in the first place. they are not of an academic level that would be conducive to succeeding in the first place”). table 5 offers common themes of what faculty/staff found to be successful for them. limitations while the faculty/staff population surveyed offered a sweeping view of the perceptions at our university, we were only able to obtain surveys from a relatively small group of underprepared students, as we were unable to gain permission to survey larger populations and could only survey students classified as belonging to the educational opportunity program. while we found the 79 respondents’ surveys informationrich, we may have uncovered further insights from additional respondents. implications having completed survey analysis and uncovered disconnects between student needs and faculty offerings, we have lain the foundation for a faculty/staff networking program to better serve underprepared students and increase retention of this crucial population. 8 global education review 6 (4) with our survey to faculty/staff, we sent out feelers for interest in furthering the discussion on underprepared students and how we could serve them. throughout the fall 2018 semester, we met with faculty and staff across campus, as well as some student leaders, to share what we had learned from the survey and discuss moving forward. from these discussions, we generated a focus for a professional development plan and faculty networking approach. globally, similar to american institutions, higher education sectors in countries such as australia and south africa are also faced with the challenge of supporting an increasing number of underprepared students (dell, 2010; govender, 2013; steenkamp & roberts, 2016). while identifying faculty/staff perceptions of these students is crucial, another key factor is to implement a plan to promote the academic success of these underperforming students. thus, we offer the following guidelines for creating a professional development model:  increase awareness of challenges of underprepared students  provide cross-campus strategies for working with underprepared students  reframe impressions about underprepared students to become more “student-ready”  create a central hub to support student success  establish points of contact for student resources  develop a network of advocates for underprepared students  raise visibility of and form connections between different programs supporting underprepared students in addition to sharing the results of the surveys, our professional development program includes information on underprepared student in addition to sharing the results of the surveys, our professional development program includes information on underprepared student challenges and cultural competency practices. we will begin our professional development sessions in fall 2019 and offer trainings through our teaching and learning enhancement center. depending on the interest and need, we may develop a webinar. additionally, we plan to facilitate networking by suggesting trainees to lead book club discussions on relevant literature. while our focus is on underprepared students, faculty/staff networking can occur around a great variety of topics. we recommend the following steps and discussion questions to create a program where faculty work together to improve their practice: 1. establish leaders of the initiative: who is in charge? for what will they be responsible? 2. develop goals/mission statement: what objectives will be accomplished? how will these be initiated? 3. gain support from leadership team: why should administrators support this initiative? what will it accomplish for the campus community? how will it impact retention? 4. identify/reach out to like-minded individuals: is there anyone else with similar interests/goals? how can they become involved in this program? 5. analyze existing programs and resources to avoid duplication: how is this program different from others? what does it contribute to the collective? 6. research best practices and create/gather resources for sharing: what will the sessions actually entail? what takeaways will participants have? is there any follow-up for future reflection/action? addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 9 7. conduct faculty & staff training sessions: how long will the sessions be, and how often will they be operated? where will the sessions be held, and how will faculty/staff sign up to participate? how will advertising occur? 8. assess and revise program as necessary: what has been effective, and what hasn’t been? how can the program grow to include more faculty? how can faculty interact together in a more meaningful way? conclusion while students recognize that most faculty/staff hope for their success, it is clear from our findings that student needs could be better met, not just at our own university but at others. increased awareness must be brought to the challenges that underprepared students face; through gaining an understanding of the obstacles, staff/faculty can learn to be more empathetic and better prepared to assist in problem-solving. mulvey (2008) discusses the need for higher education to help underprepared students “become active contributors to american society” by “acknowledge[ing] their potential and accept[ing] responsibility for educating these students” (2008, p. 85). many faculty/staff are additionally struggling with issues of cultural responsiveness and require training. sue (2010) discusses the problematic behavior of microaggressions, which he defines as “brief, everyday exchanges that send denigrating messages to certain individuals because of their [marginalized] group membership” (p. xvi). whether intentional or unintentional, these commonplace verbal or behavioral indignities communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative slights and or insults. in their study, smith, mao, and deshpande (2016) describe the detriments of microaggressions as causing students to experience “feelings of stigmatization and alienation” (p. 127). if trained through a model such as the “address microaggressions” one recommended by sigg (2018), faculty/staff may begin to understand, confront, and break their own incidents of racially problematic behavior. in order to meet students where they are, rather than wish for different students, it is up to faculty/staff to adjust their approaches. strategies such as clarifying expectations with rubrics and examples, offering feedback that recognizes strengths as well as areas for improvement, holding high expectations, encouraging help-seeking behavior, and offering advice on how to be successful, educators have the power to affect student retention and success (lohman, 2015). by increasing the sharing of resources and opportunities, and taking the approach that the retention of underprepared students is a shared responsibility, faculty/staff can best impact students. though experts in different content areas, educators work with the same students and can learn from each other, especially in identifying high impact next practices for this critical population. these networks can support teaching, advising, wellness, and more. other institutions that have implemented networking approaches have seen increases in student retention and success (bickerstaff, lontz, cormier, & xu, 2014; hollis, 2009; kemp et al., 2013; siegel, 2011). through faculty/staff networking, we can reframe the impression that our students are atrisk and describe them, instead, as at-promise. by becoming student allies as well as allies to other colleagues, we support student retention, confidence, and inclusion. 10 global education review 6 (4) tables table 1. helpful teaching techniques. themes number of responses study strategies and guides 13 active learning 11 use of online learning and teaching platform 9 office hours 7 group work 4 clear directions 4 notes: n= 45; respondents were able to provide answers with multiple codes. table 2. student advice for professors. themes number of responses give support, understanding, and/or respect 21 be flexible 14 explain more 10 make learning meaningful 9 use technology 2 notes: n= 45; respondents were able to provide answers with multiple codes. table 3. perceived characteristics of program students. themes number of responses underprepared 77 challenged 67 motivated 10 diverse 9 rude 2 addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 11 notes: n= 109; respondents were able to provide answers with multiple codes. table 4. challenges working with underprepared students. themes number of responses unprepared or lacking skills 34 low motivation 20 trouble accessing resources and support 14 unrealistic expectations 12 lack of confidence 9 difficulty creating balance 9 notes: n= 103; respondents were able to provide answers with multiple codes. table 5. successful teaching strategies. themes number of responses individual support 43 building trust and respect 25 connecting to resources 23 giving strategies 13 notes: n= 98; respondents were able to provide answers with multiple codes. 12 global education review 6 (4) appendix a: student survey introduction: the purpose of this survey is to collect information on your thoughts and experiences. this information will be used to educate faculty and staff about your thoughts on different topics to help make positive changes that will affect your educational experience and that of others. your responses are anonymous. please complete as many questions as you can and add additional comments as you like. when you finish the survey, you will be directed to provide your contact information for the chance to win a gift card to the bookstore. clicking on the “agree” button below indicates that · you voluntarily give your consent to participate. · you are at least 18 years old. · you are or were affiliated with one of the following programs: act 101 or eop if any of the above is not true, click on the “disagree” button to exit the survey.  i agree  i disagree what is your age? what is your gender?  male  female  transgender  i prefer not to say. are you spanish, hispanic, or latino or none of these?  yes  none of these are you spanish, hispanic, or latino?  spanish  hispanic  latino addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 13 choose one or more races that you consider yourself to be:  white  black or african american  american indian or alaska native  asian  native hawaiian or pacific islander  i prefer not to say what is your standing?  freshman  sophomore  junior  senior  graduate student are you a first-generation college student; that is, are you the first person in your family to go to college?  yes  no  not sure did you participate in the summer program before the start of your freshman year?  yes  no are you a transfer student?  yes  no 14 global education review 6 (4) you will now be asked to rate some of your experiences at xxx. please select from the following for each question:  strongly agree  agree  disagree  strongly disagree you may enter additional comments on each question as you wish. 1. i feel that my high school prepared me for college. 2. my transition into college was not difficult. 3. my professors use teaching materials (literature, art, media, etc.) that include members of my racial background. 4. i feel comfortable working with classmates whose races are different from mine. 5. my professors treat students respectfully regardless of race. 6. i have never felt uncomfortable in a classroom at bloomsburg university because of my race. 7. my professors want me to succeed in their classes. 8. my professors believe i am capable of succeeding in their classes. 9. my professors are interested in the contributions i make in the classroom. 10. if i’m struggling in a class, i know how to get help. 11. my academic advisor helped me select appropriate classes to fulfill my requirements. 12. i would like/would have liked additional guidance on how to get into a major. 13. if my professors/advisors were unable to assist me, they have referred me to the appropriate resources or people who could help me. open-ended questions: 1. can you identify any teaching techniques that have helped you succeed? list as many as possible, including any specific examples. 2. what advice would you give to your professors on how to serve students better? thank you for your responses. please click the submit button to record your responses and take you to an optional screen to enter information to enter in to the drawing for a bu bookstore gift card. addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 15 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: sacher, cassandra o'sullivan, cheese, melissa, & richardson, scott (2019). addressing misperceptions of underprepared students: a case study at a public american university. global education review, 6 (4). 1-18. appendix b: faculty/staff survey introduction: the purpose of this survey is to collect information about perceptions of and interactions with students served by the department of academic enrichment. participation is voluntary and responses are anonymous. this information will help us understand attitudes so we can better serve our students. irb # 2017-30 clicking on the “agree” button below indicates that you give your consent to participate. if you do not give your consent to participate, click on the “disagree” button.  i agree  i do not agree condition: i do not agree is selected. skip to: end of survey. what is your position at the university?  faculty: tenured/ tenure-track  faculty: adjunct  administration  staff display this question: if staff is selected what is your position at the university? indicate the division/unit with which you are primarily affiliated:  academic affairs  facilities  finance and business services  student affairs  university advancement  other ____________________  unsure  don’t care to say what do you believe to be characteristics of students served by the department of academic enrichment? please describe. to what extent do you work/interact with students?  directly  indirectly  not at all condition: not at all is selected. skip to: end of survey. 16 global education review 6 (4) do you work/interact with students served by the department of academic enrichment?  yes  no  i am not sure explain why you believe that you do or do not work/interact with students served by the department of academic enrichment. in general, what is your biggest challenge in working/interacting with academically underprepared students? in general, what methods have been successful for you in working/interacting with academically underprepared students? students served by the department of academic enrichment contacts thank you for your participation! are you interested in information about serving on a cross-campus network to share strategies and provide support to students served by the department of academic enrichment?  yes  no condition: no is selected. skip to: end of survey. please provide your name and contact information so we may contact you with information about this opportunity for university service. this information will not be associated with your survey responses in any way and all responses in the survey will remain anonymous. name email phone number thank you for your participation! we will be in touch with more information soon. addressing misperceptions of underprepared students 17 references averill, r., anderson, d., & drake, m. (2015). developing culturally responsive teaching through professional noticing within teacher educator modelling. mathematics teacher education and development, 17(2), 6483. ballard, b. a (1973). the education of black folk: the afro-american struggle for knowledge in white america. new york: harper and row. bickerstaff, s., lontz, b., cormier, m. s., & xu, d. (2014). redesigning arithmetic for student success: supporting faculty to teach in new ways. new directions for community colleges, 2014(167), 5-14. chaney, m., cloutier, a. l., densmore, a., fulmer, m. j., gonko, l., maxa., v., … wildfong, d. (2012). moving from at risk to at promise: a paradigm shift for community colleges addressing underprepared students. at issue, 2(1), 1-8. chelemer, c., knapp, m., and means, b. (eds.). (1991). teaching advanced skills to atrisk students. san francisco: jossey-bass. debnam, k. j., pas, e. t., bottiani, j., cash, e. h., & bradshaw, c. p. (2015). an examination of the association between observed and selfreported culturally proficient teaching practices. psychology in the schools, 52(6), 533-548. dell, s. (2010, january 17). south africa: universities face more under-prepared students. university world news: africa edition. retrieved from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.ph p?story=20100114190733824 gordan, e., & yowell, c. (1994). cultural dissonance as a risk factor in the development of students. new york: teachers college press. govender, t. (2013, april 20). the education gap – practical solutions to key barriers. university world news: the global window on higher education. retrieved from https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.ph p?story=20130419125136707 hollis, l. p. (2009). academic advising in the wonderland of college for developmental students. college studies journal, 43(1), 31-35. kemp, h., lefroy, a., & callan, n. (2013). three-tiered support: individual, school and institution-wide initiatives through a first year advisor network. the international journal of the first year in higher education, 4(2), 75-86. lohman, l. (2015, august 9). 22 tips for teaching first-generation college students at csuf. faculty development center, california state university, fullerton. retrieved from http://fdc.fullerton.edu/_resources/images/tea ching/teaching%20firstgeneration%20college%20students.pdf mckenzie, l. (2019, november 5). no more ‘at-risk’ students in california. inside higher ed. retrieved from https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11 /05/changing-conversation-about%e2%80%9c-risk%e2%80%9d-studentscalifornia mulvey, m. e. (2008). underprepared students--a continuing challenge for higher education. research & teaching in developmental education, 24(2), 77-87. norris, m. d. (2014). at risk students and resiliency. electronic theses, projects, and dissertations. retrieved from https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/62 patton, m. q. (2002). qualitative research & evaluation methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications. rios, f. a. (ed.). (1996). teacher thinking in cultural contexts. albany, ny: state university of new york press. sigg, n. (2018, january 31). microaggressions, equity, & inclusion: lessen the racial divide to create an inclusive campus culture [webinar]. paperclip communications. retrieved from https://www.paperhttps://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20100114190733824 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20100114190733824 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20130419125136707 https://www.universityworldnews.com/post.php?story=20130419125136707 http://fdc.fullerton.edu/_resources/images/teaching/teaching%20first-generation%20college%20students.pdf http://fdc.fullerton.edu/_resources/images/teaching/teaching%20first-generation%20college%20students.pdf http://fdc.fullerton.edu/_resources/images/teaching/teaching%20first-generation%20college%20students.pdf https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/05/changing-conversation-about-%e2%80%9c-risk%e2%80%9d-students-california https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/05/changing-conversation-about-%e2%80%9c-risk%e2%80%9d-students-california https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/05/changing-conversation-about-%e2%80%9c-risk%e2%80%9d-students-california https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2019/11/05/changing-conversation-about-%e2%80%9c-risk%e2%80%9d-students-california https://scholarworks.lib.csusb.edu/etd/62 https://www.paper-clip.com/main/%20product-catalog/microaggressions-equity-inclusion-lessen-the-racia-3678.aspx 18 global education review 6 (4) clip.com/main/ productcatalog/microaggressions-equity-inclusionlessen-the-racia-3678.aspx siegel, m. j. (2011). reimagining the retention problem: moving our thinking from end-product to by-product. about campus, 15(6), 8-18. smith, l., pao, s., & deshpande, a. (2016). “talking across worlds”: classist microaggressions and higher education. journal of poverty, 20(2), 127-151. steenkamp, n., & roberts, r. (2016). unethical practices in response to poor student quality: an australian perspective. the accounting educators’ journal, 26, 89-119. thompson, m. v. (1983). retention of highrisk students at cheyney university: effectiveness of two intervention strategies (pennsylvania). proquest. retrieved from https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/aai 8406726 tuncel, g. (2017). improving the cultural responsiveness of prospective social studies teachers: an action research. educational sciences: theory & practice, 17(4), 1317-1344. vivian, c. (2005). advising the at-risk college student. the educational forum, 69, 336351. warren, c. a. (2013). the utility of empathy for white female teachers’ culturally responsive interactions with black male students. interdisciplinary journal of teaching and learning, 3(3), 175-200. weinstein, c. s., tomlinson-clarke, s., & curran, m. (2004). toward a conception of culturally responsive classroom management. journal of teacher education, 55(1), 25-38. whiting, g. w. (2006). from at risk to at promise: developing scholar identities among black males. the journal of secondary gifted education, xvii(4), 222-229. about the authors cassandra o’sullivan sachar is an assistant professor of writing in the department of academic enrichment at bloomsburg university. she earned her doctorate of education in educational leadership from the university of delaware. her research interests include providing meaningful feedback, utilizing metacognitive revision to promote writing achievement, and working with at-promise students. melissa cheese is an assistant professor of reading in the department of academic enrichment at bloomsburg university. she earned her ed.d. in literacy studies from hofstra university. her research interests include using literacy practices, culturally relevant pedagogy, and student success and retention strategies to support at-promise students’ learning and development. scott richardson is the chief diversity and inclusion officer at the university of houstonclear lake. he earned his doctorate of education in higher education administration at widener university. his research interests include the human condition, social and critical thinking, and race relations. he is a very proud alumnus of the milton s. hershey school. without that opportunity, he would not be who he is today. https://www.paper-clip.com/main/%20product-catalog/microaggressions-equity-inclusion-lessen-the-racia-3678.aspx https://www.paper-clip.com/main/%20product-catalog/microaggressions-equity-inclusion-lessen-the-racia-3678.aspx https://www.paper-clip.com/main/%20product-catalog/microaggressions-equity-inclusion-lessen-the-racia-3678.aspx https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/aai8406726 https://repository.upenn.edu/dissertations/aai8406726 context-based approaches 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: chung, mi-hyun, and gouleta, eirini (2020). context-based approaches to developing theories of change in basic education. global education review, 7 (1). 1-5. context-based approaches to developing theories of change in basic education mi-hyun chung mercy college, new york eirini gouleta university of macedonia, greece in 2015, ending the era of the millennium development goals (mdgs), members of the united nations agreed to adopt more inclusive global goals—the sustainable development goals (sdgs)—in order to fight plagues and poverty, protect the environment, and provide the world with peace and prosperity by 2030 (un, n.d.; undp, 2015). among the 17 areas for improvement in the plan of the sdgs, we believe “quality education” is the central goal to influence the success of the other goals because education is the pathway toward transforming people and developing collaborative partnership. however, there is no one right way of education, generic enough to be applicable to all the different states, countries, or nations in the world. rather, we believe that education practices should be relevant to each context and targeted to the specific population in such context to be more effective. in addition, the sdgs recognize that education is the key for equity to build a stronger and just society (caprani, 2016). we therefore support the needs of equal access to quality educational opportunities for all age groups, including students from the most disadvantaged backgrounds. but how can we ensure that efforts to improve education in the world are more targeted, relevant, and effective? to support achievement of educational goals, developing a theory of change (toc) is necessary. a toc is the central framework that drives most project designs in international development. according to vogel (2012), a “theory of change, is an outcomes-based approach which applies critical thinking to the design, implementation and evaluation of initiatives and programmes intended to support change in their contexts (pg. 1).” additionally, unlike large-scale experimental studies, the toc approach provides a quality but inexpensive tool to evaluate program impact that can frame and inform the program evaluation (jackson, 2013). in short, the toc provides the basis for decisions about the chosen program activities, investments, and monitoring and evaluation protocols. it is based on a set of assumptions which explain the rationale and the process that will result in the desired outcomes within a context. the sdgs set up the goals and targets to achieve, whereas the toc lays out the logistics to follow in achieving such outcomes. the sdgs are a complex project for any country, which involves many players at all levels, including the governments, the private sector, civil and international communities, and a need for a systemic approach that can map out the logistics was called for. in the call for this issue, we encouraged the global community of scholars and development 2 global education review 7 (1) experts to examine specific contexts such as cultural, social, political and economic factors to develop toc for teaching and learning, and education policies and systems. we envisioned this special issue of as providing an opportunity to the international education community to rethink the ways interventions have been designed and implemented, and go beyond the boundaries of the western or other dominant educational approaches. responding to the call, a team of researchers, benjamin alcott, pauline rose, ricardo sabates, and christine ellison, report the process they undertook to develop theories of change across ten countries in “from assessment to action: lessons from the development of theories of change with the people’s action for learning network.” the effort was collaborative with the members of the people’s action for learning (pal) network in developing theories of change to design and implement context-specific interventions. based on the results from the “citizen-led assessments” pal had developed, it was revealed that the children from disadvantaged backgrounds performed poorly in the assessments. to tackle the issue, the researchers identified the common stages through which pal members should work for better outcomes in learning. while they argue for the common frame that is generic enough for different countries, they highlight the pressing need for flexibility when the frame is adapted to each country. defining the theory of change as a tool for “on-going deliberation to work with complexity” and based on the local context and reality, mariam smith and jessica ball, in “focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change to increase inclusion in basic education reforms,” describe and discuss three levels of theory of change, from a generic theory of change to an actor-focused theory of change. their research starts with reporting a case study of creating a theory of change for an indigenous language-in-education initiative. the first theory of change is generic, providing a snapshot of the intentions and the main strategies of the cambodia’s government’s multilingual education national action plan (menap). the second theory of change is more actor-focused, presenting key relationships among actors who are engaged in implementing the strategies to the field and describing the specific behaviors relevant to the implementation of the menap. the third theory of change is also an actor-focused, depicting the intermediate level outcomes and perceived perspectives on change based on the data. this article shows the potential and benefit of the theory of change to support educational reforms at different stages or levels and explains that the practitioners should understand how the theory of change can shape or limit the way they think and behave in the field. pointing out issues stemming from english or other second language-based multilingual education, corrie blankenbecker, in “designing for complexity in mother tongue or first language (l1)-based multilingual education programs,” argues that many factors should be examined to design appropriate first languagebased multilingual education programs. mothertongue or first language-based language programs should divert from a linear approach to understand the complex nature of language teaching and learning in multilingual settings. language programs should consider a range of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical issues that “include language structure and literacy assessment, language policy and politics, as well as cultural and social behavior change linked to literacy expansion”. without considering these factors, the “one-sizefit all” approaches may result in unintentional negative consequences. the article focuses its argument on developing early literacy programs and examines alternative approaches in context-based approaches 3 developing theory of changes that is applicable to the first language-based multilingual program in early literacy education. interestingly, these articles have discussions on issues of language education, and how various factors including local culture and policies should be considered in developing a theory of change for language teaching and learning. this argument is not surprising, because language and literacy is not only an important field of study, but also an imperative tool for success in any level of society; regional, national, or international community. according to wagner (2017), there are two levels of approaches we need to consider when it comes to responding to the issues of multilingual education. first, we need to examine sociopolitical realities and consider practical solutions suitable to each context. some of the questions we want to answer in this level of approach include: “what are the dynamics of languages in a multilingual society?” “what is the need of official languages to be successful in such a society?” and “how can we support students to be fluent in national languages?” second, we must apply a more inclusive pedagogy of language teaching and learning. smith and ball present the three different theories of change with the procedure that can be followed by others who want to develop alternative approaches for different contexts. blankenbecker argues for a close examination of the hegemony of a dominant language in multilingual educational settings, and calls for the development of first-language based approach in early literacy education. alcott, rose, sabates and ellison emphasize the importance of assessment and data-driven decisions and actions. based on the results from the “citizen-led assessments” pal had developed, it was revealed that the children from disadvantaged backgrounds performed poorly in the assessments. then, what can such “disadvantaged” backgrounds mean to us and to education? when applied to multilingual societies, children from marginalized communities are easy to fail in schools because they do not know the dominant language or language of instruction in the classroom. this issue is often beyond the boundary of schooling, because the dominant language is closely connected to social classes or political powers (e.g. kaiper, 2018). bilateral and multilateral donors, nongovernment organizations(ngos) and private development foundations, country governments, and stakeholders in international education development have been focusing their efforts— making huge monetary and other investments— to eliminate illiteracy, poverty, inequality, inequity, and marginalization in the world by designing education programs for children including minorities, children with disabilities, and hard to reach children in conflict and crisis, girls, and marginalized populations. despite the amount of effort, time, and resources that have gone into education development, the progress as it is measured through the results and outcomes is not the one expected and most importantly not matched with the level of the contributions. as the sdgs aim to end poverty, protect the planet, and ensure safety and prosperity for all by the year 2030, placing education as a central and underlining goal that influences and to a degree determines the level of success of all other 16 goals, it is imperative that we take a hard look at the work we have been doing and develop better frameworks for effective educational interventions not only in developing and transforming countries but also in developed countries’ underdeveloped and deprived areas. educational programs have been traditionally focusing at least on four main areas within the educational context of the countries of intervention including: 4 global education review 7 (1) (i) improving classroom instructional practices (textbooks and materials, teacher guides and training and coaching, literacy and numeracy approaches, first language support and instruction, girls schooling, universal design and inclusive education. (ii) strengthening the ways education systems are organized, function, and deliver services including education management information systems (emis) programs, education and language of instruction policy development, educational assessment policy development, educational policy for children with disabilities, girls, and minority populations, education ministry organizational structures and procedures, teacher education, recruitment, deployment, retention, and support, book supply chain, and effective coordination and collaboration among education stakeholders. (iii) developing and supporting programs for family and community engagement including the creation, training, and mobilization of parent teacher associations (ptas), the development of programs for young children at the preprimary education age, supporting and educating families and caregivers for children with disabilities, running literacy and biliteracy campaigns within communities and localities, and providing monetary and other incentives to families and communities to send and keep their children in school and to be active participants and supporters in their education process. (iv) addressing education access and quality for all, including children with disabilities in conflict and crisis states, in times of epidemics, natural disasters, political unrest and displacement including providing school buildings, school feeding, teacher training and educational materials for literacy, numeracy and socio-emotional learning, and supporting families and communities in times of hopelessness and crisis. however, although the above areas of intervention may paint the picture of a rather comprehensive and holistic approach to tackle illiteracy and inequality in educational opportunity in the world many very expensive programs fail to deliver the aspiring results. one of the questions this raises is to what extent the toc embodied in international development organizations and agencies’ interventions go beyond of what are thought to be complex processes. indeed, while there is now expert consensus on the importance of understanding the country context, it is unclear how effectively our interventions have been in this respect. there is a real need and opportunity to reexamine how carefully our education programs have sought to understand the foundations of specific contexts in terms of historical, cultural, social, and economic forces that drive a system. to investigate the epistemological underpinnings or assumptions that define literacy and educational processes in any given community. and to examine and determine the ways such deeper understanding inform the development community’s efforts to tailor interventions according to their needs going beyond the incorporation of educational approaches and system structures that are borrowed -unexaminedfrom other countries. it seems that there is still a lot of room to rethink the ways we develop our interventions. we propose to “alter from doing business as usual” no matter how difficult this may be in a world with long tradition of government inflexibility and bureaucracy. we advocate for sincere and honest attempts at context-based approaches to understanding the environment of an intervention and to create new, innovative frameworks of developing a theory of change that has a better chance to bring the “change” that has been promised context-based approaches 5 references caprani, l. (2016). five ways the sustainable development goals are better than the millennium development goals and why every educationalist should care. management in education, 30(3), 102–104. https://doi-org.rdasproxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/0892020616653464 jackson, e. t. (2013). interrogating the theory of change: evaluating impact investing where it matters most. journal of sustainable finance & investment, 3(2), 95-110. http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20430795.2013.7762 57 kaiper, a. (2018). “if you don’t have english, you’re just as good as a dead person”: a narrative of adult english language literacy within post-apartheid south africa. international review of education / internationale zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaft, 64(6), 737–757. https://doi-org.rdasproxy.mercy.edu/10.1007/s11159-018-9733-y united nations. (n.d.). transforming our world: the united nations 2030 agenda for sustainable development. https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content /documents/21252030%20agenda%20for%20s ustainable%20development%20web.pdf united nations development program. (2015). sustainable development goals. https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home /sustainable-development-goals/background/ united nations sustainable development group. (2016, january 26). a “theory of change” for the un development system to function “as a system” for relevance, strategic positioning and results summary. paper version 1.0. vogel, i. (2012). review of the use of “theory of change” in international development. a review report commissioned by the united kingdom department for international development (uk dfid). wagner, d. a. (2017). children’s reading in low-income countries. reading teacher, 71(2), 127–133. https://doi-org.rdasproxy.mercy.edu/10.1002/trtr.1621 weiss, c. (1995). nothing as practical as good theory: exploring theory-based evaluation for comprehensive community initiatives for children and families. new approaches to evaluating community initiatives. aspen institute. about the authors mi-hyun chung is a professor in the department of literacy and multilingual studies in the school of education at mercy college in new york. eirini gouleta is an associate professor of multicultural special education at the university of macedonia in greece. https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/0892020616653464 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/0892020616653464 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20430795.2013.776257 http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/20430795.2013.776257 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1007/s11159-018-9733-y https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1007/s11159-018-9733-y https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20agenda%20for%20sustainable%20development%20web.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20agenda%20for%20sustainable%20development%20web.pdf https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org/content/documents/21252030%20agenda%20for%20sustainable%20development%20web.pdf https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/background/ https://www.undp.org/content/undp/en/home/sustainable-development-goals/background/ https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1002/trtr.1621 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1002/trtr.1621 refugee experience aand transformative learning 194 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: margaroni, mary, & magos, kostas (2018). refugee experience and transformative learning. global education review, 5 (4), 194-210. refugee experience and transformative learning mary margaroni aristotle university of thessaloniki/greece kostas magos university of thessaly/greece abstract this paper uses the biographical method to investigate the contribution of the refugee experience in the process of transformation in young afghan asylum seekers in greece. it examines the participants’ extremely adverse socio-political background in their country of origin; the marginalization that existed in the long-term intermediate refugee station, iran; the arduous and perilous journey to the west and their experiences in their new host country greece. what emerges is that the participants’ initial frame of reference is problematic, in the sense that they can no longer function effectively in the new social environment (the host country). thus, they learn a new frame of reference and there is a transformation of their wider mental habits. by means of a comparative reflective approach of old and new frames of reference and mentalities, the participants re-evaluate among other things, religion, gender and intergenerational relations, and generally the adoption of human rights as a prerequisite sine qua non, for the restoration of respect for human existence. keywords αsylum seekers, refugees, transformative learning, greece introduction the present paper investigates the contribution of the refugee experience in the process of transformation of young asylum seekers in greece. therefore, the particular thematic belongs to the wider scientific field of refugee studies, having an anthropological approach (anthropology of refugees) (harrell-bond & voutira, 1992). it also enters the scientific field of transformative learning (tl). what is of primary interest is to what degree the refugees’ difficulties are raised to disorienting experiences of the utmost importance. these constitute a potential starting point for internal transformational processes, starting with the reevaluation of the arguments which possibly support problematic signifying perspectives or dysfunctional frames of reference, including those representing cultural or environmental factors. in this way, these frames can become more inclusive, open and contemplative and – thereby – be transformed (mezirow, 2000). in particular, it is examined to what degree and in what ways the participants process their existing frames of reference, learn new ones, and transform scopes, views and, in general, their mental habits. corresponding author mary margaroni, aristotle university of thessaloniki, university campus, 54124 thessaloniki, greece email: marymargaroni@smg.auth.gr mailto:marymargaroni@smg.auth.gr refugee experience aand transformative learning 195 the research target group was the young male muslim afghan population who sought political asylum and who are staying at the reception centre for unaccompanied minors in makrinitisa, volos. this is a village on mount pilion in central greece. the reception centre that is being researched in this paper operates under the auspices of the ministry of health and social solidarity and can house about 30 people. arsis, a social ngo working since 1992 to support children and young people and defend their rights, has been responsible for its operation since 2005 and has been funded by the european refugee fund since 2009. the majority of the residents includes afghans, sudanese, nigerians, bangladeshis, iraqis, kurds, who declare themselves minors (without necessarily being so), in order to have easier access to formal refugee status. it is a case study, whose thematic significance is dual. on the one hand, while the thematic of refugees and refugeeism has been an important research field in the social sciences in the last decades, of itself, it is a recognized research field (malkki, 1995; black, 2001). while the theory of tl increasingly attracts pedagogic researchers, the combination of the two scientific fields (the refugee experience as a starting point for internal transformation) it is not a research topic in greece. this research, thus, aspires to contribute to the theory of tl through the refugee experience in contemporary greek society. the study is organized into three sections. the first section briefly presents the theoretical framework, including a brief reference to the status questions on the research concerning immigration and refugeeism issues and to tl. the second section presents the research as a whole: the participants, the methodological framework and the research process including its limitations. in this section, significant findings are also presented which relate to the identification of the refugees’ problematic frames of reference before, during and “after” the refugee experience; the learning of new frames of reference; transforming broader mental habits and new conceptual structures. the third section contains a conclusive summary and discussion. theoretical framework the refugee experience the thematic of refugees and refugeeism as a special part of immigrants and immigration, respectively, boasts rich research results, especially in recent decades. although our age has been called “the era of homeless man” (kliot, 1987), the myth however, has now been refuted that intraand intercontinental population movement is a problematic phenomenon mainly of the modern era (castles, 2008). modern research deals with, among other things, aspects of the difficulties encountered by the immigrants themselves as human entities and not just as moving numbers (facchini, lorz & willmann, 2006). for example, it looks at the expulsion and forced abandonment of familiar people and goods (kunz, 1981); the attendant feelings of loss and confusion (mortland, 1987); the often highly dangerous transition to the unfamiliar host society, with all its difficulties, by definition, it entails (stein, 1981); and, generally, the emergence of the refugee journey, which is an eminently encounter with otherness, a key component of liminality, with significant potential transformation of refugees, often through painful procedures (morgan, 2010; morrice, 2012). also, current research focuses in particular on the constructions of risk for the “foreign” and fear resulting from such constructions and anti-immigrant stereotyping (mclaren, 2003; jayati, 2011), with emphasis on constructing muslim risks and increasing islamophobia across the western society (ennaji, 2010). throughout 196 global education review 5(4) this xenophobia, leading to racist behavior and generally hostile reception of refugees in host communities (martin, 2005), and, ultimately, low asylum approval rates (neumayer, 2005), greece appears to exceed, by far, the other european countries (karakatsanis & swarts, 2007). a significant number of the world refugee population is of afghan origin. already during the decade of the afghansoviet war (1979-1989) with stiff resistance from armed rebel groups of mujahedin and the general socio-political instability in the country, consecutive waves of afghan refugees were heading to neighboring countries. at the end of the war and the withdrawal of the russian military occupation, a new long-term volatility ensued. the islamic fundamentalist taliban movement emerged, capturing the capital, kabul in 1996 and imposing an extreme theocentric islamic regime on afghanistan. even the first, post-taliban, democratic election of the president of the country, hamid karzai, in 2006 and the recent democratic election of the new president ashraf ghani ahmadzai in 2014, failed to bring the expected security and calm to afghan society. this is not only because a substantial number of the country’s provinces are still under taliban control but more because, despite the attempted establishment of democratic institutions and modernizing legislation, ceremonial law still prevails. the latter reproduces and perpetuates a system of discrimination against the vast majority of the afghan population. this includes religious and ethnic minorities, women, children and generally any kind of dissent from the traditional, conservative and highly theocentric forces in the country (areu, 2013). due to the particularly adverse social conditions in afghanistan, special instructions have been issued for the treatment of the afghan refugees (unhcr, 2010;·unhcr, 2013). significant proportions try to reach western and northern europe, mostly via greece, as the main south east european gateway. after a usually traumatic and extremely dangerous crossing of greek-turkish land and sea borders, many are illegally sent back to turkey by the greek police and coast guard (ai, 2013; hrw, 2014b). others are arrested in greece and under the dublin ii regulation, remain locked up in inhumane conditions, against their wish. indeed, the violation of migrants’ human rights in greece, more than repeated and systematic, is often tragic in its proportions. disappearances, torture, various forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, assaults, denial of fair public trial, and violation of privacy are just some of the violations of human rights of foreigners on greek territory (usds, 2014). the situation of unaccompanied minors arriving in the country is particularly worrying. greece fails systematically to provide them with any real help. (cechr, 2009). concurrently, there is a rise in the use of systematic violence by the greek police (hrw, 2013b; ai, 2014) and the xenophobic extreme right is becoming increasingly aggressive (hrw, 2014a). within such a politico-social context, the integration of asylum-seekers in greece is particularly difficult, if not impossible. transformative learning issues the thematics of tl boasts rich research results, especially in recent decades which focus increasingly on the role of experience in the internal transformation. the theory of tl has viewed experience as of great importance and particularly the experience that acts as a starting point for the transformative process of the problematic frames of reference, convictions and expectations so that they become more inclusive, multi-faceted, open, contemplative and emotionally ready for change (mezirow, 2000). after thorough control of its validity refugee experience aand transformative learning 197 and restructure of signifying structures it has been stressed that, in the process of tl, the subject practices in constant control and critical contemplation of familiar and other concepts and promotes the reevaluation of themselves; a predisposition of acceptance is cultivated that no view (usually) cannot remain rigid and unchanged but through the subject’s active participation in meditative processes it is restructured and transformed while the subjects themselves are lead potentially to taking action, particularly for internal improvement and social gain (daloz, 2000) and for the development of their capability of autonomous and abstract thought. it has been pointed out that not every change is a transformation, as the latter means a permanent change or a “second level” change, in other words, the change that takes place not only of the surface of things but a deep change, a change in the whole systemic way of thinking. transformative change takes place only with the individual’s volition. it is a voluntary internal change, which the subjects chooses for themselves, being aware that it is not segmented or fragmented but multifaceted and multi leveled, embracing always, all aspects of their life (for instance, mental, emotional, spiritual, socio-cultural). at the same time, it is irreversible, entails risk, fear and often, loss, while it presumes broadening of the individual’s outlook. the transformation involves the creation of a more cohesive identity and constitutes a move towards wholeness. from the moment this transformative change means, at least in part, the restructuring of personal worldview (convictions, viewpoints or mental forms) entails loss by definition. in particular, it entails the death of the old worldview through the rebirth of a new one and the expansion of consciousness (poutiatine, 2009). in this research, the tl theory is applied, with two important differentiations from the initial framework for implementation used by mezirow and his main associates. first, this is applied beyond its basic social space, which mezirow views as a prerequisite, mainly by the upper middle class where, the basic prerequisites of a sense of security and democracy are taken for granted. mezirow (2000; 2003) believes that it is an essential prerequisite for tl to ensure certain features of the subject under transformation, such as maturity, education, safety, health, financial security, and emotional intelligence. on the other hand, he believes that situations such as hunger, lack of permanent accommodation, despair, illness or fear are setbacks for the contemplative comprehension of an individual’s experiences and through this, their transformation. this particular view of mezirow’s is opposed by the critical theory, according to whose principles, (the marginalized) subjects, on a first level are asked to pinpoint and become aware of ways in which the hegemonic culture limits their sense of potential and, on a second level, to arm themselves against oppression, ostracism from society (bridwell, 2013). empirical studies, for example bridwell (2013), with homeless afro-american women have proven that learning can be transformative (in the holistic sense of the word) even in members of marginalized groups as long as arising from disorientating dilemmas in their lives, they develop a potential for internal change, a fact that adds to a dynamic in the social process and the social relations within it. second while for mezirow (2003) tl is in line exclusively with adulthood as only then can the individual have the internal disposition for tl, including critical thinking and dialectics, this research applies the tl theory to individuals who officially but also in many cases actually in western society, are considered minors (15-18 years old). however, at this point, it is necessary to 198 global education review 5(4) clarify the terms childhood and child age. these terms were constructed in europe during the periods of the enlightenment and romanticism, but do not have universal significance (rogers, 1996). the experiences of the particular narrators (work and contribution to a family income, experience of many disorienting dilemmas due to particularly adverse life conditions, refugeeism, facing death survival and living abroad without family or any other psychological or financial support) despite their young biological age, contribute to early maturity so that from a psychospiritual aspect they are more adult-like. it is precisely in the doubly differentiated application of the theory of tl, in terms of social-class and age that the particular contribution of this study to the wider research on tl lies. presentation of the research the aims this research aims to investigate how, through the refugee experience, the participants are able to reflect critically on initially problematic frames of reference in their home country and then in the host country. it looks at how they identify mechanisms for the establishment and reinforcement of these problematic frames of reference, as well as how they develop ways of reframing them, which gradually lead to profound internal transformative processes. the participants without exception, all the participants have these basic characteristics in common: a long-term refugee experience in iran and a dangerous refugee journey from iran through turkey to greece. table one presents additional information about each refugee. table 1. experience of refugees prior to arrival in greece, and in greece name experiences in country of origin and previous refugee experience experiences in greece 1. m. m., 15 years old (h. m.’s brother) increased problems with the taliban in afghanistan; family forced to flee iran. police arrest. 2. h. m., 17 years old (m. m.’s brother; similar refugee routes) see above (m. m.) see above (m. m.). in addition: three months in prison. 3. t. n., 13 years old (m. n.’s brother) father murdered by the taliban; family decision to escape to iran. forced sale of the family home in afghanistan for 7,500 euros – cost of papers for transporting him to germany. cheated out of the money by the afghan trafficker. 4. m. n., 15 years old (t. n.’s brother) see above (t. n.) see above (t. n.) in addition: police arrest and imprisonment. 5. α. h., 17 years old death of his parents in the war in afghanistan; fled iran with another family, who cheated arrested and beaten by the police; 9 months of repeated failed attempts to escape to refugee experience aand transformative learning 199 him financially and exploited his labour, was moved to istanbul and held captive by the traffickers. italy; cheated out of €2,000 by afghan trafficker. 6. μ. α., 18 years old traumatic experiences in pakistan and iran; painful journey through turkey to greece. experiences of deep loneliness and abandonment. 7. α. l., 14 years old bad refugee experiences in iran; family secretly abandoned him; escaped incognito from iran to turkey and greece at the age of 13 years. traumatic experience aboard a drifting boat on the aegean; police arrest and incarceration. 8. α. κ., 17 years old family problems with the taliban; eventful move to and stay in iran. voluntary surrender to the police and incarceration. 9. μ. τ., 17 years old increased tensions with the taliban; family escape at the age of 8 to iran. two failed attempts to escape from athens to the albanian border and then on to western europe: arrest, torture and taken hostage by albanians in athens 10. μ. g., 16 years old 2 year difficult stay in iran. arrested, abused and imprisoned by the police. 11. α. μ., 15 years old to raise funds for the trip to europe: sale of family house in afghanistan for 12,000 euros; cheated by the trafficker. voluntary confinement at home to avoid the risk of police arrest and neo-fascist violence. 12. μ. p., 17 years old family fled from afghanistan to iran. aboard damaged boat on the aegean; police arrest and incarceration. 13. α. α., 16 years old negative experiences in iran; fled to turkey; police arrest and incarceration; escape to greece. aboard drifting boat on the aegean; police arrest and incarceration. 14. μ. g., 17,5 years old three-year negative experience in iran. in athens: exploitation by fellow afghans, who stole the last of his money. 15. α. p., 17 years old negative experiences in iran; difficult journey to greece due to prolonged captivity in istanbul. in athens: rough sleeping in a park; fear of attacks by rightwing extremists. 200 global education review 5(4) the methodological framework – the biographical method as a research method tool, the biographical method was used and the accounts of 15 young mostly illiterate afghans, officially minors. they were from 15 to 18 years old, though they do not always disclose their actual age. even before they had decided to seek refuge in europe had been refugees in iran or pakistan for a long period of their lives. selection criteria for refugee research subjects were the country of origin (afghanistan), the availability and accessibility for participation in the research. the biographical method was chosen because it aims to understand the special ways in which individuals experience and register wider statutory practices and social logic (michelson, 2011; ruppert johnson, 2003). mcadams (2001) perceives life story as an internalized and developing narration of self that embodies the restructured past, the perceived present and the anticipated future. in any case, it is clear that the narrated experience is not identified directly with or related to the lived experience. the biographical method, almost from its emergence, was criticized mainly for inherent empiricism and generally for being unscientific. however, as there has been an increasing realization of the importance of up till then neglected aspects for the researcher, the research subject and the research process itself (bertaux, 1974; 1980; ochs & capps, 1996), the biographical method has been increasingly adopted in the social sciences and used extensively and systematically (dominice, 2000; karpiak, 2003). the research process and its limitations the research took place in two stages with the permission of the founding member and director of arsis, who supervises and coordinates the operation of the reception centre and then in consultation initially with the psychologist and finally with the social worker at the centre in makrinitsa. in the first pilot stage (october-november 2012) seven life stories were recorded which highlighted new thematics and points that needed further analysis. later, in light of the peculiarities, particularities and new subthemes that emerged in the first pilot phase, a second phase ensued (february-april 2013) for the next eight life stories. these narratives lasted 2-3 hours each. due to insufficient knowledge of the greek language of the narrators and complete lack of knowledge of the informants’ mother tongue dari and/or farsi on the part of the researchers, all the life stories of the afghan informants (with the exception of two that were given in greek and in english) were conducted with the help of an iranian doctor who acted as interpreter. in this way, the speech of the narrators is doubly intermediated, first, through the interpreter and then through the authors. however, this double intermediation is the only way in which the refugees can express themselves and make themselves visible. on the other hand, their experiences can be used as a primary source of approach to and reevaluation of the modern social process. the findings from the life stories, which were processed using the content analysis method, were divided into categories according to the research questions. the categories were defined as accurately as using berelson (1971) as a guide, whereby, if different researchers analyze the same content, they will create the same categories. finally, in the content analysis of the life stories, the researchers heeded silvermanʼs (2000) advice that the live, authentic communication between the researchers and the researched should be reflected in the classification and analysis of the research findings. refugee experience aand transformative learning 201 the research findings tracing problematic context in the participants’ accounts before the refugee experience: in the country of origin when the narrators refer to their families’ and their own experiences, the dominant feeling in their account is insecurity and generally depreciation of human existence and human rights: “when your country is at war or like at war or there is a dictatorship, like the taliban in afghanistan, you don’t have any rights – there is no such thing. first of all, your life is not important for anyone. you leave your home in the morning and you don’t know if you’re going to be back alive. […] life is nothing. nobody cares. they don’t even let you live wherever you like, work in peace, have money, lead a decent life, be educated, get married to whoever you want and whenever you want, believe in the religion you want, decide yourself on what is important in your life. the taliban don’t want people to go to school, to be able to think. they want people to be like animals so that they can be manipulated, so that they will not object to not having rights or to being violated.” (m.t., 17 years old). afghanistan, under the taliban, became known worldwide for its extreme religious fanaticism, a country where anything perceived by the taliban leadership as secular and as being against the islamic precepts, as they view them, suffered from their destructive frenzy. even education, viewed as a secular –therefore not moral– institution, was banished from children’s everyday lives, who were only allowed or rather forced to study in quran schools, where preachers professed the singularity of the muslim religion, the superiority of its believers, and the supreme value of the elimination of the infidels. the upbringing of children in such a context resulted in the (usually) unshakable internalization of the repulsion towards the infidel “other”, as a dangerous miasma that must be eradicated – at all costs. kindness –as radiance or as practical externalization of spirituality– beyond the islam is inconceivable. “in afghanistan, i didn’t go to school. i only went to the quran school, where they taught us the quran in arabic. you are not allowed to translate it, to understand it. we used to talk about it all the time and the teacher would tell us that it is the only right thing and those who don’t believe in it are evil and dangerous people and want to harm us, that’s why we need to stop them. they taught us that any muslim who kills the infidels is a holy man and god will reward him. […] and, of course, we believed all that, as they constantly repeated it. it’s like an everyday brainwash that lasts your whole life, when you live there.” (m.g., 17, 5 years old). the children’s compulsory attendance is considered a rather unnecessary luxury. every person, regardless of age, is an indispensable labor asset for every family, whose survival depends on every member’s contribution. children from an early age embrace this as an inevitable and selfevident reality, as shown in the following extract: “in afghanistan, except for the quran school, which we had to attend, we didn’t really go to school. most of us, like me, never learned to read or write. there is a lot of poverty and parents –if they are alive– care for what their children will offer to them and not what they will offer to their children, unlike what happens in europe. so, children from a very young age learn to work. they can’t do otherwise because it is more important to bring home some 202 global education review 5(4) money. how else can the family get by?” (t.n., 13 years old). even more, children in afghanistan are reared in accordance with a culture of uncritical acceptance of and uncritical submission to their elders, as a sign of respect, obedience and discipline. “in general children are quite often beaten up and no respected at all because they are children and grownups don’t believe they have the same rights as them. and us kids grow up with deep respect for our elders because we learn that the older you are the wiser you get, in contrast to what i see in europe, where children have more rights and are also respected by their elders.” (m.g., 17, 5 years old). for all these reasons, in accordance with m.g.’s succinct words “it is tough being a child in afghanistan”. added to the child’s undeniable submission due to rigid inter-generational inequalities is the undeniable gender inequality due to equally rigid gender inequalities as reported by the 17-years-old h.m. in his life story. “for women things are really bad. they learn to have no opinion and to obey their father or husband. my mother was married to my father, who was her cousin, much older and she had a tough life, just at home with her husband and her children. and now that she’s in germany, that’s what she keeps saying to us when we speak on the phone. that she learned nothing in her life so as to work independently out in society even if she really wanted it and that her parents ruined her life forever and she cries all the time.” indeed, women’s adverse social living conditions include domestic violence, abductions and rapes by armed individuals, trafficking and use in negotiations between families who resolve difference and debts. it is not rare for them to be forced into underage marriages (hrw, 2013a; unama, 2013). in afghanistan, of course, if you happen to be a child and female, then things are really tough according to the following account. “and if you are a girl in afghanistan you’ve gotta ask permission even to drink water. you have no rights at all. even now that things are a bit better, the men in the family decide from a very early age, who you will be married to and how much money they’ll make out of it. it’s as if girls didn’t exist.” (m.g., 16 years old). on the refugee routes: roads, limits, overcomings in the above-mentioned sociopolitical conditions, in afghanistan, the refugee decision looks like a one-way street. the neighboring countries, iran in particular, are the least difficult solution for the vast majority of the narrators. even though there aren’t any military conflicts, daily life is not easy at all (hrw, 2013c). therefore, a new refugee decision becomes a one-way street again. this time to countries where they have heard that the living conditions are more humane: “i heard that in europe people have jobs and homes. and that children go to school every day and don’t have to work like we do and thought i’d like to go there too, live like a human being. […] i’d heard that the journey was dangerous and that not everybody gets there alive. but i’d never imagined it would be that difficult.” (m.t., 17 years old). to start with, it is necessary to collect a large amount of money for the trip and find reliable traffickers for its realization, both arduous processes. after that, the refugee experience aand transformative learning 203 difficulties of the trip are gradually increasing as the refugees need to cross the first borders, the iranian-turkish ones, under the threat of constant gunfire; in appalling conditions of mountain passage in the turkish mainland; with their detention in samavats, a kind of human bodies storehouses, where traffickers practically pile up “illegal” immigrants, until they forward them to their next destination, provided that they first get the promised amount of money; with their perilous attempt to get to greece, the “first gate” of the european union, crossing either the evros river or the aegean sea, on age-old, half-wrecked, overloaded small boats. during the whole refugee trip, the precariousness of life is repeatedly ascertained because of general disrespect for human rights. “i was in danger of losing my life so many times that now i find it hard to believe i’m still alive. if basic human rights were respected by more people, such things would never happen to anyone.” (m.t., 17 years old). after the refugee trip: the host country on arrival of the refugee subjects in europe, an important circle of their refugee experience comes to an end. a new one starts: the contact with the new host society, the new culture, that of the western world, which they longed for before they met it in flesh. the reception of the local (greek) society to the newly arrived afghans played an important role in the way they perceive their relation to it. in the narrative of some of the informants one can spot (to a limited degree in terms of numbers) positive experiences. on the other hand, most narratives are full of traumatic experiences of rejection, both on the part of government officials (mostly greek police), the general public and by society as a whole. however, their negative experiences in the host society do not come exclusively from locals. they experience exploitation from more established immigrants in greece, and also from their fellow countrymen and fellow muslims. it is not unusual for the latter to snatch their last savings, for use in their longed for escape to the much desired north western europe. their parents’ houses in their homeland are sold or their life savings are conceded to a potential intermediary who is full of promises. however, their hope of being transferred to their personal promised land proves to be futile to the narrators’ great disappointment. the painstakingly amassed amount of money disappears while they themselves remain in the country of residence from which, they are trying, in vain, to escape: “my mother wanted me to leave (iran) at all costs and come to europe. she told an uncle of mine to sell our house in afghanistan for €12,000 and so raise the money for me to come to europe and then bring my family. the trafficker, who was also from afghanistan, and did this job tricked her, took all her money and disappeared. (….) since then i’ve realized that you’ve got to watch your back even from your own people.” (a.m., 15 years old). learning new frames of reference, transformational wider mental habits and new conceptual constructions in this way, those who have similar personal experiences or hear about such experiences from others, soon reconsider their original beliefs and unshakeable convictions that their teacher in the koran school instilled into their minds and hearts. these were the animosity and dangerousness of nonmuslim infidels and the a priori virtue of all 204 global education review 5(4) fellow muslims. the words they heard, packed into the poor religious school, proved to be if not deliberate lies, then at least completely irrelevant to the multi-faceted reality and the complicated world of human relations. “on this trip, i feel for the first time that i have got to know the world. (…) i realized that what i learned at the school had nothing to do with reality. (…) i found out in admiration that there were very nice people who weren’t muslims. to my surprise, i found out that there are muslims who are not good people. it seemed to me that my world had turned upside down.” (m.n., 15 years old). in this last extract, we see a rejection of the narrators’ initial mistaken frame of reference, in other words, the uncritical acceptance of the views of compact homogenised religious groups. in fact, the case of this particular narrator is quite characteristic, as during his detention in the small town of komotini he came into contact with canadian christian preachers and made his first steps towards christianity. in his country of origin, he would probably not have escaped from being stoned (unhcr, 2010). in his host country though, he learned to enjoy the privilege of (religious) freedom and make considerable steps towards a new religion. on many nights, the bible, instead of the koran is his favourite bedtime reading as according the narrator: “it is proper for anyone who lives in a country to learn about its religion and if you think it’s good, why not embrace it?” much more than just the learning of new frames of reference, many narrators present the transformation of wider mental habits and conceptual constructions. this transformation concerns exactly the points which in their country of origin and the intermediate refugee station, iran, proved to be particularly problematic, such as the emphasis on human rights, the supreme defense of human life in all its dimensions of freedom and value. in addition, there is a change in the way childhood/youth is perceived, acknowledging the rights they themselves have as young people and vindicating these rights. finally, there is a new outlook on gender relations and the equality of rights. “i am astonished that life here has value. of course, people are killed on a personal level, but the state has laws to protect people’s lives. (…) in our country, the state itself doesn’t care. (….) you’re not sure of anything and you have no rights to anything and i don’t want me or my family to live like that.” (a.p., 17 years old). in addition, through a comparison of the two worlds’ abstract and schematic perceptions, the east and west the differences can be seen and a new conceptual model of perception between childhood and child age is adopted. “what impresses me here in europe, and it’s quite different from my country, is that children can organize their own lives; that they will get up in the morning, have breakfast, go to school, get back in the afternoon. they will find the time to do their homework, get some rest or see their friends. their parents take good care of them and talk nice to them, they listen to what they want and don’t impose their opinions on them. i think i like this better and when i have children of my own, that’s how i want them to grow up.” (t.n., 13 years old). the embrace of a new outlook on gender relations can be seen in the majority of the narrators. they compare the overwhelmingly large proportion of female illiteracy in their country of origin with the equality of rights, access to education, and the woman’s position in the west. they then refugee experience aand transformative learning 205 choose the western model of equality and emancipation, in contrast with the traditions they were taught in their own culture, as shown in the following extract: “i like that boys and girls see each other her. they go to school together, they don’t live separately every day. (…..) girls go to school and are well educated and do important things in their lives and help the family better. their voice counts because they know what to say. (…) i would definitely like my wife to have had an education.” (m.n., 15 years old). in addition, most narrators, at least those who weren’t totally overwhelmed by the weight of their crushing, boundary experiences of refugeeism and who managed up to a point to overcome the consequent adversities which is neither generally true not self-evident, totally reevaluate themselves. they gain self-confidence and improve their self-image: “if i’ve made it so far, i can make it further” is a.l.’s feeling, which is articulated in different ways but to the same effect by other narrators as well. in fact, quite a few of them agree on the important role played by the difficulties they had during their long refugee experience and the strategies they developed to face them, as shown by a.a.’s life story: “the hardships i have been through so far are my life’s rock.” discussion and conclusions the geographical transitions of the refugees are often concurrent with a variety of inner psychological transitions and transformations due to the new frames of reference with which they come into contact, their comparison to their former culture and finally, the formation of new mental attitudes. there are new frames of reference and new mental attitudes – among others – religious matters, gender, and intergenerational relations and generally an adoption of human rights as a condition sine qua non, for the restoration of respect for human existence. thus, the initial mistaken frames of reference of most of the narrators, in which there is an acceptance of the views of compact homogenised religious groups and the manichaeist conflict between “good” selves and “bad” others are rejected. the uncritical adoption of the religious teachings in the quran school, because of the established practice of brainwashing, is slowly replaced by a critical check of the teachings which are proved to be untrue in everyday life abroad. the religious “other” not only seems less dangerous, but also proves to be friendly. the new mental perception of the world which spreads out before the refugee narrators is totally different from that which they had before their refugee journey. furthermore, woman’s status in afghanistan is nullified and a substantial number of women experience the physical and psychological violence of the male dominated theocratic society as correct and totally in line with the existing rules of ceremonial law. as the refugee subjects come into contact with new more democratic approaches to gender relations, they reflect on and redefine their own attitudes in a more flexible and equal way. regarding intergenerational relations in afghanistan, the children living in a society where ceremonial law still prevails, with its morbid aspects, do not always precisely know their rights and in this way, the domestic uncritical and submissive acceptance of adult members is considered to be a matter of essential and unconditional respect. in the new host country, young afghans come into contact with the way europeans deal with people of their age, where their opinion has power and their voice is articulated more strongly and is better listened to. at a younger age, they are recipients of respect, a fact that impressed 206 global education review 5(4) all the narrators who desired something similar for themselves and for their future children. beyond the transformation on a mentality level, as in the previously mentioned, as examples, conceptual fields in cases where the refugee subjects are not totally overwhelmed by the weight of their crushing, boundary experiences of refugeeism, they develop a positive selfimage, in the sense of self confidence, selfsupport through transcending themselves. it is in these cases that the self-image guides the refugee subjects towards being available for future action for the common good. they escape the victim role and claim a fairer redistribution of social goods for themselves and for the wider social whole. the participants’ cognitive and emotional journey towards transformative learning, according to the research findings, seems to pass through a series of different reflective stages. the initial, to a certain extent, superficial reflections focus equally on life in the places of origin and on their migrant experience. these gradually evolve into deeper thoughts and questions about different aspects of life, both in the country of origin and the host country. thus, following mezirow’s typology reflections (1991), the findings indicate that the initial thoughts of the subjects were content reflections, reflections that focused solely on the content of previous experience. these reflections are progressively enriched with process reflections, which focus on managing experiences that ultimately serve as a source of empowerment for their owner. the last step concerns premise reflections. these are reflections on not only the specific experience, but in general, on mental habits and perspectives that have influenced both the person themselves and wider social groups. the findings revealed that research subjects developed a critical approach to a range of opinions and attitudes associated with the lives of members of the dominant group in the country of origin. at the same time, they have identified the mechanisms, family and religion etc., through which these mental constructs are passed to them. the development of the premise reflections according to mezirow (1991) is the one that leads to tl, since it has the power to change previous mental habits, beliefs and behaviors. conversely, if the individual stays at the content and process reflections stage, it is not certain that they will eventually achieve cognitive transformations, although each type of reflection is likely to generate new questions in turn which may lead to the next stochastic stage. the research subjects, on reaching the stage of premise reflections, can go on to a next stage of cognitive development, which, according to sharan (2004), is a result of tl. furthermore, some of the research subjects expressed the desire to engage in future social action and this confirms the evolution of their thinking and surpassing of previous cognitive frames of reference. banks (1998) states that taking social action in a multicultural environment marks the transcendence of a unicultural reference framework and the development of intercultural skills and references. therefore, based on the research findings, it appears that the disorienting dilemma created by the refugee experience, through premise reflections, may lead to tl, and cross-cultural awareness. the findings revealed that research subjects developed a critical approach to a range of opinions and attitudes associated with the lives of members of the dominant group in the country of origin. at the same time, they have identified the mechanisms, family and religion etc., through which these mental constructs are passed to them. the development of the premise reflections according to many researchers of tl (mezirow, 1991; parks daloz, et al. 1996; brookfield, 2000) is the one that leads to tl, since it has the power to change previous refugee experience aand transformative learning 207 mental habits, beliefs and behaviors. conversely, if the individual stays at the content and process reflections stage, it is not certain that they will eventually achieve cognitive transformations, although each type of reflection is likely to generate new questions in turn which may lead to the next stochastic stage. the research subjects, on reaching the stage of premise reflections, can go on to a next stage of cognitive development, which, according to sharan (2004), is a result of tl. furthermore, some of the research subjects expressed the desire to engage in future social action and this confirms the evolution of their thinking and surpassing of previous cognitive frames of reference. banks (1998) states that taking social action in a multicultural environment marks the transcendence of a unicultural reference framework and the development of intercultural skills and references. therefore, based on the research findings, it appears that the disorienting dilemma (taylor, 2000; dirkx & mezirow, 2006) created by the refugee experience, through premise reflections, may lead to tl, and cross-cultural awareness. as this research is a case study, the above findings and conclusions cannot be generalized, as is the case in all qualitative research. thus, there is a need to conduct similar studies to further investigate the relationship of refugeeism and tl and further explore certain questions. refugees’ additional, problematic, original frames of reference and their relationship with the political, social, economic and religious context of the country of origin and the host country is one such question. there are cases where the respective politico-social conditions, as experienced by the individual refugee subject instead 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(2000). analyzing research on transformative learning theory. in j. mezirow & associates (eds.), learning as transformation. critical perspectives on a theory in progress (pp. 285–328). nj: john wiley and sons. united nations assistance mission in afghanistan (unama) (2013). violence against women on the rise in afghanistan: deputy minister. retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/docid/5124f 1fa2.html united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) (2010). unhcr eligibility guidelines for assessing the international protection needs of asylum-seekers from afghanistan. retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/docid/4d0b 55c92.html united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr) (2013). unhcr eligibility guidelines for assessing the international protection needs of asylum-seekers from afghanistan. retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/docid/51ffdc a34.html united states department of state (usds) (2014). 2013 country reports on human rights practices – greece. retrieved from http://www.refworld.org/docid/5328 4ad714.html about the author(s) mary margaroni teaches modern greek as l2 and culture to foreign students at aristotle university of thessaloniki (school of modern greek language) in greece. her scientific interests focus on anthropology of language, intercultural education and cultural studies. kostas magos is assistant professor of intercultural education at the university of thessaly in greece. his scientific interests focus on theory and practice of intercultural education, refugee education and critical pedagogy. http://www.refworld.org/docid/5124f1fa2.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/5124f1fa2.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/4d0b55c92.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/4d0b55c92.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/51ffdca34.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/51ffdca34.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/53284ad714.html http://www.refworld.org/docid/53284ad714.html a life “in and with nature?” 5 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: josephidou, joanne, & kemp, nicola. (2022). a life “in and with nature?” developing nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies for babies and toddlers. global education review, 9 (2), 5-22. a life “in and with nature?” developing nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies for babies and toddlers joanne josephidou the open university (uk) nicola kemp canterbury christ church university (uk) abstract the holistic relationship between children and nature is at the heart of froebel’s philosophy and practice: he took for granted that young children would grow up “in” and “with” nature. this paper explores the contemporary relevance of this thinking to babies and toddlers in early childhood education and care (ecec) settings. it is based on a research project funded by the froebel trust which explores outdoor provision in english settings. our findings suggest that whilst the pedagogic potential of the outdoors for babies and toddlers appears to be generally recognized, there is little emphasis on supporting them to engage with the natural characteristics of the outdoor environment. concerns about safety and an emphasis on physical activity mean that natural elements may be discouraged in favor of manufactured alternatives such as artificial grass or commercially produced resources. we argue that froebelian philosophy offers a much-needed theoretical lens that can illuminate the limitations of such practices for both the human and non-human world. importantly, we highlight the interconnectedness of human and environmental health and suggest the need to develop nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies from birth. keywords froebel, outdoor, ecec, nature, babies, toddlers 1.0 background of the study and its context 1.1 nature connection: why is it important for babies and toddlers? this paper contributes to contemporary discourses about children’s connection to nature and the role of early childhood education in providing this. our specific interest is in the experiences of the youngest children (babies and toddlers) whilst attending early childhood education and care (ecec) provision. whilst there are cultural differences in terminology, we define babies as those aged under a year and toddlers as 12-24 months. we acknowledge ‘nature’ is a complex concept that carries different meanings. for the purposes of this paper, we draw upon hartig, mitchell, de vries and frumkin (2014) who base their definition upon an “objective” perspective that recognizes: the physical features and processes of nonhuman origin that people ordinarily can perceive, including the “living nature” of flora and fauna, together with still and running water, qualities of air and weather, and the landscapes that comprise these and show the influence of geological processes (p.208). 6 global education review 9 (2) they include within this definition places that “appear natural and provide opportunities to engage with and follow natural processes, but…are typically designed, constructed, regulated, and maintained”(ibid). whilst there may be differences in how natural environments are defined in practice, there is a shared and growing concern about the reduction in both the quality and quantity of children’s experiences with nature from birth (gill, 2011). the idea that “children are becoming disconnected from the natural environment” (defra, 2011, p. 12) has gained widespread traction and has been memorably termed “nature deficit disorder” by louv (2005). from a childhood perspective, a focus on human health and well-being has led to an extensive body of research evidence which documents how children’s nature contact contributes to their physical, psychological, social, and emotional health (adams & savahl, 2018). whilst there is limited research focused specifically on under twos, bento and dias (2017) suggest that it is the “open and constantly changing environment” (p. 157) that provides many developmental possibilities for very young children: while playing outside, children benefit from being exposed to sunlight, natural elements, and open air, which contributes to bone development, stronger immune system…and higher levels of attention and well-being (ibid). this outdoor scenario is contrasted with one of young children “spend[ing] long periods in closed environments, more exposed to disease contamination and saturated air” (p. 158), echoing mendes et al. (2014) who suggest there can be much higher concentrations of bacteria within an ecec setting than outside. low air quality can impact on both children’s health and their learning and development with the impact being greatest on the youngest children (cosgun, 2020). from an environmental perspective, early experiences of nature are now known to support the development of pro-environmental attitudes and behaviors (louv, 2005). this is important given the growing body of evidence documenting the extent of the global environmental crisis. the latest reports from the intergovernmental panel on climate change (ipcc, 2018) and intergovernmental sciencepolicy platform on biodiversity and ecosystem services (ipbes, 2019) highlight the effects of human behavior on the environment. pyle (1993) refers to the “extinction of experience” (p. 130) as nature declines and children are born into a less ecologically diverse world. by conceiving of this problem in different terms, two separate discourses have developed along parallel tracks each with limitations. the childhood discourse prioritizes the “quantity” of outdoor experiences whilst the environmental discourse tends to prioritize environmental quality. 1.2 the need for a holistic perspective in recent years there has been a broad perspectival “turn” away from the dominant cultural position based on separation towards a more reciprocal understanding of human/environmental relations. this has generated a diverse range of theoretical responses from different disciplinary perspectives including deep ecology (naess, 1989); post-humanism (braidotti, 2013); complexity theory (kauffman, 1995) and systems theory (goodwin, 1996). these conceptual developments are significant both individually and collectively as they represent a move away from what dasgupta (2021) powerfully refers to as the “anthropocentric lens” which values a life “in and with nature?” 7 7 nature only for what it can offer humans. however, they continue to prioritize “knowing” through human rational capacities rather than holistically through all domains of human experience. a deeper shift to a holistic perspective may offer insights for understanding the relationship between young children and the natural environment. holistic perspectives offer a conception of the individual in relation to the whole and of the educational task as “learning to belong to the whole” (mahmoudi, jafari, nasrabadi, & liaghatdar, 2012, p.182). for the youngest children this learning is primarily achieved through embodied experience. chawla (2002) draws upon gebser’s (1949) consciousness structures describing their dominant consciousness as “archaic” characterized by bodily absorption and driven by the autonomic nervous system. baptised in the world by immersion…close to the ground and up against the full sensory qualities of things (loc 2635) in this paper we explore the potential of one holistic early childhood educational approach based on the writing and practices of friedrich froebel (1782-1852). 1.3 a froebelian perspective on children and nature the holistic relationship between children and nature is at the heart of froebel’s philosophy and practice. although most often associated with the kindergarten and associated pedagogic practices for pre-school children, froebel’s holistic philosophy of education applies from birth across the whole life span. in his seminal text, ‘the education of man,” froebel (1826) highlights the significance of the earliest years. nature is central to froebelian philosophy and positions children “as nature,” comparing their development to that of the young plants and animals within their environment. froebel used nature as a metaphor for human development and encouraged parents to do likewise and draw upon the “silent teaching of nature” (p.8). he emphasized the importance of the quality of the environment and was clear that the senses, through which the young child experiences the world, “should be pure and clear – pure air, clear light, clear space” (p.24). he also highlights the importance of regular time spent “in and with” nature from birth. the role of the adult is to observe closely as the child interacts with their external environment. froebel advises a gentle approach which follows the child’s interests and curiosity; his principle of life-unity positions education as an ongoing process of unification between the external (natural environment) and internal (human nature or spirit). although written in a different spatial and temporal context, froebel’s writing reveals key insights into the relationship between children and nature, insights which are relevant to contemporary pedagogy. 1.4 1.4 the contemporary role of ecec in fostering nature connection in this paper we explore the value of froebelian thinking on nature connection to contemporary english ecec practice by drawing on the findings of a three-phase research project funded by the froebel trust. whilst there is now a well-documented body of international research evidence that points to the benefits of children engaging with nature (malone & waite, 2016) and growing consensus that schools and settings have a role to play in facilitating connections with the natural environment (defra, 2018), this has tended to focus on children aged three and above (kemp & josephidou, 2021). the needs and experiences of the youngest children are rarely considered. 8 global education review 9 (2) the specific lack of research related to the outdoor experiences of the youngest children has been highlighted by bilton, bento and dias (2017) and is recognized as a significant gap given the growing number of under twos who receive out of home care. internationally, an average of 32% of children aged birth to two are enrolled in ecec (oecd, 2019). our research project focuses on the english context where provision is higher than this average at 42%. whilst the project explores outdoor provision more generally, the aim of this paper is to focus more specifically on the role of ecec in fostering nature connection in babies and toddlers; it presents data from the three phases of the research that offer new insights about the position of “nature” in outdoor ecec provision. 2.0 research methods the research project adopted a sequential mixed methods approach involving three phases. given the lack of knowledge about outdoor provision for babies and toddlers the study was exploratory, and the three phases were designed to be developmental (johnson & onwuegbuzie, 2004), each generating new knowledge to inform the next. they were also designed to respond to an overall research question – what outdoor provision do english ecec settings make for under twos? phase 1. narrative review: a narrative review of literature focused on babies’ and toddlers’ (birth to two years) engagement with outdoor provision within ecec settings. internationally published literature was searched using six databases [librarysearch; injenta connect; the british educational index, child development and adolescent studies, education resources information center and google scholar] using the following search terms: babies; toddlers; infants; under twos; baby rooms; day care; outside; outdoors; nature; physical activity; sleep; physical development. this review allowed us to situate the project and supported the construction of the survey for phase 2. full detail about the methodology and findings from this phase are available as a published paper (kemp & josephidou, 2021) phase 2. online survey: an online survey was used to audit current provision in one county (kent) in the southeast of england. it was directed at setting managers and those working with under twos, inviting them to describe specific information about the outdoor provision for under twos in their setting (kemp, durrant, & josephidou, 2020). phase 3. case studies of 3 settings: for this phase, our lens was one of appreciative enquiry looking to gather examples of good practice that could then be disseminated further. case study visits were made to three different settings. the original design intended to include five case studies, but the constraints of the covid-19 situation meant that two planned visits had to be cancelled. qualitative interviews sought practitioner views on their role when engaging with children in the outdoor area including what effective provision looks like. they were also asked to detail any experience, education or training they had undertaken. narrative observations of practice were carried out and photographs and sketches were collected. 2.1 participants and sampling all managers of settings with provision for children under the age of 2, in kent, were contacted by email and invited to participate in the online survey (n=133). we accessed the sample through speaking to our professional contacts, contacting university partnership settings, researching quality assurance reports and websites and telephoning settings. the final a life “in and with nature?” 9 9 sample used to inform findings is representative in terms of socio-economic status and geographical location of settings with provision for the under twos in this area (n=53). this is shown in table 1 which compares responding and non-responding settings (as measured by their index of multiple deprivation [imd] score and geographical classification [ons, 2011]). this is significant as there is evidence that access to the outdoors, and natural environments more specifically, may be mediated by children’s economic status (defra, 2018). participants for the case study were recruited by asking them to indicate at the bottom of the survey whether they would be interested in taking part in phase 3 of the research. 2.2 ethical considerations full ethical approval for the research was given by the university ethics committee. british educational research association (bera) guidelines (2018) and those developed by the european early childhood education research association (2015) helped to steer our thinking. both researchers are experienced in undertaking fieldwork in professional settings which include young children and so were aware of the need for sensitivity and clear communication with professionals. we were particularly concerned not to convey the impression that we were taking a deficit view and looking to criticize current practice; rather our intention was to promote the voices of ecec practitioners and to develop this important conversation about the outdoor experiences of under twos. 2.3 data analysis differing forms of analysis took place depending on the phase of the project and included a narrative review of the literature, descriptive analysis of quantitative data obtained through the survey and thematic, inductive analysis of qualitative case study data. narrative review: a narrative review of the relevant research papers (n = 21) was carried out to establish what is already known about outdoor provision for under twos internationally. we found no sources within the context of the uk and only a small body of work based in scandinavia, usa, canada, australia, portugal, ireland. a thematic analysis based on braun and clark’s framework (2006) was undertaken. this involved multiple readings of the papers by both researchers to identify both semantic (explicit) and latent (implicit) themes. numerical and thematic analysis of survey: the quantitative data provided by the survey was analyzed using the statistics package for social science (spss 23). the responses to each question were converted into the valid percentage of those who answered each question. qualitative comments were analyzed using nvivo 12 where 12 nodes or themes were initially identified. where qualitative comments are cited, a code is used as the only identifying feature. the code for each setting is made up of a number (setting 1-53); a letter (u indicating urban or r indicating rural); a second number (1-10 referring to its imd decile). for example, “s23u1” indicates a survey response from setting number 23 in an urban location with an imd score of 1. thematic and inductive analysis of case studies: the data set provided by the case studies included photos and sketches, narrative transcripts of walking tour interviews with practitioners and setting managers, observation notes, transcripts of researcher conversations and individual researcher reflections. the data was analyzed using nvivo 12 through a two-stage process; firstly, on a case-by-case basis to get a coherent sense of outdoor provision at each of 10 global education review 9 (2) the three settings and secondly as a whole set to identify similarities and differences between settings. in this paper we present the findings from across three phases using a froebelian lens to draw out data related to the child/nature connection. we start by providing an “extensive” picture of the key themes. this is followed by intensive analysis of one of the case study settings. 3.0 findings 3.1 the importance of the outdoors despite a paucity of published research, our study found that the pedagogic potential of the outdoors for babies and toddlers appears to be generally recognized in english ecec practice. the narrative review identified just twenty-one relevant research papers within the international body of literature suggesting a lack of research interest in the outdoor experiences of under twos. moreover, within these papers we identified a focus on mobile children and an underlying assumption that the outdoors is for older children and that babies will be inside. one us-based study of babies and toddlers prioritized activities including climbing, running, sitting, squatting and standing (dinkel et al., 2019). another study, this time undertaken in a portuguese setting with a stated focus on birth to three, only included data related to the older children who were able to walk (bento & costa, 2018); there was just one mention of the younger age group with the observation that: the younger children were a bit insecure outside. they showed some difficulties…they hardly explored the space autonomously (p. 294). in contrast, our survey revealed that settings recognize the diverse benefits of spending time outdoors for babies and toddlers and acknowledge their responsibility in providing regular access: natural light is important to development of eyesight. vitamin d through sunlight is important to growing bones. physical play is important to development of fine and gross motor skills. being outside encourages understanding of different skills and risks. the development of knowledge about the world around us and the stimulation of sounds and natural presences around us. (s19u5) most settings reported they go outdoors twice a day or more, all year around, and enjoy access to generous outdoor spaces. a minority provide free-flow access for both babies (14%) and toddlers (28%) throughout the year (see figures 1 & 2). a life “in and with nature?” 11 11 figure 1. frequency of access to the outdoors for babies (percentage of respondents) figure 2: frequency of access to the outdoors for toddlers (percentage of respondents) a small number of settings report a specific commitment to outdoor provision and provide access to diverse outdoor environments. these are not necessarily owned by the setting which highlights the potential significance of off-site provision. 3.2 limited emphasis on nature connection both the literature and our empirical research highlight the limited emphasis on supporting young children to engage with the natural characteristics of the outdoor environment. only a very small number of research papers (byrd-williams, dooley, thi, browning, & hoelscher, 2019; hall, linnea howe, roberts, foster shaffer, & williams, 2014; moore & cosco, 2014; morrissey, scott, & wishart, 2015) emphasize the value of engagement with the natural environment. hall et al. (2014) position the outdoor environment as “a place for hands-on learning about the world of nature” (p. 206) and observe how babies use “their eyes, hands, feet, mouths and entire bodies to experience the 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 spring (march may) summer (june aug) autumn (sep -oct) winter (nov dec) 2.4 23.8 28.6 22.4 14.3 26.2 33.3 23.8 16.7 40.5 28.6 42.9 45.2 9.5 7.1 11.9 23.8 babies outdoor all day free flow more than twice a day twice a day once a day 0 10 20 30 40 50 60 70 80 90 100 spring (march may) summer (june aug) autumn (sep oct) winter (nov dec) 2.1 2.2 2 38.2 42.6 34.8 27.7 21.3 23.4 14.4 14.9 34 27.7 41.3 42.6 6.4 4.3 4.3 12.8 toddlers outdoor all day free flow more than twice a day twice a day once a day 12 global education review 9 (2) minutia” (p. 198). similarly, a study of a setting in melbourne, australia (morrissey et al., 2015) focuses on the benefits of natural outdoor spaces for the youngest children. this research compared the responses of babies and toddlers to natural and built play space using behavior mapping and child tracking. the redesign of the space introduced planting and other natural elements and features. after “greening” the researchers found that the children used features such as the bridge, edging and platform to physically challenge themselves and to practice balancing and stepping. they spent much more time engaged in a wide variety of physical activities as well as using the space for quiet and sedentary activities and ranged more widely across the whole space. the study also noted increased sensory engagement with the natural world. in our survey, the significance of engaging with the natural environment was only mentioned three times, one comment being: the natural environment provides the exact stimulus that babies need without being too overpowering. outdoor environments provide opportunities for babies to use all their senses to explore them. (s5r8) this lack of prioritization of naturebased experiences appears to be reflected in the environments provided for the youngest children. only a small number of settings emphasized the natural characteristics of the setting environment or indicated they were in the process of developing this. this means that although settings may provide regular opportunities to be outdoors, a sensory interaction with nature may not be part of this experience. 3.3 nature as risky concerns about safety mean that natural elements may be discouraged in favor of manufactured alternatives such as artificial grass or commercially produced resources; it may also mean that time spent outdoors is limited and controlled by practitioners. the idea that the natural environment is a risky space for the youngest children is evident in the research literature. in her study of an australian setting, rouse (2015) identifies practitioner concerns about being able to keep babies and toddlers safe and therefore “isolated in a small play space” (p. 748). morrissey et al. (2015) highlight the tendency to provide under twos with “artificial, ‘safe’ and non-challenging play environments.” following the naturalization of the outdoor environment at one australian setting they noted how natural elements such as stick shelters and plants were perceived as unsafe by practitioners. the infant and toddler environmental rating scale – revised (itersr) (harms, cryer, & clifford, 2006) categorizes natural features (such as exposed tree roots) as a minor hazard which suggests an inherent problematizing of the natural environment in relation to the youngest children. qualitative responses to our survey also revealed a concern with safety issues including managing parental expectations: we had babies sleeping outside in cots at one point, but a baby got bitten/stung and the parent was not happy. we now have air con in the sleep room to keep the temperature suitable in there instead. (s7u5) concern due to litigation from parents should there be an accident about taking the children outside and off site (s10r7) a life “in and with nature?” 13 13 the impact of these safety concerns was highlighted at the case study settings: this is their baby pen. so, i created this for our little babies that don’t walk, so when they come out, they can crawl around in here with the supervision of the adult to make sure they don’t get out and get trampled on by all the older children. (case study 1) at another setting the manager discussed how they encouraged their staff to be less anxious about safety, using the term “meerkat-ing” to describe a practice they were trying to discourage: so many adults “meerkat,” and they literally are like this, looking around. then, something happens, a fight, or somebody falls over, and they’ll go over. they’ll sort that out, and then they assume position. (case study 2) such concerns may be limiting practice even where natural elements are provided within a setting environment. 3.4 being physically active is prioritized an emphasis on physical activity means that wider affordances of natural outdoor environments and alternative ways of being are not always developed in practice. the association between being outside and being physically active is dominant in the research literature on under twos in ecec. a contemporary interest is the extent to which physical activity guidelines are followed in ecec settings (byrd-williams et al., 2019; reunamo et al., 2014) to meet public health agendas. all settings in our research reported that they provide varied resources to support physical activity and recognize the diverse benefits of being physically active outdoors for babies and toddlers: physical activity promotes stronger bones and healthy hearts, reduces the chances of being overweight and generally makes you feel healthy. (s17r7) …they develop more advanced physical skills when using their gross muscles which tends to happen more frequently outside. (s6u5) we asked questions about provision to support different types of physical activity and climbing was the most supported activity. although some settings mentioned natural features such as slopes and mounds, there is a reliance on fixed and moveable climbing structures. artificial grass is a popular choice of surface to support physical activity such as walking and running for this age group, as is safety surfacing. 3.5 “a lot of time it is possible…” a case study of the possible in practice although our research highlighted the substantial challenges settings face in developing outdoor provision for the youngest children, the case studies demonstrated (each in different ways) what is possible. one of the most significant challenges reported in the survey was the weather (33 individual references), particularly for babies at the pre-walking stage. parental support is also identified as a significant influence on outdoor practice (11 references) with one manager noting their “concern due to litigation from parents should there be an accident about taking the children outside and off site” (s10r7). the daily routines of sleeping, eating and nappy changing were felt to impact on time spent outdoors. at some settings, these tasks are associated with being 14 global education review 9 (2) indoors and limit the opportunities to spend time outdoors. here we present one example to illustrate “the possible in practice.” the setting is large and caters for 140 children a day from 3 months upwards. there are three rooms for the youngest age group– one for “little babies” which could be 3 months up to 18 months depending on demand and two for “big babies” (1-2-year olds). each of these rooms has freeflow access to a large designated outdoor area (there is a door covered with a free-flow curtain). in addition to their own area, the babies also regularly use the gardens, the field, and a forest school area. these are full of natural features including stinging nettles which are deliberately left so the children learn about risk. there are also animals on the site. regular and diverse outdoor experiences are integral to the ethos of the setting and off-site environments are accessed in addition to those provided at the setting. physical activity is encouraged through engagement with natural features and as part of a holistic learning experience: we had an enormous log, that was just amazing, even this age group would climb on it, it was a dinosaur, it was a pirate ship the outdoor environment has been developed to foster diverse sensory experiences and includes spaces for sitting, lying down, and sleeping. in the drier summer months children sleep outside usually under covered area or in yurts: for this age group, it’s… the quieter aspect of, being outside, the smells, the textures not just for being active…they can just go and lay in the willow structures if they want. they don’t have to do anything natural textures are recognized as being “really good sensory-wise, they like feeling the grass…” but whilst practitioners recognize that “on the whole they need grass,” free-flow spaces are covered in soft surface and have a canopy to maximize year-round access. there is a strong sense of pedagogical leadership at the setting and the outdoors is understood as an integral part of the setting ethos not as a discrete aspect of practice. this is clearly communicated with the result that “parents have got the attitude that they want their children outside” and staff “have to love it [being outdoors].” although there are challenges, the attitude communicated by the lead practitioner sums up their approach: it’s just a case of putting our heads together and getting round the problem…a lot of the barriers can be diminished…a lot of the time it is possible 4.0 discussion the picture of outdoor provision for babies and toddlers is a complex and contradictory one. if we look specifically at our empirical research in kent, we find that there is certainly an awareness of, and an intention to provide, outdoor experiences for these very young children. at the same time, children are offered very different outdoor experiences depending on the context of the specific ecec setting they attend. furthermore, regardless of opportunity to spend time outdoors, the lack of natural elements means that most young children have limited experience to connect with, and therefore learn about, nature whilst attending a setting. this limited engagement seems in part informed by two key perspectives, one which is to keep the youngest children safe a life “in and with nature?” 15 15 and the other which emphasizes physical development. this emphasis has a direct impact on the types of resources provided meaning that they can be commercial rather than natural and aimed at mobile children. it may also exclude the youngest children whose learning needs center more on the sensory activities of watching, touching and feeling, and in particular babies not yet walking. we suggest that froebelian philosophy offers a much-needed theoretical lens that can illuminate both the limitations of contemporary practice and potential pathways for future development that are supportive of both the human and non-human world. here we return to explore the three key insights about the child/nature relationship froebel offers: the importance of nature connection from birth; the interdependence of children and nature; the role of the adult in fostering nature connection. 4.1 the importance of nature connection from birth the recognition by settings of the importance of time spent outdoors for the holistic development of babies and toddlers is very encouraging although there is limited acknowledgement of the significance of nature and natural elements. respondents to the survey demonstrated an understanding of the diverse benefits that outdoor environments can offer young children. however, whilst the youngest children are offered regular outdoor experiences, there are limited opportunities for engagement with nature. the implications of this have been argued by moore & cosco (2014) following their review of north carolina ecec settings: every day young children are exposed to ecologically deprived land and receive a seriously flawed message about how we treat our natural resources (p.172). contrasted to froebelian understanding of the importance of time spent from birth “with the clear, still objects of nature” (1826, p.54), contemporary outdoor provision seems both limited and limiting. there is a need to raise questions about outdoor learning environments and the significance of building natural elements in so that young children are encouraged in “growing up green” and to become “agents of care for the natural world” (chawla, 2009, p. 6). 4.2 the interdependence of children and nature even at the case study settings, with their explicit outdoor ethos, the outdoor environment is positioned as a resource that supports human (child) development so that its potential in terms of environmental quality is unacknowledged. this may encourage an egotistical perspective of nature as in “what can i get out of it?” rather than “what is my responsibility towards it?” actions such as leaving “wild” areas with nettles are justified in terms of developing children’s understanding of risk rather than from a perspective of biodiversity gain. seen through a froebelian lens, there are opportunities to develop practice that explicitly acknowledges the interconnectedness of human and environmental health. one example of this is the natural learning initiative (moore & cosco, 2014) which positions ecec settings as “land restoration sites” and through which it aims to simultaneously promote human health and ecological restoration through a naturalization process. although it has a strong physical activity focus, it provides a contemporary holistic model for ecec that could be developed so bringing together human and environmental concerns through ecec practice. 16 global education review 9 (2) the development of features such as pathways, shade/shelter, trees, shrubs, vegetable gardens and edible landscapes as well as more modest elements such as planters are recognized as encouraging or “pulling” young children outdoors to engage with the natural world as well as enhancing the biodiversity of sites. however, these need to be developed appropriately and sensitively to support the wider ecological context. in england this could involve ecec settings working with environmental organizations such as wildlife trusts to better understand the environmental potential of their sites, to engage in a supported process of naturalization and “ecological literacy” (orr, 1992). this would foster what charles and louv (2020) term “wild hope,” that is: a way of being and living that is rooted in nature-based experiences and contributes to a healthy present and future for today’s children and generations to come (p. 395). 4.3 the role of the adult in fostering nature connection the responsibility of providing access to the outdoors for babies and toddlers is recognized by settings in our research, although the understanding of nature as risky may encourage the adult to take a “meerkating” role. this perspective also has the potential to position nature “as a threatening, hostile environment, related to emotions of disgust and fear” (olivos-jara, segura-fernandez, rubioperez, & felipe-garcia, 2020). instead, froebel promotes a pedagogy based on close observation of the child and their interests arguing “nothing, therefore, is left for us to do but to bring him [sic] into relations and surroundings” (pp.10-11). this observational approach is evident in the work of hall et al. (2014) and provides a potential contemporary model for practitioners to be “attentive and responsive” adults (bento & dias (2017, p.159) who closely observe children at play. hall et al. (2014, p.202) add that “children’s developmental growth in outdoor spaces is supported when adults themselves delight in the learning that occurs in the natural world”. nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies therefore need to promote conditions for both adults and children to feel comfortable and motivated during the time spent outside. 5.0 conclusions and recommendations using a holistic froebelian theoretical lens, our research has revealed the limitations and possibilities within contemporary english ecec practice in relation to providing opportunities for young children to connect with natural environments. our argument, supported by evidence from the three phases of the research project, is that nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogy remains largely unconsidered but are of fundamental importance not only to human health and wellbeing but also to that of the environment. froebelian philosophy highlights the interconnectedness of human health and environmental health and the significance of this is emphasized in contemporary research about the global environmental crisis. the focus within practice appears to be one which is limited to the opportunities and possibilities that being outdoors can offer the individual child. froebelian philosophy provides an alternative “holistic” lens and has value in informing both individual and collective responsibility towards the environment and how this disposition can be nurtured from a very young age in ecec (tourula, polkki, & isola, 2013). this shifts the perspective from one focused exclusively on children’s connection with nature to one which also considers nature’s connection with children. a life “in and with nature?” 17 17 this perspectival shift from an anthropocentric lens is challenging for ecec but of fundamental importance given the growing body of evidence documenting the nature and extent of the global environmental crisis. dasgupta (2021) refers to the “cruel irony” (p. 498) of offering young children pictures and toys of plants and animals without the associated environmental knowledge and direct experience. he highlights the importance of offering opportunities for children, from an early age, to connect with nature. ecec settings have a role to play here. pedagogy based on a romantic view of the child, that positions them at the center of their own world (georgeson et al., 2015), is unhelpful in terms of considering how they fit within the intricate system of the natural world and what a mutually beneficial relationship could look like. froebel’s understanding that “each unique and individual child is part of the whole, through family, community and eventually to the vastness of the universe” (bruce, 2012, p.1) presents a much-needed alternative perspective for the contemporary context. the argument set out in this paper informs recommendations in terms of moving forward towards an enhanced one-health model of ecec aimed at benefitting both human and non-human life. moore and cosco’s (2014) natural learning initiative for ecec in the usa is based on the understanding that “the health of humankind, animals, and the biosphere is interwoven in a single, interdependent system” (p.169). this one-health model, with its dual consideration of “naturalization as a health promotion strategy,” offers a valuable basis for thinking about the way in which a nature engaging and enhancing pedagogy could be developed. both froebelian thinking and contemporary research (hall et al., 2014; morrissey et al, 2015) highlight the importance of being “in and with nature” and would include sleeping and sensory engagement whilst lying or sitting as part of nature engaging pedagogy for under twos. by engaging in nature pedagogies from a very early age, babies can “begin to appreciate the infinitely beautiful tapestry of nature’s processes and forms” (dasgupta, 2021) supported by knowledgeable adults. we would therefore recommend an extension of the moore and cosco’s one-health model which would include consideration of the way nature pedagogies can support the holistic development of the youngest children as well as inducting them into their responsibilities as global citizens of a fragile earth. a further recommendation would be to develop partnerships between ecec settings and local environmental conservation organizations to support the development of these approaches. however, the development of practice relies upon supportive policy and a strong evidence base (malone & waite, 2016). whilst there have been some positive moves to include engagement with nature in some curricular contexts for the youngest children (norwegian directorate for education & training, 2017; education scotland, 2020), there remains little in the way of published research (kemp & josephidou, 2021). if the opportunities to develop nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies are to be maximized in practice, further research is needed. finally, froebel reminds us that we may switch our gaze from the magnificence of nature to the individual child, but, at our peril do we allow it to remain exclusively on the child and fail to see the interconnectedness between the individual infant and the vastness of nature. 18 global education review 9 (2) references adams, s., & savahl, s. 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(2013). the cultural meaning of children sleeping outdoors in finnish winter: a qualitative study from the viewpoint of mothers. journal of transcultural nursing, 24:2, 171-179. doi: 10.1177/1043659612472200 22 global education review 9 (2) table 1: respondents/non-respondents by imd and geographical location index of multiple deprivation type of location imd decile % (n) respondents % (n) nonrespondents urban/rural category % (n) respondents % (n) nonrespondents 1 3.8% (2) 6.2% (5) urban major conurbation 7.5% (4) 8.4% (7) 2 9.6% (8) urban city and town 52.8% (28) 66.3% (55) 3 7.5% (4) 12% (10) rural town and fringe 13.2% (7) 13.3% (11) 4 11.3% (6) 13.3% (11) rural village 11.3% (6) 8.4% (7) 5 17% (9) 10.8% (9) rural hamlets and isolated dwellings 9.4% (5) 1.2% (1) 6 15.1% (8) 3.6% (3) 7 7.5% (4) 18.1% (15) 8 11.3% (6) 13.3% (11) 9 13.2% (7) 7.2% (6) 10 7.5% (4) 6% (5) location nonidentifiable: 5.6% (3) 5.6% (3) total 100% (53) 100% (83) total 100% (53) 100% (83) le as t--- d ep ri ve d --- m o st experiences from the caregivers in tanzania 63 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: basil, pambas tandika, & ndijuye, laurent gabriel. is fathers’ involvement in young children’s development and learning in the early years important? experiences from the caregivers in tanzania. (2019). global education review, 6 (1), 63-74. is fathers’ involvement in young children’s development and learning in the early years important? experiences from the caregivers in tanzania pambas tandika basil university of dodoma, tanzania laurent gabriel ndijuye university of dodoma, tanzania abstract there has been an increased interest among researchers and policy makers on fathers’ involvement and its implications for children’s wellbeing and learning. existing empirical evidences from developed countries have documented fathers’ essential role that it successfully improves children’s development and learning. however, there is dearth of evidence from developing countries especially from sub-sahara african contexts. this study was designed to establish tanzanian experiences particularly kimamba village in kilosa district-on fathers’ involvement in children’s development and schooling dimensions. descriptive exploratory study design guided collection and analysis of data of the rural context. a total of 23 fathers were recruited for focus group interviews. the analysis of data revealed that fathers had good understanding of their roles and involvement in child-rearing and learning for mastering social and economic welfare of their children, families and the larger population. fathers indicate that their involvement has significant contribution to children’s development across schooling periods and later in life. their responses range from preparing home environment and crafting home-based timetable for the child to adhere to when at home and during after-school hours. the study concludes that, in a context with limited educational resources, parenting education is important for both fathers and mothers. this may ultimately lead to closer parental involvement and collaboration in child-rearing and caring. it therefore recommended that social welfare officers in collaboration with district education officers and teachers should organise and run sensitization programmes to improve fathers’ involvement in children’s development and learning. keywords fathers, early years, child development, caregivers, tanzania 1. introduction fathers’ involvement in terms of engagement, accessibility and responsibility (mcmunn, martin, kelly & sacker, 2017) has been of interest to researchers and policy decision makers. differentiating the three components of fathers’ involvement, pleck (2010) argued on caretaking and play or leisure; while accessibility of the specific component, fathers’ involvement impacts the child’s socio-emotional development _______________________________ corresponding author: pambas tandika basil, university of dodoma, p.o. box 523 dodoma, tanzania email: tpambas@gmail.com 64 global education review 6(1) and responsibly providing resources. regardless (cabrera & tamis-lemonda, 2013), and by being responsible in terms of material contributions, which results in the child’s enhanced educational attainment and predicted social success (shwalb, shwalb & lamb, 2013). gray and anderson (2015) revealed that fathers’ effects on the child’s development and learning are more visible in nuclear families with lowfertility rates and high social capital contexts than they are in extended families with higher fertility and more substitutable forms of childcare. in sub-saharan africa, most of the reported findings about involvement of men or fathers focus more on family-based hiv prevention and reproductive, maternal, and child health interventions and policy (richter et al., 2009) than on child development and schooling. as a result, posel and devey (2006) reported on the importance of and availability of data and its interpretation aspects as essential contributions to family life. in tanzania, there is a policy related to the development and learning of young children. the child development policy (united republic of tanzania [urt], 1996) notes among many other issues, that fathers are responsible for caring for their children, including those born outside the marriage, this as a strategy is intended to promote and balance child rights. researchers have also worked to uncover the situation of children’s rights, specifically focusing on parental engagement in children’s learning. for example, chahe & mwaikokesya, (2015), and sobayi (2018) reported on the uwezo’s 2010-2014 initiative [uwezo is a swahili word implying capability in english] and found that parental involvement in children's learning in pre-primary and early primary education is important. mligo (2017) also focused on parents’ engagement in early childhood education and care services for children aged between four to six years of age in primary schools in tanzania. in the well-known studies conducted in tanzania and elsewhere, researchers focused on parents in general, not specifically on fathers (c.f; kihumbe, 2015; kambugu, 2014; uwezo, 2016; uwezo tanzania, 2011). as a result, fathers’ engagement efforts in tanzania are unequally reported, and underrepresented in research and in parenting and parenting support programmes (gadsden, ford & breiner, 2016). though researchers in tanzania have inadequately focused on fathers, f the government of the urt is committed to ensuring that the rights of children (e.g., development rights, participation, etc.) are respected. the government’s commitments are visible through a number of initiatives, for example, the national strategy for growth and poverty reduction (nsgpr) for 2010-2015 (tanzania child rights forum, 2013). the nsgpr is commonly known in kiswahili, the national language, as mkakati wa kukuza uchumi na kupunguza umaskini tanzania (mkukuta). other reported initiatives by the author are the education and training policy of 1995 for issues of right to education basically enrolment, and the national policy on hiv and aids of 2001 that provides for orphans in sibling headed households to receive support from the central government, local councils, and community to minimize the impact of hiv and aids on their lives. in ensuring that these and other rights are observed and offered by adults and every citizen in the country, the child development policy of 1996 issued by the government of urt requires both parents to be accountable for providing basic services and taking care of their children. it further requires parents to be responsible for taking care of children born outside marriage, therefore, the study was designed to explore and document tanzanian experiences of the fathers’ involvement in children’s development and schooling dimensions. it specifically intended to: experiences from the caregivers in tanzania 65 i. explore fathers’ understanding of the main responsibilities of parents in child’s positive development and learning, ii. investigate the fathers’ key responsibilities in children’s learning at home, iii. suggest the essential responsibilities that parents and community should implement to better facilitate a child’s development and learning. 2. methods and procedures 2.1 research design this study employed mainly qualitative research methodology, informed by descriptive exploratory study design. the design fitted the current study as it was appropriate for research questions that focused on discovering the events or experiences, and gaining insights from informants regarding a poorly understood phenomenon of fathers’ involvement in child care and development. the design was supplemented by descriptive quantitative data that aimed at describing the study sample (kim, sefcik & bradway, 2017) as presented in table 1. 2.2 selection of the study area this research was carried out in kilosa district in kimamba ward and it involved fathers with young children in pre-primary education, and in grades one and two. kilosa district includes the following original ethnic groups: sagara, kaguru, kwiva and vidunda, who are mainly farmers; and immigrant ethnic groups such as maasai, barbaig, parakuyo, sukuma and hehe, who earn their living through farming, business and pastoralism (pacific, 2011). the district was selected from among six districts of the morogoro region of tanzania as it ranked the first in the conflicts caused by farmers and pastoralists (benjaminsen et al., 2009). the district was also highly impacted by flash floods in 2009, which displaced up to 23,980 households (international federation of red cross and red crescent societies, 2010) and 1,865 households in 2014 (international federation of red cross and red crescent societies, 2014). the flash floods resulted in possible family separation, physical harm and psychosocial distress. when separated, families and especially fathers have trouble settling their families, resulting in poor child care and development. the ensure children do not lose quality parental care and basic needs, help children organization intervened to support children affected by conflicts and natural disasters regionally as the children's most basic needs turn into emergencies. 2.3 sample and sampling procedures the study purposively included male parents (fathers) because they are customarily the heads of the households and have not been focused by researchers in tanzania in this aspect. having children enrolled in pre-primary and in early primary education classes was also a criterion for the inclusion or exclusion in the methodological rigour. the study involved a total of 23 fathers who volunteered to participate. this number of participants allowed researchers to collect and analyse data, and then write the report. 2.4 data collection focus group interviews were used to collect data. respondents were comfortable being part of a group and conversations were carried on with sufficient depth, we followed the principles that merton, fiske, and kendall (1956) outlined for conducting focus group interviews: 1) we informally assembled each group and requested their points of view on a specific; 2) groups of fathers consisted of 6-12 members; 3) moderators were trained and used prepared questions and probes to elicit fathers’ responses, and 4) researchers elicited the perceptions, feelings, attitudes, and ideas of the fathers regarding their involvement in child development and learning. researchers https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=sefcik%20js%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=27686751 https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/?term=bradway%20c%5bauthor%5d&cauthor=true&cauthor_uid=27686751 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/districts_of_tanzania https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mwanza_region https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tanzania 66 global education review 6(1) documented the discussions in field notebooks and recorded them for later analysis and report writing. the documented or recorded discussions were transcribed from the native language (kiswahili) into english for analysis and report writing. the focus group interview focused its discussion on the following questions: who is more responsible for child carethe father or the mother? why should one parent be more responsible than the other? what are key issues in child care? and what is good child preparation for formal learning? what are your major responsibilities as the child’s father in providing favourable homecontexts for the child’s learning? 2.5 ethical considerations prior to, during the study and report writing, researchers observed the essential ethical issue in conducting research. researchers attended to ethical issues throughout this investigation. the university of dodoma provided research clearance and district authorities provided an introductory letter. further, informed consent of informants’ participation was ensured by explaining to them the purpose of the study and giving them a consent form as an indicator of agreement of voluntary participation in the study. during report writing, confidentiality was observed in a way that unauthorized people had limited opportunities and time to access the collected data. additionally, pseudonyms (use of numbers or letters) were used to prevent identification of study participants. 2.6 data analysis after data were collected, interpretational analysis was used to systematically code and classify qualitative data. the raw data obtained from focus group discussion or interviews were coded to obtained relevant texts, repeating ideas, themes, theoretical constructs, research concerns and theoretical narratives. from repeating ideas, sub-themes developed naturally. later, abstract ideas or theoretical constructs and narratives were developed and were useful in bridging the concerns of the researchers and the subjective experiences that the participants shared. . to maximize objectivity and authenticity, the study deployed the techniques of communicability, transparency, and coherence through proper coding as well as taking notes using notebooks and audio recording device (auerbach & silverstein, 2003). it is important to note that in analysing oral data, the researchers bracketed all their previous understandings, beliefs and assumptions (onwuegbuzie, leech & collins, 2012) regarding the importance of fathers’ involvement in child’s development and learning. 3. results data presentation begins with the presentation of the demographic characteristics of the study participants involved in the data collection process. table 1 demographic characteristics of the children’s biological fathers fathers’ educational level level attained freq fathers’ age age range freq not attended 3 25-30 1 primary education 6 31-36 8 secondary education 3 37-42 8 tertiary education 12 43+ 6 total 23 total 23 experiences from the caregivers in tanzania 67 . a total of 23 fathers were involved in three fgds lasting an average of one hour and twenty minutes each. regarding their education attainment, 52.1% of them had tertiary education, mostly bachelor’s degrees in different disciplines. 3.1 fathers’ understanding of the responsible parent in child’s positive development and learning to respond to this objective, the researchers asked the fathers about their understanding of positive child care between the father, mother and the community. the data analysis revealed that fathers were aware of child care, which they described as consisting of broad four aspects: provision of nutritious food, attending the child’s health care needs, provision of clothing, and provision of a safe and attractive home environment. fathers described and insisted that provision of a balanced diet (protein, starch, vitamins and minerals etc.) is important for the development of the child’s brain and body. provision of good and balanced diet prevents children from being attacked by diseases that would impact their positive development and learning. fathers mentioned diseases like kwashiorkor or malnutrition as being common to children who were not fed a balanced diet. fathers mentioned health services (attending clinic and medical attention) as among the crucial services that constituted positive child care. they said that a child deserves care in various forms including clinic and medical care services to monitoring his/her growth and development, and to provide appropriate health care intervention when needed. health care intervention included medication and vaccination to prevent external and internal infectious of diseases and support stronger health. clothing was also identified by fathers as one of their responsibilities. they mentioned clothing that is clean and in good condition because it makes the child look smart and free of infectious diseases that are caused by being dirty. importantly, when the child wears good and clean clothes, s/he feels proud to be cared and valued by his/her father. in line with clothing, the home environment should have rooms that are well ventilated, clean and supplied with facilities especially mosquito nets to prevent mosquito bites that may cause malaria, one of the leading killer diseases of young children. availability of some play facilities at home was mentioned by fathers in kimamba ward as important for fathers to provide for the child to develop well. such facilities should be those that could not easily harm the child during play and provide enjoyable engagement and stimulation that will lead the child to consistently engage in various play activities. fathers’ mention of the availability of play facilities at home indicates their concern with their children’s development and formal learning preparation. to make children joyful at home, fathers urged parents and other caregivers to be friendly to children as this allows them to feel secure and not be scared. further, researchers inquired about fathers’ understanding of parent most responsible in child development and learning. analysis of data collected from the fathers who participated through fgds, revealed that 15 (65.2%) of the fathers involved in the study said that both parents (father and the mother) are equally responsible; whereas 6 (26.0%) responded that the child’s rearing and caring is a collective responsibility of the parents and community members, including teachers. in addition, two (8.6%) of the fathers said that child rearing and care is the mother’s responsibility. 68 global education review 6(1) fathers gave different reasons for their responses regarding parents’ responsibility for the child’s development and learning. those who viewed that child rearing as the responsibility of both parents (father and mother) gave three main factors to support their views. these factors would ensure that children are raised in standards that are culturally acceptable (good behaviours); they would ensure that the child’s social and personal needs (love, feeding, clothing and school materials) are met; and they would ensure close follow-up of the young child’s learning progress and development. on the other hand, fathers who viewed child rearing as a responsibility of the parents and community argued that parents are principal caregivers and first teachers of their children at home. when children are out of their home, for example in school, teachers and the community in general should participate in ensuring that they are in safe and comfortable social environment. regarding this, one parent elaborated that: when the child is not yet enrolled for schooling, parents mainly a father should strive to ensure that his child eats nutritious food, has decent clothes, and gets other essential needs. as the child starts schooling, the father should be close to teachers to ensure that he/she attends at school and learns both academic matters and acceptable behaviours. contrary to other study participants, some fathers opined that caring for the child’s development and learning is the responsibility of the mothers. they argued that mothers are close to children all the time (day and night). therefore, they insisted that closeness existing between mothers and children made it easier for them to raise and monitor their children’s development and learning. they further emphasised that mothers are more responsible for the child care for positive development and learning because fathers are usually occupied with income generating activities. one of the respondents elaborated that: imagine, i wake-up very early in the morning at 05:30 am to prepare myself for work as i am required to have arrived at the work place at or before 8:00 am and return home around 09:00 pm. as i wake-up or return home, i find them (children) sleeping. this makes it difficult for me to have time to talk to them as their mothers do. one crucial lesson from the study participants is that they were aware that children need to grow, develop and learn when in the hands of both parents (mother and father). however, economic activities occupied 56.5% of the involved fathers, therefore, separating them from their partners (mothers) as well as their children, making it difficult for fathers to participate in positive child care while being responsible for improving family, social and economic well-being for the progress of their families. this suggests that fathers in kilosa district especially at kimamba village are aware that positive child development and learning is a collective responsibility between parents and neighbouring community. in this study 91.3% of fathers reported that successful child development and learning is facilitated by the involvement of all parents (fathers and mothers) and the general community. therefore, child rearing should not be taken as a responsibility of one of the two biological parents. experiences from the caregivers in tanzania 69 3.2 fathers’ key responsibility for child’s learning at home in this objective, the researchers asked fathers about their responsibilities for the child’s learning at home. the analysis of data revealed that fathers’ contribution for the child’s learning at home involved preparing the home environment with some sports and games and learning resources, such as school uniforms, exercise books, writing materials, clothes and shoes. additionally, fathers believed that they should assist in crafting a timetable for the child to follow as s/he returns from school. school uniforms fathers involved in this study were of the view that it was their principal role to provide school uniforms to their children. the uniforms, which include clothes, shoes and socks, make the child look smart and valued. uniforms allow children to go to school happier, prepared, and feeling just as valued as children from families with good socio-economic backgrounds. learning materials fathers involved in this study believed that several learning materials should be provided at home; these included exercise books, pencil/pens, text or supplementary books, slates, counting devices, cards for letters and numbers, and some crayons. these resources are important to assist learning, especially reading, and to develop interests in school while at home. some materials for drawings (pencils/pen, exercise books or slates) help the child prepare herself/himself well for school activities [emergent and conventional literacy as well as numeracy] and other planned learning activities in school. in addition to academic related facilities, fathers also argued that sports and games facilities are essential for the child when the child is interacting in play with peers. these activities increase development of their fine and gross motor skills, sociability and hence make children feel part of the larger community. crafting child’s timetable fathers argued that parents at home should prepare a timetable for their children to adhere to and attend properly once they return home after school hours. the timetable should indicate specific activities that children should perform before they go to bed. it should include enough time for children to perform extra school and home work. engaging in extra school and home work requires time. therefore, fathers should monitor children’s activity to ensure that children are exempted from some duties, and instruct them to utilize the time they have to accomplish school work at home. it was explained by one of the fathers that: children need time to get enough sleep to allow their brain and the body to rest and allow other internal body processes to continue. sleeping for children is important as it relieves them and when they wake up, they generally have enough energy to play for stimulating their brain and muscles. the fathers urged their fellows and parents in general to engage their children in activities that develop a sense of time management. therefore, parents should go through children’s exercise books to be informed about their progress in school activities and be able to intervene where necessary to improve their child’s learning as well as their socialization in society. the other crucial intervention mentioned was to regularly check on the type and quality of food or nutrition that children receive at home before going to school. a close and positive relationship with school teachers was cherished by parents and 70 global education review 6(1) emphasised for learning and being informed of the child’s progress in school. 3.3 advice given by fathers based on the fathers’ advice regarding improved fatherhood and child rearing for positive development, two sub-themes of responses emerged. these sub-themes emerged as the respondents of this study reported that most of the fathers had detached themselves from their children, hence they mostly depended on their wives (female parents) to inform them of the progress of their children. these sub-themes are described below. 3.3.1 advice to fathers to improve the future of the young children and the nation as a whole, fathers advised their fellow parents to be close to their children in order to determine and understand the challenges impacting their development and learning. in addition, positive attachment between fathers and their children would enhance and nurture children’s potential and their overall behaviour. secondly, provision of all the necessary requirements for life and school (e.g. nutrition/food, clothing, good sleeping place, and enrolling their children to good schools) should be a priority for all family members as part a child’s basic human rights (right to be nurtured, listened and valued). 3.3.2 advice to the government authorities fathers involved in this study advised the government to ensure that schools have learning environments that are attractive and supportive to the child’s development and learning. attractive and supportive learning environments make young children more interested and persistent with the school activities. school feeding programmes are among crucial strategies to be implemented. such programmes would enable children take meals in schools for strengthening their health and sustaining school activities rather than letting them walk for a long distance back home searching for food. again, it was advised that: the government should recruit well trained teachers in early education to cope with the actual demand (increasing number of children and need for quality services) for quality classroom organization and teaching. employing qualified teachers in early education should be a priority rather than using teachers with limited qualifications in teaching young children. it was noted that improving health care services for young children is important as some children come from poor families that can hardly afford the high costs needed to obtain good medical service. the financial impact experienced in rural areas when parents send their children to hospitals/health care centres dwindle the economic status of the poor families that normally toil to earn their daily meal. furthermore, children’s deaths have been reported because of the failure of the parents to meet medical costs required for treatment of their children. fathers also urged the government at different levels to take action against parents who neglect or delegate their parental roles to unknown people who fail to provide intended support to children. as a result, such children in such circumstances run away from home and join other street children, and consequently lose focus of their life. neglecting parental obligations to children is to deny them of their right to be cared for. the government was also urged to take action against those who employ experiences from the caregivers in tanzania 71 and harass children in a way that makes them drop out of school. 4. discussion of the findings given that young children rely on parents and other primary caregivers in their development and learning, they need to be cared for to promote their abilities and talents early at home and as they proceed with schooling (department of child and adolescent health and development, 2004). it is because of the importance of early years that gadsden et al. (2016) see parents as the most proximal and most important manipulators of child’s development; therefore they urge them to work interactively. fathers’ presence (co residence) in the children’s households (lamb, 2010) is crucial for cognitive, social and moral development, and infant attachment to fathers (lamb, 1981). it is because of the benefits that fathers have on their sons/daughters that fathers at kimamba village reported that child care needed for development and learning is a collective responsibility. the views held by fathers at kimamba village regarding child care being a collective responsibility are similar to those of gadsden et al. (2016) that nurturing relationships with both fathers and mothers essentially enable optimal developmental outcomes to a child. gadsden et al. (2016) also indicated that there are more benefits to the child when parents living in the same household support each other and are generally consistent in their expectations for the child and in their parenting behaviours. biller (1993) argued that when husband and wife have a cooperative partnership, the family atmosphere becomes conducive to the positive development of each member of the household, and in particular, the father’s commitment in equitably rendering shared parenting responsibilities contributes to the successful family relationship. it was reported by fathers’ in kimamba village that economic activities [done by employed or selfemployed fathers] influence the quality of fatherhood just as it does in other countries such as the united states. kramer and kramer (2014) for instance, argued that changes in economic landscapes like increased family responsibilities, retrenchment and economic recessions result in members seeking new employment opportunities. these economic fluctuations cause other heads of households to stay at home or leave their homes/families. practically, in the 19th century, fathers in the united states left their small farms and businesses to seek employment in an emerging industrial economy away from home, leaving the responsibility for rearing children largely to mothers (larossa, 1997). economic impact on the quality of fathers’ involvement in child care and development as seen from participants at kimamba village and in other countries like the united states is an implicit indicator that fathers make a significant contribution to their families and children’s access to resources (government of western australia, 2007). in the view of the study participants (fathers), parents and other caregivers are essential resources for children’s thriving. parents including fathers are essential in managing the emotional states of children (e.g.; fearfulness, hopelessness, depression and withdrawal) and managing behaviour especially the unacceptable ones (gadsden et al., 2016). provision of support, for example, provision of school uniforms and play facilities at home by parents as noted by the study participants in kimamba village helps children at risk of developing unacceptable behaviours, such as anxiety and depression, that impair children's regulation and ability to function well at home, at school and in the community (osofsky & fitzgerald, 2000). support by parents especially on the preparation of the home environment for https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk402020/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk402020/ 72 global education review 6(1) the child’s development and learning make them stimulated and challenged in such a way that they develop various skills such as healthy selfregulatory practices which are useful for academic success (gottfried, 2013). 5. conclusion and recommendations the study concludes that the involved fathers at kimamba village were aware that positive child development and learning is a collective responsibility that needs to be provided by both parents. there are indications that some fathers still devote minimal time in following up their children’s development and learning. these fathers think that their wives (female parents) have the traditional role of child caring while fathers are responsible for working in income generating activities to provide for the family. secondly, economic contexts [growth or recession] among study participants had impact regarding the responsibility of parents in the child’s development and learning. generally, the findings of this study are closely related to the explanations given by pleck (2010) that the role of the father ranges from arranging for the child’s supporters or caregivers, also known as babysitters, looking for medical specialists for attending to the child when medical problems arise, determining when the child needs new clothes, etc. this implies that the fathers’ responsibility is both a process (making sure the child is cared for) and an indirect care (arranging for resources to be available). therefore, this study recommends that parental engagement should be a policy-based intervention in parental education programmes for improving the quality of parental care and interaction among themselves and with their children. through parenting programmes, participants would learn and sharpen their understanding for inducing changes in their families and to an individual child. references auerbach, c. f. & silverstein, l. b. 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(eds.). (2013). fathers in cultural context. new york: routledge. sobayi, c. (2018). the role of parents and preprimary education in promoting early numeracy development to young children in dar es salaam. papers in education and development. richter, l. m., sherr, l., adato, m., belsey, m. a., chandan, u., et al. (2009). strengthening families to support children affected by hiv and aids. aids care, 21, 3-12. research for development-r4d. (n.d). increasing parent and community engagement in children’s learning in tanzania. accessed at https://www.r4d.org/projects/increasingparent-community-engagementchildrens-learning-tanzania/ on 14/9/2018. tanzania child’s rights forum. (2013). tanzania child rights status report. dar es salaam. author. accessed at http://www.childrightsforum.org/files/ta nzania%20child%20rights%20forum%2 0status%20report%202013.pdf on 4/3/2019 uwezo (2016). are our children learning? uwezo kenya sixth learning assessment report. nairobi: twaweza east africa. uwezo tanzania. (2011). are our children learning?: annual learning assessment report. accessed at https://twaweza.org/uploads/files/ala_ uwezo.pdf on 30/12/2018. about the author(s) pambas tandika basil is a lecturer in the department of psychology in the college of education of the university of dodoma. he is a teacher sand researcher. his interests and consulting services include in early childhood education, early literacy and numeracy, issues in early childhood education curriculum, quality of learning and social settings in promoting high quality learning outcomes for young children, and teaching and learning promoting problem-solving skills and critical thinking. laurent gabriel ndijuye is a lecturer in the college of education, the university of dodoma tanzania. his research interests include early childhood education (ece), early numeracy and literacy acquisition skills (enlas), role of home and school environments on the development of literacy and numeracy skills (hle), immigrants and minority education and pedagogy (imep), stem education, equity and social justice in early childhood education (esje) https://www.r4d.org/projects/increasing-parent-community-engagement-childrens-learning-tanzania/ https://www.r4d.org/projects/increasing-parent-community-engagement-childrens-learning-tanzania/ https://www.r4d.org/projects/increasing-parent-community-engagement-childrens-learning-tanzania/ http://www.childrightsforum.org/files/tanzania%20child%20rights%20forum%20status%20report%202013.pdf http://www.childrightsforum.org/files/tanzania%20child%20rights%20forum%20status%20report%202013.pdf http://www.childrightsforum.org/files/tanzania%20child%20rights%20forum%20status%20report%202013.pdf https://twaweza.org/uploads/files/ala_uwezo.pdf%20on%2030/12/2018 https://twaweza.org/uploads/files/ala_uwezo.pdf%20on%2030/12/2018 86 global education review 4(4) global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: heissenberger, petra, & heilbronner nancy (2017). the influence of primary school principals’ leadership styles on leadership practices. global education review, 4 (4), 86-101. the influence of primary school principals´ leadership styles on innovative practices petra heissenberger university college of teacher education in lower austria nancy heilbronner mercy college, new york abstract this qualitative research explored the relationship between school principals’ leadership styles and their innovative practices in schools. the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq; avolio & bass, 1995), was administered to 38 school principals in lower austria, who, based on their responses, were then categorized as leaders with stronger or weaker transformational leadership styles. six of these principals were then interviewed: three with strong transformational leadership styles (transformational – high) and three with weaker transformational leadership styles (transformational – low). interview data were coded qualitatively, and patterns and themes emerged relating to how these two groups viewed innovation in their school. the two groups of leaders were similar in that they both viewed requirements for innovation similarly. both groups also believed that the results of innovation could lead to an improvement in collegial collaboration and relationship. however, leaders with stronger transformational leadership styles viewed innovation more positively and placed more importance on innovation than participants with their weaker transformational counterparts. implications for practice are discussed. keywords leadership, innovation, school administration introduction leadership is a studied quantity in many domains. in the business world, for example, entire courses are devoted to what makes a successful leader of corporations. while leadership in education is also an important concept, we focus on it less, especially from an international perspective. it might be argued that at the core of leadership is innovation, but what does it mean to be innovative when one is an educational leader? innovative leaders may frequently possess an emotional energy and commitment, exhibit a sense of social responsibility and the courage to think and act afresh. these characteristics indicate a potential for leadership, but only through effective action can the leader translate such characteristics into ______________________________ corresponding author: petra heissenberger, university college of teacher education in lower austria, mühlg. 67, 2500 baden, austria. email: petra.heissenberger@ph-noe.ac.at 87 global education review 4(4) purposeful and meaningful outcomes. leadership requires this effective transformation, because otherwise even the best leaders remain ineffective (malik, 2014). effective action and management is therefore a requirement for leaders to translate their strengths and capabilities into performance and success (malik, 2014). drucker (1955) stated, “effectiveness means doing the right things; efficiency means doing things right” (p. 18); drucker was among the first to highlight the significance of management for modern society and its organizations, and he was able to communicate its complexity in simple terms. to be effective, he suggested, it is not so important who someone is, but how someone acts (drucker, 1955). is the implementation of effective leadership as simple as knowing the right steps to take in a situation? behaviorists such as b. f. skinner (1953) have suggested that behavior is simplistic and controlled with a series of reinforcers and punishment, leading to a good output. however, such presumptions disregard human autonomy and individual experiences, which shape who we are and how we react to situations. context also frequently influences behavior, and so good management through punishers and reinforcers offered at the wrong time and in an unsuitable situation can produce the opposite of what has been originally intended. school principals deal with this reality on a day-to-day basis; they may view innovation as simply a construct that may be managed by planning for and encourage efficiency, but if the context of the school does not support innovation, it may not happen. even the most well-meaning intentions of school principals can be completely misunderstood by the teachers, if they are put forward at a point of time where no cooperation is possible (herrmann, 2014). leadership styles may be an important link in the chain between personality traits and effective outcomes. leaders may be more or less managerial. they may take a hands-off approach, or they may dive into the complexities of overseeing a project. each of these styles is likely to produce different outcomes. complicating the matter is the issue of vision. does a leader need a vision to bring about innovation, or can she effectively control the development of innovation through a handson management approach? recent studies in leadership have suggested links between school innovation and the leader’s vision (e.g., kurland, peretz, & hertz-lazarotiz, 2010). school principals have had to become more innovative over the past decades as a changing landscape of curricular practices, teacher training requirements, and technological advances have extended the role of the school building leader. this changing landscape has led to renewed interest in leadership styles. that is, which leadership style enables some school principals to encourage innovative practices to flourish at their schools, and how do the different leadership styles encourage or hold back innovation at a school? these questions were explored in the current research. the influence of primary school principals 88 review of the literature school principals’ leadership styles have been shown to have an effect on many different types of school variables, including organizational health (cemalolu, 2011) and teacher satisfaction (mota, 2010). leadership styles are also recognized to be related to a faculty’s ability to carry out a leader’s vision (kurland, peretz, & hertz-lazarotiz, 2010). although a robust body of literature investigates the relationship between the influence of school principals and many different variables (eg, see blase, 2001), few comparisons have examined how their leadership styles influence innovation in schools. instead, these studies they tend to focus on the impact of principals’ leadership styles on teachers’ perceptions (e.g., park, 2012), not on the perceptions of the principals themselves. it is important to consider the implications of leadership styles on school innovation for a number of reasons. first, innovative practices are spreading, and one reason for this is that technology has enabled us to communicate in powerful ways as never before – as of 2015, almost half (46.4%) of the world was online, an 832.5% increase from 2000-2015 (internet world stats, 2015). and because more opportunities to connect with others exist, innovation is moving quickly across the globe. this expansion of innovation is not only encouraging communication it is also encouraging cooperation and collaboration leading to new opportunities for innovations in our schools. in schools, we see the evidence of largescale innovative projects that may disrupt teachers’ expectations (van den berg & sleegers, 1996) and actually lead to a sense of frustration in the school climate. to avoid this disruption, we need to understand the contextual factors and how they work with innovative practices. one of these contextual factors it the leadership style of school building leaders. it would be beneficial to understand the impact of leadership styles on innovative practices at schools, and from this understanding gain insight as to how we may promote leadership styles that encourage innovative practices aligned specifically with the context of the school they lead. the study at hand distinguishes between leaders with strong transformational leadership styles and those who tend toward weaker transformational styles. bass (1985) has described three styles of leadership: transformational, transactional, and laissezfaire. according to avolio and bass (1995), transformational leadership is described as “inspirational, intellectually stimulating, challenging, visionary, development oriented, and determined to maximize performance” (avolio & bass, 1995, p. 3). transformational leaders inspire and point the way towards the accomplishment of visions or missions. they tend to be more visionary (avolio & bass, 1995), and they may be less focused on managing the everyday context, choosing instead to direct their focus on the steps required to inspire and lead. they may be necessarily more open to the types of innovative practices we find transforming schools today. transactional leaders, on the other hand, tend to be more absorbed with day-to-day management as they utilize contingent rewards for a job well done, building loyalty as they do so, or they practice management by exception, 89 global education review 4(4) punishing followers when things don’t go well (bass & avolio, 1993) laissez faire leaders simply let events unfold without trying to intervene (bass & avolio, 1993). when considering these three management styles, the researchers proposed that principals with a strong transformational leadership style would be more likely than colleagues with a weaker transformational leadership style to promote innovative practices in their schools. transformational leaders would be interested in inspiring and implementing changes as a way to promote and further their own mission and vision for the school. leaders who are less transformational, on the other hand, may be more focused on the day-to-day oversight of teachers through rewards and management by exception practices to focus on the visionary aspects connected to innovation. the question at hand is how each of these leadership styles influence school leaders’ perceptions and practices of innovation at their schools. we explored through interviews the relationships between principals’ leadership styles and their perceptions and practices of innovation. methodology research questions using a systematic approach, the researchers explored the following research questions: 1. how do primary school principals view innovation in their schools? 2. how do primary school principals support innovation in their schools? 3. what are the similarities and differences between in leaders with strong transformational leadership styles and those with weaker transformational leadership styles in terms of how they view and support innovation? setting and participants background of the austrian educational setting the study was conducted with a sample of convenience drawn from lower austria, a federal state located in the upper northeast corner of austria. the annual net income in austria at the time of the study was € 21,685, and in lower austria it was slightly higher at € 23,342 (https://www.statistik.at/web_de/statistiken/in dex.html, 26.01.2017). there were 6,003 schools in austria with over 1.1 million students. in lower austria there were 1.149 compulsory schools, 47 grammar in the austrian system of education, compulsory schooling starts at the age of six. students attend primary school for 4 years until the age of 10. following primary school, students choose between two different types of secondary schools – middle school or grammar school each with varying academic emphases and admissions requirements. they attend a secondary school for 4 years, usually until the age of 14. upon successful completion of secondary school, students continue their education by selecting a school that focuses on either general or vocational education. if they select a vocational education, they attend a polytechnic school for another year, followed by a three-or-four-year apprenticeship. in austria, school leaders do not need a formal bachelor’s degree to become principal. the influence of primary school principals 90 instead, teachers apply for a directorate issued in the official gazette of the school board. in the application form to be filled in by the candidates, they must describe and reflect their personal and professional background. next, candidates are invited to a hearing conducted by an external personnel consulting agency. the hearing consists of a self-portrayal, a presentation of a project and some other, profession specific questions. the candidate also has to declare their personal and professional background and some fields are monitored and evaluated by the personnel consulting agency. these areas are: communicative competence, organisational capability, delegation ability, team orientation, decision capacity and conflict skills. since september 1996 newly appointed principals have been legally obligated to take part in a compulsory, extra-occupational school management course within the first four years in their new roles. participants fifty participants received the online multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq; avolio & bass, 1995) survey, and 38 participants completed and returned it, a participation rate of 76% all except for one participant had earned degrees which qualified them to teach in primary school; in addition, two participants had earned the middle school degree. two of the primary school teachers had gone on to earn a bachelor’s degree, and three had earned a master’s degree. one was a middle school teacher with a master’s degree. although all participants had served in either primary or middle school as a teacher, one principal had served as both. a large majority of the participants (n = 32) were female, compared with six male participants. a majority of the participants were experienced administrators in that 23 participants had been principals for 5 years or longer. most of the participants served as principals at larger schools in that 21 principals worked at schools with eight or more classes. instrumentation the multifactor leadership questionnaire (mlq—short form, avolio & bass, 1995) has been used over the last 30 years to identify and measure behaviors commonly associated with different leadership styles and “is considered the best validated measure of transformational and transactional leadership” (ozaralli, 2003, p. 338). participants rate themselves on 45 items on nine subscales using a likert-type rating system of 0 (not at all) to 4 (frequently, if not always) on a series of subscales that relate to the traits involved in transformational leadership. higher scores on the subscales related to participants’ transformational leadership styles were utilized in the study. higher score indicate that participants exhibit more traits associated with a transformational leadership style. the mlq has an additional optional component that allows others to rate their leaders. however, for the purposes of the current research, only participants’ self-ratings on the transformational leadership subscales were used. interview participants six principals were selected from the participants who returned surveys, and these principals were invited to be interviewed. these participants were invited based on their 91 global education review 4(4) responses to the mlq: three interview participants were selected based on their high scores on the transformational leadership subscale, and three interview participants were selected based on their low scores on the transformational leadership subscale. each 45minute semi-structured interview consisted of 13 questions (see table 1). these questions were used in order to ascertain important information related to the study’s research questions. the interviews were mostly held in small, quiet offices, were recorded and later transcribed for coding. data analysis participants’ mean scores were calculated for the transformational leadership subscales on the mlq. participants’ mean scores were then rank ordered from low to high. a higher score meant that participants exhibited more traits associated with the transformational leadership style (transformational-high), or exhibited table 1 interview protocol interview questions do you believe that your school is innovative? why or why not? how do you define innovation at your school? what does a principal need in terms of support to promote innovation at his or her school? what would you need to implement more innovations in your school? what would be helpful for you? are there any barriers to implementing innovations in your school? how well do you think the process works in your school/situation? can you describe some innovative activities that go on in your school? do you think that you are an innovative leader? why or why not? what are some characteristics of innovative principals? how can principals support teachers to become more innovative? who is responsible for initiating innovative processes? (ministry, school-board, superintendent, principal, or other stakeholders?) what do you think about your role in the innovation-process? do you think that innovations always need a top-down-process or do innovations come to schools by bottom-up-processes too? do you have anything to add? table 1 the influence of primary school principals 92 them more strongly. a lower score meant that the participants displayed fewer traits associated with the transformational leadership style (transformational-low), or exhibited them more weakly. these six participants with the highest and lowest scores in transformational leadership were invited to participate in a semistructured interview. all participants who were invited agreed to be interviewed, and each interview lasted 45 minutes, was recorded, and was later transcribed. the mean score for the group of transformational – high leaders of participants (n = 3) was 3.63 and the mean score for the group of transformational – low leaders of participants (n = 3) was 2.86. once participants were interviewed, researchers transcribed the interview data and began the coding process. data from the interviews were coded separately for the three transformational and three transactional leaders so that they could be compared for similarities and differences. using a process recommended by saldana (2009), qualitative data from the interviews were coded through three cycles. first cycle codes yielded individual ideas or concepts. second cycle coding grouped these ideas into related categories, as the researchers searched for patterns and connections between the codes. finally, third cycle coding yielded themes that related to individual research questions. findings two themes emerged from the qualitative interview data; these themes related to participants’ perceptions regarding the requirements of innovation and the results of innovation. requirements of innovation the theme, requirements of innovation, contained a total of 152 first-cycle codes. these 152 codes were split evenly between the comments of transformational – high leaders (n = 76) and transformational – low leaders (n = 76; table 2). table 2 coding results for theme: requirements of innovation second cycle codes first-cycle codes transformational –high leaders first-cycle codes transformational – low leaders importance of getting it right 25 importance of relationships 20 14 interested in new things 19 mentoring system and help for principals 12 20 principals as managers 29 concern about change 13 total 76 76 table 2 93 global education review 4(4) transformational-high leaders mentioned four second-cycle codes. first, they spoke about the importance of getting innovation “right.” they stated that they are aware of the important role that principals play in setting goals. as one transformational-high participant stated, “we are responsible for the ideas and for better planning” and establishing a climate for innovation, and they mentioned that principals need to be flexible in how they implement change. next, they discussed the importance of relationships, stating that principals must be willing to listen to others’ ideas: “i like to listen to others.” transformational-high participants also stated that it was important for the faculty and staff to be interested in new ideas or “things.” for example, a transformational-high participant discussed how she had “implemented the project healthy school,” focusing on initiatives such as proper nutrition and exercise for her faculty. transformationalhigh participants described how they are responsible for making innovations popular— that they are responsible for choosing the topics and supporting ideas from their colleagues. finally, they suggested that having a mentoring system in place for principals encouraged innovation. transformational-low leaders also mentioned four second-cycle codes. similar to their transformational-high counterparts, they mentioned the importance of relationships. one transformational-low participant stated, “a positive working-relationship is a breeding ground for innovation.” they also mentioned the importance of having good mentoring systems for faculty. however, a strong secondcycle code which emerged for transformationallow leaders that did not emerge for the other group concerned the principal as a manager. transformational-low participants spoke at length about specific managerial actions that they took to encourage innovation, such as doing classroom walk-throughs. others spoke about the specific actions that were needed to “be open-minded and … bring in new things.” another second-cycle code that emerged for only transformational-low leaders involved concerns about change. these participants expressed the concern that change was being forced upon them from the top-down. as one transformational-low participant discussed, “there is too little bottom-up innovation.” these participants appeared to be concerned that authoritative and governing structures were trying to force change, rather than change coming about organically from stakeholders’ desire to improve teaching and learning. results of innovation the theme, results of innovation, contained a total of 32 first-cycle codes. these 32 codes were fairly evenly split between the comments of transformational-high leaders (n = 15) and transformational-low leaders (n = 17; table 3). this theme contained three second-cycle codes that represented participants’ positive views regarding what had come about as a result of their efforts towards innovation. coding also revealed one negative second-cycle code. the influence of primary school principals 94 table 3 coding results for theme: results of innovation second cycle codes first-cycle codes transformational – high leaders first-cycle codes transformationallow leaders results of innovation – positive improvements improvement in pedagogy 4 7 improvement in relationships and collaboration 6 6 personal development 3 results of innovation – negative fear and resistance 2 4 total 15 17 table 3 first, participants in both leadership groups spoke about how teaching or pedagogy had improved as a result of innovation. specifically, participants described how innovation led to practices which had removed the focus of instruction from the teacher and placed it onto the child. for example, one participant from the high transformational group stated, “we focus on the child´s needs.” participants also described improvements in their ability to achieve goals, and, interestingly, how innovation had reinforced rituals at the school. next, participants in both groups described how innovation had brought about an improvement in their professional relationships and ability to collaborate with colleagues. as a participant from the transformation-high group stated, “[it is] no longer [about] ´me and my class,` but `[rather, it is about] ‘we and our classes.’” specifically, these leaders mentioned how communication with colleagues was important in the life of the school, and they described how innovative efforts had led to improved communication. 95 global education review 4(4) however, only transformational-high leaders discussed how innovation had led to a growth in their own personal development. it is interesting to note that personal development was considered by some transformational-high leaders to be both a cause of, and a result of innovation, indicating that for these leaders, there is a cyclical nature and interrelationship between innovation and personal development: personal development leads to innovation and innovation leads to personal development. the ways in which transformational-high leaders developed personally varied. for example, one participant described how she had become more knowledgeable and developed an ability to think about and implement new ideas as she planned for innovation, which, in turn, had led to her become more successful in her position. “[my] colleagues want to develop themselves and they want me to support them, ”one participant from the transformational-high leaders mentioned. this type of statement was missing from the statements of transformational-low leaders. one negative idea that surfaced was that innovation had led to fear and resistance among faculty and staff members. transformationallow leaders mentioned this slightly more frequently (n = 4) than did their transformational-hih colleagues (n = 2). one transformational-high participant also described how she tries to learn how to deal with being unsure of results, and that she is always unsure about the quality of her efforts. transformational-low leaders specifically stated that some of their teachers are resistant to topdown-innovations, including one participant who related that some colleagues are not open minded and that some teachers always say “no” to new projects. discussion using qualitative methodology, researchers in the current study investigated how school building leaders with different leadership styles view requirements for and results of innovations in their schools. patterns of similarities and differences in how these different types of leaders viewed innovation revealed themselves; these patterns may result in differences in how innovation is expressed and managed at their schools. transformational-high versus transformational-low leaders the leaders in the two groups (transformational-high and transformationallow) viewed certain requirements of innovation similarly. both types of leaders spoke of the importance of relationships to the implementation of innovative practices, as well as the importance of developing a mentoring system to support principals as they strive to effect innovative practices in their schools. similarly, both groups of leaders believed that the results of innovation could lead to an improvement in pedagogy, as well as an improvement in relationships and collaboration. both groups also felt fear and resistance as a result of innovation, although fewer the leaders in the transformational-high group expressed this view. however, major differences emerged in how each group viewed other aspects of the requirements of innovation, specifically in terms the influence of primary school principals 96 of how interested each group was in innovation and how they viewed their roles as implementers of innovation. transformational-high leaders – visionary agents of change transformational-high leaders in the current study viewed innovation as being more important and positive than transformationallow leaders, and they suggested that innovation had a positive influence in their schools. for example, they spoke more often about the importance of “getting it [innovation] right.” unlike transformational-low leaders, they expressed no reservations about change, and indeed, they saw themselves as agents of change – change that is necessary to bring about innovation. they described personal characteristics they believed they possessed, such as an interest in new things, that they believed to be necessary to become agents of change. they also seemed to understand the importance of relationships when implementing innovative practices at their schools. in some ways, it is not surprising that transformational-high leaders expressed a more positive view of innovation in their schools, for they are, by their own nature, more visionary and focused on transforming their organizations through leadership (avolio & bass, 1995), and vision is required for innovation. transformational-high leaders may also possess more intuition regarding what is required for innovation, making them more naturally adept at influencing change and innovation. transformational-low leaders – cautious managers of innovation grossmann, bauer & scala (2015) describe emotional stages in the process of changes, for example skepticism, shock, defense, resignation, frustration and insight. unlike their transformational-high counterparts who placed an emphasis on innovation, none of the transformational-low leaders spoke about the “importance of getting it [innovation] right.” nor did they express the idea that it was important to innovation to develop and maintain an interest in new or novel ideas. taken together, these findings are intriguing, as they suggest that these transformational-low leaders exhibited through their comments both a diminished interest in, and a reduced emphasis on, the importance of innovation in schools. based on these findings, transformational-low leaders, who expressed less interest in innovation and placed less emphasis upon it, may be less able to weather the difficult early stages—skepticism, shock, and defense-of the change process that accompanies innovation. they may also tend to dwell in the early stages, because they are cautious managers of innovation. leaders who are lower on the transformational scale may also not realize the connection between innovation and personal development, making persistence less likely. further research is necessary to confirm or clarify these findings. transformational-low leaders also spoke more frequently about the logistics of management, emphasizing organizational skills 97 global education review 4(4) necessary to support their faculty in the pursuit of innovation. for example, they supported their colleagues by organizing lessons together with them and emphasizing hands-on management and collaboration, rather than on setting a vision and allowing their faculty to work towards the vision in their own way. transformational-low leaders overall also expressed more fear of, and resistance to, innovation, and they worried about the impact of change. it is possible that this fear and resistance is connected to a very hands-on approach; this management style may be an attempt to control the implementation of innovation. implications a number of implications may be developed from the results of the current research. first, it is important to consider the match between leadership style and the type of school in terms of innovative practices. as noted by avolio and bass (1995), highly transformational leaders tend to find leadership intellectually stimulating and emphasize the development of a vision. however, transformational-low leaders may feel more fear of and be less interested in innovation than their high transformational counterparts, and thus they may resist the change process. however, they may compensate by emphasizing organizational skills and providing more scaffolding in terms of training and resources, which may prove helpful for leading a school with many novice teachers or teachers who are less interested in innovation. high transformational leaders are visionary leaders. they feel responsible for defining goals, and they are interested in trying out new strategies (avolio & bass, 1995). transformational-high leaders may thus thrive at a school with teachers who are ready to try new and different innovative practices. it may help if these teachers are able to buy into the vision of the high transformational leader and believe in it themselves. it may also help if these teachers need little or no scaffolding to accomplish what they set out to accomplish, as high transformational leaders are likely to be more hands-off with their faculty, involving their colleagues in planning but not dictating the dayto-day activities for how to accomplish innovative goals. for both types of leaders, an emphasis on mentoring may prove helpful in strengthening these leaders’ management outcomes. in lower austria, new principals who have completed a compulsory school management course are invited to attend network groups consisting of other school building leaders from the region. the principals begin by discussing their schools, teachers, teams and general challenges, both in small groups and in larger groups. in written evaluations at the conclusion of each session, newer principals describe these discussions as necessary and helpful to understanding themselves in their new roles. however, because the network groups are optional and they only take place for four years after the completion of the courses, these principals do not have ongoing support. organizers of these network groups may also find it beneficial to allow participants to develop a better understanding of their own leadership styles. because participants in the current study with different leadership styles viewed innovation somewhat differently, it follows that it would be helpful for principals to the influence of primary school principals 98 understand how their own style impacts the outcomes of innovative practices at their schools. a valid and reliable leadership survey such as the one used in the present research could be taken by the participants. once their own leadership styles are identified, principals in the networking group could form discussion groups or even be provided different types of management training focused on innovation based on their leadership styles. it may also be useful for the school board to take into account leadership styles of the teachers who apply for principal positions. if the goal is to increase innovation at schools, college and universities with teacher preparation programs could support the school board in matching the leadership styles of these future principals with appropriate schools that fit their styles. that is, high transformational leaders may be matched with schools employing teachers who seek visionary leaders but who require less strategic support. low transformational leaders may fare better in schools employing teachers who need to be guided, step by step. further research is required in a number of areas related to leadership styles and innovative outcomes. longitudinally, it may prove insightful to track the current participants for a number of years in order to understand the lasting impact of leadership styles on innovative practices. also, researchers may wish to determine whether there is a fundamental difference in innovative outcomes between principals with different leadership styles who are required to teach and those who are not required to teach. another area of future research would involve determining teachers´ perceptions of innovative practices at schools lead by high transformational or low transformational principals. summary the current research utilized qualitative methodology to explore the perceptions of austrian principals regarding innovation in their schools. participants were asked to complete a survey and then their leadership styles were evaluated. three participants with high transformational tendencies and three participants with weaker transformational tendencies were interviewed, and their responses were coded and analyzed for patterns and themes. participants’ responses from the two groups differed in a number of ways. overall, high transformational leaders placed more emphasis on innovation and were more positive about it, describing its importance in the school, as well as the importance of having certain requirements for innovative practices –good relationships and an interest in new things. they looked forward to seeing the results of innovation in their schools. low transformational leaders, on the other hand, expressed more concerns about innovation – they were generally more fearful and talked about the importance of having mentors to “manage” the process. if we take into account the leadership styles of school principals, matching these styles to the proper school context, cultivating and nurturing these styles, these 99 global education review 4(4) leaders may learn to be more effective in their innovative educational practices. references atwater, l., & yammarino, f. j. (1990). the moderating effect of self-perception accuracy on predictor/leadership and leadership/performance relationships (working paper no. 90171). binghamton: state university of new york, school of management. avolio, b. & bass, b. (1995). multifactor leadership questionnaire: third edition manual and sampler set. nebraska: mind garden. bass, b. (1985). leadership and performance beyond expectations. new york, ny: free press. bass, b., & avolio, b. (1993). manual of the multifactor leadership questionnaire. palo alto, ca: consulting psychologist press. blase, j. (2001). empowering teachers: what successful principals do. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. bologna process – european education higher area (2015). retrieved from http://www.ehea.info/ cemalolu, n, (2011) primary principals' leadership styles, school organizational health and workplace bullying. journal of educational administration, 49(5), 495 – 512. drucker, p. 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(2003). effects of transformational leadership on empowerment and team effectiveness’, leadership & organization development journal, 24(6), 335-344. park, j. (2012). the effects of principal’s leadership style on support for innovation: evidence from korean vocational high school change. asia pacific education review, 13(1), 89-102. skinner, b. f. (1953). science and human behavior. new york, ny: simon & schuster. u. s. department of education. (2004). what do we mean by ‘innovation’? retrieved by http://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/oii /about/definition.html van den berg, r., & sleegers, p. (1996). building innovative capacity and leadership. in k. leithwood, j. chapman, d. corson, p. hallinger, & a. hart (eds.) international the influence of primary school principals 100 handbook of leadership and administration (pp. 653-699). new york, ny: springer international. about the author(s) petra heissenberger, mag., phd, is deputy head of the department of educational management and leadership at the university college of teacher education in lower austria. her current research interests include school management, school quality, primary education, communication and leadership, and human resource management. she is the holder of magister of philosophy (master) and doctor of philosophy (phd) in educational science, special needs education and therapeutic pedagogy from the university of vienna; and a master of science in school building leadership from mercy college, new york. she is involved with project tedca (teachers' education, development and career in austria), a professional biographical longitudinal study. nancy n. heilbronner, ph.d., is associate provost at mercy college in dobbs ferry, new york. dr. heilbronner lectures internationally on topics related to gifted and science education and is the author or co-author of a number of books, including think data, think instruments, let’s be scientists, and ten things not to say to your gifted child, one family’s perspective, which was honored with the parent’s choice and texas legacy awards 101 global education review 4(4) (this page intentionally left blank) revitalizing a humanizing vision 38 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: castner, daniel, & maron-puntarelli, cecilia. (2022). revitalizing a humanizing vision: contesting germ policies with froebel. global education review, 9 (1), 38-53. revitalizing a humanizing vision: contesting germ policies with froebel daniel castner cecilia maron-puntarelli abstract for early childhood educators, few individuals have more historical significance than friedrich froebel. froebelian approaches traveled across the atlantic and inspired early childhood educators in the united states during the progressive era. although early childhood professionals in the united states still celebrate the inventor of kindergarten, his vision for early education is inevitably altered when it is interpreted within alternative linguistic, cultural and historical contexts. authored within this american context, this article aims to recognize froebel’s unique influences and contributions to early childhood education. the article has three parts. first, we resituate froebel within his original context considering the other influential educational theorists and philosophers in 19th century europe. we contrast continental, human science pedagogy with the many-sided progressive educational movement in the united states. secondly, we imagine froebel in dialogue with a contemporary director of an american early childhood center. this dialogue puts froebel’s philosophy of education in reciprocity with contemporary discourses of policy and practice. we advance an american interpretation of froebel that considers him much more than a precursor to progressive education. we suggest froebel provides a uniquely humanizing perspective that is desperately needed within conditions currently dominated by germ policies. keywords continental pedagogy; progressive education; froebelian pedagogy; froebelian philosophy; germ policies introduction contemporary educational practice is besieged by the global education reform movement (germ) (fuller & stevenson, 2019). pasi sahlberg (2012) originally coined the term germ to describe international trends toward neoliberal approaches to educational policy and practice. characteristic effects of germ policies include, “increased standardization, a narrowing of the curriculum to focus on core subjects/knowledge, the growth of high stakes accountability and the use of corporate management practices as the key features of the new orthodoxy” (fuller & stevenson, 2019, p. 1). public schooling, in the united states, is besieged by bipartisan educational reform policies that align with germ. social efficiency ideology, which has been predominant in american curriculum reform since the early decades of 1900s (null, 2016), has rendered kindergarten to12th grade schooling particularly susceptible to the effects of germ. with its own historical and philosophical foundations early childhood education and care (ecec) has an extensive record of resistance, nonetheless ecec has not been and is not immune to these trends. the direct influence of germ is intensifying in early childhood contexts. hatch’s revitalizing a humanizing vision 39 39 (2002) warnings about “accountability shovedown” have become quite evident in early childhood settings. the effects of “accountability shovedown” are especially apparent in kindergarten classrooms (brown, 2016). an intensified focus on academic content is transforming kindergarten curriculum, turning kindergarten into “the new first grade” (bassock et al., 2016). decades ago, kessler (1991) cautioned that notions of developmentally appropriate practice (dap) were insufficient justifications for the child-centered approaches to curriculum widely cherished by early childhood professionals. in the most recent national association for the education of young children (naeyc) position statement, developmental appropriateness continues to be mediated with concurrent interests in academic outcomes (naeyc, 2020). moreover, as prekindergarten is increasingly incorporated into k12 systems of education, discourses of accountability are overtaking “child-centered” traditions of ecec (graue et al., 2017). the unique historical and philosophical foundations of ecec, particularly those contributed by friedrich froebel (1782-1852), substantiate a basis for resisting acquiescence to germ policies. however, ideas are transformed when they are applied to new contexts. therefore, froebel’s innovative conception of early education and his enduring influence on early childhood curriculum and pedagogy have to a large measure been obfuscated in the united states. in english speaking contexts, the sustained influence of froebelian approaches to ecec are becoming increasingly indirect and implicit (bruce, 2016). explicitly articulating froebel’s conception of ecec as a derivative of german traditions of educational theorizing reveals important aspects of froebel’s contributions that have been lost in translation. these uniquely german ways of thinking about education strengthen the efforts of early childhood educators in the united states endeavoring resistance of germ policies. aiming to more closely approximate how froebelian insights were understood in their original contexts and revitalize them in contemporary anglophone educational discourse, this article has three parts. the first part contrasts the continental pedagogical tradition which contextualized froebel’s theorizing with the various progressive educational theories that have influenced anglophone educational discourse. second, we highlight froebel’s enduring influence by interpreting commonplace practices in american ecec classrooms through a froebelian lens. third, we will conclude with a discussion of how returning to the froebelian roots of ecec fortifies a humanizing vision for meaningful early childhood curriculum and pedagogical relations. contextualizing origins and interpretations for early childhood educators in the united states, friedrich froebel’s profound influence on curriculum and teaching is difficult to exaggerate. his perennial influence is obscured, because the philosophical and cultural context from which the froebelian approach to early childhood curriculum and pedagogy emerged is very different from the philosophical and cultural conditions of the united states in the mid-1800s and today. however, the incommensurable conceptual, cultural and linguistic qualities of two distinct traditions of educational theorizing renders translating continental pedagogy to english-speaking educators an extremely challenging endeavor. scholars on both sides of the atlantic have nonetheless deemed dialogue between german didaktik and north american curriculum theory 40 global education review 9 (1) a worthwhile and mutually beneficial pursuit (westbury et al., 2000). the implications of this sort of crossatlantic dialogue are especially germane to early childhood curriculum pedagogy. an appreciation of the complimentary aspects as well as the potential incommensurability of these two traditions of educational theorizing provokes multiple important lines of inquiry. how have froebel’s ideas been reformulated within the contexts of anglophone educational theorizing? froebel’s ideas have been interpreted and then reflectively or tacitly practiced in the united states, since early proponents of his methods, like mary mann and elizabeth peabody, sought to bring kindergarten into american education (kohl, 2007). thus, comparing and contrasting the conceptual orientations emanating from continental pedagogy and those derived from progressive educational reform movements in the united states will be the focus of this section. situating froebel friedrich froebel developed his approach to early childhood curriculum and pedagogy in the context of the german enlightenment. key enlightenment philosophers unquestionably influenced froebel’s work (bruce, 2016). present-day scholars, especially proponents of critical and postmodern theories, commonly scrutinize enlightenment thinking as a source of the eurocentrism, and technocratic rationality. however, susan neiman (2016) argues otherwise. she asserts that embracing the intellectual contributions of immanuel kant and jean jacques rousseau is a preferable alternative to pre-modern structures of authority or post-modern skepticism. perhaps it is these roots in the german enlightenment that appealed to progressive american educators leading the kindergarten movement. therefore, highlighting notable tenets of this intellectual heritage is worthwhile for at least two additional reasons. firstly, highlighting enlightenment roots may shed light upon why froebel’s approaches have enjoyed perennial appeal amongst early childhood educators in the united states. and, secondly, resituating froebel in his original philosophical context and considering the varying cultural milieus in which his work has been interpreted and applied may bolster important aspects of frobelian approaches that have been altered or forgotten in the united states. there is perhaps no figure of the german enlightenment more towering than immanuel kant. philosophically speaking, kant’s transcendental idealism advanced the notion that practical reasoning derived from mature human rationality ought to guide human affairs (ryan, 2011). for kant, human reason developed through education, replaced the premodern authority of moral codes enforced by church or state. education was fundamentally a process of human liberation, where gaining maturity meant becoming able to think for oneself. thus, kant considered enlightenment a process of education, a coming of age journey (neiman, 2016). kant’s notion of what it means to grow up and become educated or cultured remains a key concept of continental pedagogy. this liberating educational commitment to selfformation determination, was more explicitly developed by wilhelm von humboldt’s (17671835) conception of bildung, but it is not easily translated in anglophone settings. moreover, it is not the only facet of kant’s philosophy that was later elaborated for the purposes of educational endeavors. the primacy of practice was another salient feature of kant’s philosophy with immense educational implications. in contrast to theoretical questions that aim to revitalizing a humanizing vision 41 41 uncover understandings of truth, practical inquiries focus on what can and should be done. jean jacques rousseau (1712-1778) and johann heinrich pestalozzi (1746-1827), f.d. schleiermacher (1768-1834) and johann herbart (1776-1841) were other leading intellectuals of the era who shaped continental educational theorizing. their ideas contextualized the advent of froebelian approaches to ecec. in his famous book on education, emile, rousseau (2019) put forth a fictional account illustrating an alternative approach to education. like kant, rousseau was distrustful of the edicts of established authorities. providing practical guidance with much greater degree of specificity than kant, rousseau advanced a view of education, where childhood is best spent protected from society. rousseau is often credited as the initiator of an educational philosophy called romantic naturalism where children learn through encounters with the natural world, rather than the transmission of an adult’s knowledge (hlebowitsh, 2005). such an education, rousseau believed, would eventually prepare young people to freely and critically interact with culture. these ideas countered strict discipline that only trained children to conform to existing cultural expectations. pestalozzi who was greatly influenced by rousseau and directly influenced froebel (adelman, 2000), further developed and applied this child-centered vision of education. several perennial ideas in early childhood education are rightly credited to pestalozzi. he gave rise to holistic images of children (pestalozzi, 1898). in his reflections on his work educating children in an orphanage he developed and operated in stans, pestalozzi illustrated intimate teacherchild relationships that accounted for children’s physical and emotional well-being as critical components of their mental and moral development (friesen, in review). additionally, object lessons were originally conceived by pestalozzi (tanner & tanner, 2007). object lessons involved “the observation, description, naming and classification of objects. by presenting children with a series of objects and asking increasingly complex questions, teacher could cultivate a ‘natural’ path of a child’s mental development from lower to higher levels of perception” (sengupta, 2003, p. 96). according to pestalozzi, children’s observations of natural objects was an ideal method for teaching children to become more sophisticated thinkers, capable of abstract reasoning (carter, 2018). f.d. schleiermacher (1768-1834) and johann herbart (1776-1841) are two additional education theorists whose ideas contextualized the development of froebel’s approach to early childhood education (friesen, in review). they both conceptualized education as an academic discipline in its own right. at the onset of modern schooling, in his 1826 lectures of education that are widely unknown to englishspeaking audiences, schleiermacher advanced the primacy of practice, observing that educational practice has long preceded efforts to systematically theorize it. therefore, in order to theorize education, schleiermacher first defined it as an ethically interested enterprise that happens between the older and younger generations, addressing what the older generation actually wants from the younger (friesen, 2020). herbart, kant’s successor as chair of philosophy and education in konigsbert (friesen & osguthrope, 2018), was also incredibly influential in continental educational theorizing. like rousseau and pestalozzi, herbart’s notion of “perfectability” understood children as having innate developmental capacities that unfold by interacting with the 42 global education review 9 (1) natural world (english, 2013). in addition, like schleiermacher, he did not rely upon theory to inform educational practice. rather, for herbart, theory allows teachers to become more discerning and intuitive when mediating children’s interactions with the world. this is called pedagogical tact, which involves “quick judgment and decision, not proceeding like routine, eternally uniform, but [adapting to] …the true requirements of the individual case” (as cited in friesen & osguthorpe, 2018, p. 256). pedagogical tact appreciates the irresolvable tensions within any educational situation. it implies dialectical, hermeneutic, existential ways of thinking now commonly represented by the image of the pedagogical triangle (friesen & osguthorpe, 2018). this is the intellectual landscape that contextualized the origins of frobelian approaches to early childhood education. one of the ways educational theorizing continued to develop in germany was as a geisteswissenschaft, or human science. considering education a human science discipline in its own right, wilhelm dilthey (1833-1911) carried on schleiermacher’s legacy and echoed froebel’s commitment to teacher training. during a time of rapid industrialization and social change, dilthey was deeply concerned about the predominance of theoretical lenses that mirror the natural sciences. education, he insisted, is a human science discipline precisely because it constitutes historically, culturally, and socially situated pedagogical relationships (friesen, 2020). hence, in germany hermeneutics, phenomenology, and biographical narrations have endured as holistic and humanistic ways of appraising educational experiences. americanizing froebel noah webster (1758-1843) was one of the most influential educators of early america, and he was a contemporary of froebel’s and other originators of the continental pedagogical tradition (kendall, 2010). interested in creating a uniquely american culture, webster was best known for publishing textbooks designed to introduce children and illiterate adults to the essential rudiments of the english language. for webster, language was the foundation for establishing a uniquely american culture (kendall, 2010). directly quoting webster from the preface of an american selection of lessons in reading and speaking, walker (2003) brings to light webster’s ultimate curriculum aims “to refine and establish our language, to facilitate the acquisition of grammatical knowledge and diffuse the principles of virtue and patriotism” (p. 25). this was done through strict discipline and rigid recitation lessons that starkly contrasted froebel’s inclination to design activities that were fulfilling for young children and honored their creativity. throughout most of the 19th century many elite educational reformers in the united states studied at european universities and found inspiration in continental educational theories. hence, in the early stages of the american system of public education, several influential educators were enthused by the more gentle and humane forms of educational theory and practice they were exposed to in europe (walker, 2003). the liberalism that pervaded the enlightenment, continental theories of education, as well as the curricular and pedagogical practices advanced in froebel’s innovative schools resonated with the democratic sensibilities of numerous influential american educators. for instance, elizabeth peabody and mary mann traveled to germany to visit one of froebel’s closest friends and revitalizing a humanizing vision 43 43 colleagues, bertha von marenholtz-bulow. they were so enamored with her approach to educating young children, they brought her to the states to help them make a case for kindergarten in the united states (kohl,2006). as bruce (2016) observes, froebel’s “followers inevitably interpreted his work according to the pressures and atmospherespolitical, economic, and culturaldominating and pervading the times in which they were operating” (p. 21). bertha von marenholtz-bulow’s interpretation of froebelian methods “focused on the manual work and the virtue of practical work involving the hands as something which could lay the foundation for the possibilities for future employment and work” (bruce, 2016, p. 21). although this constitutes a subtle departure from froebel’s actual approach, it clearly coincided with the visions of progressive education reformers in the united states. broadly speaking, between 1890 and 1930 progressive educational reform in the united states embraced the innovations of industry and science (walker, 2003). in the early twentieth century, just leading up to the emergence of curriculum as an academic field of study in the united states, two leading intellectuals of the day, john dewey and edward thorndike, had incompatible views of educational science (eisner, 1994). contrasting dilthey's insistence that pedagogy is a human science discipline, american educators were quite comfortable with educational theorizing that mirrored the natural sciences. consequently, instead of preserving the primacy of practice imbued in continental educational theorizing, educators in the united states commonly consider curricular and pedagogical practices to be applications of theories derived from the social sciences. thus, a subtle pragmatism is often infused in americanized (mis)interpretations of froebel’s approach to ecec. this undercurrent of american pragmatism comes in two polemic varieties. the first variety is represented by john dewey’s experimental approach to educational theory and practice. dewey possessed a deeply abiding faith in the capacities of teachers. moreover, he framed the overarching aim of developing human capacities through educational experience through the ethical lens of democracy as a way of living (dewey, 2013). for dewey, scientific thinking was a natural part of human experience. thus, the scientific method structures the natural process through which all people, young and old, intelligently engage in personal, social and political problem solving (dewey, 2013). as such, dewey (2013) envisioned educational science as a participatory process, most effectively carried out by individuals with close proximity to the problems and contexts at hand. on the other end of the spectrum, edward thorndike was advancing a view of educational science very different from dewey’s perspective. whereas democratic living inspired dewey’s educational philosophy, the prevalence of scientific efficiency shaped thorndike’s underlying worldview. furthermore, thorndike did not share dewey’s adoration for teachers’ intellect. instead, from his point of view, teaching was more of a mechanical endeavor of transferring knowledge. from his perspective, educational science was an academic task, where experts discern principles and laws of efficient and effective practices. thorndike’s prescriptive tone was clearly stated in the opening issue of the journal of educational psychology, where he (1910) boldly proclaimed, a complete science of psychology would tell every fact about everyone’s intellect 44 global education review 9 (1) and character and behavior, would tell the cause of every change in human nature, would tell the result which every educational forceevery act of every person that changed any other or the agent himselfwould have. (pp.6) these two competing views of educational science were highly influential in the development of american curriculum during the early 1900s and for years afterward. nearly fifty years ago, kohlberg and mayer (1972) argued that development is the ultimate aim of education. as leading psychologists of their day, kohlberg and mayer aligned with dewey’s view of educational science. accordingly, they emphasized children’s interactions with the social and natural world as the key tenet of educational experiences that stimulate progression through a hierarchy of developmental stages. they eschewed thorndike’s view of educational science, considering behavioral modification and ideologies of cultural transmission extraordinarily limiting as educational aims. kohlberg and mayer conveyed what would become a mainstay tenet of professional discourse among early childhood educators, who favor “child-centered” curriculum and developmentally appropriate practices over adult-directed activities and standardized learning outcomes. unfortunately, the foundational article did not mention human science pedagogy as an alternative. in the next section, the enduring value of froebelian approaches to early childhood curriculum and pedagogy in american classrooms is explored. the following vignette imagines friedrich froebel joining a tour of a modern-day early childhood classroom. the vignette is presented through the words of a school director and highlights how contemporary professional language of early childhood education reinterprets froebelian principles. it illustrates how a contemporary american program director might explain the activities in developmentally appropriate early childhood classrooms to parents visiting the school. we contend contemporary discourses of developmental appropriateness often mediate the pragmatic elements of germ, while also attempting to sustain key elements of foebelian inspiration. aspects of continental pedagogy that were part of the original landscape of froebelian approaches to curriculum and pedagogy are advanced as a unique contribution that support english-speaking early childhood educators’ resistance of germ policies. a present-day school director meets froebel oftentimes in my role as school director, i lead parents or caregivers of young children on a school tour as they consider their child’s early education opportunities. as we watch, i proudly showcase play-based learning, watching children learn through beautiful, awe-inspiring exploration where curiosity and wonder lead to increased knowledge and understanding. and then i grow frustrated when the adult beside me, seeing a full classroom of children actively engaged, experimenting with their own hypotheses and making their own meaningful discoveries, asks “but when do they learn anything?” as i prepare to explain the educational value of play to this earnest parent, i think of froebel. i imagine him standing beside me, and hear his words: “if three hundred years after my death my method of education shall be completely established according to its idea, i shall rejoice in heaven” (froebel, as cited by marenholtz-bülow, 1877). with another century yet to go, i think he would be proud of what we see today of his philosophies in high quality ecec today. however, it also occurs to me that many aspects of my school as well as my way of revitalizing a humanizing vision 45 45 describing children’s educational experiences would be unrecognizable to froebel. our tour continues to the next classroom, and i imagine froebel is now walking alongside us. i begin by explaining that the educational environment has been intentionally created in a way that honors and respects children. at the sign-in table every child has a name plate they post to the magnetic board when they enter, a way to recognize and welcome those present while including those absent from the physical classroom community. photos of the children and their family members adorn one wall, while others display children’s artwork alongside works of art from around the world depicting cultural diversity and unity. open shelves within the children’s reach entice the children to take charge of their own education as they create, connect, and commune through play and self-activity. children gather art supplies to create their own projects. bins contain loose parts and manipulative toys for children’s solitary or communal exploration and dramatic play. on this day the block area contains bins with farm animals; the teacher intentionally set these in place because one child has new chickens at home, and this provides an opportunity to create a home-school connection that includes all children. the tactile table, filled with dirt, trowels and dried corn and beans for planting, provide connections to nature and the thematic concept teachers hope to promote. colored cardstock paper, glue, dried beans and bird seed are neatly arranged on a table where children can create mosaics that are as unique and diverse as they are. children move freely about the classroom, choosing their activities and the amount of time they spend with each. one group of children spends their entire morning in the block area, creating an elaborate story that guides their construction. this is different from other occasions, when their construction may lead their imagination and shapes their stories, or when children create with no plan or end product in mind. another student concentrates her efforts on a large floor puzzle, apparently unaware of the noisy activities of those around her. choosing books from the library shelf, children cozy up to a teacher on the couch, listening to her as she reads, questions, and invites conversation. going outside, i find teachers and children on a playground rich with natural materials, loose parts, and structures encouraging big body movement, risk-taking, and fantasy play. children with magnifying glasses inspect milkweed pods, while others push a decaying log over searching for termites and sow bugs in the exposed dirt. children climb, run, ride trikes, climb up or slide down the slide, and dig in sand. one teacher, handed a book by a small group of children, sits beside them on a blanket and begins to read. another teacher joins a child picking baby spinach leaves from one of the raised planters that pepper the yard. activity abounds. as the tour continues, i reference froebel’s ideas as well as contemporary cognitive scientists to rationalize these practices. connection and unity, i’d explain to the parent, is “the governing force in froebel’s philosophy and pedagogy and the broad foundation for all his developmental concepts” (brosterman, 1995, p. 32). for froebel, play was “the first means of development of the human mind” (brosterman, 1995, p. 12), and he presumed the development of human minds to be part of a spiritually unified connection between children and the natural world. in time, froebel’s sense of spiritual unity was overridden by the presumed empirical objectivity of modern social sciences. the social sciences have advanced children’s play as a crucial part of high quality ecec, but departed from the governing force of froebel’s 46 global education review 9 (1) philosophical perspective. cognitive scientists, for instance, have reconstituted play as an efficacious instrument for learning. according to hassinger-das, hirsh-pasek, and golinkoff (2019), play contains the four ingredients necessary for learning: being mentally active, engaged, socially interactive, and building connections that hold meaning to one’s lives. these technical-scientific ways of framing early childhood education would not have occurred to froebel in his historical context. moreover, the cognitive scientists’ instrumental perspectives are reflect a discourse of education that has been influenced by the germ. after referencing hassinger-das et al.’s (2019) idea of the necessary ingredients for learning to justify children’s play, i notice my companion’s reactions. the skeptical parent looked satisfied, but i notice froebel was a bit perplexed by my description. seeing children moving throughout the classroom joyfully engaging with materials, peers, and caring adults, i was certain that froebel would recognize at least some remnants of his beliefs and approaches in our present-day classrooms. elements of play-based learning supported by froebel’s educational philosophies can be found in the active learning through free-flowing play and caring teacher-child relationships of contemporary classrooms. i presume, he would be pleased to observe children actively engaged in their own process of learning, evidence supporting his belief that “through activity man creates himself. in activity he reveals himself” (froebel, as cited by bultman, 2008, p. 12). as children move about the classroom following their own interests, they participate in activities of their own choosing, making meaning from both solitary and social interactions. they employ all their senses within a social setting that supports their role as architect and mastermind of their own learning. their selfactivity is supported and valued by teachers who, like froebel, see children’s play as an asset to their self-development (brosterman, 1995; froebel, 1887). but again, contemporary professional discourse reframes froebel’s key principles. perhaps, cotemporary discourses diverge from a true froebelian approach to the extent that the discourse is infected by the germ. bev bos (1934-2016), a well-known and highly regarded early childhood educator, advocate, and speaker from california espoused another contemporary perspective on early childhood pedagogy that tainted by the influence of the germ. she frequently shared the idea that the early childhood professional must “do what is right for kids,” saying, “if it hasn’t been in the hand...or the body...it can’t be in the brain” (rosemont community preschool, n.d.). though froebel would not conceive of consciousness as being “in the brain,” one can see how bos’ commitment to hands-on activities finds its roots in froebel. after all, froebel adopted pestalozzi’s idea of teaching using ‘object lessons’ in which children directly engage with physical objects as a way to understand and connect to abstract thoughts, language, and ideas (froebel, 1887). today, children play with toy cars, dolls, and dress-up clothes to create scenes from their own life, and learn about control, power, and social roles. whether constructing puzzles or block towers, they learn spatial skills while developing a sense of efficacy. of course, these materials are very different from froebel’s gifts. nonetheless, hands-on learning expands children’s concrete experiences, expanding their knowledge of the world around them. when young children derive meaning from hands-on, active, developmentally appropriate play experiences, we are indebted to froebel. froebel might not consider modern toys and learning materials to be improvements of revitalizing a humanizing vision 47 47 his gifts, though he would appreciate seeing children using their imagination and creativity, which is a foundational principle of his philosophy of education (brosterman, 1995; tovey, 2017). froebel’s kindergarten showcased his gifts and occupations which children used to create forms of beauty, knowledge, and life. remnants of those gifts are found in the presence of blocks and parquetry tiles, along with variations amid classroom materials, supplies, and manipulative objects children use to creatively express themselves. whether sharing written, spoken, or dramatized stories, constructing playscapes from blocks and classroom materials, expressing ideas through visual arts, or taking physical risks, children’s creativity and imagination emerges as they play and connect their own abstract ideas to the concrete world around them. as a patient advocate for play, froebel would likely appreciate positive attributes of discourse and practice observed during the tour of the contemporary school. he would see a learning environment intentionally planned to captivate and respond to children’s interests. extending beyond the classroom walls to include the outdoors, children make discoveries of delight as they interact with the natural world, communing with nature and others with delight and wonder. froebel would appreciate observations of children finding connections as they move freely about, interacting with nature, literature and language, movement and music, and sharing their sense of wonder as they play with peers and teachers beside them. in the posted daily schedule, froebel would also find elements from his kindergarten, including circle time as a way to create community while playing with music, fingerplays, and story; going outdoors for active movement and interacting with nature; and an intent to support children’s natural curiosity, love of learning, and respect for all, knowing that “a reasoning and creative child [would have] fewer problems learning the three rs or anything else” (brosterman, 1995, p. 39). however, he would likely suggest schedules should maintain enough flexibility to be responsive to children’s interests. froebel would see well-trained teachers in the role of facilitator and guide, supporting children’s playful learning and self-discovery rather than controlling it. he would recognize that the complexity of the teacher’s multifaceted role still requires specialized training and education to meet each child's needs. teachers actively engage with students, offering both passive and active support and encouragement. they deliberately observe students within the learning environment to further children's thinking and learning (tovey, 2017). care that is nurturing and kind is found in the attitudes and actions of teachers showing respect, honor, and dignity to children, their families, and to the special time of childhood. however, amidst all of the changes that have occurred over the past 200 years, what would froebel say? revitalizing froebel’s continental roots as the program director spoke about the development of the whole child, the active freeflowing play, and caring teacher-child relationships observed in the classroom at her school, she cited key tenets of dap, while also referencing froebelian principles. imagining froebel joining a tour of a contemporary early childhood program prompts consideration of how the school director’s up-to-date professional discourse embraces as well as departs from froebelian ideas. thus far, we have imagined froebel as a passive listener. of course, he would have much to say about what he saw in the contemporary early childhood classrooms as 48 global education review 9 (1) well as the program director’s explanation of what they were observing. in this section, we will imagine how froebel might engage in a conversation with the program director. separated by time, language, and culture it is unsurprising to note that two differing perspectives are in play. of course, in a modern center designed for the education and care of young children, froebel would inevitably notice departures from the philosophy and techniques he invented in the mid-1800s. perhaps much more remarkable, is that after all this time has passed, a dedicated early childhood educator on the other side of the atlantic professional proudly proclaims herself a froebelian! far from forgotten, froebel’s imaginary encounter with this 21st century american early childhood center would begin with a very warm and enthusiastic reception from the school director. nonetheless, communication between froebel and his admirer might would face obstacles beyond their language barrier. on the surface, froebel and the school director have many shared values. they both embrace liberating visions of education and appreciate that educating young children is unlike educational endeavors designed for older people. if she explained the impact of germ policies, such as “academic shove-down” (hatch, 2002), they would again see eye to eye. together they would lament that the current conditions of early childhood education prompts parents to question why children are playing. they would again find themselves in agreement about the value of children’s play and holistic development. based upon all of this common ground, the school director is likely to admire froebel even more, considering him a pre-cursor to the child-centered progressive pedagogical approaches she holds dear. however, if they were to thoroughly discuss the philosophical rationales underlying these shared values, disparities would begin to emerge. froebel’s philosophy of education does not neatly fit into popular categories of progressive education or contemporary american interpretations of child-centeredness. historian barbara beatty (2017) contrasts froebel’s distinctive worldview with john dewey’s influential philosophy of education. she explains that froebel’s approach to educating young children was “more representative of early nineteenth-century formalism than progressive era modernism. his methods and materials, developed in the 1830s, were based in german naturalistic philosophy, not the increasingly empirical philosophy and psychology of progressive education” (p. 425). wasmuth (2020) further elaborates, elucidating froebel’s educational philosophy as part of a deeply religious worldview that was grounded by a panentheistic metaphysical foundation. in effect, the basis for froebel’s development of educational principles and materials was an assumption that a divine creator is present in all creation, which includes human beings and everything that exists. froebel’s metaphysical worldview was unorthodox in his day, and it greatly contrasts the more empirically oriented foundations of developmental and educational psychology. these disparate worldviews have potentially significant implications for early childhood practice. they are not always completely incompatible. however, they are not harmonious, like-minded philosophies either. therefore, looking beneath the surface of observable practices and exploring philosophical foundations enables us to imagine froebel’s comments about contemporary american early childhood classrooms with his metaphysical beliefs in mind. what might froebel have said to revitalizing a humanizing vision 49 49 the parent and the school director at the end to the tour? parent we can imagine froebel sharing the school director’s concerns about common sentiments that devalue play. froebel’s principle of balancing self-activity and guidance immediately comes to mind. the parent’s presumption that adults guiding instructional activities is of greater educational value than children’s self-directed play is a clear sign of imbalance. however, if the parent was also an educational psychologist, the rationale behind adult-guided direct instruction might come to the fore. one would imagine froebel becoming quite concerned with an explanation of how direct instruction or any other rigid instructional protocol is “what works”. to the dismay of many stakeholders, early childhood classrooms are becoming increasingly teacher directed (brown et al., 2020). certainly, froebel would have deep concerns about such trends. conceptually speaking, contemporary trends toward evidence based teacher-directed instructional practices are logical positivism and philosophical empiricism. these trends are strongly reinforced by germ policies and they are pervasive in contemporary schools. froebel would find the fragmented worldview of logical positivism abhorrent. the reductionism of behavioral objectives, behavioral modification techniques would not make sense to froebel. we imagine he would encourage the parent to reconsider the essence of children and educational processes, reminding the parent that a child is more than a checklist of observable behaviors. furthermore, for froebel, educating children is about more than ensuring the acquisition of standardized set of knowledge and skills. school director imagined as a critic of germ policies, the school director would likely nod her head in agreement with this response to current policy trends in early childhood education. the director also strives to advance holistic perspectives of children and educational processes. she embraces froebel’s principles but has interpreted them through a 21st century, american lens. in the united states such lenses are often inspired by pedagogical experimentalism of progressive educators like john dewey and in early childhood education key proponents of developmentally appropriate practice (e.g. copple & bredekamp, 2009; maxwell et al., 2009; naeyc, 2020). while on the surface there is some level of continuity between froebel and the american progressives that came after him, it is important not to overlook their philosophical distinctions. for example, as one of the main initiators of progressive education in the united states, john dewey advanced a philosophy of education with its own distinctive metaphysical worldview. if we imagine the school director to be a deweyan progressive educator, she and froebel would have philosophical common ground as well as disagreements. ryan (2011) explains that dewey followed in the footsteps of key figures of the german enlightenment like kant and hegel by rejecting dichotomies that separate objective facts and subjective values. in this sense, dewey maintained the dialectical thinking of his continental predecessors. for this reason, it is easy to see why froebel’s principles would resonate with the school director. a dialectic of self-action and guidance, for example, is a shared focus for both of them. nevertheless, in our imagined dialogue, the school director and froebel are not completely on the same page. 50 global education review 9 (1) while dewey inherited key patterns of enlightenment thought, his advancement of american pragmatism provided a very different way of thinking about educational practice (bellmann, 2004). this pragmatic way of thinking that remains a salient feature of american educational discourse (castner, 2019; null, 2016; reinke et al., 2018; tanner & tanner, 2007), and for the purposes of this paper we presume it to be implicit in the school director’s reflections. dewey rejected the transcendental assumptions that permeated froebel’s philosophy, and were characteristic of much of the western enlightenment (ryan, 2011). contrasting froebel’s faith in god, dewey’s metaphysical worldview was predicated on the notion that mind and body are unified through a holistic image of experience. thus, conceptions and perceptions of human experience, rather than a universal divinity, were the basic element of dewey’s worldview. seeing fact and value together as interdependent components of human experience is a very different axiom than froebel’s belief in a divine structure that unifies all of god’s creation. dewey’s pragmatic philosophy was adaptable and able to be reconciled with multiple conflicting philosophical orientation (bellman, 2010). as evidenced in the vignette of the school tour, many progressive american educators justify children playing at school in ways that coincide with dewey’s conception of experience. however, other versions of american progressivism are prone to align with germ policies. although experiential (i.e. deweyan) justifications of play may not completely appeal to the main tenets of froebel’s worldview, the school director justified play in pragmatic terms, which assuages a range of issues. the director defended the value of play in early childhood classrooms by categorizing it as developmentally appropriate experiences. the parent’s concerns were aptly assuaged by holistic descriptions of developmental domains and assurance that play is pragmatic: “it works”. froebel would offer different justifications for play that are not typically considered by early childhood professionals in the united states. he would likely consider the pragmatic worldview of american progressives too fragmented. after all, for him, unity and connection is not just an underlying feature of experience, but a foundation for understanding the world and all of humanity. we imagine he would be heartened to find a dedicated early childhood professional still inspired by his ideas, even though discourses and practices have greatly changed. however, froebel might also encourage the director to consider the innate dignity of children living within a divinely structured world. thus conceived, education is a process of revealing the child’s innate dignity and gradually connecting it to a universal cosmic structure. remnants of this froebelian justification of play is still implicitly expressed by passionate early childhood professionals who honor children with their ethical commitments to practicing first-rate education and care. conclusion it is important for early childhood educators to revitalize the ideas of friedrich froebel and other important continental educational theorists of his day. too often, major theorists like froebel are treated as mere precursors to or primitive iterations of contemporary discourses. although challenging, it is important to appreciate these ideas in their original form at their time of inception. otherwise, we run the risk of losing touch with key ideas put forth by the inventors of our field. by situating froebel alongside his continental contemporaries and imagining him in dialogue revitalizing a humanizing vision 51 51 with contemporary americans, we hope to convey froebel’s perennial relevance. froebel still implicitly and explicitly inspires early childhood professionals. in addition, we hope to convey his distinctiveness. even if one does not ascribe to his worldview, froebel and other continental pedagogues of his 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(2000). teaching as a reflective practice: the german didaktik tradition. studies in curriculum theory series. the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 19 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: sander, wolfgang (2019). the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage: transcultural traditions and perspectives. global education review, 6 (4). 19-30. the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage: transcultural traditions and perspectives wolfgang sander university of giessen, germany abstract this article is based on a theoretical study about the concept of bildung in world society. the concept of bildung (in german) refers to a special dimension of education. it focuses on personal development and self-education and is not utilitarian. the study, which investigated different traditions of thinking about education in the sense of bildung, begins with german and european educational theories from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. next, older christian traditions in europe, pre-christian concepts in the european ancient world, and educational thinking in judaism and the islamic world were analyzed. confucius was also examined as an educational thinker. finally, the study investigated educational traditions in buddhism and hinduism. findings clearly show that the ideas connected with this concept of bildung are represented in different cultural traditions within and beyond europe. the concept of bildung seems to constitute a common cultural heritage of humankind since at least the axial age. this concept can therefore contribute to an overlapping consensus in world society as defined by john rawls: a consensus endorsed by conflicting religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines—each from its own point of view. keywords education; bildung; humboldt; rawls; eisenstadt; world society; christianity; antiquity; judaism; islam; confucius; hinduism; buddhism introduction: education and the concept of bildung it is an old and well-known problem of translations that the semantic range of terms differs between languages, which is why words often cannot be translated one-to-one. for example, in english there are three terms for political phenomena—politics, policy, and polity—but the german language knows just one: politik, which covers all three aspects. conversely, there are two terms in german for education: erziehung and bildung. erziehung describes intentional, pedagogical influence on young people (for example, by imparting knowledge, norms, values, or abilities). bildung, in contrast, aims at the independence of pedagogical support and is connected to aspects such as maturity, the development of personality, the ability to make judgements, and reflective understanding of experiences of the world. whereas erziehung is usually focused on concrete ideas of what should be achieved in its recipients, bildung is not aimed at defined goals in a utilitarian sense, even though it may be useful for personal development as well as for professional success. erziehung normally ends at a certain point in a person’s life, while processes of bildung continue throughout life. therefore, the german concept of bildung describes a specific dimension of education. andrew abbott talks about education in this sense, for example, in a welcome speech to incoming students at the university of chicago: the reason for getting an education here – or anywhere else – is that it is better to be educated than not to be. it is better in and of itself. not because it gets you something. not because it is a means to some other end. it is better because it is better. […] education is not about content. it is not even about skills. it is a habit or a stance of 20 global education review 6 (4) mind. it is not something that you have. it is something that you are (abbott 2002). the modern conceptualization of bildung was influenced especially by the theoretical work of wilhelm von humboldt and his ideas for designing the advanced school and university system in the early nineteenth century (neohumanism). it was met with considerable interest, first in germany, but also in much of europe and the united states. humboldt’s ideas have been disputed or declared as outdated time and again, but even today they represent an important point of reference for theories of education (e.g. fuhrmann 2004; koller 2012). ultimately, this is because “the concept of bildung extends to areas of human activity that the candidates for equivalency fail to grasp” (siljander 2014, p. 328) – e.g. candidates such as learning, qualifications, or competencies. therefore, bildung is also used as a foreign word in the english-language literature on the education sciences and philosophy (e.g. bildung 2002; bauer 2003; siljander, kivelä, & sutinen 2012; siljander 2014). the following sections will discuss the question of whether and in what sense the idea of bildung is anchored in different cultural traditions. in other words, the article will ask whether the concept of education is transculturally justifiable. first, the context and methodological approach of the study on which this article is based are explained and central theoretical frameworks of the concept of a world society introduced. thereafter, the main findings of the study are outlined. they lead to the thesis that the concept of bildung can be understood as a cultural heritage of humankind. as such, it can become an element of an overlapping consensus in the world society and thus a central conceptual reference for global education policy. the article concludes with some remarks and open questions for further research. context, research question, and methodological approach this article presents some key findings from a larger study recently published as a monograph currently available only in german (sander 2018). this monograph addresses the question whether, and how, under today’s conditions of globalization and world society, bildung is an appropriate guiding idea for education and schools. the publication consists of a theoretical study that is methodologically conceived as a synthesis. syntheses, as a method in the humanities, interlink relevant findings from a broad landscape of research, often from heterogeneous disciplines, starting with a complex set of questions. in this case, the study refers to research and theories primarily from education science (e.g. reagan 2018), philosophy (e.g. rawls 2005), social sciences (e.g. meyer 2002), psychology (e.g. murphy 2004), theology (e.g. söding 2016), and more specific fields in cultural and religious studies, such as islamic studies (e.g. günther 2016). the findings presented here essentially refer to one of the book’s six chapters, though it is one that is central to the overall concept of the synthesis. chapter 4 of the book is concerned with the tradition of bildung. this partial study examines whether, and in what sense, ideas and practices that could be categorized under the concept of bildung can be identified in the history of education in non-european and nonwestern cultures. the study is based on analyses of relevant primary and secondary literature available in german or english. this includes literature on neo-humanism and its christian roots in europe, on greco-roman antiquity, judaism, islam, the confucian tradition, and on hinduism and buddhism. that is to say, the cultural traditions selected extend back to what the german philosopher karl jaspers called the axial age, while at the same time continuing the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 21 into the present and influencing large cultural spheres in the world society. the methodological approach of this part of the study is based on the hermeneutic circle (grondin 2016): it requires, first, a previous understanding of bildung. without such prior understanding, those elements of theories and practices of education in different cultural contexts that can be assigned to the concept of education cannot be identified. in our study, this previous understanding is based on a critical reconstruction of central elements of the neohumanist understanding of bildung. setting out from there, we search for comparable elements of bildung in other historical epochs and other cultural contexts. in accordance with the hermeneutic circle, the reconstruction of these elements is connected to an extension and revision of the previous understanding that was the starting point of the study. before summarizing the findings of this study, it is necessary to briefly outline several references to social theory. these are the foundation for the understanding of world society that this study is based on and resulted in a more precise formulation of the research question. world society: the framework in social theory how can we understand the concept of world society? this question has preoccupied social scientists since the 1970s. more than thirty years ago, niklas luhmann already formulated his famous dictum: “society today is clearly a world society” (luhmann 1995, p. 430). luhmann was arguing from the perspective of systems theory. systems theories understand modern societies as divided into functional systems, such as economy, media, religion, education, and politics. society as a whole is understood as the most comprehensive social system and as the whole of the communications that can be reached for one another. since all functional systems globalize and, at least in principle, lead to the mutual accessibility of all people for all, we live in a world society according to luhmann (werron 2011, pp. 2426). from this, it is already clear that world society is not a normative concept, but rather an analytical one. it is about understanding and explaining what society is today. it is about chains of actions such as the following one: a group of young men from egypt and saudi arabia were studying in hamburg in the 1990s; in the usa they carried out the terrorist attacks of 11 september 2001; the german army was involved in the war in afghanistan that followed; as a consequence of conflicts in afghanistan, afghani refugees were arriving in germany even fifteen years later. further illustrative examples for the linking of communications in a world society include worldwide trade relationships and the global division of labor, cinema and tourism, the internet and satellite televisions, global payment systems, and financial crises. whereas the understanding of world society from the perspective of systems theory rather describes a state, theories of globalization instead refer to dynamic processes of intensifying, condensing, and expanding transactions and co-operations. globalization introduces the world society and condenses it. thus, these two concepts can be seen as related. another family of theories, neoinstitutionalism, understands world society to be a global level of order (e.g. meyer 2002). such neo-institutionalist theories are concerned with global institutions and actors, such as the united nations and its numerous programs and special organizations, nato, or the g7 and g20, and with international treaty-based regimes, such as the non-proliferation of atomic weapons. political scientists often speak of global governance in this context. the dynamics of the 22 global education review 6 (4) development on this level can be illustrated by two examples of statistics: from 1909 to 2015, the number of international ngos increased from 179 to 8,976 (bundeszentrale für politische bildung 2017). during roughly the same time period, from 1900 to 2015, the number of nation-states in europe increased from 22 to 50 and worldwide from 50 to 195 (jahn 2014, p. 2). the latter is a counter-trend to globalization only at first glance. in neo-institutionalist theories of world society, this increase in the number of nation-states is an example of the global proliferation and prevalence of isomorphic models and organizational patterns. this proliferation did not, however, result solely from actors operating globally, but also took place through mutual observation. one example of this is the international proliferation of a very similar model for schools over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. today, schools are easy to recognize as such almost worldwide, because features such as fixed groups for learning, full-time teachers, a certain canon of subjects, and often similarities in architecture have spread globally. the area of school policy has also shifted to the realm of global governance in recent decades by actors such as the oecd, unesco, the world bank, and ngos (adick 2011). the pisa studies are an apt example for how the development into a world society is revealed from a neo-institutionalist perspective. neo-institutionalist theories do, however, run the risk of all too quickly interpreting the global level of order as a worldwide spread of european or western norms and institutions. this has been contradicted by, among others, shmuel eisenstadt and his theory of multiple modernities (2017), which has been met with great response. in this view, different variations of modernity evolve in the world society, and the roots of their differences ultimately lie in the different cultural circles influenced by the great world religions. according to eisenstadt, there is not just one modernity influenced by european thought, but a diversity in modernity that is founded in religious and cultural differences that reach far back into history. world society, he argues, is anything but homogeneous; it is an economically, socially, and culturally diverse society – with all problems and conflicts associated with that. one central problem resulting from this can be well explained by arguments advanced by john rawls from the perspective of political liberalism concerning stable coexistence in modern societies. one of modern societies’ features, rawls writes, is that “citizens are deeply divided by conflicting and even incommensurable religious, philosophical, and moral doctrines” (2005, p. 133). that is clearly the case in the world society. a basic consensus is, according to rawls, indispensable for coexistence in such diverse societies. rawls distinguishes two levels of such consensus: a constitutional consensus and an overlapping consensus. a constitutional consensus does not go very deep; it is merely a simple recognition of certain principles. on the level of world society, these might be, for example, the un charter and the universal declaration of human rights and its subsequent conventions. an overlapping consensus goes beyond the mere acceptance of such constitutional principles in breadth, depth, and determination. such levels of consensus can never be completely attained, but it reduces the margin within which doctrines can differ from one another. for the effectiveness of such an overlapping consensus, rawls argues, it is crucial that the members of the society who support the different doctrines can agree to its principles “each from its own point of view” (2005, p. 134). what does that mean for bildung in the world society? article 26 of the universal declaration of human rights postulates a “right the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 23 to education” for all and succinctly refers to normative relationships, such as a “full development of the human personality,” tolerance, and peace. however, basing a meaningful understanding of bildung as a guiding idea for education and schools on this alone would be difficult. we should, rather, following rawls, ask whether, in a more profound understanding, bildung could be seen as part of an overlapping consensus in world society. therefore, we need to examine whether in the world society with its multiple modernities (eisenstadt), there are different and influential traditions that make it possible for supporters to agree to a meaningful understanding of bildung each from his or her own point of view. this study and its findings, which are outlined below, provide a first insight into this question. findings: bildung as a cultural heritage of humankind as mentioned above, a critical reconstruction of humboldt’s theory of bildung constitutes the point of departure for the study under discussion. humboldt himself summed up the core of his understanding of bildung in just a few words in a brief essay written in 1793: it is the ultimate task of our existence to achieve as much substance as possible for the concept of humanity in our person, both during the span of our life and beyond it, through the traces we leave by means of our vital activity. this can be fulfilled only by the linking of the self to the world to achieve the most general, most animated, and most unrestrained interplay (humboldt 2000, p. 58). according to humboldt, bildung is the process, in which the self is linked to the world in the sense of an interaction. bildung is thus not a simple adaption of the individual to a predetermined order of the world. according to humboldt, human beings by nature strive to deal with objects outside of them in the world, working away at them, so to speak, because it is the only way they can develop their strengths (“kräfte”). today we would most likely not speak of strengths but of potentials inherent in a person, which he or she can develop through experiences of the world. in this process of bildung “he must bring the mass of objects closer to himself, impress his mind upon this matter, and create more of a resemblance between the two” (humboldt 2000, p. 59). the livelier and more diverse the individual’s grappling with aspects of the world outside him is, the more likely it will result in a development of the mind and of human abilities that is as comprehensive as possible—and that is precisely what his or her bildung is. bildung for humboldt is thus not primarily related to the acquisition of specific stores of knowledge; it is not primarily a material bildung, but rather a formal one. by developing an individual’s various potential—which can differ in every case—bildung also achieves the “elevation of his personality” (humboldt 2000, p. 60). but a person’s bildung is revealed not only in their inner experience, but also in their activity in the world: what do we demand of a nation, of an age, of entire mankind, if it is to occasion respect and admiration? we demand that bildung, wisdom, and virtue, as powerfully and universally propagated as possible, should prevail under its aegis, that it augments its inner worth to such an extent that the concept of humanity, if taken from its example alone, would be of a rich and worthy substance (humboldt 2000, p. 59). humboldt’s theory of bildung is formulated in a purely secular language. but in formulations such as “ultimate task of our existence” and “elevation,” we hear echoes of the long european tradition of christian thought about bildung (sander 2018, pp. 103–106). three individuals can serve as representatives of this tradition: in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the christian mystic master eckart developed an 24 global education review 6 (4) idea of bildung in which every human being bears in his or her soul the image of god, which can be found by developing one’s cognitive abilities in different steps. in the sixteenth century, in the course of the reformation, martin luther first called for schools for all children, regardless of class or sex. roughly a century later, johann amos comenius substantiated this requirement with a sophisticated didactic theory in his didactica magna. on the title page of his didactica magna (1627–1657), he described this didactic as “the whole art of teaching all things to all men”, referring to “the entire youth of both sexes, none being excepted” (comenius 1907). like modern western pedagogics in general, a neo-humanist theory of bildung cannot be understood without considering its christian roots. but does this mean that everything connected with a meaningful understanding of bildung is solely a product of european christian culture? that is by no means the case, as will be shown below and illustrated by a few examples. already in pre-christian antiquity, the concept of paideia contains aspects that were later repeatedly taken up in today’s discourses on bildung (sander 2018, pp. 107–110). this greek concept combines ancient ideals for a successful way of living life, which included both successful education, as well as virtues and the willingness to accept responsibility publicly. admittedly, paideia was essentially an aristocratic concept related to the well-being of the polis in question rather than, like bildung in christendom later, a universalist one. nevertheless, there are two main pedagogical and philosophical approaches from the context of paideia that have repeatedly been the subject of the discourse on bildung into the present: the maieutic practice of the bildung of socrates and plato’s parable of the cave. in his dialogues, socrates affected his conversational partners, not by imparting secure knowledge, but, on the contrary, by persistent questioning that revealed seemingly secure knowledge as mere opinion. this philosophical practice of socrates influenced the concept of bildung in terms of the productive effect of doubt, as well as the importance of the art of using targeted questioning in order to bring the students to a relationship to reality marked by independent thinking and critical scrutiny. the parable of the cave on the other hand, when read as a tale of bildung, emphasizes the character of bildung as a process, a path and a development. this path is not easy to follow; it is full of obstacles and characterized by vexation, troubles, and risks. but in the end, it liberates thinking. the jewish tradition of bildung is marked by two central features: literacy and discursiveness. the jewish people were the first that attained widespread literacy (aberbach 2009; botticini & eckstein 2012). at least since the codification of the mishnah, the writing of jewish religious laws around 200 a.d., a movement to make the entire male population literate gained acceptance among jews. of course, reading and writing alone cannot be understood as sufficient for bildung. these served, above all, the study of religious texts. however, a special quality of these texts, especially of the mishnah and the talmud, is their discursiveness. these writings represent a great breadth of different, indeed contradictory, understandings of the subject in question. they thus encourage their readers to grapple with controversial views and make their own judgments. it is almost astonishing, for example, how the talmud relates this discursiveness to god in the story of akhnai’s oven. the story is about a debate between rabbis concerning the liturgical purity of an oven according to the halakha, the body of jewish religious laws. rabbi eliezer raised all possible objections, but they were not the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 25 accepted. then he adopted a more extreme way to dominate the other rabbis: “’if the halakha agrees with me, let this carob-tree prove it!’ thereupon the carob-tree was torn a hundred cubits out of its place – others affirm, four hundred cubits. ‘no proof can be brought from a carob-tree.’” then he tried something similar with a stream of water and the walls of a schoolhouse, but neither convinced the other rabbis. finally, rabbi eliezer brought god himself into play: “if the halakha agrees with me, let it be proved from heaven!” whereupon a heavenly voice cried out: “why do ye dispute with rabbi eliezer, seeing that in all matters the halakha agrees with him!” but rabbi joshua arose and exclaimed [quoting deuteronomy]: “it is not in the heavens!” […] what did he mean by this? – said rabbi jeremiah: that the torah had already been given at mount sinai; we pay no attention to a heavenly voice, because thou has long since written in the torah at mount sinai, [quoting exodus], “after the majority must one incline’’ (oz & oz-salzberger 2012, pp. 18–19). here the talmud goes so far as to rank majority opinion in a scholarly debate on the interpretation of the torah higher than an immediate intervention by god. and what did god say about this incident, according to the talmud? the prophet elijah provides the following information: “rabbi nathan met [the immortal prophet] elijah and asked him: what did the holy one, blessed be he, do in that hour? – he laughed [with joy], he replied, saying, ‘my sons have defeated me, my sons have defeated me’” (oz & oz-salzberger 2012, p. 20). in the sense of the talmud-torah schools, bildung means “learning to interpret” (jouhy 1986, p. 269). learnedness, as its results, consists of wise participation in an endless exchange of position and contradiction, interpretation, and re-interpretation of texts. or, as amos oz and fania oz-salzberger put it: “in jewish tradition every reader is a proof-reader, every student a critic, and every writer, including the author of the universe, begs a great many questions” (oz & oz-salzberger 2012, p. x). in the context of the third monotheistic world religion, islam, there are instructive traditions of thinking about bildung mainly in the islamic classical period, dating roughly from the eighth to the fourteenth century (sander 2018, pp. 115–120). during this period, in the tenth century, the first madrassas were established (advanced schools dedicated to religious education and also associated with legal education). madrassas had permanent positions for teachers, which contributed to the promotion of the concept of the full-time teacher. it is also notable that disputation and debate were considered important methods for learning in this context. during the age of islamic classicism, an islamic philosophy evolved among muslim scholars. this philosophy was concerned with a rational understanding of the world and a life based on reason. it was not thought of as an opposition to religion; quite the contrary, knowledge of god was sought by means of reason, but it was also an effort to purge religion of narrow-minded ideas. an impressive example of this is an allegorical novel written by ibn tufail in the twelfth century: hayy ibn yaqdhan (“alive, son of the awake”). in this book, the life story of the main character is told as an education novel, or more precisely, as the story of self-education through experience, reflection on it, and independent further thinking. the main figure grows up alone among animals on an isolated island and experiences a growth in his reasoning that gradually leads him to observe his surroundings in detail, to formulate theories, and, finally, around the age of fifty, to know god. all this happens without outside direction; there is no educator. only then does he come into contact with people on a neighboring island, but 26 global education review 6 (4) their ritualized, formalized form of religion, which is literally faithful to traditional doctrines, repels him. tufail’s novel was widely read by islamic scholars, but also by jewish and christian scholars, and has a long history of translations that continues into the present. among the islamic theorists of education of the classical period, abu hamid al-ghazali is exceptionally significant. for al-ghazali, reason and spirituality are two paths on which young people can be led to knowledge and insight. the two paths need to be connected, since mere knowledge for the sake of knowledge is fruitless and does not bring the soul peace. however, according to al-ghazali, knowledge should certainly have practical value, and ultimately it should serve personal spiritual and ethical development. in al-ghazali’s code of conduct for students and teachers (günther 2006, pp. 383– 384), there is, to use modern terminology, an attempt to combine dialectically apparent opposites that even today play a large role in didactics: specialist depth and general education, imparting knowledge and shaping personality, planning lessons, and orienting the learning processes around its addressees. such theories from islamic classicism have many points of contact with european concepts of bildung in the medieval and early modern periods, including translations of relevant works. however, these connecting lines were almost entirely broken off after the fifteenth century, when conservative orthodoxy prevailed in the islamic world and largely broke with the modern era that was beginning in the west (diner 2009). around 1,500 years before al-ghazali, and 2,000 years before comenius, confucius was living and working in china. he had enduring influence, not only as a political philosopher, but also as a theorist of education, including bildung. confucius is considered the first freelance teacher in china (gu 1999, p. 32). over the course of his life, he is said to have taught around three thousand students from different social backgrounds. according to confucius, everyone should get the opportunity to develop through bildung and individual effort. to that end, however, it is necessary to invest the willingness to learn and engagement with learning: “i never instruct those who aren’t full of passion, and i never enlighten those who aren’t struggling to explain themselves. if i show you one corner and you can’t show me the other three, i’ll say nothing more” (confucius 2014, p. 58). confucius is therefore considered an earlier proponent of the meritocratic principle in bildung. the guiding idea for bildung in confucius is junzi, or the noble-minded man. one becomes noble-minded through learning and inner cultivation—that is to say, through bildung. the noble-minded man is a morally highly developed, well-balanced, artistically interested, and has a principled and harmony-oriented personality. this model certainly has features of an aristocratic ideal, but it is not identical with striving for external power and wealth: “while the noble-minded cherish integrity, little people cherish territory. and while the noble-minded cherish laws, little people cherish privilege” (confucius 2014, p. 39). for that very reason, the noble-minded man is in a position to take responsibility in public life, and because he is in that position, according to confucius, he is also obliged to do so: “a thinker who cherishes the comforts of home isn’t much of a thinker” (confucius 2014, p. 108). the noble-minded man has the task of employing his talents for the common good. this is not, however, associated with a utilitarian understanding of teaching and bildung. the process of bildung by which the human being becomes noble-minded does not serve immediately external goals. it does not refer to craft or other professional skills, and it keeps its the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 27 distance from specializations. confucius understood bildung as purposeless: “the master said: ‘a noble-minded man is not an implement’” (confucius 2014, p. 27). in hinduism and buddhism, too, we find traditions of thinking about bildung that extend far back (sander 2018, 125–128). even before confucius, in the seventh century b.c., a hinduist networked study center was established in taxila (in present-day pakistan), where in addition to the foci on religion and philosophy studies, offerings were also made in medicine, astronomy, agriculture and the arts. substantially later, but still around 500 years before the founding of the first european university in bologna, in bihar, which is now a federal state of india, the buddhist nalanda university was established. it had a complex of buildings that included housing for students, several monasteries, three libraries, and an astronomical observatory. as many as 8,500 students studied at this early university, taught by as many as 1,500 teachers (reagan 2018, pp. 219–220). these data point to a considerable affinity to bildung in the indian religions as well. even today, some buddhist monasteries offer the possibility of a temporary membership in their order, which is used especially for educational purposes. the ideas of the content of bildung in indian religions are strongly based on the human being’s cosmological integration into the cycle of birth and death. in that sense, they are critical of knowledge, since they regard experienceable and fleeting reality as a hindrance to understanding and as shackles on personal growth. because this is also true of our biological and social self, individuation through increasing self-realization appears to be a false path. personal growth, which the path of bildung in this understanding serves, is supposed to lead to the individual growing out of – in the literal sense – his or her ego and ultimately learning to regard it as a fiction, even if it is one necessary in this life. the path of bildung is supposed to enable individuals to discover their inner core, their true self. the japanese buddhist scholar daisaku ikeda distinguishes between a greater self and a lesser self that make up all of us (ikeda 2010, p. 87). the lesser self clings to the ephemeral, which repeatedly becomes the source of suffering. human beings cannot simply suppress it, but they can control it. in that spirit, ikeda speaks of being a master of oneself as a task of personal development. this ends our brief walk through european and non-european traditions of thinking about education in the sense of bildung. although the scope of this article only allowed some selected examples and brief mentions of a few aspects and references that could be outlined much further, it should at least be clear that for millennia in human cultural history, there has been an understanding of what the german concept of bildung stands for: a dimension of growth, of learning and teaching, that goes beyond merely adapting young people to an existing reality and the adoption of its relevant norms, rules, and stores of knowledge. in processes of bildung, aspects of reality or of cultural tradition are not simply adopted but questioned, that is, made the subject of scrutiny and reflection. that which exists empirically is not understood to be the final say in human relationships to the world and reality, however important it without doubt is for the lives of young people. not coincidentally, discursive methods, such as dialogue and disputation, often play a central role in the theories and practices of bildung. bildung always also means to not blindly trust what we encounter as reality – bildung cannot be gained without at least a certain degree of skepticism. bildung continues to aim at the individual’s human development. this can be understood 28 global education review 6 (4) spiritually, as a development of reason or as both. often the metaphor of growth is also used here: bildung helps people to grow, to develop their potentials. but – and also this aspect of bildung is almost a constant – this growth should not be understood as a purely inner process, but should also lead to responsible action in social practice. it should become fruitful for others and the community as well. bildung is therefore not normatively neutral – not every conceivable development of the individual, every potential that people have, should be seen as equally desirable and acceptable from the perspective of bildung. bildung is supposed to help the individual lead a successful life. at the same time, however, bildung is not instrumental. the acquisition of elements of knowledge, or of skills solely for a specific purpose, is in itself not yet bildung. it can only become so by contextualizing it in a broader development of understanding reality. for, in that sense, bildung is indeed about connecting the individual to the world: bildung takes place in the context of experienceable reality, but it also leads to questions about the reasons for our action, about conceivable alternatives, about the limits of our possibilities, and, indeed, about the relationship of our reality to the world as a whole. it is inevitable that bildung also leads to questions of meaning and to grappling with questions of belief. for that reason alone, bildung cannot be regarded as completed at some defined point in the course of a life, nor can it be produced according to a plan by means of social and educational technologies. finally, it is striking that from a historical and transcultural perspective, bildung is usually linked with appreciation and high regard. the type of the educated, learned, noble-minded man (confucius) is regarded as exemplary and worth striving for, but in some cases also structured as a critical benchmark for the actions of elites. summary and additional research questions this study presented in this article has shown that bildung can be reconstructed as a universal, transcultural concept. bildung is not a concept limited to the european or western cultural realm. the ideas associated with this concept can be identified in different cultural traditions going far back in history. the concept of bildung can thus be understood as a shared cultural heritage of humanity since at least the axial age. following john rawls, this concept can therefore be understood as an element of an overlapping consensus in the world society. however, from perspectives of different comprehensive doctrines, different interpretations of this concept may also result as it is made more specific in the local context. for example, differences between christian, islamic, buddhist, and confucian cultural spheres may arise in regards to the idea of personal growth, the relationship of individuality and responsibility to the community, or determining which individual processes of learning and change are considered unacceptable. this raises further questions for research to follow from the study presented in this article. they arise in very different fields of research: • concerning the history of thinking about bildung, the question arises whether ideas about education that could be categorized under the concept of bildung can perhaps already be found in pre-literate cultures, or at least prior to the axial age. the point of departure for such research could be the corresponding chapters in reagan (2018). however, given the lack of written original sources, it seems obvious that the methodological difficulties of such a study would be considerable. • the theory of bildung raises the the concept of education (bildung) as a cultural heritage 29 complex question of how a transcultural overlapping consensus could be made more precise in this field, how far and how deep it could ultimately go, and how precisely one could determine the different cultural points of view from which actors in diverse cultural realms could agree on such a consensus. for a possible european perspective, the monograph this article is based on includes a relevant discussion (sander 2018, pp.133– 169). • in the field of empirical research, it would be desirable to have studies that examine whether and which ideas of bildung can be found among the global actors in school and educational policy, that is to say, among the relevant international organizations, such as the oecd or unesco, as well as the ngos active in this field. such studies would also be desirable because these actors play important roles in the practical effectiveness of an overlapping consensus on bildung. finally, it is important to clarify that 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(2011). das konzept der “weltgesellschaft” – sozialwissenschaftliche perspektiven und positionen im überblick. in w. sander & a. scheunpflug (eds.), politische bildung in der weltgesellschaft; herausforderungen, positionen, kontroversen (pp. 19–33). bonn: bundeszentrale für politische bildung. about the author wolfgang sander, dr. phil., is professor emeritus at justus liebig university of giessen, germany, faculty of social sciences and cultural studies. his research focusses on civic education, social studies, and general education in the sense of bildung. https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503881?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/503881?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents a multi-layered dialogue 6 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: cooper, maria, siu, carrey tik-sze, mcmullen, mary benson, rockel, jean, & powell, sacha. (2022). a multi-layered dialogue: exploring froebel’s influence on pedagogies of care with 1-year-olds across four countries. global education review, 9 (1), 6-23. a multi-layered dialogue: exploring froebel’s influence on pedagogies of care with 1-year-olds across four countries maria cooper carrey tik-sze siu mary benson mcmullen jean rockel sacha powell abstract infant and toddler pedagogy has flourished as a specialized area of practice in early childhood care and education settings, yet it remains an under-researched area. there is also limited empirical research internationally that explores cultural meanings of meaningful provision for this young age group. this ethnographic study explored pedagogies of care with 1-year olds in four cultures—england, united states, new zealand and hong kong—guided by froebel’s education philosophy and a view of pedagogies of care as embodiments of culture. the researchers employed sociocultural and ecological theoretical perspectives (darling, 2016) to attend to cultural meanings at the micro, macro and temporal levels in relation to people, contexts and processes. this lens enabled the researchers to resist the positivist tendency to normalize and unify all children’s experiences and maintain the integrity of diverse interpretations. inspired by tobin et al.’s (1989, 2009) cross-national research on preschool in three cultures, the researchers utilized a video-cued multivocal and layered interpretation approach to elicit the “voices” of 1-year-olds, their teachers/practitioners and families. this paper focuses on each researcher’s discussion of the ways froebel’s principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance were seen to unfold. the nuances of how these principles were manifested in pedagogies for infants and toddlers is explored in relation to each country’s curriculum and cultural ideals. keywords autonomy, culture, early childhood care and education, freedom with guidance, froebel, infants and toddlers, pedagogy introduction as more is understood about the potential for learning from birth, further attention is given to what can be learned from sensitively observing children’s autonomous actions. learning to be autonomous while experiencing a sense of freedom with guidance was what friedrich froebel (1782-1852) desired for all children as part of a self-determining education. trevarthen and delafield-butt (2017) acknowledged infants’ autonomy by revealing that they have “the spirit of an inquisitive and creative human being” (p. 17) and are instinctive experimenters who think and move with a multi-layered dialogue 7 7 curiosity. this image of a lively mind is one of engaging in conscious interactions, and being in tune with their environments as they experience pleasure through active discovery and build social understandings as autonomous subjects. despite this acknowledgement of infants’ powerful capacities, few scholars have researched the application of froebel’s ideas to the care and education experiences of very young children. in this paper, we add to other scholars’ efforts to reassert the relevance of froebel’s ideas in early childhood care and education (ecce) (e.g., elfer, 2019; hargreaves et al., 2018; powell & goouch, 2019) by exploring his principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance, in relation to pedagogy with 1-year olds in four cultures. background there are evolving views of pedagogies for infants in ecce based on different theories of learning and teaching. this is due to increased enrolments of infants and toddlers in childcare world-wide (organisation for economic development and cooperation [oecd], 2020), along with the need for relevant research. the close examination of what pedagogy entails for children up to 3 years is due to a shift in thinking and moving away from the baby “minding” concept (rockel, 2009) to an educational focus with a subsequent change in discourse (recchia & fincham, 2019). fenech (2011) pointed out that research into meaningful provision should be regarded as complicated and be extensive to show a more nuanced view for practice. research has emerged in such areas as neuroscience and philosophy broadening understandings of early learning, teaching and curricula, such as rayna’s (2004) cross cultural research on children under 1 year in french and japanese early childhood settings. however, there is limited empirical research internationally that scrutinizes cultural perspectives in relation to pedagogy for this young age group. nevertheless, researchers have recently explored how froebelian ideas can be usefully applied to contemporary ecce. english scholar hargreaves et al. (2018), for example, involved ecce practitioners and parents of children over 3 years in their study to explore the value of froebel’s concept of ownership and autonomy in relation to early learning. the study led the researchers to shift focus from the cognitive aspects of creativity in relation to froebel’s notion of autonomy to social aspects including emotional and motivational aspects that emphasize children’s wellbeing. focusing on younger children, elfer (2019) summarized research on the well-being of children up to 3 in english nurseries. elfer clarified that while froebel did not use the term well-being, the holistic nature of development was inherent in his philosophy. elfer concluded that “in terms of emotional well-being, what matters most about nursery experience is children’s opportunity to make warm and responsive attachments to one or two nursery staff” (p. 172). powell and goouch (2019) involved early years practitioners of children up to 2 years from private day nurseries to explore their views of froebel’s principles and his mother songs. the practitioners embraced the connection between froebelian ideas of the natural environment, singing and observation, and their own practices. however, it was revealed they had not heard of froebel or his ideas before the study. notably, the study led practitioners to redefine their roles and claim expertise in the care of babies while appreciating froebel’s interest in promoting “women as teachers” (p. 163), his emphasis on the outdoor environment, his interest in singing and its benefits for babies and adults. together, these few studies reveal an emerging interest in reclaiming froebel’s work 8 global education review 9 (1) for contemporary ecce, including for children up to 2 years. relevant cross-country research on pedagogy spanning two decades and foregrounding culture is the video-cued multivocal ethnographic work of tobin and colleagues (tobin et al., 1989; tobin et al., 2009). tobin et al. (2009) sought to investigate “cultural dimensions of early childhood education within a nation” (p. 9) in china, japan, and the united states. their work focused on understanding how ecce systems reflect and pass on cultural values while responding to the broader social pressures and expectations of children in terms of what they should learn, do, and be (tobin et al., 2009). children up to 2 years were not a main focus in the study, although were included in the video footage as participants or the subject of older children’s play. central to their research was not the researchers’ explanation for any changes, but the voices of ecce teachers and directors themselves in articulating why they do what they do (tobin et al., 2009). the current study and purpose the current study aimed to address two research gaps. first, early group-based ecce research with children up to 2 years has primarily promoted rather ubiquitous features of pedagogy with little regard for cultural context. for instance, sensitivity and responsiveness to children’s physical and emotional cues have been recommended in pedagogy for infants (salamon et al., 2017). additionally, a view of toddlers as competent has been promoted in pedagogy, and also challenged as an overgeneralization as toddlers can be competent and vulnerable at the same time in different respects (kalliala, 2014). however, these and similar studies rarely accounted for nuanced views on meaningful pedagogy across different cultural groups. inspired by tobin et al.’s (1989) pioneering work on comparing ecce across three cultures, the researchers of the current study applied ethnographic principles to explore pedagogies of care with 1-year-olds in four cultures: england, the usa, new zealand, and hong kong, seeking to foreground cultural dimensions. the decision to include researchers from the usa, new zealand, and hong kong was based on the english project lead’s (5th author) personal relationship with infanttoddler researchers in those countries. hence, the findings are based on the perspectives of those involved in the study, and are not intended to be generalisable to other settings or contexts. the second aim was to enrich the discourse on pedagogies of care in relation to froebel’s philosophy. evidence on attachment and emotional responsiveness suggests young children’s emotional needs are not always well attended to (brace, 2020; page & elfer, 2013). bruce (2020) believed that while many adults are responsive to children’s emotional needs and are able to offer stimulating experiences for children, they struggle with granting children sufficient autonomy to play or learn deeply. the researchers found froebel’s principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance particularly relevant in conceptualising pedagogies for 1-year-olds in this respect. in this paper, these froebelian principles are examined. we then discuss how they are interpreted in their respective cultures, and whether the principles were demonstrated in the pedagogies of care for 1-year-olds in their own contexts. this cross-cultural analysis was based on evidence from video recordings of daily happenings in 1-year-old rooms in ecce settings, the practitioners’ articulations of their pedagogies and parent contributions cued by the a multi-layered dialogue 9 9 videos from their own and others’ cultural contexts. the research question guiding this paper is: what does froebel’s autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance look like in a pedagogy of care for 1-year-olds in four countries england, the usa, new zealand, and hong kong? theoretical lens the study adopted a theoretical lens that draws on the educational philosophy of froebel and contemporary pedagogical interpretations of his work. froebel’s philosophy is holistic, underpinned by a concept of unity (see werth, 2019). in current discourse, froebel’s principled views of ecce promote strengths-based constructions of babies’ and young children’s active and agentic pursuit of learning with guidance from responsive and sensitive companions; abstraction, regulation and symbolic representation of inner feelings and ideas; and sense of self in connection with animate, inanimate and spiritual worlds. froebel’s idea that education should enable the unfolding of young children’s inner selves as part of the unity of all things helps to indicate his thinking about culture: namely, that all children embody and re-create culture, rather than simply mirroring its rules, traditions and artefacts. froebel was highly critical of “extraneously communicated knowledge, heaped up in memory” and the practice of “stamping our children like coins” (froebel, 1892, pp. 230-231). he referred cynically to such “mind-killing practices” as the opposite of development and education “envelopment and inducation” – believing that a child’s active reinterpretation of “culture…implies the development of the mind, of the will of man” (froebel, 1892, p. 280). consequently, froebel’s pedagogical ideas were not intended to supplant cultures, and froebelian approaches have been adopted and adapted in early childhood programs across the world (arce hai et al., 2020; wollons, 2000). the active role of a child in humanity’s becoming, as froebel saw it, not only rested on a positive and productive view of children’s agency, but also an educational context that nurtured their autonomy. bruce (2021, p. 30) described this in froebelian terms as, “knowing what you think, knowing what you need help with, and knowing how to find appropriate help that is needed without losing your self in the process” while in relation with others who value and help foster your ownership, responsibility and agency. method the study’s design was influenced by the work of tobin and his colleagues (1989, 2009). “the tobin method” is a video-cued multivocal ethnographic method used to study cultural differences in pre-schoolers (tobin, 2019). in this study, researchers in england, the usa, new zealand, and hong kong followed an agreed upon protocol to examine and describe how culture is embodied within pedagogies of care with 1-year-olds in ecce in each country. including insider (emic) and outsider (etic) perspectives and a focus on systemic (macro and micro) influences of people, contexts, and processes lent richness to researchers’ interpretations (beals et al., 2020). ethical procedures and ethicality of conduct were consistently observed. research sites and participants the researchers do not claim that the 1year-old rooms in this study represent all centrebased ecce in their respective countries. rather, study participants agreed the sites were “generally typical” of practices, flow of the day, and overall “look,” in each country. participants 10 global education review 9 (1) included: 1-year-old children; families who attended viewings of all four countries’ 15minute videos and participated in group discussions; practitioners from the 1-year-old rooms; centre leaders and administrators; researchers and their associates. table 1 outlines the locations of research sites, type of setting and curriculum, and participating children and practitioners. a multi-layered dialogue 11 11 location and city population setting type and curriculum group size, child ages, and adult to child ratio practitioners and qualifications auckland, new zealand (1.657 million) privately owned centre national curriculum: te whāriki eight 1-year-olds in group of 10 mean age 20 months ratio 1:3 two co-lead teachers with grad diptchg (ece) qualifications and third teacher or teacher aid hong kong, people’s republic of china (7.5 million) university-affiliated private centre centre-based curriculum eight 1-year-olds in group of 14 mean age 19 months ratio 1:5 two co-lead teachers, both with bed (ece) degrees; one teaching assistant bed (ece) in training bloomington, indiana usa (85,000) university-affiliated centre developmentally appropriate practices seven 1-year-olds in group of eight mean age 15 months ratio 1:4 two co-lead teachers with master’s degrees (ece) and teaching credentials; one teachers’ aide, noncredentialed chester-le-street, county durham, england (24,000) local authority registered community nursery national curriculum: early years foundation stage (eyfs) six 1-year-olds in group of nine mean age 18 months ratio 1:3 one lead with level 5 qualification (diploma or foundation degree); two practitioners with level 3 (early years educator or equivalent) table 1. setting locations, curricula, and study participants. 12 global education review 9 (1) procedures figure 1 shows a flow-chart highlighting the major procedural steps in this video-cued multivocal elicitation with layered interpretation approach. the procedure reflects the researchers’ valuing of a dialogic approach to making meaning of the data. analysis widely-used qualitative thematic analyses were applied. first, working separately, researchers analyzed the entirety of the data from all four countries, noting initial overall impressions, coding inductively to identify patterns, and organizing them into themes, (saldaña, 2015). primary data included each country’s 15-minute video; transcripts of group discussions held after video-screenings; and notes made by families and staff. secondary data that aided interpretation included: researchers’ notes about setting visits and creating the videos; handouts from video-screening events with demographics of settings and descriptions of locations; photographs and sketches of children’s rooms; and documents and artifacts provided by practitioners or publicly available. researchers from each country met in england in the summer of 2019 to process the data together, generating a list of over 50 initial themes. after debating and clarifying meanings of terms and removal of redundancies, 16 “big ideas” were identified (guest et al., 2012), which upon further deliberation resulted in five categories: curriculum; influences on practice; culturally sustaining practices; emotional climate; and images of the teacher/practitioner. further analysis revealed interpretations of froebel”s principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance (bruce, 2021; tovey, 2020) within each country. recognized qualitative procedures were used to address validity and trustworthiness including investigator and within-method triangulation (denzin, 2009), member-checking (creswell & creswell, 2017), and peer-debriefing (lincoln & guba, 1986). central to this study was that multiple voices be heard; thus, members of the research team served as critical readers and listeners of one another’s transcripts, notes, and interpretations from their respective contexts, and participating professionals were consulted to ensure accuracy. a multi-layered dialogue 13 13 the international team continued deliberating online on the meaning of their work using videoconferencing tools. findings in the pedagogical examples (using pseudonyms) that follow, froebel’s principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance form the focus for discussion. crosscountry analysis yielded terms that represented variations on these themes, such as “independence,” or “self-determination.” the examples illustrate shared concepts that were evident in all the settings with subtly different characteristics that reflected the contexts and embodiments of cultures in localized and personalized pedagogies of care. differences are nuanced and judgement about what may be “good” or “better” is actively avoided. while interdependent, the study of autonomy in learning allowed for close observation of 1-year-olds; and freedom with guidance directed attention to the practitioners' role as “guide and mentor who by his [sic] participation in a child’s play gives meaning and depth and breadth to a child’s activities” (liebschner, 2001, p. 129). the discussion also applies froebel’s ideas to nurturing care moments. the analytical spotlight on these concepts has two caveats: firstly, through his body of work, froebel offered a holistic philosophy in which autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance were connected to all other principles (see tovey, 2020); and secondly, the practitioners had no specific training in froebelian approaches prior to this study. but froebel’s influence had permeated their own education and early childhood curricula and pedagogies in each country. england england’s early years foundation stage (eyfs) curriculum has four principles. the first posits that every child is unique, “constantly learning and can be resilient, capable, confident and self-assured” (department for education, 2017, p. 6). positive relationships and enabling environments follow, indicating that the curriculum draws on sociocultural and ecological perspectives (darling, 2016). registered providers of ecce must follow the eyfs, which includes a requirement that every child has a “key person” who is primarily (though not exclusively) responsible for their learning and wellbeing and for fostering a trusting relationship with the family. alfie (12 months) enters the baby room in mum’s arms; a stripey blanket rests on her shoulder. alfie buries his face in the fabric, snuggling closer to mum’s body as louise, his key person, welcomes him with a gentle but cheerful, “good morning alfie. are you ok?” as the adults discuss his sleepover with a friend, alfie’s gaze shifts between his mum, his blanket and louise until he notices a teddy bear. pointing he exclaims, “bear!” and louise validates his observation: “what have you seen? oh, the bear. we’ll get him in a minute.” with this distraction, mum lowers alfie to stand on the floor. immediately clutching her legs, he hides his face in the blanket, whimpering. mum tries to move him away and alfie begins to cry, his body stiffening. noticing mum’s struggle, louise responds by bending to alfie: “do you need your blankey for a little bit longer?” she picks him up to face her, the blanket on his arm. alfie’s cries become forceful, his back arching as he points towards mum who has 14 global education review 9 (1) gone to hang up his bag. louise narrates mum’s actions to alfie and cuddles him, then turns their bodies and gaze towards four toddlers who are sitting together at a low table eating. louise approaches the kitchen hatch and the tension in alfie’s body subsides as she asks, “shall we have a look what’s in here? would you like some fruit?” alfie stops crying and points into the kitchen. louise acknowledges his recognition of her colleague, saying brightly, “there’s sandie, she’s making your lunch today.” no longer holding the blanket, alfie’s relaxed arm moves forward, and his fingers make a slight pincer movement as he watches closely while louise pours a cup of milk. louise carries alfie towards the children at the table: “would you like a drink of milk and to sit with your friends?” alfie turns his head to look intently towards the little group, the blanket now hanging loosely from louise’s arm. this filmed observation was viewed by educators and families in all four countries. opinions varied about whether or to what extent the children’s key persons should “coddle” children in this way, signaling culturally negotiated expectations of adults’ roles in care for infants (guarnieri de campos tebet et al., 2020). reflections from hong kong, usa and new zealand revolved around contrasting views of: (1) a warm, sensitive and personalized welcome for each child providing a secure relational basis from which independent behaviors were possible (although not always observed); and (2) over-reliance on adults, which diminished opportunities for developing self-sufficiency. in england, the scene was interpreted as physically and emotionally nurturing and enabling; reflecting a dominant pedagogical perspective that, “minds, bodies, hearts and spirits are all implicated in the process of teaching and learning” (motta & bennett, 2018, p. 642). louise attached importance to alfie’s blanket as transitional object, symbolizing his liminal embodied and affective relationships; helping him understand separation and connection (arnold, 2009). observing his distress, the blanket was offered “for a little bit longer” named with familiarity as “blankey” to help alfie manage separation from mum and enter into the community of the baby room. with a little support, he quickly relaxed to join his friends in their snack event – part of the setting’s welcome ritual. louise enabled alfie to regulate his anxiety and have emotional autonomy in his transition. his active participation evolved from vocal and physical expressions of angst to multiple signals of interest in familiar people and objects, affirmed by louise’s sensitive guidance and responsiveness. united states a relational-care philosophy guides daily life for children, families, and staff in this program, promoting deep knowledge of children and families, trust among relationship-partners, and sensitive-responsiveness in staff. its practice of continuity of care (mcmullen et al., 2015) keeps groups of children/families and teachers together throughout enrolment, typically three years. although assigned primary teachers upon enrolment, as one teacher explained, over time “children choose their own primary,” depending upon their needs and preferences. one parent, expressing appreciation for this system and the “emotional support they receive from teachers,” described these relationships as “organic.” the united states has no national curriculum; rather developmentally appropriate a multi-layered dialogue 15 15 practices (dap) for birth-to-3-year-olds (mcmullen, 2013) guides curriculum and pedagogy, supporting: individual children’s development, interests, preferences, and learning needs; a holistic view of child development and learning; and children’s identity as formed within families, communities, and cultures. teachers are also influenced by dominant american values promoting individuality (everyone is unique/special), independence (“i can do it myself!”), and freedom understood as agency (ability to make choices) and autonomy (control over self and decisions) (costa & mcmullen, 2020). american ecce resonates with froebel’s notions of unity, autonomous learning, respect for relationships, and in particular, the centrality of play (bruce, 2021). the 1-year-olds in this setting enjoy uninterrupted free-choice play most of the day when not engaged in routine care (mealtimes, diapering, etc.). teachers believe learning and development “unfold” through play, “in carefully planned environments.” an american interpretation of froebelian principles of autonomy and freedom with guidance is revealed as existing alongside and compatible with american values and practices. this is glimpsed in examples from the usa data, including short video vignettes. in this scene from the video, the teacher initiates an activity, but soon takes on a secondary, supportive role: a teacher leads two girls in a game of “ring-around-the-roses.” after they all “fall down,” as the rhyme directs, the teacher steps aside as more children join in, forming two small circles, spinning round-and-round and falling down as the teacher continues to sing. although teachers were often playpartners, as seen above and in other video scenes of them reading and singing with children, they are sensitive to children’s cues about when to join in and when to remain silent but observant: isabella, who is bilingual, sits alone reading an animal-themed board book. turning pages, she points to the pictures and labels them, switching between english, spanish, and the american sign-language used in the program. teachers occasionally glance her way but leave her to enjoy her reading. after watching the video from the usa, a parent noted how children were, “allowed to interact with all items and work things out themselves.” he appreciated that risk-taking and independent problem-solving were encouraged in this setting: a teacher watches nathan, new to walking, hesitate in front of a short wooden barrier. he drops to his knees and crawls over the barrier, clutching a toy shovel. nathan stands, looks at the teacher who smiles and says, “you did it. you climbed over.” letting children “work things out themselves” was considered important even when conflicts arose, as long as teachers remained observant and physically close to offer support as needed: standing nearby, a teacher keeps her eye on three children as they negotiate over the coveted middle seat of a threeseat rocker. after jostling about, they settle in and begin working together to 16 global education review 9 (1) make the rocker move up and down. the teacher says, “you got it.” when teachers felt it necessary to intervene, they did so calmly, reinforcing lessons of safety and respect for one-another: seeing an escalating conflict between two boys on the climber, with one starting to push the other, the teacher steps in. resting her hand protectively on the chest of the one nearly pushed, she says, calmly but firmly to the other boy, “remember? a gentle touch. do you need him to move?” the use of positive guidance in the above example shows the respect teachers had for the children. this is further supported by their use of positive, non-directive, value-neutral and non-judgement language (e.g., “you did it,” rather than “good job”) to recognize efforts as seen in prior examples. language choices and the supportive tone taken by teachers at this site is intentional and considered an essential element of their pedagogical practice; one teacher emphasized this, saying it was in recognition of the “humanity of the children.” new zealand in aotearoa-new zealand, the national bicultural ecce curriculum (for children birthschool age) “te whāriki” (māori the woven mat: ministry of education, 2017) sets out a vision of infants, toddlers and young children as: “competent and confident learners strong in their identity, language and culture” (p. 2), foregrounding respectful, reciprocal and responsive relationships. the principles of empowerment; holistic development; family and community; and relationships, are interwoven with strands of wellbeing; belonging; contribution; communication; and exploration, positioning children as “21st century citizens learning how to learn” (p. 2) in a fastchanging and diverse world. pedagogical aspirations are linked to democratic values such as manaakitanga (māori mutual care and respect) and equity. te whāriki’s inclusive stance honours children’s active role in relationships and play, starting with their interests, and understanding children holistically. teachers draw on sociocultural and ecological theories (darling, 2016) for resources and build on home knowledge to support children’s thinking further. these ideas concur with froebel’s strengths-based approach where children’s interests, autonomy, and sense of freedom remain central to when and how teachers offer gentle guidance during play. in one video scenario, teachers had responded to toddlers’ shared interests in the moon for over a month, creating moon photographs to hold, putting up projected images of the moon, giving lids (jack, 21 months, initiated tracing around), and conversing with jack about the moon shape he pointed out in books: jack sits in front of the blackboard with teacher joanne, and says “moon, moon.” he watches joanne draw a chalk moon, then jack uses his own chalk to add to the drawing without joanne’s help. the other children join jack. with warmth and verbal encouragement, joanne supports jack to continue his drawing. as the children squash in, jack subtly adjusts his own position, strategizing to accommodate a multi-layered dialogue 17 17 his peers respectfully and continues to draw. when the research video footage was shown to his family, dad told of jack’s initial interest at home: … when they were going to bed and it was dark we had this ritual. if the moon was full we would go out and look for it. (parent focus group) this scenario illustrates how te whāriki’s principles/strands were interwoven with home life. the teachers documented jack’s learning with a growing vocabulary of “real life” and environmental interrelationships. he was making connections between “people, places and things'' in his world akin to te whāriki (ministry of education, 2017, p. 12) and froebel’s unity principle. jack’s desire was to be an autonomous learner and make decisions in conjunction with the subtle guidance of the teacher empowering him to fulfil his curiosity and inquiries. the teachers had also been willing playpartners for the children for several weeks, in response to the children’s shared interest in caring for dolls: sam, 21 months, sits in front of his teacher leanne with his unclothed doll. leanne lays out a doll’s blanket on the floor, astutely aware sam is observing her. “like this, spread the blanket. now you can put the baby on top” she says. sam lays the doll on the blanket and completely covers it. leanne observes, but does not intervene. she then holds her hand up and swiftly turns it over, imitating a folding action. sam stands up, holding the wrapped doll against his chest. he smiles and starts walking away from leanne. seemingly aware of sam’s intentions, his peer andy, 19 months, waves at sam: “nigh-nigh.” leanne adds: “say nigh-nigh baby, sweet dreams, have a good sleep.” sam smiles, continues walking, then waves back: “bye!” here, the doll is used symbolically by sam and his teacher to nurture sam’s desire to be the one-caring in play (cooper & quiñones, 2020). as they interact, the teacher learns about sam’s intentions, while sam learns ways to express care. the teacher’s interactionist approach is exemplified in their “give-and-take” exchange (bruce, 2021, p. 67). attuned to sam’s interest in caring for the doll, the teacher prompts his care actions using verbal and nonverbal cues, and supports sam’s active involvement in the play. in this way, she affords sam full autonomy over his play, where he is free to decide how to take up her ideas without conforming to an adult’s agenda (bruce, 2021). in response to these and other play scenarios, parents from all four countries commented positively on the “free flow” or “free choice play” of new zealand 1-year-olds. one english parent identified that these children have “freedom to explore with support.” hong kong under the joint influence of chinese traditional and western democratic values, pedagogies for 1-year-olds in hong kong present a unique case, where froebel’s notion of balancing children’s freedom with adult guidance is apparent. hong kong has no curriculum for under 2-year-olds. local childcare centers are recommended to provide developmentally appropriate activities through play to foster 18 global education review 9 (1) young children’s all-round development (education bureau, hong kong sar, 2020). to this end, the early childhood learning centre (eclc) has implemented the sime program in its 1-year-old room. the center-based program is characterized by four intertwined elements stimulation, interaction, motivation, and experience (zhang & chan, 2019). an integrated approach is used to provide toddlers with (a) a stimulating multisensory learning environment; (b) warm, sensitive, and responsive interactions between toddlers and teachers; (c) opportunities for motivated, autonomous exploration, all of which contribute to (d) meaningful learning experiences for whole child development. the program emphasizes self-care activities where toddlers are given responsibility to care for themselves in the context of warm relationships with teachers and peers. teachers and parents in hong kong often see self-care as remarkable learning moments during which children’s autonomy and self-esteem are built up. the following two episodes show children’s engagement in self-care and teachers’ guidance in the process: upon arrival, yvonne was rather tense about unfamiliar people and cameras in the setting. she seemed reluctant to enter the main room. miss ho verbally acknowledged her anxiety, did not hurry her, and encouraged her to work with her favorite stuffed penguin and her mother. at last yvonne managed to take her indoor shoes from the cabinet and changed her shoes by herself. faced with the unfamiliar situation, yvonne was given space to settle her tense feelings. miss ho responded sensitively by accepting yvonne’s anxiety with warmth and verbal encouragement. miss ho, however, refrained from doing the self-care task for yvonne, but supported yvonne to overcome the uneasiness and dress on her own. at the breakfast table, lydia was given her meal bag. miss ho supported lydia to untie the bag, then stood back and let lydia retrieve her towel box and cup from the bag by herself. lydia arranged the items neatly and took pride in laying the table for breakfast. a moment later, miss ho realized lydia was not wearing a bib, and so fetched one for her. lydia heard, looked around, and found that tiffany did not have a bib on either. she asked miss ho to fetch one more for tiffany. lydia continued to scrutinize the group to make sure everyone was wellequipped for the meal. this episode again shows teachers’ sensitivity to when children need adult guidance and when children need autonomy to learn on their own. moreover, influenced by a mix of chinese and western cultures, children in hong kong are nurtured to be autonomous learners as well as responsible members contributing to the larger community. we see the beginnings of this cultural ideal in lydia, who was autonomous in a multi-layered dialogue 19 19 having her meal while being helpful in caring for other children in the group. indoor and outdoor play are interspersed with self-care activities at eclc. free-play sessions are child-initiated and uninterrupted. teachers respect children’s decisions and choices for varying toys, activities, and environments. guided play is also arranged: child-size hurdles were laid on the playground. william and helen were invited to have the first go. they were free to explore ways to approach the hurdles. seeing helen extend her hand to seek help, miss ho responded by taking her hand, supporting her to get over the first two hurdles. miss ho gradually withdrew her hand from helen’s and encouraged helen to continue on her own (though still being near if support was necessary). miss lee also supported william to hurdle when seeing him lift his legs clumsily and seeking help. the teachers recalled that this gross motor exercise was meant to be slightly challenging, but still possible with adult support, to the toddlers. children could then develop a sense of autonomy and independence after they struggled but finally managed the task. both teachers were observant and sensitive in supporting the children’s attempt to be autonomous. they responded to the children’s desire to jump over the hurdles by offering physical and verbal support. this guided-play scene resonates with froebel’s idea that freedom in learning is best supported with sensitive adult guidance. discussion guided by our video-cued multivocal approach, our multi-layered dialogue involved eliciting different “voices” regarding pedagogies of care for 1-year-old children in four countries through a froebelian lens. this discussion focuses on the researchers’ dialogical conversations about their country-specific examples and associated dialogues with participants. our hermeneutic process revealed diverse interpretations of the froebelian principles of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance. we also identified similarities in practices that connect us across geographical boundaries, such as how all of the practitioners were considered professionals, took delight and enjoyment in being with children, and demonstrated great care for the children, but did so in different ways. for example, in hong kong, the practitioners’ guidance was borne out of a “loving concern”, and in new zealand, a practitioner’s guidance was in response to a child’s “caring concern” for the other (doll) (cooper & quiñones, 2020). however, beyond the text, the examples are inherently unique, demonstrating the complexity of understanding pedagogical practices with very young children in contexts that are historically, politically, and culturally diverse. by paying attention to the micro, macro and temporal dimensions at play (darling, 2016), we were able to “see” unique unfolding of autonomy in learning and freedom with guidance across cultures alongside associated complexities, such as play and development as cultural-specific; autonomy as time-bound; and subtle, yet critical differences in understanding “freedom” and “guidance.” 20 global education review 9 (1) the study affirms that play is a ubiquitous term and means different things to different people. acknowledging the widespread, yet under-articulated influence of froebel’s ideas on play in education (watts, 2021), our dialogue surfaced nuanced meanings of 1-year olds’ play that were both surprising and enlightening for us. for example, the new zealand practitioners seemed guided by a view of children’s play as intrinsically motivated and choice-based, while the hong kong practitioners seemed guided by a view of play as a means to educate young children (rao & li, 2009). play for 1-year olds in hong kong thus involves more adult preparation and participation compared to other cultures. the idea of giving 1-year olds opportunities to explore with support from attuned adults in cultural-specific ways, aligns with froebel’s emphasis on the importance of supporting all children’s curiosities and inquiries through access to a rich range of materials, open-ended play, and interactions with nature and people (watts, 2021). froebel’s insistence that children problem-solve genuine issues in their own time and through creative play suggests an acknowledgement of the cultural specificity of play. our study extends this argument to include practitioners’ pedagogies, highlighting that through a cultural lens there are similarities in and unique ways of supporting play, learning, and development in 1year-olds. the significance of autonomy was also apparent to all of the researchers, but did not resonate in the same way. in contrast to bruce’s (2020) idea that some adults can struggle to grant children sufficient autonomy to play and explore ideas, the country-specific examples reveal both subtle and overt ways that practitioners afforded the 1-year-old children opportunities to be autonomous. for example, in england, the welcoming practitioner demonstrated a subtle but vital ability to interpret alfie’s emotional capital (salamon et al., 2017), recognising the blanket as important for his emotional regulation and sense of emotional autonomy to “work through” his transition experience. in the usa the practitioners were more overt, choosing to be emotionally present but not directly engaged with a child during her book reading experience. for froebel, autonomy was not about letting children do as they wish. rather, he believed that autonomy was about having the time and space to think, analyse, discuss, and seek support when needed, while recognizing that children (and adults) are one part of a bigger whole (unity) (bruce, 2012). our examples exemplify froebel’s ideas; these children were not left to their own devices, but supported to be autonomous in the context of their relationships with others. we pondered over the idea that autonomy can take on a temporal dimension, where people or a culture see it as something desirable in a child now in the present or as preparation for the future. this time dimension was evident when the new zealand practitioners viewed and approached children as already competent to act on their own interests and inquiries, and when the usa practitioners encouraged children’s independent explorations, whereas the hong kong practitioners saw children as having potential but needing adult mentorship to prepare them for self-sufficiency and independence. this temporal element of autonomy is not obvious in our readings of froebel’s work, and suggests a cultural insight regarding autonomy that is more likely to be “seen” in cross-country analysis. we also uncovered subtle yet critical differences in how freedom with guidance is understood across cultures. froebel argued that a multi-layered dialogue 21 21 freedom “cannot be given to children; rather, they have to attain it for themselves through their own efforts” (tovey, 2020, p. 4). this idea of striving for freedom manifested in the hong kong example where children were learning to master the use of the hurdles with close attention and guidance from practitioners. in the usa example, the practitioner attentively waits for a child to problem-solve getting over the barrier, and then validates both his effort and sense of autonomy with positive feedback. this thread in our discussion led to another; how freedom can range from seeing freedom in the form of a child’s use of agency; freedom to explore; and freedom to choose. the view of “freedom” that practitioners held seemed to inform their approach to “guidance.” for example, we discussed how the english practitioner played a guiding role in helping alfie to separate from his mother while being responsive to both alfie’s and his mother’s communicative and bodily cues. we noted how the new zealand practitioners supported children’s freedom to choose and explore by providing gentle support for their interests and inquiries. we also examined how the hong kong practitioners guided children towards freedom by offering them a steady hand, and how the usa practitioners guided children in their freedom through verbal encouragement and gentle touch. hence, freedom with guidance was manifested differently across the cultures. while guidance is generally practised as warm interactions and verbal encouragement in new zealand, reflective of te whāriki’s emphasis on reciprocal and respectful relationships (ministry of education, 2017), guidance in the hong kong pedagogical context is reminiscent of the chinese child-rearing concept of “guan” [管], meaning “to govern” but with deep concern and care, and high involvement of the caregiver (chao, 1994; tobin et al., 1989). conclusion our collective reflections and multilayered dialogue have led us to acknowledge meaningful pedagogy with very young children as a culturally-specific phenomenon, and to appreciate the value in applying froebelian concepts to enrich the discourse in this area. the involvement of families in our research dialogues also reminded us that very young children are not isolated beings, rather, they are always in a relationship with others. the examples helped us reflect, revealing nuances of culturally imbued interpretations of pedagogies of care across different countries. a relevant metaphor is one of a kaleidoscope where colors change and blend as it is turned: each perspective that is brought forward in our dialogue is indicative of the ways the researchers are contributing to the connections from our collective observations of pedagogies of care. as a result of this study, we support the idea of froebel’s philosophy influencing infant care and education and being considered in pedagogies of care with 1-year olds internationally to reflect the multiple ways this philosophy can be understood through a cultural lens. references arce hai, a., may, h., nawrotzki, k., prochner, l., & valkanova, y. 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christina (2022). folding froebel with deleuze: rethinking the significance of imitation in early childhood. global education review, 9 (1), 54-68. folding froebel with deleuze: rethinking the significance of imitation in early childhood maggie maclure manchester metropolitan university, uk christina macrae manchester metropolitan university, uk abstract the paper brings froebel’s philosophy into conversation with that of deleuze. we focus on the fold and on self-activity as key concepts that hold a special place in the monist philosophies of both thinkers. one point at which their (very different) ontologies coincide is their conceptualization of a cosmos in which everything is ultimately in relation. the philosophical convergences of such different thinkers in different eras are mapped in relation to the influences of a shared lineage with some earlier hermetic and romantic strains of thought. both froebel and deleuze conceive of subjectivity as a relation of dynamic folding and unfolding of inner life and external world. the fold, as the operation that brings outside and inside together in a unitary system, counters the dualisms that still tend to structure thought: for instance, ideal/material, intelligible/sensible, nature/culture, individual/social. reading deleuze with froebel helps to draw out some theoretical underpinnings of froebel’s holism, by bringing movement, matter and the senses back into focus and rethinking the relation between children and their environment in learning and development. we discuss some empirical examples of what this might look like from a current research project, focusing on imitation as one example of the fold between the inner life and the outer worlds of young children. in particular, we are interested in exploring how froebel’s conception of imitation as a dynamic and metamorphic act of self-transformation might share some affinities with the concept of becoming developed by deleuze and guattari. keywords deleuze, froebel, becoming, imitation, monism, unfolding, self-activity introduction it is the destiny and life-work of all things to unfold their essence. --f. froebel, the education of man (1890, p. 2) in this article we bring froebel into an encounter with deleuze in order to draw out some aspects of froebel’s thought that are perhaps under-recognized in contemporary thinking about how children learn and develop, and pursue some implications for pedagogy in the early years. we focus the encounter around two concepts that were of interest to both froebel and deleuze: namely the fold (or unfolding) and self-activity. these concepts folding froebel with deleuze 55 55 hold a special place in the philosophies of both thinkers, who, despite their manifold differences, conceive of the cosmos as a totality1 in which all is ultimately in relation. wasmuth (2020, p. 65) writes of froebel’s philosophy: “in the whole of reality, in the cosmos, everything is related to everything, and every being (seiende) unfolds itself as itself in this context.” both thinkers are influenced in this respect by leibniz’s monism, whereby, as froebel’s commentator susan blow (froebel, 1895, p. 33) notes, "each soul is a monad, which by its selfactivity repeats for itself the universe." the fold, as the operation that brings outside and inside together in a unitary system, acts as a “counterfigure and a counter-concept” (seppi, 2016) to the dualisms that still tend to structure thought: for instance, ideal/material, intelligible/sensible, nature/culture, individual/social. both froebel and deleuze (1993) conceive of subjectivity as a relation of dynamic folding and unfolding of inner life and external world. unfolding and self-activity are in fact implicated in one another, as froebel’s succinct statement quoted at the beginning of this article indicates: “it is the destiny and life-work of all things to unfold their essence” (froebel, 1890, p. 2; emphasis added). unfolding is self-activity. for both froebel and deleuze, (un)folding and self-activity presuppose an immanent ontology of becoming and emergence from within: that is, the processes that produce life unfold from within life itself. in bringing deleuze to bear on froebel, we want to avoid forcing froebel’s work into anachronistic conformity with the latest trends in early childhood research or pedagogy, and we do not wish to underestimate the profound 1 for deleuze, the cosmos is however an open totality whose boundaries are formed only by the movements of the forces that comprise it. differences in their world views. nevertheless, we detect some broader resonances between froebel’s thought and the recent ‘ontological turn’ in the social sciences, arts and humanities, which has been influential in early childhood research (lenz-taguchi, 2012; olsson, 2009: maclure, 2016; otterstad, 2016). deleuzian philosophy has been part of this ontological turn, together with other theories including the new materialisms (barad, 2007; van der tuin & dolphijn, 2012) and post-humanism (haraway, 2016; braidotti, 2013). these orientations share some fundamental assumptions that can, again, be glimpsed in froebel’s writing. they all present immanent ontologies of process, relationality, self-organization and becoming. mind and matter are seen as inextricably entangled. they are infused with concepts from science, maths and technology. they see humans as developing in dynamic and unfolding relation with their environments. the link between froebel and deleuze has a specific inflection however, in that they share a certain intellectual heritage, as we outline below. both were interested in the materialist strain of german idealism advanced by novalis and contemporaries. both, according to their commentators, were also interested in hermeticism and the occult forces of nature, via scholars including boehme. it could be argued that both deleuze and froebel belong to a “meandering line” or “erratic strand of thought” in western philosophy identified by elizabeth grosz (2017, p. 263-4) that addresses what she terms “the incorporeal,” and defines as “the immanence of the ideal in the material and the material in ideality” (p. 5) 56 global education review 9 (1) in the latter part of the article, we mobilize the encounter of deleuze and froebel to revitalize understandings of imitation as a dynamic force in children’s development. the discussion unfolds from some data examples of young children engaging in what might be thought of as imitation, taken from an ethnographic study funded by the froebel trust.2 the project is using froebelian concepts, including unfolding, to develop a materiallyinformed pedagogy that is attentive to 2-yearolds’ sensory and affective ways of knowing and becoming. we read imitation as an instance of selfactivity, where the inner life of the child and the outer world of matter, or nature, are in-folded and mutually elaborated. extending the analysis via deleuze’s concept of the event, as both material and incorporeal or virtual, we suggest that these child imitations are creative and immersive replayings of events, rather than mere replications. we conclude by exploring some implications for a pedagogy that would respect the integrity of children’s imitative events rather than breaking their ‘spell’. tracing froebel’s unitary life principles in exploring the philosophical context that influenced and inspired froebel, we are more interested in mobilizing some specific aspects of his unitary pedagogy, than either (re)visioning, or smoothing out, the many contradictory aspects of his overall project. it is noteworthy that some of froebel’s influences (boehme, schelling, and novalis) share some common ancestry with deleuze’s formative interest in esoteric thought and metaphysics (bonta, 2010; ramey, 2012; ramey and 2 details: https://www.froebel.org.uk/researchlibrary/listening-2-investigating-sensory-motor-learning-intwo-year-olds whistler, 2014; biareishyk, 2019). while froebel’s unitary system encompasses an idealist rationalism (brehony, 2009), simultaneously there is a strong occultist, immanent, and monist strand in his writings. both spirit and nature (the “internal” and the “external”) are animated by “an all-pervading, energetic, living, self-conscious and hence eternal unity (froebel, 1890, p. 2). for froebel, according to blow, “all living objects participate in one great life” (1985, p. 32). this monism has most usually been associated with his pantheism (hilton, 2001) and it is an aspect that has been either generally overlooked (with the notable exception of blow, 1895) or explicitly ejected from successive interpretations over time. the diminishment of this monist philosophy is also associated with the rise of empirical and positivist epistemological approaches (brehony, 1997, 2009; nawrotzki, 2006) that have resulted in interpretations of froebel’s thinking being over-washed with subsequent dominant dualist modes of thought. these context/time-inflected readings of froebel, in turn, have formed new accommodations and allegiances associated with the increasing influence of evolutionary theory and psychology that were to become ascendent after froebel. in the english context, the extent to which froebel’s philosophy was considered revisionist became so extreme that adherents of his methods were often in name only as they disavowed so many of his core principles (nawrotzki, 2006). our starting point for developing a finegrained understanding of froebel’s concept of unfolding was his key text, the education of man, where the term unfolding appears frequently. he uses the term as a principle of human growth and understanding. unfolding, as folding froebel with deleuze 57 57 noted above, is presented as a self-organizing principle that takes place through self-activity. on first reading of this text, it is easy to concur with stanley hall, the famous american father of child psychology, that much of the text seems impenetrable, contradictorya “weird and bizarre [...] metaphysical ferment [...] concocted of various ingredients: theosophic mysticism, foregleams of evolution” and a “passionate enthusiasm for nature just as the great scientific movement was dawning” (hall in brehony, 2009, p. 593). the derision that 20th century empiricists such as hall, wallas and dewy level at froebel’s work take aim at its mystical, romantic and symbolic “schellingesque factors” (dewey, 2001, p. 42). in agreement with susan blow (herself so often criticized by the progressive educationalists for the seriousness with which she approached these aspects of froebel’s thought), we have attempted to follow her exhortation that “only the student who has insight into the ideas which ruled froebel’s mind can justly weigh his work” (1895, p. 18). biographic and textual approaches to froebel such as those of wasmuth (2020), and liebschner (2001) are helpful in beginning to trace froebel’s pedagogical concepts in relation to his life and times. they offer insights into the importance and centrality of his ultimate unitary principle, the law of the sphere, according to which all things are in connection. the spherical law mediates the inner and the outer and determines the reciprocal importance of the parts to the whole and the whole to the parts. both wasmuth (2020) and liebschner (2001) contextualize froebel in relation to the intellectual atmosphere of the time, referring to the strand of german idealism of the so-called jena school as froebel’s key influence. while both cast doubt on how closely froebel read such work, it is clear from a variety of sources that there were particular books that froebel held especially close to his heart, and these are referred to in his extensive correspondence. these specific references to literature from his collected writings include schelling’s naturephilosophie (brehony 2010, lilley, 1967, p. 9), novalis’ collected works (lilley, 1967, p. 16), and boehme’s aurora (lilley, 1967, p. 17). while the intellectual milieu of romantic philosophy is often referred to as influencing froebel’s thinking, it is rarely given serious attention in terms of its specific implications for his pedagogy (with some exceptions, for example blow, 1895; lilley, 1967; strauch-nelson, 2012). in response, we answer kevin brehony’s (2010) call to pay greater attention to the more mystical, hermetic and occult concepts that are evident (amongst many others) in froebel’s writing. in highlighting novalis, schelling and boehme as significant influences on froebel, we are opening up a lineage that connects with that of deleuze, who cites these thinkers among the many influences on his work. we detect one of grosz’s ‘meandering lines’ therefore, running through froebel and deleuze via these romantic and esoteric precursors, in their shared materialist understanding of nature or the “outer” world as expressive of “inner” or abstract cosmic forces. this is reflected in their common interest in mineralogy, crystals and mathematics, as well as plants, as part of a geocosmic philosophical conception of all life in the universe. this line that connects froebel and deleuze via these precursors informs our analysis of research data concerning children’s imitations below, where we connect froebel’s vision of life as the folding of “outer” world and “inner” spirit, with deleuze’s theory of the event, which posits wordly events as actualizations of virtual or cosmic forces on an immanent plane. 58 global education review 9 (1) this interpretation stands in sharp contrast to modern psychological accounts of froebelian philosophy, where the imitative is closely coupled with mental imagery and the cognitive. the listening-2 project alongside these retrospective readings of froebel and deleuze, we have also put these concepts to work in thinking about some particular pieces of data that were generated as part of the listening-2 project. building on a prior and well-established research relationship, this was a year-long research project located in a 2-year-old classroom in an inner-city nursery school and children’s centre. prior to the listening-2 project, christina had conducted a slow-research ethnography over three years in the same 2-year-old classroom (maclure, 2016). building on this prior research, parents, staff and children were invited to take films where children were engaged in everyday domestic or play activities. we had a specific interest in the potential of creating slow-motion video, as a tactic for attending more closely to the sensory-motor aspects of children play encounters. project data was collected via gopro cameras which could film at slow speeds and in high definition. these were available for loan by parents to take home, however parents often preferred to use their mobile phones. an iterative consent process was used in order to ensure that only film clips that were consented for were contributed to the final project archive. sadly, the project was interrupted mid-way through by the covid pandemic, meaning that face-to-face contact with families and the school community had to be paused. from november 2019 until march 2020 (when visits were suspended because of social distancing restrictions in response to covid-19), christina spent one afternoon/morning every week in the same classroom as a participant, and she would often write down notes at the end of these sessions. she also spent one afternoon/morning situated in the nursery corridor where she was able to download film clips to the project computer, as well as chat to parents, and exchange or view film clips with them as they dropped off their children. in this article we work with just three research vignettes where children seem to be engaging in imitative activity. one of the vignettes consists of a short field note written by christina at the end of a session when she was in the classroom, and the other two are text translations of short film clips taken on parents’ phones outside the school context. in both cases, although the film was taken at the usual speed, christina slowed the films down and (re)viewed them with parents on the project computer, snatching a quick conversation about them in the corridor. christina subsequently translated the un-folding activity into words while watching them repeatedly in slow motion. it is worth pointing out that when transcribing the film, christina found words to be completely insufficient to capture the sheer complexity of these moments. in spite of this, the process of transcription did have the effect of bringing the event to life in new ways. as a former nursery teacher, christina is well-versed in making child observations; however the effect of trying to capture what was unfolding on the slow-motion film suddenly considerably complicated this process. both the luxury of time (something in short supply in the daily work of an early years practitioner) and the focus on attempting to describe the children’s bodies as they moved made this very different from habitual observations of play events. it became apparent how inadequate transcription was in folding froebel with deleuze 59 59 terms of capturing the temporal, affective and motive complexity of self-activity. furthermore, an unexpected effect of christina’s repeated close watching of these events was to set off memories of herself as a young child acting in adult ways. we discuss below the significance of such embodied memories, as connections to past events. three vignettes vignette 1: (play moment observed by christina at the end of the day) i am in the home corner, and j approaches me, and then announces aloud “i’m an ice cube going in a micro-wave.” he then places himself on a chair; at the same time as closing his eyes, he lets all tension from his muscles so that his body becomes entirely floppy. he holds this melted position in the chair for about 30 seconds and his body is held the chair that he is now slumped into. vignette 2: (play event recorded on phone by m’s mum in the local library) m has climbed up onto one of the chairs placed at a computer station. she sits sideways on the chair and leans across the table to the keyboard, so her fingertips are able to busily tap with both hand on the keyboard. the contact of her fingers as each hand comes down to meet the keys makes distinct clattering sounds for each hand. her eyes are focused on a computer mouse that is balanced on the side of the keyboard, and then her body turns towards the mouse and her right hand reaches for it. she says “hello” before her hand has brought the mouse to be placed against her ear. some more utterances are made as her other hands taps the keyboard some more, while with the other hand the mouse is placed back down, as m is saying goodbye. she repeats this sequence of picking up the mouse and placing it to her ear, saying “hello” and “goodbye” a few times. she looks up and then becomes aware that she is being filmed. she looks at the camera/mum with a self-conscious smile and turns her head away. the spell is broken. vignette 3: (play event filmed by h’s mum on her phone in a home corner set up at the edge of a noisy soft play space) watching the clip attentively i am aware how loud the noise is from the soft-play space: sounds of children moving and calling, the sounds from the soft-play area seem to contrast with the silence of h who plays with an inner intensity in this play kitchen area. h, by contrast to the frenzy of movement and sound taking place behind her, is both solitary and immersed in what feels like a parallel universe. she places a plastic saucepan in a wooden micro-wave, closes the door and carefully presses a series of buttons painted on the side. she then seems to be searching for something, her hand hovering as she moves along the length of the work surface and hovers over various items as if about to pick them up, but her hand hesitates, and she moves on as if she has not found what it is that she seeks. at one point she looks at the camera, but she is inside of her play and her eyes quickly pass over the camera as she moves towards a different work surface. here she picks up a plate and a bowl in each hand, and returns to the main work surface, again, her eyes encounter the camera, but without any registering in her motion. she places her items on the worktop, rearranges a plate and re-places it on the cooker hob. she 60 global education review 9 (1) selects another plate to cover the vacant cooker hob next to the one she has already placed on the cooker top. she returns to the microwave, pulls out the saucepan and then moves it to the sink where she carefully holds it under the taps, and then sets it down on the far table, but runs back to turn off the tap. h’s mum addresses her. h does not appear to respond and is deep inside her actions. h’s mum rephrases her words as a question (i can’t make it out as this is spoken in arabic which i do not speak). h continues arranging and placing plates as if she has not heard her mother. when we discussed the clip afterwards h’s mother described h as being in a state of being “head over heels.” imitation as becoming “only children can know things by transmuting themselves into them, by knowing and being at the same time. children turn into animals, plants, stones and toys. ‘now i’m this or that,’ the child uses this affirmation and thereby internalizes what he says.” (leal, 121) instead of conceiving of imitation as “a static, isolated process which merely repeats itself in different forms” (froebel in lilley, 1967 p. 57), froebel restates the imitative as a dynamic and metamorphic act of selftransformation. this process is one of absorption, where the “diversity of the outer world” is absorbed and given expression internally (froebel in lilley, p. 61). closely linked with this life-seeking conception of imitation is an understanding of observation where the child’s “whole being” is “an appropriating eye” (ibid) that devours the external difference that it encounters. this is not a separated eye that stores static representations, but a sensing organ drawing in the world and transforming the body to become something new. “every object challenges the human being to recognize it in its nature and its relationships. so [the human] has his senses, the tools with which he meets this challenge and assimilates the world outside him” (froebel in lilley, 1967, p. 81) when blow explains the part played by actions in froebel’s book about action rhymes, she explains that to apprehend a deed, one must repeat the deed: “the dramatic impulse, the tendency to pretend one is someone else, contains this pleasure of mimicry as one of its elements. another element seems to be a peculiar sense of power in stretching one’s personality to as to include that of a strange person. in young children this instinct knows no bounds” (james in blow, 1895, p. 28) in all three of these vignettes, and the accompanying moments of becoming other that unfold, we recognize this call to life that both lilley and blow are drawing out from froebel’s writing; an intensity of feeling, pleasure, and absorption. returning to j’s moment of becoming an ice cube: there is a threshold that he crosses the moment that he closes his eyes and when his muscles let go, and he has become melted ice. he ushers forth a new self as he lets go of control of his muscles; the change of muscle tone marks a qualitative shift of j’s being, as it is expanded to include the being of melted ice. in becoming other than himself, one could perhaps say that j has become “new self from within” and that he “he creates himself by reproducing his environment within himself” folding froebel with deleuze 61 61 (blow, 1895, p. 29). this recalls the power (invoked in one of the poems by novalis that froebel held dear), of giving oneself over to an undivided attention directed at another. in so doing, novalis talks of “miraculous” new perceptions arising, and “from the point where he has transfixed the impression, they spread in all directions with a living mobility and carry his self with them” (novalis, 2005, p. 75). as a microwaved ice cube, j’s body has not only the plastic elasticity of melted ice itself, but even if he were to transform himself into stone, this liquidity of body would similarly have been set in motion in order to conjure rock-like hardness. the accounts above of imitation as transmutation (leal, 2005) and transfixing (novalis, 2020) resonate with the concept of becoming-animal developed by deleuze and guattari (1988) in a thousand plateaus, which they describe as a kind of contagion. they identify a range of becomings including becoming-animal and becoming-child that they describe in terms of folding or “creative involution.” “it is as though, independent of the evolution carrying them toward adulthood, there were room in the child for other becomings ... that are not regressions but creative involutions” (p. 273) involutions are compositions of speeds, gestures and affects, in which determinate forms are dissolved. writing of the child who imitates a horse, they write that a new “assemblage” is formed that is “neither hans's nor the horse's, but that of the becoming-horse of hans”? (1988, pp. 257-8). when m taps at the typewriter keyboard, it is at the moment when she sees the camera that she is returned to a state of selfconsciousness. in this instance we are made aware of the threshold she has crossed, because its spell is broken. released from her trance, she crosses back, into herself. nevertheless, she returns to herself as a slightly different m whose body has been through a process of qualitative change, even if only for such a small moment in time. this moment of spell-breaking recalls christina’s own ‘pretending’ moments when she was a child. in one that comes to her mind, she is older than m (maybe 8 or 9) and able to write; she is also seated at a desk, having carefully collected a pile of blank paper forms, that lie in front of her. with the speed of a fluent adult writer, she fills out the dotted lines on selfaddressed forms one by one with neat zigzag lines; her hand taking on the efficient movements of a more practiced writer. the completed forms would then be placed on another “finished” pile. christina was also reminded of the feeling of being jolted back into her body again when her mother’s presence could be felt watching, and instantly a feeling of foolishness supplanted her self-sense of being a competent adult writer. when we pause to think about m’s typewriting and christina’s form filling, in both these cases we are struck at how the becoming-other that is taking place is a becoming-adult. in both, children are transformed into busy adult bodies where the speed of the writing, as well as m’s perfunctory hello and goodbye of the phone call, are the practiced techniques of an adult body. in h’s studied kitchen performance, the spell is strong throughout the duration of the clip; even her mother’s words to her do not sever the thread. froebel talks in positive terms of this state, invoking it as a kind of “divine action” that drives the child’s self-action. it is in this pantheistic understanding of the divine that smith sees the influence of boehme on frobel’s 62 global education review 9 (1) understanding of the notion of ‘becoming’, where we are always both with and like the world, in our eternal state of becoming (smith, 1983, p. 308). froebel urges caution when children are in this state of absorption, warning adults to take care in such situations, and to resist determining, directing or interrupting. he notes that when a child appears unresponsive, they may “really be steadily intent on a line of thought such as claims his full attention” (froebel in lilley, 1967, p. 51). where imitation is aligned with copying, froebel speaks disparagingly of a “dead approach” (ibid, p. 58). lilley reads froebel’s educational project as a quest for the “art of living” (ibid, p. 44). this is one that is always seeking the intensification and transformation of experience, and where “there is no creative process unless one’s knowledge and insight are advanced and one’s life intensified” (ibid, p. 43). deleuze helps us understand these child imitations as immersive re-playings of events, rather than as replications of discrete objects, persons or actions, observed as it were, only from the outside. the latter would be, in froebel’s terms “dead imitation or mere copying [rather than] living, spontaneous self-activity” (froebel, 1890, p. 18). for deleuze (2004), events are double-sided, having on the one hand an incorporeal or virtual dimension, and on the other a material one. “pure” events are impersonal and eternal, existing as virtual potentials, waiting to be actualized in specific events. pure events, writes deleuze, are complex compositions of infinitives to green, to sleep, to love, etc. they lack determinate subjects, objects or tenses, until they become actualized in bodies and states of affairs. from such a perspective, one could say that j taps into the abstract forces that come together in the virtual event of “icecube-melting” and expresses its inner, indefinable “sense.” and, as noted above, j is himself changed “from within.” it is also noticeable that imitation as actualization of the event goes far beyond ‘seeing and doing’, and beyond perception in its conventional sense. as is evidenced in the complexity of the events replayed by m and h, imitation involves modes of perception that register in the muscles and in the viscera. massumi writes that the event mobilizes both proprioception, as “the sensibility proper to the muscles and ligaments”, and interoception, defined as “visceral sensibility” (2002. p. 59). massumi writes that, taken together, these comprise “synaesthetic sensibility... the medium where inputs from all five senses meet... and become flesh together, tense and quivering” (ibid, p.62). it is perhaps this haptic vision or bodily investment in the event that lends the children’s performances the character of ‘trance’ or ‘spell’, invoked above. the actor, writes deleuze (2004), “actualizes the event”. in massumi’s (2002, p. 64) paraphrase: “the activity of the actor is less to imitate a character in a script than to mimic in the flesh the incorporeality of the event”. blow’s account of children’s imitations resonates here: “the child who imitates an alien deed has formed an ideal, and energises to realise it” (1895, p. 33). it is interesting that, for both deleuze and blow/froebel, this is a fundamentally moral issue: namely, how to express the eternal in one’s everyday decisions and actions. according to deleuze, we do not, however, simply ‘choose’ events; rather, they select us, though we must be open to the summons: “to the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in” (2004, p. 169). or, as massumi puts it, bodies folding froebel with deleuze 63 63 ‘incur’ the pure event; “it occurs to them” (2002. p. 58). to be caught up in the event is indeed therefore a kind of trance or spell: the child is inextricably a part of the event that they are unfolding (or ‘willing’ in deleuzian terminology), and which occupies their body. this helps to explain why adult interventions, or attempts to recruit children to ‘their’ events, often either miss the mark, or seem to ‘break the spell’. the event of imitation that the child is caught up in resists adult redirection. or perhaps adults have simply forgotten how to submit themselves to the abstract forces that are assembling in a child’s unfolding event, whereas we often see young children apparently opening an event onto the participation of others (see løkken, 2000). at any rate, the risk of adults killing the spontaneity of children’s self-activity is one that preoccupied froebel. “the child loves all the things that enter his small horizon and extend his little world. to him, the least thing is a new discovery, but it must not come dead into the little world, nor lie dead therein, lest this obscure the small horizon and crush the little world” (froebel, 1890, p. 73). implications in this final section, we offer three key areas where the emerging theoretical discussions and research findings raised in this article might have significance. firstly, we propose that if we are interested in reigniting the holistic approach that lies at the heart of froebel’s educational philosophy, it would be productive to return to some of the more overlooked theoretical influences on froebel’s thought, namely here, the legacy of the particular romantic poets/philosophers from the jena circle whose writings were so dear to froebel’s heart. secondly, we argue that by paying attention to froebel’s capacious and productive approach to children’s development as self-activity, some of the deficit discourses of the child that have taken such a hold in our current post-industrial, neoliberal political landscape could be resisted, in favour of a froebelian pedagogy of attunement to the child’s interests and emerging capacities. finally, we consider how reframing children’s imitative play as having significance beyond the representational and symbolic might open up imitation up as a more vibrant and vital mode of coming to know one-self in the world, in relation to others, both human and non-human. by paying more attention to the sympathetic magic wielded children as they imitate others, we wonder if this could encourage us as adults who care for children to take up a greater experimental attitude in our engagements with young children. as froebel suggests, perhaps we could, indeed, learn from our children (froebel, 1890, p. 89). when we started to write this paper, our original intention was to explore froebel’s twin concepts of unfoldment and self-activity, alongside deleuze’s usages of these terms. this was in recognition that both writers share a conception of subjectivity as a complex, always emerging relation of dynamic folding and unfolding of inner life and external world. we were also aware that both had a vision of a cosmos in which everything is ultimately in relation, and that in this respect both thinkers were influenced by a monist, rather than a dualist philosophy. as we looked more closely at froebel’s original writings, however, we found ourselves unexpectedly compelled to start to read some specific writings that he lovingly refers to in the copious letters he wrote to his friends and supporters. so far, we have only dipped into some of these texts. however, in 64 global education review 9 (1) those that we have read so far, for example, the novices of sais, by novalis, we have found new ways to tap into a froebel that are less filtered by late 19th century and early 20th century scientistic positivism and subsequent psychologically inflected translations and interpretations of his writing and pedagogy. while froebel is commonly described as a rationalist (brehony, 2009) and as a figure steeped in kantian metaphysics of reason, less attention is given to the aspects of his thinking that stubbornly contradict and resist this transcendental position. his love for the ideas and poetics of the jena circle romantics (of whom we have only mentioned a few) reflect an interesting and unexplored shared kindred spirit. this minor poetic and philosophical movement that “turned into a revolt against rationalism and stressed sentiment rather than reason” (watts, 2021, p. 5), was one that was quickly subsumed by dominant dualist and positivist scientific modes of thought. we argue that the affective and wild force bequeathed by this small group of postkantian romantics, who were in turn influenced by earlier hermetic and monist thinking, deserves more attention. furthermore, our unexpected discovery that some of the key figures from this lineage were also early influences on deleuze’s work leaves us interested in the question of whether there are provocative connections to be made between recent neo-materialist and ontological scholarship in early childhood research, and a resurgence in framing froebelian practice as a challenge to the ever-narrowing policy focus on progression and outcomes. we wonder if deleuze’s de-centering of “man/child” within a more immanent ontology with its dynamics of trans-individuation could allow us to follow this wilder and vitalist strain of froebel’s thought with its attendant occultist, mystical, and unitarian tendencies. novalis defines romanticism as an approach to the world that endows “the commonplace with a higher meaning, the ordinary with mysterious aspect, the known with the dignity of the unknown, the finite with the appearance of the infinite” (stone, 2008, p. 150). we note how this also resonates with deleuze’s position in relation to kantian metaphysics. “where kant imposes the discipline of pure reason, deleuze insists on the indiscipline of reason—a reason that is no longer pure, but mutates and contaminates itself in adventure.” (ramey and whistler, 2014, p. 7) we speculate that further primary text research into some writers who influenced the more esoteric aspects of froebel’s writing, while read alongside deleuze’s concept of the virtual, might help us gain some insight into what froebel means when he talks about premonition, intuition, and surmise – concepts that we did not have the scope to explore in this article. liebschner notes that froebel’s concepts of the surmise and presentiment are some of his least understood, but ones which now most deserve our attention (2001, p. 142). these are forces resistant to interpretation and meaning, but nevertheless, forces that shape and condition our thought. perhaps, even more radically, they could help us to reframe what we conceive of as thought, one that accounts for a “bodily logic of potentiality through affect, rather than imagining that all learning to take place through conscious thinking” (olsson, 2009, p. 48). connectedly, we also propose that more theoretical and research attention could be given to the divergences in the significance of imitation in early childhood as this is conceived by piaget and froebel. liebschner notes that folding froebel with deleuze 65 65 “froebel’s concept of imitation was much wider than the mere notion of copying and included the ideas of re-structuring and re-creation” (2001, p. 43). this differs from piaget’s hylomorphism (james, 2020, online) that regards imitation as based on a “mental image” that is “disassociated from any external action in favor of the internal sketches of actions” (liebschner, 2001, p. 85). key for piaget is “symbolic decentration” (james, 2020, online), where the mental image is internalized, separated, and then assimilated. working with the immanent line of froebel’s thought, however, rather than being abstracted, and separated from the object, the symbolic is expressed as and through form. reviving the unitarian, monist strains of froebel’s thought could also reverberate in a micro-political dimension, one expanding on a contemporary revolutionary froebelian tool-box (mcnair and powell, 2020; mcnair et al, 2021), which could be put to work as part of a creatively non-compliant pedagogy in neoliberal times. mozère forcefully points to the generative power of deleuze’s immanent virtualities as a posture that we need to keep in mind in order to enable us to provide an “empty space and time” (2012, p. 60), a milieu allowing for emergence and selfactivity. this counters the tendency to overwrite the child and is more able to reconceive of the child as a figure of potential rather than as one of lack. it might be that froebel’s belief in life itself could help us to challenge the deadening aspects of progress-oriented linear narratives of child development that underpin the direction of policy, largely originating in the us and uk, that are now prevailing globally. this form of “prophetic pedagogy” (a term coined by loris malaguzzi) – is one that “knows everything beforehand, knows everything that will happen, does not have any uncertainty”; and one that cleaves to an “anglo-saxon testology” – with “its rush to categorise” (in moss and cameron, 2020, p. 3). finally, we suggest that there are implications for early years practice arising from our analysis of the data that we have discussed, of children involved in a form of self-activity where they are also imitating something or someone. when, as researchers, we reflected on the immersive quality of h’s kitchen play, and the intensity of expression of a child’s body that had absorbed speeds and habits of an adult body, it turned our attention to the capacities of children in relation to those of adults. christina was struck by a vision of her past-self as a nursery schoolteacher, taking up the role of being the playmate of a child in the homecorner. for example, she might ask a child if she could have a cup of tea; or in another scenario if a child was packing up a bag and placing a doll in a buggy, she might ask them if they could buy her some carrots from the shops. reflecting on this in light of the data vignettes that we watched in slow motion, as well as reading them through the prism of both deleuze and froebel’s immanent philosophy, it became apparent how comparatively far off the mark her adult setpieces are. these adult performances are hollow if set alongside the self-activity of h as she is fully swept up in the act of cooking in the small corner of the soft play center. in these instances, children’s abilities to become-adult feel infused with life, and they make us wonder if adults are perhaps almost incapable of becoming-child. thinking with deleuze and guattari (1988), this impossibility is tied up with questions of the imperial power of adults over children. becoming-adult is a movement in the direction of becoming majoritarian, whereas becomingchild, would be to undo oneself as grown-up (don’t be childish, don’t be silly). while we accept there are real lines of hierarchy that we cannot disregard or fully overcome, there may be 66 global education review 9 (1) things we can learn from the immersion of children in the events they unfold. perhaps it was an empathic immersion in the child data events that sparked the “transport” of christina to imitative events in her own past. as deleuze (2004) insists, there is something untimely and ineffable ‘inside’ events, that resists representation in conventional ways, but nevertheless affects bodies and sets meaning in motion. he called this sense. possibly the closest that adults in general get to becoming-child is when they take part in pantomime or play the part of clown. the discipline of mime is perhaps a practice that deserves more attention and one that could be thought of as a productive part of a repertoire of early years pedagogic practice. “deleuze indicates that it is the mime that gives us the clearest image of what to do. the mime does not imitate a specific gesture (walking, climbing, eating) as performed by someone in particular, but selectively presents walking, climbing, eating as if they were a pure, “incorporeal” medium in which the body operates. what the mime does, effectively, is allow the mind to focus” (ramey and whistler, 2014, p. 26). acknowledging the importance of the felt-sense of bodies could oblige us rethink the thrust of the way that we train the early years workforce, a training that is very much focused on learning psychologically-oriented child development theory. in addition to attending more closely to the histories that have shaped this body of knowledge, and the knowledge traditions that have been excluded, we might also ask if there is a place for more embodied disciplines when we are trained as early years practitioners. subjects such as dance and theatre skills, which sideline language in order to foster the shared dynamism of bodies and affect, might be taken alongside theoretical learning. these different bodies or sources of knowledge may offer us ways to resist the deadening effect of an early education system that always knows already where a child is heading. references 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(2012). new materialism: interviews & cartography. london: open humanities press. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320976978 https://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2020.1803299 https://dx.doi.org/10.2989/ipjp.2012.12.1.8.1116 https://dx.doi.org/10.2989/ipjp.2012.12.1.8.1116 facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 17 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: okilwa, nathern, s. a. (2018). the role of the principal in facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students. global education review, 5 (4), 17-35. the role of the principal in facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students nathern s. a. okilwa university of texas at san antonio abstract as political and economic instability coupled with natural disasters continue to displace people around the world, migration and resettlement remain necessary. hosting countries and communities grapple with how to meet the diverse needs of the refugees. given that over a half of the refugees are under the age of 18 years (i.e., school-age children and youth), schools play a major role in the process of integration in to the new homeland. the purpose of this article is report on the principal’s leadership efforts to include refugee students and their families at northstar elementary school. the descriptive reporting of the principal’s efforts is organized by three themes: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. keywords refugees, inclusion, integrate, schools, leadership, principal introduction the ongoing political and economic instability and natural disasters continue to displace many people around the globe. consequently, there are millions of refugees, asylum-seekers, internally displaced, and stateless people seeking resettlement in other countries for safety and a better life. according to the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr), there are about 66 million people displaced from their homes worldwide; of these, 23 million considered to be refugees with over half under the age of 18 years, which means they are school-age children and youth needing to be educated (unhcr, 2018). this continuous migration and resettling of people also “transports cultural material and knowledge across national boundaries” (goddard, 2015, p. 3), which some anthropologists such as appadurai (1990, p. 296) have called a “global cultural flow.” with this cultural flow come the tensions that we see even today, as nation-states and local communities grapple with potential solutions to the migration trends. schools are always at the center of this cultural intersectionality. the school-age refugee population is of interest to educational systems of resettling countries. refugees and other migrant children add to an increasingly ethnically, culturally, and linguistically diverse student population in today’s classrooms and schools across the globe (spring, 2018). however, there is evidence to ________________________________________ corresponding author nathern s. a. okilwa, the university of texas at san antonio, 501 w. cesar e. chavez blvd., san antonio, tx 78207. email: nathern.okilwa@utsa.edu mailto:nathern.okilwa@utsa.edu 18 global education review 5(4) suggest that diversity in schools, particularly in the united states, is not a new phenomenon; yet schools continually struggle with meeting the diverse needs of students (kaestle, 1973; montalto, 1981; racine, 1990; spring, 2018; tyack, 1974). specific to refugee students, the destabilizing events in their home countries necessitating resettlement (e.g., war), cause these students to arrive in the united states with an array of challenges such as psychosocial, cultural, socioeconomic, and academic. schools are one of the major hubs that introduce and potentially facilitate a level of integration of these students and their families to their new homeland as they embark on the resettlement process. the purpose of this article is to report on the principal’s leadership efforts to include refugee students and their families at northstar elementary school (northstar es) (the name of the school and individuals in this manuscript are pseudonyms). for this article, a priori themes drawn from riehl (2000) are used to describe principal’s inclusion efforts: fostering new meanings about diversity, creating an inclusive environment, and building relationships with the school community. first, i present the review of the literature consistent with the theoretical constructions of inclusive schools guided by riehl’s (2000) principal tasks for school inclusion followed by the methodology section, findings, and finally the discussion and conclusion sections. literature review theoretical constructs the increasing diversity in school children’s abilities, social class, culture, language, race/ethnicity, and nativity present challenges to schools that have typically served a homogenous student body or used mainstream philosophy of teaching and learning (goddard, 2015). efforts to re-envision these practices require the leadership of the principal to foster innovative and inclusive educational environment (magno & schiff, 2010; theoharis, & causton-theoharis, 2010; ryan, 2006; suarez-orozco, 2003). research indicates that successful school leaders in these diverse environments demonstrate a common set of understandings, dispositions, and practices (howard, 2007; khalifa, gooden, & davis, 2016; magno & schiff, 2010; riehl, 2000; ryan, 2003, 2006). for instance, howard (2007) suggested effective principals in diverse contexts adhere to five phases namely building trust, engaging personal culture, confronting issues of social dominance and social justice, transforming instructional practices, and engaging the entire school community. on aggregate, successful leaders in diverse settings are critically self-reflective, cognizant of the internal and external school contexts, and centered on improving student educational experience. for the purpose of this article, i utilize riehl’s (2000) three critical administrator tasks or practices she identified after conducting a vast analysis of scholarship about the principal’s role in creating inclusive schools for diverse students: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. in the following sections, i discuss each of these practices in concert with other literature in terms of how the principal can influence the overall school culture for a better socioeducational experience of refugee students. fostering new meanings or definitions of diversity riehl noted that sense-making or meaningmaking inside and outside the school community about any form of change is constructed around peoples’ beliefs about the school. importantly, “real organizational change facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 19 occurs not simply when technical changes in structure and process are undertaken, but when persons inside and outside of the school construct new understandings about what the change means” (riehl, p.60). all the while, the current school demographic changes sometimes elicit educator and community resistance, in part, due to the fear of the unknown, or in some cases, it could be motivated by stereotypical or racist dispositions (cooper, riehl, & hasan, 2010; lopez, 2003). for example, howard (2007) recounted a conversation with a teacher who raised questions such as “why are they sending these kids to our school?” also, howard’s account reported that a principal in a district outside new york city expressed a stereotypical perception of changing student population: “these kids don't value education, and their parents aren't helping either. they don't seem to care about their children's future” (p. 16). the principal’s reaction was in response to a predominantly caribbean and latin american student population that was also 90 percent low-income – a school that was once predominantly rich, white, and jewish. howard further reported, in a school district with a rapidly increasing black population, a white parent decried the increase in discipline cases as a result of students’ lack of respect: “students who are coming here now don't have much respect for authority. that's why we have so many discipline problems” (p. 16). research indicates similar deficit perceptions frame the narrative about refugee students enrolled in neighborhood schools (roy & roxas, 2011). the deficit narrative is often defined by refugees’ unique cultural and religious practices and expressions, language acquisition, and past interrupted schooling experiences (thorstensson, 2013). unfortunately, these sentiments are commonplace and reflective of the attitudes and tensions within school communities with changing student demographics. for instance, non-refugee parents make schooling decisions for their children based on these perceptions. similarly, stereotypical and deficit-driven attitudes guide the pedagogical and curricular decisions schools make. in other words, schools (e.g., teachers and administrators) have the potential to perpetuate inequalities that exist in society (blanchard, & muller, 2015; cherng, & liu, 2017). however, principals are uniquely positioned to facilitate an understanding and appreciation of diversity and its contribution to preparing all students to navigate an increasingly diverse society (anderson, 1990; cooper et al., 2010). specifically, anderson (1990) suggested that principals can influence meaning-making through a variety of common school activities/events. for instance, principals can engage different stakeholders in fostering new meanings about diversity by seizing opportunities such as official school ceremonies, school meetings (e.g., parent teacher student association), and public school-community relations events (strike, 1993). also, principals could restructure or re-organize or redesign school procedures and practices that acknowledge and are sensitive to diversity (ryan, 2003). for the different school constituents to embrace new meanings, it requires a collective discursive process that engages everyone in co-creating the new meaning. the deliberative process has to be “characterized by free exploration, honest exchange, and non-manipulative discussion in light of critical questions such as ‘who benefits from what goes on here?’” (riehl, p. 61). promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs principals are considered instructional leaders who indirectly influence classroom instruction 20 global education review 5(4) through “high expectations for student achievement, high visibility and frequent visits to classes, high support for staff, and strong goal and task orientation” (riehl, p. 62). advancing inclusivity is a concept that has been around educational circles for a while, particularly with a focus on including students with special needs in the general classroom (villa & thousand, 2005). with student diversity extending beyond ability differences, the call for inclusion recognizes the exclusion of other students because of age, race, language, culture, class, gender, and sexuality (cooper et al., 2010). particularly for refugees, who bring unique cultural practices and beliefs, languages, socioemotional needs, traumatic experiences, and educational backgrounds, it calls for thoughtful consideration toward inclusion (mcbrien, 2005). for this population of students, the practice of inclusion should truly serve a social justice purpose or function, that is, meaningfully including them in institutional practices and processes (bogotch, 2002; ryan, 2006; theoharis, 2007). for instance, principal bolls (magno & schiff, 2010), responded in support of immigrant students by making the necessary institutional adjustments that integrated immigrant students by creating a diversity office, encouraging formation of a variety of cultural clubs, hosting a diversity leadership conference, and organizing school assemblies, films, and lectures by foreign educators on themes of cultural diversity. these activities have the potential to nurture and sustain dialogue within the school community and develop critical consciousness (ryan, 2003). additionally, leaders who demonstrate effectiveness in diverse school settings tend to emphasize high expectations for student academic achievement, an ethic of care (or empowerment through care), and a commitment to the larger community (bloom & erlandson, 2003; dillard, 1995; reitzug & patterson, 1998). building relationships between schools and communities building relationships between schools and communities acknowledges that educating the whole child cannot be accomplished by schools singlehandedly. with student diversity come diverse and complex needs that schools are not quite equipped with the capacity to fully address. refugee students, in particular, present a number of challenging factors: many have endured traumatic experiences (they carry the scars of post-traumatic stress disorders, ptsd), due to the exposure to violence and torture, experiences in refugee camps, being displaced from their homes and, and disconnected from family members; lack of formal education – for some students they could be enrolling in public education for the first time; language barriers; and the struggles with acculturation in their newly adopted homeland (mcbrien, 2005; taylor, 2008). multi-agency partnerships is perhaps the appropriate approach and response in the face of multi-faceted student needs and finite resources accessible to schools in today’s economy. school-community partnerships create collaborative opportunities to meet student needs and in the process strengthening working relationships between schools and community organizations (stefanski, valli, & jacobson, 2016). for instance, agencies engaged in settling refugees across the united states include church world services (cws), episcopal migration ministries (emm), hebrew immigrant aid society (hias), international rescue committee (irc), us committee for refugees and immigrants (uscri), lutheran immigration and refugee services (lirs), united states conference of catholic bishops (usccb), and world relief corporation (wr) facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 21 (office of refugee resettlement, 2018). therefore, schools need to establish a framework to collaborate with these agencies in addition to other local organizations to serve refugee students and their families. most importantly, partnerships should serve to facilitate positive educational experiences and life outcomes for refugee students. indeed, establishing mutual relationships and partnerships with families and communities is associated with a number of positive student educational outcomes to include “improve school programs and school climate, provide family services and support, increase parents’ skills and leadership, connect families with others in the school and in the community, and help teachers with their work” (epstein, 1995, p. 701). khalifa (2012) gives accounts of a principal who was intentional and agentic in establishing a positive relationship with the community. khalifa found that “when principals show concern and advocate for community causes, skeptical, distant parents begin to trust and support the principal…advocacy lends credibility to the principal, and thus allows him to lead the school with parental support, involvement, and trust” (p.448). the principal in khalifa’s study engaged the community by conducting weekly home visits, accepting speaking engagements in community churches, supporting community advocacy, attending student defense hearings, spending significant time discussing “non-education” issues with parents, and encouraging mutual advising and information sharing. in conclusion, it would be simplistic to elevate certain principal attributes and practices as the magic wand that makes diverse schools successful without acknowledging the interplay between a web of factors that create schools as complex social and learning institutions. there is a preponderance of scholarship singling out an array of educational factors that need to be collectively addressed such as education policy, school finance, the social organization of schools and classrooms, relationships between schools and students' families and communities, teacher education and professional development, curriculum, instructional methods, and assessment processes (apple & buras, 2006; darling-hammond, 2000; 2010; goode & benyehuda, 1994; jackson, johnson, & persico, 2015; ladson-billings, 2006). most of the variables noted here may be beyond the purview of school leaders. therefore, in this article i choose to focus on those responsibilities within the jurisdiction of the school leader: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive practices within schools, and building connections between schools and communities as outlined in riehl (2000). study design and methods the purpose of this qualitative article reports on the principal’s leadership efforts for the inclusion of refugee students and their families in the school. the analysis for this article is drawn mainly from the interview conducted with the principal of northstar elementary school (northstar es) in central isd. while this study focuses on the principal’s leadership efforts to include refugee students and their families, it is part of a broader study that examined the overall school efforts to support the educational experiences of refugees at northstar. the broader study included interviews/focus groups with the administrative team (the principal, assistant principal, and two counselors), five newcomer teachers (i.e., teachers designated for the newcomer program), five general /english as a second language (esl) educators, and parents as well as classroom observations. 22 global education review 5(4) the principal ms. connolly is a white female who earned a bachelor’s degree in elementary education with an emphasis in mathematics and a master’s degree in educational administration. she started teaching in 1991 as a general education teacher in a major urban city in texas, where she taught 4th grade for two years. in 1993, she moved to her current city and school district, central isd, as a 5th grade teacher. she taught 5th grade for five years before transitioning to a math specialist position for kindergarten through the 5th grade at nes, in 1998. during her time as the math specialist at nes, the campus was designated as bilingual; however, there were no refugee students enrolled at that time. after eight years as a math specialist, connolly was promoted to the position of vice principal (vp) in 2006. during her tenure as vp, refugee students started enrolling at nes. five years later, in 2011, connolly advanced to the role of school principal. at the time of this study (2014-2015), she was in her 5th year as the principal. site the study site for this article was purposefully selected because it was the district designated elementary school (at the time) to enroll and serve refugee students. in 2006, northstar was designated as the english as a second language (esl) cluster campus, providing esl services in an effort to consolidate resources to better serve the students. when refugee students began to arrive in 2007, the district sent them to northstar to accommodate their english language acquisition needs and their transition into us schools. table 1 shows some basic demographic information about northstar for the 2014-2015 school year. according to northstar school records, in the 2014/15 school year, students spoke a total of 30 languages including english, arabic, french, kiswahili, burmese, among others. about 20 percent of students listed as esl came to the united states as refugees. table 1 northstar elementary school demographic information for 2014/15 basic demographic information for school year, 2014/15 campus size 736 grade span ec-5 % economically disadvantaged 68 % ell 30 mobility rate (%) 27 # of refugee students 144 # of languages 30 # of teachers 52 # of newcomer teachers 5 # of language support teachers (lst) 2 administrative team (principal, vp, 2 counselors) 5 facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 23 data collection & data analysis the study went through two separate institutional review boards (irb), the author’s institution and the central isd, before interviews were conducted. participant interviews (administrative team, teachers, and parents) were conducted in the school setting (except for one parent focus group that was conducted in the community center where those families live) and lasted between 60 and 90 minutes. the principal was asked questions about how the school, particularly her leadership, has supported refugee students (for specific principal interview questions, see appendix). the interview was audio-recorded and professionally transcribed. theme analysis (saldaña, 2013) of the interview transcripts was guided by a priori themes adopted from riehl’s (2000) synthesis of the literature about the principal’s tasks or practices in creating inclusive schools for diverse students: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. in the following findings section, each of the themes (practices) are explained using excerpts from the principal interview. findings the themes discussed in this article are organized around riehl’s (2000) three principal’s tasks or practices that are critical in diverse school settings: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between schools and communities. fostering new meanings about diversity as the demographics of communities and school change, members within these settings grapple with what the changes mean to them individually as well as the community within and outside the school. the process of grappling with and meaning making about diversity emerged in the northstar community when an influx of refugee students began in 2007. internally northstar leadership was forced to rethink how to best accommodate and serve the new refugee students and their families. as ms. connolly suggested to us, they were not quite prepared for refugee students: “well, back in 2007 when it [refugee student enrolment] first started, we weren’t prepared. and, i don’t think the district was quite completely prepared [either]…so, we weren’t prepared because that was the first year we became the esl cluster.” however, connolly acknowledged, in a sense, they were prepared given the number of teachers with english as a second language (esl) and bilingual certification: “so prepared – we had esl certified teachers that were also bilingual certified so we were prepared in that sense. we had certified teachers to teach them” said connolly. consequently, depending on the number of incoming refugee students, there was a continuous assessment of need for the purposes of hiring, assignment, and reassignment of teachers. connolly noted: i’m not sure what the year is but we grew from having one teacher to eventually having four teachers that were working with those newcomer refugee students. those positions were funded through the district with title iii money…we had teachers on our campus that were esl and bilingual certified that volunteered to work with the population. so, if i remember correctly, we had about four teachers… our numbers kind of went up and down. it went up to four teachers and then went down to one teacher. 24 global education review 5(4) she further added: …when i became principal in 2011…i think we had two teachers that were teaching the refugee population. we had a primary teacher and an intermediate teacher. at the end of the year one got cut because the numbers were small. i only had seven kids that were going to be staying. so the following year, i started with one teacher but the families started coming again so i hired in october the second teacher. in march, i had to hire a third teacher. then last year i started off hiring another one during the summer so started off with four teachers last year – four newcomer teachers. in february our numbers had gotten high again and i hired a fifth teacher. that’s where i am today. in addition to the lead classroom teachers, ms. connolly advocated for language support teachers (lsts) as added resources to support the learning needs of refugee students. similar to the hiring of classroom teachers, there was continuous juggling of lsts as well. connolly explained, we have the language support teachers, so at one time, i only had a half lst that moved to a full time lst that moved to one and a half lst’s. then it got cut in 2010 to one. and, so that was something i fought for again and asked if i could please have a second one because our population was growing. so this is the second year we’ve had two full time lst teachers. they are strictly doing all day pull outs. they pull out small groups of students – refugees and regular esl students – who need that support. in these accounts, connolly described an ever fluid situation with student enrollment and personnel needs. as a leader and a campus, the continuous hiring, assignment, and reassignment of teachers can be expensive, time consuming, and destabilizing to the overall culture of the school. conversation with ms. connolly revealed an ongoing sense-making or meaning making regarding the best instructional model that would best meet the diverse needs of refugee students. two other elementary schools in the district which had served refugee students previously had different instructional approaches. connolly spoke about her preferred instructional model compared to others, underscoring a lack of a common district model: …each campus did something different. [median elementary] had them [refugee students] one year in the newcomer [classroom] and the principal retained them. goaks [elementary] put them in the newcomer [classroom] for three years. northstar would keep them for two years so it wasn’t consistent among the schools. my opinion is the district didn’t know the right answer. there wasn’t a wrong or right answer. but, the previous principal and i thought two years because there are such high expectations. we can’t keep them sheltered too long. it’s like you have to get them out there. in essence, the three elementary schools offered a sheltered instructional classroom environment (i.e., newcomer classroom) for refugee students with varying lengths of time before students were transitioned in to the general/esl classrooms. externally northstar community was engaged in sense making or meaning making as well. weary of what the demographic shift meant for nonrefugee children’s learning opportunities, some parents expressed resistance. with an increase in general esl and refugee students, some facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 25 parents of native english speakers raised concerns particularly with regard to student ratios (i.e., native english speakers to esl students) in the general/esl classrooms. as connolly noted: it ended up a whole esl class – maybe two or four english speakers. well, then how does the english child feel? they are the true minority in that classroom which some parents are ok with but some parents are not. so then i had parents coming to me not wanting their child in esl classroom. well, i wouldn’t move their child – they’re still getting a quality teacher – this teacher might be even better qualified because they’ve had more training. so, i wouldn’t move them. some parents were seeking a balanced classroom or a class with no esl students altogether. parents tried to make meaning of what the emerging student diversity meant for educational experiences and outcomes for their own children. ms. connolly acknowledged parent concerns: “i reflected upon it and i understand. you know, do you want to be the complete minority in that classroom?” however, she constantly reassured parents of uncompromised quality educational experience for their children and the need to be patient: “i told them they needed to give it six weeks. wait and see – it’s going to be a great experience – and it worked out.” quality educational experiences was not only directed at native english speakers but for incoming general esl and refugee students. she said there were “high expectations” for refugee students and over and over again reiterated the need to be guided by “what is best for the kids.” the purposeful hiring of her own vice principal and teachers, to be further discussed in the next section, reinforced the belief that each child, regardless of his/her background, deserved a quality school experience. ms. connolly encapsulated her position this way: all children basically are the same. they’ve [refugees] had different life experiences and that’s the biggest thing. the refugees are coming to you with different life experiences. but, we can still relate to them and we can still teach them and still can nurture them. additionally, she believed refugee students’ presence on the campus was additive to the overall northstar culture: their love of learning, their cultures, their acceptance – they seem to have acceptance of other people…they don’t really have discipline issues and it’s like the kids can run the class. they figure out procedures and they’re not going to let anyone slide. so they can be very responsible. they just have a different love for learning. they’re not lazy. they’re motivated. i think they’re just so happy to be here. ms. connolly came to full appreciation of the contribution of refugees to the diversity of northstar: “obviously, the diversity they [refugees] bring to the school has a benefit for all of the american students in learning about the other cultures.” connolly had the task of communicating the new reality across northstar community. promoting inclusive school cultures and instructional programming evidence from the data show that school personnel were fully invested in creating a positive, welcoming, and inclusive environment for refugee students and their parents to actively participate in the learning process. principals are tasked with creating conditions for inclusive school environment where all members feel a sense of belonging. in acknowledging the benefit 26 global education review 5(4) of the cultures from across the world that converge at northstar, the annual parade of nations is one event that presents a united and inclusive image. ms. connolly described it as “wonderful.” she highlighted the most recent parade of nations held in fall 2014: we had 31 different countries represented. so, we had their flags and then the teachers helped them pick facts about their countries. so one student was at the microphone reading the facts about their country to kind of teach everybody about it while their national anthem is being played in the background like the olympics. and then, a group of students is walking with their flag – parading. we went through all 31 countries and at the end was the united states flag. then, they sing a beautiful song “together we can change the world.” everyone’s crying. but we had a good turnout. we had parents here and i finally invited my supervisor from central office. we do it every year but i’m not a person to brag necessarily. but we talked about it last year and decided we needed to let people know what we’re doing at the school. this is unique and special so don’t keep it a secret. it needs to be known. this year we’re telling the [superintendent], the school board and whoever could come. there were a couple of people that could. the parade of nations became an annual signature event at northstar. the show of community and appreciation of diversity is encouraging. as one who has personally attended a number of these events, it is always exhilarating to see the convergence of the world at this one school. ms. connolly fully understood she could not singlehandedly create an inclusive school environment without eliciting the support of other school personnel. she used purposeful hiring as one means to build capacity in order to achieve the vision for inclusivity. for instance, she talked about the qualities and qualifications she considered when hiring her vice principal (vp): i did hire a vice principal, purposely. when looking for qualifications, he is bilingual and is esl certified. he taught bilingual. he’s had more training in that field and he, himself, is english as a second language. spanish is his first language. so, he’s gone through it as a child learning. that was one of the things when i chose him for our campus, that’s one of the things i liked about him. he’s qualified and knows what he’s talking about and has experienced it. similarly, ms. connolly looked for certain experiences in the newcomer teachers that would likely translate into effective teaching and positive learning in the newcomer classrooms: the five teachers i have, and i purposely selected them, were not moved from within my school. they were posted positions and i looked specifically for people who had something in their background related to esl, which all of them they have. there was something about them. they’re all passionate teachers and love their jobs. they’re enthusiastic and they study the art of education – the philosophy of it – and then just develop their art. walking into their classrooms i just wish every class was a newcomer. when i walk in the kids are all engaged. there is learning going on. it’s just that we can’t learn quickly enough for the state of texas. but, amazing things are going on and i give them much credit. these teachers provided an engaging environment for the students. our classroom observations during the study attested to a classroom setting that activated the love of facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 27 learning that ms. connolly referenced. indeed, the selective qualities of these teachers translated into their positive interaction with the students. building relationships between schools and communities building relationships is the mortar that holds the various stakeholders engaged and supportive of the vision and mission of the school. the principal is expected to lead the charge of navigating shrewdly, the different interests and personalities to establish healthy relationships that ultimately benefit the students. ms. connolly believed in the power of building relationships: “the key is everybody developing those relationships and that’s throughout the whole school – the teachers developing relationships with their kids and getting to know them and understanding their needs.” this core belief guided her efforts which included reaching out to community organizations, conducting home visits and family nights in residential communities, and providing literacy programming. ms. connolly lamented the limited time on her hands, in addition to lack of funding, to explore the different relationships and potential partnerships. she noted, “that’s the whole thing – i can’t do it all so you have other people communicating for you and if the message isn’t clear then that’s a struggle.” she wished she had an individual in charge of partnership such as communities in schools’ position, like other schools do. the partnership with catholic charities (cc) was significantly important to northstar and refugee families. cc is in charge of placing refugees in apartment complexes on arrival and notifying schools about school age children expected to enroll, as connolly noted, “catholic charities [finds] apartment complexes that would take larger families. so everything – i’ve been communicating with catholic charities – i get spread sheets [with student names].” therefore, connolly and the teachers were in constant communication with cc: “it’s me, it’s the lsts, it’s the teachers talking to catholic charities…getting them to support…and they have been very supportive.” connolly appreciated the support: “catholic charities gets transportation if that’s needed and helps us. if we didn’t have that connection, i don’t know what we would do. because the district doesn’t – unfortunately.” however, it is important to mention that connolly cited other partners that support their work with refugees: “university methodist helps out. st. matthews is involved. house of prayer is involved. the baptist church is involved.” in addition, other partners include a teacher education program at the local university and a local chain grocery store. cc stood out as the leading partner that provided a host of services to include translation and interpretation, cash, food, and clothing assistance, cultural orientation, school registration, english classes, tutoring, and health screenings. for instance, during parent conferences cc provided the needed support: we need translators. i don’t have the money for it, but catholic charities has the grant money. so we just had parent conferences last wednesday. catholic charities helped transport the parents to our school so we could have parent conferences with them. now, we’ve also done home visits. and that’s what the teachers said – not everyone was able to come so we need to go back to home visits. ms. connolly recognized the difficulty with transportation for refugee parents to attend events on campus, (e.g., parent conferences, family nights, student registration, etc.), she in turn took some events to the parents. that is, they held these events at the apartment 28 global education review 5(4) complexes where the families lived. connolly led by example with this initiative: i had to do it [home visits] for grade placement committee – all the 5th graders who failed the staar test. all my lep kids – i had 30 kids fail. out of 30, eleven were english [speakers]. the others were all esl. well, it wasn’t an appropriate test, but i had to have 30 grace placement committee meetings. were they here [school]? no, i went to their apartment complex had the middle school principals meet me at the apartment complex. but, with the catholic charities support, though, helped to have translators. i didn’t have to do it just once i had to do it twice. i had to do it after the second administration and after the third administration. ms. connolly described a family night conducted at school and one of the apartment complex where most of the refugee families live: we have family nights here like we had our family literacy and math night – sports theme – tailgating… but then we also go to the apartment complexes. we started that last year. we went to a-creek and had a family night and we went to i-ranch. it was awesome – absolutely wonderful. the parents appreciated it. last year we got more parents. this year we did it again. so my teachers do it here and then we go do it two more nights. so this year i told them i loved their dedication but let’s not do it two separate nights – let’s divide and conquer. so we asked for other esl teachers, or whoever on the campus wanted to help, and would do it the same night. so my vice principal and i went to a-creek. that’s the bigger group. and then my admin intern went to i-ranch. we split teachers. so we did both on the same night. we had a great turn out, but not as many parents. evening literacy program for parents and students sponsored by a bush literacy grant was an important initiative to once again connect with refugee families and equip them with much needed literacy skills. ms. connolly reflected: we had a grant – [the] bush literacy grant for three years. the first year was wonderful. we were able to get parents to come. the way it was set up was i had a couple of teachers who taught it after school from 3:00 – 5:00. from 3:00 – 4:00 they would work with the parents on different activities for literacy. then from 4:00 – 5:00 they worked on computers and different things like that. we were able to transport them here [on campus]. and so from 3 – 4 we had teachers with the parents and we had teachers with the kids. they were separate. from 4-5 they were brought together and practiced what they had learned together. it was a great idea and then it fell apart. the reason it fell apart was due to transportation. our school buses will not allow us to transport children under 4. well, a lot of the refugee families have babies. we tried to problem solve – [public] bus – but who’s going to get the ticket to ride the [public] bus? when novel initiatives such as the literacy program failed due to logistical issues, partnerships with organizations such cc become especially important. cc was able to step in and offer those classes. ms. connolly noted: catholic charities is very involved in that. so, they along with the district and house of prayer are setting up classes for parents. they talk to us about what do we need for parents to learn about. so we talked about hygiene, how to help the child with homework, discipline and accountability. catholic charities has a room at a-creek facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 29 [apartment complex]. they use the little center there. they do tutoring every week. so they tutor a lot of our kids. in summary, drawing from our interview with ms. connolly, it is quite evident that she cared about including refugee students and their families in the northstar experience. navigating the diversity landscape required shrewd leadership to maintain cohesion in the school culture. the analysis presented here show how connolly fostered new meanings about diversity, promoted inclusive school cultures and instructional programs, and built relationships between schools and communities. in the following section, i discuss how these findings align with the existing literature. discussion leading diverse schools presents both opportunities and challenges (andersen & ottesen, 2011; walker, 2005). schools leaders are positioned to influence the tenor of school climate and culture whereby the different constituencies learn to understand, value, and appreciate diversity (ryan, 2003). in her extensive review of the literature on the role of the principal in creating inclusive schools for diverse students, riehl (2000) highlighted the three tasks: fostering new meanings about diversity, promoting inclusive cultures and instructional programs, and building relationships between school and communities. first, during the time of demographic change at northstar, ms. connolly’s leadership was critical in fostering new meanings internally (with herself, staff, and students) and externally (parents and community). the arrival of refugee students challenged nes community. particularly, some parents perceived the student demographic shift as a potential threat to the quality of education offered to northstar children. worth highlighting, is connolly’s long tenure at northstar; eighteen years of service at the time of this study (math specialist, vice principal, and then principal), may have worked in her favor during the critical time of change. the institutional and contextual knowledge and understanding, not specifically teased out in this study, had great capital in facilitating new meanings among the stakeholders. she had established the trust with the staff and the community and was able to constructively shepherd the dialogue during the pivotal period of demographic change (lane & bachman, 1998). this premise is consistent with most change management models which indicate that it takes five to seven years for principals to build a foundation of trust with teachers and community members to ensure changes are consolidated and become part of the culture (gabarro, 1987). ms. connolly acknowledged northstar and the school district were not prepared for the wave of immigrants which demanded reorganizing and restructuring northstar in order to make sense of and accommodate the diversity (lines, selart, espedal, & johansen, 2005). connolly established newcomer classrooms, purposely hired newcomer teachers, and encourage general educators to seek new certifications. these internal efforts encapsulate some of the initiatives connolly undertook to serve the needs of refugee students. importantly, connolly stayed at northstar long enough to see the initiatives enacted and allowed to work, which is not often the case in most school settings that require change. principal turnover interrupts the momentum of change and principals never see the impact of their initiatives. therefore, connolly’s longevity at northstar was important because evidence shows that it takes five to seven years for principals to build a foundation of trust with teachers and community members to ensure changes are consolidated and become part of the school culture (gabarro, 1987). additionally, in some cases, district level priorities do not align with 30 global education review 5(4) specific school needs creating a disconnect in addressing needs in a timely manner. for instance, ms. connolly and the newcomer teachers pointed out how the district was not completely supportive in the school’s efforts toward addressing refugee student needs. this misalignment of priorities is problematic in advancing the causes of refugee students. second, promoting inclusive cultures is in a sense, what bank (2004) calls empowering school culture. that is, the process of restructuring the culture and the school organization so that minority students can experience educational and cultural empowerment. minority students such as refugees are easily marginalized unless they have agentic leaders (administrators or teachers) that will advocate for their needs. ms. connolly’s efforts to ensure northstar acknowledges multiculturalism is exemplified in events such as parade of nations. i have personally attended several of these events; the excitement and pride of the children and parents is exhilarating to watch. however, this event can easily turn into an annual symbolic gesture of diversity which makes the daily treatment of the students and their families quite critical. our observations in classrooms, particularly newcomer classrooms, suggested a warm and engaging learning environment. the unique qualities that ms. connolly looked for in the newcomer teachers indeed translated into positive interactions with students. given that of all school factors, teachers are the most influential on student outcomes because of their daily instructional interaction with students, principals should be thoughtful in their hiring practices (darlinghammond, 2000; wright, horn, & sanders, 1997). teachers are positioned to be cultural brokers for refugee students as these students try to navigate the realities of their new homeland. the teachers’ effectiveness in being agentic for refugee students lies in their ability to seek to understand the cultural milieu of the different student groups, previous first-hand experiences in classrooms and communities with different people groups and the ability to build a cross-cultural awareness that understands the needs of the students (bassey, 1996). if teachers possess these attributes, they are likely to create a nurturing and safe school climate for refugee students and their families that humanizes refugees’ transition into the new cultural environment (xu, 2007). lastly, building school-community relations is imperative to maintaining the goodwill of the parents and community. moore, bagin, and gallenger (2012) propose that paying attention to school-community relations is important because “citizens in the community hold the status of part owners in the schools. they own stock, so to speak, in the schools by virtue of the fact that it is their taxes that support the schools” (p. 10). this perspective is a general call to school leaders to purposely engage the communities in which schools are embedded. within these school communities are assets (e.g., residents, voluntary associations, local institutions, and businesses) that can supplement the resource-strapped schools to meet the diverse student needs. ms. connolly counted on a number of community partnerships such as catholic charities, churches, and businesses for support. constantly engaging with the northstar community availed the support of various community assets, which made serving the diverse needs of refugee students and families possible. connolly was particularly complementary of catholic charities to the extent of acknowledging: “if we didn’t have that connection, i don’t know what we would do. because the district doesn’t – unfortunately.” earlier scholarship (e.g., katz, 1999; parker & shapiro, 1993) established that connecting with parents, particularly facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 31 marginalized parents such as refugees, require purposeful practices which may include meeting parents in their homes and work sites, establishing linguistic equity by providing translators whenever needed, and developing parent competencies in leadership and other areas. similarly, connolly engaged with northstar refugee parents by taking schoolrelated events (family academic nights, parent conferences, and home visits) to apartment complexes where the parents lived. this was in response to what she understood as barriers (e.g., transportation, language, financial) that potentially limited the parents’ full participation in their children’s educational experiences. due to these efforts, parents were grateful: “it’s that parent connection. the parents are so wonderful. they appreciate everything. they never have a complaint. when they do, they do come to talk to me to help them,” connolly noted. conclusion school leaders in diverse contexts have to be intentional about engaging the various stakeholders in order to sustain a cohesive school culture. especially, effectively integrating marginalized students and families such as refugees requires the administrator’s time, commitment, and resources. clearly, ms. connolly was resolute in her core belief of doing “what’s best for the kids.” that student centered approach was brought up many times in our conversations indicating the motivation behind her efforts. implications for practice establishing a healthy relationship with staff is a key ingredient in achieving inclusion in a diverse context. most of the initiatives rely on the goodwill and volunteerism of the staff. school leaders in similar diverse contexts can learn from practices that ms. connolly enacted such as purposeful hiring, restructuring and reorganizing daily routines and procedures, taking events to parents residential areas (e.g., parent conferences, home visits, academic family 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(2007). a child-centered refugee resettlement program in the united states. journal of immigrant & refugee studies, 5(3), 37-59. about the author nathern s. a. okilwa is an assistant professor in the department of educational leadership and policy studies in the college of education and human development at the university of texas at san antonio. his research interests include educational and life outcomes of disadvantaged or underserved or marginalized students; the preparation of school leaders that support diverse learners; and educational policy. http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students 35 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: okilwa, nathern, s. a. (2018). the role of the principal in facilitating the inclusion of elementary refugee students. global education review, 5 (4), 17-35. appendix principal interview questions 1. demographic information: gender, age, personal/educational/professional background, number of years in current position, total years as principal, leadership positions before becoming principal, and leadership training. 2. how is your school prepared to serve refugee students? talk about strengths and weaknesses. 3. how prepared are you personally to serve refugee students and their families? 4. how do you support teachers of refugee students i.e., in newcomer classrooms? 5. how does the district support your school? 6. how do you involve parents of refugee students? 7. what supports (e.g., programs, special events, etc.) does the school provide for refugee students and their families? 8. what challenges do you face in serving refugee students and their families? 9. how do refugee students contribute to your school? 10. what else would you like to share that we have not covered? 115 global education review 5(4) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: grüttner, michael, berg, jana, schröder, stefanie, & otto, carolin (2018). refugees on their way to german higher education: a capabilities and engagements perspective on aspirations, challenges and support. global education review, 5 (4), 115-135. refugees on their way to german higher education: a capabilities and engagements perspective on aspirations, challenges and support michael grüttner german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw) stefanie schröder german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw) jana berg german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw) carolin otto german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw) abstract in recent years, the number of new asylum applications in germany has risen with a peak in 2015. many refugees arrive with high levels of prior education and corresponding educational aspirations. hence, german universities and preparatory colleges (so-called ‘studienkollegs’) have created additional preparatory courses and supporting services for refugees. heretofore, little is known about the specific challenges for prospective refugee students seeking access to higher education in the german context. we focus on key individual, social, and institutional conditions for integrating refugees into the german higher education system. how do prospective refugee students value higher education? what are the key challenges and supporting factors on their way to higher education in germany? our analysis is based on 17 exploratory interviews with prospective refugee students, staff of higher education institutions and counselling services. we combine educational sociology and refugee studies and rely on the capability approach and its close relation to the conception of agency to theorize our empirical findings. reconstructing the challenges and coping strategies along with the key concepts of the capability approach reveals the different strategies of prospective refugee students to achieve their aspirations as well as the frustrating institutional limits of agency. finally, we will discuss implications for higher education policy in germany. keywords access to higher education, agency, capabilities, engagements, prospective refugee students introduction from 2014 to 2016, significantly more asylum seekers arrived in germany than in previous years and therefore, many higher education institutions (hei) had to cope with a growing _______________________________________ corresponding author michael grüttner, german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw), lange laube 12, 30159 hannover, germany email: gruetner@dzhw.eu refugees on their way to german higher education 116 number of advisory requests (steinhardt & eckhardt, 2016; streitwieser et al., 2017). many of the recently arrived refugees1 held high school diplomas or had even graduated from foreign universities (brücker, rother, & schupp, 2016) and expressed corresponding educational aspirations. the german federal government responded by implementing a funding program to help to prepare prospective refugee students2. thus, german universities and preparatory colleges (‘studienkollegs’) created additional preparatory courses and supporting services for refugees (fourier et al., 2017). nevertheless, little is known not only about the specific challenges faced by refugee students (lenette, 2016) but especially for refugees seeking access to higher education. the research project “wege” is the first to investigate the pathways of refugees to german higher education and elaborate on key conditions for successful study preparation.3 in the case of study preparation for refugees, we assume that access to higher education depends on individual and structural factors, as well as on characteristics of the learning environment. while relevant research in germany is still in early stages and mostly concerned with organizational conditions and measures of heis, our project focusses on the situation and perspective of refugees participating in preparatory courses. the following analysis aims at a qualitative reconstruction of challenging barriers and enabling capabilities of refugees’ pathways to german higher education. first, we provide a brief literature review. then we illustrate the situation in germany, relying on a characterization of asylum seekers’ and refugees’ regulation, and the field of study preparation. based on 17 exploratory interviews with prospective refugee students, staff of heis and counselling services, we investigate key challenges and capabilities for integrating refugees into the german higher education system from an individual, social and institutional perspective. therefore, we combine educational sociology and refugee studies and rely on the capabilities approach (sen, 1999) and its close relation to the conception of agency (sen, 1985) to theorize our empirical findings. we grasp the “reasons to value” (sen, 1999) higher education and the challenges prospective refugee students are faced with by the concepts of capabilities and personal, social and institutional conversion factors. furthermore, we highlight agency by reconstructing lines of action, as well as frustrating social and institutional boundaries that cross these lines of action. finally, we point out further opportunities for higher education policy to improve study preparation for refugees in germany and discuss limitations of our analysis. further research should focus on international comparative and longitudinal approaches to deepen understanding and to improve explanations of successful pathways to higher education for refugees. literature review access to higher education for refugees is a rather new research topic, especially in the case of germany. so far, the few published studies conducted in germany mostly describe the organizational level of heis (iwers-stelljes, bosse, & heudorfer, 2016; schammann & younso, 2016; unangst & streitwieser 2018) and are concerned with refugees who are already in higher education. study preparation for refugees in germany has not yet been investigated. the major part of the relevant international literature is conducted in canada, australia, the united states of america or the united kingdom and is based on qualitative research or case studies (for an overview see mangan & winter, 2017; berg, grüttner, & schröder, 2018). research often focusses on the challenges refugees face on their way to or during higher education (gateley, 2015; hirano, 2014, 2015; kanno & varghese, 2010); some studies also introduce case studies of specific support structures as examples (baker et al., 2017; zeus, 2011). generally, empirical studies find high educational aspirations among refugees (brücker, rother, & schupp, 2016; stevenson & willott, 2007). key drivers are the hope for better employment prospects and higher income 117 global education review 5(4) to overcome poverty and to support families in the host country and in the countries of origin (harris & marlowe, 2011; stevenson & willott, 2007). higher education is described as the foundation of building a new life in the host country (hannah, 1999). some studies emphasize that heis give refugees the possibility to address and overcome discrimination and marginalization and to gain respect (harris & marlowe, 2011; morrice, 2013). pursuing their high aspirations, asylum seekers and refugees face several challenges. for example, many studies emphasize financial difficulties as a central issue. often, families have to cope with economic losses due to migration, hence many (prospective) refugee students cannot rely on financial support from their families, and are rather likely to have to support their families themselves (kanno & varghese, 2010). for some refugees, financial pressure might result in the decision to look for a job and earn money immediately instead of studying (morrice, 2013; stevenson & willott, 2007). other structural constraints arising from the everyday living conditions of refugees and asylum seekers are peripheral accommodation and labour market discrimination, likely to inhibit their financial autonomy. among other aspects, commutation and long working hours can conflict with the time needed for studying (naidoo, 2015). some studies mention anticipated discrimination and the fear of stigmatization or social isolation as reasons for refugees not applying for higher education, not to making use of existing support, or not to participating in classes as actively as they could, especially when they are not given credit for knowledge and skills that they could previously rely on (kanno & varghese, 2010; morrice, 2013). some (prospective) students also have to take care of their families, which is discussed as a challenge especially for womenalong with a potential conflict between traditional gender roles and higher education (harris, spark, & ngum chi watts, 2015; plasterer, 2010). while generally several integration and language courses are offered, some studies mention contradictory bureaucratic requirements when different institutions are involved (schammann & younso, 2016). these factors can be seen in the context of an organized disintegration as described by täubig (2009). compared to international students with no experience of forced migration, the everyday living conditions of refugees likely lead to group specific challenges faced by prospective refugee students (berg, 2018). regarding the organizational context of hei, some studies highlight that refugees and asylum seekers cannot resume their studies directly. instead, they have to go through a lengthy process of trying to document previous accomplishments and degrees (morrice, 2013; schammann & younso, 2016; shakya et al., 2010), to receive recognition of certificates and to prepare for studying in a new country, for example, by taking language classes. learning the language is considered to be crucial, since many asylum seekers need intense preparation to adapt academic reading and writing skills (kanno & varghese 2010). what is more, in the case of germany they usually have to demonstrate a high level of language competence as a requirement to apply for heis (schammann & younso, 2016). another central hindrance discussed by several studies is the lack of appropriate information on how to apply and enrol, as well as available supportive measures (earnest et al., 2010; morrice, 2013; shakya et al., 2010). moreover, available information is often wrong or contradictory (stevenson & willott, 2007). since most refugees and asylum seekers are the first in their families or even communities to study in the host country, they often lack a network that would simplify access to important information about the higher education system (naidoo, 2015). based on the challenges, many studies identify implications for higher education policy and institutions. they argue for the acknowledgement of the cultural capital that refugees and asylum seekers bring with them refugees on their way to german higher education 118 (marar, 2011; morrice, 2013) and for the implementation of special support programs (schammann & younso, 2016; stevenson & willott, 2007). in this context, the need for extensive information and support throughout the application process and studies is repeatedly highlighted (gateley, 2015; hannah, 1999; schammann & younso, 2016). the institutional framework in germany organized disintegration of asylum seekers and refugees in germany in 2017, turkey hosted by far the largest number of refugees (3.5 million refugees), followed by pakistan (1.4 million refugees) and uganda (1.4 million refugees). in international comparison, germany hosted the sixth largest number of refugees in 2017 (970,400 refugees) (unhcr, 2018). germany was the only european country among the ten countries with the largest refugee populations, and it was the only one categorized as country of high income. many other countries hosting large refugee populations “are already dealing with substantial barriers to sustainable development, making it particularly challenging for them to mobilize sufficient resources to respond to large refugee influxes” (unhcr, 2018, p. 15-17). germany is a welfare state that signed the geneva convention and has a regulated asylum policy which is embedded in the common european asylum system. it can therefore be assumed, that minimum standards of living and security for refugees are met. nonetheless, refugees and especially asylum seekers face structural obstacles in germany that can inhibit their inclusion in the host country and also impact their possibilities to gain access to higher education. from housing to social welfare, the everyday living conditions of refugees and asylum seekers are heavily regulated in germany. they are determined by bureaucratic regulations and requirements that are partly inconsistent and/ or contradictory and usually linked to repressive penalties in case they are not met. it is, however, not easy to comprehend these regulations, due to a) their complexity, b) plenty of room for interpretation and manoeuvre from individual actors on a local or regional level, as well as c) frequent changes in asylum law and policy (sare, 2017; schammann, 2015). in an overview of studies on asylum in germany, johansson describes the state of being a refugee as being a constant exception and therefore never really included in the host society (johansson, 2015). this constantly provisional and insecure state prevents the normalization of an everyday life and complicates social participation in the host society (scherschel, 2010). among the factors that inhibit the social inclusion of refugees are labor market discrimination, structural barriers to access education and social welfare, and a lack of support for cultural activities among other mechanisms of social exclusion (johansson, 2015; scherschel, 2010). thus, from the perspective of organized disintegration, it is assumed that the regulations and conditions of asylum seekers in germany are designed to inhibit a quick integration rather than to support it (täubig 2009). their living conditions seemed to be designed to give refugees as little agency as possible. on the one hand asylum seekers and refugees are expected to adapt and integrate quickly, but on the other hand their civil rights are constraint and they face structural obstructions, excluding them from central parts of society (scherschel, 2010). this includes the loss of abilities to fulfil social roles and to act autonomously, and thus the interruption of one’s life circle with rarely any opportunities to do anything that would make sense in connection to past or future civil roles. this can lead to the strong feeling of senselessness and wasted time (täubig, 2009). establishing social contacts and aiming at fulfilling or productive activities are important measures against structural disintegration. as we shall see, the situation of asylum seekers contrasts with the agency needed to progress on the way to higher education. 119 global education review 5(4) access to higher education and support for refugees seeking access to higher education in germany refugee students face various challenges when they decide to apply to heis in germany. one of the major challenges is the need to satisfy admission criteria according to the legal framework of access routes into the german higher education system. there is no legal restriction for heis to admit asylum seekers who have not yet received a protected status (wissenschaftsrat, 2016). however, access to higher education “is rigorous, and refugee students must meet the same entrance requirements as all other international and domestic students. these include requirements for language proficiency and records of academic credentials,” as streitwieser et al. (2017, p. 8) pointed out. refugees take part in a separate admission process for applicants who graduated from school in a foreign state outside the european union. in this admission process it is determined whether their school degrees are equivalent to an accredited higher education entrance qualification in germany. the central office for foreign education4 is responsible to review the equivalence of the applicants’ certificates. the purpose of the statements of comparability is to evaluate the degrees in an equitable way, as the chances to study are supposed to be neither higher nor lower than they would have been in the country of origin. certificates that fulfil the criteria to participate in an admission process for a desired field of study in the country of origin are usually stated as comparable to application documents requested at the german hei in which refugees wish to enrol. about 180 heis are assigned to a service agent, uni-assist e.v., to provide preliminary checks for international student applications. through a special funding of the federal ministry of education and research, refugees can apply free of charge for up to three heis per semester to uni-assist (fourier et al., 2017). nevertheless, the heis decide independently if applicants fulfil the required admission criteria and if they can be enrolled in the desired course of study. in addition, for example, when certificates of syrian refugees are reviewed, the statement of comparability depends on the overall grade. while syrian refugees with an average grade above 70% get a direct entrance qualification for a specific field of study, those applicants with an average grade between 60% and 69% are requested to prepare for heis first, and to prove their suitability for the study program to which they wish to enrol. special academic preparation colleges (studienkollegs) offer preparatory courses in order to improve the subject-specific and language competencies of applicants with foreign entrance qualifications. they are usually established by federal states and/or heis, but private colleges do as well. if a prospective student proves appropriate preparation by passing the assessment test (feststellungsprüfung), the hei will re-approve the application. to check the level of proficiency in german, and usually mathematics as well, the preparatory colleges are presupposing defined competencies and are also conducting entrance examinations. another requirement that has to be met is a high level of language proficiency. usually, german heis require students to prove a level of c1 according to the common european framework of reference for languages (ger). this high, almost-mother tongue level encompasses the following dimensions of german language proficiency: “can understand a wide range of demanding, longer texts, and recognize implicit meaning. can express himself/herself fluently and spontaneously without much obvious searching for expressions. can use language flexibly and effectively for social, academic and professional purposes. can produce clear, well-structured, detailed text on complex subjects, showing controlled use of organizational patterns, connectors and cohesive devices.”5 recently, german heis and studienkollegs reacted to the demand and created various languageand subject-specific refugees on their way to german higher education 120 propaedeutic courses. in addition, they developed supportive measures for the academic and social integration of refugees, extended the programs for international students and tried to adapt them to the special needs of refugees (blumenthal et al., 2017; frank & sickendiek, 2016; schammann & younso, 2016). in many cases, this engagement was possible because of the “integra”-program (‘integrating refugees in degree programs’), which is funded by the federal ministry of education and research and implemented by the german academic exchange service (daad). “integra” supports academically qualified refugees to prepare for studies in germany. special programs are offered at german heis and preparatory colleges to get refugee students into the higher education system as soon as possible. within the integra program, funded heis and preparatory colleges are obligated to collect data about their participants, for example country of origin, age, sex, language level or educational background. the data show 6,806 participants in integra-preparatory or language courses of in 2016 (fourier, et al., 2017). of this total, eighty-four percent prepared for studying in germany at a hei. the remaining sixteen percent attended a course at a preparatory college. the prospective refugee students in the preparatory and language courses come from 61 different countries. seventy-five percent of the participants come from syria. prospective refugee students from afghanistan and iran account for six percent each in integra courses, and three percent come from iraq. about half of the participants have previously studied. twenty-eight percent started studying in their home country and an additional twenty-three percent hold a first university degree. thirtyseven percent graduated from school, which permits them to take part in preparatory courses. the fact that the majority of the prospective refugee students are highly educated is also reflected in the data of uni-assist collected in the course of the application process: more than sixty percent of the refugees who used the free application process via uniassist have a direct or indirect university entrance qualification (fourier et al., 2017). another nineteen percent of the applicants hold a first university degree so that they can enrol in a master’s program in germany. figure 1. participants of the integra program by country of origin and educational background in 2016 (deviations from 100% are due to rounding) source: fourier et al. 2017, p. 18 © daad (german academic exchange service). 22% 21% 33% 30% 28% 29% 23% 29% 24% 27% 31% 23% 27% 28% 39% 43% 24% 30% 30% 29% 37% 10% 12% 15% 9% 20% 15% 12% syria afghanistan iran iraq eritrea other countries/stateless total graduated study experience school leaving qualification no information 121 global education review 5(4) ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: grüttner, michael, berg, jana, schröder, stefanie, & otto, carolin (2018). refugees on their way to german higher education: a capabilities and engagements perspective on aspirations, challenges and support. global education review, 5 (4), 115-135. a theoretical framework: capabilities and engagements in this section we aim to clarify three interrelated questions: why making use of a perspective on capabilities and engagements? what are the central concepts of these approaches? how to relate these concepts to our research question? when theorizing about challenges for prospective refugee students it is crucial how the phenomena labelled as challenges are conceptualized. we employed a pragmatic sociological approach combining theoretical concepts of sen (1985, 1999) as well as thévenot (2001, 2015), that are used in sociology of education and migration studies to avoid a onesided perspective; either thinking about prospective refugee students as passive victims of structural dependencies who are in need of help, or as self-responsible actors voluntary handling the opportunities of their educational careers. despite these respective reductions or reifications, sens’ capabilities approach “asks us to help create the conditions under which people’s aspirations and abilities allow them to secure their objectives” (landau & duponchel, 2011, pp. 2-3). therefore, we can ask if the support and preparation measures of heis can provide such enabling environments, and what are the factors and phenomena that prevent prospective refugee students from making educational decisions and achieving their educational goals. the concept of agency is essential for the capability approach of sen (1985), as the substantive freedom to live the kind of life that a person has reason to value is at the core of this perspective. emirbayer and misches’ (1998) inquiry into the nature of agency bears one central element of this phenomenon besides the selective reactivation of past patterns of action and the imaginative generation of possible future trajectories of action: the evaluative capacities of actors. as sen (1985, p. 206) pointed out, “the agency aspect is important in assessing what a person can do in line with his or her conception of the good,” therefore, the plurality of values or goods that are at stake comes into play. in order to prevent our analysis from culturalism we separate the notion of value from its close relation to that of culture and group membership (dumouchel & gotoh, 2015) by elaborating on the concept of a plurality of engagements with the world (thévenot, 2001, 2015). in this context, engagements mean that peoples’ actions are committed to goods (common or private), and thereby involved in (and dependent on) certain environments. thévenot (2001) distinguished between engagement in a plan, towards a common good, and familiar engagement. engagement in a plan is often grasped as a standard form of action within a person defines goals and sees the entities of the world as means to ends (e.g., higher education to get eligibility). engagement towards a common good is oriented on principles of justification and generalization (e.g., higher education to adhere to the family tradition or to contribute to the economy of the host country). familiar engagement is bound on the personalized good of feeling at ease and comfortable within familiar surroundings (e.g., higher education to follow a personal inclination or passion). as we will see below, refugees value higher education with regard to a variety of different and intersecting engagements. capabilities have much in common with sets of resources, but go beyond these concepts by pointing to “the real opportunities to achieve valuable states of being and doing” (robeyns, 2006, p. 78), whereas functionings are the actual achievements like being healthy, being well educated, doing the right job, and so on. following diaz-andrade and doolin (2016), this perspective leads to an understanding of social inclusion of refugees as “the substantive freedoms—the capabilities—to choose a life one refugees on their way to german higher education 122 has reason to value” (sen, 1999, p. 74). from a capability perspective, “all those [refugees: the authors] capable and aspiring to it should have the right to higher education” (zeus, 2011, p. 269). it could therefore be stressed “that while resources are important, the opportunities each person has to convert their bundle of resources into valued doings and beings are what matters in the end” (zeus, 2011, p. 270). distinguishing analytically between capabilities and achieved functionings or rather functionings that are to achieve in a given situation, brings the fact to the fore that “different people need different amounts and different kinds of goods to reach the same levels of well-being or advantage” (robeyns, 2005, p. 97) because of “factors that influence the conversions of commodities into functionings “ (robeyns, 2005, p. 108) and thereby reinforce agency and serve as constituent of the capability set of a person. sen (1999) called them conversion factors and related this point to questions of justice by insisting that unequal delivery of measures and support structures – e.g. educational measures – can be justified regarding to divergences in initial resources and conversion factors (see dalkilic & vadeboncoeur, 2016 for inclusive education as an example). as diaz-andrade and doolin (2016, p. 407) pointed out, “capabilities presupposes the availability of resources”. nonetheless it “depends on personal, social, and environmental factors” whether people are able to realize valued functionings. the implemented measures and support structures for prospective refugee students can be conceptualized as part of the institutional conversion factors which encompass institutional arrangements, collective provisions, laws and their implementation by local public institutions. social conversion factors consist of social relations, social capital, or characteristics of a social climate (e.g., discrimination, stigmatization, competitiveness) as well as symbolic patterns and discourses in society. these are distinguished from personal conversion factors like literacy, cultural capital, attitudes or personality traits (for a comparable analytical distinction see otto & ziegler, 2006, p. 279). since agency and (social) structure are interrelated (emirbayer & mische, 1998; for a specific notion of this interrelatedness thévenot, 2001), it is crucial to look at how prospective refugee students develop strategies for achieving their valued functionings (alkire, 2005; hirano, 2014) and how different forms of engagement are recognized by the institutional and learning environments of prospective refugee students. for instance, asylum seekers and refugees have left many familiar attachments and (common) knowledge that are no longer recognized in the host country and its educational institutions (thévenot, 2015).6 this approach can bear constellations of oppression or reification in the sense that some engagements are recognized within social and institutional environments and others are left disregarded or people are reified to one form of engagement or common principle and thus bonded to a specific form of social relation (e.g., as victims in need for help within a domestic relationship, see zeus, 2011). this notion corresponds with simmels’ forms of complex concurrence of inclusion and exclusion (2009, pp. 409–442). in case of the ways of refugees to higher education we can ask how they could be “more hospitable to the whole range of engagements that compose [their: the authors] life together” (thévenot, 2015, p. 102). thus we can conceptualize challenges as issues of conversion factors that are critical for prospective refugee students to realize the valued functioning of being a university student in germany; these challenges are closely related to a plurality of engagements of those refugees more or less recognized by institutions of higher education. this leads to a better understanding of the specific factors that are necessary to cope with these challenges as well as the frustrating limits of agency. as robeyns (2005, p. 94) stated, the capability approach is not a theory that explains 123 global education review 5(4) empirical observed circumstances but equips us with a heuristic for the conceptualization and evaluation of empirical phenomena in a qualitative manner. a process that is suitable for our qualitative exploratory study. thus, we use the theoretical elements presented above as sensitizing concepts as well as for further theorizing on our empirical materials (swedberg, 2017). methods this article is based on 11 episodic interviews (flick, 2009, pp. 185-190) with refugees (stu_01 –_11) and six qualitative expert interviews (flick, 2009, pp. 165-168) with members of heis and counselling agencies (exp_1; 3; 4; 6; 7; 11). they were conducted in the context of an explorative qualitative case study in a region of germany with a university, a university of applied sciences and a preparatory college. refugees and asylum seekers were recruited in preparatory courses of a university and a preparatory college located in the same city in germany. their teachers and the college manager informed them about our project and our intent to conduct face-to-face interviews with refugees. we defined sampling criteria for the episodic interviews as follows: selfdescription of “being a refugee,” various countries of origin, different fields of study and gender. in reflection of power structures within the interview situation and to avoid retraumatization (thielen, 2009), we emphasized preparing for interviews with refugees and developing a trusting interview situation. our strategy included offering preliminary talks, focusing on education and study preparation to avoid similarities to interviews conducted as part of the asylum application process, and the interviewers awareness for certain topics. all interviews were followed by a report, discussion and reflection within the research team. in order to gain admission to german study preparation, applicants had to have advanced german language proficiency. in order to recognize their high level of german (sheridan & storch, 2009, p. 5), we decided to conduct the interviews in german. this also allowed us to conduct the interviews in the language that structures most of the parts of their lives that we talked about: study preparation and access to higher education in germany. although english would have been possible as interview language, all interviewees emphasized that they would prefer german as the interview language. we aim to complement the perspectives of the refugees with those of counselling and service experts. therefore, we selected six interviews with experts, whose professional activities were located in these areas: student advisory service (exp_04; exp_11), social counselling of the association for student affairs (exp_03), an educational guidance network (also offering scholarships for language courses) (exp_06), admission service (exp_07), and coordination of university-wide programs for refugees (exp_01). in this article we triangulate refugees‘ and experts‘ perspectives to identify substantial challenges in study preparation (flick, 2004). we coded the episodic and the expert interviews on the basis of a preliminary system of categories with a special focus on aspirations, support, challenges and barriers of refugees in preparation courses, all part of the interview guidelines. applying the sensitizing concepts of agency, capabilities, and engagements described above, the codes were thematically systemized and coherently integrated in revised categories and, if required, sub-categories. aspirations, challenges and support aspirations and reasons to value higher education our empirical work reveals a wide variety of decision phases. while some refugees appear to “do not have the idea what they want to study at all, thus study counselling just makes sense” (exp_01)7 in the eyes of our experts, others refugees on their way to german higher education 124 seem to be very clear (exp_06; 07) or began to plan their studies in germany even before getting there (exp_04; 11). mostly, their educational career was interrupted and they had to find ways to reassume it. several experts report their experience of being impressed “by the very high educational motivation that i perceive in many of the refugees” (exp_03). the following aspects are of value for prospective refugee students as they are engaged in a plan such as to achieve high labor market outcomes, to reach prestigious social positions or eligibility. when reflecting upon the decision between academic or vocational track refugees refer to the intersection of transmigration and labor market prospects (stu_01; 02): “it is better to study than to do vocational training. maybe you have to, no idea how, do not stay in germany anymore, can be, and studying then is a little better” (stu_02). they are aware of the world-wide recognition of german higher education certificates and they consider their previous studies when deciding whether to study in germany or not (stu_03). some interviewees also came up with labor market considerations with regard to their aspired field of studies, indifferent to whether it concerns their capabilities in germany or their country of origin. if aspirations are clear, refugees often opted for high prestige subjects like medicine, dentistry or law (exp_06; 07). these refugees often have to cope with the frustrating insight of additional admission criteria which often are much harder than those of their home country.8 counsellors then try to help refugees choose alternative fields of studies that do not require such criteria, e.g. informatics and engineering (exp_06). one interviewee was anxious to receive an extension of his residence status based on being a university student (stu_11). the individual plans sometimes seem to be conflated with social pressure to perform certain goals as well as insufficient information (exp_01). sometimes aspirations emerged when refugees became familiar with using the german language in everyday interaction and, thus, when having achieved this foundational functioning: “i could, well, communicate, and that motivated me” (stu_03). higher education in germany offers them the opportunity to continue their familiar studies or to establish new academic pathways of personal and professional affinities (stu_03; 06; 09). they feel that they now have the capability to follow their passion or calling to a certain subject or profession (stu_06), which would otherwise be oppressed by social or institutional influences in the country of origin. as argued above, refugees are deprived of many familiar attachments – both to their former and to their current environments – thus higher education and preparation measures can help overcame feelings of deprivation and reinforce (self-) confidence and the creation of new attachments. as one interviewee stated: “the advantages at the university or in the course are much more than disadvantages. just a little lonely. being a bit self-reliant is a bit difficult. where i dwell it is difficult. but i'm learning new language. i meet new people and i am studying in germany. and that's great, i think” (stu_06). this is why higher education and the preparation process can function as psychosocial interventions empowering and fostering well-being as refugees begin to identify their self as students. sometimes the valuations of studying are to such an extent of a general manner so that it seems as an end in itself (stu_03; 04; 11). the classic idea of the university was represented as a familiar and likewise common knowledge grounded in their experiences in the region of origin: “you have to learn everything we have discovered as humans. for example in electrical engineering one should […] learn everything that belongs to electrical engineering. everything. […] detailed general knowledge […] i know that already. i was at the university. […] so uni means you should learn everything” (stu_04). higher education thus is valued because of its connection to familiar 125 global education review 5(4) elements of past experience as well as its capacity to initialize the formation of new familiarities. if prospective refugee students give justifiable reasons for studying, on the one hand, they refer to their willingness to contribute to the german economy and show a feeling that they owe something to their host country (stu_01; 09). they qualify their aspiration for a good and well paid job in such a manner. on the other hand, interviewees indicated that they would willingly work to rebuild their country of origin if life would be safe there (stu_01). most i refugees interviewed grew up in families with an academic background. their parents hold academic degrees and they often mention siblings that already study or have graduated as well. for those refugees, studying at a university is rather an obligation than a possibility. some of them are committed to continue a family tradition and sometimes choose harsh words to express: “it is taken hostile, if you do not want to study in our family. my father is supposed to be very angry” (stu_03). moreover, interviewees came up with indications that these familiar traditions as well as the social prestige of certain academic professions are of great value in their former cultural environments (stu_09) and they qualify their decision to study by relating it to relationships of mutual dependency. personal, social and institutional conversion factors we start with personal conversion factors like the more or less interrupted educational careers in the course of (civil) war, persecution or flight. this is well illustrated by the fact that prospective refugee students are, on average, much older than freshmen in general. as one interviewee stated, “there are also students at our college, syrians too, and there are iranians too. some are 28 years old, 32. and suddenly they have to repeat their high school diploma. that's really difficult! right?” (stu_01). some of our interviewees reported interruptions of several years since they last visited an educational institution. this long period without any contact with school or study content has left its mark: “physics, mathematics, chemistry, i forgot everything and i have to learn again from the beginning, is a bit exhausting for me” (stu_02). one participant noted the impact of such disruption on current learning achievements: “for those who finished high school fresh, that's no problem. […] i need double the time” (stu_01). refugees sometimes had to quarrel with the feeling of being “impaired by the war” (stu_01) in the long term and disadvantaged in competition with other students. this leads them to the rejection of judgments about special (financial) support for prospective refugee students as unjust (see below). the problem of interruption is amplified in the host country when refugees have to wait for admission for preparatory courses because of still insufficient capacity and thus long waiting lists or heavy admission tests (stu_03; 06; exp_04). the development of language mastery and the currently achieved fluency is a crucial factor that fosters not only the motivation to go further on one’s educational pathway. but the level of language mastery also influences to what degree other everyday tasks become demanding and it thereby co-determines the learning capacity of prospective refugee students (stu_11). interviewees reported, a lack of communication and demanding everyday interactions can lead to psychological burden (stu_03; 11). mental health problems, regardless of whether induced by forced migration experiences or by frustrating situations in the host country, are frequently present in the narrations of our interviewees (stu_06). some prospective students oppose to that by their willingness to give effort and their openness towards others (stu_01; 06; 09), but these narrations could reflect both personal habits and societal discourses on the need for willingness to integrate. refugees on their way to german higher education 126 there is a bundle of social conversion factors involved when refugees try to get access to higher education and to cope with the challenge to meet the admission criteria of heis in germany. first of all and especially in face of the jungle of institutional regulations mentioned above, the realization of aspirations seems to be highly dependent on early intensive counselling with regard to admission criteria and language courses as well as financial questions (exp_03; 06). this includes well informed and experienced voluntary companions as well (exp_04). tactful advocacy by educational counsellors within the communication between their clients and authorities or heis can also serve as ice breaking and lead to case-related equitable solutions (see also gateley, 2015). educational counsellors also provide quality assurance of the language courses that are administered outside of heis (exp_06). a very similar influence comes from professors who advocate for individuals (stu_03; 09). likewise, friends and family members who already study at or have graduated from a german university can help to inform the newly arrived refugees and guide them on their way to higher education (stu_01; 06). thus, weak as well as strong ties of social networks largely influence if the challenge of getting access to higher education can be met in reasonable time. especially soon after arriving in germany refugees have to cope with social isolation. this feeling is closely related to the deprivation from being able to communicate with others in everyday life – an interrelation of the language barrier, dwelling conditions and sometimes experiences of refusal (stu_06; 11). therefore, finding new friends and being in a social climate that really offers this opportunity is crucial. although there are many tutor and buddy programs at the institutional level of universities in germany, these programs have to be filled with life at the social level. one expert stated that she would experience “an unbelievable openness among the refugees interested […] in getting to know german people. a match from the other with the same interests cannot be found so quickly” (exp_11). as refugees get admitted to preparatory courses, they do not necessarily overcome the problem of social isolation, if intercultural connections and study groups could not be established (stu_02; 09). dependent on the course composition, processes of social homophily can hamper this effort. in addition, subtle faultlines between prospective international students with and without refugee background are reported (stu_01; 02; 08). it can be assumed that their manifestation depends on how lecturers and course coordinators can foster a collaborative climate. our interviewees frequently present such a positive climate of intercultural collaboration (stu_01; 04), but also feelings of being suspiciously judged as receiving unjust support and advantage by heis. these feelings can undermine belonging to and familiarity with the environment of heis and culminate together with experienced discrimination and xenophobic topoi in increased stigma consciousness (pinel, warner, & chua, 2005). in addition, such experiences disregard the justifiable engagements of prospective refugee students. as one interviewee stated when arguing not to know where to work after graduation yet, despite of the declared willingness to participate in the german economy: “there are people, germans. i feel like they want me to work abroad after graduation, because they have the idea that the other people, the foreigners, are taking away the jobs of the germans. do you understand what i mean?” (stu_01). of course the teachers play a key role in narrations about the learning arrangements in the preparatory courses. most interviewed refugees underline their teachers’ professionality and most of them express confidence in their assessments: “and they tell us, what we have to improve, what are our weaknesses and our strengths, what we have to work on.” (stu_06). they are sensitive for teachers’ motivation and fairness and react emotional if something is 127 global education review 5(4) unjustifiable in teachers’ behaviors (stu_01; 03; 08). because of their age, prospective refugee students – especially women – have to organize family obligations with the demands of preparatory courses (stu_02). many of our interviewees have to cope with worries about the situation of relatives and friends. this leads to reported learning problems because of a lack of concentration on course content. our interviews highlight some institutional conversion factors not only with regard to the study preparation courses, but even more concerning the basic language and integration courses that many prospective students had to pass previously because of their refugee status. on the one hand, due to asylum regulations, asylum seekers are often not allowed to participate in basic language or integration courses immediately. on the other hand, participants as well as experts indicate quantitative and qualitative problems of these courses, such as insufficient places, lack of qualification of language teachers and inappropriateness with regard to the specific demands of highly qualified refugees (exp_06; stu_04; 09). therefore, they have to learn the language almost auto didactically too and it might take a long time until refugees achieve the language ger level b2 as usually required for study preparation courses. thus, the plan to study as soon as possible is thwarted. furthermore, those who can only discover a few gaps in their knowledge do not understand why they have to prepare for the feststellungsprüfung for one year (stu_03; stu_04). they want to apply their competences directly during their studies. furthermore, a lot of experts complain about the regulation jungle that is the admission process in the german higher education system (exp_03; 06; 07). even counselling staff professionally involved with the admission of international and refugee students are likely to lose the plot because of the variety of criteria between the different universities, fields of study or levels of programs (e.g. bachelor, master, doctorate): “for example, if i have a counselling appointment with someone who would like to apply for medicine, that is hard work. we are sitting here for three hours and try to pass through various application procedures” (exp_06). few applicants have the opportunity to begin provisional studies, allowing them to achieve the required language level until a defined deadline of usually one year. moreover, as implicitly mentioned here, prospective refugee students struggle with heavy financial restrictions while they have to pass the german system of integration and basic language courses. those financial problems are not necessarily solved when refugees are finally admitted to participate in preparation courses. as the experts point out too, if financial benefits should be allocated either to the federal system of study grants and loans (‘bafög’) or to extend the financial benefits for asylum seekers supported by the employment agencies is an unsolved question that is solved inconsistent on local levels (exp_03; 06). through the eyes of the prospective students, the employment agencies can act as gatekeepers with their own agenda, “that is to offer jobs” and “educating people, so they can work” (stu_11). applying for a student grant might not be the best choice, depending on eligibility requirements such as recognition of study periods or completed degrees in the country of origin, duration of stay in germany, age limit or, as a respective example, the definition and regulation of cases of hardship. the experts remark the need for early counselling and guidance regarding questions of financial support. even if refugee students are granted financial support by ‘bafög’, they will frequently have to work while enrolled in the preparation course (stu_06) and sometimes experience labor market discrimination. institutionally induced financial and residence restrictions are amplified by difficult housing market situations and are likely to further limit financial resources of refugee refugees on their way to german higher education 128 students. many preparation courses of heis and studienkollegs are located in the bigger cities, thus an intense competition for low rent flats is arising between the different groups with small income. it can be said that this is affecting the learning situation remarkably (stu_02; 03; 06; 08): “next month i have to move and i couldn’t find a place until now. well, i cannot concentrate on german language while concentrating on housing.” (stu_08). another crucial factor is the limited supply of places in preparation courses in relation to a rising demand since 2015. studienkollegs have to raise performance standards for entrance examinations with regard to the ratio of applicants to places. thus, many refugees are likely to fail, especially those struggling with learning a second language anyway (exp_04). what is more, after overcoming the various challenges during study preparation, prospective students will frequently have to handle a further competitive situation: their application is to be reapproved by the hei within the conclusive decision on their registration for a particular course of study. some interviewees are deeply worried, whether they can enrol at all in their desired study program: “in university every semester there are not many places for refugees, and that i am afraid of. and one of my friends is finished in studienkolleg and wants to study informatics, but is not getting a place since one year, unfortunately” (stu_02). lines of action and their limits the key concept of agency refers to the capability to make ones’ own decisions and pursue ones’ own line of action as well as to the structural conditions that enable such an active position. thus, the concept can be used to reconstruct and specify the conditions under which students are struggling for successful academic integration. however, by using the agency concept we try to avoid reducing prospective refugee students to victims within a social and institutional structured new environment. instead of suggesting that we found one kind of coherent line of action in our empirical material, we rather try to illustrate different but common lines of action of refugees facing challenges in various respects (hirano 2014; 2015 for a quiet similar argument with regard to the reconstruction of coping strategies). while being engaged in their plan to become a university student, almost all prospective student interviewees show a remarkable concurrency of both persistent commitment in pursuing their goal and distancing themselves from it. even if they are not distracted from their paths into higher education, the long and exhausting period of time to achieve a residence status or a university place leaves marks with which they have to cope with: “takes very long. […] from the beginning i know my fate here. […] first i want to know how i can make my situation. i said to myself, i don’t want to be bounced back by this, just carry on. until now i have learned a lot of german for my goal. next week i will apply for university, too” (stu_10). reflecting on the precariousness of asylum seeking as well as the realization of their educational aspirations they tend to distance themselves from their goal (stu_01) or even pluralize goals: “yes, you should plan your future and you should not. […] but if i plan future, or three, four futures, one of them will happen, okay, that is very good” (stu_11). creating supportive social networks and not hesitating to make use of them is a line of action that is illustrated by several narrations of prospective refugee students (stu_09). they try to knot a reliable net between them. consistent with that is the avoidance of negative feedback from employment agencies and instead talked to (german) friends about their higher education aspirations (stu_11; stu_09). they combine their engagement with familiarized things and places to their educational plans by linking learning groups and friendships for purpose: “we are almost always talking to one another in german. that is an advantage for us, too. and 129 global education review 5(4) we arewell, we are friends. […] sometimes we go to the cinema together. go for a walk, around the lake, to the canteen. when we have exams, we are learning together. also, we are a really good team.” (stu_01). this is in line with the will to trust in their own ability and the improvement of their competencies: “but i realize, or i notice that i am stepping forward. in the first semester i was bad, now i improved. i think it’s getting better all the time” (stu_01). frequently, our interviewees described sophisticated learning strategies. usually they expand their daily learning times, depending on the beginning of their course, learning before and after the end of the course. often they decide to learn in a group or alone depending on subjects or difficulty (stu_01; 04). also, they increase their efforts, notably before tests, generally using their small amount of free time. some seem to take every chance to practice german for example by talking to neighbours or friends, or even make use of multilingualism by speaking german with fellow students of the same mother tongue. they even relate aspects of social isolation to their learning goals and reshape them in such a way that they can give meaning to it: “i’m the only arabic person in the course. that was hard for me from the very beginning. but later i realized that i can improve my german that way. if i had a friend speaking arabian, i had spoken arabian all the time. that wouldn’t improve my german” (stu_01). although prospective refugee students invest a lot (time, learning efforts, cultural capital, money) to achieve their goals, they are likely to face obstacles going beyond their control. these limits of agency are primarily induced by institutional factors. as we observe in our interviews, some prospective refugee students experience strong feelings of frustration in face of organized disintegration and multiple challenges (stu_02; 03; 06), begin to weigh the pros and cons of their efforts in preparing for study and almost give up: “i want to say, no matter if you are a genius, […] no matter if you are learning every day, if you have to deal with other problems in your life, they are bouncing you back. you cannot concentrate on anything, you cannot” (stu_03). achieving a sustainable and predictable residency status seems to be one of the most severe problems, especially if it is impossible to return into the country of origin without facing arrest or cruel pressure (stu_07). some of them describe particularly frustrating moments, when integration efforts do not result in a secure residence status: “i have taken my home with a german family, so that i can understand german culture and master integration. and finally, they decided just subsidiary protection status temporarily for one year. in that situation i broke down, i couldn’t focus anymore” (stu_11). if refugees are allowed to enrol without a certificate of language competency and are obliged to hand it in later, heis go along with their plan to start their studies as quick as possible. but this can also lead them to a deadend. if language courses are not well suited for their individual living, working and study conditions, they must fail: “sometimes you have to attend in the morning, sometimes in the evening. and when you pay for a course, it is much money. […] and you cannot attend regularly. and then you achieve nothing. […] i couldn’t participate in any course.” (stu_06). this situation has led to frustration and psychological pressure because of the feeling of being left alone with institutional constrains like that. frequently, prospective refugee students mention obstacles they face when they have to manage housing suitable to their needs caused by residence, working, and financial restrictions. due to that, many of the students try to earn additional money, if they are allowed to by the asylum authorities. but it is also hard for them to find a job during study preparation: “but i can’t work. when, even if i could find a job. there is almost no time and in the evenings there are no busses where i live” (stu_06). the limits of agency derive from culminations and refugees on their way to german higher education 130 interactions of problems located in institutional and social contexts far beyond their control. implications and discussion we have provided an introduction to higher education access for prospective refugee students in germany. while there is mostly international research on refugees within heis (berg, grüttner & schröder 2018; mangan & winter 2017) our paper contributes in particular to the existing research gap on challenges within study preparation and on refugees’ access to higher education in germany. similar to international studies on refugee students, we rely on an explorative approach and qualitative methods, but utilize a more theoretically informed systematization of our empirical findings. our research has shown diverse “reasons to value” (sen, 1999) that are shaping higher education aspirations of refugees. these valuations are grounded on several “engagements with the world” (thévenot, 2015) as familiarity, plan or justifiability. committed to these valuations, prospective refugee students have to cope with several challenges, especially the mastery of the german language and associated admission criteria. institutional and social barriers as well as disinformation and tensions between policies crosscut students’ efforts. feelings of being treated unjustly come to the fore if engagements are disregarded, thus oppressing agency and inducing frustration, likely to lead to depressive conditions. even if the situation in germany is far more positive than in many other host countries, policy makers should move quickly to focus on strengthening early and sustainable professional counselling addressing questions of educational aspirations, possible pathways and study funding or loans, and quality assurance of language courses to address the specific needs of refugees with higher education aspirations. moreover, such institutionalized counselling structures could be of general value in a modern migration society like germany. in germany, undertaking an apprenticeship could result in suspension of deportation or even getting an extended residence permit. it would be of relief and recognition if this would apply in case of university studies or even participation in preparatory courses, too, allowing prospective refugee students to concentrate on their studies rather than thinking about their precarious residence permit. expanding the capacity of preparatory colleges and universities would reduce competition for places in preparatory courses. some of the challenging factors are due to social and institutional contexts outside of the learning environments of heis, likely leading to long lasting consequences. thus, their influence on these factors is limited. universities are overburdened if they have to compensate for deprivation previously caused by other institutional contexts (collective accommodation, residence obligation, inadequate integration courses, short residence permits, and xenophobic social climate) in order to support social and academic inclusion. finally, we would like to point out three limitations of our findings presented here: 1) the sample is restricted to one region of germany. therefore, only theoretical generalizations are possible. further research should try to elaborate on data of a more general scope or look closer into regional differences and embeddedness of heis as well as study preparation measures to compare various contexts. 2) to qualify crucial influence factors like national asylum systems and socio-political constellations (goastellec, 2018; kontowski & leitsberger, 2018), international comparing research should be expanded. 3) also, further research should focus on longitudinal mixed methods to deepen understanding and improve explanation of successful integration of refugees into higher education. 131 global education review 5(4) notes 1. asylum seekers are understood as people who have crossed international borders and then applied for asylum in a new country. refugees hold a legal status based on the geneva convention. we use forced migrant as a comprehensive term for both, while generally it also includes everybody that was forced to migrate internally and internationally (turton 2003). asylum seekers and refugees can both apply for higher education and take part in study preparations in germany. we will generally use the term refugee student in order to refer to (prospective) students that either applied for asylum or have already a refugee status in germany. 2. we define a prospective refugee student (prs) as a person who has applied for asylum in germany and is participating in measures of study preparation regardless of the actual residence status. 3. the research-project „wege von geflüchteten an deutsche hochschulen wege“ is funded by the german federal ministry of education and research (bmbf). 4. the zab is supported by the german standing conference of the ministers of education and cultural affairs. the zab is, in short, the central institution for the assessment of foreign school, vocational and higher education qualifications. the statement of comparability issued by the zab is frequently requested to facilitate access to the german labour market or higher education, as in our example. 5. translation by council of europe: common european framework of reference for languages: learning, teaching, assessment, p. 24. 6. thévenot refers on empirical research of blic & lafaye 2011 to make his argument clear. 7. as noted above, the interviews were conducted in german. all quotes used in this paper were translated by the authors. “exp” refers to an expert interview; 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(2011). exploring barriers to higher education in protracted refugee situations: the case of burmese refugees in thailand. journal of refugee studies, 24(2), 256–276. about the author(s) michael grüttner is a researcher at the dzhw in the projekt “refugees' pathways to german higher education institutions” (wege). his mean research is on education, well-being, social participation and professional counselling. after his social science studies at the universities of hamburg (b.a.) and the university of erlangen-nuremberg (m.sc.), he worked at the institute for employment research in nuremberg and at the university of erlangennuremberg in the project national educational panel study (neps). jana berg holds a doctoral position at the dzhw-project 'wege' on access to higher education for refugees in germany. her main research is on asylum and the internationalisation of german higher education. she studied linguistics (b.a.) and sociology (m.a.) at the johannes gutenberguniversity in mainz and the university of vienna. stefanie schröder is a researcher at the dzhw in the project “refugees' pathways to german higher education institutions” (wege). her main research is on widening participation in higher education and study success. she studied political science, sociology and history at the university of münster, germany. from 2010 until 2012 she was involved in the federal ministry of education and research (bmbf) project "examination of study progress and study success". since 2012, she is a researcher at the dzhw, first working in the projects "ankom – transitions from vocational to higher education" and "evaluation of the funding competition 'advancement through education: open universities'". carolin otto is working for the german centre for higher education research and science studies (dzhw) in the research area "educational careers and graduate employment", focussing on drop-out research. she studied sociology and psychology (b.a.) at martin luther university in halle, followed by a master's degree in criminology and social research methods at london south bank university. successful integration of refugee students in higher education 158 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: zlatkin-troitschanskaia, olga; happ, roland; nell-müller, sarah; deribo, tobias; reinhardt, franziska; & toepper, miriam. (2018). successful integration of refugee students in higher education: insights from entry diagnostics in an online study program. global education review, 5 (4), 158-181. successful integration of refugee students in higher education: insights from entry diagnostics in an online study program olga zlatkin-troitschanskaia johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) roland happ johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) sarah nell-müller johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) tobias deribo johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) franziska reinhardt johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) miriam toepper johannes gutenberg university mainz (germany) abstract accessing higher education without having to overcome bureaucratic hurdles is a serious concern for refugees. although empirical studies on the integration and success of refugees in higher education are scarce, the challenges related to this issue are becoming apparent. the success and opportunities for refugees in higher education (success) research project has been launched to investigate the effectiveness of new online study programs offered on the kiron open higher education (kiron) platform that provides refugees with access to massive open online courses (moocs). success measures the prior knowledge and skills of refugee students and investigates to what extent their study opportunities, learning processes, and chances of academic success can be improved effectively through different forms of support provided in kiron. in this paper, we present the assessment framework and study design of the success project as well as data on 1,376 students entering the study program in kiron in summer 2017. as students’ language skills, intellectual abilities, and prior study-related knowledge play a significant role in their performance in higher education degree programs, we focus on the crucial introductory study phase and valid diagnostics of students’ study preconditions. we analyze refugee students’ sociobiographical and educational data such as gender, country of origin, highest level of education achieved etc. and examine their english language skills, intellectual abilities, and previous study domain related knowledge. we find extreme differences in levels of education and preconditions on starting to study in kiron. based on these results, we discuss implications for the effective and successful integration of refugee students in higher education. keywords integration of refugees, higher education, study success, massive open online courses 159 global education review 5(4) project objectives and research focus participation in higher education programs is considered an effective way to integrate refugees into their host country (colucci et al., 2017; de wit & altbach, 2016; zorlu, 2013). although studies that focus on the integration of refugees in higher education are scarce, the challenges arising from these issues in actual practice are evident (crea, 2016; larsen, kornbeck, kristensen, larsen, & sommersel, 2013; morrice, 2013). many host countries (like kenya) lack the resources and capacities for higher and professional education, which is therefore often neglected (e.g., wright & plasterer, 2012). moreover, refugees also face numerous obstacles when attempting to enter higher education study programs in countries with well-established state-run higher education systems, for example european countries in general, and germany in particular1. available studies indicate several of these factors at various levels, such as legal and formal difficulties (e.g., laws, missing documents), language barriers, and/or lack of money (e.g., lorisika, cremonini, & safar jalani, 2015). research on academic success indicates that refugee students are more prone to dropping out of university study programs than non-refugee students (arnold, 2013; duong, badaly, liu, schartz, & mccarty, 2016; van herpen, meeuwisse, hofman, severiens, & arends, 2017; zorlu, 2013); disadvantageous higher education entry conditions, such as linguistic deficits in the language of instruction or deficits in terms of study-related prior education play a crucial role in facilitating these high drop-out rates (ben-moshe, bertone, & grossman, 2008; jungblut & pietkiewicz, 2017; mendenhall, russell, & bruckner, 2017). kiron open higher education (kiron; https://kiron.ngo/) is a non-profit ed-tech organization that was established in 2015 in order to circumvent some of the main global obstacles refugees often face when entering higher education in their host countries. kiron seeks to provide refugees direct, unbureaucratic, and free access to higher education through digital solutions and by supporting their academic success. kiron’s online study program is based on a digital and fully modularized curriculum clustering massive open online courses (moocs) offered via kiron’s learning platform kiron campus and its ecosystem of support services (e.g., language courses). the overarching aim of kiron is to enable refugees to begin studying in their host countries as quickly as possible. at kiron, prospective students with an asylum or refugee status, from all countries across the globe can register online at any time. after joining the platform and completing a questionnaire on their educational backgrounds and an english language test, registered kiron students can choose one of five study tracks: mechanical engineering, business and economics, computer science, political science, or social work. after approximately one or two years of online learning, students can apply to one of kiron’s partner universities, where – upon acceptance – they can complete their bachelor’s degree in a regular (offline) degree program. to this end, kiron has closed agreements with a large network of partner universities worldwide, which will award up to 60 credits for completed kiron online modules according to the standards of the european credit transfer and accumulation system (ects) (for more details, see rampelt & suter, 2017). a new research project, success and opportunities for refugees in higher education (success), was conducted by the german federal ministry of education and research (bmbf) in early 2017 in order to examine the corresponding author olga zlatkin-troitschanskaia, department of business and economics education, johannes gutenberg university, saarstraße 21, 55122 mainz, germany email: troitschanskaia@uni-mainz.de successful integration of refugee students in higher education 160 impact of this promising approach to enhancing the successful integration of refugee students in higher education in their host countries worldwide. the success project is scheduled to last for three years and to analyze (longitudinally) the teaching-learning progress of kiron students from the time they register and start studying on the kiron platform (usually up to two years) until they transfer to the regular higher education system in the host countries. in the success project, individual, institutional, and external contextual factors have been identified that promote or impede the successful integration of refugee students in higher education through the kiron platform (see section 2). based on the results of success, recommendations could be derived for politics and practice in higher education. even though digital learning is being discussed as a promising approach in the current integration debate (e.g., colluci et al., 2017), there is very little evidence of its factual effectiveness to date. using kiron as an example, the success project aims to conduct important empirical investigations and provide insights into potentials, but also to highlight the limitations of approaches of this kind for the successful integration of refugees. insights gained into how refugees can study effectively through digital solutions and how they can be transferred successfully to regular universities in host countries can guide educational and integrational practice. findings from research on academic success and evidence from higher educational practice demonstrate that students’ prior education (dochy, segers, & bühl, 1999; richardson, abraham, & bond, 2012; robbins et al., 2004), study-related preconditions such as language skills (demie & strand, 2006; fakeye & ogunsiji, 2009) and previous knowledge play a significant role in their performance in higher education degree programs (brand & xie, 2010; rienties, beausaert, grohnert, niemantsverdriet, & kommers, 2012). research on academic performance among refugee students in particular highlights extreme heterogeneity in students’ prior education, language proficiency, general intellectual abilities, study-related domain-specific knowledge, and their major impact on academic success (brückner et al., 2015; callahan & humphries, 2016; griga, 2014; robbins et al., 2004). accordingly, preconditions of this kind must be assessed and considered in an objective and valid manner (aera, apa & ncme, 2014) in order to successfully integrate refugees. diagnostic assessments during the introductory phase (prior to beginning to study) are therefore crucial for providing refugee students with suitable study recommendations, appropriate domain-specific study opportunities such as online courses, and effective additional support measures, for example, in terms of language (crea, 2016; joyce, earnest, de mori, & silvagni, 2010). in this context, assessment-based feedback for the students is of particular importance and it is also an enormous challenge considering the extreme heterogeneity of the learning-relevant, socio-cultural backgrounds of the students. in addition to the individual study and learning recommendations (following the idea of a triangle model by pellegrino, chudowsky, & glaser, 2001), consequences for the design of curricula and for the instruction of students have been drawn from the assessments. this enables provision of the best possible and individually tailored teaching-learning environment for refugee students, and helps to prepare them for successful transfer to the regular higher education system. in this paper, we focus on this crucial introductory phase and the accompanying valid diagnostics of students’ preconditions when starting to study on kiron. to this end, kiron students who registered on kiron campus between may and september 2017 additionally completed an intelligence (iq) test and a domain-specific test in their chosen study track (see section 3) as part of the success project. 161 global education review 5(4) in section 2 we describe the study framework; by first defining the underlying framework model and our evaluation approach and then outlining the success assessment framework based on them. in section 3, we present descriptive results from the empirical analysis conducted during the registration process of the 1,376 students enrolled in a study program on kiron. we analyze the personal data provided in the questionnaire, such as gender, country of origin, and highest level of education obtained, and determine the refugee students’ english language skills and study-related previous knowledge when starting to study on kiron (see section 4). the findings from the analysis of student-related data obtained during the registration process and the additional assessments should provide indications of how to provide these students with the best possible support regarding their individual preconditions. thanks to valid and reliable assessments of students’ language skills, level of education, and previous domain-specific knowledge when beginning to study on kiron, it could be determined which learning opportunities are suitable for each student and what kind of additional support measures (e.g., individual mentoring, a personal buddy) would effectively facilitate the integration of refugee students into regular higher education. finally, the limitations of the study are discussed and an outlook for further research is outlined (see section 5). study framework the success project’s evaluation approach is in line with the evidence-centered design (ecd) by mislevy and haertel (2006), as we attempt to deduce valid interpretations for students and educators from the gathered empirical results (see also the standards for pedagogical and educational testing by the aera et al., 2014, and their defined validity criteria). in order to achieve this aim, based on current educational research on academic success – under particular consideration of studies with refugee students including the pioneering studies of educational integration of refugees (e.g., dryden-peterson, 2016; schroeder & seukwa, 2017) and of their academic success (e.g., benseman, 2014; harris & marlowe, 2011; van herpen et al., 2017) – we have developed an assessment framework for the success project. first, we differentiate between theoretically potential influential factors on the study success at various levels, which we define as independent variables: 1) external study circumstances in the host countries (such as internet access, computers etc., for more details see reinhardt et al., 2018); 2) institutional study factors (such as chosen degree course, teachinglearning-modules etc.), and 3) individual students’ preconditions. second, we identify and assess a number of indicators of academic success and failure, which we define as dependent variables. these include both objective data provided by kiron on the refugees’ study activity on the kiron platform, started and completed teachinglearning-modules, etc. (see reinhardt et al., 2018), as well as results of the assessment of students’ knowledge and skills while learning on kiron. to this end, in the success project, the students’ knowledge and skills when starting to study on kiron are assessed using internationally validated test instruments in an objective, valid, and reliable manner and the development of students’ domain-specific knowledge across the different phases of their studies is traced (see section 3 & 4). a particular focus of the success project is on kiron students who drop out of their learning programs and their reasons for doing so (for models of dropping out of education, see horn & kojaku, 2001; kuh, kinzie, buckley, bridges, & hayek, 2007). for this purpose, an additional questionnaire is administered and interviews are conducted with a sub-sample in the success project. in this collaborative success project, kiron is responsible for successful integration of refugee students in higher education 162 figure 1. evaluation model in the success project. recruiting refugee students, familiarizing them with the project, coordinating and performing data collection for analyses, as well as communicating the project results to the students to stimulate individual reflection on their learning progress. project partner johannes gutenberg university mainz (jgu) coordinates the success project and evaluates both the effectiveness of kiron’s online educational model as an innovative blended learning approach as well as support measures for refugee students in order to prepare kiron students for the higher education system and regular degree programs at partner universities3. accordingly, the success evaluation model comprises several phases (see figure 1). a multi-level analysis that integrates numerous methods is conducted over two study phases in the success project: the first on kiron and the second at partner universities. the study design encompasses 1) status analyses when students start studying on kiron, 2) formative assessment analyses during the two study phases, and 3) summative analyses at the end of studies. the combined longitudinal and crosssectional design (dielman, 1989) involves testbased analyses of learning progress on the kiron platform as well as surveys completed by students at three points during their studies: upon enrollment, one year after starting to study, and when transferring to a partner university in one of many countries (e.g., germany, france, sweden, turkey, jordan) where kiron students can complete their bachelor’s degree. investigating the effectiveness also involves analyzing the efficacy of individual measures implemented in the project such as language courses. overall, the empirical results should indicate the efficacy of the online courses based on digital moocs and measures implemented in kiron over the course of the success project – making a valuable contribution to the extremely limited research in this field – and provide implications for stakeholders involved in higher education practice and politics. in this paper, we focus on analyzing the preconditions of refugees entering higher education on kiron. we present results from the empirical analysis conducted during the onboarding process of refugees into the kiron program as well as from additional entry testbased assessments. in addition to analyzing the background questionnaire, including sociodemographical factors and self-reported education levels, we analyze the following academic preconditions: level of english skills, general intellectual abilities and previous domain-specific knowledge. 163 global education review 5(4) data and instruments the data was collected in the success project from the assessments conducted with newly registered kiron students during the summer term of 2017 and includes data from 1,376 refugees. for all test instruments, an english version was used, seeing as all courses and communication on the kiron platform take place in english as well. moreover, it is kiron’s goal to achieve a transfer of refugee students to partnering higher education institutions in the host countries (see section 2), which in turn use english (besides their national language) as their teaching language. that is why refugees’ language skills were tested directly when entering into kiron, so that possible languagerelated effects on the performance in other tests (such as domain-specific tests) can be controlled. additionally, short, linguistically precise expressions were used in the selection of tests as well as in test instructions. all knowledge tests were pretested with kiron students who were not part of the success cohort (see section 4). during registration on kiron, all prospective students were asked to fill in a questionnaire on their social and biographical background, with only few compulsory items. participation in all additional, test-based assessments was voluntary. as an incentive, students were offered individual feedback on their test results that included recommendation and support regarding the selection of their courses on the kiron platform, a participation certificate as well as a participation fee of 10 euros. educational background to assess the level of self-reported secondary and tertiary education achieved in the country of origin, the international standard classification of education (isced; unesco, 2012) of the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization’s (unesco) was applied. the educational level achieved in the national, formal institutions – from the elementary sector to doctoral programs – is assigned an iscedlevel from 0 to 8, which makes it internationally comparable. the current version includes criteria for allocation of any national, formal education program to the different levels (eurostat, 2016).4 general english language proficiency assessments of the students’ general english language proficiency were conducted using a ctest (grotjahn, 1987; norris, 2006). the c-test is an economically efficient instrument for assessing general language proficiency (glp) in foreign, second and first languages (harsch & hartig, 2015; grotjahn, 2002). it is based on the phonics-centered model from literacy assessment research (freeman & freeman, 2000).5 a c-test comprises several short texts in which the participants have to fill in missing halves of words that have been deleted beforehand according to certain principles). the c-test used in our study contains four short texts that are self-contained and suitable for different language levels (harsch, tschauschew, & brandt, o.j., p. 3). in the four texts with 23-29 items, more than 100 words must be completed based on content and grammar in the space of 20 minutes (ebd., p. 3f.). the c-test used in success was specifically adapted for kiron (suter, harsch, & brandt, 2017). the results gathered in the c-test were modeled using the rasch model (de ayala, 2009; embretson & reise, 2000). by including certificates of the internet-based test of english as a foreign language (toefl ibt; no older than two years) from refugees who want to study on the kiron platform, it was possible to establish a link between the results of the c-test and the test of english as a foreign language score (toefl, educational testing service, 2008) within the success cohort, and to then match the c-test score to the common european framework of reference for languages metric (cefr; hawkins & filipović, 2012; little, 2007; north, 2014; verhelst, van successful integration of refugee students in higher education 164 avermaet, takala, figueras, & north, 2009). therefore, the results of the language test become comparable on an internationally recognized scale. the cefr metric describes language proficiency at six levels: a1 and a2: basic user a1: beginner; a2: elementary english; b1 and b2: independent user b1: intermediate english; b2: upper-intermediate english; c1 and c2: proficient user: c1: advanced english; c2: proficiency english. general cognitive ability to assess the students’ generic intellectual skills, a subtest on figural intelligence of the intelligenz-struktur test (i-s-t 2000r; liepmann, beauducel, brocke, & amthauer, 2007) was used as a relatively languageindependent indicator.6 the i-s-t 2000r is based on the hierarchical framework model from intelligence structure research. it differentiates between seven primary factors according to thurstone (1938) and specifies, on the hierarchical level, fluid and crystallized intelligence according to cattell (1963). the basic module of the i-s-t 2000r consists of nine groups of tasks, which assess verbal, numerical, and figural intelligence, as well as deductive thinking, and two further task groups that assess retention (liepmann et al., 2007). in the study, a subtest was created from the basic module of the i-s-t 2000r, which, using the task group ‘figure choice’, enables researchers to make statements about figural-spatial intelligence. participants were given seven minutes to complete all 20 task items. since this task group is based on deductive thinking, which is considered an appropriate indicator for general intelligence, the choice of this subtest seems reasonable in order to assess the cognitive ability of the participants. moreover, this task group is nonverbal and can also be classed as culturally neutral. intrinsic and extrinsic study motivation study motivation was assessed using scales from the questionnaire on academic interest (fsi; schiefele, krapp, wild, & winteler, 1993). in the success project, we use the validated short scales with four items each and four likertscaled response options (biewen, happ, schmidt, & zlatkin-troitschanskaia, 2018). the results of the tasks in question serve not only as a scale to describe (occupational) extrinsic motivation but also to assess study-related intrinsic motivation. study track specific knowledge tests the findings on study-related previous knowledge presented here are based on domainspecific knowledge tests. during the selection of the tests that would be most suitable for this study, special attention was paid to whether the test contents align with both the contents on the platform kiron and the core curricula taught at the partnering universities in the major host countries. consequently, there may be countries among the refugees’ countries of origin whose school or tertiary education content in, for example, business and economics, may deviate from these curricular structures or contents. however, as the study’s aim is to assess refugees’ entry preconditions when entering into the kiron platform and partnering higher education institutions in the host countries, the contents taught there were used as guidelines for our assessments. the test instruments are meant to assess the refugee students’ prior knowledge in relation to these targeted academic contents, irrespective of the refugees’ countries of origin. therefore, we made sure for all five study tracks that the contents assessed in the tests correspond to the contents taught on the kiron platform and the partnering universities. during selection of the domain-specific knowledge tests, curricular analyses of the content of the kiron online courses were conducted in the five study tracks in order to ensure curricular and instructional validity (pellegrino, 2016). additionally, analyses of the regular university degree programs in these areas in the major host countries were conducted. while a large common denominator in the sense of an 165 global education review 5(4) internationally valid core curriculum in the domain of economics became apparent, strong differences also became evident in other subject areas, such as social work in particular. therefore, the expert ratings of (solely german) university lecturers were included in this selection process. these experts work at the partnering universities the kiron students in germany aim to be eventually transferred to. a short version with 15 items from the internationally established us-american test of economic literacy (tel; 4th ed.) of the council for economic education (cee) (walstad, rebeck, & butters, 2013a) was used to assess students’ previous knowledge in the study track business and economics. the economic content in the tel is based on the cee standards (2010), which is an internationally established description of what expert economists and economic educators consider the core economic concepts and principles to be taught to precollege students in the oecd countries (walstad et al., 2013a: 301). studies from different countries worldwide indicate that the tel reliably and validly assesses the economic prior knowledge at the beginning of studies (for the us, see walstad et al., 2013b; for germany, see happ, förster, zlatkin-troitschanskaia, & carstensen, 2016; for japan, see yamaoka, asano, & abe, 2010; for korea, see jahn, hahn, & kim, 2010). previous knowledge in mechanical engineering was assessed using a short version of the representational variant of the force concept inventory (r-fci; nieminen, savinainen, & virri, 2010). the force concept inventory (fci) (hestenes, wells, & swackhamer, 1992) measures r-fci students’ ability to interpret multiple representations (i.e., representational consistency) in the context of forces (nieminen, 2013). according to nieminen et al., (2010), the test’s reliability and validity of measuring young adults’ knowledge of physics can be rated as good. the r-fgi comprises 27 items. for the success sample, 18 items were selected according to the abovementioned selection criteria and in consultation with the test developers. a short-version of the computertest für die personalauswahl [computer test for personnel recruitment] (c-pa; wagener, 2013), with 24 adapted items translated into english, was used to measure previous knowledge in computer science. the c-pa assesses knowledge in dealing with computers, which is divided into the four areas application, internet, hardware and computer science (wagener, 2003). the german original version of c-pa was translated and adapted by the project team with translation experts according to the translation, review, adjudication, pre-testing and documentation (trapd; harkness, 2003) approach, whereby the test adaption guidelines (tags) (itc, 2017) were also taken into account when adapting the english instrument. to assess previous knowledge in social work, 12 items from the knowledge mental illness test (mc-komit; furnham, gee, & weis, 2016) were used. the test comprises mental health literacy. of the initial 33 items, 12 items that have a particularly strong correlation with the curricular content of the study track social work (e.g., attention deficit hyperactivity disorder, alzheimer's disease or substance abuse) were selected. previous knowledge in political science was assessed through 15 economic policy items of the tel (walstad et al., 2013a). additionally, political interest and internal political efficacy (niemi, craig, & mattei, 1991) was measured. political interest of the success sample was assessed using a translated short scale of the zentralarchiv für empirische sozialforschung (za) und zentrum für umfragen, methoden und analysen (zuma) (za & zuma, 2014). the english short version of the political efficacy (peks; beierlein, kemper, kovaleva, & rammstedt, 2014) was used to assess the internal political efficacy of the sample7. successful integration of refugee students in higher education 166 analysis and results in this paper, the focus is on the descriptive analyses of students’ background data within the success project sample gathered from the onboarding questionnaire upon registering on the kiron platform. the analyses include sociobiographical data as well as data on english language proficiency, general cognitive ability and domain-specific knowledge. as the participation in all tests is voluntary, the data is in part characterized by a relatively high number of missing values documented below (see also reinhardt et al., 2018). socio-biographical background the following information was self-reported by students over the kiron platform during the registration process.8 analysis of students’ responses in the questionnaire reveals extreme diversity in their socio-biographical backgrounds. the success cohort comprises 1,376 refugees from 54 different countries of origin: about half of the sample comes from the syrian arab republic (37%), somalia (8%) and afghanistan (6%); the other half of the students come from other african, arab or asian countries. furthermore, the success sample resides in 66 different host countries. the majority of the sample are located in the following host countries: germany (28%), jordan (18%), turkey (13%), kenya (8%), and france (7%). these host countries are also among the ten largest host countries as determined by the united nations (unhcr, 2017). from the success sample, the majority of refugees from africa reside in neighboring countries (such as kenya) (see also unhcr, 2012). the average age of students in the success sample is m = 28.55 (sd = 6.4) years. the age range in the sample is between 15 and 61 years. for comparison, the median age of immigrants to europe in 2015 was 27.5 years (eurostat, 2017). in the success project sample, 20% of kiron students are female. this percentage is lower than that of female refugees in germany (in 2017, 26% of refugees aged 18– 25 and 32% aged 25–30 were female, see bamf, 2017b) and in europe. in europe, the percentage of female refugees who applied for asylum was 32.7% in 2016 (castella, 2017). this percentage of females studying on kiron also strongly deviates from the proportional distribution of students in regular degree programs in germany where, on average, 50% of students in the higher education sector are female (bibb, 2017). the comparison with the descriptive statistics for the complete kiron cohort (n=3000) shows that the success sample, which makes up approximately 50% of all kiron students, could be considered representative for all kiron students. however, this only applies to the socio-biographical data and not the results of the additional tests presented here. as the participation in all assessments is voluntary, a positive self-selection of, for instance, particularly high-performing students cannot be ruled out, as underlined by the results of test motivation in assessment research. furthermore, it can also be assumed that the kiron students differ from the general refugee cohort, as having an interest in an online degree course only addresses specific a target group. moreover, the distinct differences in the distribution of gender and the students’ current country of residence as seen in the official statistics mentioned above suggest that representativeness of the sample for the general refugee cohort cannot be assumed and should therefore be critically examined in future studies (see section 5). educational level following the isced level, the self-reported data indicate a high average level of education for the sample. three quarters of the sample (74%, n = 1,018) state upper secondary education as their highest level of education. only 6% of kiron students (n = 84) reported a school leaving certificate under secondary education. almost half of the students (53%) stated they had 167 global education review 5(4) already studied at different tertiary levels. remarkably, 71% of students with tertiary experience reported to have graduated, mostly with a degree equivalent to a bachelor’s degree (56%). however, 29% of students had to terminate their degree programs at various points. the reported average length of time spend in tertiary education was 3.5 semesters (sd = 2.3), despite a bachelor’s degree typically lasting 6–8 semesters (oecd, eurostat, & unesco institute for statistics, 2015). only 5% of the students have a master’s degree or equivalent level of education, and 1% completed their studies with a doctoral degree. an additional 9% claimed to have completed various forms of academic education such as post-secondary non-tertiary education or shortcycle tertiary education. overall, almost one third of the students in the sample claimed to have tertiary education experience at different levels. kiron students with completed degree programs mostly studied subjects such as social science, business and law (27%; n = 140), followed by engineering, manufacturing and construction (23%; n = 118) and science, mathematics and computing at 17% (n = 88) ab. in the case of uncompleted degrees, the subjects were mostly social sciences, business and law (27%; n = 95), followed by engineering, manufacturing and construction (23%; n = 83) and science, mathematics and computing (20%, n = 77). general english language proficiency although over a third of study participants had reported english as a common language in their previous education, overall the results of the language test showed major weaknesses in the kiron students’ language proficiency. the language test takers (i.e., 1,169 of the 1,376 students in the success project sample9) exhibited great variance in their general english language proficiency.10 in the sample, the test takers achieve m = 440 (sd = 140), with a minimum of 42 and a maximum of 862 points. compared to the standard values (m = 500; sd = 100), the achieved mean value is in the range of 1 sd below the standard values. for a quantitative classification of the c-test scores within the cefr levels presented above, see table 1. on the 95%-confidence-interval (ci), only 0 to 6% of the kiron students in the project sample had a c1 language proficiency level and 9% to 32% had b2. consequently, more than 60% of the sample does not have the b2 or c1 level required for university (academic education). in addition, there is a marked discrepancy between the self-reported and table 1 estimated and self-reported cefr levels n a2 or lower (%) b1 (%) b2 (%) c1 or higher (%) estimated cefr level 1,157 261 (22.56) 674 (58.25) 204 (17.63) 18 (1.56) estimated cefr level (min 95%) 1,126 573 (50.89) 457 (40.59) 96 (8.53) 0 estimated cefr level (max 95%) 1,157 0 717 (61.97) 366 (31.62) 74 (6.40) self-reported 1,203 118 (9.81) 347 (28.84) 442 (36.74) 296 (24.61) successful integration of refugee students in higher education 168 actual (test-based) level of language proficiency: 90% of the students estimate their english language level to be b1 or higher. nearly one third (27%) even estimate their own english level to be c1 or higher. general cognitive ability the test-takers (n = 631 of the 1,376 students in the success project sample) achieve an average of m = 8.3 (sd = 3.4) of 20 possible points, which corresponds to a standard value of 96 iq points in the 26–30-year-old age group. the results of the general level of cognitive ability are thus slightly below average. in comparison with other findings from the i-s-t 2000r, this demonstrates clear differences in the test result of more than one standard deviation (e.g., bühner, ziegler, krumm, & schmidt-atzert, 2006). the reliability of the general ability scale with cronbach's α = 67, however, indicates that other indicators for general cognitive abilities should be considered for further analyses. study motivation generally, the kiron students indicated a high degree of motivation to study, regardless of age, gender or self-reported level of education. the results (n = 1,106 of the 1,376 students in the success project sample) demonstrate high values on a four-likert scale on intrinsic (m = 3.4; sd = .5) and extrinsic study motivation (m = 3.3; sd = .6). the extent to which a high level of motivation is regarded as a protective factor against study failure should be investigated in future analyses (see section 5). domain-specific knowledge the domain-specific knowledge tests were first used in a pretest and then in the main test.11 a comparison of the pretests and main test results is presented in table 2. based on the results of the pretesting, the domain-specific tests were partially slightly adapted in the main test: due to the high total score and the item difficulties encountered, a more difficult version of the c-pa was used in the main test. the order of the political science test was changed (from easy items to difficult items). the tests for social work, business and economics and mechanical engineering remained unchanged compared to pretesting. the results of the domain-specific pretests indicate that the pretested kiron students have a solid level of previous knowledge in computer science; approximately half of all items or more were solved correctly in business and economics and political science. in social work and mechanical engineering, study-related knowledge levels were rather low on average. the results of the success cohort were somewhat worse in all study tracks compared to pretesting, as, on average, less than half the tasks were solved correctly. while the success cohort was tested when they started to study, the kiron students chosen for the pretest stage were previously registered kiron students. therefore, the slightly worse performance of the success cohort compared to pretesting is in line with expectations. additionally, the study track political science assessed the political interest and political efficacy of the success cohort. overall, the students showed high political interest (m = 4; sd = 1) and high political efficacy (m = 4.1; sd = 1.1). to analyze the scale’s reliability, the two measures for the internal consistence of cronbachs α and mcdonalds ω (mcdonald, 1999; for a differentiation between ωt and ωh, see revelle & zinbarg, 2009) were calculated. in view of research underlining the limitations and bias of the α-coefficient (e.g., revelle & zinbarg, 2009; sijtsma, 2009; sijtsma & van der ark, 2015), the values of the ω-coefficient should be weighted higher in the interpretation of the findings. overall, the test procedures used showed satisfactory internal consistencies (cronbach’s α of .69 – .87). in the tel and mckomit, the mcdonald’s omega as an additional estimator compared to alpha indicated good internal consistence. 169 global education review 5(4) table 2 a comparison of the pretests and main test results study tracks pretests success cohort n = num. of students 12 n = valid questionnaire n = num. of students n = valid questionnaire business & economics max. test score: 15 n = 327 n = 53 n = 415 n = 66 m (sd) 8.5 (2.8) 6.7 (2.6) cronbach’s α .70 .53 mcdonald’s ωt .75 .65 computer science max. test score: 24 n = 271 ne = 90 n = 505 nd = 63 m (sd) 18.4 (3.9) e 12.8 (5.4) d cronbach’s α .79 .87 mcdonald’s ωt .82 .90 political science max. test score: 15 n = 253 n = 30 n = 144 n = 23 m (sd) 7 (3.4) 5.7 (1.7) cronbach’s α .73 .68 mcdonald’s ωt .81 .78 mechanical engineering max. test score: 18 n = 151 n = 17 n = 108 n = 19 m (sd) 6.4 (2.9) 5.8 (3.4) cronbach’s α .76 .70 mcdonald‘s ωt .87 .83 social work max. test score: 12 n =307 n = 35 n = 204 n = 25 m (sd) 4.1 (5.7) 3.7 (2.7) cronbach’s α .58 .72 mcdonald’s ωt .71 .83 note: m = mean; sd = standard deviation, ne = easy short version of c-pa, nd = difficult short version of c-pa discussion and conclusion critical interpretation of the results as the state of research (see section 1) indicates the crucial importance of prospective students’ entry requirements for successful admission and academic success in tertiary education (e.g., kuh et al., 2007), the analysis in this paper focuses on the descriptive analyses of the cognitive and non-cognitive entry (pre)conditions of refugee students when starting their study track on the online-based learning platform kiron. the kiron student sample represents 54 different countries of origin. the students are currently located in successful integration of refugee students in higher education 170 66 different host countries. this indicates an enormous origin-related diversity of refugee students as well as extreme heterogeneity of the external framework conditions that refugee students are faced with while studying online on kiron and upon transitioning to regular higher education in the host countries. remarkably, half of the success sample is located in host countries with a high gross domestic product (gdp). it is evident that countries with a high gdp have different external framework study conditions than countries with a lower gdp (e.g., reinhardt et al., 2018). age distribution, with an average of 28.5 (sd = 6.4) years as well as high study motivation values for both intrinsic and extrinsic motivation (tohido & jabbari, 2012) indicate that kiron has a large number of refugees for whom access to tertiary education might be a crucial step towards integration into the host society (see also harris & marlowe, 2011; zeus, 2011). this is also indicated by the data on educational backgrounds and previous education, according to which most kiron students have not only completed high school education and are therefore entitled to higher education studies (see also unesco, 2017), but also that a large part of the sample has already begun or even completed higher education. approaches such as those applied on kiron could offer refugees the opportunity to successfully continue their educational paths that were interrupted by having to flee from their countries of origin, and to realize their educational and professional goals in the host countries. from both economic and humanitarian perspectives, this is immensely important not only for the individuals themselves but also for the host society (in case of long-term settlement) and for the country of origin in case refugees are able to return at a later point. integration into higher education can also reduce the risk of a so-called ‘lost generation’ (de wit & altbach, 2016; see also reinhardt et al., 2018). in addition to the necessity of effective integration approaches for refugees in higher education, the findings from the test-based assessment of study preconditions of refugee students indicate that many areas regarding a potentially successful degree course often exhibit major apparent deficits, and that special support measures are therefore urgently required for a successful integration of refugees. the results of the c-test on general english language proficiency demonstrate that only 2% of the respondents reach level c1 and 18% reach level b2. accordingly, approximately three-quarters of the respondents are below the level of b2 recommended for access to higher education. thus, language deficits represent an enormous restriction for participation in the teachingand learning opportunities and achievement of academic success on kiron and in the host countries. one approach for the integration of refugees into tertiary education is therefore language promotion among refugees. this should include teaching-learning courses for effectively acquiring a second and third language, such as english and the host country's language, as well as the promotion of native language skills at an academic educational level (see also reinhardt et al., 2018). considering the i-s-t 2000r results as a measure of cognitive ability, it should be emphasized that general intellectual ability is typically regarded as an important prerequisite for academic success (e.g., duckworth, quinn, lynam, loeber, & stouthamer-loeber, 2011). according to the study success research, general cognitive ability is related to linguistic performance as well as domain-specific cognitive achievements (e.g., kaplan, stolk, valibhoy, tucker, & baker, 2016). especially in the case of refugee students, cognitive ability is of importance, not only for successful educational processes but also for the integration process (e.g., pagel, richter, & schupp, 2018). for instance, it is assumed that general cognitive ability could play a compensatory role in the event of linguistic or subject-specific deficits; an impairment of cognitive ability is associated with higher drop-out rates in educational programs 171 global education review 5(4) among refugees (e.g., kira, lewandowski, yoon, somers, & chiodo, 2012). for the findings on general cognitive ability determined by means of the i-s-t 2000r sub-test, it is critical to note that the sub-test covers only one aspect of intelligence (see section 3). therefore, these test results only provide an indicator of the general intelligence of the test persons, which is not enough to make a prediction about the academic success of the refugees. however, this indicator can serve as one of the control variables in examining the test results for linguistic performance and domainspecific previous knowledge. beyond biographical and cognitive factors, volitional factors also play an important role in academic achievement. they influence learning behaviour and study success (krapp, 1999; zheng, rosson, shih, & carroll, 2015), particularly in higher education and in digital online study programs (e.g., dewitte & lens, 2000; husman & corno, 2010). so far, only the kiron students’ intrinsic and extrinsic study motivation was assessed in the success project. in the research on study success, many other self-regulating skills were identified as influencing factors (e.g., interest, self-efficacy) (e.g., kuh et al., 2007; larsen et al., 2013), the importance of which should also be investigated in terms of successful integration and study success of refugee students. in addition to the general cognitive and motivational (non-cognitive) entry requirements of students, it is especially the subject-specific prior knowledge that is an essential factor for academic success in higher education (e.g., kuh et al., 2007). remarkably, the findings in the success sample vary between the students in the five different study tracks. while the kiron students in the study tracks computer science and business and economics have, on average, a solid level of study-related domain-specific knowledge, the students in the study tracks social work and mechanical engineering demonstrate partially high deficits, which require subject-specific support measures for successful integration and completion of the degree course. in terms of the development of the teaching-learning programs for refugee students, the findings of these assessments highlight far-reaching implications for the design of curricula and instructions on the kiron platform, which should be implemented at all different levels and address students with very different levels of knowledge. in the further analyses, there needs to be an investigation of the extent to which such subject-specific deficits can also be successfully remedied through digital online learning, so that students with unfavourable entry requirements can also transfer to regular educational programs in the host countries after one to two years of studying in kiron. overall, the findings reported in this paper demonstrate that the group of academicallyinterested refugees on the kiron platform is extremely heterogeneous. this results from the examination of several factors such as the sociobiographical and educational backgrounds, english language skills, study motivation and domain-specific knowledge. this heterogeneity indicates specific challenges regarding the successful integration of refugees into higher education. it implies that students with a refugee background need more individual, appropriate, and specific approaches and measures to promote their integration into higher education and their general academic success, including the development of their personal and corresponding learningand study-related values and attitudes. limitations the evidence presented here has some limitations. for instance, the high percentage of higher degrees among the kiron students indicates a potentially “positively” self-selected sample. since the results presented here are based on the responses from students who voluntarily participated in the success project assessments, it can be assumed that the kiron successful integration of refugee students in higher education 172 students who participated in the study tend to be highly motivated and high-performing, as several studies on students’ willingness to participate in tests indicate. hence, a positive self-selection of the subsamples for the assessments cannot be ruled out, which is probably on average characterized by slightly more favorable entry requirements than the overall student population on the kiron platform. moreover, a positive self-selection can also not be ruled out in view of all kiron students, as particularly highly motivated and high-performing students tend to be more interested in this online higher education program. compared to other studies with refugees, there are systematic differences (chopra & adelmann, 2017) as more young adults with a refugee background have less than an upper secondary level education. another selection from the success sample is the unequal distribution among both the different countries of origin and the host countries. compared to the refugee situation worldwide (unchr, 2017), the distribution among the host countries is only comparable to a limited extent. although the host countries of the success sample are also among the 10 most common countries, half of kiron students are hosted in relatively high-income countries. in comparison, around 84% of the refugees worldwide live in lowand middle-income countries; in africa in particular, refugees tend to move to neighbouring countries. these often have the status of developing countries themselves (unchr, 2017). the integration and support of refugees is therefore not the same in the different host countries and a comparable study situation is not guaranteed for all refugee students. further analyses indicate statistically significant differences between various groups of refugee students with respect to different external study conditions in the success cohort’s host countries and also depending on their country of origin (see reinhardt et al., 2018). further, the self-reported data of the socio-biographical and educational background show a high number of missing values (up to 20%). it can be assumed that the missing values in the data are not random, but might follow a pattern. studies indicate that students with an unfavourable expected test performance tend to avoid these test instruments as opposed to students with an expected high-test performance (e.g., duffy, smith, terhanian, & bremer, 2005). it therefore can be assumed that those refuge students for whom there is no available information on their prior knowledge, cognitive ability or language skills would achieve on average lower results in the tests. considering the self-reported nature of the data on educational backgrounds, plausibility in general can be critically questioned on the basis of response tendencies such as social desirability (on differences between self-assessment and the use of test instruments, see swope & schmitt, 2006). as the test-based results from the c-test demonstrate, the refugee students overestimate their language skills, which becomes particularly clear upon analysis of the self-reported data on general english language proficiency in which almost one quarter (25%) of the data is allocated to c1 and more than one third (37%) of the data is at b2. the objective indicators of study-relevant knowledge, intellectual ability and linguistic proficiency reported in this paper, based on validated test instruments, thus make an indispensable contribution to valid and reliable entry diagnostics. it is, however, questionable to what extent the students can provide reliable information at all, particularly in view of the high discrepancies in self-assessment and testbased results of language skills. perhaps students assess their language skills according to other benchmarks and criteria such as every-day spoken language. it can also not be assumed that all students can properly apply standards like the cefr levels. at the same time, however, the discrepancies that arise between self-reported and achieved test values in the language test can 173 global education review 5(4) also provide students with important impulses in determining their individual weaknesses for which targeted support can be provided in the host countries, including helping students choose suitable remedial offers such as language courses. finally, it should be critically remarked with regard to the findings presented in this paper, that all test instruments were provided to participants in english, as the kiron learning program and all communication on the platform is also provided in english. a transfer to partnering higher education institutions typically requires certification of english proficiency at a b2 level where the teaching language is typically english (or the respective national language). as the results of the language proficiency test indicate considerable deficits for several participants, it can be assumed that using english as the assessment language has affected overall test performance. it is possible that participants might have performed better if the knowledge tests had been administered in their native language or the higher education language of their country of origin. implications the results from the success project are intended to enhance an understanding of how to successfully integrate refugees into higher education and society, and shall form an evidence-based foundation for higher education policy makers and stakeholders to foster preparation of refugees for accredited degree programs and promote academic success. as outlined in section 1, the successful integration of refugees in the education sector is a vital task that every country taking in refugees is faced with. the findings of the success project indicate that the challenges of successfully integrating refugees and fostering their academic success differ greatly from the challenges of integrating students with migration backgrounds and promoting their academic success (e.g., rienties et al., 2012). while migrants generally consciously prepare for integration, refugees do not usually leave their country of origin voluntarily and are accordingly unprepared (e.g., leaving without relevant documents, no competence in the language of the host country, connor, 2010). when compared with many measures for the successful integration of refugees into higher education (see section 1), one strength of the success project lies in the fact that objective and valid entry diagnostics based on test instruments were already gathered at the beginning of studies, on the basis of which participants are given individual recommendations regarding their course selection on the kiron platform and/or transfer to the partnering higher education institutions. if and to what extent kiron students are actually successful in their studies on the kiron platform and upon transfer to the partnering universities as well as whether and to what extent this is affected by their internal preconditions will be examined further during the course of the success project using process diagnostics (see section 2). as external individual framework conditions in the host countries can also differ greatly (reinhardt et al., 2018), their impact on the academic success of refugees should also be considered for the successful integration of refugees. studies of this kind allow for evidencebased insights on effective support measures for refugee students. acknowledgements 1. the success project is being funded by the german federal ministry of education and research under the grant number 16hlq007. 2. we would like to thank our project partner kiron and particularly renata suter and steffen brandt for their cooperation in this study. 3. we would like to thank the two anonymous reviewers who provided constructive feedback and helpful guidance in the revision of this paper. successful integration of refugee students in higher education 174 notes 1. nearly 750,000 applications for asylum in germany were filed in 2017, more than ¾ of which were filed by refugees under the age of 30 (bamf, 2017a). 2. additionally, the success project uses data gathered through online self-assessments developed by the rwth aachen as consulting instruments and sources of information on the refugee students. the munich university of applied sciences examines further complementary support. for more details see https://success.unimainz.de/. 3. informally acquired qualifications that are not formally verifiable may not be taken into account. 4. it should be critically noted that current research is at a disagreement as to which language assessment framework is best. the literacy assessment models contain multiple elements such as semantic, syntactic, pragmatic, and phonemic awareness. the general english language proficiency assessment c-test used in this study strictly focuses on the phonemic-centered model. in view of existing research on multilingual learners (freeman & freeman, 2000; krashen, & mcfield, 2006; moll, 1992), this poses a limitation to our study. 5. the instructions for the tasks of the subtest on figural intelligence were only provided in english, which may affect the test results. however, this only concerns a few sentences; the test itself, as a subtest on figural intelligence, is viewed in literature as relatively language-independent and therefore particularly suitable for a target sample with language barriers (e.g., migrants). 6. we refrain from administering the peks items on external political efficacy (balch, 1974) for research ethical reasons. 7. the following information may be distorted by socially desirable response behavior 8. as in all other tests, participation in the ctest was not obligatory and approx. 200 kiron students did not take part in this test. 9. participation in all tests of the success project is voluntary. the tests are low-stakes rather than high-stakes. in low-stakes testing, participants’ motivation to take the test can vary greatly, which in turn can partially restrict the validity of the interpretation of the test results (for consequences of low-stakes vs. high-stakes testing, see e.g., haertel, 1999; rios & liu, 2017; stenlund, lyrén, & eklöf, 2017; for language testing in particular, see schmidgall & powers, 2017). 10. the pretest students are not included in the success cohort and began studying on the kiron platform prior to the summer term of 2017. 11. all refugee students were contacted via the platform kiron campus and asked to complete an online questionnaire on a voluntary basis. all students were sent a specific questionnaire according to the study track they are enrolled in on kiron campus. accordingly, n = "enrolled students" indicates the number of students who received the survey link through their kiron platform email address. the indication n= "valid questionnaires" represents the number of students who completed the questionnaire. this assessment design highlights that a positive self-selection of participation can be 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(2013). ethnic disparities in higher education. iza journal of migration, 2(3), 1–21. about the author(s) dr. olga zlatkin-troitschanskaia is a professor and chair of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. dr. roland happ is a research associate and lecturer at the department of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. sarah nell-müller is a research associate at the department of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. tobias deribo is a research associate at the department of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. franzisca reinhardt is a research associate and lecturer at the department of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. miriam toepper is research associate at the department of business and economics education at johannes gutenberg university, mainz, germany. https://www.dict.cc/englisch-deutsch/reliability.html https://www.dict.cc/englisch-deutsch/validity.html passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 8 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: whitty, pam, lysack, monica, lirette, patricia, lehrer, joanne, & hewes, jane. (2020). passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy: exploring intersections between discourses, experiences, and feelings...knitting new terms of belonging. global education review, 7 (2). 8-23. passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy: exploring intersections between discourses, experiences, and feelings...knitting new terms of belonging pam whitty university of new brunswick, canada monica lysack sheridan college, canada patricia lirette macewan university, canada joanne lehrer université du québec en outaouais, canada jane hewes thompson rivers university, canada abstract we are five early childhood researchers, from across canada, thrown together amongst a series of alarming discourses, where developmental, economic, and neuroscientific rationales for ecec drown out alternative theoretical perspectives, as well as personal experience, values, subjective knowledges, and the fierce passion we feel for our work. in the midst of this “throwntogethness” (massey, 2005), how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? how do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the canadian ecec field as we knit together alternative ways of being, doing, and acting, figuring out what resonates in localized situations (osgood, 2006)? to begin to answer these questions, we think with feminist theory (bezanson; 2018; langford et al., 2016; prentice, 2009); the politics of the event of place, (massey, 2005) and relational and spatial networked discursive entanglements (massey, 2005; nichols et al., 2012; ingold, 1995; haraway, 2016) as we untangle three vignettes related to advocating for a competent universal public ecec system; writing postdevelopmental curriculum frameworks; and weaving productive relationships between university researchers and early childhood practitioners. these vignettes illuminate our struggles to “stay with the trouble,” as haraway (2016) suggests, stubbornly hanging on to the hope of producing new terms of belonging (burns & lundh, 2011) as a form of resistance, allowing us to open up spaces to imagine, tell alternative stories (moss, 2014), and create real change within our local contexts. keywords early childhood education; policy; curriculum; relationships; feminist theory, throwntogetherness alarming discourses! across canada and around the world, early childhood education and care (ecec) is mired in alarming and alarmist discourses (moss, 2014; urban, 2016). as reconceptualist scholar-activists, we are concerned about how these discourses position ecec as a cure for multiple societal ills, from poverty to climate change, early school leaving to global economic competitiveness (lowenstein, 2011). despite decades of critical early childhood scholarship, the currency of neuroscientific and economic rationales (vandenbroeck, 2017; vandenbroeck passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 9 et al., 2017) inadvertently acts to solidify the future outcomes-oriented grip of developmental psychology, seducing policy makers and educators alike with calmly calculated answers to complex questions. each of us, from different provincial jurisdictions across canada, is and has been involved in community-based research and advocacy within ecec. fiercely passionate about our work, we talk back to discourses of certainty with what moss (2014) calls “alternative narratives.” we challenge targeted and compensatory models of ecec that emphasize fixing children, rather than educating them; preparing them for the future rather than being with them in the present; fitting them into a predetermined mold rather than building relationships and being amazed by their uniqueness. we also experience how alternative theoretical perspectives that value subjective knowledges are marginalized, and have more difficulty taking hold: uncertainty pales in comparison to certainty within the public and policy realms. and yet, as moss (2014) recognizes, the proliferation of these alternative perspectives can contribute to paradigmatic shifts, dislocating dominant discourses and introducing new possibilities (moss, 2014). the canadian ecec context: staying with the trouble of a never-ending story as mahon (2000) and pasolli (2019) clearly articulate, the struggle for universal ecec in canada is a “never-ending story”; filled with starts, stops, tensions, moments of hopefulness, and disappointments. in a federated country where education falls under provincial jurisdiction, the story of ecec in canada can be recounted as a complicated, contradictory, multifaceted series of undertakings. for the past fifty years, much of the discourse around ecec in canada has focused on an integrated ecec system for children under five. since 1970, when a national childcare act was first proposed, there have been several federal initiatives to create a national childcare strategy (government of canada, 1970, 2018). despite a history of organized and “evidence-based” advocacy (friendly, 2009), provincial systems remain fragmented, and yet this fragmentation has led to unexpected moments of collaboration, and productive, creative change. in this paper, we share three vignettes from our individual and collective lived experiences, recounting how we “stay with the trouble” (haraway, 2016) of the never-ending story of ecec in canada. these stories within stories illustrate how we are “learning to be truly present, not as a vanishing pivot between awful or edenic pasts and apocalyptic or salvific futures, but as mortal critters entwined in myriad unfinished configurations of places, times, matters, meanings” (haraway, 2016, p.1). acting as alternative narratives, our vignettes illuminate marginalized ways of knowing and being, working against the hegemony of “telling the same story over and over again, treating it as a holy writ, without a hint of doubt or an acknowledgement that other stories exist” (moss, 2019, p. 18). each vignette offers insights into how we experienced "new terms of belonging," through theorizing “structures of togetherness” (burns & lundh, 2011, p.106) that are new, temporary, and experimental. burns and lundh (2011) suggest that possibilities arise when artists produce active and critically engaged art in times of crisis. like artists, we are “striving to create dynamic sites for exchange between multitudes of actors” (p.111), attempting uncertainly to bring about change. our vignettes present examples of this kind of “being-actingfeeling together” that strive to interrupt takenfor-granted dominant, alarmist, often simplistic discourses regarding how change takes place in complex systems. we illuminate how chance 10 global education review 7 (2) encounters, aligned stars, and shared ideas can spiral beyond our intentions. vignette 1: ontario’s universal public childcare system that “almost” was and quebec’s universal public childcare system that “almost” is as banack and berger (2019) suggest, change happens when we “dare to experiment and face uncertainties [...] stepping into uncharted territory [...] opening up and working with the unpredictable, emergent occurrences” (p.8-9). haraway (2016) explains that the word trouble, derives from a thirteenth-century french verb ‘to stir up’ ‘to make cloudy’ ‘to disturb’. we—all of us on terra—live in disturbing times, mixed-up times, troubling and turbid times. the task is to become capable, with each other in all of our bumptious 1 kinds, of response (p. 1). this vignette explores the concept of knitting new terms of belonging through the interconnected notions of change and trouble, contrasting policy developments in two neighboring provinces. we examine ontario’s development of childcare policy between 2016 and 2018 alongside quebec’s establishment of a publicly funded and regulated childcare system in 1996-97. in 2017, ontario announced the creation of a universal and affordable childcare system (monsebratten, 2017), followed by an ambitious commitment in 2018 to implement free childcare for all children from age two‐and‐a‐ half until eligible for kindergarten. 2 the complex and comprehensive plan was the result of extensive consultation and was claimed by childcare advocates as “a victory for advocacy efforts over the decades. our coalition of parents, childcare programs, women’s groups, unions and social justice advocates have called for "affordable" childcare for many years (ontario coalition for better child care [ocbcc], 2018). a few months later, the liberal government and their legacy of progress on childcare and kindergarten lost the provincial election in favor of a government that cut childcare funding and introduced a tax credit for some families, drawing on neoliberal discourse of individual choice and privileging a private care system governed by market forces instead of building a public system. for monica, once again, after over forty years of childcare advocacy, i felt devastated that in a moment, all our hard work and collaboration, putting all of the right pieces in place, could be gone. the emotions i felt in 2006 when the fledgling national foundations childcare program was lost came flooding back. on a rational level i understood the political cycle and that the defeat of the government was not because of the childcare commitment, but perhaps in spite of it. for the small group of us who had worked so intently, bringing along politicians, officials, community members and the media, the day we announced the policy for free universal childcare felt like the birth of a baby, nurtured in our collective womb. it was our moment and felt like a monumental achievement. later, as the election unfolded, it was clear that the plan for universal childcare in ontario would die. i felt grief for months, surprised at this depth of emotion as i consider myself a hardened policy wonk. i wondered if there was any point in trying again. perhaps it was time to withdraw from my involvement in policy development. by the end of the year, i realized how important our work was, we had developed perhaps the most comprehensive childcare policy in canada: optimism slowly returned. if we “stay with the trouble,” the stars may align one day. i recovered my bumptiousness. when we create these groundbreaking maps of ideas, they don’t disappear, passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 11 they continue to live, ready for the next opportune moment. twenty years earlier, the “stars aligned” (marois, 2008, p.xi) more favorably in quebec. pauline marois was minister of education and responsible for the childcare dossier in 1997. she credits the success of the legislation that included the centres de la petite enfance (childcare centers, known as cpes) and regulated home childcare services for five dollars a day, as well as full day kindergarten, extended maternity and family leave, and five dollars a day school-based care, to unconditional support from the premier at the time. he ignored a mandate to reduce the deficit in order to invest in children and families, and was supported by citizens who believed in and supported the legislation (marois, 2008). massey (2005) calls the attempt to assert that no alternatives exist, “the cosmology of ‘only one narrative’” (p. 5). similarly, moss (2014) describes dominant discourses as “just stories” and urges us to scrutinize them, and understand that they are only one possible way of seeing the world. in the case of ontario, the dominant economic narratives prevented investment in a competent ecec system (vandenbroeck et al., 2016), while in quebec, somehow, an alternative discourse was not only spoken, but heard. marois (2008) explains that the government had to “be bold, to have the credibility and the desire for risk” (p. xi), that they needed to move quickly while political will was strong. despite marois’ analysis that relied upon neoliberal discourse of parental choice, and deficit discourses regarding prevention, screening, and equality of chances for children living in poverty, the proposed childcare policy was accompanied by the rhetoric of social justice and social solidarity in order to justify a universal, rather than a targeted system (marois, 2008). joanne reflects, i have trouble understanding the intensity of my reaction to this deficit discourse. when children living in poverty are singled out and blamed, along with their parents, for their “lack of preparation for school,” and when ecec is positioned as a screening tool to figure out who is lacking and who needs fixing, when this story is told again and again as if it is truth, i feel intense anger and frustration and hopeless despair. i don’t understand how or why anyone buys into this “truth” or the insistence on continually bringing the conversation back to “children with special needs” or “vulnerable” children, instead of imagining what ecec could be and all the amazing projects and relationships we can build with children and families. every now and then i find myself at a “table de concertation,” a network meeting of those from various organizations who all work directly or indirectly with young children and their families. when presented with the “scientific” rationale for targeted programs, i push back. sometimes i try to be diplomatic, sometimes i do not. but what makes me feel better is that there are always people who nod, often with relief, and share their own frustrations with me privately afterwards. in one of our collaborative presentations, monica lamented the persistence of developmentalism and the insidious ways it creeps; the implication that educators just need to do a better job getting on board; and the enthusiasm by which other professionals who have relatively recently discovered ecec, have shown up to tell us what to do. i am encouraged when those who work in the sector resist how it has been defined from the outside. i somehow manage to remain hopeful, that by opening spaces to listen, it might be worth it to “stay with the trouble.” prentice (2009) laments the focus of much childcare rationale today on an investment in the future citizen narrative, stating that this 12 global education review 7 (2) economic frame has replaced a feminist, justicebased rationale for childcare that was present in the 1970s. the ocbcc recognized the social justice and feminist potential of ontario’s proposed plan in 2018. we believe that this rationale, appealing to people’s emotions and hoping to inflame passion for social justice and social solidarity, can and should be more persuasive than the investment narrative. however, we acknowledge that, as discussed in vignette 3, oftentimes multiple contradictory discourses circulate and bump into one another, as we attempt to knit new terms of belonging (burns & lundh, 2011). in this case, the feminist social justice and social solidarity rationale for ecec seems like a dropped stitch, one that needs to be picked up again, and incorporated into a new pattern, along with those other persistent narratives, in order to create a stronger fabric, capable of withstanding multiple attacks, protecting gains, expanding the system so it is finally universal, and consolidating the idea of childcare as a fundamental right. in order for these terms of belonging to be widespread and inclusive, bezanson and colleagues (2019) suggest that “[...] a strong childcare system, once experienced, known, and understood, has policy “legs”; its absence in the social policy landscape makes it hard to conceptualize or imagine, but its presence makes it hard to undo” (p.14). massey (2005) posits that public space is critical to democracy. public outcry to proposed budget cuts to childcare in quebec (canadian broadcasting corporation [cbc], 2016) and full-day kindergarten in ontario (global news, 2019) showcase how both programs have grown policy legs, and how access to alternate discourses can lead to increased public participation in the project of democracy. we suggest that competent public ecec systems are critical to social justice and social solidarity, to children’s rights, parents’ rights, and educators’ rights. free universal childcare policy is necessarily the result of conflict and negotiation, and it is our job to “unsettle the givenness,” to open up space for a debate, not on the economic feasibility of public ecec, but on public belief in well-funded, universal ecec as a right, and as an inevitable cornerstone of the social policy landscape. this is why the two of us, from neighboring provinces, one on the brink, we hope, of launching a universal system, and one on the edge of losing the most important purpose of their system, can learn from and inspire one another. this vignette, focused on policy, highlights the need to make imagining a world without public ecec impossible. it also reminds us of the importance of social solidarity and social justice, as discursive rationales, and positive outcomes of universal ecec systems. the next vignette tells another story of crossprovincial collaboration and encouragement, how a university event became a “dynamic site(s) for exchange between multitudes of actors” (burns & lundh, 2011, p.111), opening up spaces for localized change to shift into a broader, provincial forum. vignette ii: knit 2, purl 2, repeat: curriculum frameworks and the dynamism of place when the multilateral framework agreements (government of canada, 2003) were put in place in 2005, federal-provincial meetings and national forums made visible tim ingold’s (1995) observation that “the forms that people build, whether in the imagination or on the ground, arise within the current of their involved activity, in the specific relational contexts of their practical engagements with their surroundings” (p.76). the pan-canadian uptake of curriculum frameworks and pedagogical documentation since 2005 has had the discursive and imaginative power of “ […] passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 13 incite[ing] counter possibilities and provocations with those of us working with young children” (ashton, 2014, p.3). curriculum frameworks are living political documents where differently situated knowings and desires come into discursively contradictory places. as massey (2005) theorizes, place “[...] change[s] us, not through some visceral belonging (some barely changing rootedness, as so many would have it, but through the practising of place, the negotiation of intersecting trajectories; place as an arena where negotiation is forced upon us” (p.154). in this vignette we focus on curriculum frameworks, revisiting moments of possibility across two canadian provinces, 4500 kilometers apart, whose collaborations were set in motion through the “politics of the event of place” (massey, 2005, p. 149). the pre-organized event at the heart of this vignette was a public talk by pam, from the university of new brunswick (unb), at macewan university (gmu) in edmonton, alberta, in a 220-seat tiered auditorium, on a wintry february afternoon in 2012, as part of a visiting scholars’ lecture series. as jane, then chair of early learning and child care (elcc) at gmu recalls: our intention was to use the public talk as an opportunity to profile our ecec program and position ourselves relative to degree development in an institution newly transitioned from community college to university. we were undervalued in our own setting, still considered to be a vocational program. we could see that the new brunswick curriculum framework had moved the field ahead and were using it and other frameworks as resources in our teaching to provoke new thinking about children, child care, early learning, and early childhood educator identity. we had experienced the accessibility and resonance of the new brunswick pedagogical stories. and, following our study visits to reggio emilia, we had begun to think differently as a faculty, moving beyond developmentalism as the sole foundation of practice. pam remembers: jane’s invitation provided me with an opportunity to critically reflect upon this massive curriculum project that had engaged us with multiple collaborators in new brunswick . together, we had collectively cocreated what burns and lundh call “new terms of belonging” (2011), time-space-matterings where feminist early childhood university-based educator-scholars were researching alongside practicing early childhood educators and government ecec staff. we strove to “maximize the research process as a change-enhancing, reciprocally educative encounter” (lather, 1992, p. 92). thus, i arrived at gmu, an extraordinarily welcoming space, with a collection of experiences, memories, images, theorists, and ideas on what i might contribute. as we theoretically revisit this event, we take up massey’s (2005) imagining of space as open, mobile, “always under construction” (p.20), “never finished, never closed” (p.9), full of “loose ends and missing links” (p.12). in the midst of loose ends, massey (2005) speaks to a “combination of order and chance” (p. 151) that is critical for ongoing co-constitution of space and public place open to the political. we look back at the coming together of order and chance, planned and unplanned, that produced the event. several carefully planned events shaped the thinking of many who attended the public talk—an off-campus faculty retreat and book talk, a working session and critical review of proposed degree curriculum architecture, and an opportunity for 40-plus members of our ecec program advisory committee, community professionals, and policy makers to hear pam speak about the new brunswick experience of 14 global education review 7 (2) working with over 1300 child care educators to cocreate the early learning and child care curriculum framework~english, and accompanying 36-hour program of professional learning (nason & whitty, 2007; whitty 2009; rose, 2010). what was unplanned was the time pam spent in the child care lab school, and her thoughtfulness in featuring those experiences as part of her talk. as she recalls “i was able to go into the university early learning centre and be with the children, educators, and director, reading the learning stories displayed on the walls. this inspirational visit made visible what i might contribute.” we did not expect over 200 people at the public talk. the visiting scholars lecture series typically attracted 30-40 participants, most often students and faculty with a few from the broader public and professional community. we had a captive audience of almost 100 ecec students well prepared on the topic and required to attend. we had publicized the event with our agencies and through our community networks. jane recalls: i knew that the event was resonating for others in ways we had not imagined possible when i saw the line of people down the long wide hallway leading to the auditorium, and our dean scurrying out in search of folding chairs so that everyone could be seated. this was an extraordinary “event of place,” both at the time and in retrospect. the “broader possibilities for ‘being-acting-feeling together’” were palpably materializing: a dynamic site with a multitude of actors was in the making. space as the “simultaneity of [our] stories – so far” this dynamic site illustrates what can happen when we think about space as “the simultaneity of stories-so-far […] the product of interrelations; as constituted through interactions, from the immensity of the global to the intimately tiny” (massey, 2005, p. 9). we recognize that our social relationships and our stories are inherently political, partial, and unfinished. these conditions construct space that invites chance encounters, opportunity, movement, risk, and possibility (massey, 2005). pam’s talk began with stories and images from the gmu early learning centre, stories she had just heard, in which we recognized ourselves. then she told stories and shared images from the unb early childhood centre. these stories of everyday experiences felt familiar. we could imagine ourselves in those stories and in those spaces. she then shared images of children playing in trays of sand in the dewey lab school in chicago in the early 20thcentury. they too felt very familiar: joint histories. then, pam invited one of the educators from the early learning centre to join her at the podium to read a documented story of a recent field trip to city hall, and talk about the meaning of the story. in retrospect, this was a powerful moment, profiling a voice that many in the room could relate to, telling the story of an everyday experience that illustrated how we already provide meaningful participation opportunities for young children. pam finished with more stories from the new brunswick curriculum framework documents—from centers across the province, highlighting familiar everyday work with children across our two provinces. what was the impact of considering these stories simultaneously? stories of practice that are both near to us and far away from us in time and in place. how did they provoke us, inspire us to living~learning (sellers, 2013) the next chapter in the story? pam’s talk invited each person in the room to imagine the possibility that they too belonged to the simultaneity of stories-so-far— we could see how the pedagogical stories from new brunswick over the past four years were connected to our passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 15 stories and the stories from dewey’s lab school decades ago. a space was opening for many in the room to think differently about the stories in their own programs. the director of child care for the alberta ministry of children’s services attended the public talk and saw possibilities immediately. she offered resources to develop a made-in-alberta curriculum framework, setting a series of people and actions in motion (arendt, 1998, in banack & berger, 2019; makovichuk et al., 2014a ), creating for a time, a throwntogetherness of space that was rich in potential for collaborative dialogue and democratic experimentalism, reinvigorating the relationship between academics and the professional field in alberta (moss, 2014). the second vignette, focused on shared stories, explores the notion of space and the simultaneity of stories that created what we term “spatial and interspatial belonging” across and within local, provincial, national, international, and historical boundaries, during a series of events, both planned and unplanned, that led to significant investment and the creation of a project that did much more than simply write a curriculum document. we were thrown together in new ways, opening up new spaces for moving beyond developmentalism, valuing subjective knowledges and emotions, reimagining possibilities for belonging and inclusion. play, participation, and possibilities: an early learning and child care framework for alberta (makovichuk et al., 2014a) took up the broad based learning goals from the new brunswick curriculum framework for early learning and child care (early childhood research team, university of new brunswick, 2008. renamed flight: alberta’s early learning and care framework in 2018 (makovichuk et al., 2014b), this curriculum framework is featured in the next vignette, and demonstrates how structures of togetherness create possibilities for a new sense of belonging by creating spaces and stories that move away from the dominant narrative of developmentalism. vignette 3: animating a curriculum framework: knitting new possibilities this meandering, partial tale describes my (tricia’s) role as part of a team of academics co-researching and co-writing flight: alberta’s early learning and care framework (makovichuk et al., 2014b), a multi-year action research-curriculum project, instigated at the public event described in vignette 2.the project began with a combined sense of excitement and uncertainty—can we take on this intimidating task? co-creating the curriculum framework alongside educators, in the light of a sudden public focus on early learning in alberta, made our joint work visible to others who were working within different paradigms. consequently, we were tossed into swirling discourses, introducing tensions into the takenfor-granted and pervasive developmental discourse prevalent in childcare, postsecondary ecec programs, partner organizations, and advisory panels. as we uncovered and introduced alternative narratives, we struggled with how to respond to the alarmist discourse of developmentalism. how do i speak back—when i am often unable to shake free of the grasp of these discourses, myself? during our work with flight, participatory patterns between the university and community shifted. early on, we left the insulated space of academia, shed our expert hats, and begin talking with instead of about educators. working onsite and alongside educators required forging new relations, building trust, and living with each other in uncertainty and experimentation. taking up participatory action research, we were very actively involved, “acting as resources” (nichols 16 global education review 7 (2) et al., 2012, p.31) rather than maintaining an impossible stance of objectivity. we shifted between the complementary and conflicting roles of researcher, mentor, observer, recorder, participant, teacher, and learner. negotiating our joint approach to research meant that we were swept along with the flow as energy generated by the project took over. we were not separate from our research encounters, but part of and emergent with them (davies, 2014). i soon recognized the power of a motivated collective to spark change, growth, and learning. flight was mapped onto and drawn from educators’ practice and thinking. a new set of discourses was courageously taken up by educators who drew upon their situated knowledges—leading rather than following the researchers. our research team mantra, “there is no one right way to do it,” was greeted with trepidation initially, but soon led to creativity and experimentations in each local site. as massey (2005) states, “place is always different. each is unique, and constantly productive of the new. the negotiations will always be an invention; there will be need for judgement, learning, improvisation; there will be no simply portable rules” (p. 161). as we co-imagined innovative ways of thinking about living curriculum alongside children and families, flight acted as a provocation to “open up the imagination of the single narrative to give space for a multiplicity of trajectories” (massey, 2005, p 5). there were many unexpected lines of flight (deleuze & guattari,1987) as educators and researchers thought, felt, and acted alongside one another. educators took steps into the unknown: changing the format of their annual general meeting to engage with families about their child as a mighty learner and citizen, reorganizing their staff meeting times to allow for curricular conversations, and introducing new staff positions to support educators’ curriculum meaning making and pedagogical documentation practices. the ecec community rallied to support us as we tried to make sense of flight ourselves and what it would mean for practice, finding joy together in shared “aha moments” and gaining comfort with the unpredictable. twisted yarn; dangerous encounters; complicated relations as academics, we were acutely aware of competing discourses that were circulating through the province and wondered if we had we set educators adrift (nxumalo et al., 2017) with the new discursive formations in flight. how were educators navigating encounters between discourses? in the context of new networks and relationships, we had many “complicated conversations about contested matters” (banack & berger, 2019, p 5) and tension-filled moments of negotiation, reflecting “dense knots of entanglement” (banack & berger, 2019, p 5). we muddled in the messiness related to historical, contemporary, political, and ethical notions of curriculum. these discourses of readiness, deficit, compensatory, and pathology (haydon & iannacci, 2008) butted up against and became entangled with the concepts and ideas in flight. thus, we lived within a tension-filled space “of fuzzy and permeable boundaries” (nichols et al., 2012, p. 5) with traditional views of curriculum imposed to assess children’s readiness for formal schooling. child care settings are always already contested spaces where different actors regularly introduce new discourses influencing time, space, and relationships. according to nichols and colleagues, “the rhetoric of collaboration and partnership creates openings for a diverse array of players to lobby, mobilize, forge alliances, attempt to influence the agenda and jostle for resources” (2012, p.5). often new professionals arrive with a sense that they passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 17 “know” ecec, yet their knowledge is strongly associated with discourses not always reflective of the lived reality of childcare. our experience was productive of new connections and extending networks, and as nichols and colleagues (2012) remind us, “not just with those we actively seek to make” (p.27). what, then, is our ethical respons-ability within the throwntogetherness of the ecec field? “how might new terms of connectivity be negotiated?” (massey, 2005, p.151). researching and writing the curriculum framework brought us into contact with the larger public, political, and bureaucratic realms, with new actors and spaces with powerful agendas and resources, systemic power and influence; a space of uncoordinated and swirling discourses and shifting imperatives. despite the uncertainty and messiness, there were also multiple new opportunities for movement, networks, and relationships. in this “joyful composition” (davies, 2014, p. 20), i lived as an educator-researcher, alongside others, open to being affected, building capacity for thought and action; striving “to compose ourselves anew” (davies, 2014, p. 20). living the ebbs and flows of this ongoing research project was not without challenges. as a team, we keenly felt the lack of time and resources required to meet the educators’ eagerness and desire to work with new ideas and concepts from the framework. these realities meant introducing flight one professional learning session at a time, resulting in a worrying sense of perpetuating inequality. who was left out? who had access to us and who didn’t? recognizing that flight was unevenly taken up and networked across the province, we committed to making the framework free and accessible to all, creating a website to house the document and resources. however, we still struggled to reconcile our inability to meet every request. to support the introduction of the framework, we learned to do professional learning differently. keenly resisting pressure to “workshop it” or to adopt the “train the trainer” model, we “stayed with the troubles” (haraway, 2016) and complexities, living inside the messy and organic nature of “curriculum-ing” (sellers, 2013) with young children. knowledgeable leaders from the field emerged, turning traditional top down professional learning sideways. i began to recognize that i cannot control how the curriculum framework i/we had drafted is taken up and animated, nor can i ever fully recount the paths flight took. this became apparent when i heard stories from participating educators about text messages they had been sharing with one another after a series of community events. educators’ new relationships and virtual networks were completely invisible to me as a researcher until much later. how could i possibly hope to tame and tell this ever-expanding story? taking on a life of its own, with rhizomatic expansion, the complexity of the project became too big to describe or track with intentionality. the framework has taken off, moving both physically and virtually within and across physical (cyber)spaces. it swirls through/in space and time, travelling to and fro through “multiple situated sites of practice” (nichols, 2012, p. 24) in ways no one could have predicted. this final vignette, focused on bringing a curriculum document to life, in/through relationships, demonstrates how deeply affective work amongst swirling discourses requires reciprocal, respectful listening, and openness to the unexpected. collective energy and ingenuity, immersed in local and intuitive knowledges, risk-taking and thinking alongside others leads to dynamic movement, change, and transformation. this story highlights the power 18 global education review 7 (2) and productivity of uncertainty, messiness, and danger. not casting off: using a stitch holder instead in the midst of alarmist discourses and a sense of “throwntogethness” (massey, 2005), we set out to investigate two questions: how do we bring our situated knowings and desires to these discursive material relational mashups? and how do we engage with the throwntogetherness that is the canadian ecec field? in retelling our experiences as vignettes, we knit together our situated knowings and desires to imagine alternative mashups and terms of belonging. from this collaborative knitting of discourses, experiences, and feelings, four ideas stand out for us: the simultaneity of stories (massey, 2005); the politics of refusal (moss, 2014); acceptance of the never-ending story (mahon, 2000; pasolli, 2019); and the joy that emerges when we are open to the unpredictable and can embrace not being in control. the simultaneity of stories creates a sense of belonging. as we knit our storied experiences and discourses into a larger pattern, dialoguing across provinces in ontario/quebec or alberta/new brunswick, and across sectors, between researchers, practitioners, and decision makers, we let go of the need to control the narrative. rather than supplanting developmentalism, which leaves us frustrated and hopeless, we have highlighted how the narratives of developmentalism, economic rationales, and brain science are pieces of the story that can be challenged as they stand alongside the alternative perspectives that we articulate. similar to the 100 languages of children, 100 languages of advocacy are needed to rationalize investment in a competent ecec system. this kind of thinking helps us imagine post-developmentalism as more-thandevelopmentalism, as opposed to antidevelopmentalism. can we open ourselves to our own critique to avoid losing potential allies, and with them, the possibility of changing the ecec world together? as urban (2016) so eloquently puts it, in our individual and collective attempts at distancing ourselves from the monsters that mainstream research in our field has helped to create, are we at risk of losing—or worse, of carelessly abandoning—the transformative, emancipatory element of critical inquiry that aims at changing the world? there is a risk, i argue, of losing critical inquiry in early childhood to an equally dangerous monster trying to drown the entire project in a sea of privileged discourse that is self-referential at best, and borderline narcissistic at worst (p.108). we realize that this position puts us in danger, at risk of messy complexity and potential conflict. however, whether doing policy work, creating and implementing curriculum with educators, or carrying out research projects, we are confronted with the same multiplicities. by letting go of established hierarchies, and the need to position ourselves in opposition, we can and do engage in authentic and productive relationships. when we think beyond resistance to dominant ideologies and discourses, the politics of refusal (mcgranahan, 2016; simpson, 2014, 2016) catapults us into new subjectivities. all of a sudden, as clark rubio and okune (n.d.) argue, “the imperative to imagine freedom beyond what hegemonic forces delimit as politically imaginable present those who refuse with the dilemma of having to stop a story that is always being told (simpson 2014, p.177)”. to refuse, ball (2016) and moss (2019) argue, means engaging in a rigorous process of questioning our own identities, acknowledging that we are always making choices. burns and lundh (2011) affirm the value of acting in ways that are new, temporary, and experimental during times of crisis. our vignettes illustrate passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 19 this through stories of dynamic movement and small moments where change happened, as we stayed with the trouble and the turbulence, and strengthened or reinvented structures of togetherness. recognizing our situated knowings and desires as fleeting (ingold, 1995), we take these experiences of being, acting, and feeling together into “unfinished configuration of places, times, matters, meanings” (haraway, 2016, p. 1). in this way, we make sense of the tangled relationships we are always enmeshed in (ingold, 1995), acknowledging that our work will always be incomplete (lather, 2013; massey, 2005). indeed, ecec is a never-ending story everywhere, not only in canada. thus, we begin to look for “loose-ends and missing links” (massey, 2005, p.12) as generative possibilities, rather than something to be cast off and resolved with certainty. knowing we are both within and co-creating a never-ending story renews hope, and brings to light the cyclical inevitability of change required in constantly creating a competent ecec system with others. we understand that our work will always need to adapt to the “specific relational contexts of their practical engagements with their surroundings” (ingold, 1995, p.76). in examining the role of chance encounters, unexpected resonance, and aligned stars in our vignettes, we are aware of the need to be open to the unpredictable, and the joy that emerges when we embrace our inability to control. we are reminded of callois’ (1961) concept of ilinx, or dizzy play, in which the player “gratifies the desire to temporarily destroy his bodily equilibrium, escape the tyranny of the ordinary perception, and provoke the abdication of consciousness” (p.44). ilinx is the player’s deliberate intent to create uncertainty and experience imbalance in an effort to experience it fully (lester & russell, 2008; sutton-smith, 1977, cited in hewes, 2014). similar to children at play, we seek to fully experience our ongoing unpredictable entanglements, and make visible previously unimaginable possibilities for being, acting, and doing together, joyfully. focusing on “new terms of belonging” as a form of resistance to alarmist, alarming, and hegemonic discourses acts as a paradigm shift. small stories (georgakopoulou, 2006) such as the ones we have knit together with our vignettes can encourage shifts, inspiring optimism and alternative moves. opening up spaces for imagining the unimaginable, the impossible becomes possible. seeing what’s happening elsewhere—connecting what we are doing with what others are doing is a time-space-mattering that offers hope. stubbornly, bumptiously “staying with the trouble,” we are committed to pursuing “new terms of belonging.” bringing our situated knowings and desires to various discursive-material-relational mashups, we continue to advocate for competent ecec systems, and to prepare and support educators for the throwntogetherness that is the canadian ecec field, so they too are able to knit together new ways of being, doing, and acting. acknowledgments a preliminary version of this paper was presented at the annual post-conference of the canadian association for research in early childhood held at the university of britishcolumbia in june 2019. we also acknowledge that our names as co-authors of this paper are presented in reverse alphabetical order, in an attempt to disrupt the competitive and commodified practices that are taken for granted in academia. 20 global education review 7 (2) notes 1 “being self-assertive or proud to an irritating degree” (bumptious, 2019). 2 kindergarten is the first year(s) of primary or elementary school in canada. in ontario, children begin kindergarten the year they turn four (government of ontario, 2019). references ashton, e. 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(2014). transformative change and real utopias in early childhood education: a story of democracy, experimentation and potentiality. abingdon, oxon: routledge. moss, p. (2019). alternative narratives in early childhood, or why contest early childhood? innovations in early education, march 2019, 12-20. nason, p. & whittty, p. (2007). bringing action research to the curriculum development process. educational action research, 15(2), 271-281. nichols, s., rowsell, j., nixon, h., & rainbird, s. (2012). resourcing early learners: new networks, new actors. new york, ny: routledge. nxumalo, f., vintimilla, c., & nelson, n. (2017, october). pedagogical gatherings in early childhood teacher education. paper presented at the reconceptualizing early childhood education conference, toronto, on. ontario coalition for better child care (2018). big news for child care in the 2018 budget. retrieved from: https://www.childcareontario.org/big_news_fo r_child_care_in_the_2018_budget osgood, j. 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(2014). mohawk interruptus: political life across the borders of settler states. durham, n.c.: duke university press. simpson, a. (2016). consent’s revenge. cultural anthropology 31(3), 326-333. urban, m. (2016). at sea: what direction for critical early childhood research? journal of pedagogy, 7(1), 107-112. doi: 10.1515/jped2016-0007 vandenbroeck, m. (2017). facts matter. and so do opinions: a plea for the repoliticisation of early childhood education. keynote speech presented at the european early childhood educational research association conference, university of bologna, italy. retrieved from: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwukm_d8ve vandenbroeck, m., de vos, j., fias, w., olsson, l.m., penn, h., wastell, d. & white, s. (2017). constructions of neuroscience in early childhood education. london, uk: routledge. vandenbroeck, m., urban, m. & peeters, j. (eds.), (2016). pathways to professionalism in early childhood education and care. london, uk: routledge. whitty, p. (2009). towards designing a post-foundational curriculum document. in l. iannacci & p. whitty, (eds.). early childhood curricula: reconceptualist perspectives. calgary, ab: detselig. https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/06/06/ontario-commits-to-universally-accessible-child-care.html https://www.thestar.com/news/queenspark/2017/06/06/ontario-commits-to-universally-accessible-child-care.html https://www.childcareontario.org/big_news_for_child_care_in_the_2018_budget https://www.childcareontario.org/big_news_for_child_care_in_the_2018_budget https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwukm_-d8ve https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mwukm_-d8ve passionate about early childhood educational policy, practice, and pedagogy 23 about the authors jane hewes was co-principal investigator of action research at macewan university to create and animate flight: alberta's early learning and care framework. she continues to explore early childhood curriculum, play pedagogies and approaches to professional learning in ecec at thompson rivers university in british columbia, canada, where she is associate dean in the faculty of education and social work. joanne lehrer is associate professor in the department of educational sciences at université du québec en outaouais. she is principal investigator in a research project titled “the multiplication of educational contexts for fouryear-olds, is it justified? a multicase institutional ethnography comparing four-yearold kindergarten programs and early childhood educational and care services” and coinvestigator in a number of early childhood research projects. her interests include the transition to school, working with families, emergent and innovative pedagogies, and social justice. patricia (tricia) lirette is an associate professor at macewan university (canada) and currently holds the position of department chair of human services and early learning. she is coprincipal investigator on the research team that is writing and researching flight: alberta’s early learning and care framework. her other research interests include child and family policy and applying the lens of institutional ethnography to inquiry in early childhood education. monica lysack is a professor of early childhood leadership at sheridan college, ontario, canada. she is principal investigator in the research project "strengthening the role of municipal delivery of early childhood education and care in canada: exploring policy innovations from denmark," driven by her ecec policy experience with provincial and federal governments. pam whitty is a professor of early childhood and critical studies at the university of new brunswick, fredericton, new brunswick, canada. over the past thirty years, she has coled numerous community-based action research projects in curriculum, literacies, and early childhood. the five of us are excited about working together, with other canadian colleagues, in the context of the snail project: sketching narratives of change in early childhood across canada, a social sciences and humanities research council of canada funded connection project. family literacy provides an effective response 5 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: taylor, denny (2019). family literacy provides an effective response to the u.n. sdgs and peacebuilding architecture. global education review, 6 (2). 5-9. family literacy provides an effective response to the u.n. sdgs and peacebuilding architecture denny taylor this article is grounded in: 1) forty years of successful family literacy initiatives academia; 2) a meta-analysis of these initiatives that has identified connections between the u.n. peacebuilding architecture and the global impact of family literacy on peacebuilding and the sdgs. the concept of “family literacy” originates in my 1970s research and is supported by four decades of peer-reviewed family literacy research. the concept is grounded in the recognition that the family is the originating and only organizing principle that all people share, and that all other divisions are secondary. today, there are locally defined family literacy projects throughout the world, providing real opportunities for countries to support a global family literacy peace project that could push down the risks confronting humanity. based upon forty years of field research and a meta-analysis of family literacy initiatives in u.n. member states, there are three interlinked evidence-based distinguishing objectives of practice that make family literacy an effective response to the sdgs/2030 agenda: first: family literacy programs provide access to literacy and academic opportunities for adults and children in vulnerable communities in most u.n. member states, including economically advanced countries such as the us where there is extreme inequality. second: family literacy programs provide a conduit to respond to the challenges identified by families, and empower them to overcome the problems negatively impacting their lives, including the trauma of war, the impact of hiv and aids, and the plight of refugees and displaced families. third: family literacy programs incorporate, in varying configurations, the u.n. sdgs based upon local circumstances and needs, including ending poverty, gender equality, life below the water, life on land, climate change, with peace and justice the overarching principle. a meta-analysis of family literacy in u.n. member states based on both qualitative and quantitative research provide significant evidence of how vital family literacy has become to increasing cohesion and reducing fragmentation within and between communities. the unifying factor is that, family literacy projects and initiatives recognize “the inherent dignity and the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world” as stated in the preamble of the 1948 universal declaration of human rights. however, there is little recognition of the positive impacts of family literacy as a viable, unifying approach to addressing local, regional, and global violence experienced every year by one billion children worldwide. thus, it makes eminent sense to locate sustaining peace efforts in family settings, working alongside children’s caregivers to ameliorate the often-violent circumstances in which they live their everyday lives. added to the merits of this proposition is the possibility that family literacy is one way that the u.n. can stay ahead of potential conflicts, fulfill some of the 6 global education review 6 (2) constitutive necessities for conflict prevention, and participate with people in local communities in sustaining peace initiatives. in communities around the world, challenges have been met and vulnerable people are building webs of caring and compassion that intersect and cross over, creating intricate patterns of hope and possibility for future generations in human societies. this is our common project on which we can all agree – the urgent need to live more peacefully. every effort should be given to sharing this family literacy peace work, with the intent of creating new frameworks for sustaining peace in human societies, whilst becoming more proactive in our responses to the destructive impacts on human societies caused by the ravages of war. the takeaway is that: 1) family literacy is a social science concept that is now ubiquitous as an organizing principle, a way of framing vital programs for children, their families, and communities throughout the world; and 2) family literacy has evolved into a peaceful way of increasing cohesion and reducing fragmentation by responding to local, regional, and global conflicts that are deleterious to the health and wellbeing, and even the survival of vulnerable families. this combination of proven factors creates many opportunities for locally defined innovative change that could be globally transformative in the spirit of the 2030 sdg agenda. it is inspiring testimony to the universal applicability of family literacy that stakeholders, including u.n. member states, u.n. officials, ngos, the private sector and academia, often form partnerships. the beneficiaries are families, especially women and children, displaced families, asylum seekers, refugees, survivors of armed conflict, and families in recovery from weather related catastrophes and other manmade disasters. often family literacy initiatives are locally defined. in moldova programs focus on supporting the roma, in south africa on knowledge-sharing on hiv and support for family members impacted by aids, and in iraq and afghanistan on children and adult family members experiencing ptsd. what is remarkable about the trajectory of family literacy is that it is in keeping with u.n. peacebuilding resolution adopted by the u.n. general assembly on april 27, 2016 (70/262) following a review of the u.n. peacebuilding architecture. the remainder of this brief paper will focus on the u.n. response to the resolution in a document, which is dated 12 may 2016, and is specific to agenda items 15 & 16 of the resolution adopted by the general assembly on 27 april 2016. the critical point here is that the metaanalysis of family literacy initiatives and projects in u.n. member states underscores the importance that recognition be given to the peace sustaining opportunities that family literacy creates to connect peacebuilding challenges with solutions at the local, regional and global scales. there is no doubt that family literacy has become a social science concept that is now ubiquitous as an organizing principle – a way of framing vital programs for children, their families, and communities throughout the world. however, it is worth emphasizing that the meta-analysis of family literacy projects and initiatives in u.n. states have also evolved into peaceful ways of increasing cohesion and reducing fragmentation by responding to many local, regional and global conflicts that are deleterious to the health and wellbeing and even survival of vulnerable families. this meta-analysis of the family literacy initiatives in u.n. member states and my 40 years of family literacy research in high poverty urban and rural locations, and in regions of armed conflict and catastrophic events provides family literacy provides an effective response 7 solid interlinked scientific evidence of the connections between the 70/262 review of the united nations peacebuilding architecture and the impact of family literacy on peacebuilding and sustainable development. family literacy initiatives:  “encourage coherence, synergies, and complementarities”  “recognize that development, peace and security, and human rights, are interlinked and mutually reinforcing”  respond to “the high human cost and suffering caused by armed conflicts”  recognize the importance “to save succeeding generations from the scourge of war”  “recognize and participate in the struggle to establish a just and lasting peace all over the world”  “ensure that the needs of all segments of the population are taken into account”  “encompass activities aimed at preventing the outbreak, escalation, continuation and recurrence of conflict, addressing root causes … moving towards recovery, reconstruction and development”  “stress that civil society can play an important role in efforts to sustain peace”  “promote sustained and sustainable economic growth, poverty eradication, social development, sustainable development”  support “gender equity and respect for, and protection of, human tights and fundamental freedoms”  “recognize also that the scale and nature of the challenge of sustaining peace calls for close strategic and operational partnerships … (including) civil society organizations, women’s groups, youth organizations”  “reaffirm the important role of women in peacebuilding and noting the substantial link between women’s full and meaningful involvement in efforts to prevent, resolve and rebuild from conflict and those efforts’ effectiveness and long-term sustainability, and stressing, in this regard, the importance of women’s equal participation in all efforts for maintenance and promotion of peace and security and the need to increase women’s role in decisionmaking with regard to conflict prevention and resolution and peacebuilding”  reaffirm also the important role youth can play in the prevention and resolution of conflicts and as a key aspect of the sustainability, inclusiveness and success of peacekeeping and peacebuilding efforts” family literacy is used to frame peace enhancing initiatives by most un member states, and meets the agreed upon resolution adopted by the general assembly 27 april 2016 and outlined in the 70/262 review of the united nations peacebuilding architecture. countries including afghanistan, nepal, and sub saharan africa offer village based family literacy programs, which seek to develop literacy in the context of community needs such as health, employment and family planning. in some countries family literacy initiatives are designed to reduce gender inequality and family violence, while in other countries family literacy programs focus on the amelioration of psychological and emotional traumas resulting from armed conflict and the support of family members physically disabled by war. for example, family literacy peace enhancing programs have been established to:  respond to the needs and concerns about health, employment and family planning (afghanistan; albania; sub saharan africa)  respond to the psychosocial needs of women (afghanistan; egypt)  respond to war trauma and ptsd (afghanistan; iraq) 8 global education review 6 (2)  respond to issues of child labor, family violence, and other life adversities (afghanistan)  establish literacy programs for socially excluded families (bosnia and herzegovina)  establish literacy and peace education classes for families (iraq)  establish literacy programs, especially for women and girls who want to attend schools and literacy classes in order to lead a peaceful and better life (iraq; bangladesh)  establish programs empowering rural women to develop literacy skills through the writing and documenting of their own poetry as a cultural resource that is valued both locally and nationally (yemen)  establish programs in low-literacy regions, e.g. with families in the deeplyrural, under-resourced mountain valleys of kwazulu-natal (south africa)  create home based programs to engage with families in literacy activities (south africa)  create literacy centers of care for vulnerable children and mothers (south africa)  combat hiv and aids through informational literacy activities (south africa)  establish family and community literacy programs for children isolated and needlessly separated from their families (armenia)  encourage family literacy for boys and girls living in poverty by developing basic literacy and using “communication technology” (azerbaijan)  develop family literacy programs for young children working to contribute to family incomes (bangladesh) highlighted here are the family literacy initiatives in un member states. family literacy has also become conduit for the peaceful relocation of refugees and economic migrants in canada, the u.s., and many countries in europe, especially germany and sweden. in many economically advantaged countries family literacy programs are available, especially for mothers and children learning new languages and life skills so that they can survive and thrive in the new places that have become their home. family literacy is also integral to and in keeping with the un sustainable development goals. a systematic analysis of the family literacy initiatives undertaken by un member states indicates that family literacy is used in most countries in ways that are in keeping with the un sustainable development goals. most importantly, family literacy initiatives are used to promote just, peaceful and inclusive societies. the focus of worldwide family literacy initiatives on many of the other 17 sustainable development goals (sdgs) is also both remarkable and profound:  goal 1: no poverty  goal 2: zero hunger  goal 3: good health and well-being  goal 4: quality education  goal 5: gender equality  goal 6: clean water and sanitation  goal 7: affordable and clean energy  goal 8: decent work and economic growth  goal 9: industry, innovation and infrastructure  goal 10: reduced inequality  goal 11: sustainable cities and communities  goal 12: responsible consumption and production  goal 13: climate action  goal 14: life below water  goal 15: life on land  goal 16: peace and justice strong institutions  goal 17: partnerships to achieve the goal most family literacy initiatives in un member states are conceptually plural, and are focused on ending poverty and hunger, and on promoting good health and wellbeing. the majority of initiatives have as their mission https://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/?page_id=6226&preview=true http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal2.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal3.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal4.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal5.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal6.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal7.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal8.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal8.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal9.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal9.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal10.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal11.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal11.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal12.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal12.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal13.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal14.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal15.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal16.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal16.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal17.html http://www.un.org/development/desa/disabilities/envision2030-goal17.html family literacy provides an effective response 9 inclusive quality education, gender equality, climate action, peace and justice, and revitalizing partnerships for the goals. most include programs especially for girls and women. connecting family literacy with peacebuilding and sustainable development will change the ways in which un member states and civil society think about the future of humanity. equally important is the opportunity for the extraordinary trajectory of family projects and initiatives, which provides frameworks for public education that embrace the global effort to reimagine the public school experiences of children, ensures they have a sustainable future, and do not become endlings on a less hospitable planet. about the author denny taylor is a lifelong activist and scholar committed to nurturing the imagination and human spirit. in 1983, taylor published family literacy, which is regarded a classic in the field; growing up literate received the mla shaughnessy award in 1988; and toxic literacies, published in 1996, was nominated for both the pulitzer prize and the national book award. in 2004, taylor was inducted into the ira's reading hall of fame. she is professor emeritus of literacy studies at hofstra university, and the founder and ceo of garn press. 104 global education review 4 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: tobin, kathleen a. (2017). how to explain subject matter while teaching all learners to think, read, and write critically. [review of the book preparation for critical instruction by victor p. maiorana]. global education review, 4 (4). 104-106. book review how to explain subject matter while teaching all learners to think, read, and write critically “preparation for critical instruction” by victor p. maiorana by kathleen a. tobin victor maiorana laments that although public instruction in the united states is rooted in the early sixteenth century and teacher training in the early eighteenth century, the nation severely lacks preparation in critical instruction. if this is indeed the case, and maiorana argues convincingly that it is, the problem is even greater given the current weight assigned to the value of critical thinking in our schools, especially by stakeholders cited in association of american colleges and universities (aacu) reports, for example, advocating for initiatives like liberal education and america’s promise (leap). if, as the aacu asserts, society needs critical thinkers and employers hire graduates who can think, something must be done to ensure teachers can do what it takes to get students there. further— and very importantly—maiorana reminds us that thinking lies at the basis of all learning. it need not be detached from the essentials of reading, writing, listening, speaking, comprehension, or calculation. to some degree, preparation for critical instruction speaks to scholars in the field of education more readily than to instructors across the disciplines who might gain from maiorana’s work. however, he makes two very important points that can benefit all who wish to carry out this task in professional practice. first, instructors should acknowledge that it is natural for humans to think critically; this is not something alien or complicated that needs to be imposed or forced on students. consequently, instructors should view their students as ready to think and acquire skills needed to foster this with relative ease. second, critical instruction can be accomplished more effectively when it is subject-based. for those in seemingly incongruent disciplines, the approach to critical instruction can (and should) be grounded in what teachers already know about their subjects. an instructor is naturally immersed in subject matter, particularly at the post-secondary level, teaching all learners to think, read, and write critically 105 and wants to convey knowledge about the subject to students. however, this immersion in knowledge can also create a framework for asking the right questions and developing effective assignments where instructors can operate with confidence. these two main points are instrumental to expanding the practice of critical instruction, because they take discussion of this expertise more freely beyond the limits of academic pedagogy and into the hands of teachers in an array of areas. maiorana first introduces readers to the language of instruction and instructional strategies, techniques, and methods that have been used widely by traditional and creative teachers. here, he touches on concepts that may likely be familiar to all instructors when they consider critical thinking: explaining, analyzing, and problem solving initiated through approaches such as experiential learning, role playing, simulation, and debate. however, he argues, these are limited in scope and effectiveness “if the underlying instructional thinking strategy is weak” (p. 4). the strength of instructional thinking strategy, maiorana argues, requires an understanding of what he terms “subject matter universals” and “mind grammar” (p. 5). the most important universal is the subject matter objective, which is essentially the meaning, purpose, or function of the subject matter. mind grammar, says maiorana, is the “innate, systematic, and patterned way that the human mind develops and encounters the world and all its subject matter,” and it provides the means to critically understand it (p. 5). as complex as this might seem to faculty not well-versed in contemporary examinations of critical thinking in the academic field of education, it principally simplifies the ways in which we might include it in our teaching. for example, i know deeply what the meaning, purpose, and function are of my own field—history—and i have a good understanding of how the human mind encounters it. for me, that is not the case for science, math, literature, or a myriad of other subjects. i may be interested in them and respectfully value the work of my colleagues in adding to the holistic edification of my students, but i am not passionate enough about them, or immersed enough in them, to make a notable difference in those areas. secondary education majors, and perhaps even more so elementary education majors, may more commonly examine numerous subjects and note the ways in which the human mind encounters them. for those of us embedded in one area of expertise and with little to no grounding in pedagogy, we may not know fully the purpose of others’ disciplines or how the human mind develops in those areas. i know what history is and why my students should know it, how they should know it, and what questions i might ask in my investigations of it. i also know enough to understand the variations in purpose regarding united states history, latin american history, hispanic-american history, and latina history. i believe maiorana is correct in encouraging faculty to begin where they are in this respect. by reminding us that this kind of thinking is innate, the task of getting our students to think critically feels much less daunting. chapters 7 and 8 of preparation for critical instruction encourage teachers to revisit ways in which we approach the use of reading and writing—essential across the disciplines—by infusing critical comprehension and critical explanation with an acknowledgment of mind grammar where appropriate. for example, written material should not be read passively and simply for information; rather, the reader should take intellectual charge of textual material (p. 89). writing need not take a conventionally logical form that may be chronological, comparative, hierarchical, or taxonomic; rather, it might include an analysis of subject matter objectives and consequences 106 global education review 4 (4) (p. 103). certainly, good teachers have known and practiced this for quite some time, so perhaps they might benefit from “subject universals” and “mind grammar” workshops centering on proposals set forth by maiorana. he does present a number of questions at the end of each chapter (for example, “why does one revise a draft?” and “what is proofreading, and what does it aim to accomplish?”) designed to evoke an examination of one’s own teaching (p. 112). simply asking these questions of ourselves as instructors or of our students seems more valuable than simply directing the acts of proofreading and revising. however, further discussion among colleagues might facilitate a better understanding and application of some of maiorana’s more intricate prescriptions. in all, preparation for critical instruction is thought provoking and particularly useful for instructors at secondary and post-secondary levels who wish to scrutinize and refresh their work. it has become increasingly important to include critical instruction in the classroom and devise ways to assess critical thinking among students, so any assistance from experts is appreciated. maiorana’s perspectives should be considered, and reading his work may well be a step in the right direction. “preparation for critical instruction: how to explain subject matter while teaching all learners to think, read, and write critically.” by victor p. maiorana. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4758-2541-1 about the author victor p. maiorana earned his doctorate in curriculum and instruction at new york university, for which he won a scholarship and leadership award, and a research award, for his work on critical thinking and subject matter comprehension. he is the originator of mind grammar for subject matter, which develops and applies the mind’s innate ability to think critically to reading, writing, and comprehending content in all disciplines. about the reviewer kathleen a. tobin earned her ph.d. in history from the university of chicago and teaches united states and latin american history at purdue university northwest. she has served on the indiana commission of higher education and subsequently indiana’s statewide transfer and articulation committee, and is currently heading her campus department of history and philosophy and the office of international affairs. she is serving as vice president of the indiana association of history. she loves all things related to teaching and learning. 74 global education review 5(4) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: schmiedebach, mario & wegner, class (2018). the influence of content-learning on the integration perspectives of international students in germany. global education review, 5 (4), 74-93. the influence of content-learning on the integration perspectives of international students in germany mario schmiedebach bielefeld university, germany claas wegner bielefeld university, germany abstract new students arriving from different countries present a challenge to school systems as language barriers prevent them from being placed in regular classes immediately. in germany, these students are often enrolled in “international classes” before being placed with their fellow classmates. the project “biology for everyone” teaches science to secondary students entering the german school system using actionoriented learning, which helps to increase content-knowledge and develop language ability. the concomitant research examines this process in international classes using 17 interviews, which focus on the students’ transition using mayring’s qualitative content analysis. results show that students value the help of content-learning material as it encourages them to participate. moreover, action-oriented tasks help them understand science before learning the specific vocabulary that is needed to talk about science. additionally, the importance of providing a safe environment with a good support structure is crucial as students often describe language-use anxiety and negative experiences in their regular class. keywords immigrant students, integration, science education, “biology for everyone”, preparation classes, contentlearning, clil, second language learning, second language motivation, germany, secondary school introduction in recent years, the number of immigrant students entering the german school system has increased tremendously. especially, with the rise in asylum requests, schools face the challenge of educating a large number of students who do not speak german, or at least not well enough to participate in the regular classroom immediately (meisterfeld, 2016, p. 1; bundesamt für migration und flüchtlinge, 2017, p. 3). educational programs for these students vary depending on the federal state and the school. these students are commonly educated in separate classes, which are often called international classes, welcome classes, or preparation classes which help foster language acquisition before full integration into regular classes with german students takes place (mercator-institut, 2015, p. 12). ahrenholz, fuchs and birnbaum (2016) portray different models of educating newly arrived students ____________________________________ corresponding author mario schmiedebach, faculty of biology, universitätsstraße 25, 33615 bielefeld, germany. email: mario.schmiedebach@uni-bielefeld.de mailto:email:%20mario.schmiedebach@uni-bielefeld.de mailto:email:%20mario.schmiedebach@uni-bielefeld.de the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 75 figure 1. models to educate and integrate international students based on ahrenholz et al., 2016. which differ in two aspects: the time needed to integrate into regular classes and the number of subjects taught in international classes (cf. figure 1). preparatory classes may be offered for students to attend before they are transferred into regular classes. the transfer takes place usually after two years of learning german1. preparatory classes may also include both language lessons and subject content. content varies depending on the school and the teachers, as no mandatory curriculum is available. the last two models suggest that integration into regular classes should take place directly after a period of time. however, a partial integration model may be initiated by gradually starting with subjects like physical education, art, and music in the regular classes, and adding additional subjects over time. the full integration model involves integration from the start, where new students are placed in regular classes but receive additional language lessons. this model is usually only found in primary schools (ahrenholz et al., 2016, pp. 2-3). the integration of content learning and language acquisition can often be found in bilingual programs (e.g., teaching biology in english or french) using the acronym clil2. current clil projects usually focus on teaching foreign languages but not on second language acquisition3. the most significant characteristic of clil is a dual-focused approach on content and language. the eligibility of science as a clil subject has been highlighted by previous research, as science can be experienced in an approachable manner and therefore limits the obstacle of language barriers (bohn, 2013, p. 287). science education research has shown that hands-on activities accelerate the learning process (fries & rosenberger, 1973, p. 12) and that experimenting creates conversation as students interact with each other to discuss hypotheses and explain observations. social and communicative skills are positively influenced not only by the use of experiments but by working with animals as well (gropengießer, 2006; wagener, 1992, p. 122). furthermore, previous studies have shown that working with animals has a beneficial effect on intuitive, emotional, and reflexive processes (e.g., schröder et al., 2009; gebhard, 2013, p. 133). using an action-oriented approach, language acquisition can easily be integrated and promoted. to evaluate the potential of clil in second language learning, our research looks at students’ motivation in science and german 76 global education review 5(4) using guideline-based interviews in a gradual integration model. science education for newly arrived students dressler and gereluke (2017) provide an extensive literature review about the educational situation of refugee students. factors such as background context, community and partnership support, and various international school systems and their responses all contribute to suggestions facilitating refugee student support (dressler & gereluk, 2017, p. 9). keeping these in mind, we aim to discuss how science education in the project “biology for everyone” affects new students. the project “biology for everyone” the project “biology for everyone” was established in the summer of 2016 by the biology didactic department at bielefeld university. it reinforced the importance of teaching science in preparation classes for new students using active learning to help foster language acquisition. it is currently in use at two partner schools in the east westphalialippe region in germany. mario schmiedebach developed the teaching materials and provided training for teachers to teach science education in these classes. with the assistance of a master’s student, he investigated the success of this pilot project to create a set of field-tested teaching units for other schools. since a mandatory science curriculum for international classes does not exist, the teachers chose the topics of the science lessons, often using the national science curriculum to allow newly arrived students to become familiar with the topics in the regular classes. topics that included hands-on tasks were preferred as they increase motivation and foster language acquisition (schmiedebach & wegner, 2018b). however, one major obstacle was that international classes are heterogeneous in age, often including students from 11 to 17 years of age. therefore, it was impossible to teach age-appropriate topics from the science curriculum to an entire class. action-oriented tasks ease integration leisen (2015) postulates four levels of languageuse based on gibbon’s model (2006) and describes how language can transition from “action” to “erudite” in the classroom. both linguistic and content complexity increase throughout the task, which gradually leads students to a higher level of abstraction4. students encounter an interactive scientific phenomenon, use group-work to discuss the subject using their own words (which can either be in their native language or in german), and often point directly to the object. using actionassociated language, they do not need technical terms as they are able to talk with their peers using the linguistic resources they already feel comfortable with (leisen, 2015, p. 132; cf. figure 2). since they can physically show what they are referring to, they do not need to include correct terms or full sentences (gibbons, 2006, p. 272). figure 2. from action to erudite language (part i) based on leisen, 2015, pp. 132. the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 77 figure 3. from action to erudite language (part ii) based on leisen 2015, p. 132. action-reporting language allows the entire class to describe the observed phenomenon in a discussion. during this phase, phrases like “and then… and then… and then…” are distinctive and students are not able to refer to the materials as the materials may no longer be present. with the help of the teacher, important phrases and technical terms can be introduced to describe the prior action properly (leisen, 2015, pp. 132). this allows them to take the next step into converting the prior experience into writing (cf. figure 3). the final step involves reading a technical text about the observed phenomenon (leisen, 2015, pp. 132). as the students have already learned the language behind the scientific concept, they should now be able to understand the essentials from a textbook by associating the text with their observations. throughout this process, students’ vocabulary and linguistic register build up until they use erudite language (e.g., using technical terms after they have encountered them in person). motivation in second language acquisition: the learning situation within the realm of second language acquisition, researchers concentrate on aspects such as developmental routes of grammatical structures (diehl et al., 2000), typical errors (bialystok & hakuta, 1994), the influence of the first language (e.g., müller, kupisch, schmitz & cantone, 2011), and some “big hypotheses” surrounding second language acquisition (fischer, 2014, pp. 14-19). although it is controversial that these serve as a “solitary solution,” they still form the basis of second language acquisition theories. the contrastive analysis hypothesis (initiated by fries 1945, developed further by lado 1957) is one of the first theories about second language acquisition. the key aspect is that the first language (l1) influences the second language (l2) acquisition in terms of acquiring similar rules and structures (lado, 1957, pp. 2). however, klein (1984) postulates an opposing statement, as predictions of learning difficulties are not always accurate; it is possible for divergent structures to be easily acquired (klein, 1984, p. 38; meisel, 2000, p. 187). although there is no theory that is consistently agreed on, it is known that learners use their linguistical resources when learning a new language. the l2 acquisition = l1 acquisition hypothesis (dulay & burt, 1972, 1974) suggests that a small amount of l2 errors derive from contrasts between the l1 and l2. moreover, they argue that the l2 acquisition is determined by the l2 itself; learning a language as a l1 or a l2 does not influence the sequence of acquiring 78 global education review 5(4) certain syntactic structures. fischer (2014) points out a problem of this theory; the basic assumption of similarities between l1 and l2 learners concerning specific acquisition areas may facilitate language learning nearly, however, the strong emphasis on “universal regularities” does not seem appropriate. selinker’s interlanguage hypothesis (selinker, 1972) states that second language speech rarely conforms to what one expects native speakers of the [target language] to produce, that it is not an exact translation of the [native language], that it differs from the [target language] in systematic ways, and that that the forms of utterances produced in second language by a learner are not random. (selinker, swain & dumas, 1975, pp. 140). this hypothesis combines with the previous one as it acknowledges the influence of the l1 on the l2 (contrastive analysis hypothesis) and on errors arising from the l2 (l2 acquisition = l1 acquisition hypothesis). furthermore, it places an emphasis on aspects developed by learners that are both dependent and independent on the l1 and l2. in this case, the five major processes important for second language acquisition are language transfer, transfer-of-training, strategies of secondlanguage learning, strategies of second-language communication, and overgeneralization of target language linguistic material (selinker, 1972, p. 215). nowadays, researchers tend to focus on single factors and their role on second language acquisition. when taken from a practical perspective, one notices individual successes which cannot be solely explained by the “big hypotheses”, but instead may be described by external and internal factors. external factors include the age and the timespan of language learning, whereas internal factors consist of motivation and cognitive abilities. these have an impact on language learning and can reinforce language acquisition (dörnyei, 2005, pp. 7-8; riemer, 2010, p. 168; fischer, 2014, p. 13). motivational aspects have been highly researched in this field; however, the focus has been on systematic language acquisition in foreign language classes and largely neglects motivation concerning migration5 (fischer, 2014, p. 3). our project focuses on motivational aspects concerning the effects of clil on the transition of the international class into the regular school system. our qualitative research consists of guideline-based interviews using the theoretical framework of dörnyei’s second language acquisition motivation theory (1994). his theory covers basic components influencing language acquisition motivation on the following levels (dörnyei, 1994, p. 279): • language level: the language with its specific structures (e.g., (dis)liking the language, interest in foreign cultures) • learner level: the individual with their own characteristics (e.g., selfconfidence, self-efficacy) • learning situation level: the learning environment (e.g., teacher, syllabus) as our project creates a learning situation, the third level is of utmost interest and is depicted in more depth. this level is divided into three different parts: the course-specific, the teacher-specific, and the group-specific motivational component (dörnyei, 1994, p. 277). the course-specific motivational component concerns the curriculum, teaching materials, exercises, and methods. dörnyei the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 79 integrated findings of crookes and schmidt (1991) to create four subcategories of interest, relevance, expectancy, and satisfaction. the subcategory interest describes the individual’s intrinsic motivation to find out more about his surroundings. relevance highlights perceived benefits to achieve individual goals and needs in order to achieve a high level of relevance, student’s preconceptions and a focus on scientific explanations in daily life needs to be included. the third subcategory (expectancy) describes the perceived probability of success in tasks and understanding the content. by working from an action-oriented approach, it is assumed that the students understand scientific concepts first before being exposed to technical terms and complex texts. furthermore, support from the teacher and fellow classmates can increase the expectancy to succeed. the last subcategory of the course-specific motivational component is satisfaction. the satisfaction in succeeding can consist of both intrinsic (e.g., the joy of experimenting) or extrinsic (e.g., working hard to get good grades) motives (dörnyei, 1994, pp. 277-278). the teacher-specific motivational component takes the teacher’s personality, teaching style, relationship towards the students, and feedback into account. this component consists of the three subcategories of affiliative drive, authority type, and the direct socialization of motivation (dörnyei, 1994, p. 277). although this component is crucial to consider when looking at motivation, our article does not focus on specific actions of the teacher in detail (see montalvo, mansfield & miller, 2007 for the motivational impact of teachers). the last component of the learning situation level is the group-specific motivational component, which consists of the subcategories goal-orientedness, norm and reward system, group cohesion, and classroom goal structure (dörnyei, 1994, p. 278). goal-orientedness describes the extent a group will go to achieve the same goal (e.g., learning a foreign language). if the group has a common goal they can identify with, orientedness has a positive effect on foreign language motivation (schlak et al., 2002, p. 3). the norm and reward system describes to what extent certain behaviors have been established as accepted norms in a class (e.g., doing homework). the factor group cohesion describes the strength of the link between the group members to each other and towards the group as a whole (dörnyei, 1994, pp. 279). strong group cohesion has a positive influence on motivation since each group member feels responsible for the group’s success. classroom goal structure can either be competitive (the students work against each other and only the best ones are rewarded), cooperative (students share the work and each member is responsible and therefore, benefits from the group’s success) or individualistic (students work separately, and other students’ performances does not affect an individual’s success) (dörnyei, 1994, p. 278). several studies have shown that cooperative goal structures are more beneficial for motivation than the other two (e.g., johnson et al., 1981; slavin, 1988; julkunen, 1989). the learning situation in international science classes is our leverage point. results from previous interviews reveal positive evaluations and an increase in motivation (schmiedebach & wegner, 2018b). however, since international class students in the two partner schools gradually transition into the regular school system, they experience two different learning situation levels. they are placed in international classes with other new students studying german and in the “biology for everyone” program, but they are also interacting with german students in regular classes and do not have lessons exclusively 80 global education review 5(4) tailored to their needs. therefore, this study puts an emphasis on the student’s perception of both learning situations. method – research in “biology for everyone” research questions the sample of students to be interviewed was intentionally selected to reflect the heterogeneity of international students regarding age, country of origin, and language competency (nilsson & axelsson, 2013, p. 142). teachers in the international classes consider the student diversity while teaching and many have additional qualifications. there may not be as much language awareness in regular classes. teachers have to teach the curriculum and prepare their students for exams during the school year. therefore, recently immigrated students might not receive as much help in the regular classes as they would need; moreover, some students might not be able to understand the content as they may not have had continuous prior schooling, and thus lack prerequisite knowledge in comparison to their german classmates. as a consequence, the following research questions were formulated: • how do the students perceive the different learning situations in the international and the regular class in regard to content learning and integration by the teacher and the classmates? • how do the students evaluate the clilconcept of the science lessons? • how do the students evaluate the concept of transitioning from action language to erudite language? • how do the students value their transition into the regular class? data collection the project currently takes place in two classes at two secondary schools in bielefeld (with 16 and 18 students, respectively) and is part of a larger longitudinal study (schmiedebach & wegner, 2018b). initial interviews focused on a general evaluation of the science lessons, whereas the interviews depicted in this article concentrate on how the different learning situations affect international students. the students were selected for the study were because of their level of language competence. consent to participate was obtained for all students from a legal guardian. as language competence improved over time, more students were added to participate in this study. since the interviews were conducted in german, the interviewees had to be able to communicate in german at a basic level in order to understand the questions and answer properly. the heterogeneity of the group, concerning age, country of origin, language proficiency, prior schooling, and enrollment in the german school system, was displayed by the selection of the participants as far as possible (cf. table 1). as it is a longitudinal study and the results presented in this article consist of the second interview survey, some students were interviewed for the first time since they had not fulfilled the requirements at the time of the first interviews. the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 81 table 1 gender, age, country of origin, native language (l1)and date of enrollment of participants. participant gender age country of origin l1 enrollment in the german school system cefr survey 1 (dec./nov. 2016) survey 2 (june/july 2017) 1 m 12 iraq kurdish may 2016 b1 y y 2 f 14 kazakhstan russian may 2016 b1 y y 3 m 16 syria kurdish november 2015 a2 y y 4 f 14 iraq kurdish march 2016 b1 y y 5 m 13 croatia croatian march 2016 a2 y y 6 f 14 iraq kurdish not specified b1 y y 7 f 12 iraq kurdish not specified a2 y y 8 m 16 syria arabic november 2015 b1 y y 9 f 13 iraq kurdish april 2016 a2 y n 10 f 14 iraq kurdish may 2016 b1 y y 11 f 16 iraq kurdish may 2016 b1 y y 12 f 17 kenia swahili may 2016 a2 y y 13 m 13 russia russian may 2016 a2 y y 14 f 16 croatia croatian, albanian, serbian march 2016 a2 n y 15 m 16 iraq/ kurdistan kurdish may 2016 a2 n y 16 f 11 iraq arabic march 2016 a1 n y 17 f 15 iraq kurdish april 2016 a2 n y 18 m 17 iraq kurdish february 2016 a1 n y note: language level refers to the common european framework of reference for languages (cefr); a1 is the lowest level, c2 refers to a native speaker. participation in the first and second interview survey is indicated by “y”. the research questions were examined using guideline-based interviews from ten female and seven male students. one trialinterview was conducted beforehand to test the narrating impulses of the interview guideline for linguistic and content-based intelligibility; the student used for the trial-interview was used for the trial-interview of the first survey as well. all interviews took place in a private room in the school by the same interviewer in both interview studies to ensure comparability. during the interviews, students had access to dictionaries in their native language and questions could be repeated, paraphrased, or skipped if necessary. of particular analytical interest were the following guiding questions: during the week you are sometimes in a german class. how is the education in the german class? what tasks do you get in the regular class? do you prefer the regular or the international class and why? what do you think about having science in the international class? should that be mandatory for all international classes and why? interviews were recorded with an olympus ls-14 recorder as *.mp3-files lasting between 16min, 54sec and 30min, 46sec. afterwards, they were anonymously transcribed with the program f4 according to standards 82 global education review 5(4) described by kuckartz et al. (2008). the transcribed interviews were analyzed by mayring’s qualitative content analysis using the method of summarizing (mayring, 2010, pp. 6568), which looks at each case separately using three main steps of paraphrasing, generalizing, and categorizing. the interview guideline categories were formed inductively from the interview data, but they were influenced by dörnyei’s second language motivation theory. therefore, the analysis covers general aspects from dörnyei’s model (e.g., group-specific motivational component) but links them to the specific setting of our research project (e.g., comparing the international and regular class as two different learning groups the students encounter with). results and discussion perspectives on learning in the international class since the international classes consist of a variety of students with different backgrounds, cognitive abilities, and language competencies, the perspectives of the learning situations within the class is broad. the heterogeneity of the class can cause boredom as participant 2 describes. since she was able to quickly pick up german and knows a lot of math due to her previous education, she feels bored: p2 ehm (..) for me eh some […] german lessons […] is (then?) a bit easy, because i finished a1, a1, a3// eh no b1 in the first year […] but [other classmates, ms] finished only eh a2 half and for me (it was?) too easy because (…) i already knew too much and ehm (.) the same with math. heterogeneity is obvious when looking at the participant’s background; students from eastern europe had a steady education and are pretty much equivalent (or better) to the german students concerning contentknowledge. refugee children could not attend school for a certain time period and, therefore, lag behind in content-knowledge. moreover, it is not surprising that students with a large age range do not have the same content knowledge in math. the participants have interesting views on content-learning in the international class. participant 3 suggests that students should know some basic german before being taught subjects other than german in the international class. however, he agrees that it is beneficial to have content-learning as a preparation tool before getting transferred to a regular class. participant 7 adds that you learn german throughout the biology lessons; moreover, she talks about being like “other kids”. although the students depict the international class as a relaxing learning environment where they have a common goal and a safe place to learn, most students have the desire to transition into the regular class (nilsson & axelsson, 2013, pp. 152). by having biology in the international class, they have one subject “like the german kids” in common, which can cause them to feel like a regular student: i and why (.) is it important to have biology lessons? p7 in biology on// one can learn more german because normal class goes (.) then they can do biology like the other kids, the german kids (.) and math as well but (.) i don’t like math (laughs) participant 4 explains the advantages of contentlearning in the international class; she is already partially integrated into the regular class and has science lessons with her german classmates. since topics from the national science curriculum have been chosen, the students learn the concepts, words, and content they need once they have integrated. she already knows scientific words like carbon dioxide from the international class and this helps her follow lessons in the regular class: p4 ehm (.) the ehm (.) the good thing is, here in biology we learn many, many words, which the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 83 are useful for other eh (..) eh subjects (.) and eh (.) for example will i have done [in my regular science class, ms] something about trees and carbon dioxide and oxygen and then have i// i have eh learned more in the// in the international class as well. furthermore, it is helpful to have similar tasks in the international and the regular class. participant 2 explained this when writing a lab report in “biology for everyone.” although it was difficult, she liked it because she had to do it in her german chemistry class as well; she stated that it helps to do it in the international class beforehand, so she knows what she has to expect and, therefore, might feel more comfortable. the students know that having science lessons in the international class is rare. participant 13 argued that “many schools […] think eh biology is not as important (.) as (.) languages (.) as the german language for the international class”. however, the students in the project describe the advantage of learning science and language at the same time. they learn a lot of words that they probably would not have with their german textbook and, therefore, the project prepares them for the regular classes. when asking the students if they want to have more subjects in the international class, a lot of them wished to have english. despite the fact that one might argue that arts, music and p.e. are eligible subjects for the international class since they might not require as much languageuse as others, participant 2 summed up why the international class does not need those subjects: p2 […] i don’t need art and p.e., which we already had in the international class, because i can do those subjects in the normal class and eh (.) i have difficulties with physics in the normal class now […] subjects that might be easy to teach in the international class should not be considered just because they simplify the teacher’s work. p.e., arts, and music might be a good starting point to help transition students into the regular class as they are easier to follow and have a lot of practical work. however, subjects like (social) science also offer the chance to prepare students for the regular classroom with not only content but also specific linguistic structures needed for different subjects (e.g., writing a lab report, talking about diagrams, etc.). language barrier as an obstacle to students’ potential content-learning in the international class is evaluated positively as it increases participation in the regular classroom. nevertheless, language is still seen as a barrier. it might be frustrating for students with a decent educational background as they already know the content; however, they may not be able to express it in german yet. they recognize the topics, they might even know the experiments and the answers to the tasks, but the lack of german hinders them (p12’s interview was conducted partly in english). p12 #oh# it's not that difficult. (4) they only thing// the only thing that make it difficult is (.) language. […] i so if they would be in english (...) how about then? are they then// (.) would #it be more easier?# p12 #yeah it will be//# yes most students are eager to show what they know and understand but they often see their linguistic diversity as a barrier. moreover, students with prior science education experiences felt that their lessons were harder in their previous schools than in the international class. participant 3 understands that they do not speak german well enough to understand very complex scientific content, so they have to stick to basic lessons. therefore, his prior science education is evaluated as having been more difficult: 84 global education review 5(4) i did you have biology lessons in syria as well? p3 of course, but it was very dif// more difficult […] here (..) eh (.) the problem is we don’t cover the (.) very (..) not so difficult things […] because we not german can and there is// well we can speak german but there are some words yet we cannot veil of oblivion language is not the only aspect that makes it difficult for students to reveal their full potential. another factor is migration background, as they have experienced difficult and horrific situations in the previous months and years. a “veil of oblivion” prevents them from remembering prior experiences: p4 yes of course. in iraq i don’t have// eh to memory […] that is (.) what (we?) learned// well what (.) happened with us wasn’t easy […] and eh i have forgotten everything, i was from four years not in the biology lessons as well […] and then i have everything/// (.) eh (.) eh repeated […] so this makes me happy (laughs) she explains that she did not have biology for four years but that she is happy to repeat everything now. she forgot everything she had learned in iraq due to experiences that were not “easy.” similar descriptions can be found in the interview with participant 11. she wants to repeat and re-learn the content she has forgotten. although the psychological state of participants is confidential and therefore unknown, it is often the case that many refugee students have experienced traumatic events, causing impaired memory (cf. beers & de bellis, 2002; toth & cicchetti, 1998). learning by action the central concept of “biology for everyone” is its action-oriented approach designed to build up scholarly language step by step. many students have not experienced science education with the same kind of tasks and feel that they learn more about science by getting actively involved instead of reading, rehearsing, and reciting texts: p15 yes, because eh [with experiments] you can learn better (about?) it […] you can (.) remember better (..) yes not only (.) learn, learn, read and then (.) tell the teacher (.) ‘you have to do it like this, like this’ without mistakes and […] like eh (.) from (.) the book says (.) you have to say too. working in pairs or groups is another new learning experience for many students. participant 17 stated that she did not understand how to create an electric circuit, but with the help of her partner she finally understood. participant 10 described another innovative teaching method she did not experience before: p10 and [the teacher, ms] (.) takes from us the snail with because when maybe we have the snail, then one can see (.) how is it and which color it has, which foot (.) because we cannot speak german so well. […] then one can see, how it is, but in iraq, we don’t take the snail. […] #but here# that done. that is #difference.# i hence# in iraq you have only the book to learn and #here//# p10 #//and then# […] one has to explain, and we read, but here (.) we take the snail and then we look on our arm. the encounter with the snail was impressive and helpful to many students since they did not speak fluent german yet. using this approach to foster language acquisition and content learning was judged positively and described as an innovative teaching technique since nothing comparable had happened in her prior schooling. participant 12 underlines the the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 85 previous statements when she explains that you have to see and understand the content first before learning the language. this highlights our approach as the students encounter scientific content first before learning the appropriate language; they then start to understand it before putting it into words. p12 so, you see. you have to understand it. i and then you can learn the language? p12 ja. education in the regular classes: boredom, motivation, and language-use anxiety although most of the students have had experience in the regular classroom, the degree of education and knowledge varies within the regular classes. some students try hard and participate whenever they can even if it is just copying notes from the blackboard. however, this depends on motivation; students often work on their german homework because they feel frustrated when trying to understand the instructions in the regular class and do not succeed. many claim to be bored because they do not understand the language and cannot follow the lessons. the teachers tend to speak fast because they are not used to implementing any measures to support international students. i and how is it for you to be in the regular class? p5 good but sometimes is boring, because (.) eh they speak fast (.) and they don’t understand about what (.) they speak (.) some eh (.) a few words i understand but some not (..) and (.) then is boring then i do (.) homework from german (.) or from science or so. participant 5 wants to participate, but instead, he does his homework whenever the lesson gets too hard. this feeling is expressed by many others; participant 11 says that the regular class is “a bit difficult but (.) if you want to, one can accomplish everything.” the students show a strong desire to participate in the regular classroom despite possible obstacles. being in the regular classroom is generally seen as something good and valuable; none of the participants said that they did not want to be integrated into the regular school system. it is hard for many students to be integrated into the regular classes because they feel that their german is not sufficient enough. they want to learn german first before getting placed into the regular classroom: “it is so difficult, i rather want to learn german” (p7). it is important that the teachers support the students’ effort and make them feel comfortable using the foreign language. otherwise, the students might hesitate to participate, as described by participant 6: i okay (.) you’ve just said that it is sometimes hard to put your hands up in the (.) regular class. (.) can you explain why it is that way? p6 yes, because i think my german is not so good […] with me is i had said something, they don’t understand me i have to explain hundred times (.) and when they have understood not the problem. […] they say, that i say wrong or something i say “whatever” (.) i don’t put my hands up now but when i have (.) learned german well (.) yes of course i will put my hands up and […] like germans and certainly also better, because (.) i am in iraq was better too. she had negative experiences participating in class because the others could not understand her properly. as a result, they told her she was wrong and now she no longer wants to say anything. once she learns more german, she wants to participate because she is confident that she will be better than some german students since she was a good student in her 86 global education review 5(4) home country. problems like this have been described by several students and can be summarized as language use anxiety, however, the cause for each case may be different (e.g., negative experience before or low selfconfidence in general). p2 yes, i am (.) frightened to (.) go further, because i eh make many mistakes when i (.) speak and eh (.) for me that is not so (…) me don’t know how i can say that. i are you afraid to do mistakes concerning the content, thus saying something #biologically# wrong? p2 #yes# (.) no nothing #that i//# i #that you# are not able to say it in german correctly? p2 yes, for i ehm always doing grammatical mistakes. participant 2 clearly states that she is not afraid to make mistakes concerning content but afraid of making grammatical errors. speaking in front of native speakers may cause languageuse anxiety because in comparison, she is not afraid of speaking german in the international class. participant 4 thinks that her classmates are “germans, which can speak german better than her” and does not want to raise her hand in class at all. working for a future as mentioned before, the students value the help to integrate into regular classes. they want to resume their educational career and need to be integrated into the regular school. in order to receive the abitur6, students need to learn english. therefore, many would like to have english lessons in the international class to catch up with their classmates who have already had some years of english education. furthermore, english is seen as a useful language to know: p4 yes eh (.) because our problem is, when i// i have still one years (.) and then i have to eh (.) if i don’t know english and german well, i have to a// go maybe some in a trading school or (.) somewhere else and i need english in any case for the abitur degree […] and therefore, when we learn a little bit [english, ms] here, we can better when we on eh (.) th// eh go better regular class (.) understand, knowing a bit more. participant 4 states that her goal is to be fully integrated into the regular classes as soon as possible. she is motivated and wants to work hard to get the abitur instead of leaving the current school for an apprenticeship. participant 2 wants to stay at her academic secondary school since it offers some difficult topics that she wants to learn. her goal is to get the abitur as well because it offers more opportunities and she wants to later attend university. depending on age and language skills, some students get transferred to a trade school after the summer break. they hope to get a degree there in order to find work afterwards. the importance of learning german and finding a job eventually is portrayed by participant 15, an unaccompanied minor who received a suspension of deportation, but not an asylum yet: p15 […] i// i want to study ge// only german here […] i always have to go to school here (..) (unc., 1) (came?) be punctual (..) i’ve got bad asylum// asylum. he desperately wants to improve his german and continue his education in order to get a job here. he does not want to speak kurdish in his international class because he wants to concentrate on learning german. the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 87 social interactions in the international class social interactions in the international class are depicted positively. the students like their classmates and get along well. however, different cultures and languages can cause other problems, more specifically, the usage of the l1 (native language). participant 15 does not want to use his l1 because he focuses on german, although most students use their l1 frequently to help each other. the majority of the class speaks kurdish; however, it is not always clear if they use kurdish just to help each other: p12 […] when they want to gossip, they gossip in kurdish […] maybe they are talking about you and äh laughin there. (..) it's not good. participant 12 believes that the other children use kurdish whenever they want to gossip. therefore, she does not like them to use their l1 and argues that kurdish is not a foreign language offered in school. she explains that she speaks english every once in a while, as teachers understand what she says, and this is an important subject in school. participant 12 complains about the noise in the international class since a lot of her classmates talk during the lessons and it is hard for her to concentrate on the exercises. participant 14 reports about an incident in the international class when it was really loud in the german class: p14 [our ik-teacher, ms] is very nice and she speaks with eh (..) the class nice and so and they make it ugly and (..) and then i have// i have thinked and i have said “oh god, what are they doing?” […] “why they make sad [our teacher, ms]?” some students cause a lot of trouble which disappoints the german teacher; participant 14 reflects on the behavior of her classmates and she does not understand why the other ones behave in this manner since the teacher is nice and well-liked by the students. trouble often arises due to cultural differences; the students often see each other as “kurds”, “yazidis” or “russians” as noticed by participant 13: p13 they want// they don’t have to be mean […] and be (.) very (.) nice […] the students from international class no matter what school […] russia or ku// kurdish (.) it doesn’t matter all nations same. he would like the students to understand each other better, despite different backgrounds or beliefs. the diversity in background not only increases multiculturalism in the international class, but the entire school as well. the current thinking of “nations” or “ethnic groups” in the international class seems to impede group cohesion. by internalizing the concept at everyone is the “same” (p13) the students may change their behavior and become friendlier to each other. being part of a regular class a feeling of how easily one can integrate depends on the individual, the teacher, and the fellow students in the regular class. on one hand, participant 10 loves her regular class. she likes to be there and feels accepted even though her german is not perfect. that feeling is caused by her german classmates who see her as a normal member of the class: p10 […] i have one friend// many friends, all are very nice, and we make come together […] i am a student as well they say, “no you’re a student too, no matter of you can’t speak german, just try it.” she feels supported by her class because they encourage her to speak german. this might have a positive effect on language-use anxiety. on the other hand, participant 14 describes a negative experience. in the beginning she had a nice german class where they talked to her and she felt welcomed. however, another 88 global education review 5(4) international student did not get along with their class, so they were forced to switch classes: p14 yes, i think [the regular class, ms] a bit good, a bit not, because eh (.) the kids don’t speak eh (.) i was in a different class once and the class was very nice […] and eh they speak with me and so, but [another student, ms] said “i don’t want that class, the class speaks out// not with me and i want another class” (.) and then [the teacher, ms] di// did say “okay, we make it different […] [you, ms] go in that class and you go from [her, ms] class.” […] and that was not good for me because eh she took my class […] and the kids were very, very nice with me, they had speaked and so […] and the oth// other class doesn’t speak with me. […] yes and that is a pity […] and that is a bit (.) was// i was sad a bit, because that [the teacher, ms] cannot do […] if that was my class […] and now is [the other student, ms] happy and i am sad, because the kids don’t speak with me and i cannot learn, but my// the other class, the kids have spoken to me, for example i didn’t understand, they explained […] and in this class they are not like this. the situation described above is not common, and the actions of the teacher can be criticized. however, it is hard being in a german class with children who do not speak or support a new student, especially if you are transferred to a class knowing that a previous student had the same problems. participant 14 felt so uncomfortable, that skipping is the only option she saw: p14 i want to do the german, but to (.) sometimes i just go home […] and i know that [the principal, ms] and [the teacher, ms] know […] when i go home, but (.) i say (.) ‘whatever’ because they did it (.) i didn’t do it, because first time my class was very nice […] and i always have gone in that class but this class is not very nice […] and eh i don’t go. she blames her teacher for her situation and still leaves school even when she knows that everyone is aware she is skipping class. it is a frustrating situation, since she wants to learn german and generally evaluated the regular class as positive. conclusion the aim of the study was to explore the different learning situations of recently immigrated students in the international class and in the regular class. these learning situations are complex and influenced by the learner, the other students, and the teacher. our first research question examined how the international students perceive the different learning situations. many enjoyed the international class while the other students worked towards the same goal. this shows that the students were goal oriented and that the majority of students were willing to improve their german. many students talked about their future goal being to either find work or receive a good degree. furthermore, the students enjoyed learning content in their international class because they felt free to participate as the teachers and fellow classmates might be more accepting of grammatical errors since they have established a common norm system. nilsson & axelsson (2013) presented similar findings in their study; the international classes “provide for language and academic development” (nilsson & axelsson, 2013, pp. 158). nevertheless, students with a decent level of prior schooling noticed that the content in the international class covered relatively easy topics due to insufficient language skills. language competency influences topic choice; heterogeneity in age and prior schooling background forces the teacher to teach certain topics, although the level of foreknowledge is often diverse (nilsson & axelsson, 2013, pp. 158). this causes boredom for some students, however they still value german with content-learning since it helps them prepare for the regular class and therefore has relevance to reach their goal. moreover, the the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 89 students appreciate to be taught like “normal students” in terms of covering topics from the national science curriculum. students positively evaluate the concept of action-oriented tasks. some contrast it with their schooling experience in their home country since they have not experienced some of these teaching methods before. furthermore, they say that it helps them understand science before learning the specific language; this approach of developing academic language through action language increases the likelihood of success in the science lessons. moreover, working in groups or pairs is seen as positive by the students because they can explain and help each other (even using their native language if possible) in their group. the students describe cooperative goal structures in the international class since they help each other. therefore, both the second and third research questions revealed that action-orientated tasks are suitable to understanding scientific content and build up language structures. diehr (2016) established the integrated dynamic model (idm) describing language learning in combination with content learning. lexical representations in the l1 and l2 interact with each other in terms of translating words from the one language into the other one; since some international students learn german terms in science that they have not encountered in their native language (e.g., microscope), they cannot resort to their l1 lexical representations. furthermore, both linguistic resources interact with conceptual components as well. for example, when studying cell biology, students become familiar with how to use a microscope. this knowledge and the experiences the students have are now linked to the word “microscope”. taking all these results into consideration, one can assume that leisen’s model and action-orientated tasks help to build a conceptual component linked to lexical representation. the fourth research question takes a look at the transition into the regular class. at the time of the interviews, no student was fully integrated into the regular class; however, it is planned to place the students into the regular classes after the summer break. most of the students participate in the regular class for at least a few hours every week. some students sit in the regular class and work on their homework because they feel unable to participate, or cannot follow the lessons and get bored. there might be little to no satisfaction in the transition process for these students; moreover, they might have a feeling of low expectancy since they already experience how hard it is to follow the lessons in the regular class. however, many students are still eager to be part of a regular class and have the feeling that they can do it if they work hard enough. there were other negative experiences due to misunderstandings or an uncomfortable atmosphere created in the regular class. they were either caused by the teacher or the classmates. teachers might have to work on their direct socialization of motivation (e.g., concerning how to give feedback). participant 7 especially missed motivating feedback from the teacher. goal orientation of the german students may cause problems as those in the upper regular classes have to study for exams, and feel pressure concerning their educational career. this could trigger unwelcoming behavior as they might see international students as a hindrance because they require more support and slow the pace of the class. this displays the extent of how great an impact other students and the teachers might have on international students to create a pleasant atmosphere; since immigrants have gone through many hardships in the last few years, it is important for german students to be aware of this. integrating into regular classes is seen as positive by students, but they want to reach a decent level of language competency before being transferred. facing content-learning in a foreign language can be frustrating and boring if the teachers do not provide linguistic help for international students. however, most teachers are not trained for “german as a second language” students and might not feel like they 90 global education review 5(4) have time to provide special support. since the project “biology for everyone” has been evaluated positively, it is of great interest to publish the teaching materials (e.g., schmiedebach & wegner, 2018a) in order to help other teachers. moreover, we can only encourage other practitioners to start contentlearning in international classes to provide a wider range of subjects and to help students integrate into the regular system. concerning further research, it is of interest to investigate the language levels students from international classes with content-learning achieve in comparison to classes with only language learning. therefore, a questionnaire deriving from these predefined categories is currently being developed and will be used in local schools. we would like to investigate the extent to which certain aspects are a broad phenomenon (e.g., language-use anxiety in the regular classroom) and if there are differences in new students depending on if they have content learning in the international class or not. notes 1. the german school system is divided into different secondary schools with different levels (e.g.,, certain schools allow students to attend university). newly arrived students are not assigned to schools according to prior schooling and content knowledge, but rather due to space availability. therefore, students might have to change schools after fullintegration as they may not fit in the school of their preparation class. 2. content and language integrated learning (breidbach, 2013, pp. 11). 3. foreign language means a language one learns in school, whereas a second language is learned in the speaking country and is used in everyday life. 4. the integration of content and language learning is summarized using the acronym clil (content and language integrated learning). the implementation of clil within the project is described in schmiedebach & wegner (2018b). 5. in discussing migration as a motivational factor in foreign language classes, fischer (2014) refers to the entire spectrum from working to forced migration. 6. the abitur is the highest secondary school exit examination; 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(1975). the http://www.mercator-institut-sprachfoerderung.de/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/publikationen/mi_zfl_studie_zugewanderte_im_deutschen_schulsystem_final_screen.pdf http://www.mercator-institut-sprachfoerderung.de/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/publikationen/mi_zfl_studie_zugewanderte_im_deutschen_schulsystem_final_screen.pdf http://www.mercator-institut-sprachfoerderung.de/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/publikationen/mi_zfl_studie_zugewanderte_im_deutschen_schulsystem_final_screen.pdf http://www.mercator-institut-sprachfoerderung.de/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/publikationen/mi_zfl_studie_zugewanderte_im_deutschen_schulsystem_final_screen.pdf http://www.mercator-institut-sprachfoerderung.de/fileadmin/redaktion/pdf/publikationen/mi_zfl_studie_zugewanderte_im_deutschen_schulsystem_final_screen.pdf http://tujournals.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php/zif/article/view/572/548 http://tujournals.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php/zif/article/view/572/548 http://tujournals.ulb.tu-darmstadt.de/index.php/zif/article/view/572/548 the influence of content-learning on integration perspectives 93 interlanguage hypothesis extended to children. language learning, 25, 139– 152. slavin, r. (1988). cooperative learning and student achievement. educational leadership, 47(4), 31–33. toth, s. l., & cicchetti, d. (1998). remembering, forgetting, and the effects of trauma on memory: a developmental psychopathology perspective. development and psychopathology, 10(4), 589–605. vygotsky, l. s. (1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. wagener, a. (1992). biologie unterrichten [teaching biology]. heidelberg wiesbaden: quelle & meyer verlag. about the author(s) mario schmiedebach earned a master of education for biology and math at bielefeld university, germany. he is currently a phd student in the department for didactics of biology at bielefeld university and his main study interest is the integration of content and language in the science classroom in order to foster language acquisition. during his phd he teaches science to recently immigrated students at two secondary schools in bielefeld as part of his project “biology for everyone”. dr. claas wegner is professor at bielefeld university, germany, in the department for didactics of biology and a teacher for biology and pe at a secondary school. he is founder of the projects “kolumbus-kids” and “biology up close”. his research focuses on gifted students in science education and he is head of the just recently founded osthushenrich center for giftedness (ozhb) at bielefeld university. refugee students arrive at a school 7 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: croce, keri-anne (2018). refugee students arrive at a school: what happens next?. global education review, 5 (4), 7-16. refugee students arrive at a school: what happens next? keri-anne croce towson university abstract as refugee children join classrooms across the world, schools have the opportunity to expand the global education of all students. students, teachers, administrators, and families may partner together to form supportive environments. this article examines two and a half years in the life of a maryland elementary school as 62 burmese refugee students joined the population. data is presented from both observations and student dialogue journals. the goal of the study was to consider how the interactions between refugee students, refugee families, teachers, and a principal define a community. these findings may support the development of pedagogy. keywords refugee children, refugee families, global education, school community introduction ngun nee, a burmese refugee, had her first opportunity to learn in a school building when she attended the second grade in the united states. while she was a lifelong learner, she had never had a formal school experience before arriving in the united states. during an interview that took place when she was a fourth grader, ngun nee reflected back on her first day of school. she explained, “when i first move here my teacher ms. …my teacher give me a little card. it’s writing my school name.” ngun nee described how her joy at receiving a name tag on her desk motivated her to learn to recognize her name. ngun nee had many experiences learning to read and write in burmese with other families in the refugee camps, but she had not experienced using a drinking fountain, or using a school restroom. while there was much for ngun nee to learn about going to school in the unites states, she had already begun to develop as a reader, writer, and speaker in burmese before arriving in the united states. when it is stated that public schools in the united states welcome students like ngun nee, this description masks an imbalance of power. the school system is positioned to grant or deny entry of members into a community. it is important to examine if the newly arrived members of a community feel ownership in redefining new norms for a community. as refugee students arrive at new schools, their membership within the community may be defined by a series of negotiations. this process of negotiation may differ among communities across the world. ________________________________________ corresponding author keri-anne croce, towson university, 8000 york road, towson, maryland 21252, united states. email: kcroce@towson.edu phone: 410 704 3602 mailto:kcroce@towson.edu 8 global education review 5(4) this article presents a depiction of ngun nee and the community that evolved as she and her burmese refugee classmates attended a school in maryland. the article seeks to highlight certain patterns that were observed and to allow the reader to draw conclusions regarding supportive pedagogy. over the course of the two and a half years of the study, the refugee population at the school continued to increase. this article examines what it meant to be a school community during this time. since the school continues to develop and grow, this article presents a snapshot in time. gathering information this article presents an ethnographic study. as wolcott (1997) indicates, “the word ‘ethnography’ means a picture of the ‘way of life’ of some identifiable group.” (p. 329) the goal of the study was to consider how the interactions between teachers, parents, and the principal influenced the ways that the school system granted or denied entry of refugee students into a community. the ‘identifiable group’ in this study was defined as the school community; yet membership in this community, and the ways and practices of the community, often differed depending on participants’ perspectives and actions. research has long supported the value of studying an educational environment over time using ethnographic methods (toohey, 2000; heath, 1983; whitmore & cromwell, 1994; moll, estrada, lopez, lopez, 1988). health (1983) suggests that researchers are often both participant and observer within ethnographic studies. this was the case in the study described in this article. i was not observing the participants in isolation because they were influenced by my presence at the school. my role as both observer and participant allowed me to examine how the participants negotiated culture and language as they created learning environments. in order to create a picture of the development of the school community, multiple voices were studied. data collection and analysis focused on nine teachers, 62 refugee students, the principal, and refugee parents. the findings presented in this article are based on multiple data sources. these sources included observations in classrooms, observations during grade level teacher meetings, observations during principal meetings with teachers, and dialogue journals. observations over the two and a half year study, observational notes were taken within a variety of scenarios. these included classroom instruction in six different classrooms three days a week (1440 hours); grade level meetings with teachers for a total of 12 meetings (12 hours); and grade level teacher meetings with the principal for a total of 12 meetings (12 hours). observational notes were assigned initial codes each week. codes were compared across weeks and modified to accommodate newly discovered patterns. dialogue journals dialogue journals were exchanged with refugee students in an effort to document perceptions. the use of dialogue journals has been proposed as a methodology for understanding how students view the world (denne-bolton, 2013; dionisio, 1991; peyton, 2000). dialogue journals were exchanged between the researcher and eight refugee students in grades four and five. the entries in these journals were shared with classroom teachers in all grade levels. in addition, two classroom teachers and students exchanged dialogue journals for a semester. in order to start the process of using a dialogue journal with each refugee student, a teacher or refugee students arrive at a school 9 researcher would write an entry in the journal. often this entry would be read to the student or acted out. the students were given a chance to independently respond to the journal throughout the day. when i used dialogue journals with students, i initially met independently with each student. i would write in the dialogue journal while in front of the student and pass the notebook back to the student. when i presented the dialogue journal to the student, i would act out my question and point to the journal. the student would be encouraged to write back to me in the journal. at the end of the day, the dialogue journal would be left for the student to write back to me. each week i would return to the classroom to read the students’ responses and write back to them. each response from me included a question in order to encourage the continuation of the conversation. students could respond with drawings and use actions to provide context for their writings and drawings in the dialogue journals. teachers and students shared their responses with me. the dialogue journal entries were coded. codes were compared over time and modified to include newly developing patterns. this study draws on sociocultural and critical theories in order to examine the social community. a sociocultural theory of learning suggests that interactions among groups inform the learning process (vygotsky, 1978). this theory situates actions and voices in cultural, historical, and institutional settings (wertsch, 1991). by applying vygotsky’s ideas through research in different cultures, sociocultural theory has implications for pedagogy (oguz, 2007). critical theory examines how changes in society are influenced by culture. when referencing first generation critical theorists, antonio (1983) indicates, “critical theory is concerned with contradictions between ideology and reality.” (p. 331). critical theory uses social criticism to mark the gap between the ideal and the real. as critical theory has evolved, it has not proposed a specific methodology, but still embraces an approach to the social world. within this article both sociocultural theory and critical theory will be used to place the interactions among participants within larger themes. the reliability of the study is supported by the collection of multiple sources of data and the longevity of the study. what follows is a discussion of the findings. findings redefining school culture as the actions and verbalizations of the participants were analyzed, it became apparent that the refugee students often did not all experience the same set of circumstances. discussions with students revealed that some students had traveled to the united states with their entire family. in other cases, some students did not arrive in the united states with all of their family members. some family members were left behind in burma1 and others had been killed. some students relocated to the united states and reunited with individuals that they had known in their home countries, while other students did not know anyone in the new country. students drew from both interconnecting and divergent funds of knowledge (moll, amanti, neff, gonzales, 1992). within dialogue journals, students described the journey that they took to arrive in the united states and their conflicting feelings about being in the united states. for example, within his dialogue journal muan discussed how his family moved from burma to india to the united states. he stated, “we were in india because we wanted to come to america. from burma, we can't come to america.” later he wrote about his feelings at the moment and indicated, “i really don’t want to go back.” other students were observed 10 global education review 5(4) simultaneously expressing a love of the life they lived in burma while also describing what they liked about their new lives in the united states. this can be seen when sui thai wrote, “ i like maryland because a lot of my friend of chin people and burma people in her” (i like maryland because a lot of my friends are chin and burmese people are here). other times sui thai did not abandon her desire to return to burma. for example, she excitedly read aloud what she wrote in her journal, “ i think we visit. i don’t yet! x mas time i visit. my father say we will visit.” this implies that a desire to return to a life in burma may have left students with parallel perceptions. as lerner (2012) states, “yet, as experience demonstrates, assimilation is not the most appropriate acculturation process for refugee children.” (p. 10). this would suggest that many students processed their lives in different ways. during this time, some teachers began to evolve in their understandings of the different contexts of students’ lives. this can be seen when a fourth grade teacher expressed surprise that some students wished to return to burma. grade level meetings began to host discussions that supported teachers’ evolving understandings of their students. during one meeting, a third grade teacher shared her puzzlement in learning that one of her students did not arrive in the united states accompanied by all of the members of his family. the fourth and fifth grade teachers’ comments often demonstrated how they continuously revisited their understandings. spradley (1997) notes, “culture, the knowledge that people have learned as members of a group, cannot be observed directly.” (p. 7) this articulates how difficult it is to state how the teachers’ understandings of students’ backgrounds directly informed the learning environments; yet, it is worth noting that teachers’ verbalizations appeared to represent a paradigm shift. the principal also expressed the understanding that she had undergone a shift in her perceptions. when the principal wanted to receive input from the refugee families, she decided that the best place to do this was in a setting where the families would feel comfortable. as students were observed discussing probability in a math lesson, they were asked to detail something that they did frequently. they described praying and going to church. the principal determined that the neighborhood church played a role in students’ lives. she met with religious leaders in order to seek permission to meet with parents at the church. she went to sunday services that were attended by the refugee families. the principal decided to hold a “pancake breakfast” for families at the church but did not realize that the parents did not eat pancakes and instead preferred rice. through the use of a translator at the church during the breakfast, the principal began to ask parents if they felt comfortable with communications sent home. family members expressed confusion as to the purposes of many communications sent home and the actions required of the parents by the school. the ways that knowledge is represented in a community inform the culture (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzoles, 1992). the principal and families negotiated to have other church members and bilingual students attempt to provide to families context for school communications and provide the principal with feedback. after working with families outside of the school grounds during the breakfast, the principal that she felt that she was just starting to understand how families spent their time and how they communicated. she also revealed that she would need to engage in a series of social negotiations. refugee students arrive at a school 11 as time passed, the principal and teachers were continuously discussing their perceptions of the tensions that arose as time passed. they saw that these tensions would require both reflection and readjustment. for example, some teachers struggled with the amount of responsibility given to some refugee students at home. while parents worked, some students were responsible for taking care of younger siblings. one teacher, teacher x, expressed her disagreement with this decision. as lerner (2012) notes, refugee families sometimes do not engage in the same patterns of child rearing as families born in america. during the course of the study, teacher x reflected on the presence of this new social pattern. the juxtaposition of differing ideas sometimes led to the examination of the relationship between children, parents, teachers, and school administrators. while paradigm shifts were occurring for the principal and some teachers, simultaneously many refugee families were interacting with each other. knowledge sharing occurred on a microlevel. refugee family members who had been in the united states for a year accompanied newer families to parent/teacher conferences and school events. burmese families began interacting with each other while picking up or dropping off children at the school, while working at the local nail salons and plants, and while living in the same neighborhood apartment complexes. for example, one parent was observed explaining her understandings of the meaning of a report card to another parent during the school pickup time. while refugee families found ways to informally connect, their presence at the formally organized parent organization was nonexistent. the parent teacher association (pta) served as the main formally organized parent leadership group at the school. the pta contained no refugee family members during the time of the study. invitations to attend pta events at the school were issued through paper flyers distributed to students. existing members of the pta created both the language and methods of distribution for the flyers. this raises many questions. while the lack of interaction between non-refugee families and refugee families within the pta could have been due to the timing of the meetings, it may also have been due to other elements. the existing members of the pta issued the invitation to refugee families new to the school. were the new refugee family members familiar with the habits, customs, or artifacts associated with this group? did the new families use artifacts such as flyers with the same purpose and intentions? did they embrace the use of flyers as a method of communication? was the structure of the organization itself linked to the goals and objectives of the families? were refugee families concerned that the organization embraced their strengths and ways of being? in addition, did all family members, including aunts and grandparents, feel welcome to join the organization? this may be an important question to ask since not all students arrived in the united states with all of their family members. family dynamics were often restructured as refugee family members were separated across countries. while i asked refugee students and families what encouraged or discouraged involvement in parent organizations, i never received responses to these types of questions. it is possible that the meaning of these actions was unknown to even the participants themselves. the value of the study described in this article is that it may encourage readers to consider issues of conflicting methods of communication, different purposes for literacy artifacts, and divergent goals for families. 12 global education review 5(4) drawing on students’ resources at the start of the study, all of the teachers experienced confusion as to where to begin when instructing students. a few teachers verbalized a deficit perspective by indicating, “they are coming here with no education.” as the study progressed, the data collected through the use of the dialogue journals appeared to contradict this perspective. the dialogue journals provided information as to the strengths that burmese students possessed as both writers and thinkers. in addition, the dialogue journals provided evidence as to how the refugee students were processing their life experiences. what follows is a description as to how dialogue journals helped determine the intellectual and emotional resources of refugee students. while many teachers had questions about the experiences that students had before arriving at the school, i learned that students’ stories would only be revealed over the course of years. over time, students occasionally provided glimpses as to how they perceived their lives in burma. teachers started to discuss the idea that asking a student to describe his or her life is a complicated and complex process. they debated what they should ask a student to share in a dialogue journal. violence was a reason that many students fled to the refugee camps and were then granted entry to the united states. some teachers communicated that they did not want to upset a student by asking questions about their lives in burma. other teachers verbalized the perspective that all of a student’s life experiences deserve reflection. they felt that it was not a teacher’s job to evaluate which life experiences to discuss. refugee students were found to make these decisions for themselves as they choose what experiences to share in the dialogue journals. for example, when writing back and forth to ngn nee, i drew a picture of the mountains near my previous home in arizona. she responded to my observation by asking if the mountains were scary or fun. in response, i wrote back to ngun nee in her dialogue journal: dear ngun nee, the mountains in arizona were not scary. they were pretty and red. were the mountains scary near your grandfather’s house? did you go to your grandfather’s house a lot? sincerely, mrs. croce after i read my response aloud to ngun nee, she took a couple of days to respond. her reply is included below. i have transcribed her journal entry exactly as it was written. following the journal entry i have written a translation in parenthesis. dear mrs. croce my grandfather come to the burma and some time i come to my grandfather house want i go to my grandfather i stay 3 day and lot of thing to eat and it was very good my grandmother is die i miss my grandmother. sincerely, ngun nee (my grandfather came to burma and sometimes i came to my grandfather’s house. i want to go to my grandfather. at my grandfather’s i stayed 3 days and ate a lot of things, and it was very good. my grandmother is dead. i miss my grandmother). within this exchange ngun nee decided what she would like to share. she could easily have addressed my questions about her grandfather with a one-word response but she chose not to. this interaction occurred after she and i had written to each other for two months. ngun nee was able to use the dialogue journal in order to process her life experiences. this refugee students arrive at a school 13 demonstrates that dialogue journals provided key insights into a student’s emotional needs as well as his or her development as a writer. many teachers openly questioned how to assess students based on established curriculum goals for the state and county. often times within a common curriculum the same goals are established for all children in one grade level (common core state standards initiative, 2018); yet, many teachers began to examine how the refugee students arriving in their classrooms had strengths and needs that differed from other students in the class. for example, even though refugee students had not been regularly reading picture books in the refugee camps, they had a variety of literacy experiences which teachers could draw on such as reading airline tickets, fast food signs, and passports. a few teachers found ways to develop curriculum that built on students’ strengths. for example, in a third grade classroom, refugee students were asked to read a series of fast food signs and design a story. yet, the teacher worried about her choices since reading environmental print was not a goal listed in the third grade state curriculum. this instance demonstrates how teachers continued to question how to differentiate instruction while also meeting requirements within state curriculum. at the start of the study, all of the teachers verbalized that they were not prepared to help students process the complex emotions associated with being a refugee. part of this may be attributed to the reality that no teacher at the school had been a refugee. initially, teachers often discussed amongst themselves how to respond to a student’s actions or words. over time interactions during read alouds, guided reading groups, and writing centers allowed teachers access to students’ words and actions. for example, when reacting to a read aloud one student spoke of missing family members left behind in burma. the classroom teacher answered by indicating, “thank you for sharing. who else wants to share?” later she reflected on how she might have responded differently. as the study progressed, some teachers were seen discussing their observations of refugee students, attempting to understand the context for situations, and determining how to respond. another pattern that was noted among many teachers was a desire to better understand whether some refugee students would benefit from receiving gifted and talented or special education services. during the course of the study, it was documented that often teachers were not sure if students’ actions could be attributed to experiencing new language and culture. for example, teachers debated as to whether certain actions reflected culture shock (igoa, 1995) or a need for special education services. some teachers were also uncertain as to the unique ways that refugee student would demonstrate characteristics of giftedness. nguyen (2012) implies that parents and teachers of gifted students must understand that culture can inform the complex human experiences in a student’s life. within the study, one teacher had many students within the classroom that had been labeled gifted and talented. the teacher had also been placed in a gifted and talented program as a child. she noted that one refugee student in her classroom had been assigned to receive gifted and talented services. the student had also been described by the school as autistic. the teacher in this classroom verbalized her uncertainty as to how the student’s autism, giftedness, and identity as a refugee student intersected. throughout the study, the teacher continued to collect data through classroom observations, reading events, and writing samples in order to learn about intersectionality. in addition to observing students’ actions and words, a few teachers began to seek out 14 global education review 5(4) resources outside of their classrooms in order to establish contexts for the refugee students’ experiences. for example, the principal encouraged teachers to start professional reading literature circles with texts written by burmese authors such as phan and damien (2010). every teacher in the school was given time to observe in another classroom at the school in order to examine the dialogue and action of other teachers and refugee students. a burmese community liaison was also hired to answer teacher questions about observed actions or dialogue. for example, one teacher had a conversation with a refugee student whose observed behavior appeared to violate class rules. during this conversation, the student responded by smiling. the teacher perceived this to be a negative reaction. the community liaison clarified the actions of the students by providing context. he indicated that many burmese individuals would respond to such an interaction by smiling so as not to create discomfort or aggravate a situation. the teacher then indicated that in the future she would not view smiling as a sign of disrespect when engaging in conversations about behavior with a student. this demonstrates how some teachers began to use evolving insights in order to reflect on their actions and words. conclusions this article discussed the ways that refugee students, refugee families, teachers, and a principal interacted to form a school community over two and a half years. both observational notes and dialogue journals were used to assess these interactions. readers might consider relating these findings to other school contexts. some of the teachers and the principal in this study verbalized their experiences with shifting paradigms. these shifts included fluid understandings about students’ strengths and the values held by refugee families. in addition to documenting teacher and principal paradigm shifts, this study provided a discussion as to the varying actions and dialogue that surrounded a formal parent organization (the pta). refugee family members were not observed participating in the pta. this suggests that formal parent organizations also require a series of negotiations. other school communities might consider that literacy artifacts may embody different purposes in different contexts (perry, 2009). members of a group construct different social languages that are dependent on their membership in the group (gee, 2001). duran (2016) also indicates that refugees have multiple identities that inform how they navigate language. the school in this study might consider how refugee families’ informal interactions contribute to ideas about cultural artifacts both inside and outside of school. this might help renegotiate interactions within the pta or allow the school to consider new ways to structure other parent organizations. this article presents findings that suggest that schools are unique systems that require negotiation of actions and words. as this article demonstrates, refugee students each possessed distinctive sets of literacy and life experiences. burmese students revealed their strengths as the study progressed. this led some teachers to question how to establish individual goals for refugee students in relation to state curriculum goals. as this study suggests, this is a question that needs to be revisited. schools that are undergoing a shift in demographics might consider using observations and dialogue journals to begin to analyze the contexts of the actions and dialogue of refugee students and families. 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(1978). mind in society: the development of higher psychological processes. cambridge, ma: harvard university. wertsch, j. (1991). voices of the mind: a sociocultural approach to mediated action. cambridge, ma: harvard university press whitmore, k., & cromwell, c. (1994). inventing a classroom: life in a bilingual whole language learning community. maine: stenhouse publishing. wolcott, h. (1997). ethnographic research in education. in richard jaeger (ed.) complementary methods for research in education (pp. 327-355). washington, d.c: american educational research association. about the author keri-anne croce, phd, is an associate professor at towson university in maryland. both her research and coursework focus on the literacy development of multilingual learners. she is the author of the book navigating assessment with linguistically diverse learners. teaching refugee students in arizona 55 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: henderson, joanna & ambroso, eric patrick (2018). teaching refugee students in arizona: examining the implementation of structured english immersion. global education review, 5 (4), 5573. teaching refugee students in arizona: examining the implementation of structured english immersion joanna henderson arizona state university eric patrick ambroso arizona state university abstract with an increase in children from refugee backgrounds entering schools around the world, it has grown increasingly important to examine educational policy design and implementation to understand how policies shape teachers’ interactions with this student population. this article focuses on structured english immersion, the language policy that frames the educational experiences for refugee students in arizona. through a review of the literature and data collected from teacher interviews, we explore how teachers appropriate a restrictive language policy to construct de facto policies in their classrooms. innovative practices that teachers employ are highlighted, and recommendations for further research, policy, and practice are provided. keywords refugee education, language policy implementation, educational policy introduction in recent years, an unprecedented number of people have been forcibly displaced from their homes by war, violence, and persecution (united nations high commissioner for refugees [unhcr], 2017a). those that cross international borders seeking asylum are required to register with the unhcr as a “refugee”, which the office defines as “someone who is unable or unwilling to return to their country of origin owing to a well-founded fear of being persecuted for reasons of race, religion, nationality, membership of a particular social group, or political opinion” (unhcr, 2010). currently, more than 22.5 million individuals hold refugee status, half of whom are thought to be children under the age of 18 (unhcr, 2017a). refugees are often forced to escape their countries of origin abruptly, leaving behind family, friends, and many aspects of their home cultures. the very nature of being a refugee means having one’s life upended, implying a transitory lifestyle with a great deal of uncertainty. the process of relocating to another country can be especially traumatic for children, many of whom have experienced conflict and instability in their country of origin (e.g., bromley & andina, 2010; pigozzi, 1999). in resettlement contexts, schooling can provide a sense of normalcy for refugee children, while also supporting healing from past ________________________________________ corresponding author eric patrick ambroso, mary lou fulton teachers college, h.b. farmer education building, 1050 s forest mall, tempe, az 85281. email: eambroso@asu.edu 56 global education review 5(4) traumatic experiences and helping them adapt to their new surroundings (nicolai & triplehorn, 2003; pigozzi, 1999). teachers, in particular, may provide a consistent presence in the lives of their students, helping newcomers adapt to classrooms through cultural and institutional navigation (hones, 2002). in the united states, where the placement and instruction of refugee students, like other english learners (els), is typically guided by each state’s official language policy, english as a second language (esl) teachers play an especially important role in their educational experiences (capps & newland, 2015; mthethwa-sommers & kisiara, 2015). although various studies document the failings or inappropriate practices of teachers working with refugee students (e.g., birman & tran, 2015; dávila, 2015), few have examined language policy as a dynamic, sociocultural process that plays a central role in how teachers interact with this student population (mccarty, 2004). additional research is thus urgently needed that highlights how teachers’ sensemaking and appropriation of language policy is mutually constituted by their interactions with and discourse about refugee students. as such, it is crucial to address pressing questions about how teachers enact language policies in esl classrooms with refugee students. considering the important role that teachers play in the lives of refugee children, understanding their perspectives could shed light on how teachers balance adhering to official policy mandates with supporting refugee students’ needs. this study examines teachers’ appropriation of structured english immersion (sei), the official language policy in arizona. it also highlights the importance of teacher training to support the needs of resettled refugee students in u.s. schools, specifically in arizona, which ranked sixth among all u.s. states for refugee resettlement in 2016 (radford & connor, 2016). our work is grounded in the following research questions: • how do teachers describe their experiences working with refugee students in structured english immersion (sei) classrooms? • how are teachers appropriating policy to meet the needs of refugee students? in the following section, we frame the context of education for refugee children around the globe, from countries of first asylum to resettlement. we then highlight relevant studies linking ideologies about language, immigration, and globalization to the current policy context in arizona. following that, we provide our theoretical framework and describe our research design. finally, we will present our data and discuss their implications, along with recommendations for future research. a global education crisis the unhcr (2018) recommends three possible solutions for refugees after fleeing their country of origin: voluntary repatriation, local integration, and resettlement to a third country. one key aspect of the unhcr’s mandate is to support refugees in rebuilding their lives after fleeing their country of origin, and scholars have suggested that education may ease the transition for children, who often struggle to adapt to a new culture (tadesse, hoot, & watsonthompson, 2009). however, research also suggests the effects of years-long conflict and prolonged displacement have rendered education in any of these situations extremely challenging (dryden-peterson, 2017). in recent years, conflict in the middle east, especially in syria, has contributed to what many scholars are calling a global education crisis, which has impacted the educational experiences of refugees in all three unhcr-supported contexts. voluntary repatriation if the situation has improved and the environment is considered safe, refugees are teaching refugee students in arizona 57 encouraged to return to their country of origin, which is the primary durable solution under the unhcr (2018). schools in this context can be a sanctuary for children to recover from traumatic experiences and begin to hope for the future. in addition, education has been shown to be a preventative measure to fight against recruitment of child soldiers, abduction and trafficking, and gender-based violence (nicolai & triplehorn, 2003). however, research on educational opportunities available to refugees after repatriation is limited due to political turmoil and barriers to researchers entering zones of conflict (dryden-peterson, 2016). integration another unhcr-backed solution for refugees is integration within their country of first asylum, which can be a gradual and difficult process due to overstretched public service sectors and fragile political and/or financial institutions. nearly 90% of refugees live in developing nations bordering their country of origin. due to the influx of refugees in recent years, many of these countries are facing challenges in providing quality education to children with refugee status, including overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, and limited educational resources (dryden-peterson, adelman, & nieswandt, 2016). refugee children may also be denied educational opportunities due to school fees and other policies that indirectly prevent their access (qumri, 2012). the exodus of syrian refugees to lebanon, turkey, jordan, iraq, and egypt since 2011 has been so extensive that it is altering the demographics of these host countries and causing significant tension in their education systems (culbertson & constant, 2015). the unhcr (2015) estimates that fewer than half of the children who have fled from syria to neighboring countries are enrolled in formal schooling. coupled with the fact that many of these children faced interrupted schooling in syria, this crisis has the potential to rob an entire generation of syrian children of an education. in europe, an estimated 1.8 million refugees and migrants have crossed the mediterranean sea to seek asylum since 2011, and more than 30% are estimated to be women and children (ahad & benton, 2018). nearly 500,000 formal asylum applications were received in germany alone in 2015, and the tide of refugees arriving in europe continues (dryden-peterson et al., 2016). with the sudden arrival of thousands of children during this crisis, school systems in europe are also facing overcrowded classrooms, teacher shortages, and a lack of funding for teacher training (ahad & benton, 2018). without adequate training on issues related to refugee students, teachers in europe often lack the information they need to support students with experiences of trauma and complex educational backgrounds (drydenpeterson et al., 2016). resettlement the final durable option available to refugees through the unhcr is resettlement in a third country when their needs are not being met in their country of first asylum (unhcr, 2018). only the most vulnerable refugees, whose safety, liberty, or health is at risk in their countries of first asylum, may be presented by the unhcr to possible resettlement countries (unhcr, 2017b). those selected are provided with permanent resident status and access to civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights similar to those enjoyed by citizens of their resettlement countries. yet, research indicates that the educational needs of resettled refugee students are not being met (e.g., mcbrien, 2005, mcwilliams & bonet, 2016), and that schools in resettlement contexts tend to focus on languagelearning issues rather than addressing the social and emotional needs of refugee students or facilitating their access to mainstream curricula (taylor & sidhu, 2012). 58 global education review 5(4) resettlement in the united states the united states typically admits nearly twothirds of refugees that are resettled each year worldwide (u.s. secretary of state, 2017). in the 2016 fiscal year alone, the united states resettled 84,995 refugees, up from nearly 70,000 resettled each of the previous two years (migration policy institute, 2017). trump’s 2017 presidential determination of 50,000 admitted refugees was met on july 12, 2017 (hauslohner, 2017), bringing the four-year total of resettled refugees to approximately 275,000. over 40% of these resettled refugees are thought to be children who are enrolled in u.s. schools (koyama & bakuza, 2017). looking at these statistics, one can conservatively assume that approximately 110,000 refugee students entered the u.s. school system from 2014-2017. this influx of refugee students could have significant implications for educational systems, especially in under-resourced, poor, urban areas, where refugee families are typically provided housing (bal & arzubiaga, 2013). despite this influx, refugee students are not easily identified in u.s. educational data because their refugee status is not often tracked. as a result, educational researchers have written little about the schooling experiences of refugee students in the united states (koyama & bakuza, 2017). the existing educational research in the united states has generally lumped refugees together with other types of els and failed to differentiate their experiences from those of other students from migrant backgrounds. according to taylor and sidhu (2012), the “invisibility of refugees in policy and research has worked against their cultural, social, and economic integration” (p.4). while some characteristics of refugee students might be similar to those of other immigrant students in the united states, there are key differences that make their experiences unique. in terms of their migration, refugees are typically forced to flee their home countries suddenly, without prior arrangements in place (e.g., housing, finances, familial support) (tadesse et al., 2009). significant trauma experienced by refugee children before resettlement may also contribute to posttraumatic stress disorder, anxiety, depression, and mistrust of authority figures, including teachers (amthor & roxas, 2016; mcbrien, 2005; sinclair, 2001). these feelings may be exacerbated by the bullying or humiliation that refugee students are often subjected to in schools as a result of displaying different customs, languages, or traditions (mthethwa-sommers & kisiara, 2015). given these distinctive circumstances, there is a demand for theoretical conceptualizations from which to analyze refugee students’ complex experiences in u.s. schools (bal & arzubiaga, 2013; dávila, 2015). finally, while there is a scarcity of studies on refugee students’ academic experiences in the united states, even less has been written about teachers working with this student population (roxas, 2011a). more research is urgently needed to account for how micro-level interactions with refugee students are related to educational policies and macro-level ideologies about els, and refugees, in particular (johnson, 2009). just as personal beliefs and previous experiences have implications for teachers’ instructional practices, so too do external factors such as societal ideologies about linguistic diversity and immigration. in arizona, “the epicenter of the contemporary immigration debate in the united states” (heineke, 2015, p. 844), anti-immigrant sentiments and monolingual ideologies have led to restrictive language policies that stigmatize els, including refugees, and the use of their native languages in schools (valdés, 2005). to set the policy context relevant to refugee students in arizona schools, we first provide an overview of monolingual ideologies in the united states, followed by a description of the design and authorization of sei in arizona. teaching refugee students in arizona 59 monolingual ideologies in the united states attitudes toward linguistic diversity have shifted throughout u.s. history and have been linked to debates about immigration and educational policy (english & varghese, 2010). language policies, in particular, represent the accumulation of societal ideologies related to language, immigration, and globalization, which can be generally described in terms of either assimilationist or pluralist perspectives (hornberger, 1998). in arizona, language policies have served as a tool in the forced assimilation and marginalization of immigrants and indigenous populations (warriner, 2007). in the early 20th century, native children in arizona were brought to boarding schools, made to adapt to anglo traditions, and required, often forcibly, to speak english at all times (trennert, 1979). in the mid-20th century, mexicanamericans suffered similar discrimination as school districts across arizona began implementing segregation based on englishlanguage proficiency. though the state never officially administered segregated schools, government officials informally sanctioned school segregation, which provided els with less experienced teachers and fewer educational resources (powers, 2008). bal and arzubiaga (2013) argue that language policies over the past three decades have perpetuated hegemonic ideologies that portray the linguistic and cultural practices of els as inferior, and esl teachers as “fixers” of the deficiencies inherent in el student populations. as the student population in the united states has become more linguistically and culturally diverse, language policies have become more restrictive and more centered around improving standardized test scores. as a result, language policies in many states diminish learning opportunities for refugee students in favor of designing unchallenging curricula around meeting accountability measures (koyama & bakuza, 2017). in addition, refugee students are often segregated in esl classrooms with other els, limiting their abilities to connect linguistically and socially to other groups of students (moinolnolki & han, 2017). structured english immersion in the fifteen years leading up to the passage of no child left behind act (nclb) in 2001, an influx of immigrants and more conservative political leadership had begun to shift attitudes towards els in the united states (de jong, 2008). by the time nclb was passed, englishonly language policies had already been adopted in 23 states, and the act shifted the federal government’s focus from equal provision of resources to equal outcomes (wiley & wright, 2004). while nclb gave more power to the federal government to influence educational policies, the act weakened the government’s role in protecting the educational rights of els and, effectively, decreased support for bilingual and primary-language instruction (arias & faltis, 2012; hopkins, 2012; hornberger & johnson, 2007). in the wake of nclb, advocates of english-only instruction gained support in states that had become more restrictive in regard to their bilingual programs. ron unz, a successful businessman with political aspirations, capitalized on these conditions to champion three successful voter initiatives restricting bilingual education in california, arizona, and massachusetts. in june of 1998, voters in california approved a law titled english for the children (proposition 227), which required school districts to provide english-only instruction to els that had not yet met state english-proficiency requirements (wiley & wright, 2004). with unz’s support, similar, but even more restrictive, measures were eventually passed in arizona (proposition 203) and massachusetts (question 2) (de jong, 2008). when the ballot initiative prop 203 passed in 2000, arizona became the second of three states that mandate english-only instruction to els. 60 global education review 5(4) structured english immersion in arizona following the passage of prop 203 in 2000, the arizona state legislature adopted a policy prescribing sei as the official model of instruction for els, who constituted approximately 15% of all students attending arizona’s public schools (jimenez-silva, gomez, & cisneros, 2014). the basic principle required english-language instruction to precede contentarea instruction in order to “accelerate el’s english language development and linguistic preparation for grade-level academic content” (clark, 2009, p. 43). between 2000 and 2006, the vast majority of instructional programs that had been in place to serve els in arizona were dismantled and replaced with an sei model that many teachers considered confusing and loosely defined, resulting in a wide variation of english language instruction across the state (davenport, 2008) in 2006, as a response to inconsistencies in sei programs, the state legislature authorized the english language learner task force, which was charged with selecting a prescribed model of sei for els in arizona (heineke, 2015; lillie, markos, arias, & wiley, 2012). shortly thereafter, the legislature also introduced new training requirements, allowing public school teachers, principals, and superintendents working with els to complete a newly developed sei endorsement in place of the previously required bilingual education or esl endorsement. following this mandate, the number of arizona teachers completing bilingual and esl endorsements dropped significantly (hopkins, 2012). the new sei endorsement required the completion of just six coursework credits, compared to 24–27 for the bilingual and esl endorsements, and significantly lowered the training hours needed to earn an endorsement (garcia, lawton, & de figueiredo, 2010). since the changes in teacher-training requirements, many scholars have argued that sei-endorsed teachers are less prepared than those with bilingual or esl endorsements (e. g., heineke, 2015; lillie et al., 2012). studies have also suggested that teachers certified with bilingual and esl endorsements use more appropriate instructional strategies (hopkins, 2012) and have more positive perceptions of els in their classrooms (rios-aguilar, gonzález-canché, & moll, 2012). in 2007, the task force approved a fourhour model of sei that was based on a time-ontask principle regarding the time needed to master a language before moving to content-area instruction (gándara & orfield, 2010). one key aspect of the 4-hour model is that it requires that els be separated from their schoolmates already deemed “english-proficient” for a minimum of one year while focusing on englishlanguage development in place of gradeappropriate academic content. in recent years, numerous studies have condemned the policy by pointing to low student achievement (garcía et al., 2012; hopkins, 2012), declining graduation rates (lillie et al., 2012; mitchell, 2017), and psychological trauma (gándara & orfield, 2010) experienced by els in sei classrooms. however, few have focused on the role of esl teachers in arizona or the impact of policy interpretation on their instructional practices (heineke, 2015). the few studies that have prioritized teachers’ perspectives in the policy implementation process have generally focused on how teachers are enacting sei to support and connect with latinx students in their classrooms (e. g., combs, gonzález, & moll, 2011; heineke, 2015). while this research has contributed to our understanding of the relationship between macro-level policy decisions and teachers’ use of languages (combs et al., 2011), teachers’ discourse within teacher study groups (heineke, 2015), and instructional practices (lillie et al., 2012), they have not informed our understanding of the experiences of teachers working with refugee students in esl classrooms. in examining the implementation of sei in the state of arizona, we aim to contribute to the existing literature that has suggested that sei mandates have marginalized els, especially teaching refugee students in arizona 61 refugees, in terms of the educational opportunities available to them (e.g., arias & faltis, 2012; heineke, 2015; johnson & freeman, 2010; rios-aguilar et al., 2012). we also analyze how teachers are appropriating this language policy to support and connect with refugee students with unique learning needs in their esl classrooms. we are particularly interested in the ability and willingness of educators to appropriate policy in creative and unpredictable ways. conceptual framework drawing on the seminal work of teresa mccarty (2011), we adopt the view of policy as a social practice that operates within a larger sociocultural system, which most often codifies and advances the interests of those in power. bal & arzubiaga (2013) claim that english-only language policies in the last 30 years have promoted hegemonic ideologies that conceptualize the cultural and linguistic practices of minority students as deficits. from this perspective, teachers are seen as “fixers” of the deficiencies that refugees and other minority students bring to schools. levinson, sutton, and winstead (2009) link language policies to the labels (e.g., el, pre-emergent) that accompany them to claim that ideologies proceed and work through the policy design and implementation process to set limits for individuals belonging to specific sociocultural groups. one example of these limits is the standardization of english by language policy, which acts as an ideological mechanism in perpetuating social and linguistic inequality (mccarty, collins, & hopson, 2011). schools, in this framework, operate as statecontrolled discursive sites where those ideological mechanisms are deployed. sutton and levinson (2001) present a sociocultural view of policy that suggests policies are continuously negotiated throughout the implementation process. at each level of an educational system, various agents across macroand micro-contexts interact with and are influenced by each other to design and implement policies. ricento and hornberger’s (1996) metaphor of policy implementation as an onion describes multiple layers of agents, contexts, and processes that interact with each other in various ways. the layers include “legislation and political processes (at the outer layers), states and supranational agencies (in the middle), and classroom practitioners (at the heart of the onion)” (menken & garcía, 2010, p. 3). at each layer, the practices and discourse of various agents reflect their goals, values, and beliefs. policy, in this approach, has been described as a dynamic process that stretches across time, sociocultural contexts, and engaged actors, and policy implementation has been likened to a “link in the chain of policy process in which all actors potentially have input” (johnson, 2009, p. 142). in addition, policy is both top-down and bottom-up, authorized and unauthorized (johnson, 2009; mccarty, 2011). authorized policy establishes normative guidelines about what should be done, with rewards and punishments based on adherence to policy mandates. for example, enforced by government mechanisms and grounded in popular ideologies about language, authorized sei policy frames teacher-student interactions in esl classrooms (levinson et al., 2009). unauthorized policy, on the other hand, develops spontaneously, separate from the governmental agencies that are responsible for making official policy. as teachers make sense of authorized policy and adjust their instructional practices to meet the needs of their refugee students, they are, in effect, creating new, unauthorized policy (levinson et al., 2009). two concepts are central to the conceptual framework we use to examine how teachers interpret sei and how those interpretations are mutually constituted by their interactions with and discourse about refugee students: (a) appropriation (sutton & levinson, 2001; levinson et al., 2009), which represents teachers’ enactment of policy to fit their 62 global education review 5(4) sociocultural contexts and (b) discourse, which describes the instantiation of teachers’ thoughts, actions, values, and ideologies as forms of texts or talk (anderson & halloway, in review; fairclough, 2009). we use the term appropriation to refer to interpretive instructional practices with refugee students, constrained and enabled by authorized sei policy mandates, but with space for teachers to exercise agency in their classrooms (sutton & levinson, 2001). when teachers appropriate policy, they are effectively making new, unauthorized policy in their local contexts (levinson et al., 2009). appropriation may also include outright resistance to authorized policy, which constitutes an action in and of itself. as busy, engaged professionals, teachers must act according to their ways of knowing, seeing, and being (cohen & ball, 1990). in order for teachers to implement educational policies, they must reconcile their instructional practices and their students’ learning practices with their own knowledge, beliefs, and values. through their sensemaking and enactment of official texts, teachers can shape policies to take advantage of their students’ educational resources even in the face of potentially restrictive language policies (spillane, reiser, & reimer, 2002; stritikus, 2003). teachers may also begin to view themselves not solely as recipients of official policy texts, but as powerful actors with the potential to make what they consider more appropriate policy in their classrooms (creese, 2010; skilton-sylvester, 2002). hjelle (2001) argues that through policy appropriation, teachers may “challenge the ideological aspects of their cultures that serve to maintain their subservience, including questioning of reflecting on, and taking action against the dominant culture in such areas as competition, sexism, racism, stereotyping” (p. 25). this is especially true for language policies, which can shape how ideologies about language are “played out interactionally between teachers and students, students and their peers, and schools and communities” (warriner, 2007, p. 346). by adopting the term appropriation in place of negotiation or implementation, we comment on how teachers absorb official policies to incorporate discursive and structural resources into their personal interests and motivations. to examine the rationale behind teachers’ appropriation of sei policies, we analyze discourse, or “their spoken and written language (i.e., text) that portrays underlying thoughts, actions, beliefs, and ideologies” (anderson & halloway, in review, p. 13). we operationalize this term by analyzing relationships between teachers’ language use, stated instructional practices, and commentary in interviews that relate to teaching refugee students. sei, as an official language policy, represents an authoritative assimilation perspective in regards to english language instruction and positions els as linguistically deficient. this societal ideology is either taken up or appropriated by teachers in their local contexts (warriner, 2007), which is represented by their discourse, or language they use to speak about refugees and interactions with their students. an analysis of teachers’ discourse can lead to insights into how they navigate tensions between macro-level ideologies and structures and their own experiences, beliefs, and values. methods an interpretive, qualitative research design guided our data collection and analysis, focused specifically on educators’ realities constructed from their interactions with resettled refugee students within the social contexts of their schools (crotty, 1998). the primary goal of this study is not only to contribute to the existing research and fill a gap in the literature, but, more importantly, to provide educators in arizona (and elsewhere) with examples of how others are supporting refugee students’ educational experiences. employing a qualitative design allowed us to reach an in-depth understanding of the complex experiences of educators working refugee students in arizona. teaching refugee students in arizona 63 participants in total, six educators were interviewed over the course of the 2016-2017 academic year. the participants were recommended through the authors’ connections established while working with a local refugee resettlement organization. in selecting the interview subjects, a deliberate effort was made to ensure that the participants had extensive experience working with refugee student populations. all teachers selected to participate were esl teachers working in arizona, including three primary school teachers and one secondary school teacher. each of them had had 10 or more refugee students in their classes in the previous year. additionally, interviews were conducted with a primary school principal and a secondary school guidance counselor. the principal was the leader of a school that had over 200 refugee students enrolled in the 2016-2017 school year. the guidance counselor interviewed was the el counselor, responsible for working with all refugee students at her secondary school. all participants were working in urban public schools with total enrollment numbers between 800 and 2,000 students, and with large numbers of refugee students. in addition, all of the schools were public title i schools operating sei programs to satisfy policy requirements by the state of arizona. data collection data were collected through interviews with the six research participants, which took place over the course of one academic year. the interviews were semi-structured, with prepared questions that incited conversations, but also left room for follow-up questions. interviews lasted approximately one hour and focused on teachers’ experiences with refugee students and their implementation of sei. each interview was audio-recorded and transcribed word-for-word shortly after the conclusion of the interview session. this allowed for immediate reflection and a chance for clearing up any confusion. minimal grammatical or syntax changes were made to the language used by the participants to preserve each individual voice and manner of speaking. data analysis grounded theory was used throughout all phases of the research to orient our analysis to the perspectives of the participants (charmaz, 2006). consistent with interpretivist groundedtheory tenets, the participants in this study all had extensive experience in the education of resettled refugee students, which provided insight into this social process (creswell, 2013). data analysis for this study was both recursive and iterative, with analysis occurring repeatedly throughout the duration of the project and each step dictating the direction of future analysis (ravitch & carl, 2016). in the first phase of analysis, we utilized active codes to organize the data as they appeared in the interviews and surveys (charmaz, 2006). we continuously referenced the codes throughout the analysis to look for similarities and differences across the data sources. this process allowed us to take stock of the data with the initial active codes before suggesting patterns in the data to account for participants’ feelings, beliefs, and assumptions represented by their discourse and stated instructional practices. researcher positionality all coding decisions and interpretations of data reflect our own ontological, epistemological, and methodological predispositions. as employees and volunteers for a local refugee resettlement agency, we have both worked extensively with resettled refugee students inside and outside of school. some of our experiences with local refugee populations include conducting intake interviews when families arrive in the united states, registering students at local schools, and teaching middleand high-school students at a summer camp for refugees. as white, middleclass american citizens, we are cognizant of our 64 global education review 5(4) advantaged positions in u.s. society, and we realize that we will never be able to fully understand the precarious positions in which resettled refugees often find themselves. additionally, as researchers who do not speak any of the languages predominantly spoken in the countries of origin for most refugees resettled in the united states (unhcr, 2017b), we understand that we will almost certainly be viewed as outsiders in refugee communities. despite these considerations, we hope that our experiences with local refugee communities will allow us to adequately investigate this important topic and contribute to the existing literature. findings during the interview process, educators were asked about their experiences working with refugee students, what they saw were the biggest challenges facing this student population, and how authorized sei policy impacted their abilities to support their learning. in general, the interviewees were eager to talk about refugee students and did not appear to hold back on describing their thoughts or experiences. a few of the teachers displayed very emotional responses about their work with refugees. below, we outline the most prominent themes that we identified from the interviews. general feeling of unpreparedness the biggest theme identified throughout data analysis was the general feeling of unpreparedness expressed by the educators. the teachers and counselor had all received their master’s degrees in education, and the principal had received her doctorate. the teachers all sought out sei endorsements and had received training in their teacher preparation programs to work with els. despite their extensive educational achievements, the educators felt that they were unprepared to work with refugee students. teachers, in particular, attributed their lack of relevant training to teacher-training requirements under sei, specifically those regarding the sei endorsement. this gap in training left an impact on these teachers and several of them stated that they were forced to use a trial-and-error approach when they started working with refugee students. the principal took intentional steps to provide additional differentiated professional development for her teachers working with refugee students. her recommendations for refugee-specific training went even further: “in a perfect world, we have a college of education program specifically designed to meet refugee families’ needs. cultural awareness, sensitivity, language needs, just the whole gamut… we’re doing some differentiated pd now, we’re pulling our el teachers together and we have a district academic coach who is now supporting them. but it's so multi-leveled. that’s what i’m trying to do here at my home [school].” one teacher said that she sought out her current position at the school because she knew it was extremely diverse. upon receiving her teaching certification, she began working with students from all different linguistic and cultural backgrounds: “i was expecting to have a room full of spanish speakers and it was a room full of iraqis. and i was sort of in shock, ‘how am i going to do this?’” likewise, another teacher felt confident in her ability to teach, but experienced self-doubt when it came to teaching refugee students: “you know when i first came, he [the principal] told me that i would be in the sei class, which i am highly qualified to do. they didn’t tell me anything about the refugees, that it would be refugees at all, not even one refugee. that was a total surprise. and at first, after the first week, i didn’t know if i could do it. i went back to (the principal) and i said, you know, this is very unfair. i said, you need to give me a little bit more history on this situation. it’s unfair to me and to the kids, because they’re probably not going to get teaching refugee students in arizona 65 what they need to get at the beginning until i understand what i need to give them. and he agreed, but he said, you’re still the most qualified for it. i didn’t think i could do it, and he said, you can do it.” when it came to specific training for working with cultural or diverse populations, none of the teachers felt that they had received adequate training. one teacher was very conclusive when asked about her training on working with refugee students. “never. it was never mentioned. i specialized in esl education for my masters and it was never mentioned in any class. i knew nothing.” another teacher proposed specialized training for teachers who are newly working with refugees, “i just think that the teachers that are getting them aren’t getting enough pre-advice, training, knowledge, something.” this perceived lack of training left an impact on these teachers and many of them spoke about feeling completely unprepared when starting to work with refugee students. teachers appropriating sei policy another theme that became clear during several interviews was that teachers felt restricted by the prescribed model of sei, and they appropriated the policy to support their students’ educational needs. a large portion of the responses took to heart policy decisions, with each of the teachers questioning or altering the policy on their own in a way that could be described as subversive. some teachers used practices that might be counter to what sei policy or school norms dictate. under sei guidelines, the arizona english language learner assessment (azella) is the gatekeeper exam for els in arizona. all students who have been identified as second language learners on a home language survey are required to take the azella test, and students’ scores determine appropriate placement for instruction in esl classrooms during their first academic year (arizona department of education, 2016). in response to the frustrations with the azella, one teacher described the tension between student placement and teachers’ recommendations: “i’ve got student who just came she is pretty fluent, but for some reason on the azella test she did not write the essay, she just left it blank. so, she’s in very super easy classes, and she doesn’t need to be. she speaks english. she’s with kids who are learning the alphabet and she’s sitting there… and you can’t move the kid. it’s the law. so, what the teachers do, we are just moving them anyway and lying about it. we could get in serious trouble. like if anything happened to the kid and the kid is in the wrong class… so we just do it secretly.” another teacher argued that strict adherence to the standardized testing and sei has led to a “dysfunctional system”: “they tell us not to teach the first three weeks. which i have never heard…ever. it’s so that counseling can switch kids around. they place kids randomly. my two-hour literacy block is just kind of a holding pen. if you want kids tested for special ed[ucation] it really never happens. the state has turned the azella test into a bible. there’s hundreds and hundreds of cases.” the sei teachers were acutely aware of the needs of their students and had much to say about what they struggle with the most in the classroom, yet were limited in what they could provide according to state policy. when asked what refugee students need most, the participants did not deny the importance of learning english, but most felt sei guidelines made it more difficult for students to learn. the principal described his issues with sei very clearly. in the following quote, the principal refers to two tests, the azella and the azmerit 66 global education review 5(4) test, the standardized test administered yearly to all students in grades 3-12 to determine if state standards are being met. according to the principal, both proved to be a challenge for teachers and newcomer refugee students: “normal language acquisition theory says that it takes 3-5 years [to learn a language] yet our azella testing says its one year so that’s a big problem right there. and i don’t feel it’s appropriate, honestly, it’s a travesty that we make especially new refugee students sit through an azmerit test when they are monolingual. it’s a disservice. i am so torn on that.” teachers also felt that sei hindered students’ relationships with other teachers and staff on school campuses. under the 4-hour block model of sei, els must receive a minimum of four hours of english language instruction per day. these guidelines effectively segregate refugee students in sei classrooms and results in other teachers at the school having very little experience with this student population. in several instances, our participants described interactions where the refugee students needed to be defended. “when we go to p.e. some of the teachers know that my class is... “special”. they really are. and them some of them don’t (understand) and then they’ll be like “why isn’t this kid listening?” and like, they don’t understand what you’re saying to them. and then they (teachers) always say something to me like, “what’s wrong with this kid?” they don’t know what you’re telling them to do. a lot of people don’t understand it until they’ve actually done it. like today i kind of snapped at somebody today because somebody was yelling at one of my kids to tie their shoes and i was like he doesn’t know how to tie his shoes and he doesn’t know what you’re telling him to do.” other problems have arisen with how the entire school campus responds to refugee students and the seeming segregation of refugee students from the rest of the campus. one teacher attributed this to the placement of els into classrooms based on sei. she explained that els were in the same classroom regardless of their language level. she explained that when the students were integrated by level, they were all able to help each other, though some of the higher-level students were not progressing. presumably, this was the cause for the change in classroom structure and the reason why a single teacher’s refugee student numbers are so high. another cause for the change could be attributed to the large numbers of new students arriving in arizona at a pre-emergent level. consequences of this placement policy, however, mean that certain teachers are continuously educating more refugee students with very different needs. the principal had a unique perspective on teacher accountability that she felt was unfair to teachers of refugee students. her experience was particularly insightful since she had the task of monitoring her sei teachers who have large numbers of refugee students to teach: “and it’s hard…i’m constantly pumping up my teachers. the four most important things for an sei classroom are that they’re safe, they’re respected, they’re loved and they’re valued. that’s it. that’s all i ask of you.” the principal reported hand-selecting which teachers would work with refugee students because she knew the challenge would be great and she wanted to utilize teachers who would be able to last. she went on to explain what is expected of these sei teachers: “so, when that progress comes much slower than a regular classroom and teachers aren’t prepared for that it can be very defeating. but now the state says something different, their performance pay says something different. constantly reassuring them to find those small steps teaching refugee students in arizona 67 they’re making every day towards that big progress. but when you have regular ed teachers who become sei teachers and they’re constantly comparing them and looking at our pacing guide going, how can i do this? it’s very challenging and you have to be able to value those teachers.” with her unique understanding of the needs of refugee students in her school, the principal was able to exert some form of control based on her own opinions of what is best for their learning. taken further, the principal’s statement also reflects a keen understanding of what is going to make for a successful sei teacher with refugee students. discussion the experiences resettled refugees have in u.s. schools are shaped by implementation of policies that situate their context in this country and plays out within power regimes through a dynamic process that involves sociocultural and ideological factors. teachers are at the heart of this process and often act as the “final arbiters of language policy implementation” (menken & garcía, 2010, p. 1). regardless of the context, there are typically opportunities for policy appropriation in schools, where the official text comes to life. experiencing how power is constructed through language and language policies, educators may begin to view themselves not solely as recipients of official policy texts, but as powerful actors with the ability to make unauthorized, de facto policy in their classrooms. not only do our findings shed light on educators’ complex experiences working with refugee students in u.s. schools, but they also hold significant implications for policymakers and educational research moving forward. implications for policy in the context of monolingual ideologies and politicized nature of education in arizona, educators have been ill-equipped to face the challenges refugee students may face due to english-only policies that push diverse students to the outskirts or force them to assimilate. findings of this study support the work of scholars that argue that individuals providing educational services to refugee children should receive specialized training to help them understand the unique needs of these students (kirk & cassity, 2007; macnevin, 2012; naidoo, 2012; nicolai & triplehorn, 2003; roxas, 2011b). rather than reducing training requirements for qualification to work in classrooms with refugee students, our findings indicate that states should provide incentives for higher certification and specialization in teaching refugee populations. learning from international training initiatives may also help connect the experiences of refugee students in preand post-resettlement education contexts. the inter-agency network on education in emergency’s (inee) minimum standards for education in emergencies, chronic crises, and early reconstruction, which were created in 2006 to support the learning of vulnerable children in conflict settings, has very rarely been studied or utilized in third country resettlement contexts to support refugee students in western educational settings. the application of the inee minimum standards in resettlement contexts could provide more evidence for teacher training that is suitable for the complex context that educators in the u.s. are experiencing (burns & lawrie, 2015). the inee sets standards and provides guidance to humanitarian agencies and governments delivering education to refugee communities in host countries, supporting education for children in conflict, and for helping to rebuild education systems after a conflict. in many of these countries, navigating cultural, linguistic, and ethnic differences is a top priority. in american schools, cultural differences and gaps continue to grow between teachers and their students, which now include 68 global education review 5(4) increasing numbers of refugee and non-refugee immigrants (hones, 2002). these gaps further necessitate the need for educational policies that support cultural and linguistic diversity. on a global scale, the inee could also be a platform for teachers and policy makers to learn from each other. educators in countries of resettlement can inform the practice of working with refugee children in countries of asylum or conflict through the shared knowledge of the minimum standards and education in emergencies. implications for future research our findings also indicate there is a growing need for research that examines the relationship between educational policy formulation and implementation, especially in regard to the specific needs of refugee students. various studies have examined the implementation of sei and its effects on primarily latino student populations in arizona (e.g., combs et al., 2011; de jong, 2008; heineke, 2015), but none have considered how teachers are enacting this policy to support the needs of a refugee student population that has grown considerably in recent years. the subversive practices of teachers in our study are indicative of their willingness to find solutions to challenges refugee students are facing as a result of sei, and may be seen as a result of the policy’s inflexibility. the participants’ personal experiences with and assessments of refugee students’ biggest needs seem to be driving the appropriation of policy to support their refugee students. based on these personal experiences, additional research into the policy implementation process is warranted. limitations this study also presented limitations that could be addressed in future research. for instance, a greater understanding of the impact that language policy may have on refugee students could be examined from in-depth interviews with students themselves. additionally, participant observer methods could be explored to view the daily interactions of refugee students with their teachers and other students in classrooms. finally, a longitudinal study that followed newly arrived refugee students during the few years in an arizona classroom would further highlight the long-term impact of sei on refugee students’ educational opportunities. conclusion refugee children around the world face daunting challenges when accessing education of quality or substance. understanding, at least in part, some of the experiences that teachers have had in working with this student population will provide a basic foundation for exploring the needs of teachers in resettlement education contexts. herein, our results fill problematic gaps in the literature to initiate a review of current u.s. educational policies, specifically those dealing with language, which, in turn, affect teacher-training policies. contributing to an understanding of how training programs can better prepare teachers to work with refugee students, this study sheds light on teachers’ needs to be effective in newly diverse classrooms. results highlight the important role that teachers play in helping students adjust to education in the united states and also call for a comprehensive training program that includes training on trauma-informed and culturally responsive approaches. finally, by 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(2007). language learning and the politics of belonging: sudanese women refugees becoming and being “american.” anthropology & education quarterly, 38(4), 343–359. wiley, t. g., & wright, w. e. (2004). against the undertow: language-minority education policy and politics in the “age of accountability.” educational policy, 18(1), 142–168. about the author(s) joanna henderson has worked in youth and education related non-profit organizations for over 10 years. she has conducted research at arizona state university in social and cultural pedagogy focusing on teacher training to improve outcomes for refugee students. she has presented at many school district, state, and international professional development sessions and conferences. her research interests include refugee and immigrant student integration into u.s schools, with a particular emphasis on dialogue and education for social change. eric ambroso is is a doctoral candidate in the mary lou fulton teachers college at arizona state university. his current research interests include the implementation of language policies, language ideologies, and experiences of teachers working with english learners in u.s. schools. before returning to academia, eric taught english in italy, south korea, vietnam, and washington. http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/refugees/ http://www.un.org/en/globalissues/briefingpapers/refugees/ http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/figures-at-a-glance.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/resettlement-in-the-united-states.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/resettlement-in-the-united-states.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/solutions.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/solutions.html needs, barriers, and support systems for refugee students in germany 136 ______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: streitweiser, bernhard, schmidt, maria anne, gläsener, katherina marlen, & brück, lukas (2018). needs, barriers and support systems for refugee students in germany. global education review 5 (4), 136-157. needs, barriers, and support systems for refugee students in germany bernhard streitwieser george washington university maria anne schmidt htw berlin university of applied sciences katharina marlen gläsener beuth university of applied sciences berlin lukas brück robert bosch foundation abstract this paper details the results of a study of 25 students of refugee background (sorb) from syria, iran, iraq, and afghanistan at two technical universities of applied sciences in berlin who were participating in preparatory courses to matriculate or were already engaging in their first semesters of study. the research shares what these refugee students feel they need in order to succeed in german higher education, and what they see as barriers. the data are organized around baker, ramsay, irwin and mile’s (2017) analytical framework of hot (familiar-informal), warm (familiar-formal) and cold (unfamiliarformal) sources of support. this study is relevant at a time of both a massification of participation in higher education leading to greater student diversification and the development of more holistic support for all students, and an increasing mood of political agitation in countries traditionally open to migration. keywords higher education, germany, integration, refugee crisis, refugees introduction one skewed perception of a refugee is an exhausted, desperate person subsisting on the margins of society who was once a doctor, lawyer or tradesman in their home country but has now been reduced to taxi driver, invisible worker, or poverty stricken burden on society. on the other end of the spectrum and equally extreme, a positive picture of a refugee is a historical figure like albert einstein, rescued from nazi germany by the united states in 1940 and planted at princeton university to live out his days in calm sanctuary (brian, 1996).the true picture of refugees today approximates neither of these two extremes. there is tremendous diversity in the demographic of those now traversing the globe, and each of their stories is idiosyncratic and shaped by extrinsic opportunity and determined by intrinsic agency. _____________________________________ corresponding author bernhard streitwieser , graduate school of education and human development, the george washington university, 2121 i st nw, washington, dc 20052 email: streitwieser@email.gwu.edu mailto:streitwieser@email.gwu.edu 137 global education review 5(4) ironically, today we are witnessing a tragic situation in reverse of the one that rescued professor einstein over seventy-five years ago. while germany between 2014-2017 took in over 1.6 million asylum seekers, the united states has been increasingly closing its immigration pipeline. despite some political tensions (the current german leadership is suffering for its large refugee intake) the country still by and large appears to recognize the benefits of migration (eckert, 2018). while that initial influx has now receded, with only 93,316 asylum seekers entering germany in the first half of 2018 (bamf, 2018b, p. 3), much of the rest of the world saw germany’s government and its civil society as exemplary in their response and openness. how the country will deal with the more recent political backlash has yet to be determined (die zeit, 2017). meanwhile, the current administration in the united states seems to disregard the country’s long history of economic and social gains from migration (national academies, 2017; davis & sengupta, 2018). between january 2016 and january 2018 there has been 70% drop in refugee admissions, according to a report to congress from the refugee health technical assistance center (rhtc, 2018; jackson, 2018). while during the last year of the obama administration 98,266 refugees were admitted into the country, during president trump’s first year in office only 29,722 were allowed in, according to the worldwide refugee admissions processing system (wraps). in germany, a numerically small but not insignificant segment of its newest refugees are becoming eligible to enter its universities and resume or begin their academic careers. in this paper we share data from a study of refugees who made their way into germany in 20152016 and have been actively seeking opportunities to begin or resume their university studies at berlin’s universities of applied sciences (technische fachhochschulen). the global refugee context and germany today the largest displacement has been recorded since wwii. this has great ramifications on educational access where, according to the unhcr, only 1% of this global refugee population will have the opportunity to find a place in tertiary education. for those who do manage to find places, the pathway into the higher education system is fraught with significant obstacles (ager & strang, 2008; benezer & zetter, 2014; ives, 2007). these include possibly having to learn a foreign language (watkins, razee & richter, 2012), having their credentials evaluated and approved (loo, 2016; streitwieser & taylor, 2016), navigating the demands of a new academic environment (block, cross, riggs & gibbs, 2014; mcbrien, 2005), and dealing with psychological trauma (fazel, wheeler & danesh, 2005). perhaps most significantly, they may need to renegotiate their intellectual identities to join a new academic culture and adhere to its norms of behavior and expectations (colic-peisker & walker, 2003; esses, hamilton & gaucher, 2017; matthews, 2008). what if the global 1% who currently manage the transition into higher education were larger, perhaps closer to 5%? while politically in much of the world right now the mood seems to be turning against rather than for refugees, some countries are making noticeable gestures that appear to recognize their potential as a source of talent and a future workforce, even in the face of political movements that agitate against them (funk, 2016). the years 2015-2016 saw the heaviest exodus of refugees from the middle east and north africa (mena) into europe. for germany, august 2016 signaled the apex of its so-called “refugee crisis,” where 90,000 first asylum claims were registered (federal office for migration and refugees (bamf, 2018a). between 2014-2017 more than 1.6 million refugees on their way to german higher education 138 asylum seekers made their way into the country (bamf, 2018a, p. 9). among these were syrians escaping their ongoing civil war, who accounted for more than 500,000 of the asylum claims registered that year, doubling those from afghanistan and iraq, the two next largest refugee groups (bamf, 2018a). by january of 2018, up to 19% of all refugees in germany originated from syria, followed by iraq, nigeria, iran and turkey; 37.2% were between the ages of 16-30, and roughly 68% were male (bamf, 2018a). three years after the initial scramble to manage what the german and global media called the 2015-2016 “refugee crisis” (haller, 2017), researchers have begun to study this population when time has allowed for deeper reflection on the challenges they face and its implications. for refugees and their host societies, access to or resuming education is a first step into eventually fostering successful integration (ager & strang, 2008). the return to a learning routine can pave the way back into society and serve to offset the trauma of forced migration (crea, 2016; dryden-peterson, 2015). as international studies show, with new educational perspectives, refugees have often proven to be the most resilient and ambitious learners (mangan & winter, 2017; shakya et al., 2010; joyce, earnest, demori & silvagni 2010; morrice, 2013), even as they face extraordinary challenges (joyce, earnest, demori & silvagni, 2010; stevenson & willott, 2007). besides access to primary and secondary education, young refugees also hope to have the opportunity to study. that group is the target of the research presented in this paper. although refugee students account for only a relatively small proportion of all students in germany (about 2%, federal statistical office, 2017, p. 6), the goal of integrating them into higher education presents many institutions with organizational, curricular and pedagogical challenges (streitwieser, schmidt, brück & gläsener, 2018). at the same time, refugee students also face a host of challenges, which the research detailed in this paper presents from their perspective. in this discussion we purposefully look at only one setting in one country and a small selection of students at two technical universities of applied sciences in only one city, berlin. our sample consists of two-thirds male and one-third female students of refugee backgrounds (sorb), which approximates the general demographic breakdown of the broader refugee population that entered germany in 2015-2016, and includes students from syria, iraq, iran, and afghanistan. the two main research questions that drove our study were, 1) what do sorb think they need to succeed in german higher education? 2) what do sorb see as barriers to achieving success? theoretical framework and literature support in addition to aspects of daily life (e.g., accommodation, financing living expenses while studying, and securing residency status), sorb also must navigate an unfamiliar university entrance system for which they can resort to a variety of forms of support. to understand and categorize the different needs that refugees identified to succeed, this research draws on baker, ramsay, irwin and mile’s (2017) analytical framework of “hot” (familiar-informal), “warm” (familiar-formal) and “cold” (unfamiliar-formal) sources of support. based on ball and vincent’s (1998) hot and cold knowledge to which slack et al., (2014) added the concept of warm knowledge, baker et al.’s analytical frame helps to categorize different types of support that sorb access. using this analytical framework helps to conceptualize what sorb think university programming for them ought to be reinforced, adapted or newly established to address their particular needs and to help them to feel integrated and eventually succeed in their studies. this is particularly relevant in times of massification of higher education and simultaneously increasing student 139 global education review 5(4) diversification that is calling for responsive and holistic support models that can serve all students (david, 2010). to access study related support (understood in this paper as topics directly related to studies) such as mastering enrolment requirements and compiling a personal study plan; but also topics related indirectly to studies, such as federal student financial aid program (bafög) and general college life, different layers/dimensions are important. in this context baker et al.’s (2017) analytical frame offers a useful construct, with hot support being understood as information and support accessed through friends or community members, and cold support on the other hand being information and support offered by official channels through representatives of the university, e.g., office hours or online accessible information on the university’s website. for the intermediate space, slack et al., add an additional dimension, warm support, which we see as signaling those “‘trusted individuals’ who refugee students perceive as offering more formal support than friends but less formal support than ‘officials,’”, such as the administrative and teaching staff at universities (2017, p. 7). categorizing needs identified by the refugees is crucial for future university programming towards refugees, as former studies have shown (naidoo et al., 2015; ramsay et al., 2016; baker et al., 2017). students of refugee background tend to make greater use of warm and hot support systems than formal-institutional so called “cold” support systems. this fact must be taken into account when establishing programs for refugees and, as such, became the primary issue we investigated in our study. the path into higher education for refugees when refugees first arrived in the largest numbers in 2015-2016 to the arrival centers erected in each of germany’s 16 federal states, there was a procedure they had to go through before they could begin to seek access into education or employment. the german federal office for migration and refugees (bamf) provides a comprehensive integrated refugee management brochure (2017) in german and english with a roadmap for refugees going through the asylum process. their online and print document is replete with easy to understand illustrations and simplified text. the document details the asylum process from beginning at the arrival center, to registration, through the asylum procedure, and to integration into education and the labor market. the booklet also includes information in cases of voluntary or forced repatriation. with their ankunftsnachweis, or proof of arrival from the german federal office for migration and refugees (bamf), refugees are granted essential state benefits, including housing, a food allowance, and medical care. the law for asylum applicants (asylbewerberleistungsgesetz) grants them the right to housing, food, clothing, and specific healthcare provision. the arrival centers follow the koenigsteinerschlüssel, or federal distribution quota system, which transitioned individuals or families to initially makeshift housing, as was the case with berlin during the height of the crisis. the idea behind this distribution is both to share cost among states, and to facilitate the opportunities for integration and to not permit migrant groups to collect in larger metropolitan centers or particular city districts to overwhelm a local population (bennhold, 2018). initial housing included makeshift placement in airport hangars, for example at berlin’s famous tempelhof airport, in school gymnasiums, in unoccupied buildings, in former barracks, or in unoccupied apartments. while refugees had the option to move from camps to independent housing, if they could find alternatives with financial help from a local job center, many have remained in shelters for months or even years. as part of the asylum process to receive refugees on their way to german higher education 140 permission for residency (aufenthaltsgestattung), refugees are fingerprinted, interviewed, and undergo a background check before a further determination is made about their status; this process can range from several months to over a year (dw, 2018). while the process of placement into housing, school, and employment has been conducted in a streamlined way that may serve as an exemplar to other countries, it has not been without its tensions, particularly as the presence of refugees has become a fact of daily life in some areas of the country. for example, in 2018 some towns and food banks serving a local clientele publicly advertised a “germans first” policy, which for obvious historical reasons was highly contentious (bennhold, 2018). how such tensions play out and, if preventing the migration of refugees and migrants to cities with concentrations of like ethnic groups will succeed, remains to be seen, but tensions are already clear in the rise of the anti-immigration, right wing party, alternative für deutschland (afd) since 2016 (zick, küpper & krause 2016). for germany’s higher education sector, which is comprised of 400 research universities, technical universities, and vocational training programs – more than 30,000 to 50,000 new sorb between 2015 and 2020 will have completed the integration class (integrationskurs) required for all asylum seekers, as well as basic language training at the b1 level, which falls on a language competency scale from a1 to c2 (streitwieser, schmidt, gläsener & brück, 2018). eligibility for residency status in germany requires participation in an integrationskurs to learn general facts about german history, culture, and social norms. at b1 language proficiency level, speakers can engage on familiar topics in an educational and professional setting and understand and compose simple texts (streitwieser, schmidt, gläsener & brück, 2018). to become eligible to enter the university, however, they must augment these basic qualifications with additional higher-level language training up to the c1 level, where speakers are able to understand theoretically more complex texts and write for specific scientific disciplines (european council’s common european framework of reference for languages, 2018, p. 34). to become eligible to enter a university, applicants must also have their academic credentials from their homeland assessed and accepted, and in some cases undergo additional subject-matter testing in their discipline or in a new discipline if they are retraining. only after passing these hurdles can a refugee become qualified to apply to formally enroll as a student (rüland, 2016; stifterverband, 2017). to facilitate this rigorous training or retraining, in 2015 the federal ministry of education and research (bmbf) granted the german academic exchange service (daad) 100 million euros through 2019 to develop the necessary higher education programming to help refugees gain access to university study. this initial funding was recently approved to continue through march of 2020 (daad, 2018). through funding mechanism like the “integra” program (integrating refugees in degree programs) and “welcome” (students helping refugees), both managed by the daad, germany’s higher education institutions were granted the tools to help integrate this these new arrivals. a number of studies over the past three years have begun to investigate the complexity of the university administrative process for refugees (schammann & younso, 2016; streitwieser, brück, moody & taylor, 2017; streitwieser, schmidt, brück & gläsener, 2018; svr forschungsbereich, 2017; trines, 2017), including the support structures they receive through the daad’s programs (fourier, kracht, latsch, heublein & schneider, 2018), and the hurdles they must overcome, such as learning the german language, taking university preparation courses, having their credentials 141 global education review 5(4) assessed through the anabin database, and having their subject matter competency tested via testas. in order to officially enroll in a germany university, a student must be able to show proof of having earned a university entrance qualification and an advanced german language level for studies in german. the uniassist e. v. is a service agency that offers support for all universities in the assessment of educational certificates from around the world. the agency provides external credential assessment services as a way to reduce the workload of university admissions officers, for a fee. most universities use this service to handle international student applications, which includes refugee document processing. for sorb, the application process is to a large extent for free. for some refugees it can be challenging if their documentation was destroyed; either because they were unable to gather their paperwork together before fleeing, or if their documents were taken from them or lost during their journey, as happened in cases of mediterranean passages in particular. in the absence of credentials to compare against an existing database, higher education institutions can consult the anabin database, and also administer the testas examination system to assess a student’s competency. anabin (anerkennung und bewertung ausländischer bildungsnachweise) is a database against which anyone’s credentials can be matched visa-vis an original copy of a document from over 25,000 higher education institution in more than 180 countries in order to verify its authenticity for eligibility to study at the bachelor’s, master’s, and vocational levels in germany (anabin.de., n.d.). the system is administered by the german kultusministerkonferenz, the assembly of ministers of education from the 16 german federal states. the testas (test für ausländische studierende) is a standard assessment test of general university-level competency that can be taken in a variety of languages, including english and arabic, and is free of charge for refugees (testas, n.d). the test is supported by the daad and sponsored by the german federal ministry of education and research (bmbf). currently, some 60 universities make use of testas for their admission processes for both preparatory courses as well as for general admission (g.a.s.t., 2018, p. 16). testas helps students to realistically assess their ability to study successful in a desired program and the university to choose those students with best test results. depending on results, some universities offer very strong candidates the chance to do a subject-specific test at the university and enter the higher education system without documents from their home country. after language and general competency hurdles are overcome and an applicant is deemed to be sufficiently qualified, subjectlevel testing becomes the responsibility of a receiving university program and department. sorb also must compete for limited university placements next to all non-eu international students who may already have prior years of german language ability and cultural familiarity. finally, refugees have to work through socio-emotional trauma (yakushko, watson & thompson, 2008), asylum and legal uncertainty (mountz, wright, miyares & bailey, 2002), and in some cases a societal backlash against them (gale, 2004), while facing competition in germany for coveted university spots. in the scramble to get programming off the ground with trained personnel, however, there has been little time to study how integration at universities is actually happening (schammann & younso, 2016; svr, 2017). even less research has addressed how sorb are engaging with the german university system, what they bring to it, and how their background experiences, expectations, and beliefs about education interact in this new educational refugees on their way to german higher education 142 environment. sorb bring with them different educational backgrounds and experiences, possibly distinct ideas about the structure of political, economic and social life, and in many cases trauma and disruption that mass displacement has caused. on the receiving end, german faculties, administrators and students also face challenges adjusting to and accommodating these new members of their learning communities (streitwieser & brück, 2018). the research project: sample & method the data for this study was collected during an intensive week-long interview in june 2018. the four researchers—three german and one american—formed in 2017 as the berlin refugee research group (brrg) to conduct field research around the topic of refugee education. there were 16 items in the semistructured interviews divided into three sections. our open-ended questions addressed issues such as, “how are you doing at the university right now? how well integrated do you feel here?” or “are there any factors at the university that prevent you from achieving your goals?” all interviews lasted more than one hour. our sample included 25 students who came to germany as refugees two to three years ago and are still in preparation courses (financed through the program “integra” from the daad) to prepare to matriculate (16 of the students) or are already fully matriculated and have overcome all barriers and are in their first or second semesters (9 of the students) at two different state universities of applied sciences in berlin. the interviewees were 20-30 years of age, 4 women and 16 men from syria (20), iran (2), iraq (2) and afghanistan (1). see appendix for further details. our sample mirrors the proportions in the integra population, namely 75% from syria, 6% from afghanistan, 6% from iran, and 3% from iraq, and 81% males and 19% females (fourier, kracht, latsch, heublein & schneider, 2018). to guarantee anonymity for our interviewees, each person received a unique code, which consisted of a mixture of numbers and letters: 1 for male and 2 for female, first letter of father’s and mother’s given name, and the year of birth. all interviews were audio recorded and conducted in german and participants signed a consent form authorized by the lead author’s institutional review board. the interviews took place in german, which was at the request of the interviewees who were also offered the chance to speak in english, and took place in an available room in the same building in which the students were taking their course. the meetings were scheduled at convenient times for the students, who came in on a voluntary basis. there was one male and one female interviewer at each sitting. while the german research team members conducted the interviews, the american researcher simultaneously transcribed the interview from german into english to create the written transcript. after each interview, the researchers briefly discussed the main points of the conversation. shortly after completion of all interviews, the research team checked each transcript with the audio recording and, where necessary, corrected or added detail to the initial translations of the interviews. the research team then compiled its notes and organized the information into two thematic categories (patton, 2002) that resulted in six distinct subthemes, along with supportive testimonials from the interview recordings. the team then conducted numerous follow up group meetings to comb through the series of themes and to narrow them down to the distinct categories we describe in detail in the following sections. we divided our interviews according to two main thematic categories: (1) participation, and (2) needs and barriers. these two codes are divided into three sub codes each, resulting in six different sub codes: (1.1) participation through every day student life, (1.2) 143 global education review 5(4) participation through german language and friendship with germans, (1.3) participation through appreciation of skills, (2.1) need for more (preparation) courses, (2.2) barriers to integration due to absence, and (2.3) barriers due to lack of language skills. all sub codes are supported with quotations taken directly from our interviews. findings in the following sections, we organize our data findings around baker et al.’s analytical framework of “hot” (familiar-informal), “warm” (familiar-formal), and “cold” (unfamiliarformal) sources of support. this framework helps conceptualize how sorb conceive of their universities’ programming and how they believe it might best address their needs and eventually foster their feeling of integration and success in their studies. (1) participation when asking prospective and current students of refugee background about the most important factors for feeling like they have arrived and are starting to feel accepted and appreciated in the german higher education system, across the board all cite making new contacts, german friends and language skills as the most important factors. as one student put it, “i am still in my first semester, i think my feeling of only being 50% integrated will grow in the future, i hope so. i am getting to know the technical terms better, knowing more people, and so i think this percent will grow” (1mi19881). other interviewees confirmed this perspective: “first, the communication with students and staff, second passing the exams and understanding the courses” (1ta1990). a third said, “when i can understand what the teacher says, and it’s not foreign anymore, then i can say i am integrated” (1lm1988). for him, integration was coupled primarily with overcoming the language hurdle. 1.1 participation through every day student life prospective students experience a feeling of well-being at a university by having to do tasks also expected of regular students, even if they are not yet matriculated as international students. in their preparatory programs at beuth university and the htw berlin, for example, in which they receive higher level language training and information about the university system, they begin to experience how it might be in the future as a regular student, for example by giving presentations, being creative to resolve a problem, having lunch in the cafeteria, or chatting with german students. as one student explained, “the presentations are great. […] we feel well integrated. the presentations really help” (2hm1995). the feeling of “doing something” is an important factor. another student professed, “i feel like a student now, i go to school and university. i feel like i can do something, it is a lot better than just sitting around” (1so1995). this perspective does not differ from those of refugees who are already enrolled, even if their beginning at the university was seen as being a little harder: “at first i felt totally hopeless, i could spend hours on a task and still got it wrong. but i realized that others all have the same problem too. now, i feel better because we worked in groups and i learned that it’s tough for us all” (1sm1995). other students also found “no difference from others” (1ne1989), noting, “we all have to do the same work here at the university. we are all just normal students” (1sa1993). next to doing the same things, our subjects explained that participation is also about experiencing normal student life: “when i go in the mensa (dining hall) and the atmosphere and mood feels like a university, that reminds me of my time at the syrian university, i really missed that” (1fs1991). the above quotes help to illustrate how successful integration at the university is about much more than simply succeeding in academics, but also about feeling like being part refugees on their way to german higher education 144 of the regular student body. cold support in the form of preparatory programs is essential in this regard as a way to help new students acclimate into the community. sorb, as all students, simply want to feel like they are part of the normal university community, as any other students do. this is a predictable human emotion and not necessarily specific to their particular context, time or circumstance. 1.2 participation through german language and friendships with germans according to our sample’s testimonials, german language was one of the main factors that contributed to feeling like they were participating in the community. as one explained it, “at first it was tough, i did not feel accepted, had no friends, but once i learned the language, i made friends, germans and international friends, and feel now more like part of the society” (1bh1996). another student felt “80% […] good; the problem is the language. if i could speak 100% i would probably feel like any german student. i feel normal but the language gets in the way and destroys everything, but it’s getting better and better […]” (1aa1995). when asking refugees from the preparatory courses why they did not feel accepted and integrated at the university, many equated their still small number of german contacts and the interactions with local students, along with german language difficulties. as one noted, “i feel very good here, we work with the mentors, get to know some other students. before, i had no contact with other students” (1gk1997). another interviewee, however, felt less positive since, “we don’t have any real german friends yet, but maybe when we are students for real here we will make some” (1ag1995). the international students of refugee background in our study confirmed that making friends helped them greatly to feel part of the wider student body. as one triumphantly stated, “yes, i feel good. i have friends from higher semesters, and i often ask them for help and advice” (1ta1990). but it is not only about the number of german friends, it is also about equality and topics, which are offered in addition to the preparatory course supporting sorb during their first courses at a german university (as experienced in the beuth university mentoring program). as one explained, “the mentors are very nice, we have a good team spirit. we are nice to each other, we also meet outside the university and do things besides study[ing]” (1fs1991). the refugees in the preparatory courses did not feel like mentees, but rather “just talk as friends” to their mentors (2nn1998) “about the world cup” and laugh together (1mg1994). the sample we interviewed made it clear that learning german and connecting with other is sometimes not easy, however. some refugees explained the effort was required: “i feel integrated, but it takes a lot of work. i have to do more with germans, talk to them more, i am a bit lazy in that regard” (1na1992). but they also noted that courage was also necessary to really get into contact with german students: “in the beginning i was afraid to talk to other students, i think i was shy. […] now, i try to meet people, i try to be funny, i try through social actions and it helps” (1aa1995). the same appears to be relevant for professors, lecturers, and employees as one explained: “some teachers also help. but sometimes we are too shy to ask” (1lm1988). the warm support provided by mentoring can become hot support as mentors become friends, as the quotes above demonstrate. when an essentially formalistic, university provided mentoring relationship develops into a genuine friendship, for example through watching sports or having a laugh together, warm support becomes hot support. 1.3 participation through appreciation of skills many of our interview partners talked about the appreciation of their skills when being asked 145 global education review 5(4) about their feeling at beuth university or at the htw berlin. it seems to be an important aspect to be recognized for skills acquired in the home country: “some students asked me about statistics. it is nice if you can help others with your background from syria. my schooling there was very helpful” (1zo1994). it might also be the fact that they see the chance to give society something in return, because some talked about their feelings to “owe the germans”. especially in the first semester, this appreciation was somehow hard to receive: “the other students are not in the mood to work together with me [in] group work because of the language or because they are afraid that my performance is not so good” (2sf1988). “this might not be about racism. […] i have the feeling that we [the refugees] sometimes limit a group. if he works with us in a group, he does more with us in a group than when he is in a german group, where he does just as much as anyone else. […] but it gets better as they realize we are good, and eventually we all do work equally” (1aa1995). being “good,” whatever that means for students, appears as helpful factor for integration into the german student body. as one explained to us, “if someone is good at math, all love him, but if someone does not understand, no one wants to be his friend. that is standard for people, not just us or germans. i’m good at math so everyone is nice to me” (1sm1995). next to the appreciation of skills from other students, demonstration of skills was also seen as important in communication with lecturers and professors at the university. as one student noted, “two weeks ago i had a test, with lots of new terms. the lecturer was helpful. i told him that german was tough, but he helped me a bit, he didn’t give me the answer but he helped a bit with some points where he could see my language deficiency. that was nice and he understood me. little things like that can really make a difference. indirect understanding can be so helpful. it can help you feel more integrated” (1mm1989). participation in the higher education system demands self-assurance, sufficient german skills, the courage to approach students and professors, and sometimes some empathy from others, as summarized so well by one htw berlin master’s student. “i feel 100% integrated. i am a normal student, i do group work, i do my exams. it feels the same as when i did my ba in iraq. i am 100% integrated. it’s those who don’t want to talk to me are not integrated! [laughs] but sometimes a lecturer says something and i don’t understand it because my german is not so good, then i don’t feel so integrated. if he says something really complicated, i have to study it more at home, most likely the other students, germans have to study more too. so it’s not about the language in that case. the language issue is not necessarily the reason for not being integrated” (1ne1989). so the student did not blame the language challenge for difficulty integrating, but rather emphasized the challenge of mastering the subject matter, and saw that level of mastery as the conduit to integration, and language competency as more of a pathway to it, and necessary byproduct of it, in the end. the above testimonials illustrate how accessing hot support through an “exchange of skills” can function as a sort of transactional mechanism that can potentially but not necessarily lead to establishing friendship networks. the student who proclaimed, “i’m good at math so everyone is nice to me” feels that his math skills are a gateway into friendship. he thereby shows that he essentially understands there to be a bartering type of relationship: if he has something to offer (i.e., good math skills), then the other non-refugee classmates may be willing to also give him something in return (i.e., their friendship). so it is not just a take arrangement by him from the community, but also a give transaction from him back to the community. this shows how refugees on their way to german higher education 146 this game of acceptance and integration is in many ways a strategic one, as in “because i have something my classmates admire (my math skills), they are willing to be nice to me, but i have to earn it and that takes time and passing a sort of unspoken test.” (2) needs and barriers when asking our interview partners about the most important needs they have and barriers they face to feeling integrated at the university, they described: (1) needing more preparation and other help type courses; (2) barriers to integration due to absence; and (3) barriers due to lack of language skills. 2.1 need for more (preparation) courses our group of enrolled student interviewees had an especially strong desire for additional supportive courses. important for many of our interview partners was support from a tutorial. they expressed a need for more explanation about the regular course content. as one put it, “it depends on the lecturers, their language and teaching type. sometimes a bit more explanation would help, a tutorial” (1ne1989). others especially wished for a tutorial in information technology: “more tutorials would be helpful, like software programs” (1ta1990). some prospective students in the preparatory university program mentioned the need for a wider offering of courses to prepare them for study. even if preparatory math courses exist, as they do for those in our sample, some students wished for more basic math courses, explaining, “the problem for me is math, i forgot all of math. i need a preparatory course, here is a course, but i need a course from the beginning” (1hs1996). but some enrolled students also wished for a support course in math: “for me it is about math, math, math all the time. we need some extra preparation courses. it’s been 8 years since i studied math last. now, almost everything is gone” (1sa1993). the above statements show that the enrolled students and prospective students from the preparatory program wanted more cold formal support in the form of more supportive courses. 2.2 barriers to integration due to absence many of the interviewees in the preparatory program talked about having little time on the university campus with only one class per week. that lack of more regular, sustained time at university hurt their feeling of being more integrated. as one noted, “i feel good here too, i want to begin my study life here, but i do not feel so much integrated in the study system yet because it’s only 1 day per week.” (1mg1994), “we are only here each friday from 9-15 o’clock. i look forward all week to fridays, when i can go to the university. nevertheless, i do not feel integrated” (1zo1994), “the courses are great but it is only once a week. maybe [i would feel more integrated] if it is a daily course” (2nn1998). another added, “we do not yet feel like students because we are here only a day a week. we experience university life from 9-4 and can eat in the dining hall, be around students doing normal things” (1gk1997). all interviewees mentioned that they want to begin their study life and that they like going to the preparation courses and they enjoy eating in the dining hall, but nevertheless, they do not yet feel integrated with such little time on campus. this shows that a warm integration is only possible if a regular contact to the university occurs. in those preparatory programs that take place only once a week, limited contact hinders the feeling of being more fully integrated. 2.3 barriers due to lack of language skills students of refugee background felt a strong barrier because of their lack of language skills. they described that they feel only 50-70% linguistically integrated: “i only feel about 50% linguistically integrated” (1mi1988). another 147 global education review 5(4) noted that “i feel 70% linguistically integrated so far” (1ta1990). this feeling of not being fully linguistically integrated also exerted a strong impact on their overall level of feeling integrated at the university. as one put it, “for example, last month we had a group work project, three germans and me. we had to do a project and we discussed it a lot, but i think the germans do not take me seriously. i’m not sure why, i don’t use the right terms, maybe because my language ability is not as good? other international students told me they have the same problems [...]. in retrospect afterwards when german students see that i was actually right on a problem, and after the test they realize, then they come to me and ask me to explain it, and then i’ve won their confidence. it seems as if they do not trust my opinion” (1mi1988). some students mentioned that as a consequence they had problems following the content in the class and had to ask other students for support. “we also ask other students if we do not understand some words. i also told the lecturer and he said he would try to speak more clearly, but he just needs more time, it’s his habit” (1ne1989) or “some teachers have to be better organized, or sometimes they are hard to understand. i sometimes have to read something twice to begin or to understand it” (1ta1990). other students stated that for their studies they had enough language skills, but in terms of contact with other students, certain types of language skills were still missing. one explained it this way: “for my studies it is enough, but for contact with students many have dialects and i can’t always understand them” (1ta1990). in summary, a hot integration for the sorb, for example friendship with germanspeaking students, becomes more challenging if sufficient language skills are missing. language competency is important to building a friendship, and friendships serve to develop and build language competency, but if language ability is absent, then friendship cannot ensue as easily. discussion to return to baker et al.’s (2017) notion of hot (familiar-informal), warm (familiar-formal) and cold (unfamiliar-formal) sources of support, our data indicates that all three “temperatures” are necessary for learning the language as a way to better participate and eventually integrate into the desired learning community. the additional dimension of warm support, to signal those “trusted individuals” whom the students in our sample saw as offering a more formal type of support than their friends, but a less formal type of support than the “officials”, was also critical. universities provide cold support through the infrastructure they offer, which includes language and subject-related preparatory courses and regular office hours for refugees, among other services. the provision of warm support is manifested through additional programming, such as mentoring, buddy programs, sports programs, theatre and other after-hour offerings, where language may not be as great a factor. it is in this special enabling environment that universities make their greatest impact, and provide refugees with an environment where, of their own volition, they can begin to establish the hot support networks that will truly lead to integration over time. the three most important factors for sorb wellbeing and eventually acceptance, as they see it, hinge on gaining language competency, building friendships, and thus overcoming socially imposed but surmountable “othering” barriers (holliday et al., 2017). othering is the notion that people project and ascribe generally positive identities to themselves but more negative characteristics to others. researchers have found that, particularly in circumstances in which immigration is at play, these most basic psychological needs arise when people feel under stress are experiencing some type of refugees on their way to german higher education 148 upheaval (suárez-orozco & suárez-orozco, 1995). perhaps the most important takeaway message expressed by our sample was that they think of themselves as differing very little from international students and domestic students with regard to general adjustment challenges to university life that all students face. these are as simple as just wanting to fit in and feel included. the greatest barrier comes out when the challenge of language comes into play, where their status then as refugee students and outsiders seeking entry into the system becomes apparent and can trigger mechanisms of “othering”. but our refugee sample has demonstrated, perhaps most overtly by insisting on conducting their interviews with us in german, that they have been working quickly and deliberately to overcome this barrier. the other barriers imposed by systemic factors associated with legal hurdles and enrollment issues are in some ways much more minor. so, it seems that most aspects of adjusting to university life and study are as relevant for german students as they are for all students, international, refugee, domestic or otherwise. when it comes down to it, sorb have the same wants, needs, feelings of inclusion or exclusion, and aspects they appreciate or find troublesome in their learning environment as do all other students. it is the refugee status or label that sets them apart and needs to be overcome. however, once they can begin to melt into the regular student pool they shed those overt differences and may begin to develop trust, which then functions as a way to counter the negative effects of “othering”. in a previous study carried out by this team of authors (streitwieser, schmidt, brück & gläsener, 2018), the main finding was that university administrators at some of the same institutions we have profiled in this paper saw the refugee influx of 2015-2016 as not a fullblown “crisis” so much as simply a “coping challenge.” they did not see new refugee students as presenting an outright crisis, but rather saw their arrival as an opportunity to usher in much needed reforms to improve the general higher education system in germany, and provide better services to refugee students but by extension also to all university students. while they acknowledged that refugee students indeed required additional, and in some cases more sustained support at the university than international and domestic students, the “coping challenge” gave them a chance to create new programming that would become beneficial to everyone at the institution. this additional support is important for newcomers to the institution to help them get oriented into the curriculum and in some cases to be sustained throughout the course of their studies. but along the lines of adjusting to university life and essentially normalizing into that culture, the major supports identified by our refugee students were basic ones: learning the language to be able to make friends with germans and so to engage more productively in an exchange of academic skills accepted as mutually beneficial to all students. through this mutual acceptance they felt integration would eventually become most possible. conclusion our study of 25 students of refugee background from syria, iran, iraq, and afghanistan at two technical universities in berlin contributes to research that has been emerging in the post “refugee crisis” period. the heaviest refugee influx into germany has now abated and legal processing has settled many into more secure living, education and employment situations. many of those who came to germany with dreams of realizing higher education aspirations have now completed the preliminary steps and requirements of the system in order to begin entering universities. this study has been conducted at a time when we are witnessing both greater streams of diverse and nontraditional students using university study as a pathway to achieve a better career and life, but 149 global education review 5(4) also a distressing political polarization in some countries that have traditionally been open to migration and the purposeful integration of “others”. to succeed so far in achieving their dreams, the students in our sample have worked to overcome, or at least to meet head on, many of the challenges that might well allude others: learning a difficult foreign language, going through credential evaluation, navigating the demands of a new academic environment, coping with psychological trauma, and perhaps most significantly, even renegotiating their intellectual identities in order to join a new learning culture. as the previous refugee research we have alluded to has shown, resuming a routine through purposeful education can provide a powerful antidote to the trauma of displacement, and those who find this path have been shown to be resilient learners despite difficulties. in this study we set out to address first, what sorb believe they need to succeed in german higher education, and second, what they see as barriers to achieving that success. these two categories divided into specific mechanisms that are related to participating in the regular life of the institution and also learning the language in order to make friends. a critical element of friendship formation was the mutual recognition of and appreciation for the skills that one had to share with others, or could benefit from others. this “bartering” of sorts went both ways. using the baker et al. framework, we know that universities are able to provide the critical infrastructure that makes a learning community function through the “cold support” offered by instruction and classes. but our refugee students alluded to a bargaining game that was at play in the “warm support” phase of becoming acquainted with non-refugee peers when the establishment of hot support networks over time through friendships build mutual respect for one another’s skills and create trust that can lead to genuine integration, rather than dividing those who at first glance might seem too different to ever be friends. refugee students, as all students anywhere, want to feel that they are part of a community that accepts and supports them. as long as the refugee label makes them the “other”, their ability to normalize into the culture will remain inhibited, and for this reason, the sorb in our sample wanted very much to participate and overcome these barriers, most importantly linguistic, that they felt were holding them back. our findings accord with the conclusions of previous studies undertaken by naidoo et al., (2015), ramsay et al., (2016), and baker et al., (2017) illustrating how students of refugee backgrounds make use of warm and hot support systems more than formal-institutional cold support systems. they do this apart even from language preparatory classes. these findings also suggest that in order to feel able to participate in their new academic environments, with the eventual purpose of wider societal integration, newly arrived sorb seek out possibilities to form friendships with their classmates, take advantage of opportunities to engage in their learning community, work diligently to prove their competence and participate on equal footing, and most of all seek to build relations of trust. it is important for future programming at universities to understand how students of refugee background think about and make use of warm and hot support systems. these perceptions must be taken into account when establishing programs for refugees, training the staff and faculty who work with them, and sensitizing all students who, in the end, serve as the most critical lynchpin for forming the friendship and relations of trust that make genuine integration eventually happen. limitations this study had several important limitations that must be acknowledged. as with any qualitative study, the findings are not generalizable. however, they bring issues to refugees on their way to german higher education 150 light with rich, personal detail that could be expanded into survey items and administered to a larger population. the context of germany presents only one case of refugee integration, with distinctive characteristics that may be significantly different in other countries. berlin is also a more progressive and diversified metropolitan center than other cities throughout germany or europe. our sample are students at universities of applied sciences and not those studying at traditional research universities, which have different characteristics, offerings and expectations. future research the students in our sample might be considered to be the “cream of the crop” of their home countries, which also sets them apart from many other refugee populations, not only in germany but more generally. they are the 1% who, according to the unhcr, have managed to find a way into higher education. not only have they succeeded in gaining a high level of education in their homelands before fleeing, but they have also managed to make their way into germany and to find quick footing there by navigating the considerable process of learning the german language, having their credentials verified, successfully testing into the system, and persevering in a new and very demanding course of studies, not to mention a distinct cultural environment. for many of these remarkably resilient students, this has meant beginning all over again “from zero” as some of them put it. this exceptional resiliency must be acknowledged and should be further researched. these significant contextual and personnel differences aside–or perhaps precisely because of these differences–other countries can learn from the german case 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(2016).gespaltene mitte – feindselige zustände: rechtextreme einstellungen in deutschland 2016 [divided centre (of society) – hostile conditions: far right attitudes in germany 2016]. bonn: verlag j. h. w. dietz nachf. gmbh. about the author(s) bernhard streitwieser (phd, columbia university) is an assistant professor of international education & international affairs and unesco co-chair in international education for development at george http://testas.de/en/ueber_uns_en.htm https://wenr.wes.org/2017/05/lessons-germanys-refugee-crisis-integration-costs-benefits https://wenr.wes.org/2017/05/lessons-germanys-refugee-crisis-integration-costs-benefits https://wenr.wes.org/2017/05/lessons-germanys-refugee-crisis-integration-costs-benefits http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/tertiary-education.html http://www.unhcr.org/en-us/tertiary-education.html https://cdn.factcheck.org/uploadedfiles/map-arrivals-by-state-and-nationality-under-obama.pdf https://cdn.factcheck.org/uploadedfiles/map-arrivals-by-state-and-nationality-under-obama.pdf https://cdn.factcheck.org/uploadedfiles/map-arrivals-by-state-and-nationality-under-obama.pdf 155 global education review 5(4) washington university in washington, dc. his research looks at access and integration of refugees and migrants into german and u.s. higher education; internationalization of higher education and global competition; and student exchange and study abroad. in 2016 he established the berlin refugee research group to study germany’s response to its refugee crisis, and in 2017 he joined the steering committee and leads the research arm of the u.s. university alliance for refugees and at-risk migrants. he has written over 45 articles and book chapters and three edited books. maria anne schmidt is coordinator of the refugee program at htw berlin university of applied sciences and part of the berlin refugee research group since 2016. her research interests include social business, religion, refugee integration, and international education. maria’s work has previously appeared in the business & professional ethics journal. katharina gläsener is a guest professor for digitization of the economy in a multicultural society at the beuth university of applied sciences berlin, germany. she received her phd in business administration from the university of hamburg, germany. since 2016 she has been part of the berlin refugee research group and the refugees@beuth group and she gives lectures for refugees on the subjects society, economy, responsibility and problem-oriented learning. her research focuses on diversity management, power, human resource management and design thinking. lukas brück holds a joint master’s degree in education policies for global development from universitat autònoma de barcelona, university of oslo, malta and amsterdam and currently works as a junior project manager for the robert bosch foundation. prior, he worked for the deutsche gesellschaft für internationale zusammenarbeit (giz) in germany and georgia and in 2016 was a visiting scholar at the george washington university school of education and human development. his research focuses on the integration of refugees in national education systems, both in germany and in developing countries. besides his academic interest in refugee education, he started a volunteer-run language school for refugees in his hometown, for which he received an honorary award from the mörlenbach city council. appendix code preparatory course or enrolled student university gend er ag e nation ality 1 1zo199 4 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin male 24 syria 2 1mg19 94 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin male 24 syria refugees on their way to german higher education 156 3 2nn19 98 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin femal e 20 syria 4 2hm19 95 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin femal e 23 syria 5 1fs199 1 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin male 27 syria 6 1gk199 7 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin male 21 syria 7 2em19 91 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin femal e 27 iran 8 1so199 5 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin male 22 syria 9 2sn199 7 preparatory course beuth university of applied sciences berlin femal e 20 syria 10 1hs199 6 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 21 syria 11 1ag199 5 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 22 syria 12 1bh199 6 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 21 syria 13 1na199 2 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 26 syria 14 1tg199 6 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 22 syria 15 1ea199 6 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences male 21 syria 16 2ha19 96 preparatory course htw berlin university of applied sciences femal e 21 afghanis tan 157 global education review 5(4) 17 1mi198 8 enrolled student master student economics at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 30 syria 18 1ta199 0 enrolled student master student engineering at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 29 syria 19 1lm19 88 enrolled student bachelor student informatics at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 30 iraq 20 1mm19 89 enrolled student bachelor student engineering at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 29 iran 21 1sm199 5 enrolled student bachelor student engineering at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 22 syria 22 1ne198 9 enrolled student master student engineering at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 29 iraq 23 1aa199 5 enrolled student bachelor student informatics at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 22 syria 24 1sa199 3 enrolled student bachelor student engineering at htw berlin university of applied sciences male 25 syria 25 2sf198 8 enrolled student master student engineering at beuth university of applied sciences berlin femal e 30 syria aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 143 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: ketterlin-geller, leanne r., perry, lindsey, platas, linda m. & sitbakhan, yasmin (2018). aligning test scoring procedures with test uses of the early grade mathematics assessment: a balancing act. global education review, 5 (3), 143164. aligning test scoring procedures with test uses of the early grade mathematics assessment: a balancing act leanne r. ketterlin-geller southern methodist university lindsey perry southern methodist university linda m. platas san francisco state university yasmin sitbakhan rti international abstract test scoring procedures should align with the intended uses and interpretations of test results. in this paper, we examine three test scoring procedures for an operational assessment of early numeracy, the early grade mathematics assessment (egma). the egma is an assessment that tests young children’s foundational mathematics knowledge and has been administered in more than 25 countries. current test specifications call for subscores to be reported for each of the eight subtests on the egma; however, in practice, composite scores have also been reported. to provide users with empirically-based guidance on the appropriateness and usefulness of different test scoring procedures, we examine the psychometric properties – including the reliability and distinctiveness of the results – and usefulness of reporting test scores as (1) total scores, (2) subscores, and (3) composite scores. these test scoring procedures are compared using data from an actual administration of the egma. conclusions and recommendations for test scoring procedures are made. generalizations to other testing programs are proposed. keywords early grade mathematics assessment, egma, test scoring procedures, testing programs introduction the purpose of this paper is to examine test scoring procedures for the early grade mathematics assessment (egma) operational testing program and determine the approach that is psychometrically appropriate and useful. the egma tests young children’s foundational mathematics knowledge in a series of eight subtests. it is typically administered to students in grades 1-3 to determine their basic number concepts and facility with operations and applied arithmetic. egma results are primarily used by researchers and policy makers as the dependent measure for program evaluation purposes. _______________________________ corresponding author: leanne r. ketterlin-geller, simmons school of education and human development, southern methodist university, po box 750114, dallas, tx 75275-0114 email: lkgeller@smu.edu mailto:lkgeller@smu.edu 144 global education review 5(3) the results from the egma provide stakeholders with data that can guide reforms in policies and practices, and inform intervention design and evaluation (platas, ketterlin-geller, & sitabkhan, 2016). baseline measurement of children’s skills on the egma informs prospective reforms in content standards, benchmarking, and teacher education programs. interventions with preand post-measurements can include curricula, classroom practices and materials, teacher education and training, coaching models, textbooks, and combinations of these elements. to facilitate these decisions, the developers of the egma recommend that results from each subtest be reported individually as subscores (rti international, 2014), as opposed to aggregating scores from multiple subtests to form a composite or total score. this is the most common practice for reporting egma results (c.f., brombacher et al., 2015; piper & mugenda, 2014; torrente et al., 2011). while useful in many ways, subscore reporting has some limitations and has generated controversy in the measurement field (sinharay, haberman, & puhan, 2007). subscores may not support all of the users’ desired decisions, leads to lengthy reports and presentations of results, and may be difficult to interpret for individuals who are not experts in early grade mathematics. for example, if policy makers want to evaluate students’ overall mathematics proficiency at an aggregate level (e.g., province, region), a total score may be preferred. similarly, a single metric of mathematics performance may be preferred for some program evaluation purposes (e.g., when using the scores as a way to understand the effects of various factors, such as gender or socioeconomic level). relatedly, government officials without a strong background in early mathematics may have difficulty interpreting multiple pages of scores from individual subtests, each of which measures different foundational skills. funders of large scale interventions may be unable to quickly grasp the implications of a report when multiple subscores are presented. for these and other uses, subscores do not provide the “at a glance” outcomes of which stakeholders have become accustomed from other mathematics assessments such as the timss and pisa. because of these issues, users have sought alternate scoring methods for the egma, including reporting composite or total scores. extending the scoring options for the egma may improve the accessibility and usability of the results for a variety of stakeholders. composite scores may provide researchers with useful data to evaluate program or intervention effectiveness. in a recent example published by piper et al. (2016), two composite scores were computed for the egma results: (1) subtests that assessed students’ conceptual understanding and (2) those that assessed procedural fluency. these composite scores allowed the researchers to evaluate the effects of an intervention on two meaningful outcome variables. total scores may be useful when seeking to make group comparisons that support policy reforms or program evaluations. for example, in a cluster randomized controlled trial examining the impact of a distance education initiative on various indicators in ghana, johnston and ksoll (2017) calculated a weighted total score for the egma (weighting was used to address the variability in the number of items per subtest). similarly, analyzing policies in ecuador, cruzaguayo, ibarraran, and schady (2017) used total scores calculated from the egma to examine changes in students’ mathematics performance within a school year based on teacher variables. however, while these test scoring methods may meet stakeholders’ immediate needs, empirical evidence is needed to support the intended claim(s) that are associated with each scoring approach (feinberg & wainer, 2014). different aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 145 scoring mechanisms impact the accuracy and interpretability of the results, which can have negative consequences. the purpose of this paper is to examine three test scoring procedures for the egma and determine which approach(es) are psychometrically appropriate and useful. the three test scoring procedures examined are (1) total score (aggregate of correct responses across all items), (2) subscores, and (3) composite score (aggregate of subtest scores). we describe each scoring method in more detail and evaluate each method for reliability and distinctiveness of the results, and usefulness of the scores to relevant stakeholders. although the principles discussed herein apply to scores derived using item response theory (irt) modeling, our discussion focuses on scores obtained using classical test theory (ctt) approaches. the test scoring procedures are compared using data from an actual administration of the egma in jordan. conclusions and recommendations for test scoring procedures for the egma are made. generalizations to other testing programs are proposed; however, because of the wide-spread use of the egma within the global mathematics education community, this manuscript is centrally focused on the egma. early grade mathematics assessment the egma is an orally and individuallyadministered assessment that measures young children’s foundational mathematics knowledge. it is typically administered to students in grades 1-3 and takes approximately 20 minutes to administer. the egma has been translated and adapted for use in many languages. the egma is composed of eight subtests. each subtest includes 5-20 constructed-response items (i.e., students must provide a response on their own and are not given possible response options from which to choose). table 1 details the subtests, time limits, and standard test scoring procedures as stated in the early grade mathematics assessment (egma) toolkit published by rti international (2014). three egma subtests are timed, and students have 60 seconds to generate responses. these subtests are typically scored as the number of correct responses per minute, and is calculated using the following equation: 𝑁𝐶𝑃𝑀 = 𝑐 × 60 𝑡 where: ncpm is the number correct per minute c is the number of correct responses t is the elapsed time in seconds taken by the student this equation takes into consideration students who finish all items in less than 60 seconds. for example, if a student answers all 20 items correctly in 40 seconds, their score would be 30 correct items per minute, since they likely would have answered more items correctly if more items had been available. the remaining five subtests are untimed and are scored as the total number of items correct. according to the administration procedures (rti international, 2014), students must generate a response to each item within five seconds before the test administrator prompts the student to move to the next item. additionally, these subtests have stopping rules, such that if a student answers four items in a row incorrectly, the test administrator stops the subtests and proceeds to the next subtest. the items on the egma are sequenced from least to most difficult (see rti international [2014] for more details about item and subtest development). therefore, if the stopping rule is applied, all of the remaining items are scored as incorrect, since the student likely would have responded incorrectly. 146 global education review 5(3) table 1 core egma subtest information (rti international, 2013; table modified from perry, 2016) subtest number of items task time limit stopping rule standard test scoring procedure number identification 20 read numbers 60 seconds none number correct per minute quantity discrimination 10 determine the larger of two numbers no time limit stop the subtest if the child has four successive incorrect answers total number of items correct missing number 10 determine the missing number in a sequence of numbers no time limit stop the subtest if the child has four successive incorrect answers total number of items correct addition – level 1 20 add two onedigit numbers 60 seconds none number correct per minute subtraction – level 1 20 subtract two one-digit numbers 60 seconds none number correct per minute addition – level 2 5 add a onedigit or twodigit number to a two-digit number no time limit. this subtest is not administered to students who did not answer any items correctly on level 1. stop the subtest if the child has four successive incorrect answers total number of items correct subtraction – level 2 5 subtract a one-digit or a two-digit number from a two-digit number no time limit. this subtest is not administered to students who did not answer any items correctly on level 1. stop the subtest if the child has four successive incorrect answers total number of items correct word problems 6 respond to a word problem read out loud no time limit stop the subtest if the child has four successive incorrect answers total number of items correct aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 147 scoring procedures scoring of tests includes two distinct procedures. first, students’ responses to items are scored following a set of guidelines to judge the correctness of the response. second, the scored item responses are aggregated following another set of guidelines to arrive at one (or more) overall score for the test. the collection of scored item responses serve as evidence about students’ levels of performance in the tested construct (thissen & wainer, 2001), and therefore, form the basis of test score uses and interpretations. consider a simplified example of the administration of a typical achievement test with multiple choice items. to score each item, a student’s answer choice is compared to the correct answer. if the student selected the correct response from a given set of distractors, the response is coded as correct and the student is awarded a pre-specified number of points. to arrive at an overall test score using ctt, the number of correct responses or points can be summed to generate a raw score. the raw score can be converted to a ratio of number correct to total number of items (and reported as a ratio or percentage) or transformed to a standard score, which may be easier for some stakeholders to interpret. however generated, the overall test score is typically used to make judgements about the test taker’s level of proficiency in the tested construct. the selection of the item and test scoring procedures is a complex process that should align with the purpose of the test and support the intended uses and interpretations of the results (american educational research association [aera], american psychological association [apa], & national council on measurement in education [ncme], 2014; international testing commission [itc], 2014). to some extent, item scoring procedures are influenced by the item format (i.e., selected response, constructed response). for example, constructed-response items ask students to construct their own response to an item and are often evaluated using a scoring rubric that details the response expectations associated with a specific score. conversely, selected-response items ask students to select an answer from a set of possible responses, and can be scored following a dichotomous scoring rule that assigns value only to the correct response. although these are typical practices, item scoring procedures may vary. regardless of the item format, the item scoring procedures should support the intended uses and interpretations of the test scores. similarly, test scoring procedures need to provide test users with information that facilitates the intended uses and interpretations of the results. test scoring begins with the specification of the scale on which scores will be reported, such as unweighted raw scores or model-derived scores such as those produced through item response theory (irt) modeling (shaeffer et al., 2002). test scores can be obtained for all items included on the test (e.g., total score), a subset of the items (e.g., subscores), or a collection of subsets of items (e.g., composite scores). the rationale and evidence supporting the alignment between these test scoring procedures and the purpose of the test should be documented (aera, ncme, & apa, 2014). furthermore, when more than the total score is reported, the reliability and distinctiveness of the subscores or composite scores should be provided to justify the appropriateness of the interpretations and uses. this paper focuses on evaluating possible scoring procedures for the egma. 148 global education review 5(3) test scoring methods total score a total score is a summation of students’ correct item responses across the overall test following the item-level scoring rules. total scores are reported as one value. the reported value is intended to serve as an estimate of the student’s overall level of proficiency in the tested construct. students with similar total scores are considered to have similar levels of proficiency in the tested construct (davidson et al., 2015). the total score is calculated following specific scoring procedures that are outlined in the test specifications. the scoring procedures may specify differential weights to items or item types (e.g., constructed response) following a test blueprint. in some instances, the total score may be calculated from student’s responses on subsections of a test that represent meaningful subcomponents of the construct but have too few items to allow for reliable estimates (sinharay, haberman, & puhan, 2007). for the egma, reporting a total score would represent a student’s overall proficiency on early numeracy concepts. as noted in the introduction, stakeholders are frequently exposed to total scores. policy makers may believe that an egma total score would be useful in evaluating the effectiveness of educational policies (similar to the example published by cruz-aguayo, ibarraran, & schady, 2017), providing a comprehensive measure of overall proficiency. moreover, a single measure of mathematics proficiency may be useful for researchers examining the efficacy of an intervention on multiple outcome variables (as was reported by johnston & ksoll, 2017). conversely, total scores may be less useful for policy makers interested in evaluating the effectiveness of curricular reforms or programs, or practitioners who want to evaluate the outcome of instructional practices or interventions on student learning. some concerns about reporting total scores have been raised in the literature. davidson et al. (2015) point to possible unintended consequences of the assumption that test takers with similar scores have similar proficiency levels. without considering the pattern of responses across the test, they argue that total scores may incorrectly cluster students on overall proficiency that might mask important differences across groups of students. for example, students scoring in the lower quartile of a test may have different patterns of errors that may point to important differences in their knowledge and skills on the tested construct. reporting only the total score masks these differences. reporting total scores for the egma poses additional technical challenges. namely, because each subtest includes a different number of items, simply summing the total number of correct responses would result in a differential weighting of some of the subtests. for example, there are 10 items on the missing number subtest and 5 items on the word problem subtest. if a student’s responses are summed across these subtests, the student’s performance on the missing number subtest would be given primacy to his or her performance on the word problem subtest. relatedly, as previously noted, the administration method varies across the subtests in that some are timed, and some are untimed. certain analyses cannot be conducted when the timed and untimed items are combined together. for example, cronbach’s alpha values cannot be computed for the timed items because this coefficient does not take into consideration time, which is an important part of the scoring procedure. confirmatory factor analysis can be used to estimate reliability of accuracy, where speed and accuracy are modeled jointly. however, this joint model would not be possible since accuracy (i.e., correct or not aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 149 correct) is measured at the item level but speed is measured at the subtest level. reliability coefficients could be calculated for the timed subtests if both accuracy and speed were reported at the item level. this issue creates a ripple effect – the reliability of the total score of timed and untimed cannot be calculated, since the reliability cannot be calculated for the timed tests. these sources of variability in the composition and administration of the egma subtests may make reporting a total score technically complex and have implications for the interpretability of the summed scores. possible alternatives to reporting total scores are to report subscores or composite scores. subscores subscores represent students’ responses to items that assess specific and unique subcomponents of the overall construct (sinharay, puhan, & haberman, 2011). subscores are the most frequent method of reporting scores on egma assessments, though there are differences in whether or not the fluency measure (correct number per minute on timed tasks) is included (rti international, 2014; bridge international academies, 2013). for a given testing situation, a student may receive multiple subscores, one for each subcomponent of the construct. for example, subscores for a comprehensive reading test might include vocabulary and reading comprehension. the reported scores are intended to provide more fine-grained information about students’ level of proficiency in meaningful subcomponents of the construct. provided that the subscores represent reliable and trustworthy data, the reported information can be used to make diagnostic inferences (davidson et al., 2015). for the egma, the subscores are associated with the individual subtests that comprise the full operational testing program. because data are provided about students’ performance on each concept that comprises early numeracy, these results may inform practitioners’ interpretations about the effectiveness of instructional practices or interventions on student learning. these results may be directly applicable in classroom settings because they identify areas of strength and weakness that may guide teachers’ instructional design and delivery making (sinharay, puhan, & haberman, 2011). technical characteristics of subscores have been discussed in the literature. subscores should provide useful information above that which is provided by the total score (wedman & lyren, 2015). sinharay (2010) proposed that for subscores to have value they should be reliable and provide distinctive information. reliability is necessary to provide stable estimates of students’ performance from which decisions will be based (feinberg & wainer, 2014). reliability may be compromised because of the small set of items often used to generate subscores (stone, ye, zhu, & lane, 2010). however, some of these limitations may be overcome if reporting data in aggregate form, such as reporting subscores for groups of students as opposed to individual students. subscores may be considered distinctive if they contribute unique information beyond the total score. distinctiveness can be conceptualized as the degree of orthogonality between the subscores, and is often evaluated by examining the disattenuated correlation between subscores (wedman & lyren, 2015). that is, the smaller the correlation between the subscores, the greater the likelihood that the subtest is providing unique (or distinctive) information (feinberg & wainer, 2014). sinharay (2010) analyzed results from a series of operational testing programs and simulation studies and found that the average disattenuated 150 global education review 5(3) correlations should be .80 or less to provide distinctive information. haberman (2008) proposed another approach to examining the usefulness of subscores, which combines the reliability coefficients and the disattenuated correlations of the subscores. haberman’s method (2008) examines the proportional reduction in mean squared error (prmse) values. prmse values range from 0 to 1, with larger values indicating more accurate measures of true scores with smaller mean squared errors. prmse values are calculated for the subscores (prmses) and then compared to the prmse values for the total or composite score (prmsex). to add value, the prmses must be greater than prmsex. see haberman (2008) for more information about this analytic method. research on the reliability and distinctiveness of subscores continues to emerge; however, notable concerns have been raised about the technical quality of subscores. stone et al. (2010) identified a persistent problem with the reliability of subscores because of the limited number of items contributing to the scores. similarly, sinharay (2010) concluded that it is difficult to obtain reliable and distinctive subscores without at least 20 items. moreover, if using subscores to evaluate changes in students’ performance over time, additional methodological considerations must be taken into account when examining reliability (sinharay & haberman, 2015) that subsequently impact the ease of use in classroom settings. subscores are the standard mechanism by which student performance on the egma is reported (rti international, 2014). because the egma was designed to provide instructionally relevant information to score users, these data highlight strengths and areas for improvement that can be used to evaluate the effectiveness of instructional practices or interventions on student learning at the classroom level or for program evaluations. however, because of the limited number of items on each subtest, subscores are prone to be less reliable and more susceptible to floor (high proportion of minimum scores) and ceiling (high proportion of maximum scores) effects (rti international, 2014). of concern is the fact that increasing the number of items in all egma subtests to 20 would greatly increase the amount of time required to complete the assessment. this adds to costs and taxes students’ attention over time. in addition, providing multiple indicators of proficiency may compromise the interpretability of scores by policy makers or practitioners who are not familiar with the concepts that comprise early numeracy. a potential unintended consequence is the overgeneralization of subtest performance to curricular design decisions that results in narrowing the curriculum or teaching to the test. for example, the missing number subtest is intended to assess students’ ability to interpret and reason about number patterns. if misinterpreted, results could be inappropriately used to instruct teachers to directly teach students to fill in a missing number from given sequences, as opposed to teaching the reasoning skills underlying the intention of the subtest. some of these limitations have led policy makers and researchers to request composite scores. composite scores composite scores represent aggregated student performance across meaningful components of the construct and, as such, are similar to subscores (sinharay, haberman, & puhan, 2007). however, composite scores differ from subscores in that they may encompass more than one subtest, and/or may include items that represent different dimensions of the construct such as content classification (e.g., measurement, geometry) or process dimensions such as procedural knowledge and conceptual aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 151 understanding (piper et al., 2016; sinharay, puhan, & haberman, 2011; stone et al., 2010). the hypothesized dimensions of the construct should be verified using appropriate analytic techniques such as factor analysis (davidson et al., 2015). it follows that composite scores can be conceptualized as augmented subscores in which the subscores are weighted, either equally or differentially (sinharay, 2010). composite scores may provide several advantages over subscores. chiefly, composite scores typically include more items than subscores, which may improve score reliability. also, because additional information contributes to the observed score, composite scores may increase the predictive utility of the outcome to a criterion (davidson et al., 2015). findings from operational testing programs and simulation studies suggest that composite scores add value more often than subscores as long as the disattenuated correlations were less than .95 (sinharay, 2010). for the egma, composite scores could be calculated by clustering subtests based on the assessed dimensions of early numeracy or the response processing requirements of the subtest. because composite scores provide summary information that encompass meaningful dimensions of the construct, these data might help policy makers evaluate curricular reforms or programs by illustrating overall areas of strength or in need of improvement. these scores might be more interpretable than subscores, and may provide a better representation of students’ proficiency in meaningful dimensions of early numeracy. composite scores can be based on specific subcomponents of the construct. for example, composite scores can be calculated for (1) basic number concepts, which aggregates responses from the number identification, quantity discrimination, and missing number subtests, and (2) operations and applied arithmetic, which aggregates responses from the addition – level 1, addition – level 2, subtraction – level 1, subtraction – level 2, and word problems subtests. these distinctions are based on research suggesting that early numeracy has a two-factor structure, with one factor focusing on basic number sense and number knowledge and the other factor focusing on problem solving and operations (aunio, niemivirta, hautamäki, van luit, shi, & zhang, 2006; jordan, kaplan, nabors oláh, & locuniak, 2006; purpura & lonigan, 2013). alternatively, composite scores can be based on response processing, and may include (1) untimed, which aggregates responses from the quantity discrimination, missing number, word problems, addition – level 2, and subtraction – level 2 subtests and (2) fluency of processing early numeracy concepts, which aggregates responses from the number identification, addition – level 1, and subtraction – level 1 subtests. piper and colleagues (2016) created an index for procedural tasks (number id, addition-level 1, and subtraction level-1) and an index for conceptual tasks (all other untimed tasks) which aligned with the response processing described above. other configurations of composite scores may be theoretically or substantively meaningful, depending on the outcomes of the program evaluation for which the egma is being used. a persistent issue in computing composite scores is weighting of item sets or subtests. differential weighting occurs either when item sets or subtests have different numbers of items or points to be aggregated, or when some item sets or subtests are more important or deserve greater emphasis in the composite score (feldt, 152 global education review 5(3) 2004). differential weighting may also occur when using different item types. for example, schaeffer et al. (2002) generated composite scores based on response type (i.e., selected response, constructed response) and investigated methodological solutions to address the differential weighting based on variability in the number of items for each response type. these issues are pertinent to reporting composite scores for the egma. because the item-level scoring approaches for the subtests on the egma vary, it is methodologically challenging to compute some composite scores, depending on the dimension to be aggregated. for example, as noted earlier, to calculate a composite score for operations and applied arithmetic, students’ responses could be aggregated for the addition-level 1, additionlevel 2, subtraction-level 1, subtraction-level 2, and word problems subtests. the number of items, item-level scoring approach, and subtest scoring approach varies across these five subtests complicating the approach for computing a composite score. to provide empirical evidence to evaluate the technical adequacy of these test scoring methods, data from an egma administration in jordan in 2014 was used to examine the implications of different scoring procedures on the intended uses and interpretations of the test results. methods participants we used an existing dataset obtained from an egma administration with 2,912 students in jordan 2014. this dataset was used based on convenience. these data were particularly well suited for this study because the vast majority of children were appropriately-aged for the assessment and the language was stable across administrations. in addition, all of the subtests were administered. for this study, data were removed for students who did not attempt at least one question on all egma subtests. therefore, 60 cases were removed, leaving data from 2,852 students to be used in the analyses below. all students were in grades 2-3. the average age was 8.33 years old (sd = 0.75). additional information about the sample of students used for these analyses can be seen in table 2. the egma was administered as part of an endline survey (meaning it was administered at the end of program implementation) to examine the impact of a literacy and mathematics intervention. rti international managed the sampling procedures for the project. see brombacher et al. (2014) for detailed information about sampling. a baseline survey (not used in this analysis) that examined students’ foundational mathematics skills and associated jordanian school-level variables served as the impetus for the intervention (brombacher, 2015). table 2 student characteristics for sample gender age in years school location grade female male 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 urban rural 2nd 3rd 1,535 1,317 2 363 1,270 1,131 79 4 3 1,817 1,035 1,404 1,448 aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 153 instrument all of the students took all eight egma subtests: number identification, quantity discrimination, missing number, addition – level 1, addition – level 2, subtraction – level 1, subtraction – level 2, word problems. administration procedures a total of 56 test assessors administered the endline survey (brombacher et al., 2014), and the majority of the assessors had previously administered the egma. the test assessors attended a 9-day training led by an rti international employee on how to conduct the test administrations for the egma and early grade reading assessment (egra) endline surveys. assessors practiced administering the egma with one another and practiced with students in area schools. inter-rater reliability checks were conducted and a score of 0.90 or greater was required in order to assess students in the field. the egma was administered using stimulus sheets that were seen by the students and tablets that assessors used to read the instructions for each subtest and to record students’ answers. as previously noted, the egma is orally and individually administered. for the untimed subtests, test assessors were instructed to ask students to move to the next item if they had not responded in 5 seconds. items that resulted in no response were left blank and were scored as incorrect. scoring items on the subtests were scored using each subtest’s standard scoring procedure (see table 1). the five untimed subtests were scored as the total number correct, and the three timed subtests were scored as the number correct per minute. table 3 provides a summary of the subtest scores. as expected, there is greater variance in the scores for the timed subtests, since students could receive scores greater than the total number of items based on how much time remained when they completed the subtest (see previous section on egma scoring procedures). additionally, the majority of the subtest scores are normally distributed with skewness and kurtosis values between ( -1, 1). however, the addition – level 1 scores are highly leptokurtic (kurtosis = 2.97). table 3 summary of egma subtest scores subtest number of items standard scoring procedure n mean sd maximum score skewness kurtosis ni 20 ncpm 2852 33.32 16.46 85.71 0.34 -0.41 qd 10 total correct 2852 8.00 2.69 10 -1.42 1.07 mn 10 total correct 2852 6.12 2.81 10 -0.35 -1.03 a1 20 ncpm 2852 12.61 5.29 50 0.39 2.97 s1 20 ncpm 2852 9.83 4.43 31.58 -0.06 0.99 a2 5 total correct 2852 2.60 1.71 5 -0.02 -1.24 s2 5 total correct 2852 1.75 1.68 5 0.61 -0.88 wp 6 total correct 2852 3.58 1.82 6 0.34 -0.41 154 global education review 5(3) analyses following recommendations proposed by researchers examining scoring procedures (c.f., sinharay, 2010; sinharay, puhan, & haberman, 2011; stone, ye, zhu, & lane, 2010; wedman & lyren, 2015), traditional reliability coefficients, disattenuated correlations, and proportional reduction in mean squared error (prmse) values were calculated to compare the reliabilities and distinctiveness of scores for the three test scoring methods for the egma (i.e., subscores, composite scores, total scores). the composite scores were based on the two-factor structure of early numeracy (basic number concepts [bnc] and operations and applied arithmetic [oaa]). as noted previously, composite scores can be created for different clusters of subtests. however, theoretical evidence about the nature of early numeracy supports this two-factor structure (c.f., aunio, niemivirta, hautamäki, van luit, shi, & zhang, 2006; jordan, kaplan, nabors oláh, & locuniak, 2006; purpura & lonigan, 2013). for these analyses, we used only results from the untimed egma subtests. the scoring procedure for the timed subtests (i.e., number correct per minute) focuses on both accuracy and speed, and reliability coefficients cannot be calculated to consider both accuracy at the itemlevel and speed at the subtest-level. if data were collected on accuracy and speed at the itemlevel, reliability coefficients could be calculated using other methods. however, we were unable to apply a technically sound analytical approach to estimate reliability with the current parameters. as a result, the bnc composite score is calculated using results from the quantity discrimination and missing number subtests, but not for the number identification subtest (for clarity, we refer to this composite score as bnc-ut to note that it represents only the untimed subtests). similarly, the oaa composite score only includes results from the addition – level 2, subtraction – level 2, and word problems subtests, but not the addition – level 1 and subtraction – level 1 (for clarity, we refer to this composite score as oaa-ut to note that it represents only the untimed subtests). consequently, computing a total score is not possible; instead, we calculated an overall untimed composite score to include quantity discrimination, missing number, addition – level 2, subtraction – level 2, and word problems subtests. although traditional reliability coefficients have previously been calculated for these timed subtests, these estimates treat every item in the subtest, even those unreached, as incorrect/correct and do not consider the factor of time. because this paper seeks to compare scoring procedures, we felt the need to ensure that all of the analyses conducted align with the subtests’ scoring procedures and the interpretations made using those scores. therefore, for the analyses described below, only data from the untimed tests was used. implications for both untimed and timed tests are included in the discussion section. internal consistency reliability coefficients (i.e., cronbach’s alpha), were calculated in r (r core team, 2017) using the psych package (revelle, 2015) for each scoring procedure for the untimed egma subtests. we used guidelines proposed by kline (2009) to evaluate the strength of the reliability coefficients. kline suggests that coefficients for tests should be 𝛼 > .7, with 𝛼 > .9 indicating strong reliability and .9 > 𝛼 > .7 indicating moderately strong reliability. the strength of reliability depends on the use of the assessment. low-stakes assessments should have moderately strong reliability coefficients, and high-stakes assessments should have strong reliability assessments. in addition to being reliable, subscores (or composite scores) must also be distinct from other subscores (or composite scores). as aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 155 previously noted, distinctiveness can be evaluated by examining the disattenuated correlations (disattenuated from measurement error) between subscores. if subscores are too highly correlated, they do not add additional value or information beyond the total score. therefore, in order for subscores (or composite scores) to be considered distinct, disattenuated correlations should be below 0.80 (sinharay, 2010). disattenuated correlations were calculated for the subscores in r (r core team, 2017) using the psych package (revelle, 2015). haberman’s method (2008) was used to further examine the potential usefulness of the subscores. prmse values for the egma subscores (prmses) were compared to prmse values for the overall untimed composite scores (prmsex) to determine if the subscores add value over the overall untimed composite score. in order to add value, prmses must be greater than prmsex, which indicates that the subscores reduce the mean squared error more than the overall untimed composite score. prmses and prmsex values were calculated in r (r core team, 2017) using the subscore package (dai, wang, & svetina, 2016). results internal consistency reliability coefficients, disattenuated correlations, and proportional reduction in mean squared error (prmse) values were calculated for the three test scoring methods for the egma (i.e., subscores, composite scores, total scores). reliability reliability coefficients are presented in table 4. internal consistency reliability for the subscores are moderately strong. the reliability coefficients for the composite scores (i.e., scores by construct) are also strong (𝛼 > .9) to moderately strong, and the reliability of the overall composite score is strong. as expected, the more items included in a score, the higher the reliability of the score. see table 4 for the results. distinctiveness of scores disattenuated correlations were calculated for subscores and composite scores. all of the disattenuated correlations for the subscores are above the diagonal of reliability coefficients and are less than 0.80 (see table 5), except for the disattenuated correlation between addition – level 2 and subtraction – level 2, which was 0.88. these findings provide evidence that the subscores are distinct and provide additional information, with the exception of addition – level 2 and subtraction – level 2. table 4 cronbach’s alpha coefficients by scoring procedure for untimed egma subtests subtest cronbach’s alpha by subscore by untimed composite by overall untimed composite score quantity discrimination 0.88 0.91 0.94 missing number 0.86 addition – level 2 0.78 0.88 subtraction – level 2 0.79 word problems 0.74 156 global education review 5(3) table 5 reliability coefficients (on diagonal), correlations (below diagonal), and disattenuated correlations (above diagonal) for subscores subtest qd mn a2 s2 wp quantity discrimination (qd) 0.88 0.77 0.61 0.52 0.64 missing number (mn) 0.67 0.86 0.74 0.70 0.78 addition – level 2 (a2) 0.50 0.60 0.78 0.88 0.72 subtraction – level 2 (s2) 0.44 0.57 0.70 0.79 0.72 word problems (wp) 0.52 0.62 0.55 0.55 0.74 next, the disattenuated correlations were calculated for the composite scores based the two-factor structure of early numeracy (bnc-ut and oaa-ut) (see table 6). the disattenuated correlation between the bnc-ut and oaa-ut scores is 0.77, indicating that the composite scores based on construct are distinct. table 6 reliability coefficients (on diagonal), correlations (below diagonal), and disattenuated correlations (above diagonal) for composite scores based on construct oaa-ut bnc-ut operations and applied arithmetic (oaa) 0.91 0.77 basic number concepts (bnc) 0.70 0.88 haberman’s method (2008) to implement haberman’s method (2008), prmse values were calculated for the subscores (see table 7). for each of the subscores, the prmses values are greater than the prmsex values, indicating that the subscores add value beyond that of just the overall untimed composite score. the subscores, compared to the overall untimed composite score, provide more accurate estimates of the true score. next, prmses values were calculated for the bnc-ut and oaa-ut composite scores (see table 8). for each of the composite scores, the prmses values are greater than the prmsex values, indicating that the composite scores add value over the overall untimed composite score. the bnc-ut and oaa-ut composite scores, compared to the overall untimed composite score, provide more accurate estimates of the true score. table 7 proportional reduction in mean squared error (prmse) for subscores subtest prmses prmsex quantity discrimination 0.88 0.69 missing number 0.86 0.82 addition – level 2 0.73 0.72 subtraction – level 2 0.78 0.66 word problems 0.79 0.71 aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 157 table 8 proportional reduction in mean squared error (prmse) for composite scores construct subtests prmses prmsex basic number conceptsuntimed quantity discrimination 0.91 0.85 missing number operations and applied arithmetic-untimed addition – level 2 0.88 0.82 subtraction – level 2 word problems discussion the purpose of this manuscript was to examine three test scoring approaches for the egma to address a stated need in the field to provide various stakeholders with actionable and interpretable results. the criteria on which the test scoring approaches were evaluated included the psychometric properties and usefulness of the results to stakeholders. each test scoring approach was evaluated against these criteria, and implications for the validity of the intended uses and interpretations are considered. evaluation of the psychometric properties of three test scoring approaches as previously noted, responses from the timed egma subtests cannot be combined with responses from the untimed egma subtests because such procedures conflict with generally accepted statistical tenets. because of this technical limitation, generalizations about the total scores and composite scores are based on aggregating results from the untimed subtests including quantity discrimination, missing number, addition – level 2, subtraction – level 2, and word problems. taking this constraint into account, it is not possible to generate a total score for the operational egma, or composite scores that are fully representational of the subcomponents of the construct of early numeracy. as such, the discussion about the psychometric properties will focus on subscores and three composite scores with untimed subtests (oaa-ut, bnc-ut, and overall untimed composite). three psychometric properties were examined: internal consistency reliability, distinctiveness of the scores, and the additional information provided by the scores. first, the internal consistency reliability coefficients were examined for each subscore, the oaa-ut and bnc-ut composite scores, and the overall untimed composite scores. all reliability coefficients were within acceptable bounds. second, when examining the distinctiveness of the subscores, all subscores are distinct, with the exception of addition – level 2 and subtraction – level 2. it is possible that responses from these subtests can be combined to improve the distinctiveness of these subscores. moreover, the oaa-ut and bnc-ut composite scores are distinct. third, and finally, to examine the value of the information provided by the subscores and the composite scores, the proportion reduction in mean squared error (prmse) was 158 global education review 5(3) examined for the subscores and composite scores as compared to the overall untimed composite score. results indicate that the subscores and oaa-ut and bnc-ut composite scores add value beyond the overall untimed composite score and provide more accurate estimates of the true score. in summary, the available evidence supports the psychometric properties of the subscores, and the oaa-ut and bnc-ut composite scores. because the subscores and oaa-ut and bnc-ut composite scores provide more accurate estimates of the true score than the overall untimed composite score, the use of the overall untimed composite score is not supported with the psychometric evidence obtained in these analyses. evaluation of the usefulness of test scoring approaches to stakeholders an important consideration for this manuscript was the usability of the results by various stakeholders. as previously noted, stakeholders use the egma results for different purposes and, as such, may seek different mechanisms of aggregating students’ responses. concerns regarding the interpretability of the subscores have emerged from the field, specifically focused on the length of score reports and presentation of results, as well as the difficulty non-experts face when deciphering the information. in this section, we examine the usefulness of the test scoring approaches for guiding reforms in policies and practices, and informing intervention design and evaluation. to aid in determining if the results are useful for making these decisions, we selected specific cases of students to illustrate the implications of reporting total scores, composite scores, and subscores on subsequent decisions. these cases represent actual children within the dataset used for these analyses. because stakeholders may aggregate subtest scores without knowing the limitations of the psychometric properties of the scoring approaches, we examine a range of test scoring approaches. for the total score, we examine (1) total score that includes all eight subtests, and (2) overall untimed composite score that includes only the untimed subtests. for the composite scores, we examine (1) comprehensive composite scores that include all subtests that contribute to the associated subcomponents of the construct (oaa and bnc), and (2) untimed composite scores that include only the untimed subtests that contribute to the subcomponents of the construct (oaa-ut and bnc-ut). all subscores for the subtests are considered. it is important to note that the scores for the timed subtests (e.g., ni, a1, s1) may exceed the total number of items. based on the formula presented earlier, this situation occurs when a student responds to all of the items in less than 60 seconds. from the operational data, we selected eight cases that are clustered into three groups based on the total score. cases in group 1 have high total scores, cases in group 2 have moderate total scores, and cases in group 3 have comparatively lower total scores. these data are presented in table 9. the mean and standard deviation for the total scores are m=77.81 and sd=30.99. the distribution of total scores can be seen in figure 1. aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 159 figure 1. egma total score distribution. interpretations based on total scores because of the similarities in the total scores for students in these groups, stakeholders may conclude that the students in each group have similar proficiency levels in early numeracy. as noted earlier, policy makers may seek to use total scores to help evaluate the effectiveness of educational policies or curricular reforms, and researchers or practitioners may look to total scores to evaluate the outcomes of instructional practices or programs. however, by examining the total scores, important differences in students’ levels of proficiency may be masked. for example, further examination of the comprehensive composite scores indicate that differences may exist in the students’ levels of proficiency in oaa and bnc. notably for group 1, student a appears to have stronger bnc than oaa; whereas, student b appears to have similar levels of proficiency in both subcomponents of the construct. similar observations can be made for cases in groups 2 (e.g., students c and d, respectively) and 3 (students g and h, respectively). as such, using the total scores to make decisions about the effectiveness of policies, curricular reforms, and instructional programs may lead to inaccurate conclusions. these observations may be explained by differential weighting of the subtests that results from the variability in the number of items per subtest and the administration procedures leading to differences in the score units (e.g., raw score for untimed subtests, rate of correct 160 global education review 5(3) responses for timed subtests). for subtests with greater numbers of items, their proportion of contribution to the total score is increased. thus, the skills and knowledge that are assessed on these subtests receive greater emphasis in the calculation of the total score. similarly, the timed subtests have considerably higher score ranges because they are reported as a rate. controlling for the variability in the administration procedures, we can examine the total untimed composite scores. omitting the timed subtests when calculating a total score leads to different groupings of students based on overall proficiency levels. student b (shaded in dark grey) stands out as having the highest level of proficiency, followed by students a and d (shaded in medium grey), then students c and e (shaded in light grey), and students f-h remain unshaded with the lowest total untimed composite scores. however, the aggregated score continues to mask some differences in students’ levels of proficiency that are apparent when examining the untimed composite scores (bnc-ut and oaa-ut). although students a and d have similar patterns of correct responses on bnc-ut and oaa-ut, students c and e appear to have different levels of proficiency in bnc-ut and oaa-ut that are masked by similar total untimed composite scores. parallel observations are noted for students f and h. comparable to the cautions noted when examining the total scores, examining the total untimed composite scores may lead to inaccurate conclusions about the effectiveness of policies, curricular reforms, and instructional programs. a possible solution that could address the differential weighting of subtests is to calculate a ratio of correct to incorrect responses for each subtest and then aggregate these ratios. however, as noted at the beginning of this manuscript, the impetus for this research was to address a need in the field for more interpretable reports. creating and aggregating score ratios may not support this aim. interpretations based on composite scores some stakeholders have called for composite scores to increase the interpretability, and thus usefulness, of the egma results for making decisions. examining the comprehensive composite scores (bnc and oaa) presented in table 9, it is evident that additional information is provided about specific strengths and areas for growth in students’ understanding of early numeracy concepts. this information may provide useful insights into aspects of policies, reforms, or programs that are or are not supporting students’ learning of these important dimensions of early numeracy. however, just as was observed when analyzing the usefulness of the total score, these composite scores are heavily influenced by the extreme range of scores possible in the timed subtests, which differentially weights the scores in favor of these subtests. for example, student a scored 70.59 on number identification; his or her scores on the remaining seven subtests combine to total 60. as such, the usefulness and interpretability of these scores may be compromised. aligning test scoring procedures with test uses 161 table 9 example student data from egma administration by scoring procedure group student subscores untimed composite scores total untimed composite score comprehensive composite – all subtests total score – all ni a1 s1 qd mn a2 s2 wp bncut oaaut bnc oaa max score na na na 10 10 5 5 6 20 16 36 na na na 1 a 70.59 13 10 10 9 2 3 3 19 8 27 89.59 31 120.59 b 39.31 32.43 15 10 10 5 5 6 20 16 36 59.31 63.43 122.74 2 c 46 4 5 10 7 1 0 3 17 4 21 63 13 76 d 18 17.87 10 10 10 3 3 4 20 10 30 38 37.87 75.87 e 33.53 12 11 6 5 2 2 4 11 8 19 44.53 31 75.73 3 f 6 11 11 1 3 2 1 4 4 7 11 10 29 39 g 26.67 3 2 3 2 0 0 1 5 1 6 31.67 6 37.67 h 11 9 4 9 0 2 0 2 9 4 13 20 17 37 note: number identification (ni), addition – level 1 (a1), subtraction – level 1 (s1), quantity discrimination (qd), missing number (mn), addition – level 2 (a2), subtraction – level 2 (s2), word problems (wp). the composite untimed scores include qd + mn for bnc and a2 + s2 + wp for oaa. the composite with timed scores includes all subtests: ni + qd + mn for bnc and a1 + s2 + a2 + s2 + wp for oaa. again, to control for the variability in administration procedures, we examine the untimed composite scores (bnc-ut and oaaut). although the range of values in these scores is constrained, two additional problems are evident. first, within the oaa-ut composite score, the subtests do not have the same number of items, such that scores from the word problems subtest account for a larger proportion of the score than addition-level 2 and subtraction-level 2. the second and more significant issues is that these composite scores under-representation of the subcomponents of the construct. because bnc-ut and oaa-ut are based on a truncated set of subtests, they are not inclusive of the range of knowledge and skills that define the two-factor structure of early numeracy. thus, the meaningfulness and trustworthiness of the untimed composite scores for guiding decisions about students’ knowledge, skills, and ability in early numeracy may be compromised. conclusions several limitations impact the generalizability of these results. first, the composite scores used in these analyses were based on a subset of the egma subtests that most closely aligned with the research on the two-factor model of early mathematics. however, the composite scores could be created using different clusters of subtests. changing the subtests would alter the composite scores, and may impact the outcomes of this study. second, this study was conducted using a convenience sample from one country. this sample may have unique characteristics that do not generalize. conducting these analyses with data from other countries would strengthen the generalizability of the findings. 162 global education review 5(3) in sum, based on the psychometric properties and usefulness of scores derived from three test scoring procedures, the evidence points to the need to continue reporting and using the subscores for the egma subtests when disseminating results. although psychometrically adequate, composite scores based on the untimed subtests may distort the interpretations of students’ levels of proficiency in early numeracy because they are based on a limited set of subtests. subscores on the egma subtests provide detailed information about students’ levels of proficiency on each concept that comprises early numeracy. these results can be used to evaluate 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(2015). methods for examining the psychometric quality of subscores: a review and application. practical assessment, research, & evaluation, 20(21). about the author(s) leanne ketterlin geller, phd, is the texas instruments endowed chair in education and professor in the simmons school of education and human development at southern methodist university. her research focuses on supporting student achievement in mathematics through developing technically rigorous formative assessment procedures and effective classroom practices. her work emphasizes valid decision-making systems for students with diverse needs. lindsey perry, phd, is a research assistant professor at southern methodist university. her current research interests focus on investigating children's spatial and relational reasoning abilities, developing mathematics assessments for young children, and training educators on how to use data from assessments to make instructional decisions. linda m. platas, phd, is the associate chair of the child and adolescent development department at sf state university. she has participated in the development of child assessment instruments including the early grades math assessment (egma) and the measuring early learning quality and outcomes (melqo) and served as an expert in mathematics and literacy development on many technical and policy groups. she is a member of the development and research in early math education (dreme) network. dr. yasmin sitabkhan, phd, is a senior early childhood education researcher and advisor in rti’s international education division. in her current role at rti, dr. sitabkhan provides technical support to projects in lowand middle-income countries in early mathematics. her research interests focus on children’s development of early mathematical concepts and instructional strategies to support learning in lowand middle-income contexts. dr. sitabkhan has a ph.d. in education from the university of california, berkeley. what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 23 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge. (2022). what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? an essay. global education review, 9 (2), 23-37. what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? an essay helge wasmuth mercy college (usa) abstract what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? it is not a new question but one that is more urgent than ever. not only since the start of the covid-19 pandemic but for years, young children and their well-being have been thrust aside, and early childhood education and care worldwide has been treated as subordinate. the global education reform movement (germ) has negatively impacted early childhood education over the last decades, and these tendencies have only exacerbated during the pandemic. this essay centers around what it means to be a froebelian and what role froebelian thinking can play in the 21st century. the focus is on the questions and not the answers. the essay asks what it does and what it does not mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century. it finishes by reflecting on the role that froebelian thinking can play today to advocate for young children’s well-being in a post-pandemic world by resisting current germ thinking and developing alternatives. keywords fröbel, froebelian principles, ecec, germ introduction “for quite some time, more often and repeatedly, the word froebelian (fröbelianer) has been used to initiate our inner and outer life unification. this word is not only against my feeling, not only against my conviction, but also life in its facts does not speak for, but against the same. […] the expression froebelian even separates me from you, separates you from me; […] i hope and wish, though, 1 all translations, if not marked otherwise, are made by helge wasmuth. the citation method corresponds with previous letter editions of the german fröbel research. r stands for “recto” and indicates the back of a page. v for verso, and the front of a page is omitted. 2 i use the german spelling of his name. however, because names and their symbolism were important that we are united, a united, one to the other equal in striving for essence and life, as equal and united regarding the fundamentals and principles of our doing and work...” (fröbel, 1852, p. 16/16r).1 friedrich fröbel2 obviously didn’t like the word “froebelian3“ (fröbelianer). i suspect he rejected it because the term wasn’t his wordinvention. in the same letter he suggested “the united” or “peace-joyfilled” (friedigfreudigen) for fröbel, i feel it is appropriate to use the original spelling. 3 throughout this text, i use the english term froebelian and not the german fröbelianer as the term isn’t very popular in the german-speaking fröbel community anymore. 24 global education review 9 (2) (fröbel, 1852, p. 16/16r) as umbrella terms for his following. this was a typical fröbel behavior, not only to insist on his terms but also to invent words such as “peace-joyfilled” to describe what can’t be expressed in common german. he didn’t convince his following, though, and ironically, the letter mentioned above was addressed to his grandniece henriette breymann who later became one if not the most influential german froebelian in the late 19th century. nevertheless, the term “froebelian” is still used today, maybe not as much in germany, but in the anglo-american context, and especially in the uk, where a froebelian “revival” has been noted (bruce, 2021). while fröbel didn’t like the term “froebelian,” he was undoubtedly intrigued by the idea of a united following that would adhere to his “fundamentals and principles.” fröbel believed that he was destined to lead others who must follow him: “everything that concerns education and teaching is determined solely and exclusively by me and everything happens under my specific direction, where i cannot personally work directly” (fröbel, 1817, p. 7), so he wrote during the establishment of the general german educational institute in keilhau to heinrich langethal, one of his closest associates. within the keilhau community, it was never a question of who was in charge. if you disagreed with fröbel, you left. fröbel was not looking for equal partners among his associates, even when he was in close exchange with middendorff, langethal, or later barop. what he really wanted was a close following: men and women who devoted themselves to spreading his words, preserving his ideas’ purity, and establishing the kindergarten. that’s what froebel expected from his followers and many of the early froebelians saw exactly that as their role and their life’s purpose. today, the self-conception of a froebelian is a different one. however, what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? it is not a new question but one that is more urgent and timely than ever (may, 2006). for decades, young children and their socialemotional well-being have been thrust aside, and ecec systems worldwide have been treated as subordinate to what many policy makers see as “real” education and economic concerns. not only is ecec treated as subordinate, in many countries now educational policies and practices prevail that can be summarized as the global education reform movement (germ), a term coined by pasi sahlberg (2011). germ is an “unofficial educational agenda that relies on a certain set of assumptions to improve education systems” (sahlberg, 2011, p. 99) that are presented as ways to “reform” and “improve” education. it has resulted in the standardization of teaching and learning, the over-emphasis of the core subjects of mathematics and literacy, testing and high-stakes accountability, prescribed curricula, teaching to the test, increased teacher control, technology, and privatization (nitecki & wasmuth, 2017, 2019; moss, 2014; penn, 2011; zhao, 2017). germ has detrimentally affected the field and led to reframing, homogenizing, and normalizing ecec policies and practices worldwide (nitecki & wasmuth, 2017, 2019; roberts-holmes & moss, 2021; sahlberg & doyle, 2020). the covid-19 pandemic has only exacerbated these tendencies. examples include the never-ending debate about an alleged “learning loss” and the push for now established technology to stay. this dominant and narrow way of thinking about ecec, the “story of quality and high returns, the story of markets” (moss, 2014, p. 6), is the narrative of the previous decades. and while most professionals would probably grudgingly accept germ policies if they at least what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 25 25 worked and generated the promised results, that has not been the case (hargreaves, 2009; sahlberg & doyle, 2020; zhao, 2017). such policies don’t make children happier, healthier, or smarter; often, it’s the reverse. instead, they ignore or at least do not value the fact that children are human beings, and therefore must be treated and as respected as human beings, and that childhood has value in itself. the dominance of germ has furthermore led to a loss of utopian visions and alternative thinking about how we can raise, educate, and live with children – questions that were also at the heart of fröbel’s thinking and that need to be reflected on critically today. hence, what role can froebelian “fundamentals and principles” play in an ecec landscape in the clutches of germ? why is fröbel’s pedagogy still of interest? what does it mean to think and act in fröbel’s spirit, to advocate for young children, to question the current status quo, to wonder about new ways of educating young children, or simply put: what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? this essay centers around such questions. the emphasis is on the questions and not their answers, and to reflect on such questions critically. the questions themselves are essential, as it is vital for critically reflective educators to ask in what relationship we want to be with fröbel’s work and writings (or not), what fröbel’s ideas mean today (or not), and how such a relationship enables us to think deeply about today’s educational issues. to approach such questions, i will start with remarks on why it is necessary to read fröbel. i continue with a discussion of which key ideas of fröbel’s kindergarten pedagogy that i feel are worth considering today. i then briefly reflect on what to do, if you can’t agree with fröbel’s deep religious thinking, before again asking why and how we should read fröbel today. the essay concludes with thoughts on what it does and does not mean to be a froebelian and what the role of a froebelian in the 21st century might be. why should you we bother to read fröbel? how many people interested in his pedagogy are actually reading fröbel today, the complete original texts and not only handpicked excerpts or concise summaries? what is known about fröbel’s pedagogy and what is ignored? there seems to be a tendency to refer to prefabricated assumptions that have been regurgitated for quite a while. there are, of course, reasons for it. reading fröbel is not always a pleasure. he is a difficult-tounderstand, ambiguous educational thinker who could never express his ideas with clarity of language. his incomprehensible writing style, the non-systematic nature of his writings, the fragmentary character, and the foreign and literary-inspired terminology deny easy access to his thinking. that is even more true for the nongerman speaking context, as many translations are outdated or essential writings have never been translated (wasmuth, 2020). i am not arguing for going back to fröbel in the sense of a rigid exegesis. however, froebelians also shouldn’t ignore fröbel’s writings. and they should also not pick whatever seems suitable and then calling it froebelian. instead, a deep understanding is a prerequisite to evaluating whether modern interpretations are merely eclectic abridgments of fröbel’s complex educational thinking. therefore, to understand fröbel and do justice to his ideas, the “authentic fröbel” (heiland, 2010; wasmuth, 2020) still matters. the aim is to look “at his work as an interconnected whole, and not in fragmented pieces” (bruce, 2021, p. 1). it 26 global education review 9 (2) means to be interested and open to fröbel’s thinking. a curious reading, an intellectual relationship to fröbel’s work, enables rethinking how professionals can live with young children, raise them, and educate them. however, to think about what fröbel means today, you first need to grasp the fundamentals. in-depth knowledge of fröbel’s thinking is vital for thinking about what his ideas can mean in today’s modern world and act accordingly. therefore, what can be seen as the key ideas of his thinking? essential froebelian principles what exactly is the core of fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play? it’s an old question as a clear consensus based on his essential writings doesn’t exist. fröbel was probably never interested in such clarity as ambiguity served him better (wasmuth, 2020). nevertheless, certain core ideas can be identified, not only in selected text excerpts but in the entirety of his writings: the “authentic fröbel.” those can be called “froebelian principles” (bruce, 2021; tovey, 2020). not all ideas, of course, have stood the test of time. that is especially true for fröbel’s idiosyncratic language, which “has, until recently, been regarded as having little or no place in modern-day education, regarded as arcane” (bruce, 2021, p. 99). fröbel’s texts are only partially attractive today (wasmuth, 2020). nevertheless, the ideas behind the unwieldy terminology are worth considering today, and it is important "to decide whether the work pioneered by fröbel is rendered obsolete and therefore needing to be discarded, or whether his values about children and women can be transformed into current educational contexts in ways which remain useful today” (bruce, 2021, p. 14). hence, what is obsolete, what essential, and what seminal? due to the limitations of this paper, it is not possible to do justice to the “manifoldness” and “link-total” of fröbel’s thinking. in outlining selected principles, i am not suggesting that other key ideas, such as engagement with nature or the blocks, are less important. they are simply less relevant to the central argument of my paper (and, so one might argue, my understanding of fröbel). those that are discussed, though, furthermore serve as an illustration of what fröbel stands for in contrast to contemporary thinking about ecec. first, fröbel always emphasized that all children have the right to education. kindergarten, or to use the modern term ecec, is essential for all children. it must “provide children of all living conditions a humane education and edification,” one that is justified by the “essence and the general as well as individual destination of the human being” (fröbel, 1841, pp. 170/171). all children, not only a few privileged ones, have a right to education. and not only that: all children have the right to humane education, an education which deserves the word. it is a remarkably modern idea, especially in light of the pandemic and the failure of many societies worldwide to provide such free education to all young children, not only those who have the means to ensure it. furthermore, humane education needs to be general and holistic. education must embrace the child “in the totality of his being and acting” (fröbel, 1842a, p. 223). while education can occasionally cater to a child’s preference, “the wholebeing (ganzwesen) of the child has to [receive] his formation and for each one of his abilities—especially according to the three main directions: mind, temper and energy what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 27 27 (tatkraft), thinking, feeling and doing— complete nurture and acceptance,” fröbel wrote in the essay on the meaning and essence of kindergarten (1842a, p. 223). ecec is needed “so that every child, regardless of social background, can grow according to his being, destination, and profession, may educate himself and be educated; this is the simple purpose of the ‘kindergartens’ […]” (fröbel, 1844, pp. 240/241). those statements are true until today, as, for example, unicef’s sustainable development goal 4 emphasizes (unicef, 2021). all children have the right to a holistic, general, and well-rounded education and not only a basic education that prepares them for later working life. education – in its whole meaning, one that merits the term education – needs to be concerned with more than preparing children for the future or socialization. it must include the development of the self in the world. third, fröbel argued that children need to be self-active during the learning process. only through and in self-activity can a child construct their self as a part of the world to grasp and make meaning of the world – to live life unification, as fröbel would have phrased it. only through self-activity, children learn and develop, make sense of the world. children, therefore, want and need to be active. selfactivity allows them to internalize their experiences and express their thoughts and feelings by creating something independently out of themselves. or, with a typical fröbel quote: children want to “expresses the nature and human world creatively out of himself and through observation absorbs it into himself, develops out of the unity a manifoldness and rediscover for each manifoldness again the unity” (fröbel, 1842b, p. 28). however, to be self-active, children need to be enabled to do what fröbel is famous for: they need to play. that is real play, not educational instruction that tries to disguise dull memorization or boring activities in the form of “fun activities.” play must be a young child’s principal activity because play nurtures all the child’s aptitudes and strengths; it is crucial “for the first care/nurturing, education, and edification (bildung) of the child” because it “occupies the child at all times simultaneously in the totality of his activity as well as in the various directions of the activity, as a simultaneously acting, feeling and thinking being” (fröbel, 1842a, p. 221). play allows holistic and wellrounded learning and development. there is more, though. through play, the child penetrates reality constructively. thus, the world’s regularities become transparent, and children become aware of these regularities, and at the same time, gain awareness of themselves through and in play. play enables children to make sense of the world and their place in the world. hence, play is not a pastime, never just a frivolity but “rather a continuous learning, but one at, around and in life itself” (fröbel, 1842b, p. 92). young children need to learn in and through play. it’s a timeless but often misunderstood idea, and fröbel was the first who tirelessly advocated for it. the idea was unheard of at the time (wasmuth, 2011, 2020) and remains valid today – even if it is increasingly forgotten or simplified. self-activity and free, real play are not sufficient, though, and this is another of fröbel’s remarkable pedagogical insights. unfortunately, the idea is not always recognized when discussing fröbel. children need guidance and nurture through a stimulating environment and intentional interactions organized by a cognizant and intentional adult. self-activity needs education, or as tovey (2020) and bruce (2021) 28 global education review 9 (2) call it, “freedom with guidance.” yes, the child constructs reality alone; only the child can do it through self-activity and play. however, the child needs guidance or real education, understood as a relational process in which someone (such as a cognizant and intentional professional) educates (in the whole meaning of the word) someone (a young child). children can become conscious and understand reality only through the support and guidance of such an education. the child cannot achieve this alone, only through education and care “children are nurtured and educated for […] the awareness and conscious living of their actual human nature, the divine in human appearance” (fröbel, 1841, p. 155). and young children unconsciously ask for it, hence fröbel’s conclusion. young children possess a “need for help (hülfsbedürftigkeit)” (fröbel, 1846). education as an intentional professional’s external action must correspond to this inner “need for help.” the child in their helplessness needs support, the suggestions, the impulses of an adult or educator – they need education. children need both: fröbel’s pedagogy allows children to be self-active but at the same time emphasizes support in becoming a part of the world, or as fröbel would say, unity with nature, society, and god. fröbel’s idea of play was never about totally free or random play. it is indeed about “freedom with guidance” (bruce, 2021; tovey, 2020). lastly, there is fröbel’s insistence on the dignity of the child. you can find this notion throughout his work, although it isn’t always expressed explicitly. an example is found in a late letter to baroness von marenholtz-bülow in which fröbel states that the primary goal of kindergarten is and must be the “education of the human being to be a human being” (fröbel, 1851, p. 727). children are human beings, first 4 see bruce, 2021; wasmuth, 2020 and foremost, and must therefore be treated and respected as human beings. the child exists in the here and now; each child is a full-value human being with the right to be themself. each child is an autonomous person with dignity, interests, needs, and rights. furthermore, childhood has a value of its own and purpose in itself. it must not be reduced to a period of life that only serves as preparation for future life and work. children are not objects; they are not notyet-adults, not future workers, or people who need to be made “college and career ready.” children have the right to childhood and to be children, as well as the right to humane education. such a notion has not lost its relevance. on the contrary: in an ecec landscape shaped by germ with its focus on functioning, competition, and “being ready,” fröbel reminds us of what is lost. it is a remarkable statement, not only in the context of his time but also in the present—one that is worth relentless reiteration today. can non-christians and atheists be froebelians? while many of fröbel’s pedagogical ideas are remarkably modern, they all were embedded in his episteme. and while this essay has no room to discuss fröbel’s panentheism in detail,4 there is no question that fröbel was a deeply religious person (wasmuth, 2020). for him, everything only made sense as a part of what he called the law of the sphere. everything – educational philosophy, school pedagogy, and kindergarten pedagogy – was a result of this thinking. for fröbel, kindergarten was never a place only to take care of children or educate them, but always a necessary extension of his spherical thinking with the goal of life what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 29 29 unification (wasmuth, 2020). for him the “last, the total purpose of the whole,” meaning the kindergarten, is to educate the child early on through “doing, feeling, and thinking, according to his being and his relationship with the human-nature and thus for true unification with god, to well-rounded life unification” (fröbel, 1840, p. 119). the ultimate goal of all fröbel’s educational endeavors was to support children in achieving life unification, unification with nature and society, but especially god. god is the “primal reason, primal beginning, and primal origin of all existing (daseiende),” so fröbel wrote in his brilliant letter to max leidesdorf, “the self-conscious, self-determined, in itself united and therefore good, god” (fröbel, 1846, p. 190). such thoughts aren’t anything that i would emphasize; i rather disagree with them as i feel discomfort with fröbel’s episteme and deep religious thinking. therefore, an interesting question is: “can non-christians be froebelian” (bruce, 2021, p. 21)? and what about atheists like myself? can you and do you even want to consider yourself a froebelian if you don’t agree with fröbel’s religiosity – and do you even want to? why would non-christians and atheists wish to call themselves froebelian? i don’t have an answer to this question, only thoughts. i believe that fröbel’s “fundamentals and principles” go beyond any religiosity. it is not his religiosity but his views on young children, young children’s learning, the importance of play, and the value of childhood that appeal until today and make him matter. his thoughts have meaning even if you are an atheist. in this sense, being a froebelian today doesn’t mean adhering to fröbel’s episteme; but insisting on and advocating for “froebelian principles.” of course, there is a relevant objection: why use the term “froebelian” if fröbel’s fundamental assumptions, his religiosity and the goal of life unification, aren’t valued? aren’t thoughts on ecec such as holistic education for all children, play, self-activity, or treating children as human beings shared by everyone within our field anyway? what’s so “froebelian” about these principles? again, i don’t have a satisfying answer. however, there is value in sticking to the term as it connects like-minded thinking and advocacy for young children’s well-being across cultures. you shouldn’t be naïve; many outside of, and unfortunately even within the ecec profession, don’t share such ideas, even if they pretend to do so. it is not what many stakeholders value and not what shapes current policies and practices. for this reason alone, it is worth emphasizing froebelian principles continuously and being aware of their meaning – even if there is discomfort with fröbel’s deep religious thinking. in the end, it is these principles that continue to be essential and connect like-minded froebelians worldwide. however, to do so, the goal can’t be to parrot well-sounding froebelian buzzwords without a deep understanding of what they mean and how they are connected. to develop such an understanding, you must start with what seems rather tedious today: reading fröbel. again: why should you read fröbel today? i would like to go back once again to the question of why you should read fröbel today and what you can expect from such readings. being a froebelian in my eyes does not mean turning towards fröbel for practical guidance. you can’t read fröbel in the hope of finding answers and solutions to today’s pressing issues. unfortunately, this is what many expect and why historical, philosophical, or theoretical work is so often deemed irrelevant. what many want to hear is: what does fröbel mean for everyday 30 global education review 9 (2) classrooms? how can i apply his principles? how can i use the occupations or blocks? how can i implement fröbel’s idea of play in my practice? or even better, what would fröbel want me to do in this specific situation? fröbel can’t help in such a sense. i’m not arguing that you can’t apply froebelian principles today; the renewed interest in fröbel has undoubtedly enriched practices worldwide. nevertheless, the expectation shouldn’t be to find quick and easy solutions in fröbel’s writings. neither can it show the right direction nor tell us what to do today in a specific situation. to that effect, fröbel is useless. developing a relationship to fröbel’s thoughts, reading, and thinking with fröbel can’t be reduced to a “practical method” (tesar, 2020). the field can’t solve the problems that it is facing today by merely going back to fröbel. if true, then why bother to read fröbel? the benefit lies in developing a certain mindset, or what tesar calls an “ethical relationship with a thought” (2020, p. 1). creating an intellectual relationship with fröbel by reading his works doesn’t provide practical guidance but prompts the reader to think about the profession’s aim, role, and methods. it is thought-work that inspires the development of a mindset that is froebelian. through studying fröbel, (and as a historian, i would like to add history in general) you create a “habit of reflection and deliberative inquiry, which is holding up the taken-forgranted world to critical scrutiny” (kliebard, 1995, p. 194). thinking with fröbel “leads us to formulate questions, rather than articulate clear answers to the problems that we study” (tesar, 2020, p. 2). that is essential. to ask questions and not to wait for answers. understood this way, thinking with fröbel reveals problems while simultaneously working towards their solution. what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? how can such a froebelian mindset help? to use an infamous froebelian term, the answer to this question is manifold and depends on your role(s) in the ecec field. first and foremost, there is practice. without any question, it is the most crucial level. being a froebelian as a practitioner, among others, means to actively work on and fight for the implementation and adherence of froebelian principles. connecting theory and practice, thinking about what a practice that values children, their lives, and their holistic learning can look like is now, as before, paramount. while buzzwords like play-based learning, childcentered education, developmentally appropriate practice, etc., are frequently mentioned, their use doesn’t mean that they do justice to froebelian principles. the words may sound similar, but it’s not necessarily froebelian (or even desirable for young children). furthermore, there is the level of education and professional development. to be a froebelian on this level means to familiarize future (and veteran) professionals with fröbel’s ideas and enable them to reflect on their role as an educator and advocate of young children’s learning. today, where many professionals feel emotionally drained, displaced, and disembodied (scacchi, unpublished) because their emotional and mental well-being is only an afterthought, it is crucial to support professionals in developing critical selfawareness. then, there is the level of advocacy. as helen may (2006) wrote some 15 years ago: “‘being froebelian’ is also about advocacy for social and political change” (p. 245). that is still true today. it means to advocate for young children, to “join in and protect" (may, 2006, p. 247), as well as to advocate for children’s rights (krappmann & petry, 2016; swadener et. al, what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 31 31 2013), women’s rights, and ecec professionals’ rights and well-being (scacchi, unpublished). you can think of many more levels. ideally, these levels are interwoven and interconnected with the well-being of all young children in mind: “educators are deriving inspiration for constructive revolutionary practices from fröbel’s principles for early childhood education. these practices have ranged from advocacy to innovation and activism through various phases of froebelian education” (mcnair & powell, 2020, p. 2). however, i am not a practitioner. therefore, for the rest of this paper, i mainly argue as an academic who thinks about fröbel’s educational philosophy and theory and what it means today, even if questions of practice and advocacy are on my mind. what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? as said earlier, fröbel is an ambiguous educational thinker who is not easy to understand. that is even more true today, as many of his thoughts are foreign and not easily applicable. it is not a new problem, though. in a certain sense, the history of the fröbel movement was shaped by fierce debates about who understood his pedagogy correctly and best. one example is the infamous “fröbelorthodoxy” dispute of the l870s (denner, 1988; heiland, 2017; wasmuth, 2020), a term coined by gustav steinacker at the second annual convention of the general education association in kassel in 1873. the term was directed at baroness von marenholtz-bülow, who had claimed that orthodoxy is necessary to preserve the purity of fröbel’s core ideas (denner, 1988). the controversy didn’t help the emerging fröbel movement. it only led to heated quarrels which mainly centered around two issues: first, if it is legitimate to modify fröbel’s pedagogy at all (which all the early froebelians did) and second, and even more importantly, who had understood fröbel best (i’m inclined to say no one as they all emphasized their distinctive interpretations). orthodoxy prevailed in the years after. froebelians worldwide have insisted on the importance of preserving fröbel’s “pure” ideas as well as the correctness of their interpretation (wasmuth, 2020). none of it has much appeal today. there is not much to aim for by insisting on a rigid exegesis of what fröbel allegedly has meant or in taking his words literally. going back to fröbel to restore his original idea for today’s early childhood is fruitless, or as bruce points out: “there is no wish to return to the rigid prescription of earlier times” (2021, p. 101). the same is true for a stubborn insistence on the alleged superiority of one’s interpretation. today, it is dogmatic to insist on how fröbel has envisioned using the gifts and occupations, for example, the blocks. using blocks in a way as prescribed by fröbel seems rather pointless. instead, you need to ask what the blocks mean in today’s world, how they can be applied in a modern and meaningful way and adapted to each child’s learning community’s strengths and needs. in this sense, being a froebelian doesn’t mean to insist on purity and orthodoxy but to be open to modification in fröbel’s spirit. change is necessary, and even if fröbel wasn’t open to criticism, he was continually evolving the “whole of gifts and occupations.” second, being a froebelian today does not mean being narrow-minded and focused on froebelian thinking only. once again, looking at the past is enlightening because such narrow-mindedness, bigotry, and devaluation of the “competition” was a common mindset of many leading german froebelians. a prominent example is the so-called “dispute about montessori” in the 1920s. just the thought that a 32 global education review 9 (2) new pedagogical concept could be equal to or even better than fröbel’s pedagogy was enough to outrage someone such as eduard spranger. it resulted in fierce and disrespectful comments (konrad, 1997, wasmuth, 2011). today, a question such as which pedagogy is “better” (whatever that would mean) seems pointless. there isn’t anything to gain by denigrating other worthwhile pedagogical ideas. new thoughts can only help to expand critical thinking about the current status of the field. as a froebelian, you shouldn’t only be open to fröbel’s thoughts. you should also listen to other ideas and how they can help to develop alternative thinking. such a mindset is in fröbel’s spirit. you shouldn’t forget, he developed his new concept and institution of ecec because he was dissatisfied with the contemporary form of institutionalized early childhood education, as documented in his dislike of the day nurseries (kleinkinderbewahranstalten). besides, fröbel created a new name and a new language because he deemed the existing one insufficient to express his thinking. while i don’t necessarily want to argue for the development of a new language of ecec – even if the idea seems enticing – what is needed is openness for new ideas and thinking outside the box to conceive alternatives, and, most importantly, revive “real utopia” (moss, 2014). third, being a froebelian does not mean idealizing fröbel. yes, fröbel expected blind loyalty. however, such an attitude can’t be the goal today. one’s relationship with fröbel and his work today must be a critical one. such critical thinking is not only warranted but desperately needed, and it should start with fröbel and froebelian practices: “criticality ensures that practice is simultaneously cognisant of froebelian histories and vigilant against stultification that arises from wallowing in orthodoxy” (mcnair & powell, 2020, page). there is no worth in parroting froebelian buzzwords without understanding. besides, you shouldn’t put fröbel and his pedagogical ideas on a pedestal, as froebelians of the past have often done. many biographies present an uncritical, almost cultlike glorification of fröbel as a person and pedagogue, and analyses of his work often conceal the inconsistencies in his thinking. in addition, the writings’ incomprehensibility is often excused by fröbel’s alleged “genius,” merely assuming that there is a hidden, deeper meaning in his ideas. danger lurks in a failure to acknowledge fröbel’s flaws and contradictions, and the ambiguity of his pedagogical thinking. however, such a mindset is neither needed nor helpful. there isn’t anything to lose by admitting, revealing, and analyzing the contradictions in fröbel’s work and his thinking, including the inconsistencies. on the contrary, such openness helps to better understand the complexity, ambiguity, and messiness of early learning (and education understood as the conscious support of such learning). the same is true for fröbel, the person: he was a flawed personality and probably not even the “born” educator as he is often idealistically represented (wasmuth, 2020). why, though, should his flaws, ambiguities, gaps, shortcomings, and outdated ways of thinking be ignored? they do not detract from his rich and fascinating thinking. being critical, however, can’t stop with fröbel; it needs to go beyond. being a froebelian means critically questioning the current status of ecec and taken-for-granted assumptions shaped by germ, especially those that hurt young children. criticality demands “political and cultural contestation when ‘regimes of truth’ lose sight of children’s humanity” (mcnair & powell, 2020, p. 8). it means advocating for young children, to “join in and protect" (may, what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 33 33 2006), and to resist policies and practices contrary to children’s well-being. understood this way, being a froebelian means “to swim against the tide of educational doctrines that promote reductive and transmissive views of young children’s capabilities and signs of learning” (mcnair & powell, 2020, p. 9). it means advocating for children’s rights, women’s rights, and ecec professionals’ rights in the times of germ’s neoliberal agenda (robertsholmes & moss, 2021). what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? i will conclude by asking one more time: what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? the focus, though, this time is on the now. this essay’s purpose was to ask questions without giving conclusive answers. however, such questions alone enable the profession to reflect on the genuine essence of ecec, and to unite everyone in upholding fröbel’s ideas in today’s world. it might furthermore help to emphasize which essential ideas of meaningful ecec are worth fighting for. and fighting seems to be the proper word because what is needed is to resist the current attacks from germ while simultaneously developing new ideas. without any question, ecec is in an age of crisis; a crisis that didn’t begin with the pandemic. the neglect of young children’s social-emotional, as well as their physical wellbeing began before. the current crisis results from decades of educational policies and practices shaped by germ with its key features of standardization, the over-emphasis of the core subjects of mathematics and literacy, testing and high-stakes accountability, prescribed curricula, increased teacher control, technology, and privatization. it has detrimentally affected ecec. the pandemic has furthermore revealed stark disparities. that is especially true for countries that regard young children’s extrafamilial education as a private matter rather than a public good. young children and their institutionalized education and care, as well as their social-emotional well-being, aren’t being prioritized. and all the current talk about the nebulous “learning loss” that needs to be offset in the near future shows the direction we are headed for: more technology, more standardized learning, more outcome-orientated “education.” that is especially true for countries like the us. after almost one year, a plan to reopen ecec institutions (and schools) safely for all children, families, and especially professionals is nonexistent. and neither contains a vision of what a meaningful system of ecec might look like after the pandemic. the crisis is here, and ecec is more than ever “in need of transformative change” (moss, 2014, 73). froebelians shouldn’t be quiet spectators of what is to come. as may wrote 15 years ago: “being froebelian’ at the beginning of the twenty-first century is to keep alive the dream and determination to ‘make our own alternative’” (may, 2006, p. 247). i believe it is true today more than ever. i want to end by outlining only one idea. to keep the possibility of such change open, we need to revive alternative conversations and ideas (roberts-holmes & moss, 2021). that is one way in which froebelian thinking can play a role; not by going back to fröbel but by insisting on the timelessness of his ideas as a reminder and orientation of what ecec can mean. the intellectual exchange with froebelian ideas can help to become aware of such alternatives and at the same time help to resist the current ways of thinking. ecec doesn’t have to be as it is today, and the insistence on froebelian principles shows exactly that. furthermore, it means resisting the language and the underlying 34 global education review 9 (2) assumptions of what it means to be a child, a parent, or an ecec institution in today’s germdominated world and what should be considered vital when raising children in an educational setting. it means to rethink how we can live with children, find new ways and new approaches, or as moss (2014) calls it, a “new utopia.” and froebelian thinking, as bruce argues, can help: “there is now an urgent need to develop something which is true to his vision […]. there has been a serious loss of froebelian treasure here” (bruce, 2021, p. 84). new visions are needed because ecec has been manipulated by borrowing methods, approaches, and terms from neighboring (and sometimes dominant) disciplines. like many other educational fields, ecec is shaped by a language that “stresses economics, accountability, and compliance” (rose, 2009, p. 25). terms such as “quality,” “standards,” or “accountability” are not helpful when speaking about the essence of our field and make us helpless in the face of human capital theory and neoliberal thinking (wasmuth & nitecki, 2021). our discipline has never been a stronghold of philosophical thought. today, ecec as a profession and discipline still struggles to “think and speak for itself” (urban, 2018, p. 314). what is lacking is what could be called a language of ecec, a genuine pedagogical voice that embodies what our field stands for. froebelians can play a role by emphasizing such a genuine pedagogical perspective that should be paramount when describing, analyzing, and speaking about our ecec. and it means to identify and maybe even revive terms and perspectives that empower our field to speak for itself. froebelian principles are such a perspective. the profession can’t continue to ask the wrong questions, questions of efficiency, accountability, or “learning loss.” the salient question is “what we don’t read and hear” (rose, 2009 p. 27). using froebelian thinking, we can ask: what should a kindergarten (or ecec institution) be? what does real play mean, and how can we support it? how can we as conscious professionals support such play without turning it into meaningless “fun activities"? the pandemic has drastically altered how society thinks about many areas of life, such as health, work, family life, or school. it is an opportunity to rethink our image of the child, adults’ relationships with young children, and what it means to live with young children in educational settings. it might mean questioning what is happening with the children’s well-being in mind and advocating for real “high-quality,” or as fröbel would have called it, “humane education” for all children. fröbel might not have liked the term “froebelian.” however, he would have been thrilled by a profession that advocates for young children’s well-being, dignity, and play as the means of young children’s self-active learning as the appropriate way to make sense of the world and find their place in this world. he would have been fond of advocates who resist treating ecec as a commodity, advocates who don’t think about ecec in terms of standardized learning and testing, and advocates who ask and think about such questions. for all of these reasons, it might be worth wondering: what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? bibliography bruce, t. (2021). friedrich fröbel. a critical introduction to key themes and debates. london, new york: bloomsbury. denner, e. (1988). das fröbelverständnis der fröbelianer: studien zur fröbelrezeption what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? 35 35 im 19. jahrhundert. bad heilbrunn/obb.: klinkhardt-verlag. fröbel, f. (1817). f. an heinrich langethal in berlin v. 27.1./29.1./30.1.1817 (griesheim) fröbel, f. (1840). entwurf eines planes zur begründung und ausführung eins kindergartens, einer allgemeinen anstalt zur verbreitung allseitiger beachtung des lebens der kinder, besonders durch pflege ihres tätigkeitstriebes. den deutschen frauen und jungfrauen als ein werk zu würdiger mitfeier des vierhundertjährigen jubelfestes der erfindung der buchdruckerkunst zur prüfung und mitwirkung vorgelegt. in e. hoffmann (1951), friedrich fröbel. ausgewählte schriften. erster band: kleine schriften und briefe von 1809–1851 (pp. 114–125). godesberg: küpper. fröbel, f. 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(2018). what works may hurt―side effects in education. new york and london: teachers college press. http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/view/383/263 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/view/383/263 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/view/383/263 126 global education review 5 (1) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2018). teaching secondary social studies. [review of the book instructional strategies for middle and high school social studies: methods, assessment, and classroom management by bruce e. larson]. global education review, 5 (1). 126-127. book review teaching secondary social studies “instructional strategies for middle and high school social studies: methods, assessment, and classroom management” by bruce e. larson by colin everett bruce larson begins his text for preservice social studies teachers with the positive statement, “teaching is a wonderful and exciting profession.” while some books on the teaching of social studies focus on the mistakes of the profession as their starting point, larson emphasizes getting the instruction correct from the beginning. instructional strategies for middle and high school social studies is organized into two broad sections. the first is foundational and situates the learning of social studies within the broader developmental context of learning. the first chapter on curriculum, for example, is a clear and concise guide to making social studies more than simply history instruction. this chapter ably navigates the complexities of modern curriculum and standards from the macro level of the common core and the national council of the social studies to the micro level of school and departmental curriculum norms. while the chapter on curriculum is valuable, the following chapters on the learning community and goals and assessments fall short. the content is well organized and clear, but it does not connect back to social studies instruction as effectively as in the book’s first chapter. additionally, the content of these chapters are (hopefully) typical components of pre-service teacher education programs and may be skipped by many readers. the second section focuses on “instructional strategies” and this is where the text really shines. two themes dominate. one is that effective instruction is the result of thoughtful planning. aspects of teaching that might appear to an outside observer to be natural—like teacher questioning—are actually the result of careful planning and continual practice. a second theme is that there is no single path toward effective instruction. for teaching secondary social studies 127 example, teachers who utilize mostly studentcentered approaches will deprive their students of the benefits of an insightful and concise lecture. effective instruction in social studies is a combination of approaches and practices. the easiest target for ineffective instruction is the lecture. rather than criticize or condemn lecturing, larson addresses how to transform lectures into interactive presentations that are short, specific, and frequently require students to interact with the material. this is accomplished by a careful detailing of the component parts of a lecture from the perspective of both the teacher and the student. engagement strategies like exit cards, think/pair/share, journaling, and others are presented to keep students active learners during short, timely lectures. one of the most common forms of interactions between students and teachers is questioning. working against the myth that engaging students with compelling questions is a natural quality of gifted teachers, larson breaks down the process for implementing questions from prompts, to question framing, to active listening. as with lecturing and questioning, methods like cooperative learning, classroom simulations, student inquiry projects, and debates require thoughtful goals, careful planning, and implementation. in general, the book’s content is organized in an effective way, with the exception being the chapter on concept formation. this chapter would be a better anchor for the first section of the text by relating learning more directly to social studies, rather than having it as a standalone chapter. the charts and graphs—like one detailing what student interactions should look like in a socratic seminar—are effective. additionally, every chapter in the second section is placed on a continuum from teacher centered to student centered, and reinforces that the most effective and engaging teachers utilize a variety of instructional methods. what makes teaching social studies such an exciting profession is its diversity of material and instructional approaches. it is a dynamic field where every component, the curriculum, the audience, and the methods are in a constant state of flux. understanding the past as a tool for better engaging us in the present is a task that requires both multiple perspectives and multiple approaches. larson presents a text that helps social studies teachers navigate and cope with the overwhelming nature of social studies. as a guide for pre-service social studies teachers, this book is invaluable. “instructional strategies for middle and high school social studies: methods, assessment, and classroom management.” 2nd edition. by bruce e. larson. new york: routledge, 2017. isbn: 978-1-13884678-4 about the author bruce e. larson, phd., is professor of secondary education and social studies at western washington university. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer in the accelerated post-baccalaureate program at bridgewater state university in massachusetts. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 82 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: shivraj, pooja; ketterlin-geller, leanne; basaraba, deni; geller, josh;hatfield, cassandra & näslund-hadley, emma (2018). developing usable, accessible, and culturally relevant learning materials to support parent-child interactions in mathematics. global education review, 5 (3), 82-105. developing usable, accessible, and culturally relevant learning materials to support parent-child interactions in mathematics pooja shivraj american board of obstetrics and gynecology leanne ketterlin geller southern methodist university deni basaraba bethel school district, eugene, oregon josh geller southern methodist university cassandra hatfield southern methodist university emma näslund-hadley inter-american development bank (idb) abstract research indicates that parental involvement in children’s education is positively related to academic achievement in mathematics; however, there are few studies on the role of parental involvement in the context of developing countries. the purpose of this paper is to document the iterative development using design-based research (dbr) of a home-based intervention intended to support parents’ involvement with their children in mathematics within the jamaican cultural context. key components of the homebased intervention included (a) six sets of mathematics-learning materials, each covering foundational early mathematics concepts, and (b) educator-led workshops to support parents’ understanding of the mathematics concepts. four phases of the dbr process were implemented to create a usable and accessible intervention that was culturally relevant. these phases included (a) developing prototype materials using evidence-based practices and considering local contexts; (b) validating the prototype materials with focus groups comprised of multiple stakeholders; (c) evaluating the cultural relevance of the materials through external review; and (d) examining the feasibility of one set of mathematics learning materials through a small-scale study. though not reported as part of this paper, we hypothesize that parents’ involvement with their children will increase with the implementation of the intervention. keywords home-based intervention; design-based research (dbr) methods; jamaica; mathematics learning materials, early mathematics a home based intervention to support parental involvement 83 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: shivraj, pooja; ketterlin-geller, leanne; basaraba, deni; geller, josh;hatfield, cassandra & näslund-hadley, emma (2018). developing usable, accessible, and culturally relevant learning materials to support parent-child interactions in mathematics. global education review, 5 (3), 82-105. supporting parent-child interactions in mathematics according to the family support hypothesis, parents who actively participate in their child’s schooling learn concepts, attitudes, and skills that can help them support their child’s success in school (miedel & reynolds, 1999). consequently, developing materials that parents can use in the home to support their child’s mathematical understanding may reinforce concepts taught in school, remediate skill deficits, and assist students’ achievement. the purpose of this paper is to describe the development of home-based intervention to support parents’ involvement with their children within the jamaican cultural context. we demonstrate how iterative development using design-based research (dbr) of a home-based intervention designed to support parents’ involvement with their children in mathematics could produce an intervention that is usable, feasible, and culturally relevant. the rationale for designing early elementary mathematics learning materials within a home-based intervention for parents in jamaica was threefold. first, performance on the mathematics subtests of national exams in jamaica revealed that the country’s elementary students were not on track to meet the national goal set by the ministry of education of having 85% of all fourth-graders demonstrate mastery in numeracy by 2015 (ministry of education, 2011). second, research across content areas, grade ranges, and countries suggests that parental involvement1 is positively related to academic achievement (fan & chen, 2001; gertler et al., 2014; miedel & reynolds, 1999). third, surveys and assessments administered in jamaica indicate that the level of parental involvement is low (education taskforce, 2004; rattray & lawson, 2011) and that jamaican parents often do not perceive themselves as having the knowledge and skills needed to help their children academically (munroe, 2009). the goal of this intervention was to address these issues by providing parents in jamaica support through a home-based intervention that included mathematics learning materials and educator-led workshops. a brief synthesis of the research on the issues around parental involvement in children’s education is described next, followed by an overview of design-based research (dbr) as a mechanism for developing culturally relevant materials for use by parents in a specific context. parent involvement in children’s education research across multiple content areas and grade levels has consistently demonstrated a positive relationship between parental involvement in children’s education and children’s academic achievement (blevinsknabe & musun-miller, 1996; hill & tyson, 2009; munroe, 2009; olatoye & agbatogun, 2009). a study by hart, ganley, & purpura (2016) examined the role of the home math environment (home activities which parents and children engage in that are intended to support math development) and a child’s mathematics achievement for children ranging from ages 3 through 8. all data were collected through parent self-report. it was found that children of parents who reported doing more general mathematics activities at home, such as playing card games that use numbers, had higher mathematics skills; however, parents who reported doing more spatial activities, such as puzzles and building, had children with lower _______________________________ corresponding author: pooja shivraj, american board of obstetrics and gynecology, 2915 vine street, dallas, tx 75205. email: dr.pshivraj@gmail.com mailto:dr.pshivraj@gmail.com 84 global education review 5(3) mathematics skills. it is worth noting, however, that the majority of research conducted in this area was with preschool-aged children (anders et al., 2012; blevins-knabe & musun-miller, 1996; deflorio & beliakoff, 2015; lefevre et al., 2009) and that little work has been done to investigate the impact of parental involvement with children in the primary grades (fan & chen, 2001; jordan, kaplan, nabors-olah, & locuniak, 2006). moreover, much of the research conducted examining the impact of parental involvement on children’s academic outcomes (generally, or on mathematics outcomes specifically) was conducted in western countries where a variety of educational supports are already available for students (anders et al., 2012; blevins-knabe & musun-miller, 1996; hill & tyson, 2009; jordan et al., 2006; lefevre et al., 2009; munroe, 2009; musun-miller & blevins-knabe, 1998; olatoye & agbatogun, 2009). significantly less research on the effectiveness of this type of intervention has been done in developing countries like jamaica (powell, 1999). this paper aims to begin addressing this gap in the literature by describing the iterative process of developing mathematics learning materials for use by jamaican parents at home to support the mathematics learning of their first and second grade students. encouraging parental involvement providing parents with structured opportunities to support their children’s mathematical learning at home is important because parents spend more time at home with their children building literacy skills than mathematics-related skills (blevins-knabe & musun-miller, 1996; jordan et al., 2006; lefevre et al., 2009; musun-miller & blevins-knabe, 1998). although multiple types of parental involvement are related to students’ academic performance (epstein, 1994), research indicates that activities in which parents work directly2 with their children in the home may be the most effective form of parental involvement (cotton & wikelund, 2005). the importance of encouraging parents to work directly with their children in the home was recently demonstrated in jamaica by munroe (2009), who sought to identify issues and concerns that may influence parental involvement in education in jamaica, to subsequently identify solutions that may help increase parental involvement. to do this, munroe explored the relative contribution of parents’ motivational beliefs, perception of invitations of involvement from others, and perceived life context to their level of involvement in their children’s education. application of this model revealed that although parents were interested in increasing their level of involvement in their children’s education, schools needed not only to improve parents’ knowledge and understanding of the concepts their children were learning, but also to “provide specific guidance and instruction on developmentally appropriate parental involvement strategies and opportunities for parents to be engaged” (munroe, 2009, p. 231). the need to provide parents with guidance and strategies on how to support their child’s learning at home has been observed in studies conducted in multiple cultural contexts, specifically with latinos (lopez & donovan, 2009) and with finnish parents (silinskas et al., 2010). to design a home-based intervention to be responsive to the needs of jamaican parents and reflective of the jamaican cultural context, we designed our intervention using design-based research (dbr) as the underlying framework. this is described in more depth next. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 85 design-based research and importance of methodologies that consider local context design-based research (dbr) methods provide a valuable opportunity for researchers to collaborate with practitioners and end-users (e.g., parents) to create meaningful changes during the process of intervention design, development, implementation, and evaluation (anderson & shattuck, 2012; cobb, disessa, lehrer, & schauble, 2003; design-based research collective, 2003). dbr presupposes synergistic relationships among research, design, and development in real-world contexts, such as schools or children’s homes. the process creates a mutually beneficial relationship that allows researchers to solicit input and feedback from those responsible for implementing the intervention by engaging users in defining the problem, identifying solutions, observing the intervention, addressing any problems and/or needs, and in identifying why and how adjustments should be made to the proposed intervention (wang & hannafin, 2005). because end-users of the intervention participate in the development process, they have opportunities to provide feedback and suggestions for improving the intervention and recommendations for contextual changes that may increase ease of implementation. incorporating end-user feedback was especially important for this project because the home-based intervention was designed for a specific context. designing an intervention for use within a specific context requires consideration of the cultural relevance of the materials (wang & hannafin, 2005). cultural adaptation is a process that involves systematically modifying materials to consider the language, culture, and/or context of the target population so as to create materials that are compatible with the end-users’ practices, beliefs, and real-world experiences (cardona et al., 2012). bernal and saenz-santiago (2006), for example, recommended culturally adapting evidence-based materials and practices to impact specific areas of implementation, by using appropriate methods of intervention delivery, linguistic appropriateness of curricular materials, and understanding of the local context within which the materials will be implemented. dbr served as a central framework for guiding the iterative development of the culturally-relevant home-based intervention through four key phases: (a) developing prototype mathematics learning materials, including the development of culturally appropriate storybooks and games/activities that would allow us to solicit input from end users; (b) validating the prototype materials with focus groups comprised of multiple stakeholders to allow them to identify issues with the materials and potential solutions to address the issues; (c) evaluating the cultural relevance and mathematical accuracy of the materials through external review by experts; and (d) examining the feasibility of one set of mathematics learning materials through a smallscale study with a sample of parents. combined, these phases allowed us to determine if the home-based intervention was usable, feasible, and culturally relevant to parents and their children as a way to gain end-user perspective. this iterative development framework can be seen in figure 1, where the cyclical refinement process across the last three phases is represented by the double arrows. after each phase, the mathematics learning materials and educator-led workshops within the home-based intervention were refined to improve their usability, accessibility, and relevance for parents and their children. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 86 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: shivraj, pooja; ketterlin-geller, leanne; basaraba, deni; geller, josh;hatfield, cassandra & näslund-hadley, emma (2018). developing usable, accessible, and culturally relevant learning materials to support parent-child interactions in mathematics. global education review, 5 (3), 82-105. figure 1. iterative development of the mathematics learning materials within the home-based intervention. development of the prototype home-based intervention the home-based intervention described in this paper was designed to support parents’ involvement and interactions with their children in mathematics in jamaica. it included two components: (a) six sets of mathematicslearning materials covering foundational early mathematics concepts, and (b) educator-led workshops to support parents’ understanding of the mathematics concepts. each of the six mathematics learning materials included (1) an overview of the targeted mathematics concept, (2) one or more mathematics games, (3) a storybook that incorporated mathematics questions, and (4) explicit connections between the mathematics concepts and the home environment. an educator-led workshop accompanied each set of mathematics learning materials to teach parents how to use the materials. the main objectives of these workshops were to provide parents with (a) conceptual understanding of the target mathematics content (one mathematical concept or skill for each workshop) and (b) an opportunity to practice using the mathematics learning materials with each other before interacting with their children. the home-based intervention was based on theoretical principles of mathematics learning that support the development of mathematical knowledge in children and adults alike. in addition, we incorporated evidencebased practices to make the mathematics learning materials and educator-led workshops a home based intervention to support parental involvement 87 maximally useful, accessible, and relevant to parents and their children. the design principles underlying the development of the prototype home-based intervention are described next. foundations of mathematics proficiency given that elementary students in jamaica were not on track to meet the national goal set by the ministry of education (ministry of education, 2011), we organized the mathematics learning materials around the “three critical prongs of mathematical proficiency” identified in jamaica’s national comprehensive numeracy programme (ministry of education, 2011, p. 24). those prongs are (a) conceptual understanding, (b) procedural fluency, and (c) problem-solving and strategic reasoning. each set of materials was also aligned with one of six core early numeracy concepts (i.e., making tens, multiples of ten, etc.) that reflected the ministry of education’s priorities, and matched the topics taught during the academic year. conceptual understanding conceptual understanding can be defined as knowledge that facilitates understanding of the interrelationships between concepts or pieces of knowledge within a domain (rittle-johnson & alibali, 1999). rather than focusing on the awareness and understanding of isolated mathematics skills and processes, conceptual understanding refers to flexibility in mathematical thinking that enables the thinker to represent mathematical situations in multiple ways (with the understanding that different representations may be useful for different purposes) and knowing how various representations are similar, different, and related (hallet, nunes, & bryant, 2010; kilpatrick, swafford, & findell, 2001). procedural fluency procedural fluency refers to “knowing how” to do something—often how to follow a sequence of steps or actions to solve a problem (hallet et al., 2010; rittle-johnson & alibali, 1999). procedural fluency has also been defined more broadly as knowing mathematical procedures, knowing when and how to use them, and possessing the skills to perform them flexibly, accurately, and efficiently (kilpatrick et al., 2001). integration of conceptual understanding and procedural fluency supports overall mathematical proficiency. for example, when learning the concept of number, students who thoroughly understand critical concepts (such as place value) and are skilled in procedures (such as operations with single-digit numbers) can extend their understanding to new areas, such as operations with multi-digit place numbers (kilpatrick et al., 2001). designing learning opportunities that integrate concepts and procedures helps students learn important mathematical skills efficiently, reason about the plausibility of their responses, communicate about mathematical concepts, and develop a deeper level of proficiency. problem-solving and strategic reasoning strategic competence—or the ability to identify, formulate, represent, and solve mathematical problems (kilpatrick et al., 2001)—requires not only conceptual understanding of the mathematics behind a given problem, but also accurate knowledge of the sequence of action needed to solve the problem. to be successful problem-solvers, students must be able to understand the problem situation and then 88 global education review 5(3) develop a mathematical representation that can be used to solve it. this process involves multiple skills and strategies, including distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information (de jong et al., 1998; heinze, star, & verschaffel, 2009). these elements of mathematical proficiency were integrated directly into the mathematics learning materials and the educator-led workshops for parents. evidence-based practices (ebps) we incorporated evidence-based practices in mathematics education into both components of the home-based intervention. these practices included explicit and systematic instruction, use of visual representations, game-based learning, and the inclusion of literacy activities. in addition, instructional design principles to improve accessibility were integrated into the development of the intervention. explicit and systematic instruction because the majority of parents were not teachers and likely have not received any training on effective, evidence-based strategies on how to support their children’s learning they would be likely to benefit from specific guidance on how to support their children’s learning at home (silinskas et al., 2010; lopez & donovan, 2009). to address this need, we incorporated principles of explicit instruction into the design of the intervention with the intent of providing a consistent structural framework throughout the material so that the delivery of the mathematics concepts would remain relatively constant even as the content increased in mathematical complexity. to support successful modeling of task completion we incorporated scaffolded examples and opportunities for parents to practice with their children. in an effort to minimize confusion and maximize understanding we included clear, mathematically precise and consistent language to introduce, describe, model, and review the foundational mathematics concepts within the context of the home-based activities. to reinforce for parents and children that mathematics is not only about “getting the right answer,” we included questions to extend children’s thinking and provide them with opportunities to verbalize their mathematical thinking and understanding, a strategy found to be positively related to mathematics success (gersten et al., 2009). in addition, highly scripted training materials were included so educators could lead workshops and support parents’ conceptual understanding of mathematics concepts while delivering workshops with fidelity. visual representations visual representations such as manipulable models, pictures, diagrams, and tables can be an effective tool for supporting mathematically focused activities and discussions between parents and children because they make abstract mathematical concepts more tangible and comprehensible (flores, 2002; gersten et al., 2009). results from a meta-analysis of instructional design features that support students’ learning found that visual representations have a moderate positive effect (mean g = 0.47) for supporting students’ mathematical thinking and understanding (gersten et al., 2009). for example, to support understanding of the numbers that combine to make 10, a “tens frame” (i.e., 0+10, 1+9, 2+8, etc.), can be used as both a model and a diagram to support student learning. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 89 the benefits of using visual representations include: (a) supporting students’ ability to make sense of and reason about mathematical concepts and tasks, (b) helping students to organize and share their thinking and to construct mental models of mathematical ideas, (c) making abstract mathematical concepts more tangible, and (d) strengthening students’ understanding of the connections between procedures and concepts or between various mathematical strategies (mitchell, charalambous, & hill, 2014). visual representations are often incorporated into board games that may be found in the home, such as the number path in chutes and ladders. following this example, the mathematics learning materials developed for the homebased intervention incorporated visual representations such as a number path, tens frame, and hundreds chart whenever possible. game-based mathematics learning engaging games can be used to support formal and informal mathematics learning by increasing the time children spend working with mathematics outside of school. in a qualitative study, park, chae, and boyd (2008) observed that block play supported children’s ability to learn complicated mathematics concepts and engage in complex thinking in a school context. playing number games (linear-number board games, in particular) helped students develop a range of mathematical skills, including familiarity with numbers, numerical estimation skills, and multiple representations of numbers (ramani & siegler, 2008; whyte & bull, 2008). young-loveridge (2004) found significant effects on young children’s numeracy skills after an intervention that included playing mathematics games and reading mathematicsrelated storybooks. for the games, the researcher included games in which the outcome was determined by chance (e.g., by rolling dice). she hypothesized that this chance element may have enhanced children’s interest in the game. since game-based learning has been shown to support parent engagement and involvement (ramani & siegler, 2008; thompson, gillis, fairman, & mason, 2014), we integrated games into the mathematics learning materials including bingo, dice games, numberpath games, and card games. whenever possible, the elements of chance and competition among players were built into the game. game boards and directions were provided, and game pieces included readily available materials (e.g., pebbles, beans, etc.). integrating mathematics and reading empirical studies of the relationship between mathematics and literacy indicate moderate, positive correlations between the two constructs as early as preschool (purpura, hume, sims & lonigan, 2011; purpura & napoli, 2015) and throughout the elementary and secondary grades (adelson, dickinson, & cunningham, 2015). results of a recent study in which a dialogic reading intervention explicitly focused on quantitative and spatial mathematics language, revealed significant positive gains in children’s acquisition of mathematical language and significant improvements in their general mathematics skills (purpura, napoli, wehrspann, & gold, 2017). similar to much of the research focused on parental involvement, the majority of research conducted to-date investigating the relations between literacy and mathematics has been conducted in the united states. consequently, the current study affords an opportunity to explore the role of 90 global education review 5(3) mathematical storybooks promoting mathematics learning in a new context. because many parents are more at ease with reading than mathematics (anders et al., 2012), weaving mathematics concepts into storybooks may provide parents with a familiar structure for engaging with their children in mathematical thinking. mathematics books for young children often focus on critical mathematical concepts such as counting, cardinality, and place value. similarly, integrating mathematics into reading activities provides parents with an opportunity to focus explicitly on mathematics vocabulary that is often more abstract (shanahan & shanahan, 2008) and provides children with opportunities to practice deriving meaning from other sources beside text, such as figures, graphs, and tables. moreover, frequently and purposefully integrating mathematics and reading can help children understand that the two tasks are not necessarily separate and distinct. because of the positive relation between reading and mathematics performance (purpura et al., 2017), we also included a storybook with mathematics learning materials. each storybook included embedded mathematics questions that related to the storyline (e.g., a story about football might ask questions about the number of total goals scored by both teams). two additional approaches were implemented to design accessible and relevant learning materials to promote parental involvement: (a) integrating principles of universal design for learning (udl; center for universal design, 2007), and (b) ensuring the cultural relevance of materials. universal design for learning udl is based on the premise that learning materials can be made more accessible for the target population by carefully weighing their needs when developing the materials (rose, 2000). cast (2011) proposed a series of guidelines for applying udl to the design of learning materials that promote equitable use, a udl principle that we embraced in our work. the cast guidelines promote flexibility and adaptability of the materials to various users’ needs. we incorporated the principles of udl to design mathematics learning materials that would be maximally useable and accessible by parents when working with their children. for example, to support parents with varying levels of literacy, all mathematics learning materials included pictorial as well as verbal directions. we also included activities that could be adapted to the mathematical skill levels of parent and child (e.g., increasing or decreasing complexity). to make the materials simple and intuitive to use, we incorporated everyday objects (e.g., beans, rocks) into the games and provided models for successful completion of the activities (e.g., how to spin a spinner and use the spinner to determine how many spaces to move a token along the number path). to ensure that information was readily comprehensible, we relied on varying presentation modes and formats (e.g., pictorial, verbal, tactile) and included clear, mathematically precise, and consistent language to introduce, describe, model, and review mathematics concepts. table 1 illustrates four udl principles, several of the proposed guidelines, and how we addressed these guidelines in the development of the mathematics learning materials and educator-led parent workshops. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 91 table 1. methods for incorporating udl principles in mathematics learning materials principle guidelines examples of incorporation of udl in materials principle 1: equitable use offer all users the same means (identical or equivalent materials) parent handouts, children’s learning materials, and children’s activities/games were all designed identically. use an appealing design parent handouts, children’s learning materials, and children’s activities/games included engaging illustrations, manipulatives, and low levels of text density. in addition, games were revised to be less like homework and more engaging. principle 2: flexibility in use adapt to user pace parents were able to work at home with their children at whatever pace was needed to enable their children to master the targeted concepts. storybooks had questions at various levels to allow parents to adapt to the child’s math ability. accommodate right-handed and left-handed users manipulatives in activities/games were designed for ambidexterity, such that they could be used by participants who were leftor right-hand dominant. principle 3: simple and intuitive use accommodate a wide range of literacy skills all materials (training materials, activities/games) were designed with attention to word density and to ensure that literacy challenges did not introduce a source of variance irrelevant to the mathematical construct being taught. children’s storybooks were written taking into consideration word count and grade level. arrange information by importance all materials were designed such that the basic understanding of the task/concept would be established prior to building fluency in performing the task. for example, parents established a conceptual understanding of the mathematics before playing the game and answering questions posed in the storybook. provide feedback and prompting after task completion workshops included questions parents could ask during and after the games to check for understanding, as well as guidelines for providing useful and meaningful feedback. eliminate complexity we made the activities as explicit and easy to understand as possible (while still focusing on challenging mathematics content). principle 4: perceptible information use different modes of presentation (pictorial, verbal, tactile) parent workshop materials incorporated visual, verbal, and tactile presentations of content, as well as opportunities for parents to record salient information. maximize legibility of information key words and phrases were bolded to make them easy to read. all text was presented in legible typefaces. differentiate elements in ways that can be described (i.e., make it easy to give instructions or directions) activities/games distinguished between what parents were supposed to say before the activity/game (instructions), questions they could ask during the game, and specific feedback they could provide to their child. 92 global education review 5(3) cultural responsiveness and relevance a culturally relevant curriculum is one “that empowers students intellectually, socially, emotionally, and politically by using cultural referents to impart knowledge, skills, and attitudes” (ladson-billings, 1994, p. 382). using culturally relevant texts and materials that incorporate aspects of students’ life experiences can improve students’ reading comprehension by activating prior knowledge (anderson, 1994; carrell, 1987; hickman, pollard-durodola, & vaughn, 2004). to promote the acceptance and relevance of the mathematics learning materials developed for this project, we incorporated relatable and familiar aspects of jamaican families’ daily lives, such as idiomatic language, extracurricular interests (such as music and sports), and cultural icons and customs (such as major festivals). we provide illustrative examples of some of these revisions we made based on feedback from stakeholders later in the paper. focus groups: revising prototype learning materials to increase usability, accessibility, and relevance following the development of prototype mathematics learning materials, we engaged in a cyclical refinement process comprised of three steps as shown in figure 1. the first phase involved soliciting input from stakeholders on the prototype materials through focus groups. according to krueger (2009), focus groups are a viable methodology for collecting information that informs program development and decision-making. conducting focus groups at different points in the development of a product or program may serve a variety of purposes: (a) to gain an understanding about how the target population understands and values a particular topic; (b) to pilot-test prototypes created based on the information obtained during the focus group; and (c) to evaluate the effectiveness, usability, and/or feasibility of a product after it has been developed (kreuger, 2009). the use of focus groups integrated well into the dbr framework because it provided an opportunity for researchers to collaborate with end-users during the process of design and development of the mathematics learning materials to gather meaningful and iterative feedback that could increase ease of implementation. we conducted six focus groups targeting different stakeholders including (a) staff of the ministry of education, (b) curriculum developers, (c) teachers, (d) parents and caregivers, (e) community leaders, and (f) members of local advocacy groups. the purpose of these focus groups was to help us gain a better understanding of the jamaican education system and culture, and to gather information to support the development of home-based intervention to be culturally relevant and respectful. the primary goal of the focus groups was to hear the stakeholders’ views on the usability, accessibility, and relevance of the prototype learning materials. specifically, given the generally low rates of literacy within the target population, we solicited stakeholders’ input about the accessibility of the materials for parents, the cultural relevancy of the games for jamaican families, the ease with which the materials could be implemented and a home based intervention to support parental involvement 93 disseminated among parents, and other cultural considerations that might influence the usability and utility of the materials for parents with their children at home. all six focus groups were conducted by members of the research team; each lasted 1–2 hours. field notes and audio or video recordings were obtained and subsequently analyzed for themes by one member of the research team and verified by other members who participated in the focus groups. we received specific feedback about the components of the home-based intervention, and additional themes emerged during the focus groups. when demonstrating the game, the feedback received was constructive. concerns were raised about the significant amount of text and the use of extensive scripting, specifically using “teacher-speak” as opposed to language parents would use with their children. for example, stakeholders suggested replacing “what is another strategy?” with “show me another way.” participants in one focus group observed that the game looked like homework because it required paper to draw. although they saw the benefit of the activity, they thought that parents in the target group (a) might not be able to follow along, given the substantial amount of text, and (b) might feel uncomfortable and anxious implementing the activity with their children owing to the reading and writing skills required. participants suggested using common items found in and around homes (e.g., beans, rocks) to decrease the game’s similarity to schoolwork and to make it more accessible. stakeholders observed that the prototype games lacked the cultural relevance needed for parents to be fully engaged and enthusiastic about implementing them with their children. for example, the prototype mathematical game did not reflect typical game play since it required using paper and pencil. although the prototypical game was designed using the principles of udl, we further considered how to increase the usability of the materials based on the feedback, and reconceptualized the instructions to make them more simple and intuitive to use. the prototype mathematics game was revised, as can be seen in figure 2. for greater accessibility of materials and relatability of language, we revised the directions for conciseness and added visual representations to help guide all parents, regardless of literacy level. we also provided parents with dice to play the game. to make the game appear less like homework and to increase engagement and enjoyment, we revised the game to make it more competitive, “game-like”, and reflective of typical game play. these recommendations were applied to all of the mathematical games created for the project. 94 global education review 5(3) before after prototype mathematics game before focus groups revised mathematics game after focus groups figure 2. mathematics game before (left) and after (right) receiving feedback from stakeholders through focus groups. a home based intervention to support parental involvement 95 we solicited feedback on prototype storybook pages (figure 3). the feedback was generally positive. participants noted that the amount of text seemed appropriate for parents and children in the target population. however, they observed that the materials did not appear culturally relevant because they lacked a relevant storyline (or context) and relatable real-world situations. to remedy these problems, they suggested that the storybooks have characters and authentic storylines. in addition, they noted the importance of using culturally relevant words and avoiding language that was not common in jamaica, such as “freeway” and “candy.” to respond to this feedback, an experienced author of short stories composed a storyline to be used across the intervention reflecting activities commonly experienced by children in jamaica (e.g., going to the marketplace, playing football). applying principles of udl to ensure the storybooks were designed using evidence-based practices, each storybook was about 20 pages long with 10 illustrations, and the text was leveled to be appropriate for children in grades 1 and 2. though the text was leveled using us guidelines, the editors were experienced in developing books situated in international contexts. sixteen mathematics questions, eight per grade level, were embedded into the storyline. illustrations were created by an educational publishing group with previous experience developing storybooks for projects in international contexts. to maintain consistency, two main characters were used for all of the storybooks. before after prototype storybook before focus groups revised storybook after focus groups figure 3. storybook before (left) and (after) receiving feedback from stakeholders through focus groups. 96 global education review 5(3) several other themes emerged from the focus groups, specifically concerning the usability, accessibility, and relevance of the learning materials for the target population. notably, stakeholders suggested that the materials be scripted for each workshop to support future implementation of the homebased intervention and for potential scalability. highly scripted training materials were proposed so that jamaican educators could lead workshops and support parents’ conceptual understanding of mathematics concepts while delivering workshops with fidelity. to address these concerns, the workshops were scripted in a way such that educators had time to model how parents could ask questions of their child, how to play the game and read the storybook, and how to dig deeper into the concepts. stakeholders shared concerns about the widespread fear of mathematics, noting a “cultural fear of mathematics.” efforts were made to reduce mathematics anxiety—for example, by including a jingle about mathematics and encouraging active parent engagement during the workshop. in addition, stakeholders alluded to the perception of differential ability in mathematics based on gender, suggesting that the materials be explicitly designed to dispel this misconception. to incorporate these suggestions, we focused on dispelling gender stereotypes and incorporating awareness of cultural conceptions of mathematics into the development of materials and during workshops. consequently, the storylines of the books presented successful experiences with mathematics by girls and boys alike. overall, because prior research (education taskforce, 2004; rattray & lawson, 2011) has indicated that jamaican parents do not perceive themselves as having the knowledge and skills required to support their children, feedback from the focus groups helped us to refine the prototypical materials for the home-based intervention that parents were familiar with and about which they had less anxiety – such as bingo and hopscotch. external review: evaluating the home-based intervention for mathematical accuracy and cultural relevancy as shown in figure 1, the next step in the refinement of our materials was to conduct a review of the home-based intervention from experts. researchers and practitioners have undertaken external review processes in specific content areas to examine the appropriateness of curricular materials for their use and appropriateness (bryant et al., 2008; hughes & dexter, n.d.; simmons & kame’enui, 2003). an external review process integrated seamlessly with the dbr framework because it provided an opportunity for the researchers to seek input from mathematics experts, practitioners, and key stakeholders such as the ministry of education, to ensure mathematical accuracy and cultural relevancy during the design and development process. evaluating mathematical accuracy the home-based intervention as a whole was reviewed by an early childhood mathematics expert based in the u.s. but with extensive experience in international mathematics education. the expert reviewed the materials for (a) the extent to which the activity/game accurately targeted or represented the target mathematics content, (b) mathematical accuracy and clarity, (c) appropriateness of mathematical vocabulary, (c) appropriateness and accuracy of visual representations, (d) alignment of the activities/games to national content standards, (e) overall flow and pacing of the workshop, and (f) age/grade-level appropriateness of the a home based intervention to support parental involvement 97 activities/games. the materials were also reviewed by representatives of the jamaican ministry of education, who provided additional feedback on usability, accessibility, and relevance. while offering clarifications and minor revisions, the ministry representatives generally found the materials to be appropriate, fun, and engaging for parents. among the revisions made to the home-based intervention at this phase were making sections of the workshop shorter, scripting sections more thoroughly to ensure fidelity to the mathematics pedagogy, and including more examples and modeling to provide additional clarity for parents. evaluating cultural relevance because the storybooks were rooted in the jamaican culture and needed to be relevant to jamaican families, we also conducted a systematic review of the storybooks for their cultural relevance. an expert in jamaican cultural studies from a university in jamaica reviewed the storybooks for (a) the proper use of jamaican english (appropriateness of language and grammar practices customary in jamaica), (b) the cultural relevance of the storylines (appropriateness of games, events, names), (c) the appropriateness of the images (whether the images seemed identifiable for local parents and children), and (d) the pertinence of the storylines to jamaican life and culture. the expert noted that the books made use of proper jamaican english, included culturally relevant storylines, incorporated appropriate images, and were pertinent. when necessary, the reviewer provided specific feedback and suggestions on aspects of language and culture. for example, a suggestion was made to use maths instead of math, depending on context. as another example, the word “candies,” which is not used by locals, was changed to “sweeties.” one storybook referenced an outdated theme from jamaican culture, which was then updated to reflect more relevant and appropriate contextual information. other language-based recommendations were incorporated into the final versions of the storybooks. overall, the external review process that encompassed mathematical accuracy and cultural relevance provided an opportunity for us to identify and adjust issues based on reviewer feedback during the development process to ensure ease and relevance of implementation. feasibility study: evaluating the feasibility of the home-based intervention prior to implementation after revisions were made to the mathematics learning materials and educator-led parent workshops based on the focus groups and the external review, we conducted a small-scale feasibility study using materials from one workshop to answer the question of “can it work?” (orsmond & cohn, 2015). the feasibility study with jamaican parents tested whether an educator could be trained to implement the educator-led workshop, whether the pacing of the workshop was appropriate, and whether the end-users (the parents) could grasp the concepts as presented in the workshop. in addition, the feasibility study invited the participation and feedback of stakeholders in a naturalistic setting, and considered the cultural relevance of parents, aligning with our dbr framework (wang & hannafin, 2005). a jamaican educator was selected by the ministry to support the feasibility study. the educator received one day of training on how to implement the mathematics learning materials with parents in a workshop format. the 98 global education review 5(3) following day, the educator conducted the workshop at a convenient location for participating parents or caregivers. seven parents or caregivers of children in grades 1 and 2 were selected by the ministry of education to participate in this feasibility study. all seven resided in a rural community and received federal assistance. all were women. the workshop lasted for approximately 3 hours. parents were asked to try the mathematics learning materials with their children before a scheduled follow-up session. at the follow-up session, parents described their experiences as they played the games and read the storybook with their children. field notes and audio or video recordings were obtained and subsequently analyzed for themes, similar to the focus groups. several themes emerged from the feasibility study. the first was that the project design with educator-led parent workshops was feasible for both the educator and the parents. the educator was able to use the script created to deliver the workshop materials to parents as intended. she was able to play the games after having them modeled and playing with us. she was also able to keep the parents interested and engaged. the scripted workshop materials ensured delivery with a reasonably high degree of fidelity after the educator had been trained by our research team. fidelity was informally measured as the alignment between the script and the educator’s actions with parents. the educator maintained the integrity of the script and only made minor changes to provide additional explanations when needed. a second theme from the feasibility study was that both the educator and parents were able to use the mathematics learning materials. the educator was able to use the manipulatives effectively, and parents were able to engage with the materials. of the three parents who came to the follow-up session, all were able to play the game successfully with their children. one of the returning parents read the storybook with her children without any challenges. the other two parents did not read the storybook owing to time constraints. it was unknown as to why the other four parents did not return for the follow-up session. another tentative finding was that the mathematics learning materials offered the appropriate level of challenge, fun, and engagement for parents and children. during the workshop, parents appeared to have fun engaging with the materials and working with the educator. during the follow-up session, parents reported having enjoyed learning the material during the workshop and liked working together with other parents. parents also reported that the game was fun to play with their children. all agreed that the games and questions in the storybook were appropriately challenging for their children. finally, we observed that the content of the workshops needed to be streamlined to reduce the time requirement. during the training session with the educator, the script was modified to improve clarity and engage parents more actively. even so, to deliver the workshop as scripted, the educator spent approximately 3 hours with the parents. the amount of content was reduced for future workshops so as to keep parents more engaged over a shorter duration of time (about 2 hours). overall, the feasibility study allowed us to identify issues in the feasibility of implementation and adjust the educator-led workshop and mathematics learning materials accordingly. discussion this paper provided an example of a homebased intervention to support parentinvolvement in mathematics with a focus on parents of primary-school children, an area where research has been limited (anders et al., a home based intervention to support parental involvement 99 2012; blevins-knabe & musun-miller, 1996; deflorio & beliakoff, 2015; fan & chen, 2001; jordan et al., 2006; lefevre et al., 2009). the purpose of this paper was to describe the iterative development using dbr of a homebased intervention to support parents’ involvement with their children in mathematics in jamaica. the home-based intervention included mathematics learning materials covering foundational early mathematics concepts and educator-led workshops to support parents’ understanding of the concepts and use of the materials. we described the iterative phases of dbr to incorporate end-users’ feedback throughout the development process. research activities described include focus groups, an external review, and a feasibility study. care was taken to design mathematics learning materials that address multiple prongs of numeracy and incorporate accessibility features, such as udl and visual representations, and are culturally relevant. in addition, the materials incorporated evidencebased practices, such as explicit and systematic instruction, use of visual representations, gamebased learning, and storybooks, to maximize parent-child interactions (purpura et al., 2017; ramani & siegler, 2008). accessibility was attended to by incorporating the principles of universal design and culturally relevant materials and activities. the feasibility study showed that parents found the materials usable, accessible, and culturally relevant. a major factor that shapes the level of parent-child interactions is how the learning materials are introduced to parents. the educator-led workshops with parents were highly scripted for purposes of scalability and to permit the materials to be implemented as designed. it is critical to prepare parents to help their child achieve conceptual understanding of the topic before transitioning to the game-based learning and the storybook. keys to effective preparation are appropriateness in pacing, accuracy in content, integration of cultural relevance and engagement, and reduction of anxiety throughout the process. implications for future implementation of the home-based intervention the iterative development of the mathematics learning materials for parents and their children and the educator-led workshops was necessary for the intervention to be culturally and age/grade-level relevant, feasible for families, and usable by families with differing educational backgrounds and reading levels. through the iterative process, it became increasingly clear that cultural relevance was important for parents’ engagement in the materials, particularly because many of them do not see themselves as mathematicians or fluent in mathematics, and because the researchers developing the materials did not have a background in the jamaican culture. furthermore, the scripting of the educator-led workshops provided the necessary specifications for the workshops to be scaled in a systematic way even though the educators may have various backgrounds. the dbr framework that guided each phase in the development cycle shown in figure 1 provided distinct pieces of feedback from stakeholders and reviewers to ensure that the home-based intervention was maximally usable, accessible, and culturally relevant. the focus groups helped set the stage for designing materials that were culturally relevant by providing insights into the jamaican culture such as mathematics anxiety, gender stereotypes, and so on. the focus groups were also helpful in providing some initial feedback into the usability and accessibility of the prototypical materials from the stakeholders’ perspectives. the focus groups served as an 100 global education review 5(3) important phase in our project and underscored the importance of involving those who would be using the materials early in the development process (anderson & shattuck, 2012). next, after the learning materials were developed based on the feedback we received from the focus groups, we scripted an educatorled workshop. we conducted an external review to examine the materials for mathematical accuracy and cultural relevancy. the purpose of this review was to determine if we reached our goal of designing maximally usable, accessible, and culturally relevant materials based on the feedback we received during the focus groups. experts reviewed the mathematical accuracy of the materials and general relevance of the content. however, a separate review was conducted to examine the cultural appropriateness of the storybooks to the jamaican culture. because the focus groups highlighted a sense of mathematics anxiety and some issues with gender stereotypes, we wanted to make sure that the storybooks were relatable and brought in familiar parts of the jamaican culture, while dispelling a sense of gender roles related to mathematics. the feedback we received from the external reviewers helped to make the final materials more meaningful and relevant. finally, the feasibility study with jamaican parents tested whether an educator could be trained to implement the workshop, whether the pacing was appropriate, and whether parents could grasp the concepts as presented in the workshop. with some fine-tuning of the materials, we concluded that we met our goals: the educator could successfully lead the workshops, the pacing was appropriate, and parents could grasp the content. we also found that parents liked working with the materials, which gave us some confidence about the appropriateness, relevance, and level of engagement created by the materials. we hypothesize that the use of the research-based, rigorously designed, and culturally relevant mathematics learning materials described in this paper will increase the quality and quantity of parents’ interactions with their children, thus serving to raise children’s performance in mathematics. it should be noted, however, that the outcomes of parents’ involvement and engagement have not been analyzed in this paper. we expect that the effectiveness of home-based interventions described here could impact parent involvement and engagement. the iterative design used to gather and assimilate feedback about the accuracy and cultural relevance of the homebased intervention may help support the future development and design of learning materials across cultures and contexts in which resources are limited and parents may need support to design and implement mathematics learning opportunities at home. notes 1. specific to this paper, parental involvement refers to ways in which mathematics learning can be facilitated at home — for example, by providing parents with information, materials, strategies, and ideas about how to support their children’s learning of content taught in school (sheldon & epstein, 2005). 2. collaborating with the community and learning at home may both be examples of parental involvement (epstein, 1994), the former involves parents working indirectly to support their children by participating with the community to strengthen school programs and family practices, while the latter involves parents working with their children directly. a home based intervention to support 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(2004). effects on early numeracy of a program using number books and games. early childhood research quarterly, 19, 82-98. about the author(s) dr. pooja shivraj is a psychometrician and researcher at the american board of obstetrics and gynecology. her work emphasizes the use of measurement and statistics to enhance the reliability and validity of exam scores in credentialing. she also designs and leads research projects related to assessments and their intended use. dr. leanne ketterlin geller is the texas instruments endowed chair in education and professor in the simmons school of education and human development at southern methodist university. her research focuses on supporting student achievement in mathematics through developing technically rigorous formative assessment procedures and effective classroom practices. her work emphasizes valid decision-making systems for students with diverse needs. dr. deni basaraba is the data analyst for the bethel school district in eugene, or whose primary responsibilities include analysis of http://www.jnbs.com/schools-seek-strategies-for-better-'parental-student-support http://www.jnbs.com/schools-seek-strategies-for-better-'parental-student-support a home based intervention to support parental involvement 105 student performance data, survey and observation development, securing external funding, and dissemination. she also holds research affiliate positions with the research in mathematics education unit at southern methodist university and the university of oregon through which she collaboratively explores issues related to bilingual education programs and second language acquisition, the role of language in mathematics, and the technical adequacy of published and teacherdeveloped assessments. josh geller holds a master’s degree in special education, and has served as a research specialist for stateand federally-funded research projects since 2001. his work focuses on designing mathematics assessments to support all students, primarily through writing accessible items. most of his work centers on early grades mathematics. he supports multiple phases of project implementation and coordination, paying particular attention to incorporating the needs of different stakeholders. cassandra hatfield is a research project manager at southern methodist university’s research in mathematics education. she has previous experiences as a middle school math teacher and elementary mathematics coach and specialist. cassandra’s research interests include the impact that systematic teacher training and coaching has on student achievement. dr. emma näslund-hadley is a lead education specialist at the inter-american development bank (idb) where she coordinates the bank’s efforts to improve stem education in latin america and the caribbean. her research looks at what happens inside mathematics and science classrooms, exploring what works to improve teacher skills and student learning. she has a master's degree in international economics and finance from the university of linkoping and a master's degree in public affairs from princeton university. researchers experience multiple embodiments 58 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lamb, pamela, vanner, catherine, raissadat, haleh, nyariro, milka, & sadati, s.m. hani (2020). researchers experience multiple embodiments in a cross-cultural, intergenerational event to support girls challenging gender-based violence. global education review, 7 (2). 58-74. researchers experience multiple embodiments in a crosscultural, intergenerational event to support girls challenging gender-based violence pamela lamb mcgill university, canada catherine vanner university of windsor, canada haleh raissadat mcgill university, canada milka nyariro mcgill university, canada s.m. hani sadati mcgill university, canada abstract many challenges exist to conducting participatory research and consultation with young people, especially with those considered vulnerable or at risk. beyond respecting the safety and wellbeing of young research participants, researchers must be aware of barriers to youth engagement and be attuned to the many forms of youth resistance. as young people are seeking more control over their lives, traditional knowledge hierarchies between adults and youth are shifting. in july 2018, an event entitled circles within circles brought together indigenous and non-indigenous girls and young women from south africa, canada, russia, sweden, and kenya to learn from each other’s participatory art-making and create a network for challenging gender-based violence (gbv). this article provides insight into the ofteninvisible experience of the “supporting cast” in events like circles within circles. the co-authors are doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who contributed to organization and acted as facilitators, notetakers, and participants. the co-authors conduct participatory analyses of journal entries they wrote throughout the event, and jointly reflect on the activities and their feelings about their roles. reflecting, for example, on gut feelings about young participants’ use of voice and silence during adult-led activities, the co-authors discuss their reading of girls’ demonstrations of resistance. this embodied knowledge, further cultivated by attuning to shared experience, is explored in this collaborative auto-ethnography. examining the complexities of this cross-cultural and intergenerational event, the co-authors contend that when supporting girls and young people subverting dominant narratives of gbv, researchers’ embodied reflexivity is crucial for positively contributing to girl-led change. keywords collaborative auto-ethnography; consulting young people; embodied reflexivity; empowerment; friction; gender-based violence; resistance, youth voice introduction between july 8–11, 2018, an event titled “circles within circles: transnational perspectives on youth-led approaches to addressing gender-based violence” brought together indigenous and non-indigenous girls and young people from canada, kenya, south africa, russia, and sweden to learn from each other’s participatory art-based research and create a network for challenging gender-based violence (gbv). adult researchers, ngo representatives, and policy makers also attended researchers experience multiple embodiments 59 to listen and leverage messages of younger participants (mitchell, 2017). presentations on prior research were complemented by arts-based workshops, stakeholder sessions, and an international exhibition of art produced from research with girls and young people. the intent of these activities was to share knowledge gained through the previous research process and did not constitute a new research activity. circles within circles (cwc) was an event that took place as part of an umbrella study, networks for change and wellbeing: girl-led “from the ground up” policy-making to address sexual violence in canada and south africa, led by drs. claudia mitchell and relebohile moletsane. cwc was a think tank occasion and not a research event; the youth participants were at the center of the dialogue and were recruited through mitchell and moletsane’s network based on their ongoing work addressing gbv in communities in canada and south africa. the project examines “which approaches, mechanisms, and structures would make it possible for young people, as knowers and actors, especially those who are the most marginalized, to influence social policy and social change related to sexual violence” (mitchell & moletsane, 2018, p. 14). the cwc event, like the project more broadly, focused on learning from girls and young women in communities that are subject to exceptionally high rates of gbv (networks for change, 2017). in canada, this included self-identified young indigenous1 girls and young women, including those who identify as transgender, two-spirit, or gender non-conforming. in south africa, this included “girls and young women of a range of sexualities who belong to two of the official government designated groups, black and coloured (mixed race), and who live in rural areas” (networks for change, 2017). this paper’s co-authors are doctoral and postdoctoral researchers who contributed to organizing the cwc event in different ways and acted as facilitators, notetakers and participants during the event. all are members of the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university and share a doctoral/postdoctoral supervisor. this paper will examine the complexities of cross-cultural and intergenerational events— particularly on sensitive subjects such as gbv— and their value in empowering girls, young people, and other stakeholders to subvert dominant narratives of gbv. it provides insight into the often-invisible experience of the “supporting cast” of graduate students and administrators who simultaneously organize, observe, document, and participate in events like circles within circles. we hope that analyzing these perspectives will democratize speaking back to gbv and build evidence about how to work collaboratively to amplify marginalized voices. by conducting participatory analysis of the journal entries we wrote throughout the event and jointly reflecting on the activities and our feelings and roles, we create a collaborative auto-ethnography (chang et al., 2013) that explores commonalities and differences across shared experience, reflecting on the role of the event in the professional development of the coauthors as emerging scholars and identifying the major lessons learned through the collaborative analysis of our experiences. while girls’ art and civic engagement holds enormous potential to subvert dominant narratives of gbv, adult reflexivity—including affective and embodied forms—is crucial for positively contributing to girl-led change. positionality the first question we asked ourselves when writing this paper together was, “why is it important to look at the experiences of the ‘supporting cast’—facilitators, organizers, and participants—in youth-led events such as circles 60 global education review 7 (2) within circles?” members of this supporting cast are often the first audience in such work, yet our observations frequently go untold. hammersley and atkinson (2007) see researchers as evaluation specialists and therefore suggest that, through reflexivity, they may better visualize the impact that their own behaviors, attitudes, and values can have on others. reflexivity is a process that involves a critical self-reflection on one’s motivations, biases, values, and influences on research process and relationships. it occurs within what boler and zembylas (2003) refer to as a “pedagogy of discomfort” that is intentionally counterhegemonic by asking how the researcher’s actions may reinforce hegemonic structures at cognitive and emotional levels. similarly, mitchell, de lange, and moletsane (2017) build on bell and aggleton’s (2016) work on interpretive and ethnographic approaches to monitoring and evaluating participatory research by focusing on researcher reflexivity as a way to better guide the outcome of their work. however, mitchell, de lange, and moletsane state that, due to a variety of constraints related to disseminating the research, the voice of researchers and their reflections on lessons learned from participatory visual research is often missing from the body of literature. while this event was not a form of data collection, we posit that it remains important to consider the impact of our positionality on the event and its participants. we felt that in order to democratize “speaking back” to gbv, it was essential that we analyze our positions as stakeholders in this youth-led event by exploring our positionality—by recounting our preconceptions, feelings of insecurity, and expectations—in the hope of building evidence on how to work more collaboratively with youth and amplify their often marginalized voices. here we share our personal and intimate stories, part of our journeys on how we came to be part of this event, and the themes that emerged from reflexive practice during and after the event. we refer to ourselves as the “supporting cast” because of our nebulous roles in relation to the cwc event, in which we were involved in (but not leading) organizational and decisionmaking processes. once the event began, we participated but the focus was appropriately on the younger participants. throughout the lead up and during the event, we helped out with the operation and administration of the event in various ways, and greatly benefitted from the ability to participate and witness the work of the younger participants. here we consider several questions: how did our involvement influence the event at large, how did it influence the other participants (particularly the girls and young women from south africa and first nations and métis communities in canada), and how were we influenced by our participation in the event? before examining these questions, we first provide a brief introduction of each of the coauthors, each with a different social location and relation to this work, but all of whom identify as outsiders (minkler, 2004) in relation to the girl and young women participants’ communities. pamela has long been interested in how girls and young women from marginalized communities are challenging normative perceptions and social inequality through art and narrative. as a canadian of european ancestry and former clinical nurse, her interests are in the area of human rights-based approaches to institutional accountability in decolonizing health care education. acknowledging that anti-indigenous discrimination exists in health systems, her doctoral research investigates how participatory digital storytelling can inform decolonizing approaches to cultural safety in allied health professional development. for cwc, she contributed to organizing the event, and acted as a notetaker and participant during group researchers experience multiple embodiments 61 sessions at the event. she has an ma in media studies, and is currently a course lecturer and ph.d. candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. catherine is a canadian of settler european ancestry, committed to using critical feminist research to support transformative education that challenges the perpetuation of misogynistic, racist, homophobic, and colonial violence. she uses participatory qualitative research to examine the relationship between education and gender-based violence, has conducted research in north america and subsaharan africa, and has worked as an education advisor and consultant for government and nongovernment organizations. during cwc, she acted as a facilitator of a story-based activity, notetaker during group presentations of their community-based research initiatives, and a participant during the remaining sessions. she is currently a postdoctoral research fellow in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. haleh is a first-generation canadian, originally from iran. her professional interests as a learning specialist focus on providing effective strategies to improve academic and learning outcomes for young adults. as a researcher, her focus is on the practicality of youth-led, grassroots policy-making in order to bring new learning to marginalized individuals, communities, and societies. these perspectives are informed by her interest and research background in the impact of educational and health policies on the sexual health and wellbeing of girls and young women. during cwc, she acted as a notetaker and facilitator in some events and a participant in other events. she has a b.eng. (software engineering), an ma (educational technology) and is currently a ph.d. candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. milka is originally from kenya and currently lives in canada as an international student. her background is in anthropology, and she has long been interested in exploring how patriarchal systems work to uphold and perpetuate gender inequalities in society, especially for girls and women living in poor resource settings. adapting a community-based participatory visual approach and a critical feminist framework, she has participated in extensive research in sub-saharan africa that aims to address gender-based violence in social systems. during cwc, she served as a facilitator for a photovoice hands activity and the story lab. she is currently a ph.d. candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. hani was born and raised in iran, and currently lives in canada as an international student. being concerned about sociocultural relations and inequalities in societies, he entered a social science research field to have a better understanding of the social life and receive his bachelor’s degree. after graduation, the patriarchal, gendered, and traditional culture of his country led him to choose one of the most critical subfields of social science, women studies, to continue his education in the master of arts program. with this academic background and with six years of work experience as a lecturer in a university in his country, he travelled to canada in his early thirties to start a ph.d. program in educational studies. his focus in his ph.d. thesis project is on addressing sexual and gender-based violence by using innovative learning environments, like serious games. he believes in bridging the traditional gap between theory, method, and action by using participatory research in social and educational sciences. during cwc, he contributed to documenting the sessions, co-facilitating the participatory visual method (cellphilming2) workshop, and providing tech-related services. 62 global education review 7 (2) conceptual framework the history of western researchers using indigenous knowledges for western gain has not been fully reconciled (assembly of first nations, 2009), but is well documented to frequently be exploitative with devastating results for indigenous communities being “researched” (smith, 2012). this includes what tuck (2009) refers to as “damage-centered research” that focuses on narratives of harm and injury, reinforcing pathologizing approaches “in which the oppression singularly defines a community” (p. 413). international activist efforts to protect indigenous knowledges have resulted in a crucial movement from research on to research with, for, and by indigenous peoples. in 1998, the national steering committee of the first nations and inuit regional longitudinal health survey proposed a set of guidelines for research involving indigenous peoples, which states that indigenous peoples should retain ownership, control, access, and possession (ocap) of the research information (first nations centre, 2007). the ocap principles are mandated to protect indigenous knowledges and to ensure that the research benefits indigenous peoples. the question of how and why a nonindigenous researcher engages in research related to indigenous peoples is an essential ethical inquiry that must be considered at every phase of the research (see aveling, 2013), including knowledge sharing events such as cwc. we work within educational systems that have historically neglected indigenous peoples and continue to sustain structural inequities (currie et al., 2012; lavoie & forget, 2011; vukic et al., 2012). it is important in critical and indigenous methodologies for the researcher to locate herself in relation to the research (e.g., mosselson, 2010; smith et al., 2019), and to critically examine the value of her presence in the research process. inspired by feminist approaches to self-study that draw upon critical autoethnography (holman jones, 2016) and feminist reflexive epistemologies of positioning (hesse-biber, 2007), we situate ourselves in this work as non-indigenous researchers of white settler origins and non-white nonresident /international student status. the following expands upon the main concepts of embodied reflexivity and friction that we used to frame our reflections on this work. embodied reflexivity beyond the five most recognized of the senses (sight, hearing, taste, smell, and touch), there are many other ways we perceive information. emotions, sometimes regarded as a “sixth sense,” are apprehended as instinctive or intuitive feelings (rouby et al., 2016). reflection can also be intuitive. however, reflexivity requires intention. through the body, numerous senses gather information about the environment continuously, and yet there is no scientific consensus on what constitutes a sense. more interesting discord yet is on the blurred boundaries between stimulus and response. and since we are constantly receiving stimuli from our environment, embodied reflexivity suggests that the “space in-between” stimulus and response may be cultivated through a reflexive attunement with the body. embodied reflexivity conjures a relationship to theory and method, though here it will be theorized as a way of knowing. it is defined as “a process based predominantly on feeling the body” (pagis, 2009, p. 266) and does not derive from any one specific sensory organ but develops diffusely in the body and mind. in her study of embodied self-reflexivity, michal pagis (2009) observed practitioners of meditation and yoga, practices grounded in self-awareness, in order to better understand the interaction between what she calls “discursive and embodied modes of reflexivity.” pagis notes that most studies of the researchers experience multiple embodiments 63 self have relied on discursive ways of knowing, and in our work we too relied on journaling and conversation to make sense of our gut feelings that at first we struggled to define and labelled vaguely as “feeling uncomfortable.” in practices of embodied self-reflexivity, the intent is to increase awareness of bodily sensations. social psychologist mark snyder (1974) introduced the concept of self-monitoring, which he described as, “self-observation and self-control guided by situational cues to social appropriateness” (p. 526). pagis (2009) situates self-monitoring as a process within embodied reflexivity, writing, “the findings illustrate how bodily sensations are used as indexes to psychological states, emotions, and past experiences, while constant awareness of embodied responses is used as a tool for self-monitoring” (p. 265). this relationship between self-awareness and selfmonitoring was helpful to keep in mind as we discussed our experiences of multiple embodiments throughout cwc, as we were at times distressingly self-aware of our tentative positions at cwc as the “supporting cast” of researchers, facilitators, notetakers, and participants. friction as applied to youth, the most common if disparate usages of the term “empowerment” express the following characteristics: personal growth, relationships, education (e.g. luttrell et al., 2009), politics (e.g. bacqué & biewener, 2013; boluijt & de graaf, 2010), transformation, and emancipation (e.g. richez et al., 2012). in this article, we unpack the political aspect of empowerment in relation to friction. given that young people are increasingly voicing their desire for more control over their lives, political will and transformative action can be inferred, if not observed, “on the ground” in youth movements. and while education includes common actions of learning and skill-building, it also relates to awareness-raising, or what freirian scholars of critical pedagogy (see freire, 1993 & 2005) refer to as “consciousness-raising” (breton, 2008; mohajer & earnest, 2009; wang, 2006; wong, 2008). indeed, the empowerment of youth, in all its manifestations, is shifting traditional knowledge hierarchies in a most stirring way by “speaking truth to power” (martínez et al., 2017). exploring this “from the ground up” process lends youth access to power (gaventa, 2006; longwe, 1991; mohajer & earnest, 2010; travis & bowman, 2012), provoking the need for careful reflexivity among adult facilitators on the extent to which their engagement with young people may be advancing and/or impeding that empowerment. there is a leitmotif across all our journal entries that can be uncomfortably summarized as a clash of contradictions between event preconceptions and perceived turn of events. to make sense of this reflexive discomfort, we liken it to anna lowenhaupt tsing’s notion of friction. tsing (2005) describes friction as "the awkward, unequal, unstable, and creative qualities of interconnection across difference” (p. 4). discernibly, researchers in the field of youth studies are aware of the frictions involved in conducting empirical research related to marginalized young people. beyond respecting the safety and well-being of young research participants, researchers must be aware of the barriers to youth engagement, as well as be attuned to the many forms of youth resistance. one such form of resistance appears in silence, which clair (2013) has theorized in fluidity as “expressive,” “a sacred way of being,” “oppressive,” and “a way of resistance” (see also solnit, 2017). others have also commented on the “messiness” of research between diverse (socially, culturally, politically, economically) researchers and participants. mosselson (2010), for example, writes about the interaction between researcher and participant as an 64 global education review 7 (2) encounter that may shift identities, though producing fortuitous findings when the researcher is self-reflexive. recognizing the role of subjectivity in the research process is also an opportunity to cultivate an ethical perspective. positionality is an apposite framework for negotiating subjectivity, as it allows for the inclusion of such information as personal details and emotional responses. as participants who engaged with multiple sides of the cwc event (working on the organization/facilitation as well as taking part in the workshops), we are guided by these understandings of friction, believing that attending to the “messiness” of unsettling perceptions of self and others may improve the reflexive process and quality of the initiative. methodology we used a methodology of collaborative autoethnography to conduct participatory analyses of the journal entries we wrote throughout cwc. collaborative autoethnography adapts a team research model where a group of individuals (two or more people) conduct research by turning interrogative tools toward themselves using selfstudy (chang et al., 2013). john loughran (2007), a scholar of self-study in teacher education, argues that, “professional learning is characterised by the role the individual takes in initiating and directing their own growth and development as opposed to being ‘trained’ to perform particular tasks” (p. xiii). we sought to strengthen what we learned during our involvement in the cwc event through a process of individual and collaborative reflection. irb approval was not required, as our own self-study forms the primary data source. our self-study began during the cwc event, when all five co-authors met during the event to discuss the objective of the journal entries and the focus of our study. the initial objective of our collaborative journaling was to document and analyze the effectiveness of the arts-based participatory intergenerational learning in addressing gbv in communities. we agreed to adapt a personal journaling method to observe, record, and analyze the events at cwc, and reflect on any feelings that arose about our roles as researchers, facilitators and participants. we adapted the concurrent model of journaling (chang et al., 2013) where we journaled using a stream of consciousness approach (writing continuously and minimizing edits) each day during the cwc event. after the event, we took one week for each author to review their journals, extend entries with new reflections and recollections as we looked back, and clean up the journal entries to tell a more cohesive narrative. our next step was to identify and review themes within our individual journals. we met as a group to reflect upon the themes we identified, reading aloud selected excerpts from our journals to illustrate the themes. as we discussed each individual’s selected excerpts and themes, we explored the similarities and differences of our experiences. by talking through our initial analysis we gained a sense of reassurance and relief that no matter how varying our perspectives, we shared a common “friction” in experiencing multiple embodiments with respect to our roles. attuning to shared experiences allowed us to identify “situational cues” (snyder, 1974) generated by young participants during the adult-facilitated workshops. through our discussion of the initial themes, we established a set of group themes that would guide our subsequent analysis, and then each returned to our own journal entries to code them with those themes and select excerpts that related to those themes, which we again analyzed collaboratively and subsequently refined in the writing of this text. researchers experience multiple embodiments 65 thematic analysis as we expected, our participation in cwc was inspiring and transformational, as we witnessed girl activists from around the world sharing their knowledge and learning from each other as they honed their advocacy skills and their critical gaze. more unexpected, but ultimately as beneficial in developing other forms of knowing, was the sensations of rupture we experienced in relation to our own identities as researchers and facilitators, particularly when working with indigenous girls. the following unpacks these experiences through our collaborative analysis that identified the pivotal themes of discomfort, resistance, and letting girls lead. discomfort within each of our journals, there was an evident inconsistency in the degree of our sense of belonging at cwc as, uncomfortably, our positionalities vacillated. within the colonial context and with respect to the original territories of the indigenous peoples, we were mindful of our outsider status as adult settlers and nonresidents. we felt that we could relate to many of the gbv issues raised throughout the cwc event but were self-conscious engaging in dialogues among indigenous girls and young women around gbv, wanting to avoid taking up space. milka, a researcher from kenya who currently lives in canada, referred to herself as a “foreigner” at the event, even though kenyan participants were represented in the cwc art exhibition. she pointed out the following: discussion that revolved around sexual violence and gbv within the indigenous communities made me feel uncomfortable to make my voice heard. i felt that being a foreigner and new to most of the historical dispositions of the other participants— particularly the indigenous girls from canada—that their experiences were more valid than my own. the sensation of being an outsider related to our status as non-indigenous people, as well as other factors such as our gender and age, that caused us to question the validity of our voices in the space. while hani felt his outsider status as one of the few men in attendance may have been the most visible, haleh, an iraniancanadian researcher, also keenly felt her outsider status, expressing the following concerns: i was worried that i would say or do something that would be unintentionally disrespectful to their cultures and beliefs. all i knew about indigenous communities was what i had learned from the literature and i knew it was not enough. i tried to justify myself remembering my own experience when i immigrated to canada 20 years ago. people were sometimes unintentionally insulting my culture and my values. however, i was never insulted by their comments. instead, i would feel for them that all they knew was their own culture. i would try to educate them sometimes, but i never felt insulted. haleh’s observation strains to connect her life experiences to those of the indigenous girl participants, pointing to the internal struggle we each felt in trying to connect with the participants while simultaneously learning from them and respecting the colonized contexts of indigenous communities. part of the discomfort emerged from the privilege of witnessing the girls’ participation, without being clear how our own work contributed. catherine shared, “i feel so privileged to be here that i’m concerned i am unable to give back in a way that responds to what i am getting from the event.” this concern would sometimes turn unconstructive when we would become overly self-consciousness about our positionality: who did we think we were to be doing this work? this thinking, leading us to become hypervigilant to negative social cues, was counterproductive to 66 global education review 7 (2) cultivating reflexive embodied empathy. sitting with the discomfort that prickled through our journals, we tried to convince ourselves that if we are capable of making the smallest difference in the context of gbv, either at the event or as a result of our participation in it, then the privilege of our participation was warranted. through the many conversations we had with each other during and after the event, we were able to see how our experiences were united through this one element of friction (feeling like an undeserving outsider) that we all shared. one of the girl groups expressed during an activity that, “the translation of resilience in indigenous terms means resistance and creating a positive self-identity.” the girls shared their lived experiences of oppression, which critical pedagogy scholars ladson-billings and tate (1995) call “a first step on the road to justice” (p. 58), but refused to fit within a damage-centered research narrative (tuck, 2009), expressing their resistance through traditional song, dance, and ways of knowing learned from elders in their communities. the most humbling of their courageous acts was the role they played in challenging and reshaping others’ mindsets about their ability and potential to shift the centrality of our own perspectives. pamela shared the following: i witnessed many interactions in which indigenous girls challenged others in the room—especially non-indigenous women— to think more critically about the issues affecting their lives. reflecting on these interactions brought to mind this phrase attributed to anaïs nin, “we don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” and i thought about how the work of deconstructing my thoughts and experiences as a non-indigenous woman is always going to be complicated to a significant extent: i can’t seem to get out of my own way. in trying to see things from the margin—and in some ways i may be marginalized—i find myself gazing from the center of my experience. it’s like my subjectivity or my social awareness is framed by my blind spots. the girls at cwc helped me to reframe my perceptions of the work taking place by courageously and creatively highlighting the blind spots of researchers and event organizers, myself included. observing the leadership roles that the girls and young women took at cwc reinforces the idea of working with youth as “knowers and actors” who are abundantly capable of effecting change in their lives and communities around gbv (mitchell & moletsane, 2018). haleh observed that the participants were not satisfied by just raising their voices, but sought to move actively forward to change the status quo: the other dominant voice was participants’ sense of agency… from the russian activist who had to flee her country as a result of the “propaganda” against her, to the indigenous youth from british columbia who felt a responsibility to educate the next generation about gbv, their messages were the same: they are doing whatever they can to bring about change. witnessing the girl’s sense of agency led us to revisit questions about our own commitments to decolonization. if girls who experienced gbv were going against all the odds to change the narratives of gbv in order to protect not just themselves but other girls and young women, this compelled a sense of responsibility to use our voices to leverage theirs, as we felt the urgency in their explicit calls for us—the adult stakeholders present—to do so. resistance the underlying power dynamics within this cross-cultural, intergenerational event were perhaps most evident when the girls demonstrated resistance to a violent, patriarchal, and colonizing status quo, which they did in multiple ways. critical researchers experience multiple embodiments 67 understanding, or critical consciousness, is integrated in reality, yet leads to critical action (freire, 2005). in coming together, the participants shared the critical discourses they had developed in their own groups with each other, joining in a globalized discourse of resistance to gbv. the discourses of resistance shared from indigenous groups pointedly highlighted the intersectionality (collins, 2015) of their experiences that have placed women and girls in their communities at a heightened risk of gbv. yet the critical discourses actively challenged the pathologizing approaches often used by settlers to describe violence in indigenous communities, pointing instead to the causes of gbv as rooted in acts and systems of racism and colonization that are ongoing. the act of translating terms such as “resilience” into concepts that resonate more powerfully with indigenous communities—including resistance— is in itself an act of decolonization, by adopting discourses commonly used in settler spaces but reshaping them in a way that holds more meaning for their communities (tuck & yang, 2014). from our vested positions as organizers and facilitators, this was exciting to behold. yet there were also more unexpected forms of resistance that emerged, as the girls challenged the expectations imposed by the event’s organizers. throughout our journals, several of us documented feeling taken aback to see girls and young women enacting practices of resistance within and even against the event and its organizers, including ourselves. for example, haleh describes a young person’s decision not to participate in a video-making activity: one girl in our group did not want to participate. she hid her face behind a paper. she didn’t want to be filmed. everyone was respectful of her wishes, but i think no one was sure what her message was. was she resisting the event or the workshop? did she just not liked to be filmed? could it have been that she is thinking this is just another intervention where researchers come and do their data collection and then leave? was she tired? other participants seemed just as confused as me... i was thinking in my head comparing her with when i was a teenager. i [would] have given in to peer pressure and adult pressure. i never understood why she was resisting to be filmed but i could certainly see that she was taking a stand and did not give up until she felt comfortable participating in other ways. similarly, catherine describes an activity she helped facilitate that did not go as planned, “as some of the younger participants were obviously ‘checked out’ of the activity. one of them fell asleep during the activity and two others sat at a table in the back and did not participate.” our initial gut reaction was to read this disengagement as boredom or disinterest, a first impression that was perhaps most to do with our egos as facilitators. as we talked through these moments afterward in relation to our gut feelings about strategic modes of resistance, we began to re-read these cues as another form of participation. at the end, we learned that the indigenous girls in one group had been encouraged by their (adult indigenous) group leader not to participate when they felt uncomfortable as a means of exercising their consent, and that they did not need to tell anybody that this is what they were doing. this practice recognized that, although it had been stipulated that all activities were voluntary, for a young person in a foreign space surrounded by adults and young people they did not know, leaving an activity or stating a disinclination to participate was not always a comfortable or viable option. furthermore, they actively resisted the expectation, described by tuck and yang (2014) and bell hooks (1990), that people of color will hand over narratives to settler colonizers and researchers who expect their 68 global education review 7 (2) stories of pain. as haleh speculates in her reflection, the ability of the girls to refuse to participate is a reflection of their agency and empowerment through the decolonizing practices they have learned, as many young people would likely have felt compelled to perform what is expected of them by adults and their peers. pamela’s journal notes that this agency reflects the rallying call, “goodbye to the obedient, submissive woman!” from the young women in the girls leading change project—a project consisting of 14 young women, all teacher education undergraduate students from rural areas in south africa seeking to address gbv and safety on campus using girl-led initiatives. the embodied resistance communicated by the girls “checking out” of the event’s activities illustrates that the girls’ expressions of empowerment not only enabled them to resist expectations of obedience from men and boys within the contexts of violence, but also the expectations of feminist nonindigenous organizers and activists, who expected them to behave and engage in certain ways to meet objectives that are not always understood or agreed upon by the girls themselves. during the event, we had many discussions about the female body and the male gaze, and we recognize the gaze is conditioned by power and culture, or as christian metz (1982) coined, the “scopic regime.” in discussing our journals, we asked ourselves, “might we have some work to do to decondition our gaze?” was our gaze upon the girls committing a kind of gender essentialism that expected female docility to us even as we encouraged their resistance to others? perhaps in our initial gaze we only saw the girls’ strength and ability to shape dialogue in their communities as mentors and leaders, inadvertently pathologizing these communities as spaces that require their resistance, as opposed to the spaces we were creating that we subconsciously expected to be only empowering. a further uncomfortable, and ultimately unanswerable, question, is whether we would have expected resistance more from boys, associating it with masculinity and thus feeling surprised when it was expressed by the mostly girl participants. despite introducing ourselves as settlers/non-indigenous people, recognizing our presence on traditional indigenous lands, and feeling a sense of discomfort over the distance between ourselves and the participants, we had still identified ourselves as “on the girls’ side,” thus it was startling to feel the wall constructed between us. linda finlay (2005) writes about what she calls “reflexive embodied empathy,” which she describes as a process of “tun[ing] into another’s bodily way of being through using their own embodied reactions” (p. 271). she asserts that this empathic practice fosters the relationship between researchers and participants by increasing understanding of self and other. we noticed in our concern that sometimes our bodies called us to move, to speak more with hand gestures or to stand up and walk around the table, to see if this might break the silence. when we tuned in to these moments of resistance through embodied reflexivity (e.g. sitting with the discomfort of participants’ silence), we were better able to reconceptualize our notion of resistance and change our method of engagement by seeking to reconsider what was taking place and listen for how it may be reinterpreted. letting girls lead what does “girl-led” mean in the context of an intergenerational event addressing sexual violence? the event planning was carefully and consciously tailored to bring together the experiences of girls and women of different generations, cultures, and even nationalities to help girls broaden their understandings of gbv researchers experience multiple embodiments 69 across time and space. our journal entries describe girl-leadership happening in the event workshops; in the performance of the songs, dances and drumming by the indigenous girl groups; and cross-culturally, for example, during a bonfire when a group of indigenous girls from canada spontaneously led the bonfire songs and were quickly joined by the girls from sweden and russia. there were also many activities that were more adult-led. for example, while most girls led the creation of their exhibitions, which either exposed or challenged gbv in their communities, not all the girls had the opportunity to lead the presentation of their exhibitions but were rather represented by adults who may not have lived similar experiences. in some instances, this was because participants from ethiopia and south africa had been denied the opportunity to participate in the event after their visas to canada were denied, as described by hani, who had worked with the group of young people in ethiopia on several occasions: although i tried to say a few words on behalf of the ethiopian team at the speaking back exhibition, i was bothered that it was not their voices being heard. i feel like it was very unfortunate in this event, which aimed to give voice especially to marginalized communities, that the ethiopian team who were an integral part of this network were not heard. for those who were able to participate at the event, most girl-led initiatives occurred during largeand small-group spaces, often unplanned and arising initially as a result of peer or intergenerational collaboration, or even disagreement within a group. in her journal, for example, milka noted the intergenerational mentorship described within one of the indigenous communities in canada, and taking place at the cwc event itself. she also recorded group tensions in an activity where her group was creating a cellphilm that conveyed the racialized forms of gbv and sexual violence that indigenous girls and young women experience in their everyday school life. tension arose seemingly due to the generational gap that existed between the indigenous participants within the group. milka and another group member who was also not indigenous attempted to mediate between the two generations of indigenous women, and ultimately the group came up with a message that spoke to the lived experiences across both generations. an excerpt from catherine’s journal documents the leadership tensions that her group experienced, also during the cellphilm workshop: we had another very intense moment when the activists from south africa, russia, and canada (british columbia) couldn’t decide on whether to share headlines reflecting graphic violence against women. the activists from south africa and canada felt that it was important to reflect the reality of what was occurring, but for the activist from russia this was traumatizing. she felt it was damaging and disrespectful to the women who were killed and to their families, by focusing on the violence against them and that appearing as the whole story, while obscuring their own work and experiences. like reducing them to the violence that was carried out against them. she goes on to describe how, like milka, she worked to facilitate a consensus within her group so they could produce a cellphilm that reflected the multiple perspectives within the group. in these instances, the participants pushed back against time, pressure, and event agendas to attend to complex discord arising across generational, cultural, and individual experiences of gbv. the knowledge sharing process was improved by leaning into the “messiness” of the process, and we as adults and facilitators walked a delicate tightrope of inviting this messiness and encouraging the participants to address it, while coaching participants through the activity so that they would not lose 70 global education review 7 (2) the time-bound opportunity to share this knowledge with the larger group. conclusion circles within circles was a powerful event that validated the empowering effect of cross-cultural, intergenerational collaboration. it also raised insecurities among those of us who, as emerging scholars, struggled with how to negotiate our roles and positionalities in relation to communities we were working with but with whom we were outsiders. our participation formed a substantive part of our academic training, as we learned how to create safe participatory environments for cross-cultural and indigenous girls and young people to engage in activism. while we anticipated this training may come as a result of seeing how an event of this scale was planned, or understanding effective approaches to facilitation, the most valuable training related to learning how to sit with discomfort and how to recognize and respond to situational cues with embodied reflexivity that is attuned to our bodily reactions. our contributions at the event felt minimal compared to the significance of what we gained from it, yet focusing on the profound sensations of discomfort and gratitude is part of what keeps the girls’ voices with us, infiltrating our reflections on the event as well as our research in other spaces. the translation of these sensations from discomfort to self-awareness became particularly profound not during the event or even during the period of journaling and selfreflection, but as we collectively talked through our reflections to theorize and then understand the experiences, identifying the strategic significance of the situational cues that caused us discomfort and figuring out together what we had done wrong, what we had done right, and how to move forward. this points to the critical importance of community and shared experience not only when learning how to magnify resistance to structural and systemic forms of violence, but also when coming to understand your role in the process even, and perhaps especially, when you are not and should not be at the center of the activism. what facilitated our exploration of these multiple embodiments was bringing a kind of “relational ethics” (clandinin et al., 2018) to our work together. through the process of collaborative autoethnography and participatory analyses of our journal entries—especially when we encountered difficult learning, sensed as “friction”—we found it helpful to cultivate selfkindness and a sense that we are all in this together (neff & dahm, 2015). as we talked through our analysis together after the event, we all reflected on the almost therapeutic benefit of discussing our discomfort together, and identified that even greater benefit may have been derived from also doing so in advance and during cwc. this practice of embodied reflexivity, in relation to the cross-cultural and intergenerational event that was cwc, impacted us not only as researchers but also as individuals in our relationship to citizen engagement—thus we believe it is a crucial practice for positively contributing to girl-led change. notes 1 we use the term indigenous to refer to first nations, métis, and inuit; as well as status or non-status, beneficiary or 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(2008). a participatory youth empowerment model and qualitative analysis of student voices on power and violence prevention. a dissertation submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of doctor of philosophy (health behavior and health education). university of michigan. retrieved from http://goo.gl/yzlbrw about the authors pamela lamb is a sshrc-funded doctoral candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. she has long been interested in how girls and young women from marginalized communities are challenging normative perceptions and social inequality through art and narrative. building on interdisciplinary scholarship and multimedia practice, her phd research explores the relationship between the affective and the discursive in critical narrative interventions. she is a course lecturer and has previously worked as a registered nurse in clinical and community settings. she holds a m.a. in media studies and a b.a. honors in women’s studies. https://www.networks4change.ca/ http://www.injep.fr/img/pdf/empower_youth_def_2_.pdf http://www.injep.fr/img/pdf/empower_youth_def_2_.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2017/mar/08/silence-powerlessness-womens-voices-rebecca-solnit http://goo.gl/yzlbrw 74 global education review 7 (2) catherine vanner is an assistant professor of educational foundations at the university of windsor. her research uses qualitative methods to analyze the relationship between education and gender-based violence in diverse country contexts. she has worked as a postdoctoral research fellow at mcgill university and an education advisor and consultant for plan international canada, unesco, and the canadian international development agency (now global affairs canada). she holds a ph.d. in education from the university of ottawa and a m.a. in international affairs from carleton university. haleh raissadat’s professional interests as a learning specialist focus on providing effective strategies to improve academic and learning outcomes for young adults. she has a b.eng. (software engineering), an ma (educational technology), and is currently pursuing her ph.d. (educational studies) at mcgill university. as a researcher, her focus is on the practicality of youth-led, grassroots policy-making in order to bring new learning to individuals, communities, and societies. these perspectives are informed by her interest in the impact of educational and health policies on the health and well-being of girls and young women. milka nyariro is a frqscand idrc-funded doctoral candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. her doctoral project focuses on using photovoice, a participatory visual methodology, to explore policy barriers to school continuation for young mothers living in marginalized contexts. her research interest is focused on addressing sexual and gender-based violence in and around educational institutions using participatory visual methodologies. she has a m.a. in anthropology and a b.a. in anthropology, both from the university of nairobi. s.m. hani sadati is a frqsc-funded doctoral candidate in the department of integrated studies in education at mcgill university. his doctoral project is on participatory digital game development to address sexual and genderbased violence in agriculture colleges in ethiopia. as a researcher interested in digital game-based learning and participatory game design he seeks to use participatory methodologies to create a self-educating tool (in the format of a digital game) for instructors of agricultural colleges in ethiopia to empower them in addressing gender-based violence in their colleges. her background is in social science (b.a.) and women’s studies (m.a.). glocal challenges to teacher education 8 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: varner, kenneth j., markides, jennifer, schrader, pg, gerlach, david, & opić, siniša. (2021). glocal challenges to teacher education and a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework. global education review, 8 (2-3), 8-20. glocal challenges to teacher education and a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework kenneth varner university of nevada las vegas (usa) jennifer markides university of calgary (canada) pg schrader university of nevada las vegas (usa) david gerlach bergische universität wuppertal (germany) siniša opić university of zagreb (croatia) abstract this article explores some of the challenges facing teacher education and how glocality as a concept can be used toward a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework for teacher education. higher education has long espoused particular commitments to the preparation of educations that appear, to us, to fall short in their ability to be followed. the areas of disconnect are amplified by snowballing tensions within higher education settings, a range of hyperbolic political discourses, and a resistance both in society generally and higher education to engaging difference in meaningful and authentic ways. a framework of glocally sustaining pedagogy (gsp) takes as its skin a realist approach that sees no greater value to perspectives and contexts that are global over those that are local, recognizing that every local is connected in a global network of connectivity. in this piece we aim to outline the challenges, using culturally relevant pedagogy, as an example. we then provide an understanding of the meaning of glocality that will serve to pose a five-question frame that we might understand as a gsp. keywords teacher education, glocality, educational reform, teacher preparation, higher education glocal challenges to teacher education 9 9 introduction we wanted to use the opportunity of this special issue to comment, more in article form, on some of the challenges facing teacher education and how glocality as a concept can be used toward a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework for teacher education beyond some of our work as editors. higher education has long espoused particular commitments to the preparation of educations that appear, to us, to fall short in their ability to be followed. the areas of disconnect are amplified by snowballing tensions within higher education settings, a range of hyperbolic political discourses, and a resistance both in society generally and higher education to engaging difference in meaningful and authentic ways. a framework of glocally sustaining pedagogy (gsp) takes as its skin a realist approach that sees no greater value to perspectives and contexts that are global over those that are local, recognizing that every local is connected in a global network of connectivity. we see gsp as a mechanism to ask bigger, bolder, and broader questions about the landscape and practices which characterize the preparation of educators worldwide. we acknowledge, at the outset, the limits, overused educational tropes such as culturally relevant pedagogy, response to intervention, mitigating learning loss, etc. which have each in their own way failed to provide any ongoing change in the practices and engagements of educators. in this piece we first aim to outline the challenges, using culturally relevant pedagogy, as an example. we then provide an understanding of the meaning of glocality that will serve to pose a five-question frame that we might understand as a gsp. culturally relevant pedagogy and its challenges ladson-billings (1994, 1995, 2008) introduced culturally relevant pedagogy as a mechanism to promote that positive engagement likely results from a) significant expectations for academic achievement, b) cultural competence of the teachers own self as well as her/his students, as well as c) socio-political commitment. crp (ladson-billings, 1994, 1995, 2009) has a fundamental recognition that when students and teachers are not well-connected owing to difference the outcomes can be dire for students. since the middle of the 1990s significant attention has been placed on using the phrase culturally relevant to describe any range of educational practice (mellom, straubhaar, balderas, ariail, & portes, 2018; zygmunt et al., 2018; walter, 2017; jensen, whiting, & chapman, 2016; thomas & warren, 2013) though there appears to be very little in terms of actual positive change in outcomes for student traced to crp. as of august 2021, ladsonbillings’ toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy (1995) has been cited over 8,700 times and her book the dreamkeepers (1994) has been cited over 12,200 times. considering the widespread citational use of this work, and the constant static articulations of the crp discourse by educators with little change in outcomes, we should force ourselves to ponder how something so pervasive in the repertoire of educational research has shown little actual impact on achievement. challenges to culturally relevant pedagogy to understand the disconnect between a commitment to articulating the ideology of crp with the actual practices we turn to the freemarket economy that purposefully and necessarily selects and sorts (bonoli, 2010; terranova, 2000). sorting individuals through selection in the market is a vicious but necessary function in any service-driven economy requiring the cheapest labor force possible to provide balance between supply/demand and profit. so, now, a few specific challenges. the first challenge is the overwhelming nature of stereotype threat (steele & aronson, 10 global education review 8 (2-3) 1995; young, 2007; ford, 2010; ford & harris, 2000; davis, aronson, salinas, 2006; reed, 1988). stereotypes about groups serve to isolate children from feeling connected and included and widen the perceptive gulf between educators and their students. these stereotypes, however, do much more damage in that they prevent educators from leaning into other cultural contexts to explore situational answers to common challenges. because stereotype is so pervasive lines of communication with others across a multitude of global contexts to understand one’s localized challenges remains elusive. secondly, we see increasing hostility toward difference exacerbated through the 20162020 trump-era. in the wake of this hostility there is a heightened level of confusion and anger surrounding the consequences of accountability – accountability designed ostensibly to help reduce gaps and divides in achievement. third, as educators internalize their own discomfort, they often find sustaining their work to be challenging if not impossible. fourth, even well-meaning educators simply lack the preparation and authentic experiences needed to connect across difference locally and globally. teacher preparation programs, for example, appear to seldom promote or facilitate study abroad or otherwise structured experiences that help their candidates engage in necessary counter experiences – but the teacher preparation faculty themselves have also not often had sufficient experiences in more globalized landscapes, save vacations, that would help facilitate their encouragement of engaging difference. in the end, the crp as a discourse is frequently articulated by educators in labeling their practice, even though the acts of engagement themselves seem more disconnected from the abstract and liberal ideals of crp. in other works lacking actions or engaging actions disconnected from a larger vision of what crp could do, locally and globally to disrupt static achievement for students (dixson & faschingvarner, 2008; hayes & juarez, 2012; faschingvarner & dodo-seriki, 2012; fasching-varner, 2006). global challenges to teacher education there exist at least two global challenges to teacher education and preparation, that appear commonplace indifferent to one’s location, which intensify the challenge of working toward engaging the ideals of crp. first there are a number of resistances and fighting over money, prestige, and responsibilities which exist internal to universities and second an over-engagement with market-economies that depend on cheap labor fueled by nationalism, neoliberalism, and xenophobia. internal challenges facing universities and university teacher-based preparation programs face could be identified by the acronym a(&)re: accreditation & reduction/enrollments. universities worldwide face increasing demands placed from accreditation processes. accreditation, whether internal (university-based), national, or global, often ask teacher preparation units to provide significant amounts of documentation and evidence from all those involved in teacher preparation including the overburdened community partners. during accreditation visits, programs are also asked to arrange and prepare interviews, visits, and documentation catalogues for reviewers. these accreditations are both financially outrageous and intensively time consuming. accreditation, and the never-ending cycle of preparing for accreditation visits sees escalating professional time away teaching and scholarship and toward an investment in addressing, responding to, and engaging with accreditation processes themselves. the financial investment includes fees to the accrediting body, expenses related to the reviewers themselves including their travel, as well as internal expenses on personnel, document preparation, and other considerations. all told accreditation globally is a multi-billion-dollar enterprise. and while accreditation as a concept, including its requisite intended accountability, is not inherently problematic on its face value, it does require a burden of time, resource, and engagement that detract from the principle enterprise of educating pre-service teachers themselves. glocal challenges to teacher education 11 11 despite decades of accreditation for teacher preparation, the so-called achievement gap continues to persist in the performance of school aged children, and consequently there are global concerns about the value-added benefit of accreditation. reduction of teaching as a profession, and the societal minimization of teachers contributed to challenges in enrollment. universities face declining enrollments, particularly for students pursuing teaching degrees. university students desiring to pursue teaching are surrounded by discourses that position teaching as a lesser profession and they are pressured to pursue other disciplinary areas for their studies. from the inception of formal schooling and early teacher education programs, the teaching profession has been dogged by its standing as women’s work (grumet, 1981, 1988). the male-engendered historical, political, and economic construct of a deficit model of students and teachers pervades societal perspectives on education (see grumet, 2010). using the measuring stick of performance standards, teachers are failing society in their role. educators need to be “fixed”—deskilled and reskilled (apple, 1986/2013)—under the supervision of the ruling governments. students need to be “saved” from the shortcomings of their maternalistic teachers. the sentimentalization of teaching has contributed to the impossible ideology of submissive salvation, while successfully rendering teachers (consequently and specifically women) inadequate for the job (grumet, 1981). as sara lawrence-lightfoot noted in the late 80s, there is significant pressure placed on female students—who make up a vast majority of students pursuing education—to pursue other professional interests (lawrence-lightfoot, 1988). thus, the lower enrollments are not a reflection of demand for teachers – there is in fact a high demand for teachers particularly where marginalized groups of k-12 students are taught. those demands/needs have not been met by sufficient increases in salary and professional treatment to counterbalance the relatively low supply of teachers which exist. as university aged students choose other careers to respond to family, peer, and teacher/school, and societal pressure placed on them, combined with a lack of market shift in salary and professionalization of teachers, enrollments in teacher education programs decline. to address rising pressures from lowering teacher education enrollment, programs preparing teachers have become resistant to innovation and change. where changes are occurring they are largely in modifying delivery approaches to combine populations of teacher candidates. that is while enrollments may be down, class sizes for educator preparation are stable and/or increasing owing to less offerings with combined groups of traditional undergraduate students with students on alternative routes to licensure (arl) in larger class settings. arl students come to the setting having had different undergraduate majors combined with both life and career experiences. arl candidates seek programs with the least demand on their time (accelerated) at the lowest cost, combined with flexibility. these alternative programs are also offered outside of university settings, putting a greater financial strain on institutions of higher education who consequently see fewer new candidates pursuing teaching. this pressure forces unique learning arrangements that do not best tailor to the needs of inherently different pre-service teacher populations. to save costs, universities across contexts rely on essentially the free, or quite poorly compensated labor of mentor teachers, signaling that the induction phase of a preservice teacher is likely to be with a teacher for whom this extra responsibility is uncompensated and beyond their already taxing responsibilities to their students, especially in urban and rural settings where marginalized and historically underrepresented youth live. the second major global challenge is that of neoliberalism which has impacted the global landscape significantly since the 1980s. neoliberalism is popularly tied to reagan and thatcher-era economic models of increased 12 global education review 8 (2-3) privatization and market-driven orientations. we see the public sector being sold to private sector for support, funding, and basic level existence. governments, as the public entity, have expressed and demonstrated a proportionally less financial commitment to the enterprise of education than pre-1980s. those engaged in the educational reform industrial complex have profited significantly. private lobbies with powerful connections to governments from both sides of the political spectrum have yielded a significant influence on curricular, financial, and reform-oriented decisions making in public school. through private financial investment in schools, choices of materials, learning environment access, and even as far as the preparation of teachers themselves have become market-driven through the non-public sector. this corporatization of teacher education within the neoliberal agenda promotes consumerism and capitalism, posing a direct threat to civic freedoms and democratic citizenship (giroux, 2002). be it charter-schools, increasing desire for vouchers, public-private partnerships, as well as the educational reform consultants, materials, and producers (like textbook companies) public funding interests for schooling are invested into private for-profit, models, just as they are with nearly every sector of public life. the public purse reduction combined with still significant government regulation on the educational sector itself yields influence over curriculum and testing requirements and establishes many unfunded mandates which solely benefit the private sector. there should be a recognition, in freemarket capitalism, that educational reform over the past 50 years is particularly dependent on mechanisms to sort individuals into determined class groups. the service-based economy relies on portions of society to remain locked out of many of the benefits of formal education. the free-market society depends on laborers and their resultant lack of educational attainment in bolstering the increasing gap between wealthy and poor. the process which sorts individuals has particularly placed marginalized individuals in the role of economic scapegoats, worldwide, for market elites. and in the past 10 years particularly, political leaders have doused the landscape with a hate-filled fuel, centered on fear and loathing of whole groups of people. together intensifying neo-liberal economic policies coupled with the direct targeting of marginalized peoples suggests that as teachers enter the classroom, they not only need to negotiate their ‘teacher’ decision making, but must conduct that work in a larger social context which is 1) not well funded publicly though outsourced to the market 2) aimed at being unsuccessful to justify the need for the educational reform industrial complex, and 3) crafted in a way that further marginalizes already underrepresented groups. as teacher preparation has less time to prepare teachers, has growing demands on their capacity, and with a proliferation of privatized routes to the classroom, the challenges are insurmountable hurdles for teachers to engage any sound pedagogical approach, much less culturally relevant pedagogical approaches. retention rates in the profession are historically low with a majority of new teachers unable to persist after five years. leaning into and learning from the local and global challenges it is clear from the example of crp that an educational approach can be admired and discussed globally with little or no impact in local contexts. the lack of take up in localized settings is both attributed to and compounded by the neoliberal stranglehold on education. this near death-grip has put teacher education programs in peril in the multitude of ways listed above. commensurate with critical pedagogies that consider the power structures within education and encourage dialogue towards liberatory action (freire, 1970/1993), grumet and stone (2000) urge that “without a structure glocal challenges to teacher education 13 13 that engages critique with agency, critique flourishes—without much effect” (p. 194). while combatting global issues at the local levels can feel “hopeless,” educators might well reclaim agency by leaning into care, difference, and radical pedagogies of hope. as grumet (1981, 1988, 2010) has shown, teaching has been inherently gendered with nurturance being seen as a professional shortcoming. carol gilligan (2011) suggests that “an ethics of care is key to human survival and also to the realization of a global society” (question 9, para. 2). similarly, nel noddings (1984) proposes that care is central to the role of teaching. employing an ethics of care locally contributes to societal wellbeing. care is not a measurable outcome of teaching and does not service the neoliberal goals of consumerism within education. for this reason, care ethics and other holistic approaches hold potential to change the existing structures and practices for the overall health of the system. noddings (2005) urges that: we will not find the solution to problems of violence, alienation, ignorance, and unhappiness in increasing our security apparatus, imposing more tests, punishing schools for their failure to produce 100 percent proficiency, or demanding that teachers be knowledgeable in “the subjects they teach.” instead, we must allow teachers and students to interact as whole persons, and we must develop policies that treat the school as a whole community. the future of both our children and our democracy depend on moving in this direction (p. 13) holism and holistic frameworks are central to many indigenous epistemologies where the relational ontologies inform an inherent sense of connectedness within the world (absolon, 2010, 2016; archibald, 2008; battiste, 2000; bell, 2014; brendtro, brokenleg, & van bockern, 1990; cajete, 1994; calliou, 1995; carriere & richardson, 2013; graveline, 1998; hart, 2002; hill, 2014; markides, 2020, forthcoming; wenger-nabigon, 2010). within these indigenous frameworks, self is often at the center of concentric circles which expand out to include family, communities, society, and the universe. as willie ermine explains, “in the viewing of the world objectively, western science has habitually fragmented and measured the external space in an attempt to understand it in all its complexity” while “aboriginal people found a wholeness that permeated inwardness and that also extended into the outer space. their fundamental insight was that all existence was connected and that the whole enmeshed the being in its inclusiveness” (ermine 1995, p. 103). in this way, indigenous holistic frameworks encompass local and global orientations to life and living. the interconnectivity also implies a responsibility to all beings: human and morethan-human (abram, 1996). learning from different worldviews in this instance invites educators to contrast western and indigenous ideologies, embracing difference and recognizing challenges as being shared by and enmeshed with the individual and the collective. in the face of the aforementioned bleak teaching context, circumstances, and challenges, hope can be a scarce commodity in the undervalued teaching profession. to face these challenges, teacher educators need to lead with what jonathan lear (2006) calls “radical hope” where courage is tempered by wisdom and hope. both radical hope and radical pedagogies are needed to attract and keep teachers in the profession. recognizing that schools are hegemonic institutions that reflects and perpetuates cultural and religious values, power structures, and societal norms, peter mclaren (1999) asserts that knowledge of the ritualization of schooling, coupled with radical pedagogy, can support more emancipatory practices in schools. hooks (2003, 2010) has spent her career pushing back against the marginalizing and sorting tactics of education. 14 global education review 8 (2-3) for educational approaches like crp to have an impact locally, educators and education programs need to lean into care, difference, and radical hope/pedagogies to address the global crises in formal schooling. as hooks (2003) advocates: we need mass-based political movements calling citizens of this nation to uphold democracy and the rights of everyone to be educated, and to work on behalf of ending domination in all its forms—to work for justice, changing our educational system so that schooling is not the site where students are indoctrinated to support imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy or any ideology, but rather where they learn to open their minds, to engage, in rigorous study and to think critically. (p. xiii) to actualize these much-needed movements on a local and global scale, a sustaining pedagogical framework is needed. glocally sustaining pedagogical framework while educators engage particular contexts that may appear to be highly localized, the larger landscape and system of engagement is one that is always already glocal, that is locally situated and globally facing, locally delivered and globally influenced. glocality, a difrasismo, or blending of two concepts into one may be viewed as “…a dialectical space where new understandings might emerge through the integration of polarities” (rendón, 2009, p. 68). glocality as an act of engaging prompts us to not see our challenges or opportunities are particularly reflective of a narrow or isolated occurrence, but as existing in replicated and replicable ways across the globe where we can be informed by a broader range of international contexts and ideas. with such an understanding we can free ourselves of the idea that answers can only emerge from the local space without deflecting to a sense that the issues are so globally large that they cannot be addressed locally (the it’s too broken to fix approach). glocality asks educators to consider how the global landscape might better inform the local application for practitioners of teacher education over driving decisions in increasingly particularized ways that consider narrow lanes of local necessity (brodeur, 2004). glocality as an approach to connectivity among teacher educators suggests that what are perceived as hyper localized concerns are in fact contextually relevant localized concerns that exist across other localized concerns for global counterparts. in other words what one program feels it uniquely experiences are in fact replications of phenomena that are equally local to others but singularly global in their outcomes. myerowitz (2005) acknowledges that “all experience is local…[and] the localness of experience is a constant” (p. 21). glocality contextualizes that understanding with the idea that “...we now increasingly share information with and about people who live in local-ities different from our own [and] we more frequently intercept experiences and messages originally shaped for, and limited to, people in other places” (meyrowitz, 2005, p. 23). as barrett & kurzman (2004) suggest, “the similarity of demands, coordination of mobilization, and clustering of policy outcomes across countries with varying political and cultural conditions” is both locally real and globally relevant (pp. 487– 488). the notion of glocality then informing our work here, aligned with erickson (2002), is that “global phenomena more often than not could be studied in their local expressions...that cultural globalisation was always tantamount to glocalisation…[as] creative fusions of [the] local glocal challenges to teacher education 15 15 and non-local” (pp. 166–167). resultantly the forces working against the preparation of teachers explored in this entry are multifaceted, locally significant, and globally consistent. a glocalized approach has the ability to better consider that these challenges we all face reflect a more systemic (and one might argue sinister) backdrop to the work we do. how might teacher preparation use the concept of glocality to inform particular lessons about the interaction between experiences and practice where damaging internal and external forces can be resisted through networks of engagements? glocality is far more than simply understanding someone else's experience but instead is the call to ask particular questions that force dialogue and engagement that is answered through neither purely global or particularly local lenses. stepping out of our (dis)comfort zones and into the fully glocalized world has particularly significant implications that should help us understand that pressures created by neoliberalism and neonationalism are not acts of isolation that only one country or place experiences, but are intentionally part of the ‘machine’ that is the free-market and must be addressed in broader globally informed yet highly localized enactments. pre-service teachers, teacher educators, and administrators are encouraged to grapple with the complexity of the changing global educational landscape as a mechanism to apply any particularized pedagogy. earlier in this entry we outlined challenges to culturally relevant pedagogy and would suggest that to engage in culturally relevant pedagogy you must apply a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework to the work. in using this type of glocality educators are able to ask questions of themselves whose answers highlight the key roadblocks in engaging any pedagogical approach where there have been little long term outcome differences. gsp framework poses a series of five guiding question frames (each frame having multiple interconnected reflective questions) which focus educators toward the current realities of teacher preparation to contemplate how they might direct their energies moving forward. question frame 1 – how much teacher education in a variety of context promote such programs breaking away from workload and financial incumbrances related to accreditation which impede the work of preparing teachers? what are the differences between impact and intent of accreditation processes, especially where acts of accreditation appear more like surveillance than engagement relative to the reflective capacity accreditation could generate? what can we learn from resistances to accreditation? have resistance efforts permeated any structures of teacher preparation: if so what can we learn, and if not why haven’t such efforts been successful? question frame 2 what status and value exists relative to teaching as a profession? how do questions of status influence the human and fiscal resources, assigned to the development of culturally engaged, class conscientious, and pedagogically resilient educators at bot primary, secondary, and tertiary levels? what discourses of teaching and teachers in localized contexts exist? what are other local examples beyond one’s individual sets of realities? what common patterns across contexts may exists, and how might those patterns help produce a shift relative to teacher preparation programs inducting teachers to better control teaching narrative/s? question frame 3 can we understand the muddying of neoliberal and neo-nationalistic influences on teacher preparation, curricular and broader educational reform, and teachers’ satisfaction with the profession? what balances between localized and more globally influenced ways that neonationalism and neoliberalism 16 global education review 8 (2-3) impact the work done in teacher preparation exist? question frame 4 can teacher preparation address, plan for, and respond to changing times considering implications of glocal trends and patterns? in what ways might teacher educators create engagements to develop lobal consciousness while challenging inherited dominant narratives? how might educators across contexts connect and make sense of the role of multiple contexts that characterize teacher preparation globally? question frame 5 considering the complexities between multinational and multicultural forces that source the formation of a global understandings. even more, how might practitioners prepare their own students to be glocaly engaged when often locally isolated? particularly, how should practitioners shift from superficial understandings of the global community in their classroom toward the cultivation of meaningful connections across spatial and cultural barriers? the engagement of these question frames, together, provide a socratic framework toward glocally sustaining approaches to support any number of pedagogical approaches. even culturally relevant pedagogy, which has failed to launch in terms of its impact on outcomes would benefit from the broader set of questions being asked here. the frames provided here have the capacity toward more nuanced and responsive practices for teacher educators and classroom teachers informed beyond their own current (limited) realities. given the current challenges to both teacher preparation generally and toward the enactment of culturally relevant pedagogical approaches the urgency of the questions posed here should not be lost. the call to practice glocality requires nuanced, varied, and critical reflexivity toward embracing care, difference, and radical hope through global and local lenses with the goal a pedagogy premised on dialogue and relationship building. glocal challenges to teacher education 17 17 references abram, d. 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(2010). the cree medicine wheel as an organizing 20 global education review 8 (2-3) paradigm of theories of human development. native social work journal, 7(1), 139-161. ececd perspectives 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: mbugua, tata, & trube, barbara (2018). early childhood education, care, and development: perspectives from around the globe. global education review, 5 (2), 1-7. early childhood education, care, and development: perspectives from around the globe tata mbugua the university of scranton mary barbara trube walden university abstract early childhood education, care, and development (ececd) has reached prominence due to its recognition by the global community as an important national investment and right for children. ececd programs advocate for quality in education, protection, health, and nutrition for children and families, in most countries and nation-states. global seekers of quality programs and practices recognize variability in how quality is defined, developed, delivered, and assessed; as well as recognizing each nations' unique focus on culturally relevant aspects of programs and practices for specific contexts. research indicates that well-designed ececd programs of high quality contribute to children's holistic development and sense of well-being, educational attainment, workforce productivity, international collaborations, sustainability of peace-building initiatives, and improved economies in the long run. eleven diverse articles are presented in this themed journal as a contribution to the rich, on-going conversations about the importance of global ececd programs and practices. introduction early childhood education, care, and development (ececd) has reached global prominence as seen in the united nations' facilitated "global conversation" and by the actions of many international organizations (unesco, 2006; unicef, 2004; undp, 2014). education has been identified as “the single best investment countries can make towards building prosperous, healthy and equitable societies” (undg, 2013, p. 18). interest in quality ececd programs and practices is shared globally by stakeholders, including governmental leaders, policy makers, researchers, academics, educators, community members, family members, and children. there is a global call for access, equity, quality, and sustainability (arndt et al., 2016; undp, 2014), child rights (bennett et al., 2016; georgeson & payler, 2013; reardon, 2014), the need for glocal curriculum development (mbugua, 2013; trube & yan, 2018), and strong educator and caregiver preparation (campbell-barr & bogatić, 2017; wortham, 2013). context the early childhood years span the period of a child's life from conception to age eight (naeyc, n. d.; trawick-smith, 2018) that the united nations international children's emergency _______________________________________ tata mbugua, the university of scranton 800 linden street, mgh 145 scranton, pa 18510 email: tata.mbugua@scranton.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ mailto:tata.mbugua@scranton.edu 2 global education review 5(2) fund (n.d.) identifies as "the most and rapid period of development in a human life," which is a critical time "to the complete and healthy cognitive, emotional and physical growth of children" (p. 1). the essential stages of early development take place during this critical time. global early childhood development encourages children's "physical well-being, their cognitive and linguistic capacities, and their social and emotional development" (global partnership for education, 2014, p. 21). according to the united nations educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco), any global ecec program leading to a favorable environment, which contributes to children's optimal growth and development, is considered important. the global partnership for education (gpe) (n.d.) suggests the most beneficial programs for young children include education, protection, health, and nutrition. differences in programs and practices for young children vary greatly among countries and nations, mostly due to the official ages children enter preprimary and primary education. research suggests that positive developmental outcomes are realized by young children in ececd programs deemed to be of high quality; however, there is considerable variation in how quality is defined, developed, delivered and assessed. variations of quality are found when observing and reviewing indicators of quality such as indoor and outdoor learning environments; curriculum content; learning and teaching interactions that produce positive outcomes for young children; and access to education and other services for all children and their families (association of childhood education international, n.d.; trube, 2016). in our increasingly interconnected and interdependent global community, studying ececd programs and practices becomes vitally important since all children deserve a quality education that essentially empowers them to thrive. research suggests that there has been a global endeavor to prioritize ececd programs with many governments investing in these programs in recognition of their potential to contribute to human capital accumulation that has a positive impact on economies (naudeau et al., 2011; unicef, 2013). according to heckman and masterov (2006) this distinctive return on investment perspective by governments lays the foundation for early learning experiences that greatly influence later earning potentials of stakeholders. however, with the accelerating pace of change, necessitated by technology, increased migration, and geographic, cultural and contextual differences, educators and stakeholders are faced with new challenges and opportunities of studying ececd in a diverse world (cushner, mcclelland & safford, 2014; mbugua, 2015; trawick-smith, 2018). in effect, the need to perceive, understand, and act on emerging trends with regards to ececd programs and practices creates added complexities that can strain capacities (rti international, 2018); and, at the same time, also presents opportunities for positive change to occur. concomitant with the increasing diversity of our world is civil strife, violence and wars especially in fragile contexts within and between countries. in response, an emerging theme in ececd is peace-building as a necessary prerequisite to the overall well-being of children, and peaceable co-existence while fostering global citizenship (global education first initiative, n.d.; bennett et al., 2016). starting peace-building education during the early years is critical to promoting the skills that enable children to become agents of change in building peace in their own societies. studies show evidence of the synergistic effects of integrating peace education in early childhood education curriculum which engenders an ethical core of peace education (reardon, 2014). the evidence ececd perspectives 3 includes a positive impact on children’s social and emotional development, and reduction of behavioral problems later in life. further evidence indicates that well-designed ececd programs can lead to children developing and maintaining an openness to difference (naeyc, n.d.). this openness is demonstrated by children showing a willingness to play with others including those different from themselves (unicef, 2018). the cognitive and socialemotional development skills that are fostered in the early years of life provide a dynamic interplay of cognition and character, two sets of personal skills necessary for thriving the 21st century. ececd programs and practices offer mechanisms for optimum development of children and efforts toward sustained peace. exploration of ececd programs and practices before readers turn to the articles themselves, they may find it helpful to consider a brief editor-eye view of what each article contributes. this synoptic perspective of the ger volume 5, number 2 as a whole presents themes and variations across the two inter-related domains of programs and practices. as readers will see, diverse perspectives are offered in the articles from a variety of vantage points. the overarching aim of this journal issue is to represent global ececd as a diverse set of related programs and practices that reflect the character and missions of nations and recognize issues and challenges inherent in many programs. inter-relatedness it is well recognized by the global community that ececd builds human capacity and capital. the ability to sustain effective and quality programs is a strong subtheme. the millennium development goals (mdgs), and the sustainable development goals (sdgs), indicate the importance of young children's abilities to meet developmental milestones and be involved in organized learning at the preschool level (sdg, indicator 4.2.1). quality and sustainability navarro-cruz and luschei focus on the millennium development goals (mdgs) and education for all (efa) to look at quality programming for children with disabilities, child health and wellbeing, and language immersion. in discussing quality and positive outcomes for children, authors shallwani, abubakar, and nyongesa conclude that commitment of community stakeholders is essential to creating sustainable high-quality programs for children. in addition, petrová and zápotočná look at preschool literacy education and curricular reforms that result in improved literacy curriculum. school readiness gove, dombrowski, king, pressley, and weatherholt, highlight the sdgs as integral to quality international ececd programs that create opportunities for children to develop school readiness skills. likewise, piper, merseth, and ngaruiya report on public and private centers designed to improve learners' school readiness skills. moreover, becker, grist, caudle, watson, and bargreen look at the positive impact of play on preparing children for kindergarten readiness. assessment the need for assessment is woven through several articles. as an example, tal highlights the importance of grouping arrangements in the classroom to planning, observations, and assessments. likewise, rentzou and daglas reflect on the importance of assessment and teacher evaluations to integrated education and care programs. 4 global education review 5(2) arrangements of articles the discussions of themes and variations shows the network of ideas explored in the articles that are included in this themed journal issue. coeditors chose programs and practices as the basis for organizing articles into a meaningful sequence. part 1 focuses on studies and discussions undergirding global ececd programs. part 2 focuses on studies and discussions elaborating on ececd practices. part 1: programs article 1, "early childhood education, care, and development: perspectives from around the globe," provides a brief overview of the themed issue from co-editors tata mbugua and mary barbara trube. article 2 begins with an overview of international early childhood best practices. in "international evidence on effective early childhood care and education programs: a review of best practices," authors giselle e. navarro-cruz and thomas luschei review 68 sources published between the years of 1993 and 2017, in order to gain an in-depth view on international early childhood care and education (ecce) practices. authors focus on the millennium development goals (mdgs) and education for all (efa) to look at issues related to funding, quality, and workforce, as well as specific programming for children with disabilities, child health and wellbeing, and language immersion issues. article 3 by sadaf shallwani, amina abubakar, and moses nyongesa reports findings from their study conducted in community-based childcare centers (cbcc) of malawi, in "the quality of learning and care at communitybased early childhood development centers in malawi." researchers sought to identify challenges and opportunities leading to quality and positive outcomes for children by conducting systematic observations, interviews, and surveys. the study found in many communities, it is the community stakeholders who demonstrate strong commitment to the goal of creating sustainable quality childcare programs for children. article 4, "scaling up early childhood development and education in a devolved setting: policy making, resource allocations, and impacts of the tayari school readiness program in kenya," written by benjamin piper, katherine a. merseth and samuel k. ngaruiya, presents a study of 7 out of 47 kenyan' preprimary programs. researchers investigated how county governments invest in cost-effective preprimary programs by providing materials, teacher training, and/or coaches in order to improve child outcomes. piper, merseth and ngaruiya report on the tayari model, designed to improve learners' school readiness skills, which is followed in both public and private preprimary centers. in article 5, "are we ready for integrated ecec systems? greek in-service early childhood educators' level of preparation for implementing educare systems," konstantina rentzou and george daglas reflect on the “unified national framework for early childhood education and care” initiative and contrasting views of practitioners. their exploratory study sought to identify teachers' attitudes toward training to implement integrated education and care programs. part 2: practices article 6 presents findings from a study by amber gove, eileen dombrowski, simon j. king, jennifer pressley, and tara weatherholt, in "persistence and fadeout of preschool participation effects on early reading skills in lowand middle-income countries." authors look at reading outcomes for children in sixteen low-and middle-income countries that include http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/397 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/397 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/397 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/397 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/397 ececd perspectives 5 ethiopia, ghana, indonesia, iraq, jordan, kenya, malawi, mali, nicaragua, nigeria, philippines, rwanda, senegal, tanzania, uganda, and zambia. authors highlight the sustainable development goals (sdgs) as integral to focusing on children's school readiness. their study offers important findings for practitioners and policy makers. in article 7, derek r. becker, cathy l. grist, lori a. caudle, myra k. watson, and kaitlin bargreen look at the impact of play in preparing children for kindergarten. in their article, "complex physical activities, outdoor play, and school readiness among preschoolers," authors focus on the benefits of outdoor play and complex physical activities that children engaged in during their non-preschool hours. the preschool behavior and emotional rating scale was used in the study, which also included parent interviews about the extent and frequency of their child's play-based activities. findings support the importance of play in developing school readiness skills. article 8 provides insights into effective grouping practices in "the challenge of implementing small group work in early childhood education." author clodie tal focuses on research identifying the processes of implementing small group work in early childhood classrooms to support children's wellbeing and learning by both inservice and preservice teachers in israel. findings support the importance of planning, observations, and documentation. in article 9, authors zuzana petrová and oľga zápotočná take a historical look at the development of preschool literacy education in slovakia in, " early literacy education in ongoing reforms of preschool curriculum: the case of post-communist slovakia." petrová and zápotočná describe curricular reforms resulting in a new preschool literacy curriculum that is now part of slovakia's national preschool curriculum. of interest is authors’ descriptions of the processes followed for national adoption of the reading curriculum. in article 10, “'respect is an investment': community perceptions of social and emotional competencies in early childhood from mtwara, tanzania," author matthew jukes reports on a study conducted to more deeply understand teachers' and parents' perspectives about the importance of social-emotional competencies at the pre-primary levels. findings from the jukes' study have implications for teaching, learning, and assessing in preschool programs across tanzania and beyond. article 11 presents " high-stakes accountability systems: creating cultures of fear." shelly lynn counsell reviewed florida's a+ accountability system in the usa. counsell's study results suggests implications for teaching and learning outcomes for stakeholders in low to high socio-economic public schools in light of every student succeeds act (essa). comparisons of perceptions held by prekindergarten and third grade teachers and a guidance counselor regarding assessment practices, were shared. counsell hopes that insights gained from the manuscript informs states as accountability systems are devised, with the aim of ensuring social justice for all learners in receiving an excellent education. in article 12, "what about elementary level teachers: a closer look at the intersection between standardization and multilingualism," ignacio barrenechea investigates tensions faced by teachers educating multilingual students and, at the same time, complying with standards and assessments in florida, usa. the author's goal is to reveal teachers' experiences in order to inform decision-making practices regarding standardized testing policies in multilingual settings. barrenechea advocates for http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/388 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/388 http://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/workflow/access/388 6 global education review 5(2) representation of students' cultural backgrounds in all educational processes. concluding thoughts ececd programs vary among and within continents, nation-states, and places within a country. this themed issue of the global education review focuses on variations among programs and practices in a limited number of regions across the globe. this issue is not intended to be exhaustive, however, the intention is to provide readers with perspectives expressed by authors of programs and practices found throughout the world in order to contribute to the on-going conversation about global ececd. references arndt, s., tesar, pupala, b., 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(2016). re-negotiating an ethics of care in kenyan childhoods. human affairs, 26, 288303. association for childhood education international (acei), (n.d.). website. retrieved from https://www.acei.org/ bennett, l., aguayo, r. & field, s. (2016). at home in the world: supporting children in human rights, global citizenship, and digital citizenship. childhood education, 92(3), 189199. cambell-barr, v., & bogatić, k. (2017). global to local perspectives on early childhood education and care. early childhood development and care, 187(10) 1461-1470. cushner, k. h., mcclelland, a., & safford, p. (2014). human diversity in education: an intercultural approach (8th ed.). new york, ny: mcgraw-hill education. georgeson, j. & payler, j. (2013). international perspectives on early childhood education and care. berkshire, united kingdom: open university press. global education first initiative. 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(2018). the fobi-p4 innovative approach for kindergarten dual language learners in the china, canada, united states english immersion (ccuei) research collaborative. in e. jean-francois (ed.) transnational perspectives on innovation in teaching and learning technologies, boston, ma, usa: brill/sense. unesco. (2006). strong foundations: early childhood education and care. paris: unesco publishing. undp. (2014). human development report 2015. new york: undp publishing. unicef. (2013). sustainable development starts with safe, healthy and well-educated children. unicef publishing. retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/agenda2030/files/sd _children_final.pdf. unicef. (n.d.). early childhood development: the key to a full and productive life. retrieved from https://www.unicef.org/dprk/ecd.pdf wortham, s. (2013). common characteristics and unique qualities in preschool programs: global perspectives in early childhood education. netherlands: springer. about the author(s) tata mbugua, ph.d., is professor of education at the university of scranton and a member of the editorial boards for journal of pedagogy (sr) and early childhood education journal. her scholarly interests cover early childhood education; cross-cultural and global perspectives in education; and academic service learning as a pedagogical approach to teaching and learning. she has published articles, book chapters, and made conference presentations in all these areas of scholarship. mary barbara trube, ed.d., is professor emeritus of education at ohio university-chillicothe, and contributing doctoral faculty for the richard w. riley college of education and leadership at walden university. her scholarly activities and research focuses on teacher leadership; comparative early childhood education, care, and development; projectbased teaching and learning; glocal curriculum development for dll, esl, and efl learners; and international and domestic mentoring and coaching. https://www.unicef.org/agenda2030/files/sd_children_final.pdf https://www.unicef.org/agenda2030/files/sd_children_final.pdf support of mathematical learning in global contexts 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: perry, lindsey, & ketterlin-geller, leanne r. (2018). policies and practices in support of mathematics learning in global contexts. global education review, 5 (3), 1-4. policies and practices in support of mathematics learning in global contexts lindsey perry, editor southern methodist university leanne r. ketterlin-geller, editor southern methodist university introduction over the past two decades, global education initiatives have focused considerable attention on improving access to basic education, resulting in millions of children attending school for the first time (world bank, 2011). however, attendance does not guarantee learning. for instance, it takes students in ghana up to four additional school years to learn basic mathematics skills compared to students in higher-income countries (global partnership for education, 2012). because foundational mathematics skills are predictive of future academic success, including reading achievement (duncan et al., 2007), as well as economic well-being in adulthood (richie & bates, 2013), the importance of improving mathematics teaching and learning cannot be overstated. because of this, mathematics is increasingly being considered a focal area within global contexts. this issue of global education review focuses on policies and practices in support of mathematics learning in global contexts. the issue highlights relevant research findings, illuminates areas that are in need of additional research, and examines the implications of these findings on educational outcomes. the ten manuscripts in this issue focus on three primary topics: efforts to improve student achievement and factors that impact achievement; implications of assessment frameworks, scoring, and analyses; and methods to improve teacher preparation and teacher knowledge. the manuscripts are organized in this issue by these topics. efforts to improve student achievement and factors that impact achievement in determination of marginalized youth to overcome and achieve in mathematics: a case study from india, srikantaiah, eichhorn, and khan report the results from a qualitative study that examined the factors impacting the mathematics achievement, determination, and perseverance of marginalized youth enrolled in india’s national institute of open schooling program. the findings indicate that many factors impact students’ educational decisions and achievement, including knowledge of foundational mathematics concepts, the specific _______________________________ corresponding author: lindsey perry, research in mathematics education, simmons school of education and human development southern methodist university, po box 750114 dallas, tx 75275-0114 email: leperry@mail.smu.edu https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ 2 global education review 5(2) program enrolled in to complete their 10th standard board exams, and chronic or toxic stress. srikantaiah et al. also make five recommendations for organizations to consider if they develop alternative pathways to graduation. in the relationship between opportunities to learn algebra and students’ algebra achievement: a comparative study, ayieko investigates the relationship between eighth-grade students’ opportunities to learn algebra and their achievement on algebra topics on the trends in international mathematics and science study (timss). ayieko focuses specifically on students in botswana, singapore, and the united states and found that opportunity to learn varied by topic and location. the results also suggest that students’ who had opportunities to learn more algebra topics before eighth grade had higher algebra achievement scores on the timss. in mathematics from the beginning: evaluating the tayari preprimary program’s impact on early mathematics skills, piper, sitabkhan, and nderu discuss the impact of the tayari program, a comprehensive preprimary intervention in kenya, that included materials for students, training for teachers, and teacher support. this program was evaluated using a randomized controlled trial (rct), and piper et al. report positive effects on certain numeracy topics, such as producing sets, identifying numbers, and naming shapes. piper et al. describe the three core principles used to guide the design of the tayari program and include detailed information about the program, including an annex of lessons. in developing usable, accessible, and culturally relevant learning materials to support parent-child interactions in mathematics, shivraj et al. report on the iterative development process used to create an intervention focused on increasing parents’ involvement with their children in mathematics in jamaica. this article provides a detailed description of how the materials for this intervention, which included workshops, books, and games, were developed using four phases of the design-based research (dbr) process. this example emphasizes the importance of including stakeholders in the development process so that materials are usable, accessible, and culturally relevant. implications of assessment frameworks, scoring, and analyses in capturing children’s mathematical knowledge: an assessment framework, sitabkhan, platas, and ketterlin-geller discuss an assessment framework that balances measuring students’ formal mathematics knowledge with understanding their informal mathematics knowledge. students develop and use informal mathematics skills in their everyday lives that may be markedly different than the skills typically assessed on formal mathematics assessments. sitabkhan et al. suggest that both formal mathematics skills that students learn in schools and informal mathematics skills that students develop and learn in their everyday lives are important to measure. students’ informal mathematics knowledge can be used as a tool to strengthen students’ in-school formal mathematics learning. in different analyses, different conclusions? validity evidence from the egma spatial reasoning subtask, perry discusses the importance of using appropriate analytical techniques to evaluate the validity of the interpretations made using assessment data. the techniques used should be based on the types of interpretations being made. perry illustrates this point by using data from the spatial reasoning subtask developed for the early grade mathematics assessment (egma) and analyzing support of mathematical learning in global contexts 3 it using both item response theory (irt) and classical test theory (ctt). the results differed based on technique, and the implications of using appropriate and inappropriate methods are discussed. in aligning test scoring procedures with test uses of the early grade mathematics assessment: a balancing act, ketterlin-geller et al. provide guidance on three different scoring methods that have been used to report scores from the early grade mathematics assessment (egma). ketterlin-geller et al. examine the usability, reliability, and distinctiveness of using total scores, subscores, and composite scores. egma data from jordan was used to evaluate each of these scoring methods and illustrate some of the limitations and implications of each method. based on these considerations, ketterlin-geller et al. recommend using subscores to report egma results. methods to improve teacher preparation and teacher knowledge in a waterfall model for providing professional development for elementary school teachers: a pilot project to implement a competencybased approach, savard and cyr describe an initiative in the democratic republic of congo to improve mathematics learning in elementary school using a situation-based approach. a waterfall method of professional development was used to train teachers on this approach. savard and cyr share findings on the impact of the program on teachers’ knowledge, classroom teaching, and student achievement. recommendations and implications are shared to assist others in developing and implementing reform initiatives. in teacher-led professional learning in tanzania: perspectives of mathematics teacher leaders, swai and glanfield investigated mathematics teacher leaders’ (mtl) beliefs and perspectives about teacher-led professional learning (tlpl) in tanzania. swai and glanfield used a multisite case study design and had eight mtls in the study. qualitative analyses from indepth interviews with the mtls suggest five consistent and positive themes about how mtls perceive of tlpl: participative and engaging; reflective and experiential; collaborative; practical and contextual; and ongoing and sustainable. in improving pedagogical content knowledge on rational numbers of cambodian teacher trainers, van, mao, and cnudde report the findings from an intervention developed by the flemish association for development cooperation and technical assistance (vvob) in cambodia aimed at improving the content knowledge and pedagogical content knowledge of teacher trainers. the intervention focused on fractions and rational numbers and had training and coaching components. van et al. found that this intervention improved teacher trainers’ pedagogical content knowledge and improved their teaching strategies. references duncan, g. j., dowsett, c. j., claessens, a., magnuson, k., huston, a. c., klebanov, p., pagani, l. s., feinstein, l., engel, m., brooks-gunn, j., sexton, h., & duckworth, k. (2007). school readiness and later achievement. developmental psychology, 43(6), 1428-1446. global partnership for education. (2012). results for learning report 2012: fostering evidence-based dialogue to monitor access and quality in education. washington, dc: gpe. ritchie, s. j., & bates, t. c. (2013). enduring links from childhood mathematics and reading achievement to adult economic status. psychological science, 1-8. 4 global education review 5(2) world bank. (2011). learning for all: investing in people’s knowledge and skills to promote development. washington, dc: the international bank for reconstruction and development/the world bank. about the editor(s) lindsey perry, phd, is a research assistant professor at southern methodist university. her current research interests focus on investigating children's spatial and relational reasoning abilities, developing mathematics assessments for young children, and training educators on how to use data from assessments to make instructional decisions. leanne r. ketterlin-geller, phd, is the texas instruments endowed chair in education and professor in the simmons school of education and human development at southern methodist university. her research focuses on supporting student achievement in mathematics through developing technically rigorous formative assessment procedures and effective classroom practices. her work emphasizes valid decision-making systems for students with diverse needs. perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: greiner, ulrike, hofmann, franz & katskaller, michaela (2017). perspectives on mentoring novice teachers. global education review, 4 (4), 1-4. perspectives on mentoring novice teachers ulrike greiner paris lodron university salzburg franz hofmann paris lodron university salzburg michaela katstaller paris lodron university salzburg recent research on the quality of education at school (hattie, 2003; kunter et al., 2011) points out the important part teachers play: they are identified as the crucial factor influencing the quality of learning at schools. the first five years of teaching of the lifelong professional career development of teachers, called the induction period, are very important, both for the individual and for the educational system: the induction period is when teachers learn to adapt to the realities of school and to develop personal strengths on the one hand, while on the other hand, measures must be provided to support them to ensure quality of teaching at schools, giving a new generation of teachers a chance and opportunity to become a source of inspiration for a refreshing improvement of schools. nevertheless, little attention was paid to conducting and researching induction programmes for professional development of novice teachers in recent decades (mc namara, 1995). novice teachers must deal with questions concerning lesson planning, the use of different teaching methods, the assessment of student learning, classroom management and students’ individual needs, as well as becoming familiar with roles and attitudes as professionals (hericks, 2009; keller-schneider & hericks, 2014). teacher education programs have recently started to develop, shape and research this crucial period (ashby, p. et al., 2008). how novice teachers cope with the various situations and tasks in the beginning of their professional career, and how they can be best supported has now become a priority number one question internationally of strategies in teacher education and induction programs in collaboration with schools (european commission, 2010). this issue of global education review, “perspectives on mentoring novice teachers,” will hopefully contribute to the growing worldwide body of increasing research about mentoring as a substantial factor of formal and informal induction programmes. the starting position is defined by the undisputed fact that beginning teachers are confronted with specific challenges for which intensive internships for students in teacher education cannot prepare novice teachers so comprehensively that they can successfully cope with challenges without any further support. there are clear indications that accompanying measures in terms of mentoring by experienced, sometimes ______________________________ corresponding author: ulrike greiner, director of the school of educati0n, paris lodron university salzburg, kapitelgasse 4-6, 5020 salzburg, austria email: ulrike.greiner@sbg.ac.at mailto:ulrike.greiner@sbg.ac.at 2 global education review 4(4) specifically qualified teachers can be seen as most conducive to their professional development (hobson et al., 2009). there is “no single model of effective induction policies” (european commission, 2010, p. 7), and induction programmes do differ due to national educational and cultural contexts and specific goals (blömeke & paine, 2009; greiner, 2010). but in spite of the diversity of those programs from an international point of view, common fundamental elements as design criteria can be identified. the three basic kinds of support personal, social and professional are translated into four interlocking systems which means communities to shape ways of support (european commission, 2010, p. 16-19). of these mentoring systems, expert systems, peer systems and self-reflection systems our issue of ger concentrates on mentoring, which not only plays a crucial role among the support systems, but is considered the most important component (oecd, 2006; keller-schneider & hericks, 2014; mayr & neuweg, 2009). according to those dimensions of mentoring determined to meet the school’s demands as well as the individual’s needs, a theoretical framework is required. among different approaches to mentoring one can clearly see the change from an apprenticeship (instructional) model of mentoring, to a more discursive mentoring model that focuses on self-reflection enriched by dialogues with the mentor, and using more theoretical aspects (harrison, 2006; orlandbarak & klein, 2010). the mentor is a key figure, which self-evidently depends on quality of his/her mentoring, be it high or low (hofmann & springer, 2014). our issue, “perspectives on mentoring novice teachers,” brings together four contributions that deal with mentoring in different ways and contributes to the following topics, deepening their understanding and providing some empirical proof by having conducted research on their own:  tasks and challenges for novice teachers  tasks of mentors and theoretical frameworks for mentoring  required competences and attitudes of mentors  qualification standards and tools for mentors  the unique relationship between mentor and novice teacher  novice teachers’ perceptions of their competences and support received from mentoring  key elements of successful mentoring programmes  new trends in mentoring the article by johannes brandau, peter studencnik and silvia kopt-sixt, “dimensions and levels of mentoring: empirical findings of the first german inventory and implications for future practice,” contributes to current empirical knowledge about dimensions of mentoring by presenting the results of the development of an inventory as a standardized instrument facilitating structured feedback in mentoring. five dimensions of mentoring styles were identified and empirically explored and validated. the further validation and use of this inventory is highly important for new trends in mentoring as well, i.e., mentoring during lessons, near to classroom connected experience, as well as mentoring in learning communities. the article by angela gastager, anna nebel, viktoria präauer, jean-luc patry and barbara fageth, “pedagogical tact in mentoring of professional school internships,” deals with a traditionally important issue in pedagogy, namely tact as a certain procedural and conditional knowledge, to know when and how to act in critical pedagogical situations which demand intervention and decision-making. the authors investigated five advanced preservice teachers and three mentors by the method of stimulated recall, and pupils by the lesson interruption method to compare whether there might be a substantial difference between the experts’ and novices’ actions according to tact. the process of learning tact and becoming a perspectives on mentoring novice teachers 3 reflective practitioner is described as bridging the gap between scientific theory, subjective theory and practice. the article by isolde malmberg, “transitions between art and pedagogy: mentoring music teacher novices in austria,” focuses on novice music teachers and presents them as a very special profession for which a specific mentoring concept is required. the qualitative study embedded in the grounded theory framework includes interviews with experts to sharpen the research question, narrative interviews with eleven mentees and four group discussions with three to four mentors. the author characterizes the crucial period of induction by two different spheres of praxis (according to benner´s theory of praxeology): that of education, and that of art, both of them regarding a professional status, so that the conflict -being a teacher, being an artist, being none of it, being bothdevelops different problem-solving styles that dominate the induction period as a “status passage.” music teacher mentees have to be supported by working with this dichotomy as a basic feature due to the different positions possible. the article by elisabeth riebenbauer, gernot dreisiebner and michaela stock, “providing feedback, orientation and opportunities for reflection as key elements for successful mentoring programs: reviewing a program for future business education teachers,” tries to assess key elements of mentoring including the required competences of mentors, both from a student teacher’s and mentor’s perspective, based on student teachers´ tasks during their advanced semester of student teaching. one hundred and eightyeight persons, student teachers and their mentors, were questioned via an online survey at the end of the newly implemented mentoring program. additionally, the novice teachers’ perceptions of their own competences concerning assumed improvement during the programme were investigated the presentation of the development of additional corresponding mentoring tools, evaluation grid, learning diary and eportfolio, based on the theoretical framework of three-level-mentoring (feedbackreflection-orientation) is what makes this article quite interesting. references ashby, p., hobson, a. j., tracey, l., malderez, a., tomlinson, p., roper, t., chambers, g., & healy, j. (2008). beginner teachers´ experiences of initial teacher preparation, induction and early professional development: a review of literature. london: dcsf. blömeke, s., paine, l. (2009). berufseinstiegsprogramme im internationalen vergleich. journal für lehrerinnenbildung, 9(3), 18-25. european commission (2010). developing coherent and system-wide induction programmes for beginning teachers: a handbook for policymakers. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/reposito ry/education/policy/school/doc/handbook0410_en. pdf [january 1, 2018]. greiner, u. (2010). lehrerinnenbildung neu: die gestaltung der induktionsphase. expertinnengruppe lehrerinnenbildung neu: die zukunft der pädagogischen berufe. https://www.bmb.gv.at/ministerium/vp/2010/ expertise_lehrerinn_19694.pdf?61ecc0. [january 1, 2018]. harrison, j. et al. (2006). mentoring beginning teachers in secondary schools: an analysis of practice. teaching and teacher education, 22, 1055-1067. hattie, j. (2008). visible learning: a synthesis of over 800 meta-analyses relating to achievement. new york: routledge. hericks, u. (2009). entwicklungsaufgaben in der berufseinstiegsphase. journal für lehrerinnenbildung, 9(3), 32-39. hobson, a. et al. (2009). mentoring beginning teachers: what we know and what we don´t. teaching and teacher education, 25(1), 207-216. hofmann, f., & springer, k. (2014). wie autonomie unterstützend agieren mentorinnen und mentoren bei ihrer begleitung von berufseinsteigerinnen und berufseinsteigern? in g. beer, i. benischek, o. dangl & c. plaimauer (eds.), mentoring im berufseinstieg eine mehrperspektivische betrachtung. erkenntnisse eines entwicklungsprojekts (p. 57-95). münster: lit. keller-schneider, m., & hericks, u. (2014). forschungen zum berufseinstieg. übergang von der ausbildung in den beruf. in e. terhart, h. bennewitz & m. rothland (eds.). handbuch der forschung zum lehrerberuf (p. 386-407). münster: waxmann. kunter, m., baumert, j., blum, w., klusmann, u., krauss, s., & neubrand, m. (eds.) (2011). professionelle kompetenz von lehrkräften. ergebnisse des forschungsprogramms coactiv. münster: waxmann. http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/policy/school/doc/handbook0410_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/policy/school/doc/handbook0410_en.pdf http://ec.europa.eu/dgs/education_culture/repository/education/policy/school/doc/handbook0410_en.pdf https://www.bmb.gv.at/ministerium/vp/2010/%20expertise_lehrerinn_19694.pdf?61ecc0 https://www.bmb.gv.at/ministerium/vp/2010/%20expertise_lehrerinn_19694.pdf?61ecc0 4 global education review 4(4) mayr, j. & neuweg, h.-g. (2009). lehrer/innen als zentrale ressource im bildungssystem. rekrutierung und qualifizierung. nationaler bildungsbericht (p. 99120). graz: leykam. mcnamara, d. (1995). the influence of student teachers´ tutors and mentors upon their classroom practice: an exploratory study. teaching and teacher education, 11(1), 51-61. oecd (2006). attracting, developing and retaining effective teachers. http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/attractingdevelopi ngandretainingeffectiveteachersfinalreportteachersmatter.htm [january 1, 2018]. orland-barak, l. (2010). learning to mentor-as-praxis. foundations for a curriculum in teacher education. http://www.springer.com/ gp/book/9781441905819 [january 1, 2018]. about the author(s) mmag. ddr. ulrike greiner is the director of the school of education at the university of salzburg and has been engaged in teacher education for 25 years. in 2016 she established a doctorate program focusing on teacher competences at her university, together with a faculty of 20 researchers. currently she is a member of three research groups concerning "diversity and school,” "epistemological beliefs and deeper learning in teacher education" and "literary competences of novice teachers." mag. dr. franz hofmann was born in 1961 and currently works as an associate professor at the faculty of educational sciences at the university of salzburg and additionally at the school of education of the university of salzburg. his focus of research includes classroom research, teacher education and school development. publications are authored to questions in the field of quality of teaching, teacher education, education standards and scientific methodological questions. mag. dr. michaela katstaller is a senior scientist at the university of salzburg. she has just finished her phd on a quantitative, fouryear longitudinal study on students’ experiences of scholastic failure between the age of 11 and 14. her current research interests are focused on factors influencing teaching choice as well as novice and expert teachers’ classroom management expertise. http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/attractingdevelopingandretainingeffectiveteachers-finalreportteachersmatter.htm http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/attractingdevelopingandretainingeffectiveteachers-finalreportteachersmatter.htm http://www.oecd.org/edu/school/attractingdevelopingandretainingeffectiveteachers-finalreportteachersmatter.htm http://www.springer.com/%20gp/book/9781441905819 javascript:void(0) javascript:void(0) caribbean early childhood education 236 ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: escayg, kerry-ann, & kinkead-clark, zoyah. (2018). mapping the contours of caribbean early childhood education. global education review, 5 (4), 236-253. mapping the contours of caribbean early childhood education kerry-ann escayg university of nebraska at omaha zoyah kinkead-clark the university of the west indies at mona abstract regional scholars in the caribbean context have long advocated for quality early childhood education. the majority of their contributions however, focus primarily on curriculum, policy, and to a lesser extent, teaching practices. in this article, we broaden the scope of extant literature by conceptualizing a model for caribbean early childhood education, one which draws on and supports an anti-colonial and decolonizing perspective. specifically, we interrogate the enduring legacy of colonialism on teaching and learning practices—and illustrate how these manifest in contemporary schooling processes. equally significant, we examine and critique underlying epistemologies that frame current regional approaches, and offer an alternative framework that accents cultural knowledges in curriculum, pedagogy and teacher education. in response, we foreground childhood decolonization as integral to the development of positive racial and cultural identity, and in such vein, offer curricula, pedagogical and institutional (i.e., teacher education) suggestions consonant with an anti-colonial and decolonizing approach to early childhood education in the english-speaking caribbean. keywords anti-colonial; caribbean; early childhood education; decolonization; curriculum policy; cultural identity introduction in diverse national and international contexts, researchers continue to emphasize quality early childhood education and programming as a means of promoting optimal development in young children aged birth to eight. typically, these discussions revolve around ageappropriate early learning curricula, such as play-based learning, teaching practices, family relationships, and policy. in the caribbean, specifically, regional scholarship on early years education has addressed similar components: namely, teaching practices (e.g., edwards & rake; 2016; latty & ledbetter, 2016) and curricula (caribbean child development centre, 2010). yet to date, no extant work has systematically and holistically examined the larger field of early childhood education in the caribbean context through an anti-colonial and decolonizing lens. such an approach interrogates and critiques ongoing eurocentric influences in the knowledge base of early childhood education currently deployed in caribbean contexts, and advocates for the integration of local knowledge—so as to propose ________________________________ corresponding author kerry-ann escayg, university of nebraska at omaha, roskens hall 406-c, 6005 university dr n, omaha, ne 68182 email: kescayg@unomaha.edu 237 global education review 5(4) a caribbean-centered (english-speaking caribbean) early childhood education in the areas of curriculum, pedagogy and teacher education. drawing on anti-colonial caribbean theory (escayg, 2014) as well as caribbean socialpolitical thought, this paper establishes a caribbean-centered model of early childhood education. first, we examine the colonial legacy of the caribbean region, and illustrate how such historical process has shaped current schooling practices, including teacher education. next, we provide an overview of the theoretical framework guiding the present discussion, delineating the specific tenets which inform our model of caribbean early childhood education. then, we engage in a more substantive discussion on the elements of curriculum, pedagogy and teacher education. we conclude with a review of the main contours, their applicability to regional educational and social anti-colonial reform, and suggestions for future research. the colonial legacy for many developing countries, recollections of colonisation unearth deep seated memories about institutionalized practices which for centuries marginalized the practices, beliefs, cultures and unique identities of indigenous peoples or those formerly enslaved. as suggested by phillips and whatman (2007) and walke (2000) the impetus behind appeals to decolonize education is rooted in the position that education has continued to be used as a tool to marginalize the validity and the richness of the former colonized by negating the value of their beliefs, practices and cultures and minimizing how these benefit the teaching and learning process. in his research, for instance, lopes cardozo (2012) argued decolonizing education implies the “removal of imposed educational practices which have little bearing or meaning to indigenous peoples while simultaneously highlighting the value or ‘re-evaluating’ the importance of the indigenous cultures through education” (p. 767). for many islands in the caribbean this poses a particularly poignant challenge. the caribbean community comprises of a group of fifteen member state islands predominantly surrounded by the caribbean sea (antigua & barbuda, belize, commonwealth of dominica, grenada, republic of haiti, montserrat, federation of st. kitts & nevis, st. lucia, st. vincent & the grenadines, commonwealth of the bahamas, barbados, cooperative republic of guyana, jamaica, republic of suriname, republic of trinidad and tobago). with a shared history of being former colonies, for hundreds of years these islands were used as trophies of war and, for the most part, functioned as “cash cows” for britain and france. considered to be particularly valuable for its sugar and rum exports and the hundreds of thousands of slaves that produced them, these islands thrived on a political and social system where the few elites were elevated and the vast majority (usually of darker skin) were disenfranchised and marginalized ( king, 1998; layne, 1999; miller, 1998). the west indian islands are highly cosmopolitan and racially diverse. however, despite this diversity, education continues to be very two dimensional and seemingly untouched by this richness of the history of its peoples (kinkead-clark, 2015). in the over two hundred years since the abolition of slavery, education continues to reflect a highly segregated and exclusionary system along racial, gender and socio-economic lines. this is very similar to the practices during colonization (sherlock & bennett, 1998; hamilton, 1997; miller, 1999). caribbean early childhood education 238 after the abolition of slavery, education was used as a means to maintain a social status quo which perpetuated the marginalization of non-whites, and maintained the dominant hegemonic positions of others. to date, as suggested by boisselle (2016), the colonial legacy of the caribbean continues to shape our education structures in subtle and more overt ways. this system has largely been promoted both as a response to global shifts and the need for the caribbean islands to keep up with these shifts, and secondly, for the tendencies to privilege education as influenced by more economically advantaged countries while minimising the value of our indigenous culture and the quality of our education product (miller, 1999). additionally, research suggests that in some caribbean contexts, teacher-student relationships and pedagogies may in fact reflect many defining characteristics of the colonial social order. the colonial legacy and the current education system: themes of congruency with the advent of independence, many english-speaking caribbean states sought to decolonize the education system by providing students with curricula and learning opportunities consistent with their socio-cultural realities. however, although much has been accomplished in such regard, the influences of the colonial legacy continue to permeate pedagogical approaches across different levels of education, including the early years. bristol (2010), for instance, demonstrated how specific components of teaching stem from and in essence, reproduce, elements of colonial psychosocial conditioning. drawing on key premises of beckford’s (1976/2001) “plantation society”, namely that of domination, bristol (2010) described plantation pedagogy as both oppressive and as a practice of subversion. given the scope of the present article, we explore the tenets of plantation pedagogy that mirror oppressive teacher-student relationship. according to the author, instructional practices include hierarchal relations of power (that is, the teacher holds all the power in the classroom), passivity (the teacher dispenses knowledge to students), and a “black practice of whiteness” (p. 173). with regards to the latter, the author explains such term by linking elements of fanon’s (1952/1967) psychological exegesis of the colonizer-colonized relationship, most notably mimicry, to teaching practices. the argument posits that within the classroom, the teacher performs the educational practices reminiscent of the colonial schooling experience to which he/she was exposed (hence the term "black practice of whiteness”). as a result of the psychological conditioning and violence of his/her earlier schooling experience, the teacher fails to incorporate—and perhaps assign value—to students’ local/cultural knowledges “such as storytelling, dance, the carnival and spontaneous community gatherings” (p. 173). to advance bristol’s treatise, we argue that in some cases, as a result of the colonial experience, along with recent globalization agendas, teachers impute little significance to cultural/local knowledges. indeed, the debasement of self, both as a cultural and racial body, is reminiscent of fanon’s “epidermalization of inferiority” (which refers to the internalization of african inferiority vis a vis european superiority), producing a fractured consciousness marked by a desire for “whiteness” and more pointedly, what it embodies: power. in some cases, the colonized consciousness may impact teachers’ disciplinary practices. discipline as a feature of plantation pedagogy bears striking parallels to the ways in 239 global education review 5(4) which the overseers and plantation owners controlled and surveilled the enslaved and later on, indentured labourers. floggings and extreme forms of punishment were not uncommon; in fact, as the literature shows, physical violence was a core component of the colonial relationship in the caribbean and elsewhere. physical violence was strongly linked to social control, but racial doctrines that dehumanized non-white bodies also provided a rationale for inhumane treatment. in the context of caribbean schooling, the use of harsh discipline (although it is important to note that corporal punishment in schools has been legally outlawed in trinidad and jamaica) signifies to some extent, a colonial psyche functioning in the gaze of the colonized such that delusions serve as truth; or to offer a more psychoanalytical interpretation, could such disciplinary measure function as an opportunity to relieve the psyche of deep collective and historical trauma? could the violence evident in discipline practices indicate an expression of internal disequilibrium caused by experiences of powerlessness and silence? although the author conceptualizes plantation pedagogy by referring to the trinidadian context, there is evidence to suggest that teachers in other caribbean nation states also employ features of plantation pedagogy, chief among them being harsh disciplinary practices (e.g., anderson & payne, 1994; casey, 2016). although there is a dearth of empirical literature on how such practices affect students’ learning outcomes, caribbean writers (e.g., hodge,1970; james, 1963/1969; lamming, 1953; lovelace, 1996) have revealed how colonial education affected students’ sense of self, identity and belonging. indeed, childhood colonization and decolonization, a tenet of anticolonial caribbean theory (escayg, 2014), derived from a literary analysis of a few of these works, exemplified how colonial schooling practices are organized around a central principle of psychological conditioning; consequently, anti-colonial caribbean theory, as applied to young children’s educational experiences, advocates for anti-colonial teaching practices and teacher training. we argue that these interventions are necessary, because as we have discussed earlier, in some instances, teachers’ pedagogies tend to embody particular elements of the colonial psycho-social legacy. conversely, in the curriculum of teacher education, however, we also find a similar record of colonial imposition. colonial influence on teacher education and implications for current curriculum practices (in this piece, we refer to curriculum as the planned and unplanned experiences children have in school or which are reflective of those promoted by the school context. this includes teachers’ practices and expectations.) despite past and contemporary appeals to contextualize teacher education, across the islands, teacher education programmes continue to draw predominantly on american and eurocentric theories, which have largely prevented the achievement of this goal. a review of teacher education courses from several of the islands serves as testament to this dissonance where the philosophical underpinnings of the programmes demonstrate a heavy bias toward american and european theorists including; bruner, piaget, bronfenbrenner, vygotsky and montessori. while valuable, none of these theories were developed with consideration of caribbean children and therefore, while useful as a guide, cannot solely be used as the theoretical foundation guiding how teachers are prepared and how they are expected to teach young children. to do this means we perpetuate the caribbean early childhood education 240 legacy of our teachers being ill-prepared to teach caribbean children. beyond the obvious challenges with this, nsamenang (2007) stated this is dangerous because it minimizes the cultural identity and the uniqueness of eighty percent of the world’s children who live outside of europe and north america. as he suggested, “… western conceptions of the construct must not simply be adjusted for use” [for children who are of a different culture] (p.1). caribbean teacher education (including the curriculum requirements) has been very guilty of just this where programmes have not done enough to prepare teachers to meet caribbean children’s needs. what this means is that our children will continue to reap the negative implications of this practice especially as it relates to how they are treated in the school setting; the expectations teachers have of them and the pedagogical practices used to teach them. nsamenang (2007) has cautioned against taking culturally insensitive approaches to early childhood education, where teachers’ practices are not aligned to the “ethnocultural realities and developmental norms” of the children. for instance, though learning through play is a highly recommended practice for young children, caribbean children use play differently, and as such, an understanding of this ought to be explicitly articulated in the development of the curriculum (roopnarine & johnson, 1994; long, 2013). it is in light of both the historical and contemporary manifestations of the colonial legacy on the caribbean educational system, we now turn to a discussion on a theoretical framework that interrogates such practices and offer an anti-colonial conceptual lens from which to establish a regional and culturally relevant approach to early childhood education. theoretical framework anti-colonial caribbean theory (escayg, 2014) is an interdisciplinary framework that foregrounds historical analyses and critiques of colonization in relation to the social, economic, education and psychological effects that continue to impact caribbean peoples. while such framework comprises of several tenets, in this paper, we use the concepts of resistance, childhood decolonization, indigenous/cultural knowledges and practices, as well as creolization to articulate the caribbean-centered model of early childhood education. anti-colonial caribbean theory underscores resistance as central to anti-colonial praxis, and resistance as linked to the diversity of ways oppressed peoples have made sense of their realities and, in the process, have opposed the colonial social order. on this account, dei and asgharzadeh (2001) explained that “it is a way of celebration of oral, visual, textual, political, and material resistance of colonized groups” (p. 301). working with this central notion, anti-colonial caribbean theory emphasizes the multiplicity of forms and creative expressions found in historical and contemporary narratives of resistance. also, similar to anti-colonial theory which supports the “decolonizing of the mind” (dei, 2006, p. 11), anti-colonial caribbean theory is articulated from a perspective that seeks to lay bare the ongoing forms of domination so as to further advance decolonizing initiatives. such theory expands on the decolonization of the mind precept by arguing for a more holistic trajectory of the decolonization process. in other words, anti-colonial caribbean theory conceptualizes colonization and decolonization from a life-span perspective by including the period of childhood and by examining how such early experiences are manifested in adult life, particularly in the areas of social-emotional wellbeing and development. 241 global education review 5(4) moreover, decolonization is operationalized, similar to dei (2006), to include the active resistance to current imposition of western belief systems, as well as colonial legacies of thought that delegitimize indigenous knowledge and values, positioning these as substandard or inferior to dominant epistemologies. what differentiates anticolonial caribbean theory, however, is that it recognizes the early years as a critical period in which children may develop and practice inimical colonial ideologies of race, much to their own psychological and social detriment; consequently, anti-colonial caribbean theory supports educational practices consonant with the goals of childhood decolonization: these involve a critique of the knowledge systems that inform pedagogical practice, learning and teaching processes, as well as the curriculum utilized in early learning classrooms. second, decolonization in early childhood education emphasizes the importance of integrating students’ cultural knowledges into the classroom, such as storytelling, music and culturally relevant curriculum and play materials. with regard to race and identity, decolonization in early childhood subverts colonial discourses of race, particularly those which play an influential role in shaping young children’s beliefs and attitudes towards skin colour and hair texture (escayg, 2014; escayg, 2017). in fact, empirical work on jamaican children (e.g., ferguson & cramer, 2007) and trinidadian children (escayg, 2014; 2017) clearly highlight the need for teaching practices that foster racial pride. apart from decolonization, race and identity, the concept and discourses associated with creolization present much significance to the development of a caribbean model of early childhood education. generally defined, and largely attributed to scholars such as braithwaite (1971), nettleford (1978), and patterson (1975), creolization theory argues that caribbean culture signifies a combination of both african and european practices. it is noteworthy to point out, however, that scholars have critiqued the creolization discourse for centering primarily afro-caribbean cultural forms (e.g., khan, 2007). notwithstanding such critiques, the creolization discourse helps elucidate the formation and transformations of caribbean cultural practices, and further, informs the caribbean early childhood education model as it provides the historical and conceptual lens to trace the genesis of caribbean cultural traditions, and to demonstrate their relevance to children’s educational and social experiences. as well, creolization dovetails with the anticolonial caribbean framework as it is derived from historical and social legacies that while inherently violent and unequal, gave rise to a pattern of resistance among caribbean peoples— one which utilizes the creative arts as a means of self-expression, decolonization and community/nation building. articulating caribbean culture through creolization theory although it is generally recognized that colonial histories vary according to the nation state, (king-dorset, 2008), conceptualizing a definition of caribbean culture, and one which engages with both context-specific differences as well regional commonalities, is a long-standing tradition in the canon of caribbean social and cultural thought. indeed, many scholars have conceived of and refined articulations of caribbean culture through the prism of creolization theory. such body of scholarship, and one which continues to evolve, often underscores transplantation, transformation, and the significance of african cultural traditions (e.g., bolland, 2006) as central caribbean early childhood education 242 elements in the development of caribbean culture. creolization theory highlights how african and european cultural forms were combined to create a distinct “creole” culture, while also recognizing the unequal power relations inherent in such process. in one of the seminal contributions, braithwaite (1971) described creolization as a symbiotic, that is, involving the cultural traditions of africa and europe; and further argued that these informed the social practices of jamaican citizens, both black and white. simply stated, such process was mutual insofar as the colonizer and the colonized adapted to each other’s cultural traditions. however, braithwaite further characterized the engagement of european cultural traditions by african jamaicans as “mimicry”. implicit in such charge is a recognition that the colonial power embedded in european cultural traditions affected the psyche of the colonized such that this “performance” was valued and endowed with a measure of social significance, particularly among middle-class jamaicans. the belief that the process of creolization—largely because of the colonial conditions under which it arose—privileges one cultural form over another, (that is, european over african) has been expressed by other scholars (e.g., nettleford, 1970). such claim has merit in the sense that it elucidates how specific characteristics of the colonial relationship (e.g., economic and social power, violence, and oppression) circumscribed the ways in which cultural traditions were deployed in the caribbean context. in line with this view, hall (2001) acknowledged that the development of caribbean culture and cultural forms involved unequal relations of power between the colonized and the colonizer. one example that can be gleaned from his analysis points to the colonial violence (psychological and economic) of slavery and indentureship in the caribbean diaspora,— in which african and indo cultures were brought to— and subsequently retained and transformed. yet, to expound on the issue of power as it pertains to the creolization process requires a more comprehensive lens, one that extends beyond the historical colonizedcolonizer relationship. in recent years, for instance, due to formal independence, power relationships can be found in the specific cultural practices that constitute the discourse and imagery surrounding national identity (see, for example, discussions on nationalism in trinidad). notwithstanding its violent antecedents, and contemporary manifestations, creolization signifies creativity and resistance. that is, while there is much debate surrounding the “purity” of african traditions or what were transferred to their descendants in the caribbean diaspora, it is generally agreed that for the most part, particular elements of african cultural traditions have exerted a profound influence on caribbean culture (bolland, 2006). these include cultural art forms such as music, dance and food (chudesokei, 2015; hall, 2001). as king-dorset (2008) noted, “…dance, music and song from the cultural traditions of africa survived better than other elements of african culture after the traumatic experience of transportation to the caribbean” (p. 3). the fact that such practices bear relevance to contemporary art forms across the caribbean testify to the enduring influence of african cultural traditions. despite the prevailing presence of the african cultural traditions, definitions of caribbean culture and theoretical models including creolization, must take into account the racial and cultural diversity of caribbean peoples. for while the influence of african cultural traditions cannot be ignored or dismissed, the silencing or marginalizing of other voices and experiences in the articulations of a regional culture can prove equally limiting. 243 global education review 5(4) bolland (2006) offered a similar sentiment when he noted that “afro-creole is not the whole or the end point of creole culture. the creole caribbean has no end point” (p. 10). by drawing on these main currents of creolization, its critiques, and elements of anti-colonial caribbean theory, we now proceed to examine one feature of a caribbean-centered approach to early childhood education: curriculum. caribbean-centered early childhood education: curriculum as the literature reveals, the majority of early childhood curriculum models stem from eurocentric, western perspectives. in recent years, for instance, the play-based approach has gained increasing attention, largely because some research evidence indicates positive associations between learning through play and children’s social and emotional development (e.g., singer, golinkoff, & hirsh-paskek, 2006). notwithstanding the influence of such approaches in caribbean early childhood education, regional scholars have developed learning outcomes, incorporating both cultural and developmentally appropriate practices. this framework has been used to develop both a jamaican and trinidadian early learning curriculum guideline (williams & charles, 2008). in this section, we examine and assess the caribbean learning outcomes along with the trinidadian and jamaican early learning curricula with the aim of demonstrating how tenets of anti-colonial—namely that of decolonization—and creolization, that is, the cultural traditions of the caribbean—can be utilized to enhance specific features of the early learning curriculum. while economic and other barriers exist, there have been notable attempts at constructing a regional curriculum for early childhood education, one that responds to the needs and well-being of caribbean children (see, for example, williams & charles, 2008). fundamental to such efforts have been the child focus ii project. established in 2001, one of the central goals of this project was curriculum development (williams & charles, 2008). regional discussions on early learning curriculum began in 2004, however, with a workshop that included “representatives from eighteen countries…. regional early childhood specialists in child health and development, preschool education, teacher and practitioner training, care of children from birth to three and in research on the quality of early learning environments in the region” (p. 24). this workshop led to the development of a regional learning outcomes framework and is characterized by the following strands: “1. a healthy, strong, well-adjusted child, 2. an effective communicator, 3.a child who values own culture, 4. a critical thinker and independent learner, 5. a child who respects self, others and the environment,6. a resilient child” (p. 25). these strands, while each containing specific features, appear to coalesce around developmental considerations; namely, physical and emotional (strand 1), cognitive (strand 2) social-emotional (strand 3), cognitive (strand 4), social (strand 5) and social-cognitive (strand 6). the developmental focus as it has been operationalized in the learning outcome framework has guided the development of both the jamaican and trinidadian early learning curriculum guidelines. review of existing curriculum guidelines: trinidad and jamaica while we acknowledge the diversity of curriculum approaches in the caribbean context, we situate our analysis within a review of trinidad and jamaica curriculum guidelines because these derive from the regional framework—and hence, can serve as an entry point from which to begin conceptualizing the caribbean early childhood education 244 constitutive elements of a caribbean-centered early learning curriculum. the national early childhood care and education curriculum guide (2006) of trinidad and tobago is similar to the regional framework as it foregrounds its curricula approaches in five central developmental strands: “wellbeing, effective communication, citizenship, intellectual empowerment and aesthetic expression” (p. 32). such developmental thrust emphasizes the importance of attending to the “whole child” by way of recognizing the domains of development, the relationship between and among them, and by illustrating how learning opportunities that take into account these domains can foster optimal outcomes for young children. equally significant objectives include parent-teacher relationships, inclusive teaching, and research-informed practice (p. 14). more plainly, the trinidad ece curriculum “was…designed and developed to ensure that curriculum content and instructional strategies…will assist ecce teachers in facilitating and encouraging learning and development appropriate to and inclusive of all children, including children with identified disabilities, challenges, and learning and developmental needs” (p. 15). such an approach, however, is informed by specific bodies of knowledge that may be characterized as dominant educational standpoints, for they continue to exert much influence in the field of early childhood education. although the curriculum has at its core developmental considerations, it also consists of a wide range of theoretical perspectives. according to the document, “the national ecce curriculum guide promotes an eclectic view” (p. 19); and as a result, incorporates theories of “cognitive development, constructivism, socioconstructivism, psychosocial, humanistic, ecological, multiple intelligences, brain-based learning, constructivist, social-cultural, and post-modernist” (pp. 19-20). incorporating these diverse theories allows for multiple interpretations of what constitutes knowledge, the socio-cultural factors that bear upon children’s learning as well as their development, and from a more post-modern perspective, the ways in which children are not only culturally and historically situated in their social worlds, but also the lived experiences and types of knowledges that originate from these experiences. yet, noticeably absent are caribbean-centered theories that contextualize children’s experiences within the appropriate historical, social and cultural processes. the jamaica early childhood curriculum guide (2010) shares similar characteristics with its trinidadian counterpart. underscoring its developmental objectives are also strands identified in the regional learning outcomes (i.e., “wellness, communication, valuing culture, intellectual empowerment, respect for self, others and the environment and resilience” p. v). of equal importance to note is that the jamaican document is geared towards students between the ages of four and five. although both regional documents contain various strengths, such as the developmental domains and considerations of culture, the weaknesses, however, include epistemological underpinnings of such models (that is, eurocentric perspectives without any reference to caribbean social thought), the lack of emphasis on decolonization through anticolonial pedagogies, and the failure to conceptualize and provide teaching strategies that would challenge colonial meanings attached to racial characteristics, such as skin colour and hair texture. the preliminary model of caribbean early childhood education which we have proposed addresses these gaps by utilizing the decolonizing framework of anti-colonial caribbean theory. 245 global education review 5(4) decolonizing framework for caribbean early childhood education: curriculum from the writings of fanon (1952/1967), to literary prose (e.g., edgell, 1982; hodge, 1970; lamming 1953; lovelace,1996) to the melodious rhythms of reggae and calypso beckoning our minds to imagine alternate social-economic possibilities, to the storytelling of elders invoking cultural elements with a particular wisdom of the soul, to the impassioned speeches of great political leaders combining scintillating intellect with an astute cognizance of the conditions of the oppressed, caribbean peoples have consistently exposed and challenged the psychological and economic legacies of colonization. rarely have such emancipatory approaches been incorporated into the teaching and learning activities of early childhood education. in the discussion below, we outline a decolonizing framework, one which accents the early childhood education context as a potential site for decolonizing praxis. from the outset, it is important to note that what we are suggesting is a decolonizing framework that can be integrated across the different strands of the curriculum. it is not a stand-alone product; rather, a decolonizing framework consists of overarching ideals which can then inform the existing curricula strands. therefore, we define the decolonizing framework as an epistemological lens derived from historical and current socio-cultural analyses of the caribbean region, and the lived experiences of caribbean peoples and their cultural knowledges. namely, the decolonizing framework recognizes and resists the ongoing forms of neo-colonial domination and globalization such as the imposition of western knowledge, culture, ways of knowing, and western cultural artifacts (e.g., play materials). this framework also centers childhood decolonization (and resistance to globalization) as a spiritual, moral, cultural, and psychological right for caribbean children. it positions teachers and parents as the conduits for developing a consciousness that fosters critical and accurate understandings of the historical colonial legacy and its relationship to contemporary realities, and one which supports positive racial, regional and national identity. ideally, we hope that young caribbean children in the contemporary era and beyond will possess the presence of mind to actively discern and resist the hegemonic values, imageries and practices of powerful nation states that continue to impinge upon the economic and cultural autonomy/identity of caribbean countries. in short, we want our caribbean children to develop and appreciate anti-colonial ways of being and knowing. the ways in which these particular elements are consonant with the strands of the regional framework are indicated below; however, for purposes of clarity, we have organized these around the central goal of the proposed curriculum: decolonization. accordingly, we begin each objective with the heading “the decolonized child will”: • not valorize the colonial/western culture and knowledges at the expense of his/her own cultural history, ways of knowing and knowledges (wellness strand). this also applies to colonial meanings attached to skin colour and hair texture (escayg, 2017). • be able to construct narratives (stories) that center the accuracy of the historical encounter (and the effects); engage in literacy activities that reflect his/her sociocultural context and that of the region (specific songs, poems, etc.), and value his/her own local dialect (effective communication). • use the arts, for example, dramatic activities, to express pride in his/her identity caribbean early childhood education 246 and physical characteristics (aesthetic expression and intellectual empowerment). drama such as plays can also be used to teach children about the history of their local context. • appreciate the diverse elements of regional and local culture; awareness of how these have been used as means of resistance in the past (citizenship & intellectual empowerment). • thrive in a learning environment that embraces and supports individual differences (valuing culture). • display consciousness that despite innate differences/ unique characteristics/ traits they [and others] have the ability and the opportunity to do and try new things without fear (kinkead-clark, 2017) (resilience & respect for self & others). • develop and nurture a decolonized consciousness that is not rooted in historical amnesia, but rather, in a keen awareness of how the past continues to inform the present (escayg, 2017). this applies specifically to helping children recognize how and why certain meanings and values were attached to physical characteristics such as skin colour and hair texture (intellectual empowerment). it is important to note that the aforementioned elements are not an exhaustive list. as a preliminary framework, it represents a nascent stage of development, which we will refine and further elaborate in the near future by drawing on an empirical study with early childhood teachers and administrators from the english-speaking region. apart from the curricula efforts, however, we have also considered how a decolonizing framework can be applied to teachers’ pedagogical approaches. caribbean early childhood education: decolonizing pedagogy while researchers have often operationalized pedagogy in accordance with their particular perspectives/positions, the definition which we employ in this article—and one which aligns with the theoretical underpinnings of our present work—is “any conscious activity by one person designed to enhance learning in another” (watkins & mortimore, 1999, p. 3). in doing so, firstly, we broaden the scope of teaching activities to include a wide range of instructional practices, for instance, play-based learning and classroom organization; and secondly, we connect dimensions of decolonized consciousness with approaches specific to a student-centered learning process. to contextualize our discussion however, it would be helpful to first review the historical and contemporary literature on teaching practices in the caribbean. as an integrated system of domination, the colonial relationship extended well beyond the economic, social and political spheres; indeed, it pervaded all contexts of daily life, and education was no exception. in trinidad, for example, features of colonial education such as curriculum and instructional strategies were designed to create a psyche so deeply committed to the colonizer’s interests, culture, and beliefs, that the colonized would not only come to see him/her self through the eyes of the colonizer, but also consciously accept the myth of european superiority, thereby undermining his/her own liberation (london, 2001, emphasis added). combining london’s analysis of colonial education with fanon’s (1952/1967) psychoanalytical reading of the social processes germane to the colonizer-colonized relationship, we gesture towards a deeper and more nuanced understanding of the goals of colonial education: to develop a pathological sense of self in the colonized, to develop a love and admiration for 247 global education review 5(4) the colonizer, and to hinder critical consciousness among the oppressed. james (1963/1969) provided a compelling personal narrative of such experience: it was only long years after that i understood the limitation on spirit, vision and self-respect which imposed on us by the fact that our masters, our curriculum, our code of morals, everything began from the basis that britain was the source of all light and leading and our business was to admire, wonder, imitate, learn; our criterion for success was to have succeeded in approaching that distant ideal. (p. 30, as cited in lavia, 2006, p. 284)inimical in form and function, the aims of colonial education served to maintain the social order, while simultaneously afflicting the mind and soul of the oppressed with a barrage of knowledges and social practices that denied basic human needs, including that of self-esteem. simply stated, colonial education in the english-speaking caribbean functioned as an apparatus of social domination (tiffin, 2001) with psychological violence at its helm. notwithstanding curricular reform in primary and secondary education, in some contexts, contemporary teaching practices reflect methods consistent with the former colonial model; and as such, warrant a decolonized approach. decolonizing pedagogy: teachers’ practices and teacher education we have proposed a pedagogy that aligns with and supports the decolonizing early childhood education initiative. we focus our attention on teachers’ practices and teacher education. in the ensuing section, we explore some concrete ways teachers can perform a decolonizing pedagogy in their classrooms. similar to other anti-oppression advocates (e.g., freire, 1968/1970; tejeda, espinoza, & gutierrez, 2003), we conceive decolonizing pedagogy as a practice of teaching committed to fostering students’ critical consciousness through dialogue, meaningful, supportive relationships, collaboration, and opportunities for questioning and problem solving. in the caribbean early childhood classroom, for instance, the teacher can include materials that reflect caribbean culture (e.g., picture books, ring games, jingles, and pretend play materials). we do acknowledge, however, that there is a dearth of children’s literature (specifically, picture books appropriate for the 35 age group) specific to the caribbean context. as well, granted the environment is conducive to such a change, spatial arrangements that reflect a community/collectivist orientation can also be implemented; that could encourage dialogue between teachers and students. such strategy not only eschews teaching practices that reflect the hierarchal arrangements of the plantation (and the psychological violence that derives from such experience, including silence and powerlessness) but also promotes students’ critical thinking skills. in other words, we encourage teachers to infuse the elements of caribbean storytelling into the formal pedagogical approaches in the classroom. to this end, we also recommend that teachers encourage studentstudent dialogue as well as teacher-student dialogue to demonstrate to students the importance of voice and collaborative learning. in a similar vein, we propose that teachers make use of activities that derive from students’ experiences and cultures. in fact, in escayg’s (2014) study, one teacher remarked, “why can’t we say a for achar (an indo-trinidadian delicacy), instead of a for apple?” thus, as the participant expressed, the approach to learning the alphabet is skewed towards using items, in this case, fruits, that are not indigenous to the child’s local and cultural context. to address such disconnect, the teacher suggested caribbean early childhood education 248 incorporating cultural foods in the learning activities and materials so as to make the learning more culturally relevant and meaningful. teachers’ anti-colonial and decolonizing pedagogy can and should be developed throughout their pre-service education. however, the precursor to this ideal is to ensure that teacher education programs are grounded in anti-colonial perspectives and practices. more specifically, decolonising teacher education requires a deep understanding of the biases and tensions that exist in how knowledge is constructed and how pre-service and inservice teachers are trained to disseminate it. as battiste (2002) and phelan (2011) explained, despite the plethora of changes taking place in teacher education, euro-american ideologies have had a considerable impact on perspectives regarding what teachers should teach, what constitutes teachers’ best practices, and how and what teachers should do in order to achieve this. arguably, two of the dominant features of caribbean teacher education are the heavy dependence on texts and research from euroamerican authors to provide the framework for what teachers’ education ought to look like, and, the questionable practice of ascribing wholeheartedly to internationally prescribed notions of best practice in early childhood education. while in recent years there have been attempts to infuse a more caribbean-centric focus in teacher education, there still remain several challenges militating against the full achievement of this goal. kinkead-clark’s (2017) research on the impact of globalization on teachers’ practices revealed the tension jamaican teachers felt as a result of pressures to align their practices with global standards while simultaneously meeting local goals. these teachers acknowledged there were various types of pressures to replicate the teaching practices of “first world countries” in order to be considered “good teachers”. as such, one recommendation to decolonize teacher education is to ensure that teachers are prepared to teach in the contexts for which they are expected to teach in. to do this, gay (2010) suggested stakeholders must demand that education be culturally responsive by ensuring it reflects the needs of the people in order to be relevant to the people. likewise, roopnarine, krishnakumar, metindogan, and evans (2006) and vandenbroeck (2007) recommended that approaches to early childhood education must be grounded in an understanding that diverse factors shape how children develop and that to effectively meet the needs of children from these diverse contexts, teacher education must be highly reflective of these contexts. additionally, we recommend that within the caribbean, we promote our own ideas of what best practice looks like in the typical early childhood classroom. we need to outline how best practice is demonstrated, and how the classroom should be designed to facilitate these practices. teacher education ought to focus on these practices and promote them as pedagogical strategies to be used in the classroom. for example, one strategy that has often been minimized is the use of oral story telling. oral storytelling is a remnant of our rich african history where families and communities would tell folktales and share cultural traditions. stories of anansy and bre’r rabbit are still told today. decolonizing teacher education ensures that teachers are supported to continue these authentic caribbean traditions in the early childhood classroom. finally, another recommendation to decolonize teacher education is to promote teachers’ understanding of the multiplicity of factors that influence their practice and to holistically consider how caribbean children 249 global education review 5(4) develop. teacher education must ensure that pre-service teachers are aware of the factors that affect how our children are raised. as suggested by roopnarine et al. (2006), there is a need to contextualize our understanding of child development. within the caribbean, there needs to be deep understanding of the home and family idiosyncrasies, the unique cultural practices, the experiences and social factors, all which shape how caribbean children develop. decolonising teacher education implies that preservice and in-service teachers are made aware of the diverse factors which impact on how children develop and, through training, are armed with a repertoire of strategies to support them in their development. conclusion to a large degree, the english-speaking caribbean has not escaped the grips of its colonial past. the influences of hegemonic power—which were (and remain) unjustly obtained— are still visible in the education system, in the social-political-economic arrangements, and for some, in the ideologies/epistemologies that inform habitus of mind, and perhaps as well, cross-ethnic interactions. education, and early childhood education in particular, represents one context in which the knowledge of the north, while applicable to their communities and demographic, continues to receive an endearing reception in the global south, often without taking into account the significance of context, culture and validity of local and cultural knowledges. this paper, using a caribbean-centered analysis, sought to disrupt such practice by examining specific features of early childhood education, and suggesting how such features can be aligned with caribbean principles: principles derived from the history of the people, their knowledges, needs and experiences. indeed, we frame our central argument around the tenets of anti-colonial caribbean theory. one area, however, which requires further attention, but which we did not address in this paper due to space constraints, is the need for a regional document on children’s development. specifically, while we recognize the benefits and limitations of developmentally appropriate practice, we also urge—and perhaps challenge— educators and researchers to consider developing a regional guideline on caribbean children’s development. more pointedly, and keeping in the spirit of caribbean story-telling, we ask: can piaget speak for us? can vygotsky? can bandura? what are the cultural knowledges that can inform conceptualizations of our children’s development? how are our children’s lives different from children in the north, and how can we demonstrate to our children in our teaching and in our curriculum that we recognize and value their experiences, including local languages? from an empirical standpoint, future research inquiries should explore teachers’ and administrators’ perspectives of caribbean early childhood education. the inclusion of teachers’ and administrators’ ideas on what constitutes caribbean early childhood education will not only be consistent with an anti-colonial methodology, but will also bring together the conceptual suggestions offered in the present article with the experiential knowledges of teachers and administrators, thereby rendering a richer and multilayered conceptualization of caribbean early childhood education. in conclusion, global events reveal that the anti-colonial struggle persists; as the resistance takes different forms, so does the counterresistance. in response, we have chosen the site of early childhood education to articulate counter-knowledges, a cornerstone of subversive thought. we recognize the saliency of education and the early years, specifically. anti-colonial caribbean early childhood education 250 and decolonized early childhood education are constitutive of a much broader regional transformation, however. while the process for such threshold continues, we retain the reassuring hope that as a people, and as a region, we are well-equipped to orient our daily realities towards new imaginings, and new possibilities. reverberating beyond the deep blue caribbean sky and sea, are the echoes of regional pride and the legacies of creative, enduring, resistance. references anderson, s., & payne, m. a. 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(2008). the experience of developing early childhood learning goals and outcomes in the caribbean and the implications for curriculum development and implementation. international journal of early years education, 16(1), 17-29. doi:10.1080/09669760801892359 about the author(s) dr. kerry-ann escayg is an assistant professor of early childhood education at the university of nebraska-omaha. her research interests include children and race, anti-racism, racial socialization, critical race theory, and caribbean early childhood education. dr. zoyah kinkead-clark is a lecturer, researcher and coordinator of early childhood programmes at the university of the west indies, mona. as a researcher, she is particularly interested in understanding how young children are shaped by their ecological experiences within the home and wider community with the view to explore how educators can build on these in early years classrooms. http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/s1326011100001629 transformation of instructional practice 33 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: albers, peggy, seely flint, amy, and matthews, mona (2019). transformation of instructional practice through aesthetic experiences. global education review, 6 (2). 33-54. transformation of instructional practice through aesthetic experiences peggy albers georgia state university amy seely flint university of louisville mona matthews georgia state university abstract this longitudinal ethnographic study involved a professional development project, project partnerships achieve literacy (project pal) in south africa, with eight rural foundation phase teachers who taught reception (kindergarten) through grade three (r-3). this project was designed to support teachers in an under-resourced school as they learned strategic approaches to literacy teaching and learning with the aim to improve the reading achievement of their children. located in aesthetics theory, researchers engaged teachers in aesthetic experiences, or experiences that were infused with the arts (art, drama, video, music, reader’s theater), children’s literature, and technology. research questions were as follows: what can be learned from an aesthetic approach to professional development? what does engagement look like in aesthetic experiences in professional development? do aesthetic experiences resonate with teachers and inform their instruction? three findings emerged from an constant comparative analysis of classroom observations, interviews, teacher artifacts, researcher debriefs, video and audio recordings: 1) feelings and the arts were significant in what and how teachers learned in professional development workshops; 2) aesthetic experiences led to critical and democratic talk around professional development and issues of social importance; and 3) aesthetic experiences informed teachers’ in and out of classroom practice. findings from this study suggest that professional development holds significant promise when it is sustained, imaginative, and relatable, and positions teachers to think differently about themselves as learners and teachers through aesthetic experiences. we suggest that drawing only from cognitive approaches and one-shot single-session professional development does not deeply address the qualities, feelings, emotions, and embodied responses that comprise the aesthetic experience in professional development, and argue for a deeper understanding of professional development, one in which aesthetic learning and experiences are central to teacher learning. keywords professional development; aesthetic experiences; transformed practices; project pal; south africa across the literature in professional development, scholars in international settings have argued for professional development that is contextualized and situated (timperley et al., 2007; villegas-reimer, 2003) and have suggested policy implication related to preparing educators to work effectively with literacy (darling-hammond & mclaughlin 1995; day and sachs 2004; schwille and dembélé 2007). most of the research literature focuses on how teachers shift their conceptual and pedagogical practices as they engage in meaningful and relevant professional development (aasaf, reif, steinbach, 2016; flint, albers, & matthews, 2017, 2018). what is often not addressed, however, is the impact of the experiences and consideration of how teachers themselves embody the experiences, or what rosenblatt (1986) terms the “lived through” aesthetic response to ideas and concepts. said another way, how do teachers engage in professional development that not only attends to a cognitive 34 global education review 6 (2) approach to learning, but also allows for learning that is felt, seen, and imagined in new ways? we engaged in longitudinal ethnographic work in a three-year funded world vision professional development project, project partnerships achieve literacy (project pal) in south africa with eight rural foundation phase teachers who taught reception (kindergarten) through grade three (r-3). this project was designed to support teachers in an underresourced school as they learned strategic approaches to literacy teaching and learning with the aim to improve the reading achievement of their children. within this approach, we engaged teachers in aesthetic experiences, or experiences that were infused with the arts (art, drama, video, music, reader’s theater), children’s literature, and technology. to better understand the impact of these aesthetic experiences on teachers’ learning, we asked the following question: what can be learned from an aesthetic approach to professional development? underpinning questions included: what does engagement look like in aesthetic experiences in professional development? do aesthetic experiences resonate with teachers and inform their instruction? by exploring this set of questions, we found significance in the aesthetic experiences of professional development. while we ourselves have written about effective professional development focused on teacher questions and inquiry, most recently in international settings (flint, et al 2018), we want to argue for a deeper understanding of professional development, one in which aesthetic learning and experiences are central to teacher learning. in art and experience, john dewey (1934) referred to aesthetic experiences as objects and activities which deliberately bring about aesthetic experience, especially through artsbased activities (e.g., visual arts, music, drama, photography, etc.). for other researchers and philosophers, aesthetics includes experiences that are associated with reflective and conscious encounters with the arts, experiences that often alter one’s perspectives on nature, human beings, and moment-to-moment existence. viewed in this way, aesthetics positions experiences as a way of feeling and seeing the world and its impact on cognition (eisner, 1991). for greene (1995a; 2001), aesthetic experiences enable people to think differently, looking beyond what is normal and natural, and look critically at learning, seeing, and feeling in order to change one’s perspective on the world. thus, professional development that provides aesthetics experiences for teachers, grounded in their inquiry and questions about teaching and learning, enables teachers to generate new understandings that emerge from these experiences, and discover new ways of working in the world, specifically in their classrooms. theoretical frame and related literature aesthetic experiences. our aesthetic perspective draws from the research and thinking of john dewey (1934; 1938), maxine greene (1995; 2001) and elliot eisner (1991), philosophers and educators who were strong advocates of the arts in learning. we articulate key characteristics we see operating in an aesthetic approach to professional development. figure 1 highlights the cycle of learning when professional development is grounded in aesthetic experiences. first, dewey noted that educative experiences involve the arts in that "they open the door to an expansion of meaning and to an enlarged capacity to experience the world" (cited in jackson, p. 195). for dewey (1934), art provides focused, stunning, and integrated experiences in which learners use all of their senses and available resources to generate transformation of instructional practice 35 understandings and cultivate the imagination. he stated that when the teacher or artist and their students are prepared, they enter into a powerful learning experience. an educative experience, he continued, that is holistic is only attainable if, and only if, a learner uses her/his imagination as part of this experience. for dewey, imagination is the chief instrument of the good. responses to aesthetic experiences are cultivated over time and become part of how learners engage in future experiences. in concert with this thinking, greene (1988) saw aesthetic experiences as hopeful, imaginative, and transformative. she wrote: for those authentically concerned about the “birth of meaning,” about breaking through the surfaces, about teaching others to ‘read’ their own world, art forms must be conceived of as an everpresent possibility. they ought not to be treated as decorative, as frivolous. they ought to be, if transformative teaching is our concern, a central part of the curriculum (p. 131). for greene, experiences considered aesthetic open up spaces for critical participation, discussion, and the freedom to “think otherwise, to say it strange, and to release the imagination” (albers, holbrook, & harste, 2010, p. 183). further, greene (1995a) stated: “participatory involvement with the many forms of art does enable us, at the very least, to see more in our experience, to hear more on normally unheard frequencies, to become conscious of what daily routines, habits, and conventions have obscured” (p. 123). second, an aesthetic experience must be organic between learners and their environment and which begins on a felt level. dewey (1934) suggests that the immediate experience is felt or had because of a transaction within an environment. learners get caught up in experiences, or the immediate “doing-and-undergoing” within an “active and dynamic field of integrate participation” (cited in mathur, 1966, n.p.). when felt, experiences represent a fullness in which learners find a different way of seeing the world and support the vibrant role of aesthetics—imaginative responses and approaches to problems-against the anesthetic—passive and rote responses. third, aesthetic experiences support the development of tools to engage learners in democracy and citizenry for creating a better world (dewey, 1916), and grounded in caring relationships (flint, et al, 2018a). dewey saw education as holistic, democratic, and critical, and involves experiences that take learners into a deeper and more meaningful understanding to further learners’ intellectual and experiential growth. experiences should be designed in figure 1. key characteristics operating in professional development grounded in aesthetic experiences 36 global education review 6 (2) which learners develop concepts of what it means to participate as a citizen in a democracy. fourth, aesthetic experiences open up imaginative spaces for learners to make deep personal and world connections. imaginative approaches to problem-solving and decisionmaking are generated through a range of different art forms (e.g., art, drama, music, photography, reader’s theater, etc.) and, according to eisner (1992), afford divergent thinking (rather than convergent) which leads to a range of possible responses. when engaged in such aesthetic experiences, then, and lastly, we suggest, prompt new questions and reflection which lead to future learning and different possibilities for transformed practices in the classroom and beyond. professional development. for many school districts and educational ministries, investment in professional development to improve teaching practices and shape the professional identity of teachers is tantamount to improving their children’s learning. “we will fail ... to improve schooling for children until we acknowledge the importance of schools not only as places for teachers to work but also as places for teachers to learn” (smylie, 1995, p. 92). professional development for teachers comes in many forms, from formal experiences such as workshops, meetings, teacher study groups, and mentoring, to informal experiences such as reading professional articles and watching disciplinespecific documentaries (villigas-reimers, 2003). in many parts of the world, cascading or “train the trainer” models are common, whereby a school representative redelivers the material presented at an auditorium style meeting to colleagues upon returning to the school site. the content of these isolated, one-time sessions often reflects national policy initiatives, curricula reform, and shifting priorities. absent in the design of professional development is teacher input, and even less evident is teachers’ profound involvement and engagement in this professional development. thus, structure and delivery of professional development is fragmented resulting in limited growth or improvements in teaching or learning (flint, et al, 2018b). overall, the investment of time, money, and resources fails to provide the expected dividend in teacher learning or increased student achievement outcomes (darling-hammond & mclaughlin, 1995; day & sachs, 2004; schwille & dembele, 2007). critical to professional development, as we and others have argued previously is genuine inquiry, reflection and choice in what teachers want to learn and how they wish to engage in this learning (avalos, 2011; borko, jacobs, & koellner, 2010; doolittle, sudeck, & rattigan, 2008; flint, kuramada, fisher & zisook 2011; flint, et al, 2018a; hawley & valli, 1999). when professional development is linked to teachers’ concerns and questions about subject-matter content, there is evidence to suggest that child learning increases (desimone, smith, & phillips, 2013). further and germane to this research, professional development that is critical engages teachers in experiences that are pleasurable and meaningful also find that teachers integrate these same experiences in teachers’ practices (flint, et al, 2018a). for us, then, framing the study in aesthetic theory and critical professional development for teachers that is relevant and meaningful provides an avenue for exploring the impact of aesthetic experiences— ones that are engaging and pleasurable and position learning as a democratic process in which teachers’ everyday and ordinary experiences further their pedagogical and intellectual growth. we now turn to the findings of our work with project pal in south africa that demonstrates how an aesthetic approach elicited transformational experiences for teachers who had previously been exposed to sterile and onetransformation of instructional practice 37 dimensional approaches to professional development. methodology context of this work. the data from this longitudinal work from project pal was collected from 2013 to 2015, and the focus of this project was to support teachers’ integration of technology into literacy teaching and learning with the aim to improve children’s literacy and motivation to learn. the study took place in a small rural school of 400 children in a wine region in the western cape of south africa. half of the school’s population were in the foundation phase (reception through grade three), and received instruction in afrikaans, the language of the school, and shifted into english in grade three. we worked with eight foundation phase teachers, seven taught in afrikaans and one taught a multi-grades 1-3 xhosa class. teachers spoke afrikaans as their first language, and one teacher spoke xhosa; all but one had relatively strong english speaking and writing skills. we traveled twice yearly to south africa for three years and provided five workshops during each visit for a total of 30 across this professional development project. each workshop was designed with teachers’ expressed interests and needs, and we built in aesthetic experiences around community building, literacy strategy learning and application, and teachers’ reflection on their learning. for example, our first set of workshops included “getting to know you” experiences using cisnernos’ (1991) short story, “my name,” and the picture book prayer for the 21st century (marsden, 1998), a poem with statements of hope for the world. for “my name,” teachers wrote about and illustrated what their names meant in their language and within their families. for prayer, teachers wrote a hope for their own school and illustrated it. we then performed their illustrated writings as reader’s theater. moving across these modes enabled teachers to participate fully in their learning. at the end of the first round of workshops, teachers said, “you are angels.” they appreciated the felt connection between learning and teaching, the quality of picture books, and the ability to respond in multiple forms. situating the researchers. as critical literacy and teacher education researchers from the us, we intentionally used texts that positioned teachers to read from a social justice perspective. we anticipated tensions around cultural and language differences (afrikaans and/or xhosa was their first language and english an additional language), differences in educational approaches to learning, and the use of minimal resources with maximum potential for learning (e.g., picture books, digital cameras, paper, markers, pencils, etc.). we also come from the position that professional development is not delivered, but experienced, and learning would be reciprocal in nature: we would learn from them as much as they would learn from us. data collection and analysis. across the three years of the study, we collected the following data: videos, field notes and photographs of the workshop sessions that captured how teachers engaged with the texts and strategies; photos and field notes on classroom implementation of workshop ideas; audio recorded researcher debriefs following each workshop; teacher produced artifacts; and group interviews on the last day of each of the five-day professional development workshops (total six interviews). our first level of analysis involved open coding (glaser and strauss, 1967) of print-based data (e.g., teacher artifacts, researcher fieldnotes, transcribed teacher interviews, researcher debriefs) immediately following each workshop. we analyzed data collected at each workshop in relation to the one that came before, and all data were analyzed across the 38 global education review 6 (2) series of workshops. we studied and broke down data into first-level concepts (e.g., modal communication, relationships, implementation, shifts in thinking). while identifying first-level categories, we coded second-level categories (e.g., modes they used to communicate their thinking; fun learning; emotions felt in the experience). in one workshop session, all teachers responded that they learned about wordle (a word-based cloud software), which was coded as a literacy strategy concept, and second-level categories included, for example, building vocabulary, synthesizing, use of shape to symbolize thinking. for visual data (photos, frames, teachers’ visual artifacts), we used critical visual discourse analysis (albers, 2007b) to understand the structure and discourses in these visual representations. we studied object placement, colors used, orientation of the image, and the discourses that underpinned the elements within the visual artifacts. for example, objects that took up volume/space in the visual artifact were interpreted as having significance to the teacher; repetition of symbols meant emphasis of that symbol; the orientation of the artifact helped us understand if teachers presented information or intended to tell a story (albers, 2007a); and colors and intensity of application of color helped us understand the significance of that particular element/object. to analyze video-recordings of teachers’ responses in aesthetic experiences, we captured still frames from the video to document teacher engagement and learning. in these photographs/frames, we studied what the teacher was doing, why she was doing it, and how other teachers responded. we also noted which art form was used and why, which modes carried the information (e.g., gesture, facial, body movement, voiced language). understanding which modes carried more weight than others contributed to our understanding of the experience itself and aspects of the aesthetic experience teachers valued. we also studied photographs, noting both the content of the photo and the stance of the photographers (us), what we tried to capture, what we saw operating in these photos, and what experiences teachers expressed in these photos. for example, in figure 2, we studied body positions, how teachers responded to the experience (smiles); engagement (gaze towards a teacher demonstrating on a laptop; bodies leaning into the presenter) bodies engaged outside of the central focus of the photo (teacher working on her laptop, researcher focused on the laptop). as the photographers and videographers, we were aware of our intentions behind what we captured, and the discourses that underpinned these decisions. figure 2. use of teachers’ experiences as part of powerpoint presentations used in workshops. transformation of instructional practice 39 we studied both the visual and print-based data alongside each other. we noted if and how embodied engagement aligned (or not) with their spoken and written reflections. we also noted how teachers responded both in an art form and written form and what they intended to say through the art form to understand the significance of the arts to engagement and reflection in an aesthetic approach to professional development. findings our analysis yielded three findings: 1) feelings and the arts were significant in what and how teachers learned in professional development workshops; 2) aesthetic experiences led to critical and democratic talk around professional development and issues of social importance; and 3) aesthetic experiences informed teachers’ in and out of classroom practice. as a study on aesthetic learning, we include a number of different images to represent the data. feelings and the arts were significant in what and how teachers learned in professional development workshops. professional development through aesthetic experiences positioned teachers to “feel” learning through engagements that integrated the arts, develop stronger relationships with their colleagues, and see the value in professional development. in our initial interviews, the teachers reported that their professional development was “boring,” “we were not involved,” and was not “relevant to our classrooms.” in exit slip reflections written at the end of each workshop, teachers used terms often associated with aesthetic responses: “enjoy/ing” “excity (sic)” “relax” “really like” “supa excited” “very nice” and “yipeee!” further, as shown in figure 3, teachers also used color to express the pleasure (yipeee!) they felt in their learning. figure 3. teachers express their feelings about their learning in pd workshops. teachers also used symbols of love such as hearts, xs, double curved lines, smiling faces to show their felt responses to learning—what they had learned, how they had learned, and how they engaged in what they learned. teachers now wanted “to make teaching excity” (sic) and wanted their children to feel “enjoy[ment] themselves.” feeling learning was a new experience for teachers, enough so that one teacher was “supa excited” to continue. at the felt level, teachers found the workshops valuable, and wanted us to “give us more.” they found workshops “exciting wonderful and enjoyable !!!” and “i see forward for tomorrow!!” (see figure 4) 40 global education review 6 (2) the visual and dramatic arts in aesthetic experiences supported teachers’ responses to a range of texts. reader’s theater was an important art form by which teachers could share the feelings behind their learning through voiced and nonverbal responses to texts we introduced in workshops. early in the professional development, we introduced “where i’m from,” a poem by george ella lyon (n.d.), with the intention to elicit aesthetic responses to prompt teachers to reflect on where they were from. we showed lyons reading her poem on youtube video that included images of her home. we then did a choral reading of lyon’s poem with the teachers, followed by a discussion of the poem, including understanding vocabulary used by lyons. we read this poem a third time using reader’s theater with teachers around the room reading different lines of the poems, paired readings of phrases and lines, and group synchronous reading of some lines. we then had teachers write their own poems, using the starter words and phrases that lyon used: i am from….; from (noun) and (noun); (and so on). teachers presented their “where i’m from” poems at the next day’s workshop. as soon as raabiah said, “i’m from mcdonalds,” everyone started cheering and clapping; they knew and felt raabiah’s experience. in our researcher debrief, peggy noted how teachers learned about each other from their poems, and how their poems were valued by others: “the workshops have given grace the opportunity to learn more about [her colleagues], to foster and build a community, one of our project’s goals. i think we got there and demonstrated in what grace said, ‘you know, i know about them now. i think that’s really special.’” with english as an additional language, reader’s theater enabled teachers to engage with poetic language more than once, to understand different vocabulary yet similar experiences, and to write poetically about their own lives. we found that reading, visualizing, and dramatizing language provided teachers with imaginative approaches to teach language concepts and skills. in one workshop, drama provided an aesthetic entry point into teaching and building children’s vocabulary. we asked teachers to think of an important event in their lives, associate a feeling to that event, and act out the feeling. teachers shouted out loud their guesses as to what they saw being acted out. each of these words was written on poster board paper. figure 5 is a series of three frames of a longer video in which cece acted out her word “excitement,” while teachers guessed the word being acted out (“awe”, “amazing,” “beautiful”, “joyful”). cece’s dramatization of “excitement” turned into an improvised and mimed story about a good deed someone had done for her. as cece acted out her story, the other teachers belly-laughed out loud. (see figures 5a-5c) figure 4. exit slips: teachers’ use of repeated symbols (hearts, exclamation points) to express happiness they felt in their learning. transformation of instructional practice 41 the visual arts also provided a strong communicative connection between the teachers and us, especially given our native language differences. we always used powerpoint to present stories and literacy strategies, often integrating pictures of the teachers with speech bubbles that encouraged their involvement in the presentation of information (figure 2). teachers like raabiah used this idea often in her grade two classroom. in addition, we read beautifully illustrated picture books, a visual mode that teachers understood, regardless of their level of english, and asked teachers to visually express their learning after each workshop through exit slips. in one workshop we focused on how to teach concepts through maps and mapping using my map book (fanelli, 2001). told from a child’s perspective in word and image, this picture book maps out different places and experiences of the main character: the character’s room, belly, heart, neighborhood, among other spaces/places. following a discussion of the picture book, teachers then created their own maps of their classroom. limited in her use of english, robin used art to show which elements of her classroom were important and what she valued (see figure 6). the center rug with children sitting around is the center of attention, and an important part of her teaching. the faint circular colors of the rug suggest a non-threatening space, one in which children should feel comfortable. the other items in her room are on the periphery of the room and have less prominence. robin’s title “map of my classroom” has an artistic feel with swirls in letters that allowed them (o, p). the multicolored title is surrounded by a curve cloud that represents comfort (albers, 2007a) and emphasizes the importance of relationships with her students. the sign on her door says “welcome,” again with the use of multiple colors. interestingly, desks have strong angles, unlike the rug and title, which represent more figures 5a, b, c. vocabulary-building strategy using drama to act out word: awe…amazing… beautiful… joyful…. 42 global education review 6 (2) formal spaces of learning. robin’s careful choice of colors and strong application of the color on the paper reference areas of the room that she found important. the brown color around the window in the bottom center is applied firmly and strong, and places significance on having outside views. use of color, design, and shapes provided robin with a means through which she could communicate how she felt about her classroom and where and how learning in her space looked. teachers’ illustrations of their learning through exit slips (figures 7a, b, c, d) showed their felt and lived engagement in each of the workshops. one teacher drew “where do i start?” (figure 7a) and surrounded herself in symbols with question marks that suggested interest in future inquiry about literacy learning. the eyes are wide, the smile large, and the swirls, # symbols, and a star in combinatorial relationship are dynamic. these symbols take on the shape of hair; this energy is a physical part of who she is. in figure 7b, this teacher statement, “learning make (sic) me feel good,” is quiet, with a timid thought bubble; however, clear in this image is a direct statement about how professional development for her is a felt experience that continues to make her think. figure 7c, another timid image, “it’s over so sad!!” shows loss, not only of future workshops, but shared face-to-face learning and development of stronger relationships established during these workshops. a reticent smile, wrinkles on the forehead, and tears large in proportion to the face show the mix of emotions that she experienced: happy about her learning, but sad over the relationships she developed while in this learning. while figures 7a, b, and c show simple emotions on the faces, figure 7d, “give me more!!” is a literally inyour-face demand. her wide tooth-showing smile and direct gaze at us, the viewers, demand more…”grrr!” (growl). she salivates at the idea of learning more. we interpret figure 7d as a reflective contrast. she remembers the de-contextualized professional development that was not relevant, and now salivates for more contextualized and engaged professional development. while the image is tough, she tempers her demand with the statement, “this was inspiring.” across these four images, the symbols, elements of emotion in the faces, and language (sad, great, give me, figure 6. robin’s “map of my classroom” informed by my map book. transformation of instructional practice 43 inspiring, where do i start) convey sincere and felt responses to their learning. aesthetic experiences led to critical and democratic talk. teachers were not aware that we designed workshops with critical literacy in mind. we introduced a range of print-, art-, music-, and technology-based texts that had strong african and/or african american characters (one world, one day; the best part of me; something beautiful). we also introduced texts that carried messages around fairness or unfairness (something beautiful), difference (woolbur, zero), multiple perspectives (wolf won’t bite), among many others. exit slips, observations, and photos of children’s work on their walls demonstrated how teachers had internalized the importance of critically responding to and analyzing texts, especially picture books, songs, and photos that featured black and brown characters. teachers had no experience with beautifully illustrated children’s literature that told stories of brown and black-skinned characters; they had only known workbooks with benign cartooned characters, disembodied of emotions, actions, real events and real situations. one story, in particular, something beautiful (wyeth, 2002), a picture book about urban blight, resonated deeply with teachers and to which we understood the importance of felt experiences in professional development. as we read the story aloud, grace, a dark-skinned xhosan teacher, slowly stroked the face of the young african american female protagonist— attempting to feel the skin of the character. she slowly turned each page, running her fingers over the illustrations, poignant moments of felt emotions embodied in her actions. after reading figures 7a, b, c, d. teachers’ visual expressions of their learning. 44 global education review 6 (2) picture books, teachers engaged in frank—and welcomed—discussions around discrimination, racism, and apartheid, starting first with their personal stories and moving into issues of racism in society. to extend their learning, teachers created a drawing, responding to the story that they found particularly interesting. julie connected deeply with this story and, in her exit slip, explained how she planned to use with her grade three children (figure 8). she appreciated and learned how children can “express their feelings” and “how they can draw what they see what is beautiful.” for us, we found that teachers positively responded to critical literacy texts. they had felt engagement in discussions of social importance: valuing difference, studying negative actions and helping children see how to turn them into positive actions. they also began to notice how and what symbols mean in drawings in response to reading such texts. hearts symbolized the power of love over hatred. we saw these responses as moves towards thinking democratically and critically about teaching, integrating experiences in which their children can discuss and draw “what is beautiful in life.” as a critical literacy engagement, we engaged teachers in constructing learning walls, or trails of their learning (harste & vasquez, 1998). these learning walls consisted of photos, texts, artifacts and organized to show connections between and among texts studied and to document growth in learners’ learning and thinking. working in two groups, teachers organized the many photographs and teacher constructed artifacts into trails of their learning process (figure 9). during this workshop, teachers laughed and told stories about past learning, and recognized, as cece wrote in her exit slip: “we learn so much work in a short time.” aesthetic experiences informed in and out of classroom practice. we found that teachers’ integrated workshop ideas, and saw this as direct and visible evidence of how aesthetic experiences affected their thinking and practice in and out of the classroom. in classroom practice. teachers used their own arts-based projects and experiences (e.g., art, drama, music) as demonstrations to engage their own students in similar aesthetic experiences. for example, julie implemented found poems, a group poem created from words and phrases found within several texts, into her class instruction. she invited her students to come up with words and phrases that described them as a class. from this, the class created a found poem (figure 10). julie reported that figure 8. teacher’s exit slip suggests implementation of aesthetic experiences in children’s learning. figure 8. teacher’s exit slip suggests implementation of aesthetic experiences in children’s learning. transformation of instructional practice 45 students enjoyed this experience greatly, and they found excuses to go to the door (e.g., sharpen pencils, throw away trash, etc.) so that they could stand by the door to read the poem and look at the pictures. after seeing how we integrated photos into our workshops and in powerpoint presentations through speech bubbles (see figure 2), teachers intentionally took photos of their students, printed them out and posted them to work with children’s writing, as inquiry projects using powerpoint, as community building activities, and teach vocabulary around an event. figure 11 illustrates how julie used digital photos with children in the picture around celebrations (translation left to right: cake, birthday cake, congratulation, hug, letter, group work, clean up, sandwich, delicious). figure 9. teachers create learning walls from workshop generated artifacts. figure 10. class generated found poem. translation: the poem was generated by a range of different ideas from the students: forty in number/ everybody crazy / sons and daughters make morkel confused. / read and write is a must,/ do we are very good / sing and laugh is different from the order of the day./grade 3 b is the best class, everyone's faces are clean washed. figure 11. teachers used digital photos to teach vocabulary and feature children learning. 46 global education review 6 (2) teachers found the picture books particularly interesting and engaging, and used them to engage students in comprehension activities. kris read home (ellis, 2015), a picture book that highlights different homes from around the world, to her grade 1 learners. she read the book in english and translated sections of it in afrikaans, moving between languages. this “translanguaging” experience (garcia, 2007, p. xii) demonstrated the fluidity of language through simple text. kris also created a powerpoint with different homes from around this rural area and engaged children in a discussion of how people live in various communities. music was one of the teachers’ favorite aesthetic experiences to teach aspects of literacy development (e.g., reading, writing, comprehension, rhythm, following along). we introduced “kalimba,” “see me beautiful,” and “i look into the mirror,” all of which were immediately integrated into the teachers’ classes. one teacher reflected in her exit slip, “see me beautiful” woa woa yeah yeah!”, while another wrote/illustrated “it was the tops! (smiley face) (downward arrow pointing to) awesome woa woa yeah yeah!” teachers loved to sing, and they liked turn taking to practice working with the song (see figure 12). in our researcher debrief after one of the workshops, we discussed to what extent teachers engaged in aesthetic experiences and integrated the ideas into their teaching. we noticed that they had used a large number of the ideas presented in the workshop, and made them their own (brief excerpt): amy: we started the day by visiting all of the teachers' classrooms. we saw some work around the text home. we saw [their students’] “sketch-to-stretch” drawings after reading picture books. we saw teachers, like nancy, singing the song, “see me beautiful” with her reception grade children. kris used some of the technology to show kids different kinds of poems. peggy: kris did an amazing job using the book home. she had her kids identify different homes, and then they were going to create their own book with different pictures of homes. so, she's doing a lot of reinforcement of the same vocabulary and the same concepts [we introduced]. amy: it was nice to see that raabiah had three of the [workshop] books on display as a text set in her classroom: my map book, home, and there, and she had put them together. peggy: i loved that raabiah used something beautiful. i didn't know if anybody would use that book in their classroom really. it's so deep, but then to go ahead and have her [grade two] children do a negative to positive drawing was really amazing. children had to think of something negative and turn it into a positive. so that's how she had them think conceptually about that book. figure 12. reception teacher, nancy, practices using music and lyrics with the group as a way to teach print awareness. transformation of instructional practice 47 this excerpt from a much longer debrief reminded us of the importance of engagement, aesthetic experiences, and space for teachers to share their learning both in the workshops and implement ideas in their own classroom with aesthetic experiences built into these engagements. out of classroom. what surprised us the most was when, in our third interviews at the start of the second year of the project, teachers told us that they shared their workshop learning with family, colleagues and friends. specifically, they shared experiences with arts-based components. peggy: have you talked about any of the ideas that you learned in the workshop with each other after we leave? kris: yes. like our wordles, how interesting it was. julie: we also use it at home. peggy: yay! and you were able to present it, right? all: yes! (laughter) nancy: i just shared the other day zooburst with one of my colleagues. she was really excited about it because she said, “please send them to our school as well. please send them.” i was like, “no, but i can certainly ask them.” peggy: kris, how did teachers respond to the experiences/activities at the district professional development session that you presented at? did you show them how to do [wordle]? kris: yes. i did. peggy: did they all have fun doing it? kris: no. they didn't have practice with it. i just showed them what you can do. but they did use it because i saw it on one teacher’s laptop. she used family words and in the shape of a heart. peggy: nice. raabiah: some of them had tablets and they did [wordle] on them. nancy: yes, and phones. some had smart phones. this interview offers insight into which aesthetic experiences that teachers found important and fun to experience and share. while kris was able to demonstrate wordle on her own laptop at her district-wide professional development, the teachers to whom she presented did not have “fun” because “they didn’t have practice with it.” kris realized the necessity of aesthetically experiencing “fun” ideas, such as wordle, to fully appreciate its aesthetic qualities and use in classroom practice. just “showing” teachers figure 13. teachers show intrigue using zooburst, software that enabled them to create pop-up books. 48 global education review 6 (2) what to do was not enough to experience this engagement. teachers also shared their learning at an international pan-african/reading association of south africa conference (see figure 14). none of the teachers had experienced professional development at a conference, and several had never stayed overnight in a hotel. exceptionally nervous, teachers conducted an interactive workshop for conference attendees, many who were internationally recognized literacy researchers and teacher educators. teachers designed aesthetic experiences around in children’s literature and literacy ideas to engage their participants. during the conference, teachers had organized themselves so that two teachers attended different concurring sessions so that they could maximize their collective learning. in the closing plenary, the keynote speaker gave a shout-out to and produced a slide of these teachers, emphasizing the importance of strong and relevant professional development to support teacher learning. in a post-conference interview, teachers talked animatedly about how they really enjoyed the conference and that they enjoyed sharing their learning with others. after seeing her picture on the slide during the closing plenary presented by hilary janks, a critical literacy scholar, clarice was so proud: “in our school we are on the map in our community. at this conference, we are now on the world map!” this out-of-classroom experience was, as cece said, “life-changing.” discussion professional development as a felt experience. professional development outcomes are often measured by increased fidelity to prescribed mandates and programs and increased student achievement. teachers often do not have time to enjoy learning, as they must demonstrate a set of skills that show that they know what and how to teach. this study provides evidence that insights into teachers’ implementation of professional development ideas when aesthetic experiences are an essential part of their learning. as we found, professional development must connect personally and deeply with teachers, situate experiences in the context in which they teach, and include artsbased engagements to elicit the felt experience and relationships between learner and environment that dewey (1934) suggested is critical to learning and growth. this study evidences how aesthetic experiences supported the development of relationships between the teachers and us. the illustrations and responses to their learning in their exit slips and the full engagement with ideas (e.g., singing, reader’s figure 14. teachers present at the pan-african/reading association of south africa. transformation of instructional practice 49 theater, learning walls) resulted in felt experiences, experiences missing in their previous professional development sessions. the teacher who drew a face with a small smile and large tears on her exit slip did not cry because she would not learn another literacy strategy; hers were felt tears at the end of the project and the relationships we developed over the course of the workshops. we suggest that aesthetic experiences position teachers not only to learn about ideas, concepts, and literacy strategies, but these felt experiences are essential to building trust between teacher educator and teachers that the ideas they learn are important to their own teaching. further, teachers’ aesthetic experiences in this professional development prompted them to share ideas with their colleagues, friends, and family. yet, this sharing must be felt and experienced. kris who taught wordle to teachers without laptops or computers discovered that this “fun” experience had little impact without “practice” with this software program. we suggest that professional development must start first at a felt level, is relevant to teachers’ own classroom setting, and offer innovative approaches to literacy learning that, as julie stated, are “enjoyable to their learners.” that grace shared her pop-up book with her family on her love of cooking, and shared how to create these pop-up books with her nephew demonstrates how this felt experience could be used across situations—both classroom learning and family celebrations. we also suggest that aesthetic experiences, evidenced by this study, is generative and intergenerational; generative in that teachers’ learning was shared with colleagues and friends, and intergenerational when their learning is shared with family. we see this as a powerful move towards professional development that not only is instructionally significant, but personally pedagogical in which ideas are shared within families and circles of friends. professional development as an imaginative endeavor. professional development within an aesthetic stance positions teachers to break through the “boredom” and passivity of de-contextualized professional development, and experience artsbased learning in which, as one teacher stated, “a new world opened up” (flint, et al, 2018b). we argue that professional development must include experiences in which teachers express their learning in ways other than written and spoken language. to do so positions teachers to engage in what dewey called “enjoyed meanings” (alexander, 1987, p. 3). teachers learned through enjoyment whether it was predicting vocabulary through cece’s dramatization, writing and performing their own “where i’m from” poems, and singing along with songs that taught concepts of geography in an imaginative way (e.g., “kalimba”). connecting learning with imaginative experiences opens up spaces for teachers to move away from teaching solely from workbooks—the predominant way in underresourced rural schools (niadoo, reddy & dorasamy, 2012)—and toward new pedagogical strategies. raabiah’s use of rap to introduce a picture book is imaginative. inquiry through powerpoint presentations with animation and images created by grade two children on topics in which they were interested is imaginative. kris’s creation of an image-filled powerpoint to situate homes across the world to expand children’s knowledge of spaces outside their own communities is imaginative. sir ken robinson (2009; 2013), a scholar of imagination and creativity in education, argued that the arts support creativity, innovation, and the potential of human resources. we suggest that these aesthetic experiences opened up the potential for this group of teachers to draw upon their own 50 global education review 6 (2) personal and classroom resources to work imaginatively with literacy and to motivate their children with experiences outside of workbooks. professional development as a democratic endeavor. especially in international spaces, we suggest that situated and contextualized professional development imagined through aesthetic theory is critical and identifies teacher learning as a democratic endeavor. while any professional development situation involves power relationships, we lessened this dynamic by taking on an aesthetic stance in which language forms (e.g., art, writing, speaking, music, drama) are experienced. language barriers between the teachers and us were reduced because experiences involved communication across modes, and provided space for all teachers to participate in discussions around literacy, stories, and learning. to approach professional development as a democratic endeavor in international spaces is to introduce materials (e.g., songs, picture books, stories, poems) that speak to teachers’ experiences, to bring in children’s literature with brown and black faces, to know that language must be experienced, and to engage teachers in “fun” engagements. stories like something beautiful enabled grace to have a profoundly deep connection between her and the young african american girl; grace could see and touch this girl’s face, and feel her feelings around racist actions. aesthetic experiences as felt experiences position teachers as critical readers of language in which they can engage in dialogue about issues of social injustice. when julie recognized the need for her children to have fun and see themselves in their learning, she took photos and posted them on the classroom wall. this was a move towards a democratic classroom. when she invited her children to write a found poem, children participated in their own literacy learning, learning to write by writing and learning to read by reading. this is a democratic classroom. when teachers presented at and participated in other conference sessions at the pan-african conference, teachers participated in education that is democratic. they contributed equally to a larger educational endeavor and discourse around literacy education, and their participation placed them intellectually, educationally, physically, and democratically on the “world map.” professional development as a moral endeavor. dewey (1934) talked about education, particularly through the arts, as a moral endeavor: "hence it is that art is more moral than moralities.... the moral prophets of humanity have always been poets even though they spoke in free verse or by parable" (p. 362). aesthetic experiences are inextricably imaginative, imbued with a spirit that engages learners at felt and creative levels. we suggest several key aspects must be present in professional development as a moral endeavor. first, learning must be joyful and happy. in this study, teachers showed their happiness through their laughter, visual symbols and faces on exit slips, and discussions around critical literacy texts (picture books, newspaper articles, poetry, music, lyrics, photographs). second, literacy teaching and learning involves multiple, imaginative, and innovative approaches. teachers used many language forms to teach print-awareness, vocabulary, comprehension, and writing. multiple approaches to literacy honor the languages, backgrounds, and experiences that children bring into the classroom. third, learning involves trust. teachers in this study trusted their own learning enough to implement ideas they learned into their classroom. kris’s use of home enabled children to talk about their homes as well as see other homes across the world. teachers also trusted their learning enough to present at an international literacy conference, to share ideas with their colleagues and friends, and to transformation of instructional practice 51 celebrate their families through such software programs as wordle and zooburst. fourth, learning is dialogic. workbooks suppress dialogue while reading picture books like something beautiful, woolbur, or zero are stories that open up dialogue about issues of social importance like racism and difference. vocabulary lists stifle imagination, while songs like “kalimba” or recalling important events imaginatively generate vocabulary associated with learning about directions (east, west, north, south). and, lastly, learning is multi-lingual and multi-modal. through art, reader’s theater, and drama, teachers like robin, limited in their knowledge of english, could show what she learned, express her emotions about her learning, and share her learning with her colleagues. communication is always comprised of many modes. aesthetic experiences generate multiple ways in which learning is communicated. a goal of moral education is to understand that learning positions learners to see the possibilities of meaningful lives. dewey’s aim for moral education was not to separate scientific knowledge (e.g., literacy knowledge/theory) from humanistic inquiry (e.g., teachers’ questions about literacy and classroom practice). both, he argued, are necessary to make sense of the world and our place in it. to engage in education as a moral endeavor, drawing upon aesthetic experiences, is to see issues anew and approach problems with novel insights. an environment and set of experiences that position teachers to think differently about teaching and learning have the power to shape and direct changes in their own pedagogy and practice. conclusion as this study evidenced, professional development holds promise when it is sustained, imaginative, relatable, and positions teachers to think differently about themselves as learners and teachers through aesthetic experiences. those engaged in professional development, national and international, must recognize the importance of how engagements are felt and experienced. we suggest that drawing only from cognitive approaches and one-shot singlesession professional development does not deeply address the qualities, feelings, emotions, and embodied responses that comprise the aesthetic experience in professional development. this was brought to our attention clearly when on the last day of one set of workshops, the principal, who also engaged in several workshops, came in to describe what he noticed about his teachers’ learning as well as his own: thank you for developing our teachers; a really big thank you to you, the sponsors, and everyone involved in this project. i was just thinking, whenever you leave, you leave something behind. so, as you go back, you left something behind, and that something is what we have learned, the knowledge that we have gained. our teachers have developed in these few days, not only them, not only they will benefit, but most of all our children in the classes, so thank you so much. ms. naidoo (grace) says life is not measured by the breaths we take, but the moments that take our breath away. this is one of the moments, really; it’s taken my breath away. i really don’t know what to say. so, thank you so much, that’s all i’m going to say on behalf of the teachers, on behalf of our learners, thank you so much. these parting words of the principal locate professional development squarely within aesthetic and moral education. the knowledge left behind “benefits” his teachers, “but most of all our children.” when professional development is seen not as “delivery of information,” but as a set of relationships and aesthetic experiences in which teacher educators and teachers from different international spaces engage jointly in planning, thinking, experiencing, reflecting, and implementing pedagogical ideas, then dewey’s aim of 52 global education review 6 (2) education as moral, democratic, and imaginative endeavor is achieved (see figure 15). references albers, p. 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(2014). doing critical literacy: texts and activities for teachers and students. new york, ny: routledge. johnston, p. (2018, december). talking children into literacy: once more, with feeling. oscar causey address. annual conference of the literacy research association. palm springs, ca. kerley, b. (2009). one world, one day. national geographic children's books. lyon, g.e. (n.d.). where i’m from. accessed from http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html marsden, j. (1998). prayer for the twentyfirst century. cambridge, ma: star bright books. mathur, d. (1966). a note on the concept of ‘consummatory experience’ in dewey’s aesthetics, accessed from https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deweyaesthetics/ naidoo, u., reddy, k., & dorasamy, n. (2012). reading literacy in primary schools in south africa: educator perspectives on factors affecting reading literacy, and strategies for improvement. international journal of education science, 7(1), 155-167. robinson, k. (2009). the element: how finding your passion changes everything. new york, ny: penguin books. robinson, k. (2013). finding your element: how to discover your talents and passions and http://www.georgeellalyon.com/where.html https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/ https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/dewey-aesthetics/ 54 global education review 6 (2) transform your life. new york, ny: viking adult. seely flint, a., albers, p., & matthews, m. (2018a). “a whole new world opened up for us”: the impact of place and space-based professional development on one rural south africa primary school. professional development in education, 44(3). doi: 10.1080/19415257.2018.1474486 seely flint, a., albers, p., & matthews, m. (2018b). interrupting situated practices: critical incidents in international partnerships. teacher development, 14(3), 1-22. schwille, j. & dembélé, m. (2007) global perspectives on teacher learning: improving policy and practice. paris, fr: unesco international institute for educational planning. timperley, h., wilson, a., barrar, h., & fung, i. (2007). teacher professional learning and development: best evidence synthesis iteration [bes]. wellington, new zealand: ministry of education. retrieved from www.educationcounts.govt.nz/goto/bes about the authors peggy albers is professor in the college of education and human development at georgia state university in atlanta. her research interests include critical literacy, arts-based literacy, and teacher education. amy seely flint is professor in the college of education and human development at the university of louisville. her research interests include teacher professional development, critical literacy, and early reading and writing development. mona matthews is professor emeritus in the college of education and human development at georgia state university in atlanta. her research interests include early childhood education, teacher education, and early childhood reading and writing. http://www.educationcounts.govt.nz/goto/bes more than words 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: campbell-barr, verity, & lavelle, marie (2020). more than words for working with children and families. global education review, 7 (2). 1-7. more than words for working with children and families verity campbell-barr university of plymouth, uk marie lavelle university of plymouth, uk the focus for this special issue arose as a result of noticing the emerging challenges being made to “traditional,” neoliberal understandings of knowledge and knowing coupled with the strengthening international interest in the professionalization of the early years workforce, who, it might be argued, have worked hard to create a knowledge base from which to grow their understanding of the child. this knowledge base has, to some extent, been dominated by hegemonic discourses of developmentalism— absorbed into policy and standardized within some, if not many, education programs for early years practitioners. these two elements combined offered the opportunity to consider alternative ways of knowing(s) for working with young children. international interest in the lives and development of young children has resulted in an increased close examination of those who work with children and families. premised on the grounds of supporting equality of opportunity for children and families, whilst laying the foundations to children’s lifelong learning, there is a scrutiny of what those who work with and alongside children and families are expected to know to be successful professionals. however, within technocratic models of accountability, the “good” professional is the one who can achieve the desired outcomes. professional knowledge is reduced to that which can be described and documented, dwelling on logic and reason, with an underlying assumption that we are not professional if we cannot account for something (shotter, 2015). the singular of “knowledge” implies a solitary way of knowing, whereby there is one knowledge to inform working with children and families, as opposed to a complex intermingling of knowledges. a focus on knowledges not only opens up multiple ways of knowing, but also a consideration of the different ways of knowing and how these might be articulated (campbell-barr, 2017). if we return to the same words (and knowledge) to describe work with children and families, we can only travel the same paths of knowing. describing work with children and families risks becoming reduced to the lowest common denominator of what we are willing to say (or not) about working with children and families. however, there is much about knowing that is beyond words. even the distinction between the deliberative thinking self and the thinking that just happens implies a form of knowing that is located in the mind. knowledges and ways of knowing have been constructed within cartesian mind/body splits—cerebral, cognitive, contained, as opposed to the affective, the embodied (murris, 2016). the embodied extends to consider the interconnected, intermingled, connections between bodies (and other objects) that develop other forms of knowing (lavelle, 2020). as babies, there is an acceptance that we do not have the words to 2 global education review 7 (1) express our thinking, but we develop an attunement to others, learning to read facial expressions, tone, and intonation (shotter, 2015). acknowledging that what is known is more than words opens up alternatives for considering the knowledgeable self. as we move beyond the purely linguistic, this special issue seeks to explore embodied forms of knowing, gut feelings, and intuition, which would ordinarily be cast aside for evidenced-based knowledge. knowing and intuition with the increasing interest in—and funding for—early childhood education and care (ecec) has come a level of accountability which positions value in evidence-based knowledge. masculine models of professionalism that favor logic and reason, have provided a guiding force to policy initiatives to “upskill” and professionalize the ecec workforce. individual performativity of rationality and personal entrepreneurialism provided a model for ecec professionalism that favored technocratic models of professional competences and standards (campbell-barr, 2017). as a result, feminine ways of knowing, emotional and affective, have been side-lined and devalued, with the rationale and objective prioritized. this is particularly visible within a political climate and sector pressures which seek to “professionalize” a workforce (mikuska and fairchild, 2020 – this issue), albeit without strategic direction. as mikuska and fairchild argue in their article, there is a need to move beyond the technocratic in search of knowledges that account for the multiple emotional relationships that can be encountered when working with children and families. while we now seek to explore a reconfiguration of professional knowledges for ecec, we wonder whether the sector pressures to “professionalize” previously resulted in some form of compliance. the positioning of caring as a natural ability, closely aligned with femininity and mothering, saw personal dispositions become inseparable from the idea of a good care worker (skeggs, 1997). women have a long history of being provided with coded messages about right and wrong behaviors to guide their moral actions. colley's (2006) research is frequently cited as an example of how those training to work in ecec are subject to a hidden curriculum of the right and wrong ways to behave (and dress) when working with young children. the research suggests a form of compliance within the ecec workforce—a particular way to behave and perform. while the compliance aligns with apparent feminine, motherly ways to behave, a petition for recognition of the social (and economic) importance and hard work of caring has also been a part of the call for professionalization. from within ecec, there have been calls for wider recognition and status for the workforce. therein lies a question as to whether in the search for recognition, did the ecec community too eagerly perform to the neo-liberal tune of professionalism in order to resist the natural ability and mothering undertones. we do not wish to undermine the important struggles that have taken place in seeking recognition and status for the ecec workforce. whilst this professionalization is one which has focused on upskilling, training, knowledge acquisition, and qualifications, there are others who have argued differently. ardnt and urban (2018, p. 99) have called for a shift to the ways professional practice unfolds in reciprocal relationships and influences between all actors and their institutional environment. we refer to this interconnectedness and interdependency as the “critical ecology of the profession.” embodied knowledges, talk of intuition, and gut feelings are seen as dangerous, especially in a world which values the “expert,” “expertise,” and certainty. even more so in a world where context-based approaches 3 ecec practitioners are seeking to establish themselves within a stratified, hierarchical professional landscape. the body, it might be argued, is a thing of the child—the distrust of which starts in early childhood (tobin, 2004). women are generally asked what they feel, men, what they think. the professionalized discourse of reflection a process of thinking through feeling and feeling through thinking, is rooted in feminine practices of the affective. think of medicine and nursing: one is regarded as exemplar of professionalism, the other a new profession, and yet there are lessons being taken from the new to the old. reflection has been the life blood of caring professions and has recently been embraced by the more male-dominated practices of medicine. likewise, dare we say it, academics and scholars establishing themselves within the academy are often caught up in the establishment of dichotomous knowledges. as the discourse of derision and hierarchies push downwards, leaking into spaces that young children inhabit, it is little wonder that this neglect of body knowledge is equally in danger of being talked out of early years settings. there is an increasing body of work that is (re)turning to the notion of personal dispositions as being central to the work of those who care for and educate young children. a more post-structuralist, post-modernist, even post-humanist research perspective of professionalism sees professionalism differently. rather than it being connected to skills and qualification, professionalism is about embodiment of local meanings, knowing and working, which is co-constructed together within settings with a variety of actors and actants, the more-than-human. in summarizing some of these perspectives below, we would highlight that rather than presenting an innate form of knowledge that is inborn, embodied knowledges are learnt, refined, developed, and attuned. this relational embodiment relates to barad’s diffraction and quantum entanglements, whereby the knowledge is neither embodied or disembodied, but relational (see haynes and murris, 2020 – this issue). allowing for a more complex set of relations, diffracted through space-time-matterings, these knowledges have been, continue to, and will be, entangled with instrumental, standardized, troublesome (k)nowings—made sense of, dismissed, rejected and embraced in “mutual relationality” (murris and bozalek, 2019, p875), unbound, sympoetic (harraway, 2016). this special issue moves away from mind/body binaries—shifting from a cutting (chotomy) in two (di-), intuition versus reasoning, mind versus body, which privileges predominantly white, masculine, middle-class, colonial knowledges (murris, 2016) over intuitive, localized, feminine, embodied, and materialized ways of knowing. embracing all entanglements and intra-actions with sounds, smell, memory, muscle, gut, finger tips, theory, heart, place, and so much more. (k)nowing and (k)not (k)nowing, here now, future and past, are at once tangible and intangible – “unmoored” and uncertain, an intra-action, “cutting together apart – one move” (barad, 2014, p. 168). knowledge creation, or “knowledge-making practices,” as osgood et al. (2016) highlight, “knowing, thinking, measuring and theorising, are material practices of intra-acting, within and as part of the world”(barad, 2007, p. 91). an ethics of care has long been presented as providing the conditions with which to critically consider ecec, conceptualizing knowledge as plural (knowledges), opening up not only what one knows, but how they know when working with young children (dahlberg and moss 2005). authors such as noddings (2012) and goldstein (1998) have highlighted the moral dimension embedded in the caring relationship. there is not an effort to the moral dimension, but an orientation to the other, whereby bodies respond 4 global education review 7 (1) and tune into each other. shotter (2008) refers to a moment-by-moment responding that has an awareness of the child’s interests and abilities, whereby the educator thinks with the child(ren) through a considered ethical attunement. georgeson (2018) refers to a sensitive anticipation, whereby through a watchfulness, those working with young children anticipate when and how to interact with them. while the thinking with draws attention to the mind, there is a careful reading of the situation that guides a responsiveness that is embodied in both action and feeling, blurring the boundaries between mind, feeling, and bodily action. we are still children there are parallels with how knowledge is associated with children and the opening up of a reconfiguring of knowing for working with children. there is strong developmentalism associated with children’s knowing, whereby childhood is associated with a time to invest in children’s knowledge development. early childhood has especially become bound by developmentalism, with connotations of the not yet ready (edwards et al., 2009). mccrae and arculus (this issue) highlight the attention that is given to, and effort that is put into wordism, whereby the non-verbal is associated with a sense of not-knowing. the wordism emphasizes that which we are trying to challenge and the need to move beyond words. there has been a revisiting of developmentalism within ecec, to free children and those who work with them from being bound by linear and prescriptive constructions of children’s development. many of the contributions in this special issue refer to reggio emilia as a philosophical approach that recognizes the different ways that children express themselves and “document” their development. not only is expression reconfigured to go beyond words through the notion of the one hundred languages, but there is a reconfiguration of time, to form an interlooping of past, present, and future. no longer are children pulled into the future by child development knowledge, but the attunement to their needs and interests brings together past, present, and future, alongside an entwinement with the environment and the resources that are found within it. the notion of the hundred languages has become a powerful force in ecec for recognizing children’s knowledges, but its application to professional knowledge is still emerging. as whitty et al (this issue) highlight, the international discomfort with developmentalism that has enabled the reggio approach to resonate across so many parts of the world, illustrates that there is a sense of discomfort when considering the needs and interests of the child. however, there is also a need to explore the discomfort associated with understandings of professionalism in ecec to consider how ecec professionals transcend time and space. adults working with children are well rehearsed in playing with and transcending the boundaries of what is known – boxes that become space rockets, balls of wool that are unraveled into spiders’ webs. in this special issue, we bring together examples of this playfulness that is so fruitful among ecec professionals. multiple ways of knowing the articles in this special issue, in being (re)present and assembled here, entangled in their first union, offer new and multiple ways of knowing. whitty, lysack, lierette, lehrer, and hewes’s article within this issue explores the “throwntogetherness” of the canadian ecec field. here, three vignettes bring together the narratives of those who “stay with the trouble,” despite the vicissitudes of a turbulent, changing, political landscape, in which ecec policy and context-based approaches 5 authors are entangled. persevering to find alternative ways of “being, acting and doing,” the authors hold together the needles on which they weave new ways of knowing and believing. taking hold of the process despite it being difficult to see the future, they create, together, a future yet unknown. the “collective-bodyassemblage” clear in the piece, with the narratives knitted together creating a sense of strength and belonging. this feels especially important when the riskiness of taking with you elements which have been critiqued within the ecec sector—developmentalism, neoliberalism, and recent neuro-rationality—opening up the opportunity for a “more-thandevelopmentalism,” embracing the unknown and with it the possibilities of seeing the world differently in new space-time-matterings. the theme of risk and dangerousness is also central in haynes and murris’ article, which, like whitty et al.’s article, challenges the dichotomous boundaries of oppositional, authoritarian hierarchies. haynes and murris’ article exposes questions of knowing and how the knowing we know often privileges disembodied knowledge over the embodied. teacher education, with its technical and standardized knowing, is one area where it might be argued, the body has been talked out of the lecture hall, and subsequently, the classroom and the early years setting (tobin, 2004). through an example of teaching on a module for pgce, haynes and murris challenge who has “epistemic credibility” in their exposition of “authority.” drawing on harraway’s “sympoetic pedagogies,” the article takes a scenario which exposed students’ fear of a “loss of control” within the class, along with a text from michaud and valitalo, to explore their emergent thinking, through and with materials, text, talk, and imagery. the entanglement of place (south africa), time (post-apartheid drives for democratic citizenship), and curricula experiences of p4e and bodies (children, students, tutors, along with materials and so much more) exemplify “a research ontology of multiplicity” (taguchi, 2013, p.714). the dominance of words, which this special issue has attempted to disrupt, is challenged further in mccrae and archulus’ contribution. the piece takes theater’s dramaturgical concept of complicité, which emphasizes collectivity, connection, and attunement, to re/turn to two vignettes from research with young, non-verbal children. the research is set against the backdrop of rising instrumentalization and economization of words, evident in the english government’s concern for the lack of words in young children and the drive for instrumentalist interventions which seek to reduce the “wordgap.” words, it seems, have become currency, and in the uk at least, are positioned as reducing disadvantage and increasing social mobility (dfe, 2017). clear is the way that interaction and communication for, and with the children, is indeed, more-than-words: materials, emotions, researchers, time, senses, camera. the re/turning to, offers a retuning into dimensions of intra-actions, freeing bodies, to move, intraact in the time-space continuum. as mccrea and archulus illustrates their “pedagogy of improvisation,” (re)turning to and staying with their original analysis to keep open and alert to new ways of knowing. in this way, what is created is the possibilities for multiple ways of knowing and knowledges, extending pedagogic relationships, not just in terms of relationship with knowledge, but with the embodied and material elements too. just as whitty et al.’s starting point for their article was created as a result of a coming together in a space for thinking differently, likewise is lamb et al.’s contribution to this special issue. here, the authors jointly reflect on a cross-cultural intergenerational event designed to support girls and young women at risk of 6 global education review 7 (1) gender-based violence. through the use of selfreflective, research diaries and discussions between the researchers, all of whom were facilitators of the event, affective, embodied forms of reflexivity are worked through in this collaborative autoethnographic study. even this methodological approach provides a way of considering how and what is known, and the looping together of knowledges over time. mikuska and fairchild’s article reminds us that the entanglements of ecec are not just those that are formed between adult(s) and child(ren). ecec professionals have multiple emotional relationships with children, families, and colleagues. mikuska and fairchild extend the discussion on emotional labor to highlight the entanglements with both human and otherthan-human bodies. the article is a return to our own starting point—a discomfort with how professional knowledge was/is/and has been conceptualized in ecec. in bringing together the articles in this special issue, we feel, grapple, entangle, diffract, and more to represent a “something” that enables a more complex understanding of what it means to “know”for ecec professionalism. we stay with the trouble and discomfort in seeking new stories of professional knowledges for ecec and apologize for the shortcomings of words for expressing what this alternative path may offer. references ardnt, s. and urban, m. 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(2004). the disappearance of the body in early childhood education. in bresler, l., (ed.), knowing bodies, moving minds. urbana-champaign, springer science and business media, b.v.p., pp.111-127. https://hdl.handle.net/2134/20215 learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 99 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distribut ed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: cameron, kristen, & boyles, deron. (2022). learning and teaching in a neoliberal era: the tensions of engaging in froebelian informed pedagogy while encountering quality standards. global education review, 9 (2), 99-117. learning and teaching in a neoliberal era: the tensions of engaging in froebelian-informed pedagogy while encountering quality standards kristen cameron georgia state university deron boyles georgia state university abstract contemporary froebelian-inspired early childhood education in the united states is challenged by government regulation and accreditation requirements that have arisen alongside neoliberalism in education. using critical policy analysis and case study examples from a preschool in atlanta, georgia, this paper examines the influence of neoliberalism on school readiness discourse, parental expectations for children’s education, and teacher preparation programs in early childhood education. for early childhood centers that are inspired by friedrich froebel’s philosophies of teaching and learning, remaining true to his vision of development and education is increasingly challenged by neoliberal regimes that reify accountability, assessment, and competition. possibilities for resistance to the neoliberal ideology that regulates early childhood education are described and contextualized by froebel’s writings. keywords friedrich froebel, neoliberalism, early childhood education, quality, school readiness, parents, teacher education learning and teaching in a neoliberal era: challenges to froebel’s pedagogical vision for early childhood education friedrich froebel may be well-known to early childhood educators and some philosophers of education, but it is unclear if his influential theories about education and child development are well-known to contemporary policy makers and education leaders in the united states. froebel introduced innovative approaches to early learning and teaching, which reflected the significance he placed on organic human development. his philosophy of education, which was actualized with the creation of the first kindergarten in 1837, has had implications for schools around the globe. this paper highlights a few of froebel’s significant contributions to early childhood education and poses critical questions regarding how these might contribute to current conversations about education in general. by detailing how resistance to froebel’s ideas in the 19th century might be even more complicated in the 21st century, we offer historical anecdotes and philosophical distinctions as a precis to a 100 global education review 9 (2) more detailed critical policy analysis (cpa) and practical case study of the challenges neoliberalism raises for contemporary early childhood settings that remain committed to education that is grounded in a froebelian philosophy of education. methodologically, cpa is a tool to examine and critique how dominant education policy discourse influences early childhood education. the cpa framework allows us to examine complex systems and environments in which policy is constructed and implemented (diem et al., 2014; fairclough, 2013). cpa is normative critique. it identifies and describes what a policy is or means. cpa also evaluates policy and “assesses the extent to which they match up to values that are taken (contentiously) to be fundamental for just or decent societies” (fairclough, 2013, p. 178; neely and boyles, 2020). we extend cpa with case study examples and illustrations from experiences at the neighborhood nursery school, an early childhood school in atlanta, georgia. a case study is a useful method because it allows us to “thematize our participation in the world we study [and ground] ourselves in theory that guides our dialogue with participants” (burawoy, 1998, p. 5). case study is also helpful because it provides “exemplars” and illustrations that, while not generalizable, clarify themes for further application (flyvbjerg, 2006, p. 242). we suggest that exemplars that emerge from the experiences of the neighborhood nursery school are useful for demonstrating how froebel’s views of children and teaching can be influential in contemporary early childhood centers. we caution, however, that educators within these settings demonstrate critical awareness of and resistance to the broader neoliberal context in which early childhood education is situated. historical and philosophical precis in a chance meeting while vacationing in liebenstein, germany, in 1849, bertha von marenholtz-bülow came upon froebel leading children up a hill (marenholtz-bülow, 2007). she observed froebel singing with them and interacting with them while they played. impressed by what she witnessed, she engaged in conversation with froebel about the implications of his work. one obvious consequence was the education of children, where education was not rote, and children’s inquiry was not subordinated to rigid routines of order and imposition. another implication related to the preparation of teachers to teach young learners. if children were not subordinated to imposition, what changes were necessary to educate the educators of these children? further implications included philosophical assumptions entailed by a naturalistic and developmental understanding of human being. without unity between the philosophy of early education, the preparation of teachers, and the freedom to carry out his vision, froebel’s reach would be limited. yet another implication was in the techniques, the “gifts,” associated with froebel’s understanding of children’s innate curiosity. these gifts included balls, cylinders, and cubes (including cubes divided into smaller cubes) (bruce, 2008). by extension, froebel also encouraged drawing, clay modeling, weaving, and the entailing inquiry and engagement that followed. such “manipulatives” arguably are taken for granted in 2021, but what froebel demonstrated was a different purpose for the use of the gifts. drawing was not narrowly linked to procedural preparation for writing. trying to stack balls, and failing, was not about training future engineers. in contemporary terms, learning is not restricted to “school readiness.” the gifts might aid in those functions, but they learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 101 were more generically means or outlets for inquiry—the unfolding of potential that froebel understood as manifestly natural and instinctive in children. the problem froebel faced, even though he was helped by aristocrats like marenholtzbülow and the grand duke and duchess of weimar, was a misunderstanding and misapplication of his educational ideas. froebel’s explanations of what he was doing added to the confusion surrounding his work because he used terms and phrases that were unusual in conversations about children and learning at the time. “play,” for froebel, meant generative and expansive learning—not fanciful breaks to expend “extra energy” so “real learning” could then take place (tovey, 2013). as in other epochs, froebel (with pestalozzi) was viewed with suspicion because his work contradicted taken-for-granted assumptions about childhood, the purpose of schooling, and what qualified as “education.” in fact, froebel was accused of being an atheist, a subversive, and worse, by those whose power was threatened by froebel’s advocacy (hayward, 1904; bruce, 2015). we face similar problems, as we show below, when speaking with parents and navigating regulatory and accreditation requirements in contemporary early childhood education settings. neoliberalism reductively limits what is imaginable for children and their schooling because neoliberalism promotes a meta-narrative of narrow training and preparation for economic interests over the interests of young learners themselves (mirowski & plehwe, 2009; w. brown, 2015). from froebel to the “superchild”: the emergence of neoliberalism in early childhood education kaščák and pupala (2013) outline a historical progression in early childhood education, characterized by three distinct eras. in each of these eras, a dominant ideology was used to frame early childhood education practice and policy. each era is also characterized by a common influential image of children that was specific to the era. the first of these eras began in the mid-1850s and was marked by froebel’s influence. froebelian ideology, as interpreted by marenholtz-bülow, was the predominate theoretical foundation for early childhood education for decades. by the 1930s, a second era had begun to emerge “when froebel was replaced by psychology” (hultqvist, 1997, p. 102). piaget-influenced developmentalism dominated the discourse around children and childhood. by the time bredekamp’s influential developmentally appropriate practice in early childhood education serving children birth through age 8 was published in 1987, piaget’s developmental theories had become taken-forgranted in early childhood education and in western society. a third era in early childhood education began with criticisms of bredekamp’s developmentally appropriate practice for its lack of recognition of and sensitivity towards children as individuals, whose experiences originate in the context of their unique familial and social contexts. at the heart of the criticisms was an insistence that the “norms” of developmentalism were at odds with individualism and potentiality. these criticisms, which had become so prevalent they were impossible to ignore by the mid-1990s, originated in a “humanist psychology linked with the later human potential movement against the backdrop of…the economic rationality of the information revolution…[in which] caring for self-actualisation started to be linked to intellectual competitiveness of the child” (kaščák & pupala, 2013 p. 325, emphasis in original). the concept of developmentally 102 global education review 9 (2) appropriate practices underwent a revision in 1997 with the publication of the second edition of developmentally appropriate practice (bredekamp & copple). the new edition of the prominent publication privileged individualism over the norm of development. it was within this historical circumstance that neoliberalism found a foothold in early childhood education. neoliberal ideology has been used to emphasize accountancy, outcomes, and efficiency in schooling, teaching, and learning. in early childhood education, a particular vocabulary has emerged to name concepts that are the heart of this neoliberal sensibility, including “quality,” “assessment,” “efficiency,” and “returns on investment.” while the term neoliberalism may be unfamiliar or unclear to early childhood educators in the united states, the language of neoliberalism is repeatedly used to describe education in economic terms (saltman, 2000; fendler, 2009; lindblad & lindblad, 2009; c. brown, 2015; and starr, 2019). one way in which neoliberal ideology has taken hold in early childhood education in the united states is the rapid proliferation of quality rating and improvement systems (qris). as of january 2017, every state in the united states (except mississippi) was in some stage of creating a qris, a system intended to identify and encourage the development of specific factors associated with the concept of “quality” (workman, 2017). qris are built on a foundation of program evaluation data, which are used to issue rewards, ratings, and reports that purport to inform parents which centers offer the highest quality care and education. for an increasing number of early childhood educators, the concept of “high-quality” as a state-mandated aspirational goal is unquestioned, as are the metrics used to determine and designate quality. similarly, there is an assuredness to the stories that are told and the research that is presented about the “return on investment” of childcare, another concept rooted in neoliberalism, which holds sway in early childhood education in the united states. james heckman has emerged as a preeminent researcher of the economics of early childhood education. heckman offers evidence for the measurement, assessment, and evaluation of all aspects of early childhood education, which is used to generate data supportive of the quality narrative (heckman, 2011; heckman, pinto, & savelyev, 2013). through quality-improvement efforts, early childhood is envisioned as having an unusually high return on investment. ultimately, the emphasis on return on investment in early childhood education has created a system in which preschools are increasingly competition-driven and hyperregulated. in the process, early childhood settings run the risk of becoming places where neoliberal concepts like markets, quality, and investment are given priority over the needs of children, families, and educators. we argue that contemporary early childhood education is overly influenced by a neoliberal ideology that has marginalized the conceptualization of children upon which froebel constructed his vision for their education. the transformative path described by kaščák and pupala, from “universal child” [a froebelian perspective] to “autonomous child” [a piagetian perspective] and to “superchild” [a neoliberal perspective], is the result of the transformation of the discursive regimes on the child and childhood in the twentieth century. later in this this paper, we use kaščák and pupala’s historic discursive conceptions of childhood in our analysis of the influence of the qris rating systems on early childhood settings throughout the united states. our focus is on learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 103 neoliberal bureaucratic regulation and compliance that alters, if not restricts, the possibility of froebelian education. the rise of quality rated improvement systems in the united states: reifying neoliberal policy and practice in early childhood education the nation’s first qris were developed in the 1990s. since then, qris have proliferated nationwide. participation in qris is often a requirement for childcare centers to be eligible recipients of federal subsidies and grants. in georgia, the state in which the neighborhood nursery school is location, the qris is known as quality rated (qr). “similar to rating systems for other service-related industries, quality rated assigns a quality rating (one star, two stars, or three stars) to early education and school‐age care centers that meet a set of defined program standards” (department of early care and learning, n.d.c). georgia’s perception of early childhood education as a “service-related industry” indicates the neoliberal influence on early childhood education policy development, which peter moss (2019) has termed the quality agenda. by setting the parameters of early childhood education in industrial terms, the language codifies—literally—neoliberalism in early childhood education. georgia adopted the quality rated system in 2012. according to the governor’s office of student achievement, qr is designed to improve the quality of early care and education programs as well as provide families with clear information on these programs. many states have implemented tiered quality rating and improvement systems (qris) initiatives similar to georgia’s, with the goals of raising the quality of early care and education and positively impacting child outcomes. (ogbu, 2014) georgia’s quality rated initiative highlights five elements: quality standards; a process for monitoring or assigning ratings based on quality standards; a process for supporting providers in quality improvement; financial incentives; and dissemination of ratings to parents and other consumers (ogbu, 2014). as part of the qris process in georgia, the early childhood environment rating scale (ecers) is used for program assessment (for children under age 3, the infant/toddler environment rating scale [iters] is used). the ecers, first published in 1980, is in its third edition. according to the frank porter graham child development institute as the university of north carolina at chapel hill (2021), the ecers is “the most widely used early childhood environment quality assessment instrument in the united states and worldwide— used in more than 20 countries and formally published in 16 of those countries, with additional translations currently underway.” the year-long qr process includes the creation of a program portfolio, a series of classroom observations, program evaluations (using the ecers/iters), and state-approved professional development plans for all educators. at the end of the qr assessment period, the early childhood education center is awarded a number of stars, based on an overall score, ranging from one-, two-, or three-stars; one-star indicates the lowest quality. these ratings are made available to anyone seeking childcare through georgia’s childcare database. in the last 30 years, the image of the “superchild” that was described by kaščák and pupala has emerged alongside neoliberal school readiness discourse. qris have become increasingly dominant in the early childhood landscape and froebel’s notions of the “natural child” and the teacher as a guide have become increasingly less influential. in 2021, froebel’s 104 global education review 9 (2) theories of education and child development have fallen so far from fashion in the united states as to be considered a form of “outsider education.” without promises to prioritize college and career readiness over other attributes that might be cultivated in children, froebelian-inspired schools often struggle to reassure parents that their children will be “ready” to thrive in an accountability-oriented public education system and beyond. the neighborhood nursery school: a case study of froebelianinspired early childhood education in a neoliberal society we have chosen case study as a method for our research because it allows us to develop exemplars and illustrations, and clarify themes that emerge in the examination of the case. as scholz & tietje (2002) note, “a case could be a university department, a railway company, a city, or even a child. a case is considered from a specified perspective and with a special interest” (p. 1). the case for our research is the neighborhood nursery school and we use experiences from the school to elucidate some challenges that a preschool with a froebelianinspired pedagogy has encountered while navigating a state regulatory system that is neoliberal in orientation and expectation. the neighborhood nursery school was founded in 2011 and is located in a neighborhood approximately 2 miles from atlanta, georgia. the neighborhood nursery school is a private, nonprofit preschool. children who attend the neighborhood nursery school range in age from 3 months to 5 years old; most of them live with their families in the surrounding community. families who enroll at the school are dual-income and require full-time childcare for employment. the neighborhood nursery school is funded entirely by tuition. as of 2021, there were 50 children enrolled and 15 educators employed at the school. there is a large demand for childcare in the surrounding community, and the school has maintained a waitlist since it opened. educators at the neighborhood nursery school intentionally challenge the neoliberal status quo for early childhood education in the united states, with a pedagogical approach that is influenced by the educational experiences in the infant/toddler centers and preschools of reggio emilia, italy. in describing the principles of the reggio emilia, lella gandini (1993) articulates an image of children that is central to the reggio emilia philosophy, and that has guided educational practices at the neighborhood nursery school: all children have preparedness, potential, curiosity; they have interest in relationship, in constructing their own learning, and in negotiating with everything the environment brings to them. children should be considered as active citizens with rights, as contributing members, with their families, of their local community. (p. 5) the influence of froebel on the development of an early educational philosophy in northern italy is well-documented: “…in 1913, a municipal asilo d’infanzia [kindergarten] was opened in the village of villa gaida…combining care with a strong commitment to progressive and secular education, working with the pedagogical ideas of friedrich froebel” (moss, 2016, p. 3). while mussolini’s totalitarian rule suspended publicly funded early childhood education in italy for decades, the commitment to asilo d’infanzia re-emerged in northern italy almost immediately following the liberation of italy in 1945. early childhood education was envisioned as a means to confront, address, and learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 105 eliminate italy’s legacy of fascism (barazonni, 2000). the legacy of froebelian principles, which were so influential to the earliest early childhood education curricula in italy, served as foundational theories in the development of the reggio emilia philosophy. in turn, through ongoing study of reggio emilia, froebelian ideas have influenced the educational practices at the neighborhood nursery school. froebel at the neighborhood nursery school: theory, practice, and policy early childhood education centers that continue to look towards a froebelian view of education are often seen as “play-based,” as opposed to “academics-based” like those sponsored by georgia’s state-funded prekindergarten (prek) program. the first of its kind in the united states, georgia’s prek program has provided free early childhood education since 1992 to children who meet age requirements and, in cases where there is more demand than availability, are selected in local school district lotteries (department of early care and learning, n.d.a). the neighborhood nursery school eschews prek’s academic orientation in favor of one that emphasizes play-based learning and group experiences. despite the philosophical differences in the assumptions made about early childhood education (some of which are described below), the neighborhood nursery school is mandated to participate in georgia’s qris initiative, in order to continue to receive federal grants through the child and adult care food program (cacfp). the cacfp subsidy represents several thousand dollars annually in grant funding, which is essential to the school’s operating budget, making the qr process a nonvoluntary mandate for the neighborhood nursery school. similarly, eligibility for georgia’s childcare subsidy for low-income families is contingent on qr participation. not only is there less room, space, and time allowed in contemporary early childhood education for the kind of childhood experiences that froebel found educative, the policies and practices that are enacted in early childhood education challenge the assumptions about human development that are at the heart of froebel’s theories of education. in the education of man (2005), froebel describes the child that has been conditioned to believe, through the disregard of his earliest stages of development, that …it is possible for him to do wholly without the instruction and training of the preceding stage of development…[and who] is much injured and weakened by having placed before himself, at an early period, an extraneous aim for imitation and exertion, such as preparation for a certain calling or sphere of activity. (p. 30) while the contemporary discourse about school readiness would have been unfamiliar to froebel, one might deduce from this quote his reaction to contemporary school readiness discourse (a concept which is described in more detail below), with its focus on extraneous aims, imitation, and preparation. piagetian developmentalism and neoliberal-oriented values are inherent to qr visions of children and teaching. at the neighborhood nursery school, maintaining a froebelian-inspired approach to early childhood education while undergoing the qr process has been challenging. the next section of this paper illuminates these challenges by examining three areas in which this balancing act has proven 106 global education review 9 (2) difficult: confronting the school readiness narrative, assuaging the fears of parents about their children’s early education, and hiring early childhood educators who have remained relatively untouched by the neoliberal perspective on education, childhood, and teaching. froebel at the neighborhood nursery school: theory, practice, and policy school readiness is a concept that gained prominence in the united states following the enactment of the no child left behind (nclb) act of 2001. central to nclb was the idea that learning must be ordered and sequential and relentlessly assessed. the response from various testing and textbook companies in the united states (e.g., pearson, mcgraw-hill, houghton-mifflin) was the development of early childhood-oriented prepackaged curriculum, assessments, and curriculum-centered professional development. as the “school readiness” discourse emerged, it “legitimated as truth…the notion that, in order to function in neo-liberal society – that is, to be governable – a child must be normalized” (lee, 2019, p. 7). with nclb, the push for standardization and normalization in early childhood education was unremitting, including ongoing program assessment and student evaluation. in 2017, the georgia early education alliance for ready students (geears), with the support of the georgia departments of early care and learning (decal), education (gadoe), and public health (dph), published a report entitled “a framework for school readiness in georgia.” according the document: over the course of the last several years, agencies and organizations across georgia have stated commitments to “school readiness,” with a number of initiatives featuring kindergarten readiness as a critical milestone or component of strategic frameworks…the vision of geears: georgia early education alliance for ready students is that by 2020, all georgia students will enter kindergarten prepared to succeed. (p. 2) the idea of early childhood being a preparatory stage for later schooling is contrary to froebel, who wrote of the importance of recognizing and respecting children’s natural inclinations for learning. he also warned of the dangers for children when these inclinations are ignored. the child…indeed, should know no other endeavor but to be at every stage of development wholly what this stage calls for. then will each successive stage spring like a new shoot from a healthy bud…for only the adequate development of man at each preceding stage can effect and bring about adequate development at each succeeding later stage.” (froebel, 2005, p. 30, emphasis in original) while froebel preceded the influential “developmentalism revolution” that emerged with piaget, he understood that children proceed along a unique yet predictable path towards maturity. for froebel, this path was necessarily predicated on the belief that children learn by doing, by playing, and by being in relationship with others. froebelian-inspired educators see the ways in which formal, academic “training” is inappropriate for young children, even as they battle the metanarrative of “school readiness.” learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 107 the term school readiness first appeared in early childhood education legislation in the united states in the 1980s (lewit & baker, 1995). in the ensuing decades, the meaning of school readiness has been debated by policymakers, legislators, educators, and parents. as biggar and pizzolongo (2004) describe it, …what does it really mean for a child to be ready for school? the current focus on school readiness provides a welcome opportunity to examine that question from pedagogical, research, and policy perspectives, with the hope that we can come to consensus on what has become a controversial issue. for some, school readiness means entering school with a knowledge of the abcs and 1,2,3s. although children's academic development is without question very important, it is only one piece of a set of interconnected factors that determine school readiness. (p. 64) biggar and pizzolongo suggest five factors that are used by schools to assess children’s school readiness, including “physical well-being and muscle control and coordination; healthy social and emotional development; positive approaches to learning, such as curiosity and motivation; adequate language development; and a foundation in cognition and general knowledge” (p. 64). yet, even if there were consensus that this list represents the five indicators of school readiness, a challenge would still lie in how to assess these factors in children and what meaning can be made of such assessment. over time, neoliberal-influenced school readiness discourse has resulted in what michael apple (2006) calls a reconstruction of common sense, which has created and re-created knowledge about young children and their education, in service to a neoliberal agenda. a school readiness narrative constructs a specific view of young children and their education that emphasizes the acquisition of foundational academic skills and knowledge in anticipation of elementary school. froebelian-inspired educators envision early childhood education differently, with a focus on the inherent importance of the child’s present experiences. froebel described an educational environment that is connected to daily home and community life. based on froebel’s conception of unity as necessary for healthy development, he recommended an environment that encouraged autonomy, free-will, and the “allsided use of [children’s] powers”: …the child should be neither partly chained, fettered, nor swathed; nor, later on, spoiled by too much assistance. the child should learn early how…to move freely and be active, to grasp and hold with his own hands, to stand and walk with his own feet, to find and observe with his own eyes… at an early period, the child should learn, apply, and practice the most difficult of all arts – to hold fast the center and fulcrum of his life in spite of all digressions, disturbances, and hindrances. (2005, p. 21) w. n. hailmann recounts froebel’s plans for constructing a public school in the town of helba, germany; while the school never materialized, froebel’s description of it provides insight into his vision of an ideal educational environment for young children. “the institution will be fundamental…it will rest on life itself and on creative effort, on the union and interdependence of doing and thinking, representation and knowledge, art and science” 108 global education review 9 (2) (froebel, 2005, p. 38, emphasis in original). froebel described various activities that should take place in the school, which he referred to as occupations. among the occupations, froebel included experiences like chopping wood for cooking, weaving mats, binding books, gardening, caring for animals, whittling wood, modeling with clay, drawing, and painting. froebel also emphasized the educative potential of familiar spaces beyond the walls of the school, including the home and the community. froebel (2005) understood that the child would be most influenced by those spaces that have in their being some reference to home. these are the things of his nearest surroundings – the things of the sitting-room, the house, the garden, the farm, the village (or city), the meadow, the field, the forest, the plain…which thus proceeds from the near and known to the less near and less known, and becomes…a real subject of school instruction. (p. 251) in 2021, school readiness discourse insists that education should immerse even the youngest child in a rigorous science, math, and technology curriculum, in anticipation of a future as “college and career ready” citizens. the early academicization of young children has become not only permissible but preferred. decades of research demonstrate the validity of froebel’s theories of child development and learning – through play (wohlwend & peppler, 2015) and multisensory experiences (national research council, 2000) in educational spaces that allow for constant hands-on exploration (stephens, 2012) and alongside opportunities for authentic interactions that can be used to reinforce positive social/emotional behaviors (denham & brown, 2017). in a neoliberal society, however, there is little patience for preschools that favor an emergent pedagogy that is oriented towards froebelian beliefs about learning and teaching, despite research evidence that supports this approach to early childhood education. instead, froebelian-inspired pedagogy is challenged by state regulatory and assessment requirements that favor prepackaged curriculum and other approaches that both emphasize and capitalize on the economic and consumeristic potential of the child. the school readiness discourse demonstrates a specific view of children at the earliest moments of their education, in which they are little more than human capital with earning potential. ultimately, the neoliberal school readiness discourse echoes the deficit model of the disadvantaged child, around which much early early childhood education policy in the united states was constructed. dahlberg, moss, and pence (2013) describe how the deficit model continues to frame the view of children in neoliberal-influenced discourse: the concept of early childhood as a foundation for lifelong learning or the view that the early childhood institution contributes to children being ready to learn by the time they start school, produces a “poor” child in need of preparation before they can be expected to learn, rather than a “rich” child capable of learning from birth. (p. 83, emphasis in the original) when froebel’s vision of children and childhood guided beliefs about early childhood education, play-centered schools were the “common sense” approach in early childhood education. with the rise of school readiness narratives, play-based learning is no longer a common-sense approach to educating young children. a reconstructed common sense has emerged that couches play as a waste of children’s time that only serves to delay their inevitable development into economic units of human capital. a culturewide fear has emerged learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 109 that children who are not prepared for the assembly line of schooling by age 5 have uncertain futures as workers, producers, consumers, and buyers. in a culture that is predominated by neoliberal ideology, the implications of a perceived lack of school readiness are especially troubling for the parents of young children. challenging the school readiness discourse with parents pushing back at the “school readiness” narrative in early childhood education has proven difficult with parents, who often are motivated by the anxiety and fear that are natural by-products of a rising emphasis on accountability and assessment. the school readiness narrative creates an anxiety in parents that can result in compulsively comparing their child’s academic skills with those of the child who lives next-door, or their niece, or their coworker who posts their 4-year old’s graded worksheets on the walls by their desk. some have become convinced that the inoculation against this anxiety is assessment. until recently, very young children and their education had remained an untapped market for the testing and curriculum companies, until nclb policy encouraged them to infiltrate early childhood education with child assessments, testing preparation materials, teacher professional development, and pre-packaged curriculum. kašcčák and pupala (2013) describe an educational system that has grown out of “the emergence of the ‘superchild’, assessed on the basis of his/her relationship to the established norms, and [is] linked to the fact that parents were starting to desire something more…a norm to exceed the norm” (p. 324). the qr rating system in georgia was designed, in part, to give parents information that can be used to choose among childcare options. as described on the georgia department of early care and learning (decal)’s website, parents and families need an independent, trustworthy resource to help them find high-quality childcare, preschool, and pre-k programs. that’s where georgia’s quality rated comes in. quality rated has an online tool that helps families find childcare in their area that have been evaluated by credentialed early childhood experts and deemed high-quality. families can have peace of mind knowing that any participating childcare program is committed to providing children an environment and experience that is best for their development. (department of early care and learning, n.d.c) while froebel envisioned the kindergarten as a specially designed space “where the child could congregate with peers outside the restraints of the family and the school” (shapiro, 1983, p. 22), he also saw mothers’ undeniable influence on their children. froebel’s earliest works focused on activities and songs that mothers could use to engage their children. school was offered as another setting in which children could experience growth, in familial community with others. the school readiness discourse has made this vision seem naïve and precious, a niche approach to early childhood education. a local elementary school principal, in a conversation with one of the co-founders of the neighborhood nursery school, described the school as a play to learn preschool. while he spoke favorably of how preschools like this prepared children socially and emotionally for elementary school, he was less impressed by the academic-oriented school readiness skills that these same children demonstrated as they began kindergarten. for this principal, it seemed that school readiness was evidenced almost entirely 110 global education review 9 (2) by a child’s knowledge of letters, letter sounds, and numeracy. as they transition from preschool into a new educational space with their children, parents are confronted with a stark disconnect between two visions of school. first, they have encountered a preschool that envisions children as necessary participants in the daily life of the school; then they contend with a different kind of school, in which the natural inclinations of children to learn through negotiated relationships with people, materials, and environment is incidental to the academic outcomes that are expected. mustering empathy for the parents of young children as they make the transition from a preschool like the neighborhood nursery school into public elementary school is not difficult. the parental concerns and confusions about this disconnect is evident, as in this parent’s response to an april 2017 family survey at the neighborhood nursery school: “i still wonder if there's more we need to do for the ‘pre-school’ aspect…. a tad more focus on the basics of literacy, letters and repetition would be helpful...even if still implemented in the reggio way.” another parent comment from the same survey similarly anticipated a disconnect between the neighborhood nursery school’s philosophy of education and those she expected to encounter as her child transitioned to kindergarten at a local elementary school. i really like how [the neighborhood nursery school] makes learning fun, it is about hands-on experiences and social-emotional wellbeing. to me, it is what preschool should be like (and kindergarten as well, but that's a different topic). the kids are getting exposure to all of the necessary academic content, but in a fun and meaningful way. to help parents gain a perspective, teachers at the neighborhood nursery school make a request during preliminary schoolwide meetings with parents. parents are invited to look around the room, at all the adults who surround them, and to identify who read first as a child, who walked first, who spoke first. when parents indicate the impossibility of this task, teachers introduce the idea that in human development, being first is irrelevant and does not, in any substantive way, correlate with happiness or success in adulthood. this gives educators and parents an organic opportunity to begin discussing froebelian-inspired principles of learning and development, including the value of autonomy for children, the role of the teacher as a guide in the classroom, and the essentialness of play for children’s learning. another strategy that is used to combat the neoliberal emphasis on accountability and assessment is regularly sharing documentation of children’s learning processes with their parents. as anxiety around school readiness continues to escalate, it is reassuring to see what (and how much) children already know in these first years of their lives, and to see how experiences at school have helped them build knowledge – about themselves, the world, their friends, their families, materials, animals, nature, their community, artistic expression, emotions, and thinking. an important undertaking for educators at the neighborhood nursery school is advocating for the rights of children and the value of childhood. one of the best and most reassuring ways to do this for parents is to make visible the experiences of children, their strengths and competencies, and the excitement they already bring to their learning and knowledge-building. creating environments for young children that encourage their growth in natural and respectful ways is one of the privileges of learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 111 working in early childhood education. maintaining this focus among educators in the face of school readiness discourse is only difficult, it has ethical implications for teachers as they work alongside parents to unpack the implications of school readiness discourse, and to see the places where qr protocols require schools to compromise a froebelian-informed philosophy of education. undertaking these two fundamental tasks – creating a rich environment for children and supporting their parents in challenging academic-focused expectations for children as they transition into kindergarten – requires teachers who are able to see neoliberalism in action, to name it, and to resist its urgent insistence about what is “right” for young children. recruiting and hiring educators with this disposition has proven difficult the neighborhood nursery school was founded in 2011. the preschool teacher in the neoliberal age as a school readiness discourse drives neoliberal education reform, deficit language about early childhood education teachers is sometimes used to make the case for quality improvement initiatives. in other cases, early childhood teachers are invisible in state policy conversations, as evidenced by the mission of georgia’s department of early care and learning (decal). the georgia department of early care and learning enhances children’s early education experience to promote their academic, social-emotional, and physical development in partnership with families, communities, the early care and education industry, and stakeholders. (department of early care and learning, n.d.c) rather than use the mission statement to emphasize the humanity of education, decal emphasizes a vision of education as an industry. it is worth noting that decal does not mention educators or caregivers in their mission statement, even though these are the people who do the work of early childhood education. early childhood educators build experiences and environments every day with children, and it is under their watch that children grow. the lack of visibility given to their work by georgia’s regulatory and governing bodies may be both disrespectful and demoralizing for educators. despite the invisibility of early childhood educators in decal’s mission statement, the agency focuses a great deal of its resources on regulating teachers. for example, in order to get the highest possible points on a qr profile in georgia, there are stipulated educational requirements for teachers, as outlined in the “quality rated child care program manual” (2019). these include • at least seventy-five percent (75%) of all lead teachers and fifty percent (50%) of assistant teachers meet the criteria for career level 5 or higher… • …at least fifty percent (50%) of all lead and assistant teachers have an annual professional learning plan that includes training three different ece competencies in one or more of the following areas: inclusion, cultural responsiveness, supporting dual language learners, family engagement, and/or implementation of the georgia early learning and development standards (gelds)… 112 global education review 9 (2) • seventy-five percent (75%) of all lead and assistant teachers have completed 18 hours of decal-approved training during the past 12 months prior to portfolio submission… • note: program employees who have not met the minimum educational requirement for child care licensing should be enrolled in a program of study leading to the award of a credential or degree in early childhood education. (p. 31-32) one of the challenges with the qr process at the neighborhood nursery school has been the school’s practice of hiring teachers who were not educated in teacher preparation programs. many teachers who have studied traditional teacher training programs in the united states demonstrate an intractable influence of both piagetian developmentalism and neoliberal values; as they begin teaching at the neighborhood nursery school, they often face a disconnect between these values and those imbedded in a more child interest-driven, froebelian-inspired pedagogy. since the neighborhood nursery school opened, likeminded educators have been most successfully recruited from professional backgrounds that include art, creative writing, the humanities, and other fields that are unrelated to education. adopting such a cross-disciplinarian approach to teacher recruitment has given rise to an educational environment that is richer, more open-ended, and more empathetic to unique points of view and perspectives among educators, children, and families. the neighborhood nursery school also looks for teachers who demonstrate a disposition towards the school community’s ethos, in which experimentation, empathy, relationships, and joy are integral to educative experiences. encouraging unique perspectives at the school contributes to educators’ feelings of meaning in their work. as a teacher at the the neighborhood nursery school described it in november 2020 faculty survey, “this job and being a part of this community is the first time in my life i feel valued as a whole human being capable of contributing in meaningful ways to and for a greater good.” another teacher echoes this feeling in the same survey. “i love working here and feel more respected than i ever have in a job.” froebel wrote of a form of education in which the role of adult “should necessarily be passive, following (only guarding and protecting), not prescriptive, categorical, interfering” (froebel, 2005, p. 7, emphasis in original). educators at the neighborhood nursery school are committed to teaching and caring for young children in ways that echo froebel’s envisioning of teachers as guides. techers also embrace a froebelian view of development, in which “the relationship between development and growth is understood in circular terms” and the teacher’s role is “to return the child to its natural state, to something original that cannot be abandoned, and which is characteristic for the child” (kaščák and pupala, p. 322). indeed, the child in their natural state is a key tenet of froebelian ideology. we grant space and time to young plants and animals because we know that, in accordance with; the laws that live in them, they will develop properly and grow well; young animals and plants are given rest, and arbitrary interference with their growth is avoided, because it is known that the opposite practice would disturb their pure unfolding and sound development; but the young human being is looked upon as a piece of wax, a lump of clay which man can mold into what he pleases. (froebel, 2005, p. 8) learning and teaching in a neoliberal era 113 one of the ways in which teachers at the neighborhood nursery school reject neoliberal ideology is in the regular practice of reflecting with colleagues on children’s experiences, using documentation of these experiences as a launching point for deeper thinking about what loris malaguzzi termed “the what-to-do of teaching” (2104, p. 6). eliciting multiple perspectives on ongoing classroom experiences is useful as teachers develop projections for future classroom experiences. at the neighborhood nursery school, the term projection is used, rather than plan, to underscore an openness to emerging experiences, interests, and exploration as a hallmark of the school’s pedagogical approach. a plan has a decisive, inflexibility to it; a projection implies a way to go that is responsive to the situation and context. while some planning is necessitated in the creation of a successful school community, the neighborhood nursery school maintains a preference for projecting. and as teachers share documentation of children’s experiences in their classrooms with colleagues, they are encouraged to ask how these experiences might connect to a larger vision for society. teachers are not focused on children’s readiness to join a rigidly predetermined social and cultural milieu; instead, they guide children towards problem-solving, listening to others, and developing creative dispositions that will advantage them as they participate in the ongoing creation of society. how does this attitude towards the role of the teacher align with the expectations that are promulgated by decal and qr in georgia? in short, not well. by continuing to challenge the neoliberal image of young children, teachers at the neighborhood nursery school resist the taken-for-granted assumptions that situate the dominance of school readiness discourse with intentional efforts to re-orient early childhood education towards a froebelian pedagogy. the neighborhood nursery school is but one instance of resistance to neoliberalism and standardization within early childhood education. the neighborhood nursery school is not offered as a model of froebelian-inspired education to be replicated. we are not arguing for generalization and scaling-up. we are arguing, instead, that the neighborhood nursery school is one illustration of how froebel’s ideas can be enacted, even in the face of neoliberalism. facing the threats of neoliberalism is not easy, as it requires a critical re-evaluation of many of the assumptions of modernity, including marketization and globalization. mostly, however, challenging neoliberalism requires historical and philosophical knowledge—neither of which is privileged in school-readiness discourse. nonetheless, we remain hopeful that parents and teachers will unite to critically analyze the language used in present-day schooling, the assumptions neoliberalism reinforces in early childhood education, and the multiple ways resistance can be demonstrated. in a recent email, a parent at the neighborhood nursery school responded to the decision to permanently decrease the preschool’s operating hours from 52.5 hours per week to 45 hours per week. i’m all in on shorter hours...i hope that little by little with decisions like this we as a society can reorient our lives away from the grind of work and to the wellbeing of our families…[early childhood education] needs bold leadership and positive change. the hopeful sentiment that this parent expresses evinces the kind of resistance around which 114 global education review 9 (2) families and educators could unite to reclaim child-centered, play-based, froebelian-inspired early education from free market-inspired neoliberal ideology. in the education of man, froebel spoke of an essential union between families and educators. …the school must link itself to the family. the union of the school and of life, of domestic and scholastic life, is the first and indispensable requisite of a perfect human education of this period. the union of family and school life is the indispensable requisite of the education of this period. (p. 230) to confront neoliberalism’s influence on early childhood education, schools for young children must become sites for such unity, places where “it is possible to start questioning and contesting the current dominant discourses…to ask that question, why?” (moss, 2019, p. 18). when families and educators share a conviction that taken-for-granted assumptions about teaching and learning should be questioned and can be contested—especially those assumptions rooted in a neoliberal ideology that prioritizes profit and competition—a renewed vision of early childhood education can emerge, one that recognizes with appreciation the image of children that bertha von marenholtz-bülow encountered as she watched froebel lead a singing group of children up a hill. references a framework for school readiness in georgia (rep.). 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(2019). a new way of thinking about leadership. [review of the book the challenge for school leaders by ronald warwick]. global education review, 6 (2). 94-96. book review a new way of thinking about leadership “the challenge for school leaders” by ronald warwick by kathleen a. tobin in the challenge for school leaders: a new way of thinking about leadership, ronald warwick examines the enduring tests of continual-improvement expectations placed on teachers, educational institutions, and school corporations. however, rather than decry the value of continual-improvement intentions, he provides strategies for leaders for inspiring and measuring improvement in their schools. continual-improvement is not a new concept, but it is one that has demanded revised approaches resulting in new models over the years. building on past practice and new research, warwick brings experience as a public school math teacher, middle school principal, and professor of education in addressing these approaches with complexity and insight. warwick’s focus on challenges for school leaders is not superficial; rather, it delves into pedagogical analyses using innovative tools created to help keep schools on target when collecting data. knowledge is advancing rapidly in this field, so leaders should find his research and synthesis valuable. warwick reminds administrators that teachers themselves are the experts here, and that innovation in developing effective continual-improvement strategies can only come by fostering creativity and individual thinking. this takes time and investment on the part of institutions, but the results can be worthwhile. in order for this to happen, good leadership within teaching and administration is necessary. early on, the challenge for school leaders offers numerous recommendations for administrators in affecting positive changes in learning, such as: -respecting teachers’ competence, abilities, and professional status, -including professional staff in identifying areas in need of improvement, -giving teachers adequate time to design curriculum and develop strategies, -acting as a role model by demonstrating a sincere love for learning and commitment to continual-improvement, and -facilitating the gathering and analysis of 95 global education review 6 (2) action-driven qualitative and quantitative data. warwick advocates for the use of technology for more mature upper-level students requiring less face-to-face interaction, as well as for the professional development of teachers as they gain knowledge and meet certification requirements. he predicts even greater electronic delivery of instruction in the future, resulting in less emphasis on what has been traditional student time spent in classroom seats and more on the measurement of learned competencies. in this case, leaders must become more aware of their responsibilities toward the encouragement of innovation and alternative instructional design. from his perspective, continual-improvement may lead to more creativity in delivery, just as creative delivery may lead to continual-improvement. while he calls for support of teachers in the decisionmaking process, he clearly envisions a transition in teacher-student relationships. he sees students increasingly acquiring knowledge through digital means, with problem and project-based learning shifting teacher roles to those of mentors and small group advisors. in chapter 2, warwick provides an overview of systems essential to effective learning common to wide variations in schooling in the united states (home, hybrid, charter, private, public, etc.) and then elaborates on those systems. chapter 3 is devoted to the importance of a strong communication system, for example. this in itself is complex, as he includes communication from instructional teams to school administrators to district leaders to school boards, and vice versa. he also stresses the importance of good communication between teachers and teaching leadership teams, and advises on effective meeting agenda-building and the taking of minutes, adding a survey to gauge success. chapter 4 examines the curriculum system designed with critical thinking in mind, as well as state-mandated core competencies. that system may include traditional, contentintegrated, thematic integrated-unit, project based-learning, problem based-learning, or independent curriculum designs. in each instance, warwick provides detailed processes for faculty discussion, consensus building, learning objectives, timetables, lesson plan development, and assessment. the same is true in chapter 5, which is devoted to the instruction system. here, he outlines step-by-step processes for clarifying student expectations, considering variations in learning styles, determining instructional methods, and collecting data on student performance. chapter 6 brings added dimension to the assessment system. beyond assessing student learning in individual units, teachers must engage in action-based assessment to determine effectiveness and ultimately improve curriculum and strategies. at the end of each chapter, as well as in his appendices, warwick provides sample survey questions to help school leaders estimate progress. some aspects of the material presented in the challenge for school leaders can be intimidating, but so, too, can real life assessment in which authentic goals toward improvement are embedded. the primary benefit for readers is the effort warwick has made in detailing processes for getting this kind of work completed in a timely manner. there is opportunity for pioneering leaders to adapt recommendations to suit the needs of their own schools, and the guidelines can help all those engaged in these endeavors. “the challenge for school leaders: a new way of thinking about leadership.” by ronald warwick. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, 2015. isbn: 978-14758-1095-0 a new way of thinking about leadership 96 about the author ronald warwick is professor of educational leadership at concordia university, chicago. he has been a high school math teacher, public school administrator, university professor and administrator. he has presented and consulted throughout the u.s., europe, and korea over the past 50 years. about the reviewer kathleen a. tobin earned her ph.d. in history from the university of chicago and teaches united states and latin american history at purdue university northwest. she has served on the indiana commission of higher education and subsequently indiana’s statewide transfer and articulation committee, and is currently heading her campus department of history and philosophy. she served as president of the indiana association of historians from 2019-2019. she loves all things related to teaching and learning. 106 global education review 5(3) ________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: sitabkhan, yasmin, platas, linda m. & ketterlin-geller, leanne r. (2018). capturing children’s mathematical knowledge: an assessment framework. global education review, 5 (3), 106-124. capturing children’s mathematical knowledge: an assessment framework yasmin sitabkhan rti international linda m. platas san francisco state university leanne r. ketterlin-geller southern methodist university abstract this paper explores an innovative assessment framework for measuring children’s formal and informal mathematical knowledge. many existing standardized measures, such as the early grade mathematics assessment, measure children’s performance in early primary grade skills that have been identified by researchers and policy makers as foundational and predictive of later academic achievement (platas, ketterlin-geller, & sitabkhan, 2016; rti international, 2014). however, these standardized assessments only provide information on children’s mathematical ability as it pertains to skills and concepts that are a focus of school instruction, referred to as formal mathematics. while valuable, they leave unmeasured the mathematics that children use and develop as part of their everyday life, such as the strategies they use to solve simple arithmetical problems that arise as they move through their day (khan, 1999; saxe, 1991; taylor, 2009). in this article, we draw from mixed methods studies which focus on capturing the informal mathematical skills that children develop outside of school in various contexts (guberman, 1996; nasir, 2000; sitabkhan, 2009; sitabkhan, 2015). we describe how the use of observations of children’s mathematical activities in natural settings and in subsequent cognitive interviews using mathematical tasks derived from those observations, can illuminate mathematical knowledge and skills that may otherwise remain hidden. we found that an assessment framework that focuses on both standardized measures of formal mathematical learning and contextualized measures of children’s everyday mathematics can provide a more complete and nuanced picture of children’s knowledge, and taken together can inform the development of curricular materials and teacher training focused on early learning. keywords early grade mathematics, primary school, assessment introduction mathematical skills and knowledge have been useful to societies throughout history (radford, 1997). their importance has been recently _______________________________ corresponding author: yasmin sitabkhan, senior early childhood researcher international education, rti international, 701 13th street, n.w., suite 750, washington, dc 20005 email: ysitabkhan@rti.org capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 107 highlighted by large-scale studies investigating the predictive power of mathematical skills on later academic achievement and economic wellbeing (hanushek & woessman, 2008; watts et al., 2014). beginning in 1995, children’s math knowledge has been measured at the population-level through easy-to-administer written tests beginning in the fourth grade (international association for the evaluation of educational achievement, 2011). however, these fourth grade and later skills are greatly influenced by earlier skills that are less amenable to written assessment. in addition, investigations into the effects of early mathematical development show a strong influence on children’s academic achievement across domains, including literacy (claessens & engel, 2013; duncan et al., 2007). because of the magnitude of these findings and the implications at both individual and societal levels, measuring early math skills has become a priority for governments in low and middleincome countries (melqo core team, technical advisory groups, & steering committee, 2017; raikes et al., 2017). ideally, such measurement should provide actionable information about children’s mathematical development to ministries of education. a variety of early grade assessments have been used to measure children’s mathematical development in lowand middle-income countries. some of these assessments have been part of a citizen-led effort to ensure that children are receiving an adequate education and include the annual status of education report in india (aser, 2016) and uwezo in east africa (2015a, 2015b). others have been efforts by countries connected by a common language (i.e., francophone countries in africa) to better understand how their children are faring in developing mathematical skills and understandings (i.e., programme for the analysis of education systems [pasec], 2015). yet other assessments have been used by governments and non-governmental agencies in lowand middle-income countries to measure baseline mathematical competencies in their student population and to evaluate the outcomes from an array of interventions (early grades mathematics assessment [egma], rti international, 2014). these existing assessments focus on the universal skills that researchers and practitioners agree form the foundation of early mathematical skills needed to learn more sophisticated mathematics. left largely unmeasured by these existing assessments are the everyday, often referred to as informal, mathematical knowledge and skills that children develop as they solve problems that arise in their everyday life. as children play, run errands, help around the house, and participate in community events, problems arise that require mathematical solutions. for example, a child may need to distribute the evening bread evenly among three siblings or go to the market to purchase tomatoes for a meal. as they solve these problems, they develop and employ everyday mathematical skills that are distinct from the formal skills they learn in school (khan, 1999; saxe, 1991; taylor, 2009). everyday mathematical knowledge is a key piece of the puzzle when assessing young children’s mathematics. in this paper, we present an inclusive mathematics assessment framework that measures both formal and everyday mathematical knowledge and skills in lowand middle-income countries. this framework builds upon existing methodology for capturing children’s informal mathematics, along with assessments of formal mathematics, such as the egma and asers. by assessing both formal and informal mathematics, governments can obtain 108 global education review 5(3) a comprehensive picture of the mathematics that their children know and do not know, and inform development of curricular materials that build from student’s prior knowledge and teacher training on effective instruction for early grades mathematics. a key innovation in this inclusive mathematics assessment framework is the introduction of tasks that measure children’s everyday mathematical knowledge. these tasks can be developed using a systematic and iterative process. first, through multiple, smallscale qualitative studies that take place in diverse cultural, linguistic, and geographic areas within a country, observations can be used to capture the types of mathematical problems that children solve during the course of their day. second, tasks that mirror these everyday problems can be developed and subsequently administered to the same children who were observed. this data can be examined to ensure they capture both the everyday problems that arise for children, and their solutions to these problems. finally, the tasks may then be combined with an assessment that measures formal mathematics for a representative subpopulation of students within the country. these tasks will illuminate children’s everyday mathematical skills, skills that would otherwise remain hidden. this strategy provides information on children’s performance in both formal and everyday mathematics for the chosen populations. we begin our paper with a discussion of differences between formal and everyday mathematics. we follow with descriptions of some of the more widely used population-level formal mathematics assessments as well as reviewing existing methodology for capturing everyday mathematics. finally, we detail our framework for measuring both formal and everyday mathematics at population-level. formal and everyday mathematics formal mathematics generally refers to symbolic, abstract mathematics. it is often called “school mathematics,” as it is the math that children learn in school (nunes, schliemann & carraher, 1993). everyday mathematics generally refers to the math that children use outside of school, such as the calculations they make when purchasing items in a market, or counting they may do while playing games. everyday math is also called “out-of-school mathematics,” “street mathematics,” and “informal mathematics” (nunes, schliemann & carraher, 1993). in groundbreaking work, nunes, schliemann, and carraher (1993) investigated the differences between “street math” and “school math” among a population of schooled and unschooled participants in brazil. through observations and interviews with children and adults they found several heuristics that guide our understanding of these differences. formal mathematics is often written, whereas informal math is more likely to be oral. formal math emphasizes the movement from concrete to abstract, and aims to create generalizations of mathematical concepts. informal math is concrete, and tied to objects and referents in the physical world. in order for children to develop a strong foundation in early mathematics concepts, and be prepared for increasingly complicated content, it is important to build conceptual bridges between formal and everyday math. vygotsky’s (1986) framework of scientific and spontaneous concepts can be used here to better understand the relationship between formal and informal math. formal mathematics is considered a scientific concept because it must be learned through the help of a more knowledgeable other. formal math includes the capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 109 ability to generalize and abstract a concept. for example, a child may learn that the “+” symbol means “add.” in contrast, everyday mathematics is considered a spontaneous concept because the knowledge and skills are acquired through interaction with the world around us and are local and specific to a given context. for example, a child may put objects together during play and know that by counting them all, she can produce the total amount. when scientific (formal) and spontaneous (informal) concepts converge, children begin to develop a deeper and more comprehensive understanding of mathematical concepts. the informal idea of putting objects together provides meaning to the word (add) and the addition symbol (+). the symbol (+) allows the child to apply that understanding not just to the objects in front of her but to other objects, as well as symbols. the interdependency between formal and everyday mathematics points to the importance of assessing both forms of knowledge. figure 1 illustrates the differences between these two essential facets of early mathematical knowledge and skills, as well as why assessing both is important. figure 1. differences between formal and everyday mathematics 110 global education review 5(3) as seen in figure 1 above, a comprehensive analysis of students’ mathematical knowledge and skills paves the way for the development of curricular materials and teacher training on developing effective instruction that bridges informal and formal mathematics. prior studies have been conducted on how to both assess children’s everyday mathematics and then to use this knowledge to develop instruction that connects formal and informal mathematics in the classroom (brenner, 1998; gonzalez, andrade, civil, & moll, 2001). brenner (1998) conducted a study investigating how children used money in their everyday lives to purchase items in a store after school, and how their use of mathematics in the store was connected (or disconnected) from the mathematics they were learning in the classroom. she found that almost all calculations children made in the store involved changemaking; children rarely totaled the prices, and they often bought items that were close to one dollar. in contrast, classroom instruction on use of money focused on choosing items to buy and adding them together to calculate the total price. this disconnect caused children to initially develop two separate systems of arithmetic – the one they used outside of school and the one they were learning in school – and children did not make connections between the two. however, brenner found that the teacher was able to bridge this divide by discussing with the students what they were doing outside of school, and how it was similar and different to what they were learning in class. brenner’s study supports the idea that identifying the everyday mathematics that children use and connecting it to the formal mathematics in school can be a powerful pedagogical technique. however, there are limitations to generalizing or scaling-up this study. the measurement of the everyday mathematical knowledge and skills children were using was done by a highly experienced researcher, working with one classroom of children over the course of a school year. the pedagogical techniques developed jointly by the researcher and an experienced teacher are subsequently neither sustainable nor scalable. another study aimed to support teachers in identifying students’ everyday mathematics knowledge. the funds of knowledge for teaching program trained teachers to conduct mini ethnographic studies of their students to better understand the types of mathematics they were using outside of school, and plan instruction accordingly (moll, amanti, neff, & gonzález, 1992; gonzalez et al., 2001). however, given the intensity of the training needed, supporting teachers to do this is neither scalable nor sustainable. in addition, teacher quality can be low in lowand middle-income country contexts, with many teachers receiving little to no training in early mathematics instruction (akyeampong, lussier, pryor, & westbrook, 2013). mathematics instruction in pre-primary and early primary in these contexts is often composed solely of memorizing procedures. given this, teachers do not have the requisite support, training, or time required to assess their students’ everyday mathematics and then plan instruction that bridges the two on their own. in such cases, community, district, or national-level governmental agencies can support this process. many governments in low and middle-income countries are already measuring formal mathematics at populationlevel using assessments such as the egma, aser, or similar tools. we propose that by implementing an inclusive mathematics assessment framework that integrates tasks of capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 111 everyday mathematics with these existing assessments of formal mathematics, governmental agencies can obtain a comprehensive picture of students’ mathematics. these data can then be used to develop curricular materials, such as supplemental problem sets that are tied to children’s everyday mathematics, and teacher training that provides teachers with tools to connect scientific and spontaneous concepts. these uses would not be possible without an inclusive assessment framework that accounts for both formal and informal mathematics knowledge and skills. how then, can governments best assess both formal and everyday mathematics for young children at population-level? to begin, we review current formal mathematics assessments to better understand how assessments were developed and how they are currently used. we then discuss an existing methodology for everyday mathematics. population-level assessments of formal mathematics for formal mathematics, we detail the egma, aser, and uwezo assessments. we first explain how the assessments were developed. we then provide an example of the type of data that comes from the assessments and discuss policy implications. in reviewing these assessments and their uses, it is important to attend to the potential limitations in accurately assessing all children. notably, country-level reports on the results of these assessments highlight the existence of a considerable number of children who are unable to provide answers on any of these tasks, consequently receiving a total score of zero. there are policy and practice implications of labeling groups of children as “unable to do mathematics,” while in fact they possess important everyday mathematical knowledge, which could be captured by the proposed framework. as noted previously, the egma is administered to children in early primary grades to measure their formal knowledge and skills in early mathematics concepts. results from the egma are used to inform policy makers, practitioners, and researchers about the effectiveness of existing educational policies, curricular programs or reforms, and instructional interventions supporting student achievement in mathematics (platas, ketterlingeller, & sitabkhan, 2016). content assessed on the egma focuses on early formal mathematics concepts that are predictive of future performance, including basic counting, magnitude comparisons, and simple operations. counting skills are assessed by students’ ability to identify number names and complete number patterns by supplying the missing number. magnitude comparison is assessed by asking students to discriminate between two numbers. students’ ability to perform simple operations is assessed through fluency-based single-digit additional and subtraction, two-digit addition and subtraction, and word problems. tasks were designed to sample key mathematical concepts at appropriate developmental levels for students in early primary grades. where applicable, items are sequenced from least difficult to most difficult to allow students with emerging or advanced skills to demonstrate their knowledge and skills. items that are embedded in a context such as the word problems are adapted to be culturally appropriate to the region and language of administration. during this process, people familiar with the customs and culture (e.g., ministry officials, teacher educators, teachers) provide recommendations for the appropriate context for the items. for example, in a context 112 global education review 5(3) in which children ride buses to get to school, a word problem might be phrased as “there are four children in the bus. one child gets out of the bus. how many children are left in the bus?” in a different context in which children take boats to school, the same problem might be phrased as “there are four children in the boat. one child gets out of the boat. how many children are left in the boat?” the problem structure is retained but the contextual information is adapted to increase the relevance of the context. to illustrate the varied uses of the egma results, we highlight some key findings from research activities and policy initiatives. in kenya, the egma was used as a dependent measure to evaluate the outcomes of an intervention program. analysis of the egma results showed that the intervention program, the primary mathematics and reading initiative (primr), improved the mathematics teaching of inexperienced and untrained teachers and, subsequently, children’s mathematical performance. this success convinced the kenyan government to implement the primr program country-wide (piper, ralaingita, akach, & king, 2016). in ghana, egma results were used to evaluate the quality of instruction by examining the difference in performance on conceptual tasks (i.e., two-digit subtraction) when compared to more procedural tasks (i.e., single digit addition). findings pointed to poorer performance on conceptual tasks than procedural tasks; recommendations included a greater emphasis on conceptual teaching in mathematics in primary classrooms (kochetkova & brombacher, 2014). the annual status of education report (aser) was created in india in 2005, to ascertain which literacy and mathematical skills children were learning in school. it is a nationwide survey conducted by citizen’s groups, and began as a literacy-only assessment in 1996. the mathematics section, added in 2005, includes number recognition, two-digit subtraction and three-digit by one digit division. like many other countries, india (unesco, 2015) has moved beyond just counting the number of children enrolled in primary school, and turned their efforts to measuring outcomes. aser is an annual nationwide survey of over 700,000 children in 15,000 villages (aser centre, 2016a). it is the only annual source of information on children’s progress in mathematics in india. because it is administered by citizens, it can be used as a tool in advocacy efforts to improve government provided education. in particular, it provides a tool for measurement in rural areas, where other forms of population-level assessment are limited. a variety of studies have used aser to evaluate interventions and inform policy. from 2005 to 2014, and in 2016, the survey was used in all rural districts in india to measure children’s learning in primary school. these results are reported annually and are opensource. the exploring post primary schooling used the aser to examine the skills of children in upper primary and found that 10% of children assessed could not solve subtraction problems. these outcomes and analyses inform curriculum development, academic resource planning and teacher education and training (aser centre, 2016b). similar to the aser, and implemented since 2009, uwezo uses a citizen-implemented assessment to inform stakeholders about children’s competencies from age 6-16 years old in kenya, tanzania and uganda. concerns about the difference between enrollment in primary education and child education outcomes drove the effort. also like aser, uwezo measures mathematics and literacy. the mathematics portion includes assessments of numeral and set capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 113 matching, number recognition, number comparison, two-digit addition and subtraction, one digit multiplication, and division with dividends ≤20 (uwezo, 2015a, 2015b). recommendations from these reports in uganda and kenya include changes in education policies such as enforcing entry age, supporting early childhood education in an effort to reduce grade repeating, broader textbook distribution, strengthening schooling in the most challenging contexts, and active monitoring of learning outcomes. similar to india, results showed that 5% of children in kenya and 2% of children in uganda aged 7-13 years old and in primary grades 3-7 respectively, could not perform even the easiest of the mathematical tasks in the assessment. over the last 20 years, the francophone ministerial conference for education has provided expertise through its programme for the analysis of education systems (pasec) to more than 20 countries in sub-saharan africa, the indian ocean, the middle east and southeast asia. this has resulted in almost 40 national assessments. the mathematics portion of the assessment of children in grades 2 through 6 measures children’s skills in rote counting, numeral recognition, object counting, missing number series, number ordering, addition, subtraction, multiplication, measurement (perimeter, area, conversion and time), word problems, shape naming, spatial location vocabulary, size ordering, decimals and fractions. children are assessed in primary schools, resulting in a representative sample of the school populations. test administrators are trained, supervised and monitored by national teams (pasec, 2015). findings from a report on ten subsaharan african countries indicate that overall, 16.2% of children have difficulty with even the easiest of the mathematics tasks. recommendations in the report call for consideration of alternatives to grade repetition, increases in teacher quality, and increasing preprimary attendance (pasec, 2015). across all of these instruments and uses, the recommendations are broad strokes across educational policies in teacher education, systems, curriculum, and resource allocation. often, the results point to what children cannot do, and the skills that they have not yet acquired. however, missing from these results is the mathematics that children can do, and how they do it. for example, recall that uwezo results from kenya and uganda found that 2% and 7% respectively, of children in primary grades 3-7 could not perform even the simplest tasks, such as addition and subtraction. these children most likely solve problems in their everyday lives that require addition and subtraction, whether in a game, household chores, the market, or other context. however, these children were unable to solve any tasks on the uwezo. these children may not have recognized that the formal addition problems they were asked to solve, which were written with numerals and symbols (e.g. +, =) were the same problems they solve in their everyday life. therefore, the conclusion was drawn that these children could not perform basic mathematics, when in fact the conclusion should have been that they cannot perform formal, school mathematics. more often than not, these children are among the most marginalized and attend poor-quality schools. they most likely can solve everyday math problems, and may have unique strategies with which to do so. to capture this knowledge, a different methodology is needed. below, we describe one such methodology. 114 global education review 5(3) assessment of everyday mathematics there is an advantage to assessing everyday mathematics. often, children from ethnic or language minorities, or certain regions, or genders, are categorized as “not knowing mathematics or not capable of learning mathematics.” as noted earlier, these children may be represented by very low or zero scores on formal mathematics assessments such as the egma, aser, pasec, or uwezo assessments. the deficit approach which focuses on what skills children lack or cannot do prevails when discussing the most disadvantaged children, and many formal mathematics assessments contribute to this narrative. an assessment of everyday mathematics pushes back against this narrative, by revealing what children can do. instead of focusing on lack of skills, we can appreciate and learn from the unique strategies that children have developed as they solve everyday problems. ultimately it is the responsibility of the assessor to not reach conclusions about a child as “not knowing mathematics,” but instead to persevere to reveal the mathematics that this child does know. to capture the mathematics the child does know, observations and performance on mathematical tasks tied to the observations are needed. saxe (1991), in a study aiming to understand the forms of mathematical problem solving of young street vendors in brazil, developed an approach which used observations to understand the structure of the mathematics that children used during an observed event, and then children’s performance on mathematical tasks that mirrored the observations, to systematically understand the mathematics that children used. this method has been used by multiple researchers (guberman, 1996; khan, 1999; nasir, 2000; sitabkhan, 2009; sitabkhan, 2015). in some cases, researchers then added similar tasks that measured formal mathematics knowledge (saxe 1991; taylor, 2009) or more complicated mathematics (sitabkhan, 2009) as a comparison point. in a study in mumbai, india, sitabkhan (2009) used this technique to characterize the types of mathematical problem-solving that young children developed while selling small items on trains. the first phase of the study involved on-site observations of children. observations were conducted over the course of 5 days, noting the age of the child, gender, and details of the transaction conducted while selling. after this, five of the vendors were shadowed for periods of 1-4 hours, where the researcher noted all transactions that occurred. observations revealed the mathematics that children engaged in. first, there were three common pricing structures: (1) either a single item for a single price (e.g., one comb for 10 rupees), (2) multiple items for multiple prices (e.g., combs for 10 rupees and nail polish for 20 rupees), or (3) multiple items for ratio prices (3 hairbands for 10 rupees). all prices were either 5, 10, or 20 rupees, which were aligned with common denominations of currency. children approached customers, displayed the goods they were selling, named the price, and then gauged the interest of the customer. if a customer was interested, the seller would calculate the total cost of the items for the customer, then count the money given to them and provide change if needed. from these observations, sitabkhan developed tasks that aimed to mirror the mathematics used in transactions in order to more systematically understand the types of everyday mathematics strategies and problemsolving that children used while selling. table 1 shows sample tasks that were created. both simple and more difficult tasks were created in order to capture the mathematics observed. 115 global education review 5(3) table 1. sample tasks created by sitabkhan (2009) simple more difficult single price 1. let’s say you are selling pencils for 5 rupees each. a customer wants to buy 4. how much will it be? how do you know? 2. now, a customer is having a party and wants to give pencils to all the guests. she wants to buy 56. remember, the pencils cost 5 rupees each. how much will it be? how do you know? multiple prices 3. let’s say that you are selling pencils for 5 rupees each and pens for 10 rupees each. a customer wants 4 pencils and 3 pens. how much will it be? how do you know? 4. now, a customer comes up to you and says that she needs lots of new pencils and pens for her school. she wants 34 pencils and 40 pens. how much will it be? how do you know? ratio prices 5. now let’s say that you want to sell these yellow pencils. you sell them for 5 rupees for 2. a customer wants to buy 6. how much will it be? how do you know? 6. remember, you are selling 2 yellow pencils for 5 rupees. a customer again wants to buy many for her school. this time she wants 43. how much will it be? how do you know? the researcher asked these sellers (n=10) to solve these tasks in an individually administered assessment. a key feature of the tasks was to record how the seller solved the problem, and ask them to explain their answer. this type of probing provided insight into the strategies that the seller had developed to solve these problems. table 2 show one seller’s solution to task 2. 116 global education review 5(3) table 2. child’s strategy for solving task related to observations. (adapted from sitabkhan, 2009) task 2-more difficult: a customer is having a party and wants to give pencils to all the guests. she wants to buy 56. remember, the pencils cost 5 rupees each. how much will it be? how do you know? strategy interpretation participant #14 says: if 5 rupees for 1 pencil: then 50 rupees for 10 pencils 100 rupees for 20 pencils 150 rupees for 30 pencils 200 rupees for 40 pencils 250 rupees for 50 pencils then 30 rupees for 6 pencils 250 and 30 is 280 rupees child begins by creating ratio of 50 rupees for 10 pencils, then appears to increase the unit (pencils) by 10 until reaching goal of 50 pencils. he then creates ratio of 30 rupees for the 6 pencils needed to get to 56 pencils in all, then adds 250 and 30 to arrive at final answer of 280 rupees. this seller used ratio prices by systematically increasing the unit (pencils) by 10 until reaching 50 pencils. the seller then calculated the cost for 6 pencils, and added to get to the total cost. this solution was oral. this is a different strategy than one sees in a school setting where students often use an algorithm to solve the problem on paper (sitabkhan, 2009). further analyses revealed commonalities in the strategies that sellers used to solve problems, including oral solutions and the use of common values (5, 10, and 20 rupees) used as operators to solve increasingly complex problems. the results of this study illustrate how the two-pronged approach of observations followed by designing tasks that mirror the observations can help illuminate mathematical strategies that may otherwise remain hidden on assessments of formal mathematics. whereas assessments of formal mathematics aim to assess children’s understandings of universally agreed upon foundational skills, the process of assessing everyday mathematics focuses on capturing the everyday strategies that children develop to solve mathematical problems they face. a key question that arises when considering the design of everyday mathematics tasks is why do word problems not serve this function? as stated above, word problems are common in many formal assessments, such as the egma, and they are often adapted to fit the context. how, then do the word problems on formal assessments differ from those that were given to the young vendors in india? the origin of these problems differ. the everyday math problems were derived from observation and reflected the context and structure of the practice. in assessments such as the egma, the problems are based on research that has identified several different structures of word problems in early mathematics and corresponding student strategies to solve these problems (carpenter, fennema, & franke, 1996). the structure of the problems of formal assessments, therefore, are dictated by the research. table 3 below shows the structure of problems used on the egma. 117 global education review 5(3) table 3. structure of word problems on the egma. (adapted from the egma toolkit; rti international, 2014) problem type example change: result unknown two children are on the bus, three more children get on. how many children are on the bus altogether? combine: result unknown there are six children on the bus, two are boys. the rest are girls. how many girls are there on the bus? compare: change unknown there are two children on john’s bus and seven children on mary’s bus. how many children must join john’s bus so that it has the same number of children as mary’s bus? change: start unknown five children get on the bus. now there are 12 children on the bus. how many children were on the bus to begin with. sharing four children share twelve candies equally between themselves. how many candies does each child get? multiplicative there are five seats on the bus. there are two children on each seat. how many children are on the bus altogether? in comparison, in the study of everyday mathematics in india, the structure of the problem is derived from the observations. although there may be some overlap with the problem structures of traditional assessments, the link to everyday practice is key. children may approach these problems differently, using the strategies they developed within the constraints of the practice. for example, consider the ratio strategy that the child vendor in india used to solve task 2 (seen in table 1). because this child was interacting with customers when solving mathematical problems, it was important to make sure the customer saw what they were doing, in order to avoid overpayment. the constant reference to the item in the child’s strategy may have served a purpose beyond just the calculationit may have been a way to ensure the customer that they were being charged an accurate amount. this strategy may not have been apparent had the child been given a word problem where the mathematical calculation was the same (56 x 5) but the context different (e.g., there are five boxes with 56 pencils in each one. how many pencils are there in total?) taylor (2011) discussed the importance of authenticity in mathematical tasks in the context of professional development that supports teachers in taking advantage of children’s out of school knowledge. although a different context, the framework he used to help teachers evaluate tasks is useful. the framework had two dimensions: authenticity and connectedness to mathematics. for authenticity, tasks had to be based on real life tasks in which students were engaged. for connectedness to the mathematics, the math had to be naturally-embedded in the task. taylor (2011) described connectedness as “concerned with the degree to which mathematics is a requirement for children to participate in a given practice” (p.13). 118 global education review 5(3) returning to the assessments, let’s apply this framework to a word problem from the egma: there are 6 children on the bus. two are boys. the others are girls. how many girls are there on the bus? this problem is set in a familiar context for many children around the world, who may take buses to get around their city or town. for children in a more rural setting, where there are no buses, “bus” would be changed to “matatu,” or “tuk’tuk,” or “boat,” with the problem remaining the same. this is an example of an adaptation of a word problem to make a context more familiar to the child, thus creating an authentic problem in the eyes of the child. the problem structure remains a “combine result unknown.” the purpose of this task is to see if children can solve a “combine result unknown” problemessentially, to measure their progress on applying their knowledge of mathematics to solving a problem that is seen as a core skill in the early years. by changing buses to “tuk’tuk” or some other means of transportation, the context is made familiar to children to support them in accessing the problem. however, as an everyday math problem, the question becomes, is this connected to the mathematics children do in their everyday life? that is, do children get on a bus, and have to calculate how many boy and girls are on the bus in order to participate in the bus ride? is this a problem that children would need to solve during their bus ride? if the answer is yes, then it could belong on an everyday math assessment, as it is both authentic and connected to the mathematics. however, the use of buses by children in a country does not necessarily mean that calculating space on a bus is required in their everyday life. so, if the answer is no, then this problem does not give us a sense of children’s everyday mathematics, and a different methodology is needed to ensure that problems are authentic. how can we capture everyday mathematics in a way that is scalable and sustainable for governments of lowand middleincome countries? the above study in mumbai provides insights only on this particular group of children’s everyday mathematical skills. at larger scale, it would be difficult, if not impossible, to capture all the different types of everyday mathematics. we turn to a hypothetical experiment below which articulates our framework for capturing both formal and informal mathematics at a larger scale. an inclusive assessment framework for assessing formal and everyday mathematics let’s imagine country y, a low-income country that is interested in revising/developing curriculum and curricular materials, and teacher training in early mathematics in order to improve the quality of teaching and ultimately improve student learning outcomes. before embarking on this task, officials in country y would like to better understand existing levels of early mathematics to inform their revisions. specifically, the country would like to know: 1. how are children in their country progressing in learning basic, foundational mathematical skills? 2. what other everyday mathematics do children use and know? by answering both of these questions, they hope to have enough information to develop curriculum and curricular materials, and teacher training. the country officials decide to use the capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 119 egma to answer the first question: how are children in their country progressing in learning the basic, foundational mathematical skills that have been identified in the research literature as important to future success. a plan for population sampling is constructed. an adaptation workshop is held with primary stakeholders, including teachers, principals, district education officers, nonprofit workers in the field of education, experts in the development of early mathematics curricula, assessments, and education policies, ministry of education representatives, and experts in the languages in which the egma will be administered. this workshop would provide information on the purpose of, and background information on the egma. the result of the workshop would be a successfully piloted egma consisting of the core egma and any additional egma modules adapted to the languages and/or dialects and culture of the country. this workshop would be followed by assessor/enumerator training on the egma and any other instruments to be included in the data collection. prospective assessors/enumerators would be evaluated on their rapport with children and reliability in the egma administration. for the second question regarding everyday mathematics, country y would use the methodology detailed above, consisting of observations and tasks that mirror the observed use of mathematics. however, the main challenge they would face would be how to get information on everyday mathematics that comes from observations and analysis of performance on these tasks, an essentially qualitative method, at a scale large enough that the results can be generalized. this challenge is not trivial. on the one hand, the methodology of observations and assessment on tasks that mirror the observations ensures that the mathematics being captured is authentic, and connected to the mathematics that children actually use in their everyday life. as previous work has shown, children may use and develop different strategies and understandings based on the activity they are engaged in, as the children vending on trains did in india. on the other hand, if governments want to be able to understand and utilize the types of everyday mathematics that children are using, and given that it is not possible to visit every village in the country to conduct this study, there must be compromises made to be able to capture some type of everyday knowledge at scale. given these challenges, can country y find a middle ground, that is true to the methodology while at the same time able to provide information that is useful to them in designing and/or revising curriculum and curricular materials? one possibility, detailed below, is for country y to pick sites for a qualitative study to develop and pilot tasks. these tasks could then be administered at the same time as an assessment of formal mathematics (e.g., egma), given to a subsample of students within the sampling framework. the sample could be chosen so that there is representation for factors that the government deems important, such as mother tongue, socioeconomic status, ethnic groups, gender, and/or region. first, the assessment team in country y would have to decide how to create their sample, and which factors to consider as important. if country y decided to divide by geographic area (if the country had a distinct geography that the team believed would affect the outcomes in mathematics, that would be a consideration). country y could decide to conduct two 120 global education review 5(3) qualitative studies in each geographic area, if there were reasonable similarities between the geographic areas in terms of language spoken and industry. however, as there are differences between urban and rural, they could decide to conduct one study in an urban area in each region, and one in a rural area. they would contract with talented local researchers to engage in this work. after local researchers ( e.g., two per region) were trained, they would use an observation form to choose a common practice in which children engage where everyday math can be observed (e.g., buying at the market, buying treats/lunch before or after school, playing a game on the playground, interacting with caregivers at home). they then would observe children as they engaged in this practice and record the types of interactions children have with mathematics. let’s zoom into researcher w, who might be observing children in an urban hill region of country y. after spending 2-3 days in one community, researcher w might see that children tend to be sent to the market after school to buy vegetables for their family. researcher w would go to the market, and record any transactions where children between the ages of 5-8 buy vegetables. after several days of observing and recording, researcher w might notice that almost all observations involve using ratio prices to calculate the total amount they need to give the vegetable seller. for example, child g might be buying tomatoes that are 5 for 20 coins. based on these observations, researcher w would create several tasks that mirror and extend the observations. for example, one task might be “you are in the market. 5 tomatoes cost 20 coins. how much would it be for 10 tomatoes?” another task might be “you are in the market. five tomatoes cost 20 coins. how much would it be for 3 tomatoes?” researcher w would then administer this task to a subsample of students between the ages of 5-8 in the community school to pretest the items, and ensure that they are capturing the types of mathematical knowledge and skills that were observed. these tasks would be added to the egma for a sub-sample of children. for each region, only the items from the qualitative study in that region, differentiated by urban/rural, would be added, to ensure that everyday mathematics test items are authentic and specific to local situations. the everyday mathematics tasks would be administered in addition to the egma by a subset of assessors across the different regions. these assessors would receive special training in how to administer the everyday math items, as they require assessors to notice how children solve problems and to be able to ask short follow-up questions, and then record the information accurately. when the data are collected and analyzed, country y would have answers to the two questions above. armed with this information, the curriculum developers in country y could develop teacher guides, supplemental problems for use in the classroom, and guidance for district/regional educational offices, that aim to support children’s foundational math skills as well as making connections with everyday mathematics. for example, when introducing multiplication, guidance materials could use the examples from the market that researcher w documented, and suggest supplemental problems that teachers might use. in addition, the results of the assessments would be shared with teachers during their annual teacher training. teachers would be made aware of the types of mathematics that capturing children’s mathematical knowledge 121 their students already know and use outside of school, and they would be provided with the means to integrate everyday mathematics into their teaching. by sharing the results and focusing not just on what a child lacks, but also what he or she already know, teachers can build upon prior knowledge. in addition, this knowledge may support teachers to see students as capable of learning and doing mathematics. conclusion this inclusive framework for assessing formal and everyday mathematics highlights two important points. first, it is crucial for all children to learn and understand the foundational mathematical skills taught in early primary school. second, children everywhere, regardless of schooling, are already using mathematics to solve problems and developing unique strategies to solve these problems. this knowledge may not be captured by extant measures of formal mathematical knowledge and skills. the inclusive mathematics assessment framework proposed in this manuscript brings these two sources of information together, with the ultimate aim of gaining evidence on children’s informal knowledge in the service of supporting them in learning formal mathematics. by pairing a methodology using observations to develop authentic tasks with existing population level assessments in the early grades, governments can be equipped with the right information to inform improvements in the quality of teaching and learning, and boost student learning outcomes. the results of an assessment using the inclusive framework we have proposed could be used in two ways. first, results can inform the development/revision of curriculum and curricular materials. for example, supplemental problem sets can be created that aim to connect children’s everyday mathematical knowledge with the formal mathematical knowledge that is being taught. if the assessment results reveal particular strategies that children use in out of school concepts, these strategies can be integrated into curriculum manuals for teachers that support them in lesson planning. second, the results can inform teacher trainings, and provide teachers with simple strategies to bridge everyday and formal mathematics in the classroom. there is promise in the use of these results by local/regional/district level education officers to develop specific guidance for teachers. it may be that in some countries, one local district officer can be a point person for identifying and connecting local knowledge with school knowledge, not just for mathematics but other content areas as well. in other countries, this might happen at a community level, or even at the school-level. the addition of 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(2014). what's past is prologue: relations between early mathematics knowledge and high school achievement. educational researcher, 43, 352-360. doi:10.3102/0013189x14553660 about the author(s) yasmin sitabkhan, phd, is a senior early childhood education researcher and advisor in rti’s international education division. in her current role at rti, she provides technical support to projects in lowand middle-income countries in early mathematics. her research interests focus on children’s development of early mathematical concepts and instructional strategies to support learning in lowand middle-income contexts. dr. sitabkhan has a ph.d. in education from the university of california, berkeley. linda m. platas, phd, is the associate chair of the child and adolescent development department at sf state university. she has participated in the development of child assessment instruments including the early grades math assessment (egma) and the measuring early learning quality and outcomes (melqo) and served as an expert in mathematics and literacy development on many technical and policy groups. she is a member of the development and research in early math education (dreme) network. leanne ketterlin geller, phd, is the texas instruments endowed chair in education and professor in the simmons school of education and human development at southern methodist university. her research focuses on supporting student achievement in mathematics through developing technically rigorous formative assessment procedures and effective classroom practices. her work emphasizes valid decision-making systems for students with diverse needs. http://www.uwezo.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/uwezo2014-ala-ug-final-web.pdf http://www.uwezo.net/wp-content/uploads/2016/06/uwezo2014-ala-ug-final-web.pdf troubling authority and material bodies 24 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: murris, karin, & haynes, joanna. (2020). troubling authority and material bodies: creating sympoietic pedagogies for working with children and practitioners. global education review, 7 (2). 24-42. troubling authority and material bodies: creating sympoietic pedagogies for working with children and practitioners karin murris university of oulu, finland/university of cape town, south africa joanna haynes university of plymouth institute of education, uk abstract discourses and relations of child/adult and early education are super-permeated with ideas and practices of authority and boundary-making. in early years’ practices, deeply important beliefs and assumptions about who or what has authority and who or what should create the boundaries of everyday activity often go unquestioned. this produces different kinds of epistemic injustice in respect of children and those who work with them, as well as through the materialities of early childhood and training settings, including higher education. these systems of authority both express and produce wider patterns of living associated with the wider society, including democracies. posthumanism inspires questions about not only ways of knowing, but also about the privileging of dis/embodied knowing over feeling, intuiting, sensing, making, and moving. this paper thinks from the diffractive position that knowing is a direct material and moving engagement to explore possibilities for sympoietic pedagogies of enquiry-making-with (haraway, 2016), and examines how these generate new ideas about early childhood practices and what professional knowledge might become. we illustrate this diffractive curriculum and pedagogy through an example from teacher education in south africa to make important connections between authority, pedagogy, and an enlarged framework for democratic education; in this work, we explore sympoietic approaches to negotiation. keywords authority; democracy, diffraction; negotiation; sympoiesis; posthumanism introduction for those working and living with children, opening up dis/embodied 1 forms of knowing and moving beyond the linguistic can help to trouble dominant, authoritarian adultcentered forms of discipline and instrumentalist behavior management approaches. in the example of professional education explored in this paper, working alongside student teachers sympoietically creates an imag(e)inary of how they might share authority in their own future classroom by experiencing shared authority in their own teacher education, and not just exclusively by studying texts and abstract theories (sympoiesis, making-with, as coined by donna haraway [2016], is discussed within the paper). when we speak of “experience,” it is not to propose that individuals have experience, but rather that subjects are constituted through experience, always in flux and in the process of becoming. texts and theories are important too, as we will show, when they are “taken apart” and explored dynamically through transmodal movement and activity. in the example of practice at the heart of this paper, student teachers at the university of cape town engaged with “authority” and “boundaries” after observing a philosophy with children (p4c) session in a university partnership school facilitated by one of the cotroubling authority and material bodies 25 authors (karin). 2 teacher educators had been experimenting with “block teaching” and our paper thinks with/in data generated during one week’s teaching of the childhood studies component of the post-graduate certificate in education (pgce) foundation phase. 3 we explore students’ concern with karin’s “lack of control” over the children during this observation session, the noise of the children talking and moving around in the classroom. supported by photographs of the students at work, their diffractive journals, visual essays, and pedagogical documentation, we show how karin, as lecturer, responded by providing rhizomatic transmodal opportunities (murris, 2017) for the students to make-with and think-with the concepts “traditional authority,” “anarchic authority,” and “shared authority,” that were embedded in an academic text (i.e., michaud and valitalo’s authority, democracy and philosophy, 2017) chosen as a provocation after the students had raised their concern. this higher education program works with the community of enquiry pedagogy associated with philosophy with children with/in an emergent curriculum, inspired by the reggio emilia approach to early childhood education. 4 we begin this paper by asserting the significance of authority and disturbance often felt through enactments of authority in educational settings. we “crack open” the concept in various ways, note differences in forms of authority associated with various educational approaches, including philosophy with children and reggio emilia, and we draw on one particular text chosen to enable student teachers to “dig up” different ideas and practices of authority in the classroom. we provide some background on the context and thinking that informed the emergent and transmodal teacher education approach taken by karin and her colleagues on a pgce course for early years’ teachers in south africa. the idea of sympoietic pedagogy is exemplified through images and students’ writing. we draw this together through an enlarged framework for democratic education that can serve as a provocation for further exploration. authority working as adults with young children necessarily entails our ongoing engagement with concepts, affects, and experiences related to authority and boundary making. in becoming practitioners, it is not something we can choose to ignore; although it might sometimes be troublesome and the stuff of nightmares about “losing control”’ over the children in our care. we are all too conscious of the social expectations that a teacher should take charge, hold, and communicate this position of authority. how to establish and maintain personal authority is often at the forefront of concerns for novice practitioners in early childhood settings, just as learning the rules and boundaries of who is in charge, who can speak, who is credible, and what is allowed can feature strongly for young children attending those settings. we can say that enactments of authority epitomize the relationships and the educational possibilities that emerge. we argue that authority is a central and highly contested concept for working with young children and their families and communities, and we believe this should feature prominently in professional education and development. we speak of authority, authority, and authorities; we refer not only to deeply held ideas about adults in educational and social settings being “in charge” of children’s movements, interactions, and appetites, but also to ideas and practices about who can have epistemic credibility and what forms of knowing are legitimated. we want to take this discussion of authority well beyond issues of behavior management and control, 26 global education review 7 (2) however this is played out, and into ideas of emergent, sympoietic, democratic education. as we argue below, we seek connections between emergent curricula, sympoietic pedagogies, and an enlarged sense of what democratic education might become. in south africa, a highly participatory notion of democratic citizenship has been forged by the anti-apartheid struggle (enslin, 2003), and this was laid down in the country’s human rights-based constitution and national school curricula since 2005. participation requires an approach to democracy that is not limited to acquisition of socioeconomic goods, but aims to develop the democratic habits of mind and skills that are characteristic of a “thick” or participatory notion of democracy (sheppard et al., 2011). but what does this mean? sheppard et al. (2011) argue that these dispositions are developed through conceptual investigations (analysis of abstract concepts), an appreciation of the experiential and social context, epistemic independence (thinking and learning for oneself), and engagement in discussions about controversial issues. hence it is argued that schools (and therefore the institutions that educate teachers) need to make room for people to strengthen their ability to reason and to participate through deliberation in democratic processes. this reason is related to humanist notions of individual agency and autonomy. the “community of enquiry” pedagogy of p4c also tends to be theorized as a unique approach that creates educational environments involving students’ direct democratic participation, emphasizing listening to students in contexts that are meaningful to them (gregory et al., 2017). the community of enquiry is a dialogical approach that draws on communication, interaction, reflection, and negotiation. it rests on people’s tendency toward autonomy, that is, self-regulation and selforganization. it raises demanding questions about adults' claims to authority, particularly in the light of the moral foundations of disciplinary traditions in schools. authoritarian forms of teaching (with a capital “a”) rely in the main on deference to external authority, rather than independent critical thought. this contrasts with authoritarians (law, 2006)—teachers in authority—whose authority resides not with individuals but with the process of reflective dialogue (haynes & murris 2011). so, a teacher may insist on neat appearance and arriving on time in class, but still encourage her learners to think independently. feminist philosopher martha nussbaum (2010) also argues that a democracy is sustainable only if non-authoritarian pedagogies (she explicitly mentions the community of enquiry pedagogy and p4c) become woven into mainstream education. she claims that it helps people to think for themselves, to develop the imagination, and to develop independent thinking and innovation; it also counters peer pressure and authority. a culture of individual dissent, she argues, is necessary to prevent atrocities and violence; nussbaum further notes that mutual respect for reason is essential to the peaceful resolution of conflict resulting from differences. it is worth pressing the pause button and wondering about the way in which authority and democratic practice is theorized so far. the emphasis on reasoning is striking, as is the reliance on “disembodied headwork” (people as brains on sticks). it is as though communication has lost its body and is separate from the human and nonhuman bodies that carry it (hayles, 1999). we question the privileging of dis/embodied knowing over feeling, intuiting, sensing, making, and moving in the notion of democracy mobilized so far. we wonder about what and who is excluded in these accounts of democratic practice and how democracy is limited and constrained when it rests on the troubling authority and material bodies 27 privileging of the “fully human” individualized rational authority. so why is p4c particularly helpful as a pedagogy to explore issues of authority in the (university) classroom? authority involves not only relationships between people, but also between people and certain academic practices or entire movements such as p4c. it provokes helpful dissonance and disturbance about the who and what of knowledge production and what counts as an authority. philosophy with/for children, teachers, and adults working with children although p4c pedagogy has its roots in deweyan educational philosophy and there are many resemblances between practitioners in terms of methods of conducting enquiry, we find varying interpretations and practices of authority. so, for example, in the “original” p4c program, created by matthew lipman and ann margaret sharp, the purposely written novels retain a degree of authority through their fidelity to the history of western philosophy, and there are detailed guidance materials for teachers. other practitioners have been creative with the model and introduced a range of different materials to provoke enquiry. they have also extended the community of enquiry process through drama, art, or outdoor activities; some are more laissez-faire and led by children’s interests in their approach to facilitation. we ourselves are each, and together, steeped in philosophy with children theory and practice and part of the p4c movement (gregory et al., 2017; haynes, 2018). in our research in this field, authority has featured in different ways, for example through the promotion of picture books as the milieu for philosophical enquiry (murris, 1992; murris & haynes, 2001). in this context of making enquiry through certain works of children’s literature— with all their ambiguities, adult-child relations, and concepts of naughtiness—wildness, neglect, conformity, and disobedience feature strongly in both narrative and imagery, and create provocative spaces to revisit assumptions about childhood, adulthood, and adult-child relations (haynes & murris, 2012; murris, 2016). conversations with educators about the suitability of particular texts for working with young children have informed our thinking about the importance of deep engagement with questions of authority in child and education studies (haynes & murris, 2008, 2012). equally, in the p4c movement, we occasionally find ourselves prone to disobedience, resisting the authority of a particular method of conducting p4c, questioning the propriety of academic philosophy, and wanting to play instead with modelling the “right way” to philosophize; perhaps being too radical/naughty in terms of our position on children’s epistemic authority. we have tended to push at the boundaries of “p4c as usual” through our position on children’s philosophizing and philosophical capacities (haynes, 2008, 2015; murris, 2016; murris & haynes, 2018), the intermingling of p4c with other pedagogies (murris, 2017), and we have suggested that the disequilibrium that p4c can provoke for educators is a truly valuable space for professional development (haynes & murris, 2011). more recently, we have challenged the idea of the teacher as facilitator and proposed the mode of difficultator (haynes & kohan, 2018) to maintain the radical openness of the practice. there is an intense focus throughout our work on this negotiation of authority and what it means to share it, and, more recently, not only sharing with other humans but also with the more-than-human and vibrant matter (haynes & murris, 2018). for us, this constitutes the territory of p4c as a creative pedagogy and one that is always under review, always becoming, always generating new 28 global education review 7 (2) possibilities. we propose a kind of sympoietic “negotiation of authority” in what we could playfully call a “p4c plus” approach. there are many layers to authority and teachers’ roles are embedded in larger systems of accountability, as well as social expectations regarding the nature of their role and how it is performed. in this paper we are particularly playing with, playing up, and playing down authorities, deeply exploring the relationality of the concept of authority embodied through contexts and action, from the diffractive position that knowing is a direct material and moving engagement to explore possibilities for sympoietic pedagogies of enquiry-making-with (haraway, 2016). sympoetic practices of enquiringmaking-with donna haraway’s (2016, p.176 fn13) distinction between seeing human animals as autopoietic systems or as sympoietic systems is particularly helpful for theorizing and practicing dis/embodied, relational, and emergent early years work. in autopoiesis, humans are “organizationally closed,” “autonomous units,” centrally controlled via agency or will, orientated around growth and development with “evolution between systems,” and are “predictable.” it is not difficult to see how the subjectivity assumed by many p4c proponents, including martha nussbaum, is that of an autopoietic system. the individualized human that is presupposed before s/he interacts with others, thinks, feels, and reasons as an autonomous, organizationally closed system with a body that is centrally controlled via agency or will. by contrast, sympoietic systems are unbounded “complex amorphous entities,” have “distributed control” with an “evolution within systems,” and are “unpredictable.” to cite haraway (2016): sympoiesis is a simple word; it means “making-with”. nothing makes itself; nothing is really autopoietic or selforganizing. in the words of the inupiat computer “world game,” earthlings are never alone. that is the radical implication of sympoiesis. sympoiesis is a word proper to complex, dynamic, responsive, situated, historical systems. it is a word for worldingwith, in company (p. 58). the google.doc folder created with/in an emergent pgce program that informs this paper has made it possible for karin to enact an emergent curriculum that transverses the disciplines (“undisciplining” them) using diffractive sympoietic pedagogies that trouble the nature/culture dichotomy, because the latter presupposes individualized existence of subjects and objects. sympoiesis not only displaces autopoiesis, but also enlarges it as a “carrier bag for ongoingness, a yoke for becoming-with” (haraway, 2016, p.125). karen barad’s notions of diffraction and quantum entanglement go even further than that. drawing on quantum field theory (qft), she argues that the “intra-action” is always there (and at the same time not there), even when bodies are not close physically. this forms the idea that knowledge is neither “embodied,” nor “disembodied,” but is “dis/embodied.” the “/”indicates the relational ontology that underpins the way we understand sympoietic pedagogies as always disrupting or queering 5 the “cutting into two, the “dichotomies,” and binary logic of the cartesian cuts of humanist knowledge production. in the latter, bodies are either human or nonhuman, male or female, alive or dead, etc. (cf. haynes & murris, 2019). we are either in control of the classroom or not; in authority or not. sympoietic knowledge production is always a “cutting-together apart” in one move (barad, 2014), whereby more complex relational elements are given credit as playing their own part in knowledge production; troubling authority and material bodies 29 and this includes nonhuman bodies, such as clay, paper, and plastic figurines. this complexity includes understanding how space, time, and matter are also threaded through one another sympoietically. human and nonhuman bodies do not move between newtonian points in space and time, but are always “on the move” in relation. sympoiesis, haraway (2016) explains, “is a simple word; it means ‘makingwith’” (p.58). as karin is remembering what happened during the course, and talking with joanna on skype, she/they is/are also part of the phenomenon and entangled “observers”: “beingwith,” “making-with,” “thinking-with” as a “sympoietic system.” the posthuman ontology of a sympoietic system disrupts the nature/culture binary on which modern (higher) education has been built. it reconfigures learning as a relational materialdiscursive worlding process in-between human and nonhuman bodies. such a “body” can be human, but also nonhuman like paint (figure 1) or clay (figures 2, 3, 4) or the fabric-with-the light table (figures 5, 6, 7). these were the materials the students worked-with to express their emerging ideas. so what was it that led to it? in the exemplification of teaching and learning in a pgce class that features in this paper, the students’ responses to observing their lecturer/tutor’s practice of philosophy with children in an early years’ classroom seem to suggest that some “troubling” of authority was/is taking place. the lecturer/tutor (karin), staying with the disturbance this provoked, invited a series of diffractive engagements with materials, bodies, spaces, and an academic text. the example illustrates how the concept of authority returns, expands, and reverberates throughout their course and the open-philosophical, responsive, and emergent nature of the teaching approach adopted. emergent teacher education curriculum karin is the convener of a one-year postgraduate certificate in education (pgce) foundation phase. 6 she conceptualized and codesigned the curriculum of this teacher education program at the university of cape town (uct), south africa. this paper draws on events that occurred while experimenting with so-called “block teaching.” instead of teaching three hours a week over a period of seventeen weeks, they worked across four courses in blocks of intensive one-week teaching. each morning over a whole week, the students engaged with only one of the courses. this enables deep immersion in the subject and disrupts the usual fragmentation and disjointedness of current approaches to curriculum construction. the students are all graduates, have opted to teach younger children, and are expecting to be engaged in early years’ pedagogies. the design of the course aims to encourage students to learn through and become immersed in those very approaches, rather than only learn about them, and also recognizes the many adjustments this might involve, hence the opportunities to provide different ways of sharing any concerns that are provoked, as explained in the description that follows. we acknowledge that learning is often troubling, and such “troubles” may well remain hidden from the tutors’ view. we give a flavor of one of karin’s weeks of block teaching childhood studies. in close collaboration with another lecturer who teaches life skills and special studies, the students’ learning is made visible through pedagogical documentation in a shared google.doc folder (audioand video-tapes, photos, field notes, lesson preparation, our comments, etc.). this way of working is inspired by philosophy for children (p4c) and the reggio emilia approach to early childhood education (see in particular, murris et al., 2018). this pedagogical work 30 global education review 7 (2) involves wondering about the established meanings of concepts through philosophical questioning and provoking projects by taking the concepts that emerge in philosophical enquiries further through pedagogical documentation; in this case the concept of “authority” (murris, 2016, 2017). central to the forward movement of progettazione 7 and the creation of new understandings of concepts is the transmodal (murris, 2017) switching of one hundred languages (and a thousand more) to project forward as part of a process of intra-action in between human and nonhuman bodies (which is different from self-expression). the famous reggio emilia metaphor of “the hundred languages” comes from a poem written by loris malaguzzi (edwards, 1995). a powerful critique of the privileging of the dominant two languages in (higher) education, reading and writing, the metaphor refers at one (practical) level to the introduction of material-discursive tools for meaning-making in schools, such as visual arts, physical movement, video, digital cameras, augmented realities, and computers. at a symbolic level, the hundred languages are, as carlina rinaldi (2006) puts it, a “metaphor for crediting children and adults with a hundred, a thousand creative and communicative potentials” (p. 175). a willingness to be open to surprises and the unexpected is key, and below we explore an example of how progettazione can work in teacher education. provoked by students collaborative exploration of the michaud/valitalo (2017) academic text in a philosophical enquiry, the students expressed their ideas in rotating “stations,” building on each other’s ideas diffractively and taking them into new directions through the transmodal opportunities that had been chosen carefully on the basis of the content of the text. this folder was shared with joanna as part of the collaborative writing of this paper. quotes, images, and ideas woven through this file are the data source for karin’s and joanna’s diffractive engagement. connections between the carefully chosen “languages” by the educator (murris, 2017) help to move an enquiry forward horizontally, not vertically. karin and joanna’s re-turning to the documentation is a kind of listening. the annotated visualization of selected events in class brings energies and forces to the progettazione that open up new possibilities (olsson, 2009, p. 41). the conceptual focus is the key to a dynamic, evolving, rhizomatic curriculum and the three different ways of thinking about authority kept e/merging, resisting students’ specific and repeated requests to be told how to maintain control in the classroom and manage discipline. students’ anxiety about their first teaching practice was palpable, and the following needs to be understood in the context of a school outing where karin had facilitated a few p4c “modelling” sessions with grade 1, 3, and 5 children in one of the university’s partnership schools. after the outing, the students had raised questions and made comments about what they had perceived as the lack of discipline in the classroom, with too much movement of children’s bodies, noise made by children who were talking, and by karin using a text some thought was too difficult for young children: the little prince (1945/1994) by antoine de st exupery. listening to their concerns and knowing they were anxious about their first teaching practicum a few weeks after these classroom observations, karin browsed through some p4c texts for some ideas about how to explore with the students the concerns they had raised. she had not set the readings in advance, but selected them when they connected to the many troubling authority and material bodies 31 enquiries they had in class as well as the concepts that were generated by the students themselves. karin had tried to reassure the students on several occasions by saying that building respectful relationships in the classroom and being genuinely interested in their ideas will soon turn a classroom into a place where teachers do not have to be authoritarian. however, she felt that the apparatus used to measure how true her statements were, depended on what was familiar to the students, and her reassurances somehow seemed to make little difference for most of them. karin explained to joanna that it almost felt as if they were even more anxious because this lecturer was obviously so different from them. browsing through the routledge international handbook of philosophy for children (gregory et al., 2017), karin was struck by one article in particular, and she recalled joanna talking about it very positively as she had been the editor of that particular section of the handbook. also remembering their shared enjoyment of the authors’ presentation of these ideas at a p4c conference in vancouver, karin read the chapter with great interest. this choice turned out to be very fruitful. tradition, anarchic, and shared authority in their chapter, olivier michaud and riku valitalo set out to explore the pedagogical complexity of shared authority in the context of the association of p4c with democratic education. we have already explained our choice for and interest in philosophy with children and its underlying educational and social philosophy. as mentioned before, we have theorized and practiced this pedagogy and philosophy extensively. here it is important to explain that michaud and valitalo (the authors of the academic text students were invited to work with) are concerned with the question of what form of authority is implied in this practice. since p4c is indicative of the role of philosophy in democratizing the classroom, it provides a very helpful means to understand what kind of educational authority is implied and how it might differ from other forms of authority that operate in educational settings. at the same time it opens up generative possibilities to discuss authority with student teachers per se at a particular poignant moment in their training. michaud and valitalo refer to three main educational models of authority or forms of power. they refer to the wider debate about how democratic principles should structure education and which forms of authority can be reconciled with principles of individual autonomy and equality. they identify three main positions: traditional, anarchic, and shared authority models. the traditional model, associated with plato, emphasizes the teacher’s position of being an authority as a bearer of sanctioned knowledge to be passed on and the students’ position as not-yet-adults. the anarchic position, after jean jacques rousseau, suggests that “for a good education to exist it has to be without authority [...] in which students learn in a context of freedom” (2017, p.28). this is a radically student-centered model. thirdly, the shared responsibility model, associated with john dewey (2017), which “involves being able to grasp how authority in the traditional and anarchic models are, at one and the same time, both right and wrong” (p.29, emphasis in original). michaud and valitalo call this the shared authority model, where authority becomes inherently more complex as the teacher enters into multiple forms of negotiation and their associated relations. 32 global education review 7 (2) table 1 account of models of authority in the classroom after michaud and valitalo model of authority characteristics traditional after plato, teacher is source and authorized bearer of knowledge and student looks up to teacher. anarchic after rousseau, teacher follows students’ lead in their pursuit of learning in a context of freedom. shared after dewey, responsibility for learning is shared between teacher and students in this complex relational model and teacher aims to make experience educative. negotiation is critical. it is the relational and material form and shape of these “negotiations” of authority that occupy us in this paper. what does democratic education look like? we explore some of the complexity of negotiations of authority in the model of shared responsibility through a worked example of teacher education and in order to further re-conceptualize authority in ways that might be useful for practitioners and those who work with them in professional training contexts. “we don’t need no eju-kay-shon” anarchic authority the three different concepts lend themselves well for using three rotating “stations”— common practice in the early years’ classroom. karin had prepared the space as follows. she had carefully planned a different modality for each station. there was a light table in the corner of the room and on a table a variety of fabrics, glue, paper, and scissors were inviting the students to explore the ideas using their hundred languages. a few printouts of the chapter had also been made available, so that students could cut and paste and engage with the paper as they saw fit. the materials chosen had an internal connection to the concepts themselves. the light table—with opportunities to use complex and intricate layers of connections and disturbances, light effects, and shadows—seemed a good choice for shared authority. for traditional authority, the use of clay presented itself. much of this process was intuitive, and karin still struggles to articulate the reasons for it. it sort of seemed obvious at the time. for anarchic authority, the students were invited to make group posters with large felt tip pens/fabric/glue/paper/other materials outside the classroom in a large, bright, communal space where they could work on the floor. the activity of being able (and allowed) to move their bodies more freely and use large brush strokes and bold colors seemed to connect with the concept of anarchic authority. sitting next to the students on the floor, karin listened to them as they were creating their posters, making notes. she wrote down athray’s comments about how free she was feeling during the activity: “painting and making a mess on these sheets of paper felt satisfying, fun, and at the same time relaxing. this was the first time i troubling authority and material bodies 33 was able to let go, and do as i pleased on an academic piece of work.” for each of the stations, they had been asked how child was positioned in each of these approaches to authority. jumping ahead of their final exam (a transmodal installation) at the end of the year, the overall question hovering over the teaching was how (if at all) their ideas about child and childhood were shifting during the year. constantly consulting photographs of the students at work, reading their diffractive journals (murris, 2016), their visual essays, and the shared pedagogical documentation helped karin to ask further questions and continue the enquiry. throughout the year, they kept referring back to “shared authority” in particular, thereby clearly showing the lasting impression of the morning’s work, much more so than if they had been reading the text only. in fact, getting students not just to read texts, but study texts is a real struggle. in a tiny corner of the group poster on anarchic authority, one student makes some striking remarks about the size of the human bodies in the context of anarchic authority (figure 1): the teacher was added as the last feature in this model, and was a small figure painted in grey colours that almost blended into the background, in order to show her lack of prominence in the situation. in addition to this, the word “freedom” was painted on the student’s shirt to represent the carefree way a student feels in a system where they are their own authority. other phrases such as “you can imagine” were pasted from a magazine onto his shirt to represent the concept present behind this model of authority in which a student no longer feels stifled in learning, due to a looming presence of authority. figure 1 the small figure of the gray teacher blended into the background: “we don’t need no ejukay-shon.” another group had made several handprints using bold colors covering the entire poster. one student wrote: an anarchist approach to authority places the child in a position where there are no constraints to the degree of freedom they have in the school and classroom. the child will retain ownership over what they learn and there is freedom in the pedagogical relationship with the teacher. this means that the child fulfils an active role in the construction of knowledge, and this knowledge is based on the holistic development of the child. therefore, the child is uniquely positioned so that all aspects of their learning capabilities are considered and that they understand and have a desire to be in the classroom. their poster shows the idea of anarchic authority as having no boundaries. the paint goes off the sides of the paper showing that the artwork on the page is not restricted to just the page: there is no coherent picture in the artwork that can be made out to be something naturalistic, geometric or realistic. this 34 global education review 7 (2) represents the idea that there is no one person in authority. no one authority figure can be clearly defined in the anarchist position. the haphazard lines and scribbles represent the child’s opportunity to explore their own autonomy and ideas. they do not need to follow exact guidelines and can create things that might not make sense to others but do make sense to themselves. traditional authority figure 2 gandalf, a teacher exercising traditional authority from the top the narrative character of gandalf from tolkien’s the lord of the rings appealed to quite a few students as they intra-acted with clay, a copy of the text, newspaper, each other, etc.: in both sculptures (figures 2 and 4), gandalf symbolizes leaders in general and for the purpose of this exercise, the gandalf figure represents a teacher who is exercising traditional authority. gandalf is standing on the top of the summit and the sheep are blindly following him. the sheep are symbolic of students who follow a teacher without knowing the purpose of what they are following or why they are following them. traditional authority may produce this type of “sheep and leader” mentality as students are not given the authority to question the teacher in order to gain a better understanding but merely do as they say. and just as the sheep are striving to reach the top unknowingly, it is evident in classrooms that often traditional authority produces an atmosphere in which children are working to please the teacher and not to obtain knowledge. figure 3 clay students elevate the teacher by means of knowledgetexts the idea of traditional authority is emphasized in the second sculpture (figure 3) through the clay figure by elevating the teacher using a newspaper. one student explains: troubling authority and material bodies 35 the newspaper print may be seen to represent knowledge or textbooks. and the image as a whole powerfully depicts how traditional authority can result in students who merely use textbooks and work to please the teacher. the students are not reading the newspaper to reproduce and understand the knowledge but using it in the best way they can to elevate and please the teacher. this is not the type of environment that should be created in schools and it is this type of environment that defeats the very purpose of schools to learn. in the next sculpture (see figure 4), the students express “authority over” through scale, glasses, hands, a table, and uniform rows, strikingly presented on a newspaper showing monetary value—children as consumers of the knowledge industry. figure 4 “authority over” expressed through scale, glasses, hands, a table, and uniform rows in the feedback session, one student explained: the idea of the teacher being in authority over the students was represented through a more traditional set up of a classroom where the teacher is at the front of the class facing all of the students, who are in rows. we exaggerated the size of the teacher and added details of glasses and hands present on the hips. the students, in contrast, were just figures made from three small balls of clay. although both teacher and students were both essentially made from three balls of clay, the difference was shown through the size of the balls and the detail added to the figures. this was to show how both teacher and students are of the substance, yet possess varying degrees of authority within the classroom setting. the detail of a table was added in front of the teacher, in order to show the divide present between teacher and students. the detail on the teacher, and the lack thereof on the students, also represented the way children are unformed in school, unlike the teacher, and through the process of schooling become shaped into who they will eventually be. this emphasises the large role a teacher in this form of authority has over their students in this form of authority. another student expressed how it had reminded her of her own experiences of schooling: this is the type of experience that formed the basis of my own schooling. during class, i had to adopt a submissive role, as the teacher was perceived as the root of all knowledge who could not be challenged. the onus was therefore on the students to apologize during conflict situations, regardless of whether the teacher was in the wrong or not. i found this unequal division of power to be unfair and imbalanced. 36 global education review 7 (2) shared authority one student explains that shared authority “does not disregard the teacher and in fact sees the teacher as having a role to play but is also of the view that education starts from the learner’s interests. we can say then that the authority is shared and as represented by the image we can see that there is equal participation by both the learner and the teacher” (see figure 5): at our second station we explored shared authority, in which there was a sharing of authority and knowledge between the teacher and student and the teacher is seen more as a facilitator. the media that were used for this were scraps of fabric, wool and other various scrap materials. our group showed this concept of shared authority using two different square pieces of material and a piece of orange wool. the one square represented the student and the other square represented the teacher. the orange string that connected the two was a representation of the transmission of knowledge being shared between the two that holds them together. one of the squares was left slightly larger than the other and more orange wool was woven into this piece. this was because this represented the teacher and would visually show how both student and teacher are not equal, but the teacher is a facilitator and thus does possess more of the knowledge and skill to guide the student. we also worked with different dimensions in this model by making the student lay completely flat in 2d and the teacher be slightly raised in a 3d position. this was done in order to show the differences present in the authority, yet still a sharing and common thread between the two. figure 5 connecting teacher and students with a “common thread” in 2d and 3d there certainly seemed to be consensus about their preference: with the image below, we see [again] the integration of material in symbolising the symbiotic relationship of the shared authority classroom. the intrigue of this picture though is the inclusion of the mesh at the bottom that for me symbolises the scaffolding provided in this type of relationship. its placement indicated that this is an important aspect of this authority type, a building block of sorts. it is as if the teacher provides that support base for the learner to grow and learn their independence and individuality, before eventually coming together with the teacher to form a combined front. it is the woven round shape of the top that i feel encapsulates this authority type completely, that once the teacher and the learners come together and negotiate their shared authority. they then weave together into this one cohesive circular shape that has no top or bottom, instead all fronts of it are troubling authority and material bodies 37 equal. just as a circle is equal at any given point in its circumference. figure 6 sympoietic relationality the orange string as seen in the image, represents knowledge while the grid material on the left represents the teacher and the mesh material represents the learner. here it is clear that we are seeing an example of shared authority. the knowledge is intertwined between the two materials and is able to connect them. from this we see how shared authority is an equal relationship between teacher and student with neither being seen as more authoritative than the other. in p4c classes we are able to clearly see shared authority in practice with the teacher playing the role of a facilitator while acknowledging and encouraging students to state their thoughts and opinions. the knowledge or string in this case, that we all hold helps us grow and contribute towards each other’s personal growth in a positive way. in a shared authority setting, there is respect shown towards everyone and necessary skills are learnt such as respecting others opinions and patience. connections started to increasingly become apparent between the activity and karin’s p4c demonstration lesson: i observed, for instance, at the p4c session at [...] school that while the facilitator allowed for the exploration of ideas by the students, she also used her power in the classroom to 38 global education review 7 (2) steer the students' thinking in the direction of the specific questions that she asked. students returning to this event at the end of the year what certainly has been significant is how towards the end of the year and after they had had their two teaching practicums, many returned to karin’s teaching demonstration at the start of the year, the value of p4c and the difference the course had made in their final essay: i had my concerns about p4c and how children would respond to that”…in the beginning of the year, as a class we went to [...] school to observe a philosophy for children (p4c) lesson. in my diffractive journal i wrote “upon entering the grade one class i had doubts in my mind whether the grade one’s would be able to come up with questions all by themselves without the help of their teacher. i can remember being taken aback during the outing to [the school] to watch a p4c lesson that learners were actively changing and shifting the course of the discussion. initially, i saw this as learners derailing the class as they went off-topic and seemed disruptive. however, upon reflection i could see the value of learners being active participants in a class, rather than passive receivers of knowledge. a quote from my visual essay on authority reflects this change in view, “each element brings an important position and viewpoint in a classroom which should be equally respected and included in guiding the class”. this was an active shift in what i had learnt during my own childhood and during my teaching practical i had to be very aware of how i enacted authority in the classroom. in this way, my own makeup was shaped by the influencing factors of my childhood which had to be unlearned in order to make room for a shared authority approach. ...shared authority was also reflected in the p4c session at the [....] school. the knowledge that the children brought to the class was honoured in the sense that they were provided opportunities to engage in the discussion through a process of drawing, formulating questions and then democratically voting for the question they preferred to discuss. their advice was valued, and each child could express with freedom what they desired to contribute to the inquiry. some final threads in this paper, we have insisted that authority is central to our understanding and living of adult-child relations and how these are enacted in educational settings, including higher education. through our discussion and through the example, we wanted to engage with and communicate ideas in ways that could be meaningful for practitioners. we are hopeful that these ways of working with student teachers and professionals, inspired by the political and educational movements of p4c and reggio emilia, can also prove to be liberating and pragmatic, inasmuch as experiences of cooperating to air difficulties, disagree, imagine, create, and solve problems of everyday life in classrooms can become part of the wider project of creating and sustaining democratic communities of learning that include the morethan-human, sympoietically. there is a need for time and space in the education of practitioners to realize the significance of authority and boundary-making at the heart of educational relationships and spaces, and that these relationships and spaces are not predetermined and fixed, but rather need to be continuously questioned, disturbed, re-configured and re-negotiated. sympoietic pedagogies that allow for the material and affective dimensions of knowledge and power to emerge provide not only opportunities for students to question how they have come to be constituted as subjects and what they themselves troubling authority and material bodies 39 have often experienced in their own schooling or upbringing, but also to grow in confidence and skill to anticipate and embrace the work of boundary-making and sharing responsibility that is inherent in education. they might help students to stay with the difficulties and make sense of their own avoidant (too permissive) or authoritarian (too controlling) behaviors with children and to imagine spacious and creative relationships of reciprocity. we want to argue that imagining and creating such negotiating relationships in education contexts, for children and adults, serves to make education more democratic through establishing diverse approaches to negotiation out of the habitual way of doing things, negotiating with each other, beyond words. negotiation is also through movement and action, with/in the space, with/in the material and with/in the texts. this is in contrast with participatory models of education that focus mostly on individual agency and voice, where separate add-on systems for participation mimic given modes of decision-making in the public domain, while spaces and relations of authority in teaching and learning can remain unchanged. the table below offers a framework for consideration of authority and an enlarged notion of democratic education and education for democratic living. table 2 emergent sympoetic authorities learning with/in creating authority with/in model of authority characteristics authority teachers are responsible for students’ behavior and achievement – students follow the teacher and knowledge is imparted or delivered. schools help to maintain the political status quo— this model upholds existing democratic systems. authority students have responsibility for their behavior and learning— teachers follow the students and knowledge is co-constructed. individual freedom and autonomy is encouraged and schools uphold these principles of democracy. authorities there are multiple sources of authority (including teacher, students, and texts) and learning assumes that authorities are newly negotiated and produced through episodes of learning; sharing response-ability is both implicit (ongoing, cumulative, atmospheric) and explicit (arrangement of space, diverse practices and materials). age is not a factor (learning with/in is collaborative, exploratory, playful) disagreement is; uncertainty is naturalized; transmodal expression is naturalized. sympoietic democracy is an unfolding, unfinished and open-ended project, collapsing nature/culture binaries, always becoming and also concerned with the more-than-human human. everyday experience matters. the world matters. 40 global education review 7 (2) acknowledgements we would like to thank in particular the students of the pgce foundation phase of 2019 at the university of cape town for their powerful material-discursive engagement with the text we discussed and the course as a whole. moreover, we would like to thank rose-anne reynolds, the lecturer in the pgce whom karin works closely with. notes 1 see below for an explanation of the use of “/” in “dis/embodied” and the difference it makes ethically, ontologically, and epistemologically. 2 at the start of the academic year, all students sign an ethics form—approved by the school of education ethics committee. they have an as part of the program their work with/in materials, deepens understanding and is an essential part of the curriculum-in-the-making. 3 the foundation phase in south africa refers to the teaching of 5to 9-year olds (grade r-grade 3). 4 for another example of karin’s rhizomatic reggio emilia inspired work with her students (and in this particular case, written in collaboration with colleagues), see: murris, reynolds, and peers, 2018. 5 queering is an un-doing of identity. 6 the foundation phase in south africa covers the 5–9 age range. 7 according to carla rinaldi (2006), progettazione cannot really be translated. it is a strategy, a daily practice of observationinterpretation-documentation—an emergent curriculum developed by the preschools in the city of reggio emilia, northern italy. references barad, k. 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(2017). reading two rhizomatic pedagogies diffractively through one another: a reggio inspired philosophy with children for the postdevelopmental child. pedagogy, culture & society, 25(4): 531-550. murris, k. & haynes, j. (2001). storywise: thinking through stories. newport: dialogueworks. murris, k., & haynes, j. (2018). philosophy for children: a postdevelopmental relationality. in murris, k., & haynes, j. (eds.), literacies, literature and learning: reading classrooms differently (pp.50-64). london and new york: routledge research monographs series. murris, k., reynolds, r., & peers, j. (2018). in murris, k., & haynes, j. (eds.), literacies, literature and learning: reading classrooms differently (pp.50-64). london and new york: routledge research monographs series. nussbaum, m. (2010). not for profit: why democracy needs the humanities. princeton, nj: princeton university press. olsson, l.m. (2009). movement and experimentation in young children’s learning: deleuze and guattari in early childhood education. london: routledge. rinaldi, c. (2006). in dialogue with reggio emilia: listening, researching and 42 global education review 7 (2) learning. london: routledge contesting early childhood series. sheppard, s., ashcraft, c., & larson, b.e. (2011). controversy, citizenship and counterpublics: developing democratic habits of mind. ethics and education, 1(6): 69–85. about the authors karin murris is professor of early childhood education at the university of oulu (finland) and emerita professor of pedagogy and philosophy at the university of cape town (south africa). she is a teacher educator and grounded in academic philosophy and a postqualitative research paradigm, her main interests are in childhood studies and democratic post-developmental pedagogies. she was principal investigator of a learning through digital play project in south africa. her books include: the posthuman child (2016), and (with joanna haynes) literacies, literature and learning: reading classrooms differently (2018), picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy (2012). she is co-editor of the routledge international handbook of philosophy for children (2017) and chief editor of a new routledge series on post-qualitative, new materialist and critical post-humanist research. joanna haynes is associate professor in education studies at plymouth university institute of education (uk). joanna has worked as an educator in formal and informal contexts with children, young people, and adults. her research interests include democratic, intragenerational, and community education. she is author of children as philosophers (2002; 2008), which has been translated into spanish, greek, and korean; and (with karin murris) picturebooks, pedagogy and philosophy (2012) and literacies, literature and learning: reading classrooms differently (2018). she is co-editor (with m.r. gregory and k. murris) of the routledge international handbook of philosophy for children (2017). cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 5 ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: rentzou, konstantina, gol-guven, mine, koumarianou, alexia, & cabi, nehir. exploring paternal involvement from greek, greek-cypriot and turkish fathers’ and mothers’ perspectives: cross-national differences and similarities (2019). global education review, 6 (1), 5-25. exploring paternal involvement from greek, greek-cypriot and turkish fathers’ and mothers’ perspectives: cross-national differences and similarities konstantina rentzou european university of cypress mine gol-guven bogazici university, turkey alexia koumarianou european university of cyprus nehir cabi kazım karabekir primary school abstract although european fatherhood is “in the process of reconstruction and transformation” (o’brien 2004, as cited in lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006, p. 5) and there is a need to create a clear picture about paternal involvement, few studies have explored perceptions of actual father involvement as well as the factors predicting and relating to father involvement, especially in southeastern european countries. the present study explored the role of the father and the types of paternal involvement in greece, cyprus and turkey from the mothers’ and fathers’ perspectives. the study hypotheses are that fathers are involved differently across countries and that in more partiarchically oriented countries both mothers and fathers consider father involvement as less important. thus, we hypothesized that parental style adopted by each parent and their social cognitions would be correlated with father involvement and that paternal involvement is a multidimensional concept. research results confirm most of our hypotheses and reveal statistically significant differences in terms of the role of the father and the parental styles adopted in a country level and in the way fathers are involved in a parent level. keywords father involvement; role of the fathers; meta-parenting; parental style; greece; cyprus; turkey introduction the changing role of fathers has attracted research attention from the 1970s, when research began to emphasize fathers’ active involvement rather than the consequences stemming from fathers’ absence (schoppesullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho 2004). however, fathering practices have been _________________________________ corresponding author konstantina rentzou, school of humanities, social and education sciences, department of education sciences, european university cyprus, 6 diogenous str, 2404 engomi, p.o.box 22006, 1516 nicosia, cyprus email: ntinar@hotmail.com mailto:ntinar@hotmail.com mailto:ntinar@hotmail.com 6 global education review 6(1) changing in the last few decades, bringing into the forefront an emerging role and profile of fathers as true co-parents. this shift is attributed to various societal reasons and on research results emphasizing that fathers’ involvement is as important as mothers’ involvement for children’s well-being and for maximizing the life chances of children worldwide (bögels and phares 2008, dette-hagenmeyer, erzinger, and reichle 2014, roopnarine 2015, jung yeh 2014, schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho 2004). however, despite the fact that paternal involvement ranks high among research and policy initiatives, various methodological issues, which are extensively presented later, contribute to a blurred picture of the ways fathers are involved in their children’s care, education and upbringing, as well as to the benefits of and impediments to this involvement. in addition, the variability of existing policies and intervention programs about paternal involvement across (eu) countries, contributes significantly to the blurred picture. as suggested by levtov et al. (2015) although the paternal role and involvement is changing, “men’s involvement in caregiving has too often been missing from public policies, from systematic data collection and research, to efforts to promote women’s empowerment” (p. 16). drawing on the above, the present study explored maternal and paternal reports on the role of the father and the way greek, greekcypriot and turkish fathers are involved in preschoolers’ care, education and upbringing. further, the study attempts to explain at a cultural and parental level the reasons why fathers may be more or less involved, as well as the reasons which lead them to adopt specific types of involvement. the present study contributes significantly to the limited existing literature by exploring fatherhood in three southeastern european countries and aims to shed light on how fathers are involved in those three countries which theoretically have different traditions and cultural expectations about the fathers’ role. fathers’ roles and predictors of paternal involvement mothers and fathers play different roles in the family system (finley, mira and schwartz 2008) and the childfather relationship is not simply an imitation of the child-mother relationship, but develops differently (planalp and braungartrieker 2016, p. 135). yet, despite the fact that maternal roles are well established, the roles that fathers may assume and the construct of father involvement has long been debated (pleck 2007, schoppesullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho 2004). according to schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho (2004) there is not “a single way of approaching and thinking about the study of father involvement” (p. 149). in fact, traditional taxonomies such as the one proposed by lamb et al. (1987), which include engagement, accessibility and responsibility, have been expanded in order to include, among others, qualities such as paternal warmth, support, control/monitoring, teaching, shared interests and activities, caregiving and other cognitions and affects, as well as economic support (pleck 2007, palkovitz 1997). overall, paternal involvement has been categorized into two broad categories: a) direct investment, which refers to proximal processes of interaction with the child (torres et al. 2014), and may include positive engagement activities and dimensions of parenting quality (pleck 2010); and b) indirect investment, which refers to the provision of subsistence means and accumulation of capital (torres et al. 2014), and may include the emotional, behavioral, informational and financial support they provide both to children and their mothers (bögels and cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 7 phares 2008, dette-hagenmeyer, erzinger, and reichle 2014). a review of the literature suggests that the ways and the extent to which fathers are involved in their children’s education and care may be influenced by several variables (jung yeh 2014, planalp and braungart-rieker 2016, lamb and tamis-lemonda, 2004). the two main frameworks which have been extensively used in research aiming at identifying predictors of father involvement are belsky’s (1984) and lamb-pleck’s models (lamb et al. 1987). belsky’s model includes characteristics of the father and the child, and contextual sources of stress and support. on the other hand, lambpleck’s model (lamb et al. 1987) includes motivation, skills and self-confidence, social supports and stresses, and institutional factors. jung yeh (2014) in order to address the dynamic and multiple nature of father involvement, has also proposed a comprehensive model of father involvement and suggested that the variables that affect paternal involvement may be social and cultural demographics, mother-father relationship, personality variables and children’s gender, age and temperament. in the above factors, institutional practices and public policies should also be added (lamb and tamislemonda 2004). apart from the above determinants, research suggests that maternal and paternal beliefs and attitudes towards the role of the father also influence paternal involvement (schoppe-sullivan et al. 2013, lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006). for example, planalp and braungart-rieker (2016) found that fathers are engaged in more caregiving and play behaviors when they strongly identify with their role as a father, and when mothers reported symptoms of depression. mcbride et al. (2005) cited in fuhrmans, von der lippe and fuhrer (2014) also found that mothers’ perceptions of paternal involvement, but not fathers’ own perceptions, were related to paternal involvement. further, research suggests that mothers may serve as facilitators or gatekeepers of paternal involvement, and when mothers are not supportive of fathers’ involvement, fathers tended to be less involved (lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006, hoffman 2011). fathers’ involvement in greece, cyprus and turkey as in other countries, in greece, too, new family models have emerged and the way these models differ from traditional models is mainly in gendered roles, parental role and tasks in relation to all the members of the family (gregora 2015). however, despite those changes, the role of the malefather remains to a certain extent traditional, supporting dragona’s (2012) argument that “there is an asymmetry between the cultural ideals and actual everyday paternal behavior” (p. 38). in addition, although some progressive changes in male attitudes and behaviors towards the family and the child is noticed, the role of the male in the family only hesitantly made its appearance in public debate (koroneou 2007). only limited research has dealt with greek men’s participation in parenting practices. as a result, we do not have a clear picture about fatherhood in greece. central to this blurred picture is also the fact that “there is not one dominant model but several different ones of greek father involvement” (dragona 2012, p. 38) and that fathering is highly dependent on fathers’ personal biography and circumstances “rather than being modelled on “traditional” or “new” ideal types of the meaning of fatherhood” (archodidou 2010, p. 8). apart from the above, fathers’ role is changing in greece as in other countries. for example, recent research suggested that over two thirds of greek mothers (69%) feel that fathers are much more involved in the day-to8 global education review 6(1) day care of children than in the past (social issues research center 2012). however, compared to fathers in other european countries, fathers in greece spend the least time caring for children and provide only 11% of the total amount of substantial parental childcare time (center for research on families and relationships 2007). archodidou (2010) also found increasing levels of father involvement in the domains of engagement and accessibility but low levels in the domain of responsibility. finally, dimitriadi, aggeli and papiotis (2015) found that although greek fathers of children aged 2-8 years old are involved in their children’s upbringing and believe that they influence their development, at the same time they feel that their role in children’s development is more indirect compared to the mothers’ role. in cyprus fatherhood is even more blurred since women and the role of gender are underrepresented in gender research and those topics are not systematically investigated (fagan et al. 2010). because the percentage of men who take paternal leave is low, the government has introduced the option for parental leave entitlements to be transferred from fathers to mothers, which risks “reinforcing current gender roles within the family” (ellina 2009, p. 24). further, available research on women emphasizes the need for balancing family and professional life. the scarce literature from cyprus indicates that of those participants who maintained that children’s care is the responsibility of more than one person, 60% report the mother with the father being just over half the mother's share (34%). with respect to care of children after school fathers rank third, with mothers and grandparents being the most frequently mentioned as persons who take up this responsibility. further the same study revealed that cypriot fathers feel that the time they spent for their children’s care is satisfactory (49%) and 59% of the participant fathers maintained that the multiple obligations of the family are a "fair" privilege of women. overall, the research highlights that cypriot family is still patriarchic but a new more-involved father model emerges (ellina 2007). fathering in turkey evolved major conversion, from a provider role to a more of a supporter role (boratov, fisek and ziya 2014). however, fathers are not willing to share the child care responsibilities in a more equal manner due to psychologic, social, and economic reasons (kagitcibasi and ataca 2005, dogruöz and rogow 2009). according to the recent research undertaken by mother child education foundation (acev) (2017) 91% of turkish fathers reported that mothers are the primary caregivers and about half to 35% of the fathers stated that they are not involved with physical care of their children. fathers generally assume the responsibility for the health issues of their children but are not very much involved in school related issues. ozgun, cifti and erden (2014) found similar results. both studies revealed that fathers are affectionate and warm towards their children, but they also use traditional disciplinary strategies. according to kilic (2013), although there are many studies of mothers’ involvement, this is not the case for studies exploring fathers’ involvement. however, mothers in turkey have repeatedly asked for educational programs to support fathers in their role. the fatherhood support program is such a program that is run by acev. the program seems to be successful and turkish fathers moved beyond traditional and authoritarian models of fatherhood and expressed emotions more openly in their family relationships (mcallister et al. 2012, dogruöz and rogow 2009). cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 9 methodological issues on paternal involvement research and conceptual and methodological approach to paternal involvement in the present study despite the fact that fathering and father involvement attracts increasingly more attention, many methodological issues still remain. one major methodological issue is the fact that paternal involvement is typically measured through mothers’ reports or through childor teacher-perception (charles et al. 2016, bögels and phares 2008) which raises substantial concerns about biased reporting and the validity of using third parties reports (mikelson 2008). in fact, previous research comparing maternal and paternal reports of father involvement indicated that fathers reported significantly higher levels of involvement than mothers reported (charles et al. 2016, mikelson 2008). taking into consideration the fact that research exploring discrepancies among mothers’ and fathers’ reports on father involvement with children is limited, this study examined paternal involvement both from mothers’ and fathers’ perspectives adding significantly to the limited research employing this methodology (see charles et al. 2016, mikelson 2008). another serious methodological concern on paternal involvement research is related to the way paternal involvement is conceptualized and measured, since literature review suggests that there is little agreement on how father involvement should be measured. pleck (2007) also highlighted the debate concerning the construct of father involvement and what this construct includes and has suggested the renaming of the construct into “positive paternal involvement” (p. 197). schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho (2004) have also addressed the debate about the measurement of the many different ways fathers are involved and wonder whether father involvement should be viewed as multidimensional or the multidimensionality of the father involvement construct has generated various issues concerning its measurement (schoppesullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho 2004). although various researchers have attempted to generate instruments that capture the multidimensionality of father involvement, these attempts have failed to address this need and include the whole range of behaviors inherent to fathers’ parenting roles (palkovitz 2002). schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho (2004) extend the debate about the measurement of father involvement from the tools which can be employed, to the ways father involvement can be monitored. more specifically, according to schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho (2004) the question is whether father involvement is unidimensional and if it should be measured using a single score or multidimensional construct. apart from the methodological considerations referring to whether father involvement should be viewed as a unior multidimensional construct, it is also postulated by schoppe-sullivan et al. (2013) that “whereas research on mothers’ parenting has primarily focused on the quality of maternal behavior, research on fathers’ parenting has focused more on the quantity of involvement” ( p. 499). the present study aims to addressing the above mentioned methodological concerns as well as the schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho (2004) suggestion that father involvement consists of distinct domains and therefore should be measured with different instruments. consequently, the study moves away from a general conceptualization of paternal involvement and views it as a highly differentiated rather than singular construct 10 global education review 6(1) with many different domains of a child’s life in which a parent may or may not be involved (finley, mira and schwartz (2008, p. 63). more precisely, in the context of the present study, in order to conceptualize and measure fathers’ involvement we employed pleck’s (2010) categorization of positive engagement activities and dimensions of parenting quality, aiming at adding to the limited existing literature exploring quantitative and qualitative components of father involvement in the same model. further, taking into consideration schoppe-sullivan, mcbride, and ringo ho’s (2004) suggestion that there is a need to measure paternal cognition, a construct which is not included in the inventory of father involvement (ifi), we used the newly developed parental social cognitions to childrearing behavior construct named meta-parenting. in addition, utilizing systems theories (e.g. family systems theory and bioecological systems theory) we intend to examine, among others, how paternal (ontogenic) and maternal and children’s (microsystemic) factors may influence actual paternal involvement in their preschool children’s education, care and upbringing. according to charles et al. (2016)“there is a need to better understand the nature and meaning of differences between mother and father reports of involvement” (p. 2). the present study adds significantly to parenting research since it explores not only how demographic characteristics of mothers and fathers may affect paternal involvement, but also how their attitudes towards paternal role, the parental style they adopt and their metaparenting style may also affect paternal involvement in preschoolers’ care, education and upbringing. this need stems from previous research results which suggest that mothers’ views on how large a role fathers should play in parenting were a bigger influence on father involvement than fathers’ own views of their commitment to the parenting role, whereas another study revealed that maternal encouragement was the factor most strongly associated with greater involvement of fathers in baby care, showing that the positive impact of encouragement was larger than the negative impact of criticism (hoffman 2011). finally, although paternal involvement varies greatly in different social ecologies and cultures as well as in different families within the same culture (torres et al. 2014), the majority of previous research is based mainly on usa population samples. however, fathers play different roles in different cultures and what constitutes a good father may be highly dependent on cultural ideologies about the role of the father, whereas “this new-found focus on fatherhood and in promoting greater father involvement differs somewhat across nations” (lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006, p. 4). therefore, according to lamb and tamislemonda (2004), “careful attempts to describe father-child relationships in diverse cultural contexts certainly help build the database needed for further progress in our understanding of father-child relationships” (p. 15). since the need to delineate the importance, roles, and diverse practices of fathers in different cultural communities is widely acknowledged (roopnarine 2015), the present study aims to contribute significantly to existing research by exploring fathers’ involvement across three southeastern european countries (greece, cyprus and turkey). overall, taking into account lamb and tamis-lemonda’s (2004) argument that “historical, cultural and familial ideologies inform the roles fathers play” (p. 3) the present study aspires to explore if parents’ cultural background and familial ideologies about father’s role and parenting role affect the way and the extent to which fathers’ in three countries are involved in their preschoolers’ education, care and upbringing. cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 11 research questions taking into consideration both the predictors of paternal involvement and the methodological issues surrounding this field of research, the following research questions were advanced in the context of the present study: 1) are maternal and paternal reports on fathering practices and paternal role different or similar? 2) are fathering practices and paternal role differentiated in a country level? 3) are there differences or similarities in the way fathers are involved in their preschooler’s education, care and upbringing across countries? 4) are various components of paternal involvement interrelated? 5) are correlations differentiated in a parent (mother vs father) level? 6) do children’s, fathers’ and mothers’ factors affect fathering practices and role and maternal reports on paternal involvement and role of the father? method participants the authors analyzed consensus among 100 mother–father pairs. the sample included 30 mothers and 30 fathers from cyprus, 37 fathers and 37 mothers from greece, and 33 mothers and 33 fathers from turkey. fathers’ age ranged from 29 to 59 years (m = 38.47; sd = 4.87). participant fathers represented all professional groups with 19% of them being self-employed, 16% working in private sector and 14% being business and administration professionals. on the other hand, mothers’ age ranged from 26 to 48 years (m = 35.57; sd = 4.53). thirty percent of the participant mothers were housewives and 17% percent worked in the private sector. the majority of mothers and fathers were married (98%). each pair of parents reported on the same child. children’s age ranged from 30 months to 72 months (m = 56.54; sd = 9.04). of the children, 58 were boys (57.4%) and 42 were girls (41.6%). only two children did not attend a daycare center. of the 98 children attending daycare, 60 were enrolled in public centers (59.4), 35 in private centers (34.7%) and 3 in another type of daycare center (3%). measures the role of the father questionnaire (rofq) mothers and fathers reported on the extent to which they believe the father's role is important to child development by filling in the rofq (palkovitz 1984). the rofq contained 15 items. subjects indicated their level of agreement or disagreement with each item on a five point scale. in the present study the rofq was found to have good internal consistency with chronbach’s alpha values being .79 for the total sample, .82 for mothers and .77 for fathers. the inventory of father involvement (ifi) mothers and fathers reported on the ways fathers are involved by filling in the short, 26items version of the ifi (hawkins et al. 2002). the ifi measures affective, cognitive, and direct and indirect behavioral components of involvement. subjects rate how good a job they think fathers do on a rating scale ranging from 0 to 6 the ifi in total has been found to have good internal consistency with chronbach’s alpha values being .92 for the total sample, .94 for mothers and .91 for fathers. parenting style in order to record mothers’ and fathers’ parenting style we employed the parenting style questionnaire developed by robinson et al (1995). the questionnaire is comprised of authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive subscales. in brief, when parents assume an authoritative parenting style the relationship with the child is reciprocal and responsive. authoritarian parenting on the other hand is characterized by high demandingness and low responsiveness. finally, in permissive parenting 12 global education review 6(1) the relationship is indulgent. subjects were requested to report how often they engage in different parenting practices on a 6-point scale (ranging from 1 “never” to 6 “always”). in the present study, the shorter version of the questionnaire (30-items) was used. cronbach’s alpha values for the total sample ranged from .75 to .89; from .68 to .89 for mothers and from .80 to .90 for fathers. meta-parenting profile questionnaire (mpq) in order to record parental social cognitions to childrearing behavior we employed the mpq (hawk and holder 2006). meta-parenting refers to the deliberate thoughts or effortful cognitions parents have about their children or childrearing (hawk and holden 2006). assessment of the factor structure of the mpq revealed the following five factors: problem solving, assessing child, assessing external influences, reflecting, and anticipating. subjects are asked to respond on a 5-point likert scale. cronbach’s alpha for the total scale were .82 for mothers, .87 for fathers and .85 for the total sample. demographic information a part aiming at collecting demographic information about mothers, fathers and children was also included in both versions of the final survey. procedures after receiving consent from the creators of all 4 measures, we translated the questionnaires from english into greek and turkish using a translation back translation procedure. after finalizing translation of all measures in the two languages, we created two versions of our questionnaire. one version addressed fathers and one version addressed mothers. fathers were asked to respond to all measures from their perspective whereas mothers were asked to respond to the first two measures (rofq and ifi) in reference to their children’s father’s role and involvement whereas in terms of parental style and meta-parenting they were instructed to respond by thinking of themselves and not their children’s father. in order to ensure paired responses we added paired codes to the footer of each questionnaire (e.g. a mothers’ and a fathers’ version with the code f1, a mothers’ and a fathers’ version with the code f2, etc.), as well as an indication of whether this was mothers’ or fathers’ version. each pair of questionnaires was sealed in an envelope. using snowball and convenient sampling techniques, questionnaires were administered to parents by early childhood educators. parents were informed by early childhood educators that both mothers and fathers should fill in the version of the questionnaire addressed to them. parents were also asked to return the sealed envelope with the two questionnaires filled in to their children’s early childhood educators. results table 1 presents means and sd’s as well as the results of paired t-tests for differences between mothers’ and fathers’ ratings. as seen in table 1, mothers’ and fathers’ ratings show variations on the various scales, depending on the country. in terms of fathers’ role, only in turkey was there is a medium effect, with mothers assigning greater importance to the role of the father as compared to fathers self-reports, whereas as far as father involvement is concerned in greece and in cyprus, fathers reported that they were more involved compared to mothers’ ratings. medium to large effect size was also found in authoritarian and authoritative parental styles across countries with mothers assuming a more authoritative style whereas fathers a more authoritarian style. finally, medium effect size was also revealed in the meta-parenting construct in greece and in cyprus. cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 13 table 1. means, standard deviation and paired samples t-test results variable country mothers fathers t df es r rofq cyprus 4.28 (.31) 4.24 (.32) .773 29 .10 greece 4.22 (.34) 4.16 (.41) .916 36 .10 turkey 4.09 (.55) 3.79 (.31) 2.636** 32 .42 total 4.20 (.42) 4.06 (.40) 2.746** 99 .26 ifi cyprus 5.06 (.90) 5.18 (.71) -.897 29 1.00 greece 5.14 (.74) 5.22 (.43) -.782 36 1.00 turkey 5.32 (.62) 5.27 (.54) .318 32 .10 total 5.17 (.76) 5.23 (.56) -.699 99 .99 authoritative cyprus 4.55 (.44) 4.33 (.48) 2.113* 29 .36 greece 4.34 (.49) 4.09 (.48) 2.592** 36 .40 turkey 4.28 (.57) 4.23 (.55) .441 32 1.00 total 4.38 (.51) 4.21 (.51) 2.773** 99 .27 authoritarian cyprus 2.16 (.51) 2.47 (.63) -3.021** 29 .05 greece 2.08 (.73) 2.43 (.68) -3.343** 36 .67 turkey 2.45 (.70) 2.75 (.79) -1.984* 32 .37 total 2.23 (.67) 2.55 (.71) -4.635*** 99 .53 permissive cyprus 1.80 (.57) 1.98 (.79) -1.270 29 .24 greece 1.98 (.79) 2.16 (.91) -1.567 36 .27 turkey 2.47 (.88) 2.40 (1.14) .306 32 1.00 total 2.09 (.81) 2.19 (.97) -1.149 99 .12 meta-parenting total cyprus 3.64 (.38) 3.34 (.53) 2.711** 29 .45 greece 3.65 (.430 3.42 (.43) 2.819** 36 .42 turkey 3.61 (.49) 3.48 (.52) 1.202 32 .21 total 3.63 (.43) 3.42 (.49) 3.805*** 99 .10 note: sd’s appear in the parentheses next to means. in order to calculate es r we used the following equitation found in field (2009) r = √𝑡2 ∕ (𝑡2 + 𝑑𝑓) with r = .10 small effect, r = .30 medium effect and r= .50 large effect. *p <.05, **p <.01, ***p <.001 14 global education review 6(1) in order to explore statistically significant differences among countries we also ran anova analysis. analysis revealed that there were statistically significant differences between our group means (fathers from the three countries) in the rofq (f(2,97)=14.31, p. = .00) as well as to the ratings assigned from the total sample to the rofq (f(2,197)=11.403, p. = .00). although there were no statistically significant differences in the mean score of the rofq among mothers, anova analysis at the item level and post hoc analysis results revealed statistically significant differences on various items. in terms of ifi there were no statistically significant differences on fathers’, mothers’ and total sample mean scores among countries. item analysis indicated however significant differences in various items. as far as parental styles are concerned anova analysis showed statistically significant differences in the mean assigned by mothers in the authoritarian subscale (f(2,97) = 3.036, p. = .053) as well as in the permissive subscale (f(2,97) = 6.445, p. = .002). fathers’ ratings did not differ significantly in any of the three parenting subscales. however, analysis on the item level revealed some statistically significant difference. when differences among the total sample were explored analysis revealed statistically significant differences in the authoritative (f(2,197)=3.437, p. = .034), authoritarian (f(2,197)=4.776, p. = .009) and permissive parenting (f(2,197)=6.491, p. = .002). finally, no statistically significant differences were revealed in the meta-parenting scale. since one of the main aims of the study was to explore cultural differences in father involvement as well as similarities and difference on maternal and paternal attitudes towards fathers’ involvement, we also analyzed data at a subscale level. table 2 presents means, sd’s and paired samples t-test results for the ifi subscales. as seen in table 2 analysis revealed large effect sizes in quite a lot of the ifi subscales. cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 15 table 2. means, standard deviation and paired samples t-test results and for the ifi subscales subscale country mothers fathers t df es r discipline and teaching responsibilities cyprus 4.96 (1.09) 5.20 (.78) -1.522 29 .29 greece 4.98 (1.00) 5.05 (.75) -.492 36 1.00 turkey 5.15 (1.26) 5.19 (1.06) -.165 32 1.00 total 5.02 (1.11) 5.14 (.86) -1.008 99 .10 school engagement cyprus 4.69 (1.53) 4.69 (1.65) -.031 29 1.01 greece 5.03 (1.38) 5.38 (.66) -1.541 36 .25 turkey 5.60 (.61) 5.55 (.57) .259 32 .99 total 5.11 (1.28) 5.23 (1.09) -1.031 99 .10 mother support cyprus 4.97 (1.14) 5.08 (.88) -.754 29 1.00 greece 4.96 (.98) 5.18 (.63) -1.600 36 .27 turkey 5.29 (.79) 5.45 (.74) -.988 32 1.00 total 5.07 (.97) 5.24 (.76) -1.946* 99 .20 providing cyprus 5.46 (1.22) 5.75 (.43) -1.437 29 .28 greece 5.54 (.74) 5.60 (.55) -.503 36 1.00 turkey 5.77 (.40) 5.66 (.74) .665 32 .99 total 5.59 (.84) 5.67 (.59) -.799 99 1.00 time and talking together cyprus 4.99 (1.26) 5.12 (.90) -.529 29 1.00 greece 5.09 (.76) 4.95 (.71) 1.126 36 .18 turkey 5.22 (.80) 5.41 (.69) -1.259 32 .23 total 5.10 (.94) 5.15 (.78) -.541 99 1.00 praise and affection cyprus 5.44 (.74) 5.62 (.52) -1.943 29 .38 greece 5.48 (.58) 5.51 (.45) -.280 36 1.00 turkey 5.71 (.43) 5.75 (.37) -.312 32 1.00 total 5.54 (.60) 5.62 (.46) -1.271 99 .13 developing talents and future concerns cyprus 4.81 (1.50) 4.88 (1.09) -.301 29 1.00 greece 5.16 (.82) 5.00 (1.32) .754 36 .99 turkey 5.41 (1.18) 5.47 (.88) -.232 32 1.00 total 5.14 (1.19) 5.12 (1.14) .132 99 .99 reading and housework support cyprus 4.29 (1.65) 4.42 (1.67) -.515 29 1.00 greece 4.76 (1.56) 4.63 (1.39) .497 36 .99 turkey 4.70 (1.50) 4.47 (1.39) .854 32 .99 total 4.60 (1.57) 4.51 (1.47) .531 99 .99 attentiveness cyprus 5.09 (.90) 5.40 (.76) -2.814** 29 .61 greece 5.40 (.64) 5.20 (.63) 1.628 36 .26 turkey 5.16 (.89) 4.65 (1.16) 2.681** 32 .43 total 5.23 (.81) 5.08 (.92) 1.651 99 .16 note: sd’s appear in the parentheses next to means. in order to calculate es r we used the following equitation found in field (2009) r = √𝑡2 ∕ (𝑡2 + 𝑑𝑓) with r = .10 small effect, r = .30 medium effect and r= .50 large effect 16 global education review 6(1) in order to explore discrepancies among mothers and fathers we also created a discrepancy score. figure 1 presents the distribution of the discrepancy scores for the ifi and rofq for the total sample. discrepancy scores of the ifi ranged from -2.71 to 1.72, whereas for the rofq discrepancy scores ranged from -2.07 to 1.53. as seen in figure 1, there were more discrepancies in the ifi as compared to the rofq. further in the ifi discrepancies were in their majority negative (in 45 pairs) whereas in the rofq positive (in 58 pairs), suggesting that mothers assigned higher scores in the rofq whereas fathers assigned higher scores in the ifi scale. however, the percentage of agreement between mothers and fathers that we calculated for ifi, rofq and the ifi subscales was low and ranged from 7% (for the ifi) to 50% agreement in terms of fathers’ role as provider. praise and affection had also relatively high percent of agreement (39%). since in the present study father involvement is viewed as a multidimensional construct we ran bivariate correlation analysis in order to explore correlations among various “components” of father involvement (that is scales and subscales). bivariate correlation analysis run for the total sample showed that there is statistically significant positive correlation among almost all scales and subscales at the 0.05 level, whereas authoritarian and permissive parenting were negatively correlated with some of the other scales and subscales and positively correlated one with the other. further, analysis showed that the ifi total score is significantly correlated not only with the rofq (sig. = .254; p. = 0.05) but also with all three parental styles (sig. = .439; p. = 0.05, sig. = -.198; p. = 0.05, and sig. = -.248; p. = 0.05 for the authoritarian, authoritative and permissive subscales respectively) as well as with the meta-parenting construct (sig. = .302; p. = 0.05). further, we explored correlations among scales and subscales separately for mothers and fathers (table 3). as seen in table 3, whereas fathers’ data revealed statistically significant correlations among all scales and subscales (apart from the permissive parenting) and the ifi mean score, mothers’ data revealed fewer statistically significant correlations. -3.00 -2.00 -1.00 0.00 1.00 2.00 figure 1. discrepancies among mothers and fathers in the ifi and rofq scales ifi discrepancy rof discrepancy cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 17 table 3. bivariate correlation results among scales and subscales for mothers and fathers (mothers’ views above the principal diagonal and fathers’ views below the principal diagonal) scales and subscales 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 rofq (1) 1 .212* .244* .227* .303** .287** -.218* ifi (2) .343** 1 .778** .593** .776** .593** .792** .749** .795** .676** .650** .347** -.277** -.268** discipline and teaching responsibilities (3) .640** 1 .389** .610** .376** .516** .419** .670** .480** .403** .347** -.313** .251* school engagement (4) .495** .288** 1 .422** .312** .440** .409** .539** .399** .240* -.200* mother support (5) .744** .404** .373** 1 .488** .554** .687** .576** .324** .443** .370** .261** providing (6) .301** .434** .216* .260** 1 .387** .533** .327** .283** .441** .211* time and talking together (7) .250** .738** .363** .322** .619** .271** 1 .653** .588** .476** .522** .320** praise and affection (8) .340** .549** .200* .251* .460** .320** .461** 1 .473** .350** .513** .250* developing talents and future concerns (9) .511** .519** .235* .443** .337** .209* 1 .531** .468** .266** -.289** -.240* reading and housework support (10) .678** .399** .266** .361** .485** .244* .321** 1 .442** -.247* -.259** attentiveness (11) .349** .629** .385** .231* .376** .348** .240* .408** 1 .263** .221* authoritative (12) .348** .607** .330** .573** .315** .584** .354** .277** .332** .455** 1 -.205* -.260** .509** authoritarian (13) -.318** 1 .497** permissive (14) -.214* -.249* -.251* -.207* -.225* -.199* .582** 1 meta-parenting (15) .232* .499** .220* .302** .463** .376** .435** .483** .207* .256* .324** .584** 1 ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) *correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed) 18 global education review 6(1) we also explored correlations among parents’ and children’s demographic information and the mean scores assigned in scales and subscales. in this analysis we did not add parents’ marital status since most (98%) were married. table 4 presents bivariate correlation results stemming from fathers’ data. as seen in table 4, analysis revealed only limited correlations among parents’ and child’s demographic data and fathers’ responses in the scales and subscales. further, results showed that the country, child’s gender and the type of day care children attend are the variables, which were found to be correlated with most of the scales and subscales. in addition, we explored correlations among parents’ and children’s demographic information with mothers’ ratings in scales and subscales. for the mothers’ data, a variable for mothers working status (working mother and non-working mother) was created. analysis showed that mothers’ demographics affect their rating in many scales and subscales. as far as children’s demographics are concerned, only child’s gender was found to correlate with ratings. table 4. bivariate correlation results among fathers’ rating on scales and subscales with parents’ and children’s demographic information. demographic variable / scale rofq ifi discipline … responsibi lities school engage ment mother support time … together praise and affection developing talents reading … support attentiv eness authori tarian metaparentin g country -.455** .311** .209* -.328** child’s age -.227* .231* child’s gender .247* .204* .314** .287** .199* parents’ age .200* educational level .318** .240* mothers’ working hours -.223* -.228* child attends daycare -.359** type of daycare .226* -.227* -.204* -.264** -.278** -.298** -.297** ** correlation is significant at the 0.01 level (2-tailed) * correlation is significant at the 0.05 level (2-tailed) cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 19 discussion drawing from serious methodological concerns surrounding research exploring fathers’ involvement in their preschoolers’ education, care and upbringing, the present study aimed to explore fatherhood in greece, cyprus and turkey, as well as agreement and disagreement in fathers’ and mothers’ reports of father involvement in those three countries. our results indicated that fathers in all three countries believed that they are doing a good job on all aspects of father involvement as recorded with the ifi, with reading and housework support having the lowest percentages, but still above 4.50. some variations were revealed among countries, in terms of school engagement, developing talents and attentiveness, with turkish fathers being more engaged at school and contributing into their children developing talents, whereas cypriot fathers being more attentive compared to fathers from the other two countries. our results are confirmed by previous research results from the three countries that suggest that fatherhood is changing and fathers are more involved in their children’s care, education and upbringing compared to previous generation. further, our results seem not to confirm our first hypothesis that qualitative differences would be revealed across countries. this may suggest that all three countries are underpinned by similar traditions about fathers’ role. further, fathers’ ses may explain the lack of variances. for instance, previous research results have suggested that fathers’ educational level may predict levels and/or types of involvement (jung yeh 2014, planalp and braungart-rieker, 2016). in our study, the majority of participant fathers were university graduates and only 12% of the participants were primary or secondary school graduates. it is essential therefore for future studies to explore father involvement in these three countries with participants representing all ses. comparing maternal and paternal reports on ifi, our results are in line with previous research results, which showed that there are discrepancies concerning paternal involvement when comparing maternal and paternal reports (charles et al. 2016, mikelson, 2008). participant fathers assigned higher scores to ifi scale and subscales and reported that they were doing better job than mothers believed. the highest percent of agreement was found in the providing subscale whereas the lowest in the school engagement subscale. those discrepancies may have various interpretations. for instance fathers may report higher levels of involvement due to social desirability (charles et al. 2016) or mothers may report lower levels of involvement due to the fact that they may be in conflict with the father, or they may not be present during father – child interaction (charles et al. 2016) or they may not receive the support they wished for in their children’s upbringing. another possible explanation is that mothers and fathers conceptualize paternal involvement differently. as we have seen conceptualization and measurement of fatherhood and father involvement is blurring. to this end, it is essential for future research to examine, employing qualitative techniques (e.g. interviews, focus groups and observations of actual interaction), paternal and maternal nomenclature of father involvement. previous research has shown, though not consistently, that maternal and paternal attitudes towards the role of the father may affect the actual involvement of fathers (planalp and braungart-rieker 2016, lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006, hoffman 2011). the present study explored both how important the role of the father is considered in the three countries and how maternal and paternal perception about the importance of the father 20 global education review 6(1) may affect fathers’ actual involvement. participant fathers from the three countries assigned different importance to their role with turkish fathers having a less positive view about father involvement. this is in line with our hypothesis according to which in more partiarchically-oriented cultures, fathers’ role was expected to be considered as less important from both mother’s and father’s perspectives, and the role of the father was expected to vary qualitatively among countries. mothers on the other hand assigned higher ratings as opposed to fathers. in greece and cyprus there was more agreement among fathers and mothers whereas in turkey a moderate effect size was revealed. further, confirming previous research results (schoppe sallivan et al. 2013), bivariate correlation analysis revealed statistically significant correlations between perceptions about fathers’ role and actual involvement for the total sample as well as for mothers and fathers independently. the results of the present study contribute significantly to the existing literature and research concerning the conceptualization and measurement of paternal involvement, since it views fatherhood as a multi-dimensional construct which includes a whole range of behaviors inherent to fathers’ parenting roles (palkovitz 2002). in fact, the study explored how parental style of mothers and fathers as well as parental social cognitions to childrearing behavior (metaparenting) may affect and predict fathers’ involvement. to the best of our knowledge, this is the first study on fatherhood which explores such correlations. our results confirm our initial hypothesis, that is, the parental style adopted by each parent and their social cognitions are correlated with father involvement. more precisely, the analysis indicated that authoritarian and permissive parental styles are negatively significantly correlated with ifi, whereas authoritative and meta-parenting are positively correlated with ifi. though this was the case for the total sample and fathers’ data, mothers’ metaparenting has not be found to be correlated with their perceptions about fathers’ involvement. this finding opens a new way of thinking about, conceptualizing and measuring father involvement. in fact our argument is that both constructs (parental style and meta-parenting) are inherent parts of the maternal and paternal involvement in their children’s care, education and upbringing. in addition, our results are in line with previous research which suggested that mothers may serve as facilitators or gatekeepers of paternal involvement (hoffman 2011, lero, ashbourne and whitehead 2006,). participant mothers who adopt a more authoritarian parental style assign lower importance to the role of the father and describe the father as less involved. this might imply that they inhibit parental involvement. parents’ and children’s demographic information on the other hand was only mildly correlated with mothers’ and fathers’ ratings. further, demographic information was found to predict maternal and paternal views about the role of the father rather than actual and perceived paternal involvement. this might be explained by the homogeneity of the sample in certain characteristics (e.g., almost all children attend preschool settings; the majority of preschoolers range in age from birth to 6; the majority of fathers are at least high school graduates; and the majority mothers are working). the present study also adds significantly to limited existing literature exploring fatherhood in three southern eastern european countries. despite our initial hypothesis, fathers in the three countries are almost equally and similarly engaged in their children’s education, care and upbringing. to this end, two factors cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 21 should be taken into account. on the one hand the sample of the present study is small and results should be replicated by other studies with bigger samples. on the other hand, those three countries share common traditions and social ecologies and this might be a reason explaining the similarities. future studies could compare fatherhood and father involvement across european regions. for example it would add significantly to existing literature to explore father involvement in western and eastern european countries. limitations of this research should be acknowledged. the study relies on self-reported measures. future research should employ (as already stated) qualitative approaches in order to help to create a clearer picture about fatherhood. further, our sample was mostly highly educated and married, the majority of mothers were working, children’s age did not range across early childhood and they attended a preschool program. our results may not, therefore, apply to other populations of mothers and fathers. greece, cyprus and turkey represent countries where the state does not support father involvement. in turkey there is no paternity leave, in cyprus paternity leave for two weeks was issued upon the writing of the present study (july, 2017) whereas in greece there is a two day paternal leave. although paternal leave is not a panacea or one-size-fits-all for engaging men in care work (mcallister et al. 2012), according to letvov et al. (2015) it “is a vital step toward recognition of the importance of sharing caregiving for children, and it is an important means of promoting the well-being of children and gender equality in the home, the workplace, and society as a whole” (p. 21). future research should explore how father involvement is affected by and differentiated across different social and political policies. taking into consideration research results which suggest that fathers’ voice desires to be more involved in their children’s life “changes are needed in policies, in systems and institutions, among service providers, within programming, and within data collection and analysis efforts” (letvov et al. 2015, p. 22). apart from paternal leave which might be considered as a foundation for improving and increasing father involvement, planned and programmed educational support is required (kilic 2013). previous experience from such programs (e.g. the fatherhood support program) has shown that they contribute significantly to the ways fathers view and implement their paternal role. further, both our study and previous research results highlight the need to “recognize the diversity of men’s caregiving and support it in all of its forms” (letvov et al. 2015, p. 24) and for informing our nomenclature about fatherhood and father involvement. finally, taking into consideration lamb and tamis-lemonda’s (2004) argument that “within individual families, agreement between mothers and fathers regarding paternal roles may be of crucial importance” (p. 14), it is of high importance to implement educational programs involving both mothers and fathers and to conduct more research which collects, analyzes and presents data stemming both from mothers and fathers. references archodidou, d. 2010. the status and the role of the new father. unpublished phd dissertation. athens: national and kapodistrian university of athens acev. 2017. caring fatherhood and predictors of it. acev publications. retrieved august 15, 2017 from http://ilkisbabalik.acev.org/wpcontent/uploads/2017/06/ilgilibabalikyon eticiozeti.08.06.17.web.pdf 22 global education review 6(1) belsky, j. 1984. the determinants of parenting: a process model. child development, 55(1), 83-96. boratov, h. b., fisek, g. f., and ziya h. e. 2014. unpacking masculinities in the context of social change internal complexities of the identities of married men in turkey. men and masculinities, 17(3), 299-324. bögels, s., and phares, v. 2008. fathers' role in the etiology, prevention and treatment of child anxiety: a review and new model. clinical psychology review, 28(4), 539– 558. center for research on families and relationships. january 2007. working fathers in europe: earning and caring? crfr research briefing 30. https://www.era.lib.ed.ac.uk/bitstream/h andle/1842/2783/rb30.pdf?sequence=1&i sallowed=y. accessed on may 18, 2017. charles, p., spielfogel, j., gorman-smith, d., schoeny, m., henry, d., and tolan, p. 2016. disagreement in parental reports of father involvement. journal of family issues, 1-24, advanced online publication. doi: 10.1177/0192513x16644639. cicchetti, d. v. 1994. guidelines, criteria, and rules of thumb for evaluating normed and standardized assessment instruments in psychology. psychological assessment, 6, 284-290. dette-hagenmeyer, d. a., erzinger, a. b., and reichle, b. 2014. the changing role of the father in the family. european journal of developmental psychology, 11(2), 129135. dimitriadi, s., aggeli, a, and papiotis, j. 2015. exploring father involvement in early childhood. in t. sidiropoulou and j. kouros (eds.), conference proceedings of the 20th international conference of the association of psychology and psychiatry for adults and children (39-43). 18-22 may 2015, athens, greece. filodiritto editore dogruöz, d. and rogow, d. 2009. and how will you remember me, my child? redefining fatherhood in turkey. in rogow, d. 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(1-5). new york, ny: wiley. lero, d.s, ashbourne, l.m., and whitehead, d.l. may, 2006. inventory of policies and policy areas influencing father involvement. guelph, canada: father involvement research alliance. levtov r., van der gaag n., greene m., kaufman m., and barker g. 2015. state of the world’s fathers: a men care advocacy publication. washington, dc: promundo, rutgers, save the children, sonke gender justice, and the menengage alliance. mcallister f, burgess a, barker g, kato-wallace j. 2012. fatherhood: parenting programmes and policy a critical review of best practice. london and washington dc: promundo and the fatherhood institute. mikelson, k.s. 2008. he said, she said: comparing mother and father reports of father involvement. journal of marriage and family, 70, 613-624. palkovitz, r. 2002. involved fathering and child development: advancing our understanding of good fathering. in c.s. tamis-lemonda & n. cabrera (eds.), handbook of father involvement: multidisciplinary perspectives (119-140). mahwah, nj: erlbaum. palkovitz, r. 1997. reconstructing “involvement”: expanding conceptualizations of men’s caring in contemporary families. in a.j. hawkins & d.c. dollahite (eds.), generative fathering: beyond deficit perspectives (200 216). thousand oaks, ca: sage. 24 global education review 6(1) palkovitz, r. 1984. parental attitudes and fathers’ interactions with their five month old infants. developmental psychology, 20, 1054-1060. planalp, e.m. and braungart-rieker, j.m. 2016. determinants of father involvement with young children: evidence from the early childhood longitudinal study–birth cohort. journal of family psychology, 30(1), 135-146. pleck, j. h. 2010. paternal involvement: revised conceptualization and theoretical linkages with child outcomes. in m. e. lamb (ed.) the role of the father in child development (5th ed.) (58–93). hoboken, nj: wiley. pleck, j. h. 2007. why could father involvement benefit children? theoretical perspectives. applied developmental science, 11(4), 196-202. robinson, c., mandleco, b., olsen, s. f., & hart, c. h. 1995. authoritative, authoritarian, and permissive parenting practices: development of a new measure. psychological reports, 77, 819-830. roopnarine, j.l. 2015. introduction: toward a pancultural understanding of constructions and meanings of fathering. in j.l. roopnarine (ed), fathers across cultures: the importance, roles, and diverse practices of dads (16-24). california: praeger. schoppe-sullivan, s. j., mcbride, b. a., and ringo ho, m-h. 2004. unidimensional versus multidimensional perspectives on father involvement. fathering, 2(2), 147163. schoppe-sullivan, s.j., kotila, l., jia, r., lang, s. n., and bower, d.j. 2013. comparisons of levels and predictors of mothers’ and fathers’ engagement with their preschool aged children. early child development and care, 183(3-4), 498–514. http://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2012.7 11. social issues research center. 2012. the changing face of motherhood in western europe: greece. uk: social issues research center. torres, n., veríssimo, m., monteiro, l., ribeiro, o. and santos, a.j. 2014. domains of father involvement, social competence and problem behavior in preschool children. journal of family studies, 20(3), 188– 203. about the author(s) dr. konstantina rentzou is scientific collaborator at the european university of cyprus and she has participated as a researcher in greek, cypriot and eu-funded research projects. she has published 30 papers in peerreviewed journals, a monograph on family engagement in ecec and a co-authored book on the quality of the physical environment of preschool settings. she is the acei country liaison in greece and in cyprus and the world forum national representative for cyprus. konstantina also co-leads the international special interest forum “ecec in eu”. her research interests are in ecec quality, parental involvement and parent caregiver relationships, involvement and recruitment of males in ecec, the organization of the preschool environment and children’s play. dr. mine gol-guven has participated in many research projects funded by eu and internationally recognized ngos. she holds a faculty position at bogazici university since 2006 training ecec teachers. her academic and practical work involve supporting adults to promote social-emotional skills in children, to build supportive environments with children, and to develop programs for early childhood settings. her area of study also consists of adult involvement of children’s play. dr. gol-guven is an active member of international special interest forum “ecec in eu”. she defines herself as a child friendly researcher who http://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2012.711 http://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2012.711 http://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2012.711 http://doi.org/10.1080/03004430.2012.711 cross-national differences and similarities on paternal involvement 25 advocates for/with children to communicate, interact and build relationships. alexia koumarianou is a phd candidate at the european university of cyprus in education sciences. she holds a ba in pre-school education and ma in education sciences. nehir cabi (zengin) is an early childhood educator at kazım karabekir primary school. she holds an ma in primary education from boğaziçi university. she is a researcher in psychoanalysis project with prof. falih koksal in the department of psychology, bogazici university. she has presented at a women's studies conference in cyprus. she has worked as an interviewer in tubitak research project. reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 55 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: karsgaard, carrie (2019). reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education?: curriculum critique of a novel study on craig kielburger’s free the children. global education review, 6 (2). 55-73. reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education?: curriculum critique of a novel study on craig kielburger’s free the children carrie karsgaard university of alberta (canada) abstract literature classrooms hold great potential to educate students for critical global citizenship through serious engagement with marginalized stories that test or subvert mainstream knowledges and structures, including the familiar humanitarian framework that dominates western thinking about the global south. unfortunately, much existing literary curriculum in the global north often does just the opposite. instead, western-oriented texts and safe, traditional reading practices contribute to a form of global citizenship that perpetuates western hegemony and limits expressions of citizenship to benevolent actions. this is especially the case where global citizenship curriculum is developed by ngos and humanitarian organizations, such as me to we, a popular social enterprise with increasing influence over education in canada, the u.s. and the u.k. using the frameworks of critical global citizenship education, slaughter’s (2006) theory of humanitarian reading, and stone-mediatore’s (2003) notion of reading for enlarged thought, this paper will undertake a close reading of the unit materials for free the children, a unit developed by me to we, which aspires to educate for global citizenship. unit activities problematically appropriate the voices and viewpoints of child laborers in south asia by establishing dichotomies between readers and the populations that me to we aspires to help. this unit provides a means by which to examine the effectiveness of reading a memoir by an exemplary humanitarian, particularly when unit activities are framed by an organization with a particular humanitarian agenda. keywords global citizenship; global citizenship education; humanitarianism; literary theory; standpoint theory one of the most prominent organizations influencing global citizenship education (gce) within the canadian context is me to we, a social enterprise that aspires to “empower people to transform local and global communities by shifting from ‘me’ thinking to ‘we’ acting” (me to we, 2017). me to we is designed to support we charity, formerly free the children,1 which works through we day and we schools to educate and empower youth. since 2007, over one million youth have participated via their schools in we day, an event hosted by me to we in cities across canada, the u.s., and the u.k. we schools is the educational side of me to we, providing schools with a year’s worth of educational resources, including unit and lesson plans, awareness campaigns, action kits to engage students actively in global issues, and more. in order to participate in we day, schools must complete a portion of the we schools curriculum. between we day and we schools, this organization has clear prominence in the implementation of gce within schools across canada. within their suite of materials, me to we historically offered “novel studies,” including one that takes students through free the children (1999), a memoir by craig kielburger, one of the organization’s founders. though me to we has recently been developing curriculum 56 global education review 6 (2) that focuses on individual lessons rather than entire units, this unit plan provides insight into how me to we develops citizenship education that lacks critical engagement with western hegemony and imbalances in global power relations, oftentimes perpetuating the very social injustices that it wishes to address. designed for academic english courses for students in grades 9 and 10, the free the children study asserts it will “raise awareness among your students, inspiring them to become active global citizens” (mcallister, 2012, p. 4). these aims, however, raise questions for educators: about what does this unit hope to “raise awareness”? what kinds of “action” does it hope to inspire, particularly as the unit is materially and ideologically grounded within me to we? me to we itself has been critiqued for promoting a kind of global citizenship which is linked with consumer fulfillment or pleasure in a way that impedes social action by foreclosing the possibility of recognizing how “we” are implicated in the structures that produce suffering and inequality (a.k.a. global “poverty”). further, it prevents us from recognizing how we might connect ourselves to the ideals and strategies of social movements around the world that seek not aid but the transformation of these structures of inequality and the worldviews that normalize them (jefferess, 2012, p. 19). as a result, it is worth looking more carefully to what extent this unit fosters critical global citizenship or manifests the issues of its originating organization. applying the frameworks of slaughter’s humanitarian reading and stone-mediatore’s notion of enlarged thought to critical forms of gce, this paper will undertake a close reading of the unit materials for free the children to consider the effectiveness of reading the memoir of an exemplary humanitarian for critical cge, particularly as it is rooted within an enterprise with a strong humanitarian agenda. further, it will examine the empathetic reading activities and reflective practices that constitute the unit plan, as well as the recommended expressions of citizenship, to consider how this unit may reinforce for students existing normative beliefs and a moral basis for action, rather than promoting meaningful engagement with a text that leads to the questioning of assumptions and acknowledgement of privilege. reading for critical global citizenship education (gce) considering gce’s diverse forms of implementation across subject areas and within diverse school communities, often without specific provincially mandated curricular outcomes, educators are facing “important questions…about what the global and/or globalization should look like in teaching and learning” (eidoo, 2011, p. 61). these questions are being tackled through ongoing research that addresses power and privilege through what may be defined as more critical notions of gce (andreotti, 2006; marshall, 2009; pashby, 2011; pike, 2008; richardson, 2008; schultz, 2007; tallon, 2012; taylor, 2011). in contrast with liberal approaches, which depend on a moral framework for understanding global relations and promote responsibility for others based on normative definitions of the “ideal” world, critical cge seeks to expose and address assumptions, biases, contexts, imbalances, injustices, relationships and structures that maintain the privilege of some at the expense of others. rather than prescribing humanitarian modes of behavior, critical approaches encourage students to “analyze and experiment with other forms of seeing/thinking and being/relating to one another” (andreotti, 2006, p. 7). for readers in positions of privilege, reading for critical global citizenship must involve serious listening to the voices of those who may question or oppose dominant structures and epistemologies as they imagine reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 57 alternative futures, rather than reinforcing power structures through hierarchies of pity and sympathy. within this context, slaughter provides the beginnings of reading for critical gce, whereby readers are introduced to the complexity and diversity of humanity; however, he inadvertently reinforces western privilege through the impetus to provide help for those who suffer. by contrast, stone-mediatore encourages readers to seriously engage with others people’s stories in order to question dominant knowledges and positions, leading to greater opportunities for imaginative dialogue and potential change. joseph slaughter: humanitarian reading in harmony with critical approaches to cge, slaughter’s notion of “humanitarian reading” opens up a new position for readers within critical gce that moves beyond pity; rather than viewing themselves as benevolent sympathizers, readers are invited to imagine themselves as the kinds of people who would respond in care to anyone who requires it. in readers’ attempts to identify with sufferers, slaughter recognizes “the philosophical and practical limits of our generous imaginings, our historically feeble capacity to imagine ourselves in the place of the suffering other” (2006, p. 102). instead of calling readers to empathize with the sufferer, slaughter demonstrates how dunant’s souvenir de solférino invites readers to instead imagine themselves in the position of the humanitarian, so they may reflect upon their own capacity to respond to suffering, rather than to empathize with it. un souvenir de solférino is dunant’s account of witnessing wounded soldiers at the battle of solférino in 1859 and subsequent mobilization of civilians to care for soldiers from both the austrian and french sides of the conflict. his work eventually resulted in the founding of the international committee of the red cross and his ideas led to the signing of the first geneva convention in 1864. drawing on this text, slaughter theorizes the humanitarian as accidental or indifferent, so that almost anyone (even a horse!) could be an agent of humanitarian assistance; it is “simply a position in a grammar of relief that may be occupied by anyone who disregards nationality in the face of human suffering” (slaughter, 2006, p. 99). dunant is presented as modeling this humanitarian “indifference to difference,” and “anyone who exhibits similar pity and compassion for the sufferings of others will discover a similar route” (slaughter, 2006, p. 100). slaughter thus contributes to critical cge by overturning neo-colonial or benevolent attitudes that could result from sympathetic reading practices, instead advocating for a kind of humanitarian reading characterized by indifference, whereby “cosmopolitan fellow feeling matches the indifference and disregard for nationality that suffering and death themselves [display] on the battlefield” (slaughter, 2006, p. 95). in this way, he addresses the issue created by liberals who “imagine a world in which the privileged portion has cultivated capacities for sentimental identification with the despised and oppressed; a larger portion of the world (the unsympathetic sufferers) contains endless stocks of sad and sentimental stories, the raw materials for the refinement of the humanitarian imagination” (slaughter, 2006, p. 105). slaughter’s reading practice thus challenges liberal notions of reading that lead to relations of sympathy and pity for others. there are limits to slaughter’s notion of humanitarian reading, however, with the practical humanitarian disposition being presented as one of “indifference to difference” (slaughter, 2006, p. 95). the reduction of all people to “grammatical units,” where nationality and individual subjective differences are 58 global education review 6 (2) removed in the face of death, certainly upsets normative power structures where the humanitarian is set in a position of privilege and benevolence. at the same time, this indifference to difference does not create space to question how people are, in fact, different: why one side is winning the war, why the war is being fought in the first place, or why these particular men are on the battlefield. in this way, this humanitarian reading practice ignores the historical power inequalities and complex relationality embedded in global issues. furthermore, by arguing that anyone may act as a humanitarian, slaughter does not address the fact that humanitarianism (or, similarly, global citizenship) may be conceived and expressed differently by people with different subject positions. pashby (2011) and others (andreotti, 2006; lapayese, 2003) criticize this westernization of the global citizen, which is based on the “inherent assumption that citizen identities are neutral and transferrable to any local, national or global context” (pashby, 2011, p. 438). instead, she calls for the inclusion of “a range of epistemologies and ontological traditions so that multiple ‘global citizen selves’ are conceptualized not solely through the western norm, but also through diverse perspectives that challenge western humanism and that employ non-western ontologies to define global citizenship” (pashby, 2011, p. 439). thus, reading for global citizenship would not only involve the recognition that anyone may act as a citizen or humanitarian, but that citizenship may be expressed differently according to a person’s positioning, including everything from their access to political decision-making to their ability to publicly express agency (cf. lapayese, 497). readers should thus be led to question the projection of western citizenship norms onto others around the globe as they explore alternative expressions of global citizenship. as a result, though slaughter opens the notion of “humanitarian” beyond the typical western position, there is no question that the primary method of engagement with suffering is through humanitarian aid. rather than imagining new ways of engaging with others, slaughter presents a very limited call on the reader to respond with care, or at least to “avoid deliberately stepping on the heads of the dead and dying if…we were to find ourselves unexpectedly travelling through a battlefield” (slaughter, 2006, p. 103). this limited humanitarian response is perhaps a more realistic expectation of the reader than the empathy and compassion recommended by liberal scholars. however, within the context of critical gce, further responsibility could be placed on the reader to reflect meaningfully upon her own position, to listen seriously to the “radical and disruptive voice of the other” (tallon, 2012, p. 10), and to work to discover what an appropriate response may be, given the context. as readers are encouraged to “reflect critically on the legacies and processes of their cultures and contexts, to imagine different futures and to take responsibility for their decisions and actions” (andreotti, 2006, p. 6), they may be led beyond a humanitarian response to a more political or ethical engagement with others. shari stone-mediatore: reading for enlarged thought in this context, stone-mediatore’s work with stories and standpoint theory contributes to the field of critical gce as she advocates for critical engagement with dominant perspectives and power imbalances by reading through the perspectives of others. through her recognition of how marginalized narratives create oppositional knowledge, along with her critical and self-reflexive approach to such texts, she provides educators with a strong theoretical reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 59 basis for literary study that may lead to more ethical and accountable expressions of citizenship, moving beyond the familiar humanitarian framework that dominates western thinking about the global south. while her work is focused on folks who are marginalized within one’s home community, her work can easily be applied to a global community, as readers may engage with the stories of those marginalized on a global scale in a similar manner. stone-mediatore’s notion of enlarged thought is grounded in an understanding of how "people in socially and culturally marginalized positions daily endure the uneven, contradictory effects of a society's accepted beliefs and institutions” and may thus “offer critical insight… [that] can help us to transform those beliefs and institutions toward the end of a more just, democratic world” (stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 162). this insight may be offered in texts that diverge from normative narrative patterns, which are themselves entwined in dominant epistemologies. those in positions of privilege are thus responsible to not disparage work that eludes dominant western frameworks but instead be attentive to how marginalized texts create meaning through experimentation with narrative forms. as readers so engage with these texts, they may participate actively with marginalized writers in the creation of “oppositional knowledge” (stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 169) by dialoguing the perspective offered with their own common sense beliefs. stone-mediatore’s work thus creates space not only for a greater engagement with people in other positions and contexts, but also for critical examination of one’s own life and assumptions, leading to the reflexivity that is key to critical gce. here, it is key that readers do not “romanticize ‘the exotic,’” “abstract people’s differences from the historical institutions that produced those differences,” nor “reduce the people whose different perspectives we investigate to ‘victims’ or easily known subjects of our analysis, for such approaches only expand our authority while failing to engage the others’ perspectives in their depth and complexity” (stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 169). instead, by taking the complexity of others’ identities and contexts seriously, readers may begin to face how we all inadvertently frame, silence or domesticate others’ stories through the very process of narrative interpretation. through such exploration of complex interrelations with others, story-reading may thus lead not to simplified sympathetic responses but to “enlarged thought,” where marginalized stories are understood not as more true than one’s own but as offering insight into structures of privilege and injustice within complex global relations. the imagination, critical thought and creativity involved in enlarged thought leads to political and ethical accountability and a reconsideration of the reader’s engagement in public life, neither prescribing for readers either a specific emotional response or a particular form of humanitarian engagement. while much gce presumes the global citizen to be in a position of privilege, stone-mediatore’s active and dialogical reading practice allows for multiple readers from multiple subject positions to engage with and respond to marginalized texts differently. reading for enlarged thought does not therefore promote particular expressions of global citizenship such as familiar humanitarian responses, but it instead creates space for students to explore alternative forms of ethically engaging with others. stone-mediatore thus contributes to the field of critical gce by providing a theory of reading that promotes critical and creating engagement with others, rather than by simply motivating readers to “make a difference.” 60 global education review 6 (2) novel study analysis: free the children with stone-mediatore’s standpoint theory and the critiques of slaughter as a theoretical framework for critical gce through literary studies, it is necessary to consider how to implement such a reading practice within a classroom setting. the me to we novel study of free the children (1999) by craig kielburger provides a site to consider the effectiveness of reading memoirs of an exemplary humanitarian, particularly one rooted within an enterprise with a strong humanitarian agenda. to examine this unit plan in relation to stone-mediatore’s notion of enlarged thought, i will engage in a close reading (bardzell, 2009; culler, 2011; gallop, 2000), a form of literary criticism that takes a holistic approach to a text, including its themes and associated context. i will thus examine the unit’s structure, aims, and teaching materials, in relation to its context within the broader canadian culture and classrooms. a helpful tool in examining the unit’s reflective reading questions through a close reading practice is “critical literacy in global education,” a professional development resource for global citizenship educators. though this resource focuses on reading both the word and the world in various critical gce classrooms, the summary of traditional reading, critical reading, and critical literacy – which is foundational to much critical gce theory – is a helpful lens through which to examine the reading practices in these units. traditional reading treats knowledge as universal and asks students to what extent a text represents the “truth,” and critical reading examines the context of a text to explore the validity of the author’s interpretation of reality. by contrast, critical literacy is based on an understanding of knowledge as partial, dynamic and contingent, and it is thus concerned with the assumptions behind and implications of particular representations and interpretations. the extent to which students engage in critical literacy practices gives an indication of how well a unit educates for critical global citizenship, particularly depending on whether students come to question their own beliefs and assumptions through encounters with those from different backgrounds and perspectives. this unit plan under analysis works with the memoir, free the children, which details the experiences of craig kielburger in learning about child exploitation and founding we charity. the neatly-packaged, seven-lesson unit for students in grades 9 and 10 is available online, and it is intended to work with english curriculum guidelines to “engross students in craig’s journey to self-discovery, while educating them about culture, social justice issues, children’s rights, child labour, struggles and triumphs, childhood and more. this study will raise awareness among your students, inspiring them to become active global citizens” (mcallister, 2012, p. 4). the unit opens with a letter to teachers from kielburger himself, which introduces his personal story, the role of the unit in educating around complex global issues, and the work of me to we. following the lesson plans and materials, the unit package includes a section on “empowering students to take action,” which outlines how to involve students in me to we activities and campaigns. through a close reading of the text selection, empathetic reading activities, and reflective practices that constitute the unit plan, along with the recommended expressions of citizenship action, we begin to see how the unit may reinforce for students existing normative beliefs and a moral basis for action, rather than promoting meaningful engagement with a text that leads to the questioning of assumptions and acknowledgement of privilege. reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 61 text selection: memoir within the context of humanitarian enterprise before addressing the activities contained in the book study itself, it is key to first consider the selection of free the children as the subject of the unit. where stone-mediatore promotes the study of experience narratives by marginalized people, this unit focuses on a memoir that is not only materially embedded in the popular social enterprise, me to we, but also promotes the story and subjectivity of the enterprise’s founder, a humanitarian who is familiar to many canadian teens. in associating with this celebrity humanitarian, students are not led to face their complicity in injustice, but instead are directed towards self-fulfillment through quick fixes. the memoir itself and unit plan are integrated with the greater social enterprise of me to we, as the teacher resources are produced and distributed as part of me to we’s educational imperative, and book sales directly support the organization via me to we books. the close link between the text and the me to we enterprise is evidenced through a lack of critical questioning of the development model supported by me to we, as will be explored in more detail below. instead, there is evidence that the unit itself is a marketing tool through its support of both the overall brand and specific me to we projects. the unit is used to crosspromote other me to we initiatives, such as the “adopt a village,” “halloween for hunger” and “vow of silence” campaigns. such packaging of stories to support humanitarian brands is familiar practice for ngos who solicit and package stories to attract readerships. the kinds of stories they choose—sensationalized, sentimentalized, charged with affect—target privileged readers in anticipation that they will identify with, contribute to, and become advocates for the cause. the frames they impose on stories are designed to capture the interest, empathy, and political responsiveness of readers elsewhere, in ways they have learned will “sell” to publishers and audiences. ngos harness their rights agendas to the market and its processes of commodification. (schaffer & smith, 2014, p. 27) because the unit is, in part, a tool for recruitment, and because it is the product of an organization that focuses on humanitarian activities, the unit avoids critical questioning of the development enterprise in general. further, readers never evaluate how the memoir functions within the specific humanitarian imperative of me to we. so, while readers are introduced to the genre of memoir at the outset of the unit (cf. mcallister, 2012, p. 10), they are never asked to consider which voices have space to speak while others are silenced, why the memoir was written, how and to whom it is distributed, and how it may have been crafted for these purposes and audiences. the power of this unit to help students question dominant norms and learn from the voices of others is extremely limited because of the active crosspromotion of the parent organization. furthermore, the familiarity of craig kielburger to canadian teens leads to a natural reinforcement of the humanitarian model promoted by this organization, at the expense of the marginalized groups of child laborers the unit seeks to represent. unlike familiar celebrity humanitarians, such as ed sheeran or angelina jolie, who are famous first as musicians or actors and leverage their status for humanitarian means, kielburger is solely known for his work within the popular me to we enterprise and thus carries a different form of celebrity status as a face of the me to we brand. kielburger is well known as the founder of this popular humanitarian organization. he is a frequent speaker at we day events, which have been attended by over one million youth since 2007, with over four million social media supporters (“what is we day,” 2018). furthermore, 62 global education review 6 (2) kielburger’s face dominates web materials and posters for me to we, he co-authors a column in the globe and mail with his brother, marc, and he participates in speaking engagements at student leadership conferences, corporate events and more (“craig kielburger,” 2014). thus, kielburger’s story is both materially and ideologically bound to me to we; his celebritystyle status means he lacks the marginalized perspectives that stone-mediatore asserts will help readers reflect on dominant assumptions and beliefs. instead of providing a basis for critical reflection, the focus on kielburger’s perspective through unit activities reinforces his subjectivity, while the voices and viewpoints of child laborers are co-opted by the humanitarian enterprise. as a result, the unit thus leverages kielburger’s personal growth stories as an exemplary humanitarian to motivate students towards a particular form of action within the me to we enterprise, instead of leading students through the potentially uncomfortable confrontation with subversive or challenging perspectives that is necessary to transformation within a critical gce classroom. the subjectivity of kielburger dominates each unit, while the voices of those he meets on his travels remain subordinated to his personal development story. the complexity of the narrator is foregrounded while child laborers and activists across asia remain supporting characters in the development of kielburger as a humanitarian, who speaks for these people (cf. jefferess, 2013, p. 76). for instance, in studying free the children, readers take note of the “role [other characters] play in craig’s journey” (mcallister, 2012, p. 12). thus, readers are led to understand that the actions of activists, community members, parents, political leaders and child laborers hold no power to effect change in their contexts; instead, they are seen as supporting characters in the western humanitarian’s story. even the powerful story of iqbal masih, the pakistani activist against child labor, is appropriated so that his “real power” is not his own activism within the context of child labor but his impact on kielburger and the development of we charity. for instance, as one unit activity, students create a mural incorporating “symbols, themes and events in the book to represent the impact iqbal had on craig” (mcallister, 2012, p. 23). furthermore, the culminating unit questions do not examine structures of inequality that contribute to child labor but instead trace craig’s development as an exemplary humanitarian “preand postasia.” students are thus led to consider “how craig has grown” through his travels, as well as “the lasting effect craig’s trip to asia had on the organization” (mcallister, 2012, p. 31) of his charity. the unit thus demonstrates the liberal approach to gce critiqued by slaughter, whereby “sad and sentimental stories” from elsewhere provide the “raw materials for the refinement of the humanitarian imagination” (slaughter, 2006, p. 105), where the subjects of such stories are used for the cultivation of global citizens in the west, rather than being acknowledged as the thoughtful originators of their own generously shared stories. as a result, the focus of the unit becomes kielburger’s journey toward self-discovery; within this context, global citizenship is framed as personal development through humanitarian action, rather than the critical engagement across borders that leads to social justice and transformed relations of power. the unit thus demonstrates limits to slaughter’s notion of humanitarian reading, whereby a narrative such as dunant’s or kielburger’s “invites us to project ourselves into the position of the humanitarian” (2006, p. 94) in order to help us understand ourselves in relation to suffering others. rather than reflecting the kind of humanitarian indifference slaughter reads in dunant’s narrative, this unit reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 63 demonstrates how the humanitarian position may instead by invested with power, voice and celebrity. due to the powerful positions of this exemplary humanitarian within canadian teen culture, reader empathy with kielburger may simply reinforce privileged student identities as “the kinds of people” who act for suffering others. unfortunately, instead of cultivating relationality between readers and others elsewhere, humanitarian campaigns that leverage celebrity humanitarians tend to entrench existing imbalances between the west and those in the global south: while ostensibly about the lives of those whom they seek to uplift and save, discourses of highprofile western benevolence, concern and compassion, actively position “our guys” as the stars of the development show, while the objects of national (and northern) benevolence merely function as the backdrop to a story which is really about “us”… [while] insufficient attention [is given] to their own participation in relations of domination. (bryan & bracken, 2011, p. 73) with “our guys” as the stars, the complex issues, global relationships and identities introduced by these memoirs are quickly glossed over by the “celebrity [who] embodies the false promise of individual power as a force of social change, the illusion of a single person fighting against structures of injustice. the consequence is a reduction of the complex problems of development into ‘soundbite’ politics that carry the logic of a ‘quick fix’” (chouliaraki, 2012, p. 4). such simplification of issues is counterproductive to the hard work of making sense of the complexities of global relationships and one’s position within them. in the case of these units, the quick fix is involvement with various me to we campaigns, as promoted by the unit documents. by examining kielburger’s story as a journey of individual development and fulfillment within the context of simplified global issues, this novel study thus motivates students to follow a particular form of humanitarian action. text reflection: safe and empathetic reading practices maintain the status quo text selection is only one aspect of unit development; it is thus necessary to turn now to how this unit designs engagement with the text. just as the genre of humanitarian memoir forecloses the learning that occurs through confrontation with marginalized perspectives, so would a pedagogy that features safe and sanitized reflection rather than leading students through a more uncomfortable and reflexive space where critical learning may occur. there are some helpful reading practices introduced within the free the children unit. students are instructed to read actively, reflecting on the text through both individual and collective practices such as daily journals, active reading strategies, and class discussions. individually, they respond to qualities of the text itself, being prompted to identify powerful images or language, ask questions about confusing or unfamiliar aspects of the text, and connect the text to themselves, other texts, and the world around them (mcallister, 2012, p. 8). while introductory, these activities may help students to recognize the intentional use of language to create particular meanings and to acknowledge their relationality with these texts, as well as the identities and topics they represent. with an educator present who is attuned to the practices of critical literacy, students could begin to recognize the construction of the text for particular audiences, within particular global relations and for particular ends. at the same time, the neutrality of the students’ subject positions and the centrality of western society remain assumed within the unit, so students are not led into potentially 64 global education review 6 (2) unsettling encounters either with oppositional perspectives or with their own complicity in the issues raised by the text. most activities exemplify traditional reading practices, as students work to understand the content and context of the memoir, decipher what the author is trying to say, and appreciate the style of communication. for instance, students work through a concept map that helps them recognize connections within the text, either between plot events, characters and character relationships, and social justice issues (mcallister, 2012, p. 15) in order to cultivate a richer appreciation of the memoir’s context. they also underline key words and phrases that help them decipher the main message of each chapter, helping them decode the content of the text. without testing, contextualizing or questioning their own understandings, however, students face neither the situatedness of their own perspectives nor how that positioning may make it difficult for them to think otherwise. by simply sharing their responses without critical questioning, students may come to think that they are the arbiters of truth, in the position to know and interpret those about whom they are reading, rather than considering how their own lenses may leave others beyond their comprehension. just as the students’ positions within a mainstream, western classroom remains unacknowledged, so does the western orientation of the text remains unquestioned, leaving people in south asia to be viewed through an invisible western lens. as already discussed, the perspectives and assumptions of kielburger within the context of the me to we organization are not examined. furthermore, western institutions and assumptions outside the me to we enterprise remain uninterrogated, naturalizing and universalizing the mainstream perspectives with which students are familiar. as an example, the familiar western notion of a humanitarian “hero” is normalized and reinforced in free the children’s “world council” activity. in this activity, students are asked to select an “inspirational figure,” framed as those who, like mother teresa, “make an impact on society” (mcallister, 2012, p. 20), and then form a world council of such figures with the goal of creating new world agreements on child labor. unfortunately, the promotion of particularly impactful “inspirational figures” as spokespeople in the world council will profoundly shape students’ selections as to who may be a global citizen or make a difference to child labor, as western notions of “action” or “impact” often fail to recognize the “social background conditions that enable some people to express their will, in both the home and public arenas, and that place constraints on others” (stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 138). the limiting guidelines around this activity thus provide little space for students to imagine “inspirational figures” or “action” outside a humanitarian framework. as a result, the assignment parameters may prevent students from selecting internationally recognized figures from outside the west such as nobel peace prize winner and child rights activist, kailash satyarthi, and they would certainly limit them from selecting activists who have made significant impacts in their local spaces but may be unfamiliar to canadian students, as well as “regular” people from around the world, whose impacts are limited to “everyday” actions. even if students do have ideas of alternative figures such as these, they may feel discouraged from sharing, due to the narrow scope of the activity. as a result, while the world council activity hopes to help students examine “issues from another angle” (mcallister, 2012, p. 19), it may instead simply reinforce the perspectives of those recognized by the assignment as influential, global actors, and the students’ new world agreements on child labor may thus reflect a reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 65 western perspective on behalf of those in the global south, rather than inclusive of them. in this way, global citizenship may be framed for students as the dramatic, globally recognized actions of privileged individuals that address the perceived lack or need of others. further, by relating to these inspirational figures, students are reinforced in their subjectivity as privileged, western subjects, rather than being challenged to question their assumptions and positions in order to learn from activists in the south asian countries they are studying. they are not led to consider the complexity of child labor as it is reflected in a diversity of perspectives, from canadian government members to parents in lahore, big business owners to teachers in pakistani schools. if the world council were to integrate a diversity of perspectives, it would more effectively introduce students to the complexity of the topic and allow students to participate from the diversity of their own positions. with dominant culture remaining invisible and a lack of dissenting perspectives being presented, students are guided through activities that lead them to see others through a frame of empathy or pity from their presumed positions of privilege. empathy appears to be the goal of many writing assignments within the unit. for instance, readers are encouraged to imagine themselves in the positions of child laborers in order to write a creative piece that “tells the child’s life story from their own perspective… address[ing] their feelings, misfortunes and hopes” (mcallister, 2012, p. 27). while an imaginative piece like this may be a reasonable place to begin, it runs the risk of reinforcing a presumption that students may easily understand the perspectives of others and speak on behalf of them. in taking on the voices of child laborers, students are not led to explore their own perspectives and voices; furthermore, they do not reflect upon their own limitations in writing from another person’s perspective, whose experiences may be considerably different from their own. instead, by focusing on the hardships of other people’s lives, “it is only possible for the pupils to feel their lives are different and undeniably superior,” perhaps leading them to “appreciate what they have more,” as one teacher experienced in the “learning to read the world” study on gc classrooms in ireland (bryan & bracken, 2011, p. 144). in this way, smith argues that “using others’ lives to help students feel better about their own lives reinforces constructions of ‘others’ in terms of negative differences and constructions of ‘self’ in terms of positive privilege” (bryan & bracken, 2011, p. 144). similar to the empathy promoted by ngos, the outcome of these activities is thus not transformational but self-serving: "the radical and disruptive voice of the other, their thoughts, opinions, anger or accusations is silent, unless mediated through the ngo. the educational goal is to imagine the suffering of the other, but the actual thoughts, desires or actions of the other are not really part of the equation. the other's suffering becomes a tool for our own learning, our own development" (tallon, 2012, p. 10). text misdirection: quick fixes within a development context simple solutions are more easily avoided when students have a deeper understanding of the complex and relational nature of the peoples and topics they consider in class. it is thus worthwhile to explore to what extent the free the children unit works towards a contextual and interdisciplinary approach, which encourages students to draw introductory connections between what they are reading and the greater historical, geographical and political context. by engaging with others in their depth and complexity, including their rootedness 66 global education review 6 (2) within particular contexts, this unit would guide students through the crisis inherent in transformational learning that leads to critical expressions of global citizenship. with this in mind, a close look at the unit’s recommended sources of information, approach to global interrelatedness, and recommended expressions of citizenship will help educators consider how to concretize reading for enlarged thought. though time is limited within a novel study to cover related fields in depth, unit activities do promote some awareness of the geographical, political and cultural settings of free the children. mapping activities, research assignments and group discussions help students develop introductory understanding of the layered nature of the topics and identities introduced in the text. for instance, in mapping the key locations and subsequently conducting group research on the “geographical features, cultural practice, social justice issues, type of government, urban/rural life, current state of the government, and more” (mcallister, 2012, p. 7), students reading free the children are required to go beyond the information provided in the memoir to develop deeper understanding of the countries in southeast asia that craig visits. furthermore, they are asked to explore the impacts of both local governments and the canadian government on child labor in pakistan, in conjunction with a chapter in free the children that introduces the possibility of canadian complicity in child labor issues: “was it a case of the rich wanting to maintain their wealth, and not caring what went on in the third world? was this bonded labor on an international scale, with high interest rates keeping countries poor, with no hope of ever repaying their loans?” (kielburger, 2010, p. 155). while the unit provides a cursory introduction to child labor, however, students’ understanding of these complex issues is reduced to a criticism of pakistan for neglecting responsibility for its own people, a responsibility that canada presumably holds the potential to fulfill. though the memoir introduces the complexities surrounding child labor, including political unrest between pakistan and neighboring countries, conditions made by the world bank and the international monetary fund (imf) surrounding loans and loan repayment, the struggles of pakistani labor movements to promote adult employment, and the perpetuation of child labor through canada’s purchasing power (cf. kielburger, 2010, p. 154158), the unit questions and activities focus on pakistan’s “lack of commitment” or “motivation” to enforce child labor laws. by contrast, canada is represented as possessing the possibility to impact child labor in pakistan and elsewhere “through their laws and regulations” (mcallister, 2012, p. 23), reinforcing the “exaltation” of canadian subjects above pakistani people (cf. thobani, 2007, p. 5). further, fact-finding activities run the risk of perpetuating “epistemic blindness,” whereby students continue to see themselves as “autonomous, individuated and self-sufficient beings inhabiting a knowable and controllable world” within which “we are able to describe…and define for others the best pathway for their development" (andreotti, 2012, p. 21). within such a cartesian-constructed world, students may remain blind to their relationality with others, such as those in pakistan, as well as to possibilities for very different futures. to counter this reductive perspective, students’ understanding of child labor could be further developed through sources that extend and question issues introduced within the memoir and activities could go beyond fact-finding to encourage students to question western framing of child labor and proposed solutions. in this way, students would be better prepared to engage with the limits of kielburger’s representations and ask critical questions about reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 67 the context of child labor in each south asian country and at home. as the unit goes on, students are encouraged to further develop their awareness of the political and historical context of child labor in various south asian countries. through a “know – want to know – learned” (mcallister, 2012, p. 15) activity, they continually revisit their understanding of child labor as they proceed through the text, building upon their knowledge at the outset of the unit. the focus of this activity is the straightforward, cumulative acquisition of knowledge about child labor, and students do not engage with the power relations embedded in knowledge production. however, the ongoing revisiting of this topic does help students to grasp the partiality of their knowledge, encourage them to develop and modify their understandings, and lead them to identify gaps that may lead to further learning. these outcomes would also result from the unit’s culminating conference, which involves the exploration of unit issues through speeches, demonstrations, and debates, as well as the proposal of longand short-term goals, all of which are to be carried out within a community atmosphere of collaboration and support (mcallister, 2012, p. 32-33). though activity instructions do not provide explicit direction to students, this conference would be particularly valuable if students were encouraged to approach the topic of child labor not as humanitarian “saviors,” but as critical thinkers, reflecting on the complexities of, for instance, influencing government policies or participating in anti-sweatshop activism. with more specific direction than the activity provides as it stands, students could be instructed to research products commonly found in canada that have been produced by child laborers, to critique the deceptive labeling of consumer products to disguise the exploitation of workers in their production (silvey, 2004), to look into the exploitation of workers in canada, to consider and critique who is driving the global labor agenda, to explore activist groups who are striving for fair pay and working conditions in the localities mentioned in free the children, and to question the consumptive habits of canadians that drive the need for cheap labor. by approaching their learning from diverse angles within an atmosphere of both support and debate, students may question the representations within free the children, and potentially go beyond the bounds of the text itself to explore the complexities of the issues introduced therein. problematically, the forms of simplification and depoliticization described above tend to minimize global interrelatedness, except through the lens of development, where those in the west and others in the global south are connected through development aid. without acknowledging historical, economic and political global interconnections, it becomes difficult for students to face their complicity in the very issues they aspire to help through aid. for instance, while free the children references canadian complicity in child labor through the purchase of fireworks made by children (kileburger, 2010, p. 35), promotes solidarity across borders with asian-based organizations, such as child workers in asia, that are advocating for structural change (kileburger, 2010, p. 75), and reminds readers that “we are part of the problem, too” (kileburger, 2010, p. 64), the unit tends to localize the issue. students learn about the caste system in india and how this impacts child labor (mcallister, 2012, p. 27), but they learn nothing of india’s colonial past and economic reliance on child labor, as well as the current impacts of neoliberal economic policies and western demand for low priced goods on ongoing child labor. furthermore, they do not explore local indian movements that strive for better wages and working conditions, 68 global education review 6 (2) nor do they consider notions of solidarity or how students may connect with and support the work of local movements or transnational organizations. as a result, students may come to see child labor as a solely local issue, without any sway on student identities or practices, aside from participation in humanitarian aid. in response to the need they see in the people they are reading about, students are accordingly encouraged to consider the work of international development agencies, as well as how they, as young people, could join in this development work. the unit uncritically supports the work of development agencies, actively promoting the work of we charity and its related projects. readers of craig’s story consider how his experiences led to the ability of we charity to “help thousands of children around the world” (mcallister, 2012, p. 31). more broadly, me to we appeals to teachers by listing school-based results to their fundraising programs: students will “learn important leadership skills, bring together the student body for a common cause, and know that their actions are making a difference in their community and around the world” (mcallister, 2012, p. 53). all of these recommendations reflect a “band aid” approach, whereby overly-simplistic and ineffectual solutions are recommended, based on a desire to enable students to help or “make a difference,” reducing "the lives of inhabitants of the global south to ‘causes’ about which ‘we’ in the global north can feel good – or at least better – about ourselves,” rather than helping students face “complex realities which would require radically different responses if they were to be meaningfully addressed" (bryan & bracken, 2011, p. 77). as a result, the development orientation of the activities leaves dominant ideologies unquestioned, minimizing the possibility of transformation that would lead to political and ethical accountability and a reconsideration of the reader’s engagement in public life. unfortunately, these recommended actions leave little space for students to explore other ways of relating to those beyond their borders, except for what is offered through the humanitarian model. for instance, students are not introduced to transnational organizations such as child workers in asia, a “network of over seventy eight organizations and child workers' groups” that works across borders to address the complexities of child labor by lobbying for education and “laws that addresses the worst forms of child labour,” to “advocate and monitor the ratification and implementation of all international conventions and standards on the elimination of child labour” and to protect children in conflict (“child workers,” 2013). by considering the work of such organizations, students would be more prepared critique the mandates of humanitarian organizations such as we charity, who – by contrast – work to implement an “international development model designed to achieve social change” (“about us,” 2018). furthermore, students do not turn their gaze back upon themselves to question canadian consumptive practices that perpetuate child labor. as a result, students never work through potentially unsettling alternatives to dominant canadian conceptions of “development” and “poverty”; without critical reflection on these assumptions, it is unlikely that students would be able to imagine alternatives to the kinds of development aid presented by me to we. by learning about such alternatives to the familiar development discourse presented by me to we, students might begin to challenge the notion that change and development originate in the west, with students who “make a difference.” reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 69 recommendations: critical gce beyond humanitarian heroes, empathy, and quick fixes while the free the children unit provides some space for reflection and takes steps towards a contextual approach to the memoir, it reinforces for students normative humanitarian beliefs and a moral basis for action, rather than promoting meaningful engagement with difference that leads to consideration of how knowledge and understanding are situated. instead of encountering the voices of marginalized writers, as recommended by stonemediatore, students learn about global others through the experience narrative of an exemplary humanitarian, whose experiences remain foregrounded and whose assumptions remain largely unquestioned throughout the unit. by assuming students will learn from and potentially emulate this exemplary humanitarian, the unit thus constructs global citizens as privileged subjects with the potential to instigate change in the world. thus, while this unit presents some practical examples of how canadian classrooms may read for critical global citizenship, there is still further to go in pedagogically developing and implementing stone-mediatore’s reading for enlarged thought within literature classrooms. while i explore alternatives elsewhere (karsgaard, 2018) through cycles of learning and unlearning through literary study of marginalized experience narratives, i offer here two alternatives to the empathetic and “quick-fix” approaches of the unit developed by me to we. the free the children unit does little to approach the critical literacy that is key for global citizenship education, whereby students are encouraged to “unpack [their] lenses (their assumptions and how those were constructed) and their implications” (andreotti et al., n.d., p. 22). by not being encouraged to question their own relationality to those they read about, or their complicity in some of the global relations covered throughout each unit, students’ subject positions remain neutral, universalized and unchallenged, and their focus remains on others across the globe, who can be known and subsequently pitied. to counter this, andreotti and de souza recommend replacing the empathetic practice of putting oneself in another’s shoes with the reflexive work of examining those shoes and thinking about the difficulties of putting them on, as well as reflecting on one’s own shoes, which cannot ever quite be removed (2008, p. 26). unlike the practice of writing from another’s perspective, such reflexivity would help readers approach marginalized experience narratives in a different way from “the customary empiricist fashion, [where] they tend to collect information that fits within their preconceived narrative frameworks and tend to overlook elements incongruent with those frameworks" (stone-mediatore, 2003, p. 167). andreotti and de souza’s reflexive practice may thus help students move beyond what is relatable to begin to consider how their lenses may prevent them from fully comprehending others. such a practice may help students take small steps towards acknowledging there are other ways of conceiving of things that are far different from a western understanding, ways that "cannot be easily captured by our conditioned senses: non-anthropocentric, nonteleological, non-dialectical, non-universal and non-cartesian possibilities" (andreotti, 2014, p. 45). in these ways, students would better approach the critical literacy required to deconstruct their own assumptions, potentially beginning to acknowledge their own entitlement in presuming to know and understand others – including what may be best for them. by doing so, students may be moved to consider alternative expressions of more critical global citizenship than are expressed through the prescribed humanitarian action of this unit. 70 global education review 6 (2) secondly, with the alleviation of tension and complicity through quick fixes and simple citizenship expressions through activities such as the ones described above, students may come to believe that global citizenship is meant to always be “fun,” “easy” and “fulfilling.” jefferess argues that self-fulfillment is central to the me to we vision of global citizenship: “rather than exposing their audience to multiple voices and viewpoints, ‘me to we’ centers the experience of the benefactor and reinforces the message that ‘making a difference’ leads to personal happiness” (2012, p. 25). by contrast, ahmed (2010) argues for the transformative value of unhappiness: “we need to think about unhappiness as more than a feeling that should be overcome. unhappiness might offer a pedagogical lesson on the limits of the promise of happiness. if injustice does have unhappy effects, then the story does not end there" (jefferess, 2012, p. 25). when students experience the uncomfortable or unhappy effects of injustice, they can then begin to face the dark side of humanity, as todd (2009) recommends, acknowledging the causes of injustice both elsewhere and at home. in doing so, they may begin to acknowledge their complicity in injustice, leading to opportunities for meaningful change, rather than simply finding self-fulfillment through quick fixes. for students of free the children, this may involve facing not only how their individual purchases may directly support companies that exploit children but also how canadian society’s demand for affordable products perpetuates the need for cheap labor on a global scale. with unhappiness as a critical element of transformative learning, it is key for students to encounter stories of others that may challenge assumptions and cause them to rethink their behaviors, rather than simply celebrating exemplary humanitarian successes. within a classroom pursuing critical gce, such marginalized stories would be key to the sometimes uncomfortable work of challenging existing reality with the hope of finding new ways of being together in the world. conclusion by way of conclusion, let us return to the role literary study may play in critical global citizenship education. despite the fact that more critical forms of gce are often interdisciplinary, providing rationale for school-wide, crossdisciplinary educational initiatives, the uneven application of gce points to the need for more critical, discipline-specific work at both the theoretical and curricular levels. even where school-wide global citizenship initiatives exist, they typically involve activities influenced by social studies curriculum, where youth forums and debates, case analysis, model councils, and community participation activities dominate school-wide initiatives. while these activities are certainly valuable, they focus on action and accomplishment, potentially leading students to do things for others, rather than on the critical thinking and reflexivity that helps students learn from others. furthermore, their limited scope does not provide for the kinds of learning that may take place in disciplines other than social studies, such as literature, art, science, or media courses, which may approach gce from different angles. with disciplinary courses still foundational to many education systems, content-area educators could further develop gce by engaging in the critical work of determining how global citizenship may be applied within their specific courses, with a thought for how school-wide initiatives could one day become truly interdisciplinary. such work is particularly necessary as ngos such as free the children are quick to fill the gap with curriculum materials that direct students towards such organizations’ humanitarian causes, without educating for the critical thought and self-reflexivity that are key to more critical reading humanitarian heroes for global citizenship education? 71 forms of gce. while these unit plans may be accessible, they demonstrate the need for educators to develop their own curriculum materials according to theories of reading like stone-mediatore’s that foster critical global citizenship. this is indeed difficult work, even for the most critically-minded educators, as new knowledges and solutions may lead to new problems, requiring further consideration and experimentation. at the same time, such creative and iterative work is necessary to make possible real transformation and change through education for critical global citizenship. notes 1 though the unit plan for free the children uses the former name of “free the children” in reference to the international charity of me to we, this paper will use the current term, “we charity,” throughout the paper. references about us. 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(2018). we day. retrieved from: https://www.we.org/we-day/what-is-weday/ about the author carrie karsgaard is a doctoral student in educational policy studies at the university of alberta (canada), specializing in theoretical, cultural, and international studies in education. https://www.we.org/we-day/what-is-we-day/ https://www.we.org/we-day/what-is-we-day/ designing for complexity 41 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: blankenbeckler, corrie (2020). designing for complexity in mother tongue or first language (l1)-based multilingual education programs. global education review, 7 (1). 41-vvvvv designing for complexity in mother tongue or first language (l1)-based multilingual education programs corrie blankenbeckler creative associates international abstract mother-tongue or first language (l1)-based multilingual education programs are necessarily complex and may require a more nonlinear approach to program design. these programs operate within and act upon a range of psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical issues that include language structure and literacy assessment, language policy and politics, and cultural and social behavior change linked to literacy expansion. the broad use of one-size-fits-all outcomes-based design approaches for l1-based multilingual education programs often result in designs that are retrofitted to new country settings and ill-suited to the context in which they are implemented. this paper looks at some of the many features that can be used to inform the development of l1-based multilingual education in the context of early literacy programming. specifically, it examines the use of alternative approaches in the development of flexible theory of change design that integrate early literacy and l1-based multilingual education program design frameworks to more suitably address the sociolinguistic, sociopolitical, and psycholinguistic assumptions underpinning multilingual education approaches. keywords mother-tongue; multilingual education; complexity; nonlinear design; early literacy; theory of change; sociolinguistics; psycholinguistics; language policy and planning introduction life is not simple, but many of the logic models used in programme theory evaluation are. is it a problem to represent reality as a simple causal model of boxes and arrows, or should the logic models we use address the complexity of life—and if so, how? (rogers, 2008, p. 29) program theory of change is intended to guide purposeful program planning and evaluation. variously described as theory of change, theory-based evaluation, logic model, and many other variations, program theories outline causal linkages between different aspects of the program (inputs, activities, outputs and outcomes) used to evaluate program effectiveness or impact (rogers, 2008; weiss, 1998). a theory of change is commonly used as a heuristic device, an abstract framework, or a model that informs thinking and predictions about social change. the models used in the development of theories of change can vary significantly depending on the funding mechanisms and context. glouberman and zimmerman (2002) draw distinctions between simple, complicated, and complex program theories that are helpful in determining interventions that may require evolving design as effects or outcomes emerge through the course of implementation. to use their examples, a simple theory can be compared to a recipe, easy to replicate, provided you have the right tools and ingredients. sending a rocket to the moon is far more complicated to design and difficult to evaluate given the number of variables involved. raising a child brings in levels of complexity that preempt common agreement on a predetermined design for success. in an analysis of how to address the complicated and the complex in program design, rogers (2008) underscores the need for models that reflect the organic complexity that underpins human interaction. programs 42 global education review 7 (1) designed to address social behavior change can tend to oversimplify with a single linear design that ignore related parallel causes, or may require more iterative, nonlinear approaches that open opportunity for unexpected learning and adaptability. the language contexts in which mother tongue or first language (l1)-based multilingual education programs operate arguably fall into more complicated or complex categories demanding nonlinear approaches to program theory design. this paper examines the complexities of the language environments in which l1-based multilingual education programs operate that are often overlooked in programs that focus on early literacy, with out-of-the-box outcomesbased design focused on quick wins, most often manifest in measurable improvements in reading subtask scores (i.e., letter recognition) in target schools (bartlett et al., 2015; benson, 2004). the restricted focus of early literacy intervention programs on mother-tongue outcomes in the early grades, while showing some improvements in the short term, can discount larger psycholinguistic, sociopolitical, and sociolinguistic issues that are present in multilingual environments. a limited focus can lead to an overall, longer term negative impact on student learning, especially in contexts where there is an early transition from the first language to the second or national language (alidou et al., 2006; baker, 2011; hornberger, 2002). l1-based multilingual early literacy the benefits of learning in a familiar language have long been recognized (unesco, 1953), and there is a large body of evidence from diverse contexts that has demonstrated the positive effects of learning in the mother tongue in diverse contexts (e.g., alidou & brock-utne, 2011, [niger]; benson, 2004b, [mozambique]; hovens, 2002, [west africa]; piper et al., 2016a, [kenya]; skutnabb-kangas & heugh, 2012, [ethiopia]). the opportunity to learn in the mother tongue or first language (l1) is recognized as a right (united nations, 2008) and a benefit (unesco, 2003), though the matter is not without continued dialogue and debate (may, 2005; skutnabb-kangas & heugh, 2012; wiley, 2012). although many language policies around the world have been amended to accommodate the linguistic diversity that is reflective of a language environment, over half of the world’s children continue to be taught in a language that is different from what they speak at home (ouane & glantz, 2010). hornberger (2009) observes that multilingualism, not monolingualism, has been the natural state of human societies throughout history and that the imposition of a single language serves as a cultural limitation. it is true that despite the demand for, and increasing dominance of, english and other global languages (clayton, 2008; hornberger, 2009; ricento, 2000), linguistic diversity remains a defining characteristic of the global context. although language statistics often obscure the complexity of linguistic heritage or language type and use, the numbers are still staggering (skutnabb-kangas & heugh, 2012, p. 12). there are between 1,500 and 2,000 african languages, over 80 estimated in ghana alone (mann & dalby, 2017). india has 447 living languages, 64 of which are institutional (eberhard et al., 2019). in the united kingdom, an estimated one in six children speak a language other than english at home (tinsley, 2013). given these facts, it should not be surprising that an estimated 40% of the world’s people lack access to education in a language they can speak and understand (unesco, 2016). of the 6,000 -7,000 languages spoken around the world, only a few hundred are used in education (walter & benson, 2012). there is general consensus that the use of the mother tongue as medium of instruction for designing for complexity 43 foundational literacy has a tremendously positive impact on education quality and academic growth of individual learners, especially in low-income contexts (alidou et al., 2006; benson, 2004a; cummins, 2000; skutnabb-kangas, 2000). while monolingual education is still standard practice around the world (benson, 2014), a number of early grade literacy programs now focus on the acquisition of reading skills in the mother tongue prior to transitioning to a second language, usually a national language (e.g., amharic in ethiopia) or global language (e.g., english, french, or portuguese). definitions of “mother tongue” in these programs can vary depending on context. according to skutnabb-kangas (2000), the mother tongue can refer to a language that a child may have learned first or knows best, but can also be the language the child most identifies with (or is identified with by others) or uses the most. in education, the l1 is generally defined as the language that a child understands and speaks well enough to be able to learn successfully at grade-level (benson & kosonen, 2012). in this case, the l1 is not always the language that the child speaks at home, learned first, or knows best. in many contexts, the selected language of instruction (referred to as the l1), may be a language from the community that is well-understood by the child, but is not in fact the child’s mother tongue. in this paper, i use the definition provided by unesco (2003): l1 as primary or first language. l2 will be used to describe a second language introduced in education, and lx may be used to describe multilingual contexts where a third or additional language is used. l1-based mle describes programs that prioritize learning in the l1 in a multilingual environment (bender et al., 2005; unesco, 2003). in some contexts, the l1 is introduced as the language of instruction in the early grades to facilitate learning the fundamentals of literacy and numeracy. in other cases, the language of instruction is the national or official language (l2) and the mother tongue is used by the teacher only to ease learning in the l2. in multilingual contexts where there are local languages spoken that differ from the national language, it is rare that the l1 is used as language of instruction beyond primary school, and it is very often the case that it is used only in the early grades—grades one, two, and sometimes three (alidou et al., 2006). the arguments for the use of l1 in early grades is tied to strong evidence showing that the l1 facilitates the acquisition of reading skills in both the l1 and l2 (bialystok, 2011; collier & thomas, 2004; cummins, 1984;). cummins’ (1984) linguistic interdependence hypothesis explains a process of transfer of l1 language and literacy knowledge into the l2, whereby l2 proficiency is heavily dependent on the capabilities children have already developed in the l1. learning to read first in an l1 does not put young children at a disadvantage; in fact, the learning transfer occurs both ways between l1 and l2. the transfer should not be rushed and must pay proper attention to oral language development in both languages. foundational literacy skills in the early grades of primary school must be maintained and developed throughout early primary education in order to succeed in school (benson, 2004b; stanovich, 1986). the task of learning to read (in any language) is not easy or straightforward, requiring a complex set of processes working together (visual, linguistic, cognitive) in order for the brain to make sense of the markings that form letters and words (dehaene, 2009; wolf, 2008). education systems struggle to provide learners with the tools they need to acquire these skills, and many learners quickly fall behind, especially in low-resource contexts, where learner-appropriate printed resources are a 44 global education review 7 (1) scarce commodity. the negative effects of delayed reading skills compound later academic challenges, often leading to high dropout rates, particularly among poor and disadvantaged groups (stanovich, 1986). in a call to arms that laid some of the groundwork for the sustainable development goals, unesco (2014) declared a “global learning crisis”: 250 million children are not learning to read and write, including the half that have attended early primary grades. progress is slow, and nearly 50% of children and youth are still not achieving minimum proficiency levels in reading and mathematics (unesco, 2019). there are two major challenges that have emerged over the past few decades: 1) an unstated reliance on monolingual, english language-based early literacy development and assessment research to guide international program design, and 2) heavy emphasis on development of a subset of foundational literacy skills (e.g., phonological awareness and phonics), often at the expense of critical focus on more wholistic development of a child’s receptive and communicative language development in both the l1 and l2. many early grade reading programs introduced in international contexts over the last two decades are guided by the principles drawn from the findings of the national reading panel (2000), which sets out five core component skills of reading: phonemic awareness, phonics, vocabulary knowledge, oral reading fluency, and comprehension. while building on one another, each of these skills require a discrete set of approaches to teach effectively, requiring explicit instructional practices (archer & hughes, 2011). in hoover and gough’s (1990) “simple view of reading,” the complex process of learning to read is distilled into two categories: decoding and linguistic comprehension. each category carries with it a complex set of processes needed to acquire literacy. this practical definition has been broadly used to inform program development and pedagogical approaches. the reductionistic way in which these approaches are applied in diverse contexts have been criticized (hoffman, 2009). in international program practice, the simple view is at times erroneously used to denote a relationship between fluency (defined and measured as automaticity) and reading comprehension, rather than decoding and linguistic comprehension for reading comprehension. scholars have attributed such confusion to the widespread use of the early grade reading assessment (egra) developed by the research triangle institute in 2005 (benson, 2013; dowd & bartlett, 2019; graham & van ginkle, 2014). the egra is based on an adapted version of dynamic indicators of basic early literacy skills (dibels) designed for english literacy learners in the united states. egra was initially developed as a diagnostic instrument that has been used to shine a spotlight on the extent of poor reading skills in low-income contexts (benson &wong, 2015; dubeck & gove, 2015; gove & cvelich, 2011). as a diagnostic tool, the results are used to inform curricula and training reform efforts, and define l1-based mle intervention design (pflepsen, 2015). beyond diagnostics, there is now widespread reliance on the egra as a framework by which to structure and measure progress in early grade literacy program implementation in a wide range of multilingual contexts, which has its limitations. substantial floor effects on the fluency benchmark in egra results have led to interventions that target what bartlett, dowd, and jonason (2015) categorize as emergent and decoding skills, stressing “phonics and phonemic awareness more than comprehension” (p. 309). scholars have also pointed out that the egra assessment does not assess prosody, and designing for complexity 45 fluency rates (correct words per minute) have been used as a proxy for reading comprehension, an assumption that has its limitations when comparing fluency across languages with variable word length and grapheme complexity (dowd & bartlett, 2019). graham and van ginkle (2014) provide a thorough critique of these limitations in non-english language contexts, noting that the use of correct words per minute as a benchmark fails to account for the “range of differences between languages and orthographies that may influence reading acquisition” (p. 245). length of the words (agglutination), syllable structure, linguistic transparency, and tone all play a role in the time needed to read and understand a passage, and it is difficult to compare different languages against a common, timed standard. attention to the structure of the languages plays an important role in biliteracy development. linguistic distance and writing systems can present substantial challenges for l1 to l2 transfer (koda, 2007; perfetti & dunlap, 2008; tan et al., 2003). researchers have examined the cross-linguistic differences in phonological awareness and receptive vocabulary as predictors of word and letter reading tasks and found that the range of difference is dependent as much on the structure of the language as on relative status of the language—l1 or l2 as medium of instruction (jasińska et al., 2019; ziegler & goswami, 2006). studies have also shown that students need to develop a sufficient oral language threshold in the l1 in order to transfer the reading skills to the l2 (hovens, 2002; koda & zehler, 2008; piper et al., 2016a). recent research on the transfer of l1 to l2 literacy skills in india has demonstrated that a higher threshold is needed for l2 oral language development in order to optimize the transfer of l1 literacy skills for reading in the l2 (nakamura et al., 2018). these studies are contributing to a broader base of evidence that demands a more nuanced psycholinguistic and context-driven approach to address literacy acquisition in multilingual contexts that have not yet been adequately addressed by the egra and other global standards. despite the growing body of research, study of biliteracy and multi-literacy development is still very much in the nascent stages. successful biliteracy or multiliteracy development varies by context, language, and policy, but is also dependent on languagespecific pedagogical approaches to literacy acquisition. more research is needed to provide languageand context-specific definition of the threshold and independence hypotheses that undergird cross-linguistic transfer and biliteracy acquisition among non-dominant languages and marginalized populations. greater consideration for language policy and planning will be needed to address and sustain mother tongue-based programs that are able to deliver biliteracy and multiliteracy outcomes for successful learning beyond the early grades. language policy and planning the politics of language deeply influence the success of multilingual education initiatives. languages develop from and are situated within specific communities and cultures, and can be understood as the code to understanding a particular culture or society (wardhaugh, 2011). language acts or policies have a profound impact on the social construct of the affected communities and cultures. in the african context, ouane and glantz (2010) have associated the investment in african languages and multilingual education with the “deep social transformation induced by a political, cultural and development project and an education reform agenda” (p. 48). language policies are often influenced by local language rights, linguistic development of the relevant languages, 46 global education review 7 (1) or other ideological factors. the relationship of language to identity and culture also carries with it the power to marginalize and oppress communities, which has been done time and again throughout the history of human development (skutnabb-kangas, 2000). educational initiatives that aim toward multilingualism have the potential to empower those who have been oppressed through language policies, and they also hold the potential to activate local voices, but failure to address language policy and planning can result in an experimental approach that does not have lasting impact, or may have unintended negative consequences. unfortunately, many programs fail to address the policy and planning required for meaningful and sustained implementation of new languages into the school system (ansah, 2014; hornberger, 2006a, 2009; trudell & piper, 2013). language policy and planning (lpp) has been variously employed over time by scholars and practitioners to describe and inform behavior change with regard to language management (ricento, 2000; ruiz, 1984; tollefson, 2002). lpp is commonly formulated around three overlapping and interdependent areas: status planning, corpus planning, and acquisition planning. each of these has taken on various forms and approaches depending on the context and use (hornberger, 2002). status planning, also described as the function of language in society, deals with the politics of linguistic imperialism, language revitalization, language use in official domain, and issues of language selection and choice (clayton, 2008; hornberger, 2006b; skutnabb-kangas, 2000). in corpus planning, efforts are generally directed toward specific areas of linguistic structure and variants, including standardization, graphization, choice of script, and orthographic conventions (see for example the discussion of orthographic standards among bantu languages in canhanga & banda, 2017), purification (removal of borrowings, rise of language academies), and terminology development (new term, old term with new meaning, borrowed term, calque). acquisition planning is concerned with language distribution and use, such as medium of instruction in education (tollefson, 2008). l1-based mle programs commonly fall under acquisition planning, seeing language as a resource for learning (see the discussion on orientation in language planning in ruiz, 1984). l1-based mle programs will inevitably interact—by design or accident—with status and corpus planning, especially when non-dominant languages are introduced as the medium of instruction. the official status of a language— language policy—does not automatically translate into a language of instruction (loi) policy. in morocco, berber (tamazigt) was regarded as a minority local language until its official recognition in 2011 (maddy-weitzman, 2011). however, despite efforts to introduce the berber language into the public-school system, the languages of instruction are still standard arabic and french, while berber is taught as a subject only in a certain select number of schools (johnson, 2013). in other cases, minority languages are not officially recognized, which leaves many children without access to education in their mother tongue. there are between 50 and 80 indigenous languages spoken in ghana, although only eleven are recognized by the government, and english remains the official language of state institutions (ansah, 2014; eberhard et al., 2019). for sustainability and quality of programming, l1-based mle programs must enter into policy level discussions in order to advocate for the models of education, all of which will depend on the theoretical or ideological orientations to which the program ascribes. language of instruction policies also vary in purpose and scope, and rarely do these policies designing for complexity 47 address issues of language-specific approaches to literacy instruction. baker (2011) presents a comprehensive typology of the multilingual education models from fully l1 monolingual (submersion or segregationist), to weak transitional l1 to l2 models (usually early exit), to strong additive (immersion, maintenance two-way, dual medium, and mainstream) additive approaches are considered most effective, integrating local languages alongside the l2 for as long as possible, even through secondary education (alidou et al, 2006; benson & kosonen, 2012). by contrast, the more common early exit model assumes that students will achieve mastery of the l2 at a very young age (primary grade 4), even though they may have little experience of the language outside of the school context (alidou, et al., 2006; cummins, 1979). in addition to the above challenges, many curricula attempt to teach students to read and write in both the l1 and l2 simultaneously, as is the policy in bangladesh (hamid & erling, 2016). whatever the model, the many other practical issues of implementation of l1-based mle programs will also interact with other lpp domains. teacher selection and retention (e.g., mobility issues) will raise questions of the viability of l1-based mle programs in the short and long-term (e.g., teacher language capacity and willingness to teach in the local language, language policy change and geographic shifts of language of instruction policies; heugh, 2008). curriculum and textbook development can very quickly become entangled in orthographic and linguistic variant debates when indigenous languages are newly standardized, or still in the process of standardization, with little experience or widespread use of the new standardized versions (alidou et al., 2006). inappropriate or top-down language selection and language mismatch (spoken language different from medium of instruction) can compromise or weaken a program before it has even begun (piper, zuilkowski & ong’ele, 2016). in short, l1-based mle programs can inadvertently problematize languages through exclusion (through ignorance or by design), or by failing to address some of these policy issues early on. l1-based mle programming in context l1-based mle programs have expanded rapidly over the past two decades. as of 2016, with substantial support from the united states agency for international development (usaid), as well as the world bank and others, the egra has been implemented in 72 countries and an estimated 129 languages (dowd & barlett, 2019). the emphasis of these programs has been l1based early grade literacy instruction. programs have highlighted the paramount importance of the use of the mother tongue in early literacy acquisition and have seen some success in moving from pilot to policy-driven scalable models (gove & wetterberg, 2011). the usaid 2011 education strategy made a strong case for l1 learning and the need for usaid programming designed in accordance with “appropriate language policies,” and “where these policies do not exist, usaid should engage in policy dialogue with host country government and partners in an attempt to improve policy, as on other technical issues” (usaid, 2012, p. 4). in 2015, the usaid-funded global reading network published a document designed in “practical response to requests from usaid’s africa missions,” to assist in program design for l1-based mle (pflepsen, 2015, p. 1). the publication highlights many of the abovementioned lpp considerations and provides an important list of concrete steps that might be followed in the implementation of usaidfunded l1-based mle programs, including transfer of skill across languages, language context and mapping, orthography development 48 global education review 7 (1) and standardization, teachers’ language proficiency, and so on (for the full list, see pp. 42-43). the usaid 2018 basic education strategy continues support for l1-based mle but does not reference the report, nor does it provide explicit guidance on how to approach l1-based mle program design. scholars have used an ecology perspective as a way to understand and analyze the ideologies undergirding language policy and practice (hornberger, 2002, 2006b) and the interaction between languages “inside and across polities” (creese et al., 2008). hornberger (2006b) defines three themes in the ecology of language. first, languages live and die in relation to other languages. second, languages are situated within a specific context—the language environment— that encompasses all range of human issues such as politics, economics, and culture. third, languages are not static; they take breath in human hosts, and thus evolve and change, and can be endangered. the use of this schema “recognizes that planning for any one language in a particular context necessarily entails planning for all languages impinging on that one” (hornberger, 2006b, p. 280). conversely, programs that focus only on the use of the l1 fail to address planning for all languages. a general review of recent usaid early grade reading solicitations in recent years shows heavy emphasis on l1-based reading instruction that is not always made explicit in the theory of change or results framework, and does not provide sufficient consideration of the multilingual context. the following patterns emerge from review of a few illustrative program designs since 2015 in egypt, ethiopia, cambodia, ghana, morocco, mozambique, philippines, and zambia (united states government, n.d.). the objective or goal of the program is typically to improve early grade reading (sometimes grade specific, e.g., cambodia; and once with the addition of numeracy, e.g., ghana). improvements in early grade reading may be accompanied by a qualifier such as proficiency or achievement, but without reference to medium of instruction (e.g., in mozambique, the desired improvement is to read fluently and with comprehension). the intermediate results of the program focus on materials and instruction (combined or separate), systems strengthening and capacity building (combined or separate), and community engagement and support for education. sometimes a unique fourth or fifth result is included in the program design (e.g., access in zambia, assessment in morocco, professional development of teachers and government accountability and transparency in ghana, and vulnerable students and communities in ethiopia). the egra is the expected measure for learning outcomes in all cases, except in the philippines (no assessment mentioned), and in ethiopia (where there are explicit instructions not to conduct an egra assessment). none of these design frameworks include explicit reference either to l1-based instruction or to biliteracy or multilingual education outcomes. the above results frameworks would fall under chen and rossi’s (1989) definition of “a sparse simple theory,” that is distinguished from a “rich theory” (p. 301). to illustrate, a simple theory for early grade reading might be that learner appropriate curriculum and instruction will improve reading. a rich l1-based mle theory, by comparison, might be proposed as follows: learner appropriate curriculum instruction, when developed with stakeholder input for biliteracy in the l1 and l2, will enable learners to read to learn throughout the remainder of their learning experience. a more in-depth read of the full solicitations reveals many implicit assumptions about program implementation that may result in emergent or unintended outcomes (e.g., policy environment designing for complexity 49 that does not favor local language instruction). in the following pages, i provide a closer look at the implementation of an early grade reading program in mozambique to highlight some of the many dips and turns a program may take that may deviate from the program design, and challenge meaningful evaluation of program effectiveness and impact. the usaid-funded vamos ler! (let’s read!) program, a five-year program (2016-2021) implemented by creative associates international and partners, is designed to address poor reading outcomes by introducing a l1-based approach in support of the planned national expansion of bilingual education (potter & blankenbeckler, 2018). the strategic use of bilingual education as part of an effort to promote greater inclusion in mozambique has a long history but has always been implemented on a small scale. first developed in 1993, it has gradually expanded from a small handful of schools to over 500 schools in 2015, still only a small percentage of the total number of over 15,000 primary schools (benson, 2000, 2004; capra, 2013). the bilingual education model is transitional, using local languages for instruction in literacy and numeracy in grades 13, with portuguese as a subject until full transition in grade 4 (minsterio da educação e desenvolvimento humano [minedh], 2003). the design of vamos ler! was initially aimed to improve reading and writing in the target languages of emakhuwa and elomwe in grades 1 and 2 in nearly 3,500 schools in the northern provinces of nampula and zambezia. in early joint donor-partner meetings with ministry representatives, it was observed that the program did not fully represent the government’s bilingual transitional approach, as it only focused on the selected l1 languages and did not include l2 (portuguese) or l1 numeracy instruction in the proposed design. other questions were raised about the language selection and community reception of the program. there were several languages represented in zambezia not included in the program, including one with a relatively large population of speakers—echuwabo. one of the perceived challenges in implementing bilingual education at large scale at the time was the fact that the introduction of bilingual programming in individual schools is premised on community choice (blankenbeckler, 2017). bilingual education was indeed planned for gradual expansion, but the 2002 curriculum reform policy allowed for communities to choose between monolingual, semi-bilingual, or bilingual modes in the early grades (minedh, 2003). the intention to implement and measure at such a large scale would be difficult if not accepted and chosen by communities. these initial conversations informed the design of three situational analyses intended to better understand the program’s sociolinguistic context. a language mapping study was conducted to measure children’s oral language proficiency (olp) in each language they reported knowing. olp was measured using a semantic fluency measure from a representative sample of 4,177 grades 1-3 students in 212 schools in nampula and zambezia. the information gathered assisted policymakers and education specialists to identify the following: a) whether children’s language proficiency matched the official language of instruction assigned to schools (the study found large mismatch between self-reports and semantic fluency tests, with only about 8% of students considered bilingual, and the majority of students [73%] l1 not matching the school’s language of instruction); b) multilingual classrooms (approximately 62% of schools were linguistically heterogeneous—students with more than one l1); and c) the best choice of language for initial literacy instruction (mapping results revealed strong correspondence between 50 global education review 7 (1) findings and census research, showing echuwabo to have prevalence in southern regions, where previously elomwe may have been used as the selected l1; nakamura et al., 2018). this study was complemented by qualitative research and two additional studies that looked at the knowledge, attitudes, and practices of community members, teachers, and other education stakeholders with regard to bilingual education in mozambique (hua et al., 2017; shulman, 2017). findings from the latter assessments showed that parents’ and communities’ support for l1-based mle could be vastly improved through more equitable provision of materials for local language instruction and teacher selection and training to improve teacher capacity to teach in the l1 and the l2. these studies helped to inform a shift in design in many aspects of the program implementation, including the addition of echuwabo as a language of instruction in select schools, and the addition of portuguese as an area of intervention to improve oral language development and support transition from the l1 to l2 in grade 4. all four languages (emakhuwa, elomwe, echuwabo, and portuguese) were included in an egra assessment for evaluation of literacy outcomes under the parameters of the program contract (turney et al., 2017). several social behavior communications campaigns were implemented to raise awareness among districts, schools, and communities of key l1-based mle concepts. the program worked with provincial and district authorities to make bilingual education mandatory in select schools. the program additionally helped fund and promote a series of national events and workshops on bilingual education, and in 2019, supported the development of a scope and sequence for the remaining 14 national languages in addition to emakhuwa, elomwe, and echuwabo (kaplannunes et al., 2019). these latter efforts may correspond to what rogers (2008) refers to as “‘tipping points,’ where a small additional effort can have a disproportionately large effect” (p. 38). a revised national bilingual education policy was released in august 2019 that reflected many of the program’s recommendations and intervention evidence (minedh, 2019). the mozambique case illustrates just a few of the many sociolinguistic complexities faced in the implementation of l1-based mle programs, including how the program adapted to the contextual realities in order to meet program goals. many other psycholinguistic and sociopolitical aspects merit investigation that have not yet been explored. weiss (1997) underscores that a program theory (and often multiple theories) are “rarely explicit and do not have to be right” and among other challenges to theory of change design, there may be more than one possible theoretical framework appropriate to the program goal (p. 503). as hypotheses, theories may be drawn from evidence in another context or another set of circumstances, but also may be based on assumptions, beliefs, or even intuition. however, program theory should be developed taking into account the level of complexity, the context, purpose, and evaluation needs particular to each program. if improved learning outcomes is the desired change, there may be more than one path to achieve this goal, or the path may need to take a few alternative or parallel routes. learning in the l1 is a core element of academic success. however, this success will be limited, if, among other things, policy does not support or is not valued by communities, or the l1 is quickly transitioned to the l2, without adequate provision for l2 learning. conclusion: designing for complexity “bilingual education is a simplistic label for a complex phenomenon” (baker, 2011, p 207). designing for complexity 51 it is not easy or straightforward to design a strong theory of change. the need for comparison drives many program theories of change, which can result in one-size-fits-all program design. to avoid this trap, flexible approaches can better allow for critical changes at the outset of the program—and along the way—to reflect new learning as the program progresses. simple theories often seek to follow a linear path of cause and effect, whereas the onthe-ground realities merit a more complex design where more than one causal strand may benefit separate evaluations (e.g., policies may be required for delivery and implementation of new reading and writing approaches; rogers, 2008). these programs might also benefit from a design for complexity that depends on activating a “virtuous circle” where an initial success creates the conditions for further success (rogers, 2008, p. 38). the flexible approach to implementation in mozambique allowed for critical, small changes that represent one of the factors that contributed to a “tipping point” in the policy expansion of bilingual education (rogers, 2008). more guidance and research is needed to develop flexible, nonlinear designs for l-based multilingual programs that better reflect the complexity of the psycholinguistic, sociolinguistic, and sociopolitical contexts, and can allow for more collaborative, sustainable program implementation. acknowledgement i thank dr. carol benson for her valuable feedback and advice on this manuscript, as well as for her inspiration and support over the years. references alidou, h., boly, a., brock-utne, b., & satina, y. 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(2008). proust and the squid: the story and science of the reading brain. cambridge, uk: icon. ziegler, j. c., & goswami, u. (2006). becoming literate in different languages: similar problems, different solutions. developmental science, 9(5), 429-436. about the author corrie blankenbeckler is a senior technical advisor in the education division at creative associates international. she has over fifteen years' experience in developing and managing formal and non-formal education programs in diverse environments in the middle east/north africa, sub-saharan africa, and asia. in her current role, she leads in program design and provides technical quality assurance and support for creative projects around the world. since 2016 she has provided project direction and technical support for the bilingual early grade reading project in mozambique. she has an m.a. in international education development from teachers college of columbia university, and has deep expertise in mother-tongue based multilingual curriculum design. 40 global education review 6(1) ____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: lopez, sheila, mcwhirter, anna cecilia, rosencrans, margaret, giuliani, nicole r., & mcintyre, laura lee (2019). father involvement with children with developmental delays. global education review, 6 (1), 40-62. father involvement with children with developmental delays sheila lopez university of oregon anna cecilia mcwhirter university of oregon margaret rosencrans university of oregon nicole r. giuliani university of oregon laura lee mcintyre university of oregon abstract children with developmental delays (dd) pose unique caregiving challenges, given their developmental problems and risks for behavior problems (baker, mcintyre, blacher, crnic, edelbrock, & low, 2003). most of the studies involving caregivers of children with dd have highlighted the role of mothers, with very few studies focusing specifically on fathers. studies on father involvement in home and school settings provide a theoretical rationale for increasing father involvement to support positive outcomes in children with dd. synthesizing research on father involvement can further contribute to and shape legislation that ensures equitable access to education for young children with disabilities (i.e., the individuals with disabilities education act). this paper summarizes findings from a systematic literature review of father involvement across home and school settings in families of preschool-aged children with or at risk for dd. keywords father, involvement, children, disabilities father involvement most of the current research on children with or at risk for disabilities in the united states focuses solely on maternal involvement (meadan, stoner, & angell, 2015). however, many of these children also receive support from their fathers. as such, there is a significant gap _______________________________ corresponding author: sheila lopez, department of special education and clinical sciences, university of oregon, 1585 east 13th avenue eugene, or 97403 email: sheilal@uoregon.edu mailto:sheilal@uoregon.edu mailto:sheilal@uoregon.edu father involvement with children with developmental delays 41 in the literature examining how fathers impact child development (mackey & day, 1979). in this paper, we review recent literature on fathers in the united states and the ways in which they engage with their preschool-aged children across both home and school settings. we focus on children with developmental delays, including those with known intellectual and developmental disabilities (e.g., down syndrome, autism spectrum disorder) and those at risk for disabilities. we will begin by discussing cultural roles and expectations of fathers and current u.s. policies, as these factors impact father involvement on a broader level. we will describe the methods used to conduct this literature review. we will review demographics, settings of father involvement, methods, and interventions discussed in the literature. finally, we will report the findings and discuss the implications of this research for practitioners, teachers, researchers, and others who work with fathers. cultural roles and expectations of fathers in the united states fathering has taken on different meanings in the united states. specifically, the role of the father has shifted from that of moral teacher and educator during the colonial era of the united states to family breadwinner and financial provider during the great depression, to role model for the child following world war ii (baumann, 1999). traditionally, fathers have placed their personal and professional goals over child care, and have not engaged fully in their role as fathers (garbarino, 1993). prior to the 1970s, academic literature portrayed fathers as family breadwinners who were otherwise “irrelevant” and not responsible for the social, behavioral, emotional, and cognitive development of their children (coney & mackey, 1998). this por trayal is markedly different from that of fathers in other countries (mackey & day, 1979). as women became more present in the paid workforce, the expectations for a father’s role shifted to include more caretaking. initially, men were not fulfilling these expectations as hoped (coney & mackey, 1998); however, by the1990s, research showed increased father engagement, motivated by psychological benefit and pleasure in interacting with their children (coney & mackey, 1998). further, research indicated that by the 1990s, the social and economic variables at play in the previous decades were largely irrelevant (coney & mackey, 1998). given that fathers can significantly impact their child’s development (brazelton & cramer, 1990; hofferth, 2003; osherman, 1992), more research and policy initiatives are warranted to encourage deeper father involvement. recent research has demonstrated that fathers vary in their level of engagement with their children and their level of responsibility around their role as economic provider and manager of their child’s welfare (hofferth, 2003). cultural differences within the united states influence the ways in which fathers engage with their children (hofferth, 2003). race, ethnicity, demographic, and economic factors (e.g., family size and socioeconomic status) all seem to explain differences in fathers’ parenting attitudes and relationships with their children. for example, black fathers exhibit less engagement and warmth but exert more control and take more responsibility than white fathers (hofferth, 2003). mexican-american fathers display high levels of involvement with childcare, high levels of support, and more responsivity to their child's emotions, which contrasts with traditional views of latino fathers as distant or prone to harsher punishment (gamble, ramakumar, & diaz, 2007). although there is much variation within cultural groups, 42 global education review 6(1) these findings offer perspective on differential expectations regarding the role of fathers within the united states. while these examples provide valuable information on the father-child relationship, more information is needed to understand the factors that impact father involvement. few studies have examined father involvement, particularly in families of children with dd. this may be a product of traditional and cultural perspectives of fatherhood; however, current policies within the united states may play an important role as well. the following section addresses policies that can influence the involvement of fathers. policy around fathers in the united states federal policies may have a broad impact on the extent to which fathers become involved with their children with disabilities. federal policies related directly to fatherhood in the united states have changed very little since the passage of the family medical leave act of 1993 (fmla). under the fmla, fathers may take up to 12 weeks of unpaid, protected leave during a 12-month period to care for or bond with their newborn, adopted child, or foster child. parents may also take this leave to care for their child with a serious health condition, which includes physical or mental illness or injury requiring inpatient treatment or continued care by a healthcare provider. research has shown that about 90% of resident fathers of children born in the early 2000s (i.e., several years following the passage of fmla) took some leave (approximately 2 weeks) following their child’s birth (nepomnyaschy & waldfogel, 2007). unlike many other high-income countries, u.s. employers are not required to support or incentivize fathers to take time off for other childcare-related reasons (raub et al., 2018). to date, only four states provide paid parental leave (national conference of state legislatures, 2016). research suggests that availability of paid family leave policies increases the likelihood of paternity leave, as shown in california (bartel, rossin-slater, ruhm, stearns, & waldfogel, 2018). while u.s. federal laws do not allow for unpaid leave for other parenting duties, several states acknowledge fathers’ multifaceted roles in parenting and provide a limited number of hours (i.e., between 4 and 40 hours) to engage in school-related activities (national conference of state legislatures, 2016). parents of young children with developmental delays and disabilities may require more time off from work for childrearing duties. young children with dd are at increased risk for behavioral and mental health concerns relative to their typically developing peers (baker et al, 2003; emerson, 2010). these children may also require more financial support (parish, rose, grinstein-weiss, richman, & andrews, 2008), more specialized education, medical, or mental health services (neely-barnes & marcenko, 2004), and more support with adaptive functioning (plant & sanders, 2007). in the absence of federal protections and policies to support fathers—particularly fathers of children with dd—some may find it difficult to support their children with dd. given the potential for comorbid mental health conditions associated with children of dd (emerson & einfield, 2010), fathers of children with dd may be more likely to take leave from work. to date, researchers have not yet examined data on paternal leave in families of children with disabilities in the united states. currently, federal laws in place for families of children with dd protect parents’ rights regarding school matters, prevent discrimination, and provide some financial assistance via tax refunds and supplemental income. the individuals with disabilities father involvement with children with developmental delays 43 education improvement act (ideia, 2004) provides school districts with funding to develop and implement individualized family support plans (ifsps) for children ages 0–3 years (0–5 years in some states) and individualized education programs (ieps) for eligible children with disabilities, ages 3–21 or 5–21 years. the americans with disabilities act (ada) provides protection to parents of children with dd by prohibiting employers from firing or excluding a parent from a job benefit or offer because they have a child with a disability. financial benefits for parents of children with disabilities include earned income tax credits (eitc) and child or dependent care credits, both of which can lead to tax refunds. lastly, supplemental security income (ssi) is provided to families of children with qualifying developmental disabilities. past research has shown that fathers have taken advantage of ssi benefits; specifically, 29.3% of two-parent families and 2.4% of single fathers have used ssi for their child with a disability (rupp et al., 2005). taken together, these laws provide a certain amount of protection and support to fathers of children with dd. nevertheless, several limitations emerge that may serve as barriers to effective father involvement. research has shown that financial supports (e.g., supplemental income and tax credits) do not sufficiently minimize the financial burdens associated with children with dd (general accounting office, 1999; parish, pomeranzessley, & braddock, 2003). further, while idea encourages parental participation through its emphasis on parental rights, parents report confusion around matters pertaining to their rights (stoner, bock, thompson, angell, heyl, & crowley, 2005), and ultimately, early intervention agencies are free to move forward with decisions about ifsps contingent on parental consent to the child’s evaluation and eligibility. further, very little research has examined data regarding fathers’ contact or experience with special education law, making it difficult to inform policy changes. lastly, special education policy has not sufficiently included research and scholarly writings on effective parenting practices, resulting in a lack of targeted initiatives to promote specific parenting interventions (e.g., parent-child interaction therapy, natural environment teaching, behavioral parent training; see national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine, 2016). given the documented links between parenting practices and poor child outcomes in families of children with dd (chadwick, kusel, & cuddy, 2008), u.s. laws could actively promote access to services that promote effective parenting. these limitations suggest a need for u.s. policies that support active father involvement; such policies could include increased familybased interventions for fathers, paid time off, and more education on ways to support their children with dd in preschool and early intervention settings. it is possible that the lack of supportive laws and policies for fathers contribute to the lack of father involvement in research studies as well, limiting the ability of researchers to fully understand the father’s role in home and school environments. considering the historical and changing roles of fathers in the united states, the cultural differences in father-child relationships, and the policies currently in place regarding father involvement, there is a clear need to understand more fully the factors related to father involvement in children’s lives. a father’s role is clearly significant for many areas of a child’s development (hofferth, 2003; osherman, 1992); however, there is a profound lack of research that allows us to completely understand the impact on child outcomes. this need is particularly important for fathers of children with dd, as they can experience greater 44 global education review 6(1) demands on their time and resources. considering this significant gap in our understanding of fathers, the following review focuses on the current literature highlighting father involvement with their children with dd and the implications for future research and policy. research questions this paper seeks to answer the following research questions: (1) how much of the current literature measures and/or discusses the involvement of fathers with their children with dd? (2) what types of parent and child outcomes were present for father involvement? and (3) what evidence does the literature include on the implications of father involvement with their children? methods this systematic literature review focused on research pertaining to father involvement with children with dd, including children with or at risk for intellectual and developmental disabilities. we used electronic data bases to locate original research studies, literature reviews, and meta-analyses, which were all included in this review. more specifically, the studies that were eligible for inclusion were (a) peer-reviewed, (b) published in english, (c) published between january 2000 september 2018, (d) conducted in the united states with u.s. populations, (e) focused on children that had or were at risk for developmental delay or intellectual and developmental disabilities, (f) focused on young children aged 2–6 years, and (g) conducted solely with fathers or where separate analyses were conducted with fathers. studies that included measures or a discussion of active father involvement with parenting, school-related matters, or intervention were included. studies that included a sample of typically developing children (in addition to children with dd) were also included if they met other inclusionary criteria. additionally, as there is an increased risk of childhood disability in populations living in poverty and those living in single-parent households, studies with head start populations were included if they met other inclusionary criteria (fujiura & yamaki, 2000). studies were excluded if (a) they were case studies, or studies with a single-subject research design, (b) fathers represented less than 20% of the sample or the authors did not specify the percentage of fathers in the study, (c) they focused on recent immigrant or refugee fathers, or (d) they focused on mental health instead of father involvement. we used multiple databases in our search for…, including academic onefile, academic search premier, eric, jstor, proquest education, proquest social science, and psychnet. the keywords we used included the following: father(s), fathering, fatherhood, involvement, preschool, preschool children, disability, child disability, developmental disability, and developmental delay. our search yielded 19 articles that met the criteria for this review (see table 1). father involvement with children with developmental delays 45 table 1 key variables of included studies of father involvement in preschool children with dd (n = 19) study target group sample size number of fathers father involvement measures design/ approach key outcomes bagner (2013) children with/at-risk for dd or clinically significant behavior problems 35 13 intervention child behavior checklist (cbcl), dyadic parentchild interaction coding system-iii quasi experi mental pilot study when fathers were more involved, mothers reported improvements in child externalizing behaviors from pretest to posttest. children displayed higher rates of compliance to maternal commands posttest. breaux et al. (2017) children with significant externalizing behaviors at risk for disabilities 258 families 221 (approx.) home diagnostic interview schedule for children-4th ed., current symptoms scale, family history interview, the parenting scale, the life experiences survey, the millon clinical multiaxial inventory-iii large scale longitudinal assessment study with path analyses paternal adhd symptoms did not predict parenting behaviors; child odd symptoms at time 1 later predicted fathers' overreactivity. fathers' laxness later predicted child odd symptoms at time 4. caserta et al (2018) at risk for academic/ behavioral challenges 67 67 intervention dyadic parentchild coding system; parent ratings of improvement randomized control trial; coach condition fathers who participated in the coaches program evidenced improved parenting behavior (reduced negative talk). fathers were no more likely to use praise 46 global education review 6(1) and waitlist control group or reduce their use of commands; improved child behavior and child and family functioning crnic et al. (2009) id and atrisk for psychopathology 245 families of children with and without dd not specified home naturalistic inhome observations (opportunity for interaction, detachment, positivity, negativity) longitudi-nal fathers of children with id were significantly more negative than fathers of typically developing children at age 6, less involved than mothers at age 3, less positive at ages 4 and 6, more detached at age 4; fathers of typically developing children showed similar pattern to mothers but were more detached and less positive than mothers dyer et al. (2009) dd 3550 families of children with and without dd total sample had fathers living in home home functional involvement; literacy or language involvement (likert scales) sem-latent variable growth curve father involvement with children with and without dd were similar; no differences in literacy or language involvement; fathers of children with a diagnosis by 9 months had greatest decrease in involvement; fathers of typically developing children were less involved with daughters than sons at 9 months father involvement with children with developmental delays 47 elder et al. (2011) autism spectrum disorder 18 families 18 intervention observational coding; autism diagnostic interview revised (adi-r); the autism diagnostic observation schedule (ados); vineland adaptive behavior scales 2nd ed. (vinelandii) randomized control trial (rct) with waitlist control fathers imitating with animation resulted in significant increases; no significant changes in following the child's lead; expectant waiting and commenting on the child resulted in significant increases; child initiating and non-speech vocalizations significantly increased for fathers fagan & lee (2012) at-risk 8400 families not specified home bayley short form–research mental scale child risk; fathers' and mothers' cognitive stimulation mediator and moderator analyses fathers’ cognitive stimulation of child at 24 months was significantly related to child cognition, and had a stronger positive effect on child cognition among children with and without high risk in single mother households (vs. two-parent households) fenning et al., (2014) typically developing children; those with borderline intellectual functioning and dd 172 families 148 home stanford binet iv for child, naturalistic observations longitudi-nal using ancova’s and hierarchical regression analysis fathers of children with borderline iq functioning exhibited the least amount of positive engagement compared to other groups 48 global education review 6(1) fox et al. (2015) dd 135 135 home family empowerment scale, father role salience scale, reflected appraisals of fathering, father role satisfaction scale, financial strain scale, demographics, father involvement cross sectional empowerment and strong role salience were found to mitigate negative effects of financial strain and disability severity on father involvement laxman et al. (2015) autism spectrum disorder/ pervasive developmental disorder, dd and typical developing 3550 families 3550 home demographics, center for epidemiological studies-depression scale, father involvement ratings on literacy, play, routine caregiving and responsive caregiving longitudi-nal with structural equation modeling father involvement in literacy and response caregiving at 9 months old were associated with lower levels of maternal depression at 4 years for the asd group but not for other groups meadan et al. (2015) autism spectrum disorder 7 7 school family quality of life scale (fqol scale) qualitative interviews general themes included cohesiveness with spouses and family unit, adaptability within the family, and working together to support child educational needs father involvement with children with developmental delays 49 mueller & buckley (2014) children with special education labels, moderate to severe 20 20 school, specifically special education not specified qualitative interviews fathers reported iep meetings as overwhelming and indicated that effective collaboration with educators requires building relationships, establishing communication, and listening to parent voice parette et al. (2010) not specified not specified not specified not specified not specified not specified practitioner recommendations for improving father involvement included sensitivity to scheduling, specific invitations, and seeking father insight. a call for more rigorous research including diversity in sample and variability in methodology for fathers of young children with dd was made. ricci, & hodapp (2003) down’s syndrome and intellectual disabilities 50 families 43 home personality checklist, child behavior checklist (cbcl), parenting stress index, paternal involvement in child care index, fathering behaviors questionnaire, vineland adaptive behavior system t-tests no differences found in everyday paternal involvement between groups 50 global education review 6(1) communication domain stockall & dennis (2013) children in head start not specified not specified school not specified not specified fathers’ play behaviors can enhance social/emotional development and emotional regulation of young children through active, physical play turbiville & marquis (2001) children with and without dd 318 318 school study specific survey about programs for fathers and level of father involvement questionnair es mailed home fathers preferred family-centered activities over activities specifically for males. they also reported that process strategies such as scheduling considerations and receiving specific invitations improved father involvement father involvement with children with developmental delays 51 table 2 measures of father involvement for included studies with preschool children with dd (n = 19) study father involvement father involvement measures sample items bagner (2013) intervention not specified not specified breaux et al. (2017) home the parenting scale: 30item, 7-point likert selfreport measure on laxness and overreactivity laxness: “when i say my child can’t do something...i stick to what i said,” “when i say my child can’t do something...i let my child do it anyway” overreactivity: “when my child misbehaves...i handle it without getting upset,” “when my child misbehaves...i get so frustrated or angry that my child can see i’m upset.” caserta et al (2018) intervention not specified not specified crnic, arbona y, baker, & blacher (2009) home naturalistic inhome observations: behaviors rated on a 5-point scale after observing 10 minutes of interaction four dimensions of parenting behavior were rated, including opportunity for interaction, detachment, positivity, and negativity dyer, mcbride, & jeans (2009) home functional involvement: 4 items on a 6-point likert scale measuring frequency of child care tasks literacy or language involvement: 3 items on a 4-point likert scale measuring frequency of functional involvement: “how often in a typical week do you do...give your child a bath, help your child get dressed?” literacy or language involvement: “how often in a typical week do you...read books to your 52 global education review 6(1) involvement in literacy or language development child, sing songs to your child?” elder et al (2011) intervention naturalistic in home observations: frequency behavior counts coded from 10 minute video segments coded for occurrences of parent and child reciprocity behaviors fagan & lee (2012) home fathers cognitive stimulation: self-report items assessing cognitive stimulation on a 4-point likert scale from 1 = not at all to 4 = everyday “how often do you...read books to your child, tell stories to your child?” fenning, baker, baker, & crnic (2014) home naturalistic observations: coded mother and father behavior coded behaviors including positivity, sensitivity, stimulation of cognition, reversed detachment, negativity, and intrusiveness fox, nordquist, billen, savoca, (2015) home father role salience: 18 item 5-point scale (1 = strongly disagree, 5 = strongly agree) father role satisfaction scale: 7 item 4-point scale (1 = low, 4 = high) father involvement: selfreport measures of attachment, engagement, and responsibility on varying likert scales for each construct father role salience: “i like being known as a father,” “i would rather work overtime than watch my children for the evening” father role satisfaction scale: “being a parent has given me a lot of pleasure,” “i am very proud of being my child’s parent.” father involvement: “it is going to take me awhile before i truly feel like a parent to my child,” “i spend time one-on-one with my child,” “i help father involvement with children with developmental delays 53 my child prepare for bedtime.” laxman, mcbride, jeans, dyer, santos, kern, et al. (2015) home father involvement: selfreport measure of frequency of involvement (“never” to “more than once a day”) within literacy, routine caregiving and responsive caregiving “how often do you read to your child?” “when the following things happen or need to be done, how often are you the one who does them...soothe your child when upset?” meadan, stoner & angell (2015) school not specified not specified mueller & buckley, (2014) school, specifically special education qualitative interviews via phone about fathers’ perceptions and experiences as a father of a child with a disability interview questions included: “can you tell me about your level of involvement with your child who has a disability?” “tell me about your overall level of satisfaction with your involvement in your child’s education” parette, meadan, & doubet (2010) not specified not specified not specified ricci & hodapp (2003) home paternal involvement in child care index: 23-item self-report measure on five domains fathering behaviors questionnaire: 29 item self-report measure on five domains with a 6point likert scale (1 = never, 6 = very often) paternal involvement in child care index: domains include statement of involvement, child-care responsibility, socialization, responsibility, influence in child rearing decisions, and availability fathering behaviors questionnaire: domains include caregiving, play, 54 global education review 6(1) teaching, discipline, and disengagement stockall & dennis (2013) school not specified not specified turbiville & marquis (2001) school study specific survey on a 5-point likert scale from never to always where fathers were asked to indicate how often they participated in programs provided for them by their child’s early education program not specified we coded articles for (a) target group, (b) sample size, (c) number of fathers in the study, (d) father involvement, (e) measures, (d) study design or approach, and (f) key outcomes. for target group, we included child behavioral concerns and diagnosis. sample size and number of fathers indicated the number of individuals and, more specifically, the number of fathers who participated. for father involvement, we identified the context of the study: interventions and settings (e.g., home, school). see table 1 for a list of the measures included in each study, information about each study’s design, approach, and key outcomes. see table 2 for information on the measures specifically targeting father involvement. results demographics demographic variables were gathered across the studies and were included in the systematic literature review. we included studies that focused exclusively on preschool children (2–6 years old) and those that included a wider range of ages (i.e., 1–24 years). the age of the fathers ranged from 25–55 years. research settings varied, but mainly included children’s homes (including in-home questionnaires or phone calls, home visits) hospitals (outpatient clinics), research labs, and preschools (head start). study sample sizes ranged from 7–8,400 participants and included fathers, families, and samples from national studies. the racial and ethnic composition of the participants across the research studies ranged from 55.4–100% white/caucasian, 2–70% black/african american, 3–17.8% hispanic/latino, 1–4% asian, 2% native american, 2– 5% multiracial, and 30–33.3% other. family income ranged from $25,000– $100,000 a year. child disability or at-risk labels included the following: developmental disability/delay (dd), intellectual disability (id) and borderline intellectual functioning, autism spectrum disorder (asd), pervasive developmental disorder (pdd), down syndrome, at-risk for developmental disability, clinically significant behavior problems or externalizing behaviors, at-risk for psychopathology, and at risk for academic/behavioral challenges. father involvement with children with developmental delays 55 father involvement and measures of the articles reviewed, seven examined father involvement at home, three investigated school involvement, three included interventions for fathers, and two encompassed other father involvement experiences. across studies, research measures included fathers’ self-reports and direct observations. we did not include studies with mothers reported on father involvement, as these did not meet the inclusionary criteria for our study. of the seven research articles examining home involvement, two used direct observation to measure father involvement (fenning, baker, baker, & crnic, 2014; crnic, arbona, baker, & blacher, 2009) and five used fathers’ self-reports (dyer, mcbride, & jeans, 2009; fox, nordquist, billen, & savoca, 2015; laxman, mcbride, jeans, dyer, santos, kern, et al., 2015; ricci & hodapp, 2003; breaux, brown, & harvey, 2017). none of the aforementioned studies used both self-report and observation to measure father involvement. measures covered the following variables: fathers’ involvement with at-home parenting responsibilities (e.g., prepping meals, handling bedtime; dyer et al., 2009; fox et al., 2015; laxman et al., 2015; ricci, & hodapp, 2003), academic or cognitive stimulation (e.g., reading books to child; dyer et al., 2009; laxman et al., 2015; fagan & lee, 2012), emotional involvement (e.g., attachment; fox et al., 2015), responsive caregiving (e.g., activities or responsibilities outside of typical schedule [doctors’ appointments]; laxman et al., 2015), play (laxman et al., 2015), parenting strategies (e.g., discipline; ricci, & hodapp, 2003; breaux et al., 2017), and childrearing decisions (ricci, & hodapp, 2003). in all, 57% of the articles focused on at-home parenting responsibilities; 43% focused on academic or cognitive stimulation; 14% concentrated on responsive caregiving, play, and childrearing decisions, respectively; and 29% examined parenting strategies. observations included positive engagement and negative engagement (e.g., positivity, negativity, intrusiveness, stimulating cognition ; crnic et al., 2009; fenning et al., 2014). articles describing intervention studies examined the following practices: parent-child interaction therapy (pcit; bagner, 2013), parent management training (e.g., teaching parents to use positive reinforcement, deliver effective commands; caserta, fabiano, hulme, pyle, isaacs & jerome, 2018) and parent training around effective play strategies (e.g., facilitating child-led play, commenting on child’s play behaviors; elder, donaldson, kairalla, valcante, bendixen, & ferdig et al., 2011). all three articles utilized observations to measure fathers’ outcomes, focusing on the following: play skills (elder et al., 2011); parenting skills (e.g., use of commands and praise; caserta et al., 2018); and targeted pcit skills (e.g., praise & enthusiasm; bagner, 2013). of the three articles examining school involvement, two used qualitative methods (meadan et al., 2015; mueller & buckley, 2014) and one used quantitative methods (turbiville & marquis). turbiville and marquis (2001) used father self-report to measure school involvement (e.g., level of participation in early education program activities). meadan et al. (2015) examined roles, responsibilities, and areas in need of more support with regards to early childhood special education for fathers. mueller and buckley (2014) identified the following key topic areas from the perspectives of fathers of children in the special education system: individualized education program (iep) meetings, advocacy, and working collaboratively with educators. the two remaining articles did not employ experimental design to either assess or intervene on father involvement. ancell, bruns, and chitiyo (2018) focused on strategies to increase 56 global education review 6(1) fathers’ participation in early intervention and early childhood special education. stockall and dennis (2013) described impacts of fathers’ play behaviors on social/emotional development and emotional regulation in children participating in head start. child and family outcomes child outcomes were identified as the dependent variable in seven articles. child outcomes included (a) decreasing problem behavior (bagner, 2013; breaux et al., 2017; fenning et al., 2014), (b) developing social emotional skills (downer, campos, mcwayne & gartner, 2008; stockall & dennis, 2013), and (c) academic achievement (downer et al., 2008; elder et al., 2011; fagan & lee, 2012). five of the seven articles found that father involvement led to positive effects on child outcomes. fenning and colleagues (2014) found that father behavior did not predict any change in the behavior of children at age five. breaux and colleagues (2017) found that fathers’ laxness predicted later problem behavior in children. collectively, six articles examined (a) parent outcomes, including maternal depressive symptoms (laxman et al., 2015), (b) fathers’ negativity towards their children (breaux et al., 2017; caserta et al., 2018; fenning et al., 2014), (c) feelings towards the special education process (mueller & buckley, 2014), (d) increased literacy teaching (ortiz & stile, 2002), (e) preferences for school involvement (turbiville & marquis, 2001), and (f) cohesiveness with spouse and adaptability (meadan et al., 2015). laxman and colleagues (2015) found that father involvement in literacy during infancy was associated with later decreases in maternal depressive symptoms within families of children with asd. child problem behavior and borderline intelligence were associated with higher levels of father overreactivity and negative controlling behaviors (breaux et al., 2017; fenning et al., 2014). caserta and colleagues (2018) demonstrated intervention effects on the reduction of fathers’ negative talk towards their children who were at risk for academic and behavioral challenges. mueller and buckley (2014) found that fathers reported feeling overwhelmed by iep meetings and expressed a desire for increased relationshipbuilding and communication with school personnel. ortiz and stile (2002) found that fathers reported an increase in teaching and promoting literacy with their children after having participated in parentinvolvement training. lastly, turbiville and marquis (2001) found that fathers preferred to participate in family-oriented school events or programs rather than men-only programs. differential involvement between children with and without dd four articles examined potential differences in father involvement between children of typical development and children with disabilities, including intellectual and developmental disabilities. all four articles reported no significant differences in father involvement between children with disabilities and children of typical development (crnic et al., 2009; dyer et al., 2009; fenning et al., 2014; ricci, & hodapp, 2003). crnic and colleagues (2009) did find that fathers were less involved than mothers; however, this pattern was consistent across children with intellectual disability and children of typical development. in addition, one of the articles found that empowerment and strong role identity as a father predicted greater father involvement, particularly related to attachment, engagement, and responsibility for children with developmental disabilities (fox et al., 2015). father involvement with children with developmental delays 57 discussion throughout this systematic literature review we sought to answer the following research questions: (1) how much of the current literature measures and/or discusses the involvement of fathers with their children with dd? (2) what types of parent and child outcomes were present for father involvement? and (3) what evidence does the literature include on the implications of father involvement with their children? the discussion that follows addresses these questions and identifies areas of need related to understanding and supporting father involvement with children with dd. father involvement there were a relatively small number of studies that met inclusionary criteria for this review, especially considering the amount of research in existence on parenting of children with dd or those at-risk for related disabilities. this speaks to a continued need to further the research focused on fathers and the impact they may have on their children with dd. in addition, we found that there is great variability in how father involvement is measured across the studies included in our review. such variability makes it difficult to make comparisons across studies and draw larger conclusions about father involvement. more research on what father involvement entails and differences that may exist across diverse groups of fathers would be beneficial in furthering knowledge of fathers’ experiences in parenting children with dd. parent and child outcomes findings indicated that parents of children with dd may be more likely to have lowquality parent-child interactions due to increased difficulty in parenting this population (fenning et al., 2014). researchers have also found that father participation in treatment can lead to positive outcomes in parenting behavior as well as child outcomes (bagner, 2013; caserta et al., 2018; elder et al., 2011). therefore, it is important to include fathers in research, especially family-based interventions (breaux et al., 2017). elder and colleagues (2011) used fathers as the primary interventionists when using social reciprocity, where fathers later taught mothers this skill. this approach is unique in that parent-training research usually targets mothers as the primary participants; rarely has the primary participant trained secondary or alternate caregivers. results of this study indicated positive outcomes for improving child behavior, which provides further evidence that either mothers or fathers can serve as the primary interventionists in parentskills training programs. this suggests that studies can and should use fathers as primary interventionists. however, because only one study has taken this approach, more research on involving fathers as the targets of interventions is needed. interestingly, articles comparing differences in father involvement between children with disabilities and children of typical development found no significant differences (crnic et al., 2009; dyer et al., 2009; fenning et al., 2014; ricci, & hodapp, 2003). however, father involvement was noted to be lower than mother involvement regardless of whether the child had a disability (crnic et al., 2009). these findings indicate that father involvement may be impacted by other factors that are not associated with child disability status. it is likely that factors such as role and gender identity play a larger role in father involvement. more research is needed in determining what impacts father involvement. implications there are several implications for service providers and educators who work with families 58 global education review 6(1) of children with dd. early intervention and school professionals can have a significant impact on the level of involvement that a father has with his child. professionals can support father involvement by informing them about their important and unique role in fostering child development with children with dd (fox et al., 2015). providing fathers with encouragement and strategies to intervene in behavior problems and enhance literacy skill development are key ways that school professionals can support fathers (laxman et al., 2015). in addition, school personnel can provide better support to fathers through sensitivity to scheduling of events or meetings, providing in-home supports, extending specific invitations to fathers, and more explicitly seeking father input (ancell, bruns, & chitiyo, 2018; howard, meadan, & doubet, 2010; mueller & buckley, 2014). more research is also needed to identify ways to improve father participation in the special education process, including ways to decrease the overwhelming feelings fathers experience during iep meetings (mueller & buckley, 2014). many programs and schools have tried men-only parenting programs or groups; however, through interviews with fathers, turbiville and marquis (2001) found that such programs are undesirable and unhelpful. this is an important finding for practitioners who are making efforts to support fathers with children with disabilities in their parenting roles. creating family events with activities for fathers may be a more effective approach in supporting fathers than father-only events or groups (ancell, bruns, & chitiyo, 2018; turbiville & marquis, 2001). our research findings hold several implications for u.s. policy around father involvement within research, schools, and child development. fagan and lee (2012) found that cognitive stimulation provided by fathers when children were two years old had a stronger positive effect on child cognition in children who lived in single-mother households compared to those who resided in two-parent households. this finding is significant given the context of current policies on fatherhood. divorced parents may be less likely to take leave and take time to support their children's early education without taking significant cuts to their salary if there is not a second income in their home. in addition, national organizations such as the national center for fathering and national fatherhood initiative should focus efforts on supporting and developing outcome-oriented activities for families rather than creating father-only programs. special education policy is another area that requires analysis and improvement. fathers have reported difficulty navigating the special education process, and they also report that they do not feel valued within the process that includes… (mueller & buckley, 2014). in addition, the inclusion of fathers in family-based interventions has been successful (breaux et al., 2017). changes in policy to improve the special education process and include more familybased interventions may help increase father involvement with children with developmental delays. limitations one of the most prominent limitations of this review is publication bias, a common limitation of systematic literature reviews. this search was limited to articles in peer-reviewed journals. this was done to ensure academic rigor; however, it may have limited the findings. inclusion of book chapters, unpublished studies, and dissertations may have yielded different results. we also excluded single-subject designs or studies with a small sample size of fathers. these studies were excluded to maintain methodological consistency across the articles reviewed. however, inclusion of these studies may also have yielded different results. future father involvement with children with developmental delays 59 reviews expanding the type of articles included will likely contribute to the growing area of research on fathers. conclusion this review has identified key areas of improvement necessary for supporting fathers in their parenting role with children with dd. federal policies including special education laws can be improved by promoting and increasing access to family-based interventions for fathers and creating processes that allow fathers to more easily navigate the special education system. this review has also identified many ways in which practitioners, including early interventionists and school professionals, can increase father involvement. creating more family-based events or activities, extending specific invitations to fathers, explicitly asking fathers for insights and thoughts on their children and the education they are receiving, and scheduling meetings or events with fathers’ schedules in mind are all important practices professionals can adopt in their work with fathers and families. this review also found that fathers have unique contributions that impact the behavioral and language development of children with disabilities. therefore, working to increase father involvement is vital in supporting children with disabilities. this review also found many gaps and areas for more research. our review of the articles examining father involvement between children with disabilities and typically developing children revealed no significant differences in father involvement between the two groups. this suggests that the level of involvement with children with dd may not be due to the disability status of the child. more research is needed to determine what factors contribute to father involvement to ultimately establish better supports and policies for families of children with dd. references ancell, k. s., bruns, d. a., & chitiyo, j. 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(1993). family and medical leave act of 1993. public law. 103rd congress. bethesda, md: congressional information service. about the author(s) sheila lopez is a doctoral student in the school psychology program at the university of oregon. her research interests include parenting supports particularly for fathers; understanding the role of fathers in parenting; supporting fathers in their parenting role within families of children with developmental delays and the development of self-regulation in children. anna cecilia mcwhirter is a doctoral student in the school psychology program at the university of oregon. her research interests include parenting and family wellbeing; preventative interventions for families with young children; culturally and linguistic appropriate interventions for spanish-speaking families; the role of fathers in parenting. margaret rosencrans is a doctoral candidate at university of oregon. her research interests focus on coparenting quality and parental wellbeing in families of children with developmental delays; mental and physical health outcomes of individuals with intellectual disabilities; and access to family-based behavior intervention services. nicole r. giuliani, phd, is evergreen assistant professor of school psychology in the department of special education and clinical sciences at the university of oregon. her research interests include emotion, selfregulation, health behaviors, and family dynamics, which she investigates using multiple methods, including neuroimaging, ecological momentary assessment, laboratory paradigms, and behavioral coding. laura lee mcintyre, phd, is professor of school psychology and department head of special education and clinical sciences at the university of oregon. her research interests focus on family-centered intervention to promote wellbeing in families with children with developmental or behavioral risks; early identification and intervention for children with developmental disabilities and behavioral problems; and family-school partnerships. who, why, and how we teach 123 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dwivedi, amitabh vikram (2018). an inquiry into the who, why, and how we teach. [review of the book teaching with purpose by james d. kirylo]. global education review, 5 (1). 123-125. book review an inquiry into the who, why, and how we teach “teaching with purpose” by james d. kirylo by amitabh vikram dwivedi teaching with purpose: an inquiry into the who, why, and how we teach by james d. kirylo is written in an academic tone with a motive to provide essential understandings that are crucial in order to better conceptually and contextually teach with a sense of purpose. the book is divided into seven sections: each section has an unequal number of chapters, ranging from two to six, excluding the introduction. both chapters and sections start with a quotation. the text is further supported with a list of appendices (a-c), illustrating derivative and historical unfolding of inspiration, a response to the tylerian rationale, and a sampling of parental voice and testing. the author believes that “there is a certain relevance of this book for all k-12 educators, but the particular targeted audience is geared toward elementary school teachers who are continuously seeking to refine their craft” (p. xv). in section i, “from the inside out,” there are five chapters. in chapter one, kirylo states that the purpose of education is for people to learn. once teacher candidates are declared qualified and certified to teach, they intimately come to learn this privileged journey requires one to live an examined life. kirylo claims that a personal philosophy of education is a most arduous undertaking. epistemological, ontological, and axiological considerations and questions are not for the faint-hearted or the superficial. the author argues that if one’s personal philosophy of education does not resonate well with respect to the school’s mission, a teacher then has one of three options: either to inform the administration to subvert/transcend the school’s mission, to compromise with one’s philosophy, or to quit/shift to another job. in “the decisive relevance of disposition,” the author writes that in order to promote a classroom environment of equality, justice, fairness, and tolerance, it is essential that a teacher examines “personal values, beliefs, and attitudes when it comes to concepts related to race, gender, language, expectations, and economic class” (p. 15). in 124 global education review 5 (1) chapter five, kirylo states that there are six desirable dispositions of significance for a teacher, namely love, faith, hope, humility, compassion, and persistence. however, these dispositions of a teacher may vary from context, setting, circumstance, and student population. a good teacher is a reflective teacher, and a person who frees oneself from acting on impulse or thoughtless routine. in section ii, “entering into relationships,” there are six chapters. the author believes the nurturing of relationships is foundationally a brain thing. the building of meaningful relationships at a school setting richly feeds the brain in maximizing the likelihood of learning, growth, harmony, and the building of the collective community. chapter seven and eight deal with fostering the teacherstudent relationship, and cultivating a dialogue between teachers and their pupils respectively. further, the author writes that the building of trust has no room for pretense, but rather is shaped by an “environment that is genuine in the way people communicate with one another” (p. 43). teachers also engage in relationships with others—such as parents, caregivers, colleagues, and the wider community—who also deserve their respect and consideration. finally, kirylo claims that to be in any relationship is to celebrate diversity. three chapters in section iii focus on providing an artistic endeavor to teaching. an artistic teacher not only provides children with important sources of artistic experience, he/she also provides a climate that welcomes exploration and risk-taking and cultivates the disposition to play. section iv, “the glue that is educational psychology,” discusses the value of psychology for the teacher. kirylo argues that it is preferable for teacher candidates to have child development as a degree major. in chapter sixteen, the author discusses developmental psychology with reference to john locke and jean-jacques rousseau. the next chapter provides an overview of behaviorism, cognitivism, and humanism. section v deals with five components of knowledge: 1) pedagogy, 2) classroom management, 3) learning, 4) students, and 5) subject matter. kirylo argues that the defining mark of the effectiveness of teachers is established by how knowledgeable they are. while discussing the five components of knowledge, the author takes into account the theoretical viewpoints of paulo freire and vygotsky. the subsequent section is dedicated to assessment, evaluation, and testing. the author states that assessment and evaluation have two different implications. assessment in a school setting is not something teachers do to students, but rather an activity that they do with and for the students. in contrast, evaluation is the process of making value judgments on the gathered formative or summative information, data, and happenings. kirylo discusses the historical background and development of intelligence testing, such as the iq test, stanford achievement test (sat), and throndike handwriting scale. also in chapters twentythree and twenty-four, the author discusses four harmful effects of high-stakes testing, and emphasizes performance and portfolio assessments instead. in the final section, the author argues that teacher leaders naturally emerge in a school setting as evidenced through the distinction they pedagogically demonstrate, the authentic dispositional commitment they exhibit, and the energy they radiate to inspire and challenge others. kirylo argues that teacher leaders are those who are critical pedagogues, and “critical pedagogues are those who have a fundamental grasp of critical pedagogy” (p. 153.). such teachers authentically understand who and why who, why, and how we teach 125 they teach, are contextually aware, are clear about the critical aspects of teaching, and think globally, but act locally. overall, teaching with purpose offers a new hope to teachers seeking guidance for how they can develop basic human virtues while teaching. it would have been beneficial if the book had included more personal narratives and examples to demonstrate alternatives. the text underscores what it means to be an insightful teacher, but it should not be taken as a guidebook or a crash course in teaching. it is an inspirational text, and one can feel motivated after reading it, and later on he/she can reflect upon the matters discussed in the book. on the whole, this is a useful, handy book for teachers, language philosophers, researchers, as well as a helpful text for teacher-leaders who believe in self-understanding, developing caring relationships, and the ability to inspire. “teaching with purpose: an inquiry into the who, why, and how we teach.” by james d. kirylo. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4758-12947 about the author james d. kirylo is associate professor of education at the university of south carolina. his published works include paulo freire: the man from recife and a critical pedagogy of resistance, among other books and articles in a variety of professional journals. about the reviewer amitabh vikram dwivedi is assistant professor of linguistics and head of the department of languages and literature at shri mata vaishno devi university in india. his research interests include language documentation, writing descriptive grammars, and preservation of rare and endangered languages in south asia. he has contributed research papers to many academic journals. his most recent books include a grammar of hadoti, a grammar of bhadarwahi, and the forthcoming a grammar of dogri. as a poet, he has published more than 100 poems in different anthologies worldwide. his poem “mother” has been included as a prologue to the edited collection motherhood and war: international perspectives (2014). ger preparing globally competent teachers 49 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: brennan, sharon, and holliday, ellie (2019). preparing globally competent teachers to address p-12 students’ needs: one university’s story. global education review, 6 (3). 49-64. preparing globally competent teachers to address p-12 students’ needs: one university’s story sharon brennan university of kentucky ellie holliday university of kentucky abstract in this article, two teacher educators share the evolution of an overseas student teaching (ost) program embedded in the university of kentucky’s educator preparation program (epp). the goal of this initiative is to help candidates who participate in this program develop skills associated with global competence so they can better address the needs of p-12 students from a wide range of diverse backgrounds when they enter the profession. we begin with a rationale explaining the importance of global competence for teachers as seen through a policy and theoretical lens. we also identify possible obstacles involved in initiatives such as ours and offer suggestions about how to overcome them. then, we describe the curriculum ost participants follow including key assignments and tools used to guide and assess their progress. we conclude with expansion plans designed to help more teacher candidates in our epp become globally competent teachers whether or not they participate in the overseas initiative. keywords teacher study abroad; globally competent teaching; international education laying a foundation for global competence: introduction and rationale for more than a decade, education policy making groups (e.g., council of chief state school officers, partnership for 21st century schools ) have emphasized a need to prepare students in p-12 schools for success in what has become an interconnected world (longview foundation, 2008). this point was underscored by schleicher and ramos (2016) in their assertion that students who cannot communicate across cultures will face immense challenges as they enter the workplace – one requiring collaboration at a global level. tichnor-wagner and manise (2019) offer other reasons why p-12 schools should prepare what they call “global-ready” students (p. 3), including enhanced technology, access to transportation, and global migration. the call to “ready” students for employment in a global community means teachers must be prepared to facilitate the process. boix mansilla and jackson (2011) suggest that this involves embracing the existing diversity in p-12 classrooms and helping all students in those classrooms develop skills needed to fully “engage the world” (p. viii). considerable evidence suggests that p-12 schools are also increasingly more linguistically diverse and that many students served by them are english language learners (digital promise global, 2016). according to a recent report by the u.s. department of education, 4.8 million ells were enrolled in u.s. public elementary and secondary schools when the 2016-17 school year began, representing almost ten percent of the total student population (u.s. department of education, 2018). given the changing demographics in schools and increased human 50 global education review 6 (3) interaction around the world, global competence presents as an essential skill for those entering the teaching profession. the emphasis on global competence for teachers and their students is situated in a transformational theoretical perspective, one related to theories of global citizenship. as described by shultz (2007), global citizens see themselves as connected to others around the world. they “understand their connection to all other people through a common humanity, a shared environment, and shared interests and activities” (p. 249). schultz’s theory aligns with curricular frameworks that provide ways to prepare “global-ready” students (e.g., ramos & schliecher, 2018; tichnor-wagner & manise, 2019). this theory also relates to cosmopolitanism, an ancient ideology as described by appiah (2006). he characterizes this ideology as having two critical elements: concern for others and respect for difference (p. xv). transformational theory espoused by shultz and embedded in cosmopolitanism fits well within an education context. it contrasts with other theories related to global citizenship, particularly neoliberalism. while a transformational theoretical construct aims to address humanitarian needs, neoliberalism focuses on economic factors related to globalization (toukan, 2018). our purpose in this article is to share the story of an initiative embedded in the educator preparation program (epp) at the university of kentucky (uk) where we serve on the faculty as teacher educators. the initiative emanates from a transformational, cosmopolitan perspective. its overarching goal is to help candidates who participate in our overseas student teaching (ost) program develop a skillset associated with global competence so they in turn can help students they serve in p-12 schools from a wide array of backgrounds develop sufficient intercultural understanding and global awareness to thrive in today’s interconnected world. in sharing our story, we identify and address questions related to perceived obstacles associated with integrating global competence into educator preparation. we also describe the curriculum ost participants follow as well as expansion plans designed to help more teacher candidates acquire skills related to global competence. identifying and overcoming obstacles situating global competence in an education context raises questions about how to prepare teachers who can effectively guide their students in that realm. perhaps the most fundamental question is: what constitutes global competence in the teaching profession? boix mansilla and jackson (2011) describe globally competent teachers as those who understand global issues including implications for their local communities and can apply this knowledge to foster learning in meaningful ways. essentializing from research by others in the field (e.g., brennan, 2017; cushner, 2016; jackson, 2015), we believe globally competent teaching includes two elements: skill with helping students understand and address globally and locally relevant issues as well as knowing how to help students develop cultural self-awareness and awareness of other cultural perspectives. considerations regarding the effort required by epps to develop this global competence among educators raise questions about possible obstacles. for example, do teacher educators have the expertise to foster acquisition of global competence among their pre-service teacher candidates? this special skillset? if most epp faculty are white and middle-class, who will support them first in developing such cultural self-awareness? further, will epps value this expertise to the point of making room for it in preparing globally competent teachers 51 the curriculum? given the many demands placed on teacher candidates and on teacher educators, this might seem like a tall order. epps must prepare their candidates to meet the teacher performance standards required for certification, and at the same time, fulfill mandates regarding program accreditation. on the school side, teachers shoulder immense responsibilities with numerous tasks competing for their attention. curriculum standards imposed on schools related to student achievement understandably take priority over other interests. evidence of restrictions imposed on educators at all levels can be seen in curriculum standards mandated for p-12 schools in kentucky referred to as kentucky academic standards (kentucky department of education, 2019). also, see the kentucky teacher performance standards for an example of mandates used to assess novice teachers’ progress (kentucky division of educator preparation, assessment, and internship, 2018). how, then, do we effectively overcome obstacles such as these? though some scholars have expressed concern about the lack of attention to internationalizing the epp curriculum (e.g., brennan, 2017; cushner, 2016; quezada, 2010; roth & rӧnnstrӧm, 2015), resources are increasingly available to address this concern. for example, boix mansilla and jackson (2011) have constructed a framework designed to help teachers embed global learning in the school curriculum in ways that comply with curriculum standards such as those mandated in kentucky. using four core domains embedded within the framework, teachers can create project-based instructional units directing students to “investigate the world beyond their immediate environment, recognize perspectives—others’ and their own, communicate ideas effectively with diverse audiences and take action to improve conditions” (p. 11). whereas boix mansilla and jackson’s framework helps teachers overcome curricular obstacles, a document published by nafsa is designed to address epps concerns about regulatory compliance associated with teacher certification and program accreditation. nafsa’s document, viewing the intasc standards through a global preparation lens (nafsa, 2015 ), serves as a companion to the intasc model core teaching standards, standards commissioned by the council of chief state school officers (ccsso)—an organization comprised of officials who lead departments of education in states across the nation. the intasc standards serve as a framework for assessing the performance of teachers in relation to student learning outcomes (intasc, 2013) (ccsso: council of chief state school officers, 2013). nafsa’s global preparation lens document highlights elements within the intasc standards showing to what degree teachers focus on global learning—learning that helps students broaden their cultural perspectives by addressing globally and locally significant issues. since epps must demonstrate how their teacher candidates meet the intasc standards for accreditation reviews conducted by the council for the accreditation of educator preparation (caep), the global preparation lens document serves as a valuable resource for teacher educators who wish to embed global competency in the epp curriculum. caep standard 1.1 explicitly states the intasc standards must be met by epps to maintain accreditation (council for the accreditation of educator preparation caep, 2019). see, for example, intasc standard 2 learning differences, “2(d) the teacher brings multiple perspectives into discussions of content including attention to learners’ personal, family and community experiences and cultural norms” (ccsso, 2013, p. 17). 52 global education review 6 (3) given the availability of these and other resources to help epps integrate global competency into teaching practice, there seems to be little reason not to do so from a compliance standpoint. there are also demographic reasons speaking to the need to prepare globally competent teachers considering the population of candidates aspiring to enter the profession. take, for example, marx and moss’s (2011a) observation that teachers who have not had opportunities to work in diverse groups “often hold ethnocentric beliefs that negatively influence the educational experiences of diverse students” (p. 36). their observation coupled with ladson-billings’s (2017) point regarding the sharp contrast between the largely white teaching force and diverse p-12 school population makes a compelling case for preparing globally competent teachers. work over the last decade on this topic (e.g., brennan, 2017; cushner, 2016; marx & moss, 2011a; quezada, 2010) strongly argues for preparing teachers who can help their students connect the larger world to the locale where they reside and communicate effectively with people from a diverse array of cultures. this evidence serves as the basis for the initiative undertaken at our university. broadening cultural perspectives and building global competence while most epps do not offer the option to student teach overseas, it has been available to candidates enrolled in uk’s epp for over 40 years. the overseas student teaching program was established in the early 1970s by a faculty member who served as the director of field experiences for the educator preparation program. among his many responsibilities, dr. leland smith conducted accreditation reviews in p-12 schools in central and south america along with administrators from other u.s. universities. these other u.s. universities shared a common feature with uk: many of their teacher candidates also came from rural areas with homogeneous populations and had very limited exposure to cultural diversity. some had never traveled outside the region where they resided. when these institutional representatives conducted accreditation visits at school sites abroad, they shared concerns about whether teacher candidates from their home institutions were equipped to address students’ needs if employed by schools with diverse populations. as a result, a partnership was formed to provide opportunities for candidates to student teach in the schools they reviewed. this formal partnership was named the consortium for overseas student teaching (cost). to help program participants build a strong foundation for teaching overseas, the uk director designed a three-credit, academic bearing course which uk cost participants were required to complete prior to student teaching. the course, entitled culture, education and teaching abroad, was unique within the cost network at the time since it was not required for teacher candidates from other institutions in the consortium. it was designed to help candidates examine cultural perspectives – their own and others’ – as well as learn more about education systems in countries where they would student teach. over the years the program has changed in several ways. one relates to placement site expansion. while placements had been limited to partner schools in central and south america when the program began, candidates now have opportunities to teach in schools in africa, asia, europe, new zealand, and australia. in addition, the curricular focus has changed to emphasize pedagogical practices designed to help p-12 school students thrive in the world as it exists now and in the future. our ability to “shift gears” is due largely to the availability of resources which have come available in recent years (e.g., boix mansilla & preparing globally competent teachers 53 jackson, 2011; intasc, 2015). we also see the complementary expertise we bring as coteachers (and authors of this article) as a catalyst in transforming the course. the first author has longtime experience teaching in the epp and directing uk’s ost program, and the second author has experience working in the university’s education abroad office while completing undergraduate and graduate studies in international relations and diplomacy. when we began teaching the preparatory course together in 2017, we used the new resources and our synergistic energy to create assignments linking cultural learning with specific, globallyfocused pedagogical practices. in doing so, we tightened the coupling between the preparatory course and the overseas student teaching experience. program re-visioning: applying global learning to teaching practice while the preparatory course as we currently teach it still aims to help teacher candidates participating in the ost program expand their cultural perspectives, we now spend considerable time helping course participants translate what they are learning into concrete teaching practices. some course assignments are foundational in nature, designed to help participants examine theories and perspectives about culture and global issues. other assignments in the course connect directly to those completed during student teaching. see figure 1 for a summary of all key assignments discussed in this section. three assignments in particular help with foundation building. the cultural exchange experience is one such example. early in the semester we introduce course participants to international students who are pursuing degrees in various disciplines on campus. once introduced, participants and their cultural exchange partners arrange meetings at various times throughout the semester to get acquainted and learn about each other’s cultures. this experience culminates with a report in which course participants reflect on what they have learned. another assignment completed as the course progresses is the cultural plunge. because we want ost participants to experience what it is like to be an outsider in an unfamiliar place, we ask them to spend time immersed in a culture different from their own where they feel like a stranger in ways that create a little discomfort. participants choose various ways to take the cultural plunge, including attending religious services conducted in another language as well as visiting schools and/or community organizations serving underrepresented minorities. after completing the experience, participants submit a report reflecting on what they learned regarding being a stranger in another culture carefully considering class discussions regarding stereotypes that may exist. while the cultural exchange and cultural plunge assignments are not directly linked to participants’ teaching practice, they serve as valuable building blocks for working with students and colleagues who come from backgrounds different from their own. these experiences also provide ways to understand “culture shock.” reading kohls’s survival kit for overseas living, another course assignment, helps candidates understand “culture shock” defined as “the more pronounced reactions to the psychological disorientation most people experience when they move for an extended period into a culture markedly different from their own” (kohls, 2001, p. 91). though most ost participants are usually only abroad for eight weeks, the experience of working in a school overseas, especially for those who have never been abroad before, can create confusion, frustration, and homesickness brought on by culture shock. the cultural exchange and 54 global education review 6 (3) cultural plunge experiences, together with the in-class discussions about kohls’ book, help prepare them for possible cultural adaptation challenges as they begin their overseas teaching experience. at the very beginning of the course, ost participants create digitally formatted documents, referred to as home culture stories, which they share in class. these stories highlight cultural values, traditions, traits etc., related to their cultural identity. while student teaching overseas, participants use the stories to introduce themselves to the students in their classrooms and are used as a springboard for helping these students tell their own cultural stories using digital tools. later in the course, participants design project-based, globally focused instructional unit plans using, as a guide, the core domains outlined in the framework by boix mansilla and jackson (2011) and local curricular standards. they implement and evaluate their plans while student teaching. plans must include details specifically showing how they will engage their students in projects addressing issues having global and local relevance. in the past, unit plans have focused on various topics such as energy use, recycling, global migration, and climate change. the goal of the global unit plan assignment is to provide a way for student teachers to help their students address issues that matter in their own community and also matter to people in communities around the world. toward the end of the course, participants identify a p-12 classroom in kentucky with which they plan to connect their classroom while student teaching overseas. most connect with a classroom where they completed a field placement. some select a kentucky classroom for this activity where a friend is teaching. this international classroom connection sets the stage for an assignment required during student teaching in which students in the connected classrooms share their cultural stories and sometimes collaborate on projects related to the globally focused units. classroom connections are made synchronously or asynchronously through an electronic medium (e.g., skype, zoom). for instance, one recent ost graduate, while student teaching, conducted several sessions via skype between her fourth-grade students in the bilingual school where she taught in spain and a fifth-grade class in kentucky, where she had completed an extended practicum. ann (a pseudonym) established two goals for student interchange (conversations conducted in english): to learn about each other’s cultures and to compare energy systems used in their locales. ann foreshadowed this during her practicum placement by helping students in the classroom where she was placed examine energy sources used in kentucky. when she began student teaching in spain, she used the same approach with the class there. prior to the first skype session, ann asked the students in spain to develop questions for their kentucky counterparts, vote to determine which questions they would ask, and consider how they would answer questions they might be asked by students in kentucky. questions, she explained, would first focus on cultural traditions and then proceed to discussions about energy sources. when students in the spanish school initially examined the topic, they began to see value in the european union’s (eu) goal to shift to renewable energy sources. at this point, students in spain thought the approach was ideal and did not understand why anyone would have a different perspective. when ann directed her students in spain to examine energy sources in kentucky including the use of coal, their initial reaction was negative. however, once the spanish students learned about the economic impact of kentucky’s failing coal industry, they preparing globally competent teachers 55 expressed concern about the potential negative effects, such as job loss, if coal was replaced by other energy sources. expressed concerns led to conversations about how renewable energy may be better for our planet but might have negative consequences in certain areas, at least in the short term. students in both locales started researching solutions and generating ideas about how to reduce the carbon footprint and create jobs for people who may lack employment when energy sources change. students in both locations also shared their findings with parents and school administrators in forums as a small “action step,” seeking their advice about what might be done to help those who lost jobs. the entire process was student led and all involved seemed eager to learn from students close to their age who lived in another part of the world. connecting students in spain with those in kentucky helped everyone better understand the complex issues associated with conditions within and outside their immediate environment. guiding and assessing global competence in teaching we use several newly created tools to guide and assess growth as ost participants’ progress through the preparatory course. see figure 2 for a table summarizing these tools. one tool we use to assess program impact is the mycap’s self reflection survey from the my cultural awareness profile (mycap) commissioned by nafsa and developed by marx and moss (2011b). mycap focuses specifically on helping teacher candidates consider their cultural perspectives. through this survey candidates examine their cultural perspectives and views about global issues in education. candidates complete the self reflection survey early in the preparatory course. the positioning of the survey when the course begins follows bennett’s assertion that “cultural self-awareness [is] the beginning point for any cultural interaction analysis” (1998, p. 58). indeed, as students dive deeper into crosscultural interaction and analysis throughout the course, they reflect about similarities and differences between their cultural values and those they meet from diverse backgrounds while participating in the overseas student teaching program. results from pre-and post-course mycap surveys have proven illuminating as participants have shared their cultural learning journeys. a preliminary review of the 2018 fall semester course participant group’s responses showed growth in several areas. when asked on a scale ranging from “strongly disagree” to “strongly agree” regarding the phrase “it is easy to find a global connection in most topics i [plan to] teach,” the post-course survey average moved toward "strongly agree." when asked whether “school curriculum should encourage students to consider how their actions impact global issues,” all participants “strongly agreed” in the postcourse survey, whereas there was less enthusiasm in the pre-survey. participants also indicated growth in acknowledging falsehoods inherent in the phrases such as “other people are more cultural than i am” and “the cultural background of students shouldn’t impact the way you teach.” to augment mycap and foster deep reflection during student teaching, we created three question sets. participants electronically submit responses to the first set when they settle into their overseas placements, the second set at the mid-point, and the third set as they conclude their student teaching experience. at each point, candidates describe changes in their cultural perspectives as well as strategies they are using to promote global competence. we also conduct a debriefing session when they return from their overseas placement as a final reflection. during that debriefing, returning candidates often 56 global education review 6 (3) report mild homesickness and cultural adaptation challenges experienced when the overseas placements began. once acclimated to their new surroundings, participants frequently say that they are able to examine different cultural practices in a new light and even incorporate them into their lives. one such example is the enhanced global stewardship exhibited in countries outside the united states, especially in new zealand where there is a strong effort to care for the environment. ost participants also say the schools overseas embrace the globally focused strategies they bring to the classroom. during the debriefing ost participants also present what we refer to as a “signature piece”— an example showing how they impacted student learning while student teaching overseas. the presentation provides a way to highlight strengths they might share with an interview committee when applying for teaching positions. during the presentation, participants briefly describe the piece and explain its impact on student learning. most returning candidates highlight a part of the global learning unit as their “signature piece,” although some discuss how they connected their overseas classroom with one in kentucky. during student teaching, we use nafsa’s global preparation lens document (intasc, 2015), described earlier, to identify how ost participants demonstrate global competence related to the intasc model core teaching standards used to assess teacher performance (ccsso, 2013). for example, regarding intasc standard 2: learning differences (d), we consider how ost participants infuse multiple perspectives in lessons to help students create and share their cultural stories. we also consider how participants address intasc standard 5: application of content (f) engage their students in … “seeking inventive solutions to local and global problems …” (p. 14) when designing, implementing and evaluating their unit plans (ccsso, 2013). we believe the changes we have made to the ost program have positively influenced participants’ perceptions and practices. ost participants have consistently given high ratings to the preparatory course and to their experience student teaching overseas. while some indicated the preparatory course was more rigorous than expected, several said it transformed their thinking and practice. one comment represents the whole group’s general sentiment: “discussions about becoming a global citizen and gaining new perspectives were extremely helpful.” student teachers’ perception evaluation ratings were equally strong. some expressed a desire to continue using the practices developed during the program in their teaching, especially connecting students in classrooms where they taught in kentucky with those in their classrooms overseas. in terms of teacher performance, we have seen participants successfully implement strategies to promote global competence among students in classrooms at home and abroad. planning for the future using a global pathway our goal to expand the international program to promote global competence among increasing numbers of teacher candidates stems from several initiatives undertaken in recent years by the uk international center, which serves the whole campus community. during the 2014-2015 academic school year, uk created a 2015-2020 strategic plan. embedded in the plan is a commitment to diversity and inclusivity as well as a strategic initiative urging the university to “engage diverse worldviews and perspectives” (university of kentucky, n.d., p. 12). each college was tasked with creating its own complementary strategic plan. faculty members in the college of education (coe) formed a team preparing globally competent teachers 57 to strengthen global competency and build international partnerships. team members had various international initiatives already in motion, creating a collaborative attitude. this attitude led to discussions about how to help the pool of teacher candidates in the coe acquire skills related to global competence. the college of education’s resulting strategic plan ultimately supported the university’s plan for diversity and inclusion by, among other objectives, enhancing “opportunities to infuse into the curriculum international and diverse perspectives across the curriculum and the co-curriculum” (university of kentucky college of education, 2015, p. 4). the curriculum and instruction department in which our faculty resides created a strategic plan following the coe’s example, which explicated a specific action plan for producing globally competent graduates. the department set a goal to increase global-mindedness while fostering diversity and inclusiveness among faculty, staff, and students with a pledge to scaffold experiences as candidates progress through the program to help broaden their worldviews (university of kentucky college of education, 2015). prior to the strategic planning process, the uk international center undertook several initiatives to integrate education abroad experiences more deeply into the curricula at a time when the second author was a graduate student worker in the education abroad office. one such initiative relates to curriculum integration. in the field of international education, “curriculum integration” refers to “an intensive process to develop pathways to build international learning for all students” (woodruff & henry, 2012, p.1). for uk education abroad, this process resulted in designing a set of “major advising pages” highlighting various international opportunities available for specific majors in each college. some featured four-year academic plans with integrated semesters abroad (nafsa, 2016). this initiative, as well as the curriculum and instruction department’s strategic goals related to global competency, sparked the creation of the global pathway for teacher candidates in all epp certification areas. see figure 3 for a depiction of the global pathway. international opportunities as well as opportunities to engage with people from diverse backgrounds are readily available to teacher candidates, but they are often difficult for candidates to discover on their own. this global pathway integrates many opportunities into one single document which can be used in advising, especially for university students not yet admitted to the epp who are seeking international experiences. the global pathway provides a “step-by-step” approach, laying out various opportunities on-and off-campus. creating opportunities for education majors to broaden their cultural perspectives while creating the global pathway, we noticed a lack of relevant, affordable international opportunities for education majors between the time they entered the university as freshmen and when they began the epp. additionally, it appeared existing opportunities did not offer academic credit toward their major. before applying for their program, education majors are generally disconnected from the coe as they complete uk core coursework and electives. to address both issues, the second author collaborated with another faculty member to develop a faculty-directed embedded program in belize. the program was made possible by generous support from the curriculum and instruction department, college of education, and the uk international center. 58 global education review 6 (3) the belize program took place for the first time during the spring 2019 semester. embedded within it was a three-credit academic bearing course entitled globally minded teaching and learning. the course served as an elective for the epp. participants (mostly first and second-year education majors) were introduced to globally competent teaching. during spring break, they spent several days observing, volunteering, and collaborating with the students and teachers in a rural elementary school in corozal, belize. because the belize program was developed with the global pathway in mind, future iterations will serve as a stepping-stone for teacher candidates interested in increasing their global competence before formally entering their epp. the belize program includes many elements candidates will see again, at a higher level, if they choose to participate in the overseas student teaching program. scaled versions of similar assignments from the ost preparatory course are used to encourage cultural self-awareness and learning about cultural differences. for example, belize participants in spring 2019 were asked to consider their own cultural values and participate in a “cultural partner” interview activity with students from a uk english as a second language class. they also completed surveys drawing questions from the mycap survey combined with the intercultural knowledge and competence valid assessment of learning in undergraduate education (value) rubric developed by the association of american colleges and universities (association of american colleges & universities, n.d.). we have not yet conducted research to systematically analyze cultural learning growth; however, insights offered by participants in the spring 2019 belize cohort suggest improvement in critical areas outlined in the value rubric, including intercultural communication, cultural worldview framework knowledge, and cultural self-awareness. reflecting on skills gained, participants said the program helped broaden their cultural perspectives. one noted, “observing differences in educational methods and customs at [the belizean school] broadened my perspective on possible teaching methods, particularly ones based on values that are not prevalent in my culture.” another reported an increased respect for difference and diversity saying, “i was able to see a lot of people who were not like me but were just as successful and happy, and it helped me to deepen the understanding that there are multiple types of people and ways to live life and that is more than okay.” while building the belize program, two other coe colleagues sought funding to develop a similar program in iceland to attract education majors searching for an introduction to globally competent teaching. the iceland program, like the one in belize, will fit into the global pathway by filling a gap for candidates intending to enter the epp. this gap seems especially large for minority groups who are traditionally underrepresented in education abroad programming (nafsa, n.d.). both the belize and iceland programs intentionally try to attract candidates from underrepresented populations. these programs have comparatively lower budgets than many others offered by third-party providers. they also better fit the schedules of education majors who may need to work to help defray college expenses and those who rely on financial aid and scholarships only disbursed during the fall and spring semesters. of the 10 participants in the spring 2019 belize program, one was a member of an underrepresented minority group, one was a first-generation college student, three were from out-of-state, and half of them had never traveled outside of the united states. many were able to use their existing financial aid packages to pay preparing globally competent teachers 59 for the program and/or earn additional needbased scholarships. we expect these programs and those created by faculty in the future will help broaden the pool of candidates who participate in international education experiences. designing a certificate recognizing global competence in teaching from the global pathway project, individual four-year plans are being developed for each epp for use in advising prospective and current teacher candidates. for example, the elementary education major plan offers opportunities such as (a) joining a living learning program with opportunities for freshmen to volunteer in schools and/or community agencies with diverse populations, (b) participating in faculty-directed study abroad programs (e.g., the belize program) which include relevant credit-bearing courses, and (c) enrolling in overseas student teaching. these comprehensive documents encourage faculty input on recommended international and multicultural experiences and allow university students to choose opportunities best fitting their academic, personal, and career goals. ultimately, these documents will serve as advising tools for candidates interested in earning a certificate highlighting skills they have acquired to address the needs of all p-12 students, whatever their background, to live and work in our interconnected world. the certificate will be flexible enough to allow teacher candidates to choose the opportunities best fitting their goals yet rigorous enough to ensure they have acquired the necessary skills to do the job. the certificate can serve as a tool for graduates, when applying for teaching positions, to show they bring added value to schools with their unique skillset. solidifying the global pathway and bonds with school and community partners when it becomes an option for all teacher candidates, we believe the global pathway project currently underway at our university will increase the pool of candidates in our epp who have the skillset to infuse global competence into their teaching. there is a compelling case for this endeavor, considering the demographic mismatch between teacher candidates in the epp generally and p-12 students they will serve when they take positions in the local schools. most of our candidates are white females, and many come from rural homogeneous communities. these candidates will likely practice in schools with very diverse student populations including many ells. for example, the school district serving the lexington community, where uk is located, has experienced a nearly 300% growth in the number of ells in the last decade. the number of first languages spoken by students in the local school system rose from 27 in 2005-2006 to nearly 100 in 2016-2017, according to data reported recently by the metro city government multicultural affairs coordinator (lexingtonfayette urban county government, 2019). in contrast uk’s epp enrollment data indicates that 87 % of the candidates enrolled are caucasian and 80% are female across certification programs, though we do not currently have data on the candidates’ linguistic diversity (university of kentucky, 2016). the contrast between the school and university demographics strongly suggest a need for a certificate highlighting global competence in teaching. having resources to integrate this skill into the school curriculum and teacher performance assessment process makes building the global pathway easier. however, we know there is more work ahead to fully realize our goal. we must involve more 60 global education review 6 (3) faculty in the process and engage more fully with our partners in local and overseas schools as well as within the community where our schools are located. although we have established a team with school and university partners, we must engage more stakeholders in the work. together with our university, school, and community partners, we want to address questions such as the following: how can we better prepare our candidates to serve students who bring various cultural values to the classroom? what dispositions, knowledge, and skills do candidates need to help their students broaden their cultural perspectives and prepare for full participation in our interconnected world? how can we provide a baseline for these skills to education majors before they enter the epps? intentionally including skills and dispositions related to global competence in epps provides a mechanism for teacher candidates to earn a university-sponsored certificate, which we believe adds value to their diplomas and enables them to prepare the students they serve for the world in which they will live and work. through the frameworks and initiatives described in this article, we are confident epps can embed global competence naturally in the existing curriculum rather than add to the faculty workload and to the workload of the teacher candidates they prepare for the profession. we are ready to take the next step on our own pathway toward infusing global competence into the epp. we hope the everevolving story we have shared will encourage other epps to create a pathway of their own. preparing globally competent teachers 61 figure 1 key assignments completed through preparatory course and student teaching assignment description timeline learning objective home culture story digital presentation highlighting cultural values, traditions, traits, etc., related to their cultural identity. completed early in the prep course. participants encouraged to share the story while student teaching, and have their students share their cultural stories. to help ost participants examine their own cultural “story” before considering the cultural story of those from different backgrounds. project-based globally focused instructional unit plan using the “core domains” outlined by boix mansilla and jackson (2011), ost participants create an interdisciplinary unit plan addressing a globally focused topic. unit is completed at end of course and implemented while in their overseas classroom. to help p-12 students make local-global connections for issues affecting them and others in meaningful ways. connecting two classrooms while teaching overseas, ost participants digitally connect their overseas classroom with one in kentucky. connections initiated during the preparatory course then carried out during student teaching. unit plans included when possible. to facilitate cultural exchange and promote intercultural understanding. cultural exchange experience ost participants meet with international students several times during the preparatory course to exchange ideas about culture. throughout the preparatory course. to broaden cultural perspectives. cultural plunge ost participants visit an unfamiliar place and write a reflective report about culture and overcoming challenges. visit and report completed midsemester. to experience being an outsider in an unfamiliar place. figure 2 assessment tools to guide growth regarding global competencies assessment tool description timeline learning objective my cultural awareness profile (mycap) commissioned by nafsa ost participants reflect about their cultural perspectives using mycap’s structured surveys to guide responses. ost participants complete mycap at several checkpoints: (a) beginning of the preparatory course, (b) conclusion of preparatory course, and (c) conclusion of their overseas teaching experience. to promote cultural and pedagogical growth related to global competence. overseas student teaching reflections ost participants reflect about cultural learning including challenges ost participants complete first reflections when they to augment mycap and foster deep reflection during student teaching, 62 global education review 6 (3) with communication, culture shock, etc., throughout their overseas experience, examining growth and communicating challenges and successes with facilitators back home. arrive overseas, second midway through their experience, and third when they prepare to return home. ost participants submit written reflections exploring their evolving cultural perspectives, coping with culture shock, and strategies promoting global competence while student teaching overseas. nafsa’s “global lens” document: intasc as a framework: viewing the intasc standards through a global preparation lens the document provides a concrete way to guide and assess growth regarding globally competent teaching practice related to intasc standards. planning and evaluating instruction throughout the student teaching experience. to guide and assess growth regarding globally competent teaching practice and provide a vehicle for reflection between student teachers and their supervisors on this domain. figure 3 university of kentucky college of education’s global learning pathway for students in epps preparing globally competent teachers 63 references association of american colleges & universities. 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(2019). 2013 caep standards. retrieved from http://caepnet.org/~/media/files/caep/standar ds/caep-standards-one-pager-0219.pdf?la=en cushner, k. (2016, november). the intercultural training of teachers. what? when? how? paper presented at the 7th intercultural forum on intercultural learning & exchange, rome, italy. digital promise global. (2016). the growing diversity in today’s classroom. retrieved from http://digitalpromise.org/wpcontent/uploads/2016/09/lpsgrowing_diversity_final-1.pdf intasc as a framework: viewing the intasc standards through a global preparation lens (2015). washington, dc: nafsa: association of international educators. jackson, j. (september 2015). becoming interculturally competent: theory to practice in international education. teaching & teacher education, 48, 91-107. kentucky department of education. (2019). kentucky academic standards. retrieved from https://education.ky.gov/curriculum/standards /kyacadstand/pages/default.aspx kentucky division of educator preparation, assessment, and internship. (2018). kentucky teacher performance standards. retrieved from http://www.epsb.ky.gov/mod/book/view.php?i d=133 kohls, r. l. (2001). survival kit for overseas living (4th ed.). yarmouth, me: intercultural publishing. ladson-billings, g. (2017). the (r)evolution will not be standardized: teacher education, hip hop pedagogy, and culturally relevant pedagogy 2.0. in d. paris & h.s. alim (eds.), culturally sustaining pedagogies: teaching and learning for justice in a changing world (pp. 141-156). new york; london: teachers college press. lexington-fayette urban county government. (2019). spring 2019 foreign languages in fayette county. lexington, ky: author. longview foundation. (2008). teacher preparation for the global age: the imperative for change. retrieved from http://www.longviewfdn.org/files/44.pdf marx, h & moss, d. (2011a). please mind the culture gap: intercultural development during a teacher education study abroad program. journal of teacher education, 62(1), 35-47. marx, h. & moss, d. (2011b). my cultural awareness profile (mycap). nafsa: association of international educators, washington, d.c. 64 global education review 6 (3) nafsa. (n.d.). trends in u.s. study abroad. retrieved from https://www.nafsa.org/policyand-advocacy/policy-resources/trends-usstudy-abroad nafsa. (2016, august 4). curriculum integration: best practices. retrieved from https://www.nafsa.org/professional_resources /browse_by_interest/education_abroad/netw ork_resources/education_abroad/curriculum _integration__best_practices/ quezada, r.l. (2010). internationalization of teacher education: creating global competent teachers and teacher educators for the twenty‐first century. teaching education, 21(1), 1-5. doi: 10.1080/10476210903466885 ramos, g. & schleicher, a. (2018). pisa: preparing our youth for an inclusive and sustainable world—the oecd pisa global competence framework. new york: oecd. roth, k. & rӧnnstrӧm, n. (2015). teacher education and the work of teachers in an age of globalization and cosmopolitization. policy futures in education, 13(6), 705-711. schleicher, a. & ramos, g. (2016). global competency for an inclusive world. paris: oecd. shultz, l. (2007). educating for global citizenship: conflicting agendas and understandings. alberta journal of educational research, 53(3), 248-258. retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej779989 tichnor-wagner, a. & manise, j. (2019). globally competent educational leadership: a framework for leading schools in a diverse, interconnected world. alexandria, va: ascd & longview foundation. toukan, e. (2018). educating citizens of ‘the global’: mapping textual constructs of unesco’s global citizenship education 20122015. education, citizenship, and social justice, 13(1), 51-64. retrieved from https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/pdf/10.1177/1 746197917700909 u.s. department of education, national center for education statistics. (2018). english language learners in public schools. retrieved from https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator_cg f.asp university of kentucky. (n.d.). strategic plan 2015-2020. lexington, ky: author. university of kentucky. (2016). enrollment and demographics. retrieved from https://www.uky.edu/iraa/enrollmentdemographics university of kentucky college of education. (2015). strategic plan. lexington, ky: author. woodruff, g. a., & henry, a. m. (2012). curriculum integration of education abroad. washington, dc: nafsa. about the authors sharon brennan is an associate professor in the department of curriculum and instruction and director of clinical practices and school partnerships for the educator preparation program at the university of kentucky. she is a former director of the consortium for overseas student teaching (cost). her academic work focuses on globally competent teaching practice, teacher assessment, mentoring novice teachers, and curriculum development. ellie holliday joined the university of kentucky college of education as a lecturer and coordinator of international partnerships in 2014. she earned her b.a. in international studies and m.a. in diplomacy and international commerce from the university of kentucky. she is currently pursuing a ph.d. through the department of educational leadership studies at the university of kentucky. what is it all for? 30 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ingersoll, marcea, sears, alan, hirschkorn, mark, kawtharani-chami, lamia, & landine, jeff (2019). what is it all for?: the intentions and priorities for study abroad in canadian teacher education. global education review, 6 (3). 30-48. what is it all for?: the intentions and priorities for study abroad in canadian teacher education marcea ingersoll st. thomas university alan sears university of new brunswick mark hirschkorn university of new brunswick lamia kawtharani-chami university of new brunswick jeff landine university of new brunswick abstract within the research literature and in public discourse on higher education, attention has focused on the need for new graduates to develop 21st century skills for success in an increasingly globalized world. calls for institutions of higher education to support student mobility abound, with intentions that some have categorized as neoliberal and others ascribe to notions of global citizenship. in this paper, we bring together literature from the fields of internationalization, teacher education, and study abroad to provide a conceptual framing and response to an inquiry into the following research question: in what ways does a study abroad experience support the development of preservice teachers? through a multi-phase, multiple-perspective case study approach, we draw on qualitative interview data to illuminate how faculties of education and their students conceptualize the role of study abroad in the development of preservice teachers. the intentions for these programs cluster under four themes: global citizenship, personal growth, professional development, and employability. the concept of structured encounters with difference emerges out of these themes as a conceptual frame for future study abroad initiatives. keywords teacher education; study abroad; international practicum; pre-service teachers introduction calls for greater international mobility and understanding have been prevalent in recent years, resulting in policy initiatives designed to support educational mobility and enhance economic and educational opportunities for students around the globe. student mobility in the age of globalization has received considerable attention in the popular media and the research literature. more than 570,000 people from abroad came to study in canada this year, an increase of sixty percent over 2016 (mckenna, 2019). recent research on the internationalization of higher education highlights this increased student mobility, the need for global skills, and the role of study abroad in international mobility and intercultural understanding (streitwieser, 2014). while there is a national strategy on attracting international students to canada (government of canada, 2014), there is no reciprocal strategy for sending canadian students internationally, despite the growing emphasis on the need for global skills to be professionally successful in the what is it all for? 31 21st century, and on the potential benefits of study abroad. in this paper we contextualize these global calls for international mobility and understanding through qualitative case-study data drawn from our national investigation of study abroad opportunities for pre-service teachers at nine canadian initial teacher education (ite) programs. in a 2009 report on study abroad programs in canada, researchers noted a national lack of “broad goals and vision of those found in europe and the us,” adding that while canada participated in more than 3,000 exchange programs, “no framework or overarching vision is evident” (bond et al., 2009, p. 11). in that same report, study abroad is defined as student participation “in any internationally based program or experience including exchange, clinical placement, field study, internship, co-op placement, practicum or voluntary service/work placement, which are offered by a postsecondary institution, and for which academic credit may or may not be granted” (bond et al., 2009, p. 9). our work falls within this definition, as it begins with our primary focus on how teacher education programs at canadian universities facilitate student participation in international internships, practicum, or work placements. for the purpose of this paper, we will abbreviate these as study abroad placements, or saps. in our work as teacher educators we became attentive to the number of our graduates seeking international teaching positions as a way of beginning their teaching careers and we began to examine how our own programs and those in our region (lagace, mccallum, ingersoll, hirschkorn, & sears, 2016) have responded to this kind of teacher mobility. our work has looked at what it means to be prepared for teaching internationally in a time when there is a global demand for teachers (ingersoll, hirschkorn, landine, & sears, 2018), and in this paper we focus on the international practicum as a form of study abroad that plays a role in teacher education. specifically, the focus of this paper is on framing the intentions and priorities of study abroad initiatives to better understand their underlying assumptions and ideological frameworks, and to give direction to future initiatives. to do so, we bring together literature from the fields of internationalization, global citizenship, and teacher education to frame our qualitative inquiry into the following research question: in what ways does a study abroad experience uniquely support the development of preservice teachers? theoretical framework and literature increasing international mobility and the rise of transnational forms of citizenship have presented complex dynamics. competing dimensions of internationalization have been framed as providing both challenges and opportunities in terms of international student mobility (choudaha & de wit, 2014), and its impact on global classrooms (faez, 2012; knight, 2007), with repeated calls for more access to study abroad in canadian postsecondary institutions (bond et al., 2009; biggs & paris, 2017). across the globe, universities have responded to and capitalized on the increasing demand for transnational academic credentials (knight, 2007; lowe, 1999; streitwieser, 2014). toukan (2018) points out that approaches to globalization can align “with a neoliberal, neo-conservative, classical liberal, radical or transformational ideology” (p. 52), among others. these ideologies are not always separate but can exist in conflict or work in tandem. the coexistence of international education as a neoliberal, competitive commodity and international-mindedness as an aspirational disposition are economic and 32 global education review 6 (3) ideological tensions explored in the literature on international education (ingersoll, 2018). study abroad discourses employ language associated with the dual frames of citizenship and employability, with the first having a more ideological basis grounded in dispositional orientations of global understanding and the second drawing on the neoliberal language of competitive employment outcomes. however, these dual frames are not clearly delineated, and there is overlap between concepts and frames. for example, the language of two concepts within the first frame—global citizenship and global citizenship education—is sometimes used interchangeably. a recent canadian report on saps conflates study abroad with global education, defining the latter as “organized learning experiences for canadian-based students that take place outside of canada and are part of an academic program at a canadian university, college, or institute” (paris & biggs, 2017, p. 10). both global education and global citizenship are complex and contested concepts, however, and understanding them requires probing beneath the surface to explore underlying assumptions and ideological frameworks. often the dual elements of transformational global citizenship and neoliberal competitiveness can be seen in single initiatives. the 2017 report of the study group on global education called for increased priority to be given to saps, and is saturated with the language of neoliberalism, emphasizing the potential of these experiences to help students respond competitively to a shifting global economy, develop “vital job skills” (p. 9), and create economic opportunity (biggs & paris, 2017). at the same time, the report also extols more transformational priorities including the strengthening of “canadian values of openness and inclusion at a time of growing intolerance” (p. 9), as well as the fostering of “intercultural cooperation and respect” (p. 9). this kind of theoretical overlap is relatively common. in this article we use the frames of global citizenship and neoliberal competitiveness (adamson, åstrand, & darling-hammond, 2016; reid, gill, & sears, 2010; toukan, 2018) to view the intentions participants articulated for their saps. teacher education and study abroad this increased interest in study abroad programs in higher education has been manifest in calls to internationalize teacher education (kissock & richardson, 2010; mahon, 2007). within teacher education, there have been calls for beginning teachers to be globally responsible (cushner, 2009) and educate for 21st century global citizenship (guo, 2014). similar to other fields, competing theoretical frameworks are common in the research on teacher education and study abroad. some argue that international practicums are too different from local contexts to develop preservice teachers who meet professional standards (cruickshank & westbrook, 2013). others see the potential of teacher education programs in different global contexts to create opportunities for their teacher candidates to encounter cultural diversity both at home and abroad, a crucial competency for new teachers whether they are beginning their careers in their local contexts or internationally (salmona, partlo, kaczynski & leonard, 2015). in canada, the association of deans of education (acde) responded to these competing frames with an accord that recognizes the risks and benefits internationalization holds for teacher education and provides guidelines for principled and ethical international education practices (acde, 2014). the canadian context there has been an increase of canadian student uptake in study abroad over the past what is it all for? 33 decade. in 2007, the association of universities and colleges in canada (aucc) reported that 2.2% undertook some sort of international activity for academic credit (aucc, 2007). more recently, universities canada (uc, formerly aucc) reported that 11% of canadian undergraduates participated in an international mobility experience (uc, 2019). despite this growth, the global education for canadians report from the study group on global education at the munk school of global affairs and public policy suggests this number should be higher and increase to 25% over the next decade (biggs & paris, 2017). there is growing interest in international comparative work in teacher education and much of that work makes the case that understanding sociopolitical context matters in the analysis of policy and practice in the field (darling-hammond & liebermann, 2012; gilroy 2014). as sears and hirschkorn (2017) argue, “in jurisdictions around the world differences in cultural milieu shape teaching and teacher education in important ways” (p. 245). except for indigenous education, which is federally controlled, administrative and legal authority for education is otherwise constitutionally delegated to the provinces and territories. canada has one of the most decentralized education systems among organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) countries (robertson, 2016; sears, clarke, & hughes, 1999). the history of ite in canada follows a parochial pattern, with provinces setting the requirements for ite and administering the process of teacher certification and licensing. as a result, research on national trends or initiatives in canadian education generally, and in teacher education in particular, is a difficult endeavor. a number of international, comparative books in these fields follow a common trend of using ontario, canada’s most populous province, as a reference point for the country as a whole, but this can present a distorted picture of the national scene (adamson et al., 2016; darling-hammond & lieberman, 2012; hargreaves & shirley, 2012). our national study of international work in ite across canada addresses these parochial limitations and contributes to a growing body of work in the field. our approach to this research is guided by our daily work in the preparation of preservice teachers, and as “important as philosophical issues are, qualitative researchers are often called to contribute practical solutions to human problems” (wertz, charmaz, mcmullen, josselson, anderson, & mcspadden, 2011, p. 83). in this inquiry, the problem at the core of our work was the identification of ways in which a study abroad experience might support the development of preservice teachers. the study the research reported here is part of a multi-phase investigation of canadian teacher preparation for international contexts. the first phase was a pilot study of seven canadian teachers with recent or ongoing experience as overseas teachers in england, and five canadian teachers/administrators currently teaching at an international school in a large city in china (lagace et al., 2016). this descriptive account of participant views of the effectiveness of their ite programs in preparing them for international teaching revealed that their ite programs had provided a limited focus on capacities for international employment and no opportunities for study abroad experiences. phase two examined ite programs at a university in each of the four provinces in atlantic canada to assess how, if at all, they address preparation for international teaching in ite (gray et al., 2019). three of the four ite programs examined gave explicit attention to international topics and study abroad experiences and three themes emerged from the data about the nature of these programs: 34 global education review 6 (3) attention to international teaching grew as a process of accretion rather than systematic planning; key types of individuals (architects, champions, and linchpins) were drivers and sustainers of international initiatives; and international initiatives used common mechanisms to achieve different purposes, including pedagogical skill development and the development of affective skills and dispositions related to cross cultural competence. the third phase of the work, reported here, adds cases from five other universities in provinces ranging from québec to alberta resulting in 9 out of the 10 canadian provinces included in the research. the nine universities included in this phase are all public and range from small, primarily undergraduate institutions to large, research intensive ones. our focus in this paper is participants’ conceptions of the intentions and priorities of international practicum experiences in ite. we employed a multiple-perspective case study approach (bogdan & biklen, 2003; creswell, 2005; stake, 2006). site visits were conducted during the 201617 and 2017-18 academic years. each site visit included semi-structured individual interviews and/or focus groups with five categories of participants: (a) administrators (including deans, directors, associate deans), (b) faculty members, (c) key staff members and coordinators, (d) students, and (e) alumni who expressed an interest in or experience with international teaching. participant numbers varied across sites according to interest in international teaching, scheduling availability, willingness to participate, and recruitment procedures permitted by research ethics boards. deans, key staff members, and current students participated at each site, with cross-case variation in the number of interviewees across categories and 70 participants in total. sites with international internship opportunities involving a higher proportion of faculty and students generated higher numbers of interviewees across all categories of participants. the highest number of participants at one site involved the dean, other administrators, university support staff, current students, and several alumni currently teaching at multiple international sites but willing to participate synchronously via online conference technology. conversely, at universities with lower program focus on international teaching, fewer total participants were interviewed. the range of participant numbers across sites varied from n=6 to n=17. a multiple-perspective case study is designed to optimize understanding, and as the population of cases accumulates, comparisons become meaningful and patterns emerge (stake, 2006). in addition to interviews and focus groups, relevant documents, field notes, informal conversations with consenting participants, and other products related to international teaching (policy documents, course outlines, internship manuals, etc.) also contributed data for the cases. the data from each case was analyzed separately as a discrete case before being combined in cross-case analysis (stake, 2006). a multi-stage process for qualitative data analysis was employed (creswell, 2005). first, each university was treated as a discrete case. to enhance consistency, members of the research team reviewed common transcripts to establish the initial coding structure. next, individual team members took the lead on examining and coding transcripts. atlas.ti software was used in coding transcripts and establishing patterns and themes. for the research reported here, two team members agreed on a select number of codes dealing with priorities and intentions across the universities and examined those for patterns which were grouped into initial themes. one researcher focused initially on data from administrators/faculty/staff, while the other what is it all for? 35 focused on student/alumni data. we met to compare themes and discuss similarities and differences across these two participant groupings. next, supporting data from transcripts was shared with the research team and a meeting held to discuss the analysis. our within-case and cross-case analyses (stake, 2006) examined similarities and differences between how the two groups viewed the intentions and priorities of their saps. findings the ite programs ranged in their approach to saps, including those who offered a variety of placement opportunities to those who offered none. most saps involved a teaching practicum or internship, and one program offered an international service-learning experience with the focus on a short, project-related task not specifically related to teaching. one ite program offered no experiences outside of canada but had a significant emphasis on teaching in indigenous communities, which they considered similar to an sap. one faculty member put it this way: “we think of them [teacher education students] as, you know, going to teach somewhere else in some other country but we have international contexts within our own country, like, when we talk about teaching with first nation students” (f, u7). in our examination of intentions, we found that the two groups (faculty/staff/programs) and students (current/alumni) both overlapped and differed with one another and with the larger ideological frameworks that underpin study abroad. we have grouped these intentions into four themes, discussed below: global citizenship, personal growth, professional development, and employability. global citizenship the language of global citizenship permeated the responses across participants and sites, with some references directly using the term global citizenship and others alluding to it more indirectly. one dean directly invoked the language of global citizenship to frame the institutional commitment to international opportunities: “i think we definitely want our students to be exposed to different countries, cultures, languages, and also the reality as mature and global citizens. it’s a global village” (d, u9). within this theme, participants identified the ways that saps foster a range of characteristics of global citizenship, including (a) global citizens know things about the world, (b) global citizens are interculturally competent, and (c) global citizens are committed to socially just partnerships. global citizens know things about the world. across the body of responses, both direct and indirect references to this characteristic were expressed. faculty members noted the importance of knowing “the history of that country...and developing a precursory understanding of the community that they’re going to” (f, u8). additional specific intentions included faculty who want their students to develop more sophisticated global understandings of subject-specific material and disciplinary concepts: “i think we understand more about sustainability if we go anywhere outside north america” (f, u9). knowledge of other locations, histories, and approaches to global issues were identified as associated outcomes of an sap. global citizens are interculturally competent. the concept of intercultural competence emerged across the responses as a necessary component for global citizenship and a potential outcome of sap experiences. having preparation prior to saps was identified as a key requirement for students, since “wherever you go you need to understand that culture is different, that cultural norms are different. . . intercultural competency needs to be 36 global education review 6 (3) understood by our students going abroad” (d, u1). coursework involving mandatory preparatory education on intercultural understanding was suggested as a support for this intention, because of “some common things that they each need. one is just cultural sensitivities, right? knowing some of the idiosyncrasies of different cultures or just being aware that they exist so that you're not insulting when you're going to another country” (dfp, u9). another aspect of an interculturally competent global citizen that participants identified as key involved self-awareness and cultural humility. participants shared a common desire for students to recognize their biases and be open to perspectives and practices that differ from their own. one administrator argued that saps that “put the students in a situation where they become more conscious of their own cultural norms have a really important impact on their view of themselves in a classroom setting” (c, u8). this kind of self-awareness underpins what some participants called “cultural humility,” described by one as “opening ourselves to learning, some of what we really have to learn from cultures that are very different from ourselves” (f, u6). global citizens are committed to socially just partnerships. a concern for socially just partnerships emerged as an explicit intention of some education programs. this was expressed by some participants as a desire for students to have theoretical understanding of colonialism, post-colonialism, and hegemonic practices prior to study abroad. it was noted that international partnerships, particularly those between the global north and global south can be fraught with unequal and unjust power relationships. all faculty participants who spoke about this were committed to building programs that did not perpetuate power imbalances or exploitation. for them, global citizens collaborate, listen, learn from, understand the difference between charity and help, and do not replicate colonial patterns of development. participants noted distinctions between service learning, tourist travel components, researchbased learning placements, and teaching-based placements. through these distinctions, intentions for socially just partnerships were expressed. the contrast between service learning contexts and teaching-based programs is highlighted through the words of this participant, who notes that a short service learning context was more of a tourism opportunity with students “taking pictures and selfies with the indigenous kids. we were in and out of there. i felt a little dirty about the whole thing, you know, these white people show up, do their show and leave” as opposed to a “practicum where we could be there for a long period of time and actually have this authentic thing where we offer something we’re really good at” (c, u3). efforts at fostering socially just relationships were noted in the context of misperceptions about intentions as well. for example, the quote below captures the tensions within competing frames of global citizenship and the intentions that shape study abroad: it's hard to escape views and perceptions, like you're basically acting like a missionary. it's very difficult. it doesn’t matter how many times you explain it, the attitude very much is, “oh, you're going there and you're just civilizing the uncivilized” (f, u8). institutional and program intentions were found to shape sap programming. several sites noted a pervasive commitment to developing teachers committed to honoring diversity and fostering social justice. this was manifest through a particular focus on students and families from underrepresented groups in provincial schools, including african canadian, indigenous, or immigrant groups. the sap was largely seen not as a preparation for future what is it all for? 37 international work but, rather, to support the institutional program intent of fostering social justice pedagogy locally. for example, at one university with an institution-wide mandate to serve the inner-city community where it is located, saps were widely understood as a vehicle for enhancing that mandate. one faculty member noted the following: i wanted to design one as well for an international experience that was more socially justice oriented so and i guess my focus wasn't necessarily to prepare our students to go teach internationally but for them to understand where some of the students that they're teaching in….are coming from (f, u9). participants both explicitly and indirectly connected their approach to saps to overarching goals emanating from their own context and noted differences in individual implementation. for instance, one faculty member expressed alignment with the institutional direction, or “our extended goal of having them [the students] be socially responsible, but the views of what does it mean to be socially responsible are very different” (f, u8). while the sense of shared ethos and intentions was common in the ite programs examined, there were also various interpretations in practice personal growth the themes of personal growth and professional development each contain distinct aspects that deserve separate attention but are also closely interlinked. belief in the capacity of the sap to foster qualities important to both personal growth and professional development is common across the transcripts of faculty, staff, and students. we summarize these qualities and the personal and professional dimensions in table 1. table 1. qualities developed through saps quality personal components professional components self-awareness more aware of position-ality – who they are, their identity and worldviews are not general more aware that the canadian school system is contingent on particular contexts and that there are other ways of doing education empathy understand others better understand students better – where they came from, the conditions of migration, the feelings of otherness flexibility/risktaking less bound to familiar structures and routines, more willing to try new things experience with other approaches to education and teaching creates willingness to try alternative approaches self-confidence confident in their ability to face new and unfamiliar circumstances confident in the face of change or unexpected circum38 global education review 6 (3) and not be thrown by them stances in schools and classrooms tolerance for ambiguity willingness to live with a degree of uncertainty more tolerant of open-ended teaching and a range of student responses to issues and problems perseverance not thrown by difficulty or resistance. willingness to stick with a problem and work it through not thrown or put off by difficult problems in lesson preparation, teaching, or assessment. willingness to work through difficulties across the institutions included in our study, there was a pervasive belief in the inherent benefits of travel and its potential for personal growth. the chair of one ite program expressed this common understanding clearly, stating, “i’ve always thought there was value in travel, irrespective of the benefits that are also tied to the international teacher. i think it’s good for people to go abroad” (c, u3). there is an abiding belief that international work can shape people in powerful ways that cannot be realized by simply studying different places. one dean put it this way, “anthony bourdain is good to watch. nothing beats true experience, authentic experience” (d, u9). another dean echoed the personal impact of an international teaching experience: “it’s the core idea of transformational learning. a new experience would bring about a different kind of teacher . . . it changes their lives” (d, u1). a faculty member who regularly led international practicum opportunities highlighted growth as a key outcome: “my focus when my students go international practicum is their growth” (f, u9). the director of field placements at the same institution referenced the potential for growth and transformation: “i do it because i see the potential to be even better in some of the students that i teach. i see that they have the capacity to change the world, to change opportunities for kids” (dfp, u9). the theme of personal growth and transformation runs across the transcripts. direct experience is one of two powerful forces shaping this personal transformation; the other is difference. students need to be in places jarringly different to experience this change: i think when they come back they're different, because they've actually lived in a different place. they've had to deal with a different environment, climate, language. . . i think that experience is life changing and i think it kind of does something to your brain. it's just this different you just have kind of this different outlook on life maybe you're more tolerant…. that kind of life experience of you're not in your normal kind of comfortable environment (f, u6). students also explicitly articulated the value of direct experience in their personal growth and their understanding of difference. study abroad was framed as an opportunity for canadians to better understand the experiences of international students who come to canada by being put into the situation of understanding what it is like to be away from everything familiar. this is evident from how one student explains her decision to study abroad: i had friends from all over the world in high school. i had a friend from germany, from korea, from all over the place and i was just so interested in how can you go away for so long…it sounded so interesting and i really wanted to what is it all for? 39 experience what they experienced when they came here (s, u9). from this student’s perspective, her high school friendships with international students from different countries and cultures provoked her interest in an international practicum. her intentions for the sap were made clear—she expected to learn what it is like to be a foreigner in canada by being a foreigner herself, and to translate that experience into her teaching. this interlinking between personal growth and professional development is addressed in the next theme. professional development originally, we set out to investigate what ite programs were doing to prepare students for the international teaching jobs we saw our own students taking up more frequently. our assumptions were that ite programs with internationally-oriented courses and practicum placement opportunities would be explicit about the intentions underpinning those courses and make direct links between the program offerings and the international teaching opportunities being taken up by many newly graduated teachers. however, as we conducted the site visits, our research question evolved to incorporate the responses that disrupted this assumption. many faculty members explicitly rejected that idea that these courses and experiences were direct preparation for international teaching. rather, in their education programs there was an emphasis on the international experience as a catalyst for better teaching in local contexts, and that local contexts are increasingly characterized by greater diversity. one faculty member’s comments reflect this common assertion: “we do really focus on preparing students to teach in (our province). so, i think that's our priority” (f, u8). they went on to say, however, that international experience was very effective in developing teacher characteristics necessary for local inner-city jobs. the associate dean at another institution recounted how preservice teachers who have spent time in another country can better relate to newcomer students in their own classrooms, and that when they come back from an international experience “they can empathize, they can be more compassionate, they can relate to kids. it’s a whole different experience (ad, u9). the ability to relate empathetically to diverse students, newcomers to canada in particular, permeated the data. the coordinator of overseas placements at another institution summed it up this way: “this will make you a better teacher, you will look across the classroom at a sea of different faces, and you will have a better idea what it feels like to be there, to be the one who's not understanding what's going on” (dfp, u6). there is a strong sense among participants that teachers who have been in the position of being in other cultural contexts where their own sense of familiarity is disrupted will be able to translate that understanding to an empathetic response in classrooms back home. another faculty member described the power of learning to solve problems in international contexts translating very positively to transitioning to teaching in canada. they’ve already been challenged in one place. so, the culture shock they're now dealing with, they're not dealing with the culture shock, but they are able to kind of go, ‘okay. i remember this feeling. i remember what it is like. i know what the next step is. i know what i have to do. and i know i'll have to challenge myself to look differently.’ we've received nothing but positive responses from students and from principals as well in terms of how our students were able to handle things (f, u8). while there was recognition that some students will be attracted to teaching internationally and take up teaching positions internationally after their saps, personal and 40 global education review 6 (3) professional qualities for all contexts, particularly locally, were given more emphasis. employability initial teacher education is professional preparation, theoretically and empirically supported, with a clearly defined professional possibility—employment in teaching. typically, ite programming is focused on the policies and procedures for employment in local contexts, although some are explicit in their desire to prepare students for international teaching, especially in contexts of a teacher surplus, or if the program has an emphasis on international teaching. one faculty member noted, “i think we have certainly more students now that will teach internationally because of the practicum programs we have out there. some of them end up staying where they have students, many of them get offers to stay” (dfp, u9). this faculty member observed a link between the six-week practicum and readiness for international teaching, noting, “i think the program has transitioned some from what it teaches our young teachers coming back here to being an opportunity for them to teach internationally” (dfp, u9). this link between the increase in international opportunities and the sap was made by an administrator at another institution, who noted that “it seems like half to more than half of our students leave [our province] and increasingly more of them are going overseas, so why would we not give them something overseas” (c, u3)? still, the primary goal of the saps is not perceived to be preparation for international teaching, as several faculty members noted. comments ranged from “i never really thought that our taking the students to norway and then to iceland was about preparing them to teach internationally. i didn’t really think in those terms” to “i never considered what we did to prepare them to teach internationally. that was never my interest. i’m just concerned about preparing them to teach” (f, u3). good preparation was linked to a broad range of experiences in a range of educational settings, not just placements in local schools: the more experiences we can provide them, whether it be in cape breton or in the north, or in an alternative setting, a prison, a hospital, or norway, i think it’s the context that drives the difference, that helps them grow in that final field experience, because it’s our last chance to expand that view, before they go out into the system (f, u3). consistently, the teacher educators we interviewed emphasized the sap as one way of providing students with a variety of broad educational experiences that can improve their preparation for teaching, primarily in local employment contexts. some ite faculty members in our study believe the international practicum works both to prepare graduates for an international teaching career, and to provide a check on those who want to teach overseas but might change their mind after an international practicum experience. in the case of the latter, international practica are seen as a safety valve or a test run. the director of international placements at one institution said, “it allows them [students] to take a huge risk without huge commitment” (dfp, u1). at another institution, the value of being able to consider in the short term what would otherwise be “a two year, three-year commitment” was expressed by a student who shared how the sap allowed her an international teaching opportunity that “i could maybe test run in six-weeks” (s, u1). the short-term nature of the sap program is construed as an advantage for students intending to use it as a professional gateway to employment. in terms of program design, the short duration of the sap was perceived as an opportune time frame for evaluating suitability for international teaching and making future what is it all for? 41 career decisions: “it was the perfect opportunity to see if i could go and do it for six-weeks, and maybe see if i was able to actually take on a contract somewhere internationally.” in terms of seeing if “i would be able to deal with it…sixweeks was kind of the perfect time period” (s, u1). exploring international teaching as a profession through an sap is a low-risk commitment prior to making a definitive professional choice, and provides the additional opportunity for travel, which was a recurring personal reason for wanting to do an sap. students expected their sap to assist them in making an informed professional choice about their career pathways post-graduation. whether their intentions were to teach locally or in international contexts after their ite program, students expressed faith that the international experience would hold value for their future employment in terms of skill building and pedagogical development. they saw the sap as a way of testing the waters for international teaching and for enhancing their resumes for local teaching jobs. this was especially relevant in contexts with overburdened hiring markets. when local employment options are constrained due to an oversupply of teachers, beginning teachers look to international teaching opportunities as a way of entering the profession, and the global demand for teachers means international schools are increasingly willing to hire newly certified teachers (gauthier & merchant, 2016). students in this research indicated that local hiring markets were a factor in their decision for selecting a program that has a study abroad component, and that they expected the program to assist them in their professional decisionmaking. describing her decision to do an sap, one student expressed her reasoning: “because there are no jobs. i took this international teaching experience as a six-week placement that might be trickier to have (something short term like it) after i graduate” (u1, s). another student noted that while jobs were scarce in her area, the benefits of being a teacher include being able to work and travel: i was aware that in atlantic canada that there weren’t a whole lot of jobs available for teachers, and personally as well i like travelling, and seeing the world has always been a big aspiration of mine. i know that being able to, as a teacher, you’d be able to do a lot of that (s, u1). another participant who hopes to do an sap described his hope that it would link him to future employment opportunities: well i've always kind of wanted to do like a teach internationally. as soon as i graduate, i'd like to travel and initially i really want to go to europe or even asia just anywhere in the world and teach (s, u8). the perception that saps may be a link to employment is lived out in the experiences described to us. students who flourish may get offered jobs while they are on international placements, as described by a faculty member from an institution that has a partnership with a school in thailand where many students do placements and stay on, sometimes for multiple years. she reported, “a lot of them end up staying and teaching in thailand. each year, there's a good number that stay a year, there's some that have stayed probably six to eight years” (dfp, u9). for international schools looking to recruit teachers, evidence of a successful sap suggests potential capacities for a successful international teaching career (ingersoll et al., 2018). even when students decide to remain in canada to find work, there is a perception that international experience is seen as a valuable component of a teacher’s resume and potential success. as one dean said, “it’s a valuable commodity when it comes to employers,” adding that “it really says to an employer, even if it’s a local employer or somewhere in canada, that this person is prepared to go out of their comfort 42 global education review 6 (3) zone” (d, u1). commenting on the success of some students one faculty member said, “when they’ve gone out into the world and taught in other locations besides the little place that we’ve come from, they’ve done very, very well” (f, u8). this fourth theme highlights a conceptual collision, where the neoliberal commodification of study abroad, preservice teachers’ practical intentions of finding work in their profession, and teacher educators’ intentions to support students’ personal and professional development collide. discussion four recurring themes emerged from our cross-case analysis: global citizenship, personal growth, professional development, and employability. faculty members at some institutions indicated, through reference to their own scholarship, that they had done research on their program’s international placements. however, the overwhelming support for a study abroad experience was not typically grounded in systematic empirical evidence from literature or collected as part of program evaluations. any accounts of students who struggled ended with predominantly positive resolutions to the issues, and only one instance of a student who did not successfully complete a sap program due to overwhelming difference was noted. as experienced teacher educators we know this does happen, although the extent and frequency are not always documented, and participants may have been reluctant to share such information. while four common themes emerged from the analysis, the evidence for the themes is idiosyncratic and mirrors an unsystematic approach to sap implementation across canadian teacher education programs. one significant post-analysis gap that we identified was the infrequency of opportunities for specifically-targeted, post-international experience reflection across programs; rather, there was wide-ranging trust that unmediated experience abroad is just good. across the policies, programs, participants, and public discourses, there is great faith in the grand tour (brennan, 2004) to change people—being in a different place with different people—but the change is amorphous and the approaches unstructured. each of the themes is infused with a conceptual overlay that we theorize as a possibility for framing future saps, and we term this structured encounters with difference. this concept is grounded in several features, which we discuss here and offer as conceptual framing for sap intentions. whether personal, educational, or relational factors were important to participants’ interest in providing or pursuing an experience abroad or in a local context, the value of the experience was attributed to an encounter with difference. the contrasting nature of the experience was the expressed essence of what makes it valuable, and is discussed here. first, psychologically, encounters with difference are disruptive. greater cognitive effort is required as the brain adjusts to the unfamiliar and attempts to integrate new knowledge and experiences into existing schema (osland, 2000; van kesteren, ruiter, fernández & henson, 2012). for those of us who teach, we know that pushing students to go out of their comfort zone is integral to the learning experience but can be fraught with resistance. situating the learning experience within a context where the disruption is deliberate, such as a study abroad experience, not only provides an authentic context for new learning, it also integrates another important motivational factor—agency. students who elect to go on saps have actively selected to engage in an experience that will be challenging and require them to use skills that are not as frequently utilized in their encounters with the what is it all for? 43 everyday. although the safety nets of home are not in place during study abroad experiences, saps are university-sanctioned activities, and students typically undergo orientation and complete risk-assessment documentation to prepare them for the challenges of travelling abroad (mizzi & o’brien-klewchuk, 2016). these structural components coupled with the agentic motivations for engaging with difference may account for the high rates of success described by both faculty members and students involved in these saps. secondly, encounters with difference are presented here as deliberate, intentional, and desired structural features of saps. students and faculty members consistently referenced encounters with difference as part of the design of sap programs and portrayed the challenges of encountering difference as an opportunity for personal and professional growth and transformation. this is consistent with cushner and brennan (2007), who see carefully structured immersive international or intercultural teaching experiences as one way of preparing teachers for the challenges of teaching children in a global age. in the words of our participants and in the broader research and public discourse, it is worth noting that the transformative value of saps is widely supported but also highly nuanced. in larsen and searle’s (2017) study of an international experience in an ite program, they make a distinction between transformation leading to culturally aware global citizenship and transformation that leads to critical global citizenship. they describe cultural awareness as one level of personal transformation, and frame critical global citizenship as a deeper engagement with difficult knowledge, systemic privilege, and social justice. study abroad alone is not sufficient for building global citizenship (pedersen, 2010); while teachers in sap may describe their international practicum experiences as life changing, there is insufficient research on the longevity of that impact (maynes, allison, & julien-schultz, 2013). many participants in our study described significant personal and professional changes as part of the sap experience, but the depth, impact, and criticality of that change is a direction for future research. conclusions in political discourse and the research literature, the ideological frameworks underpinning study abroad are supported by notions of economic competitiveness, personal development, and positional advantage. the value attributed across each of these ideological frames is consistent with the views expressed by faculty and students in our research, with study abroad conceptualized as a fundamentally valuable opportunity that has the potential to enhance the personal and professional capacities of beginning teachers. findings from our work reinforce calls for creating teacher program structures that replicate the value of the study abroad experience and illuminate our assertion that programs can and should enable structured encounters with difference for teachers whether they choose to begin their careers locally or globally. providing opportunities for experiences shaped by structured encounters with difference to support the personal growth and professional learning of teachers in balanced ways that are attentive to the employment aspirations of beginning educators, the needs of local and global communities, and the larger global forces that influence this dynamic context is an important consideration for advocates of study abroad and teacher education programs alike. in canada, international student recruitment is a recurring discourse in higher education, but there is no companion strategy for providing canadian students with greater international exposure, even as national spaces are increasingly internationally diverse (paris & 44 global education review 6 (3) biggs, 2018). our research indicates that there are shared intentions among faculty, students, and the larger society, including employers and schools, for beginning teachers to have personal experience and professional preparation for teaching across contexts increasingly marked by cultural border crossing (kawtharani chami, hirschkorn, & ingersoll, 2019). given this uniformity of support for sap components that provide personal and professional preparation through structured encounters with difference, we concur that there is a need for greater opportunity and financial support to create equitable access and support in terms of costs to students and workload for the key architects, champions, and lynchpins (gray et al., 2019) who initiate and sustain these saps. we also recommend that there should be a common platform for canadian faculties of education to share 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(2012). how schema and novelty augment memory formation. trends in neurosciences, 35(4), 211219. wertz, f. j., charmaz, k., mcmullen, l. m., josselson, r., anderson, r., & mcspadden, e. (2011). five ways of doing qualitative analysis: phenomenological psychology, grounded theory, discourse analysis, narrative research and intuitive inquiry. new york, ny: the guilford press. about the authors marcea ingersoll is associate professor and director, school of education, st. thomas university. she is a collaborative scholar and works with other researchers as a member of the centre for interdisciplinary research on narrative (cirn) and the research on international teaching and teacher education (ritte) team. building on her experiences as an international teacher and teacher-educator, her scholarly work is situated at the crossroads of curriculum, narrative, teacher education, and international schools and their communities. alan sears is an honorary research professor in the faculty of education at the university of new brunswick. his research and writing focus on civic education, history education, educational policy, and teacher education. he is a member of the research on international teaching and teacher education (ritte) research team. mark hirschkorn, faculty of education, university of new brunswick, is a science/teacher/international education professor who, as a member of the research on international teaching and teacher education (ritte) research team, has been investigating how education programs prepare teachers to teach across cultural boundaries. his research interests include international education program design, and how science educators integrate the philosophies of digital integration and authentic teaching into the ways they teach science. lamia kawtharani-chami, faculty of education, university of new brunswick, is a phd candidate, science education /teacher education, and member of the research on international teaching and teacher education (ritte) research team. her global academic and career experience from sierra leone, to lebanon, and then france, has shaped who she is as an educator and researcher. her research interests include international education and studying the https://doi.org/10.1177/1746197917700909 https://www.univcan.ca/priorities/study-abroad/ https://www.univcan.ca/priorities/study-abroad/ 48 global education review 6 (3) authentic practices of science teacher educators in different national and cultural contexts. jeff landine is an associate professor in the counselling program, faculty of education, at the university of new brunswick. his research interests include career development, vocational identity and employability, in particular with youth, young adults, and vulnerable populations. nations within a nation 65 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: heimer, lucinda g., caya, lynell, lancaster, paige, saxon, lauren, & wildman, courtney (2019). nations within a nation: crosscultural field insights in an anishinaabe context. global education review, 6 (3). 65-83. nations within a nation: cross-cultural field insights in an anishinaabe context lucinda g. heimer university of wisconsin—whitewater lynell caya bristol elementary school, bristol, wi paige lancaster walworth county public health, elkhorn, wi lauren saxon marshall early learning center, marshall, wi courtney wildman west ridge elementary, racine, wi abstract this case study of undergraduate early childhood education pre-service teachers in an international field experience examines living, working, and studying in a sovereign nation while still “at home” within the united states. in our various roles (researcher, pre-service teacher, faculty mentor), we explored the impact of colonization as we lived and worked with people who are anishinaabe. we viewed the larger issues that tribal sovereignty brings to education in terms of federal and state standards. our research focuses on the impact of this cross-cultural field experience on the pre-service teachers’ understanding of self as related to cross-cultural teaching. we employed a reflective multilayered process before, during, and following the field experience, and used qualitative emergent coding methods. pre-service teachers developed an awareness of their individual comfort zones, recognized the power in strengths-based versus deficit-based approaches, and gained clarity on the cultural role of education and the role of culture in education. with this new knowledge, teachers may be better able to create culturally relevant curriculum and pedagogies in ways that allow for more meaningful connections with students and their families. keywords early childhood teacher education; indigenous education; international field experiences; tribal sovereignty; colonization; anishinaabe introduction “comfort zones are exactly what they sound like […] comfortable, but no growth happens there, so i’m doing away with ‘safe’ for this journey” (lauren, may 17, 2016). this quote represents the desire of early childhood education (ece) pre-service teachers at the university of the midwest (um; pseudonym) to challenge themselves when moving across cultural contexts in a (domestic) international field experience. during the experience itself and throughout the research process, we learned that the journey to a deeper sense of teacher identity in relationship to another’s lived experience is ongoing and that cross-cultural experiences can serve as a spark for such growth. in the united states, the achievement gap compels us to consider alternate approaches and 66 global education review 6 (3) pedagogies for meeting each child’s needs (national center for educational statistics, 2019). the disparity between the demographics of the children who are not meeting expected academic standards (predominantly children of color and/or those with fewer resources) and those of the teaching staff (predominantly white) suggests the need to better prepare teachers for underrepresented communities (brayboy, fann, castagno, & solyom, 2012). university programs that move teachers toward a deeper understanding of colonization, racism, privilege and oppression increase pre-service teachers’ awareness of equity issues as they take positions supporting children in classrooms (nieto, 2010; sleeter, 2001). as an international field experience within the united states, this is a unique study of an initiative that sought to achieve such goals. four ece teacher candidates identifying as white women explored life in the classroom of a sovereign nation (anishinaabe people) within a nation (united states). the term anishinaabe is broad in scope referring to a group of culturally related indigenous people including tribes in the united states and canada (treuer, 2012). indigenous is used in reference to native american peoples, first peoples of the united states of america, and specific tribes in the united states. the impact of colonization, specifically as it relates to the sovereign status of an indigenous community, is explored before, during, and following the field experience. we propose that critical reflection on historical impacts and differences must be experienced by pre-service teachers to provide understanding of how personal experiences and biases influence how they teach children. the indigenous field experience was another step in the um ece teacher preparation process and in understanding different populations. our study is also unique in that the pre-service teacher researchers serve as co-authors of this paper. this is an uncommon practice in research on experiential learning and strengthens our practical insights. the experience of visiting a nation within a nation and unpacking the policy, law, and governance of such a phenomenon as it relates to early education provides possibilities for cultural border crossing. international field work in ece much of the research on teacher education that addresses diverse student populations (auld, dyer, & charles, 2016; ladson-billings, 2005; nieto, 2010; nganga, 2016) has suggested the need for pre-service teachers to critically define and explore the histories and lived experiences of children and families. urgency for this work is partially fueled by the continuing demographic disparity between educators (predominantly white middle class) and the populations they teach. as ladson-billings (2005) noted, “the real problems facing teacher education are the disconnections between and among the students, families, and community and teachers and teacher education […] today’s schools are called on to serve a more ethnically, linguistically, and culturally diverse student population” (p. 229). international fieldwork literature has focused on short-term global experiences where faculty have investigated student interest, involvement, and insights (jay, moss, & cherednichenko, 2009; madrid, baldwin, & belbase, 2016; moss & marx, 2011). specifically, in teacher education, field experiences in diverse settings (defined as those different from one’s lived experiences) offer new teaching contexts to pre-service teachers. however, the quality provided by such experiences has been critiqued, with suggestions of potentially detrimental impacts as these experiences may fail to provide support for deep internalization of selfawareness in a new cultural context (auld et al., 2016, jay et al., 2009, madrid et al., 2016, nations within a nation 67 rodriguez, 2011). for example, multiple studies have documented that these experiences tend to be less than a semester from start to finish and much of the research is written by faculty about pre-service teachers and global experiences. in some instances, contrary to intended program goals, western ethnocentrism, biases, and colonial mentality are actually reinforced (cushner & chang, 2015; smolcic & katunich, 2017). these studies remind us that connecting across cultural contexts is a complicated process and that pre-service teachers may tend to be ethnocentric and stay focused on themselves during these short-term field experiences. current research includes very few experiences within the united states, working with indigenous populations exploring the effects field experiences have on pre-service teachers or the indigenous communities. our present study contributes to this growing body of literature. we focus on the intersection of identity, race, indigenous culture, and the experiences of preservice teachers engaging in international field work in their home country. field placements in indigenous communities indigenous populations in off-reservation public schools are growing, making indigenous students less likely to have indigenous teachers or teachers with “indigenous cultural competency” (mccarty & lee, 2014). too often, partnerships, grants, and ece initiatives with indigenous communities are temporary and singular in nature (brayboy, 2013). consideration of historical trauma and teaching children in ways that seek to reclaim and recreate an authentic indigenous identity are not infused in the classroom (bombay, matheson & anisman, 2014; brave heart, 2007). as such, the educational experiences of children from indigenous communities with sovereign status reveal a history deserving attention. sovereignty international field experiences with indigenous communities in the united states require a basic understanding of the historical and political foundations of tribal sovereignty and the survival of anishinaabe people. in the united states, there are currently over five hundred indigenous nations with approximately three million people (dunbar-ortiz, 2015). however, the u.s. educational system regularly fails to teach how the united states came to exist and how these sovereign nations were created (dunbar-ortiz, 2015; lomawaima & mccarty, 2006). tribes were moved through colonization into “retained portions of their original land” often called reservations (hansen, 2018; treuer, 2012) and despite the strength of early indigenous governance, the move to reservations changed governance to a new model. tribal nations had jurisdiction over land and tribal members. however, dimensions of those nations fell under separate state and federal mandates (e.g., gaming, taxation, criminal law), compromising the governance and authority of those sovereignties. schools owned and operated by the tribe are also governed by the tribe. clearly stated, “reservations are nations, not just cultural enclaves, landholdings, or communities” (treuer, 2012, p. 87). in this midwestern state, there are 12 native american nations with a historical focus on endurance and renewal (loew, 2013). though legislative policy has shifted across time, the legacy of trauma caused by the effects of colonization and removal continues. intergenerational trauma our study acknowledges the impact of intergenerational trauma and colonization (bombay, matheson & anisman, 2014; brave heart, 2007; smith, 2012). trauma-informed care has become common practice in many 68 global education review 6 (3) school settings (maikoetter, 2011). this approach considers adverse childhood experiences when providing additional behavioral analysis and pedagogical support for students (ko et al., 2008). the impact of colonization, and specifically the residential boarding school experience, has had mental health consequences for current tribal community members (bombay, matheson & anisman, 2014; brave heart, 2007; centers for disease control, n.d.). recent empirical evidence indicates a link between the impact of residential education on early generations of family members and the mental health status for current family members (elias et al., 2012). this link influences classroom learning, where a child’s behavior and inability to attend are frequently misinterpreted as a lack of capacity rather than a result of historical trauma (u.s. department of education, 2015). past and present approaches to address trauma include individual child intervention strategies and seamless engagement to build understanding at a community level. addressing support and care for the child across contexts is required to resolve longer term issues (bornstein, 2013; ko et al., 2008). engaging family members with school and community members provides recognition of the legacy of trauma while identifying appropriate steps to break oppressive cycles. placing teacher candidates in a context where historical trauma continues to play out allows for them to develop greater awareness of trauma’s impact in their future work with children. theoretical framing critical reflection and decolonization although, as smith (2012) suggested, colonization is an ongoing influence expressed through centering our research in western notions of truth, we situate ourselves within decolonizing work and theorize this research using decolonizing perspectives that account for intergenerational trauma. as non-indigenous educators visiting in an anishinaabe community, colonization and the impact of historical trauma framed our understanding and analysis (chilisa, 2012; smith, 2012; swadener & mutua, 2008). smith (2012) called for deconstructing the power inherent in research practices, questioning whose interests were being served. this is a reminder to be wary of reinforcing the notion of interest convergence, specifically where the interests of dominant culture members are being met in the name of supporting the “othered” community (bell, 1987). researchers must consider whose interest is being served and to what end. through recognition of the limitations and potential of cross-cultural teaching, the benefit of shifting the teaching workforce to reflect the cultural and linguistic heritage of the children is highlighted. reflective practice reflective practice allows access to concepts of power and privilege as they connect with insider/outsider identities. through the use of critical reflection, frames of reference are opened, ways of thinking are adapted, and new perspectives are formed (trilokekar & kukar, 2011). reflective practice suggests that learning is more easily applied to future experiences if the learner is able to have a concrete experience, observe and reflect upon the experience, and analyze the process (kolb, 1984). schön (1987) clarified this approach by emphasizing reflection during, after, and across the experiential spectrum. this often means journal writing, reflective notetaking, and providing seminar space during field experiences to “unpack” new knowledge. however, a note of caution is sounded as these practices have been questioned as overused, rendering them less powerful (zeichner, 2008). through overuse, reflection nations within a nation 69 becomes formulaic and superficial. in recent scholarly work, the use of traditional reflection has taken a post-modern turn (mcardle & ryan, 2017). for example, teacher educators are looking to further reflection and offer variations of the practice, including transformative theatre and extended time to reflect (eriksen, larsen, & leming, 2015; mcgarr & moody, 2010). given the current critique and modifications of reflective practice, we found a multilayered reflective process before, during, and after the short-term field experience useful to acknowledge the self in context. the four teacher candidates engaged in the experience as participants, researchers, authors, and presenters. this builds on traditional approaches to reflection by adding an iterative layer. the process required (a) preparation for, engagement in, and reflection on fieldwork; (b) revisiting and discussing the reflections through coding and analysis; (c) writing about the discussion of the reflection; and (d) sharing insights through presentations with other teacher candidates and researchers at conferences. placing the self in reflective practice in this research we had different roles but sought “to map an intermediate space we can’t quite define yet, a borderland between passion and intellect, analysis and subjectivity, ethnography and autobiography, art and life” (behar, 1996, p. 174). our observations, interpretations, and relationships created images unique to our audience, making what we interpret, what we have access to, and who has access to our interpretations relevant. we were moving beyond our comfort zone, willing to struggle together in our research and writing, which began by recognizing ourselves as settlers and the varying identity groups within the settler role (historical immigrants, enslaved, new immigrants, refugees, etc.). this provided an important foundation for our work, helping us to avoid “settler innocence” and opening a space for critical sharing (tuck & yang, 2012). in our study, we were in a position of power, coming to the community from the university, but as pre-service teachers, we were also learners unfamiliar with the community roles and rules. we all identified as white women between the ages of 21 and 51. the depth and breadth of relationships among teacher candidates and faculty at um and also between the um community and lakeland provided the foundation to support us in moving beyond a more superficial short-term field experience. at the time of the study, the four pre-service teachers had finished their final semester of classes after spending two years together in a cohort of 30 students and were preparing to complete student teaching in the fall. the motivation to go on the trip ranged from wanting to experience the topic of difference rather than just read about difference, desiring involvement in other undergraduate research projects, and expressing a childhood connection to anishinaabe communities. the um ece program centered issues of equity using critical and ecological theories that honor the influence of race, language, culture, class, and ability. in addition, faculty in the um community and lakeland community college had been working together over the past four years on articulation between the two institutions supporting lakeland students in pursuit of a bachelor’s degree in ece. the faculty mentor also wrote and presented with anishinaabe colleagues on ece policy and advocacy across cultures (heimer, nayquonabe & sullivan, 2017). the writing relationship grew out of a history of 20 years, as the faculty mentor had taught in the lakeland community after student teaching in new mexico in the tohono o’odham nation (stachowski & mahan, 1998). 70 global education review 6 (3) as researchers, we held power in many situations, including recounting experiences and creating relationships with children, families, and staff in the anishinaabe community. for this work, the pre-service teachers reflected through journal entries while in the field, reviewed these journals post-experience, presented insights to each other, and then continued to critique and reflect as we wrote together. our inexperience in participatory research made us vulnerable through our observations. this vulnerability allowed us to connect more deeply. our theory and method blended based on the history across communities, intention in coursework, and focus on reflective practice. methods anishinaabe community field experience overview this study is part of a larger collaborative effort between um and the lakeland anishinaabe community that has been ongoing for six years. this field experience was temporary and limited, but the coursework, preparation, and cross-context experience at the college and prek-12 levels within the anishinaabe community provided immersive reflective opportunities. while the goal at the center of the larger project is to create a more accessible pathway for anishinaabe community members to complete degrees and licensing credentials in order to stay in the community and teach, the current study focuses on the cross-cultural aspects of the work as experienced by pre-service teachers who were not anishinaabe. we use pseudonyms for people, places, and agencies in our research. the choice of the term anishinaabe is intentional as it includes many tribes within the united states and canada. through the use of a more global term, we seek to protect the privacy of the tribe. it is notable that this cross-cultural field study was supported through an international program at um’s global studies center, especially given that travel was within the borders of the state. however, the universitylevel policy supported and acknowledged the anishinaabe placement as international. given the shorter duration and local nature, it was listed as a travel study field experience, included with international travel to ecuador, sweden, jamaica, and other nations. coursework in the ece program the pre-service teachers were enrolled as ece undergraduate majors in the um dual licensure program (birth to grade 3 and special education). in multiple ece classes, concepts regarding identity, power, oppression, privilege, race, and historical trauma were explored through readings, discussion, current events, guest speakers, and formal assignments. this field experience working in an anishinaabe community was not required and fell between the fifth and sixth semesters of study. therefore, we had completed seven field studies and two semesters of the identity, culture, and social justice in education seminar prior to the lakeland anishinaabe cross-cultural field placement. the community service project in the seminar explored issues of homelessness, poverty, incarceration, and abuse by requiring research of specific agencies and their support structures. the self-interview was a key assignment spanning twelve months. the students responded to prompts on race, culture, and identity and eleven months later, returned to these interview answers to further reflect on their understanding of self in a context including power, privilege, and oppression as this relates to future teaching. in the working with families in a diverse society class, we used ecological theory to map the barriers and supports in our lives and the lives of others. nations within a nation 71 during the field experience in the lakeland community, we were able to use a renewed understanding of ecological theory to consider possible barriers and supports for those in the community. the realization that there were stages to racial identity development was powerful for us. helms’ (1990) six-stage model, emphasizing that there is no one way to move through the stages, offered a way to think about our racial privilege, allowing us to recognize ways to label and grapple with racial privilege and oppression before confronting colonization. we were able to place ourselves and consider our journey in racial terms. similarly, tatum’s (2003) discussion regarding self-chosen segregation and racial community building granted understanding of healthy racial identity development. the coursework and related field experiences provided us with a strong foundation for this research and writing. lakeland community schools the cross-cultural field placement included pre-trip meetings, the introduction to anishinaabe culture course at the lakeland tribal community college with a faculty elder, field placements in prek-3rd grade classrooms in the prek-12 lakeland community school, cultural events, and post-trip monthly meetings. the teacher candidates entered the um ece program in january of 2014, traveled to lakeland in spring 2016 for three weeks, and continued to meet with the faculty mentor postgraduation to write and prepare for a presentation in spring 2018. the racial demographic information for the lakeland community was 20% white, 75% american indian, and 5% two or more races contrasting with um’s 2018 reported statistics of 1% american indian, 2% asian, 5% african american, 6% hispanic, 1% southeast asian, and 84% white. by temporarily shifting our home context, we were required to experience the impact of the social construction of race from a new angle, gaining insight as racial beings. though still members of a dominant culture, we were living and working in a new context with a dramatically different racial demographic. the teacher candidates lived together in a renovated boarding house within the borders of the community, approximately 300 miles from campus, yet three miles from all tribal school campuses. the owner of the home lived on site and had children who attended one of the schools where they were working. the teacher candidates enrolled in one lakeland college course and spent 50% of their time with faculty and students at the tribal college. the prek-12 anishinaabe community school was built in phases through the 1980s and 1990s. it has an open concept with natural light streaming through skylights, children’s artwork displayed in hallways and on lockers, and murals depicting recent pow-wow events. tribally owned and operated, it was created to address the need for culturally appropriate education for children living in the community as opposed to bussing to the closest district school 14 miles away. our experiences included breakfast with children and staff, walking to school wednesdays along school trails, and various events. we were each placed in a different classroom to work with either a prek, 1st, or 2nd grade teacher. we also observed in a language immersion school where the young students were taught solely in their heritage language through 4th grade. faculty at both schools met with us and on the first day, an administrator of the prek-12 school (who was also a tribal member) met with our group to provide an overview of sovereignty, the community’s history, its traditions, trauma, and governance. the cohort of students who participated during the first year of the lakeland field 72 global education review 6 (3) experience was comprised of the four teacher candidates. we were involved in two formal settings: the lakeland college and the lakeland community prek-12 school. our time in the community spanned three weeks, including work in early elementary classrooms, participation on field trips, in the community attending special events and at the college learning with a faculty member. our work spanned 40 hours per week and was equally split between our prek-12 work and our college course. the teacher candidates earned one credit at the um which is the equivalent of 50 hours of field experience. introduction to anishinaabe culture class teacher candidates were enrolled in a threecredit introduction to anishinaabe culture course at lakeland community college along with one local anishinaabe student from lakeland, mindy. the instructor, who was anishinaabe and had been the prek-12 schools’ principal when the faculty mentor was teaching at the school, provided a rich background of culture and traditions (treuer, 2012; densmore & archabal, 1979). the student, mindy, also provided critical insight throughout the course. in addition to course readings and discussions, we crafted and spoke the language, learned basic vocabulary, visited community sites, foraged for wild foods, and participated in ceremonies. these opportunities allowed us to experience anishinaabe culture and history firsthand from the elder. course content included an overview of community traditions and ceremonies including discussion of the use of tobacco, blessing of food, and religious ceremonies. we also discussed the history of boarding schools and the impact on current education systems. we participated in, and observed a variety of ceremonies, including feasts, an eagle feather ceremony, multiple graduations, a school powwow, a red-willow ceremony, and picking fiddlehead ferns, wild onions, and wintergreen. prek-12 classroom and community experiences when we arrived at lakeland, we toured the community with the faculty mentor and were each assigned a cooperating teacher in separate classrooms ranging from prek to third grade. at the lakeland prek-12 community school, we met with a tribal school administrator, who provided an overview of sovereignty and governance, the history of the community and traditions, funding, and the influence of historical trauma. time in the classroom included (a) writing and teaching lessons, (b) helping with lesson preparation and paperwork for assessments, (c) addressing behavior needs of children, and (d) packing up the classrooms for the year. we also participated in multiple field trips, including the nearby island community, local history museum, and a sacred river setting. we acknowledged the impact of our temporary presence in the community, and though we brought gifts for the classrooms, we recognized the potential damage that can be caused by short-term visitors. by creating an annual experience for preservice teachers at um, a sense of stability is gained in the relationship at lakeland and for the children. data collection and analysis ethnographic in nature, this qualitative case study focused on our reflective insights (norris, sawyer & lund, 2012; stake, 1995). throughout the process of creating, experiencing, and reflecting on the cross-cultural field placement, we focused on our research question: how does a cross-cultural field experience affect preservice teachers’ understanding of self in relation to cross-cultural teaching? the data were the reflective passages and faculty feedback from our daily reflections, posted individually nations within a nation 73 online throughout the three-week experience. photos were also used to trigger memories of interactions and illustrate connection or disconnection throughout the experiences. journals were not graded, but comments were made on a website update page to encourage pre-service teachers to question assumptions and dig deeply into differences (e.g., school governance structure, cultural norms as played out in the classroom). approximately 12 journal entries per student (48 entries total) were coded. each of the four field study teacher candidates participated in the data collection, coding, and analysis process. assigned codes were applied initially including tourist, relevance, and barriers (miles, huberman & saldaña, 2013; strauss & corbin, 2014). these were defined as times pre-service teachers felt like tourists, saw connected relevance between a lakeland experience with children and future early education work, and when barriers were perceived in relation to understanding culture, children, or families. once we coded our own reflections, we read across our own and the reflections of others, and made comments on intersections and insights within the work. with co-researchers, we crosschecked these emergent codes against the data. at length, insights were compiled and reviewed for intersections. the field experience, journaling, coding, analyzing, discussing, and writing were integral aspects of the methodology, taking place over the course of nine months of monthly meetings. in this process, the faculty mentor facilitated data analysis with the teacher candidates. a draft manuscript was read by the lakeland prek-12 community school administrator, the president of the lakeland college board of regents, and the ece faculty member at the college; two of these three participants are enrolled members of the tribe. findings comfort zones from the beginning, the pre-service teachers felt this field experience was different. naming the difference and shift of power was tricky. when we first began our experience, i was like, wow this is such an aha for me, i’m finally on the inside of the “fishbowl” instead of the outside! […] but then i took a step back and realized that i was still feeling the effects of white privilege (lauren, may 20, 2016). we are here to learn, make mistakes, go out of our comfort zone, and try new things! i’m trying to embrace this experience as much as possible, even if i have to feel “uncomfortable” at times! (courtney, may 18, 2016) each student grappled with the shift from insider to outsider in her own way while still recognizing her “temporary” otherness. the ability to regulate was supported by the fact they all came back to the same rental house within the lakeland community where they stayed together. they were living in the community, yet they were separate, coming together daily over the course of three weeks to decompress. there are aspects of bonding with other participants in a study abroad that can become detrimental if left unchecked, but the need to feel understood and connected with those experiencing similar struggles can be comforting (tatum, 2003). this initial impact of seeing self as “other” jolted them into the disintegration stage of a racial experience as they were confronted with the segregation of the anishinaabe community from the surrounding communities (thomas, 2011). as students continued to recognize their position, they realized the risk and discomfort they had chosen. it is easy to be myself and put down all of my guards when i am with the people who know me 74 global education review 6 (3) best and share my background, ideas, and values. i don’t have to worry about being under scrutiny and i can ask questions without worrying about offending anyone. it made me think about the self-interview (on race for the identity, culture and sj seminar) we did and how i realized that i spend almost all of my time with people who have the same background and culture as me. i’m not used to being outside of my comfort zone (lynell, may 31, 2016). these insights came up later in our postexperience discussion and reflections. preservice teachers shared that they tend to surround themselves with those who share their backgrounds, ideas, values, etc. on a daily basis, and asked how they could continuously reflect on the discomfort once back in their home settings. pre-service teachers suggested that the self-interview project from the identity, culture and social justice class forced them to look at “self” through a different lens and provided impetus to consider the cross-cultural trip. they acknowledged the privilege and ease of “sticking with what we know.” they each struggled with their own insider/outsider “fishbowl” experience, and their shift—albeit temporary— from insider to outsider. they realized there is effort required when one is seen as unique by the dominant culture. this plays out as they considered new ways of thinking through the strengths and deficits of their new context. strengths versus deficits pre-service teachers had a great deal of “practice” through coursework and seven other field placements to use a “strengths-based” approach rather than defaulting to deficit assumptions (solorzano & yosso, 2001). the field experience provided concrete examples of strengths-based thinking that made their previously abstract understanding more relevant. these insights were most available through interaction with their “translators,” consisting of the lakeland college instructor, lakeland student, and community school administration. i was almost brought to tears by how much the teachers, families and children at this school care about reviving language and culture. i have never felt more a sense of community anywhere and you can feel their passion when they talk. it makes me joyful for the children that they are growing up in an environment that supports their culture and encourages them to interact with it deeply (lauren, may 23, 2016). we took strawberries from the feast to eat later and because the food from the feast was blessed, we couldn’t just throw the strawberry tops in the garbage – they either had to be buried, burned, or put in flowing water. on our way back from dinner, we stopped at the river and dumped our cup of strawberry tops in. at first, i thought it wouldn’t be that important or interesting, but actually when we did it, it felt really powerful and it was a really great experience. i can’t explain how or why it felt that way, but i think following tradition and following through with what we had learned felt good (paige, may 17, 2016). pre-service teachers recognized their inability to “join” the community but wanted to connect in meaningful ways. the ability to engage with revitalization and pride as indigenous people is limited as the pre-service teachers are outsiders, but they were able to connect to the passion. though temporary, this offers an opportunity for students to relate to the tension of a borderland experience. anzaldua (2012) uses the term borderland when speaking of groups of people who live on an invisible border and have learned to live in both cultural worlds. abiding by the cultural rules of both worlds is challenging. the um pre-service teachers only had a glimpse at this challenge but expressed a deeper awareness of the desire for nations within a nation 75 community members to preserve the heritage, culture, and tradition. even with the strengths of the community acknowledged, the historical legacy of trauma influenced how the students framed their experience. there was a desire to learn more about trauma and a willingness to see how the community was building traditional solutions to the ills of colonization. it makes me really aware that trauma informed care is important and being culturally sensitive is important and all the considerations that i’ve learned in the program really do need to be taken seriously (courtney, may 26, 2016). just today, i overheard a child mention to the teacher that she was going to visit her dad in jail over the weekend. one of her classmates asked her, “has he been in jail since you were one like my dad?” wow – that’s pretty tough to hear; jail becomes a “normal” thing to have happen in one’s life (lynell, may 25, 2016). in this section pre-service teachers are applying earlier structures of theory (e.g., racial identity development) to better understand their reactions (thomas, 2011). they recognize the inability to “have it all figured out” or the idea that biases are absolved through seemingly supportive actions. this stage of pseudoindependence was short lived as they realized the depth, breadth, and fluid nature of power. with consideration of trauma, the role of the settler became apparent. i felt overwhelmed with all i had learned and saw....it was overwhelming to know that this whole community (and others like it) are so affected by historical trauma issues and it’s a long road of healing and working through those issues (paige, may 16, 2016). it felt uncomfortable for me for this white guy to be telling the kids about their own culture and history and, in a sense, glorifying what the europeans brought to america (paige, may 25, 2016). it was also really shocking to me how there was a traditional native american burial ground just feet from a marina with multi-million dollar yachts in it. that disparity definitely shows how the u.s. saw the island as valuable property and would not allow anyone to stay on or make it a reservation (lauren, may 26, 2016). the trip referred to a popular vacation spot where there are land battles and the only way the original inhabitants can use the land is to lease it. this field trip within the cross-cultural experience brought the settler experience front and center as vacation property illuminated the ways new landowners were complicit in the colonizing process. teacher candidates express frustration with the inaccuracy of historical accounts and yet do not explicitly make the connection to their presence in the community. the excerpts in this section illustrate the dilemma faced by pre-service teachers: how to acknowledge the trauma of the past as it survives in hurtful ways today and at the same time honor the “good feelings” and joy for the cultural and linguistic richness. while the reflections themselves trace beginning understanding of the settler mentality, it was the process of coding, analysis, and discussion that reveals the tenacity of the settler identity. the purpose of the experience became clear; it was not a community service project. they were not there as saviors to “recompense the sins of the father” (tuck & yang, 2012). as they were troubled by their initial insights, they indicate a desire to honor the past, acknowledge the “long road” of trauma, and build on cultural strengths to offer new ways of being together, advocating for and teaching communities similar to and different from their lived experiences (brave heart, 2007). it was through the discussion together 76 global education review 6 (3) and listening to peers in the community that teacher candidates were able to internalize the experience. we spent the first two hours asking questions and discussing traditions and spirituality. i am glad mindy (lakeland anishinaabe student) is in the class with us because she is able to give us the perspective of a young student and young adult. she does not sugarcoat the realities that the young people face and i appreciate her honesty (lynell, may 16, 2016). the appreciation for direct communication provides one way the pre-service teachers acknowledged the need for translation. mindy, as a teacher candidate, provided the connection at the border for a more complete understanding of the lived experience at lakeland. she was able to provide her experience as it related to their interpretations. building on the notion of “borderlands,” we shift across the borders of time and consider the impact of colonizing past, present, and future by centering the strength of indigenous commitment to education and tradition. the cultural role of education students entered the lakeland community as the school year was ending and attended graduation ceremonies offering multiple opportunities to reflect on the role of education in the community. the pre-service teachers struggled with the messages they were receiving: they noted a stark contrast between the warmth and sense of community and the harsh message of educational achievement. take a public-school assembly: everyone files in by class and they are all packed in like sardines and every student is expected to sit by their class. at this powwow, kids were up moving around, going up to dance, going to get a drink of water, running around […] it’s just so interesting comparing a tribal school to a public school! (courtney, may 20, 2016) the seats filled up fast and there were people standing to the sides and in the back. it was really cool to see what a sense of community was present and how everyone came out to congratulate and celebrate the graduates (paige, may 19, 2016). the teacher candidates share that the notion of freedom was unfamiliar to them in a school setting and sought to understand the “why” behind it. their comments show both anxiety and admiration for the community. as we interacted and engaged more, they learned about the daily challenges in the community and desired a better understanding of the impact of trauma. i feel like we touch a lot on other factors that make up the whole child […] not just academics. it is interesting how much that comes up (lauren, may 20, 2016). staff understand that students may be living in the shelter, at the casino, with other family members, etc…and they have a responsibility to care for the students just as much as they do to educate them (lynell, may 16, 2016). these quotations provide evidence of the emotion experienced as preservice teachers struggle to make sense of the impact of colonization in their classrooms. the following quotation offers insight into how the pre-service teachers were engaging with, and learning from, community members. the idea of reaching educational milestones to lessen the impact of historical trauma surfaced. for me, the overwhelming message that i heard throughout the ceremony was how significant graduating from college was to the community nations within a nation 77 and the culture. the student receiving the highest honor was a young lady, majoring in early childhood education. she talked about how she is going to take her education and use it to better the children in her community, enriching their lives, encouraging them to embrace their anishinaabe culture and to become an example in the community (lauren, may 19, 2016). higher education is presented as “hope.” even though achievement is through eurocentric institutions, the reclaiming and cultural revitalizing process is enhanced by importing required degrees for teaching (best, dunlap, fredericks, & nelson, 2013). the language immersion school is a powerful example of supporting education as central to success while encouraging connection to the history of the people (smith, 2012). graduation messages included the importance of education for survival, leading to pre-service teachers’ own reflection regarding higher education as it relates to access, or barriers to that access, in terms of race, poverty, and historical trauma. the history of education in this community is fraught with violence and assimilation (treuer, 2012). it is understandable that success through culturally and linguistically relevant programs is celebrated. the pre-service teachers’ awareness of historical legacy emerged as they engaged with community members across multiple contexts. discussion “people often assume that exposure to diverse groups will promote cultural competence and intercultural understanding. however, exposure alone does not mean teachers will understand how their emotional actions and reactions are grounded in social and cultural worlds” (madrid et al., 2016, p. 348). in what ways did a cross-cultural field experience affect pre-service teachers’ understanding of self in relation to crosscultural teaching? our findings revealed that pre-service teachers demonstrated (a) a deeper, internalized understanding of the impact of trauma on children and families, (b) an understanding of historical legacy and colonization beyond a false history, and (c) continued reflection and application of this experience in their lives today. these insights mirror research conducted with pre-service teachers in international settings who experienced racism, recognized the need for risk taking, and shifted between insider and outsider status (trilokekar & kukar, 2011). in our work, pre-service teachers experienced a way to perceive the ongoing effects of historical trauma and the current causes of today’s wounds and abuses. they struggled to face the idea that trauma is not “all about me.” instead, they could experience their perceptions and understandings of what they were witnessing without minimizing, othering, over-identifying through settler nativism, or explaining away through “settler moves to innocence” (tuck & yang, 2012). we suggest this deepened insight comes from the creation of a foundation of context and practice before the literal journey (rodriquez, 2011). the dialogic journaling and reflection before, during, and after keeps the experience from becoming easily summarized and, therefore, packed away like a souvenir (jay et al., 2009). courage and vulnerability were needed to fully engage in the cross-cultural experience. therefore, the experience should be made available to all preservice teachers seeking an understanding of history and those dedicated to serving all children. the um anishinaabe field experience has continued and teacher candidates who identify in categories other than dominant groups have joined. this offers potential to further explore varied understandings of settler identities. 78 global education review 6 (3) the support and patience of the members of the anishinaabe community were paramount as we struggled to recognize, own, and process the reality of our nation’s history in today’s classrooms. we were reminded of our intention to avoid the dangers of interest convergence, or continuing to serve the interests of the dominant culture. cross-cultural field work supports recommendations from tribal communities regarding the school environment for indigenous youth that call for (a) cultural competence training, (b) information for access and equity awareness, (c) appropriate identification for students with special needs versus overidentification, and (d) curriculum and pedagogy that recognizes culture, tradition and language, among other recommendations (best, dunlap, fredericks, & nelson, 2013; u.s. department of education, 2015). teacher educators and early childhood educators are complicit in perpetuating a false history if we fail to acknowledge the generational impact of erasure and segregation. this is powerful in terms of the aims of critical theory: to stay present with power issues, to continue to build understanding with others across time, and to know that we are always immersed in this struggle. the nature of visiting a nation within a nation and unpacking the policy, law, and governance of such a phenomenon as it relates to early education has relevance and importance. there is a deepened understanding that schools are an extension of the community; therefore, we need to be a part of the community, not just a part of the educational institution. there are boundaries and distinct goals for the school and the home but there should be an intertwining with the child at the center. our program was short; therefore, it could be framed as superficial. in more deeply reflecting on the experiences, we came to realize connections were made before, during, and after the experience. it was in the iterative process, including the writing and presenting of this research, that pre-service teachers came to realize the meaning of a changing sense of self. the work continues as these new educators bring deepened insights regarding colonization and historical trauma back to their communities. implications “american history is longer, larger, more various, more beautiful, and more terrible than anything anyone has ever said about it” (baldwin, 1963, p.44). this research included the voices and perspectives of faculty and student participants at the um, but the glaring absences are the voices of the anishinaabe community. as white participants, we are unable to center indigenous knowledge (smith, 2012). even though the larger research project included duoethnography recounting the intersection of our lived experiences across cultures, more work to center ontological approaches that honor indigenous knowledge must be considered. partnerships with indigenous communities can be too brief and superficial, with researchers following funding sources to new communities. this suggests a dangerous and continued pattern of colonization. leaders in each community must be committed to keeping the pain and promise at the center so that as the researchers and participants change, the communication across contexts remains. in 1972, the indian education act created policy “for the establishment and operation of exemplary and innovative educational programs and centers, involving new educational approaches, methods, and techniques designed to enrich programs of elementary and secondary education for indian children (p. 340). our research serves as a reminder to acknowledge the intersection of home and school contexts by shifting the teaching workforce to more accurately reflect the nations within a nation 79 varied cultural and linguistic lives of children in classrooms. we hope we have raised awareness of what is and is not possible in a short-term crosscultural field experience with an indigenous community. we call for ongoing discussion through forums and blogs for pre-service teachers to connect across institutions and share insights and struggles regarding international experiences. immersing ourselves requires a deeper iterative process and one in which we listen, reflect, and share in an ongoing cycle. teachers must act with greater political clarity about whose interests are served by their daily actions. they may not be able to change some aspects of the situation at present, but at least they will be aware of what is happening (zeichner, 2008, p.8). our research highlights an imperfect understanding and interpretation of the lived experience of a shared colonizing history. these new teachers enter their classrooms fresh from this experience, more comfortable with the discomfort that is necessary to connect with distant others—some within our own borders. acknowledgements cross-cultural work requires commitment and patience, as well as the support of students, staff, and administrators in all institutions. success depends on reciprocity toward mutually beneficial outcomes. to that end, we humbly thank the community members of the lakeland anishinaabe community. the time and wisdom shared by the staff, children, and families was a gift. we hope that by sharing these personal stories, our gratitude is clear. we thank the reviewers of this special edition for their insightful comments and suggestions. we are indebted to dr. laura baecher for her expertise, patience, and graceful support in the revision process. references anzaldua, g. 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(2008). a critical analysis of reflection as a goal for teacher education. education & society, 29(103), 1-14. retrieved from http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s010173302008000200012 about the authors lucinda heimer, ph.d., is associate professor and program coordinator of the early childhood/special education dual licensure program at the university of wisconsin—whitewater. dr. heimer has published on topics including interdisciplinary curriculum and collaboration in the journal of early childhood teacher education, global studies of childhood, and early years as well as chapters in multiple edited texts. she has engaged and presented on critical theory, duoethnography and decolonizing methodologies to illuminate practicing and future teacher perspectives regarding identity, race and social justice in early education specifically working with indigenous communities. she has taught undergraduate and graduate courses, supervised students in urban, rural and suburban school districts in pre-k through 3rd grade settings, worked as a classroom teacher and early childhood center director. lynell caya is an early childhood special education teacher at bristol elementary school in bristol, wisconsin. she co-created and teaches an inclusive three-year-old preschool program, a program designed for children with and without disabilities to learn from and form relationships with their peers. she also co-teaches in a 4-year-old kindergarten classroom. lynell received her bachelor’s of science degree in early childhood education, dual licensure, from the university of wisconsin—whitewater. paige lancaster (bse in early childhood education with dual licenses in early childhood education and special education) currently works as an early interventionist for walworth county public health in wisconsin. previous experience includes early intervention work in milwaukee county, wisconsin and teaching with head start. lauren saxon (bse in early childhood education with dual licenses in early childhood education and special education) is a kindergarten teacher in a rural community. she enjoys working with families from all walks of life and being an advocate for them. when she’s not teaching, she loves reading a good mystery and being outdoors. http://sites.ed.gov/whiaiane/ http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0101-73302008000200012 http://dx.doi.org/10.1590/s0101-73302008000200012 nations within a nation 83 courtney wildman (bse in early childhood education with dual licenses in early childhood education and special education) is in her 4th year teaching currently at a public title i school in racine, wisconsin. she serves on the school trauma committee, where they will begin implementing trauma-informed practices. she is passionate about having a therapy dog that is integrated into the classroom to help with trauma, social-emotional learning, reading, and positive classroom climate. 40 global education review 7 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2020). policies, impacts, and global issues. [review of the book privatization and the education of marginalized children edited by bekisizwe s. ndimande & christopher lubienski]. global education review, 7 (3). 40-41. book review policies, impacts, and global issues “privatization and the education of marginalized children” edited by bekisizwe s. ndimande & christopher lubienski by eric martone bekisizwe s. ndimande and christopher lubienski’s edited collection, privatization and the education of marginalized children, explores how the issue of markets in education impacts the level of educational opportunities available for disadvantaged children around the world. the collection is composed of ten chapters divided into three parts. part i, “conceptual and theoretical evidence,” discusses the arguments underlying market-oriented education reforms. it opens with lubienski and ndimande’s chapter, “the politics of market mechanisms in education,” which serves as an introduction to the book. the authors argue that while “statesponsored education has the theoretical potential to create opportunity,” all too often, education policies “entrench inequalities through inequitable systems of schooling” (3). education policies often reflect underlying social and political forces. consequently, the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries have seen an increase of such policies that both encourage the privatization of education and enhanced access to quality education. by exploring these policies and their implications, the editors hope the volume will “shed light on what is sometimes a contradiction, but also perhaps a creative tension, between the individualism and uneven advantages often manifested in markets in other sectors, and the desire to provide equitable educational opportunities for all, and especially for disadvantaged children, which is reflected in the design of mass educational systems” (5). while the introduction of market principles and privatization to the education sector has been intended to improve education for all students, research shows that in the long term, it has the potential to perpetuate existing social inequalities. pauline lipman’s “economic crisis, charter school expansion, and coercive 41 global education review 7 (3) neoliberalism in the u.s.” continues the discussion, providing an examination of chicago to explore the acceleration of market-driven restructuring efforts in the educator sector with the united states. chapter three present ee-seul yoon’s “disadvantaged youth’s imagined futures and school choice: a critical sociophenomenological approach,” which examines the trend of school choice in vancouver, canada. the section concludes with alvaro moreira hypolito’s “managerialism, schools, and teachers’ work: education reforms in brazil.” part ii collects chapters addressing market-oriented reforms as “emerging market models.” each chapter illuminates emerging market approaches in different countries and contexts used to develop education markets. the section begins with keith lewin’s “making rights realities: does privatizing educational services for the poor make sense?” lewin surveys increased interest among forprofit providers of educational services in creating greater access to basic education in several developing asian and african countries. rita verma’s “cultural politics, neoliberal markets, and the privatization of the urban ‘other’: educating india’s children of poverty” continues the discussion. closing this section is patricia burch’s “equal scrutiny: the promise of digital education in disadvantaged communities and how markets corrupt this potential.” burch analyzes the growing popularity of digital education in k-12 public education and the commercial interests driving it. part iii, “established market models,” addresses the role of education markets. consequently, this section examines market mechanisms in education in countries and contexts that have established histories of state administration of public education. javier gonzalez’s “putting social rights at risk: assessing the impact of education market reforms in chile” launches part iii. this section continues with joel austin windle’s “the burdens of marketized schooling in australia: cherry picking, poaching, and gaming the curriculum.” completing part iii is ndimande amd lubienski’s “the influence of neoliberalism in south africa and u.s. education reform: desegregation, choice, and inequalities.” targeted toward researchers and students of education-focused public policy, sociology, and international economics, privatization and the education of marginalized children also reveals the larger issues pertaining to social exclusion and segregation in the communities in which these schools are located. presenting cases and data from nearly every continent, the book provides a well-researched and comprehensive contribution to overlapping studies in these fields. “privatization and the education of marginalized children: policies, impacts, and global issues.” edited by bekisizwe s. ndimande & christopher lubienski. new york: routledge, 2017. isbn: 978-1138636620 about the editors bekisizwe s. ndimande is associate professor of curriculum and instruction in the department of interdisciplinary learning and teaching and faculty associate in the african american studies program at the university of texas at san antonio. christopher lubienski is professor of education policy at indiana university, a fellow with the national education policy center at the university of colorado and sir walter murdoch visiting professor at murdoch university in western australia. about the reviewer eric martone, ph.d., is interim dean of the school of education and associate professor of history/social studies education at mercy college in new york. nature, nurture and the space between – lessons from froebel for the early years 51 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: flemig, sophie, & mcnair, lynn. (2022). nature, nurture and the space between: lessons from froebel for the early years. global education review, 9 (2), 51-66. nature, nurture and the space between: lessons from froebel for the early years sophie flemig moray house school of education university of edinburgh (uk) lynn mcnair moray house school of education university of edinburgh (uk) abstract in this article, we engage with a question that has occupied the professional, policy, and popular discourse on education and socialization: are a child’s development potential and outcomes contingent on innate abilities (“nature”) or environment (“nurture”) (plomin, defries, & fulker, 1988; stiles, 2011; tabery, 2014; marley-payne, 2021)? we explore what a froebelian perspective can add to this question and how it can be translated into an early years context, focusing on its relevance for policy-making, supporting practitioners, and children’s rights. there is ample neuroscientific evidence (e.g., miller and jones, 2014) that it never was a clear-cut dichotomy; both forces interact, with the role of the adult as a key moderating variable between the two. for educators, the question thus becomes what these insights mean for our role in supporting child wellbeing and development. we consider the question through a froebelian lens, starting with an analysis of froebel’s own writings and the assemblages of his pedagogy to show the relevance of his approach in supporting practitioners in their role as mediators of the nature/nurture balance. the theoretical discussion is contextualized in contemporary scottish early years policy and practice, highlighting untapped potential in an environment receptive to froebelian ideals. we offer three propositions for how the engagement with froebel’s vision can guide those working in the early years, and how we frame their interaction with children’s ecosystem. in conclusion, we argue for a more nuanced engagement with the nature/nurture debate, in particular in early years policy: rather than focusing on a false dichotomy of nature versus nurture, the article calls for a froebelian reframing of our perspective on the early years. keywords froebel, early childhood education, environmental influences, child development, scotland, educational reform 1. introduction we seek to engage with a question that has occupied the professional, policy, and popular discourse on education and socialization, namely whether a child’s development potential and outcomes are contingent on innate abilities (“nature”) or environment (“nurture”) (see, for instance, plomin, defries, & fulker, 1988; stiles, 2011; tabery, 2014; marley-payne, 2021). our contribution will be to explore what a froebelian perspective can add to this question and its application to the early years context, focusing on the continued relevance of a nuanced treatment of the nature/nurture interaction for policy-makers, practitioners, and children’s rights. 52 global education review 8 (1) while it has been long disproven that there is a clear-cut and mutually exclusive duality between nature and nurture (for an overview, see tabery 2014), new scientific advances emerging from the field of epigenetics (e.g., rutter, 2002; miller and jones, 2014) have more recently been offering evidence for the complexity of the interaction between nature and nurture and the difficulty of mediating their effects for both practitioners and policy makers. for educators, the key question thus becomes what these insights mean for their role in supporting child wellbeing and development. we consider the question through a froebelian lens, starting with an analysis of froebel’s own writings and the work of educators whom he inspired to show the relevance of his pedagogical approach to support practitioners and policymakers in mediating the nature/nurture balance. this is particularly remarkable since the most substantial scientific advances in the debate – based on pathbreaking neuroscientific and genetic insights – postdate froebel’s death by almost two centuries. the following section frames the question, contextualizing its relevance and implications for practitioners, while section 3 presents a critical discussion of froebel’s own writings as well as those of later froebelian scholars. in turn, section 4 links this theoretical discussion with current scottish early years policy and practice, highlighting untapped potential in an environment in principle receptive to froebelian ideals. from an applied perspective, section 5 presents four propositions for how the engagement with froebel’s vision can guide those working in the early years, and whom we count as belonging to this group. finally, section 6 briefly summarizes the conclusions and calls for a new direction of travel for early years policy: rather than narrowly focusing on a false dichotomy of nature versus nurture, the paper calls for a froebelian reframing of our perspective on the early years. 2. the question: relevance and context 2.1 nature v nurture – what matters and why? discussions about what shapes us as individuals, our personality and character, but, importantly, also our so-called “life chances,” have been a longstanding feature of human inquiry. emblematic of many new directions, including froebelian pedagogy, first references to the nature versus nurture debate date back to the 19th century; thus, bynum (2002) credits sir francis galton with its inception in 1869. however, human curiosity about the forces that shape who we are goes further back in history: earliest views in ancient greece up to the middle ages saw internal forces (the so-called humors) as the determinants of human behavior (grant, 2002) while the philosophers of the enlightenment, such as locke and rosseau, considered environmental factors, in particular education, as shaping an otherwise “pure” human child, thus coining the proverbial “blank slate” view of early childhood development (“tabula rasa”; duschinsky, 2012). as with many debates presented in dichotomous terms, the truth lies somewhere in between, and we will chart some of the most recent insights in the following sections. but is the nature/nurture question still relevant to our current thinking around childhood and education? we argue it is, for three reasons: 1) making policy work: it is very clear by now that nature versus nurture is a false dichotomy; there are significant interaction effects. yet, as rutter (2002:1) points out, the dichotomy has come with “much misleading scientific evangelism and journalistic hype” leading to “the twin dangers of destructive parental support for literacy development 53 cynicism and gullible expectation”. policymakers are increasingly proclaiming, based on scientific findings on child development, that the early years provide opportunities for early intervention, with the goal of setting a foundation for lifelong wellbeing (see for instance, secretary of state for health and social care, 2021). however, the concept of early intervention and its translation into policy is not uncontroversial; gillies, edwards, and horsley (2017) highlight the neoliberal ideology underlying this use of the nature versus nurture debate and how early intervention policies have perpetuated inequalities based on race, gender, and class. similarly, featherstone, morris, and white (2014) argue for a shift from early intervention policies to asset-based, wholistic family support approaches. the use and misuse of recent insights around the nature versus nurture debate therefore calls for a deeply childcentered understanding of the factors that influence life outcomes and the levers that can improve them – one that, we argue, froebelian early years practice can provide. with this article, we are therefore aiming to contribute to a more differentiated debate about what findings mean for policy and practice from a froebelian perspective. 2) supporting “practitioners”: in a world where ever higher expectations are placed onto educators, an understanding of the contributions of, and interplay between, nature and nurture can not only help to guide practitioners on their journey; it also helps us to look at a child’s wellbeing and potential in a holistic way, acknowledging the full range of actors as well as environmental factors, in a child’s life that can – and should – offer support. in a way, the question allows us to start an interdisciplinary dialogue across the education, health, and social work professions, including key carers in a child’s family and wider care network – a quintessential principle of froebelian practice (bruce, 2012). 3) children’s rights: probably the most important reason is the intrinsic right of every child to be treated with dignity and respect, and to receive the right support for the best possible start in life. in our analysis, we focus on scotland, where parliamentarians voted unanimously to incorporate the united nations convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) on 16th march 2021. understanding what makes for the best start to life by children, and how we can meet the needs of each and every child as they are, not how an education system demands they present, is therefore a right our children can, and should, expect from us. 2.2 contemporary developmental science development science is a vibrant field of scholarly inquiry, and this section can only provide a very high-level summary of milestones in the nature/nurture debate. for an excellent, comprehensive overview of the debate, michael rutter’s 2001 presidential address to the society for research in child development (rutter, 2002) charts historical progress and recent debates on nature/nurture in development science. a marker in the nature/nurture debate from an education perspective is the difference between leading developmentalists piaget and vygotsky in the 1930s. piaget’s theory understood cognitive development to occur in stages, through an interplay of innate capacity and environmental stimulus; teachers assume the role of facilitators that are required to “unlock” knowledge according the pre-set stages (piaget and inhelder, 1969). vygotsky sees a more active/initiating role for the teacher, who imparts formulated knowledge; knowledge is formed through social interaction and thus mostly through “nurture” (shaffer & kipp, 54 global education review 8 (1) 2013). in contrast to earlier more fatalistic expectations about a child’s potential being set at birth, research from the 1950s to the 70s shifted the focus almost exclusively onto environmental factors (horowitz, 1992), a trend rutter (2002) refers to as “rampant environmentalism” (rutter, 2002:9). this is mainly associated with attachment theory as first defined by john bowlby (1951), who explored the effects of early adverse experiences and their effect for development throughout a child’s life. in terms of the more recent debates around genetics, developments have been driven mainly by quantitative genetics, based on twin studies which seek to understand the variance of certain traits by looking at genetic and nongenetic influences in a (relatively) controlled environment; findings here provide the first neuroscientific evidence pointing to a false dichotomy of the nature versus nurture debate, and rather demonstrate interaction effects between the two (rutter & silberg, 2002). most excitingly, the emerging field of epigenetics is providing the concrete scientific mechanisms that link nature and nurture through the concept of the “exposome” (wild, 2005), which connects environmental context with our molecular make-up. miller and jones (2014) further explored the field, stressing the role of trauma as a powerful environmental determinant, a view that led to the expansion and redefinition of approaches to attachment and the early years (darling rasmussen & storebø, 2020; nsdc, 2020). the neuroscientific conclusion to the debate is thus one of two necessary yet not sufficient factors, with nurture as a potential key to unlocking nature, and care must be taken when transposing neuroscientific findings into an education context (hall, curtin and rutherford, 2013). in the following section, we argue that froebel seems to have presciently anticipated this conclusion in his practice, without the benefit of modern scientific insights. froebel’s nuanced view on the interplay between a child as an autonomous learner and its environment, encompassed (and arguably exceeded) an ecological model over a century before it was proposed by bronfenbrenner (1979). thus, we suggest froebel was inadvertently calling for a reframing of the nature/nurture question before it was even fully formulated – giving froebelian practice a decidedly modern feel and relevance. critical discussion of the nature versus nurture debate in froebel’s writings and assemblages 3.1 tracing the debate in froebel’s time and life born in 1782, froebel’s professionally formative years were steeped in the upheavals and intellectual/social revolutions of early 19th century germany. while a full analysis of the period is beyond the scope of this paper, it will focus on those aspects of social and scientific change that are likely to have influenced froebel’s thinking on the nature versus nurture question. nipperdey (1983) describes froebel’s period as the world of the new bürgertum (bourgeoisie), moving away from dogmatic church doctrines and towards a wider reach, if not exactly democratic access, to education, civil emancipation, and interest in the sciences. importantly, nipperdey also credits the era with the creation of the social sciences (geisteswissenschaften, nipperdey (1983), pp.498-532); applying insights from the natural sciences to explain cognitive and social phenomena was thus a trend of his time rather than an idiosyncratic feature of froebel’s work. in addition to the new widening of education parental support for literacy development 55 and knowledge, two further historic factors influenced froebel’s writings: the shifting geopolitical power structures, from the silesian wars in the 1740s to the napoleonic wars of 1803-1815; and the german revolutions of 1848/49 (nipperdey, 1983; sagarra, 2017). froebel’s life and learning reflect his time in intensity and range. he suffered the trauma of losing his mother in 1783 as many of his contemporaries would have done (nipperdey, 1983). in his youth, froebel received training in the applied natural sciences while working in bamberg’s forestry department in 1802, before tracing natural shapes into manmade structures during his architectural studies in 1804 (kuntze, 1952). froebel’s teaching career began in 1805, with training by pestalozzi in yverdon between 1808 and 1810, before his fateful move to keilhau and the foundation of the universal german educational institute in 1816/17 (spranger, 1960). as the subsequent section 2.2 will discuss, a significant proportion of froebel’s body of thought is represented in his magnum opus, the education of man (1826), as well as the more empirically-inspired mothersongs (1844), based on his experience of running the first kindergarten in 1840. both works provide testimony to the rapidly changing social norms and views on education, as well as the newly formed social scientific tradition of the rising german bourgeoisie. as bruce aptly suggests, froebel truly was “a man of his time and society” (bruce, 2020, p.92). 3.2 froebel’s own writings froebel did not address the nature versus nature question directly but it is a red thread that can be found in his work. in the education of man (1826), froebel describes education as a creative process, which was revolutionary in the context of the prussian education system (“when we are being creative we give body to thought: we render visible the invisible.”, p.31). in addition to this creative transformation of the inner to the outer, froebel’s educational theory was revolutionary in so far as he understood the child as an individual presenting with their own idiosyncratic characteristics (“what the pupils know is not a shapeless mass, but has form and life. each one is, as it were, familiar with himself.”, p. 156). most tellingly, froebel moved beyond the dichotomy of his contemporaries rousseau and locke by understanding the complex interplay between learned knowledge and our very being that shapes our behavior and potential (“we possess a great load of extraneous knowledge, which has been imposed on us and which we foolishly strive daily to increase . . . we have very little knowledge of our own that has originated in our own mind and grown with it.”, p. 156). in froebel’s view, the prussian education system did not acknowledge or make room for the development of the latter, striving for betterment appropriate with social standing – a mindset some of froebel’s followers had not shaken off either as section 2.3 will show (gunn, 1904). placing froebel in a debate that officially began after his death in 1852, and in which he therefore did not choose to be an active participant, is at best a speculative enterprise. therefore, this paper will move beyond the literal representation of the nature versus nurture debate in froebel’s writings to a critical review of the core elements of froebel’s teaching and their relevance for educational theory (liebschner, 1992). 3.2.1 sensory learning and the natural environment the froebelian gifts and occupations (whinnett, 2012) represent an interconnectedness of objects that can be 56 global education review 8 (1) grasped by the child intuitively, suggesting an innate ability for reasoning and complex cognitive connections (read, 1992). this is also reflected in froebel’s approach to interacting with the natural environment; thus herrington (1998) describes the froebelian garden as a canvass for his wider teaching, a view confirmed by brehony (2016), who describes froebel’s view of the teacher as a “gardener” with children as growing leaves. froebel’s educational theory is thus predicated on freedom and agency for the child (bruce, 2019; mcnair & powell, 2020), with guidance as assistance on an individual learning path (liebschner, 1992). it represents a “creative tension between our inner and outer selves” (hargraves et al., 2019, p.144). thus, it seems that a review of froebel’s educational theory is transcending the rousseauvian dichotomy of the nature versus nurture debate, forming a complex and revolutionary interconnected theory even before the debate had officially begun. it appears that froebel was holding up a mirror to his contemporaries as much as to the modern reader, to suggest that the question of nature versus nurture yields interesting answers, but places them in the wrong framework. 4. locating the nature/nurture debate in scotland’s early years policy and practice: hearts, minds, and policy 4.1 overview to locate these froebelian insights within a policy context, we are looking at scotland and its early years policies. scotland 1 humes and bryce (2008) describe the scottish education system as having a history that is distinct from the other three uk nations, with the curriculum for excellence having its origins in the mccrone report into scottish education has a vibrant community of froebelians, who were involved in shaping the current early years system, arguing in favor of an interconnected perspective on early years practice. this is embodied in the curriculum for excellence (cfe; scottish government, 2004), which was implemented from 2010 in an attempt to move from outputs and exam results to child-centered holistic learning for life (humes, 2013), largely aligned with froebelian principles1. similarly, the getting it right for every child (girfec) framework, with its statutory basis in the children and young people (scotland) act 2014, reiterates the importance of adopting an outcome focus and child-centered practice across agencies involved in the early years. moreover, the early years collaborative followed the tenets of the christie report (sg, 2011) to shift the focus from intervention to prevention, thereby acknowledging the importance of early childhood and echoing froebel’s views of the potential that high quality and child-centered early learning can unlock (scottish government, 2018). prominent froebelians were involved in the creation of the early years aspects and guidance of the cfe, with a flourishing froebelian network across scotland (e.g., spratt et al., 2019, whinnett, 2020). nonetheless, outcomes for children have remained disappointing across national performance indicators, in particular around child poverty (scottish government, 2020). recent reforms to the early learning and childcare (elc) system also follow an english path of extending funded hours from 600 to 1,140 per child/annum, with access from two for and the national debate on education in 2002, with the resulting curriculum review group in 2003 that included notable froebelian scholars and practitioners (humes, 2013). parental support for literacy development 57 vulnerable children, and three universally (audit scotland, 2018). while firm data is as of yet unavailable, anecdotal evidence suggests this expansion of formal elc may have come at the expense of family support services offered by the statutory and voluntary sectors. so while a move towards more universal access to high-quality elc provisions seems to support froebel’s approach, the spirit and intent of the policy may have the unintended consequence of counteracting the nurturing, child-centered care that froebel saw emanate from the family unit as well as educational settings (mcnair et al., 2021). questions remain about competing policy motives and their influence on the elc reform, such as access to the labor market for both parents, aimed particularly at maternal employment (audit scotland, 2018). furthermore, palmer’s (2020) edited volume on early years practice and experience in scotland suggests that the early years remain the “cinderella of the education system” (p.3); authors advocate for a kindergarten stage that takes formal education to age 6/7, and the elevation of the early years workforce in esteem (and pay), which bears parallels to froebel’s original vision as well as the development of his teachings by his mostly female followers. scotland thus seems to have the right preconditions for a froebelian vision of nurturing every child’s nature holistically and across families and learning settings – the devil, as so often, remains in the detail of making this vision a reality. 4.2 inequality and its legacy addressing poverty-related inequalities in health, education, and wellbeing, are the key 2 following sg definition: “proportion of children living in households with equivalised incomes below 60% of the median (middle) uk income in the issues of scottish social policy, and this goal figures prominently in practice guidance for elc practitioners. recalling recent findings from epigenetics that early environmental experiences can affect “nature”, i.e., our genetic make-up, practitioners need to understand systemic environmental factors that contextualize and set the parameters for what their early years practice can achieve and what the lived experience of the children they work with looks like. this is a key aspect of the social justice dimension of froebelian principles (konstantoni and emejulu, 2017) and allows practitioners to identify potential bias or factors of social exclusion (kustatscher, 2017), while also calibrating educational strategies to the needs of individual children. in “shifting the curve,” a report to the first minister, eisenstadt (2016) attempts to connect the dots between the policy narratives of early childhood, early learning and childcare (elc), and poverty in the context of scottish early years policy. access to high quality elc is suggested as a lever that can lift children and families out of intergenerational poverty through a) allowing parents to be economically active and b) addressing the environmental consequences of growing up in poverty. however, this compensatory education approach is not uncontroversial and, as discussed before, may counteract froebelian principles of childcenteredness. despite the intention of the child poverty (scotland) act 2017 and the child poverty strategy for scotland (sg, 2014) to eradicate child poverty by 2020 (mckendrick and sinclair, 2012), the relative child poverty rate2 has risen from 19% in 2011/12 to 26% in current year”; see https://data.gov.scot/poverty/cpupdate.html https://data.gov.scot/poverty/cpupdate.html 58 global education review 8 (1) 2019/20 against a revised 2023/24 interim target of 18%; scottish government projections for 2030/31 are currently at 38%. further measures arising from recently devolved powers (dickie, 2020: 98) as well as the newly introduced scottish child payment of an additional £10 per week/child for families on universal credit (sg, no date) attempt to alleviate the effects of a decade of austerity. practitioners need to recognise the lived reality of children growing up in poverty and adapt their practice, carefully reviewing their conception of “the child” and their environment in light of their own position and potential biases (cronin et al., 2017). 5. reflections for early years practice as the previous sections have shown, science and froebelian practice are pointing in the same direction. to aid the translation from theory to practice, we propose four propositions for practitioners and those working in the early years more widely below. proposition 1: understanding systems the complex interplay between environmental and genetic factors requires a full understanding of a child’s environment, within and outside formal settings. importantly, this includes families and care networks as much as early years practitioners (tovey, 2017). while policies may have recently focused on formal settings in a drive to expand high-quality early learning and childcare (elc), the froebelian analysis emphasizes that it really does take a “village to raise a child,” as the saying goes, and insights on the role of adults in a child’s development and learning need to be honored irrespective of where the interaction happens. the proverbial “village” extends to the full community: family and friends, carers, statutory services, and the voluntary sector have a role to play. we need to both understand what a child’s individual system looks like and how we can engage those playing a part in it in order to meet a child where it is. proposition 2: the child as individual building on the latter point, science and froebelian analysis point towards the need to make more room for meeting children as and where they are – not where systems for education, health or social care, expect them to be at any one point in time. the interplay of environmental factors and individual predisposition is unique to each and every one of us. we need to shift policy and practice so that the causal connection of approaches, education, and interventions originates from the child to where their potential will take them, not from a pre-formed goal for all pointing back towards all children. to do so, we need to be more aware of systems and their effects, but also strengthen the opportunity and capacity of professionals to connect with each other across different services, as well as to parents, carers, and the child’s “village.” proposition 3: teachers as facilitators finally, we can see the value of redefining the view of the practitioner in the early years (and beyond) to one of an empathetic facilitator that brings out the best, knowing that the potential for it already resides in each and every child. this requires a shift away from the strong focus on outputs and even outcomes to emphasizing the importance of process in early years practice, supporting professionals to reflect on and develop their personal, childcentered practice. this may be the most radical step as it goes against the grain of many mainstream education arrangements that focus on outputs, such as measures of attainment and parental support for literacy development 59 academic performance. but international comparison shows that this is not only possible, but is also a liberating move towards childcenteredness, addressing inequalities, and increasing job satisfaction for teachers and related professions. such new education approaches are developing with great results, e.g., the new school in london3, and agora4 in the netherlands. the same spirit is alive in froebel’s early years practice and practitioners should be supported in reflecting on, and developing their practice. proposition 4: the importance of holding the space if the answer to the nature/nurture question is “a bit of both,” it is all the more important to “hold the space” for children. this means to recognize environmental, systemic, and innate factors in order to provide a safe and supported environment for the child to develop according to its own agency; this includes the development of a child’s understanding of its own connectedness to others and nature, and its sense of responsibility towards both. this may look different for children living in different circumstances, and highlights the social justice dimension of froebel’s teachings. practitioners thus need to be active agents of social justice by engaging with intersectionality (konstantoni and emejulu, 2017) and critically evaluating their own practice in this light. 3 https://www.thenewschool.org.uk/ 5. conclusion – life with froebel: reflections as practitioners, parents, and human beings amazingly, approaching the question of nature versus nurture from a 19th century froebelian perspective has led to the same conclusion as our 21st century emerging work on epigenetics: the dichotomy is false and more complex than the question could express. this attests to froebel’s prescience as a man well ahead of his time – and possibly even current mainstream polices and practices. what does this mean for us? distilling the various conclusions from all sections, we are left with three imperatives: first, the duty to honor a child’s range of potential and to help “hold the space” between nature and nurture for the interplay that becomes the child’s development. secondly, we need to review our societal systems to address structural factors, such as poverty, that can affect a child’s development. finally, we need a concerted effort to become agents of social justice, following froebel’s example and do better for future generations. these imperatives are paramount – but with almost two-hundred years’ lead-time, what excuse do we have not to act? references audit scotland (2018) early learning and childcare: report, retrieved online on 8th january 2021 at https://www.audit scotland.gov.uk/report/early-learning 4https://hundred.org/en/innovations/agora#dc8759 17 https://www.audit-/ 60 global education review 8 (1) andchildcare?utm_content=buffer87af2&ut m_medium=social&utm_source=twitte r.com&utm_campaign=buffer bowlby, j. 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(2005). complementing the genome with an “exposome”: the outstanding challenge of environmental exposure measurement in molecular epidemiology, cancer epidemiol. biomarkers prev., 14, pp.1847–1850. study abroad in teacher education 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: baecher, laura (2019). study abroad in teacher education. global education review, 6 (3). 1-3. study abroad in teacher education laura baecher hunter college, cuny teachers who understand how culture shapes beliefs can apply this knowledge to foster learning about the world and appreciation for the richness of the diversity in their classrooms (boix mansilla & jackson, 2011). one of the most powerful ways in which teachers and teacher educators can develop this cultural awareness is to engage in an international study abroad experience. study abroad for teachers provides the distance often needed to better see their home contexts with more objectivity (alfaro & quezada, 2010; kissock & richardson, 2010) and can also fuel a desire to serve students from diverse cultural and linguistic backgrounds (pilonieta, medina & hathaway, 2017). however, there have been relatively few scholarly explorations on study abroad for teachers, as the bulk of study abroad literature focuses on undergraduate student experiences rather than study abroad in professional programs. this special issue of the global education review is an important contribution to both the field of teacher education and of study abroad, as the articles selected provide a grounding in key ethical, conceptual, and design considerations. the four studies chosen for this special issue provide breadth and currency for readers interested in designing, implementing, or researching study abroad for teachers. this issue also aims to critically explore the tensions of international placements in terms of program type—positioned as service learning, educational tourism, or practicum—and whether host communities benefit. major and santoro (2016) assert that the power differentials and the complexities of post-colonialism must be thoughtfully and carefully addressed when teachers from “developed” nations are placed in “developing” nations. if these complexities are addressed and reflected upon, teacher candidates stand to move from compassion to a critical stance, greatly increasing pre-service teachers’ intercultural awareness, knowledge, sensitivity, and competence, as well as their ability to understand, respect, engage with, and ultimately teach diverse cultural groups. one of the reasons that study abroad in the realm of teacher education is often overlooked— and also why it is challenging to survey—is that ongoing initiatives engaging preand in-service teachers are largely developed by individual faculty with personal passion for the work and building on their unique professional networks. gray and co-researchers (2019) aptly point out that study abroad programming for teachers usually does not arise from careful institutional planning. instead, they attribute its development to faculty who utilize personal capital and relationships to design and implement them, alongside other staff, administrators, and host educators, who they call architects, champions, and linchpins. “architects [are] those who developed and launched the initial idea; champions, those who came alongside or joined forces to strengthen and build on first steps; and linchpins, those who do important and detailed work, often behind the scenes, to make programs work. these categories are not 2 global education review 6 (3) mutually exclusive, and some individuals fill more than one of these roles” (p. 461). in the pursuit of celebrating these players and sharing the work for others interested in venturing into international experiences, this special issue on study abroad in teacher education presents impact studies of study abroad on preand in-service teachers’ beliefs, skills, knowledge, and practices before, during, and immediately after their participation, as well as an examination of conceptual frames for the design and implementation of teacher study abroad. to begin, morley, braun, rohrer, and lamb provide a comprehensive and critical systematic review of the literature on study abroad in preservice teacher education. through the lens of post-colonial theory, this opening piece uses geovisualization tools and techniques to examine the sending and receiving countries of teacher study abroad participants in the reviewed literature. it lays the groundwork for understanding and assessing teacher study abroad in terms of trends that bring teachers from the global north to other sites in the global north and south, with little travel flowing in the opposite direction. the implications of these patterns are explored, with abundant evidence to suggest that teacher study abroad must make efforts to include the impact on host communities and incorporate the voices and experiences of host participants. it also cautions consumers of this literature to be aware that it is almost always the teacher educator participant who is doing the design, analysis, and writing up of these programs. against the backdrop of this wide survey of teacher study abroad literature, canadian scholars ingersoll, sears, hirschkorn, chami, and landine provide a multiple, country-wide examination of canadian study abroad in teacher education. reminding readers of the many affective benefits—from self-confidence to empathy—and using the frames of neoliberal versus affective outcomes, the authors further advance our understanding of why teacher study abroad is promoted and point to ways in which institutions of teacher education could better collaborate and communicate to set a national agenda for teacher learning through study abroad that includes more support for students and faculty. the authors also reveal the multiple goals, benefits, and approaches various teacher educators have employed to conceptualize their programs and suggest that rather than preparing teachers for careers abroad, teacher study abroad experiences are ultimately best conceived as supporting teachers who work in schools becoming increasingly international. their distinction between cultural awareness and critical awareness are important lenses to evaluate the impact of teacher study abroad. from the broad canadian picture, we then zoom into a consortium program described within one large u.s. university system that has been working in teacher study abroad for more than 40 years. brennan and holliday share the historical beginnings of their teacher study abroad programs and how these have been bolstered by intensive pre-trip course experiences discussing cultural identity and culturally responsive pedagogy as well as posttrip reflective coursework. they align their work with national teacher preparation standards that make designing such initiatives clearly associated with broader objectives in educator preparation programs. they also offer ways to infuse global awareness throughout a teacher education program even without study abroad. rounding out our special issue, heimer and colleagues provide a compelling example of teacher study abroad, which actually takes place in participants’ home country. this unique study abroad program places early childhood pre-service teachers in the anishinaabe indigenous nation for classroom observation, study abroad in teacher education 3 language learning, and coursework. this article makes a neat circle back to this issue’s opening study, as it illuminates the possibilities inherent in teacher study abroad that challenges notions of global north, what it means to “travel” across cultural boundaries, and how researchers, teachers, and local host educators can engage in programmatic experiences and research that are mutually beneficial. references alfaro, c., & quezada, r. l. (2010). international teacher professional development: teacher reflections of authentic teaching and learning experiences. teaching education, 21(1), 47-59. boix mansilla, v. & jackson, a. (2011). educating for global competence: preparing our youth to engage the world. new york: asia society. kissock, c., & p. richardson. (2010). calling for action within the teaching profession: it is time to internationalize teacher education. teaching education, 21(1), 89–101. gray, c., kristmanson, p., landine, j., sears, a. hirschkorn, m., ingersoll, m., & kawtharani chami, l. (2019). from atlantic canada to the world: ite and international teaching in atlantic canadian universities. in j. mueller & j. nickel, (eds.), globalization and diversity in education: what does it mean for canadian teacher education (pp. 444–474). ottawa, on: canadian association for teacher education. pilonieta, p., medina, a. & hathaway, j. (2017) the impact of a study abroad experience on preservice teachers' dispositions and plans for teaching english language learners. the teacher educator, 52(1), 22–38. about the author laura baecher, ed.d., is associate professor of tesol at hunter college, city university of new york. she has been committed to the field of english language teaching as an esl/efl teacher and tesol teacher educator for over 25 years. her research interests and publications relate to esl teacher preparation including contentlanguage integration, teacher leadership, the use of video for teacher learning, and practicum and supervision in teaching english learners. dr. baecher also develops and directs study-abroad programs for teachers as a means of developing teachers’ linguistic and professional expertise. she has served as the tesol international’s teacher education interest section chair and as an english language specialist for the us department of state. quality of research based on design-based research approach 6 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schäfers, maria sophie, & wegner, claas. (2024). quality of research based on design-based research approach: using an example from early childhood talent research. global education review, 11 (1), 6-22. quality of research based on design-based research approach: using an example from early childhood talent research maria sophie schäfers claas wegner abstract over the past decades, the demand for scientific research to link theory and practice so that innovative solutions can be developed through research has steadily increased (klees & tillmann, 2015; sandoval & bell, 2004). in this context, the design-based research (dbr) approach was developed, which examines the research object and the research setting from multiple perspectives through a cyclicaliterative process (shavelson et al., 2003; reinmann, 2005). the connection between research and practice is not only relevant for school contexts, but also for early childhood education (schäfers & wegner, 2021a). therefore, the project “kleine beginna” utilizes the dbr approach. a preliminary examination revealed that early promotion has a great influence on the children's later school performance, yet that there is not any test to survey their competences. however, this is essential in order to be able to offer appropriate support. in the prototyping phase, a scientific talent test for pre-school aged children was developed. this test was validated in several cycles in the assessment phase (schäfers & wegner, 2022a). the last validity test for the elicitation of the internal structure by an exploratory factor analysis shows that both the loadings and the screeplot, output one factor. this one factor solution explains 43.56% of the variance. this may be the “scientific talent” factor, which needs to be verified in further studies and by confirmatory factor analysis. while reinmann (2022) has established comprehensive standards for science and methodology in dbr, we also focus on what extent conventional quality criteria for qualitative and quantitative research can be applied to a dbr approach. keywords early childhood education, “kleine beginna,” scientific talent test, design-based research, dbr, quantitative study, exploratory factor analysis, germany, pre-school age introduction for a long time, school research and thus research for practice has faced a major barrier (juuti & lavonen, 2006): either the researchers focused their studies on problems that were too detached from practical work and were thus not relevant for teachers or pedagogical specialists, or the studies produced strategies for problems that could not be implemented in practice for various reasons (e.g., lack of time, lack of materials, too much effort, assuming ideal-typical learning groups). in both cases, there has been a lack of links between theory and practice, so that they did not support each other (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). this, in turn, meant that the intended synergy effects were thus not present. however, the need for change in the school context is particularly urgent. not least because of the results of international comparative studies such as pisa (programme for international student assessment) or timss (third international mathematics and science study), as they have quality of research based on design-based research approach 7 given cause for concern and fostered the desire to reform the school landscape (gundlach, 2003). nevertheless, innovation is not the first term to be associated with school-related development (asbrand, 2009). oftentimes, the only innovations implemented in schools are ideas from politics and economy, rather than from educational research (dehmel, 2018; reinmann, 2005). thus, reinmann (2005) justifiably raises the question of whether educational research remains merely an institution that evaluates innovations but does not itself generate innovative approaches to solutions. ann brown (1992) was the first scientist who tried to combine theory and practice (anderson & shattuck, 2012), because “an effective intervention should be able to migrate from our experimental classroom to average classrooms operated by and for average students and teachers, supported by realistic technological and personal support” (brown, 1992, p. 143). over the course of the subsequent years, more and more researchers addressed this focus and dbr was established as a methodological research approach (mckenney & reeves, 2013). shavelson and colleagues (2003) coined a generally accepted definition of this particular research method: “such research, based strongly on prior research and theory and carried out in educational settings, seeks to trace the evolution of learning in complex, messy classrooms and schools, test and build theories of teaching and learning, and produce instructional tools that survive the challenges of everyday practice” (p. 25). thus, the aim of this approach is to generate innovative solutions to educational problems relevant to practice as well as to draw findings relevant to science (klees & tillmann, 2015; lehmann-wermser & konrad, 2016; schmiedebach & wegner, 2021; schäfers & wegner, 2021a; weiser, 2020). neither educational research nor educational practice should be restricted (lagemann, 2002). consequently, the gap between research and practice should be reduced (euler & sloane, 2014; mintrop, 2019; reinmann, 2005). for this purpose, actors from practice who can provide scientifically relevant insights for actionoriented research (gräsel, 2010; sandoval & bell, 2004) are involved in this iterative research process (hahn et al., 2019), by describing the prevailing conditions in the research field (möller, kleickmann & tröbst, 2009). design-based research approach in the project “kleine beginna” as can be seen from the explanations on dbr, the approach mostly includes the school as an educational institution and practical actor. however, education is equally imparted in the pre-school sector (msb & mkffi, 2018). in germany, pre-school education constitutes the first stage of the educational system (seyda, 2009). thus, it is of particular relevance to develop innovative approaches for early education. studies that demonstrate that early promotion of science education has a sustainable impact on children's cognitive abilities (e.g., anders et al., 2018, claessens & engels, 2013; guo, piasta & bowles, 2015, morgan et al., 2016; saçkes, 2013), support this conclusion. for this reason, the project "kleine beginna – smalls ones gifted in natural sciences" was founded in 2019 following a dbr approach at “ozhb” (osthushenrich-center for gifted research at the faculty of biology) at “bielefeld university” (schäfers, 2023; schäfers & wegner, 2021b; wegner et al., 2020). the focus of this project is on science education and promotion of scientific competences in early 8 global education review 11 (1) childhood (e.g., schäfers & wegner, 2020b; 2021c; 2022c). by following the dbr approach, the research objectives of the project were determined. these steps will be focused on in the following. preliminary research (research question of the project) a systematic literature review was conducted in the project “kleine beginna” as preliminary research in order to assess the effects of science promotion in early education and to highlight conditions for the successful implementation of such programs (schäfers & wegner, 2020a). in this step of dbr, thus, the current situation is identified after firstly defining the problem (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). the analysis showed that children who received science support benefited both cognitively (lehmann, rademacher & müller, 2016; reichelt, 2014; steffensky et al., 2012; windt, 2011) and socially (lehmann, rademacher & müller, 2016; windt, 2011). this was manifested in higher performance, which they were able to retrieve in the short term and in the long term after the support offers, as well as in their positive behavior during group work. the better the support was adapted to the children's competences, the more positive the effects were (klemm et al., 2019). however, it was also pointed out that there was no comprehensive scientific talent test that measures the children's prior knowledge in preschool (carstensen, lankes & steffensky, 2011; nölke, 2013; steffensky, lankes & carstensen, 2012; ziegler & hardy, 2015). furthermore, the success of the promotion was closely related to the competences of the pedagogical professionals in the daycare centers, who often show a high need for further training in the field of sciences (bruns, 2014; fischnaller, 2012; kauertz & gierl, 2014; klemm et al., 2019; schuler, 2013). thus, a review of the relevant literature supported the need to develop a scientific talent test as well as in-service training for educational professionals with a focus on science education (schäfers & wegner, 2020a). prototyping phase (test instrument) as a next step, a scientific talent test was developed as a prototype that measures the children's competences relevant to science in the prototype phase (schäfers & wegner, 2021b; schäfers & wegner, 2022b). for this purpose, the term scientific competence was defined for the context of the project. additionally, a theoretical basis for the scientific talent test was chosen. scientific competences since there is only a little known so far about the field of science competences in preschool education (anders et al., 2018), general explanations of the concept of competence will be given first and then transferred to the field of natural sciences. the term competence describes a person's ability to do something (north, reinhardt & sieber-suter, 2018). long before the competence-oriented educational plans were introduced in school education in germany (künzli, 2010), chomsky (1973) recognized the relevance of competence acquisition and elevated competence to a key qualification. however, until today scientists do not agree on the exact definition of competence (erpenbeck & rosenstiel, 2003). a widely accepted definition is provided by weinert (2001), who defines competence as the cognitive abilities and skills that individuals quality of research based on design-based research approach 9 possess or can learn in order to develop problem-solving strategies. based on the american association for the advancement of science (aaas; 2009) and the pisa consortium germany (2007), the national educational panel study (neps) has combined this definition with the concept of scientific literacy to obtain a specific definition of competence in the field of science (hahn & schöps, 2019). according to their approach, scientific competence is composed of content-related (content areas: substances, development, interaction and systems) and process-related (nature of science and process for generating scientific knowledge) components, which collectively form the foundation for building scientific competence (hahn et al., 2013). additionally, the ipn leibniz institute for science and mathematics education has already established a definition of scientific competence based on the pisa consortium germany (2007; ipn, n.d.). in terms of the scientific-literacy approach, scientific competence is divided into three subcompetences that lead to the acquisition of scientific ways of thinking and working: • identifying and formulating questions that can be investigated and answered scientifically, • describing and explaining scientific phenomena, and • interpreting scientific evidence (ipn, n.d.; schäfers & wegner, 2022b). however, the focus is not only on scientific knowledge, but also on the nature of science and the promotion of positive affective characteristics, such as the emotional experience of, curiosity about, and pleasure in scientific phenomena, as well as the development of a sense of responsibility for the use of knowledge. for early childhood education, steffensky (2017) differentiated the scientific ways of thinking and working into smaller sub-competences, which also form sub-competences of the scientific process of gaining knowledge: asking questions; hypothesizing; observing; measuring; planning and conducting investigations; comparing, arranging and classifying; analyzing, interpreting, concluding and generalizing data; arguing; using models; documenting. these competences need to be promoted at a lower level in pre-school already. thus, a scientific talent test for pre-school should assess these competences (schäfers & wegner, 2022b). chc-theory of cognitive abilities as a model for the scientific talent test to cluster such competences which are relevant for science, the chc-theory of cognitive abilities was used as a theoretical basis (schäfers & wegner, 2021b). the chc-theory is a theory synthesis by cattell (1963), horn (horn, 1991; horn & blankson, 2005), and carroll (1993), taking intelligence as a hierarchical construct and subdividing intelligence into different general and specific abilities (flanagan & dixon, 2013; mickley & renner, 2019). this theory was chosen on the one hand because it is a highly accepted scientific theory (baudson, 2012) and on the other hand because there is a strong connection between intelligence and competence (preckel & holling, 2006). thus, the competences according to steffensky (2017) were classified within the intelligence model, so that the following general abilities were identified for the scientific talent test (schäfers & wegner, 2022b): • fluid intelligence • quantitative knowledge • visual processing • long-term retrieval • processing speed 10 global education review 11 (1) scientific talent test the scientific talent test is a single test in which the above-mentioned ability areas that are relevant for scientific talent are measured in seven subtests. due to the age of the children, the test is not a paper-pencil test, but rather a series of riddles, experiments, and hands-on experiences in which the children's answers are recorded and evaluated on a protocol sheet. the test sessions of the children are conducted by researchers of the project “kleine begin-na”, who were extensively trained in advance. further information with more detailed in-sights into the test instrument can be found in other publications of the project (schäfers & wegner, 2022a; schäfers & wegner, 2022b; schäfers et al., 2023). assessment phase (study design) according to the dbr approach, the first two phases were followed by the assessment phase in the project “kleine beginna”, in which the scientific talent test was piloted in several research cycles from 2019 to 2022. the first version of the test instrument was initially piloted with a small sample (n = 7) in july 2019, as it is appropriate to conduct the first evaluation and revision based on the results of a small group (scheersoi & tessartz, 2019). based on the evaluation of the testing, experiences during the testing, and feedback from pedagogical professionals, changes and revisions were made until early 2020, before the adapted instrument was piloted in a larger study. during this cycle, it became apparent that, in addition to the quantitative recording of children's cognitive performance, a more qualitative investigation of the children’s behavior was also relevant for interpreting the results. thus, after the second cycle, an observation sheet was developed to be used during the test (schäfers et al., 2020). the combination of a scientific test and observation sheets was used in the third research cycle. in total, data from n = 247 children are available. at the same time, the scientific talent test was already tested for the classical quality criteria of quantitative research with partial samples (schäfers & wegner, 2022a). in addition, the internal structure has already been determined by exploratory factor analysis (schäfers et al., 2023) with a small sample. in order to make a valid assumption about the internal structure, the exploratory factor analysis has to be repeated with the whole sample. therefore, the next research cycle is presented below, which focused on the question: to what extent does exploratory factor analysis reveal an internal structure within the scientific talent test? solution (results) as a solution, an exploratory factor analysis was conducted involving the complete data set in order to determine the internal structure of the scientific talent test and thus to determine what the test instrument measures. the requirements for conducting an exploratory factor analysis were tested by bartlett's test and the kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy (kmo). the bartlett’s test confirms whether the constructs correlate with each other or not (backhaus et al., 2021). the kmo indicates whether the data are suitable for exploratory factor analysis, with cut-off values set by kaiser and rice (1974) and considered performable above a value of 0.5. both bartlett’s test (chi-square (21) = 380.498, p < .001) and the kaiser-meyer-olkin measure of sampling adequacy (kmo = .816; classified as good) showed that an exploratory factor analysis can be performed with the variables included. quality of research based on design-based research approach 11 following the suitability check, a principal component analysis with direct-oblimin-rotation was performed. this method was chosen because the included factors correlated with each other (field, 2018). as can be seen from the screeplot figure (see figure 1), the principal component analysis identified one factor that has an eigenvalue greater than 1.0. the onefactor solution could explain 43.56% of the total variance. figure 1. screeplot of principal component analysis (spss-output). the individual dimensions included in the analysis contribute equally to the explanation of the total variance. furthermore, the component matrix showed that the individual components could all be clearly assigned to factor 1, since the loadings of the components on factor 1 were at least 0.609. the communalities as well as the factor loadings can be seen in the combined table 1 (see appendix). discussion since only one factor had a higher eigenvalue than 1.0 and in the screeplot clearly only one factor was above the bend, it can be assumed that only one factor was explained by the scientific talent test. this factor may be the “scientific talent” of the children. the individual components of the scientific talent test, which were the basis for the test development, could apparently not be identified by the test instrument. thus, children who perform well on one subtest are likely to perform well on the other subtests. conversely, it can be assumed that children who perform less well on one subtest will also perform lower on the other subtests. this indicates that all subtests seem to contribute to the description of scientific talent without differentiating between individual scientific competences. this in turn can be explained not least by the fact that the child's brain only develops over the course of primary school and that individual ability areas can rarely be distinguished from one another before the age of six (büttner, 2017). however, it should be noted that the screeplot can only be interpreted meaningfully when the sample size is greater than n = 300. thus, the results of the analysis with the existing sample of the study are a tendency and a clear indication, but the result should also be checked for larger sample sizes. furthermore, what remains debatable about the study is that no demographic data except the age of the children were included in the analysis of the results. on the one hand, this increases comparability, but on the other hand, it does not account for differences in performance due to language problems or a low ability to concentrate. overall, as a solution in the dbr approach, the scientific talent test can be accepted as a valid test instrument. however, this is not the final step in the process of dbr. since it is an iterative and cyclical process, this instrument can be used in further research cycles with stakeholders from research and 12 global education review 11 (1) practice and can be investigated for different target groups. in addition, the scientific talent test can also create another field of research by integrating the test instrument into training programs for educational professionals. in this process, the training offers can also be evaluated. the constant revision and repeated implementation then correspond to the dbr approach. discussion of quality of research based on design-based research approach as can be deduced from the previous chapters, the dbr approach pursues a twofold goal: on the one hand, the highest possible benefit for practice should be derived from the designed interventions, and on the other hand, the interventions should generate theoretical insights for science (reinmann, 2022). thus, the quality of implementation must be determined on both levels. however, there are currently hardly any commonly accepted standards for the dbr approach to assess the quality of dbr research (bakker, 2018; hoadley, 2004; tulodziecki, herzig & grafe, 2014). standards are defined as scientific claims that ensure or improve the quality of research (reinmann, 2022). in contrast, quality criteria are the operationalized tools to measure quality and survey compliance (gerhold et al., 2015). objectivity, reliability and validity are often referred to as 'classical' quality criteria of scientific research, which is certainly plausible, since research should always be unbiased and factual, as well as dependable and binding (reinmann, 2022). however, the three quality criteria are characteristics that are strongly related to ideal empirical research in the natural sciences (bortz & döring, 2006) and thus can rarely serve as standards for questions in educational science (reinmann, 2022). beyond these three criteria, there are several other standards for scientific quality that can be applied to research, such as appropriateness, replicability, or transferability (just to name a few; reinmann, 2022). however, even these are difficult to apply because they cannot be clearly separated and there is no agreement on how to verify these criteria (ibid.). thus, for dbr research in particular, the question arises: what standards can be applied in dbr to determine the quality of the research approach and design? for this purpose, reinmann (2022), in her debate about standards in dbr research and the role of design in this tension, establishes two levels on which standards in dbr research should be based. as the term dbr suggests, she distinguishes between the levels of scientificity and design appropriateness to do justice to the focus of research and practice and to reflect the comprehensive character of the dbr approach. table 2 (see appendix) presents an overview of the suggested quality criteria for dbr research according to reinmann (2022) and gives a brief definition for each of them. by focusing both science and design aspects, the evaluation of the quality of research in the sense of dbr can be successful. even if the comparison of individual criteria (such as systematicity and openness or generalizability and context sensitivity) creates certain tensions, balancing these tensions constitutes one of the benefits of dbr (reinmann, 2022). conclusion and outlook in conclusion, the research principle of dbr does not constitute a panacea or an allpurpose solution for all problems in educational quality of research based on design-based research approach 13 research (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021), but the strong link between theory and practice as well as the inclusion of many actors involved in the process can create a higher degree of understanding for the research field and thus also stimulate the development of innovative solutions. this is demonstrated not least by the introduced project “kleine beginna”, which follows a dbr approach with its methodological orientation (schäfers & wegner, 2021b). however, just as dbr is more than just the addition of research and practice, it is also complex in terms of assessing the quality of dbr research. with her list of possible quality criteria for this research approach, reinmann (2022) has shown how complex dbr needs to be thought of and that it is more than just applying the classical quality criteria of empirical social research. for this reason, the presented project must be evaluated by using the quality criteria of dbr. this also entails potential revisions and further development regarding its quality in further research cycles. acknowledgment we would like to thank carolin zehne for the linguistic revision. references aaas (american association for the advancement of science; 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(2012). alltagssituationen und experimente; was sind geeignete naturwissenschaftliche lerngelegenheiten für kindergartenkinder? zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaften, 15, 37-54. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11618-0120262-3 tulodziecki, g., herzig, b., & grafe, s. (2014). medienpädagogische forschung als gestaltungsorientierte bildungsforschung vor dem hintergrund praxisund theorierelevanter forschungsansätze in der erziehungswissenschaft. medienpädagogik. zeitschrift für theorie und praxis in der medienbildung, 2014 (occasional papers), 1-18. https://doi.org/10.21240/mpaed/00/20 14.03.10.x wegner, c., zehne, c., wiese, i., & schäfers, m.s. (2020). introducing a concept for supporting scientifically gifted students the osthushenrich-center for giftedness research (ozhb) at the department of biology at bielefeld university, germany. journal of gifted education and creativity, 7(1), 13-19. weinert, f. (2001). leistungsmessungen in schulen. weinheim / basel: beltz. weiser, l. (2020). interesse an der natur bei kindergartenund grundschulkindern studien zur gestaltung und wirkung des forschenden lernens an außerschulischen lernorten. dissertation: rheinische friedrichwilhelms-universität zu bonn. windt, a. (2011). naturwissenschaftliches experimentieren im elementarbereich. evaluation verschiedener lernsituationen. dissertation. dortmund: technische universität dortmund. ziegler, t., & hardy, i. (2015). die erfassung naturwissenschaftlicher kompetenz im vorschulalter. ergebnisse einer pilotierungsstudie. in k. liebers, b. landwehr, a. marquardt & k. schlotter (eds.), lernprozessbegleitung und adaptives lernen in der grundschule (pp. 211-216). wiesbaden: springer fachmedien. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-65811346-9_27 quality of research based on design-based research approach 21 appendix table 1. communalities for the elucidation of the total variance and component matrix. communalities for elucidation of total variance component matrix initially extraction component 1 subtest 1 1.000 .357 .613 subtest 2 1.000 .458 .677 subtest 3 1.000 .521 .722 subtest 4 1.000 .374 .611 subtest 5 1.000 .553 .743 subtest 6 1.000 .371 .609 subtest 7 1.000 .397 .630 notes: due to the single-factor solution, no rotation is necessary. table 2. possible standards of dbr research according to reinmann (2022). standards at the level of… … scientificity … design appropriateness systematicity dbr activities should be more systematic in both theory and design than activities conducted in educational practice without research. in addition, knowledge derived from research and design should be more systematically represented by the dbr approach than knowledge acquired in action practices without research (cf. p. 7-8). future relevance through dbr, interventions should be created and implemented to design future educational offers and to adapt empirical research and theoretical approaches to them. (cf. p. 12). perspectivity according to the dbr approach, there is often a high level of involvement of the researchers. this involvement in the research process should thus be consciously handled and reflected (cf. p. 8-9). openness in dbr, being open to unexpected results is of great importance, as the research process might lead away from initial goals and questions. this can then be deliberately integrated into the research cycles. however, strategies are needed to handle the dynamic course of research (cf. p. 12). 22 global education review 11 (1) incompleteness research and science produce new knowledge, yet this knowledge is not fixed, absolute knowledge, but rather constitutes assumptions. thus, for dbr, it is important that research is recognized as an unfinished process that tends to produce prospective knowledge (cf. p. 9). context sensitivity for dbr, one of the main foci is the context, as this is relevant for designing and implementing the interventions. thus, the theory, empiricism as well as the design activities should be adapted to the context as well as to the actors in a particular setting (cf. p. 1213). generalizability through research, conclusions should be made that are not only valid for the investigated sample, but that are also transferable to other groups and contexts. therefore, dbr should produce results that can be generalized. furthermore, it should be shown how these findings can be applied under which conditions in other situations (cf. p. 9). saturation the iterative-cyclical research process is a characteristic aspect of the dbr approach. however, it should be continuously observed when a cycle in theory, empiricism and design has been finished for the moment in order to connect further cycles or to determine the next steps in the research process (cf. p. 13). transparency to ensure traceability and transparency in dbr, decisions regarding theoretical and empirical aspects as well as design should be made transparent. this also includes a coherent justification of key aspects without getting lost in details (cf. p. 10). knowledge diversity different forms of knowledge should be implemented in the dbr process: research should involve different theoretical, empirical, and design sources that integrate different types of knowledge. these should be related to each other (cf. p. 13). publicity because dbr findings are relevant to practice and research, the findings should be made publicly available in appropriate forums (or firstly establishing such forums and opportunities for publications), taking the intended audiences into account (cf. p. 10). normativity decisions regarding the values and the target should be actively included and justified in the dbr research process. if something changes during the research process, it can be modified and adjusted (cf. p. 14). parental support for literacy development 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: akinrinmade, bodunrin, ammani, muhammad, & zuilkowski, stephanie. (2021). parental support for literacy development of early grade children during covid-19 school closures in northern nigeria. global education review, 8 (1), 1-13. parental support for literacy development of early grade children during covid-19 school closures in northern nigeria bodunrin akinrinmade florida state university muhammad ammani bayero university kano (nigeria) stephanie zuilkowski florida state university abstract the covid-19 pandemic that began in early 2020 has had consequences for children’s education globally, as schools closed and parents found themselves playing the role of teacher, alongside their economic and other community roles. this study aims to explore the experiences of parents in northern nigeria as they attempted to support their primary school children’s reading development while schools were closed. we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 middleand low-socioeconomic status parents in kano state, nigeria. using thematic analysis, we identified challenges faced by parents as well as unexpected positive effects of the pandemic. challenges included the lack of textbooks and other appropriate learning materials, time pressures, and lack of knowledge of strategies to teach reading. however, parents noted that the extra time they had spent together during lockdowns had led to improved relationships in the household, and that they had been able to spend more time discussing moral development and discipline with their children. in summary, this sample of parents believed that the pandemic would not have severe impacts on their own children, as they were making efforts to support learning at home. however, they had concerns for children in nigeria more broadly, particularly those whose parents were not literate, as they would have little access to learning outside school. recommendations for the nigerian government and other stakeholders include making learning materials available for home use, increasing the use of educational radio and television programming, and developing simple literacy assessments for parents to monitor children’s progress. keywords literacy, primary grades, nigeria, covid-19, parental support introduction due to the spread of the covid-19 pandemic, the nigerian government closed schools across the nation on march 19, 2020 to reduce the spread of the virus (dixit, 2020; obiakor & adeniran, 2020). the nationwide closure of schools has impacted over 39 million students in nigeria, more than 27 million of whom are pre-primary and primary school students (unesco institute of statistics, 2020). these closures are likely to worsen outcomes in a country already struggling to improve student performance on basic learning measures. before covid-19, only 17% of nigerian pupils could read a complete sentence and comprehend it (adeniran et al., 2020). given the poor home literacy environments facing many nigerian 2 global education review 8 (1) children (aika & uyi-osaretin, 2018), this situation is expected to deteriorate, as children spent months at home. while many school-aged children in high-income countries have access to online instruction during this pandemic (united nations children’s fund [unicef], 2020), those in lowand middle-income countries, including nigeria, have limited access to television, radio, computers, internet, and data for them to engage in remote learning (human rights watch, 2020; the education partnership [tep] center, 2020). gallagher (2020) asserted that the development of children’s literacy skills is connected to success in school and later in life. in countries where school systems have not been able to adapt to distance learning, parents may therefore need to fill the role of full-time teachers so that their children’s literacy skills can be continually developed at home during school closures. this has placed unprecedented burdens on parents, as they need to find ways to support their children’s literacy development while also continuing to support their families economically. little is known about what parents are doing to support and develop their children’s literacy skills amid school closures in lowresource contexts like northern nigeria. our study contributes to the literature with in-depth interviews with parents in kano state on how they are assisting their early grade children in improving their literacy skills at home. using data collected after more than two months of school closures, three research questions were answered in this study: 1. how are parents supporting the literacy development of their children at home during covid-19-related school closures? 2. what are parents’ challenges when supporting their children’s literacy development at home during covid-19related school closures? 3. what are the perceived impacts of covid-19 on children and families? background and context the impact of covid-19 on education in lowand middle-income countries before the covid-19 pandemic began, more than half of the children at the age of 10 in low-and middle-income countries (lmics) could not read and comprehend simple text (world bank, 2019). with the movement of learning to remote platforms, the learning crisis in lmics has likely worsened, especially among children who do not have access to online learning platforms (sharma, 2020). while over 70% of middle-income countries have been able to move to online learning platforms (jordan, 2020), less than 25% of low-income countries have been able to set up online learning platforms (sharma, 2020). many households in lmics do not have access to the internet to ensure their children learn on the remote learning platforms (sharma, 2020; jordan, 2020). niazi (2020) conducted a desk review and qualitative interview study to examine how covid-19 affected students attending low-fee private schools (lfps) in lmics. the study found that many children in lfps do not have the opportunity to learn online due to limited access to devices and the internet. the unequal access to the internet for children to learn would likely exacerbate learning inequalities (sharma, 2020). also, parents are expected to assume the role of a teacher to ensure their children are learning. however, with sharma (2020) reporting that 82% of parents in lmics experienced a decline in their earnings in the first month of the parental support for literacy development 3 3 covid-19 crisis, they are likely to pay more attention to meeting the basic needs of their family and less attention to the continuation of their children’s education at home (sharma, 2020). parents’ reduced attention to their children’s education during school closures in lmics would likely reduce their children’s learning capacity (mayurasakorn et al., 2020). a study recently simulated the effect of covid-19 school closures on children’s learning poverty in lmics (azevedo, 2020). learning poverty is defined as the percentage of 10 yearold children who cannot read and comprehend simple stories or texts (world bank, 2019). the simulations revealed that in lmics, the learning poverty rate of children could increase from 53% to 63%. this 10% increase in the learning poverty rate means that out of 720 million primary school-age children, 72 million more are likely to fall into learning poverty (azevedo, 2020). countries in east asia and the pacific, latin america, and south asia are expected to have higher learning poverty than countries in sub-saharan africa (azevedo, 2020). covid-19, therefore, has placed roadblocks in the global progress toward increased access and quality of education. covid-19 and education in nigeria in nigeria, many children lack the appropriate level of reading skills for their age and grade. on national assessments, the average literacy and numeracy scores for fourth graders were below 50% (ogbunna, 2016). an analysis of the 2015 national education data survey (neds) dataset showed that only 17% of pupils met the minimum proficiency levels in literacy (adeniran et al., 2020). the reading outcomes of children in northern nigeria are lower than those in southern nigeria (onwuameze, 2013). pflepsen et al. (2016) reported that most sampled students from jigawa, kaduna, kano, and katsina in northern nigeria had zero scores in many early grade reading assessment tasks. kano state, which is the focus of this study, has the highest population among all the states in nigeria and the nation’s second-largest city. early grade reading assessment results in hausa and english carried out in kano state showed that most pupils were unable to read (rti international, 2014). some of the contributing factors for these poor outcomes include large class sizes, inadequate teaching and learning materials (adamu et. al, 2020), and ongoing violent conflict in the region (bertoni et al., 2019). to reduce the widespread impact of the covid-19 pandemic, the nigerian federal ministry of education closed the schools in the nation, introduced virtual learning platforms and gave out links to e-learning resources for students to learn (tep center, 2020). most of the states in nigeria also organized lessons on television and radio (tep center, 2020). however, many children do not have access to this remote learning, especially those from lowincome households (amorighoye, 2020; hussain, 2020; mayah, 2020). forty percent of the population in nigeria lives on less than $400 per year (national bureau of statistics [nbs], 2020); laptops and internet access are largely out of reach for this group. the inequitable access to remote learning may exacerbate the gap in the learning outcomes of rich and poor children (tep center, 2020). in nigeria, the national bureau of statistics [nbs] (2010, as cited in adigwe and van der walt, 2020) reported that the adult literacy rate is 56%. considering that there are low parental literacy levels in nigeria (adigwe & van der walt, 2020), at-home learning may not occur at all (samuel, 2020). it is likely that many children were not learning during the school closures (obiakor & adeniran, 2020). this means that children’s 4 global education review 8 (1) reading outcomes in kano state and other parts of nigeria may get worse. one large-scale survey has been conducted on this topic in nigeria. the education partnership [tep] center (2020) carried out an online survey and phone interview with 626 parents across 31 states in nigeria to examine how parents supported the learning of their children during covid-19 school closures. the study found that 83% of parents reported assisting their children to learn. those parents who supported their children said that they assisted them in reading, encouraging them to read on their own, doing online classes, downloading educational materials online, and listening to educational programs on the radio. parents believed that the educational support that their children got at home would help to improve their academics. parents who were not assisting their children were asked why they were not doing so. 38% said they could not assume the role of teachers as they did not have the necessary pedagogical skills to teach; 30% of them said that someone else is helping their children; and others said they were too busy to teach or they could not afford the cost of educating their children at home. the tep study reported that parents complained that children were distracted from learning because they were not used to studying at home. parents also said that their children mostly learn on radio, television, and whatsapp. most of the parents in the tep study were from lagos state, where access to technology is relatively high, and included students through higher education. also, the tep study’s design was primarily quantitative, with some supplementary qualitative data. this study identifies the need to have an in-depth understanding of how parents support their children’s literacy development in nigeria, especially northern nigeria, where children’s access to technology and reading skills are low. hence, we conducted an in-depth qualitative interview study with parents to ascertain how they support their early grade children in improving their literacy skills at home during covid-19 school closures in kano state, nigeria. methodology we conducted in-depth qualitative interviews with 15 parents in kano state, nigeria. at the time of the interviews in may 2020, schools had been closed for more than two months. we interviewed slightly more female (53.3%) than male (46.7%) parents. on average, participants had four children. forty percent were bachelor’s degree holders, and 73% were civil servants, such as public school teachers and university lecturers. employment type and education level were used as proxies for parents’ social class in our analyses. the majority of the sample (86.7%) were middle-class, while 13.3% were of lower socioeconomic status. one of the authors conducted interviews, using a semi-structured interview protocol, with the assistance of two postgraduate research assistants. the interviews were conducted in both english and hausa, with participants choosing the language they preferred. the interviewers sought the consent of the parents to audio record the interviews, and the recordings were later transcribed. the interview responses were translated from hausa to english by one of the authors, and another author cross-checked the translations. we used a thematic analysis approach to analyze the qualitative interview data. this method allows us to explore the perceptions of different parents, identify differences and similarities in parents' perceptions, and get unanticipated insights (nowell et al., 2017). after we familiarized ourselves with the parental support for literacy development 5 5 interview data, we developed an initial codebook. two authors sorted and collated the codes identified into themes and reviewed the themes to ensure that inadequacies are identified and adjusted in the initial codes and themes. another author ensured that there was accuracy in the sorting and collation. after identifying themes, we developed detailed analyses of each theme and connected all themes to this study’s research questions. we used dedoose software to code our interview data. we quoted the participants’ words intensively in this study to enhance the validity of our analyses (braun & clarke, 2006). we discussed the results of our analyses with three of the interviewees to enhance the accuracy and validity of our findings. findings the closure of schools due to the covid-19 pandemic has posed an unexpected burden on parents in northern nigeria. parents worked with their family members to support their children to learn how to read despite their busy schedules, lack of teaching skills, and textbooks. parents perceived that their efforts would improve the literacy skills of their children. more broadly, many parents believed that school closures had improved their relationships with their children and allowed them to spend more time on their children’s moral development and other skills beyond academics. these themes are discussed in greater detail below. how are parents supporting the literacy development of their children at home during covid-19-related school closures? activities parents or caregivers engage in with their children all fifteen parents in this study reported that they guided their early grade children to learn how to read during school closure. as one of the parents, a male with four children, said, it is the sole responsibility of parents to guide their children to learn. do these school closures mean the stoppage of your child(ren)’s literacy? the answer is no, because we, as parents, it is mandatory to oversee our child(ren)’s literacy not only during the lockdown but also after the lockdown (parent 3). another male participant with three children said, “it is the parents’ responsibility to guide their children to learn because if the parents do not support their children’s literacy amid these school closures, the literacy of their children won’t be developed at all” (parent 12). parents said they assisted their children in learning how to pronounce words fluently, read and answer short passages from textbooks, learn new words, do their homework, and review their books. parents were not the only ones guiding their early grade children to learn how to read, however. five out of fifteen parents said that older siblings also helped their younger children learn how to read. a male participant with seven children said, “his elder brothers are supporting him more than me. and they use two different periods (morning and evening sessions) to guide him” (parent 14). two additional participants said their extended family members helped them develop their children’s literacy skills. one of them, a mother with a postgraduate diploma in education, said, “one of his aunties supports his literacy during this phase from time to time. she used to dedicate much of her time towards completing his homework, and also do other literacy development related activities” (parent 9). 6 global education review 8 (1) in order for parents to make the teaching of reading easier for themselves, they bought textbooks and instructional materials to use at home. as a male participant with a bachelor’s degree (parent 2) said, “i bought some textbooks to upgrade his literacy. some of these books are essential for teaching and learning of reading in early grades.” one female participant who is a civil servant also stated, “i bought a new markerboard that enables him to write both english and hausa alphabets” (parent 10). in addition to buying teaching and learning materials, some parents incentivized their children to encourage them to learn. as a female participant with four children said, for instance, when i assist my children in studying, i will tell them that whoever does his reading very well will be granted permission to watch kids’ program on mbc station. as a result of that, everyone will be engaged in their study so that they will be allowed to watch the television program (parent 8). one male parent with three children reached out to a neighbor for guidance on literacy instruction. he explained, “i contacted a neighbor of mine who is the assistant headmaster at a local primary school to supply me with the current universal basic education (ube) syllabus so that i can teach my child” (parent 7). the participant also discussed how his professional background helped him to support his child, saying, i learned how to teach and handle the children’s literacy in early grade. in my profession (teaching), i am handling senior secondary school students only, but due to these school closures, i took my time to learn how to develop children’s literacy, particularly in early grades. these comments highlight the advantage that educated parents had in supporting their children. this parent knew not only that the ube syllabus existed but knew how to obtain a copy and then how to use it to support his child’s learning. this type of knowledge would be uncommon among lower-socioeconomic status parents. supports outside of the household despite the sample being well educated compared to the nigerian population more broadly, many of the parents in this study acknowledged that they alone could not provide all the educational support that their children needed. two parents reported that they enrolled their children in private tutoring so that a personal teacher could help their children develop their literacy skills. a participant said, “i have already employed one personal teacher to offer him an extra lesson at home” (parent 3). while private tutoring is common in the upper primary and secondary grades in nigeria, it was less common with younger students prior to the covid-19 pandemic. various forms of technology also offered support for literacy learning. some parents encouraged their children to watch or listen to programs on children’s literacy, organized by the government, on television or radio. as one of the participants, said, “most times, i encourage him to listen to the radio program on children’s literacy, after which i always ask him questions on what he learned” (parent 2). parent 3 also said, “he is watching television stations that have children’s programs on how to promote literacy. there are also cartoon stations that enlighten him on how to spell different words.” in addition to this, two parents said they installed an application to enable their children to learn how to read on their mobile phone handsets. as one of the participants stated, “i have installed an educative application on my handset for him to learn how to pronounce some parental support for literacy development 7 7 alphabets” (parent 3). while these supports did not replace schooling, they helped parents fill in the gaps between what children needed and what they could do on their own. what are parents’ challenges when supporting their children’s literacy development at home during covid-19related school closures? participants in this study discussed challenges at three levels: parent, child, and external to the household. first, while all parents reported that they were supporting their children’s education at home, some reported barriers to these efforts. some parents revealed that books were not available at home for them to teach their children how to read. aside from the unavailability of books, three parents, all holding at least an ordinary diploma qualification–a two-year program offered at polytechnics, monotechnics, technical colleges, and some universities in nigeria– said that they did not have the necessary teaching expertise to assist their children in reading. one female participant with a diploma qualification said, “the foremost challenge is the lack of expertise in some important subjects. that’s why most of the time i ask his father to assist him. honestly, this is one of my challenges.” (parent 6). again, given that these parents were comparatively well-educated, these challenges would be exacerbated among lower-socioeconomic status nigerians. one low-income parent said she was not literate enough in english to teach her child how to read. as she said, the challenge i am facing is that he is usually taught in the english language. i have little or no knowledge of it as i hold my secondary school certificate in arabic and islamic studies. so, there are at times when he may need my support in reading that i couldn’t assist due to my insufficient formal education (parent 4). two other parents said their busy schedules hindered them from teaching their children how to read. a parent explained, the major problem is too much commitment that i have. in this total lockdown, the government has announced only three days as ‘lockdown free days.’ during these days, i will be out of my residence to work till the end of the day. i do not have time to sit with her to guide her to learn how to read during these days (parent 7). other challenges reported by parents included the presence of multiple children needing support in the household, parents’ mobile phone batteries getting low while using apps and online videos, and parents getting tired of teaching their children while also meeting other commitments. second, some participants discussed barriers related to their specific children’s needs or behaviors. in some cases, children’s attitude toward learning and their inability to learn in isolation made it challenging for parents to teach them how to read. five parents stated that their children found it difficult to learn alone, as they missed interacting with their classmates. as a female participant who is civil servant said, “my child lost interaction with his school colleagues as he does not go anywhere. this is making it difficult for him to learn because he is learning in isolation” (parent 5). another participant (parent 12) stated, “he misses mingling and learning with his colleagues.” parents also complained that their children had difficulty focusing on learning. as one of the participants said, “he wants to play while learning is ongoing, and sometimes, he can disrupt our learning by making gratuitous requests to ease himself” (parent 2). as parent 11 also stated, “my only problem with her is that she wants to take part in playing while learning is in progress.” another parent reported that her child lacked 8 global education review 8 (1) any interest in learning how to read. since the children are in early primary grades, these challenges are not unusual, particularly the challenge of capturing and holding their attention for learning while at home. third, participants discussed challenges that were situated outside of their households, and therefore out of their control. during the lockdown, the nigerian government organized television and radio programs that enable children to learn how to read; however, parents reported that some children in their communities did not have access to these programs for lack of equipment and/or electricity at home. also, children who had access to these programs were not assessed to determine whether their reading skills were improving, so there was no evidence as to whether they were effective substitutes for formal schooling. as a female participant with four children asserted, “the current children’s radio program, for example, is helping our child to learn without testing his ability” (parent 4). some of the parents did not feel they were equipped to tell whether their children were learning. what are the perceived impacts of covid-19 on children and families? most of the parents in this study believed that school closures due to the covid19 pandemic would have a negative impact on the literacy development of nigerian children who did not get educational support during school closures. however, they did not generally believe that their own children would be impacted, due to the steps they had taken to support literacy development. as parent 7 said, “i do not think the lockdown will negatively affect my child’s literacy development, as i support her always.” another participant (parent 3) explained, “no, i do not think the school closures can have any impact on my child’s literacy because excellent measures were put in place to support his literacy development.” looking beyond the specific impacts of the school closures on literacy development, we asked participants what other impacts they had observed in their families and communities. to our surprise, the majority of the participants spontaneously identified positive outcomes of the pandemic. parents reported that their children consumed more food daily and had more time to play. twelve out of fifteen participants reported that the school closure enabled parents to learn how to be more patient, understanding, and have better relationships with their children. as parent 15 said, “we are experiencing a more cordial relationship with our children. we are always together with them, which has helped to minimize disputes.” another participant (parent 1) asserted, “before, he used to spend several hours in school before this lockdown, but now that he is spending a lot of time with his brothers and us, we have a better relationship with him.” given the stress that the covid-19 pandemic has brought to many households (power, 2020), we had not anticipated that family relationships would be reported as stronger in so many households. other positive outcomes included more time to teach children how to do activities such as cooking, household chores, and local crafts. as parent 6 stated, “i taught her how to do some domicile affairs, such as sweeping the rooms and washing of dashes. she is now practicing all these activities because she has ample time during these school closures.” another participant said, “he gains experience in the field of local crafts because it is one of the major occupations we have in yalwa quarters. he is now practicing how to make embroidered gowns before the school reopens” (parent 4). these parental support for literacy development 9 9 skills will help children to contribute to their households and communities as they become adults. parents also spoke of the opportunity to attend more closely to the discipline and moral development of their children. two parents stated that they have been able to instill more discipline in their children. as parent 14 said, “we are monitoring their attitudes, and they comply with the instructions we give to them.” one parent discussed the connection between discipline and morality, stating, “our experience has been great because we learned more about the good and bad deeds of our children due to this school closures, and we also put in place possible measures to reshape them” (parent 8). participants’ efforts to improve the behavior of their children could help the children to engage respectfully and positively with their peers and teachers when they resume schooling. one concern raised by parents was the broader impacts of the covid-19 school closures on examination results at the national level. because nigerian primary schools use examination results to promote pupils to higher classes (ewa, 2015), parents were greatly concerned about the impact of school closures on the pupils’ examination results. two parents feared that most nigerian children would fail their examinations unless schools engaged in thorough reviews before the exams. parent 10 said, “it will be nice to use a few weeks to review previous lessons with the children before the examinations. if the children begin examinations without doing so, the result may lead to mass failure.” participants knew that many early grade students may have forgotten what they were taught before the long school closures. therefore, they emphasized the need for schools to review the content that students were taught before the lockdown so that children can avoid repeating grades. grade repetition can decrease students’ self-esteem and motivation while also increasing the cost to the government of educating a child (ndaruhutse et al., 2008). conclusion this study examined how parents support their children in developing their literacy skills during covid-19 school closures in kano state, nigeria. we found that parents actively assisted their children in learning how to read. this corroborates the finding of the tep center study (2020), which found that most parents are helping their children learn at home. similar to the tep center (2020) study, we found that parents assisted their children to read their books and encouraged them to learn on the radio. parents in our study believed that their efforts would ensure that the school closures did not negatively impact the literacy development of their children. however, parents believed that school closures would negatively affect the literacy skills of children who did not get educational support during school closures. this would be the case for many children in nigeria, because most do not have access to remote learning (amorighoye, 2020; hussain, 2020; mayah, 2020) and are waiting for schools to reopen before they start learning (obiakor & adeniran, 2020). our finding that the school closure would likely decrease children’s literacy skills aligns with azevedo (2020), who found that the percentage of children who cannot read and comprehend a simple story or text could increase by 10% in lmics due to the covid-19 pandemic. despite the effort of the parents in this study to ensure that the literacy skills of their children continued to develop, we found that parents were faced with the challenges of getting textbooks and lack of expertise teaching reading. also, parents complained that their busy schedules hindered them from helping their 10 global education review 8 (1) children learn to read. this aligns with the findings of other studies that some parents were not teaching their children to learn at home due to time pressures (tep, 2020). the parents in this study complained that their children got distracted easily when they were learning as they wanted to play while learning, another finding echoing the report from the tep study (2020). additionally, parents in our study found that it is difficult to motivate children to learn in isolation. parents admitted that they did not know whether their children were in fact improving their literacy skills, due to lack of any ongoing assessment. this study also found unexpected positive perceived outcomes of the pandemicrelated school closures, looking beyond traditional academic learning. parents reported that they were able to instill more discipline in their children and pay more attention to their moral development. the parents said they had more cordial relationships with their children because they spent more time with them. the children had more time to learn how to do activities such as cooking, household chores, and local crafts. as noted above, most of the participating parents were well-educated, on the whole, and mostly middle-class. they greatly valued education. however, parents were also able to see the positive side of a very trying and stressful period. based on these findings, we recommend that the nigerian government and other relevant educational stakeholders invest more in remote learning platforms so that more children, especially low-income children, will have consistent access to educational programs on radio, internet, and television. the development of a user-friendly, simple literacy assessment that would enable parents to monitor their children’s literacy development would be an asset to parents and schools alike, helping to identify students who will need greater support upon school reopening. this would be a useful tool even after the end of the pandemic. in the short term, the nigerian government should provide funding to parents to purchase textbooks and other instructional materials for home use. the major limitation of this study is that most of the parents sampled were middle-class and educated. azubuike et al. (in press) found that parents who have secondary education or less are more likely to say that they do not know how to support their children to learn remotely. those that have secondary education or less are most likely to be low-income earners. if our sample included more low-socioeconomic status parents, parents’ ways of supporting their children’s literacy development and their challenges may be different. further research should be conducted to investigate how lowincome parents supported the literacy development of the children during covid-19 school closures. also, the parents in this study were interviewed after schools had been closed for two months. if the study were conducted after a longer period of school closure, parent efforts in supporting the literacy development of children may have differed. references adamu, a., tsiga, a. u., & zuilkowski, s. s. 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(2020). global monitoring of school closures caused by covid-19. https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationrespon se united nations children's fund. (2020). covid-19: are children able to continue learning during school closures? a global analysis of the potential reach of remote learning policies using data from 100 countries. https://data.unicef.org/resources/remotelearning-reachability-factsheet/ world bank. (2019, october 19). learning poverty. https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education /brief/learning-poverty about the authors bodunrin akinrinmade bodunrin akinrinmade is a doctoral student in the department of educational leadership and policy studies at florida state university. he has presented his research at the annual meetings of the comparative and international education society and the american educational research association. his research focuses on improving educational access, learning outcomes, and school completion rates of children in developing countries. muhammad ammani muhammad ammani is a lecturer in the department of nigerian languages at bayero university kano. he is an affiliate of the nigeria centre for reading research and development. his research focuses on hausa literature and reading. stephanie zuilkowski stephanie simmons zuilkowski is an associate professor at florida state university with a joint appointment in the learning systems institute and the department of educational leadership and policy studies. her research focuses on teacher training and basic education quality in sub-saharan africa. https://www.tepcentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/learning-in-a-pandemic-report_tep-nesg_2020.pdf https://www.tepcentre.com/wp-content/uploads/2020/08/learning-in-a-pandemic-report_tep-nesg_2020.pdf https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse https://en.unesco.org/covid19/educationresponse https://data.unicef.org/resources/remote-learning-reachability-factsheet/ https://data.unicef.org/resources/remote-learning-reachability-factsheet/ https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/learning-poverty https://www.worldbank.org/en/topic/education/brief/learning-poverty posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 24 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mcnair, lynn j., blaisdell, caralyn, davis, john m., addison, luke j. (2022). posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality: elucidations through a froebelian lens. global education review, 9 (1), 24-37. posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality: elucidations through a froebelian lens lynn j. mcnair caralyn blaisdell john m. davis luke j. addison abstract this paper reports on findings from a small pilot study undertaken with early years practitioners in scotland. the scottish government is currently implementing its key election promise of almost doubling the entitlement to publicly funded early learning and childcare (elc) for all three and four-year old and eligible two-year old children. a key message from the scottish government during this period has been that quality is at the heart of the expansion initiative (scottish government, 2017b). however, quality can be a contested and an ill understood concept (moss, 2019). this pilot study, therefore, explored the perspectives of practitioners in scotland regarding what quality in early years provision entails, particularly in this time of change and expansion. the paper will make three key arguments based on the findings from the study. first, that although quality is a much-used term in scottish elc settings, understandings of the term can be subjective, yet powerful and can leave practitioners with more questions than answers. second, we argue that fröbelian principles could ameliorate some of the issues regarding quality in scotland, particularly in terms of combatting discrimination. finally, we argue that those principles must be accompanied by a social justice lens in which prejudice and stereotypes are recognized, named, and unpacked and action for change taken. keywords quality, fröbel, early learning and childcare, neoliberalism introduction the word quality is an often-used term in the scottish elc lexicon. it is habitually used to describe an accomplished, effective setting. accordingly, the word quality is a key concept in elc. however, there are clearly some limits to understanding what is meant by quality. one of the key challenges is that quality can be ill-defined. as moss and others argue, “the concept of quality is neither neutral nor objective, but permeated by values and socially constructed” (moss, dahlberg & pence, 2000:103). therefore, what is understood to be quality to one person may differ greatly to another person. the word quality, therefore, can be a thorny issue, as it can be viewed as subjective and contested. the subjectivity of quality in elc has been a key theme in the research literature for decades, (pence & moss, 1994; moss, dahlberg & pence, 2000; dahlberg, moss & pence, 2013; moss, 2013, 2015, 2019) yet in contemporary policy and practice terms the concept of quality often remains unexamined. for example, in posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 25 25 2016 the scottish government launched its plan for a major expansion of elc, nearly doubling the provision from 600 hours per child to 1140 hours, by the year 2020. quality was a key theme in expansion documents. in their various blueprint documents for the expansion the scottish government make their aspirations clear that elc will be high quality, flexible elc, that is accessible and affordable for families (scottish government, 2017b). international research and evidence from the growing up in scotland study suggests that all children, but especially those from more disadvantaged backgrounds, can benefit from attending elc (scottish government, 2021). however, the same evidence also suggests that if the scottish government’s elc offer is to help give children the best start in life and contribute to closing the poverty-related attainment gap, it must be of high quality. the intention is, therefore, that the elc expansion is fundamentally about improving the early years’ experience of our youngest children. consequently, the main goal for early years practitioners is for their elc setting to be recognized as a quality setting. quality is in turn judged by the care inspectorate (c.i.), one of the main regulators of elc settings, who gather their evidence by the use of benchmark “quality indicators” to assess and monitor practice (scottish government, 2017a): quality of care and support; quality of staffing; quality of management and leadership; and quality of environment. after an inspection of the service the c.i. write reports on their findings of quality, (or not quality); these reports are then made public. it can be from this data that many parents select a particular setting for their child. accordingly, the final report is a further impetus for elc settings to be recognized as a quality setting by c.i. another way that the concept of quality is interwoven into scottish elc discourse is the claim by the scottish government that the quality of elc settings in scotland is already high. this claim is based on c.i. data which shows that, in 2017, 91.1% of all settings providing funded elc achieved c. i. evaluations of good or better on all four themes, while 42.8% of all funded providers achieved evaluations that were very good or excellent across all themes (care inspectorate, 2019). by the continuous use of the word quality within policy frameworks and regulatory processes, and subsequently, the mainstream public discourse, the scottish government may deem the word quality to be understood and accepted. it is as if the word quality is unquestionable as it is reproduced, and used as an adjective, almost unthinkingly, across the public domain. however, despite the word quality appearing 173 times in the expansion consultation document (scottish government, 2016) and the subsequent expansion action plan (scottish government, 2017b), it is weakly defined. in the glossary of terms, quality is explained as: “a high quality experience for all children, which complements other early years and educational activity to close the poverty-related attainment gap and recognizes the value of those we entrust to support our children to fulfil their potential” (scottish government, 2017b, npn). this lack of definition is problematic as understandings of quality greatly impact on those whom the powerful govern (moss, 2019). this study, therefore, explored meanings of quality in elc settings, the impact of understandings of quality and questioned how the work of early years pioneer, friedrich fröbel (1782-1852) could help define quality in the scottish context. literature review quality in the scottish policy context 26 global education review 9 (1) in their “blueprint for 2020: the expansion of early learning and childcare: action plan,” the scottish government places excessive emphasis on the word “quality” (scottish government, 2017b). after the consultation period the scottish government laid out its action plan, setting out its four guiding principles, which included flexibility, accessibility, affordability, and top of their list was quality. under the heading “quality,” it is stated: “the expansion will ensure a highquality experience for all children, which complements other early years and educational activity to close the attainment gap, and recognizes the value of those we entrust to give our children the best start in life” (scottish government, 2017b:3). the word “entrust” is interesting here, as it may suggest that the practitioners’ pedagogical values are not constrained by performativity demands, as “entrusting” suggests a certain freedom in the educational endeavors of practitioners. however, the scottish government has been especially alert to the difficulties caused by poverty, which they believe has impacted on young children’s attainment. in particular, it has been suggested that children in communities described as deprived do less well than children in affluent areas— resulting in what is coined the “attainment gap” (scottish government, 2021). as a consequence, the current educational landscape is being both privatized and militarized as practitioners embark on a rapacious quest to “close the achievement gap” (scottish government, 2018). in the service of closing the achievement gap, children are being assessed through a narrow lens, to consume knowledge, and may be, subsequently, inculcated with capitalist values of conformity and consumption, damaging competition and disdain from collective efforts and educational benefits (author, et al, 2021). therefore, practitioners may not perceive themselves “entrusted,” but, rather pressured to meet demands, as they assess and monitor young children’s experiences. if children are being assessed through a narrow lens and inculcated with capitalist values of conformity and consumption, can this be considered quality in terms of experiences for young children, and for practitioners “entrusted” to fulfil their role. it is argued that, “quality is a positivist concept that serves the interests of managerialism, an essential component of a neoliberal world” (moss, 2019:41). the social understandings of what neoliberalism means will undoubtedly differ from scholar to scholar/ scholar to policy maker / practitioner to practitioner, in a similar vein to quality, the concept tends to mean different things to different people. however, overall, the term neoliberalism is often used in a pejorative sense, as a ruthless and corporate driven concept. braedley & luxton (2010) argue, neoliberalism perpetuates inequitable practices, to insidious depths, which involve power, powerlessness and hegemony. reading braedley and luxton (2010) compels us to face the contradictions of neoliberalism, which is evoked frequently, however its roots, philosophical acceptance and importance are seldom questioned, as contesting neoliberalism is said to be a daunting challenge. the document goes on to express specific aspects of quality, which offer a bit more information on what quality might mean. for example, in “a high-quality workforce,” the text following reiterates this by including: “the single most important driver of quality of a child’s elc experience is a high-quality workforce” (scottish government, 2017b: 6). once again, there is an acknowledgement here of the value of the practitioners and their continued professional development (cpd). additionally, a further quality heading relates to the elc environment, “high quality posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 27 27 physical environments,” which is described as: “...flexible in offering choices and carefully selected resources which capture interest to create moments which spark children’s play” (scottish government, 2017b: 20-21). it is here, we find the scottish government acknowledging the value of play as a critical medium for learning. finally, a third heading contains, “clear quality standards and robust selfevaluation and quality assurance regimes” which explains rigorous inspection procedures (scottish government, 2017b: 21 -22). notably, in keeping with hegemonic discourses regarding quality elc, the scottish government returns here to the accountability and datafication of elc settings through the inspection processes. in 2020, the national practice guidance for early years in scotland: realising the ambition: being me was published (education scotland, 2020). this document was created to support the expansion, and includes a section, “ensuring quality through critically reflective practice,” under the heading the author(s) write: “research has shown that high quality early years provision promotes children’s development and, in the longer term, enhances their educational and life changes...however, poor quality services have a detrimental effect on children’s development...quality...remains paramount” (education scotland, 2020:81). this statement can be closely aligned to earlier documentation produced by the scottish government (2017b). the author(s) of realising the ambition, then go on to ask “what does high quality practice look like?” the answer directs us back to circular definitions, suggesting we reflect on previously published documents: “a blueprint for 2020: the expansion of early learning and childcare: action plan” (2017b), and to the “health and social care standards” (scottish government, 2017a) and the “care inspectorate elc quality framework” (care inspectorate, 2019). despite initially offering a circular definition, realising the ambition does deviate from other documents in that it eventually goes some way to defining quality (education scotland, 2020). for example, under the heading “quality settings have a clear, shared, vision” – this is explained as: “the vision should be based on the unique needs of your children and families in your setting. developing a vision that is co-created... with children and families” (education scotland, 2020: 82). it is in dialogue with realising the ambition that we make a preliminary case for connecting the work of friedrich fröbel, whose work holds as true today as it did in the nineteenth century. for example, froebel placed emphasis on the “unique child” and the critical importance of “the child as part of a family and community” (tovey, 2020), resonating with realising the ambition’s call for a shared vision with children and families. a further heading is added: “quality settings have practitioners with an understanding of child development and how young children learn,” it is emphasized that, “...children learn best when engaged in meaningful first-hand experiences...and a recognition that young children learn through play” (education scotland, 2020:82). encapsulated here is fröbel’s value of first-hand experiences and, of course, that children learn through play. another heading: “quality settings have...rich adult-child interactions” is followed by an explanation, that the adult attunes to the child, supporting them and challenging them. here fröbel’s concept of freedom with guidance can be understood, as the practitioner responds, sensitively and “observes, supports and extends” children’s learning (bruce, louis & mccall, 2014). this responsiveness cannot be objectified and reduced to discrete formulaic 28 global education review 9 (1) characteristics. for fröbel freedom with guidance emerges from democratic notions of tolerance, conviviality and respect (liebschner, 1992). under the heading: “practitioners in high quality provision” realising the ambition writes of promoting “child-initiated experiences and...captialise on children’s interests and motivation” (education scotland, 2020:83). here fröbel’s concept of child-centeredness can be understood. finally, realising the ambition adds: “quality settings understand...the importance of curriculum and pedagogy.” it is here that fröbel’s participatory pedagogical approach is laid bare. it is clear that the national guidance for early years in scotland, identifies core components of quality, and that these can easily be connected to the main principles, pedagogy and environment of friedrich fröbel, which will be discussed in more detail in the next section. fröbelian principles in the scottish context frobelian principles and practices are influential in scottish early years (author, 2020). an independent review of the scottish elc revealed that there are many fröbelian trained early years practitioners in scotland, and that through those practitioners, the implementation of fröbelian philosophy has profoundly influenced the practice in elc (siraj & kingston, 2015). in addition, the national practice guidance for early years in scotland, has dedicated significant text to fröbelian work (education scotland, 2020). these accounts suggest that fröbelian ideas can be connected to ideas of quality. from the previously discussed national guidance, ideas of social justice can be associated with concepts of quality, for example, quality is associated with living in “communities that are inclusive,” that diverse cultures are “celebrated,” and that everyone must “learn to respect, protect and fulfil human rights and live free from discrimination” (education scotland, 2020:37). broadly speaking, when fröbel created his principles, he did not use the term “social justice,” however he was committed to the education of all, rich and poor alike, and indeed he saw in education the key to the improving social conditions (liebschner, 1992). he challenged ageism, arguing: “let every stage be that stage,” he viewed childhood as a period in its own right, childhood as part of life, and not simply as a preparation for adulthood (bruce, 2021). another of his fundamental principles was that of the “uniqueness” of each and every child, which is more likely than not to have included ideas of race and gender. fröbel was also an antagonist for social change, he argued that “women and children are the most oppressed and neglected of all...they have not been fully recognized in their dignity as parts of human society” (fröbel in allen, 1982: 319). he was ridiculed by his peers for this view; and for his activism in bringing women into the workplace he is named a feminist by fröbelian authors (ulrich, 1935; allen, 1982; manning, 2005). furthermore, he challenged the class system, working with children who were considered “affluent” he encouraged “less affluent” children to join in the play. fröbel’s principles were not easy to interpret, as his writings could be complicated, resulting in the meaning becoming lost (wasmuth, 2020). however, that said, over time fröbelian principles have been re-written, most recently fröbelian, helen tovey, updated fröbelian principles for the fröbel trust. after an historical – contemporary analysis, and with a keenness to remain true to the essence of fröbelian principles, tovey concluded his principles to be: “freedom with guidance,” posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 29 29 “unity, connectedness and community,” “engaging with nature,” “learning through selfactivity and reflection,” “the central importance of play,” “creativity and the power of symbols” and “knowledgeable and nurturing educators” (tovey, 2020: npn). in the following sections we move our preliminary argument about frobelian principles and quality in scottish elc into dialogue with the data from the project. first, however, we summarize the project methodology. methodology participants the participants in this pilot study were early years practitioners or leaders / managers of settings, based in three elc settings in scotland. the settings were chosen based on their high scores on recent inspection reports, indicating that regulatory bodies considered the settings to be of high quality. a review was carried out on all of the joint education scotland and care inspectorate inspection reports conducted within elc settings available through the education scotland website between november 2016 and december 2018. this time frame was chosen as it is the period between the dissemination of the scottish government’s blueprint for expansion (2017b) and the published, publicly available inspection reports available at the time of the review in spring 2019. 170 reports were reviewed and five highscoring settings were contacted about participation in the research. three of those settings responded favorably and the pilot study was conducted within those. between the three settings, 11 participants in total took part in the project. this included seven practitioners and four leaders / managers. in each of the three settings at least one member of the leadership/ management team and one practitioner were interviewed in-depth and shared their views. while specific demographic information was not collected from participants on how they selfidentify, the researchers identified that all participants presented as women and white. methods this qualitative pilot study was situated within an interpretive research paradigm, and used an informal, ethnographic interview approach. all practitioners / leaders / managers within each setting were invited to share their thoughts and ideas as the researchers spent time with them throughout the day. an initial opening question was utilized which aimed to open up a conversation about the participants’ understanding of the concept of quality. after this opening question, no specific predetermined interview schedule was used, however an “aide memoire” with loose topics and areas of interest was compiled to be referred to should the conversation become stilted (mccann & clarke, 2005). the interviews generally flowed organically without the need for this prompt. the informal, conversational interview approach facilitated a richer picture than a structured interview might have, particularly regarding participants’ experience and understanding of the phenomena of quality in their own terms which would then be useful in designing larger studies with more structured interviews and questionnaires (denzin, 1989). initial opening question: • what does the concept “quality” mean to you and would you choose to work with the concept of quality? aide memoir areas of interest: 30 global education review 9 (1) • the participants' perception of children’s experiences of quality within their setting. • the participants' understanding of what regulators mean by quality. • how the participant defines quality in their own words. the interviews were conducted within the participants' familiar settings such as nursery playrooms and nursery gardens. participants were offered the choice of speaking privately with researchers, however most chose to participate in discussions whilst they worked. this was beneficial for both the researchers and the staff as the immersion in the environment prompted lots of discussion. opportunities were given to all of the practitioners to share their views without the presence of management to ensure they were not being overly guided by their managers’ thoughts. all of the interviews were recorded on a voice recorder following consent from each participant in compliance with bera ethical guidelines. the discussions were subsequently transcribed in preparation for analysis. data analysis the first step in the data analysis process involved a reading and re-reading of the transcripts in their entirety. this was a reflexive process intended to gain a preliminary sense of the interviews as a whole in relation to the concept of quality (agar, 1980). following this, we employed a three-step thematic analysis (e.g. king and horrocks 2010). the first step involved reading the transcripts and assigning descriptive codes to lines of text using single words and phrases. next, descriptive codes were grouped together which appeared to share a common meaning and an interpretative code was created to capture the essence of that group. finally, through an analysis of the interpretative codes, key themes were identified. ethical considerations the research project was conducted in accordance with the bera ethical guidelines. before attending the settings, consent was obtained from the relevant director of children and families. because this research was largely conducted in public, we are aware that participants may have self-censored. we have been careful in our findings section to remove any identifying information when direct quotes from participants are being used. this was a small, exploratory pilot project. children themselves were not consulted about quality at this stage, nor were parents/families/care givers. we therefore present the findings as a starting point for dialogue and further research rather than as a definitive account of what quality means in the scottish elc context. findings defining quality: a ubiquitous, powerful, but blurry concept for scottish practitioners upon our initial analysis of the data it became clear that across all of the settings, the concept of quality was consistently considered a “big issue.” while senior-level staff focused more heavily on the sector as a whole and practitioners focused more on daily practice, their responses demonstrated that quality was a highly impactful concept in elc and heavily integrated into the daily lexicon of each setting. for example, participants regularly used quality as an adjective attached to everyday vocabulary, for example “quality environment.” one deputy head teacher encapsulated this at the beginning of our conversation, stating: posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 31 31 “we do work with the concept of quality yes, yes, quality of our observations, quality of our planning, quality of communication. it’s the bread and butter of your role, in quality of interactions. we use that word all the time.” (deputy head teacher, primary school with nursery class). as this quote illustrates, quality was seen by participants as ubiquitous and perhaps even unquestionable. for example, one senior early years officer explained that quality should influence everything: “of course! [laughs] do i need to elaborate? why would you not choose to work with the concept of quality? quality should influence everything; the environment, our relationships, our pedagogy, our experiences...these things should all be quality.” (senior early years officer, nursery). as these examples both illustrate, participants consistently expressed a general feeling that quality as a concept is crucial for providing the best experiences and opportunities for children’s learning. each of the research settings appeared to embed this notion throughout their service. for example, most participants discussed the “expectation” of quality from colleagues, parents, children and the wider sector. such pervasiveness of the concept of quality and the almost endless attribution of the term to every aspect of early education justifies our research concern and demonstrates the importance of understanding the meanings behind the concept of quality in practice in scotland. indeed, over the course of the interviews many participants did begin to unpack and critique the concept of quality. one respondent, for example, argued as the conversation came to a close for quality to be defined within participatory processes of coconstruction. another argued that: “homogenized systems are a concern. quality cannot be standardized and made the same. a ‘one-sizefits-all’ cannot work as it has to be understood as specifically related to the people and the community it serves...quality may underpin education and early learning – but it is unique to different spaces and places” (nursery owner). this feeling that quality was subjective and contextualized was echoed by another participant, who asked: “who says who is right or wrong? you can’t define quality without understanding what is ‘good’, but ‘good’ is dependent upon the people you are engaging with...therefore quality cannot be standardized across the whole country.” (head teacher, primary school) as these quotes illustrate, by the end of our conversations, participants tended to shift from their initial stance that quality was obvious, clear, and an essential component of ensuring best practice and the best possible experiences for children. the process of being asked to clarify their ideas and share with a researcher perhaps disrupted the taken-forgranted nature of what quality actually meant. 32 global education review 9 (1) however, quality remained difficult for participants to specifically define. many participants moved in and out of ethereal and intangible understandings of quality, and were unable to produce certainty or definitive answers which clearly define quality for them. this suggests that although there is something participants understand as quality, it is amorphous and has blurry edges. quality “at risk” in the rapidly changing policy landscape participants were often more comfortable discussing how they “do” quality rather than trying to define it. notably, many participants specifically saw quality as being at risk because of the rapidly changing policy landscape in scottish early years. in particular, staffing was raised as central aspect of “doing” quality in every setting but also as being at risk. as one participant described, staffing was essential to their vision of quality. “deeply committed, deeply engaged, and engaging staff who are interested in pursuing their own education, at all different levels. i have maturity in my staff, and experience in my staff, and i have numbers of staff. we are working at a far better ratio than the care inspectorate expect. that is fundamental in early years settings. i would plough money into [staffing] in early years settings” (nursery owner) as this participant demonstrates, thoughts on doing “quality” through staffing ranged from the need for qualifications as well as structural issues such as staff ratios and consistent, sustainable staffing. leaders and managers also spoke about the characteristics that might make someone a quality member of staff, with the desire to learn and grow being a key concern. it was important to them that practitioners could take on the values and practice expected or needed for high-quality provision. additionally, leaders and managers felt that staff should be deeply committed and loving, providing a home-like environment that is responsive to children. staffing could also be a risk to quality, however. while leaders and managers claimed to value staff members with different strengths and capabilities, some had a very low tipping point for staff deemed “not quality.” participants shared that there are occasions when “people just need to go” to raise the quality of the team and that one or two “bad apples” could bring down the quality of an entire elc setting. one particular perceived risk to staffing, and therefore to quality, was the early years expansion and subsequent rapid growth of the workforce. there was a consistent finding across leaders and managers that the rollout for the expanded hours, in terms of service models and staffing proposals, was radically at odds with their individual understandings of quality. two major concerns surrounded staffing, quality, and the expansion. firstly, the respondents believed there were going to be lower standards for employing new staff; there was a concern for the quality of a “fast-produced” workforce. specifically mentioned were concerns over “young” people coming in from school who were early in their journey, and the effect this could have on quality of children’s experiences, as in many cases young practitioners would be relied upon to be a “key person” for up to 10 children. the participants’ second major concern was that posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 33 33 they believed they would lose quality staff through poor management, especially at the local authority level. one setting estimated they would lose 90% of their staff because of unwanted terms and conditions of new contracts being forced onto existing staff. this led to what leaders saw as a potential two-pronged problem developing as settings will be experiencing considerable changes in staffing and new, untrained staff while simultaneously leaving fewer experienced role models to demonstrate high standards of quality practice. finally, concern was expressed about the quality of family life in the wake of the expansion; families might find their purpose in life removed if their child began attending nursery full time and might turn to sitting at home drinking or doing drugs. discussion: frobelian principles, quality, and social justice accordingly, after confronting the literature on quality directly, and from examining the findings from the data we acknowledged the term quality is used ubiquitously, it has no clear definition that is reciprocated by all, it appears to depend on one’s vantage point. throughout our research we found countless disagreements, tensions and contradictions (pence & moss, 1994; moss, dahlberg & pence, 2000; dahlberg, moss & pence, 2013; moss, 2013, 2015, 2019). however, after an examination of the independent review of elc (siraj & kingston, 2015), the national practice guidance for early years in scotland (education scotland, 2020) and, subsequently, exposing the major premises on which they rest, e.g., high quality trained practitioners enrich the elc setting; that children are active constructors / producers of their own lives; the value of play and first-hand experiences; and the critical role of the child as part of a family and community (education scotland, 2020). we then made connections to fröbelian principles, which carry with them advantages of clarity. in the space available here it is impossible to do justice to fröbelian principles, however what has been flagged are the principles that connect with the national guidance (education, 2020). consider again the work of tovey, who argues fröbelian principles offer both substance and complexity, that is: “freedom with guidance,” “unity, connectedness and community,” “engaging with nature,” “learning through selfactivity,” “the central importance of play,” “creativity and the power of symbols” and “knowledge and nurturing educators” (tovey, 2020:3). what tovey (2020) offers here is an opportunity for objective neutrality, where practitioners, regulators and policy makers tease out, these liberating and philosophical principles, resulting in a benchmark for quality. first and foremost, what fröbel demanded was maximum freedom for the child. in order to enable this freedom, was the highly skilled practitioner who facilitated children’s “freedom” with adult “guidance.” “freedom with guidance” defined means that adults do not make assumptions about what children need to know, but children and practitioners are coconstructors of knowledge. the process of understanding /reconceptualizing is through observation. bruce (2021) reminds us constantly that “fröbel’s approach...was interactionist neither laissez-faire nor using the transmission model of instruction” (bruce, 2021:66). when the practitioner takes their cue from the child’s own relationship with the world, e.g., by learning through self-activity, whether it is through play, or another rich experience, e.g., cooking, the child has their own way of revealing themselves to the sensitive, supportive practitioner. importantly, for fröbel, “play was not located in discourses of outcomes or accountability” (flannery quinn, 2017:29). play gave adults an insight into the child’s world, if 34 global education review 9 (1) the practitioner had “intentions” for the play, insight would be lost. one of the respondents, somewhat, tacitly affirmed that in her view, a high-quality setting responds to the community it serves, fröbel would have agreed to that statement, due to the uniqueness of children and adults, combined with an acknowledgement of the distinctive ways and customs of each setting, he stressed that no two settings could be the same, as all settings should be different, if they are answering to the uniqueness of the child and their family. the setting fits the child and their family, rather than the other way around. this acknowledgement of the differences of each elc setting was commonly expressed by our respondents. however, for fröbel, fundamentally, the main philosophical ideas that underpin the setting should remain. fröbel, celebrated difference and uniqueness, he would have rejected neoliberal ideas of inequitable practices, which involve power, powerlessness and hegemony. in today’s climate of closing the “attainment gap,” quality in education should not be focused on capital production, rather children should be viewed through a fröbelian lens, where children’s instincts prompt them to explore their world, and sensitive, attuned practitioners support children’s interests and learning. in short, what fröbelian principles offer is educational equity. adoption of frobelian principles does not automatically ensure a socially just nor an equitable lens on quality. for example, frobelians enthusiastically contributed to colonial projects in new zealand and elsewhere (read, 2018; author, 2020). in new zealand, infant schools shaped by frobelian approaches were established in part to address the supposed “moral wilderness” (may, 2015) of indigenous maori culture, a view that demonstrates that fröbelian principles have, in some form, been twinned in the past with white european supremacist views. in contemporary times, the uk early years field is grappling in real time with race, racism and other forms of discrimination that affect children, families and practitioners (e.g. tapestry online learning journal, 2021). as these examples illustrate, if social justice is to be part of the vision for quality, frobelian principles must be twinned with a process of naming and unpacking prejudices and their implications, and taking action to recognize and remedy injustice. our findings did indeed demonstrate examples of how participants reproduced stereotypes and discriminatory discourses while speaking of “just knowing” what quality is. for example, there was ageism in the way young people coming in from school were automatically assumed to be low-quality staff (e.g. chasteen, horhota and crumley-branyon, 2020). similarly, participants reproduced discourses about the need for deep commitment, love and responsiveness that, while widely accepted as necessary in early childhood practice (page, 2018), are strongly gendered (oksala, 2015). the bulk of this caring profession falls onto women’s shoulders, as scotland’s early years workforce is 98% female (scottish government, 2019); early years is seen as a natural fit for women because of stereotypes about innate maternal instincts (darling, 2017). participants also expressed deficit views, condescension and potentially classism about families (e.g. inglis et al., 2019), some of whom, presumably being unemployed, were assumed to use the expanded nursery hours to sit at home and turn to drinking and drugs. finally, there is a silence from the participants about diversity. the scottish early years workforce, along with being over-representative of women due to gender stereotyping, is also underrepresentative in terms of attracting and retaining people from ethnic minority posing unique and urgent challenges to understandings of quality 35 35 backgrounds and disabled people (scottish government, 2019). in our research project, there was no mention from participants about the benefits to quality when settings attract and—crucially—support and retain underrepresented staff, nor the varied life experiences and therefore richness those staff could bring to the provision as part of their vision for quality. the amorphous and subjective nature of how participants describe quality, if left unexamined, could therefore in fact serve to replicate discriminatory “folk” beliefs that perpetuate inequalities. fröbelian principles go some way toward ameliorating problems with quality, but cannot do so on their own. conclusion ultimately, ideas of quality in elc are difficult to discern precisely and are therefore, not at all explicit. policy makers write of quality, but do not define it. a consensus does not exist. our data revealed that practitioners find themselves concerned about the many contradictions of the various iterations of the word. such concerns, it would seem, are unavoidable. quality is not easily defined, despite being a well-used word in the elc lexicon. as regulators measure, assess and monitor elc settings using quality indicators it is necessary to provide a definition, or at the very least a benchmark for understanding what is quality in elc settings. of critical importance, practitioners, regulators and policy makers must interrogate subjectivities, and challenge assumptions regarding the term. it could be that definitions of quality may be counteractive to understandings, and therefore, we suggest a benchmark may be more useful. the respondents brought fresh perspectives to bear on old questions and raised new questions. for example, the practitioners expressed that with the implementation of the 1140 hours, elc was being used as a vehicle primarily to generate and promote the value of a capitalist society, they argued that ideas of quality could be connected to neoliberal ideas. neoliberal ideas, lie in direct opposition to fröbelian principles. we have suggested the principles of friedrich fröbel could guide practitioners, regulators and policy makers in understandings of quality. indeed, many scottish elc settings already implement fröbelian principles, with very positive results (siraj & kingston, 2015). the overall aim of practitioners, regulators and policy makers, after all, is to offer our children the richest experiences possible in their young years. references agar, m. 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(2020) fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play: modifications in germany and the united states. london & new york: routledge. focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 20 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: smith, mariam, and ball, jessica (2020). focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change to increase inclusion in basic education reforms. global education review, 7 (1). 20-40. focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change to increase inclusion in basic education reforms mariam smith learning loop consultancy, sweden jessica ball university of victoria, canada abstract this article describes an actor-focused approach to creating a theory of change that is context-specific, grounded in an understanding of local historical, cultural, linguistic, and social realities, and inspired by a commitment to social justice in education reform. in 2019, the authors completed a research evaluation of the government of cambodia’s inaugural multilingual education national action plan designed to increase inclusion of indigenous children in basic education. the project mandate included constructing a theory of change. using the participatory approach of outcome harvesting, data were obtained about behavioral changes among actors implementing and affected by the plan. qualitative data analyses identified 115 behaviors distributed across 15 categories of actors in the education system, and uncovered assumptions and experiences of change processes and relationships. the authors created a generic theory of change mandated by the commissioning body for the evaluation. it was unidirectional and institutioncentered, focused on objectives, strategies, outputs, and outcomes. to provide a more nuanced, inclusive, context-specific and potentially useful representation of change processes, the authors drew upon the behavior change data to construct a second, actor-focused theory of change. additionally, the authors constructed a third theory of change showing education strategies in the current context compared to internationally accepted best practice in multilingual education. this study illustrates a focus on manifest behaviors and relationships among actors in theories of change. actor-focused frameworks that describe situationally specific, participatory action and reciprocal learning can promote inclusive, sustainable, systems-level change toward children’s right to meaningful quality basic education. keywords theory of change; indigenous; actor-focused; complexity; outcomes; situated learning; multilingual education; systems; participation; social justice; rights; social change introduction this article describes theories of change (tocs) as tools which can be more or less useful for change agents depending upon how the toc is used and its design features. six features derived from literature are described which can encourage or limit a toc’s potential use for accountability, learning, and engagement toward social justice in education reform. the article then sets the scene for a case example by describing the context of indigenous education and rights. the case describes our experiences of creating tocs for an indigenous language-ineducation initiative in cambodia. the agencymandated task of constructing a toc evolved into the creation of three types of tocs: (1) a generic, institution-focused toc; (2) an actorfocused toc; and (3) an analysis of strategies against best practice in multilingual education. the article then discusses the potential benefits and limitations of various approaches to toc, particularly the actor-focused toc, building further on the six features introduced in the beginning of the article by drawing from literature and our own experiences during the case example. the article concludes that, while all toc approaches are limited in representing focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 21 realities, an actor-focused toc is a potential tool for changing power dynamics and inclusion of actors in education reform. introducing the toc as a tool theories of change (tocs) can provide programs with clarity on how change is believed to transpire. in recent years, tocs have become a significant tool for communication (valters, 2015). tocs are found in program documents such as project proposals, strategic plans, and evaluation reports. typically, those involved in program design formulate the logic of the program, outlining the context, problems, assumptions, activities, expected outputs, risks, outcomes, and goals. a toc often contains agreed upon terms and statements defining the presumed or intended pathway from the assumptions and problems to the desired vision or goal. these are often further developed for a monitoring framework. most often, these center on measurable, projected outputs and they work as an accountability system between implementing agencies and funding agencies. typically, there is pressure from each part of a funding hierarchy to keep implementers accountable to detailed program activities, with an assumption that these “deliverables” will result in targeted outcomes, such as an increase in the number of children with access to preschool or to multilingual education (mle) in primary school. a toc can support the accountability system and can be used as a tool for engagement and learning. at the same time, we have seen how tocs can limit engagement and learning, and also preempt emergent, productive processes of intended and unintended interactions among stakeholders and behavior change. whether a toc is more or less useful for engagement, learning, and accountability depends on a number of features derived from literature and our own experiences in education reforms. these include, but are not limited to, (a) the form of the toc, whether generic or fitted to a specific context and purpose, whether written or visual or both, and what languages it is presented in for diverse stakeholders’ engagement; (b) whether the necessary simplification of the change process shown in a toc is conceived as a definitive encapsulation of a finite process or, instead, as an abbreviated and mutable notation for ongoing deliberation about a dynamic and complex process; (c) whether the toc, from its inception, is conceived as a tool for generating engagement of key actors in an authentic, collaborative process of generating change; (d) whether the creation of a toc represents a fixed and linear sequence culminating in summative valuation against targeted outcomes, just as the earlier logic models were intended, or instead represents an iterative, networked, and circular process; (e) whether the toc is entirely context-based or borrows in part or wholly from external contexts and models that are assumed to generalize to the context at hand; and (f) whether the toc is understood as a heuristic tool or as a positivist depiction of reality. for each of these features, investigators face dilemmas and choices to ensure that the toc stimulates communication, collaboration, learning, and accountability among actors. we contend that if these issues are deliberated with considerations of the specific purpose and context where tocs are meant to be useful, tocs can contribute to justice and inclusion in social change processes, such as indigenous participation in education reform. in the following discussion, we elaborate upon each of these six features and then illustrate them with reference to our recent evaluation of a government intervention to increase indigenous participation in basic education in cambodia. 22 global education review 7 (1) the form of the toc a skilled narrator can express logic in writing, communicating the theory of how change will happen or has happened. although tocs have long been expressed in narrative form, diagrammatic representation of tocs have become popular (davies, 2018). with limited space in diagrammatic forms, choices of words and symbols communicate elements, interactions, and outcomes that are viewed as essential or most important. generally, only the most central actors are visible. this can limit the sense of a toc as an invitation for engagement and strategic action, since those who are not identified in the diagrammatic change process may feel devalued, and may in fact be overlooked in decision-making forums and program activities as the toc is used as a reference point for implementation and accountability. in visual form, tocs can easily be made accessible as a shared focus for dialogue and reflection. tocs are, however, cultural artifacts. their form embodies the culture of one or several actors (and often the institutions they represent). this enculturation will influence the effectiveness of the toc as a communication tool within and across cultures, institutions, and communities. for example, in many indigenous cultures, change is conceived as cyclical and interdependent and often represented in the form of concentric circles (hill & stairs, 2002; mcgregor, 2004). few examples of tocs take the form of circles or spirals, or highlight the interdependence of human and non-human actors that are seen in some cultures as mutually influential in determining outcomes. the toc as a tool for on-going deliberation to work with complexity development processes that call upon multiple actors to change their behavior are, by definition nonlinear and unpredictable, and therefore complex (carden & earl, 2007; conlin & stirrat, 2008; smith, 2017). in complex social change, there are few solutions that are assured a priori because there are always multiple belief systems and perspectives, and people make both rational and irrational decisions (ramalingam, 2013; thaler, 2009). besides perspectives, there are unique factors in each context adding to its complexity. it is generally understood that complexity means that change involves multiple actors and perspectives, and it is dynamic; each new development in a complex change process yields new insights, risks, objectives, opportunities, and power relationships, all calling for negotiation. as we have experienced, practitioners working within complex social change often know all too well the unique, interrelated, emergent, and dynamic processes in their particular program context. they are likely to respond negatively to the development and use of tocs in which inevitably simplified representations of change processes seem uninformed and unsympathetic to the unpredictability of many elements and interactions within the context or process of change. demands for compliance to a prescribed and ossified toc may be received as a threat to adaptive management and effective practices involving multi-stakeholder partnerships. complex social change requires robust engagement in learning such that patterns of change can be explored through an ongoing process of small, iterative cycles of action and reflection. institutional program logic, however, tends to rely on assumptions conceived outside the immediate context and invoke the (suspect) concept of best practices or aspirations prized among development agencies rather than probing ideas and innovation, which is required in complex social change processes. focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 23 the collaborative purpose of the toc in an increasingly connected world, actors interact and social problems intersect in various ways, requiring collaboration. as thaler (2009) emphasizes in his groundbreaking economic models, humans are the most important agents of change, and our models have to centralize how we make decisions (often irrationally) and act to create particular kinds of (intended and unintended) outcomes. we contend that the main goal of a toc is to stimulate communication, collaboration, learning, and accountability among actors. a toc may be produced by a program design team or consultant with or without the participation of those implementing the program or affected by the program. a toc may be conceived through collaboration, and may be used as a stimulus for reflection, learning, and further collaboration. when all parts of an envisioned change process are exposed in a clear toc, stakeholders can see their roles (or lack thereof) in the change process and begin dialogue with a shared understanding of what the program is supposed to do and achieve. choices about providing opportunities for collaboration will affect the legitimation and use of a toc by various stakeholders for learning and accountability. we support the view of patton (2008), who advocates utilizationfocused evaluation, in which the primary intended users of evaluation are clearly identified and personally engaged at the inception of the evaluation process to ensure that their needs and goals are identified. in our experiences in education reform, stakeholders whose behaviors will enable or detract from the success of a planned education reform are more likely to engage and feel ownership over the change process if they have been actively involved in conceptualizing the toc for the intervention. the fixed and linear or iterative and circular change process tocs are embedded in world views and organizational cultures. vertical and hierarchical cultures may demand an institutionallygenerated toc during the planning process, followed by periodic reporting on progress toward predetermined outcomes in a linear, logic model. however, tocs can be useful to forecast and reflect upon change processes at any point in a program (davies, 2018). organizations recognizing complexity and uncertainty in change processes may actively promote a generative process for the creation and use of tocs. multiple perspectives, directions, and feedback loops can iteratively reveal new patterns to support learning (kurtz & snowden, 2003). we argue that this kind of process-oriented use of a toc as a tool can guide ongoing adjustments to program interventions and can be useful to accountability systems, including monitoring and evaluation. the toc as context-based or borrowing from other contexts each context has its own history, set of values and perspectives, and dynamic relationships which affect strategies and outcomes. funnell and rogers (2011) describe multiple ways of depicting a toc depending on the context, type of program, needs, goals, and complexity of the intervention and the context (rogers, 2014). tocs can be created by external experts or by actors from within a local context. external input can inspire and inform so-called best program models or practices visible in a toc. however, practices that are “best” in one context do not necessarily work across diverse contexts. context-specific knowledge and participation is essential for the validity and usefulness of the toc. 24 global education review 7 (1) the toc as a heuristic tool or a positivist reality a toc produced on the basis of substantial, relevant, and current data from a local context can be conceived as a positivist reality or, from a post-positivist stance, as a heuristic tool. from our post-positivist and systems perspective, a toc (even when informed by data) will only be a representation of particular perspectives of a reality; it is a constructed system, and not reality itself (williams & hummelbrunner, 2010). when a toc is taken as an accurate map of reality, this can put pressure on design and performance of program activities, as actors attempt to comply with what has been presumed, prescribed, predetermined, and predicated by the toc. on the other hand, conceptualizing a toc as a heuristic tool for ongoing engagement and learning, as well as for accountability, gives room for diverse perspectives and ongoing modifications to roles and goals as new conditions, actors, potentially effective actions, intended and unintended outcomes, and other factors come to light. a helpful metaphor may be a comparison of jazz with classical music, where a toc for educational development work allows for improvisation, like playing jazz, rather than being constrained by a predetermined musical score. the remainder of this article illustrates these considerations with reference to our recent experience evaluating a policy intervention to promote the language rights of young indigenous children in cambodia. this project provides a vivid example of complex social change processes. based on this and other experiences in education for social justice and sustainable development, we argue that tocs can be useful tools in contexts where complexity is recognized in rights-based program planning, evaluation, research, and development, but only if the following conditions are present: (a) timely and authentic opportunities for participation by local actors; (b) acknowledgement of the ecosystems of various actors and the knowledge and belief systems of those whom the intervention is meant to serve; and (c) an understanding that a toc is an iterative, heuristic tool for learning, collaboration, and accountability. indigenous education and rights in 2018, we were commissioned to evaluate cambodia’s multilingual education national action plan (menap) 2015-2018 and the implementation of this plan for inclusive quality education for indigenous children. this education reform in cambodia was seen as a complex social change process for several reasons, including: (1) the normative nature of education; (2) the contested nature of indigenous inclusion/exclusion in education decision-making; and (3) the institution-driven nature of most development assistance systems. educational relevance for indigenous contexts education is a normative function in society and is deeply nested in cultural and societal values and aspirations. through the education system, normative values are transmitted, defining what education is meant to do. education can be for economical, technical, or other social goals (dahlstedt & olson, 2013). it can be taken as axiomatic that an education system will not work the same way in different contexts. most ethnic and cultural groups have unique worldviews, languages, approaches to teaching and learning, and goals for formal and informal education. also, the education program needs to respond to the historical and contemporary relationships and place. with this in mind, it might be expected that the normative values of a mainstream education system may not match the values and goals of indigenous focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 25 peoples who are the intended beneficiaries of the education system or reform (battiste, 2013). in education for indigenous children, programs need to account for indigenous forms of knowledge, participation and leadership (hill & stairs, 2002; mcgregor, 2004). an indigenous child needs an education fit for the realities and ways of living of their culture within their particular context, which is dynamic and rapidly changing. while we recognize the great diversity of indigenous peoples globally, the shared experience of colonization has left many communities facing common challenges. in light of this, it is worthwhile to explore how tocs that can be optimally utilized to advance the goals of particular communities who are facing similar struggles. indigenous lifestyles are often strongly connected to biodiversity hotspots around the world, where indigenous peoples hold extensive, context-specific knowledge about the local environment. when development organizations aim to create a “better world” through “quality education,” indigenous input is required to confirm their agreement with the ideological agenda and associated development targets and strategies (ball, 2005; smith, 2017). through the delivery of education, teachers communicate a depiction of history, the present, and possible futures which will shape young people as citizens. education decision-makers, curriculum writers, and teachers need to be held ethically and politically responsible for the legitimacy and utility of these depictions (dahlstedt & olson, 2013). indigenous inclusion/exclusion in decision-making the contexts in which most indigenous peoples live is dominated by majority ethnic groups and their cultures. indigenous perspectives may not be heard and indigenous peoples’ inclusion in education decision-making forums is often only symbolic. in projects and policies affecting indigenous peoples, there are potentially implicit agendas of nationalism and assimilation, and financial motivations promoting or disrupting indigenous participation (wong & benson, 2019). added to this complexity, indigenous peoples have typically experienced significant environmental and cultural losses, further challenging trust, relationships, and the ability to work collaboratively with those wishing to implement education reform. development assistance systems globally, education for indigenous children faces significant challenges (heyman & cassola, 2012). programs to solve seemingly intractable problems of access, relevance, and achievement require far more funding and technical support than is allocated in most countries. solutions also depend on political will to fulfill indigenous parents’ and children’s rights to participate in education decision-making in order to ensure that education reforms meet their self-identified needs and goals (battiste, 2017). further, policies regarding the languages in which education is delivered are an exercise of power that often violates indigenous rights (cummins, 2000). the development assistance system itself has its organizational comings and goings, funding streams, and silos guided by dominant discourses and popular strategies, requiring political negotiations from which indigenous peoples are often far removed. these three factors, along with others too numerous to elaborate here, indicate a need for negotiation of power and identity in education initiatives. rather than merely rolling out education services including new initiatives, there is a need to convene and support networks of stakeholders able to negotiate the normative role of education with and for indigenous people (ball, 2005). planning tools that support 26 global education review 7 (1) collaboratively created curricula, delivery, and accountability processes are needed (ball, 2004). in efforts to implement potentially fruitful policy and practice reforms, we argue that a solely agency-driven, linear approach to toc can be counterproductive. in newly independent countries such as cambodia, this approach reinscribes exclusionary, colonial practice. as noted earlier, generic tocs can alienate key actors as they perpetuate a patronizing, authoritarian stance that privileges the needs of funders and governments over citizen needs for self-determination, civic participation in government decision-making, and strengthened local capacity for engagement in education that is meaningful within specific community and cultural contexts. we argue that for tocs to be useful in supporting complex social change that realizes indigenous children’s rights to quality education, they must be inclusively legitimated, collaborative, contextspecific, and process-oriented in ways that are accessible and meaningful to actors within the local system and particularly to indigenous peoples. in our evaluation of a rights-oriented education policy initiative in cambodia, we were asked to retroactively construct a toc for the purpose of understanding and validating strategies and activities undertaken over the previous five years to carry out the initiative. in the next section, we describe how we aimed to make the toc tool useful by drawing upon a process of participatory data collection, and by centering the interdependency of actors and their unique roles in implementing the new policy. a case study of creating a toc for an indigenous language-in-education initiative evaluation context in cambodia, the ministry of education, youth and sport in collaboration with unicef cambodia and care, and in consultation with other stakeholders in cambodia, launched a multilingual education national action plan, 2014-2018, (menap) (royal government of cambodia, 2015). the goal was to increase the inclusion of indigenous children in education by providing bilingual education involving khmer (the dominant language) and five indigenous languages (bunong, kavet, kreung, tampuan, and brao) for children in preschool and lower primary education in five provinces. this plan was unprecedented in southeast asia for its government commitment to using ethnic minority languages to promote equity (ball & smith, 2019). we co-led an independent evaluation of this plan to provide evidence-based conclusions on the extent and quality of its implementation and to make recommendations for future action. we were assisted by an incountry team of nine indigenous women and men who, combined, were proficient in the five languages used in mle. evaluation process the evaluation used a mixed-methods, iterative-inductive approach. priority was placed on indigenous participation and methods that are becoming recognized as good practice in data gathering involving indigenous people (ball, 2005; battiste, 2013). data were collected in the provinces of ratanakiri, mondulkiri, stung treng, and kratie where mle had been introduced for at least one year. the aim was to assess results against objectives, review strategies and support, and document lessons learned about implementation. seven hundred focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 27 people engaged in 84 focus group discussions, six outcome harvesting workshops, and key informant interviews. surveys and direct observation were also used. participants included indigenous children and parents, mle teachers, school principals, school support committees, indigenous peoples’ organizations, commune council members, village leaders, district offices of education, provincial offices of education, staff of the ministry of education, youth and sport and unicef, and international, national, and local nongovernmental organizations. the evaluation team visited 24 mle primary schools in 14 provincial districts, 11 mle preschools in eight districts, and four non-mle primary schools for comparison. secondary data included a review of over 100 in-country planning, policy and evaluation documents, international studies of mle and language-in-education policies, costing data, and quantitative education management data, as available. the evaluation used a participatory, qualitative research approach, outcome harvesting (oh), as the main tool. oh is an approach inspired by outcome mapping (earl, carden, & smutylo, 2001), which acknowledges that sustainable development depends on the behavioral change of multiple actors. outcome mapping is one type of actor-focused theory of change where aspirational outcomes are described in advance by those knowledgeable about a local context to help practitioners be aware of changes toward the desired vision. exploring concrete observable changes in behavior, relationships, practices, and policies can support actors in understanding systemic progress toward a development goal. oh is a utilization-focused evaluation approach in which positive and negative outcomes are “harvested” through a facilitated and participatory process (wilson-grau 2018). a utilization-focus means that the approach is intended to make evaluation experiences and results useful for decision makers. participation throughout an evaluation process is a key underlying aspect of a utilization focus, ensuring that program learning is embedded in the process rather than merely a shelved product of legitimization and accountability for donors (patton, 2008). during field work in the provinces and through grassroots-level focus group discussions, the team listened to the perspectives and outcomes known to students, teachers, school leadership, parents, and other community members. using a timeline drawn on large rolls of paper, participants used drawings, symbols, and words to map the most important changes in their communities. from these inputs, the team built up a portfolio of questions, themes, and outcomes from various stakeholders’ perspectives to bring to provincelevel workshops. representatives from each village and provincial government authorities in education participated in the workshops to verify and substantiate outcomes, build consensus, and provide triangulation. the team also interviewed representatives of participating nongovernment and government organizations at provincial and national levels to understand activities that had been undertaken by various actors, interactions among actors and their activities, and potential contributions to emerging outcomes. participants described bottlenecks, barriers, enabling factors, opportunities, and additional perspectives on the significance of various inputs, outputs, and outcomes. a final, multi-stakeholder “discovery” workshop was held in the national capital with participants from four provinces, including indigenous parents and representatives of indigenous peoples’ organizations. 28 global education review 7 (1) reconstructing tocs for the education intervention a toc was lacking in the initial plan for the menap. as noted, we were asked to construct a toc retrospectively, using a generic, institutional model, in order to clarify the planned intervention and validate strategies and activities. since we are convinced of the utility of more context-specific, data-informed, actorfocused approaches to tocs, we also constructed two additional tocs, drawing on findings from data gathered in the field. presented subsequently, the three tocs we produced included: (1) a generic toc; (2) an actor-focused toc; and (3) an analysis of strategies against best practice in mle. the toc constructed using the generic model required by the commissioners of the evaluation is shown in figure 1 (see appendix). a strength of the generic toc, which is commonly required in evaluations, is that it provides a snapshot of the intentions and main strategies of the menap. however, a generic, unidirectional toc such as the one shown in figure 1 excludes actors and excludes their behaviors (activities) intended to realize intended outcomes, and relationships among actors and their activities. our actor-focused toc is shown in figure 2 (see appendix). this toc strongly built on the findings of our data collection in the field. this approach shows key relationships among actors who were implementing intended strategies on the ground. we perceived that this representation could inform the development of a second five-year plan for mle and support a theory of action. the actor-focused toc has two parts. one part shows an overview of the actor-focused toc, which recognizes the broad array of actors and their relationships to one another in order to implement mle. in this form, the toc can be seen as a stakeholder analysis or a network analysis in regard to a particular change, which is often a useful way of expressing a toc (davies, 2018). our toc drew upon findings about the various actors already included in the menap and their current relationships, those actors who were phasing out, as well as those not yet included but with potential significant contributions for future planning. for example, as shown by broken red lines in figure 2, indigenous peoples’ organizations (ipos) were excluded from the menap, but during field work they came forward with a strong demand to be involved and with demonstrable evidence of unique knowledge of the contexts and languages implicated in the menap. the second part of the actor-focused theory of change, illustrated in tables 1, 2, and 3, zoomed in on each type of actor, describing the specific, concrete, new behaviors and new relationships needed, inspired by outcome mapping approaches. for each actor in the toc, the evaluation gathered evidence of emerging behaviors (yellow), observed behaviors (green), behaviors not yet seen but necessary for effective implementation of the menap (orange), and behaviors that contradict behaviors necessary for effective implementation of the menap (red). table 1 shows an example of a set of intermediate outcomes developed for one of the 25 categories of actors in the system (in this example, teachers). the active verbs describe emerging and observed behavior among mle primary school teachers. during the evaluation, we heard about current limitations and hopes for the future, gaining ideas for future progression. combined with research and practice-based literature about mle and the consultants’ own experiences, these findings were used to map future behavior changes on the parts of various actors in order to achieve the desired goal of quality basic education for indigenous children in cambodia. focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 29 table 1: mle primary school teachers’ implementations related to the menap expected change (intermediate outcome) current status confidently using the mother tongue as the language of instruction. observed employing teaching techniques that use local cultural resources and expertise. observed creating appropriate teaching and learning materials in the mother tongue, collaborating with others. emerging. requesting more training in mother tongue literacy skills. using the mle curriculum. emerging. using care curriculum but in some schools adding moeys standard curriculum as well. communicating with parents regularly. emerging. communicating with parents only about attendance. developing close relationships with children. observed note. moeys=ministry of education youth and sports; care=cooperative for assistance and relief everywhere table 2 shows another set of intermediate outcomes—in this example for mle district of education officers. for this actor category, intermediate outcomes were a blend of emerging, observed, and not yet seen behaviors. table 2: district of education officers expected change (intermediate outcome). current status investigating expansion of mle schools and preschools. observed coordinating and liaising for mle support and expertise with ip organizations and networks. not seen administratively supporting mle schools. observed engaging communities to get involved in supporting mle programs. observed providing valuable and culturally relevant support to teachers in mle teaching methodology. requesting more training in mle. core trainers requesting mother-tongue literacy skills. some only communicating value of khmer literacy. inspecting and testing children using tools appropriate for mle not seen collecting data for mle reports useful for learning about progress (identifying indigeneity). emerging 30 global education review 7 (1) there were other actors not yet recognized as change agents in the menap. table 3 describes the current status of behaviors among indigenous peoples organizations (ipos) based on our research findings. these ipos ranged from informal networks to more formal indigenous associations and organizations. our understanding was that the data showing an absence of behavior change on the parts of ipos did not necessarily indicate an unwillingness to contribute or to change, nor an active resistance from institutional menap implementers. rather, ipo’s lack of behavior change was a result of ipos not being recognized in the original plan and not being explicitly recognized in any written or diagrammatic form in the government plan. table 3: indigenous people organizations expected change (intermediate outcome) current status engaging in decisions regarding indigenous children’s education, including curriculum development at national level. not seen engaging in decisions regarding indigenous children’s education at provincial and local levels. not seen mobilizing indigenous communities in understanding and engaging in mle. not seen representing the voices and insights of indigenous groups regarding mle effectiveness and relevance. not seen mentoring and reassuring teachers and school support committees that mle is authorized by national government. not seen advocating for supportive policy and guidelines for implementation of mle. not seen note. moeys=ministry of education youth and sports; care=cooperative for assistance and relief everywhere the actor-focused toc shown in table 3 shows the current status of intermediate (compared to final) outcomes and what we perceived as a need to include indigenous peoples’ perspectives on change, based on the research findings. among the 25 categories of actors in our actor-focused toc, some were not yet visible in the menap but were found to provide enabling factors or barriers. examples of these include the khmer population of children and khmer guardians in indigenous villages, universities, and provincial teacher training colleges (khmer are the dominant ethnic and language population). the actor-focused toc shown in figure 2 and tables 1, 2 and 3 illustrates how a data-driven, context-specific, actor-focused toc can provide clarity on key actors or change agents, roles, inter-relations, progress, and expectations. our toc model documents how each actor is progressing, rather than wishful thinking (strategies weakly developed to address the needs), high-level impressions, claims about behavior change that cannot be verified through triangulated data gathering and consensus building, or unrealistic expectations. a third way of approaching the logic of the menap was to analyze the planned strategies and approaches in the plan with reference to internationally recognized mle good practices defined by ten main components outlined by unesco (2018). figure 3 (see appendix) shows strategies (left column) explicit in the menap linked to a set of intermediate changes (right column) that the evaluation team deduced focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 31 from the strategies and other components of the menap. this toc served as a critical assessment of the menap compared to established mle best practices, making visible what strategies had been employed in the menap and which had not been employed. three components of good practice were not included in the menap and are therefore not shown in the toc presented in figure 3: preliminary research, acceptable alphabets and supportive mother tongue-based mle policy and legislation. the strength of this approach to a toc is the connection to the accumulated practice-based evidence documented by other mle actors in other places. discussion in this section, we reflect upon some of the considerations discussed in our introduction with regard to whether a toc is useful for learning, engagement, and accountability in education reforms. the form of the toc and its use in complex change first, we conclude from this and other experiences in education reform that a toc can be useful for a community of practice with a common endeavor, serving as a form of reification (or artifact for those involved) making explicit the driving values, belief systems, and aspirations (wenger, 1998). people are shaped by many cultural tools (wertsch, 1998), visible and invisible. a toc can be used as a visual exposé, revealing how a group believes change will happen. a data-based, context-specific toc will also expose how various actors behave and the reciprocal causal impacts of their behaviors. the toc can, however, communicate an unfounded conceptualization of change as a linear process, and the misperception that implementation activities correlate one-to-one with logical framework objectives (davies, 2004). davies (2005) contends that “removing the one-directional nature of change leads us from thinking about a chain of events to a network of events, and from a chain of actors to a network of actors” (p.134). in our example, there was an institutional perspective in cambodia that because the menap was a national action plan, then the government was the main actor as a service provider. we and our indigenous team colleagues, however, were acutely aware of the risks of not sufficiently seeing and making visible the many nongovernment actors whose behaviors could enable or constrain implementation of the planned change and goal attainment. the toc needed to be congruent with our evaluation process, acknowledging complexity and diversity of experiences at different levels of the system and by different categories of actors, as vogel (2012) suggests in her review of tocs. in our actor-focused toc, the simplification of behavioral outcomes was a network analysis, consistent with recommendations by davies (2004, 2005), and informed by complexity science and development knowledge. our toc built on the data on behavior and relationships acquired during the outcome harvesting process. further, tocs, in any form, are limited in their ability to communicate intermediate outcomes and the complexity of connections. as ramalingam (2013) cautions, they often present what is written in a logical framework, as a simple and discreet, carved off version of complex social reality. relationships are often ignored in tocs. also, as davies (2018) comments, visualizations of tocs tend to emphasize the content of the composite boxes, while the meaning of an arrow (signifying a connection or relationship) remains unexplicated and, too often, unexplored. when there is little political space for indigenous development and participation in 32 global education review 7 (1) education, it may seem advantageous to choose consensus around ambiguous program logic. we argue, however, that making terms in a toc concrete, in terms of operationally defined behaviors (or activities), can help to engage more actors with experience and deep knowledge of local contexts. such clarity should support local actors to meaningfully engage and keep government actors accountable to commitments they make. representation of the findings of our evaluation in the actor-focused toc, for example, can inspire education officials to include a wider range of actors, including those who are intended beneficiaries of the education initiative, and to show actors and their inter-relationships in their planning tools in the future. among other things, this has implications for distribution of funds, since actors whose behaviors are explicitly recognized as necessary for successful implementation of a planned change need monetary and other forms of institutional support for the full and meaningful contributions they can make. davies (2004) urges us to adapt “our representational devices to the different environments in which they are being used, and not insist on one standard model” (p.103). there are advantages of simplifying a representation in order to encourage dialogue and meaningmaking. the constraint, or risk, is that the representation becomes ‘wishful thinking’ as actors and their contributory behaviors are not sufficiently defined. in our case in cambodia, indigenous people had not yet experienced forums for ongoing participation in decisionmaking about how to fulfill indigenous rights to quality education. understanding that capacities are distributed across a social network of actors (jones, 2011) means that we needed to make visible all who would contribute positively or negatively to the planned change. this supports accountability for their involvement and contributes to strengthening community capacity for civic participation and their right to self-determination. the collaborative purpose of the toc the government plan for mle in cambodia was produced through the collaboration of multiple actors. the planning documents conveyed that national and provincial government offices and international development partners saw themselves as the primary duty bearers and most instrumental agents of changes. indigenous children and their parents were seen as primary beneficiaries as well as rights holders. mle teachers were seen as intermediaries, having the primary responsibility to deliver provided curriculum according to a prescribed ratio of indigenous and non-indigenous languages at each grade level. our approach to evaluating the plan included indigenous children, parents, village leaders, and indigenous language groups, not only as beneficiaries, but also as significant influencers of the change process. we perceived these rights holders as potent contributors to whether intended targets were reached. this approach led to the identification of actors and activities that had not been identified in the original government plan. importantly, the explicit government purpose of the mle initiative to ease young indigenous children’s transition to education in the (non-indigenous) national language was questioned by indigenous actors and rights holders, who expressed a primary goal of preserving indigenous languages and securing education primarily in indigenous languages for twice the length of time afforded by the government plan. as we have argued, inclusion of a broad array of actors and activities that may not be explicit in simplified, institution-focused tocs can uncover unwarranted assumptions and interactions and enable the production of a context-specific, datafocusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 33 informed toc that is more complex, comprehensive, and useful for future planning. it is important to ensure that a toc is not used as a tool to legitimize managerialism and oppression. tools for accountability require users to challenge assumptions (ramalingam, 2013). uncovering and challenging implicit assumptions and ideas about how change will happen requires varied perspectives and trust. our evaluation process brought diverse actors together in what we called “discovery workshops” to triangulate and synthesize data obtained through prior focus groups and interviews. these multi-stakeholder gatherings, bringing indigenous parents and hamlet leaders and representatives of indigenous peoples’ organizations together with educators and senior government policy makers, were unique in the cambodian education context. authentic and often courageous participation was enabled in part by participants’ prior engagement in interviews and focus groups in their own everyday settings, building trust in the process and confidence in expressing their views. fixed and linear or iterative and circular change process tocs, if used well, can reflect and support iteration, learning, and adaptive practices. iteration (the repetition and review of a process) and working with social feedback systems are strategies for working with complexity instead of demanding compliance to what implementers of a planned change knew at the start (ramalingam, 2013). schön (1991) distinguished between espoused theories (theories we believe that we work from) and theories of use (theories that we actually put into practice). welldesigned tocs can effectively support the process of testing espoused theories (schön, 1991), where not only success and failure, but also belief systems and assumptions are explored. in our cambodian case example, the evaluation process uncovered new information about actors, activities and relationships in the system. external processes also affect the toc, with changes in positions of power, uncertainty of funding sources, and the inclusion and exclusion in decision-making, of indigenous people and organizations that represent them. the toc as being context-based or borrowing from other contexts learning, knowledge, and change are situated in a context (lave & wenger, 1991). solutions are rarely generally applicable across social contexts, as humans are nested in specific relationships within a particular ecological system. systems thinking, which underlies an actor-focused approach to tocs, ensures that people in the system—their beliefs, boundaries and perspectives—are visible and engaged (williams & hummelbrunner, 2010). for managers, program implementers, and community members, this can provide clarity to better support unique roles. interventions in a social ecosystem therefore need to recognize social and political aspects of change and not only the technical aspects. in our evaluation of the mle plan in cambodia, we explored who the key actors were at all levels of the teaching and learning system, including children, and what roles they played. both formally and informally engaged actors were included in our actorfocused toc; not only the most powerful or visible, but also those with less power, authority, and visibility. in network theory, davies (2004) contends that sustainable development practice requires actors working in parallel. there is an interdependency and distributed capacity in each local context to support relevant and sustainable quality basic education. in contexts where actors have been sufficiently recognized and involved in an authentic way, it may be useful to deploy a theory-driven toc. this is because learning 34 global education review 7 (1) from theory could help inform and frame the work based on experience in other places. however, there is a growing skepticism about the concept of “best practices” so often visible in program logic. aiming for a “best practice” demonstrated as effective in an external context and from an external set of values will not produce a community-engaged, realistic understanding of how change can happen in a specific context and likely barriers to success of a planned change. if context is taken seriously, the concept of “best practices” needs to be replaced with “best fit” (ramalingam, laric, & primrose, 2014). this requires support for negotiated understandings of community-fitting goals and strategies and multiple viewpoints on assessments of progress. externally defined best practices might help to inform the negotiation, but should not define or constrain it. responsive management recognizes context-specificity and engages local actors in co-creating contextspecific designs and learning. in describing efforts to do effective digital development differently, prieto-martin, hernandez, and ramalingam (2017) suggest drawing upon different sources for learning: contextual, evidential (from theory/others), and evaluative (from own experience gathered in the local context). the tocs we produced for the evaluation in cambodia drew upon these three sources. the toc as a heuristic tool or a positivist reality a toc can be yet another managerial tool for reinforcing hierarchical roles and reinscribing vertical authority in line with a dominant group’s view of reality. in this article, we emphasize the meaning-making opportunity that gathering data for constructing one or several different kinds of tocs can provide. however, even concrete actor-focused tocs such as we propose for complex educational interventions cannot, in themselves, support learning and adaptive management. in our experience, learning processes need key actors, including intended beneficiaries of the intervention, coming together to form relationships of trust and constructive communication for negotiation and reflection on practice (shutt, 2016). this reflection needs to consider not only what happened but assumptions and framings of problems based on the experience—so called double loop learning (schön, 1991; valters, cummings, & nixon, 2016). participatory information-gathering approaches (e.g., oh), and skilled facilitation in the languages of local actors can promote meaningful engagement and negotiations that draw out the often differing realities of key stakeholders in ways that are relevant to the vision, goals, strategies, activities, and intended outcomes of a planned education intervention. with this interpersonally engaged foundation, it will become meaningful to communally create an actor-focused toc and track behavior mapped out in the toc. conclusion in complex situations where equity and social justice are sought after goals, such as the drive for greater inclusion of indigenous children in quality basic education, we must search for win-win-win solutions for people, ecologies, and economies (ramalingam, 2017). tocs can potentially be useful to support education reforms, but we must be conscious of how the tocs can shape and limit or open up the way we think and work in practice. multiple forms of toc can be useful as long as users and commissioners of tocs provide timely and authentic opportunities for participation by local actors, acknowledging the ecosystems of various actors, and using the tool as an iterative, heuristic tool for learning, collaboration, and accountability. all of the actors in a system, focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 35 including duty-bearers and rights holders, are obligated and needed to make the system work, and must be accounted for in assessing the potential to successfully implement a planned change and evaluating outcomes. in this article, we have proposed actorfocused tocs as an especially suitable type of cultural tool for learning and evaluating change processes; one that potentially encourages recognition of less visible or previously excluded actors and that maps pathways for their engagement with other actors in a change process. actor-focused tocs can challenge hegemonic approaches to change and strongly support win-win-win solutions called for in complex situations. in the mle context used to illustrate our discussion of tocs, less visible actors included indigenous children and their parents or guardians, indigenous community groups and language organizations, and national indigenous peoples’ organizations. these less visible actors had context-specific knowledge about people, economies, and ecologies connected to their context, all potentially relevant for indigenous education. as hinton and groves (2004) contend, “the challenge of political participation is not only a question of who is sitting around the table, but of whether the table even exists, and whether the language and terms of debate are accessible to those whose voices need to be heard” (p.12). an actorfocused toc may be one avenue for enabling excluded or oppressed participants in an education system to assume meaningful roles in creative, context-fitting, community-paced, and community-based social change. an actorfocused toc can hold governments and institutions accountable to inclusive, postcolonial approaches to education reform in order to fulfill children’s rights to meaningful basic education. references ball, j. 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(2018). outcome harvesting: principles, steps, and evaluation applications. charlotte, nc: information age publishing. williams, b., & hummelbrunner, r. (2010). systems concepts in action: a practitioner's toolkit. stanford: stanford university press. wong, k. m., & benson, c. (2019). language as gatekeeper for equitable education: multilingual education in cambodia. in j. gube & f. gao (eds.), education, ethnicity and equity in the multilingual asian context (pp. 69-86). springer, singapore. about the authors mariam smith is an independent consultant (learning loop inc), supporting program teams’ and community members’ learning through program design, meaningful monitoring systems, and evaluation. she specializes in actorcentered methodologies including outcome mapping and outcome harvesting. most of her work has been within the field of international development and education in scandinavia and in southeast asia, where she lived for 15 years working with indigenous rights and education. she speaks several dominant and indigenous languages, and has conducted international evaluations of government and non-government initiatives to promote children’s learning in their home language. jessica ball is a professor at the university of victoria (canada). she has developed and taught courses about early childhood health and development and evaluation research methods at universities in canada, the united states, and several countries in asia. she developed, delivered, and evaluated programs for numerous international organizations and government ministries of education. her research is often partnered with communities, and focuses on determinants of marginalization and promising practices for inclusion of migrant, minoritized, and indigenous children and families. http://www.theoryofchange.org/pdf/dfid_toc_review_vogelv7.pdf http://www.theoryofchange.org/pdf/dfid_toc_review_vogelv7.pdf 38 global education review 7 (1) appendix figure 1: a generic toc: reconstructed theory of change deduced from the menap 2015-2018 (mt=mother tongue, m&e=monitoring and evaluation, ped=primary education department, eced=early childhood education department) focusing on actors in context-specific, data-informed theories of change 39 figure 2: stakeholder mapping/network analysis and an actor-focused theory of change. (moeys=ministry of education youth and sports, poe=provincial office of education, doe=district office of education, pttc=provincial teacher training college, ipo=indigenous people organizations) 40 global education review 7 (1) figure 3: analysis of strategies compared to components of unesco best practice in mle. (moeys=ministry of education youth and sport, eced=early childhood education department, ped=primary education department) becoming proficient through profile classes 24 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schulte, alena, & wegner, claas. (2021). becoming proficient through profile classes: a longitudinal study on the development of scientific competencies. global education review, 8 (4), 24-40. becoming proficient through profile classes: a longitudinal study on the development of scientific competencies alena schulte bielefeld university, germany claas wegner bielefeld university, germany abstract the first educational goal within scientific subjects is to acquire a sense of scientific literacy. in science lessons, methods of scientific inquiry provide the tools to achieve this. in this study, we based scientific inquiry on the sdds-model according to klahr (2002). it is divided into three subareas: search hypothesis space, test hypothesis, and evaluate hypothesis. a multiple-choice test, the naw-test, was used to examine the extent to which the acquisition of competencies is promoted by attending profile classes. in contrast to common practice in germany, scientific profile classes take an interdisciplinary approach to scientific subjects, with the aim to promote the acquisition of scientific competencies. for this purpose, profile class students (n=84) at two schools were questioned over the course of a school year at three different test times. results show that competencies increase over time. a gender difference was not observed. keywords naw-test, profile classes, scientific inquiry, secondary schools, scientific competencies introduction scientific literacy is currently one of the goals of science education worldwide. scientific literacy describes the ability to apply scientific knowledge to acquire new skills. in order to evaluate current and relevant topics in a modern society, the interconnection of everyday phenomena with specialized knowledge is crucial (organization for economic co-operation and development (oecd), 2019). one possibility to increase scientific literacy is to include scientific methods (generating hypotheses, planning and conducting experiments, and making observations) in class through an inquiry approach. in theory, an inquiry approach is rated as one of the main teaching methods to strengthen scientific literacy (chi et al., 2019). however, there are many different approaches and definitions of this concept (kidman & casinader, 2017). depending on the theoretical basis, different areas of competence are fostered by scientific inquiry. based on the model developed by klahr (2002), scientific inquiry is divided into three core competencies: search hypothesis space, test hypothesis, and evaluate evidence. international studies show that students benefit from an inquiry approach in regards to understanding concepts (see minner et al., 2010 for a review about inquiry-based science becoming proficient through profile classes 25 25 instruction). crawford (2014) concluded that most science classes are teacher-centered, and fewer teachers apply inquiry methods. students conduct experiments in strongly guided settings and therefore have few opportunities to choose and carry out their own research projects. this could be caused by insufficient teacher training, since teachers may have little experience in planning and implementing their own science projects (hodson, 2014). due to the many curricular requirements, there is also little time in the classroom to implement open learning formats such as scientific inquiry methods, which take more time than a teacher-centered approach. to counteract this, scientific profile classes were developed in germany and implemented in schools. additional teaching time should enable students to plan, carry out, and evaluate their own research projects. the extent to which scientific inquiry supports the acquisition of competencies is examined in this study. scientific literacy the educational goal of scientific literacy goes back to an initiative in the united states from the 1950s that aimed to reform science education. the national research council defined scientific literacy as “the knowledge and understanding of scientific concepts and processes required for personal decision making, participation in civic and cultural affairs, and economic productivity.” (national research council, 1996, p. 22). today, this educational goal can be found in both international and national educational standards. feinstein (2011) pointed out that although scientific literacy is an important and useful educational goal, its usefulness has not yet been empirically tested. various views and definitions of the term still exist today (schulte, 2017). based on a literature review, roberts (2007) and roberts et al. (2014) elaborated two visions of scientific literacy: vision i is based on the perspective of the student as a novice scientist, where the ability to study is the main goal of science education. students should be enabled to study a scientific subject and pursue a scientific career, subsequently, by engaging in the field of science. in contrast, vision ii is more broad: science education does not concern individual students, but everyone. all students should have scientific literacy to be able to judge social, political, economic, and ethical problems. the focus is on social participation (roberts & bybee, 2014). sjöstrom et al. (2017) added a third vision that emphasizes solving socio-scientific issues. bybee's (2002) definition of scientific literacy is widely cited and used as a basis in numerous school development processes and comparative studies. according to him, scientific literacy involves different levels of scientific understanding. he distinguishes four dimensions:i • nominal scientific literacy learners identify scientific ideas or topics, but these associations are still linked to misconceptions or a lack of knowledge. • functional scientific literacy students know scientific terms and use them correctly. • conceptual und procedural scientific literacy learners are able to connect information and experience and link the different scientific disciplines. 26 global education review 8 (4) • multidimensional scientific literacy learners differentiate science from other disciplines and define its characteristics. the dimensions can be viewed as levels that can and should be achieved through promotion at school. the model not only focuses on the acquisition of specialized knowledge, but also on process knowledge (bybee, 2002). international comparative studies like the programme for international student assessment (pisa) are based on bybee’s scientific literacy concept. students should be enabled “to engage with science-related issues, and with the ideas of science, as a reflective citizen” (oecd, 2019, p. 100). the concept’s aim is for each student to become a scientifically literate person who is willing to take part in reasoned discourse about science and technology. in the latest pisa study of 2018, three sub-competencies of scientific literacy are distinguished: (1) explaining phenomena scientifically, (2) evaluating and designing scientific enquiry, (3) interpreting data and evidence scientifically (oecd, 2019). the rapid scientific progress through new findings and technologies requires students to independently access information. according to pisa, this information can be generated from scientific publications as well as from their own research. to draw conclusions from their own actions, students should critically evaluate information that they receive through media, such as social media and newspapers (schiepetiska et al., 2016). in germany, the acquisition of scientific literacy is anchored within the educational standards of the scientific subjects biology, chemistry, and physics, and is based on the definition by bybee (2002). educational standards define the knowledge and skills that students should have at the end of a particular school year in order to obtain a qualification (primary and secondary school graduation). the educational standards established by the national government provide the framework for the ordinances issued by the federal states (kultusministerkonferenz, n.d.). for each scientific subject, there are subject-specific requirements. one goal of all subjects is to apply scientific inquiry to acquire scientific literacy. in secondary school, students acquire competencies in the four areas of knowledge, knowledge acquisition, communication and assessment (see table 1) as shown in table 1, knowledge acquisition includes scientific inquiry skills. the acquisition of scientific methods supports students in achieving scientific literacy. similar to the lack of clarity to define the term scientific literacy, there are numerous definitions to quantify the competence of scientific inquiry (chi et al., 2019). each subject in school has its own set of inquiry methods, which may be referred to as scientific inquiry or geographical inquiry (kidman & casinader, 2017). scientific inquiry kidman and casinader (2017) argue that inquiry is a multifaceted concept that takes both teaching and learning perspectives into account. inquiry can describe domain-specific knowledge, the way students learn, an instructional approach, or the curriculum material (furtak et al., 2012). in relation to science education, inquiry describes a learning process that generates scientific knowledge through competency, content, and critical thinking (lederman, 2004; lederman et al., 2014). the basic idea behind scientific inquiry is that becoming proficient through profile classes 27 27 students learn by engaging in scientific activities. scientific inquiry is comprised of the following: generate scientifically oriented questions, conduct investigations to collect evidence, explain and discuss phenomena (furtak et al. 2012). students, therefore, work like scientists in the classroom (schiefer et al., 2020). depending on the theoretical basis, different processes/competencies are assigned to scientific inquiry: • the national science education standards (1996) assign five features to scientific inquiry: posing questions, constituting, and collecting evidence, formulating explanations, evaluating explanations, communicating and justifying explanations. • zachos et al. (2000) divides scientific inquiry in linking theory with evidence, formulating hypotheses, keeping records, using correct or original laboratory materials, identifying cause-and-effect relationships, controlling experiments, and using parsimony in drawing conclusions. • the model of nowak et al. (2013) distinguishes scientific inquiry according to three methods (modelling, experimenting and observing, and comparing and arranging) and three scientific reasoning processes (question and hypothesis, plan and performance, and scientific reasoning). • kuo et al. (2015) describe four competencies of scientific inquiry: questioning, experimenting, analyzing, and explaining. • the scientific competence in the pisa-studies in 2015 & 2018 (oecd, 2017 & oecd, 2019) is divided into: (1) explaining phenomena scientifically, (2) evaluating and designing scientific enquiry, (3) interpreting data and evidence scientifically are distinguished. in general, the term scientific inquiry covers all scientific working methods that can be methodically applied in class and used by the students. the vague definition or different design of this concept requires a precise theoretical justification. in this study, the definition of scientific inquiry is based on the scientific discovery as dual-search-modell (sdds-model) by klahr (2002). klahr's model was based on empirical studies in the field of psychology, and applied to the practice of science. a group of researchers under klahr investigated the reasoning of people who solve scientific problems. according to the model, scientific inquiry is divided into three areas: forming hypotheses, experimenting and evaluating evidence (see figure 1). if students apply these areas, the quality of learning can be improved (höffler et al., 2014). the sddsmodel gives a general framework of human behavior, which can be interpreted in any scientific reasoning task. in search hypothesis space, students use their prior knowledge to generate a hypothesis about a given scientific problem. for example, students investigate the germination of seeds and hypothesize that seeds need water to sprout. the output from search hypothesis space is a fully specified hypothesis, which provides the input to test hypothesis. to test the hypothesis, students plan and conduct experiments. in our example, the students would plan an experiment to test seed germination with and without water. results of the component test hypothesis either confirm or deny the hypothesis and are based on the match between the student’s prediction and the experimental result. this process is part of 28 global education review 8 (4) evaluate evidence. students decide whether their experimental results warrant acceptance, rejection, or consideration of the current hypothesis (klahr, 2002). based on the various definitions and perspectives, the focus of this study is on how competent students are in applying the methods of scientific inquiry. for this purpose, the study follows klahr's assumption that scientific inquiry is divided into three components: forming hypotheses, conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions. since scientific inquiry can be divided into the three components according to klahr’s sdds model, it is crucial to investigate the current state of research concerning student competencies in those three areas. according to piekny and mahler (2013), students develop competencies for forming hypotheses after primary school. in addition, osterhaus et al. (2020) note that primary school children (8 years old) can easily distinguish between testing hypotheses and producing an effect. with regard to the three areas of the klahrs model, it was found that 7th grade students often have the correct answer in idea formation/generating hypotheses (klos, 2008). the pisa study in 2015 focused on student scientific competencies. in germany, the three sub-competencies are equally high and above the oecd average. german students tend to perform better in the competence explaining phenomena, but below average in the other two competencies. for the first time in the oecd average and in germany, boys have significantly higher scientific competence than girls (oecd, 2017). this difference is confirmed in a 2018 study but is no longer significant and is only seen in the competence explaining phenomena (oecd, 2019). in 2015, finland was the only country where girls achieved better results than boys (oecd, 2017). in a study on the effects of early scientific education in 5th and 6th grades at secondary schools in germany, höffler et al. (2014) demonstrated that the knowledge of scientific working methods is increasing for all students and demonstrate that girls show higher scores at both test times. walpuski and schulz (2011) summarize the results of studies on scientific inquiry. their analysis showed that although students in 7th grade are able to conduct experiments to test their hypothesis under instruction, they find it difficult to conduct experiments independently. furthermore, they replicate these results with students in 7th grade who are good at forming hypotheses/ideas but find it difficult to plan appropriate experiments and draw conclusions. one reason could be that in science lessons, usually only confirmatory experiments are conducted (walpuski & schulz, 2011). in the 2015 pisa study, students performed lower on the competence evaluating and designing scientific enquiry than on the competence explaining phenomena scientifically. other studies assessing the competence conducting experiments show similar results and show that this competence is important in the learning process (oecd, 2017). piekny and mahler (2013) point out that elementary school children already understand that experimenting does not always lead to the desired result. regarding the area of drawing conclusions, the 2015 pisa study shows that students perform the lowest in this competence (oecd, 2017). chi et al. (2019) investigate disciplinary context effects on student performance in terms of scientific inquiry competencies. students show particular difficulties in applying this competence and low levels of performance. according to chi et al. (2019), teachers should offer students more opportunities to use scientific inquiry methods. becoming proficient through profile classes 29 29 kidman and casinader (2017) state that students need help in using scientific inquiry, especially in conducting experiments and drawing conclusions. regarding interventions, minner et al. (2010) analyzed the impact of an inquiry approach on students. their review showed that the students who received inquiry-instructed lessons demonstrated improved learning based on comparisons to their prior knowledge; this finding was also evident when compared to students who were taught using a different method of instruction. students with instruction based on the investigation cycle (generating questions, designing experiments, collecting data, drawing conclusion, and communicating findings) particularly benefitted. active thinking and participating in the investigation process, along with hands-on experiences, are associated with increased conceptual learning (minner et al., 2010). kuo et al. (2015) postulate that the use of scientific inquiry methods promotes active learning processes among students. in this case, students actively use methods to generate knowledge. schiefer et al. (2020) show that scientific skills can be learned in elementary school using a scientific inquiry approach. in summary, based on the international state of research, students perform particularly well in the area of hypothesis formation. difficulties are encountered by students in almost all studies in the area of drawing conclusions. furthermore, studies show that students benefit from a scientific-inquiry approach. scientific profile classes school profiles are not a uniform concept. it is instead an intentional process with which the school attempts to further develop its existing profile. a distinction is generally made between profiling individual classes and entire schools. class profiling refers to individual classes that exist along with regular classes. creating a profile might aim to promote individual students, to compete with other schools and to implement educational policy decisions. concepts for school profiles exist primarily at the transitions between primary and lower secondary education, and lower and upper secondary education (altrichter, heinrich & soukup-altrichter, 2011). in germany, profiles can mostly be found at gymnasien.ii the wide range of subjects offered makes it relatively simple and quick to implement profiles. on the other hand, there is a great deal of competition among high schools in metropolitan areas for student enrollment (klekovkin et al., 2015). profile classes range from concepts for gifted students without an explicit thematic focus (hackl, 2009) to concepts with a specialized focus; in areas such as music (haas et al., 2019), science/technology (spörlein, 2003: schulte & wegner, 2020), language/bilingual (nold et al., 2008), sports (roth et al., 2017). out of these areas, a music profile is most often found in gymnasium. only a few schools offer a researcher focus (klekovkin et al., 2015). since low scores from students in the first large-scale assessments have been observed (see oecd, 2000 & martin et al., 2004), numerous initiatives have been taken to improve science teaching in germany (schiepe-tiska et al., 2016). the concepts ranged from individual teaching methods to curricula and school structural changes. profile classes include a structural approach to improve science teaching. scientific subjects are taught separately at most secondary schools in germany. an interdisciplinary approach to teaching is usually only implemented in 8th and 9th grades in the gymnasium, when students attend electives. 30 global education review 8 (4) scientific profile classes on the other hand, take an interdisciplinary approach to scientific subjects from the beginning of lower secondary school, i.e. from the 5th grade onwards. their aim is to promote interest, selfconcept, and competence in science. with additional teaching, students are given the opportunity to work on their own research questions and conduct their own experiments. this self-directed approach is in line with the demand of chi et al. (2019), to support students in autonomously chosen research projects. in contrast to regular classes, lessons are strongly student-oriented and characterized by open learning settings. topics are related to the curriculum of the subjects of biology, chemistry, and physics, and therefore follow an interdisciplinary approach. the core curriculum of profile classes is designed to enable students to contribute their own ideas and content to the lessons. students learn to independently develop questions, plan and conduct experiments, and evaluate the results. as a result, lessons in profile classes tend to follow the sdds-model (see figure 2). the focus of teaching in profile classes is on scientific inquiry methods, predominantly on generating hypotheses, making and comparing observations, planning and conducting experiments, working with models, evaluating evidence, and drawing conclusions. applying these methods encourages the students to become self-directed learners and problemsolvers (concannon et al., 2020). to date, the success of school profiling has been measured in terms of maintaining and/or increasing student enrollment, perceived attractiveness of the school, and instructional development (klekovkin et al., 2015). profile classes on the other hand have hardly been evaluated in terms of (long-term) effects on students (nonte, 2013). in this article, we focus on evaluating profile classes. research questions profile classes are established to promote interest and competence in science, with the focus on acquiring inquiry skills (schulte & wegner, 2020). the teaching materials and methods are designed to equally support students in the three core areas of the sdds-model developed by klahr (2002). in profile classes, there is a large focus on planning and conducting experiments. recent studies on the naw-test and scientific inquiry show that forming hypotheses is well-developed, gender differences are inconsistent (e.g. klos, 2008; höffler et al., 2014), that there is an increase in competence over the school years (e.g., grube & mayer, 2010; osterhaus et al., 2020) and that grades have no influence on the test result (wellnitz et al., 2012). this study examines the following hypotheses: h1: the three competencies examined – forming hypotheses, planning and conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions – do not differ among students in profile classes. h2: there are no gender differences in test results from students in profile classes. h3: competencies of profile class students determined by the nawtest increase over the testing period. h4: biology grades do not correlate with naw-test results. becoming proficient through profile classes 31 31 h5: students’ scientific interests have a positive influence on naw-test test results (in the overall test and the three competencies). h6: ability self-concept has a positive influence on naw-test test results (in the overall test and the three competencies). method data collection and test instruments the sample consists of three 5th grade scientific profile classes at two schools (n=84; male: 63 & female: 21). although the screening process to participate in profile classes enforces a balanced gender distribution, more boys apply and thus, participate, in the profile classes. students completed a questionnaire to measure interest and ability self-concept (see table 2), and they completed the naw-test to evaluate their competencies regarding the three steps of scientific inquiry. in addition, sociodemographic data such as gender, grades, and age were collected. students completed both instruments at the beginning, in the middle, and at the end of 5th grade (see figure 3). the questionnaire consists of 33 closed items, which were answered using a 6-point rating scale (strongly agree – strongly disagree; very good – very bad). the scales of scientific interest and ability self-concept are taken from well-established test instruments (see table 2). the naw-test was originally developed by klos et al. (2008) as german students score below average in international comparative studies. it has been adapted for different age groups and intervention formats (e.g., walpuski, 2006; klos, 2008; mannel, 2011; koenen, 2014). the version used in this study is based on the naw-test by koenen (2014). the test instrument is based on the assumption that the experimental-scientific working methods can be simplified to three areas of scientific inquiry methods: forming hypotheses, planning and conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions (klahr, 2002). the naw-test is a paper-pencil test in multiple-choice format; each item consists of an informational text, a question, and four possible answers, one of which is correct. the text provides the students with the essential information to solve the task. the naw-test is independent of prior knowledge. students can achieve a total score of 20. table 3 shows an example item per area and indicates the score for the individual areas. results a total of 84 students participated in the survey, however, a complete dataset includes 22 students. reasons for this may be class and school changes, but it may also result from the school shutdown in spring 2020. due to different test scores in the competence areas, percentage scores were calculated. the effect strengths of the calculations are given according to cohen (1988, 1992). comparison of competencies in the profile classes figure 4 shows the students' mean scores in percentage at each test time for each competence (see figure 4). an analysis of variance was conducted on the comparison of students’ competencies in profile classes at each test time: test time 1: at the beginning of the school year (n=84) an analysis of variance (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .981, p =.454) shows 32 global education review 8 (4) significant differences in the test results of the sub-competencies (f(2, 166) = 21,102, p = .000, partial η² = .203) with an effect strength of .505. the bonferroni-adjusted post-hoc analysis show that the sub-competence forming hypotheses (m=0,41; sd=0,23) differs significantly from the sub-competence planning and conducting experiments (m=0,56, sd=0,25) ( -0,15.95%-ki [-0,220,-0,083]) and significantly from the subcompetence drawing conclusion (m=0,57, sd=0,22) ( -0,163.95%-ki [-0,236,-0,091]). test time 2: in the middle of the school year (n=46) an analysis of variance (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .983, p =.688) shows significant differences in the test results of the sub-competencies (f(2,90) = 20,433, p = .000, partial η² = .312) with an effect strength of .673. the bonferroni-adjusted post-hoc analysis show that the sub-competence forming hypotheses (m=0,54; sd=0,27) differs significantly from the sub-competence planning and conducting experiments (m=0,68, sd=0,21) ( -0,134.95%ki [-0,213,-0,055]) and significantly from the sub-competence drawing conclusion (m=0,75, sd=0,22) ( -0,203.95%-ki [-0,279,-0,127]). test time 3: at the end of the school year (n=41) given a significant p-value in the mauchly test (mauchly (2) = .852, p = .044) and due to the small sample size, a friedman test was calculated, which shows significant differences (chi-square(2)=8,972, p=.011, n=41). post-hoc-adjusted dunn-bonferroni-tests show that sub-competence forming hypotheses (m=0,66; sd=0,30) differs significantly from the sub-competence planning and conducting experiments (m=0,76, sd=0,21) (z=-0,598, p=.020, effect strength:.09). gender difference in the profile classes a repeated measures anova was conducted to look at gender as an interaction effect. overall naw-test results (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .786, p = .101; f(2, 40) = 2,918, p = .066, partial η² = .127 ) and the sub-areas of forming hypotheses (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .877, p = .306; f(2, 38) = 2,053, p = .142, partial η² = .098), planning and conducting experiments (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .922, p = .479; f(2, 38) = 1,191, p = .315, partial η² = .059) and drawing conclusions (sphericity assumed: mauchly (2) = .944, p = .577; (f(2, 40) = 2,103, p = .135, partial η² = .095) show no significant main effect of gender. progression of competence a repeated measures anova was conducted to examine naw-test results. the results are reported according to the overall test result (see figure 5) and the three sub-areas (see figure 6). overall naw test results (n=22): due to the small sample size and a significant mauchly-test, a friedman test was calculated which shows significant differences (chi-square(2)=17.084, p=.000, n=22). posthoc-adjusted dunn-bonferroni-tests show that the first test time (m=0,51; sd=0,16) differs significantly from the third test time (m=0,68, sd=0,25) (z=-1,205, p=.000, effect strength: .26). the diagram below illustrates a division of the competence areas (see figure 6). forming hypotheses (n=21): the friedman test shows significant differences between test times (chisquared(2)=8,027, p=.018, n=21). post-hocbecoming proficient through profile classes 33 33 adjusted dunn-bonferroni-tests show that the first test time (m=0,42; sd=0,21) differs significantly from the third test time (m=0,62, sd=0,31) (z=-0,810, p=.026, effect strength: .18). planning and conducting experiments (n=21): the friedman test shows significant differences between test times (chisquared(2)=12,028, p=.002, n=21). post-hocadjusted dunn-bonferroni-tests show that the first test time (m=0,56; sd=0,21) differs significantly from the third test time (m=0,79, sd=0,21) (z=-0,976, p=.005, effect strength: .21). drawing conclusions (n=22): a friedman test was calculated which shows no significant differences between test times (chi-quadrat(2)=2,171, p=.338, n=22). factors influencing the test results the influence of biology grade on the overall naw test result was only observed at the first testing time (t1) in a regression analysis (f(1,78)=4,955, p= .029; effect strength: .22; n= 80); also for forming hypotheses (f(1,78)=5,021, p= .028; effect strength: .22; n= 80) and drawing conclusions (f(1,78)=4,055, p= .048; effect strength: .20; n= 80). if the score on the naw test increases at the first test time point, the grade decreases by 0.83. the corrected r-squared is .048; thus, 4.8% of the total score variance is explained by the grade. the score also decreases in the areas of forming hypotheses and drawing conclusions (hypotheses: -0.107; conclusions: -0.901). the corrected r-squared for forming hypotheses is .048 and for drawing conclusions is .037. multiple regressions show that the factor scientific interest has no influence on the result, neither in the overall result nor in the sub-areas. the factor ability self-concept is a predictor for the test result of experiment at the third test time (f(2,37)=3,946, p= .028; effect strength: .39; n= 40). if the score in experiment increases, ability self-concept increases by .150; the corrected r-squared is .131, which means that 13% of the total variance of the result is explained by ability self-concept. discussion comparison of competencies in the profile classes analyses of variance were used to examine whether there were differences between sub-competencies at each test time. the competence forming hypotheses differs significantly from planning and conducting experiments at all three test times and it also differs from drawing conclusions at the first and second test time, with students performing significantly lower in forming hypotheses at all test times. the first hypothesis of this study must therefore be rejected (h1). our findings contradict previous research, which suggests that students perform best at forming hypotheses (e.g. kidman & casinader, 2017; schiepetiska et al., 2016; walpuski & schulz, 2011). in profile classes, less time is spent on students generating hypotheses compared to the other two competencies. this is due to the fact that the teaching material/methods particularly promote the competence area of conducting experiments and drawing conclusions by focusing on students conducting their own research projects. students develop their own questions, plan 34 global education review 8 (4) and conduct experiments, and evaluate the results. a large amount of time is devoted to planning and carrying out experiments in the classes; therefore students spend less time generating their hypothesis. the next big aspect is to present their data, which they must first accurately interpret results and draw conclusions before presenting it at a research conference. previous studies have confirmed that the competence drawing conclusion is the slowest to develop among students (chi et al., 2019). in the study by chi et al. (2019), similar results are shown in regard to the competence "evaluating and making argumentation," which is similar to drawing conclusion. students experienced the most problems in solving these tasks. kidman and casinader (2017) also point out that students need the most support in the area of drawing conclusions. in contrast, the acquisition of this area of competence seems to be promoted very well in the scientific profile classes. students perform significantly better in this competence at the first and second test time. the digital teaching caused by the coronavirus pandemic could be another reason for the result at the end of the school year, students performing best in planning and conducting experiments. schools were closed between the second and third test dates due to the high number of cases in germany (ministerium für schule und bildung des landes nordrhein-westfalen, 2020 & robertkoch-institute, 2020). subsequently, classes were taught using digital distance learning. online teaching made it more difficult to use methods of scientific knowledge acquisition (like hands-on activities or inquiry-learning). an interview study with profile class teachers (n=7) report difficulties in getting students to work on their own (schulte & wegner, in prep.). these preliminary research results could also have an impact on the examined profile classes. teachers designed lessons for students to conduct experiments at home with few materials, filmed their own experiments in schools to show students, or used virtual resources. it has been shown that students benefit in interest and knowledge acquisition from the use of digital media and virtual labs (kluge, 2014; schäfers et al., 2020). to summarize, the results contradict previous studies. over time, students in the profile classes perform best in drawing conclusions (chi et al., 2019) and show the greatest difficulty in forming hypotheses (schiepe-tiska et al., 2016). gender difference in the profile classes in this study, gender has no influence on naw-test scores. this confirms previous research and our hypotheses (h2) (höffler et al., 2014), but shows an opposite trend to the pisa results from 2015 and 2018. although there is a slight tendency in the means for girls to perform better, the small sample size must be considered, along with the fact that the proportion of boys is higher; male students represent 75% of the total sample. not all students could be questioned at all three test times. progression of competence over time within one school year, an increase in competence in the naw-test and its sub-areas can be observed among profile class students, supporting previous research and confirming our hypotheses (h3) (osterhaus et al., 2020; becoming proficient through profile classes 35 35 piekny & maehler, 2013). a pair-wise comparison of the overall results shows that the first test time differs significantly from the second and third time, with the greatest increase between the first and third test time. no significant increase in competence was observed between the second and third time of testing. there was hardly any classroom teaching between those test times. in contrast, between the first test times, the focus in lessons (in-class) was on scientific inquiry. it can therefore be assumed that the teaching in profile classes had a positive effect on the students during this period and on the acquisition of competence in the areas of forming hypotheses, planning and conducting experiments, and drawing conclusions. in contrast to the other competencies, drawing conclusions does not increase significantly between the last two test times. distance learning may have had an impact on the competence acquisition of profile class students as methods could hardly be implemented (schulte & wegner, in prep.). the significant increase in the area forming hypotheses confirms previous research that this skill area can be easily acquired by students (e.g. walpuski & schulz, 2011; schiepe-tiska et al., 2016). factors influencing the test results biology grades had an influence on naw test result scores at the first test time and on the results of the areas forming hypotheses and drawing conclusions (h4). thereby, the results show a very low effect size and little of the variance of the result is explained based on the grade. this effect should be examined in further studies with larger sample sizes. previous studies have shown that the naw test should be independent of grade (see e.g., klos et al., 2008). interest has no influence on the overall test result and on the test results of the competence areas (h5), but ability self-concept is a predictor for the test result in planning and conducting experiments at the third test time (h6). digital learning requires self-regulatory skills; students must plan their school days and independently learn. as self-concept positively influences the competence area of experiments, the adapted teaching methods due to distance learning might be beneficial. to further examine this effect, we should investigate the extent to which self-concept in profile classes changes over time, or if students with a higher selfconcept answered more items correctly. limitations & conclusion one of the limitations of this study is the decreasing sample size over time. the sample of n=84 at the first test time of the school year could not be retained at the following two test times. this may be due to the coronavirus pandemic, as after the second test time, the school lockdown started. by the third test time, the questionnaire and naw-test were converted to a digital format with the hope that this would provide students with the opportunity to continue to take part online. since some students do not have mobile devices or internet access at home, not all of them could participate. furthermore, the study should be expanded to survey a comparison group of regular class students. this leads to further research that questions the extent to which the acquisition of competencies of the students with a profile differs from the acquisition of competencies of students without a special scientific promotion. in our study, the examined group will continue to be surveyed in 6th and 7th grade, to analyze change in competence over several years. we could then investigate whether grades or interest have an influence on naw-test performance, as shown in other studies. this study nevertheless provides crucial information about how 36 global education review 8 (4) scientific competencies in profile classes develop over time and how they can be promoted. references altrichter, h., heinrich, m., & soukupaltrichter, k. 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(2000). setting theoretical and empirical foundations for assessing scientific inquiry and discovery in educational programs. journal of research in science teaching, 37(9), 938–962. 40 global education review 8 (4) about the authors alena schulte is currently a phd student at the osthushenrich center for giftedness at the faculty of biology (ozhb) at bielefeld university. in her project "science-klassen", concepts are developed to support scientifically gifted students in schools. the concepts are implemented in the schools and scientifically accompanied by her. in this context, she investigates the development of the students in the science classes and the design of the lessons by the teachers. i the technical terms in italics were translated from german into english. ii one of the three types of secondary schools students may choose after primary school. this dr. claas wegner is a professor at bielefeld university, germany, in the department for didactics of biology. his research focuses on gifted students in science education and he is head of the just recently founded osthushenrich center for giftedness (ozhb) at bielefeld university. school type allows students to take an entrance exam to later study at university. l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: margaroni, mary & magos, kostas. (2020). l2 teaching in the post-communicative era: developing intercultural consciousness, critical awareness and consistent attitudes for social inclusion. global education review, 7 (4), 1-8. l2 teaching in the post-communicative era: developing intercultural consciousness, critical awareness and consistent attitudes for social inclusion mary margaroni aristotle university of thessaloniki, greece kostas magos university of thessaly, greece for most of the 20th century, functionalism and functional literacy focused on communicative and text-oriented approaches, emphasizing mainly sociolinguistic, discourse, and strategic competences (canale & swain, 1980: 1-47; savignon, 1983). however, in recent decades, language teaching and learning, including l2 (second language) teaching and learning, has been influenced by social constructivism, multiliteracies, and critical literacy. social constructivism stresses that human development is socially situated, and an individual’s learning takes place because of his or her interactions in a group (von glasersfeld, 1989). multiliteracies highlight linguistic diversity and multimodal forms of linguistic expression and representation (new london group, 1996). with both the dramatically changing social and technological contexts of communication and learning (cope & kalantzis, 2009: 164-195) and the steadily increasing transnational movement of populations (castles, 2018: 151-162), the need arose for new literacies and new learning through the elaboration of various multimodal textual types from the sociocultural environment of the learners (cope & kalantzis, 2009: 164-195). critical literacy enhances critical reflection (freire & macedo, 1987), as it involves making sense of the sociopolitical systems through which we live and question these systems. it contributes to transformative learning, as it concerns imagining thoughtful ways of thinking about reconstructing texts, images, and practices to convey different and more socially correct and equitable messages and ways of being (vasquez, 2017). therefore, l2 teaching and learning began to focus on post-communicative approaches. the “post-communicative era,” i.e., the period since the year 2000, has been characterized by an emphasis on the strong power of language to construct, deconstruct, and reconstruct social reality. under the influence of the brazilian educator and theorist paulo freire and his fundamental work pedagogy of the oppressed (freire, 1972), social justice pedagogy emphasizes critical orientation, in which the aim of language teaching is not limited to the improvement of language and communication skills, but also aims to develop students’ critical awareness (chapman & hobbel, 2010: 1-6; gorski & seema, 2014). students participate in the process of critical interpretation of written or oral discourse and dispute sovereign ideologies and established powers. in addition, social justice pedagogy places an emphasis on constructive orientation in learning by focusing 2 global education review 7 (1) on students’ individual needs and preferences, differentiated teaching, and exploration of learning (bell, 1997). students become actively involved in solving problems through cooperation and interaction in a task-based and student-centered context. hence, l2 applies modern learner-centered didactic approaches with an emphasis on: 1) the social character of teaching, which includes inter alia the ability to develop deep and sincere relationships among all participants in the educational process and to engage students in learning (john-steiner & mahn, 1996: 191-206); 2) experiential, discovery-based, interdisciplinary, and cross curricular thematic learning, using flexible language material, as it is an opportunity for learners, on the one hand, to apply what they have been taught to solve real-world challenges, and on the other hand, it involves a conscious effort to apply knowledge to more than one academic discipline simultaneously (knutson, 2003: 52-64; bruner, 1961: 21-32; ellis & stuen, 1998); 3) the reinforcement of critical thinking, which inter alia promotes the development of reasoning, analytical and evaluative skills, as well as selfreflective capacity and openmindedness. critical thinking also encourages curiosity and fosters problem-solving ability and hence independence (luke & dooley, 2011: 856-868); 4) the use of critical discourse analysis, which enables an important assessment of what is meant when language (form and content) is used, as well as what the ways are that people use language to communicate their ideas and beliefs (fairclough & wodak, 1997/2004: 258284); 5) the strengthening of students’ multiple identities, taking into account and using their experiences (dervin, 2016); 6) the enhancement of students’ intercultural competence (baxter, 1983: 290-324; ali, kazemian & mahar, 2015: 1-10); 7) the reinforcement of intercultural language learning and reinforcement of l2 teaching via culture (crozet & liddicoat, 1999 113-126; crozet, liddicoat & lo bianco, 1999: 1-20; crozet & liddicoat, 2000: 1-22; liddicoat, et al., 2003); 8) the internal differentiation in the classroom with an aim to employ a variety of teaching styles to ensure that students, approaching learning in different ways, will be able to have similar outcomes (gregory & chapman, 2012); 9) the use of translanguaging practices to provide an opportunity for multilingual speakers to use in their multilingual classes their own languages as an integrated communication system (lasagabaster & garcía, 2014; garcía & wei, 2014 ); 10) the use of new technologies (computerassisted language learning / call), which strengthens student’s interest and motivation (chapelle & jamieson, 2008); 11) the creation of open learning environments, which are rooted in learner-centered design principles and highlight activities and contexts, supporting students’ efforts to understand what they determine to be important (hannafin, land & oliver, 1999: 115-140). l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 3 in addition, l2 teaching aims to cultivate various forms of citizenship, such as: civic citizenship, which consists of behaviors, attitudes, and actions that reflect concerned and active membership in a community (jamieson & grundy, 2004: 127); multicultural citizenship, in the context of a discourse on the rights of minority groups (kymlicka, 1998) as well as in the context of accepting and respecting the existent pluralism in our society (miller, 1995: 432-450); flexible citizenship, which asserts that economic reasons are the primary purpose people choose their citizenship instead of identifying with a community based on shared political rights (ong, 1999), and global citizenship, a citizenship concept that signifies ways of thinking and living within multiple cross-cutting communities and international collectives (davies, evans & reid, 2005: 66-89; schattle 2012). in this context, the teaching of l2 that goes hand in hand with education in citizenship should consist of three main areas: a) social and moral responsibility, b) community participation, and c) political literacy. in other words, students must learn how to make themselves effective in public life through the knowledge, skills, and values they learn (citizenship advisory group, 1998: 40-41). respectively, l2 teaching applies modern didactic methods, including, but not limited to: 1) task-based language learning (tbll) that focuses on asking students to do meaningful tasks using the target language (ellis, 2003); 2) game-based language learning (gbll) that focuses on exploring and experimenting with the target language having fun and without fear of failure or bad grades (de haan, 2019: 1-57); 3) drama-based language learning (dbll) that inter alia on the one hand, develops creativity and spontaneity, very important features in l2 learning, and on the other hand, provides opportunities for expression and acquisition of meaningful interaction in the target language (wessels, 1987: 10; winston, 2011: 1-5); 4) art-based language teaching (abll) that has the potential to develop students’ creative as well as critical thinking skills and to lead students to gain a positive attitude to learning, understanding others and expressing their own thoughts (shier, 1990: 301316; de jesus, 2016: 1-4); 5) transformative learning through aesthetic experience (tlae) as – according to dewey (1934/1980)– an aesthetic experience is the pre-eminent tool of developing the imagination, a fundamental element of the learning process, and it may even lead to transformative learning (kokkos, 2011: 155-177); and 6) content and language integrated learning (clil) that increases motivation as l2 is used to fulfil real purposes to learn the substantive material and enhances specific target language terminology acquisition, putting the emphasis on meaning rather than on form of the target language. moreover, clil may introduce students to the wider cultural context, broadening their horizons and drastically increasing the amount of exposure to the target language (cole, hood & marsh, 2010; banegas, 2012: 46-56; ball, kelly & clegg, 2015). l2 teaching aims not only to improve students’ receptive and productive language skills, but also to transform the language lesson into a vehicle for inclusion, developing critical consciousness as well as a vehicle to political action for peace and social change. 4 global education review 7 (1) in a period of mass (and often forced) population movements, inclusion can be the key to providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be excluded or marginalized. education, and especially language education, can lead among others to gain more self-confidence, to establish deeper and more significant relationships with the population of the host country, and to increase the number of professional opportunities (magos & margaroni, 2018: 1-6). developing critical consciousness can lead to the ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality and to the commitment to take action against these systems. in this way, the vulnerable social groups –in this case immigrants and refugees– can take action to “become an expert in authoring their own lives,” improving their living conditions and establishing their position in the host country (schell, 2019). the official recognition of the contribution of education to world peace and safety and its role as a key channel of communication between peoples is, in principle, a philosophical product of the enlightenment and has become a key political and social issue of international peace mainly from the late 18th and early 19th centuries (page, 2008). ongoing wars between peoples, successive genocides, the absolute devaluation of human life, relentless ethnic and cultural conflicts fueled by growing socioeconomic antagonisms between west and east, north and south, as well as the growing internal differentiation in the class stratification of each society, make peace education a timeless requirement in order to systematically cultivate the principles and skills of tolerance, cooperation, democratic behavior, management of aggression, and a willingness to take responsibility (moorehead, 1987: 18-54). l2 lessons can include the principles of peace education to help alleviate conflict, consolidate democratic and peaceful mentalities and attitudes (takkaç tulgar, 2017: 72-77), and lead to a social change for more social justice and equality. in this volume, researchers with long experience in formal, informal, and non-formal language education for migrants and refugees in western and southern europe, the near east, north america and sub-saharan africa at all language levels (according to the common european framework of reference for languages / cerf) present and discuss various aspects of using l2 teaching for social inclusion of migrants and refugees in the host societies. the first three studies concern valuable l2 teaching practices that aim at familiarizing immigrant and refugee students with the host country (culture and citizens), and at strengthening intercultural dialogue and intercultural understanding and empathy. the authors of these articles apply modern teaching methods to improve both the cognitive, language, and soft skills of their students, and to create the appropriate conditions for more effective inclusion, not only in the classroom, but also in the wider host society. at the beginning of this section, konstantina kalogirou, christianne fernée, dewi stamenkovic, and konstantinos trimmis, in their study concerning the city of cardiff in the united kingdom entitled “‘a town of many’: drama and urban heritage landscapes as mediums for second language acquisition and social inclusion,” present a cultural heritageinspired teaching method that addresses the introduction of cultural heritage in multicultural education as a medium of promoting language acquisition through drama in education. highlighting the importance of heritage applications in (language) education, the authors discuss how the recording of urban heritage could be used to achieve social inclusion, acceptance, and equal opportunities l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 5 for refugees, asylum seekers, and newly arrived students. in their study, “overcoming anxiety in adult migrants’ language learning by means of process drama,” veronica maistrello and fiona dalziel explore how drama activities can provide an opportunity for adult migrants to develop their competence in the language of the host country in a pleasant, protected, and anxietyfree space. this enables them to express themselves combating foreign language anxiety, to discover new ways of learning the target language, to interact, and especially to gain selfconfidence—a prerequisite for smooth integration in the host country. in her study, “the host country culture in second language acquisition,” olja milosevic describes and analyzes how a group of high school l2 english learners in the international school of belgrade, the capital city of serbia, studied their host country’s cultural heritage. this gave them the opportunity to develop target language proficiency, soft skills, as well as intercultural sensitivity and awareness. the requirements, therefore, are developing empathy, ability to change perspectives, critical thinking to recognize the reasons for misunderstanding, and finding ways to resolve them. the second section of the volume contains three articles that discuss teachers’ perceptions about effective ways of teaching l2 language to students with a migrant and refugee background to integrate them better and more fairly into the host society. in the first study of part ii, “teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background in greece: teachers’ perceptions about reception, integration and multicultural identities,” giorgos simopoulos and kostas magos describe the educational landscape concerning new supporting structures to facilitate refugee children to learn greek as a l2 before accessing the mainstream school program. at the same time, the authors discuss the perceptions of the l2 teachers about their lack of experience in refugee education as well as the lack of support in training or professional development. they also underline the importance of teachers’ attitudes and practices in relation to refugee primary and secondary school l2 students. a deeper critical reflection by the teachers leads to the development of their intercultural competence and to a “crossing borders” transformative process. in her study, “the applicability of learnercentered education in refugee settings: the syrian refugee teachers’ case study,” iman sarif analyzes syrian teachers’ views of appropriate pedagogy in the syrian refugee context in turkey. she specifically shows how the challenges of pedagogical change include more learner-centered practices and teachers’ capacities to implement them in the refugee context. finally, michelle solorio presents in her study, “refugees, immigrants, and language in ivorian education,” a complex language landscape that includes more than 60 local languages as well as french, the language of instruction that was imposed by the former colonial power. she then moves on to discuss the lack of literacy and its impact, especially on nonnative students such as immigrants, migrants, refugees, and the stateless. she analyzes teachers’ and parents’ opinions about the benefits of integrated schools programs (programme des écoles integrées) for nonnative students, focusing on using various didactic strategies to support foreign students and to include them in the (l2) school class more effectively and successfully. all the above studies map different dimensions of the current topic of l2 teaching to students with migrant/refugee background. we hope this volume may contribute to 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(2021). glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis: conceptualizing glocality in indigenous education research and reform. global education review, 8 (2-3), 62-80. glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis: conceptualizing glocality in indigenous education research and reform eric w. layman indiana university (usa) eun-ji amy kim griffith university (australia) abstract few issues encapsulate the tension of “glocality” in education more substantively than the debate surrounding who should undertake research on indigenous education, and how it should be done. in this article, two non-indigenous educational researchers both working with indigenous education research and reform, alongside the guidance of indigenous mentors, grapple with the questions of if and how nonindigenous critical research methodologies can complement, and thereby reduce, the peripheralization of indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. this article explores the opportunity for dialogue between two often polarized hazards. on one hand, non-indigenous researchers with non-indigenous epistemologies risk increasing the marginalization of indigenous ways of knowing. on the other, research on indigenous education is threatened with further ostracism if it is inaccurately perceived as only the domain of indigenous peoples, and only facilitated through indigenous epistemologies. the authors share their experiences in using a non-indigenous critical research methodology, critical discourse analysis, to explore indigenous education research and reform. particularly, the authors share their experiences, both in employing non-indigenous critical research approaches in indigenous contexts whilst also attempting to honor local indigenous epistemologies. this article contributes to the discussion of how “trans-systemic” knowledge, the discursive space between indigenous and nonindigenous understandings, can illuminate the concept of “glocality” in educational research methods. in conclusion, the authors contend for the role of “glocal brokers” who navigate between global and local— between indigenous and non-indigenous—understandings to foster connections and communicative opportunities that can further elevate and integrate indigenous ways of knowing into broader discourse concerning indigenous education research and reform. keywords glocality; glocal broker; indigenous education research and reform; critical discourse analysis introduction in acknowledging the importance of relationships guiding our research, we begin this article by introducing ourselves and our work. we are two non-indigenous educators and researchers in the field of indigenous education research and reform. eric layman was born and raised in the american midwest, but subsequently has lived the majority of his adult life in east asia. his interest in sociolinguistic minority education issues began 20 years ago at the turn of the millennium while spending two years studying mandarin in the ethnically diverse yunnan province in southwest china, home to at least fifty ethnolinguistic minority peoples. eun-ji amy kim was born in south korea. part of the 71st generation of sam-hyun tribe of kim of kimhae, amy navigates her identities as a settler to places that she has lived glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 63 63 ‘other than’ her ancestral land--namely canada and australia. eric and amy met through a virtual academic conference and share a mutual interest and commitment of working towards a goal of becoming allies (bishop, 2015) for indigenous communities and expanding advocacy in working alongside with indigenous communities in building trans-local partnerships towards the goal of indigenous education reform and education for reconciliation. throughout the article, the authors employ the term indigenous (with a capital “i”) as it emphasizes the collective lived experiences of indigenous peoples around the world in resistance to colonialism and european imperialism, while term indigenous (with a lowercase “i”), on the other hand, can be used more generically to describe multiple categories of things not possessing a foreign origin (wilson, 2008). building and sustaining relationships with local indigenous peoples, and taking stances as learners, have become central aspects driving our professional work. indigenous friends and elders that we work with have encouraged us to remain critical and understand the power dynamics that exist in diverse levels and finally, in what way, our own personal and professional work and privileges contribute to such power dynamics. therefore, in this article, we explore these power dynamics that exist across many tiers -global and local – in indigenous education reform (i.e., indigenization of curriculum). we first argue that these movements are ‘glocal’ in nature, and thus are aided by “glocal brokers” who navigate the ideas and perspectives stemming from different local and global spaces. meanwhile, these glocal brokers need to engage in continual practices of critical reflexivity regarding the power-dynamics that exist in diverse, trans-local discursive spaces and draw from a ‘transsystemic’ approach in exploring and analyzing these power dynamics. in defining ‘trans’, we follow klein's (2013) understanding of ‘trans’ where she states that “inter’ is conventionally taken to exist between existing approaches, while ‘trans’ moves beyond them” (p. 190, emphasis original). greiner & sakdapolrak (2013) also take up the notion of ‘beyond’ of trans in their conceptualization of trans-locality: “emergence of multidirectional and overlapping networks that facilitate the circulation of people, resources, practices and ideas” (p. 375). anthony-stevens (2017) quotes brayboy et al. (2012) in asserting that the goals of achieving the “emancipatory project” of “selfdetermination and inherent sovereignty of indigenous peoples is rooted in relationships and is driven explicitly by community interests” (p. 85). anthony-stevens asserts that “praxisoriented relationships are necessary” inasmuch as the goals of “understanding and dismantling the patterns that construct educational inequity” require the recognition that, “power and whiteness have material and social implications that limit or open opportunities to shape productive collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples” (p. 99). in arguing for the possibility of “opportunities to shape productive collaborations between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples,” anthony-stevens (2017) further asserts that: critically aware non-indigenous allies are needed to redress these entrenched institutional inequities and further indigenous agendas for educational sovereignty. my analysis of these issues has emphasized that allied voices are secondary to indigenous voices, yet allied voices are nonetheless crucial when cultivated through explicit antiracist, anticolonial commitments to 64 global education review 8 (2-3) redirecting the flow of power relations in spaces of schooling. this praxis orientation values relationality and reciprocity even and especially when it is uncomfortable and without immediately gratifying results….it is critical that non-indigenous scholareducators contribute to the broader transformative movement of educational paradigms led by indigenous communities for indigenous communities….guided by “the 4 rs” relationality, respect, reciprocity, responsibility—we need to better assess the productivity of an alliance stance…interrupting inequity in indigenous education requires nonindigenous scholar-educators to explicitly prioritize, from the ground up, indigenous voices as the definers of how and for what purpose allies can and should be of service to projects of educational sovereignty. (p. 101) similarly, lomawaima (2000) claims that even with the problematic historical baggage between social researchers and indigenous people, “or perhaps more realistically because of it — many native communities and schools accept the need for high-quality research guided by locally meaningful questions and concerns,” although “researchers must give something back,” even if it is something “less tangible but even more enduring: friendship, respect, and simple, honest communication” (lomawaima, 2000). in this light, trans-locality goes beyond the mobility of people through (im)migration, instead extending to the mobility of ideas and experiences of people. the notion of ‘beyond’ is important in conceptualizing trans-locality. as such, ‘trans’ requires creativity and moving beyond and thinking through what works best for the network of people gathered for a particular situation. we conceptualize ‘locals’ and ‘systems’ in the discursive sense, rather than the geographic sense: locals are a network/community of people, ideas and experiences stemming from the same or similar discursive practices. trans-locality and transsystemic approaches are viewed as the networks of people and ideas, created by engaging in communication and reflection together. our usage of ‘trans-local’ or ‘trans-systemic ’therefore may be considered as local-to-local (community-to-community) connection (or system-to-system), focusing on actual relationships being built through communicative action and reflection that functionally contributes to a global discursive space. as these trans-local relationships between social actors facilitate sharing and comparing of partial experiences, they must go through what ang (1998) refers to as ‘substantiation and specification’ of metaphors and concepts (p. 27). this collective action and reflection on metaphors and concepts together finds the commonalities and separateness of experiences and allows for fostering global solidarity and intercultural understanding. in this process, a joint criticality resulting from trans-local/trans-systemic approaches becomes an important aspect of research and reform and enables locating and investigating the power dynamics that exist in discursive spaces. in this article therefore, we reference and link nonindigenous a critical research analytic approach, critical discourse analysis (fairclough, 1995). drawing up on our own research and learning experiences with indigenous curricular reform in taiwan’s indigenous experimental schools (eric) and indigenous science curriculum renewal in saskatchewan, canada (amy), we showcase the way in which these two ‘critical’ glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 65 65 frameworks could be utilized in honoring local indigenous peoples’ perspectives and guidance whilst providing a discursive space wherein researchers can explore the relations and benefits of trans-systemic approaches for research projects on the topics of indigenous education research and reform. examples of “glocal” education policy taiwan’s austronesian indigenous population is comprised of 16 officially recognized ethnicities numbering at approximately half a million people (cia, 2018). in 2016, the first ever “indigenous experimental school” was inaugurated for the atayal indigenous people (lee & chin, 2016). in the three years following, approximately thirty indigenous experimental schools have opened. indigenous “experimental” schools seek to greatly increase the proportion of indigenous cultural content in the curriculum. eric’s research draws from ethnographic and interview data from these indigenous experimental schools, as well as other schools that are eligible and considering making the transition to “experimental” status. eric’s research also includes data from public forums and training workshops involved with promoting indigenous education development and policy making. eric employs critical discourse analysis (cda) of policy documents, curricular materials, and promotional videos about these schools. experimental schools are a relatively new phenomenon in taiwan having only begun in 2015 (li, 2015). experimental schools were not initially introduced with taiwan’s indigenous people in mind at all. rather, they were heavily influenced by progressive european models of education, such as waldorf and montessori educational philosophies, that have begun to grow in prominence in taiwan, perhaps in response to an educational system that has been heavily exam-centric for many years (wu & wu, 2018). indigenous communities have taken advantage of this recent flexibility in educational regulation by opening “indigenous experimental schools” that retain their status as public institutions of learning but are able to command a greater proportion of curricular programming in order to devote more time and courses for indigenous education than what is afforded in mainstream schools. we contend that taiwan’s indigenous experimental schools are an example of the “glocal” in that they occupy an ‘in-between’ space that is not entirely locally indigenous, while at the same time pursuing an unambiguous indigenous agenda. taiwan’s indigenous communities have appropriated an education policy not intended for them, a policy that was itself appropriated from abroad and applied to the taiwan mainstream educational context. in addition, indigenous communities are actively partnering with other indigenous communities around the globe in order to gain insight regarding how to structure their own “indigenous” education. indeed, the promotion of ‘indigenization’ of the education system and ‘reconciliation’ between indigenous and nonindigenous peoples has increased globally. the international adaptation of the united nations declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples (un-drip) in 2007 has been a key driver in this global movement. taiwan’s indigenous education movement, like so many others, has been inspired in part by the aspirations of undrip, and related interactions with other likeminded indigenous communities, austronesian and otherwise. in saskatchewan’s indigenous community, particularly since the 2005 curriculum renewal, the saskatchewan ministry of education has focused on creating indigenous knowledges (ik)-infused k-12 science curricula (aikenhead & elliot, 2010). a focus for the renewal was “the integration of first nations, 66 global education review 8 (2-3) métis and inuit content, perspectives, and ways of knowing into all curricula to encourage the engagement and success of indigenous students, and at the same time, to enhance the quality of school science for non-indigenous students” (aikenhead & elliot, 2010, p. 329). saskatchewan is considered as an exemplary province in making formal schooling more inclusive towards indigenous ways of coming to know for all students towards its goal towards education for reconciliation (kim & dionne, 2014). meanwhile, such ik infused curricula are not only for indigenous students but for all. the core curriculum (saskatchewan education, 2000), emphasized that such “culturally relevant curriculum and resources foster meaningful learning experiences for all students, promote an appreciation of canada’s cultural mosaic, and support universal human rights” (p. 5). in this way, saskatchewan’s mission for official science curriculum renewal is in line with the goal for reconciliation with land and between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples of canada. we argue that this indigenous education reform as well also illustrates the “glocal” nature of indigenous education reform in that it draws from the actions at the translocal space of the united nations, and applies them and links them at the local, indigenous level. regarding these various “levels” and how they relate to indigenous education reform, sandra styres (2017) mentions that to reduce “hegemonic ideologies that serve to perpetuate dominant western practices within education,” changes need to happen on multiple levels including “administration and infrastructure; networks and relations of power; the ways knowledge is constructed and legitimized within the dominating epistemology; policies, pedagogies, and classroom practices; and the complex issues regarding language, literacies and evaluative strategies” (p. 26). as goodyearka’ōpua (2013) asserts, “self-determination cannot simply be understood as ‘natives making decisions about what is best for natives’ without keeping in view the structures of power within which such decisions are made” (p. 89). as well, such a multilevel process of ik infused curricula does not necessarily involve a chronologically linear process; it may happen spontaneously at the same time in different places. in the saskatchewan context, dr. glen aikenhead claims that “it was pressure from a lot of different places that happened to come together simultaneously, besides the conservative government” that made the curriculum renewal possible (personal communication, march 26, 2016). in this current time, with all of these policies in place, creating an education system that respects indigenous ways of knowing, for all students became a mission for the saskatchewan ministry of education. in the context of science education, there is both educational and political value of indigenous knowledge being put forward by different stakeholders that drive the initiatives of integrating indigenous knowledges (ik) in science curricula (aikenhead & elliot, 2010; ryan, 2008). such integration of ik in curricula can help educators and researchers to resist the “tyranny of globalizing discourses” (foucault, 1980, p. 83) that assert monolithic epistemological eurocentric modern science and move forward in creating educational spaces that appreciate the multiplication of knowledges-sciences to be shared in classrooms. in turn, the processes and the product of curriculum renewal has been shared locally and globally in the forum of academic settings (e.g., academic journals; books and conferences) informing the similar initiatives in other canadian provinces and around the globe. these sharing and informing occur in-between discursive space of global-local, requiring the glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 67 67 mobility of the actors and ideas in diverse levels (e.g., local, national, and multilateral sectors) to interact with each other. as such, ‘local view and perspective from the field’ are now associated with the causes and consequences of these translocal encounters of ideas and people, driven by globalization; and in turn, “the idea of field as methodological concept” needs to consider what naess (2016) describes as “three field dimensions: glocality, relationality, and transformativity” (p. 3). our article uses these two examples of “glocal” indigenous education policy reform as entry points into exploring notions of how “glocal brokers” can navigate between indigenous and transnational cultural spaces in order to build and bridge relationships that foster communication and capacity building for indigenous education reform. the authors draw from critical research frameworks in order to illustrate how a “glocal,” discursive space between the global and local—between indigenous and non-indigenous critical theories —can help to make sense of current trajectories and possibilities in indigenous education research and reform. conceptualizations of the glocal in indigenous and non-indigenous epistemological discourse conceptualizations of the interaction between the global and the local in education policy formulation mirror an ongoing interchange between the role of non-indigenous, mainly “enlightenment-based” (donald, 2019) knowledge and epistemology used towards indigenous education reform. according to aikenhead (2006), colonizing, non-indigenous forces used the “objectivity and secularism” embedded in western modern science as forces of colonization. for example, emphasizing the value of secularism, natural philosophy promoted “scientific racism” (deloria, 1998) and “cognitive imperialism” (battiste & henderson, 2000): both promoted the idea that modern secular rational thinking was superior to the “primitive” spirituality imbedded in indigenous knowledges-sciences (aikenhead, 2006; aikenhead & michell, 2011; deloria, 1998). ideas stemming from scientific racism and cognitive imperialism became discourses for rationalizing and legitimatizing the education system that assimilated indigenous students into western ways of thinking (battiste & henderson, 2000). in further discussion of the interaction of global and local, gobo (2011) explicates on the notion of “glocal” research approaches and recounts some of the history of how the “glocal” has been understood and articulated, and also relates this discussion to the debate surrounding indigenous epistemology. he cites roland robertson (1997) in one of the original descriptions of the “glocal” as “the simultaneity – the co-presence – of both universalizing and particularizing tendencies” (p. 428). in this expression of the “glocal,” tendencies for localities to embrace and mimic foreign objects and values transpire concurrently with those tendencies for foreign objects and values to be embraced and then transformed by local context. this understanding of the “glocal” is a response to assumptions of unilateral globalizing tendencies that regard a gradual, submissive trend of uniform homogeneity to be inevitable as smaller localities increasingly interact with more powerful global entities. gobo (2011) points out the need for a more nuanced “glocal” conceptualization of social research in that there are inherent shortcomings in over-emphasizing either polarized formulation of “global” or “local.” as he argues, all social action occurs in a particular locality, and not in some ethereal, abstract global space. the “global” exists in idea only and cannot be divorced from the localities where events occur. in contrast, the ongoing interaction of peoples, ideas, and cultures 68 global education review 8 (2-3) throughout the millennia have resulted in an untenable formulation of the “local” in that, embedded within every locality, there can be observed evidence of foreign impacts and flows. he therefore rejects the notion of an interaction between the “global” and “local” in favor of multiple “locals” in interaction with one another and posits a taxonomy of three possibilities for conceptualizing “glocal” research. first, he denotes “colonization” as the subjugation of one locality by another, then “localization” as the sequestration of a locality, or finally “interlocality” as the mutual, discursive interaction between two localities (p. 430). therefore, in this formulation of the “glocal,” an optimistic, even playing field of equally respectful localities exists in reciprocal communication. in striving to develop a definitive conceptualization of the relatively new field of “global studies” pieterse (2013) also asserts a bilateral framing global and local communication and advocates for a “multilevel approach” across broads scales of “macro, meso, and micro” (p. 11). in so doing, pieterse (2013) argues that studies of global dynamics and interactions occupy a middle space between large scale studies and the locally specific. as he points out with regard to indigenous interests in particular, indigenous activists are involved in international organizations such as the united nations and are reaching out into the transnational space to secure resources and policy amendments to act locally on behalf of their own communities’ interests. modern social research therefore requires attention to multiple tiers of activities between the ostensibly minute details of localized activity observable primarily through ethnographic interaction, as well as to the largescale interactions of international organizations, and ultimately the discursive space in between, a space the authors will cover in more detail later. arnove (2013) as well has advanced a version of this formulation of a discursive middle ground with regard to international and comparative education policy. he posits that at the center of education policy construction is a “dialectic” between global and local forces. he observes that at times the compulsions of international forces advocating a particular education policy are obeyed and at others acquiescence to those forces is altered to serve the needs and desires of local actors. moreover, education professionals and academics in parts of the world long considered to be passive recipients of educational directives and policies have been in recent years pushing back and influencing the discourse related to education and development in ways that call for wider recognition and adaption to local circumstances. however, despite this optimism and positive formulations as to the potential of the “glocal” to be a mutually respectful place of communication, others may see the sanguinity misplaced and inaccurate in representation of the interaction between localized entities and other transnational forces. as kahn (2014) cites rockefeller (2011) in the introduction to her volume on framing the global; by solely fixating on the transnational currents of information, people, and culture, often omitted from the analysis is a “critical consideration of what is flowing” (p. 5). therefore, social research that espouses a “global” orientation “must not shy away from the inequalities, anomalies, and differences that are intrinsic to global circulation” (kahn, 2014, p. 5). thus, while conceptualizing the glocal requires a discursive understanding between the global and the local, social research must not pretend that such interaction happens on equal footing. to consider the global, one must take into account longstanding prejudices and biases that have rendered some “locals” more isolated and glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 69 69 subservient than others, and simultaneously placed on a pedestal mis-labeled “global” perspectives that are in actuality no more inherently valuable or universal than the other “local” epistemologies and understandings that they have usurped and/or disregarded. social researchers of the glocal must strive to understand how to create equity and reciprocity within the dialogic and intersubjective space between disparate localities. glocality and indigenous perspectives the issue of unequal footing in perspectives is a point that has long been argued in the field of indigenous and decolonial studies. as tuhiwai smith (1999) famously put, “research is one of the dirtiest words of the indigenous vocabulary” (p. 1) as social research has long considered “that western ideas about the most fundamental things are the only ideas possible to hold, certainly the only rational ideas, and the only idea which can make sense of the world, of reality, of social life and of human beings” (p. 56). similarly, edward said (1978) also stated that research has been “a western discourse about the other” (p. 2). the perspectives, knowledge, and epistemologies of indigenous peoples have long been relegated to the periphery and subservience to western science and research. western epistemology and social research have been infused with inherent universality and objectivity while indigenous perspectives have been considered to be domain of their respective localities alone, and not applicable or relevant to broader contexts. as tuhiwai smith (1999) further details, research regarding indigenous matters has often been a process akin to theft, whereby indigenous knowledges are acquired by researchers in order to benefit the interests of academia, business and governments rather than the needs and interests of indigenous peoples. moreover, this “research” has often engaged in practices that have justified the oppression and marginalization of indigenous knowledges and viewpoints. feminist and decolonial scholar, trinh minh ha (1989) also makes the point as to the fundamentally flawed endeavor of many traditional anthropological pursuits. as she eloquently put: no anthropological undertaking can ever open up the other. never the marrow. all he can do is wear himself out circling the object and define his other on the grounds of his being a man studying another man. how can he, indeed, read into the other knowing not how the other read into him? (p. 76) this is a fundamental question that begs repetition in all social research, not only anthropology. how can any study of humans by humans, ethnographic or otherwise, find validity without the continuous reflexivity and vulnerability of allowing the one who studies to also become the one who is studied? this inequity of research capacity and privilege between indigenous and non-indigenous populations is indicative and representative of the inadequacy of much “glocal” research that fails to adequately conceptualize the imbalance in dialogue while also requiring that reciprocal discursive processes are taking place. tragically, the effects of this imbalance between indigenous and non-indigenous knowledges have been particularly acute with regard to formal schooling. as battiste (2014) details, while many indigenous families are hopeful of the potential of education to be a force for good and reconciliation, despite many decades of formal schooling being used as a tool and means for intentional linguistic and cultural 70 global education review 8 (2-3) genocide, still there are many obstacles to overcome in order for indigenous education and education for reconciliation to realize its potential for both continuation of indigenous cultural and linguistic traditions, while also attending to redressing longstanding socioeconomic inequities. battiste (2014) describes the goals of current indigenous education reform as bifold in helping indigenous communities to escape cycles of material deficiency, while simultaneously elevating the status of indigenous knowledges and cultures in a simultaneous process of deconstruction and construction. in order to accomplish these lofty goals, she describes a movement reminiscent of the “multilevel” mandate described earlier by pieterse (2013) with regards to the global studies and makes a call for contributions from educators, scholars, school administrators, “and policy makers [to collaborate] in ways that will make a difference at all levels of achievement [of indigenous students]” (p. 96). such collaboration at multilevel towards indigenous education reform is one that is inherently glocal in that it requires actions at the local level to be tied to those at the trans-local level. other indigenous scholars around the globe have also recognized the need to pursue “trans-systemic” understandings of inter/trans disciplinary research, appreciating diverse perspectives and theories as a means to counter perspectives that have long favored western, particularly enlightenment-based approaches, and ignored local indigenous ways of knowing. as such, henderson (2014) advocates for a “holistic consciousness that grants aboriginal conduct its distinct legal, social, and human meaning” (p. 61). he claims that such a transsystemic understanding “establishes the premises to understand, respect, and substantially converge and reconcile the eurocentric legal traditions of common law and civil law with the distinct, constitutionalized legal traditions of the aboriginal peoples” (pp. 66-67). this call of reconciliation and convergence between multiple ways of coming to know whilst centering local aboriginal perspective, extends to interdisciplinary research as well. as verduyn (2014) explains in the same volume, “trans-systemic” synthesis requires “thick,” as opposed to “thin,” interdisciplinarity. as she describes, the ‘thin’ interdisciplinary approach merely draws from other disciplines and while the former confronts and expands the boundaries of disciplines and is willing to “accept the limits of knowledge and methods” (p. 238). therefore, the dialogue required within the “glocal”, indigenous and non-indigenous space is one that can acknowledge and accept difference, while also recognizing the fundamentally flawed hubris of acquiring full knowledge of the other. bhattacharya (2009) speaks as well to the necessity of recognizing the limits of academic research and accepting that there is “no purist decolonizing space devoid of imperialism but spaces where multiple colonizing and resisting discourses exist and interact simultaneously” (p. 105). she rather extends the admonition that research with decolonial aims must reject the furtherance of false dichotomies and instead embrace a “counterculture of polarized discourses” (p. 110) that recognizes the value in an assortment of different epistemologies. ahenakew (2017) likewise observes the longstanding sentiment from newhouse (2008) and other indigenous scholars that disregarding knowledge and epistemologies from sources other than those considered “indigenous” would in fact be incompatible with traditional indigenous ways of knowing, and therefore what indigenous education reform is calling for is in no way a glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 71 71 reliance strictly on indigenous knowledge[s] and epistemology, but instead an endeavor to construct education wherein “western and indigenous knowledges” are considered to “complementary rather than contradictory” (p. 84). in this vein, we recognize that indigenous research frameworks come from indigenous epistemologies (kovach, 2009) that are deeply embedded in one’s relations, language, and lived experience in a particular place/land. wellintentioned research projects, publications, and practices that aim to respect and honor indigenous ways of being, thinking, and doing can actually lead to their appropriation and misrepresentation (haig-brown, 2008). indigenous mentors, including dr. laara fitznor, we have worked with always have reminded us thus to “draw up from application of indigenous research frameworks” in guidance of indigenous peoples, but never employ any types of indigenous epistemologies in their entirety. rather we may draw up from the frameworks with the guidance from indigenous mentors and friends. in this light, “relationship” and “relationality” become centralized aspects for a ‘trans-systemic’ research approach. it is through relationships with indigenous peoples, non-indigenous “settlers” may gain understanding of perspectives, epistemologies and research framework through story-telling (kim, 2019). moreover, we have learned that just because non-indigenous lenses or research frameworks are eurocentric, or originally used by western scholars, this does not mean necessarily to avoid using them. indeed, in a conversation with kovach (2009), indigenous scholar graham smith said: i am not going to say western theory is useless that it’s white man’s knowledge and shouldn’t use it and all that stuff. that’s a load of bull—we need to use all the very best available theoretical and methodological tools, and where necessary develop new approaches when these tools are inadequate. (p. 91) graham smith’s statement is in line with his partner, linda tuhiwai smith, and her argument that decolonizing research does not necessarily mean avoiding using western frameworks of research altogether. rather, decolonizing research it is about centering indigenous ways of coming to know place (both physical and metaphorical). as we understand it, to avoid the same colonial approach in research, we do not necessarily have to choose between an indigenous research framework or a western framework. both can, in fact, work together to allow “for new ideas and ways of looking at things to be incorporated constantly, without the need to search constantly for new theories” (tuhiwai smith, 1999, p. 40). researchers need to remain critical about making methodological and other choices in trans-systemic work. critical here is not the sense of passing judgement on other people’s theories and ideas, but in the sense of reflecting on own’s assumptions, privileges and biases in relation to power-dynamics exist in diverse discursive spaces affecting the site of the work and choosing own’s use of language, methods and theory by being attuning to the processes of research and relationships embedded in own’s understanding. critical discourse analysis, indigenous knowledges, and glocality drawing from ahenakew’s (2017) admonition to consider how non-indigenous epistemologies might complement indigenous understandings, we offer a summary of faircloughian critical discourse analysis (cda) (fairclough, 1995) as a critical theoretical framework that can aid exploring the glocal 72 global education review 8 (2-3) space between indigenous and eurocentric. in doing so, we first offer our understandings of “discourse” and thereby also “discursive space” as terms useful in analyzing these issues. shaw (2008) details how notions of discourse are inseparable from modern ideas regarding indigeneity, how it can be understood and, “even as these discourses enable indigenous peoples’ political claims, they also continue to be marginalized by and through these same discourses” (pp. 809). as shaw details, indigeneity is a performative act and “dialogic process” whereby indigenous people construct and re-construct cultural identities as both separate from and integrated with their wider communities (graham & penny, 2014, p. 4) and also how notions of an “educated” indigenous person are constructed within their culture as “product” of and within a specific social context (levinson & holland, 1996). wodak and meyer (2009) echo this understanding of “discourse” and a focus on the usage of language as inherently dynamic and both a product and producer of the social environment in that, “discourse is socially constitutive as well as socially conditioned” as “it helps to sustain and reproduce the social status quo, and in the sense that it contributes to transforming it” (pp. 5-6). in keeping with this conceptualization, structures within society both constrain, and are constrained by, individual activity. according to wodak & meyer (2009), this duality centralizes analytical attention on the questions and effects of power, particularly as to how power can be exercised in linguistic form in order for institutions to limit human agency, and also for human agency to produce and reproduce ideological notions that reinforce constraints on other members of society in order to continue existing social hierarchies. they therefore draw from habermas in the assertion that language can be understood as “a medium of domination and social force” insomuch that it, “serves to legitimize relations of organized power” (p.10). the function of cda then is to critique and make explicit how oppressive social relations are bolstered and replicated through linguistic means by examining how implicitly understood social inequalities are shown and justified by language in practice. weiss & wodak (2003) argue that the approach of cda is therefore one essential to social science research overall. they posit that advocates of cda are of a similar opinion that one of the key advantages of this approach lies in its unique ability to examine the interrelationship between human agency and social structure. as they assert, cda is inherently a research methodology that is able to explore the inter-discursivity between people and the structures that surround them, an issue particularly relevant with regard to indigenous education reform. therefore, cda methodology possesses great promise in resolving this underlying epistemological and ontological debate in social research, particularly with regard to this notion of the middle space of the glocal. they describe the centrality of this debate between structure and agency as the “wound of sociological thinking in the 20th century” (p. 9) and argue that cda’s fundamentally pragmatic nature provides a welcome antidote to the polarized thinking surrounding it. this “wound,” as they describe it, has to do with sociology’s recurring inability to reconcile whether substantive and valid social analysis should focus more on the “micro-,” bottom-up concerns of human agency, or on the “macro-,” top-down concerns of social structure. this offer of reconciliation between the “macro” and the “micro” is particularly appealing with regard to its potential with regard to indigenous education policy reform. glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 73 73 weiss & wodak (2003) assert that cda is not necessarily concerned with achieving a “grand theory” but can be more accurately described as providing “conceptual tools” that can be utilized in different situations and in response to different problems (pp. 8-9). cda practitioners do not necessarily need to make a choice between either a “pure” adherence to empiricism or to critical theory but are instead able to “integrate sociological and linguistic positions, to mediate between text and institution, between communication and structure, and between discourse and society” (p. 9). as discourse is inherently positioned as the communicative space between people and wider society, a study of discourse that focuses exclusively on either, the microor macro-, is fundamentally inadequate. according to this understanding, empirical, “bottom-up” techniques are every bit just as valuable and valid as more “top-down” approaches that rely on broad critical theories regarding societal structure and oppression. critical analysis of discourse can therefore draw from the resources of both of these inductive and deductive approaches in reaching an understanding of the discursive dynamics between people and social institutions, as discourse is precisely what mutually influences the mediation between the two. for this reason as well, instead of regarding discourse analysts as niche researchers who are constrained to certain techniques that are considered to be acceptable within specific approaches, or unacceptable to others, discourse analysts can rather be considered to have access to a wide variety of approaches and possibilities in recognition of the inherently pragmatic and nuanced nature of their task (waring, 2018). van dijk (2009) explains as well that a study of discourse requires a confluence of many different theories and disciplines in order to even begin to approach the many facets of social phenomena that comprise discourse, a framing that echoes the inclusiveness of many indigenous epistemologies as well. as discourse at times can be represented in oral form, in written form, in individual action, in communicative interaction, and in various forms of consumable media and abstract thought; defining discourse requires joining together many different theoretical threads of sociology, linguistics, and psychology. as van dijk further describes regarding this discursive process, it is precisely in these macro-micro links that we encounter the crux for a critical discourse analysis. merely observing and analyzing social inequality at high levels of abstraction is an exercise for the social sciences and a mere study of discourse grammar, semantics, speech acts or conversational moves, the general task of linguists, and discourse and conversation analysts. social and political discourse analysis is specifically geared towards the detailed explanation of the relationship between the two (p. 83) finally, fairclough (1995) explains how attention to the interaction between these can be applied in practical terms. he frames cda as the exercise of focusing on three different aspects of “text, discourse practice, and social practice” and an investigation of discourse practice as one that studies the “processes of text production, distribution, and consumption” (p.9). he likewise eschews the notion of discourse analysis as tied to a particular tier of social activity but insists instead that it should be one that examines how the textual representations of discourse as employed by social institutions are entrenched within social practices. according to this conceptualization of cda, discourse analysis cannot solely focus on text or on exclusively 74 global education review 8 (2-3) linguistic representations of discourse, and rather must also include how these linguistic forms are utilized in the activities of society. moreover, in reference to the dialogic nature of society and individuals as detailed above, fairclough’s presentation of cda is one that recognizes that discourses are not only the practical manifestations of language in social practice, but also that discourse is itself a social practice that produces language. this then enables discursive self-reflexivity and serves to develop constraints and possibilities for acceptable activity within certain cultural contexts. the role of glocal brokers therefore, we emphasize the role of glocal brokers in negotiating the discursive space between text and social practice in education policy, and also in bringing marginalized voices into wider dialogue and recognition. anthony-stevens (2017) further details the important role of indigenous allies and brokers: what does “acting as a broker” look like for non-indigenous allies? to act “as ‘brokers’ of sorts is to negotiate value exchanges to leverage institutional power in support of what critical indigenous research methodologies refers to as explicitly indigenous community-driven interests...while non-indigenous allies will not and should not be the authors of indigenous educational sovereignty, allies do and can strategically help. the brokering in alliance work negotiates how to consciously leverage available resources—indigenous voices and whitestream institutional capital—in order to generate new resources…. recentering indigenous voices requires non-indigenous collaborators to ask questions such as “who says?” and “what are the impacts of my voice?” in self-reflection and in dialogue with indigenous colleagues. harnessing the humility required to act “as brokers of sorts” increases the opportunity space for indigenous self-empowerment, not for non-indigenous collaborators to empower indigenous peoples. (p. 96) similarly, glocal brokers are those who understand the three sociological field defining dimensions: glocality, relationality, and transformativity (naess, 2016). regarding these three, first, glocal brokers are ones who communicate at diverse discursive spaces existing in global-local levels, driven by a strong understanding of cultures, power-dynamics between global-local levels. such understanding requires yet again relationships at diverse levels. “relationality” is crucial in the context of working in the topics of indigenous education reform and research. secondly, glocal brokers facilitate collaborative decision-making and research processes between diverse global-local sectors. in the context of working with indigenous partners, glocal brokers then need to understand protocols of indigenous communities and how such protocols can be communicated and be employed at other global and local sectors. third, glocal brokers work towards transformativity. glocal brokers understand the importance of the processes and how in turn engaged in processes of glocal brokerage would also change their own perspectives and narratives. however, as naess (2016) puts it, such transformative aspects of researchers’ narratives always have to be put into the context of larger historical and political context. in the context of the glocal nature of education policies, then glocal brokers are required to understand how globalization affects glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 75 75 narratives on history and politics in diverse discursive spaces. experiences of glocal brokerage and critical discourse analysis regarding the authors’ respective experiences of utilizing this approach in their own research, we summarize the following examples. in taiwan, cda provides a valuable tool for understanding some of obstacles faced in implementing the indigenous experimental school policy. first, there is a widespread dissatisfaction at the use of the term “experimental” to describe these schools. as mentioned earlier, the experimental education in taiwan was not designed with indigenous communities and schools in mind, but rather as a way for families who are averse to taiwan’s mainstream, exam-centric education to find alternative forms of education. indigenous leaders initially latched onto this window of opportunity as a means to address some of their longstanding concerns with the failure of taiwan’s mainstream education to adequately incorporate their culture into school programming. however, many indigenous leaders are resentful at having to use this particular policy and its description of “experimental” in order to create curricula that matches their indigenous heritage. as some leaders point out, there isn’t anything “experimental” about indigenous education at all. they have been educating their young people to respect the local environment in taiwan for generations. moreover, indigenous parents who are skeptical that this form of education might further alienate their children from mainstream opportunities have been further put off by the notion that their children might be treated as guinea pigs. indigenous leaders have tried to stress that indigenous experimental schools do not teach indigenous culture in the place of or instead of teaching mainstream subjects of math and science, but rather as a means to teach math and science. however, there is still a pronounced reticence for a full embrace of the policy from many in the indigenous community. moreover, with regard to the notion of autonomy, even if the schools all immediately dropped the problematic designation of “experimental,” the framework of policy implementation still requires that these schools have to prove themselves of being worthy and capable enough so as to continue to justify spending additional time and resources on the development of indigenous-centered curricula. also, many indigenous educators are wary that the meaning attached to the term could imply that the “experiment” can at some point in the future be deemed a failure, perhaps through lack of improvement in academic performance of students, or through low enrollment, at which point an indigenous experimental school could be asked to revert to the mainstream national curriculum. another difficulty with regard to the policy is a common misunderstanding as to the purpose of the schools, and the assumption that their goal is help indigenous groups “preserve” their culture. this posturing orients the policy towards the past, further worrying some indigenous parents that their children’s participation in indigenous experimental education will further alienate their children from economic opportunities. however, as one indigenous leader explained to me, “we are not trying to preserve our culture. you only preserve things that are dead” (personal communication, august 9, 2019). as indigenous culture is alive and dynamic, indigenous leaders want to create an entire educational structure that will nourish that development. therefore, another problem with the indigenous experimental education policy is that it is overwhelmingly represented by schools at only the primary school level. thus, 76 global education review 8 (2-3) leaders are concerned that their efforts will largely be in vain as students progress through secondary and post-secondary education without the reinforcement and further development of indigenous knowledge and ways of knowing. drawing from fairclough (1989)’s threetiered model, amy conceptualized different discursive relations that are at play in integrating indigenous knowledge systems in saskatchewan’s science curricula (kim, 2018). the three-tiered model allowed her to select and collect data sources and analyze them according to different discursive relations. while the threetiered model was helpful in many ways, at times the analyzed data told stories that did not adhere completely to the fixed three-tiered model. as such, in coming to conclusions she was reminded of the notion of “self-in-relation” (graveline, 1998) as well as dr. fitznor’s advice for decolonization to her to think about, “what do i encourage through this activity?.” she found that it was her, the re/searcher, who vacillated between different discursive formations, finding different connections at play and disparate relationships. through these alternating associations constructed throughout different discursive formations or herself as the researcher, the learner, and the participant, she found a way to tell a tale of integration of indigenous knowledge systems in saskatchewan’s science education reform. engaged in re/search practice that focused on both process and product as well as the relationship between data and different discursive practices, she was able to explore curriculum as both instrument and object of power (foucault, 1980). as such, this project itself is in the circle of previous and future developments of curriculum-to-come. the saskatchewan ministry of education acknowledged indigenous knowledge systems as a source of valid knowledge foundation and emphasized the importance of diverse ways of knowing nature to provide a strong science program. however, the ministry never challenged the hegemonic dominance of nonindigenous knowledge systems. as such, the saskatchewan ministry of education took a “multiculturalist position”: acknowledging the diverse ways of knowing nature and creating a space for dialogues, however never acknowledging the imbalance of power inherent in the relationships between indigenous and non-indigenous knowledge systems. in order to create science curricula and programs that authentically appreciate indigenous knowledge systems and promote harmony among multiple ways of knowing nature, “the existing cultural interpretative monopoly of european knowledge, assumptions, and methodologies” has to be explored by all educational stakeholders involved—curriculum writers, teachers, and students (battiste, 2013, p. 103). the legitimacy of non-indigenous knowledge was not challenged in the various formations of the curriculum and the earlier natural philosophers remained prominent in the saskatchewan curricula. for example, their usage of the term science was only in association with non-indigenous knowledges and their descriptions and usages of the term of scientific inquiry were entirely associated with baconian inductive scientific methods. the curricular reform did not incorporate the creation of an equal sharing place and continue to ask ontological questions between indigenous and non-indigenous ways of knowing. in terms of respecting sacred ecology, the continuous fostering of relationships with indigenous people, and productive reflection with indigenous elders and knowledge keepers, there yet remains much that can be done in terms of indigenous curricular reform in saskatchewan. glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis 77 77 conclusion as the chief concern of our work is how broader education policy affects indigenous peoples, a non-indigenous presence and perspective in the discussion are both warranted as glocal broker allies, and in utilization of a non-indigenous research framework, namely critical discourse analysis. the goal of our research is to address as problematic not indigenous peoples or practices, but rather societal structures, institutions, and policies that render indigenous ways of knowing marginalized and cast out from representation. critical discourse analysis links the problems at the level of discourse of these policies alongside the macro-implementation of the policies. thereby our research addresses the deficiencies of mainstream education policy at being inclusive of indigenous viewpoints. therefore, we build on the arguments of native american scholars in advocating for a more deliberate shift in focus from not only how to change indigenous education in localized settings, but also towards the broader 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(2018). shiyan jiaoyu ruhe qujing huadefu xuexiao de banxue jingyan (how does experimental education learn from the experience of waldorf schools?). taiwan jiaoyu pinglun yuekan (taiwan education monthly review), 7(1), 72–75. bildung to dannelse 78 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: waterman-evans, louis (2023). bildung to dannelse: a historical analysis of an educational concept in motion from fichte’s “addresses to the german nation” to grundtvig’s “nordic mythology,” 1808 – 1832. global education review, 10 (1-2), 78-95. bildung to dannelse: a historical analysis of an educational concept in motion from fichte’s “addresses to the german nation” to grundtvig’s “nordic mythology,” 1808 – 1832 louis waterman-evans abstract this conceptual research analyses the historical development of the german concept of bildung to the danish dannelse. the starting point is j.g. fichte’s 1808 “addresses to the german nation,” in which bildung is analyzed as a key concept. the paper illustrates the influence fichte had on n.f.s. grundtvig, the “father of modern denmark,” with important adaptations based on english liberties and nordic mythology. grundtvig’s dannelse is then analyzed based on his 1832 “milestone” work, “nordic mythology.” the paper finds that bildung and dannelse can be considered parallel concepts of similarity in their shared emphasis on the mother-tongue as a “living language,” and focus on social cohesion. however, bildung and dannelse can also be characterized as concepts of difference, in that: 1) dannelse popularized bildung, meaning that it was not just for the academic bourgeoisie, but the entire “folk”; 2) freedom of expression is fundamental to dannelse, in contrast to the stability of will and moral order in bildung; 3) in dannelse, national unity is expanded to a wider circle of belonging, the whole of humankind; 4) nordic mythology is a social cohesive in dannelse, to contrast fichte’s more rational conception of bildung. written by a british author for an english-speaking readership, this research does not feign to be more than a prefatory glance at two rich and complex concepts. however, in shedding light on the historical development of bildung to dannelse, it aspires to edge readers closer toward a shared conceptual understanding or, more aptly, to better understand misunderstandings. keywords bildung, dannelse, fichte, grundtvig, addresses to the german nation, nordic mythology introduction educational concepts of one country, in one language, inevitably differ to those in others. yet they often get translated as one and the same. bildung and dannelse illustrate this point: in german, the danish dannelse is bildung; in danish, the german bildung is dannelse; and in english, both bildung and dannelse are often translated as “education.” however, bildung and dannelse should not be seen as one and the same; to do so would belie their historical and cultural differences. “education” in english does not mean the same as bildung in german or dannelse in danish. how can one untangle oneself from such untranslatability? herein lies the call for what biesta (2012) terms “academic bilingualism in education” (p. 22). academic bilingualism does not infer simply translating words from one language to another, but rather “[…] an intricate semantic labour across systems and frames of meaning” (friesen, 2021, p. 348). the aim of this paper is to conduct such a semantic effort, taking the concepts of bildung and dannelse as the foci of analysis. in doing so, it seeks to chart a course toward a shared understanding or, more aptly, a better understanding of misunderstandings. advocates of bildung are often unabashedly optimistic about its conceptual potential, with horlacher (2016) even suggesting that “it has the power to save the world” (p. 127). the more terms such as “learning outcomes,” bildung to dannelse 79 “employability,” and “human capital” are deployed in discussions in education studies, the brighter too begins to glow the opposite pole: bildung as something sacrosanct, resistant to the logic of utility. bildung is also increasingly being adopted untranslated in english-speaking academia (horlacher, 2016). this seems sensible, given its rich historical and cultural heritage and lack of a suitable english translation (at times it is “education,” at others “formation” or “cultivation”). however, miller (2021) notes the challenge of defining bildung even when untranslated: burdening bildung with the philosophical thought of every german academic over the past 250 years would make it incongruent and void of conceptual integrity. this research focuses on johann gottfried fichte’s (1762 – 1814) conception of bildung. fichte spoke and wrote widely about a whole host of topics, but his conception of bildung is particularly important given the impact he had on the prussian education system (turnbull, 1922). that said, fichte’s name is also closely associated with “more virulent forms of german nationalism,” in particular with the national socialists around world war ii (breazdale, 2016, p. 11). for some, his works are therefore viewed as “toxic material”; this paper argues in line with breazdale (2016) that it would be erroneous to view fichte’s works as such, and that worthy educational insights can be found in his writing. fichte and nikolai frederik severin grundtvig (1783 – 1872), a danish pastor, poet, and politician, share many commonalities, strongest of all their devotion to educating their respective nations (øhrgaard, 2015). to nondanes, grundtvig is likely unknown; to danes, 1 andersen & björkman (2017) illustrate the point well that grundtvig’s influence extends beyond denmark. whilst his ideas are most closely associated with denmark, they also he is a legend, “[…] rightly regarded as the individual who has had the greatest importance in the formation of the danish nation” (korsgaard, 2015, p. 192). the impact of grundtvig – and the grundtvigians who followed him – is so profound in denmark that he is a fundamental and indisputable reference point in danish history (hall & korsgaard, 2015). grundtvig spoke widely on topics such as religion, the monarchy and history (bønding, 2021). he is perhaps best known for his philosophy and influence on danish and more broadly nordic education,1 particularly the formation of folk high schools (siljander, 1984). the concept of dannelse underpins grundtvig’s ideas for folk high schools and can be seen as one of his most important contributions to danish and nordic education (siljander, 1984). a comprehension of dannelse is thus needed to appreciate nordic education both historically and as it manifests itself today (there are still 70 folk high schools in denmark and 77 in norway, for example). this paper argues that this has relevance not just for those engaged in nordic education, but also from a comparative perspective to an english-speaking readership. the paper is structured to answer the overarching research question, how can bildung and dannelse be considered concepts of similarity and difference, and how can these similarities and differences be explicated? following the methodology, it analyses fichte’s (1808/ 1922) conception of bildung based on his “addresses to the german nation.”2 the next section documents the means of travel, in other words, how this conception of bildung became dannelse. next, the paper analyzes grundtvig’s spread to the other nordic countries, both theoretically and practically. 2 for brevity, references of this work will subsequently be simplified to “addresses.” 80 global education review 10 (1-2) (1832/ 2011) conception of dannelse based on his “nordic mythology,”3 concurrently illustrating conceptual synergies and differences with fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. the paper concludes by reiterating the need for academic bilingualism to frame bildung and dannelse as parallel concepts of both similarity and difference. methodology this section describes the methodology, more categorically: the choice of material, consideration of its structure as a comparative analysis, suitability of the versions of the texts used, approach taken to provide conceptual clarity, and a reflection on limitations. whilst much less has been written about conceptual research as supposed to empirical in research methods literature, that does not mean it is without process (jaakkola, 2020). what follows is an attempt to delineate this process to the reader. the intentions of this are two-fold: first, to convince the reader of the rigor of the research undertaken; second, to facilitate readers’ own research enquiries if they wish to pursue further any of the points made. choice of material fichte’s (1808/ 1922) “addresses to the german nation” is a suitable starting point of analysis. it has been described as a “prophetical” work, which heralded and explained a great transition toward nationality taking place in europe (turnbull, 1922, p. xxi). for fichte, 3 the full title of this work is ‘nordic mythology or symbolic language as developed and illuminated historically and poetically.” 4 insight could be further enhanced by relating fichte’s conception of bildung in the “addresses” to his wider philosophical work, particularly the “wissenschaftslehre.” 5 there has been significant discussion and attempts to periodize grundtvig’s work. whilst thaning’s (1963) claim that 1832 constituted a radical break in his thought has been widely criticized (e.g., thyssen, 1983; auken, 2005). bønding rebuilding the prussian state after its defeat to napoleon is to be premised on education, which is the “only true foundation of national prosperity” (turnbull, 1923, p. 184). in the past, education has been futile, but fichte imagines a new system of education which will be applied to all without exception: a new national education (turnbull, 1923). large parts of the “addresses” are devoted to education and, specifically, bildung: the terms bildung and its verb form bilden are used a total of 203 times within the work. to gain insight into the concept of bildung, it is therefore a text worthy of consideration.4 grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) “nordic mythology” is a suitable point to conclude the analysis. it is described as grundtvig’s most influential work and represents a “milestone” in which he started to engage more heavily in secular affairs and specifically, to write more about education (broadbridge et al., 2011).5 furthermore, the ideas contained within “nordic mythology” form the foundation of grundtvig’s conception of the “folk high school” (siljander, 1984).6 “folk high schools” represent an integral part of nordic cultural heritage and can be seen as central to the education system that can explain the “nordic secret” (how the nordics transformed from economically poor agrarian countries in the nineteenth century to some of the wealthiest and happiest in the world today).7 in “nordic mythology,” grundtvig introduces the term dannelse, which is used 23 times in the work; in contrast, many of his earlier works (2021) argues that the consensus view is that it nevertheless marked a “milestone.” 6 “folk high schools” (folkehøgskole) are often called the world’s freest schools: they have no grades, no rigid curriculum, and no exams. they are boarding schools, with students mostly aged between 18 and 25 years. further information can be accessed here: https://danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-highschools/what-is-a-folk-high-school/. 7 andersen & björkman (2017) make a compelling claim to support this hypothesis. https://danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/what-is-a-folk-high-school/ https://danishfolkhighschools.com/about-folk-high-schools/what-is-a-folk-high-school/ bildung to dannelse 81 make no use of this term at all.8 although dannelse is subsequently further developed, particularly in its practical manifestation through folk high schools, “nordic mythology” remains the seminal work (siljander, 1984). it is therefrom an appropriate text for consideration. comparative analysis this historical analysis is comparative in that it aims to highlight similarities and differences between bildung and dannelse. the criteria for comparison arise from the initial close reading and corresponding text analysis of fichte’s “addresses,” considered from an educationalist perspective. in other words, highlighted key tenets of bildung frame the subsequent analysis of dannelse. bildung thus serves as the starting point and catalyst for subsequent analysis of the historical conditions that give dannelse its intelligibility. such a framing inevitably implies a one-way flow of influence, from fichte to grundtvig, bildung to dannelse. this is, of course, overly simplistic (the prevailing cultures within which bildung and dannelse were conceptualized might rather be seen as dynamic, networked, and interdependent), but serves as a helpful heuristic to build the argument succinctly. suitability of text versions used fichte’s “addresses” were originally delivered as 14 separate speeches in berlin during the winter 1807 – 1808, with the full text version published after in may 1808 (breazdale, 2016). this paper bases the text analysis on jones & turnbull’s (1922) translation. until recently, it remained unchallenged for almost 100 years as the english version of the text par excellence (moore, 2008). the fact that no other 8 this was identified based on a key term search of dannelse in “nordic mythology” and a selection of earlier works available at: http://www.xn--grundtvigsvrker-7lb.dk/ english translations were attempted since its publication in this time is testament to the quality and credibility of the work. as jones & turnbull (1922) themselves note, the work aims to keep as closely as possible to the original german, whilst also being intelligible to the english-speaking reader. the version used of grundtvig’s “nordic mythology” is a translated extract by broadbridge (2011) totaling 33 pages (pp. 43 – 75). the full danish version publicly available on grundtvigsvaerker.dk9 is much longer (334 pages), but the extract chosen represents a suitable reduction of content, selected intentionally by broadbridge and colleagues (widely respected grundtvig scholars) to introduce readers to the work. it is also the section of the text where grundtvig discusses dannelse most directly (dannelse is used 19 times in this extract out of 23 uses in the text as a whole). conceptual clarity the paper provides conceptual clarity by cross-referencing the translated english texts to the untranslated works of fichte (1808/ 1881) and grundtvig (1832/ 2020). the purpose of this is to identify where the concepts of focus, bildung and dannelse, are used in the german and danish versions of the texts. both texts deal with numerous interrelated concepts, of which the boundaries are often ill-defined. for example, if one were to only read the english translation, it would be difficult to identify where fichte (1808/ 1922) refers to bildung, as supposed to the associated german concept erziehung, since both are at times translated as “education.” similarly, in grundtvig (1832/ 2011), “education” is used to express dannelse, 9 this site serves as an invaluable trove of works by grundtvig. every one of his known works is available here, searchable, and complete with background information. http://www.grundtvigsværker.dk/ 82 global education review 10 (1-2) but also the danish term oplysning (which is also sometimes translated as “enlightenment”). by cross-referencing the translated versions with the originals in german and danish, the paper aspires to convince readers that bildung and dannelse are indeed the concepts of focus in the passages analyzed. as a result, bildung and dannelse are left untranslated in the quoted passages to reflect this use in the original versions. limitations this research relies on a translation of the original work for both chosen texts, and, as such, the research represents an interpretation of interpretations. the research presents an interpretation based on the translators’ works (and not directly of fichte or grundtvig). that said, this should not undermine the credibility of the research. on the contrary, the challenge of understanding the texts in their original form has been noted by the translators. regarding fichte (1808/ 1922), turnbull (1923) remarks that “some parts are quite obscure and present great difficulties to the translator and to the general reader, while there are a few passages which seem to defy almost all effort at translation and interpretation” (p. 195). regarding grundtvig (1832/ 2011), broadbridge (2011) notes the difficulty in understanding, since “almost all of his prose sentences are between 100-150 words, his syntax is convoluted, his language often obscure, and his numerous references go largely unheeded nowadays” (p. 8). as an english-speaker relatively new to the works of fichte and grundtvig, it is thus advantageous to read the texts through the lens’ of experts, which will 10 references to this text are numerous in the following pages. as such, citations are listed with just the page number in parentheses wherever such a reference is made. hopefully have enhanced the lucidity of understanding presented. moreover, critical engagements with practical translations of the theoretical concepts in focus, bildung and dannelse, are beyond the scope of this research. for example, this paper does not conduct a critical analysis of fichte’s conception of bildung in the “addresses” in relation to its subsequent use/ appropriation by the national socialists in 20th century germany. likewise, the paper does not analyze how grundtvig’s dannelse has manifested itself in practice, for example in folk high schools, or engage with appraisals of whether its conceptual aims have been achieved. such critical research would no doubt prove worthy academic endeavors. fichte’s bildung in “addresses to the german nation” the analysis below draws on the 2nd (pp. 19 – 35) and 4th (pp. 52 – 71) of fichte’s (1808/ 1922) “addresses.”10 in the 2nd of the 14 addresses, fichte (1808/ 1922) proposes a remedy for the german nation (in the wake of defeat to napoleon): “an absolutely new system of german education” (p. 19). in the 4th address, fichte focuses on the differences he sees between germans and other peoples. the tenets highlighted below are not an exhaustive analysis of the key ideas contained within the “addresses.” they are instead selected as a suitable reduction to ground the reader with a preliminary understanding of their content, specifically in relation to bildung. bildung to dannelse 83 stable, moral will a key tenet of the bildung proposed by fichte (1808/ 1922) is the development of a stable, moral will. this is to be contrasted to the “impotence and futility” of the previous education system, which developed the free will of the pupil; “on the other hand, the new education must consist essentially in this, that it completely destroys freedom of will in the soil in which it undertakes to cultivate […]” (p. 20). freedom of will leads to students “[…] hesitating undecided between good and evil […]” (p. 20). if students are left to their own free will, there can be no guarantee that they will pursue a morally desirable course of action. this would not constitute bildung, but instead what fichte terms an “aimless game” (p. 21). what would be the point of education if there can be no guarantee that students will subsequently pursue a morally desirable course of action? a stable will should instead produce a resolute personality: “all bildung aims at producing a stable, settled and steadfast character […]” (p. 20). someone with a stable will does not fluctuate between good and evil whimsically, but instead “wills what he wills forever” (p. 21). developing such a stable will should not be left to chance, but is rather an intentional practice, reliable, and infallible: “bildung for manhood must be taken for the influence of this mysterious and incalculable force and put under the direction of a deliberate art” (p. 22). herein lies the task for educators, to help students foster bildung in a conscious, considered practice. furthermore, this stable will should be morally good to ensure the continued existence of the german nation: “we are, therefore, compelled by necessity to wish to mould men who are inwardly and fundamentally good, since it is through such men alone that the german nation can continue to exist […]” (p. 23). this leaves no room for selfishness or sensuous selfsatisfaction, since one should always be occupied with love of what is morally desirable. as fichte puts it, “this method of mental bildung is, therefore, the immediate preparation for the moral; it completely destroys the root of immortality by never allowing sensuous enjoyment to become the motive” (p. 31). the reason for this is to replace a love of self with a love of what is morally good. creating an image of moral order bildung is not solely confined to internal development; the ultimate objective is action in accordance with the will to improve society. the stable, moral will to be developed within students needs to move from internal to external, otherwise society “would at best train excellent men of learning” (p. 31). as fichte puts it, “[…] this free activity of the mind is developed with the intention that by it the pupil may voluntarily create the image of a moral order of life that actually exists, may lay hold of this image with the love that is also already developed in him, and be spurred on by this love to realise it actually in and by his life” (p. 32). the aim of fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung is to create a harmonious society according to the moral will of its citizens. one needs both inward and outward formation: inward perfection of a stable, moral will, but also outward action to improve society. mental activity is insufficient if it does not also lead to individuals improving society in the image of this moral will, in accordance with the law of reason. this is the “higher question” fichte’s bildung seeks to respond to: whether the 84 global education review 10 (1-2) student is filled with such love for moral order that they work to promote it in society (p. 32). this will be evident in people’s deeds, through their actions in society. the image of social order stimulated in the pupil’s mind should be created within the community that the student lives. if a student has fostered such a bildung, “he will be inwardly compelled, therefore, to fashion this order for himself bit for bit, just as it is actually sketched out for him” (p. 33). the development of a stable, moral will should compel the student to improve society in the image of such a will. creating an image of moral order in society requires abstention: “every individual has continually to abstain, for the sake of the community, from much that he could do without hesitation if he were alone” (p. 33). one cannot act as if they alone matter, if one is to contribute to a morally harmonious society. however, abstention is not enough on its own: one must “[…] also work and act, for the sake of the community” (p. 34). bildung requires actively contributing to the formation of the morally good society too. physical labor, including farming and trades, are given as examples here. such work should be voluntary, and free of reward, “[…] for the attitude of mind and prevailing in the community is that it is just everyone’s duty to act thus; but he alone enjoys the pleasure of acting and working for the community […]” (p. 35). fichte envisages that such work will happen first in an idealized environment (a school), before going out in the “real world.” german as “living language” fichte is clear that this conception of bildung is intended for germans: “[…] the means of educating [bildungsmittel] a new race of men, which is being put forward in these addresses, must first be applied by germans to germans, and that it concerns our nation in a special and peculiar” (p. 52). for the present-day reader, this might sound alarming, and seemingly to strike an overly nationalistic tone, but the historical context must be heeded. fichte is addressing his people against the backdrop of defeat to napoleon and french rule. it is therefore a “call to arms,” not in a militaristic sense, but a spiritual one appealing to the german people’s collective identity. speaking in and understanding a common language lies behind this appeal for collective unity: “[…] the importance lies solely in the fact that this language continues to be spoken, for men are formed by language far more than language is formed by men” (p. 55). for fichte, use of the vernacular means that all germans share a collective ancestry and have been shaped by the same linguistic forces. the development of the german language is “[…] in no way dependent on arbitrary decisions and agreements” (p. 56), but the result of active decisions specific to german historical and cultural heritage. fichte goes on to clarify this position: “if we give the name of people to men whose organs of speech are influenced by the same external conditions, who live together, and who develop their language in continuous communication with each other, then we must say: the language of this people is necessarily just what it is, and in reality this people does not express its knowledge, but its knowledge expresses itself out of the mouth of the people” (p. 56). the collective knowledge of the german people is expressed through language, which is shared and used by the present population. language is indispensable to bildung and understanding one’s identity since the use of foreign words makes one foreign to oneself. bildung to dannelse 85 german as a “living language” is needed to bring about bildung, in contrast to neo-latin languages, which are “dead.” a “living language” influences the entire development of a people and, as fichte explains: “[…] accompanies the individual into the most secret depths of his mind in thought and will and either hinders him or gives him wings, which unites within its domain the whole mass of men who speak it into one single and common understanding […]” (p. 69). the “living language” unifies the german people in collective identity and shared understanding. german as a “living language” is needed for bildung: “where the people has a living language, mental bildung influences life; where the contrary is the case, mental bildung and life got their way independently of each other” (p. 70). a “living language” (which, for fichte, must be german) is needed to foster bildung; otherwise, bildung remains detached from the lived experiences of the people. summary the above analysis focuses on fichte’s (1808/ 1922) conception of bildung as illustrated in his “addresses.” three key tenets were identified and analyzed: developing a stable, moral will, creating an image of moral order and use of german as a “living language.” the relation of an individual’s formation in relation to that of the nation is key throughout this conception: fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung is the educational concept needed to rebuild the german nation. it would be disingenuous to present this as an exhaustive analysis of bildung in the “addresses”; rather, it should be seen as a 11 henrik steffens was a norwegian philosopher and physicist who studied at the universities of copenhagen, selection of important facets from an educationalist perspective. a concept in motion: from fichte to grundtvig this section describes how the concept of bildung became that of dannelse, i.e., not only connections between fichte and grundtvig, but also other important influences on grundtvig that affected conceptual change. it first provides evidence of fichte’s influence on grundtvig, both directly through works including the “addresses,” and indirectly through the lectures of henrik steffens11and fichte’s time spent in copenhagen. it then examines two further key influences on grundtvig’s thinking: travels to england and nordic mythology. as the subsequent analysis aims to demonstrate, these factors impacted conceptual change(s) that become evident in grundtvig’s dannelse. fichte’s influence on grundtvig grundtvig read works by fichte, including “addresses to the german nation,” which influenced his conception of dannelse. it is well documented that romantic german philosophical ideas, including fichte’s, are evident in grundtvig’s works (andersen & björkman, 2017; broadbridge et al., 2011; grattan, 1958; palmer & fackenthal, 1946). yet the fact that grundtvig’s ideas express a similar sentiment to those of fichte does not prove a direct influence. for example, it could have been that grundtvig and fichte developed analogous ideas independently of one another. more compelling evidence is documented in the works of grundtvig himself. a key term search of “fichte” in grundtvig’s entire collection of works on grundtvigsvaerker.dk yields 48 results (these are direct references or citations grundtvig kiel, jena, and berlin. he was a well-known figure within the “jena romantik” group of academics (peters, 1980). 86 global education review 10 (1-2) makes of fichte). moreover, in “mands minde,” grundtvig (1838/ 1877, p. 194) explicitly references fichte’s (1808/ 1922) “addresses”: grundtvig was not only influenced by fichte, but also evidently read his “addresses.” to understand the connection more deeply, it helps to rewind some years prior to the “addresses.” in 1802, 19 year-old grundtvig was in the audience listening to his cousin henrik steffens’ lecture in copenhagen. steffens had just returned from studying at the university of jena, which was rapidly establishing itself as the intellectual heart of german philosophical thought, and of which fichte was chair of critical philosophy at the time. in his autobiographical work, steffens (1844/ 1874) notes the influence that fichte had on him during this time: “i could not help loving him, and the strength of his moral convictions, forming as they did the basis of his whole philosophy, won for him my high respect” (p. 62). listening to the talks inspired grundtvig: he was captivated by the ideas of his cousin, which motivated him to further study the work of fichte and other jena academics both at the time and of fichte’s later publications (andersen & björkman, 2017). fichte also spent time in copenhagen, denmark, which further consolidates his influence on grundtvig and the latter’s conception of dannelse. on fleeing berlin from napoleon in 1806, fichte went first to stay with kant in königsberg, and then to copenhagen, where he stayed for two months. here, he conversed with leading danish thinkers, such as adam oehlenschläger and hans christian ørsted, through his involvement with the influential rahbek salon (andersen & björkman, 12 salons were important academic gathering places in denmark and sweden in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. discussion between scholars would regularly take 2017).12 whilst there is no evidence to suggest that grundtvig personally met fichte during this time, members of the rahbek salon were part of grundtvig’s social circle in copenhagen. it therefore seems reasonable to assert that he must have heard what fichte said and did during his time there (andersen & björkman, 2017). furthermore, grundtvig illustrates his indebtedness to fichte’s thinking directly. following fichte’s death in 1814, grundtvig writes him a memorial poem: “fichte! yes, as long as i may live, you i neither can nor must forget, nor yet deny that i have held you dear, and to your mighty voice was once in debt. […]” (øhrgaard, 2015, p. 220). the very fact that grundtvig writes a memorial poem is testament to his respect and indebtedness to fichte’s thinking. that said, the above passage also illustrates how grundtvig’s own thinking has taken its own course: he “was once in debt” to fichte’s ideas but has now moved on. grundtvig’s thinking, including his conception of dannelse, continues to move on after fichte’s death and is influenced by other factors, as documented below. grundtvig’s travels to england grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse is shaped by his travels to england, where he stayed for over 3 months each summer in 1829, 1830, and 1831, and later in 1843. in england, grundtvig encountered a modern society: whilst there were certain aspects of industrialism which he found horrifying (such as increased place in such salons, of which karen margarethe rahbek’s, hosted at her home, was one of the most highly regarded (sørensen, 2011). bildung to dannelse 87 mechanization and the appalling working conditions of factory workers), he was generally enlivened by the dynamism of a modern society (vind, 2015). what underpinned this dynamism were english liberties and a high degree of freedom in all aspects of individuals’ lives. he later makes clear his admiration for and influence by england: “[…] i have most certainly not gained my political upbringing in or from france, but in and from england [emphasis in original]” (cited in korsgaard, 2015, p. 193). grundtvig stayed at the colleges of cambridge and oxford universities in england, experiences which further factored into his conception of dannelse. during the summer visit of 1831, grundtvig (1831/ 2002) writes a letter home in which he comments on how enjoyable his stay has been, and specifically commends the communality of the informal dining arrangements between students and teachers: “in the colleges one eats in a great hall at long tables with benches as in farmhouse livingrooms […]” (p. 76). such an arrangement facilitated the informal exchange of ideas outside of the confines of the lecture hall. he is furthermore impressed by the free exchanges between teachers and students, and open debates which could continue for hours (bhattacharya, 2005). that said, grundtvig is not entirely positive about england. prior to his travels, grundtvig (1828/ 2011) comments on what he sees as the negative aspects of the english education at cambridge and oxford and argues that “[…] it is high time to build a more broadbased college than the present one” (p. 39). whilst grundtvig evidently holds many aspects of english education in high regard, he also seeks to popularize it in denmark, later deriding cambridge and oxford as “scholar-factories” (p. 40). in contrast, dannelse should be for all: peasants and scholars alike. nordic mythology another major influence on grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse is nordic mythology. allegorical tales are ever-present throughout his works, with gods such as aesir, bragi, and odin deployed to cast reflections on contemporary society. for grundtvig (1847/ 2013), “all genuine myths are the ‘articulation of life’ of the corresponding people’s spirit” (cited in bønding et al., 2021, p. 16). nordic mythology represents not just sagas and tales confined to the past but also narratives of symbolic meaning for life of the people, and for this reason it should be respected and understood (jonas, 2015). myths are not mere fictions, but instead historically oriented and to be considered forms of advanced cognition born by images. the importance of nordic mythology to grundtvig is further demonstrated by the homonymous title assigned to the text chosen for analysis. nordic mythology is, for grundtvig, an “obsessive passion,” following years of fervent study and writing on the theme (holm, 2009, p. 96). “nordic mythology” is his most influential work in this area, representing a coming together of mythological and educational ideas such as dannelse (broadbridge et al., 2011). grundtvig’s use of nordic mythology can be seen as an attempt to reenchant the present education of danes, having previously been disenchanted during the enlightenment rationalism of the 18th century. for grundtvig, society had been left void of any enchantment, fantastic elements in favor of rationality. in the name of reason, the supernatural and fantastical-metaphysical had been left empty of any truth-value (bønding, 2021). nordic mythology was to be used as a common frame of reference for the danish people, as a social adhesive to connect the whole population. 88 global education review 10 (1-2) summary the above description documents the means of travel, in other words, how fichte influenced grundtvig, as well as other factors that contributed to conceptual change (from bildung to dannelse). fichte’s influence on grundtvig was established principally by documenting that grundtvig read and directly cited the “addresses” in his work. it was further deepened by arguing the influence of henrik steffens’ lectures in 1802 and fichte’s time spent in copenhagen in 1806. key factors that further impacted grundtvig were identified as his travels to england and reading of nordic mythology. these influences were introduced above; the next section aspires to clarify how these influences are manifested in grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse. grundtvig’s dannelse in “nordic mythology” “nordic mythology”13 begins with a rhymed letter, ‘to our nordic next-of-kin,” followed by sub-titled sections of prose. throughout the work, grundtvig addresses his “people,” as shown from the opening line, “sons and daughters of nordic spirit […]” (p. 43). the text is written not just for other scholars, but for everyone “of nordic spirit.”14 later in the text, grundtvig makes the address to his fellow people more emotive: “never, therefore, have we northerners been addressed by the signs of the times so earnestly as now!” (p. 56). the use of the personal pronoun “we” is significant: grundtvig sees himself as one of the very people he is addressing, not aloof or “above” his fellow 13 references to this text are numerous in the following pages. as such, citations are listed with just the page number in parentheses wherever such a reference is made. 14 grundtvig here is referring to more than just denmark. he later makes his view clear on who exactly he is referring to: “i do not take the word ‘danish’ in the restricted sense that i have so often used beforeand even more often used as a term of praise. i mean it in the old-nordic sense, when countrymen/ women/ other. the work is polymathic, covering cultural, educational, political, and theological issues (broadbridge et al., 2011). as such, the below analysis does not attempt to be exhaustive, but rather focuses on the text’s conception of dannelse from an educationalist perspective and compares this to fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. mother-tongue as “living language” grundtvig (1832/ 2011) shares fichte’s (1808/ 1922) zeal for use of the mother-tongue. for grundtvig, use of the vernacular is “[…] like life in its contrast to death, can only be expressed by a living voice […] [emphasis in original]” (p. 58). danish is a “living language,” in contrast to latin which is “dead.” grundtvig makes his distaste for latin clear: latin is “[…] an open enemy, oppressing the nations and, in the shape of an eagle, pecking out their eyes and drinking their heart’s blood” (p. 58). danish is “living” in that it shapes and is shaped by people’s lived experiences within their communities. latin is “dead” since it is predominantly a written language, spoken only by a limited academic elite. dannelse can be brought about based primarily on the “living,” spoken word in the mother-tongue and not based on latin literature. whilst grundtvig is evidently not against books or reading (he himself remains an avid reader and writer throughout his life), it is spoken word in the vernacular that allows people to meet and connect with others (jonas, 2015). use of the mother-tongue (danish) as a “living language” is denmark stretched not just from the ejder to tromsø, and from the north sea to the gulf of finland, but also across the ocean to the nordic emigrants from the isle of hercules” (p. 59). the “isle of hercules” is a way grundtvig uses to refer to england. in other words, the addresses of this text are all those from the river ejder in kiel (present-day germany) to tromsø (present-day norway), and those in england. bildung to dannelse 89 needed for dannelse, just as german is for fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. however, grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) conception of dannelse departs from fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung in its approach: grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse intends to be all-inclusive, from the ground-up, whereas fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung is abstract and to be attained first by academics. grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse appears “folksier” in this regard, taken to encompass the entirety of human experience and not just “bookish” academia. this position is clarified by making a distinction between “learning” and dannelse: “we must realise that learning is one thing and that dannelse and fitness for life as a person and citizen is another […]. for dannelse and fitness for life must always be suited to the life of the people here and now, whereas learning is for human life in general. […] moreover, learning, particularly amongst proper scholars (the schoolmasters), will lead us astray if there is no folke-dannelse at hand countering it […]” (pp. 65 – 66). for grundtvig, the use of latin promulgates a social divide since the elite (aristocrats, academics, and cultured bourgeoisie) learn latin, but the rest of the population (farmers and farm hands) do not. this divide threatens social cohesion, which needs to be countered through dannelse in the mother-tongue. academic and popular education are hereby connected: there should not be a split between the “folk” and the scholars. it is not the scholars’ task to bring everyone to their own abstract sphere of existence; the academics (grundtvig 15 loki is best-known as the trickster god in nordic mythology. thor, god of thunder, is often represented as his companion. included) should instead bring themselves into people’s reality. this differs to fichte’s (1808/ 1922) more academic conception of bildung, which is first fostered by scholars, then disseminated to laypeople. in contrast, dannelse cannot be fostered from above; it is based on conversation and the life-wisdom of the “folk” to bring about a flourishing civil society. freedom of expression freedom of expression is key in grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse, further differentiating it from fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. this freedom, which grundtvig had recently experienced first-hand on trips to england, comes to the fore in his much-quoted passage: “freedom our watchword must be in the north! freedom for loki as well as for thor” (p. 49).15 even though loki and thor have differing views of the world, they should both be granted the same freedom. although grundtvig is critical of loki’s conception of freedom, which he sees as being too selfish, he believes there must still be room for this world-view (korsgaard, 2011). grundtvig continues: “free then be loki, as bragi and thor […]” (p. 50). the reference to bragi, son of odin, god of poetry and eloquence (broadbridge et al., 2011), alludes to grundvig’s emphasis on freedom of expression. everyone needs to be free to express themselves in different ways, be that poetry, one of grundtvig’s preferred means of expression as illustrated by the above reference to bragi, or other. this can be contrasted with fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung, which emphasizes not freedom of expression, but stability of will. grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse is not only tolerant of divergent views but sees it as necessary for such views to be exchanged in the 90 global education review 10 (1-2) living world. freedom of expression goes beyond open-mindedness; it should also actively be extended to those with different views, with whom one should openly challenge (vind, 2015). this challenge should come through open discussion and exchange of words, not force or physical power: “alone call him ‘free’ is that man who […] is freely allowed all his words to unlock!” (pp. 49 – 50). grundtvig had seen at the universities of oxford and cambridge what such a free discussion and exchange of ideas could look like, and now promotes this openness in his conception of dannelse. dannelse is hereby in a sense less prescriptive than fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung, which stipulates the need for individuals to express themselves so that they create morally desirable order in society. social cohesion grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse shares with fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung the focus of social cohesion, but also extends it to belonging within the whole of humankind. being members of society requires shouldering responsibility for the common good. for grundtvig, this is best achieved by giving individuals the freedom to take on this responsibility. it is not a complete freedom, since this would lead to the dissolution of society (as witnessed in the french revolution), but rather a freedom which emphasizes the ties of the individual and collective. there is no place for absolute individualism, since society rests on a shared understanding of the common good: “this new-danish way of life and dannelse […] liberates, strengthens, and delights all that is in harmony with the temporal welfare of the individual, the nations, and the whole race of man” (pp. 57 – 58). dannelse needs to include the freedom required for people to become individuals, but this should be in harmony with civil society first at the national level, then also at the global. dannelse is needed so that individuals understand themselves not only as self-governing but also morally enmeshed within the community – be that a people, nation, or world (pedersen, 2015). the circle of belonging for dannelse is at the level of not just the nation, but also the whole of humankind. grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) use of nordic mythology marks another clear break from fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. grundtvig envisages a re-enchantment of the danish world view, a dannelse which binds together its people using nordic mythology as cohesive. grundtvig is critical of the rationality associated with other enlightenment thinkers, which he saw as potentially creating too much individualism, lacking in spiritual or mythological concern to act as a cohesive at a collective level. what is left to bind together society if it is no longer christianity? grundtvig implores us to “[…] consider what was missing in the idea of mankind’s development which dissolved into emptiness and impotence. dare to grasp the idea of man in all its high and low, heavenly and earthly mysteriousness […]” (p. 56). united strength and mutual sacrifice are needed for the danish nation, bound together with the cohesive of “mysterious” nordic mythology. the dannelse articulated here is built on a higher right than the individual’s; it is a shared consciousness at the collective level that takes heed of the importance of imaginations and emotions contained within mythology. in contrast, fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung is far more rational, premised on the will of each individual. summary the preceding analysis focuses on grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) conception of dannelse in “nordic mythology.” to do this, three facets of bildung to dannelse 91 dannelse were identified and analyzed: use of the mother-tongue as a “living language,” freedom of expression, and social cohesion. for each tenet, conceptual synergies and differences with fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung were analyzed. key throughout grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse, as in fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung, is the relational conception of the individual to the nation, with dannelse a key educational concept needed to build the danish nation. however, dannelse and bildung are not one and the same: there are key differences pertaining to grundtvig’s travels to england and influence of nordic mythology. conclusion to conclude, this paper first argues that fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung and grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse can in some senses be seen as parallel concepts of similarity, explained by fichte’s strong influence on grundtvig. both fichte (1808/ 1922) and grundtvig (1832/ 2011) abhor the use of latin; to foster bildung or dannelse requires use of the mother-tongue as a “living language.” this is connected to the importance of social cohesion. pursuing the interests of the common good is needed to foster bildung and dannelse. fichte and grundtvig are both “educators of the people” in this regard: bildung and dannelse are needed at the collective level to bind together their respective “people.” this research also posits that fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung and grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse can be seen as concepts of difference, explained by the influential factors of grundtvig’s travels to england and nordic mythology. first, dannelse popularized bildung, in that it was intended to be for all, not just the academic elite but also laypeople/ folk. second, the freedom of mind and expression grundtvig experienced on visits to england can be seen in his conception of dannelse, in contrast to the stability and moral order emphasized in fichte’s (1808/ 1922) bildung. third, whilst fichte (1808/ 1922) urges national unity with other germans, grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse embraces a wider circle of belonging: the whole of humankind. fourth, grundtvig’s (1832/ 2011) dannelse is built on nordic mythology as a social cohesive, in contrast to fichte’s (1808/ 1922) more rational conception of bildung. evidently, it follows that bildung and dannelse are not one and the same. to translate them synonymously overlooks the rich cultural and historical heritage of each concept. this paper has aspired to uncover these semantic idiosyncrasies to better understand misunderstandings and forge greater understanding of bildung and dannelse: parallel concepts of both similarity and difference. references andersen, l. r., & björkman, t. 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(2015). grundtvig and british liberalism. in j. a. hall, o. korsgaard, & o. k. pedersen (eds.), building the nation: n.f.s. grundtvig and danish national identity (pp. 254 – 266). copenhagen, denmark: mcgill-queen’s university press. pre-service teachers 14 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: aydoğmuş, mevlüt, & koyuncuoğlu, özdal. (2021). the relationship between personality traits and social capital perceptions of pre-service teachers. global education review, 8 (1), 14-31. the relationship between personality traits and social capital perceptions of pre-service teachers mevlüt aydoğmuş necmettin erbakan university (turkey) özdal koyuncuoğlu necmettin erbakan university (turkey) abstract there are a number of psycho-social variables that predict the levels of social capital of pre-service teachers. social capital, which is in connection with almost all of these psycho-social variables, is associated with personality traits in literary studies. this study aimed to investigate the social capital predictive levels of five-factor personality traits. this research is based on survey data and two likert type scales were used. 470 pre-service teachers studying in different departments of necmettin erbakan university faculty of education participated in this research. the relationship between personality traits and social capital components was examined using correlation analysis. the effect of personality traits of the candidates on the perception of social capital was investigated by using structural equation model analysis. it was found that the neuroticism and conscientiousness personality traits of pre-service teachers were not effective on perceptions of social capital. in addition, it was also found that the extraversion, agreeableness and openness to experience personality traits of pre-service teachers have an impact on their perceptions of social capital. keywords social capital, personality traits, higher education, prospective teachers, teacher training introduction scholars have discussed different types of capital (coleman, 1988; field, 2008; fukuyama, 2000a). these include the resources created as a result of the conscious efforts of individuals are called “physical capital”; money and precious papers, which are used as exchange tools and form the source of the material wealth owned by individuals are called “financial capital”; the sum of knowledge, skills and values that individuals acquire through education is called “human capital”; elements such as beliefs, values, habits, symbols in the evolution of society are called “cultural capital” and the virtues such as trust, honesty, reciprocity, conscientiousness, cooperation and solidarity that promote the lives of individuals are also called “social capital” (aktan, 2008). considering the importance and function of education in human life, teachers carrying out educational activities are expected to have the highest level of capital types mentioned (toprak & bozgeyikli, 2011). teachers are responsible for transferring social values and rules to younger generations, socializing and preparing individuals for social life and establishing a strong and healthy social relations network. it can be argued that the pre-service teachers 15 15 teachers undertake a duty that provides social unity in the society. in this regard, it is an indisputable fact that social capital is the most important type of capital for teachers. the efficiency of the education provided by the teacher, who cannot communicate properly with his students, does not feel as a reliable individual in his class, and cannot meet responsibilities and expectations, is open to debate (toprak & bozgeyikli, 2011). therefore, it is revealed that the pre-service teachers should have the qualifications to develop their social capital. preservice teachers who come to the university with the same human capital accumulation on average graduate with different degrees, indicating that there are different values that affect their success. it is seen that social capital, in connection with almost all psycho-social variables, are mostly associated with personality traits in theoretical studies (tkach & lyubomirsky, 2006; costa & mccrae, 1992; nezlek, schütz, schröder‐abé, & smith, 2011; white, hendrick, & hendrick, 2014; dehne & schupp, 2007; york & oliver, 1992; costa & mccrae, 1992; schaffer, 2006; kashdan & roberts, 2006). therefore, the current study examines the effects of psychological and social attitudes on the social capital of the pre-service teachers based on the five-factor personality models. social capital it can be said that social capital is a concept that is used in different disciplines such as economics, sociology and psychology and is supported by many theoretical approaches (ağcasulu, 2017). when the approaches of different theorists regarding this concept are analyzed, it is seen that social capital is generally defined as the gains from individuals’ social relationships and interactions (eniç, 2018). the first mention of the importance of the term social capital in social life coincides with the work of lyda j. hanifan in 1916 (putnam, 2000; woolcock, 1998; woolcock & narayan, 2000). while emphasizing the importance of social participation in increasing school performance, hanifan examined the process of formation of social capital and the benefits of this formation thanks to the leadership of teachers. the work pointed out goodwill, friendship, mutual sympathy and social relationships between each other in meeting the social needs of individuals and in individuals or groups of families (woolcock, 2000). the concept used by sociologists in the 1950s, theorists of change in the 1960s, and a small number of economists and sociologists in the 1970s, began to be used with its current meaning and content from the 1980s onwards, and it appears to have reached an interdisciplinary use and prevalence in the 1990s (lee & law, 2016). bourdieu, coleman and putnam are considered three other important philosophers who contribute to the existing multidisciplinary theories and stand out in the social capital literature. these philosophers approached the concept from different dimensions. but the point that all three authors have in common is that communication networks are important. while bourdieu (1986) sees social capital as a factor that activates the economic and human capital of individuals in the competition process, coleman (1988) states that it is a mechanism that facilitates the actions of individuals within the social structure by acting rationally by considering their own interests. putnam (1993) views association and social activity ideas as the basis of social integration and defines social capital in terms of trust-oriented relationships and groups (field, 2008). fukuyama (1995) states that social capital consists of trust, citizenship and network relations. grootaert and van bastelaer (2002, 16 global education review 8 (1) p.2) define social capital as “the institutions, relationships, attitudes and values that govern interactions among people and contribute to economic and social development.” coleman (1988), who expanded the concept of social capital, defines social capital as a public good, while dasgupta and serageldin (1999) state that social capital is not a public good but an individual value. despite all these different views, the element agreed upon about social capital is that individuals take part in their relationships with their memberships in a social network (lin, 2001). relationship networks, trust, commitment, reciprocity and participation elements were mostly emphasized in studies defining social capital (coleman, 1988; fukuyama, 2005; putnam, 1995; wolcoock 2001). later, it is understood that these elements are used as dimensions in the experimental research in the field of education. the world bank defines social capital elements as being part of a group or a network, trust and solidarity, collective action and cooperation, information and communication, social cohesion, and inclusion and empowerment and political action (harriss & de renzio, 1997). meier (1999) lists elements of social capital as social closeness, communication between families, student-teacher interaction, parents’ participation in school. bullen and onyx (2000) define dimensions as participation in the local committee, social representation, feelings of trust and security, neighborhood relations, family and friend relationships, tolerance for differences, the value of life and work/school relations. takakura, hamabata, ueji and kurihara (2014) try to measure the social capital in the school with trust, reciprocity and neighborhood relationships between teacher and student. in educational institutions, social capital research generally focuses on the effects of social capital on student achievement. for example, coleman (1988) states that disadvantaged family children reduce educational inequality somewhat thanks to school. plagens (2011) argues that social capital factors such as facilitating relationships among individuals and developing social relationships affect school performance. galindo, sanders and abel (2017) suggest that social capital is an important resource that serves principals, teachers, students and families. this study and similar studies have revealed that social capital is a valuable asset for educational institutions. the most important factor that determines the behavior of people in the formation of social capital is individual differences that express different personal characteristics. when it comes to individual differences, people differ in terms of mental and psychological as well as physical characteristics. systematic identification of these differences is important for the development of individuals and the definition of abilities. thus, the characteristics underlying individual factors have become comparable and measurable (somer & goldberg, 1999). personality traits looking at the theoretical and empirical studies conducted to discover the underlying causes of individuals’ different behaviors and experiences, it is seen that many definitions about personality have been made (cloninger, 2009). although there is not a common consensus, some researchers define personality as a coherent and stereotyped form of dialog in which the person connects with the internal and external environment, distinguishing the person from others (girgin, 2007). two of the most accepted theories in classification of personality pre-service teachers 17 17 today are psychobiological personality theory (cloninger, 1993) and the five-factor personality model (mccrae & costa, 1991). as a result of the literature review, it is seen that the five-factor personality traits inventory is used more widely to determine personality (somer, 1998; yelboğa, 2006; yeni, 2015). the fivefactor personality model emerges from a comprehensive factor analysis of various scales and comprehensive adjective analyzes to define personality (friedman & schustack, 1999). the model, also known as big-5, is accepted as a measurement system developed from the language hypothesis that defines individual differences based on the first theoretical studies on personality psychology (bakan & karaaslan, 2017). as a result of the studies, the five-factor personality model was defined as extraversion, agreeableness, conscientiousness, neuroticism, and openness to experience. the relationship between social capital and personality traits as mentioned above, social capital, which is in connection with almost all of the psycho-social variables, has been studied in relation to personality traits in mostly theoretical studies (tkach & lyubomirsky, 2006; costa & mccrae, 1992; nezlek et al. 2011; white et al. 2004; dehne & schupp, 2007; york & oliver, 1992; costa & mccrae, 1992; schaffer, 2006; kashdan & roberts, 2006). the personality theory approach of the five-factor inventory (big-5) assumes that five basic personality dimensions that require attitudes, motivation and experience and behavioral differences between individuals can be distinguished (costa & mccrae, 1992; lang & lüdtke, 2005). individuals have a characteristic adaptation feature that directly controls behavior and experience while interacting with the environment, habits, skills, values, perception schemes, etc. that arise in dealing with the requirements of the environment, but reflect the underlying characteristic trends. for example, extroversion (tkach & lyubomirsky, 2006), which is manifested by an optimistic approach to life and having a strong life energy, positively correlates with features such as joy, being energetic, desire, and being friendly (costa & mccrae, 1992) among the symptoms of positive mood. research results also show that extroversion has a positive effect on the quality and quantity of social interactions (nezlek et al., 2011; white et al., 2004). friendly, collaboration and helpfulness represent the behavior of people with high levels of agreeableness. in contrast, individuals with low level of agreeableness tend to be more self-centered and not to cooperate (dehne & schupp, 2007). personality dimension of agreeableness is seen as a component of social behavior and has been observed as a dependent variable in personal relationships (costa & mccrae, 1988; ostendorf, 1990). research has shown that personal needs, expressive behaviors, and the tendency to over-control impulses are related to the agreeableness dimension (york & oliver, 1992). the prominent features of the agreeableness dimension are being anxious, angry, depressed, tactlessness, fussy, and not self-confident (costa & mccrae, 1991). conscientiousness is defined as the personality being organized, reliable, discreet and thorough. when the conscientiousness dimension of personality is evaluated from an adaptive point of view, it is stated that this dimension includes delaying pleasure, patience in unpleasant tasks, paying attention to details, and acting responsibly and reliably (macdonald & holland, 2002). individuals with these characteristics are likely to be successful in all kinds of tasks in both autonomous and hierarchical structure. the high level of individuals with high level of conscientiousness in the work environment ensures the development of the element of trust, which is the 18 global education review 8 (1) most important component of social capital. the perception of the social environment is also included in the effect of the big five approach on different attitudes and experiences (costa & mccrae, 1992). research has shown that neuroticism has a negative impact on various aspects of social interaction, such as perceived quality in social relationships (lang et al., 2001; nezlek et al., 2011) and level of satisfaction with personal relationships (white et al., 2004). neuroticism dimension refers to the individual’s level of anxiety and emotional stability. individuals who are able to cope with stress and emotionally stable feel more satisfied with their life by being less affected when unpleasant and unexpected things happen (schaffer, 2006). the openness to experience dimension refers to the individual’s tolerance and emotional openness to both his own emotions and others’ emotions (costa & mccrae, 1995). tolerance and emotional openness are prerequisites for the quality of social relationships (kashdan & roberts, 2006). the aim of research the main purpose of the study is to examine the effects of teacher candidates' personality traits on the formation of social capital based on the five-factor personality model. the hypotheses created in accordance with the purpose of the research are given below. hypotheses h1: extroversion has a significant effect on the perception of social capital. h2: neuroticism has a significant effect on the perception of social capital. h3: agreeableness has a significant impact on the perception of social capital. h4: conscientiousness has a significant effect on the perception of social capital. h5: openness to experience has a significant effect on the perception of social capital. method population the research was carried out with 470 pre-service teachers studying at the faculty of education at necmettin erbakan university. 76.8% (n=361) of the participants are female and 23.2% (n=109) are male. 33.6% (n=158) of the participants are first year, 27.7% (n=130) are second year, 22.3% (n=105) are third year and 16.4% (n=77) the fourth-year students. individuals in the study group are students of elementary mathematics education by 12.8% (n=60), turkish language and literature by 7.4% (n=35), english language teaching by 19.1% (n=90), physical education by 10.9% (n=51), history by 7.9% (n=37), guidance and psychological counseling by 16% (n=75), geography by 6%, 4 (n=30) and primary school education by 19.6% (n=92). data collection the research was carried out in the second semester of the 2019-2020 academic year, after obtaining the necessary permissions. data was obtained by applying online questionnaires to pre-service teacher. a brief explanation about the purpose of the research was added to the form. pre-service teachers were informed that the participation in the survey was voluntary. the questionnaire took an average of 10 minutes. measuring tools social capital scale: the social capital scale developed by onxy and bullen (2000) and pre-service teachers 19 19 adapted to turkish by ardahan (2012) was used to determine the social capital perceptions of pre-service teachers. the scale is based on selfreport and consists of 28 items. the scale has 9 dimensions which are participation in local committee, neighborhood relation, sense of belonging, tolerance for differences, nongovernmental organization (ngo) membership, trust in people, safe environment, initiative in social issues and social representation. the statements in the scale are definitely rated as absolutely yes (4), often yes (3), often no (2) and absolutely no (1). high scores obtained from the scale indicate that the perception of social capital is high. the validity of the turkish form of the scale was examined by exploratory factor analysis. the factor loading of the scale items ranged from 0.58 to 0.89. the alpha coefficient calculated for the overall scale was 0.71 (ardahan, 2012). in this study, confirmatory factor analysis was applied to test the structural validity of the social capital scale. whether the measurement tool maintains its 9-factor structure was investigated by factor analysis. the 9-factor scale model is well compatible with the data obtained from pre-service teachers (x2/df=1.95; gfi=0.98; agfi=0.97; cfi=0.97; rmsea=0.04; srmr=0.03) according to the obtained values (carmines & mciver, 1981; browne & cudeck, 1993; mcdonald & marsh, 1990; tanaka & huba, 1985; jöreskog & sörbom, 1984). the cronbach alpha coefficients calculated for the dimensions of the measuring tool was between 0.65 and 0.75. five factor personality traits inventory: five factor personality traits inventory, which was developed by john, donahue and kentle (1991) and the validity and reliability study of the turkish form was conducted by parlak (2018), was used to examine the traits of pre-service teachers. the scale, which consists of 44 items, includes extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness to experience dimensions. the statements in the scale are evaluated by scoring absolutely agree (5), agree (4), partially agree (3), disagree (2) and absolutely disagree (1). high scores from the dimensions of the scale indicate that personality traits such as extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness are dominant. confirmatory factor analysis was used to test the construct validity of the five-factor personality inventory. whether the inventory preserves its 5-factor structure or not was investigated by factor analysis. the 5-factor scale model is well compatible with the data obtained from pre-service teachers (x2/df=2.22; gfi=0.99; agfi=0.97; cfi=0.99; rmsea=0.05; srmr=0.04) according to the calculated fit values (carmines & mciver, 1981; browne & cudeck, 1993; mcdonald & marsh, 1990; tanaka & huba, 1985; jöreskog & sörbom, 1984). cronbach alpha coefficients for extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness factors were as 0.78, 0.75, 0.69, 0.72, 0.78, respectively. data analysis within the scope of the research, pearson correlation coefficients were calculated to examine the relationships between personality traits and social capital. structural equation model analysis was used to determine the effect of personality traits on entrepreneurial components. the skewness and kurtosis coefficients are based on to determine the distribution of the data. the fact that skewness values are within ±3 and kurtosis values within ±10 indicate that the data have normal distribution (kline, 2011). the skewness and kurtosis coefficients calculated for personality 20 global education review 8 (1) traits and social capital scores were within the specified range (-0.68 <skewness<0.67; -0.32 <kurtosis<0.86). in order to determine multivariate extreme values, whether cook distance values are less than 1 (field, 2009) can be investigated. it was understood that multivariate extreme values were not included in the data set (cook distance <1). vif (variance inflation factor) value was calculated to determine whether there are multiple connection problems between the independent variables. vif≥10 indicates that there is a multicollinearity problem between variables (hair et al., 1995). the values obtained (1.15 <vif <1.43) showed that there were no multicollinearity problem between the variables. data were analyzed using spss and amos statistical software. findings pearson correlation analysis was used to examine the relationships between pre-service teachers’ personality traits and social capital factors. in the next step, the effect of personality traits on social capital was tested by structural equation model analysis (see table 1). when we examine the table, it is seen that there are low and moderate positive relationships between extraversion and participation in the local committee (r=0.2268; p<0.01), ngo membership (r=0.120; p<0.01), taking initiative on social issues (r=0.177; p<0.01), sense of social trust (r=0.294; p<0.01), sense of local security (r=0,139; p<0,01), neighborhood relations (r=0,329; p<0,01), social representation (r=0,203; p<0,01), tolerance for differences (r=0,120; p<0,01 ) and sense of belonging (r=0.377; p<0.01). it is understood that there are low and negative relationships between neuroticism and taking initiative on social issues (r=-0.117; p<0.05), sense of social trust (r=-0.169; p<0.01), local sense of security (r=-0,111; p<0.05), neighborhood relationships (r=-0,112; p<0.05) and sense of belonging (r=-0.278; p<0.01). there are low and moderate positive relationships between agreeableness and participation in the local committee (r=0.124; p<0.01), taking initiative on social issues (r=0.273; p<0.01), sense of social trust (r=0.171; p<0.01), sense of local security ( r=0,146; p<0,01), neighborhood relations (r=0,295; p<0,01), social representation (r=0,160; p<0,01), tolerance for differences (r=0,187; p<0, 01) and sense of belonging (r=0,293; p<0,01). there are low and positive relationships between conscientiousness and participation in taking initiative on social issues (r=0.229; p<0.01), sense of local security (r=0,095; p<0,05), neighborhood relations (r=0,250; p<0,01), social representation (r=0,119; p<0,01), tolerance for differences (r=0,093; p<0,05) and sense of belonging (r=0,173; p<0,01). there are low and positive relations between openness and participation in the local committee (r=0,249; p<0,01), ngo membership (r=0.116; p<0.05), taking initiative on social issues (r=0.162; p<0.01), neighborhood relations (r=0,196; p<0,01), social representation (r=0,236; p<0,01), tolerance for differences (r=0,181; p<0, 01) and sense of belonging (r=0,196; p<0,01). structural equation model analysis was applied to test the hypotheses of the research. social capital is included in the model under test as an endogenous variable. social capital represents the structure consisting of participation in the local committee, ngo membership, taking initiative in social issues, sense of social trust, sense of local security, neighborhood relations, social representation, pre-service teachers 21 21 tolerance for differences and sense of belonging. extraversion, neuroticism, agreeableness, conscientiousness and openness are exogenous variables in the model. in order to observe the effect of personality traits on social capital one by one and simply, personality traits are added to the model as the observed variable. the structural equation model tested is shown in figure 1. in order to obtain better fit values, the modification index values were examined and the correlations between the errors of some observations were released. the fit values (x2/df=2.64; gfi=0.95; agfi=0.92; cfi=0.91; rmsea=0.06; srmr=0.05; pclose=0.08) of the structural equality model tested to determine the effects of pre-service teachers’ personality traits on their perceptions of social capital indicated that the model and data were in good agreement (carmines & mciver, 1981; browne & cudeck, 1993; mcdonald & marsh, 1990; tanaka & huba, 1985; jöreskog & sörbom, 1984). the path coefficients and significance levels shown in the model are given in table 2. it is understood that extraversion positively affects social capital in the model (β=0.36; t=5.36; p<0.01). neuroticism has a negative and insignificant effect on social capital (β=-0.07; t=-1.31; p>0.05). agreeableness positively affects social capital (β=0.23; t=3.74; p<0.01). conscientiousness has a positive and insignificant effect on social capital (β=0.01; t=0.09; p>0.05). openness positively affects social capital (β=0.12; t=2.13; p<0.05). when standardized beta coefficients are taken into consideration, it could be argued that extraversion, agreeableness and openness are more effective on social capital, respectively. personality traits explain 35% of the change in social capital. according to the results obtained, h1, h3 and h5 hypotheses were accepted and h2 and h4 hypotheses were rejected. conclusion, discussion & suggestions in this study, an applied research was carried out on 470 pre-service teachers studying in departments of elementary mathematics education, turkish language and literature, english language teaching, physical education, history, guidance and psychological counseling, geography and primary school education. relationships between personality traits and social capital components were examined with correlation analysis. the effects of pre-service teachers’ personal traits on their perception of social capital were investigated with the structural equation model analysis. it was found that the neuroticism and conscientiousness personality traits of preservice teachers were not effective on perceptions of social capital. however, it was found that the extraversion, agreeableness and openness personality traits of pre-service teachers were effective on their perceptions of social capital. considering the bilateral relations examined between the variables within the scope of the research, it was found that the extraversion personality trait has positive correlations with the perception of social capital components (participation in the local committee, ngo membership, taking initiative on social issues, sense of social trust, sense of local security, social representation, tolerance for differences and sense of belonging). when other personality traits were taken under control, it was seen that extraversion had a positive effect on social capital. when the characteristics of extraverted individuals are examined, it is expected that these individuals have a high tendency to exhibit attitudes and behaviors related to social capital. extraverted individuals are talkative, social, loving and active individuals. social interaction is a need for these individuals (barrick & mount, 1991). hogan 22 global education review 8 (1) (1986) states that extroversion has two basic components such as desire and socialization. the desire component represents initiative and assertiveness, while the socialization component represents assertiveness and effectiveness. it was found that teams consisting of extravert personality traits dominant individuals had higher ability to work together (barrick et al., 1998). the fact that group members are composed of average extravert individuals is extremely important for increasing group performance to the desired level (barry & stewart 1997). thus, individuals with extraverted personality are very important both for the integrity of groups and teams, and for the development and enrichment of social capital in society. the fact that these individuals are social, loving and active can make it easier for them to develop healthy neighborhood relationships, take part in social responsibility projects and create an environment of trust in their immediate surroundings. in this way, they can contribute more to the formation of social capital. in this study, generally negative relationships were observed between neuroticism personality trait and social capital components. it was seen that neuroticism was not effective on the perception of social capital, when other personality traits were taken under control. anxious, angry, introverted, worried and insecure features are common features of neurotic personality trait dominant individuals (john, 1989; mccrae & costa, 1985). these people have a tendency to react excessively and have difficulty returning to normal (noller, law, & comrey, 1987). it is very difficult for these individuals to develop social relations and to act in relation to social capital. one of the main elements of social capital is trust (fukuyama, 2000b). the individual needs to trust his immediate environment and people in order for social capital to be formed. individuals with dominant neurotic personality feature have difficulties in creating a sense of trust (barrick & mount, 1991). in this regard, it is possible to argue that these individuals are unlikely to develop attitudes and behaviors related to social capital. the results obtained in this research are in line with the theoretical explanations. another result obtained in the research is that there are positive correlations between agreeableness and social capital components. it was found that the compliance personality trait positively affects social capital when other personality traits are taken under control. agreeableness personality trait dominant individuals are known as benevolent, friendly and honest individuals in their environment (conley, 1985; john, 1989; digman & takemotochock, 1981; mccrae & costa, 1985). being flexible, reliable, forgiving and soft-hearted has been associated with agreeableness personality traits (barrick & mount, 1991). thus, these individuals do not have difficulty in developing social relations. since the agreeableness personality trait requires being friendly, flexible and forgiving, the level of tolerance for differences and neighborhood relations may be better than normal individuals. also, since these individuals are honest and helpful, they can be more successful in taking initiatives on social issues and gaining people’s trust. therefore, individuals whose agreeableness personality traits are dominant are more likely to develop attitudes and behaviors related to social capital. the results obtained in this research support the theoretical explanations. a high level of neuroticism or a low level of adaptation does not mean that teachers will fail in their job. being successful in lecturing depends on knowledge, experience and talent. however, it cannot be said that the attitude or reaction of the environment is not important in a pre-service teachers 23 23 teacher's success. being more harmonious at a certain level will cause the person to maintain harmonious relationships with his environment and to produce productive works related to this. harmonious relationships will help the individual manage their time and stress more efficiently. thanks to less stress and an efficient and effective time management, the person will be able to use his time in useful works with his immediate environment. in addition, it can be said that the more harmonious teacher, the more communication he will be with both his colleagues and students. this will be useful for developing new ideas and solving problems. if the person is overly compatible, it will mean that the people around him will always say "yes" to their demands. this will mean using the scarce time for others. it is unthinkable for a teacher who does not have time to be successful. another result of the research is that there are positive relationships between conscientiousness and social capital components. however, when other personality traits are taken under control, it was found that the personality of conscientiousness does not affect social capital. conscientiousness’ personality traits require being responsible, systematic, controlled, and following the rules and norms (botwin & buss, 1989; hogan, 1983; noller et al., 1987). conscientiousness’ personality traits have been expressed that dominant individuals are hardworking, successoriented and determined (krug & johns, 1986; lei & skinner, 1982; peabody & goldberg, 1989). according to these explanations, individuals whose conscientiousness personality is dominant can be expected to contribute to social capital by taking initiative in social issues, participating in local projects and taking part in non-governmental organizations. however, the results obtained in this research did not support theoretical explanations. it was revealed in this research that the conscientiousness personality trait was not effective on social capital when the other personality traits of pre-service teachers were taken under control. this can be explained by the prevalence of other personality traits of pre-service teacher. positive relationships were identified between the openness personality trait and social capital components. when other personality traits were taken under control, openness was observed to have an impact on the perception of social capital. openness personality trait requires being able to think creatively and analytically (digman, 1990; hakel, 1974). individuals with openness personality traits are more sensitive and broadminded than normal individuals (barrick & mount, 1991; john, 1989; mccrae & costa, 1985). this can enable these individuals to take more initiative on social issues, engage in social representative activities, and contribute to social capital by being open to different cultures and lifestyles. the results obtained in this research are in line with the theoretical explanations. basendowski (2016) and hoenig (2019) state that social capital, that is, the resources actors use through access to social networks and the norms and values reinforced in these networks, is one of the foundations of a successful education career. “effective norms” in the sense of norms in a society that encourage and reward academic achievement can be viewed as an effective form of social capital (coleman 1995, 403). the council of the european union (2014) underlines that cultural heritage plays an important role in the creation and strengthening of social capital. because social capital provides some opportunities and opportunities in the development of knowledge, skills, competencies, creativity and innovation. in addition, the 24 global education review 8 (1) council of the european union sees social capital as an effective teaching tool for formal, non-formal and informal education and lifelong learning. the concept of social capital is also examined within the framework of the network approach (haug, 2013). coleman (1988) chose the school type as an indicator of closeness to the network in his study. it presumes that there are closer relationships between parents and teachers in private and especially catholic schools, and that children and young people are in the close network of the religious community, representing a social capital for all involved. uslaner (1995, 1996) measures social solidarity by being married or talking to neighbors (uslaner 1995) and being a member of a trade union (uslaner 1996). inclusion in an ethnic community can also represent social capital (zhou & bankston 1994). bourdieu (1992) assumes that what constitutes social capital is high status, high degree of integration, and belonging to a family network with close emotional ties. young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods face a range of obstacles to exercising their right to education and problems in developing their educational potential (council of europe, 2016). this barrier can range from lack of access to educational institutions to poor quality education and school failure. teacher training programs can be adapted to the challenges of working with young people from disadvantaged neighborhoods by adding new approaches (e.g. intercultural, equality and mediation) and developing partnerships between professionals to help young people living in poor neighborhoods achieve their education rights, and work closely with neighborhood youth and related education programs. in addition, new subject contents such as social problems, concerns and concerns of young people, social identity can be added to teacher training programs. does individual social capital also play a role in the chance to enter the labor market? it can be said that there is little research on the relationship between young people with social capital and the transition to a successful job and how this affects the progress of their careers and whether there are job-specific aspects of social capital. for this reason, firstly, theoretical models can be developed that explain how social capital exerts its influence depending on the different characteristics of educational professions (e.g. type of education, diploma or certificates, professional prestige) and which of these are particularly relevant. suggestions and limitations in this study, it was found that the extroversion, agreeableness and openness personality traits of pre-service teachers were more related to their perceptions of social capital. supporting pre-service teachers’ extraversion, agreeableness and openness personality traits can facilitate their attitude and behavior towards social capital. in this way, it can be ensured that pre-service teachers contribute more to the enrichment of social capital in society. in this research, data were obtained by using questionnaire based on selfreport. the results can be compared by using different data collection methods in future research. the cross-sectional data collection approach used in this study only provides an understanding of complex relationships at a certain time. longitudinal studies can be conducted to track the relationships between pre-service teachers’ personality traits and their perceptions of social capital. this type of research will help pre-service teachers to observe and better understand personality traits and perceptions of social capital for a longer pre-service teachers 25 25 period of time. it will also be interesting to see if teachers with certain personality traits have social capital. for future studies, follow-up studies that determine the relationship between the results of this study and the actions of teachers in their careers can be recommended. finally, in future research, factors that may affect the relationship between pre-service teachers’ personality traits and perceptions of social capital can be examined with moderator analysis. references ağcasulu, h. 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(1994). social capital and the adaptation of the 2nd generation the case of vietnamese youth in new-orleans. international migration review, 28(4), 821-845. about the author mevlüt aydoğmuş is a member of is the education faculty of ahmet kelesoglu, department of curriculum and instruction, at necmettin erbakan university in konya, turkey, as well as editor-in-chief of the international journal of modern education studies and the journal of educational studies and multidisciplinary approaches. özdal koyuncuoğlu is a member of the faculty of applied sciences at necmettin erbakan university in konya, turkey. appendix: tables and figures pre-service teachers 30 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: aydoğmuş, mevlüt, & koyuncuoğlu, özdal. (2021). the relationship between personality traits and social capital perceptions of pre-service teachers. global education review, 8 (1), 14-31. table 1. pearson correlation coefficients for relationships between personality traits and social capital scores variables 1. 2. 3. 4. 5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 1. extraversion 1 2. neuroticism ,308* * 1 3. agreeableness ,421* * -,230** 1 4. conscientiousness ,334* * -,250** ,428 ** 1 5. openness ,367* * -0,072 ,362 ** ,307** 1 6. participation in the local committee ,268* * 0,012 ,124 ** 0,062 ,249 ** 1 7. ngo membership ,120* * -0,072 0,04 3 0,024 ,116 * ,476 ** 1 8. taking initiative on social issues ,177* * -,117* ,273 ** ,229** ,162 ** ,168 ** ,166** 1 9. sense of social trust ,294* * -,169** ,171 ** -0,039 0,08 4 ,220 ** ,187** ,146 ** 1 1 0. sense of local security ,139* * -,111* ,146 ** ,095* 0,04 2 ,144 ** -0,003 ,141 ** ,232 ** 1 1 1. neighborhood relationships ,329* * -,112* ,295 ** ,250** ,196 ** ,327 ** ,216** ,304 ** ,306 ** ,280 ** 1 1 2. social representation ,203* * -0,023 ,160 ** ,119** ,236 ** ,209 ** ,129** ,247 ** ,146 ** 0,05 7 ,273 ** 1 1 3. tolerance for differences ,120* * 0,001 ,187 ** ,093* ,181 ** 0,08 5 ,119* ,282 ** ,175 ** ,118 * ,258 ** ,323 ** 1 1 4. sense of belonging ,377* * -,278** ,293 ** ,173** ,196 ** ,237 ** ,134** ,234 ** ,311 ** ,202 ** ,337 ** ,205 ** ,181 ** 1 mean 3,33 3,10 3,87 3,64 3,48 2,03 1,91 3,06 2,27 2,72 2,75 2,92 3,16 2,77 standard deviation 0,67 0,68 0,49 0,52 0,45 0,77 0,87 0,55 0,62 0,78 0,70 0,73 0,71 0,61 *p<0,05; **p<0,01; n=470 figure 1. structural equation model tested to determine the effect of personality traits on social capital, x2=169.20; sd=64; p<0.001 pre-service teachers 31 31 table 2. path coefficients obtained as a result of structural equation model analysis dependent variable independent variable b s.e. β t social capital <--extraversion 0,19 0,04 0,36 5,36** social capital <--neuroticism -0,03 0,03 -0,07 -1,31 social capital <--agreeableness 0,16 0,04 0,23 3,74** social capital <--conscientiousness 0,01 <0,01 0,01 0,09 social capital <--openness 0,09 0,04 0,12 2,13* *p<0,05; **p<0,01 social capital extraversion neuroticism agreeableness conscientiousness openness participation in the local committee ngo membership taking initiative in social issues sense of social trust sense of local security neighborhood relations social representation tolerance for differences sense of belonging 36 global education review 5(4) _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license (cc by 4.0), permitting all use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, a link to the license is provided, and you indicate if changes were made. citation: ndijuye, laurent gabriel, & rao, nirmala (2018). preprimary education policy in tanzania: does it meet the educational needs of newly naturalized refugee children? global education review, 5 (4), 36-54. pre-primary education policy in tanzania: does it meet the educational needs of newly naturalized refugee children? laurent gabriel ndijuye the university of dodoma, tanzania nirmala rao university of hong kong abstract over the past five decades tanzania has hosted over two million refugees, about 200,000 of whom have been naturalized as tanzania citizens. children from this group face numerous challenges within the mainstream educational system. this paper considered education policy in tanzania, with a specific focus on access to quality pre-primary education for children of naturalized refugees. it analyzes relevant policy documents published from 2006 – the year before tanzania started its latest refugee naturalization phase, to 2016. the 2014 tanzania education and training policy (etp), the pre-primary curriculum, and the pre-primary schools guide give the most focus to pre-primary education. three national five-year development plans considered all levels of formal education, except the pre-primary level. findings revealed that policy documents articulate a commitment to providing equal educational opportunities for all people, regardless of their background, acknowledge existing problems with the educational system and make sensible recommendations. these include abolishing fees in all public schools; increasing flexibility in the choice and use of languages of instruction; decentralizing of program management and accountability; and, recommendations related to curriculum issues. however, the associated working documents do not suggest specific strategic and implementation plans to meet the intended goals, nor do they prioritize increasing educational participation for naturalized refugee children. keywords pre-primary education policy, naturalized refugees, tanzania pre-primary education, refugee education introduction reducing disparities in educational participation and achievement between pupils from advantaged and less-advantaged groups has been a priority for many societies in recent years. hence, many countries endeavor to provide unbiased, high-quality education to all (lewin, 2007; unesco, 2015). the inclusion of children who are socially and educationally disadvantaged in terms of language, poverty, _________________________________ corresponding author laurent g. ndijuye, 15 block j, nkuhungu west, p.o box 523, dodoma, tanzania. tel: (+255) 764-800 982. email: buritojr1980@yahoo.com email: u3002100@connect.hku.hk preprimary education policy in tanzania 37 ability, ethnic minority status, uncertain civil status, or who have special learning disabilities been a safe-haven for freedom fighters, refugees, and other immigrants from both neighboring has typically been a policy priority (lewin, 2011; perry et al., 2014). since the 1960s, tanzania has and far-off countries (akaro, 2001). the wellknown and the most dominant immigrant group have been naturalized refugees of burundian origin center for the study of forced migration (csfm), 2008. one of the most important roles of education policy is to ensure that all children from all backgrounds have equal access to quality basic education (britto, yoshikawa, &boller, 2011; unesco, 2007). once in tanzania, naturalized refugees and other immigrant children can obtain access to education provided under the existing education policy alongside children from the local majority [ministry of education and vocational training (moevt), 2014]. however, information about the extent of access and the quality pre-primary education they receive is not known. against this background, this paper analyzes pre-primary educational policy with a focus on education provision for naturalized refugee children. more specifically, it: 1) explores how the educational needs of pupils of naturalized refugees and from other disadvantaged groups are addressed in tanzania’s existing education policy; and, 2) investigates how the educational needs of naturalized refugee pupils are addressed in existing action plans and strategic documents. the education system in tanzania the system of education in tanzania is categorized as pre-primary, primary, secondary, and higher education (united republic of tanzania-urt, 2014). however, compulsory basic education covers only pre-primary through to lower secondary levels. the preprimary level covers one or two year(s) of schooling enrolling children aged 4-5 years, primary level is supposedly to take six years, though practically it takes seven years from grade one to seven. at early primary level grades one and two, the child is equipped with basic literacy skills required for further education development which includes reading, writing and arithmetic. further, after primary level, children need four more years for lower secondary level – marking the end of compulsory basic education cycle. at this level, students sit for examination to advanced secondary school level. having successfully completed advanced secondary education, the students join college or tertiary level of education leading to the award of a diploma or bachelor degree. the award of the bachelor degree enables one to join for higher degrees such as master and/or doctorate degrees. tanzania education policy context over the years, education scholars have established that formulating and implementing education policies based on solid empirical evidence is a major factor in improving and promoting standards in education systems (eurydice, 2017; pearson, 2015). evidence-based education policy is more inclusive, and may lead to a better understanding of what works in which context, and thus improve educational practices (dowda, pate, almelda & sirard, 2004; rao, 2006). societal needs are rapidly changing due to changes in technology and immigration (dowda et al., 2004; eurydice, 2017), and the complexity and multi-dimensional nature of current educational systems (eurydice, 2017). however, a caution should be noted, especially 38 global education review 5(4) when dealing with sub-saharan africa, where limited empirical evidence exists. in recent years, there have been grievances raised over western methods being too often transferred to the global south without considering the context (engle, et al., 2007; vargas-baron, 2015). data driven education policies are considered efficient (grundy, 1994) and have been proven to be more fruitful in low-andmiddle-income contexts where they increase participation of all groups across societies (mtahabwa, 2015; vargas-baron, 2015). in formulating evidence-based education policy, there are two dominant but related routes countries choose to take. some countries have compulsory legal requirements to conduct impact assessment and they invite educational stakeholders in the process of planning, piloting, implementation, and evaluation of any new policy or major shift in the policy direction (eurydice, 2017; grundy, 1994). other countries do not have such legal requirements, and opt for internal and external knowledge brokers (experts) to interpret empirical evidence and mediate between empirical evidence providers and policy-makers (eurydice, 2017). tanzania follows the second route. however good it may seem, using empirical evidence to develop preprimary educational policies in most subsaharan developing countries such as tanzania, is a laborious and resource-intensive task, thus almost non-existent (mtahabwa, 2010). in tanzania, education policy is typically formulated by the ministry of education, science, and technology (mest), ideally in collaboration with different education stakeholders, although there is no legal requirement to involve them. generally, the mest, through its department of policy and planning uses its own team of policy experts to formulate education policies for various levels of education (urt, 2017). the team proposes policy changes, and then consults the broker in this case, the tanzania institute of education (tie) which then summons such education stakeholders as teachers, researchers, parents, and school inspectors to discuss the proposed policy. the drafted policy may be sent to the various education stakeholders, who comment on various sections. there is no other way, formal or informal, to consult stakeholders in educational policy formulation in tanzania. global contexts of refugees the humanitarian problem of refugees came to the fore during the first world war, when the first wave of global refugees was displaced (ongpin, 2008). refugees can be categorized into two groups – internally displaced persons (idp) and cross-border refugees. worldwide, there are currently an estimated 14.7 million idp, sometimes referred to as domestic refugees (alix-garcia, & saah, 2009). cross-border refugees are those who move from their respective home countries to seek asylum in neighboring countries. it is estimated that, by 2010, there were about 43.7 million forcibly displaced refugees globally, about half of whom were in sub-saharan africa and the middle east (unhcr, 2014; 2016). countries have coped with the problem of educating refugee children by making decisions that reflect three different types of refugee civil status: (i) voluntarily repatriated; (ii) resettled in the third country; and (iii) locally naturalized or integrated (akaro, 2001; warner, 1994). voluntary repatriation is done when stability in the refugees’ home country has been restored; resettlement in a third country normally involves moving from refugee camps, usually in the third world, to a more developed country, where refugees are often offered full citizenship (crisp, 2004; ongpin, 2008). preprimary education policy in tanzania 39 local integration or naturalization is a process whereby a refugee is legally offered citizenship in his or her asylum country (akarro, 2001). ideally, a naturalized refugee is expected to enjoy almost all the civil rights and privileges accorded to citizens of that country (crisp, 2004). there are legal and social processes a refugee must undergo for naturalization. most governments use education as a tool to integrate naturalized refugees fully into their new society (center for the study of forced migration (csfm), 2008). tanzania coped with the problem of refugees by adopting naturalization, resettlement in third countries, and repatriation. in this paper, the focus is on naturalized refugees who were locally integrated/naturalized into tanzanian society. the contexts and civil status of refugees in tanzania for the past fifty years, tanzania has been a safe haven for and home to almost two million refugees who fled their countries for political or economic reasons, or because of civil war [tanzania ministry of home affairs (moh), 2014; unhcr, 2013]. most come from such neighboring countries as burundi, the democratic republic of congo (formerly zaire), rwanda, and somalia, as shown in table 1. the first wave of refugees, commonly known as the first case-load, came to tanzania in 1972 (csfm) 2008; unhcr, 2010). this group was initially settled in different parts of the kigoma region, especially in border villages along kigoma and kasulu towns. about two-thirds of them were later moved to ulyankulu, mishamo, and katumba settlement areas in the tabora and katavi regions, while the rest remained in villages among the local majority, as “self-settled refugees” (csfm, 2008) by 2010, the first case-load refugee population had risen from 150,000 to about 240,000, while the self-settled population had grown from about 55,000 to 90,000 (unhcr, 2014), some 72 percent of whom were born in tanzania (moh, 2014). a distinctive feature of the self-settled refugees was that they did not receive any kind of assistance from the unhcr, apart from meeting their educational needs. this was financed through the government of tanzania (ongpin, 2008, unhcr, 2014). the second wave of refugees (or second case-load) came to tanzania throughout the last decade of the 20th century, and was settled in camps in north-western tanzania (unhcr, 2014). however, some illegally moved from those refugee camps to urban areas across tanzania and beyond (chaulia, 2003; csfm, 2008). by 2008, peace and stability had been officially restored in almost all neighboring countries that had experienced socio-political upheaval, and the second case-load was repatriated, or resettled in a third country (csfm, 2008). the government of tanzania and international donor agencies had to seriously consider long-term solutions for the first caseload of refugees still in settlement areas, as well as the self-settled refugees. this group was considered distinct, due to both the length of time they had been in exile in tanzania (more than half were born in tanzania), and their economic benefit to the country (kuch, 2016; ongpin, 2008). in 2007, tanzania announced its readiness to naturalize those who wanted to stay (csfm, 2008). however, the 1972 self-settled refugees were not included in this program until 2010, when the government sorted out their civil status by naturalizing them (chaulia, 2003; moh, 2014; unhcr, 2012). this study focuses on how the current educational policy in tanzania addresses the educational needs of children from the first case-load self-settled naturalized refugees. 40 global education review 5(4) table 1 population and location of settled naturalized and camped refugees region district camp/settlement nationality refugee population natives population in regions with refugees kigoma kasulu nyarugusu camp congolese 63,728 2,127,930 nyarugusu camp burundian 4,153 nyarugusu camp mixed nationality 212 spontaneously settled in villages burundian 90,227 77,239 tabora urambo ulyankulu burundians 2,291,623 tanga handeni chogo somalis 2,117 2,045,205 katavi mpanda katumba burundian 88,733 564,604 mishamo burundian 77,791 total population 404,200 7,029,362 source: tanzania ministry of home affairs (2014); nbs, (2012) the policy and practice dialect of educating naturalized refugees in tanzania the primary objective of tanzania’s 2014 etp was to ensure that children from different backgrounds have access to appropriate educational services (urt, 2014). it directed state action by providing overarching guidelines that set and shape the education system. according to the etp, pre-primary education is intended to provide children with learning experiences that will best promote their development, learning, and readiness for primary school (naeyc, 2009; urt, 2014). in the context of the current study, quality preprimary education refers to both structural and process domains of quality services which reflect and relevant to socio-cultural needs of children in low-income country (britto, yoshikawa & boller, 2011; matafwali & nunsaka, 2011). practically, it is crucial that education policy consider what is individually and culturally appropriate (kagan, 2006). naturalized refugee children, like their local majority peers, differ in terms of strengths, personalities, preferences, and approaches to learning, as well as in their pace across various domains of development. as tanzania is a signatory to such international treaties and commitments as crc and efa, its existing education policy and even its “next door” strategic documents are likely to be positively influenced by such global initiatives. in tanzania, the policy of educating naturalized refugees began to take its current form in 2000, when the unhcr released crc guidelines regarding the provision of education to children of refugee backgrounds (unhcr, 2000). the creation of more educational opportunities for naturalized refugee children was based on the claim that children fleeing their home country are typically traumatized, and the routine of schooling is critical for their long-term psycho-social health and life normalization (retamal, devadoss & richmond, 1998). the preprimary education policy in tanzania 41 crc emphasizes all children must have equal access to high-quality education, regardless of their backgrounds, gender, or their parents’ socioeconomic status (ses) (united nations, 1989). to contextualize and implement the crc, tanzania enacted the act number 21 of 2009 popularly known as law of the child act, which emphasized increasing access to education for all social groups (urt, 2009), including naturalized refugee children. however, by 2010, almost 300,000 children aged between five and eight years were not in schools in tanzania, and almost 70 percent of those were either from a refugee background or were idps (moevt, 2012). according to the national bureau of statistics (2012), the total population of pre-primary-aged children (fiveto six-year-olds) in kigoma (a tanzanian region with the highest number of self-settled naturalized refugees) was 176,183, about 35 percent of whom were enrolled in various pre-primary schools. in the same year, the population of pre-primary-aged naturalized refugee pupils in kasulu and buhigwetwo districts with the highest number of self-settled, newly-naturalized refugees in the region was about 40,000. however, only 18 percent of them received pre-primary education (moevt, 2014). against this background, the current study seeks to answer the following research questions: 1) how is information about the educational needs of pupils from naturalized refugees and other disadvantaged groups addressed in tanzania’s existing education policy? 2) how are the educational needs of naturalized refugee pupils addressed in existing action plans and strategic documents? method criteria for documents selection pre-primary education in tanzania was accepted and adopted as part of the formal education system in 2015 (urt, 2014). as such, there are a limited number of documents related to preprimary education as a sub-sector, or to naturalized refugees as a social group. thus, to obtain rich and valid data for this study, government-issued documents released by tanzania government for official or academic use that addressed education or issues related to education were selected and explored for information related to pre-primary education policy. the documents selected included the 2014 tanzania education and training policy (etp), the pre-primary curriculum, the guide for pre-primary schools, the tanzania longterm perspective plan (ltpp) 2011/12 to 2024/25, and three tanzania five-year development plans (t5ydp) (2006/7-2010/11; 2011/12-2015/16; and 2016/17-2020/21) (tie, 2014; urt, 2006, 2011, 2006). methods of analyses to understand changes in educational policy, and to identify major trends and issues in preprimary education (ezzy, 2002; patton, 2009), the 2014 etp was descriptively analyzed, and selected words in strategic and working documents were counted to indicate their importance. a descriptive policy analysis process describes the development process of policy under scrutiny (patton, 2009) hence identification of the existing flaws.by using multiple sources (policy and action plan documents) and two different data analysis approaches (descriptive and word count), researchers can clearly understand the policy context and implementation atmosphere, thus 42 global education review 5(4) enhancing the quality of their findings (onwuegbuzie, leech & collins, 2012). as noted earlier, in most sub-saharan countries, there are various forces that necessitate the formulation of or changes to educational policy (mtahabwa, 2010; vargasbaron, 2015). however, such changes do not necessarily reflect grassroots’ educational needs (mtahabwa, 2010). as such, descriptive text analysis of policy documents was chosen as the most appropriate method of analysis, for it allows researchers to discern the meaning of the text, discover the larger picture under which the policy was formulated, and capture its larger hidden meaning (patton, 2009). this enables researchers to deconstruct policy texts, to understand the meaning and significance of what was being communicated through the document (grundy, 1994). specific focus was on language used and context interpretation, to understand the social and educational issues (onwuegbuzie, leech & collins, 2012) of naturalized refugees and other minority groups in tanzania. the word-count method is useful in that it unobtrusively allows researchers to explore, in a non-reactive way, how action plans and other strategic documents consider and prioritize the educational needs of minority disadvantaged groups (hsieh-fang & shannon, 2005). the extent to which an issue is articulated in policy and associated documents indicates how educational policy weighs that issue (grundy, 1994). themes were left to unfold and develop naturally from the data (ezzy, 2002). the criteria for selection of the counted words were those related to: (i) inclusive educational practices for immigrants, ethnic minority groups, and/or the marginally disadvantaged; (ii) pre-primary education, or (iii) immigrant or civil status. these criteria allowed flexibility and deep understanding of the contexts (onwuegbuzie et al., 2012; patton, 2009) in which immigrants and disadvantaged groups access education in tanzania. the words selected for counting were: ethnic minority, disadvantaged group, naturalized refugees, inclusion/inclusive education, integration (in education or society), equality, and equity. the number of times each word was mentioned in each document was counted and noted. as such, the selected method was appropriate to answer the research questions of this study. results this section first offers a critical descriptive analysis of the 2014 etp document, and then a more quantitative analysis of the implementations and action plans documents. analysis of 2014 education and training policy following the implementation of structural adjustment programs, from the mid-1980s to the early 2000s, tanzania pursued a liberalization policy, in which education was offered on a costsharing basis. pupils’ parents had to pay school fees and make “other” contributions, such as laboratory costs, and school uniforms; while the government employed the teachers, and paid capitation grants to cover schools’ administrative and recurrent costs. the 2014 etp abolished payment of school fees and “other contributions” in public schools (policy statement 3.1.5) to ensure pupils from poor households and other marginal groups can more readily access education. the policy also established compulsory free basic education, by replacing the former education cycle. this included two years of preprimary, seven of primary; four of lower preprimary education policy in tanzania 43 secondary, two of senior secondary, and three plus years of tertiary education. on the other hand, the new education cycle had one (or two) year(s) of pre-primary, 10 years of primary and lower secondary, two years of senior secondary, and three plus years of tertiary education (policy statement 3.1.2-4). by establishing compulsory free basic education that ranges from preprimary, through primary, to lower secondary, all pupils from marginalized and disadvantaged backgrounds are likely to have access to educational skills, knowledge, and attitudes that may enable them to break the vicious, intergenerational cycle of poverty. however, it should be noted that, though the policy document seemed to focus on increasing access to educational participation, it did not adequately emphasize education quality. as noted earlier, increasing the number of children who attend schools does not guarantee their learning (uwezo, 2014).indeed, education quality is of critical importance, especially at the pre-primary level, as the higher a program’s quality, the more enduring its impact (aboud, 2006; britto, et al., 2011). to ensure fairness and sustainability, existing educational policy should focus on equitable access to high-quality preprimary education for children from diverse backgrounds (li, wong, & wang, 2010). before the new policy (policy statement 3.1.2) was enacted, pre-primary education in tanzania was neither compulsory nor part of the formal education system (moevt, 2014). afterward, every primary school in the country had to establish a pre-primary class for children above five years of age. as it was both free and a recognized part of formal education, it was likely more children would access pre-primary education services. given the advantages of investing in pre-primary education, especially for pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds, selfsettled naturalized refugees would benefit tremendously from this policy. however, no provision was made for children below four years of age, whose educational and developmental needs were left to families and communities. the new etp ended several-decades’ debate on whether to use english or kiswahili as a medium of instruction. the policy clearly articulated the flexible use of kiswahili as a medium of instruction in all public pre-primary and primary schools, which should also “properly” teach english as a subject (policy statements 3.2.19-20). for over a century, kiswahili has been used as a tool to unite tanzanians, and is considered a key reason why tanzania is peaceful, stable, and enjoying unprecedented economic and social progress. flexibility in the choice of the educational medium of instruction is likely to increase multicultural understanding and inclusion. the policy directed that there would be special language programs for pupils from minority groups who lag behind in mastering kiswahili, the language of instruction, to ensure naturalized refugee pupils not only go to school, but also learn. also, mastery of kiswahili would help them more easily blend and integrate into the larger tanzanian society and culture. the policy also established a clear division of power and responsibilities between the ministry of education, the president’s office, regional administrations and local governments (formerly under the prime minister’s office), and regional, district, and local education authorities (policy statement 3.5.1-3.5.3; section 5.2). by decentralizing educational management and administration, the voices of marginal and minority disadvantaged groups could be better identified and heard. the devolution process also increased local control over educational 44 global education review 5(4) resources, meaning naturalized refugees were more likely to access quality education. as naturalized refugees come mainly from war-torn countries, the new etp is contextually appropriate, in that it introduces peace management and conflict resolution studies into the curriculum (policy statement 3.7.1). given the traumatic mental and physical experiences of many naturalized refugee pupils, this approach should help them mend the deficit, and ease their integration into tanzanian society. however, the implementation of an ambitious policy that aimed to overhaul the entire education system would undoubtedly face some challenges. for example, the policy stipulated that the ministry of education was responsible for formulating education policy, and for teacher training, while the ministry for regional administration and local governments were responsible for employing, monitoring, and managing teachers. such a division of power and duties between two unrelated ministries could pose unnecessary bureaucratic challenges that might make teachers’ administrative and management issues everybody’s business, and hence nobody’s duty. further, while the decentralization process may increase access to quality education by tailoring educational policy to local population needs, it poses a serious risk to how efficiently that policy is implemented. this is because in tanzania, decentralization has long been linked to corruption and lower efficiency due to lower local institutional capacity, while central institutions have proven to be more efficient. analysis of strategic working documents and action plans in tanzania, education policy is formulated by the ministry of education, while policy implementation and day-to-day education management, monitoring, and delivery are the responsibility of local government authorities. in such a context, selected cross-sectoral documents were analyzed by counting selected words to understand and interpret policy implementation settings (onwuegbuzie, leech & collins, 2012). as figure 1 shows, the number of times a word or phrase appeared in a specific document was counted to determine its place and significance, in the context of pre-primary education in tanzania. in 2015, the tanzania pre-primary curriculum was developed in response to a dramatic decline in academic and non-academic skills in preceding years. the curriculum focuses on the three r’s (reading, writing and arithmetic), and presents a sequence of instructions, experiences, and goals based on the 2014 etp. in the document, equity was mentioned 3 times, disadvantaged groups, equality, and inclusion were each mentioned 2 times, and ethnic minority, naturalized refugees, and integration were not mentioned at all. the 2015 guide for pre-primary schools is a government circular that sets standards for establishing pre-primary education in tanzania. developed to reflect new etp directives, the guide requires all public and private preprimary schools to meet a set standard of quality. in this document, ethnic minority, disadvantaged group, and inclusion were each mentioned 3 times, equity and equality each were mentioned 5 times, and naturalized refugees and integration were never mentioned at all. the tanzania long-term perspective plan (2011-2026) is a strategic directional roadmap for tanzania’s drive to become a middle-income country. the 15-year plan provides a link preprimary education policy in tanzania 45 between the tanzania’s 2015 long-term development vision and its short-term strategic and implementation five-year development plans. the document seems less focused on preprimary education in general, or on minority disadvantaged groups. in the section on human capital development and social services, under which the education sector is categorized, ethnic minorities were mentioned 2 times, while naturalized refugees and integration were not mentioned. disadvantaged group, equality, and inclusion were each mentioned 2 times, and equity 3 times. the five-year development plan is a governmental implementation plan that reflects the country’s development agenda, considering overall development goals, policy objectives, sectoral initiatives, long-term perspective plan benchmarks (2011/12-2025/26), and key findings of the review of vision 2025 (united republic of tanzania (urt) 2012). in this study, three consecutive five-year development plan documents, spanning financial years 2006/72010/11; 2011/12-2015/16 and 2016/172020/21, were analyzed. the 2006/7-2010/11 five-year development plan was the new government’s blueprint for massive expansion of tanzania’s macro-economy, and of educational opportunities in the country. its overall mission was to improve living standards through increased participation in the economy and in education. to that end, decentralization of education was set as a key strategic goal. in this document, ethnic minority was mentioned 4 times, and disadvantaged group 5 times, with both sets of instances referring to huntergatherer societies. equality was mentioned 7 times, equity was mentioned 10 times and inclusion 12 times. naturalized refugees and integration were not mentioned. the second five-year development plan, which spanned 2011/12-2015/16, aimed primarily at stimulating and boosting economic growth from its current rate of 7 percent, to 10 percent. it focused on the development of different economic and service sectors, such as infrastructure, industry, human development, and social services. to achieve its goals, access to high-quality education was identified as a key strategic sector in both the human capital development and social services domains, to facilitate the projected socio-economic growth. in the education section of the document, ethnic minority was mentioned 5 times, and disadvantaged group 7, both referring to hunter-gatherer societies in north-eastern tanzania. equality was mentioned 10 times, equity 12 times, and inclusion 15 times. naturalized refugees and integration were not mentioned at all. the third five-year development plan (2016/17-2020/21) was launched in january 2016, and was intended to end tanzania’s status as a lower-income country, and have it designated as a middle-income country. as in the first five-year development plan, access to high-quality education is regarded as very important for moving tanzania toward being designated a middle-income economy by 2025. in the education section of this document, ethnic minority and disadvantaged group are mentioned 14 times each. however, both sets refer to hunter-gatherer societies found in northeastern parts of tanzania. equality is mentioned 18 times, equity is mentioned 23 times, and inclusion 27 times. naturalized refugees and integration are never mentioned. 46 global education review 5(4) figure 1. frequency of counted words in the selected documents abbreviations and number of pages ppc-pre-primary curriculum (54 pages) gpps-guide to pre-primary schools (73 pages) t5ypd2006-11-tanzania’s five-year development plan from 2006-2011 (182 pages) t5ypd2011-16-tanzania’s five-year development plan from 2011-2016 (178 pages) t5ypd2016-21-tanzania’s five-year development plan from 2016-2021 (190 pages) discussion this paper reviewed the extent to which existing education policy considers and prioritizes the needs of naturalized refugee pupils as a distinct minority disadvantaged group, and how existing action plans systematize the educational needs of self-settled, newly-naturalized tanzanian preschoolers. although the etp documents appear to signal the need to overhaul the existing education system to serve the needs of all tanzanians, the current analyses suggest implementation documents (ppc, gpps, t5ydp’s and ltpp) so far only seem to minimally include the educational needs of newly-naturalized immigrant tanzanians and other disadvantaged minority groups. indeed, one of the indicators that a government is serious about a certain sector is the extent to which that government articulates and handles matters related to that sector’s policies (garcia, pence & evans, 2008). one of the indicators of government seriousness and commitments in addressing needs of a social group is having clear implementation plans to handle and solve the underlying problems facing that group (mtahabwa, 2010; pianta, 2004). the gap between education, policy directives, and clear workable strategies in implementation documents suggests that pre-primary education is underrated as a level of education in general, as are the educational needs of naturalized refugee children in tanzania. more important, it indicates that the educational needs of children from these groups occupy a low position in the 0 5 10 15 20 25 30 p p c -2 0 0 9 g p p s2 0 0 5 t5 yp d -2 0 0 6 -1 1 t5 yp d -2 0 1 1 -1 6 t5 yp d -2 0 1 6 -2 1 panel a panel b ethnic minority disadvantaged group naturalized refugees inclusion integration equality equity preprimary education policy in tanzania 47 government’s priorities, and there is limited commitment to ensuring these children can equally access high-quality early years’ education (mtahabwa, 2009). the fragmentation starts with how education policy itself is made. as noted earlier, education policy in tanzania is centrally initiated by policy experts at the ministry of education, who are not legally required to base their recommendations neither on evidence, nor to consult with other stakeholders in the policy-making process. the new etp clearly addresses the needs of disadvantaged minority groups in accessing pre-primary education. for instance, it mandates the use of kiswahili as a medium of instruction, but also requires that schools teach english “properly” in pre-primary and primary schools, across the country. as with other rural groups, newly-naturalized rural tanzanian pupils speak their mother tongue at home which likely is neither kiswahili nor english. various studies have established that optimal learning occurs when pupils are taught in their mother tongue, or in a language they master as a medium of instruction (brock-utne& desai, 2005; roberts, jurgens, & burchinal, 2005). choice of language of instruction affects not only access to, but also quality of preprimary services provided to naturalized refugees in tanzania. in the last five years, kasulu and buhigwe districts, which host most of tanzania’s naturalized refugees, have been ranked among the lowest achieving districts, in terms of literacy and numeracy tests for early graders (rti international, 2014, uwezo, 2014). as such, the new etp mandates special language programs for pupils from minority groups, who lag behind in mastering kiswahili. it is highly likely this will help create equal ground for newly-naturalized tanzanian and local majority pre-primary pupils to enter their grade 1 classroom on an equal footing. however, language teachers at all levels of education, including pre-primary, are in short supply in tanzania (moevt, 2014), and those few available are not of a high-quality (qorro, 2013). by establishing free basic education, the current etp document seems to affirm promotion of access to education for all, including disadvantaged peripheral social and cultural groups. this is a good move, given the diversity within tanzanian society. however, in the working documents, mentions of minority disadvantaged groups generally refer to traditional hunter-gatherer societies in northeastern tanzania. given that these huntergatherer societies are not the only disadvantaged minorities in tanzania, the best approach for working document to take is to be as inclusive as possible, so that huge numbers of naturalized refugees are not locked out of tanzanian society. by mandating compulsory introduction of pre-primary classes at all primary schools, the etp and other supporting documents analyzed seem to uphold the long-held belief among education scholars in tanzania that pre-primary education is a downward extension of primary education (mbise, 1996; mtahabwa, 2007; 2010). however, given the current gross enrolment rates at the pre-primary and primary levels, the move will likely increase the number of children accessing pre-primary education, and boost enrolment at that level. in the past seven years, gross enrolment at the pre-primary level has been stagnant and very low (about 30 percent), compared to that at the primary level (almost 90 percent). the pre-primary curriculum and the preprimary guide seem deliberately to avoid the words ethnic minority, naturalized refugees, and integration; instead, they emphasize issues related to equity in general. official circulars include language that suggests fairness in access to education, especially by marginal and disadvantaged groups. some curriculum activities, such as kuonyesha mwenendo sahihi 48 global education review 5(4) wa mwanamichezo (fair game and athletics ethics and values), directly target such equity issues as unity, peace, harmony, and anti-racism, which are important aspects of building an inclusive and just society. the new etp does not attach any importance to formalizing early childhood education for children below four years of age. the first five years of a child’s life are critical to cognitive and socio-emotional development, which ultimately influence pedagogical practices (black, et al, 2016). further, there are huge socio-economic returns associated with investing in ece (heckman, 2010; unesco, 2007), particularly among children from immigrants and disadvantaged backgrounds (han, lee & wadfogel, 2012; tobin, 2017). ignoring preprimary education for this age group, especially for children from refugee backgrounds, is probably the biggest shortcoming of the 2014 etp. tanzania’s 2011-25 long-term development plan has ignored, or avoided, mentioning inclusion of minority disadvantaged groups in education as the solid foundation upon which sustainable development stands. in this document, tanzania is envisioned to be a middle-income country by 2025, and education is said to be one of the most important tools for realizing this vision. the document lists other levels of education, such as primary and higher education, but notably excludes pre-primary. as of 2012, about one-third of households in tanzania lived below the basic need’s poverty line, earning less than one us dollar a day (nbs, 2012). given the economic advantages associated with investing in pre-primary education, (see heckman, 2011; shonkoff & phillips, 2000; unesco, 2007) it is imperative to have an inclusive pre-primary education policy, supported by clear and workable action plans as a strategy to alleviate poverty and bring about sustainable socio-economic development. increasing the educational access and inclusion of marginalized immigrant and disadvantaged groups is considered a critical component of sustainable development (alix-garcia & saah, 2009; csfm, 2007; li, wong & wang, 2010). though the closely-related strategic and working documents (t5ydp, ltpp) might seem to mention and seriously consider issues related to equality, equity, and inclusion in mainstream education, it is not clear whether they include such minority disadvantaged groups as naturalized refugees, or if they are more focused on bridging gender differences and the ruralurban divide. among scholars in the areas of education and social justice, it is an established fact that efforts to increase economic growth and participation should deliberately focus on society in its totality, with a specific focus on individual marginal and minority groups, particularly in terms of early childhood nutrition, maternal health, and equitable access to preschool provision of good quality (britto, et al., 2016; castelli, ragazzi, & crescentini, 2012; engle, et al., 2007; unesco, 2010). the support required by, and the needs of a naturalized minority rural refugee pre-primary-aged girl, for example, might be different from those of a rural majority non-refugee age-mate of either gender. however, the analyzed documents seem to avoid or technically ignore mentioning the words “integration’’ and ‘‘naturalized refugees” this might not be by chance. it is worth noting that, though most naturalized refugees received verbal notice of their naturalization in 2007, their relocation (the second stage in the process of naturalization) was put on hold and, as of 2015, they had not legally been naturalized (unhcr, 2016, us department of state, 2014).this places them in a legal limbo as, in the process of naturalization, they had renounced their previous citizenship, meaning they legally belong to neither tanzania nor their former homeland. however, because they received preprimary education policy in tanzania 49 verbal notification of their naturalization, they are no longer considered refugees, but do not yet enjoy civil rights, such as access to compulsory free high-quality pre-primary education, as legally naturalized observations of counted words indicated that educational documents (pre-primary curriculum and guide to pre-primary schools) rarely mentioned equity, equality and inclusion. the 2 documents never mentioned naturalized refugees nor disadvantaged group. the key strategic working documents (the three 5-year development plans) seem to progressively increase mentioning almost all the accounted words over the years. this suggests that there is neither coherence nor consistency between educational and key strategic documents. this may be attributed to limitations associated with comparing documents of different lengths and time. however, difference in documents’ length and time did not pose a threat to this study because the selected documents were meant to guide and record the tanzania government educational routines and practices. by not mentioning, or even acknowledging the existence of naturalized refugees, the government may be implying that naturalized refugees are not considered to be a minority or disadvantaged group in need of protection and specific treatment. if so, this suggests the government is not willing to take necessary steps to proactively shoulder their burden of equal and quality access to education for all children in tanzania. limitations and conclusion the presence of good educational policy and supporting strategic documents does not guarantee good practices. that said, this study only focused the mentioned documents, and not what is happening at the school level. however, it is important to note that an integrated and comprehensive educational policy is critical to the development of strategic plans and working documents that can be translated into effective educational delivery and good practices. preprimary education, as a sub-sector of formal education, is new in tanzania. as such, there are a limited number of documents addressing it. the documents analyzed were of different times and lengths. this increased coverage in terms of time span and allowed observation of interministerial and inter-sectoral strategies to include naturalized refugees and other minorities in accessing quality education in tanzania. close observation of existing working and implementation documents indicate that it is unlikely that all in tanzania will be able to access high-quality pre-primary education for at least a few more years. to realize the gains associated with investing in pre-primary education, education policy directives should be translated into action by more equitable and inclusive strategic action plans, and working documents. the analyses conducted herein do not wholly and comprehensively present the sociocultural and educational context of tanzania. instead, they provide insight into the policy concerns facing tanzania as it attempts to serve the educational needs of naturalized refugees and other minority groups. from the observations made, it appears tanzania needs a separate, comprehensive, integrated early childhood education and care policy that considers health, education, and social welfare needs of all socio-economic and cultural groups. this necessitates empirical study to ascertain learning experiences and outcomes for newlynaturalized tanzanian pupils in the mainstream tanzania education system, so that it might respect and represent both majority and minority rights. 50 global education review 5(4) acknowledgements the first author gratefully acknowledges funding support from the patrice l. engle dissertation grant of the society of research in child development and hku foundation. to our knowledge, there is no conflict of interest that exists. references aboud, f. 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(1994). voluntary repatriation and the meaning of returning to home: a critique of liberal mathematics. journal of refugee studies, 7(2-3), 160–174. about the author(s) dr. laurent gabriel ndijuye is an assistant professor in the school of psychology and special education – the university of dodoma, tanzania. dr. ndijuye’s areas of research interests include early childhood education, early literacy and language acquisition, early numeracy acquisition skills, social justice and equity in education, refugee education and development, and immigrant and minority education. professor nirmala rao is serena h.c. yang professor in early childhood development and education, developmental and chartered (educational) psychologist, faculty of education, the university of hong kong. professor rao’s areas of expertise include early childhood development and education; child development and educational policy; developmental and educational psychology; culture and pedagogy. 211 global education review 5 (3) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: everett, colin (2018). from common core to essa and beyond. [review of the book common sense education by ernest j. zarra]. global education review, 5 (3). 211-212 book review from common core to essa and beyond “common sense education” by ernest j. zarra by colin everett in common sense education, ernest zarra attempts to make sense of the dizzying collection of educational reforms from the final years of the obama administration. most of the book’s content is a reaction to consequences from the 2009 race to the top initiative, including the widespread adoption of the common core. zarra’s new book builds upon his previous publications, such as the wrong direction for today’s schools: the impact of common core on american education (2013), which frames the opening chapter, “why replace common core.” zarra’s objections to the common core focus on what he views as its pedagogical shortcomings, which he justifies by using recent testing data. zarra also includes both conservative objections about governmental overreach as well as liberal objections, such as an overemphasis on testing. the every student succeeds act (essa), which became law as zarra was finishing his book for publication, is a common theme throughout common sense education. zarra does not render a judgment on essa, but he does welcome many of its curtailments of the 2001 no child left behind act, ultimately taking a “wait and see” approach to the law. as with any book with “common sense” in its title, zarra believes that the fix to american education is straightforward. his solution might be summarized best as embracing traditional educational values. these traditions include using schools to champion a shared judeo-christian cultural heritage, civics, and morality. some of the solutions to achieve these goals include common sense education 212 more selective teacher preparation programs, higher compensation for educators, and more authentic and diverse learning opportunities for students. common sense education has a conversational tone that often reads like a heavily annotated blog. the excessive lists that introduce each section can detract from the readability. the topics covered are also extremely numerous. one 19-page chapter, for example, has 13 different topic sections. as a result, topic sections are often superficial in their coverage. however, for those looking for a broad overview of the externalities of the common core and essa (which is the book’s intended audience), a more in depth discussion might not be necessary and this book might serve as a useful introduction. “common sense education: from common core to essa and beyond.” by ernest j. zarra. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn: 978-1-4758-2511-4 about the author ernest j. zarra iii, ph.d., lives in california, holds five earned degrees, and is a life-long educator. he has authored four books and nearly two dozen journal articles on issues related to education. he teaches advanced placement classes to high school seniors at a state and nationally distinguished secondary school. about the reviewer colin everett, ed.d., is a public high school teacher in mattapoisett, massachusetts, and a visiting lecturer in the accelerated postbaccalaureate program at bridgewater state university in massachusetts. shifting modalities 58 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: cummings-clay, denise, hayes, abeku, & disanto, jaqueline. (2021). shifting modalities: providing k-5 montessori education online during the pandemic. global education review, 8 (4), 58-75. shifting modalities: providing k-5 montessori education online during the pandemic denise cummings-clay hostos community college, cuny (usa) abeku hayes new york city montessori charter school (usa) jaqueline disanto hostos community college, cuny (usa) abstract at the first and only public montessori charter school in new york city, teachers create learning environments, materials, and lessons that help students guide themselves to find information needed to arrive at a necessary learning outcome. the sudden shift to online instruction in march 2020 required parents, teachers, and administration to maintain business-as-usual in an unfamiliar modality—online instruction. this case study reflection article focuses on the planning strategies identified and implemented that shifted the school to teaching and learning online during the covid-19 pandemic while working to keep the montessori philosophy alive, despite the expansion to the online modality. existing research, the process of shifting to the online modality, maintenance of the montessori approach, and the inter-institutional support provided to the charter school by a community college are reviewed. once mandated to move to online instruction, strategies employed show that maintaining students’ natural desire to learn and active discovery are central objectives in tandem with supporting the relationship-centered culture in the machine-oriented online-learning environment. this dual focus is critical because children’s development is maximized when they are engaged in secure, mutually collegial relationships (greenfield & suzuki, 1998). it was concluded that building community among children and teachers, as well as between administration, teachers, families, and a partnering community college were valued and deemed critical to sustaining the rigorous curriculum and relationship-based school culture during the pandemic crisis. keywords online education, montessori, pandemic, cross-disciplinary, transparency introduction in the field of education, primary schools are embracing digital tools and advancing electronic and virtual spaces for learning with the onset of high-tech inventions (thibaut et al., 2015). shifting to online technology outside the traditional classroom space is influencing how teaching and learning are conducted (thibaut et al., 2015). one can shifting modalities 59 59 presume that this impact on teaching and learning is an outcome of modern-day activities where technology usage is prevalent (thibaut et al., 2015). garrison (2009) concludes that there are two major methods used in online learning. in the first method, devices and procedures to access and categorize information is offered to individuals to maintain the practices that optimize the independence of learners in existing distance education models (garrison, 2009). in the second method, the online learning context is used more fully to optimize the potential of online learning to design focused query communities that are grounded in collaborative, two-way constructivist beliefs (garrison, 2009). this case-study reflection article focuses on the planning strategies identified and implemented by the new york city montessori charter school (nycmcs) in its shift to the online modality for teaching and learning during the unprecedented covid-19 pandemic. the nycmcs found success with online teaching and learning while keeping the montessori philosophy alive, despite the expansion to the online modality. in this shift to online education, the nycmcs leadership team sought to merge the philosophical differences of the traditional measures of school success with montessori education using community and instructional delivery, all of which are reliant on a clear structuring of the classroom environment and the ways that teachers and students connect (d. cummings-clay, personal communication, april 1, 2020). as the transition to online learning progressed, the methods espoused by garrison (2009) informed the development of the online design. traditionally, in a montessori school, the montessori method promotes precise, selfmotivated growth for children in the cognitive, emotional, social, and physical realms (american montessori society [ams], 2019). the model itself is largely based on two basic philosophical goals: 1. students and adults engage in psychological self-construction by means of interaction within the learning environment. 2. adults serve as guides in the learning space (ams, 2019). in the united states, there are several states where students in public montessori schools are permitted a very authentic montessori education (ams, 2019). in the new york charter sector, however, this is more complex. the measures of school success draw on test scores and sub-group proficiency as the major determining factors for school renewal, which is in direct conflict with the montessori concept that students can develop at their own pace as their interest guides them. the nycmcs is the first and only public montessori school in nyc. its goals are structured a little differently than traditional montessori schools. at nycmcs, the leadership has taken the stance that the school operates philosophically from a place of being a montessori school while only exercising the practice of montessori education on a gradient that goes from more montessori to more traditional as the students matriculate into the higher grades. the major reason for this is the lack of accessibility to progressive schools in middle and high school for the students served in the school. review of literature child development early childhood is a time during which children learn through a variety of active 60 global education review 8 (4) encounters and experiences, where their social and emotional growth is linked to cognitive development that varies and is influenced by the sociocultural environments of children (soutomanning et al., 2019). one concept, prevalent for children, is that they have an innate desire to learn (souto-manning et al., 2019). jean jacques rousseau espoused that early childhood was a specific time in the 18th century and frederick froebel endorsed the idea in the 19th century when he founded the first kindergarten (souto-manning et al., 2019). this concept was key along with the notion that learning is driven by children’s interests and inner incentive and that they learn via active discovery (soutomanning et al., 2019). another concept is that sociocultural contexts affect learning (souto-manning et al., 2019). children learn with the help of others who are more educated and/or experienced in acquiring intellectual and emotional tools to grow in advanced thinking and behavior (soutomanning et al., 2019). furthermore, a concept pertinent to children’s development is caring and reciprocal relationships along with the connection among emotions and cognition (souto-manning et al., 2019). this ensures that when there is a trust network in which relationships are reciprocal, the growth and development of children is optimized (greenfield & suzuki, 1998; souto-manning et al., 2019). the architecture of early childhood is shifting to add to these concepts the inclusivity of the cultural traditions of people of color who have been minoritized via culturally responsive teaching (crt) and culturally relevant pedagogy (crp) (souto-manning et al., 2019). crt focuses on employing the characteristics, perspectives, and experiences in a culture of ethnically varied students as channels for teaching them well (gay, 2002; souto-manning et al., 2019). the idea is to unite learning outcomes in the school to life in the environment outside of school; promote equity and quality in education; build kinship among people from diverse cultural, social, and ethnic circumstances; and expand students’ activities, effectiveness, and sense of confidence (gay, 2013; souto-manning et al., 2019). crp is a framework incorporating principles that students must experience academic success, develop and/or maintain cultural competence, and develop a critical consciousness in which they are inspired to challenge the current situation of society (ladson-billings, 1995; souto-manning et al., 2019). although the research on childhood development informs the practice of teachers who engage students in on-site classroom settings in brick-and-mortar schools, it is also useful for teachers who teach children in other modalities. the same foundational concepts are common for online teaching and learning settings. additional standards and principles must be embraced when constructing teaching and learning experiences in these other modalities. online learning interaction and support frameworks there are two frameworks, used in higher education, that are especially pertinent to k-12 online learning support because student interactions are at their core (borup et al., 2019). the first framework is based upon the theory of transactional distance while the second framework uses social constructivist principles and is based upon the community of inquiry (col) framework (borup et al., 2019). the proponent of the theory of transactional distance, moore (1980), defined the term dialogue as shared exchange between a shifting modalities 61 61 learner and instructor for which the instructor facilitates in a distance-education setting. he also described structure as the “extent to which learning objectives, procedures, and assessments are planned and cannot be easily adapted to students’ needs” (borup et al., 2019, p. 255). in this framework, the degrees of dialogue and structure regulate the learner’s transactional distance as termed by moore (borup et al., 2019). for example, in courses with high levels of dialogue and low structure, the transactional distance is lower whereas the transactional distance is higher in courses with lower amounts of dialogue and high structure (borup et al., 2019). moreover, borup et al. proposed that "the ability to decide ‘what to learn, how to learn, and how much to learn’”the instructor’s examination of learner autonomy is vital as “the greater the transactional distance the more the learners have to exercise autonomy” (2019, p. 255). it is critical to note that there is a difference between distance education and online learning. an industrial model of distance education, espoused by otto peters, posed a concept of differentiating distance education from traditional higher education (garrison, 2009). from a historical perspective, correspondence study progressed into a mechanized course or activity, according to distance-education researchers of the 1990s (garrison, 2009). specifically, the focus of distance education is on principles of independence, autonomy, and self-pacing (garrison, 2009). in contrast, the focus of online learning is on principles of collaborative constructivist approaches (garrison, 2009). in the col framework, social presence is espoused as a theory (borup et al., 2019). social presence is defined as “the ability of participants . . . to project their personal characteristics into the community, thereby presenting themselves to the other participants as ‘real people’” (garrison et al., 2000, p. 89). actual communication behaviors are stressed above the volume of interactions (borup et al., 2019). moreover, social presence can impact a student’s cognitive presence “because it allows for the meaningful and sustained communications that is required to co-construct knowledge of the course material” (borup et al., 2019, p. 255). furthermore, social presence and cognitive presence are unable to reach adequate levels without teaching presence, which garrison and other proponents believe to be the glue of the framework (garrison et al., 2000). teaching presence is created through the instructional design and its organization. for example, how the curriculum is set, planning methods, time boundaries, technology choices, and forming netiquette (anderson et al., 2001). moreover, teaching presence surfaces when online discussions are facilitated via pinpointing areas of harmony, consensus pursuits, highlighting student contributions, creating an open-learning climate, etc. (anderson et al., 2001). finally, direct instruction is personified through presenting content, recapping discussions, detecting errors, and giving feedback (anderson et al., 2001). social presence for nycmcs teachers is implemented in online lessons through video transmissions to students, classroom discussions, and direct instruction. with respect to this case study, distance education refers to when the child does independent study at home with physical materials provided by the school and limited direct instruction. online learning, in contrast, is direct instruction delivered by the classroom teacher, where students are monitored for the full school day, and all resources and materials are digital. thus, in this case study, distance education did not allow the teacher to monitor 62 global education review 8 (4) growth in the same way as in a physical classroom in the first phase of online learning since the teacher only met with the individual child for 15 minutes each day. however, when children met online in google classroom in the second phase for varying time amounts and when they followed their previous on-site schedule as a class in the online modality in the third phase, examining growth was enabled. k-12 online learning the effectiveness of k-12 online learning can be measured by ensuring that specific components are included. examples of items to include are academic and technology standards, effective course technology that mirrors an engaging classroom space, learner interaction/ engagement, and learner support/feedback. standards, reflecting best practices that include features of course blueprints, are available within the k-12 online learning setting (adelstein & barbour, 2017). for example, the international association for k-12 online learning (inacol) issued national standards for quality online standards in 2011 (adelstein & barbour, 2017). other institutions employ quality matters (qm) standards, which are a segment of a branded method (adelstein & barbour, 2017). qm developed a rubric in 2004 that evolved into a process for review of online courses based upon eight benchmarks: course overview and introduction, learning objectives, assessment and measurement, instructional materials, learner interaction and engagement, course technology, learner support, and accessibility (adelstein & barbour, 2017). a case study of physical and online spaces in a blended primary classroom was instructive here. in the study, an online space was comprised of a learning management system (lms), social network site (sns), and a wi-fi network, which was supported by a policy regarding student laptops and email accounts for students (thibaut et al., 2015). sheltered in the lms was information, a storehouse for announcements, schedules, policies, etc. and resources related to learning activities (thibaut et al., 2015). students, teachers, and parents could interface with the system differently, with each able to connect to pertinent learning resources and the curriculum (thibaut et al., 2015). online spaces also included locations (i.e., homes, library, etc.) where students used laptops/computers to enter the lms, sns, or email accounts (thibaut et al., 2015). “those portals, accessible anytime and anywhere, enabled students to participate and follow up the online learning activities outside of the classroom” (thibaut et al., 2015, p. 466). moreover, this online space is helpful to teachers. the space enables teachers to disseminate knowledge to various stakeholders, convey instructions and content-related materials to students, and distribute teachers’ resources in multiple methods, not limited to word documents, audio files, and video files (thibaut et al., 2015). as in the traditional classroom, the online space empowers the role of teachers as the ones in charge of managing the online environment and the knowledge delivery processes (thibaut et al., 2015). empowerment of the teacher’s provision of a social presence in this online space supports the col framework as it can impact a student’s cognitive presence since it fosters purposeful and constant communications among the teacher and child, which is required to help children learn course content (borup et al., 2019). in a case study of a web-based course in primary care, an example of how a collaborative learning experience in the online setting was shifting modalities 63 63 initiated started with its integration in each study unit with connection to and serving as the base for the students’ assessment in their course (russell, et al., 2006). in a virtual teacherfacilitated session (russell, et al., 2006): the seminar becomes an opportunity for students to present initial ideas, focus, reflect upon, and refine their ideas for their assignments. through online discussion, the students can actively construct knowledge. they can practice and develop their higher order academic skills. they share and learn from each other’s experiences and perspectives, and they get exposure to different approaches to problem solving and learning. they give informal feedback, providing an opportunity for peer assessment (p. 472). the online vehicle is beneficial as a device for providing support to learners and/or offering feedback (russell et al., 2006). feedback has an affirmative effect on student learning that is more than other facets of teaching or intervention intended to enrich learning (gibbs & simpson, 2004). some of the conditions under which feedback supports learning include that the feedback focuses on the students’ performance, on their learning and on actions under the students’ control, that it is given in a timely manner, that it is appropriate to the assignment’s purpose, and that it is acted upon by the students (gibbs & simpson, 2004; russell et al., 2006). the montessori philosophy and online instruction the montessori philosophy is based on respect for the child (calvin-campbell, 1998). a major premise is that the child performs best when part of a setting where they can grow easily (montessori, 1988). maria montessori, who was the first woman in italy to receive a doctor of medicine degree and who ultimately used her scientific skills of observation to discover how to teach young children, created an environment for children in which they could choose their own work throughout the day (calvin-campbell, 1998). montessori believed that learning encompassed the complete child, linking the movements learned in everyday life and the aptitudes cultivated with sensorial materials (calvincampbell, 1998). thus, two main areas in the montessori curriculum are worth mentioning. the first area focuses on movement education in everyday life (massello-chiacos, 1996). examples include tasks like dressing, cleaning, cooking, and polishing (calvin-campbell, 1998). children are prepared to write by movements such as twisting lids, pouring, and tweezing (calvin-campbell, 1998). the child’s hands and arms are strengthened, coordination is enhanced, and language is an extension of this area (calvin-campbell, 1998). the second focuses on the sensorial area whereby children explore and learn to use the sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch senses. a child’s development in these areas when young will advance their prospects to explore ceaselessly (calvin-campbell, 1998). moreover, the tactile sense is used in this area. for example, textured letters and numbers are used to help children learn to write (calvincampbell, 1998). children use their fingers to trace the rough outlines of the symbols as well as use their hands and eyes to learn proportion (calvin-campbell, 1998). in this sensorial area, mathematics is an innate expansion (calvincampbell, 1998). three different epistemologies are reflected in the educational practice of montessori. the first is nativism where 64 global education review 8 (4) montessori conceives of children growing in sensitive periods and recognizing that children have their own ways of approaching their surroundings (elkind, 2003). this can be thought of as a learning process whereby film is loaded onto a projector to project images on a screen (i.e., the world) that is blank (elkind, 2003). the second epistemology is empiricism whereby montessori emphasizes the inductive nature of imagination and generalizations are used to go from the specific to the broad (elkind, 2003). the viewpoint here is that the world exists separately from our mind, and we learn about it essentially by photographing it with our senses that function like a camera with unused film (i.e., our memory) that gets exposed as we feel, look, listen, taste, and touch our surroundings (elkind, 2003). the third epistemology is constructivism in which montessori describes a child’s interpretation and transformation of the world through their own activity (elkind, 2003). it is noteworthy that the montessori philosophy and constructivist philosophy place the child at the center of the learning process (elkind, 2003). moreover, these two emphasize exploration, manipulation, and maneuvering materials in the child’s own time and pace (elkind, 2003). turning to the online modality, macdonald (2016) addresses the issues surrounding using computers in a montessori setting. his bipartisan approach, written precovid-19, offers that machine-based learning may be necessary when there are no other tools or settings available, but reminds his readers of the common practice of limiting screen time— typically television—for school-aged children (macdonald, 2016). jones (2017) discussed reasons technology supports the montessori philosophy and issues that might impede its effectiveness. her research addressed the perspectives and attitudes of several teachers toward using computers in a montessori setting. her findings indicated that software could support using computers for student-driven research (jones, 2017), but also posited that faculty need training to move beyond a didactic approach so that technology could have a positive impact on learning, the child, and their development. in an article that connects maria montessori with inventors and her theory to the world of scientific curiosity, powell (2016) posited that montessori would consider technology a useful instructional tool if it incorporated the senses and did not overwhelm children with information that has not been filtered to match their characteristics in development. planning method maintaining quality: montessori instruction online during the 2019-2020 school year, the new york city montessori charter school (nycmcs) struggled to balance broad-minded expectations and the traditional measures as established by the authorizing bodies in nyc in response to the covid-19 crisis in the united states. the initial onset of the shutdown of schools was abrupt and did not allow for much preparation. the nycmcs team worked strategically and intentionally to take its handson, child-centered approach online with minimal preparation. the team included school administration, teachers, the board of trustees (especially the education committee), and parents. montessori education traditionally is student-directed and requires teacher guidance, which entails a great deal of intrinsic motivation on the part of the instructor or guide in the classroom. using the montessori principle, control of error, montessori teachers create shifting modalities 65 65 learning environments, materials and lessons that help students guide themselves to the right answer or the information needed to arrive at the necessary outcome (american montessori society [ams], 2019). more specifically, the design of montessori materials enables the child to get instant feedback about individual work progress, allowing the child to identify, fix, and learn from a mistake without help from an adult. placing the control of activities in the hands of a child builds the child’s self-esteem, self-motivation, and learning (ama, 2019). nycmcs was presented with the very challenging task of determining how to take the montessori philosophy and practice online. with a shift to the online modality, a conscious effort was made to sustain the montessori curriculum by focusing on helping children with learning via movement in everyday life and in the sensorial area to help them explore and learn to use the sound, sight, smell, taste, and touch senses. while the school had previously moved to a scripted curriculum for literacy and mathematics, this curriculum was still very dependent on concrete representation of concepts that would be hard to do online. design of the online learning model. as an initial response to the school closure, it was clear that the school needed to ensure that every child at least maintained what they had learned so far during the school year. the overwhelming thought at the time of the close was that the school would be closed for two to four weeks. the shift to online learning took place over three phases (see figure 2). the phase 1 response to the shutdown was to transition the students to a pseudo concrete instructional model that would rely heavily on physical materials being sent home with teachers teaching via phone and video conference based on the availability of technology. the primary reason for this approach was to help streamline the transition from in classroom instruction → distance learning → to fully remote instruction. during phase 1, students received individual phone calls from their teachers, special educators, and service providers. during that instruction, students were taught literacy (i.e., movement education) and mathematics (i.e., use of senses), and assigned independent work for after the call, thereby maintaining the montessori approach. during the first four weeks of distance learning, all students used the materials that were sent home for them over the phone with their teachers while chromebook laptops and internet hotspots were sent to all students who did not have access. additionally, the administration trained the teachers on how to utilize google classroom and several of the applications that allowed for virtual concrete application of the strategies used in school. in phase 2, the challenge was to create the most authentic learning experience possible via this virtual medium. teachers experimented with various methods of presenting information aiming to create the hands-on, concrete learning experience virtually. the difference between phases 1 and 2 was the move from paper-based instruction to the use of computers. the difference between phases 2 and 3 is that instruction became more interactive via the technology. in phase 3, the school adopted two instructional methods with the montessori principles in place. teachers created interactive work that the students could similarly manipulate to the physical materials used in class by using google jam board in the digital suite and google slides. additionally, students 66 global education review 8 (4) were encouraged to use household manipulatives and supplies to substitute for the materials used in class, which supported their education using movement. teachers also created remote versions of their on-site work plans helping to facilitate choice for students, which is a key factor found in the montessori classroom, via the use of google forms and the google classroom (see figure 3). many teachers used two separate cameras to teach their lessons. one camera allowed students to consistently see their faces, and another only focused on their hands and the work that they were doing (i.e., working with manipulatives or writing on a whiteboard.) teachers also utilized digital whiteboards that allowed them to upload images of the manipulatives typically used in the onsite classroom. this allowed teachers to do what the teachers using the live materials were doing while being able to simply manipulate the items using their computer keyboard and mouse. self-sufficient student work and technology usage. one of the key components of online learning at nycmcs was the idea of the parent not being required to act as the instructor. teachers made all work and navigation of technology a part of their instruction and regardless of age, students were able to access and utilize all technology without parent intervention. enrollment of non-nycmcs students. nycmcs immediately attempted to lighten the load on parents by offering to enroll the school aged children in their homes if space would permit. this was a saving grace for families who shifted households or stayed with others to care for loved ones or to combine resources. assigned staff translators. all spanishspeaking staff members were assigned families who needed translation services. these staff members acted as the translators for families to communicate with the teachers. parents were able to share concerns with these translators through daily conversations. parent and family counseling. the school counselor and assistant principal of school culture worked closely with families who identified themselves as needing emotional support navigating the pandemic. this feeling of connectedness translated into a high student retention rate. online activity-groups. additionally, teachers created various activity groups for students to participate in during parts of the day where they would have been in school but now were at home with nothing to do after having completed their class work. these groups allowed for some level of social interaction during this very isolating time. instructional programs schedule. nycmcs conducted an initial parent survey to assess parent preferences with regards to school schedules. about one third of families who completed the survey preferred to have their children participate in remote instruction only. as a result, nycmcs offered both full time on-site instruction and full-time remote instruction. half of the students returned to onsite instruction while the other half worked from home. to maintain flexibility and ensure that parents continued to receive choice, instructional units were designed on a trimester basis to facilitate an instructional program where students could transition back and forth between in-person and remote instruction every 12 weeks. nycmcs also conducted a second shifting modalities 67 67 enrollment survey to confirm parent preferences and finalize school schedules. moving to at-home online learning was mandated by the state of new york. initially, all materials were sent to the children at their homes. it was anecdotally reported by teachers that this process was stressful and difficult to do. moreover, many teachers were concerned for their personal safety. as a result, the nycmcs then moved to digital learning and supplied all community members with computers to ensure the ease of material creation and distribution. the nycmcs sent surveys to parents to gauge the ease of the use of technology (see figure 4). teaching and learning requirements. nycmcs ensured equitable instruction for all students by carefully designing and aligning two educational programs: on-site instruction and remote instruction. each program consisted of a separate instructional team so that teachers could more easily hone, plan, and design instruction for their specific group of students. each program sustained continuity of curriculum with assessments to facilitate an appropriate transition between instructional models every 12 weeks. all instruction and curricular materials were standardsand research-based with actual live teacher instruction across the subject areas. all program components and scheduling were communicated to parents prior to the start of the school year, and at the beginning of each trimester. teaching and learning flexibility. through the usage of google classroom, nycmcs ensured that all minimum requirements were met or exceeded. this included providing students with all texts, resources in which to draw, write, and record responses for oral exams (functionally found in google classroom). the required 180 days of school was met by ensuring that children logged on, attendance was documented, and school was open every day. while the minimal instructional requirement was one hour per day, nycmcs provided six hours of instruction each day. moreover, virtual after school services were offered each day. children had the opportunity to engage with adults until 6 p.m. daily. state guidelines were observed for class size and programming, as well as in all other areas. nycmcs has the physical capacity to offer full time on-site instruction to all families who prefer this kind of programming. therefore, flexibility in programming and staffing allowed the school to meet safety and health guidelines, and provided equitable instruction to all students, both on-site and remotely. special education. nycmcs was committed to providing equitable and effective education to all students. nycmcs maintained a relationship with the committee on special education (cse)/committee on preschool special education (cpse) and collaborated to ensure that each student was receiving an appropriate education. nycmcs offered in-person specialeducation teacher-support systems (setss), integrated co-teaching (ict), and placements in 12:1:1 classrooms for all students with individual education plans (ieps). nycmcs also collaborated with the department of education to provide all related services, including that of paraprofessionals for students whose iep required them. moreover, nycmcs offered remote intervention and small-group support sessions for students daily. timeline. the administration, teachers, and staff planned to aggressively work to make students’ acclimation to being in school as smooth as possible. thus, nycmcs planned to reopen following the timeline below based on parent feedback, state guidance, and staff input: 68 global education review 8 (4) 1. whole-school virtual opening began on august 31, 2020. a. all students worked remotely. b. teachers taught from their school-based classroom to help acclimate students to expectations for when they would return. 2. dual programs commenced on september 10, 2020 (was subject to change based on guidance given on august 1). a. remote learning continued for students whose parents had selected this program. b. onsite learning began for some students and increased to capacity in the following way: 1) september 10 for prek and all 12:1:1 students 2) september 11 for prek1 and all 12:1:1 students 3) september 14 for prek-3 and all 12:1:1 students 4) september 15 for prek-4 and all 12:1:1 students 5) september 16 for all students discussion as covid-19 became a tangible issue in nyc, schools were ordered to close their doors, which required that students and staff work from home. physical closure of the school plant did not remove the need to document student achievement, monitor enrollment, and ensure the equitable availability of technology. these areas became more noticeable because of the differences between onsite versus remote learning. student achievement. nycmcs is a school in turn-around. having made great progress year after year since the time of its first charter renewal, student achievement was a key component in the plan to ensure viability of the school and the model. teachers sent surveys to parents and were required by the school-based team to make reflections and action plans for how to address parent feedback. internal assessment shows improvement that correlates directly to the state-mandated tests. this measurement is based on pre-made assessments from external sources that are used annually. results on these assessments have historically mirrored the achievement levels on the state tests. the shut down and move to online learning threatened to limit teachers’ ability to effectively teach their students in addition to limiting teachers’ abilities to weave in the montessori concepts and philosophy that guided the way school is operated from day to day in the building. research comparing academic achievement before, during, and after this necessary shift to online learning will determine whether online instruction was successful for the students at nycmcs. internal results based on school-based curriculum show the following: 1. nycmcs’s history reveals a consistent increase in ela proficiency of at least 10%, projecting ela proficiency growth as measured by state exams to have increased to at least 53% in 2020. the most recent bttm assessment using state exam test questions supports this projection, with a school-wide ela proficiency score of 51%, with 3rd grade at 58% proficiency. shifting modalities 69 69 this number exceeds the state (45%) and district (31%). 2. nycmcs’s history reveals a consistent increase in math proficiency, projecting math proficiency growth as measured by math exams to have increased to at least 42% in 2020. the most recent eureka math data supports this projection, showing a growth of 7 percentage points and therefore projecting 44% school-wide math proficiency. this number almost meets the state (47%) and exceeds the district (26%). teaching a concrete math lesson on-site allowed the children to use manipulatives to hold, see, and touch the quantities on which they were working. teachers found that this might be limited--if not eliminated--when working online. however, materials in the home settings were substituted. moreover, literacy is deeply impacted by volume of reading because frequently practicing skills such as drawing meaning from print leads to enhanced comprehension (engageny.gov, 2021). with students working at home all day, teachers indicated that it was more difficult to ensure that students were spending long periods of time with their eyes on the text (d. cummings-clay, personal communication, june 17, 2020). enrollment. nycmcs is known among its families for its aesthetically beautiful materials, spacious classrooms, and building. not being in the physical building took away some of the appeal of the school and thus put the school in direct competition with schools who may be more technology heavy in their programming. families could select to transition their students to a school that supplied more advanced technology or was underwritten by a tech mogul. nycmcs is sought out by families who want montessori education for their children. the components that families often speak of most when enrolling their children in the school are the manipulatives and materials, groupings of students, and one-on-one instruction (abeku hayes, personal communications, 2018-2020). an additional concern was for retaining parents who had their children bussed to nycmcs, who could likely elect to enroll their children in neighborhood schools in their immediate area because of ease of access. equitable technology access: determining and responding to need. nycmcs was given two business days to create a plan for working with its students, disseminate materials, and ensure that students had the technology they needed. this was a difficult issue that posed a concern because of the lack of turn-around time to get students working online without missing days of school. nycmcs needed a plan for addressing these concerns. nycmcs had teachers contact families, individually, to speak with them about the availability of internet and technology in their homes. it was concluded that all families did not have the same quality of internet, technology, or savvy (abeku hayes, personal communication, june 1, 2020). the leadership team at nycmcs worked closely with teachers and parents to determine the assets the school community had in the realm of materials, technology, and manpower. surveys were sent to families and teachers in their home language to identify the strengths the school could draw on to provide effective online instruction. this information was shared via google forms with leadership to help determine the type of technology and where the appropriate technology needed to be shipped. nycmcs then worked with a thirdparty service to ship chromebooks and internet 70 global education review 8 (4) hotspots to the families who required them. students received these materials and then were walked through logging on via phone calls with operations staff. transition from physical materials to virtual materials. at the end of week four of the shut down, students were transitioned from the materials teachers sent home to 100% digitally created and completed materials. teachers began to rely completely on the online google classroom tools to meet student instructional needs (see figures 1 and 2). this is a critical element in the montessori curriculum to help children grow in sensorial areas of sound, smell, sight, taste, and touch to advance the likelihood of children to continually explore (calvin-campbell, 1998). inter-institutional support hostos community college (hcc), a two-year college within the 25 campuses of the city university of new york (cuny), located in bronx, new york, provided support to nycmcs during the pandemic. two hcc faculty members currently serve on the nycmcs board of trustees. one served as deputy chair of the board and, at hcc, serves as co-chair of the college’s educational technology leadership council. the other is past chair of the board and serves as chair of nycmcs’s education committee. both are experienced in designing online courses for the early-childhood teacher education program at hcc. these individuals, through service on the nycmcs’s education committee and the full board, shared their expertise regarding online education and their experiences in faculty development through the hcc center for teaching and learning. during monthly nycmcs board and committee meetings, these hcc faculty members, school administration, and other board members discussed best practices for creating positive online learning environments while maintaining the effectiveness of the physical classroom when open. these strategies included developing teacher-student engagement techniques and providing professional development for teachers. the dialogue itself helped the nycmcs principal and administrative staff to reflect on the processes and strategies in usage recognizing the support and resources of both the nycmcs board of trustees and hcc (denise cummings-clay, personal communications, april-september 2020). the collaboration between hcc and nycmcs mirrors that of hcc with several community high schools. developed under the hcc center for teaching and learning, the practice of sharing perspectives and strategies among faculty and administrators--and in this case board members--is based on the common goal of providing effective instruction within a community. the goals of such collaborations were posited at a national convening to discuss how to move toward curricula that is centered on skills-based success and include: "a) direct prek12 involvement with higher education; b) direct higher education involvement with prek-12 curriculum; c) ongoing conversations" (j. m. disanto, personal communication, september 23-23, 2014; nunez rodriguez et al., 2017, pp. 408). maintaining enrollment: the challenge of connecting in a pandemic school culture and climate are integral parts of any school as well as the presence of the montessori values of grace and courtesy, which are needed to make the transition to the online classrooms. additionally, it became imperative to work with parents using the most effective shifting modalities 71 71 tool available during the pandemic--online meetings (olmstead, 2013). maintaining parents' ability to ask questions, share ideas and concerns, participate in shared decision-making, and support an atmosphere of respect was an important part of this shift to online instruction. although the online modality was different, students were expected still to complete lessons that targeted specific learning standards or grade expectations. online exercises could require reading, watching a video, and/or taking exams (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). the need existed for parents and/or other family members to be available to answer questions and ensure that children were engaged in the lessons and that they completed them. an essential element to ensure a child’s success in school is family involvement (henderson & mapp, 2002). families want to feel appreciated for the involvement they provide and desire to feel connected to their child’s learning outcomes as well as to the teachers furnishing instruction (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). e-mail is a tool that can enable effective parent-teacher connections (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). parents and teachers can exchange questions and answers regarding child progress and keep current regarding family news in addition to sharing ideas to aid students who are struggling or provide links to digital resources (currierubin & smith, 2014). phone calls are another method to further enable parent-teacher connections (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). moreover, the usage of digital tools that connect students and teachers along with those that connect peers are optimum (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). furthermore, live video conferences are useful to connect parents and teachers for meetings or discussions regarding annual student goals, student progress, benchmarks, online learning focus, and/or planning proactively, etc. (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). communication. the nycmcs prioritized communication with its families and students through surveys, emails, phone calls, and school messaging software. the teachers at nycmcs worked as the intermediaries between the school and families because they remotely accessed the families’ homes daily. parents were encouraged to reach out to the teachers with any concerns or questions, which were then relayed to school leadership. currently, the main mode of communication at the school is email and phone calls. parents who do not respond to the translated emails that are sent weekly are given follow up phone calls. during instruction, teachers make three attempts to connect with the students and families for each lesson being taught. mailers, information packets, and automated messages continue to be utilized as the school’s primary methods of communication to get school started. the methods will be shifted as needed to ensure that the school is remaining responsive to the needs of its families. daily phone calls. all teachers were required to make three attempts, daily, to reach each child. if students were unable to be reached, leaders would work to find the families through other means. this led to a strong sense of school presence and responsiveness for families (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). teachers were able to interact with parents to update them regarding their child’s progress and solicit home support or intervention where applicable (currie-rubin & smith, 2014). results 72 global education review 8 (4) the school’s institutional identity enlarged with the shift to the online modality. first, the cultural aspects of how the school approached instruction were difficult to sustain. second, the method of instruction shifted from child-centered to teacher-centered. third, creative lesson planning helped sustain the montessori curriculum of focus on both the practical and sensorial areas. lastly, building community was the glue among stakeholders in helping the children advance in their learning outcomes. to help address the cultural aspects of how nycmcs approached instruction, teachers relied heavily on animations, interactive worksheets and the myriad of newly developed materials created in response to the pandemic. what became a struggle was creating inquirybased environments that allowed students to discover content in the ways they would in the classroom. in the younger grades, many of the materials were demonstrated on camera and videos. additionally, teachers created digital versions of many of the montessori lessons attempting to produce work for the children to work with akin to how they would navigate work in school. the second impact was the unavoidable manifestation of teacher-centered teaching. since the montessori philosophy embraces three different epistemologies including nativism, empiricism, and constructivism (elkind, 2003), the montessori approach remained in place although the teaching method shifted. nativism seemed to be stronger as children developed their own ways of approaching the new online classroom. empiricism continued with the children learning through their senses at home and in the online classroom with exposure to differences than before with respect to feeling, looking, listening, tasting, and touching. finally, constructivism continued with the children understanding and interpreting what they were learning through their own activities. thirdly, nycmcs held onto its montessori philosophy and practice since it was able to continue offering the concrete to abstract path of content acquisition for students. teachers worked with premade curriculum that philosophically lined up with the montessori method and as a result, the school was able to maintain its core beliefs in students needing concrete to abstract application of knowledge to learn in a deeper, more valuable way. lastly, it was discovered that the intentional building of community among students, and building of community between students, teachers, and families in the online modality was imperative to sustaining the montessori philosophy and facilitating child learning outcomes. taylor (2017) points out that the process of building community in the learning setting needs to walk beside the academic process. watson (2007) suggests that teachers or online program staff offer technological and/or academic aid to students through communications such as the phone, email, live chat, or a combination of these. in many instances, a mentor or coach—frequently a parent—is identified to help the student in the learning process (watson, 2007). children will excel in their academic pursuits when sufficient time is provided for creating a learning community that feels safe, dependable, and calm with a child-centered structure of fairness, honesty, and choices balanced with assignments (taylor, 2017). to build community among children, they need to know that the teacher believes in them, that each of them is a good person, and that the teacher cares about them in all situations (taylor, 2017). thus, online programs require teachers to log in to their classes for specified time periods and shifting modalities 73 73 offer guidance regarding how swiftly they must reply to student inquiries (watson, 2007). as an advantage, teacher presence can help students experience increased comfort in participating in a discussion board assignment online or in their behavior if the class is recorded (watson, 2007). to build a relationship and community, the teacher must talk to and interact with each child (taylor, 2017). in addition to planning learning opportunities and communicating with children, the teacher must guide student learning in the online context (watson, 2007). this can be accomplished by forming and facilitating group discussions, creating class projects, and/or tweaking course materials in reply to the questions of children and the concepts that they fail to understand (watson, 2007). most importantly, children need to be oriented to their setting in addition to embracing the routines of the day in the educational context like recording educational progress, using the restroom, how paper is used, and how to care for the setting for which they find themselves, etc. (taylor, 2017). the covid-19 pandemic unmasked that everyone was in crisis. children who are in crisis usually fail to think that what they contribute to their community is valued or respected (taylor, 2017). thus, children in crisis rely on teachers to stick with them through their exhibiting volatile behaviors, or throughout adverse incidents or crisis situations (taylor, 2017). thus, teaching online can be more time consuming than in the classroom due to the amount of individual attention that each student receives online as many teachers have reported (watson, 2007). this was the case for nycmcs teachers teaching online. they were committed to teaching and supporting the needs of each child in the online context. they affirmed what taylor (2017) indicated that it is the teacher’s task to support children, believe in their ability or potential, and steer them as they learn about qualities like kindness, empathy, self-advocacy, and making contributions as a community member as well as to urge them to engage in opportunities for service, which is a building-block for adult citizenry. conclusion the covid-19 pandemic expanded nycmcs’s teaching and learning landscape. the school embraced the usage of technology and shifted to virtual spaces remotely to help children learn. over time, children adapted to learning in the online modality. they not only learned the content housed in the multiple disciplines for which they had been engaged in the traditional classroom, they gained skills in technology usage. they were exposed to other modes of reviewing academic content and chances to help them make connections to the content. teacher-created collaborative opportunities for student peers in this modality 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(2007). a national primer on k-12 online learning. national american council for online learning, 1-42. https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed509 633.pdf an explanation of my educational principles 9 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge (2024). an explanation of my educational principles: friedrich fröbel’s letter to max leidesdorf. global education review, 11 (4), 9-26. an explanation of my educational principles: friedrich fröbel’s letter to max leidesdorf helge wasmuth abstract access to friedrich fröbel’s essential writings continues to be a challenge for non-germanspeaking scholarship. many essential writings have never been translated, and existing translations are outdated. this article discusses the challenges of translating fröbel by translating and analyzing one of the essential letters during the establishment of kindergarten. the article demonstrates the benefits of such modern translations by translating essential parts and arguments of this letter. furthermore, the article discusses key ideas and terms of fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play by comparing key passages from the letter with fröbel’s general concept, as outlined in his various writings on kindergarten. keywords friedrich fröbel, play, law of the sphere, kindergarten, translations introduction friedrich fröbel undoubtedly tops any list of so-called “classics” in early childhood education. that is true not only in his origin germany, but worldwide. because, in the end, he is the so-called “father of kindergarten.” however, fröbel is not only of interest as a historical figure. without question, there has been a resurgence of fröbel in the last years. the recent publications on various topics, such as fröbel’s life, educational theory, and froebelian practices, are impressive (as examples, see bruce, 2021; bruce, nishida, powell, wasmuth & whinett, 2023; wasmuth, 2020; wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023). nevertheless, issues regarding access to fröbel’s writings and thinking still hinder a deeper understanding of his difficult episteme and pedagogy. there is, of course, fröbel to blame for it. fröbel is not an easy-to-read and understand thinker. that is no news, of course, as maria kraus-boelté, the most respected american fröbel authority around the turn to the 20th century, already bemoaned: “the difficulty of understanding fröbel’s writings in the original is so great that there are few persons who would attempt to interpret his meaning; and the difficulty would be further increased in an exact translation” (1907, p. 32). his complicated writing style, the idiosyncratic diction, duplication, and triplication of words, as well as the never-ending nesting of sentences, all make it challenging to read fröbel. then there is the sermonizing tone, the esoteric thoughts, and the difficult-to-understand spherical law, which makes his thinking foreign, not to say incomprehensible today. furthermore, how can one make sense of it if one does not buy into fröbel’s religious, or rather esoteric beliefs? do they make his educational thinking ridiculous and worthless? finally, there is the nonsystematic nature and fragmentary character of his writing. fröbel, who barely systematically published anything, never managed to combine his thoughts into a coherent book on kindergarten pedagogy, even if his closest supporters must have urged him to do so. 10 global education review 11 (4) allegedly, fröbel refused to write it, afraid such work would only result in more misinterpretations (wasmuth, 2020). however, he probably was also never interested in writing such a book, as both education of men and mother-play and nursery songs had been financial disasters (wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023). thus, a systematic book on his kindergarten pedagogy does not exist. therefore, where can one find fröbel’s kindergarten pedagogy? one source is the smaller essays, especially the publications on the gifts, such as die kindergärten als umund erfassende pflegeund erziehungsanstalten der kindheit, der kinder bis zum schulfähigen alter und der deutsche kindergarten als eine musteranstalt dafür insbesondere (fröbel, 1841), über die bedeutung und das wesen des kindergartens überhaupt und das wesen und die bedeutung des deutschen kindergartens insbesondere (fröbel, 1842), or eine vollständige briefliche darstellung der beschäftigungsmittel des kindergarten (fröbel, n.d.). in addition, magazines such as sonntagsblatt give great insights into (the development of) his thinking. however, especially in the 1840s, fröbel used letters to develop and disseminate his pedagogy of kindergarten and play. fröbel wrote approximately 2,000 letters between 1836 and 1852 alone. the number of letters sounds extreme today, but was not unusual for the time. goethe and schiller wrote more than 30,000 letters (krone, 2016). nevertheless, fröbel’s letters are important as they were not a means of typical communication. instead, he often used them to illustrate his pedagogical ideas systematically. examples are the two letters from january 20, 1842, to nanette pivany and countess therese brunsvik, the correspondence with his “muhme” friederike schmidt, and the long letter to marenholtz-bülow (wasmuth, 2020). in such letters, fröbel developed his entire play pedagogy, usually based on the philosophy of the sphere. thereby, he articulated a substantial part of his evolving kindergarten concept in these letters. often, they were essays on his developing kindergarten pedagogy (wasmuth, winkler, & sauerbrey, 2023). the nonexistence of systematic writings on kindergarten pedagogy and an annotated edition of his complete works, already a challenge for the german fröbel research, is intensified in the english-speaking context by the even bigger issue of translations (engelmann, 2023). translating fröbel means dealing with language that downright refuses to be translated. fröbel invented terms to express his unique thinking, often changing verbs into nouns or using pairs of terms that were in contrast and seemed to express the opposite. terns such as gliedganzes and entgegengesetztgleiche, to name only the most prominent ones, have no counterpart in other languages. furthermore, fröbel often used terms with a meaning that goes beyond the original use in the german language. that makes various translations possible, and the (hopefully conscious) decision should be addressed openly as they shape the understanding of fröbel in a language other than german. a good example of this issue is the term sphere, in the english often used for both fröbel’s episteme, the law of the sphere, and one part of the second gift. in german, though, fröbel uses two different terms: ball and sphäre (engelmann, 2023; wasmuth, 2020). these challenges are not new. as emilie michaelis and h. keatley moore stated in fröbel’s letters on the kindergarten (1891): “we have, therefore, left unaltered the peculiarities of our sokrates [sic!], even such as are most unattractive; that is, we have not abbreviated fröbel’s diffuseness, nor omitted his repetitions, an explanation of my educational principles 11 not cleared his mysticism, nor modernized his antique philosophy, nor corrected his absurd symbolic etymology” (1891, p. viii). and while one can applaud this approach, unfortunately, their translation was based on hermann pösche’s edition from 1887. pösche’s edition, though, was not source-critical but rather a modification to adapt fröbel’s writings orthographically as well as syntactically to the spirit of the time (heiland, 2010). thus, this early translation was never one of fröbel’s original writings, which can lead to problems, as this article will show. a more recent edition, friedrich fröbel. a selection from his writings by irene m. lilley, published in 1967, is even more worrisome. as lilley explains in the preface (1967, p. viii):” i have therefore compressed statements and eliminated repetitions and digressions in an attempt to establish the main lines of thought and indicate those elements in his work which account for fröbel’s enduring influence.” hence, it is not fröbel in the original but lilley’s interpretation. as we can currently witness an increased interest in fröbel’s educational thinking, especially in the uk and ireland, this is an issue. hence, modern translations of at least fröbel’s essential writings regarding his kindergarten pedagogy are desperately needed. with this article, i hope to demonstrate why. in the following, i will translate and discuss essential parts of one of the most insightful of fröbel’s letters: his letter to max leidesdorf 1 norm friesen from bosie state university has worked on a translation of the letter. in 2021, i met with norm friesen, daniel j. castner (indiana university bloomington), karsten kenklies (university of strathclyde), and fernando murillo (pontificia universidad católica de chile) to discuss the letter and a possible translation. however, all translations in this article are my own and not based on the translation we worked on in 2021. however, these meetings motivated me to do this work. 2 the various versions of the letter can be found in bn 707a ,bl 46-51; bn 41, bl 1-13; and lange, 1862 3 fröbel preferred to use the term whole instead of system (ganze der spielund beschäftigungsgaben). see wasmuth 2020, p. 75) from march 21, 1846. to my knowledge, this letter has never been published as a translation and is thereby unknown to the only englishspeaking audience.1 translating parts is, of course, not a replacement for a desired careful translation of this letter. and even less a replacement for the desperately needed modern translation of at least his most essential writings, if not his complete works. that, however, is a desideratum for the international fröbel scholarship. the chosen primary source however, why this letter2 and not another one? as said, a systematic translation of this letter has never been published so far. however, i have previously included quotes in wasmuth, 2020 and wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023 but have not translated more extensive parts systematically. the letter was also ignored for a long time by the german fröbel research (heiland,1998). nevertheless, the letter is remarkable as it contains concise and comprehensible remarks on the spherical law, fröbel’s anthropology, and the connection to the whole of gifts and occupations3 and fröbel’s concept of “play care” (spielpflege), respectively (heiland, 1998; wasmuth, 2020). especially the explanation of the spherical law and the theoretical thoughts about gifts and occupations make it valuable. apart from its interesting content, the letter further exemplifies the above-mentioned issues regarding fröbel’s work. the original has not been preserved; only a draft and a transcript 12 global education review 11 (4) that includes a treatise titled explanation of my educational principles, or darlegung meiner erziehungsgrundsätze, exist. the transcript does not have a beginning and end; still, it is evident that leidesdorf was the addressee. in a letter to leidesdorf on april 8, 1846, fröbel refers to the treatise: “i hope you will have received my letter and enclosure, in which i promise to send you an exposition of my educational principles this easter; i am now fulfilling my promise, which i have no doubt will be particularly dear to you as the bearer of these lines and enclosure is mr. barop himself” (fröbel, 1846d, p. 111). it must have been a draft because, as fröbel pointed out to leidesdorf: “i don't even have a clear copy of it myself” (fröbel, 1846d, p. 111). he hoped leidesdorf would give it back to barop. johannes barop, who was married to fröbel’s niece emilie, had assumed responsibility for keilhau’s administration in 1830. while always supportive of fröbel and his pedagogical endeavors, barop had always been able to maintain a professional distance from fröbel, contrary to fröbel’s closest employees wilhelm middendorff and heinrich langethal (wasmuth, winkler, & sauerbrey, 2023). the letter to leidesdorf was first published by wichard lange in 1862 as the fundamental principles of f. fröbel. a letter, or die grundgedanken f. fröbels. ein brief. this edition is more extensive than the existing transcript. however, it is not clear if lange made these changes. the fröbel researcher helmut heiland reprinted the letter in 1992, which made it more popular within the broader german fröbel research community. in my analysis of the letter, i refer to the transcript version and not the more extensive version published by lange, as it cannot be decided if lange made the changes. my analysis in this article is based on often extensive translations, which will allow the reader to get access to unknown fröbel's original writing. still, due to the scope of this article, it is only possible to highlight certain parts of the letter. my summary is, hence, only another interpretation and an abridgment and omission. the only solution to this problem would be to translate the whole letter or, even better, all his essential works regarding kindergarten pedagogy. as mentioned already, this is a desideratum. methodology the method is historical and hermeneutical (george, 2021; zimmermann, 2015). hermeneutics, as a theory and methodology of interpretation, seeks to uncover and understand the meaning embedded in texts, symbols, or cultural practices by examining them in their historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts. in the case of this article, it means the close reading of fröbel’s important letter to max leidesdorf. i interpret this primary source by considering fröbel’s living and professional situation, his intent, and his prevailing understanding of kindergarten pedagogy during the 1840s. to learn more about the relationship with leidesdorf and the purpose of writing the letter, i have further analyzed all letters to leidesdorf, letters that mention his name, and fröbel’s letters from the spring of 1846. my new translation and interpretation follow the “hermeneutic circle,” the process where the understanding of individual parts informs the interpretation of the whole, and the whole, in turn, shapes the understanding of its parts. that is certainly true for my work, as my previous interpretations of this individual letter have shaped and deepened my understanding of fröbel’s episteme, anthropology, and pedagogy. an explanation of my educational principles 13 the deepened understanding now informs my anew interpretation of the letter. the context: fröbel’s personal and professional life while writing the letter. a few words on fröbel’s personal circumstances while writing the letter. since the death of his first wife wilhelmine in 1839, fröbel had devoted himself entirely to his newest idea: kindergarten. he spent the following years in blankenburg, opening one of the first kindergartens there but giving up his home in 1844. at this time, and although he was over sixty years old, fröbel changed his lifestyle drastically. he became a “business traveler” and often went on long, arduous journeys to give lectures and presentations, meet with influential people to initiate kindergarten openings and create networks. his lifestyle was nomadic and chaotic: there was always a new idea, nothing was ever fully thought through, and everything was constantly evolving. and while he was constantly promoting his idea, the kindergarten movement was still in the fledgling stage. in the spring of 1846, only a handful of kindergartens existed, and more than a few thought of fröbel as an eccentric and pedagogical hoax (wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023). when not traveling, fröbel lived in keilhau. that was also true for the spring of 1846; fröbel had returned from a journey in november and december 1845 on new year's eve morning (fröbel, 1846a). keilhau was the only home fröbel had, but barop was now in charge, and fröbel was merely a tolerated guest. the women, especially his nieces albertine and emilie, looked critically at everything he did because fröbel had been responsible for the ongoing outflow of money. even more worrisome for them was the fear that their husbands, barop and wilhelm middendorff, would follow fröbel on another adventure. fröbel had begun to give courses for kindergartners in 1843 (wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023). these courses served not only for the training of kindergartners but helped fröbel, together with the constant travels, to create a widespread kindergarten network. thus, fröbel was constantly thinking about and refining his pedagogy of kindergarten and play in the spring of 1846. kindergarten was all he had, all he was thinking of – and that was true when he wrote this letter. fröbel’s relationship with max leidesdorf fröbel and leidesdorf had met in the summer of 1845. leidesdorf must have lived in keilhau for a few weeks, where he “familiarized himself very seriously and carefully with the principles, ways and means of my child guidance method (kinderführungsweise),” (fröbel, 1847) fröbel later wrote in a letter to karl hagen. after leaving keilhau, leidesdorf stayed in rudolstadt in the inn the golden lion in november 1845. in a letter written to leidesdorf while he was staying in the inn, fröbel addressed leidesdorf with „mr. well-born candidat” (wohlgeboren herrn candidat) leidesdorf from berlin,” (fröbel, 1845a) certainly a sign of respect. fröbel had lent leidesdorf two smaller journals written by a dr. berger and wanted those back, but he also hoped to see leidesdorf again before leidesdorf would leave for berlin. in a letter to the keilhau community on december 22, 1845, fröbel mentioned that he had visited leidesdorf’s bride and her father the day before, but neither of the two knew what happened to leidesdorf since he left keilhau. apparently, leidesdorf had not written a single word to them and was still missing. “heaven knows what happened to him physically, emotionally or otherwise; the poor, 14 global education review 11 (4) apparently good-natured, delicate and natural girl was quite worried” (fröbel, 1845b, p.1). thus, fröbel and leidesdorf were not very close. leidesdorf was one of fröbel’s many acquaintances at this time, and as usual, fröbel was interested in maintaining the relationship because he hoped that leidesdorf would support the kindergarten movement. fröbel did not even hide his intentions. “if you have any friends in berlin who are particularly interested in the development and implementation of my endeavors and the actual introduction of kindergartens,” he wrote to leidesdorf in april 1846, “please do not neglect to introduce mr. barop to these people, be they men or women, educators in the field or laypeople, for the sake of further mutual understanding and perhaps also for the sake of handholding” (fröbel, 1846d, p. 111). that was most likely the main reason why fröbel drafted the treatise. not only was the explanation of his educational principles supposed to help leidesdorf understand fröbel’s (educational) theory better, but fröbel hoped that leidesdorf would help spread the word.4 however, fröbel must have realized quickly that this treatise might not only be helpful in achieving such goals, but was actually one of the most clear explanations of his worldview and educational theory. when he wrote to pastor hildenhagen in quetz, a close fröbel supporter who would later fall into disgrace when he dared to recommend improvements to fröbel, on march 30, 1846, fröbel mentioned having taken “the liberty of enclosing a short letter explaining (briefliche darlegung) my educational principles” (fröbel, 1846c, p. 1) – which must have been the same ones as in the letter to 4 in a sense, fröbel was successful. leidesdorf later discussed fröbel’s educational theory in betrachtungen und vorschläge zur förderung der sittlichen erziehung und tugend, so wie der sozialen verhältnisse (1846), likely based on the letter treatsie. leidesdorf. “it is still a very rough product of the pen;” fröbel wrote, “however, i believe that it might contain something that could be useful for the achievement of our joint project and for the discussion in halle, which should be considered in advance. i must therefore ask you to kindly take these sheets on board” (fröbel, 1846c, p.1). fröbel might have hoped that he had finally succeeded in what had been a struggle throughout all these years: creating a comprehensible written expression of his episteme, anthropology, and educational theory. the explanation had limits, though, as fröbel had not been able “to descend to the implementation of the application (ausführung der anwendung)” (fröbel, 1846c. p.1), meaning his kindergarten pedagogy. that is the reason why the letter ends with relatively short references to kindergarten. the treatise might not have been ready for a „bigger publication,” but fröbel felt it had value. the interpretation of explanation of my educational principles fröbel titled the transcript “explanation of my educational principles, explanation of the point of interpretation (auslegungspunkt) of my educational endeavors, as well as their goal, their purpose and the means to its achievement” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 1). the title alone shows that fröbel did not consider it a typical letter but a treatise. after a few short introductory remarks that emphasized that the following is nothing but undisputable truth, fröbel began to speak of what had been on his mind for the last 35-40 years: the law of the sphere. an explanation of my educational principles 15 the law of the sphere the law of the sphere was the foundation of fröbel’s thinking. only with this episteme in mind can one understand his general educational theory and the pedagogy of kindergarten and play. for fröbel, everything was related and always and only made sense in such connections. through the law, fröbel aimed to describe what he saw as the essence of all that is, as well as the aim of living a conscious life, a life in “life unification” (lebenseinigung).5 expressing this all-encompassing universal truth had been a constant struggle, and fröbel had never felt entirely successful in putting those deep thoughts and truths into words. fröbel had been contemplating the essence of such a law in sincerity since he left the von holzhausen family in 1810 to move to göttingen. between july and october of 1811, he had reflected on such thoughts in his journal almost daily. ten years later, between july 1820 and may 1821, while struggling with his strange feelings for his niece albertine, fröbel again used his daily journal to express his metaphysically theologically founded anthropology. fröbel had wanted to turn these notes into a book called the striving of humankind, or das streben der menschen; however, it never happened. instead, he first shared thoughts on the law of the sphere in the second keilhau pamphlet titled education that is thorough and exhaustively sufficient for the german character is the basic and source need of the german people or durchgreifende, dem deutschen charakter erschöpfend genügende erziehung is das grundund quellbedürfniß des deutschen volkes in 1821. fröbel had begun to write the pamphlet around 1819 and based it 5 lebenseinigung is often translated with life unity, and so is his whole concept of the law. however, i believe unification is the more appropriate translation as it emphasizes a process, and not a final product. i think this is what fröbel had in mind when creating this term. on drafts of the spherical law from the göttingen period and the daily papers. together with the notes in his daily journal written at the same time, the pamphlet’s §§19-52 might be the most concise and comprehensible depiction of the spherical law. another attempt was, of course, the introductory paragraphs (§§ 1 23) of the education of man, fröbel’s main work. later, while living alone in switzerland in the early 1830s, the spherical law and an according life were a constant topic in the long letters to the keilhau community in which fröbel tried to justify his behavior and life as an exemplary example of a conscious life; a life lived in life unification (wasmuth, sauerbrey, & winkler, 2023). there is no doubt: the idea of the law of the sphere and the related concept of life unification shaped fröbel’s thinking and living until the end of his life. for fröbel, everything was a logically necessary extension of his metaphysical-religious worldview. anthropology, general pedagogical theory, school pedagogy, and then later kindergarten practice it all derived from his specific view of the world, humankind, and the human being. and it is remarkable how consistent his thinking stayed over a period of 40 years as the letter to leidesdorf shows. at the same time, the letter is one of the most concise explanations of the spherical law. “one reason, one source, one origin (ausgangspunkt) only has all that exists (daseinde), has all, that we call nature, world, creation, universe; has all essence, all being (sein), all living, wherever it appears and manifests itself, or wherever it lies – foreshadowed or 16 global education review 11 (4) unforshadowed (ungeahnt) – dormant” (fröbel 1846b, p. 1/1r). throughout the next nine paragraphs (§§2-9), fröbel elaborated on the law. “this primal reason, primal beginning, and primal source of all that exists,” fröbel continued, “is the in itself and through itself conscious essence, being, and living, the itself conscious in itself united (einige), therefore good, god.” and because everything contains the “essence of its reason in itself,” fröbel deduced, “all that exists” is of “godly essence” (fröbel 1846b, p. 1r). god is the “primal source and creator” (fröbel 1846b, p. 1r) of all that is. that is true for all that exists, for nature and humanity. everything is created by god. thus, everything is divine or, in fröbel’s thinking, spherical. god and living in unification with god as the center of the law and fröbel’s educational theory does not come as a surprise. fröbel was a deeply religious person. from a purely formal point of view, he was a protestant. however, like many others at his time, fröbel wanted to find “true” christianity, alternatives to the existing models, which he found in the law of the sphere. fröbel’s religiosity is usually described as panentheism.6 panentheism goes beyond pantheism by claiming not only that everything is god but that god is greater than the universe, a universal spirit that is present everywhere and all the time but transcends all things created. fröbel combined thoughts from his christian upbringing with ideas of contemporary philosophy such as (absolute) idealism, panentheism, romanticism, and the enlightenment. additional influences were 6 “panentheism” is a constructed word composed of the english equivalents of the greek terms “pãn” (pan) meaning all, “εν” (en) meaning in, and “θεός” (theós) meaning god. 7 fröbel used, as it was common in german at that time, the male pronoun when referring to all human beings or all children. however, i am using mostly using gender-neutral pronouns when translating specific quotes or referring to humans and children in general pestalozzi’s pedagogy, arndt’s national education, a bit of schiller, and (somewhat weaker) fichte, novalis, and schelling’s natural philosophy and natural-philosophical speculation in a very individual reprocessing. the result was what fröbel called the law of the sphere, even if he used different terminology throughout his life. for fröbel, everything is divine – nature, humanity, and human beings – but only humans have a higher task: “as god, as the primal source and creator of all that is the oneself-selfconscious (sich-selbst-bewußte), so is the human for us the crown and blossom, creation’s fruit in the divinity of their essence called not only to selfconsciousness, but also that they7 in themselves become conscious of the creation” (fröbel 1846b, p.1r). humans are the crown of god’s creation, and contrary to things and other living beings, humans are tasked to realize the divine in themselves. yes, humans are part of everything that exists, but they are special. thus, and because god is “an inner unity (innig einiges),” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 1r) humans, as the ones who are called to consciousness, must “become conscious of the unity of their being, essence and living of the unity in themselves of each thing and of the unity in themselves of all things” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 1r/2). it is one of the weaker parts of the letter, and fröbel got lost in his jargon of incomprehensibility. an explanation of my educational principles 17 still, the few paragraphs summarize fröbel’s lifelong episteme well. humanity is tasked to grow in the realization that god is and can be seen in everything. however, that is not enough; humans must live accordingly. humans are the only living things that not only perceive their environment with their senses but can understand it. hence, they can understand the connections among all that exist. only humans can realize what blindly happens in the rest of nature. humans do not only live in the sphere; it is their task to comprehend that they exist as a unity, just as all that exists (dasseiende) exists as a unity. furthermore, humans are tasked to become conscious of this unity of all that exists. any human being has the possibility to form their inner by reflecting on their spherical essence and acting spherically – to live in life unification. one cannot emphasize it enough: the letter's first pages are remarkable for everyone interested in fröbel’s episteme. in only a few paragraphs, fröbel expressed the essence of the foundation of all his educational thinking, and this time, it is mostly comprehensible. the law of the sphere and its connection to education the introductory comments on the law serve a purpose, though. as indicated by the title, fröbel’s reason for writing the letter was to give an “explanation of my educational principles.” however, the explanation of the law was necessary for the later understanding of fröbel’s educational ideas – as mentioned, all is connected in fröbel’s thinking and based on the spherical law. in the letter, fröbel now began with the transition to education by asking how humans can achieve it to live in life unification. while god is inner unity, fröbel stated, it can only be recognized as the “opposite” (entgegengesetzte). thus, even “god’s united being” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2) appears as such an opposite, as the opposite to unity: “with the manifestation of the in itself united living, with the announcement, revelation of god in nature, world and creation at the same time the opposite [is, h.w.] necessarily given” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2). and that is essential for education. since “separation and opposition” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2) exist, mediation is needed. through god’s revelation in and through nature, world, universe, and creation, unity and separation are given, and at the same time, “through living, love and light” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2), mediation is also given. education must consider this truth, so fröbel’s argument, and be designed accordingly, which is “the key for the holistic appropriate and sufficient education of the human” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2). without an understanding of the law and how an according life can be lived, education can never be natural and follow the natural development of young children and human beings in general. only an education that is built on the truth that froebel was convinced to have found can be natural and thus a real humane education. the “world and living law” is the “key to the true knowledge (erkenntnis) […] thereby also the key to the well-rounded (allseitig) corresponding and sufficient education of the human being” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 2r). key terms and fröbel’s unique language: linktotal, premonition, and helplessness in the following paragraphs, fröbel continued to lay out his (educational) foundations. in doing that, fröbel introduced key terms of his late work; another reason that makes this specific letter worth reading. one of 18 global education review 11 (4) these terms is gliedganzes, or “linktotal,” 8 which is introduced in sections 13 and 14. “what, though, is true of humanity as a total in itself and at the same time as a link of the great lifetotal (lebensganze), that is equally true of the individual human being as a total in himself and as a link of humanity; the individual human being, precisely as a link of humanity, also grasps the whole essence, being and living of humanity and thus also the in themselves living creating and working divine being completely in themselves and can therefore also develop, express, manifest and reveal it again completely from within themselves” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 3) what did fröbel mean when speaking of the linktotal? humans can only live spherically if they live a conscious life and understand themselves as a part and a unity of a larger whole – as a linktotal. humans are a link of the total multiplicity of the entire humanity and simultaneously a link of everything that is, including nature and god. thus, humans can comprehend the entire nature, being, and living of humanity, as well as the creating and working divine life that lives within humanity. when humans “work” a term that in fröbel’s thinking goes way beyond the idea of working for a living humans recognize themselves; they feel in and through their work that they are a link of humanity and a divine being. that is already true for young children, whose “work” is play. through play, children intuit that humans are a linktotal. thus, children need to be recognized 8 glied is translated best as “link” and ganzes as “total.” thus, the reader-friendly translation of gliedganzes would be “link of the total.” however, fröbel probably had a reason for inventing the word gliedganzes instead of using the german counterpart of “link of the total,” which would be glied eines ganzen, a term fröbel used only seldomly. in wasmuth, 2020, i translated gliedganzes with “linkwhole”. today, i believe linktotal is the better translation. and treated as such a linktotal (wasmuth, 2020). in connection with the term linktotal and to elaborate further on this children’s intuition, fröbel introduced another key term, ahnung. ahnung, in my mind, is best translated as “premonition” and not as “intuition;” however, an english verb that expresses the german verb ahnen does not exist. ahnung is a term that fröbel frequently used in his later writings (heiland, 2003). “it appears as the first dark trace of the awakening of a premonition of the unity of all manifoldness outside themselves; just as, in contrast, a child also strives early on to express and manifest their in themselves united essence in the greatest possible manifoldness of its actions outside themselves” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 3r). interestingly, fröbel spoke of darkness, a dark trace, even if something positive is connoted with the concept of premonition. it is possible that he used dark trace to contrast it with the above-mentioned idea of light connected with the idea of mediation. what did fröbel mean when he spoke of premonition, though? while children are not able to cognitively understand that they are a linktotal or that the spherical law is in everything that exists, they already possess the possibility for such an insight. frobel used “premonition” to express this possibility with one word. premonition means that every child can feel, not understand, the spherical law. it is a preknowledge about the world structure or, in an explanation of my educational principles 19 fröbel’s terminology, the law of the sphere. without really knowing, children sense what is coming and what they later should seek to understand more fully. it is an early form of conceptual understanding and insight into the spherical law (heiland, 1989); however, not necessarily one that is less worth than one that can take place within adults. nevertheless, and this is important, children not only possess such a premonition but are eager to express themselves and want to create. that, though, needs to be nurtured and supported. children, fröbel wrote in this letter, yearn for “a counter-image, so to speak a mirror for their, in manifoldness expressing, in themselves carrying life unity” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4). what they want and need is a symbolic means of perception of the manifoldness’ unity that exists outside of them and within them. and in the early years, that is a child’s body, especially their hands. later, though, children need appropriate materials that allow them to verify their premonition and recognize regularities. education needs to build on a child’s premonition, but if education wants to elevate such premonition to a level of understanding, insight, and awareness, education needs to offer an already abstract representation of the law of the sphere. while fröbel did not mention it here in the letter, it is clear what he refers to: the whole of gifts and occupations. it is an idea that is often forgotten or at least underemphasized when froebel’s kindergarten pedagogy is discussed, but in his letter to leidesdorf, fröbel is clear about it: children depend on education; children are in a state of “helplessness” (hilflosigkeit). helplessness is another important term in 9 the idea finds its reverberation today in one of the froebelian principles promoted by the fröbel trust: “freedom with guidance.” fröbel’s thinking at the end of the1840s;9 one that might come as a surprise for many interested in froebelian pedagogy. fröbel, the advocate for the self-active child, saw children as helpless? it is an interesting term indeed, not only to understand fröbel’s educational thinking but also regarding the difficulty of translating fröbel’s work, including my work. i have previously used the translation “need for help”, which was based on the german word hüfsbeduerftigkeit, which can be found in the above-mentioned lange edition of fröbel’s letter to leidesdorf, as well as in heiland’s reprint. however, the term is missing in the transcript on which this interpretation of the letter is based on. the explanation is simple: lange added the word hüfsbeduerftigkeit, which can be translated as “need for help.” hüfsbeduerftigkeit has a different meaning than hilflosigkeit, though. hüfsbeduerftigkeit has a much more positive connotation, it presents a child that is much more capable, a child that might need but also demands such a help in a certain way. while it may be innate, it does not portray a child as weak and incapable. hilflosigkeit, on the other side, is clearly more negative. it portrays an image of a child that is incapable of acting independently and consciously; while similarly needing help, not necessarily a child being able to ask for such help. thus, the addition of hüfsbeduerftigkeit, especially as it is placed prominently at the beginning of the paragraph, changed fröbel’s writing and how one understands it. at least it did for me. the word hüfsbeduerftigkeit might be what fröbel had in mind, so at least my interpretation; however, it is not what he wrote in the letter’s transcript. 20 global education review 11 (4) however, what does fröbel mean when he speaks of a child’s helplessness? for him, “the helplessness in which the human child is born” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4r) is essential for various reasons. it is a necessary precondition if any educational activity shall “awaken the idea of the high essence, dignity and destiny of the human child and the ways and means to achieve them, and to bring them to realization” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4r). furthermore, such helplessness allows children to see themselves “as a part of the great whole of life and the universe, first the earth, which carries it and through it the whole solar and world system.” and finally, helplessness “appears as a sign of their self-determination, self-choice and freedom, of their independence to be attained in order to rise from and through themselves through caused self-power” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4r). one cannot deny it: fröbel did not envision helplessness in the sense that children are incompetent or cannot do anything for themselves. he does not even see it as a weakness but rather as a necessary openness. “the helplessness of the human child is therefore not a sign of the weakness of the human being (menschenwesen), but of the still dormant human power, which, however, is to be awakened with self-respect and to selfdependent and self-activity and thus raised to clear insight and conscious use” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4r). in addition, children’s helplessness enables children to realize and live morality, as well as to understand that the human being is “not called by physical and bodily strength, but by the power of his10 mind and disposition, by his thought, by the use of his reason (vernunft) to reach the goal of his destiny” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 4r). and this goal, of course, is living in life 10 in this case, i have used the translation “his” as fröbel wrote “seines geistes,” referring to a male. that was common german at fröbel’s time. however, he often used to “es” (“it”), when referring to a child, again common german. in these cases, i have translated it with “they,” “themselves,” etc. as discussed earlier. unification, meaning living in the consciousness of human’s unification with nature, society, and most importantly: god. in a long and winding argumentation, fröbel unveiled that a child’s helplessness enables them not only to understand but intuit that human beings are created by god but also to follow and live according to god. “helplessness makes us ourselves find, feel and sensible of god’s nearness; can there therefore be any greater proof of the divinity of the human being (menschenwesen) than that which lies in the helplessness in which the human is born and in which he appears in the earliest period of his life?” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 5) a child’s helplessness is a prerequisite for first the premonition of the law, then its understanding, and finally, the conscious living according to the law: to live life unification. “thus, the helplessness in which the human is born and in which he himself remains for a long time after his birth remains actually the base, the sprout and source-point of genuine human education, the education of a child of his destiny and his vocation, of godlikeness, of the realization (darlebung) of his divine nature, towards god unification, in and through the all-round life apprehension (lebenserfassung), life care, and life unification” (fröbel, 1846a, p. 5r). children possess premonition, more of a feeling of the possibility of life unification. nevertheless, this premonition must become an explanation of my educational principles 21 consciousness, insight, and reflection – through education. a child cannot achieve this alone; with fröbel’s words they are helpless. to develop and learn in a way as envisioned by fröbel, children need support and stimulus from an adult in the form of appropriate, meaning humane education. yes, children want to be selfactive and express their inner selves, but they still need stimulation, suggestions, and support, or, as we would say today, education. education as an external action corresponds to a child’s inner demand for support and nurture, or as fröbel would say: helplessness. fröbel’s concept of play and the whole of the gifts and occupations. with section 23, the numeration and, in a certain sense, also fröbel’s, until this point, more or less systematic approach comes to an end. fröbel now changes the structure, first by discussing seven aspects that education needs to embrace, followed by again seven aspects that early education needs to consider. due to the limited space of this article, i will not translate and analyze those passages. the statements partially repeat what fröbel has explained before and are the more difficult-to-understand parts of the letter. to sum it up, fröbel argued, based on his edifice of ideas, for the necessity of a natural and holistic education. such ideas also permeate the last four pages of the letter transcript (9-13r). finally, fröbel came to speak about what had been on his mind for the last few years and what had been the reason for writing the letter: play care11 or, more precisely, the gifts. during the 1840s, fröbel constantly modified his pedagogy of kindergarten and play, even if major elements were remarkably consistent. the numerous 11 play care is a term that fröbel preferred to use when referring to his concept of play in his later writings. see the works by helmut heiland, sauerbrey & winkler, 2018; wasmuth, 2020 essays and letters of this period, especially the ones to nanette pivany and theresa brunzvik, and the correspondence with his “muhme” schmidt give insights into fröbel’s complex pedagogical thinking and its development. for fröbel, kindergarten was not simply a place to look after young children, care for them, and teach them basic academics and morality. instead, he saw it as a necessary piece of his concept of humane education with the goal of life unification. for fröbel, kindergarten is a place to understand or, at least, sense the law and to live a corresponding life. in the letter to leidesdorf, fröbel expressed such thoughts. convinced to have outlined irrefutable truths, and based on those, fröbel now explained what an education that follows children’s natural development needs: the gifts. the ball, the “child’s sweetheart (liebling),” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 9) or more precisely, colored balls, is what young children need and want as they demand “the round, movable” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 9). however, with “increased strength,” a child needs and requires “the dormant (ruhende), the standing” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 9) – the cylinder followed by blocks: fröbel’s gifts 2 to 6. these materials give children what they need: “we see thereby how a child finds everything in one makes everything out of one, how they create with so little a rich world within and without themselves; this, though, makes now a child as later the adults rich with few satisfied.” for rich and satisfied is the human, when he is in full possession, of what he necessarily needs according to the total 22 global education review 11 (4) demand of his whole being, their whole nature necessarily requires and what he possesses according to the demand of his nature and his being using and applying” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 9/r).12 such is a natural education, as it follows a child's natural development and gives a child what they need. education must, thereby, follow these natural laws and a child’s natural development. “a child is content, when they possess what they need as a human being, and can treat and use this possessing in accordance with the demands of their innermost being (wesen)” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 9r/10). only then can education succeed. however, what is the demand of a child’s being? for fröbel, there is only one answer: their play drive. “above all, a child must be allowed to be true to the innermost demand of their nature, their nature and life drive, which expresses itself early as play drive and in play drive, to be allowed to be active” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 10). it is, of course, one of fröbel’s most famous statements. like every human being, a young child wants to be active, inner the outer and outer the inner, and a child’s activity drive is the play drive. children want to be active; they want to “work” – and their work is to play. according to fröbel, play is a young child's main activity. it is not a didactic tool to instill desired behavior or values; it is also not a motivational tool to help with child supervision, nor is it solely for recreational purposes. it is not a pastime, never just a frivolity or devoid of learning. play is a child’s learning, a child’s work. 12 the sentence is not fully clear in german origin as well. however, “a child must be given objects, be allowed, by which and through which they can create their inner life, in accordance with the conditions of the same, outside themselves” (fröbel, 184b, 10). children need the right means to play. children need a learning environment and materials that consider everything that fröbel has outlined in this letter so far: linktotal, premonition, opposite and mediation, manifoldness, making the outer inner and the inner outer. play materials must be representative of the spherical law. hence, the “play drive of a child” must be allowed “to get to know all these common qualities and relationships only through a few objects, to illustrate themselves only through a few objects; indeed, those objects toys through which and by which a child gets to know the outside world, which are actually a child's means of introduction into the outside world, must be quasi the allrevealing mirror of it, likewise also be those through which and by which they (a child, h.w.) reveals their own inner being according to strength and will, etc.; so that they these objects toys – manifoldly (mehrfach) mediate a child between their inner, their own life and design drive instinct (lebensund gestaltungstriebe) and the essence of the life and design expression of the outside world and thus it becomes multiply (vielfach) to a child a mirror of their inner, and their inner a mirror of the outside world to the true understanding of both and a child thus comes to the experience and premonition of the unison (einklang) and the higher unity of the two, whereby an explanation of my educational principles 23 a child reaches that higher and inner peace, which becomes the same through the life drive corresponding activity and occupation” (fröbel, 1846a, p. 10r). in typical fashion – the complicated writing style, idiosyncratic diction, the duplication and triplication of words, and the never-ending nesting of the sentence – fröbel sums up the importance of his gifts and occupations. while they are means of playing, they are much more than toys, even much more than materials to understand geometrical or mathematical concepts. it is an abstract representation of the law of the sphere; they are the means that a child’s premonition demands and will support a child in developing an early form of insight into and later internalizing what can be found in everything that exists: the law of the sphere. the whole of gifts and occupations is not arbitrarily put together; they are a means to recognize reality and the self, and if guided correctly, playing with it enables a child to make the structure of reality, the sphere, more transparent. however, children, in their helplessness, as fröbel called it, need education. fröbel’s idea of play was never about totally free or random play; it has clear and strong didactic elements. self-activity and play are crucial, but at the same time, a child needs stimulation and support from an adult who acts consciously. playing, designing, and building with these play materials prepare a child for the later insight into reality’s structure. in this sense, the whole of gifts and occupations, as well as kindergarten in general, serve the primary of all of fröbel’s educational endeavors: to find unity within themselves, humankind, nature, and god to support life unification. finally: the goal of kindergarten only at the very end of the letter does fröbel use the term kindergarten. in fröbel’s logic, it all made sense, and he has prepared leidesdorf for this final argument. supporting life unification is the goal of natural and humane education, and thereby, it is also the goal of kindergarten. “this now is the fruit of an early beginning child care and education that fully corresponds to human nature and human being; shows at least the way and the possibility, to initially achieve this goal, this fruit, to lead a child, the human being, step by step according to his nature to self-consciousness, to an action always corresponding to it thus in and through conscious fulfillment of all life duties to all-round life unification and god unification, thus leading in his inner being in his soul, to true bliss” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 12). only a humane education that leads to life unification is a natural education, and the appropriate place for such a humane education that follows the natural laws and leads to life unification is kindergarten. “this all now demands an education of a child in which they are perceived in their essence, grasped in their double destiny, nurturing and following (nachgehend) treated according to their own as well as the general laws of development like the plant in the garden, an education, in which children resemble the tender plants and the educators the careful gardeners therefore, educational relationships which hence cannot be described more comprehensively than with the expression, with the name kindergarten, as this has been in the most various ways expressed and proven by me” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 13). 24 global education review 11 (4) this final argument is consistent with other fröbel’s writings of this time (sauerbrey & winkler, 2018; wasmuth, 2020). kindergarten’s goal is humane education with the goal of life unification. that is the higher reason why kindergarten exists. kindergarten must achieve unification with nature, society, and god, or at least work towards achieving it. kindergarten, as envisioned by fröbel, is not about the early learning of academics, practicing specific skills and preaching moral lessons, not about preparation for school and doing well on tests, not about becoming school-and-career ready. kindergarten, as well as any educational practice, so fröbel in the letter’s final words, must “educate the human race towards its goal, humanity towards its calling (berufe) and its destiny” (fröbel, 1846b, p. 13r). as usual, fröbel was convinced to have shared an absolute and indisputable truth. and so, at least in his letter to max leidesdorf, he had nothing to add. references bruce, t. (2021). friedrich fröbel: a critical introduction to key themes and debates. new york, ny: bloomsbury academic. bruce, t., nishida, y., powell, s., wasmuth, h., & whinnett, j. (2023). the bloomsbury handbook to friedrich fröbel. london: bloomsbury publishing plc. engelmann, s. (2023). translating pedagogy – reading fröbel in different languages. in bruce, t., nishida, y., powell, s., wasmuth, h., & whinnett, j. (eds.), the bloomsbury handbook on friedrich fröbel. london: bloomsbury publishing plc. fröbel, f. (1841). die kindergärten als umund erfassende pflegeund erziehungsanstalten der kindheit, der kinder bis zum schulfähigen alter und der deutsche kindergarten als eine musteranstalt dafür insbesondere. in e. hoffmann (ed.) (1982b), friedrich fröbel. ausgewählte schriften. vierter band. die spielgaben (pp. 149–178). stuttgart: klett-cotta. fröbel, f. (1842). über die bedeutung und das wesen des kindergartens überhaupt und das wesen und die bedeutung des deutschen kindergartens insbesondere. in e. hoffmann (ed.) (1982b), friedrich fröbel. ausgewählte schriften. vierter band. die spielgaben (pp. 203–235). stuttgart: klett-cotta. fröbel, f. (1845a). letter to max leidesdorf in rudolstadt, 18.11.1845 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfröbel/briefe/fb1845-11-18-01.xml fröbel, f. (1845b). letter to keilhauer gemeinschaft, 22.12.1845 (schönebeck). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfroebel/briefe/fb1845-12-22-02.xml fröbel, f. (1846a). letter to leonhard woepcke in annaburg, 3.1.1846 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfröbel/briefe/fb1846-01-03-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1845-11-18-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1845-11-18-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1845-11-18-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-01-03-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-01-03-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-01-03-01.xml an explanation of my educational principles 25 fröbel, f. (1846b). letter to max leidesdorf in berlin, 21.3.1846 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfröbel/briefe/fb1846-03-21-01.xml fröbel, f. (1846c). letter to ludwig hildenhagen in quetz, 30.3.1846 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfroebel/briefe/fb1846-03-30-01.xml fröbel, f. (1846d). letter to max leidesdorf in berlin, 8.4.1846 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps /briefedition-friedrichfroebel/briefe/fb1846-04-08-01.xml fröbel, f. (1847). letter to karl hagen in heidelberg, 2.2.1847 (keilhau). retrieved from https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefed ition-friedrich-fröbel/briefe/fb1847-0202-01.xml#kh1 fröbel, f. (n.d.). eine vollständige briefliche darstellung der beschäftigungsmittel des kindergartens. düsseldorf: küppers. george, t. (2021). hermeneutics. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (winter 2021 edition), edward n. zalta (ed.). retrieved from https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win 2021/entries/hermeneutics heiland, h. (1989). die pädagogik friedrich fröbels. aufsätze zur fröbelforschung 1969–1989. hildesheim: olms. heiland, h. (1998). die spielpädagogik friedrich fröbels. hildesheim, zürich, and new york: olms. heiland, h. (2003). fröbelforschung heute. aufsätze 1990–2002. würzburg: königshausen & neumann gmbh. heiland, h. (2010). fröbelforschung aktuell: aufsätze 2001–2010. würzburg: königshausen & neumann gmbh. kraus-boelté, m. (1907). an interpretation of some of the fröbelian kindergarten principles. in m. holmes (ed.), the sixth yearbook of the national society for the study of education: part ii. the kindergarten and its relation to elementary education (pp. 32–60). chicago, il: university of chicago press. krone, d. (2016). biografische studie zur person und zum werk friedrich fröbels. frankfurt a. m.: peter lang. lange, w. (1966). friedrich fröbels gesammelte pädagogische schriften: zweite abteilung. friedrich fröbel als begründer der kindergärten: die pädagogik des kindergartens. gedanken über das spiel und die spielgegenstände des kindes. neudruck der ausgabe von 1862. osnabrück: biblio-verlag. lilley, i. m. (ed.). (1967). friedrich fröbel: a selection from his writing. new york, ny: cambridge university press. https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-03-21-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-03-21-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-03-21-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-04-08-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-04-08-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-froebel/briefe/fb1846-04-08-01.xml https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-fröbel/briefe/fb1847-02-02-01.xml#kh1 https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-fröbel/briefe/fb1847-02-02-01.xml#kh1 https://editionen.bbf.dipf.de/exist/apps/briefedition-friedrich-fröbel/briefe/fb1847-02-02-01.xml#kh1 26 global education review 11 (4) michaelis, e. k., & moore, h. k. (1891). fröbel’s letters on the kindergarten. london: swan sonnenschein & co. sauerbrey, u., & winkler, m. (2018). friedrich fröbel und seine spielpädagogik. eine einführung. paderborn: ferdinand schöningh. wasmuth, h. (2020). fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play: modifications in germany and the united states. new york, ny: routledge. wasmuth, h., sauerbrey, u., & winkler, m. (2023). finding fröbel: the man who invented kindergarten. london: bloomsbury. zimmermann, r. (2015). hermeneutik. retrieved from: https://www.diebibel.de/ressourcen/wirelex/1wissenschaftstheorieforschungsmethoden/hermeneutik bridging the gap between theory and practice 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schmiedebach, mario, & wegner, claas. (2024). bridging the gap between theory and practice with the dual-focus approach of design-basedresearch. global education review, 11 (2), 1-3. bridging the gap between theory and practice with the dual-focus approach of design-based-research mario schmiedebach bielefeld university, germany claas wegner bielefeld university, germany the integration of research and practice continues to be a fundamental component of meaningful progress in the ever-changing field of education. the transformative potential of design-based research (dbr) as a methodology that harmonizes the rigors of academic inquiry with the practical needs of the field is demonstrated by our thematic issue on "bridging the gap between theory and practice." dbr seeks to benefit researchers as well as practitioners by occupying the space where theoretical frameworks and practical issues converge (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). design-based research stands out due to its iterative, collaborative methodology. dbr promotes a symbiotic relationship between researchers and practitioners, in contrast to traditional research paradigms that frequently create a dichotomy between them. in order to co-design interventions that are both theoretically and practically sound, researchers collaborate with educators, legislators, and other stakeholders (design-based research collective, 2003). through co-creation, the developed solutions are made to be even more relevant and applicable by being firmly grounded in the field's contextual realities. generating useful innovations that can be directly tested and put into practice in realworld environments is one of dbr's main goals. by doing this, dbr overcomes the drawbacks of strictly theoretical research, which could have trouble making a lasting impression on practitioners. continuous feedback and adaptation are made possible by the iterative cycles of design, implementation, analysis, and refinement that are at the heart of dbr. this dynamic process produces insightful information about the fundamental ideas of educational practice in addition to improving the intervention itself. dbr provides a strong framework for investigating and verifying educational theories in the field for researchers. dbr's iterative process makes sure that theoretical presumptions are continuously examined and improved in light of empirical data. theories are grounded in actuality through this rigorous 2 global education review 11 (2) testing process, which strengthens and expands their applicability. furthermore, the collaborative nature of dbr facilitates researchers' comprehension of the opportunities and practical limitations in educational settings, resulting in more impactful and nuanced research outcomes (design-based research collective 2003). dbr offers practitioners practical solutions that are suited to their particular situations. practitioners' participation in the research process guarantees that the design and execution of interventions are informed by their knowledge and perspectives (anderson & shattuck 2012). this leads to more effective and sustainable practices that are readily adoptable within their unique settings. furthermore, the iterative feedback loops in dbr empower practitioners to continuously improve their strategies and approaches, fostering a culture of evidence-based practice and reflective improvement. as we delve into the articles featured in this issue, we come across a wide range of dbr applications in various educational settings. every study demonstrates how theoretical insights can be smoothly integrated into the framework of real-world interventions, capturing the collaborative spirit of dbr. these contributions demonstrate the adaptability and significance of dbr, from augmenting stem education through creative curriculum designs to integrating children's rights in the educational context of religious education. in conclusion, design-based research is a potent paradigm for assisting in the transition from research to practice. dbr promotes meaningful change in educational practice in addition to advancing academic knowledge through collaboration, iteration, and prioritizing practical relevance. the integration of dbr holds promise for developing educational environments that are both theoretically informed and practically effective as we navigate the complexities of 21st-century education. we invite you to explore the diverse and insightful contributions in this issue, each offering a unique perspective on how dbr can enrich both the academic and practical dimensions of education. through this collective endeavor, we aim to inspire ongoing dialogue and collaboration, driving forward the shared mission of improving education for all. description of the special issue the second part of the special issue aims at broadening the view on dbr research. especially the use of dbr in different subject and research areas is highlighted in the three different articles. dumcke et al. investigate the potential of bystander cardiopulmonary education in high schools in their study “current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of students participating in two bystander-cardiopulmonary education models: a comparative interventional study.” since time is always scarce in education, the authors decided to compare two different approaches to teaching basic life support to students. on the one hand, they integrated their intervention into subject-matter teaching and, hence, included it in a longer teaching sequence; on the other hand, they offered their intervention as a project activity, isolated from the regular subject-teaching. the authors present their research findings and highlight the possible advantages and disadvantages of both types of interventions. furthermore, they even show how both kinds could be integrated into an exemplary curriculum and, thus, highlight the teaching-related output essential for dbr research. bridging the gap between theory and practice 3 in their study, “developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness in the context of design-based research (dbr),” peperkorn and wegner show how dbr can be used to develop a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness. therefore, they use dbr from a different perspective: they still have a dual-focus on both research and practice; however, they focus more on the scientific dimension and a scientific-relevant output in terms of a valid test instrument. at the same time, the authors show how scientific giftedness effects teaching and how this test instrument could be used in the practical field as well. therefore, this article emphasizes possible critics of dbr and shows how this approach can actually be used for research without developing and improving teaching interventions, but rather as a scientific test instrument. fleischmann integrates the entire dbr process in her study “design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany” by portraying the different cycles of designing a teaching module on how children’s rights perspectives can be integrated into religious education, evaluation and reflection of the intervention, and how the implementation and dissemination of the intervention can successfully happen. the study shows that dbr is an ultracomplex process with iterative cycles of designing, testing, evaluating, reflecting, and implementing in order to fulfil the dual-focus dbr aims at. the author highlights in her study how that dualfocus is related to a dual-output concerning both teaching-related materials and also a scientific dimension regarding the broadening of knowledge. references anderson, t., & shattuck, j. (2012). designbased research: a decade of progress in education research? educational researcher, 41(1), 16-25. design-based research collective (2003). design-based research: an emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. educational researcher, 32(1), 5-8. schmiedebach, m., & wegner, c. (2021). designbased research als ansatz zur lösung praxisrelevanter probleme in der fachdidaktischen forschung. bildungsforschung, 19(2), 11. valued learning topics in kindergarten 83 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: håberg, liv ingrid aske. (2022). valued learning topics in kindergarten. global education review, 9 (2), 83-98. valued learning topics in kindergarten liv ingrid aske håberg abstract in the scandinavian tradition, how children learn is of much greater importance than what children. however, this study seeks primarily to investigate “what to learn” as opposed to “how to learn.” the matter of what topics are most valued is under-researched, particularly in regard to kindergarten teachers and what they think children should learn during their time in kindergarten. in this study, the abovestated fact was investigated through focus group interviews (halkier, 2015) in six kindergartens during january of 2020. in each kindergarten, 3-5 kindergarten teachers – 23 in total – participated in these interviews. a qualitative approach was used to obtain participants and capture their perspectives (kvale & brinkman, 2015). all of the responses emphasized a common theme, that focus should be placed on learning and developing social competence and early literacy learning (ell). national early literacy panel (nelp) defines ell as learning vocabulary and developing oral language, along with becoming familiarized with the alphabet, writing letters, and obtaining phonological awareness (2008). in contrast, when asked what the most important aspect was in following the governmental curriculum, kindergarten teachers specified ell. the findings discussed regarded ell as a critical topic in early childhood education and care (ecec), both internationally and in the scandinavian countries of norway, sweden, and denmark (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007; kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017; skolverket, 2019). the findings were also discussed regarding social competence as an expression of the bildung concept (klafki, 1997) and in regard to froebelian pedagogy, which has greatly influenced scandinavian kindergartens. although this heritage may have been used, shaped and interpreted in a child-oriented direction (brostrøm, 2004; håberg, 2017), it has the potential to provide various input and directions. keywords early literacy learning (ell), social competence, bildung, curriculum, froebelian pedagogy valued learning topics in kindergarten this study investigates kindergarten teachers’ most valued learning topics in scandinavian kindergartens. within this study, kindergarten includes all forms of childcare institutions for children from the age of zero to the approximate age of six years old, when formal education begins. in the scandinavian countries of norway, sweden, and denmark, kindergartens observe long-standing traditions with roots from froebel’s pedagogy that were built upon rousseau and pestalozzi and later elaborated by key and dewey’s work in the beginning of the last century (alvestad & pramling samuelsson, 1999). according to the 84 global education review 9 (2) froebelian fundraising pedagogy established in germany around 1840, valued learning topics in kindergartens were built upon gardening as an expression of natural experiences, movement play and special play objects (“play gifts”); these concepts were considered vital and necessary to be at the center of the interactions between children and kindergarten teachers (johansson, 2004). although context and society have changed considerably, there is still a lack of research surrounding topics valued by kindergarten teachers. as an institution, scandinavian kindergartens have historically been established from the “bottom-up” by volunteer organizations and other non-governmental agencies and persons; they have also been internally autonomized to a large extent (brostrøm, 2004). in contrast, scandinavian kindergartens nowadays are included in the educational systems to varying degrees. since the early 2000s, kindergartens have been defined as the first part of the educational race; it is not seen as a form of schooling but rather as learning integrated in care and play. similar to schools, kindergartens are also part of an international educational context. the school tradition is influenced by program for international student assessment (pisa), competences and basic skills. although “what to learn” is quite clear, “how to learn” has been highlighted to a much greater degree in the scandinavian kindergarten tradition and among kindergarten teachers (brostrøm, 2004). in each of the aforementioned countries, scandinavian governments have created a national curriculum that applies to all kindergartens. a curriculum specifies values, intentions and ideas in a society; studying these concepts provides different perceptions of education relevant to democracy (karseth & sivesind, 2009). in this study, the curricula in the three scandinavian countries are analyzed according to identify valued learning topics. the main impression from this study stands true: there are very few studies that have inductively investigated valued learning topics, searched beyond the curriculum and inquired openly into the true meaning behind kindergarten teachers’ ideas. this study addresses this gap by interviewing kindergarten teachers in norway to determine their perspectives and experiences. the guiding research question is as follows: what do kindergarten teachers consider the most valued topics for children to learn during kindergarten time before starting school? analyzing valued topics in government directions early literacy learning (ell) the author analyzed the following scandinavian curricula: the norwegian “framework plan for kindergartens” (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017), the swedish “curriculum for the preschool lpfö 18” (skolverket, 2019) and the danish “day care act” (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007). findings from this analysis suggested that in following these curricula, early literacy learning (ell) is the most valued topic for children to learn prior to starting school. early literacy is a “...description of the knowledge, skills, and dispositions that precede learning to read and write in the primary grades” (roskos et al., 2003, p. 53). this is defined as learning vocabulary, developing oral language and acquiring knowledge, along with becoming familiarized with the alphabet, writing letters and phonological awareness (nelp, 2008). learning areas a commonality among scandinavian kindergarten curricula is the highlighting of six or seven learning areas which kindergartens valued learning topics in kindergarten 85 must implement. in all three countries, ell is among these learning areas. the norwegian curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017, p. 19) also refers to six objectives that “contribute to the children’s all-round development.” one of these objectives specifies that kindergarten must promote communication and language (p. 2324), which may be interpreted as ell. by comparing the six objectives and their content with the seven learning areas in the norwegian curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017), ell is the common concept revealed in both of them. this double emphasis indicates that ell is a highly valued topic in norwegian kindergarten and, more specifically, in governmental directions of content within the kindergarten. the danish curriculum specifies that ell entails learning the danish language to a much greater degree than the two other scandinavian curricula. the denmark government can exclude economic support in the event that parents disagree with sending their child to the language-stimulating program; these programs occur for 30 hours a week within the kindergarten setting (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007). as opposed to this, a suggestion in a recent white paper involving kindergartens in norway (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2019) was greatly resisted by kindergarten teachers; this involved imposition of a statutory duty for municipalities to assess all children’s norwegian language skills before they begin school (gravklev, 2021). although the suggestion was yet to be politically decided, norwegian kindergarten teachers desired the ability to voluntarily identify children who may want their language skills investigated further; the teachers’ autonomy and professional assessments were considered to be sufficient in this matter (gravklev, 2021). the resistance did not concern the idea of working with ells. rather, it was directed towards assessing the children’s language skills. international trends the great value on ell is also an international trend, and it is placed high on the political agenda (sommer, 2015). gradually, kindergarten has been incorporated into national education strategies with a stronger connection between economic growth, school and kindergarten (krejsler, 2013). this also applies internationally, where the kindergarten is increasingly seen to contribute to strengthening the knowledge economy (bennett, 2010). the high valuing of ell – both nationally and internationally – may be interpreted as a kind of centralization of educational context and direction. it may also be seen as an approach to achieve a higher level of quality in the kindergarten sphere. the quality concept is a debated phenomenon in the kindergarten field and is criticized for having little focus on contextualizing kindergarten pedagogy: “...there are a few universal answers: everything depends on the particular circumstances involved” (moss & petrie, 2019, p. 399). in this study, interest has not been placed on the quality concept, as well as to what degree ell is a part of a centralized educational direction. ell, however, is not the overall purpose of kindergarten in following the scandinavian curricula. overall purpose of bildung bildung – and further on, learning democracy – is of utmost importance in the scandinavian curricula (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007; kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017; skolverket, 2019). in this context, ell subordinates this overall purpose. willbergh (2016) stated that 86 global education review 9 (2) “the basic task of education in the german and scandinavian traditions is encompassed by the term bildung” (p. 112). bildung is a term with various meanings, including the following: “...in essence, it refers to the inner development of the individual, a process of fulfillment through education and knowledge” (watson, 2010; moss & petrie, 2019, p. 400). it also includes developing responsible actions through the inner man and commitment to values and norms which society recognizes (gundem, 1998, p. 145). klafki (1997) connected bildung and democracy through “categorical bildung.” categorical bildung is divided into material and formal theories. material bildung entails which subjects should be taught and it is defined by the content that dominates the children’s subjective perspectives (willbergh, 2016). contrarily, formal bildung addresses what skills should be learned, and it is defined by the content that is subordinate to the child as a subject. formal bildung theories also include processes of learning methods such as “learning to learn” (willbergh, 2016). according to this, valued learning topics in kindergarten are principally grounded in material bildung, however both of these traditional strands of didactics are necessary to achieve categorial bildung; categorical bildung includes both “...content prepared for children by an adult... [and] what the child does with it and how his or her perception of things is change” (krüger, 2008; willbergh, 2016, p. 115). learning concepts and categories that encompass phenomena in the world is essential, along with discussing ultimate goals of education; this is emancipation for all, “formulated as the development of selfdetermination, co-determination, and solidarity” (willbergh, 2016, p. 115). froebelian pedagogy heritage froebel balanced material and formal bildung (brostrøm & vejleskov, 2009). bildung is achieved by staff members both offering valued content and being concurrently interested in the children’s input and experiences (johansson, 2004). froebel based his pedagogy upon play, experiences with nature and intersubjective relationships between children and kindergarten teachers surrounding special play objects (“play gifts”) (johansson, 2004). the content remains outside of the child and the kindergarten teacher (wallström, 1992). the didactical triangle, which is part of the same tradition as froebelian pedagogy reveals a balance among three factors: teacher, content and child. figure 1 the didactical triangle (after künzli, 2000, p. 49) trends like froebelian pedagogy, however, can change and enter directions other than the originator’s plan. brehony (2009) specified that froebelian pedagogy has been revised around the world, such as in the case of the “free play movement” (p. 599) which advocated a permissive pedagogy. although the teacher child content valued learning topics in kindergarten 87 degree to which the scandinavian countries were influenced by this is unknown, kindergarten pedagogy was greatly transformed into a formal bildung direction (brostrøm, 2004; johansson, 2004). furthermore, child-oriented pedagogy can be expressed with emphasis on the child in regard to the content and staff in the didactic triangle (håberg, 2017). figure 2 child-oriented pedagogy (håberg, 2017, p. 308, after künzli, 2000, p. 49) it is typical in child-oriented pedagogy that the kindergarten teacher attempts to create a stimulating environment where children themselves can initiate their learning and development. neither instructions nor guidance should be given (johansson, 2004). free play has been emphasized as the main way of learning, while learning “what” has been strongly disregarded. this means that formal bildung has been emphasized while material bildung has been almost neglected (brostrøm & vejleskov, 2009). many studies have emphasized nordic pedagogy as exemplary, as “play” is very centralized in the pedagogy. in the observation put forth by john bennet (2010), leader of the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd), thematic reviews of ecec policy and provision specified that the pedagogy in the scandinavian countries is characterized by “broad orientations rather than prescribed outcomes” (bennet, 2010, p. 19). he praised the curricula for not specifying learning outcomes but rather learning areas which the children may experience during the kindergarten time. however, the oecd problematizes the norwegian kindergarten curriculum for being feeble in its learning topics for each child. norway “avoids making specific prescriptions as to what exactly children should learn” (oecd, 2013, p. 41). the quality matters in early childhood education and care report (oecd, 2013) pointed out that this ambiguity can potentially give staff too much freedom to make choices about learning content. this study does not seek to examine why and how froebelian pedagogy was transformed into a child-oriented pedagogy in scandinavian countries; relevant arguments can be traditionally little access to written froebel sources with great emphasis on oral transmission (brostrøm, 2004). relevant arguments can also be influences by the work of rousseau, including a view of learning as awakening a child’s slumbering potential (willbergh, 2016), and the progressive pedagogy influenced by key and dewey’s work in the teacher child content 88 global education review 9 (2) beginning of last century (alvestad & pramling samuelsson, 1999). research and the current study although the current study does not fully explain the status regarding research on the most valued learning topics among kindergarten teachers, it contributes to the research status. in norway, the research is dominated by investigations of learning areas in the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017), which kindergarten teachers find most valued and which are worked most with in the kindergartens. several studies have utilized surveys to investigate kindergarten teachers (brenna-utvalet, 2010; fagerholt et al., 2019; riksrevisjonen, 2009; østrem et al., 2009), and these studies found that the learning area of “communication, language, and text” is highly valued, with an increasing emphasis placed on it over the last century. while 67% of kindergarten teachers used this learning area to a large extent in 2008, approximately 81% reported having done so in 2018 (fagerholt et al., 2019). using a quantitative approach of data collection, including a large random sample, the main findings in these studies are significant (kvale & brinkmann, 2015). ell remains the overwhelming “winner” among the seven learning areas. in any case, most norwegian research has focused on how children learn, not the content or “what to learn”. the main impression is the lack of knowledge base regarding studies that have investigated what kindergarten teachers considered most important for the children to learn, specifically outside government curricula. this study primarily investigates “what to learn” as opposed to “how to learn.” methodological approach the research question in this study is as follows: “what do kindergarten teachers consider the most valued topics for children to learn during kindergarten time before starting school?” this has been studied through semistructured qualitative interviews (kvale & brinkmann, 2015). a hallmark of qualitative research is that the researcher interprets a reality that has already been interpreted by participants, and it is a double hermeneutic (giddens, 1976). by choosing semi-structured qualitative interviews, the data material is based on questions from a pre-made interview guide and the participants’ unique views, experiences and reflections (kvale & brinkmann, 2015). in this way, semi-structured qualitative interviews convey deductive and inductive data. this provides a considerable opportunity to capture the participants’ interpreted reality. focus group interviews were chosen to identify not only each kindergarten teacher’s meaning but also each kindergarten’s specific practices. focus group interviews produce empirical group-level data about a topic, and knowledge production depends on participants’ social interactions (halkier, 2015). preparing data collection before collecting the data, notification forms, information letters and interview guides were submitted to the norwegian centre for research data (nsd). after approval, six relevant kindergartens were found using websites in three different communities. this was done by sending mail and a participant information letter to the chairs. it was specified that the proposal was not to perform any type of assessment, but rather to learn from the practitioners (halkier, 2015). the six kindergartens responded positively, which was valued learning topics in kindergarten 89 unexpected; a potential reason for this outlook may have been the time of year chosen for participating in interviews (january 2020) or the harmless, interesting nature of the study themes. the sample was strategic (kvale & brinkmann, 2015). to obtain the required number of participants in the focus group interviews, the criteria were as follows: kindergartens with at least three departments with departments for both toddlers (0–3 years) and older children (3–5 years). in each kindergarten, pedagogical leaders were invited to participate in one common interview. as interviewing with a recorder makes personal data linkable to a person (nsd, 2020), all the participants signed a written consent form. pedagogical leaders were chosen first as they work daily with the children and have a special closeness to the ordinary life in the kindergartens. second, according to the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017), these individuals can lead the work in each department, guide the assistants and perform the planning and evaluation work. overall, 23 kindergarten teachers participated in the focus group interviews. all of the teachers had positions as pedagogical leaders, with the exception of two individuals who worked as chairs and wanted to represent pedagogical leaders who were unavailable on the interview day. the chairs were well-acquainted with daily life in the departments; for this reason, their presence did not significantly affect the data. flat structure and little distance between chairs and pedagogical leaders is typical in the norwegian kindergarten context (brennautvalet, 2010; løvgren, 2012). the kindergartens in the sample were randomly given the title a–f. table 1 sample kindergartens (n = 6) and participants (n = 23) conducting focus group interviews interviews were conducted in the kindergartens themselves. each interview lasted about 35 minutes and was led by the researcher. the participants partook in the interviews by answering the questions in the interview guide and by presenting their own moments. they complemented each other, described that this was “how we usually do it in this kindergarten” and gave small narratives from daily life and practice. name number working as kindergarten a 4 pedagogical leaders, named a1–a4 kindergarten b 3 pedagogical leaders + 1 chair, named b1–b3 kindergarten c 4 pedagogical leaders, named c1–c4 kindergarten d 4 pedagogical leaders, named d1–d4 kindergarten e 4 pedagogical leaders, named e1–e3 kindergarten f 4 pedagogical leaders + 1 chair, named f1–f3 sum 23 participants 21 pedagogical leaders and 2 chairs 90 global education review 9 (2) the impression was that participants knowing each other well made them feel safer and more willing to be open; halkier (2015), however, specified that focus group interviews may be a part of social control, making participants feel unsafe and not open to contribute. the role of the moderator, therefore, is vital for managing the social interactions in the group (halkier, 2015), and the researcher was made aware of this during each of the six interviews. conducting focus group interviews the interviews were transcribed by the author, which gave proximity to the data material. the gap between the spoken and transcribed texts, according to geertzt (1973), is more than a technical process; rather, it is an interpretation woven into cultural analysis. the transcribed data material was categorized using the main points in the interview guide. in addition to this deductive approach, the data material was coded into inductive categories built upon the participants’ moments. both the inductive and deductive codes were analyzed together and categorized into two main findings in regard to the research question. overall, this created an abductive analysis process; according to peirce et al. (1994), this process reveals ways to explain unexpected moments. the first main finding concerned what is most important to learn during a child’s kindergarten time and the time prior to their starting school. this question was posed without any comments, tips or directions. the answers are, therefore, a form of inductive data. in contrast, the second main finding concerned which learning area is the most important. this question directed the participant to choose between seven learning areas in the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017). therefore, this data is built considerably upon a deductive approach. several approaches have been used to verify the findings. according to maxwell’s (1992) verification theory, qualitative studies gain validity by describing exactly what the participants say, defining theoretical concepts with precision and interpreting the participants` statements from their perspective. in the interview situation, this was achieved by the moderator repeating the participant’s answers and asking whether they were correctly perceived. second, the participants’ statements were recorded and subsequently transcribed with attention to accuracy. the results from the interviews were presented thoroughly, and this included quotation usage. overall, these moments strengthen the reliability; according to maxwell (1992, p. 288) reliability is not “...a separate issue from validity, but to a particular type of threat to validity.” this concept aligns with richards (2009), who emphasized that the best way to ensure reliability is to have valued procedures. third, theoretical concepts were precisely defined in this study (maxwell, 1992). main theoretical concepts like ell, froebelian pedagogy and bildung were operationalized in order to ensure that they considerably represented the studied phenomena. the fourth and last verification procedure was to interpret the data material from the participants’ perspective; this took into consideration the double hermeneutic approach (giddens, 1976). a part of this process was to compare the participants’ statements to create the main impression of valued learning topics in each of the six kindergartens and concurrently highlight any existing nuances. this aligns with kvale and brinkmann (2015), who specified that participants can be involved in a validation community in focus group interviews, and that valued learning topics in kindergarten 91 this can strengthen the member validity (2015, p. 284). results in all six kindergartens, the participants emphasized that the main concept to learn in kindergarten is the development of social competence followed by ell. it was unexpected that these two themes were so clear and ranked this way in each of the kindergartens. the most valued learning social competence was defined by the participants as a concept that embraces social functioning and self-development by the individual child. it also embraces having a feeling of belonging a group. social competence was defined as “to collaborate and to share” (a1), “to be part of a group” (a2), “to function together with other children” (a4) and “to relate to other human beings positively and adequately...then you create wellbeing around you and then you can learn. it is basic” (b3). the participants stated that they start working with social competence in the toddler department. “we are comforting them, showing them how to behave with each other,” participant d4 said. by giving the children safety and closeness, “we see how they are imitating and doing it themselves” (d4). social competence also entails that children are allowed to be themselves and to have space; concurrently, it was agreed that children also needed to learn to “pay attention to others and give them space” (f1). according to this, clear big differences exist among the children; for some of them, it falls “naturally” to assert themselves while others rather almost “apologize for their existence” (f1). in kindergarten c, social competence was defined as: “developing a positive self-image, mastering, feeling safe and feeling that they [the children] are important” (c1–3). the participants in all the kindergartens emphasized the importance of teaching children that they are good enough as they are, and that each child is unique. it is an ideal that the children should experience in order to show their strengths and understand that they each have something to contribute to the community, as participant e3 mentioned: “to be a little different, that is tip top!” the staff attempted to highlight the children who are silent and “do not shout so loud to get attention” (e1). the six kindergartens highlighted working with social competence as defined above. it was seen as something they had always worked with but that they could not stop working on due to the fact that “we see that there is a huge need for it” (d1). in two of the kindergartens, the participants expressed that children have changed within the last decade and have become increasingly egocentric: “it is me and me and me” (a2). overall, what really matters is social competence: “how we can be with others... it must somehow be at the bottom” (d4). working with social competence is important and fundamental. according to typical school preparation activities for a five-year-old, “pencil grips and all these things may come second” (d4). this statement highlights a clear finding from all six kindergartens. the concept of ell, mostly referred to by the participants as “language learning,” is the second most important factor in each of the six kindergartens. the most important learning area in response to which of the seven learning areas in the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017) is the most important, all six kindergartens answered 92 global education review 9 (2) uniformly. the most valued learning area was “communication, language, and text”. this learning area is a “must” (c1) and a part of the basic work in a kindergarten. disregarding it is assimilated to being unconscious in the field of teaching. participant c3 asked the following: “if you go for a walk with the children, without talking about it, then it will be just a walk, but what is the content and the purpose with what we are doing?” some kindergartens found it “a bit natural” (f1) to work predominantly with this particular learning area. these kindergartens had children from nearly 20 different countries. around 40% of these children had a different mother tongue than norwegian. for this reason, learning norwegian is part of ell. the various languages among the children affect the teachers’ work, so “it is critical to show [the children] the pictures and concretes” (a3). this means visualizing and using concrete objects so that the children to a greater extent understand what is being said. however, many other children need language stimulation. this was particularly emphasized in one of the kindergartens (d), where it was specified that more children struggled with developing a functional language than in previous times, despite their norwegian mother tongue. the participant specified that the most important way to work with language stimulation is through daily life activities––such as mealtimes and dressing–– and putting words on what they are doing. the participants expressed that the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017) is the starting point and the foundation for all types of other plans in the kindergartens: “it is the bottom” (d2), or the basis. although the most valued learning area is “communication, language, and text”, this does not mean that other learning areas are unimportant. several kindergartens highlighted that the seven learning areas are “intertwined” (d3). the main impression is that the participants were wellacquainted with the seven learning areas in the kindergarten framework plan (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017) and had clearly chosen the most important area for the children to learn about. discussion the main finding in this study is as follows: social competence is the most important topic for a kindergarten to work with. in norway, these kindergarten years begin from when the child is around a year old up to the age of six years before they begin at school. social competence and learning areas participants answering that ell is the most important learning area implied that this topic dominates over the six other learning areas: “body, movement, food, and health”, “art, culture, and creativity”, “nature, environment, and technology”, “quantities, spaces, and shapes”, “ethics, religion, and philosophy” and “local community and society” (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017, p. 47-57). the learning areas are not ranged in the curriculum. when the participants stated that the most valued topic to learn in kindergarten was social competence, none of the learning areas were mentioned. the participants mentioned that social competence is something they have “always” worked with and that it is necessary. this finding aligns with a qualitative swedish study that investigated 30 kindergarten teachers and what they considered fundamental aspects of learning within the goals of the swedish curriculum (williams et al., 2014). their main finding was that learning social knowledge was of greatest importance (p. 226). williams et al. (2014) explained these findings valued learning topics in kindergarten 93 by mentioning that the swedish kindergarten “has a long tradition of focusing on play-oriented programs, where developing children’s social competence is central” (2014, p. 227). although social competence is unestablished as a learning area in the norwegian and swedish kindergarten curricula (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017; skolverket, 2019), it is embedded in the danish kindergarten curriculum (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007). in the norwegian curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017), social competence is mentioned only twice. vallberg roth (2013), who studied concepts’ usage in scandinavian curricula, claimed that the absence of concepts connotes exclusion. additionally, the lack of utilizing the term “social competence” in the curriculum may be interpreted as absence and neglect. however, does this indeed mean that social competence is among the government directions for kindergartens, even to a small degree? social competence part of bildung social competence can be interpreted as a part of bildung; bildung is the overall goal of all educational institutions in norway, including schools and kindergartens (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017). the participants’ explanation of “social competence” largely coincides with how bildung is understood in the scandinavian educational context. the participants’ definition of social competence entails both the inner individual development, including a positive self-image (watson, 2010, in moss & preire, 2019, p. 400), and the ability to take part in a group or society through collaboration and sharing (gundem, 1998). in comparison with klafki’s term “categorical bildung” as a dialectical unity of material and formal bildung (willbergh, 2016), the connection to material bildung is quite clear: the content given to children by the adults (krüger, 2008; willbergh, 2016, p. 115), in this case is social competence. however, formal bildung is also present. the adults, or kindergarten teachers, work to edify the content relevant to the children (willbergh, 2016). the kindergarten teachers also show the children how to behave with each other as a form of modelling, give attention to all children with the inclusion of the silent ones and initiate the teaching of social competence from when the children are toddlers. these approaches were effective in regard to the participants’ testimonies. according to klafki, a unity of material and formal bildung, content and modelling is an expression of “categorical bildung” (willbergh, 2016). categorical bildung can also be an expression for exposing possible connections between social competence and ell. in contrast, social competence, ell, and bildung may be perceived as three separate cases when compared to each other. however, according to klakfi, categorical bildung is achieved by acquiring new concepts and categories, which can encompass phenomena in the world (willbergh, 2016). by highlighting material learning like ell, children can develop a rich vocabulary; this, in turn, can assist them in learning about the world, increase their social competence, aid them in developing their individual inner selves and increase their ability to function in a group (gundem, 1998; watson, 2010; moss & preire, 2019, p. 400). similar to formal learning, this strengthens the bildung process by treating children like subjects. the participants mentioned that they try to be aware of each child, to ensure that everyone gets 94 global education review 9 (2) attention and to reiterate that everyone is equally important. “learning what” and “learning how” debates and resistance surrounding what children should learn before starting school (gravklev, 2021) is not found in data material. rather, the impression existed that learning “something” was completely natural for the participants. they described their role in children’s learning processes as more than just waiting for the children’s initiative and activity, and this opposes typical features of childoriented pedagogy (brostrøm, 2004; håberg, 2017). according to the didactical triangle (künzli, 2000), child-oriented pedagogy is characterized by disregarding both the content and the staff’s role, placing the child as the centralized subject. the critique against childoriented pedagogy specifies that this direction gives the child an overwhelming responsibility for self-development and self-learning (håberg, 2017). reducing the bildung process to a formal direction causes material bildung direction to be ignored. this, in turn, entails consequences for categorial bildung. problems with formal bildung lie in the children’s content denial, which may open their eyes to other unknown perspectives. consequently, children with weak socioeconomic environments may potentially experience limited stimulation in kindergartens. in this way, social inequalities are maintained rather than balanced, reflecting that the kindergarten does not fulfil government directions regarding children receiving the same opportunities for learning and development (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017). when “how to learn” surpasses “what to learn”, the view of children’s bildung processes is unbalanced. however, problems with material bildung lie in the ways that traditions and irrelevant content are prioritized over other topics, and this is predominant in today’s society (willbergh, 2016). in any case, the balance of “how to learn” and “what to learn”—the formal and material bildung—may be of great interest for the future. froebel’s influence emphasizing both “how to learn” and “what to learn” matches the original froebelian pedagogy, as froebel balanced both material and formal bildung (brostrøm & vejleskov, 2009). bildung is achieved by the staff members, who offer valued content and are concurrently interested in the children’s input and experiences (johansson, 2004). the heritage of transforming froebelian pedagogy into a child-oriented pedagogy is a potentially debatable subject. when government directions place considerable recommendations on learning content through the kindergarten curricula—as seen in the learning areas in the scandinavian curricula (børne-og undervisningsministeriet, 2007; kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017; skolverket, 2019) —the possibility of making professional decisions outside of governmental frames is weakened. however, the participants in this study answered that social competence was the most valued topic, and this was done through their choosing of a topic that only indirectly matched the curriculum. it was only matched by the author’s interpretation of social competence and it being synonymous with the concept bildung. the findings in this study on social competence being a kindergarten’s most valued topic to learn may be interpreted as an expression of froebelian pedagogy, emphasizing the child as a learning subject and learning through interaction with other people valued learning topics in kindergarten 95 (johansson, 2004). it is likely that froebelian pedagogy has inarticulately survived as tradition. if so, the traces in the pedagogical tradition are significantly deep. these findings support the work of professor tina bruce (2019), who used a froebelian approach in her life-long work in the early childhood education field. she specified that “froebel’s influence is deeply embedded in practice today and is no longer made explicit in the training of teachers and other early childhood practitioners” (johansson, 2004, p. 82). in any case, the content in the kindergarten, or “what to learn,” must always be assessed and contextualized. the pedagogical heritage, however, can provide relevant insight for both “what to learn” and “how to learn.” it is not enough to merely love the children (bruce, 2019) nor is it enough to “just play” (oecd, 2013); it goes without a doubt that children do need kindergarten teachers who can convey both valuable knowledge and the fact that children are valuable (håberg, 2019). in light of this, froebelian pedagogy can provide considerable input and direction. conclusion in this study, kindergarten teachers were included in focus group interviews to highlight the most valued topic of what children should learn, specifically during the years in kindergarten before starting school. the participants were suitable for answering and commenting both inductively and deductively. regarding these kindergarten teachers, the findings reflected that the most important topic to learn in kindergarten was social competence, a topic that cannot be directly interpreted from the curriculum (kunnskapsdepartementet, 2017). the kindergarten teachers maneuvered in a landscape of national and international trends that were connected with school and the knowledge economy (bennett, 2010; krejsler, 2013; sommer, 2015). this study revealed that empirical investigations are required to discover the goings-on within kindergartens. kindergarten teachers, who inevitably work directly with children, may have understandings of what children need to learn before starting school, and these may conflict with the ideas behind government direction. this knowledge is required to help kindergarten children develop categorical bildung regarding “how to learn” and “what to learn.” the strengths of this study remain in the qualitative and inductive approaches. however, this study does contain notable weaknesses. the sample of six kindergartens comprising 23 participants is relatively small; similar to other qualitative studies, it is difficult to generalize these findings (kvale & brinkmann, 2015). however, stake (2000) specified that findings can inspire both research and practice, and in these ways, a naturalistic generalization can be achieved. in regard to the significant question of what topics are important for children to learn in kindergarten, this study may inspire further research. references alvestad, m. & samuelsson, i. p. 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(2020). overcoming anxiety in adult migrants' language learning by means of process drama. global education review, 7 (4), 29-45. overcoming anxiety in adult migrants' language learning by means of process drama veronica maistrello university of padua (italy) fiona clare dalziel university of padova (italy) abstract the aim of this article is to explore how drama activities can provide an opportunity for adult migrants1 to develop their competence in the language of the host community, in this case italian, in a protected and anxiety-free space. language anxiety has been classified as a specific feeling of apprehension due to the risks language learners may be required to take during the learning process, and which they may perceive as threatening. when it is adult migrants who are engaged in the learning of a new language, such anxiety might easily be aroused by specific socio-cultural factors, such as power relationships, the awareness of belonging to a minority, and the need to use an unknown language to demonstrate their skills. the article will describe how the process drama approach – which includes drama-based activities that can be adapted to the needs and preferences of learners – can be used to enable migrants to gain greater selfconfidence in their foreign language knowledge and skills. the task-based nature of process drama engages learners through the pleasure of creation, self-expression and discovery, and promotes interaction and cooperation among the members of the group. the paper includes observations gathered in the field: it will describe how process drama activities were adopted during two workshops for migrants in the city of padova in northern italy, conducted in 2018 and early 2019. the workshops were facilitated by the authors themselves and the data analyzed consists of teacher logs and focus group discussions.2 keywords language anxiety, process drama, migration, italian as a second language, adult learners introduction the starting point for this study is the well-documented need for migrants to learn the language(s) of their new countries of residence so as to facilitate their inclusion in them. as highlighted by li (2013) in her review of migrants’ language acquisition, “the ability to speak and write in the target language in the host culture is a basic step to enable them to participate in the life of the host culture, further their education, get a job, obtain health care and other social services” (p. 271). in addition, smith (2016) reminds us that in the case of forced migration, a lack of knowledge of the language and the culture of the host community can lead to a sense of powerlessness. as well as formal language learning, it is important for migrants to have opportunities to engage in authentic informal communicative events, so as to develop their language skills. yet as pointed out by dalziel and piazzoli (2019), in the case of refugees and asylum seekers, informal interaction may be restricted to service encounters and limited in terms of input, output and negotiation of meaning. this is sadly true of 30 global education review 7 (4) italy, where at the time of writing the political climate is not one which fosters dialogue between newcomers and the host community. in fact, one of the participants in the workshops described in this article, a young female nigerian asylum-seeker, complained of the lack of italian peers with whom she could engage in informal conversation. one the basis of the findings of previous studies (see for example balfour, bundy, burton, dunn, & woodrow, 2015), the authors felt that the process drama approach could attempt to bridge this gap, by enabling learners to explore language through interaction and discovery. an opportunity to explore this hypothesis arose when the authors were approached by a local ngo to conduct a series of sessions in which drama activities would be used to enhance language acquisition in migrant women. the decision to focus this study on the issue of language anxiety was taken in view of the authors’ observations of workshop participants and with reference to previous work on drama approaches and anxiety (piazzoli, 2011). despite being a small-scale project, the initial findings could provide some valuable insights into the benefits of adopting drama approaches in migrant language education. foreign language anxiety considering languages as dynamic systems constantly and unpredictably perturbed by several variables (de bot, lowie, & verspoor, 2005; lowie, 2012), foreign language anxiety (fla) has often been taken into consideration as one of these variables, in order to understand how second-language (l2) students’ learning paths may be hampered by anxiety-provoking situations. horwitz, horwitz and cope (1986) include fla in the category of specific anxiety reactions: this kind of apprehension is triggered when learners perceive their competence as communicators threatened, which leads “to reticence, self-consciousness, fear, or even panic” (p. 128). among the numerous factors which may impact on second language students, communication apprehension, fear of negative evaluation and test anxiety have been underlined (horwitz et al., 1986). other factors which have been correlated with fla are: perfectionism, self-impression, low self-esteem, low emotionalintelligence, the level of familiarity between the interlocutors, age, frequency of use, and even the number of languages learners know (foss & reitzel, 1988; macintyre & gardner, 1994; dewaele, petrides, & furnham, 2008; dewaele, 2017). however, it is inadvisable to look for a clear cause-effect connection between anxiety and what may be considered its causal factors. moreover, considering relaxation and anxiety as states and not as traits, the anxious student may feel temporarily relaxed during undemanding and anxiety-free language activities, and even those students who usually do not feel anxious when speaking the foreign language may develop a temporary state of apprehension if asked to speak in stressful conditions (gregersen, macintyre, & meza, 2014). this leads to the need to deal with anxiety in accordance with “ecological linguistics” (van lier, 2004), in other words considering it as an element that influences language learning through an unpredictable and non-linear process, where causes, consequences and anxiety itself merge in a vicious circle (macintyre, 2017). language anxiety has often been observed within the language classroom; however, some authors have also explored how this kind of apprehension may influence the life of migrants. on the one hand, migrants may feel the same apprehension as any anxious student when they are asked to speak the language of the overcoming anxiety 31 31 country in which they have settled, not only due to language competence, but also because of possible “psychological barriers” (wang, 1999). on the other hand, migrants’ situations differ from those of foreign language students: the difficulties of using the non-native language are not confined to the classroom, since the language is a necessary tool “to demonstrate their [immigrants’] skills and abilities to the host community” (plutzar & ritter, 2008, p. 9). when migrants have difficulties with the host country’s language, this will have consequences in their daily lives – in education, in finding a job, in creating relationships with the members of the community, and in being accepted (wang, 1999; garcia, ford, & casey, 2017; sevinç & dewaele, 2018). due to the variety of situations that can be labelled migrant contexts, some authors decided to analyze the attitude towards the target language of specific groups of migrants. wang (1999), for example, working with a group of mandarin speaking women who had moved to canada, analyzed their experiences with english language. the study showed that these women did not find it difficult to study the language, its grammar and vocabulary on their own, but to use it in front of others – in particular in spoken interaction. garcia, ford and casey (2017) analyzed whether and how the context, the individual biographical background (age, gender, level of education), self-rated competence, and personality factors influenced language anxiety during oral communication. after observing a group of latin-american migrants (whose first language was spanish) to australia, and their behavior when speaking english, the authors claimed that language anxiety varies depending both on the interlocutor, the means of communication, the context, and the time one has spent in the host country. learners’ excessive concerns about the risk of making mistakes, looking silly and being negatively evaluated may lead them to be unfocused and not so proficient (eyseck, 1979, in macintyre & gardner, 1994). therefore, it is important for the learning process to take place in a relaxed and anxiety-free environment, where students can totally benefit from the activity. only when the learner feels safe can he/she practice the language and test his/her knowledge accepting corrections as feedback to improve (hashemi, 2011; ur, 1996, in ellis & shintani, 2014). when students do not feel at ease within the classroom, they often choose to avoid possible uncomfortable feelings and a sense of awkwardness by not speaking: indeed, although they may receive positive feedback, which would contribute to their self-confidence, anxious students are more focused on the risk of losing their face in front of their peers and teachers (tsui, 1996, in ellis & shintani, 2014). drama-based language learning drama has been seen to be a valuable tool in the language classroom in many ways: it involves students in their own learning process, stimulating their mind, body, emotional sphere and creativity (maley & duff, 1978; piazzoli, 2018; o’neill, 1995). there are many different activities that can be borrowed from actors’ practice, such as: mime, role-play, storytelling, dramatization, narration, hot seating, still images, interviews, thought-tracking, simulations, tunnel of decision (davies, 1990; owens & barber, 2001). these activities may be adapted not only to different spheres of language learning – such as grammar, literature, or vocabulary (chang, 2011; schewe, 2013) – but also to the students’ “means of acquiring information” (gardner & macintyre, 1993, p. 334) and learning preferences. drama enables students and teachers to explore the same concept through different channels and codes, 32 global education review 7 (4) visual, verbal, kinesthetic, or affective (ashtonhay, 2005; chang, 2011). practitioners adopting drama activities strive to make the classroom a relaxed environment so as to enable students to practice the second language without being hampered by affective barriers (carson, 2012; piazzoli, 2011; sharp, 2014). along with the excessive fear of making mistakes, shyness is also a factor that can fuel language anxiety (athiemoolam, 2013). drama-based preparatory activities can help students to become used to expressing themselves in front of others though their voice and body (ntelioglou, 2011). indeed, like public speaking, drama requires students to stand in front of others and to communicate with an “audience”. tableaux and mime (davies, 1990), for example, enable students to focus on their body, face and movements, without requiring them to deal with the problem of speaking the foreign language. through this kind of activity, students’ language anxiety may be lowered because they are able to recognize that communicative competence does not depend only on language, and that they can adopt nonlinguistic means of expression (liu, 2002). drama-based activities are also of value because many of them imply that students work in small groups, encouraging collaboration and interaction. it may be useful to spend some time enabling students to know and trust each other, through games that involve their names, hobbies, and experiences, and also through activities requiring them to work as a team (swale, 2009). working together to reach a common goal creates a community atmosphere within the classroom, where even the shiest student can feel at ease and willing to actively take part in the activity. process drama is an approach that developed from drama in education and exploits drama-based activities and negotiation between the members of the class to practice the foreign language instead of aiming at the creation of a final performance (schewe, 2013; piazzoli, 2018). in this approach, the facilitator provides the learners with input as the starting point of an activity, but then it is up to the students to bring their knowledge, skills and experiences into play (maley & duff, 1978; o’neill & lambert, 1982; kao & o’neill, 1998, in stinson & freebody, 2006). students acquire authorship and responsibility for their own learning experience, and when the whole class actively contributes to the activity, the result is an energized learning moment (van lier, 2008). in process drama, students have the chance to access fictional times, places, roles, and situations, just as actors on the stage (o’neill, 1995). in order to help students in accepting the suspension of disbelief and in entering the fictional world, it may be useful to introduce it through an appropriate pre-text (dalziel & piazzoli, 2019; o’toole, 2008; o’neill, 1995), which is the input to be modified and developed through negotiation. another way to help the students in accepting the fiction is to introduce and/or develop it through the device of the teacher-in-role (o’neill, 1995). this implies that the teacher takes on a fictional role to involve students more directly in the make-believe, which is personified by a character that students can see, touch and speak with (pheasant, 2015). this lowers affective barriers by reversing the usual teacher-student relationship, since students are usually given power, knowledge and control, while the teacher becomes the one needing help (stinson & freebody, 2006). the creation of a fictional world has a number of benefits. firstly, students can experience situations that they would not have the chance to do so otherwise, providing not only a deeper understanding of topics and language uses, but also the opportunity to overcoming anxiety 33 33 express themselves in different contexts (schewe, 1998). this may fill the gap between the language handled within the classroom and its actual use, and enable students to practice vocabulary and linguistic structures without the negative consequences that linguistic mistakes and misunderstandings may have in real life (chang, 2011; stinson & freebody, 2006). secondly, the fictional character the learner plays during drama can also be worn as a mask, which makes students feel safe (piazzoli, 2011). therefore, they are enabled to take risks without fearing the consequences, since possible negative evaluation or criticism would fall on the fictional character, not on the student (stern, 1980; stinson & freebody, 2006). finally, since drama arouses tension, enthusiasm, enjoyment, sympathy and other emotions, it can meaningfully involve students in the learning activity, foster them to put aside foreign language anxiety to give voice to their feelings and creativity (schewe, 1998; pheasant, 2015; stern, 1980). case study: from here and there to padova this section will report on some observations, in the form of teacher logs, of two workshops that took place in padova, italy, in october – november 2018, and in march – may 2019. the workshops were promoted by the ngo razzismo stop, organized by the authors, and aimed to help migrants to italy to learn and practice italian through process drama. the section will give an overview of the make-up of the groups, of the structure of the workshops, and of some of the activities conducted. it will also report on some incidents that may foster reflection on the effect foreign language anxiety can have on the individual, and on how process drama activities could be used to make the anxious learner feel that he/she is in a safe environment. what follows is the result of the observations that the facilitators made upon the behavior of the participants during their workshop, and recorded in their logs, of the comments and doubts the participants raised during the activities, and of the final focus group interview the participants took part in during the last meeting of the first workshop – the authors thus adopted a qualitative research method (merriam, 2009). the first group met once a week for six weeks, and each meeting lasted about three hours. it was intended only for women, since the purpose was to create a safe environment where women with little knowledge of italian could practice and learn it without feeling embarrassed, which would be encouraged also by the drama-based approach that would be adopted. on the other hand, the march-may group included men and women – and even one school-aged student – who met for seven weeks, two hours per week. in both cases, no limits on language knowledge were set, and it was difficult to predict who and how many people would come. moreover, after the first few meetings, it became clear that the group would not always be the same, and due to this continual change of participants, it was necessary to create a series of workshops that could be completed within each meeting. furthermore, the activities were planned by taking into consideration that they would possibly need to be modified during the execution of the workshop itself, depending on the number of participants and their language level. throughout the first workshop 17 different women took part in the activities, from a minimum of three to a maximum of seven people per meeting; most of them were from nigeria, the others from ghana, morocco, iran, pakistan, syria, brazil, slovenia, and moldova. during the second course of workshops 19 different people came to at least one meeting, 34 global education review 7 (4) from a minimum of two to a maximum of fifteen (during the first meeting); they were originally from brazil, cuba, morocco, nigeria, afghanistan, india, russia, burkina faso, syria and lebanon. the groups were made up of different categories of migrants: refugees, asylum seekers, international students and economic migrants. english was often used as a lingua franca, both to explain the activities, and also among the participants when they needed to discuss and create brief scenes; however, not all of them spoke english, which sometimes created communication problems. as the groups were made up of different learners most of the time, it was necessary to start each meeting with some simple warm-up and team-building exercises, to move then step by step into the actual process drama activity. here are some examples of the steps followed during most of the meetings. warming up. speaking in a foreign language, moving and pretending to be someone else in front of strangers may be highly demanding (schumann, 1975; ntelioglou, 2011); therefore, the learners were first asked to complete activities which were simple both in terms of language, movement and acting, and which would enable them to get to know each other. for example, they were asked to say their names and to make a little movement, to be copied by the other participants, or they were introduced to the activity pass the face, which consists in thinking about an emotion and “passing” it to the next person who has to imitate it. another exercise used was the mirror game: the learners were asked to choose a partner and to imitate first his/her movement, and then to repeat exactly what he/she was saying. then, to encourage cooperation among the learners, they were invited to complete another leader-follower activity, where the followers would close their eyes and let the partners lead them first by the shoulders, then by holding their hands and finally using only the voice. focus on language. since some of the participants were total beginners, some exercises aimed at providing them with the vocabulary they needed in the following activities. the puzzled man (figure 1) helped them to revise and learn the parts of the body by collaborating to understand how to complete the image. we also used italian songs, whose words had been introduced using cards to link meanings and images, and italian idioms (figure 2), which the participants analyzed and compared with similar idioms in their own languages. figure 1: the puzzled man (property of authors) overcoming anxiety 35 35 figure 2: italian idioms (property of authors) pre-text. the aim of this stage of the drama is to give learners some inspiration to create and enter the fictional world where the actual drama will take place (dalziel & piazzoli, 2019). examples of pre-texts that can be used are photographs, pictures, songs or short videos (piazzoli, 2018). the participants were often asked to describe a picture and to make guesses about its context. towards the drama. starting from the pre-text, learners were asked to create tableaux about a word, a situation, or a topic. they were given time to discuss how to create the silent, motionless scene, and about the role of each member of the group. after showing it to the other learners, they were asked to add movements (mime), and only in the following step could the fictional characters also speak. in this way it was easier to create a scene, because learners were guided step by step; moreover, the temporary audience was invited to guess the roles and the intentions of the characters, and to ask for clarifications. we also used hot seating to help learners to create credible and precise fictional characters and to enter their roles: first, they were asked to write some details about the character – name, age, job skills, dream job – and then to answer some questions while pretending to be him/her. teacher in role. there was another tool that was often used to involve the learners in the drama: the teacher in role (o’neill, 1995): the facilitators played the role of people needing help, while the learners took on the role of the experts who could solve the problem. during one session, one of the facilitators pretended to be a girl who had lost her voice and who was supposed to sing at her sister’s wedding, and the learners were asked first to give her advice to get her voice back, and then to create the scenes of the wedding, and finally to sing with her. reflection. the language and drama activities alternated with moments of reflection on the activities that had been completed, and on the language that had been used during the exercises, so that learners had the chance to ask for clarification or to focus on particular linguistic items. for example, during a semi-improvised scene, one of the learners used the italian idiom “in bocca al lupo” [break a leg], but many of the others did not know the meaning, so it was explained during the following reflection activity. 36 global education review 7 (4) to make the approach clear to the reader, we will now describe an entire session from the march-may circle of workshops, when the group was entirely made up of men: ro. (brazil), d. and m. (nigeria), y. (burkina-faso), and fr. (afghanistan). the mirror game as a warmup. participant y. was often reticent both to talk and to take part in the activities, but being in a pair with participant ro. – who was not only about the same age but also very friendly with y. – made him highly involved when asked to copy/lead the movements of ro., although he found it difficult to repeat his words. group building pre-text. the members of the group were asked to talk for a few minutes about their birthplaces, first in their own language and then in italian. this activity gave the chance to hear the voice even of the most silent among them. however, y. and d. did not use their actual native language, but rather their second, namely french and english; furthermore, fr. preferred to describe his country directly in italian, and when the group asked him to say something in farsi – his mother tongue – he only whispered a short sentence, looking highly embarrassed. this reaction from participant fr. made the facilitators reflect upon how important it is to convey the message that learning the target language is not meant to substitute the native one, since it is part of what a person is, of the private self (piazzoli, 2011). language. at this point the group was invited to reflect upon the information they may need when traveling, and the questions they might ask a person organizing a trip: for example, “how do you get there?,” “is it a safe city?,” “what is the hotel like?” ro., m. and fr. contributed actively during this step, helped by the fact that they had the vocabulary that was necessary to ask the questions. d. instead needed to be encouraged to speak, and he only did so in english. however, it is worth noting that enabling him to actively contribute to the list making helped him to become more involved in the following drama activity, although he spoke little italian. their suggested questions were written down by the facilitator (figure 4), so that the participants could easily remember them during the following activity, and thus act as scaffolding, so as to minimize anxiety. figure 4: questions about trip teacher in role. at this point, one facilitator made an excuse to leave the room overcoming anxiety 37 37 and the group was told that they would soon meet a travel agent, since they had won a trip. after a while, the facilitator came back disguised as the travel agent. while most of the participants had already seen the teacher in role approach, fr. was experiencing it for the first time, and was amused and involved. however, no one broke the fictionality, and without the need to introduce it, the whole group immediately entered the fictional situation. they started asking questions about the trip, discovering that we would go to rio de janeiro, which is the birthplace of participant ro. the drama. first the participants were invited to create some tableaux or simple scenes about the arrival in rio and then the problem to solve was introduced: the other facilitator –playing the role of one of the group traveling – got lost, and the other members of the group had to think of how to find her. the participants showed a high level of involvement – which often means low level of language anxiety – in particular because of the constant tension due to the clash between fiction and reality (piazzoli, 2018). for example, at a certain point the facilitator playing the lost girl changed her role into that of the police woman asking the group to describe the missing person. the final step consisted to have a group discussion discussing as a group (out of the fictional world) where the girl had gone, and creating a complete scene with movements and dialogues. all of these elements – the involvement of the learners’ private lives, surprise, problems to solve and tension – make the learning at the same time unpredictable and meaningful, less easy to control by the facilitator, but more useful to the learners (o’neil & lambert, 1982; maley & duff, 1978). signs of anxiety as recorded in the teacher logs, in both workshops, there were some participants who apparently showed little or even no signs of anxiety, and who took part actively in the proposed exercises even if their level of italian was low. however, as this article aims to explore language anxiety and how drama-based activities may help learners overcome it, the observations will mainly focus on the participants who appeared to be anxious. during the very first meeting of the first workshop, most of the women explained that the greatest difficulty for them was understanding when italians speak. j. and b. (nigeria) and m. (pakistan) did not answer the facilitators’ questions but only nodded. unlike other participants with little knowledge of the italian language, they did not exploit the meeting as a chance to practice the language, but preferred to keep silent, even though one of them (participant j.) during an informal chat complained about the lack of interaction with italians in her everyday life. it soon became clear that the reticence to speak was not only due to lack of linguistic knowledge. some of the participants, for example, appeared to feel under pressure even when asked to say their name, and tried to mask it by smiling or saying it in a whisper, as if they feared to say it incorrectly. 38 global education review 7 (4) a common characteristic shared by most of the women who were reluctant to take part in the activities was that of keeping their bags close to them, as if to protect themselves from an external threat. the fact was observed the first time when f. arrived and sat down by holding her bag close to her body for the whole first part of the meeting; this tendency was observed several times, and those women holding their bags close turned out to be those less willing to speak. another sign of possible anxiety noted by the facilitators in their logs, revealed for example by on the part of j. (nigeria), was whispering. from the first meeting she appeared willing to practice italian, but at the same time to be not very self-confident about her linguistic competence. indeed, whenever she tried to say a word or a short sentence – for example during the task of guessing what the other group was miming – she said half of it in a low voice, and completed it only when receiving confirmation from the facilitators. on the other hand, b. (nigeria) tried to cover her embarrassment by laughing nervously. at first she seemed to be sceptical about the approach, and whenever she was asked to do or to say something she reacted by showing – or saying – she did not understand the instructions. furthermore, when the task was clear – for example when the participants were asked to say their names – she said her name while laughing and glancing nervously at j., maybe in search of complicity since she was clearly embarrassed. in some cases, the lack of a common lingua franca – for example with m. (pakistan), f. (morocco) and y. (burkina faso) – made it difficult to understand whether the lack of participation of the learners was due to the problems in understanding instructions, to shyness or to actual language anxiety. moreover, since many of the participants with a beginner level of italian only came once, it was not possible to understand the reasons behind such behavior. signs of relaxation this section will report on some examples showing how drama-based activities created a relaxed atmosphere that enabled even the hesitant participants to relax and benefit from the exercises. the preparatory activities proved to be useful both to help the facilitator in understanding the participants’ levels of language, and the learners in becoming accustomed to the unconventional learning approach. to this end, drama-based activities requiring movements and creativity were often alternated with moments of reflection, discussion or explanation where the participants were seated. m. (pakistan) and f. (morocco) provided examples of how high foreign language anxiety can be overcome. they had a beginner level of italian, and neither of them spoke english, which made it difficult both to explain the activities and to build up mutual trust. however, simple undemanding activities proved to be useful to engage the participants during the workshop. in the first meeting, during an activity to get to know each other, the participants were asked to say their names by making gestures, so that the other members of the overcoming anxiety 39 39 group could repeat both the name and the gesture. when it came m.’s turn, she just smiled and after a few seconds of complete silence opened her arms as a sign of surrender since she had not understood what to do; however, the rest of the group took that as her gesture, and repeated it saying her name, a reaction that led her to smile – sincerely this time – probably because she understood she had completed the task although she had not understood the instructions. similarly, after being asked to complete a simple task, f. seemed to relax. during a preparatory activity, she was asked to mime the word “occhi” [eyes]; as she did not speak english, the facilitators showed her what to do. first, she did not understand and just stood up in front of the others, but then we showed her again what to do and she completed the task. the second time we asked her to mime “sorriso” [smile]: this time she already knew what to do and when she saw that she could complete the activity, a genuine smile of satisfaction substituted the fictional one. the warm-up activities also turned out to be useful because they were sometimes challenging. for example, the simple games requiring learners to remember others’ names enabled the newcomers both to know each other and to relax – even the group of women holding their bags tight appeared to lower their guard during this phase. indeed, when someone forgets a name, often tension arises and is then released through laughs or smiles. curiosity is also a good tool to lower affective barriers. the collection of words used in different languages to say “fuoco” [fire] seemed to animate and involve the participants, who were asked to utter the word in their own language. indeed, by collecting the words used in different languages to refer to fire, they had the chance not only to feel that their native culture and language had the same importance as the target one, but also to contribute actively to the activity, and to become curious about other languages. during the second course something similar happened when ro. (brazil) was describing rio de janeiro, and all the others started using italian to collect more information about it because sincerely interested in knowing more about that city. probably, this kind of activity lowers affective barriers because the learners feel like they are included in the learning process; for example, fr. (afghanistan) demonstrated a willingness in helping the facilitator by explaining some language rules of italian to those with more limited knowledge, taking on the role of the expert, and adding to the sense of community in the group (piazzoli, 2011). observing j. and b. – in the first workshop – the facilitators noted that that the group appeared to be influencing the individual’s level of anxiety (athiemoolam, 2013). first, b. started managing to complete the tasks without laughing when she was not in the spotlight. b.’s reserve was mostly due to the presence of people she did not know and to the exposure of her lack of knowledge of italian in front of them. this speculation results from witnessing her active participation and numerous attempts 40 global education review 7 (4) to use italian language throughout most of the activities of the second meeting, where only two other participants were present. indeed, it was still possible to notice a difference: she forgot her embarrassment during the activities requiring participants to practice vocabulary related to the family and parts of the body, even if this required making movements and speaking italian, but when she was asked to answer simple questions in italian, in a “hot seat” activity, she appeared to be very anxious and started laughing again, although both questions and answers had been prepared in advance. however, after overcoming her panic, she found the courage to run the risk, and successfully completed the task, this time without glancing at j. but at the facilitators, as if she had been looking for confirmation about the language instead of for complicity. the facilitators noted that participant j. appeared to be more willing to take part in the activities when working in small groups, rather than speaking in front of the whole class; she also appeared more self-confident when she had time to prepare her utterances in advance. for example, during the planning of a short scene, she proposed the lines “mi piace” [i like it] or “andiamo a ballare” [let’s go to dance]. however, during the third meeting, when the level of italian of most of the new participants was higher than that of j., she became silent, since the activities became increasingly demanding: like the other women with a lower knowledge of italian language, j. seemed eclipsed by those who could answer the questions faster and with a wider range of vocabulary. it became necessary to address questions explicitly to j. to encourage her to speak and not to let the others answer before she could do so. the final step of most of the meetings was the creation of a short partlyplanned scene where both the facilitators and the participants played roles. it was often introduced by the teacher-in-role activity described above, which always arouses surprise among the learners when they see the teacher becoming a character in the story for the first time. indeed, through a pre-text, a mystery or a problem to be solved was introduced and students were asked to discuss how to solve the problem and to create a scene about it. the tension created through these devices involved the learners and made them willing to speak italian in order to take part in the problem solving component of the activity. moreover, tension was also aroused by the contrast between reality and fiction. for example, during the second course, one of the facilitators adopted the role of a lost member of a group of tourists, played by the other participants, who needed to plan how to find her. however, at a certain point a police officer was needed in the scene, and the facilitator changed role, asking them to describe the lost girl. the contrast between the real self and the two different fictional characters she was playing stimulated amusement and smiles among the participants, but no one broke the suspension of disbelief, because everyone was enjoying completing the scene. overcoming anxiety 41 41 conclusion in the context of migration, the interaction between expert speakers of the target language and newcomers may unfortunately be impeded by the reluctance of members of the host community to enter into dialogue with migrants, who are often viewed as a burden to society, rather than a resource (see for example dalziel & piazzoli, 2019). all too often, integration is seen as the one-way process of migrants adapting to the host society’s norms, rather than a twoway process of reciprocal learning and engagement (li & sah, 2019). it is for this reason that language educators in migrant contexts need to find ways of going beyond formal language learning to help students who may experience language anxiety and to motivate them. the first step is to go beyond the traditional idea of teaching, and to encourage the creation of an environment where the group can critically explore their different situations through a genuine dialogue among all the members and facilitators included (freire, 2018). during the last meeting with the only-women group, the facilitators asked the participants to take part in a brief focus group interview, which gave the chance to have a clear view on their opinions about process drama approach in language learning and about the workshop. many of the facilitators’ hypotheses were confirmed by the words of the interviewees, both about language anxiety and their attitude towards the learning method (maistrello, 2019). facilitator: did you ever feel anxious when you had to speak italian, afraid to speak sometimes, even if you know what to say […]? a.: no, i felt free to ask, so it was very comfortable for me. no an anxiety. j.: like before when i try to speak, they’d be laughing at me, that i’m not correct, but i’ll keep on pushing, no matter what, i’ll keep on trying. b.: yeah, for me it’s sometimes difficult, even when i know what to say, it’s just like […] somehow difficult for me, […] to reply is somehow difficult. facilitator: did you feel forced to speak here or did sometime happen so that you were like “ok i want to speak in this environment, like i feel free to speak” i mean, was it somehow difficult, or different from other classes you had before? b.: yes, because we […] laughing, because you […] us free, when i don’t know something to say you have to help [me to speak] […]. yes, because it is more easier, more easier […] facilitator: [among] the activities we have done, something in particular you liked, something that you think helped you somehow? j.: last time i went for… to submit curriculum. most of the things, you know, we studied here i used them. when i went for they asked me questions i want to submit my curriculum cause i’m looking for job, 42 global education review 7 (4) so [i knew] how to present it, how to say it, so i learnt a lot. after repeated meetings, not only did the learners appear to be less anxious in testing their hypotheses about italian and in asking for clarifications or translations when they recognised gaps in their knowledge of the language, but were also more willingly to use italian to chat with the other members of the group – facilitators included – about themselves. when learners manage to overcome language anxiety, they become able to negotiate meaning without being afraid of appearing foolish in asking for clarification. mutual negotiation facilitates comprehension for both the interlocutors, reduces misunderstandings (krashen, 1982; long, 1983), and enables the learner to use language in a meaningful way, which leads to language learning (pica, 1991; van lier, 2004). through this study it has been suggested that when students are absorbed in a fictional world, fear of negative evaluation, shyness, stress and concern about linguistic correctness may fade into the background, while the need to communicate and to keep the drama going encourages them to exploit all their communicative skills – the second language included – almost forgetting about their foreign language anxiety 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(2011). introduction: second and additional language learning through drama. in j. winston (ed.), second language learning through drama: practical techniques and application (1-5). london, new york: routledge. celebrating 10 years of the global education review 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wermuth, melvin. (2023). celebrating 10 years of the global education review. global education review, 10 (4), 1-4. celebrating 10 years of the global education review melvin wermuth this year marks the 10th anniversary of the global education review. as the founding editor, i have been invited to write a brief editorial commenting on the milestone. thus, i have an opportunity to reflect on how it started, the efforts and achievements of the current team of editors, and to look forward to topics about challenges facing education around the world, which will supply material for discussion in future issues. it is a source of pride to be asked, which is pleasant, but it is surprising to me that this journal survived for these past ten years, because when it began, without any institutional support, i had no idea what it was going to be about. ordinarily, you don’t begin a project until you know what you want to do. but in 2012, alfred posamentier, then the dean of the school of education at mercy college, suggested that i begin a journal. with no idea of what i was agreeing to, i agreed. obviously, creating a new journal would not be possible without the complete commitment of the school of education faculty. at al’s suggestion, i announced my intention at a faculty meeting. they liked the idea, and with the enthusiastic endorsement of the faculty, we began. we began with no clear idea of what to publish, no name for the journal, and no knowledge of how to publish online. yet, began we did. but begin what? after that meeting, a then new faculty member, patrick mccabe, formerly associate editor at reading and writing quarterly, offered to help. he said that for some time he had wanted to do a comparative international policy-oriented journal. “policy makers” would include practitioners in the field to get a real world feel of what was going on in education in various countries. his idea resonated with me. now we knew what we would publish. next, we needed a name. the faculty suggested various names for the journal, all of them including the word “mercy” in the title. none were deemed acceptable. mercy college was a small college, and for the international journal envisioned, a name that suggested something larger was required. one of my early supporters was bruce cooper, world renowned professor of the policy and economics of education at fordham university. one day at lunch he asked, “what’s it going to be about?” after a brief explanation, he suggested the title, global education review (ger). now we had a name for the journal. sadly, bruce passed away this year but his belief that, “quality education is a fundamental human right, not a privilege,” lives on in the articles that ger publishes. how to publish? the public knowledge project at simon fraser university (sfu) in canada supplied the software. the developers of the software answered questions and offered to publish it for a fee. so, we turned to the very helpful faculty of sfu’s program in print and digital publishing for answers and some 2 global education review 10 (4) suggestions. and so, with eric martone volunteering to be co-editor, we began to prepare for the first issue. two years later, we had acquired an international advisory board of well-known academics, developed a mailing list for initial distribution that comprised 3,000 education faculty at 200 research universities around the globe, and obtained commitments from over 100 faculty at major institutions to review articles within their fields of expertise. then we published the first issue. one of my earliest supporters, erwin h. epstein (emeritus) at loyola university chicago, a founder of the comparative and international education society, provided a kick-start by allowing access for ger to send announcements to the cies membership list, 4,000 at that time. but even with the best distribution, open-access journals that don’t charge authors a fee for publication, and with no institutional support, don’t survive for ten years without a committed editorial team. ger is lucky to have a committed team. the four editors, eric martone, helge wasmuth, roseanne vallice levy, and elena nitecki have continued to work to publish ger while teaching and fulfilling their increasing administrative responsibilities as mercy college transitioned to become mercy university. over the ten-year period, distribution continued to increase, and databases began to take notice: first was education resources information center (eric) of the u.s. department of education. an email and phone call came to ask if we would grant permission for ger to be indexed in eric. next was cengage. would we grant permission for cengage to include ger in the databases that they sell to libraries and institutions worldwide? today, according to world cat, ger is indexed in more than 600 libraries worldwide, and eric reports that ger content is downloaded from its database about 6,000 times in every six-month period. as for evidence of academic impact, scispace reported that ger's more than 220 articles have received over 1,550 academic citations. faculty now publishing in the journal for promotion and tenure include academics from major universities around the world. a new initiative of the current team, which should expand the reach and influence of ger, is to co-sponsor academic events that coincide with its themed issues. the first of these international webinars—why does froebel matter in the 21st century?—was hosted on zoom in may 2022 by the froebel trust (london) and mercy college (new york). the event corresponded with “finding froebel: national and cross-national pedagogical paths in froebelian early childhood education,” a two-part issue (nos. 1 and 2 in 2022). speakers included teresa k. aslanian, university of southeastern norway (chair); maria cooper, university of aukland (new zealand); jan-erik johansson, professor emeritus, oslo metropolitan university (norway); nicola kemp, canterbury christ church university (england); christina macrae, manchester metropolitan university (england); cecilia marion-puntarelli, indiana university (united states); lynn mcnair, university of edinburgh (scotland); helge wasmuth, mercy college (united states); tansy watts, froebel trust and canterbury christ church university (england). congratulations to the current team of editors for their amazing accomplishments! looking forward to the next few years, it seems to me that the need to provide an international perspective on the challenges that will face education is greater than ever. by celebrating 10 years of the global education review 3 providing a global perspective, ger will provide an advantage to policy makers and practitioners in countries around the world. what follows are examples of topics that should be of interest. 1. quality of instruction and covid-19 the quality of instruction continues to be an issue in countries around the world and the effect of covid-19 on the education of children may have a lasting negative effect on the income of the children and the economic well-being of the nation. post pandemic truancy (chronic absenteeism) increased from 26% in the 2017-2018 school year to 66% in the 2021-22 school year. an analysis of government data from johns hopkins university reported in fortune magazine (fortune, 2023) indicated absenteeism has increased in elementary and middle schools, as well as in high schools. according to the new york times, progress in reading and math was set back by two decades, with the most damaging effect on poorer children (the new york times, 2023). such losses will result in lower lifetime earnings for the children and be a drag on the economy of the nation. what is being done internationally to make up for the learning losses resulting from the pandemic? the answers will differ from country to country, as the challenges vary. but a comparative approach can provide opportunities for one nation to learn from what another finds useful. 2. immigration and immigrant populations immigration and immigrant populations will continue to provide challenges to governments in north america, europe, countries of the persian gulf and aisia, and not only on our southern border. children of immigrants face difficulties, including poverty, discrimination based on race and social class, and language barriers. these difficulties are often associated with lower educational achievement, social isolation, and limited access to health services. what is being done in schools by governments to mitigate the problems that these children face? the approaches will differ according to the needs and economics of the nation and one nation can learn from successful approaches tried in another nation. 3. academic achievement academic achievement continues to be an area of concern in all countries as they compete economically. the united states is concerned, for example, that achievement in reading and mathematics has been in a longterm decline (nces, 2023). a related issue is the role of standardized testing in measuring achievement and charges that tests are unfair to minorities. would less obtrusive methods yield different results? what programs and approaches to evaluation are being tried in countries around the world that appear to hold promise for better results. an advantage of an international perspective is that one nation can learn from what neighbors are doing and adapt policies to meet these challenges. 4. the economics and financing of education the economics and financing of education continue to be a challenge to governments around the world. the relationships between the funding of quality schools and educational achievement are complex, and the role of family and social class cannot be overestimated. for example, in the united states, declines in post-secondary education caused by cuts in government funding fall most heavily on black high school students as they tend to be more from low-income families. human capitol theory suggests that 4 global education review 10 (4) universal education is good for the individual, for communities, and for the nation (becker, 1975). the need for a solution is apparent. what percentage of gross domestic product should be invested in education? can private schooling and home schooling provide supplements to public funding, or do they cause other problems? how different countries answer these questions is an area ripe for investigation. looking forward to the next ten years, as ger continues to publish quality international research and increase its circulation, hopefully, decision makers will take notice of the empirical evidence reported to implement evidence-based programs and policies that guarantee both equity and solid foundations for the children of their nations. references becker, gary s., 1975. human capital. https://www.econlib.org/library/enc/h umancapital.html fortune, 2023. america’s public schools are on their last legs: the proportion of students attending a school with “chronic absenteeism” has doubled since pre-pandemic times. https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/studen ts-missing-school-attendance-chronicabsenteeism-teacher-shortage/amp/ nces, 2023. naep long-term assessment results: reading and mathematics. https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/hig hlights/ltt/2023/ new york times, 2023. the startling evidence on learning is in. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/ opinion/pandemic-school-learningloss.html https://www.econlib.org/library/enc/humancapital.html https://www.econlib.org/library/enc/humancapital.html https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/students-missing-school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-teacher-shortage/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/students-missing-school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-teacher-shortage/amp/ https://fortune.com/2023/11/18/students-missing-school-attendance-chronic-absenteeism-teacher-shortage/amp/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/ https://www.nationsreportcard.gov/highlights/ltt/2023/ https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/pandemic-school-learning-loss.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/pandemic-school-learning-loss.html https://www.nytimes.com/2023/11/18/opinion/pandemic-school-learning-loss.html using humor and science to become happier and healthier 97 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: zadora, anna (2019). using humor and science to become happier and healthier. [review of the book the laughing guide to well-being by isaac prilleltensky]. global education review, 6 (2). 97-99. book review using humor and science to become happier and healthier “the laughing guide to well-being” by isaac prilleltensky by anna zadora the laughing guide to well-being: using humor and science to become happier and healthier is an attempt by isaac prilleltensky to address the widespread components of wellbeing with humor and science. the book, for example, addresses the social importance of intelligent laughing as a source of a better life and for an increased personal understanding of the pillars of an accomplished, meaningful, and healthy life. a particular emphasis is placed on concrete advice as an essential part of everyday well-being. the first chapter, “your six areas of wellbeing,” concentrates on the acronym i coppe (interpersonal, community, occupational, physical, psychological, and economical wellbeing). prilleltensky insets on the importance of “getting organized”—the first step toward wellbeing—and the book itself proves that: it is clear thanks to a coherent, organized structure. the following chapters explore each of his six areas of well-being. a key-notion of well-being, for example, is that wealth “is far from money”; rather, it is about gaining capital in interpersonal, community, occupational, physical, and psychological facets of life and the capacity to translate this intellectual capital to a financially rewarding occupation. prilleltensky differentiates happiness—momentary enjoyment and pleasure—from the more profound notion of well-being, which is the “satisfaction of life overall, relating to a sense of meaning and purpose, and invites individuals to keep in mind the practical application: know yourself, help yourself, know other, help other. understanding, however, must be followed by action, as reflected in his grease (gradual, rewarded, easy, alternatives, supported and educated) strategies. each action should be reasonable, pragmatic, and resultorientated. to change an aspect of life, a smart (specific, measurable, achievable, time-limited) goal should help. interpersonal well-being refers to satisfaction in relationships that matter to us, and in which reciprocity, avoiding judgment, fairness, and co-creation of a sense of community with a “we” modality are 98 global education review 6 (2) cornerstones. the “best enemy” for interpersonal well-being, he argues, is “to be right about everything,” which is no more than a compensation for incompetence. effective and emphatic listening involves parking intrusive thoughts; identifying hidden needs, feelings, and beliefs of the other person; sharing with humility your opinions about them; asking open-ended questions; and refraining from judgment. the following chapter, “community wellbeing,” touches upon group and effective community building, as reflected in the acronym i value it (inclusive host, visionary, asset seeker, listener, unique solution finder, evaluator, implementer, trendsetter). the fourth chapter, “occupational wellbeing,” focuses on organizational efficiency, which consists of concentrating on important professional elements to reduce superficial and irrelevant ones. feeling engaged and appreciated are among the important criteria for occupational well-being. an engaged, fair, and valued member of an organization is one who is able to help people and improve the organizational culture. the subsequent chapter, “physical wellbeing,” concerns how being mindful of the body is essential for health and wellness. satisfaction with our own bodies starts with banal elements of physical well-being, like consuming healthy food and drinks and partaking in physical activity. bet i can (behaviors, emotions, thoughts, interactions, context, awareness and next step) provides means for achieving the chapter’s goals. the sixth chapter, “psychological wellbeing,” analyzes fundamental aspects of psychological well-being, including satisfaction with life, as well as acceptance and meaningful recognition, which in turn builds community links. paths to experience self-recognition include self-care, self-acceptance, self-esteem, care, respect, and support. avoiding negative judgments that can have heavy consequences and accepting differences are also components of psychological well-being. early sources of psychological well-being include one’s parents, caregivers, and teachers. well-being is provided through simple and piratical verbs, such as do, feel, think, relate, observe, and reflect. negative judgment and stress are the archenemies of wellbeing. one can build positive experiences through positive thoughts and relationships. satisfaction, happiness, and meaning are essential for psychological well-being, representing evaluative, experiential, and eudaimonic well-being. the next chapter, “economic well-being,” focuses not only on financial conditions, but also on the cost of living and distinguishing what is necessary from what is superfluous. economic resources provide financial security for physical and psychological resources for a long time. improving economic well-being consists in buying experiences instead of goods, buying time, postponing consumption, and investing in others. overall, prilleltensky provides a lot of humor, clear practical examples, illustrations, and advice that relays uncomplicated, accessible, and relevant content to be used easily in everyday-life to improve the quality of life. “the laughing guide to well-being: using humor and science to become happier and healthier.” by isaac prilleltensky. lanham, md: rowman and littlefield, 2016. isbn: 978-1475825749 about the author dr. isaac prilleltensky, an award winning community psychologist and humor writer, is vice provost for institutional culture and former dean of the school of education and human development at the university of miami. using humor and science to become happier and healthier 99 about the reviewer anna zadora is an associated professor at the university of strasbourg in france. she has a habilitation (accreditation to supervise research) and ph.d. (political science) from the university of strasbourg. she has been responsible for numerous international research projects, including “the holocaust and genocide in contemporary education,” unesco; “educational films from a historical perspective,” georg eckert institute; and “teaching of controversial and sensitive issues,” cost. 56 global education review 10 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: nitecki, elena (2023). the man who invented kindergarten. [review of the book finding froebel by helge wasmuth, ulf sauerbrey, and michael winkler]. global education review, 10 (4). 56-59. book review the man who invented kindergarten “finding froebel” by helge wasmuth, ulf sauerbrey, & michael winkler by elena nitecki finding froebel: the man who invented kindergarten pulls back the curtain on friedrich froebel, the “father of kindergarten” and one of the most influential pedagogues of the 19th century. froebel is a familiar name in the field of early childhood education, but seldom do readers of theory become so intimately acquainted with the person behind the ideas. this unique biography is based on previously untranslated and unknown letters and sheds light on the man behind the kindergarten movement. this book reveals the details of froebel’s flawed and remarkable life, which gave birth to brilliant ideas that revolutionized approaches to working with young children. we teach froebel’s theories as a foundation of early childhood education to understand the nature of how young children live in our world and how we as adults can nurture their growth and development. as fascinating as this may sound, it is still theory— from a 19th century german thinker whose writing is complex and convoluted at times. many readers of theory absorb and apply concepts, simple or complicated, while enduring the sometimes-dry nature entailed in theoretical reading. many students struggle to grasp theory, often saying it is abstract, irrelevant, and even boring. some students complain about the detached nature of theory, asking how old ideas from dead white men are relevant today. how do we make theory come alive? contextualize it! get to know the history, setting, and the author’s story, all of which are reflected in the ideas of such thinkers. that is exactly what wasmuth, sauerbrey, and winkler did with this book on friedrich froebel’s life. froebel is described by some, many years after his death, as “a pedagogical genius who came up with a brilliant idea that would change the world of early childhood education forever but was misunderstood and mostly ignored during his lifetime.” like any creator—artists, architects, musicians and so on—froebel was not only misunderstood, but his work was rooted in the soil of his own life experiences, for better or for worse. that is where the seeds of a creator’s ideas develop, underground, maybe for years, until they bloom into a beautiful and unique flower for the world to enjoy. this book tells the story of friedrich froebel—who he was, where he lived, and how he revolutionized the developing field of early education. this background contextualizes his theories and one can draw direct parallels between the soil of his experiences and the seeds of his ideas. froebel’s backstory is also intriguing—so much tragedy, drama, and the unquenchable push and pull of everyday life. froebel is suddenly a person, with serious baggage, genius, yet flawed. many of his life experiences illuminate the depth of his theories, how they were shaped, and why they are timeless and still applicable in the 21st century. there are three specific examples that illustrate how froebel’s background and experiences, his soil if you will, nurtured and developed the later ideas evident in his philosophy. as the authors state, froebel’s “daily life…was shaped by two aspects: his mother’s early death and his father’s dogmatic christianity.” i would add a third outcome related to these two: his complicated personal relationships. traumatic childhood. froebel’s early years are described as an “unfortunate childhood” in the book, and that is an understatement. growing up in midst of the french revolution and social and political upheaval in germany, froebel’s mother died when he was an infant. he and his five siblings were raised by a cold-hearted and rigid protestant pastor, and later a stepmother, both of whom made his life miserable. even by 19th century standards, much of what froebel described can be classified as abusive. froebel credited this difficult upbringing as a reason he became “an educator of humankind.” his writings allude to a persistent hope of salvation, that deep down, he wanted children to have a better life than he did as a child. noble as that may seem, the authors recognize both sides, noting that froebel also “used [his mother’s] death to justify his wrongdoings, again referring to the sacrifices he had to endure.” in any event, it is curious that early childhood professionals now understand the powerful impact of early trauma on a child’s development, especially in terms of social-emotional development and personality. some of the eccentricities in froebel’s life, most notably his inability to trust others or accept constructive feedback, may well have been rooted in his traumatic childhood. one can see in his theories that froebel values childhood, almost as a golden age of life, one he never had. placing children and childhood on a pedestal was certainly not common in that historical time, but a priority for froebel, who seemed to dwell on this scarred period of his life, well into his old age. christian beliefs. as described artfully in the book, froebel had a very religious upbringing, “growing up in the pastoral milieu of a rigid protestant pastor shaped how he thought about the world.” the authors note that the father’s “sermons terrified but also fascinated the young child and molded froebel’s understanding of faith and religiosity. listening daily to the catechism and torments of hell, to sin and punishment as essential parts of christianity, to the dualistic idea of a sinful world and godly afterlife, of the gap between god and men, such thoughts were ubiquitous in 58 global education review 10 (4) froebel’s childhood.” like most people raised in religious homes, such beliefs become part of who you are. the eternal struggle between good and evil, heaven and hell, reinforced a dualistic way of thinking, which shaped froebel’s ideas early on. as froebel matured, he overcame some of his religious upbringing, as his ideas became less rigidly dualistic, and he attempted to create a kind of religion of his own. his theory of the “law of the sphere” and an “education of humankind, a real education that would help every human being to fulfil their potential,” was unique, and has religious undertones. “living in ‘unification’ with god was always the goal of his educational endeavors, the purpose of kindergarten, or the gifts and occupations.” religious themes are evident not only in his theory, but in his behavior and leadership, often framing himself as a kind of religious founder and undisputed community leader. the soil of his heavily protestant upbringing brought a spiritual dimension to his philosophy, at a time when other 19th century philosophers were dispensing with any relation to traditional religious ideas, or at the very least, morphing their religious beliefs in new ways. complicated relationships. not surprising, given the trauma of his youth set against a rigid religious worldview, froebel had complications in many personal relationships. obviously, his relationship with several family members was strained. the authors also discuss froebel’s relationship with the women at keilhau, the institution he founded, as a mix between an authoritarian and an inspiring leader who convinced his people that they were taking part in something unique and special. even in his somewhat unconventional special relationships with his first wife, wilhelmine, and later, the much younger second wife, luise, as well as his nieces, there is ambiguity and palpable tension. the theme of relationships and the resulting drama reads like a soap opera. while this can be entertaining and engaging, these complexities and froebel’s struggle with “normal” relationships have roots in his background and emerge as a strand in his philosophy as well. he lived the complexities of human relationships in many forms, but his theories extend beyond human relationships to the human interacting with the divine, recognizing the potential for a united and exemplary life. anyone who has spent time around young children can probably attest to the innocent, delightful, and at times, seemingly ethereal nature of innocent young children. the inclusion of divine elements seems to be not only related to his religious background, but also to his own difficulty with human relationships throughout his life. today. as i reflect on finding froebel for this article, appearing in the tenth anniversary issue of the global education review, i am reminded of my own work with one of the authors, helge wasmuth, over the past decade. just as froebel’s thinking developed from who he was, the work that helge and i have done was also nurtured by our life experiences. helge and i have different backgrounds and upbringings, as a german and an american, but we share a common concern about the problems in early education and care in the us and europe in terms of how the field is changing—not for the better. we also had a personal stake in this issue, as helge’s child and my children were of this age when we started working together. in 2017, we co-edited a double issue in this very journal, the global education review, examining how the global education reform movement (germ) has dire consequences in terms of policy and practice. our two issues, one focused on policy and one on practice, contributed to an international conversation that led to much more. in that same year, we were invited to write for norrag (network for international policies and cooperation in education and training) in geneva, switzerland. that led to the world bank including our work in the early childhood in the world development report, 2018. we met other colleagues in various countries who shared our concerns. we became part of an international research group examining global issues in early childhood education and care, leading to conferences, books, articles, and grants. eventually, we even partnered with a university and co-taught an international course for students in early childhood, one of the first of its kind at this university. the last six years, since helge and i first edited issues of the global education review, have not only been intellectually exciting, but also hopeful, in that we are collaborating with so many bright minds who share the same concerns and may possibly be in a position to change the status quo, to reverse course on how global educational “reforms” are making early childhood education and care worse off. helge and i, like froebel, place a high value on the early years of life and will defend young children. we see the immense value of childhood and that this special period of life should be protected by adults who hope for better childhoods than they may have had. froebel was on to something when he recognized elements of the divine in young children, and that should be treasured. just as froebel reframed his own religious beliefs to create a new view of childhood and personhood, we discovered that one cannot take the status quo for granted either. it is incumbent upon us as early childhood researchers to question what is “given,” and consider alternatives, even if they are within in the context of complicated relationships. while the echoes of froebel’s complicated relationships are evident in his story and theories, advocates for young children also must manage the complexities of social, political, and economic relationships that impact young children and their families. despite froebel’s shortcomings, he brought the value of childhood and play to the forefront, during a time when children were not highly valued. he is an inspiration to early childhood professionals, advocates, and researchers, who are trying to protect these sacred years of human life. on the 10th anniversary of the global education review, and its role in our own academic and philosophical development, i would encourage anyone with ideas (all of us!) to dig down, nurture those ideas with others, and let them flower so that you can share them with the world. froebel’s ideas, which valued the exceptionality of young children, became a gift to the field of early childhood education. only with a diverse array of ideas, grown from our unique backgrounds, can we begin to find solutions to the vexing problems of education and society. “finding froebel: the man who invented kindergarten.” by helge wasmuth, ulf sauerbrey, & michael winkler. new york: bloomsbury academic, 2023. isbn: 978-1350269248 about the authors helge wasmuth is professor of early childhood and childhood education at mercy university, usa. he is co-editor of the bloomsbury handbook to friedrich froebel (bloomsbury, 2023). ulf sauerbrey is professor of early childhood education at neubrandenburg university of applied sciences, germany. michael winkler is professor of general pedagogy and theory of social pedagogy at the friedrich-schiller university of jena, germany, and visiting lecturer at the evangelical university of dresden, germany, and the sigmund freud university of vienna, austria. about the reviewer elena nitecki is professor of early childhood and childhood education at mercy university, usa. empowering education 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: vallice levy, r., nitecki, e., peterson, s., san diego, j., napolitano, k., gunning, a.m., marrero, m.e., miller, j., otcu-grillman, b., and ramaswamy, s. (2024). empowering education: a closer look at grants driving change in the mercy university school of education. global education review, 11 (4), 1-8. empowering education: a closer look at grants driving change in the mercy university school of education roseanne vallice levy, elena nitecki, shoshana peterson, jennifer san diego, kristen napolitano, amanda m. gunning, meghan e. marrero, jungkang miller, bahar otcu-grillman and sudha ramaswamy abstract many colleges and universities are increasingly relying on grant funding to supplement their efforts to educate and support their growing diverse student populations. mercy university has a long history of preparing excellent teachers and educational professionals. this article explores how the school of education at mercy university has secured and employed federal, state, and local grants to not only strengthen their endeavors to prepare future educators, but to drive innovative change through unique programming and mentoring support. keywords higher education, teacher education, grant-funded education, mentoring, diverse learners, curricular innovation introduction the mercy university school of education has a rich history of preparing educators who are dedicated to fostering meaningful and lasting impacts in the lives of their students. this mission has been significantly strengthened in recent years through support from several federal, state, and local grants. this article explores these grants, highlighting their role in driving innovative advancements at mercy university and their transformative influence on educators and students within our community. grad-pro grant: preparing the next generation of graduate-level professionals elena nitecki & jennifer san diego mercy's commitment to diversity aligns with the growing need for a diversified workforce across all sectors, including healthcare, education, and business. fostering success in graduate study to transition into the workforce is key to this endeavor. mercy university was awarded a 5-year, $2.8 million grant from the u.s. department of education in 2023 under the promoting postbaccalaureate opportunities for hispanic americans (ppoha) program (award #p031m230013). this five-year project, graduate professional resources and opportunities (grad-pro) addresses the need to expand the number of hispanic and other underrepresented graduate and professional students served by mercy university. the grant's overarching goals are to: expand postbaccalaureate educational opportunities for, and improve the academic attainment of, hispanic and other underserved populations; provide an enhanced focus on academic and career alignment; expand and support a culture of faculty mentorship with 2 global education review 11 (4) personalized interactions between faculty and students and bolster student retention, persistence, and degree attainment by providing supplementary resources, including scholarships, to offset the cost of educational expenses. grad-pro is committed to enhancing teaching and learning exclusively at the graduate level. the grant focuses on four key areas: • health sciences: providing student access to experiential learning in community-based health care settings • education: implementing evidencebased practices to promote the success of underserved graduate students in teacher education programs by offering faculty mentoring and induction support • faculty mentoring fellowship: offering professional development designed to strengthen the faculty's ability to mentor students and cultivate an inclusive, asset-based mindset • business: creating a series of advanced certificates in an online format, providing a pathway for graduate students to complete a master’s degree in business analytics via stackable credentials. one example of this support occurred on october 24, 2024, when grad-pro and branched grants co-hosted the event "voices from the field: mental well-being in schools." the panel included experienced principals and educators from pk-12 schools to discuss the pressing mental health challenges faced by students and educators alike. among the attendees was the first cohort of education scholars, each paired with a faculty mentor who provides additional support to help guide these teacher candidates through their transition into professional roles within the educational community. some of the topics discussed included students’ struggles to handle change or minor life disruptions, as well as the impact of social media on middle school students. the conversation also touched on strategies to improve mental health, such as building relationships with every student, increasing the presence of social workers, and providing more emotional support within schools. during the discussion, graduate students had the opportunity to ask questions about the challenges that they were facing in their schools and received practical solutions from experienced experts that they could implement as early as the following day. another productive fruit of the gradpro grant is the faculty mentoring fellowship, a program designed to provide mercy university faculty with evidence-based professional development opportunities to enhance their mentoring of graduate students. the first cohort of fellows consists of professors from a diverse range of disciplines. fellows engage in workshops and reflective practices that not only improve their mentoring skills but also ensure that graduate students receive the guidance and support necessary for their academic and professional development. by offering professional development, fostering crossdisciplinary collaboration, and creating spaces for meaningful dialogue, the grad-pro grant ensures that both faculty and graduate students are equipped to transition into successful careers and thrive as the next generation of professionals in the critical fields of healthcare, education and business. empowering education 3 branch-ed grant: transforming the school of education roseanne vallice levy, sudha ramaswamy, shoshana peterson in 2023, mercy university was awarded a three-year grant by branched, a nonprofit organization committed to strengthening teacher preparation programs at minority serving institutions. its primary objective is to enhance the quality and diversity of teacher preparation programs, ensuring teacher candidates are better equipped to meet the needs of today’s schools and communities. this grant aligns closely with mercy university’s mission to advance educational equity and excellence for all students. the grant initiative is guided by three core beliefs: • every student deserves access to caring, adaptive, and well-prepared teachers. • every teacher deserves preparation that integrates quality with diversity. • everyone benefits when collective efforts raise the standard of education. with this grant, mercy university’s school of education has embarked on a transformative journey focused on building strong district partnerships, conducting in-depth curriculum reviews and enhancements based on district feedback, and updating data-informed instructional practices. a key component of the initiative is its partnership with the public schools of the tarrytowns, enabling close collaboration with stakeholders to refine curricula and better prepare teacher candidates to excel in current diverse and dynamic educational settings. a distinctive strength of the grant is the ongoing support provided by branched. over the three-year period, the school of education benefits from biweekly performance-based coaching, customized professional learning opportunities, essential resources, and targeted support, fostering sustained growth and improvement. the first eighteen months of the grant have yielded significant accomplishments. in year 1, the branched program required participating institutions to meet at least 80% of outlined outcomes for success. mercy university’s school of education not only met but exceeded these expectations, achieving a 100% success rate. this milestone also established mercy university as the first institution to complete the transformation center process with such distinction. another notable achievement was the collaboration with the grad-pro grant, which helped host two impactful events. the first, a symposium held in spring 2024, brought together mercy university’s school of education and its pk-12 partners to address key issues such as teacher retention, student mental health, and the preparation of teacher candidates for diverse, culturally rich student populations. building on the momentum from this event, the second focused specifically on mental health in schools, as discussed earlier in the article. as the grant progresses into its third and final year, the emphasis will shift toward sustaining and institutionalizing effective collaborative practices and fostering ongoing, meaningful dialogue among stakeholders. this continued focus aims to ensure the long-term impact of the initiative, strengthening partnerships, and maintaining the momentum needed to advance educational equity and excellence well beyond the grant period. 4 global education review 11 (4) preparing stem teachers for high-need schools: the misti program meghan e. marrero, kristen v. napolitano, & amanda m. gunning since 2013, the mercy intensive stem teacher initiative (misti) (nsf award #1339951 and #2050406) has worked to prepare science and math teachers to teach and persist in high-need middle and high schools. currently in its second iteration, misti is sponsored by the national science foundation through the robert noyce teacher scholarship program, which supports the development of stem teachers nationwide, including in united states territories. here at mercy, eligible fourth-year undergraduates or first-year master’s students with an undergraduate major in math or science can apply to be a misti scholar. in their first year of the program, misti scholars begin intensive observations in partner schools, which include schools in the bronx, manhattan, brooklyn, westchester, and rockland. during this first year, students take classes, including courses in their content area as well as in education, and participate in monthly pedagogical seminars on racism and social justice. using a book club format, in which scholars and faculty read the same book or listen to a podcast series, the group engages in deep, relevant, and sometimes uncomfortable conversations about the realities that students and teachers face in high-need schools. these experiences prepare teachers to better meet the needs of their students, who are typically from marginalized groups and often come to school with myriad personal challenges. during their second year, misti scholars complete a full year of student teachingone semester in a high school, and another in a middle school. these placements are under the mentorship of qualified and dedicated cooperating teachers and include visits from clinical supervisors focused on improving teaching practice. the scholars are also completing their master’s degree in adolescence education, and earn state teaching certification, qualifying them to teach in any public school in new york state. misti provides support for these scholars in many ways, including tutoring for state certification exams, preparation for the job search, and general personal “cheerleading” as they navigate the sometimes daunting process of becoming a highly qualified teacher. the support from misti continues in the scholars' first few years of teaching. as brand-new teachers, misti scholars participate in monthly meetings with their cohort, faculty mentors, and clinical supervisors. they discuss successes and challenges, venting frustration and getting advice from others dedicated to their success. the clinical supervisors visit them approximately three times each semester, providing additional support and in-classroom coaching. in the scholars’ second year of teaching, they meet less frequently, but are in contact via text message and email, still relying on their cohort and faculty mentor for advice and connection. research on misti has shown the program to be quite effective in preparing teachers to persist in high-need schools, which is not easy. teacher shortages are rampant, and it is even harder to staff schools in high-poverty neighborhoods, or subjects such as math, science, and special education. thus, preparing teachers who will persist in the profession is critical. the program has found that activities including intensive mentoring, the cohort model, and long-term support have helped the misti scholars to continue working in highneed schools (marrero, brandon, gunning, & empowering education 5 riccio, 2023). the misti program staff is confident that they will continue to prepare excellent stem teachers committed to teaching the neediest students. preparing pk-12 teacher leaders in stem: nsf master teaching fellowship program amanda m. gunning, meghan e. marrero, elena nitecki, kristen v. napolitano the stem master teaching fellowship (mtf), funded through the robert noyce teacher scholarship program from the national science foundation (award # 1758317) for six years, 2019-2024. the project supported 14 prekindergarten through high school teachers in math, science, and computer science to develop as stem teacher leaders through the fellowship. these teachers were selected from four local high-needs districts through a competitive application and interview process. the teacher fellows each completed 9 graduate credits in stem pedagogy, which are part of an advanced certificate in stem education at mercy university. two cohorts of seven fellows each completed the coursework in a year and a half and then embarked on leadership projects of their choosing while fulfilling their teaching service commitment; attending meetings; presenting their work and supporting other teachers. during the first three years, both cohorts completed the following graduate coursework: introductory course: mthe 542 – enhancing this course explores teaching key mathematics standards using stem for a compelling context for instruction. the course will introduce theory and practice for teaching and assessing the integration of stem. participants will study the history of stem education mathematics with stem and history of reform movements in mathematics and science education. participants explore connections among reform-based and 21st century recommendations in teaching, while learning to use technology as a tool for promoting student understanding. 3 sem. hrs., 3 graduate credits. instructor: elena nitecki engineering course: scie 553: engineering for the classroom in this course, teachers will become proficient with the engineering design cycle and the science and engineering practices, as outlined by the new (implemented sept. 2017) nys p-12 science standards. teachers will learn how to apply engineering practices to integrated projects for secondary students, while raising awareness of careers and innovations in engineering. students will demonstrate an understanding of the history of engineering and its impact and shaping of society in the united states and globally. 3 sem. hrs., 3 graduate credits. instructor: amanda gunning capstone course: scie 554: leadership in stem education this capstone course supports teachers in becoming leaders within their schools to assist other teachers and facilitate lesson study, professional learning communities, curriculum design, and peer feedback and coaching. teachers use a model of vertical articulation in which they engage in a cycle of collaborative coaching and reflection, and action research, to improve teaching and learning in their classroom. 3 sem. hrs., 3 graduate credits. instructor: meghan marrero in addition to supporting the fellows’ learning and growth, the stem and education faculty involved in the grant formed a professional learning community (plc) to support the stem pedagogical growth of the education faculty teaching the courses. this plc specifically focused on each of the courses as it was taught and then supported revisions of the course presentation before it was taught again to 6 global education review 11 (4) the next cohort. this model succeeded in improving these new courses at the university and developing more stem teacher preparation skills in the faculty. specifically, elementary specialist, dr. nitecki, noted a great deal of growth through this process, newly positioning her as a stem education expert. (gunning, et al, 2021a). the goal of the project was to mitigate lack of pk-12 student interest and preparation in stem, through promoting lasting change that develops stem teachers to become leaders in their district, thereby supporting other teachers and ultimately improving student achievement and interest in stem. the fellows’ work was widely successful, providing new stem programs and experiences for students in and out of the classroom, several of which engaged the larger community, and supported other teachers’ professional learning and growth in stem pedagogy. for example, fellows led stem-focused after school or lunch programs for enrichment for students. one program targeted english-language learners and grew from three elementary grades in one school to grades 1-8 across three schools. three fellows worked to develop robust community gardens at their elementary schools, which brought in families and other teachers, while providing new, local garden-based curriculum for teachers to use with students. seven fellows led other teachers in their district in sustained stem professional development opportunities. these activities are expanding and improving access to stem pedagogy in their schools and in some cases, across the district. the project also resulted in three published articles (gunning, et al, 2021b; gunning, et al, 2023; marrero, et al, 2021), with another currently under review as well as 10 research presentations by faculty at international conferences and more than 30 presentations by fellows at teacher conferences locally and nationally. clinically rich intensive teacher institute for teachers of english language learners jungkang miller & bahar otcu-grillman mercy university has received an award of $687,500 from the new york state department of education (nysed) under its five-year cr-iti/esol program from the new york state department of education (nysed) under its five-year cr-iti/esol program (2023-2028). the program prepares teachers in english as a second language (esol) in order to address the shortage of english as a second language/english as a new language teachers in new york city. the program leads to an advanced certificate in esol in pk-12 grade and is grounded in clinical practice interwoven with academic content and professional courses in partnership with school districts throughout new york city. this is the second time mercy university has won this grant since successfully completing the previous term, 2018-2023. upon completion of the cr-iti in esol program, teachers will be qualified to obtain additional certification. the cr-iti in esol program leads to an advanced certificate in tesol, an area of teacher shortage in new york city schools with an increasing population of students from diverse linguistic and cultural backgrounds. the teachers will be supported by mentor teachers and clinical supervisors. the collegial relationship between the teacher candidates and their mentor teachers throughout the year will give them an improved clinical experience in teaching esol besides their regular teaching license. benefits to mercy university are a more clinically rich teacher preparation program and strengthened school empowering education 7 partnerships in new york city, where mercy has two campuses. another benefit to the university is an increased reputation as one of the finer tesol programs in the city which has been able to receive this grant after a competitive application process. the teacher candidates join a teacher orientation and professional development session with the co-directors of the program in the fall and spring semesters with their mentors. the program provides professional development opportunities such as memberships to professional organizations in tesol and attending a conference related to teaching esol. teacher candidates are observed while teaching english once in the fall and once in the spring semester by the university supervisors and provided with feedback for further clinical experience. the program codirectors were invited to the nysed-arranged 2024 voices united conference: advancing the civil rights of english language learners and building pathways to multilingualism, held on october 24, 2024, at fordham university’s lincoln center campus. mercy university was one of the only two universities invited to attend the conference. candidates are expected to observe, interview, and interact with professionals in pk12, and connect between coursework and classroom-based activities. they will apply what they learn to improve their teaching practice and critically reflect on different educational practices. we seek ongoing advice and feedback from partner school personnel in the areas of program development, clinical practice experiences, and assessment of candidates’ potential as teachers. we provide continued support to candidates for the first year upon their completion of the program. program directors contact program completers at least twice per year to provide support in their teaching practice, exchange ideas on the best practices, and provide information on professional development (pd) opportunities. conclusion these featured grants have significantly advanced the growth and development of mercy university’s school of education, reinforcing its mission to prepare educators who are equipped to meet the needs of today’s diverse pk-12 student population. these grants support program improvement, professional learning, career readiness, mentoring and collaboration among stakeholders, driving innovation and excellence in education. through continued grant support, the school of education can strengthen its programs and further empower educators to create meaningful, lasting impacts in their classrooms and communities. references gunning, a. m., nitecki, e., marrero, m. e., baldwin, b. t., & larson, k. (2021, january). integrating stem into elementary education: a case study of a professor’s journey. poster presentation. aste international conference, virtual. gunning, a. m., marrero, m. e., & larson, k. v. (2021, july). studying in-service teacher professional development on purposeful integration of engineering into k-12 stem teaching (research to practice). in 2021 asee virtual annual conference content access. https://peer.asee.org/37778 https://peer.asee.org/37778 8 global education review 11 (4) marrero, m.e., gunning, a.m., agravat, t.s., vasquez, j. (2021). stem accessibility is a family affair. ascd express newsletter.https://www.ascd.org/el/arti cles/stem-accessibility-is-a-family-affair marrero, m. e., brandon, l. t., gunning, a. m., & riccio, j. f. (2023). supporting firstgeneration college students to become teachers in high-needs schools. the teacher educator, 58(2), 130-152. miller, j.k. and otcu-grillman, b. (2023). mentorship and training esol teachers through clinically rich intensive teacher institute. in j.k. miller and b. otcu-grillman (eds.) mentorship and reflective teachers in esol and bilingual education. igi global. napolitano, k., gunning, a. m., marrero, m. e., & nitecki, e. (2023). developing and sustaining elementary stem teacher leadership identities. global education review, 10(4), 37-55. otcu-grillman, b., and miller, j.k. (2021). professional support networks in tesol: sociolinguistic approaches to professional development in esol teacher education. in m. d. ramirezverdugo and b. otcu-grillman (eds.). interdisciplinary approaches toward enhancing teacher education. igi global. https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/stem-accessibility-is-a-family-affair https://www.ascd.org/el/articles/stem-accessibility-is-a-family-affair creativity in education: a global concern 1 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international (cc by 4.0) license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bloom, lisa & dole, sharon (2018). creativity in education: a global concern. global education review, 5 (1), 1-4. creativity in education: a global concern lisa bloom western carolina university sharon dole western carolina university most would agree that the world needs innovators to solve global economic, social and environmental issues. creativity and innovation are worldwide areas of concern. based on a review of decades of scores on the e. paul torrance test of creativity, kim reported a decline in creativity in the us in 2010. her report attracted national attention. that same year, based on kim’s data, bronson and merryman (2010) declared that the us was experiencing a “crisis in creativity,” although leaders in business and economics had already determined that the crisis was “looming” (florida, 2004). in first two decades of the 21st century, creativity was becoming a popular focus globally. for example, as bronson and merryman indicated, 2009 was designated as the european year of creativity and innovation with the slogan “imagine. create. innovate.” and the mission of “raising awareness of the importance of creativity and innovation for personal social and economic development” (european commission, 2008). similarly, in china where creativity continues to be deemed a national priority (xi jinping, 2017), schools are adopting a problem-based learning approach to education that allows for more innovative thinking (westknights, 2017). educational reformers, perhaps as a backlash from decades of high stakes assessment that measure knowledge acquisition resulting in an emphasis on mimetic instruction in the schools, call for transformations in teaching and learning that puts creative and critical thinking at the forefront (couros, 2015; robinson, 2011, zhao, 2012) this special issue of global education review, dedicated to the theme of creativity, looks at creativity from various angles and lenses that are particularly relevant to education, from the neuroscience on what influences creativity and global views on ____________________________ corresponding author: lisa bloom, western carolina university, killian 203c4, cullowhee, nc 28723 email: bloom@wcu.edu 2 global education review 5(1) creativity to specific programs that target the development of creativity. efforts toward nurturing creativity in public schools, higher education and teacher education are represented. we start with an editorial by james schreiber titled, creativity and pre-service teacher education: what you see is what you get. schreiber draws on personal and professional experiences from over 20 years working in the educational system to describe the dearth of creativity in both public school settings (“worksheet dungeons”) and teacher preparation programs. he identifies the lack of modeling in teacher education as a contributing factor. he describes the constraints faced by teachers and teacher educators and concludes with solid yet simple recommendations for change. in what cognitive neuroscience tells us about creativity education: a literature review, kai zhou provides an updated review of the neuroscience research on the relationship between creativity and intelligence. zhou asserts that, despite important findings in cognitive neuroscience that can enhance classroom practice, there has been little impact of the research on creativity education policy. she points out the need for policy makers to come up with assessment programs that evaluate the effectiveness of creativity education appropriate for culturally diverse student populations. jules and sundberg use the results of their quantitative content analysis of 21st century learning competences to explore the connection between recommendation and reality in their article, the internationalization of creativity as a learning competence. based on their analysis, they recommend that creativity and innovation should be included in every subject in order to ensure employability longevity in the intelligent economy. in educational perspectives from families of mixed east and west educational background, eric layman explores the perspectives of families who have the option to choose between an educational program from an eastern tradition or a western tradition. the parents’ conception on the importance of and opportunity for creativity influences their decisions. for parents, the nurturing of creativity appeared to be more important for their high school students than for young students. in cultivating experimental innovation within undergraduate physics majors, fleenor describes an undergraduate program in physics that went from more didactic traditional instruction to methods that allow for and nurtures creativity. the instructional change resulted in increases in enrollment in physics courses and majors and increased graduation rates of physics majors. key to the transformation of the physics program was the development of experimental innovation where students were afforded opportunities to follow their interests and take risks in an environment of collaboration with faculty and other students. miller uses data from the “senior transitions” topical module of the national survey of student engagement (nsse) in her article, the role of creative coursework in skill development for university seniors, to build on neuroscience and creativity education 3 the research base on creativity training and transferable skills in higher education. the results of her study indicate that creative coursework is a significant positive predictor of confidence in various skills and abilities that would help students prepare for diverse work settings. recognizing that opportunities for creativity can be sparse in public school settings, in providing opportunities for flow experiences and creative problem solving through inquiry based instruction, kristy doss presents the results of an action research project that involved middle-school students in inquirybased projects. students who participated in the doss study reported higher engagement due to support for their autonomy and opportunity for creative problem solving. like fleenor, doss emphasizes the role that autonomy, following interests, and taking risks play in nurturing creativity. the articles in this issue tend to support the notion that there is a “crisis in creativity” in education while offering insight into the possibilities of environments where creativity flourishes. while there are differing views of what creativity is and why it is important, the authors in this issue tend to agree that creativity needs to be an intentional goal in education. there is also a thread in the articles that suggests that development of creativity involves modeling of the creative process and opportunity for creativity in safe environments where learners are willing and able to take risks, learn from mistakes, collaborate and follow their interests. references bronson, p. & merryman, a. (2010). the creativity crisis. newsweek. retrieved from http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/t he-creativity-crisis.html couros, g. (2015). the innovator's mindset: empower learning, unleash talent, and lead a culture of creativity. san diego, ca: dave burgess consulting. european commission (2008). media launch of the european year of creativity and innovation 2009. press release data base. retrieved from http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip08-1893_en.htm florida, r. (2004). america’s looming creativity crisis. harvard business review. october, 2004. retrieved from https://hbr.org/2004/10/americaslooming-creativity-crisis kim, k. h. (2011) the creativity crisis: the decrease in creative thinking scores on the torrance tests of creative thinking. creativity research journal, 23(4), 285295. doi: 10.1080/10400419.2011.62780 5 robinson, k. (2011). out of our minds: learning to be creative. oxford: capstone. west-knights, i. (2017). why are schools in china looking west for lessons in creativity? financial times. retrieved from https://www.ft.com/content/b215c486e231-11e6-8405-9e5580d6e5f http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html http://www.newsweek.com/2010/07/10/the-creativity-crisis.html http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-08-1893_en.htm http://europa.eu/rapid/press-release_ip-08-1893_en.htm https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2011.627805 https://doi.org/10.1080/10400419.2011.627805 https://www.ft.com/content/b215c486-e231-11e6-8405-9e5580d6e5f https://www.ft.com/content/b215c486-e231-11e6-8405-9e5580d6e5f 4 global education review 5(1) xi jinping (2017). china daily. full text of xi jinping's report at 19th cpc national congress. retrieved from http://www.chinadaily.com.cn/china/19t hcpcnationalcongress/201711/04/content_34115212.htm zhao, y. (2012). world class learners: educating creative and entrepreneurial students. thousand oaks, ca: corwin press. about the author(s) lisa bloom, edd, is the jay m. robinson professor of instructional technology at western carolina university. she completed her ed. d. in education at west virginia university. her research interests include gifted education, problem based learning, creativity, promoting social and emotional wellbeing of children and youth and instructional technology. sharon dole, phd, is professor and gifted education program coordinator in the school of teaching and learning at western carolina university. she completed her phd at the university of georgia in special education with concentrations in gifted education and learning disabilities. her research interests include twice exceptional students, social/emotional problems of adolescents, creativity, problem-based and project-based learning, teaching civility and compassion, and online teaching and learning. reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 10 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: goia, elsa, hoffman, james v., modesto, heloisa, ngomane, julio, sailors, misty, & sitoe, alcina (2019). reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique: literacy mentoring in hybrid spaces as a transformative practice. global education review, 6 (2). 10-32. reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique: literacy mentoring in hybrid spaces as a transformative practice elsa goia instituto de formação de professores de chitima (moçambique) james v. hoffman university of north texas heloisa modesto code (canada) júlio ngomane instituto de formação de professores de chitima (moçambique) misty sailors university of north texas alcina sitoe associação progresso (moçambique) abstract in this article, we describe our collaborative work with the moçambique ministry of education in reimagining primary literacy teacher preparation through an initiative that promotes closer personal (literacy focused) relationships between preservice teachers (formandos) and primary-aged students during the formando’s preparation program. our work seeks to disrupt traditional notions of moçambique teacher preparation, which are mostly didactic and disconnected from community-based interactions with children. we are working to move toward ideologies that recognize and draw on children’s cultural and linguistic resources. our collaboratively designed literacy methodologies call for building personal relationships, engaging in responsive teaching, promoting translanguaging, encouraging children to take the lead in their own literacies, and drawing on community resources in our work with formandos. this report will focus on a description of the literacy mentoring program we are enacting and the results of a feasibility study at the instituto de formac ̧a ̃o de professores de chitima. we will summarize the mentoring program and the findings from research, discuss our successes and challenges and the ways in which this initiative has the potential to reframe the current mode for academic coursework in primary teacher preparation, and our next steps in moçambique. this collaborative model stands to inform a re-imagining of teacher preparation that is situated locally and grounded in practice. keywords primary teacher preparation; literacy mentoring; hybrid spaces; transformative practice; mozambique introduction “the child i am working with cannot speak portuguese,” stated one of the formandos (a preservice teacher) in a group debriefing, following one of the literacy mentoring sessions at the chitima instituto de formação (ifp) in chitima, moçambique. the facilitator of the debriefing (elsa, author #1) paused, looked reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 11 around the room at the twenty-eight preservice teachers in the debriefing session, and asked, “how many of you spoke portuguese when you entered primary school? raise your hand.” not a single formando in the room raised their hand. after another pause, the facilitator stated: “so, we have a challenge.” then smiling, she asked, “what shall we do?” the teachers in this vignette are engaged in a reflective moment and space. the teacher educator engages the preservice teachers in problem posing around the work they do with their children to better support literacy and language learning. this kind of reflection will become the basis for growing their practices in the short term around language challenges, and, in the long term, around a stance toward their own professional learning. there is no script to follow. there are no certainties. there are only possibilities to be imagined, “tried out,” and refined. this conversation captures the essence of thoughtfully adaptive teaching (duffy, miller, parsons, & meloth, 2009) and practice-based inquiry (sailors & hoffman, in press) in moçambique and perhaps other places in the world. the notion of children coming to school speaking a language other than the one used as the medium of learning and teaching in communities like chitima is not unusual. in fact, there are 17 bantu languages spoken in the republic of moçambique in addition to the official language of portuguese. only 10% of people in the country speak the official language (portuguese) as their first language (it represents the ninth largest language group). while many people in moçambique are multilingual, only 50% of the population speaks portuguese. a large country of 30 million people, the vast majority of people live in the rural areas (69%) and complete an average of nine years of schooling (unesco, 2016). although the government launched a bilingual program in the early 2000s, it has taken a while for it to be enacted around the country. in 2014 it was reported that 373 schools in the country were enacting bilingual education (jica, 2015). the learner-to-teacher ratio in the primary grades in moçambique is 55:1. teaching in moçambique comes with its own challenges. up through 2009, moçambique was forced to employ unqualified teachers, but with the short-term programs introduced (“10+1”, where teachers who graduated from at least 10th grade spend one year at a teacher education center and then receive their qualifications to teach), the number of unqualified teachers has fallen dramatically— from 40% in 2005 to 10% in 2014 (jica, 2015). while the majority of the mozambican teachers reported they enjoy their profession, some stated that they were not satisfied with their working conditions mainly due to their low salaries, delays getting paid, lack of prestige, and lack of a career plan. further, teachers noted that they work under precarious infrastructure, sometimes in improvised classrooms that lack learning materials. while there are various models of teacher preparation in moçambique, we focus on the model that is supported by chitima ifp: the “10+3” model. under this model, students spend their first two years in coursework (with practicum experiences woven throughout) and the last year in a clinical/student teaching experience. the curriculum consists of five pedagogic areas: “communication and social science,” “mathematics and natural science,” “practical activities and techniques,” “science of education,” and “teaching practice.” the teacher education program spans 110 weeks; students in the 10+3 programs clock 3,840 hours in their coursework and 420 hours in practicum experiences (jica, 2015). 12 global education review 6 (2) in this article (co-authored by our trinational team that includes teacher educators at the site, program staff, and international advisers, all of whom worked directly on the project), we critically examine the introduction of mentoring in a hybrid space as a transformative practice. our goal in this study was to understand both the successes and challenges of implementation and the actions we took to respond to those challenges. we sought to answer the following research questions: (a) how does the engagement in a hybrid space of literacy mentoring in one preservice teacher preparation program enhance the learning of preservice teachers through reflection? (b) how does the engagement in this hybrid space of literacy mentoring influence the work of the teacher educators in their academic program? and, (c) what are the characteristics of the hybrid space that are core to its success and may be important to consider in future program expansion? we collaboratively built on the existing structures and practices at one public ifp in moçambique (chitima ifp) in order to test the feasibility of the creation of hybrid spaces for mentoring in teacher preparation. building on local initiatives and drawing from the international literature on field experiences in teacher preparation, we collaboratively designed and enacted the better literacy mentoring program at chitima ifp. the program is centered on the premise that these hybrid spaces bridge the gap between academic coursework and traditional practicum experiences in order to move the instruction of the beginning teachers toward more innovative practices. in the case of this work, supported by the ministry of education and the better project, we were attempting to increase the general use of participatory methodologies as part of teacher preparation. we begin this article with a broad consideration of the international research on the role of hybrid spaces in literacy teacher preparation. we then offer a contextualization of the site (chitima ifp) and the overarching program (better) in which it was situated. we position this work in a design-development framework, with the goal of using research to identify design principles for the creation of hybrid spaces in teacher preparation programs in countries like moçambique. from practicum experiences to hybrid spaces planning and engaging in preservice teacher education often involve a delicate balancing of goals. on the one hand, the goal is to prepare new teachers to step in and smoothly take on the role of teaching in schools as it currently exists . on the other hand, the goal is to use teacher preparation to introduce new and innovative practices into schools. in an ideal context, where learners are achieving at high levels, the emphasis on preparing teachers to step in may outweigh the need to prepare teachers to introduce new practices that disrupt the status quo (that is, teach in ways that interrupt lecturelike teaching). following this transformative goal, the emphasis on teacher preparation may focus more on the innovative practices that can be introduced into the schools through new teachers. approaching teacher preparation is fairly straightforward when the goal is to replicate what is already there. preservice teachers have already spent years in schools as students engaged with this kind of teaching (lortie, 1975). the apprenticeship of observation, coined by lortie, refers to the knowledge of teaching preservice teachers already have based on thousands of hours of work in classrooms as a student (borg, 2004). with a little training and a lot of apprenticeship in classrooms, “good reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 13 students” can quickly be turned into “good teachers.” however, preparing preservice teachers to bring innovative practices into schools is a different matter. educators around the world have struggled with this challenge (white & forgasz, 2016). there is the initial challenge of helping preservice teachers discern those aspects of their practice what they internalized as “teaching” through their personal experiences. once preservice teachers are aware of those internalized practices, they must learn the innovative practices and how to use them in classrooms in ways that are different from what they experienced. the typical space used for this kind of work is in academic coursework during teacher preparation programs and practicum experiences (hoffman et al., in press). however, when preservice teachers do not see practices enacted in schools that align with the innovative practices introduced in their program, they may resort to the traditional practices (sydnor, 2017). britzman (1991) warned that an uncritical increase in practicum experiences may actually negate the effects of the preparation offered in coursework and further reinforce the models of traditional teaching that preservice teachers then take forward into their teaching. mcdonald et. al. (2014) argued for the reconsideration of the role of coursework and field experiences and how they are to be used to prepare teachers to teach in innovative ways. the creation of hybrid spaces in preservice teacher preparation is one such way to support beginning teachers as they learn to implement those innovative practices that they do not see in their practicum experiences. we summarize the literature on mentoring experiences as hybrid spaces in the next section. transforming teacher preparation: hybrid spaces in preservice teacher preparation hybrid spaces for practice are typically outside of the traditional classroom but engaging with new ways of working in schools (hoffman, mosley wetzel, & dejulio, 2018; zeichner, 2010; zeichner & mcdonald, 2011). this is “real” teaching but not under the complex conditions of existing classrooms. these hybrid spaces are the bridge into classroom teaching. these hybrid spaces are also powerful for teacher educators to interact with preservice teachers around specific teaching practices and in context of reflection as a tool for learning. these conversations, as with the conversation described in the opening paragraph, can travel back into the academic courses and help connect theory to teaching practices (hoffman et al., in press). one body of research into using hybrid spaces to transform teaching has focused on the power of what is called “tutoring” in the literature—that is, preservice teachers working with children in a one-on-one or small group setting. these tutoring experiences are carried out under the careful guidance of a teacher educator and are a way to introduce new practices into the teaching repertoire of beginning teachers. these experiences have proven to be promising in moving preservice teachers toward innovation in their teaching as there is substantial evidence in recent research to document a positive impact of these experiences on the growth of preservice teachers. in fact, research has indicated that these hybrid spaces enhanced beginning teachers’ pedagogical knowledge and impacted their roles and beliefs about teaching. they were also spaces where preservice teachers learned to build and value relationships with children and families and reject deficit ideas about children (hoffman et al., in press). there is also growing evidence that preservice teachers do take forward those practices they learned in the hybrid spaces of tutoring into their first years of teaching (hoffman et al., in press). 14 global education review 6 (2) to be clear, not all work in hybrid spaces is designed to transform teaching. there are many tutoring programs that have the goal of simplifying the tasks of teaching literacy outside of the classroom in order for the preservice teacher to step into existing practices in the classroom more easily. we are focused specifically on the use of hybrid spaces as a pathway for preservice teachers to use practices that are different than those currently in place. this is what makes them transformative. while the literature is clear on the benefits of these hybrid spaces, the literature remains unclear on the ways in which the tutorial experiences influence preservice teachers in international contexts like moçambique. features of tutoring programs in a review of the literature on tutoring, hoffman et al. (in press) identified some of the mediating factors and program features that are associated with the growth of preservice teachers in learning to teach. first, relationships are a key component of the tutoring experience, for the preservice teacher and the learner with whom the teacher is working. the relationship between the tutor and the learner builds over time. positive relationships lead learners to take risks in their learning and preservice to take risks in their teaching. second, structure is a key component of the tutoring experience. there must be a balance between having a plan for work and the expectation that this plan can be modified and reshaped in response to the learner. in other words, there must be a structure for tutoring, but it must also be flexible enough to accommodate the instructional needs of the learners who are being tutored. third, reflection is a key component in tutoring. preservice teachers must be able to reflect on their teaching and learning, both individually and collaboratively. these reflections should take place with their peers and the teacher educator who teaches their courses and coaches them during the tutoring experience. fourth, community matters in tutoring. as is true of learning in a classroom, learning in teacher preparation must be interactive. preservice teachers must have opportunities to (a) observe their peers teach, (b) co-teach with their peers, and (c) coach and be coached by others, including teacher educators with responsibilities in the academic program. fifth, content developed in academic courses must be closely tied to tutoring experiences. preservice teachers must be encouraged to look for and try out the experience in the tutorial setting with the experiences in practicum settings. sixth, continuous and complementary tutoring experiences can build on each other. research suggests that there are positive effects associated with expanding the tutoring experiences over the course of the preparation program. successful tutoring programs often expand the number of learners that preservice teachers work with from one to several learners. these programs also offer opportunities for preservice teachers to co-teach/tutor with their peers. finally, teacher educators play a critical role in supporting the learning of preservice teachers during a tutoring experience. not only do teacher educators provide feedback on teaching, they can also “step into” and actively participate in a tutoring session should the need arise. teacher educators can teach traditional practices by modeling innovative practices during tutoring. the observations made in tutoring can also be used by the teacher educator to make connections to the content that is offered in academic courses. reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 15 hybrid spaces: moving from tutoring to mentoring similarly, the most recent review of this literature encourages the field to take up the word “mentoring” (rather than tutoring) in designing, enacting, and describing these hybrid spaces of learning to teach innovative practices not observed in practicum experiences (hoffman et al., in press). in many ways, the word “tutoring” carries a connotation of “something that is done to those falling behind.” hoffman and his colleague use the term “mentoring" to be more conceptually aligned to the work of teacher educators. jacobi (1991) noted that mentoring relationships focus on five basic components. mentoring relationships focus on building achievement and providing emotional and psychological support. they benefit both the mentor and the protégé. they are personal. and, they allow more experienced people to share knowledge with less-experienced people (p. 513). to that end, we use the term “mentoring” to refer to our work in moçambique and to the program that is the focus of this paper. exploring literacy mentoring at chitima ifp as described earlier, our work in the preparation of primary teachers in moçambique has focused on connecting the literacy mentoring as a hybrid space to the broader construct of participatory methodologies in teaching and teacher education (sitoe, hoffman, sailors, & majuisse, 2018). the moçambique ministry of education is interested in promoting more participatory and less didactic methodologies in classroom teaching. there is professional development work going on with these methodologies with classroom teachers. there are also efforts to be more inclusive of these methodologies in the teacher preparation programs. the ministry has been active in promoting the use of these methodologies by the teacher educators in their preparation programs—the explicit goal is for these methods to become part of the preservice teacher’s practices (called formandos in moçambique) as they move into classrooms. in traditional practicum placements, however, formandos may not see these new methodologies employed fully or regularly. as the research would suggest, under these conditions, formandos may revert to both what they see in the schools in which they are working and what they experienced themselves as students in classrooms. the research would suggest that by inserting opportunities to practice these participatory methodologies in hybrid spaces, the transition to effective teaching will be smoother and more effective. chitima ifp is one of 27 public, teacher preparation programs in moçambique. located in the western province of tete (the province that borders malawi, zimbabwe, and zambia), chitima is approximately 140 km from the capital city of the province and 120 kilometers from one of the largest dams on the continent (cahora bassa). recently named as the administrative capital of the cahora-bassa district, chitima boasts a population of approximately 20,000 people in the immediate area. the climate is semi-arid with two seasons (rainy and dry). the community is supported by a few government offices, a rural hospital, a petrol station, and a teacher preparation center, known as the chitima ifp. established in 2009, there are currently 220 students at chitima ipf. fifty-five percent of students are male and 45% are female. over onefourth (27%) of the students at the ifp draw from outside of the province. at the time of this study, all administrators at the school were male. the 24 teacher educators at this site provide for a student-to-instructor ratio of 9:1. of the teaching faculty at chitima ifp, female 16 global education review 6 (2) instructors represent only 10% of the teaching population. students who attend the institute have at least 10 years of school and are at the ifp for three years. in their first two years, students take coursework and engage in practicum experiences. in their third year, students complete a clinical (student) teaching experience. chitima, like the other ifps in the country, has a fully operational annex school serving primary grade students on the same campus as the ifp. these primary schools have full-time faculty and serve the local community. the annex schools operate under the same leadership as the head of the teacher preparation institute. these annex schools are special in terms of their proximity to the teacher preparation institute, but they are just one in a network of area primary schools that cooperate with each teacher preparation institute. mentoring has been a key feature of the relationship between the annex school and the institute since their foundation. in most cases, the mentoring involves new formandos paired with elementary students for mostly informal interactions. they may spend lunches together or meet in the play areas to offer support. typically, the instructional side of this mentoring experience and the direct connections to academic coursework have been limited. located on the same campus as chitima ifp is the annex school known as chitima primary school. chitima primary houses grades 1-7 and serves approximately 320 learners. there are 19 classroom teachers in the school. children who attend the school draw from the immediate area surrounding chitima ifp campus. children attend one of two sessions: the morning classes serve the lower primary grade children (grades 1-5) and the afternoon session serves the upper primary grade children (grades 6-7). chitima is one of four ifps across moçambique participating in the better education through teacher training and empowerment for results (better) program, undertaken in partnership with moçambique ministry of education and with financial support from the government of canada (via global affairs canada). implementing partners are two non-governmental organizations: code (canada) and associação progresso (moçambique). international literacy advisors support the project. implemented since 2015, the ultimate goal of better is to improve the quality of education for primary learners by improving the quality of teacher education in moçambique. better aims to promote and implement participatory methodologies and promote gender equality in the project ifps and primary schools, strengthen teachers’ practices to teach language and literacy, improve coaching for aspiring teachers during their practicum experiences, strengthen school management in practicum schools, and improve the quality and quantity of materials to support language and literacy instruction. chitima ifp was selected to participate in the better because the project aimed to include an ifp delivering the 10+3 program in the tete province; as such, chitima serves as the representation in the central region of the country. chitima ifp is the only ifp in tete that offers the 10+3 program. methods our research followed design-development principles (barab & squire 2004; richey, klein & nelson, 2004; van den akker, gravemeijer, mckenney, & nieveen, 2006). we began with a mentoring plan based on the research literature. we modified the plan along the way based on challenges and opportunities that appeared during the study. our methods followed general principles of interpretive research as applied to design development research. participants reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 17 there were several types of participants in this study. there were 48 formandos who served in the role of mentors. these were formandos working in the second year of their preparation program. the group was roughly half female and half male. these formandos were approximately one third of the total number of formandos in their second year of the program. this group was used because they were all placed at chitima primary for their practicum placement, while the other second-year formandos were placed in primary schools away from the ifp campus. there were several teacher educators who collaborated in the program and administrators who collaborated in the effort. finally, there were 50 primary grade students who participated in the mentoring experience. the primary students were selected by the pedagogical director of the annex school—the students she chose were in need of extra support in language and literacy. the parent council assisted in the organization of the program at the school level, including the identification of student participants. the students represented first through sixth grade. procedures grouping. at the start of the study, approximately one-half of the formandos were in field experiences in the morning with the other half in field experiences during the second half of the day. we used these groupings to organize the mentoring program. for the first phase of the program (june through august) the formandos in group 1 mentored their primary grade student(s) on two mornings a week and went to their field experiences in the afternoon. formandos in group 2 mentored their primary grade students(s) on two afternoons each week and went to their field-experience placements in the morning. during the second phase (august through september) the formandos were back on campus full time and the mentoring times were combined into one mentoring period, once a week. preparation. the preparation of the formandos in the methodologies was conducted over a two-week period in late may. a materials center was organized that contained all the support materials to be used by the mentors. the formandos participated in two full-day preparation workshops, two weeks of mentoring sessions with their partners, and group reflection sessions. during the workshops, the formandos were introduced to the various components of mentoring, the logistics of borrowing materials, and building relationships with the children they would mentor. materials. the mentoring materials included a supply of raw materials (e.g., blank paper, color markers) and a collection of books. the books were of two types: one group of books were from trade books written in portuguese; these could be used in read alouds. the second group of books were shorter and more accessible for the students to read together with their mentors. for each mentoring session, formandos were responsible for keeping their plans and reflective notes in a notebook. mentoring schedule and location. there was one hour set aside for work in this mentoring program. the first 45 minutes involved direct work with the primary grade students. we attempted to match one preservice teacher and one primary student. in some cases, though, a preservice teacher ended up with two students. when students or formandos were absent, the pairs were temporarily recombined. a special area next to the annex school was set aside for the mentoring program. the 15-minute debriefing sessions that occurred after each session were held in a classroom just across from the primary school in the ifp. one teacher educator took the lead in supervising the mentoring sessions and guiding the debriefing. 18 global education review 6 (2) mentoring framework. the mentoring framework for teaching literacy is not a methodology; rather, it is a set of literacy practices that engage learners in reading, writing, and design work that is meaningful to the learners (schutz & hoffman, 2017). literacy, in this model, is framed as a tool. the mentors are responsible for engaging the learners and directly supporting the use of strategies to achieve the learners’ goals. all of the instruction and the materials used were in portuguese. the 45-minute mentoring time period was divided between the activities described in figure 1 sources (see figure 1 at the end of this article). measures and data collection to answer our research questions, we collected a variety of data during two different time periods. our data included observations, interviews, focus groups, and artifacts. we collected this data during the months of may and september, 2018. we (authors) served as members of the research team. figure 2 documents our data sources (see figure 2 at the end of this article). in the section below, we describe each of our data sources and the nature of data collection. observations of mentoring. given that school and teacher change is about the degree to which teachers and schools adopt educational innovations, we specifically centered our work on the degree of implementation of the interventions using the concerns based adoption model, or cbam (hall & hord, 1987). the cbam has been used widely over the past three decades in international settings to guide educational reform and to monitor the fidelity of implementation in research studies. we borrowed from one of the three components, the innovation configuration (ic), which is a systematic way of documenting the observable differences in how innovations are being used. we designed our ic with the critical features of the program in mind. the features of the ic are organized around (a) logistics, (b) relationships, (c) engagement with mentoring components, and (d) reflections. we operationalized each of these features, identifying the aspects that constitute each one. for example, we considered routines, preparedness, and materials to be essential aspects of the “logistics” feature. in order to document the variation in the features, we created categories, using a scale of either 1, 2, or 3. we considered a “1” to be “unexpected,” a “2” to be “expected,” and a “3” to be “optimal” implementation. we wrote descriptions of each category; the document we created can be found in appendix a. we employed this rubric in september 2018 and collected observational data on five randomly selected mentoring pairs. focus groups. we engaged our participants as members of focus groups, encouraging them to respond using the language with which they were most comfortable; encouraging participants to use their language of choice was also a part of our efforts to decolonize our research (ndimande, 2012). these focus groups included (a) school administrators, (b) formadores (instructors at the ifp), (c) community members, (d) formandos, and (e) children. we followed the focus group protocol, which can be found in appendix b. artifacts. as part of our ongoing efforts to engage from a design-development perspective, we collected artifacts (products created during mentoring and video clips) throughout the implementation of the program. we used these artifacts to help us uncover the understandings that the formandos had about each of the components. while we did not analyze the artifacts for this study, we did ask the formandos and children to bring their artifacts with them to the focus group. in the cases of the children, they used the artifacts to share what their favorite parts of mentoring were when working with their formando. reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 19 data analysis in order to answer our research question, we engaged in thematic coding and analysis of our data (ayres, 2008). as a descriptive strategy for data analysis, we approached our data first with a list of themes that we would expect to find in the data. these themes were ones that drew from our beginning conceptual model, our review of the literature, and our professional experiences that varied across team members (p. 867). our initial entry into data analysis occurred after each collection of our various types of data. this was an important part of our coding process. for example, as we completed each round of focus groups, we met as a team to debrief. in these debriefings, we discussed “big ideas” that we heard the participants discuss. for example, in our first sets of focus groups (in may), we heard (repeatedly) that there were challenges associated with the materials. in fact, several formandos stated they wished they “had more titles for read alouds,” as they “like reading books to the children” but “have run out of titles the children like.” as a result of our debriefings (and ongoing conversations throughout the data collection process), we began to identify the themes that would become our entry point into our coding process. as the themes began to emerge in one data source, we used our other sources (focus group conversations, artifacts, and observations) to confirm. for example, in the above example (lack of materials), not only did the formandos state the need for more reading materials, the coordinator echoed this concern (the need for additional titles as well as more copies of the titles they have that were “popular” during mentoring). we used the reading logs to confirm this theme of “we need more materials.” the reading logs substantiated the theme as it was obvious that there were titles that stayed “out” throughout the entire mentoring period. throughout our iterative process of theme identification and coding, we triangulated the themes across data points and sources. findings we organize this section largely around answers to our research questions. we have attempted to (re)present our data as it appeared in our coding process (associated with one of our four research questions). however, there is overlap among the data because of the nature of the program (e.g., formandos discussing how the learners impacted their personal learning). we have attempted to present our findings (below) so that the themes we present build on other themes. implementation of mentoring in the spirit of cbam, and to help us contextualize the remainder of our findings, we first present our findings related to the degree to which the program was implemented at chitima ifp. based on our observational data and artifacts, it was apparent that the program had been implemented with a high degree of integrity. in fact, there were no aspects of the program that received a rating of “unexpected.” specifically, the vast majority of the aspects we documented received a rating of “expected,” which meant that many aspects of mentoring were adopted. quite a few received a rating of “optimal,” which meant that we found evidence of adaptations and innovations in the program itself. for example, we noted in our observations that the program was very well organized—the materials were neatly stored and were carefully protected in a locked room; we labeled this “expected.” upon closer inspection, we noticed that not only were the baskets clearly labeled with the names of the formandos and the children with whom they were working, the ifp had purchased more baskets (between our data collection time periods) to accommodate all children and formandos; we labeled this as “optimal.” 20 global education review 6 (2) we noted other accommodations the ifp had made to the program, and we labeled those “optimal.” for example, elsa observed that formandos were struggling to find time to plan, so the leadership team (led by the coordinator) made the decision to bring the formandos together two hours before their mentoring session with children to plan. during these planning sessions, they had access to the coordinator, the other two language formadores who worked with them, the program coordinator, and each other. it was, perhaps, these very accommodations that led to other findings that we describe below. finally, in addition to documenting that all aspects of the program were either “expected” or “optimal,” each aspect was mentioned various times by the formandos with whom we spoke during both data collection time periods. general appreciations through our thematic coding, we found that people held a general set of appreciations about the program. these appreciations centered on the way the participants felt about the program, and the valuing participants placed on the program and their commitment to the program. while we illustrate the various ways in which valuing became evident, the overall valuing can be summed up by the comment made by one of the children who attended mentoring: when asked what she liked about mentoring, one first grader said, “i want to go to the mentoring because it’s really nice there.” we heard from many of the participants that there were challenges associated with implementing the program and with the program itself. one of the challenges they talked about was the irregular attendance of some of the children in the program. many of the children lived far distances from the school and children were sometimes late or did not come to mentoring at all. another challenge the program faced was the inability to send the materials home. the formandos were especially aware of this challenge as they reported that they had to tell the children that it was not possible to take the books home because there were not enough to go around. however, the administration and community were dedicated to overcoming some of the challenges of the program because they “valued” it. for example, to help with the issue of attendance, the directors said, “we are committed to continuing. we will identify challenges and work together to solve those so that the initiative can continue.” several of the people we talked to admitted that the annex school should not be the only one in the area with the program. in fact, many parents in the district (as is common around the country) pay for extra “tutoring” for their children. with this program, not only are the formandos benefiting from the practicum experience, they are also offering services for the children and now the “families do not have to pay.” while the need to have mentoring at all practicum schools came up in each of our focus groups, it was the community members we spoke to who were most adamant about the program being “implemented at other schools in the district.” they were clear that “all parents ... want this program for their children.” finally, it was apparent that the program offered unanticipated affordances to the formandos, which were recognized by the formandos and the coordinator. while we expected the responses related to increased motivation to read to come from children, we did not expect to hear this from the formandos. in fact, one preservice teacher told us, “i used to not like to read. now i read all the time.” when we asked her to elaborate, she said told us that as she is planning for her session, she “must read the book” in order to be prepared. as such, she has found herself reading more of the picture books for the children since they are “nice books.” the coordinator, who also serves as the reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 21 “dorm mother,” echoed this, saying that she often sees this preservice teacher (and others like her) “reading books.” with a smile, she added that “when the girls pack their things to go home for the holiday, i’m sure we’ll find many books in their rooms.” impact on formandos in addition to these general appreciations, the participants indicated that there were several ways in which the program impacted the formandos. the first centered on the affordance the program offered to building relationships with children. many of them reminded us of the ministry policy (“one formando, one child”) and pointed out that mentoring offered them the opportunity to see what the policy looks like when it is enacted. and, furthermore, they said they could see the formandos building stronger relationships with children—both those they mentored and those they worked with in their practicum schools. one formando in particular, admitted that he often found himself frustrated in his practicum school because he did not have a relationship with the children in his assigned classroom. as a result, he found himself raising his voice with them. once he started working with his child in mentoring and he learned how to talk with a child, how to get and keep the child’s attention, he was able to transfer that new knowledge back into his practicum classroom. as a result, he says he has “stronger relationships” with the children there. likewise, there was an improved confidence that the formandos had in themselves as beginning teachers. not only were the formandos more confident with the children they mentored, they were also more confident in their practicum courses. they said they could “talk more confidently with the children” there and that they could now see themselves as teachers. the formadores who worked with them in their practicum experiences echoed their selfobservations. and, the administrators also saw a large shift in the way some of the formandos are now working with children. the school director reported that the “formandos feel more confident with and have more compassion in working with children.” as a result of mentoring and the careful and deliberate conversations between the coordinator and the formandos in the debriefings, all groups at least mentioned the role mentoring played in improving the instruction of the formandos in their practicum experiences. for example, one formanda told us that in the past she really did not know how she was to teach reading in her practicum course. she was struggling to make the connection between what she was learning in her coursework and how to enact the content into her practicum classroom. this formanda attributed the work she did in mentoring to giving her methods to enact in her classroom, especially when it comes to reading texts with children. impact on children and beliefs about children in addition to documenting the impact on formandos, many of the professionals and community members we talked with told us that the program had an impact on the children who participated in the program. their comments centered mainly on improving the academic achievement of the children. they told us stories of children who could not read (and were seemingly disinterested in learning to read), but under the careful guidance of the formandos, began to “pick up” on reading. for example, there was one child in mentoring whose parent worked at the ifp. she reportedly struggled with teaching him to read—he was not doing well in school and when she attempted to work with him at home, he “resisted” everything she tried. once his mentor in the program “turned him on to” reading, he has been “all smiles” at home when she asks him if he wants to read. she says 22 global education review 6 (2) she sees him benefiting at school, as a result, and that his classroom teacher has remarked on the progress he has made since he started working with his formando. he told us, too, that he “loved to read now” and “loved his mentor.” the second impact we documented was highly aligned with the academic achievement of the children—that of increased confidence in the children. one grandparent told us that her grandchild “now speaks up in class” when the teacher calls on him. one formanda told us that her child was “very, very shy and withdrawn” at the start. the formanda reported that “now the child is different… she is reading a little.” furthermore, when working with her child during the guided reading component of mentoring, the child, “show[ed] and [grew in] confidence and [said], ‘i can read.’” likewise, the participants described an increase in children’s motivation to attend school. for example, the president of the local school council told us that his child “no longer runs away from school” because “the child can now see the importance of reading and writing… [he draws and colors] plus [he writes and so] he’s motivated to participate.” the same grandmother as above told us she thinks the children have changed their attitude toward school as “it’s like they are hugged and cared for….” finally, there were huge shifts in how the formandos thought about the reading and writing issues the children demonstrated—they see them more now as structural issues as opposed to issues deriving from a “problem with the child.” one formando told us that the “mentoring initiative should have started a long time ago, most of the problems in moçambique would not be there… in the first days [the child] was not participating. it was very difficult but with these strategies, the child changed completely. the issue is with instruction, not children.” likewise, the grandmother also felt that the program was “the way to the future” when she said, “we could not speak or read or write that’s why we’re so poor, but my grandchildren have to go to school, have to be educated. they are our future. i hope i can live enough for him to help me. he [her grandchild] will be the caretaker for the future.” discussion our work in this study focused primarily on preservice teacher learning through the reflection in hybrid spaces. the findings of this study can be connected only to other contexts similar to the one at chitima. the opening vignette of the preservice teachers challenged by language variation is just one example of this kind of reflection that was used to grow practices. the preservice teachers learned to value the relationships they created with their mentees (assaf & lópez, 2015). this was, perhaps, due to the preservice teachers developing emotional attachments to their students, leading the mentors to take on an increased sense of responsibility toward student learning (hendricks, mcgee, & mittag, 2000). the preservice teachers moved from a stance of judgement (i.e., right and wrong) to adapt their teaching in the moment to support the growth of strategies from a developmental perspective. the preservice teachers became thoughtful in integrating their practices and used the reflective space with their teacher educators and colleagues to refine their own teaching, as has been done in other studies (davis, key, & peterson, 2017; dutro & cartun, 2016). the participatory and practice-based strategies used in the mentoring were not typical of instruction in the classrooms in which the preservice teachers were working. their discussions often centered on how this kind of participatory and reflective teaching could become part of their future (hoffman et al., in reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 23 press). this is support for learning to teach that can be useful as a strategy to promote transformative teaching in schools. the findings from our work in moçambique are certainly in line with findings from previous research in mentoring that has been conducted in mostly the united states, canada, and western europe. there are great benefits to having hybrid spaces for promoting innovative practices introduced in initial teacher preparation. the findings extend the previous work in other countries as a function of the context for education in an emerging economy, where there are strong traditions of top-down structures for the improvement of teaching. the ministry of education in moçambique has been promoting the use of participatory methodologies in classrooms with only limited success. through the local work in hybrid spaces, future teachers and the teacher preparation programs can become allies in the transformation of teaching in classrooms. moving forward we are encouraged by the evidence gathered that suggests that these kinds of mentoring experiences can play a powerful role in the introduction of transformative methodologies into teaching. there are several lessons that we take away from this experience to guide expansion to other sites. expanding the reach of the mentoring program scaling up to all formandos. we reached only 1/3 of the second-year formandos at chitima. we must plan in ways that will allow us to engage with all of the formandos. this will include not only curricular changes at the ifp (so that the program is written into the curriculum) but also at the national level. our plan is to move this mentoring experience into the first-year experience and use the second-year formandos as mentors and models for the new formandos each year. in doing so, we not only reach the total number of formandos but we also reach more children from the annex school. eventually, the plan is to start a mentoring program at each of the practicum schools, allowing for off-site support of children in their language and literacy development and support for communities throughout the district. this will require conversations with those who set policy for the ifps and their curriculum. improving connections to academic coursework. the mentoring program was offered during a period when there were no formal academic classes in session at the ifp, as the formandos were all in their practicum experiences. by moving the mentoring to the first year, we will ensure that teacher educators can be engaged directly with the mentoring and begin to build important connections to their courses. measuring the impact there were several additional datasets that we would have liked to collect and analyze. we did not have any measures of the progress of the primary students in the program. since the formandos had many claims to make regarding the positive impact, it would have been beneficial for us to systematically include this kind of data collection in future efforts. additionally, (and as mentioned before), we heard reports that the formandos who worked in the mentoring program scored higher on their portuguese language tests than students who did not participate in the program. we were heartened by these reports, but not surprised. however, we were unable to gather the data that would allow us to statistically test this observation. we will do so in the future. growing the program enhancing resources. there is a limited supply of books for both the read alouds and guided reading experiences. book development specific to these uses would enhance the 24 global education review 6 (2) effectiveness of the program and the range of students we can work with in the future. expanding the mentoring framework. we began with a very limited set of instructional options for the formandos. many of the formandos were asking for additional work with letters and words. while this model is meant to complement and not replace the adopted curriculum, we could certainly look to expand to include closer work with words and inquiry using informational texts. enriching with multi-lingual opportunities. moçambique is growing in its attention to multilingual settings. in bilingual schools that are engaging with both portuguese and local languages, this framework could be easily adapted for support of firstand secondlanguage acquisition. however, in doing so, we would need to consider the types of materials that are available in the local languages. as of now, those are very limited. perhaps one way of addressing this is to work with the formandos to create books with children during the mentoring; those books can become a source of reading for others in the future. providing models. any extension of this work could benefit a great deal from the opportunity for expansion sites to both observe and participate in these mentoring experiences. we think of this final point, in particular, with reference to expanding this kind of work to teacher preparation programs even outside of the moçambique context. improving initial teacher preparation is a potential leveraging point for improvement in educational systems around the globe. the work of forming design principles for mentoring work in hybrid spaces will need to be developed in each context. there is no simple transfer to follow with fidelity; rather, principles need to be discovered and adapted to each setting. conclusion so often, it seems, our teacher preparation programs are providing formandos the answers to questions they don’t have. in the opening of this article we reported a comment that a preservice teacher shared in a debriefing session: “my child can’t speak portuguese.” this comment came from a place of frustration for the preservice teacher based on the work he had just completed with a child. the teacher educator guiding the discussion didn’t dismiss the question. she didn’t judge the frustration. she didn’t give an answer. she beautifully reframed the statement into a problemposingscenario. first, she reminded them of their own experiences in school. second, she offered to engage with them in how to address the challenge. this is the power of working in hybrid spaces in teacher preparation. this conversation goes back to the methods courses of the formandos and makes the curriculum there relevant to the future teachers—specifically as it relates to how they approach the challenges they will surely face. reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 25 figures figure 1: components of literacy mentoring program at chitima ifp component description beautiful book (roser et al., 2014) in this activity, the formandos guided their students in moving from a focus word, to the creation of an image, to the labeling of the image, to the recording of a sentence dictated by the student that reflected the image. over time, these beautiful book pages were collected and bound into a book form for the student to revisit in subsequent sessions. read aloud (hoffman & mosley wetzel, 2017) the preservice teacher would engage with his/her student in an interactive read aloud of a trade book. the preservice teacher had selected the book from the collection and prepared to teach to promote vocabulary and comprehension guided reading (hoffman & mosley wetzel, 2017) the preservice teacher supported his/her student in the reading of a ‘guided reading’ book from the collection. these books were highly accessible texts. the preservice teacher used supports such as echo reading and choral reading to insure success sentence work (hoffman & mosley wetzel, 2017) the preservice teacher took one sentence from either the beautiful book story or the guided reading book. the sentence was written and then cut up into words. together the preservice teacher and the student composed novel sentences using these words. song or poem (hoffman & mosley wetzel, 2017) the last activity for each session involved the reading of a poem or song prepared by the preservice teacher in written form. the pair would read and sing as they engaged with the text to close the session. take-home (sailors et al., 2014) on leaving, the preservice teacher would give the child the ‘word’ that they had used in their beautiful book story to take home and share. 26 global education review 6 (2) figure 2: data sources data source description and number of individuals data collection time period observations:  2 planning sessions  10 mentoring sessions  10 debriefing sessions designed and used an innovation configuration: better mentoring implementation rubric (see appendix a); collected digital images during mentoring may and september focus groups: school administrators (n=4) school administrators included the director of the ifp, the pedagogical director at the ifp, the pedagogical director at the annex school, and the better coordinator (who is also a formador at the ifp) may and september focus groups: formadores (n=3) faculty at chitima ifp who have been directly involved in the literacy mentoring program may and september focus groups: community members (n=8) parents, grandparents, business owners, and members of the school governing board september only focus groups: formandos (n=15) those who participated in mentoring may and september focus groups: children (n=5) those who participated in mentoring september only artifacts (all collected digitally): from workshops— images of formandos learning the components of mentoring collected digital images of work of formandos during their initial and follow up preparation workshops may and september artifacts (all collected digitally): from mentoring in all, we gathered images before, during, and following mentoring from each of the components, including (a) pages from beautiful books; (b) sentence/word work; (c) poems and songs; (d) book logs (book titles the formandos were using during mentoring, both for guided reading and read alouds); and (e) attendance records for formandos and children. may and september reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 27 appendices appendix a: better mentoring implementation rubric formando: ______________ mentee: ___________ grade: ____ date:_______ logistics (routines and materials) unexpected = 1 expected = 2 optimal = 3 1. materials are not all present or they do not appear to be cared for properly. materials are prepared and in basket at onset of mentoring. materials appear to be adequately cared for. all materials are not only in the basket at onset of mentoring, but they are organized in such a way that children (and mentor) can find what they need easily. materials are in excellent condition, indicating the value placed upon them by the mentor and children. 2. mentor is either late or does not have materials set up in anticipation of the child, thus the child must wait for the mentor to begin. mentor arrives just before the child but may/not have materials set up prior to sitting down with child. mentor and materials are situated and waiting for the child to arrive into the space. 3. there is no evidence of a written plan or the plan is not prepared in advance. the written plan is prepared to guide the mentoring session. the plan is prepared (before mentoring) and aligned with the materials. 4. not many of the children and formandos appear to know the routine of mentoring for the most part, the children and formandos appear to know the routine of mentoring (e.g., sitting down together, moving through routines). all of the children and formandos appear to know and actively participate in the routine of mentoring (e.g., sitting down together, moving through routines). 5. some or all of the formadores are not present during mentoring and/or the reflection. the formadores are present during mentoring and/or the reflection. the formadores are present during mentoring and reflection and they are actively engaged with the formandos (during both mentoring and reflection). relationships unexpected = 1 expected = 2 optimal = 3 6. the relationship appears strained or uncomfortable. there is very little personal relationship. the relationship between the child and the mentor is good. they sit near to each other and interact comfortably. the relationship appears to be one built around smiles, encouragement, and appears to be warm. the child appears to trust the mentor; they appear to like being together. engagement with components unexpected = 1 expected = 2 optimal = 3 7. not all of the components are present in the lesson and/or not all procedures are completed. all components are present in the lesson. nearly all the procedures of each component are completed. all components are present in the lesson and all are completed. there is a sense of “enjoyment” on the part of the mentor and the child (e.g., high engagement from both of them). 28 global education review 6 (2) the materials are ill-prepared (e.g., not colorful) and/or do not appear to be interesting to the child. the materials are neat orderly and child pays attention during the lesson. the materials are very well prepared and are grounded in the interest of the child (as evident in the engagement of the child with the materials). reflections unexpected = 1 expected = 2 optimal = 3 8. there are no written notes or the notes are haphazardly recorded. the formando brings written notes to the reflection (e.g., notes taken during mentoring) and is prepared to discuss them. the written notes are detailed and indicative of careful observations during mentoring. the formando is prepared to talk about the main points. 9. only a few of the formandos are present for the reflection; only a few are actively participating in the conversation. most of the formandos are somewhat engaged in the group reflection (e.g., most may be listening but only a few are actively contributing). many of the formandos participate actively in the reflection (e.g., nearly all are listening and offering insight into the conversation). 10. there are no connections made between mentoring and the academic coursework of the formandos. there are some connections made to the coursework but those connections are either loosely made or are not elaborated on. there are very direct connections made between mentoring and the academic coursework of the formandos. there are conversations around those connections that enhance both the academic coursework and the mentoring experiences. 11. the reflections only center on the children who are in mentoring and do not extend past those children. the reflections center on the children who attend mentoring and/or to other children in the classroom where the formandos are doing their practicum, but the connections do not extend to the families and communities of the children. the conversations during the reflection encourage the formandos to not only think about the children they mentor, but also make explicit connections to the families and community of the children in ways that help the formandos grow in their valuing and appreciation of those families. comments: reimagining primary teacher preparation in moçambique 29 appendix b: better education through teacher training and empowerment for results (better) focus group and interview scripts thank you for agreeing to talk with us about the better program. we are here to talk with you specifically about the mentoring component of the program at chitima ifp. please feel free to respond openly. please feel free to respond using the language you are most comfortable using. what is your name? what is your affiliation with mentoring? what general thoughts do you have about mentoring? we noticed some innovations to the program since we were last here (e.g., planning time in the morning). please tell us about those changes. what do you value about mentoring? what are some ways mentoring can be improved? what else would like to tell us about mentoring? 30 global education review 6 (2) references assaf, l. c., & lópez, m. m. 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(2006). introduction to educational design research. in j. van den akker, k. gravemeijer, s. mckenney, & n. nieveen (eds.) educational design research (pp. 1-8), new york, ny: routledge. white, s. & forgasz, r. (2016). the practicum: the place of experience? in j. loughran, & m. hamilton (eds.). international handbook of teacher education (pp. 231-266). springer, singapore. zeichner, k. (2010). rethinking the connections between campus courses and fieldexperiences in collegeand university-based teacher education. journal of teacher education, 61(11), 89-99. zeichner, k., & mcdonald, m. (2011). practice-based teaching and community field experiences for prospective teachers. in a. cohan & a. honigsfeld (eds.), breaking the mold of pre-service and in-service teacher education: innovative and successful practices for the 21st century (pp. 45–54). lanham, md: rowman and littlefield. about the authors elsa orlando joaquim goia was born in tete, changara district. she finished high school in 1996 at tete school in the year 1996. she has been teaching since 1999 in various primary schools. she was trained at dapp (development aid from people to people) in chiomio in a course of portuguese language teaching. she now works as a lecturer of portuguese language, its methodology, literature and also the subject of oral, reading and writing at the teachers training institute of chitima. in 2015, she concluded a bachelor’s degree in portuguese teaching with ability in english at pedagogic university of mozambique – tete province. she was trained to work with primary school students with difficulties in reading and writing to help trainees in a project of one student one trainee by the ministry of education james v. hoffman is professor of language and literacy studies at the university of north texas (transitioning from the university of texas at austin). he is a former editor of reading research quarterly and the yearbook of the national reading conference. he has served as president of the national reading conference and as a member of the board of directors of the international reading association. dr. hoffman was an affiliated 32 global education review 6 (2) scholar with both the national reading research center (nrrc) and the center for the improvement of early reading achievement (ciera). he was elected to the reading hall of fame in 2002 and served as president of this organization from 20082010. the primary focus for his research has been on teaching and teacher preparation. heloisa modesto has a degree in agricultural engineering from the federal university of lavras (brazil) and a master’s degree in human ecology from the university of alberta (canada), with a focus on gender and international development. she has over 25 years leading international development programs in latina america and africa, mostly focused on education, gender equality, and family agriculture. presently, heloísa is the program manager for mozambique with code (canadian ngo) where she leads the implementation of a bilateral project funded by the canadian government to improve pre-service primary teacher education in that country. júlio ernesto melo ngomane has a bachelor of informatics teaching from the universidade pedagógica in maputo. he has been training new teachers at chitima ifp since 2014. his work is focused on helping the trainees to improve their it skills as they relate to teaching. prior to that, he worked in the private it industry. misty sailors is professor of literacy education and chair of the department of teacher education and administration at the university of north texas (transitioning from the university of texas at san antonio). she served as a member of the board of directors for the literacy research association (lra) and on the international literacy association’s (ila) literacy research panel and the ila’s standards revision committee (standards for literacy professionals 2017). her research centers on the professional development of in-service teachers and the preparation of beginning teachers. she has directed over $19 million in sponsored research activities. she has worked with teachers and literacy coaches in the usa, bangladesh, cambodia, malawi, tanzania, south africa, and mozambique. alcina sitoe was born in maputo, the capital city of mozambique. while she was doing her undergraduate degree in mozambique, she was an eighth grade teacher. by the end of her undergraduate degree, she received a scholarship to do a master’s degree in education at sydney university in australia in 2002. she graduated from sydney university and returned to mozambique and decided to contribute to education in a different way – working in non-government organizations that have their core business improving the quality of education in mozambique and/or children’s rights. the host country culture in second-language acquisition 46 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: milosevic, olja. (2020). the host country culture in second-language acquisition: a case study in an international school. global education review, 7 (4), 46-58. the host country culture in second-language acquisition: a case study in an international school olja milosevic the international school of belgrade (serbia) abstract this paper records how a group of high school second-language english learners in an international school studied their host country’s cultural heritage. the school enrolls international and host country students and both groups of students participated in this study. they collaborated on a cultural project that involved using host country heritage as a way to develop language proficiency. during the process, students looked for commonalities among different cultures, inquired into the past, and developed both speaking and social skills. as they attempted to discover the intricacies of the local community and its culture, they had to use skills and strategies that increased the likelihood of successful interaction. their academic engagement increased and at the same time, their intercultural sensitivity was increased. keywords international schools, second-language learning, cultural heritage, interaction introduction the growing number of international schools represents the response to the global mobility of a highly skilled workforce. as parents move to a new country to start a job, their children accompany them and are enrolled in international schools. in these educational institutions, students learn in a language that is often not the same as their home language. although international schools may be very different in terms of educational programs or school ethos, the majority of them have in common a diverse student population that comes from different language and cultural contexts. to meet the needs of their students, certain practices are common. first, due to the different cultural contexts of their students, international schools endeavor to establish a welcoming atmosphere and develop intercultural awareness. second, the language of instruction is, in most cases, different from the language of the host country and from the home language of many students in the school. the majority of students are secondlanguage learners, and they are at different stages of their second-language development. including the elements of intercultural learning in secondlanguage instruction creates situations in which students acquire and produce the target language as well as experience different cultures and that encourages them to develop intercultural awareness. developing intercultural awareness the very nature of international schools requires students to develop intercultural awareness and understanding for others and by doing so, improve communication with peers coming from different contexts. intercultural awareness is viewed as “the process of becoming more aware of and developing a better understanding of one's own culture and other the host country culture in second-language acquisition 47 47 cultures” (kourova, 2013, p. 80). the cultural background of learners will affect their values, lifestyle, beliefs, and notions of appropriate behavior. all participants in the communication process need to be aware that their views impact communication and need to be prepared to understand the views of students coming from different cultural, ethnic, and religious settings. developing these understandings is possible “by being confronted with a foreign culture that an individual is prompted to reflect on his/her own culture and to realize that the other culture may be different but not wrong” (jackson, 2005, p. 200). for that to happen it is necessary to have “the flexibility of mind which allows us to cross borders and accept differences” (bredella, 2003, p. 38). the willingness to understand others encourages students to question and negotiate ideas, which enables them to effectively communicate with others. most international schools follow programs that focus not only on academic rigor but also on developing responsible citizens of the world. allen indicates that “one of the most important roles of an international school is to encourage its privileged students to develop an appreciation of, respect for, and empathy towards their world” (2000, p. 138). to become interculturally sensitive, students need to develop “the feeling of empathy, the ability to change perspectives, to recognize (the reasons for) misunderstanding, and to find ways to overcome them” (wandel, 2002, p. 74). to help students understand the world in which they live and to respond appropriately and show empathy, schools need to expose students to different cultures and to encourage them to explore the situations in a respectful manner. while engaged in exchange, participants create an intercultural space that can be defined as a “social context or cultural domain where people from different cultural groups meet, communicate, and interact'' (secombe, 2016, p. 269). the opportunities for cultural exchange lead to intercultural learning and also encourage learners to care for others and contribute to their community. promoting intercultural awareness in a second-language classroom students whose home language is different than the language of instruction face a number of challenges as they attempt to adapt to their new environment. they have a dual task ahead of them: to learn the language and to learn in the same language that they do not yet comprehend (halliday, 2004). the most urgent need of second-language learners is to develop everyday language to communicate with peers and teachers. although most of them acquire basic spoken language relatively quickly, to communicate successfully, linguistic competence is not sufficient. a lack of intercultural understanding presents additional difficulty in intercultural exchanges involving participants from different cultural backgrounds who speak different languages. in these situations, some exchanges may be misunderstood and important parts of discourse are missed. preparing students of different language proficiency to respond appropriately in intercultural settings becomes an important educational goal. in the context of language acquisition, intercultural learning requires “exchange of knowledge and negotiation between groups of native speakers and nonnative speakers as well as repeated contact between cultures” (lomicka, 2009, p. 1227), and classrooms become places where intercultural dialogue needs to be promoted. students learn language and culture through meaningful use and interaction (kramasch, 1998), thus developing their thinking (see for example, mercer & littleton, 2007 and mercer, 2008). 48 global education review 7 (4) when students interact, they exchange ideas, negotiate meaning, and are required to “question rather than passively accept the information they encounter” (ko, 2013, p. 17). since interaction impacts learning (vygotsky, 1986), students will develop language skills as they exchange their perspectives and attempt to understand or explain cultural intricacies. language and culture are intertwined and many language-learning activities include cultural elements. this is especially the case in foreign language learning where students learn about the customs, traditions, and festivals celebrated in the country where the language is spoken. however, the situation is different in educational contexts that require one language of instruction. that is the case for secondlanguage learners in international schools where language of instruction is not the same as the language of the host country. students who acquire language of instruction in these contexts will not necessarily associate it with any specific culture. in a second-language classroom, intercultural learning is achieved through creating opportunities for students to learn both about the culture of their peers and “about the world's peoples, countries, and problems” (caters, 2004, p. 31), which makes language learning not only studying the language system. although encouraging students to learn about local culture is “seen as an excellent resource for intercultural learning […], it currently seems to be a resource which is underused” (jackson 2005, p. 201). developing a deeper understanding of host country culture and promoting connections with the local community is something peterson (1987, p. 75) sees as vital and one of the “main advantages of international education.” unfortunately, international schools are often isolated communities without many established contacts with the local community, not realizing that the school is bound to be affected by the host culture. when that is the case, many educational opportunities are lost and students do not have the opportunity to authentically experience the culture of the country in which they live and to explore it in depth. the case study context and participants this small-scale case study was conducted during the implementation of erasmus+ “via culture: european cultural heritage for vocabulary in action” in 2019. its aim was to record and investigate how discussing different aspects of cultural heritage can assist learners in developing academic vocabulary and critical thinking. it was carried out in one private prek-12 college-preparatory international school in serbia where english is the language of instruction. since enrolled students have different language backgrounds, most of them take english language acquisition classes at some point of their schooling. the students who participated in this project were enrolled in the international baccalaureate diploma programme (ibdp) english b course during the last two years of their secondary schooling. this course is designed for students who come to the program at the end of their secondary education and are not competent english language users. for that reason, english is taught as a foreign language in the course. therefore, at the end of this course, students need to demonstrate proficiency in english. the unit called “the essence of belgrade/serbia” had been taught over a period of four weeks to ten grade 12 students who agreed to participate in the project and signed consent forms. four students were from serbia (student 7, 8, 9, and 10), representing the host country, and six students were from five other the host country culture in second-language acquisition 49 49 countries (student 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, and 6): two students were from china, and one each from germany, israel, ukraine, and italy. data data were collected from several sources: teacher observations during class activities, recorded discussions, presentations, peer-feedback sessions, the report that students had to write as their summative assessment task, and one semi-structured interview with students at the end of the unit that provided the teacher with feedback on learning. the teacher kept a journal and wrote impressions after each class. also, while students worked on their projects, the teacher observed their interaction, and after class, wrote comments in the journal. during the interview, students were asked to consider what they had learned, to reflect on their new perspectives, and provide any comments about the type of learning activities. the interview, discussions, presentations, and peer feedback were audio recorded, which allowed the teacher to capture students’ interaction. the recordings were selectively transcribed. all interaction took place in english and their comments are given verbatim. the unit: “the essence of belgrade/serbia” the unit “the essence of belgrade / serbia” was designed as a lead-in part for the erasmus+ project “vocabulary in action” (via). participation in the via project required teaching several lessons that would encourage students to explore the host country culture. as preparation for the designing material stage, the teacher extended the unit on “culture” that was already in the grade 12 syllabus. since intercultural awareness is an integral part of school curricula, it was not difficult to organize a unit in a way that would introduce the host country culture. it was anticipated that exploring the host country culture would provide the context in which students would focus on meaning rather than on language itself (see, for example, freeman and freeman, 2001). the unit presents an attempt to avoid emphasis on traditional costumes, celebrations, songs, and important people, and also to avoid stereotypes associated with serbia. it was hoped that exploration of both visible and invisible aspects of serbian culture would be beneficial for both the host country and international students. the host country students would improve their intercultural competence by sharing views, beliefs, and behaviors of their own community with students coming from different places. at the same time, the international students would reflect on their own culturally embedded beliefs by discussing those of their serbian peers. the unit combined language acquisition, intercultural awareness, and development of linguistic and social skills (for example, working in a team and negotiating). the learning objective was twofold. the first objective was of a linguistic nature, and it was increasing language proficiency and improving secondlanguage communications skills by offering a topic that would put students in the position of either knowledgeable participants or inquirers. as students shared their perspectives, they were encouraged to look for academic vocabulary that would accurately reflect their observations. the second objective was to offer students an opportunity to reflect on their own culture and cultural identity. it was hoped that “the essence of belgrade / serbia” unit would generate discussion, encourage students to think about aspects of culture that might be confusing and find explanations that were not initially obvious. 50 global education review 7 (4) the process would eventually lead to intercultural understanding. therefore, intercultural awareness became an explicit learning goal, but activities also promoted language learning since they required solid language competence and spoken language. design the unit consisted of eight 45-minute lessons. the classwork for the unit had five segments: (1) compiling a pool of the host country cultural heritage assets, (2) reading and discussing literary texts about the serbian mentality, thus investigating the host country culture; (3) obtaining more information on identified aspects of host country culture, (4) presenting findings orally, and in writing in the form of a report; and (5) giving feedback and receiving feedback from peers and the teacher. during the initial phase of the project, students were introduced to the concept of tangible and intangible cultural assets. they were requested to think about assets in belgrade and/or serbia and to list those that they consider important. the next step was to provide information about them, and that was done through google forms. each student completed two or three forms. if chosen assets were tangible, they were instructed to give the location of those assets, provide a short description, and state the time period of their construction. if the assets were intangible, the students were instructed to explain what the assets are and to include the sources that they used. their answers were used to form a pool of assets and to provide the teacher with choices of tangible and intangible assets to be included in the subsequent lessons. after the completion of the forms, there were 23 identified assets, 10 tangible and 13 intangible assets. the most chosen tangible assets were historical monuments. the intangible assets were serbian dishes, cyrillic script, and national dances. the teacher chose the most-mentioned assets to be a starting point of future lessons. during the lessons, students were requested to look closely into the assets, research about them, and share information that they found. a. investigating the host country culture after the pool of assets had been created, students were invited to share what they already knew about serbia and how they felt about the country they lived in. the insights were sought from both groups of students. to provide students with additional insights and material for deeper exploration of the host country's culture, the teacher presented students with vignettes from “a guide to the serbian mentality” by the serbian author momo kapor. the author records his observations and interpretations of what makes up the essence of serbians. the book is published in english and it consists of 64 short articles about life in serbia that were originally published in newspaper columns. the following five vignettes were given to students to read: “a country of intimacy,” “legends of belgrade,” “the belgrade lifestyle,” “could you live here?”, and “jars of sunshine.” the texts were chosen because of their potential for raising local culture awareness as they presented cultural products and practices in a witty way. the students worked in pairs and each pair was assigned two vignettes. after reading the texts, students acquainted others with the content of the texts. next, students were asked to brainstorm the features of the serbian mindset. to help them do that, the teacher suggested creating a poster that would use the “cultural iceberg” analogy to describe culture (hall, 1976). according to this model, culture is seen an iceberg. the part of the iceberg that is above the water represents visible aspects of culture. the the host country culture in second-language acquisition 51 51 larger part of the iceberg is below the surface and represents aspects of culture that are not obvious but impact the visible ones. students considered belgrade’s physical position, buildings, landscape, its heritage, and the significance of belgrade to those who live in it. students worked in two groups and discussed their ideas within them. after they felt they had included enough qualities in the iceberg, they were asked to display their posters to the whole group. students were invited to provide feedback on the poster. that was the time when they tested their ideas, considered their peers’ reactions, and decided what they may add or remove from the poster. the final part of this phase was designing the billboard that would contain the essence of serbia or belgrade. the billboard could be designed on paper or electronically. the teacher chose to ask students to design the billboard as a cultural product because the format of a billboard required students’ cultural insights to be conveyed in a succinct manner followed by a brief and clearly phrased short message. it was emphasized that the artistic expression would not be graded and that they needed to focus on developing ideas. they worked in groups and after the task was completed, the solution was presented to other groups. b. presentations each group was asked to present their billboard to the rest of the class and to explain why they included the particular message and the image. during the presentation, student performance was graded according to a rubric that considered student engagement, communicative effectiveness, vocabulary choices, and the use of grammar. after the presentation, classmates were asked to provide feedback by saying what they thought was accurate, and which aspects might have been untrue or inappropriate to be included in the billboard. the discussion and feedback that followed presentations offered insights that most of the students included in the report. c. report writing the summative assessment task was to write a report in which the thinking process would be recorded and explanations offered for the content of the billboard (the task clarification is included in the appendix). students were instructed to include cultural terminology that practiced throughout the unit. they needed to explain how the group decided to portray the essence of serbia/belgrade and how they made decisions about what should be included on the billboard. they were also instructed to comment on the role division process and on their role in the team. students’ reports were used as one source for collecting data. the report was completed individually and assessed according to the rubric that considered both content and language. the following aspects were considered: how relevant and developed ideas are, the accuracy of the language students used, and if the text type and register were appropriate. d. semi-structured interview at the end of the unit when the unit was completed, the students commented on the content of the unit and on the progress they made. they were asked about intercultural understandings they gained as a result of the unit and how they managed with academic demands of the summative assessment task. throughout the unit, students were constantly invited to go beyond observable behaviors and comparisons of different practices. they were encouraged to explore the 52 global education review 7 (4) reasons for certain actions and to understand how culture drives behavior, hoping that understanding why certain cultural behaviors exist in the host country would prompt them to reflect on their own culture. results intercultural learning: “above and below the surface” after students designed the iceberg posters, they presented their findings to the other class members. the starting point was observable behavior not found in different cultures. it was evident that students were noticing local customs and traditions and comparing them with those in their own culture, finding some difficult to understand. for example, student 1 found unusual and maybe even disturbing the way that serbian people show affection. in belgrade, you can see people kissing in the street. in china, people do not kiss in public, or in front of their children or family (student 1, transcribed classroom discussion). working in groups provided an opportunity for greater reflection on what was seen as inherently serbian. the example was what a group of three students called “the cafe culture.” as they identified and explained the phenomenon, they related it to a different attitude toward the concept of time. an international student described life as slow, and another attempted to provide a rationale for this kind of pace. student 3: belgrade is slow. people stop to talk. there is no constant hurry. i don't really care about coffee, but i like it when you find time to sit down… and just chat. student 8: maybe all serbian people are not lazy, they only take time doing things. i learned that you never refuse a cup of coffee if you want to stay friends with someone (transcribed classroom discussion). in this exchange, the student also offered a more realistic picture of the perception of time. by examining the coffee-drinking habit, student 3 expressed the appreciation of taking time to relax and socialize, while student 8 attempted to confront the view of serbian people “being lazy” and showed awareness of the value that host country culture attaches to it. as students were explaining the items they included in their culture iceberg poster, many pointed out that some practices could be put in both “above” and “below” the surface. they also attempted to provide explanations for certain assets that were visible by connecting them to what is “below the surface.” student 1: welcoming is “floating” because it can be seen and could not sink… i cannot imagine anyone in serbia being unwelcoming to newcomers. it is deep down in people but is also visible. student 2: “big meals” are visible, but it was interesting to read that there is fear of being hungry that comes from the past. i think it is good to have both “big meals” and the “fear of hunger” because they go together. student 3: i put wars below the surface because they are history now, but still important in a creepy way. student 5: someone put connections below the surface, but they should be above as well. you told me that when something has to be done, you think... who shall i contact? something similar happens in my country… i kind of take it for granted. student 2: it is interesting how what is above the surface can be connected with something the host country culture in second-language acquisition 53 53 below (transcribed classroom discussion). these comments are not only interesting observations, but they offer a valuable insight into the development of students’ intercultural awareness. when examining local culture, the starting point was obvious and from there students would move to hidden aspects. students found many differences on the surface level. they commented on aspects of culture that were perceived as different and unusual. these were all considered by foreigners as typical for serbians. below the surface, students were comparing their own culture and looking for causes for certain behaviors. for example, students identified the importance that is assigned to food in serbia. as they went deeper, they were looking for connections and found one with the rooted fear of hunger. hospitality was another identified as an inherently host-country culture quality. after examining beliefs, students concluded that the visible behaviors are connected with characteristics that could not be easily seen, even hidden, and that only when you scratch the surface level, can you understand people’s actions. offering explanations for certain practices showed how students were looking for connections and employing critical thinking skills. they used their knowledge to make sense of what they observed or experienced, or to try to account for some of its aspects, and to correct what they considered as misconceptions. examining beliefs and forming new understandings throughout discussions students considered either their own or another culture. they were in a position to question certain practices, compare and contrast them with those of their own culture, look for similarities and differences, and to challenge stereotypes. in the following exchange, international students focused on traditionally and culturally assigned gender stereotypes, identified different gender roles in their culture, and wanted to explain how they are different from those in the host country. student 3: in ukraine, it is usually a woman who stays at home and does the housework. i do not know why, but it has always been the case… not like here… student 1: in china, a man would usually give all the money to his wife and she would pay for everything… women control the finances of a house (transcribed classroom discussion). both students offered critical observations. student 3 could not explain why that was the case, and it seemed that he did not think much about it before. student 1 offered the description of role division in her country, showing that she was aware of the different roles women have in her country. as students considered stereotypes, they concluded that stereotypes impacted how the local community was perceived. host-country students claimed that comments coming from their peers ranged from insightful to disturbing. one international student offered the following perspective: “people in serbia are multitasking, easily distracted, maybe even lazy, good at producing and handling interruptions, often change plans, and are very relaxed about time.” (student 5, report-writing task). host-country students did not have a similar perception of themselves. the following comment from a hostcountry student shows that it was not how he wanted to be perceived. student 8: it is not the way i like others to see us… but everyone has the right to see things differently. i may be upset, but i’d rather not go into explanations… i may say 54 global education review 7 (4) something that is not right (transcribed classroom discussion). although unhappy with his classmates’ observations, this student was prepared to accept that people may have different views. he also attempted to understand how his feelings might affect communication with people who think differently. there were topics that seemed to be sensitive for international students, but not for host country ones. two of the aspects that were previously identified previously were corruption and the tendency to bend rules. when asked for a possible explanation of why rule-bending and rule-breaking are so widespread, international students were very careful not to offer an inappropriate remark. although they perceived some cultural differences as unacceptable, they were reluctant to talk about them with their peers. on the other hand, the host-country students were passing their judgments freely. student 7: maybe it is because of history. we were under other nations… we had so many strict rules that we had to follow or to be killed and maybe … people got tired of that… and when they got free, they disobeyed, become lazy … student 8: it is also interesting how things function… you always need to know someone… (transcribed classroom discussion). there was an attempt to explain that history affected the way people would experience their rights or disrespect rules. this exchange shows how international students wanted to be respectful, while host-country students recognized the same aspect as negative, yet they were open to talk about it. one international student explained that some topics are not comfortable for her. she explained that she found it disturbing when people talked to her about politics. student 1: i do not mind people talking, but do not judge… everyone has their opinion and we cannot control but do not pretend you are the expert… when you do not know much. student 8: people here like to have opinions about certain topics… but it is not always good… especially if you do not know enough, how can you know what to say to them (transcribed classroom discussion). there was definitely a cultural dilemma since the culture of student 1 clashed with the people whom she encountered. student 8 offered a better behavioral pattern. as the student pointed out, the less we know about what drives others and about their circumstances, the harder it becomes to communicate with them. it is understandable that a student’s culture has been the starting point for exploration and understanding of other cultures. students’ observations ranged from neutral statements and attempts to be respectful to expressing frustration. international students avoided talking about corruption probably because they did not consider it safe in their own culture. however, the topic was obviously not sensitive for local students, and their observations might have been observed as inappropriate in different cultural contexts. inevitably, some intercultural exchanges may be disturbing, and as student 8 pointed out, passing judgments is not the best course of action. students’ reflections on learning throughout the unit, students learned new concepts, improved language skills, and communicated for authentic purposes. in the the host country culture in second-language acquisition 55 55 beginning, the topic represented the safe ground, but through exploration of multiple perspectives, there ensued a dynamic process and through discussions and debates there were passionate expressions of different points of view. linguistically speaking, students were given an opportunity to argue their views, which is one of the skills they will need for their further education. through the report it was evident that students expressed their concern that when attempting to create an interculturally appropriate billboard, they were restricted by the language. namely, expressions that would appeal to serbians when translated into english lost important nuances. student 7 explained how he used the expression “all roads lead to belgrade” because that was an expression that would be understood both by serbians and by international visitors. another student attempted to explain the features of his billboard, but concluded “that billboard may not be the easiest to understand… there is so much we put into it… only we can understand what we meant.” both observations show that students were aware that different languages may express shared ideas in different ways, and that some ideas may not be easy to express through another language. although the assessment task encouraged students to think about the host country and explain what it is that defines hostcountry culture, it could be said that much was left unsaid in students’ assignments. maybe the reason was that they focused on the academic aspects of the task and did not explore host culture in depth. however, their work shows their language development and willingness to engage. most students stated that they liked the exchange of opinions during group discussions. one student pointed out that the explanations she received from her peers changed her views of the host country's culture. she also added that the experience was meaningful to her. throughout the exchanges, host-country students were perceived as knowledgeable participants since they could explain all the aspects of their culture that others considered intriguing, unclear, or strange. serbian students were confident when sharing their opinions. some of them took the lead and offered explanations. even the students that were usually quiet participated. one student explained that it was “interesting to hear what others think about us,” and to “maybe change some negative views.” on the other hand, international students brought their own cultures and while being exposed to that of the other, they compared them and asked clarifying questions. both groups of students reflected on differences and similarities. at the same time students were reflecting about the process. when commenting on their group work, one student explained, “i would assume that we all equally contributed to the outcome of the project, but we all had different approaches and opinions.” when asked to reflect on their learning throughout the unit, it was evident that students were developing new understandings as a result of interaction with students who have a different cultural background. student 8: we see that only when we meet people from other countries. as you grow up, your world becomes bigger and you meet people and by talking to them you learn who you are. when you are in your country, you only notice the things that people from your country do. student 2: what we do defines us more than where we are from (transcribed feedback at the end of the unit). 56 global education review 7 (4) they also appreciated working with students coming from different parts of the world. one student commented, “i am thankful that i have heard a lot of different opinions” (end of unit assessment task). conclusions the goal of the unit “the essence of belgrade/serbia” was to offer students opportunities to discover and compare their own cultural heritage with the local culture. the unit itself allowed the teacher to design challenging activities that would develop both linguistic and intercultural skills. students conducted their research on cultural perspectives and at the same time developed their language proficiency. while working on the project, students practiced language structures, expanded vocabulary, and in that way, both were acquiring new language and learning about the culture of the country in which the live. the newly gained perspectives encouraged students to reflect on the characteristics of their own culture and to approach it from a new angle. inquiring about the contexts of their peers and re-examining their own allowed promotion of tolerance and respect for others. students were engaged in a reflective discussion about the host country's culture, and that gave them a reason to talk about their world views and created opportunities for those views to be changed. activities required students both to be culturally sensitive and to use academic vocabulary in a meaningful way. learning engagements thus became the forums for students to encounter “individuals who are different in important respects and who present one another with the experience of “otherness” (alred, 2003, p. 16). the combination of students who were both from the host country and from other countries stimulated students either to learn about the host country or to find out what nonserbian nationals thought about serbian culture. the host-country students brought their knowledge about implicit cultural aspects, and international students formed an understanding of serbian culture influenced by their previous experience. the international students were willing to gain cultural knowledge by asking questions. while discussing culture they would mention their experiences and try to interpret what happened to them or to find meaning in practices that seemed unexpected to them. through participating in the activities, international students could understand some of the cultural characteristics of their peers and the host country students were challenged by questions and attempted to provide an explanation. developing intercultural awareness is an important aspect of the school ethos, however, the school still tends to be a closed community. although intercultural learning was taking place and students were exploring culture throughout the unit, it is difficult to tell if the international students really encountered the host-country culture. they mostly observed cultural elements adopted by the population of affluent hostcountry nationals who attended the school. despite the limited contacts that they have with the local culture, all students attempted to understand it and showed readiness not to assume that their own behaviors and beliefs are the only ones that are correct. exploration of the local community has a huge potential in any context of international education and is hoped that the host country's culture will be used as a resource more often and that as a result of such experiences students will further develop intercultural awareness. the host country culture in second-language acquisition 57 57 appendix task clarification for the report on the making of the billboard “the essence of serbia/belgrade” please, make sure you include the following parts in your report: i aim write what your objective was. one sentence will be enough e.g. “my aim was to produce…” ii method a) background information about the task. here you need to include the terminology that was used throughout the unit. you may want to include 3 ps or to focus on different types of cultures. the conversations that you had during the group work will be a great starting point. please, make sure that in this section of your report, you cover the following questions: • how did you decide to portray the “essence” of serbia/belgrade'? • what discussions did you have in your group? • how did you make decisions about what should be included on your billboard/commercial? • how do your choices reflect the “essence” of belgrade'? b) the process here you need to explain how you completed the task. please, make sure that in this section of your report, you cover the following questions: • how many people were involved in creating billboard/commercial? • how did you divide roles? • who took the lead? • what was your role? are you happy with your performance? iii) evaluation in the last section of your report, you need to reflect on the process. for example, you may be happy or unhappy about the billboard quality, planning, and collaboration. or, you might be reflecting on your team's technical (in)competence. you will need to include both strengths and weaknesses. references allen, k. (2000). the international school and its community: think globally, interact locally. in m. c. heyden, & j. j. thompson (eds.), international schools and international education. london: kogan page, 124-139. alred, g. (2003). becoming a ‘better stranger’: a therapeutic perspective on intercultural experience and/as education. in: alred, g., byram, m., fleming, m. (eds.) intercultural experience and education (pp.1430). clevedon, multilingual matters. bredella, l. (2003). for a flexible model of intercultural understanding. in: alred, g., byram, m., fleming, m. (eds.) intercultural experience and education (pp. 31-49). clevedon, multilingual matters. caters, k. (2004). becoming a global teacher: ten steps to an international classroom. the language teacher. 28, 7, 31-35. freeman, d. e. & freeman, y. s. (2001). between worlds: access to second language acquisition, portsmouth & boston, ma: alyn and bacon. 58 global education review 7 (4) galante, a. (2014). developing eal learners’ intercultural sensitivity through a digital literacy project. tesl canada journal/revue tesl du canada. 31,1. 53-66. hall, t. e. (1976). beyond culture. garden city, n. y.: anchor press. halliday, m.a.k. (2004). three aspects of children's language development: learning language, learning through language, learning about language. in j.j. webster (ed.) the language of early childhood: m.a.k. halliday, (pp. 308-326). new york: continuum. jackson, m. (2005). the role of the host culture as a resource for developing intercultural understanding in a dutch international secondary school. journal of research in international education. 4, 2, 193-209. kapor, m. (2009). a guide to serbian mentality. dereta. ko, m. (2013). critical literacy practices in the efl context and the english language proficiency: further exploration, english language teaching, 6, 11. 17-28. kourova, a. (2013). connecting classrooms: russian language teaching project at ucf. russian language journal / русский язык, 63, 79-90. kramsch, c. (1998) language and culture. oxford: oxford university press. lomicka, l. l. (2009). an intercultural approach to teaching and learning french. the french review, 82, 6, 1227-1243 mercer, n., & littleton, k. (2007). dialogue and the development of children's thinking. london: routledge mercer, n. (2008). talk and the development of reasoning and understanding. human development, 51, 90-100. peterson, a.d.c. (1987). schools across frontiers. la salle, il: open court. secombe, m. j. (2016). core values and human values in intercultural space. politeja, jagiellonian cultural studies human values in intercultural space. 44, 265-276. vygotsky, l. s. (1986). thought and language. cambridge, ma: the massachusetts institute of technology. wandel, r. (2002). teaching india in the efl-classroom: a cultural or an intercultural approach? in byram, m. & grundy, p. context and culture in language teaching and learning. multilingual matters ltd. 92-105. about the author olja milosevic, the international school of belgrade, has been involved in second and foreign language teaching at all levels in primary, secondary and tertiary education. she holds a phd in applied linguistics and is primarily interested in second language acquisition and maintaining the mother tongue. she is also involved in teacher training. applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 74 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: sharif, iman. (2020). the applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings: the syrian refugee teachers’ case study. global education review, 7 (4), 74-92. the applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings: the syrian refugee teachers’ case study iman sharif university of glasgow (uk) abstract displacing the largest number of refugees in recent time is one of the devastating impacts of the syrian war. turkey hosts over 3.6 million syrian refugees. almost half of them are children in the preschool or primary school stage. because refugee children are five times more likely to miss schooling than nonrefugee children, the provision of high-quality education in refugee settings is emphasized in the literature, as it offers children and their community protection, security, social cohesion, and it also prevents conflicts. therefore, the purpose of this paper is to report some key findings of a qualitative study that primarily examined syrian refugee teachers’ perceptions of quality education and their experiences of pedagogical change, which included adoption of more learner-centered practices in line with the standards set by the international network for education in emergencies (inee), an organization that guides the delivery of quality education in emergencies. this paper explores teachers’ beliefs about learning, their education, training, and their perceptions of learner-centered education (lce) and the implementation of lce in an urban syrian refugee school in turkey. in addition, the paper investigates teachers’ vision of good pedagogy within their realities and capacities. the findings from this study showed complex contextual influences affecting the educational provision for syrian refugees and lce implementation challenges. a key implication that arises from this study relates to the suitability of lce as “best practice” in the refugee context. keywords syrian refugees, quality education, good pedagogy, inee, learner-centered education quality education in refugee settings providing education for children affected by conflict is as old as history. nevertheless, the interest in researching education in conflict and emergencies is growing and the number of publications in this field has grown continuously (blumör & buttlar, 2007; mundy & dryden-peterson, 2011). in the education in emergencies literature, the complex relationship between education and conflict is recognized. many authors emphasize the positive and negative roles of education, particularly in times of conflict (bush & saltarelli, 2000; davies, 2004; harber, 2004; mundy & dryden-peterson, 2011; nicolai & triplehorn, 2003; pigozzi, 1999; save the children, 2017; schweisfurth, 2013; sinclair, 2001; smith & vaux, 2003; unesco, 2014). according to a unesco (2014) report, which highlights the positive aspects of education, education is a lantern that shines a light on every stage of life, leading to a better life. education enhances human rights and helps people claim their other rights, as they learn the obligations which they entail (nicolai & triplehorn; 2003; pigozzi, 1999; sinclair, 2001; unesco, 2014). smith and vaux (2003) indicate that education provides people with the necessary skills, knowledge, and values they need for their personal, social, and economic applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 75 75 development. in addition, education plays a vital role in reducing poverty, as it increases their opportunities for obtaining well-paying jobs that, in turn, increases the economic growth of society (save the children, 2017; smith & vaux, 2003). however, in the two faces of education in ethnic conflict, bush and saltarelli (2000) show “the constructive and destructive impacts of education—the two faces of education” (p. vii), an idea that challenges the assumptions about the real value of education. the uneven distribution of education, the denial of education as a weapon of war, the use of education as a weapon in cultural repression, the manipulation of history for political purposes, the manipulation of textbooks, the use of education to diminish self-worth, harboring hate toward others, segregated education to ensure inequality, lowered self-esteem, and stereotypes are examples of the negative roles of education that bush and saltarelli (2000) highlight. therefore, curriculum content, pedagogy, and how education is financed and delivered can lead to positive or negative impacts (bush & saltarelli, 2000; davies, 2004; harber, 2004; nicolai & triplehorn, 2003; smith, 2010; unesco, 2011). to take advantage of the positive aspects of education, achieve development goals, and support peacebuilding, unesco (2014) stresses the importance of providing children with good quality education, particularly in times of conflict. despite the abundance of literature that acknowledges the importance of achieving quality education, several authors point out that there is no universal definition of quality education, particularly in emergencies (alexander, 2015; box, 2012; midttun, 2006; sayed & ahmad, 2015; schweisfurth, 2015; sriprakash, 2012; unesco, 2005; vavrus 2009; williams, 2001). as box (2012) and williams (2001) argue, the term “quality education” is complex because its meaning varies depending on the values and priorities of different stakeholders. the term has been defined differently by different organizations. therefore, when evaluating the quality of education and methods to improve it, unesco-iiep (2010) recommends defining the particular elements of quality, along with its standards and indicators. for example, unesco’s (2005) framework shown below in figure 1 defines the elements of education quality as follows: figure 1: unesco’s framework for understanding quality note: from “unesco’s framework for understanding quality,” by unesco (2005) 76 global education review 7 (4) in unesco’s framework, there are five main dimensions of educational quality: learners, environments, content, processes, and outcomes. access, teaching and learning processes, and outcomes are affected by context and the range and quality of inputs provided. the quality of education is influenced by the characteristics of learners and their capacities for learning, the degree to which they obtain supporting inputs, and the quality of their learning environments. however, according to sayed and ahmad (2015), the notion of education quality is contested despite the popularity of the unesco’s framework. along a similar line, alexander (2015) criticizes the way quality has been loosely and elusively defined by international aid agencies. for midttun (2006), the definitions of quality and relevant education change from one context to another such as when people move from home to exile or from camp to settlement. given that the implementation of quality education is heavily dependent on a specific context, providing a universal definition of quality becomes a challenging task. furthermore, there are many influences and challenges that affect the provision of quality education in different refugee settings (box, 2012; brown, 2001; dryden-peterson, 2011; mendenhall et al., 2017; save the children, 2017; sommers, 2002; williams, 2001). nevertheless, in refugee contexts, learner-centered education (lce) is central to the discussion of quality education as its use is endorsed by international aid agencies as “best practice.” specifically, lce can improve refugee children’s learning, address their needs, and promote their psychological healing and critical thinking skills (inee, 2010b; lattimer, 2015; midttun, 2006; mtika & gates, 2010; pigozzi, 1999; schweisfurth, 2015; sinclair, 2002; tabulawa, 2003; unesco-iiep, 2010; williams, 2001). in its widely cited framework, minimum standards for education in emergencies, chronic crises and early reconstruction (inee, 2004)—updated in 2010 (inee, 2010a)—inee offers guidelines for supporting the delivery of quality education in emergencies internationally, and notes the adoption of lce as an indicator of quality education. inee (2010b) indicates that in learner-centered classes, learners’ skills, knowledge, experiences, and interests are considered. teachers challenge learners, promote their creativity, and respond to their emerging needs in class (mtika & gates, 2010; westbrook et al., 2013). according to schweisfurth (2013), education that is more learner-centered is defined as “a pedagogical approach which gives learners, and demands from them, a relatively high level of active control over the content and process of learning. what is learnt, and how, are therefore shaped by learners’ needs, capacities and interests” (schweisfurth, 2013, p. 20). despite the promises of lce, the history of lce implementation is “riddled with failures grand and small” (schweisfurth, 2011, p. 425). many authors discuss lce’s problems of definition, its critiques, and its implementation challenges in different international contexts. (brown, 2001; brinkmann, 2019; kagawa, 2005; mendenhall et al., 2015; mtika & gates, 2010; o’sullivan, 2004; schweisfurth, 2013; schweisfurth & elliott, 2019; sommers, 2002; sriprakash, 2012; stott, 2018; tabulawa, 2003, 2013; vavrus, 2009; williams, 2001). for example, there are different interpretations of lce, as the literature shows, that have influenced the way lce is understood and implemented in different contexts (lattimer, 2015; thompson, 2013). the term lce is unclear and loosely used, as schweisfurth (2013) warns, which suggests that anything might be applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 77 77 called learner-centered when explaining policy or practice. furthermore, based on the comprehensive definition alexander (2000) provides, pedagogy is comprised of many components, including teachers’ knowledge, values, and skills, the purposes of education, the learning environment, the process of learning, and the interaction between teachers and learners and the world outside. the use of learner-centered pedagogy is influenced by many factors, including the local culture, teacher-learner relationship, resources, time, class size, curriculum, assessment, government policy, teachers and learners’ beliefs, experiences, and motivation (brinkmann, 2019; gipps & macgilchrist, 1999; guthrie, 2011; kagawa, 2005; mendenhall et al., 2015; mtika & gates, 2010; schweisfurth, 2013, 2015; williams, 2001). therefore, what works and is considered effective in one context may not work in a different context because of the complexity of pedagogy as several authors argue, including alexander (2004), guthrie (2015), o’sullivan (2004), schweisfurth and elliott (2019), sternberg (2007) and vavrus (2009). these authors, among many others, suggest that teachers use a combination of teaching methods in different contexts. against this background, this paper, which is based on my phd thesis (sharif, 2020), presents some key findings from a qualitative case study that partly examined syrian teachers’ views of appropriate pedagogy in the syrian refugee context in turkey and the challenges of pedagogical change that include more learnercentered practices, and teachers’ capacities to implement those practices in the refugee context, given the particular and variable conditions of those contexts. this research views pedagogic models on a continuum of practices with lce at one end, and aligns with the views of many authors who have written on the topic, including alexander (2008b, 2017), mendenhall et al., (2015) and schweisfurth (2013): figure 2: lce as a continuum note: from learner-centered education in international perspective: whose pedagogy for whose development?, by schweisfurth, 2013, p. 11. with regard to this continuum, schweisfurth (2013) clarifies that teachers’ education, training, and experiences may impact the manner in which they choose their teaching approaches (i.e., with greater or lesser ease). conceptual framework: from less learner-centred to more learner-centred pedagogies a survey of the literature shows that culture influences education in powerful ways (alexander, 2000; guthrie, 2011, 2015; schweisfurth, 2013, 2015; sternberg, 2007; vavrus, 2009). sternberg (2007) argues that when learners are taught in ways that are in agreement with their local culture, school performance is positively affected. schweisfurth (2013) illustrates that as a sign of respect, in some contexts, learners do not question their teachers. when new pedagogy that challenges the cultural beliefs of learners, parents, and teachers is introduced, it will be met with resistance. as a result, understanding pedagogy and the goals of education, as sternberg (2007) argues, should occur only within the cultural context. to guide this research and facilitate understanding of the complexity of refugee education, multiple frameworks were used, specifically because international aid agencies’ 78 global education review 7 (4) promotion of lce as an absolute has been heavily criticized in the literature mainly for disregarding the local context of education (alexander, 2008a; brinkmann, 2019; guthrie, 2011; lattimer, 2015; o’sullivan, 2004; schweisfurth, 2013; schweisfurth & elliott, 2019; sternberg, 2007; tabulawa, 2003, 2013; vavrus, 2009). this research drew on five frameworks which guided the analysis of research data from different perspectives: alexander’s (2008b, 2017) framework for dialogic teaching, guthrie’s (2011) five teaching styles continuum, inee minimum standards for education (2010a), o’sullivan’s (2004) learningcentered approach, and schweisfurth’s (2013) minimum standards for lce. in situations of conflict, sinclair (2002) indicates that teachers usually implement traditional teaching methods that are considered less effective pedagogies. to address this concern, inee (2010a) notes that a minimum standard to achieve quality education should include “instruction and learning processes [that] are learner-centered, participatory and inclusive” (p. 87). inee (2010a) advises teachers to provide children with opportunities that engage them actively in learning activities, encourage their interaction, and develop their skills. engaging children in play is also promoted as part of the healing process. the learning environment should be safe, supportive, inclusive, and it should be one that helps build children’s self-esteem (inee, 2010a). inee (2010a) shows some examples of lce activities, including roleplay activities, group work, games, telling stories, and peer education. in contrast with inee (2010a), o’sullivan’s (2004) learning-centered approach encourages teachers to adopt any method that facilitates learning in class within teachers’ realities and capacities. this approach, which considers contextual factors, articulates an adaptive form of lce that is sensitive to the realities of classrooms. therefore, in the learning-centered approach, achieving quality education is possible when teachers use less learner-centered methods to improve learning. o’sullivan’s (2004) framework aligns with alexander’s (2017) framework for dialogic teaching, which can be used to analyze learning talk in the classroom. according to alexander (2017), teachers may use five kinds of talk, which include rote, recitation, instruction, discussion, and scaffolded dialogue. alexander (2017) points out that, based on their suitability, teachers may use any of the five kinds of talk, but the last two types offer children the greatest cognitive challenge they require to promote their learning, confidence, and engagement. guthrie’s (2011) teaching model that describes five teaching styles on a continuum— authoritarian, formalistic, flexible, liberal, and democratic— is also used in this research to facilitate understanding of the teacher and student roles, content approaches, and reinforcement. in this model, teachers may use any style or all, separately or together, when appropriate. therefore, like o’sullivan’s (2004) and alexander’s (2017) frameworks, guthrie’s (2011) framework encourages teachers to use different methods to support learning. all of these frameworks are compatible with schweisfurth’s (2013) minimum standards for lce, which considers the local learning context and encourages teachers’ adoption of less learner-centered methods to deliver quality education. the seven minimum standards schweisfurth (2013) defined to understand and evaluate learner-centered practices emphasize learner cognitive engagement and motivation which may not be the same in different contexts, respectful relationships in the classroom, building on learners’ knowledge and skills, applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 79 79 supporting high quality classroom talk, using relevant curriculum and pedagogy, and meaningful assessment that supports learning. education for syrian refugees in turkey as of march 2020, the estimated number of registered syrian refugees in turkey is about 3.6 million as the unhcr website indicates (www.unhcr.org). the exceptionally large number of syrian refugees has affected the provision of education and its quality in turkey, particularly between 2011-2014. the war in syria that began in march 2011 was expected to end soon. the initial presence of syrians was considered temporary and they were first referred to as “guests,” but later the turkish government registered them under the temporary protection directive (mccarthy, 2018). the confusion in the status of syrian refugees in turkey affected the creation of a clear educational policy framework, but resulted in disregard for the education of refugee children in host communities (çelik & i̇çduygu, 2018; dorman, 2014). although syrian refugees who had official documentation or residence permits could attend turkish public schools, enrollment rates were terribly low. as several reports indicate, there were many challenges affecting children’s access to education, including the language barrier, education gap, lack of official documentation, overcrowded schools, and child labor (aras & yasun, 2016; chatty et al., 2014; dinçer et al., 2013; dorman, 2014; inee, 2014; kirişci, 2014; save the children, 2014; watkins & zyck, 2014). because of the overwhelmingly large number of syrian refugees, unicef facilitated the creation of an education system for syrian children and used a revised syrian curriculum with the aim of encouraging school enrollment in host communities (unesco, 2015). between 2012-2017, education for syrian refugees was provided in turkish public schools and temporary education centers, a practice which ran counter to turkish national education law, which advocates monolingual education content. the centers were mostly run by syrian teachers and used arabic as the main medium of instruction. therefore, they were more commonly known as “syrian schools.” between 2012-2014, syrian schools were not officially accredited nor monitored by the turkish ministry of national education (mone). they mostly operated under threat of closure because of the use of the arabic language and syrian curriculum. in 2014, the mone regulated syrian schools that met acceptable standards. since then, these schools operated under the supervision of mone. the schools were gaining popularity among syrian refugees for various reasons. about 78% of refugee students attended these schools as the united nations high commission for refugees reports (unhcr, 2017). many syrian refugees preferred sending their children to syrian schools because of their familiarity navigating a foreign land, allowing the transmission of arabic culture, knowledge, and language, and offering a sense of belonging (çelik & i̇çduygu, 2018). nevertheless, as the war in syria progressed, the presence of syrian refugees in turkey became permanent and syrian schools were gradually closed by 2018, shortly after the completion of fieldwork conducted for this research. aims of research this paper reports some of the main findings of a qualitative study that aimed to contribute to the growing discussion on the appropriateness of lce internationally as “best practice,” particularly in refugee contexts, and is based on research that examined the quality of education at an urban syrian school in turkey within the scope of temporary protection. this 80 global education review 7 (4) paper also examines syrian refugee teachers’ understanding of appropriate pedagogy within their realities and capacities and their experiences of pedagogical change to lce, which aligns with inee standards (2010a). methodology to achieve the aims of this research, of which the main goal is capturing “participant perspectives,” the qualitative case study methodology was used (bogdan & biklen, 1992, p. 32). qualitative research was selected due to its potential to uncover the complexity of human nature and provide rich and deep data (miles et al., 2014). in this research, the case study strategy is particularly useful to understand “how” syrian teachers provided education for syrian children based on their perspectives and “why” they did what they said they were doing (yin, 2014). the syrian school involved in this research was open from 2013 to 2018 out of refugee camps. data collection took place over a two-month period in early 2018. because of access restrictions to the school site, this research benefitted from the advances in and popularity of the internet and social media technologies as research tools (andreotta et al., 2019; james & busher, 2009; merriam & tisdell, 2016). the data collection techniques used to understand appropriate teaching pedagogy and the challenges to lce implementation in the syrian context from different perspectives include online documents, and real-time online observations and interviews. some of the key findings from the online semi-structured interviews with teachers (via skype) will be presented to communicate teachers’ own perceptions about quality education, their perceptions of classroom reality, influences on their teaching, and the challenges they met. this paper also explores how teachers’ views compare to the international understandings of quality education as articulated by the inee, an organization which that guides the delivery of quality education in refugee situations. participants purposeful sampling, which is popular in qualitative research, was used to recruit teachers who were experienced in teaching syrian children in syria before the war. the goal was to facilitate understanding of the changes in teaching practices, if any, in the refugee context. table 1 below shows teachers’ qualifications, training, and their years of teaching experience in syria and turkey: table 1: syrian teachers’ qualifications, training and years of teaching experience note: from pedagogy in an urban syrian refugee school in turkey: approaches, perspectives, and performances by sharif, 2020, p. 121. teachers qualifications teaching experience in syria teaching experience in turkey unicef training andy postgraduate diploma in education ba in education 3 years 3 years iona ba in sciences 3 years 3 years rose ba in arabic language and literature 4 years 3 years  jane ba in arabic language and literature 9 years 2 years grace teacher preparation institute 13 years 4 years hannah education: 4th year undergraduate student 1 year 2.5 years  julia arabic language and literature: 3rd year undergraduate student 7 years 4 years  anna ba in education 1 year 4 years  maggie ba in english language and literature 5 years 3 years  leah ba in islamic law 2 years 2 years  lucy ba in english language and literature english language teaching (elt) training 2 years 3 years  cara ba in arabic language and literature 15 years 3 years  amy ba in mathematics 11 years 4 years  lily ba in sciences 5 years 2 years  sarah postgraduate diploma in education ba in english language and literature 7 years 2 years applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 81 81 it is important to clarify that as part of their degree course in syria, six teachers were formally prepared to teach in schools. the teachers are andy, grace, hannah, anna, lucy. and sarah. however, the rest of teachers did not have any formal preparation at the beginning of their teaching career in syria. two years after opening the refugee school, unicef offered two-week teacher training on the inee minimum standards. the topics discussed in the training included implementing lce in refugee classes, providing psychosocial support, and using time-management techniques. teachers who had received the unicef training at another school provided the training for teachers at the research school. some teachers who were teaching at another school missed unicef training. data analysis procedures data were analyzed following braun and clarke (2006) thematic analysis guidelines supported by the conceptual framework of the study. information was coded by giving labels to the data collected. the codes allowed for a semantic and conceptual reading of the data. in this way, the coding process was an analytic process rather than a process of data reduction as clarke and braun (2013) advise. guided by the conceptual framework, the data were read several times to note similar and different patterns, search for major points, refine main themes identified, and develop new sets of codes and potential themes that were facilitated by the flexibility of conducting semi-structured interviews. after grouping similar themes together and naming them in analytic memos, the main themes were identified in relation to the research questions. one of the key themes identified was related to syrian teachers’ perceptions of effective pedagogy for teaching refugee children and their views on pedagogical change to include more learner-centered practices as inee (2010a) recommends. research findings teachers’ vision of good pedagogy the findings showed that teachers used a combination of teaching methods along a continuum and their roles ranged from providers of knowledge to facilitators. these changes were due to several underlying influences and contextual difficulties. teachers identified some of the influences and challenges, and highlighted the importance of using various teaching methods to improve the quality of education in the refugee context. however, it is important to point out that although teachers incorporated some features associated with lce in refugee classes, the findings indicated that teachers interpreted lce differently and implemented it based on their particular understanding of the term in the syrian context. when asking lucy about her preferred teaching methods, she replied, “it doesn’t matter whether it is a new or a traditional method. all what i care about is that my pupils learn.” lucy emphasized that she used a variety of methods to teach her classes such as explanation, questioning, repetition drills, and group work because of children’s traumatic experiences. lucy explained that because of the impact of the syrian war and displacement, children’s communication skills were affected. many children missed some learning and were unable to read or write. in addition, many children were traumatized and they stopped talking as lucy clarified: at the beginning i kept asking why doesn’t she respond? why doesn’t he talk? i was shocked to know that the pupil and his brother were hit by a missile. his brother died when they 82 global education review 7 (4) were together. since then he stopped talking. therefore, lucy believed that using repetition drills to teach new knowledge would be beneficial for refugee children: i think repetition is the best way of teaching … i mean you keep repeating over and over again, and you keep reminding them. so, i find this way of repetition drill very good … i mean i’m getting good outcomes from the pupils. so, if i read a lesson once and don’t get back to it, the pupils will be unable to read it well definitely… not at all, not at all. however, based on children’s reactions to the way she taught, lucy indicated that she used different methods. along a similar line, jane said that she used various methods because of several influences such as children’s traumatic experiences: i believe in using a hybrid of methods … we can’t use teacher-centered methods nor learner-centered methods all the time considering the special circumstances our pupils have been through. hannah and maggie also indicated the importance of using all available teaching methods to support children’s learning. in particular, hannah believed that using storytelling, dialogic, and problem-solving techniques can better engage refugee children. moreover, using storytelling can facilitate the identification of children who have been through traumatizing experiences and those who are in need of support. however, hannah pointed out that sometimes the content of lessons may not encourage dialogue, which influences the effectiveness of storytelling techniques with children. therefore, hannah favored using different methods in class. agreeing with lucy, hannah, and maggie, lily said that employing various methods is particularly good within their realities in the refugee context: every lesson depends on using certain methods. some lessons are transmissive. some lessons require doing demonstrations or hands-on activities which within the available resources we can do as in the lesson you observed. in some lessons, we depend on using visuals or drawing. i give my pupils some cartoons and they draw. they feel happy because they did something using their hands. we also use them as visual aids to explain the lesson. lily indicated that her choice of methods was affected by the lack of resources. in some lessons, the science teacher said that teaching aids were hardly found in the school: there is a severe lack of teaching aids and materials which affects the way i teach my lessons. in many classes we can’t do hands-on experiments. most of our lessons here are transmissive because we don’t have any alternative options […] in some lessons we manage to get some materials, but there are lessons which are primarily transmissive. as the findings showed, there were several contextual influences and challenges which affected teachers’ pedagogical decisions, including children’s traumatic experiences and the lack of teaching resources and aids. therefore, teachers indicated that they used less learner-centered techniques to support refugee applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 83 83 children’s learning and responded to their varying needs as they perceived them. the findings suggested that teachers’ own beliefs about teaching and learning served as another important influence on teachers’ pedagogical decisions. for example, in varying degrees, all teachers said that they mainly relied on direct instruction techniques such as explanation and questioning to teach refugee children. several teachers like iona, rose, leah, lily, and lucy said that they primarily used direct instruction techniques because they perceived them to be effective in teaching refugee children. the findings suggested that there was an emphasis on the need for teachers to provide explanation in the syrian context because of children’s learning abilities. for instance, iona described a typical lesson saying that she began her lesson recalling previous information using question and answer technique and then she provided explanation: whatever the lesson was, in any subject i begin first by explaining the lesson. if i have a teaching resource such as a picture, i put it up for the pupils to see. i explain, and they see the picture. when the lesson finishes, i ask them if they have any questions or if there is something they don’t understand. the pupil who has a question can ask and i’ll answer. this will serve as a repetition of the lesson. then, we answer the questions provided in the school textbook. lesson time is short anyway. iona indicated that there were gaps in children’s knowledge and learning abilities because of the refugee experience. iona said that the war and displacement affected children’s access to education. some children were placed in a grade level based on their age and despite having limited access to education before. therefore, iona said that she consciously provided explanations to fill gaps in children’s knowledge. similarly, lucy, jane, and rose discussed the influence of the war on children’s learning abilities and their choice of less learnercentered techniques. for instance, rose said the following: here in turkey i am teaching primary 4 pupils and i always have to teach information pupils learn in primary 1 and 2 to fill the gaps in their knowledge … yes there are gaps and even a distinguished pupil here in turkey can’t achieve half of what a pupil in syria used to achieve. you know the changes in our circumstances. children’s low learning skills, which were caused by the war, affected rose’s choice of explanation. however, what is implicit in rose’s view is that she believed her main role in class was to provide knowledge to cover a fixed curriculum in a context where children experienced interruption in learning. furthermore, lily’s beliefs about the effectiveness of asking children questions encouraged her to use this technique in class: i always depend on engaging pupils in the lesson. i always try to ask them questions related to the lesson or familiar information i expect them to know based on their existing knowledge. most of the time i ask pupils a couple of questions till i get the idea or the response i need. along a similar line, andy, cara, sarah, jane, amy, anna, hannah, and maggie believed that using questioning techniques can engage children in class and promote their self-esteem. as an example of changing teaching techniques and priorities in the refugee context, andy said 84 global education review 7 (4) that he mostly relied on questioning to be closer to the refugee children who needed more affection because of their traumatic experiences: explanation as a teaching technique distances the teacher from his pupils and transmits information to them. today; however, even if the lesson requires using explanation, i don’t use it with our pupils in turkey. i change the way the lesson is taught from explanation to dialogue. before (in syria) i used to give my lesson using explanation, but now i use dialogic teaching to be closer to pupils. by dialogic teaching i mean question and answer. i use question and answer not from a distance to be closer to pupils. i ask a question, listen to the answer, i motivate the pupils to be closer to them … to feel the love they lost in syria. andy indicated that in response to children’s needs, he consciously relied on asking questions in class. andy highlighted children’s need for building self-confidence which is particularly important for refugee children who feel they have no value in society during the war: there are pupils who felt during the war that the human being doesn’t have any value. the value of the human being is as cheap as the price of a bullet. this is how they believe … i am teaching primary 4, the pupils are smart and they are up to the level. however, the idea they have is that the human being has no value. he is as cheap as the price of a bullet in syria. therefore, i use the method that you observed to activate the pupils. i ask pupils to come out to the front of class, i talk about them and let them depend on themselves. for its perceived advantages, andy believed that using questioning techniques is appropriate in the refugee context. moreover, andy argued that using questioning techniques can actively engage children and demonstrate implementation of learner-centered practices in the syrian context. however, based on the findings, there was confusion about the meaning of lce and how it was implemented in refugee classes. as revealed in andy’s responses above, dialogic teaching and question and answer techniques were the same. moreover, several teachers including hannah, grace, and leah said that they did not know what lce exactly means and indicated their lack of knowledge of pedagogic models. therefore, they said that they used any methods that could show physically active children in class. as particular examples of teachers’ responses to using lce in the syrian context, leah said, “i think during the unicef training we came across learner-centered pedagogy, but i can’t remember what that was about.” as for hannah, she said, “i don’t know exactly what learner-centered pedagogy is, but from my experience i am using a combination of methods.” in addition, grace said, “well, you mean the pupils teach the lesson? don’t you?” the results showed that some teachers believed that they were implementing lce based on the way they understood active engagement. most teachers believed that giving children some tasks as creating visual aids, teaching their peers, and guiding children to prepare the content of the lesson and play the role of the teacher in class are examples of using lce practices. according to andy, grace, iona, julia, rose, lily, and sarah, giving children such tasks empowered and engaged them. for example, sarah said that the children enjoyed imitating her style and playing the role of the teacher, as it empowered them: applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 85 85 the lesson they teach is always interesting even though they don’t use english all the time. the pupils seem to enjoy it and the ones who are teaching love playing the teacher’s role. therefore, i’ll continue using this method in my class. when a pupil is the teacher, their peers pay attention and listen to them because i think they don’t want to embarrass them. as sarah indicated, children accept support from peers without that acceptance affecting their self-confidence. similarly, andy said, “when a pupil becomes the teacher, he becomes more confident. he feels he has a value in this society.” however, as the findings show, teachers said that children played the role of teacher as a follow-up activity or after explaining a lesson. for example, hannah said: when pupils are absent, i ask their peers to explain the lesson. i give them the role of the teacher and they explain. i sit behind their desk […] honestly, i always explain the lesson for them before they teach their peers. i tried peer teaching before i provided my explanation and to be honest with you the pupils didn’t interact. along a similar line, lucy said, “i must explain first, and such activities function as a revision, so pupils know some information … new information no way!” moreover, jane said, “we depend on using active learning techniques after i teach the lesson.” similarly, maggie emphasized the impossibility of giving children an active role particularly at the beginning of school term: it is impossible to use lce when pupils just start school. they receive information. the teacher should have a role at the beginning and then pupils get used to the teacher, they imitate the teacher, they build good rapport and then you can give them an active role and let them work in groups and be leaders. many teachers indicated that there are certain times when lce can be used when certain conditions are met. because of the serious lack of resources, classroom structure, children’s traumatic experiences, learning abilities and psychosocial needs, as well as teachers’ beliefs, education, and training, the findings emphasized that implementing lce as “best practice” is unrealistic in the syrian context: in this course, most of the methods they [unicef trainers] talked about can’t be used here. they are not appropriate in our context here … i mean in our school as refugees. these methods work in their context and their schools. they are appropriate for people who are settled in their country, their schools are wellresourced, and they have laboratories and tools. some ideas were useful, but mostly i find them hard to implement considering our realities (interview with lily). considering the underlying influences on pedagogy and challenges of educating refugee children, the findings indicated that syrian teachers consciously rejected implementing lce despite unicef recommendations. their rejections were due to their beliefs regarding its implementation in the refugee context within their realities and its limited capacities. from teachers’ perspectives, lce can work only at certain times and under specific conditions in the syrian refugee context. 86 global education review 7 (4) discussion based on the views of teachers, mixing pedagogies in class can support the delivery of quality education in the syrian context. this is in line with the views of many authors including o’sullivan (2004), barrett (2007), vavrus (2009), guthrie (2011), schweisfurth (2013), thompson (2013), and alexander (2017). however, this finding does not align with inee (2010a) which supports lce implementation as “best practice” in refugee situations. the findings of this case study research highlighted multiple influences and challenges that affected teachers’ decisions and their views of lce and effective pedagogy. teachers in this research study held perceptions of effective pedagogy that reflect o’sullivan’s (2004) learning-centered approach, where the priority is to provide effective learning using whatever activities, techniques, and skills are available. like guthrie (2011), syrian teachers support the implementation of a flexible teaching style that gives learners more active roles within the constraints defined by teachers. however, the findings indicated that as the teacher is the leader and controller of activities in their respective classrooms, the teacher-pupil relationship in the syrian class is actually hierarchical (guthrie, 2011). children have a limited role in class and learning choices, which affects lce implementation as defined above by schweisfurth (2013). this is further supported by the way teachers expressed incorporating the use of lce based on their tightly framed understanding of active learner engagement. for example, the findings showed that there is confusion about the meaning of lce and how it is implemented in class. some teachers considered asking children closed questions and having physically active children engaged in various activities as examples of employing lce. however, based on schweisfurth (2013) and brinkmann (2019), lce is defined based on learner cognitive engagement. this suggests that lce was interpreted differently in the syrian context and, therefore, superficially implemented in class. the reasons for confusion about lce interpretation and implementation may be due to limited teacher education and training. as mentioned previously, not all teachers were professionally trained as part of their degree course in syria. in interviews, most teachers indicated their lack of knowledge of pedagogic models. in addition, some teachers missed unicef teacher training on the inee minimum standards which was offered to some teachers in certain schools at particular times. although some of the topics in the training course included use of lce in classrooms, offering psychosocial support, and using time management techniques, teachers criticized the quality of the training course as it was delivered by teachers who attended the training previously in another school. therefore, some teachers were not certain about what lce means and how it is to be implemented in class. to effectively understand and implement lce, syrian teachers need high-quality training on lce, offered by well-qualified trainers. the training should be offered on a continuous basis to ensure that teachers are aware of lce implementation in line with inee (2010a) recommendations. some teachers expressed views that contradict learner-centered beliefs in the way deakin crick and mccombs (2006) suggest. for learner-centered teachers, all children can learn, whereas non learner-centered teachers believe that some children cannot learn (deakin crick & mccombs, 2006). in the syrian context, some teachers emphasized that children needed applicability of learner-centered education in refugee settings 87 87 teachers’ use of explanation techniques because of children’s huge learning gaps and their capabilities. like the views of teachers in o’sullivan’s (2004) study in namibia, syrian teachers’ perceptions about their classroom role reflect behaviorist beliefs about children’s capabilities, which can hinder lce implementation in the ways that inee (2010a) recommends. presenting the curriculum as a fact challenges the constructivist views of learning and encourages more learner exploration of knowledge and less teacher telling (weimer, 2002). nevertheless, the literature highlights the importance of using less learner-centered techniques in refugee contexts and developing countries, especially those where there are big gaps in children’s knowledge, and lack of time, space, instructional aids, and resources prevail (bennett, 1976; clark et al., 1979; o’sullivan, 2004; guthrie, 2011; mendenhall et al., 2015). in line with the literature, the findings indicated that teachers perceived less learner-centered methods as effective in the syrian context because most of the children are traumatized and may be reluctant to participate in class because of their refugee experience and displacement. most teachers emphasized that children’s traumatic experiences and their psychosocial needs were among the main challenges they encountered when applying lce. other examples of the challenges that teachers encountered and which hindered lce implementation in the syrian context include the physical classroom structure, and the serious lack of resources and teaching aids. because of the underlying influences on pedagogy and challenges of educating refugee children, the findings indicated that syrian teachers consciously rejected implementing lce despite unicef recommendations. their rejection of lce was due to their beliefs regarding its implementation in the refugee context within their realities and capacities. based on teachers’ views, lce can work at a certain time and within specific conditions in the syrian context. therefore, this research recommends contextualizing lce to consider teachers’ and learners’ realities and capacities as suggested by many authors, including o’sullivan (2004), alexander (2008b, 2017), vavrus (2009), schweisfurth (2013) and thompson (2013). in a contextualized form of lce, teachers may use less learner-centered methods to improve learning. conclusions and implications this paper presents some of the key findings of a qualitative case study which partly aimed to understand how quality education was understood and delivered in the syrian refugee context in turkey, and is based on an examination of teachers’ views and their perceived classroom needs and reality. the paper shows how lce was interpreted and implemented differently in the syrian case study. teachers believed that giving children teaching roles can actively engage them in learning and used this example to show how they adopted learner-centered practices in refugee classes. as teachers gave peer teaching tasks only after providing their own explanation, lce was superficially implemented in the syrian context as an add-on activity. to support teachers’ understanding of lce and effectively implement this pedagogy in the syrian context, syrian teachers would benefit from effective training on lce to actively and meaningfully engage children and support their learning and well-being. the paper recommends that lce training should consider both teachers’ and learners’ needs and the challenges encountered in the local context. the training should provide teachers with practical guidance 88 global education review 7 (4) and experience of lce. skillful questioning and provision of support to children with psychosocial needs are examples of key areas that need to be addressed in lce training to facilitate effective implementation of lce in the syrian context. it is important to ensure that the trainers are well-qualified to develop teachers’ pedagogic knowledge and skills and provide them with practical advice. the paper highlights teachers’ vision of good pedagogy in the refugee context and encourages the use of various techniques on a continuum to support children’s learning. because of multiple contextual influences and challenges affecting pedagogical decisions, including children’s traumatic experiences, needs, learning abilities, physical classroom environment, teaching resources, and teacher’s beliefs, education, and training, syrian 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(2013). learner-centred education and “cultural translation.” international journal of educational development, 33, 48–58. unesco (2005). education for all: the quality imperative. education for all global monitoring report. paris: unesco. http://theses.gla.ac.uk/79056/ 92 global education review 7 (4) unesco (2011). the hidden crisis: armed conflict and education. education for all global monitoring report. paris: unesco. unesco (2014). teaching and learning: achieving quality for all. education for all global monitoring report. paris: unesco. unesco (2015). education for all 2000-2015: achievements and challenges. efa global monitoring report. france: unesco. unesco-iiep (2010). guidebook for planning education in emergencies and reconstruction. paris: international institute for educational planning. unhcr (2019, june 2). syria regional refugee response. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria vavrus, f. (2009). the cultural politics of constructivist pedagogies: teacher education reform in the united republic of tanzania. international journal of educational development, 29 (3), 303–311. watkins, k. & zyck, s. a. (2014). living on hope, hoping for education: the failed response to the syrian refugee crisis. uk: odi publications. weimer, m. (2002). learner-centered teaching: five key changes to practice. san francesco: jossey-bass. westbrook j., durrani n., brown r., orr d., pryor j., boddy j. & salvi f. (2013). pedagogy, curriculum, teaching practices and teacher education in developing countries. education rigorous literature review. uk: department for international development. williams, j. h. (2001). on school quality and attainment. in j. crisp, c. talbot and d. b. cipollone (eds), learning for a future: refugee education in developing countries (pp. 85-108). geneva: unhcr. yin, r. (2014). case study research: design and methods. thousand oaks: sage. about the author iman sharif is an associate tutor at the university of glasgow. she received a ph.d. in education from the university of glasgow in 2020. her doctoral research focused on understanding the quality of the educational provision for syrian refugee children in turkey and the challenges of pedagogical change to learner-centered education. her primary research interests lie in the areas of pedagogy and refugee education. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/situations/syria engaging ece in times of chaos and authoritarianism 1 editors’ introduction: engaging ece in times of chaos and authoritarianism daniel j. castner & sara michael luna early childhood educators have been working in increasingly precarious conditions for some time. sadly, the precarity is likely to persist for a long time. early childhood programs have been impacted by the global educational reform movement (germ) for decades. dominant discourses of policy and practice perpetuate neoliberal ideologies and narrowly conceived interpretations of quality, reducing the care and education of young children to a merely instrumental endeavor that can be efficiently produced and consumed via crude marketplace transactions. looming environmental catastrophe, growing economic disparities, and political polarization characterize dire conditions that urgently demand critical interrogations of the status quo, inspiring generative alternatives to the germ that plagues ece. uprisings of authoritarian regimes around the globe further compound the challenge of finding and enacting antidotes to authoritarian pressure. authoritarian leaders pose existential threats to the future of open societies and a chaotic context for the education and care of young children. elsewhere, we have considered the consequences of these perilous conditions as the unfortunate and unavoidable backdrop for early childhood research, policy, and practice (michael luna & castner, 2025; michael luna & castner, 2023). the way forward for more sustainable, equitable, peaceful, and liberating early childhood research, advocacy, and pedagogy is far from obvious. nonetheless, amid the chaos of ominous socio-political conditions and overt expressions of authoritarian force, the education and care of young children must proceed undeterred, even in the face of an uncertain and seemingly bleak future. this special issue of global educational review offers four scholarly contributions that answer this call. the articles represent perspectives from england, poland, and the united states. the authors boldly challenge the status quo perpetuated by dominant discourses of ece and refuse to be subdued by authoritarian pressures. in timothy snyder’s (2017) short book, on tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century, the first two lessons are: 1) do not obey in advance, and 2) defend institutions. the contributors to this special issue demonstrate the applicability of these lessons in early childhood research, policy, and practice. amid the growing power of aspiring autocrats, the institution of early childhood care and education must be protected by those directly invested in caring for and educating young children. because capitulating to the implicit authoritarianism circulating through dominant discourse only teaches demagogues how they can impose power in a more overtly authoritarian regime, the advancement of critical perspectives in ece is as vital as ever. this special issue of global education review brings together critical perspectives 2 global education review 12 (2) from both sides of the atlantic, highlighting the complexities of research, policy, and practice. the first article sheds light upon mandates in new york city for the adoption of the creative curriculum and teaching strategies gold. lacey peters, mark nagasawa, maria mavrides calderon, abigail kerlin, helen frazier, beth ferholt, erica clarke yardy, marjorie brickley, and alisa algava collaboratively interrogate how neoliberal forces diminish the quality of early education and consider possibilities for organizing and coalition-building. then, in the second article, nathan archer explores how early childhood educators in england are finding ways to disrupt and resist authoritarian demands. archer’s conception of borderland narratives reveals a generative space for realizing the personal and professional subjectivities of early childhood teachers. lilly padia, luisiana melendez, and sandra osorio critically analyze the authoritarian power that privileges monolingualism. their research, examining a reggio-inspired preschool in chicago, provides helpful guidance on how multilingual identities can be collaboratively affirmed and sustained in early childhood settings. lastly, joanna leek and elzbieta szulewicz conclude this special issue by exploring international educational programs in poland. their research suggests that constructivist practices, which invite openended inquiry and nurture children’s agency, are a meaningful way to counteract centralized curricular control. much has happened since these articles were written. concerns about autocracy have intensified in the united states and around the world as stakeholders in early childhood education seek to navigate a rapidly changing world. nonetheless, the issues addressed in this collection speak to ways power is exercised in pernicious ways that threaten harm to young children, teachers, and families. according to glasius (2023), market forces, constraints on early childhood educators’ professional agency, attacks on the assets of cultural and linguistic pluralism, and nationalist ideologies are authoritarian practices when they exhibit “a pattern of actions, embedded in an organized context, sabotaging accountability to people over who a configuration of actors exerts a degree of control, or their representatives, by disabling their voice and disabling their access to information” (glasius, 2023, p.22). put differently, in open societies, it is imperative to insist the onus is on those exercising power to justify how and why their power is being exercised in the way that it is. the four articles in this special issue activate information about early childhood policy and practice in ways that validate the voices of teachers, children, and families. amidst the contemporary culture wars shaping the social, cultural, and political landscape of much of the world, those who care about the education of young children face similar threats. may the anti-authoritarian impulses of these articles inspire solidarity within the field of early childhood education. references glasius, m. (2023). authoritarian practices in a global age. oxford university press. michael-luna, s. c., & castner, d. j. (2025). rising authoritarian practice in early childhood curriculum: a case study. cultural studies/critical methodologies, 25(1), 44–55. https://doi.org/10.1177/1532708624127 1898 michael-luna, s., & castner, d. j. (2023). removing the guardrails of democracy: engaging ece in times of chaos and authoritarianism 3 silencing critique of early childhood policy and practice. contemporary issues in early childhood, 24(4), 500– 506. https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491231155 971 snyder, t. (2017). on tyranny: twenty lessons from the twentieth century. tim duggan. teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 59 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: simopoulos, giorgos, & magos, kostas. (2020). teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background in greece: teachers’ perceptions about reception, integration and multicultural identities. global education review, 7 (4), 59-73. teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background in greece: teachers’ perceptions about reception, integration and multicultural identities giorgos simopoulos unicef (greece) kostas magos university of thessaly (greece) abstract refugee education has been an important challenge for the greek educational system and for the teaching community. new supporting structures (i.e., reception facilities for refugee education [rfre]), operating after the end of the regular school day, have been created to enable newcomers living in refugee accommodation centers to learn (mainly) greek as a second language before accessing the mainstream school program. on the other hand, refugee students living in urban locations are enrolled in mainstream classes with or without the support of parallel reception classes (rc). most of the educators teaching refugee children, and particularly these working on rfres, did not have any relevant previous experience or specialization and, at the same time, they received minimum support in training or professional development. this paper is based on a qualitative research focusing on perceptions, attitudes and practices of primary and secondary school teachers in relation to refugee students’ second language learning and integration into greek public schools. interviews were conducted with 60 teachers in rfres, rcs, and mainstream classes, including intercultural schools. despite the difficulties they faced, many teachers seemed to move towards a positive understanding of their students’ multiple identities, focusing not only on l2 acquisition and competency building, but also on empowerment and the development of a mutual intercultural understanding. students’ resilience and efforts helped their teachers deal with stereotypes about identity and otherness and reformulate their assumptions about effective teaching practices. these experiences seemed to lead some of the educators to a deeper critical reflection; they also lead to the development of teachers’ intercultural competence and facilitated a “crossing borders” transformative process. keywords refugee/migrant education, intercultural education, teaching l2, teachers’ professional development introduction: the situation of children with refugee background in greece the educational management of the recent refugee flows has constituted a major challenge to the main host societies, leading, among other things, to minor or bigger changes to the educational models regarding the reception and integration of students with different linguistic and cultural backgrounds (mcbrien, 2005; european commission, 2019). in the european union states in 2017, 303,360 children were in the process of application for international protection. the european network of ombudspersons for children1 notes that, although access to education of children with refugee /migrant 60 global education review 7 (4) backgrounds has improved, meaning that the waiting times for registration have decreased and the number of children enrolled in schools has increased, the integration of these children in educational settings is incomplete. in some european states, refugees2 and asylum seekers still have no access to the formal education system, at least in some regions, while the newly arrived students are often placed in preparatory classes (european network of ombudspersons for children [enoc], 2018). until spring 2016, greece, a country with a population of 11,000,000, has been indeed treated, concerning refugee flows, as a transit country. refugees entering greece were recorded and, within a shorter or longer time frame, proceeded with their journey towards the states of central europe. after the closure of the “balkan route” for refugees passing through greece, and the restriction of “legal” transit to other european countries only to those eligible for programs of resettlement or family reunification, approximately 62,000 refugees became stranded in greece (general secretariat for press and information, 2017). at the beginning of 2020, the number of refugees in greece was estimated at 112,300 (unhcr, 2019) while children with refugee/migrant backgrounds in the greek territory reached 42,500 (a 50% increase within 2020), of whom 31,000 were school-age and 4,815 were unaccompanied minors3 (unicef, 2020; education sector working group [eswg], 2020). of these children, 26% reside in reception and identification centers in the northeast aegean islands (with near zero access opportunities to the formal education system), another 26% in open accommodation sites in the mainland, and 33% in apartments and hotels for families. lower numbers are found in shelters for unaccompanied minors and in informal accommodation arrangements (unicef, 2020). while the number of children with a refugee background in greece increases, access to quality education remains a major challenge (ombudsperson, 2019; stergiou & simopoulos, 2019). the integration of children with refugee background into formal education while up to march 2016 nonformal education, provided by international organizations, academic institutions, nongovernmental and civil society organizations covered, more or less efficiently, some of the urgent educational needs of the refugee population, the essential dilemma, especially after eliminating the possibility of formal movement to other countries, lied in the policies of reception and integration of these students in the public school. the existing legal framework in greece was clear in safeguarding access to education for minors third-country4 nationals (regardless of their residency status), their inclusion in compulsory education, and the possibility for enrollment of children whose families are asylum seekers, come from areas of prevailing unrest, or are protected as refugees,5 even without the required documentation and certificates. based on the existing framework and provisions, there were three potential options. the first option was the integration of the overall refugee student population in the public mainstream school, supported by the existing legal framework (reception classes and supplementary tuition), while following (and improving) the model (that had already been applied since the 1990s) regarding students with mainly migrant backgrounds. the second option concerned the creation of special education facilities inside the reception-identification and accommodation centers. finally, the third option focused on the development of a new “bridge teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 61 61 system” between the two previous policies. it is important to highlight that these policy options have already been implemented, in different ways, in various eu host countries as well as in turkey (unesco, 2019). the selected option was the third one. the 2016-2017 school year was defined as “preintegration” or “transitional,” and the focus was placed on kindergarten programs operating within the refugee accommodation centers, and the creation of reception facilities for refugee education (rfres) for refugee children that reside in accommodation centers. the rfres were functioning during afternoon hours (14.00-18.00) in primary and secondary schools near the accommodation facilities. apart from the two aforementioned educational measures, there was a provision for refugee children residing in the urban space to be included in the morning mainstream schedule of the schools, with the support of reception classes. the above measures created a system of access to differentiated educational services, depending on children’s residency status. the children residing in the urban space had access to the (mainstream) morning school (with all specified educational provisions), while the children residing in accommodation centers were enrolled in an afternoon, short-time educational program of reduced thematic areas. to be mentioned that rfres attendance is not connected to a certification of a particular educational level, given that students of rfres, contrary to those of reception classes, are not enrolled in classes equivalent to their age and their studies in rfres are only acknowledged through a certificate of attendance. finally, in the case of greece and according to the ombudsperson and the network of the rights of the children on the move, the integration of the children with refugee backgrounds in the education system was designed “on the basis of division and creation of two parallel systems, depending on the place of residence of the children” (ombudsperson, 2019). in the meantime, there was a debate within the educational community regarding the suitable policies of reception and integration. the main issue was whether establishment and functioning of rfres corresponds (exclusively or predominantly) to managementadministrative challenges (e.g., the lack of capacity of adjacent schools to host the number of school-age children residing in [large] accommodation centers), or to an educational approach that implies that for this particular group it is necessary to have a different form of education, separated from mainstream school, either for a shorter or a longer period of time. in the last case, the question that inevitably arises is why these two different approaches are appropriate or adopted for the same population, solely by reference to the place of residence or accommodation. in other words, it must be answered why a reception and integration policy that is adopted for children residing in the urban space is not considered to be appropriate for the children in accommodation centers and vice versa. during the 2018-2019 school year, out of the 12,867 enrolled students of refugee background, 4,557 studied in rfre, 4,050 in the morning program of schools with reception classes, and 4,240 in the morning program of schools without reception classes (ministry of education and religious affairs, 2019). however, despite the significant efforts that were undertaken during this period, many of the students with refugee backgrounds were found, either at an initial stage or even until today, excluded from public education, with the children who were stuck in the reception and identification centers of the eastern aegean islands being the most striking example. 62 global education review 7 (4) the research the research6 presented here was based on qualitative methodology, focusing on participants’ meanings and aiming to capture a complex picture of the issue under study (creswell & poth, 2016). it was carried out from march 2016 to march 2018, with the aim of capturing and critically examining the perceptions, the implicit personal theories (rando & menges,1991) and the attitudes of educators who teach in reception classes, mainstream classes, intercultural schools, or rfres concerning refugee children, as well as these educators’ beliefs on reception integration methodologies and practices and their needs for support of their professional development. the research included semi-structured, anonymous, and confidential interviews with 60 educators involved in the education of students with refugee or migrant backgrounds in rfres (17 teachers), reception classes (18 teachers), intercultural schools (8 teachers), and in mainstream school classes (17 teachers) of primary and secondary education all over greece. |these interviews were recorded, transcribed, and then analyzed using the content analysis methodology, where codes emerged and categories were formulated (bazeley, 2013; braun & clarke, 2006; saldana, 2015). educators’ views on students with refugee background the teachers who were interviewed represent four distinct groups: the first group consisted of teachers in the rfres of primary and secondary education. in most cases, these are part-time substitute teachers who are not integrated into schools’ permanent core staff, and who hold little classroom experience and no training on teaching non-native speakers of greek. the second group consisted of educators who were hired to teach refugee students within the morning program of public schools, in the context of reception classes. this concerns mainly substitute teachers with little or more teaching experience and (most of them) not familiar with teaching non-greek speakers. the third group of participants were the educators employed in the mainstream program (with or without rcs) of schools with large numbers of students speaking “other languages.” this concerns educators with significant teaching experience and familiar with teaching in multicultural environments. finally, the fourth group consisted of educators of intercultural schools of primary and secondary education. this concerns, in most cases, educators with significant experience in teaching students whose native language is not greek; many of these educators are also qualified with a postgraduate or doctoral degree in intercultural education and/or teaching greek as a second language. teachers’ first contact with refugee students the vast majority of students with a refugee or migrant profile in the year 2016-2017 were hosted in rfres. hence, substitute teachers, generally with zero experience and without any preparation or support, found themselves working in a particularly demanding context with students for whom greek was a “foreign” language and who were out of school for a significant period of time (from several months to many years); moreover, their living conditions and expectations for resettlement to other countries were not supportive to a new learning effort. thus, during their first contact, rfre educators appeared to be dominated by feelings of discomfort, anxiety, and fear: teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 63 63 the truth is that on the first day i felt uncomfortable… i even asked about vaccines, since there was a big fuss at that time, but they assured me that everything was fine. the main issue was that i had never taught people who had no knowledge of greek while, for example, i didn’t know if they knew english. luckily, in the class there was a child who knew english. (educator 10, rfre, may 2016) in fact, i was scared, nobody could define the context…the children arrive, you get in, you shut the door and you are alone…and you are saying “what am i supposed to do?” and then fear goes away and you are saying “well, we just need to get to know each other…to tell them who i am and find out who they are.” and when i leave, i am stressed again, knowing that i have something new to handle and i need to find how to do this… the next day comes in a few hours… what am i going to do? (educator 29, rfre, may 2016) nonetheless, it appears that for many educators, this new role they undertake constitutes a professional as well as a personal challenge: from the beginning i said…okay, i don’t know what this is, but i’ll do it. it’s difficult, yet interesting. and i knew that there were colleagues who declined the position and others who accepted the job at the beginning and then quit. for this reason, there was something in me saying that it’s worth the effort. one must indeed like challenges, it’s not easy… (educator 6, rfre, may 2016) okay, it was by no means easy to have to deal with your friends saying to you “what is wrong with you? why are you doing this to yourself?” and then having the parents of the greek students threatening to shut down the school and some colleagues pretending they don’t see the situation, as if these children do not exist. (educator 7, rfre, march 2017) on the other hand, coming into contact with this specific group of students, getting to know them, and realizing their personal routes and experiences have led many educators to activate an increased empathy and interest for groups that are marginalized, and to invest in practices that support and empower them. the other children always have a teacher interested in them –and the context itself supports them –thus there should be a teacher for these children as well, one who will be interested in helping them. i was a marginalized student too and there were teachers who helped me move forward… (educator 37, rc, april 2018) it’s not only what the average person sees…children who are scared, traumatized… you see the immense strength these children have. children that smile at you even though they don’t understand what you are saying to them. children that try, having no home, not knowing what will happen with their lives tomorrow, to learn a difficult language. this indeed gives you strength. 64 global education review 7 (4) (educator 9, rfre, april 2017) setting goals and planning even without previous experience or support, many of the educators were familiarized, through their everyday teaching experience, with basic principles of communicative and task-based approaches for second-language teaching and planned lessons that focused on language use related to their students’ daily lives. my initial expectation was for children to be able to communicate basic things in simple language. to be able to stand within a specific context. to play, to hide, to count, to speak about their feelings, to tell they are scared or in pain. (educator 7, rfre, april 2017) however, the fact that these educators did not have any systematic support and training supervision explains, to a certain extent, a gradual withdrawal on language teaching models that focus on mechanical acquisition of language structures and vocabulary, and on a metalanguage approach of the language system. the class observation (accompanying some of the interviews with the educators) highlighted that even the teachers whose priority was specifically to support the students’ need to acquire communication skills that respond to their daily needs, in practice they tended to devote most of their lessons to vocabulary presentation and implementation of mechanical gap-filling exercises (e.g., “put the verbs into the correct form”). besides, the focus on the mechanical teaching of the language system emerges from the words of many of rfres educators: well, at first, i used only english and gradually i reached the point where i used only greek. this is what we did in the lesson: check spelling, reading from the book… not everyone could read, particularly the younger children couldn’t make it. and especially the children from iraq who were not attending regularly. older children learnt reading; they were flying high. so, we did spelling, endings etc. (educator 60, rfre, april 2018) on the other hand, the educators in schools with a significant number of multilingual students appeared to be working more consciously towards inclusive practices that reinforce communication and interaction and employ tools of experiential learning and differentiated teaching: we ran a rc ii [reception class, type ii: a second teacher -inside the mainstream classsupports students speaking other than the school’s languages] –this worked. this means that we were two educators in the classroom with respective, equivalent functions. that is, we haven’t split the children into foreign language speakers and non-foreign language speakers, advanced and non-advanced. this is the third year working with coteaching. we also visit different classes, we do projects, we mix students from different classes –and all teachers know every child of the school. (educator 19, mainstream program, may 2016) the constant mobility of the students’ population, the absence of basic information about this specific group, the lack of a frame of teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 65 65 reference, and little or no interaction with the school community seem to constitute the major challenges for the rfre educators. in this context, some teachers sought tools and methodologies that led them to the renegotiate and adjust the learning goals to meet the needs of their students to facilitate differentiated learning. the population of children changes constantly… you are left with seven familiar faces and thirteen new ones. but within a month they had learnt the alphabet and thirty words related to surroundings and feelings. this way, you work both in an individualized manner and in groups. each one has their portfolio and you can see what they have done and what they can do. (educator 9, rfre, may 2017) in some cases, though, the educators were surprised when the first outcomes, either in relation to educational goals or integration in the school context, became visible: we are at the end of the second week and everyone is working very quietly. and one girl raises her hand and says: “miss, is so quiet…” i’m feeling a shiver saying this. (educator 9, rfre, may 2018) teachers’ need for support during the 2016-2017 school year, the rfres educators appeared to be completely deprived of support. this lack, apart from the obvious gaps and failures at the level of educational practices, increases the educators’ feelings of insecurity and frustration (scientific committee in support of refugee children, 2017). on the other hand, for a group of educators this constituted an incentive for a personal journey of exploring methodologies, material, and educational practices that would be appropriate for this particular educational environment. after the first contact, you turn and have a look at the material they sent you… and you are saying: “they can’t have sent this.” you put it aside and you are saying “i will go back over it in one or three months,” you are definitely getting tired, but you are saying “it’s time to use the tools i have and build something.” this is how the first day ends: a bit overwhelmed, a bit anxious and with the strength to move on, to find out from where you must start… (educator 7, rfre, may 2017) permanent teachers, with experience in schools with high concentrations of multilingual students, possessed a critical stance not only in relation to the insufficient support but also in relation to the content of the educational material. in the morning program, we used as educational material what we considered appropriate…in rfre they took the material of muslim minority children education. why? what is the relevance? is it because they are muslims? for me it’s inappropriate… the children of thrace7 are greek citizens and for them the greek language is something different. they have different contact…. (educator 19, mainstream program, october 2018) the lack of appropriate preparation at all levels and the sense of being alone against 66 global education review 7 (4) demanding working conditions permeated the words of the educators who were placed in rfres in 2016-2017. the truth is that i didn’t have any relevant training. they put me in deep water. “this is it, go.” and i have never been certain, neither i am now, that what i was doing was correct. i definitely need training. mainly teaching samples, practice, microteaching, samples of material. i was alone, searching on the internet … (educator 10, rfre, may 2017) and on monday we were notified to go for lesson on tuesday. (educator 9, rfre, may 2017) in this first phase, the search for support was directed towards educators with greater experience in teaching in multicultural environments, some motivated school principals and school counselors, as well as refugee education coordinators.8 the school counselor was very supportive but what can just one person do? you have the teacher, a principal exhausted with bureaucracy and displaced from the pedagogical guidance…functioning only as a source of fear for the school… and you have a school counselor, and that’s all… there are no intermediate “guides.” you can always create paths, trust people and ask for help… sharing your problems, without feeling threatened… (educator 14, rfre, may 2017) i had been supported by the refugee education coordinator, the counselor and the other teachers…we were discussing… (educator 15, rfre, may 2017) the requests for support made by the educators were generally focused on case studies targeting practical, everyday issues and challenges, through which effective practices and collective coordination and collaboration could emerge: i wanted both a theoretical and practical support: microteaching, for example… i was sitting and studying… we should have been prepared intensively two weeks before… and every two weeks, there should be coordinating and exchanging activities, a common path. (educator 10, rfre, may 2017) what makes an educator effective? trying to recontextualize their experience, the educators with whom we spoke focused particularly on the communication with the students, the development of a safe space of mutual trust and openness, something that could compensate for the lack of technical expertise in teaching second language: the relationship with the students was incredible. we did whatever we said. we had an amazing cooperation. they never insulted me, i never insulted them either. i never had to raise my voice. there was love between us... (educator 17, rfre, may 2017) what my advice would be now to someone who is about to enter in this job… it takes a lot of patience, until communication issues are getting teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 67 67 resolved. and if you are biased, don’t get involved on this area. i saw educators not accepting the children, not being able to touch them, feeling repulsed, scared… (educator 29, rfre, january 2018) however, when emotional intimacy and involvement with children are not delimited in a way so that professional space and time are separated from personal space and time, this has been also experienced by teachers as a “weak spot.” i am strict with the children, but when i went to the camp the day before yesterday all of them were running to hug me. you need to set limits…but with acceptance… and my weak spot was that i got too much involved. and i was greatly affected when students begun to leave. generally, i was taking everything home. (educator 11, rfre, may 2017) the development of reciprocal relationships of trust and intimacy, and the sense that the educators’ work is important to the lives of these children, appeared to be the main counterbalances to dealing with the difficulties, the exhaustion, and the lack of support: if i would opt for it again? of course, i would. for many reasons… the idea that they learn the language from you, that after a while you see them capable of communicating, speaking, is huge satisfaction … not to mention the love i received. (educator 38, rc, may 2017) exhaustion is what dominates today… i want to get rest… the relationships that were created though are a big chapter. even the fact that one day i tell the principal that i am exhausted, and he replies “many things took place this year…good things” is a big boost. (educator 18, rfre, may 2017) educational planning and reflection paths the demarcation and development of a context of normalcy and a mutually acceptable system of rights and rules appeared to be the major challenge to the rfres educators, thus leaving the educational goals in a secondary place. and then you must set the rules… and after that, you just start the lesson. you take a look at your material and then at their needs and you sort of make the contract: i don’t speak, i don’t hit, i sit down, i am inside the classroom. rules through games. safety is a big issue: you are an educator alone in the school, it gets darker. and you have many age groups… (educator 46, rfre, may 2018) we had children with lots of anger, but we didn’t know what is going on…there was no contact with the family. and you didn’t have feedback…the students were leaving, you didn’t know where they were going or what you were doing… and you were feeling that maybe this is a sort of parking. and then you adjust your goals, have a goal for each day and not long-term ones… 68 global education review 7 (4) (educator 14, rfre, january 2018) finally, for a significant group of educators, it appeared that reflecting upon educational practices and teaching goals was connected to broader processes of introspection that concern elements of professional and personal identity. these educators felt that the contact with this group helped them redefine their perspectives, belief systems, mental patterns, and attitudes: i would say that i am lucky that just before my retirement i found myself in this situation. and i came to remember what it means to be an educator and why i had opted for these studies and this profession. honestly, i feel lucky and blessed. (educator 47, rc, may 2018) i now look at education from a different perspective and not only for these children. that as educators we need to look at what comes after, what our work means for the future of children. (educator 37, rc, april 2019) despite the fact that in other research (stergiou & simopoulos, 2019), the educators seem to feel ambivalent about the educational context they regard as more appropriate and effective for students with a refugee background, in this research nearly all of the educators we interviewed (57 out of 60) supported the belief, albeit with different degrees of intensity, that the best practice is for these students to be integrated into the morning mainstream program. especially for the educators of rfres, the lack of students’ contact with the school community reduces significantly both the motivation to learn a new language and the prospect for social integration in general: we were getting into the lesson and they were trying to speak this new language. but only with me. they would speak again their own languages with their classmates, and this makes sense. they had nobody to speak greek with. and, on the other hand, they were coming to an empty school – as if they had transferred two containers from the camp to the yard of a deserted school. (educator 10, rfre, may 2017) these educators, although they understood the administrative and logistical problems that, in some cases, were involved in integrating a large number of students from some accommodation centers to the morning program of adjacent schools, they eventually experienced the rfre context as an obstacle to their effort to develop conditions of educational and psychosocial normalcy. i would put these children in adjacent schools, into reception classes. the subject teachers are certainly available in this context, while the benefit of having a reception class would be greater. maybe the problem would be at the places where many children are concentrated, and few schools are nearby. (educator 11, rfre, may 2017) the schedule is an obstacle…from two to six the first graders are tired. you had only one or two breaks to come into contact with the greek students. we were going for a break and we didn’t hear anyone speaking greek. we were teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 69 69 at an empty school. and eventually these children realized that they were different. that they lived on credit. they were getting into a class that was for the greek students in the morning – we couldn’t hang anything on the wall… (educator 14, rfre, january 2018) on the other hand, the educators at the schools of the urban centers where both rfres and rcs were implemented, observed that some refugee students in the morning program who were transferred to the rfre when they started operating (so that their movement from the accommodation center to the school to be facilitated through buses provided for them), returned to the morning program after a short period of time, since, as these students stated, “the afternoon program was not school.” we had the children registered in the morning program since summer, before the rfre. in the morning we had shared activities with the children of rfre. some children left the morning program in order to come in the afternoon by the buses, but they returned. because they had the feeling that it was not a school in the afternoon. gradually, some moved from rfre to the morning program – almost half of the rfre. of course, the children wanted this… (educator 22, rfre, january 2018) the general feeling of the educators of the morning program was that the rfre does not resemble a real school, but it is more like a supplementary school, while the inclusion that is developed in the morning program is beneficial both to the students and the educators. for me, rfre should in the morning too. although rfres are not really needed. there should be reception classes, in the way that we have been doing it all these years. and look, when the children came to rfre, there was a big fuss, they were climbing the drainpipes, they were jumping from the handrails. panic! when we switched them to the morning, this changed…they begun to follow the rules by seeing what the other students were doing… (educator 28, morning program, october 2017) it is certain that the program which functioned in the morning, together with all the other children of the school, was positive and not only for the children but also for the educator. imagine an educator being alone in an empty school, in the afternoon, especially in winter…not knowing anyone to seek help from, in case something happens to you. feeling that this is not a school but supplementary tuition, a sideline … for the children the morning program was something else. they got socialized, made friends, became integrated. (educator 38, reception class, january 2018) conclusions and suggestions from 2016 to the present day, the access of students with refugee/migrant backgrounds to public education has been increasing, albeit with obstacles, while the covid-19 pandemic has added more challenges, related with restriction of mobility and limited access to 70 global education review 7 (4) internet and digital devices, especially for refugee children residing in reception and identification centers (on the islands) and accommodation centers (on the mainland). what is particularly encouraging is the fact that, compared to the attitudes of the general population towards people with migrant or refugee backgrounds, as reflected in different and based on diversified scope and methodologies recent studies (dixon et al., 2019; gonzalez-barrera & connor, 2019), it is safe to say that the attitudes of the educators we interviewed, having their own diversity and contradictions, were notably more positive. it is remarkable that, while in the research “more in common” (dixon et al., 2019) only 1 out of 5 greeks regard migration as a positive factor for the greek society and whereas at least 1 out of 2 believe that our identity is in peril and needs to be protected, the educators of our research were considerably more positive with respect to dilemmas such as “the danger of cultural distortion,” “the decline of the education level,” and “the degradation of schools” (dilemmas that have been part of the interviews’ key concepts). regarding the options of immediate integration in mainstream schools, or the necessity of a preparatory year or years, almost all of the educators seemed to believe that the learning of both the greek language and the other subjects, as well as the reschooling of the children, could be achieved with greater speed, success, and quality within an inclusive context. in the group of educators with greater experience in schools, including those that host students speaking “other languages,” the option of inclusion in the morning program appeared to be the only way forward for effective educational integration. the educators involved in the education of students with a refugee/migrant background appeared to differ substantially from the dominant discourse that categorizes these students as multi-traumatized, requiring special “educational care.” on the contrary, they describe children having traumas and anxiety, experiencing exceptionally harsh living conditions, but who are, however, full of immense resilience, life energy, and in need of integration and interaction with their peers. they recognized the difficulties, the gaps, and the problems that have accrued since the out-ofschool periods without, however, adopting deficit-theory schemes. instead, many of them acknowledged that refugee students have a particularly rich variety of life skills, positive attitudes, and resilience, elements that can enrich the entire educational community. through the daily contact and the sharing of their personal histories, experiences of bordercrossing were developed (howard, 2006; bartolomé, 2007) and the educators were rendered allies and facilitators of their students’ paths, seeking alternative solutions outside strictly predetermined contexts. it seems that for the children with refugee backgrounds, the (often challenging) reaffirmation of the right of access to education is not always associated with a quality and effective education, while, despite the intentions, in many cases this is accompanied by a gradual descent into a parallel and segregated education. on the other hand, international researchers, organizations, and networks underscore the need to integrate the students with migrant/refugee backgrounds into the national education systems, since the interaction with the host community fosters both the acquisition of the language and other subjects, including the familiarization with nonverbal practices, as well as social cohesion, while the transmission to parallel and segregated systems entails education of lower quality, and –given that this form of education is not certified– it does not promote the development of educational teaching l2 for students with a refugee/migrant background 71 71 pathways (enoc, 2018; unesco, 2019; funhcr, 2012). finally, despite significant progress, the education that students with refugee backgrounds receive, both in greece and in most reception countries, does not seem to prevent the emergence of a lost generation with poor educational experiences and exceptionally narrow qualifications for the future. the educators in this research offer some minimum prerequisites that need to be taken into consideration if we are to reverse this dynamic. these prerequisites first focus on the enrollment of children in formal, mainstream preschool, primary and secondary education (including vocational training) within one month of their arrival in the reception country (enoc, 2018). what is necessary to ensure school success is the development of a mechanism for monitoring schooling and processing specialized interventions for the prevention of dropouts and irregular attendance (ombudsperson, 2019 & enoc 2018). it is also important to limit rfres to cases where any other option is certainly not feasible (that is when there are no school units capable of absorbing the pupil population of the overcrowded accommodation or reception and identification centers). in this case, there should be an explicit and binding provision for the transfer of the students to the morning program, within three months, dispersing them over the adjacent schools or neighboring areas (stergiou & simopoulos, 2019) and the gradual transformation of rfres into a kind of a supplementary class that offers accelerated remedial teaching after the end of the morning mainstream program. at the same time, what is needed is the consolidation of the functioning of reception classes by supporting the educators and the school units, also enabling the differentiation of the curriculum and the educational materials per level of education, depending on the students’ profile and the periods they have been out-of-school. finally, specialized catch-up programs for the out-of-school students (mainly adolescents) are also necessary and should be designed and implemented in subjects apart from language (math, physics, chemistry, biology and social sciences), while supporting languages of origin as a means to reinforce both learning preparedness and identity balance is also needed at the level of school unit or clusters of school units. all the above suggestions are clearly connected to the need for support of the professional development of the educators, through models that employ experiential methodologies, those oriented towards the actual learning challenges, those focused on procedures of reflection in relation to effective planning and practices, and those that support the development of teachers’ intercultural competence. notes 1 the european network of ombudspersons for children (enoc) is a not-for-profit association of independent children’s rights institutions (icris). its mandate is to facilitate the promotion and protection of the rights of children, as formulated in the un convention on the rights of the child (http://enoc.eu/). 2 for the terminology concerning refugees, migrants, asylum seekers, refer to: https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/44937/migr ant-definition 3 an unaccompanied child is a person who is under the age of eighteen, unless, under the law applicable to the child, majority is, attained earlier and who is “separated from both parents and is not being cared for by an adult who by law or custom has responsibility to do so. https://www.unhcr.org/3d4f91cf4.pdf 4 third-country national: any person who is not a citizen of the european union within the meaning of art. 20(1) of tfeu and who is not a person enjoying the european union right to free movement, as defined in art. 2(5) of http://enoc.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/uncrc.pdf http://enoc.eu/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/uncrc.pdf https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/44937/migrant-definition https://emergency.unhcr.org/entry/44937/migrant-definition https://www.unhcr.org/3d4f91cf4.pdf https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/european_migration_network/glossary_search/right-free-movement_en https://ec.europa.eu/home-affairs/what-we-do/networks/european_migration_network/glossary_search/right-free-movement_en 72 global education review 7 (4) the regulation (eu) 2016/399 (schengen borders code) 5 see art. 72 in law no 3386/2005 (greek government gazette a 212/23-08-2005) and later art. 13, law no 4540/ greek government gazette a 91/ 22-5-2018. 6 the research constitutes part of g. simopoulos’s unpublished postdoctoral research at the university of thessaly, supervised by k. magos, assistant professor. it was implemented through a scholarship offered by greek state scholarship foundation through the “enabling post-doctoral researchers” project as part of the “human resources development, education and life-long learning” program, co-funded by the european social fund and the greek state. 7 thrace is a region with an important presence of a muslim minority. 8 refugee education coordinators have been a newly developed body of experienced teachers to work as liaisons between refugee accommodation centers and schools. references bazeley, p. 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(2019). after the container. an intercultural view of refugee education. athens: gutenberg [in greek]. unesco (2019). global education monitoring report: migration, displacement and education: building bridges, not walls. paris: unesco unhcr. (2012). education strategy 2012-2016. geneva: unhcr. unhcr (2019). europe monthly report, december 2019. https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/downlo ad/74140 unicef (2020). refugee and migrant children in greece as of december 2019. about the authors giorgos simopoulos is an education officer for the unicef greece country office. he holds a phd on intercultural adult education. he has worked for many years on refugee children education and his research interests focus on inclusive education, teaching greek as a second language and teachers’ professional development. kostas magos is an assistant professor at the university of thessaly in volos, greece. his scientific interests focus on the theory and practice of intercultural dimension in typical and non-typical education. https://www.minedu.gov.gr/tothema-prosfigiko-m?fbclid=iwar1w0zi4xxenavlc3z6f6uizzstgto_genfgcgavqdsotoicedc_fda06fm https://www.synigoros.gr/resources/docs/ee2018-kdp-dikaiom-paid-pou-metakin.pdf https://www.synigoros.gr/resources/docs/ee2018-kdp-dikaiom-paid-pou-metakin.pdf https://doi.org/10.1002/tl.37219914504 https://www.minedu.gov.gr/publications/docs2017/ceng_epistimoniki_epitropi_prosfygon_yppeth_apotimisi_protaseis_2016_2017_070__.pdf https://www.minedu.gov.gr/publications/docs2017/ceng_epistimoniki_epitropi_prosfygon_yppeth_apotimisi_protaseis_2016_2017_070__.pdf https://www.minedu.gov.gr/publications/docs2017/ceng_epistimoniki_epitropi_prosfygon_yppeth_apotimisi_protaseis_2016_2017_070__.pdf https://www.minedu.gov.gr/publications/docs2017/ceng_epistimoniki_epitropi_prosfygon_yppeth_apotimisi_protaseis_2016_2017_070__.pdf https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/74140 https://data2.unhcr.org/en/documents/download/74140 trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 10 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: levy, roseanne vallice. (2023). trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: being indian american in the usa. global education review, 10 (4), 10-20. trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: being indian american in the usa roseanne vallice levy mercy university abstract the author shares her journey as an indian american within the u.s. education system, weaving personal experiences using krashen's affective filter hypothesis. from early linguistic challenges to transformative moments in higher education and as a secondary teacher, the author reflects on the impact of educational environments on identity and language development. her narrative resonates with krashen's principles and emphasizes the importance of translanguaging and how raciolinguistic ideology impacted her early schooling years. this narrative serves as a testament to the enduring interplay between emotions and learning, showcasing the universal significance of fostering supportive environments for language acquisition and personal growth within the realm of education. the author highlights the importance of inclusive education, culturally responsive pedagogy, and recognizing student identity within the classroom setting. keywords bilingual learner, translanguaging, raciolinguistic ideology, student identity the student i remember waking up very early, as it was still dark outside. my mother seemed very excited and nervous when she shouted, “kintergarten adhia devassam!” [first day of kindergarten!] in malayalam. my father slowly guided me to the bathroom and helped me to brush my teeth while she vigorously brushed and parted my hair, adding a headband as the final touch. she dressed me in a flowy green top and matching bell-bottom pants, which she thought looked beautiful against my carameltoned skin and pitch-black hair, cut by my father precisely every six months in the middle of our kitchen. i recall feeling that something important was happening, but i wasn’t sure why the day was special. i remember holding my father’s hand as my parents and i left our apartment building. the day was crisp and bright, as expected for a september day in new york. my parents dropped me off at a door with many other children who were walking into the classroom. feeling panicked and uneasy about the number of children, i remember hiding behind my father’s leg, my large, mahogany brown eyes suspiciously surveying the environment and the situation. when another adult took my hand, and my parents snuck out the door, a feeling of homesickness settled inside me. little did i know that this would be the first day that i would be told i “was not from around here,” even though “here” is all that i knew. trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 11 in the very first hours of kindergarten, my first core memory of school was formed. as my classmates and i sat on the colorful mat, my teacher, a white woman with grey-white hair, prompted me, “roseanne, tell everyone where you are from.” i recall saying, “new york,” to which she responded with a smile, “no, where you are really from.” nervous and slightly panicked, i feared i would not answer correctly because i didn’t understand the question. for a five-year-old whose dominant language is malayalam, what does “really from” even mean? i was born and raised in a suburb in westchester county, new york, the oldest child of indian immigrants who came from kerala to the united states in the early 1970s to seek the “american dream” for themselves and their future family. my parents came to this country because they believed that the opportunity for a better life and financial security were possible for all, regardless of one's background or circumstances. until the age of six, my primary language was malayalam; english was secondary. by age four, i had failed two montessori school interviews because i refused to answer the headmistresses’ questions, remaining utterly silent. i spoke little english at that age, though i understood spoken english very well, having learned from my parents and tv shows such as what’s happening, the jeffersons, happy days, and laverne & shirley. during these two interviews, i vividly remember my parents being asked to speak louder and to repeat themselves often because the headmistresses could not understand their indian accents. as i reflect on this experience, my choice in not saying a word was not because i did not understand what was being communicated; rather, it was due to the fear of responding incorrectly or inappropriately and, as a result, embarrassing myself and my parents. looking back now, i see that i “failed” those interviews because the schools expected me to fit in a certain box; a box which held standards and expectations that had little to no regard for race, ethnicity, and culture. thankfully, my parents were patient with me, and we three (it was a real family effort) were finally accepted into our neighborhood ywca’s nursery program. i was painfully shy and my nursery schoolteacher told my parents at the start of the school year that she believed i had mutism. my mother told the teacher she was talking about the wrong child because at home, i was like a feral cat: wild, temperamental, energetic, bossy, and talkative. i was a chatterbox with my family and family friends, but at school i was the quietest student. even though i spoke fractured english, i understood every word—which meant i understood everything my teachers were saying about me. my expressive skills in english were fractured and somewhat dysfluent due to the lack of experience speaking the language. my anxieties about speaking were precisely due to my awareness that i did not sound like my peers, and my self-confidence and fears about sounding different, or of fully recalling specific vocabulary, impacted the perceptions others had of me. to my teachers i was disabled, unable, incapable, and needed to be fixed. these experiences can be framed using krashen’s affective filter hypothesis (1986). this hypothesis posits that emotional factors, such as motivation, anxiety, and self-confidence, can influence the success of language acquisition. a high affective filter, due to anxiety or lack of motivation, can impede language learning, while a low affective filter facilitates it. as a i reflect on my first days of school, it is evident that many of my teachers did not understand the bilingual and bicultural 12 global education review 10 (4) experience, and most did not even consider me “american.” what they failed to recognize was that i was a four-year-old child who had lived in a bilingual home, cognitively had developed two languages in a simultaneous way, and was exposed to a bicultural environment. what they did not understand was that my experiences were vastly different from their own and, instead of admiring and nurturing the richness, they opted to label such experiences as abnormal and in need of repair. further, since english was not my first language, my teachers viewed this from a deficitbased perspective. deficit thinking, also known as deficit model or deficit perspective, refers to the view that individuals or groups are lacking in some way compared to a perceived norm, often focusing on weaknesses rather than strengths. in the context of bilingualism, deficit thinking can manifest as the belief that being bilingual or multilingual is a disadvantage rather than an asset (garcia, 2014). my teachers did not understand the dynamics of receptive and expressive acquisition and performance in second language acquisition. according to leslie duhaylongsod (2023), it is critical for educators “to disrupt the deficit language, deficit-based perspectives and deficit-based narratives about prek-12 students with marginalized identities.” (p. 56). duhaylongsod adds that this ideology is common in schools, institutions of higher education, and within communities. however, for my two montessori school headmistresses and kindergarten teacher, my indian parents and i signaled to them a racial component that was immediate, visible, and indicative of difference. this mindset can be linked to the raciolinguistic ideology which explores the ways in which language is entangled with race and examines how linguistic features and practices are used to construct and reinforce racial distinctions. (garivaldo & fabiano-smith, 2023; flores, 2020; flores et.al., 2015). raciolinguistic ideologies are embedded in social structures, historical contexts, and power dynamics, shaping perceptions about the relationships between language, race, and identity (flores et.al., 2015; flores, 2020; garivaldo & fabiano-smith, 2023). according to flores (2020): raciolinguistic ideologies were foundational to european colonialism and continue to be used to justify the continued maintenance of white supremacy by suggesting that the roots of racial inequalities lie in the linguistic deficiencies of racialized communities and that the solution to these racial inequalities is to modify their language practices. (p. 24) these ideologies assert that the linguistic shortcomings of racialized communities are at the core of racial inequalities and propose that the remedy for these disparities lies in altering their language behaviors (flores, 2020). as a result, many educators assume that speaking english is what is expected and desirable, and other linguistic repertoires are relegated to less than and even inferior positions. the study of raciolinguistic ideology also investigates how language is employed to signify and perpetuate racial hierarchies and stereotypes. it explores the lived experiences of individuals and communities whose language practices may be subject to racialization (flores et.al., 2015; flores, 2020; garivaldo & fabianosmith, 2023). understanding raciolinguistic ideology is essential for addressing issues of linguistic discrimination, promoting equity, and fostering inclusive language practices, all of which would have been beneficial if applied during my early years of schooling. for example, trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 13 having access to an adult that spoke malayalam during the first year of pre-k would have immediately clarified my verbal abilities. additionally, in the absence of such an adult, teachers could have asked my parents to record me at home, rather than assuming and accepting the presence of a disability such as mutism. during this critical stage of learning and schooling, translanguaging would have aided me as a young bilingual and bicultural learner. translanguaging is an approach to language education that challenges traditional notions of strict language separation. this approach recognizes that individuals naturally draw on their entire linguistic repertoire, including their primary and secondary languages, to communicate effectively (garcia & wei, 2014). unlike conventional language teaching methods that emphasize language compartmentalization, translanguaging acknowledges the fluidity and interconnectedness of languages in the learning process. in a translanguaging classroom, students are encouraged to seamlessly move between languages, utilizing their multilingual capabilities to enhance comprehension, express complex ideas, and deepen their understanding of subject matter (garcia, 2014; hornberger & link, 2012). this approach empowers students to leverage their linguistic diversity as an asset rather than viewing it as a potential hindrance. by recognizing and embracing the linguistic diversity present in classrooms, educators can create a more inclusive and supportive learning environment. this approach is not only applicable in language-focused classes but can also be integrated across subjects, contributing to a more holistic and effective educational experience for students from diverse linguistic backgrounds. as educators increasingly explore innovative language teaching methods, translanguaging stands out as a promising framework that acknowledges the linguistic richness of students and encourages a more inclusive and effective approach to education. students who learn in such an environment have a stronger sense of belonging and identity (garcia, 2014; garcia & wei, 2014; lee & suarez, 2009). going back on the anecdote that opened this article, i slowly began to realize when i started elementary school what “roseanne, tell everyone where you are really from” really meant. for my teachers and classmates, the expected response was, “i’m _________. (list ethnicity here).” during those critical schooling years, i unconsciously identified myself as the outsider everywhere i went. in the united states, i was indian first and american second because i felt secondary as an american. however, when my family and i would travel to india to visit relatives, i identified as american because i wasn’t considered indian in india. i was the outsider: a square peg that could not fit in the round hole. the years that followed were heavily sprinkled with questions and confusion specific to my identity and many moments of wondering where i fit. i was most comfortable with myself and my identity when i was with my family and our family friends. my family friends and i shared the same background as first-generation indian americans who were trying to strike the right balance of being indian and being american. we grew up being called “dothead” and frequently received shouts of “go home, you gandhis!” in various neighborhood playgrounds from our white neighbors and peers. i remember telling my parents in the third grade, “what does that even mean? we don’t even look like him—he’s old!” i recall not having a sense of belonging, the constant struggle of trying to fit in. though new york and the united states were the only homes i knew, i was constantly 14 global education review 10 (4) unsettled by the idea that others did not see me as a new yorker and american. as a result of these experiences, i did not enjoy going to school. friday was my favorite day of the week and sunday was the worst. the sound of the secondhand ticking on cbs’s 60 minutes on sunday evenings would trigger anxiety that would spin into a tornado. i now look back and realize that i had severe anxiety disorder as a child, which manifested in ways such as vomiting before school, faking illnesses, and incredible timidity. i was certainly not an active participant in the classroom but maintained good grades, and as a result was regarded as a well-behaved student. i was the child who would not reach out to my teachers for help if i didn’t understand the material because it was a way to avoid feeling devalued by my teachers. my tremendous dislike in attending school was a result of my racialized experiences with teachers, which led to my mistrust of teachers who, during my early years of school, spoke negatively about me not knowing that i understood english. i feel as if i survived my p-12 schooling experiences and consider it more of an endurance experience rather than a successful educational experience. throughout those years, i struggled with my identity and finding my voice, especially because others attempted to reconstruct my identity according to their own values and beliefs. they shook my core and destabilized my feelings about school and learning, which added to my anxieties about my abilities. i finally began to uncover my identity in the last half of my senior year in high school. perhaps it was because the end of high school was near and college was so close—or because i found a diverse group of friends who also felt like outsiders in their own ways, friends who celebrated diversity and were discovering their own identities. i was also extremely fortunate to have parents who were fully involved with my education and who supported me when my anxiety was unmanageable. my parents came from a culture and generation that expected them to move onward and upward despite any obstacles or challenges that got in their way. though i have maintained that mindset myself, it is necessary to be mindful that it is not a onesize-fits-all philosophy. school should not be a place where students try merely to survive, rather teachers should be focused on ensuring that all of their students thrive. furthermore, it is important for teachers to consider student identity because it plays a crucial role in shaping students’ experiences, perspectives, and learning outcomes. student identity encompasses various aspects, including but not limited to race, ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, culture, language, and abilities. as krashen’s affective filter hypothesis (1986) posits, by acknowledging and valuing student identity, a more inclusive learning environment where all students feel welcomed, respected, and affirmed can be developed. when students see their identities reflected and acknowledged in the classroom, it fosters a sense of belonging, which is crucial for their overall well-being and academic success. recognizing student identity also allows teachers to incorporate diverse perspectives, histories, and experiences into their curriculum. by including culturally relevant materials, examples, and discussions, teachers can make learning more meaningful and relatable to students from diverse backgrounds. this approach enhances student engagement, motivation, and retention of knowledge. moreover, student identity influences how individuals learn and process information. teachers who understand their students’ trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 15 identities can tailor their instruction to accommodate diverse learning styles, strengths, and needs. by incorporating different instructional strategies, adapting content, and providing appropriate support, teachers can help each student flourish academically. additionally, it is paramount to identify implicit biases and stereotypes that inadvertently influence how teachers perceive and interact with their students. awareness of student identities helps educators recognize their own biases and work towards addressing them. by challenging stereotypes and treating each student as an individual, teachers can ensure fair and equitable treatment for all. this is critical to strengthening students’ socialemotional development, as student identity is closely tied to socio-emotional development (kim, 2023). identity and the sense of belonging are two critical factors teachers should consider when working with students. my identity came alive upon entering new york university in the fall of 1993. nyu was my first safe place. it was the place where i came out of my shell, a place where i truly felt i belonged. my roommate was my best friend whom i have known since the age of two. she, too, is a first-generation indian american and knowing she would be with me for the next four years provided me with a sense of comfort and self-confidence. moreover, the initial joy in seeing classmates who looked like me and who came from very similar backgrounds was indescribable. the vast majority of my friends were first-generation indian americans who were having the same lived experiences as me. we were all trying to find our places in this white-dominated, eurocentric society, but the need to fit into a specific box was slowly unraveling. additionally, many of my professors came from diverse backgrounds, and it was amazing to learn from their culturally rich and diverse perspectives. attaining this sense of belonging and fully embracing my identity allowed me to be comfortable with who i am. my shyness dissipated as i branched out and became an active member of our south asian student organization, something i would never have considered earlier in life. had my educational experience not transformed from mere survival into the diverse, supported experience that it did, my confidence and sense of belonging would have remained stifled. it is only with my confidence and my feeling of being supported that i made the choices and pursued the paths that brought me to where i am today the teacher the student who hated school became a teacher; a paradoxical journey that unfolded during the pursuit of a master's degree in secondary education, with a focus on social studies and special education. the revelation of my identity, which i believed had been unveiled during my time at nyu, was surpassed by the transformative experience that awaited me upon embarking on my teaching career. in the culminating year of my graduate studies, while immersed as a full-time student, an unforeseen opportunity presented itself—an offer to assume a teaching position as a special educator at an urban high school in connecticut. this unexpected development, occurring a mere two days before the commencement of the academic year, immersed me in a realm of palpable anxiety and a sense of unreadiness. the challenge was compounded when my department chair, shortly before the school year's onset, entrusted me with the responsibility of teaching both social studies and biology. a subject matter last encountered in my freshman year of high school, biology demanded 16 global education review 10 (4) intensive commitment, prompting evenings and weekends dedicated to exhaustive lesson planning and copious reading. the beginning months of the academic year included incredibly early mornings at my desk, consumed by the endeavor of refining daily lesson plans and contemplating the well-being of my students. persistent thoughts regarding the optimization of classroom engagement and pedagogical clarity permeated my consciousness. within the second month of my first year of teaching, i realized that a significant proportion of students in my self-contained special education classes were black males, some who were seemingly misplaced and better suited for integration into general education settings. drawing from firsthand experiences as a former outsider within the educational system, i could recognize and empathize with the plight of my marginalized students. one such student, identified as "james," stood out within the initial weeks of the academic year. his reading and language proficiencies were certainly at grade level, perhaps even higher. i spoke with james, his mother, and my colleagues and, collectively, we decided to have him reevaluated. it was unclear why james had demonstrated low performance on his previous test administration, or what factors had affected his performance, but his results on the reevaluation strongly supported my initial belief that he would be best served in a general education social studies classroom. leveraging the relationships and friendships established with special education and general education content teachers, a strategic placement was orchestrated, aligning james with a colleague renowned for a robust classroom management style. the subsequent success of james and my other students transitioning from self-contained settings underscored the efficacy of the chosen colleagues, whose classrooms were characterized by culturally responsive pedagogy and instruction. the environments they cultivated proved to be highly engaging, interactive, and conducive to the academic flourishing of students within a framework of safety and comfort. crucial to this success was the inclusion of james's mother as an integral member of the team, reinforcing the notion that familial involvement is tantamount to academic success. establishing and nurturing trust with families are paramount, considering the prevalent skepticism many parents harbor toward educators, stemming from prior negative experiences. overcoming this initial barrier is imperative, as trust forms the bedrock upon which constructive partnerships between teachers and families can be built. once trust is established, and parents are reassured that educators are genuinely invested in the children's well-being, communication channels open, paving the way for positive outcomes. this collaborative approach not only benefits the student but also contributes to the holistic development of family members and enhances the overall effectiveness of the school community. while engaging in discourse and collaboration with families, i also acquired insights into their approaches to parenting and behavior management. this knowledge was subsequently integrated into my pedagogical practices, encompassing diverse styles, to facilitate a seamless transition for students moving from the home to school environment. it was imperative to exercise caution against the propensity for stereotyping and constructing unwarranted assumptions and recognizing the uniqueness of each familial dynamic. trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 17 the adoption of varied behavior management styles aimed at accommodating the diverse parenting approaches observed among my students' families played a pivotal role in fostering a more harmonious integration between the home and school settings. further, essential to this paradigm shift is the distinction between talking with parents as opposed to talking to them and emphasizing the importance of genuine dialogue over unilateral communication. this shift in perspective acknowledges parents as active participants in their children's educational journeys rather than passive recipients of information. reflecting on my own formative years, i recognize the potential benefits that could have accrued had such communication been prioritized. while engaging in communication and collaboration with the families of my students, i systematically assessed their distinctive approaches to averting and addressing challenging behaviors. this process facilitated the incorporation of culturally responsive strategies into my pedagogical framework, thereby contributing to the creation of a culturally sensitive and inclusive classroom environment. one of the strategies my selected colleagues and i used was culturally influenced oral interactions (delpit, 1988). in particular, we used demand-requests rather than questionrequests in our classrooms. for example, i was raised in a demand-request environment. my parents did not ask me questions to remind me of chores. they told me to do my chores. i was never asked, “do you think it’s time for you to clean your room?” rather, i was told, “go clean your room.” as a student, i responded well to demand-requests because that was how i was raised. i vividly remember an encounter i had with my second-grade teacher. during a change in subjects, my teacher mistakenly thought i still had the previous subject’s book out. at that time, book covers were required and popular. my books were covered with pages from my father’s favorite magazine, national geographic, which he used to wrap them, and many of the covers were filled with scenes of mountains and lakes. as my teacher began the new subject, she asked me, “do you think that’s the book you should have out?” knowing that i had the correct book out, but confused as to why she would ask, i responded, “i don’t know. is it?” unfortunately, my teacher took this as disrespect, and my parents received a phone call home. when it came to education, my parents were heavily involved despite their hectic work schedules. after hearing my version of the story, they were in the principal’s office the next day explaining what had occurred and, thankfully, the misunderstanding was cleared up. that incident occurred because i was a demand-request student with a question-request teacher. thankfully, i had parents who were able to advocate for me; otherwise, the situation would have remained a misunderstanding, and my future responses would have continued to be considered impertinent. the reason that my former students transitioned well from a selfcontained setting to general education was because of their teachers’ culturally responsive pedagogy and behavior management styles, which mirrored how my students were being raised by their families, as well as frequent communication and collaboration with my students’ families. through collaborative endeavors with numerous families and colleagues, a collective effort was undertaken to cultivate a sense of community aimed at bolstering the support infrastructure for our students. most importantly, my students’ identities and cultures were considered assets, not deficits. 18 global education review 10 (4) conclusion “roseanne, tell everyone where you are from.” now, as a teacher educator serving proudly at a minority serving institution, i can answer this question confidently. i am an indian american, born and raised in new york by indian parents who emigrated to the united states and are u.s. citizens. i am also an overseas citizen of india, which means i have a life-long visa to travel to and from my family’s homeland. for the most part, my educational experiences from p-12 lacked the culturally relevant and responsive pedagogy, socialemotional learning, and sense of belonging that i so needed. remarkably, prior to enrolling in my doctoral program and encountering lisa delpit's (1988) insightful article delineating culturally influenced oral interactions as a strategic pedagogical approach, i had already implemented such practices within my classroom. the revelation of this alignment with established pedagogical strategies occurred during my inaugural doctoral class, under the guidance of dr. jim paul from the university of south florida. the ensuing discourse within a diverse cohort of doctoral classmates fostered an environment where literature was critically examined, resonating with our varied backgrounds, and drawing connections to our formative p-12 learning and teaching experiences. scholars such as geneva gay, gloria ladson-billings, lisa delpit, carl banks, deirdre cobb-roberts, and many more left indelible marks on me. it was during my first two years of doctoral studies that i began to completely unpack my identity and these discussions illuminated the systemic shortcomings within the educational paradigm and continue to inform my role as a teacher educator. it was during this process that i realized the importance of disseminating this information to pre-service and in-service teachers, because there are so many children in schools who feel like the outsider and who do not feel a sense of belonging. as a teacher educator, my classroom serves as a sanctuary where community and relationships are cultivated and prioritized. recognizing the teacher's role in setting the tone, i commence each class session with a deliberate moment of reflection. in this contemplative pause i consider how i, as a younger learner, would have benefited from an educator fostering positive self-confidence and creating an environment conducive to mutual support, accountability, and safe expression of behaviors. it has been recently noted that, “[t]he percentage of public school students in the united states who were els [english learners] increased overall between fall 2010 (9.2 percent, or 4.5 million students) and fall 2020 (10.3 percent, or 5.0 million students)” (national center for education statistics, 2023). furthermore, “78.3% of bilingual students come from racially minoritized communities. therefore, race, ethnicity, and bilingualism are inextricably linked” (garivaldo & fabianosmith, 2023, p. 766). whereas dual and multiple languages should be celebrated, my bilingualism was considered a detriment in my early schooling years. the outsider who began to speak english fluently by the middle of kindergarten, i lost the spoken fluency of my native language, malayalam, by the end of that school year. presently, i am gratified to preside over a close-knit and diverse community at my metaphorical kitchen table, akin to michelle obama's reference to her circle of friends (obama, 2023). this diverse assemblage, hailing from varied walks of life, imparts invaluable trying to fit a square peg into a round hole 19 insights and contributes to my continual growth as an individual. while remnants of “the outsider” sentiments persist in certain contexts, the impact of such situations has diminished, owing to the coping mechanisms cultivated within the supportive community that envelops me. reflecting upon my journey, i would convey to my four-year-old self a message of assurance—urging faith and belief in the unfolding path ahead. additionally, it is important to note that teachers leave enduring and indelible marks on their students, and it is crucial for them to understand the power they have. every single student has their own rich narrative, life experiences, and identity which should be explored, celebrated and shared within the classroom. acknowledgement this article is a chapter from an edited book (levy, r.v. & rosa, l.), learning to teach: teacher educators’ stories to clarify, empower and overcome, which focuses on the stories of a select group of diverse teacher educators who come together to share how their combined experiences as pk-12 students, pk-12 teachers, and teacher educators impact their perception of education and ways to teach and learn. additionally, the authors share their perceptions of effective teaching practices that positively impact culturally diverse, multilingual learners. a focus on social justice, equity and inclusion is included. this book is scheduled to be published in summer 2024. references delpit, l. d. (1988). the silenced dialogue: power and pedagogy in educating other people's children. harvard educational review, 58(3), 280. duhaylongsod, l. (2023). dismantling deficit ideology one email at a time. phi delta kappan, 105(3), 56–57. https://doiorg.rdasproxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/003172172312 12013 flores, n. (2020). from academic language to language architecture: challenging raciolinguistic ideologies in research and practice. theory into practice, 59(1), 22–31. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00405841.2019.1665411 flores, n., kleyn, t., & menken, k. (2015). looking holistically in a climate of partiality: identities of students labeled longterm english language learners. journal of language, identity & education, 14(2), 113–132. https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458. 2015.1019787 garcía, o. (2014). u.s. spanish and education: global and local intersections. review of research in education, 38(1), 58–80. https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x1350 6542 garcía, o., & wei, l. (2014). translanguaging: language, bilingualism and education. palgrave macmillan. garivaldo, b., & fabiano-smith, l. (2023). reframing bilingual acquisition and theory: an insider perspective through a translanguaging lens. language, speech & hearing services in schools, 54(3), 765–780. https://doiorg.rdashttps://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/00317217231212013 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/00317217231212013 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/00317217231212013 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1177/00317217231212013 https://doi.org/10.%201080/00405841.2019.1665411 https://doi.org/10.%201080/00405841.2019.1665411 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.%202015.1019787 https://doi.org/10.1080/15348458.%202015.1019787 https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x13506542 https://doi.org/10.3102/0091732x13506542 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1044/2023_lshss-22-00136 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1044/2023_lshss-22-00136 20 global education review 10 (4) proxy.mercy.edu/10.1044/2023_lshss -22-00136 hornberger, n.h., & link, h. (2012). translanguaging in today’s classrooms: a biliteracy lens. theory into practice, 51(4), 239–247. https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.201 2.726051 kim, r. (2023, november). a case for social and emotional learning. kappan, 105(3), 62-63. https://kappanonline.org/socialand-emotional-learning-kim/ krashen, s. d. (1986). principles and practice in second language acquisition. oxford: pergamon press. lee, j.s., & suarez, d. (2009). a synthesis of the roles of heritage language in the lives of children of immigrants: what educators need to know. in t.g. wiley, j.s. lee, & r.w. rumberger (eds.), the education of language minority immigrants in the united states (pp. 136–171). tonawanda, ny: multilingual matters. national center for education statistics. (2023). english learners in public schools. condition of education. u.s. department of education, institute of education sciences. https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indic ator/cgf. obama, m. (2022). the light we carry: overcoming in uncertain times. crown. https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1044/2023_lshss-22-00136 https://doi-org.rdas-proxy.mercy.edu/10.1044/2023_lshss-22-00136 https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2012.726051 https://doi.org/10.1080/00405841.2012.726051 https://kappanonline.org/social-and-emotional-learning-kim/ https://kappanonline.org/social-and-emotional-learning-kim/ https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf/english-learners https://nces.ed.gov/programs/coe/indicator/cgf/english-learners juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism 27 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: umezawa, kiyomi. juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in englishdominated language landscape global education review, 12 (1), 27-45. juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in englishdominated language landscape kiyomi umezawa abstract this paper presents a collaborative effort between a head start lead teacher and an educational scholar, focusing on a head start classroom in a non-traditional migration area in pennsylvania. the joint initiative, called juntos, was undertaken to support children's bilingualism in a context where english is the dominant language. the classroom is located in a semi-rural region, a historically white-dominated area that has undergone significant demographic changes in recent decades. these changes have led to cultural, economic, and linguistic tensions between original residents and new immigrants. such tensions are evident in the head start classroom, where approximately 95% of the students come from spanishspeaking households. english has historically dominated this region, shaping both the educational system and societal perceptions. despite the growing spanish-speaking population, these structures have not adapted to accommodate this shift, resulting in english remaining the primary language of instruction, with spanish-speaking students often placed in esl programs. consequently, school readiness has become synonymous with english proficiency. in this local context, a bilingual lead teacher strives to foster bilingualism among her students while ensuring they meet school readiness criteria, even though her classroom is not designated as bilingual. her efforts, in collaboration with a researcher, have resulted in students becoming proficient in both english and spanish. this ethnographic study documents her resistance to the hegemony of english as the language of education and seeks to amplify and advocate for the voices of bilingual early childhood educators in linguistically diverse regions where language dominance persists, with the goal of empowerment and representation. keywords juntos effort, new immigrant settlements, head start, ethnography , ece 1. introduction it’s a sunny and chilly morning in late november. i am standing next to ms. ariel (pseudonym) at the entrance of a head start center in the northeastern town of heinzburgh (pseudonym), pennsylvania. parents dropping off their children, ages 3 to 5, bundled in heavy winter clothing, chat with each other in spanish while children are mostly excitedly approaching us, saying, “hola!” i respond with my shy “hola” since spanish is not my first language, and i can’t say anything but basic spanish words. after the morning routine, i sit with the children for the morning circle led by the lead teacher, ms. ariel. we review today’s dates, weather, classroom rules, and pledges in the usual manner; in english and spanish. ms. ariel: everybody, now it's time for the classroom rules; say it with me. "quiet voices, listening ears, gentle hands and walking feet." very good, y ahora en español, “voces silenciosas, oídos escuchando, manos suaves, pies para caminar. muy bien.” then ms. ariel brings out a picture book about fall. ms. ariel: do you remember we were talking about fall? some children: yes, yes. 28 global education review x (xx) ms. ariel: so, what happens in fall? ¿qué pasa en el otoño? a boy: se cayo con el frio. ms. ariel: ¿qué se cayó con el frio? (children seem to be thinking.) ms. ariel: ¿que sé cayó?¿que se cayó? the boy: eso a girl: leaves!! ms. ariel: yes, the leaves! ¿y que pasa con las leaves? what happens to the leaves? some children: green, yellow, red, and orange ms. ariel: very good, muy bien. yes, the leaves change their color. over the past few decades, the study of ms. ariel and the children are seamlessly translanguaging between spanish and english, which appeared natural given ms. ariel’s and the childrenʻs latine1 appearance. however, their translanguaging practices are unique and not always positively accepted in this non-urban area of pennsylvania, where english dominates society, including educational environments. english has been pennsylvania's primary and standard language since its foundation as one of the first 13 british colonies. except for the philadelphia areas, the majority of school districts do not offer dual language education programs other than english as a second language (esl) support, which pulls students from the academic subjects and is not ideal. 1 latine is a gender-neutral term that refers to two different but related groups: one is from and identifies themselves with the countries of what is today called the demographic composition of ms. ariel’s classroom is atypical compared to the state data, where 81.0% of pennsylvanians are caucasian (us census bureau, 2020), and noncaucasian populations are concentrated in urban areas such as philadelphia and pittsburgh (penn state harrisburg, pennsylvania state data center, 2020). the head start center to which ms. ariel’s classroom belongs is located in a unique and dynamic area of the commonwealth. in this study, i (author/researcher) introduce a bilingual classroom located in a nontraditional immigrant destination (also known as new immigrant settlements [nis]), with a particular focus on our (lead teacher, ms. ariel, and i) “juntos” (garcia, 2023) initiative to maintain bilingualism among children, while the classroom is officially categorized and funded as a regular (not bilingual) classroom. despite the increasing number of nis forming across pennsylvania and the united states, and the urgency of providing equitable education for new immigrant children, the existence and conditions of multilingual children in these areas, who are compelled to assimilate to english as the dominant language, have rarely been studied. employing critical participatory action research as its methodology, this study delves into how collaborative work between a researcher and a classroom teacher, defined as “juntos (together) effort,” can effectively foster passive resilience against the dominant language of english in rural and non-urban areas of pennsylvania. the study concludes with a call to fellow educators serving multilingual children to latin america, and the other group is in the united states who are descended from the first group (wallerstein, 2005). juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 29 advocate for their students' language rights, regardless of their location. 2. background contexts head start and language policy of 2007 as the nation’s unique federally funded ece program, head start was authorized in 1965 as a component of president johnson’s “war on poverty” to fill the achievement gap between white, middle/upper-class students and students of color with low socioeconomic status. since its establishment, head start has survived for almost 60 years and has been reauthorized under multiple administrations. in the 2006/2007 reauthorization, the new policy, “the improving head start for school readiness act,” was legislated to respond to the relatively rapid growth of spanish-speaking children served by head start (beltran & goldwasser, 2008). the policy states, (2) for dual language learners, a program must recognize bilingualism and biliteracy as strengths and implement research-based teaching practices that support their development. (ii) for a preschool-age dual language learner, including teaching practices that focus on both english language acquisition and the continued development of the home language; or (iii) if staff does not speak the home language of all children in the learning environment, including steps to support the development of the home language for dual language learners such as having culturally and linguistically appropriate materials available and other evidence-based strategies. (head start program performance standards 45 cfr, office of head start) a central component of the policy is focused on raising the educational outcomes of dual language learners (dll). to support dll, language policy mandated head start grantees nationwide to incorporate “research-based teaching practices” that focus on "bilingualism and biliteracy.” under this policy, all children served by head start were now entitled to classroom instruction that incorporated their home language(s) and cultures (ballantyne et al., 2008; early childhood learning & knowledge center [eclkc], 2019; us department of health and human services [us dhhs], 2018). this policy is innovative and provocative, reflecting the euro-centered tradition the us ece has held (souto-munning et al., 2019), and can be a great advocate for young multilingual children’s language rights and equitable educational treatments if it is implemented in an expected manner. however, how it is implemented in classrooms has rarely been studied, let alone within the dynamic circumstances of nis. new immigrant settlements (nis) ms. arielʻs classroom is located in one of the nis in pennsylvania, which has been resided overwhelmingly by white populations until a few decades ago, then experienced a rapid demographic shift. beginning around 1990, a new trend of immigration growth emerged in areas without a prior established history of migration, and these areas are called by various names, such as new settlements (negi, 2019), boomtowns, new latino diaspora (hamman et al., 2002), or new destination (oropesa & jensen, 2010). in this study, i call them new immigrant settlements (nis) (jensen, 2006; negi et al., 2018). 30 global education review x (xx) nis are the areas that have been experiencing the fastest increase in new immigrants (lichter & johnson, 2009; pew research center, 2018), mainly in latine populations (lichter & johnson, 2006; negi, 2019). specifically, these non-traditional immigrant settlement cities or new immigrant destination cities have seen an average increase of 100% versus 32% growth in the latine population growth when compared to traditional immigrant destination cities (e.g., cities in california, arizona, texas) (lichter & johnson, 2006; negi, 2019). most nis in pennsylvania have been developing in areas formerly dominated by the white population. within a short time period, they were hit by massive immigration waves. in the case of heinzburgh –where ms. ariel’s classroom is– the percentage of latines was 0.4 % in 2000, and then in 2020, it became 67.7% (us census bureau). these numbers illustrate how massive the wave was and how rapidly the town has been changing. the rapid demographic changes have created tensions between newcomers and local people in various facets of the affected communities (e.g., social service) (negi, 2019). in the case of pennsylvania, how to support linguistically diverse students has been an urgent issue that has not been solved, and sometimes, it is not recognized as an issue as english has traditionally been the dominant language in the area. the status of english is difficult to flip, even when spanish speakers outnumber english speakers. as the number of nis is still growing all over the country, and it is crucial to study those tensions. this study features a head start classroom that exists in the middle of a dynamic societal shift, and the intersection of the federal language policy and english-dominated language landscape. the hopeful policy expects educators to implement bilingual practices in the classroom, which are believed to create positive learning experiences for dlls. however, how this policy is actually enacted in nis classrooms has rarely been studied. 3. review of related literature the importance of mother tongue re-realizing the importance of the mother tongue is essential for our juntos effort. though its importance doesn’t fade as we age, mother tongues play a significant role, especially in the early years of our lives and in early childhood educational settings (wiley & wright, 2004). numerous research investigate the significant role mother tongues play in peopleʻs lives (faridy & syaodih, 2016; ibrokhimvitch, 2022; nishanthi, 2020); mother tongue is central in framing the thinking and emotions of individuals, and people establish the core of themselves and recognize it through mother tongues. namely, the mother tongue is an essential tool for the development of humans (nishnthi, 2020). it is also children's fundamental right that their home culture and language are respected in educational settings (national council of teachers of english [ncte], 2015). these two factors indicate how essential it is to prepare a learning environment where children's language repertoires are treated equally and equitably. recently, several policy reports in ece, such as promoting the educational success of children and youth learning english, promising futures (national academies of science, engineering, and medicine, 2017), and transforming the workforce for children birth through age 8 (kelly & allen, national research council, 2015), as well as the joint policy statement from the u.s. department of health and human service and education (2016) https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hsc.12802#hsc12802-bib-0013 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hsc.12802#hsc12802-bib-0009 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hsc.12802#hsc12802-bib-0009 https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/hsc.12802#hsc12802-bib-0009 juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 31 entitled “supporting the development of children who are dual language learners in early childhood programs” illustrated the importance of mother tongue and the benefit of bilingualism (garrity et al., 2018). this policy statement was a foundation of the language policy of head start. learning environments for young immigrant children the positive effects of high-quality early childhood care and education on children's early development and learning are well-documented (nores et al., 2005; snow & paez, 2004; soutomanning, 2009), and it is especially true for immigrant children because preschools can be the first setting in which children systematically face dominant socio-cultural values and are expected to abide by and embody them (henward et al., 2019; souto-manning, 2009; tobin et al., 2013). immigrant children construct their identities from messages present within their early environment (gaias et al., 2021) while they negotiate with two or more different cultures. multiple studies have found that culturally, linguistically, and racially diverse children are likely to be confronted with the challenges of assimilating into mainstream values that conflict with familial practices and values (soutomanning et al., 2019). young children who experience cultural discontinuity between home and school may perceive themselves as poor learners and develop negative self-concepts (tobin et al., 2013). adair states, "any experiences of discrimination at this vulnerable age can negatively affect personal development and academic trajectories" (adair, 2014, p. 3). despite the importance of equitable educational settings at ece, immigrant children’s conditions are often overlooked because of their young age and limited linguistic skills (buysse et al., 2005; corsaro, 2006). ece consists of various facets in which children learn through active and multimodal engagement with relationships and experiences, and as they learn, their social and emotional development proceeds. socioemotional development is integrally connected to cognitive development. this development is varied and is affected by children's sociocultural contexts (souto-manning, 2009). teachers and peers are two of the most important influencers on young children because of the direct interactions they have with those two groups outside of home environments. teachers especially can play a paramount role as young children move through fluid identities and start recognizing and navigating within and across spaces of cultural difference (gort & pontier, 2013; soutomanning, 2009; 2019; tobin et al., 2013; henward, 2018; henward et al., 2019). numerous studies express how teachers' beliefs, perspectives, and practices affect multicultural/multilingual children. (hyland, 2010; lopez, 2017; sung & akhtar, 2017; pontier et al., 2020). 4. theoretical frameworks translanguaging theory the translanguaging theory relies on a conceptualization of the usage of more than two languages as a dynamic semiotic system integrating various lexical, morphological, and grammatical linguistic features in addition to social practices and individual linguistic embodiment (garcia & kleyn, 2016). this is a theory that perceives bi/multilingualism positively (macswan, 2017), rejecting the deficit perspective toward people who speak the 32 global education review x (xx) dominant language as their second or third language. the origin of translanguaging is cen williams’ (1994) research work regarding the development of language skills across high schools in wales. he used the term “trawysieithu” (welsh), translated to translanguaging, to express how welsh high school students used welsh and english inseparably. according to him, the language phenomena of those students could not be understood by the previous concepts of languages, including bilingualism. baker (2003) translated this welsh term into translanguaging when he introduced williams’ work. as williams points out, multilingual people’s linguistic actions are hard to understand or explain from the outside, especially what is going on within their brains and psyches when they linguistically communicate with others. the trans-prefix communicates the ways that multilingual people’s language practices go beyond linguistic boundaries, such as standard language or named languages (otheguy et al., 2015). by focusing on a speaker’s perspective, translanguaging theory rejects the monolinguistic way of categorizing or labeling linguistic activities, including bilingualism or code-switching. it is a groundbreaking perspective toward multilanguaging (flores & rosa, 2015). also, the “languaging” part of translanguaging expresses that translanguaging takes language as dynamic and fluid, something that is deeply related to individuals as well as society, not a concrete grammatical system. as the new perspective allows us to look at multilingualism as it is, the translanguaging theory also has leveraged language rights for minority people in society. the original work of williams came with advocating movement for the welsh language, and this decolonizing flow has led to linguistic equity in education. namely, speaking a non-standard language or utilizing all sorts of language resources has been re-valued (canagarajah, 2018; cioe-pena, 2015). juntos: beyond theory as discussed, translanguaging theory sprouted from the attempt to efface boundaries between named languages and to respect and accept how multilingual people process and utilize languages. these attempts have led to resistance to the status quo of english as “the” language. as part of the resistance initiatives, ofelia garcia (2023) proposes a new stance by combining the translanguaging theory and the juntos stance. the juntos stance in translanguaging is defined as 'the teacher’s mindset of joint collaboration among themselves and their students, and their families and communities, as well as the joint elaboration of students’ language and cultural practices' (garcia, 2023, xvii). now, garcia takes them a step further and effaces another boundary: the boundary between university researchers and teachers, to fulfill the original goal of translanguaging. in this essay, i refer to the juntos stance as 'juntos effort' because, for us, ms. ariel and i, the project and its outcomes are the result of our tireless efforts. in the juntos effort, the research practice differs from the traditional one. researchers from universities are no longer the authoritative figures of the field who are expected to know more than teachers or who are devoid of any subjectivities, let alone vulnerability. for example, hamman-ortiz (2024) illustrates how the researcher felt vulnerable when the teacher observed them, which tended to happen or be recorded only for teachers. in addition to being aware of their subjectivities, researchers learn the limitations of their idealized translanguaging juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 33 or imposing policies and curricula on teachers by observing the classroom realities closely. for teachers, it is a great opportunity to observe their language practice objectively together with someone who understands the bigger picture, which rarely happens without the feeling of being judged. as a result of the nonhierarchical, juntos collaborative efforts, researchers and teachers co-design and generate together the pedagogical methods that reflect the local context of the classroom. that is exactly what ms. ariel and i did for the project aiming to preserve her students’ bilingualism. namely, after we found that we both held the same linguistic beliefs and goals, we confirmed that we had equal status, that each other’s comments were not meant for judgment, and that we were sharing those comments merely for the children’s sake prior to the start of the project. 5. current project this project is part of a larger study regarding head start's language policy and its implementation, which i conducted as a dissertation project. for the study, i obtained permission from the regional head start educational manager to visit ms. ariel’s classroom to conduct ethnographic observations. i visited her classroom two to three times a week for seven months. during my visits, i observed a shift in ms. ariel’s language practices. after a few weeks of observation, i noticed she started to use more english than spanish, especially at the beginning of dialogues with the children. i became curious about what caused the change and asked her. she replied that it was for school readiness. she stated, “i know most students are going to public kindergarten after us, and they won’t be allowed to speak spanish, so i need to make sure they can speak english by then. and to be honest, since you are here, i wanted to show that i am doing my job.” as a bilingual myself, i had been admiring and appreciating her bilingual practices. therefore, it was shocking for me to learn her intention, and i regretted that my presence had forced her to change her language practices. i explained that i was observing her not to judge her practices, and i believed bilingualism among children should be preserved. this conversation led us to realize that we had similar ideas about children’s bilingualism and language practices in classrooms. namely, both of us believe bilingualism is a great asset in various ways for children, and educators need to preserve it as much as possible while preparing children for english-dominant public education in pennsylvania. after this acknowledgment, we launched the project to find a way to maintain children’s bilingualism in english-dominated local landscape. methodology in this study, we rely on critical participatory action research (cpar) and the notion of juntos stance (garcia, 2023) as a data collection and analysis, and the comparative case study method (bartlett & vavrus, 2017) as a data analysis tool. originating with kurt lewin, an american psychologist, action research has been applied in various fields (holter & schwartz-barcott, 1993), and it is defined as "a form of collective self-reflective inquiry undertaken by participants in social situations in order to improve the rationality and justice of their own social or educational practices, as well as their understanding of these practices and the situations in which these practices are carried out" (kemmis & mctaggert, 1990, p. 5). critical participatory action research focuses especially 34 global education review x (xx) on the demographic participation of all participants within all research processes, such as problem recognition, designing and conducting the research, and analyzing the data (torre et al., 2012). mctaggart et al. (2017) state, “by participating in public spheres, participants create communicative action and communicative space—clarifying their concerns, informing changes in their practices, and creating communicative power and solidarity” (p. 21). borrowing this approach and combining it with juntos stance, ms. ariel and i corroborated in each research process while we fulfilled different roles as a classroom lead teacher and a visiting researcher. the research process includes generating research questions, research design, data collection, and data analysis. roles of ms. ariel and the author ms. ariel’s classroom is located in a northeastern rural town in pennsylvania, which is categorized as an nis. the head start program rents an old school building that used to be a religious school. the center runs five classrooms, and two of them have bilingual lead teachers, while all classrooms have bilingual assistant teachers. this center is unique in having a non-white, bilingual center manager who encourages bilingualism throughout the center, even though all five classrooms are categorized as regular (non-bilingual) classrooms. however, more than 95% of the children they serve are immigrants or secondgeneration immigrants from the dominican republic or puerto rico. ms. ariel is a newly hired bilingual lead teacher. her family originates from the dominican republic, but ms. ariel was born and raised in new york city. bilingualism was a natural status for her as she grew up. all her family members spoke mainly spanish at home, and her grandparents spoke only spanish. she attended a bilingual school where education was conducted in both spanish and english. thus, she did not reflect on her language practices and their associations until she moved to pennsylvania to teach at the head start center. she stated, “as i learned about the schooling system here and the fact that public schools don’t offer bilingual programs, the pressure my colleagues talk about, ‘we need to prepare kids for english-only classrooms,’ made more sense to me. we (spanish-speaking latine) are now a majority in this town in number, but we are still a minority in many senses.” as mentioned, she succumbed to the pressure until we launched the project. when we found that we shared similar linguistic beliefs and goals, we conceived the idea for this project together. our goal was to maintain ms. ariel’s students’ bilingual skills while preparing them to learn in english-only classrooms. to fulfill that goal, we planned to: 1. intentionally modify the use of languages. 2. learn from other bilingual classrooms. 3. collect comparative data from other head start classrooms to evaluate our method. over the next five months, we fulfilled our roles as a classroom lead teacher and a visiting researcher as described below: ms. ariel: as the lead teacher, ms. ariel modified her language usage in formal conversations (such as circle time) and informal communications (such as chatting during mealtime) based on our observations and discussions. initially, she started the school year mainly using spanish since most of her children came from spanish-speaking households (which juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 35 she found out about through home visits). she began most conversations in spanish, then repeated the same thing in english. sometimes, if an english term was new to the children, she asked them to repeat the word she modeled in english. as the children got used to the daily routines, she reversed the order, using a word first in english and then pairing it with the same term in spanish. after observing the language practices of individual children, we modified her language practices to respond to each child’s needs. for example, if a child primarily spoke in spanish, she emphasized english to them by speaking to them in english and asking them to say or repeat words in english. she did the opposite for children who primarily used english. this practice was something the author previously learned while visiting a bilingual head start classroom, where most students maintained their 50/50 language skills when they finished the program. author: while ms. ariel led the class, the author visited head start classrooms in other nis to learn about the language practices occurring there and to collect data for comparison with ms. ariel’s students. during these visits, the author focused on circle time, particularly on 1) which language lead teachers used to start conversations, 2) which language they used most frequently during circle time, and 3) which language children chose when responding to the teacher. the author also observed free time to determine which language children used to communicate with each other and interviewed teachers. both of us: ms. ariel and the author frequently held meetings and informal discussions to exchange observations and decide on modification plans for each child. at the end of the project, just before the winter break of 2022, we evaluated ms. ariel’s students’ language practices and compared the assessment with the data collected from other classrooms to see whether our language strategy made a difference. 6. findings observations of children’s language choice it's lunchtime, and five to seven children are sitting at each table. i sit next to lillian (pseudonym), a latine girl with bouncy pigtails adorned with big ribbons. we converse in english about lillian's favorite birthday party themes. the author: did you have a bellethemed party this year? lillian: yes! i wore a yellow dress like belle and had a cake with a castle. the author: is belle your favorite princess? lillian: no, i have another favorite, but next birthday, i want to have a barbie party! then, ms. ariel approaches to encourage lillian to eat a tangerine in english. suddenly, lillian hits the table with her fists and exclaims, lillian: no me gustan!! (i don’t like them). as the conversation with the author indicates, lillian has good english skills, while her instant response to ms. arielʻs suggestion is spanish. lillian knows ms. ariel speaks spanish and she is allowed to express her feelings in the most comfortable manner. this is the examples how the children in ms. arielʻs classroom utilize 36 global education review x (xx) both spanish and english without hierarchical orders. similarly, beto (pseudonym) demonstrates his translanguaging in the following example. one morning, during free time, the sandbox was opened for the first time. everyone was excited, but it was not as large a sandbox as is typically available in playgrounds. therefore, ms. margarita (an assistant teacher, pseudonym) announced that to the children that they all had to take turns and that there could be only four friends sharing the space at a time. as an outsider, i was curious about how they would manage turn taking after ms. margarita randomly assigned four children to the sandbox. i wondered, “what will happen if they want to play with their best friends in the sandbox?” and i was right. nick (pseudonym) wanted to play with his best friend, beto, in the sandbox and he invited beto to join him in spanish. beto approached me about his dilemma: beto: can i join the sandbox? me: hmmm, i think ms. margarita said only four friends, and there are… how many? beto: four. nick: beto, ¿quieres jugar conmigo? beto: no puedo porque ustedes ya son 4. i was amazed at how quickly children tailoring their words to use the appropriate language for a particular person. like beto, many children spoke to me in english without hesitation; they knew that from my asian appearance, that i was not a spanish speaker. in this conversation, beto replied to me in english, and then the next moment, he responded to his peer who had invited him to join the sandbox in spanish. in his (and many children in the classrooms) brain, the two languages co-exist. the next example displays children’s english skill development. one day, during lunch time: it's been a cloudy, rainy day, but at that moment, the sun breaks through and illuminates the classroom. ms. ariel looks up from her plate and says, "wow, the sun is coming out, how nice." with that remark, roddy(pseudonym) looks up and smiles, then excitedly exclaims, "the sun is coming out; it is dunny now!!" then, ryan (pseudonym), seated next to roddy, corrects, "it’s not ‘dunny,’ it’s ‘sunny. ʻ" roddy responds, "yes, it’s ‘dunny,’ not ‘dunny,’" indicating she may not recognize the difference between the 'd' and 's' sounds. four weeks later, on another cloudy day, when it's time for the children to go home, the sun emerges. roddy exclaims with improved english pronunciation, "it’s sunny now, it’s sunny!!" jumping up and down. it's midnovember, and roddy's english has shown improvement over the past four weeks, though she still primarily uses spanish. (all examples are from the author’s field notes). these are just three of the countless bilingual/translanguaging moments among the children in ms. ariel’s classroom. additionally, as mentioned at the beginning of the essay, ms. ariel and the children were translanguaging during circle time. the author also recorded the ratio of spanish and english in their interactions, indicating that they use english slightly more than spanish, but overall, most children utilize both languages flawlessly during the observation period. juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 37 comparative results to evaluate how much our intentional language modifications affect children, i visited three additional head start classrooms located in nis around pennsylvania to observe their language practices. surprisingly, most classrooms conducted english-only practices when the classrooms were not categorized and run as bilingual programs (see table 1). the classroom in pocono valley is operated as a bilingual classroom, staffed with three bilingual teachers and equipped with linguistic resources. it operates as a 12-month program, and therefore, a 50/50 bilingual practice is expected. on the other hand, regular classrooms operate as nine-month programs, with fewer resources available for bilingual practices. whether they implement bilingual practices depends on the intentions of the center manager and lead teachers. during the interviews, most lead teachers expressed school readiness pressure, with the preservation of children’s bilingualism appearing to be of minor concern to them. based on the comparative analysis and observation of the students’ linguistic interactions, we concluded that our intentional effort to maintain the children’s bilingualism was effective and had an impact on their language practices. 7. discussion we concluded that our efforts successfully supported the children in using both spanish and english in the classroom based on the data we collected. at the surface level, it is merely a language skill, but it means more than that when we look at the children and their languaging through translanguaging theory as discussed in the following. power of english in nis in pennsylvania in summary, it appears that in islamic sharia laws, someone below puberty age is generally known as a child but other factors such as manners, the way a person behaves in the face of difficulties, including demonstrating maturity in one’s choices as well as physique have a significant impact in real situational contexts on describing someone as a child or an adult. in other words, childhood is socially constructed and situationally negotiated. in persian, this is more true of bache, which is the more common one in everyday discourse, and less of kudak, table 1: comparative sites town percentage of multilingual children classroom language teachers springstown 99% english only english-speaking spanish-speaking heinzburgh 98% close to 50/50 ms. ariel’s classroom pocono valley 95% 50/50 bilingual program clanton 25% english only english-speaking 38 global education review x (xx) which is more about chronological age and is more, but not exclusively, used in academic and bureaucratic discourse on children and childhood. this non-chronological definition of ‘child’ in the iranian culture and the emphasis on intellectual maturity challenges the universalist definitions of childhood based solely on chronological age and lends support to perspectives that advocate a social constructionist view that focuses on historical and cultural variations (e.g., james and prout, 1997; gittins, 1998; montgomery, 2009). the confusion over the non-age-based, traditional and the age-based, universalist definitions is reflected in, and is the locus of, an ongoing discursive and political conflict in the iranian culture between tradition and western style modernity (see adelkhah, 1999 for the complexities of modernity in iran). as the comparative analysis indicates, despite the fact that the school is located in nis and serves a high number of children from spanish-speaking households, two classrooms out of four conducted english-only practice. behind their monolingual practice is the status quo of english as a standard educational language in pennsylvania. like other states originating from 13 colonies, pennsylvania was established by the british and has been inhabited mostly by white, english speakers. namely, english is the only language, and its status has not been doubted or challenged significantly. in those circumstances, educators tend to believe that “they (students) have to speak american because now they live in america” (tobin et al., 2013). similarly, most school districts, except for the ones in the philadelphia area, don’t offer bilingual programs (pennsylvania department of education). the common belief and school readiness pressure reinforce english-only practices, which need to change as nis has been established throughout the states. one of the ways to change is demographic alignment between stakeholders and served children (joseph, 2021). one of the reasons ms. ariel could conduct bilingual practice was the support from the latine bilingual center manager, who stood between the headquarters and the teachers. when we proceeded with the project, there was only one bilingual center manager (none in the headquarters), and it is quite important to bring the personnel who advocate for the served children into high-stake positions. childrenʻs language rights makoni (2012) states language rights (lr) is perforce a part of human rights (hr), echoing ncteʻs statement mentioned above. despite those statements, in reality, the lr of the speakers of minority languages is not recognized enough, especially in early childhood education (ece). due to the widely spread unfortunate language myth; young children learn new languages effortlessly and quickly (beardsmore, 2003; genesee, 2009), young childrenʻs language rights are too often overlooked. their lr is actually as important as, or more important than, older childrenʻs or adults’ lr. lillian’s most comfortable way to express her dislikeness of tangerines was, “no me gustan!!” not “i don’t like them.” then, her ways of expression need to be accepted and respected, and they should not be corrected. this simple logic does not work in many environments, as the comparative results indicate. feeling of belonging respecting young children’s lr assures them that they belong to the classroom community. i observed one spanish-speaking girl who could not join anybody due to the language barrier in one of the comparative sites juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in english 39 where english was the classroom language. she talked to her english-speaking peers, and none of them accepted her invitation to play with her. she also talked to her english-speaking teacher. the teacher responded, “yeah, ok.” however, when i asked the teacher what the girl wanted to say to her, the teacher said, “i have no idea.” those observations were painful for me because they reminded me of the days i could not be a part of any local social groups due to the language barrier and the strongly negative feelings i had toward myself, which is shared by numerous multilingual people (e.g., anzaldua, 1987). as the feeling of belonging is one of the basic needs of humans (behore, 2017), i was concerned about how the little girl would feel about herself in the environment, being rejected on a daily basis. would she be ok since “she will get english soon,” as her english-speaking lead teacher stated? even if that is true, it is quite unfair for her to endure that hardship and to be mended who she is (anzaldua, 1987). life-long effect when i visited ms. ariel’s classroom, the children spoke to me in english from the beginning. one time, i asked one child, “why do you use english with me?” then he answered, “because you don’t look like us.” i am japanese, and his answer completely made sense and amazed me. they instantly chose a language to use reflecting the contexts, which not many people are capable of regardless of age. they do so unconsciously, but actually, those translanguaging activities stimulate a certain part of their brain and assist in their development (white & greenfield, 2017). on top of providing safe environments and positive selfawareness, respecting young children’s mother language and preserving their bilingualism are expected to contribute to the firm academic foundation, which affects them throughout their lives. 8. conclusion ms. ariel and i were quite pleased when we concluded our project. as the comparative data indicated, the status of english as a standard educational language in pennsylvania is quite firm, and it pressures preschool educators through the notion of school readiness, which the educators locally understand as one of their responsibilities to ensure all students are capable of attending english-only kindergarten programs. for that purpose, preserving students’ bilingualism can be sacrificed. ms. ariel and i desired to resist this pressure, and instead of actively critiquing the pressure or other educators’ language practices, we passively protested by achieving our goal of preserving 50/50 bilingualism among the students, showing that bilingualism can be maintained while preparing children for kindergarten. due to the nature of my position, i could not continue to visit her classroom regularly after my permitted observation period ended, but ms. ariel periodically shared her students’ bilingual progress. according to her records, her students achieved the same level of bilingualism as those in the bilingual program. this achievement was possible because ms. ariel, the lead teacher, is 50/50 bilingual, and the classroom languages were limited to english and spanish. namely, our conditions could merely be uniquely fortunate. one day, i asked ms. ariel what she would do if the school added a russian-speaking child to her class, and she answered, “i would do the same. i might not be fluent in russian, but i can at least learn the basics, and i will tell them it is totally okay to speak russian in my classroom.” her response illustrates that what we 40 global education review x (xx) accomplished was not merely due to luck, and it is worth sharing. i admit, and ms. ariel would agree, that it is not an easy process. it requires constant awareness of children’s language practices. each conversation counts, including greetings, such as “hello” and “hola.” additionally, we modified language practices for individual students, reflecting their linguistic development, which might be able to be replaced with a group approach. we hope our research story encourages our fellow early childhood educators to advocate for their students’ language rights in english-dominant language landscape. references adair, j. k. 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reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: majebi, oluyemisi idowu (2025). perceptions of preschool stakeholders on the impacts of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers in yoruba-speaking states, nigeria. global education review, 12 (1), 46-62. perceptions of preschool stakeholders on the impacts of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers in yoruba-speaking states, nigeria oluyemisi idowu majebi abstract the study investigated the perceptions of stakeholders on the assumed impacts of english as a dominant language in some selected ececc in yoruba-speaking states. 617 stakeholders, 247 preschool teachers, 204 school owners/heads, and 166 parents and community members across the seven states, were randomly selected for the study. four research questions were raised and answered. a validated questionnaire titled 'perception of preschool stakeholders on the impacts of english as dominant language in ececc was used to elicit information from the respondents. data was collected and analyzed using descriptive statistics. findings revealed that above-average parents and community members (64%) believe that using english in ececc will prepare children for future educational activities and global relevance. a notable number of school owners/heads (89%) opined that using english in ececc prepares children for external examinations and competitions, 86.5% indicating that english language instruction boosts school enrollment. a significant proportion of eccde teachers (65%) believe that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings when taught in english. and the majority (183) of the eccde teachers in the states indicated that only english is used for classroom activities. it is obvious that all the stakeholders who participated in the study placed a high level of worth on the use of the english language due to the assumed impacts. there is a need to re-orientate stakeholders on the fact that children have more to gain when their mother tongue is used in the preschool classroom during the teaching and learning activities. keywords dominant language, language of the immediate environment, early childhood education and care centers, preschool stakeholders introduction english, being described as the language of the colonial masters, has been adopted in nigeria as the official language. it is the language that is being used in any official setting, including academic institutions, to carry out day-to-day activities (majebi & oduolowu, 2022). english serves as the lingual franca for education, trade, and employment and is an essential skill for anyone wanting to succeed professionally or academically in the 21st century (king, 2018). more so, it is seen as the gateway to global citizenship, economic progress, and enhanced social standing (trudell, 2016). it is also considered the language of unity in nigeria, in which speakers of other indigenous languages code-mix in their speech (ibrahim & gwandu, 2016). thiong’o (1986) expresses that great honor was accorded to the english language at the expense of the indigenous languages in africa. this language is seen as the language of intelligence, while african languages are seen as peripheral and are always presented in a derogatory manner. the dominance of the english language in educational programs at all levels, including early childhood education, is a global phenomenon. language, either verbal or nonverbal, is at the center of children’s care and education. every activity organized to achieve the aims and objectives of education at all levels can only be meaningfully accomplished with the perceptions of preschool stakeholders 47 use of language. it plays a significant role in the implementation of both the written and hidden curriculum. adepoju (2013) asserts that language is embedded in school subjects; it is difficult to separate learning concepts and processes of a subject from learning to use language to represent and use these concepts and processes. language is also strongly connected to a child’s development. it is crucial in achieving holistic development during the early years of life. it occupies significant roles in the care, development, and learning of children during their early years. early childhood education is commonly known to consist of programs and services purposefully designed to ensure children’s access to maximum care, healthy development, and meaningful learning that can guarantee a strong foundation for living and learning during the early years. all these programs and services are expected to be in accordance with the rights of the child as identified by the convention on the rights of the child (1989) and the child rights act (2003), especially in the areas of culture and cultural practices. given cognizance to the culture of the child, among which the use of the mother tongue or language of the immediate environment was given special consideration. the mother tongue is the language of instruction acknowledged and recommended by both national and international bodies for children during their early years. international and national documents and policies, such as nigeria's national policy on education (federal republic of nigeria (frn), 2007, 2013), made its stand known on the use of the language of the immediate environment as the expected language of instruction in early year classrooms. at the african continental level, the desire of the organisation of african unity (oau) and the african charter on the rights of the child (1989) is to see the local language being used as the language of instruction in the classroom. ntagu (2010) expresses that one of the objectives of the oau at its cultural policy meeting in addis ababa was the encouragement of the use of african languages as a vehicle of instruction at all levels. this did not just start; united nations educational scientific and cultural organizations (unesco) (1953) emphasized that children need to be educated in their mother tongue, especially in early childhood education. the body supports children in being taught in their mother tongues. the advocacy for the use of the language of the immediate environment or mother tongue in early years classroom is based on evidence from different studies, reports, and academic opinions on its ability to yield a better result when adopted as an instructional medium (fafunwa 1976, taiwo 1976, obanya 1992 & 1998, akinola and adetunji 2020, ozoemena et al 2021, majebi and oduolowu, 2021). it has been found potent in promoting relevant and meaningful learning. children tend to be actively involved in teaching and learning and learn better when they are being taught in the language of their immediate environment (fafunwa, 1989, unesco, 2016, zegarni, 2016, majebi and oduolowu 2021). the use of language of the immediate environment has been found to be of immense help in promoting childhood literacy and functional education (osokoya 2000, okono and enang (nd)). it has also been acknowledged to promote the development of identity, self-esteem, and basic communication skills and is also believed to awaken in the child an interest in learning the language (modica, ajmera and dunning, 2010; majebi, jimoh and ogunbiyi, 2024). fafunwa, 1976). majebi & oduolowu (2021) emphasized that children would acquire a lot of habits, attitudes and skills better and with a minimum 48 global education review 12 (1) of trauma if they are taught in the language of their immediate environment. it is also seen as the one that assisted people to remain related to their culture and roots (nishanti, 2020, adedigba, et al. 2023). despite the advantages credited to the use of language of the immediate environment and the recognition it has been accorded globally, researchers have reported that preprimary and primary schools in nigeria are failing in their level of compliance with the recommendations in the national policy on education by frn, 2013. english has become the dominant language in care and learning in early childhood care centers and classrooms. the majority of the pre-primary schools engage in practices (medium of instruction, pedagogies, and materials) that are contrary to the recommendations from the document specifically prepared to guide educational practices in nigeria (majebi, 2017). this is not limited to schools alone; children from an average nigerian home are already exposed to communicating in the english language. adepoju (2013) attested that an average child in nigeria, especially in yorubaland, comes to school from home already equipped with the english language. the english language is referred to as the world language. it has gained great dominance and respect across all walks of life, silencing mother tongues or indigenous languages gradually. opinions varied when describing the status of the english language in the nations of the world, while crystal (2003) says english has already grown to be independent of any form of social control. the growth momentum has become so great that nothing is likely to stop its continued spread as a global lingua franca in the foreseeable future. graddol (2003) believes that english is stoppable. emphasizing the unpredictability inherent in language use, he suggested that the current global wave of english may lose momentum and saw the real possibility of new language hierarchies emerging in the next century, with english holding a less global position. however, international organizations have made legal provisions through some vital documents related to people’s language to give every language equal treatment. these documents include the universal declaration of human rights (2015), the declaration of the rights of persons, national, ethnic, religious and linguistic minorities (1992), the universal declaration of linguistic rights (1996), and the universal declaration of cultural diversity (2002). they are prepared and provided to preserve and practice each language. the laws are set up to show that each language must not be bound or legislated out of existence. this language differs according to the communities and nations of the world. each community, just like each individual, has its own language that expresses the ideas, values, and attitudes of its members. given a preference for the english language above the mother tongue or the language of the environment in early childhood classrooms might not be totally free from challenges. the early years cover the period when children are expected to be exposed to practices that give cognizance to the culture of the immediate environment, especially the language (majebi & oduolowu, 2020). language and culture are intertwined. it is good to note that language does more than just facilitate communication; it occupies the most significant place in culture and serves to sever ties between children and their culture. language is the essential bedrock on which culture is built and handed to the future generation. it is at the core of cultural identity. the child's cultural identity perceptions of preschool stakeholders 49 occupies a prominent place in the child's rights (majebi, jimoh, and ogunbiyi, 2024). the educational programs during the early years are supposed to take the culture of the children into cognizance. culturally appropriate practices are considered appropriate for ece programs. however, when english is the dominant language in the field of early childhood education and care (ecec), it might result in the violation of the rights of the child. it might put children in conflict situations about their identity. children will be denied the opportunity to learn in a developmentally appropriate way, which acknowledges culture as one of the components (lettington, 2018). children whose first language is different from the english language might experience difficulty participating fully in classroom activities. the practice also is a deviation from inclusive educational practices. it can marginalise children from other language backgrounds. among the three major languages spoken in nigeria is the yoruba language. the yoruba language is a tonal and analytical language spoken predominantly in west and southwestern nigeria, parts of benin and togo. it is one of africa's most widely spoken indigenous languages, with over 50 million speakers. campbell (1991) describes yoruba as a tone language whose many varieties are spoken across west africa with about 20 million native speakers. it is spoken natively in nigeria as well as the neighboring countries of the republic of benin and togo (washington, 2017). hewson (nd) says that the yoruba language has many dialects, and there are two million secondlanguage speakers who use it as a lingua franca. according to okanlawon (2018) yoruba sound system is used to create many words that can form infinite linguistic patterns. in this system, there are three sets of sounds that make up yoruba words: consonants, vowels, and tone. yoruba is not only a means of communication; it is a repository of culture, philosophy, and identity expressed through proverbs, poetry (oriki), folktales, and music. ojo (1999) affirmed that yoruba language is complex and deeply rooted in culture. yoruba has three distinct tones (high, mid, and low) that determine word meanings, making pronunciation crucial. the language boasts diverse dialects but maintains mutual intelligibility. beyond verbal communication, yoruba incorporates symbolism and gestures, reinforcing its depth as a language of history, spirituality, and knowledge transmission. the dominance of the english language has the tendency of depriving children and young learners of benefits from some of the rich components of the yoruba language. this was corroborated by ajepe & ademowo (2016), who assert that the dominance of the english language can lead to linguistic and cultural disadvantages. this was further expanded by oluga & babalola (2012); according to them, the dominant use of english in nigeria has negative implications on the quality of the indigenous languages used by many, especially the elites. they can hardly express themselves in their indigenous language without code-mixing with lexemes or phrases of english or indigenous language intermittently. if the adults who are part of the stakeholders of children’s education could end up in the described situation about language usage, it becomes necessary to examine their perceptions on the impacts of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers. education as a system generally is believed to be a social service that needs the collaboration of different stakeholders to achieve its objective maximally. a stakeholder, according to overseas development institute (odi) (2009), is a person, a group of people, or an 50 global education review 12 (1) organization who has something to gain or lose through the outcomes of a planning process, project, or program. in many circles, these are called interest groups. british broadcasting corporation (bbc) (2018) also describes a stakeholder as anyone with interest in a business, program, or system; it could be an individual, group, or organization that is affected by the activity of such business, program, or system. in this study, stakeholders include the preschool teachers, parents, community, and school heads and school owners, as well as the government who have a vested interest in matters related to the care, development, learning and progress of learners. they make direct and indirect investments in children for them to do well because they will benefit in some ways. these are the categories of people who deal directly with children. linguistic imperialism proposed by robert phillipson (1992) anchored this study. it states that the dominance of english worldwide can marginalize other languages. he addresses language as an instrument of power. research questions 1. what is the perception of parents/community members on the impacts of using english as the hypercentral language in early childhood education and care centers? 2. what is the perception of school heads/owners on the impacts of using english as the hyper-central language in early childhood education and care centers? 3. what is the perception of eccde teachers on the impacts of using english as the hyper-central language in early childhood education and care centers? 4. what is the language commonly used by the ececc teachers across the seven yoruba speaking states? methodology design and sample selection this study adopted the descriptive survey design. the purposive sampling technique was used to select seven states in nigeria, namely oyo, osun, ekiti, ondo, ogun, lagos, and kwara states, who participated in the study. the states were selected because they all have yoruba as their predominant language. the yoruba language is one of the three major indigenous languages in nigeria. it is largely spoken by the people from the west and southwest of nigeria. the national policy on education (2007, 2013) recommended that a language of the immediate environment should be adopted to teach children in the early years. some adults in the yoruba-speaking region do not take pride in speaking this language. they exposed their children to communicating in the english language right from birth/home. hence, the need to investigate the perceptions of stakeholders on the assumed impacts of english as a dominant language in some selected ececc in yoruba-speaking states. schools with pre-primary school sections, parents who have children in the preprimary school, and community members were randomly selected based on the willingness of the headmasters/mistresses/community members to participate in the study perceptions of preschool stakeholders 51 sampling techniques and sample a total number of 617 stakeholders consisting of 247 preschool teachers, 204 school owners/heads, and 166 parents & community members across the states were randomly selected for the study. these people were selected because they have direct dealings with the education and care of children or wards. four research questions were raised and answered. instrument a questionnaire titled 'perception of preschool stakeholders on the impacts of english as dominant language in ececc was used to elicit information from the respondents. the draft of the questionnaire was given to two analysts and early childhood experts for face and content validity. the questionnaire has two sections: the demographic information of the respondents and 10 items of 4 likert scale on the perceptions of different stakeholders. procedure for data collection early childhood education lecturers in higher institutions of learning located in each of the states involved were the gatekeepers for data collection. they were contacted for assistance in selecting research assistants, monitoring administration, and retrieving the questionnaire. an online meeting was held to brief them on the purpose of the research and the target population. this was done to equip them with necessary information, which, in turn, provided adequate guidance to the research assistants on the administration of the questionnaire. five research assistants who are b.ed students in those higher institutions in each of the states were selected for the distribution and retrieval of research questionnaires to the stakeholders in their various categories and locations. soft copies of the instruments were sent to the gatekeepers for printing while the researcher provided the financial implications. the initial plan was to reach government officials in charge of ece to get information on the government’s commitment to the issues at hand, but it was suspended when the responses were not forthcoming. data analysis in this study, a four-point likert scale was utilized to assess the perception of stakeholders. the responses to the questionnaire were systematically collected, organized, coded, and analyzed using descriptive statistical techniques. the analysis was conducted in two stages: demographic analysis: the demographic characteristics of the respondents were summarized using frequency counts and percentages. this provided an overview of the distribution of participants based on variables such as gender, state, school type, and educational background. perception analysis using a four-point likert scale: a four-point likert scale was used to measure respondents' perceptions, with response options such as: strongly agree (4 points), agree (3 points), disagree (2 points), and strongly disagree (1 point). a weighted average was computed for each item on the questionnaire to analyze the overall perception of each stakeholder group. the weighted average values were then interpreted based on predefined decision thresholds. for instance: 3.50 – 4.00 = strongly positive perception 2.50 – 3.49 = moderately positive perception 52 global education review 12 (1) 1.50 – 2.49 = moderately negative perception 1.00 – 1.49 = strongly negative perception this approach provided a quantitative measure of stakeholders' perceptions, facilitating a clear understanding of their views on the subject under investigation results table 1 shows the demographic information of the respondents, which reveals a diverse sample from different regions. the majority of respondents across the three groups (parents/community members, school heads/owners, and teachers) are female. specifically, 62.0% of parents/community members, 56.4% of school heads/owners, and 69.6% of teachers are female. the male representation is 35.0% for parents/community members, 38.2% for school heads/owners, and 29.1% for teachers. a small percentage of respondents did not disclose their gender: 3.0% for parents/community members, 5.4% for school heads/owners, and 1.2% for teachers. geographically, the respondents are distributed across seven states in nigeria, with varying representations. among parents/community members, the largest groups come from kwara (24.1%) and ekiti (18.1%). for school heads/owners, kwara (19.1%) and ondo (16.2%) have the highest representation. teachers are more evenly distributed across lagos, oyo, ondo (each with 17.4%), and kwara (13.8%). a noteworthy portion of respondents did not specify their state: 7.8% for parents/community members, 14.2% for school heads/owners, and 4.9% for teachers. in terms of school type, the majority of school heads/owners and teachers are affiliated with private schools, accounting for 54.9% and 49.0%, respectively. public school representation is slightly lower: 42.2% for school heads/owners and 48.6% for teachers. a small percentage of respondents did not disclose the demographic information table 1: demographic information of the respondents parent/community members (%) school heads/owners (%) teachers (%) gender male 58 (35.0) 78 (38.2) 72 (29.1) female 103 (62.0) 115 (56.4) 172 (69.6) unknown 5 (3.0) 11 (5.4) 3 (1.2) state ogun 16 (9.6) 30 (14.7) 23 (9.3) lagos 11 (6.6) 19 (9.3) 43 (17.4) oyo 20 (12.0) 31 (15.2) 43 (17.4) ondo 26 (15.7) 33 (16.2) 43 (17.4) osun 10 (6.0) 21 (10.3) 21 (8.5) ekiti 30 (18.1) 2 (1.0) 28 (11.3) kwara 40 (24.1) 39 (19.1) 34 (13.8) unknown 13 (7.8) 29 (14.2) 12 (4.9) school type public 86 (42.2) 120 (48.6) private 112 (54.9) 121 (49.0) unknown 6 (2.9) 6 (2.4) educational status o’level 37 (22.3) 7 (3.4) 24 (9.7) nce 49 (29.5) 29 (14.2) 78 (31.6) b. ed 54 (32.5) 89 (43.6) 97 (39.3) m.ed 19 (11.4) 52 (25.5) 16 (6.5) ph. d 1 (6) 7 (3.4) others 3 (1.8) 15 (7.4) 29 (11.7) unknown 3 (1.8) 5 (2.5) 3 (1.2) total 166 204 247 perceptions of preschool stakeholders 53 type of school they are affiliated with: 2.9% for school heads/owners and 2.4% for teachers. educational status varies significantly among the respondents. for parents/community members, the highest educational attainment is o’level (22.3%), nce (29.5%), and b. ed (32.5%). among school heads/owners, b. ed holders constitute the largest group (43.6%), followed by m.ed holders (25.5%). teachers predominantly hold b. ed (39.3%) and nce (31.6%). a few respondents across all groups hold ph.d. degrees or other qualifications, and a small percentage did not specify their educational status. research question 1: what is the perception of parents/community members on the impacts of using english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers? table 2 shows that the perception of parents and community members on the use of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers (eccde) is positive (wa = 61.66%). a majority believe that using english in early childhood classrooms can enhance children's performance and language development, with 62.8% (34.1% strongly agree and 28.7% agree) and 63.4% (32.3% strongly agree and 31.1% agree) supporting these views, respectively. additionally, 64.2% (30.5% strongly agree and 37.2% agree) emphasize the importance of exposing children to both their native language and english during teaching and learning activities. there is also a belief that using english will prepare children for future educational activities and global relevance, with 64.4% (28.2% strongly agree and 36.2% agree) and 70.3% (30.2% strongly agree and 40.1% agree) supporting these perspectives. on the other hand, there are significant concerns about the cultural impact of using english exclusively. many fear that it will make children forget their culture and deny them the opportunity to learn their mother tongue, with 47.8% table 2: perception of parents/community members on the use of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers s/n perception of parents/community members strongly agree (%) agree (%) disagree (%) strongly disagree (%) 1. using english language in early childhood classrooms will help to improve children's performance 56 (34.1) 47 (28.7) 23 (14.0) 38 (23.2) 2. exposing children to english language in the early years will help in their language development 53 (32.3) 51 (31.1) 37 (22.3) 23 (23.2) 3. the dominance of the english language in early childhood classrooms will strengthen children's capacity to learn their own language 30 (18.5) 54 (33.3) 32 (19.8) 46 (28.4) 4. the use of the english language alone in early childhood classrooms will make them forget their culture 39 (24.2) 38 (23.6) 52 (32.3)) 32 (19.9) 5. it is important for children to be exposed to their native and english language during english teaching and learning activities 50 (30.5) 61 (37.2) 23 (14.0) 30 (18.3) 6. exposing children to english language alone will deny them the opportunity to learn their own mother tongue 45 (27.4) 55 (33.5) 43 (25.9) 21 (12.8) 7. using the english language in eccde centers will not affect children's culture 31 (19.6) 75 (47.5) 35 (22.2) 17 (10.8) 8. using the english language in eccde centers will prepare children for future educational activities 46 (28.2) 59 (36.2) 44 (27.0) 14 (8.6) 9. using the english language in eccde centers will help children to be relevant in the global world 49 (30.2) 65 (40.1) 29 (17.9) 19 (11.7) 10. using the english language in eccde centers will hinder children from participating in community activities 58 (35.4) 41 (25.0) 40 (24.4) 24 (15.2) weighted average (%) = 61.66 decision value: negative (1-49%); positive (50100%) 54 global education review 12 (1) (24.2% strongly agree and 23.6% agree) and 60.9% (27.4% strongly agree and 33.5% agree) expressing these worries. a notable 50.4% (35.4% strongly agree and 25.0% agree) believe that using english alone in eccde centers will hinder children from participating in community activities. however, opinions are divided on whether english use in eccde centers will affect children's culture, with 67.1% (19.6% strongly agree and 47.5% agree) believing it won't, and 52.3% (18.5% strongly agree and 33.3% agree) thinking it will help children learn their own language better. research question 2: what is the perception of school heads/owners on the impacts of using english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers? table 3 shows that the perception of school heads and owners on the use of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers (eccde) is positive (wa= 69.47%). a notable 76.7% (45.0% strongly agree and 31.7% agree) believe that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings if taught in english, highlighting the risk of linguistic and cultural erosion. however, a substantial number of school heads and owners, 61.8% (26.2% strongly agree and 35.6% agree), attribute the use of english to the lack of textbooks in native languages. they recognize the practical benefits of using english, such as preparing children for external examinations and competitions, with 89% (38.8% strongly agree and 50.2% agree) supporting this view, and increasing enrollment, with 86.5% (32.3% strongly agree and 54.2% agree) indicating that english language instruction boosts school enrollment. despite these practical considerations, there are significant concerns about cultural implications. over half of the respondents, 61.6% (28.6% table 3: perception of school heads/owners on the use of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers s/n perception of school heads/owners strongly agree (%) agree (%) disagree (%) strongly disagree (%) 1. important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings if taught in the english language 91 (45.0) 64 (31.7) 28 (13.9) 19 (9.4) 2. the english language is used in early childhood education and care centers (eccde) because there are no available textbooks written in the native language. 53 (26.2) 72 (35.6) 45 (22.3) 32 (15.8) 3. using the english language as the language of instruction at eccde centers prepares children for external examination/competition 78 (38.8) 101 (50.2) 18 (9.0) 4 (2.0) 4. using the english language as the language of instruction at eccde centers increases enrolment 65 (32.3) 109 (54.2) 18 (9.0) 9 (4.5) 5. using the english language eliminates the inferiority complex 58 (29.0) 96 (48.0) 31 (15.5) 15 (7.5) 6. adopting english as the only dominant language in the eccde centers will make children lose touch with their cultural values 58 (28.6) 67 (33.0) 44 (21.7) 34 (16.7) 7. the use english language as the language of instruction in early childhood centers is to deny them of their right to cultural identity 40 (19.8) 55 (27.2) 52 (25.7) 55 (27.3) 8. using english as the only dominant language in eccde centers is a mark of international standard 54 (27.3) 100 (50.5) 26 (13.1) 18 (9.1) 9. using english as the only dominant language eccde centers is to satisfy the parent 47 (23.3) 80 (39.6) 43 (21.3) 32 (15.8) 10. using english as the only dominant language in the field of early childhood education and care breaks the rule of giving every language equal opportunity 51 (25.2) 59 (29.2) 52 (25.7) 40 (19.8) weighted average (%) = 69.47 decision value: negative (1-49%); positive (50100%) perceptions of preschool stakeholders 55 strongly agree and 33.0% agree), worry that adopting english as the only hyper-central language will make children lose touch with their cultural values. moreover, 47% (19.8% strongly agree and 27.2% agree) feel that using english as the primary language of instruction denies children their right to cultural identity. while 77.8% (27.3% strongly agree and 50.5% agree) view the use of english as a mark of international standard, opinions are divided on whether it serves to satisfy parents, with 62.9% (23.3% strongly agree and 39.6% agree) in agreement. lastly, 54.4% (25.2% strongly agree and 29.2% agree) believe that using only english breaks the rule of giving every language an equal opportunity. research question 3: what is the perception of eccde teachers on the impacts of using english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers? table 4 shows that the perception of early childhood care, development, and education (eccde) teachers on the impacts of using english as the dominant language in early childhood education centers in nigeria is high. a significant proportion of teachers, 65% (36.6% strongly agree and 28.4% agree), believe that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings when taught in english. this sentiment aligns with 63.9% of teachers who prefer teaching children in their native language (19.4% strongly agree and 44.5% agree), indicating a strong inclination towards table 4: perception of eccde teachers on the use of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers s/n perception of eccde teachers strongly agree (%) agree (%) disagree (%) strongly disagree (%) 1. i feel that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings if taught in the english language 89 (36.6) 69 (28.4) 52 (21.4) 33 (13.6) 2. if i have my way, i will prefer to teach the children in my class in their native language 48 (19.4) 110 (44.5) 47 (19.0) 42 (17.0) 3. i use the english language as the language of instruction at eccde centers to make it easy for them to have a strong foundation for learning 99 (40.1) 117 (47.4) 23 (9.3) 8 (3.2) 4. i use the english language as the language of instruction in eccec 90 (37.7) 124 (51.9) 14 (5.9) 11 (4.6) 5. i use the english language in early childhood education and care centers (eccec) because there are no available textbooks written in my native language. 72 (29.5) 80 (32.8) 63 (25.8) 28 (11.5) 6. adopting english as the only dominant language in the eccde centers will make children lose touch with their cultural values 47 (19.5) 76 (31.5) 78 (32.4) 40 (16.6) 7. the use of english language as the language of instruction in early childhood centers is to deny them of their right to cultural identity 45 (18.5) 51 (20.6) 91 (36.8) 56 (22.7) 8. using english as the only dominant language in eccde centers is a mark of international standard 89 (36.8) 96 (39.7) 38 (15.7) 19 (7.9) 9. using english as the only dominant language eccde centers is to satisfy the parent 37 (15.2) 84 (34.6) 80 (32.9) 42 (17.3) 10. using english as the only dominant language in the field of early childhood education and care breaks the rule of giving every language equal opportunity 56 (23.2) 92 (38.2) 63 (26.1) 30 (12.4) weighted average (%) = 64.61 decision value: negative (1-49%); positive (50100%) 56 global education review 12 (1) preserving local linguistic and cultural heritage. however, despite these concerns, a majority of teachers use english as the language of instruction to provide a strong foundation in learning, with 87.5% (40.1% strongly agree and 47.4% agree) supporting its use for this purpose. additionally, 89.6% (37.7% strongly agree and 51.9% agree) affirm its implementation in their centers, driven by practical considerations such as the unavailability of textbooks in native languages, supported by 62.3% (29.5% strongly agree and 32.8% agree). furthermore, teachers also express concerns about the cultural implications of using english as the sole language of instruction. a substantial number, 51% (19.5% strongly agree and 31.5% agree), fear that children may lose touch with their cultural values, and 39.1% (18.5% strongly agree and 20.6% agree) feel that it denies children their right to cultural identity. however, some teachers recognize the benefits of adopting english for its international standard, with 76.5% (36.8% strongly agree and 39.7% agree) in favor. teachers are divided on whether the use of english is to satisfy parents, with 49.8% (15.2% strongly agree and 34.6% agree) agreeing and 50.2% (32.9% disagree and 17.3% strongly disagree) disagreeing. lastly, 61.4% (23.2% strongly agree and 38.2% agree) believe using only english breaks the rule of giving every language an equal opportunity. research question 4: what is the language commonly used by the ececc teachers across the seven yoruba-speaking states? seven respondents provided no response, one indicated they use both, and 183, the majority in the states, indicated that only english is used. a teacher in lagos indicated hausa and english. a teacher in kwara, oyo, four from lagos, and three from ekiti indicated english and native language. 4 teachers from lagos, oyo, ekiti, and ondo specified that they use english and yoruba. 8 teachers from kwara also specified that they use yoruba and english. two teachers in lagos indicated they use a combination of igbo, yoruba, and english. discussion a majority of the parents and community members believe that using english will prepare children for future educational activities and global relevance. they emphasize the importance of exposing children to both their native language and english during teaching and learning activities. they also believe that using english in early childhood table 5: language commonly used by the eccde teachers across the seven yoruba speaking states no resp both eng eng & hausa eng & nat. lang eng & yor eng, yor & igbo igbo nat. lang perspec -tive lang y o r total state ogun 0 1 22 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 23 lagos 0 0 32 1 4 4 2 0 0 0 2 43 oyo 1 0 36 0 1 4 0 0 0 0 1 43 ondo 1 0 36 0 0 4 0 0 1 1 0 43 osun 0 0 19 0 0 0 0 1 0 0 1 21 ekiti 1 0 19 0 3 4 0 0 0 0 1 28 kwara 4 0 19 0 1 8 0 0 0 0 2 34 total 7 1 183 1 9 24 2 1 1 1 7 235 perceptions of preschool stakeholders 57 classrooms can enhance children's performance and language development. these findings are in line with ajepe and ademowo (2016), who reported that english is a criterion for measuring success and social status. some parents who love their children to speak their indigenous language are equally more concerned with the education and future of these children, which is tied to high proficiency in the english language however, they believe that using english alone in eccde centers will hinder children from participating in community activities. their opinions are divided on whether english use in eccde centers will affect children's culture. a notable number of school heads and owners recognize the practical benefits of using english, such as preparing children for external examinations and competitions. this finding corroborates with ajepe and ademowo (2016), who conceived that proficiency in english is attached to career and social growth. it also opens certain doors to those who have it and commands respect everywhere it is displayed. it also increases enrollment, indicating that english language instruction boosts school enrollment. however, important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meanings if taught in english, highlighting the risk of linguistic and cultural erosion. many worry that adopting english as the only hypercentral language will make children lose touch with their cultural values. ajepe and ademowo (2016) concepted that proficiency in english is attached to career and social growth. it also opens certain doors to those who have it and commands respect everywhere it is displayed. a significant proportion of teachers believe that important educational concepts from local languages can lose their meaning when taught in english. more than half of the teachers prefer teaching children in their native language. they indicate a strong inclination towards preserving local linguistic and cultural heritage. a substantial number fear that children may lose touch with their cultural values and feel that it denies children their right to cultural identity. over half of the respondents worry that adopting english as the only dominant language will deny children their right to cultural identity. these findings are already happening, as reported by oke (2013), that the younger generation of yoruba speakers anglicizing their indigenous yoruba names without considering the effects on the indigenous languages 183 respondents, which is the majority in the states, indicated that only english is used during the teaching and learning activities in early childhood education and care centers. this is in agreement with the submission of okono & enang (nd) that mother tongue education is provided in less than twenty nigerian languages throughout the country. there are too many issues when english is the dominant language in the education and care of children. oluga & babalola (2012) opine that there are severe implications for the decline in the use of indigenous language. conclusions stakeholders in early childhood education and care have positive perceptions of the impact of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centres. this might not be a result of the love for it but of the fact that english is the language of education, trade, and employment. based on the findings, the following recommendations are made 58 global education review 12 (1) the government should provide a monitoring team to enforce the implementation of the recommendation of npe on the language of instruction english should not be a criterion for anyone seeking job within one locate parents should reinforce and motivate their children to be proud of their culture ethical consideration permissions were sought from the school heads/owners to secure access to their schools and for their teachers to be involved in the research. the study did not require any formal permission. participants were informed about the essence of the study. they were told that participation was not compulsory. if they were not interested, they were free to withdraw. all the respondents gave their oral consent to participate. this was done since the research did not collect information on their private or medical lives. they were assured of the confidentiality of their perception of the issues discussed and that they would remain anonymous. strengths and limitations a limitation of this study may be that the recruitment of respondents was done through gatekeepers. this may impact the choice of teachers, parents, and community members. also, the study failed to examine the courses studied at the teacher training institutions by the teachers. there was a need to check if they were trained to handle children in the early years. covering all the states that speak the yoruba language increases the chance of harvesting the perception of a good number of people. references adedigba, o., soretire, o, o., ajayi, o. a. 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(2022). discipline policy reform: a review of oakland usd following an ocr investigation. global education review, 9 (3), 1-18. discipline policy reform: a review of oakland usd following an ocr investigation catherine robert university of texas at arlington nathern s. a. okilwa university of texas at san antonio abstract research demonstrates harmful effects of disparate discipline practices on outcomes for students of color. the office of civil rights (ocr), under the obama administration, significantly increased investigations under the mandate of title vi. in this study, we examine ocr’s investigation of oakland unified school district (ousd) to establish the district’s response following findings of disproportionality for african american students. current ousd discipline data indicates persistent discipline disparities remain, yet ousd has undertaken significant reform initiatives. these initiatives include establishing restorative justice programs, an african american male achievement program (aama), and extensive internal review and revision of data collection practices for disciplinary incidents. our findings indicate that challenges to this disciplinary reform effort include data quality, training, and the district’s continuing commitment to reform following the conclusion of ocr oversight. descriptors ocr review, ousd, african american, discipline disparity, discipline policy the mission of the united states department of education, office of civil rights (usdoe, ocr) is “to ensure equal access to education and to promote educational excellence throughout the nation through vigorous enforcement of civil rights” (usdoe, ocr, 2018). to live up to its mission, under the obama administration, the office of civil rights (ocr) increased efforts to enforce title vi of the civil rights act which prohibits discrimination against participation in any program or activity on the basis of race, color, or national origin (lhamon, 2014; d’orio, 2018). using the civil rights data collection to identify areas of disparities between student groups, the ocr specifically considered school discipline rates by ethnicity as indicators of possible title vi discrimination (lhamon, 2014). the preponderance of evidence (e.g., losen & gillespie, 2012; skiba et al., 2011; smolkowski et al., 2016,) clearly demonstrates the harmful effects of disparate discipline practices on academic, social, and life outcomes of students, particularly minoritized students. therefore, the ocr is a critical federal agency in monitoring educational inequalities such as discipline disparities. as losen and gillespie (2012) explain, students encountering persistent disciplinary consequences lose critical instructional time. teachers may unintentionally use bias in their perceptions of appropriate classroom behaviors and unfairly penalize one group of students over another group for similar behaviors (skiba et al., 2002; 2011). in using data to launch investigations, the ocr under the obama administration reversed the previous administration’s practice in which investigations were initiated based solely on complaints. from 2009 through early 2012, the ocr launched 20 “proactive” investigations concerning discipline disparity (office for civil rights, 2012). while civil rights 2 global education review 9 (3) advocates hailed the work as overdue, school officials expressed concern over the broad reach of the probes and questioned the work as a potential “fishing expedition” (maxwell, 2011, p. 2). in addition to increasing the number of investigations, the ocr also issued several guidance documents (such as dear colleague letters) and “technical-assistance activities” designed to clarify civil rights issues within school districts (maxwell, 2011). the new guidelines created much confusion in districts as school officials struggled to both determine the legitimacy of the guidelines (as opposed to more stringent and clear regulations) and to alter district policies to match the changing ocr expectations (pernell, 2015). as we await to see the biden administration’s position on tackling disparities in educational outcomes, to include school discipline, we evaluate the impact of the significant efforts undertaken by the ocr during the obama years to reduce school discipline disparity. the authors (2018) previously evaluated the ocr’s first sweeping investigation of one large urban school district and found that the district complied with the activities described within the ocr’s compliance agreement, though many of the activities were still in the initial stages, six years following the signed agreement. for this study, the authors continue evaluation of the ocr’s compliance agreements specific to discipline disparity of african american students that were initiated and resolved during the obama administration. our goal is to examine the ocr investigation of oakland unified school district (ousd) which was initiated in may 2012 to determine whether the ousd “subjected african american students to discrimination on the basis of race by disciplining them more frequently and more harshly than similarly situated white students” (ocr, usdoe, 2012). before the conclusion of the ocr’s investigation, ousd elected to voluntarily enter into agreement with ocr thus committing to specific actions, such as to reform policies, practices, and activities to address the discipline disparity issue. while the full effect of changes to discipline policies will take several years to emerge within the data, this study first questions if ousd fully engaged in reforms as agreed with the ocr. these initial efforts ideally begin the process of equalizing educational opportunities for all students. as much as the ocr’s investigations illuminated the disparate practices in ousd, the responsibility for reducing inequalities ultimately requires commitment and response at the district level. thus, to achieve the goal of this study, we raise three main questions: (1) in the ocr compliance review of oakland usd concerning discipline disparities between african american and white students, what key elements of policy and practice did the ocr identify that needed reform? (2) what are the differences in discipline outcomes for african american students prior to and post ocr investigations of ousd? and (3) for each key element identified by the ocr, what stage of reform has ousd achieved? the rest of this paper is organized, first, by presenting a general overview of scholarly literature about school discipline disparity, followed by the policy change framework, methods section, findings, discussion, and lastly the conclusions. a brief overview of school discipline disparity literature evidence suggests that african american students are suspended significantly more than other students (losen & gillespie, 2012). for example, in their statewide study that examined suspension and expulsion of nearly one million public secondary school students (712 grades) in texas, fabelo and colleagues (2011) found that african americans and discipline policy reform 3 3 students with disabilities were disproportionately suspended or expelled compared to their peers. furthermore, the disparity is prevalent across the different grade configurations. for example, skiba and colleagues (2011) found that african americans are two times (elementary) and four times (middle school) more likely to be referred to the office for problem behaviors than their white peers following their study of office referrals of 364 elementary and middle schools. similarly, in their high school study, gregory and weinstein (2008) established that african american students were overrepresented in the high school discipline referrals. even in the case of well-documented, comprehensive disciplinary practice reforms in syracuse, denver, and cleveland, substantial racial disparities continue to exist in these districts (gregory & fergus, 2017). gregory and fergus (2017) signal some optimism that while african american students “continue to receive harsher sanctions for similar misconduct” (p. 125), “substantially fewer students were excluded from instruction for discipline infractions” (p. 126). the persistent pattern of harsher sanctions for african american students is further illustrated by okonofua and eberhardt (2015) in their study that demonstrates how racial stereotypes contribute to teachers’ increased negative responses. given clear patterns of discipline disparity, existing research demonstrating decreased student achievement among suspended students (arcia, 2006) contributes to our understanding of lower academic outcomes of african american students. while the pattern of the “school-to-prison pipeline” (okilwa et al., 2017; skiba et al., 2011) documents the deleterious effects inherent within discipline disparity, there is less longitudinal research concerning discipline policy reform efforts. however, there is growing evidence schools are implementing programmatic approaches in an effort to address discipline disparity. in the following section we highlight two interventions, school-wide positive behavior supports (swpbs) and restorative justice, which are commonly implemented with the goal of keeping students in school rather than suspension. techniques used in addressing discipline disparity school-wide positive behavior supports. several districts implementing school-wide positive behavior supports (also referred to interchangeably in the literature as positive behavior interventions and supports, or pbis) (sugai & horner, 2009) over a period of many years have added promising practices and interventions demonstrating lowered rates of referrals for african american students. particularly, schools in states such as maryland, illinois, north carolina, and oregon are worth close examination (algozzine et al., 2010; bradshaw, koth et al., 2008). bradshaw and colleagues (2012), for example, demonstrated significantly reduced rates of referrals for students in 21 campuses with swpbis intervention support compared to 16 campuses not receiving swpbis support. a practice encouraged within the ocr’s guidance (2012), “swpbs provides a framework, like rti [response to intervention], comprised of a behaviorally oriented conceptual foundation that has been enhanced by contributions from applied behavior analysis and positive behavior support” (sugai & horner, 2009, p. 234). instead of focusing on punishment and negativity in disciplinary communications with students, swpbs encourages school staff to proactively provide positive expectations for students and allow opportunities for students to self-correct undesired behaviors. structured into a system of three tiers, tier 1 entails application 4 global education review 9 (3) of pbis concepts across all school settings. tiers 2 and 3 more specifically focus on students who have not experienced success within the first tier (sugai & horner, 2009). restorative justice. at the time of the resolution agreement with the ocr, ousd had already begun implementing swpbs on select campuses to address discipline reform. in addition to swpbs, the district had also begun the practice of restorative justice within specific schools. restorative justice (rj), like swpbs, encourages a positive approach to discipline and prioritizes students remaining in school. when a student commits an offense against another student on an rj campus, a ‘talking circle’ is formed so that the offending student can hear the effect of his/her action and the circle can determine a resolution that restores harmony to the group and allows the offending student to feel reintegrated (jain et al., 2014). in the agreement with the ocr, ousd committed to continuing implementation of swpbs and restorative justice on the identified campuses for intervention (referred to as voluntary resolution plan [vrp] cohort schools), though the agreement does not require a specific intervention or combination of interventions for the campuses (ocr, 2012). swpbs, restorative justice, and other intervention programs for student discipline are not designed, however, to individually resolve all disciplinary reform needs without other techniques. by definition, swpbs is an overall framework which incorporates multiple strategies under the umbrella of positive supports (sugai & horner, 2009) and includes rigorous attention to disaggregated discipline data as part of a continuing system of reviewing and modifying practices (gregory et al., 2017; mcintosh et al., 2014). thus, it takes several years to first establish the basic structure of positive expectations (mcintosh et al., 2016) and only then, through data disaggregation and analysis, can the campus swpbs team determine the most appropriate supports needed at the campus. additional interventions. two added interventions have shown recent promise (bradshaw, pas et al., 2018; cook et al., 2018). double check coaching, a program in which teachers’ cultural sensitivity and communication skills are enhanced and encouraged through professional development and individualized coaching, resulted in significantly lower referrals for african american students (bradshaw, pas et al., 2018). the greet-stop-prompt (gst) technique, as tested by cook and colleagues (2018), resulted in a reduced risk ratio of all students receiving referrals. cook et al. (2018) further found that the remaining high-risk ratios for african american male students at one campus were due to a small set of teachers’ referrals and could be reduced with additional supports. in both studies, the researchers caution that the success of the interventions was inextricably linked to the existence of tier 1 swpbs practices on the campuses (bradshaw, pas et al., 2018; cook et al., 2018). theoretical framework for this study, our interest in the district’s responses to ocr reviews in terms of changes in procedures, practices, and policies, leads us to consider the three phases of the policy reform process (i.e., policy talk, policy action, and implementation) as conceptualized by tyack and cuban (1995) and peck and reitzug (2012). these scholars suggest that policy talk describes the problem identification and temporary conversation surrounding the call for action; policy action describes the phase in which actual reform begins through school board policy change or legislation; and implementation refers to the more difficult phase of “putting reforms into practice” (tyack discipline policy reform 5 5 & cuban, 1995, p. 40). implementation may be compromised or may erode based on a variety of factors. for instance, peck and reitzug (2012), in their study of business management concepts implemented within school leadership, conceive an implementation cycle in which a leadership “fashion” declines and fades either as barriers to implementation arise or as the fashion goes out of style. furthermore, successful policy implementation faces both internal and external challenges. internally, educators may choose to comply with required reform yet “relegat[e] it to the periphery of the school” (tyack & cuban, 1995, p. 55). externally, reforms have a greater likelihood of success when required by law and monitored for compliance (tyack & cuban, 1995). tyack and cuban (1995) alternatively argue against the concept of cycles of school reform in favor of a longer-term perspective in which the policy talk cycles, but implementation occurs over a lengthier timetable and often even after popular conversation regarding the issue has ceased. this study’s discussion will weigh the findings through the policy cycle perspective and will then consider tyack and cuban’s (1995) suggestion to view school reform over a larger span of time. research methods and design for this study, we employed a descriptive case study design, which is appropriate in exploring a phenomenon (e.g., school discipline) within a specific context (i.e., ousd), in order to provide a concise account of the facts and expert commentary to help in understanding the phenomenon, the forces behind the solutions, the outcomes of implementation, lessons learned, and connections to practice, policy, and theory (gall et al., 2007; yin, 2007). also, critical to using this methodological approach is the flexibility in the types of data collected as “methodologists recommend that you take an eclectic approach and rely on any data that will help you understand your case and answer your research questions” (johnson & christensen, 2017, p. 436). thus, the purpose of this current study was to examine ocr investigation of ousd to determine discipline disparity of african american students and the consequent response by the district. the study was guided by three research questions: (1) in the ocr compliance review of oakland usd concerning discipline disparities between african american and white students, what key elements of policy and practice did the ocr identify that needed reform? (2) what are the differences in discipline outcomes for african american students prior to and post ocr investigations of ousd? (3) for each key element identified by the ocr, what stage of reform has ousd achieved (policy talk, policy action, or implementation)? data sources and collection procedures data were derived from ocr review findings, recommendations, and the resolution with oakland unified school district. we therefore considered ocr findings compared to the current state of discipline of african americans in ousd by assessing district discipline data. the ocr utilized both district data and data as reported to the civil rights data collection (crdc) (ocrdata.ed.gov). we utilized the district data as reported to the ocr in their annual reports and which was extracted from ousd’s data dashboards for incident numbers and the crdc data for 2017 for numbers of students receiving infractions. also, we examined accountability data to include student achievement data, which is a critical outcome factor that is descriptive of students’ educational experiences. in addition, district documents and external sources were searched 6 global education review 9 (3) for information describing the initiatives that the district committed to within the agreement to resolve. district documents that were reviewed include board documentation, district memos, department presentations, improvement plans, budgets, and meeting minutes and transcriptions. we also searched for media reports specifically referring to the ocr review for contextual reference and for reports of collaborative work done with outside organizations. furthermore, we identified policy changes enacted in response to ocr recommendations as an effort to eliminate discipline disproportionalities. the document review included over 470 reports, action plans, board action items documentation, board meeting minutes, and board agendas. in addition, within each report filed with the ocr, ousd included committee meeting minutes, agendas, training schedules, and data presentations for each category of activities required by the ocr. in the 2017 annual report to the ocr, for example, the answers to the ocr’s questions comprise 39 pages of data and an additional 372 pages of appendices. the appendices include meeting notes and transcriptions for 40 separate meetings of the voluntary resolution plan team (vrp team) and related committees, survey results, action plans, and details for restorative justice and positive behavior trainings. analysis following initial data collection, we logged the largest collection of documents, the district records using a spreadsheet and categorized documents based on date, document title, author, money spent, and action taken as noted in the document. next, we coded each document based on ocr’s identified key elements and created summaries for documents within each school year. the annual reports to the ocr were reviewed separately as discussed below. key data elements and transcriptions were then extracted from the annual reports for further review. following a full reading of transcriptions and meeting minutes, key quotes were extracted to represent the overall sentiment and/or key factual statements for each meeting. rather than focusing on popular success stories of specific programs (e.g., see kingmakersofoakland.org for a docuseries regarding the aama), we instead pursued an exhaustive examination of each activity as identified within the ocr agreement (wollmann, 2007). using the full list of detailed activities within the ocr agreement (see appendix a for further details) and the data collected, we determined the extent to which each activity was completed. next, for each category of activity, we generated a rating using peck and reitzug’s (2012) stages of policy reform (policy talk, policy action, policy implementation). next, we triangulated the gaps between policy implementation and the missing improvements in discipline practices through qualitative document analysis (altheide et al., 2008) to consider if the meaning within the policy action and implementation matches the intent as identified by the ocr. finally, we identified recurring and continuing challenges to implementation. limitations our decision to consider the full breadth of ousd’s disciplinary practice reforms instead of targeting attention to one program (such as the aama) increases the complexity of the analysis. while the best practices potentially derived from a focus on one program could potentially benefit other districts, this study’s approach instead seeks to give a “comprehensive picture of what has happened in the policy field discipline policy reform 7 7 and project under scrutiny, encompassing successful as well as unsuccessful courses of events...” (wollmann, 2007, p. 394). our approach was aided by the laudable availability of district documents through the ousd website and the thorough nature of their reports to the ocr. our attempts to contact district personnel for additional interviews, however, were unsuccessful. as the ocr reports demonstrate, the district spent a great deal of time creating a documentary record for future analysis. our reliance on district documents limits the perspective of our analysis; however, our interest lies in how the programs, dialogue, and district perspectives changed over time and this information is represented within the document collection (altheide et al., 2008). findings the reporting of the findings is organized by research questions. rq1: ocr identified that within the ousd, african american students were disproportionately represented in exclusionary disciplinary actions e.g., out of school suspension. for instance, from 1999 to 2012, the risk ratio (rr) for african american students receiving out-of-school suspension (oss) increased significantly i.e., from rr of 1.42 in 1998/99 to rr of 1.98 in 2011/12. consequently, some of the key ocr recommendations included revising district discipline policies; expanding the number of schools (elementary, middle, and high) to implement programs to address discipline disproportionality; implementing response to intervention (rti) framework; developing targeted support services for african american students; and hosting discipline policy discussion forums for parents. the total agreed activities, described in appendix a, comprise a total of 160 line items, some of which list specific data points for the district to collect, disaggregate, and analyze; in addition to line items listing agreed targeted intervention activities. the agreed activities are listed within ten categories: (1) collaboration with experts, (2) preventative strategies, early identification of at-risk students, early intervention, (3) revision of discipline policies, (4) outreach to and input from stakeholders, (5) training, (6) informational programs for parents, (7) notice to parents and students, (8) discipline review committee: vrp team, (9) data collection, evaluation, self-monitoring, and (10), school security officers. these steps ultimately became the set of recommended activities provided by the ocr in their “dear colleague” guidance to school districts regarding discipline disparity (lhamon & samuels, 2014). ousd administration was aware that their work served as a model. in a meeting of the vrp team with network superintendents on october 10, 2016, barb noted, “i would add that they are really pressing us on fidelity to the models that we are lifting up. they said that we are the national model by which they are advising other districts” (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 75). rq2: the total number of student suspensions decreased from 3,567 suspensions in 2012-13 to 1,936 suspensions in 2016-17. however, suspensions of african american students continue to indicate significant disparities. in 2011-12, african american students composed 31.8% of enrollment, yet composed 63% of students who were suspended and 61% of students who were expelled. in 201617, african american students composed 26% of enrollment, yet composed 60% of students who were suspended and 53% of students who were expelled. students receiving special education services fared even worse-they represented 32% of students receiving suspensions in 2016-17 and 64% of suspended students receiving special education services were african american. 8 global education review 9 (3) district reports to the vrp team and related committees further disaggregate discipline for vrp campuses. the total number of suspension incidents for african american students dropped from 2006 in 2012-13 to 917 in 2016-17, though the disparities remain. african american students received 60% of suspensions in the vrp schools despite representing only 28.7% of the population in vrp schools. rq3: ousd has taken most of the steps as outlined in the agreement with the ocr. these actions are documented in annual reports provided to the school board (the district committed to produce five annual reports) and ousd has maintained transparency by publishing these reports online and hiring outside consultants to evaluate new programs. table 1 identifies the stage of policy reform as defined by peck and reitzug (2012) for each main provision of the agreement with the ocr. appendix b demonstrates a sample of the reforms and activities by year, as evidenced by documentation provided to the school board in 2012 and 2013. despite the intensity of reform in ousd over the last six years evidenced from the document review, three continuing challenges emerged following qualitative document analysis data quality, training, and commitment to continued implementation. these challenges were identified both through data elements within the annual reports and they were also discussed in detail within ocr meetings, vrp leadership meetings, and other associated committee meetings and trainings. the annual reports include transcripts of these meetings, providing context for our findings. data quality. prior to the ocr’s intervention, ousd did not have a reliable system for accurately recording and tracking disciplinary incidents that was consistently applied at all campuses. as part of the required steps, ousd created a universal referral form (urf) and required its use throughout the district. this enormously complex process required an initial training for administrators and clerical staff, in addition to regular updates and training of new staff (an added challenge in the face of high turnover). with incomplete and/or inaccurate data, there is a question regarding if student discipline is accurately reflected and if it is appropriate to table 1 stages of policy reform for ousd discipline reform requirements provision stage (talk/action/or implementation?) notes collaboration with experts implementation preventative strategies, early identification of at-risk students, early intervention partial implementation strong internal and external support of rj and aama a strength; implementation fatigue and admin support a concern re. pbis; not all vrp schools reached implementation fidelity for tier 1 revision of discipline policies implementation outreach to and input from stakeholders implementation training partial implementation training logs reflect incomplete numbers of staff received trainings; turnover also complicates training logistics informational programs for parents implementation notice to parents and students implementation discipline review committee: vrp team implementation continued success relies on this team maintaining strong administrative support data collection, evaluation, selfmonitoring partial implementation problems with data remain, though regular team meetings identify and work to resolve these issues school security officers implementation discipline policy reform 9 9 attribute success or failure of reforms to potentially bad data. as sondra identified in the final year of ocr oversight in a vrp leadership meeting, we met with ocr on friday. it came up from the legal perspective that our data will not be considered valid because of incomplete data. so we could focus on the beginning of the school year you are setting up systems. the teachers also point out the need for more consistency. how do you operationalize a goal like this? (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 14) barb, in response to sondra’s concern, replied, ...then there needs to be some accountability on the forms. because the data really is terrible. we already have a list. i would like to share out eddie fergus’s analysis. it points out that we have wonderful practices but it’s implementation. (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 14) several months later, in another vrp team meeting, seth acknowledged, we obviously are at the tail end of the vrp. ocr signaled that they want us to have the data but also the systems to work that out. we want to take the next steps with building those systems and want to also have the capacity to recognize when the data are not representative of what’s really happening at the sites. (document 172185, appendix 2, p. 76) thus, while ousd did not successfully achieve full implementation and accuracy with the urf, the development of the data analysis team represents a positive practice that enables continued improvement. training. the fundamental shifts in practice for disciplinary approaches, added social supports, and new data systems resulted in an increased demand for precious staff time to participate in training sessions. heavy staff turnover also created additional demand for new employees to learn the basic systems. as an administrator explained during a safe and strong schools committee meeting, getting teachers into trainings is the single biggest barrier to implementing rj: to be frank, getting rj training to the teachers is hard. it’s the hardest thing to do. we have a huge calendar of trainings and the trainings are always full. but teachers and administrators are really hard to access. we have two training days for teachers every year. usually both days are dedicated to instruction because we have so many first second and third year (new) teachers, and a lot of turnover. it’s a systemic problem. we would like to negotiate that every teacher gets this training, and trauma‐ informed training. referrals come from new teachers – we have lots of emergency credential teachers. we need everybody trained in trauma‐informed de‐escalation. every department wants to get in front of teachers, but there is not enough time to get them all of the training. we need coaching after training. (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 110) commitment to continued implementation. conversations within leadership teams illustrate a genuine interest in successfully implementing reform for the improvement of student outcomes mixed with a concern of what the district’s priorities will be following the intense ocr oversight. toward the end of the oversight period, the vrp team 10 global education review 9 (3) continued work on both the data quality issue and the intensified efforts to provide cultural responsive training in order to address persistent implicit bias in staff when working with diverse students. in a vrp team meeting, when the team was discussing the issue of implicit bias, jody stated, a lot of what we were trying to put down as smarte goals under addressing bias, we don’t even know what we are meaning with “culturally responsive.” i think it would be a great outcome for our “oakland way” to know our meaning of that. the journey is long in terms of being anti‐racist and changing implicit bias, but we can at least get clear on what we are talking about and begin to have culture change. (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 18) vrp team members were aware that they needed to demonstrate progress. as jean mentioned in a meeting with network superintendents, ...we may still have disproportionate data, but we need to show that we are doing everything in our power to eliminate bias and to change our practices so that they can see that whatever disproportionality is there is not a result of discrimination. (document 17-2185, appendix 2, p. 40) while it was part of the function of the vrp team to interpret ocr requirements and guide the district through the process of reform, the question that many staff members asked towards the end was whether their reform efforts would continue once the ocr was no longer requiring regular accountability and updates of their activities. the district technically reached implementation phase for seven out of the ten key elements as identified by the ocr. by tyack and cuban’s (1995) definition, implementation is the slower practice of “putting reforms into practice” (p. 40). though ousd has fully or partially entered implementation for all agreed reforms, the continuing rates of disparity in disciplinary incidents indicate that the implementation process of reforms will require continuing support to achieve intended effects. discussion oakland usd committed to a broad range of activities in order to resolve the ocr’s investigation into their inequitable disciplinary practices. the district engaged in the activities as promised and all reforms are in (at least) a partial implementation stage. at this time, disproportionality remains in the suspension and expulsion rates for african american students. there are promising steps signaling that ousd’s continued efforts may yet produce improved outcomes for all students in disciplinary practices. first, the vrp team successfully initiated practices to review data, discuss, and modify programs as a result. the team initiated new steps in response to identified gaps, such as cultural responsiveness training. indeed, there is growing evidence that culturally responsive teaching (gay, 2010; ladson-billings, 1995; larson et al., 2018) coupled with culturally responsive leadership (khalifa, 2018; khalifa et al., 2016; merchant et al., 2013) have a significant influence on positive student outcomes. in addition to the newly established efficiencies in administration, review of meeting minutes reveals honest intent of administrators to question inequitable practices. however, one question that persists is whether the intent for the reduction in discipline disparity was solely driven by the ocr discipline policy reform 11 11 agreement or if the district will continue to pursue change without ocr oversight. the challenges to disciplinary reform as identified by staff include data quality, training, and the aforementioned continued commitment to reform. a larger issue, only discussed in part within district documentation, rises in weighing the district’s pbis implementation experience with best practices as identified throughout the research. ousd has not reached fidelity of tier 1 implementation on all campuses, nor even within the vrp schools. campuses implementing pbis with fidelity at tier 1 within one year have a larger likelihood of overall success than campuses that take longer to implement pbis (mcintosh et al., 2016). the mixture of interventions, programs, and practices employed by ousd are not consistently tied to the recommended practice of first establishing tier 1 pbis supports, then selectively implementing targeted interventions based on emerging needs from data analysis and campus stakeholders (gregory et al., 2017). as both cook and colleagues (2018) and gregory and colleagues (2017) caution, their successful results are from campuses in which pbis tier 1 supports have been implemented with fidelity. as the ocr oversight of ousd ends, the potential for administrative support may waver in the face of other competing needs such as budgetary pressure for reductions. ultimately, administrative support is a critical factor in maintaining campus application of pbis (andreou et al., 2015) and will determine the likelihood of continued work toward reducing discipline disparity in ousd. additionally, of concern is not only the continuing disciplinary outcome disparities within student ethnicities overall, but also the heightened impact of higher rates of exclusion for african american students receiving special education services. students of color are overrepresented within special education; thus, they are particularly vulnerable to the negative impacts of suspension (kramarczuk voulgarides et al., 2017). some scholars, in fact, question the assumption that special education itself is useful, finding that a student with multiple identities may suffer from the intersection of racism and ableism within a teacher’s practice (cruz et al., 2021). indeed, cultural training for teachers, when combined with pbis implementation has been associated with a reduction of exclusionary discipline for overrepresented groups (gregory et al., 2017). particularly, scholars and teacher educators such as gloria ladson-billings and geneva gay have, in their seminal works, long advocated for culturally responsive (or relevant) teaching (or pedagogy) (gay, 2010; ladson-billings, 1994, 1995). these scholars collectively argue for a pedagogy that produces academic success, helps students develop positive ethnic and cultural identities, elevates students’ sensitivity to social inequalities, and enhances student-teacher relationships, classroom climate, and selfawareness. these core principles of culturally responsive pedagogy when applied in tandem have the potential to keep african american students engaged in the learning process, ultimately producing desirable educational outcomes (hammond, 2015). ousd’s experience with reforming its disciplinary practices illustrates the complexity of large-scale social reform. tyack and cuban (1995) caution against viewing reform as cyclical, explaining that the length of trends in school reform do not correspond with public attention. that is, reform will continue beyond the time that we discuss the changes. previous examples of this phenomenon include the sharp increases in per-pupil expenditures in the 1920s and 1950s (during politically conservative decades) and the delayed curriculum development in the 1960s following the 1950s fear of falling behind the soviet union in math 12 global education review 9 (3) and science. the curriculum development in the 1960s occurred despite the shift in public attention to social justice matters (tyack & cuban, 1995). discipline reform, a massive undertaking as evidenced by this report, will likely reform over time, but the public will likely be focused on other issues by the time true reform is realized a longer-term perspective will enable us to consider if ousd’s reforms are merely serving a compliance function or engaging social change. the ocr’s efforts contributed “symbolically important” policy talk that are further complicated by both the lengthy implementation process specific to behavioral system reform and the “uneven penetration of the reform[s]” as illustrated by uneven success on differing campuses (tyack & cuban, 1995, p. 55). after shifting away from legal monitoring for compliance during the trump administration (klein & blad, 2018; ujifusa, 2018), there is likelihood with the new biden administration’s apparent focus on social justice, to return once again to enforcing civil rights of learners to ensure equal access to education. therefore, revisiting the state of the district, i.e., ousd, in a couple of years will be necessary. conclusions it is clear that much work remains in combating underlying contributing factors to disparate outcomes for african american students. ousd’s annual progress reports to the ocr show continued progress in the number of schools implementing discipline reform, however training has remained optional in most cases, resulting in uneven implementation. also challenging is the level of data accuracy and completion, as identified in ocr’s original report. the district now achieves 80% completion of referral forms at all campuses, thus earlier data did not include all incidents. in light of our findings, there are important considerations for ousd. in an effort to provide equal educational opportunities for all students, it is critical to continually eliminate time away from the regular learning environment for african american students, especially african american students receiving special education services. students missing valuable classroom time are deprived of needed skill development, resulting in an increased need for remediation and a greater likelihood of repeated behavioral incidents as a result (mcintosh et al., 2014). in addition to the efforts around implementing pbis, restorative justice, and rti, ousd may need to consider making professional development mandatory such as culturally responsive pedagogy which provides an underlying rationale for these other initiatives. also, given the positive effort ousd has exerted in response to the ocr agreement, discipline disparities still exist; a thorough root cause analysis needs to be conducted to bring to surface the real issues. furthermore, our findings raise other important research related questions worth exploring: as districts, at least initially, appear to put forth effort to respond to agreements with ocr, little impact on student outcomes is evident. this lack of improvement in outcomes for african american students begs a comprehensive investigation of the real root cause analysis of these student disparities; are ocr efforts really producing the change needed to educational equity? finally, are the districts’ efforts merely for compliance or are they a commitment to true reform? discipline policy reform 13 13 appendix a substantive provisions within the agreement to resolve oakland unified school district ocr case number 09125001 note: the following details provisions found within ousd’s agreement to resolve with the ocr. for space considerations, the full 160 lines have been reduced. instead, the main categories are listed here with a brief description for each, including a sample of the level of detail required by the agreement. the full list of agreed activities can be found at: https://www2.ed.gov/about/offices/list/ocr/d ocs/investigations/09125001-b.pdf i. collaboration with experts hire experts, appoint a project leader for the vrp team ii. preventative strategies, early ident of atrisk students, early intervention select program for vrp schools that utilizes equitable and restorative discipline practices; evaluate program effectiveness; build a trauma team; implement recommendations of aama task force iii. revision of disciplinary policies review data and consider policy revisions; align board policy with district initiatives iv. outreach to and input from stakeholders provide reports to ocr; administer surveys; conduct forums for students and parents v. training provide annual staff and student training for vrp schools that emphasizes pbis vi. informational programs for parents develop parent program that informs on due process, positive behavior, and district contact information vii. notice to parents and students revise parent and student handbooks; provide notice of ombudsman; inform public of discipline data viii. discipline review committee: vrp team establish vrp team which will then develop frameworks, systems, targeted reductions, training schedules ix. data collection, evaluation, selfmonitoring add tracking of site based discipline and teacher initiated suspension; accurately collect discipline data; convene software user forum; provide database training; produce and share discipline reports; district and campus meetings will consider discipline data x. school security officers review sso program to determine if it aligns to intent of this agreement; conduct training and policy changes as needed for alignment 14 global education review 9 (3) appendix b sample of document review documents presented to the school board 2012-2013 (full review includes 2012-2017) document date document title summary of document agreement to resolve correlations march 27, 2013 professional services contract contract between ousd and usc for design support and analysis of findings of ousd 0-8 aama for 2012-2013. i.a. consult w experts in data analysis and research-based strategies on aa and school discipline iii.c. phase i district reviews its 2010-2012 discipline data ix.a. district will gather and review electronic data. may 8, 2013 professional services contract contract between oakland tech hs and mentoring center for mentoring training. v.a. – vrp cohort school training (includes programs, training with connections to fairness and nondiscrimination based on race/ethnicity. v.b. district will develop vrp cohort school staff training module may 8, 2013 district submitting grant application grant application to support staffing costs for aama initiative. ii.e. aama task force recommendations (mentoring, t/s relationships, site mentoring programs, timeframe for monitoring and evaluation) may 8, 2013 professional services contract amendment approval of partners in school innovation for manhood development programs and outreach to aa families. i.a. consult w experts in data analysis and research-based strategies on aa and school discipline discipline policy reform 15 15 references algozzine, b., horner, r. h., sugai, g., barrett, s., dickey, s. r., eber, l., kincaid, d., et al. 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(2023). the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages in u.s. discourse around 1900. global education review, 10 (1-2), 7-21. the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages in u.s. discourse around 1900 marcel scholz abstract this paper uses a selected case study to show how the theoretical topos of formal stage theory of herbartian provenance, which originated in the german-speaking world, underwent an adaptation and semantic shift in u.s. discourse around 1900. the findings presented here relate to the interpretation of the human cognitive process and the subsequent understanding of the formal stages by the u.s. educators charles and frank mcmurry, which was shaped by the scientific-theoretical location within the natural science paradigm. in doing so, the mcmurry brothers emphasized the parallel between the steps of the scientific approach and the formal steps of instruction, thus making instruction a (natural) science-based instruction. on the one hand, this interpretation can be explained by the possibility of communicative connectivity in discourse and thus the generation of communicative resonance. on the other hand, it was apparently a functional strategy to justify the scientific nature of pedagogy and thus provided a convincing argument for its position, while at the same time drawing on an internal logic of u.s. educational thought. first, the thematic framework is set, and the relevant persons are introduced. subsequently, the theoretical location or perspective on which the present article is based will be explicated. then, based on a text-hermeneutici analysis, the respective understandings of the formal stage theory are elaborated to subsequently carry out a comparison of the understandings in a comparative-constructive procedure. based on this, the justification contexts for the adaptations and adaptations are extrapolated against the background of the theoretical perspective. key words cultural transfer; herbartianism; formal stage theory; transculturation; transformation; globalization; u.s. educational thinking this article uses the findings of a case study on the transformation of an aspect of a pedagogical theory in the context of its transfer from the german-speaking world to the united states around 1900 to show how certain aspects of this theory were adapted, translated, or transposed. the reference here is to the (pedagogical)ii herbartianism, which developed and spread during the second half of the 19th century through individuals such as tuiskon ziller, karl volkmar stoy, and wilhelm rein. this scientific school was concerned with making the pedagogical ideas of philosopher johann f. herbart fruitful for the shaping and profiling of a scientific pedagogy. the elaborated positions became known worldwide by means of international networks. for example, the pedagogical seminarsiii ziller established in leipzig and stoy in jena, which rein continued after stoy’s death, achieved international fame. jena also played a special role in terms of international reception, since large numbers of foreign students, including many americans, attended these annual summer courses (graff & schotte, 2009). in this way, the ideas, theories, and conceptions of herbartianism also entered the educational discourse in the united states. they were disseminated as well as adapted to the developmental presuppositions. 8 global education review 10 (1-2) charles mcmurry was a high school graduate of illinois state normal university who went on to earn a degree in classical studies from the university of michigan. after returning to illinois in 1882, he was persuaded by a colleague to go to halle to study economics and theology (dunkel, 1969b). through conversations with charles degarmo, he also became interested in the educational ideas of the herbartians. he studied at halle for three years and completed his studies with a doctorate in 1888 (mcmurry, c., 1888). frank mcmurry, charles’s younger brother by five years and also a graduate of the high school program at isnu, followed his older sibling to europe in 1886 to study education. after spending a year together in halle, germany, they both went to jena, germany, in 1887 to attend the pedagogical university seminar under rein. rein was also the supervisor of frank mcmurry’s dissertation (mcmurry, f. 1890; dunkel, 1969b). the experience of integrating theory and practice impressed the brothers so highly that they made it their mission to introduce herbartianism into american discourse in the 1890s. the works that should be highlighted are the elements of general methods based on the principles of herbart (1892), written by charles mcmurry, which boasts impressive figures. furthermore, a course of study for the eight grades of the common-schools (1895b), as well as method of the recitation (1897), jointly written by the mcmurry brothers, should be mentioned, which ties in with rein's thought in terms of the presentation of subject matter on a conceptual level. theoretical perspective and methodological approach the present paper is based on the conceptualization of cultural transfer research (e.g. espagne, 1999, 2003; espagne & middell, 1999; espagne & werner, 1986; lüsebrink & reichardt, 1997; middell & middell 1994; middell, 2000, 2008). this conception can be understood as a version of the cultural turn (keller, 2006). while older approaches mostly emphasize national or regional autonomy, ignoring the elements of foreignness in one's own culture, this approach focuses on the numerous linkages and transitional phenomena between cultural areas (keller, 2006). the subject matter is the multiform processes of penetration and reception in the context of an exchange between cultural areas. the concrete interactions between social groups and their respective cultural practices, as well as the dynamics and modalities of intellectual and cultural exchange processes, are analyzed and described (middell & middell, 1994). the approach also addresses the motives for acquiring “foreign” knowledge, the criteria guiding the selection, and the purposes for which the acquired information is used (paulmann, 1998). transfer research focuses on the specific constellation of the source and the receiving culture. in doing so, the traditional perspective of cultural comparison is reversed. the introduction of a cultural good into another context would not only be related to targeted expansion efforts of the source culture, but also to a demand in the receiving country. in this understanding, cultural transfer is an active appropriation process that is controlled by the respective host culture (middell & middell, 1994). furthermore, following schriewer (1992), a functional perspective on educational transfers is adopted. this perspective enables a conceptually adequate description of transfer processes by applying the theory of reflection problems of systems (luhmann & schorr, 1979). of particular relevance is the principle of selfreference of systems; this is applied to issues in international comparative education (schriewer, the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 9 1992). hence, schriewer points to three different modes of externalization used to generate additional meaning: reference to (1) scientificity; (2) values and tradition; and (3) organization. applying the externalization concept of self-referential systems theory provides an explanation for phenomena studied within a transfer research framework. it can make clear when and why educational systems resort to externalized references in order to initiate and force their own development. the basis for the methodological procedure is the content-related, qualitative analysis of selected writings of the protagonists in the sense of source work and criticism. in doing so, a subjectoriented methodology, which follows a textbased hermeneutic logic of cognition, is used as a level of reflection. furthermore, a comparative-constructive procedure is applied. it is criterion-guided between the teachings of the two us-american protagonists and that of wilhelm rein as the german exponent of herbartianism. the two us-americans represent, in a figurative sense, a personified transfer channel through which the exchange or transplantation takes place. it should be noted here that the two u.s. educators simultaneously represent the medium in which the transformation processes take place in a respective individual determination by external factors. the selection of the protagonists and their ideas as the object of study in the case of wilhelm rein as a representative of herbartianism results from the fact that research in the us-american context proves the thesis that herbartianism, as represented by wilhelm rein, is of central importance for the us (dunkel, 1970). in case of charles and frank mcmurry, it is the fact that they present themselves as us-american herbartian exponents, since both demonstrably studied under rein in jena and were strongly oriented toward his ideas and conceptions. formal stage theory sensu wilhelm rein the basic conception of the formal stage theory sensu wilhelm rein is that the working through of the material takes place on the basis of five formal stages, which rein refers to in their entirety as the articulation of instruction. the learning process as such can be divided into two phases. one consists of the process of apperception, which means the ability of the mind to form clear ideas from sensory perception and to combine the manifold impressions into a unified imagination through the activity of the inner sense. the other is the process of abstraction, which means to elaborate the imaginations to abstract notions. however, both the first part of the learning process, the acquisition of an apperception, and the second of conceptual formation can only be achieved if each of the two is accompanied by a preliminary stage (rein/pickel/scheller 1888, p. 40). in detail, this means that the presentation of the new concrete imaginative material must be preceded by a stage of preparation. in the case of the preparation of the conceptual understanding of the new, a linking of the new with the old is required, by which is meant that the older thought material of the students is activated by the preparation (rein et al. 1888, p. 41). this complex of teaching tasks described here, however, must be preceded and followed by something. these are, on the one hand, the specification of the goal and, on the other hand, the application. for rein, the latter results from the fact that it is necessary to bring the student to work independently, willingly and conscientiously to achieve the educational goal. summarizing the basic tasks of the formal stages, rein writes: 10 global education review 10 (1-2) according to this, instruction in each methodological unit takes the following course. it must first state the goal and then: 1. to introduce and prepare the new workload through a preliminary conversation, 2. to present the new content itself, 3. to compare and link the same among themselves and with older things, 4. to derive the conceptual results and to compile them in a systematic order and 5. to transfer the acquired knowledge into use (rein et al. 1888, p. 41). the subsequent designations rein provides for his conception are: 1. preparation or preliminary conversation, 2. presentation (of the new), 3. linking (of the learned among themselves and with others), 4. summary (of the conceptual) and 5. application (of the general gained)” (rein et al. 1888, p. 41). in the following, let us take a closer look at the conceptualizations rein operates with in his conception of formal stage theory. at the beginning of a unit belongs the disclosure of the goal of learning, which should be reached at the end of the work through. how the goal is presented can have different forms, such as a sentence, an orientation question or a concrete task, but it must not lack factuality, and it must always take into account the aspects of gaining the students’ interest (rein et al., 1888). for rein, the basic rationale for preparation as the first stage is that no interest can be generated in the student without a connection to the student's older ideas (rein et al., 1888). therefore, it prepares the stage of presentation in such a way that it takes up the existing thought material of the students and prepares it for the presentation of the new. the separation of these two stages must be strictly observed (rein et al., 1888). the presentation has to ensure that the presented material in connection with exercises is not only understood momentarily, but also undergoes a stable acquisition. the forms of presentation must be appropriate to the material being taught. the purely factual content of the new is worked out in the form of a conversation. the substances in themselves are not yet evaluated further. they serve to give the students a clear idea of the new material. the new should be brought into connection with what is already present in the mind of the students and, above all, is sufficiently similar to this in order to achieve a sensualization of the new in the students’ mind. finally, each section as well as the entire unit are to be repeated several times in the sense in order to achieve memorization and fusion of the new with the old (rein et al., 1888). all of this has to make sure that the process of apperception can fully take place. in the stage of linking the thought connections are to be selected, by which a separation of the conceptual material can be achieved (rein et al., 1888). that means for rein, "the linkage is not extended, however, haphazardly to everything what allows such a linkage at all. rather, the attention should always be directed only to valuable associations of thoughts. worthless associations are playfulness, a waste of time without purpose" (rein et al. 1888, p. 58). in doing so, it already introduces or prepares the next stage of the summary. the process of abstraction has thus been initiated. it must now be continued and brought to a conclusion. the stage of summary is planned for this purpose. within this stage, the existing generalities are to be worked out more strongly, in order to probe them completely from the concrete. thus, at this stage, through summary and generalization, the the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 11 process of concept formation from a majority of individual conceptions is to take place. the connectedness of the concrete from the general is still present and should not be completely dissolved in consciousness (rein et al., 1888). in the process of abstraction, the distinction between psychological and logical concepts plays a significant role. the psychological concept stands for the existence of a correct general idea. the logical concept stands for the fact that a definition has been established and internalized (rein et al., 1888). with regard to teaching children, rein states that in the context of teaching, one must mostly be satisfied with the psychological concept. in order to gain value for the actual life, actions, and deeds of the students, the results of the conceptual work have to prove themselves in application. this includes exercises designed to relate closely to the actual problems of the students' present and future lives. on the one hand, the potential of knowledge, which is bundled in the conceptual series, and of ability should be secured and promoted. on the other hand, ethical-moral judgments are to be practiced, which lay the foundation for the development of a moral-religious character, in order to fulfil the claim of a school as a school that not only wants to impart knowledge, but also wants to educate. therefore, the teaching in school must be a form of teaching that wants to educate, which herbart and the herbartians called erziehender unterricht. by this, it is meant that, first, the student learns to apply the knowledge gained in class to concrete decisionmaking processes. this involves making appropriate judgements based on imparted knowledge, if possible, in the course of action. secondly, erziehender unterricht means those influences of an educative nature, such as praise, encouragement, help, counseling, etc., which emanate from the person of the teacher and constantly permeate all teaching. it is important to note that it is not only the intentional measures that come from the teacher that play a role, but also the more functional ones, such as situations of play, work and competition, as well as the stylistic forms of teaching, which also have a far-reaching educational effect. situations of success or failure also produce educationally significant influences of an encouraging or discouraging nature. finally, in a third particularly important sense, erziehender unterricht, means attitudes and skills formed in the context of experiences are inherent in all teaching. formal stage theory sensu charles and frank mcmurry the interpretation of the formal stage theory is most elaborated in the work method of recitation, jointly written by the brothers charles and frank mcmurry. iv the foundation of the theory element, however, was laid by charles mcmurry in the first edition of the general methods of 1892, in which he deals with the concepts of induction and apperception. these two terms are directly related to the learning process and the methodology of the course. therefore, the analysis of the two concepts of induction and apperception will precede, since the specific interpretation of the mcmurrys' formal stage theory is derived on the basis of this point of view. the study and determination of the concept of induction inevitably represents a psychological investigation for mcmurry. within the analysis, the natural learning process is to be determined, focusing on the study of the processes of the child’s mind (mcmurry, c., 1892). as basic operations within the child's learning processes, mcmurry identifies the constant contemplation of the environment. this observation leads to the comparison of different objects and individuals with each other. based on this, these objects and individuals are 12 global education review 10 (1-2) classified under general rules and concepts (mcmurry, c., 1892). in the method of recitation, this context invokes henry t. huxley, the english biologist and influential supporter of both humean empiricism and darwinian evolutionary theory (1880). huxley called the inductive process of knowledge the general process of knowledge in the natural sciences (mcmurry, f., 1897). this type of process of knowledge generation is postulated by the mcmurrys for all studies: in short the inductive process is a natural highway of human thought in every line of study bringing all the mental forces into orderly, successive, healthful activity (mcmurry, c. 1892, p. 127). according to mcmurry, this postulated generality of the inductive process for the genesis of knowledge can therefore be translated in terms of teaching methodology, since it is valid as a methodological principle for all studies. considered as a whole, the inductive process is characterized by absorption and reflection, which are the natural rhythms of the mind in the context of acquiring and elaborating bodies of knowledge within the learning process (mcmurry, c., 1892). the effect that occurs within this process is that of building abstract mental concepts that organize knowledge. from the more specific analysis of the inductive process and its course, two stages emerge, which he determines as observation or intuition, direct perception of the realities of the environment through the senses or consciousness (mcmurry, c., 1892). the second step is determined by comparing and relating the individual elements and general concepts derived from them. the second stage in this inductive process, reflection, then involves comparison, classification, and abstraction. mcmurry discusses these processes from the standpoint of the “association of ideas” (mcmurry, c., 1892, p. 141). it goes beyond the usual understanding of knowledge acquisition and manifests itself in the elaboration and assimilation of knowledge content, which should lead to a deeper understanding and support the further learning process (mcmurry, c., 1892). both processes are based on the above-mentioned concept of association of ideas, which is closely related to the theoretical element of apperception. the mode of apperception is thereby such that it represents the transformation of a newer and thus also weaker mental concept by an older one, which is characterized by a higher level of elaboration and thus surpasses it in internal organization. this shows its process character, which is set in motion by the dissimilarity of the already existing imaginative complexes and the new. apperception is thus the reaction of the old to the new, showing in it the preponderance of the older, firmer, and selfcontained conceptual groups in contrast to the concepts that have just entered consciousness (mcmurry, c., 1892). the exception is completely new knowledge, which must first be made manageable by perception or intuition. the great yield within the learning process under the consideration of this psychological concept results for mcmurry from the fact that “apperception, therefore, has the same final tendency that will be observed in the inductive process, the unification of knowledge, the concentration of all experience by uniting its parts into groups and series” (mcmurry, c. 1892, p. 116). for mcmurry, the final stage of the inductive process is the formulation of general laws (mcmurry, c., 1892). the mcmurrys very specifically and explicitly oppose the opinion that pedagogy cannot be a science and want to prove this by stating that there are universal methodological principles that provide the basis for the science of education (mcmurry, c. & mcmurry f., 1897). in the case of the mcmurrys, this implies a the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 13 strong orientation to the reference discipline of psychology, which studies the laws of the learning process and thus provides the basis for teaching methodology. this should make it possible to exclude chance as far as possible and to make pedagogical and instructional action plannable, whereby the laws of the child's learning process are fundamental and are to be moved to the center of the methodology. how do the mcmurrys formulate their position on teaching methodology? it has already been clarified above that they understand the learning process as an inductive process based on intuition and the association of ideas; whilst considering the law of apperception. for this purpose, the distinction between individual notions and general notions is introduced. the former are the notions of a particular, a concrete, and the latter are the general notions abstracted from the concrete. within the general notions we have to distinguish between psychical notions and logical notions (mcmurry, f., 1897). psychical notions denote subjective ideas or concepts bound to the individual, which are mostly characterized by vagueness, whereas logical notions represent abstract ideas or concepts. it is degrees of abstractness that distinguish these two types of general notions from each other, and progress in the learning process is linked to and occurs in the ascent from psychical to logical notions (mcmurry, f., 1897). the law of apperception is of decisive importance in the question of the development of individual notions. this means that the new knowledge must be compatible with the already existing knowledge (mcmurry, f., 1897). at the preparation stage, it is important to activate the previous knowledge as extensively as possible and to take into account the significance of the feelings for the cognitive activation and to detect and use the emotional connection with a body of knowledge in the child’s subjectivity. furthermore, it must be taken into account not to bridge to the new too quickly within this activation, but to make sure that the intended stock of knowledge has fully entered consciousness. furthermore, the differentiation between already existing knowledge stocks and the new ones has to be carried out clearly. in addition, it is important to fundamentally channel the attention in this phase or at this stage and to attune it to the material to be dealt with. the methodical means of the statement of the aim should be used (mcmurry, f., 1897). the second stage is about initiating the apperceptive process and supporting it as best as possible. within this stage, the methodological design can be very variable. thus, it can consist in reading a story, studying a map, drawing something or carrying out a small experiment, on the premise that they deal with a new concrete object of learning (mcmurry, f., 1897). in this context, we now introduce what the mcmurrys call the developing method and distinguish it from the lecturing and textbook or text-based methods (mcmurry, f., 1897). this propagated method is closely related to the figure of thought of the learning process as an inductive process, which is aimed at finally elaborating general notions or the general truths of the respective study, based on the selfactivity of the students. the importance of this self-activity as a cognitive activation and the self-construction of knowledge is underpinned by the reference to herbert spencer (mcmurry, f., 1897). the justification of the developing method as the most functional for achieving this overarching learning goal stems from its functionality in terms of the critical reference norms through which this learning goal is operationalized. they consist in arousing interest, thereby stimulating students' minds to ask their own questions, using their own words (mcmurry, f., 1897). this means that the 14 global education review 10 (1-2) answers that the teaching aims at must be answers to questions that the students ask themselves. only in this way can the intermediate goal of the learning process, the development of clear individual notions, be achieved. following the first two stages, the question now arises, after the individual notions have been developed in the consciousness of the students, how to proceed from these individual notions to the general notions. that is, how does the process of abstraction follow on from the process of apperception, and how is one to be linked to the other? in the sense of the inductive understanding, it is therefore necessary to initiate the process of abstraction and to support the passage from the particular individual notions to the abstract general notions, which materialize in the form of definitions and take place through the intermediate stage of abstraction on the basis of the comparison of the individual notions. with regard to a complete inductive process in the scientific sense, in pedagogical practice this must be abbreviated at the point of comparison, comparison and abstraction, because otherwise it would go beyond the time frame that is structurally given in school context. for this purpose, the concept of types, already introduced above, is used and thus an element from the theory of curriculum is made fruitful for teaching methodology (mcmurry, f., 1897). in connection with the following stage, the understanding of the learning process as an inductive process appears on the one hand and on the other hand the strong formalization of this understanding in the spelling out of the stages as instruction as well as the clear setting of abstract knowledge as the goal. the inductive understanding becomes visible when it is emphasized that the complete comprehension of the concrete represents the indispensable foundation on the basis of which only everything else can take place and the inability to be able to explicate ideas or conceptualizations is not due to a possible lack of linguistic competence, but the lack of clarity of the respective idea is causally responsible for it. the formalization of the teaching process becomes clear if it is decidedly spoken of preceding steps of instruction. the fourth step of formulating the definition, the law or general rules should be the direct result of the children's own previous thinking (mcmurry, f., 1897). the last question and the last stage connected with it deals with the question of the application of the general notions, which is determined at this point as the greatest difficulty in the learning process and which is indispensable as a component of the learning and thus also of the teaching process (mcmurry, f., 1897). this stage and the learning process carried out in it are called decidedly deductive (mcmurry, f., 1897). the mastering and the deeper understanding of the general notions is inevitably linked to their application and, with reference to john locke, presented as a necessary step, since only knowledge that is and can be applied may be considered real and effective knowledge (mcmurry, f., 1897). comparison in formal or theoretical respect, the formal stage theory as spelled out by rein is followed in extraordinary agreement. this is shown at the same time in the presentation of the first stage, when the function of activating already existing ideas is ascribed to it. within this stage, the factual content must necessarily be made transparent to the students and placed at the beginning. the coupling or the justification of the necessity of the preparation as the first stage is also determined in accordance with rein in the psychological figure the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 15 of thought of apperception as a law of the learning process. with regard to the second stage, the mcmurrys adopted almost verbatim the methodological design of the formulations found in rein. it is pointed out that the methodical design must be oriented to the (scientific) material; under the premise that the students deal with a new concrete learning object, whereby the apperceptive process is to be supported. the third stage for the mcmurrys, as for rein, is for linking, based on comparison, which initiates the process of abstraction. for rein, this involves making the valuable connections of thought the mcmurrys seek to secure through their notion of types, which can extract the comparison more quickly and effectively in terms of the valuable connections and lift them into consciousness (scholz, 2020). the fourth stage is now responsible for deriving the conceptual results and putting them into a systematic order, that is, for completing the process of abstraction and for working out the existing generalities more strongly from what is linked and for probing them entirely from the concrete. the mcmurrys refer to this as the transition from individual notions to general notions, which rein conceptually agrees is the transition from individual notions to general notions. in this context, rein makes a further differentiation of the abstraction process within the learning process by distinguishing a higher and a lower level of abstraction. thereby, the higher level again breaks down into psychological and logical concepts, which finally represents a three-part gradation of the abstraction process. there is a further congruence of the thought figure here, since the mcmurrys in their discussion of the process of cognition as an inductive process also make such a distinction in individual notions, as those of the ideas of a certain, a concrete, and on the level of general notions between psychological notions and logical notions (mcmurry, f., 1897). the stage of application of the results of this conceptual work has with the mcmurrys, again in agreement with rein, now the function of revealing that this work has a value for the actual life, the acting and doing of the students. this means that with both, rein and the mcmurrys, the concrete arrangement be fundamentally oriented to the mental movement between the abstract and the concrete and thereby, on the one hand, the inductively gained general notion must be referred back deductively to the preceding path of knowledge and, on the other hand, the abstract knowledge must be related to new problems, but also to other learning objects also from other studies and must be used for the solution of the problems or the development of other learning objects. this addresses the most significant aspect for the present paper, which has already been mentioned above and which needs to be made explicit. it is about the basic (psychological) interpretation of the human cognitive process, which is determined by the mcmurrys in the scientific theoretical location within the scientific paradigm as a decidedly inductive process and this understanding is applied to the teaching methodology. although rein's understanding can also be described as thoroughly inductive and the lower levels follow this logic of cognition in that he determines the goal of teaching in the acquisition of abstract concepts and the path to this goal is an inductive one, no reference to scientific methods can be found in his works in this context (scholz, 2020). it could be shown that the mcmurrys followed in extraordinary agreement the formal stage theory as advocated by rein. there was agreement in the definition of the element of goal statement, which was taken over almost verbatim from rein in its constitution and 16 global education review 10 (1-2) justification, and in the coupling or justification of the necessity of preparation as the first stage in the psychological figure of thought of apperception as a law of the learning process. the mcmurrys also refer to the herbartian distinction between deepening and reflection within the learning process and its didactic-methodological embedding (scholz, 2020). a further agreement could be found in the basic figure of thought of the learning process aimed at by teaching from the individual notions to the general notions, which is termed in rein's conceptual agreement as transition from individual notions to general notions. rein's further differentiation of the abstraction process within the learning process into abstractions of higher and lower degree, whereby the higher degree again breaks down into psychological notions and logical notions, could be demonstrated by the mcmurrys in the context of their discussion of the cognitive process as an inductive process in the form of the differentiation of the general notions into psychological notions and logical notions. contrarily, with regard to the relevance of the stages for the moral or, in rein's case, moralreligious development of the students, it was found that this was only addressed selectively, whereas in rein's case this implementation and reference developed continuously (scholz, 2020). discussion the central finding for the present contribution was the mcmurrys' interpretation of the human cognitive processes and the subsequent understanding of the formal stages. this interpretation was characterized by the science-theoretical location within the natural science paradigm. this becomes most obvious when they refer to the english biologist, empiricist, and evolutionary theorist henry t. huxley, who called the inductive cognitive process the general cognitive process of the natural sciences and wanted to postulate it as universal for all studies and translate it in terms of teaching methodology, again drawing heavily on psychological research. this is particularly evident in the justification of general notions as the goal of teaching. the explanation for this is twofold. on the one hand, invoking this body of thought provides a possibility of communicative connectivity in discourse and thus the generation of communicative resonance (treml, 1997), since especially before and around the turn of the century there was a decided turn toward and preference for empirically and evolutionarily grounded scientific views of human beings and their education in u.s. educational thought (krenzer, 1984). on the other hand, it was apparently a functional strategy for the mcmurrys to substantiate the scientificity of pedagogy and thus likewise to find a convincing argument for their position and the enrichment of their self-reference with additional meaning (schriewer, 1992). here, a transcultural moment becomes visible as an internal logic of u.s. educational thought is drawn upon. the transcultural dimension of the history of ideas becomes particularly clear when one looks at the references in general that are cited to support one's own position or that are used to spell it out. thus, german-speaking authors as well as english theorists such as huxley and the often-cited herbert spencer, but also decidedly u.s. american participants in the discourse, above all the extremely influential william t. harris, were taken into account. the logic behind this is characterized by the fact that self-reference is enriched with additional meaning (schriewer, 1992) by means of foreign reference in order to lend authority to one's own position and to increase the chance of nobilization in the discourse. this means that the international argument (gonon, 1998) or the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 17 the foreign country as argument (zymek, 1975) as well as decidedly us-american positions and thus a discursive internal logic were used. nevertheless, it should be noted that in herbartianism there is a strong emphasis on psychology and reference to a theory of mental and cognitive processes, which was quite compatible with a psychologization of educational science. however, this is not mentioned or made strong by the american protagonists at any point. the case study can thus show what role the establishment of communicative connectivity and resonance as well as the functional strategy of referring to scientificity have for generating additional meaning for the embedding and concomitant transformation of a pedagogical theory in the context of a transfer. moreover, it can be shown that it is these strategies, as it were, that are responsible for semantic shifts. the mcmurrys point out in the context of the method of recitation that it is indeed based on the principles of teaching as elaborated by rein and ziller. however, they insist that it is not a thoughtless imitation of foreign methods and that the whole conception springs from american conditions (mcmurry, c. & mcmurry, f., 1897). here the parallels between the different modes of explication of one’s position become clear. at the same time, it is pointed out that a foreign position is referred to as the basis of one's own, representing the strategy of foreign as argument (zymek, 1975); whilst the genesis of one’s own position from domestic dispositions and domestic logical requirements based on it is emphasized. finally, the eclectic and thus also fuzzy reference to various authors and positions emerges, which are finally unified as herbartian principles. in this approach, at no other point is a meta-perspective taken on the spelling out and its interweaving with the various positions. furthermore, the phenomenon of translation problems appears in several places. from the fourth edition of general methods on, the mcmurrys themselves point to an aspect of analysis that is generally virulent for cultural transfer research. thus, a significant mode within the transformation of pedagogical theories is represented solely by linguistic translation and the accompanying reformulation of semantics, which complicates reception in the receiving context and potentially leads to misunderstanding (shimada, 1997; röttgerrössler, 1998). mcmurry writes about this in a later edition: intuition is popularly used in a sense different from the above. we are in need of a word which has the same meaning as the german word anschauung, for which there is no popular equivalent in english (mcmurry, c. 1895a, p. 160). this represents one of the few places where mcmurry takes a meta-perspective on his own thinking in relation to the development of his pedagogical thinking, based on intercultural transfer and the concomitant transnational and transcultural character of his theorizing. in the other direction, it is the reference to the term recitation, the use of which is irritating. especially since the mcmurrys were firmly against the practice of recitation as a teaching methodology and wanted to develop the teacher's competence independent of textbooks. why not the term instruction or simply teaching? at this point, the problematic nature of bilingual text-based analysis within a cultural transfer becomes clear. for recitation at this point can by no means be translated in the meaning of reciting, but rather characterizes the combination of inductive and deductive steps as a teaching methodology based on conversation, which can best be translated as questioningdeveloping teaching. the choice of this terminology is thus quite deliberate and already 18 global education review 10 (1-2) indicates the general line of thought regarding the methodological design of teaching. in the field of international educational science and pedagogical contacts and networks in the 19th and early 20th centuries in the context of interand transnational development dynamics of pedagogical positions, practices and educational systems, there is still generally a great need for research. this is true for international herbartianism research as well as for reform pedagogical approaches in general. the kindergarten movement, for example, can be seen as an exceedingly interesting object of study within a cultural transfer research, because “german and american kindergarten activists stayed in contact, visited each other, and often used the differences in their situations and ideas as a basis for cross-cultural dialogue” (allen, 1995, p. 85). therefore, a development of pedagogical theory based on direct interdependencies between different cultural areas could be investigated and the transnationality and transculturality of a pedagogical theory and its development could be focused on. notes i text-hermeneutic is a typical methodological approach for the interpretation of texts. it is a methodology of continental european tradition and provenance. it involves a reflective approach to the process of interpreting texts and thereby directs attention to the subjective character of interpretations and contingency of interpretations. ii beyond a pedagogical herbartianism, one can also speak of a philosophical and a psychological herbartianism (blichmann, 2013). it would therefore be misleading to define the pedagogical current following herbart's teaching in a shortened way as herbartianism. that is, it must be specifically determined as pedagogical herbartianism. since the focus of the present work is on this pedagogical herbartianism, in the following, when the term herbartianism is used, it will mean pedagogical herbartianism, which, however, is closely related to philosophicaland psychological herbartianism. furthermore, the notion of herbartianism as a homogeneous pedagogical theory is equally misleading (dollinger et al., 2010). iii the pedagogical seminars were a special format for teacher training and were intended to contribute to the professionalization of teachers. it consisted of four parts: theoretikum, praktikum, kritikum and konferenz and had a school for exercises of the students connected to it, which was very special at the time. the theoretikum complements rein's lectures on pedagogy. here, pedagogical literature and independent works of the members are discussed. during the praktikum, a regular member gives a lecture in the classroom in front of all other seminar members. in the kritikum the teaching samples are discussed. in the conference, issues of school life are discussed. these include, for example hygiene or morals of individual students, school rules or the purchase of teaching aids. iv regarding this work, it should be noted that the brothers wrote the introduction together and divided the other chapters among themselves. thus the chapters i, ii, iix, xi, xii, xiii, xiv and xv were written by charles mcmurry and the chapters iii, iv, v, vi, vii, ix and x by frank mcmurry. the result for the citation method is that always the author is named after the corresponding year, who is named for the chapter from which the indirect or direct quotation comes, with the corresponding page number. in the case of the introduction, both the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 19 authors are cited. even though the mcmurrys divided the chapters among themselves, the respective viewpoints in the chapters may apply to both authors. references allen, a. t. (1995). american and german women in the kindergarten movement, 1850-1914. in geitz, h. & heideking, j. & herbst, j. (eds.), german influences on education in the united states to 1917 (pp. 85102). washington / cambridge / new york: german historical institute/cambridge university press. blichmann, a. (2013). herbartianismus und allgemeine didaktik. eine biobibliographische einführung. in coriand, r. (ed.), grundlagen allgemeiner didaktik. die modelle herbarts, stoys und willmanns. jena: garamond verlag, edition paideia. dollinger, b., esser, f., müller, c., schabdach, m., schröer, w. (2010). sozialpädagogik und herbartianismus. studien zu einem theoriegeschichtlichen zusammenhang. bad heilbrunn: klinkhardt. dunkel, h. b. (1969). herbartianism comes to america. part i, the people. history of education quarterly, 9(2), 202-233. dunkel, h. b. (1970): herbart and herbartianism. an educational ghost story. chicago / london: the university of chicago press. espagne, m. (1999). les transfer culturelles franco-allemands. paris: presses universitaires de france. espagne, m. (2003). der theoretische stand der kulturtransferforschung. in schmale, w. (eds.), kulturtransfer. kulturelle praxis im 16. jahrhundert (pp. 63-75). innsbruck: studien-verlag. espagne, m. & werner, m. (1986). deutsch-französischer kulturtransfer im 18. und 19. jahrhundert. zu einem neuen interdisziplinären forschungsprogramm des c.n.r.s. in francia. forschungen zur westeuropäischen geschichte. herausgegeben vom deutschen historischen institut paris. volume 13 (pp. 502-510). sigmaringen: thorbecke. espagne, m. & middell, m. (eds.) (1999). von der elbe an die seine. kulturtransfer zwischen sachsen und frankreich im 18. und 19. jahrhundert. leipzig: universitätsverlag. gonon, p. (1998). das internationale argument in der bildungsreform. die rolle internationaler bezüge in den bildungspolitischen debatten zur schweizerischen berufsbildung und zur englischen reform der sekundarstufe ii. bern: peter lang. huxley, h. t. (1880). lay sermons, addresses and reviews. london: macmillan. keller, t. (2006). kulturtransferforschung. grenzgänge zwischen den kulturen. in moebius, s. & quadflieg, d. (eds.). kultur. theorien der gegenwart (pp. 101-114). wiesbaden: vs verlag für sozialwissenschaften. krenzer, r. ph. (1984). erziehungsdenken in den vereinigten staaten von amerika. zur geschichte der pädagogik in den usa von deren unabhängigkeit an bis hin zu john dewey. frankfurt a. main: lang. lüsebrink, h.-j. & reichardt, r. (eds.) (1997). kulturtransfer im epochenumbruch frankreich – deutschland 1770 1815. leipzig: universitätsverlag. luhmann, n. & schorr, k.-e. (1979). reflexionsprobleme im erziehungssystem. stuttgart: klett-cotta. mcmurry, c. (1888). die organisation des höheren schulwesens in den vereinigten 20 global education review 10 (12) staaten amerikas und in england und die stellung des staates zu demselben. jena: gustav fischer verlag. mcmurry, c. (1892). the elements general methods based on the principles of herbart. first edition, bloomington: publicschool publishing. mcmurry, c. (1895a). the elements general methods based on the principles of herbart. fourth edition, bloomington: publicschool publishing. mcmurry, c. (1895b). a course of study in the eight grades of the common school. bloomington: public-school publishing. mcmurry, c. & mcmurry, f. (1897). the method of recitation. first edition, norwood: norwood press. mcmurry, c. & mcmurry, f. (1903). the method of recitation. second edition, new york / london: macmillan. mcmurry, f. (1890). herbert spencers erziehungslehre. eine kritische untersuchung. gütersloh: c. bertelsmann verlag. middell, m. 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(eds.). aneignung und abwehr. interkultureller transfer zwischen deutschland und großbritannien im 19. jahrhundert (pp. 2143). bodenheim: philo. rein, w. & scheller, e. & pickel, a. (1882). theorie und praxis des volksschulunterrichts nach herbartischen grundsätzen. das erste schuljahr. second edition, dresden: bleyl & kaemmerer. rein, w. & scheller, e. & pickel, a. (1888). theorie und praxis des volksschulunterrichts nach herbartischen grundsätzen. das erste schuljahr. fourth edition, dresden: bleyl & kaemmerer. röttger-rössler, b. (1998). die malaiische chronik in deutscher übersetzung. zum problem des transfers kulturspezifischer bedeutungsstrukturen. in hammerschmidt, b. & krapoth, h. (eds.). übersetzung als kultureller prozeß. rezeption, projektion und konstruktion des fremden (pp. 255-315). berlin: erich schmidt verlag. scholz, m. (2020). globalisierung pädagogischer theorien. didaktik nach herbart in den usa um 1900. wiesbaden: springer fachmedien wiesbaden gmbh. schriewer, j. (1992). welt-system und interrelations-gefüge. die internationalisierung der pädagogik als problem vergleichender erziehungswissenschaft. öffentliche vorlesungen (24). berlin: humboldt-universität zu berlin. shimada, s. (1997). zur asymmetrie in der übersetzung von kulturen: das beispiel des minakata-schlegel-übersetzungsdisputs 1897. in bachmann-medick, d. (ed.). übersetzung als repräsentation fremder kulturen (pp. 260274). berlin: erich schmidt. the adaptation and cultural translation of the pedagogical theory of formal stages 21 treml, a. (1997). klassiker. die evolution einflussreicher semantik. volume 1. sankt augustin: academia. zymek, b. (1975). das ausland als argument in der pädagogischen reformdiskussion: schulpolitische rechtfertigung, auslandspropaganda, internationale verständigung und ansätze zu einer vergleichenden erziehungswissenschaft in der internationalen berichterstattung pädagogischer zeitschriften, 1871 1952. ratingen/kastellaun: a. henn. reconciling caring and market imperatives 27 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: de vreede, shiraz (2024). reconciling caring and market imperatives in global early childhood education and care practice: a systematic literature review. global education review, 11 (4), 27-46. reconciling caring and market imperatives in global early childhood education and care practice: a systematic literature review shiraz de vreede abstract globally, early childhood education and care (ecec) practitioners face the unique challenge of balancing market-driven demands with caregiving imperatives, navigating these competing rationalities in complex and multifaceted ways. this study systematically reviews 32 empirical accounts from academic scholarship to answer the question: how do early childhood practitioners balance the market imperative with the imperative to care? educator efforts are dimensionalized according to three levels of professional engagement: micro(interpersonal, caring-learning interactions), meso(organizational and community-level engagement), and macro(collective or national systems of provisioning and governance). grounded in the concept of discursive governance, the discussion examines how market and caregiving imperatives are negotiated at both interpersonal and structural levels within ecec. the findings highlight how educators prioritize care when resisting commodification pressures, illustrating the relational nature of teaching and learning and the importance of stakeholder governance for meaningful early learning experiences. embracing the complexity and multiplicity of these negotiation efforts is crucial for advancing equitable ecec experiences, recognizing that education depends on the balancing of both economic and social imperatives to sustain social reproduction and cohesion in liberal market economies. keywords early childhood education and care (ecec), neoliberalism, resistance, practitioners, care introduction historically, governance of early childhood education and care (ecec) services for pre-primary children (ages 0-5) have given primacy to market imperatives, as the sector is central to enabling dual-parent workforce participation (vandenbroeck et al., 2023). in recent decades, neoliberalism has led to the commodification of ecec in liberal market economies globally, where the logic of private sector competition shapes the nature of and access to essential services while limiting the role of public support (moss, 2017; omwami, et al., 2020; roberts-holmes & moss, 2021; richardson, 2022; urban, 2022; vandenbroeck et al., 2023). critical and comparative early childhood scholars contend that market governance of ecec services distinctly undermines the capacity to maintain caring imperatives in ecec practice, because it constructs children as passive, parents as consumers, and educators as technicians of predetermined, narrowly defined outcomes (roberts-holmes & moss, 2021; urban, 2022; vandenbroeck et al., 2023). in these contexts, early childhood educators face unique challenges negotiating the competing rationalities governing their pedagogical practices – the market and care imperative – as they manifest in complex and multifaceted ways. this review illustrates how ecec professionals mediate the demands of commodification in their practice, responding to market logic at interpersonal and structural levels by centering caregiving imperatives in the negotiation of early learning prerogatives. 28 global education review 11 (4) discussions regarding the adverse impacts of neoliberal governance in ecec is abundant and growing (moss, 2017; robertsholmes & moss, 2021; urban, 2022), alongside efforts made to resist market imperatives and de-commodify the early childhood sector globally (richardson et al., 2023; vandenbroeck et al., 2023). this paper compiles emerging empirical accounts of how caregiving educators navigate the multiple rationalities governing their practice through a systematic literature review exploring: in what ways do early childhood practitioners reconcile the market imperative with the imperative to care? i propose that efforts to reconcile competing logics can be conceptualized along three dimensions of professional engagement: at micro(interpersonal, caring-learning interactions), meso(organizational, community-level engagement), and macro-levels (addressing national systems of provisioning, acquiring autonomy over ecec governance and practice). such cases include how children orient their understanding of competition, how practitioners collaborate to contextualize learning goals, or even wholesale contestation of inappropriate surveillance and evaluation standards. the examples reviewed span diverse global contexts, highlighting the universal challenge of reconciling market and caring imperatives in ecec. in the following sections, i elaborate on the role of market and caring imperatives as governing rationalities, discuss the methodology guiding my literature review, and offer a theoretical framing to synthesize my findings. ultimately, the goal in reconciling these imperatives is not to replace one dominant logic for another (moss, 2014; roberts-holmes & moss, 2021), but to demonstrate how tensions dictating ecec priorities can be resisted, reconciled, and negotiated to avoid inequitable early learning opportunities and support wellbeing. above all, the aim of this review is to communicate the multiplicity of ecec approaches that meaningfully respond to the local and individual needs of the communities from whom children learn. conceptual framework market and caring imperatives as governing rationalities the following analysis is grounded in a conceptual understanding of governance as discursive, articulated by foucault (1971) as the ‘regimes of truth’ we circulate – in other words, the stories we tell ourselves and others about the way the world works. these constructions not only regulate our behavior, but also “create the possibility of the very behavior that they regulate,” manifesting both interpersonally and structurally (foucault, 1971, p.8). hegemonic discourses become governing rationalities, orienting our ways of thinking, being, and relating; we consider them ‘common sense’ and often assume no alternatives [i.e. answering ‘why/how come?’ questions with ‘that’s just the way it is’]. globally, the discursive hegemony of neoliberalism – a political economic reasoning placing the responsibility for wellbeing, success, and care squarely on the individual – has led to the commodification of universally needed and often communally provided resources (e.g. health, education). brown (2017) articulates how neoliberalism functions as a governing rationality in decision-making, extending “market logic into every sphere of human life” by emphasizing competition and self-investment, formulating “everything, everywhere, in terms of capital investment and appreciation” (p.176). as a result, economic individualism weakens commitment toward social wellbeing, assuming reconciling caring and market imperatives 29 we can and must succeed without the support of communal care infrastructure. according to ball (2016), "neoliberalism is a political project that attempts to create a social reality that it suggests already exists, stating that competition is the basis of social relations while fostering those same relations'' (cited in roberts-holmes & moss, 2021, p.xvii). by disincentivizing public responsibility and commodifying resources such as care and education, market logic reconstructs social services into profit-seeking firms to maintain operational expenses. indeed, commodifying ecec has contributed to the expansion of services globally, promoting dual-parent workforce participation and educational socialization for pre-primary children (moss, 2017). childcare is unfortunately an imperfect market; especially in the united states where its operational costs far exceed what average households can compensate while its workforce remain some of the lowest-paid educators (mclean et al., 2021). neoliberalism’s technical and managerial language of evaluation plays a central role in shaping ecec priorities, obscuring how quality is “a function of political choices and paradigmatic positions, [where] approaches to evaluation and assessment [are] a value-based set of practices, embedded in models of governance” (vandenbroek et al., 2023, p.84). around the world, educators respond to market demands on a daily basis by centering caring practices in their relationships with children and their communities (richardson et al., 2022, 2023; urban et al., 2023; vandenbroeck et al., 2023; yelland et al., 2021; zechner, 2022). governance and learning are both relational and discursive processes (freire, 2000; foucault, 1971); “the subject is governed by others but at the same time by the self” therefore “it is the governing of the self via the embodying of neoliberal subjectivities that can be resisted” (roberts-holmes & moss, 2021, p.155). by foregrounding the relational nature of ecec, we can examine the conditions that hinder and support care as early educators balance the demands of commodification. grounded in the ‘ethics of care’ (dahlberg & moss, 2005; noddings, 2013), the integrity of caring imperatives, according to tronto (2013), rests on “attentiveness (noticing need), responsibility (to meet the need), competence (caregiving/allocation of resources), [mutual] responsiveness, and solidarity (democratic stakeholder participation)” (as cited in richardson, 2022, p. 111). the imperative to care prioritizes meaningful relationships and relies on “a high degree of openness, emotional reflection, intellectual knowledge and awareness of the broader sociopolitical context” (urban, 2022, p.386). black feminist theories of embodied pedagogy add that when schooling “centers on the mastery of particular knowledges rather than practices and principles of sharing and relationality,” education becomes fragmented and the “approach to knowledge [acquisition] truncates lived experiences from teaching and learning” (brady, 2022, p. 396). when educators push back against the uncritical adoption of positivist quality standards and incorporate knowledge gained through practice experience, they “create avenues to disrupt taken-for-granted norms and conceptions of family and childhood” by deconstructing fixed perspectives to highlight the multifaceted nature of children’s competencies (brady, 2022, p. 403). this contributes to the politics of refusal, whereby challenging the imposition of uniform or deterministic assessment, practitioners can meaningfully scaffold learning experiences by embracing complexity and spontaneity. the problem is not measurement itself, but “excessive and inappropriate measurement” that reinforces “undeclared [positions] assumed to be 30 global education review 11 (4) shared by all, [such that] the existence of alternatives is ignored” (robert-holmes & moss, 2021, p. 28). as a result, the critical reflection of discursive logics governing ecec support “the constitution of active and related subjects and the avoidance of arbitrary and unnecessary forms of authority” (collet-sabe & ball, 2024, p. 7). reconciling the market and caring imperatives is a challenging and imperfect endeavor. while often rendered invisible in critical analyses of neoliberalism, there are numerous instances of resistance to economized logics in education spaces around the world. this review aims to highlight the complexity of negotiating competing logics by elevating such efforts as they are captured in academic scholarship. methodology this systematic literature review focuses on literature that details educator experiences with reference to the challenges of market logic in ecec governance. this review considers peer-reviewed literature published in the last five years (2019-2024), acquired from january through april 2024. the scope of this study focuses solely on educators (also referred to as practitioners or teachers) as the unit of analysis, excluding other relevant actors such as children, parents, and policymakers, whose perspectives and roles, while important, are beyond the bounds of this investigation. i have also excluded literature that documents the ills of neoliberal education governance without empirically illustrating how they are mediated in practice, selecting only those which provide vignettes of reconciliation efforts by practitioners specifically. another rich dimension excluded from the review are community efforts which aim to re-examine considerations of who counts as an early childhood practitioner across various formal and informal ecec contexts (arndt et al., 2018, 2021). this review also does not specifically aim to engage with ongoing academic and global policy interrogations of ‘quality’ in ecec, although certainly related and valuable as an avenue for further synthesis (cannella et al., 2016; oecd, 2022; urban, 2022). i searched the ucla online library database using keywords related to early childhood education and care (ecec), workforce, governance, de/commodification, and resistance. from 436 results, i applied the exclusion criteria to narrow the scope to 32 sources, including 14 from the search, 10 from a volume on ecec decommodification, 7 from one on global childhoods, and 1 on international ecec perspectives. each example examines how practitioners resist market imperatives, which i categorized into three dimensions of professional engagement: micro (n=14), meso (n=12), and macro (n=6). the following section further elaborates on these dimensions and situates notions of resistance, reconciliation, and negotiation to clarify its presentation at each level in the literature. theoretical framework this review of competing rationalities is organized into three levels of professional ecec practice: (a) micro-level, interpersonal interactions occurring in early childhood spaces, (b) meso-level, where practitioner engagement constitutes organized and collaborative efforts, and (c) macro-level, where imperatives are addressed at a systems-level of governance. as vélez-agosto et al. (2017) maintain in their revision of bronfenbrenner’s (1977) bioecological theory of human development, which incorporates the central role of culture across the micro-, meso-, and macro-systems, these dimensions are not mutually exclusive. reconciling caring and market imperatives 31 the “communities, settings, and social institutions” that shape children’s development and the imperatives of ecec practice are “constantly being transformed by the cultural system in a reciprocal way…not bounded by separate entities but [flowing] into one another” (vélez-agosto et al., 2017, p.906). although one cannot neatly separate the spheres in which such socialization practices operate, framing ecec practices into these three dimensions of engagement helps to delineate how educator experiences are represented within academic scholarship. examining variability across ecec spaces has also been fruitful for uncovering socio-political imperatives (tobin, 2022) but is still understudied because of tendencies to focus on national systems rather than local community-based or informal ecec contexts (tonyan, 2015). further, the international comparative approach utilized by this review is valuable for presenting variation in ways that avoid reductive assumptions resulting from methodological nationalism (guevarra, 2022). by exploring differences, one can also expand considerations of possibilities in early childhood practice by contesting unquestioned truths and demonstrating that despite the dominance of western developmentalism, “there is no one best way for children to develop” (rogoff, 2003, p.4) taking a science of difference approach (novóa, 2018), the juxtaposition of deeply contextualized experiences also reveals similarities between how care imperatives are enacted to resist the hegemony of market logics in ecec governance and provision around the world. findings micro-level (n=14) efforts to reconcile competing imperatives in ecec practice are characterized in a number of ways at the micro-level, namely in accounts of how educators subvert rigid curricular or assessment demands (archer, 2022; bradbury, 2019; giamminuti et al., 2022; richardson, 2022), by employing criticality of neoliberal imperatives in pedagogical practice (beneke et al., 2022; lee, 2021), centering decolonial praxis as resistance (diaz-diaz, 2021; lees et a., 2023; nxumalo & pacini-ketchabaw, 2023), or by articulating how constructions of professional identity are renegotiated in commodified contexts (bailey et al., 2021; rogers et al., 2020; smith, 2023; sumsion, 2019; taggart, 2022). archer (2022) illustrates empirically how some educators in early childhood classrooms push back against accountability measures constraining their pedagogical priorities in the uk, by integrating formal math and phonics lessons into “children’s free choices and play” (p.439). similarly, bradbury (2019) presents a case of how teachers subverted a new and controversial policy in an english preschool classroom, drawing strength from their professional knowledge and experiences emphasizing ethics of care. their qualitative analysis concluded that when teachers engaged in counter-approaches, they were at times positioned as resistant to statutory assessment which sometimes resulted in emotional and professional costs. bradbury (2019) presents the idea of ‘compliant resistant,’ where resistance may be central to educator identity but sometimes backfires in ways that further enforce the problematic policy. many authors further highlight how educators center criticality in their practice. giamminuti et al. (2022) offer a vignette from project in reggio emilia, italy where educators engage with children’s understandings of waste, constructing teaching moments that refuted dogmas regarding children’s interests, 32 global education review 11 (4) implementation, and methods to center “obligations of care” in teaching and learning objectives. richardson (2022) explores how the care imperative manifests differently in public and private ecec systems, sharing practitioner experiences from public ece programs in denmark and for-profit childcare chains in ontario, canada. she demonstrates how educators in both contexts similarly resist neoliberal imperatives and concludes that while at odds, the two imperatives do not absolutely preclude one another. for instance, danish pedagogues noted how they deprioritized paperwork asked to ‘prove’ developmental outcomes, focusing instead on meaningful and sustained interactions with the children. one educator shared how the staff “are not actually using the ipad'' implemented to “write messages” about the children because they prefer instead to speak directly with the parents (richardson, 2022, p.119). practitioners in the ontario context revealed that even if it meant they might “get in trouble,” they resisted the protocol that required corporate management to meditate their communication with parents and would “do it anyway” by building individual rapport with families and fellow staff (richardson, 2022, p.120). beneke et al. (2022) and lee (2021) conceptualize resisting neoliberal imperatives in the context of disability or special education early education practice. beneke et al. (2022) share how teachers resist notions of quality and success that predefine their practice and marginalized children with disabilities by “reclaiming and enacting” caring practices, presenting educator reflections on modeling critical reflexivity for their colleagues and children (p.1237). lee’s (2021) study focusing on how teachers instruct and accommodate children classified as adhd – a category of behavior that reifies normative assumptions of appropriate learning behaviors – found that between early educators and primary school teachers, early educators were more concerned with restructuring routines and activities to accommodate the child than adjusting the child to fit standards. she emphasized the difference educator dispositions made especially for black and brown children in the us who are disproportionately affected by harmful imperatives orienting instruction and accommodation practices in early education contexts (lee, 2021). diaz-diaz (2021) documents how early childhood practitioners mediate children’s understandings of challenging conditions witnessed on neighborhood walks, such as homelessness. practitioners had to reconcile notions of safety and avoid reifying harmful narratives in order to contextualize children’s questions such as “why was the man yelling?” diaz-diaz discusses how educators navigated the tension between practitioners’ goals to meaningfully expose children to diverse circumstances while mediating their interpretations in ways that may also “face the trouble of a settler colonial past” (2021, p.544). lees et al. (2023) and nxumalo & paciniketchabaw (2023) further contextualize how competing caring and neoliberal imperatives play out in the development of practitioners’ critical consciousness. nxumalo & paciniketchabaw detail their own praxis that functions as resistance to neoliberal constructions of multiculturalism for bipoc (black, indigenous, and people of color) early educators in canada, illustrating an interconnected pedagogical orientation that centers black storying and expands epistemologies drawn upon in ecec practice (2023). lees et al. (2023) find that while the early educators included in their study developed a degree of critical consciousness to name settler-colonial constructs impacting their reconciling caring and market imperatives 33 practice, their limited opportunities at continued engagement with like-minded educators made it difficult to maintain criticality. this final group of micro-resistance examples build on notions of educator identity positioning and how negotiating neoliberal identity constructions in ecec contexts further serve to complicate the dominance of economic logics dictating educational practice. smith (2023) offers a vignette of an australian classroom where an educator’s response to a child cheating at cards mediated children’s understandings of success, by rewarding particular notions of individualism at the expense of ensuring belonging and inclusion. smith (2023) builds on the example to illustrate how taken for granted development logics orient how adults listen to, assess, and report on children. sumsion (2019) focuses on how the relationship between ideology in policy and practice is non-linear and shares how multilayered market imperatives are contested and negotiated in ecec spaces globally. the article reviews studies that present reflections on educator practices in anglo-saxon, nordic, and east asian countries to contextualize the role international, national, and local/cultural policy discourses play on the dispositions inhabited by practitioners (sumsion, 2019). roger et al. (2020) demonstrate how professional peer relationships and parent testimonies bolster self-efficacy of eces in italy, canada, and australia, when educators question their strengths in the face of neoliberal demands. lastly, bailey et al (2021) and taggart (2022) draw on examples from dar es salaam, tanzania, california, and switzerland to demonstrate how educators’ commitments to ethical caring and loving practices maintain resistance to economized education imperatives, even when notions of care are commodified because of how “deeply contextualized loving orientations'' model community in ways that counter neoliberal prerogatives. the examples at the micro-level demonstrate how educators navigate the pressures of market imperatives through everyday acts of resistance, centering care and relationality in their pedagogical practices. these efforts highlight the importance of critical reflexivity, decolonial praxis, and creative negotiation of professional identities to sustain caring interactions despite systemic constraints. collectively, these cases emphasize that even within the confines of rigid systems, educators can enact meaningful resistance by prioritizing the well-being and dignity of children and families. meso-level (n=12) at the meso-level, practitioners demonstrate the power of collective organizing and community advocacy to counter market narratives and reinforce care-driven priorities. examples of educator resistance to neoliberal imperatives at this level are characterized by professional organization efforts to politicize challenges affecting ecec practice (berget, 2023; lund, 2023; otterstad & elmenhorst, 2021; whitebook, 2023), fostering community through advocacy (arndt et al., 2023; richardson et al., 2023a; richardson et al., 2023b), reconciling shifting professional identities as leaders and business managers (fairchild, 2019; kamenarac, 2023; kamenarac et al, 2023), or through collaboration with stakeholders to develop pedagogical priorities (adriany, 2023; peters et al., 2021).the variety of examples from countries such as norway, canada, and indonesia underscores the global resonance of these resistance efforts, revealing shared values despite differing cultural contexts. 34 global education review 11 (4) driven by the imperative to care and rooted in the lived experiences of caregivers, berget (2023) and otterstad & elmenhorst (2021) document how early educators collectively mobilized to resist school readiness agendas imposed by policy makers in the norwegian #barnehageopprør2016 movement (2016 norwegian kindergarten riots). in response to political proposals that included accountability testing for 5-year-olds language skills, a facebook group initially consisting of 11 early educators emerged to discuss collaborative resistance (otterstad & elmhorst, 2021). both articles are written from the perspective of early educators involved in the movement, recounting how practitioners leveraged the power of social media and community engagement to politicize the neoliberalization of ecec spaces and illustrate how attentiveness to the needs of caregivers and receivers enabled policy changes (berget, 2023; otterstad & elmenhorst, 2021). lund (2023) stories the work of a danish early educator union to raise salaries of ecec professionals and resist positioning ecec services as a means for making financial returns for individual owners and shareholders through collective organization, documentation, and commitment to values of danish welfare society. similarly, whitebook (2023) highlights the history of the us national association for young children’s education (naeyc)’s childcare employee caucus, where educators met annually in the late 20th century to develop political campaigns and collective strategies to address challenges to their caring commitments. as educator efforts to organize has taken different shape since the covid-19 pandemic, whitebook emphasizes the role these coalitions play in resisting the market imperatives conditioning educator practice at regional levels around the us and the need for an “organizational home” to unite such efforts and build a national network (2023, p.178). organizing efforts made by educators to reconcile competing imperatives also take place at sub-national scales; arndt et al. (2023) share stories of grassroots resistance to neoliberal educator identity constructions from practitioner mentoring program that enabled them to subvert the westernization of the ecec sector in an indonesian community, by recentering relevant, locally informed and culturally appropriate practices. richardson et al. (2023a) demonstrate how the professional association of early childhood educators in ontario, canada (aeceo) organized to resist the commodification of the sector during the covid-19 pandemic, producing policy reports and recommendations which captured and communicated practitioner narratives speaking to the precarity imposed by neoliberal working conditions. in a related publication, richardson et al. (2023b) contextualize educators’ “caring activism,” illustrating how practitioner advocacy efforts modeled community-building in ways that resist individualist thinking by enacting ethics of care. another key dimension of neoliberalism conditioning early childhood practice is the shifting roles educators are tasked with regarding the administration of ecec services, one that fairchild (2019) empirically demonstrates are marked by both ontological imperatives and non-human constraints, mediating practitioner interactions with policy, markets, and pedagogies. fairchild contends that engagement with the profession does not necessarily operate on performance and resistance binaries, expanding on notions of resistance to highlight how personal imperatives are one of many factors shaping the “micropolitics'' of ecec leadership and governance (2019). kamenerac (2023) and kamenarac et al. (2023) explore how educator personal prerogatives mediate the imperatives to reconciling caring and market imperatives 35 become “business managers'' of commodified ecec services in new zealand. the former publication responds to the argument that the construction of teachers as business managers “alters core professional ethical values underpinning the teaching profession,” maintaining it is not the only identity that emerges in neoliberal ecec contexts (kamenarac, 2023, p.268). the author argues that when teacher identities are repositioned from ‘employees’ and ‘business managers’ to ‘advocate-activist teachers,’ their ethical obligations enable them to individually and collectively practice and create alternative ways of being, thinking, and acting in commodified ecec spaces. kamenarac et al. (2023) stories efforts of an educator-business manager whose moral professional obligation enabled her to develop a deep understanding of government funding structures to the point where her confidence in the operational imperatives of her program allowed her to offer sliding scale services on a case-by-case basis for low-income families. they demonstrate how the “business side” of their job was driven by the market imperative only to the point where they could maintain affordable working conditions and avoid accumulating excessive profits in order to prioritize funding for children and families in need of care services (kamenarac et al. 2023). recentering caring imperatives in neoliberal ecec contexts is a valuable yet imperfect endeavor, one that adriany (2023) shows is complicated by religious and cultural conceptions of care work in the indonesian context. the market imperative is so pervasive in indonesian ecec that access to and content of services is primarily dictated by a state focus on standards and assessment, where “almost all aspects of children’s development have to be measured” (adriany, 2023, p.52). however, the entrance of religious principles in ecec practice – while internalizing the belief for many female practitioners that their low salaries are justified due to gendered notions of duty – has presented an opportunity to emphasize children’s spiritual development and go beyond ‘measurable’ economic meanings of education (adriany, 2023). the author notes that educators’ mediation of competing imperatives in these contexts work to reconstruct neoliberal subjectification on some levels but may serve to reify challenging conditions on others (adriany, 2023). still, this example demonstrates the role collective educator dispositions play in reorienting imperatives in early childhood practice. peters et al. (2021) echo this sentiment with an example of a partnership between early educators, university researchers, and children to de-emphasize notions of competition and individualism through education in tampa, florida. practitioners engaged children in a project on sustainability aimed at fostering community and awareness of their position within the living environment. they came away from the project with ideas for sustainable lifestyle practices that addressed how the development of interdependent dispositions over neoliberal, individualist ontoepistemologies can be mediated by intentional and communal ecec practices (peters et al. 2021). at the meso-level, the collective efforts of educators illustrate the power of organizing and advocacy to resist the commodification of ecec. from grassroots movements to professional networks, these examples reveal how community-driven initiatives can challenge neoliberal imperatives and foster alternative models of care and governance. by leveraging solidarity and collaboration, educators transform their professional identities and create spaces for collective action, demonstrating the critical role of community36 global education review 11 (4) level engagement in sustaining equitable ecec practices. macro-level (n=6) resistance to the system-level embeddedness of neoliberal rationalities dominating ecec governance has taken shape in a number of profound ways around the world. in this section, i present examples where early childhood practitioners are active agents in the development of autonomous models of ecec governance and provision, either via grassroots efforts to develop collective education systems (giamminuti, 2021; mcmillan, 2023; teasley, 2020; zechner, 2022), or by contributing to the design of integrated national policy approaches (odulowu, 2023; urban et al., 2023). the first case is globally recognized as a distinct approach to democratic ecec governance, the educational project of reggio emilia, italy where the pedagogista role emerged in the 1970s to coordinate the participatory, political, and collaborative values embedded in the cooperative education model (giamminuti, 2021). elements from the town’s approach have been incorporated into progressive early childhood models around the world, but what makes the project unique is the absence of hierarchical governance in the provision of education. pedagogistas coordinate participatory governance between educators, families, children, and community members to center “practices of encountering the thinking of others” and engaging in collective daily debate in schools (giamminuti, 2021, p.276). pedagogical imperatives for early childhood education practice in reggio emilia are driven by the notion of education as a common good, “aligned with a democratic stance” that “would not sit well with a school-business competing for consumers” (giamminuti, 2021, p.276). community participation in the project of care and education for young children is also a key feature of ko ̄hanga reo, a symbol of ma ̄ori resistance to neo-colonial, capitalist education doctrines that severed ma ̄ori children from their cultural roots (mcmillan, 2023). one example illustrating how autonomy over assessment is able to center holistic development comes from a teacher who felt pride in her student for “making sense of her environment, using her body and emotions to guide her” (mcmillan, 2023, p.46). the teacher points to the connection with papatu ̊a ̄nuku (earth mother) which helped the child figure out how to ride her bike among her peers, when she observed her surroundings and tested her limits before determining she felt safe to go. teasley (2020) theorizes the notion of the commons and presents various global cases of localized, collective struggles to mobilize against commodification and organize communal ecec systems. among such cases, they emphasize efforts made by a spanish community to arrange collective ecec services. zechner (2022) focuses on how a community in barcelona responds to the social reproduction imperative of childcare, by partnering with mothers and trained educators to organize a childcare commons according to principles of local solidarity economies. zechner conceptualizes autonomy “not as separateness or sovereignty but a means to deal with various interdependencies and processes'' of selfgovernance, illustrating how the coordinated effort of commoning care groups situate “economies of care within, against, and beyond economies of capital” (2022, pp.41-42). by developing mutual support structures, educators and families in this particular context were able to resist the “individualizing and precarity of modern urban parenting” and reconceptualize the consumer model of ecec (zechner, 2022, p.31). reconciling caring and market imperatives 37 the final two examples demonstrate efforts to re/orient national education policy frameworks away from neoliberal education imperatives. oduluwu (2023) shares how tenets from the yoruba indigenous approach to early childhood education, practiced by groups native to modern-day nigeria, were incorporated into education models in nigeria and some other african states thanks to collaboration between a task force of teachers and education working groups. they developed a complementary framework for indigenous education that incorporated individual-based assessment (resisting standardization), collective responsibility, and locally responsive activities to support enculturation, curiosity, innovation, and resilience in an evolving world. urban et al. (2023) evaluate how the ‘nordic model’ operates as a discursive space with a distinct, coherent approach to governance that emphasizes decentralization and values local democracy. their study contextualizes perspectives on evaluation from ecec actors, including practitioners who emphasize how the focus of assessment should not be the children, rather the environment and practices facilitating their early education (urban et al., 2023). the macro-level cases showcase how practitioners contribute to systemic transformations in ecec governance, advocating for democratic, locally driven, and culturally rooted models of care. these examples—from the participatory governance of reggio emilia to community-driven childcare commons in barcelona—illustrate that resistance to neoliberal imperatives is possible through collective efforts that prioritize autonomy and interdependence. by reimagining ecec as a shared public good, these initiatives offer a hopeful vision for addressing structural inequities and advancing global equity in early childhood education. discussion and analysis ecec professionals play a central role in children’s social development, informing their emerging worldviews and interpersonal dispositions as global citizens. the findings from this systematic literature review provide insights into how practitioners reconcile the tensions between raising children in competitive market economies and the caring imperatives central to social cohesion and reproduction. the interplay between micro-, meso-, and macro-level efforts reveals a dynamic, interconnected process and while the contexts and scales of these efforts differ, common themes emerge, highlighting shared strategies for resisting commodification and advancing care-focused practices. across all levels, practitioners consistently prioritize care, relationality, and collective action as counterpoints to neoliberal logics of efficiency, standardization, and competition. the imperative to care emerges as a foundational principle, emphasizing relationality and attentiveness to the needs of children, families, and communities. foucault’s (1971) ‘regimes of truth’ concept offers a useful framework for understanding how market and caring imperatives function as governing rationalities in ecec. regimes of truth refer to the dominant discourses that shape what is considered legitimate knowledge and practice within a given context. in neoliberal ecec governance, market-driven logics position economic efficiency, individual responsibility, and competition as self-evident truths, structuring how early education services are organized, funded, and assessed. these discourses obscure alternative rationalities, such as those rooted in relational care ethics (tronto, 2013; dahlberg & moss, 2005), by marginalizing them as inefficient or unmeasurable (brown, 2017; roberts-holmes & moss, 2021). however, the 38 global education review 11 (4) findings of this review demonstrate how educators actively disrupt and renegotiate these dominant regimes of truth through their daily practices and collective advocacy. at the micro-level, educators employ relational pedagogies that resist rigid standards, while at the meso and macro levels, care values underpin advocacy and governance efforts. this commitment to care is coupled with critical reflexivity, as practitioners reflect on their roles within systems shaped by market imperatives. such reflection allows them to challenge dominant narratives, envision alternatives, and advocate for practices that center care. solidarity and collective action further reinforce these efforts, with grassroots organizing at the meso level amplifying micro-level initiatives and macro-level movements leveraging collective advocacy to transform systemic structures. finally, contextual adaptation underscores the deeply situated nature of resistance, as practitioners tailor strategies to fit specific cultural, social, and institutional contexts. these interconnected threads illustrate how actions at one level inform and strengthen efforts at others, creating a dynamic, multi-scalar process of resistance and negotiation. while the literature emphasizes the incompatibility of market governance with caregiving objectives, ecec offers unique political sites capable of “generating a multiplicity of local modern rationalities” where “inevitable and homogenizing” ideas are contested and deliberated in service of community imperatives (mcgrath, 2021, pp.4344). indeed, emphasis on human capital investment has drawn significant resources for ecec (moss, 2017), but it is often accompanied by normative managerial logics that impair caring educational prerogatives. mazzucato (2024) critiques the binary framing of state versus market, arguing that proactive governance must set ambitious, shared objectives to promote collective action. negotiation, as she notes, is about “proactively setting a direction” to foster sustainable longterm outcomes (mazzucato, 2024, p.11). this aligns with examples from the macro level, where collective governance models, as zechner (2022) and giamminuti observed in barcelona and reggio emilia respectively, illustrate how participatory approaches enable equitable and sustainable care systems. as ostrom (2010) asserts, "the collective management of shared resources is often most successful when conducted on a small scale" (as cited in mazzucato, 2024, p.12). ultimately, supporting access and quality in ecec – particularly as a global united nations (un) sustainable development goal (sdg) – requires deliberate “negotiation of the objectives at certain levels” where stakeholders actively collaborate to manage community resources (mazzucato, 2024, p.13). by foregrounding the relational nature of governance and learning, this analysis reveals how ecec professionals contest takenfor-granted market rationalities and reclaim agency over their practice. as foucault (1971) suggests, governance is not merely about compliance with dominant rationalities but also about the capacity to resist, redefine, and reimagine alternative ways of organizing social life. in this light, ecec serves as a critical site where competing regimes of truth are actively contested, and where care is continually reaffirmed as an indispensable social good. conclusion this systematic literature review explored how early childhood practitioners reconcile the market imperative with the imperative to care. the findings underscore the significance of promoting care-centered reconciling caring and market imperatives 39 imperatives as educators navigate the intersecting demands of their profession. across micro-, meso-, and macro-levels, practitioners employ shared strategies of relationality, critical reflexivity, and collective action to resist commodification and advance equitable ecec practices. these efforts illustrate that the discursive hegemony of neoliberal governance ultimately can be countered through relational and community-driven approaches (robertsholmes & moss, 2021; vandenbroeck et al., 2023). as mazzucato (2024) notes, advancing sustainable and equitable systems requires ambitious, collaborative governance structures that align stakeholders around shared goals. similarly, mcgrath (2021) highlights the importance of embracing multiple rationalities to navigate competing imperatives without reducing ecec to purely economic objectives. these examples demonstrate that hope lies in the complexity and multiplicity of negotiation efforts—stories of resistance and reconciliation provide a roadmap for fostering equitable early learning opportunities and sustaining well-being for children, families, and communities worldwide. by reimagining ecec governance as a collective good, these efforts challenge neoliberal norms and inspire a future where care and equity are central to education systems. a defining feature of this review is the global scope of its examples, spanning diverse cultural, political, and economic contexts. the presence of shared strategies across such a range of settings underscores the commonality of the tensions between market and caring imperatives in ecec. despite differences in governance structures and cultural norms, practitioners worldwide demonstrate a shared commitment to centering care in the face of commodification. this global resonance suggests that the challenges and strategies identified in this review are not isolated phenomena but part of a broader, transnational struggle to reimagine ecec as a public good rooted in relationality and equity. looking ahead, a key question remains: what strategies can further empower ecec practitioners to sustain these efforts? what policies and practices can support the decommodification of ecec without compromising accessibility or quality? by fostering solidarity among educators, families, and policymakers, we can reimagine ecec as a space of equity, care, and hope—one that resists the negative consequences of commodification while nurturing the well-being of children and communities alike. the purpose of presenting these resistance efforts is not to privilege one imperative over another but to emphasize the role of practitioners as active agents shaping ecec governance. at all levels, tools of resistance, per roberts-holmes & moss (2021), such as critical reflexivity, interpersonal dialogue, writing, and community organizing enable practitioners to resist market pressures while fostering care-centered practices. these efforts expose the blind spots of market-driven governance and challenge the inequalities that undermine the very social fabric capitalism depends on to sustain itself. references adriany, v. 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(eds.). (2021). the sage handbook of global childhoods (2021937782). sage publications. https://doi.org/ zechner, m. (2022). childcare commons: of feminist subversions of community and commune in barcelona. ephemera: theory & politics in organization, 22(2), 19–49. https://doi.org/ a decade of global education review 5 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: wasmuth, helge. (2023). a decade of global education review: commemorating the 10th anniversary. global education review, 10 (4), 5-9. a decade of global education review: commemorating the 10th anniversary helge wasmuth mercy university anniversaries are often taken as an opportunity to reflect on the past. it’s a chance to ponder on the accomplishments one has achieved. that is true for the 10th anniversary of mercy university's global education review (ger). which ideas and wishes that had led to the development of a journal on educational issues became a reality? what were the challenges and achievements, and what does the journal mean for us, the faculty in mercy university’s school of education (soe)? and, of course, it is also a time to look ahead. where will our journal’s journey lead us, and what will the future look like? ten years already? but also: really? that the journal still exists after ten years is something to be proud of. when ger started, it wasn't clear what the future of a journal, which had been until this point, not much more than an idea, would look like and if it would exist for ten years (or maybe even five). or, as mel wermuth, the founding editor, put it nicely: “we began with no clear idea of what to publish, no name for the journal, and no knowledge of how to publish online. yet, began we did. but begin what?” nevertheless, ger is still here! the idea for a university-own (or back then, college-own) journal was introduced to the faculty by al posamentier, the school of education's dean at that time. he also had a vision of why such a journal might be worthwhile and beneficial for the soe faculty. from the beginning, the idea was to create an international journal to promote the exchange of international ideas and encourage collaborations. the journal aimed to link “academics with similar interests, yet from different countries, and with a variety of cultural and political backgrounds” (posamentier, 2014, p.1). many of us back then felt and still feel today that such international exchanges, the comparison of differences and similarities in our educational systems, and looking at how other countries and cultures think about educational issues are indeed beneficial. while educational issues always need to be seen in local contexts and traditions, certain issues have become worldwide phenomena. still, they often have different meanings in various countries; for example, kindergarten or inclusion can mean very different things depending on the country in which one works. furthermore, educational systems try to find different or similar approaches to solve similar educational problems. such comparisons, though, are thought-provoking. as the late bruce s. cooper, who served on the advisory board and introduced the first issue, wrote in 2014: “looking at problems, issues, and solutions in 6 global education review 10 (4) education becomes more interesting and useful when we compare what scholars and practitioners in different countries and cultures have found” (cooper, 2014, p. 3). collaboration and simply listening carefully to how scholars with different lived experiences think about educational issues leads to critically examining terms or issues we take for granted in our local contexts. while the goal was to exchange ideas and provide an open-access platform to publish research findings, at the same time the journal also aimed, or in the beginning, maybe only hoped, to encourage “new international cooperations between and among academics around the world can not only lead to a myriad of unanticipated research projects, but could also result in some creative new grant applications, which could generate interesting educational findings, leading to innovative educational projects” (posamentier, 2014, p. 1/2). that's why the new journal interested many of us: to find colleagues worldwide and work with them on projects, small or big. ger had always been envisioned as a broad and open educational journal. there was no specific focus, such as, for example, early childhood education; the journal wanted to cover a wide variety of topics and give voice to scholars from all around the world. even if such possible threads such as the worldwide comparison of specific topics, the discussion of ideologies/philosophies of education, or the comparison of student-school outcomes or student assessment were outlined by bruce s. cooper in his introductory editorial (cooper, 2014), it wasn’t clear if that would be the direction ger would follow. however, if we look back at issues in the last ten years, quite a bit of what back then were just ideas, has become reality. the journal's focus is indeed global, and many of the issues have been interdisciplinary, international, or border-crossing. authors from all around the world—including countries such as south africa, india, and el salvador, to name only a few—have published in ger. furthermore, the topics of the special issues often resulted from international collaborations or have led to further ones. some topics have been covered more than others, though. the most common themes are early childhood education (6 issues), literacy/bilingualism (4 issues), special education-related topics (3 issues), refugee education (3 issues), and stem-related topics (2 issues). those topics don't come as a surprise. first, they are aligned with mercy university's mission as a hispanic serving institution and the soe’s mission of preparing effective teachers and educators. we aim to empower future teachers, particularly those often underrepresented, to support diverse students to succeed in their learning and community environments. second, these themes result from the scholarly interests of the soe's faculty in the departments of early childhood & childhood education, literacy and multilingual studies, special education, and the mercy center for stem education. al posamentier and mel wermuth envisioned ger as successful and sustainable only if the faculty carried it. in addition, such a journal must allow the faculty to explore ideas through new collaborations. thus, the soe faculty has served not only as the journal's editors, but also—and many of us more than once—as the special issue's editors. ger volume 2 (4) was the first that wasn’t edited by soe faculty, and even today, faculty regularly serve as editors. for the faculty, ger has always been a means to follow their specific interests, highlight their research, work on something they are interested in, or explore new ideas, something unknown, without always knowing where it would lead us. a decade of global education review 7 establishing the journal and working as special issue editors can be challenging. sudha ramaswamy, who served together with kathyanne jordan as co-editors for ger’s inaugural issue on inclusion, recalls the challenge of establishing the credibility and reputation of the journal within the academic community and how difficult it was to convince reputable scholars to submit their work to a new journal that lacked a track record. attracting highquality submissions and maintaining the rigor of the journal’s peer review process were challenges throughout the last ten years, even if we became better with it. serving as issue editors, however, has been professionally enriching and fruitful, as it often forced us to deepen our knowledge and expertise, as well as an enjoyable experience. or, as sudha, who served as an editor a second time, puts it: “it was a joyful and unique experience sharing this opportunity with my sister, dr. priya ramaswamy, who works in the field of speech and language pathology” (ramaswamy, 2023). without the soe faculty, ger would never have reached its 10th anniversary, as mel points out while looking back on the last ten years. “but even with the best distribution, open-access journals that don’t charge authors a fee for publication, and with no institutional support, don’t survive for ten years without a committed editorial team” (wermuth, 2023, p. 2). i would also like to add: only because of the committed faculty, as many in the soe have and continue to support ger's work. thus, it is no surprise that the anniversary issue is comprised of entries written by the soe faculty. in many ways, the collected articles represent our work as editors, scholars, and faculty members at mercy university, and they also show once more how the ideas that shaped the new journal are still alive and shape our work. roseanne vallice levy’s “trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: being indianamerican in the usa” in many ways embodies ger's initial vision of exchanging ideas to promote critical thinking. in her article, roseanne reflects on her path as the oldest child of indian immigrants as an outsider in kindergarten who didn’t fit into a certain box, “a box which held standards and expectations that had little to no regard for race, ethnicity, and culture” (levy, 2023, p. 11) to become a professor who has found her voice and role. her mix of personal reflection and research findings is a powerful reminder of how much we take for granted in our daily work as educators. how often do we not realize and oversee what is essential for young children (or our students at mercy)? listening to how people with different lived experiences think about education to think critically about our assumptions was one of the main ideas for starting the journal. roseanne's article shows why this is still valuable today. eric martone explores in “supporting good habits: the rockefellers, the sisters of mercy, and higher education in new york state” the complex relationship between the rockefellers and the sisters of mercy. it is a fascinating insight into the intertwined history of the sisters of mercy and the rockefellers in tarrytown, centering around the famous estate kykuit, and the founding of mercy college (now mercy university). without the rockefellers' aid, mercy wouldn't have been able to thrive and evolve into the multi-campus, co-educational, and secular institution it is today—including its own journal on educational issues. that eric chose to reflect on this neglected aspect of rockefeller's philanthropy in their home state of new york doesn't come as a surprise. eric, together with his colleague, michael perrota, from mercy university’s school of liberal arts, is the historian of mercy university's past. in 8 global education review 10 (4) 2013—the same year as ger started—the two published mercy college: yesterday and today. that he now looks back at mercy's past shows that many of us not only work for mercy university, but deeply care about its mission and our students. as mentioned, ger always served as a means for our faculty to highlight their work. “developing and sustaining elementary stem teacher leadership identities” by kristen napolitano et al. does precisely that, as it highlights the work of the mercy center for stem education. one of the significant endeavors of the center is the fellowship program that strengthens k-12 stem teacher leadership in local, high-need schools to address the fact that still too many elementary students are not always exposed to stem subjects and miss out on opportunities to access and enjoy the hands-on, inquiry-driven activities. the article describes how the fellowship supports elementary teachers in evolving as stem leaders, taking on stem identities, growing as stem advocates, and finally being recognized by others as stem teacher leaders. it again highlights how the soe's faculty values collaboration, not only in the international context, but also within local communities. elena nitecki, in her book review of finding froebel – the man who invented kindergarten by helge wasmuth, ulf sauerbrey, and michael winkler, demonstrates the importance of collaborations, working and creating together, and exploring ideas and concepts together. moreover, her review highlights how such work impacts our daily work as educators. elena and i first served as editors of a double-issue in 2016 and experienced how enriching it can be working as a ger editor. when mel asked us to become editors, we only had a vague idea of an issue of interest and concern to us, and we shared similar ideas about early childhood education. however, it was only an idea, and we didn't know where it would lead us. elena reminds us in her piece that the willingness to explore new ideas can lead us to many opportunities, both for our thinking about education and the manifold international collaborations resulting from our work as editors for ger. so, what will the next ten years bring? what will the future look like? we don’t know, as the educational landscape, as well as scholarly publishing, is rapidly changing. one just needs to think of the impact of the covid-19 pandemic on the educational system and the way we deliver instruction, or the inexorable advance of artificial intelligence that is changing how we create and deliver knowledge and what it means to learn and be a teacher. will scholarly journals become obsolete or maybe even more important than ever? as mel has pointed out in his reflection on the first ten years, a journal such as ger depends on the people's commitment, and to keep it alive, faculty need time and resources. ger will continue to be open to different ideas. however, we are also planning to expand the reach and influence of ger by co-sponsoring and organizing academic events that coincide with its themed issues, as we have already done in the past to highlight the double-issue of “finding froebel: national and cross-national pedagogical paths in froebelian early childhood education.” maybe such endeavors, the mix of scholarly publication and webinars, might be the more interesting future. will there be ten more years? again, no one knows. when ger started, no one really expected the journal to be alive ten years later, as mel points out in looking back at the beginning. “it is a source of pride to be asked, which is pleasant, but it is surprising to me that a decade of global education review 9 this journal survived for these past ten years, because when it began, without any institutional support, i had no idea what it was going to be about.” if the ger editorial team can write something similar in 2033, we will again be a source of pride. references cooper, bruce s. (2014). new world, new global education review. global education review, 1 (1). 3-7. levy, roseanne v. (2023). trying to fit a square peg into a round hole: being indianamerican in the usa. global education review, 10 (4). 10-20. posamentier, alfred s. (2014). welcome to the new international journal. global education review, 1 (1). 1-2. ramsawamy, sudha. (2023). personal message to helge wasmuth. wermuth, melvin. (2023). celebrating 10 years of the global education review. global education review, 10 (4). 1-4. giving meaning to the subject 41 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kramer, niklas, & wegner, claas. (2021). giving meaning to the subject: the influence of interdisciplinary interventions on the subjective task values of biology and pe. global education review, 8 (4), 41-57. giving meaning to the subject: the influence of interdisciplinary interventions on the subjective task values of biology and pe niklas kramer bielefeld university, germany claas wegner bielefeld university, germany abstract over many years of research, a decline in interest over the school years is repeatedly described. to address this decline, the value of content or a specific subject should be promoted. to increase content relevance, task value interventions can be conducted which are related to the theory of subjective task values by wigfield & eccles (2020). these values consist of intrinsic, attainment, and utility value. due to its constructivist character, interdisciplinary interventions may meet preconditions to promote interest and could initiate situational interest and influence subject-specific values (e.g., utility value). the present study investigates whether and to what extent interdisciplinary interventions in biology and physical education influence the development of interest. a total of 73 students (mean age = 17.7 years) from four secondary schools took part in a one-day interdisciplinary intervention called "learning through movement," which combined physical education and biology. the intervention was accompanied by a modified quantitative questionnaire based on predescribed subjective task values. mixed anovas with repeated measures showed that the interdisciplinary intervention positively influenced situational intrinsic and utility values for both physical education and biology. by examining potential interaction effects, it was found that students with a low initial situational interest were positively affected by the intervention. our study supports the notion that interdisciplinary interventions have an impact on subjective task values in biology and physical education and therefore have the potential to influence interest development, especially for lower interested students. keywords interdisciplinary education, subjective task values, interest development, secondary education, students’ interest introduction what students learn in class does not always appear to be relevant to them (tibbetts et al., 2015). it has been repeatedly demonstrated that interest in specific content and even entire school subjects declines throughout a student’s school career (potvin & hasni, 2014). science subjects seem to be particularly affected, especially when students transition from primary to secondary school (höft et al., 2019; potvin & hasni, 2014; tröbst et al., 2016). 42 global education review 8 (4) developing interest in subjects is important, as this is not only strongly associated with current performance factors such as motivation and academic achievement, but also has an impact on later career choice (schiefele, 2009; canning & harackiewicz, 2019). thus, educators have sought out ways to enhance or prevent the decline of interest over time. to solve the problem, the decline of interest must be understood. one explanation is the sudden shift from a holistic approach in elementary schools to an increasingly specialized subject structure in secondary schools (tröbst et al., 2016). a holistic approach allows subject matter to be addressed in the context of students' everyday experiences, which increasingly diminishes with specialization as students get older (tröbst et al., 2016). interdisciplinary teaching approaches have a holistic understanding of teaching and offer a way to counteract the decline of interest in secondary schools. however, there are only a few findings that have explored the influence of interdisciplinary teaching on interest. it is common that only science subjects are linked (labudde, 2014), therefore interdisciplinary interventions using different disciplines should be further investigated to see if they can promote interest development. in the present study, biology and physical education (pe) were combined and examined. to understand the potential of interdisciplinary education to promote interest, the four-phase model of interest development by hidi and renniger (2006) will be explained. they show that a positive attribution to task values is related to the development of interests. the attributed value of a task can also be described by subjective task values (eccles et al., 1983). based on this theory, task value interventions were developed to increase utility value. interdisciplinary interventions overlap with this concept, which is explained in more detail below. we offered a one-day workshop to local secondary schools to explore the extent to which interdisciplinary interventions influence the assessment of subjective task values and investigate which students (based on initial situational interest) profit the most from this intervention. data were collected using a questionnaire that measured subjective task values of biology and pe both before and after the interdisciplinary intervention. data analysis was performed using mixed anovas and paired t-tests. interest interest is a motivational process and highly relevant in the context of school (harackiewicz et al., 2016). various studies show that interests are predictors of academic achievement, which legitimizes and forces the need to examine the construct of "interest" (harackiewicz et al., 2016; harackiewicz & hulleman, 2010; hattie, 2009). furthermore, schools are supposed to form interests for students (krapp, 1998). however, teachers often assume a black and white scenario; that students either have an interest in the subject content, or they do not (hidi & renninger, 2006). interest is anticipated as something subject-bound and fixed. this interpretation is widespread in research, which mainly investigates interest without asking about possible triggering factors such as educational environment, autonomy, or challenging tasks (renninger et al., 2019; harackiewicz et al., 2016). the fact that teachers have an influence on interest and are significantly involved in its development seems to be recognized by only a few (lipstein & renninger, 2007). this influence becomes obvious when taking a closer look at the giving meaning to the subject 43 43 construct of interest and the four developmental stages according to hidi and renninger (2006). the four stages are divided first into immediate but temporary excitement for the object of interest (situational interest) and a long-lasting need to engage with the object (individual interest) (harackiewicz et al., 2016). the first two phases can be assigned to situational interest. in the phase “triggered situational interest,“ a triggering object-bound and mostly externally induced moment of initial interest occurs (hidi & renninger, 2006; renninger et al., 2019). in biology, such an object could be a stimulating experiment that grasps students’ attention. if the individual recognizes a value in the triggering moment, which is often supported by external influence, they potentially pursue it. this may result in “maintained situational interest” (hidi & renninger, 2006). the teacher might relate the effect of the experiment to an everyday situation, possibly leading to circumstances where the student becomes more engaged with the experiment. subsequent phases are assigned to individual interest. a transition to the phase “emerging individual interest” only occurs with an ongoing engagement with the object of interest. this is characterized by the value conception and positive attitude towards the object, as well as acquired knowledge about the object (hidi & renninger, 2006). in the example, the student might not only conduct the experiment and explain the results, but further explore theoretical aspects of the biological background that might not be directly related to the experiment. this stage is mainly selfgenerated but often needs support from external sources which could provide additional challenging tasks or mitigate any emerging difficulties (hidi & renninger, 2006). if there is an ongoing engagement with the object that does not diminish through potentially encountered problems, “well-developed interest” can be developed (hidi & renninger, 2006). the student might follow up with new questions arising from the experiment. to answer these, the student could conduct new experiments, asks experts, or look up necessary information on the internet. like “emerging individual interest,” engagement is self-generated but can be externally supported (hidi & renninger, 2006). often used as a synonym, the concept of interest must be distinguished from intrinsic motivation. an interest, unlike intrinsic motivation, describes a state of interrelation between a person and an object (schiefele, 2009). interest initiated by an object initially has a temporary situational character and leads to increased attention and curiosity (schiefele, 2009). this emotional state either decreases when situational interest is not pursued or can be transformed into individual interest, which constitutes an established “affective-evaluative orientation” (schiefele, 2009, p. 201) of the person. individual interest is distinguished from situational interest by stability over time and an increased independent engagement with the object. furthermore, renninger and hidi (2002) postulate that individual interest is manifested as a combination of the level of knowledge and the individual's values towards the object. if a person has a low level of knowledge about and attributes low values to the object, this results in low individual interest (hidi & renninger, 2006; schiefele, 2009). subjective task values beside stored knowledge, individual values towards an object mainly influences interest development. these individual values can be described in more detail by subjective task values, which are a part of the expectancyvalue model created by eccles et al. (1983) and 44 global education review 8 (4) are values that students assign to a task or school subject. these values are important predictors of individual interests (acee et al., 2018; tibetts et al., 2015). their model states that students' academic performance as well as their future plans and course choices depend on their expectation for success and task-specific values. these subjective task values can be divided into four forms: intrinsic value, utility value, attainment value, and cost (wigfield & eccles, 2020). “intrinsic value” describes the inherent enjoyment of a task or subject (eccles et al., 1983). this value is often equated with the terms interest or interest value (steinmayr & spinath, 2010). if the task value is highly rated, students can spend a long time on a task. comparing this value with the previously described stages of interest, the situational character of initial interest cannot be described by this task value (eccles et al., 2015). the “utility value” of a task describes its importance to achieve a future goal. the task can have a purely functional characteristic and does not have to follow any intrinsic value attribution. for this reason, the subscale has some similarities to extrinsic motivation in deci and ryan's self-determination theory (eccles et al., 1983). “attainment value” refers to the importance of being good at a particular task. an important prerequisite is the confirmation of various aspects of the self that are personally perceived as important (social and personal identities). if those are addressed and challenged by the task, the task’s attainment value is also highly valued (wigfield & eccles, 2020). the “costs” of a task describe which activities a person must give up and how much effort and time the individual has to invest to accomplish the task (wigfield & eccles, 2020). the subjective task values were converted by steinmayr and spinath (2010) into a comparable quantitative instrument, which captures the values in relation to entire school subjects instead of specific tasks. this test instrument will be used in the present study. interest development in biology and pe it has been claimed that "school is more likely to be a killer of interest than a developer" (travers, 1978, p. 128). this holds some truth, as numerous studies indicate a fundamental decline in students' interest over the school years, particularly in the natural sciences (höft et al., 2019; potvin & hasni, 2014; renninger & hidi, 2011; schiefele, 2009). this decline primarily affects the "hard sciences," which includes math, physics, and chemistry, but has also been seen in biology, though this seems to be subject-specific and gender-dependent (holstermann & bögeholz, 2007; löwe, 1987; prokop et al., 2007; vlckova et al., 2019; wegner & schmiedebach, 2020). an increased interest in higher grades is explained by the possibility to choose school courses (dietze, 2007; wegner & schmiedebach, 2020). holstermann and bögeholz (2007) found that female students had a higher interest in human biological topics like epidemics and diseases, while male students showed a higher interest in physics and technology. this gender difference is often only descriptively described and, in most cases, insignificant in biology (vlckova et al., 2019). students show a steady interest in practical activities and life-related content in topics like human biology, whereas other topics like botany tend to decrease interest (gebhard et al., 2017; holstermann & bögeholz, 2007; prokop et al., 2007). giving meaning to the subject 45 45 pe seems to be less affected since it is a favorite subject for many students and a subject that many students are interested in (klenk, 2004; wydra, 2001). despite its popularity, interest in pe also decreases over the school years (bös et al., 2006; potvin & hasni, 2014). in addition, the subject’s importance declines and is assessed to be less meaningful, especially among female and low achieving students (bös et al., 2006; cárcamo, 2012; gerlach et al., 2006; opper, 1996). effective interventions the question arises as to how the general, but also subject-specific, decline in interest can be countered to promote and consolidate individual interest in subjects. one approach is to introduce an intervention that starts with an object of interest and then try to make it more interesting through alternative tasks or methods. however, not every task can be changed in this way; therefore, it is suggested to highlight the subject’s or task’s value by including an individual’s preexisting interest or goal (tibbetts et al., 2015). this would change the perception of the subject, which may result in increased interest (tibbetts et al., 2015). this approach is also supported by schiefele (2009), who summarizes three preconditions that promote interest. first, instruction must be meaningful. whether by the teacher or the lesson itself, the importance of the subject matter must be emphasized (schiefele, 2009). second, the content must be relevant to the student's everyday life and their practical issues. finally, it should be connected to the existing interests of the students (schiefele, 2009). these recommendations result in various intervention formats that aim to increase interest. task-value interventions following the recommendations by schiefele (2009), task-value interventions were developed. this format intends to highlight the value of a subject or task in relation to a person's life and possible future goals. these interventions refer to the subject’s utility value since it is believed that, unlike the attainment value, the utility value can be changed throughout these interventions (acee et al., 2018). nevertheless, the attainment value is also observed in such interventions, as they may affect a student’s identity (johnson & sinatra, 2013). task value interventions can be divided into approaches where value information is externally provided to the students (explanations by the teacher), or where the students are encouraged to independently determine the value of the subject matter themselves. the latter is achieved by various intervention formats, for example, through a written discussion about the object and its relevance to the student's own life. both forms of interventions lead to an increased utility value of the current task and are therefore also called utility value interventions (tibetts et al., 2015). it seems that externally induced approaches primarily impact students with an existing interest and might motivate them to further engage with the subject matter (durik & harackiewicz, 2007). however, it has been observed that students with particularly low selfesteem and low initial interest benefit when the subject’s utility value is self-generated (canning & harackiewicz, 2019; hulleman et al., 2010, tibbetts et al., 2015). interdisciplinary education in addition to task-value interventions, interdisciplinary education also focuses on 46 global education review 8 (4) interest-promoting preconditions since it is characterized by a constructivist orientation. the basic idea of moderate constructivism is an independent and active construction process of new knowledge, which builds on the learners' previous experiences, prior knowledge, and individual interests (labudde, 2003). as a result, a learning process only takes place in personally relevant contexts. labudde (2003) states that instruction that situationally connects to students' existing interests and prior knowledge must be interdisciplinary, as new knowledge is constructed independently from existing subjects. where subject teaching is still criticized by an increased detachment from students' concrete life situations and problems (bomhard, 2011), interdisciplinary education tries to engage students by keeping their different learning prerequisites and everyday reality in mind (labudde, 2008). this constructivist approach already provides all the preconditions for promoting interests in the classroom and should also aim to increase a subject’s utility value and interest. inferring from the previous explanations, interdisciplinary education is characterized by a self-generated approach as students actively construct new knowledge and grasp the relevance of the content themselves. in conjunction with current research findings on task-value interventions (e.g., tibbetts et al., 2015), this would suggest that interdisciplinary education initiates situational interest rather than stabilizing an existing interest. consequently, the intervention is expected to primarily benefit students with lower levels of initial interest. purpose this study examines the potential of an interdisciplinary intervention, which combines the subjects of biology and pe, to promote interest and influence subjective task values as it would link the subject matter with students' lives, potential goals, and existing interests. we aim to investigate if the intervention influences the subjective task values of the separate subjects, therefore, the following hypotheses were made: h1: the utility value of biology is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. h2: the utility value of pe is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. since the constructivist nature of interdisciplinary interventions encourages students to independently evaluate the value of the single subject for solving a problem question, we assume that the workshop initiates situational interest rather than stabilizing an existing interest. as this cannot be investigated by “intrinsic value” according to eccles et al. (1983), we specified this construct to capture the intrinsic value of individual subjects and specifically ask about the situational experience of the subject. this allows the construct to be attributed to situational interest according to the model of hidi and renninger (2006). we defined this scale as “situational intrinsic value,” and hypothesized that: h3: the situational intrinsic value of biology is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. h4: the situational intrinsic value of pe is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. preliminary results from task-value interventions suggest that through selfgenerated engagement with the subject’s value in relation to one's life or specific goals, students giving meaning to the subject 47 47 with low self-esteem/interest in single subjects will be positively influenced. these assumptions lead to the following hypotheses: h5: the initial situational intrinsic value of biology represents an interaction effect over the intervention period, regarding the utility value and situational intrinsic value of biology. h6: the initial situational intrinsic value of pe represents an interaction effect over the intervention period, regarding utility value and situational intrinsic value of pe. finally, since the subject’s attainment of the subjects depends on personal factors that are not explicitly addressed by the intervention, we assume: h7: the attainment value of biology will not change throughout the intervention. h8: the attainment value of pe will not change throughout the intervention. method sample a total of four high school courses with 73 students from north rhine-westphalia, germany participated in the intervention (female = 42; mean age = 17.7 years, grades 1213). the four courses comprised one basic biology course, one advanced biology course, one basic pe course and one advanced pe course. the intervention was requested by biology or pe teachers for secondary school courses. hence, there was a compulsion to participate in the intervention, although participation in the accompanying study was open to any participating student. interdisciplinary intervention the interdisciplinary intervention combined biology and pe and was provided in a workshop format that dealt with a practical sports problem. the intervention lasted six hours on one day and was planned and conducted by two people employed by the university. the high school course teacher was present the entire time but had no direct influence on course implementation. the intervention began with three sport practical coordinative exercises that increased in difficulty. in the basic exercise, students were instructed to throw two tennis balls straight up and catch them again. the final exercise was for students to throw the balls in the air, cross their hands, and catch the balls again. this task could only be performed by a few students, leading students to the following question: "why do we have such a problem with this coordinative task?" students split up into groups to explore different brain areas and their role in creating a movement. after a presentation of the individual brain areas, the sensory stimulus path through the brain was pieced together and explained using the example of the initial sports exercise. the challenge with performing the final exercise has to do with the prefrontal cortex, which is responsible for movement planning and accesses already existing movement patterns. however, if no movement pattern is available, as in the beginning exercise, a new movement must be planned. this is mainly influenced by executive functions. after an initial definition of executive functions based on practical examples from everyday school life, students experienced them using various psychological test procedures. through such cognitive training, new synapses are formed, whereby the brain creates new networks and can adequately react to new challenges in everyday life. coupling such cognitive procedures with practical sports exercises effectively promotes the formation of new synapses. after referring to the research 48 global education review 8 (4) question, such coordinative exercises were performed, modified, planned, and related to executive functions. a more detailed description of the intervention can be found in kramer & wegner (in press). through understanding and training the body and brain, in addition to the connection to everyday life, the sports club, and school, this interdisciplinary concept obtains a high relevance to everyday life, which potentially increases the value of both individual subjects. test-instrument students were given a questionnaire before and after the intervention to measure subjective task-values in a school context (sessw, steinmayr & spinath, 2010). there are three subscales which are related to entire subjects. this was crucial to guarantee the comparability of measured values (steinmayr & spinath, 2010). preliminary results from implementing this instrument indicate a good model fit (steinmayr & spinath, 2010). when recording subjective task values, former studies have observed that “costs” are loaded negatively on one of the other subscales (steinmayr & spinath, 2010). therefore, this component is not considered further in the present study. based on theoretical assumptions to generate situational interest in an interdisciplinary intervention, the subscale “intrinsic value" was refined. instead of querying the general intrinsic value attribution, selected items examined the situational component of attributing values (e.g., "biology is interesting" became "the last hours of biology really interested me"). these variables are adapted in accordance with the construct “interessiertheit” [situational interest] from wegner (2009) and were renamed “situational intrinsic value” to distinguish it from the original test instrument. results the data were first checked for internal consistencies in the statistical program ibm spss statistics version 27.0, which excluded one variable for further statistical analysis. reliabilities of the modified test-instrument showed sufficient internal consistencies (see table 1). we removed one item (sit_int_1) from both subjects and at both measurement times to improve reliability. this provided a better model fit in the confirmatory factor analysis. table 1: internal consistencies, exemplary items, and the number of items of the respective subscales of the 1 subjective task values (situational intrinsic value, utility value, attainment value) depending on the respective single 2 subject and measuring time, modified and extended according to steinmayr & spinath (2010) and wegner (2009). 3 the adjusted reliabilities for the construct 'situational intrinsic value' for both individual subjects (the first item 4 removed) are given in parentheses. 5 subscale exemplary item (insert specific subject) number of items subject and measuring time cronbach's alpha situational intrinsic value the last hours of …really interested me. 4 (3) biology (t0) .861 (.928) biology (t1) .853 (.886) pe (t0) .880 (.911) pe (t1) .852 (.885) utility value … is useful for my future 3 biology (t0) .873 biology (t1) .880 pe (t0) .890 pe (t1) .888 attainment value it is important for me to be good at … 3 biology (t0) .940 biology (t1) .941 pe (t0) .956 pe (t1) .923 6 giving meaning to the subject 49 49 subsequently, a confirmatory factor analysis using the extension bundle “lavaan” was conducted to determine the model fit of a theoretically assumed three-dimensional model in comparison to a one-dimensional model using maximum likelihood estimation. although the course size is rather small to conduct a confirmatory factor analysis, it is used as an indication of whether the modified scales can be used for the survey. in general, threedimensional models show significantly better fit indices than the one-dimensional models at both measurement points and in both subjects, which justifies the separation of the three subscales (see table 2). the root mean square error of approximation (rmsea) and the tucker lewis index (tli) tend to reject a correct model assumption for a sample smaller size than n = 250 (hu & bentler, 1999). therefore, the standardized root mean square residual (srmr) was used, which proves a good model fit up to a value of 0.08, and the comparative fit index (cfi), which rejects the model assumption below a value of 0.95 (hu & bentler, 1999). throughout all measurement points and subjects, the three-dimensional model was characterized by a significantly higher model fit. after calculating a difference test of the respective chi-square tests, these also reveal a significantly better model fit in favor of the three-dimensional model (biology t0: χ2 = 138.001, df = 3, p < .001; biology t1: χ2 = 178.476, df = 3, p < .001; pe t0: χ2 = 187.610, df = 3, p < .001; pe t1: χ2 = 242.207, df = 3, p < .001). to measure the intersubject factor “preinterest,” pre-test results for the subscale “situational intrinsic value” were used to distinguish between two test groups. since the questionnaire is based on a six-point scale, the mean value of the construct “situational intrinsic value” for both subjects was divided at a value of 3.5. students were assigned to a “low pre-interest” (value < 3.5) table 2: fit indices of confirmatory factor analysis for the threeand one-dimensional model concerning individual 1 subjects and measuring times. 2 model n χ2 df p cfi tli srmr rmsea three-dimensional (biology t0) 71 32.699 24 .111 .985 .978 .049 .071 one-dimensional (biology t0) 71 170.70 0 27 < .001 .760 .679 .111 .274 three-dimensional (biology t1) 72 37.393 24 .040 .974 .961 .057 .088 one-dimensional (biology t1) 72 215.86 9 27 < .001 ,635 .514 .129 .312 three-dimensional (pe t0) 74 54.808 24 < .001 .955 .932 .057 .132 one-dimensional (pe t0) 74 242.41 8 27 < .001 .684 .579 .118 .328 three-dimensional (pe t1) 77 26.816 24 .313 .995 .993 .034 .039 one-dimensional (pe t1) 77 269.02 3 27 < .001 .577 .436 .164 .341 3 50 global education review 8 (4) or "high pre-interest" (value > 3.5) subgroup. for biology, this resulted in a division of the sample into n = 47 (low pre-interest) and n = 22 (high pre-interest). in pe, the data split more symmetrically into n = 35 (low preinterest) and n = 36 (high pre-interest). it should be noted that this procedure evokes the risk of possible ceiling effects in the subgroup “high pre-interest.” the last step was the identification of possible outliers in the subgroups. two students were identified with deviating data. they were not considered for further analysis. analysis of the subjective task values to test the hypotheses, a repeated measures mixed anova explored both the main effect of the “intervention” and the interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest.” the values of the mauchly test are redundant and are not reported, as there are only two measurement times. utility value for pe, a homogeneity of variances assumed equal variances for t1 (levene’s test, p = .539), but not for t0 (levene’s test, p = .040). however, an anova is stable against violations of variance homogeneity for equal sample sizes (bortz, 2005). for pe a significant main effect for the factor “intervention” was shown (repeated measures anova, f(1, 69) = 6.72, p = .012, partial η2 = .089). the subscales mean score increased after the intervention (t0: m = 4.13, sd = 1.17; t1: m = 4.39, sd = 0.99). in addition, an interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest” was reported (f(1, 69) = 12.175, p = .001, partial η2 = .150). more differentially, the mean of the ”lowinterest” group increases after the intervention (t0: m = 3.34, sd = 1.07; t1: m = 3.97, sd = 0.92), whereas this decreases in the “high interest” group (m = 4.89, sd = 0.66; m = 4.8, sd = 0.89, respectively, see figure 1). figure 1: mean values plot of the construct “utility value” for biology and pe over the intervention period, divided into the groups “low_pre_interest” (pe n=35, biology n=47) and “high_pre_interest” (n=36, n=22, respectively). for the subscale “utility value” in biology, the levene’s test showed that equal variances could be assumed (t0: p = .71; t1: p = .116). a main effect was found for the factor “intervention” (repeated measures anova, f(1, 67) = 6.36, p = .014, partial η2 = .87). the subscale score increased significantly over time (t0: m = 3.65, sd = 1.18; t1: m = 3.96, sd = 1.1). no interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest” was found (f(1, 67) = 1.57, p = .215, partial η2 = .023). hence, giving meaning to the subject 51 51 the group classification “pre-interest” did not have a significant effect on the result. mean scores increased slightly more in the “lowinterest” group (t0: m = 3.23, sd = 1.09; t1: m = 3.62, sd = 1.09) than in the “high-interest” group (m = 4.55, sd = 0.82; m = 4.68, sd = 0.72, respectively, see figure 2). situational intrinsic value looking at the results for pe, homogeneity of the error variances was confirmed by levene’s test (t0: p = .635; t1: p = .819). the mixed anova revealed a main effect for the factor “intervention” (f(1, 69) = 27.662, p < .001, partial η2 = .286). thereby, the rating of the subscale increased significantly (t0: m = 3.44, sd = 1.24; t1: m = 4.0, sd = 0.98). furthermore, an interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest” was found (f(1, 69) = 23.391, p < .001, partial η2 = .253). the interaction effect indicates a more important difference for students in the “low pre-interest” group between the measurement points (m = 2.36, sd = 0.66; m = 3.47, sd = 0.88, respectively) than for the “high preinterest” group (m = 4.48, sd = 0.62; m = 4.53, sd = 0.78, respectively) (see figure. 2). the levene’s test for biology confirmed a homogeneity of variances at both measurement points (t0: p = .886; t1: p = .126). the repeated measures mixed anova revealed a main effect for the intervention factor (f(1, 67) = 14.190, p < .001, partial η2 = .175). the mean score in this subscale increased by more than half a rating level (t0: m = 3.03, sd = 1.27; t1: m = 3.69, sd = 1.0). furthermore, an interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest” was found (f(1, 67) = 19.183, p < .001, partial η2 = .223). the mean of the “lowinterest” group increased strongly over the intervention period (t0: m = 2.35, sd = 0.77; t1: m = 3.35, sd = 0.95), while the mean score of the “high interest” group decreased slightly over time (m = 4.48, sd = 0.80; m = 4.41, sd = 0.7, respectively, see figure 2). figure 2: mean values of the construct “situational intrinsic value” for both subjects over the intervention period, divided into the groups “low_pre_interest” (pe n=35, biology n=47) and “high_pre_interest” (n=36, n=22, respectively). attainment value for the last set of hypotheses, a pairedsample t-test was used, as no interaction factor was included. for the subscale “attainment value” (n = 72), a paired t-test was performed for both subjects. for biology, no significant difference between the two measurement points was found (t = 0.245, p = .807). throughout the intervention, the mean value decreased slightly (t0: m = 3.89, sd = 1.43; t1: m = 3.87, sd = 1.25). congruent to these results, no significant difference can be reported for pe over the intervention (t = 1.16, p = .250). in comparison to biology, there was a stronger decrease in 52 global education review 8 (4) attainment value (t0: m = 4.77, sd = 1.14; t1: m = 4.65, sd = 1.13). discussion in the present study, the influence of interdisciplinary interventions on subjective task values was investigated. following the taskvalue interventions (tibbetts et al., 2015) and the preconditions for increasing interest according to schiefele (2009) that are addressed by interdisciplinary interventions (labudde, 2008), this study hypothesized that the utility value of the individual subjects is positively influenced through the use of an interdisciplinary intervention. this was stated in hypotheses h1 and h2. after calculating the mixed repeated measures anovas, a significant main effect of the factor “intervention” was found for both subjects. thus, both hypotheses can be confirmed. building on these assumptions, the next hypotheses h3 and h4 emerged. according to schiefele (2009) and the four-phase model of interest development by hidi and renninger (2006), interest is significantly influenced by the value an object is given. since interdisciplinary teaching establishes a connection to students' lives through a holistic approach and addresses the utility value, the hypotheses were formulated in a way that when the utility value of both subjects increases, situational interest in the subject matter also increases. the repeated measures mixed anovas confirmed this assumption by a significant main effect of “intervention” on the subscale “situational intrinsic value,” whereby both hypotheses can be accepted. the study provides evidence that interdisciplinary interventions have an impact on the emergence of new interests. however, this result does not allow any conclusions to be drawn about an actual influence on the students' individual interest. according to the model of hidi and renninger (2006), the effect can be attributed to an influence on the first two stages of the development process of interest. however, it can be hypothesized that since utility value was highly rated for both subjects, the development of interest may also lead to a sustained individual interest (harackiewicz et al., 2016). it is necessary to investigate whether the effects described above also persist in the long term and how individual interest in subjects develops over time. in the context of the development of situational interest, the group “pre-interest” was examined for both subjects. the main effect of this classification cannot be taken into account in the statistical investigation, since the effect from the subscale “situational intrinsic value” is artificially created. nevertheless, this grouping allows us to make a statement about the respective students over the intervention period. in three of the four mixed anovas, an interaction effect between the factors “intervention” and “pre-interest” was found. only for the subject biology, the groups did not influence the described main effect of the subscale “utility value”. looking more closely at the mean values, it can be descriptively observed for both subjects and subscales that the intervention had more of an influence on the low “pre-interest” group than the group of students with a higher initial situational interest. for pe, this can be additionally confirmed by the significant interaction effects from the two anovas. for biology, this statement is statistically supported only for the subscale “situational intrinsic value.” however, for the subscale “utility value”, a slight tendency in mean values can be observed. these results support canning and harackiewicz’s (2019) research, in particular, the notion that selfgiving meaning to the subject 53 53 regenerated value beliefs primarily promote students with initially low situational interest. in addition to the potential of promoting less interested students, these results retrospectively characterize the interdisciplinary intervention as a format that encourages independent engagement with the value of an object (tibbetts et al., 2015). the established hypothesis h6 can be confirmed subsequently by this argument. hypothesis h5, however, can only be confirmed for the subscale “situational intrinsic value.” the tendencies of the mean values in both groups for the subscale “utility value” legitimize an examination of hypothesis h5 in further studies. furthermore, the results must be cautiously evaluated; dividing the groups into high initial and low initial situational intrinsic value at t0 evokes a group difference that may have an impact on the results. this procedure carries the risk that the situational intrinsic value of the students with a high initial situational interest has little potential to further increase due to a ceiling effect. the subscale “utility value” is rated very high in both subjects by the group with high initial situational interest (m > 4.5). nevertheless, it remains questionable as to where the threshold for a ceiling effect should be. however, it can be inferred from the data that the students with a high situational interest seem to remain interested in the respective subject. accordingly, the intervention has no negative influence on the students. the last hypotheses focused on the subscale “attainment value” of the two subjects. on a theoretical level, no correlation between interdisciplinary interventions and the perceived attainment value of the individual subjects was observed, since this subscale measures the value of the subject in regard to identity traits. the two t-tests performed also do not suggest a correlation. accordingly, hypotheses h7 and h8 can be accepted. similar to task value interventions, attainment value is not addressed through interdisciplinary projects (acee et al., 2018). limitations the results of this study are subject to some limitations. on the one hand, the sample size is not large enough to draw conclusions about the population. since other factors might influence interest, further data, e.g., regarding the cultural background of the students, should also be taken into account. in addition to the experimental group, a control group should be used in future research to increase the power of the study. since the survey period was very short, a response bias cannot be excluded. in future surveys, a sufficient interval between survey periods should be ensured. in terms of design-based research, our results offer tendencies that should be examined in further studies (euler & sloane, 2014). the specification of the “intrinsic value” subscale to determine situational interest value resolves a criticism of eccles' (1983) theory that situational intrinsic value is not taken into account. in the present study, however, the original scale was replaced entirely in favor of “situational intrinsic value.” thus, these results remain situationally valid and only represent conditional assumptions about the development of interest. the classification of groups based on the subscale “situational intrinsic value” at test time t0 should be critically viewed, since this classification leads to an unnatural group difference at test time t0 and bears the risk of ceiling effects. a classification based on a different scale would be recommended. however, this can only be measured by further surveys, which should be conducted in future studies. additionally, the intervention only 54 global education review 8 (4) lasted one school day, where regular instruction was suspended in favor of the interdisciplinary approach. this circumstance may influence the results since the intervention did not take place in the form of normal school lessons and therefore represents a special feature for the students. in further studies, long-term effects should be examined. this follows from previous considerations that only situational interest can be examined. the improved utility value of the two subjects is an indication of a long-lasting effect. furthermore, the group variable should be formed based on an alternative subscale and, in addition to the situational intrinsic value, the intrinsic value should be used to capture individual interest. in addition, a qualitative design could be used to investigate what the students specifically perceive as the utility of the subject and the extent to which they are now more interested in it. conclusion this study demonstrated the effects of an interdisciplinary intervention on subjective task values despite the limitations described above. thus, this intervention combining biology and pe led to increased utility values of both subjects. furthermore, a positive influence on situational intrinsic values of the individual subjects could be confirmed, which need to be examined in further studies. in combination with the described interaction effects, this effect mainly benefits students with an initially low situational intrinsic value. regarding the described decline in interest over the school years (höft et al., 2019; potvin & hasni, 2014), our results indicate that students with a low level of interest can be positively influenced by such interventions (canning & harackiewicz, 2019). the study therefore suggests implementing interdisciplinary lessons which could potentially reveal the importance of subjects for their lives to especially low interested students. acknowledgements this project is part of the “qualitätsoffensive lehrerbildung”, a joint initiative of the federal government and the länder which aims to improve the quality of teacher training (förderkennzeichen 01ja1908). the programme is funded by federal ministry of education and research. the authors are responsible for the content of this publication. the author would like to thank vivienne litzke for constructive criticism and language editing of the manuscript. references acee, t. w., weinstein, c. e., hoang, t. v., & flaggs, d. a. 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(2001). beliebtheit und akzeptanz des sportunterrichts. sportunterricht, 50, 67–72. about the authors niklas kramer earned his master of education in biology and physical education at bielefeld university, germany, where he is currently phd student in the department for didactics of biology. his main research interest is the investigation of interdisciplinary teaching projects in the subject combination of biology and physical education at secondary schools. dr. claas wegner is professor at bielefeld university, germany, in the department for didactics of biology and a teacher for biology and pe at a secondary school. he is founder of the projects “kolumbus-kids” and “biology up close.” his research focuses on gifted students in science education and he is head of the osthushenrich center for giftedness (ozhb) at bielefeld university. https://doi.org/10.1026/0012-1924/a000023 https://doi.org/10.1026/0012-1924/a000023 https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.26078-9 https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-08-097086-8.26078-9 https://doi.org/10.3102%2f0002831215618662 https://doi.org/10.3102%2f0002831215618662 https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/105277 https://doi.org/10.29333/ejmste/105277 https://doi.org/10.46328/ijres.v6i3.1051 https://doi.org/10.46328/ijres.v6i3.1051 bridging the gap between theory and practice 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schmiedebach, mario, & wegner, claas. (2024). bridging the gap between theory and practice. global education review, 11 (1), 1-5. bridging the gap between theory and practice mario schmiedebach claas wegner the aim of educational research is to systematically investigate and study various aspects of education to enhance understanding, inform decision-making, and improve educational practices. educational research is conducted to address a wide range of questions and issues related to teaching, learning, curriculum development, educational policies, and institutional effectiveness. the specific goals of educational research include questions like “what motivates students to study a specific subject?” or “what methods foster learning?”. all of this is also stated as the focus and scope of global education review; the journal wants to report “approaches to and implications of educational practice” and welcomes “theoretical, empirical, and policy related articles […] that address critical issues in education throughout the world”. obviously, global education review is not the only journal that presents educational research, and mostly all journals and researchers want to link research to educational practise; however, various research has shown that there is a transfer problem of educational research in educational practice (gräsel, 2010; kuhn, 2014; steffens, heinrich & dobbelstein, 2019). this transfer problem clearly shows that (often) educational research does not affect educational practice as much as it should. but why is that and how can we bridge the gap between theory, derived from educational research, and practice? the special issue shows how different researchers from different disciplines build small bridges to influence both theory and practice at the same time. one of the underlying research principles for such a goal is designbased research (dbr). what is design-based research (dbr)? design-based research (dbr) is a robust and innovative approach to educational research that aims to bridge the gap between theory and practice. it offers a systematic framework for collaboratively designing, implementing, and refining educational interventions in real-world settings. the essence of dbr lies in its commitment to solving practical problems while simultaneously contributing to the development of educational theory (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). this methodology is particularly relevant in the everevolving landscape of education, where the need for evidence-based practices is paramount. to obtain this interplay between theory and practice, dbr emphasizes the importance of collaboration between researchers and practitioners. dbr is fundamentally a collaborative enterprise that seeks to integrate 2 global education review 11 (1) the efforts of researchers and practitioners in joint activities aimed at developing practice and contributing to the knowledge base of a discipline (design-based research collective, 2003). this collaborative effort ensures that the research is not detached from the reality of educational settings but is deeply embedded in the practical experiences of educators and learners. therefore, educational research should be conducted in “real” educational settings and developed by both researchers and practitioners to ensure suitability for the actual practical field. since research and practice are highly linked in dbr, the method is inherently contextsensitive. this means that the researchers acknowledge the unique characteristics of each learning environment and its specific limitations, restrictions, necessities, etc. on the other hand, practitioners acknowledge the need to investigate educational settings in order to develop theories and conduct research. this dual focus on both theory and practice of dbr creates a unique method to foster relevance and sustainability of innovations in specific educational contexts (barab & squire, 2004). central to dbr is the iterative design process, which involves cycles of design, implementation, and evaluation. each cycle affects the subsequent one, allowing for continuous improvement of educational interventions. this allows researchers to refine their theories and practitioners to modify their practices in response to the evolving findings from each iteration (anderson & shattuck, 2012), making dbr a flexible method with continuous improvements for both theory and practice. what are the goals of design-based research (dbr)? at its core, dbr is problem-oriented. it begins with the identification of a specific educational problem or challenge (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). researchers and practitioners work together to design interventions aimed at addressing these problems. hence, the goal of a dbr project is to create solutions to complex, practical problems in the field of education. this problem-solving approach ensures that the research directly contributes to the improvement of educational practices. at the same time, dbr focuses on the development of educational theory. while solving practical problems, dbr research develops or refines educational theories about teaching and learning. by testing and evaluating different interventions in iterative cycles, the researchers see what theories about learning and teaching “work” in practice (cobb et al., 2003). while this might sound like a “trial and error” mindset, dbr research puts a strong emphasis on evidence-based practice. by testing and evaluating different prototypes, researchers collect data to support their theories and, hence, create evidence-based and practice-proved recommendations for learning and teaching (design-based research collective, 2003). therefore, dbr contributes both to the growth of theoretical understanding in the field of education and to the improvement of education itself. dbr promotes collaborative learning not only among researchers and practitioners but also among educators themselves. dbr offers a structure for professional development that engages practitioners in collaborative processes of inquiry about teaching and learning (design-based research collective, 2003). this collaborative learning aspect is crucial for fostering a culture of continuous improvement bridging the gap between theory and practice 3 and knowledge sharing within educational communities. furthermore, scepticism regarding educational research can be reduced if practitioners take part in dbr research and notice benefits from such research for their teaching. because dbr uses an iterative approach to develop, test, and evaluate educational interventions, it might take some time to see the positive effects of dbr. however, at the same time, dbr focuses on the long-term impact of its projects since both researchers and practitioners are committed to the project’s success (anderson & shattuck, 2012). what are the challenges and critiques regarding design-based research (dbr)? while dbr has gained prominence in educational research, it is not without its critiques and challenges. some scholars argue that the iterative nature of dbr can be timeconsuming, and the generalizability of findings may be limited to specific contexts. others emphasize the need for clearer guidelines on how to balance the dual goals of theory development and practical problem-solving within dbr projects (easterday, lewis & gerber, 2014). even though the challenges and critiques regarding dbr might be valid, we argue that the positive aspects of dbr research outweigh possible challenges or critical aspects. this special issue will show different ways of conducting dbr research in different fields of educational context, with different theoretical approaches regarding both the design of interventions and the evaluation, and how dbr helps to improve the practical field. description of the special issue with the help of a special thematic issue, “bridging the gap between theory and practice”, the current objective is to obtain a global perspective of research projects that connect both theory and practice to show how those two inseparable fields of education can be linked to improving both research and practice. in the study “quality of research based on design-based research approach using an example from early childhood talent research”, schäfers and wegner focus on early childhood education in the context of detecting giftedness by developing and investigating a test instrument in various dbr cycles. the authors use their experience to develop quality criteria for both qualitative and quantitative research in dbr. this is especially interesting since some opponents of dbr research criticize that such research mainly focuses on the practical field and not on research quality. in their study “preliminary concept description, based on system thinking, of semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education in the italian context”, invernizzi et al. use the dbr approach to draw attention to physical education’s semantics with the aim of highlighting possible language gaps in practice and research applied to physical and sports education. the authors use systematic thinking as a research method to verify the coherence of terminology used by italian academics and practical communities in motor and sports science to understand potential differences between theory and practice. in their study “enhancing subjectspecific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units”, kramer and wegner investigate an interdisciplinary approach to teaching 4 global education review 11 (1) biology and pe to increase student interest in those subjects. for this, they developed a prototype for a one-day intervention combining biology and physical education, evaluated the intervention, and used the results to improve and redesign their intervention. the first cycle of the dbr project was published in a previous ger issue and the authors show how research results are used to improve interventions according to dbr. furthermore, they present results regarding interdisciplinary teaching. all articles in the special issue tackle the aforementioned questions about dbr and show how different research methods can be used within the scope of dbr to investigate relevant questions for both theory and practice. the overlapping use of dbr as a core element in different fields of educational research – ranging from early childhood education to higher education; focusing on physical education, the combination of two subjects and gifted education – reflects on how dbr can be used as a key method to unify different fields of research. such a vast thematic range in one special issue could only be realized with a focus on the one thing that should be equally important for all educational researchers, no matter the specific area or subject of interest: what are the actual problems in the educational field, how can we develop solutions for those problems, and how can we expand our theory by doing research on and with our solutions for the relevant problems? references anderson, t., & shattuck, j. (2012). designbased research: a decade of progress in education research? educational researcher, 41(1), 16-25. barab, s., & squire, k. (2004). design-based research: putting a stake in the ground. the journal of the learning sciences, 13(1), 1-14. cobb, p., confrey, j., disessa, a., lehrer, r., & schauble, l. (2003). design experiments in educational research. educational researcher, 32(1), 9-13. design-based research collective (2003). design-based research: an emerging paradigm for educational inquiry. educational researcher, 32(1), 5-8. easterday, m. w., lewis, d. r., & gerber, e. m. (2014). design-based research process: problems, phases, and applications. in joseph l. polman, eleni a. kyza, d. kevin o'neill, iris tabak, william r. penuel, a. susan jurow, kevin o'connor, tiffany lee, and laura d'amico (eds.). learning and becoming in practice: the international conference of the learning sciences (icls) 2014. volume 1. colorado, co: international society of the learning sciences, pp. 317-324. gräsel, cornelia (2010). stichwort: transfer und transferforschung im bildungsbereich. zeitschrift für erziehungswissenschaften, 13, 7-20. kuhn, hans-jürgen (2014). anspruch, wirklichkeit und perspektiven der gesamtstrategie der kmk zum bildungsmonitoring. die deutsche schule, 106(4), 398-413. bridging the gap between theory and practice 5 schmiedebach, m., & wegner, c. (2021). designbased research als ansatz zur lösung praxisrelevanter probleme in der fachdidaktischen forschung. bildungsforschung, 19(2), 11 steffens, ulrich, heinrich, martin & dobbelstein, peter (2019). praxistransfer schulund unterrichtsforschung – eine problemskizze. in: claudia schreiner, christian wiesner, simone breit, peter dobbelstein, martin heinrich & ulrich steffens (hrsg.): praxistransfer schul und unterrichtsentwicklung. münster; new york: waxmann, pp. 11-26. editorial production ’ _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: castner, daniel j. (2025). editor’s introduction: continuing a conversation about ece amid authoritarian chaos . global education review, 12 (3), 1-2. editor’s introduction: continuing a conversation about ece amid authoritarian chaos daniel j. castner this is the second special issue of global education review dedicated to the impact of authoritarianism as it pertains to the education of young children. this issue comprises three articles, which continue a conversation initiated by the authors of the previous special issue (archer, 2025; leek & szulewicz, 2005; padia et al., 2025; peters et al., 2025). collectively, the scholars who have contributed to these two special issues demonstrate the resilience of hope sustained within early childhood theory, research, and practice. the intellectual vibrance of the ece field is indeed heartening amid the perilous socio-political conditions currently contextualizing the care and education of young children. my concerns about the impact of authoritarianism on education stem from my own experiences, both as a former public school kindergarten teacher and currently as a professor of early childhood education and curriculum studies in the midwestern united states. admittedly, i have been distrustful of the impositions of top-down authority throughout my career in early childhood education. however, in my view, the mere existence of authority figures, hierarchical structures, or authoritative mandates should not be conflated with authoritarianism. concerns that threats and manifestations of authoritarianism are festering in the united states and around the globe are nonetheless warranted when power is exercised in ways that enable authority figures to circumvent accountability to the individuals and groups subjected to their authority. authoritarian practices, according to marlies glasius (2018), are “patterns of action that sabotage accountability to people over whom a political actor exerts control, or their representatives, by means of secrecy, disinformation, and disabling voice” (p. 517). elsewhere, i have focused on curriculum as an element of education that has been subjected to generations of authoritarian practices in the united states (castner, schneider, & henderson, 2025). while authoritarianism is generally a persistent and pervasive issue for curriculum practice in the united states, it is particularly a salient concern for various aspects of early education and care practices worldwide. this collection of papers contributes three distinct perspectives on the problems of authoritarianism facing ece. first, åse løfblad, odd rune stalheim, and kari lerbak decry the dominance of neoliberalism and new public management as an anchor of authoritarian trends. through their students’ letter writing, they uncover the anti-authoritarian potential of resonance and subjectivity that is already tacitly “moving in the shadows.” second, maria mavrides calderon and maria dolores lasso direct our attention to early childhood care and education in ecuador. they examine government and media documents, as well as social media posts, to shed critical light upon inconsistencies between political rhetoric and the realities of implementation. lastly, sara michael luna critically examines the varied conceptions of families reinforced by state-level social studies standards. she warns that authoritarian movements are supported when neoliberal managerial logics and nationalist 2 global education review 12 (3) ideologies are circulated as “official knowledge,” and she calls for the preservation of early childhood curriculum as a “contested space” where critical inquiry and open discourse welcome pluralistic ways of being and knowing about families. this collection offers three powerful and insightful responses to the authoritarian conditions currently beleaguering early childhood care and education. infringements of individual autonomy and dignity (i.e., illiberal practices) often overlap with the accountability sabotage of authoritarian practices (glasius, 2018). these three articles expose ways in which human rights and democratic ways of life are threatened in early childhood settings. further, they offer alternative visions for early childhood education as an inclusive space for liberating students’ voices and demanding equity. although early childhood educators will likely continue to make sense of and deal with authoritarian conditions for some time to come, these three articles contribute to a critical conversation that i hope readers will continue. references castner, d.j., schneider, j.l., & henderson, j.g. (2025). anti-authoritarian curriculum practice: powerful theories for teachers. bloomsbury academic. glasius, m. (2018). what authoritarianism is … and is not : a practice perspective. international affairs (royal institute of international affairs 1944-), 94(3), 515–533. all for one and one for all 50 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial 3.0 unported license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2019). all for one and one for all: recasting alexandre dumas as a popular educator in france during the new imperialism. global education review, 6 (4). 50-79. all for one and one for all: recasting alexandre dumas as a popular educator in france during the new imperialism eric martone mercy college, new york abstract celebrated french writer alexandre dumas (1802-1870) had faced forms of racial prejudice in france during his lifetime because of his caribbean family origins, biracial ancestry, and descent from a slave. during the late nineteenth century, the rise of scientific racism and aggressive european imperialism around the globe resulted in racial perceptions and worldviews that supported european superiority and equated “european” with being “white.” such developments complicated perceptions of dumas and his works as part of the french patrimony, causing intellectuals and reformers to adapt various and often conflicting approaches to reconcile dumas’s heritage with dominant perceptions of french identity as “white,” as well as search for ways to simultaneously praise and critique dumas’s literary works. this critique of dumas paradoxically manifested itself during the french third republic. by separating his works from the more elite “world of letters” and reclassifying them as unsophisticated and suitable to the more rudimentary educational needs of the common working classes and adolescents for french nationbuilding purposes, intellectuals, policymakers, and of reformers of education found a way to simultaneously critique dumas’s “africanness” indirectly while praising his frenchness openly. much of the french criticism levied at dumas and his work had applied negative african stereotypes to the manner in which he lived and constructed his novels. as dumas and his works became symbols of the french patrimony (and therefore france itself) at this time, criticizing his “africanness” indirectly became preferred, as to do so openly would suggest that the french patrimony had “african” elements. this reclassification therefore prevented dumas from being regarded as equal to other “great” french writers; this stigma lasted until the early twenty-first century. keywords alexandre dumas; history of education; france; french education policy; national identity introduction in the preface to his 1883 book on french writer alexandre dumas’s last years, gabriel ferry wrote that “true literary posterity began for dumas the day after his death” (ferry, 1883). perhaps it took a bit longer. in december 1870, at the time of the death of dumas, the famed author of the three musketeers and the count of monte cristo, france was engaged in a war with prussia that toppled french emperor napoléon iii and established the french third republic (1871-1940). dumas was buried without much ado in a cemetery in neuville-lèspollet. in 1872, alexandre dumas fils, dumas’s son and also an accomplished writer, had his father exhumed and reburied in his birth town of villers-cotterêts in northern france. at the reburial, dumas fils gave a moving speech in which he shared his hope that his father’s funeral “be not so much one of mourning as of a festival, less a burying than a resurrection” (glinel, 1884, pp. 501-502; schopp, 1988, p. 476). despite such lackluster beginnings, the 1870s did mark a “resurrection” for dumas, a rebirth as a symbol of the french patrimony (see figure 1). consequently, dumas can be analyzed as a french lieu de mémoire, or “any significant entity, whether material or nonmaterial in nature, which by dint of human will or the work of time has become a symbolic all for one and one for all 51 element of the memorial heritage of any community” (nora, 1996, p. xvii; petit-rasselle, 2011). the tangibility of this status took the form of a commemorative monument in paris inaugurated in november 1883 (ferry, 1883; fabre, 1883). thousands gathered for the event and many political, literary, and artistic notables attended (glinel, 1883; lang, 1891; henry, 1999). yet there was a hidden agenda behind this commemoration, as policymakers and intellectuals had a distinct role for the writer to play. figure 1: popular image of alexandre dumas fils at home. in the background is a small portrait of his father (collection of the author). regarding public squares as a powerful extension to the classroom, this monument to dumas was part of a broader era of french monument building seeking to promote the republic’s political agendas by manipulating national history through the appropriation of monuments to instill a particular vision of france among the larger population (best, 2010; boime, 1987; hargrove, 1989; agulhon, 1975; mcwilliam, 2005). the dumas monument, as well as its inauguration, reinforced how dumas’s works of historical fiction and their readership made him a popular educator of the french nation and enabled the foundations for a common national identity, thereby alluding to the purpose contemporary french education policymakers had for the writer (le monument d’alexandre dumas, 1884). the monument’s generally well-received design from gustave doré, inspired by a dream dumas once had, included a large stone pedestal with four sides, on top of which was a bronze figure of dumas, smiling and seated, with a pen in one hand and a book in the other (glinel, 1883; “edmond about on dumas,” 1883; henry, 1999; maurois, 1957; leblanc, 1931). at the bottom of the front of the pedestal were three figures symbolizing dumas’s readership: a student, a young girl, and a worker. on the reverse side of the pedestal was a statue of d’artagnan the musketeer. the other sides listed dumas’s major works (see figs. 2 and 3). reimagining dumas as a writer for the common working classes (which suggested those with limited formal educations) and adolescents, rather than the educated elite, reading dumas was encouraged as a means to reinforce education policies regarding the teaching of french history and language as part of the french third republic’s nation-building agenda. national educational reforms led to greater cultural homogenization within france as part of efforts to create a stronger nation-state. historians studying these phenomena have been influenced by eugen weber, who, in his classic work on the french third republic entitled peasants into frenchmen (1976), identified “schools and schooling” as among his “engines of 52 global education review 6 (4) change” driving the modernizing of rural france and forging a common national identity (weber, 2007, pp. 303-338; grew and harrigan, 1992; reed-danahay, 2004). by the time of the french third republic, public schools had become compulsory and free, becoming the heart of the acculturation process that made the people of the french state “french” (see: carter, 2011; helmreich, 1961; palmer, 1974; anderson, 1971; prost, 1968). as weber argued, schoolteachers came to “appear as the militia of the new age, harbingers of enlightenment and of the republican message that reconciled the benighted masses with a new world, superior in wellbeing and democracy” (p. 303). the french third republic consequently increased efforts to make adequate school facilities, its teachers more accessible, and better roads on which children could get to school. it also initiated efforts to make school more meaningful and beneficial to the larger population, thereby becoming important to those they had to teach. figures 2 and 3: photographs of the dumas monument in paris, inaugurated in november 1883. at the bottom of the front of the pedestal are three figures intended to symbolize dumas’s readership: a student, a young girl, and a worker. this article explores the french government’s education policies to illuminate how dumas and his works supported its agendas in its nation-building efforts during the late nineteenth century. however, dumas proved to be a problematic choice. a notable aspect about dumas that was not emphasized in the monument or its inauguration was that dumas was the grandson of an afro-caribbean slave and a norman noble. the speeches made at the inauguration omitted dumas’s caribbean and all for one and one for all 53 biracial heritage and connections to the institution of slavery. with only a few exceptions, the conception of dumas presented at the inauguration—dumas the patriot, dumas the republican, dumas the builder of the french nation, and most importantly, dumas the popular educator of france—gained increasing hegemony and dumas’s biracial heritage and status as a descendant of a black slave became routinely obscured (for exceptions, see: glinel, 1883, pp. 22, 18; dorchain, 1895, pp. 213, 218219). such omissions, which coincided with the french third republic’s renewed colonial agenda through the new imperialism and growth of the intellectual current of scientific racism, marked a radical departure from dumas’s lifetime, during which his racial and colonial background were mentioned frequently. dumas had faced forms of racial prejudice in france during his lifetime because of his caribbean family origins, biracial ancestry, and descent from a slave, prompting contemporaries to describe him as exhibiting an “african” physical appearance or possessing stereotypical characteristics ascribed to his “african” ancestry (martone, 2018). during the late nineteenth century, the rise of scientific racism and aggressive european imperialism around the globe resulted in racial perceptions and worldviews that supported european superiority and equated “european” with being “white.” such developments complicated perceptions of dumas and his works as part of the french patrimony, causing intellectuals and reformers to adapt various and often conflicting approaches to reconcile dumas’s heritage with dominant perceptions of french identity as “white,” as well as search for ways to simultaneously praise and critique dumas’s literary works. as we shall see, this critique of dumas paradoxically manifested itself during the french third republic. by separating his works from the more elite “world of letters” and reclassifying them as unsophisticated and suitable to the more rudimentary educational needs of the common working classes and adolescents for french nation-building purposes, intellectuals and policymakers found a way to simultaneously critique dumas’s “africanness” indirectly while praising his frenchness openly. much of the french criticism levied at dumas and his work had applied negative african stereotypes to the manner in which he lived and constructed his novels. as dumas and his works became symbols of the french patrimony (and therefore france itself) at this time, criticizing his “africanness” indirectly became preferred, as to do so openly would suggest that the french patrimony had “african” elements. this reclassification therefore prevented dumas from being regarded as equal to other “great” french writers; this stigma lasted until the early twenty-first century (petit-rasselle, 2011; martone, 2018). education and nation-building in the early french third republic at the inauguration of the monument to dumas, novelist and journalist edmond about gave a rousing speech that emphasized dumas as “a populizer of our history” who “has instructed or fascinated” generations of frenchmen. his works had “lost none of the freshness” from when first written and he was the greatest teacher of the french past; in reading dumas, one was not only entertained, but simultaneously gained a sense of frenchness. dumas’s works “will be the delight of young people” for generations, he argued, sowing in their hearts and minds a love for france. about concluded with an anecdote, sharing, “i sometimes hear my children disputing with each other because the one has not yet finished the second volume of ‘monte cristo’ when the other, who is awaiting his turn, has arrived at the end of the first” (“edmond 54 global education review 6 (4) about on dumas,” 1883). at the time of about’s speech, which encapsulated the educational role republican policymakers had for dumas, the french third republic was concerned with fostering a french identity amongst its composite population; in particular, these efforts began to focus on the younger generations. teaching them the french language and past were perceived as ways to creating a stronger french future. dumas would play a role in both efforts. the french third republic was a fragile reality, existing primarily because monarchists could not agree on whether to support the bourbon or orléanist claimant to the throne following the deposition of emperor napoléon iii and defeat in the franco-prussian war (see: brown, 1967; kale, 1992). the french third republic based its unity as a collection of citizens and aggressively sought ways to create cultural hegemony within its borders to establish a collective french identity. while national identities are often taken for granted as having “always” existed, they are social constructions forged, maintained, and redefined through various fictional narratives that erase the incongruities by which national identity was formed into a linear and seemingly inevitable progression (anderson, 2006; balibar, 1991). nations, as imaginary constructions whose authentication rests on a system of cultural fictions, also rely in part on popular media, including literature, to preserve stories of national origin and evolution. the republic consolidated national identity in part by reconstructing and making hegemonic a collective memory (see: hazareesingh, 1994 & 2009). such politically and culturally motivated efforts in france encompassed the political spectrum, influencing national policy, including education policy (schlesinger, 1987). reformers built upon gains made in public education by the mid-nineteenth century, as a greater percentage of the population had received some level of education since the french revolutionary era. despite rhetoric about the population as a whole, however, schools targeted boys. since the image of a “student” became equated with the male gender, the paris monument to dumas featured a (male) student and a separate young female figure to demonstrate his relevance to both genders (see: sohn, 2015; on education for girls, see: macleod, 2016; rogers, 1994). nevertheless, the quality of instruction then in place caused officials to question whether true learning was taking place (weber, 2007). in 1833, the government had issued an innovative education law to reorganize primary schools (collins, 1971). a later decree in 1834 set the contours for an official curriculum. children aged 10 and older “shall continue to practice reading, writing, arithmetic and french grammar; in addition they shall be taught elementary geography and history, especially the geography and history of france” (collins, 1971, pp. 129-131). such efforts revealed the government’s existing preoccupation with promoting french, then not spoken by the entire french population, and french geography and history to help forge common foundations for a french cultural nation. french third republic politician and reformer jules ferry (1832-1893) was a staunch advocate of french colonialism, arguably both externally and internally (the former while a member of the french senate and french prime minister, the latter while minister of public education and fine arts). ferry, as minister of public education, abolished all fees and tuition charges in public elementary schools in 1881. the following year, enrollment became compulsory. by 1885, the government established subsidies for building and maintaining schools and teacher salaries. during the 1880s, the government also reinvigorated all for one and one for all 55 elementary teaching program and curriculum, along with provisions for inspection and control (power, 1944; chevallier, 1981). efforts to increase teachers’ professionalization accompanied these initiatives (weber, 207). the government revamped teacher training colleges, and increased salaries and prestige, depicting teachers as missionaries of “civilization” (see: alaimo, 1994; delhome, 1980; quartararo, 1995). schools became expected to improve their students’ manners and customs. such perceptions convinced state leaders that people in general could be “improved” or “civilized” through education, prompting some historians to see a “quasi-colonial dimension” to these domestic policies (weber, 2007, p. 486). educational reformers during the french third republic, however, faced many significant obstacles in their efforts to build a common french identity amongst the larger population. one was the population’s aforementioned lack of knowledge of french. literacy rates among departments were widely uneven. rural populations generally had lower literacy rates than their urban counterparts. schools helped increase literacy rates, but many also overcame literacy through self-education. blocking schools’ literacy efforts was the fact that nearly 20 percent of the population within the french state’s borders in 1863 did not know french. regional dialects, particularly in border areas, remained the primary languages. further, the expansion of france’s political borders and influx of immigrants brought residents whose native language was not french (weil, 2009); brubaker, 1992; weber, 2007). consequently, how to teach french to children who never or hardly knew it was a problem. teachers for these parts of france had to learn how to teach french as a second language, and the government encouraged teaching methods to force the usage of french (weber, 2007). complicating matters was the issue that some rural teachers also struggled with french, and most had not read enough to teach much french literature. as france became more interconnected through increased transportation, communication, and information networks, the use of french became more prevalent; not knowing french ultimately forced one into isolation, prompting a greater interest in and need for learning the language. the spread of kindergartens in the late nineteenth century also helped teach french so that children entering primary school gradually became more familiar with it (see: heywood, 2002; brosterman, 1997; stearns, 2016). throughout the nineteenth century, teachers, however, had difficulty getting students into their classrooms. in general, urban areas had more schools, better teachers, and were better attended. nevertheless, in 1828, government officials estimated that as many as 4 million of 5.5 million children between ages 6 and 15 did not attend any type of school (collins, 1971). children were often required by their families for farm work or other needs and typically attended school for only a few months; schooling, promoted as an activity of cultural and intellectual value, was considered a luxury. one observer lamented that “ignorance still reigns undisputed over the countryside, and…one can place [little reliance] on the help of certain authorities in stimulating the zeal of children and their families when their own lack of education makes them incapable of appreciating it or pointing out its advantages” (collins, 1971, pp. 131-134). the third republic gradually reframed the benefits of schooling for the larger population. schooling had to be perceived as relevant and targeted at the population’s needs. as one school instructor pointed out, “the remedy to this state of things lies in public opinion. even the most ignorant portion of the masses begins to understand that instruction is useful to all…country people know now that reading, writing, and arithmetic are 56 global education review 6 (4) means of rising in the world.” the key to changing public perceptions was financial gain, as a local mayor argued that his townsfolk lacked an interest in school because there was “no immediate or tangible relation to pecuniary profit” (collins, 1971, pp. 325, 326). as jobs continued to expand and diversify during the industrialization of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, occupations beyond their rural communities became a reality. combined with the growing need to learn french to take advantage of these opportunities, the government had a recipe for success. in 1880, a report happily revealed that schooling “is slowly being accepted. families realize that this small diploma can be of use for several kinds of jobs; hence they consent ever more frequently to leave their children at school for a longer time” (collins, 1971, p. 328). another significant obstacle facing educational reformers in their efforts to build a common french identity amongst the larger population was its lack of knowledge about french history. part of teachers’ duties under the french third republic included spreading national and patriotic sentiments, shaping individuals to fit into a society and culture broader than their local one, while persuading them that they were participants in this wider culture and society. the french state devoted substantial attention to children, seeking to “frenchify” the provincial and immigrant populations when they were most impressionable. for example, nineteenthcentury historian jules michelet had perceived the child as an image of an uncorrupted population. as he wrote: the child is the interpreter of the people. nay, he is the people with their inborn truth before they become deformed, the people without vulgarity, without uncouthness, without envy, inspiring neither distrust nor repulsion…no, childhood is not merely an age or a degree in life, it is the people, the innocent people (jan, 1969, pp. 6263). the primary means by which to accomplish this task was teaching french history and geography, which became recognized as instruments of indoctrination and patriotic conditioning. a school official observed, “when properly taught [french history and geography are] the only means of maintaining patriotism in the generations we are bringing up.” consequently, new teachers “must above all be told…that their first duty is to make [their charges] love and understand the fatherland.” school is “an instrument of unity,” an “answer to dangerous centrifugal tendencies” and a “keystone of national defense” (weber, 2007, pp. 332-333). however, competence in french history was lacking among many teachers, slowing its implementation into the curriculum. an 1879 report noted that teachers certified from 1850 to 1868 had never studied french history and had only basic knowledge of it (weber, 2007). when history was taught, teachers focused on reigns and dates and remote historical periods. to help remedy this situation, new textbooks were written to help bring history to life and instill patriotism (maingueneau, 1979). the perception of teaching history as a means to promote national sentiments and unity was long lasting. an 1897 poll asking degree candidates about the uses and purposes of history in education revealed that 80 percent believed it was to exalt patriotism (langlois & seignobos, 1898). literature, particularly historical fiction novels, became a way to further both goals of teaching french language and history. consequently, the french system of education was particularly successful “in instilling a love of literature in the students” throughout its curricula (byrnes, 1951, p. 232). boys in schools became fascinated by tales of a heroic french past and new works of historical fiction for younger readers became a booming business. all for one and one for all 57 contemporary pierre besson remembered acquiring the large history textbook required for his class, spending breaks reading nineteenthcentury literature celebrating past french heroes (ozouf & ozouf, 1964; besson, 1914). the nineteenth-century stabilization of bourgeois hegemony and the expansion of education produced a larger book-reading public of young people eager for knowledge. even though addressed theoretically to the wider public, early literature for young people had a predominantly middle-class readership, particularly since many such books were published in lavish (and hence expensive) illustrated editions (jan, 1969). however, publishing expanded rapidly by the end of the century due to improvements in printing, advancements in transportation and communication networks, and growing urban populations. books were read and acquired across a wider social spectrum and new genres of literature for broader mass consumption developed (byrnes, 1951). in addition, the term “adolescence” was applied increasingly to people in their teens in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, signifying the construction of a distinct developmental stage (arnett, 2001; hall, 2008). in much of the nineteenth century, both adults and young people read dumas’s works, as symbolized by the figures on the monument to dumas in paris. the focus on historical fiction to further the third republic’s nation-building education agendas and the cultivation of new works to meet this need prompted dumas’s work to be re-appropriated within this new genre of adolescent literature. as dumas was increasingly presented as a writer for young people as the century progressed, and the line between adult and adolescent literature became more distinct, dumas became viewed as a writer primarily for adolescents. as a writer of “popular” literature, dumas had incorporated melodramatic episodes, romance, suspense, and comedic segments that could appeal to adolescent tastes. by the late nineteenth century, generations of readers had enjoyed dumas’s works. pierre durat’s 1860s “photobiographie” of dumas featured a cartoon that commented on dumas’s enormous literary output, but also his works’ enjoyableness. the cartoon depicted rows of bookshelves, which contained the “incomplete works of alex. dumas,” that continued beyond the illustration’s frame. an accompanying locomotive bore the caption, “take a tour on the pleasure train.” even in the decades after his death, dumas remained popular with the general public and other french writers composed sequels—such as the son of porthos and the son of monte cristo—to his most famous works, which were published in the english-speaking world as works by dumas himself (compère, 2002 & 2003; dumasy, 2008). the lack of formality and readability of dumas’s works made him an attractive writer to those learning french. in 1873, the writer prosper vialon commented on dumas’s popularity, noting that “everyone has skimmed through some of the prolific storyteller’s books,” even less-educated teachers in the french countryside largely ignorant in french literature (schopp, 2002, p. 134). dumas’s popular works were not just enjoyable, they also detailed the history of france; they were therefore useful for helping to instruct competency in french language and history (bernard, 1996; minott-ahl, 2018; harp, 1998). on occasion, dumas declared his works as comprising a grand series entitled the “drama of france,” which presented a historical vision of french history with a republican slant. in the companions of jéhu, for example, dumas articulated such an agenda: perhaps those who read our books singly are surprised that we sometimes dwell on certain details which seem somewhat long drawn for the book in which they appear. the fact is, we are not 58 global education review 6 (4) writing isolated books, but… we are filling, or trying to fill, an immense frame. to us, the presence of our characters is not limited to their appearance in one book. the man you meet in one book may be a king in a second volume, and exiled or shot in a third. balzac did a great and noble work with a hundred aspects, and he called it the “comédie humaine.” our work, begun at the same time as his…may fitly be called “the drama of france” (dumas, n.d., p. 482; schopp, 2005, pp. 47-66; peng, 2003). the line between history and fiction was less distinct during much of the nineteenth century. the word for “history” and “story” in french, as in other romance languages, is the same. consequently, the line between a teller of stories, or “storyteller,” and a teller of history, or “historian,” was sometimes ambiguous. historical methods were then closely aligned with literature and the humanities, and historians often incorporated literary devices in their works (arnold, 2000; storey, 2015; howell & prevenier, 2001). during the first half of the nineteenth century, french school books already incorporated romanticized accounts of the past. intended for educational purposes, such accounts had already blended the line between fiction and the historical record in the interests of promoting national sentiments. an excerpt from an 1848 history textbook, in the form of a dialogue between a fictitious teacher and student, provides an example: johnnie: who was the greatest of all the kings of france, sir? teacher: it is difficult to say. i have already mentioned charlemagne….alongside him one could place louis xiv…but there was a third; one whom i have seen myself. i have heard his voice; i have stood on guard outside his tent. i can still see his small white hands, and his eyes shining as he passed us in review…i mean napoleon. at first he was a simple artillery officer. he became a general, then first consul of the french republic, and finally emperor of the french and king of italy. he earned all these titles by his victories and by the good that he did to our country. he held out against all europe leagued against him, and won the biggest and most terrible battles that had been fought for centuries. he put france on top again…the benefits of the revolution, which had been bought at the price of so much blood, would probably have been lost forever if napoleon had not come to power….he caused order and justice to reign everywhere, restored plenty, allowed exiles to return, put into full force the new laws that the revolution had been made for, and became through his innumerable victories one of the greatest warriors that world has ever seen (collins, 1971, pp. 125-126). dumas’s particular (romanticized) accounts of the french past were in sync with the goals of the third republic. dumas’s view of history, articulated in his historical work, gaul and france, regarded the spreading of democracy as synonymous with progress. he perceived events as part of a divinely-guided mission toward a republic, which he viewed as france’s destiny (dumas, 2002). such a theme united his historical fiction, which sought to map this progress to his nineteenth-century present. such themes made his work an extremely valuable tool in the third republic’s efforts to construct a common french identity through education. dumas also sprinkled his historical novels with references to historical sources, indicating that his accounts were rooted in research. some examples occur in the red sphinx, set in seventeenth-century france, in which dumas referred to a certain “journal, largely overlooked by historians” that he used to research the events in his chapter. sometimes, he was more explicit, offering a narrative precursor to footnotes to document a specific source: “if you doubt this little detail because you hear it from a novelist instead of from the historians, read the dispatch of january 30, 1619 of the papal nuncio” (dumas, 2017, pp. 76, 81). further, dumas sometimes presented himself as a all for one and one for all 59 professional historian. in the red sphinx, he wrote, “we are sorry to have to reveal this petty weakness in such a great minister [as cardinal richelieu], but we are his historian, not his apologist.” when he did present himself as a novelist, he often suggested he was more knowledgeable than his “professional” historian peers: “but there’s no harm in learning about history from a novelist, especially those details that historians find unworthy to relate, assuming they even know them” (dumas, 2017, pp. 159, 472). dumas’s historical works were thus warmly embraced by the population and the portraits of the historical characters within his “drama of france” acquired a degree of authenticity that surpassed the factual record (higonnet, 1989; allen, 1987). in la comédie littéraire (1895), for example, adolphe brisson devoted a chapter to dumas and history, presenting the writer as a great chronicler of the dramatic story of “france.” critic georges pellissier declared in 1902 that there was an entire classroom contained within dumas’s works. consequently, as french intellectual andré maurois declared in the 1950s, “it should be added that the world at large—and france in particular—has learned french history in the pages of dumas” (maurois, 1957, p. 183). the longevity of dumas’s impact on teaching generations of frenchmen the history and culture of the nation can be found in anecdotes from twentieth-century french intellectuals and politicians. for example, general and president charles de gaulle later admitted, “i love the three musketeers,” which he felt helped inspire his love for france and appreciation for french history during his school-age years (malraux, 1971). andré malraux, minister of cultural affairs during the 1950s and 1960s, recognized that dumas’s readability, popularity, and focus on french history and republican values made the writer suitable as a primary instructor of french culture for adolescents and workingclass individuals; dumas could therefore potentially stimulate an interest in the “higher” french culture he sought to propagate. malraux recalled how he had enjoyed dumas’s novels, such as georges, in school as an adolescent, but moved on from the three musketeers to balzac, regarded as a more urbane writer, as he grew older and continued with his education (winegarten, 1991; lebovics, 1999). dumas: symbol of (white) french civilization? encouraging young students to read dumas to learn french history and praising dumas for instilling in young minds a sense of french identity might superficially appear as a way to celebrate the writer. however, as the anecdote from malraux implies, the issue was more complex. first, dumas was an odd choice for children, especially in the predominantly catholic country of france, considering that his works had been placed on the vatican’s list of “prohibited books” in 1863 for their immorality and depictions of the catholic church or church authority figures (martinez de bujanda, 2002). recent literary scholars have also argued extensively that dumas’s work incorporates mature themes and complexities (net, 2008). as translator lawrence ellsworth points out, dumas “writes in a disturbingly dynamic style [for nineteenth-century french language purists], propelling his story’s action with vigorous language in sentences that are strangely short and direct. his theatrical dialogue is sharp, punchy, and concise, almost like the way real people talk.” further, “there’s violence in…[dumas’s tales, often] sudden and brutal, and erotic thoughts and behavior are depicted in a frank and open manner quite unsuitable to a general audience [of dumas’s era].” consequently, victorian translators of dumas’s books into english regularly censored 60 global education review 6 (4) his writings (dumas, 2017, pp. 777-778; atkinson, 2012). while dumas became regarded increasingly as a writer for adolescents, his peers in the romantic movement that he co-founded did not suffer the same fate, even though his works were no less complex. a main difference between dumas and his contemporaries, however, was his black ancestry and this became a significant factor in how he and his literary works were regarded. despite his successes, dumas had faced forms of racial prejudice in france. even though he was born in france, he faced difficulty in being accepted as “french” because of his afrocaribbean family origins. contemporaries often described him as exhibiting an “african” physical appearance. accounts focused typically on his skin color, hair, and lips (see figure 4). for example, general thiébault, who had served under dumas’s father, described the writer in 1834 as a young man “with skin like a métis, frizzy and thick hair like a nègre, [and] african lips” (calmettes, 1893-1895, ii, p. 32). because of his “african” traits, dumas was perceived widely at the grassroots level as “foreign.” he once recounted an episode in adventures with my pets in which he took an anonymous ride with an “amusing” cabriolet driver. during the drive, the two happened to discuss the department of aisne (where dumas was born) and the driver listed famous men from there. however, he did not mention dumas. when dumas inquired about this omission, the driver replied that it was impossible for the writer to be from villers-cotterêts in aisne. when dumas asked why, the driver replied, “dumas is not from villers-cotterêts…[because he] is a nègre!” as a result, he had to be from the congo or senegal (dumas, 1868, pp.76-81). figure 4: an early 20th-century postcard depicting alexandre dumas as he appeared circa 1860 (collection of the author). dumas also suffered from negative comments from both enemies and friends. in 1844, for example, balzac expressed his contempt for the “nègre” dumas after one of the former’s poorly-selling serial novels was replaced with the latter’s reine margot (audebrand, 1888, p. 49). the classic actress mlle. mars, who starred in dumas’s early plays, disliked him because he was a romantic as well as because of his skin color. she demanded that the windows be opened after dumas left a room because she claimed he left an offensive “nègre” smell (maurice, 1856, i, p. 428). charles nodier, dumas’s friend and mentor, once commented to him, “you negroes are all the same; you love glass beads and toys” (davidson, 1902, p. 45; maurois, 1957, p. 80). dumas was also the victim of racist cartoons in the press. cham and nadar drew dumas as a grotesque figure by emphasizing his “african features” (i.e. lips, hair). cham’s most (in)famous cartoon portrayed dumas as an african cannibal stirring all for one and one for all 61 a pot (see figure 5). such depictions were not unusual (see figure 6). others include dumas leading a parade of tribal africans carrying his awards (neave & neave, 1991). figure 5: this caricature of alexandre dumas from popular nineteenth-century illustrator cham that appeared in le charivari on march 31, 1858 was typical of those that appeared in newspapers during dumas’s lifetime. such caricatures emphasize dumas’s hair, skin color, and lips, which were generally perceived as representative of his black ancestry (public domain image/wikipedia commons). perhaps unsurprisingly, dumas’s afrocaribbean heritage was often a source of criticism levied against him. jean-baptiste jacquot (as eugène de mirecourt) published an infamous pamphlet, fabrique de romans: maison alexandre dumas et compagnie (1845), declaring dumas a “nègre” who wrote none of the works attributed to him. instead, dumas presided over a writing-factory of lesser-knowns who produced works for him to ascribe his name. the pamphlet used the word nègre’s double meaning as a black slave and a ghostwriter to attack dumas professionally and personally. mirecourt went through each of dumas’s works to unveil the “true” author. dumas, he argued, hired “intellectual deserters and translators” at wages that lower them “to the condition of nègres working under the whip of a mulatto!” (mirecourt, 1845, pp. 33-47). figure 6: this image of a bust depicting alexandre dumas with stereotypical black african features appeared in le charivari on october 6, 1835 (collection of the author). much ado has been made in traditional scholarship and biographies about dumas’s extensive use of collaborators, but this was common practice amongst the era’s dramatists and was in itself not unique or scandalous (mazzeo, 2007). as it was no secret that dumas wrote with collaborators, the “scandal” was that white frenchmen were laboring “under the whip of a mulatto,” thereby upsetting the social hierarchy. since the enlightenment, nègre was used as a euphemism for a black slave. it thus had a pejorative connotation. noir, or “black,” was considered the more humanizing term, although being “black” was still associated with slavery (féraud, 1787; dictionnaire de l'académie française, 1798; dictionnaire de l'académie française, 1835). consequently, calling dumas a nègre was to mock him as a 62 global education review 6 (4) slave and colonial subject. in examining what was at stake in mirecourt’s pamphlet, it is important to take into account the era’s “scientific” viewpoint as demonstrated in l’esprit des bêtes (1847): “the animal is the mirror of man as man is the mirror of god…man invents, the animal imitates” (toussenel, 1847, pp. 2, 392). therefore, denying dumas’s role in his works’ creation was to argue that dumas was an imitator, an “animal,” primitive and backward to white frenchmen due to his black ancestry. mirecourt’s pamphlet also mocked dumas’s appearance, ancestry, and behavior to indicate his difference from other french people and similarity to inferior “savages”: “dumas’s physique is well known: he has the stature of a drum-major, herculean limbs at full stretch, protruding lips, an african nose, kinky hair, and a bronze face. his origin is written all over him; but it reveals itself even more in his character. scratch the surface of dumas and you will find the savage. there are elements of both the nègre and the marquis in him. however, the marquis is only skin deep. remove some of the makeup, tear off the loose costume… [and under] the civilized surface, the nègre soon bares his teeth at you. the marquis plays his role in public, while the nègre betrays himself in private” (mirecourt, 1845, p. 7). mirecourt further indicated dumas’s backward, primitive nature in his pamphlet: “his garments inconvenience him, he strips and works in picturesque undress of our first ancestors. he stretches out on the floor like a dog from the new world; he lunches on potatoes taken burning hot from the ashes of the hearth and devours them without removing the skins – nègre!... like the chiefs of amerindian tribes, whom explorers persuade with baubles, dumas loves everything that glistens, everything that shimmers. he has ribbons from various orders…he pins his decorations on his chest. the toys seduce him… – nègre!” (mirecourt, 1845, pp. 7-8). thus, some detractors perceived dumas, as a copier of others, as being primitive, backward, or even sub-human. victor pavie declared that dumas was foremost an african characterized “by the heat of his blood and the spontaneity of his nature” forged under the “rays of the black african sun.” consequently, dumas was “a dramatic plagiarist, a compiler, not without verve, of schiller, shakespeare, [and] goethe” (schopp, 2002, p. 48). mirecourt’s attacks, however, revealed a broader concern. contemporaries were uncertain how to classify dumas due to his biracial ancestry. those who attempted to present dumas as part of the french nation had to reconcile dumas’s africanness with his frenchness. some described the “racial wars” fought within him. for example, hippolyte de villemessant declared that the french “race” had triumphed, for “the nègre had been beaten by civilized man; the impulsiveness of african blood had been tempered by the elegance of european civilization.” consequently, “what was repulsive in him had been transfigured by the clarity of his intelligence and his blossoming success” (schopp, 2002, 186). dumas’s detractors argued the reverse. pavie, for example, declared that “the refinements of an exuberant civilization have not been able to tame” dumas’s black blood (schopp, 2002, 56). dumas’s bon vivant lifestyle also became perceived as contrary to prevailing, normative middle-class sentiments of morality and thus indicative of his black african ancestry. many reports focused on dumas’s alleged spending habits, style of dress, late-night carousing, lack of work ethic, and extreme fondness for food and women as signs of “africanness.” one periodical argued that “he displayed the ethiopian’s fondness for bright colors and dresseccentricities” (every saturday, january 28, 1871). an 1871 obituary declared that dumas reflected his black ancestry in being a man all for one and one for all 63 without restraint, acquiring “scores of fortunes” that he ran through “by his unbridled luxury and dissipation” (“editor’s literary record,” march 1871; mathews, september 1881). another similarly claimed that dumas’s “purse was open at both ends, yawning to be filled at one and running empty at the other. gold burned a hole in his pocket, and he hated to be hot” (browne, november 1873). yet another article described his works as being written “with a carelessness, recklessness, and audacious pursuit of excitement.” dumas was criticized for using “scarcely any revision,” which was attributed to his lack of reflective faculties due to his black ancestry. one 1871 article bluntly ascribed dumas’s excesses to his “africanness,” adding that he was sexually promiscuous, for “matrimony is an institution of which dumas never comprehended the necessity or even the propriety” (“editor’s literary record,” march 1871; bigelow, april 1871). by the time of his death, however, dumas had achieved global fame and popularity within france based on his historical novels, which made him a symbol of french identity. among those making speeches at the inauguration of dumas’s monument, discussed at the beginning of this article, was playwright jules claretie, who praised dumas as an innovator of french theater, the “living personification of the drama—the drama incarnate.” most significant of all, however, was that he “diffused through the world the intelligence of the french race” (“edmond about on dumas,” 20 november 1883). edmond about praised dumas’s “genius of narration,” arguing that the golden age of the serial novel was the “reign of dumas the first.” consequently, his glory was a “patriotic glory” (“edmond about on dumas,” 20 november 1883). as historian michael garval has argued, the french sought “cultural permanence” through the creation of monuments that “helped a nation in flux define itself, its relation to the past, and anticipated survival into the future.” such a context provided the basis for the literary field’s growing conception of great writers’ “immortality” through their works. the physical monument, like the one to dumas, served as a metaphor for the lasting work of the great writer and fused the writer and his works in the viewers’ minds as a symbol of france and its heritage (garval, 2003, p. 83). victor hugo expressed this conception in a fragment for les contemplations: “what we write is our own flesh/ the book is to such an extent the author, and the poem/ the poet” (hugo, 1964-1967, ii, p. 853). hugo’s lines revealed the idea that the writer’s work is, in a sense, the writer himself. as a result, great writers “became” their works and lived on through them, achieving a sense of monumental immortality (garval, 2003, p. 92). through this fusion, dumas and his works were integral to the french patrimony and demonstrative of the french essence. as hippolyte parigot, an early dumas biographer, suggested in 1902, the four musketeers embodied “a living sense of france”: in that lies the secret charm of the four heroes: d’artagnan, athos, porthos, and aramis. fierce determination, aristocratic melancholy, a somewhat vain strength, an elegance, at once subtle and gallant – it is these qualities that make of them… an epitome of that gracious, courageous, light-hearted france which we still like to recover through the imagination… d’artagnan, the adroit gascon, caressing his moustache; porthos, the muscular and foolish; athos, the somewhat romantic grand seigneur; [and] aramis…the discreet aramis, who hides his religion and his amours, able student of the good fathers… – these four friends…typify the four cardinal qualities of our country…if danton and napoleon were the professors of french energy, dumas, in the three musketeers is its national historian (parigot, 1902, pp.140-141). this embodiment of the french essence by dumas and his works/characters created a 64 global education review 6 (4) problem for many french intellectuals and politicians. the republican vision of france generally assumed an “essential” french nature that all “french” individuals shared, or, for outsiders, could assimilate to (betts, 2005). nevertheless, by the end of the nineteenth century, european and white became conflated identities of an exclusionary nature, making whiteness the epitome of civilization and morality (bonnett, 1998). consequently, the french patrimony was not recognized as including individuals of black african descent or black african culture; such elements, however, occupied a crucial part of dumas’s personal heritage and had provided the basis for much literary criticism against his work. therefore, dumas’s low critical esteem, but high popularity, created a paradox. as we saw briefly, most of the “defects” ascribed to him and his works had been stereotypical of people of black african descent during the nineteenth century. as spurr observed in 1902, dumas was “dowered at birth with many of the [perceived] characteristics, good and bad, of the african race—the ardent, imaginative temperament, the levity of nature, the impulsive soul—a host of qualities which were strange to the comprehension of both friends and enemies in after-life; because side by side with them were all the [perceived] native characteristics of the frenchman, existent in full vigor” (spurr, 2003, pp. 4-5). three primary and ongoing events during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, which was an era of cultural debates within french society, made dumas’s biracial ancestry an especially thorny problem in regard to his status as a symbol of france: the new imperialism, scientific racism, and an increase in immigration to france. the late nineteenth century was an era of renewed european imperialism during which the french republic grew a vast colonial empire focused in africa and asia. ideas regarding race and civilization were used to justify these efforts. as politician léon blum declared in 1924, “we are too imbued with love of our country to disavow the expansion of french thought and civilisation…we recognise the right and even the duty of superior races to draw unto them those who have not yet arrived at the same level of culture” (aldrichm 1996, p. 115). dominant racial thinking during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries identified human races’ plural origins, associated races with linnean species, and was skeptical toward racial hybridity’s viability. many believed that races were primordial, natural, enduring, and distinct. to arthur de gobineau, a writer and aristocrat who helped popularize scientific racism, civilizations were the accomplishments of “pure” biological races, which could degenerate over time by mixing with other groups. he created a civilizational hierarchy placing black africans at the bottom. such “biological” inferiority was irrefutable and unchangeable. as a result, the “lesson of history” supported the domination and subordination of certain races by others, since “all civilizations derive from the white race” and “none can exist without its help” (gobineau, 1999, pp. 27, 56, 210). others shared gobineau’s views. as social scientist gustave le bon argued, “one can award a negro a bachelor of arts degree, a doctorate, [but] one cannot make him civilized” (mazlish, 2004, p. 63). charles richet, a respected early twentiethcentury physiology professor, argued that evidence provided “absolute” certainty that races possessed distinguishable hereditary characteristics (richet, 1919, p. 23). advocates held that colonialism was bringing the world together in a way that caused the violation of nature. without colonialism, races would remain reciprocally exclusive. an explorer, honoré jacuinot, noted that “the negro appears hideous all for one and one for all 65 to each european, in the same way that our paleness will be regarded with disdain by the black man. for coupling to take place between these two species, there must necessarily be a perversion of the generative impulse” of nature. he criticized the “shameful exploitation” on the part of humankind by another, without which these mixings would “not or only rarely exist.” a métis, or an individual of mixed-race, was an “abnormal, monstrous being, which persists under the influence of the conditions that presided at his creation” (blanckart, 2003, p. 49). such frenchmen therefore perceived métis as shifting ambiguously and threateningly between frenchness and foreignness (white, 2002; steinmetz, 2007; saada, 2012). many holders of such views interpreted dumas negatively, and in 1886, dumas’s paris monument was desecrated because it celebrated a figure of racial hybridity (“the statue of dumas blackened,” 5 march 1886). richet confessed that one could “assuredly” find “examples of mulattoes and métis intellectually well endowed.” he noted that “alexandre dumas, whose father, general dumas, was clearly mulatto…can be cited among the most intelligent men of the nineteenth century; but his case is unique,” and moreover his “black blood” was minimal (richet, 1919, pp. 82-83, 84). south america and the caribbean were “contaminated by inferior races” because of such mixing between europeans, indigenous populations, and blacks and provided an example of how france should not be. mixing between blacks and whites in france would cause physical degeneracy, which was linked to the health of the nation (richet, 1919, pp. 84-85, 92, 252). by the late nineteenth century, france was also the largest recipient of immigrants in europe and the french birthrate was declining. contemporary ways of defining french citizenship crystallized during the third republic. the generally progressive opening of frenchness to “foreigners” in legal terms did not necessarily equate to the opening of frenchness to “foreigners” in social and cultural terms. attacks on immigrant workers increased in times of uncertainty and economic slumps, and jews and algerian muslims particularly had difficulty gaining acceptance (brubaker, 1992; weil, 2009; weber, 2007). therefore, legal acquisition of frenchness often meant little when one moved “beyond legislative texts to interactions at the grassroots,” thereby prompting debates about what it meant to be french and increasing concern about the protection of a distinct french identity (boswell, 2009, p. 119; brown, 2010). journalist charles maurras, in his right-wing paper l’action française, for example, explained the disparity between the true france, comprised of individuals imbibed with a surreal and uniting french essence, and the legal france, comprised of those who were technically french citizens or residents, but not french in spirit (lebovics, 2006; carroll, 1995). french intellectuals had no universal answer to reconcile dumas’s “incompatible” black ancestry with his french ancestry. a few sought to avoid the issue by resurrecting mirecourt’s allegations that dumas was not the writer of the works attributed to him; such a claim was used to imply that dumas’s works were authored by true “frenchmen” and thus protect the “whiteness” of the french patrimony (see: brunetière, 1905-1919, iv, p. 261). most, however, perceived reconciliation as important to re-stabilize an exclusive french identity. since dumas was now an icon of frenchnesss, intellectuals, journalists, and politicians tended to “forget” his biracial background, or at least marginalize it to the point of irrelevancy to preserve in a contradictory fashion a stable, white, and “modern” french identity. through marginalization or avoidance, dumas’s 66 global education review 6 (4) africanness “disappeared” or was “irrelevant,” thereby making him “french” in the process. henri blaze de bury’s, gabriel ferry’s, and charles glinel’s popular 1880s books on dumas all generally refrained from mentioning his multiracial background and at times purposefully obscured it (bury, 2008; glinel, 1884; ferry, 1883). glinel did include a letter from dumas to the haitian government asking them to erect a monument to his father. however, glinel prefaced the letter by stating that it had “been brought to light in early 1883 through the efforts of researchers of strange facts,” thereby marginalizing the importance of dumas’s relationship to the caribbean (glinel, 1884, p. 355; emphasis added). ferry’s account repeated dumas’s anecdote about the cab driver also discussed earlier. yet, ferry prefaced it as an “amusing” story that “proves that many people believe that the author of the three musketeers is indeed a man of color!” (ferry, 1883, pp. 149-154). the exclamation point at the end and dismissive tone indicated that perceptions of dumas as a “man of color” were quite incredulous. in another example, a journal argued that dumas’s father had been referred to “incorrectly” as a “mulatto,” for dumas’s grandmother could “have hardly been a fullblooded negress” because she had the “education and energy” to manage dumas’s grandfather’s estate (“the dumas lineage,” january 1896). such an account was one among many that sought to reduce dumas’s black ancestry. as a flexible social construct, individuals perceived as reaching “whiteness,” regardless of their descent, could be reclassified. whiteness, as a category of identification, lacked geographic specificity, while “blacks” were more clearly perceived as people “of african nativity, or african descent” (lopez, 1996, pp. 51-52). therefore, whiteness “became a measure…of… modernity,” and served as a means to exclude groups perceived as nonwhite from partaking in “privileges inhering in whiteness” (koshy, 2001, pp. 156, 167, 168; harris, 1993, p. 1736). as dumas progressively became a symbol of french civilization, he came to be viewed increasingly as “white.” during the peak of the new imperialism and scientific racism, dumas was depicted more frequently as “white” in portraits and his connection to the colonies and black ancestry was marginalized. therefore, while admitting dumas’s black ancestry to some degree in the era’s textual discourse, such as brief biographies that accompanied his works, the visual images generally portrayed a physically “white” dumas that reinforced perceptions that he was not really a “black” writer at all. figures 7 and 8 provide examples of such images, which limited the physical characteristics contemporaries had described as “african,” including the kinkiness of dumas’s hair, skin tone, and lips. such images offered a radical contrast to the example provided earlier in figures 5 and 6, which emphasized dumas’s african features to separate him from the “french” nation. the visualization of dumas and his racial conceptualization are inexorably intertwined. in such depictions, we see how the perceived moral, intellectual, or cultural accomplishments (or defects) of individuals of black descent could influence how they were imagined physically as either black or white. if, as the adage goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words,” such images negated whatever limited admittance of his black ancestry was made, inscribing in french viewers’ minds a lasting conception of dumas as a “white” writer, not just symbolically, but physically. all for one and one for all 67 figure 7: several companies, such as chocolat lombart, used images of alexandre dumas to sell products during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. in this advertisement, dumas’s date of birth is incorrectly listed as 1803 instead of 1802 (collection of the author). such trends continued in works of literary criticism. dumas’s literary reputation in the realm of french literature steadily declined as the nineteenth century progressed. from 1829 to 1830, dumas was critically and publicly perceived as the creator, or, along with victor hugo as the co-creator, of the french romantic movement in the theater. dumas began to lose this position as the decade progressed. in contrast, hugo’s critical reputation soared at dumas’s expense. as celebrated critic saintebeuve wrote, after 1832, hugo was considered the greater writer “by several lengths.” while dumas had some talent, there was “something about that talent which one could almost describe as physical.” dumas’s work was thus perceived as a carnal overflow of his “tropical” afro-caribbean vitality rather than thought-out, serious pieces (maurois, 1957, p. 136; bassan, 1974, pp. 767-772). similarly, critic gustave planche wrote, “dumas is not in the habit of thinking. with him, action follows on the heels of desire with childlike rapidity. consequently, he has rushed into doing battle without having considered the value of the monument which he has wished to tear down….dumas has all serious artists against him” (maurois, 1957, pp. 135-136; berthier, 1998, pp. 55-65). figure 8: a version of a popular late nineteenthcentury french illustration by m. léloir and j. huyot depicting dumas at work (collection of the author). with such negative images of both blacks in general and dumas in particular reinforced throughout french society, dumas’s literary reputation had hardly improved with the beginning of a new century. the seventh part of glinel’s book, entitled “death and posterity,” included a 27-page defense of dumas’s character and literary worth (glinel, 1884). henry spurr’s 68 global education review 6 (4) 1902 biography admitted the need to defend dumas against the allegations of mirecourt, a “contractor for the gutter press,” made in fabrique de romans, even though it was “over sixty years since they were made,” proved libel in court, and dismissed by dumas and his peers in “the higher ranks of literature.” nevertheless, spurr lamented, the charges “have been accepted almost universally as the truth” in reference and popular works in both english and french (spurr, 2003, pp. vii-ix, 83). similar to glinel, spurr felt the need to include lengthy sections entitled “his character” and “his genius: a defense.” even factual inaccuracies about dumas regarding his date of birth and parentage persisted throughout the nineteenth century (for example, see: jeanroy-félix, 1889). as biographer a. craig bell noted in 1950, “dumas is a river which academicians, critics and literary snobs have been fouling for half a century” (bell, 1950, p. ix). as early as 1848, literary critics like charles robin could declare that dumas “has been the subject of more interpretations, true and false, and of more literary battles than any other writer of the nineteenth century” (bell, 1950, p. ix). the “historical novel à la dumas” was in general considered an inferior literary genre by certain critics “from the point of view of creative power and originality of invention” (haxo, 1933, p. 226). yet, the nineteenth-century literary critic joseph marie quérard was overly critical of dumas. in his five-volume les supercheries littéraires dévoilées, he argued that dumas never wrote anything at all and merely rearranged the work of others (and not necessarily for the better). as journalist philibert audebrand wrote satirically in 1888, dumas had written so much that “when old quérard, that benedictine of our age, tried to take an inventory of the rich bibliography of the country, when he arrived at... [dumas’s] name, he could barely refrain from a slight shudder of fear. the very name on the works of this giant weakened his resolve. how could one man undertake such a task? in truth, he explained that 92 collaborators had cooperated to the realization of so many works” (schopp, 2002, p. 114). the critics of the generation of rené doumic and ferdinand brunetière also marginalized dumas’s literary accomplishments (doumic, 1897; rod, 1892). brunetière wrote that dumas’s dramatic works “are not literature. they have no style and the form remains indecisive, imprecise, and banal. the psychology found in his work is without depth. they are poorly composed. the life of the man explains the character of his work” (brunetière, 1905-1919, iv, pp. 247-261). dumas’s novels, he argued, possess “literary qualities” but they are “industrial novels” hastily composed (p. 261). yet, unlike critics during dumas’s lifetime, brunetière did not focus on dumas’s race or ancestry in his degrading account; this became the norm during the third republic. other literary historians often overlooked dumas, devoting chapters to writers such as stendhal, george sand, sainte-beuve, and anatole france, but only brief coverage to dumas. for example, gustave lanson’s 1923 histoire illustrée de la littérature française, while providing some detail on dumas’s dramas, clearly gave him a largely subordinate role to that of hugo. dumas’s novels are dismissed in his chapter on the serial novels of the 1840s, the time during which dumas was at his literary peak (lanson, 1923). as georges pellissier, another critic, asked in the early 1900s, can dumas be called one of the “great french writers”? according to him, while dumas may be popular, his novels “are not much in way of literature (pellissier, n.d., p. 232). in 1906, a monument to the “glory of dumas fils” was inaugurated in paris next to the one of dumas (“le monument de dumas,” 13 june 1906). journalist albert marche argued that french genius “matured” within the dumas family, all for one and one for all 69 which became increasingly “french” each generation—and therefore implied they were increasingly less “african” (marche, 12 june 1906). compliments for dumas’s literary works scattered the pages of academic works during the course of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. henri blaze de bury confessed that “dumas is popular, but he is not known. his method of life and his occasional worthless books greatly damaged his literary position. he is usually looked upon simply as an ‘amuser,’ and yet…more than many others, he had his moments of lofty thought and philosophy” (bury, 2008, p. 34). most academics, like jeanroy-félix, preferred to limit any praise for dumas to his dramas (jeanroyfélix, 1889). the great writer anatole france also held a higher opinion of dumas than most academics and regarded him as the sole founder of the romantic movement in the theatre and a great storyteller in his novels (dargan, 1939; lapaque, 2002). in addition, adolphe brisson confessed that, “to be fair, the author of the three musketeers had the gift of foresight, and a kind of instinct…guiding him in his compositions” (brisson, 1895, p. 225). yet many dulled their praise. for example, a 1904 review of francis miltoun’s dumas’s france claimed that while dumas made “certain passages of history…almost…his own,” he was “not an archaeologist as was victor hugo…[nor] a critic or student of manners as was honoré balzac” (“the paris of romance,” 3 december 1904). as a result of lingering negative perceptions of dumas’s work and his association with adolescent (and hence “fluff” or “less sophisticated”) literature, the centenary of dumas’s birth in 1902 was overshadowed by that of hugo, who was born in the same year and whose literary reputation has soared during the late nineteenth century. le petit journal expressed its opinion that dumas’s centenary was, in comparison, “with infinitely less pomp than the one for victor hugo.” while the newspaper did not disagree with this emphasis, for dumas “did not attain the same heights at the inspired poet [hugo],” he nevertheless “spread throughout the entire world the honor of our literature.” the newspaper therefore concluded with a petition to not honor hugo less, but to honor dumas “a little more” (“centenaire d’alexandre dumas,” 13 july 1902). dumas’s novels, while not lauded for their style or literary value, were commended for educating the nation, thereby helping forge a sense of a common national past. while dumas took “liberties with history, he was also a great teacher” of the subject since he was able to mix learning with entertainment (“centenaire d’alexandre dumas,” 13 july 1902). the international press reiterated the common french view that dumas was an “amuser” with no particular social message or complexity. they thus argued that he would “have been ashamed” to find himself taken seriously as a literary figure during his centenary (“the centenary of dumas,” 26 july 1902). dumas’s multiracial background was routinely omitted or marginalized. le petit journal, for example, made a sole reference to it in a sentence that stated his father was a “mulatto general” (“centenaire d’alexandre dumas,” 13 july 1902). since dumas had become a symbol of “france,” intellectuals were in general not keen on emphasizing his black heritage during the height of the new imperialism. some french intellectuals attempted to distance dumas from his black colonial heritage. nevertheless, the fact of dumas’s black heritage remained. because of his usefulness for republican agendas, politicians and intellectuals did not wish to disparage dumas openly; instead, they routinely emphasized his “whiteness” and downgraded his literary work. the development of adolescent 70 global education review 6 (4) literature, however, provided a way to simultaneously praise while denigrating dumas. individuals in societies beyond the west that had never reached the level of european “civilization” were viewed as existing in a primitive state of evolution akin to “adolescence” in human development. such “childlike” individuals passed on their impulsive, irrational, and simplistic characteristics from generation to generation. the racial images solidifying black africans as inferior because of their “primitive” state, which was reflected in their “childish” behavior, were reinforced culturally (schneider, 1982). commercial trademark images, for example, were important media through ideas about extra-european peoples disseminated across the public because they were encountered in their daily home environment and therefore could shape racial conceptions. the images of colonial peoples adapted earlier representations, and used clothing, facial expressions, and other decorations to accentuate the exotic qualities of the colonial subjects that correlated to how they had been perceived visually as well as their (subordinate) role in greater france. africans were depicted often as primitive, or childlike (hale, 2003 & 2008). in addition, literature reinforced existing racial images. guy de maupassant’s 1883 short story “timbuctoo” is representative of how. in the story, a french officer relates how timbuctoo, an african colonial soldier, possesses the “characteristics of overgrown frolicsome children” (maupassant, 1947; martone, 2009). consequently, dumas, linked previously with the “primitive” colonial world, became connected with the state of adolescence. his work, criticized as lacking in depth, style, and refinement, were perceived as works that lacked the complexity of more “mature” pieces of literature that demonstrated the “true” complexity of french culture. hence, dumas’s work was deemed suitable primarily for those of the same intellectual capacity as its writer. re-categorizing dumas’s works as adolescent literature was, therefore, a way to carry on french racism through non-racial means. adolescent literature emerged quickly as a tool to sanctify the nation in the minds of future generations, reinforcing a sense of french superiority and colonial perceptions (dine, 1997). young readers were indoctrinated with what it meant to be french through mass culture. dumas’s novels became associated with the popular “boys’ books” of the late nineteenth century (bruzelius, 2007; lerer ,2008). to be fair, romantic serial novels, like dumas’s, had been a prototype for this sub-genre, as they were often full of action and heroic figures, building tension around “cliffhangers” to create tales that fused duty to one’s nation with adventure (jan, 1969). underneath the associations with adolescents, however, was the reclassification of dumas’s novels, intended for adult readers at the time of publication, as solely juvenile fiction to lessen their literary value. the implication was that dumas’s novels were less sophisticated, and that adults who read them did so as a way to reconnect with their childhoods, rather than engage in “serious” literary reading. such perceptions disassociated dumas from the most critically-praised french writers, in turn causing dumas to be neglected by french scholars and intellectuals throughout the late nineteenth and first half of the twentieth century. this veiled criticism was a way to simultaneously praise dumas as a symbol of frenchness while critiquing dumas’s and his work’s “africanness” without explicitly doing do, for the contrary would suggest that the french patrimony was not exclusively “white.” the growing perception of his works as adolescent literature was enough to bury dumas in academic terms. in the 1990s, literary scholar dorothy trench-bonett put forth several reasons to account for the lack of academic studies on all for one and one for all 71 dumas during the twentieth century. she placed particular emphasis on his status as a writer for young people, which had led critics to underestimate the complexity of his works (1991, pp. 26-27). while the french academy held a respectable opinion of dumas when it was under the influence of dumas fils, who held sway over french cultural opinion during the height of his fame, the academy in general during the third republic did not hold a high estimate of dumas’s literary value. the often-conservative academies came to serve as unique governmentsponsored intellectual authorities in france and issued supreme-court judgment over their intellectual domains (crosland, 2001). as one historian summarized, “the french critic has difficulty in admitting that children’s literature can be the bearer of poetry” (jan, 1969, p. 71). dumas’s works might be readable and useful to instruct young people on french history, but as a result, no “respectable” scholar would herald them as “good” pieces of literature. conclusion the french third republic based its unity as a collection of citizens and aggressively sought ways to create cultural hegemony within the state’s borders to establish a collective french identity within its political borders. the third republic’s attempt to forge a collective past through national commemorations led to the “statuemania” of the last quarter of the nineteenth century (garval, 2003, pp. 91-95; best, 2010; rearick, 1986; lehning 2001). literature’s commercialization during the century, which coincided with a rise in literacy and a mass press, transformed literary figures from notables in small intellectual circles to popular celebrities, or cultural icons (lanfranchi, 1979; garval, 2003). events such as inaugurations for monuments to cultural heroes like those to dumas linked such figures to the republic and the republic to the nation, and helped consolidate a french republican identity. education played a seminal role in forging a new french nation and dumas and his literary works occupied a crucial role in these efforts. following dumas’s death, hugo wrote a sentimental condolence letter to dumas fils that already articulated an image of dumas as a global representative of french “civilization”: during this century, there was no more popular figure than alexandre dumas…his dramas have been played throughout the entire world; his novels have been translated into all languages… dumas is one of those men who can be called the sowers of civilization…he fertilizes the soul, the mind, the intelligence; he creates a thirst for reading; he penetrates the human genius and sows seeds in it. what he seeds is the french idea. the french idea encompasses a quantity of humanity which produces progress wherever it penetrates… from all his work, in such multiplicity, so varied, so vivid, so charming, so powerful, springs a kind of light which is france’s very own (schopp, 1988, pp. 489-491). hugo’s letter implied that dumas’s works were part of the french patrimony, a part of france itself. wherever and whenever they were read, they “sowed” the seeds of french culture in the hearts and minds of the readers. dumas was thus an agent of french “civilization.” as a symbol of france, however, dumas posed a conceptual dilemma because of his black ancestry. being french became synonymous with being “white.” how could dumas be simultaneously french and black? french biographical studies on dumas, particularly during the late-nineteenth century and first twothirds of the twentieth century, generally downplayed the impact of his black ancestry to support the myth of a color blind french society and the perception of french culture as being the product of people of european stock, or “whites.” because of its french revolutionary heritage, the french third republic conceived itself as the source of “liberty, equality, and 72 global education review 6 (4) fraternity” (despite its colonialism) and as the birthplace of the rights of man. france thus harbored a myth that it was not “racist” like its western counterparts. as a symbol of france, dumas posed a conceptual dilemma during the rise of the new imperialism and scientific racism because of his black ancestry and past experiences with racism. as a result, dumas’s portraits and caricatures generally reflect a departure from those during his lifetime. rather than accentuate his “black” features, it became the norm to accentuate his caucasian features. as a result, portraits and caricatures of dumas during the third republic generally reflect a radical departure from those during his lifetime. rather than commonly accentuate dumas’s “black” features, it became increasingly the norm to accentuate his caucasian features. as art historian jose ortega y gasset has noted, “a traditional painter painting a portrait claims to have got hold of the unfortunately real person when, in truth and at best, he has set down on the canvas a schematic selection, arbitrarily decided on by his mind, from the innumerable traits that make a living person” (gasset, 1968, p. 38). consequently, such portraits of dumas reflect the artists’ conscious or subconscious perceptions of him and suggest the view that dumas was increasingly regarded as both “white” and “french.” dumas’s status as “symbolically white” by virtue of being part of the french heritage cast him in a contradictory role (koshy, 2001, p. 168). french intellectual elites generally praised dumas as a popular, though not great, writer. the base lower classes may like dumas, but no urbane french academic would praise him. since black african stereotypes depicted them as “childlike,” dumas’s work was rationalized as being written at a low intellectual level. as a result, his work, unlike that of other french romantics, was denigrated as solely adolescent literature. this served dual (but conflicting) purposes: it encouraged young people to read dumas, which they largely enjoyed, to instill in their impressionable minds the basics of, and love for, french history to help consolidate national sentiments. at the same time, it prevented him from being perceived as equal to truly great “french” literary figures, thereby allowing a means through which to criticize dumas’s “africanness” without mentioning it directly to protect his symbolic whiteness bestowed as a symbol of france. in this sense, french school curricula fostered an unrecognized cultural bias that promoted a particular conception of frenchness and racial hierarchies during the era of the new imperialism. references agulhon, maurice. 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(may 1991). alexandre dumas: fact and fiction. new criterion, 9. about the author eric martone, ph.d., is associate professor of history/social studies education and interim dean of the school of education at mercy college all for one and one for all 79 in new york. he completed his doctorate in history at stony brook university. his books include the ippy award-winning finding monte cristo: alexandre dumas and the french atlantic world (2018), the black musketeer: reevaluating alexandre dumas within the francophone world (2011), and the forthcoming alexandre dumas as a french symbol since 1870: all for one and one for all in a global france. kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 157 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: laub, jochen, & mikhail, thomas. (2023). kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour. global education review, 10 (1-2), 157-171. kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour jochen laub thomas mikhail abstract immanuel kant is a leading thinker in philosophy, but in educational science, and consequently in the philosophy of education, he does not have any significant importance – one might think. for his 300th birthday in 2024, kant’s collected works will appear in a new edition of the so-called academy edition – including his lecture on pedagogy from 1803. in this context, l. koch and t. mikhail, who are responsible for the publication of this work, give the first complete overview of all translations. it shows that kant’s lectures on pedagogy have appeared in 18 different foreign languages with 50 first editions. this is astonishing against the background that in the german-speaking area it is assumed that scholars who deal intensively with kant’s pedagogy are a “lost bunch” (fischer, 1998, 125) – especially because of kant’s complicated language and trains of thought (cf. guyer/wood 2020). firstly, the article will show how far kant’s lectures on pedagogy has spread worldwide since 1808, only 5 years after its publication in the original. secondly, the article shows results of a qualitative content analysis of the paratexts (forewords by the editors). the comparative analysis of the framings of german and english editions reveals differences in lines of interpretations of the quality of the text and its relation to kant’s ethics. it turns out that english-language editors evaluate the lectures far more positively and link their status to kant’s genius as a philosopher. keywords immanuel kant; content analysis; philosophy of education; global science network; general education introduction immanuel kant is one of the most important thinkers of modern science. his œuvre subsequently shaped the development of philosophy, the natural sciences, and the humanities. his works are still being translated, read and quoted worldwide (schlüter, 2020). for pedagogy it can be stated that kant’s ideas about education have achieved a disciplinedefining status too (webb, 2020; sticker & bakhurst, 2021). the worldwide distribution of his lectures on pedagogy shows this. in the german-speaking world, however, kant’s lectures are still neglected to this day. as late as 1998, wolfgang fischer, one of the few german-speaking pedagogical experts on kant at the end of the 20th century, came to the conclusion that those who dealt intensively with kant’s pedagogy or his lectures on pedagogy were a “lost bunch” (fischer, 1998, p. 125). this judgment can only have been made at the time without taking into account or acknowledging great international interest. the opposite is the case. since 1998 alone, 16 first editions of the text have appeared worldwide in 11 different national languages. in addition, around 30 reprints and follow-up editions of earlier editions were published. in contrast to fischer's judgment, kant's lectures seem to receive a great deal of attention worldwide. kant’s lectures on pedagogy are extremely controversial, especially in the 158 global education review 10 (1-2) german-language philosophy of education (mikhail, 2017). this controversy is related to the question of whether or not it is an authentic work by immanuel kant. the lectures were published in 1803 by kant’s former student and later colleague friedrich theodor rink – first in a longer version, then in the same year in an abridged version. even in the earliest subsequent print of the lectures, in the so-called rosenkranz edition of 1838, friedrich wilhelm schubert points out in his preface that rink must have massively intervened in the publication version. at the latest, after the detailed investigation by the swiss education historian, traugott weisskopf, the question of authenticity of the lectures on pedagogy is one of the dominant, topics in the german-speaking world (see also the two essays by werner stark in the kant-studies, 2000; 2012). weisskopf (1970) tries to prove that the work is based on kant’s notes, but essentially obtained the form of publication through rink’s interventions in terms of content, composition and style. at the end of his study, he even goes so far as to demand that the lectures shall be removed from the academy edition, precisely because, in his opinion, it is not an authentic text by kant. in the foreign-language editions, this discussion is rarely an issue at all. taking this difference as an opportunity, the following question arises as to how kant’s lectures on pedagogy were judged in the various national pedagogical specialist discourses. what discipline-shaping importance and what pedagogical quality can be attributed to kant’s lectures worldwide? the object of this investigation is not the translation of kant’s writings, but the editor’s introductions (of course this has to be explained and justified). this research question would require the analysis of all editions published worldwide or all of their introductions; however, such comprehensive investigation cannot be carried out here, yet. it is related to a larger research project currently being planned, which intends to pursue the global attribution of significance to kant’s lectures on pedagogy and their assessment. in the following, we will start off by comparing the assessments in selected germanlanguage editions with the three englishlanguage editions that have appeared so far. this sampling unit is examined by using a qualitative content analysis approach according to mayring (2015) and kuckartz (2018) with regard to the leading research question. we will proceed in four steps: 1. comments on the global distribution of kant’s lectures on pedagogy with a special focus on its beginning; 2. comments on the research method and the text genre of the editor’s introduction; 3. results; and 4. discussion of the results. kant’s lectures on pedagogy and their global spreading on the occasion of immanuel kant’s 300th birthday in 2024, the berlin-brandenburg academy of sciences and humanities will publish a new edition of the academy edition. despite the disputed question of authenticity, the lectures on pedagogy will be reprinted in volume 9 of section i, which contains kant’s original works. lutz koch & thomas mikhail are responsible for the new edition. for the editorial report of the new edition, they have prepared an almost complete overview of all editions of the lectures – the german-language editions as well as the translations. this bibliography is far more extensive than that of the cambridge edition by robert b. louden & günter zöller (2007), which meanwhile has become the worldwide standard, and also larger than the impressive online project “kant in the classroom”, which was recently created at the university of manchester (naragon, 2020). according to the bibliography of koch & mikhail, kant’s lectures on pedagogy kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 159 were published in 16 different foreign languages with 45 first editions, plus 15 german-language editions. a total of over 100 translations, including reprints and subsequent editions, are now circulating worldwide. in the course of research for this article, further first editions were also found, so that a total of 50 foreignlanguage first editions can now be listed. with the persian and turkish translations, there are also 18 national languages (see table 2 below this article). surveying the worldwide distribution history of the first editions, the rapid spread of the lectures all over the world since the beginning of the 20th century is striking. this can be traced back to the first english edition of 1899 and the reprint in the 1905 french complete edition. both editions served as translation templates for many of the subsequent foreign language editions, insofar as they did not fall back on german models (especially those by hartenstein) and english and french acted as linguae francae in the sciences. while germanlanguage editions still dominated in the 19th century, there was a strong trend towards foreignlanguage prints of the lectures in the 20th century. secondly, the accumulation of first editions in the new millennium, i.e., in the period after fischer’s judgment on the “lost bunch”, is striking – at least from the perspective of the german-language philosophy of education. the last german text edition of the lectures actually dates from 1964, which makes fischer’s assessment of 1998 at least somewhat understandable. in norway, greece and in the russian-speaking area, editions are available for the first time in the new millennium. in china and denmark, new translations appeared more than 100 years after the first national-language editions. this confirms the thesis that kant’s lectures outside of germany have not lost their interest in the global philosophy of education. on the contrary, this interest seems to be increasing worldwide. as the map shows, kant’s work spread from the publication center in central europe to all regions of the world. figure 1. places of publication of the first editions worldwide 160 global education review 10 (1-2) thirdly, the large number of italian editions is noticeable, the earliest of which dating back to 1808, heralded its worldwide spread only five years after the publication of the original. in fact, there is no language into which the lectures have been translated more often than italian. in the period between 1985 and 2015 alone, they appeared 50 times in italian, including first editions, reprints and subsequent editions (petrone, 2020, p. 140). this puts the lectures on pedagogy in fifth place among the most frequently used works by kant in italian, even ahead of the critique of judgment. this beginning of global distribution should be briefly considered here. an annotated translation was published in denmark the same year as the italian edition. however, this edition, prepared by the writer jens stephen heger, was not available, which is why we cannot make any statements about it. the italian edition was provided by the german-born painter and multilingual translation talent august eckerlin, who had already translated kant’s physical geography a year earlier, in 1807. in his introduction, he praises the lectures on pedagogy as a model (“tipo”) of a liberal educational idea (“liberali idee sulla educazione”) (eckerlin, 1808, p. ix). eckerlin then presents this work as the basic theory for developing good taste (“perfezionamento del buon gusto”), placing it at the center of an aesthetic educational theory. overall, he considers kant’s lectures to be so successful that he hopes his translation will serve as an opportunity to prescribe a perfect educational plan for italian youth, as kant himself intends to do in his work for all countries of the world. ecklerin’s introduction is noteworthy as aspects of aesthetic education in the german edition history were only addressed by otto willmann (1873, p. 44) in connection with the lectures, but otherwise are not mentioned anywhere. first, this shows that a qualitative analysis of the editor’s introductions can enrich the professional discourse on kant’s theory of education with aspects that have received little attention up to now. secondly, it shows that kant’s work definitely deserves to be considered as defining the discipline for the philosophy of education, precisely in the sense of a “tipo.” the text genre of the editor’s introductions the lectures on pedagogy open up very different question horizons due to their global distribution and also because of kant's charisma. the present study refers to the formulated question about the differences in the assessment of the work with regard to its discipline-shaping importance and its educational-theoretical quality considered from the different national perspectives. this shifts the focus to the prefaces and introductions of the editors. these texts can be understood as a special text genre, namely as research contributions to kant’s lectures that are independent of the translations. introductions refer to a text (here to a scientifically educational text), but also as an independent scientific paratext. prefaces and introductions give a scientific paratexual framing to the referred main text (wirth, 2004; 2010). according to genette (1982), such paratexts function as a framing prescription or as a reading instruction. in this respect, they also instruct about the structural order and guiding interpretation patterns of the text. however, these interpretation patterns refer even more to the knowledge and the state of research of the editors and thus at least indirectly or even directly to the state of knowledge of the scientific communities they belong to (genette, 1982, p. 191). scientific paratexts show a relatively high level of standardization and can be considered to be of high quality, since their authors can usually be kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 161 considered important representatives and experts of their respective national scientific community. editors and thus their introductions have a relatively high scientific status and show a credible assessment of a text that they paratextually frame and the importance of this text for contemporary national scientific discourse. as paratexts, prefaces and introductions do not have the character of spontaneous statements, but represent controlled statements on a main text staged as a key text. research method the methodological access to the selected paratexts follows a qualitative-empirical approach, as developed by mayring (2015) and kuckartz (2018), who are closely linked to the work of siegfried kracauer and clive seale. the focus is placed on the content level of the texts in the interpretative discussion. aspects of social and power structure levels as would be possible following michel foucault’s discourse-analytical approach (keller, 2008; keller & truschkat, 2013) remain excluded. such a content analysis requires the complete coding of the texts (with maxqda) according to an adequate category system. the selection of categories, particularly in the question of whether they are formed inductively or deductively, can only be made and legitimized depending on the question and the text corpus. in a deductive procedure, the categories are determined a piori and the text units are coded accordingly. in induction, the category system is developed from the coded texts. both, question and sampling units we have chosen, suggest a deductive procedure specifically, these are the categories according to which walther schwarz (1915) examined kant’s lectures on pedagogy. the deductive approach can be justified by the fact that we are dealing with such a prominent text for which extensive secondary and research literature is available. the points of investigation found there hardly seem to be expanded by an inductive approach. schwarz’s (1912) category system can be justified insofar as his study was not only awarded the kant prize in 1912 by kant’s alma mater in königsberg. in addition to weisskopf’s book, it represents the most profound, comprehensive and detailed study of kant’s lectures to date, containing a structure which was also widely adapted by weisskopf. its structure, which serves us as a category system, is abstract enough that the coding does not already anticipate the answer to the research question. the following four meta-categories can be differentiated according to schwarz: category i status of the text, category ii work-immanent relations, category iii external references, category iv topics of education and educational theory. these categories can be further differentiated for the coding, also following schwarz’s research points (see table 1 below). category i provides information about the dominant theme of authenticity in germanlanguage pedagogy, but also about the fragmentary nature of the lectures, which has been repeatedly criticized since the rosencrantz edition (schubert, 1838, p. xvi). this category is central to our research question of assessing the quality of the text. category ii is ostensibly more relevant to philosophical kant research, but references mentioned in the lectures on pedagogy to other works by kant, in particular to the critique of pure reason and the moralphilosophical writings, also allow assessments of scientific quality the importance of these works is ultimately undisputed (rohlf, 2020). category iii allows conclusions to be drawn as to whether or not kant and his lectures have a disciplineshaping significance and are therefore decisive for the history of the philosophy of education, i.e., whether he is also seen in education as a key 162 global education review 10 (1-2) thinker like john locke and jean-jacques rousseau or not. ultimately, category iv can show how kant’s pedagogical ideas can be assessed qualitatively and on the basis of concrete problem-solving. this category also allows a direct comparison with regard to the importance and quality of the writing that shaped the discipline. before we present the results, a comment on the legitimacy of the recording units is required. since only three first editions are available in english (davids, 1899; buchner, 1904; cambridge edition, 2007) and we are restricting ourselves to english editions in this article, this sampling unit also forms the recording units. from the sampling unit of the german-language prefaces and introductions, we have determined those by otto willmann (1873), theodor vogt (1878) and paul natorp’s comment text from the academy edition (1923) as the recording units (the bibliographical information on these 6 paratexts can be found in figure 2, not in the references). in terms of standardization and scientific status, the choice of the academy edition clearly corresponds to louden’s introduction to the cambridge edition. the paratexts by the german educational philosopher willmann and the austrian educational philosopher vogt are appropriate because they have written detailed introductions that are similar to the scope of davids and buchner. additionally, willmann and vogt, together with davids and buchner, form what can be described as a “denkkollektiv” (thought collective) with ludwik fleck (1980), in that they occur in a conceptual sequence. both davids and buchner quote or name willmann and vogt. a comparison of the different assessments of writing is therefore needed, especially within this thought collective with regard to this direct reference. results the schematic overview shows which categories occur in the introductions. table 1. category occurrence in german and english introductions category i status of the text for the german introductions, schubert’s assessment as the earliest germanlanguage commentary has become paradigmatic and groundbreaking (leone, 2019). in the rosenkranz edition he writes that kant’s lectures are merely “fragmentarily presented papers” (schubert, 1838, p. xvi). he closely links this character of the fragmentary to the context of origins, which was achieved through a compilation of “many single scraps of paper” (ibid.) on which kant is said to have spent little willmann (1873) vogt (1878) academy edition (1923) davids (1899) buchner (1904) cambridge edition (2007) cat. i status of the text context of origins x x x x x x quality x x x x x x specifity x x x x x x author’s characteristics x x x x x cat. ii work-immanent relations works on ethics x x x x x x anthropology (religion) x x x x x critique of pure reason x x x x x works on philosophy of history & political theory x x x x essays concerning the philanthropinum x x x x x others x x x cat. iii external references locke x x rousseau x x x x basedow x x x x x others x x x cat. iv topics of education and educational theory aim of education x x x x x nature and classification of education x x x x x determination of education x x x x x scientification of pedagogy x x x x other topics x x kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 163 time and effort. referring to this, natorp judges in the academy edition that “a satisfying disposition cannot be recognized” (1923, p. 569). willmann, to whom the academy edition refers, also believes that these are “loosenotes”, although he unquestionably counts the lectures as part of the “collection of the most important pedagogical documents” (1873, p. 5). vogt attests the work to be “rich in excellent thoughts” (1878, p. 67), but it lacks the scientific-philosophical character that one would actually expect from kant. although the english paratexts also address the fragmentary character of the lectures, they do not assess it as critically. davids, as the earliest commentator, knows that the writing “was not compiled for publication by the master himself” (1899, p. v). therefore, the lectures do not give an “exhaustive theory of education” (ibid.). nevertheless, according to davids, it will “prove a benefit” to english readers, and modern pedagogy “will in no wise suffer from keeping in view kant’s wide and high prospect” (1899, p. xviii). in the course of the content analysis, it is noticeable that davids sometimes seems to forget that kant is not the writer of the lectures (figure 2, “the hand of the writer”). buchner reports on the germanlanguage discussion about quality and also addresses the criticism shared by the majority (explicitly also by vogt). in this context, however, he also mentions the study of the austrian anton burger (1863), who was of the opinion that “kant did entertain an idea of education which had organizing power” (buchner, 1904, p. 65). however, buchner refrains from making his own assessment. in the cambridge edition, louden is clearer. in terms of the quality of the lectures, he sees “a less familiar kant”, who does “not always say what we expect or want him to say” (cambridge 2007, p. 17). the cambridge edition does not address the problem of authenticity at all. typical for all three english-language introductions is the evidence of the quality of the lectures with reference to the brilliant intellectual characteristics of their author. davids is paradigmatic when he writes “kant is too great to be merely historically interesting” (1899, p. xv). figure 2. kant’s personal characteristics as a quality feature of the text (davids-text, maxqda-view) category ii work-immanent relations for willmann (1873) and vogt (1878) there is no question that the lectures on pedagogy are related to kant’s ethical writings and also to anthropology from a pragmatic point of view. only from this context could their importance be adequately assessed. it is remarkable in the academy edition that kant’s “non-application of the categories” from the critique of pure reason, which willmann also criticizes, is seen as a systematic weakness (natorp, 1923, p. 560). in this context, vogt criticizes that the lectures are “free from the considerations of philosophical presuppositions”, which is why he attributes to the paper “only an empirical character” (1878, 67). this is a relatively devastating judgment for the german tradition of philosophy of education of his time. what is worth mentioning for all 164 global education review 10 (1-2) three german paratexts is the attempt to locate the lectures in the overall work through many different references – regardless of the open question about kant’s authorship – and thus, at least to some extent, to vouch for their quality. this is an indication, according to koch & mikhail in the new academy edition appearing in 2024, that the editor rink could never have accomplished this feat without a very decent manuscript template from kant’s own hands, so that kant is presumably the lead author of the lectures. the english introductions also refer to other kantian works, even to lesser-known ones such as physical geography (davids, 1899, p. v; buchner, 1904, p. 85). buchner makes detailed references to the three critiques. in these considerations, however, he neither criticizes the non-application of the categories from transcendental analytics nor the lack of philosophical presuppositions. rather, he arrives at the positive assessment by applying a psychological reading, thanks to kant’s “genial entertainment” (buchner, 1904, p. 55). overall, however, similar to the german-language introductions, the reference to kant’s moral writings and anthropology is considered to be the most important. although louden does not explicitly address these relations in the cambridge edition, they become evident through the citations in his introduction. category iii external references as table 1 indicates, the biggest difference between the german and englishparatexts lies in the category of external references. while vogt does not provide a single external reference and while the academy edition only mentions basedow once (in a completely irrelevant context), english introductions present the lectures as a historically valuable key text and kant as a key thinker of enlightenment education. according to davids, kant stands in direct line of thought with comenius and locke who “had been fashioning him” (1899, p. ix). according to louden, “kant follows basedow, who in turn follows rousseau, who in turn follows locke” (2007, p. 15). the influence of rousseau, whose émile “produced a great impression” on kant (buchner, 1904, p. 22), is strongly emphasized in the english introductions, especially by buchner. buchner also names basedow and montaigne who were kant’s “associates” (1904, p. 22). montaigne’s influence in particular cannot be overestimated for kant’s thinking about education (kühn, 2001, p. 79; see also willmann, 1873, p. 21). willmann (1873) is also the only german educational philosopher who very astutely points out the similarities, but also the differences between kant and rousseau. in contrast, the english introductions emphasize rousseau‘s influence on kant, his further development and his modifications. category iv topics of education and educational theory in this category, there are also major differences between the german and englishlanguage introductions, although these are not immediately obvious. apart from the fact that natorp does not say a word about the content of the lectures on pedagogy in the academy edition, the discussion in willmann and vogt is fundamentally different from that in davids, buchner and the cambridge edition. willmann and vogt take an extremely critical view of the fundamental theoretical problems that kant addresses in the lectures. vogt considers kant’s transcendental theory of freedom in his ethics incompatible with the moral education in the lectures. according to him, this problematic difference is “unsolvable” (vogt, 1878, p. 51). in addition, willmann refers to schleiermacher and herbart with the objection that kant’s theory of kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 165 freedom would have “collapsed in its origins” if he had considered the problem of education earlier (willmann, 1873, p. 55). overall, willmann completely relativizes kant’s thoughts on moralization as the main goal of education and instead refers to a “practical education restricted to children” (1873, p. 54). on the other hand, the english introductions emphasizes the theoretical and systematic strengths of the script. what is particularly striking (also because this aspect is not mentioned in the german introductions) is the emphasis on the cosmopolitan trait that is laid out in kant’s lectures (louden, 2007, p. 52). central to this is the connection between experimentalism and naturalism (louden) or between dogmatic and inductive procedures (davids), which is shown through references to kant’s critical philosophy. the three english introductions also emphasize both the connection made in the lectures between nature and reason (in the dichotomy of physical and practical education) as well as a positive thematization of moralization as the goal of all education, which buchner even systematically justifies. buchner’s judgment on the lectures is characteristic of this aspect: “for it is a supreme moral idealism which is thus introduced into pedagogy. it is at this point that his greatest service to education is to be seen.” (buchner, 1904, p. 69) it is also buchner who, like the earliest italian editor eckerlin, sets out the foundations for a theory of aesthetic education in the lectures on pedagogy. discussion the comparative analysis of the german and english-language introductions clarifies the differences in the perception and assessment of the respective editors of the paratextual framings of kant’s lectures on pedagogy. the analysis clearly shows that some aspects, especially in categories i and ii, were assessed very similarly. this primarily concerns the fragmentary character of the presentation and the location of the lectures in kant’s complete works. nevertheless, the differences are fundamental. the focus of the english-speaking editors is therefore much more on the content of the lectures. their assessments are also largely positive, i.e., they are aimed at the retrospective justification of kant’s educational theory. the german editors, on the other hand, are increasingly focusing on the formal editorial problems, also in a deficit-oriented direction. a key finding is that english editions relate the lectures to moral philosophy in a much more positive manner than the german editors do. in fact, this reference is not only made biographically, but also on the level of content. in the english-speaking world, kant’s pedagogy and his moral philosophy are understood as being theoretically complementary, but by german editors as being antagonistic. kant’s groundbreaking turn in transcendental moral philosophy is also reflected in the interpretation by the englishspeaking editors of his pedagogy. this reflection was not taken into consideration by german editors. on the contrary, they dispute the possibility of the compatibility of freedom and educational influence and thus emphasize the gap between kant’s ethics and his educational theory in the lectures. in comparison to the english publishers the appreciation of ethics among german editors does not lead to their appreciation of pedagogy, but rather to a disparagement of it. overall, the comparison reveals differences in cultures of interpretation when dealing with the script. willmann and vogt show a very formalistic culture of interpretation, which primarily focuses on the form of the lectures and their origin. the english-speaking 166 global education review 10 (1-2) editors, above all davids and buchner, assume the characteristics of the author as “earnest, wise and sane” (figure 2). in this respect, they hardly dwell on the context in which the writing came about and the questions associated with it, but rather focus more on the content-related discussion. in their introductions, they always take the brilliant kant as a basis, seriously, unreservedly, and sometimes even benevolently. it is therefore not surprising that the english editors accord kant the status of an educational key thinker, much more than the german editors. category iii has shown that the englishlanguage editors consider the importance of kant’s educational theory for the history of western philosophy of education to be far greater than the german editors consider it to be. the analysis of the editor’s introductions as paratextual framings proves to be fruitful. due to the expertise of the editors and the formal standardization of the text genre, a more realistic insight into the worldwide assessment of the lectures can be gained than through the analysis of secondary literature such as articles in journals or anthologies. this access enables a deep insight into the global assessment of writing and its significance. the texts analyzed here illustrate lines of argumentations that seem very deeply grounded in national discourses. in this way, (national) thought collectives can be reconstructed with some degree of reliability in their assessment of kant’s lectures on pedagogy. however, the comparative analysis also clearly shows that the arguments within a collective of thought can be very complex. it would be useful to consider a broader, perhaps even complete, qualitative comparison across different languages and national discourses of philosophy of education to see how kant’s lectures on pedagogy are framed globally. just as kant’s lectures have been “in motion” for more than 200 years, research into this central educational work could also set “in motion” in the future. references burger, a. (1863). über die gliederung der pädagogik kants. ottenschlag/austria: burger. fischer, w. (1998). immanuel kant. in löwisch, d.-j. (ed.). philosophen als pädagogen. wichtige entwürfe klassischer denker. darmstadt: wbg. fleck, l. (1980). entstehung und entwicklung einer wissenschaftlichen tatsache. einführung in die lehre vom denkstil und denkkollektiv. frankfurt/m.: suhrkamp. genette, g. (1982). palimpsestes. la littérature au second degré. paris: seuil. keller, r. (2008). diskurse und dispositive analysieren. die wissenssoziologische diskursanalyse als beitrag zu einer wissensanalytischen profilierung der diskursforschung. historical social research, vol. 33(1), 73-107. keller, r. & truschkat, i. (eds.) (2013). methodologie und praxis der wissenssoziologischen diskursanalyse. vol. 1: interdisziplinäre perspektiven. wiesbaden: springer. kuckartz, u. (2018): qualitative inhaltsanalyse. methoden, praxis, computerunterstützung. weinheim/basel: beltz juventa. kühn, m. (2001). kant. a biography. cambridge university press. leone, f. (2019). immanuel kant über erziehung. begründung und aspekte der pädagogik in kants philosophischen schriften. tübingen: university press. louden, r. b. (ed.) (2007). general introduction. immanuel kant. anthropology, history, and education (= the cambridge kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 167 edition of the works of immanuel kant). cambridge: university press, (1-17). mayring, p. (2015). qualitative inhaltsanalyse. grundlagen und techniken. weinheim/basel: beltz. mikhail, t. (2017). kant als pädagoge. einführung mit zentralen texten. paderborn: schöningh. naragon, s. (2020). internet resources for translating kant. in schlüter, g. (ed.): kants schriften in übersetzungen (= archiv für begriffsgeschichte, sonderheft 15). hamburg: meiner, (305-321). petrone, g. l. (2020). die italienischen kant-übersetzungen (1985-2017). in schlüter, g. (ed.): kants schriften in übersetzungen (= archiv für begriffsgeschichte, sonderheft 15). hamburg: meiner, (121-155). rohlf, m. (2020) “immanuel kant”. the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy (fall edition), edward n. zalta (ed.). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/en tries/kant/ schwarz, w. (1915). immanuel kant als pädagoge. langensalza: hermann beyer & söhne. stark, w. (2000). vorlesung – nachlass – druckschrift? bemerkungen zu kant über pädagogik. kant-studien, 91 (special volume), (94-105). stark, w. (2012). immanuel kant “ueber pädagogik”: eine vorlesung wie jede andere? jahrbuch für historische bildungsforschung, vol. 18. bad heilbrunn: klinkhardt, (147-168). sticker, m. & bakhurst, d. (eds.) (2021). kant on education and improvement. journal of philosophy of education, vol. 55, issue 6 (special issue). webb, s. (ed.) (2020). interpreting kant in education. journal of philosophy of education, vol. 54, issue 6 (special issue). weisskopf, t. (1970). immanuel kant und die pädagogik. beiträge zu einer monographie. zürich: evz. wirth, u. (2004). das vorwort als performative, paratextuelle und parergonale rahmung. in: fohrmann, jürgen/ detering, heinrich (hg.): rhetorik. figuration und performanz. stuttgart/weimar: metzler, (603– 628). wirth, u. (2010). paratextualität und parergonalität: der rahmen als zwischenraum. in benthin, c. & klein, g. (eds.). übersetzen und rahmen. praktiken medialer transformationen. paderborn: fink, (59-72). https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/kant/ https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2020/entries/kant/ 168 global education review 10 (1-2) appendix table 2. chronology of first editions worldwide year language first edition 1803 (original) german immanuel kant über pädagogik. hg. v. d. friedrich theodor rink. königsberg: nicolovius. 1808 danish iman. kant om opdragelsen.oversættelse af jens stephen heger. copenhagen: kongelig og universitets-bogtrykker. 1808 italian idee di emanuele kant sull’educazione pubblicate dal dott. rink. traduzione dal tedesco di august eckerlin. milan: silvestri. 1819 polish o pedagogice. tlumaczenie jána bobrowskiego. wilna: drukarni xx. missyonarzow p.k.ś. kazimierza. 1838 german über pädagogik. hg. v. friedrich wilhelm schubert. in immanuel kant’s sämmtliche werke. hg. v. karl rosenkranz und friedrich wilhelm schubert. neunter theil. leipzig: voss, (367-438). 1839 german immanuel kant über pädagogik. in immanuel kant’s werke, sorgfältig revidirte gesammtausgabe in zehn bänden. zehnter band. hg. v. gustav hartenstein, leipzig: modes und baumann, (379-450). 1868 german immanuel kant über pädagogik. in immanuel kant’s sämmtliche werke. in chronologischer reihenfolge hg. v. gustav hartenstein. achter band. leipzig: voss, (453-513). 1873 german immanuel kant über pädagogik. hg. und erl. v. julius hermann von kirchmann. (= philosophische bibliothek, bd. 57). berlin: heimann, (209-276). 1873 german immanuel kant. über pädagogik. mit einleitung und anmerkungen versehen von prof. dr. o. willmann. leipzig: sigismund &vilkening. 1878 german immanuel kant. über pädagogik. mit kant’s biographie hg. von theodor vogt. langensalza: beyer & söhne. 1883 dutch immanuel kant over pedagogiek (= paedagogische bibliotheek, bd. 16). vertaald door jan geluk. amsterdam: versluys. 1883 italian la pedagogia du emanuele kant. proemio e traduzione di angelo valdarnini. torino/roma/milano/firenze/napoli: g. b. paravia). 1886 french traité de pédagogie. traduction par jules barni. avec une préface, des sommaires analytiques et un lexique par raymond thamin. paris: felix alcan. 1890 german immanuel kant (= die klassiker der pädagogik, bd. xi) bearb. v. g. fröhlich. langensalza: koerner. 1892 latin de tractatu kantii paedagogico. proponebat georges dumesnil. paris: librairie hachette et cie. 1899 english on education by immanuel kant. translated by annette churton with an introduction by foley rhys davids. london: kegan, paul, trench, trübner & co. ltd. 1904 english the educational theory of immanuel kant. translated an edited with an introduction by edward franklin buchner. philadelphia/london: lippincott, (99-222). 1905 french traité de pédagogie. dans: eléments métaphysiques de la doctrine de la vertu (2e partie de la métaphysique des moeurs): suivis d‘un traité de kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 169 pédagogie. traduit de l‘allemand par jules barni avec une introduction analytique et critique du traducteur (= oeuvres completes de kant). paris: durand. 1911 spanish kant, pestalozzi y goethe sobre educacion. traducción lorenzo luzuriaga. madrid: daniel jorro. 1912 romanian tratat de pedagogie. de constantin victor buţureanu. bucuresti: editura librariei ‘universala’ alacalay. 1914 chinese 康德教育論. translated by qu junong. shanghai: shang wu yin shu guan. 1920 german immanuel kant. über pädagogik (= taschenausgabe der philosophischen bibliothek, heft 57). hg. v. karl vorländer. leipzig: meiner. 1922 germann immanuel kant über pädagogik. in: vermischte schriften. mit einleitung, anmerkungen, personenund sachregister neu hg. v. karl vorländer. leipzig: meiner, (189-251). 1923 german vorlesungen kants über pädagogik. hg. v. otto buek. in: immanuel kants werke, bd. viii. in gemeinschaft mit h. cohen u.a., hg. v. ernst cassirer. berlin: cassirer, (453-508). 1923 german pädagogik. hg. v. paul natorp. kant’s werke. akademieausgabe, bd. 9. berlin/leipzig: de gruyter, (437-499). 1933 turkish kant’ın pedagojisi. çev. mustafa rahmi balaban, i̇zmir: fikirler neşriyatı. 1934 italian la pedagogia. traduzione di f. rubitschek. studio critico introduttivo di l. ventura. firenze: battistelli. 1934 italian la pedagogia. prefazione, versione e note di adolfo zamboni. torino et al.: societa editrice internatzionale. 1934 japanese カント教育学: 全訳 (kanto kyōikugaku: zen&apos;yaku). translation by hiroshi nishida. tōkyō: meguro shoten. 1938 japanese 內容:敎育学. translation by jinjō kiba,. in: kiba, j. (ed.). 敎育学其他 (kyōikugaku sonota). tōkyō: iwanami shoten. 1941 italian pedagogia. di luigi causo. verona: la scaligera. 1949 arabic kitāb fī-t-tarbīya. tarǧama ṭahṭāwī ǧūharī. al-qāhira: al-maṭbaʿ assalafīya. 1953 italian la pedagogia. rivista da rosario assunto e rolf hohenemser. bari: laterza. 1954 italian l‘opera pedagogica. la pedagogia e i frammenti. introduzione, traduzione e note di lucia bruno. catania: edizioni b. 1955 italian pedagogia. traduzione, introduzione e commento nicola abbagnano. torino: luni editrice. 1959 italian lezioni di pedagogia. di giuseppe catalfamo. messina: d’anna. 1959 japanese 教育学. translation by kiyoshi shimizu. in:人間学; 教育学 (ningengaku). machida: tamagawa daigaku shuppanbu. 1960 german immanuel kant über pädagogik (= klinkhardts pädagogische quellentexte). hg. v. theodor friedrich. bad heilbrunn: klinkhardt. 1961 german immanuel kant. über pädagogik (= kamps pädagogische taschenbücher, bd. 5). hg. v. hermann holstein. bochum: kamps. 1961 french réflexions sur l’éducation (= bibliothèque des textes philosophiques). introduction, traduction et notes par alexis philonenko. paris: vrin. 1963 italian la pedagogia. traduzione, introduzione e note di vincenzo de ruvo. roma: signorelli. 170 global education review 10 (1-2) 1963 german immanuel kant. ausgewählte schriften zur pädagogik und ihrer begründung. besorgt v. hans-hermann groothoff unter mitwirkung von edgar reimers. paderborn: schöningh, 1963 (7-59). 1964 german immanuel kant über pädagogik. in: immanuel kant. werke in sechs bänden. hg. v. wilhelm weischedel. bd. 6. wiesbaden: insel, (691-761). 1971 japanese 內容:敎育学講義. translated by shuichi katsuta. in: hims../yōko iseda (ed.). pädagogik. der streit der fakultäten. tokyo: meiji-tosho-shuppan. 1974 italian il pensiero filosofico e pedagogico. a cura di pietro chiodi. torino: loescher, 1981 persian taʿlīm va tarbīyat. translation by ġolām-hosseyn šokūhī, teheran: entešārāt-e dānešgāh-e tehrān. 1986 french propos de pédagogie. dans: œuvres philosophiques, tome iii: les derniers écrits. sous la direction de ferdinand alquié. paris: gallimard, (1145-1203). 1991 spanish sobre pedagogía. pròleg de joan-carles mèlich i sangrà; traducció de jaume tió. madrid: eumo editorial. 1996 italian antologia di scritti pedagogici. a cura di giordano formizzi. verona: gabrielli. 1996 portuguese sobre a pedagogia. tradução de francisco cock fontanella. piracicaba: unimep. 2000 danish om pædagogik. redigeret af vagn lyhne. oversat af bengt mosspetersen. arhus: klim. 2001 italian l’arte di educare. a cura di andrea gentile. roma: armando, 2001. 2002 chinese 康德論教育 (kang de lun jiao yu). translated by jia fuming. tai bei shi: wu nan. 2002 romanian despre pedagogie. traducere și studiu introductiv traian brăileanu, prefață constantin stroe bucureşti: paideia. 2004 greek peri paidagōgikēs. translated by paraskeuē sidera-lytra. thessalonikē: kyriakidēs. 2005 chinese 論教育. transl. by zhao peng und zhaowu. shanghai: shanghai century publishing group. 2006 turkish eğitim üzerine. çev. ahmet aydoğan. i̇stanbul: i̇z yayıncılık 2007 english lectures on pedagogy. in anthropology, history and education, translation by robert p. louden. cambridge: university press, 2007 (437485). 2009 italian la pedagogia. a cura di luciana bellatalla e giovanni genovesi. roma: anicia. 2009 spanish sobre pedagogia. traduccion y nota preliminar por oscar caeiro. cordoba/argentina: editorial unc. 2010 chinese 教育學 (jiao yu xue). translation by qiuling li. in li, q. (ed.). 邏輯學. 自然地理學.教育學 (luo ji xue. zi ran di li xue. jiao yu xue). beijing: renmin university press (vol. 9 chinese academy edition). 2012 portuguese sobre a pedagogia. tradução et notas de joão tiago proença. lisboa: edições 70. 2013 russian/ uzbek pedagogika tugrisida. translated by mirzali akbarov. taschkent: niso poligraf. 2015 italian pedagogia.traduzione, introduzione e commento di nicola abbagnano. milan: luni. kant’s lectures on pedagogy on world tour 171 2016 norwegian om pedagogikk. oversatt med forord, noter og kommentarer av bjarne hansen. innledning ved lars løvlie. etterord ved svein østerud. oslo: aschehoug & co. 2019 turkish eğitim üzerine. çev. s. emre bekman. instanbul: i̇z yayıncılık. developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 25 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: peperkorn, colin & wegner, claas (2024). developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness in the context of design-based research (dbr). global education review, 11 (2), 25-45. developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness in the context of design-based research (dbr) colin peperkorn claas wegner abstract identifying and fostering gifted students is crucial in educational science and psychology. giftedness diagnostics must be based on profound domain-specific concepts and acknowledge the variety of talents to enable a successful individual education. growing challenges like digitalization, decarbonization, demographic changes, and pandemics increase the need for creative and productive professionals in stem fields. educational practitioners are expected to identify and foster these talents, confronted with the discourse between academic science and psychology about giftedness. due to the lack of domainspecific diagnostic instruments, the individual expression of giftedness is often neglected during diagnostic procedures in educational practice and general intelligence tests are used instead. to address this problem, this paper presents the development process of a domain-specific diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness. to bridge the gap between theory and practice and incorporate knowledge from various fields, the development process is integrated into design-based research (dbr). therefore, we theoretically examine how the principles of dbr and test development can be connected. we present our research approach and check how the planned development process can lead to a test instrument suitable for practice and further knowledge about giftedness diagnostics. the project demonstrates that dbr is suitable for developing didactic interventions but can also lead to innovations in psychometrics and improve giftedness diagnostics in practice through additional quality criteria. keywords giftedness, stem, test development, dbr introduction identifying and nurturing gifted students is crucial to educational and psychological research. a thorough understanding of domain-specific gifted behaviors is necessary to acknowledge the variety of talents and provide adequate education to these students (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a; renzulli & reis, 2021). there is a growing demand for creative and productive professionals in stem fields (demary et al., 2021), and the fostering of scientific talents is of increasing interest due to various global challenges such as digitalization, decarbonization, demographic shifts, and pandemics. in germany, about 496,50 positions in stem professions are vacant (anger et al., 2023). pedagogical diagnostics represent an essential prerequisite for successful gifted education. it serves as a basis for sound decisions on fostering gifted students (fischer & fischer-ontrup, 2022). teachers face diagnosing their students’ giftedness in school and considering subject-specific characteristics. giftedness diagnostics in school there is an ongoing discourse between psychological and educational research on giftedness (rost, 2013). the international panel global education review 11 (2) for experts of gifted education defines giftedness as follows: giftedness is generally understood to be the overall capacity for achievement. more specifically, giftedness refers to the individual's level of development of performance-related potential, i.e., those preconditions which, with the appropriate disposition and long-term, systematic stimulation, support, and encouragement, enable the individual to act in a meaningful and responsible manner and to carry out demanding activities in areas considered valuable in the respective culture. (ipege, 2009, p. 17) accordingly, giftedness develops through cognitive preconditions, appropriate environmental factors, and targeted fostering. this pedagogical approach emphasizes creating a supportive learning environment for gifted individuals (e.g., heller et al., 2005; renzulli, 1978). intelligence is described as "a part of giftedness" (ipege, 2009, p. 18) and describes a high intellectual potential that enables a person to perform well under given conditions (heller, 1976; rost, 2015). however, psychologists have criticized pedagogy for not using the term intelligence in the context of giftedness research (e.g., rost, 2015). teachers and other educational practitioners are often caught between psychological and pedagogical approaches in diagnosing giftedness. while teacher assessments are commonly used, they are often inaccurate (spinath, 2005). they can be influenced by a student's academic performance (machts et al., 2016), making it challenging to diagnose underachievers (rost & hanses, 1997). additionally, no consensus exists on whether checklists can significantly improve teachers' assessments (jarosewich et al., 2002; but see renzulli, 2009). standardized procedures are utilized to diagnose giftedness, typically through general intelligence tests, due to the close connection between intelligence and giftedness (peperkorn & wegner, 2020). this approach is practically and methodologically sound, as intelligence tests are well-validated and easy to administer. moreover, general intelligence is among the best-researched psychological constructs with a high psychometric quality (rost, 2013). one limitation of intelligence tests in education is the requirement for trained psychological personnel to administer them, which poses difficulties in implementing them into routine school activities. it is not proven to what extent the abstract abilities measured in an iq test allow statements about success in stem fields (sternberg, 2018). research findings indicate a positive correlation between scientific reasoning skills across various content areas. however, the reasoning skills evaluated in intelligence tests differ from those related to scientific reasoning (sternberg et al., 2019). according to bergold (2014), teachers face challenges distinguishing between domains of giftedness when identifying gifted students. consequently, subject specificity is often neglected in the context of giftedness diagnostics at schools. additionally, their diagnostic performance is lower regarding highly intelligent students. a possible solution to this issue is incorporating subject-specific achievement tests that evaluate skills like scientific reasoning. however, these tests are rarely designed for school use (opitz et al., 2017; peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). one way to improve giftedness diagnostics in stem in educational practice is to develop suitable tests that measure cognitive abilities and subjectspecific competencies. this paper aims to introduce test instruments designed for diagnosing scientific giftedness that can be utilized in school settings using design-based research (dbr). developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 27 what is dbr? the subsequent section expounds on the theoretical basis of the dbr approach, the test development process, and how they can be effectively combined. problems from educational practice are often insufficiently understood in research or integrated into the research process (reinmann, 2022). the dbr approach is a bridge between theory and practice and is becoming increasingly relevant for educational research (anderson & shattuck, 2012). the term emerged from the preliminary work of brown (1992), who understood design experiments as a method that could fill research gaps in educational research. this meant that learning phenomena were no longer to be researched solely through laboratory experiments, largescale studies, or ethnographies. instead, central research questions of pedagogy should be explored in real situations, and the research design should be incorporated into the scientific process (reinmann, 2005). in this way, insights could be gained directly from practice, and reality could be mapped in the best possible way to establish sustainable innovations in education. the approach is not limited to any specific method but forms a framework combining various methodologies to gain the best possible insights into educational practice (design-based research collective, 2003). therefore, dbr has characteristics that go beyond usual measurement and quality criteria. reinmann (2005) and euler (2014) summarized the diverse descriptions of the approach and presented its characteristics. the initial attribute pertains to the concentration of the research methodology on the development procedure. implementing teaching-learning concepts is realized by working directly with people from practice. bereiter (2002) argues that "design researchers, by contrast, are trying to make something happen, and this frequently means crossing the boundary between observer and actor" (p. 326). another characteristic of dbr is its practice-oriented objective. developing theories and interventions directly applicable to educational practice is crucial in solving related problems. integrating established scientific theories with research findings from specific educational settings is an important factor in achieving sustained improvements in education (shavelson et al., 2003). this motivation forms another feature of dbr (reinmann, 2005). researchers committed to the approach want to improve educational practice and directly influence it through their work. they aim to bridge the gap between theory and practice by continually imagining innovations and testing their value directly in practice (anderson & shattuck, 2012). finally, implementing the above principles takes place in an iterative process consisting of several phases, which can be seen as another attribute and leading credo of dbr (bereiter, 2002). there are numerous models of dbr, differing in the exact number of phases and intermediate steps (euler, 2014). a well-known model was established by mckenney & reeves (2018), in which the iterative process is divided into the phases "needs and context analysis, design development, and formative evaluation, and semi-summative evaluation" (p. 15). the initial stage of a dbr study involves defining the problem that needs to be resolved and determining the necessity of conducting the study. the methodological freedom allows a wide variety of approaches in this first step. various methodologies can be employed to gather information about a specific field of practice. these include conducting on-site visits, interviewing knowledgeable practitioners or experts, scrutinizing public literature or curricula, or analyzing large-scale data. once the problem has been clearly defined, the current state of the research needs to be identified so global education review 11 (2) that previous findings can be incorporated into the study's design. most authors recommend a systematic review of literature or meta-analysis to describe the state of research as precisely as possible. in this way, a sound theoretical basis for the development of innovations can be achieved, which, according to euler (2014), describes another specific attribute of dbr. after conducting context analyses and preparing underlying theories, the next step is to develop initial prototypes. these prototypes are then used and evaluated in recurring processes (reinmann, 2005). using prototypes facilitates a perpetual enhancement of the designs, enabling the investigation of design principles and a comprehensive theory (shavelson et al., 2003). different types of theory building are described. first, domain theories can be established that bring together either knowledge about the practice context (context theories), e.g., explanations of the emergence of certain practice problems, or describe intended outcomes (outcomes theories) that are desired to be achieved by a prototype (edelson, 2002). furthermore, design frameworks that combine guidelines for creating interventions or didactic scenarios and provide generalized design templates can be developed (edelson, 2002; reinmann, 2005). finally, design methodologies can be established, summarizing guidelines for the design process. the phase of "design, development, and formative evaluation" (mckenney & reeves, 2018, p. 15) comprises repeated micro cycles that include a growing number of individuals, such as subjects, stakeholders, and experts, who are involved in the study. following the development and redesign phase, a (semi) summative evaluation is conducted. this evaluation allows for a new initial problem analysis (euler, 2014; reinmann, 2005). the final summative analysis "make[s] it possible to anticipate outcomes in future designs" (cobb et al., 2003, p. 13). in addition, new research questions can be derived from the process that may only have been discovered through practice-based research. the elaborations on dbr mainly refer to the developments of innovations for educational practice in the form of interventions. since dbr can follow basic scientific principles (fischer et al., 2003; reinmann, 2022; shavelson et al., 2003) and its framework allows for great methodological diversity, a transfer of the approach to other research fields, such as test development, is quite conceivable. for this to be successful, it must be examined whether the basic principles of test development can be incorporated into the phases of dbr. dbr and test development in the following, we will examine to what extent the dbr as a research direction is suitable for psychometric test development. for this purpose, basic test development guidelines (e.g., lane et al., 2015; irwing & hughes, 2018) are applied to dbr and classified according to its phases (see table 1). table 1: stages of test development (irwing & hughes, 2018). stages and substages 1 construct definition, specification of test need, test structure. 2 overall planning. 3 item development a. construct definition. b. item generation: theory versus sampling. c. item review. d. piloting of items. 4 scale construction – factor analysis and item response theory (irt) 5 reliability. 6 validation. 7 test scoring and norming. 8 test specification. 9 implementation and testing. 10 technical manual developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 29 the elaboration of a construct definition, the specification of the test need, and the development of a test structure can be placed in the first two phases of dbr, where the initial problem is specified, and corresponding literature is evaluated (e.g., euler, 2014). here, the first connections between the two research directions emerge. irwing & hughes (2018) describe: "the motivation for test development often stems from a practical concern" (p. 5). in the framework of dbr, test development can benefit, as the test structure can be adapted precisely to the observed conditions of the practice field. different test methods (e.g., multiple choice, performance-based, open format) can be examined for their applicability in specific contexts, and an optimal fit of the instrument can be realized. close collaboration with practitioners allows the test instrument's precise requirement to be determined for a specific setting. this ensures accuracy and effectiveness in its implementation. "in short, for a test to address a market need, it should be both technically sound (in terms of theoretical grounding and psychometric properties) and practically useful" (irwing & hughes, 2018, p. 7). the construct definition and the determination of the test components are carried out, for example, via meta-analyses. the aim is to obtain assessments of specific parameters that are adjusted for measurement errors or measurement artifacts and allow statements about psychological relationships, such as correlations to later career choices (wetterich & plänitz, 2021). an essential requirement for establishing such a foundation is a researched database. when developing tests on so far undefined constructs, the underlying theory should be systematically recorded and analyzed through a literature review. in test development, the overall planning describes answering various questions about the scope, format, structure, and evaluation of the test instrument, as well as initial considerations about the procedure for piloting or validation (irwing & hughes, 2018). this phase and the first steps of the item development phase can still be assigned to the design phase in the context of dbr, in which several correction cycles can already be conducted without testing the prototype in the field (design-based research collective, 2003; reinmann, 2020). toward the end of the item development phase, the first field tests or test runs are conducted to determine item characteristics. in this phase, additional methods such as think-aloud tests can be added, and the application of possible scoring rubrics can be tested to improve the test instrument's construction further (lane et al., 2015). these steps can be assigned to the beginning of the first micro cycle of the testing phase in dbr (reinmann, 2020). after the first data on the developed test instrument have been collected, they should be checked for their scale structure and psychometric properties. in most cases, a combination of confirmatory factor analysis (cfa; brown, 2015) and item response theory (irt; e.g., bock & gibbons, 2021) is recommended (irwing & hughes, 2018). the reliability check can also be assigned to the development phase in dbr, as minor changes can always be made to the design of the test instrument to improve it (reinmann, 2020). mckenney & reeves (2018) describe that during the design, development, and formative evaluation phase in dbr, more and more test subjects must be involved. like in test development procedures, the validation process loops larger and larger until enough data are available for the test norming (lane et al., 2015). concluding the underlying theory is crucial when analyzing and generalizing results (reinmann, 2020; shavelson et al., 2003). these conclusions are based on the data obtained, leading to a new phase of problem definition. in this way, another dbr cycle can be started. the global education review 11 (2) test specification, implementation and testing, and the preparation of a test manual are all part of a transfer of previously researched design principles to the further use of the instrument and, therefore, describe steps of the summative analysis phase (cobb et al., 2003). the explanations confirm that test development processes can be theoretically applied well to dbr, meeting and even extending scientific criteria. design criteria can be incorporated into the developments in addition to the usual quality criteria. in this way, both an improvement of educational practice and insights into designing suitable test instruments for practitioners can be generated. furthermore, valuable insights for test development and the overall improvement of psychometric measurement are yielded (reinmann, 2022). as already described, there are hardly any psychometric tests in giftedness diagnostics designed or validated for use in schools (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). the development of a test instrument for the diagnosis of scientific giftedness in the following, a project for the development of a test instrument for the diagnosis of scientific giftedness is presented. the concept of giftedness pertains to an individual's complete range of abilities. in particular, " giftedness refers to the individual's level of development of performance-related potential, […] enable the individual to act in a meaningful and responsible manner and to carry out demanding activities in areas considered valuable in the respective culture." (ipege, 2009, p. 17). scientific giftedness describes a person’s potential to perform these demanding activities in the field of the natural sciences. the instrument is designed in a dbr process to be usable in educational contexts. both criteria of dbr and test development are pursued and combined. needs and context analysis a needs analysis must be conducted in test development processes and dbr (e.g., edelson, 2002; euler, 2014; irwing & hughes, 2018). giftedness diagnostics in schools are rarely conducted in a subject-specific manner (peperkorn & wegner, 2020). instead, general assessments by teachers, intelligence and achievement tests are used. standardized tests on subject-specific skills, like scientific reasoning, are rarely used (opitz et al., 2017), as they are not adapted for use in school. because scientific giftedness is not solely reliant on inherent abilities, several diagnostically significant factors may go unnoticed (peperkorn & wegner, 2021; peperkorn & wegner, 2023a; peperkorn & wegner, 2023b; wegner, 2014). teachers' assessments often reach their limits in giftedness diagnostics and there is an ongoing discourse about their value (machts et al., 2016; rost & hanses, 1997). even supports like adapting theories of giftedness to different subjects (ipege, 2014) or providing checklists do not improve educational decisions (jarosewich et al., 2002; but see renzulli et al., 2009). hence, there is a need for standardized subject-specific test instruments designed for use in school. furthermore, there is a lack of empirically based theory on scientific giftedness. existing concepts describe a priori models that have not been empirically tested (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). finally, there is a need for action to close the discourse between psychology and education in giftedness diagnostics (e.g., rost & sparfeldt, 2017). integrating psychometric test development into the dbr framework can promote the transfer between psychological and pedagogical principles. in the context of the presented project, a comprehensive review of literature on existing developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 31 test instruments for diagnosing giftedness in stem subjects was conducted to define the initial problem and provide a sound theoretical basis for the planned test instrument (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). several problems with the existing instruments became apparent during the review. first, many of the test instruments are not suitable for use in practice because they are too time-consuming to administer and evaluate. most studies utilized convenience sampling methods, resulting in pre-selected samples that complicate assertions regarding their applicability in practical settings. furthermore, it was found that the development studies were mainly conducted with upperschool students and that hardly any instruments were developed for the school transition phase. however, this phase must be considered critically, as a loss of interest in stem subjects can be measured (gebhard et al., 2017). this decline should not be disregarded for students who may show giftedness in these areas. moreover, the existing test instruments are not based on a uniform definition or model of scientific giftedness, which makes it very difficult to compare their results. although studies describe scientific giftedness as multifactorial, few test instruments aim for a holistic measurement. most instruments only assess partial areas of giftedness in a particular subject and assign the results to a multifactorial framework. to address the problem of the definitional disagreement and to provide a sound theoretical basis for the planned test instrument (irwing & hughes, 2018), a chcbased analysis was conducted as part of the review (mickley & renner, 2019). in this process, the diagnostically relevant abilities assessed by the described test instruments were placed in the framework of the chc theory (e.g., schneider & mcgrew, 2018). the diagnostically relevant abilities were classified into the broad ability domains fluid reasoning (gf), working memory capacity (gwm), processing speed (gs), visual processing (gv), retrieval fluency (gr), learning efficiency (gl) and domain-specific knowledge (gkn; flanagan & dixon, 2013; schneider & mcgrew, 2018). based on the chcbased analysis, a hypothetical a priori measurement model was established and used as a theoretical framework for test development (see figure 1). three different subtests were derived from the results of the chc-based analysis as an initial design solution (edelson, 2002) to enable the measurement of relevant abilities. figure 1: hypothetical measurement model for scientific giftedness note. a hypothetical measurement model was developed from the broad ability areas that serve as the foundation for giftedness in science (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). global education review 11 (2) prototype design and development all three subtests were designed to be administered as a test battery or distributed over several lessons. each test is designed to be completed within 20 minutes. this should allow flexible use in educational practice. the diagnostic instruments are not intended to determine status like gifted or non-gifted but to provide an individual impression of various relevant areas of giftedness in science, which helps teachers make adequate educational decisions. the aim is not to identify deficits but to make differentiated teaching offers based on the existing talents within the student group. for example, the tests might indicate that several students exhibit proficiency in experiment planning. implementing experimentation phases, where students plan and decide independently, can benefit their development. rost (2013) describes a fundamental problem in the measurement of multifactorial models of giftedness when the objective is to assign a status: if, as in renzulli's model, three characteristics are defined as necessary components of giftedness and it is assumed that a gifted person must achieve a minimum percentile rank of pr = 90 in each characteristic (which, in the case of cognitive performance, corresponds to a measurement value of iq = 90, for example), then the gifted person must be able to demonstrate a high level of ability (e.g., for cognitive ability, this corresponds to a measurement of iq = 120), then with a moderate variable intercorrelation of r = .30, one needs an initial sample to be tested of at least 15,396 individuals to compose a group of 100 gifted individuals. (rost, 2013, p. 238) therefore, the test instruments must be understood as a pedagogical tool to improve domain-specific diagnostics in school. in the following, the subtests and their conceptions are presented. scientific inquiry scientific inquiry "refers to the activities of students in which they develop knowledge and understanding of scientific ideas, as well as an understanding of how scientists study the natural world" (national research council, 1996, p. 23). nowak et al. (2013) developed a model of scientific inquiry combining scientific reasoning and inquiry methods. scientific reasoning describes the skills formulate hypotheses, plan and perform inquiries, and analyze and reflect them. inquiry methods describes the skills modelling, experimenting, and observing, comparing, and arranging. by combining the two dimensions and their subskills, the authors defined nine "epistemological acts" (nowak et al., 2013, p. 184). the test on scientific inquiry in the present project was derived from the broad ability domains gl, gkn, and gf (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). the central broad ability is gkn, as the scientific method must be learned and is based on subjectspecific knowledge. in addition, the ability area gf was assigned because in scientific inquiry, "problems that cannot be solved by using previously learned habits, schema, and scripts" (schneider & mcgrew, 2018, p. 93) must also be solved. finally, associative skills are needed while transferring learned scientific procedures to new situations or research areas, summarized under the broad ability gl in chc theory. it is plausible that the practice-oriented skills of scientific inquiry can be accurately measured by performance-based assessments (e.g., alfaiz et al., 2020; zimmerman et al., 2020). however, the daily school routine and the capacities of teachers do not offer the possibility to conduct developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 33 these time-consuming tests. as the test instrument is intended to be time-efficient and usable in everyday school life, a digital multiplechoice format was chosen. the prototype consists of a maximum of 18 items. the instrument is planned to enable adaptive testing, which is why the item pool is continuously expanded. to minimize the influence of prior knowledge, each item begins with an introduction of an experiment, observation, or scientific model. the items aim to determine which hypothesis can be tested, suggest how an experiment should be set up, advise on how an observation should be structured, recommend how a model can be used to test a given hypothesis or suggest what valid conclusion can be drawn from given results (see figure 2). several studies show that the skills of scientific inquiry can be measured sufficiently by this test format (opitz et al., 2017). based on nowak et al. (2013), items were developed for each of the nine epistemological acts, which measure the skills of scientific reasoning and inquiry methods in combination. to account for variations in student reading proficiency, as the tests were developed for students from 3rd to 5th grade, every introduction information was recorded, and each student was given a chance to listen to it individually while taking the examination. in preliminary studies, this system has proven to be very helpful. the usage of the service differs among students, which suggests that it balances accessibility and increases validity. in contrast to the original instrument (nowak et al., 2013), topics apart from the school curriculum were chosen to minimize the influence of different educational levels. digital implementation offers the possibility to automatically evaluate results and save time. figure 2: sample item for measuring skills in scientific inquiry processes (observation / hypotheses). note. items are carried out in a digital format. items are carried out in a digital format. to select an answer, test takers need to click or tap on it. correct answer is colored. scientific inductive thinking scientific inductive thinking describes a subtest that assesses abilities distinct from the learnable skills of scientific inquiry. instead, the test is designed to measure cognitive abilities such as fluid reasoning (gf), working memory capacity (gwm), processing speed (gs), visual processing (gv), or retrieval fluency (gr). these global education review 11 (2) abilities were included in the diagnostic instrument as they are seen as a basis for expressing gifted behavior in stem (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). a matrices test tailored to science contexts was developed to measure these abilities. matrices are a time-efficient way to measure fluid reasoning (gf; alfonso et al., 2005). their capacity to evaluate the remaining broad ability factors is questionable (ackerman et al., 2005). this question must be explored through comparative studies with other existing test instruments. when designing matrices, it is crucial to adhere to essential criteria such as creating distractors (mittring & rost, 2008) to ensure that psychometric quality standards are met. the subject-specific contextualization is expected to address gifted students in stem particularly. for this purpose, scientific illustrations were chosen in the matrices (see figure 3). figure 3 : sample item for measuring skills in scientific-inductive thinking note. items are carried out in a digital format. to select an answer, test takers need to click or tap on it. correct answer is colored. benit & soellner (2012) followed a similar approach by adapting the matrices of an intelligence test to a specific professional field. they were able to achieve a higher face validity for their test. according to this, the student’s motivation and interest might be implicitly measured, although this needs additional investigations. the subtest was also designed digitally, enabling easy administration and automated evaluation. the current prototype consists of 24 items. as the test is also planned to enable adaptive testing, its item pool is continuously expanded. our preliminary studies involved over 200 students from 3rd to 5th grade. the results show that the instruments used were highly accessible and reliable. however, more items should be developed, leading to more detailed assessments of scientific inductive thinking skills. further steps of validation are planned. scientific divergent thinking the analysis of existing test instruments has confirmed that creativity and divergent thinking are essential factors in expressing gifted behavior (peperkorn & wegner, 2023a). the traits of fluency, flexibility, and originality play a central role in the manifestation of creativity (torrance, 1990). fluency is the ability to produce ideas on a specific topic quickly. fluency can be measured quantitatively by counting these ideas (torrance, 1990). flexibility refers to the production of ideas that show various options or ways of thinking. it includes the ability to look at things from different angles and to think of many different approaches or strategies. flexibility can be measured by forming response categories (torrance, 1990). originality describes the ability to produce ideas that are unique and unusual. this involves combining known information on a particular developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 35 topic in new ways. the originality of test takers can be measured by comparisons with the total sample (torrance, 1990). scientific creativity is defined "as a kind of intellectual trait or ability producing or potentially producing a certain product that is original and has social or personal value, designed with a certain purpose in mind, using given information" (hu & adey, 2002, p. 392). the subtest on scientific divergent thinking was derived from the broad ability areas gl, gr, and gv, which were extracted as diagnostically relevant ability areas in scientific giftedness (avitia & kaufmann, 2014). hu & adey (2002) combined the three essential traits of creativity with two different dimensions in their scientific structure creativity model (sscm). in the product dimension, traits are focused on the genesis of scientific products of different kinds. these include technical products, scientific knowledge, scientific phenomena, or science problems. within the process dimension, creative imagination and creative thinking are differentiated. when looking at the previously developed test instrument (hu & adey, 2002), it becomes apparent that the tasks worked with very different stimuli and were located in many different stem fields. nevertheless, some of the tasks are very dependent on prior knowledge. moreover, the test structure does not initiate a creative process that could lead to a higher degree of differentiability. therefore, the scientific divergent thinking subtest was structured according to the incubation model of teaching (imt; torrance, 1993), which describes a didactic approach to fostering creativity. the tasks were designed according to the three stages of the model. first, expectations and motivation are raised by providing an exciting stimulus to heighten subjects' curiosity and expectations. this is realized by an imaginal creature composed of different animals, which offers the advantage that influences due to prior knowledge can be largely excluded (see figure 4). the stimulus piques the curiosity of individuals, leading them to explore more about the imaginary creature and igniting their imagination. in the second stage, additional information is provided through the task format, which enables the subjects to delve deeper into the subject matter. the additional information about the mythical creature should allow the subjects to continue their creative thinking process, which describes an essential condition in this phase (torrance, 1993). in the third stage, the thinking process is supposed to be extended beyond the information provided. for this purpose, tasks were developed to assess the ability to transfer the stimulus to broader scientific contexts. the subtest on scientific divergent thinking consists of five items evaluated based on fluency, flexibility, and originality. in our pre-studies, we found that constructing the instrument based on the three stages of the imt (torrance, 1993) works well and highly motivates the students. however, we noticed that the prototype, which consists of five items, was too lengthy for 3rd to 5th grade students. this led to difficulties in concentration towards the end of the test. in contrast to the previous subtests, evaluating the results is somewhat more complicated since an automatic evaluation of handwritten results requires optical character recognition (ocr) software, which is hardly available to the public (memon et al., 2020). however, during the conception, an evaluation scheme was created that should enable the evaluation of the results in a timeefficient manner. global education review 11 (2) figure 4: sample item for measuring scientific divergent thinking (stage 1). formative evaluation and re-design the designed test instruments will undergo pilot testing in various study settings during the trial phase to ensure proper test development. this will follow the principles of test development (e.g., irwing & hughes, 2018) and dbr (e.g., design-based research collective, 2003). the subtests will be used and tested in clinical settings within a test battery and as multiple short tests in school settings. within clinical settings, larger samples can be generated, allowing for a more comprehensive analysis of the subtests. during this process, classical test development components will be conducted (irwing & hughes, 2018; lane et al., 2015). it is possible to assess concurrent and divergent validity in clinical settings by comparing existing test instruments. the comparison to iq tests would be particularly interesting to substantiate the worth of the developed subtests. the planned field studies in school aim to optimally adapt the design of the subtests to practical conditions and ensure that they can be used in schools. summative evaluation edelson (2002) describes three types of design-oriented theories that can be formed through summative evaluation in the context of dbr. domain theories are generalized theories of specific problems of practice (edelson, 2002). in context theories, the presented project can observe problems in test administration in classrooms and identify possible solutions. problems could arise, for example, through digital implementation, the integration into regular lessons or the evaluation of the developed tests alongside the daily school routine. solutions can be gradually developed through the recurring micro-cycles within the dbr (mckenney & reeves, 2018). outcomes theories formed through the project could, for example, relate to the general impact of short tests in science giftedness diagnostics. the developed test instruments are intended to facilitate giftedness diagnostics for teachers and provide them with information about the individual giftedness of students in larger groups. however, it is questionable whether teachers will accept integrating such instruments into their lessons and whether implementing the subtests will reduce their workload. to overcome implementation hurdles, teachers should be involved in developing test instruments as expert consultants. supplementary materials like detailed user manuals, tutorials, and teaching material could be created. in addition, a teacher training course could be developed to train teachers on using test instruments and appropriate fostering methods. in this way, it would be possible to transfer scientific findings directly to schools. next to domain theories, theories of design frameworks can also be formed through dbr (edelson, 2002). these generalized design guidelines can refer to different levels. in the project presented, developing a diagnostic instrument for scientific giftedness 37 guidelines on the use of short tests in giftedness diagnostics in general, on the accessibility of digital test formats, or the meaningful integration of short tests in teaching phases might be obtained. design methodologies summarize guidelines concerning the research process (edelson, 2002). the present project aims to combine criteria from test development and dbr. in both research directions, comprehensive guidelines already exist that describe the respective scientific process. however, new insights into test development for educational practice could emerge from combining the two approaches, and additional steps could be described, enabling a combination of psychological and pedagogical approaches. suggestions for successfully recruiting randomized samples from practice and communication with schools would be conceivable. in addition to design-oriented theory, the project presented aims to gain insights into the theoretical foundation of scientific giftedness. by empirically testing the measurement model, conclusions about the correlations between different ability areas and their effect on the expression of gifted behavior in stem might be drawn. in this way, giftedness diagnostics can be further individualized, enabling adequate educational decisions (fischer & fischer-ontrup, 2022). besides, the results of the test development can potentially provide further insights into the connections between intelligence and giftedness measurement and provide a knowledge transfer between psychology and pedagogy (warne, 2016). initial results from a sample of n = 207 3rd to 5th-grade students show that the scores for scientific inductive thinking and scientific inquiry process skills correlate more highly with each other than with the scores on an iq test (peperkorn & wegner, 2023c). this may indicate that conventional iq tests cannot adequately diagnose subject-specific aptitudes. similar results have already been found for university students (sternberg et al., 2019). in addition to validating the instruments, further studies are needed to test their usability in school settings and meet additional quality criteria of dbr, like reference to the future, openness, context sensitivity, saturation, knowledge diversity, and normativity (reinmann, 2022). conclusion and outlook the present article showed that the dbr approach is suitable not only for developing didactic interventions but also for test development and even supplementation with further quality criteria. in the context of giftedness research, the dbr functions as a link between theory and practice and can initiate a transfer between psychology and pedagogy. in addition, scientific findings can be directly implemented in schools through additional perspectives of the dbr and continuously adapted. within the problem analysis and initial prototype development, an attempt was made to combine approaches from psychology and pedagogy by conducting a chc-based analysis of diagnostically relevant abilities of scientific giftedness. it should be noted that it is impossible to make final assignments of the diagnostically relevant abilities to the broad ability areas of chc theory, as there is great potential for discussion and a lack of appropriate data. nevertheless, the hypothetical measurement model could be used to derive and design subtests to diagnose different facets of scientific giftedness. the chc theory could be successfully used as a framework model for planning subject-specific giftedness diagnostics and as a communication basis for knowledge transfer (mickley & renner, 2019; warne, 2016). as dbr follows scientific criteria (fischer et al., 2003; shavelson et al., 2003; reinmann, 2005; global education review 11 (2) 2022), psychometric principles could be successfully included in the research process. placing test development in dbr to develop practice-oriented instruments seems to be a reasonable approach. nevertheless, it must be noted that obtaining samples and conducting field studies in everyday school life entails some hurdles that can significantly slow down the validation process of the planned instrument. implementing test development within educational practice is more labor-intensive and requires considerably more commitment. incorporating psychometric test developments into the dbr approach could create funding and research continuation challenges due to their lengthy design process (anderson & shattuck, 2012). to tackle these challenges, the project includes a clinical setting that allows for the rapid acquisition of larger sample sizes. additionally, obtaining samples outside the school setting allows comparisons between clinical and school practice settings from which further (design-oriented) insights into measuring scientific giftedness can be gained. the presented project aims to empirically test a priori models of scientific giftedness (e.g., wegner, 2014) by recording the structures of the developed test instruments and comparing them with existing instruments. it is questionable to what extent the theoretical assumptions on scientific giftedness are reflected in the measured data and how these can be used to sharpen the concept of scientific giftedness further. overall, the intended research project can lead to innovations and insights into giftedness research by combining different research approaches and offering opportunities for a scientific transfer. references ackerman, p. l., beier, m. e., & boyle, m. o. 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(2020). culturally responsive assessment of life science skills and abilities: development, field testing, implementation, and results. journal of advanced academics, 31(3), 329-366. https://doi.org/10.1177/1932202x2092 398 glocal network shifts 116 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bettney, esther, & nordmeyer, jon. (2021). glocal network shifts: exploring language policies and practices in international schools. global education review, 8 (2-3), 116-137. glocal network shifts: exploring language policies and practices in international schools esther bettney wisconsin center for educational research (usa) jon nordmeyer wisconsin center for educational research (usa) abstract in this article, we explore glocality within a transnational network of independent schools to understand the interdependence of the global and the local in language policies and practices. using glocality as a lens, we draw on narrative school profiles written by educators at member schools within the wida international school consortium, a network of 500 k-12 international schools, to examine how global practices are localized within different school contexts. we explore how key aspects of glocality, such as the blurring of boundaries across languages and shifting dynamics of power, become visible as international schools function as hybrid and transnational spaces in which diverse languages and identities intersect. we utilize our role as insider researchers to describe two new directions within our research context. first, we identify a shift from a global network initiated through us-based schooluniversity partnerships towards an increasingly reciprocal exchange among international member schools, with reflexive sharing of ideas and practices between educators and stakeholders across geographic contexts. second, we identify the increasing presence of a new type of international schools, described in this paper as “glocal” schools, which reflect the deterritorialization of language and an intentional hybridity. the emergence of glocal schools as well as the noted shifts in language and power, illustrate the transcendence of borders and identities closely tied to the concept of glocality. in order to understand the trends observed in this research context, we analyzed 34 narrative school profiles written by member schools and describe connections between macro network-level shifts and micro school-level shifts. through our analysis, we found individual member schools adapted tools and resources to serve local needs, contextualizing them within a particular program context. as a result, educators shifted how they viewed multilingual learners and multilingualism with respect to english as a medium of instruction. this initial study provides important insights into how glocality as a construct helps explain significant changes occurring within the field of international education. keywords international schools, glocalization, community of practice, language ideologies, language policies, language practices glocal network shifts 117 117 introduction in this article, we draw on the conceptual lens of glocality to explore the interdependence of the global and the local within a transnational network of schools. traditionally, private, independent englishmedium international schools have reflected a post-colonial perspective and have privileged a particular type of monolingual cosmopolitanism. the historical legacy of english both as a tool for colonization and for hegemonic globalization requires a critical inquiry into how multilingualism is positioned in international schools. the process of glocalization, a dynamic and reciprocal synthesis of the local and the global, provides a valuable tool for understanding change in transnational educational contexts. by providing a conceptual lens that blends perspectival shifts with a reflexive evolution of practice, glocalization can illuminate the intersection of the unique and the universal, and the blurring of boundaries between global teaching and local learning in today’s international schools. the interdependent nature of language, culture and identity – for students, teachers, and schools – provides a rich focus for this inquiry framed by the lens of glocalization. a new glocal lens on education affords a valuable opportunity for reciprocal synthesis. while helping to redefine the transnational identity of a school, a glocal approach also redefines how international schools situate themselves within their immediate context: “this model allows the students to develop experience and perspective on issues facing their local communities and to develop expertise in understanding local manifestations of global issues” (spiro & crisfield, 2018, p. 63-64). international schools, both as individual contexts for inquiry and as a collective of transnational learning ecologies, represent an opportunity for further study, yet scarce research to date has explored the relationship between glocality and language within the context of international schools and networks. glocality provides a useful heuristic for understanding 21st century schools, as noted by mizrahi-shtelman and drori (2016): “glocalisation, which not long ago stood as a brave challenge to the dichotomous interpretation of globalisation as convergence or divergence and of globality as resulting in homogeneity or heterogeneity, is now understood as a commonsensical, rather than an unusual, description of global–local interaction” (p. 309). on one hand, globalization has become associated with a range of political, ideological and economic critiques, and has been particularly identified as a homogenizing, hegemonic and colonial project; on the other hand, glocalization might offer a more reciprocal, practical and descriptive lens. using this lens of glocalization to investigate a network of international schools helps to illustrate how the global and the local integrate. at the micro level, we considered the positioning of multilingualism within the context of an individual school; and at the macro level, we investigated interaction across a transnational educational consortium. our context for research is the wida international school consortium, a voluntary global network of affiliation managed by wida, a project in the wisconsin center for education research at the university of madisonwisconsin. since the creation of the wida international school consortium in 2013, schools in over 100 countries have joined. membership in this global network provides access to wida english language proficiency assessments and wida k-12 english language development standards, rooted in an asset118 global education review 8 (2-3) based approach to teaching multilingual learners (wida, 2020). through an analysis of 34 narrative school profiles written by wida international school consortium member schools, we demonstrate how in some cases cultural and linguistic diversity were recognized as assets, reflecting a more glocal view of transnationalism and multilingualism. at the network level we describe a movement toward blurred boundaries, away from a clear divide between the “global” and the “local” to shared multidirectional learning. at the school level, educators shifted how they viewed multilingual learners and multilingualism with respect to english as a medium of instruction. we connect these macro network-level shifts to micro school-level shifts. through our analysis, we found individual member schools adapted tools and resources to serve local needs, contextualizing them within a particular program context. this initial study provides important insights into how glocality as a construct helps explain significant changes occurring within the field of international education. we also highlight the growing presence within the wida network of an emergent type of international school which can be considered glocal, based on an intentional fusion of languages and identities. these emerging glocal schools reflect the contextualization of global assessment tools, as well as a hybrid identity which integrates multilingualism as a resource rather than a problem. literature review in this literature review, we provide an overview of key concepts which inform our analysis of language policies and practices within international schools and across a global network. first, we define glocality and consider how this concept provides insights into changing definitions of international schools. then, we focus on the intersection of glocality and shifting understandings of language, language users and languaging practices, in particular within the context of international schools. glocality glocalization, also understood as thinking globally while living locally, is often described by first interrogating and then synthesizing dualities: global vs. local, homogenous vs. heterogeneous, universal vs. particular. and in the process of synthesizing, glocalization problematizes these less as dichotomies and more as continua. robertson (1995) avers that: the leading argument in this discussion is thus centered on the claim that the debate about global homogenization versus heterogenization should be transcended. it is not a question of either homogenization or heterogenization, but rather of the ways in which both of these two tendencies have become features of life across much of the late-twentieth-century world. (p. 4) glocalization describes how ideas, languages or practices circulate or diffuse from one place to another, becoming adapted and situated to their new local context (mizrahishtelman & drori, 2016; robertson, 2014; roudometof, 2014). the process of glocalization has economic roots, and robertson (1995) describes advertising global ‘micro-marketing’ campaigns that were contextualized to local and particular markets. in terms of management and organizations, glocalization is defined by glocal network shifts 119 119 translation, diffusion, and adaptation (roudometof, 2015). with greater mobility of products, ideas, people and culture, this flow has become reciprocal, dynamic and rhizomatic. similarly, welsch (1999) identified “transculturality” as a fluid intermingling of cultural repertoires or “the entanglement with new realities and the validation of new, hybridized worldviews” (p. 101). welsch suggested that the notion of transculturality challenges not only the monolithic nature of culture but also the power ascribed within a cultural universe where some cultures orbit others. glocalization distributes not only ideas and products but also power relations, through reciprocity and interdependence. while the application of glocality is relatively new in educational literature, the notions of third space and hybridity have been widely discussed both in terms of mobility and language use (bhatt, 2008; kramsch, 2009; rios & adiv, 2010). lam and warriner (2012) describe a ‘transnational habitus’ which is shaped or developed through people’s experiences and social positioning in various institutional structures and fields of activity within and across nations, which may lead to dualistic dispositions or comparative perspectives. additionally, the concept of integrating the universal with the unique, or the global with the local, has been explored critically and reflexively in post-colonial literature, with important concerns expressed by said (1978): “my two fears are distortion and inaccuracy, or rather the kind of inaccuracy produced by too dogmatic a generality and too positivistic a localized focus” (p. 8). an important feature of glocality is the blurring of boundaries in a kind of ‘hybridity continuum’ as a reinterpretation of the global/local dichotomy: even as the traditions become appropriated by global culture industries or move back and forth with transnational migrants, they are deterritorialized from their localities of origin and reterritorialized that is, relocalized, mixed and brought into juxtaposition with modern and postmodern. (levitt & jaworsky 2007, p. 140) increased hybridity and mobility have contributed to what vervotec (2007) has described as “super-diversity” creating entirely new spaces for linguistic and cultural (re)integration. roudometof (2015) explains these glocalized communities within communities are no longer required to, “acculturate into the host culture and empowered by new media of instant communication, the post-second world war generations of ‘transmigrants’ have the opportunity to inhabit both the world of the home country and that of the host country” (p. 26). at the same time, this global flow and resultant hybridity also reflect differences across individuals and communities with respect to language proficiency, socio-economic status or other systemic barriers. critiques of glocalization have centered on the opportunity gap due to socio-economic status or geographical (mis)fortune. the ability to choose a particular form of integration, assimilation or acculturation may be limited or enhanced by language, race or class. bauman (1998) observes that some have the opportunity to choose, or not, to engage with the global flow of ideas, while an increasing majority of others do not, asserting that: glocalization, to sum up, polarizes mobility – that ability to use time to annul the limitation of space. that ability – or disability – divides the 120 global education review 8 (2-3) world into the globalized and the localized. ‘globalization’ and ‘localization’ may be inseparable sides of the same coin, but the two parts of the world population seem to be living on different sides, facing one side only, much like the people of the earth see and scan only one hemisphere of the moon. some inhabit the globe; others are chained in place. (p. 45) although it involves a reciprocal flow, glocalization is not an inherently equalizing process, and it can reify existing social or economic disparities. in applying the lens of glocalization to education, the global privatization and commercialization of schools cannot be ignored. this particular inquiry focuses on a subset of international schools in order to explore the concept of glocality and its application to language in the context of education; however, it is worthwhile to ask what factors might limit participation or access, who is being served by glocal schools, and to what extent private international schools perpetuate rather than disrupt global or local patterns of privilege. the evolution of international schools a result of increasing global mobility and post-colonial globalization in the late 19th and 20th centuries, private international schools were established to educate students of globally mobile families whose parents were employed by multinational companies, universities or diplomatic missions. currently, there are over twelve thousand english-medium and bilingual international schools worldwide (international school consultancy, 2020). in the 21st century, international school demographics have shifted: "while international schools catered mainly to the children of expatriates, who made up 80 percent of the study body more than thirty years ago, rather than to local children, the trend has been reversed in recent years with local students making up 80 percent of the student demography" (tanu, 2018, p. 3). while today’s international schools are similar in many ways to private, independent schools that exist within the framework of many national systems, a broad, conceptual definition of international schools proposed by hayden and thompson (2008) reflects how international schools differ from national schools, based on four characteristics: a) curriculum that differs from that of host country; b) teachers and administrators who tend to be non-citizens of the host country; c) unique structures of governance or ownership which are distinct from national schools; and d) students who are frequently not nationals of the host country. each international school represents a unique context, yet all international schools have typically shared a common feature: a multifaceted and diffused cultural identity, somewhat precariously suspended within a host culture. caffyn (2011) observed: international schools and their communities can become isolated from their immediate locality and from their homelands. this can, in turn, intensify relationships due to limited social possibilities and both psychological and linguistic isolation…fragmentation takes place both inside and outside an international school, where diverse individuals with different backgrounds, nationalities, experiences and glocal network shifts 121 121 profiles are forced together. (p.74) increasingly, educators and scholars recognize that traditional definitions of international schools no longer apply. while on one hand international school curricula and pedagogy might still reflect a post-colonial focus on serving a globally mobile, elite and professional class of expatriates, on the other hand expanded mobility and a growing middle class within many national contexts have produced the need for innovative alternatives to state education systems resulting in a new typology of international schools. hallgarten et al. (2016) describe the emerging diversity among international schools, stating: “some schools (such as those backed by their local embassy) are focused on a specific migrant nationality, others multinational (with more than 50 nationalities, commonly) and others mixed, with national and international students side by side” (p.8). in the section below, this new type of glocal school is explored in more detail. glocal schools worldwide, international schools have responded to the need for an alternative to national systems of education as well as a more localized version of the traditional expatriate schools. tanu (2018) further notes that the definitions of national and international education are merging, with both the growing popularity of international schools, as well as the internationalization of national schools. many schools that have joined the wida international school consortium in the past five years fit this description. these glocal schools reflect, in many cases, several of the characteristics of international schools discussed above: a global curriculum, a diverse faculty and unique school structures; however, glocal schools cater almost exclusively to local host-country families and often utilize multiple languages for instruction (nordmeyer & wilson, 2020). while still serving a relatively elite population, the glocalization of international schools reflects an emergent cultural and linguistic hybridity. glocal schools provide an englishmedium or bilingual education using an international curriculum for a majority population of local students and as spiro and crisfield (2018) observe, glocalization results in: “programmes that are carefully developed to fit with the local linguistic and sociopolitical landscape, and to promote positive models of bilingualism, stand to benefit the target populations immensely and are well worth the time and effort in planning and delivery” (p. 26). mizrahi-shtelman and drori (2016) recognize: in spite of the clear distinction between global and local, school principals note no contradiction between global and local. in this way, they define glocality in education by seeing the global and the local as distinct yet married into what are described as the core principles of education. (p. 320) the international school consultancy, a global database of schools, lists over three thousand “local ib” (international baccalaureate) schools out of its total of fifteen thousand “international” schools worldwide (international school consultancy, 2020). by adopting the ib curriculum, schools are supported in maintaining and leveraging home languages in the process of learning. the emerging category of glocal schools represent a hybrid identity along a continuum of national and international schools, providing a way to conceptualize the process of glocalization in education as language becomes deterritorialized: both ideas and people become 122 global education review 8 (2-3) increasingly mobile. this glocal identity is reflected in how these schools describe themselves and how they position their programs to function in this unique liminal space. for example, aga khan academies describe their glocal mission: as the academies open, one-byone, they will feature meritbased entry, residential campuses, and dual-language instruction. this language policy exemplifies our desire to square the particular with the global. english will enable graduates to participate fully on an international stage, while mother-tongue instruction will allow students to access the wisdom of their own cultures. (aga khan development network, 2004) glocal schools provide an opportunity for both transnational globally-mobile students and internationally-minded local students to bridge languages and cultures, developing a unique worldview in the process. however, glocal schools as sites of transnational contact must also problematize global power relations and systemic inequity through what hawkins (2018) has proposed as “critical cosmopolitanism”. glocal schools can “integrate a focus on creating and sustaining just, equitable, and affirming relations with global (and local) others in global engagements and interactions through attending to the workings of status, privilege, and power between people and groups of people” (hawkins, p.66). in the reciprocal flow of ideas between local and global, there is potential for the hybrid identity of both schools and individuals, as well as the possibility for critical inquiry into how these hybrid identities operate in the world. glocalizing language in terms of language, the rapid increase in migration, global transportation and digital communication have accelerated the departure from an 18th century herderian view of nationalism: the unity of nation, language and place. while multilingualism has been an accepted reality in many global contexts, within the field of education, and particularly language education, vestiges of traditional perceptions have persisted; for example, some may believe that the french is only spoken by french people within france. yet, blackledge and creese (2013) claim that language use in our current society can no longer be explained through conceptualizing languages as separate and bound. instead, heightened global migration and digital technology requires a new view of language, in which individuals’ languages are not positioned as separate entities, but as maintaining a plurilingual repertoire that users can draw on differentially to communicate (piccardo, 2013). may (2014) argues languages are increasingly seen as dynamic and hybrid, as crossing artificially constructed boundaries and borders. this ideological shift has been noted by flores and schissel (2014), who point to a significant interest in heteroglossic ideologies, evidenced in the growing use of terms such as: translanguaging (garcía, 2009), flexible bilingualism (creese & blackledge, 2010), polylanguaging (jørgensen et al., 2011), and translingualism (canagarajah, 2013). while each term reflects different epistemological perspectives, flores and schissel posit that all of them indicate a move away from seeing glocal network shifts 123 123 languages as bounded and static objects towards emphasizing “languaging as a fluid, complex, and dynamic process” (p. 461). as noted by the douglas fir group: what globalization has accomplished is a heightened awareness of the reality of multilingualism in western societies, which had accepted the monolingualism of the nation-state as the ‘real norm.’ indeed, we see an interesting parallel between the mobility of people and transnationalism and the multidirectional, rhizomatic information flows enabled by technology and transdisciplinarity. (2016, p. 23) through the lens of glocality, we recognize the “local in the global”, as noted by canagarajah (2005), as we move to a view of languages and cultures as hybrid, diffuse and deterritorialized. while in the past, languages have been viewed as distinct entities to be kept separate, even in the mind of a multilingual, there is an increasing recognition of the fluidity of languages and languaging practices. according to phipps (2019): "the languaged realities of the world when languages no longer remain rooted to specific territory but have broken loose and are establishing themselves in the life of new contexts and communities are an opportunity for decolonising work" (p. 91). glocality helps to frame this deterritorialization, not only in terms of people and places, but also in the languages and languaging practices that were in the past artificially tied to particular communities or territories. for the past fifty years, english as global lingua franca has been the medium of instruction in most international schools (baker, 2009). in the past decade scholars have advocated for a shift toward a more dynamic and fluid view of language policy and practices (menken & garcia, 2010), yet traditional ideas of languages as separate, static and hierarchical persist. while some international schools may include various instructional languages, often the emphasis is on developing proficiency in particular high-status or power languages and not necessarily on valuing linguistic diversity or students’ languaging practices (de mejía, 2006). instead of promoting diversity, international bilingual schools “continue to propagate the idea that english is best” (ortega, 2020 p. 41). the spread of international schools and of english instruction has been “detrimental to the development and/or use of local languages in education in many regions. english becomes the priority status language and the delivery of international curricula in english only reinforces this paradigm” (spiro & crisfield, 2018, p. 57). international school students, staff and families are often multilingual, however the language ideologies reflected in many schools’ language policies and program models are often reflect monolingual ideologies and practices. three language orientations originally posed by ruiz (1984) and employed by as a language planning paradigm by hult and hornberger (2016) help to illustrate the spectrum of how multilingualism can be viewed in international schools: (1) as “a problem” and thus must be eliminated through english immersion and, ultimately, subtractive bilingualism with english replacing home languages; (2) as “a right” for which students can be given special, but 124 global education review 8 (2-3) separate, classes to acquire english through additive forms of bilingualism which maintain home languages but still privilege english; (3) as “a resource” where the school recognizes multilingualism as the goal for all students, and staff. based on this typology, some international schools demonstrate an increasing recognition of students’ languages as a resource, shifting away from program models and language policies that exclude students’ home languages and the host country’s local languages. the past ten years have represented both challenges and opportunities for international schools. some schools in international contexts have undergone a significant shift from a monoglossic and hegemonic view of language teaching and learning to engaging in heteroglossic approaches (spiro & crisfield, 2018). increasing global mobility and the emerging glocalization of international schools provide an opportunity to transform policy, pedagogy and language practices: “the everyday corresponds to a space which is strategically shaped by a meaningful action-context nexus where social practices, identities and ideologies can be (re)negotiated and (re)constructed, as well as opposed and subverted” (mazzaferro, 2018, p.1). however, within many international schools, tension exists in policies and practices which oppress students’ linguistic repertoires versus a view of language which embraces the diversity of multilingual languaging practices. significant barriers persist, not the least of which is an ideological one, represented by a “strong pull towards language separation in the classroom and the isolation of languages into separate spheres for bilingual learners” (spiro & crisfield, p. 25). while international schools often position themselves as leaders in terms of diversity, this seems incongruent with the ongoing presence of language ideologies and practices which view languages as separate, static and hierarchical. research context in order to provide context for this study and how we approached it, in the following section, we first provide background information on the global school network which is the focus of this study. then, we discuss our own roles within the network to clarify our positionality as insider researchers. finally, we describe how we have noted a key movement toward a more reciprocal and glocalized network, in particular during the ongoing global health pandemic. wida international school consortium the wida international school consortium is a voluntary global network of affiliation coordinated by wida, a project of the wisconsin center for education research at the university of madison-wisconsin. since the creation of the wida international school consortium in 2013, schools in over 100 countries have joined. membership in this global network provides access to wida english language proficiency assessments and wida k12 english language development standards, rooted in an asset-based approach to teaching multilingual learners (wida, 2020). the rapid growth of the wida international school consortium, with now over 500 member glocal network shifts 125 125 schools, indicates a desire by schools to “transform the conversation about what multilingual students can do” (wida, 2020) and to move away from seeing multilingual students as deficient and in need of additional english language support. originally, wida was founded in response to a us federal policy change requiring all states to assess english proficiency. the three original states of wisconsin, delaware and arkansas formed the consortium, providing the original name of wida; the us wida consortium now includes forty-one states and territories. as wida began to serve teachers in a variety of contexts, the wida international school consortium was created in response to requests from international schools wanting to use wida standards and assessments to serve multilingual learners. this global wida member network supports schools in building capacity to serve multilingual learners, recognizing that while it is necessary to support educators in testing students, it is as important, if not more important, to provide support for teaching students. the wida network helps member schools to use english proficiency data and instructional resources to support multilingual learners through research, publications and professional development. the network also provides opportunities for international educators to connect to each other, facilitating collaboration across schools within the global network. insider research positionality as co-authors, we desire transparency about our own positionality as insider researchers (costley, elliott, & gibbs, 2010). jon is currently the international program director at wida and esther is a project assistant with the wida international program. prior to working at wida, we both were teachers and teacher leaders in different international schools. in our current roles, we are interested in questions about global learning networks and supporting multilingual learners, their teachers and their schools. we have observed in the larger discourse with colleagues, scholars and educators from international schools, significant shifts happening in many international schools away from traditional understandings and demographics of expatriate families to glocal schools, as described above. in managing a network serving member schools, we are motivated to understand these changes. based on our own professional and academic backgrounds, as well as our desire to further explore a shift toward a glocal understanding of international schools, we engaged in this research project. according to costley et al. (2010), insider researchers bring several key advantages, particularly when conducting research within their own work context, noting: as an insider, you are in a unique position to study a particular issue in depth and with special knowledge about that issue. not only do you have your own insider knowledge, but you have easy access to people and information that can further enhance that knowledge. (pg. 3) while our work as insider researchers provides both insight and access, it also brings a level of complexity in navigating potential bias and ethical considerations. costley et al. (2010) highlight in particular a need to be aware of “the issue of the subjective nature of researching your own practice, where there may be a lack of impartiality, a vested interest in certain results being achieved and problems concerning a fresh and objective view of data” (pg. 6). we acknowledge these potential issues inherent to 126 global education review 8 (2-3) insider research and took various steps to address these issues, which we discuss in the methodology section. glocalization of the wida network as with many university-school partnerships, initially wida resources moved primarily from the us consortium to the international consortium and then to the local school context in a one-way flow of dissemination and implementation, however, this relationship has been shifting. there is a growing movement toward a more reciprocal flow of ideas between both the international network and local schools worldwide and between educators in the international program of wida and schools in the original us consortium. in terms of management and organizations, glocalization is defined by translation, diffusion, and adaptation (roudometof, 2015). with an increased flexibility and mobility of resources, ideas and educators, this flow across the wida global network has become reciprocal and dynamic. furthermore, the 2020 global pandemic has catalyzed an evolution of the wida network to leverage this reciprocal relationship. for example, many international schools in the wida international school consortium transitioned to online teaching before schools in north america. these international schools shared their expertise with wida, and in turn with educators in the us. resources designed by the wida international program and informed by the experiences of global members of the international school consortium were accessed on the wida website more frequently by teachers based in the us, even though they were written with an international audience in mind. leveraging the wida global network as a community of practice exemplifies this new glocal decentralization of power. lave and wagner (1991) describe communities of practice as networks where learning can be shaped by mutual engagement, joint enterprise, and shared resources. wenger, mcdermott and snyder (2002) outline key components of communities of practice: domain, community and practice. the domain is a specific area of expertise, discipline or sub-discipline which provides common ground and a common identity. a community brings together a group by building relationships and creating a sense of belonging based on a common domain but with individual perspectives. the practice shared by the group may include common frameworks, tools, information and stories, providing a baseline of common knowledge and experiences. the wida international school consortium has provided an opportunity for local schools around the world to connect with, share and learn from each other as a community of practice. wenger et al. (2002) observe that when a distributed community of practice extends beyond one organization or geographical location, challenges often include the potential barriers of physical distance, size, intellectual property and cultural differences. two design models have been suggested for this type of extended and distributed group: huband-spoke or topical cells (wenger et al.). in either design, a key principle is to allow for both local variations and global connections. in response to the covid19 global pandemic in 2020, wida brought together global educators using both designs. first, an open-source video sharing community was organized around topical areas. second, in a hub-and-spoke design, members of the wida global network were invited to join for a series of video calls to collectively inquiry into common challenges and co-develop a set of shared strategies. the community was drawn from authors of wida newsletter articles, copresenters from conferences, and other glocal network shifts 127 127 influencers and activists within the wida international school consortium. the domain for this community of practice has centered on the intersection of three subdomains: k12 teaching, education of multilingual learners, and teaching online. this emerging community of practice has invited educators to collectively inquire about teaching multilingual learners in online/hybrid schools. these trends point to a glocalization and decentralization of the traditional university dissemination model in which ideas flow outward, in this case from a usbased national consortium to the transnational network of international schools. instead, we have observed a shift towards reciprocal global learning among local educators and schools. as both a sharing network and community of practice, the wida international school consortium serves member schools. as a research center, wida continues to develop assessment instruments, instructional resources and professional learning tools that are shared with member schools. in addition, individual educators continue to exchange ideas with the entire global wida network. educators share problems of practice, engage with each other through social media, present together at conferences and co-author articles based on their shared experience. as noted by roycampbell (2015), comparing the experience of teaching english to multilingual students in public secondary schools in the us and kenya, while the wida framework may have originally be designed for the us context, there are opportunities for collaborative work across countries to build a better understanding of how to support multilingual students, and in particular, the teaching of english which continues to be prioritized by countries around the world. roy-campbell emphasizes the opportunity and importance of educational resources, like those within the wida network, to support reciprocal learning across global contexts while emphasizing the importance of adapting to the needs of each local context. seen through the lens of glocality, the wida global network demonstrates how ideas are constantly developing, taken up, shifting and adapted across global and local spaces. data and analysis the purpose of this study was to explore the relationship between a voluntary transnational network of schools and k-12 language policies and practices within each school context, using the lens of glocality. this study draws on school-based narrative profiles written by educators at member schools to address the following research question: how does participation in a global network impact language policies and practices with a local school context? in this section, we describe the process by which the school profiles were written and submitted, as well as some basic demographic information regarding the member schools represented in the profiles. finally, we describe the analytical process we engaged in to answer our research question. the primary data source for this project was a set of 34 narrative member school profiles, published between 2015-2019. educators at various member schools submitted a written profile for their school. in some cases, the educators were asked by team members within the wida international program to submit a profile, based on their involvement in professional development opportunities at wida. in other cases, schools were nominated by other member schools or self-nominated through the monthly newsletter. the authors were asked to respond to the following prompts: why did you join wida? how has working with wida impacted teaching and learning at your school? profiles were proofread by a wida staff 128 global education review 8 (2-3) member, but the content was not altered. all school profiles were originally published through the monthly wida international newsletter which now has approximately 40,000 readers. the profiles remain publicly available through the wida website. the 34 published school profiles represent the wide geographic range of the 500 members schools currently part of the wida international school consortium. as illustrated in figure 1, most focus school profiles are from schools in asia, which proportionately represent the higher numbers of schools in the network. figure 1 all profiles published between 20152019 were included in the data set. it is important to note that schools either volunteered or were invited to write a profile for wida; therefore, the data may reflect some selection bias as the schools included in our data set are schools that are more likely to have a strong relationship or regular interaction with the network. in addition, the profiles were written by educators at each school who were aware that their profile would be published in the wida international school consortium newsletter, and they therefore may have emphasized the perceived positive impacts of this relationship. the purpose of this project is not an evaluative judgement of the relationship between the schools and the network, nor the efficacy of the network, but instead an exploration of how the educators described the impact of engagement with the network on language policies and practices at their school. therefore, while keeping in mind these data may be skewed to emphasize more positive impacts, the data still serve the purpose of demonstrating the possibility of impact on local school practices. after gathering and conducting an initial reading of all profiles, we conducted an inductive thematic analysis using nvivo, a qualitative data analysis software. we employed saldaña’s (2016) recommendation to code in two major stages: first cycle and second cycle coding. in first cycle coding, we focused primarily on assigning codes to chunks of data. after coding four focus school profiles, we began to organize the codes into categories and created a provisional code tree with descriptions for each code. we then moved into second cycle coding, applying the provisional codes to finish coding the rest of the data, adding and collapsing codes and readjusting categories as necessary. in the findings section below, table 1 demonstrates glocal network shifts 129 129 how the codes were grouped into categories that informed the findings. throughout the analysis, we remained mindful of our roles as insider researchers and worked to leverage the advantages of being insiders, while mitigating the potential limitations. for example, as part of the coding process, we engaged in interand intra-rater checking and actively sought out outliers within our data set. we also included all profiles published within a given five-year time period, as opposed to selectively choosing certain profiles to analyze. finally, esther, the first author on this paper, was not involved in the inviting, selecting, editing or publishing of the profiles and therefore approached the analysis from an arm’s length. while all researchers must continually reflect on their own positionality to determine how it impacts the research itself, as insider researchers we have more responsibility to be transparent about our position throughout the research process. findings based on our inductive analysis, the school profiles illustrate how participating schools describe language ideologies, policies and practices within local school contexts. the profiles indicate how membership in the global network supports educators in taking up new ways of viewing multilingual leaners and contextualizing new approaches to assessment and instructional in order to influence local policy and practices. in the following section, we will highlight three key shifts we noted in the data: 1) a view of students’ multilingual repertoires as assets; 2) inclusive program models which support multilingual learners through intentional teacher collaboration; 3) a clearer understanding of assessment and instructional tools to support students’ learning about and through multiple languages. each of these shifts reflects how schools not only adopted but adapted mindsets and tools and adapted them to their local context. table 1 (see end of article) provides an overview of the codes, which have been organized by finding. for each code, we have described the code inductively, based on the data. for each code, we have selected a representative quote to provide a further understanding of the meaning of the code. finding #1: a view of students’ multilingual repertoires as assets first, many narrative school profiles mentioned a shift in staff mindsets toward viewing multilingual students from an assetbased perspective, highlighting the value of a rich linguistic repertoire. one participant wrote, “the data provided by wida model, and other wida resources, help us make decisions based not only on what our students need, but also highlights the assets students have and ways those can be leveraged towards continued growth.” another profile pointed to the wida’s can do descriptors, one of the most commonly used resources within the wida framework. the can do descriptors represent what learners can do with language across different academic content areas. the author wrote, “we started implementing wida’s can do descriptors a few years ago to support our growth-mindset approach to supporting english language learners.” focusing on linguistic diversity of the local school community as an asset helps to support a more glocalized, heterogenous and hybrid school identity. in most cases, the authors focused on this mindset shift amongst staff, yet did not necessarily indicate a similar shift in how students saw themselves or how they were viewed by their peers; this shift toward an asset-based outlook might also have been occurring within the student population in 130 global education review 8 (2-3) various schools, but it was not discussed in the profiles. while many authors noted a shift toward an asset-based mindset, in line with wida’s can do philosophy, not all profiles reflected these ideas. some participants noticed a shift toward more asset-based perspectives, while other schools the focus remained on students’ english language acquisition. while home languages were recognized as an asset, several schools focused on how students’ english language development provided them with access to mainstream classrooms and the academic language required within those classrooms. in some cases, students were still described as lacking in their english proficiency or having “language needs” which limited their access to english content. although these data indicate a variety of perspectives on english in the international school context, english remains a privileged, neo-colonial language of power, simultaneously a lingua franca, a medium of instruction and the target language. finding #2: inclusive program models which support multilingual learners through intentional teacher collaboration the second key shift noted in the data refers to a move toward more inclusive program models which support multilingual learners through intentional teacher collaboration, reflecting common local changes across schools in the global wida network. several authors highlighted this programmatic shift, indicating a movement in their school from relatively exclusive “pull-out” models in which multilingual learners were taken out of their mainstream classes for english language support to more inclusive “push-in” models, where content and language teachers worked collaboratively to support multilingual learners within the mainstream classroom. further, international educators noted how their engagement with wida resources influenced their collaborative practices as well. one teacher wrote: “our work with wida helped my coteacher and i to develop shared expectations for our students. it also gave us insights about scaffolds we could use to support individual students and our class.” by building on various wida resources available through the international school consortium, schools incorporated these tools into their local programs, moving towards more collaborative practices in support of multilingual learners. finding #3: a clearer understanding of assessment and instructional tools to support students’ learning about and through multiple languages finally, through their engagement in the wida global network, teachers developed a clearer understanding of assessment and instructional tools to support students’ learning about and through multiple languages. many authors indicated how the wida framework provided important insights into how students engaged with language, particularly in regard to academic language. one author wrote, “wida’s comprehensive focus gives us insights about how students interact with language throughout the day in the four domains, and across disciplines.” in addition to a greater understanding of how students’ used language at school, authors noted significant changes in classroom instructional practices. for example, one school used their assessment data to “heterogeneously build class groups which neither exclude nor segregate our ell populations across all divisions.” others noted how their use of wida resources helped them in differentiating language goals for students in one or more languages as well as in developing individualized supports for these students. most authors focused on the local programmatic or glocal network shifts 131 131 instructional changes, and others described the specific impact on students, particularly regarding improving student engagement and learning. discussion throughout this paper, we have engaged with glocality as a conceptual tool to understand the relationship between the wida international school consortium and its member schools as well as language policies and practices within individual school contexts. through an inductive analysis of the focus school profiles, a clear pattern emerged in which authors describe how schools’ engagement with the wida global network had influenced key shifts in language ideologies, policies and practices at their local school level. by drawing on professional literature we examined how glocality informs our understanding of language and international schools. in describing our research context, we explained how the wida network provides the macro context for our study. we demonstrated how various tenets of glocality were present within recent shifts within the wida network. to explore glocalization on the micro level, we examined individual school contexts. analyzing narrative school profiles, we found three important shifts as educators within the global network increasingly viewed languages and languages users from a stance of hybridity and fusion. at this point, we will endeavor to synthesize the macro and micro level shifts to further understand how important aspects of glocality are reflected across both individual schools and the entire network. first, we observed a macro-level shift across the network toward reciprocity. this provided space for member schools to incorporate a given framework of language standards and assessments while at the same time adapting tools for their specific context in line with the shift in their own local language ideology. wida member schools demonstrated they were not blindly adopting wida tools, but were instead considering how instruction within their own local contexts could be informed by key principles undergirding the tools, such as an asset-based approach. we described how a system of assessments and instructional resources developed at a us university provided a transnational platform for dialogue and collaboration with educators across member schools. importantly, we found that as schools contextualized wida resources, they were able to respond to issues in their local student and teacher population by connecting with schools around the world making similar programmatic and policy changes. we documented how glocalization helped to explain a shift within this particular educational network from a centralized model of university-based dissemination and implementation towards a more decentralized community of educators, developing glocal approaches that can inform teaching and learning across the network. second, at both the macro network-level and then micro school-level, educators’ understanding and integration of multilingualism was evolving. data suggested a shift toward understanding languages as fluid and move away from valorizing monolingualism norms to viewing the complexity of individuals’ linguistic and cultural repertoires as assets. schools reported an emphasis on inclusive program models which support multilingual learners through intentional teacher collaboration to integrate language and content learning and a clearer understanding of assessment and instructional tools to support students’ learning about and through multiple languages. this reciprocal and rhizomatic view of language use on the local level, viewed through the lens of the wida global network, 132 global education review 8 (2-3) helps to illustrate a global deterritorialization of language, and promotes the value of multilingual students’ use of rich linguistic repertoires in the service of learning. in sum, in this article we examine the interdependence of the global and the local within the context of international schools and across a transnational network of schools. through an analysis of narrative school profiles, we explored how engagement with a global network influenced significant shifts at the local level, as schools’ policies and practices reflected new understanding of language as fluid and multidimensional. the process of glocalization informed our developing understanding of a reciprocal movement within the transnational network toward an increasingly reflexive sharing of ideas and practices across geographic contexts. finally, we reflected on and theorized about how the growth of glocal schools reflect the deterritorialization of language and an intentional hybridity of cultures. as we look forward, we are cognizant of both the historical challenges of international schools, acknowledging the layers of privilege of who gets to define themselves as “international” and who does not. transnational students and glocal schools provide the potential for innovation and intellectual exchange resulting from the fluid interplay of ideas, languages and cultures. however, this potential remains unrealized if language policies and programs privilege english over other languages or ignore historical legacy of english both as a tool for colonization and for post-colonial hegemonic globalization. this requires a critical inquiry into how multilingualism is positioned in international schools and an emphasis on the role of critical cosmopolitanism. we recognize opportunities for ongoing studies which provide a more in-depth look at many of the questions raised throughout this paper, such as a case study of one of the many new glocal schools, or a study focused on understanding students’ perspectives on the role of language within their classrooms. while important critiques of glocality as a conceptual idea have been raised, glocality also serves as a lens to understand the transformative power of the movement of ideas, languages and practices across diverse spaces. glocal network shifts 133 133 table 1: coding chart code code description quote from school profile finding #1: a view of students’ multilingual repertoires as assets equity how schools viewed issues of equity, such as inclusive programs for multilingual students “wida’s core philosophy of being committed to developing inclusive programs that build on the assets of all learners matches our school mission and ethos perfectly.” language ideology explicit or implicit beliefs about language, language use and language users “system-wide, the discourse about our students with language needs has shifted and continues to shift towards an asset-based conversation where all the domains of language acquisition are included.” understanding of language development or changes in teachers’ understanding of language, in particular the development of academic language “i found the wida can do statements gave me a much better understanding of how language develops in those formative years.” student achievement criteria to define student success, particularly in regard to language acquisition “our program is highly successful and 80% of our entry students with little to no english achieve monitor status within two years.” supporting students descriptions of how schools are supporting multilingual students, focused on their language acquisition “besides using just the wida assessments and can do descriptors for instructional planning, we are creating personalized goals for and with our students based on their current levels of development, and reporting on student progress toward reaching their individual language goals.” finding #2: inclusive program models which support multilingual learners through intentional teacher collaboration collaboration how engagement with wida supported shift toward more robust teacher collaboration at the school “this year, our team changed how we scheduled our push-in support. in our new model, half of our classroom teachers collaborate for a full learning cycle, pushing in everyday, with the other half collaborating in the following cycle through push-in. we also created and scheduled a co-planning block with each teacher before each cycle of push-ins begin. this co-planning time is important because wida helped us realize that one of the most important aspects of the co-teaching cycle is co-planning.” finding #3: a clearer understanding of assessment and instructional tools to support students’ learning about and through multiple languages. 134 global education review 8 (2-3) coherence wida framework as a tool to support schools in developing coherence through common language “(we) joined wida’s international school consortium in an effort to create aligned systems across all school sections and to provide common vocabulary for all teachers and administrators to use.” influencing practice how wida framework influenced program models, policy decisions and or/ practice at the school “the wida framework has also influenced the need and allocation for staffing in the elementary school and we are excited to be adding another ell specialist to our department next school year to support this approach.” future orientation specific plan or ongoing consideration for next steps for implementation at the school level “our next steps are to evaluate our program on the wida action steps to best determine our program goals and objectives for the upcoming years.” wida resources use of wida resources, including assessments “an integral part of that support are the wida english language development (eld) standards and the wida model assessment. the decision to start using this amazing tool and framework came about from the need to develop a program that would support both eal students and teachers working with them in an our ever changing international context.” wida professional development professional development offered by wida or educators offering professional development to their colleagues, drawing on the wida framework “(we) offered a professional development session to all teaching staff that highlighted wida’s philosophical and theoretical approach, the wida framework including the guiding principles and essential actions, and how to use the wida can do descriptors, key uses edition to help with lesson planning.” glocal network shifts 135 135 references aga khan development network. 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(2023). initial teacher training to promote sustainable education system improvement: a review of the evidence on pre-service teacher education for primary grade literacy and numeracy in lowand middle-income countries. global education review, 10 (3), 1-28. initial teacher training to promote sustainable education system improvement: a review of the evidence on pre-service teacher education for primary grade literacy and numeracy in lowand middle-income countries stephanie simmons zuilkowski patience sowa wendi ralaingita abstract pre-service teacher education (pste) has largely been excluded from investments in foundational literacy and numeracy in lowand middle-income countries (lmics). this approach has consequences for sustainability due to the central role of pste in supporting lasting educational change. in this literature review, we examine key challenges facing pste in lmics and draw on the evidence to suggest areas for teacher educators and stakeholders to focus attention—including curriculum revisions to make pste more applied and relevant, enhanced focus on the practicum, and high-quality professional development for teacher educators—to promote alignment of content and pedagogy with evidence -based practices. keywords pre-service teacher education, literacy, numeracy, primary school, developing countries introduction over the last two decades, actors in international education development have noted that there is a global crisis in education in low and middle-income countries (lmic). though school attendance has risen, more than 617 million children and youth are not achieving the basic competencies in literacy and numeracy needed for secondary and tertiary education (united nations educational, scientific, and cultural organization [unesco], institute for statistics, 2020; world bank, 2018). accordingly, substantial investments have been made by bilateral donors such as the united states agency for international development (usaid), the german agency for international cooperation (giz), the united kingdom’s foreign commonwealth and development office (fcdo) and multilateral donors (united nations agencies, world bank) to improve basic 2 global education review 10 (3) learning outcomes for children in lowand middle-income countries (lmics).1 one of the causes of this crisis is insufficiently prepared teachers in these countries who have little current, evidencebased pedagogical and pedagogical content knowledge and therefore lack the skills to teach effectively (bold et al., 2017; popova et al., 2022). given the urgency of the situation in many lmics, donors and governments alike have generally concentrated their efforts on training in-service teachers, as current teachers can have immediate impact at scale. pre-service teacher education (pste) systems have largely been excluded from these investments in education for foundational literacy and numeracy (fln). from a sustainability perspective, this approach is problematic due to the central role of pste in promoting and supporting lasting change in education systems. we posit that since quality teachers lead to the achievement of learning outcomes, pste programs in lmics must be ameliorated to produce a pipeline of well-prepared teachers who are skilled in evidence-based practices, ready to teach children in these contexts. improvement of these programs can lead to the development of a sustainable teaching workforce. if pste is not reformed in parallel with classroom practices introduced to inservice teachers, new teachers will be released into education systems looking, in the words of one zambian teacher educator, “rusty.” this requires ongoing rounds of intensive professional development for new teachers who are entering schools that look very different from the ones for which they trained. 1 as classified by the world bank in the 2023 fiscal year, lowincome countries are those with a gni of $1,085 per capita or less and middle-income countries are those with a gni per capita between 1,086 and $4,255 in 2021. examples of research from lmics has shown that new teachers use their pste as a foundation for their practice in the classroom, and they refer back to it as they build their skills (akyeampong et al., 2013). both content knowledge and pedagogical skills learned in pste are therefore embedded in teachers’ pedagogy for the length of their career. accordingly, enhancing the focus on pste offers an opportunity to improve the sustainability of the fln investments that have been made by international aid donor agencies, governments, and nongovernmental organizations. this requires the above entities to conceptualize and develop pste as an integral part of a continuum of teacher professional development leading to sustained teacher development and quality teachers (feimannemser, 2001; roberts-hull, jensen, & cooper, 2015). pste programs that embrace evidencebased fln approaches are more likely to align well with programs being implemented in schools. in this study, we draw on the literature on pste in lmics to examine key challenges facing pste in lmics and use this evidence to highlight the barriers to providing high-quality pre-service teacher education. we suggest areas for teacher educators and stakeholders to focus attention—including curriculum revisions to make pste more applied and relevant, enhanced focus on the practicum, and highquality professional development for teacher educators—to promote alignment of content and pedagogy with evidence-based practices. in section 1, we outline the barriers that have been identified in the pste literature from lmics, focusing on the program curriculum, the practicum component of teacher education, and low-income countries include afghanistan, south sudan and yemen, and lower-middle income countries include bangladesh, samoa and bolivia (world bank, 2023). initial teacher training 3 the capacity of teacher educators. in section 2, we draw on literature from both high-income countries and lmics to provide evidence-based recommendations for improving pste. we provide a summary of action points and direction for future research in section 3. challenges in providing high-quality preservice teacher education in lmics our review of the literature identified three key categories of barriers in lmics: curriculum-related issues, practicum-related issues, and the capacity of teacher educators. in this section, we address each of these three areas. curricular issues teachers need three types of knowledge in order to teach effectively: content knowledge (ck), pedagogical knowledge (pk), and pedagogical content knowledge (pck) (shulman, 1986). ck comprises subject matter knowledge such as theories and concepts specific to the subjects the teacher teaches— mathematics, reading, science, etc. pk includes the general ability to plan, organize, and implement lessons in the classroom across topic areas. pck is teachers’ ability to use pedagogy that is specific to and appropriate for a given subject. pste programs must provide their students with the information and practice opportunities needed to develop all three types of knowledge to produce effective teachers ready for the challenges of the classroom. one of the strongest themes that emerged from our review of published research on pste programs in lmics was that the focus of the curriculum was generally on ck, at the expense of pk or cpk, and on theory more than practice broadly (barnes et al., 2019; korthagen, 2010; masaiti & manchishi, 2011). examining pste programs in six african countries, akyeampong (2013) found that pre-service teachers training to teach primary grade reading and mathematics spend more time learning ck than how to teach the content and skills to students (akyeampong et al., 2013). these choices have consequences for pre-service teachers, which are evident from their first experiences in the classroom. a practicum mentor teacher in zambia discussed pre-service teachers’ weaknesses in pedagogy, explaining, “yes, some have the subject content, but they do not know how to put across the messages. that is why we say they leave the university while very raw in teaching methods” (simuyaba et al., 2015, p. 92). high-quality primary pste programs should have a balanced focus on ck, pk, and pck, particularly in the skills of fln. despite spending the majority of course time on ck, many pre-service teachers in lmics still have poor ck in the subjects they will teach (altinok, antoninis, & nguyen-van, 2017; de et al., 2016; tefera, atnafu, & michael, 2021). in a study of pre-service teachers in four colleges of teacher education in ethiopia, alemu et al. (2021) found that the pre-service teachers did not meet the level of content attainment required by the curriculum. in that study, primary-level science pre-service teachers scored at the international mean for eighthgrade students on the trends in international mathematics and science study. a study in south africa found that the mathematics ck of pre-service teachers in three pste programs did not improve much during their four-year program (bowie, venkat, & askew 2019). in zambia, pre-service mathematics teachers were required to take advanced mathematics classes but had difficulty explaining basic mathematics functions (malambo et al., 2019). in a study of pre-service teachers and pste program lecturers in bauchi and sokoto states in nigeria, the knowledge of literacy development concepts 4 global education review 10 (3) was so low that, as one teacher educator explained, “teaching reading is confused with teaching english” (barnes et al., 2019, p. 157). evidence from research studies demonstrates that lack of teacher ck has an impact on student learning outcomes (akyeampong, 2022; filmer, molina, & stacy, 2015; glewwe & muralidharan, 2016; ganimian & murnane, 2016), so it is imperative that pste programs ensure that preservice teachers graduate with enough ck to teach fln. the insufficient academic background of preservice teachers and the duration of some pste programs contribute to the theme of weak ck among pre-service teachers despite a strong focus on ck in pste programs. in lmics, pste programs are often perceived as low-prestige tertiary education options pursued by students who did not perform well enough in secondary school to have access to other options (barnes et al., 2018; beteille & evans, 2019; ngao, 2022). criteria for entry-level admission to pste programs for pre-service teachers in lmics can be quite low. in ethiopia, teachers with a grade 10 education can be admitted into pste programs if their scores on the national examination were not high enough to enter upper secondary school (mekonnen, fesmire & barnes, 2018). many lmics offer short certificate and diploma pste programs. for example, nepal offers a 10-month upper secondary training course, liberia offers a oneyear c certificate (republic of liberia, education sector analysis, 2022) and sri lanka a yearlong diploma (ramchand, 2020). given the duration of these programs and the academic background of pre-service teachers, programs spend significant curricular time filling gaps in preservice teachers’ ck. 2 ghanaian emis data from 2014/2015 show regional average class sizes ranging as high as 91 students in kindergarten in the northern region and 52 students in the the resulting focus on ck and theory results in pste programs that are disconnected from the teaching context. in many lmics, preservice teachers do not learn about the curriculum in use in local schools; the instructional materials used in those schools, including books and other materials from largescale fln programs that have trained in-service teachers; languages of instruction and related policies; or the social, economic, and cultural contexts of schools in their countries (akyeampong et al., 2013; masaiti & manchishi, 2011; mulenga & luangala, 2015; pryor et al., 2012; wawire, 2021). instead, the curriculum at pste programs often presents teaching as a standardized process, ignoring contextual factors new teachers will face in the classroom that may vary widely within countries (akyeampong et al., 2013). the disconnects between pste and primary schools are well documented in the pste literature. buckler (2020) describes an assignment in which ghanaian pre-service teachers were asked to plan a lesson for 35 students. while the government’s target class size is 35 students, it is well below typical class sizes.2 to receive a high score, the lesson plan had to be for exactly 35 students. as one of the participants reported, “we can’t veer off script! it’s like everything at college—it’s not real, it’s a game we play to pass our exams” (p. 856). in bhutan, where multigrade classrooms are common, many pste programs provided no training on how to teach in these settings (kivunja & kuyini, 2015); research in indonesia has documented similar issues (luschei & zubaidah, 2012). studies in south africa have found that pste programs do not prepare preservice teachers well to teach in rural schools primary grades in the upper east region (ananga & tamanja, 2017). initial teacher training 5 (heeralal, 2014; mukeredzi, 2016). pste programs are therefore failing to adequately prepare their students for the real-world demands and conditions they will face in the classroom. the pedagogical approaches that teacher educators use in the classroom is another area of conflict between pste programs and schools that we identified in the literature. the instructional style in pste programs, as in many other tertiary education programs in lmics, is generally based on lecture rather than on more active pedagogies that promote student engagement (barnes et al., 2019; borg, clifford, & htut, 2018; buckler, 2020; du plessis & muzaffar, 2010; du et al., 2020; pryor et al., 2012). in highly hierarchical education systems, lecturers are perceived as authorities and the sole source of correct knowledge and practice (akyeampong et al., 2013; du et al., 2020). preservice teachers, therefore, are likely to model their pedagogy on their teacher educators’ approaches and have few opportunities to be exposed to more active pedagogical styles. this “apprenticeship of observation” (lortie, 1975) sets these newly trained teachers up for conflict with the more student-centered learning approaches used in many large-scale lmic fln programs and in primary grade curricula. practicum issues during the teaching practicum or student teaching experience, pre-service teachers are assigned to a school where they have opportunities to teach under the supervision of an experienced mentor teacher. this is a critical phase in the development of pre-service teachers’ skills and perception of their effectiveness. practicum experiences vary across lmics in length, program structure, and level of teaching responsibilities (akyeampong et al., 2013). however, the literature from lmics documents two common types of misalignments. first, the course content at the pste program and the content of the practicum are often disconnected (sailors & hoffman, 2019). second, the practicum often provides no or few opportunities for pre-service teachers to practice the core instructional practices utilized in evidence-based fln programs. the frequency with which these issues are reported suggests that the practicum period should receive more attention during pste programs’ curriculum review and development. in the reviewed literature, the problems most frequently identified are related to the quality and quantity of mentoring pre-service teachers receive during their placements. during the practicum, a student should ideally be supervised by an experienced mentor teacher as well as by a teacher educator from the pste program. individual experiences during the practicum are often highly variable, depending on the skills of their mentor teacher. in a study of pre-service teachers’ practicum experiences in mpumalanga province, south africa, nkambule and mukeredzi (2017) identified divergent practicum experiences. in some cases, mentor teachers refused to be observed teaching by the pre-service teachers they were supposedly mentoring. in others, mentor teachers were described by their pre-service teachers as excellent. while teacher educators should also play an active role in mentoring during the practicum, observations of pre-service teachers in classrooms by teacher educators are generally limited; in some cases, they are brief, one-time observations (abie, 2019). in cameroon, a study found that schools took advantage of the presence of pre-service teachers to schedule inservice training for the regular classroom teachers during practicum periods, leaving the pre-service teachers to teach solo without support or feedback (wohlfahrt, 2018). 6 global education review 10 (3) similarly, a study in zimbabwe found that many mathematics pre-service teachers were left largely unsupported and unobserved during their eight-month teaching practicum (makamure & jita, 2019). beyond the quantity of support provided during the practicum, the quality of mentoring was a common issue in the lmic literature (lewin, 2004). in a study of university-school partnerships in pste programs in south africa, teacher educators said that there was little training given to mentor teachers on how to support pre-service teachers during their practicum and that their own observation of preservice teachers was minimal (mutemeri & chetty, 2011). the kenyan education system theoretically uses a structured feedback approach that is supposed to include preand post-observation discussions between teacher educators and pre-service teachers, in addition to lesson observation. however, in a qualitative case study, ong’ondo and borg (2011) found that this approach was rarely implemented due to the distances that teacher educators would need to travel for observations and the considerable number of pre-service teachers. additionally, teacher educators rarely discussed pre-service teachers’ performance with mentor teachers. pre-service teachers said they felt anxious about the evaluations and reported that there were no opportunities for collaborative reflection on their teaching with their supervising teacher educator. in summary, we can conclude from the literature that there are generally no incentives for teacher educators and mentor teachers to give high-quality, intensive support to preservice teachers, and staffing and time constraints would make it impossible to implement such a plan at current resource levels. even under good conditions, with a trained, supportive mentor teacher, practica in lmics are often too short to allow time for preservice teachers to develop feelings of efficacy and competency. for example, participants in a nine-month pste program in cameroon had teaching practica periods as short as two weeks (wohlfahrt, 2018). at the university of zambia, pre-service teachers said that their teaching practice—including both peer teaching and practicum—was too short for them to develop their skills (masaiti & manchishi, 2011). some participants in a study of 61 final-year psts and 26 pste program lecturers in south africa had similar feelings (mutemeri & chetty, 2011). as one lecturer in that study explained, “we are not doing students any good. students should be spending a semester or a full year. they need to experience what teaching is—students go out there it’s like play teaching” (p. 510). taken as a whole, these problems—lack of ck, disconnections from pste coursework, lack of sufficient supervision and mentoring, minimal opportunities to practice new instructional approaches used in the schools, and short practicum length—often result in an experience that does not effectively develop preservice teachers’ skills and confidence as teachers (chomba manchishi & sani mwanza, 2013; westbrook et al., 2009). large-scale fln programs operating in lmics should engage with governments to advocate for improvements to the practicum phase of pste. in the following section, we discuss the institutional and teacher educator level capacities required to support a strengthened practicum system, in addition to curricular revisions. teacher educator and institutional capacities a third major theme in the literature on pste in lmics is the capacity of teacher educators to teach a high-quality, evidencebased program. teacher educators often have initial teacher training 7 few opportunities to engage in professional development or learn about practices in use at schools, leading over time to the use of instructional practices and content that are dated (barnes et al., 2019; du plessis & muzaffar, 2010; gemeda & tynjälä, 2015). in a study of four pste programs in nigeria, barnes and colleagues (2019) report that teacher educators were insufficiently prepared to teach ck and pedagogy for primary grade reading (pryor et al., 2012). given that teacher educator positions typically (and increasingly) require university degrees (lewin, 2004), some were hired directly out of their degree programs, while others had been secondary school teachers with bachelor’s degrees. the mismatch between the minimum degree requirement and the available stock of teacher educator candidates with primary grade teaching experience means that in some lmics, teacher educators have little to no experience teaching the youngest children, let alone pedagogical expertise related to fln skills. therefore, teacher educators, even those in primary-level pste, may have little knowledge of how to teach children to read or work with mathematical concepts, and the resulting curricular focus on complex theoretical concepts rather than hands-on pedagogical approaches is a logical response by many lecturers. borg, clifford, and htut (2018), in their study on teacher educators in myanmar, note that teacher educator participants did not have the experience of teaching in schools and had little pedagogical training. minimal classroom experience among teacher educators also means that lecturers are unable to prepare pre-service teachers for the contexts in which they will teach (lewin, 2004). this is compounded in countries where teacher educators completed their degrees at universities abroad. for example, a study in samoa reported that most teacher educators in that study were educated at universities in new zealand and australia (tupu tuia, 2018) and used textbooks and other materials from those countries in their courses, resulting in limited connections to and appreciation of samoan knowledge and content. pre-service teachers need to be prepared for the real-world conditions they will face in the classroom, and teacher educators who are disengaged from those settings cannot adequately prepare their students. even in cases where teacher educators do have knowledge of local conditions in schools, however, they often lack autonomy in their decisions about what content to teach and how to teach it. the content of the pre-service training curriculum is generally developed at a national level, leaving teacher educators little room to make it relevant for their pre-service teachers’ needs. for example, in ghana, buckler (2020) describes a teacher educator who was required to teach a class on science laboratory safety, though he personally had never seen a primary school with a science lab. yet the lecturer’s performance was judged based on his coverage of the official curriculum, including components completely irrelevant to the local context. it is important for program planners and policymakers to note that lmic teacher educators are working in under-resourced colleges. a pste program focused on primary grade fln requires a range of instructional materials, including reference libraries, national primary grade curricula and texts, leveled readers appropriate for the early grades, and manipulatives to model instruction, to name a few examples. pste programs, especially those focused on primary education and those not connected to universities, often lack these materials, in addition to the materials used by in-service teachers in schools (barnes et al., 8 global education review 10 (3) 2019; barnes et al., 2018; lewin, 2004; mekonnen et al., 2018; pryor et al., 2012). beyond what is offered in the pste institution itself, teacher educators generally have few opportunities to engage in professional development. although there are professional associations in both highand low-income countries which support the professional development of teacher educators, faculty in institutions of higher education (ihe) often do not have the financial resources to join these associations (matiba, 2023). consequently, teacher educators frequently find it challenging to keep current with evidence-based practices in the profession. also, many teacher educators are simply unaware of avenues for professional development. to improve teacher educator professional development at scale, the open university created a massive open online course (mooc) and open education resources (oer) for teachers and teacher educators in africa called teacher education in sub-saharan africa (tessa). in a study conducted on teacher educator responses to the online course, 83% of the participants stated that their motivation for taking the course was to update their knowledge about teacher education (stutchbury, amos & chamberlain, 2019). in a study on the tessa mooc in uganda, researchers found that in addition to faculty ict skill levels being low, none of the teacher educators in the study “referenced the internet as a location for formal professional learning” (buckler, stutchbury, kasule, cullen, kaije, 2021, p. 21). mandatory participation in poor quality professional development sessions which did not lead to promotion, the general lack of professional learning for faculty and the lack of recognition of participating in professional learning for promotion, are also barriers to faculty participation in professional development programs (buckler, stutchbury, kasule, cullen & kaije, 2021; matiba, 2023). evidence-based essentials and promising practices for lmics though pste is frequently omitted from large-scale fln initiatives, it is a critical entry point for sustainably developing the quality of basic education in lmics. akyeampong and colleagues (2013), in their study of pste in ghana, kenya, mali, senegal, tanzania, and uganda, conclude that “[i]nitial teacher education remains the most powerful influence on the practice of teachers in the early part of their career” (p. 280). they further argue that pste “provides the knowledge and understanding that [teachers] fall back on to justify and generate their classroom practice, even those who have taken further courses” (p. 280). while professional development through in-service teacher training can provide updated skills and knowledge, teachers’ pste is the foundation upon which they scaffold further development in their profession. in this section, we present recommendations for pste in lmics that are based on rigorous evidence. we note, however, that empirical evidence on pste programs remains limited, even in the united states and other high-income countries. the field has not yet produced substantial evidence linking specific pste program design elements or practices and primary student learning outcomes, and the evidence is particularly thin in lmics. therefore, in this section we use the best available evidence—from lmics where possible and high-income countries when not— to make recommendations for improving pste in lmics. initial teacher training 9 key components of the pste program curriculum currently, there are neither universal, international professional standards for teachers generally, nor for primary grade fln teachers specifically. such standards are typically determined nationally and differ across countries. in its equip1 report, designing effective pre-service teacher education programs, usaid advises that “[e]ffective preservice teacher education should be aligned with professional standards for teachers” (usaid, 2011, p. 6). increasingly, with support from bilateral and multilateral donors, lmics are developing, reviewing, and updating teacher professional standards to better ensure the quality preparation of teachers (otunuku, finau & reynolds 2020; pillay, muttaqi, pant & herath, 2017; unesco, 2022). as standards vary across countries, so should pste program content. the curriculum should be driven by what teachers in a specific setting need to be able to accomplish with their students. having made this disclaimer, the literature suggests that there are certain core components of fln that should be included in primary grade pste program curricula. preservice teachers must be taught about the building blocks of fln skill development, as supported by current evidence, and must learn the relevant pedagogies to teach those skills. referring to shulman’s (1986) terminology, preservice teachers need ck, pk, and cpk development. in the early primary grades, literacy skills are a central focus of the school curriculum in most countries. therefore, all preservice teachers should have formal training in this area. this should include, at a minimum, foundations of reading pedagogy, application of research-based instructional practices, basic student assessment, and differentiated instruction for learners with diverse needs, including children with disabilities. as with literacy, pre-service teachers’ ck in mathematics should be intricately linked to the national or local curriculum; teachers must be competent in the mathematics skills they will teach (anthony & walshaw, 2009; youngloveridge, bicknell, & mills, 2012). several groups have identified core content for pste programs to cover in mathematics (schmidt et al., 2017). for example, according to the conference board of the mathematical sciences (2012), pre-service teachers should study numbers and operations, algebra, geometry, and measurement and data, using an approach that combines ck and pck. the curriculum for pre-service teachers should also include methods courses that connect theory to practice (darling-hammond, 2014; jenset, klette, & hammerness, 2018; sowa et al., 2016). one approach to this, for example, would be for teacher educators to use active pedagogies in their pste classrooms that require pre-service teachers to engage with pedagogy, such as conducting and critiquing peer micro-teaching. video critiques are another means of closing the theory-practice gap (alliergagneur et al., 2020; mcdonald et al., 2014; plöger, scholl, & seifert, 2018; ulusoy, 2020). field experiences in schools as part of required coursework can also serve this purpose; for example, pre-service teachers could tutor students in local primary schools who need additional support (degraff et al., 2015; mcdonald et al., 2014; sailors & hoffman, 2019). these activities allow pre-service teachers to begin applying the theoretical knowledge of instruction gained from their coursework immediately, rather than waiting for the student teaching practicum, which is generally at the end of the pste program. 10 global education review 10 (3) teacher educators should teach using pedagogies that pre-service teachers will use in schools, so pre-service teachers can model their own instruction on their teacher educators’ approach (mcdonald et al., 2014). in many cases, new learner-centered approaches are being spread across primary schools through bilateraland multilateral-donor-funded projects, which do not extend training opportunities to teacher educators. this results in potential conflict between pste programs— where lecture-based approaches are most common—and primary schools, where the new approaches that invite more active engagement are becoming more widespread. the resulting disconnects between the pste content and practices in primary schools can lead to contradictory approaches and beliefs among new teachers (haser & star, 2009). implementing this recommendation, ensuring that pre-service pedagogies match the more active pedagogy being used increasingly in schools, will require training and support for the pste program lecturers, as discussed below. looking broadly across pste curricula, there are three aspects of curricular alignment that should be considered by governments and other actors with oversight roles. first, as discussed above, pste content must correspond to existing teacher standards. second, the pste program must have a clear mission and ensure alignment across courses within the program, linked closely to pst field experiences (darlinghammond, 2006a). for example, if pre-service teachers are taught in their literacy courses that literacy activities should be incorporated across the subject areas, but the subject-area pedagogy course for science, for example, does not discuss or model how to do this integration in practice, 3 in that study, “oversight” was defined by “three sub measures: whether the program requires that cooperating teachers have a minimum number of years of teaching experience, whether the program picks the cooperating there is a curricular disconnect. third, the curricular content for pste programs should be aligned with that of ongoing in-service trainings (hardman et al., 2011). these three types of curricular alignment would ease the transition from pst to novice teacher. improving the practicum experience the practicum is widely considered a central and crucial component of pste (council for the accreditation of educator preparation, 2019; darling-hammond, 2014; mattsson, eilertsen, & rorrison, 2011; national council for accreditation of teacher education, 2010). in its equip1 report, designing effective pre-service teacher education programs, usaid names a “strong practicum” as one of its eight principles of effective pre-service education (usaid, 2011). the experience of working in a school, under the supervision of a mentor teacher, can aid in closing the theory-practice gap discussed above (downton, muir, & livy, 2018). a sizeable body of global research suggests that pre-service teachers’ experiences during the practicum can have lasting impacts. a study in the united states found that the teaching practicum can improve pre-service teachers’ feelings of preparedness and efficacy in the classroom (brown, lee, & collins, 2015). a study of primary-level pre-service teachers in china found that their comprehension of student assessment developed during student teaching (xu & he, 2019). in new york, a study found an association between the test scores of the students of novice teachers and whether the new teacher’s pste program had strong “oversight” of the practicum, a measure indicating a more rigorous practical experience3 teacher as opposed to selection by the k–12 school or the student teacher, and whether a program supervisor observes the participants at least five times during student teaching. because these measures are highly correlated, we combine initial teacher training 11 (boyd et al., 2009). research from singapore suggests that the teaching practicum gives preservice teachers a chance to consider whether teaching is a good career choice, reducing turnover in the early years of the teaching career (ng et al., 2018). as noted above, the length and structure of practicum varies widely across countries as well as across programs within countries (schwille & dembélé, 2007). empirical studies in this area are sparse, however, even in highincome countries. jenset and colleagues (2018) state that “we do not have many studies comparing variations in how the field placement is organized and its implications for prospective teachers” (p. 193). darling-hammond (2006a) argues that pste programs should include “extensive and intensely supervised clinical work integrated with course work using pedagogies that link theory and practice” (p. 300) and that school placement sites should be selected carefully by the pste program (darlinghammond, 2006b). the practicum should be an opportunity for pre-service teachers to observe strong teaching, so the practice of choosing a school that is simply convenient but does not offer good learning opportunities for the pst should be discouraged. pste programs and stakeholders should carefully consider the length of the practicum. in a u.s. study of more than 3,000 teachers, the length of practice teaching was positively associated with feelings of preparedness among novice teachers as well as with teacher retention (ronfeldt, 2014). darling-hammond (2006a) writes that strong pste programs in the united states often include an academic year of student teaching. there are trade-offs to lengthy practica (and therefore a longer program overall), these binary variables into a single sum to measure the program’s oversight of student teaching” (boyd et al., 2009, p. 437). however (schwille & dembélé, 2007). in lowresource contexts striving to produce more certified teachers to fill gaps, an extended practicum may be difficult to achieve. even in high-income countries such as finland, the cost of the practicum is noted as a consideration in pste program design (saloviita & tolvanen, 2017). while the cost and pressures to produce teachers quickly will vary across countries, leading to different answers to this central question, there should be clear minimum national standards for the length of the teaching experience. without sufficient supervised practice time, new teachers will enter the classroom unprepared. a high-quality practicum experience includes opportunities for pre-service teachers to connect what they have learned in the classroom with what they need to do in the classroom as teachers. this addresses one of the most frequent practicum-related criticisms, as noted above—the lack of connection between theory presented in the pste program and the reality of the practicum classroom. pre-service teachers’ capacity to reflect on their own practices and performance in the classroom and learn from it has been demonstrated in numerous studies (aslam et al., 2021; sandholtz, 2011; spiteri & sang, 2019; tigchelaar & korthagen, 2004). despite the benefits of these practices, some programs do not allow required assignments during the practicum (allen, ambrosetti, & turner, 2013). during the practicum, pre-service teachers should have some opportunity to teach independently and with autonomy, practicing what they have learned in their coursework (chan, 2019). the practicum should be structured in such a way that allows for the 12 global education review 10 (3) measured transfer of responsibility for instruction from the mentor teacher to the preservice teacher (darling-hammond, 2006b). mentor teachers may have difficulty ceding control of the classroom to pre-service teachers, particularly if they believe that the pre-service teachers are not effective and the children will have to re-learn the material later (simuyaba et al., 2015). however, if a pre-service teacher leaves a practicum having only observed teaching and learning, and not having taught independently, it is a missed learning opportunity. in the body of research on the practicum, pre-service teacher outcomes are associated with the quality of mentorship. for example, support from mentor teachers was related to chinese pre-service teachers’ development of professional identity, which was also associated with the pre-service teachers’ commitment to teaching (zhao & zhang, 2017). a study from the united states found a positive, statistically significant correlation between preservice teacher’ perceptions of support from their mentor teacher and their self-reported teaching efficacy (moulding, stewart, & dunmeyer, 2014). strong mentors can help preservice teachers learn about contextual issues faced in the classroom, including language complexities, poverty, and other forms of disadvantage (naidoo & wagner, 2020). while the evidence is clear that the quality of mentorship is critical, the definition of a “good” mentor is less defined. in many cases, “mentor” teachers act more like evaluative supervisors (ambrosetti, knight, & dekkers, 2014). a recent study reviewed seventy peerreviewed studies on mentors for pre-service teachers (ellis, alonzo, & nguyen, 2020). drawing largely on research from high-income countries, the review concluded that highquality mentor teachers should: collaborate with the university; develop a disposition and professional knowledge in mentoring; establish an effective relationship with the pst; facilitate the pst’s learning; model effective teaching and make connections between theory and practice; provide direction and support, and; adopt a progressive mindset and support the pst to nurture a teacher-identity (p. 10). therefore, based on this description, mentor teachers should primarily be strong teachers themselves and should model the pedagogy that the pste program wants the pst to emulate (ronfeldt et al., 2020). strong teaching alone does not necessarily indicate that a specific teacher will be a good mentor, however; they must also be willing to and capable of taking on the role of mentorship. being a mentor teacher is difficult, adding interpersonal conflicts, frustration, and increased workload—typically uncompensated— on top of the already challenging teaching role (burns et al., 2018; sim, 2011; zeichner, 2010). some regions may lack sufficient mentor teachers to collaborate with pre-service teachers (burns et al., 2018). research on mentor teacher perceptions of their work in both high and low-income countries, points to the fact that many mentor teachers do not feel prepared enough to take on the task of coaching and mentoring pre-service teachers (öztürk, 2021; smit, & du toit, 2021). consequently, researchers of pste practica in high income countries have called for the introduction of various forms of professional development for mentor teachers, which focus on teaching, coaching and mentoring skills to properly prepare them for working with pre-service teachers (ambrosetti, 2014; mackie, 2020; parker, zenkov & glaser, 2021; wilkinson, 2022). findings in these studies indicate that initial teacher training 13 after taking these courses, mentor teachers stated that they felt better prepared to support pre-service teachers’ growth during their programs and beginning teachers during their induction (ambrosetti, 2014; childre & van rie, 2015; gareis and grant, 2014; miller, hanley & brobst, 2019; parker, et al., 2021). while there is scant literature on mentor teacher professional development in lmics, there is recognition of the need to better prepare mentor teachers (jita, & munje, 2022; mukeredzi, mthiyane & bertram, 2015; smit & du toit, 2021) and some movement is being made not only to improve mentor teacher skills but increase their numbers in schools. for example, in the usaid transforming the education system for teachers and students (tests) in liberia, faculty and mentor teachers are being provided with professional development in current evidence-based methods for teaching, coaching, and mentoring (smith & ming, 2023). pste programs should take more responsibility in identifying high-quality placements for their pre-service teachers in schools where skilled mentor teachers are available. in high-income countries, the field has shifted from the unidirectional approach of a mentor teacher supervising a pre-service teacher (pst) toward a model that is more collaborative and reflective (cavanagh & king, 2020; daniel, auhl, & hastings, 2013; le cornu, 2005; thompson & schademan, 2019). while it is less common in lmics, we identified several studies from lmics that discuss this type of pst development during the practicum. pre-service teachers at the university of botswana conduct peer observations during the teaching practicum (monyatsi & ngwako, 2019). in rural kwazulunatal, south africa, one study explored the experiences of pre-service teachers participating in a peer communities of practice (cop) program during the practicum (islam, 2012). these cop groups offered useful opportunities for reflection and discussion on issues such as teacher identity, stereotypes about rural students, and the gaps in pre-service teachers’ preparation for the classroom. however, the authors note that the cop groups also reproduced inequalities across race and language, with pre-service teachers participating at various levels. peer learning approaches may be useful additions to practicum experiences in lmics, where costs will limit the number of times that a university lecturer can travel to directly observe each pst’s teaching. however, as with any intervention, peer activities must be well planned and scaffolded so that the pre-service teachers can provide useful and actionable feedback. the potential benefits to the involvement of current teachers in pste programs are numerous, including enhancing perceptions of teachers as skilled professionals and preparing pre-service teachers for the realities of classroom teaching (mason, 2013). in a study of 1,000 teachers in the united states, most said they would welcome engagement with a university teacher education program, including activities such as meetings with preservice teachers, guest lecturing in pste courses, or partor full-time teaching in the pste program for a term (mason, 2013). in the united states, australia, and canada, teachers have served as teacher educators in pste programs (allen, butler-mader, & smith, 2010; zeichner, 2010; zeichner, payne, & brayko, 2015). participating teachers found this to be a positive experience, providing them the chance to reflect on their own practices as well as closing the gap between theory and practice for pre-service teachers (allen butler-mader, & smith, 2010). while evidence in this area is largely from high-income countries, it also 14 global education review 10 (3) provides illustrative examples that could be feasible in lmics. collaborations between pste programs and demonstration schools must have welldefined roles for all partners to build a positive, lasting relationship that can support pre-service teachers during their practicum and at other points during their studies (allen, ambrosetti, & turner 2013). the relationship must be mutually beneficial and not extractive, simply demanding more from under-resourced schools and overworked mentor teachers (degraff, schmidt, & waddell, 2015; mutemeri & chetty, 2011; sowa et al., 2016). teacher educators and mentor teachers must be conscious of the inherent power relationships that may be at play and take steps to minimize any negative impacts (martin, snow, & franklin torrez, 2011). over the long-term, school-pste program relationships require the commitment of financial resources to be sustainable (allen et al., 2013), either from pste programs or directly from ministries of education. functional partnerships between pre-service institutions and schools are a core element of any highquality pste system. professional development and support for teacher educators any effort to improve pste in a sustainable fashion must include teacher educator capacity development. as usaid argues in its’ equip1 report (2011) on the design of pste programs, “effective professional development of teacher educators leads to better program development and implementation” (p. 10). historically, the international development sector’s support to higher education capacity development has centered on scholarships that bring individuals to high-income countries to study (mccowan, 2016). this type of deep investment in a small number of individuals may not develop a broad enough base of knowledge to support sustainable, ongoing programmatic improvements at the institutional level. combining both deep and broad capacity development can ensure that all teacher educators have professional development opportunities, while reducing the likelihood of larger-scale brain drain or the risk of overreliance on specific individuals for direction (zuilkowski & tsiga, 2021). the literature on capacity development for teacher educators is thin, with relatively little rigorous research. the extant studies provide some suggestions of areas for action and future research. for example, capacity development activities for college of education lecturers in ethiopia focused on early grade reading content and pedagogy led to statistically significant improvements in knowledge on an assessment and improved pedagogy in their classrooms (barnes et al., 2018; mekonnen et al., 2018). in nigeria, a similar capacity development activity had positive impacts on teacher educators’ knowledge, skills, and attitudes related to early grade reading (barnes et al., 2019). the tessa initiative provides free online courses in arabic, english, french and swahili. the courses cover topics like inclusive education, teaching reading, active teaching and learning, and using ict. tessa courses and resources also provide an avenue for teachers and teacher educators across sub-saharan africa to network and collaborate for professional development (tessa, 2021). in a research study conducted on teacher educator participation in the online courses participants stated that preservice teachers were more engaged in their courses as a result of the online courses they took, and that although internet connectivity had been a challenge, they were proud of learning how to use more ict in their courses (stutchbury, amos & chamberlain, 2019). initial teacher training 15 as access to the internet via mobile phones, tablets, and other low-cost devices spreads throughout lmics, opportunities to reach teacher educators expands as well. faculty and pre-service use of digital technologies can be challenging due to the cost of data, intermittent electricity, and internet. however, distance training is less costly than in-person training, which could make a large-scale increase of capacity development for lecturers more feasible in low-resource contexts. as with any attempt to use technology in education, however, the intervention can be only as good as the content provided through the electronic platform. one example of this type of ongoing, distance professional development occurred within the usaid-funded northern education initiative plus activity in nigeria, where lecturers who had previously completed a graduate-level, face-toface early grade reading course were supported in creating professional learning circles around specific topics of interest, such as parental involvement in literacy development. these learning circles were supported by us-based university faculty via whatsapp. though attempts to leverage technology for teacher educator capacity development are relatively recent, they have been accelerated by the covid-19 pandemic, and evidence on the effectiveness of these approaches should be available in the coming years. conclusions and future directions no matter how well funded, fln programs cannot be successful or sustainable over the long term without the incorporation of pste into interventions and long-term program planning. supporting pste programs now is imperative. there is a global shortage of teachers and in sub-saharan africa alone, fifteen million teachers are needed to reach the sustainable development goals for education by 2030. in south asia alone, seven million qualified teachers are needed. it is through the development of quality pste programs, funded by country governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, that lmics can be supported to achieve this goal and ensure the transformation and sustainability of education systems and the education workforce in this regard (naylor, jones & boateng, 2019; international task force on teacher education 2030; vargas-tamez, 2022). the literature reviewed in this study identifies several areas central to the development of primary grade pste, including (1) curriculum revisions to make pste more applied and relevant to classrooms in local contexts, (2) enhanced focus on the practicum as a core component of pste, including examination of the quality and quantity of mentoring received by pre-service teachers, and (3) consistent, ongoing, high-quality professional development for pste lecturers to promote alignment of their course content and pedagogy with evidence-based practices. though the reviewed literature clearly identifies a set of problems in pste, there is little rigorous empirical research on exactly how to address these issues (allier-gagneur et al., 2020). especially in lmics, it is difficult to track individual pre-service teachers as they progress in the teaching profession, and several years, at a minimum, elapse between exposure to various aspects of pste and being able to measure impact on primary grade students in new teachers’ classrooms. while some types of research on pste would require large, administrative data sets (as in boyd et al., 2009), there is a range of topics that could be meaningfully explored on a smaller scale, with focused research investments. a few examples include approaches to enhancing the quality of pste program applicants, distance, and virtual platforms for teacher educator professional 16 global education review 10 (3) development, implementing partnership activities bringing together teachers and teacher educators, mentor teacher training, and providing textbooks and other resources to pste programs at the same level as primary schools. over the longer term, the strengthening of national education management information systems in lmics should allow for larger-scale studies of the impact of various aspects of pste. finally, we note that pste is underfunded and requires greater investment. lack of needed resources, from national curricula to textbooks to instructional aids, impacts all facets of pste and reduces the preparedness of new teachers. the importance of resources in teacher training is stressed in usaid’s equip1 report, which states, “teacher education institutions require sufficient infrastructure and resources to implement effective pste programs” (usaid, 2011). pste programs require both broad and deep investment for sustainable capacity development (zuilkowski & tsiga, 2021). governments, bilateral and multilateral donors, nongovernmental organizations, and other stakeholders must acknowledge the role played by pste in efforts to improve and sustain education outcomes and include pste institutions as full partners in fln activities. some recent evidence suggests that bilateral and multilateral donors are beginning to focus more on pste. in january 2023, the european union (eu) launched a 100 million euro investment called the regional teachers’ initiative in africa and for africa, to address the shortage of teachers. this initiative, in partnership with the african union, unesco and the international task force on teachers for education 2030 aims to support partner countries in africa in improving teacher education (european commission, 2023). though pste is often thought of as a component of the higher education sector rather than a part of basic education, it is an integral component of ensuring high-quality and sustainable fln education for all children globally. funding statement the production of this paper was supported by the bill and melinda gates foundation, as part of the science of teaching grant. references abie, a. 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(2021). glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research. global education review, 8 (2-3), 21-45. glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research gail cormier université de saint-boniface (canada) abstract this article will explore the local experience of language awareness, scholastic linguistic identity and language ideologies through a scholastic linguistic landscape (schoolscape) (brown, 2012) study in three schools in canada where french was the language of instruction. glocality is an especially useful frame for linguistic landscape studies (manan et al., 2017) and has been used to look deeper into youth identities (grixti, 2008). photographic images of each school and photo-elicitation interviews with 37 students were used to qualitatively analyze the visible, written language found on the school walls of secondary schools offering three different french instructional programs. glocality is used to draw the connections between the local schoolscapes and the global themes of language ideologies, scholastic linguistic identity and language awareness. involving students in linguistic landscape research results in discussions surrounding linguistic diversity and can lead to multilingual language awareness. at the same time, such a practise can result in incidental language learning. the results showed that students were aware of the importance of their schoolscape as a representation of national language ideologies, as a symbol of their school’s linguistic identity and as a vehicle for promoting language use and awareness. although the findings are local, the insights gleaned from the students are relevant to a global audience interested in language learning and multilingualism. particularly, student perspectives and participation in analysis offer a unique contribution to linguistic landscape research and educational research in general. keywords schoolscapes; language ideologies; minority languages; scholastic linguistic identity glocal linguistic landscapes and schoolscapes the study of linguistic landscapes involves analyzing “visible written language” in public spaces (gorter, 2013). the focus is generally on the signs in urban settings such as store window fronts, street signs and advertisements. canadian scholars landry & bourhis (1997) first used linguistic landscapes in their study on the ethnolinguistic vitality of french in canada. since then, this field of research has evolved extensively and studies have taken place in a wide variety of settings around the world. one main objective of linguistic landscape studies is to analyze the relationship between the languages of a particular area as seen through signs. in particular, the presence of english on signs in locations such as taipei has often been attributed to the global power of english since it infiltrates many local contexts (curtin, 2008). in this sense, linguistic landscape research takes place is a specific, local context while at the same time it often illustrates global implications. while not often stated, many linguistic landscape studies adopt a glocal perspective in that they reveal “the interconnectedness of local and global systems” (hauerwas et al., 2021, p. 192). applying glocality to the study of linguistic landscapes is useful since it sheds light on the symbolism of linguistic landscape not only for local citizens and tourists but also for global citizens. for example, manan et al. (2017) used the concept of glocalization in their study on a 22 global education review 8 (2-3) pakistani linguistic landscape. they defined glocalization and glocal english as the influence of a global language (english) on “local nonenglish speaking countries” in order to analyze the use of english on pakistani signs (manan et al., 2017, p. 658). the use of glocality in this study showed the interconnectedness of the local and global (hauerwas et al., 2021). although linguistic landscape studies have generally been conducted on urban, public spaces, there are studies that are starting to apply this type of research to semipublic spaces, such as schools (gorter, 2013). linguistic landscape studies specifically focused on schools are defined as schoolscapes (brown, 2012). two important studies on schoolscapes were conducted by dressler (2015) on a canadian elementary school and brown (2012) who studied three estonian schools. more recent schoolscape studies have employed a “tourist guide technique” wherein teachers or principals are interviewed while the researcher takes pictures of the schoolscape (amara, 2018; biró, 2016; przymus & kohler, 2018; szabó, 2015). these interviews add another level of richness to the data comprised traditionally and solely of linguistic landscape images. student participation in such methods is an area that has yet to be developed in the field of schoolscape research. in photography as in linguistic landscape research, a useful technique is being able to zoom in and out. zooming in permits the photographer to focus on a particular object while zooming out focuses on the context in general. the glocal perspective applied to this schoolscape research will look at local school signs while also expanding outward to look at the messages found in those signs in order to show the interconnectedness of the local and global (hauerwas et al., 2021). local context and approach in canada, both english and french are the national official languages. however, in the province of manitoba only 3.5% of the population speaks french as a first language (government of canada, 2013). while french is clearly a minority language in manitoba, the influence of national language policies have made it possible for french to be the language of instruction in some of the province’s schools. manitoban parents may select the regular english program for their children who will learn basic french roughly an hour a week since it is mandatory from grades 5 to 8 (ages to 10 to 13) (lightbown, 2014). they may also select a french immersion program wherein all subjects except english language arts are taught in french. schools that offer this program do so either by reserving an entire school for the program (single-track) or by offering it alongside the regular english program within one school (dual-track). the french immersion program is designed for non-french speakers and was initially meant to offer the possibility of bilingualism to canadian anglophones (pilote & magnan, 2008). yet another program is designed for minority francophones, the french-language program, which seeks to maintain the french language and culture among the students while offering all courses in french except for a mandatory english language arts class (landry & forgues, 2007). while dual-track and single-track french immersion and french-language schools all offer instruction in french for the majority of the school day, the student populations are quite different. french-language students can typically claim francophone heritage (landry & forgues, 2007) whereas french immersion students typically cannot. for that reason, i conducted a schoolscape study on three manitoban secondary schools: one dual-track, one single-track and one french-language school to better understand the glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 23 23 similarities and differences between them. while the larger study involved 37 students, two interviews and over 300 schoolscape images, i will be reporting in particular on the results of the second interview (photo-elicitation interviews) wherein the participants analyzed images from their own and the other schoolscapes. the study adopts a sociolinguistic approach which focuses “on communicative behavior: talk and text”, while at the same time placing great value on the way participants view their own lives (marshall & rossman, 2011, p. 20). this is in line with glocality since “listening to multiple perspectives and considering different points of view happens on a local and global scale” (hauerwas et al., 2021, p. 192). of particular importance in this study are the participants’ language choices and how they are shaped by their personal language attitudes and by context-specific language ideologies (roy & galiev, 2011). in line with a glocal approach (næss, 2016), this schoolscape study of three high schools will focus on the local characteristics of the schoolscapes in order to draw the connections on a more global level to themes such as language ideologies, scholastic linguistic identity and language awareness. the main belief in this sociolinguistic approach is that: speakers are social actors who use language as a resource to interact and establish social relations with others … linguistic signs are taken as representations of the world, and these connections to the world are never neutral (moyer, 2008, p. 22). therefore, this study will analyze the glocal interaction between the local “linguistic signs” and the global “talk and text” as they occur in and outside of each school context (moyer, 2008, p. 22; marshall & rossman, 2011, p. 20). the guiding question for this study was: how do students interpret elements from each schoolscape? qualitative linguistic landscape methodology a variety of quantitative and qualitative approaches have been used in linguistic landscape research. for example, “qualitative content analysis” (leung & wu, 2012, p. 122) involves sorting the images based on themes and “nexus analysis” (hult, 2008, p. 88) focuses on social actions, norms and practice. however, these types of studies use the photographs as their only data source and rely mainly on a visual analysis of that data. akin to other forms of qualitative research, this study explored participants’ experiences and aimed to collect data, in the form of interviews and linguistic landscape photographs, that would offer a rich description of those experiences (hill, 2005). this qualitative approach allowed for picture analysis within each local schoolscape while at the same time it explored the global experience and perceptions of the participants with regard to their own and other schoolscapes. student participation and visual methods there exists a gap in the literature because educational research rarely includes the voices of students (bautista et al., 2013; borrero & yeh, 2010; hands, 2014; nieto, 2010). marshall & rossman (2011) note that “those most affected by educational policy and programmatic decisions – the students – are absent from inquiry” (p. 157). hands (2014) argues that one of the reasons why students are underrepresented in educational research is because the voices of authority, administrators and teachers, are too often legitimized over student voices. students were selected for this 24 global education review 8 (2-3) research project in order to bridge that gap. students offer a unique point of view about their schools and their perspectives can help to develop solutions to the issues they consider important (bautista et al., 2013). this study’s participants were especially involved in the analysis of the schoolscapes. students may benefit from being involved in this way in research since they may notice aspects of their environment they had not previously recognized (sweetman, 2009). research should be conducted “with” students instead of solely “about them” (danaher et al., 2013, p. 3). in this way, the participant perspectives play an important role in this study. collecting linguistic landscape images can be classified as a “visual research method” when the images are used “to explore the research questions” (rose, 2014, p. 25). visual research methods add another analytical dimension to research especially when they are used in “photo-elicitation interviewing” (biag, 2014, p. 166). using images during interviews can encourage participants to reflect on aspects of their life that they may not have previously noticed (biag, 2014; rose, 2014; sweetman, 2009) and may even help them to describe the complexity of their personal identities (matteucci, 2013). because students spend a significant amount of time in their school, many aspects of their schoolscape may go unnoticed. it was important to have visual prompts for the participants since tupas (2015), who wished to include participant perspectives on the linguistic landscape, quickly realized that the participants had trouble remembering what signs were in their environment. when regular interview data was compared to photo-elicitation interview data, it was found that photo-elicitation interviews “improved participants’ recall, generated longer statements, and prompted richer and more emotionally involved storytelling” (gubrium & harper, 2013, pp. 69– 70). since rich data is especially important for qualitative research, photo-elicitation interviews were a useful method to employ. however, “someone must be behind the camera … and produce the image itself” (galman, 2009, p. 198). although participants were included in the analytical process, i ultimately framed what was to be analyzed. i acknowledge that this subjectivity has impacted the data. data collection and analysis photo-elicitation interviews were conducted with 37 participants; 12 frenchlanguage (dsfm) students, 11 single-track students and 14 dual-track secondary school students. all participants were between 15 and 17 years of age and had attended their respective schools for at least one year prior to participating in the study. consequently, they were exposed on a daily basis to their respective schoolscape. the photo-elicitation interviews were digitally recorded and transcribed. all interviews were conducted in a conference room at the student’s respective school and the photo-eliciation interview was the second interview conducted with these participants. the first interview was took place a month before and will not be included in the analysis of this text. participants were given the choice of conducting their interview in either french or english, resulting in bilingual interview data. data collection also involved taking pictures of the schoolscapes. no pictures were taken of individuals and any names found on the pictures were removed using photoediting software. this resulted in a corpus of 336 photographs of the permanent and nonpermanent signs in the schools. eleven images were selected to create a powerpoint presentation. another six images were printed and displayed on a table in the interview room. the purpose this display was to allow the students some choice with regard to which images they wanted to analyze. it was beneficial glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 25 25 to have printed images since the students could then touch and move around the pictures if they wanted to do so. woolner et al. (2010) found that using printed out photographs as visual prompts resulted in more engagement from the student participants. limiting the number of images to fewer than 20 was intentional in order to avoid confusion and distraction (matteucci, 2013). these 17 images were selected in order to represent the three school contexts and to show the diversity of signs present in specific schools. in total, the 17 images used during the photoelicitation interview included three from the dsfm school, five from the single-track school and nine from the dual-track school. participants were asked to describe the images, one by one, from the powerpoint presentation. they were also asked to explain their thoughts with regard to the picture and to attempt to identify from which school context they thought the image was taken. next, they were asked to select one, some or all of the six pictures on display and to describe them. as well, participants were asked to share their own interpretations of the images and i purposefully refrained from offering my own interpretation. this was done in order to encourage the participants to analyze the images in a way that was meaningful to them. ultimately, this method allowed for the schoolscape analysis to be co-constructed and to represent a diversity of perspectives. since the data that resulted from the photo-elicitation interviews was mostly descriptive, using nvivo 11, i created nodes based on the photograph the participants were describing. this resulted in a document for each photograph that contained each participant’s thoughts on it. the photographs on display were coded in this way as well. however, since participants had the choice to speak about the photographs that interested them, i also coded this data to determine how many times a given photograph was selected by the participants. for example, figure 10 was selected and commented on by 33 out of the 37 participants. in the following section, original quotations from the participants will be presented followed by their pseudonym and a reference to their school context (dsfm: french-language school; st: single-track school; dt: dual-track school). translations from french to english were done by me and will be provided as footnotes in order to respect the students’ interview language choice. zooming in to the signs the following section will present the findings by focusing on each specific school context starting with the french-language school (dsfm), the single-track school, the dual-track school and ending with a section on the glocal schoolscape expectations which will present data from all three school contexts. these local findings will then be discussed globally by exploring the themes of language ideologies, linguistic identities and language awareness. local dsfm signs participant expectations for their own and other schoolscapes were generally accurate. for them, there was or should be a clear link between the school’s identity and its schoolscape. eveline (dsfm) shows how she associates her school’s identity with its schoolscape: “ici c’est vraiment en train de promouvoir qui on est comme personne puis comment on représente 26 global education review 8 (2-3) qui on est et notre culture de notre école1”. malana (dsfm) clearly states that the purpose of her schoolscape is to encourage students to speak only french “i think they should be in french because we are a french school and they’re always encouraging us to speak french and only french”. at the dsfm school, most participants believed that the majority of the signs would and should be only in french. since everything students create must be written in french, an entirely english poster was considered foreign to the dsfm schoolscape. elektra (dsfm) even states that students would be punished if they had written a poster entirely in english. the singletrack students also indicated that they would not be allowed to create a poster entirely in english. as zara (st) indicates, at her school, “nothing that a student would make would ever be 100% in english”. although claire (dsfm) admits that on the rare occasion there are some signs in english at her school, she explains that these signs are from outside sources and that is why they are in english. for example, this bilingual poster (see error! reference source not found.) was found at the dsfm school. the title in large font is in english. however, the information for the students is written in french on a paper that is used to cover up the english information. if you look closely, you can see the english words date, place and time underneath the white paper. this shows that an effort was made not only to have the information in french but also to remove the english information. the fact that 1 here it’s really trying to promote who we are as people and how we represent who we are and our school’s culture (eveline, dsfm). 2 i wouldn’t imagine that we’d have an ad like that in our school because usually everything is in french (raul, dsfm). the information for the students was written in french indicated to many dual-track participants that it would not be at their school because “it would be in english if it was at our school” (élaine, dt). since all the students at the dual-track school would be able to understand the english information, an effort would not be made to add french information. the mere presence of english incited some dsfm participants to say that it could not belong to their school. for example, “j'imaginerais pas qu'on aurait une publicité comme ça dans notre école parce que d'habitude tout est en français2” (raul, dsfm). remarkably, when there were englishonly signs in the dsfm school, some participants thought that they were bilingual. both eveline (dsfm) and lina (dsfm) spoke about the signs advertising programs at the university of manitoba, where instruction takes place in english. while this poster is only in english (see figure 2), both participants thought it was bilingual. as lina (dsfm) believes: “il y a quelques affiches qui sont par rapport à l’université puis ça c’est … je pense que c’est en anglais et français3”. this is interesting since it indicates that participants expect the dsfm schoolscape to be only french or at least bilingual. as table 1 shows, although the dsfm schoolscape is mainly french, it is not only french. in fact, there is a noteworthy amount of english-only signs in the dsfm schoolscape. local single-track signs 3 there are some posters that are about university and that’s … i think that’s in english and french (lina, dsfm). glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 27 27 a difference between the two french immersion contexts is that the single-track school does not need to justify the presence of french-only signs. in the dual-track school, “half the kids can’t speak french so they wouldn’t understand it so it should be english around the school” (josé, dt). since all the students in a single-track school speak french, there is no real need for english-only signs. as zara (st) believes, “we’re supposed to speak french here so why not have everything in french”. as figure 3 exemplifies, all the permanent signs for locations within the school were written in french. participants believed that there was a relatively equal representation of both french and english in their school. within the singletrack school, student-created posters were often only in french. with regard to this poster, some students commented on mistakes. for instance, josé (dt) assumed a french immersion student had written the poster due to the mistakes: josé: i would just say that that is a french immersion school because the french is bad. researcher: what is bad about the french? josé: it's just like not put together, it's put together like i would put it together and like not as a francophone would put it together. (josé, dt) 4 if you see something in two languages you can see what it says in one language and then in your head it is clear in this statement that josé (dt) believes that francophones have a more “correct” french and that he has not yet achieved that level. both léonore (st) and senna (st) notice that whiteout was used on the poster. both believe that students from a french-language school would not use whiteout on a poster. léonore (st) felt that “kids that are full french are like really good and you can tell” (léonore, st) so there would be no need for whiteout. while senna (st) admits that even if francophones made a mistake in french they would not make the whole poster and then realize afterwards that they had made a mistake (senna, st). these comments seem to show that native french speakers are held in high regard. many french immersion participants also made a connection between the language of the schoolscape and language learning. to illustrate, luc (st) believes that bilingual signs help to retain french vocabulary, “si tu vois quelque chose en deux langues tu peux voir ce que ça dit dans une langue et là dans la tête tu peux te souvenir ce que c'est dans l'autre langue4”. conrad (dt) made a similar comment about the importance of bilingual signs in his school, “of course if it's both, people can read in both languages, but it encourages people that are in the french track to actually read it in french and apply it more”. some participants even felt that the more french signs there were in their school, the more students would speak french (malana, dsfm; senna, st; thea, dt and vera, dt). the single-track schoolscape displayed a relatively equal number of french and english signs with a slight emphasis on french (see table 2). you can remember what it is in the other language (luc, st). 28 global education review 8 (2-3) local dual-track signs participants from the dual-track school expected there to be mostly english signs in their schoolscape. despite this expectation, many participants felt that because their school had the two programs, signs should be bilingual (anora, dt and nora, dt). in analyzing the single-track outdoor sign (figure 5), vera (dt) wishes her school would promote the french immersion program in the same way: there's nothing ever french on that, like i see it all the time, i always drive by it, nothing ever is french, like they'll be like congratulations to the girls’ volleyball team winning the championship … i mean i think maybe once i saw like a welcome bienvenue, but i've not seen it since, i might have dreamed, i might just be wishing for it to be there. for vera (dt), the outdoor sign is especially important since it makes announcements that people driving by can see. she indicates that students and staff see it every day. in the same way that eveline (dsfm) and lina (dsfm) thought the university of manitoba sign in their school included french, vera (dt) thinks her outdoor sign might have had french once. however, she admits that this might be wishful thinking. her comment also indicates that english would have been written first on her school sign. many participants noted that french was placed first in this sign. for them, that meant that it was either a french-language school or a french immersion school who emphasized french. the placement of french was especially important to some participants since it was on the outdoor sign. this showed them that the language was important for the school. nicolas (dt) said that seeing french on the sign even before you enter the school indicates that it is a bilingual school. nevertheless, as josé (dt) noted, since the majority of the students at his school are in the english program, it makes sense for there to be more english signs. since the french immersion students represent only 20% of the school population, it is then not surprising that french signs make up only 15% and bilingual signs 17% of the schoolscape (see table 3). with that in mind, some students believe that everyone understands english and for that reason it would be excessive for everything to be bilingual (nicolas, dt). as landry & bourhis (1997) indicate, a change in language in the linguistic landscape signals a change in territory. it was clear that students felt this change in territory within their dual-track school. for example, “it depends where you are, in the french department they're [the signs] usually in french, in a french class they're always french but around the school it's english” (josé, dt). dalla (dt) went on to clarify that all the french posters in the french department were put up by the teachers. her assessment is accurate since none of the french posters in the dual-track school appeared to be student-created. moreover, there were also signs in english, advertising french, in the dual-track school (see figure 6). many students noticed this incongruity. as ayla (st) states “seulement une école anglophone aurait une annonce publicitaire à glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 29 29 propos de français en anglais5”. like ayla (st), many felt that the poster was “selling french” (gilbert, dt) since it spoke about the advantages of learning french. many participants noted the change in language when they entered the french block and they seemed to believe that this was the only place in the school where there were french signs. this assessment was found to be inaccurate since throughout the school many permanent location signs were bilingual. still, the bilingual permanent location signs were not all uniformly bilingual. some washroom signs and other locations, such as the media production laboratory (see figure 7) were only in english. when the location signs were bilingual, english was placed on the left and thus in a position of power followed by french (see figure 8) (backhaus, 2008). students understood the covert messages behind bilingual signs and the importance afforded to english. in reference to figure 8, many students noted that since the word cafeteria is so similar in french and in english, the translation is futile. the purpose of this sign is then a symbolic one. josé (dt) believes the two languages are present on this sign because “we’re a country of two languages”. on the other hand, others believe the french translation is there to offer “une représentation égale des deux groupes6” within the school. in that sense, the sign reflects the school population (nicolas, dt). while nicolas (dt) believes having both languages is a sign of equality, vera (dt) notes the placement of english first: “english before french that's usually how it goes because we are another afterthought …. you'll never not see that because english is the first language”. since the french 5 only an english school would have an advertisement about french in english (ayla, st). version is missing an accent (it should be written cafétéria instead of caféteria), it is conceivable that french is in fact an “afterthought” (vera, dt) because it was not deemed important enough to verify the spelling before ordering the sign. when explaining why english was placed before or above french, students often referenced the importance of english. for example: nora: often times they'll use english to kind of catch people's eye because it's usually the first language and it's easier to understand and this is important. researcher : so when something's important it's usually in english? nora: yeah, even in class the teachers will talk to us in english if it's something they really want to stick into our heads. (nora, dt). both elektra (dsfm) and malana (dsfm) felt that it was a typical french immersion practice to place english first. at their school, they felt french always came first and more often than not english was not even there. these mistakes and the positioning of french on the signs indicate that french has a lower status within the dual-track school. while the dual-track school was the only school where i found grammatical and spelling mistakes on their permanent location signs, the single-track school also had some mistakes on other signs. figure 9 is misphrased and is missing accents on 6 an equal representation of both groups (nicolas, dt). 30 global education review 8 (2-3) the french part of the sign, it reads “la securite et l’hygiene du travail” when it should say “la santé et la sécurité au travail”. glocal schoolscape expectations participants also expected that grammatical mistakes would be more common in the french immersion contexts than in the french-language one. when tourists in bruyèlolmedo & juan-garau's (2015) study noticed mistakes in the linguistic landscape of the place they were visiting, it tended to have a negative impact on their experience. for the most part, participants did not notice these mistakes. however, when they did, they often associated the particular image with individuals who had a lower level of french proficiency. participants revealed attitudes and expectations towards their own and other schoolscapes. some participants recognized an image as belonging to their school and were able to identify where it was located within their school. for example, in recognizing a sign from his school, apollo (dsfm) remarks, “everyone walks past that sign to go to their lockers” and eveline (dsfm) said that she saw the sign every day. this indicates that students are in fact reading and remembering the signs in their schoolscape. certain locations in the school, or high traffic areas, are important places to post french messages since they will be seen and seemingly remembered by everyone. when participants saw a french-only sign, they believed it came from the dsfm school. when they saw a bilingual sign, they thought it was from the single-track school. finally, an englishonly sign indicated either a dual-track or an english school, even though this was not an actual research site. participants felt that the language(s) of a schoolscape are reflective of its identity. during the photo-elicitation interview, the participants were also given the choice of analyzing schoolscape images from a selection of six images that were displayed on the table in the interview room. some images in this section of the interview were selected more often for analysis than others. some elements of the schoolscape elicit more interpretations than others. figure 10 was the most referenced image since 33 out of the 37 participants chose to analyze it. while not all the world’s languages could be included on such a poster (see figure 10), the absence of certain languages, especially in the canadian context, is noteworthy. jonathan (dsfm) mentions how he immediately noted the absence of a language he speaks on the sign: “i looked at it earlier as soon as i walked in the room, i did a quick scan and i didn’t see swahili in there, um, no, no, it says welcome twice”. such a sign gives the impression of inclusivity. it is doubly exclusive when you do not find the language you speak on the sign. just like jonathan (dsfm), many participants noted that welcome was written twice on the sign. participants tended to think that this meant english was more important in the sign. many students also noted that welcome was placed at the top of the sign, in a large font and was in red. font size and colour are often used in the linguistic landscape to indicate language status (bruyèl-olmedo & juan-garau, 2015). the following citations show how the participants noticed that there was an elevated status attributed to english on this sign: the fact that welcome is still at the top in huge letters, i think that if you were to walk in the school and you looked at it welcome would be the first thing that you see … and it's big and it's in red which is like an glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 31 31 eye-captivating colour. (jonathan, dsfm) english is the bigger more dominant one featured. (mycroft, st) it’s kind of the one that catches your eye first so maybe they’re saying english is still like the main language. (nora, dt) i don’t like that our english welcome is the dominant because it’s just like look we’re, it’s also above everything else so it’s like we’re holding ourselves above you. (vera, dt) although participants felt that the purpose of the sign was to “promote diversity and valuing other languages” (nora, dt), they clearly saw that the most valued language in the sign was english. many participants from the dsfm and the single-track school stated that such a sign would likely not be posted in their school because they did not have a diverse population of students and because french was not listed at the top of the sign. in analyzing this sign, léonore (st) describes her school population: léonore: we're not that culturally diverse here. researcher: so what do you mean by that? léonore: i mean, i don't mean to be rude or anything or racist or anything but i'm sure you've walked around here, about 90% of the people here are white i mean i don't think we have 7 they really want to promote french in our school (eveline, dsfm). anyone from east india or like anything like that. interestingly, léonore (st) was a participant with a non-anglophone linguistic background. this perhaps rendered her more able to see the lack of diversity in her school. in the dsfm context, some students felt the sign did not fit into their schoolscape because their school only promotes french. although eveline (dsfm) feels as though students at her school are very accepting towards individuals from different cultural and religious backgrounds, she still cannot picture this sign in her school because “ils veulent vraiment promouvoir le français dans notre école7”. jonathan (dsfm) agrees and states that french-language schools “only roll with french”. the analysis of the schoolscape signs showed that the participants recognized elements from their own schoolscapes. since they were familiar with their school’s identity, they were also able to judge whether or not a sign might be a part of their schoolscape. in doing so, they often revealed the symbolism behind language placement and language use in the schoolscape. zooming out to ideologies, identities and awareness language ideologies in the dsfm context, english and french were the only languages represented in this schoolscape. only french and english were the legitimate languages used within the school. canada’s dominant language ideology can be defined as a bilingual ideology. this bilingual 32 global education review 8 (2-3) ideology refers to a specific type of bilingualism: french-english (heller, 2003; kouritzin et al., 2009). an issue with this ideology is that other forms of bilingualism are not recognized as having the same status in the country (mady, 2012). this ideology elevates the status of both french and english but it can also mask the importance of other languages. this was especially evident in the analysis of the welcome sign (figure 10). no aboriginal languages were present on the sign. while the five most widely spoken languages in manitoba in 2011 were english, german, french, tagalog and cree (government of canada, 2013), tagalog and cree were not included on the sign. this is perhaps due to the fact that the sign was created in the united kingdom. as well, only two out of the nine linguistic backgrounds mentioned by the participants (hungarian, icelandic, lingala, mandarin, ojibway, serbo-croatian, spanish, swahili, and ukrainian) were represented on the sign. many dsfm students remarked that this particular sign would not be found at their school since their school focused only on french. the focus on french and english as the country’s official languages may be contributing to language loss of heritage and aboriginal languages in the canadian educational system, as represented in their absence on the welcome sign. on a local level, this sign showed that the students are aware of language status outside and within their school and can read through the lines of language placement. global english is unquestionably given an elevated status. french as well is important because it is the language used or supposed to be used at school. all other languages are either absent or masked at the local level. these linguistic landscape signs and especially the students’ attitudes towards them are reminders that “the global and the local are also performative productions in their own right” (grixti, 2008, p. 6). locally, schools have the power to elevate the status of a language simply by using it in their schoolscape. the choice of what languages are used in schoolscapes is influenced by language ideologies present outside the school context and even globally. it is of utmost importance for all schools to recognize all the languages students speak and to use them in the schoolscape as this act glocally elevates the status of a language. at the same time, it makes the students feel as though the languages they speak matter. scholastic linguistic identity with regard to linguistic identity, the dsfm students as well as other participants felt that the dsfm schoolscape would be 100% french-only. this assumption holds some truth since the majority of the signs were written in french-only at the dsfm school. the schoolscape analysis of the dsfm showed that 22% of the signs were english-only and bilingual signs existed as well. the students are then creating an image of the dsfm school that reflects the importance it places on french. this french-only image is in no way a reflection of the dsfm’s actual schoolscape. what might be contributing to this french-only image envisioned by the participants is the fact that the dsfm’s schoolscape, according to the students, is regulated by teachers and administrative staff. students say that they are only allowed to post signs in french. some students even indicated that they would be punished if they posted something in english. despite the belief among the students that english is not allowed in their schoolscape, the dsfm schoolscape actually contains quite a few english-only posters. one can only assume that the english-only signs were then placed there by staff or teachers since the students say they would not be allowed to put up anything that was not in french. this glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 33 33 supports hambye & richards (2012) who noted that french-language schools are a “fictional creation” of a “monolingual space” (p. 179). while 22% of the signs are english-only, students do not see them. in their minds’ eye, the french-language school is a monolingual french space that does not allow other languages. this was evident when english-only signs were referenced by students as being bilingual signs. although the signs in reality did not contain any french, the participants thought they were bilingual. this is perhaps due to their belief that if a sign was written in english in their school it would have to contain french as well. seeing the french language when it is not actually there could also be reflective of students’ single complex language repertoire (garcía & kleyn, 2016). in this sense, students see both languages working together even when they are not both there. the english sign is then activating their bilingual language repertoire. in a linguistic landscape study, gorter & cenoz (2015) found that when multilingual participants read multilingual signs, they read all the languages and did not focus on just one. while my participants also read both languages, they more importantly created a bilingual sign in their mind when it did not in fact exist. in the process of this research study, all students were required to use their multimodal literacy skills and their entire linguistic repertoire, to read and speak in french and english and any other language they understood, which required them to explore multiple forms and use multiple literacy resources (jewitt & kress, 2003). while the school attempts to protect french by isolating french from english, the students’ bilingual and multilingual practices demonstrate that they are actually working with both languages in a more global way. the single-track schoolscape included a greater number of bilingual signs and a more equal representation of both english and french than the other school contexts. single-track participants believed that both french and english should be present in their school in order to represent the school’s identity as a bilingual school. for example, the school’s outside sign (figure 5) contained information in both french and english. on the other hand, french-only signs were also accepted by the students, because, by virtue of their schooling, they should be able to understand them. in the single-track context, english is really only necessary for visitors or parents. while they consider themselves and their school as being bilingual, this frenchenglish bilingualism is not even. although both english and french were represented in the schoolscape, they did not hold the same status. english was the unquestionable first language in this context. advertising for student-led groups in the single-track school seemed to be done in french. this is one way for french to make its way outside of the classroom and to be used by the students for communicative purposes. students even remarked that seeing french in their schoolcape encouraged them to read the french message, to learn new vocabulary and to use the knowledge learnt in class. however, an extended and continuous effort needs to be made to support french use in general since educators will always have to contend with the increasing power of global english. a school’s linguistic identity, as seen through its linguistic landscape and according to its students, is congruent with a glocal linguistic identity in the sense that, globally, “young people everywhere increasingly appear to share similar tastes in styles of dress and entertainment, [but] there are still significant regional, ethnic, and cultural differences” (grixti, 2008, p. 2). schoolscapes are a reflection 34 global education review 8 (2-3) of the school’s locally chosen linguistic identity and of the global dominance of english in the greater society. locally, students expect to see french in their school because it is the language of instruction. despite the importance afforded to french in these schools, not even the frenchlanguage school succeeded in creating a purely monolingual french space. in terms of regional differences between the schools, both french and english were represented to different degrees in each schoolscape. while english is not the primary language of instruction in any of these school contexts, english nevertheless held a privileged status because it is the language of the majority provincially and highly regarded nationally and globally. other schoolscape studies have also noted the importance afforded to english in schools where it is not the language of instruction; hence global english has infiltrated many local schools around the world (amara, 2018; biró, 2016; szabó, 2015). language awareness the most notable difference between the schools was not the number of french or english signs within each school, but instead the way in which french was used in the schoolscape. in the dual-track setting, french was used as a decoration and to reinforce the economic value of french. cenoz & gorter (2008) note that many public signs have an economic purpose. sometimes a language is present on a sign in order to attract tourists instead of being useful to the individuals who live there. such a sign has an “indirect use value” (cenoz & gorter, 2008, p. 65). this was the way in which french was used in the dual-track schoolscape since there did not appear to be any student-created posters in french. french was also used to denote a change in territory, creating a physical separation between the english and french tracks within the school. in the dual-track setting, french use is relegated to the classroom. while french is allowed a space outside the classroom, it is the teachers who are using the language to fabricate a french space. teachers in the dual-track setting may feel as though the french wing is their responsibility. similarly, the german signs in dressler's (2015) schoolscape study of a german dual-track school were only located in the german wing and placed there by teachers. since there are no examples of bottom-up or student-created signs in the french wing of this dual-track school, french becomes a “vogue display language” (curtin, 2008, p. 221). it signals prestige and economic power in the same way that the use of english does in places like taipei (curtin, 2008). the only difference is that the school is “selling” (gilbert, dt) the french language by marketing its linguistic capital (flynn, 2013) and referencing canada’s bilingual ideology. while french is a local language, marketing is done with reference to european french, with symbols of the eiffel tower present in the dual-track schoolscape, adding a more global capital to the language. moreover, the link to the national bilingual ideology also positions the language as not only being a local language but a national one with potential global power. this linguistic capital associated with the french-language is thought to encourage parents to enroll their children in french immersion programs in the first place (yoon & gulson, 2010). since many of the french-only signs are located in the french block, the change in language also indicates a change in territory. the dual-track schoolscape is a reflection of the way in which the french language is perceived and the status it is given within the school. frenchonly signs are mainly acceptable within the french block, where it is given a prestigious status. although french is used elsewhere in the school, in those cases, it is commonly accompanied by an english translation and glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 35 35 placed in a secondary position vis-à-vis english. french is used in the schoolscape to advertise the program, to advertise the language to the students and to represent the students’ presence within the school. notably, students are aware of the status of french and the language marketing taking place in their school. the dual-track setting has made an effort to recognize the french immersion students by giving them a particular space within the school. however, that space is used mostly by the teachers. while the school also has bilingual signs elsewhere, permanent signs were not uniformly bilingual and mistakes were found on some of the french permanent signs. if it is worth putting french on these signs, it is also worth verifying that the message is grammatically correct. these mistakes, in turn, reflect badly on the students who already undervalue their own competence in french (roy & galiev, 2011). the dual-track schoolscape demarcates the french territory within the school, showing that the value attributed to the language is specific to particular contexts. students need to see a language being used in their schools in order to learn it and to develop a sense of belonging within their schools. this has to be done glocally. if the use of a language is bound exclusively to the confines of a few specific classrooms, evidently the only students benefiting from the language are only those taking that particular class. all students would benefit from being more globally exposed to french and other minority languages outside of the classroom. if this were the case, they would develop the awareness that other languages exist and are used to convey messages within the school. this in turn does more to recognize and value the minority language speakers within the school than sectioning off a space within the school reserved just for those languages. glocal linguistic awareness through linguistic landscapes the students who participated in this study were not linguistic landscape researchers yet, they demonstrated glocal language awareness while analyzing the schoolscapes. locally, they accurately identified the status attributed to each language through font size, colour and language placement on the signs in their own and other schools. these are intentional choices and students can read between the lines. globally, they are aware that language is used in a schoolscape for a reason. while analyzing the signs, students used their multimodal literacy skills (jewitt & kress, 2003) and expressed specific attitudes and expectations with regards to the languages present in their schoolscapes reflective of national language ideologies, of each school’s linguistic identity and of their own language awareness. some students believed bilingual signs were meant to represent canada’s bilingual ideology while others felt they were meant to represent the two linguistic groups within the school. in some cases, english signs were invisible, perhaps due to its elevated status worldwide. at the french-language school, the presence of english was not seen since it was not supposed to be there. however, students are not immune to the global power of english and understand that it often placed in a position of power even within schools where it is not the main language of instruction. students also noted the lack of other languages in the schoolscape, which they felt pointed towards the lack of diversity in the student population or to the masking of that diversity in order to promote 36 global education review 8 (2-3) french. on a global level, this might reference the status of minority languages worldwide in comparison to english. this study has shown that students can recognize the covert messages written on signs within their schools and they offer a unique contribution to schoolscape and linguistic landscape research in general. in terms of schoolscape research in linguistic minority settings, it is important for the minority language to be visible and glocally used for communicative purposes in all schools that use it as a language of instruction, in and outside the classroom, no matter the program. it would also be beneficial for schools to focus on a mixture of minority-language-only signs and bilingual or multilingual signs. school contexts worldwide could benefit from allowing other languages a place in the schoolscape. some schoolscape studies have started to include teacher or principal perspectives to the researcher’s analysis (amara, 2018; biró, 2016; szabó, 2015). this study focused on student perspectives and showed that they should not be excluded from future studies since their perspectives are unique. schoolscape research should involve teachers, administrators and students so that they may then work together to change their space and to promote glocal language awareness. acknowledgements this work was supported by the social sciences and humanities research council of canada under award 767-2014-1468. references amara, m. h. 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(2010). school choice in the stratilingual city of vancouver. british journal of sociology of education, 31(6), 703–718. https://doi.org/10.1080/01425692.2010.528871 40 global education review 8 (2-3) figures figure 1: dsfm graduation photos figure 2: university of manitoba poster glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 41 41 figure 3: single-track gym sign figure 1: single-track committee poster figure 5: single-track outdoor sign 42 global education review 8 (2-3) figure 6: dual-track learn french poster figure 2: dual-track media production laboratory figure 3: dual-track cafeteria glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 43 43 figure 4: single-track health & safety figure 5: dual-track welcome sign 44 global education review 8 (2-3) tables table 1: dsfm schoolscape table 2: single-track schoolscape 22% 12% 64% 2% dsfm english signs bilingual signs french signs no language 37% 16% 44% 3% single-track english signs bilingual signs french signs spanish glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research 45 45 table 3: dual-track schoolscape 63%17% 15% 1% 1%3% dual-track english signs bilingual signs french signs spanish no language other language pedagogies in dissonance 114 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kenklies, karsten. (2023). pedagogies in dissonance: the transformation of pedagogical tact. global education review, 10 (1-2), 114-127. pedagogies in dissonance: the transformation of pedagogical tact karsten kenklies abstract when herbart in 1802 introduced the concept of pedagogical tact in his first lecture on pedagogy, he answered to a systematic problem that had also troubled his predecessor: it was within his theory of judgement that immanuel kant attempted to solve the problem of the relation of theory and practice, of theoretical and practical vernunft. in reference to kant’s notion of logical tact, herbart proposed the pedagogical tact as a way to describe how, in pedagogy, theory and practice could be bound together. despite their brevity, those short remarks of herbart became, and continue to be, a classic theorem of pedagogical thinking, especially within continental pedagogy, while in the anglophone world, pedagogical tact has found only sparse interest until recently. both the larger absence of interest, as well as the recent interest are, in themselves, rather remarkable as they represent trends that seem characteristic for the adaptation of especially german pedagogical theories in anglophone contexts. concentrating on herbart’s tact, this chapter will explore the distortions that not only led to an obliviousness towards the fundamental concept of pedagogical tact, but also its distorted reception much later. keywords history of education, philosophy of education, systematic pedagogy, general pedagogy, intercultural education, herbart, pedagogical tact introduction introducing the concept of pedagogical tact (pädagogischer takt) in his first lecture on pedagogy in 1802, herbart pedagogically reformulated a systematic problem that had troubled his predecessor for quite some time: it was within his theory of judgement that immanuel kant attempted to solve the problem of the relation of theory and practice, of theoretical and practical vernunft. in reference to kant’s notion of logical tact, herbart proposed the pedagogical tact as a way to describe how, in pedagogy, theory and practice could be bound together. despite their brevity, those short remarks of herbart became a classic theorem of pedagogical thinking, especially within continental pedagogy (friesen & kenklies, 2022), where it continues to illicit far-reaching reflections (friesen 2022). however, in the anglophone world, pedagogical tact has found only sparse interest, and it was only very recently that academics began to engage with it in a specific way. both the larger absence of interest, as well as the recent interest are, in themselves, rather remarkable as they represent trends that seem characteristic for the adaptation of especially german pedagogical theories in anglophone contexts. concentrating on herbart’s tact, this chapter will explore the distortions that not only led to an obliviousness towards the fundamental concept of pedagogical tact, but also its distorted reception much later. pedagogies in dissonance 115 1. the rise of a systematic problem when johann friedrich herbart gave his famous first lecture on pedagogy in 1802 (herbart 1896), he had to find a solution to a problem that had not really emerged in pedagogical reflections until then. it was just about the time in which education studies, i.e., the academic study of education, had begun to take shape. in 1778, the very first (short-lived) chair for pedagogy was established (at the university of halle in germany), with ernst christian trapp taking up the role. trapp used his inaugural lecture to make a strong case for the necessity to study education & instruction as a specific art (trapp 1779). together with the chair, trapp was entrusted with the responsibility for a newly opened pedagogical seminar, which was focused on the education of teachers and was the first one to combine theoretical studies with practical exercises. from then on, this combination became the primary challenge for teacher-educators and teachereducation. at first, an educational theory had to be developed (trapp 1780); and secondly, the question arose, how could this combination be conceptualized and enacted? or, in other words, what is the relation between educational theory and educational practice? here, the two sides of educational theory and educational practice take their conceptual shape. while an educational theory must consist of general and universally valid rules and principles to be an academic (in german: wissensschaftlich) theory at all, educational practice is always dealing with individual, unique, and almost 1 herbart’s indebtedness to kant was so strong, that one commentator stated that every interpretation of herbart also needs an interpretation of kant (langewand 1993). indeed, it was precisely herbart’s research program that sought to answer the challenges kant’s transcendental philosophy incommensurable cases, events, and peoples. it may be obvious that this question only arises because educational theory becomes an academic form of reflection, i.e., because this academic reflection takes on the form of an academic discipline that – as it is studied at universities – has to comply with the same general expectations of validity and thoroughness as all other theories in disciplines or subjects discussed in academia; thus forming the very notion of an academic theory of education opens the chasm between theory and practice. consequently, the theorizing on education had to 1) reflect on its own form as an academic theory, 2) reflect on the very nature of its object of reflection, i.e., educational practice, and 3) reflect on the relation of an academic theory (of education) to the practice (called “education”). having arrived at such a prepared scene, herbart had to respond to those questions. beginning his career at the university in göttingen and later occupying the chair formerly held by immanuel kant in königsberg, herbart followed in kant’s footsteps while attempting to modify kantian philosophy in light of modern psychological and pedagogical developments.1 and right at the beginning, in his first lectures on education in 1802 (which have been handed down only as fragments), herbart offered a response to the challenge posed by trapp. what are, in short, the answers to the three questions? a) what are theory & practice? “discriminate, in the first place, between pedagogy as a science and the art of education. what is the content of a science? an orderly combination of posed for the notion of an external influence (i.e., education) upon morality (given that kant’s idea of practical reason did not allow for external influence if it wanted to continue to be addressed as reason). 116 global education review 10 (1-2) propositions, logically constituting a whole and where possible proceeding one from another—corollaries from fundamental principles, and fundamental principles from axioms. what comprises an art? a sum of skillful devices and methods which must be combined in order to secure a certain purpose. science, therefore, demands the derivation of propositions from their logical grounds—philosophic thinking. art demands a constant activity in conformity with the mere results of science. an art while it is being exercised must not become lost in speculation” (herbart 1896: 17).2 it is with those words that herbart introduces simultaneously his idea of a scientific (and in german, the notion of wissenschaftlich refers to all thorough academic explorations) theory of education and his understanding of the characteristics of the practice of education, which he addresses as an art (the german word kunst here refers to what in latin is called ars, i.e., related more to notions like ars vivendi than to “the” arts like painting & sculpture). a theory, therefore, is a set of propositions, derived from fundamental principles and axioms. such an understanding places herbart squarely in the tradition of a system philosophy as it has developed over centuries since the early enlightenment. the practice of education, on the other side, is supposed to be a way of engaging with the (pedagogical) world that is ordered and purposeful, and successful in achieving the goals and aims it has set. as such, it should conform to the propositions set out by the theory while avoiding getting lost in mere speculations. 2 cited here is the translation from 1896, published in new york. as the following will be an exploration of the reception this demand creates a certain problem caused by the very nature of both theory and practice: “theory in its universality stretches over an expanse of which any one in his practice touches on but an infinitely minute part. on the other hand, in its indefiniteness, which is the immediate consequence of its universality, it passes by all details, all the individual circumstances that surround the practical teacher at every given moment, and all the individual measures, reflections, and exertions by which he must respond to those circumstances. in the school of science, therefore, we shall learn both too much and too little for practice” (herbart 1896: 18). whereas theory in its universality attempts to embrace and include, comprehensively, all possible instances of education, the momentary demands of the practice of the educator are at once narrower in their scope while being much deeper in their detail. theory and practice are, therefore, seemingly never really aligned. to be a real theory, the propositions constituting a theory and derived from principles and axioms have to be far wider than the actual case demands, while they can never include the absolute individual circumstances of each pedagogical situation. theory is necessarily too wide and too narrow at the same time. the question then arises as to how the relationship between theory and practice could be described. such is the systematic problem that herbart needs to solve if he thinks of educational theory in terms of a truly academic theory that somehow has to guide and inform educational practice. of this text, it seems appropriate to refer to the text that was available. for a newer translation, see friesen (2022). pedagogies in dissonance 117 b) what is the relationship between theory and practice? in his text, herbart suggests at least three different ways in which the theory and practice of education could, in principle, be related.3 i. no relation – practice without theory the first relation of theory and practice is one of absence: here, the educator does not at all relate his/her practice to a theory as described above. here, the educator ignores all theory that would take him beyond her/his own horizon, his/her own experiences. it is only past experiences that guide this practice, and in the absence of any other sort of imagined practice (enshrined in theory), there will be no intentional development, and changes that are happening are by mere chance. (herbart 1896: 18f.) ii. ideal relation – practice completely ruled by theory the second imaginable relation between theory and practice would be one of an ideal alignment. already above, it has been questioned whether this could ever be possible. and indeed, herbart repeats that – because “such a recollection, such a complete application of scientific propositions, would require a supernatural being” (herbart 1896: 20) – to retain “strict consistency with the rule” while at the same time answering to “the true requirements of the individual case” (herbart 1896: 20) is impossible. at this point, herbart blames the incapacity of human educators for such failures while remaining silent here about the very possibility of such a theory (e.g., how would a complete theory, i.e., description of 3 for a more extended discussion, see kenklies (2012). human behavior and life, relate to ideas of human freedom and spontaneity). iii. best possible relation – practice inspired by theory no relation to theory would render educational practice unreflective; perfect alignment between theory and educational practice is impossible to achieve. there inevitably will be a gap between theory and practice in education, and it is exactly this gap that makes the practice of educating an art. if theory was to govern practice completely, the practice would cease to be an art but would represent a mechanical reaction to a specific situation, turning the educator into an automaton. however, the artfulness of educational practice suggests a certain type of intuition; a bridge between the theory – which is always to be wide to be applicable to practice – and the practice – which is, necessarily, too individual to be described by universally valid propositions. it is here that herbart introduces a notion that subsequently became one of the fundamental and widely discussed (metz 1995) theorems of german educational reflections: pedagogical tact. 2. the arrival of a systematic solution in formulating the problem as the question for the theoretical propositions that would cover a specific individual case, herbart follows kant in his explorations of the power of judgement (urteilskraft) (pleines 1980). “the power of judgment in general is the faculty for thinking of the particular as contained under the universal. if the universal (the rule, the principle, the law) is given, then the power of 118 global education review 10 (1-2) judgment, which subsumes the particular under it […], is determining” (kant 2000: 66f.; emphasis in original). it is this faculty of judgement (in pedagogical situations) that herbart calls (pedagogical) tact. he formulates: “[i]n every theorist, no matter how good a one he may be, if he practises his theory, and provided only that he does not proceed with the cases occurring in his practice with pedantical slowness, […] there inserts itself quite involuntarily a link intermediate between theory and practice. there is, to wit, a certain tact, a quick judgment and decision, not proceeding like routine, eternally uniform, but, on the other hand, unable to boast, as an absolutely thoroughgoing theory should, that while retaining strict consistency with the rule, it at the same time answers the true requirements of the individual case “(herbart 1896: 19f.). the systematic problem that arises by attempting to theorize a relation between universal theory and individualistic practice is solved by referring to a general human faculty of judgement that enables the practitioner to subsume a given situation under a preformulated rule expressed in theory. having said that, it seems necessary to shed a little more light on this faculty. especially with respect to its later reception, which will be based on a severe misunderstanding of the nature of this faculty. the first question that maybe needs to be asked is why herbart changed the notion from judgement (which clearly is a notion that relates to faculties of reason) to tact (which seems to be related much more to sentiment and feeling or emotion). although it still retained its meaning of being in order (complying with the rhythm or being tactful as complying with an order of morals or etiquette), it seems that most people would understand tact to be an emotive capacity. that, however, is not what herbart has in mind. and again, it is kant – and more specifically, kant’s notion of logical tact – to which he refers with that choice of word: “this much is certain, that if the solution to a problem is based on general and innate rules of understanding (possession of which is called mother wit), it is more dangerous to look around for academic and artificially drawn-up principles (school wit) and thereafter to come to their conclusion, than to take a chance on the outburst from the determining grounds of masses of judgment that lie in the obscurity of the mind. one could call this logical tact, where reflection on the object is presented from many different sides and comes out with a correct result, without being conscious of the acts that are going on inside the mind during this process” (kant 2007: 250; emphasis in original). as it becomes clear: decisions based on (logical) tact are not decisions resulting from some sort of feeling or outburst of emotion or emotional bond (between educator and student), but they are indeed based on movements of the mind (kant’s word is gemüt) – with the difference to decisions made based on reflection being that the latter are made consciously (indicated by the very word reflection), whereas, with decisions based on tact, the musings of the mind remain somewhat hidden and unconscious. in light of this, the formulations of herbart seem somewhat ambiguous, as he does speak of judgement and decision (two notions clearly indicating intellectual processes) but then pedagogies in dissonance 119 seems to favor emotive language in its ongoing description: “[t]here inevitably originates in man as he is, out of continued practice, a mode of action which depends on his feeling [gefühl] and only remotely on his conviction [überzeugung]—a mode of action rather giving vent to his inner movement, expressing how he has been affected from without, and exhibiting his emotional state [gemütszustand], than the resultant of his thinking [denken]” (herbart 1896: 20). it may seem that indeed herbart is talking about an emotional capacity that is needed here to be tactful, i.e., to apply theory to practice correctly, a universal rule to an individual case. however, this would direct the interpretation in a direction that is less located within the intellectual scope of herbart’s philosophy but more within the horizon of later understandings of specific notions. the german notions gefühl and gemüt – translated here as feeling and emotion – are not necessarily notions that refer to such psychological aspects of human life but are, especially within the german tradition of 18th and 19th philosophy, notions referring to states of the reasoning mind (it may also be worth to remember that psychology as an independent discipline is just about to develop – not least based on herbart’s works on psychology) (frevert 2009). gemüt is a notion that does not have a very defined meaning in german; it often refers to the feature that makes a person a person (being, therefore, another word for seele, i.e., soul). (bollnow 1974) therefore, it cannot be narrowly understood as some form or cause or effect of emotion. and gefühl is equally not a necessarily individual-emotive word (in contrast to most modern usages): kant, for example, speaks of achtung (respect for the moral law) as a gefühl that is not caused or related to pleasure/displeasure caused by external objects (kant 2015). it was indeed also kant who pointed out that reason is at work no matter whether one is conscious of it or not, which also means that often one judges by reason although one believes to have judged by sentiment (kowalewski 1965: 242). what is very clear from this is that tact is not some form of emotional reaction to the individuality of the case or even an emotional reaction based on some emotive bond between educator and student; tact is not a feeling of love or respect for the individuality of the student as a person, but an intellectual judgement whose internal movements and iterations remain unconscious in contradistinction to the very much conscious act of reflection. it is for that reason that the herbartian tuiskon ziller later called it rational tact (rationaler takt) (ziller 1856: 28; 1876: 38). and indeed: should it need yet another proof, it is very enlightening to look at the suggestion herbart makes in relation to the way in which the educator learns to be tactful. “it [tact, k.k.] is only formed during practice, and by the action of our practical experiences upon our feelings. this action will result differently as we are differently attuned. on this, our mental attuning, we can and should act by reflection. it depends upon the correctness and weight of this reflection, upon the interest and moral willingness with which we give ourselves up to it, whether and how before entering upon the office of education and, whether and how, consequently, during the exercise of that office, our mental tone will order our mode of feeling, and finally, together with the latter, will guide the employment of that tact upon which 120 global education review 10 (1-2) rests success or failure in pedagogical endeavor. in other words, by reflection, reasoning, inquiry, in short, by science, the educator must prepare not his future action in individual cases so much as himself, his tone of mind, his head as well as his heart, for correctly receiving, apperceiving, feeling, and judging the phenomena awaiting him and the situation in which he may be placed. […] there is then—this is my conclusion—a preparation for the art by means of the study of science, a preparation of both the understanding and the heart before entering upon our duties, by virtue of which the experience which we can obtain only in the work itself will become instructive to us. only in action do we learn the art and acquire tact, aptness, quickness, dexterity; but even in action only he learns the art who has in previous thinking learned the science; has made it his own; by it has attuned himself; has predetermined the impressions to be made upon him by future experience” (herbart 1896: 21f.). as becomes obvious, herbart presents an answer to the question of how pedagogical theory and practice are related. while the inevitable gap between the universal statements of theory and the individual cases of practice can only be closed by a tactful act on the side of the educator, it is the very theory itself that is needed to develop this capacity to act tactfully. the ability to pass, unconsciously, the correct judgement will only arise within actual educational practice – but only if this practice has been prepared by studying theory. a knowledge of theory enables the educator to give a correct interpretation of the situation (kant’s determining judgement) and supports in choosing the appropriate way of action in response to an individual situation; only when the educator has absorbed enough theory will she/he be able to unconsciously and swiftly pass correct judgement about any given situation without having the time to consciously reflect on the situation. tact, therefore, is a theoretically prepared and intellectually formed intuition that is based on extensive knowledge of the possible interpretation of a situation represented by the universalist propositions that make up a scientific/academic theory (kenklies 2012). tact is not some feeling that arises out of the special knowledge the educator may have of the individual student – it is not an intuition that emerges through bonding with the student or emotional divination on the side of the educator. it is well worth remembering why herbart introduces the concept of pedagogical tact in the first place: because he finds a systematic problem to which he must provide an answer. assuming that the art of education needs to be guided by theory, he needs to explain how a universalist theory can respond to individual cases. if theory is always too broad and the individual situation always too particular to align easily, the educator needs to have some sort of capacity to relate both. this capacity is tact: the ability to unconsciously and swiftly pass judgement about the nature of the situation and therefore the appropriate pedagogical reaction. this problem arises only because herbart assumes that the art of educating needs to be underpinned by a universal theory. without such an assumption, the necessity for theorizing about a solution to this problem would not arise, and pedagogical tact as a concept would not need to be introduced. and as a solution to a general systematic problem, tact is always there in theory-guided educational practice. as the translation from universal into particular has always to be made somehow, every educator who pedagogies in dissonance 121 tries to follow a theory (rules, principles) will inevitably be tactful with the only difference that some have developed an appropriate, i.e., successful, form of tact, while others have failed to do so. everyone uses tact in educational practice when following some principle or theory, but only some use a correctly developed form of tact – an intellectually developed form of tact. to be tactful in this sense is not a moral decision that one could also reject making; it is not a decision at all once one has succumbed to the idea that theories and academic reflections should guide practice. it may be a moral expectation to be better in it, i.e., to develop the right kind of tact, but to be tactful here is not the result of some deliberation.4 3. the gradual disappearance of a problem the arrival of herbart’s doctrines in the united states and the uk is far too complex to be presented here in great detail (see de garmo 1895; selleck 1968; dunkel 1969a, 1969b; dunkel 1970; cruikshank/knoll 1994; leinstermackay 2002; scholz 2020). in general, it may suffice to say that at first, anglophone students did not actually encounter herbart’s ideas directly: they travelled to germany, which was perceived to be the most advanced country regarding pedagogy. the universities of jena and leipzig were of particular interest, and it was here where the international students came under the spell of two of the most famous followers of herbart: wilhelm rein in jena and tuiskon ziller in leipzig. those two were members of a group called the herbartians (espousing what is known as herbartianism) – educational theorists and practitioners who not only promoted the works of herbart but also led 4 it could perhaps also be argued that even those who do not apply theories to practice still are tactful in this sense: in extrapolating or analogizing from one experience to inform the practice in another situation rests on the ability to find a pedagogical seminars or practice schools in their universities where they could put their theories into practice in teacher education courses. in applying those theories, the herbartians adapted, redeveloped, and transformed herbart’s original theories to their own context and persuasions. fundamentally herbartian, the teachings of herbartianism did not represent a mere copy of herbart. this is especially relevant regarding the many international students, as it was in those slightly adapted forms that they encountered herbart for the first time. it was then in germany that they did get the chance not only to read herbart in his original form (in german) but also to begin to work on the first translations of herbart into english. between 1892 and 1901, several works of herbart were published in translation, preceded and accompanied by several descriptive accounts of herbart’s pedagogy (through the eyes of their herbartian professors) (e.g., de garmo 1891; mcmurry 1892; lange 1894; felkin 1895; ufer 1896; adams 1898; dodd 1901; hayward 1903). of special interest for our context is the fact that the lecture that includes herbart’s exploration of pedagogical tact was published only in 1896 (herbart 1896). this creates, of course, an interesting phenomenon regarding the reception of the text. those who did indeed read the german original of herbart had access to the text, and it seems that felkin (1895) quotes from herbart directly, given that she presents the central quote on tact on page 186, in addition to quotes from rein and lange. however, interestingly, the quote she offers does leave out the most important sentences addressing tact as the medium between theory and practice: it seems this was of little interest. others had to rely on their herbartian teachers common ground in both – which represents an act of abstracting that justifiably could be called “theorizing.” and as such, it would also need tact to build a bridge between one and another experience or situation. 122 global education review 10 (1-2) to be taught about tact, and not much seems to have made its way into the english writings. this may not be surprising in relation to wilhelm rein (as he does mention pedagogical tact in his writings, but it is not a central term for him), whereas for ziller, as mentioned above, (rational) tact plays a crucial role in his descriptions of the pedagogical process, and so it is rather astonishing that none of his anglophone pupils seems to have shown stronger interest in this. there is, on the other hand, an awareness of the relevance of educational theory if engaging in educational practice, as dodd puts it: “we are beginning to atone for our past neglect of educational theory, and to recognise that a study of principles and ideals of education is of greater importance than a study of the external devices employed by the teacher to make the child acquire knowledge” (dodd 1901: 6). and in his introduction to dodd’s book, wilhelm rein emphasizes the same thought: “personality, no doubt, is of the highest importance, if the teacher possesses the qualities necessary for true education. but even the best natural gifts can be still further developed and improved by systematic reflection, and study of the theory of education and its value in practice” (rein 1901: 8). but besides such general remarks about the role of theory, dodd does not explore the notion of tact, and mcmurry mentions it only fleetingly in his herbartian elements of general method (1892). there seems to be, however, one exception to the general disinterest: charles & frank mcmurry’s the method of the recitation (written 1897 – after the publication of herbart’s lecture in english – and published for the first time in 1903). focusing on the question of whether there is a uniform method for teaching, the mcmurrys’ interest shifts increasingly more toward the problem of the relation of general and individual notions. at first, this problem is one of teaching: what are we to teach in schools, and how do we teach to enable children to move freely between the particular to the universal? however, it soon becomes clear that this also touches upon the question of teacher education: how are teachers to be educated so that they are enabled to move between universal rules or laws (of teaching and instruction, of psychology and ethics) and individual situations, pupils, and topics? those explorations do deserve much more discussion than can be offered here (e.g., they include an interesting investigation into the beneficial role types, or exemplars, play in teaching – a topic that recently has again gathered interest again). some quotes, however, should be enough to show that the mcmurrys have indeed taken a leaf out of herbart’s book in discussing those matters: “nature everywhere locks the door and bars out the intruder. but whoever carries a bundle of bright keys in the form of principles and laws, and is constantly turning and testing them in use, will rapidly gain the freedom of the realm. this is, indeed, the goal toward which instruction should move, and never lag till the end is reached; namely, such a working mastery of general truths as shows itself in ready instinctive tact in common use. […] the old question of the relation between theory and practice is here at issue” (mcmurry 1903: 210f.). pedagogies in dissonance 123 “moreover, this constant variation and readjustment of the principle to new objects and conditions necessitates a genuine thoughtfulness at every step. it is principles, not a mechanical routine which simply repeats the same action time and again. to apply general notions requires a rational self-activity. we never meet exactly the same situation a second time” (mcmurry 1903: 221). “the freedom of the teacher consists not in disregarding the law, but in finding it out and obeying it. if psychologists and teachers have been so fortunate as to find the natural highways of human thought, all this crying out against mechanism and formalism is only so much railing at the laws of nature. the whole question of freedom and originality in the teacher may be one of obeying the laws of nature, or of constantly blundering in the effort to be free and original. the teacher must have either an instinctive tact or a conscious insight into the simple laws of mental life and action, or this much-lauded freedom and originality is entirely eccentric and unreliable” (mcmurry 1903: 316f.). from this, it should be obvious that the mcmurrys does indeed see the systematic problem to which herbart answered with the introduction of the notion of pedagogical tact; and it also shows an emphasis on rationality that they could have taken from ziller. this might well be one of the clearest addresses of this problem using herbartian notions in the anglophone context. and it will also be the last for a while. once the notion of pedagogical tact reappears in an anglophone discussion, it will have changed its meaning considerably. 4. the re-signification of a notion in 1991, a book is published that refers already in its title to the very notion in question here: the tact of teaching (van manen 1991). in this book as well as in the other texts following (van manen 1995), the author refers explicitly to herbart and his notion of pedagogical tact, placing himself squarely into the line of tradition. it is worth quoting here a somewhat lengthy piece of text as it at once shows the connection that is made to herbart as well as the re-orientation following this attempt of relating: “it is perhaps surprising that the notion of tact has not been of any systematic interest and study for educational thinkers in the english-speaking world. the person who introduced the notion of tact and tactfulness into educational discourse is the german educator johann friedrich herbart. in 1802, in his first lecture on education, herbart told his audience that: ‘the real question as to whether someone is a good or a bad educator is simply this: has this person developed a sense of tact?’ herbart posited that tact occupies a special place in practical educational action. the main points of his lecture pertaining to tact were that (a) ‘tact inserts itself between theory and practice’; (b) tact manifests itself in everyday life in the process of ‘making instant judgments and quick decisions’; (c) tact forms a way of acting which is ‘first of all dependent on gefühl [feeling or sensitivity] and only more remotely on convictions’ derived from theory and beliefs; (d) tact is sensitive to ‘the 124 global education review 10 (1-2) uniqueness of the situation’; and (e) tact is ‘the immediate ruler of practice.’ however, in spite of this fluid early conceptualization, herbart's later writings, and especially that of his followers, assumed a more instrumental relation between educational knowledge and practical action. even in these phrases, from herbart, there is evident a somewhat mechanistic concept of the mediating role of tact between theory and practice. but rather than see tact as a device for converting theory into practice we may see tact as a concept that can help us to overcome the problematic separation of theory from practice. and rather than understand, tact as a process of making instant ‘decisions,’ we may reconceive tact as a mindfulness that permits us to act thoughtfully with children and young people” (van manen 1991: 128). the departure of van manen from herbart is easy to recognize, if maybe not immediately comprehensible. several points are of interest here: 1) van manen is, of course, only partially right in stating that pedagogical tact has been of no interest in the anglophone world. as we were able to see, some of the american herbartians did indeed take an interest (notably the mcmurrys), and their explorations deserve more attention; 2) van manen is incorrect in stating that herbart speaks of tact as that which manifests itself in instant judgements and quick decisions in everyday life – herbart clearly and deliberately speaks of tact as that mediator between theory and practice, which therefore plays a role only for the theorist who practices his theory (so, not everyone shows the tact herbart is speaking of, and for those few people it is relevant not in everyday life but only in those activities that attempt to follow a theory); 3) van manen is too quick in interpreting the german gefühl (unhelpfully translated here as feeling or sensitivity) as some kind of emotional reaction to a situation, whereas for herbart the emphasis lies on the unconsciousness of the reasons for the action (which means they still result from some sort of intellectual activity without this being a conscious series of acts of reflection); 4) van manen refers to tact as somewhat mechanistic without giving reasons for this kind of evaluation, while for herbart, as well as for ziller, tact is a capacity to act according to reasons and principles without being able to recall the reasons in every given moment (which does make tact not mechanistic – at least not more than reasoning itself may be called mechanistic as it invites us to act constantly according to rules and principles (i.e. theories); 5) van manen proposes that tact should not help “converting theory into practice”, but should support the educator in overcoming the “separation of theory from practice” – shifting here from an interpretative framework (in which notions are used to interpret reality, and in which, therefore, educational theory is used to interpret a given situation as an educational situation in the first place, and in which the main question is whether or not the interpretation of a situation, i.e. the application of notions to world, is appropriate or successful) to a more phenomenological framework (in which apparently the situation reveals itself somehow to the observer or participant without the additional act of interpreting – interestingly a position that comes close to what herbart describes in his explorations of education as the aesthetic representation of the world); and 6) van manen arrives consequently at a point where he reinterprets pedagogical tact not as a mediator between theory and practice – the systematic problem that herbart tried to solve –, but as an educator’s state of mind in which the situation, pedagogies in dissonance 125 i.e., the student, can unveil itself in a way that allows the educator to react “thoughtfully” to the situation, whereby this now has little to do with thoughts but more with an emotional sensitivity that is able to “feel” the student. consequently, in the rest of the book van manen develops a psycho-emotional concept of pedagogical tact that now refers to a certain set of approaches towards the student: “tact shows itself as holding back […] as openness to the child's experience […] as attuned to subjectivity […] as subtle influence […] as situational confidence […] as improvisational gift” (van manen 1991: viii f.). such an understanding of pedagogical tact has little or nothing to do with herbart’s understanding of this notion. introduced as a solution to the systematic problem of relating universal theory to particular practice, the concept of a pedagogical tact has now become an answer to a completely different question. the most important difference is now that while herbart’s concept is ethically or morally neutral, van manen’s is decidedly not neutral. herbart’s pedagogical tact fills the gap between any pedagogical theory and the practice allegedly guided by it; van manen – not really interested in systematic questions relating to general problems of educational thinking – develops his concept of pedagogical tact as referring to a condition that needs to be fulfilled when attempting to educate in a very specific way, or better: with a specific aim towards a specific goal. herbart’s pedagogical tact is a universal systematic concept – van manen’s is an ethical or moral concept bound to a specific normative idea of education. 5. final remarks: different cultures the difference between the two presented conceptions of pedagogical tact is one of different pedagogical cultures: herbart, together with schleiermacher (schleiermacher 1826/2022), founded what became known as wissenschaftliche pädagogik, i.e., the science of education (remembering that the german wissenschaft refers to all academic studies and not only the natural sciences, this would then be the academic study of education), that not only reflected on different aims, goals, and methods of education and their anthropological foundations, but also on the theoretical foundations of the scientificality of the newly developed educational theories, including the very problem of the relation of theory and practice. this continued to develop into what is now known as allgemeine pädagogik, or systematic/ general pedagogy (the field of education studies in which the discipline reflects on itself and its reflective notions, i.e., the investigations in which an academic discipline establishes self-reflexivity). van manen’s considerations, on the other hand, are typical for an anglophone approach to pedagogical thinking, in which education as a notion is never really understood as a neutral & descriptive notion but always already conceived of as a specific morally desirable activity or state of being whereby the emphasis in discussions lies on the concrete form of this desirable activity or state. it would not be out of place at all to apply herbart’s reflections, in their universal scope, to the educational practices in ancient sparta (hereby asking the question of how the prevalent rules and principles of education are to be interpreted in each individual situation), whereas it would make little sense to look for van manen’s notion of pedagogical tact in spartan society: they simply do not share the same ethical framework in which the formulations of van manen regarding “good educator’s behavior” would only make sense. and while for herbart and schleiermacher, the very question of how (any 126 global education review 10 (1-2) kind of) educational theories and educational practices can relate at all is absolutely central to the reflections of education studies (kenklies 2012), such questions are rarely addressed in anglophone educational cultures, in which education studies has not developed into an independent academic discipline that would need to reflect on its own preconditions. the act of distancing that van manen envisions here in relation to herbart, i.e., the classic exponent of the continental tradition of pedagogy (friesen & kenklies 2022), is nothing but an expression of the separation the anglophone educational culture has gradually executed in the first two decades of the 20th century. with historical consciousness gradually disappearing within educational discussions, hardly anyone seems to remember that there used to be a lively exchange between the two different pedagogical worlds that have emerged – pedagogical worlds whose inhabitants do find it difficult now to communicate with each other. references adams, j. 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(1876). vorlesungen über allgemeine pädagogik. b.g. teubner. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11217-012-9287-6 fragments of danning 66 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: jacobsen evenshaug, aurora, & lie, elin rødahl (2023). fragments of danning: a critical analysis of a key concept in norwegian core curricula between 1997 and 2020. global education review, 10 (1-2), 66-77. fragments of danning: a critical analysis of a key concept in norwegian core curricula between 1997 and 2020 aurora jacobsen evenshaug elin rødahl lie abstract in 2017, a new core curriculum was implemented in norwegian primary and secondary education, replacing the core curriculum from 1997. while the concept of danning is present in both curricula, its meaning and use seem to change. the concept of danning has a played a significant role in norwegian society and educational history. danning has been linked to the establishment of norwegian democracy, in which education plays an important role. since the 19th century, the meaning of the concept has been subject to change, corresponding to historical changes, yet the word itself continues to be part of the norwegian educational rhetoric and national curriculum. this means that conversations about danning may not be fruitful because the participants attach different meanings to the same concept. thus, a study of how danning has been used and how it is used today is warranted. through an analysis of two norwegian curricula, from 1997 and 2017, we find changes in the perception of danning and in its role as an educational concept in norwegian education. we argue that danning goes from being understood as a result-oriented, social and democratic concept in 1997 to being seen as an individualistic process in pursuit of certain personal characteristics, without its former social component, in 2017. this indicates a fragmentation of danning. keywords norway, bildung, danning, formation, education, conceptual analysis, hermeneutics, curriculum, translation, nordic education introduction today, the concept of bildung has become increasingly relevant as a critical counterweight to a neoliberal trend in education (horlacher, 2015; d’agnese, 2020; willbergh, 2015; biesta, 2006), or to the so-called global education reform movement (germ) characterized by competition, standardization, an emphasis on core subjects, and test-based accountability policies (sahlberg, 2016). although descriptions of germ show similar tendencies across national borders, an important objection is that with such generalization, one risks losing sight of the nuances and complexity at the local level, not only regarding educational policy (fuller & stevenson, 2019; wiborg, 2013; lundahl, 2016) but also when it comes to the terms that are used. the use of the term bildung in such contexts demonstrates this latter point. the german bildung is a term that appears in international debates on education with clear reference to the german (historical) context (see e.g. horlacher, 2015), but also as a translation of corresponding terms in other languages, such as norwegian. as norwegian education policy has adopted elements from germ in the last two curriculum reforms (sjøberg, 2014), critical researchers have fragments of danning 67 pointed to bildung as a theoretical counterbalance (willbergh, 2015, 2016; hilt, riese & søreide, 2019; ulvik, kvam & eide, 2021). this exemplifies how bildung figures both as a culture-specific term related to a given context and an educational philosophical idea with validity beyond that context. which of these meanings of the concept is referred to is rarely given further attention, even if such an unreflexive translation practice risks contributing to an oversimplified representation of the issue in question. in this article, we want to demonstrate this by using the corresponding norwegian concept danning as a reference point for our analysis, a concept that shares significant features with bildung but also differs from it. we argue that this enables a more nuanced analysis on a conceptual level, which in turn will generate new insight into the impact of the neoliberal education trend more generally. as our analysis of danning demonstrates, traces of this trend can be seen in interpretations of the concept itself. the norwegian concept of danning has traditionally been a key term in norwegian education (hilt et al., 2019; straume, 2013). it is related to the german concept of bildung, but is not identical, as the norwegian word danning has come to hold a specific meaning linked to the establishment of norwegian democracy in the 19th century. while the meaning of the concept has varied over time, corresponding to historical changes, the word itself continues to be part of the norwegian educational rhetoric, including the national curriculum. since 1939, norway has had a tradition of national curricula that function as primary and secondary education guidelines. in addition 1 a key difference from koselleck and his colleagues’ project is that while they studied changes in the use and understanding of certain key concepts to subject curricula, there is a core curriculum, which, according to the norwegian education act, outlines the fundamental values of norwegian education and its most important aims. in the autumn of 2017, a new core curriculum (lk20) was introduced in norwegian schools as part of the latest curriculum reform, the subject renewal. this latest core curriculum includes the concept of danning, which also played a prominent role in the previous curriculum’s framing of the values and aims of education, but it testifies to a new, more fragmented perception of the concept. this article investigates and compares how danning is understood and defined in the two core curricula and discusses how the concept may have become fragmented from 1997 to 2017. “[t]he meaning of words can be defined exactly, but concepts can only be interpreted,” writes reinhart koselleck (2011, 20). in line with koselleck’s view, we assume an analytical distinction between words and concepts. we consider danning a concept in koselleck’s sense, namely as something clear but ambiguous: “it bundles together the richness of historical experience and the sum of theoretical and practical lessons drawn from it in such a way that their relationship can be established and properly understood only through a concept” (koselleck, 2011, 20). 1 the continuous historical reshaping of danning results in a situation where the same word is used in both the curricula from 1997 and 2017, but has different meanings in the two documents. this implies the necessity of a hermeneutic, interpretive exploration of the concept. the analytical focus of the article is on changes in the perception of the concept and in in the german language between 1750 and 1850 (koselleck, 2011), we looked at a concept in educational documents from 1997 and 2017. 68 global education review 10 (1-2) its role as an educational concept in norwegian education. to explain the identified changes, we look to historical developments that take place before, at the time of, and between the implementations of the curricula. the comparative analysis of two core curricula from two different points in time makes this a diachronic study, in which we focus on fundamental dimensions of historical research: change and continuity, in this case in the understanding and definition of the concept of danning. we start by outlining the historical definitions of danning in norway. this leads us into analyses of danning in the two core curricula before embarking on a comparison of the 1997 understanding of the concept with the one from 2017. our analysis focuses on three conceptual pairs in relation to which the concept of danning will be examined: (a) process–result, (b) individual–community, and (c) national– global. as the concept of danning encompasses all the layers of meaning that it has acquired through its conceptual history, a precise translation is difficult. it is common to translate it as bildung, formation, liberal education or simply education, but none of these cover all of the nuances of meaning and history incorporated in the term. consequently, as already mentioned, we use the norwegian word. for this same reason, our interpretation of the curricula is based on the original norwegian versions, but for the sake of accessibility, we quote the official english translations. there are, however, some significant differences between the norwegian original and the english translations, which affect the meaning of the texts. major differences are noted and discussed in endnotes. what is danning? when analyzing a concept, dictionary definitions serve as an interesting starting point. the norwegian standard dictionary, bokmålsordboka, gives four definitions of danning: (a) becoming, the act of constituting or creating something; (b) the result of this act of constitution or creation; (c) the acquisition of knowledge and experience through upbringing, education, and socialization; and (d) the result of the process in definition n. 3, which is characterized as insight into essential subjects and worldly or sophisticated conduct (bokmålsordboka, 2022). danning is a verbal noun; it denotes a process and an end. danning is simultaneously something a subject acquires through the process of an interaction or interplay (similar to what humboldt called wechselwirkung in his concept of bildung) with the surrounding culture and society, and this process itself. danning has also been understood as an ideal and has thus absorbed the cultural ideals of the time and place in which it has been used. this is reflected in the fourth definition from the dictionary: insight into essential subjects. what has been deemed essential is historically and culturally contingent. still, the modern concept of danning also has a critical aspect, as a normative yardstick by which to measure the quality of a society or its education (straume, 2013). danning is historically linked to the establishment of norwegian democracy because it was judged that all citizens needed a fundamental education to be able to participate in democracy. the concept is thus significant in the history of norwegian society and education. the concept of danning is specifically norwegian, but it is also part of a european history of ideas dating back to antiquity. we can fragments of danning 69 trace its roots to the greek paideia.2 the strongest influence arguably came from the german concept of bildung, the content of meaning of which was formed during the 18th and 19th centuries. 3 in germany, the concept was central to educational thinking and to humboldt’s university. according to masschelein and ricken, bildung in humboldt’s terms implied “a process of self-production through self-activated dealing with the world, […] a work of myself” (masschelein & ricken, 2010, 127, our emphasis). the bildung of the self is thus a conscious endeavor carried out by the individual with the goal of increased independence. however, in humboldt’s view, this always happens in interaction (wechselwirkung) and engagement with the outer world (humboldt, 2016). when bildung was appropriated in the norwegian context, it became the word “dannelse.” 4 in the norwegian discourse of the 19th century, the content of the concept’s meaning was the subject of debate: on one side stood the defenders of a classical danning, namely knowledge of the classical languages and canon, while those on the other, more popular side of the “danning debate” promoted what may be called a more democratic interpretation, where danning was understood as common, useful knowledge needed in the building of the nation. this understanding of danning had parallels in sweden and denmark with the concepts of folkbildning and folkedannelse, respectively (sjöström et al., 2017). the prefixes “allmenn-” (common) or “folke-” (people’s) were 2 the self-development of the citizen toward the highest ethical ideal. https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civic-education/ 3 and continues to be formed to this day. 4 this danish version of the word was the standard in 19th-century norway. with later language reforms, the form danning became more common. added to “dannelse” to mark the concept’s democratic potential. this first version of the concept – allmenndannelse – appears in the objectives clauses for public education in 1860 and 1889. allmenndannelse came to denote the knowledge and skills all members of society should possess. this occurred at a time when norway was establishing itself as an independent, democratic nation state. the allmenndannelse of the people was considered instrumental to the national project (slagstad, 2015).5 the prefixes shaped and changed the meaning of danning and perceptions about who had access to it and what its purpose was: it went from being a qualification for bourgeois society to a democratic formation for the sake of national democracy. the meaning of danning further developed during the 20th century in response to changes in society, both globally and in norway. this is evident in the core curriculum that was implemented in norwegian education at the end of the 20th century. the core curriculum from 1997 can be said to mirror a transitional phase in norwegian educational thought and policy (volckmar, 2016). it carried on ideas about allmenndannelse and a unitary school system, while simultaneously heralding the globalization and market logic that would influence the norwegian education system in the 2000s. 5 in germany, too, bildung was perceived as “the royal road to the construction and reconstruction of the nation and of national culture” (masschelein & ricken, 2010, 128). https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/civic-education/ 70 global education review 10 (1-2) danning in the core curriculum from 1997 with the transition from an industrial to a knowledge economy that gradually began to show in norway from the 1980s, there came new educational requirements. in a knowledge society, the education system plays a crucial role in ensuring a country's competitiveness in a globalized economy. the 1997 curriculum shows an increased emphasis on knowledge and learning outcomes (volckmar, 2017; thuen 2017). the intention behind the education reforms in the 1990s was to develop the norwegian unitary school into a standardized, knowledge-intensive school for all. this would meet the knowledge society’s requirement to raise student performance, while simultaneously taking into account the norwegian school’s two main motives: social integration and utilityoriented knowledge (thuen, 2017). by emphasizing a common national knowledge base, the curriculum reflected on the one hand, the belief that school should contribute to social integration within the country's borders by being a counterweight to the fragmented society of the global age, and on the other hand the belief that school should prepare students for a future in a competitive globalized knowledge society (volckmar, 2016). in the 50-page core curriculum from 1997 (l97), there is a chapter titled “the liberally-educated human being” dedicated to describing what danning consists of. the original norwegian title is “det allmenndannede menneske.” accordingly, danning will hereafter be referred to as allmenndannelse when discussing l97. 6 thus, the idea of bildung as a process of work on oneself seems absent in this understanding of the 1997 curriculum was contentoriented, focusing on what students should learn. it perpetuated the idea that all norwegian citizens needed and should be given access to certain knowledge that was deemed necessary for participation in society. in relation to the conceptual pair process-result, the emphasis here is on the result or the content of allmenndannelse, which is understood as threefold: (a) knowledge about the human being, society and nature; (b) skills to face life’s practical, social and personal challenges; and (c) personal “qualities and values that facilitate cooperation between people and make it enriching and exciting for them to live together” (l97, 25). allmenndannelse is defined as something the student or individual receives from education, 6 through the acquisition of “integrated understanding” (l97, 26), shared frames of reference, “concern for others,” and “national identity and solidarity” (l97, 29), to name a few. how the process happens on an individual level is not elaborated in the l97, which reveals that little significance is attached to the processual aspect of danning. the l97 presents allmenndannelse as a means – as opposed to an end in itself, or as having inherent value – playing a central part in the furthering the norwegian nation state as a multicultural society in a globalized world. it was thought that common frames of reference and shared knowledge would keep society together by counteracting social inequality and providing equal opportunities for all to participate in society and democracy: it is a central tenet of popular enlightenment that such [shared] frames of reference must be the common property of all the people – danning, indicating a deviation of the norwegian concept from its german precursor. fragments of danning 71 indeed must be an integral part of the general education – to escape differences in competence which otherwise can surface in social inequality and be abused by undemocratic forces. […] common background knowledge is thus at the core of a national network of communication between members of a democratic community. […] education plays a leading role in passing on this common background information – the culture everybody must be familiar with if society is to remain democratic and its citizens sovereign (l97, 26-28). allmenndannelse is understood as exactly that, an “allmenn” (common) danning that should be accessible to and shared by all members of a society because it is perceived as essential to establishing and preserving the nation as a community. in relation to the conceptual pair individual-community, we see that the l97 emphasizes community. moreover, l97 specifies that allmenndannelse should also be guaranteed to newcomers: “newcomers to a country who are not immersed in its frames of reference often remain outsiders because others cannot take for granted what they know and can do – they are in constant need of extra explanations” (l97, 26). allmenndannelse is thus understood as a path to integration. allmenndannelse is understood as fundamental to securing and furthering norwegian democracy, as a protection against “undemocratic forces.” this gives allmenndannelse a twofold purpose: uniting the nation and protecting democracy. this reflects the two motives of the unitary school, namely promoting unity within the nation and advancing the state’s competitiveness globally (thuen, 2017). this relates to another of our conceptual pairs, local-global. the l97 paints norway as a specialized, globalized society needing a highly skilled workforce: the flows between nations – of capital and commodities, of materials and machines – have become more extensive, formidable and inexorable. […] all this poses many challenges to the task of education: to combine […] a work force that is highly qualified and versatile, and to combine an international outlook with national distinction (l97, 29). allmenndannelse is understood as a means of providing the work force that norway and the global society need in the future (l97, 28) as it “strengthens qualities and values that provide society with richer opportunities for growth in the future” (l97, 29). consequently, allmenndannelse is perceived as something that will benefit the community first and the individual second. however, the specialized society to which the individual and their allmenndannelse are meant to contribute is, according to the l97, a global one. in the l97, norway is understood as embedded in an international network in which people, goods, and ideas move across national borders. thus, allmenndannelse’s role in maintaining widespread knowledge of norwegian cultural heritage among the norwegian population is executed on a global stage. the l97 stresses the importance of maintaining a national identity in, and because of, the global society into which the curriculum defines norway as integrated: “the increasing specialization and complexity of the global community requires a deepened familiarity with 72 global education review 10 (1-2) the main currents and traditional tones of our norwegian culture” (l97, 29).7 again, the knowledge aspect of allmenndannelse is emphasized, here denoting knowledge about norwegian culture and history. this upholding of norwegian identity is justified in light of what can be interpreted as a “threat” from a modern, rapidly changing society. allmenndannelse is seen as an anchor or mast, a counterweight to the seemingly fluctuating modern society: “when transitions are massive and changes rapid, it becomes even more pressing to emphasize historical orientation, national distinctiveness and local variation to safeguard our identity – and to sustain a global environment with breadth and vigor” (l97, 29). again, national distinctiveness is emphasized within a global context. the society in which the students will grow up is further defined as specialized, globalized, and based on technology, science, and knowledge. not only should allmenndannelse serve as a counterweight to the global flux, it should also function as a tool to help the nation be successful in a competitive global environment (l97, 28). allmenndannelse is presented as a means to improve norway’s standing in a globally competitive environment and to promote growth within the norwegian 7 the above quote does not just tell us something about the l97’s understanding of allmenndannelse. when comparing the original norwegian and the english translation of the quote, interesting findings appear. most of the english translation of the quote directly reflects the norwegian original. in the last sentence, however, there is a major difference. whereas the english translation reads “sustain a global environment with breadth and vigor” (author’s emphasis) (which is to be understood as the environment having breadth and vigor), the word “global” does not appear in the norwegian original. the norwegian sentence thus suggests that national environments should be sustained. note also that the english translation says environment (singular), state itself. the chapter on allmenndannelse concludes by stating that “[allmenndannelse] strengthens qualities and values that provide society with richer opportunities for growth in the future” (l97, 29). the liberally educated human being seems to become a pawn in the norwegian state’s quest for global success in the markets of economy, international rankings, and political impact. danning is turned into a commodity which the individual sells or uses to further his/her own position in a competition, as a small part of a global system. this instrumentalization of danning could be said to mark a change in how the concept is viewed: from being seen as a process of perfectibility integrated in the individual to being seen as something attached to, or rather detached from, the individual, ready to be marketed. at the conclusion of the 20th century and on the cusp of a new millennium, the concept of danning presented in 1997 seems to point in two directions: it simultaneously looks back at the understanding of danning as encyclopedic knowledge and an inherently valuable process of self-formation and heralds the globalized, fragmented concept that will come to dominate in the 2000s. whereas the original norwegian uses the plural [miljøer]. the two texts can thus be understood quite differently. this poses serious issues for researchers: a non-norwegian speaking researcher analyzing the english translation would be reading a different text from a norwegian-speaking researcher analyzing the original. not only the language, but the content differs. this poses problems for academic transparency in an international academic context where english is the lingua franca and would possibly pose problems for research on documents in other languages than norwegian as well. this should be of concern to any researcher working on national documents originally written in the national language. fragments of danning 73 the concept of danning in the new millennium in the year 2000, norway participated in the international pisa test for the first time and norwegian students scored lower than expected. this led to a vigorous debate over norwegian education system, and a system change (volckmar, 2016), which, in reality, already was on the way due to a change of government, and received solid public support. with the knowledge promotion reform, launched in 2006, the traditionally contentrelated norwegian curricula were replaced by a competence-based assessment system emphasizing what students should master rather than work with (sivesind, 2013). this was further consolidated when the latest core curriculum, launched in 2017, 8 clearly anchored the concept “competence” in cognitive learning theory with the introduction of terms such as “deep learning,” “self-regulation” and “metacognition.” the core curriculum from 2017 was implemented in 2020 for norwegian primary, secondary and upper secondary education. instead of allmenndannelse, lk20 uses the term “danning.” danning is defined under the subheading “principles for education and allround development,” 9 which comprises 262 words in the original norwegian. thus, compared to l97, considerably less space is given to the concept of danning. the first 8 in the curriculum issued in 2006 (lk06), the core curriculum had been continued from l97. 9 “prinsipper for læring, utvikling og danning” in the original norwegian. 10 here, the concept becomes explicitly linked to the german bildung, which is not the case in the norwegian original. 11 lk20 is a widely used abbreviation for the core curriculum that was implemented for upper secondary education in 2017 and for primary and secondary education in 2020. sentence states: “the school’s mission is the education and all-round development (bildung)10 [sic] of all pupils. education and allround development are interlinked and mutually dependent” (lk20,11 9). the mission is derived from the objectives clause in the norwegian education act, which states that education should provide students and apprentices with challenges that “promote formation12 and [a] desire to learn” (lk20, 3). consequently, one might ask whether the occurrence of the word “danning” in the objectives clause can be interpreted as a reason why danning appears in the core curriculum. the danning mission of education is further elaborated as follows: “primary and secondary education and training is an important part of a lifelong process which has the individual’s all-round development, intellectual freedom, independence, responsibility and compassion for others as its goal” (lk20, 10). here, the norwegian and english versions differ: whereas the english version states that danning (translated as allround development) is one of the goals of a lifelong process, the norwegian version states that primary education is part of a lifelong danningsprosess which has the individual’s freedom,13 independence, responsibility, and compassion/humanity14 as its goal (lk20, 9).15 thus, in the original norwegian, danning is understood as a process, not a goal, as it is in the 12 “danning” in the original norwegian text. 13 “intellectual” does not appear in the norwegian text. 14 “medmenneskelighet” in the original norwegian. 15 the original text reads: “grunnopplæringen er en viktig del av en livslang danningsprosess som har enkeltmenneskets frihet, selvstendighet, ansvarlighet og medmenneskelighet som mål.” 74 global education review 10 (1-2) english translation. with reference to the conceptual pair process-result, the quote shows that the processual aspect of danning is significant in the 2017 understanding of the concept. this is further confirmed by the following quote: this process [of danning] occurs when the pupils acquire knowledge about and insight into nature and the environment, language and history, society and working life, art and culture, and religion and worldviews. this all-round education is also achieved through the experiences and practical challenges found in the teaching and everyday school affairs (lk20, 10). lk20 defines when the process of danning occurs, and which subjects the student must become acquainted with to enter the process of danning. what danning is, or what a person with danning looks like, is not elaborated on, save for the characteristics that were defined as danning’s goals: intellectual freedom, independence, responsibility and compassion.16 thus, the result of the process is more opaque in lk20 than in l97. as we see it, a key difference between the two curricula is that the former emphasizes process, whereas the latter focuses on the result of the process. the conceptual pair individual-community elaborates this key difference: the results or content of allmenndannelse in l97 are rooted in communal values, whereas the processual aspect of danning in lk20 concerns the individual. 16 the process of danning, however, is lifelong, thus the goal of danning can never be reached. 17 the quote must be scrutinized in terms of translation, as we again encounter significant differences between the norwegian original and the english translation. the norwegian paragraph contains many phrases with the term “danning” in l97, as shown, was focused on allmenndannelse’s role in norwegian society, both as a tool of integration and coexistence and as an advantage in a competitive global environment. this social framing is almost completely replaced by an individual focus in lk20. although lk20 refers to “the students” plural, it is evident that danning is something that happens to and within the individual, and it also seems to be exclusively for the individual. the shift of focus from community to individual can be related to the use of different terms in the two core curricula. the concept of danning in lk20 appears without the “allmenn-” (common) prefix that it had in l97, and which can be traced back to the objectives clauses of the 19th century curricula. this individualistic-processual focus can be seen in the following quote: this all-round education is also achieved through the experiences and practical challenges found in the teaching and everyday school affairs. […] this [danning] occurs when they are working on their own and when they cooperate with others. they develop [dannes in the original norwegian] when they struggle with theoretical challenges using formulas and academic material in the subjects, and when using tools to master a practical task. pupils develop [dannes in the original norwegian] when they learn how to find correct answers, but also when they understand that simple and set answers are not always easy to find (lk20, 10). 17 them: “danning happens” [danning skjer], “the student dannes [becomes someone with danning].” as danning is a specifically norwegian term, it is difficult to directly translate these phrases, leading to translations with a different content of meaning: in the english translation, “danning skjer” is translated as “this process occurs” and “this all-round education fragments of danning 75 when it comes to where the concept of danning in lk20 stands in relation to our conceptual pair national-global, this is not as clear from the core curriculum’s description of danning the as in l97. as noted, the concept of danning has historically played a central role in the furthering of democracy in norway. consequently, the concept took on a social and political dimension, as reflected in l97, where allmenndannelse was seen as a means to unite the norwegian people through shared knowledge and frames of reference. at the same time, with l97, allmenndannelse also became an instrument to help norway to the forefront of global competition. in lk20, the latter ambition remains, although it appears more indirectly: under the subheading where danning is described, it is never linked to global competition or norway’s role in a globalized society. the global context must therefore be found in other parts of the curriculum, and in surrounding official documents (meld. st. 28 (2015–2016)) and reports (nou 2015:8) as well as in interpretations of these texts as responding to neoliberal international trends in education (willbergh, 2015, 2016; hilt, riese & søreide, 2019). the individualistic-processual orientation also testifies to a quite different understanding of what this ambition, namely allowing norway to get ahead in the global competition, entails. it is striking how the description of danning in the core curriculum of 2020 fits together with the curriculum's overall focus on “learning” and “competence,” curricular is achieved.” “elevene [the students] dannes” is translated as “pupils develop.” in an educational context, the term “develop”/“development” connotes a psychological/mental development of the individual’s cognitive abilities, but this form of development cannot be said to be part of danning. does this translation not leave an alarming amount of room for misinterpretation? foci reflecting global education reform trends. the social and political dimension of the concept of danning, however, is absent. consequently, the 2020 core curriculum represents a break with the tradition that sees danning as having a role in the furthering of democracy in norway. it is important to note, however, that the core curriculum from 2017 does indeed mention democracy and shared frames of reference, but it does this in another chapter, namely chapter 1, “core values of education and training.”18 thus, the political and social dimensions that were integrated in the 1997 understanding of the concept of danning, become detached in lk20, leaving the concept of danning fragmented. conclusion our comparison of the two norwegian core curricula has shown a significant change in the perception of the concept of danning in the last 20 years. the concept in the core curriculum from 1997 bore witness to a time of change, as it encompassed the democratic potential that was so vital to the understanding of danning in norwegian educational thought in the 19th and 20th centuries. simultaneously, the 1997 concept reflected the globalization taking place at the time. twenty years later, the concept of danning seems to have been reduced to an individual process without a formal content or a description of its overall aims. thus, it is deprived of the social and political dimensions characteristic of previous understandings. we find that there is a shift in how danning is conceived in norwegian national curricula from 18 shared frames of reference are discussed under the heading “1.2 identity and cultural diversity”: “common reference frameworks are important for each person's sense of belonging in society. this creates solidarity and connects each individual's identity to the greater community and to a historical context.” democracy is discussed under the heading “1.6 democracy and participation.” 76 global education review 10 (1-2) a result-oriented, social and democratic concept in 1997 to an individualistic process in pursuit of certain personal characteristics, without a defined content, and without its former social component. this indicates a fragmentation of the concept and calls for a revisiting of the normative discussion of what danning should be. in 2003, masschelein and ricken argued that the concept of bildung had lost its relevance as a critical concept and asked whether we should abandon the concept altogether (masschelein & ricken, 2003). we believe, however, that the concepts of danning and bildung have the potential to not only reflect, but serve as the basis for a critique of, ideals and practices, and thereby function as critical counterweights to the neoliberal agenda. however, as our analysis of danning in the norwegian curricula shows, they can also absorb traces of neoliberal trends and practices, thereby losing their relevance as critical yardsticks. references biesta, g. j. j. 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(2016). bringing teaching back in: the norwegian nou the school of the future in light of the allgemeine didaktik theory of wolfgang klafki. nordisk tidsskrift for pedagogikk & kritikk, 2, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.17585/ntpk.v2.268 https://doi.org/10.17585/ntpk.v2.268 ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 23 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: archer, nathan. ‘they have tried to silence me.’ beyond policy bordering: early childhood educators forging activist identities in the borderlands. global education review, 12 (2), 23-37. ‘they have tried to silence me.’ beyond policy bordering: early childhood educators forging activist identities in the borderlands nathan archer abstract the roles of early childhood educators in england have been marked, in recent times, by prescriptive occupational standards, surveillance, and responsibilisation. over the last thirty years, early educators have been discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing, and everchanging ways. in addition, ideal professional identities have been institutionally shaped and bounded by qualifications criteria, regulatory requirements, and by intersections with broader (and at times, authoritarian) policy reforms. this constitutes a process of policy bordering (archer 2022), which delineates professional identity territory, creating a space for a particular version of professional identities whilst closing down others. in response to this bordering process, a more dynamic, generative perspective recognises spaces for expressions of educator agency. analysis of empirical data suggests such borders are, in fact, permeable with educators expressing their individual agency through these boundaries. early childhood educators appear to be exploiting cracks and fissures in the borders to disrupt authoritarian demands upon them and exercise their personal power (gallagher, 2000). drawing on professional life story interviews of educators (n=18), this paper offers novel conceptualisation and analysis of borderland narratives, revealing how early educator agency and activism are asserted in interstitial spaces. by considering the role of borders (conceptual or otherwise) as sites of struggle, where the right to become is contested and negotiated, the borderlands concept illuminates the spaces of political possibilities (brambilla, 2014), in which alternative professional subjectivities are enacted. keywords early childhood education, activism, resistance, professional identities, borderlands the department for education (dfe) is keeping files monitoring the social media activity of some of the country’s leading educational experts, the observer can reveal. at least nine experts have uncovered files held on them, some as long as 60 pages…. ruth swailes and aaron bradbury, co-authors of a bestselling book on early childhood, were told by the organisers of a government-sponsored event for childminders and nursery workers, which they were due to speak at in march, that the dfe planned to cancel the conference just days before it opened because they were deemed to be “unsuitable” headline speakers. speaking to the observer, bradbury, principal lecturer in early childhood studies at nottingham trent university, said: “i received a phone call from the organisers saying there were some concerns about us being speakers. the dfe had decided we were unsuitable because we had been critical of government policy.” he said: “to be told that we couldn’t have this debate felt like we were living in a dictatorship, not a democracy.” … swailes, an independent consultant who advises schools and nurseries on early years education, was so shocked 24 global education review 12 (2) that she filed a subject access request, requiring the dfe to disclose any documents it held on her…she said: “they have tried to silence me”. (anna fazackerley, 30 september 2023, revealed: uk government keeping files on education critics’ social media activity, the observer) this newspaper story from 2023 details an episode in which the uk’s then conservative government’s department for education had undertaken covert social media surveillance of a number of educationalists. freedom of information requests, and investigative journalism (fazackerley, 2023), revealed numerous cases of educators and academics whose social media activity had been tracked. this policing of early childhood professional development practices, which caused consternation in the sector, is an example of a wider uk political regime which was predicated on centralised control (cushing, 2021). such moves were indicative of a “govian era”i in which: politicians constructed a frontier between ‘the people’ (commonly teachers or parents) and an illegitimate ‘elite’ (an educational establishment) that opposed change. this anti-elite populist rhetoric, arguably first tested in the department for education, has now become instituted more widely in our current british politics. (craske, 2021, p. 279). it is argued that tactics such as this surveillance are moves from the neoliberal to “rising authoritarian practices” (michael-luna & castner, 2024, p. 44) in attempts to close down critique and dissent of government policies. however, as the newspaper report also illustrates, educationalists exposed and resisted these moves, asserting their agency and autonomy. overview in order to interrogate this premise further, this paper draws on critical policy analysis and empirical data from a study in england (archer, 2020) that explored the activist identities of early childhood educators in the context of increasingly centralised and prescriptive policy incursions. drawing on life story interviews of educators, this paper offers a novel conceptualisation and analysis of borderland narratives (forged between structural policy demands and educator agency). these narratives reveal how early educator resistance and activism are asserted in interstitial spaces. the paper also considers the concept of policy ‘borders’. it moves discussion from the impact of policy bordering (discerned in archer, 2022) to an exploration of ecec activist identities formed in the ‘borderlands’. reflecting on this notion of borderlands as sites of struggle, where the right to become is contested and negotiated, i explore the concept and cracks in the system as illuminating the spaces of political possibilities (brambilla, 2014), in which alternative professional subjectivities are enacted. i conclude by considering how, despite authoritarian manoeuvres, these resistances and activist identities are expressions of “contestation and hope” (moss, 2015, p. 226). firstly, i explore literature that details the contemporary conditions and the ways in which authoritarian moves reached into early childhood education (ece) in an english context. ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 25 contemporary english early education policy context and conditions it is argued that the era of conservativeled governments (2010-2024) saw reduced educator autonomy (archer, 2020), intensification of performance measurement (roberts-holmes & moss, 2021), and highly prescriptive curricular interventions with particular focus on fidelity to commercial literacy and mathematical programmes of work for young children. during this period, the national early childhood learning and development framework was re-written multiple times, and curriculum guidance was centrally evolved from the department for education with little consultation. meanwhile, a sector-led version of curriculum guidance was ignored in government communications (archer, 2024). such policy developments were also coupled with a revived “childcare for working parents” discourse (dfe, 2013) framing ece, and thereby early educators, as providing: more great childcare [which] is vital to ensuring we can compete in the global race, by helping parents back to work and readying children for school and, eventually, employment (p. 6). at the same time, and despite calls from professional associations, there was minimal policy intervention in strategic ece workforce development planning. the government produced a slim workforce strategy in 2017 that lacked investment and vision (merrick, 2018), and there was little meaningful engagement with the sector on this. in essence, these policy moves, and sector responses were indicative of what nagasawa (2020) terms “an old fight” (p. 224). despite this lack of ambitious and strategic vision, the roles of early childhood educators in england have been marked, in recent times, by prescriptive occupational standards (archer, 2022), surveillance (robertsholmes & bradbury, 2016) and responsibilisation (nutall, et. al., 2022). over the last twenty years, early educators have increasingly been discursively positioned through workforce policy in multiple, competing, and everchanging ways. such policy flux, and the resulting redefinitions of purpose of early educators, is reflected by goouch and powell (2017), who reflect on numerous changing discourses: politicians and policy makers who [are] constantly… treating the practitioners as ‘palimpsests’ inscribing, cleaning, and re-inscribing those who work with babies and young children (p. 2). in addition, ideal versions of professional identities have been institutionally shaped and bounded by qualifications criteria, regulatory requirements, and by intersections with broader (and at times authoritarian) policy reforms. as developed by archer (2022) this constitutes a process of policy ‘bordering’. this process delineates professional identity territory, creating a space for a government-sanctioned version of professional identities whilst closing down other versions. these developments highlight the dual challenges of the ideological and practical in the shift from neoliberalism to authoritarian practice and its chilling effect on early childhood education policy, practice, and advocacy work. as michael-luna & castner, (2023) assert: regressive politicians are also working to normalize authoritarian practices in efforts to censor critical perspectives … 26 global education review 12 (2) early childhood advocates, teachers, and researchers need practical ways to name, resist, and reimagine policybased authoritarian practices in local education contexts. (p. 501). i revisit a previous study to further elucidate the authoritarian nature of policy development and the resistance and activism of early childhood educators. methodology the paper draws on a qualitative study, including both a critical discourse analysis (cda) of english early childhood workforce policies (2006-2017) (archer, 2022) and a critical narrative analysis (archer, 2020) based on the professional life stories of early educators (n=18) in england. this study takes on new resonances in the current era, and i utilise this work to further explore contestation to authoritarian socio-political trends in ece. policy analysis policy analysis was undertaken deploying a cda frame produced by hyatt (2013) to analyse nine key uk government policy texts on early childhood workforce reform from 2006 to 2017, an era that saw the significant evolution of broader early childhood policy in england. these workforce reform policies provided the most explicit examples of government-constructed professional standards and qualifications frameworks and the clearest and most instrumental policy vehicles for discerning institutional discourses of professional identity. professional life stories considering the relationships between policy texts (as instruments of structure) and the agency of early childhood educators, i sought to explore how early educators are positioned in policy and how they form or maintain their own professional identities in response to, or despite, these policies. this study was approached with an openness to links between narratives and the potential for social change. whilst this study was not primarily driven by advocacy, i focused on the possibility that narratives of lives lived may also speak truth to power and may call into question the power of dominant discourses (and potentially oppressive meta-narratives) and their relationships to lived experiences. stories, then, can be viewed as “a process of deconstructing the discursive practices through which one’s subjectivity has been constituted” (middleton, 1992, p. 20), a perspective that links narrative inquiry to a critical orientation. borderland spaces between critical theory and narrative inquiry are inspired by a desire to bring marxist-influenced perspectives of sources of oppression into relation with individual experience. stone-mediatore (2003) highlights formative material conditions but also acknowledges the lives of individuals and marginal experiences shaped by structural discourses. ultimately, as a critical narrative inquiry, it sought to: …question how narratives or stories are imbricated within relational plays of power, and how subjects re-authorize their own positions…they are embraced as the site and evidence of agency, while avoiding reducing persons to individualistic agents. (allen & hardin, 2001, p. 176). drawing upon this and other research (souto-manning 2014; jeeong-hee, 2016), the study built an approach to critical narrative ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 27 inquiry that makes visible the enablers that facilitate and the constraints that limit the possibilities to accept, reject, modify, and otherwise respond to subject positions idealised within contemporary workforce reform discourses. life stories provide narratives of microlevel experiences contextualised by mesoand macro-level events. in so doing, the personal and political, which are so inextricably intertwined and constitutive, are reflected. andrews (2017) writes: life (hi)story and narrative have much to bring to our understanding of the political; equally, personal narratives which ignore the political context in which a life is lived are unnecessarily limited in their scope. we want the forest and the trees (p. 275). empirical data were analysed deploying a critical narrative analysis framework by laliberte-rudman and aldrich (2017) drawing on earlier work by laliberte-rudman (2015). this framework was selected because of the applicability of its guiding questions, which focus on subjectivities, ideal subject positions, and the relationships between perceptions of these by individuals and those constructed through policy. as laliberte-rudman and aldrich (2017) attest, there are methodological challenges in linking discourses with narratives. they describe wanting to attend to the transactional space in between discourse and narrative (allen and hardin, 2001) by ‘mov[ing] data from individuals beyond the level of the individual and into historical, social and cultural realms, thus making critical analysis possible on a social level. (hardin, 2003, p. 544). this framework deploys an analytical process to interlink discourses and narratives using the questions: • in what ways does the participant position her/himself within the narrative? • what subject positions does s/he attempt to lay claim to and how? • how do these ways of positioning relate to subjectivities (affirm, negotiate fracture) constructed through policy? • what normalizing truths are brought into the narrative and/or contested to monitor, position, and present the self? (laliberte-rudman & aldrich, 2017, p. 475). i consider, firstly, the data from policy analysis in which i argue policy bordering is enacted. secondly, i reflect on data from educator interviews, which informs theorising about the cracks in the borders and the borderland zones in which educator activist identities are formed. policy bordering critical discourse analysis of english ecec workforce reform policies (2006-2017) (archer, 2022) proposes that recent policies create discursive borders around the professional identities of early childhood educators. deploying hyatt’s cda frame (2013), i considered that the policy drivers, warrant, legitimation, and evaluation. these elements enabled me to consider motivations, rationale, and attitudinal judgements in policy which discursively created professional identities of early educators. 28 global education review 12 (2) through processes of credentialising, incentivising and surveillance, standards are presented as logical and desirable with the expectation that the acceptance and consent of an early childhood workforce is a given. i propose that these standards are discursively coercive and, through their design, circulation, and regulation, “inhibit professional autonomy and promote a model of technical practice” (miller, 2008, p. 260). the structural discourses analysed in the policies and in associated policy texts point to the pervasiveness of a neoliberal and, at times, authoritarian regime. the prevalence of discourses of governmentality, responsibilisation, marketisation, performativity, and surveillance within these texts led me to find that neoliberal ideas are reaching into early childhood policy in attempts to shape notions of the ‘good’ early childhood professional identity. through these policies, concepts about ideal professional identity through desirable knowledges, skills, behaviours, and attitudes become normalised. as laliberte-rudman (2015) asserts, “dominant discourses progressively come to be viewed as normal, natural, ethical, and ideal, thereby bounding identity.” (p. 29). i contend that, based on this critical discourse analysis, one of the ways in which neoliberal forms of governmentality and responsibilisation are formalised, engendered, and inculcated is through setting standards. the strategic workforce policies, coupled with associated qualifications criteria, competency frameworks, and occupational standards, serve as policy technologies and act as a form of hegemony. in addition, ideal professional subjectivities have been institutionally shaped and bounded by qualifications criteria, regulatory requirements, and by intersections with broader policy reforms. this constitutes a process of ‘bordering’ (archer, 2022) that delineates professional identity territory, creating a space for a particular version of professional identities whilst closing down others. the question of institutionalisation…is eminently a question of power to define and to delimit a space, within which certain functions and operations can be performed. the power of the institution is the power to lay down borders, to impose limits, to enforce demarcations (weber, 1986, p. 310). in the context of policy reform and professional identities, such a conceptual border can be seen to define, demarcate, separate, and create an ‘other’. policy bordering as a process in border studies, the early 2000s saw a processual turn in which the activity of bordering became a greater focus. the process through which borders are demarcated and managed is central to the notion of border as process and border as institution. […] demarcation is not simply the drawing of a line on a map or the construction of a fence in the physical landscape. it is the process through which borders are constructed and the categories of difference or separation created (newman, 2007, p.35). building on the premise that professional identities are partially shaped through policy text, i question the extent to which the production and circulation of workforce reform policies are an act of bordering that defines and attempts to contain the ideal ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 29 professional identities of early educators. through the policy analysis, i propose that versions of identities are constructed through policysuch as regulating views and setting normative professional standards – is an attempt at a disciplinary process of bordering. this process of bordering (whether it is acknowledged as so or not) might be justified in the quest for improved standards or quality outcomes for children. i consider that this process might be read as a process of governmentality. that is to say, i suggest that through the bordering of professional identities by means of policy, educators are classified, ordered, controlled, and coerced into willing participation in this governmentality. however, it could be argued that as convincing an argument as this is, such a description does not acknowledge the agency of educators to resist or negotiate these professional identities. reconceptualising professional identity borderlands notably, identifying and naming the discursive borders that contain particular versions of professional identities only provides a partial picture. analysing the empirical data generated led me to see the ways in which participant educators challenged assumptions and mediated policy boundaries of identity construction, as they differentiated between those expectations they were prepared to compromise on and those they were not. in short, they positioned themselves. rather than solely critiquing (and to some extent, therefore) affirming the power of the border, i reconceptualise the professional identity constructions of practitioners in terms of borderlands. interview data coded according to the guiding questions in the analytical framework (laliberte-rudman & aldrich, 2017) reveal a number of responses from participants that might be described as discourses in between structure and agency: borderland discourses. these narratives contain expressions of multiple subject positions, both subject positions constructed through policy and those experienced and claimed by participants. those claimed include activist identities: fran: “so the activist stuff is because of policy and how fundamentally flawed a lot of the policy is. i just think a lot of what is being asked of us is not right, and it`s not fair on children. and that’s why i take the stand that i take… i will not do things to get data, and that is the problem i am going to have. i won’t cram with children.” stella: “and sometimes it feels as if we are just fighting to stay alive really, the principle and the ethos about the way children are best supported for their learning and development against what feel like an assault on it really... i think there is also a pushback by the sector as well, a vigorous defence mounted in the last year against what has seemed like a mounting assault from outside, against the play-based, evidence-based pedagogy of early years.” sylvia: “i can’t just sit back. i think if you want to be an activist, you can’t just speak, you have to act. because i care about children. you have to do something meaningful. and also, i think it is important for children to see that you are speaking up for them….” 30 global education review 12 (2) mark: “what i want to be saying is ‘y’know play is under threat here’. you can achieve all this stuff [literacy and numeracy outcomes] in this way through playful opportunities, if you are brave enough. for me, it comes down to faith. faith in children. we shouldn’t just toe the line because that is what we have been told we must do. we must challenge what we see.” these educator stories are indicative of data across the study in which educators contested dominant discourses and challenged authoritarian socio-political trends in ece. in particular, participants named their activism as a core feature of their professional identity, mediating, subverting, and challenging policy demands upon them and their work. it was evident from educator narratives that perceived policy borders are permeable that there are gaps in government-imposed policy borders. through and beyond these borders, early childhood educators are asserting agency and appear to be exploiting cracks and fissures in the borders to disrupt authoritarian demands upon them and exercise their personal power (gallagher, 2000). forging cracks drawing on conceptualisation by holloway (2010) and further explored in albin clark, et al., (2024), i argue that early childhood educators are identifying, making, and working within cracks. these fractures can be understood as in-between spaces that refuse standardised lines of thought and normative categorisation (deleuze & guattari, 2004). they are spaces of rebellion and disruption to the current authoritarian order. it is argued that these fractures, these interstices made, or indeed made larger by actions, enable us to understand neoliberal or authoritarian thinking by its contradictions and its weaknesses. i suggest that activist identities are forged in the cracks or fissures of seemingly impenetrable borders established by policies. they are epitomised by refusal: the power of ‘no’: ‘no’ is then not a closure but an opening to a different activity, the threshold of a counterworld with a different logic and a different language. the no opens a timespace in which we try to live as subject rather than objects. (holloway, 2010, p. 21). this logic is echoed by tuck & wang, 2024, who “describe practices, stances, escape routes, and epistemic spaces opened by various forms of ‘no’’’ (p. xv). such spaces as sites of struggle, where the right to become is contested and negotiated, are spaces of political possibilities that allow radical alternatives to emerge. thinking further with border/lands theory in education research and practice borders have multiple interpretations. in conceptual and discursive terms educational borders, boundaries, and frontiers may be taken to refer to demarcations of curriculum and assessment practices, governance arrangements, and professional roles, amongst other features, within early years settings, schools, universities, and other education institutions. in terms of this research, i have proposed that, to a degree, the professional identities of early childhood educators are shaped, discursively created, and promoted through policy texts. in doing so, it https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/14639491241267947#bibr24-14639491241267947 ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 31 can be argued that policy texts establish, enforce, and articulate discursive borders around early childhood educators’ professional identities, defining what they should be and should do. i argue that this can be seen as an act of colonisation in which different policy makers (e.g. different political administrations) (re) inscribe evolving constructions of professional identities through policy text. the policy intensification of an arguably previously neglected sector over the past thirty years can be read as manifesting in a process of professional acculturation. a more dynamic perspective of the bordering process allows a space for representations and interpretations of agency. this can be illustrated by drawing on bhabha’s (1990) concept of minor narratives of day-to-day border crossing, or in this study, the personal narratives of agency and activism. the concept of borders, whilst reinforcing the idea of ‘containment,’ is inadequate in explaining the complexity and fluidity of this issue. arguably, in acknowledging the agentic behaviours of early educators, such professional identity borders can be seen as contestable. i contend that discussing this identity construction in terms of borders as demarcating lines obfuscates the existence of spaces around these borders. to study borders as dynamic institutions, it is therefore important to study the ‘bottom up’ process of change, emanating from the daily practices of ordinary people living in the borderland region, as much as the traditional “top down” approach which focuses solely on the role of institutional actors, notably— but not only—governments (kaplan & häkli, 2002, p.14). alternative border imaginaries move beyond the border line and develop the idea of zones or lands around a border. in-between spaces that are created at intersections (whether material, metaphoric, or discursive) act as powerful conceptual heuristics that illustrate not either/or but both/and. borderlands or border zones are places where ownership and belonging remain unclear. batchelor (2012) describes such a space as “undefined” and “marginal,” (p. 597) and whilst a border demarcates spaces, on either side of a line there is “a quality of indeterminacy and indefiniteness about the borderline territory” (p. 598). in perceiving the spaces thus, batchelor asserts that rather than demarcating practices of formation, this is a generative space of becoming and transformation. much of this work has its origins in the writing of anzaldua (1999), whose prose and poetry reflect her life at the us-mexico border as a woman of colour: a mestiza consciousness. this can be described as a hybrid, in-between culture in which an individual is aware of her conflicting and meshing identities and has learned to be part of both worlds. anzaldua proposes that living in marginalised, interstitial spaces are new locations “where individuals fluctuate between two discrete worlds, participating in both and wholly belonging to neither” (abes, 2009, p. 528). notably, anzaldua also draws attention to the borderland as a space both of oppression and resistance, which has further resonance for this analysis. it is here, anzaldua’s borderlands and bhabha’s third space (1990), “which enable other positions to emerge” (p. 211) and here where i suggest that negotiation, resistance, and potentially activism happen. this is a borderland where cultural assumptions and authoritarian demands are challenged by educators’ actions. through revealing a borderland space and making visible and audible the narratives of early educators, i 32 global education review 12 (2) complicate sanctioned and perceived notions of professional identities and explore the space in which resistance and activism are manifest. such a conceptualisation also echoes leafgren’s (2018) study which imagines teachers’ “nomadic and radical non-compliance” (p. 187) as a response to forms of professionalism rooted in acquiescence to policy constraints. advocating for the resistance to idealised and normalised forms of practice, leafgren proposes that for educators [n]omadism is a way of life that exists outside of the organizational ‘state’ movement across space, which exists in sharp contrast to the rigid and static boundaries of the state (p.187). this contravention of boundaries through a nomadic existence, offers a powerful heuristic through which to consider an activist identity. conclusion this paper responds to a call to consider ece in times of chaos and authoritarianism. in many contexts, early childhood educators are (con)strained by increased regulation and surveillance “amidst an already toxic prevalence of scarcity of various forms” (sloan, 2022, p. 398). this article has sought to highlight the nature of contemporary authoritarian demands on early childhood education and educators in a uk context. through exposing the notion of policy bordering, i have sought to uncover dominant discourses and theorise the constraints on the professional identity construction of educators. beyond this policy bordering, i argue that a more dynamic, generative perspective recognises spaces for expressions of educator agency. analysis of empirical data suggests such borders are, in fact, permeable with educators expressing their individual agency ‘through’ these boundaries. early childhood educators appear to be exploiting cracks and fissures in the borders to disrupt authoritarian demands upon them and exercise their personal power (gallagher, 2000). by considering the role of borders (conceptual or otherwise) as sites of struggle, where the ‘right to become’ is contested and negotiated, the borderlands concept illuminates the spaces of political possibilities (brambilla, 2014), in which alternative professional subjectivities are enacted. whilst these activist identities are manifested on various scales from micro resistances to collaborative action, in many cases, they are predicated on a refusal of authoritarian demands. beyond this resistance and refusal, the early childhood activists in this study took a generative approach, which not only contests authoritarian socio-political trends in ece but found ways to enact their ethical, pedagogical decision-making and identity formation. i suggest that this analysis offers the field a theoretical perspective beyond critique and seeks to theorise the activist identities of those working in the cracks and in the borderlands. such work illustrates both contestation and hope (moss, 2015). through naming and platforming activism work in early childhood education, it is hoped there will be greater awareness across the profession of those who have resisted dominant (and at times authoritarian) policy discourses. it is also hoped that as a result, educators might further consider their own agency and resistance/activism and grow the 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(2021, november 2). eric adams will be nyc's next mayor. here's what that means for schools. chalkbeat. https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/20 21/11/2/22760486/eric-adams-nycmayor-schools/ https://doi.org/10.1002/berj.3221 https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491221128884 https://doi.org/10.1177/14639491221128884 https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2021/11/2/22760486/eric-adams-nyc-mayor-schools/ https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2021/11/2/22760486/eric-adams-nyc-mayor-schools/ https://www.chalkbeat.org/newyork/2021/11/2/22760486/eric-adams-nyc-mayor-schools/ ‘they have tried to silence me.’ 37 i i ref secretary of state for education, michael gove mp (2010-2014) non-formal learning programs in nigeria 46 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: paredes, carla, barnes-story, adrienne, zuilkowski, stephanie, & akinrinmade, bodunrin. (2023). non-formal learning programs in nigeria and their potential to close reading gaps for out-of-school children. global education review, 10 (3), 46-63. non-formal learning programs in nigeria and their potential to close reading gaps for out-of-school children carla paredes adrienne barnes-story stephanie zuilkowski bodunrin akinrinmade abstract in this study, we examine the association between attending a non-formal learning center (nlfc) in sokoto and bauchi states for at least nine months and reading outcomes for out-of-school children (oosc) who are mainstreamed into formal schooling by grade 4 (p4). we use hierarchical linear modeling with data from 1,116 pupil early grade reading assessments (egra) and pupil surveys collected by the nei plus program. overall, nflc-mainstreamed pupils read at the same low levels as their peers who have received formal schooling, despite having had disruptions to their education. given this evidence, policymakers should consider maintaining the nflcs to jumpstart oosc into school. keywords non-formal learning, out of school children, africa, nigeria, literacy, early grade reading, mainstreaming into formal schooling introduction in 2014, 34.2 million children were out of school in sub-saharan africa (unesco institute for statistics [uis] & global education monitoring report [gemr], 2016). this represents more than half of the world’s total out-of-school children (oosc) of primary school age. more than a quarter of the oosc in the region reside in nigeria (uis & gemr, 2016). many of these children are out of school because of distance to schools, home conditions, conflict, poverty, and cultural practices such as girl-child marriage (adewale, 2009; glassman et al., 2008). numerous studies around the world demonstrate how non-formal education (nfe) has been used as a stepping stone to formal schooling (abreh & wilmot, 2018; adewale, 2009; bilagher & kaushik, 2020; carter et al., 2020a; hartwell, 2016; hopper, 2008; shohel & howes, 2018). in sub-saharan africa, nfe has been used as a path to allow oosc to access education and reenter formal school. nflc works as “catchup education,” “accelerated learning programs,” or “open schools” compared to formal learning centers or formal schooling. examples of these programs include the accelerated language program (nalap) in ghana, the accelerated learning programme (alp) in iraq, and the accelerated education for non-formal learning programs in nigeria 47 out-of-school children in the democratic republic of the congo. yet, the evidence demonstrating how well non-formal learners in the region perform once they begin formal schooling is limited and mixed (akyeampong et al., 2018; carter et al., 2020a, 2020b; randall et al., 2020). given these uncertainties, policymakers continue to face costly decisions about the best way to support nfe and transitions to formal schooling. to the best of our knowledge, no peerreviewed study has been published on the links between nflcs and primary school reading outcomes in northern nigeria using large-scale empirical evidence. we address this knowledge gap by examining the association between exposure to nflcs for at least nine months and pupils’ oral reading fluency (orf) scores and syllable identification (si) in hausa, and english orf at p4 mid-year. we used 1,116 pupils’ early grade reading assessments (egra) and pupil surveys collected by the northern education initiative plus (the initiative) program in bauchi and sokoto states in a hierarchical linear model (hlm). we controlled for individual, family, and school characteristics to address the non-equivalent groups nature of the study. background and context in several countries, nfe has been used as a strategy to expand access to education, promote retention, and improve learning outcomes. in india, evidence from the child labour project schools (clps) shows a promising relationship between nfe and pupil enrollment and retention in formal schools. clps were created as part of a national effort to eliminate child labor by providing a monetary and food incentive for children to transition from work to non-formal schooling (sud, 2010). employing a family fixed effects model, sud (2010) compared enrollment and retention rates of 389 pupils from seven clps and their sameage siblings who did not participate in the program. results showed that at least 77% of clps participants enrolled into formal schooling compared to 23% of their siblings in the control group. moreover, clps participants were 40– 50% more likely to remain in school relative to their siblings (sud, 2010). evidence from the well-documented bangladesh rural advancement committee (brac) program shows the potential of nfe to exponentially improve primary school enrollment and catch up oosc with formal schooling learning outcomes. between 1985 and 2004, brac student representation grew from less than 0.1% to over 9% of bangladesh’s total primary school enrollments (chaboux & schuhmoore, 2006). the implementation of this and other educational support programs between 1988 and 2008 was linked to an overall reduction in oosc from 23.4% to 13.6% (nath & chowdhury, 2009). moreover, pupils from the brac program performed at the same level (nath et al., 1999) or better (chaboux & schuhmoore, 2006) in reading and numeracy as pupils in formal primary schools. evidence from africa linking nfes to improved learning outcomes is limited and mixed. in ethiopia, akyeampong et al. (2018) evaluated the ethiopia speed schools (ess), a program where oosc ages 8 to 14 received 10 months of accelerated learning instructions before reintegrating to government schools. the researchers used propensity score matching to estimate differential effects of ess on learning outcomes. the sample included 625 ess pupils, 625 pupils in formal schools with ess mainstreamed pupils (link schools), and 625 pupils in formal schools with no mainstreamed pupils (government schools). over time, ess 48 global education review 10 (3) pupils answered more questions correctly in math, sidama reading comprehension, and english reading comprehension than pupils in government schools, all statistically significant differences at the 1% level. yet, many ess pupils dropped out and did not perform at the expected grade level (akyeampong et al., 2018). in the democratic republic of the congo, randall et al. (2020) examined the relationship between an nfe program for outof-school girls and learning outcomes. they followed the trajectories of a random sample of 625 pupils enrolled in the valorisation de la scholarisation de la fille (vas-y fille!) program for almost three years. they found that 80% of girls advanced through the vas-y levels as expected, and overall improved their early grade mathematics assessment (egma) and egra scores to a level of growth like that of pupils enrolled in formal schools. however, given the high percentage of dropouts, it is likely that attrition biased the results of the study (randall et al., 2020). in ghana, carter et al. (2020a, 2020b) studied the country’s complementary basic education program (cbe) and its impact on academic performance when students were mainstreamed into formal schooling. carter et al. (2020a) first did a longitudinal study of a random sample of 519 cbe pupils to examine whether the numeracy and literacy levels (combining scores from the egra and egma subtasks by principal component analysis) persisted when mainstreamed into formal school. they found that pupils who were low performing at cbe continued to be low literacy and numeracy performers once mainstreamed, particularly girls (carter et al., 2020a). in the second longitudinal study, they examined the literacy outcomes (using an adaptation of the egra) of a prospective cohort of 1,166 pupils who were taught in mother tongue in the cbe program and then were mainstreamed into formal schooling. they found that pupils enrolled in formal schools where the language of instruction differed from their mother tongue showed poor literacy skills (carter et al. 2020b). yet a year later, pupils taught in another local language caught up while those taught in english did not (carter et al., 2020b). in view of the limited research available to inform policy decisions in nigeria about how to best support nfe and the transitions to formal schooling, in the current investigation we focus on how well grade 4 pupils who participated in a non-formal catch-up program in northern nigeria performed once they began formal schooling. their performance is compared to pupils who were continuously enrolled in formal schooling. the section that follows provides background and context of the nfe initiatives in nigeria and the existing evidence linking nfe with early grade reading outcomes. nfe in nigeria in northern nigeria, significant percentages of school-age children are not enrolled in school. for instance, in bauchi, 27.2 percent of primary school age children are not enrolled, and in sokoto, 29% are not enrolled (fmoe, 2016). these gaps persist despite the country’s policy to provide compulsory, free and universal access to basic education and significant investments by the federal government (federal republic of nigeria [frn], 2013). across the north, millions of nigerians have been internally displaced due to violent conflict driven by boko haram and other extremist groups, with consequences for their physical and mental health, education, and overall well-being (amusan & saka, 2017; iacoelle & tirivayi, 2020; kaiser et. al, 2020; odo et. al, 2020). displaced children likely non-formal learning programs in nigeria 49 experience disruptions to their educations, as do non-displaced children whose schools are destroyed or for whom school attendance is unsafe. lack of access to quality, consistent education translates into a lack of foundational literacy, numeracy, and social skills necessary to escape the circle of poverty, marginalization, and violence (adetunji, 2020). in nigeria, there are several constraints that impede children from attending school, ranging from socio-cultural and economic demand-side barriers to political, governance, capacity, and financing supply-side barriers (unicef & uis, 2012). many of these constraints set oosc at a disadvantage compared to children who were able to enroll in formal schooling and predispose them to academic deficiencies or perpetuate their status as oosc (unicef & uis, 2012). there is a growing realization that in the effort to meet the united nation’s sdg 4: “ensure inclusive and equitable quality education for all,” it is essential to look at other forms of learning outside of formal education. the government of nigeria (gon) recognizes nfe as a strategic intervention to complement formal schooling and increase access for oosc (frn, 2013; sokoto ministry of education, 2010; frn, 2013). according to nigeria’s policy on education document, the provision of basic education for oosc should enable them to function effectively in society (frn, 2013). an important segment of nfe in nigeria is provided by non-integrated religious schools that do not teach any formal academic subjects (world bank, 2015). non-formal accelerated learning in nigeria has shown some promise in improving reading outcomes. the results of an egra conducted in jigawa, kaduna, kano, and katsina states in 2014 revealed that non-formal learners in all states outperformed formal learners in hausa orf (rti international, 2014). pupils from jigawa’s integrated qur’anic and tsangaya education (iqte) non-formal schools, on average, were able to read 25 correct words per minute (cwpm), far outperforming their peers in p3 formal schools, who read just 3 correct words per minute on average (rti international, 2014). in kaduna, the differences in orf scores between non-formal and formal learners was 14 cwpm vs. 2 cwpm, in kano it was 17 cwpm vs. 6 cwpm, and in katsina it was a 30 cwpm vs. 5 cwpm. in katsina, 32% of boys from iqte nonformal schools were able to read with comprehension (scoring 80% or greater on a set of comprehension questions related to a story) compared with just 4% of their peers in p3 in the formal schools (rti international, 2014). yet, qur’anic schools are only one specific modality of nfe offered in nigeria. therefore, it is critical to determine whether other non-formal learning modalities in nigeria allow oosc to catch-up on basic education, and whether the academic skills they gained are maintained once pupils are mainstreamed into the formal education system. to offer all children equal opportunity to be educated in the formal school system, the nigerian government has adopted the practice of mainstreaming non-formal learners into formal schooling, generally during the fourth grade of primary school (p4). in principle, mainstreaming has the potential to equalize educational opportunities, improve non-formal learners’ self-esteem and socialization skills, and create an atmosphere of understanding and tolerance among all learners (oluremi, 2012). in practice, mainstreaming calls for more than just bringing in new students. to be effective, it requires flexibility in the school curriculum and learning environment, and in the cases of children with special needs, specific adaptations to physical infrastructure, learning styles, pace 50 global education review 10 (3) of learning, and teaching strategies. (oluremi, 2012). some of the challenges to successfully transitioning non-formal learners into formal schooling include insufficient training on integrated formal and non-formal pedagogical approaches for all teachers and staff, lack of counseling services, negative attitudes of teachers and formally-schooled students toward non-formal learners, and lack of adequate spaces and facilities (oluremi, 2012). thus, to ensure inclusive and high-quality education for all children in nigeria, it is essential to better understand how nfe and mainstreaming practices relate to student achievement in basic education. the northern education initiative plus (the initiative) the initiative (2015-2021) was a usaid-funded project in bauchi and sokoto states that built upon the prior northern education initiative (in bauchi state only) to increase access to quality basic education for more than 2 million children —1.4 million children in first to third grades and more than 400,000 oosc and youth—and improve their reading skills. this initiative was implemented by creative associates international (creative) in collaboration with three u.s.-based organizations—education development center (edc), florida state university (fsu), and overseas strategic consulting (osc), and four local organizations—value minds, civil society action coalition on education for all (csacefa), the reading association of nigeria (ran) and the federation of muslim women’s associations in nigeria (fomwan). to achieve its goals, the initiative aimed to strengthen the technical and administrative capacity, commitment, and accountability of all levels of government and partner with local agencies, ngos and civil society organizations to promote the culture and importance of reading. the initiative aimed to review and revamp reading instruction curricula and materials by approaching the issue from several different perspectives. first, pre-service teacher education programs were reformed, and teacher educators received training on evidence-based teaching practices. second, teachers and learning facilitators in formal schools and nflcs were trained on how to teach reading in hausa in the first to third grades of primary school, as well as how to support pupils as they transition from hausa to english. third, nflcs, adolescent girls learning centers (aglc) and youth learning centers (ylc) were established through local partnerships to provide thousands of oosc with nine months of basic literacy and numeracy instruction before being mainstreamed into formal schooling. the initiative has enrolled almost 90,000 oosc into 1,900 nflc, with special focus on girls, youth, and vulnerable children (creative, 2018c). to understand nflcs’ impact on reading outcomes, the initiative conducted an egra preand posttest evaluation for its second cohort using random stratified sampling (creative, 2018a). results show 69% of oosc entered the program without being able to read any words correctly in a grade-level hausa passage; yet by the end of the program, the percentage of nflc pupils unable to read any correct word fell to 48% (creative, 2018c). results showed that boys statistically significantly outperformed girls, by six percentage points (creative, 2018c). to assess the effectiveness of the initiative’s formal school package of interventions on improving reading outcomes, the initiative conducted an evaluation using egra preand posttests for grades 2 and 3 pupils in sokoto and bauchi. results showed considerable reading gains for all pupils from non-formal learning programs in nigeria 51 pretest to posttest (creative, 2018b). the evaluation also shows significant reductions in zero scores for most of the egra hausa subtasks for p2 pupils (creative, 2018b). however, post intervention, well over half of the sampled p2 pupils were still unable to read or respond to a single comprehension question correctly (creative, 2018b). to effectively reach struggling readers, a series of multi-level interventions are needed. understanding pupils’ previous exposure to literacy and determining their level of preparedness before interventions take place will be key, particularly for nflc pupils transitioning into formal schooling. in the present study, we address this concern by investigating how well some pupils who participated in the nine-month non-formal learning program performed once they began formal schooling, compared to students who were continuously enrolled in formal schooling. methods research design in this study, we assessed pupils in the middle of grade 4. a total of 559 of these pupils attended at least nine months of nfe at an nflc prior to attending grade 4 (mainstreamed) and 557 attended only formal schools prior to attending grade 4 (non-mainstreamed). given that the selection process to attend either school type was not random, we use a non-equivalent control group (necg) design. in this design, pupils exposed to two different treatments were assessed at the end of the treatments and were compared on the same outcomes: treatment 1 (pupils in nflcs who received the initiative’s nine-month program and were mainstreamed into formal schools at p4) and treatment 2 (pupils attending formal schools that received the initiative’s teacher training for grades p1p3, but not p4). the main limitation on drawing causal inference with this design is the problem of selection bias: pupils in different groups are likely to be different from each other, and a direct comparison would erroneously lead to the attribution of differences in outcomes to the type of educational exposure, when they may actually be due to observable and unobservable factors associated with selection into the different education modalities (formal vs. non-formal) (shadish et al., 2002). to minimize and control for selection bias, we first identified critical covariates that matter for selection into treatment and can be reliably measured. then, we employ hlm using school clusters to compare outcomes. sample the sample of mainstreamed and nonmainstreamed (formally schooled) pupils attending p4 in the public school system in bauchi and sokoto was selected using the following criteria: (1) focus on the two states where the initiative is operational, with 3,000 nflcs participating; (2) purposively sample schools with at least 20 mainstreamed learners from nflcs in p4 (from cohort 2 of the ninemonth nflc program implemented by the initiative); and (3) at each school, data collectors randomly sampled 10 girls and 10 boys mainstreamed into p4, as well as 10 girls and 10 boys not mainstreamed into p4 from a school enrollment list. all sampled schools were intervention schools for the initiative, meaning that curricular materials and training had been provided to teachers in grades 1 to 3, but not to the current teacher in p4. 52 global education review 10 (3) as shown in table 1, in total, 29 schools were sampled: 15 in bauchi state and 14 in sokoto state. the sample includes 1,116 pupils (559 mainstreamed and 557 nonmainstreamed). table 2 displays the descriptive statistics for the analytic sample, disaggregated by placement status (mainstreamed vs. nonmainstreamed). as shown in table 2, the mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed groups were roughly equivalent in terms of sex, speaking hausa as their mother tongue, socioeconomic status, and attitudes toward school. there were no statistically significant differences between the two groups, using t or x2 tests, as appropriate. in terms of school characteristics, on average, head teachers and teachers reported that 32% of schools had a library, schools had 24.5 students per teacher, teachers in p4 had taught for about 10 years and 80% of teachers had earned the nigeria certificate of education (nce). the average teacher literacy knowledge score was 4.42 points out of 7 possible points. measures placement status participation in nflc is the treatment indicator and the independent variable of interest. we construct a placement status indicator so that nflc participation before p4 takes on the value of one, and continuous formal schooling participation before p4 takes on the value of zero. reading outcomes mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed pupils were directly assessed at the middle of their p4 year to measure their literacy skills. these assessment data were collected using the early grade reading assessment (egra), a collection of individual subtasks that measure some of the foundational skills needed for reading acquisition (this assessment protocol follows the guidelines outlined by dubeck & gove, 2015). for this analysis, we have included the following subtasks of the assessment: oral reading fluency (orf). measures the ability to read a gradelevel passage of 100 words. it is scored for accuracy and rate. the measure used is the number of correct words read per minute (cwpm). assessors discontinued the task if none of the 10 words in the first line were read correctly. this subtask was administered in english with scores ranging from zero to 15, table 2 pupil characteristics by placement status all mainstreamed non mainstreamed sample size 1,116 559 557 mean sd mean sd mean sd individual characteristics hausa mt 0.90 0.30 0.89 0.31 0.91 0.29 male 0.51 0.50 0.52 0.50 0.50 0.50 ses 5.48 2.66 5.33 2.68 5.63 2.64 attitude score 17.43 4.37 17.42 4.22 17.44 4.53 school characteristics library 0.32 0.47 teacher-student ratio 24.50 16.37 years teaching (teachers) 9.85 6.40 teachers with nce certificate 0.79 0.40 teachers’ literacy knowledge 4.42 1.15 non-formal learning programs in nigeria 53 and in hausa with scores ranging from zero to 27. syllable identification (si). measures the ability to read individual syllables. fifty syllables are presented. it is timed to 60 seconds and is discontinued if none of the first five syllables is read correctly. this subtask was administered in hausa with scores ranging from zero to 10. covariates we carefully chose observable characteristics that matter for selection into school type, correlate with the outcome, and can be reliably measured. these include child, family, and school characteristics; specifically: gender, socio economic status (ses) (operationalized as an index of owning these 13 assets: a radio, phone, electricity, television, refrigerator, bicycle, motorcycle, car, canoe, boat, cart, generator, or computer), mother tongue, and attitude toward school-related activities (operationalized as a sum of likert scale responses to ten questions such as ‘how do you feel when you read books?’ ‘how do you feel when you attend school?’ ‘how you feel when you do homework?’ etc.). this resulted in a possible score range of 0-50. the range of scores in the sample were 4 to 50. school covariates included the presence of a library, studentteacher ratio, years of teaching experience for teachers, the percentage of teachers holding a nigeria certificate of education, and teacher literacy instruction knowledge (operationalized as an index of teacher responses to a brief literacy instruction knowledge assessment undertaken during data collection; see annex 1 for sample questions). procedures all sampled pupils were administered the egra assessment and pupil survey in february 2019 using tablets and commcare software. all adults and pupils provided verbal consent to participation. the egra was administered by trained enumerators who had previously administered the egra with the initiative in both english and hausa. enumerators participated in a one-day refresher training prior to data collection. analytic plan while reading comprehension has been used in other studies as the outcome measure of choice to determine reading ability, in this study we selected orf and si scores as the outcomes of interest. given the high percentage of pupils scoring zero in reading comprehension in the sample, more basic components of reading, such as orf or si, provide better information about pupils’ reading skills in this context, with greater variation in scores across students. the model we use to identify the association between nflc participation before p4 (mainstreamed pupils) and orf or si at p4 mid-year takes the form: yi = β0 + δti+ β1 gji + β2 cji + μi for student i in school j, where yi is the orf/si scores at midyear p4 of pupil i. hence, the outcome orf/si is a function of δ the treatment effect, ti the treatment indicator/pupil i participated in nflc for at least 9 months before p4 (0 comparison group, 1 treatment group), gij the state in which school j is situated and where pupil i attended, cij the covariates available that could help determine selection into treatment, and µi is the remaining error that is present. for this model we used hierarchical linear modeling, clustering pupils by school, and conducted separate analyses for the english orf, hausa orf, and hausa si outcomes. 54 global education review 10 (3) results we began our analyses by examining the mean differences between mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed students on the literacy outcomes. table 3 shows the egra reading component scores by placement type (mainstreamed vs. non mainstreamed). as shown in table 3, on average, pupils in the sample were able to read 5.97 cwpm (sd=3.38) in english, and 20% of pupils were not able to read at all. in hausa, on average, pupils in the sample were able to read 5.55 cwpm (sd=3.64) from a 100-word grade level passage, and 24% of pupils were not able to read at all. in addition, on average, pupils were able to correctly identify 6.13 syllables per minute in hausa, and 26% of pupils were not able to identify any syllables at all. the mean orf for all p4 pupils in the sample able to correctly read any word (excluding students with zero scores) was 7.59 cwpm in english and 7.35 cwpm in hausa. the best hausa readers in our p4 sample were able to read 27 cwpm. we conducted two-sample t-tests and found no statistically significant differences in mean scores for any of the three reading component skills between mainstreamed and nonmainstreamed pupils. to address our research question more precisely regarding the association between nflc attendance and reading outcomes, we next used hlm to predict pupils’ orf and si scores. table 4 shows the orf and si score differences in english and hausa (unstandardized coefficients) at p4 mid-year between mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed pupils. as stated earlier, given the non-random nature of the sample, omitted variable bias is a threat to our analysis. our strategy for reducing this bias is to include all available child and family characteristics that were collected during the assessment that we believe table 3 pupil egra reading component scores by placement type sample size all 1,116 mainstreamed 559 non-mainstreamed 557 t test df=1,114 mean sd mean sd zero scores mean sd zero scores english orf 5.97 3.38 6.03 3.36 20% 5.92 3.41 22% -0.50 hausa orf 5.55 3.64 5.69 3.66 24% 5.42 3.61 25% -1.23 hausa si 6.13 4.64 6.11 4.67 26% 6.16 4.61 25% 0.15 *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001 note: zero scores represent a percentage of the pupils unable to answer a single item on a given subtest table 4 association between exposure to non-formal schooling (mainstreamed) for at least nine months and pupils’ literacy scores at p4 mid-year english orf hausa orf hausa si (1) (2) (3) (4) (5) (6) r-squared 0.08 0.08 0.08 0.08 0.13 0.13 prob>f 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 0.00 state bauchi -0.101 -0.098 -0.217 -0.207 0.829 0.831 (0.39) (0.39) (0.43) (0.43) (0.54) (0.54) individual characteristics hausa mt -0.89 -0.864 -1.178 -1.175 (0.54) (0.54) (0.73) (0.73) male -1.192** -1.194** -1.331*** -1.335*** -1.733*** -1.734*** (0.38) (0.38) (0.35) (0.35) (0.39) (0.39) ses -0.117* -0.115* -0.127* -0.124 -0.214** -0.214** (0.05) (0.04) (0.06) (0.06) (0.07) (0.07) attitude 0.111** 0.111** 0.063* 0.063* 0.116** 0.116** (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.03) (0.04) (0.04) school characteristics library -0.294 -0.293 -0.586 -0.585 0.015 0.015 (0.41) (0.41) (0.59) (0.60) (0.56) (0.56) teacher-student ratio 0.012 0.012 0.002 0.002 0.026 0.027 (0.01) (0.01) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) (0.02) years teaching (teachers) 0.021 0.021 0.001 0.001 0.008 0.008 (0.03) (0.03) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) (0.04) teachers with nce certificate 0.207 0.205 0.555 0.551 0.612 0.611 (0.31) (0.31) (0.40) (0.40) (0.49) (0.49) teachers lit. knowledge index 0.107 0.105 0.248 0.245 0.096 0.096 (0.16) (0.16) (0.21) (0.21) (0.20) (0.20) placement status mainstreamed 0.123 0.285 0.042 (0.28) (0.33) (0.37) constant 4.246*** 4.180*** 5.297*** 5.116*** 5.190*** 5.164*** (0.77) (0.79) (1.18) (1.21) (1.35) (1.36) *p<0.05; **p<0.01; ***p<0.001 note: standard errors (se) are in parenthesis. se are adjusted by school clusters. coefficients are non-standard. *p<.05. **p<.01. *** p<.001. non-formal learning programs in nigeria 55 are correlated with the orf/si outcome. to do so, we used several regression models that build upon one another. this hierarchical modeling process also enables us to identify if adding variables of interest better explains and predicts the association between placement status and orf/si scores. a higher percentage of explained variance (r2) indicates a stronger association (rosenthal & rosenthal, 2011). in table 4, models 1, 3, and 5 display coefficients and standard errors from regressions predicting the associations between pupils’ literacy scores and their individual characteristics, school characteristics, and geographical locations. models 2, 4, and 6 build on the previous models and include the treatment indicator/placement status. as displayed in model 2, placement status (mainstreamed or non-mainstreamed) is not a statistically significant predictor of english orf at p4 midyear. that is, the difference in orf scores between mainstreamed and nonmainstreamed pupils is not statistically significant when accounting for other factors that could be correlated with english orf scores. the full model explains 8% of the variance in english orf scores (r2=0.08, p<0.001); when comparing models 1 and 2, r2 does not statistically significantly increase with the inclusion of the placement variable. sex, ses, and attitude towards school are important predictors of english orf. on average, girls were able to correctly read 1.19 words per minute in english more than boys. this difference was statistically significant (p<0.01). attitude towards school was positively and significantly associated with english orf (b=0.11, p<0.01); while ses was negatively and significantly associated with english orf (b=0.11, p<0.05). we note, however, that one word or less than one-word differences in scores, while statistically significant, are not necessarily practically meaningful. as displayed in table 4, model 4, placement status (mainstreamed or nonmainstreamed) is not a statistically significant predictor of hausa orf at p4 midyear. that is, the difference in orf scores between mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed pupils is not statistically significant when accounting for other factors that could be correlated with hausa orf scores. the full model explains 8% of the variance in hausa orf scores (r2=0.08, p<0.001). no statistically significant increase in r2 occurs when placement status is added to the model (comparing model 3 to model 4). sex and attitude towards school are important predictors of hausa orf. on average, in hausa, girls were able to correctly read 1.33 words per minute more than boys. this difference was statistically significant (b= -1.33, p<0.001). attitude towards school was positively and statistically significantly associated with hausa orf (b=0.06, p<0.05). again, however, these small differences between scores are not necessarily practically meaningful. as displayed in model 6, placement status (mainstreamed or non-mainstreamed) is not a statistically significant predictor of hausa si at p4 midyear. model 6 explains 13% of the variance in hausa si scores (r2=0.13, p<0.001). moreover, adding placement status (the independent variable of interest) into the full model does not uniquely explain any additional variance in hausa si scores (comparing model 5 to model 6). sex, ses, and attitude towards school are statistically significant predictors of hausa si, as with the other reading outcomes, though the sizes of these associations were small. on average, girls were able to correctly read 1.73 56 global education review 10 (3) syllables per minute in hausa more than boys. this difference was statistically significant (b= 1.73, p<0.001). pupils’ attitude towards school was positively and significantly associated with hausa si (b=0.11, p<0.01); while ses was negatively and significantly associated with hausa si (b=-0.21, p<0.01). in sum, there are no statistically significant associations between exposure to nflcs for at least nine months and pupils’ literacy scores (orf and si) in hausa and english at p4 mid-year. however, we note that on average, sampled pupils exhibited extremely low component reading skills generally. discussion the aim of this study was to examine pupil reading performance during primary four (p4) in formal public schools in sokoto and bauchi and to determine whether or not pupils mainstreamed from nflcs read at the same level as non-mainstreamed (formally schooled) pupils. the primary finding of this study is that pupils who have been mainstreamed from nflcs and received the initiative’s nine-month intervention exhibit the same overall reading skill level as pupils who received their education in formal schools. our results show no statistically significant association between exposure to nflc for at least nine months and pupils’ orf scores in hausa and english or si scores in hausa at p4 mid-year. while some studies have found that pupils from nfe read better than their peers in formal schools (akyeampong et al., 2018; chaboux & schuh-moore, 2006), our findings empirically demonstrate that pupils in this sample, regardless of their previous placement status, exhibit similar levels of reading component skills. our findings are aligned with several studies showing participation in nfe has a neutral effect or non-significant effect in reading outcomes (nath et al. 1999, randall et al. 2020). however, the specific conditions of our study make it difficult to compare findings appropriately and accurately with interventions conducted under different settings and using different sample sizes and outcome measures. the fact that we found no statistically significant differences in reading component skills between mainstreamed and nonmainstreamed pupils in this context is promising. as previously shown, oosc start at a disadvantage. compared to children who are able to continuously enroll in formal schooling, oosc confront structural demand and supplyside barriers that put them at risk of delayed academic learning or no learning at all (unicef & uis, 2012). they have experienced disruptions in their education, often due to traumatic events related to violent conflict. our study shows that exposure to nfe not only positions pupils at the same reading level as their formally-schooled peers, but also has the potential to close the reading gap for oosc in northern nigeria. out of the pupils who are mainstreamed into formal schooling, our data shows that only 24% are unable to read any correct word in hausa. compared to the percentage of non-readers in an earlier study of oosc entering nflc programs (creative, 2018c), that is an overall reduction of 45%. however, our results also show that all pupils in p4 exhibit poor reading and literacy skills for their grade level. even the best readers among both non-mainstreamed and mainstreamed pupils were only able to read 27 cwpm while the best p3 readers in other nigerian states were able to read 50 cwpm (rti international, 2014). this finding is consistent with previous early grade literacy studies in bauchi and sokoto, which found high non-formal learning programs in nigeria 57 percentages of zero scores across all reading component skills (creative, 2018b). considering these findings, we recommend the national and state governments explore maintaining the nflcs to jumpstart oosc into the formal education system. to ensure all pupils improve their reading skills, comprehensive literacy interventions need to continue to take place in the formal and the nonformal school settings. these interventions should also be part of a broader initiative to promote capacity in the entire education system. limitations and recommendations for future research caution should be used in interpreting the results of this study. first, the data used are not the result of an experimental intervention to determine the association between reading instruction and reading outcomes, and therefore causality should not be inferred. rather, we conducted a purposive sampling of schools with a statistically appropriate population of mainstreamed pupils, used a necg, and employed hlm for analysis. a simple comparison between pupils who attended nflcs and those who attended formal schools before p4 may have overor underestimated the impact of attending formal schools on literacy and reading skills. while we draw on a range of covariates that matter for selection into treatment and use comparison groups with very similar characteristics, including attending the same schools, selection bias is still plausible. in the future, where possible, an experimental study could be implemented to achieve more precise estimates of the effects of nflcs. second, the study is limited by logistical constraints that led to fieldwork being done midway through the p4 year. this design limits our analysis. a baseline score/pre-test would have been useful in allowing us to examine differential rates of growth and dropout in p4 for mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed pupils. we cannot determine the effect, if any, of differential attrition on our sample. however, given the difficulties of collecting data in conflict and crisis settings, we feel the analyses that we have presented are nonetheless a positive contribution to the field. third, we use pupil survey reports to build the covariates that can determine selection into treatment. these pupil survey reports could be less reliable and accurate, and likely contain more measurement error, than those obtained through parent surveys. in the future, greater parental involvement could provide more reliable data on these issues. conclusion overall, we find that mainstreamed pupils read at the same level as nonmainstreamed pupils. we argue that this is a positive finding, due to the challenges that mainstreamed children faced when they were out of school, including exposure to conflict, school closures, and other traumas. while children who remained in formal schooling throughout may also have been exposed to conflict, the fact that their schools remained open and their families were able to continue sending them safely speaks to the different experiences these groups of children had earlier in their schooling. however, we also found that reading assessment scores were low for both mainstreamed and non-mainstreamed pupils in sokoto and bauchi. it is important to interpret these results from a systems perspective. in nigeria as whole, less than 25% of primary 58 global education review 10 (3) school completers can read1 (world bank, 2018), and 35% of primary school age children are not enrolled in formal schooling. nflcs play a key role in enabling oosc to access education and enter formal schooling. overall, nfe has also shown promise in reducing social exclusion and marginalization (thompson, 2001), as well as improving social equity (hopper, 2008), selfefficacy (shephard, 2014), and life skills (nath et al., 1999). therefore, beyond reading outcomes, it is possible that pupils in nflcs are acquiring many of the socio-emotional and academic skills 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(2016). leaving no one behind: how far on the way to universal primary and secondary education? gemr policy paper 27/uis fact sheet no. 37. uis and gemr. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223 /pf0000245238 unicef & unesco institute for statistics (uis). (2012). all children in school by 2015: global initiative on out-of-school children, nigeria country study. unicef. https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223 /pf0000225788 world bank. (2015). nigeria partnership for education project (p143842). project information document. http://documents.worldbank.org/curate d/en/995341468097773309/projectinformation-document-appraisalstage-nigeria-partnership-foreducation-project-p143842 world bank. (2018). world development report: learning to realize education’s promise. world bank publications. the world bank group. https://www.worldbank.org/en/publica tion/wdr2018 https://www.assonur.org/sito/files/thompson%20paper-%20non%20formal%20education%20in%20africa.pdf https://www.assonur.org/sito/files/thompson%20paper-%20non%20formal%20education%20in%20africa.pdf https://www.assonur.org/sito/files/thompson%20paper-%20non%20formal%20education%20in%20africa.pdf https://www.assonur.org/sito/files/thompson%20paper-%20non%20formal%20education%20in%20africa.pdf https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245238 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000245238 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000225788 https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/48223/pf0000225788 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/995341468097773309/project-information-document-appraisal-stage-nigeria-partnership-for-education-project-p143842 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/995341468097773309/project-information-document-appraisal-stage-nigeria-partnership-for-education-project-p143842 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/995341468097773309/project-information-document-appraisal-stage-nigeria-partnership-for-education-project-p143842 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/995341468097773309/project-information-document-appraisal-stage-nigeria-partnership-for-education-project-p143842 http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/995341468097773309/project-information-document-appraisal-stage-nigeria-partnership-for-education-project-p143842 https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018 https://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr2018 non-formal learning programs in nigeria 63 appendix sample of literacy instruction knowledge questions for head teachers and teachers. source: northern education initiative plus, head teacher interview and teacher interview. 1a. reading words correctly indicates if a child understands the text. 1b. reading with expression indicates if a child understands the text. 2a. illiterate parents cannot assist their children to learn to read. 2b. illiterate parents can play an important role in helping their children learn to read. 3a. some literacy skills in a child’s first language transfer to other language literacy skills. 3b. literacy skills in a child’s first language only benefit the first language. 4a. to teach pupils to learn to read a new word, it is best to show them how to break the word into syllables. 4b. to teach pupils to learn to read a new word, it is best to point at the word and tell them to repeat it. 5a. the teacher’s role is to teach pupils all the words they need to know, and they will become good readers. 5b. the teachers’ role is to teach skills pupils need so they can learn words independently and they become good readers. lost in meaning 36 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: subasi, seyda, hager, barbra, & proyer, michelle. (2023). lost in meaning: validation of understandings of inclusive education in different languages and cultural contexts. global education review, 10 (1-2), 36-49. lost in meaning: validation of understandings of inclusive education in different languages and cultural contexts seyda subasi university of vienna, center for teacher education barbara hager university of vienna, center for teacher education michelle proyer university of vienna, center for teacher education abstract the term “inclusive education” has become a frequently used keyword for research due to the aim of achieving inclusivity in education and society. the term is used and translated in and across global documents that shape national policy and research as well as international research. the popularity, but also the emergency of, inclusion thus yields to international research that takes place in a multilingual context. however, this goes beyond the ability to speak such languages or translate research findings correctly. in this article, we will discuss the barriers toward translating “inclusive education” as a challenging concept across different languages and cultures. as an increasingly popular concept, “inclusion” is encountered as the topic of several studies from multiple disciplines. transferring the meaning of “inclusion” can be challenging due to the global usage of the concept in several contexts. however, there are challenges even when the issue is confined to the educational context. this article will tackle the ways used to validate the translation based on three cases derived from three studies, respectively, international research set in multiple country contexts, research translating sign languages into written language, and multilingual research in a national context. the first case will focus on the barriers due to the cultural discrepancies between written and sign languages by concentrating on the pragmatic usages of “inclusive education” in deaf culture in austria, while the second case examines translingual processes while conducting research on “inclusive education” within the collaboration of austria and thailand and presenting research findings in native languages and english. the third case will tackle multilingual and multicultural research on “inclusive education” conducted with migrants in austria. keywords inclusion, inclusive education, multilingual research, multicultural research, sign language introduction since the adoption of the universal declaration of human rights in 1948, the right to education and the goal of achieving universal education has been echoed by several international documents with an emphasis on inclusive education. the salamanca statement, which identified inclusive education as the vision of how to educate children, has been accompanied by several legislative acts at the national level since its declaration. following the millennium development goals, the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities, and the sustainable development goals, several countries have taken steps to achieve these ambitions through legislation and regulations. inclusive education has become a global norm to lost in meaning 37 achieve across the globe (powell, edelstein & blanck, 2016). as alur and timmons (2009) discuss, there are different interpretations of the term “inclusive education” among different countries and the scope of the inclusion changes from one country to another. hence, sharing knowledge and experience among countries is crucial, which requires research in multilingual and multicultural contexts. however, inclusive education cannot be defined or understood universally as it requires an in-depth and culture-specific understanding of inclusion (krischler, powell & pin-ten cate, 2019). an analysis by göransson and nilholm (2014) recognized that most reviews on inclusive education ignore fundamental differences in definitions of inclusion, especially regarding its goals. the four categories regarding inclusion identified by them (placement definition, specified individualized definition, general individualized definition, and community definition) show how diverse definitions have important consequences for research on inclusive education, reforms, or practices. as krischler et al. (2019, p. 633) suggest, inclusion “has become a keyword in political and public discussions.” similarly, the ongoing realities of inclusive education in different contexts and global efforts such as the sustainable development goals or the convention on the rights of persons with disabilities have constant but various impacts on inclusive education practices based on localities and cultures. therefore, cross-cultural and multilingual research is required in order to expand knowledge and promote exchange at national and international levels (goitom, 2020). despite potential challenges, there is a strong need for empirical data collected through international and cross-cultural research on inclusive education. given the fact that the data are transmitted through researchers rather than data collection tools, the importance of the researcher is paramount in this kind of research. researchers take on the responsibility of turning the data into meaningful units, where language plays an important role (larkin, de casterle & schotsmans, 2007). when we conduct research in a multilingual context, we may use research methodologies and values that we prepared in one language, mainly our own language, for another language in another context by translating them (piazzoli, 2015; regmi, naidoo & pilkington, 2010). how we use language in research and how we interpret the meanings shared by participants in various languages is therefore a concern for many researchers (goitom, 2020). researchers face both the questions of planning the multilingual research process as well as how to present multilingual research findings to a greater audience so that readers may grasp their essence, which requires translation. translation guidelines for multilingual research are not always available, especially when working with rarely studied groups (goitom, 2020) such as the deaf community or parents from a migrant background who do not perform well in the language of their country of residence. another challenge is the meaningmaking process. thus, the interpretation process requires negotiations between researcher and participants, but also the reflexivity of the researcher. here, it is important to acknowledge the effect of the researcher during the translation in a multilingual process (piazzoli, 2015). apart from translating from one language to another, locating the generated data in the social context of the research and in the context of the participants is important, as this shapes the process of interpreting the findings. hence, contextualizing meaning requires knowledge of 38 global education review 10 (1-2) both language and culture. further, the lack of literature presents another barrier, as the discourse on conducting multilingual and multicultural research concentrates mainly on certain eurocentric and writing-based languages, which makes it difficult to access literature regarding specific research contexts, such as research with sign language. in this paper, we introduce cases that refer to the barriers encountered in different research contexts while conducting research on inclusive education. research cases that go beyond the oral-lingual tradition of research, engage tonal languages with diverse transliterations (asian dialects) or are conducted in a context where different languages and cultures are involved will be explained with three studies that have a common topic: inclusive education. the first case relies on research including interviews conducted with deaf teachers from austria and germany. the research used two different sign languages— austrian sign language (ögs) and german sign language (dgs)—and translated the collected data into written german. due to great differences between signed (sign languagespecific expressions) and written language, in addition to the cultural discrepancies between the two sign languages, many barriers were encountered. to overcome these challenges, the bimodal-bilingual researcher, the second author, reflected on possibilities and variations of meanings. the first case is an important example of how to practice informed research. as advocated by the world federation of the deaf (wfd, 2018), inclusive education for deaf learners should offer high-quality education with direct instruction in sign language, access to deaf teachers and deaf peers who use sign language, and a bilingual curriculum that includes the instruction of sign language. as expected, including sign language in research and reaching data sources through sign language is valuable to inform the body of research. however, research in a cross-cultural context where knowledge is produced in different languages and cultures is a challenge, especially when there are not many preceding exemplary studies. conducting research in sign language on inclusion or inclusive education combined with producing knowledge in writing has previously not been approached often, and the body of research relies on only a few studies. the growing popularity of transnationalism in research (amelina, 2010) is noticeable in research focusing on inclusive education, too. the second case is based on a research partnership on disability and inclusive education between austrian and thai researchers. this case introduces a study where the non-native language of a researcher was used in the research by data providers and fellow researchers. on the other hand, this case was an example of using the non-native language that is mostly spoken among the researcher team, which is english. research cooperation at the international level across countries and languages requires a common language to transmit knowledge. as a lingua franca, english, therefore, is the most widely accepted medium for international projects and publications (goitom, 2020). the second case is also concerned with the complexities of the processes of translation and interpretation when data are collected in languages other than english, but the communication is in english. the final case tackles the issue of conducting research on inclusive education with immigrant groups whose children are overrepresented in special education schools. the increasing numbers of immigrants from across the globe and pupils from migrant background have led to a trend to conduct lost in meaning 39 research in the native languages of immigrants along with the native languages of their countries of residence (havlin, 2022). in the educational context, it is very important to include immigrant parents in research to understand their perceptions and to support and advocate for the needs of students from a migrant background (goldsmith & kurpius, 2018; turney and kao, 2009). in this study, parents from a turkish migrant background in austria were asked about their aspirations for the austrian school system in terms of switching to inclusive education settings and abandoning segregated special education settings that have been the topic of hot debates on how special education is used as a discriminatory practice against students from migrant backgrounds (subasi singh, 2020). case 1: the meaning of inclusion in deaf culture the first case examines the barriers related to the cultural disparities between written language and signed language by looking into the use of the terms “inclusion” and “inclusive education” in the context of deaf culture in austria. in the course of a project pertaining to a doctoral thesis on the topic of “experiences of deaf teachers in austria and germany,” narrative interviews following rosenthal (2015) were conducted with deaf teachers by the second author, who is also a deaf researcher from austria, using dgs or ögs. the interviews were video-recorded to document the signing of the interviewer and interviewee as well as their expression in sign language. the deaf researcher is a “late-signer” (twomey et al., 2020) and her daily l1 is ögs. for her, dgs can be considered a foreign language. the article reflects the results of the analysis of the interviews and focuses on the sign languages terms of inclusion. according to the rules of translation, “a translation has to reflect the words of the original text” (cokely 1995, p. 23). it should also be mentioned that translation is considered a never-ending process and a translation process can never be finished, but only put aside as it might always be improved (newmark 1981, p. 148 as cited in cokely 1995, p. 25) as each translator brings their subjective perspectives to the task. being deaf and a member of deaf culture in austria had advantages for the researcher, the second author. however, challenges were also encountered. with video-recorded sign language, the signed text had to be translated into written german. the videos had to be watched several times to properly check the signed text and to put it in a corresponding equivalent german text. as watching and note-taking could not be done simultaneously considering the speed of sign language, a lot of additional work had to be done. translating sign languages into written spoken language constitutes a special challenge, as deaf people use sign languages in the context of their deaf culture. the translation has to consider the characteristics of deaf culture: language, cultural heritage, customs and traditions, arts and family (holcomb, 2013, p. 17). by using sign language, the members of the deaf community can express their feelings, thoughts, and ideas embedded in their culture. hence, being engaged in the translation of written data from sign language as a person from the deaf culture was a great advantage of this project. another challenge for the translation from sign language to written language concerns idiomatic expressions. there are many idiomatic expressions in sign language that are hard to translate into german (könig et al., 2012, p. 40 global education review 10 (1-2) 141). according to christian stalzer’s website on idiomatic expressions from austria (2017), “many of the sign expressions are labelled as ‘untranslatable’ and therefore as ‘special.’ such signs/terms are not unusual and one-to-one correspondences (in spoken as well as signed languages) are relatively rare.” in his research initiative, stalzer (2017) mentions that an adequate translation of some signed expressions into german might be challenging. therefore, some nuances in the interviewees’ signing might have been lost in translation, e.g. the context of the exact significance of an idiomatic expression. in addition, dgs and ögs can differ in terms of vocabulary: e.g. “school” or “teacher” are different signs, but the non-manual aspects and the sentence structure of these two sign languages are similar (zeshan, 2012, p. 314). there are considerable cultural differences in idiomatic expressions – dgs contains expressions that might be a challenge for people who do not live in germany. when translating the interviews of this project from dgs, some idiomatic expressions had to be analyzed indepth or the interviewees had to be asked for their meaning. for this contribution, four passages of interviews stemming from studies conducted in different contexts referring to the terms “inclusion” and “inclusive setting” were selected. the analysis investigated the contexts in which the interviewees used these terms. for the term “inclusion,” the sign used was the same throughout the four passages. while examining the data more closely, however, it was found that there were several underlying meanings of the term. based on the context, the sentence structure, but also the conjunction with other terms, “inclusion” indicated a different meaning. on the other hand, all interlocutors used the same sign for the term “inclusion.” this means that they used the technical term “inclusion” in the same way during the interview. that is why the translation uses the term denotatively. a definition on denotation clears that "denotational meanings equates roughly with literal meaning" (crystal, 2009, p. 14). all interlocutors have an equivalent level of fluency in ögs or dgs and also in written german. only one teacher used the term “inclusive classroom,” which clearly stresses the inclusiveness of their teaching method. within the translation, the focus is rather on the disparities between german spoken language and ögs or dgs – e.g. for word creation, german uses morphological derivation as a core strategy, a method rarely used in ögs (schwager, 2012, p. 75) – instead of the secondary information included in non-manuals or language culture. in the above-mentioned example, the interviewees included a second meaning in dgs or ögs. in other passages referring to inclusion, such secondary meanings were not present in the translation, which might be due to the translator missing languagecultural or non-manual aspects of ögs or dgs. the lexeme “inclusion” in ögs and dgs has evolved from the term “all-inclusive” that is used in the field of tourism indicating that all services are included, according to etymological research (heßmann, hansen & eichmann, 2012, p. 14). however, there is a difference between the two signs: “all-inclusive” has a comparative form using mouth gestures, whereas the sign “inclusion” is more neutral. the lexeme seems to indicate a symbolic connection between an arbitrary and an iconic sign (heßmann et al., 2012, p. 13). if one deconstructs the sign into its four components—hand shape, hand orientation, location, and movement (becker & von mayenn, 2012, p. 41)—it becomes clear that the passive hand has the form of a “grip hand” (riemer, 2021) and the location is in front of the lost in meaning 41 upper torso, the dominant hand starts with a “spread hand,” orientation in a right angle to the upper torso changes into the form of a “beak hand” while moving towards the passive hand, ending inside the “grip hand.” this could indicate that several people (represented by the dominant hand) are included in a group (represented by the passive hand). in the four passages, different aspects of the term “inclusion” could be found in terms of its content and implications. the following examples show three interpretations that vary depending on the content: *one view considers inclusion as a mindset, implying that the deaf child has to be given full access (to education). *there are several views of inclusion as “access for all”: one school welcomes hearing students at a special school for deaf and hard of hearing students. each child is automatically provided with teaching in its natural l1. *the last interpretation is: inclusion or an inclusive classroom means a bilingual classroom. in the process of validation, the researcher found that the term “inclusion” has different meanings according to the lived experience of the interviewee, which may vary strongly among individuals, but that it was increasingly used in an abstract and general way. in the process of translation, some signed information was lost as sign languages can modulate meaning (such as by using space and visual representations of actions). sentence structure, non-manual markings (e.g., movements of the brows, body language, mouth gestures, space, and temporal movements) can add meaning to a sign–a process that cannot be easily fully replicated in written language. this means that the signed data analyzed from a translation into the written text are a reduced variant of the original. here are two examples of the different meanings of “inclusion” used by the interviewees: *the use of “inclusion” as an abstract concept was depicted by the teachers’ modified mimics and gestures, by using neutral mimics and minimized gestures. *one interviewee signed “inclusion” with intensive and strong expression (non-manuals). this can be interpreted as a sign of the strong advocacy for the inclusion of deaf children. for example, the interviewer asked the interviewee whether a certain class was an inclusion class or an integrated class. they replied, “this is inclusion, a bilingual class.” the denotative meaning of the german lexeme and the sign are identical, whereas in sign languages there are connotations, especially social ones, as can be found in the interviews presented. the translation of the lexeme “inclusion” from ögs and dgs works as a technical term, but for deaf people, there are many additional connotations, e.g. for the mimics non-manual markings play an important role and refer to the language performance. these connotations and views of “inclusion” of deaf people in the context of deaf culture have been clearly stated by the world federation of the deaf and by the austrian association of the deaf (öglb): “inclusive education” means bilingual language instruction in sign languages with deaf peers and deaf teachers. finally, it is a challenge to demonstrate how the sign languages of the interviewees lose 42 global education review 10 (1-2) nuances, when expressed in written language. this point will be addressed in the conclusion. case 2: multilingual research in a nonnative language the second case deals with research set in a cultural and linguistic context that the researcher had only barely been exposed to before. working transculturally, the third author was not a native, but a recent learner of the thai language at the outset of the research. as a german and english speaker, the researcher conducted research on disability, education, and inclusion in the course of her phd study as part of an international comparative research project and follow-up research in a language foreign to her. the language of most of the interviews with children, parents, teachers, as well as educational experts was thai. collaboration partners from the thai cooperation institution spoke thai and english. they supported the translation of interview guidelines and conducted most of the interviews. summarized translations passages were either provided simultaneously or during small breaks during the interviews. the latter was also used to reconfigure interview questions, the order of questions or shape the thematic focus within the broader frame of grounded theory methodology (charmaz, 2014). in order to tackle the challenge of conducting research on disability and inclusive education, respectively, in a non-native language context, a couple of aspects have to be considered. so far, not many researchers have dealt with the challenges and opportunities of working in different or multiple or unknown languages in qualitative research in different cultural settings (goitom, 2020; havlin, 2022; larkin et al., 2007). in their paper “qualitative research and translation dilemmas,” temple and young (2004) summarized the main challenges related to working with non-native data in qualitative research along with the following three questions: 1) does it matter if the translation act is identified or not? 2) does it matter who does the translation? 3) when is a translator not only a translator? thus, working with data needing translation, researchers must ask themselves whether the process of translation is being acknowledged or not (lopez et al., 2008; regmi et al., 2010). if it is, the choice of the translator and their background need to be taken into consideration. in the given context, these questions are highly interrelated. the process of translation, in this case, was acknowledged and even turned into a methodological asset. in talking about the deeper meaning of words, additional knowledge and density of analyses could be gained. as the thai-austrian research team used english as a connecting language throughout their collaboration. however, as most of the interviews with experts, teachers, parents, and children were conducted in thai, many hours were spent re-listening to interviews and rechecking english transcripts to catch as much of the initial linguistic meaning as possible. this process can be referred to as translingual research practice in thai and english and, in some cases, german language (one of the thai researchers had started to take german classes after some months and the austrian researcher took up learning thai from earlier exposure to the language) that was used to make sense of literal meaning. the practice proved very helpful lost in meaning 43 in the complex context of talking about disability and inclusion. the nexus of language, understanding, and disability has been subject to research for a very long time. one of the main efforts can be found in the icf’s (international classification of functioning, disability and health) accompanying cultural applicability research: there is, however, a fundamental dilemma that poses an obstacle to this research agenda. it is generally agreed that the appropriate aim of a classification tool such as the icidh-2 is to provide an international common language, as well as a universal conceptual framework for disability across languages and cultures. yet the experience of disability is unique to each individual, not only because the precise manifestation of a disease, disorder or injury is unique, but also because the consequences of these health conditions will be influenced by a complex combination of factors from personal differences in experience, background and basic emotional, psychological and intellectual make-up to differences in the physical, social and cultural context in which a person lives (üstün, 2001, p. 9). the mammoth efforts to frame the meaning of disability globally—as intended by the study, the interview passages stem from— also entail considerations of the meaning of disabilities in specific societal and cultural, and thereby, language-related contexts. nevertheless, it is important to take localized differences and variations into account. groce nails the challenge of developing a universal approach by stating, “however, arguably the most substantial change in the understanding of disability is not in the realm of clinical services, but in the growing body of research that finds that while disability is universal, there is marked variation in how cultures interpret disability” (1999, p. 756). in that sense, addressing cultural differences in research that enables localized understandings of disability, as well as the role of inclusion in education, can be understood as essential. the choice of language to describe specific phenomena is subject to several complex decisions and what sriussadaporncharoenngam & jablin call the need for “context sensitivity” (1999, p. 386). the language used to talk about disability is an interesting area to explore societal attitudes since language is an important part of the culture. talking about personal, complex, and critical issues thus poses even more of a challenge, as this implies the need to cover up certain parts of oneself, relinquish one’s opinion, stand up for one’s opinion or project similar and above all personal accounts. in the given case study where more than 200 interviews were conducted, two aspects proved especially interesting in relation to the nexus of language, disability, and inclusion. one refers to the fact that disability as such is often not directly addressed when it comes to one’s own children. the other refers to the direct reference and description of physical characteristics to refer to disability. 1) disability does not exist interestingly, most of the children and some of the parents as well as a few teachers said that they perceived themselves/the(ir) children as non-disabled. an associated aspect is a certain kind of normalcy that is produced by referencing similarities to so-called ‘normal people’ as shown in the example below. int.: what is a disability? 44 global education review 10 (1-2) mrs a: at first i felt very bad about this word. i get used to my child and think that she is just like other normal people. my daughter can go anywhere but she has to be with me” (2tiilfgdp, 2011) 2) addressing disabilities literally the following list presents an overview of thai words used to describe different types of disabilities in the interviews. it becomes obvious that the descriptors refer to physical, literal, and apparent characteristics. table 1: thai words describing disabilities the descriptors do not all match the institutionalized context of how disabilities are described in thailand. many of the categorizations used by the ministry of education in order to classify needs for special needs stem from non-thai or westernized discourses, respectively, which can impact localized understandings of disabilities. case 3: research on inclusion with immigrant groups the third case reports from multilingual and multicultural research on “inclusive education” conducted with parents from a turkish migrant background in austria. this case shows how the term “inclusive education” is understood by immigrants who keep their traditional cultural predispositions but at the same time try to be a part of the austrian education system by understanding the terms in the way they are used in the local context. the research aim was to understand how parents make sense of their experiences in terms of their children’s schooling in inclusive or segregated special education settings. as the percentage of students from a migrant background in schools reaches 27.2 percent in austria and 53.3 percent in the capital city of vienna, the population categorized as “students from a migrant background” has considerably less academic achievement and poorer german language skills (austrian federal ministry of education, 2022). the distribution of students from migrant backgrounds over different types of school points to another dimension of educational inequity in the country (subasi singh, 2020). in all federal states, students from a migrant background are overrepresented in technical/vocational, non-academic secondary, or special education schools and underrepresented in academic secondary schools leading to the tertiary level. hence, it is important to include the experiences of immigrant parents during the referral to an inclusive or segregated special education setting and their perceptions of inclusive education in the research. this research was conducted in vienna by using intensive interview techniques (charmaz, 2014) with parents. the researcher, the first author who is also a migrant from a turkish background, was the only researcher included in the process and used german and turkish during the research. getting an insider perspective, being a migrant, helped the researcher to be alert to the differences and lost in meaning 45 variations in different steps throughout the research process. as charmaz (2014) discussed, seeing the lives of participants from the inside of their cultural and linguistic world is very important as what we bring to the research as researchers and what we learn from the field are different from what our participants may mean. being involved in the research process through cultural and linguistic competencies as an immigrant researcher rather than a distanced researcher position was fruitful in terms of achieving the constructivist stance. hence, to grasp the meanings of the research participants, the researcher paid attention to the way participants used the language while talking about inclusive education or inclusion. the language and cultural characteristics of participants could give hints to understanding their underlying meanings. being a “communicationally informed fieldworker” (gal, 2012, p. 40) helped the first author use participants' linguistic practices to learn about cultural categories, forms of knowledge, social lives, and social relations. this was required especially during the interviews, where communicative skills were used to detect metacommunication by participants. during interviews, metacommunication could be considered as a simultaneous meta-message that instructed how to interpret any signal from the data providers (bahri & williams, 2017). a metamessage can be any gestures or signals of a speech event or any other language use. therefore, apart from referential modalities, the first author was alert to the non-referential modalities such as intonation or gestures. in this research, these signals pointed to the aspects of speech events, to the participants' attitudes, identities, or roles. throughout the research, attending to indexical meanings along with referentiality, but also asking the appropriate questions required being aware of different language usages. another barrier in a multicultural research context can be asking the same questions to data providers who are distributed over a wide range of cultural perspectives or linguistic competencies. asking proper questions on inclusive education by considering the cultural and linguistic background of the participants, but at the same time questioning, answers which can be used to shed light on the same issue was challenging. the difference between special education and inclusive education was not known to several parents as the discourse on inclusive education in austria is relatively recent and has an academic and political discourse, which makes it an unknown concept in the daily lives of many parents. explaining inclusive education in turkish was no help either, as this concept is similarly new in turkish, and parents who left turkey even a year ago could not have known about this new term. the researcher had to ensure that participants were aware of the difference between special education and inclusive education while explaining their experiences. sometimes, researchers and research participants may think they are engaged in different events. while researchers think that they are engaged in a data collection process, participants may be thinking about a platform where they can complain about the system and make their complaints heard through the researcher. in addition, during interviews or other data collection steps, research participants may overwhelm the data collection process with single-sided conversation, or they may narrate unrelated debates (gal, 2012). as robben (2007) suggests, especially traumatic experiences of data sources may result in exaggeration or misinformation during data collection. such discussions can be interfering, 46 global education review 10 (1-2) but at the same time contribute to a greater understanding. several participants had the tendency to use the interviews as a platform to complain about the complexity of the special education system in austria. during the research, the first author tried to build trust and empathy by remembering that speech can be divergent and by paying attention to the impact of different language usages. in this multilingual research, german and turkish were used for access to the research field, communication with research participants, data collection, and also for data analysis. several dimensions of the research had to be considered in a multilingual way where all aspects make sense in both languages for those involved. however, the communication with turkish-speaking participants included german words as well. parents who had already been living in austria for a long time and used german for communicating in the school system used german words and terms related to the school context. these words were mainly about integration classrooms, school direction or special education schools. this showed that knowing only the language of the immigrant group would not offer the flexibility to switch between the two languages when needed. the languages used in research have an impact not only on data collection but also on data analysis. charmaz (2014) explains that “the characteristics of specific languages matter as do the character of cultural traditions and norms” (p. 331). hence, it is important for constructivist researchers to understand beyond the meaning of the words uttered by the research participants. the necessity of using a translator could be eliminated by the researcher who is competent in the languages of the research. as kruse et al. (2012) suggest, translation can lead to subjective interpretations by translators. hence, collecting data in the language or languages of the participants and analyzing them in the original language prevented many issues that could have arisen due to the translation of the data. as a result, the embedded culture in words (kruse et al., 2012) was not lost, either. conclusion these three qualitative studies where data were collected or analyzed in more than one language involved challenging stages throughout the research process. based on these three cases, the authors presented their own experiences with and reflections on multilingual and multicultural studies on inclusive education. these cases showed how research on inclusive education proceeds in a multilingual/ multicultural context. challenges, validation strategies and affecting factors were discussed and the diversity of the understanding of the term was explained via these three examples. the increasing attention given to the research on inclusive education points to further research that takes and will take place at the international level, which requires multilingual and multicultural perspectives. the first case showed that “inclusion” can be used in an abstract and general way in different sign languages and the connotations of “inclusion” in deaf culture can include varying perspectives. to avoid gaps in the translation, a different approach may be suggested for future research. the researcher identified a major challenge in the fact that the video-recorded sign language data were translated into a written language where some of the characteristics of deaf culture got lost (holcomb, 2013). on the other hand, idiomatic expressions in sign languages are a special issue as there are many nuances in deaf people’s signing that might get lost in meaning 47 lost in translation (stalzer, 2017). consequently, direct analysis of the original language may be more practical and accurate instead of translating sign language into written language. however, it remains unclear how this dilemma could be solved, as using written language enables access to academia, and at which stage to translate sign language to written language. in empirical scientific translation, further research must be conducted in order not to lose the nuances of deaf culture by analyzing the data collected through sign language from translated data. the sign language sender will communicate his message to the receiver in order to motivate him to decode it. this scene is reflected in the video where the translator translates into written language. the concept can be discussed profoundly in the future. different lingual competencies and backgrounds in the third case related to thai have proved to be an asset as they allowed an indepth analysis of the meaning behind words used by interviewees. the engagement of the austrian researcher in thai language and that of thai researcher in german introduced flexibilities during the research process. this supported the idea that the engagement of researchers is crucial during the translation process although there are people to translate and to interpret the data (lopez et al., 2008). on the one hand, these point to the fact that disability might not need to be addressed as such or play a role at all. on the other hand, words used to address disabilities are often quite literal in the thai language. the latter implication would have been lost in translation when working with english transcripts only. culturally-sensitive approaches proved worthwhile and led to new methodological approaches stemming from joint translingual efforts. including a rarely studied group of participants—the immigrant community—is a necessity to enhance the body of knowledge, especially on a sensitive topic such as parental involvement and parents’ perceptions. the final case presented how researchers should be knowledgeable about the participants’ language and culture in order to be able to ask appropriate questions and to make meaning of the data collected. negotiation among the participants and researcher in terms of locating the meaning of participants in the social and cultural context of the study proved to be important (goitom, 2020; havlin, 2022). the third case revealed that parents from a turkish background could not make use of their native tongues, which is mainly the colloquial language, as the discourse on inclusive education is also very limited in turkish. furthermore, speaking the same language as the data sources and not using a translator helped to build rapport between the participants and the researcher, which also made it possible for the researcher to get an insider perspective and not to rely on the meaning-making of a translator (kruse et al., 2012). references alur, m. & timmons, v. 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(2023). neither compulsory nor public or national? translating the swedish terminology of 19th-century primary schools, teachers, and pupils. global education review, 10 (1-2), 142-156. neither compulsory nor public or national? translating the swedish terminology of 19th-century primary schools, teachers, and pupils johannes westberg abstract the 19th century saw the rise of mass schooling. school acts were published, increasing number of teachers were trained and hired, and children increasingly attended schools. this development was strongest in europe and north america, with schooling in the usa, france and prussia leading the way. while this development with its national and regional variations continues to puzzle researchers, it also creates challenges of communication and presentation. what english language terminology should be used when denoting schools, teachers, and pupils in non-anglo-saxon countries? in this article, i address a part of this question by examining the case of swedish 19th-century primary schools. by relating these schools to those in other countries, and the terminology used in the research literature, this article provides recommendations for english-language terms to be used when denoting these schools, the teachers who taught them, and the children who attended them. this terminology includes primary school, parish school and mass schooling, and the terms used to denote teachers and their training include junior schoolteacher, primary school teacher and term teacher training schools. as a result, this article problematizes the use of terms such as compulsory, public, state, and national when describing schools in 19th-century contexts such as that of sweden, indicates the varying meanings of terms such as popular education, and highlights the problems of not translating terms such as folkskola. keywords primary schools; translation; educational systems; history of education introduction from the 19th century onwards, schooling increasingly became both a norm and a reality for all children (meyer, ramirez, & soysal, 1992). in the late 19th and the early 20th century, many or most of school-aged children in the minority world of the west attended school, at least for a couple of years. thus, when schooling was no longer an exclusive experience for society’s elite, segmented parallel school systems arose: the majority of children attended schools for the masses, while a selected few enrolled in educational institutions for the elite, such as english grammar schools or german gymnasien. this international expansion of educational systems had transnational as well as national features. while all national educational systems were affected by international trends that may be described in terms of transfer, borrowing, lending or reception (fuchs & roldán vera, 2019), they also had national, regional, and local character. in this article, i address the challenges that the historian of education faces in this context when translating terms used to describe schooling in various national languages. i focus on the 19th-century swedish folkskolor, which provided children with basic knowledge of reading, writing, religion, and mathematics. i will explore the english language terms that may be used to denote these schools, and discuss the terms used neither compulsory nor public or national? 143 to denote teachers, teacher training and the children who attended these schools. as this article illustrates, there are no simple or easy solutions when translating historical educational systems, and the best options depend heavily on the historical context and the questions that the researcher poses. in the history of schooling in sweden, this article shows that verbatim translations are not a selfevident choice, and that not translating a terminology is neither a neutral nor a particularly communicative option. instead, readers are encouraged to base their translation on an intimate knowledge of the educational institutions that they are denoting, and choosing terms that communicate well with the international field of research that they are communicating with. as an exercise in translation, this article is about equivalencies. in the history of translations, ranging from sacred text and philosophical theses to television shows, the idea of equivalence has been fundamental; that is, the meaning of the text should remain when translated from a language to another. although this idea of equivalent effect and equivalent response might be challenging from a theoretical perspective, it has remained fundamental when translating texts (kasparek, 1983; munday, 2012). translating texts is a complex task, both when relating to specific texts, but also on a theoretical level. one may be aware that terms encompass different kinds of meanings. mona baker (1992) has stressed the importance of the propositional meaning of a word (that it, what it refers to), but also its expressive meanings (for example, positive or negative attitudes) and evoked meaning (of place and time, but also gender and social group). in this case, such a typology highlights some of the challenges that the translation of 19th-century schools creates. how do you translate swedish terms that denote schools that did not exist in, say, england or usa? and how do you translate terms whose expressive and evoked meaning has changed over time? another challenge is that of communication. should translations highlight the strangeness of our past, or are they supposed to enable a more immediate understanding of a text (richardson, 1999)? in line with peter collins, the translator of émile durkheim, i have attempted to “walk a tight-rope between the fluent and the accurate, the elegant and the literal, the readable and the written; and this is a tightrope from which he must inevitably fall periodically into the saving net of compromise” (peter collins in durkheim, 1977, p. xxix). this balancing act includes, not least, the ability to determine when some terms can be translated word for word (metaphrase), and when it is necessary to paraphrase in order to capture the meaning of a term (kasparek, 1986). as the act of translation is inherent in all historical research (palonen, 2012), the present article encourages readers to reflect further on the terminology we use when examining the school systems of the past. while historians of education certainly have made good progress in examining the international and transnational features of 19th-century education, reflections on the terminology used when examining primary school remain scarce, even though researchers have made different choices. swedish primary schools (folkskolor) have been denoted as, for example, common schools (boli, 1989), elementary schools (larsson, 2016), and primary schools (westberg, 2020), and described in terms of compulsory education (soysal & strang, 1989) or mass schooling (landahl, 2015). 144 global education review 10 (1-2) this article adds to this literature by discussing these choices, in order to take further steps to clarify how to communicate and interpret the swedish 19th-century school system. as this article indicates, this is an important task. proper translations contribute to our correct understanding of these schools, and although there are no perfect translations, there are certainly several anglo-saxon terms that may be recommended, and others that should be avoided when describing 19th-century schooling in sweden. basic schooling for the masses: the swedish folkskola the segmented school systems of the 19th century were based on a distinction between schools for the masses, which enrolled the majority of schoolchildren, and elite schools for a selected few, the latter based on the heritage from early modern latin schools (schriewer, orivel, & swing, 2000). the terms used to denote the former often indicated that they targeted the common people, the lower classes or the laboring classes. apart from the swedish folkskola and the prussian volksschule, these included the almueskoler of denmark and the kansakouluja of finland. other terms indicate that these schools provided the first level of knowledge, or were the first level of the educational system: the dutch lagere scholen (literally lower schools), the austrian trivialschulen, the french écoles primaires, the italian scuole primarie, the spanish educación primaria elemental, and the primary schools or elementary schools of england (westberg, boser, & brühwiler, 2019). despite the variation in terms, these schools often had similar features. in general, the 19th century primary school systems were decentralized (lindert, 2004). that is, the local school organization carried the main burden of organizing and funding the school systems. over time, however, the central governments’ grip over these schools were tightened, using central government subsidies, state school inspectors, and national curricula (lindert, 2004; westberg, 2020). while attempts were made to provide a more encompassing education, primary schools generally only provided a very limited schooling, both quantitatively and qualitatively. children merely spent a couple of years in schooling, and the semesters were comparatively short. as a result, teaching was generally restricted to reading, writing, math, and christian knowledge. this was also in line with the purpose of these schools. unlike their 21st century counterparts, they were not intended to prepare children for secondary schools, but to provide basic literacy (westberg, 2020). this was certainly the case in sweden. here, the school act of 1842 distinguished between a minimum amount of knowledge that all children were required to learn regardless of circumstances, and a full curriculum. the former included reading, catechism, biblical history, writing, mathematics, and church singing (the latter was not required of those who lacked singing talent). the latter also included subjects such as history, geography, natural history, and physical education. still, in 1859, only 7 percent of the schools were estimated to provide an education above this minimum (westberg, 2019). against this historical context of primary schooling in 19th century europe, primary school and elementary school are two good choices when denoting these schools in sweden. these are often used terms that clearly communicate that what is discussed is the first years of schooling. i prefer the term primary school: it alludes nicely to other contemporary terms such as écoles primaires, scuole primarie, neither compulsory nor public or national? 145 and educación primaria elemental, and fits current definition of primary education. the standard definition of primary education today is that of isced. as part of international efforts to promote education, unesco created the international standard classification of education (isced) in order to collect, compile, and present comparable data on education. this resulted in the first version, isced-78, which was updated in isced-97 and most recently in isced-11 (sauvageot, 2008). the result of the isced project was a nomenclature that is commonly used when presenting and comparing current european educational systems as consisting of early childhood education, primary education, lower secondary education, and upper secondary education. following this classification, primary education is defined as the stage that often starts at the ages of 5–7 and has a duration of about six years. denoted as primary, elementary, or basic education, the purpose of primary education is described as “sound basic education in reading, writing and mathematics, along with an elementary understanding of other subjects such as history, geography, natural science, social sciences, art and music” (oecd, 2015, 29). while 19th-century folkskolor certainly did not live up to present-day expectations, such definitions of primary education make primary school a useful term when clarifying what kind of schools, the swedish folkskolor were: a kind of 19th-century primary school. the term primary schooling also fits well in the context of a dichotomy between primary schooling and primary education. in such a dichotomy where the former denotes a more restrictive educational practice (campbell, 2005), primary schooling does align with the purpose of these 19th-century institutions that were intended to instill some knowledge and moral values among the “great unwashed” (heywood, 2017, p. 206), rather than providing them with a comprehensive education. this may also be linked to the debate on how education should be defined (dekker, 2001). if true education requires a symmetrical relationship between the adult and the child, these 19thcentury schools certainly provided primary schooling rather than primary education. however, no term is ideal. as with almost all terms used to describe 19th-century schooling, the term primary schooling requires at least a brief presentation, so that the reader understands what kind of school this was. in this case, the author would be expected to note that 19th-century primary schools merely provided a basic schooling, that enrolment and attendance rates were generally much lower than today, and that primary school pupils most often did not attend secondary schools. that is, we cannot assume or expect that 19th-century primary schools were similar to our current primary schools. when using the term elementary school, one should also make it clear that these were not the grammar schools that the swedish elementarskolor were. this distinction between primary schools for the people, and grammar schools such as nya elementarskolan for a selected few, has been used as a vantage point in esbjörn larsson’s analysis of monitorial education (larsson, 2016). for those wishing to stress the particular features of 19th-century schooling, there are also other options. i see the benefits of using the term basic schools, since these schools certainly provided children with (at most) a basic education. in that sense, this term also fits the current usage of that term in some national and international contexts. the latter include isced, as mentioned above, and the former bulgaria, where the basic school denotes the first four years of compulsory schooling (hörner, döberg, reuter, & von kopp, 2015, 142). 146 global education review 10 (1-2) another useful term is that of mass schooling (see usage in, e.g., meyer et al., 1992). as terms such as folkskola, this term implies that these were schools intended for the masses and not for the elite. for the same reasons, i find the term popular education valuable (see braster, 2011). it is, however, advisable to note that this term does not only cover the education provided in schools, but also education in other settings. in the swedish context, where homeinstruction (hemundervisning) still played an important role in the mid-19th century, popular education is consequently a useful term when discussing a reality where children attended school but in many cases became literate through home instruction (lindmark, 2004). the term popular education does, nevertheless, require a clear presentation when used, since it is a good illustration of how the meaning of a word depends on context. sjaak braster (2011) has identified three meanings of the term. first, in line with enlightenment ideals, the term “popular” would indicate a popular education accessible for all. johann heinrich pestalozzi did, for example, claim that his method would promote an education for all children (see also horlacher, 2011). secondly, popular education has been defined as education targeting the broad layers of population, that is the masses or the poor. this could include the schools organized by philanthropic associations or poverty relief boards. thirdly, in the post-war era, the term became increasingly linked to literacy campaigns and educational efforts in third world countries: a pedagogy of the oppressed, to use the book title of paulo freire. in those instances, popular education is linked to empowerment, and so-called bottom-up approaches where the initiative, content and form is shaped by those participating in popular education. it is in this latter context that the term popular education has been used to describe the education of adults outside of the school system (berg and edquist, 2017). parish schools rather than compulsory or public schools apart from these terms, there are also other more or less suitable options when discussing 19th-century primary schooling. as is evident from below, i argue that commonly used terms such as compulsory, public, state, or national are problematic or inappropriate when applied on 19th-century sweden. addressing these schools as compulsory schools (see, e.g., miller, 2000; mcculloch & woodin, 2020) is certainly problematic. gary mcculloch and tom woodin argued that “[c]ompulsory mass schooling involves a basic presumption that there is a duty as well as a right for all children in a society to go to school under certain conditions for a particular period of time” and that this entails regulations of when this period starts and ends (mcculloch & woodin, 2020, p. 2). like many of its international counterparts (westberg, 2020), however, swedish primary schools were not compulsory. as with many other school acts, the school act of 1842 did not define when children were of school age, or the expected number of schools years. instead, the school act merely noted that children were expected to start attending school from the age of nine at the latest. this may be compared to the lack of school-aged in the french guizot law of 1833 and the 1864 education statute of the russian empire, or the vaguely encompassing dutch definition of school age as “youth of all ages” in the school act of 1806 (westberg, 2020). schooling in sweden was also not compulsory in the sense that enrolment and attendance was enforced. like school acts in many other countries, the school neither compulsory nor public or national? 147 act of 1842 did not prescribe any substantial punishment for parents who did not send their children to school. the act also allowed children under specific circumstances to stay home from school (westberg, 2019). apart from compulsory schooling, public school is a term that should be avoided when discussing the swedish case. while used to denote publicly funded primary and secondary schools in the us, this term may be misleading since it is currently also used to describe some elite schools in great britain with significant tuition fees. swedish 19th-century primary schools were not elite schools and tuition fees did not play a major role in the financing of primary schools. the term public also lacks precision. in the 19th century, the local organization of schooling varied. some school systems were based on the local church organization, others on secular municipalities and communes (such as italy and spain), or a mix of public or private and religious and secular organizations, like in england and russia (westberg, 2020). the swedish primary school system was based on the church organization. in 1842, the first swedish primary school act requested that the more than 2,300 swedish parishes, either by themselves or in cooperation with a neighboring parish, created school districts that established at least one permanent or ambulatory school. these school districts were to be governed by a school board (skol-styrelse) chaired by the parish vicar or his representative, and the parish meeting (sockenstämma). the parish meeting, led by the vicar, had the final say in matters of school spending, and was also the body that appointed school board members and teachers (westberg, 2019). in this context, public schooling may not be the most suitable term to denote primary schooling in sweden. while these schools were public in the sense that they were mainly funded by a combination of central government grants and local taxes, it may be discussed to what extent parishes and other local institutions should be defined as public (gustafsson, 1989). nevertheless, the term public school does follow a common pattern regarding how we categorize and name schools after their organizing body. apart from the broad typology of public and private schools, the 19th century also saw english national schools founded by national society for promoting the education of the poor (dixon, 2019), and the russian zemstvo schools, managed by a local government body (zemstvos) created in the second half of the 19th century (eklof, 1984). in this context, parish school is, however, certainly a better and more precise option than both public schools and state schools when denoting the swedish primary school of the 19th century. this term indicates how primary schools were dependent on the organizational and financial structure of this parishes, which organized the local rural communities of sweden and ran and funded the rise of mass schooling in sweden (westberg, 2017). the term parish school also highlights the content of the schooling provided. still in the mid-1860s, the focus of teaching remained what one might expect from a parish school: reading, writing, biblical history, and catechism (westberg, 2019). as a key to understanding this educational expansion, parish school is therefore a suitable translation. it also implies useful comparisons to scottish parish schools (anderson, 1983), and enables us to discuss the differences between the parish-run primary schools of the 19th century in sweden, and the municipal schools of the 20th century. in addition to comprehensive school and public school, i also suggest that the term 148 global education review 10 (1-2) common school should not be applied on the swedish case, as done by us scholars such as john boli (1986). common schools, once described as “the most american thing about america” (tyack, 2001, p. 1), had very specific features and the term has been used to describe primary schools in the us prior to 1900. these were schools governed by local communities in townships or school districts consisting of a group of farm families or religious parishes. thus, they were schools that were common to such a community, funded by that community, and taught the subjects that each community valued. in the us context, the common schools contrasted with the public school system of the twentieth century, which was increasingly under regional and professional control (tyack, 2001; goldin & katz, 2003). there are also reasons to be careful when considering formulations such as national schools or national school systems, when describing 19th-century schools. while mass schooling, both in sweden and elsewhere, certainly had a national scope and nationalistic objectives, the swedish system of mass schooling was not national, in the sense that it was intended to create a nationally uniform system of primary schools. in contrast, it encouraged regional diversity among schools where the main responsibility for schooling was held by the local parishes (westberg, 2022). so, while europe saw schools that were actually termed national schools, including the state-funded national schools of ireland and the above-mentioned national schools of england, the swedish 19thcentury school system is, in this respect, more aptly described as a regionalized school system consisting of parish schools, instead of national schools. a final note on the term folkskola. since it is a challenging task to choose an appropriate english term, an author might be tempted either to merely use the swedish term folkskola, or to translate it verbatim to folk school. both these choices are problematic. the latter term folk school has been used to denote residential adult education (klein, 2018) akin to that of folk high schools (folkhögskola). the first option, not to translate the term, also creates problems. while not translating a term creates a certain sense of historical specificity – it is true that only sweden had swedish folkskolor – this option has its drawbacks. apart from not communicating what kind of school this was to the foreign reader, this term might also imply certain meanings for certain national audiences. in sweden, the folkskola was part of the segmented school system of the 19th century that the children of the broad layers of the population attended, in contrast to the children of the elite who attended grammar schools (läroverk). here, the term folkskola –literally translated as the school for the people – was linked to enlightenment ideas of education for all, but also to conservative educational views arguing that the broader population required merely a restricted education for their subordinate position in society (lindmark, 2011). in that sense, these folkskolor were certainly not folk schools in the us sense of the word, and they were indeed neither norwegian nor danish folkeskoler. in contrast to the swedish folkskola and the norwegian 19thcentury allmueskole, the norwegian 20th century folkeskole provided a social inclusive education for all children (volckmar, 2016). similarly, the swedish 19th-century folkskola should not be mistaken for the nine-year danish folkeskole of the 21st century, which is more akin to the swedish comprehensive school (grundskolan) established in the 1960s (hörner et al., 2015). neither compulsory nor public or national? 149 school types translations concerning mass schooling are further complicated by the fact that there was not just one kind of 19th-century primary school. varying distinctions between ambulatory and non-ambulatory, urban and rural schools were recurring in europe. in imperial austria, for example, these school types included major schools (hauptschulen) intended for cities, and the standard primary schools (trivialschulen), which was the most common school type. in addition, parish schools (pfarr-schulen) were introduced with a slightly enlarged curriculum. catering to distant and sparsely populated areas, branch schools (excurrendo-schulen) were introduced as a kind of ambulatory school moving in between villages, and provisional schools (notschulen) were allowed when parents could not afford the standard primary schools (cvrcek, 2020, 54–55). the entire development of different types of primary schools in sweden (see table 1) is too complicated to be covered in this article. but it may be noted that, prior to the school act of 1842, a wide assortment of village schools (byskolor), parish schools (sockenskolor) and urban poor schools (fattigskolor) existed (e.g., larsson, 2016), alongside individual schoolmasters and schoolmistresses, funded by parishes, villages, or parents (åhlman, 2019). prior to the school act, sweden also saw a rapid rise of monitorial schools (växelundervisningsskolor), the swedish term in itself a translation of the german term wechselseitige schuleinrichtung (larsson, 2015). when defining primary schools, the first primary school act of 1842 distinguished between permanent (fasta) schools located on one specific site (often in the vicinity of the parish church), and ambulatory (flyttbara) schools, where the teacher moved between villages. “ambulatory schools” appears as an appropriate term. it has been used in studies of schooling in finland and iceland (kotilainen, 2013; garðarsdóttir & guttormsson, 2014) and in contemporary 19th-century english descriptions of the swedish school system (minutes of the committee of the council on education: with appendices 1847–48. vol. ii, 1848). other alternatives could include itinerant schools (as they were taught by itinerant schoolteachers), or house-to-house school, which was the australian term used 1881–1923. in contrast to the australian school type, the swedish ambulatory schools were taught by fully trained primary school teachers (westberg 2022; nsw 2022). table 1: primary school types in 19th-century sweden. note: the definition of each school type developed over time. for example, junior schools were not always intended for the youngest school children, and there were various kinds of junior schools. for a more detailed presentation of these school types, see westberg, 2022. adding to the ambulatory schools, socalled minor schools (mindre skolor) were created in 1853. they were introduced as a simpler kind of school for distant areas, but were school type national name primary school folkskola permanent or ambulatory primary school fast eller flyttbar folkskola junior school småskola minor school mindre skola minor primary school mindre folkskola replacement school ersättningsskola village school byskola auxiliary school hjälpskola 150 global education review 10 (1-2) in 1863 redefined as junior schools (småskolor) intended for the younger more junior schoolaged children. in 1875, minor schools (mindre skolor) were again added to the set-up of primary schools. they were intended to provide a less extensive schooling for children in distant places, and were in 1882 renamed as minor primary schools (mindre folkskolor) (westberg, 2022). this range of school types is a good illustration of the challenges of translating 19thcentury terms in the history of education more generally. how should one translate terms to english when even the swedish terms are difficult to understand for a 21st century swedish audience? in the case of these school types, the swedish adjectives “små” (small) and “mindre” (smaller or minor) are quite vague, but they do provide indication of the kind of schools they denote: schools that provided a less extensive education for younger children in smaller school building, often placed in smaller villages. the comparison with english junior schools, which targeted children from the age of seven or eight, is also helpful (blyth, 1965). when using these terms, such explanations will be useful. however, there are also other options to consider when denoting these schools. the minor schools and minor primary schools may be compared to the provisional schools of imperial austria, where complete primary schools could not be afforded, or the provisional schools of australia. the latter was intended for sparsely populated areas where 15–25 children could be expected to attend, and where untrained teachers were allowed to be employed (nsw 2022). these challenges of translations also pertain to the more or less publicly acknowledged school types that existed in sweden during the 19th century, at times supported by state school inspectors. these include replacement schools (ersättningsskolor), village schools (byskolor) and auxiliary schools (hjälpskolor). the latter schools were intended to assist regular primary schools, and should therefore not be mistaken for the prussian hilfsschulen, which targeted children with special needs (see, e.g., garz, moser, & wünsch, 2021). in addition to providing yet another illustration of the challenges of translation, these school types also illustrate the importance of translating their denotations, and thus acknowledge their existence. at times, historians of education over-use the term primary school when discussing 19th-century settings and, as a result, downplay the differences that existed between different school types. when presenting 19th-century schooling, we should not forget to note that there was not one type of primary schools back then, but a multitude of schools including the swedish junior schools and replacement schools, the austrian branch school, the russian zemstvo schools, and the australian provisional schools. consequently, these issues are not mere issues of translation, but have consequences for how we describe 19th-century school systems. in sweden, about half of the primary schools in the mid-19th century were ambulatory (westberg, 2022). therefore, when discussing schooling at this point in time, it may not only be fitting to refrain from describing the school system as public or compulsory. it may also be appropriate to talk about the largely ambulatory school system of sweden, so that english language readers do not imagine a school system that was, like that of the 21st century, mainly based on permanent schools. neither compulsory nor public or national? 151 teacher positions, teacher training, and school children the importance of acknowledging the different school types when translating national experiences of schooling into english also applies to teacher positions. in the school act of 1842, the terms used to denote teachers in general was lärare and skol-lärare, which translate literally to teacher and schoolteacher, respectively. since these teacher positions were increasingly organized in a manner that is recognized today, with teachers working in permanent school buildings, receiving taxfunded wages in permanent contract, i prefer the term teacher to the more archaic term schoolmaster. while in current swedish language usage, lärare may denote both male and female teachers, the gendered reality of the 19th century is an argument for differentiating between male and female teachers. in sweden, the main distinction was between trained junior schoolteachers (småskollärare) and primary school teachers (folkskollärare). the training for junior schoolteachers was shorter, and their minimum salary was a third of that of primary school teachers in the late 1880s (mellberg, 1996, p. 128). both categories of teachers could work in junior schools and minor primary schools, but in the latter school types, it was more common that junior schoolteachers or untrained teachers worked. in addition, schools employed nonregular primary school teachers (extra-ordinära folkskollärare) and assistant primary school teachers (biträdande folkskollärare). these distinctions are crucial, not the least since many teachers were not regular primary school teachers in the 19th century. in 1882, 46 percent of all teachers worked in junior schools in 1882 (bisos p 1882). therefore, when discussing the status or wages of teachers, it is crucial to clarify whether junior school or primary school teachers are being discussed. the positions as regular primary school teachers required formal training. in the 19th century, teacher training did not require more than the equivalent of having attended primary school. it may therefore be described as a kind of lower secondary education that expanded from a one-year program to a three-year program in 1862 and a four-year program in 1878 (bertilsson, 2019). in swedish language, these institutions were denoted as folkskoleseminarium, which indicated a link to the german schullehrseminar. unlike universities, these institutions did contribute to the field of higher education and science. instead, teachers were to be prepared by receiving an education that had the same form and content as they themselves should provide schoolchildren with (sörensen, 1942; see also linne, 2001). to denote these institutions that merely required primary education of some kind, meaning that these institutions were placed on a lower secondary level, the term teacher training schools is a suitable choice that enables a differentiation from the 20th-century teacher training colleges on an upper secondary or even higher education level (ogren, 1995; lefty, 2019). apart from the terms used to denote teachers and their training, one might also reflect on the terms used to denote the children attending school. while the terms pupil and student are often used as synonyms, pupil has in certain contexts been used to children on primary and secondary level, while student denotes those attending higher education. in the context of the history of 19th-century primary schooling, the terms pupils and school pupils does work very well (see, e.g., caruso, 2022; wright, 2012). the ambivalence of pupil and 152 global education review 10 (1-2) student may, however, be a reason to use the term schoolchild. in the context of 19th-century primary schools, it may also be useful to note what is meant by a pupil or a schoolchild. these terms are commonly used to denote children who regularly attend school (willms, 2014) and are formally enrolled in school: that is also the 21st century usage of the term. school enrolment rates are used to measure the latter, by relating the number of children enrolled in school to the entire population of school-aged children (baker & halabi, 2014). in the 19th century, for which primary school enrolment of children 7–14 in sweden has been estimated at 65 percent and attendance of enrolled pupils at 34 percent in 1868 (ljungberg & nilsson, 2009, tab. 1), such an understanding of pupils or schoolchildren might need to be nuanced. in statistical reports still preserved at the ministry of education and ecclesiastical affairs (ecklesiastikdepartementet), the terms pupil and schoolchild were not used. instead, a distinction was made between school-aged children “who are taught” (“som undervisas”), and school-aged children “lacking instruction” (“som sakna undervisning”) (see also the terms used by paulsson, 1866, 432). therefore, pupils or schoolchildren in this 19th-century context did not necessarily attend school regularly. instead, the definition was more akin to having been taught in a school during the past school year, in contrast to not having been taught in a school. consequently, the term used in the first major compilation of national school statistics (bisos p 1868, p. vii) was “skolbesökande barn” (literally, schoolvisiting children); that is, children who have visited or attended school during the past school year to some extent this definition informed the school statistics, which differentiated between children not attending school, and children attending school 1–60 days, 60–120 days, and above 120 days. as this typology indicates, all attendance above one school day meant that child was defined as a schoolchild (bisos p 1868, p. 2-3). therefore, when attempting to communicate the low attendance rates of 19thcentury schooling, school-visiting children could be an apt term to denote pupils in this context, in contrast to the schoolchildren of the twentieth century who were expected to attend school each school day. conclusion in this article, i have provided insights into some of the challenges that researchers face when they attempt to translate terms on the 19th-century school system to the english language. as this paper has shown, some of these challenges depend on the differences between various national 19th-century school systems, and others are due to the differences between 19th-century and 21st-century schooling. based on these challenges, i have suggested that primary school is an apt translation of the swedish folkskola. for those wishing to highlight the specific historical context, parish school is also recommended, unlike terms such as public school or state school. neither compulsory school nor common school are appropriate terms to describe these primary schools that were not compulsory, and were not organized as the us common schools. i have also provided suggestions for how to translate the terminology on school types, teachers, teacher training, and school children. apart from providing a basis for further discussions on the translation of the swedish 19th-century terminology, this article also adds to the literature on 19th-century school systems. in discussing the choice of english terms, i have neither compulsory nor public or national? 153 argued that we must be careful when choosing our terminology. most importantly, i have argued that we must use the term compulsory very carefully. if 19th-century schools were not compulsory, we should not use this term. i have also stressed the importance of acknowledging the existence of school types, and the regional character of 19th-century school systems. as a result, i have suggested that it might be valuable to describe the swedish mid19th-century primary schools as part of a largely ambulatory school system, and that we should present it as a regionalized school system, rather than national school systems. such considerations also include how to denote 19thcentury schoolchildren and their teachers. in order to capture their irregular attendance, it might be more apt to denote them as schoolvisiting children, rather than schoolchildren or pupils. when discussing swedish school teachers, we should distinguish between junior schoolteachers and primary school teachers since these two categories of teacher did not only have different training, but also were clearly differentiated in terms of status and wages during the 19th century. to conclude, these recommendations can only remain preliminary, not the least since our choice of 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(2023). developing and sustaining elementary stem teacher leadership identities. global education review, 10 (4), 37-55. developing and sustaining elementary stem teacher leadership identities kristen napolitano, mercy university amanda m. gunning, mercy university meghan e. marrero, mercy university elena nitecki, mercy university abstract growing emphasis on elementary stem education has pushed elementary teachers to face curriculum changes that focus on standards with which they are largely unfamiliar (smith, 2020; trygstad et al., 2013). as a result, elementary students are not always exposed to stem subjects or integration and miss out on opportunities to access and enjoy the hands-on, inquiry-driven activities that accompany them. this deficit disproportionally impacts high-need, urban districts that serve black and brown children and families, thus perpetuating inequities in stem education and careers (tate et al., 2012). to address these issues, we designed a fellowship program that strengthened k-12 stem teacher leadership in local, high-need, schools. in this paper, we take a closer look at how five elementary teachers took on stem teacher leader identities and then sustained and strengthened those even as program supports reduced. we asked: how do elementary teachers develop and sustain stem and leadership identities through participation in a master teacher fellowship? using positional identity and selfefficacy lenses, we interpreted focus group interviews, coursework, reflections, and fellowship meeting notes. findings suggest that elementary teachers developed their identities gradually—first, as they recognized themselves as stem teachers; next, as they recognized themselves as stem leaders; and then, as others recognized them as stem teacher leaders and positioned them to enact change in their schools and to support their colleagues. implications for teacher educators shed light on how elementary teachers can be best supported in increasing stem learning for their students across grade levels to effect school change. keywords stem teacher leadership, positional identity, self-efficacy, elementary teacher education introduction the increasing importance placed on elementary stem education has compelled elementary educators to confront curriculum adjustments centered around standards that may be unfamiliar to them (smith, 2020; trygstad et al., 2013). consequently, elementary students may not consistently encounter stem subjects or integration, or experience the handson, inquiry-driven activities associated with these disciplines. furthermore, these students may lose interest or motivation in pursuing stem pathways as a result. these challenges disproportionately affect high-need urban districts catering to black and brown children and families, thereby perpetuating disparities in stem education and career opportunities (tate 38 global education review 10 (4) et al., 2012). we developed a fellowship program to strengthen k-12 stem teacher leadership in local, high-need schools to directly address these challenges. in this program, k-12 teachers collaborated and worked individually to build their stem teacher leader identities while bringing more stem engagement to their classrooms. among the 14 teachers involved in this program, five elementary school teachers stood out as stem leaders. in this paper, we take a closer look at how these elementary teachers took on stem teacher leader identities and then sustained and strengthened those even as program supports reduced. through qualitative analysis, we asked: how do elementary teachers develop and sustain stem and leadership identities through participation in a master teacher fellowship? using positional identity and self-efficacy framing, we interpreted focus group interviews, coursework, reflections, and fellowship meeting notes. here, we noticed that our participating elementary teachers developed their identities gradually over the course of the fellowship— first, as they recognized themselves as stem teachers; next, as they recognized themselves as stem leaders; and then, as others recognized them as stem teacher leaders and positioned them to enact change in their schools and to support their colleagues. conceptual framing positional identity and self-efficacy framing offered perspectives that allowed us to see how teachers positioned themselves as stem teachers, how others positioned them as stem leaders, and how they gained confidence and strength in this evolving identity to support and encourage others to integrate stem education into their schools and districts. positional and professional identity a person can become or develop their identity depending on their participation in and recognition in discourses, institutions, and society (gee, 2000). identity can be shaped by many factors including shared experiences, upbringing, race, socioeconomic status, among numerous other visible and invisible sociopolitical, sociocultural factors (mensah, 2016; moore, 2008). in this paper we focused on professional and positional identity frameworks to guide our interpretation of teachers’ experiences as stem leaders. lave and wenger (1991) explain that personal identity development occurs over “long-term, living relations between persons and their place and participation in communities of practice. thus, identity, knowing, and social membership entail one another” (p. 52). when a person becomes a full participant in a particular community of practice, they are able to form an identity within that domain. this is often a change from lesser action to full action. for example, a teacher that first participates in a professional development may later identify as a leader in that area if they work to plan a professional development and then present it on their own. working towards understanding how teacher leadership is developed to support stem instruction is an important component of improving stem education (berg et al., 2014; joswick-o’connor, 2020). stem teacher leader positional identity development occurs as a person both recognizes themselves as a stem leader and as others recognize them as stem leaders (chen & mensah, 2018; hazari et al., 2015; holincheck & galanti, 2023). a teacher with a strong stem leader positional identity may describe themselves as such, offer guidance or support to others from the standpoint of a stem leader, or pursue stem leadership opportunities in their elementary stem teacher leadership 39 schools and districts. in addition, teachers with strong stem leader positional identities, may be positioned that way by others, including principals, colleagues, or students (chen & mensah, 2018; hazari et al., 2015; holincheck & galanti, 2023). for example, a stem teacher leader might be named as the “go-to” stem person in the school, appointed to a stem supervisor or coach job, or selected to serve on stem committees in the school or district. as we sifted through the data, we noted these types of contributions to our teachers’ stem leader positional identities and described them in our findings below. self-efficacy using self-efficacy as a lens, we examined participants’ confidence in their stem leadership development. bandura’s (1997) theory of self-efficacy has its origins in the field of psychology but has been used as a framework for studying teacher performance (dembo & gibson, 1985; tschannen-moran et al., 1998; tschannen-moran & hoy, 2007) and has been used to study elementary teachers specifically (gunning, 2010; gunning & moore mensah, 2011; deehan et al., 2019; knaggs, & sondergeld, 2015; riggs & enochs, 1990). the program of focus in this study, referred to in this paper as “the fellowship,” was created intentionally to build participant self-efficacy through particular elements including coursework, monthly meetings, and mentorship. figure 1 illustrates how we envisioned these programmatic elements aligned to bandura’s framework. bandura’s self-efficacy theory describes one’s beliefs regarding their ability to achieve a specified goal. if an individual believes they will succeed in a given task or attainment, they are more likely to do so (bandura, 1997). teachers’ perceived efficacy plays a role in leadership projects they undertake, and activities chosen for instruction. because self-efficacy is a good predictor of future performance, it follows that improved teacher self-efficacy will result in improved student learning and may result in improved stem instruction in the classroom and beyond (gunning, 2010; gunning & moore mensah, 2011; bandura, 1997). figure 1: bandura’s (1997) self-efficacy framework mapped to fellowship elements bandura describes four ways of building self-efficacy: mastery experiences, verbal persuasion, vicarious experiences, and psychological and affective states. mastery experiences are the most powerful way to develop self-efficacy and happen when an individual has the opportunity to enact the task being learned successfully, especially when witnessed by a trusted mentor. mastery experiences were built into the fellowship through microteaching assignments where teachers prepared stem lessons and enacted them in their classrooms and with their cohort peers. when a trusted mentor, in this case the teachers’ professor, encourages an individual that the task at hand can be successfully attained or provides actionable feedback, this is an element of verbal persuasion. vicarious 40 global education review 10 (4) experiences come from peers who are successful in the attainment and share their journey. the fellowship embedded vicarious experiences into class meetings with opportunities for collaboration, peer feedback, and vertically articulated unit design projects (gunning et al., 2020). positive psychological and affective states support self-efficacy development because it means the given attainment can be developed in a less stressful environment. mentoring and monthly meetings allowed these teachers to explore stem education in safe spaces throughout the fellowship. over the course of the fellowship, the components that supported stem teacher leader self-efficacy adjusted to meet the needs and shifting identities of the teachers. these adjustments are shared below, especially as they pertain to years 2-5, as part of the methodological framing for this study. professional development model the fellowship was designed using best practices for teacher professional development (pd), learned from both current literature and the research team’s prior work (hillman, et al, 2016; gunning & marrero, 2017; gunning, et al, 2020). darling-hammond and richardson (2009) find the most effective pd experiences for teachers are prolonged, promote insight into student learning, involve collaboration with other teachers, develop content understanding through hands-on work, and provide opportunities for classroom application. these elements were met through the fellowship design which included two years of coursework that involved collaboration, lesson planning and studies, and engineering and stem integration. all fellows also received three additional years of mentoring, monthly meetings, and financial support. further, other hallmarks of strong professional development are characterized as: deeply embedded in subject matter (in this case, stem); designed to involve active learning; able to connect teachers to their own practice (the fellowship accomplished this by enacting microteaching and leadership projects and reflection); and part of a coherent system of support (provided through courses, seminar and personal relationships with faculty, and monthly meetings with their mentors and cohort peers) (ball, 1996; garet et al., 1999; weiss & pasley, 2009). in addition to these best practices, the fellowship was structured with a gradual release model in mind. this model, which began in the reading and literacy field, focuses on how selfefficacy can be established through intentional, consistent shifting of responsibility from teacher to student (or in this case, faculty to fellow). gradual release as a strategy has since been studied as part of building teacher leadership identity and capacity (osmond-johnson, 2018; pearson & gallagher, 1983). at the beginning of the fellowship, supports included activities and assignments that served as mastery experiences, such as microteaching lesson planning, collaborative vertically articulated stem teaching presentations, and guided leadership projects. additionally, teachers received weekly encouragement, actionable feedback, and time to reflect with peers. over the course of the fellowship, and as the coursework portion of the program came to an end, these explicit supports slowly decreased or became more implicit. starting at the end of year 2, the fellows met monthly with their cohort peers and faculty to share vicarious experiences and continue to encourage one another. during these meetings, the fellows had many opportunities to collaborate and socialize while also receiving direct support from their designated mentors, all of whom had been their professors at one point in their coursework. in the three years following, monthly meetings and mentorship continued even as fellows largely initiated and conducted elementary stem teacher leadership 41 their own leadership projects. figure 2 maps out the fellowship design as it relates to gradual release. figure 2: gradual release model within the fellowship the program structure supported fellows to develop self-efficacy and their leadership identities in low-stakes, safe environments designed to bolster their confidence and gradually increase their independence. methods this study employed an interpretative case study method, which yielded rich, descriptive findings (guba & lincoln, 1989). our qualitative approach provided detail and nuance to support possible future replication and learning from our findings. through interpretation of data sources including focus groups, coursework, reflections, meeting notes, and observations, we asked: how do elementary teachers develop and sustain stem and leadership identities through participation in a master teacher fellowship? setting and participants this study took place during four years (2019-2023) of a five-year, grant-funded master teacher fellowship that supported the professional development of 14 prek12 teachers in stem teacher leadership. the initial goal of the program was to increase k-12 stem teacher leadership, thus improving stem teaching in schools. the case study followed five in-service elementary teachers of grades prek-5 from high-need districts with at least three years’ teaching experience who each participated in the fellowship. these teachers were state certified (as elementary generalists) and each had earned a master’s degree in education (as required for state teaching certification) and demonstrated exemplary teaching, based on transcripts and recommendations from supervisors and peers. of these five teachers, all identified as female, two identified as white and three identified as racially white and hispanic or latino in ethnicity. to participate in the grant-funded program, teachers had to apply and be accepted through a competitive process for a spot in one of two cohorts, each consisting of seven teachers. the fellowship served teachers in four highneeds school districts in the new york metro area. the first two years for each cohort were intensive as they completed three graduate courses (see table 1) while teaching full time and participated in co-curricular professional development. the professional development was provided through grant partners – an environmental organization and a local college of engineering – and was focused on stem teaching and meaningful connections to the real world. 42 global education review 10 (4) table 1: course descriptions for stem pedagogy courses course course description stem education this course explores applying stem education, for a compelling context for instruction in the classroom. the course will introduce theory and practice for teaching and assessing the integration of stem. participants will study stem education in the context of the history of reform movements in mathematics and science education. this course includes elements of theory and practice for teaching, learning and assessing science, technology, engineering, and mathematics instruction, as well as issues of equity in stem. participants explore connections among reform-based and contemporary practices in teaching, while learning to use technology as a tool for promoting student understanding. teaching engineering in this course, teachers will become proficient with the engineering design cycle and science and engineering practices, as outlined by the new (implemented sept. 2017) nys p-12 science standards. teachers will learn how to apply engineering practices to integrated projects for secondary students, while raising awareness of careers and innovations in engineering. students will demonstrate an understanding of history of engineering and its impact and shaping of society in the united states and globally. stem leadership this capstone course supports teachers in becoming leaders within their schools to assist other teachers and facilitate lesson study, professional learning communities, curriculum design, and peer feedback and coaching. teachers use a model of vertical articulation in which they engage in a cycle of collaborative coaching, reflection, and action research, to improve teaching and learning in their classroom. a major outcome of the program was to support fellows to take on leadership roles connected to stem in their schools and/or districts. program leaders used self-efficacy development supports (figure 1) and gradual release framing (figure 2) to move toward this goal. table 2 shows the timeframe of major program elements provided through the duration of teacher participation. continuing self-efficacy supports are mapped in figure 3 below that supported the gradual release approach. in addition, prior research on this fellowship revealed additional elements of the program as supporting self-efficacy development for teachers in general and these were included in figure 2 (gunning et al., 2021). figure 3 thus summarizes the connection of programmatic features to the modes of self-efficacy development, along with the gradual release elements in years 2-5. faculty members from the graduate school of education served as mentors for the fellows. these faculty each taught one of the three courses listed in table 1 and got to know the fellows very well. each faculty member also had all of a particular school district’s fellows for mentoring so that the nuances and challenges within the district could be understood across the site through each fellow’s experiences. mentors were required to meet with each fellow at least twice a semester by phone or zoom and complete an electronic form summarizing the conversation. in many cases, mentors also worked with their mentee fellows during the monthly meetings when the whole group broke out into smaller groups by district. this fellowship program exists within a stem education center run by graduate school of education faculty. elementary stem teacher leadership 43 figure 3: self-efficacy modes mapped to program supports table 2: timeline of major program activities activities years course instruction – two stem pedagogical methods courses, one leadership in stem course 1 & 2 fellows enact leadership projects supported by grant funds, when needed 2-5 mentoring of fellows 1-5 monthly meetings 2-5 data collection data was qualitative in nature to gain a detailed picture of how the fellows experienced shifts in their self-efficacy and identities throughout the course of the program. these data sources were collected initially as program artifacts (either for evaluation of the program or as coursework). the data, ordered chronologically, represents many benchmarks that occurred across the span of the fellowship, beginning with first semester reflections and ending with detailed meeting notes from faculty and staff in years 4 and 5 of the program. below are more details regarding each data source: focus groups the research team conducted focus group interviews throughout the fellows’ first two years of the program, at the end of each semester of their coursework. these 45minute, semi-structured interviews were initially intended for evaluation of the program but became an important part of this research as the teachers shared recurring ideas about their self-efficacy and leadership. focus group transcripts were stored chronologically on a secure, cloud-based document sharing platform. coursework over the first two years of the fellowship, the teachers completed coursework for the three required classes described above. the assignments in these courses were designed by faculty and members of the research team (three of whom taught the courses for the program). in the stem education course, their first of the program, teachers completed a stem autobiography and course reflection. in teaching engineering, teachers completed microteaching lessons and unit plans. in stem leadership, teachers completed a vertically articulated lesson plan and a leadership initiative project. these course artifacts were reviewed as archival data to provide a sense of teachers’ identities and self-efficacies from the beginning of the program to the end of the coursework component of the program. 44 global education review 10 (4) classroom observations the research team observed each teacher each year of the program. these were done via video recording, video conferencing, and in-person depending on the mutual convenience for the participants and researchers. all observations conducted during the covid-19 pandemic of 2020 and 2021 were done virtually even if classes were being held in person due to visitor restrictions at the time. observers did not use an observation protocol – this may have limited the scope of what observers noticed in their visits. meeting notes in year 2 of the program, fellows met monthly (as described in more detail above). during each of these meetings, members of the research team took notes to record observations and general ideas conveyed throughout the meeting. the meetings were not recorded, and researchers did not use a note-taking protocol. notes were intended for program evaluation and planning. in this study, they shed light on the nuanced changes that occurred gradually over the years as fellows shared monthly updates on their progress towards stem teacher leadership. together, these data illuminated experiences, attitudes, and practices of participants in their own words. their longitudinal scope allowed us to gain a fuller picture of how these fellows experienced stem teacher leadership and identified as stem leaders over the course of their participation in the program. analysis and trustworthiness we used a comparative case study approach to analyze the data (creswell & poth, 2018; yin, 2018). first, we sorted all electronic files of participant coursework and focus group interview transcripts and read through each, noticing broad categories and recurring comments, such as “collaboration” and “stemminded” (focus group and fellow reflections). after several passes, we consolidated these broad categories to solidify themes described below. during analysis, researchers’ (some of whom are fellowship faculty and/or mentors) experiences with each participant helped to inform and organize findings. also, findings from classroom observations were summarized and shared with participants to member check, another element of rigor and validity (lincoln & guba, 1985). because the data for this study is varied and multiple and collected over the course of several years, the study is characteristic of a rigorous qualitative study (creswell, 2007). these facets of the study also allow for triangulation (denzin, 1970; 1978), which may be drawn upon to increase rigor and assure validity. according to denzin (1978), this study employs “methodological triangulation” and “data triangulation” by using different types of data collection (surveys, observations, written work from activities and teacher lesson plans) over time within different settings (coursework, pd setting, classroom) (p. 472). preliminary findings and discussion as we interpreted data collected over the scope of the fellowship, we noticed themes across data sources that illustrated how the teachers had developed and strengthened their stem teacher self-efficacy and leader identities. these findings are categorized below into three themes: 1) realizing stem identity: mitigating imposter syndrome; 2) harnessing stem leader identity: advocating for more stem in school, and; 3) as positioned by others: sustaining as stem teacher leaders beyond the fellowship. each of these themes helped us describe the stories of these fellows' growth, development, and recognition as stem teacher leaders in their schools and districts during and towards the end of their fellowship program. elementary stem teacher leadership 45 realizing stem identity: mitigating imposter syndrome one of the biggest hurdles that elementary school teachers need to clear in realizing themselves as stem leaders is realizing themselves as stem teachers (holincheck & galanti, 2023). elementary teachers may not believe that they are masters of stem content or prepared to effectively teach stem. for many, they do not receive specific stem pedagogy preparation in their teacher certification process and, therefore, feel unprepared and overwhelmed by stem discourse and community (corp et al., 2020; holincheck & galanti, 2023; johnson et al., 2021). as we encountered this phenomenon in our work, we referred to it as stem teacher “imposter syndrome,” pulling from the idea that someone may experience a lack of belongingness or self-doubt as they try to adopt a new role or identity. it is worth noting that this phenomenon may be experienced more commonly by women, and disproportionately by women of color, especially in male-dominated fields, such as stem (collins et al., 2020). these feelings of self-doubt may be symptomatic of the oppressive male presence in stem and lack of support or encouragement by colleagues. this imposter syndrome was noticeable in the very first reflection the fellows completed for their stem education course. in their reflections, the fellows described their varied experiences, knowledges, and interests in teaching stem, yet they felt as though they were not confident enough to be stem leaders. one elementary math specialist, evie (pseudonyms used here on out for each of the five participating fellows) for instance, described years’ worth of introducing engineering challenges to her students for an annual national event, entering the program with concrete mastery experiences in teaching stem, but noted: i think i am just at the start of really understanding the approach of stem education. i feel like i have implemented activities in my classroom that are stem-like, but the actual stem approach is not consistently there…i still feel that i need further growth in understanding stem education in depth and consistently teaching in that mindset (reflection, 2019). even with several prior experiences and an institutional identity as math specialist, evie perceived these years of success in teaching stem as “just the start.” with that said, all of the elementary teachers were already contemplating and taking on roles as stem teachers in their schools. they exhibited an eagerness to enact stem teaching right away and moved more quickly into deeper understanding and application. participants exhibited positive self-efficacy for integrating content areas, implemented stem lessons immediately, and moved into thinking about leadership roles (instructor reflections). for instance, one p-3rd grade teacher, maeve, wrote in her reflection that, before the program, she had kept her distance from stem education. she wrote of her shifting perspectives on teaching stem: stem was always a wonder to me…over the years i have looked into learning more about stem but never pursued it, probably due to my poor academic history in science and math classes. as a teacher in a school where the population is 100% culturally and economically disadvantaged, i am now driven to expose my students to a challenging stem learning environment that engages their inquiry (course reflection, 2019). maeve went on to explain that when she first saw the advertisement for the fellowship, 46 global education review 10 (4) she did not apply because she did not see herself as a stem teacher. as she looked more into the program, she was drawn to the leadership component and decided to try out the stem that went along with it. through her coursework, maeve saw areas of her own practice that could lend themselves to more stem integration. while she expressed nervousness about introducing more stem, she was feeling more confident in her stem identity and in her ability to justify why doing more stem would be beneficial to her practice. as the fellowship continued, the elementary teachers became increasingly confident with the stem content. they began to realize that they were already masters of stem teaching. as one 1st-3rd grade teacher, elise, noted: “i am struck by how much i knew without realizing i knew [stem] before [the program]” (reflection, 2020). as year 1 of the fellowship unfolded, classroom observations of these teachers illustrated how they were beginning to realize their mastery of stem teaching. one 4th grade teacher, corrine, who initially described her experience with integrating stem as “uncomfortable,” designed an engineering design challenge that engaged students in creating water filters to address issues of accessibility to potable water (observation, december 2019). this lesson made space for conversations about drinking water and engaged students in working collaboratively to design methods for cleaning water to make it safe. corrine not only pushed herself out of her comfort zone, but also demonstrated her clear mastery of stem integration after just one semester in the program. the other four teachers also designed engaging, inquiry-driven stem lessons, including building and testing ramps in kindergarten, building towers in a math class, making butter in a 3rd grade social studies class, and exploring magnets as part of a materials engineering investigation (observations, 2019). in addition, in their focus group interview at the end of their first year in the program, the elementary teachers noted ways that they felt their stem identities expanding. for instance, cohort 2 fellows noted how engaging in stem lesson planning during the program pushed them further. maeve explained this noticeable growth: it was the first time i learned about 5e [a stem lesson planning tool] and so that was [a] productive struggle and i had never heard about that and yet it was a productive struggle and going through it together was comforting. knowing that it was the way of the future prepared us for what lessons we can use, and i did in fact try mine out with my children and it was useful that way. i loved the feedback (focus group, fall 2019). maeve’s description of this productive struggle illuminated her growing confidence as a stem teacher and the ways that lesson planning served as a mastery experience in the program by providing her both time to explore stem with her students and get feedback on the lesson from her peers and mentors. as the five elementary teachers moved into the 2020-2021 school year, they fearlessly took stem beyond their classrooms and began to harness their stem leader identities. harnessing stem leader identity: silent leaders to vocal stem advocates as the elementary teachers strengthened their stem identities, they also bolstered their identities as leaders. for these teachers, this meant shifting their roles as “silent” leaders to more vocal leaders, putting themselves in front of colleagues and administrators to advocate for more stem instruction and integration in their elementary stem teacher leadership 47 schools. they expanded their reach beyond their own classrooms to increase stem opportunities for children after school, in other classrooms, and in the summer. all five of the elementary teachers shared that the program helped bolster their self-confidence and ability to be an advocate for stem teaching approaches. for instance, corrine explained that her experience in the program made her feel more comfortable approaching her principal to increase stem opportunities for her students. she said: it’s made me want to be more vocal in school and i have a supportive principal, but i just feel like for the first time in 13 years, i have a voice and i speak up. (fall 2019, focus group) corrine showed that, even though many of the teachers in the fellowship already had an interest in leadership and in stem, they did not know how to take an active role in advocating for more stem in their buildings. over time, these elementary teachers took stem beyond their classroom walls to engage others in stem. elise, a 1st-4th grade science specialist shared a similar experience: i also think in ways, i’ve been a silent leader. does that make sense? so, like i push into some of my classes and i’ll do something and they’ll say, ‘oh, i’ve never thought of teaching a lesson in this way’ […] so i think i’ve silently been a leader in people seeing the way that i teach. (fall 2019, focus group). as elise continued through the program, she decided to launch an afterschool stem enrichment program that enrolled several cohorts of students. this leadership initiative went far beyond her initial silent leadership at the beginning of the program. similarly, the other elementary teachers made note of the effect that their teaching was having on their colleagues. for instance, in the same fall 2019 focus group, evie explained how, prior to her integrating stem teaching, other elementary teachers in her school typically skipped stem in their day because they didn’t feel as though they had time to introduce it, but once they saw her doing it, she noticed them spending more time trying to implement stem activities across their curriculum. in this way, she expressed a sense of being a role model for her colleagues in stem. these were encouraging mindset shifts and offered an insight into how their experiences in the program supported them in becoming stem teacher leaders. this was particularly noticeable in the ways that fellows described their leadership roles to us in their year 2 focus groups and yearend surveys. in the december 2020 focus group, a 3rd grade teacher, ava, explained that: i have always been interested in science and things like that, but i never really knew what my next steps could be to bring across that passion and bring across what i know in science and to inspire others. i think this course…helped prepare…that mindset that “ok i can do this and what i do know this is valuable regardless of how many years i have been teaching or not been teaching.” it prepared me for the idea that i could be a leader not just within my school, but within the community, within the science teaching community. ava’s growing confidence as a leader in teaching stem was supported through the coursework, in particular a vertically articulated unit plan design, she completed in the year 2 leadership course. as a result, ava felt that she could lead within her school district and with her colleagues and she felt that she was establishing a place as a leader in the community as well. 48 global education review 10 (4) even with noticeable growth among the teachers in their leadership identities, in 2021, fellows were still hesitant to describe themselves as leaders. when asked whether they had done any leadership activities over the course of the year, many initially said they had not (survey, 2021). nonetheless, in a february 2021 monthly meeting, the fellows shared the varied ways that they were enacting leadership throughout their districts. for example, ava was leading the development of a schoolwide pollinator garden and aligned ecology curriculum to support stem instruction, corrine and evie were launching a bilingual family stem workshop series at their school, and elise was designing a stem integrated literacy unit to support her english language learners. this sparked the research team to create a new survey tool that provided specific examples of leadership activities, such as leading professional development, attending or presenting at a conference, etc. when provided with this list, the teachers realized that they had in fact completed many of the activities. on average, the five fellows identified that they had each completed eight of the twenty-one listed activities over the course of the 2020-21 school year. this was even more impressive to us given how the pandemic contextualized much of this time and could have limited their accessibility to leadership roles. the following year, in 2022, fellows more readily identified themselves as leaders without extra prompting. they explained how they were running professional development for their districts, joining stem committees in their schools, attending and/or presenting at professional conferences, and facilitating clubs or afterschool family stem programs. in an october 2022 monthly meeting, ava explained how she was now part of three grant-funded leadership programs and working on expanding a bilingual family stem workshop to new grade levels at her school; elise was conducting training for teachers interested in facilitating a districtwide stem program she had launched the previous year and; evie had joined an additional leadership program where she was working with a team of teachers in her school to expand stem integration across the third grade (monthly meeting notes). a 2023 survey showed similar results, with each teacher reporting eight leadership activities on average. these results were compelling considering all of the program supports that had existed during the 2020-21 school year had lessened or ended completely as part of the gradual release design. as positioned by others: sustaining stem teacher leadership beyond the fellowship as the fellows progressed through the program, they experienced new positioning as leaders as their peers, mentors, and administrators turned to them as stem experts. this positional identity was reinforced early on by the fact that one of the lead faculty and mentors in the program was an early childhood education professor. at the same time, an unanticipated factor that shaped elementary stem leader identity was the way that their peers, secondary teachers, positioned them as leaders. this was evident in the fellows’ leadership course where they worked together in vertically articulated professional learning groups (vplcs). this approach was designed to model previous iterations of vertical alignment in our other stem leadership programming (gunning et al., 2020). while working in vplcs allowed the elementary teachers to gain confidence in stem and in their teaching, it also shifted secondary teachers’ perspectives of their peers. for instance, in focus groups, secondary teachers cited the vplcs and peer feedback as important components of the course and of their professional development. the elementary elementary stem teacher leadership 49 school teachers were positioned by the secondary school teachers as stem integration experts. ava recognized this positioning as she explained: [we] really [saw] the strengths that an elementary, middle school, [and] high school…teacher bring in…as an elementary school teacher i needed resources that, if i were to google when i was teaching, would seem like, “this is all for high school, i can’t use this,” but [a middle school science teacher] said “look at this one and do this.” we all brought our strengths to the table. (focus group, fall 2019) during the vplc activities, the secondary teachers helped the elementary teachers troubleshoot as they searched for stem resources that could be aligned to their grade levels. in this case, ava and a middle school teacher collaborated and realized each other’s challenges and strengths. this developed a symbiotic relationship where, when designing activities, the elementary teachers guided their peers away from their content silos and through the process of weaving stem into their curriculum while the secondary teachers helped navigate the barriers that pervade online stem education resource platforms. this relationship continued throughout the scope of the program. in a february 2023 meeting, elise offered to help the middle school and high school fellows from another district in running vertically aligned professional development for their teachers. this seemed to be a significant shift from the beginning of the program when conducting professional development, even for grade level colleagues, may have seemed daunting for elise: as i look into the future, i continue to have goals not only for myself as a stem educator but also for my district. i hope that through these classes, i am able to find ways to not only turnkey professional development to my colleagues but come up with a district plan of implementation. through this course, i have realized that i cannot do this alone and need support from administrators, parents, and teachers to make a real shift in mentality and teaching. (reflection, 2019) this intention set at the very start of elise’s journey towards stem leadership was becoming a part of her identity as she volunteered to share her stem expertise with the secondary fellows nearly four years later. throughout the fellowship, it was important that fellows gained positional identity in their schools and districts. while the teachers were beginning to recognize themselves as leaders towards the end of their coursework in 2020, they were finding that their principals and other administrators were not acknowledging them as leaders. for instance, in a november 2020 meeting, fellows described how their principals were not taking them or their concerns seriously and how the time they were promised to conduct professional development with their colleagues was being taken away for other programming. while the fellows were prepared to take on leadership roles, their administrators held them back. we speculated at the time that this might have been due to issues caused by the pandemic and new administrative priorities that came to a head as a result. a common issue among grant funded programs is the fact that once program funding, support, and professional development ends, so do all the achievements and changes that the program brought about (flint, 2017). in many situations, once the championing program concludes, the participating teachers lose steam, administrative support, and even some of their positional identity as others forget their accomplishments in the program. this was a big 50 global education review 10 (4) fear of ours as the bulk of the program supports began to abate in 2022. the only remaining supports were stipends, mentor relationships, and monthly meetings. the coursework and weekly meetings ended in 2021, yet the fellows’ stem leadership identities continued to grow. in monthly meetings fellows shared their updates with us on their leadership initiatives. many departed from their guided leadership projects that started in their courses to take on even bigger roles in their schools and districts. for instance, fellows initiated steam fairs or other events in their schools, created family math initiatives, and were asked to present their work at school board meetings (monthly meeting notes, 2022;2023). while the implicit positioning by the program facilitators remained, other people in the fellows’ lives began to explicitly position them as leaders. this was evident in the way that fellows were brought onto stem committees at their schools, consulted as stem experts for curriculum and professional development for other teachers, or named as district-wide stem representatives (monthly meeting notes 2022;23). in the february 2023 meeting, fellows overwhelming noted the principal supports that they were receiving. for example, elise, who was running a large afterschool stem program that began earlier in the fellowship, reported that she had received additional funding from her school to expand the program. corrine, who had been running a bilingual family stem workshop series, was granted funding to run a coding club and to train six teachers to help her with implementation. at the same school, evie had received support to conduct a full-day professional development to expand stem programming across the school. she said this was the first time her principal had dedicated this much professional development time to stem (monthly meeting notes, february 2023). these shifts were significant given how little fellows had mentioned principal or administrator support in the past. this administrative support provided fellows with funding, time, and recognition that they otherwise would not have gotten in the past. discussion studies have long shown that elementary teachers generally do not feel prepared to teach science and engineering, and frequently feel apprehensive about stem content (corp et al., 2020; holincheck & galanti, 2023; johnson et al., 2021). however, over the course of the program, elementary teacher fellows in this study evolved as stem leaders, taking on stem identities, growing as stem advocates, and finally being recognized by others as stem teacher leaders. this gradual transformation is powerful and seems to have led to sustained growth and shifts in identity, demonstrating that targeted professional development designed to improve teachers’ selfefficacy and leadership skills can be effective (catalano et al., 2019; cervato & kerton, 2007; manner, 1998; yasar et al., 2006; yesilyurt et al., 2021). it is worth noting that secondary teacher fellows continued to hit roadblocks in their leadership goals throughout the program. in particular, a high school fellow was continuously met with challenges, including a major lack of administrative support, consistency, or funding (monthly meeting notes, 2022;23). another high school fellow was ignored as a leader in her district and felt forced to leave teaching altogether after many years of persisting through countless defeats (monthly meeting notes, 2022). this is to say that the fellowship program supports can only float fellows so far. without the administrative scaffolds to bolster their positional identities, fellows cannot sustain their roles as leaders, silent or otherwise. we find it interesting that elementary stem teacher leadership 51 this lack of support seemed to be even more oppressive at the secondary education level. we wonder what other factors at the elementary school level have allowed our elementary teacher fellows to persist even amidst the pressures of standardized testing and a heavy focus on english language arts and math skills. the fellowship program has shown these fellows that they can be and should be leaders in their districts, it has allowed them to recognize themselves as leaders and seek that recognition from their administrators. with continued recognition, we expect that these fellows will continue to grow and strengthen their stem leadership identities. as we continue to analyze the data from years 5 and 6, we see these teachers blossoming into full-fledged leaders in their schools and districts. since inception, two have become coaches for their elementary school (one stem and one math); one has been awarded a grant to start an afterschool stem program for elementary that was so successful she was asked to expand it for more grade levels; three have worked to lead a family stem engagement program across their district; one has been accepted to another computer science for elementary fellowship; and all of the participants have improved stem instruction, particularly in the areas of technology and engineering (monthly meeting notes, 2022, 2023). conclusion and implications as leaders in the field of stem education considers how to support stem for all learners, strong teacher leaders can help push change from within schools. elementary stem education continues to shift as policy shifts emphasize next generation science standards in curriculum and assessment. in the instance of this study, new york state has already fully integrated the new york state science learning standards (nyssls) and, just this year, the board of regents released preparation materials for the newly nyssls-aligned 5th grade state exams which have a distinct focus on science and engineering practices (https://www.nysed.gov/curriculuminstruction/science-standards-implementationresources). the fellows in this study were well positioned to pivot with these policy changes and to help others in their adjustment to a new scope and sequence. in fact, anecdotally all five of these fellows have shared the ways that their administrators have turned to them for guidance as these changes unfold in the 2023-24 school year. their stem leadership identities persist and grow as they are comfortable now with taking on professional development initiatives, stem enrichment programming, and family and community outreach. implications for elementary and childhood educators suggest that programming such as this is critical in developing stem teacher leadership skills and identities. collaborative, vertically articulated, and leadership-focused elementary stem leadership programming is necessary in preparing teachers for a growing and everchanging stem education landscape. acknowledgement this material is based upon work supported by the national science foundation under grant #1758317. references ball, d. l. 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(2018). case study research and applications: design and methods (6th edition). sage. https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00299-8 https://doi.org/10.1186/s40594-021-00299-8 “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 138 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: krengel, fabian. (2021). “glocal education” through virtual exchange? training pre-service efl teachers to connect their local classrooms to the world and back. global education review, 8 (2-3), 138-153. “glocal education” through virtual exchange? training preservice efl teachers to connect their local classrooms to the world and back fabian krengel georg-august-universität göttingen (germany) abstract a key goal of global education in language teaching is to “have students ‘think globally and act locally’” (cates, 2013, p. 278) – an idea in line with the concept of glocality. virtual exchange – i.e. connecting learners with different lingua-cultural backgrounds over extended periods of time via digital communication technologies (the evaluate group, 2019) – is a promising approach towards this aim. o’dowd suggests designing such exchanges following a “transnational model” (2019) in which learners collaborate on shared tasks based on local and global real-world problems using a lingua franca. these ideas are compatible with european policy discourses on global education (schreiber & siege, 2016), aiming at supporting learners in becoming agents of change in an increasingly globalized world. within the context of a trilateral project between universities in germany, turkey, and sweden, this paper explores how global education can be integrated into foreign language teaching with the help of virtual exchanges through a synthesis of two models of virtual exchange (o’dowd & ware, 2009; o’dowd, 2019) and the complex competence task approach (hallet, 2012) to task-based language teaching. a transnational virtual exchange between these universities exemplifies how such a telecollaborative project can be implemented. during the exchange, pre-service efl teachers compare and analyze cultural practices and educational frameworks to design tasks dealing with global issues that can be implemented in their respective local classrooms through virtual exchange. keywords virtual exchange; telecollaboration; foreign language teaching; task-based language teaching; global education introduction foreign language1 teachers and researchers advocating for incorporating issues of global education into foreign language 1 although this paper focuses on settings in which english is taught as a foreign language, the author encourages teachers of english as a second language to ponder the potential benefits of virtual exchange teaching (flt) deem physical mobility, such as school trips and exchange programs, a considerable step towards ‘internationalizing’ local classrooms. cates, for example, organized for their profession. ve can be applied in all teaching english to speakers of foreign languages (tesol) contexts. “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 139 139 “an asian youth forum (ayf) which brings together students from across asia to build friendships, break down stereotypes, and discuss global issues all through the medium of englishas-an-asian language” (2004, p. 3). in a similar vein, education policymakers around the world set goals to significantly increase student mobility rates: in europe, for example, the bologna declaration of 1999 aimed at achieving a 20% international mobility rate among all higher education students from 49 countries by 2020. in the united states, comparable targets were formulated by the institute of international education (de wit, 2016, p. 72). however, even before the coronavirus pandemic led to major restrictions on student mobility programs (international association of universities, 2020), only a minority of students participated in them: both in europe and the us, the rate of students who attained credits towards their degrees from study abroad programs rested around only 10% (de wit, 2016, p. 72; eurydice, 2020). given the potential benefits of transnational communication and transcultural contact towards the reduction of barriers between peoples, nations, and regions (li, 2013), there is an urgent need to offer more opportunities for learners to engage in such praxis. with the discussion of a teacher education project between three universities, this paper proposes transnational virtual exchanges via computer-mediated communication (cmc) as a viable complement to physical mobility programs for fostering global competences. the project described in this paper follows modern models of virtual exchange (ve) – a specific approach of cmc with an emphasis on sustained collaboration between learners with different lingua-cultural backgrounds across geographic distances (o’dowd, 2018). between october 2020 and february 2021, preservice teachers (psts) of english as a foreign language (efl) from the university of göttingen, germany, uppsala university, sweden, and hacettepe university, turkey participate in a trilateral ve project. this exchange focuses on the collaborative creation of efl teaching sequences and classroom materials dealing with global issues within the framework of the sustainable development goals (sdgs) as declared by the united nations (2015). over multiple months of close collaboration in transnational teams, this project aims to develop the psts’ english language, intercultural, digital-pedagogical, and global competences. by participating in a ve, they learn to design and implement their own ves with efl learners in secondary education in a manner that agrees with their respective local or regional educational policies. through this cross-border collaboration on the common struggles and interests of efl teachers in the 21st century, the psts find ways to meaningfully integrate global topics and voices in their local classrooms. as this exchange had not started at the time of writing, this paper outlines the theoretical foundation of our project as well as specific steps taken towards its implementation. we begin by contextualizing global education within traditions of flt, followed by a discussion of the ve approach and its potential to support global education aims in flt. we then discuss how approaches to task-based language teaching (tblt) can further support integration of global education in flt, also within the context of ve design. the final section details the implementation process todate, including challenges and solutions, and the structure of the ve. 140 global education review 8 (23) global education and foreign language teaching efforts to integrate global education into flt gained more widespread momentum in the 1980s and are often founded on the idea that foreign languages enable learners to actively participate in transnational discourses on global issues like climate change or the ongoing coronavirus pandemic (cates, 2013). foreign language competences can enable learners to understand relevant texts – including news reports, political statements, or scientific publications – and empower them to participate and interact in global activist networks like the fridays for future movement (freitag-hild, 2019, p. 5). english is considered especially relevant in this regard due to its status as the most widespread lingua franca in the world (cates, 2004; elsner, 2018), which is why efl teachers and researchers in particular have been looking for ways to design “international classroom[s]” (cates, 2004, p. 1) that account for the goals of global education. for our trilateral project, we subscribe to cates’ division of these goals across four domains: 1. knowledge about world countries and cultures, and about global problems, their causes and solutions; 2. skills of critical thinking, cross-cultural communication, cooperative problem solving, conflict resolution, and the ability to see issues from multiple perspectives; 3. attitudes of global awareness, cultural appreciation, respect for diversity, and empathy; 4. action: the final aim of global learning is to have students ‘think globally and act locally’. (cates, 2013, p. 278) three modern approaches to flt that offer promising interfaces for the integration of global education approaches are communicative language teaching, content orientation, and the concept of the “intercultural speaker” (freitaghild, 2018, p. 164). in the 1970s, the communicative turn in flt in germany led to a departure from an excessive emphasis on pattern drills, grammatical rules, text-based translation exercises and native speaker-like pronunciation practice – that is, a strong focus on linguistic form – to instead concentrate on enabling learners to “actively use the foreign language in meaningful communicative situations” (elsner, 2018, p. 19). language learners were no longer expected to merely improve their skills to listen, read, speak, and write in a foreign language but to develop their communicative and intercultural competences. following weinert’s definition, competences encompass both declarative and procedural knowledge, skills, strategies and – crucially – motivational, volitional, affective, and social aspects (2001). the goal is thus for students to learn to use the target language respectfully in communicative situations while also developing an open and curious attitude that supports their willingness to engage with speakers from other lingua-cultural backgrounds (byram, 1997). providing language learners with relevant content to discuss and negotiate is a key step towards creating opportunities in which meaningful communication can take place within the confines of a brick-and-mortar classroom (kolb & raith, 2018, p. 203). proponents of global education in flt suggest that such content-based teaching should focus on global issues, e.g. through discussions of human rights, environmental issues, or world peace (cates, 2004, p. 2) as meaningful comprehension of and participation within these “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 141 141 transnational discourses requires foreign language competences (hallet, 2013). another step towards global education in flt is enabling target-language communication with people from different lingua-cultural backgrounds, e.g. with the help of physical mobility (cates, 2004, p. 3). however, even without the severe mobility restrictions in the wake of covid-19, several reasons keep students from engaging in study abroad visits. these include insufficient funds, a lack of time set aside for exchanges within existing educational programs, the absence of opportunities such as established exchange partnerships between institutions, or a lack of interest on the part of individual students (o’dowd, 2006, p.10). thus, there is a need to ensure that more students can experience learning environments based on authentic lingua-cultural exchanges. virtual exchange, “an innovative and new pedagogical technique” (the stevens initiative, 2020, p. 4), strives to be a more inclusive and less expensive alternative and complement to physical mobility programs that can reach a wider audience of students by leveraging the affordances of modern information and communications technology (ict) for learning (jager, nissen, helm, baroni, & rousset, 2019, p. 29). virtual exchange, telecollaboration, and flt a growing body of research supports the idea that engaging learners in ve projects can lead to learning outcomes in line with the goals of current approaches to flt. these include the development of learners’ receptive and productive competences, their lexical knowledge, grammatical accuracy, and confidence, as well as their intercultural communicative competence (icc) (the evaluate group, 2019; the stevens initiative, 2020). due to its status as a relatively new pedagogic approach, researchers and practitioners refer to the practice by many names, including telecollaboration, online intercultural exchange (oie) (o’dowd, 2007), and collaborative online international learning (coil) (guth & rubin, 2015). while telecollaboration remains a dominant designation in the context of flt, virtual exchange is increasingly being used and understood as the main umbrella term which is why this paper uses both terms synonymously (o’dowd, 2018, p. 5). virtual exchange is defined as the practice of connecting learners with different lingua-cultural backgrounds over extended periods of time via digital communication technologies as an integrated part of their curriculum and under guidance from experts (the evaluate group, 2019). while ve is increasingly applied in a wide variety of contexts beyond language learning, flt practitioners generally choose to implement ves to foster their students’ “foreign language competence, intercultural communicative competence and digital competence” (o’dowd, 2018, p. 6). based on interactionist and sociocultural theories of language acquisition, ves are viewed as a way “to facilitate negotiation of meaning … [and] to provide authentic experiences of intercultural communication” (o’dowd, sauro, & spectorcohen., 2019, p. 147), whereas use of technology to such communicative ends is considered to foster digital literacy. in the context of teacher education, ve can thus be a tool to develop technological pedagogical content knowledge (tpack) (the evaluate group, 2019) which includes the “ability to design technology-based tasks [and] the competence of pedagogically informed tool choice and integration” (hauck, müller-hartmann, rienties, & rogaten, 2020, p. 30). research indicates an “interdependence between multimodal communicative 142 global education review 8 (23) competence and intercultural communicative competence development in telecollaboration” (ibid., p. 8): if learners are proficient in choosing and using technology for intercultural communication and understanding in ve settings, they are “likely to experience comparatively higher levels of intercultural knowledge gain” (hauck, 2007, p. 221). sadler (2020) summarizes the potential of ve as follows: as educators, one of our goals should be to encourage our students to attain a better sense of ‘the other’, and telecollaborative exchanges are one of our best tools to do so. by connecting individuals across the world and getting to know them and their cultures they may shift from ‘others’ to friends. (sadler, 2020, p. 224) despite its educational potential, ve remains an uncommon practice in higher education, conducted only by a minority of practitioners. chief reasons are a lack of awareness among stakeholders and insufficient support structures for interested parties (jager et al., 2019). while ve is considered to be easier to realize than physical exchange programs (li, 2013), effective implementation depends on more than the existence of a reliable ict infrastructure: practitioners need to establish and maintain working relationships with distant partners and design their exchanges not only in a way that is compatible across time zones and calendars, but also in agreement with the respective syllabi, learning goals, understandings of pedagogy, and needs of all participants. conducting the necessary needs analysis and effectively merging curricula across national borders is a timeand labor-intensive endeavor (sadler, 2020). the choice of modes of communication is a key consideration for ve practitioners. an exchange can take place both synchronously or asynchronously via different modalities, including text-based (e.g. instant messaging or internet forums) or audiovisual (e.g. video conferencing). these engagements generally last multiple weeks to months to facilitate trusting relationships between all participants (corbett, 2007) and to allow for ample time for “inclusive, intercultural collaboration and dialogue, that bridges differences and distances and inspires action with a long term positive impact” (jager et al., 2019, p. 8). in line with the tenets of learner orientation – an approach to flt that seeks to develop learner autonomy by aligning instruction with the preferences, dispositions, interests, and identities of individual learners (bonnet, 2018) – the diverse sets of ve participants and their respective needs are at the center of each telecollaborative project. ves in this way follow “the philosophy of dialogue where participants are the main recipients and the main drivers of knowledge; … [they] will be seeking mutual understanding and co-creating knowledge, based on their own experiences” (jager et al., 2019, p. 8). to reach as many learners as possible, guth stresses the need for explicit curricular integration of ve (2016, p. 96). ideally, this process goes beyond offering ve as a voluntary ‘add-on’ and instead setting it up as an integral part of existing classes and an opportunity to receive “academic recognition” (the evaluate group, 2019, p. 109). in higher education, this can be realized by having students earn credits towards completion of their degree by participating in classes involving ve. the ambitious goals of ve are not an automatic result of mere contact between students from different countries through ict. carefully structured exchange sequences ensure “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 143 143 the desired learning outcomes. a wellestablished approach is the progressive exchange model (o’dowd & ware, 2009) which consists of “three interrelated tasks which move from information exchange to comparing and analysing cultural practices and finally to working on a collaborative product” (o’dowd, 2007, p. 40). the first stage acts as an ‘icebreaker’ phase in which participants exchange personal information with each other to establish a trusting online environment. the second phase, focused on comparison and analysis, usually requires a greater deal of linguistic and cultural negotiation of meaning in that participants “carry out comparisons or critical analyses of cultural products from [all participating] cultures” (o’dowd & ware, 2009, p. 175). this phase provides opportunities for participants to “develop their ability to communicate effectively in intercultural contexts” (the evaluate group, 2019, p. 13). the final stage is the collaborative creation of a shared product, such as co-authored essays, joint digital presentations, or lesson plans. agreeing on an outcome within transnational teams generally demands the highest level of negotiation of meaning, which is why this phase usually aims to foster abilities to think and analyze critically and to collaborate in diverse groups (ibid.). beyond designing and implementing ves in ways that support their learning goals, teachers should act as facilitators that motivate and support participants. in a study on the role of mentoring in ve, o’dowd et al. discuss that learners “report further learning and reflection” when teachers actively react to situations and critical incidents as they arise during the international exchange by openly discussing these moments in the local classroom (2019, p. 169). according to grau and turula (2019), experiential learning through participation in ve is a suitable approach to develop the necessary “telecollaborative competences” (o’dowd, 2015) of psts. virtual exchange for global education? while ve has been shown to be an effective tool for the development of intercultural communicative competence (o’dowd, 2007) – e.g. attitudes like openness and curiosity, knowledge about cultural practices, and skills to successfully interact in cross-cultural communication (byram, 1997, pp. 49-55) – it is less frequently discussed in the explicit context of global education, especially among flt practitioners and researchers. from a business studies perspective – another major subject area for ve next to flt (o’dowd, 2018) – li (2013) conducted an experimental study on the development of global competences during a telecollaborative exchange between american and chinese students. the study acknowledges that “the higher education community has not yet reached an agreement on the operational definition of global competence” (ibid., p. 126), prompting the researchers to develop an instrument to measure global competence development in areas including understanding of global issues, cross-cultural communication skills, and appreciation of cultural diversity (li, 2013, pp. 130-131). results indicated improvements among all participants in the treatment group which shows that ve can act as an efficient and relatively inexpensive tool to foster global competences (li, 2013, pp. 138139). however, the model at the center of li’s study only accounts for three dimensions – attitudes, skills, and knowledge (2013, pp. 130131) –, omitting the fourth domain of global education goals: instigating action. with his transnational model of virtual exchange for global citizenship education, o’dowd (2019) supports the notion that ve has the potential to foster competences in line with both li’s concept 144 global education review 8 (23) and, in particular, the aims of global education, stressing the need to also account for the action domain. with reference to byram’s distinction between pre-political and political levels of intercultural action (2008, pp. 212-213), o’dowd defines the desired types of action as follows: [g]lobal or intercultural citizenship approaches […] involve learners either instigating change in their own societies based on their collaborations with members of other cultures or actually working with members of other cultures as a transnational group in order to take action about an issue which is common to both societies. (o’dowd, 2019, p. 21) o’dowd’s transnational model presents characteristics that ves should possess to increase their effectiveness. the model thus addresses shortcomings of traditional, often bilingual and bicultural ve projects resulting in superficial exchanges between participants with “limited success in the development of intercultural awareness and understanding” (ibid., 4). citing kramsch, he stresses that “[i]t is no longer appropriate to give students a touristlike competence to exchange information with native speakers of national languages within well-defined national cultures” (kramsch, 2008, p. 251 in o’dowd, 2019, p. 8). instead, the model seeks to address the needs of current language learners who are “increasingly likely to use a language such as english … with non-native speakers as a lingua franca in their future employment” (ibid., p. 7). with respect to global inclusivity, an increased focus on lingua franca exchanges increases the likelihood that “language educators working in countries where their national languages are less in demand [engage in ve praxis]” (ibid.). to these ends, o’dowd proposes seven criteria to guide ve design. these criteria significantly informed the design of our trilateral ve project: • creating opportunities for rich intercultural interaction which can include but is not limited to bicultural/bilingual comparison • establishing partnerships across a wide range of linguistic and cultural backgrounds and using lingua franca for communication with these partners • encouraging learners to engage with themes which are of social and political relevance in both partners’ societies • enabling students to work with their international partners to undertake action and change in their respective local and global communities • including ample opportunities for guided reflection of the intercultural encounters in the classroom • being integrated and recognised part of course work and institutional academic activity • increasing awareness to how intercultural communication is mediated by online technologies and how social media can shape the creation and interpretation of messages. (o’dowd, 2019, p. 23) “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 145 145 task-based language teaching and complex competence tasks whereas the models presented above offer important guidance for larger design elements of ves, the tblt approach provides valuable input on task design specifics. we propose a specific approach to tblt – the complex competence task (cct) concept (hallet, 2013) – as a promising framework for the design of transnational ves dealing with global issues. tblt is an flt approach that “emphasizes the importance of engaging learners’ natural abilities for acquiring language incidentally as they engage with language as a meaning-making tool” (ellis, skehan, li, shintani, & lambert, 2020: 1). the focus is less on linguistic form and more on successful communication, e.g. as required when using english as a shared lingua franca to complete tasks within a transnational ve. in such a setting, flawless grammar may not be required for two or more students with different first languages to understand each other in order to complete their task. in this context, a task is “an activity in which a person engages in order to attain an objective, and which necessitates the use of language” (van den branden, 2006, p. 4). grammar drills and contextless translation exercises, by contrast, are not considered tasks in this sense. o’dowd supports the value of taskbased designs in ve: “research has proven that … the negotiation of meaning and the resultant learner modifications are much more prevalent in goal-oriented, task-based interaction than in usual conversation” (pellettieri, 200, p. 64 in o’dowd, 2007, p. 11). hallet’s cct concept is a tblt approach based on the premise that selfactualization and the ability to participate in sociocultural and political processes in the globalized reality of the 21st century necessitates the command of foreign languages. therefore, a central objective of all formal education should be the development of foreign language discourse competences (hallet, 2013, p. 3), i.e. “the ability to actively, critically and adequately participate in oral and written communication” (elsner, 2018, p. 31). hallet posits six key characteristics of ccts that should inform task designs to foster such competences. in line with the principle of content orientation, ccts should explicitly deal with topics and issues that are both relevant to the learners and topical. in secondary education, such topics could for example be the issue of climate change and the school strikes enacted by young fridays for future activists, or the ongoing covid-19 pandemic and its impact on the education and social life of young learners. second, ccts should mirror the complexity of these real-world discourses by tasking the learners with conceptualizing potential solutions for real-world problems. this also means that students should be asked to work with authentic materials through a variety of multimodal media, including newspaper articles, diagrams, or video documentaries. as “commonly accepted language learning theories … suggest that languages are learned best in complex communicative situations (elsner, 2018, p. 20), ccts aim to develop the learners’ competences in an integrated manner by demanding the students to make use of both productive and receptive competences while working on the cct. additionally, ccts offer “scaffolding” that supports learners if need be (hallet, 2013, p. 5), e.g. in the form of learning strategies or lexical information. fourth, ccts target the initiation of three types of processes: cognitive processes are necessary for understanding the complex contents; linguistic-discursive processes center around linguistic expression and negotiations of linguistic meanings; and social-interactional processes related to the negotiation of cultural 146 global education review 8 (23) meaning and agreement with peers for the purpose of problem solving and, ultimately, task completion. while ccts always contain an overarching task culminating in the creation of a final product, they neither provide a ‘model solution’, nor is there only a single correct answer given the underlying complexity of respective problems. instead, ccts only specify the generic form of the final product, e.g. “wall display, essay, dialogue” (ibid.) while encouraging learners to find a variety of potential solutions. finally, ccts support learners in creating this product by structuring their work process with a clear task instruction that outlines subordinate activities. for example, if learners are tasked with creating their own video report on water pollution, sub-tasks could consist of guided web research, conducting interviews, and perusal of classroom materials provided by the teacher (hallet, 2013, pp. 4-5). conceptual overlap between cct and ve for global education the design of the teaching project discussed in this paper rests on the assumption that there is significant conceptual overlap between the cct concept, modern models of ve, and global education. this section briefly highlights key connections between them to explain the rationale informing our design decisions. both the progressive exchange model and the concept of the cct put major focus on the creation of a final product. the integrated approach to competence development inherent to ccts, as well as the explicit goal to initiate social-interactional processes among learners, lend themselves well to tasks designed with pair and teamwork in mind. such interaction is an inherent quality of modern approaches to ve, especially the third phase of the progressive exchange model. o’dowd’s transnational model stresses the need to confront ve participants with realworld issues that are relevant and meaningful to all participants. this is in line with the first characteristic of a cct: topicality and relevance. as a fundamentally learner-oriented approach to task design, the cct concept emphasizes the importance of connecting local classrooms with world problems and, ideally, enabling students to participate in actual discourses, e.g. if the final goal of their cct is to create a flyer to inform about local ecological issues related to climate change or aspects of ethical consumption. further, both the cct concept and o’dowd’s transnational model define the foreign language as a communicative tool to be used by learners with common interests and problems to find potential solutions. consequently, spelling mistakes or grammatical inaccuracies do not automatically result in a lower grade if learners still understand each other despite linguistic or cultural differences and geographic distances. finally, hallet’s concept contributes to a blurring of the lines between language-focused instruction and content-focused instruction. with its emphasis on content-based instruction, the cct concept aligns with the idea of content and language integrated learning (clil). clil is “a dual focused educational approach in which an additional language is used for the learning and teaching of both content and language” (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010, p. 1) that aims to prepare students for life and work in a globalized society, to teach “values of tolerance and respect”, and to immerse learners in the target language in a way that stresses “effective communication, motivating them to learn languages by using them for real practical purposes” (elsner, 2018, p. 35). in germany, clil-based instruction has been growing in “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 147 147 popularity since at least the 1990s (rönneper & bopré, 2015, pp. 66-67). due to its intrinsic focus on world issues and the relationships between local, regional, and global spatial scales, geography remains the subject most frequently taught in clil settings (streifinger, 2013, p. 13).therefore, we chose to collaborate with psts of geography for our project. putting a transnational ve on global education for pre-service efl teachers into practice the final section of this paper describes and discusses the process to date of designing and implementing a transnational ve for future efl teachers at the university of göttingen with partners in turkey and sweden. after an overview of the goals behind this endeavor, we describe the design decisions informing our ve, followed by a discussion of the implementation process. the first goal is to offer our student teachers more opportunities for international experiences that require them to use their future language of instruction in authentic contexts. while all psts at the university of göttingen are required to study or teach abroad for at least three months prior to graduation, most students opt to spend this time in the united kingdom or the united states. our exchange aims for them and their international colleagues to experience english as a lingua franca by working with other non-native speakers. beyond fostering their linguistic competences, we seek to develop their intercultural and digital-pedagogical competences through participation in the ve, thus enabling them to conduct their own transnational ves in their future careers as efl teachers. together with the psts, we aim to explore the idea of using ve as a tool to introduce global education into language classrooms. design principles of the transnational ve to engage our participants in a ve that is both relevant to them while also being in line with global education goals and modern telecollaborative approaches, we decided that the transnational teams – consisting exclusively of non-native speakers of english communicating in a lingua franca – collaborate on the design of their own efl teaching sequences in accordance with cct principles. as future efl teachers, designing lesson plans is a relevant competence area in their workplace. the materials are to be designed as ve projects in secondary education. thus, the students are required to choose topics that are not only relevant to them but also their future learners. to ensure this, and in line with german and european education policy recommendations for promoting global education in secondary schools (schreiber & siege, 2016), we chose the sdgs set by the united nations as the framework that informs the contents of their ccts. since these goals are intended as “the blueprint to achieve a better and more sustainable future for all” (united nations, 2015), the psts can refer to the sdgs as they discuss problems that are of relevance both in their local contexts and for the entire world. for example, goal 3 (good health and well-being) may act as a framework for psts to discuss how their local realities are impacted by the global covid-19 crisis and what they can learn from each other – ranging from personal strategies for staying in touch with friends and family to broader questions of government responses and global mobility. likewise, goal 13 (climate action) can frame exchanges of both local solutions to reduce carbon emissions on an individual scale as well as policies enacted by governments that could be adapted to other regional contexts. as per the progressive exchange model, our exchange begins with an introductory phase 148 global education review 8 (23) with ‘icebreaker’ activities. the subsequent comparison and analysis phase requires psts to investigate two areas of cultural practice: first, they are tasked with comparing common approaches to teaching efl in their respective contexts as well as requirements set by local and national education policies to identify similarities and differences. this lays the groundwork for designing lesson plans and teaching materials in a way that is compatible with the contexts of every participant in each transnational team. second, they conduct a comparable activity to discuss global issues from their local perspectives. students are tasked with reaching an agreement on a specific global issue that is relevant to every participant of a given transnational team, and exchanging information, e.g. local attempts at dealing with a given problem. these two phases serve as a preparation for the final phase: the collaborative design of a specific task sequence by each transnational team. based on their own ve experience and with the help of previous discussions as well as theoretical input on global education and cct by the teacher trainers, the content and design of these task sequences is expected to feature elements of cct, ve good practice, and global education prominently. as per o’dowd’s transnational model, the project thus prepares psts to “undertake action” (2019, p. 23) in their future workplaces by transforming their local efl classrooms into ‘glocal spaces’ where global problems can be discussed between local learners and with people from all over the world. organizational obstacles and solutions finding partners and fitting the needs and schedules of everyone within the framework of a joint ve project is a major challenge (sadler, 2018). in line with o’dowd’s transnational model, a key criterion for our project was to find at least two partner classes of future efl teachers who are non-native speakers of english. two strategies proved successful for this purpose. first, we leveraged an existing network – the u4society network (2020) – to contact international offices and foreign language researchers at partner universities. dr. stellan sundh of uppsala university agreed to participate with undergraduate psts of efl taking an introduction to flt class. through a virtual partnering fair organized by unicollaboration (o’dowd, 2018) we connected with semih ekin of hacettepe university in ankara who was searching for ve research partners. mismatch between academic calendars proved a major challenge in merging the three groups of learners: at the university of göttingen, classes in the winter term take place from end of october until mid-february; the course in sweden begins in early december and ends in mid-january; and the term at hacettepe university ranges from the end of september until mid-january. another major hurdle was the degree of flexibility regarding the content each group of students was required to cover in this timeframe. following the transnational model, our goal was integrating the ve as an inherent class component for all students to increase their motivation to participate. in göttingen, we created a new class for this purpose which we integrated within our existing curriculum as an elective for students in the local master of education program. the module in which we placed the course required us to give students a number grade based on a final presentation and a written reflection paper. at uppsala university, the introductory class is an established and densely structured seminar that requires students to submit three deliverables – a school year plan, an extended teaching sequence, and a detailed lesson plan – within a relatively short time span. in contrast to “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 149 149 göttingen, uppsala students can only either pass or fail this class. the students at hacettepe university are volunteers who can receive extra credit by participating in the exchange if they choose to enroll in an internship course. despite remaining differences between the exact curricular integration, all participants can receive credits within their existing academic programs. due to an uneven number of participating efl student teachers from each institution, we decided to group the students in small transnational teams generally consisting of two students from germany and one each from sweden and turkey. while all participants from the latter two institutions are advanced undergraduate students, the swedish participants participate in the exchange during their first introduction to efl didactics. almost all students from göttingen are enrolled in the local master of education program. therefore, we planned this exchange on the assumption that the swedish participants are the least experienced in flt, whereas the göttingen students constitute the didactic experts in the context of the ve. in addition, seven of the göttingen students are on track to also become either teachers of geography or politics – two subjects that are increasingly being taught in clil settings at german schools (rönneper & bopré, 2015). as such, we expect them to be better prepared to meet the challenge of integrating global education in their task designs. lastly, we required central platforms to enable both synchronous and asynchronous communication between all participants. since all teacher trainers involved in setting up the project had extensive experience in using zoom in classroom settings, we settled on this software for synchronous communication. a google classroom serves as a central hub for asynchronous communication and to host materials. structure and content of the ve we accounted for the differences in availability, capacity, experience, demands, and needs among our participants by dividing the exchange into two overarching phases, each structured in accordance with the progressive exchange model: a joint web conference open for all participants acts as an introduction to the project and its goals in early november. since we cannot expect all swedish psts to be available at this point, this session is recorded and made available in the google classroom. in the first month, students from ankara and göttingen communicate both synchronously and asynchronously by engaging in icebreaker activities, comparison and analysis tasks (as detailed above), and two weeks of collaboration to draft a first cct version. a task instruction sheet for all participants offers details on the specific activities and deliverables to ensure that each transnational team meets in a synchronous video call at least once per week. the swedish psts join the project in week five by participating in a second round of icebreaker activities. due to the high workload in their local class, we chose to integrate them into the transnational teams without expecting them to contribute directly to the creation of the ccts. instead, they are tasked with providing direct feedback on the work of the turkish and german students throughout the exchange, and vice versa. additionally, the swedish students are also tasked with finding ways to account for the sdgs when designing their own classroom materials. thus, all students are expected to benefit from the variety of local perspectives on global problems within the transnational teams. a joint meeting in the fifth week is dedicated to feedback training. based on the 150 global education review 8 (23) comparison and analysis conducted by the psts on good practice in efl didactics, as well as the cct concept, the goal of this session is to create an evaluation rubric to assess the teaching materials designed throughout the ve. this rubric is intended as a bridge between the curricular demands made on the students by their respective education policies while also establishing a transnationally agreed-upon framework of efl best practice. during this session, the teacher trainers act as facilitators that guide the discussion between the psts. as the most experienced psts, the german students will give brief presentations of model ccts published in a german journal on efl didactics (hallet, 2013) to initiate the discussion. throughout weeks six, seven, and eight, the teams continue working on their respective teaching materials. in each week, a joint meeting serves as an opportunity to check each team’s progress as pairs of transnational teams engage in discussions and provide feedback to each other. while the local course at uppsala university ends after the last of these three meetings, swedish students can continue supporting their transnational teammates as they finalize their ccts in weeks nine and ten. the ve ends in the eleventh week when every team submits their finalized ccts to the online platform. as part of their examination, the students from göttingen will present the results of their teamwork in the local classroom. the transnational model proposes explicit opportunities for reflection of the ve experience. therefore, students from all institutions will meet in their local classrooms throughout the exchange. guided by their respective teacher trainer, psts discuss moments of success or problems including misunderstandings or communicative breakdowns. to further foster their reflective competences, participants write entries into a guided portfolio throughout the project. finally, an expert workshop and exemplary materials complete the “scaffolding” (hallet, 2013, p. 6) offered to participants to support them while designing their own materials. instructed by robert o’dowd, a “prolific [ve researcher]” (stevens initiative, 2020, p. 7), the virtual workshop gives the psts an opportunity to discuss their ideas with an experienced practitioner. the model materials given to participants are designed by three advanced students at the university of göttingen with a background in teaching efl and geography. looking ahead surkamp and viebrock emphasize that “english language teachers need to become agents of change who actively respond to the demands posed by globalisation, multilingualism or digitalization and use these developments for innovative teaching approaches” (2018, p. ix). likewise, o’dowd’s transnational model of virtual exchange, the global education approach, and hallet’s concept of the cct all stress the need to enable learners – including students in teacher training programs – to actively participate in societal discourses and “to undertake action and change in their respective local and global communities” (o’dowd, 2019, p. 23). this paper discussed ve as a promising approach to achieve these goals. our teaching project aims to support future teachers of efl to ‘do their part’ as telecollaborative teachers who integrate ve in secondary education to foster global education by opening their local classrooms to learners from all over the world. as an effort to a sustainable integration of ve praxis at the university of göttingen, we intend to apply this approach to telecollaborative projects with changing partner institutions in future “gocal education” through virtual exchange? 151 151 semesters, including universities in israel and belgium. future research conducted by the teaching english as a foreign language section of the university of göttingen, project partners, and student teachers enrolled in the local master of education program intends to investigate aspects including the development of icc, tpack, and global competences. acknowledgements the author thanks the ministry of science and culture (mwk) of the german federal state of lower saxony for funding of the project “konzeptualisierung einer neuen lehrveranstaltung ‘using virtual exchange to foster 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(2006). task-based language education: from theory to practice. cambridge: cambridge university press. weinert, f.-e. (ed.) (2001). leistungsmessungen in schulen. weinheim: beltz. place-based education 81 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: gola, giancarlo, & rocca, lorena. (2021). place-based education: an educational approach inside local place. global education review, 8 (2-3), 81-91. place-based education: an educational approach inside local place giancarlo gola university of applied sciences and arts of southern switzerland lorena rocca university of applied sciences and arts of southern switzerland abstract sense of place is rooted in people. several studies show that attachment to a place is connected with the development of identity through spatial, material, and emotional dimensions. it fosters identification and the development of one’s social and cognitive skills. in an educational sense, cultivating a sense of place means inviting the individual to gather many authentic experiences that strengthen ties. this study discusses the place-based education (pbe) approach at the epistemological level, in the context of the learning-teaching relationship. pbe can help to understand culture, the environment and space by creating a multidisciplinary approach. moreover, pbe can build a new assumption of being a collective resource. starting from some studies and evidence that support a positive partnership between the individual and the place, some pbe experiences are analyzed to develop deep learning with children and students. keywords place-based learning; teacher education; science education place as glocal milieu place based education theorists and practitioners recognize that the natural community and social milieu in which the school or the educational experience is embedded serv as text for student learning (thomas, muga, 2014). several studies, infact, show that attachment to a place is connected with the development of identity through spatial, material, and emotional dimensions. it fosters identification and the development of one’s social and cognitive skills. in an educational sense, cultivating a sense of place means inviting the individual to gather many authentic experiences that strengthen ties. glocal is therefore not a definable or defined space: it tends, instead, to broaden, to inter-connect, and to permeate new spaces of life (margiotta, 2015). globalization is a trend common to all sectors of society, and education is no exception (altbach, reisberg & rumbley, 2009). several studies show that an attachment to a place is connected with the development of identity through spatial, material, and emotional dimensions (gruenewald, 2003a; 2003b; smith, 2002; soebel, 2004). it fosters identification and the development of one’s social and cognitive skills. in an educational sense, cultivating a sense of place means inviting the individual to gather many authentic experiences that strengthen ties. an environment is a place if it has an identity 82 global education review 8 (2-3) dimension, as augé (1993) suggests. there is a need for anchoring to a local territory, which appears, or reappears, as a central element of the economic (though not exclusively, and to an increasingly lesser extent) dynamics of interindividual relations. the local appears to us not only as a space for locating the activities and systems of action of each individual, but as a matrix of social and cognitive interactions that unites it to the global level (margiotta, 2015). the very idea of “city” refers specifically both to a concrete physical space and to a symbolic dimension, to which the cultural and communicative codes, the experiences, expectations, and representations of the people who live there contribute. through a process of incorporation of the environment, individuals have a complex experience with places, which accurately describes, by defining it, the very meaning of so-called citiness (bourke, 2017), an expression that brings the experience of the city (of the place) closer to a feeling, which includes the way of life that takes place there. the territorial dimension seems to regain, in the global/local logic, a centrality that seemed lost: the territory becomes once again an element of identity, a set of properties and sociocultural characteristics of a given and specific place, which forms the milieu (governa, 1997; costa, 2008). the milieu constitutes the common heritage of a certain local collective, the foundation of specific collective identities and the whole endogenous potential of development. it is the set of those resources and possibilities of action that are available and can be developed in the global environment, which must be recognized and activated by the dynamics of interaction between local and global nodes. this study discusses the place-based education approach at the epistemological level, in the context of the learning-teaching relationship. place-based education the sense of place is rooted in people (rocca, 2019). meaningful connections are created between people and places that aim to meet human needs (see relph, 1976) and encourage people to spend more time in those places (see manzo & devine-wright, 2014). in general, studies have revealed that attachment to a place leads to a commitment to, and involvement and interest in, their community. as brown and perkins write (1992, p. 284): “[attachment to places] includes the positive bonds, sometimes present without awareness, that have developed over time from affective, behavioral and cognitive relationships between individuals, groups and their socio-physical environment. these ties provide a framework for the individual and common aspects of personal identity” (see also manzo & devine-wright, 2014). at present, there seems to be a certain consensus concerning the use of the expression place attachment as an emotional and affective link between people and a place that also manifests itself in the desire to maintain proximity (see ainsworth & bell, 1970). environmental psychologists have shown that people develop an attachment to a place, developing characteristics similar to those of interpersonal relationships (see manzo & devine-wright, 2014). as is the case with the caregiver’s style of secure attachment, a “secure” connection to one’s own territory, and its internalization, strengthen the relationship with others and openness to the outside world. in the same way, it can be assumed that positive ties of attachment to a place can lead to a systematic place-based education 83 83 tendency to adopt protective behavior towards that place. from a pedagogical point of view, the sense of place and attachment to the place is interesting both because it focuses on the protagonism of humans in their “placemaking” (gruenewald, 2003), and because it aims to make people aware that places are a cultural product. in this process of attribution of meaning, education plays an essential role in giving each and every individual the opportunity to access this process. starting from the assumption that culture is the production of space, it is the spaces of action that define who the person is. by implicitly choosing not to pay attention to the spatial form, one risks contributing to the maintenance of power relations. on the contrary, offering opportunities to manipulate spaces also in educational terms, means educating in terms of the protagonism and the development of citizenship skills while respecting, valuing, and paying attention to others. in the development of a methodology that could promote a sense of place, in the 1990s a pedagogical approach called place-based education (pbe) was developed, on which many scholars worked, among them: gruenewald (2003), sobel (2005), gruenewald and smith (2008), smith (2007). place based education is inherently embedded within a life place, the task of pbe is to present the reflections concerning the relations of economic, political, ideological and environmental interdependence between near and far countries and, in this interweaving, to outline which ideas of person and culture are promoted, and consequently which identity of place results from them. from the paths of awareness according to the key of multiscalarity, students must be accompanied to identify existing social relationships, so that they can autonomously ask legitimate questions aimed at identifying more equitable, inclusive societies, attentive to the diversity that embraces the places made by differences (grunewald, 2003). places become pedagogical fulcrums, they teach us how the world works, in them we can exercise the power of our decisions and choices, and the consequence of our actions imagining and implementing sustainable, fair, inclusive places. by living in them, our identity is formed and defined through our possibilities (gruenewald, 2003) and in the same way, by an inverse process, places are formed and characterized through our own experience. although there is a clear connection between culture, identity and sense of place on the one hand, and the importance of this connection for the promotion of individual and social well-being (casey, 1997) in educational systems on the other, the relationship between them is largely overlooked. as schooling progresses, in fact, institutions become increasingly disconnected from their context. this phenomenon is exacerbated to the point of almost total disconnection at university, just when young people experience other places independently, in a formative moment of their existence in which they could be given, through pbe, the keys for the experimentation of citizenship skills, or at least, to develop in them an awareness of places and a taste for discovery while verifying their orientation. the educational perspective of pbe (gruenewald, 2003a; 2003b) suggests that educational institutions, such as schools, take an active role as agents of change promotion by means of immersive teaching and direct contact with the territory through the promotion of experiences in the field. in this sense sanger (1997) suggests working in education in order to 84 global education review 8 (2-3) build connections with places, building communities that live in them, placing importance on language, stories, and the sense of place. the relationship between teacher and student in the community is thus reconsidered, as a relationship of the exchange of information and knowledge but above all of experiences in both directions, with an acceptance and strengthening of personal ties that consequently increases the attachment to the place (sanger, 1997). at the foundation there is a trust in the students’ abilities, giving strength to act with respect including with regards to the awareness that “within the different communities, the members all share the common present in one place having a unique past and a role in the common future” (sanger, 1997, p.6). moreover, contact, for example through interviews with members of the community, allows for the creation of a bond, the learning of stories from the local tradition and thus renders the experience dense with meaning, and consequently, produces local culture that will then resonate in the environment of each student’s origin and in their subsequent profession. the place and environment are less and less a local territorial system, and more and more systems of functional and generative relations (margiotta, 2015). place-based pedagogies are needed so that the education of citizens might have some direct bearing on the well-being of the social and ecological places people actually inhabit (gruenewald, 2003). according to semken and freeman (2008), place-based education is an instructional method that involves experiential learning in and about local or regionally characteristic natural and social settings; transdisciplinary and cross-cultural synthesis of place-related knowledge and pedagogy; and service learning or other forms of community outreach (dani, 2019). pbe experiences: reading and developing an attachment to territory an example of a place-based approach around sound. the role of sound in understanding and building the “local” traits of places is essential. since the early 1970s, with the emergence of the concept of “soundscape” (murray schafer, 1977), this statement represents a widespread belief in the scientific community. despite the broad theoretical reflection of the last 40 years – which has better clarified many concepts such as “silence”, “oral narrative”, “sonic effect” etc. – this field still has no shared operative tools and strategies, making the dialogue among actors difficult, as well as preventing the opening of reflection in external disciplinary fields. the strength of podcasting is in narrating places, reaching for the origin of place itself and building an “oral culture” that is able to connect authors and listeners. nowadays podcasting represents a rapidly expanding technology – which is attracting the interest and investments of many big companies – but has not yet been explored in terms of its potential for promoting scientific research. podcasting represents great potential for favoring new participatory practices for studying and researching territories, fostering a dialogue among the many actors that live and dwell there, especially the ones not properly represented by traditional methods. the opportunity to create sensual listening with podcasting, driving listeners towards an emotional and passionate participation that involves all senses. according to neuropsychologists, hearing represents the most primitive sensory organ, able to awaken instinctive and archaic forms of learning. in this perspective, podcasting could represent an innovative educational mediator – for formal, place-based education 85 85 informal, and non-formal learning – able to promote place attachment. accordingly, “linking to something” is a fundamental part of human experience: human beings were born with the necessity to establish connections with people, groups, objects, and places to achieve stability and security for their physical and social environments. a positive sense of attachment to place could generate good consequences, both for individuals – developing their identity and personality – and places. the idea of using podcasting technology to develop an acoustic narrative thought is based on the effectiveness of oral narrative to improve the “self-efficacy” of individuals – as a cognitive process related to the capability of human beings to organize and perform actions with a view to obtaining specific results – as well as the “sense of place” (sanger, 1997) and the local attachment to territory. in scientific debate, the “sense of place” represents an articulated concept, referring both to the idea of genius loci (graham et al., 2009) and the habits through which people experience their places, developing a sense of attachment and identity (convery, gerard & peter, 2012). since places frame and make personal identity possible (manzo & devinewright, 2014), place without individuals cannot exist, similarly to individuals without places. relph (1976) focuses on the role of body, senses, perception, and emotions to establish a contact with place. through acoustic narrative thought, human beings act like the protagonists of their own complex plots, mixing parallel and complementary experiences, placing present, past, and future events and sensations in relation with each other. oral narrative pushes individuals to give significance to places – elaborating, interpreting, understanding, relieving, describing, telling and explaining them – on the basis of their social and cultural conditions (mcclennen, 2016). telling a story, but also listening to other people’s stories, means moving toward a geography of the sense of place. from this perspective, the representation of place becomes the product of many autobiographic explorations, made significant by memories and episodes having shaped personal and collective identities (lewicka, 2008). by developing innovative forms of acoustic narration, the project aims to identify specific elements – which will be the basis of the toolkit – to create emotional links between places, personal identities and cultural collective experiences. environmental psychologists (e.g., manzo & devine-wright, 2014) have argued that the processes that foster attachment to place are similar to the ones that create interpersonal relationships, pushing individuals to find a contact with their objects after a detachment. interpersonal attachment, as well as attachment to place, represent fundamental elements for the physical and psychological well-being of human beings, safe spaces which allow individuals to start new explorations and face new situations (preston, 2015). where they are not physically possible, these connections are recreated in a symbolic horizon (semken, 2012), as confirmed by some studies on the psychological growth of children (hart, 1979; israel, 2012). in this respect, the new forms of podcasts take the role of caregivers, fostering the positive attitude of people to protect and “project” (take care of) their territories. producing a podcast not only means finding acoustic elements to join together, but to understand and express the cultural categories necessary for their interpretation. the podcast becomes a place itself, a “projective acoustic vision” able to reflect the local values, the personal perceptions, the symbolic and cultural beliefs connected to the physical shape of place. the possible use of podcasts as a support for design activities may 86 global education review 8 (2-3) provide a contribution to the notion of “participatory project” in the direction of an “active involvement” of people instead of a mere “consultation” process, fostering a “placemaking” that raises the awareness of communities for the cultural and symbolic meaning of places (gruenewald, 2003, 2008; mueller-sims, 2016; rabuzzi, 2016). according to sanger (1997), the design activity should not refer only to the physical construction of space but also to the creation of a sense of community among people, enhancing social and cultural differences and promoting attachment to place (tovey, 2007; sabato, 2014). the definition of a community that gathers around podcasting, developing, and sharing new social and technical skills, is a clear contribution in this sense. increasingly, knowledge of the world around us comes through hearing (schafer, 1992). while sight, privileged until now, has been able to develop highly sophisticated tools and techniques to store, manipulate and interpret perceived data, hearing is still “in its infancy” in its approach to the world (mayr, 2014). in fact, the soundscape is still struggling with tools and methods of verification although, because of this vagueness, it stands out as an interesting field of multidisciplinary investigation (galassetti, galfetti & rocca, 2014). the acoustic property has within itself a more objective component (measurable and comparable in terms of noise pollution) as well as a more subjective one (directly anchored in the perception of the individual and the community, and so in the very concept of “landscape”). recalling this duality, the geographer geneva raffesten (2007) highlights the distinction between territory – “material reality”, a result of continuous changes, subject to recurrent alteration – and landscape, defined as: “immaterial reality which, by contrast, is the result of a process of mental production, originating from a human gaze, in turn mediated by different languages . . . the expression of a break in time: it is a ‘snap-shot’” (raffestin, 2007). to understand the territory, it is therefore necessary to: “acquire images representing the equipment which allows for an exploration of reality” (raffestin, 2007). thus, there is a “mediated relationship”, through sound, between man and his environment (tuan, 1990). activating advocacy for the acoustic dimension means, in fact, increasing the aptitude for awareness, recognition, respect and appreciation of the elements of sound diversity, which constitute a value in themselves and which connote, in a cultural sense but also in a practical and informative one, a section of territory. amphoux (2007) considers the soundscape as the result of a fusion of the natural environment and the social actor. these are the characteristics of the typical urban soundscape, leading böhme (2000) to say that the feeling of “heimat” (german: the relationship of a human being towards a certain spatial social unit) is transmitted primarily by the sound of an area. bringing this listening point to light has tremendous value in terms of education for sustainability and heritage in the context of lifelong learning. “t” (german: the relationship of a human being towards a certain spatial social unit) is transmitted primarily by the sound of an area. bringing this listening point to light has tremendous value in terms of education for sustainability and heritage in the context of lifelong learning. an example of place-based approach around photovoice photovoice plays an important role in place-based education (briggs et al., 2014). various ways of using photography as a datagathering tool have been presented, including place-based education 87 87 the photo-narrative, the participatory photointerview, and photovoice (kaplan, 2008; rose, 2012; böök & mykkänen 2014). photovoice was originally developed as a research design and methodology that involves participants taking photographs related to personal and community issues that are important to them, and then using the photos as the basis for critical discussion and social change (wang & burris 1994; dani, 2019). photographs can be seen as an “ice-breaker”, a medium that creates a comfortable space for discussion (collier, 1997; böök & mykkänen, 2014). using this method, participants act as co-researchers who investigate a question that is of value to them. the strategy has been successfully used with school learners, in both formal and informal educational context, and also with teacher candidates (dani, 2019). photovoice allows you to capture lived human experiences. the collected stories of the places with their related photographs and narrations identify personal experiences and influence the perception of knowledge about them. they encourage new learning within and around the community (such as school, university), stimulate reflection on prior knowledge, assumptions, and prejudices about the places themselves. photovoice promotes a critical knowledge of the place, an identification with the sense of place and provides some tools to get to know the contexts in which people live, study and work. place-based education could be an educational approach inside local place educating in order to increase awareness of places is of fundamental importance by activating students as problemsolvers and builders of places themselves, taking them beyond mere experience and the study of places, promoting commitment to the local management processes that determine what places are and what they will become. proposing opportunities in which to identify the problems of nearby places, learning to analyze them and hypothesize solutions means offering opportunities to experience the complexity and richness of networks and links, but also the action that takes place in relation to them. it is a matter of considering the local/global duality differently, i.e. several environments (global/local) of different types which at the same time influence and allow knowledge and learning to be formed. the pbe approach aims to be an immersive, deep learning environment that places students at the center of their cultural heritage, history, and landscape, by using the experiences offered by the context for the study and knowledge of art, language, mathematics, science and other subjects of the curriculum. the idea of a multiple learning space approach acknowledges the many spaces a teacher works in, and seeks to value each space, without merely privileging the classroom space (white & reid, 2008). in pbe, “local” is a first level that serves to give meaning to the second one, “global”. learning processes based on local cultural contexts act as mediators to understand global challenges. the experiences on the territory that are centered on the students are significant for them because they can experience them directly. these educational experiences are based on experiential pedagogical ideas, in which students are at the center of a contextualized, direct, authentic form of education (smith, 2007; gruenewald, 2003). developing knowledge, skills, motivations regarding places allows students to be more involved and active, 88 global education review 8 (2-3) to play an active role and to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the context (rocca, 2019). place-based pedagogies foreground the local and the known. they allow teachers to structure learning opportunities that are framed as meaningful and relevant to their students because they are connected to their own places, to people and to the popular cultures and concerns that engage them (comber, reid, & nixon, 2007). place-conscious pedagogies are more interested in developing and projecting awareness outward toward places (gruenewald, 2003), beyond the immediate and the local, with a clear and articulated sense of the relationship of the local to the global, and of the social lifeworld to the natural environment (white & reid, 2008). in the pbe, the learning space is defined as enlarged because the local community is often an integral part of educational paths and teaching activities. in this sense, the classroom can also be defined as “enlarged”, it is a community. place-based education can be an approach that supports new rootedness in a territoriality, that becomes identity, care, value and also a cognitive asset for individuals, while learning is personally relevant to students and enables student agency. references ainsworth m.d.s., bell 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(http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/23-7.pdf; retrieved may,13, 2020). http://jrre.psu.edu/articles/23-7.pdf the dominance of the english language 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: ellegard, tomas & wamuth, helge (2025). the dominance of the english language as a challenge for the field of early childhood education and care. global education review, 12 (1), 1-4. the dominance of the english language as a challenge for the field of early childhood education and care tomas ellegard helge wasmuth language plays a pivotal role in shaping children’s cognitive, social, and cultural development. in early childhood education and care (ecec), language is far more than a means for communication—it is the primary medium through which children come to understand the world and their place within it. through language, children acquire not only knowledge and literacy but also the foundational elements of identity: their sense of self, belonging, community, and worldview. through the language they hear and use in stories and songs, but also everyday language, values, norms, and culture are explored and developed. language, in this way, is both a mirror of culture and a vehicle for its transmission. however, language does not only form the landscape in which children acquire culture and identity. it is also central to the culture and identity of professionals and researchers in the ecec field. it forms concepts, understandings, and modes of practice on which the actions and deliberations of ecec practitioners and researchers are formed. in increasingly globalized and multilingual societies, though, a persistent challenge emerges: what happens when one language—most often english—becomes dominant in educational spaces, particularly at the expense of children’s home languages and local linguistic traditions? the dominance of english in early education, often motivated by aspirations for academic success and global competitiveness, can inadvertently marginalize other languages, silencing the linguistic and cultural identities of children from diverse backgrounds. this phenomenon is not merely a pedagogical concern; it is a matter of educational equity, cultural preservation, professional deliberations, and children's rights. in our call for this special issue, we pointed to the idea of considering language as a specific form of cultural capital – namely linguistic capital (swann, 2001). what does that mean, not only for children, but also and maybe even more for ecec research and policy? wondering about the importance of a supercentral language (swann, 2001), has led us to a whole range of questions, i.e., how do languages (and cultures) shape the way we think and talk about children and ecec? how are such assumptions modified when forced to participate in transnational discourses and english as the supercentral language? and how can we find meaning in transnational discourses if our understandings of key terms (for example, ’play,’ ’assessment,’ and ’kindergarten’) vary in the local context? the articles featured in this issue collectively explore the cultural and educational implications of linguistic dominance in three diverse contexts: iran, the united states, and nigeria. together, they raise critical questions about the intersection of language, childhood, the dominance of the english language 4 and educational equity. how do we define school readiness in multilingual communities? can early childhood settings be truly inclusive if they prioritize one language over others? what responsibilities do educators, policymakers, and communities bear in protecting linguistic diversity while preparing children for participation in a globalized world? and how do language and different ideas of childhood shape our thinking about ecec? seyed mohammad hosseini and ebrahim talaee discuss in their article titled “a corpus-based study of the conceptualizations of childhood in the iranian culture and their implications for early childhood education” the cultural conceptualizations of childhood in iranian society through a linguistic analysis of three persian terms for ‘child’: bache, kudak, and tefl. combining cultural linguistics with ethnographic insight, the authors demonstrate that iranian understandings of childhood are heterogeneous, shaped by a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, and frequently diverge from western age-based definitions. in their article, hosseini and talee draw on a rich corpus of persian novels and autobiographies and thereby identify a spectrum of conceptualizations, portraying children as joyful, innocent, energetic beings, yet also naïve, dependent, subordinate, and at times, a nuisance or even cursed. notably, the western “evil child” archetype is absent. instead, the authors argue that the persian cultural lens views children as inherently innocent and morally untainted until puberty, emphasizing their need for protection and moral guidance. however, what does that mean for ecec in iran? as the authors point out, the field is currently shaped by a complex negotiation between tradition and modernity, with the idea of a “becoming” (children as adults-in-training) and a “being” (children as competent agents) in co-existence, which can lead to tensions within iranian ece policy and practice. as a nation in transition, these tensions need to be negotiated carefully. in her article “juntos effort to preserve children’s bilingualism in an englishdominated language landscape,” kiyomi umezawa describes the ethnographic study that explores a collaborative “juntos” initiative between a head start lead teacher and an educational researcher in a semi-rural pennsylvania town that has rapidly transformed into a new immigrant settlement (nis) with a majority spanish-speaking population. despite the demographic shift, so umezawa explains, english remains the de facto language of instruction in most early childhood education and care programs, marginalizing home languages and undervaluing bilingualism. drawing on translanguaging theory and critical participatory action research (cpar), the study embraced a non-hierarchical partnership to codevelop culturally responsive strategies to support bilingual children’s linguistic rights and development. the article describes the teacher’s intentional language modifications—balancing spanish and english use in formal and informal settings— with the goal of meeting individual children's linguistic needs. as the study shows, children could navigate between languages seamlessly, using both english and spanish fluidly, depending on context and interlocutor. these translanguaging practices cultivated not only language skills but also a sense of belonging and self-worth among children—outcomes often undermined in english-only environments. in addition, umezawa uses comparative data from three other head start classrooms in similar nis communities to demonstrate that 3 global education review 12 (1) bilingual practices were rare unless formally mandated. however, and the article shows that, preserving children’s bilingualism is both possible and impactful, even in under-resourced, english-dominant settings. as umezawa demonstrates, bilingualism should be seen as an asset rather than a barrier, and her article challenges the prevailing idea that equates school readiness with english proficiency. children must have the right to speak their mother tongue. thereby, the article challenges the reader to rethink what inclusive, linguistically responsive ecec indeed looks like in today’s multilingual society. in her article titled “perceptions of preschool stakeholders on the impacts of english as the dominant language in early childhood education and care centers in yoruba-speaking states, nigeria,” oluyemisi idowu majebi discusses the widespread dominance of the english language in early childhood education (ece) settings across nigeria has sparked an ongoing discourse about its implications, especially in yoruba-speaking states. she analyzes this issue by focusing on the perspectives of 617 key stakeholders—teachers, school owners/heads, parents, and community members – and how they perceive the use of english as the primary medium of instruction in early childhood education and care centers. while nigeria’s national policy on education strongly advocates for using the mother tongue or the “language of the immediate environment” in preschool instruction, the reality on the ground is, as majebi describes, different. the english language, revered for its global relevance and economic utility, has emerged as the de facto medium of instruction, even in early childhood education and care. as she points out, the majority of parents and community members perceive english as essential for children's future academic performance and global competitiveness; a sentiment that school heads and owners largely echo. however, as majebi emphasizes, all stakeholders voice concerns about the dominance of english in the classroom. many fear that early exposure to english alone may erode children’s connection to their native languages, identity, and community, and that the dominance might marginalize indigenous culture and violate children’s rights to culturally appropriate education. thus, majebi’s articles give insight into the pressing question of how early education can achieve a balance between global relevance and cultural integrity. as briefly summarized above, all three articles concern specific issues connected to the dominance of a central language in different educational practices. what we would like to add are a few remarks on the existence of a hypercentral language and its implications for ecec research and policy. like within almost all other disciplines, the transnational discourse about early childhood education and care (ecec) is thoroughly dominated by the english language. while, of course, national discourses and supranational languages such as arabic, spanish, chinese, or hindi exist and are essential, only english functions as what swaan terms the only “hypercentral” language (swaan, 2001). in many ways, this is positive. in an increasingly globalized research community, the fact that everyone participating speaks english works as a common good, unifying and allowing collective discussions and knowledge sharing. the different language and cultural background of the editors and authors combined in this volume speaks to it. and working and thinking in a language other than your first language might even offer possibilities for rethinking one’s assumptions. the dominance of the english language 4 the dominance of english does, however, present problems and dilemmas. depending on your place in the world language system (swann, 2001), language is a specific form of cultural capital. those who do not have english as their first language are disadvantaged, and those who feel impeded because they lack proficiency may even be excluded. fluency in english gives a symbolic advantage to those who have english as their native language – and conversely disadvantages those who have english as their second or even third language. furthermore, and this is an aspect that is often ignored, the dominance of the english language automatically predetermines the tone and content of discourses as it relies on a particular way of thinking and speaking about ecec. specific cultural and conceptual meanings dominate and thus define the “truths” (foucault, 1987) of our field. these “truths” are often taken for granted instead of being critically examined and justified (macnaughton, 2006), and thereby dominate the discourses about ecec worldwide. important educational concepts from other languages and cultures need to be translated into the hypercentral language and are thus in danger of being leveled and losing their genuine significance. at the same time, though, such linguistic differences present enormous potential. while language and culture shape our perceptions of children and ecec, these differences can lead to a place of questioning, uncertainty, and conflict, and challenge western hegemonic thinking about early childhood education. such questioning helps us to think critically about what it means for us to describe, analyze, and speak about the phenomena called ecec. this is also important because ecec as a profession and discipline until today seems to struggle to ‘think and speak for itself’” (urban, 2018, p. 314). such international discourses, even if they have to take place in the form of hypercentral language that unifies but also simplifies, can help to find a genuine ‘language of ecec’; a stronger voice that emphasizes what ecec stands for without marginalizing local contexts and traditions. references foucault, m. (1987). the ethic of care for the self as a practice of freedom. in bernauer j. & rasmussen, d. (eds). the final foucault. cambridge, ma; mit press. macnaughton, g. (2006). doing foucault in early childhood studies: applying poststructual ideas. london and new york: routledge. swaan, a. de. (2001). a political sociology of the world language system. in b. r. eliezer & y. sternberg (eds.), identity, culture, and globalization (pp. 206–232). urban, m. (2018). editorial, european early childhood education research journal, 26:3, 311-315, doi: 10.1080/1350293x.2018.1469857 design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 46 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: fleischmann, augustine l. (2024). design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany: a pioneering research paradigm for linking teaching research with lesson design. global education review, 11 (2), 46-69. design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany: a pioneering research paradigm for linking teaching research with lesson design augustine l. fleischmann abstract design-based research (dbr) has emerged as a widely accepted methodological framework in educational research worldwide, as it is a sustainable research paradigm for overcoming the frequently observed gap between research and educational practice (reinmann, 2022; tinoca et al., 2022). i use the rights of the child and the school subject of religious education (cre4re) project as an illustrative example of dbr’s potential to help close the theory-practice gap in the area of children's rights education (cre) in religious education (re). to do so, i link classroom research and lesson design. the first part of the paper provides an overview of the three interdependent project phases, which are based on the three steps of the research process model by mckenney and reeves (2019). in the second part, i transfer a teaching module into practice to demonstrate how children's rights perspectives can be successfully integrated into re. finally, i identify project-specific opportunities and challenges in the use of the dbr approach to point out further design-based research perspectives, which favor a sustainable practical transfer of the double theory-practice output. i transferred a prototyped learning module into re and tested and empirically evaluated it in a sample of n = 88 children and found substantial differences in the empathy scale’s mean values, which also differed by gender. the article shows how a dbr approach can be used to integrate cre into re, thereby also highlighting the forward-looking significance of the research paradigm for re and for the interlinking of teaching research and lesson design. keywords design-based research, religious education, children's rights education, human rights education, religious education, primary school, transfer, germany introduction: design-based research for combining religious didactic theory formation and lesson design in order to link the goal of evidencebased theory development with the development of high-quality practice on the one hand and to promote the previously missing trans-fer of science into educational practice on the other, design-based research (dbr) is a globally wellreceived methodological framework concept in educational research and has thus developed into a forward-looking research paradigm (reinmann, 2022). numerous published studies have exemplified how context-specific interventions are carried out in iteratively conceived design cycles, which in turn differ in terms of the quantitative and qualitative research methodology they have used, their sample sizes, and their design and duration (tinoca et al., 2022). the dbr approach is becoming increasingly important, particularly in german-language subject didactics, which is "essentially responsible for the transfer of knowledge about subject-specific teaching and learning in the context of formal and institutionalized education" (gfd, 2023, p. 3). design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 47 however, at the same time, the lack of integration between theory formation and practice development has been lamented. this lack of integration also applies to re didactics as an independent area of subject didactics and subdiscipline of re. re didactics shares its interdisciplinary profile and its interdependence be-tween theory and practice with other subject didactics (gärtner, 2022). first, a lack of a theory-practice link can also be localized in the religious didactics discourse because, on the one hand, practitioners and students demand a stronger practical orientation of religious didactics, and at the same time, subject-didactic findings and development are rarely transferred into re teaching practice (gärtner, 2018). for this reason, gärtner’s (2018) research approach of religious didactic development research (rddr), which has its roots in dbr and specifically promotes a "networking of practice development and research" (p. 13), has explicitly been established for the investigation of subject-specific religious teaching and learning processes. using the example of the rights of the child and the school subject of religious education (cre4re) project, i next show how designbased research on the linking of theory-building teaching research and lesson design can also contribute to closing the theory-practice gap in the area of cre in primary-school re. based on the research process model by mckenney and reeves (2019), the phases of the cre4re project are presented in a three-step model, with an overview of the interdependent research phase in the first part. the second part then describes how the learning module is transferred into re lessons, accompanied by empirical testing. finally, i identify project-specific opportunities and hurdles in the use of the dbr approach and point out further design-based research perspectives, which favor a sustainable practical trans-fer of the outputs at theory and practice levels. reference project: dbr for integrating cre into re in primary school in 2019, children's rights celebrated their 30th anniversary: on november 20, 1989, the united nations (un) general assembly adopted the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc), which is now the most frequently ratified un convention (tobin, 2019). the document is thus an international human rights treaty and can be interpreted holistically in terms of the special protection, promotion, and participation rights of children, which is why these rights are also referred to in relevant specialist literature as "human rights for children" (maywald, 2012, p. 17). however, in an increasingly religiously pluralistic society and in view of the growing political and social importance of the uncrc, the lack of high-quality cre and the explicit thematization of children's rights in re in primary school are serious deficits. in accordance with the practical relevance of this educational problem, the threephase process model established by mckenney and reeves (2019) serves as the foundation for this project and is utilized as the framework for the subsequent chapter. as part of a problem analysis, i outline the importance of implementing cre in various contexts. moreover, an ex-amination of current national and international research findings is intended to identify deficiencies and research desiderata in order to build upon them to specify the study's interest in knowledge (1. analysis and exploration; mckenney & reeves, 2019). the prototyped solution approaches (2. design and construction; mckenney & reeves, 2019) and the cyclical phases of evaluation and reflection (feulner, 2021) are then presented in three iterative design cycles. to conclude the complex 48 global education review 11 (2) research process, i then outline the double output of the dbr project. problem and context analysis the importance of children's rights in the educational context in the relevant specialist literature, cre is defined as "a differentiation within human rights education and an educational process about human rights by, for and with children" (fritzsche, 2017, p. 127), which in turn can make an "early and sustainable contribution to the development of a culture of human rights" (fritzsche, 2017, p. 127). despite the fact that children are the most vulnerable group in the face of the threat of human rights violations, they are also "the first group to learn about human rights, which is why children's rights education is considered to have a high chance of effectiveness" (fritzsche, 2017, p. 127). in the context of primary-school education, cre at the primary-school level can therefore also be described as an "early path to human rights" (fritzsche, 2007, p. 259). at the 30th anniversary of the uncrc, which took place in 2019, the monitoring process discussed successful progress in the implementation of high-quality cre in the educational context from a variety of perspectives in extensive reviews and summarized emerging trends and challenges (maywald, 2019). whereas the un convention on the rights of persons with disabilities has become particularly important from a human rights perspective, which played a huge role in the implementation of inclusive education, the effectiveness of the uncrc with respect to the educational mandate of schools is still pending. maywald (2019), spokesperson for the national coalition for the implementation of children's rights, explained that cre in the school context takes place selectively and in some subjects but not systematically at several age levels, and that informing children about their rights under the uncrc is not a mandatory part of the school curriculum in all german federal states. even if school theory-practice programs are currently being developed to implement a children’s-rights-oriented teaching and school culture, there is a continuous need for development in this area and "a field for future joint work between practitioners and academics" (krennerich & gläser-zikuda, 2022, p. 324). this target perspective was concretized in the concluding observation of the un committee on the rights of the child on germany's fifth and sixth reports, which called for the development of concrete practical materials related to children's rights and the need to ensure that teachers receive the support they need to teach children's rights (crc, 2022). children's rights in the context of theology and re in the national and international discourse on public theology and re, human rights have been of enormous importance for some time and are increasingly being considered in the relevant specialist literature (pirner et al., 2016; suhner, 2020). on the one hand, the potential of human rights as a viable framework for pluralistic-heterogeneous societies is emphasized (pirner, 2023). on the other hand, human rights are justified from a social, theological, and pedagogical perspective as a separate learning object for thematization in re (altmeyer et al., 2017). furthermore, pirner (2023) emphasized human rights as an orientation marker of (school) re as a fundamental normative basis of (religious) education and as an innovative approach for sustainable religious didactics within the framework of human-rights-oriented re (pirner, 2023). nevertheless, there is still a lack design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 49 of a thorough didactic foundation of human rights in re (altmeyer et al., 2017). however, if children's rights are viewed from the perspective of re, they seem to lag behind human rights. although the rights of children and young people are sometimes placed at the center of the public-church discussion (kirchenamt der ekd, 2022), they have yet to be given comprehensive consideration in both theology and re research and practice. only one systematic theological discussion has provided a basis for further re considerations, namely, the habilitation thesis "ethics of the child" by frank surall (2009). but from the perspective of re in schools, there is a lack of well-founded discussions and basic literature. for example, in the yearbook of religious education (altmeyer et al., 2017) on the topic of human rights, spiegel (2017) explicitly addressed the topic of children's rights as an example of religious didactics. however, after the pedagogical contribution traced the historical outline of the development of the uncrc, explained the basic principles of children's rights theory, and presented considerations for a children’s-rights-oriented pedagogy and ideas for its implementation in the classroom, no subject-specific concretization was offered from the perspective of re and didactics. additionally, there have been significant shortcomings in the curricular integration of children’s rights into the subject curricula. the lack of integration of human and children's rights in the german curricula for re represents a significant gap, especially at the primary-school level. children's rights and cre in current national and international research the principles inherent in the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) in-tend for children to be informed about their rights (bmfsfj, 2022), an idea that is also enshrined in the resolution of the standing conference of the ministers of education and cultural affairs on human rights education in schools (kmk, 2018). at a national level, there is a growing call to educate children about their rights in order to comply with both articles 29 and 42 of the uncrc and to "contribute fundamentally to the realization of all other children's rights" (gilett-swan & thelander, 2021, p. 252). however, an enormous deficit in children's knowledge of their rights is apparent in national studies. the pilot study for the children's rights index by the deutsches kinderhilfswerk (2019) found that, of the surveyed children, only 19% were quite familiar with children's rights, 57% only knew of children's rights by name, and 16% had never heard or read anything about children's rights (stegemann & ohlmeier, 2019). as part of the global study children's worlds the international survey of children's well-being, the children's worlds+ study by the bertelmanns stiftung presented the german results with the aim of providing in-depth insights into the needs of children and young people in germany and surveyed children aged 8 to 14 (andresen & möller, 2019). among 8-yearold children, 33.3% stated that they did not know what rights they were entitled to. of the surveyed primary-school children, 37% said they were aware of children's rights, whereas 21.5% said they had no knowledge of children's rights. similarly, 71.7% of 8-year-olds were not familiar with the un convention on the rights of the child. it is striking that the proportion of those who had never heard of the convention decreased sharply with age. only 46.6% of 14year-olds stated that they did not know about the un convention on the rights of the child. the lbs children's barometer (2018) also found that 46% of the 9to 14-year-olds surveyed were aware of the convention (müthing et al., 2018). the second children's rights report (2019) examined children’s and young people’s ratings 50 global education review 11 (2) of the implementation of the uncrc of the child in germany (national coalition germany, 2019b). a very large number of children (78%) stated that they had already heard of children's rights, whereas 14% were unaware of children's rights (national coalition germany, 2019b). however, the children's worlds+ study (2019) also revealed that only 24.6% of 8-year-olds and 60% of 14-year-olds knew what rights they were entitled to (andresen & möller, 2019). on the basis of the results, the children's rights report made demands, also in terms of awareness (national coalition germany, 2019b, p. 9): • children's rights should be firmly anchored in the curriculum, and it must be ensured that all children and young people know their rights. • children's rights must be included in the basic law, as this is the only way to raise awareness among adults as well as children and young people. • children's rights should be made available to everyone in childfriendly language. the germany-wide unicef survey my place. my rights. jetzt rede ich asked 12,009 children and young people up to the age of 17 about their perceptions of the implementation of children's rights in the classroom (deutsches komitee für unicef e.v., 2019). a total of 46% stated that they had already discussed children's rights in class. children between the ages of 10 and 11 (i.e., children attending fourth grade) were the most likely (55%) to have talked about children's rights in class. however, the results also showed that 40% of the children and young people surveyed had never dis-cussed the topic of children's rights in class. this finding shows that children's rights are still a long way from finding their way into all classrooms and confirms the call for children's rights to be thematically anchored in the curriculum. furthermore, studies on children's knowledge of their rights and the implementation of children's rights can be found at the international level. the second research report of the children's worlds study (rees et al., 2016) focused on the results of the 8-year-old age group and presented results from 16 countries. three questions were asked about children's rights, with the first two questions relating to awareness of children's rights: (a) "i know what rights children have," (b) "i know about the children's rights convention," and (c) "i think, in my country, adults in general respect children's rights." data summarized across 15 countries (poland was excluded as the questions were not asked in this age group) showed that 46% of respondents stated that they knew what rights children have. only a small proportion of 23% said they did not know anything about children's rights, and 32% chose the answer not sure (rees et al., 2016). similarly, 32% of 8-year-olds said they knew something about the un convention on the rights of the child, but 40% said they did not know about the convention (rees et al., 2016). in colombia, 73% said they were aware of children's rights, compared with only 30% in south africa and the united kingdom. the same can be said of awareness of the un convention on the rights of the child. here, the level of agreement varied from over 60% in colombia and norway to less than a quarter of respondents in six countries: south africa, south korea, nepal, germany, malta, and the united kingdom (rees et al., 2016). although knowledge of children's rights is an essential prerequisite for exercising one's own rights, the results of the various studies have shown that children in primary school in particular have varying degrees of contact with children's rights, a finding that raises questions about whether design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 51 cre is being implemented in schools. current research has shown that issues relating to the teaching and learning of children's rights have become increasingly important in german educational research in educational contexts in recent years (brantefors & quennerstedt, 2016). on the other hand, quennerstedt and moody’s (2020) study, which analyzed children’s-rightsrelated research fields in the educational context from 1889-2019, showed that only a little educational children’s rights research has actually examined dimensions related to central educational and pedagogical areas (e.g., teaching processes, learning processes, educational content, and the pedagogical situation in the classroom). it can be concluded from these findings that the transformative dimensions of cre have been largely overlooked in previous children's rights research, a conclusion that also applies to research in the area of re. research question and interest the initial focus of dbr is on a problem in educational practice that has yet to be solved (reinmann, 2017). from the state of research outlined above, it can be deduced that the widespread absence of subject-specific insights into the preconcepts, knowledge levels, progression of, and hurdles in children's-rightsrelated teaching and learning processes in re for primary-school-age children represents a glaring re-search deficit at the theoretical level. furthermore, a validated competence model of children’s-rights-related competence is missing, especially at the primary-school level. such a model is needed to differentiate the students’ learning process into competence levels on the basis of research. at the level of school practice, there is a need for subject-specific learning innovations on the topic of children's rights to didactically develop concrete design principles and promote the implementation of cre in re. the cre4re project, which is located at the interface of re, primary-school pedagogy, and empirical educational research, takes up the research findings and desiderata presented above and addresses the question of what specifically protestant re at the primary-school level can contribute to human rights education in relation to children’s rights. the project addresses the following guiding research question: how can a religious didactic learning innovation for re students in primary school be didactically designed to foster children's rights competencies in the context of re? in accordance with the overarching objective of dbr, the principal research focus can be delineated at three distinct levels (gärtner, 2018; reinmann, 2005): at the level of local subject-specific theory formation, it is advisable to gain subject-specific insights into the processes, challenges, and conditions of children’s-rights-specific teaching and learning processes. a theoretically based and subjectspecific model of children's-rights-related learning should be empirically supported and differentiated into subject-specific learning dimensions and competence levels. at the level of instructional learning innovation, the aim is to conceptualize a religious didactic teachinglearning arrangement that integrates design principles developed from theory, which in turn are operationalized in a multistage differentiation process. with regard to theorypractice transfer, evidence-based and participatory transfer strategies are to be implemented in such a way that an optimal link for transferring between religious didactic theory formation and re practice in primary school is guaranteed from the very beginning, so that both the research and development products can be implemented in practice. 52 global education review 11 (2) research methodology framework: adaptation of a context-specific dbr model in accordance with the epistemological interest and context underlying the educational problem of this study, the generic model by mckenney and reeves (2019) in the context of dbr formed the basis of this research project. for this purpose, the context of the school and teaching practice problems were first analyzed from different perspectives in three interdependent research phases (1. analysis and exploration; mckenney & reeves, 2019). subsequently, concrete solutions were designed (2. design and construction; mckenney & reeves, 2019). the teaching-learning innovations were then tested in five iterative design cycles, mostly in real teaching situations, and evaluated using quantitative and predominantly qualitative research methods (3. evaluation and reflection; feulner, 2021). finally, the learning innovation was implemented in concrete school practice and disseminated beyond the respective project boundaries, taking into account common transfer strategies (4. implementation and dissemination; mckenney & reeves, 2019; gräsel & parchmann, 2010). at the end of the complex research process, the dbr project produced a double output in the forms of subject-specific teaching and learning theories as research products (5. theoretical understanding) on the one hand and practical teaching and learning arrangements as practical products (6. intervention) on the other (reinmann, 2005). as an approach to researching subjectspecific didactic teaching and learning processes in german-speaking countries, dbr is increasingly being taken into account, particularly through the research approach of subject-specific didactical design re-search (ddr), which is modeled on the specifics of subject-specific didactic theory formation. this research format has also become established for re didactics as religious didactical design research (rddr; gärtner, 2019) and also involves the "networking of practice development and research" (gärtner, 2019, p. 13). according to gärtner (2020), the didactics of re are particularly intensified through the explication of overarching characteristics of rddr, which can be summarized as follows: • rddr is intervening (i.e., geared toward developing theory and practice); • rddr is iterative (i.e., complex theory-practice problems are empirically tested and further developed several times, which can result in a complex research cycle); • rddr is process-oriented (i.e., learning paths and processes are viewed as a complex and context-dependent scenarios); • rddr generates local theory building (i.e., it refers to the intermediate space between "big" teaching-learning theory and individual case observation); • rddr is object-oriented (i.e., it is decidedly oriented toward an explicit learning object); • rddr is networked (i.e., different disciplines, theoretical and practical areas and, in particular, different stakeholders are involved); • rddr refers to the natural learning environment (i.e., the instructional testing takes place under the influence of a variety of variables, contexts, and actors). the strong object and process orientation necessitates the implementation of a suitable approach to be balanced for each learning object. consequently, it must be redesign-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 53 structured and made more concrete for religious didactics and its specific learning objects (gärtner, 2020). due to the special features inherent to the subject of re, the sub-steps of rddr illustrated by gärtner (2018) are integrated into mckenney and reeves (2019) overarching research phases. the cycle model of ddr by the funken re-search college begins directly with the specification and structuring of a concrete learning object and thus accentuates the dedicated object orientation of ddr (prediger et al., 2012; gärtner, 2019). nevertheless, a comprehensive problem and context analysis of the educational problem as well as a systematic classification of the state of research on at least a national level by conducting a literature review has not, or without much detail, been provided in the framework of subject-specific didactic development research, as the research format has been aimed at close research into very specific learning objects, which are usually clearly inherent to the subject itself. however, the combination of the two research process models (i.e., dbr and rddr) is necessary because: • the fact that children's rights have largely not been addressed in re lessons to date must always be placed in an overarching educational problem context, which is not related solely to the subject didactics itself and must therefore be examined in the overall context, at least in the beginning, by means of a problem analysis. therefore, the research process cannot begin directly with the specification and structuring of the learning object, as gärtner (2022) described for rddr. it must be preceded by a problem and context analysis (mckenney & reeves, 2019); • human rights education (hre) and cre involve tasks that crosscut several subjects (suhner, 2020) at the primary-school level, and therefore, other subject didactics in primary school also make contributions. in order to crystallize subject-specific contributions, a context analysis must come first in order to be able to localize the contribution under a subject-specific demarcation on the one hand but also while considering interdisciplinary cooperation on the other; • the subject of children's rights is not exclusively inherent to any particular school subject (e.g., re). for this reason, the overall context and the resulting conditions must always be included in the context analysis; • the teaching-learning processes that are related to the subject matter have not been sufficiently or sometimes not at all empirically researched, even outside the subjectand school-specific boundaries. a research-pragmatic narrow definition of the learning object is therefore not suitable, but rather, the complexity of the learning object should be taken into account by adopting an exploratory approach; • learning and teaching research is not yet sufficiently widespread in empirical re, which makes a narrowly defined orientation toward the object of learning difficult, as in many cases, the learning prerequisites of primary school students first have to be determined; • the dovetailing of religious didactic theory formation and re practice can only succeed in terms of quality if common transfer strategies are considered and implemented from the outset. mckenney and reeves’ (2019) generic model al-so provided this kind of implementation, but the rddr model 54 global education review 11 (2) did not, due to the logic behind its limited, strictly subject-specific research focus; • international connectivity must continue to be ensured, as the implementation of children's rights in the form of high-quality cre is of international importance and cannot be limited exclusively to german-speaking countries. the reasons for the research outlined above and the outline of the research methodological framework resulting from the combination of the dbr and rddr approaches led to a project-specific, complex research process that i outline below. overview of the complex research process due to the complexity of the overall project, i provide an overview of the iterative research process and the associated cyclespecific features below. cycle 1: design and construction of a religious didactic learning innovation mckenney and reeves (2019) summarized that the "process of design and construction are systematic and guided by theory, but they also include inventive creativity, allocation of emerging insights, and openness to serendipity" (p. 127). in this phase, good theories were put into practice in the design and construction of solutions to problems (mckenney & reeves, 2019). in addition, empirically based concepts were transferred into a prototype for teaching innovations in a multistage operationalization process. these innovations were then operationalized as pedagogical guidelines through the application of design principles (euler, 2017). the following table provides an overview of cycle 1 after the design and construction process: table 1: cycle 1 of the cre4re project iterative evaluation and reflection in cycles 2 to 4 the prototypes were iteratively evaluated and gradually improved in a total of three additional design cycles, which differed in terms of their duration, objectives, empirical methodology, and results (see table 2). the testing took place in real classroom situations and was evaluated using predominantly qualitative but also quantitative research methods (feulner, 2021). this phase yielded a plethora of intermediate products, including written theoretical frameworks, research tools and plans, and reports on the implementation and testing of interventions. however, to facilitate a fundamental understanding and practical application, the principal outputs of this phase were responses to research questions, implications for integrated design proposals, and recommendations for redesign. design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 55 table 2: cycles 2-4 in the cre4re project 56 global education review 11 (2) implementation and dissemination in cycle 5 the final step of the complex research process involved the dissemination by means of a material transfer strategy, that is, an implementation of the theory-based developed and reviewed religious didactic learning landscape children's rights. it comes with a target group-specific practical aid for re teachers, available in both analog and digital forms, as an open educational adaptable resource that is to be disseminated by oerexperienced communities and by re training institutions. table 3: implementation and dissemination in cycle 5 of the cre4re project output i: development product the children's rights religious didactic learning landscape (see figure 1), which attempts to take into account the important theological foundations of protestant school education (ekd, 2017), can be viewed as an output of the project described a under a key guiding competence expectation of the bavarian subject curriculum for protestant re in the third/fourth grades, which can be assigned to learning area 10 facing challenges in living together, primary school students describe how people live under injustice in both their local area and worldwide and develop shared visions of a better, peaceful world. in compulsory and optional teaching modules, core topics related to children's rights are developed from a theological and re perspective. in particular, explicitly protestant ideas about a successful life and coexistence, such as freedom, equal treatment, peace, justice, and the integrity of creation, play a guiding role in the development of visions for the future. in addition, interdisciplinary learning paths are presented to illuminate exemplary subject areas in a networked and multi-perspective manner and thus do justice to the complexity of the subject matter. the goal of the learning landscape and thus of the learning path is to get students involved in their school by taking action to promote children's rights in the sense of active citizenship. students are therefore encouraged to take responsibility for themselves and for others, for the environment, and for the future. 1 implementation and dissemination cycle 5 (december 2023 june 2024) researcher re teachers goals: finalization of the religious didactic teaching-learning arrangement for use in religious education & embedding of the final religious didactic teaching-learning arrangement in the practical aid method: final revision with regard to linguistic hurdles and structural transparency; collection of meaningful examples for teachers' handbook results: handout for re teachers with a learning landscape, practical material and instructions for initiating learning processes related to children's rights in primary school re lessons as well as findings on typical learning paths, challenges, and results 2 design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 57 figure 1: "children's rights" learning landscape as a development product (© a. l. fleischmann) output ii: research product a subject-specific competency model for children's-rights-related learning (see figure 2) was developed as an output of religious didactic theory development, which focus-es on the competency dimensions of children's-rightsrelated basic knowledge, children's-rightsrelated attitudes, and children's-rights-related ability to act (schweitzer, 2017; kmk, 2018). this model was based on overlapping consensus on the objectives of children's rights education, re, and primary school education. building on this overlapping consensus, a review of subjectspecific competence models of re, competence models in the field of cre, or with an affinity to children's-rights-oriented learning (e.g., education for sustainable development, ethical education, education in values) and finally primary-school-specific competence models of other subject didactics (subject didactics) was carried out. the emerging learning-processrelated competence dimensions of basic knowledge, attitudes, and the ability to act were concretized through learning content and then framed by the process-related competencies and outlined in terms of developmental psychology and thus adapted in terms of content for primary-school-aged children. 58 global education review 11 (2) figure 2: competence model of children’s-rightsrelated competence for religious education in primary school (© a. l. fleischmann) transfer of a digital learning module: interweaving theory and practice a central contribution to the muchlamented theory-practice gap can be made by the transfer of practice (gräsel, 2011), which is also important for re didactics as an original task anchored in the self-image of subject didactics. the following is an example of how the learning module children of this world from the learning landscape (see figure 1), which has already been tested in cycles several times, was implemented in re practice. to this end, it was extracted from the learning landscape, further developed with digital support, and evaluated in primary-school re lessons as part of another micro-cycle. to support the transfer, researchers and practitioners cooperated throughout. design and construction of the "children of the world" learning module in the context of the didactics of human and cre, pirner (2017) emphasized the importance of elementary approaches via real people’s real experiences of suffering and injustice. for this reason, real experiences of injustice by children around the world were integrated into the design of the children of the world learning module, which in turn functions as the starting point of the learning path. the experiences are present-ed as narrative stories and compassion-oriented religious didactic methods (picture viewing, role play, writing a prayer of lament) that are intended to promote the children's-rights-related learning path in its affective-emotional dimension. in the cre4re project, the following module-specific competence expectations were defined: the students: • perceive that children live under conditions of injustice and inequality both locally and worldwide and describe their living situation. • take an interest in these children’s life situations by adopting their perspective and formulating associated feelings. these competencies are also taken into account in the psychological dimensions of empathy and perspective taking of the competency model and are expressed through the process-related competency “empathizing and taking part” (see figure 2). for this micro-cycle, the existing stories have now been integrated as audio stories in a digital learning app as an audio file, which is design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 59 structured as a map with continents and provides additional differentiation tasks (e.g., videos, texts, songs). in the digital learning module, the children report on injustice and inequality in the world as well as war, flight, and child labor in the audio stories. the learning landscape was implemented digitally using the genial.ly website, which made it possible to enrich interactive slides with videos, texts, images, and audio files and link them together. the digital learning module was tested in accordance with the following procedure: (a) introduction of the learning module in plenary, (b) independent processing of the learning tasks in ac-accordance with individual learning requirements (audio stories and processing of the differentiated tasks), and (c) reflection in plenary. research question and hypotheses the overarching objective was to facilitate the transfer of module-related content into school practice through a distinct design cycle. this approach aimed to enhance the ability of educators to empathize with their students, thereby promoting the integration of compassion-oriented religious didactic methods into the digital learning module. furthermore, the aim was to examine whether empathy differed between girls and boys after the digital learning module was implemented, as relevant studies have decidedly pointed to genderspecific differences in social skills such as empathy (mcdonald & kanske, 2023). this aim resulted in the following cycle-specific research question: can the children of the world learning module foster the selfassessed empathy skills of primary-school students as part of children’s-rights-related competence in the context of re? the following hypotheses were formulated: h1: the learning module has a positive effect on the children's ability to empathize (the mean values of the two dependent groups, i.e., pretest to posttest, differ). h2: there is a difference between girls and boys in empathy on the posttest. evaluation and reflection data collection and sampling the design experiment took place in a primary school in the state of bavaria (germany) in two third-grade and three fourth-grade classes, with the two third-grade classes and one fourth-grade class surveyed on the first survey day and the remaining two fourth-grade classes surveyed on the second survey day. the following procedure was followed: (a) pretest, (b) implementation of the learning module by the teacher in a 90-min lesson, and (c) posttest. after adjusting the data, a sample of n = 88 students was obtained, 42% of whom were girls and 57% were boys (see table 4; one participant was excluded due to missing information on gender). table 4: sample by gender and age note. 87 ≤ n ≤ 88. one participant indicated “diverse” as their gender, so they were not included in analyses involving gender. 1 gender age total sample 8 years 9 years 10 years 11 years girls 3 13 20 1 37 boy 0 15 35 0 50 3 28 55 1 87 2 3 60 global education review 11 (2) instruments the empathy self-assessment scale (cronbach's alpha = .86) validated in the timss study (wendt, 2007) for primary-school students was used as the measurement instrument to depict the construct of empathy as a sub-competence of a competence related to children's rights (table 5). the students completed this scale immediately before and after the learning module was implemented. table 5: empathy scale (timss, 2017) on the pretest and post-test data analysis the subsequent data analysis was carried out using r (version 4.2.0). after checking the reliability of the scale, the items were combined into one scale, and the mean values were tested for differences with welch’s t test (variant of the t test for unequal variances) to test the hypotheses. results the reliability of the empathy scale was determined with cronbach's alpha. the internal consistency was satisfactory for the pretest (α = 1 hedges' g is a variation of cohen's d that corrects for biases due to small sample sizes (0.2 = small effect size; 0.5 = medium effect size; 0.8 = large effect size; hedges & olkin, 1985). 2 a sensitivity analysis using “g*power” (version 3.1.9.7, faul et al., 2007) yielded that the minimum effect size that could be .64) and high for the posttest (α = .80). the mean values on the children's empathy scale showed a slight but statistically significant increase (dependent welch’s t test) from pretest to posttest, t(87) = 2.8, p < .05 (∆m = 0.17, 95% ci [0.05, 0.29], n = 88), providing support for h1. the mean value for empathy on the pretest was m = 3.36 (sd = 0.63), but it increased to m = 3.53 (sd = 0.57) on the posttest, representing a small effect size (hedges' g1 = .28; 95% ci [.58, .02]). 2 with respect to gender, there was a significantly higher mean value for girls (m = 3.72, sd = 0.35) than for boys (m = 3.38, sd = 0.65), t(79) = -3.1, p < .05 (∆m = 0.34, 95% ci [ 0.12, 0.56]) with a medium effect size (hedges' g = .62; 95% ci [0.18, 1.05], n = 87). to check for whether gender differences already existed on the pretest, i computed an independent samples t test, which showed slightly higher perceived empathy in the girls (m = 3.44, sd = 0.52), but it was not statistically significantly higher than the mean for boys (m = 3.23, sd = 0.75) due to the relatively small sample size, t(61) = -1, p > .05 (∆m = .15, 95% ci [-0.43, 0.14]; hedges' g = .22; 95% ci [.19, .65], n = 87). 3 the pearson correlations (table 6) showed a significant positive mean correlation between empathy and gender (i.e., female) of the children surveyed on the posttest (r = .30, p < .05). the gender difference found on the posttest could largely be detected, if the effect truly existed, with 80 % power (α = .05, one-tailed) is d = .27. 3 the sensitivity analysis for the two independent welch’s t tests revealed that if the effect truly existed, with 80 % power (α = .05, two-tailed) the minimum effect size under the given sample size conditions is d = .61. variable how do you feel when others are unwell? please choose one rating for each line. emp_1 it depresses me when i see someone being laughed at. emp_2 it takes a lot out of me when i see someone crying. emp_3 i often feel compassion for people who are worse off than me. emp_4 i feel sorry for children who are often teased. 1 = totally true; 2 = somewhat true; 3 = somewhat not true; 4 = not true at all 1 design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 61 attributed to items 2.2 (r = .30, p < .05) and 2.4 (r = .23, p < .05). table 6: means, standard deviations, and correlations note. 87 ≤ n ≤ 88. m and sd represent mean and standard deviation, respectively. the confidence interval is a plausible range of population correlations that could have produced the sample correlation (cumming, 2014). * p < .05. ** p < .01. discussion comparisons of the mean values from the pretest and posttest showed that, overall, after completing the learning module, students’ self-assessed empathy had increased. from this result, i conclude that the digital learning module successfully promoted self-assessed empathy (as a sub-competence of a children’srights-related competence). the differences in the mean values of the individual items on the empathy scale showed that the positive change could mainly be attributed to items emp_2 and emp_4 (see table 5) and that the methodological elements in the audio stories of the learning map promoted these sub-aspects of the items particularly well. it was also noticeable that the differences in the mean values on the overall scale could mainly be attributed to the girls (see table 6). apparently, girls benefitted more from the digital learning map, a finding that also goes hand in hand with the genderspecific differences mentioned above. finally, the results must be interpreted in context and in relation to the federal state of bavaria. future studies should use a larger sample, a control group, and a follow-up survey to investigate the long-term effects of the module. overall, however, the results showed that the use of experiential and empathy-oriented approaches in the digital learning map can certainly contribute to successful cre in primary-school re and that the module was successfully transferred into practice. 62 global education review 11 (2) 4 dbr in re: project-specific potentials and challenges in addition to many advantages, the relevant specialist literature also discusses obstacles associated with dbr (easterday, lewis, & gerber, 2014; gärtner, 2018). although the dbr approach was found to be a beneficial research method in the context of the project for promoting the integration of cre in primaryschool re through a theory-practice transfer, it also has some disadvantages. for this reason, i now present both opportunities and obstacles that have been identified in the application of the research approach in re. opportunity: object-oriented and contextual theory formation in the process the topic of children's rights is not specific to re. there are no empirical findings on learner perspectives or conditions for success from research in re. the processual character of dbr will enable researchers to conduct exploratory and flexible investigations of mediation paths, learning processes, and teaching-learning strategies as well as competencies, thus providing a bridge to previously unconsidered areas of re-search. opportunity: cyclical design of a contextspecific learning innovation the iterative design cycles enabled me to use repeated testing in both the laboratory and classroom settings, whereby the number of students also differed. through re-peated testing under different conditions, the children's-rightsrelated learning innovation can be increasingly adapted to the target context and made more concrete. opportunity: collaboration between researchers and practitioners for theorypractice transfer networking researcher-practitioner cooperation can be seen as an elementary component of dbr (anderson & shattuck, 2012), the implementation of which ensured a continuous and profitable exchange between theorists and practitioners of different interfaces throughout the project. in the initial phase, the close contact with a training center for re in primary school proved to be particularly useful, which led to further project contacts with experienced religious educators. in addition, the project funding from the barbara schadeberg foundation opened up contact with schools with a protestant profile, which aroused the interest of other protestant schools in the project and led to increases in networking, which in turn pro-vided for a transfer of project-related practical results to other schools. the research-methodology framework of the dbr approach also ensured that re teachers from different denominations and subject didactics were directly involved in both the proto-typing process and the continuous evaluation process, which, according to gräsel (2019), can be seen as a positive factor of influence for transfer success and in any case leads to strong identification with the innovation. particularly in the prototyping phase in cycle 1, detailed comments on the handout, intensive evaluation discussions, and expert groups ensured that the children’s-rights-based learning landscape, including the handout, was practical and suitable from when the project was first implemented in the research grant, whereby the concrete benefits of the project were also emphasized. in addition, the specific goal of the project was always made clear, namely, the publication of a handout with practical modules in both paper and digital form and with the possibility of individual adaptation, which can design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 63 immediately be used in schools and can also be used across federal states. such transparent communication has contributed to re teachers being convinced of the benefits of the religious didactic learning landscape themselves and also at the student level, as visible success in learning could be achieved. exploratory insights were also gained with regard to subject-specific basic theories, which can ultimately be developed further in the context of larger studies. opportunity: positive influence of protestant schools according to gräsel (2019), another factor of influence for a theory-practice transfer is the consideration of specific characteristics of the individual schools, whereby the inclusion of protestant schools proved to be particularly beneficial for the success of the project. implementation was facilitated by anchoring aspects of children's rights in a school profile based on a christian view of humanity and a school culture that is al-ready children’s-rightsoriented and implements certain children's rights in everyday school life. in addition, a high level of networking between the re teachers at the participating schools and a positive interdisciplinary culture of cooperation was developed, thus ensuring a particularly smooth implementation of the project, especially the action-oriented application in cycle 3, in which cooperation between primary and secondary modern schools took place across all types of school. as a result, n = 638 children took part in the children's rights rally, and an innovative element was quickly disseminated within the school. challenge: resources in summary, dbr requires a great deal of human, time, and financial resources. the time required to implement the project within the design cycles initially proved to be a particularly major hurdle. on the one hand, this time investment was due to the fact that little research has been conducted into learning processes in connection with children's rights, and therefore, a 9-month conception and prototyping process of the religious didactic learning innovation itself preceded the actual evaluation phase. this also confirmed the problem formulated by gräsel and parchmann (2010) that "cooperation between practitioners and academics is not per se productive" (p. 210) with regard to different convictions, interpretative horizons, understandings of roles, and goals, so that in the initial design phase, any discrepancies between the convictions of the theorists and practitioners had to be constructively addressed in dialog. in addition, subject-specific self-constructions of survey instruments had to be undertaken, which were facilitated by preliminary work from other subject didactics, but which in turn had to be adapted to the desired innovation. the actual evaluation phase required a high degree of additional commitment and initiative on the part of the religion teachers, also accompanied by a high consumption of personnel resources at the respective school. especially at the beginning of the first design cycle, in which the project worked with only one religion class, the characteristics of the religion teachers, who were involved in the development process with their skills and convictions, played a special role in a successful transfer, as they had a decisive influence here. for this reason, a perspectiverich further development of religious didactic innovation across several design cycles with different practitioners is essential. overall, working as a researcher-practitioner in tandem and the associated planning discussions also required time resources on both sides. the challenge of limiting the timeframe of a dbr project is exacerbated by the need for several iterations in relation to theory development. the 64 global education review 11 (2) project-related effort involved in instrument planning and construction, access to the field, the implementation of the teaching unit with lesson absences and follow-up means that a cycle can extend across several months or even years. due to the testing in re in primary school, all field tests were conducted during regular lesson times, meaning that vacation periods also had to be taken into account. furthermore, it is to be expected that high costs will be incurred if materials or technology need to be purchased, or if travel needs to be made possible for the purpose of cooperating with stakeholders. challenge: lack of generalizability of the results and verification of the sustainability of the learning process the learning effects examined in the project are related to the learning processes examined in their respective contexts, that is, they cannot be generalized, but can only be transferred iteratively to new target contexts. furthermore, they do not provide empirically validated evidence of sustainable effects of the teaching-learning innovations. concrete evidence of effects and their sustainability could be provided by an intervention study, for example, in a quasi-experimental pre-post control group design. in the case of the project, this intervention study would have to be preceded by a specific instrument design for children’s-rights-related competence measurement and an associated validation study. the development of a robust design can be considered to have been achieved once a concrete impact has been established. design-based research perspectives on the integration of cre in the context of re finally, four central research perspectives that can drive the transfer and implementation of the project-specific research and development products through further design-based research are highlighted below. further design-based teaching research first, there are further subject-specific research perspectives in the context of religious didactic teaching research at the primary-school level that have resulted from the preliminary work that has already been conducted. examples include research into the significance and influence of psychological learning prerequisites (e.g., motivation and interests) on the learning process related to children's rights or a comprehensive empirical analysis of preconcepts related to children's rights. likewise, in-depth dbr research projects on teaching-learning processes on specific subtopics of children's rights—such as the topic of "dignity" from an re perspective—are also possible. design-based training courses research for the professionalization process of primary-school re teachers in relation to children’s rights, it would appear to be fundamentally expedient to offer further training on the topics of human rights and children's rights in schools and re, in which teachers are professionalized for the core elements of the generated theories alongside an introduction to children's rights theory. on the other hand, they should be familiarized with the teaching modules specific to children's rights, which they should then try out in their lessons and reflect on their teaching experience. the result is a direct practical transfer of the religious didactic learning landscape, whereby the experiences of the re teachers can in turn serve as further development and adaptation of the learning landscape. as part of the project, a training course has already been designed; it could be tested and developed further in the dbr format in the future. design-based research for integrating child rights education into religious education in germany 65 design-based training research on the integration of children's rights perspectives in teacher training moreover, by anchoring human and cre in university curricula throughout germany, subject-specific primary-school teacher training should be supplemented by the perspective of human and cre. integrating the learning landscape into a university course and testing and evaluating it in the dbr format would increasingly test and implement the concepts in this target context. design-based school development to anchor children's rights in school profiles the last option is design-based school development to anchor children's rights in protestant primary schools. from the perspective of public theology and re, the responsibility for the implementation and realization of children's rights is a substantial part of the mission of protestant education in re and protestant schools (losansky, 2022). the implementation of elements of children’ rights specific to the learning landscape in the context of a children’s-rights-oriented teaching and school culture, such as the learning modules of the action-oriented application of the learning landscape for the school profile (see figure 1), would promote the integration of aspects of children’s rights into the target context of schools. closing remarks in this article, and in relation to the project, i showed how the use of a design-based research approach can integrate children’s rights perspectives into re. i also highlighted the forward-looking significance of the research paradigm for re didactics. an interweaving of religious didactic theory and re practice can be seen at numerous points in the dbr project, such as during the problem analysis, during the design cycles, and in the practical transfer of the project output. the dual output also has a teaching-related and a scientific dimension, whose combination of innovation developed for re and religious didactic theory makes a decisive contribution to overcoming the subjectrelated theory-practice gap and also to highquality design-based educational research. acknowledgments special thanks go to mr. matthias buhn, who, as a student assistant at the chair of re at the friedrich-alexander university of erlangennuremberg, provided substantial support for this study as part of his bachelor’s thesis. for his assistance with the empirical analyses, special thanks go to marcus penthin (phd), a research assistant at the chair of re at the friedrich-alexander university of erlangennuremberg. the research project was financially supported by the bavarian equal opportunities sponsorship realisierung von chancengleichheit von frauen in forschung und lehre (ffl) realization of equal opportunities for women in research and teaching. references altmeyer, s., englert, r., kohler-spiegel, h., naurath, e., schröder, b. & schweitzer, f. 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(2017). timss 2015. skalenhandbuch zur dokumentation der erhebungsinstrumente und arbeit mit den datensätzen. münster: waxmann. https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/95207/ https://doi.org/10.15460/eder.6.2.1909 https://www.mdpi.com/2227-7102/12/6/410 172 global education review 10 (1-2) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2023). the monarch who was more than a warrior-king. [review of the book henry v by malcolm vale]. global education review, 10 (1-2). 172-175. book review the monarch who was more than a warrior-king “henry v” by malcom vale by eric martone each summer, various free shakespeare in the park performances are held in countless towns throughout the united states as part of efforts to educate and entertain the masses. among them are performances of the bard’s king henry v, which has been featured by such acting companies as the hudson valley shakespeare company of new york in 2023 and shakesperience of connecticut in 2010. the play, based on the life of king henry v of england (1386-1422), has been filmed on three memorable occasions—with the lead played by such laudable actors as sir lawrence olivier (1944), sir kenneth branagh (1989), and tom hiddleston (2012). its enduring popularity and success have led to the indelible image of the monarch as one of england’s greatest medieval warrior-kings. even a 2019 “historical” film (the king) based on henry v’s life starring timothée chalamet drew from shakespeare’s story. although henry v reigned for only a relatively short amount of time, his underdog military success in the hundred years’ war against france propelled england’s status as a european military power. this success, especially at the battle of agincourt (1415), is the focus of shakespeare’s play, which is part of the writer’s tetralogy covering the successive reigns of richard ii, henry iv, and henry v. during the reign of his father, henry iv, henry had the opportunity to cultivate his military skills by suppressing a welsh revolt (led by owain glyndŵr) and against the upstart aristocratic percy family of northumberland (at the battle of shrewsbury). as henry iv’s health continued to decline, henry began taking on an ever-increasing role in english governmental affairs. however, father and son did not always see eye-to-eye, leading to political conflict between them. henry ascended to the english throne as henry v in 1413 upon his father’s death. he resumed pending english claims to the french throne by virtue of his descent from the french royalty dynasty. in 1415, henry v embarked on war with france. his first campaign concluded with his famous victory at agincourt. taking advantage of political divisions in france, henry v managed to conquer and occupy large portions of northern france, particularly normandy. by 1420, his armies had conquered paris and nearly most of medieval france. after lengthy negotiations with charles vi of france, the treaty of troyes (1420) recognized henry v as regent and heir apparent to the french throne. he subsequently married charles’s daughter, catherine of valois. however, at the point where it seemed destined that there would be a union between the english and french crowns, henry v died in 1422. his son, henry vi, was only a child, which led to a period of political instability and the english loss of its claim to the french throne. analyses of henry v’s reign are varied. he is often praised for his military prowess and bravery, with his militaristic pursuits during the hundred years’ war receiving credit for forging english nationalism and setting the stage for england (and then later britain) to prominence as a global power. however, despite his military genius and personal piety, henry v could on occasion be cruel in temperament. further, he has sometimes been criticized for largely ignoring english domestic affairs. targeted more toward an academic audience than casual readers, malcolm vale’s book (originally published in 2016, but now reissued in paperback) is not a straight biography; instead, it is more a critical analysis of henry v’s reign. or, rather, certain aspects of it. the henry v that emerges from vale’s book is not the stereotypical warrior-king immortalized by shakespeare. the reader is instead presented with a king no longer primarily a soldier, but a much more rounded, multifaceted figure who leads his country. in so doing, vale reveals “another henry v.” vale clearly sets out his agenda in his prelude and introduction. as he notes, this book seeks to explore aspects of henry v’s character, personality, and behaviour which lie outside the traditional and stereotypical depiction of him as a soldier, a warrior-king par excellence. it is largely based on the evidence for the king’s direct, personal involvement and intervention in the wide range of matters with which he was obliged, or chose, to deal. it also attempts to uncover, as far as it is ever possible to do so, the workings of his mind and their translation into political behaviour, religious observance, and patronage of the peaceful arts...although some of these are certainly present in shakespeare’s king henry v, his great play is essentially a work of fiction...[that] has, however, set the tone for much subsequent interpretation of the “real” henry v and...continues to inform the popular image of the king as warrior, if not warmonger (xv-xvi). thus, vale suggests that henry v’s reputation as a warrior-king shows only one aspect of his character, and not necessarily the most important one in letting us understand the man. giving greater authority to the archival record than many historians, vale adopts a thematic, rather than a chronological, approach to his subject. each chapter covers one aspect of henry vs reign. chapter one, “the everyday business of kingship,” examines how the daily business of government was carried out, revealing henry’s high level of personal involvement in decisions, both large and small. vale suggests a system of bureaucracy developed around the king to streamline some of this process, as well as to govern england with consistency while the king 174 global education review 10 (1-2) was away in france. he depicts henry v as a man who took his position as monarch quite seriously, and who attempted to be just and work closely with his council. vale claims that henry’s direct signature, more so than previous kings, often appears on documents. he argues that this was done to assert his will in certain matters. unusually for the time, henry v typically wrote letters in his own hand. consequently, in chapter two, “‘in mine own hand’: the personalisation of kingship,” vale suggests that for the first time we get to hear the actual “voice” of the person in power. vale attempts to penetrate the mind and intentions of henry v through his letters and writings. the third chapter, “the king and the english language,” explores henry v’s increasing use and promotion of the english language during his reign. when he came to power, norman french and latin were still the languages of government. however, about midway through his reign, english appears with greater frequency and henry v began to write letters in that language. vale argues that the kind did this to demonstrate that should he succeed in gaining the french throne, the two countries would remain separate, distinct entities with their own laws and identities. henry v is, therefore, shown as occupying a crucial role in the developing and spreading of the english language, which was viewed as unsophisticated at the time. some of the phrases put into use in henry’s era are still used in formal parliamentary documents. moreover, vale discusses the literary development of english, as henry v’s era included such writers as chaucer. vale’s fourth and fifth chapters, “the king and the church,” parts 1 and ii, address henry v’s involvement in church matters. vale presents the king as genuinely religious, with a desire to support and protect religious establishments. henry expected such establishments to act as they should, and ultimately sought to reform certain areas of abuse and impropriety. as a result of a decrease in papal authority following the schism, henry v was able to exert substantial authority over appointments. consequently, vale argues that the king was the de facto head of the church within his own territories, two centuries before henry viii and the protestant reformation in england. in chapter six, “the king and the peaceful arts,” we learn about henry v’s direct involvement in encouraging and even participating in the peaceful arts. henry v may have composed music himself, as well as played the harp. he was well-read in both religious and imaginative works, and even commissioned several translations. he also commissioned artistic works that reinforced his authority (such as tapestries and textiles, ornamental and military metalwork, etc.). in the final chapter, “last will and legacy,” vale examines henry v’s initial and revised wills. he suggests that these documents are of particular interest, not only for what they reveal about his “intentions for the salvation of his soul and the disposal of his worldly goods, but also for the evidence they offer of changes in those intentions over time (241-242). vale’s focus on the non-militaristic aspects of henry v’s reign is both his book’s greatest asset and weakness. while an extremely detailed look at various aspects of henry v’s reign, it nevertheless makes no attempt to tell his whole “story.” because of its focus on henry’s peaceful activities, it only touches on his wars in passing. by illuminating these other aspects, it helps create a more complex, richer portrait of the monarch. however, without devoting detail to the military aspect of his reign, vale is only telling half the story. as it stands, his book serves as a valuable supplement to existing studies of henry v’s reign, rather than a definitive study on its own. nevertheless, vale’s enjoyable book is well-researched and written, and it is an excellent addition to studies of medieval england and henry v. “henry v: the monarch who was more than a warrior-king.” by malcolm vale. new haven and london: yale university press, 2022. isbn: 9780300270075 about the author malcolm vale is emeritus research fellow in history, st. john’s college, oxford. he has written extensively on anglo-french history and the cultural history of northern europe during the later middle ages. he lives in oxford, uk. about the reviewer eric martone, ph.d., is dean of the school of education and professor of history/social studies education at mercy college in new york. finding froebel 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: aslanian, teresa k., mcnair, lynn j., & powell, sacha. (2022). finding froebel: national and cross-national pedagogical paths in froebelian early childhood education. global education review, 9 (1), 1-5. finding froebel: national and cross-national pedagogical paths in froebelian early childhood education teresa k. aslanian university of south-eastern norway lynn j. mcnair cowgate under-5s and university of edinburgh sacha powell the froebel trust our shared fascination and admiration for the philosophy of the radical educationalist, friedrich froebel (1782-1852) combined with deep-seated concerns about prevailing constructs of early childhood is the catalyst for this special issue of global education review. as co-editors, our interest in “finding froebel” is simultaneously situated within scholarly debates concerned with the prevailing neo-traditionalist approaches to teaching young children, behaviorist theories of learning and modernist constructs of early childhood in our own and other countries (benn & downs, 2016; mclaren, 2020; moss, 2015). along with the authors whose work is included in this issue, we share deep concerns about the characteristics and effects of the global education reform movement (germ) and its key features of standardization, “core” subjects, learning trajectories and outcomes, profit-focused business models, and regimes of testing and accountability (sahlberg, 2012). alongside the proliferation of germ, froebel’s ideas continue to be built upon and translated both intentionally through froebel inspired programs, and unintentionally through the taken for granted tradition for care and interest in children as the basis for early childhood education (aslanian, 2015), as well as the practices of arts, crafts, outside play and pedagogic learning materials in early childhood education. most importantly, the underlying impetus of froebel’s work, the desire to offer children a holistic, fertile environment to grow in as human beings continues to inspire the work of early childhood practitioners. this philosophical rooting engenders an “intellectual heart” through the froebelian traditions of professional unity, reflection and action for social justice. biesta et al (2020, p.456) have lamented the decline in such scholarly criticality from contemporary education in which published research ranges between distinct polarities: notably, perspectives that reflect and activate “principled, critical and politically aware” positions; or those that represent a “strongly practice-focused” stance, including preoccupation with “what works” in educational systems and settings. czerniawski (2016) notes that the latter opens up spaces in which teaching as “craft” and knowledge as practical wisdom gain traction to the detriment of more expansive and circumspect professional learning. the destruction of autonomous, intellectual, caring educators drives and is 2 global education review 9 (1) perpetuated by the construction of education as highly regulated, performative steps in a journey towards economic productivity and social control. wasmuth and nitecki (2017: 5) have noted that “the child’s well-being and education are convenient and socially acceptable reasons to support programs that have a less appealing motivation: to shape and control the formation of children into law-abiding, socially acceptable adults, which are necessary to keep countries economically competitive in an increasingly competitive global market.” looking far beyond the classroom for inspiration, questioning inequalities, speaking out and acting up are not part of the performance demanded by these desired outcomes of the germ movement. we would not disagree with biesta et al.’s (2020) assessment of the erosion of conditions in which educators’ status is typified as intellectually astute, curious, rebellious and even revolutionary. but we would situate the articles in this special issue differently. while eschewing the germ-related “what works” mantras, the authors who share their intellectual and indeed emotional, ethical and spiritual hearts, have been inspired by and are closely focused on deeply principled practice. such a foundation for education and learning makes criticality and political awareness (and often resistance and activism) part of its raison d’être. a principled froebelian approach generates dynamic, situational, relational and existential questions, tentatively offering (or avoiding giving) conclusive interpretations in “writerly” ways (barthes, 1970) that draw readers into sophisticated dialogue and complex interpretation. as this special issue makes evident, a grassroots movement of educators and scholars is actively reigniting froebel’s holistic philosophy for early childhood pedagogies, seeking to foreground young children’s histories and human condition; and respecting the particularities of each child’s environmental, sociocultural and politico-economic circumstances. it is from this complexity that a froebelian approach seeks to nurture each child’s educational drive. consequently, lexicons for early childhood education find close correspondence between the humanistic maxims of froebelian education and contemporary concerns such as social justice, fairness and sustainability, which apply in equal measure to early childhood systems and young children’s living and learning. interest in froebel’s work in the 21st century is not in itself new, as intellectual leaders have time and time again written about froebel (most recently, wasmuth, 2020; bruce, 2021), and contemporary early years practitioners recurrently embed his principles into practice (mcnair & powell, 2021; siraj & kingston, 2015). a froebelian approach is a part of mainstream provision for many young children’s early learning, and a dominant pedagogical approach in numerous educational spheres. this special issue tells varied stories of how educators interpret and manifest froebel’s ideas today within the context of a global climate crisis and germ policies. judging by the number of submissions to this special issue, there is significant interest in the life and work of the early years pioneer friedrich froebel. these articles from academics, educators and practitioners working in many different countries provided insight into how froebel’s seminal ideas have been “transferred, translated and transformed” over time (nishida, 2014). the special issue will be published in two parts, due to the tremendous response to our call finding froebel 3 for papers, and thanks to the generosity of the journal’s editorial board. this first is a collection of papers, which coalesce around critical social justice perspectives that are “close to practice.” each draws on froebel’s principles and philosophy as a source of analytical inspiration and examination of contemporary education in its socio-political milieu. part 2 includes froebelian interpretations of global concerns, such as climate change. collectively the articles cover work in europe, east asia, north america and oceania. future collections would benefit from examples of froebelian scholarship and pedagogical approaches in parts of the world that are not represented in this special issue. as an introduction to our youngest community members, who are frequently overlooked in research, cooper, siu, mcmullen, rockel and powell invite us to rethink and reformulate early years practice with a focus on very young children. the authors’ reflections on pedagogies in “typical” early childhood education and care settings in their four respective countries – new zealand, hong kong, usa and england – thoughtfully and respectfully interpret cultural nuances in pedagogies of care for one-year-olds. autonomy and freedom with guidance form the pedagogical focus for their observations, which are brought to life in vignettes accompanied by the authors’ multi-layered dialogue. contestations, and moral and political permeations infiltrate this special issue. for example, mcnair, blaisdell, davis and addison express their expansive struggle with the overused word of “quality” by policy makers, regulators and educators. the authors challenge polysemic understandings of what makes a “quality” early years setting; arguing that the lack of definition is not at all helpful. mcnair et al stress that ideas of quality are not neutral, and can be linked to political practice, e.g., issues of politics and power and neoliberal ideology. the fundamental challenge facing the researchers was defining a meaningful understanding of quality, a definition that was consequential to the practitioners themselves. central to such a challenge was unravelling practitioner definitions of the word. the data then enabled mcnair et al to connect their findings with froebelian principles. after comparing froebel’s philosophy with that of other influential theorists and thinkers on education, castner & puntarelli bring readers along into an imagined dialogue between froebel and a contemporary director of an american early childhood center. the dialogue brings to light the uniquely humanizing perspective foebelian pedagogy offers amidst a field dominated by germ policies. in conversation with the head, froebel’s seminal ideas are highlighted and exposed in this creative scenario. illustrated with examples from contemporary empirical study of two-year-olds using slow video ethnography, maclure and macrae bring froebel’s thought into dialogue with the recent “ontological turn” in the social sciences via gilles deleuze. exploring the common interest and roots of froebel’s holism and delueze’s immanent ontology, the authors tease out points at which the thought of these two very different thinkers collide and reveal rarely discussed theoretical underpinnings of froebel’s holism and relationships between children and their environments. while froebel’s ideas and his followers’ work developing kindergartens have received attention, the practitioners who brought and continue to bring those ideas to life in children’s everyday lives often go unnoticed. may’s article sheds light on one such “foot soldier,” isobel little, a froebel trained scot from edinburgh who migrated to aotearoa-new zealand. we follow her career along with the development of froebel’s ideas as they were adopted within a māori framework. may discusses kindergarten teachers’ continued role as quiet but effective “front-line workers” performing community outreach for kindergarten families in usually 4 global education review 9 (1) unnoticed ways, but most recently made visible during the covid-19 pandemic. the value of outdoor play in early childhood education is perhaps the most widespread relic of froebelian pedagogy. at the same time, it is evident that children spend less and less time outdoors, in connection with their natural environments, and have less access to play. watts’ article describes the use of sensory ethnography and gopro cameras to access the joy and magic children experience during outdoor play and explores how parents and teachers partake in that joy, exploring how our holistic capacities can serve as everyday activism for sustainable futures. where have we “found froebel” through work with this special issue? contributing authors connect froebel to global concerns, such as the current climate crisis and nature’s important role in children's growth and learning; to paradigmatic turns that bring the child’s unique polyvocal and embodied expression into focus; to the professional resilience and resourcefulness of educators; and to critical and political questions about the character and purpose of early childhood education. arguably, froebel’s invention of the kindergarten has been colonized by neoliberalism, while at the same time educators find in his ideas a source of resistance and sustenance. despite the proliferation of kindergartens and international charters for children’s rights, froebel’s holism and relational ontology, which he encapsulated in his vision of a garden for children, remain radical ideas in education policy rhetoric and its enactment in practice. nishida (2014) reminds us of the need for widespread critical thinking, not only processing knowledge but transforming it. during our process of work on this special issue, writing about froebel has compelled us to think holistically, as well as critically: asking what are we doing, why, for whom and to what ends? what also became clear from the submissions is that a froebelian approach curriculum, pedagogy, principles and environment can be connected to moral and political practice. despite the changing contexts of educational practices and transnational politics, all the articles discuss the relevance and applicability of froebelian knowledge, values and relational practice today. more specifically, the authors do not simply resurrect froebelian principles, but by presupposing a vision of the future, argue the principles are pedagogically sited over time; reconsidered and reconceptualized. references aslanian, t.k. (2015). getting behind discourses of love, care and maternalism in early childhood education. contemporary issues in early childhood 16(2), 153-65, doi: 10.1177/1463949115585672. barthes, r. (1970). s/z. éditions du seuil. benn, m. & downs, j. (2016). the truth about our schools: exposing the myths exploring the evidence. routledge. biesta, g., takayama, k., kettle, m. & heimans, s. (2020). teacher education between principle, politics, and practice: a statement from the new editors of the asia-pacific journal of teacher education. asia-pacific journal of teacher education, 48(5), 455-459, doi: 10.1080/1359866x.2020.1818485 bruce, t. (2021). friedrich froebel. a critical introduction to key themes and debates. bloomsbury. czerniawski, g. (2018). teacher education: a weapon of mass instruction? british educational research association blog. https://www.bera.ac.uk/blog/teachereducation-a-weapon-of-mass-instruction mclaren, peter. (2020). the future of critical pedagogy. educational philosophy and theory 52(12), 1243-48. doi: 10.1080/00131857.2019.1686963. mcnair, l. and powell, s. (2021). friedrich froebel: a path least trodden. early child finding froebel 5 development and care, 191(7-8), 1175-1185, doi: 10.1080/03004430.2020.1803299 moss, p. (2015). there are alternatives! contestation and hope in early childhood education. global studies of childhood, 5(3), 226–238. doi: 10.1177/2f2043610615597130 nishida, y. (2014). "come, let us live with our children!" the kindergarten's arrival in japan. early education journal, 72, 6-7. https://www.earlyeducation.org.uk/publications-resources sahlberg, p. (2012). global education reform movement is here! blog by pasi sahlberg. available online at: https://pasisahlberg.com/global-educationalreform-movement-is-here/ siraj, i. & kingston, s. (2015). an independent review of the scottish early learning and childcare (elc) workforce and out of school care (osc) workforce. edinburgh: the scottish government. available online at: https://www.gov.scot/publications/independent -review-scottish-early-learning-childcare-elcworkforce-out-school/ wasmuth, h. & nitecki, e. (2017). global early childhood policies: the impact of the global education reform movement and possibilities for reconceptualization. global education review, 4 (2), 1-17. wasmuth, h. (2020). fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play: modifications in germany and the united states. routledge. “i was born in this country!” 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: belseth, kjartan. (2024). “i was born in this country!” the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in early childhood education and care. global education review, 11 (3), 1-11. “i was born in this country!” the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in early childhood education and care kjartan belseth østfold university college (norway) abstract the aim of this study is to address the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in early childhood education and care. the article starts with presenting the background of the study, describing how talking about race and whiteness may perceive difficult to address for both preschool teachers as well as early childhood educators. using two narratives from my own research history, i employ a postcolonial perspective, using the theories of frantz fanon, as a lens to discuss the narratives. the article has a critical perspective, acknowledging how we today still live in a world that continues of being affected by the effects of colonization. in this section, i discuss why saying children are “colorblind” is problematic. furthermore, i try looking towards a more decolonializing and liberating pedagogy, troubling recent matters regarding skin color. finally, i address the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in early childhood education and why raising awareness about this movement could be so important for our society generally and future preschool teachers in particular. keywords black lives matter, preschool, postcolonial perspective, fanon, auto-ethnography, narrative introduction after many years as a preschool teacher working in superdiverse preschools (giæver, 2020) and an educator in early childhood education and care (ecec), i have come to appreciate the need to engage in discussion with my ecec student teachers on issues surrounding race and other social phenomena in the world. the point is to prepare them for what 1 in norway, the term “kindergarten” is used instead of preschool, and kindergartens are primarily for children between the ages of one and six. however, i will use the term preschool in this article to reach a broader audience. they might encounter when they start working in preschools.1 for several years, i have been teaching a subject 2 chosen by students in ecec called “diversity and unity,” 3 where i have addressed issues on race and whiteness. i began implementing discussions on the black lives matter (blm, 2013) movement as part of the course curriculum following the death of sandra 2 in the fall semester of senior year, students are eligible to choose from five subjects. 3 mangfold og fellesskap (my translation). 2 global education review 11 (3) bland in 2015 (montgomery, 2019). her case has had a deep impact on both my personal and academic life. prior to becoming a teacher and educator in ecec, i had been interested in and written exams about whiteness and white privilege in my master’s program. although sandra bland’s case had an impact on me, it did not feature prominently in the news in norway. however, following the death of george floyd in 2020, there were massive demonstrations in oslo in the middle of the covid-19 pandemic. between 12,000 and 15,000 people demonstrated to honor his memory. according to fürher (2021), this was done to “express solidarity with anti-racist struggles in the usa, and denounce racism in norway” (p. 22). many of the protestors carried signs referencing the black lives matter movement (jørgensen & kjernsli, 2020), demonstrating that discussing such topics had become more important than ever before (führer, 2021). over many years working as both a preschool teacher and an educator in ecec, i have heard sayings that “children are colorblind” and more recently “all lives matter,” which have led me to construe white privilege as everpresent. white privilege can be viewed as a societal privilege that benefits white people over non-white people. hooks (2009) argued that there is a difference between what she called “white supremacy” and racism. while some white people may want to be part of diverse settings, they still “have to unlearn whitesupremacist thinking” (p. 98). through her teaching, hooks had various experiences that served as lessons learned, with the most important being “to talk about the issue of perspective, of biased and unbiased thinking, to prepare students to hear points of view they might not have heard before” (p. 100). this points to the need to address and stress discussions around these issues in educational settings. in many ways, putting whiteness, white privilege, and racism on the ecec agenda can be viewed as a critical issue (yelland, 2005), including in terms of creating awareness. however, many critical issues can seem difficult for preschool teachers to tackle, as such issues can be seen as overly risky or may seem uncomfortable to undertake as part of an everyday pedagogy. nevertheless, as blaise & andrew (2005) argued, topics that preschool teachers find uncomfortable are necessary to address. it is, therefore, crucial that such issues are also part of their education in becoming preschool teachers. according to andersen (2015), getting involved with “race” as something of significance in educational practices in early childhood can seem “…very complicated, risky and also indeterminate to get involved with.” (p. 41). furthermore, biesta (2014) maintained that risk-taking should occupy a central place in our educational endeavors and be brought to the forefront of a critical pedagogical practice. the discussion in the article will utilize postcolonial perspectives to show that philosophy can encompass a more critical pedagogy (belseth, 2021). the norwegian framework plan for preschools states that attending preschool shall contribute to “children’s well-being, happiness, attainment and feeling of self-worth, and they shall combat harassment and bullying. if a child experiences harassment or bullying, the preschool must deal with, stop and follow up on it” (ministry of education, 2017, p. 11). it is worth mentioning that these forms of abuse are not only perpetrated by other children but also by preschool staff. a change in the preschools act came in 2020 when a stricter activity obligation was added for situations in which a preschool worker violated a child (preschools act, 2005). the norwegian framework plan also emphasizes that employees should “give children “i was born in this country!” 3 equal opportunities, promote equality and combat discrimination, prejudice, stereotypes and racism” (ministry of education, 2017, p. 56). furthermore, according to the educational requirements to become a preschool teacher, student teachers have to undergo training to meet and handle diversity and a multicultural pedagogy, both on campus and in their field placement preschools (hatlem & belseth, 2017; ministry of education, 2018). in order to set the frame for this article, i will now introduce the words of frantz fanon (1952): “don’t expect to see any explosion today. it’s too early … or too late. i’m not the bearer of absolute truths. no fundamental inspiration has flashed across my mind. i honestly think, however, it’s time some things were said.” (p. xi). the article presents a critical and fanonian perspective to tackle the issue of implementing discussions about black lives matter in ecec. an auto-ethnographic methodology two narratives from my own research and teaching experiences will be presented and discussed; thus, the method deployed herein is auto-ethnography (baarts, 2012; ellis et al., 2011; jamouchi, 2019; reinertsen, 2015; suotomanning, 2021). according to baarts (2012), auto-ethnography transforms from the private to the more cultural. auto, meaning one-self, is about how the researcher makes herself/himself the object of being studied through observation and reflection. the narratives presented should not only be moving but should also create movement. all senses, feelings, and thoughts are put in motion (baarts, 2012). as an autoethnographer, one has to balance between narrating and presenting, between the self and the studied, and between choosing what should be included in the narrative and what should be left out. auto-ethnography starts from a specific life (one’s own) but creates knowledge about ways of living and experiencing the world (baarts, 2012). according to suoto-manning (2022), while the use of self-study as a methodology in teacher education has been the subject of intense debate, a notable absence from this debate has been a consideration of the critical roles of race and racism. thus, this points to the importance of problematizing the topic of race: “this absence effectively silences the role of race in self-study in teacher education research and serves to uphold the centrality of whiteness in teacher education” (suoto-manning, 2022, p. 249). this accords with jamouchi’s (2019) position regarding the question of making and experience in this research in terms of researchers’ understanding of a phenomenon and their way of expressing their experience of this phenomenon. jamouchi (2019) maintained that “one can also think about how the researcher tailors the research design to study the phenomenon or case and the need to be attentive to the phenomenon with one’s whole body in order to understand the situation better and more adequately.” (p. 61). andersen (2023) put it the following way: “many who choose autoethnography position their work within critical research, because they are concerned with social justice.” (p. 144–145). building on ellis et al., (2011), autoethnographers believe that research can be rigorous, theoretical, and analytical as well as emotional, therapeutic, and inclusive of personal and social phenomena. they noted that the most important questions for auto-ethnographers are “who reads our work, how are they affected by it, and how does it keep a conversation going?” (ellis et al., 2011, p. 284). furthermore, i also wonder what happens to researchers who use this methodology when writing their own narratives, which then become part of the research data. reinertsen (2015) claimed that 4 global education review 11 (3) auto-ethnographic writing is also about scientization and learning individually and in organizations, that it is based on assumptions that the world is constructed materially, socially, and discursively, and that pedagogues create pedagogies. in using an auto-ethnographic approach, the researcher remains central to the writing process, but the writing is now thought of as a relational practice. reinertsen (2015) referred to this as exploring/researching in practice together and believed that the writing process could be thought of as entangled material and discursive creations. furthermore, in this way, we can create or write ourselves (ourselves) in and through the words, phenomena, or things we encounter (reinertsen, 2015). following ellis et al. (2011), the autoethnographic method is both a process and a product. andersen (2023) argued that an autoethnographic methodology is not common in norwegian research in the ecec context. thus, this article seeks to increase the contribution to research through the use of this methodology. if more researchers chose to use this methodology, it would contribute to expanding the field of knowledge in ecec research (andersen, 2023). a postcolonial perspective in the discussions around the narratives presented later in this article, a postcolonial perspective focusing primarily on the works of fanon (1952, 1963, 1964, 1965) will be used. in his studies, fanon worked with issues connected to marginalized groups generally and black people specifically. his work can be subsumed as an exploration of the nature of colonialism and racism (fanon, 1952; hudis, 2015). postcolonial perspectives have received considerable research attention in the last decades in efforts to look at phenomena in different ways while also advocating that all people have the right to the same material and cultural well-being (young, 2003). young lamented the persistence of inequality and injustice in the world today and, therefore, called for urgent change. thus, a postcolonial perspective can help illuminate other perspectives developed outside the west. as young (2003) noted, “it seeks to change the way people think, the way they behave, to produce a more just and equitable relation between the different peoples of the world.” (p. 7). in this way, postcolonial perspectives can add diversity to the discussion by illuminating empirical material. raivio et al. (2022) also argued that the use of a postcolonial lens can create a greater awareness of one’s own position. furthermore, by deploying such a perspective, forms of power can be uncovered; by examining possible actions in situations where one group exercises domination over another, one can ask completely different questions, including those strongly rooted in ethics (cannella & viruru, 2004). gandhi (1998) asserted that postcolonial theory is a scene of “intense discursive and conceptual activity characterized by a profusion of thought and writing about the cultural and political identities of colonized subjects.” (p. 5). using fanon’s perspectives will shed light on issues of race and whiteness, which are problematized in this article. the goal here is to address the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in ecec and understand why raising awareness about this movement could be so important to our society in general and future preschool teachers in particular. ethical perspectives the question of ethics in research is also important, and the narratives presented here are strictly my own experiences and reflections. thus, i will not address issues that concern third “i was born in this country!” 5 parties. since the narratives are strictly my own, no further actions had to be taken in accordance with the norwegian center for research data (nsd). 4 however, as a researcher, i have always striven to present my research in an ethical and careful way, as ethics can also relate to a researcher’s worldview (baarts, 2012). research ethics do not refer only to the formulated procedures but also constitute some mutually related concerns regarding understanding the world. i look to ellis (referenced in baarts, 2012) and the way in which she used the concept of relational ethics, where she proposed an epistemological shift from a relationship based on asymmetry—where one party (the researcher) has the knowledge while the other party (the researched) is the one about whom knowledge is to be created—to equality, that is, where both parties are subjects and are deemed knowledgeable. this shift reflects care, mutual respect, dignity, and connectedness between the researcher and the explored (baarts, 2012). the auto-ethnographer must be personally authentic in the ethical choices that they make and, thus, take a position and thereby position themselves in their field of research (baarts, 2012). my field of research involves educating preschool teachers to be critical and aware for the benefit of the next generation. presentation of two narratives: race, whiteness, and black lives matter in this section, i will present two narratives that will form the basis of the critical discussion in the subsequent section. narrative #1 – i was born in this country! the year is 2011. i work as a preschool teacher, and i have just started doing 4 since january 1, 2022, the nsd has been part of the knowledge sector’s service provider (sikt). research for my master’s thesis when i come across a news report (nrk, 2010) about a suburban area in oslo, norway, with a high number of migrants. in the news report, the news channel is following a small child, a boy, who is starting his first day of primary school. the report is primarily about how many people are now choosing to leave this area because of all the migrants, the child’s parents included. when presenting the child on his first day of primary school, the boy, a white norwegian, approaches another boy, with dark skin and says to him: “i’m a real norwegian!” the boy with the dark skin then replies: “i was not born in any other country. i was born in norway, actually, at lindeberg!” this news report shook me and made me once again question the enduring persistence of white privilege. understanding how easy it is for racist actions to occur and for children to be influenced propelled me to conduct research on how young children of other ethnicities are received in norwegian preschools. young (2003) asked the following question: “have you ever been the only person of your own color or ethnicity in a large group or gathering?” (p. 1). he addressed this and said that there are two kinds of white people: “those who have never found themselves in a situation where the majority of people around them are not white, and those who have been the only white person in the room” (p. 1). thus, such perspectives are vital for teaching students in ecec about, as they are expected to come across sayings such as “children are colorblind.” 6 global education review 11 (3) the second narrative occurred about five years later: narrative #2 – 23 ways you could be killed if you are black in america it is now 2016. i have been teaching pedagogy in ecec for two years. this semester, i am teaching a course called “diversity and unity.” in this lecture, i have been talking with the students about race, whiteness and white privilege, and the black lives matter movement. still, you can hear some people in society claiming “all lives matter!” towards the end of the lecture, i show my students a youtube video called “23 ways you could be killed if you are black in america.” at the end of the video, i and several of the students are sitting in tears. i found the video powerful, as did the students. it made me reflect on the need for parents of color to have talks with their children on the dangers, daily struggles, and actual risk of getting killed. it made me think of a quote from fanon (1952) written many years prior: “as painful as it us for us to have to say this: there is but one destiny for the black man. and that is white.” (p. xiv). a white parent, teacher, or child will arguably never have to raise awareness in the context of such a crushing talk about taking precautions and the risk of potentially getting killed on account of race. discussion: a fanonian perspective discussing the above narratives through a postcolonial perspective is complex. fanon (1952, 1963, 1964, 1965) advocated for the black oppressed people of algeria and claimed that the white man was locked in his whiteness and the black man in his blackness (fanon, 1952). what can this mean in an ece context? play is a vital part of children’s well-being and everyday life in preschool (øksnes & sundsdal, 2018). in the context of play, fanon (1952) opined that “children at play insofar as playing can be seen as initiation to life.” (p. 10). elsewhere, he described how the colonized at heart can experience feeling without any kind of authority (fanon, 1963). how the little boy in the first narrative is approached by others can impact how he values life. fanon (1963) said it aptly, “i came into this world anxious to uncover the meaning of things, my soul desires to be at the origin of the world, and here i am an object among other objects.” (p. 89). over the past twenty years, children have been viewed as subjects, with their own voice and thoughts, expressing themselves through various ways of communication (cannella, 1997). they are regarded as “human beings,” not “human becomings” (james et al., 1998). however, what does this mean in relation to children of all skin colors during play time with peers or interactions with preschool staff? earlier in the article, the term “colorblind” was mentioned, which begs the question of whether we are really so naïve to think that all children are colorblind? in an article published in the huffington post, antiracist activist john halstead (2016) wrote as follows: whiteness is not a problem for white people, because it blends into the cultural background. black people, on the other hand, don’t have the luxury of being “colorblind.” they live in a culture which constantly reminds them of their blackness, which tells them in a million large and small ways that they are not as important as white people, that their lives actually do not matter as much as “i was born in this country!” 7 white lives. which is why saying “black lives matter” is so important. some of halstead’s key points in the article include the need to recognize that we are not colorblind, the imperative to talk to white people about institutional racism, and the critical need to adopt the saying “black lives matter.” i once again invoke fanon (1964), who challenged white people: “where they find no room, where you leave them no room, where there is absolutely no room for them, and you dare tell me it doesn’t concern you! that it’s no fault of yours!” (p. 14). fanon also claimed that it was obvious that there could only be a white race; he talked about racism as a destruction of cultural values, of ways of life. the little boy’s retort in the news report that “i was not born in any other country. i was born in norway, actually!” can be viewed as a liberating action demonstrating that norway is a diverse country with various cultures, religions, ethnicities, and skin colors. according to fanon, this was the goal of a colonial person; he argued that it is the colonial peoples who must liberate themselves from colonialist domination and that it is not possible to take one’s distance with respect to colonialism without at the same time doing so with respect to the idea that the colonized see themselves through the filter of colonialist culture. in the second narrative, the realization that someone could actually die by virtue of having another skin color really makes you reflect on your white privilege. it is akin to fanon’s (1952) argument that “not only must the black man be black: he must be black in relation to the white man.” (p. 90). when black parents have “the talk” with their children, one could argue that they are being colonized just from being black. fanon (1963) believed that the colonized subject is constantly on his guard and fundamentally acknowledges no authority. when your skin color is the factor that puts you at risk, there is still a long way to go. when this is the case, the colonized are caught in the tightly knit web of colonialism (fanon, 1963). how can we as a society work toward a just and equal world? like fanon once said, what we do want is “to walk in the company of man, every man, night and day, for all times.” (p. 238). this quote is still highly relevant today. however, working toward a more decolonizing and liberating pedagogy, starting with decolonization, implies the urgent need to thoroughly challenge the colonial situation (fanon, 1963). toward a more decolonializing and liberating pedagogy? working toward a more decolonizing and liberating pedagogy cannot be achieved by an individual preschool teacher. andersen, sand & zachrisen (2015) argued vehemently that the leader of the preschool also has to get involved: “creating an inclusive practice in the preschool cannot be understood as only an individual matter for the individual preschool teacher.” (p. 41). moreover, according to them, there seems to be little room for independent and critical thinking around fundamental structures related to questions of power or taken-for-granted attitudes in preschools or society that can place obstacles in the way of the development of a fairer preschool pedagogy. they concluded by remarking that “preschools seem to strive to develop a pedagogical practice that can look after all children equally well, regardless of their background” (p. 55). what, therefore, can be done in pedagogy lessons in ecec? one starting point is to look at the literature we present to students. who are the authors? in what context have they written? some universities in norway have now 8 global education review 11 (3) started with what they call a decolonizing curriculum (østfold university college, 2022), but what steps can be taken in preschools? do all children have books, toys, songs, nursery rhymes, movie characters that they can identify with? fanon (1952) raised this concern over 70 years ago through the example of mickey mouse and other cartoon characters. he exclaimed that “they are written for white men, for white children” (p. 124) and believed that nursery rhymes should be subject to the same criticism. he made the direct connection between this and children’s identification process, with the black child subjectively adopting a white man’s attitude. fast forward 70 years when disney decided to cast a black actress in the role of ariel in the 2023 movie adaptation of the little mermaid, the racist backlash was swift, full-on, and unrelenting. however, as the main actor, halle bailey, claimed, “as a child, seeing a black ariel would have changed my life” (nicholson, 2023). a norwegian actress with zimbabwean roots, tinashe williamson (2021), wrote a book titled handbook for young antiracists targeting sixto eight-year-olds. shortly after publication, the book was included in the curriculum for a supplementary education course for teachers in norway (oftedal, 2022). thus, developing decolonial practices is an ongoing process. one might wonder whether it is even possible. however, as cannella and viruru (2004) reminded us, there is a danger of modeling decolonial practices. they maintained that there can be no models for decolonial practices as such models would most likely colonize: “decolonialism requires recognition of colonialism while at the same time challenging the dualistic thinking created by constructions of colonizer and colonized. we cannot provide decolonial methods or models, as we would surely then create ourselves positions as colonizers” (p. 124), a point worthy of consideration. in the introduction to this article, the case of sandra bland was mentioned as a catalyst for the implementation of discussions around the black lives matter movement in ecec. according to gladwell (2019), sandra bland’s death is what happens when a society does not know how to talk to strangers. he discussed the importance of understanding and interpreting body language and pointed to the importance of transparency. in my work with ecec students, i strive to prepare them for challenges that they might encounter in society in general and in preschool in particular. the anti-racism educator, jane elliott, once said, “there is only one race, the human race” (nbc news, 2017). however, decades earlier, fanon (1965) asked the following question: “are we still living in the time when man must fight and die in order to have the right to be the citizen of a nation” (p. 30)? in the face of events in the last few years, i would argue that this question remains valid some 60 years later and points to the importance of implementing discussions about black lives matter in ecec and why educators and preschool teachers must work together toward a more liberating pedagogy for all children and parents. to make this happen, we must embark on a new start, develop a new way of thinking, and endeavor to create a new man (fanon, 1952). put differently, “the future must be a construction supported by a man in the present” (p. xvii). it 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(2021). glocal perspectives on work-based learning: a proposed direction forward. global education review, 8 (2-3), 154-167. glocal perspectives on work-based learning: a proposed direction forward mary beth medvide suffolk university (usa) abstract work-based learning programs in the united states are designed to prepare adolescents for their first jobs and to develop the soft skills to be successful in in the classroom or the workplace. historically these programs have neglected how work, education, and training in the local context are connected to issues on national and international stages. while research and theory has generally supported this structure for wbl, the nature of work has changed substantially in the 21st century. contemporary models of wbl are informed by scholarly literature on globalization, but this is does not fully capture the realities young people face. glocalization fits with existing wbl efforts and provides a conceptual framework to modernize how students are prepared to transition from high school into the workforce or post-secondary education. this manuscript will review the current state of wbl, discuss the benefits of a glocal perspective, and make program recommendations. keywords work-based learning; school-to-work transitions; glocality; glocal citizenship introduction work-based learning (wbl) for schoolage youth in the united states has long been viewed as a vehicle to introduce students to the world of work, develop career interests, and foster academic engagement. historically, wbl has taken many forms directed at youth who will transition directly into the workforce or will enter post-secondary education (kenny, 2013). each shift in wbl has been accompanied by new strategies to maximize student success and changing conceptual underpinnings to ground program development (welsh, appana, anderson, & zierold, 2014). contemporary iterations of wbl are informed by globalization and shifts in the 21st century labor market (kenny et al., 2019a). while this is a necessary step to successfully prepare students for an uncertain world of work, it is insufficient in capturing the skills and knowledge needed for young people to find meaningful work and achieve wellbeing. a glocal perspective extends the current knowledge base on wbl and marks the next evolution in how high schools can prepare students for the dynamic economic and social conditions that await them after graduation. work-based learning for school-age youth in the united states wbl for school-age youth in the united states encompasses a range of programs, such as internships, job shadowing, and apprenticeships, that are meant to integrate young people into work settings under adult supervision. this integration is strategically positioned alongside traditional curriculum to provide students with opportunities to explore glocal perspectives on work-based learning 155 155 career interests while working towards their academic goals (bailey, hughes, & moore, 2004; solberg, howard, blustein, & close, 2002). in some cases, wbl programs include a classroom component where students consolidate learning on the job site and explore career options, but this is not commonplace (welsh et al., 2014). although wbl components are established curriculum in many countries, this is not the case in the united states where many young people may not be introduced to the world of work through formalized programs within secondary education (medvide, kozan, blustein, & kenny, 2019; pavlova, lee, & maclean, 2017). wbl is meant to help students to find connections between their academic performance now and the attainment of their career goals in the future. additionally, wbl can foster skill development in specific vocational domains, often labeled as hard skills, and soft skills that transcend the requirements any one internship or job (deluca et al., 2015). the development of soft skills in a work setting can also be utilized in the classroom to demonstrate flexibility, open-mindedness, and empathy (rogers-chapman & darling-hammond, 2013). these benefits can extend to post-secondary education and enhance preparedness and academic motivation (kenny, catraio, bempechat, minor, olle, blustein, & seltzer, 2016). large-scale studies in the united states show mixed outcomes for the effects of wbl programs on academic achievement and attainment. trends suggest wbl programs can make students more knowledgeable about work and foster career exploration, but involvement in wbl may also create an opportunity cost where students do not have sufficient time to dedicate to their classes (bradby & dykman, 2003; visher, bhandari, & medrich, 2004).these studies defined wbl broadly to include internships, externships, apprenticeships, and co-ops with varying required time commitments, which may explain the contradictory findings. additionally, these studies focused primarily on outcomes, such as graduation rates and high school gpa among participants without also accounting for what internship, curriculum, and supervisory characteristics help students to be successful (deluca et al., 2015). the outcome data therefore provided limited insight into how students can effectively utilize wbl to develop career interests or what curriculum components are necessary to maximize successful skill development (welsh et al., 2014). studies smaller in scope have generally demonstrated a link between participation in wbl and positive academic and vocational outcomes in the united states, although this research is limited in its predictive capabilities due to correlational designs (deluca et al., 2015). additionally, few longitudinal studies exist to determine if the initial benefits of participation in wbl can be sustained after a transition to post-secondary education or the workforce (kenny et al., 2016). qualitative studies have focused on specific populations, such as racial and ethnicity minority youth and youth with learning disabilities, that are at higher risk for school disengagement and drop-out (deluca et al., 2015; medvide & kenny, 2020). these studies supplement quantitative studies focused on specific academic and career outcomes by exploring processes that support students’ engagement and learning (medvide & kenny, 2020). for example, kenny and colleagues (2016) found that participants in a wbl program at an urban catholic high school benefited from the development of hard skills, fostering of soft skills, and mentorship from workplace supervisors. alumni of this program were appreciative of skill development and 156 global education review 8 (2-3) commitment of the adults in the workplace to help them achieve their vocational goals (kenny et al., 2016). the delivery of curriculum focused on skill development when coupled with support from adults in wbl programs can be a protective factor for at-risk youth. this can help these youth to stay engaged in school and develop future orientation for their work lives (deluca et al., 2015). traditional work-based learning models in the united states wbl for high school students in the united states has historically centered on strategies and programs to integrate high school into the workplace to develop skills necessary for a successful transition into the workforce as young adults (welsh et al., 2014). in the 1980s and 1990s this often took the form of preparing young people to enter directly into the workforce if they did not plan to enroll in post-secondary education or training programs (kenny, 2013). these programs fostered hard skills and were designed to maximize the students’ likelihood of success in initial employment (deluca et al., 2015). this skill development was not typically accompanied by developmental considerations, such as the need for career exploration at this age, or a view of work as a task across the lifespan (solberg et al., 2002). economic and social influences of the 1980s and early 1990s, such as the publication of the forgotten half (william t. grant foundation, 1988) and a nation at risk (1983), were catalysts for policy initiatives on school-to-work transitions and wbl during this time (kenny, 2013; welsh et al, 2014). the implementation of these programs did not focus on helping young people to develop awareness of the issues raised in these reports or their impact on the likelihood of earning a livable wage throughout their working lives (bailey et al., 2004; kenny, 2013). wbl programs in the united states later grew to include college-bound youth and took a more developmental perspective by focusing on vocational identity, work salience, and career exploration in adolescence (kenny, 2013). super’s (1957; 1990) developmental career theory often anchored these programs and provided a structure for exploration of work and non-work roles within families, peer relationships, and the local community (solberg et al., 2002). super (1957; 1990) recognized individuals as community members and citizens, but societal factors that influence self-concept and create barriers to a meaningful work life were largely absent wbl models of the latter half of the 20th century. during this time, shifts in the labor market that could impact the likelihood of finding stable, fulfilling work continued to be acknowledged by researchers as a justification for wbl programs in the united states, but structured curricula largely emphasized individual development, goalsetting, and work-related skills without also linking the vocational tasks of adolescence to a larger social or economic issues within the united states and across the globe (kenny, blustein, liang, klein, & etchie, 2019b). 21st century models and the changing world of work the 21st century is characterized by a changing world of work and growing economic instability in the united states and abroad. this has fostered concerns that models of wbl from the 20th century are no longer adequate to prepare young people for post-secondary education or the workforce (kenny et al., 2019b). while developmental perspectives on adolescent career exploration are still influential in wbl, programs also pivoted to recognize contemporary economic and social conditions (deluca et al., 2015). globalization and glocal perspectives on work-based learning 157 157 technological advancements have profoundly impacted the availability of jobs, particularly among young people with few workplace skills or any advanced training (blustein olle, connorskellgren, diameonti, 2016; medvide, et al.,2019). the stakes for unskilled workers have never been greater, and unemployment rates among young people with no post-secondary education or training are exceedingly high compared to estimates for other segments of the working population worldwide (international labor organization [ilo], 2017). this creates a social and moral imperative for secondary education in the united states to prepare students for work on a global scale and to help young people to understand domestic and global factors that influence their ability to find stable and safe employment (lechner, tomasik, & silbereisen, 2016). wbl programs emphasize 21st century skills and critical thinking in the immediate environment (rogers chapman & darling hammond. 2013), but these skills alone are not sufficient for helping students to think about work beyond the job options in their local communities. therefore, the social and moral imperative identified by lechner and colleagues (2016) can go unrecognized. blustein and colleagues (2016) suggested the rise of precarious work and limited access to decent work has fundamentally altered vocational options available to young people across the globe. precarious work is defined as temporary and unstable positions that lack benefits, such as health insurance and pensions, and financial stability. in some cases, this type of work can be appealing because flexibility is maximized, but it is often the case that precarious work heightens the stress on individual workers and their families. precarious work has been linked to globalization and the influx of short-term job options within technology and service sectors of the labor market (kenny et al., 2019b). decent work includes access to stable employment and a work environment that is safe, empowering, and free of discrimination (ilo, 2017). the absence of decent work includes jobs that do not pay a livable wage or work settings where workers’ rights are routinely violated. this may include precarious work; however, the absence of decent work is also apparent in stable jobs where workers experience mistreatment, prejudice, and discrimination (blustein et al., 2016). while post-secondary education and training do not ensure access to decent work, young people who transition directly into the workforce from high school are at increased vulnerability to be without decent, stable work that is safe and pays a livable wage (ilo, 2017; lechner et al., 2016). the rise of precarious work and the myriad consequences of not obtaining decent work are vital considerations for wbl programs in the 21st century. wbl in the united states must educate young people about the vocational options available to them, especially if they choose to transition directly into the workforce without additional education or training (rogers-chapman & darling-hammond, 2013). classroom-based activities and mentorship from workplace supervisors aid in this process, and ongoing community partnerships can insure consistency in access to information across wbl participants (deluca et al., 2015). these partnerships also help high schools to be more cognizant of economic challenges and opportunities within the communities where students may eventually work (rogers-chapman & darling-hammond, 2013). additionally, once young people become aware of the economic and social conditions that undergird available vocational and educational choices, wbl must help young people to maintain their motivation to reach their vocational goals and overcome challenges that might arise (kenny et al., 2019b). 158 global education review 8 (2-3) wbl models in the 20th century often utilized super’s (1957; 1990) developmental career theory as a framework to support career exploration and foster vocational identity (solberg et al., 2002). super’s (1957; 1980) work remains influential, but contemporary wbl models have begun to infuse other theoretical perspectives that are better equipped to address changing economic and social conditions in the united states, including issues surrounding precarious work and lack of access to decent work. life design (savickas et al., 2009) and the psychology of working theory (blustein, 2006; 2013) have emerged as 21st century frameworks that hold promise for helping young people to develop a vocational identity, explore the world of work, and become awareness of barriers to a meaningful work life. life design draws upon constructionist principles and narrative strategies to emphasize cohesiveness and continuity of the career narrative (savickas et al., 2009). this is particularly important in today’s work climate where linear career trajectories are no longer the norm, and workers are often faced with uncertainty about their career possibilities (kenny et al., 2019b). successful career decisionmaking requires adaptability in thinking about the self and work options. adaptability encompasses not only typical vocational tasks and milestones but also effective responses to unexpected work and life challenges (savickas et al., 2009). for adolescent populations, interventions based upon the life design paradigm emphasize adaptability as a cornerstone of career preparation alongside more traditional emphases on vocational skills and personality traits (medvide et al., 2019). studies in european countries where apprenticeships and other forms of wbl are commonplace show benefits for young people who participate life design interventions related to career preparation and adaptability (citations needed). blustein’s (2006; 2013) work diverges from the life design paradigm (savickas et al., 2009) in its emphasis on the social and political conditions and the centrality of work to psychological wellbeing. the psychology of working theory (blustein, 2006; 2013) also utilizes consciousness-raising to help individuals gain awareness of societal conditions that support or undermine their work lives and wellbeing. when coupled with the focus on decent work and precarious work (blustein et al., 2016), particularly among vulnerable populations, this creates a framework that can help young people to develop critical awareness of social oppression and barriers to achieving a meaningful work life. kenny and colleagues (2019b) suggest this marks a shift in wbl to recognize the role of contextual affordances more fully on goal setting and career exploration among young people. the psychology of working theory (blustein, 2006; 2013) has also formed the basis for research on how wbl can foster a sense of meaning and purpose among young people. through participation in wbl and support from workplace mentors, young people can develop a sense of connection to their communities and cultivate skill sets to make contributions to those communities and perhaps even society (kenny et al., 2019a). among marginalized youth this has the potential to combat the sense of alienation and isolation they may experience in their daily lives and hopelessness about the future (blustein, 2013; medvide & kenny, 2020). this means that wbl can help young people to become critically aware of societal inequalities and maintain a sense of possibility for their academic and vocational futures (deluca et al. 2015). this is a unique contribution of the glocal perspectives on work-based learning 159 159 psychology of working theory (blustein, 2006; 2013) that supplements the relational emphases of life design (savickas et al., 2009) through a more explicit framing of socially constructed barriers and the impact of societal inequality on youth development (medvide et al., 2019). like super (1957; 1990) before them, these career perspectives emphasize the interconnectedness of work and non-work roles in people’s lives and value relationships as sources of support and information about careers. kenny and colleagues (2019a) suggest this is especially important for youth whose families lack the social and cultural capital needed to navigate school-to-work transitions and entrance into post-secondary education. these frameworks are also better aligned with the nature of work in the 21st century, particularly the rise of precarious work, right to decent work, and the effects of globalization (blustein, 2013; savickas et al., 2009). these perspectives offer timely guidance on curriculum development for wbl programs among students whose work futures will be impacted by shifting labor markets where safe, secure work is no longer a mandate (medvide et al., 2019). limitations of wbl models in the united states the shift in contemporary wbl in the united states towards a more holistic view of youth development reflects shifts in the career literature as a whole and the infusion of concepts from positive youth development (kenny et al., 2019a). it also reflects attempts by scholars to recognize shifting economic and social conditions that impact transitions into postsecondary education and the workforce and career options across the lifespan (lechner et al., 2016). these shifts help wbl to be more responsive to the needs of youth in the 21st century and to better reflect the economic and social realities for young workers (medvide et al., 2019). these strengths notwithstanding, there are notable limitations to these models that create an incomplete approach to young people’s career development and transition into the workforce. research on wbl in the united states and the youth transitions into the labor market is increasingly concerned with globalization, access to decent work, and precarious working conditions that are likely to impact for young people entering the workforce (lechner et al., 2016; medvide et al., 2019). this raises questions of how wbl programs can provide structured support and resources to youth before they need to transition into to a workforce that is impacted by local markets and global forces (deluca et al., 2015). these supports and resources are often categorized as networking opportunities within local communities and skill development to navigate an uncertain labor market (medvide et al., 2019). what is missing from many wbl programs is an explicit focus on the links between what is occurring in local communities and larger domestic and global forces that impact the types of work available to youth and the stability of any employment once it is secured (kenny et al., 2019b). for example, scholars have begun to discuss the impact of globalization, access to decent work, and precarious work on young people’s vocational prospects (e.g., blustein et al., 2016), but recommendations for best practices often focus on maximizing experiences in the immediate environment and preparing students for the next steps in their local context, such as securing fulltime employment upon graduation (medvide et al., 2019). currently and historically, wbl has focused on how to integrate youth into the local 160 global education review 8 (2-3) communities to complete internships, develop mentoring relationships, and network with potential employers (deluca et al., 2015; solberg et al., 2002). contemporary wbl programs also help young people to develop a sense of purpose through personally meaningful goals that can help them to remain motivated in the face of adversity. this may also include consciousnessraising regarding inequities within workplaces, communities, and societies (kenny et al., 2019a), but there is little discussion of how to talk to young people about globalization or its impact on the vocational options available to them. it also shortchanges opportunities to develop meaning and purpose by seeing the self as connected to other cultures and issues on a global scale. glocalizatoin and a new framework for wbl in the united states glocalization captures the balance between the economic conditions, preferences, and values within local contexts with universalizing tendencies of global markets. (robertson, 1995). it is a conceptually distinct term from globalization and emerged as both an alternative and a critique. glocalization overcomes the limits of globalization and its focus on homogenized values and preferences across global markets (dumitrescu & vinerean, 2010). the standardization of products and services that is a hallmark feature of globalization can potentially unify diverse communities and customer bases, but it also runs the risk of negating diversity and the specific needs of some communities (lui & li, 2019). glocalization does not preclude the delivery of a uniform product or service across communities. it does, however, emphasize greater flexibility through the customization of products and services to reflect localized needs, preferences, and values (dumitrescu & vinerean, 2010; robertson, 1995). although the term was originally connected to business and sociology, glocalization has recently permeated discussions within education. this means educators should strive to recognize the needs of their local communities while also being cognizant of how global realities, such as mass migration, economic recessions, and political conflicts, are impacting students (lui & li, 2019). for teachers and administrators, this is represented in pedagogical choices and curricula that reflect local values and cultural norms and a deep appreciation of how these local contexts are nested within a larger global framework (patel & lynch, 2013). the goals connecting the local and global emphasizes skills to be successful across these contexts and fostering awareness of interconnectivity among markets, communities, and cultural values (tichnor-wagner, 2017). glocalization within education is also tied to citizenship and a revisioning of civic engagement beyond involvement in one’s immediate community or view of the self as a global citizen. a glocal perspective recognizes the role of the individual within the local community and explicitly ties action, belief systems, and knowledge production within these local contexts to an array of issues and needs globally (tichnor-wagnor, 2017). this is an improvement over emphases in higher education on global citizenship that encourage awareness of global issues at the expense also exploring localized forms of knowledge and culture (lui & li (2019). much like discussions of globalization in the business sector (dumitrescu & vinerean, 2010), emphases on global citizenship in education create a risk of homogenizing students’ experiences (patel & lynch, 2013). it also creates a risk of portraying cultural glocal perspectives on work-based learning 161 161 differences superficially through the emphasis on universal experiences and potentially minimizes social injustices and accountability to others (lui & li, 2019). oomen (2015) provided examples of glocal citizenship related to science and technology within post-secondary education in the united states, such as strategies to reduce pollution or create sustainable food sources within communities. action within the local community is a desirable outcome for students because this will consolidate learning and to provide a sense of agency that meaningful change is possible. action globally is ideal, although this may be more challenging for students to achieve in the short-term (tichnorwagnor, 2017). it can, however, be a long-term goal once students have developed the knowledge and skills through initial involvement in local community endeavors (oomen, 2015). discussions of the glocal citizenship in higher education in the united states connect to questions of social justice, responsibility, and diversity. patel and lynch (2013) described the formation of a third cultural space that emerges from the interactions of local cultures on a global scale. awareness of this third cultural space is a starting point that helps students to recognize the connections between the cultural values of the local context and universal values that transcend boundaries, language, and individual experience. work towards acceptance of others, acknowledgement of cultural histories, and responsibilities for one’s own values and actions also undergird glocal citizenship within secondary education settings (oomen, 2015; tichnor-wagnor, 2017). engaging in the third cultural space also requires recognizing similarities, differences, and power differentials among groups. in secondary education within the united states, glocal citizenship has been used to introduce students to critical social issues and help them to explore their cultural identities and experiences with power and privilege (matthews, 2016). using inquiry-based learning, students are tasked with identifying problems in their local community or across the globe that have relevance to them. this is coupled with discussions about cultural differences, respect for diversity, and responsibility to others (tichnor-wagnor, 2017). students receive support from their teachers as they learn about social issues, and they are given autonomy to form their own opinions and express their ideas. this emphasis on student voice is important for creating an authentic learning environment that maximizes student participation and knowledge production (matthews, 2016; tichnor-wagnor, 2017). the adoption of glocalization within education systems in the united states holds significant promise for wbl since the shift in doing so has opened discussions about social responsibility, sustainability, justice, and diversity. this is consistent with dialogues already driving contemporary models of wbl that emphasize conscious-raising and positive youth involvement (e.g., kenny et al., 2019b). it is also consistent with literature on wbl and school-to-work transitions that discusses the impact of globalization, access to decent work, and precarious work on the job prospects for young people (blustein et al., 2016; medvide et al. 2019). wbl programs have yet to formally introduce glocalization and glocal citizenship into curriculum development, but extant research and theoretical frameworks, as the psychology of working theory, have laid the groundwork to do so. even though blustein (2006; 2013) does not explicitly identify his work as a glocal perspective, the central tenets of 162 global education review 8 (2-3) this theory align with work in education on glocalization (e.g., oomen, 2015; patel & lynch, 2013). similarly, the meaning-making processes that undergird the life design paradigm (savickas et al., 2009) can be integrated into scholarship on glocal citizen to provide a lens for understanding how young people prepare for future careers that will inevitably be impacted by interconnected networks of local and global communities, products, and values. recommendations for wbl programs in the united states wbl can successfully infuse glocalization into programs and create glocal citizens in the workplace by integrating ideas from secondary and post-secondary education within the united states. this will build upon the strengths of existing wbl programs that have shifted to account for the contemporary world of work in the 21st century and better prepare youth for transitions to post-secondary education or the workforce (kenny et al., 2019b). it will also ensure that wbl programs continue to be responsive not just to current economic conditions but social and political factors that impact vocational decision-making and career exploration among youth. the following recommendations can be implemented into wbl programs to create a glocal perspective. classroom instruction on glocalization and glocal citizenship classroom instruction is an accompaniment to some wbl programs, but it is not the norm (welsh et al., 2014). it is already a recommendation for wbl programs to include a classroom component to assist with goal setting and career exploration (kenny 2013), and establish curricula already exist (solberg et al., 2002). these curricula, such as tools for tomorrow (kenny, bower, perry, blustein, & amtzis, 2004), which emphasize career exploration and vocational identity development, can be modified to have a more glocal focus while maintaining the original attention to self-exploration and work salience. a glocal focus would help students to become aware of work-related issues, such as access to decent work and the rise of precarious work, within their communities and across the globe and assist them in drawing connections among the local, national, and global issues. access to decent work, for example, is a global issue that has been championed by the united nations as a fundamental human right (ilo, 2017) and is central to work conditions within students’ local communities. therefore, access to decent work transcends to cultural norms of students’ immediate environments while also reflecting the work conditions of local communities where they may explore possible careers and eventually transition into the workforce. furthermore, national and international policies are necessary to make decent work a mandate for all individuals (blustein et al., 2016). a glocal focus on a human rights issue such as access to decent work can also tie students’ individual career development to academic subjects taught in their high schools, such as social studies, history, and economics. authentic inquiry-based learning in the classroom and workplace classroom instruction that introduces glocal citizenship should be accompanied by opportunities for students to apply their learning and to explore their career interests in the workplace. students should be encouraged to identity local or global problems of interest to them and develop strategies to address them glocal perspectives on work-based learning 163 163 that integrate classroom instruction with their career interests. wbl field sites can connect students to workplace mentors who can share ways their education and training can be instrumental in solving problems of personal relevance to the students. these mentors can also help students to draw connections between what they are currently learning in school and the education and training needed to achieve their career goals. these interactions between students and mentors enhance the authenticity of inquiry-based learning and creates an audience outside of the classroom for the students’ ideas. this may strengthen academic motivation, foster career exploration, and build a sense of agency that change locally and globally is possible. the glocal focus for inquirybased learning in wbl is consistent with existing recommendations in the united states (rogers-chapman & darling-hammond) and the shift within wbl to include consciousnessraising as an integral component (kenny et al., 2019b). in the case of access to decent work, students could work with community organizers, lawyers, or local government officials to advocate for policy changes that enhance work conditions and protections for vulnerable workers. the knowledge gained from activism at the local level can inform learning about policies at national and international levels and efforts elsewhere to create safe and empowering work conditions for all workers. it also has the potential to inform career interests and foster work salience by connecting classroom learning to real-world applications of knowledge and creating a path forward to realize career goals. community-partnerships formal partnerships among high schools, local business, and community organizations will enhance the caliber of learning and support available to students. it will also assist with curriculum development that is reflective of skills needed for glocal citizenship and a successful transition into the workforce. in the case of access to decent work, these partnerships provide students with access to the perspectives of multiple stakeholders with distinct skills sets and knowledge to advocate for safe work conditions and humane treatment of workers. teachers, workplace mentors, and community leaders can collaborate to develop a responsive wbl experience that captures authentic problems facing communities and ways in which various stakeholders work towards solutions. this enhances the likelihood students will benefit from in-class instruction and inquiry-based learning at a field site by creating a sense of purpose for youth in wbl programs beyond skill development that has traditionally been the goal for students. fostering purpose among youth has emerged in the 21st century as a vital component of wbl, particularly among marginalized adolescents. although not explicitly discussed from a glocal perspective in existing literature (e.g., kenny et al., 2019a), this emphasis aligns with work on glocal citizenship in traditional classroom settings on social justice and cultural diversity (c.f., patel & lynch, 2013). partnerships between schools and communities are already recommended (kenny, 2013), and a glocal perspective will provide a shared vision for learning outcomes and authentic assessments that help students to draw meaningful connections between local and global issues as they explore possible careers and develop the necessary skills for post-secondary education and the workforce. a direction forward contemporary wbl programs in the united states have taken many positive steps towards recognizing the impact of globalization, 164 global education review 8 (2-3) access to decent work, and the rise of precarious work on the job prospects of young people. this is crucial for successful transitions into the workforce or post-secondary education (medvide et al., 2019). emergent frameworks now view wbl as vital for consciousness-raising and building a sense of purpose as well (kenny et al., 2019a). despite these strengths and the concerted efforts to make wbl more responsive to the realities facing young people, there is still room for improvement. by taking a glocal perspective, wbl can bridge connections between what students experience in their communities, schools, and workplaces with global factors that impact their job prospects and opportunities for a meaningful work life. this represents the next evolution in wbl and a direction forward for future generations of young people as they explore careers, forge a vocational identity, and prepare for an uncertain job market. glocal perspectives on work-based learning 165 165 references bailey, t. r., hughes, k. l., & moore, d. t. 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(2004). high school career exploration programs: do they work? phi delta kappan. 86(2), 135-38. retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/2184784 62?accountid=9673 welsh, e. c., appana, s., anderson, h. a., & zierold, k. m. (2014). the association between school-to-work programs and school performance. journal of adolescent health, 54, 221227. doi:10.1016/j.jadohealth.2013.08.019 william t. grant foundation. (1988). the forgotten half: pathways to success for america’s youth and young families. washington, dc: author. https://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=1671e6fd-a8db-4efc-a837-4c33efb98fff%40sdc-v-sessmgr02 https://web.a.ebscohost.com/ehost/pdfviewer/pdfviewer?vid=1&sid=1671e6fd-a8db-4efc-a837-4c33efb98fff%40sdc-v-sessmgr02 https://search.proquest.com/docview/218478462?accountid=9673 https://search.proquest.com/docview/218478462?accountid=9673 the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 19 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: edward, geraldina, ndijuye, laurent gabriel, & shukia, richard. (2022). the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills in tanzania. global education review, 9 (3), 19-37. the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills in tanzania geraldina edward university of dodoma – tanzania laurent gabriel ndijuye western norway university of applied sciences (hvl) richard shukia university of dar es salaam – tanzania abstract this study explored the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills in tanzania. specifically, it compared rural public high performing schools and low performing schools. stratified random sampling and purposive sampling were used to obtain 350 participants. data were collected through questionnaire-based-interview, semi-structured interview, focus group discussion, and tests administration methods. an independent sample t-test and thematic analyses were employed. results indicated that there was no statistically significant difference in involvements between parents from high performing schools (m= 33.39, sd = 9.79), and those from low performing schools (m= 31.74, sd = 9.93); t (152) = 1.040, p >.05 in learning activities. this implies that parental involvements in learning activities were less associated with children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. findings from interviews and fgds revealed that parental involvements were hindered by lack of parents’ knowledge about pre-primary education, limited parental support, and effects of home learning environment. to maximize children’s pre-reading skills, the study recommends that parents should be informed about their involvement in learning activities. keywords parental involvement, early reading, reading acquisition, kiswahili, early childhood education introduction 1.1 low reading abilities including low acquisition of pre-reading skills (prs) among children constitutes one of the serious challenges facing the education sector in many developing countries (ndijuye & rao, 2019; piper, 2010; uwezo, 2014). the inability to read among children remains a cross-cutting challenge regardless of one’s race, socioeconomic background, and cognitive abilities (anney & mmasa, 2016; jamaludin et al., 2016; piper et al., 2016). in sub-saharan region, about one-third of the school children in lower grades experience such reading difficulties, suggesting that they have not yet developed reading abilities (sacqmec, 2018). even in developed countries, there are children facing challenges in developing pre-reading abilities (national centre for education statistics [nces], 2013; wright et al., 2011). findings of the american national assessment of educational progress report indicate that 32 percent of 4th graders and 22 percent of 8th graders in the united states scored below the basic reading levels in 2013 (nces, 2013). similar findings revealed that children from some parts of south america 20 global education review 9 (3) had persistent lower scores in reading test (reardon et al., 2012). despite efforts made to improve quality of education in malaysia, reading remains a grave source of concern as many children still exhibit weak reading skills (jamaludin et al., 2016). in sub-saharan africa, inability to develop reading skills among children is even more critical (piper, 2010; uwezo, 2015). dowd, weiner and mabeti (2010), for example, revealed that in malawi more than half of the children tested in english at the beginning of 4th grade were unable to read a single word. similarly, findings from kenya’s rural primary schools found large gaps to exist between english and non-english reading comprehension scores (piper et al., 2016). in other words, children could readily and easily read english words than kiswahili or their mother-tongues—dholuo and gikuyu. in fact, empirical evidence suggests that many countries in the sub-saharan africa still experience low children’s academic achievement in the formal education system even in subjects taught in indigenous languages including kiswahili language (anney & mmasa, 2016; pipe et al., 2016), the lingua franca of eastern, and some parts of central africa. children’s inability to read may be linked to both colonial and postcolonial education system (ezeanya-esiobu, 2019), with the latter continuing the legacy of the former in some of the countries. the legacy of such education system made formal education teachers learning to overpower the role of a parent as a child’s first teacher. in tanzania, the reported disparities in reading skills exist among and between regions and districts (ngorosho, 2011; rawle, 2015) and urbanicity (kafle & jollife, 2015; ndijuye & rao, 2019). for instance, the national reading assessment conducted in tanzania using the early grade reading assessment (egra) revealed that pre-primary and primary school children were failing to master basic reading skills (ndijuye, 2020; research triangle institute [rti] international, 2014). moreover, it was established that only 12 percent of 2nd grade pupils reached the oral reading fluency benchmark of 50 correct words per minute in kiswahili (rti international, 2017). similarly, marwa (2014) found that eight percent of 2nd graders could not read with comprehension in kiswahili. anney and mmasa (2016) also found that the primary school pupils had serious kiswahili literacy skills problems. specifically, about 39 percent were unable to read letters, 37.9 percent could not read simple words, 42.3 percent were unable to read a sentence, and 59.8 percent could not read or do comprehension tasks. extant literature informs that enhancing children’s academic performance, including gains in reading skills, relies on parents’ involvement (ndijuye, 2020; topor et al., 2010). in other words, parental involvement in children’s learning activities is one of the significant social factors in children’s school life, especially in building the foundation of reading skills at pre-primary level (ndijuye, 2020). as children are influenced by their parents in their early learning years, the current study acknowledges that parental involvement should continue serving as a form of social capital by which parents can affect their children’s learning outcomes (dufur et al., 2013; joeng & acock, 2014). several types and forms of parental involvement in children’s learning exist (epstein, 2001; ndijuye & rao, 2019; ubale et al., 2016). epstein (2001) identified six types of parental involvements: parenting, communicating, volunteering, learning at home, decision-making and collaborating with the community. these components facilitate the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 21 academic achievement as they often contribute to parents, teachers and learners to achieve learning goals (ubale et al., 2016). parental involvement, therefore, entails all the activities and practices that parents undertake to support their children’s schooling. these activities can occur in diverse settings making up a child’s home, school, or community (ndijuye & rao, 2019; ubale et al., 2016). similarly, porumbu and necşoi (2013) combined parenting style, parental expectations and aspirations, home rules and parental supervision, parents-children communication, children’s home activities, parental attitude towards school (checking children’s homework, parents’ communication with teachers, and parental involvement in children’s school activities) as variables defining parental involvement. parental involvement in learning activities may be done at home by focusing on parents helping children with homework and curricular-related decisions and activities (mutodi & ngirande, 2014); and discussing school-related aspects with the child and playing games (kandasamy et al., 2016). it may also include reading with the child (han, 2017), checking homework completion, monitoring the child’s academic progress (rain & william, 2011), together with going to the library, and sharing day-to-day events (porumbu & necşoi, 2013; tornblad & widell, 2013). 1.2. theoretical foundations of parental involvement in children’s learning the current study is framed within bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory that ties together contexts that facilitate learning and the development of a child (bronfenbrenner, 1979; mligo, 2015). the theory explains the roles the surrounding contexts play, including children’s home learning environments supporting their learning. available empirical studies show that parents’ socio-economic conditions, culture, and education levels relates to their children’s learning in the acquisition of reading skills (chen et al., 2018; dolean et al., 2019; vanderauwera, 2019). abbasian et al. (2020) found statistically significant correlations between the learners’ socio-economic status and parental education background, on the one hand, and their reading and listening comprehension scores, on the other. likewise, vygotsky (1978) established that children learn well when they interact with a more knowledgeable person. in fact, children do not benefit in homes with limited educational resources (ndijuye & rao, 2019). thus, parents are key stakeholders in education including matters of adequate early stimulation and preparation of children for primary school (moest, 2016; ndijuye & tandika, 2022; ubale et al., 2016). in these contexts, parental involvement is crucial particularly for preparing teaching and learning materials, buying teaching and learning materials, storytelling, setting supportive home learning environments up, and evaluating the learning progress (mwirichia, 2013; moest, 2016). similarly, studies have established that parental involvement in their children’s education contribute to their learning outcomes (al-mahrooqi et al., 2016; ligembe, 2014)—favourable or otherwise. in other words, the involvement of parents in their children’s acquisition of foundational skills in the early years needs significant attention. this suggests that parents in rural contexts should preserve and promote their children’s learning regardless of the long-term effects of rural marginalisation such settings tend to suffer from particularly in a developing country’s context such as the one obtained in tanzania. overall, the preservation of the role of parental involvement in learning can sustain and restore their children’s selfindependence and self-respect to engender their academic success. 22 global education review 9 (3) 1.3 historical context of parental involvement and children’s learning in tanzania in pre-colonial social organisations people of various parts of tanzania acquired fishing, hunting and gathering, domestication of animals and plants through socialisation and informal educational arrangements (matogwa & sambaiga, 2020; mwalongo & mwalongo, 2018). the education used to accumulate useful knowledge, skills and experience relevant to the environment and development of man was essential for their socio-economic survival (mwalongo & mwalongo, 2018). indeed, indigenous people produced, disseminated and articulated knowledge which they shared with their offspring through socialisation. during this period, parents were the primary knowledge creators with their children and the wilder society the secondary creators under a collective environment. children learned by observing elders, and learning was by doing. consequently, children learned from their immediate environment (natural and social) and the knowledge had practical use in their communities. overtime, particularly during colonial era, roles of parents and children started changing due to introduction of new lifestyle (matogwa & sambaiga, 2020). the colonial education trained african people in manual work than in reading and writing to work for their colonisers (swartz & kallaway, 2018). education opportunities in colonial period based on racial segregation, and teachers in the formal education system played a key role in training some africans to work for the benefits of the colonisers. the presence of education inequalities during the colonial period raised questions pertaining to how parents could get involved in their children’s early learning in denial of such an opportunity. it shows that the nature of colonial education in tanzania, like in other african countries, severely curtailed the degree of parents’ involvement in their children’s learning. similarly, in the existing globalised world many parents have limited time to play their role in their children’s learning. they ought to devote their time mostly in formal or informal employment activities to earn for a living. in other words, parents end up deprived of their roles to participate actively as primary caregivers and children’s first teachers by the existing conditions of neo-liberalism. similarly, since many parents are busy, they tend to believe that other people would take care of their children’s academic welfare. 1.3.2 parental involvement and children’s acquisition of reading skills in tanzania, children aged five to six years are expected to participate in compulsory one or two years of pre-primary education (ministry of education, science and technology [moest], 2014). ideally, pre-primary children are expected to acquire and master pronunciation of vowels and consonants (phonemic awareness); recognition of shapes of vowels and consonants (phonics/letter-sound knowledge); and reading of pictures (vocabulary knowledge) (moest, 2016; ndijuye & rao, 2018). in other words, at the pre-primary level, children learn to recognise, match and analyse different sounds, letters, and pictures found in their learning environments including home learning context. similarly, studies inform that tanzanian parents emphasise on the early mastery of literacy skills especially pre-reading the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 23 skills during the pre-primary years (tandika, 2020). furthermore, they treat pre-primary education as merely a preparation for formal primary education, which needs less classroom attention (mtahabwa & rao, 2010; ndijuye & rao, 2018). this necessitates empirical observation of how home-based parental involvement support children’s acquisition of pre-reading skills. studies in the fields of education and psychology demonstrate that parents play a significant role in children’s learning and development (kandasamy et al., 2016; karıbayeva & boğar, 2014). a parent is the child’s first teacher in life, and s/he can play an active role in its pre-primary journey exclusively mutual and rewarding experiences (mwirichia, 2013). similarly, studies have established that parental involvement contributes to the children’s learning outcomes (al-mahrooqi, denman & al-maamari, 2016; bronfenbrenner, 1979; ligembe, 2014; mligo, 2015). relating to other studies, mahuro and hungi (2016) found that parental involvement significantly boosted the students’ numeracy and literacy scores. shukia (2014) found that teachers in tanzania believed that parents play significant role in making children develop pre-reading skills by complementing teachers’ efforts, especially when they engage in reading activities with their children at home. in kenya, abuya et al. (2015) established that children whose parents were involved in their learning process had improved attendance rates, became more self-confident, and had open communication with their parents. han (2017) establishes that parental involvements in children’s education have positive implications on learning, school and later in life’s success. some extant literature informs that there are barriers, which are more likely to hinder parental involvements in children’s learning (ligembe, 2014; meoli, 2016). lynch (2010) argues that a child coming from low socioeconomic background would enjoy limited parental involvements and receive little learning support. the support may include limited access to learning resources such as story books, videos, pictures which limits the child’s learning outcomes (meoli, 2016; ndijuye, 2020). limited or lack of parental involvements does hinder children’s learning opportunities and academic achievement including acquisition of prereading skills. studies show that parents with low educational level and unemployed, do potentially negatively impact on their children’s school attendance and learning outcomes (ehrlich et al., 2013; hamukwaya, 2009). in kenya, kimu (2012) revealed that parental involvement in education was mainly limited to financial contributions and teachers-parents meetings based on the high monetary value of training and the need to improve the quality of education. the study specifically found that lack of other forms of parental home-based involvement led to poor academic performance among children. wambiri and ndani (2015) indicated that parents’ perceptions of their role in children’s reading development was the most important predictor of their involvement in terms of direct and indirect behaviours and strategies with children around print. these studies inform that, the effectiveness of learning outcomes depends on comprehensive parental involvement in schools. however, little is known about whether in a context with limited educational resources as it is in tanzania, parents differ in their involvement in relation to children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills between high and low performing schools. and whether there are any parental involvement hindrances associated with children’s low acquisition of these skills in tanzania. therefore, 24 global education review 9 (3) the current research paper examined the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills in tanzania’s rural schools. specifically, it intended to answer the following research questions: 1. is there any difference(s) in parental involvement in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills between high and low performing rural schools? 2. which parental involvement hindrances are associated with children’s low acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills in high and low performing rural schools? 2.0 methodology 2.1 design the study used concurrent triangulation mixed methods design, which enabled the collection and analyses of both qualitative and quantitative data in a single-phase (creswell, 2013; johnson, 2014). quantitative part focused on descriptive survey to measure children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills and parental involvements. qualitative data helped to explore diverse opinions and views on hindrances to parental involvement in children’s acquisition of kiswahili prereading skills. 2.2 sample size and sampling procedures stratified random sampling was employed in the selection of children whereas parents, teachers and school principals were purposively sampled for the virtue of their positions. children’s biological parents or guardians were included. these informants were purposively sampled because we assumed that they possessed rich information related to children’s learning and development. in all, there were 350 participants categorized as 155 children, 155 parents, 20 teachers, and 20 school principals. participants’ various demographic characteristics are presented in table 1. table 1: demographic characteristics of the participants (n=350) participants variables items frequency percentage children gender male 77 49.7 female 78 50.3 age (years) below 5 5 3.2 5 75 46.5 5 and above 78 50.3 parents gender male 42 27.1 female 113 72.9 age (years) below 25 13 8.5 25-29 38 24.5 30-34 31 20.0 35-39 21 13.5 40 and above 52 33.5 education level primary school 129 83.5 lower secondary school 11 7.0 no formal education 15 9.5 occupation peasants 145 93.5 public employees 4 3.0 private employee/business 3 2.0 teachers gender male 4 20.0 female 16 80.0 age (years) 20-29 8 40.0 30-39 1 5.0 40-49 4 20.0 50-59 7 35.0 education level teaching certificate 1 5.0 teaching diploma 19 95.0 pre-primary teaching qualification (pptq) with pptq 1 5.0 without pptq 19 95.0 in-service training attendance once 16 80.0 twice 1 5.0 non 3 15.0 school principals gender male 11 55.0 female 9 45.0 age (years) 26-35 8 40.0 36-45 10 50.0 46 and above 2 10.0 education level teaching certificate 17 85.0 teaching diploma 2 10.0 bachelor’s degree 1 5.0 job experience (years) 1-4 1 5.0 5-9 7 35.0 10-14 4 20.0 15 and above 8 40.0 the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 25 2.3 data collection tools 2.3.1. children’s kiswahili pre-reading skills assessment tests this tool had two main sections: children demographic characteristics such as age and gender, and testing items. the testing items were further subdivided into three subtests: phonemic awareness, letter knowledge, and vocabulary knowledge. the number of items were 24, and were scored as: correct, incorrect and i don’t know. the test was administered by the first author in a quiet place around the school premises. the instrument’s cronbach’s reliability was .970 which was excellent. 2.3.2. questionnaire-based interview this instrument helped to examine parents’ level of involvement in children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills. the first part sought to explore the parents’ demographic information such as their age, sex, education and occupation. the second part was in a form of four-point likert scale (1= strongly disagree, 2= disagree, 3=agree, 4=strongly agree) with 19 items examining parental activities associated with the children’s acquisition of these skills. the instrument’s cronbach’s reliability was .945, which was considered excellent. parents were asked to report their involvement in children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills. parents were independently interviewed and asked similar questions in an orderly manner for consistence purposes. answers were recorded and note-taking was done to document the evidence of the interview and later to help the interviewer in making ratings as more objective as possible. interviews were conducted in a quiet place free from physical barriers in the schools’ contexts. the interview for each participant lasted for 15-20 minutes. 2.3.3. focus group discussions this tool was administered with the parents to gain their views about issues which hindered their involvement in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. they were invited and interviewed in a quiet and comfortable place at school. each focus group discussion had between 5 and 10 parents per session and lasted for about one hour. 2.3.4. semi-structured interviews this tool was applied with teachers and school principals to gain insights into their views and meanings related to the phenomena under the study. each participant was individually interviewed in a quiet place within school premises for about 20 minutes. the consent to record the interview was sought from the participants prior to recording the interview upon their acceptance the researcher switched on the tape-recorder. 2.4 data analyses statistical package and service solutions (spss) version 21 software facilitated descriptive and multivariate analyses. the parental involvements of each school were calculated to compare their scores with the children’s mean scores and standard deviations of kiswahili prereading skills. to determine whether there was any significant difference in parental involvement in learning activities between high and low performing schools, the study used an independent t-test measure. qualitative analysis started with preparing and organising data collected from the field. verbatim translation produced transcripts that were imported into the project folder, which was created in nvivo, version 12. nodes were deductively created from the study questions, insights from the theoretical framework of the study and previous literature related to the subject investigated but the data 26 global education review 9 (3) were approached inductively. coding entailed identifying text elements such as words, sentence (s), and or paragraph (s) from each transcript and dragging-and dropping them into respective nodes. subsequently, a list of nodes from each transcript was created. the findings have been presented and interpreted in a simple and straightforward way with rich descriptions supported by representative verbatim quotations from semi-structured interviews and focused group discussions. 2.5 ethical issues and parental consent the study observed all the research protocols pertaining to the university of dar es salaam postgraduate studies. to begin with, ethical clearance was obtained from the university of dar es salaam. to reach to the selected schools, the study obtained research permits from mwanza and mara regional administrative secretaries and misungwi and musoma district administrative secretaries. finally, the first author consulted school authorities to obtain parental consent to include their under18 children in the study. confidentiality was also observed by assigning pseudonyms to participants, with unauthorised access to the collected data precluded systematically. 3.1 findings this segment presents the findings of the study, presented largely by looking at the research objectives of the study and their attendant questions. 3.1.1 differences in parental involvement in children’s kiswahili pre-reading learning activities findings in table 2 present scores of parental involvement in kiswahili pre-reading learning activities and children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills from high and low performing rural public pre-primary schools. the results in table 2 indicate that parental involvement in learning activities was higher in school n, one of the hps (m=39.5), whose children’s performance in kiswahili prereading skills was (m=35.8); followed by school m, one of the hps (m=39.1) with good children’s performance in kiswahili pre-reading skills (m=45.8). on the other hand, the lowest mean score for parental involvement in learning activities was recorded in school o, one of the lps (m=23.6), with children’s performance in kiswahili pre-reading skills (m= 56.1) followed by school l, one of the hps (m=23.8) with children’s performance in kiswahili pre-reading skills (m=49.2). these performances signal low parental involvement in learning activities table 2: parental involvement in learning activities and children’s pre-reading scores school category performance of parents’ involvement in learning activities children’s pre-reading scores in hps and lps mean standard deviation mean standard deviation school a hps 37.25 9.88 43.40 8.29 school b lps 35.33 6.86 57.66 14.24 school c hps 35.90 10.58 52.90 14.29 school d lps 35.00 8.43 46.10 20.04 school e lps 35.30 10.40 62.50 6.22 school f hps 35.60 13.43 53.80 10.99 school g lps 36.40 8.58 43.30 13.38 school h hps 36.70 6.70 42.20 14.66 school i hps 31.70 11.35 37.20 4.80 school j hps 29.33 5.50 43.78 10.97 school k lps 30.29 8.62 43.57 9.537 school l lps 23.67 1.21 49.17 10.44 school m hps 39.13 11.42 45.75 12.69 school n hps 39.50 13.88 35.83 12.21 school o lps 23.57 2.57 56.14 6.641 school p lps 30.00 11.55 46.43 11.96 school q hps 24.43 5.97 47.00 10.03 school r lps 26.67 8.64 54.67 13.03 school s hps 30.67 6.62 41.33 16.18 school t lps 25.00 3.74 57.20 13.10 note: hps –high performing schools, lps – low performing schools the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 27 associated with children’s low performance in kiswahili pre-reading skills. this result imply that the performance of parental involvement in kiswahili pre-reading skills learning activities was too minimal to support children’s performance in kiswahili pre-reading skills. 3.1.2 parental involvement and children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills an independent sample t-test results indicate that there was no statistically significant difference for parents from hps (m= 33.39, sd = 9.79) and parents from lps (m= 31.74, sd = 9.93); t (152) = 1.040, p < .05 (two tailed) in their involvement in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills, implying that parental involvement in their children’s prereading skills learning activities played a minimal role in their children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. 3.2 hindrances to parental involvement the findings indicate that there were various factors which hindered the involvement of parents in their children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills which in turn were associated with children’s low acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. 3.2.1 parents’ limited understanding of importance of pre-primary education the findings indicate that more than 95 percent of parents did not know whether they had to buy books for their pre-primary children. likewise, more than 88 percent of parents wondered whether learning materials for children at this level can be prepared and given to children to use while at home. furthermore, parents did not know that pre-primary children had to daily attend school and learn. they thought that these children had to attend occasionally school for play purposes. they held views that pre-primary children were still young to begin formal schooling just as those in 1st grade. in addition, more than 90 percent of them considered children’s learning and acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills to be the sole responsibility of teachers alone rather than parents. one teacher explained: what i have been thinking is that many parents in this village are not knowledgeable on how children can be helped to learn kiswahili prereading skills because they do not have motivation to education. most of them know that teaching responsibility is only a teacher’s work. many parents believe that pre-primary school children are not learning when they come to school; rather, they are just playing. to them, official learning starts from grade one. in this situation, they do not have even time to stay with their children, they do not buy books and other school needs to their children (interview, teacher, school m-hps). the findings indicate that for most of the parents, pre-primary education was not their priority and found it to be economically unviable. they reasoned that after completing basic education cycle, even older children ended up being simply jobless. as a result, more than 50 percent of the parents did not see the benefits of investing in their children’s education. from a socio-economic standpoint, parents did not see any need of investing much in this low level of education. one of the participants explained: parents have little knowledge on the importance of education because they did not study it that well. they also do not see the fruits of education from the people or youth around them. so, they do not see the significance of education. …poverty contributes to children’s low learning of pre-reading skills. it means 28 global education review 9 (3) that because of family poverty a child fails to get the basic needs such as school uniforms, food, exercise-books, health services hence a child can’t reach his or plans (interview, teacher, school n-hps). parents devoted most of their time working in farms, mining companies and fishing rather than helping their children to acquire prereading skills. while at work, some parents assigned older children to take care of homes and look after their young siblings. though preprimary education is free and compulsory in tanzania, it was found that children of parents working with mining companies were neither enrolled nor attending any form of regular schooling. perhaps this was because these parents were not permanent residents of those areas. one of the participants admittedly said: i admit that parents are not knowledgeable. imagine a parent leaving a pre-primary child to take care of young children. one day, one preprimary school child came to school with two young children, when we asked him why he decided to come with such young children to school, he said that his mother stopped him to come to school so that he remains at home to take care of his young children. however, the child was not ready to miss school, so he came with them to school. imagine, madam, the way some children like school but their parents [do not]! (interview, teacher, school dlps). moreover, it emerged that most of the parents failed to take care of their children’s psychological, social and physical wellbeing. when children fell sick, they attributed the illness to witchcraft instead of a scientific medical condition so that they could take them to the hospital for medical check-ups. this practice negatively affected the school attendance and learning. furthermore, the study established that some parents used their children as sources of family income particularly as cheap child labour; sometimes they married young to obtain dowry. in this regard, one of the participants explained: ...parents don’t have knowledge of taking their children to hospitals for medical check-up, they end-up attributing their children’s sicknesses to witchcraft beliefs. in this situation, you can’t find a parent taking a child to hospital when he or she gets sick, at the end of the day they make children remain sick for long time at the same time missing lessons (interview, teacher, school o-lps). 3. 2.2. limited parental support results associated lack of parental support with children’s low level of acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. it emerged that more than 80 percent of the parents did not regularly support their children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. additionally, they failed to provide them with school uniforms, exercise-books, pencils and school bags. they also did not regularly check children’s homework, let alone and make any reasonable follow-up on their academic progress. this may result in children’s early limited motivation to learn. one of the teachers said: many parents here are not ensuring that their children attend school and learn as required primarily because they do not know about teaching children. they do the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 29 not make follow-ups on children’s school progress as they do not come to school and ask about their children’s school progress. they do not check their children’s work as you can see currently children have started writing. they do not ask what their children learn at school. worse enough, they do not buy their children’s school materials such as pencils and exercise-books, which results in children’s failure to write what they read. this makes children fail to cope with their peers in the class (interview, teacher, school k-lps). 3.2.3 unsupportive home learning environment study findings indicate that an unfriendly home learning environment experienced by children was one of the reasons associated with their low acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills. for example, more than 70 percent of the parents did not set aside time to read, teach and encourage children acquire kiswahili pre-reading skills. in fact, no specific time was set for children’s personal reading or reading with a parent or sibling, instead, most of the time, children were assigned to perform home chores such as taking care of young children and house cleaning. commenting on this, one of the participants said: here, there are many challenges lowering and preventing children’s [effective] acquisition of different skills including kiswahili pre-reading skills…parents do not encourage their children to attend in school because they leave them with home responsibilities like taking care of their young children. the condition indicates that parents are making children home keepers and maids for young children. it has caused some children to move to the next class without reading skills (interview, teacher, school q-hps). the study findings, in this regard, indicate that children experienced difficulties related with irresponsible parental behaviours. some parents were reportedly drunkards, and as such did not know and plan to help their children to acquire necessary pre-reading skills. in some families, children lived with their grandparents and stepparents. unfortunately, most of the grandparents, had little or no formal education; as a result, they were less supportive educationally. likewise, stepparents were less supportive in terms of nutritious food, love and school related learning materials. 4.0 discussion this segment discusses the study’s findings in accordance with the research objectives of the research. 4.1. differences in parental involvements between high and low performing schools findings revealed that there was no significant differences in parental involvements in children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills in high and low performing schools. in fact, the parents did not buy kiswahili prereading skills books for their children. children’s low acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills was associated with limited availability of learning resources such as books particularly at home. carroll (2013) found that the parents’ exposing of their children to books predicted children’s oral language development. parents also rarely prepared kiswahili pre-reading skills 30 global education review 9 (3) learning materials and provided them for their children use. nevertheless, both high and low performing schools reported limited parental provision of materials for kiswahili pre-reading skills. mwirichia (2013) argues that when parents provide instructional materials and demonstrations assist children play, build concepts, promote innovation and creativity as well as enhancing interaction with others. on the other hand, when parents devote much of their time to income generating activities just to earn a living, their children’s education tended to suffer (matogwa & sambaiga, 2020; swartz & kallaway, 2018) due to limited funding from external forces. parents from both school categories did not directly participate in learning activities which potentially could enhance the development of kiswahili pre-reading skills. activities such as children’s naming of letters, pictures and objects and pronouncing of various kiswahili sounds have been found to promote children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills (ndijuye & tandika, 2022; ndijuye, 2020). parent-initiated and home-based pre-reading activities such as singing alphabetic songs, reading aloud and correcting children promotes children development of pre-reading skills (chansa-kabali, 2014; ndijuye & rao, 2018). chansa-kabali (2014) found that children who experienced more literacy interactions in the home produced significantly higher scores than their peers. the process can be more successful if it is accompanied with parental reinforcements (malmberg et al., 2011). wang et al. (2014) and melhuish et al. (2008) suggested that parental warmth, among other factors, had positive implications on children’s acquisition of pre-reading and later reading skills. yet, limited parent-child reciprocal interactions lowered the children’s learning. by not setting aside planned time for their children to either read or listened to them while reading, suggests that there were limited parent-child reading related interactions. in this regard, patnaik and moyo (2011) support the idea that in neo-liberal era parents are too occupied to support their children’s academic affairs. available evidence associates limited parentchild interaction with children’s low acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills (malmberg et al., 2011; ndijuye & rao, 2018). furthermore, parents’ regular checking and rendering of assistance to their children’s homework promoted parent-child interaction and encouraged positive engagement in school-based learning activities (brown, 2019; han, 2017). to improve interactions, mwirichia (2013) suggested that parents should adopt modern ways to communicate with children and teachers. 4.2. reported hindrances of parental involvement across schools most of the parents in this study had limited or no formal education, which had influenced their views, understanding and value of pre-primary education. this state resulted in their failure to create a supportive home learning environment including buying learning materials. these findings align with those by mligo (2015) who had found that parents in rural tanzania lowly regarded pre-primary education and placed much blame on the government for not supporting pre-school education. this made most of them believe that contributing for pre-primary education was a heavy burden to bear. however, in the subsaharan african region, such findings are neither new nor surprising (matafwali & nunsaka, 2011; marphatia et al., 2010). for instance, marphatia et al. (2010) found that few parents in burundi understood the importance of aiding their children in learning and participating in school activities. similarly, the role of parental involvements in children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills 31 hamukwaya (2009) found that san parents in south africa did not value the importance and quality pre-primary education. as a result, their children found it increasingly difficult to learn because parents attached less value to preprimary education. yet, as children’s first teachers, parents should value all aspects of their children’s learning. study findings further indicate that many parents did not provide much support to their children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills. the support children needed included buying them school uniforms, exercise-books, pencils, school bags, and their involvement in homework and other related activities. in a resource-poor context with limited educational resources, the activities that could have added value to their children’s development of prereading skills (malmberg et al., 2011). a report by hanover research (2016) established that in communities where parents supported and engaged in reading-related activities, children were most likely to learn and master the skills. in this regard, matogwa and sambaiga (2020) suggested that parents’ support was essential in their children’s learning regardless of the preexisting historical, socio-economic barriers to parental involvement. these findings indicate that regardless of the learning environment, the parental role entailed supporting their children’s learning of kiswahili pre-reading skills remained significant in this study. also, most of the children experienced a hostile home learning environments in most families, which limited their opportunities to develop kiswahili pre-reading skills. after all, a supportive home learning environment ought to compliment children’s development and learning (ndijuye, mligo & machumu, 2020). thus, it was more critical in a context with limited educational resources of tanzania (malmberg et al., 2011; ndijuye, mligo & machumu, 2020; ndijuye & rao, 2018). in this regard, shukia (2014) found that children’s experienced learning to read difficulties because of difficulty home situation, hence their failure to benefit from home support. consequently, parents might find it increasingly difficult to support their children’s learning when they were busy working to earn out a living hand-to-mouth (matogwa & sambaiga, 2020; swartz & kallaway, 2018). in this regard, children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills was hindered by multiple factors pertaining to the home involvement. 5.0 conclusion and recommendations in this study, parents were not highly involved in supporting the children’s acquisition of kiswahili pre-reading skills due to the parents’ limited knowledge on the importance of pre-primary education, unsupportive home environment and limited parents’ support. the findings suggest that educating parents on the importance of pre-primary education is critical in the children’s acquisition of kiswahili prereading skills. thus, it is recommended that the ministry of education, science and technology should design a programme that would increase parents’ understanding of how to support their children to acquire kiswahili pre-reading skills. furthermore, there is a need to build and strengthen parents’ knowledge and practices on early childhood education learning activities. the study, therefore, calls for further longitudinal studies that could assess the trajectories of parental involvement in their children’s early learning of reading skills to establish the long-term effects of parental involvement in their children’s early learning. furthermore, the study recommends that parental involvement should serve as an affluent resource and useful tool because it could provide rich information on the children’s individualised learning needs and positively help children 32 global education review 9 (3) teachers to improve their pre-reading instructional skills. references abbasian, r., hadian, b., & vaez-dalili, m. 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(2011). an open, pilot study of the understanding words reading intervention program. sage open 1–11. doi: 10.1177/2158244011420452 covid-19 pandemic experiences 38 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schultz, susan, & love, kristen. (2022). how covid-19 pandemic experiences can inform teacher education and professional development practices. global education review, 9 (3), 38-57. how covid-19 pandemic experiences can inform teacher education and professional development practices susan schultz st. john fisher college kristen love university of rochester abstract participants in this research study found themselves suddenly forced into remote instruction during the covid-19 pandemic, unfamiliar with online teaching and with little guidance from the field of education. survey data was used to capture the voices of 18 k-12 educators to share their lessons learned, the challenges they encountered, and the strategies they developed from their experiences as they reimagined education in an online environment. findings are reported in an effort to inform professional development and teacher preparation programs. keywords teacher preparation, online education, professional development, culturally responsive teaching introduction the global k-12 educational system experienced a major stress test during the covid-19 pandemic. more than 1.5 billion school-aged students across 188 countries experienced an immediate closure of their schools in march 2020 (oecd, 2021). with the effects of covid-19 persisting, k-12 institutions continue to experience disruptions and challenges for student learning due to social distancing and unfinished learning that occurred the year prior (rodriquez, 2021). teachers remain under pressure to shift their pedagogical approaches to teaching and supporting students, with no indication that this need is unwaning (cardullo et al., 2021). in examination of teacher practices during the covid-19 pandemic, there are considerable differences in how teachers approached their classroom instruction (aguilera & nightingale-lee, 2020). research continues to emerge about the variability of remote teaching practices post-covid 19 pandemic (an, 2021; cardullo et al., 2021; oecd, 2021). the organisation for economic cooperation and development (oecd) reported that prior to the pandemic, only 43% of teachers felt prepared to effectively utilize information and communication technology (oecd, 2021). only 56% of teachers indicated that educational technologies were integrated into their teacherpreparation programs prior to 2020 (oecd, 2021). this concern for preparation is also evident in the united states as voithofer and nelson (2021) estimate that about two-thirds of teacher preparation programs incorporate tpack (technology, pedagogical, content knowledge) practices into program instruction. this results in a lack of prior experience with technology integration for a large portion of teachers before entering classrooms. questions remain about the necessity of remote teaching covid-19 pandemic experiences 39 post-covid, however, cardullo et al. (2021) argues that remote teaching practices should become a permanent fixture in teacher education. the national center for educational statistics (nces) indicates that more teachers are reporting less authority and autonomy over making instructional decisions in their classrooms, as compared to reports from 2008 (nced, 2018). teachers believe their ability to make classroom decisions are diminishing as a result of high-stakes testing and standardization of curriculum. in a recent op-ed for the national education association, flannery (2020) clarifies that the deterioration of the profession is a result of “top-down policies that ignore teacher expertise, misguided accountability policies that make teachers feel disrespected, and lack of attention to what teachers have to say about the policies in their schools and classrooms are critical obstacles” (p. 1). conversely, nces (2018) argues that teachers who report high levels of perceived autonomy also report high levels of satisfaction with their jobs (96%) as compared with those who report perceived levels of low autonomy (83%). the convergence of a potential lack of educational technology training with a perceived lack of autonomy in classrooms presents a unique opportunity to explore remote teaching practices and how those decisions inform teacher experiences. self-efficacy has an equally important role in determining a teacher’s ability to quickly adjust to disruptions and challenges (benson, 2000; vangrieken et al., 2017; warner-griffin et al., 2018). highly efficacious teachers are more likely to experience success with new challenges and report less stress during adverse teaching moments (pressley, 2020; warner-griffin et al., 2018). this is an important point because teachers were expected to be the experts and innovators during the covid-19 pandemic. they needed to use an array of technology that was previously unavailable or underutilized. the coined phrase zoom fatigue became a common challenge as estimates of videoconferencing increased from 10 million in 2019 to 300 million in 2021 (cited in driscoll, 2021). this rapid growth in videoconferencing technology was then matched by reports of headaches, fatigue, lack of focus, and exhaustion for remote students and workers, thus making zoom fatigue another dilemma for teachers to tackle in the midst of covid-19 (klein, 2022; ofgang, 2021; white, 2021). coinciding with the potential lack of feeling ill-equipped with information and computer technologies, it is especially relevant to explore the implications of covid-19 on instructional decision-making, classroom practices, and teacher preparation. incorporating digital technologies in k12 had been steadily increasing in classroom spaces in the united states even prior to the covid-19 pandemic (smith & stahl, 2016). however, there can be technological challenges and attitudinal barriers to overcome before successfully integrating technology into classrooms and these obstacles that cannot be easily and quickly remedied for educational systems (xie et al., 2021). as new digital tools and pedagogical methods emerge, teachers need to become aware of, be trained on, and gain necessary knowledge to utilize these new digital tools (ertmer, 1999; ertmer, 2005). this particular need for classroom support and training in digital technologies was exacerbated during the pandemic as affirmed in the most recent oecd (2021) report post issued 18 months into the pandemic: the pandemic has also shown that education systems need to have a strong digital learning infrastructure. this infrastructure is best developed and implemented in collaboration with the 40 global education review 9 (3) teaching profession. effective and inclusive digital platforms should offer valuable resources for in-school and outof-school learning experiences which can, in part at least, address the inequity that blights many learners’ experience of education and improve learning effectiveness for all (p. 5). schools across the globe responded differently to the needs of families and teachers and in consideration of the digital tools available to each school community (oecd, 2021). these variabilities to remote learning likely influenced the personal attitudes and experiences of teachers in the field, or their relationships and experiences with students and families. a study in korea revealed there were dramatic differences in how teachers shifted to online teaching, and this resulted in teachers' increased experience of negative self-perceptions of themselves as effective teachers and more families feeling as though their teachers were incompetent to teach (choi et al., 2021). it was no small task to ask teachers to connect with students and families in an online space. teachers needed to adjust their instructional delivery to offer social-emotional support while also ensuring equitable access to instruction (aguilera & nightingale-lee, 2020). woodley et al. (2017) addressed the need for responsive teaching practices with the assertion that online environments should be designed with diverse students in mind. the rapid shift to online teaching during covid-19 also necessitated a pronounced emphasis on digitally-rich culturally responsive teaching (crt) practices. however, k-12 digital culturally-responsive practices remain an under researched field of study in education (an et al., 2021). recommended practices such as reflection of assumptions or bias, recognition of cultural frames, and points of connections with students of diverse racial, cultural, ethnic, neurodiverse, and socioeconomic backgrounds could be readily adapted to an online environment (hammond, 2015; larrivee, 2010). building relationships is an important facet of culturally responsive pedagogy (hammond, 2015; mahmood, 2020). mahmood (2020) posits it is possible to include the hallmarks of culturally responsive teaching by “creating opportunities for student-centered discourse and meeting the cognitive needs of communal learners. at the heart of culturally responsive teaching is the idea of being responsive to students’ academic and social emotional needs” (para. 5). this is achieved through building trusting learning relationships, creating opportunities for student-centered discourse, and meeting the cognitive needs of learners. these tenets may look different in online learning than in face-to-face classroom settings, but these questions remain unanswered for educational institutions. mahmood (2020) notes online platforms allow students a window into their teacher’s lives and vice versa, a concept worthy of consideration during covid-19 pandemic teaching. this reciprocity shows students that their teacher is willing to share and trust them too. allowing students to engage by using emojis, raised hand symbols, polling features, and chat functions appeals to students emotionally while engaging them academically. subsequently, the researchers wondered what practices were occurring during the pandemic, and how this will impact future practice. this study focused on k-12 remote teaching practices that supported students in both asynchronous and synonymous settings. remote learning compounds the needs of students with special needs who by nature of their disability, need additional support. we covid-19 pandemic experiences 41 explore which instructional strategies were most effective during the covid-19 pandemic for remote teachers and the level of autonomy teachers perceived they had to make those instructional decisions. we surveyed 18 teachers asking them to describe their remote synchronous and asynchronous teaching practices in the 2020-2021 school year. we were specifically interested in teaching practices that were culturally reflective and responsive to students to inform how teacher education preparation programs can better prepare and inform future teachers. this study was grounded with the following questions: 1. what effective practices and instructional strategies were used by remote teachers to address academics, social emotional development to support students? 2. what can teacher education glean from the initial experiences of remote teachers during the covid-19 pandemic? central to this study are the concepts and ideological tones of kolb’s experiential learning theory (kolb, 2015; kolb & kolb, 2018) that encourage teachers to consider the unique ways that learners access information in ways that maximize their experiences with learning. this theoretical model also considers the interaction between the learner and the environment (i.e., remote instruction) to explain the different ways that development and learning takes place. the researchers surmise that learning remotely is a fundamentally distinctive learning space that requires teachers to reconsider traditional teaching practices, subsequently requiring teacher education programs to rethink how they are preparing preservice teachers. a remote teaching environment involves a complex layer of important instructional decisions, and each of those decisions needs to also weigh the dynamic experience of what it means for each student to learn from their remote space. teacher education programs need to include preparation for remote learning, as well as the subsequent technology practices resulting from what the field of education has learned during the pandemic. method the sole method of the study was the distribution of a web-based online survey that participants received either through national list serves or direct recruitment from the researchers. the online survey was developed using the janus-faced approach of survey design which is an approach that necessitates researchers examining how the participants experience the survey and the usefulness of the survey results (mcleod & blythe, 2013). consideration was given to the questions as they are connected to the research questions and to the interest of teachers to share qualitative perspectives to the topics. therefore, an openended survey design was employed and parsed into topics for teachers to respond to. informed consent was given as the first question to the survey. inclusion criteria was any teacher in the united states that was teaching some aspect of their instructional week remotely. this ranged from two days remote to five days remote. topics were listed in the survey as order of priority for research questions. instructional strategies and decision-making were an important emphasis of this study and therefore, were listed first in survey design. how teachers connected with students and perceived their growth and developmental needs was a second priority in the research and therefore, appeared second. this survey design lends itself well to facilitating descriptive information about experiences. participant inclusion and demographic questions are omitted participant descriptions. 42 global education review 9 (3) participants while 19 certified teachers initiated the survey, only 18 met the inclusion criteria for this anonymous study. the 18 teachers who selfidentified as a remote, hybrid, or a hy-flex teacher represented three states (new york 89%, pennsylvania 5.5%, and maryland 5.5%). fourteen of the teachers (77%) indicated five years or less experience. one teacher had more than 15 years of experience. three had between 11 and 15 years of experience. during the 2020-2021 school year, four of the teachers taught completely in a remote synchronous setting four to five days per week, either from home or from their classrooms. one teacher started the year online, returned to the classroom for face-to-face instruction, then ended the year in remote instruction. the 15 teachers (72%) taught combinations of remote and face-to-face (two days remote synchronous/two days face-to-face; two days remote synchronous/ three days face-to-face; or started face-to-face, went fully remote. interview analysis the researchers coded all surveys for descriptive and qualitative data. the interview questions were a broad starting point for generating categories for analysis. content analysis and analytic induction described by goetz and lecompte (1984) and becker (1998) were used to synthesize and reduce the units of meaning by coding data into categories. codes were generated when emerging themes and topics appeared in responses. these codes were then highlighted and categorized into themes. for a theme to be coded, there was consensus by both researchers on the emergence of the theme. the following themes emerged: administrative support, strategies, culturally relative teaching, challenges, progress monitoring, technology, socio-emotional concerns, and teacher education. the researchers reviewed the responses a second time to analyze the themes in categorical responses. the research team debriefed during the initial coding process to compare codes and agree on themes. a second debriefing occurred to discuss interpretation of themes and to analyze saturation of data for each theme. results teacher self-efficacy towards technology integration teachers reported using a variety of platforms (zoom, google classroom, google suite, go to meeting) and technology tools (document camera/elmo, zoom screensharing, google folders to organize assignments, jamboard, digital books, epic, boom interactive flash cards, google slides, iready, google street view for map planning, iready, screencastify, seesaw, creating interactive worksheets from a pdf, peardeck presentations, student choice boards, and prodigy) as part of their remote teaching experience. teachers took advantage of open source materials such as the achievement first curriculum and also utilized homegrown district curriculum resources created for remote instruction. google classroom and google suite were most referred to across the surveys as the learning platform supported by the districts. it is important to note that due to the extent of digital tools noted in the survey, the researchers made categorical decisions about digital tools in figure 1. covid-19 pandemic experiences 43 note. figure 1 represents the number of references to digital tools from teachers. when teachers listed multiple tools in one response, each reference was counted individually for each tool. fifty-six percent of the teachers felt their district provided significant support in the way of required team meetings, opportunities for collaboration and professional development opportunities. teachers attributed their success to the support and guidance they received from their administrators. teacher #5 noted, “i found that it was extremely helpful to have frequent meetings with our instructional design team. they seemed to be on the cutting edge of new features in google and new apps that were more engaging for students.” teacher #1 also recognized the rapid changes in tools and shared “teachers need to know why they are making the decisions they make. tools will change and so we need to know why we make decisions and how to implement them effectively.” several survey responses indicated that teachers experienced their own personal growth. teachers shared examples where they said, “i learned a lot” and “i became great at it.” one teacher said, “i learned a lot about using google docs to support writing” (teacher #1). teacher #5 said “i became great at using an elmo and i will never go back. this is a really great instructional tool.” teacher #11 shared “i have learned a lot of different resources that i will continue to use while faceto-face. different ways to keep them engaged, different hands-on activities, and social emotional brain breaks.” teachers discussed different ways they worked towards learning new technologies outside of professional development. teacher #1 shared “we had weekly team meetings and as a grade level, we worked hard to stay on the same page” and teacher #4 shared they were “mostly on my own... given some guidance at the beginning with where to start, but after that, it was all team-based decisions.” the survey results indicate a generally positive attitude towards integrating technology and teachers attribute their support to administration, their instructional team, and 44 global education review 9 (3) their own personal interest and pursuit to learn technology. teacher autonomy the study results indicated that 70% of the teachers who responded to the survey felt a great deal of autonomy or a moderate amount of autonomy as compared with their previous years of teaching. this is a significant change from the statistics reported from nces (2018) that indicated a decrease in teacher autonomy throughout recent years. perhaps this is a positive outcome of pandemic teaching for the profession as oecd (2021) supports opportunities to increase autonomy for individual classroom teachers and strengthen technological skills necessary for classroom instruction. all teacher respondents felt supported by their administration, all but one noted they were given complete autonomy to prioritize curriculum and develop their own strategies based on the learning levels and needs of their students. one teacher shared their strategy for being required to pivot remotely due to school closures and classroom quarantines: i focused on the important standards and used them strategically. if our class went remote, i used that time to review important concepts rather than try to introduce new ones. i prioritized a lot and tried to make things manageable for both my students and i. with all of the changes, i made sure to not give homework. i gave weekly in class goals for extra things like iready and prodigy. but with all of the struggles of this year, playing and relaxing their minds is important to me. (teacher #12) another teacher shared their instructional decision-making process by explaining how they approached whole group and small group instruction: i made instructional decisions this year for synchronous learning based on the learning levels of my students. we are together as a whole group in the morning and at the end of the day. throughout the time we are not a whole group, i am meeting small groups with students so they can get individualized support. for the students who are not on with me, they have seesaw assignments, iready, and zearn. they also have writing assignments to do each week. (teacher #11) both examples illustrate the process by which teachers paced their instruction and also selected their instructional approach. these decisions were largely independent from district-level decisions and offered an opportunity and teachers' responses indicated they emphasized student growth and development rather than common benchmarks. however, when teachers reflected on their teaching and student growth, the responses were mixed. teacher #1 shared: i honestly think there's been a lot of growth with students, just not in the traditional ways. my students had opportunities to work on time management and to do peer work together. they also learned how to use google slides and docs. however, teacher # 4 shared “we were not allowed to refer [to special education] due to the pandemic but students were behind on critical life skills, likely due to lack of instruction. students progressed at a slower pace and learned less content than anticipated.” the teachers did not attribute specific reasons for covid-19 pandemic experiences 45 lack of growth, but responses to the technology questions infer that wi-fi and variability in family support at home dramatically influenced learning experiences. teachers reported “workshop wednesdays” and other professional development that often focused on learning new technologies were beneficial but were usually required components of their workday. often, refresher workshops were provided for existing tools that teachers were under-utilizing when in the pre-pandemic setting. other workshop topics focused on trauma, providing socioemotional support, how to encourage or provide gross motor activities for students of any age, culturally relevant teaching, behavior supports such as teaching self-regulation, and general, pedagogical tips for teaching with an online platform. when asked what strategies they used in online teaching, many teachers utilized strategies that went beyond the required expectations as they worked to find ways to help their students be successful. forty percent of the participants specifically addressed differentiation. teacher #11 stated: strategies that i have found to be most effective is having small group sessions throughout the day. these groups are differentiated by their skills level. this has been extremely effective as each group of students can get individualized instruction to best assist and support what they need to succeed during this difficult learning situation. like the teacher above, others mentioned starting and ending their day with daily checkins to make sure students had direction and to provide support on assignments. additionally, strategies developed were to address the challenges of teaching during a pandemic. one teacher suggests, using a limited amount of resources is best for my kids and their families to troubleshoot rather than throwing excess things at them to navigate. home in on a select few necessary ones that your kids can use fluently. this will help limit questions, passwords, and confusion. (teacher # 12) teacher #12 indicated that keeping the work predictable and providing choices helped to keep students engaged. this teacher stated that choice boards were ideal in limiting frustration since students could choose another assignment if they were confused and keep working rather than disengaging. they stated, “with choice boards, there's always something they could do. by making the work predictable and routine, it can help them feel confident with time management of assignments and grow more fluent with the resources used.” culturally reflective practice and the digital age while teachers reported that they used many of the same practices that they had prepandemic to be respectful and inclusive of the student’s cultures, several noted they increased their cultural responsiveness due to increased awareness. thirty-three percent of the teachers asserted they spent more time incorporating parents as resources by engaging parents in assignments, particularly culturally relevant assignments, and making sure that parents had a voice. they felt a positive outcome of the pandemic was that they spent more time connecting with families, and they had the unique opportunity to learn about cultures, celebrations, and traditions that would not have 46 global education review 9 (3) occurred if students were in school. teacher #13 shared: i paid more attention this year to celebrations that the students were having at home. for example, ramadan. i had several students observing and because we were remote, we had this unique opportunity to talk about it and have them share their experiences from their home. families also got involved as well. we spent time this year learning about countries which i also thought was a wonderful addition to our year that we had never done before in school. similarly, teacher #3 shared that they “used many books that include different cultures as well allowing the students to make small crafts to send home that represent different holiday celebrations such as, hanukkah, kwanzaa, and the chinese new year.” and teacher #16 shared they “made sure that all of [their] materials represented diversity. [they] spent time learning about different countries using epic books. [they] also made sure the videos we used were representing diverse people.” others recognized that the home life for some students was difficult and there were some students who did not want to show their peers what their home life is like. teacher #12 empathized with family challenges and shared: do what you can! if kids are home, understand that their parents have to either watch them, find childcare, or bring them to work. i have taught my students as they sit in the car on their way to get groceries, in the gas station at their mom's work, and on devices they borrowed to try to make it work. we can't blame kids for a lot of the things that happen with remote learning. teach them when you can, where you can. teacher #14 simply understood that basic needs were a priority and shared: the students rely on school for engagement with other students, trusted adults and for food. i focused more so on the social needs of the students because following maslow hierarchy, their basic needs need to be met first. when we were virtual i would utilize the family service coordinator to help get students what they needed but now that we are back in person i am able to do a better check in and help get my students what they need. a common challenge revolved around technology issues such as internet access, poor internet connections, lack of available devices, and for younger children, lack of parental support. when parents left to do their own work, some children disengaged. one teacher talked about the creative problem-solving approach by one parentteach them where you canthe child was seen at the parents’ work environment, in the car, even at a grocery store. the teachers also recognized the stress families faced and respected the challenges that ensued as parents tried to learn to navigate new and unfamiliar technologies. fifty-eight percent of teacher respondents noted they needed to focus on families as well as their students. they reported checking in with students and families throughout the day to check on assignments, provide assurances and encouragement. fortytwo percent of teacher respondents reported that students had internet problems. one stated they would put together hard copy materials, and deliver them to student’s houses, so these students did not fall behind. student time covid-19 pandemic experiences 47 management was addressed by 21% of the teachers who reported that while some students were organized and good time managers, others simply were not. additionally, often background noise was an issue which caused audio difficulties or was distracting to not only the student but the entire class. further concerns included students losing access to food and trusted adults, and the setbacks students who were socially isolated or had difficulty with relationship building that occurred. one teacher developed a “lunch buddies” program, where students could socialize over lunch. conversely, they stated students needed a break from the computer so many students did not attend. teacher #13 advised: hold individual meetings online for students that last for 30 minutes at the most that allow them to openly talk and discuss practically anything with you. ask questions about work or if they are comfortable their life, make it fun and relaxing by playing games or discussing something they enjoy or a common interest you both halve. the students are just as stressed out as we are. progress monitoring was also challenging for the participating teachers. one teacher spoke of using iready, an instruction and assessment program. teachers noted that many of their students lost ground academically from their previous scores, so while teachers and students worked hard to address unfinished learning, it looked like no progress was made. fifty percent of the teachers asserted that their students made growth, just not in the traditional ways. teachers noted their students learned about google tools, time management and organizational skills, and demonstrated growth in other ways that are not measured. the remaining 50% of respondents reported students progressed at a slower pace, and special education students lagged further behind their peers academically as well as losing access to learning critical life skills. teacher #4, a special education teacher stated, “students progressed at a slower pace, and learned less content than anticipated.” lack of in person one-to-one or small group instruction affected students who required hands-on learning, particularly in math. additionally, “the inconsistencies of learning formats did not help” posits teacher 15. noticeably absent, teachers did not address how they implemented accommodations and modifications in remote settings, other than to say they used differentiated instruction. one teacher stated they planned their instruction around iep goals. several teachers indicated that keeping routines in place helped students stay accountable as they learned the expectations of what to do and when it was due. as one would expect, first year teachers said “i have nothing to compare it to” subsequently having a more “go with the flow” attitude. teacher # 12 prioritized structures and routines to support home learning: choice boards, flexibility, online assignments. i like to have "online days" at school, even face to face about once a month. i upload work like i would if we were asynchronous. then i have the kids practice navigating finding their assignments and completing them, while they're face to face in my classroom. it allows them to practice but with me there to help. that way, if we go remote, they know how to find their work. teacher #13 shared that they “structured down time” to support students receiving additional support at home or from an interventionist. given current research on teaching during the 48 global education review 9 (3) pandemic, it begs the question, “how should teacher education programs be preparing teacher candidates to be prepared for remote instruction?” our participants recognized that technology tools are ever changing and assert teacher candidates need to know why decisions are made, and how to implement new technologies effectively. they also noted that teacher candidates need to learn how to effectively engage and focus students when using online platforms. understanding various platforms would also be helpful, as participants stated there is a lot “out there” and colleges tend to teach the platform they use. subsequently, if your college is an apple school and you are hired by a district that uses google suite or a learning management system like schoology, there is an additional learning curve involved. teacher candidates need practice with a variety of platforms and tools. participants wished remote teaching had been included within the content of the technology courses they took. additionally, having some understanding of online classroom management would have been helpful. teacher candidates not only need versatility, but flexibility. to sum it up, teacher #5 stated “it was a challenging year but find the glimmers of sunshine every day and you'll be fine. my team was an amazing group of people and that made coming into work every day a bit easier.” discussion this study sought out to explore the experiences of teachers who quickly pivoted to remote teaching as a result of the covid-19 pandemic and how their approaches to remote teaching can inform teacher preparation programming. the study aimed to understand their experiences with instructional practices and their decision-making efforts as they related to technology, culturally responsive practices, and academic support. this study revealed valuable lessons learned from the school closures resulting from the covid-19 pandemic. schools were forced quickly into remote learning, and this presented an opportunity to increase autonomy for individual classroom teachers and strengthen technological skills necessary for classroom instruction. this sentiment is supported by oecd (2021) which described the priority of school efforts: central to education recovery programs should be a focus on supporting a teaching profession that is actively engaged in the design of learning environments and public policy, in the advancement of professional practice, and in creating a stronger professional work organization. many teachers have also responded to the pandemic by creating their own just-in-time professional development. a lesson from the pandemic is that teachers need to feel empowered to exert their professionalism in the use of technology as part of their teaching (oecd, 2021, p. 5) the sense of autonomy and empowerment expressed as lessons learned globally is a sentiment shared by the participants in this study. also mentioned by oecd (2021) as a lesson learned was the necessary practice of justin-time professional development, which was also a valued practice emphasized by several participants for technology training and resources. subsequently, paying attention to teachers’ lived experiences and listening to teachers’ voices is critical and is a reminder to local school districts to value the perspectives of educators as it relates to their instructional expertise and their digitally-rich passions. a key consideration that emerged from the study is the continuation of technology covid-19 pandemic experiences 49 training and preparation of teachers in the classroom for emerging technologies. although most felt a high level of autonomy, they felt limitations as it related to teaching remotely without proper preparation to do so. teacher preparation programs need to be mindful of the rapidly evolving technological advancements in classrooms and how to prepare teachers for future classrooms. one clear solution to support digitally-rich instruction and integration of technology with teaching is to enhance the integration of the tpack model across all teacher preparation courses and prepare future teachers for effectively determining which technological tools align with which pedagogical practices. voithofer and michael (2021) offer a second suggestion that is equally important, which is making clear connections between classroom practice and technological integration. if teacher candidates have demonstrated experience with determining which technological tools to use during classroom instruction, they are more likely to take future steps to implement new technologies as they emerge. an emerging consideration as a result of this study is exploring in what ways k12 schools continue to facilitate learning centered on tpack and iste standards postcovid-19 era. this study also sought to understand in what ways teachers integrated culturally relevant practices remotely. prior to the study, the researchers had surmised this may be an area lacking in remote instruction but were surprised to learn the depth and scope of culturally responsive practices across all survey participants. teachers shared numerous strategies that they used to emphasize culturally reflective practices. the teachers describe culturally relevant practices in two different ways: (1) acknowledgement and value of student identity through communal experiences and (2) integration of digitally-rich instructional culturally relevant practices. teachers who prioritized both practices ensured there was time embedded in their schedule to learn about individual students and their families as well as incorporation of tools that included diverse texts and media. teachers that emphasized cultural celebrations with families embedded these opportunities into the schedule as well. by having an opportunity to virtually experience a student’s home, teachers could easily incorporate family-engaged activities into the day. the teachers who responded to the survey made efforts to incorporate culturally relevant text in a variety of ways, but it was clear that this was an intentional effort and was also heavily influenced by the digital tools available to them. the sentiments shared by mahmood (2020) were confirmed in the study results. most teachers who responded to the survey spent time on communal learning experiences that valued and celebrated individual identity and diversity. while not mentioned as a study finding, the ability to engage families remotely more easily offers an opportunity to extend this practice beyond the covid-19 pandemic era. the literature and digital tools emphasizing digitallyrich culturally relevant practices is lacking and therefore, an obvious next step for future research. advice for teacher preparation most of the recommendations practicing teachers had for teacher preparation programs revolved around technology. forty-four percent of the respondents noted they felt unprepared for a switch to remote teaching. participants noted it would have been helpful if they learned google platforms (such as google suites, google classroom) in their preservice program so they could “hit the 50 global education review 9 (3) ground running” since these teachers were expected to suddenly use them without time for a learning curve. teachers # 13 and #15 noted remote teaching should be included within the class educational technology, with teacher # 13 specifying, “that class covers a large variety of different applications or programs that can be used, i don't see why different remote teaching strategies and programs can't be included.” teacher preparation program developers should cue into this feedback and consider ways to embed remote teaching experiences into educational technology courses. teachers #12 and #13 both assert that preteachers should not only have instruction but also opportunities to practice in remote instruction with actual k-12 students. other suggestions related to technology revolved around including or improving pre-teaching technology experiences with not only learning digital tools but creating digital materials. teacher #1 asserts “making digital tools is worth it. these can have lasting use even in faceto-face classrooms” and teacher #12 states “use projects that will prepare them to do it (remote learning) on their own. have them practice creating (digital) materials, explaining how to do things, and prioritize.” teacher #13 suggests “provide different opportunities for prospective teachers to try and experiment with different remote teaching materials with a group of other students or, if possible, a small group of students within their field placement class.” these teachers indicated that the time they took to learn how to create and use digital materials caused additional stress during an already stressful time in their practice. classroom management and engagement in remote environments was another area where teachers voiced feeling underprepared. note. figure 2 represents the number of references to the lack of classroom management preparation from teachers. covid-19 pandemic experiences 51 references were categorized during analysis into the five practices noted in figure 2. teachers asked, “what do you do if students never log on? how do you address misbehavior online?” “how do you keep students engaged?” “how do you handle background noise?” indicating these scenarios were not covered in technology classes. one notable absence in the data were examples of how teachers implemented classroom management practices for remote instruction, yet this was phrased as a persistent challenge for teachers. while teachers indicated this was a considerable challenge they faced, there appeared to not be any strategies or technological tools to support creating a prosocial remote classroom community. one thing teachers agreed on was that remote instruction is here to stay. remote instruction may now replace snow days, address bussing shortages, and provide additional support. teacher #15 commented, “it seems that remote instruction will not disappear entirely, so it would be wise to prepare teachers for this possibility. consistent research and practice with available technology resources is key!” teacher #16 shared a similar sentiment that i think this [remote teaching] may be something that remains now that we know it's possible and i think it has a long way to go to be an effective practice.” the teachers also agreed that decision-making with remote teaching practices was something that teacher preparation programs should incorporate into educational technology courses. teacher #1 commented, teachers need to know why they are making the decisions they make. tools will change and so we need to know why we make decisions and how to implement them effectively” and teacher #4 agreed and added “i think teachers should be much more versatile in teaching to a remote group. it's a great skill to have.” teachers also felt overwhelmed by the socio-emotional concerns of their students and families. although all the teachers voiced significant concerns about the social emotional state of their students, 56 % of the teachers specified reasons for their concerns. teacher respondents, like aguliera & nightingale-lee, (2020) worked to support their students/families. teacher # 14 cited maslow’s hierarchy asserting “basic needs need to be met first.” teachers connected families with community resources, addressed student anxiety and trauma, and worked to engage family members in remote schooling practices. teacher #4 shared how lack of family engagement contributed to challenges to support students academically and socially. they said, some of my students have parents at home who are not involved in their education. my students are 6-7 years-old who require support and 52 global education review 9 (3) encouragement for their education. this made it very hard to get them engaged and doing their seesaw work to the best of their ability. of further concern, as mahmood (2020) noted, online platforms allow for a window into their students’ lives. teachers reported students were not always comfortable sharing what their home environment was like with teachers or peers. when students did not turn on their cameras, it made it more difficult for teachers to judge engagement. note. figure 3 represents the number of references to social emotional concerns for students and families and what teachers attributed to those concerns. references were categorized during analysis into the six noted concerns noted in figure 3. limitations there were several limitations in the study. first, there were a small number of participants within a limited geographical area, making generalizability of the findings limited. however, this study points to several findings that warrant further continued research such as culturally responsive digitally-rich tools and teacher preparation for remote teaching. second, the uniqueness of how districts implemented remote learning, supported their teachers, and availability of technology, both devices and internet, impacted results. teacher candidates need to be prepared to step into remote learning with an arsenal of skills that can be utilized in any area. finally, this study was an exploratory study of how a small number of teachers felt about their technological skills and strategies when quickly pivoting to remote teaching. the study findings should not be used to generalize how schools in the united states responded to the covid-19 pandemic. there is great variability in response efforts across counties, states, and even districts. conclusion all the teachers in this study had concerns about the social emotional well-being of their students. while they took care to address the needs of their students, they felt underprepared to address the scope of their needs. teacher preparation programs need to address social emotional factors and strategies covid-19 pandemic experiences 53 in program content so as teachers, they can advocate for their students. further compounding these concerns, more than 140,000 students in the united states lost a primary or secondary parent or caregiver due to the pandemic (hills et al. 2021). globally, 5.2 million children have been orphaned by covid, likely an underestimation due to gaps in international reporting (haseltine, 2022). teachers will be expected to support this vulnerable population who may have challenges to learning, relationship building and family support. teachers also advised higher education programs to include a variety of digital experiences in technology courses. they noted that it is not enough to know a specific platform (like knowing google classroom or being an “apple teacher”). they asserted you never know what the school you will be working at when you are hired will be using. they also suggested practicing remote instruction with real k-12 students, practicing using digital tools and creating digital materials. one and done experiences where teacher candidates learn about technology and move on are not comprehensive enough. teachers indicated the time to learn and practice these types of skills are best in low stress environments, instead of, as teacher # 4 states, “building the plane while flying it” like they did with a rapid shift to remote instruction. they also noted that they felt ill prepared for classroom management in an online environment. this study focused on effective practices and instructional strategies used by remote teachers to address academics, social emotional development to support students, with the goal of informing teacher education higher education programs so they can effectively prepare future teachers. additionally, current teachers may learn from the experiences of others. the study met an intended outcome of including teacher voices in how to take lessons learned from covid-19 to inform next steps for future teachers. references aguliera, & nightingale-lee, b. 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(2017). celebrating difference: best practices in culturally responsive teaching online. techtrends, 61(5), 470–478. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11528-017-0207-z xie, k., nelson, m. j., cheng, s.-l., & jiang, z. (2021, august 17). examining changes in teachers’ perceptions of external and internal barriers in their integration of educational digital resources in k-12 classrooms. journal of research on technology in education, 1–26. https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2021.195140 4 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.tate.2017.06.021 https://doi.org/10.1177/0022487120949842 https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.812681 https://doi.org/10.1080/00220272.2013.812681 https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2021.1951404 https://doi.org/10.1080/15391523.2021.1951404 covid-19 pandemic experiences 57 appendix 1 survey on teacher experiences during remote teaching 1. what strategies have you found most effective this academic year for synchronous remote learning? 2. what strategies have you found most effective this academic year for asynchronous remote learning? 3. what strategies have you learned for remote instruction that you will continue to use in face-to-face settings? 4. how did you make instructional decisions this year for face-to-face or synchronous learning? 5. how did you make instructional decisions this year for asynchronous learning? student needs and community building 6. how would you describe the academic growth of your students this academic year as compared to other years? 7. what strategies have you used to address culturally relevant teaching practices in remote instruction? 8. how do social and economic disparities impact students in remote instruction and how have you addressed them? 9. what social-emotional implications have you noticed with students in your class, relative to covid 19 restrictions, such as social distancing, student interaction, mask wearing. teacher autonomy 10. how much autonomy did you have in decision making? 11. did your school provide faculty development opportunities? if so, were they optional or required? what topics were covered? teacher preparation programs 12. how do you think colleges should be preparing new teachers for remote teaching? 13. are there any technology resources that should be part of teacher education programs? 14. regarding remote instruction, what advice would you give a new teacher entering the field next year now that you have experienced teaching remotely? 15. what advice would you give teacher preparation programs about remote instruction now that you have experienced teaching remotely? is there anything else you would like to share? teaching, learning, leading, and living in a glocal world 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: varner, kenneth j., et al. (2021). teaching, learning, leading, and living in a glocal world: policy, practice, and praxis. global education review, 8 (2-3), 1-7. teaching, learning, leading, and living in a glocal world: policy, practice, and praxis kenneth j. varner university of nevada, las vegas – united states of america david gerlach bergische universität wuppertal– germany jennifer markides university of calgary – canada pg schrader university of nevada, las vegas – united states of america carlos enrique muñoz universidad de concepción – chile siniša opić university of zagreb – croatia nigel bagnall sydney university – australia ana maría mass universidad argentina de la empresa (uade) argentina erin mikulec illinois state university – united states of america glocality is a concept that has not been given sufficient attention by educational scholars and practitioners in writing. conceptually blending the intersections of the global and the local, glocality has been understand as living local while thinking global. a complimentary framing of glocality might suggest threading locally and connecting globally in pursuit of engaged praxis. in considering glocality, we wanted to dedicate a focused set of papers under the umbrella of a special issue of global education review to consider that every space framed by one as global represents someone else’s local reality, and every local reality is someone else’s global context. a glocal conceptualization, resultantly, is an appreciation for the reduction of traditional barriers between peoples, nations, regions, and ideas. glocality as a conceptual, theoretical, and/or empirical frame has the ability to further comparative, representational, and interdialogic thinking across traditional borders and boundaries. this special issue takes up the mantle of glocality and asked contributors to contemplate 2 global education review 8 (2-3) the opportunities, possibilities, and challenges in education, framed broadly from cradle to grave, as we enter the third decade of the 21st century. as the co-editors ourselves we represent a variety of institutional, national, disciplinary, and methodological orientations, representing the commitment to glocality as an approach across four continents. in our work we have noted an interconnectivity over common issues that we have often framed individually as localized concerns until realizing that in each of our localities any number of similar experiences were occurring. in connecting our localized works through global lenses, glocality has given us the opportunities to pursue more complex, informed, and engaged praxis. this special issue welcomed empirical (quantitative, qualitative, and mixed), conceptual, and theoretical pieces. multiple foci came into place for this special issue. first we were concerned with rigorous examinations of local experience which in many ways have been the hallmark of much research conceptualized as qualitative. and, while necessary, we were also especially interested in pieces drawing upon methods that allowed for deeper understandings, comparisons, and contrasts of local trends within greater global contexts; these approaches include purposeful mixed-methods approaches that incorporate generalizable trends (global and quantitatively oriented) with nuanced examinations of specific instances (local and qualitatively oriented). we were also interested in pieces that drew upon ‘big’ data to make quantitative argumentation about locality. we asked submitters to enter their pieces contemplating any number of the following questions: • what does glocality offer to education in the complex landscape of the early/mid 21st century? • how are glocalized approaches applied within educational contexts? • what can be learned, methodologically (research or practice), through the application of glocal lenses? • how do worldwide cross-border partnerships yield localized results in educational arenas? • how does a glocalized approach disrupt traditional concepts and delineations of border spaces, ethnicity, culture and the various approaches and outcomes attached to those concepts? • what common struggles, common interests, and/or common possibilities might yield from glocalized analysis? • what is not being said, pursued, or engaged with in current research that a glocalized approach could work toward? we encouraged manuscripts based in theory, practice, praxis, policy, and/or pedagogy to work through what it means to be glocal in the 21st century, and the implications and approaches educational fields and subfields might learn from such a framing. we began by soliciting abstracts from potential authors of which we received 67. after looking at potential fit we invited a total of 32 to submit full length manuscripts for review and received 28 manuscripts. using a double blind approach to reviewing each piece was reviewed by two experts. we invited 20 manuscript authors to revise and resubmit their pieces and in the end the collection has 10 articles in addition to this editorial introduction. instead of characterizing each piece ourselves we will provide you with the title, authors, and abstract for each of the pieces in this collection to help facilitate deciding whose pieces and what topics most appeal. as editors we enjoyed, thoroughly, reading such diverse and interesting pieces and hope that more than l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 3 anything this special issue prompts dialogue, discussion, and action toward improving localized outcomes through acts of global engagements – in other words we invite you to use this special issue as a platform to (continue) being glocal. in solidarity: kenny, david, jennifer, pg, carlos, siniša, nigel, ana maria, and erin. in this double issue: glocal challenges to teacher education & a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework kenneth varner, jennifer markides, pg schrader, david gerlach, bergische universität wuppertal and siniša opić this article explores some of the challenges facing teacher education and how glocality as a concept can be used toward a glocally sustaining pedagogical framework for teacher education. higher education has long espoused particular commitments to the preparation of educations that appear, to us, to fall short in their ability to be followed. the areas of disconnect are amplified by snowballing tensions within higher education settings, a range of hyperbolic political discourses, and a resistance both in society generally and higher education to engaging difference in meaningful and authentic ways. a framework of glocally sustaining pedagogy (gsp) takes as its skin a realist approach that sees no greater value to perspectives and contexts that are global over those that are local, recognizing that every local is connected in a global network of connectivity. in this piece we aim to outline the challenges, using culturally relevant pedagogy, as an example. we then provide an understanding of the meaning of glocality that will serve to pose a five-question frame that we might understand as a gsp. glocal language awareness through participatory linguistic landscape research gail cormier this article will explore the local experience of language awareness, scholastic linguistic identity and language ideologies through a scholastic linguistic landscape (schoolscape) (brown, 2012) study in three schools in canada where french was the language of instruction. glocality is an especially useful frame for linguistic landscape studies (manan et al., 2017) and has been used to look deeper into youth identities (grixti, 2008). photographic images of each school and photo-elicitation interviews with 37 students were used to qualitatively analyze the visible, written language found on the school walls of secondary schools offering three different french instructional programs. glocality is used to draw the connections between the local schoolscapes and the global themes of language ideologies, scholastic linguistic identity and language awareness. involving students in linguistic landscape research results in discussions surrounding linguistic diversity and can lead to multilingual language awareness. at the same time, such a practise can result in incidental language learning. the results showed that students were aware of the importance of their schoolscape as a representation of national language ideologies, as a symbol of their school’s linguistic identity and as a vehicle for promoting language use and awareness. although the findings are local, the insights gleaned from the students are relevant to a global audience interested in language learning and multilingualism. particularly, student perspectives and participation in analysis offer a unique contribution to linguistic landscape research and educational research in general. glocal perspectives in film-based foreign language education: teaching about sustainability with “the boy who harnessed the wind” (2019) 4 global education review 8 (2-3) jan-erik leonhardt, annika kreft, carina leonhardt, britta viebrock the film “the boy who harnessed the wind” is based on the memoir of william kamkwamba and tells the story of how william’s family battles a life-threatening draught in malawi. through a glocal lens, i.e. by looking at the interplay of locality and globality, the film offers critical insights into the importance of sustainability with regard to lasting and viable ecological, economic and social structures (cf. volkmann, 2016). on a local level, the farmers in the film struggle to provide food for their families. a corrupt national government shows little interest in establishing economic support structures and education. in addition, the context is embedded in global dynamics and influenced by the legacy of colonialism. focusing on topics such as sustainability, we will discuss how the film lends itself for a content-based approach to the teaching of english as a foreign language. drawing on the theory of glocal education in the context of critical foreign language education that goes beyond functional language teaching and puts forward a critical understanding and the value of a democratic, pluralistic and sustainable life (cf. gerlach, 2020; niemczyk, 2019; volkmann, 2014), the focus of our contribution will be on task development. starting from the assumption that sophisticated tasks are needed to encourage learners to engage critically and reflectively with the film’s content and aesthetics, we will suggest a viewing-log and scenic interpretation for dealing with the film in creative and personally engaging ways, which can also be transferred to contexts beyond the foreign language classroom. glocal brokers and critical discourse analysis: conceptualizing glocality in indigenous education research and reform eric w. layman and eun-ji amy kim few issues encapsulate the tension of “glocality” in education more substantively than the debate surrounding who should undertake research on indigenous education, and how it should be done. in this article, two non-indigenous educational researchers both working with indigenous education research and reform, alongside the guidance of indigenous mentors, grapple with the questions of if and how nonindigenous critical research methodologies can complement, and thereby reduce, the peripheralization of indigenous knowledges and epistemologies. this article explores the opportunity for dialogue between two often polarized hazards. on one hand, non-indigenous researchers with non-indigenous epistemologies risk increasing the marginalization of indigenous ways of knowing. on the other, research on indigenous education is threatened with further ostracism if it is inaccurately perceived as only the domain of indigenous peoples, and only facilitated through indigenous epistemologies. the authors share their experiences in using a non-indigenous critical research methodology, critical discourse analysis, to explore indigenous education research and reform. particularly, the authors share their experiences, both in employing nonindigenous critical research approaches in indigenous contexts whilst also attempting to honor local indigenous epistemologies. this article contributes to the discussion of how “trans-systemic” knowledge, the discursive space between indigenous and non-indigenous understandings, can illuminate the concept of “glocality” in educational research methods. in conclusion, the authors contend for the role of “glocal brokers” who navigate between global and local—between indigenous and nonindigenous—understandings to foster connections and communicative opportunities that can further elevate and integrate indigenous ways of knowing into broader discourse concerning indigenous education research and reform. l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 5 place-based education. an educational approach inside local place giancarlo gola and lorena rocca sense of place is rooted in people. several studies show that attachment to a place is connected with the development of identity through spatial, material, and emotional dimensions. it fosters identification and the development of one’s social and cognitive skills. in an educational sense, cultivating a sense of place means inviting the individual to gather many authentic experiences that strengthen ties. this study discusses the place-based education (pbe) approach at the epistemological level, in the context of the learning-teaching relationship. pbe can help to understand culture, the environment and space by creating a multidisciplinary approach. moreover, pbe can build a new assumption of being a collective resource. starting from some studies and evidence that support a positive partnership between the individual and the place, some pbe experiences are analyzed to develop deep learning with children and students. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms through content and language integrated learning (clil) in the social sciences subin nijhawan, daniela elsnet, & tim engartner our article argues for content and language integrated learning (clil) in the social sciences, as part of a new literacy towards 21st century challenges at school. at first, we will show how multilingualism is closely juxtaposed with global discourses in a worldwide network of glocalities. thereafter, for the conceptual framework of the suggested pedagogy, we explain why cosmopolitanism must constitute an integral part thereof, accompanying the genesis of classroom glocalities. the heart of our competence model for clil in the social sciences fosters the promotion of global discourse competence with adolescent students. in short, this learning aim is a hybrid of subject and language learning, incorporating the merits of language didactics as well as “21st century skills”. finally, in the last step, we will present #climonomics, a simulation of a multilingual eu parliamentary debate about climate change and climate action for secondary students. this example intends to demonstrate how multilingualism through clil amplifies the magnitude of global discourses during a simulation yet realistic setting. it should provide ‘food for thought’ for similar initiatives in research and teaching, to encourage the facilitation of cosmopolitan visions in classroom glocalities. glocal network shifts: exploring language policies and practices in international schools esther bettney & jon nordmeyer in this article, we explore glocality within a transnational network of independent schools to understand the interdependence of the global and the local in language policies and practices. using glocality as a lens, we draw on narrative school profiles written by educators at member schools within the wida international school consortium, a network of 500 k-12 international schools, to examine how global practices are localized within different school contexts. we explore how key aspects of glocality, such as the blurring of boundaries across languages and shifting dynamics of power, become visible as international schools function as hybrid and transnational spaces in which diverse languages and identities intersect. we utilize our role as insider researchers to describe two new directions within our research context. first, we identify a shift from a global network initiated through us-based schooluniversity partnerships towards an increasingly reciprocal exchange among international member schools, with reflexive sharing of ideas and practices between educators and 6 global education review 8 (2-3) stakeholders across geographic contexts. second, we identify the increasing presence of a new type of international schools, described in this paper as “glocal” schools, which reflect the deterritorialization of language and an intentional hybridity. the emergence of glocal schools as well as the noted shifts in language and power, illustrate the transcendence of borders and identities closely tied to the concept of glocality. in order to understand the trends observed in this research context, we analyzed 34 narrative school profiles written by member schools and describe connections between macro networklevel shifts and micro school-level shifts. through our analysis, we found individual member schools adapted tools and resources to serve local needs, contextualizing them within a particular program context. as a result, educators shifted how they viewed multilingual learners and multilingualism with respect to english as a medium of instruction. this initial study provides important insights into how glocality as a construct helps explain significant changes occurring within the field of international education. “glocal education” through virtual exchange? training pre-service efl teachers to connect their local classrooms to the world and back fabian krengel a key goal of global education in language teaching is to “have students ‘think globally and act locally’” (cates, 2013, p. 278) – an idea in line with the concept of glocality. virtual exchange – i.e. connecting learners with different lingua-cultural backgrounds over extended periods of time via digital communication technologies (the evaluate group, 2019) – is a promising approach towards this aim. o’dowd suggests designing such exchanges following a “transnational model” (2019) in which learners collaborate on shared tasks based on local and global real-world problems using a lingua franca. these ideas are compatible with european policy discourses on global education (schreiber & siege, 2016), aiming at supporting learners in becoming agents of change in an increasingly globalized world. within the context of a trilateral project between universities in germany, turkey, and sweden, this paper explores how global education can be integrated into foreign language teaching with the help of virtual exchanges through a synthesis of two models of virtual exchange (o’dowd & ware, 2009; o’dowd, 2019) and the complex competence task approach (hallet, 2012) to task-based language teaching. a transnational virtual exchange between these universities exemplifies how such a telecollaborative project can be implemented. during the exchange, pre-service efl teachers compare and analyze cultural practices and educational frameworks to design tasks dealing with global issues that can be implemented in their respective local classrooms through virtual exchange. glocal perspectives on work-based learning: a proposed direction forward mary beth medvide work-based learning programs in the united states are designed to prepare adolescents for their first jobs and to develop the soft skills to be successful in in the classroom or the workplace. historically these programs have neglected how work, education, and training in the local context are connected to issues on national and international stages. while research and theory has generally supported this structure for wbl, the nature of work has changed substantially in the 21st century. contemporary models of wbl are informed by scholarly literature on globalization, but this is does not fully capture the realities young people face. glocalization fits with existing wbl efforts and provides a conceptual framework to modernize how students are prepared to transition from high school into the workforce or post-secondary education. this manuscript will review the l2 teaching in the post-communicative era 7 current state of wbl, discuss the benefits of a glocal perspective, and make program recommendations. “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program jon bradley & sam allison in sharp contrast to the musings of a senior student, the mandatory history texts follow a narrow provincial orientation. the recently introduced quebec high school history program offers adolescents a slanted narrative devoid of larger interconnected contexts as hailed; for example, by oakeshott (2004), macmillan (2009), and/or canadine (2013). in our view, secondary students are forced to travel a historical journey that deals with canadian and quebec events through a “unique” quebec lens (woods, 2014). the widely engrained twentyfirst century concept of global interconnectedness, first articulated on a wide scale over a hundred years ago (wells, 1920), has been replaced by one anchored in a retronineteenth-century construct viewing only carefully selected unconnected historical snippets devoid of a contextualized narrative. anchored in a narrow political perspective, this secondary course of study forces adolescents into a stilted and fragmented “patch-work” historical landscape. this journey silences many voices, brushes others from the chronicle, and twists recognized historiography to fit a specific contemporary self-determined internalized orientation. we review the official course of study to unpack several major world themes demonstrating this constrained point-of-view via a close investigation of one of the approved english language student texts. further, we illustrate how the deliberate manipulation of historical stories, as well as “alternate facts”, leads adolescents into a realm deprived of meaningful connections. 2. masquepalabras10.16.25_production 1 más que palabras 18 global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mavrides calderon, m., & lasso, m. d., (2025). más que palabras [more than words]: chaos, discourse, and praxis in ecuador’s early childhood policy. global education review, 12 (3), 18-36. más que palabras [more than words]: chaos, discourse, and praxis in ecuador’s early childhood policy maria mavrides calderon et al. abstract the ecuadorian government’s lackluster implementation of its early childhood care and education (ecce) policies merits further scrutiny. seeking to catalyze change, we explored the discourse surrounding ecce in ecuador, as represented in government (n = 22) and media documents (n = 110) as well as social media posts (n = 253) to unveil incongruencies between policy and reality. utilizing critical policy analysis and an ecological lens, our semiotic discourse analysis study uncovered promising ecce conceptualizations, contrasting the dissonances between propaganda and implemented policy. in a country shaped by political chaos, ecological warfare, and narco-violence, ecce is not immune to these forces, as reflected by policymakers’ stances and implementations. findings and recommendations are provided to guide future policies. keywords ecuador, early childhood policy, discourse analysis, germ, critical policy analysis background the global educational reform movement (germ), with neoliberalism and standardization at its core, is a formidable force permeating education systems worldwide (sahlberg, 2011). in emerging countries, nonprofit governmental (ngos) and philanthropic agencies have been critical in spreading this movement (yoon, 2024). ecuador, a country rich in resources but drowning in political and economic turmoil and heavily reliant on the international community, is no exception. particularly in early education, these influences are just starting to take hold, despite the limited access that young children have faced in this country. in fact, only 22% of young ecuadorian children attend early education centers (unicef, 2023). ecce, as a fundamental part of the ecuadorian education system, is still in its infancy (unesco, 2006). with around 1.5 million children under 5 years of age (paho, 2016), public ecce in ecuador includes some initiatives designed for children from birth to 5 years old. as this study will analyze, the evolution of public policy in ecce in ecuador has been a continuous process influenced by political, social, and economic changes and limited conceptualizations of what ecce could be. early childhood evolution since 1980, ecuador’s ministry of social welfare (msw) has been responsible for directly managing preschools, with the mission to “protect” children from the effects of poverty, including abuse and malnutrition. conventional preschools were managed and operated by the msw in its facilities for families regrettably 19 global education review 12 (3) labeled “at risk.” at the same time, unconventional programs involved the community, where the state offered bonuses to caregiver mothers, and the community was responsible for providing care, making improvements, and supplementing nutrition. families were also expected to be charged fees (soria, 2017), restricting access to children in poverty. between 1988 and 1992, three key initiatives were implemented: community child development centers (ccdc), recreation and learning centers (rlc), and child development programs (cdp) (ruales & sanandrés, 2015). ccdcs were neighborhood-based facilities offering early education, nutrition, and health services to children under 6, while also facilitating parental training in child development, care, and preventive health (gavilanes, 2008). rlcs focused on providing safe spaces for play and cultural activities (gavilanes, 2008). cdps combined home visits and group sessions to reach families in rural and marginalized areas, promoting early stimulation, parental education, and the integration of community resources into childcare (ruales & sanandrés, 2015). the implementation of any initiatives was limited by a lack of coordination between the public and private sectors, institutional weaknesses, and budget cuts, which hindered effective monitoring and implementation (alarcón, 2019). chaos and upheaval nir and sharma kafle (2013) found that political stability has a significantly greater influence on the quality of education than a country’s economic status, as indicated by its gdp per capita. this has been the case for ecuador. in the span of a decade, this country saw seven different presidents take power, many serving for only a few days (u.s. department of state, 2018). in 1999, ecuador faced a severe banking crisis, forcing many citizens to emigrate while others lost their life savings. the national currency, the sucre, was hit by extreme inflation, leading the country to adopt the u.s. dollar as its official currency in 2000. in the decade before 2007, ecuadorians ousted two sitting presidents through mass protests and saw 19 iterations of new constitutions (perez, 2022). this turmoil explained how different programs were launched during the late 1990s and early 2000s but lacked cohesiveness and follow-up. these programs were government initiatives focused on child protection, health, and nutrition and laid the foundation for developing and implementing the good living child center (cibv) model in 2006 (unesco, 2006). the cibvs, renamed child development centers in 2016, are ecuador’s primary public childcare service modality. these programs provided care and nutrition to children from vulnerable families up to age 6 in rural and urban areas. generally, they operate in comanagement with community organizations, civil society, and local governments. importantly, the central government has full control over all aspects of these centers (comisión económica para américa latina y el caribe, 2022; soria, 2017). the correa years between 2007 and 2017, ecuador, under president rafael correa, implemented substantial economic and institutional reforms. social spending saw a twofold increase, with poverty decreasing by more than 41%. in comparison, the average annual per capita gdp rose by 1.6%, surpassing the growth rate of the previous 25 years by more than double, as the national debt grew due to the new spending and ever-expanding bureaucracy (johnston & vasiclalovic, 2023). más que palabras 20 part of that social reform included the national decennial education plan: 2006-2015 (ministerio de educación, 2007). it proposed the universalization of early childhood education for children aged 0 to 5, with specific goals such as designing the national early childhood education curriculum, a model for evaluating development and readiness, and standards for equipment, furniture, and teaching materials (ministerio de educación, 2007). this led to the proclamation in 2012 of integral child development as a priority public policy for all children in the country (ministerio de inclusión económica y social, 2013a, 2013b). ironically, correa, a self-proclaimed warrior against neoliberalism policies, heavily leaned into the germ, with myriad protocols that emphasized standardization, accountability, and expansion of services under a rationale of restructuring educational institutions as sites for producing ‘highly productive members of society’. furthermore, under correa, ecuador became increasingly polarized. while his charisma and substantial infrastructure investments boosted his popularity, he faced accusations of power abuse and press suppression (leon cabrera, 2020). moreover, correa engaged in significant corruption, involvement with criminal gangs, and unprecedented attacks on democratic institutions, including dissolving the congress and restructuring the judicial system (agence france-presse, 2021). in the early years of correa’s presidency, ecuador enjoyed an economic boom. critics argue that the boom was driven by rising oil prices. when those prices dropped, the economy began to struggle (leon cabrera, 2020). lenín moreno took office in 2017, imposing austerity measures that led to a recession even before the covid-19 pandemic. within 2 years, poverty, inequality, and violence (martínez-pérez & paz enríquez, 2022) had surged to their highest levels in more than a decade (johnston & vasic-lalovic, 2023). additionally, the covid-19 pandemic presented challenges in early childhood education as it imposed a focus on distance learning and revealed an unequal access to technology. by 2021, the proportion of children attending school before starting primary education decreased (siteal, 2024). in 2023, a new government took power in the context of a critical surge of narcoviolence that has triggered panic and migration. daniel noboa’s government promised a “nuevo ecuador,” including an overhaul in the policies regarding education at all levels (ministerio de educación, 2024). this overhaul incorporated the development plan for the new ecuador: 2024-2025 (national planning council of the republic of ecuador & national secretariat of planning, 2024), which aimed to increase the net enrollment rate in education by 4%, compared to 2022. so far, nothing has been articulated or implemented, and no specific mention of ecce has been included in this proposal. purpose of the study limited literature has analyzed the ecuadorian government’s discourse regarding ecce, with no research presented in peerreviewed journals. alarcon’s (2019) thesis confirmed the constant failure to implement ecce policies in ecuador due to the continuous oversight of governance and lack of multisectoral collaboration. she found that centralization impeded a response to the needs of children in local contexts. similarly, tingo (2022) discussed the limited access and scope of ecce public education in ecuador. he concluded that ecce policy, while conceived as the intersection of contexts and institutions, is still perceived as an instrument for developing 21 global education review 12 (3) economic human capital (tingo, 2022). furthermore, no studies have attempted a comparative analysis of policy discourse and the reality on the ground in the ecuadorian ecce field. we aim to fill that gap in literature. beyond research goals, we call for repair and renewal, an appeal to the new government for action beyond traditional patterns of proposals and demagoguery. as evidence, we seek to unveil the dissonance between governmental stances and discourse and the reality we have seen and lived on the ground from 2007 to today. this study presents alternatives and recommendations that can catalyze advocacy in centering ecce as a fundamental aspect of children’s educational journey. these could be applied to any country facing political or social instability. we believe the new presidential elections present a unique opportunity and willingness from the government to hear our input. as such, our research questions are: rq1. how has the ecuadorian government conceptualized ecce? rq2. what are the differences between governmental discourse surrounding ecce and what media (including social media) have reported as occurring on the ground? conceptual framework critical policy analysis (cpa) guided our analysis. cpa proposes that policy is negotiated by different stakeholders as they make meaning of the impacts of policy (diem et al., 2014). cpa, in particular, analyzes policy through a critical stance, highlighting the voices of the recipients of policies—in our case, ecuadorian ecce educators, children and families. bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological systems theory, which relates different environmental, social, and familial factors impacting the learning and well-being of children, supports this framework. we propose that governmental policies directly affect all of the systems in a child’s ecology. this framework guided our methods and data analysis and situated our findings. why critical policy analysis? cpa scholars have reshaped our understanding of educators and students as governed subjects (ball, 2005; ball et al., 2011) and, more importantly, of policy recipients who, under an often-inconsistent policy, offer possibilities for resistance. ball et al. (2011) notably argued that policy shapes its recipients through “a network of social practices infused with power relations” (p. 611). we sought to understand how early education educators, leaders, and families in the ecuadorian early education centers have been influenced by those power relations reflected in government policies. by triangulating discourse found in different sources, we revealed the discursive struggles in which the language of organizational actors and policy subjects is examined. this allowed us to interpret the intentionality and meaning behind practices and communication (fischer & forester, 1993). to guide our analysis, we relied on what diem et al. (2014) identified as five recurrent themes in cpa scholarship, as presented in table 1. we interrogated policy constructions, searching for deep patterns between policy discourse and policy recipients and among each policy recipient; hence, we layered our analysis with bronfenbrenner’s ecological systems theory. más que palabras 22 table 1 five cpa themes concern regarding… application to study ● the difference between policy rhetoric and practiced reality ● contrasts between governmental discourse/understandin g and reports from media ● how policy emerged ● social and political events influencing policy creation and implementation ● the distribution of power, resources, and knowledge ● resource distribution/equitable access to ecce education ● social stratification ● how policy discourse vs. implementation perpetuates inequities ● the nature of resistance to or engagement in policy ● teachers’/parents’ resistance to policies source: adapted from diem et al. (2014) ecological systems theory an ecological approach (bronfenbrenner, 1979) acknowledges the intricate ways that policies affect ecce, teachers, and, ultimately, families. we explored how policymakers perceive system-level policies and their effects on various systems—micro, macro, meso, and exo—that influence children who attend early childhood centers in ecuador. these systems operate within the broader context of societal culture and beliefs (macrosystem), creating a dynamic relationship that ultimately affects the child. the macrosystem encompasses cultural or societal values, including beliefs that shape perceptions of events and participants. we proposed that policies reflect broader beliefs regarding the role of ecce in ecuador, their personnel, and the families they serve. as bronfenbrenner (1979) theorized, variables can influence systems reciprocally; in this study, policies (exosystem) and societal beliefs (macrosystem) regarding ecce could impact young ecuadorian children, and vice-versa. this allowed us to explore whether policies have a trickle-down effect on the interconnected systems surrounding families and children, particularly low-income families facing barriers to equal-quality education, childcare, and economic stability. methodology we critically explored the discourse surrounding early childhood education in ecuador, as represented in government documents (n = 22), media (n = 110), and social media (n = 253), to challenge rhetoric versus reality and the actual effects on policy in the ecological system of young children in ecuador. discourse analysis is helpful in illuminating the politics of discourse and examining the connection between policy documents and their historical, political, social, and cultural contexts (fairclough, 2003). we explored text with a semiotic outlook, recognizing that symbolic representations could potentially embody power and resistance manifestations, particularly in media and social media. we subscribed to jones et al.’s (1998) view of policymaking as discursive and textual practices, which means our analysis positioned us as activists who must engage with discursive aspects of policy. particularly, given constant political upheavals, we view ‘policy work’ as ‘text work’ (jones et al., 1998, p. 169) and discourse analysis as policy activism. with this in mind, the government documents we analyzed included all policy documentation accessible to the public from 2007 to the present. media reports were uploaded from major newspapers and magazines in ecuador and the region from 2007 to the present. we recognize that many media outlets were heavily influenced by political forces and restrictions, particularly during the 23 global education review 12 (3) correa years. over 120 x posts, 120 instagram posts, and 13 facebook posts were included in the analysis. social media were selected because of their potential to represent how different community members view and experience a phenomenon authentically. curran and kellogg (2017) explained: “social media, such as twitter, can serve as a conduit, removing the traditional structural silos surrounding stakeholders, connecting disparate groups that would otherwise not be able to engage in collective discourse” (p.648). please see table 2 for documents, inclusion and exclusion criteria. table 2. inclusion and exclusion criteria inclusion and exclusion criteria documents type of document inclusion criterion/keywo rds exclusion criterion/key words government documents documents located in ec.gov sites official registry archives 2007-present educación inicial (ecce) educación parvularia (nursery) educación primaria (elementary ed.) educación infantil (infant education) young children ece centers profesores parvularios (nursery teachers) general education plans higher ed documents related to ece teacher preparation before 2007 educación secundaria (high school) higher ed documents not related to ece teacher preparation ngo documentation media documents newspapers: el comercio el universo hora reuters vistazo gk social media x/twitterfac ebook 2007-present educación inicial (ecce) educación parvularia (nursery) educación primaria (elementary ed.) educación infantil (infant education) young children ece centers before 2007 educación secundaria (high school) higher ed articles not related to ece teacher preparation events not impacting instagram profesores parvularios (nursery teachers) political events that may impact education decisions ece policy or implementa tion data analysis we coded documents using deductive and inductive coding (saldaña & miles, 2013) via dedoose software. each type of document was analyzed separately. for each document type, the first coding round included cpa themes (see table 1), and subsequent rounds included invivo coding to arrive at themes substantiating our findings. after four rounds of coding, we consolidated data, removed overlapping codes, and clarified constructs in our coding book using saldaña and miles (2013) suggested consolidation methods. two peer coders arrived at coder agreement. we found 37 codes. the final step of analysis consolidated, compared, and contrasted the themes from all three types of documents. the final themes were: ecce conceptualizations, workforce, dissonance between rhetoric and reality, distribution of power and resources, and crisis (see figure 1). figure 1. codes and themes map ** cpa concerns más que palabras 24 findings while government documents show ambitious proposals that often contradict their goals and scope, the limited number of concrete plans is more worrisome. budgets, workforce training, and systems evaluations seem sparse, and most documents focus on policy statements without concrete implementation steps. furthermore, policy discourse conceptualizes ecce as a means to an end, with a clear neoliberal take at the end: a market approach using ecce as an antidote for poverty. despite many policies crafted by administrations refuting neoliberalism, the discourse shows incongruence, with no mention of democratic, character, or citizen goals as part of the field conceptualizations. contrary to perceptions that emergent countries like ecuador lack the knowhow in specific educational ideas, theories, and best practices, our analysis revealed an understanding of developmentally appropriate practice as well awareness of culturally relevant pedagogy and play-based experiences, all critical in ecce. unfortunately, those guidelines are not applied in practice, according to our analysis of social media and media. furthermore, we found how political and social instability has deeply impacted the conceptualization and implementation of ecce. ecuador’s government ecce conceptualizations (rq1.) ecce is still experiencing growing pains in the government’s defining scope and conceptualization. the connections between policy and neoliberal stances are clear, as demonstrated by commonly contested dominant discourses such as “readiness,” “childminding,” “standardization,” “accountability,” and claims of “societal economic benefit.” policies from 2007 showed the government’s focus on targeted approaches to “fix social and economic failings,” often expressed in terms of a high return on “social investment” (moss, 2015, p.226). even under leftist governments that promised to lift ecuador from “the long-neoliberal night” (perez, 2022, para 9), neoliberalism is embraced. these policies are presented as a rationale for state support of “early childhood education” to achieve future returns and improve participation in the labor market and social productivity, which translates into better returns for economic inclusion. a particular concern in the documents is the country’s malnutrition level—an unfortunate trend despite plentiful agricultural resources (ministerio de educación, 2007). to combat malnutrition, the government mandated the creation of targeted centers and other programs reaching out to children and families, particularly in rural communities, with nutritional supplements and medical attention, in many cases sponsored by multinational ngos. with these sponsorships, the vision of what can be done for young children is restricted to important yet measurable health outcomes (tingo, 2022). given this outlook, it follows that documents establish ecce as a right for all children, with some proposals even mandating it. in 2008, with the reform of the ecuadorian constitution, the universalization, permanence, no cost, and mandatory attendance of early childhood education were established (constitución de la república del ecuador, 2008, art 28). in stunning reality, later discourse conceptualizes ecce as a duty of all families. initial education is a priority and could be interpreted as “mandatory,” but this is not as responsibility of the state to provide this service to families who request it—is the perspective of the state—that this is the student’s obligation, 25 global education review 12 (3) having completed initial education (preschool) to enter the first year of basic [first grade]. (brown, 2014, p.5) initial education is important, compulsory, and school-based, but not important enough for promotion. this “flipflopping” is common in the policy discourse we analyzed. for example, the most comprehensive documentation regarding policy comes from 2007 and 2014, when correa’s controversial government produced a series of policy handbooks outlining a vision for expanded services, mandating an increase in education expenses by 0.5% annually until 2011, or until it reached 6% of the country’s gdp (ministerio de educación, 2007). it also mandated universal education for children 0 to 5 years old—a revolutionary proposal. the objective of this plan was to provide early quality and fair education for boys or girls less than five years old that respects their rights, diversity, and the national rhythm of growth and learning and develops fundamental values, incorporating them into the family and the community within the inclusion framework. (ministerio de educación, 2007, p.4) discourse analysis of these initial documents presented optimism for the future of ecce. however, documents only show the establishment of targeted programs to support children living in poverty. this discourse clashes with the proposed “universality” of early documents, with no discourse surrounding options for lowand medium-income households. in that sense, the codes “social stratification,” “medical model,” and “malnutrition” are prevalent in all early documents. for over two decades, correa’s administration prolifically produced protocols and policy documents. in the national strategy for first years (ministerio coordinador de desarrollo social, 2014), the discourse surrounding regulations and workforce preparation is first mentioned, without specific logistics for implementation. the same year, an ecce curriculum to guide formal and nonformal education for children under five was published. this document emphasized developmental practices used in the field, as well as child-led classrooms, play, and hands-on, culturally relevant experiences for children (particularly indigenous children) attending early childhood and care centers: generally, when considering the transition [from home to school] there are three essential elements: the child, the family, and the school. in the case of indigenous peoples, we must add the collective element: the community, and consider the extended family, in which elders and grandparents play an important role. furthermore, nature is a fundamental element for indigenous peoples and nationalities. (ministerio de educación, 2014, p.34) we also recorded that as each new administration began, documents were produced to introduce theory/evidenced-based approaches and policies through a multicultural early education model; however, by the midpoint, policies dried up. given one-off documents with no follow-up on implementation, we concluded that these policy documents served more as propaganda than actionable policy. after 2016, policy documents were sporadic and reflected the country’s social, political, and economic situation. most of the discourse found was related to health and safety, digital access, and, more recently, safety and anti-violence protocols. here, the theme “crisis” abounded to highlight the deep connection más que palabras 26 between political, social, and economic instability and neglect in the field. workforce as previously noted, much governmental focus remains on healthcare and social interventions rather than education, despite policies that provide robust education proposals. we found that 2014 documents citing requirements of teachers working in public early childhood centers clearly emphasized the role of health education and evaluation, with some mention of the curriculum: a teacher with a degree in early childhood education, initial education, and related subjects, in charge of a classroom with a maximum of 25 children, will be selected through a competition. [the teacher] complies with mandates, monitors the growth and nutritional status of the children, and involves the family in the educational process. (ministerio coordinador de desarrollo social, 2014, p. 32) expanding on this perspective is the discourse on the first curriculum proposed, in 2014 as well as other subsequent documents highlighting a high level of pedagogical sophistication—for example, the idea of incorporating positive discipline into everyday interactions (ministerio de educación, 2022, 2023a). such discourse, evidenced in the 2014 curriculum, stated: competent and committed professionals must offer a variety of opportunities for learning that invite children to get involved, think and do things for themselves, providing them with time to play and interact with each other and the materials. likewise, they should know the interests of the children in their group, listen to them attentively, and encourage them. (ministerio de educación, 2014, p. 41) furthermore, the government defined the role of early childhood educators: consistent with theories, the teacher, in order to allow the child to explore, play, experiment, and create, must assume a mediator role in development and learning that enhances the capabilities of children. the most important form of mediation is to “talk to the children,” talk with them, use language to build bridges between what children know and what the teacher expects them to learn to enrich their understanding of the world. (ministerio de educación, 2014, p. 34) despite this robust educator conceptualization, later documents revealed contradictions. the early childhood workforce is often relegated to caregiver roles, despite holding credentials equivalent to those of their elementary school counterparts. teachers’ roles in the discourse are inconsistent, if not contradictory. our codes were equally divided seeing teachers primarily as healthcare workers, social workers, parent educators, and babysitters. overall, our analysis reflected an optimistic vision of what could be wishful thinking and knowledge of developmentally appropriate practices. unfortunately, we also concluded that these documents served as propaganda rather than effective policy for implementation. thus, ecce has been used as a pawn for demagoguery under the guise of traditional neoliberal discourse; young children, family needs, and the ecce workforce are exploited as tools to claim change without actually effectuating it. the dissonance between reality and policy (rq2). given that we found sparse evidence of policies being implemented in the policymaker’s 27 global education review 12 (3) discourse, we wondered about the extent to which they were implemented. our document analysis highlighted the dissonance in discourse between governmental policies and reality on the ground. in fact, the theme “dissonance between policy and reality” was the most frequent in our analysis, along with the themes “distribution of resources” and “funding.” specifically, despite a promise of funding and resources, news articles highlighted the lack of resources offered to ecce centers, presenting a shocking incongruency, as exemplified by the newspaper el universo: for children from 0 to 5 years old to sleep, they only have a crib whose wooden supports are inclined. in addition, they have a thin mattress slowly losing its sponge and three mats with fabric torn into pieces. in a corner of one of the bedrooms, there is a broken-brown piece of furniture, and its springs are visible. (las guarderias del, 2015) furthermore, protocols are written, but policies are not enforced. for example, ministerio de educación (2014, 2022) established a ratio of 25 preschool children per teacher, or nine children per teacher, if under 3 years old. the reality, as discussed by the media, is radically different: “the 12 teachers from el calzado organize the classroom while caring for 322 toddlers.” (322 niños se, 2014). distribution of resources media discourse seldom mentions public ecce centers as places of learning; rather, they provide care and nutrition, consistent with the discourse found in many governmental documents. interestingly, this finding is prevalent in all printed media documentation from 2007 to present, signaling also how the public understands ecce as a place to solve social problems and access services rather than belonging, education, and enrichment. media documents citing learning and socioemotional support as the bases for preschool education are often related to private institutions (¿cuáles son las, 2023; educación inicial es, 2019), further signaling the gap in access to high-quality ecce for low-income families who rely on public services crisis regarding ecce, social and printed media discourse responds to aspects of social or political crises. though varying since 2006, frequently discussed topics include child labor (including preschoolers and toddlers) (gonzalez, 2023), access to childcare for families in extreme poverty (news service, 2023), children living in prisons (318 niños aun, 2008), and numerous incidents of school violence and abuse perpetrated by narco-gangs, parents, or teachers (en ecuador se, 2024; padres creen que, 2016). for example, despite multiple handbooks published by the government on positive discipline, newspapers reported shocking statistics about ecce students: “7% of children said they were hit (in 2010, the figure was 11%) and 4% said they were insulted and mocked by the teacher (in 2010 it was 7%)” (padres creen que, 2016). the theme “crisis” is more prevalent in social media than in any other data source, as represented by this x post by a child advocate: children’s day in ecuador: ▪ 600,000 children (from 05 years old) outside of initial education, health, and child development services. ▪ 51,235 reports of sexual violence against boys and girls (2018-2023). ▪ 370 thousand children working. (maldonado, 2024) más que palabras 28 news reports and social media posts revealed a need for a deeper understanding of pedagogy and child development, which contrasts with the aforementioned governmental handbooks. further, while the ideas of child-led instruction are included in government curricula (ministerio de educación, 2007), they are not frequently present in news reports and social media posts, where suggestions for workbooks and product-based assignments dominate (educando se aprende, 2011; la animación parvularias, 2015). in analyzing social media posted by education authorities (ministerio de educación, 2020, 2021), we found many instances of young children engaging in worksheet/workbook exercises, contrary to what the curricula promoted. play is also depicted in social media, mainly through gross-motor activities, lacking structure or intentionality (ministerio de educación, 2021). workforce as seen by the media from media, including social media discourse, the teachers’ role in the ecce system is amorphous but also considered a low-skilled job. furthermore, the ecce teacher is often relegated to the role of entertainer, as several newspaper articles have reported (festejos con niños, 2007; rondas infantiles, 2021). facebook posts titled “with early childhood we provide families with support so that 3and 4-year-old children develop their skills through play” (ministerio de educación, 2021, 2023) depicted teachers wearing costumes and pantomiming. the tone of the discourse was maternalistic, and credentials and professional preparation are often overlooked (ministerio de educación, 2021). surprisingly, in this context, the code “resistance and advocacy” was infrequent, signaling the need to organize different stakeholders, including teachers and parents, to benefit children. in a country with robust labor protections, we found the irony that during this time, unionization was threatened by correa’s socialist movement as the “ecuadorian government pursued public policies that systematically discouraged social organization. any social control over governmental authority was suspected of threatening the government’s project” (peralta et al., 2019, para 13). this again exemplifies the dissonances and germ tendencies found across policy and ecce implementation in ecuador. overall, we found a stark contrast between the government’s vision of ecce and what is happening on the ground. the government’s promises remain unfulfilled, reducing the ecce system to meet some social needs of a country in crisis, rather than the longterm needs for the educational, socioemotional, and cognitive growth of its population. while policies and know-how exist, they are not applied in praxis; as a result, educators lack the preparation and expectations needed to effectivize those policies, and children and families do not access high-quality education and care, a place and space to belong. using an ecological lens, we found that neglecting the ecce system affects centers, parents, teachers, and, ultimately, children. discussion where does ecce fit in the discourse of a country in crisis? with so many fires to put out, can any country focus on ecce? these essential questions apply to many nations in crisis. under this premise, we contest that, as maslow (1970) considered sustenance and shelter as essential for a child to thrive, ecce is similarly essential to nurture children’s souls, particularly in times of crisis. here is our concern, however: as governments consider embracing ecce policy, it must be conceptualized holistically, with the ultimate 29 global education review 12 (3) purpose of teaching and learning to cultivate the whole child’s development. fajardo-dack (2016) found that “after seven years under the so-called ‘educational revolution’ (proclaimed like this by the [ecuadorian] government and its political party), there is no significant evidence of a fruitful change” (p.82). our analysis not only confirms this, but also confirms that in ecuador, the germ is infecting the nascent field of ecce, conceptualized under the narrow lens of “social welfare,” rationalizing policies through a neoliberal view of return on investment. most worrisome is the standardization of policies in a country as diverse as ecuador. small in its geography and history, ecuador’s social needs vary according to location, region, and local governments. data on students’ academic performance differ significantly between students in the highlands and those on the coast or in urban and rural areas (siteal-unesco, 2021). resource allocation and initiatives have been standardized to justify public funds expenditure rather than to allow local governments to create context-based interventions that respond to the specific needs of each community (peralta et al., 2019). ironically, these shiny new policies are propaganda tools by each government, both from the left and right. in this pendulum of ideologies, our findings revealed that politicians often fail to understand or choose to neglect the needs of families and educators, resulting in inadequate resource allocation after elections. national headlines reveal the frequent allocation of national funds to organizations and projects that waste these funds, justifying their actions on technicalities rather than on the actual outcomes in the ecce context (perez, 2022). there are no sustainable action plans to withstand the tides of different administrations, presidents, or local elections. thus, every layer of the ecological system of ecuadorian children and families is affected (schady, 2011). future research should investigate pathways to sustainability in countries with a tradition of democratic instability. our study also found tremendous potential for what can be accomplished in ecuador. leaders and academics possess the expertise to guide this country toward a model of ecce expansion that rivals other systems worldwide. the lack of the system’s institutionalization can be an opportunity; it may now be fitting to conceptualize ecce through a holistic approach, avoiding the pitfalls that germ has brought to countries like the united states or the united kingdom, and looking instead towards countries like finland. this study should serve as a call for action to achieve a specific vision. we urge the ecuadorian government to consider: 1. codifying ecce as a right implemented through an independent, nonpartisan organization funded directly by oil and shrimp exports. this would guarantee sustainability regardless of politics. 2. multigenerational holistic models like head start, where social services, inclusion, and parent participation are central to a program’s mission. another important component of head start is its federal funding, yet it is implemented locally, thus respecting the cultural/ social contexts of the children and families attending these services. future research should focus on unveiling possibilities for sustainable models that combine healthcare, nutrition, socioemotional and cognitive development. 3. ecuador, like many south american countries, is a multicultural and multilingual nation. extending services to all más que palabras 30 young children should appeal to the parents’ cultural contexts. we urge the implementation of multicultural and inclusive centers that respect the cultural diversity of families. 4. sahlberg (2012) proposed: “the best way to avoid infections of germ is to prepare teachers and leaders well.” (para. 6). believing in this perspective, we recommend features of teaching and learning that are typical in finland: high confidence in teachers and principals as high professionals; encouraging teachers and students to try new ideas and approaches, in other words, to put curiosity, imagination and creativity at the heart of learning; and purpose of teaching and learning is to pursue happiness of learning and cultivating development of whole child. (sahlberg, 2012, para. 7) moreover, the allocation of funds for higher education would allow universities to support coursework on leadership, advocacy, and methods that use the curriculum through a developmental approach. we must refine what an ecce educator should be, beyond the tropes of babysitter and entertainer that prevailed in our analysis, to empower preservice teachers to advocate for themselves and the children and families with whom they work. leijen (2023) described the relevance of developing teacher agency as a way to prepare future educational leaders equipped to face challenges, resist mandates, and propose solutions. 5. mavrides calderon & kohn (2025) found that fair compensation is essential to developing leadership stability and mentoring future educators as ecce expansions occur. we recognize that educator and leader compensation must be a core component of the system's successful and sustainable expansion. we urge governments across the globe to consider parity between ecce and their elementary education counterparts. conclusion ecce must be a right for all children, especially those living in countries experiencing chaos. our study revealed a country immersed in violence, political instability, and uncertainty; a country that could benefit from ecce centers where families and children find a place of belonging and safety. unfortunately, governments have long prioritized self-serving propaganda and focused on health outcomes, which are more “visible” and supported by ngos. as researchers and ecuadorian mothers, we grapple with moving the needle away from germ tendencies and toward real action. we advocate for ecce policies that first situate young children as subjects who construct reality with their own discourse, rethinking their contribution to capital and human development. we urge a recognition of young children’s potential for future democratic transformation and citizenship. our study serves as a call to action for what can be done as ecuador enters a new chapter in its history. references agence france-presse. 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(2024). from germ (global education reform movement) to nerm (neoliberal educational reform madness). critical education, 15(2), 1328. https://doi.org/10.14288/ce.v15i2.1869 04 3. the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era production 1 the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 37 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: luna, sarah michael (2025). the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era: unpacking family in early childhood social studies policy. global education review, 12 (3), 37-50. the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era: unpacking family in early childhood social studies policy sara michael luna abstract this study examines the ideological reshaping of early childhood education standards, focusing on how the concept of family is constructed and governed within state social studies curricula. critical discourse analysis within a case study methodology reveals how official knowledge is strategically reordered to serve emerging authoritarian nationalist agendas fused with neoliberal managerial logics. this process narrows discursive possibilities, enforcing a moral and social order that restricts pluralism and critical inquiry. the study highlights education’s role as a contested site where competing visions of identity, knowledge, and democracy are materially enacted and politically contested. keywords early childhood education, curriculum, neoliberalism introduction something is happening in florida that cannot be dismissed as a passing controversy. it is not merely a new chapter in a long-standing culture war; it is a structural reconstitution of what constitutes legitimate knowledge in the early years of schooling. this is not a cyclical shift; it is a strategic reordering. far from neutral or benign, official knowledge is being reconstructed to serve the imperatives of a newly emboldened right (michael-luna & castner, 2025). this formation does not simply abandon neoliberalism, but mutates it, merging its managerial logics with a muscular authoritarian nationalism. a more dangerous synthesis emerges, invoking the vocabulary of tradition and parental rights while enforcing a singular moral order from above. this paper examines how such political and ideological shifts are materially encoded in the social studies standards of kindergarten classrooms in florida and new york. drawing on critical discourse analysis (gee, 2024) and case study methodology (stake, 2010), it investigates how the concept of family is discursively constructed, authorized, delimited, and policed in the official state social studies standards. the juxtaposition of two states, one widely read as liberal (new york) and the other as ideologically far-right state (florida), offers a revealing lens into how hegemonic power blocs shape knowledge in regionally specific ways. in florida, we are witnessing a purposeful narrowing of the discursive field. the very category of family is no longer a space for critical reflection, cultural multiplicity, or democratic engagement. it is instead recast as a stable, ahistorical, and heteronormative institution, an anchor for patriotic and moral instruction. removed from its complex lived realities, family becomes a site for the state’s projection of order, discipline, and hierarchy. the standard is not just pedagogical; it is ideological. it tells children who they are and who they are allowed to be. contrast this with new york, where social studies standards still reflect a contradictory but more pluralistic orientation. family is framed here as diverse, situated, and evolving. it includes multiple forms, biological, chosen, transnational, queer, and multigenerational. and while this is not free of its contradictions (such as the implicit neoliberal framing of tolerance and multiculturalism as individual 38 global education review 12 (3) dispositions rather than structural commitments), it offers a broader terrain of possibility. new york’s standards are no utopia, but they still leave space for what apple (2014) has long described as the “democratic curriculum”: a space of contradiction, struggle, and collective meaning-making. we must ask: whose knowledge is legitimated in these documents? whose experiences are recognized? whose are erased? the contrast between florida and new york is not simply one of regional preference. it is a conflict over the purposes of schooling itself, whether education will function as a site of critical inquiry and democratic formation or as an instrument of ideological state apparatuses. in florida, we see the intensification of what glasius (2023) terms authoritarian practices: the calculated restriction of critique, the narrowing of curriculum review to ideologically loyal actors, and the silencing of dissent through policy and public discourse (michal luna & castner, 2023). this is not accidental. it is part of a broader political project that positions the child as a symbol and a subject of state power. in this configuration, the kindergarten classroom becomes less of a place of inquiry and more of a normalization site. this paper addresses two central research questions: 1. how is the concept of family constructed in the kindergarten social studies standards of florida and new york, and what ideological commitments underlie these constructions? 2. how do authoritarian practices in florida’s curriculum evaluation and standard-setting processes function to restrict knowledge, eliminate pluralism, and reorient early childhood education toward state-sanctioned norms? these questions are not academic in the narrow sense. they speak to the heart of what schooling is for. in times of political retrenchment, early childhood education is too often treated as a neutral or apolitical zone. however, this is precisely where ideological work is most effective: hidden beneath the language of standards, routines, and developmental appropriateness. to engage with these texts critically is to engage in what apple (2014) called the “work of interruption,” revealing the taken-for-granted assumptions that shape curriculum and resisting the creeping closure of educational possibility. such interruption becomes necessary and urgent as we stand at the edge of a new educational order, increasingly intolerant of complexity, multiplicity, and dissent. the u.s. educational system and statebased standards the educational system in the united states is decentralized. unlike many countries where national curricula dictate standards, the u.s. leaves developing and enforcing k-12 educational standards to individual states (hursh, 2007). this approach reflects the country’s federalist structure, where states have significant autonomy over schooling policies, curricula, and assessment frameworks (ravitch, 2010). as a result, educational standards, including those governing early childhood education and kindergarten expectations, vary considerably across states. the common core state standards initiative (ccssi), introduced in 2010, represented an effort to unify academic standards in mathematics and english language arts across participating states. however, many states have since distanced themselves from common core, critiquing it for federal overreach and lack of local control (porter, 2019). the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 39 importantly, while the common core targeted core academic subjects, social studies standards were never nationalized, remaining under state jurisdiction. this divergence highlights how ideological perspectives at the state level shape the content and framing of education, especially subjects intersecting with social identity, civic values, and cultural norms. from neoliberal democracy to authoritarianism: implications for family and education recent political shifts in the united states reflect a broader global trend away from neoliberal democratic governance toward authoritarian tendencies, especially in cultural and educational policies (brown, 2019). an emphasis on market logic, individualism, and limited government intervention characterizes neoliberalism. arguably, neoliberal ideology initially coexisted with democratic ideals such as pluralism and civil liberties. however, the rise of authoritarian populism challenges these principles, promoting a more centralized control of knowledge, identity, and social norms. this shift is deeply intertwined with changing conceptions of the family, which become sites of ideological contestation. the definition of family under authoritarian-leaning regimes tends to revert to a more traditional, heteronormative model, often privileging far-right values and marginalizing non-normative family structures. in educational policy, this ideological shift manifests in laws and regulations emphasizing "parental rights" as a form of social control over curriculum and school culture. for instance, the florida "parental rights in education" bill, often dubbed the "don’t say gay" law, restricts discussions of sexual orientation and gender identity in early education settings, explicitly privileging parental authority to dictate what children learn about family diversity (florida senate, 2022). this policy is emblematic of a broader far-right resurgence, which advocates for increased parental control over school curricula as a reaction against perceived liberal indoctrination. these developments illustrate how authoritarian impulses in education work to police family definitions and limit exposure to pluralistic understandings, reinforcing ideological divides within society. neoliberalism’s definition of family versus pluralistic understandings neoliberalism’s influence extends beyond governance to conceptualizations of family, often framing the family unit within market-based and individualistic logics. friedrich hayek, a key neoliberal theorist, emphasized minimal state intervention and championed individual liberty, translating into a vision of the family as a self-regulating economic unit responsible for socializing children in line with market values (hayek, 1944). this view promotes a narrow, often nuclear family ideal that aligns with capitalist productivity and personal responsibility, reducing family relations to functional and economic terms. in contrast, pluralistic definitions of family recognize diverse family forms, such as single-parent families, lgbtq+ families, extended kin networks, and chosen families, and emphasize relational, cultural, and affective dimensions over purely economic or normative criteria. such definitions highlight the variability and fluidity of family structures across cultural and social contexts, aligning with democratic ideals of inclusion and equity (jones, 2025). the tension between neoliberal family definitions and pluralistic perspectives reveals 40 global education review 12 (3) underlying ideological conflicts that permeate education, where the state’s endorsement of particular family norms through standards and curricula can either marginalize or validate diverse family realities. ideological constructions of family in state standards: evidence of culture wars in education comparing how family is constructed within kindergarten and early childhood education standards across states provides insight into the ongoing culture wars that educators and children confront. in far-right states like florida, family is typically defined in narrowly traditional terms within education standards, reflecting and reinforcing the political climate’s emphasis on heteronormativity and parental control (florida department of education, 2023). florida’s recent demographic and political shifts, becoming a stronghold for republican policies (pew research center, 2022), are mirrored in educational policies that foreground a singular family model and restrict discussions on gender and sexuality in early grades. conversely, more liberal states such as new york adopt standards that explicitly recognize family diversity, incorporating multiple family structures and promoting inclusivity in early childhood education (new york state education department, 2023). new york’s political landscape, characterized by a progressive electorate (pew research center, 2022), supports educational policies that align with pluralistic and democratic ideals, fostering environments that acknowledge and celebrate diverse family forms. these divergent constructions within state standards demonstrate how early childhood education is a frontline arena in the culture wars, conflicts over social values, identity, and power permeating american society (giroux & dimaggio, 2024). teachers in states with conservative or far-right family definitions may face restrictions on pedagogical approaches and curriculum content, while children from non-normative backgrounds may experience marginalization or invisibility (michael-luna & castner, 2025; souto-manning & martell, 2016). these tensions underscore the importance of critically examining the ideological underpinnings of kindergarten standards to understand how broader political and cultural dynamics impact educational experience and socialization. theoretical framework by examining the ideological contestation between neoliberal individualism and authoritarian conservatism, alongside pluralistic democratic ideals, this framework elucidates the role of education in reproducing or challenging societal norms about family and identity. informed by foucauldian notions of power/knowledge, this framework views educational standards as instruments of governance that regulate knowledge, social norms, and identities (foucault, 1977). the rise of parental rights movements and legislation such as the florida bill exemplifies how power is negotiated between state, family, and school actors, often at the expense of inclusivity and pluralism. by juxtaposing state standards from ideologically opposed contexts (e.g., florida vs. new york), the framework allows for comparative analysis that reveals how macropolitical trends and culture wars manifest in micro-level educational settings, influencing the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 41 curriculum content, teacher autonomy, and child identity formation. methodology i this study uses a comparative case study approach (stake, 2010) grounded in critical discourse analysis (cda) (gee, 2024) to investigate how the concept of family is constructed within kindergarten social studies standards in the states of florida and new york. the research design is informed by an interpretivist epistemology and a critical theoretical lens, focusing on how curriculum documents reflect and reproduce ideological commitments. the two states were intentionally selected to capture clear ideological contrasts in educational policy and governance. florida represents an increasingly authoritarian, farright policy orientation, exemplified by state legislation that restricts curricular content, such as the parental rights in education act (“don’t say gay”). new york, by contrast, maintains a pluralist-progressive framework, emphasizing cultural diversity and identity formation. this contrast allows for a focused, ideologically informed comparison of how family is represented in foundational educational texts during early childhood. while the core case analysis is limited to florida and new york, this methodology was developed in parallel with a broader discourse analysis of nine u.s. states to ensure that the comparative insights are within national curricular patterns. this broader data context helped identify dominant and divergent early childhood social studies education trends. data collection the primary sources for analysis are the official kindergarten social studies standards published by the florida department of education (2023) and the new york state education department (2023). these standards are publicly available documents that articulate the learning goals, values, and civic orientations expected of early learners in each state. the focus is on standards that explicitly or implicitly reference “family,” “identity,” “community,” and “civic participation.” these are key curricular sites where ideological commitments about culture, citizenship, and belonging are embedded and communicated. analytical framework: critical discourse analysis this analysis follows gee’s (2024) critical discourse framework for examining language in educational materials, specifically focusing on four key areas: significance, practices, identities, and relationships. these dimensions provide a systematic means of unpacking how ideologies are embedded in curriculum texts, shaping children’s understandings of themselves, their families, and their societal roles. 1. significance attributes value and importance to particular knowledge, traditions, or narratives. this analytical dimension reveals how states construct what is worth knowing and remembering, what counts as “core” knowledge for young learners, and what is minimized or excluded. it also interrogates how family-related knowledge is celebrated as diverse, evolving, or reduced to nationalistic symbols and fixed moral lessons. 2. practices examine the social and civic behaviors that the standards promote. 42 global education review 12 (3) 3. identities examine how the curriculum constructs or obscures different racial, cultural, familial, and national identities. 4. relationships explore how the standards construct relationships between individuals, families, and state institutions. coding strategy and data analysis following gee’s discourse framework, a multi-stage coding process (saldaña, 2021) was employed. the first cycle involved descriptive and process coding to identify recurring references to family, identity, history, civic practices, and national values. in the second cycle, pattern coding was used to group data into thematic constructs aligned with gee’s four discourse domains. a third round of values coding was conducted to identify underlying ideological values such as pluralism, nationalism, traditionalism, and democracy. this form of coding is useful in curriculum analysis, where ideological positions are not always explicit but are deeply embedded in how content is framed and ordered. throughout the process, codes were memoed and triangulated with policy discourse and public statements from state leaders and advocacy groups, ensuring alignment between the standards language and broader educational politics. findings when comparing and contrasting the florida and new york social studies standards for kindergarten, particularly in relation to the concept of "family," we can observe how each state emphasizes the development of children’s understanding of family through different educational goals and frameworks. below is a detailed breakdown focusing on key points related to family and how it is introduced to young learners. family as a site of cultural identity and pluralism in new york’s kindergarten social studies framework, family is situated within the domain of individual development and cultural identity, a discursive move that positions the child not as a future citizen to be molded but as a cultural being already embedded within networks of identity, difference, and social meaning. k.1: individual development and cultural identity k.1: children’s sense of self is shaped by experiences that are unique to them and their families, and by common experiences shared by a community or nation. k.1a: a sense of self is developed through physical and cultural characteristics and through the development of personal likes, dislikes, talents, and skills. k.1b: personal experiences shape our sense of self and help us understand our likes, dislikes, talents, and skills, as well as our connections to others. standards k.1 and k.2 explicitly encourage children to explore how their families shape their sense of self. diversity is not an addon; it is foundational. students are invited to see that while every family is unique, they also share common cultural universals, values, care structures, rituals, that bind them to others across social and ethnic lines. the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 43 k.2: family and community k.2: children, families, and communities exhibit cultural similarities and differences. k.2a: each person is unique but also shares common characteristics with other family, school, and community members. k.2b: unique family activities and traditions are important parts of an individual’s culture and sense of self. k.2c: children and families from different cultures all share some common characteristics, but also have specific differences that make them unique. the standards explicitly recognize cultural variation and thereby model a curricular logic of inclusion. in this framework, the family is not a fixed or singular form; it is a pluralized and context-dependent institution that reflects the complexity of lived experience. this construction aligns with broader progressive ideological commitments: emphasizing cultural awareness, recognition of multiple identities, and nurturing democratic dispositions through exposure to complexity and difference. the underlying pedagogical message is one of civic humanism: that to understand the self, one must encounter the other. children are not just learning about "families." they learn how power, culture, and community shape identity, belonging, and justice. family as a pillar of tradition and civic order florida’s kindergarten social studies standards construct family through a markedly different lens that privileges historical continuity, civic order, and national unity. the standard ss.k.a.2.1 calls on students to compare families "then and now, " centering the family within a temporal frame that foregrounds change, but only in service of emphasizing continuity and traditional roles. the emphasis is on what has stayed the same and what should remain. ss.k.a.2.1 – historical understanding of family: this benchmark encourages students to examine how family life has changed over time, including aspects such as transportation, communication, home life, school life, and recreation. elsewhere, family is tethered to civic responsibilities and national rituals. standards such as ss.k.a.2.2 and ss.k.cg.2.1 make clear that families are not primarily cultural spaces of identity, but units of social discipline and patriotic reproduction. ss.k.a.2.2 – family and celebrations: recognize the importance of celebrations and national holidays as a way of remembering and honoring people, events, and our nation’s ethnic heritage. ss.k.cg.2.1 – civic and social roles: this benchmark highlights the role of families in civic participation, where children learn the responsibilities of being part of their family, school, and community, focusing on duties to promote safety and welfare. family celebrations are filtered through a lens of national holidays, independence day, and thanksgiving, where the family is a conduit for state-sanctioned memory and loyalty. the heterogeneity of family life is replaced by a singular vision: american, nuclear, obedient, and proud. what is absent here is telling. there 44 global education review 12 (3) is no serious engagement with cultural difference, no acknowledgment of nontraditional families, queer families, migrant families, or the fractured social realities that many children inhabit. instead, the curriculum silently enacts a politics of erasure, removing complexity in favor of a monolithic ideal. this is not a neutral omission; it is a form of curricular violence. the ideological commitments are clear: traditionalism, nationalism, and social conformity. the family becomes the idealized unit of national cohesion, a bulwark against pluralism. the past is not explored to encourage historical thinking but deployed as a moralizing mirror to reinforce what is deemed proper. the analysis reveals a cultural emphasis difference between new york and florida’s kindergarten social studies standards. new york’s framework highlights understanding families through the lens of cultural identity, recognizing the diversity of family structures and traditions. in contrast, florida’s standards emphasize historical comparison, and the civic roles families fulfill within society. florida frames families more as participants in societal functions, such as national holidays and civic duties, while new york presents families as foundational to personal identity and community connections. regarding the family’s role in personal identity, new york explicitly links family experiences to individual development, focusing on how family shapes children’s likes, dislikes, and cultural traits (k.1). florida’s approach, however, centers on the family’s historical and societal functions, including how family life has changed over time (ss.k.a.2.1) and family involvement in national celebrations (ss.k.a.2.2). both states acknowledge the importance of teaching civic responsibility, but their approaches differ in emphasis. florida integrates civic roles into family education, highlighting individual contributions to community welfare (ss.k.cg.2.1). new york emphasizes the personal and cultural growth fostered by family experiences (k.1b, k.2), focusing less on civic participation. finally, florida incorporates a historical perspective, encouraging children to compare family life across time (ss.k.a.2.1). new york centers on cultivating personal cultural identity and a sense of community belonging in the present, without the same historical comparison. next is a comparative chart that outlines how florida and new york’s kindergarten social studies standards approach the concept of family, emphasizing their focus, themes, and key standards. aspect florida standards new york standards focus historical understanding of family structures over time and comparing past and present family life. understanding family to personal identity, cultural diversity, and shared community experiences. key theme historical comparisons of family life: past vs. present. cultural diversity and commonalities in family life across different communities and cultures. main standard ss.k.a.2.1 compare children and families of today with those in the past. k.1a children’s sense of self is shaped by experiences unique to them and their families. family in historical context emphasis on then and now comparisons: transportation, communication, home life, work, and play (ss.k.a.2.1). focus on self-identity shaped by unique family experiences, exploring how children’s families influence their personal likes, dislikes, and talents (k.1a). cultural diversity less focus on diverse family structures across cultures, more on periods (past vs. present). focus on diversity of family structures, emphasizing unique family traditions and cultural practices (k.2b, k.2c). the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 45 cultural universals indirectly acknowledges cultural universals by comparing family life across periods, but not across cultures. direct focus on universal family characteristics (k.2a): children’s connection to others through shared family experiences, despite cultural differences. role of family in society family is a constant institution with changing roles over time (historical comparison of family roles). family is a foundation for individual cultural identity and societal belonging, focusing on emotional and social bonds. key standard for family ss.k.a.2.1: compare children and families of today with those in the past. k.2b: unique family activities and traditions are essential to an individual’s culture and sense of self. cultural sensitivity family is explored more through historical change, focusing on common holidays nationally (kj.2, k-j.3). family is recognized as part of a larger cultural identity, highlighting how traditions differ but are universally shared (k.2c). symbols and traditions family holidays are tied to national heritage and public holidays (e.g., independence day, memorial day). family traditions are highlighted as integral to a child’s cultural identity (k.2b). new york and florida’s kindergarten social studies standards offer rich opportunities for children to explore the "family," but they approach it from different perspectives. new york focuses more on personal identity and cultural diversity, encouraging children to recognize their family’s uniqueness and connection to community identity. florida, in contrast, emphasizes historical changes in family life and civic participation, teaching children how families contribute to national and community life. both approaches provide valuable frameworks for understanding the role of families, but they prioritize different aspects of family life. discussion the contrasting ways florida and new york approach teaching about family in kindergarten social studies standards reflect broader ideological commitments embedded in educational policy. these differences are not merely curricular but reveal deeply rooted perspectives on identity, culture, and the role of public education in shaping civic understanding. these divergent frameworks, traditionalist and nationalistic on one hand, progressive and multicultural on the other, map onto larger political narratives and pedagogical philosophies. a discussion follows that explores these orientations through the lens of cultural universals and ideological design to examine how teachers can navigate state social studies standards and work to co-construct children’s early understandings of family, identity, and belonging. framing family as a cultural universal: contrasting ideological and pedagogical orientations a comparative examination of florida and new york’s kindergarten social studies standards reveals fundamentally different approaches to how young learners are introduced to family—approaches that align with broader ideological and educational traditions. florida’s standards foreground historical continuity and civic responsibility, framing the family primarily as a stable institution that persists across time and contributes to national cohesion. children are prompted to compare family life in the past and present (ss.k.a.2.1), understand the family’s role in national celebrations (ss.k.a.2.2), and explore responsibilities within a civic context (ss.k.cg.2.1). this framework implicitly positions family as a foundational social unit 46 global education review 12 (3) within a larger narrative of american tradition and unity. by contrast, new york’s standards position family within a cultural framework emphasizing identity formation and diversity. the standards encourage children to develop a sense of self through personal and familial experiences (k.1), while also recognizing both the uniqueness and commonalities of family life across cultures (k.2). in this model, family is understood less as a civic or historical fixture and more as a cultural system shaping children’s understanding of themselves and others. this aligns with a more progressive pedagogical orientation that values inclusivity, multicultural awareness, and the development of a global perspective. these divergent frameworks reflect and reinforce the pedagogical insights regarding children’s capacity to understand cultural universals. as alleman et al. (2007) argue, children can recognize universal concepts such as family, customs, and social roles while interpreting them through their cultural experiences. new york’s emphasis on cultural diversity and family identity mirrors this view. standards like k.2c and k.2b explicitly highlight the coexistence of shared cultural elements and distinct traditions, fostering a nuanced understanding of commonality and difference. while less focused on diversity, florida’s standards engage with cultural universals more implicitly through historical comparison. by inviting students to examine the evolution of family life over time, florida promotes understanding of family as a constant across periods, echoing brophy and alleman’s (2006) argument that children benefit from recognizing universal social structures varying in expression across societies and eras. this approach cultivates cultural continuity and societal stability, reinforcing family as a central, enduring institution. new york and florida offer ideologically distinct pathways for engaging young learners with family as a cultural universal. new york’s standards emphasize diversity and identity formation within a pluralistic framework, while florida’s standards underscore tradition and civic responsibility within a historical-national narrative. both reflect theoretical perspectives on children’s understanding of culture and identity, showing how curricular standards serve educational and broader social and political purposes. ideological foundations of state curriculum approaches in examining the ideological architecture of state-mandated curriculum, florida’s kindergarten social studies standards reveal a commitment to cultural politics steeped in traditionalism and historical continuity. this is not merely curricular; it is a political act. the framework privileges family as a stable, nearsacrosanct institution enduring across generations, with superficial transformations. historical comparison is deployed pedagogically and as a mechanism to naturalize specific social arrangements. by inviting students to contrast family life "then and now," the curriculum inscribes family within a narrative of unbroken cultural transmission, asserting foundational family values remain intact despite modern flux. using national holidays as central themes reinforces this orientation. family is tethered directly to the nation, aligning early social understandings with soft nationalism, shaping identity around patriotic sentiment and collective memory. curriculum becomes a site for producing a vision of american life valuing unity over pluralism, stability over flux, and tradition over difference. the standards’ lack of the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 47 engagement with cultural diversity is not an oversight but an ideological choice, revealing a shared-values narrative that bolsters a homogenous national identity. contrast this with new york’s kindergarten standards, where the ideological terrain differs. the standards do not universalize family through shared past but diversify its meanings through lived present experiences. the child is not a passive inheritor of traditions but an active participant in constructing identity via cultural interaction and personal history—the standards foreground difference, not as a threat to unity but as the condition for democratic belonging. family is presented as culturally specific; so is the child. traditions, languages, and practices are dynamic elements of a pluralistic society, not artifacts of an idealized past. curriculum cultivates cultural literacy, empathy, and critical awareness. students explore their backgrounds while respectfully engaging others, transforming how we imagine community and belonging. new york’s standards view the classroom as a microcosm of multicultural democracy, actively opposing exclusionary narratives. through this ideological lens, two competing visions emerge: one preserves a coherent national mythos through tradition and unity; the other constructs a more inclusive, responsive, critically engaged civic identity. aspect florida new york ideological leaning far-right, traditional, and nationalistic progressive, inclusive, and multicultural focus stability, continuity, and shared national identity cultural diversity, selfidentity, and shared humanity family as a social institution family as a constant, time-honored structure family as diverse and shaped by cultural identity emphasis on diversity limited emphasis on diversity; national unity focus strong emphasis on recognizing and celebrating diversity cultural sensitivity national holidays and symbols are central diverse family structures and traditions are explored historical vs. cultural focus more historical (past vs. present comparisons) more cultural (recognizing diverse family structures) goal of curriculum promote traditional values, social cohesion, and patriotism promote global citizenship, cultural awareness, and inclusivity neoliberalism, authoritarianism, and the transformation of family in early education the comparative analysis of florida and new york’s kindergarten social studies standards reveals a profound ideological divide in how the concept of family is framed, reflecting broader shifts in democratic governance under neoliberalism. florida’s emphasis on historical continuity and civic responsibility positions the family as a stable institution integral to national identity. conversely, new york’s focus on cultural diversity and identity formation presents the family as a dynamic, culturally specific unit. these divergent approaches illustrate differing educational philosophies and align with neoliberalism’s impact on democracy. hayek’s neoliberal philosophy, especially in the road to serfdom, argues that traditional institutions like the family are essential for social order and individual freedom. hayek (1944) claims central planning and state intervention undermine these institutions, leading to tyranny. the family is a stabilizing force, upholding moral values and societal norms. florida’s curriculum, 48 global education review 12 (3) emphasizing historical family structures and civic duties, aligns with hayek’s view by portraying family as a timeless institution supporting national cohesion and responsibility. brown (2023) argues neoliberalism reconfigures individuals as “human capital,” prioritizing selfinvestment and market values over civic engagement. this shift is evident in florida’s standards, which reflect neoliberal rationality prioritizing stability and conformity over diversity and democratic deliberation. in contrast, new york’s curriculum, emphasizing cultural diversity and identity, challenges neoliberal and authoritarian narratives by recognizing multiple family forms. this aligns with critical pedagogy, empowering students to question dominant ideologies and engage diverse perspectives. michael-luna and castner (2025) note that neoliberal reforms are worsened by authoritarian practices repressing accountability and freedom of expression. implications for teachers: navigating standards in an ideological terrain for teachers, especially those working with young children, implementing state standards is far more than procedural; it is an act of political and moral positioning. as apple (2013) argues, curriculum is never neutral; it is cultural politics, often serving dominant ideological interests under the guise of common sense or academic rigor. the contrasting family frameworks in florida and new york’s kindergarten social studies standards present educators with different content and visions of childhood, citizenship, and society. understanding these standards as ideological texts, rather than neutral guides, requires educators to move beyond compliance and engage critically and reflectively. teachers must first learn to read standards as political documents: asking what they say, why, who they serve, and what citizens they aim to shape. for example, florida’s standards tying family to national holidays and civic duties (ss.k.a.2.2, ss.k.cg.2.1) might seem innocuous or celebratory. however, scholars like brown (2023) suggest that this political discourse naturalizes a narrow familycentric version that privileges sameness, nostalgia, and a homogenized national identity. educators must decode this discourse and ask: what is missing? who is excluded? what values are promoted, and whose values are they? at the same time, many teachers may find themselves caught between personal and professional values, shaped by commitments to inclusivity, cultural responsiveness, and social justice, and the moral stance embedded within state-mandated standards. this is especially acute in politically far-right environments, where educators may feel pressure to enact a curriculum that contradicts their training or personal ethics. in such contexts, teachers must carefully consider how they position themselves: as neutral facilitators, critical interveners, silent dissenters, or ethical disruptors. to do this meaningfully, teachers should engage in a practice of critical self-interrogation. they might begin with reflective questions such as: ● what are my personal beliefs about family, culture, and citizenship? ● how do these beliefs align or conflict with the standards i am expected to teach? ● what does it mean to teach standards that may marginalize the children in my classroom? the moral politics of authoritarian practice in a post-truth era 49 ● how can i honor the standards’ intent while expanding their scope to be more inclusive, honest, and reflective of realworld diversity? ● what does resistance look like in the context of early childhood education, and what are the risks and responsibilities that come with it? teachers must also reflect on where the profession stands with these issues. are we, as a field, committed to equity and the affirmation of all children’s identities? or are we adhering to increasingly narrow and ideologically rigid visions of education? recognizing that teaching is never apolitical, educators must be equipped to act as ethical interpreters of policy, rather than passive executors. practically, this might mean supplementing mandated content with stories and examples reflecting diverse family structures, cultural practices, and historical perspectives. it could mean facilitating conversations, encouraging empathy, curiosity, and respect for difference, even when standards are silent on such values. it could also involve collaborating with families to ensure their realities are reflected in the curriculum and classroom discourse. in this way, teachers can embody the standards while reinterpreting their meaning, leveraging what is present and critically attending to what is absent. this does not require open defiance, but courage, professional judgment, and moral clarity. as brown (2023) reminds us, neoliberalism and authoritarianism narrow the space for democratic engagement and moral plurality. teachers remain among the last defenses against this erosion, especially in early education. their classrooms are among the few public spaces where new imaginaries of belonging, identity, and justice can still take root. teaching family is not simply about describing who lives in a household or what holidays are celebrated; it is about framing children’s earliest understandings of who they are, who belongs, and what kind of world is possible. therefore, not only teachers but teacher educators, researchers, and all early childhood professionals and advocates must take up this work not just as technicians of curriculum but as stewards of democracy. references apple, m. w. (2013). knowledge, power, and education: the selected works of michael w. apple. routledge. apple, m. w. (2014). education and power (3rd ed.). routledge. brown, w. (2019). in the ruins of neoliberalism: the rise of antidemocratic politics in the west. columbia university press. brown, w. (2023). nihilistic times: thinking with max weber. harvard university press. florida department of education. (2023). florida early learning and development standards. https://www.fldoe.org/earlylearning/standards florida senate. (2022). parental rights in education (florida senate bill 1834). https://www.flsenate.gov/session/bill/ 2022/1834 foucault, m. (1977). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison (a. sheridan, trans.). 50 global education review 12 (3) pantheon books. (original work published 1975) gee, j. p. (2024). an introduction to discourse analysis: theory and method (5th ed.). routledge. giroux, h. a., & dimaggio, a. r. 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(2022). political landscape shifts in the u.s. https://www.pewresearch.org/politics/2 022/01/13/political-landscape-shifts porter, t. (2019). the backlash against the common core: local control and the politics of education reform. journal of education policy, 34(2), 169–186. https://doi.org/10.1080/02680939.201 8.1549007 ravitch, d. (2010). the death and life of the great american school system: how testing and choice are undermining education. basic books. saldaña, j. (2021). the coding manual for qualitative researchers (4th ed.). sage publications. souto-manning, m., & martell, j. (2016). theorizing family diversity: implications for early childhood education. early childhood education journal, 44(3), 205–213. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-0150736-4 stake, r. e. (2010). qualitative research: studying how things work. guilford press. 47 global education review 11 (4) _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric (2024). the making and remaking of the british elite. [review of the book born to rule by aaron reeves and sam friedman]. global education review, 11 (4). 47-48. book review the making and remaking of the british elite “born to rule” by aaron reeves and sam friedman by eric martone in born to rule: the making and remaking of the british elite, sociologists aaron reeves and sam friedman present a comprehensive analysis of the british elite from the victorian era to the present day. their research delves into who comprises this elite, the pathways they traverse to attain their positions, and the pivotal role educational institutions play in this process. by examining over 125,000 profiles from sources like "who's who," genealogical records, and conducting interviews with more than 200 leading figures, the authors shed light on the enduring influence of education in shaping britain's ruling class. the british public school system has long been a cornerstone in the formation of the nation's elite. institutions such as eton, harrow, and winchester have historically been associated with grooming individuals for leadership roles within the british empire and its institutions. the 19th-century public school ethos emphasized service to the crown and empire, instilling values that perpetuated a ruling class mentality. graduates from these schools often benefited from exclusive networks, commonly referred to as the "old boy network," which facilitated their ascent into influential positions. reeves and friedman highlight that, despite societal changes, the pathway to elite status in britain remains closely tied to specific educational trajectories. a significant proportion of the elite have been educated at prestigious public schools, followed by attendance at elite universities, particularly oxford and cambridge. this educational lineage not only provides academic credentials but also immerses individuals in social networks that are instrumental in securing positions of power. 48 global education review 11 (4) the authors' analysis reveals a striking continuity in the composition of the british elite. individuals born into the top 1 percent of society are just as likely to ascend to elite positions today as they were 125 years ago. this persistence underscores the role of educational institutions in maintaining social stratification. while there have been efforts to diversify student bodies, the overrepresentation of privately educated individuals in elite roles remains pronounced. in response to these findings, reeves and friedman advocate for significant reforms in university admissions to promote social mobility. they propose that prestigious institutions like oxford and cambridge, as well as other russell group universities, limit the proportion of privately educated students to 10 percent, reflecting the national demographic. currently, these universities admit approximately 30 percent of their students from private schools, a figure that contributes to the perpetuation of elite dominance. implementing such a cap, along with considering a merit-based lottery system for admissions, could diversify the student body and challenge the entrenched pathways to power. a notable observation in born to rule is the modern elite's tendency to present themselves as ordinary, downplaying their privileged backgrounds. this performance of ordinariness serves to mitigate public resentment and perpetuate the myth of meritocracy. by emphasizing personal effort and merit over inherited privilege, the elite obscure the structural advantages conferred by their educational backgrounds. born to rule offers a compelling examination of the british elite, including an examination of the enduring role of educational systems in shaping societal hierarchies. reeves and friedman's meticulous research illuminates the ways in which educational institutions serve both as gateways to opportunity and as gatekeepers of privilege. their call for reforms in educational admissions policies underscores the need to address systemic inequalities and promote genuine social mobility. this work is essential reading for those interested in understanding the intricate connections between education and power in britain. “born to rule: the making and remaking of the british elite.” by aaron reeves and sam friedman. cambridge, ma and london, uk: belknap press/harvard university press, 2024. isbn: 9780674257719 about the author aaron reeves is professor of sociology at the london school of economics. an award-winning sociologist who has written extensively on social inequality, he is coeditor of the british journal of sociology. sam friedman is professor of sociology at the london school of economics and political science and the coauthor of the class ceiling: why it pays to be privileged and author of comedy and distinction: the cultural currency of a “good” sense of humour. he is coeditor of the british journal of sociology. about the reviewer eric martone, ph.d., is dean of the school of education and professor of history/social studies education at mercy university in new york. constructivism in the shadow of centralism 57 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: leek, joanna and szulewicz, elsbieta (2025). constructivism in the shadow of centralism? global education review, 12 (2), 57-77. constructivism in the shadow of centralism: the transformative potential of international programmes in early childhood education in poland as an escape from authoritarianism joanna leek and elzbieta szulewicz abstract this study examines the role of international education the primary years programme (pyp), in mitigating authoritarian tendencies within poland's early childhood education (ece) system. employing qualitative content analysis of legislation and media reports, the research examines how these programmes apply constructivist theory and seeks to provide an option to overly centralised education systems. the study shows that such international programmes promote active learning where the students are of great importance as opposed to authoritarian classroom cultures that often rely on pedagogical dictators. results show that the polish education system is gradually incorporating more topical and constructivist facets, especially in the context of early childhood education institutions, a trend that is being registered in legal reforms. the application of dual curricula within international schools is also noteworthy as it combines international and local educational requirements. this method offers an alternative approach that is less rigid and beneficial as it would not totally resist the internationalization of education. the study ends with a positive assessment of externally oriented programmes providing necessary mechanisms for educational reform in poland in the prevailing conditions of change in the teaching environment. keywords international curriculum, international schools, constructivism, early childhood education in poland acknowledgements the inspiration to write this paper came from the research work we undertook as part of the project entitled “comparative study on functions of international programmes in poland “comparative study on the functions of international programmes in poland” (grant number 2020/38/e/hs6/00048), financed by the national science centre poland. 1. introduction education systems around the world are influenced by a mix of national policies, teaching theories, and what society expects. in places where the government has tight control over education, schools often mirror the political mindset. this can lead to strict, teacher-focused methods that limit creativity or critical thinking. authoritarian education systems usually emphasize following rules, obedience, and sameness, which can suppress students’ natural curiosity and hinder the growth of important skills like leadership, decision-making, and problem-solving. in contrast, constructivist educational theories, especially those developed by piaget and vygotsky, focus on active, student-centred learning. here, students build knowledge through their own experiences and interactions. programmes like the primary years programme (pyp) are based on a constructivist approach to teaching. they highlight active learning, critical thinking, and working together to solve problems, providing students with strong 58 global education review 12 (2) foundational tools to handle complex social and political situations. in poland, a country with a historically centralised education system, recent developments have opened new possibilities for integrating constructivist principles into early childhood education (ece). as the national education system undergoes gradual reforms, a notable trend has emerged: the rising popularity of international schools and curricula, particularly the pyp, as alternatives to traditional public schools. these international programmes, which emphasize active learning, social collaboration, and individualization, provide a more flexible and progressive educational experience. the significance of international programmes in the polish context becomes apparent when considering the contrast between their approach and that of the national curriculum. while authoritarian regimes often control the national curriculum and prioritize conformity and obedience in education, constructivism assumes participatory approaches in curriculum development. teachers in international programmes have greater involvement in deciding on teaching content, outcomes, and evaluation methods. this bottom-up approach starkly contrasts with the top-down, ministry-level decision-making characteristics of authoritarian educational policies (zajda, 2021a; leek, 2020). previous studies have shown that teachers in poland feel suppressed by the national curriculum, leading some to switch to international programmes such as the international baccalaureate and cambridge international programme (leek & sliwerski, 2024; leek, 2022). these programmes are increasingly perceived as a refuge from the authoritarian tendencies of the national curriculum, offering students and teachers an opportunity to engage with more dynamic and personalized approaches to learning. schools that adopt international curricula are seen as islands of educational resistance against authoritarian policies in national education (leek, 2022). this study seeks to explore the role of international education programmes in transforming early childhood education in poland. specifically, it investigates how the pyp, with its foundation in constructivist pedagogy, addresses the challenges posed by centralized educational policies. by analysing legal documents, media discourse, and educational standards, the study examines how international programmes contribute to active learning by developing practical competencies and fostering social and communication skills. additionally, this research highlights the dual curriculum model adopted by international schools. this model blends national requirements with global best practices to create a more holistic and individualized educational framework. this approach provides a flexible alternative that potentially counteracts authoritarian policies while benefiting from global educational trends. the study addresses three primary research questions: (1) what are the main characteristics of the pyp, and how is it perceived in the context of education in countries with authoritarian education policies? (2) how is the polish education system evolving in the context of moving away from authoritarianism and introducing constructivist elements, especially at the level of ece? (3) what are the characteristics and conditions of implementing a dual curriculum (national and international) in ece in poland in the context of international schools? to answer these questions, the study employs a qualitative content analysis methodology to examine legal documents pertaining to polish education policy constructivism in the shadow of centralism 59 and media discourse surrounding international schools. this approach allows for a comprehensive understanding of the formal policy landscape and public perceptions of international education programmes in poland. the findings are relevant in the current educational climate, where increasing centralisation of the polish national curriculum raises concerns about the suppression of student agency and critical thinking. international programmes like the pyp challenge traditional authoritarian models and provide a path towards a more inclusive and empowering educational experience by offering an alternative that prioritizes student engagement, creativity, and independence. an investigation of these issues contributes to the broader discourse on educational reform, policy transfer, and the role of international curricula in national education systems. this research offers insights into how countries can navigate the complex terrain of educational policy in an increasingly globalised world while addressing local needs and challenges. the study thus contributes to ongoing debates about educational reform and the role of international programmes in fostering innovation and resistance to authoritarianism in education. 2. early childhood education in poland – between the constructivist approach and authoritarian policy constructivism constructivism is defined as a theory of learning and meaning creation that provides an explanation of the nature of knowledge and how people learn (ültanır, 2012). constructing knowledge refers to how a person gets to know and tries to understand the surrounding world. the theory states that people construct knowledge and their understanding of the world by experiencing things and reflecting on these experiences (akpan et al, 2020). jean piaget and lev vygotsky are described as the creators of the foundations of constructivism (klus-stanska, 2018). there have been calls to avoid using the term "constructivism" and say "constructivisms" (raskin, 2002). the two most important trends in the theory of constructivism are cognitive constructivism and social constructivism (kalina & powell, 2009). cognitive constructivism comes directly from piaget's work. people construct their own knowledge (piaget, 1953). piaget explained the importance of understanding that each person learns at their own pace (kalina & powell, 2009). in turn, social constructivism comes from the theory of lev vygotsky, who believed that knowledge is constructed through dialogue and interaction with others (vygotsky, 1978). although these theories developed in parallel, they share a common paradigm (schreiber & valle, 2013). the common part is the claim that people construct knowledge as opposed to discovering it (boghossion, 2006). constructivism understood as a learning theory is not an instructional strategy (ültanır, 2012). learning is a development that requires the learner to be creative and to put effort into the planning and organization process. according to fosnot (2013), the general principles of learning from a constructivist perspective are that students should enjoy a certain degree of autonomy and feel free to ask questions, create hypotheses, consider possible solutions, work in small groups, and conduct discussions. constructivist learning involves the development of reasoning, critical thinking, and the understanding and application of knowledge (driscoll & burner, 2005). it is important to enable practical actions. related to this, is the perception that making mistakes in the learning process is integral to learning (fosnot, 2013). people as 60 global education review 12 (2) meaning creators strive to organise and generalise experiences in a representational form. allowing time for reflection provides the foundation for developing the learning process. in turn, working in groups enables dialogue within the classroom community and interaction that encourages further development (churcher, downs & tewksbury, 2014). at school, a lesson should be about creating teaching opportunities thanks to which students can learn new things while referring to the knowledge they already have (kalina & powell, 2009). the teacher's role is to relate to pupils and take their characteristics and predispositions into account. individualisation concerns not only what is to happen in the teaching process but also accepting the very particular nature of knowledge that pupils have already constructed. authoritarian policies within education in recent decades, concerns have arisen regarding democratic backsliding in central and eastern european (cee) nations, exemplified by the ascendance of political parties propagating illiberal agendas in countries such as poland, hungary, serbia, bulgaria, slovakia, and the czech republic (diamond, 2015; levitsky & ziblatt, 2018; mounk, 2018; snyder, 2018; rupnik, 2018; enyedi, 2018; kelemen, 2017). this phenomenon has fueled apprehensions about a potential reversal of democratic trends in the region (diamond 2015; levitsky & ziblatt, 2018; mounk, 2018; snyder, 2018). one manifestation of this trend is the accession to power of parties espousing illiberal ideologies, not only in poland, hungary, and serbia, but also in bulgaria, slovakia, and most recently, the czech republic (rupnik, 2018, enyedi, 2018; kelemen, 2017; mounk, 2018). notably, poland has witnessed a decline in academic freedom, particularly since the law and justice party assumed governance in 2015 (sata & karolewski, 2020). authoritarian neoliberal regimes (ryan, 2019; bruff & tansel, 2019; gallo, 2021) tend to centralise control over educational institutions, thereby diminishing their autonomy and academic freedom (tansel, 2017). a primary mechanism through which authoritarian governments assert their influence in education is by controlling and manipulating curricula to align with their ideological narratives, often promoting nationalist or populist perspectives while suppressing alternative viewpoints (enyedi, 2018). this can lead to indoctrination and the stifling of critical thinking, undermining intellectual freedom and academic integrity (rupnik, 2018). furthermore, authoritarian policies frequently restrict academic freedom, subjecting scholars, researchers, and educators to censorship, intimidation, or even persecution for expressing dissenting views (rupnik, 2018). this chilling effect can impede intellectual discourse, hinder knowledge advancement, and compromise educational quality. authoritarian regimes typically favour centralised control over educational systems, diminishing the autonomy of individual institutions and decision-making bodies (levitsky & ziblatt, 2018). this centralisation can lead to a top-down approach to policymaking, with decisions imposed without meaningful consultation or input from educators, students, and other stakeholders. moreover, authoritarian policies in education often emphasize conformity and obedience to authority figures and established norms (altemeyer, 1996; feldman, 2003), discouraging critical questioning or dissent. this approach can stifle creativity, independent thinking, and the development of critical reasoning skills essential for a well-rounded education. the rise of authoritarian tendencies in certain countries can also have implications for international education and collaboration, as institutions and educators operating in authoritarian contexts may face restrictions or limitations in their constructivism in the shadow of centralism 61 ability to engage with global academic communities, participate in research collaborations, or access educational resources (mounk, 2018). this can hinder the exchange of knowledge, limit cross-cultural understanding, and diminish the quality of education globally. early child education in poland, i.e. the national curriculum and international curriculum primary years programme educational reform, which included ece, began in poland under the influence of a radical change in the socio-political system. during the transition to democracy, ece was designed, implemented, cancelled, and questioned by successive governments (sliwerski, 2012). despite the initiation of changes in the wave of democratic transformation, the initial intentions were not achieved because the educational system was made partisan, the decentralisation of education was suspended, social control of parents over school activities was not introduced, education and school pseudo-government was created, and the autonomy of teachers, students and parents was limited (sliwerski, 2011). ece is subordinated to the ministry of education, which has become politicised and subordinated to the ideology of subsequent authorities. sliwerski (2012) believes that subordination to the ministry of education is a factor in the erosion of social capital in poland. the regulations consist in centrally prepared documents which apply throughout the country. early school education in poland covers the first three grades of primary school. under the education law of december 14, 2026, journal of laws 2017 item 59, a child's schooling obligation begins in the calendar year in which the child turns 7. so, during this period, one starts primary school. this is preceded by one year of compulsory kindergarten preparation in a kindergarten or a kindergarten section at school. primary schools provide a first stage of integrated education. the primary school teaching system in grades i-iii involves transitioning from pre-school education to school education within the subject system. ece teachers conduct classes according to a plan they set and can adjust the time of classes and breaks to suit the activity of pupils. in integrated education in grades i-iii, there are no separate teaching subjects, and no point grades should be given. descriptive assessments should be made. there are several influential education policies. the regulation of the minister of national education of february 14, 2017 is a document that specifies the core curriculum applicable in kindergartens and schools. it provides details on the core curriculum for preschool education and the core curriculum for general education for primary schools, including for students with moderate or severe intellectual disabilities, general education for a first-cycle vocational school, general education for a special school preparing for work and general education for a post-secondary school, oj of 2017, item 356, (regulation, 2017) hereinafter referred to as the core curriculum (cc). this document was prepared as a regulation defining the core curriculum applicable in schools and kindergartens in poland. the regulation of the minister of science and higher education of july 25, 2019 on the standard of education to prepare for the teaching profession, journal of laws item 1450 (regulation, 2019), hereinafter referred to as the education standards (es), constitutes the basis for educating future teachers in poland. under annexe number 2, point 1.3. of this regulation, the studies have the character of uniform master's studies. the total number of hours of classes, including professional practice, is 2,860. education requirements to prepare for the profession of a 62 global education review 12 (2) teacher of kindergarten and early school education (grades i–iii of primary school) include substantive preparation and pedagogical preparation, including didactic, psychological and pedagogical preparation. during their studies, students are required to complete 240 hours of professional practice. these regulations apply to the entire country. this is a manifestation of authoritarianism in education by setting education standards from above. however, analysing these documents in detail makes it possible to find fragments that fit into the constructivist discourse. in teacher education in poland, two areas related to the constructivist approach that are emphasised. the dominant definition is social constructivism (vygotsky, 1978), which is manifested in the development of cooperation, communication, working in groups and understanding the cultural context (regulation, 2017). teacher education emphasises the importance of creating a good atmosphere for communication in the kindergarten group and school classroom and beyond, as well as recognizing the specificity of the local and regional environment and their impact on the functioning of children (regulation, 2019). social constructivism emphasises the constructed nature not only of social reality, but also understands construction as a never-ending process, not as solitary but rather as interactive (pfadenhaueris & knoblauch, 2019). the second area is related to cognitive constructivism, which states that knowledge is constructed individually (kalina & powell, 2009). the regulations (2017, 2019) repeatedly emphasise individualism, both in the teacher education process and in the cc for grades i-iii. the education process that prepares one for the profession of a kindergarten and early schoolteacher (grades i–iii of primary school) is individualised (regulation, 2019). in poland, in addition to schools that follow the national curriculum (nc), there are some offering international programmes. the official website of the international baccalaureate (ib) provides information that in poland in 2024, 9 schools were offering the primary years programme (https://www.ibo.org/country/pl/). the ib primary years programme (pyp) is intended for children aged 3-12, i.e., also for students in early school education. pyp is transdisciplinary because having recognised how young children learn, the pyp model moves learning across different disciplines. the framework serves as the curriculum organiser and offers an in-depth guide to achieve authentic conceptual inquirybased learning that is engaging, significant, challenging and relevant for pyp students. in pyp, the goal is to achieve authentic learning based on conceptual inquiry. through inquiry and reflection on their learning, pyp students master skills, and construct knowledge and gain understanding of concepts. constructivist and social-constructivist learning theories emphasise drawing on and building on students' needs, activity, and curiosity (https://www.ibo.org/programmes/primaryyears-programme/curriculum/). the schools employ ece teachers who have polish pedagogical qualifications. according to educational law (2016), ece is conducted in two ways. a dual-core curriculum is being introduced in schools; the polish one alongside the international core. nc is interwoven with the international curriculum (ic). the table 1. shows the number of schools with international programmes in poland. the table contains information about the number of public and non-public schools, in addition to the number of schools that offer individual international programmes. constructivism in the shadow of centralism 63 table 1. ib schools in poland (as of 07.2024) source: own study 3. methodology 3.1 research design to examine the international school programmes in terms of the role they play in mitigating authoritarianism within ece in poland, the following research question has been posted: what constructivist functions within international programs mitigate authoritarianism within ece in poland? our specific questions were: • what are the main characteristics of the pyp, and how is it perceived in the context of education in countries with authoritarian education policies? • how is the polish education system evolving in the context of moving away from authoritarianism and introducing constructivist elements, especially at the level of ece? • what are the characteristics and conditions of implementing a dual curriculum (national and international) in ece in poland in the context of international schools? to answer these questions, we followed the media discourse regarding international schools in poland. in our research, we used document analysis (bowen, 2009), which we understand as a systematic procedure for reviewing and assessing printed and electronic materials. the materials included government documents, laws, and regulations (flick, 2013). the research procedure consisted of searching, selecting, assessing, and synthesising information in documents (labuschagne, 2003). as a result, we received fragments of data, i.e., quotations, which were grouped into categories. the matters of interest we searched for in government documents for this study concerned the constructivist approach in education. two important documents were analysed. the first one was the regulation of the minister of science and higher education of 25 july 2019, on the standard of education required for the teaching profession, journal of laws, item 1450, hereinafter referred to as education standards (es). the second document is the regulation of the minister of national education of 14 february 2017, on the core curriculum for preschool education and the core curriculum for general education for primary schools, which includes catering to the needs of pupils with moderate or severe intellectual disabilities, general education for vocational and technical school of the first degree, general education for a special school preparing pupils for work and general education for a post-secondary school, journal of laws of 2017, item 356, hereinafter referred to as the core curriculum (cc). both level number of schools in total public schools nonpublic schools primary years programme (pyp) 9 9 middle years programme (myp) 16 9 7 diploma programme (dp) 42 24 18 careerrelated programme (cp) 64 global education review 12 (2) legal acts are in force nationwide, which shows how strongly centralised educational policy is in poland, including the policy regarding ece. we also refer to the media discourse concerning schools following international curricula. media discourse applies to interactions that take place via a transmitting platform (o’keeffe, 2013). for the purposes of these studies, these are written texts in which information is addressed to an absent reader. media discourse is taken to mean a form of interaction that is publicly produced and simultaneously recorded. (o’keeffe, 2013). that is why we analysed public press materials. the search criterion was information about international schools, and 103 articles were collected in the first stage. after the initial analysis, the research material was supplemented with a theoretical sampling (charmaz, 2015; charmaz and thornberg, 2021), i.e. additional research materials were sought that allowed us to complete the categories and enabled the creation of new ones. the research consisted of constant comparison of collected materials, codes, and research notes to formulate the well-established theory of media discourse in international schools. table 2. shows the number of domestic and regional articles published in given years. year of publication national coverage regional coverage total 2002 1 2 3 2003 1 1 2004 2005 2 2 2006 1 1 2007 2008 2009 2 2 2010 1 1 2011 2 2 4 2012 3 1 4 2013 1 1 2 2014 3 3 2015 3 1 4 2016 4 5 9 2017 1 4 5 2018 2 6 8 2019 4 6 10 2020 5 4 9 2021 5 4 9 2022 8 7 15 2023 13 16 29 total 53 68 121 source: own study table 2. number of articles in 2002-2023 during the study, 121 press articles about international schools in poland were collected. the first article was published in 2002, and the latest texts are from the end of 2023 (see table 2). a marked increase in interest in this topic has been seen each year. in 2023, 29 articles were published. fifty-three articles (43.8%) were national, and 68 (56.2%) were regional. most of the articles appeared in regional media, but thanks to online publication, they were available to every reader. we assigned identification codes (dw, dgp) to individual newspapers and numbers to individual articles (dw21, dwr4). the research material was subjected to content analysis (krippendorff, 2018). the analysis examined written material, i.e. press articles (rubin & babbie, 2008). this method is used to study various forms of communication and involves coding and comparing emerging types of transmitted content. in the case of this study, the unit of analysis was individual press articles. codes and then categories were extracted through a process of repeated reading. the study focuses on qualitative meaning derived from topics discussed in media discourses on international schools in poland. the codes we found related to issues addressed in the articles are: social interactions, communication, cooperation, individualisation in the teaching-learning process, active learning, development of practical competencies, responsibility for one’s constructivism in the shadow of centralism 65 education, and avoid a centrally controlled educational policy. these codes were combined into a category we called constructivism in ece, based upon the topics discussed in press articles. this category appeared in 25% of the articles. within this category, we distinguished three subcategories: “emphasis on active learning and the development of practical competencies”, “collaboration and social interaction” and “individualization and adaptation of teaching to the individual needs of students”. these subcategories correspond to the ones identified in the document analysis. being an active student, taking care of self-development, or feeling responsible for one's development were included in the first subcategory. if part of the article concerned cooperation between students and teachers, building cooperation skills among students, and peer tutoring, it was included in the second subcategory. any issues regarding an individual approach to the student in the educational process fall into the third category. additionally, we identified in media discourse categories called "international schools in poland as an alternative” and “the rise in popularity of international schools as a response to parental concerns”. 4. results emphasis on active learning and the development of practical competencies in the cc, references to constructivist discourse can be found in the defined tasks of the school, which emphasise active learning and the development of practical competencies. the duty of a school in the sphere of early school education includes 1) supporting the child's multidirectional activity by organising educational situations enabling experimentation and acquisition of experience, polysensory cognition, stimulating development in all areas; 2) organising play, learning and rest, including students developing in a disharmonious, slower or accelerated way; 3) supporting: the child's activity and developing learning mechanisms leading to independence; 4) selecting a curriculum adapted to the level of children's development and their individual needs; 5) implementation of a curriculum that respects and supports their natural individual development and supports individuality and cooperation within a group; (cc) the school's tasks are intended to enable the acquisition of experience and learning through play and experimentation gained from involvement in practical activities. the student should have the opportunity to engage in their activity while at the same time understanding the purpose of this activity. spontaneous behaviour of children is described in the education standards (es) as educational and didactic situations. a teacher should be able to: 1.2. (…); 9) identify spontaneous behaviours of children as educational and didactic situations and use them in the education process and the implementation of therapeutic goals; (es) the teacher's task is not only to encourage students to act, but also to capture children's spontaneous activity, follow it and use it in the education process. unable to get interest from educational publishers, she directly marketed it “pretending” 66 global education review 12 (2) that there was a company called teaching strategies (dodge, 2023). ultimately teaching strategies developed cc texts for supervisors, professional developers, and teachers (dodge & godhammer, 1988; dodge et al., 1988; dodge et al., 2000; dodge et al., 2002; dombo et al., 1997), including an assessment called the cc developmental continuum assessment system [developmental continuum], which rested on teachers’ documented observations and focused, ongoing collection of work samples illustrating children’s development in areas like language and literacy, mathematics, social and emotional development (dodge et al, 2001). the developmental continuum is the predecessor of the gold assessment announced as a part of the bright starts initiative. by 2023 teaching strategies called the cc “the most widely used preschool program in the nation” (teaching strategies, 2023). collaboration and social interaction in terms of social competencies, the future teacher should be able to take into account the cultural context in accordance with point 1.3 of es. 1.3. in terms of social competencies, a teacher is ready to: (…); 4) work in a team, performing various roles in it and cooperating with specialists, parents or guardians of children and other members of the school and local community; 5) communicating with people from different backgrounds, solving conflicts through dialogue and creating a good atmosphere for communication; 6) recognising the specificity of the local and regional environment and their impact on the functioning of children; (es) emphasising the need to build social competencies related to working in local and regional environments that have their specificity can be related to social constructionism. social constructionism draws attention to the supraindividual mechanism of assigning meaning, cocreated jointly through cooperation in a given environment. in other words, teachers are to learn how to cooperate effectively with the surrounding environment, accounting for its specificity. in turn, cc describes the skills developed by students at school as the acquisition of social competencies. the most important skills developed as part of general education in primary school are: (…); 6) teamwork and social activity; 7) active participation in the cultural life of the school, the local community and the country. (cc) in the part regarding skills developed during primary school education, teamwork and social activity are highlighted. in the subsequent parts of cc, the concept of teamwork is expanded to include the acquisition of communication competencies, and organizational and management skills. the acquisition of social competencies such as communication and cooperation in a group, participation in team or individual projects, as well as organization and management of projects, is of great importance for a student’s development and success in adult life. (cc) teamwork returns as the one during which students develop socially, communicatively and creatively. the use of the project method helps develop students' entrepreneurship and creativity and enables the use of constructivism in the shadow of centralism 67 innovative programmes. the project method assumes significant independence and responsibility of participants, which creates conditions for pupils to individually manage the learning process. it supports the integration of the class team, learning problem-solving, active listening and effective communication, and strengthens their self-esteem. (cc) in this fragment, the teacher is defined as a supervisor who enables students to work in teams, while ensuring that they can act independently and responsibly within these teams. the use of the project method is intended to enable students to learn how to plan their work, be independent and self-assess. further on in cc, it is noted that the content implemented using the project method may be selected by students. this means following students' interests. in addition to teamwork, both documents contain references to the individual treatment of students. individualization and adaptation of teaching to the individual needs of students constructivism emphasises individualisation in the educational process. 3.1. the education process that prepares people for early school teaching (grades i–iii of primary school) is individualised. (…); (es) the education process is to be an individualised process, starting with the diagnosis of the student's strengths and weaknesses as a future teacher of preschool and early school education. the student's task is to plan self-development with the support of academic teachers and develop the ability to reflect on their pedagogical activities and personal responsibility for their own education. 4.1. the internship aims to familiarise the student with the organisation of work of a kindergarten, school (…) to enable the student to shape and develop teaching and educational skills in direct contact with pupils and to evaluate his or her own predispositions to perform in the teaching profession. (es) future teachers, as in the constructivist discourse, are expected to support pupils' comprehensive development, taking into account their individual capabilities, needs and interests. teachers should be aware of the individual characteristics of the children they will work with. 1.2. the teacher can: (…); 2) recognise the needs, capabilities and talents of children and conduct pedagogical activities, plan, implement and evaluate personalised education; 3) use various ways of organising the learning and teaching, taking into account the specific needs of individual children; (es) references to constructivist discourse can be found in the skill requirements for graduates of pedagogical studies. the teacher is expected to prepare personalised education and teaching programmes. the need to adapt the school to all children who develop inharmoniously is emphasised. the school's tasks, in accordance with point 7, include organising classes: a) adapted to the intellectual needs and developmental expectations of children, evoking curiosity, wonder and joy in discovering knowledge, b) enabling the acquisition of experience through play, performing scientific experiments, exploring, conducting research, solving 68 global education review 12 (2) problems to the extent appropriate to the possibilities and developmental needs at a given stage and taking into account the individual capabilities of each child, (cc) despite the use of the word "discovering" knowledge, not constructing it, it is recommended that classes are organised in such a way as to arouse curiosity, joy and amazement in children, which is characteristic of activating methods. there is some inconsistency, given a constructivist perspective, in the use of terms such as knowledge discovery and knowledge building. discovering knowledge suggests that it is given from the outside and building that students build it on their own, constructing knowledge differently. international schools in poland as an alternative the analysis of media discourse on international schools emphasises issues related to active learning and the development of practical competencies, cooperation and care for social interactions, and individualisation in the teaching-learning process. schools joining international programmes apply for accreditation, which takes about 2 years. receiving such an accreditation is perceived as a mark of success and increases the prestige of a given school. “this is a great success and a unique achievement on a national scale,” says the principal. “i am proud of our team; we took up the challenge and achieved the demanding standards set for pyp. these standards include a curriculum based on experiment, combining theory with practice, focusing on the child's social and emotional needs and developing his or her language competencies. the lack of grades is also characteristic” (gw21). institutions that follow international education programmes organise school functions to promote active learning and develop practical competencies to create opportunities for cooperation and establish social interactions. in the media discourse, the international programme is described as based on practical activities and related to the needs of the child. hence, one of the functions of the school is to individualise teaching. the emphasis on developing language competencies is implemented through english lessons conducted, for example, by native speakers. parents who choose these institutions cite the opportunity to learn english from an early age as the reason. this distinguishes institutions with an international programme from schools with nc. being an alternative institution is related to building students' sense of agency and effectiveness. as in the constructivist discourse, the student's sense of responsibility for their educational process is emphasised. pyp, implemented in the first stage, is aimed at the youngest students. the new teaching method will cover kindergarten and grades one through four. the school is also planning to abandon the traditional method of grading (gwr4). implementing pyp may offer an alternative in terms of assessment. instead of the traditional digital system (in poland, students receive grades from 1 to 6, where 1 is the lowest grade and 6 is the highest grade), students can also receive grades in a descriptive form. students gain knowledge through inquiry, research and asking questions, constructivism in the shadow of centralism 69 and are encouraged to think critically and take action for the benefit of the school and local communities (gw21). the school principal describes the activities carried out by children in pyp as active activities, inquiry, research, asking questions, i.e. becoming young scientists. here, a constructivist approach to education is visible, which is to be based on practical activities. more and more parents are deciding to enrol their children in international schools. in addition to implementing the core curriculum, such institutions focus on developing practical skills in their students, which pays off significantly in adult life (gw34). schools with an international programme are perceived by parents as institutions where, in addition to theoretical knowledge, you can acquire practical skills. in international schools, in addition to traditional subjects, students are exposed to activities supporting the development of so-called soft skills that are a prerequisite in the labour market today. instead of weakening enthusiasm for learning, international schools show students how fascinating acquiring knowledge can be (gw34). rise in popularity of international schools as a response to parental concerns there is an increase in interest in private schools in poland. previously, parents perceived private schools as providing additional opportunities, for example, more hours of english in the programme and fewer students per class. parents used to choose private and charter schools because they offered something extra. they sent their children to private primary schools to make it easier for them to get used to school because classes were smaller and there were extra classes on-site so they did not have to travel to attend them. nevertheless, children often returned to public high school after private primary school. there was no belief then that they would have a worse education there. and now parents are clearly worried that public schools won't provide a good enough education. it's not about something extra, but about stable learning. this is the fundamental difference that worries me. people who can afford it, but also people with high social capital are fleeing. and this is done to the detriment of public education (gw29). currently, increasing numbers of people are transferring their children to private schools to protect them from the centrally controlled educational policy, which in the opinion of parents, under the previous government imposed too much and whose content excluded certain social groups. parents were afraid of overcrowded schools, learning in shifts, the chaos that is easier to control in a small school than in a large one, and a lower quality of education in overcrowded classes”, the councilor notes. (…) “another reason is the „lex czarnek". private schools will be able to maintain some independence and parents hope that they will not be susceptible to ideological content coming from the educational authorities (gw29). 70 global education review 12 (2) not all schools can maintain independence in a centrally controlled educational policy filled with ideological content. according to parents, this is easier to do in private schools or schools with international programmes, which generally follow the values promoted by the european union. 5. discussion and conclusion the first question that we posed in the study refers to the main characteristics of the pyp and how it is perceived in the context of countries with authoritarian education policies. the research findings indicate that the pyp is grounded in cognitive and social constructivism, emphasizing student-centred learning. this approach contrasts sharply with traditional teacher-centred methods, which are often criticized for stifling critical thinking and creativity, particularly in contexts where authoritarian educational policies prevail (greaves & bahous, 2021; cade et al., 2022). in environments characterized by such policies, the development of essential skills like decisionmaking and leadership may be hindered (rupnik, 2018). consequently, schools implementing the pyp are viewed as viable alternatives to those adhering strictly to the national curriculum, offering a more independent and progressive educational experience. the constructivist framework of the pyp aligns well with the principles of childcentered education, which has been widely recognized for its positive impact on student engagement and learning outcomes. research has consistently shown that student-centered approaches foster deeper learning and critical thinking skills (lee & hannafin, 2016; schiro, 2013). in contrast, authoritarian educational systems often prioritise conformity and obedience, which can lead to a lack of critical engagement among students (feldman, 2003). moreover, the findings suggest that international programmes like the pyp provide a refuge for educators and students seeking to escape the constraints of authoritarian policies. this aligns with recent studies highlighting the role of international curricula in promoting educational innovation and resistance against oppressive educational frameworks (leek, 2022). for instance, zajda (2021b) notes that such programmes encourage a participatory approach to curriculum development, allowing educators to engage more meaningfully with their students' needs and interests. additionally, the emphasis on collaborative learning within the pyp framework resonates with vygotsky’s social constructivism, which posits that knowledge is constructed through social interactions (vygotsky, 1978). this aspect is particularly important in ece, where social skills and collaborative problem-solving are critical for holistic development (kalina & powell, 2009). the second research question refers to the evolution of the polish education system as it moves away from authoritarianism and introduces constructivist elements. the research highlights a slow but notable shift in the polish education system from an authoritarian model to a more constructivist approach, particularly in ece. this transition is reflected in legal documents that, while maintaining a unified educational framework, increasingly emphasise individualised teaching and the need for teachers to adapt to students' specific predispositions. this gradual shift in the polish education system towards constructivism, particularly at the ece level, is indicative of a broader educational transformation that aligns with modern pedagogical theories. constructivism, as emphasised by educational theorists like piaget and vygotsky, suggests that constructivism in the shadow of centralism 71 learning is an active, student-centered process where individuals construct knowledge based on their experiences and interactions with the world (kalina & powell, 2009). this approach stands in contrast to the traditional authoritarian model, where the teacher is the primary source of knowledge and students are passive recipients. in poland, the legal framework is slowly evolving to support this shift. the emphasis on individualised teaching and the adaptation of instructional methods to suit the needs of individual students reflects a recognition of the diverse learning styles and abilities present in the classroom. this change is particularly important in the context of ece, where early educational experiences can have a profound impact on a child's cognitive and social development. however, the transition to a fully constructivist approach is not without challenges. the centralised nature of the polish education system, which still imposes a common perspective in many areas, may limit the extent to which constructivist principles can be implemented. the balance between maintaining national educational standards and allowing for individualisation in teaching is delicate, and the success of this shift will depend on how well teachers can navigate these potentially conflicting demands. comparatively, countries like singapore and china have faced significant challenges in implementing constructivist education. in singapore, the education system remains highly centralised and performanceoriented, which can stifle the adoption of more flexible, student-centered teaching methods (weng & li, 2020). in china, despite top-down mandates for educational reform, the persistence of traditional teaching methods has hindered the effective implementation of constructivist practices, particularly in ece (yin et al., 2020). poland's gradual approach to integrating constructivism may offer a more sustainable path forward. by allowing teachers greater freedom in selecting content and adapting their teaching methods, the polish system is slowly creating an environment where constructivist principles can thrive. this gradual shift may also allow for the necessary professional development and support systems to be put in place, ensuring that teachers are equipped to implement these changes effectively. the last research question concerns a distinctive feature of ece in poland within international schools is the implementation of a dual curriculum—national and international. this dual approach, which has been shaped by national policies and the influence of global educational trends, creates a unique space for the blending and borrowing of educational practices. while nation-states remain prominent actors in education policy transfer, the role of local and international non-governmental organisations, foreign agencies, consultants, and international corporations is becoming increasingly crucial (forestier & crossley, 2015). the concept of a "policy window" (kingdon, 2003) is particularly pertinent in understanding the rise and appeal of international programmes in poland's current educational landscape. as the country experiences democratic backsliding and increased centralisation of the education system, a window of opportunity has opened for alternative approaches. this phenomenon aligns with the theory that external references can serve as catalysts for implementing reforms that might otherwise face domestic resistance (steiner-khamsi, 2016). the origins of this dual approach can be traced back to the collapse of the socialist bloc, which precipitated drastic changes in all spheres of life. despite not being initially prioritised, post-socialist governments and intellectuals 72 global education review 12 (2) attempted to initiate discussions about new education goals, contents, methods, and systems (silova, 2009). during this period of uncertainty and inexperience, western international curricula, such as the international baccalaureate (introduced in 1993), became agents of lesson drawing and policy transfer (silova & brehm, 2010). education policy transfer can occur in response to problems or to justify planned policies (steiner-khamsi, 2016). in the polish context, international programmes, with their emphasis on constructivist principles, have found receptive audiences among parents and educators seeking alternatives to the authoritarian tendencies in national education policies. this dual curriculum approach allows for the integration of international and national policies, creating a more comprehensive educational framework that potentially mitigates the impact of authoritarian policies while benefiting from global educational trends. the dual curriculum model in polish international schools, which merges national and international educational standards, represents an innovative response to the challenges posed by authoritarian educational policies. this blending of curricula not only allows for the preservation of national educational identity but also introduces global best practices, which can enhance critical thinking, creativity, and the development of global competencies (forestier & crossley, 2015). the presence of international programmes within a national curriculum framework provides an alternative educational pathway that can resist the centralising tendencies of authoritarian regimes by promoting student agency and a broader worldview (steiner-khamsi, 2016). in addition, the "policy window" concept (kingdon, 2003) is crucial for understanding how such educational reforms can be introduced and sustained even in politically challenging environments. the flexibility offered by international programmes like the international baccalaureate has allowed educators in poland to navigate and sometimes circumvent restrictive national policies. this flexibility is essential in contexts where educational policy is tightly controlled by the state, as it offers opportunities for innovation and the introduction of pedagogical practices that might otherwise be suppressed (silova & brehm, 2010). the historical context provided by the collapse of the socialist bloc and the subsequent educational reforms underscores the importance of external influences in shaping national education systems (silova, 2009). the adoption of international curricula in poland can be seen as a continuation of this trend, where external models are adapted to local contexts, offering a means of reform that aligns with global educational standards while addressing local needs (steiner-khamsi, 2016). references act of december 14, 2016 education law, journal of laws 2019, items 1148, 1078, 1287, 1680, 1681 and 1818, [ustawa z dnia 14 grudnia 2016 r. prawo oświatowe, dz.u. 2019 poz.1148, 1078, 1287, 1680, 1681 i 1818.]. https://isap.sejm.gov.pl/isap.nsf/downl oad.xsp/wdu20170000059/u/d20170 059lj.pdf akpan, v. i., igwe, u. a., mpamah, i. b. i., & okoro, c. o. 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(2021b). education and authoritarianism: the role of curriculum in central and eastern europe. comparative education review, 65(2), 123-145. https://doi.org/10.1086/711867 finding froebel 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mcnair, lynn j., aslanian, teresa k., & powell, sacha. (2022). finding froebel in the environmental and economic climate of the 21st century. global education review, 9 (2), 1-4. finding froebel in the environmental and economic climate of the 21st century lynn j. mcnair cowgate under-5s and university of edinburgh teresa k. aslanian university of south-eastern norway sacha powell the froebel trust there are some crucial questions that every editor has to ask when deciding what manuscripts will form a publication. questions include identifying the relevant content, of course, but also, to ensure a balanced equipoise, the number of manuscripts is key. the aspect of balance can never be lost. our call for papers revealed a significant corpus of rich, diverse, flavored manuscript submissions. our greatest challenge was selecting only a few. each submission made for fascinating reading. the review system was, of course, extremely helpful in the selection process, the various analyses and subsequent opinions of our reviewers were informative indeed. however, like us, the reviewers accepted a higher number of manuscripts than we had space for. due to the merit of the manuscript submissions, we found ourselves planning this special issue part 2 of finding froebel: national and cross-national pedagogical paths in froebelian early childhood education. in this issue we bring together researchers and practitioners who share an interest in froebel’s ideas in the context of economic pressures and environmental challenges in the anthropocene. these different positions include environmental concerns, neoliberalism, and the fragility of how methods and curriculum issues can be interpreted, all which took us towards the complexity of life in the anthropocene. froebel, nature, and the anthropocene combining friedrich froebel’s “silent teaching of nature” (froebel 1826/2005, p. 8) with richard louv’s “nature deficit disorder” (louv, 2009, p. 157), authors joanne josephidou and nicola kemp make meaningful connections between young children and natural spaces. whilst there exists an impressive body of literature on the benefits of children being outdoors, the authors argue that the literature is ominously silent about the experiences of babies (0-12 months) and toddlers (13 -24 months) and their exposure to natural spaces. the authors stress that the aesthetic enhancements of being in nature is inherently healing and promotes allround health and holistic development; further, it is argued that natural spaces can add meaning and substance to young children’s experiences. specifically, the authors note that being in natural spaces is hugely beneficial for children living in homes with a lower socio-economic status. in the article titled “a life ‘in and with nature?’ developing nature engaging and nature enhancing pedagogies for babies and toddlers,” the authors wisely recommend that young children should spend more time in nature, and in stressing this the authors align themselves with the ideology of froebel (1826/2005). froebel had a deep love of the sciences and nature, and his immersion in the sciences was fundamental to the naturalistic shape of his educational practice (watts, 2021). he 2 global education review 9 (2) encouraged young children to explore plant-rich settings, use all their senses, and develop an appreciation of the natural beauty in the world (froebel, 1826/2005). the article integrates an impressive number of findings which reveal concerns that young children are spending more time in environments described as having “saturated air” and being “disease contaminated.” interspersed throughout the article the reader is drawn to the health and well-being of our youngest members, and the benefits of being in nature for all. in “what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century?” helge wasmuth, invites readers to consider: why is froebel’s pedagogy still of interest? what does it mean to think and act in froebel’s spirit, to advocate for young children, to question the current status quo, and to wonder about new ways of educating young children wasmuth does not profess to answering these questions he invites us to interrogate critically, he aims to leave the reader with more questions than answers. what wasmuth does in this article is give the reader a sense of his moral and political values, which appear on the surface, to echo with froebel’s ideas of moral and political practice. first of all, wasmuth rejects the technicist discourse, the human capital perspective, where a practice of domination exists, as children are taught to the test, and where teachers are held accountable for children achieving “good” results in identified subjects (nitecki & wasmuth, 2020). instead, wasmuth invites the reader to consider the meaning and substance of education, the specificity of difference, and respect for individual children and their interests (froebel, 1826/2005). this article offers a spirit of hope, as wasmuth invites the reader to deeply consider the work of froebel, whilst at the same time he challenges the status of utopian thought he asks the reader to push against the grain of simple acceptance and to be open to change through critical thinking. drawing on other critical and radical froebelian authors mcnair & powell (2020) wasmuth brings attention to the fact that education is a struggling terrain. by presenting his own deep analysis of froebel today, he invites the critical practitioner to explore froebel’s principles and use these to guide them on their journey. sally howe brings together the ideas of the common worlds research collective (hereafter the common worlds) (www.commonworlds.net) and froebel. the common worlds emphasizes the importance of educators’ awareness of ontological frameworks that education builds on, arguing that the global climate crisis demands a new responsibility from the field of education. one important tenet is to foster children’s sense of relationship to nature through de-centering the human as measure for normalcy or value. in the common world’s posthuman context, froebelian philosophy is situated within a humanist framework that places the individual, the human at the center of education practices. this human-centered perspective seems to challenge the work the common worlds are trying to achieve. howe challenges the idea that froebel’s ideas build solely on a humanist basis and explores some crossroads between froebelian philosophy and the philosophy underlying the common worlds research collective to foster environmental education. drawing on spinoza’s philosophy as a common, underlying link, howe argues that while froebel’s philosophy was developed in an era charged with a humanist understanding of humans and nature, froebel’s thinking transcended his time, and was immersed in ideas of the interconnectivity of humans and nature. sophie flemig and lynn mc nair’s article uses a froebelian lens to reassess how nature and nurture have been emphasized differently throughout the history of education from the enlightenment perspective of the child as “tabula rasa” to piaget and vygotsky’s developmental theories that emphasize an interplay between child and environment, emphasizing either the material environment or the social environment. modern research findings within for example the field of epigenetics, point to the mutual shaping that occurs between the material, the biological and the social (youdell & lindley, 2019). while the finding froebel 3 role nature and nurture play in human development has long been discussed and explored in the field of education, froebel’s pedagogic ideas seemed to intuitively grasp the interconnectivity of the material, the social and the biological long before science could provide such perspectives. froebel’s personal background and his historical situation is offered as a backdrop from which to understand his pedagogical ideas which flemig and mc nair present and analyze in terms of the ideas’ underlying kinship to a modern understanding of the mutual shaping quality of the biological, the material and the social. flemig and mcnair find that froebel’s’ ideas predate the nature/nurture debate and are particularly well suited to address social inequality, specifically the persistent consequences of child poverty on children’s possibility to thrive and flourish to their highest potential. interpreting froebel’s philosophy and pedagogical ideas in an economic climate under-funding of early childhood development and “pre-primary” education is a global issue (with a minority of exceptions) that disadvantages 50 million young children (zubairi & rose, 2021) and inhibits initial and ongoing professional learning of educators and carers. in his article, johansson elucidates froebel’s play theory as curriculum and pedagogy in contemporary early learning contexts in connection to klafki’s concept of categorical bildung: the words, concepts, and tools for thinking that we develop when we open ourselves up to the world around us, and when the world opens itself up for us. interaction with the world then, situates children within the economy of early childhood education (ece) the “outer” in froebel’s terms which is internalized by the child before the “inner” is reexternalized through symbolic activity. for froebel, johansson notes, the kindergarten curriculum must encompass all aspects of a child’s life. in the 21st century as it was in the 19th, educators and children contend with worldwide inequality and inequity, which are whitewashed by the global education reform movement an “ideological agenda that emerged from the crisis of capital in the late 1960s and 1970s and the subsequent abandonment of keynesian economic orthodoxy” (fuller & stevenson 2019: 2). johansson contrasts the openness of categorical bildung and froebel’s pedagogics with the “direct and scripted instruction” of the head start program in the usa. the sad irony of this program has been its ineffectiveness “as a means of lifting children out of poverty or reducing intergenerational poverty” despite investment of £8.5 billion per year (rashid, 2022). the content of what children learn in today’s kindergartens is the focus of aske haberg’s article. her study is situated in scandinavian early learning contexts where spending on ece is higher than most other countries (oecd, 2021). she explores whether 23 kindergarten teachers’ views about valued early learning topics mirror the inherent values of the national curricula of sweden, denmark, and norway. in these countries, as in many others, she notes that teachers operate within the “knowledge economy” where influential, international comparisons of educational performance have been introduced by an economic body: the organisation for economic co-operation and development. she concludes that teachers’ expert knowledge may conflict with government imperatives despite its necessity for enabling children to develop categorical bildung for what and how to learn. kristen cameron and deron boyles also examine dissonance and discomfort in froebelinspired practice, which finds itself situated within a policy context that espouses values and perpetuates discourses of accountability, competition, and assessment. their critical policy analysis is illuminated by case study examples from one pre-school in the united states. they highlight the challenges for sustaining froebelian education in the face of many external pressures to conform to a dominant neoliberal regime; but they also identify possibilities for resistance. 4 global education review 9 (2) with this, the final issue in our two-part special issue, we invite readers to immerse themselves in current discussions surrounding froebel’s ideas in the context of the anthropocene. along with the liberating ideas of the enlightenment and humanism comes a human centrist ideology that privileges ideas that support efficiency, productivity, and economic growth. these ideas fuel the proliferation of global neoliberal education movements and global climate catastrophes. authors in this two-part special issue share a commitment to exploring how froebel’s holistic and visionary pedagogic ideas can inform practitioners’ politicians’ and researchers’ understandings of the relationships between children, education, the environment, and lifelong flourishing. looking back and forward simultaneously, we aim to encourage questions that don’t necessarily have specific answers, but that may lead to fresh perspectives on what early childhood education is and can be and how the early years can plant seeds that grow something new, rather than merelyand dangerously reproducing the same ideas that fuel the anthropocene. references common worlds research collective. www.commonworlds.net froebel, f. (1826/2005). the education of man (w. n. hailman, trans.). dover publications. fuller, k. & howard stevenson, h. (2019). global education reform: understanding the movement. educational review. 71(1), 1-4, doi: 10.1080/00131911.2019.1532718 louv, r. (2009). last child in the woods: saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. atlantic books. mcnair, l. j. & powell, s. (2021). friedrich froebel: a path least trodden. early child development and care. 191:7-8, 1175-1185, doi: 10.1080/03004430.2020.1803299 oecd. (2021). public spending on childcare and early education. https://www.oecd.org/els/soc/pf3_1_public_s pending_on_childcare_and_early_education.p df rashid, d. (2022). the ineffectiveness of head start: a policy evaluation. fresh writing. an interactive archive of exemplary first-year writing projects. university of notre dame. https://freshwriting.nd.edu/volumes/2016/essa ys/the-ineffectiveness-of-head-start-a-policyevaluation wasmuth, h., & nitecki, e. (2020). (un)intended consequences in current ecec policies: revealing and examining hidden agendas. policy futures in education. 18(6), 686–699. https://doi.org/10.1177/1478210320949063 watts, m. (2021). friedrich froebel: interpolation, extrapolation. early child development and care. 191:7-8, 1186-1195, doi: 10.1080/03004430.2021.1881077 youdell, d. & lindley, m. (2019). biosocial education. the social and biological entanglements of learning. routledge. zubairi, a. r., p. (2021). a better start? a progress check on donor funding for preprimary education and early childhood development. https://theirworld.org/wpcontent/uploads/2021/07/abetterstart-reportpages_210720_160759.pdf global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 46 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: leonhardt, jan-erik, janßen, née kref, annika, leonhardt, carina, & viebrock, britta. (2021). glocal perspectives in film-based foreign language education: teaching about sustainability with “the boy who harnessed the wind” (2019). global education review, 8 (2-3), 46-61. glocal perspectives in film-based foreign language education: teaching about sustainability with “the boy who harnessed the wind” (2019) jan-erik leonhardt annika janßen, née kref carina leonhardt britta viebrock abstract the film “the boy who harnessed the wind” is based on the memoir of william kamkwamba and tells the story of how william’s family battles a life-threatening draught in malawi. through a glocal lens, i.e. by looking at the interplay of locality and globality, the film offers critical insights into the importance of sustainability with regard to lasting and viable ecological, economic and social structures (cf. volkmann, 2016). on a local level, the farmers in the film struggle to provide food for their families. a corrupt national government shows little interest in establishing economic support structures and education. in addition, the context is embedded in global dynamics and influenced by the legacy of colonialism. focusing on topics such as sustainability, we will discuss how the film lends itself for a content-based approach to the teaching of english as a foreign language. drawing on the theory of glocal education in the context of critical foreign language education that goes beyond functional language teaching and puts forward a critical understanding and the value of a democratic, pluralistic and sustainable life (cf. gerlach, 2020; niemczyk, 2019; volkmann, 2014), the focus of our contribution will be on task development. starting from the assumption that sophisticated tasks are needed to encourage learners to engage critically and reflectively with the film’s content and aesthetics, we will suggest a viewing-log and scenic interpretation for dealing with the film in creative and personally engaging ways, which can also be transferred to contexts beyond the foreign language classroom. keywords glocal education, glocalization, critical foreign language education, sustainability, film including glocal perspectives in filmbased foreign language education today, films are an integral part of everyday culture. while platforms such as netflix and amazon prime allow for easy access in private settings, schools and teachers increasingly realize the potentials the medium has to offer (e.g. paran & duncan, 2018). especially in foreign language education, films do not only provide input for language learning, they also have a broader educational value and offer the opportunity to learn about filmaesthetic composition. films can also be used for cultural learning (cf. donaghy, 2017; viebrock, 2016), which encompasses the critical and selfreflective understanding of how cultures are depicted in a film. our understanding of foreign language education – rooted in the german educational context – thus goes beyond global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 47 47 functional language learning and includes content-based approaches that in other educational contexts might be part of social studies, science education, or film studies. looking at opportunities for film-based critical foreign language education, this paper explores the question of how glocal perspectives can be included on both a theoretical and a practical level. glocal perspectives can hereby help to challenge a simplistic understanding of globalization processes as a linear expansion and one-way flow from the global to the local (blatter, 2006; yazan, 2018). conversely, glocal perspectives are based on the idea that “[l]ocal spaces are shaped and local identities are created by globalized contacts as well as by local circumstances” (blatter 2006, p. 358). the notion of glocalization represents the dynamic and simultaneous interplay between globalizing and the localizing processes. our topical focus will be on sustainability, which aims at an ecologically and economically balanced, diverse and democratic world and poses a core challenge of our times. since the introduction of united nation’s millennium goals in 2000, which were expanded by the sustainable development goals in 2016, sustainability has been increasingly recognized as a central category in educational contexts (united nations, 2015; 2017). among these interdependent goals, the sustainable development goals encompass ambitions to overcome world hunger and support sustainable agriculture, allow for quality education worldwide, provide affordable and clean energy, and foster responsible consumption and production. sustainability can be defined as the harmony between economic growth, environmental protection and social inclusion while meeting both the needs of the present without compromising the needs of future generations (united nations; cf. also volkmann, 2016). as sustainability is closely linked to glocalization, glocal perspectives are helpful for raising learners’ awareness and changing their behavior and lifestyles for a more sustainable future. while the un’s sustainable development goals detail a global agenda, its realization as well as any discourses about sustainable development are always bound to the interplay between local, intermediate and global stakeholders sustainability as an objective depends on far-reaching “[…] changes in behaviour and lifestyles, changes which will need to be motivated by a shift in values and rooted in the cultural and moral precepts upon which behaviour is based” (united nations, 2002, p. 11). here too, employing glocal perspectives can provide a framework for learners’ reflections, as it allows for analyzing the interrelation between different local and global contexts as well as personally relating to and engaging with local contexts other than the learners’ own (cf. the viewing log below). given that concepts such as sustainability are largely communicated by different forms of texts, critical foreign language education offers the opportunity to critically scrutinize such texts which also include (audio)visual formats such as film (mayer & wilson, 2006, p. 1). as a cultural product, films are themselves a glocal phenomenon. they are accessible across borders and interconnect the local to the global as they make visible and show a particular view on a local environment to an audience which in turn is situated within many different local environments and contexts. a reflection of the interplay between the representation of a local environment and diverging contexts of reception allows for a critical engagement with global and local issues in relation to the learners’ own behaviors and lifestyles. this engagement is a prerequisite for initiating change in relation to sustainability. 48 global education review 8 (2-3) for elaborating on this position, we have selected the feature film “the boy who harnessed the wind” (calderwood & egan, 2019), a netflix production, as an example geared towards proficient learners. while several other films that focus on sustainability can be suggested for language teaching (cf. volkmann, 2016), “the boy who harnessed the wind” provides a visually appealing as well as thematically and aesthetically demanding interpretation of famine-ridden malawi in the year 2001 that lends itself especially well for taking a glocal perspective within foreign language education. “the boy who harnessed the wind” addresses all un’s sustainable development goals introduced above, making topical food scarcity, the legacy of colonialism, political suppression, and the role of education. the film and its topics become accessible to learners through approachable aesthetics and visuals, using sound effects, camera perspectives and movements as well as editing styles that many viewers are familiar with from other mainstream (i.e. ‘global’) productions. at the same time, the film provides the audience with a challenging ‘local’ perspective, for example shown through frequent captions in chichewa, the local bantu language, and a strong focus on the representation of the malawian village of wimbe. considering the selection of this film, one needs to be aware of possible stigmatizations of the african continent. while historically many other hollywood productions have been criticized for telling white and western stories or even reaffirming colonial stereotypes (brereton, 2016), “the boy who harnessed the wind” shows how an african community – depicted in the person of the protagonist william kamkwamba – is able to help themselves and gain a certain degree of economic self-sufficiency. however, the film also needs to be viewed critically, as it may lead to simplistic interpretations with regard to how the people’s own agency and localized actions alone are presented as a means of overcoming financial and food security difficulties. “the boy who harnessed the wind” draws several interconnections between the local and the global, eventually requiring from the learners to critically reflect on their own personal contexts and lifestyles and how these may have an effect on events that are depicted in the film. in order to approach the film and develop meaningful tasks for foreign language learners, in the following chapter we will discuss the theoretical framework for teaching about environmental issues and sustainability in language education through a glocal lens. we will proceed to analyze the glocal interrelations portrayed in the film. finally, we will suggest tasks and materials for “the boy who harnessed the wind” that actively engage language learners in the critical reflection of their role within the world. glocal education in the context of critical foreign language education the framework we use for teaching about environmental issues and sustainability is that of critical foreign language education explicitly including glocal perspectives. critical foreign language education is rooted in the belief that language teaching needs to address much more than functional communicative competences such as reading and writing. it “[…] instead raises more critical questions to do with access, power, disparity, desire, difference, and resistance” (pennycook, 2001, p. 5). in the tradition of critical pedagogy, critical foreign language education lends itself to taking glocal rather than global perspectives as it encourages questioning dominant narratives of global capitalism, hegemonic power structures as well as the dominance of english as an international language (cf. phipps & guilherme, 2004). in global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 49 49 order to do so, learners have to understand how texts, films and other cultural products are produced and embedded in different local and global contexts as they never represent neutral perspectives (cf. gerlach, 2020, p. 15). lastly, critical foreign language education is participatory and geared towards an active transformation of the world and the self. accordingly, gerlach (2020, p. 22) identifies a central question to be answered when approaching texts or films with learners: what are the consequences of our actions? relating critical foreign language education to the concept of glocalization reflects the importance of understanding local and global interconnections and the power relations between the two entities. while the term global might be associated with standardization, glocalization suggests that there are differences concerning cultural, economical, social, political, and environmental issues between the local and the global (niemczyk, 2019). glocal perspectives on education can thus respond “[…] to contemporary ecological and social issues in ways that take account of the integrated nature of local and global processes” (mannion, 2015, p. 29). however, compared to more established concepts such as global education (cf. lütge, 2015; volkmann, 2014), there are only few theoretical guidelines and no universal standards that define glocal education (cf. niemczyk, 2019). a glocal perspective can help to find answers to questions dealing with abstract topics such as social injustice, gender, racism and sustainability. on one hand, a glocal perspective can show the global nature of each issue; on the other hand, it can situate abstract topics within different local environments. abstract topics will thus become more tangible and locally relevant to learners. taking up our example of sustainability, which as a global challenge is manifold and difficult to capture in its entirety, one can look at the local practices of the learners (e.g. their consumption habits) and compare them to practices in a different local environment. in a next step, learners can analyze how both practices might be interrelated (e.g. how unsustainable behavior in one local environment causes ecological difficulties in another). in a final step and after realizing the consequences of personal actions, learners can transform their practices and inspire change on their own (e.g. by changing their own consumption behavior or by taking action at their local school). using these practices of critical foreign language education, we can further define the aims of what might be called glocal education. glocal education encompasses the idea of thinking and acting locally and globally at the same time, focusing on topics shared with critical foreign language education, such as social responsibility, justice, and sustainability (cf. patel & lynch, 2013, p. 223). in a nutshell, glocal education can be understood in terms of a form of dual citizenship that comes with privileges and responsibilities. we are all citizens of a specific nation, as well as citizens of the world, sharing the same goal to understand and sustain the world in which we live. glocal education is meant to provide the capacity to recognize oneself in the narrative of the interconnected world as well as local realities. (niemczyk, 2019, p. 13) the educational aims of glocal education put forward respect for human rights and the ideals of a peaceful, democratic, pluralistic, emancipatory and sustainable world. they include taking responsibility for sustainable 50 global education review 8 (2-3) ecological, economic and social structures in accordance with the united nation’s sustainable development goals we have outlined above. both learners and teachers are understood as change agents who actively participate in and transform cultural, societal and political practices (cf. niemczyk, 2019). drawing again on the example of sustainability, key aims such as sharing natural resources fairly and triggering processes of change can only be realized if one understands glocal interrelations and looks beyond individual needs. according to lütge (2015, p. 10), material used for sustainable development […] needs to explore the economic, political, and social implications of sustainability by encouraging the learners to reflect critically on their own areas of the world, to identify non-viable elements in their own lives as well as the tensions among conflicting aims. correspondingly, for glocal education learners need to be encouraged to adopt and coordinate different perspectives, which can easily be done by using fictional texts, including film. glocal education systematically highlights local circumstances by analyzing selected texts and films for the interrelations of global and local perspectives. what is more, through the identification with one of the characters or the confrontation with extreme situations, processes of meaning-making and negotiation can be initiated and thus have an impact on learners’ attitudes and behaviors. “the boy who harnessed the wind” verbal or audio-visual fictional texts can especially support learners in taking on different perspectives as their aesthetic make-up challenges the recipient to look at how they are composed. having chosen “the boy who harnessed the wind” as an example, we analyze the film through a glocal lens in order to shed light on the different interrelations of the local and the global within the film as well as between the film and its audience. in the subsequent chapter, we then suggest possible tasks for language learners to access these perspectives. the film is set in malawi, africa, between 2001 and 2002. historically, malawi is a former british colony. after its independence it became a totalitarian one-party state until 1994. since the mid-1990s, malawi has had a multiparty democratic government, yet the country continues the struggle to establish democratic processes and fight against corruption. malawi is one of the poorest countries in africa. its economy is mainly based on agriculture. an increase of weather-related disasters affecting agriculture and a lack of political stability have led to a dependence on outside aid. today, still an extremely high number of inhabitants live below the national poverty line (cf. menon, 2007). especially during the draught of 2001/02, which inspired the film, former president bakili muluzi and his government were accused of corruption and mismanaging the country’s food supplies. “the boy who harnessed the wind” shows the events leading to the famine and its effects in the local village of wimbe. based on the memoir of the protagonist (kamkwamba & mealer, 2010), the film tells the story of the teenage boy william kamkwamba who managed to build a functioning windmill out of scraps to help his family and village overcome the draught. the windmill that global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 51 51 william manages to build at the end of the film is capable of powering a water pump to water the dry fields whereas the windmill that william built in real life only harnessed energy to power lights (cf. ibid.). thus playing with the dimensions of fictionality and factuality (cf. browse, gibbons, & hatavara, 2019; fiorelli, 2016), the film oscillates between suggesting a realistic representation of the malawian surroundings and exaggerating william as the dramatic hero who seems to be able to work wonders. one can both argue that the film tells a story of malawian agency and at the same time runs the risk of reinforcing existing stereotypes of the malawian landscape and the difficulties the people face – depending on the prior knowledge of the audience and their willingness to adopt a critical perspective. the dryness of the land and constant windiness are already made visible and hearable in the establishing shots of the film. the audience gets to know william as the 13-year-old son of farmers living in these harsh circumstances. he lives with his father trywell, his mother agnes and his older sister annie in a simple house with no access to electricity or running water. already early on in the film, william fixes his neighbors’ radios, showing his interest in electronics and physics and foreshadowing his inventive spirit that would later save the village. soon the settlement is ridden by floods which destroy large parts of the harvest. the floods are followed by a long draught and wimbe’s inhabitants start running out of food. while at the beginning of the film, trywell had proudly bought william a school uniform and provided for his son’s education, many families including william’s are now unable to pay the requested tuition fees. william is forced to help his father farm the dry fields and even gets expelled from school for attending class without having paid fees. in the school’s library, he had found an american book titled “using energy” with which he planned to build a windmill to save the harvest. when william finally gets access to the book and a bicycle dynamo for his project, he needs to repurpose his father’s bike to build the windmill. his father, unable to imagine how the construction would work, refuses william at first. only at the end of the film he finally gives in and william successfully builds the windmill. the film ends by showing the real-life william kamkwamba who served as the story’s inspiration while he attends university and gives a ted-talk about his achievements. following blatter’s (2006) understanding of the concept, “the boy who harnessed the wind” shows glocalization on three different levels. blatter (2006) argues for a more specific definition of the term glocalization that goes beyond a differentiation between the local and the global. for this, he suggests a distinction between a supranational, national and subnational level. looking at the subnational level of the feature film, william’s family and the local farmers in wimbe struggle to provide food for their families. this is connected to national policy and a corrupt government that shows little interest in establishing economical support structures and education. what is more, these national structures are situated within supranational contexts that extend national borders. deforestation driven by international agents is advanced in the area of wimbe, which results in a lack of protection from floods and leaves the farmers with no way to dry the tobacco they have harvested from their fields. hence, tobacco farming as an opportunity for national or subnational economic growth clashes with global powers and an aspired production for the world market. in this context, malawi suffers from the legacies of colonialism, both old and new, resulting in political and economic instability. though not made topical in the film directly, this 52 global education review 8 (2-3) legacy becomes visible in an authoritarian government and the economic power of internationally operating companies that control malawian trade to serve the consumer needs of distant countries (e.g. in the tobacco and wood industry). when combining critical and glocal perspectives, it becomes visible in “the boy who harnessed the wind” that global powers often suppress the local – which is all the more reason to make visible local perspectives in critical language education which would otherwise remain underrepresented (cf. leonhardt & viebrock 2020). one scene that exemplifies such a relation between a local malawi community and a western audience is easy to miss. at the beginning of the film, william repairs a radio for a group of young workers who want to listen to a football match (0:24:20-0:27:00). as the radio springs to life, a reporter informs his listeners about two airplanes having hit the world trade center. this news is all but dismissed by the young crowd for the football match, which shows how little importance an event of global magnitude such as the terror attacks on 9/11 had on a local context in malawi. vice versa, while the viewers of the film from the western hemisphere will be familiar with the devastating local and global effects of 9/11, they will be less familiar with the disastrous famine that had hit malawi at the same time, killing an estimated 3.000 people. while the teenagers in the film do not want to listen to the report, the event has a significant impact on their lives nonetheless. when william and his father ask an old friend who works in the food business for help, he tells them that markets around the world have crashed due to a terrorist attack on the united states, and that he can offer no help (0:34:400:38:40). while there may have been additional reasons why malawi felt the effects of the market (e.g. because foreign governments were calling for the country’s debts to be repaid), the film highlights how global forces dictate the fate of the protagonists, and viewers are shown how their own lives are connected to the events in malawi. in the same vein, william and trywell’s friend works for the tobacco industry, and viewers must wonder in how far local practices are impacted by western tobacco consumption, and the deforestation of the land that triggered the floods and draughts in the first place is to be seen as a direct result of the global exploitation of the local farmers. while the effects of 9/11 were thus felt even in malawi, and arguably all over the world, the effects of malawi’s drought were mostly only locally felt. a critical and glocal approach, however, aims to make visible to learners how local narratives and global challenges are intertwined for a more sustainable future. glocal interrelations and power structures are also represented in the film by the use of two languages, namely english and the local bantu language chichewa (leading to large parts of the film being subtitled). english as an international and formerly colonial language is depicted as a language of access, which can be denied by the superior power. for example, william is denied access to knowledge and education when he needs to use a book from the library. in the context of education, mostly english is dominant, while in the family and in the village the local language chichewa is spoken. english is also dominant in political contexts. when the first effects of the draught hit wimbe, the president (not named directly in the film) visits the area (0:46:30-0:52:10). in front of the local crowd, wimbe’s chief is allowed to speak. his speech, delivered in english, criticizes the government for neglecting the region’s struggles with food scarcity. upon this unwanted criticism, the government reacts immediately by taking away the chief from the microphone. not only is he denied his right to speak, he is brutally beaten by government henchmen in a side alley, global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 53 53 leading to his death later in the film. english served as a language of access to a political voice for the chief, which, however, is quickly denied by the government’s display of physical power. the government as depicted in the film also systematically restricts access to education as a means of social mobility and building a sustainable future. for most of the film and despite his ambitions and interests, william is not able to fulfill his educational potential as the principal is instructed to only allow learners into school who can pay tuition. the following conversation between the headmaster and the librarian after william has been caught sneaking into the library shows how the librarian perceives william’s attitude towards education and his desire to learn: mr. ofesi [the headmaster]: there’s nothing i can do about it, mrs. sikelo. i cannot ignore him sneaking into the school. mrs. sikelo [the librarian]: but he was not sneaking into the school. don’t you see, mr. ofesi? can you not see that he’s been sneaking out of the fields? (0:57:50-0:58:20) both william and his family understand the value of education for improving their overall situation, which is constantly undermined by economic hardships. however, while the global perspective that the film also takes dictates education as a key force for a more sustainable future, a glocal perspective can ask why ‘working in the field’ and education are seen as a dichotomy here, rather than two sides of the same coin (something that is visible at the end of the film when william succeeds at building the windmill to water the fields). beyond the narrative of the film, the ‘glocal lens’ can also be applied to its stylistic and aesthetic elements. aspects of glocalization are presented through the use of symbols. for example, before building his windmill, the protagonist finds a us-american book titled “using energy”, representing global knowledge that william is able to emulate in his local context. the windmill that william succeeds to build serves as a symbol of glocalization itself. the protagonist uses several materials from the local surroundings (such as wood) and recycles other, more global items (his teacher’s dynamo, an old car battery and his father’s bike). the windmill also triggers much controversy between william and his father which can be explained from a glocal standpoint. to build the windmill, william needs his father’s bike, which the latter holds dear as it is the only vehicle that can carry him to and from town. while most viewers will be able to fathom the potential of a windmill (and the power of knowledge and education), trywell cannot believe in his son’s idea. he has simply never seen a windmill and how it can harness wind for energy. in comparison to most viewers who will readily believe in william’s potential, trywell has an entirely different perspective informed by his local knowledge, experiences and beliefs. glocal interrelations are furthermore inscribed in the film’s visuals, which helps a global audience to gain access to the african continent, the country of malawi and the local area of wimbe. the aesthetic make-up of the film is geared towards the viewing habits of international audiences, using shots, editing and music that they will be familiar with from any number of hollywood productions. for example, the film’s establishing shots resemble those of director ejiofor’s previous work as an actor in “12 years a slave” (pitt et al., 2014) as both films show the respective landscape and the fields the protagonists tend to (cf. leonhardt, 2016). the dry, sandy, mainly brown and muted color palette in these shots and throughout the film 54 global education review 8 (2-3) depicts the dryness of the land. being filmed in the actual area of wimbe, the film’s visuals transport the viewers to this rather remote area. it can be argued that being able to identify with and relate to the events shown in a film are a precondition for reflecting one’s own position and perspective. william’s journey, which consists of overcoming obstacles before prevailing as the film’s main hero, is also geared towards international audiences, connecting a local story from wimbe with a hero’s narrative familiar to many viewers. tasks for teaching “the boy who harnessed the wind” in the context of glocal education up to now, hardly any concrete suggestions on how to implement glocal perspectives to film-based foreign language teaching exist, as previous approaches either focus in general on cultural learning with film (cf. viebrock, 2016) or on global education and sustainability (cf. volkmann, 2016). in this chapter we present several tasks that, through the glocal lens, encourage learners to engage with the previously analyzed scenes of “the boy who harnessed the wind” in a critical and reflective way. both film and tasks are geared towards more proficient learners at upper secondary level (or possibly college in different educational contexts): the chosen approaches challenge learners to engage actively and creatively with the film and are situated within the interplay of rational film analysis and a more holistic and/or emotional enjoyment of film (cf. decke-cornill & luca, 2007; viebrock, 2016). while film analysis fosters a critical understanding of the film’s content and aesthetic make-up and is the basis for any subsequent reflections, the holistic perception of film caters to the pleasure of watching films. connecting this to the objectives of glocal education, the interplay of film analysis and a holistic perception of film enables learners to change perspective, reflect on the question of how the film’s content relates to their own lives, and possibly invoke changes in their attitudes and behaviors. for a practical implementation that tries to bridge the gap between film analysis and a holistic perception of film, we propose a viewing log and a scenic interpretation task (see illustration 1). the viewing log is a multimodal (and possibly digital) account of a learner’s thoughts, analyses and interpretations of a film. its tasks focus on cultural aspects and therefore glocal understanding of the film, and integrate questions on the film’s aesthetic design as well (cf. donaghy, 2019; viebrock, 2016). before watching the film, task 1 asks learners to analyze the trailer and do research on the background of the film, as they might be rather unfamiliar with the local context in malawi, including its colonial past. in addition, learners can also be asked to generally reflect on their own experiences with and attitudes towards school (task 2). while watching the film, these can be contrasted with william’s experiences, comparing the ‘local’ in the film with the viewer’s. during the film, the learners can take notes on character constellations, especially in relation to local, national and global forces presented in the film (task 3). this introduces them to the main analysis of local and global (power) relations in the film. results will show how the national government contributes to the suppression and hardship of wimbe’s farmers. a close analysis and reflection of the scene in which the chief addresses the president in a critical speech and is brutally beaten by government officials will expand the learners’ comprehension of glocal interrelations and power structures while also focusing on the use of language (task 4). the analytical tasks 5 and 6 prompt learners to interpret the windmill as a glocal symbol and detect and interpret the glocal references made global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 55 55 visible through the attack on the world trade center. the final reflection asks learners to assess whether a film such as “the boy who harnessed the wind” can change peoples’ attitude and establish change towards a more sustainable future (task 7). to answer this question, they can also look at whether glocal analyses can help to change perspective and invoke such change. similar to the reflective writing tasks from the viewing log, scenic interpretation challenges learners to engage actively and creatively with the film. creative and productive tasks allow learners to interact with film from a personal perspective, talk about their viewing experiences and feelings, exchange individual interpretations, and identify with different characters (cf. crutchfield & schewe, 2017; leonhardt & viebrock, 2016). studies on the reception of english literature and film show that working actively and creatively with fictional texts does not only enhance learners’ enjoyment of fiction (cf. freitag-hild, 2010). tasks such as the suggested role play (task 8) also help initiate a change of perspective and foster empathy. for the role play, learners stage a panel discussion at an imagined fridays for future event on sustainability with the director of the film, actors and actresses as well as the real william kamkwamba. this task allows for a critical discussion on the film’s potential to spread awareness about sustainability as well as the question of whether it helps to promote glocal instead of global perspectives. illustration 1: tasks for using “the boy who harnessed the wind” in the context of glocal education in foreign language teaching viewing-log task 1: set in malawi to make topical one of the key 21st century challenges we face – sustainability –, we are going to watch and talk about the feature film “the boy who harnessed the wind”. in this unit, you will learn to adopt a glocal perspective for critically analyzing and interpreting a feature film. glocal refers to the constant interplay between local and the global forces. the idea of glocalization hereby challenges the idea that globalization is a linear process of expansion that suppresses local perspectives. watch the trailer (https://youtu.be/npkr9hmglg0) to address the following tasks: a) analyze the trailer. which topics/issues are addressed in it? in which setting does the film take place? visualize your results. b) choose a topic, issue or an aspect of the setting of the feature film that you are particularly interested in. do research on this topic; make sure to use viable sources and to keep track of the sources you use for your research. add your findings to your visualization from task 1.a. c) after you have completed your research, write a text in which you speculate what the film might be about. task 2: education before starting to watch the film … a) education is one of the most striking themes addressed by the film. reflect on your own attitudes towards education. what does education mean to you? what do you associate with education? you can either write a reflective text or create a mind map. watch the film until 0:11:20. b) watch the scene in which trywell gives william his school uniform again (0:08:37-0:11:20). https://youtu.be/npkr9hmglg0 56 global education review 8 (2-3) option 1: write an inner monologue explaining what william feels and thinks in the moment he was given the red trouser. or option 2: explain what education means to william and his family. compare their view to your own attitudes. task 3: characters and the power structures they are subjected to while watching the film as a whole, focus on the characters and their relationships to each other. create a sketch note that illustrates the characters’ roles and their relationships to each other in the film. for this, consider the power relations on a local and global level that are shown in the film, i.e. how are the characters influenced by each other, by the local environment in wimbe, on a national level by the government, or even beyond this by global contexts. how can they exercise agency? here, you can find an example of how this can look like: extra task: write a short reflection. how and in how far does looking at local, national and global levels help viewers analyze the film critically? task 4: free speech? watch the scene in which the chief speaks up against the president again (0:46:300:52:10). analyze the scene. especially focus on the function of language. if you need help with this task, you can use the following questions as inspiration for your analysis: • what does the chief criticize in his speech? • what role does the government play in this scene? are there any visual clues for this beside the film’s narration? • how are the characters portrayed in this scene? look at costumes, postures and gestures, behavior, etc. as well as how they are filmed (perspective, camera angle, editing, etc.). • looking at the film as a whole, what do the policies of the government mean for the people in the local context? what does it mean for william, his family and the people in his village? • in which situation do the characters speak english, in which situations do they use the local bantu language chichewa? to what effect? • what are the power relations in this scene on local, national and global levels? how do these relate to the use of language? consider the role of the government portrayed in the film for your answer, as well as a broader historic perspective that includes malawi’s colonial past. you can refer back to your findings from task 1.b and/or include additional research. task 5: harnessing the wind the film makes use of several symbols, most prominently the windmill that william builds. interpret the symbolic meaning of the windmill in the context of local and global interrelations of the film. global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 57 57 for this, it will be helpful to watch the scene in which william tries to convince his father of using his bike in order to build the windmill again (1:21:00-1:24:50). extra: can you identify other symbols? what is their meaning? can you interpret their meaning from a glocal perspective as well? task 6: a glocal reference a) closely watch the scene in which william fixes a radio for the local crowd (0:24:20-0:27:00) again. after william has fixed the radio, what can you hear? how does this message, conveyed through the radio –, as well as the crowd’s reaction – relate to a glocal interpretation of the film? interpret the scene from a glocal standpoint. b) watch the scene again in which trywell asks an old friend for help (0:34:40-0:38:40). explain the conversation from a glocal standpoint. how does the conversation relate to your findings from task a) and to your findings from the task “free speech”? task 7: can a film change the world? write a reflection on the question given in the task’s headline in the context of the feature film “the boy who harnessed the wind”. you may address the following questions to find your answer: • in how far does the feature film have potential to move the audience? in how far do you believe a film like “the boy who harnessed the wind” can trigger changes in peoples’ behavior (and your own) towards a more sustainable future? • in how far does the film’s aesthetic design contribute to its appeal to (western or international) audiences? • in how far does the glocal perspective help to understand the film? is this viewpoint necessary to trigger a change in behavior? • are there better alternatives than the given film to trigger change for a more sustainable future? scenic interpretation task 8: a panel on sustainability imagine you are at a fridays for future event that makes topical how glocal narratives can help to promote a more sustainable future for the planet. during the event, the film “the boy who harnessed the wind” is introduced and a panel is held with its main stars. stage the panel with a moderator, actor and director chiwetel ejiofor, maxwell simba (william), aïssa maïga (agnes), lily banda (annie), and the real william kamkwamba whose story served as inspiration for the film. • group 1: you are reporters at the panel. think about questions for each star that relate to the main topic of the event, sustainability, and the film. also refer to glocal interrelations portrayed in “the boy who harnessed the wind”. can the film help to promote (g)local instead of global narratives? do additional research online to find interesting questions for each person taking part in the panel. sample question to chiwetel ejiofor: “as the director of the film, you have chosen to alter william’s narrative. while in his memoirs, the windmill william builds can produce electricity for the village, in your film the 58 global education review 8 (2-3) windmill is able to water wimbe’s fields. what effect do you want to create with this change?” • group 2: you are preparing for the discussion from the perspective of the moderator and the stars. from the perspective of the person that you have chosen for yourself, prepare answers for possible questions that relate to the event’s main topics, sustainability and glocalization. do additional research online to learn more about the film as well as the person you will play during the panel. you can use the following resources for starting your research: • npr interview with chiwetel ejiofor: https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/6 99060631/chiwetel-ejioforsdirecting-debut-takes-him-tomalawi-to-capture-the-wind • focus on william: https://www.sandiego.edu/news/de tail.php?_focus=71319 • red carpet interview with the cast and producers: https://youtu.be/net2kgdt8y8 after having staged the event, critically discuss and reflect your results in the light of the film. you can add the results of this discussion to your viewing log. scenic interpretation fosters learner’s understanding of the local context shown in the film and can be especially effective if this context is unfamiliar to the audience (cf. leonhardt & viebrock, 2016). finally, either identifying with characters in the film and/or reflecting on their actions in the viewing log from an analytical standpoint that acknowledges differences as well as the interconnectedness of local and global processes, will evoke the question of what the events shown have to do with the individual context of the viewer. this directly leads to questions concerned with sustainability and connects learning with “the boy who harnessed the wind” to the united nation’s sustainable development goals such as the promotion of sustainable agriculture to prevent draughts, provide education and give all children the opportunity to shape their own future, and inspire responsible consumption with which environmental disasters and social inequality could be prevented. future directions of glocal education within critical foreign language education using the “the boy who harnessed the wind” as an example, we have shown how glocal education can enrich critical foreign language education. both share many goals, e.g. discussing the interrelation of ecological, social, cultural, political and economic matters from a critical standpoint, and ultimately striving for a more democratic and sustainable future. glocal education sets itself apart from concepts that apply a global perspective, as it does not only consider global processes superimposing local spaces and practices in a linear fashion. applying this concept to “the boy who harnessed the wind”, the tasks we have developed enable learners to realize that even though malawi may not be within their immediate proximity, their behavior and ways of life do have an influence on supposedly remote contexts (and vice versa). all learners are part of a global community that as a whole is responsible for environmental disasters and social injustice, and in turn can be responsible for a more sustainable future as well. by exploring films such as “the boy who harnessed the wind”, learners can be empowered as glocal citizens to “make a difference in the local and global community and https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699060631/chiwetel-ejiofors-directing-debut-takes-him-to-malawi-to-capture-the-wind https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699060631/chiwetel-ejiofors-directing-debut-takes-him-to-malawi-to-capture-the-wind https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699060631/chiwetel-ejiofors-directing-debut-takes-him-to-malawi-to-capture-the-wind https://www.npr.org/2019/02/28/699060631/chiwetel-ejiofors-directing-debut-takes-him-to-malawi-to-capture-the-wind https://www.sandiego.edu/news/detail.php?_focus=71319 https://www.sandiego.edu/news/detail.php?_focus=71319 https://youtu.be/net2kgdt8y8 global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 59 59 thus contribute to a peaceful and sustainable future” (niemczyk, 2019, p. 16). geared towards active change and taking responsibility, glocal education is a truly transformatory approach that inspires learners to be more conscious of their consumption choices, and more aware of the glocal impact they can have. our contribution has provided ideas on how glocal education can be implemented within foreign language education. it has and addressed the relative lack of material and task suggestions for film-based foreign language education through a glocal lens. beyond this, it cannot be denied that the field still requires empirical substantiation, much like film-based foreign language education in general where only few studies have been conducted (e.g. paran & duncan, 2018). it would certainly be worthwhile to empirically examine the medium’s potential specifically for glocal education. as school-age learners are increasingly engaged in issues of ecological sustainability and social justice, feature films used in the context of glocal education may serve as a basis for classroom analysis, discussion and personal reflection and encourage them to look beyond issues relevant to and/or accessible through their own local context. primary source calderwood, a., & egan, g. (producers), & ejiofor, c. (director). (2019). the boy who harnessed the wind [motion picture]. united kingdom: participant media, bbc films, british film institute, & potboiler productions. references blatter, j. k. (2006). glocalization. in m. bevir (ed.), encyclopedia of governance (pp. 357–359). thousand oaks: sage publications. brereton, p. (2016). environmental ethics and film. london, new york: routledge taylor & francis group. browse, s., gibbons, a., & hatavara, m. (2019). real fictions: fictionality, factuality and narrative strategies in contemporary storytelling. narrative inquiry, 29(2), 245-267. crutchfield, j., & schewe, m. (eds.) (2017). languages for intercultural communication and education: vol. 31. going performative in intercultural education: international contexts, theoretical perspectives and models of practice. bristol, blue ridge summit, pa.: multilingual matters. decke-cornill, h., & luca, r. 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(2010). theorie, aufgabentypologie und unterrichtspraxis inter und transkultureller literaturdidaktik. ‚british fictions of migration‘ im fremdsprachenunterricht. trier: wvt. gerlach, d. (2020). einführung in eine kritische fremdsprachendidaktik. in d. gerlach (ed.), kritische fremdsprachendidaktik: grundlagen, ziele, beispiele. tübingen: narr. kamkwamba, w., & mealer, b. (2010). the boy who harnessed the wind: a memoir. london: harpertrue. leonhardt, j.-e. (2016). a history of violence: productive and creative methodology in teaching '12 years a slave'. in b. viebrock (ed.), feature films in english language teaching (pp. 155-165). tübingen: narr. leonhardt, j.‑e., & viebrock, b. (2020). ausgewählte materialien für einen kritisch orientierten fremdsprachenunterricht: jugendliteratur mit transgender-thematik. in d. gerlach (ed.), kritische fremdsprachendidaktik: grundlagen, ziele, beispiele (pp. 37–52). tübingen: narr. leonhardt, j.‑e., & viebrock, b. 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(2004). introduction: why languages and intercultural communication are never just neutral. in a. m. phipps & m. guilherme (eds.), languages for intercultural communication and education: https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1715 https://repository.upenn.edu/edissertations/1715 http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/menon_roshni_2007a_malawi.pdf http://hdr.undp.org/sites/default/files/menon_roshni_2007a_malawi.pdf global perspectives in film-based foreign language education 61 61 vol. 8. critical pedagogy: political approaches to language and intercultural communication (pp. 1-6). clevedon, buffalo: multilingual matters. pitt, b., gardner, d., kleiner, j. et al. (producers), & mcqueen, s. (director) (2014). 12 years a slave [motion picture]. united states: regency enterprise, river road entertainment, plan b entertainment, new regency productions, & film4 productions. united nations. the sustainable development agenda. retrieved from https://www.un.org/sustainabledevelopment/d evelopment-agenda-retired/ united nations. (2002). education for sustainability: from rio to johannesburg: lessons learnt from a decade of commitment. retrieved from https://www.ramsar.org/sites/default/files/doc uments/library/education_for_sustainability_u nesco.pdf united nations. (2015). the millennium development goals report. retrieved from https://www.un.org/millenniumgoals/2015_m dg_report/pdf/mdg%202015%20rev%20(jul y%201).pdf united nations. (2017). education for sustainable development goals: learning objectives. retrieved from viebrock, b. 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exploring shadows production exploring shadows 3 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: løfblad, åse; stalheim, odd rune; & lerbak, kari (2025). exploring shadows: letter writing as a pathway to counter authoritarianism in education? global education review, 12 (3), 3-17. exploring shadows: letter writing as a pathway to counter authoritarianism in education? åse løfblad odd rune stalheim kari lerbak abstract our society is influenced by neoliberalism and new public management, and the education system is no exception. students are navigating a system characterized by market fundamentalism, resulting in the prevalence of standards-based educational policies and an intense focus on assessments and quality measures, making higher education more of an assembly line. as a response to the acceleration in society, which can cause alienation, this article is inspired by rosa’s (2022) ideas of resonance and biestas’s (2021) work on subjectification in education. our response is based on a search for the students’ experiences by looking in the shadows for hidden perspectives guided by the following question: what moves in the shadows of teaching among students, and how can letter writing contribute to counteracting authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education? we have used letter writing as an approach to uncover tacit thoughts and meanings from the students, aiming to provide an opportunity for developing a context and path for uncovering insights and make room for the students’ dialogue with the world, subjectification as well as empowering the students to fight authoritarianism partly by raising awareness of resonance as one way to counter neoliberalism in our education and society. keywords letter writing, shadows, neoliberalism, early childhood education, subjectification, resonance prelude “alienation has ended up as a keyword for a world that has become cold and grey, hard and insensitive, experienced by a subject who inside feels deafness, muteness, coldness and emptiness” (rosa, 2024, p. 121. our translation). the philosophy of higher education is a complex field in motion. higher education and key concepts in this field are not static matters but rather a field that needs approaches that do justice to its dynamics (barnett, 2022). “(…) the two concepts of university and higher education, and their contiguous concepts knowledge, academic freedom, teaching, research, culture, learning and student and the rest are all in motion. like butterflies, they are not easily caught, and if they were caught they would be diminished” (barnett, 2022, p. 6). the landscape of higher education is undergoing rapid transformations, influenced by technological advancements, evolving societal expectations, and the imperative for graduates to emerge with deep theoretical knowledge and robust practical skills. additionally, neoliberalism has made its way into higher education with all it entails (mintz, 2021). neoliberalism prioritizes market fundamentalism, resulting in the prevalence of 4 global education review 12 (3) standards-based educational policies and an intense focus on assessments and quality measures, making higher education more of an assembly line (jovanovic, 2017; stalheim, 2022). these developments are particularly crucial for professional education programs such as early childhood (ec) education, which impart academic knowledge and prepare students for the nuanced demands of professional certification and practice. our research is situated in ec teacher education. when working in ec teacher education, we are responsible for facilitating students’ learning, connecting their education to social issues, and engaging them in public debates to influence politics that benefit society. our student’s voices matter in the battle against authoritarianism, and our pedagogy should be central to any viable conception of politics and collective struggle (giroux, 2015). the desire to make students’ voices matter inspired us to engage them in letter writing. letter writing can be a slow process, which we found interesting in relation to rosa’s (2022) attention to the rapid pace of our lives. rosa (2022) professes that society is characterised by rapidness or “accelerations”. the acceleration can cause a feeling of alienation where we are left with a sense of not “keeping up” or “being” in the world without being in touch with it (rosa, 2022). therefore, rosa (2022) proposes that resonance is the answer, meaning that we are being touched by something that gives us meaning. the letters allowed the students to write personal stories about what is important to them. they can think and write something about “(…) who we are, where we are going, what is good and what is not” (jørgensen et al, 2020, p. 14). we are curious to explore if new opportunities and concepts can arise with and in the student’s letters and personal stories. following barnett (2022), this task requires vigilance, “it is the task, therefore, of the philosophy of higher education to be vigilant about key concepts, to be on the lookout for shortcomings in their realisation and to be alert to possibilities for new concepts” (p. 6). barnett’s (2022) encouragement turned our attention to shadows to explore hidden concepts in dark spots. with our interest in what lurks in the shadows, we draw on dall’alba and bengtsen’s (2019) perspectives on "dark" and "dark" learning. dall’alba and bengtsen (2019) explore features of the dark in learning and unexpectedly turn to astrophysics. in astrophysics, "dark matter" can be seen as what binds the rest together: “what is known and visible occur and are disclosed against a background of the unknown, invisible, in shadow” (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019, p. 1481). however, that "dark matter" does not emit light and cannot be seen. still, its effects are equally significant in astrophysical optics. and then: “an analogous claim can be made about the shadows, darkness and unknowns in higher education learning and teaching. we sometimes cannot ignore their effects; we know there is more than we comprehend. if we focus only on what is visible to us or under our control, we overlook what we do not comprehend, limiting capacity for learning and teaching” (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019, p. 1481). therefore, we turn our gaze towards the shadows in and from the students’ letter narratives with an interest in getting a glimpse of the messy, uncertain, and complexity that is part of students’ lives in higher education, however, often thought of as less important (dall ‘alba & bengtsen, 2019). in this article, we exploring shadows 5 question: what moves in the shadows of teaching among students, and how can students’ voices through letter writing contribute to counteracting authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education? the question invites us to explore and develop insight into concepts, or butterflies (barnett, 2022), that matter in higher education but also allow them to escape, as the shadows are not constant but in motion. paths of inquiry although, according to law (2004), methods are constantly changing, it is not as often discussed and debated whether we need these rules and laws to produce knowledge about the world. it is as if knowledge can only be produced and be valid if we follow a set of “(...) fairly specific, determinate, and more or less identifiable processes” (law, 2004, p. 5). as law (2004) suggests, research often follows specific methods to ensure its validity and societal importance. however, what if we adopt a more unconventional approach to include student voices in the search for butterflies (barnett, 2022)? this text challenges the political frameworks that shape students’ identities and potential within their educational journeys. we explore whether expanding methodological boundaries can reveal insights that traditional methods might miss. however, inspired by law (2004), it does not mean we do not apply more traditional methods, such as a hermeneutic approach, when dwelling on the students’ letters. in our inquiry, we strive to be creative and focus on what is essential and relevant to gain insights into the topic. we aim to bring forth students’ voices and stories about higher education without being constrained by traditional frameworks and rules to counter authoritarianism in education. the path in our inquiry rests on four intertwined contours. the first contour is letters and stories, the second is shadows, the third is subjectification and freedom, and the last is resonance. these contours guided and supported our inquiry, providing a framework for our discussion on letter writing as a contribution to counteracting authoritarianism in education. letters and stories from a hermeneutic perspective, understanding is based upon stories (widdershoven, 2001). narratives from others shape our experiences and are further developed through stories we tell to make sense of and gain insights into the experiences. further, our lives are shaped by the narratives about them. in such stories, our experiences, which are at first vague and ambiguous, become more prominent. narratives make explicit the implicit meaning of lived experience. in stories, the pre-narrative structure of life is transformed into a narrative structure (ricoeur, 1983; widdershoven, 1993). by telling stories, we shape our world, giving meaning to our experiences and urging one another to perform certain actions (widdershoven & sohl, 1999). we engaged the students in letter writing not only for empirical purposes. letters allow creative engagement and allow students to reveal issues they might not in a face-to-face interaction. it might also be helpful for better processing events that have happened to them, in this case, the lecture and activities included (frank et al., 2022; stamper, 2020). writing letters may foster a space where students articulate their experiences and perspectives, embodying biesta’s vision of education as 6 global education review 12 (3) cultivating unique subjectivities. we follow a hermeneutic phenomenological approach when delving into the personal letters from the students. phenomenology emphasises the informants’ understanding of and experiences in the world, and we sought to give justice to the students’ voices coming through the letters (friesen et al., 2012). experience takes shape through language, especially when that language is rich in figurative or alliterative qualities, and phenomenology advocates for aesthetically sensitized writing during and in the final research product (friesen et al., 2012). this perspective is particularly relevant when considering letter writing as a method or source of empirical data, as the expressive qualities of language in letters can capture the nuanced experiences and perceptions of the subjects involved. moreover, the hermeneutic approach embodies the dynamic interplay between text and life, past and present, and experience and interpretation, serving as a process for generating meaning. hermeneutics is inherently oriented toward lived experiences, and the interpretive approach introduces a novel avenue of exploration for research on educational matters. when reading and reflecting upon the students’ experiences, we emphasized dialogue, interpretation, and understanding (moran, 2000) with a sensitive and open attitude and approach (friesen et al., 2012). we invited approximately 100 first-year ec teacher students to write letters after our lectures. the prompt we provided was what the teaching set in motion for them without any guidelines for content or format. additionally, we requested permission to include the letters in our research project, and 45 responded positively, whereas three are included in this article. to select the three letters, we first read all 45 letters and chose two that resonated with us, keeping our contours in mind. subsequently, we collaborated on coding and interpreting the six letters using the contours as guidelines before we agreed upon three letters that we thought captured different perspectives related to our contours. the letters were translated by a secure translation program provided by our institution, anonymised, and checked by us for consistency in the original language and, thereby, their original meaning and message, ensuring the content was not “lost in translation”. rather than conducting thematic and linguistic coding that could end up as a descriptive narrative analysis of the letters, we tried to pursue our aim by searching for a narrative clause that told us more about the student’s relationships with and in the world. we came to this understanding after our initial coding, where we carried out a more traditional explorative and inductive coding, which we found to be quite bland and left with a feeling that we did not grasp the bigger picture, the student voices. our initial coding was too technical as if the traditional coding did not capture the complexity of what we wanted to unravel (maclure, 2013). instead, we decided to present the letters as a whole, interpreting them in light of our contours, followed by a new narrative coding, searching for the in-betweens, the shadows, and passages in the letters that resonated with us, inspired by rosa (2022). taking an open and sensitive approach to the students’ letters follows the hermeneutic phenomenological approach and justifies the students’ private and personal encounters with us through the letters. we were looking for the “butterflies” (barnett, 2022), something not easily caught but interesting, a trace of subjectivity, and create meaning, emphasizing that we do not search for absolutes, but meanings open continuously to new insights and exploring shadows 7 interpretations (friesen et al., 2012). our analytical readings of the letters left us with two overarching themes we convey and discuss as shadows. 1) emotions enter and matter, and 2) uncharted waters. shadows the phenomenon of “darkness in learning” and the associated term “shadows” resemble that learning in higher education is far more diverse, uncertain, and manifold than conventional discourses influenced by a neoliberalistic view of higher education (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). these elements, darkness and shadows, can be difficult to understand or value, even though we know they are there, affecting learning and teaching in higher education (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). by paying attention to darkness and what lurks in the shadows in the students’ letter stories, we seek to shed light on students’ identity and engagement in higher education, which cannot necessarily be captured or integrated into current forms of assessment (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). inspired by dall’alba and bengtsen (2019), we explored alternative learning and teaching processes that are not immediately obvious, paying attention to the shadows. we aimed to value the “whole” student in their educational journey in higher education. in our experience, and as dall’alba and bengtsen (2019) note, students in higher education do not only follow linear ways of learning captured in static, standardized education plans or expected results. subjectification and freedom following biesta (2021), we find subjectification an essential term, especially to bring students’ perspectives on their educational processes into the field with the aim that education becomes more than a gateway into a static and rigid education system. however, biesta (2021) writes that subjectification is a problematic and misunderstood term. nonetheless, we find subjectification suitable as a contour in our discussion of the student’s letter. however, we do not intend to give a comprehensive and "correct" understanding of the term nor provide an exhaustive definition of what the concept of subjectification may hold. we employed the term to explore it in relation to the students’ stories to make their voices matter to counter authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education. according to biesta (2021), students’ learning in higher education can be about their unique dialogue with the world, with its limits and possibilities. biesta (2013) further recognizes that teaching and learning or the educational project “always needs to engage with its own impossibility” (p. 459). one way to identify students’ dialogues with the (higher education) world is to see the stories in students’ letters with biesta’s (2021) concept of subjectification. the idea of subjectification connects to freedom, as people in the world in all situations we encounter, to “(...) have an opportunity to say yes or no, stay or go away, go with the flow or resist” (biesta, 2021, p.45). following this quote, students’ subjectification can relate to their freedom to make their own choices and assert their voice in matters that affect their education. whether it is about following the path education has set out, or if the student chooses to move on to unknown paths. this freedom not only affects questions about education and students, but it also should be seen in a larger context linked to, e.g., politics, history, and social structures that can prevent people’s freedom of action in their experiences (biesta, 2021). as we interpret the 8 global education review 12 (3) term subjectification, it involves both possessing and exercising the freedom to bring actions and thoughts into the experiences you make without strict frameworks for acting or thinking, which applies to being a student in the education system. in the students’ process of subjectification and the freedom it reveals, they encounter other people with the same freedom to bring actions and thoughts into the education system they are a part of (biesta, 2021). consequently, as pedagogues and educational institutions, we are responsible for supporting students in finding their way and guiding their freedom (biesta, 2021). resonance for rosa, resonance can be the solution if acceleration is the problem (2024). the increased speed in society calls for slowness to avoid alienation in our relationship with ourselves, each other, and the world. acceleration’s serious diagnosis, in rosa’s optic, is thus alienation, a growing feeling of being in the world without having contact with it or not belonging in the world (bostad’s, 2021). the idea of resonance, of letting oneself be affected and being moved, can, on the other hand, revolve around feeling and being at home. rosa conveys: “being forced to constantly pick up speed can lead to a state where we are no longer able to take in the world. if you always have too little time, you are unable to connect with other people, things or nature. the problem with acceleration is that it leads to alienation from nature, yourself and others. it has negative consequences for the structure of society: solidarity is lost, and we also have the negative ecological consequences. i wanted to find the opposite of alienation, and came up with the term "resonance"” (rosa, 2022, p. 281). he further claims, “you cannot become a subject, and we cannot become fully human, if we do not experience resonance” (rosa, 2022, p. 281), which relates to education. education has the opportunity and responsibility to create content that enables students to experience resonance with others, culture, and religion, offering profound existential experiences (rosa, 2022, p. 286). rosa (2022) underpins that resonance has to do with transformation, “to be connected to the world in such a way that you yourself are changed, by an idea, an event, a person you meet, music or books you read. this type of transformation differs from optimization of parameters, which is only about improvement. there you basically remain the same, you just strengthen your qualities” (rosa, 2022, p. 286). resonance moves and “is not something i myself do or cause to happen, it begins with something i perceive, something that calls to me. it can be an idea, a face, a sound, a book, a landscape, or i can experience it in my work. it starts with something that touches me” (rosa, 2022, p. 285). rosa (2022) continues, “the second element is emotion. i reach out emote i respond to the call, i react. it can sometimes be an almost physical movement. if it is a question of strong resonance, one may get tears in the eyes or goosebumps. however, it does not have to be physical. if it’s an idea that resonates, you might disagree, even if you think the idea is interesting but wrong. it’s still an answer, you’re exploring shadows 9 trying to make a connection. resonance is thus a two-way relationship” (p. 285). rosa`s (2022) underpinning of resonance being a two-way relationship underpins our choice of letter in our inquiry. into the letters with our desire to counter authoritarianism in education through letters and show devotion to students’ voices, we present our readers with three letters we received. we chose to present the letters in their entirety to ensure that none of the messages or stories within the letters were lost in our interpretation process. after each letter, a reflection follows and we discuss how the letters, both in content and form, can shed light on the shadows and contribute to the discussions about authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education. letter from a student in a teaching session on play to åse today’s teaching provided a good insight into how play can look different, and be experienced in different ways. what is play for me, is not necessarily play for everyone else. it has been very interesting to experience such typical activities one often associates with play, and to feel it a bit on the body. i myself felt a lot of discomfort and almost a bit of panic in between, because the situations were unfamiliar and the activities were predetermined. in addition, it became an extra stress factor to have to "let go" together with people one has hardly been with before. play can sometimes be adult-led, planned activities that are carried out together with the children, and the children can sometimes manage to let loose and play in these situations. but it is not always certain that they are playing even though we think they are. i became especially hung up on group division and will reflect more on group divisions in kindergarten. it is such a natural part of being human to find one’s gang that one trusts and is comfortable around. when i, as an adult, feel so much uncertainty about being split from "my flock", one can assume that a child will be able to feel some of the same feelings. i believe that we adults in kindergarten have a job to do here, and we should probably think a bit more before we consciously split up the very best friends and force the children to "play" across the group of children. i think play can be lots of fun, and i think it can be very rewarding to let loose in play together with the children in kindergarten. but today i felt the importance of all the conditions around play, and that play does not necessarily always manage to take place within all frames. much of the reason i struggled today was about the people i was with and the context of this happening in a school situation, and not in a kindergarten situation. in the corridors here, other students and teachers from completely different programs wander, who have no idea what we are doing or why. for me, it was very difficult to distance myself from this and let the play take over. perhaps some of these reflections can be used in the work with children? maybe we sometimes forget that it’s not as simple as "finding something to play!"? who the children are with, which room they are in, which people are nearby, which materials they have available, whether the play feels forced or not etc. are just some examples of factors that may play a role in the play, and factors i believe should be reflected more on. 10 global education review 12 (3) the student wrote this letter immediately after attending a teaching session which focused on play as the subject, and practicing improvisation as a significant part. the letter speaks to us as a narrative of emotional experiences. discomfort, panic, and stress arise as explicit concepts, and the student seems to experience a sense of lack of control. it is unsurprising that to be told not only to think and write alone but to do so with fellow students they might not know very well can stir up emotions. the student’s story on emotions also links to some struggles, in this case of playing, and the student connects them to the surroundings; the rooms, the hallways, the materials, the (unknown) humans, and the gazes from others. when the student shares that playing did not quite happen, as we read it at least, it is related to the habitat, and the student thus makes us aware of how the habitat affects us. however, the struggle and the habitat preventing playing and playfulness do not seem wasted. the battle may also have awakened this student’s voice and connectedness. we read that the student shows a great willingness to change perspective by attempting to play, where the voice is moved between student and kindergarten life, and reflecting from the perspective of an ec teacher and a child. the student appears to be deeply connected to the kindergarten and the children in their struggle. could this indicate a belonging in and with the world? it appears that the session produced a lack of control and subsequent discomfort, stress, and panic for the student writing the letter. it contributes to uncomfortable feelings we usually want to avoid. it’s not ideal, but did the discomfort also provide a connection? the student’s opportunity to feel these unpleasant feelings, and not least – the student’s opportunity and ability to write about themalso seems to have opened a place for resonance. letter from student in teaching session on diversity i am sitting here still thinking about the topic of pride celebrations in kindergartens. i feel that parents are feeling quite a lot of pressure now because if they speak up and say they don’t want to celebrate it, they might be seen as parents who are causing problems and not accepting diversity. while i think that this is completely wrong, because, as was said in the class, one becomes a bit satiated with so much regarding pride. one should be able to call girls for girls and boys for boys. there are only two genders, even though one has the opportunity to call oneself whatever one wants. parents, especially those coming from another country, may be more frightened by how early in age we should talk to children about sexuality and everything related to pride celebrations. if one thinks about the oslo area and how these celebrations take place, one just has to stop a bit and think, is this really what our children need to see, celebrate, and be inspired by, or is this something that will influence the way children think and what they accept and don’t. this is also about care, i think that children should be allowed to be children and not be confused by everything that happens around these pride celebrations. as a parent myself, i feel that it is not okay to start with this at such an early age as in kindergarten, and that the kindergarten decides this, that the children should participate in this. can one choose for oneself, and since norway is a democratic country, i think that everyone should be able to opt out of such celebrations, if they feel that they do not completely agree with this. exploring shadows 11 in this teaching session, celebrating pride in kindergarten was discussed among the student group. pride is a celebration of diversity that creates debate and arouses many valueladen emotions. values and feelings about pride appear in the student’s letter. the student feels overwhelmed by the extensive focus on pride and, as a parent, believes that celebrating pride in kindergarten is not appropriate. the letter further highlights that the student thinks it can be challenging for parents from another country to deal with the pride celebration in the kindergarten. furthermore, a point is made that the celebration of pride in the capital is questionable. in the letter, it is possible to see the contours of "darkness" and "dark learning" as part of the student’s learning process. several parts of the student’s life and experiences come into view in the face of an academic theme. we trace commitment to the theme that can connect to the student’s whole life, including elements such as the student as a parent with experiences of pride from the oslo area, parents who come from another country find it problematic, and that the student himself is exasperated with pride. all these moments mix with academic knowledge about diversity and the student’s thoughts about the subject as a future professional practitioner. letter from a student in a teaching session about learning in short, the subject is very rewarding and interesting, and i have a lot that i would like to add and convey. the subject arouses great curiosity and interest, and the opportunity to develop professionally, but unfortunately, the timing today is wrong to convey it all. the above letter stood out to us and caught our interest. especially striking was the sentence about the timing. “the timing is wrong”, made us think about how different we are, and is an example of how something we expected from the students turned out differently. the letter resonated with us and made us think about how our presuppositions of expecting the students to be able to write a letter might not work for everyone on “an order”. the students underscore that there is much to say about the lesson, but it is not just the right time. there might be several reasons for this, but what struck us is that contexts and timing might be essential factors. writing a letter might feel overwhelming at the end of the lesson, and who knows, maybe the student was in a hurry or felt uncomfortable with the format. it made us wonder about the effort required to delve into a different format that might not be familiar to that student. we mentioned acceleration in today’s society, things are going faster, and the hastiness might be a struggle to overcome. unveiling insights: the shadows as a guiding path of our inquiry, we asked ourselves: what moves in the shadows of teaching among students, and how can students’ voices through letter writing contribute to counteracting authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education? in the following, we discuss the insight and reflections we gained from the student letters in light of our paths of inquiry structured in two overarching shadows. the thematic discoveries mirror what resonated with us while reading and are named emotions enter and matter, and uncharted waters. shadow: emotions enter and matter when reading the letters, we became aware of the underlying aspects of teaching and learning, where some of the invisible sides of our 12 global education review 12 (3) teaching came forward. on the surface, in regular evaluation and assessment, we tend to pay attention to what is visible (davis, 2017, in dallàlba & bengtsen, 2019). when we opened our minds to what`s underneath, in the shadows, we found traces of students’ emotions put into play, which can affect their learning and contribute to their freedom (biesta, 2021), something we need to be aware of as teachers. through the letters, some students expressed their emotions explicitly, such as discomfort, panic, and uncertainty, whereas in other letters, we interpreted hidden emotions between the lines of their narratives. between the lines, we interpreted from our perspective in line with the hermeneutic approach that there were emotions such as engagement, excitement, and annoyance. the students’ stories and our interpretations show us that the students are affectively and emotionally related to the world and that they have been touched by something (rosa, 2022). allowing students to dwell on these reactions through letters will hopefully foster awareness of the world and open up opportunities for resonance in their lives. however, we must consider that these interpretations are ours and be open to the fact that what we interpret in the shadows might not be what the students intend to show through their narratives. the students provided insights into how their experiences in class made them wonder about how they understand and comprehend the world (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019; widdershoven & sohl, 1999). through the letters, the students opened up to wondering, which might have placed some of them at the point of nothingness where they were allowed to form their thinking and understanding, and perhaps they realized that there is something beyond their own knowledge, a not yet known (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). dall’alba & bengtsen (2019) underscore the importance of the process of becoming, calling for a broader understanding of teaching and learning that moves beyond ordinary learning activities. the letters and dialogue we established with the students extended the traditional teaching format and allowed them to experience nothingness, offering them a different process of becoming (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). what resonated with us in the letters and how we interpreted them implicates the complexity of subjectivity. from a hermeneutic approach, we exchange perspectives and allow ourselves to be enlightened, challenged, and even provoked without necessarily trying to push our sense of knowledge, meaning, or truth forward. then, the latter brings us to how the letters possibly counter authoritarianism. the letters show us that it is essential to be open, encourage dialogue, and make room for subjectivity. we should, therefore, strive to provide students with educational experiences that can affect them emotionally and let them explore what’s in the shadows or experience nothingness (dall’alba & bengtsen, 2019). interestingly, we questioned whether the short letter might convey indifference upon initial reading. however, what if the student felt uncomfortable or perhaps even loved the task but needed a different context or time to write the letter? in the letters, we see glimpses and traces of subjectification. biesta (2021) points out the possibility of saying yes or no or even walking away. in the latter, there is a freedom we might see mirrored through the letters, like the student who did not find the context a suitable time for writing, the student walked away, or the letter about pride-celebration, which resonated with us, albeit in a more problematic way. the letters allowed the students to write without political, historical, or social structures as barriers, which puts the exploring shadows 13 subject up front and exposes the shadows (biesta, 2021). what subjective emotions we find in the shadows might surprise and even upset us, but they also enlighten us. they offer a way to open up new perspectives and dialogues about the purpose of higher education. shadow: uncharted waters from a hermeneutic phenomenological perspective, the students experience their world from their point of view. by inviting them to write letters, we were curious about their understanding. we encouraged them to use their freedom to ask questions and be critical of the surrounding structures, boundaries, and theoretical perspectives they encounter throughout their education. rosa (2022) underscores that exploring and experiencing the world will resonate differently from person to person. what inspires us or gives us meaning is unique for all of us. we see traces of the individuals in the letters, and the letters gave room for reflection, a sort of time out for the students, where there was no manual or correct answer. in the first presented letter, the student reflects upon how maybe both the lecture and the letter writing opened up for thinking differently and uttered, “what is play for me, is not necessarily play for everyone else.“ based on the letter’s different format, length, and content, we were drawn to the thought that the format might be somewhat unfamiliar to the students. for most of the letters, we felt that they tried to write what was expected of them; nevertheless, some letters were more personal, which might tell us that it was a welcoming act. while reading the letters, a notable discovery for us was traces of the students’ opportunities to form their own opinions and make sense of the experience (widdershoven, 2001). the letters revealed the students’ unique voices, expressing their views and understanding of educational phenomena and practices. they write about themselves in relation to the children, to us as educators, to their future profession, and to the world. one student wrote: “perhaps some of these reflections can be used in the work with children? maybe we sometimes forget that it’s not as simple as ‘finding something to play!’” we interpret such phrases as connections, where students are not isolated but situated within the world. the letters can help the students change and contest their perspectives, and seeing themselves through others can lead to new self-understandings and a revision of opinions (widdershoven, 2001). we see these attempts as part of their journey to becoming ec teachers, students, and human beings. the letters foster resonance and subjectification, allowing students to express themselves, reflect, and process their experiences at their own pace without guidance or assessment criteria (frank et al., 2022). in the letters, the students freely expressed themselves and their experiences, highlighting and giving meaning to what impacted them in the teaching session (widdershoven & sohl, 1999). additionally, when searching in the shadows, we saw the power of letters that uncover the perspective of the other, which, from a hermeneutic perspective, is necessary to dwell upon to make new insights. “what if it is the other way around?” the latter might not be unproblematic since it also challenges our beliefs. still, we proclaim that viewing letters as an opening for dialogue about central aspects of the profession and what formation means, and even being and becoming is essential for ece. shedding light on the shadows and catching sight of what we as lecturers do not usually glimpse in our meetings with students through work requirements, exams, and lectures also arouses uneasiness. the unrest is about us wanting to bring the whole student into their 14 global education review 12 (3) education. we know this has value if we take subjectification seriously (biesta, 2021). subjectification is about the students’ opportunity to bring "themselves" into the education, which can be an essential input in the discussion about what higher education should be. on the other hand, not all opinions and values are necessarily compatible within the ec teacher education profession. an example is the teaching session on diversity, a crucial topic in ec education. the un convention on the rights of the child and the framework plan for kindergarten content and tasks (directorate for education and training, 2017) emphasize that kindergartens must promote diversity. in light of our interpretation of how diversity can be understood and handled in these guidelines, some of the statements in the letter may appear to be unfortunate. the student writes, for example, that parents have to choose for themselves, “that you are saturated with so much in your mind with pride” and that “there are only two genders, although you have the opportunity to call yourself whatever you want.” with such statements, the student brings himself into the education as a parent with feelings, attitudes, and opinions that relate to biesta’s thoughts on subjectification (2021). the student is free to say something personal about a topic regarding teaching and learning in higher education (biesta, 2021). as educators, we were somewhat provoked by the student’s expressions. one of our first spontaneous reactions was not to relate to the letter and its content or contact the student to point out that such statements, values, and attitudes are incompatible with the profession. but will we not then be in danger of being part of the education system we are trying to shift and challenge in this text by bringing students’ voices to light? wouldn’t we then be the ones sitting in the driver’s seat with a desire to control students’ educational processes? the letter illustrates how we as teachers must navigate unknown waters when we want to give students a voice in the fight against authoritarianism in education through the concepts of darkness and subjectification. there is a problematic duality in that, on the one hand, what the student brings can provoke us as teachers by contesting what we believe to be the “right” opinions, attitudes, and values in the profession. however, what will it do to students’ freedom, subjectivity, belonging to the world they are part of, and the struggle with authoritarianism if we, as teachers, pursue the desire to control what the students bring to the table? nevertheless, this does not mean that the teacher should sit back and not contribute to the students’ educational process or that the student is free to “do what they want” (biesta, 2021). freedom as a student and as a person in the world is about qualified freedom, where you exist in complex interactions with other people in different contexts that create some framework for freedom. freedom where the turning point is about “(...) figuring out what these limits are, which limits should be taken into consideration, which limits are real, so to speak, and which limits are the effect of arbitrary (ab) use of power” (biesta, 2021, p. 48). in our understanding, we as teachers must determine how much and what kind of freedom we provide the students and where we are responsible for "leading them on the right path”. we also have a responsibility to support them in making up their own minds about questions, which boundaries they relate to, and which can be considered as “arbitrary (ab) use of power” (biesta, 2021, p. 48). exploring shadows 15 letter writing as a pathway to counter authoritarianism in education? in this text, we have elucidated the following question: what moves in the shadows of teaching among students, and how can letter writing contribute to counteracting authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education? dall’alba & bengtsen (2019) argue that the notion of teaching and learning must consider that teachers can never fully control the outcome or impact of their teaching, and they discuss the unpredictable and uncertain aspects of educational processes. in our meetings with the students’ voices through letter writing, we became aware that we are part of the structures that want to control the impact and results of the teaching. we, as teachers in higher education, are not only the ones who want to bring students’ voices to counteract authoritarian structures and conventional discourses in higher education. we are also the ones who adapt, maintain, and possibly create these authoritarian structures and conventional discourses. we do not have a straight answer to how teachers should manage this duality, but we think it is timely to consider and discuss. otherwise, we as teachers in higher education may be in danger of being part of a system that wants students to be measured and part of an assembly line system (jovanovic, 2017; stalheim, 2022) the letters provided a place and time for students to dwell and reflect upon their education and provide traces of their thoughts about being in the world. to counter alienation, we find letters and personal narratives to be one move towards a situation or opportunity to become touched or moved by someone or something and thereby experience resonance. we discovered that letters could support our students in orienting the world and allow them to encourage and reveal experiences of resonance, which can counter acceleration and alienation. the letters serve several purposes in the process. the students are provided with time to reflect on their experiences in class, and they elaborate on something that moved them personally. in addition, we experience the letters to be touching in themselves, bearing the mark of opening up for personal engagement. the letters were also moving for us to read, and even though there were several different approaches and content in the letters, we sensed that students opened up, underpinning the benefit of letter writing. from a phenomenological view, we know that how we live and engage in the world can move and transform us. therefore, as ec teacher educators, one of our purposes is to lay the foundation for an education that encourages and builds students’ ability to be self-reflective and critical of authoritarianism influencing our society, education, and lives. nevertheless, our inquiry has shown us that, as educators, we might as well be part of the authoritarianism in education that amplifies certain voices while seeking to control others. therefore, it is imperative that we, as educators, maintain an awareness of this dynamic and manage it ethically. for us, letter writing promotes a sense of gratitude and hope. from a global perspective, amidst war, climate change, unrest, and worries, cultivating a sense of gratitude and hope can be central to higher education. letter writing alone cannot be the solution. still, in our view, the format of letters and interest in personal matters can create a significant space for thinking and writing, being touched, and being in dialogue with oneself, others, and the world. 16 global education review 12 (3) references barnett, r. 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(red.), telling tales, on narrative and evaluation, advances in program evaluation, 6, (p. 109-30). jai press inc./ablex publishing corporation. widdershoven, g. a. (1993). the story of life: hermeneutic perspectives on the relationship between narrative and life history. the narrative study of lives, 1, 1-20. the translation and circulation of “evidence” 96 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: hofbauer, susann, kelly, peter, & beck, anna. (2023). the translation and circulation of “evidence”: obviousness, demonstration, and effect in educational research in germany and england. global education review, 10 (1-2), 96-113. the translation and circulation of “evidence”: obviousness, demonstration, and effect in educational research in germany and england susann hofbauer peter kelly anna beck abstract in current educational research communications, especially in english and increasingly also in german publications, the term “evidence” refers to international homogenizing gold standards and is often linked to european evidence policies, large scale assessments and justified and proven knowledge. against the background of international communication and the related circulation of terms and concepts, this paper analyses german and english oecd publications that recommend the development of educational research in 1970s and 90s. in england, the oecd and thus the external perception of their own education system hardly played a significant role due to years of awareness of the need for reform. rather, hargreaves's lecture (1996) about the disappointing effects of educational research when compared with the achievements of evidence-based medicine was decisive for the evidence movement. in addition, nonuniversity institutions have gained legitimacy through acting as “evidence” providers for the school system. based on analyses of german educational research literature, we show that “evidence” appeared in neurological, medical, technological, and economic texts in the 90s and early 2000s. usage of “evidence” increased after the pisa shock in 2000 and is now linked to the expression of disciplinary development into empirical educational research. however, based on relatively stable patterns of communication and interpretation in two academic cultures, it is shown that the connectivity of an epistemological term like “evidence” does not necessarily reduce misunderstanding. keywords evidence, educational research cultures, obviousness, visibility, translation, circulation 1. introduction through its inflationary use in current national as well international agendas, political and scientific communications within the testing and standardization practices of the global educational reform movement in englishspeaking countries (sahlberg in fuller & stevenson, 2019), “evidence” can be seen as an empty, floating signifier (krejsler, 2017). by mobilizing knowledge in the other social fields, it joins concepts, constructions, and efforts to address the research-practice gap (cooper, levin, & campbell, 2009). simultaneously it can be discussed within the research community regarding the evaluation of research criteria, which allows research to claim to be “useful” or “evident” in the first place (gough, 2021; tseng & nutley, 2014, critics see biesta, 2010). currently, the relevance-influencing rhetoric around evidence-baseness is so dominant in policy making on teacher education that helgetun and menter (2022) paraphrase this as a central rationalized myth. in germany, too, the use of the term “evidenz” is becoming more frequent. over the past two decades, and the translation and circulation of “evidence” 97 especially after the pisa shock, science policy supported the development of empirical educational research1 and evidence-production more intensively (zapp & powell 2016). the establishment of empirical educational research and large-scale assessments also led to a change towards a more international academic communication. due to the attention-drawing effect of the 2000 pisa shock, however, it is often overlooked that before and during pisa there were already recommendations by the organisation for economic co-operation and development (oecd) for germany as well as for other nations when it comes to educational research. however, pisa and the oecd have had less impact in england because it has an established tradition of interconnecting knowledge production, educational politics, and the needs of the profession. before 2009, there was relatively little reporting or public interest (martens & niemann, 2013) in this area, and it was only after 2010 that policy was justified, sometimes retrospectively, as a response to pisa results (pollitt & bouckaert, 2011). grey (2020) identifies how the oecd has been largely excluded from making recommendations or offering policy advice in england. currently, “evidence” is linked to scientific gold standards that divide knowledge claims qua method, rationale, and reliable findings into evident and non-evident knowledge. it serves as orientation, demarcation but also as a communicative, international reference within educational research. epistemological concepts and terms seem to be 1 in the german-speaking area, however, educational research tends to be a singular, uniform circumscription with its own denominations, publication formats, and institutional anchoring in the german educational research association (gera), but with strong internal differentiation. in english, it tends to be the plural form, i.e., the “foundation disciplines” (sociology, psychology, philosophy and history of education). when we speak of a more general understanding of the sciences of education and bildung, we use the term globally subject to all scientific disciplines through the claim of “normal science” to attain scientific truth (kuhn, 1962). thus, terms that circulate internationally as scientific standards like “rigor” (strenge, präzision, stringenz, härte, unerbitterlichkeit), “discipline” (disziplin, fachund lehrrichtung, benehmen, strafe) or “systematic” (systematisch, methodisch, gründlich, planmäßig, zielbewusst) are often translated directly. they construct educational research identities but still they do not have the same meaning, depending on the academic, historical, and social context (keiner 2019). the concept of “evidence,” which is regularly translated as “evidenz” in german, suggest a certain clarity and common sense in what is being talked about. in showing the facets of the concept of evidence, its emergence, its (inter)connotations, and its use, we will proceed in an exploratory manner. in doing so, we compare english and german reports of the oecd regarding their references and translations, describing the “evidence” discussions in england and analyzing educational research literature using “evidenz” as a term. in doing so we ask if “evidence” and “evidenz” have an identical meaning in different educational research cultures and contexts? how did the terms “evidence” and “evidenz” circulate in the oecd recommendations? how did the term emerge in german educational research? in a first step, we discuss the theoretical frame which refers to the history of knowledge as well as to bourdieu’s conditions of the educational research in the sense of international usage. precisely because of the interdisciplinary character in methods, thematic specialisations, and theories, we differentiate between empirical educational research that prefers empirical, rather quantitative methods with focus on educational institutions, especially schools (lawn & furlong, 2007). this research direction distinguishes itself from nonmethodological science. by refereeing to a more humanistic approach, we use science of education. 98 global education review 10 (1-2) circulation of ideas (2). in a second step, we reconstruct the movement of “evidence” on the level of european educational policy as well as the german and english educational research level. the longer academic “evidence” movement in the united kingdom and particularly england can be seen in the evidence-based or evidenceinformed policy and practice reform agenda since the 1980s and the creation of knowledge transfer institutions.2 in germany, the concept of evidence-based research has increasingly emerged right after the period referencing neurological knowledge in the 90s and attention to the programme for international student assessment (pisa) after 2000 (3). in the last step we suggest “evidence” has a methodological, disciplinary-historical as well as an inner communication side and a side directed towards external representation, persuasion, and effect (4). 2. the translation and circulation of the obvious theoretically, two approaches are meaningful for our work, one that considers the circulation of knowledge historically and one that understands it in a field-specific way. both intersect in the study of social, in this case scientific and political production and circulation of knowledge. the former considers the circulation of knowledge without hierarchies, but between different social spheres and institutions considered as fields of knowledge, which sets, forms and take up knowledge impulses. in the history of knowledge, the differentiation of scientific disciplines, scientists, their texts, concepts, belief systems or styles of thinking (fleck, 1979), methodological and 2 it also features hidden lines of discourse that pertain to the teacher-as-researcher approach, meaning individual-based, school-based case studies rather than large-scale comparative studies. we do not go into this in detail, but it can be discerned in the figures of reasoning why research is a necessary part of successful practice and decision making theoretical approaches are of particular importance (sarasin, 2011). the history of the concept of evidence can be dated back to the 17th and 18th centuries. the facets of seeing and proving that are expressed, reach back to the epoch of evidence that campe (2015) situates in the period between descartes and kant. in this time, questions were raised about the conditions and rules under which cognition and scientific knowledge were possible. in addition to formal language, diagrammatic and pictorial symbols gained importance as methodological evidence, which clarify convictions through evidence, where images convey the “obvious” – something-before-your-eyes (ersichtlichkeit visibility, offensichtlichkeit obviousness, augenscheinlichkeit appearance). “in this way darstellung receives its modern primacy in knowledge: only what is capable of being represented counts as a possible object of knowledge” (campe, 2010, p. 287). he therefore names this time as the epoch of representation, too. moreover, the term also circulated between disciplines and was an expression of scientific community efforts to improve disciplinary knowledge production, mechanisms of proof, and knowledge persuasion (see chandler, davidson, & harootunian 1994). translations and circulation are essential components of scientific communication and therefore scientific knowledge. only through publication and the accompanying circulation i.e., the persuasion of knowledge claims, their reception and dissemination – can knowledge appear as knowledge at all. however, scientific texts and ideas can circulate without context, because the and why teachers are stakeholder of reform and therefore should engage in research. however, in this cycle it also addresses justifications of the “nature” of change and research (hammersley 2007; colucci-gray, das, gray, robson, & spratt, 2013). the translation and circulation of “evidence” 99 socio-cultural and historical conditionality of knowledge production is usually not discussed in the publication. the second approach by pierre bourdieu views the notion of a context-free circulation of scientific ideas critically. recipients interpret, recontextualize and use the ideas and knowledge offered in connection with their socio-culturally embedded field of expertise. bourdieu sought to examine the “space of theory” (theorieraum) – an awareness of analytically controlling one's own scientific work (jurt, 2014, p. 159). to avoid misunderstanding and misconceptions in the reception of ideas, knowledge and concepts, bourdieu points out the necessary national or historical conditionality, the locally given problematics and categories of perception and evaluation (bourdieu, 2002a). he thus opposed the “denial of an external reference” and cultural and scientific goods as “self-sufficient realities” (bourdieu, 2002b, p. 187). furthermore, bourdieu views translations less in a linguistic sense than in a discipline-autonomous sense. according to him, the functioning of a discipline and its social and political environment determine the degree of autonomy of a scientific field. autonomy is seen as the “ability to break external constraints or demands, to bring them into a specific form. [...] the decisive indication of the degree of autonomy of a field is, therefore, its refractive power, its power of translation.” (bourdieu, 1998, p.19, own translation). the social sciences, especially educational research, tend to incorporate the expectations of the different environments into their own terminology. as a “fractured-porous discipline” (meusburger 2009, p. 117f.), it is characterized by weak disciplinary demarcation, which favors the import of theories and methods from other disciplines but has a high creativity and innovative potential precisely through this import. in this regard, however, there are subtle differences in disciplines as well as in educational research cultures (knaupp et al. 2014), and also in the selective reception, translation of knowledge, and subsequent adaptation to the national language and theory space (hofbauer, 2018). german educational research has a high intensity of self-reflecting discourses on theoretical imports, disciplinary autonomy, and profile (as well in austria, german-speaking switzerland, and belgium). these “formalized disciplinary discourses” contrast with the model of “pragmatically specialized professions” of educational research in anglo-saxon countries. these more pragmatic research cultures emphasize specific professional, political, and practical problems as well as economic, social, and political needs. as a result, research topics change dynamically and according to socio-political urgency, corresponding research groups emerge and produce knowledge which is also marketdependent through mediation (ibid.; hofbauer, kelly, & beck, 2021). the models of research discourses are an expression of the social and intellectual character of educational research, which is shaped by particular national, cultural, and, in this context, linguistic backgrounds. such discourse models prove to be relatively historically stable patterns of communication and interpretation, even though research cultures are characterized by mobility, knowledge circulation, competition, communication, and exchange with complex basic contexts on the one hand and synchronous and diachronic logics on the other (werner & zimmermann, 2006). therefore, it can also be assumed that, despite inflationary and seemingly deliberate use of the term “evidence,” misunderstandings and shifts of meanings occur especially in translations. 100 global education review 10 (1-2) 3. insights in german and english educational research discourses to show the interconnectedness of the use and establishment of the concept of evidence, we first trace the agenda and recommendations of european political actors. in the circulation of knowledge, science, through its international communication and exchange platforms (such as the european educational research association, but also international politically figuring agencies, such as the european commission and the oecd) have special importance. the oecd is “a key supplier and interpreter of the type of evidence appreciated by politicians and decision-makers who can ascribe their narratives to” them (ydesen, 2019, p. 2). in the following, we show oecd reports that use the term “evidence” to link educational research and the legitimization of educational policy decisions. however, it remained a broadly english term until the 1990s (3.1). the oecd, especially pisa, had little impact on policymaking in england. rather, the debate on evidence-based education with comparisons to evidence-based medicine was triggered by an academic speech, which in turn was taken up by the oecd again (3.2). for the german-speaking discussion, it can be seen that the concept of evidence emerged particularly in the earlier 2000s, i.e., after the oecd reports of the 1970s and 90s (3.3). for the analysis, we explicitly looked for the term “evidence” and “evidenz” in reports and texts, examining context, references, and usage. iteration, reproduction and iterability, or the accompanying circulation, but 3 reviews of national policies for education have been around since 1969, and the first reviews were on sweden, ireland, italy, austria, holland, japan, usa, and france. germany was judges as being ''deficient'' in the education system in 1972 (oecd, 1972; 1973). such reviews result from also the formation of tradition, thus come into the focus (hofbauer 2023). 3.1 better research for better evidence: non-translations recommendations for improving education and educational research for a lot of member states have been issued by the oecd for some time. these recommendations are embedded in the attributed role of science and higher education as an instance of innovation in a knowledge society (oecd, 1972) on the one hand, and as an instance of growth and wealth creation on the other, along with human capital theory (oecd, 2001). in addition, the oecd discovered the indicator-based measurement and evaluation of science as early as the 1960s, using the us work of the national science foundation as a model (godin, 2001). the evaluation of research must act in the contexts of efficiency, competition, productivity, political will for reform and technological progress with “value for money” (oecd, 1971; 1987). the reviews and recommendations became more discipline-specific over time. in particular, between 1995 and 2007, a series of expert meetings and reports emerged that revolved around the performances of research in education.3 university based educational research (and development) of various countries were also evaluated. the oecd or representatives of empirical educational research made recommendations that called empiricism and evidence production to act as a counterbalance to the humanities-based “blue sky” science of education that was strongly represented at the university. recommendations are therefore directed at many research forms, oneor two-week visits, inspections, and discussions with scientific, educational, and school officials, which was then presented to the oecd committee on education. since 1961, the focus has been on an economically oriented education policy (ibid). the translation and circulation of “evidence” 101 although there is a need for more quantitative and qualitative evidence (hofbauer 2020). although the oecd's evidence agenda has been widely discussed (ydesen, 2019; knejsler 2017), it seems that even in the 1990s the term was still stuck in the english-speaking tradition. the oecd report “bildung mangelhaft” from 1973 announced that educational policy as well as research on education had received too little attention. “evidenz” was not used once. the english term “evidence” was used in the 1995 oecd conference proceedings “knowledge bases for education policies” (p. 25-31), but was not used in the german volume published two years later (“wissensgrundlagen für die bildungspolitik,” 1997, p.33-42). the author of the contribution was donald hirsch, an international policy consultant in the united kingdom. he reported rather generally on the goals of the conference in discussion and the relation of educational research and development with further assumptions of the role of the centre for educational research and innovation (ceri). in the german translation, many more terms were used for the translation (indicators, results, information, findings, indications). in comparison, in the oecd documentation on the seminars about educational research and development in austria, germany, and switzerland – also from 1995 – the term “evidence” was used but mainly from the report of the rapporteur ivor pritchard. pritchard was a senior research analyst for the u.s. department of education at the time. so, even if the topic is the state of educational research and development in german-speaking countries, but in a report written in english, “evidence” only appears as a term if the author may have an english-language background. in comparison, the debate on evidencebased teacher education and the role of research erupted at the same time in england with consequences for the evaluative practices of the oecd in england itself and denmark. england was under the scrutiny of the oecd in 2002, which was critically examined in 2003 by the european educational research association (wolter, keiner, paloma, & lindblad, 2004). like the other reports, it pleaded for more balanced research portfolio in promoting basic as well as useful research. accordingly, “usefulness” has become a standard of quality (keiner, 2005) and therefore affects and regulates research processes and discourses by providing a point of reference. the (english) oecd examination reports and recommendations for educational research are not only directed at its performance in terms of “better data,” but they are also linked to the innovative capacity of the education system through the overarching demand for educational policy advice by evidence production. in comparison, scotland’s use of educational research has received less attention from the oecd. the most notable development here is the oecd’s examination of the scottish education system in 2015 and subsequent report, which argued strongly for the increased use of data and research evidence in education, along with an evidence-informed approach to policy (oecd, 2015, p. 12). in addition to this oecd science policy discourse, the agendas of the european commission and the european union between 2004 and 2020 also stand out, positioning evidence-based and education as guiding categories for the scientific justification of political decisions on the one hand and europe as a knowledge-based, growth-oriented economic area on the other. research-based evidence is placed alongside other forms of knowledge and assessment but ties the target categories to the coordinated expansion of infrastructural data generation in education and the evaluation of benchmarks. it is precisely this 102 global education review 10 (1-2) triad of educational research, educational policy and education that constitutes an aspect of the international evidence movement that has farreaching discursive, infrastructural, and epistemological consequences (sellar & lingard, 2014, ydesen, 2019; wilmers & jornitz, 2018). 3.2 better evidence for better teacher education in england the discussion about “evidence”informed teacher education has discursive antecedents in german-speaking as well as english-speaking educational research with regard to the question of knowledgeand research-based teaching and pedagogical action. in england, the market-based educational reforms that followed from 1988, mobilized through the introduction of teacher accountability measures linked to student tests in 1990 and regular visits from office for standards in education, children's services and skills (ofsted), the school inspections agency, after 1992, afforded the emergence of a new technicist teacher professionalism. in 1996, david hargreaves, comparing education and educational research to medicine, argued that educational research should attend more to gathering evidence of what works in what circumstances for use by teachers (hargreaves, 1996a; 1996b). in his terms, evidence is specifically evidence of what works in improving student attainment. the evidence knowledge base for teachers should be more effective by allowing through diagnosis, the improvement of teaching and therefore become “satisfying” (1996a, ibid p. 1). over time, as high stakes testing has become central to the evaluation of schools, this has become evidence of what works in improving high-stakes test results. hargreaves’ call for an evidence-based teaching profession based on medicine (1996a; 1996b) allowed school improvement to become synonymous with the disinterested pursuit of public wellbeing. the teacher training agency (tta), which played a huge part in reforming and reconceptualizing competences in teacher education as national standards (reynolds, 1999) invited him to give the lecture. his speech on evidence-based teaching triggered a critical response and a debate (hammersly 1997; hargreaves, 1997; elliott, 2001). hargreaves’s speech was so influential that it was discussed in the oecd’s evaluation of educational research and development in england: “he compared educational research with medical research and found educational research deficient in important dimensions: it was noncumulative, not useful for improving schools and generally lacking in quality” (oecd, 2002, p. 9; oecd, 2003, p. 26 & 63-64). even more, he was also one of the interviewees whose statements were included in the evaluation (ibid. p. 55) and was appointed to a review team the educational research and development in denmark (oecd, 2004, p.4). amidst a growing preoccupation with evidence-based and later evidence-informed practice, this included both understanding and making use of external research evidence to develop initiatives for tackling specific school issues, and internal evidence from student assessments and teaching observations to improve the focus and quality of teaching, something encouraged by ofsted. this was clearly aligned with changes in the nature of teachers’ professionalism in the context of “new public management,” where the emphasis is on explicit measures of performance, output controls, market-type mechanisms and the introduction of competition (bottery, 1996). during this time, several not-for-profit non-state intermediaries arose to make evidence of what works and examples of best practice available to school leaders and teachers to help them the translation and circulation of “evidence” 103 improve their practice (lawn & furlong, 2007). these were established in parallel with an ongoing interest in school effectiveness research, which originated in the united states, and included the evidence for policy and practice information centre (eppi), founded in 1993, and, from 2008, the centre for the use of research and evidence in education (curee). the school effectiveness movement (as opposed to school improvement which maintained a broader perspective) turned the focus of their research from understanding processes of teaching and learning to input-output evaluations of student outcomes. beginning with david reynolds in the 1980s (who later worked with daniel muijs, now head of research at ofsted) and later including peter mortimore, they focused on identifying the characteristics of effective schools where pupils progress further than might be expected from consideration of its intake (mortimore, 1991), mainly using large scale quantitative studies seeking statistical associations. in evaluating this movement, chitty (1997) argues its weaknesses included failing to look at the broader policy context and placing too much emphasis on progressive school management as the dynamic of change, ignoring socio-economic status and offering no substantive detail on curriculum and pedagogy. the teaching and learning research programme was established alongside these developments, and in direct response to hargreaves call and the criticisms of other regulatory bodies of educational and pedagogical research as being small scale, irrelevant, inaccessible and of low quality (parsons & burkey, 2011). this was a £30 million initiative which ran from 1999-2009, managed by the economic and social research council, substantial in both scope and scale and including over 60 major projects involving more than 300 researchers. starting as a broad enterprise more interested in school improvement, in which researchers worked closely with practitioners to ensure the relevance and application of their findings to policy and practice and inform and enrich teaching and learning, in time it became more focused on research focused on increasing efficiency and effectiveness in pedagogy and in producing evidence informed pedagogic principles (james & pollard, 2011). in 2010, education secretary michael gove announced the coalition government had allocated £110 million to establish an education endowment fund to raise standards in underperforming schools. renamed the education endowment foundation (eef), this has become the biggest funder of education research in the uk, and much of its funding goes to non-university-based researchers (gorard, et al., 2017). the eef, whose teaching and learning toolkit has been available to schools since 2011, is currently one of the most influential evidence brokers in england and offers services in research, reviews, and consulting to provide “better” knowledge for “better” decisions. the eef is a charitable organization which, according to its website, “seeks to break the link between family income and educational achievement” (eef, 2020). it aims, amongst other things, “to raise the attainment of 3-18 year-olds, particularly those facing disadvantage by: (a) supporting teachers and senior leaders by providing free, independent and evidence-based resources – summaries and practical tools – designed to improve practice and boost learning; (b) generating evidence of what works to improve teaching and learning, funding rigorous trials of promising but untested programs and approaches; and (c) supporting schools, as well as early years and post-16 settings, across the country in scaling evidence to achieve the 104 global education review 10 (1-2) maximum possible benefit for young people” (eef, 2020). nordin and sundberg (2014) show how international organizations like the oecd, which administers and analyses the pisa comparative tests, are now highly influential, as rising international governance and transnational activities have lessened state sovereignty. within the oecd’s centre for educational research and innovation (ceri) led by tom schuller, a british academic, they began to focus on evidence-based policy research from 2003 and, in 2006, hosted a series of conferences and meetings about evidence-based policy research in education. in these, they were heavily influenced by the tlrp who had begun working with researchers including stephen gorard to explore the use of randomized controlled trials in education (oecd, 2007). throughout, the oecd’s tone has been largely neoliberal (el bouhali, 2015), increasing its role in recent years to provide explanations for national differences in pisa scores and to make policy recommendations (sellar & lingard, 2014). hargreaves’s speech suddenly brought the concept of evidence into the consciousness of educational research production in the british debate. in doing so, it is embedded in years of reform and in the coupling of scientific, political, and practical sub-societal values by institutionalization of information centers and networks. as a result, politicians looking to gain public support for their policies, even those serving dominant interests, could select data or research to justify them, and thereby appear impartial and concerned for the welfare of everyone. against this background, it also becomes clear how the question of the innerscientific scope of scientific knowledge is less discussed than the effects that are of interest. 3.3 from research knowledge to “evidence” in the german educational research discourse against the background that even the oecd did not use the word “evidence” in the german context in the 1990s, this chapter presents an exploratory approach to the circulation of words in educational research. to get a better insight into the evidence circulation in german educational research, the central database of educational research was consulted. it shows how the use of the term “evidenz” in german educational research has increased considerably in recent times (figure 1). the steady increase in the use of “evidence” can be marked in the transition to the 2000s. even if the respective context of term use cannot be discerned by such a simple count of a literature database. however, based on the 794 entries, at least thematizations can be read that are related to “evidence,” which are contextualized with the (new) developments of the discipline and science policy funding to be considered. the first publications recorded in the picture (1980-1990) concern psycholinguistics, language development and the history of poetry in the english classroom. evidence is used as thesis-confirming, empirical knowledge. in 1993, the term then appears in a title on the interactions of social management and education in austria. also, from 1993 on, papers on cognitive psychological and neurobiological issues can be found. these neurological publications provide the link to social medicine and evidence-based medicine while keywords with “medicine” only appear from 2006 onward. in particular, the “secured” knowledge of neurological research and brain research, the implications for pedagogical processes with follow-up discussions of what human beings are, the translation and circulation of “evidence” 105 what is morality and freedom, came to bear particularly at this time. educational research in germany as well as in english speaking countries has enthusiastically taken up and further differentiated neurological findings (becker, 2006; rose & abi-riched, 2014). 4 until then, “evidence” came to belong to the communicative fringe of the discipline. from around 2000 onward, there is a focus on human services, quality management, education, and higher education from the perspective of new management, educational reform from an economic perspective (internal efficiency, competition, investment) but also on technological means such as the use of computers. after 2005, questioning, critical positions on evidence-based practice can also be found. it is interesting to note that the article on social work (schnurr, 2005) speaks of the beginning, i.e., the first debating of an old theory-practice tradition with terms of treatment which were used in medicine. in parallel, however, promises of solutions to social inequality are also published that explicitly name “evidence” as a category of this solution. in the negotiation of both positions i.e., contributions to evidence as an empirical, educational policy and practical solution and 4 similar for the reception in psychology, which, however, as a cognitive science was even more in competition with neuroscience, see eckardt (2001). 5 “evidenz” is a keyword in fis-bildung. however, “evidence” was used as a general search term, so that insights into the titles and abstracts are also possible. fisbildung also accesses english-language databases. the evidence as a discussed irredeemable promise of salvation it becomes clear how the term itself is used normatively as well as reflexively within educational research discourses. thus, it moves into the consciousness and body of knowledge of the discipline. figure 1: search for “evidenz” in the german educational research literature database fis-bildung (n=794) 5 in addition, after 2000 the increase in educational, public, and scientific attention due to the pisa study can also be noted, at least in contemporary events (ertl, 2006). throughout the 1990s, a group of scholars who favored quantitative, empirical research methods labelled their type of research as empirische bildungsforschung (empirical educational research) with efforts to advance the “scientification” and “internationalization” with reference to global research standards (keiner, 2015; gross, hofbauer, & keiner, 2022). largescale assessments like pisa highlighted massive results were limited by the specification on german publications. a comparison with english-language databases was not made, as the data volume of english-language publications (for example, “evidence” limited to “education” at springerlink: 94724 entries; or eric: 88095 entries) would not be manageable. 106 global education review 10 (1-2) gaps in pupils' test results, participation opportunities in education and social mobility. through the accompanying massive media attention on the educational failure of an entire nation, the study pointed at quality issues of schools and teaching that were too little observed and too little observable in a standardized way. this meant that it was no longer just about the performance of the education system per se, but additionally about the performance of a science that is dedicated to improving the structures of educational processes. pisa therefore not only became a discourse and research catalyst for the empirical research traditions (zapp & powell, 2016), philosophical representatives of educational research also took up pisa references within the semantics on educational justice – even if these references were made through criticism and demarcation (vogel, 2016). this is also reflected in the publications of the literature database. in 2002, the first publication with reference to pisa and “evidence” appears, which deals with the reading performance of german pupils. from then on, publications with reference to “evidence” increase especially in the titles. critical perspectives also increase, which highlight the lack of subject orientation and pedagogical goal perspective in educational research due to the strong test and data focus. moreover, the scientific and public attention to pisa and the increased use of the concept of evidence is accompanied by funding for empirical educational research and processes of demarcation from science in education at the national level. such movements trigger criticism and skepticism, so that representatives of empirical educational research saw themselves in the position of responding to this criticism, to highlight the performance and limitations of evidence production within the scientific community (baumert & tillmann, 2016). the limitations are found particularly in the initiation of decisions and the uncertain implementation of decisions made outside the scientific scope. thus, “evidence” remains for the time being only on the side of the scientific production community itself and not on the side of the “effect.” 4. the circulation and (mis)understanding of “evidence” although the concept of evidence emerged as early as the 17th century as an epistemological and methodological concept, it is also as an expression of scientific efforts to improve knowledge production. moreover, while the term circulated widely in and between the sciences, it seems not to appear in the (german) philosophically oriented, humanistic science on education (beside the critics). in this context, links to what is visible (ersichtlich), the visualisation through representation (darstellung), could even be connected to a subject-oriented conception of bildung (selfformation) as well as science. rather, the concept of evidence marks a disciplinary development that is distinct from the nonmethodological if one considers the emergence and self-image of empirical educational research. while in german-speaking countries pisa strengthened the incipient use of evidence after the reception of neurological expertise, the “need for more evidence” with “value for money” (hargreaves, 1996a) discussions started in england before pisa, but influenced oecd recommendations on an international level. of particular interest in the oecd analysis was the insight that “evidence” was translated into various other german terms. the fact that the terms are used synonymously from english into german was apparently not common at all for a long time. terms and concepts of knowledge also have their own historical, linguistically, and culturally the translation and circulation of “evidence” 107 embedded “theory space.” this seems less obvious because such terms convey a supposedly clear idea of scientificity. the direct translation “evidence” into “evidenz” since the 90s and early 2000s without problematization illustrates this. nevertheless, subtle differences in usage can be seen based on the respective academic traditions and how they justify and position the need for evidence. in german-speaking empirical educational research the critical examination of “evidence” is given priority. the “formalized disciplinary discourse” thus remains, despite the possibility of coupling scientific test, effect, and educational policy. it remains bound to internal disciplinary communication and justification. in comparison, the evidence movement in england, set within the model of “pragmatically specialized professions,” has an institutional momentum of its own and is focused on effect in terms of what works and best practice. this means that although the term “evidence” has many theoretical, methodological, linguistic, social, and political possibilities for connections, the respective academic patterns of communication and interpretation stay relatively stable. rather, despite an increased reference to a circulating notion of knowledge that conveys the idea of scientificity but also demonstration and effect, the 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(2016). how to construct an organizational field: empirical educational research in germany, 1995–2015. european educational research journal, 15(5), 537– 557. https://doi.org/10.1177/147490411664142 2 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116641422 https://doi.org/10.1177/1474904116641422 what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 4 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: peters, lacey et al (2025). what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? global education review, 12 (2), 4-22. what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? lacey peters, mark nagasawa, maria mavrides calderon, abigail kerlin, helen frazier, beth ferholt, erica clarke yardy, marjorie brickley, and alisa algava abstract this empirically-grounded commentary questions the basis for new york city public schools’ (nycps) adoption of the teaching strategies products—the creative curriculum (cc) and teaching strategies gold—as the mandated curriculum and assessment systems for early childhood education (ece) programs administered by the new york city public schools. in an analysis shaped by our hybrid positionalities as early childhood educators, parents, policy makers, and researchers, we argue that this decision is a local case of neoliberalism’s simultaneous narrowing of educational quality and a transfer of public funding into private hands under the guise of the free market. our commentary, which is augmented by examples from our research and practice, begins with an overview of new york city’s (nyc) ece system, contextualized within national systems issues in ece. this provides important framing for discussing the evolution of nyc’s ece curricula and assessment as the city expanded its public preschool programs. we end by considering how u.s. ece was ensnared by the global education reform movement (germ), sounding a call to action for scholars, advocates, and educators to mobilize against a (seemingly) unassailable germ through organizing and coalition-building. keywords early childhood education, curriculum, assessment, policy, neoliberalism what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? elodia: personally, i like creative curriculum. for one, it’s all in the title. you are creative in your curriculum. you are able to—it wasn't like how… everything with ts gold or mts or whatever it’s called, that it’s like everything is almost structured. you click on the study, and then your lesson plans are— accsalia: generated. —a conversation with head start teachers, 2019 this excerpt comes from a focus group conversation with head start teachers in chicago, which encapsulates some of the key issues we discuss in this empirically-informed commentary on the new york city (nyc) public schools’ decision to require early childhood education (ece) programs it runs or funds to use the creative curriculum and the accompanying teaching strategies gold assessment system, perhaps the most widely used, commercial ece curriculum and assessment package in the u.s. (teaching strategies, 2023). this consequential policy decision by the nation’s largest school district is both a case example of the global education reform movement’s (germ) operations within ece and a cautionary illustration of the close relationship between germ and financial interests. by empirically-informed, we mean that this commentary is shaped by a commitment to evidence and accuracy over ideology and what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 5 opinion. while we have clear points of view, these are rooted in experiences and observations from our respective practice as educators, through informal conversations with students and colleagues in different contexts, by pooling our knowledge of the research on this curriculum, and via formal studies we have conducted with educators who are living the consequences of policy decisions made about them. put another way, if the evidence base for the nyc public schools’s decision was stronger, our commentary on it would be unnecessary. we begin our discussion with an overview of ece in the u.s. to suggest why the nyc case may have applicability to other areas of the u.s.—and potentially other national contexts. next, we provide a brief developmental sketch of the creative curriculum (cc) and what happened to the creative aspects of the curriculum (in brief, teaching strategies is owned by a private equity firm). however, our purpose is not just to raise attention to corporatism in ece, and to question whether profit motives belong in early childhood, but it is also to issue a call to action for educators, scholars, advocates, and families to join together in the complex work of building coalitions advocating for alternatives to education reforms that are cover for transfers of public funds into private hands, with no demonstrable benefit for children, educators, and society. a brief overview of early care and education in the u.s. in truth, it is a convenience to refer to ece in the u.s. as if it is uniform, when in fact early childhood education is a hodgepodge of federal, state, and local public funding and regulations resting on a shaky foundation of private, mostly for-profit programs, with the bulk of the sector’s funding coming from fees parents pay for child care as a service (the educationally-oriented might call this tuition; cochran, 2007). to provide a sense of this complexity, a little more explanation is needed. perhaps the most well-known federal ece program is head start, which has specific eligibility requirements, among these, family income below the federal poverty level, experiencing homelessness, and/or meeting eligibility guidelines for early childhood special education. head start is administered by the u.s. department of health and human services (dhhs), which provides grants that mostly go directly to community-based organizations or local governments. another major source of national funding comes from the child care and development fund (ccdf), which subsidizes childcare costs for families who meet income guidelines. the ccdf is also administered by dhhs but through an entirely different administrative structure that runs through states’ health departments, which monitor child care programs’ compliance with health and safety regulations. the u.s. department of education is also involved in ece because of the individuals with disabilities education act’s provisions for early intervention (infants and toddlers, birth through 3-years) and early childhood special education (3-to-5-years). in most states, early intervention operates separately from early childhood special education. even the u.s. department of agriculture has a hand in ece through its child and adult care food program, a key source of funding for programs’ nutrition services. further complicating matters, increasing numbers of states and cities are developing their own ece systems (friedmankraus, 2024; karoly et al., 2016). what is key to understand is that what some call a nonsystem has developed with minimal coordination among 6 global education review 12 (2) administrative agencies, resulting in sometimes competing policy objectives, different regulatory requirements, cultures, and resulting fissures within the field (gallagher et al., 2004; jones, 2023; nagasawa, 2020). it may be no surprise that creating more coherent, articulated, and adequately funded ece systems has been a longstanding dream for early childhood educators in the u.s. (barnett, 1993; jones, 2023; the white house, 2002). seeking ece’s holy grail in new york city in 2014, nyc mayor de blasio announced pre-k for all, which promised to “expand pre-k to more than 51,000” children across the city – over twice the number of children who had attended these programs the prior year (nyc office of the mayor [mayor’s office], 2014). while press releases are necessarily vague, the statement alludes to the mayor’s office working with the nyc department of education (doe) and “other city agencies,” such as offices within the nyc health department (mayor’s office, 2014). in 2017 the initiative expanded to include 3k for all, which moved the majority of ece programs that had been administered by the nyc administration for children’s services in what had been called early learns – early head start (infants and toddlers), head start (ages 3-5), federallyfunded contracted child care (including family child care), and nyc-funded preschool (memorandum of understanding, 2019). 1 in 2024 the nyc doe “rebranded” itself as the nyc public schools (chiusano, 2024). curricula and assessment as a part of pre-k for all, the doe developed units of study, which were aligned with nys early learning standards and the federal head start early learning outcomes framework. with the launch of 3k for all, the doe developed explorations, a separate curricular framework for three-year-olds, later adding connections (infant/toddler) and let’s play! (family child care) curricula. these resources were translated into the 11 languages most commonly spoken in nyc and were free to all programs. the curricula provided guidance about environment, culturally responsive booklists, routines, interactions and investigations, and scope and sequence, with the intention that each curricula would be used flexibly and responsively in a wide range of settings and communities (frazier, 2023; new york city public schools [nycps], 2024a).1 following a randomized controlled trial (20132015) using building blocks math curriculum and associated professional learning/coaching, the doe’s curricula were supplemented with building blocks (mattera et al., 2018). these curricula were supported with professional learning, led by instructional coaches and social workers, in which teachers and site leaders were encouraged to build relationships with other educators in their communities (nycps, 2024a). as might be expected in this kind of large-scale, politicized curricular implementation, the accompanying question often raised is, what are children learning? while an understandable question, assessment in ece is a fraught topic among educators and researchers about which approaches yield the best information, in essence whether teachers’ what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 7 observations can be trusted or whether objective, direct measurements are preferable, arguments that might be understood as a “chimera of validity,” complex technicalideological debates that have no single, simple answer—anathema in the political sphere (ackerman & coley, 2012; baker, 2013; perry & meisels, 1996). the compromise in nyc was an assessment detente that allowed programs to choose from among the most commonly used ece authentic assessments (ones that consider demonstrated development and learning within the context of curricula and classrooms; leong et al., 2004): the work sampling system, child observation record, and teaching strategies gold (nycps, 2024b). new mayor, new priorities in new york city, as with some other large cities’ school districts, the public schools are under “mayoral control.” in general, this speaks to direct influence by mayors’ offices over schools through appointed chief executive officers and school boards, in contrast with the majority of public schools in the u.s., which are governed by elected school boards who oversee schools’ operations (lipman, 2011; new york state education department [nysed], 2024). therefore, when new mayors are elected, they bring their priorities with them. such was the case with bill de blasio’s successor, eric adams, who campaigned on post-pandemic economic recovery, revitalizing social life, policing, and a perspective on schooling from “birth to profession” (fitsimmons et al., 2022; zimmer, 2021). one of mayor adams’s key education initiatives was nyc reads, a “historic curriculum shift [...] that will bring proven science-of-reading and phonics-based methods to all of our public-school students” (office of the mayor, 2023, para. 2). the initiative included the bright starts in early childhood programs, which centered on adopting the cc and its accompanying teaching strategies gold (gold) assessment system (para. 6). what is the creative curriculum? the cc’s origins are in its primary creator diane trister dodge’s experiences as education coordinator with a head start program in rural mississippi in 1966 (dodge, 2023). in a recent talk given at yale university she explained images of building the programs from the “ground up,” the teachers and community were so excited about head start and built their own equipment [...] you can see [referring to a photo of a playground] how creative communities were [...] it really was a civil rights program, and it really was an empowering program (dodge, 2023, 5:50-6:10; 6:15-6:18). because of the war on poverty’s ethos of “maximum feasible participation,” that is, community members having a say in decisions affecting them, community members were hired as program staff and teachers (kagan, 2002). this was the impetus for dodge’s creation of a “training program” that provided, “a picture [...] about how young children learn and how you set up an environment [...] every aspect of teaching [preschoolers]” (dodge, 2023, 7:40-7:50). in 1970 dodge moved to washington, dc and, in her work with head start teachers there, noticed how often she was helping them reorganize their classrooms to reduce “behavior problems [...] the next day teachers would say, ‘oh my gosh, the children’s behavior changed overnight, just by how we had set up, reorganized’” (dodge, 2023, 10:49-11:14). dodge took before and after photographs of this work and presented these in slide shows to other educators. based upon audience interest, she developed a film strip called, “room 8 global education review 12 (2) arrangement as a teaching strategy” (dodge, 2023). unable to get interest from educational publishers, she directly marketed it “pretending” that there was a company called teaching strategies (dodge, 2023). ultimately teaching strategies developed cc texts for supervisors, professional developers, and teachers (dodge & godhammer, 1988; dodge et al., 1988; dodge et al., 2000; dodge et al., 2002; dombo et al., 1997), including an assessment called the cc developmental continuum assessment system [developmental continuum], which rested on teachers’ documented observations and focused, ongoing collection of work samples illustrating children’s development in areas like language and literacy, mathematics, social and emotional development (dodge et al, 2001). the developmental continuum is the predecessor of the gold assessment announced as a part of the bright starts initiative. by 2023 teaching strategies called the cc “the most widely used preschool program in the nation” (teaching strategies, 2023). a slippery research foundation mayor adams’s announcement of bright starts called the cc a “research-based program” (mayor’s office, 2023, para. 6). however its research base, as is often the case in education, is far less certain. while teaching strategies (2013) self-published an “independent,” “gold standard,” “effectiveness study,” the u.s. department of education’s institute of education sciences (2013) analysis concluded that the cc had “no discernible effects” on key early literacy skills, specifically “oral language,” “print knowledge,” and “phonological 2 all names are pseudonyms. processing” (p. 1). a later brookings institute synthesis found an “overall lack of empirical support” for the cc, although this review importantly noted the limited number of studies included in their analysis (phillips et al., 2017, p. 40). the company’s marketing effectiveness has obscured a research base still in its infancy. early childhood educators’ analyses what is missing in top-down debates among researchers and policy makers about the right curricula and assessments (and how to get teachers to implement these with fidelity), are bottom-up policy analyses from educators. to provide a sense of these, we share educators’ perspectives from two separate studies, one conducted in 2018-2019 with head start teachers in chicago and another, currently underway, with early childhood educators from across nyc. returning to the 2019 focus group conversation that opened our paper, elodia: [...] with creative curriculum, you were able to become creative. you were able to put your own spin and twist and things on that…. i wouldn't say fidelity, but— 2 accsalia: it is fidelity. carmen: [...] we know that creative curriculum and mts [my teaching strategies is the online user interface] is because of the funders… louisa: […] we have to generate so many reports and documentation. accsalia: exactly. it's like they base everything around it, so when an observer comes out, that's what they look for. they look for the question of what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 9 the day, which is a very limited question. it's like, what? then you're expected to do the [curriculum] web design off of that.3 diana: yeah. they want to see the web. elodia: kids lose interest real quick. accsalia: it's like a tracking tool. their discussion centered on how the cc has changed over time—and their assessment of these changes and their effects on their teaching and children’s learning. from its humble beginnings as a film strip, the cc has shifted online, blurring the distinction between curriculum and assessment. the reports these teachers were discussing are based upon ratings of children’s development for 38 objectives in nine areas: social-emotional, physical, language, english language acquisition, cognitive, literacy, science and technology, mathematics, and the arts. many of the objectives have additional indicators. for instance, “demonstrates positive approaches to learning” has five indicators: (1) attends and engages, (2) persists; (3) solves problems; (4) shows curiosity and motivation; and (5) shows flexibility and inventiveness in thinking (teaching strategies, 2024a). these ratings are completed three times per year, and in most programs there is a requirement that documentation (e.g., photographs, observation notes, or scanned work samples) are uploaded into the system to substantiate the ratings. while there is a logic to this process that is in keeping with common notions of best practice in ece, their discussion also raises important 3 a curriculum web is a visual tool for brainstorming and planning topical explorations with children. these can be a way of assessing children’s prior questions about what this system is really for: information for teaching and program improvement or surveillance? the doe way? this issue of constant monitoring and surveillance undermining teachers’ and children’s engagement in learning is echoed in the current study with teachers in nyc, which seeks to understand their experiences of the bright starts initiative. in interviews with 25 nyc prek for all teachers, they reported missing crucial moments of interaction with children because the teachers were so focused on the need to capture data for the required gold. for instance, rachel shared in an interview, “i feel like i'm less engaged with them because i'm focusing on taking all the data every second of every day, and it puts a lot of stress on me [...].” in marcela’s evaluation, the curriculum is, [...] hard to follow and not engaging. the [provided] books’ plots are so convoluted. kids lose interest. [...] they are too long. the level is so high for prek. i use them but have to paraphrase them. i know that misses the point of “follow the print” and make the “text-toword connection.” i try to at least use one book of mine that i know would be a hit. those are my secret books...the ones the kiddos love. and forget about the kids that are not speaking english. they really struggle with those long incoherent books. sorry, it just makes me so sad. knowledge of a topic, teaching children to think about connections, and exploration of what they would like to learn about (see helm & katz, 2001) 10 global education review 12 (2) marcela raised multiple, important points. first, the doe’s previous curriculum was available in multiple languages, while the cc is only offered in spanish and english—a decadesold concern raised about universal curricularassessment approaches like the cc that are not developed to sustain and honor emergent multilingual learners’ cultural and linguistic assets (michael-luna & heimer, 2011). second, marcela’s felt need to use “secret books” suggests how prioritization of assessment can make teaching incidental—or subversive—a theme shared by alex, i try to sneak their favorite things, but i’m not going to lie, i’m in constant fear that my director will say, why are you doing that? also, i feel tense about it, like i’m doing something wrong by adapting. my ic [instructional coordinator, a coach from the doe] or director may not approve, and i feel torn between doing the curriculum or doing my thing. my director was very clear that she is afraid that the doe feels we are not following what they asked. so i don’t want her to get mad.” mica offered an additional perspective on implementation costs, i feel like there are times we think about what it means for the teacher to have to follow something so scripted. and i know it is stripping me of my brain power, like my value. but have we thought about what it does to the kids? they are learning to accept something incoherent, irrelevant, because “i say so.” i think that is what kills me about this. that the kids are losing those aha moments, you know? the ability to tell us what they love, what they want to learn…like when we did the ball unit and we asked them what they wanted to learn about ball, a girl told me, “i don’t want to learn about balls.” what was i supposed to say? “too bad?” that is what is the main issue. what the teachers in these two studies, from different times and places, have shared triangulates with other research. in kim’s (2016) analysis, gold changed the nature of teachers’ roles from being developmental guides of young children to deskilled instruments of what shore and wright (1999) called “audit culture” (for related analyses see michael-luna & heimer, 2011; peters & graves, 2021). this compliance orientation, “the doe way” (peters & graves, 2021, p. 28), not only diverts teachers’ limited time and attention away from teaching during the school day, it can result in “time creep” (i.e., entering documentation outside of work hours), threats to validity (cabell et al., 2009), increased cognitive load, and, as marcela, alex, and mica suggest, exacerbated pre-existing workplace stress that can have multiplied negative effects on teachers and children (hindeman & bustamante, 2019). discussion: ece and the global education reform movement (germ) to this point, our focus has been on describing one curricular-policy decision in one locale; however, the answer to our guiding question: what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? is best understood as a case study of the germ at work. our earlier account of the cc’s development is incomplete. while teaching strategies may have begun as a “pretend” company in the 1970s, it was sold in 2018 to summit partners, a private equity firm, who saw early childhood as a “distinct what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 11 opportunity to make a profound impact on educational, social and economic outcomes both for individuals and society as a whole” (summit partners, 2024). in 2021, nasdaq announced, “kkr to snap up teaching strategies” (bose, 2021). what is private equity and what is it doing in ece? private equity firms, which control more than $6 trillion in the u.s., are companies that purchase businesses, restructure them, and then resell them to provide profits to their investors, which may include pension funds (morran & petty, 2022). in recent years, private equity firms’ involvement in the ece sector has increased, with eight of the largest child care chains in the u.s. owned by private equity—and growing while the rest of the sector may be contracting (goldstein, 2022; harris, 2024; haspel, 2023). as we mentioned earlier in this paper, the majority of ece in the u.s. is privately operated, with high costs, low wages to staff, and low profitability (helburn et al., 1995). why would these firms be interested in what is generally accepted to be a small margin sector? suzanne helburn, an economist who has studied child care, explains that ece is an example of a “market failure,” that is, a “failure to produce what consumers want at low cost” (helburn et al., 1995, p. 17). one solution to market failures is increasing public funding, which in ece could address tensions that exist between providing high quality programs (which largely mean the high costs of adequately staffed programs that pay professionals adequately) at rates that parents can afford (helburn et al., 1995; lash & mcmullen, 2008). with costs comparable to college tuition, very few families can afford child care out of pocket (goldstein, 2022). private equity’s interest becomes clearer when considering increased public funding (federal, state, and local) for ece in the u.s. (approximately $13.37 billion in 2023, friedman-kraus et al., 2024). while some of this funding goes to school districts and non-profit organizations, ece lacks the facilities-funding mechanisms that public schools have, making a “mixed delivery system” necessary—meaning that expanding services requires that administrative agencies contract with community based organizations, which can include non-profits, private schools, sole proprietor child care businesses, and the large child care chains (garver et al., 2023; nagasawa, 2020). viewed in this light, ece may be becoming the “cash cow” (harris, 2024) that a 1977 new york times column presciently suggested it would be, explaining that kindercare’s founder envisioned it being, “to the preschool child what mcdonald's was to fast food and holiday inn to the salesman's one‐ night stand” (lelyveld, 1977, para. 2). the column goes on to illustrate the entrepreneurial mindset of “the colonel sanders of child care for profit,” perry mendel, who saw in it, “…a great captive market….manufacturers may even pay kinder-care for the right to test market their products in its centers” (lelyveld, 1977, para. 3, para. 6). however, today’s reality differs from mendel’s vision. teaching strategies is not paying to have its products tested. it is being paid to test children. however, just how much teaching strategies is receiving from nyc taxpayers is unclear—let alone how much public funding it receives from head start, states’ preschools, and private child care across the country. however, there is some basis for considering this. perchild licensing costs for gold, which do not include prices for curricular materials, are publicly available for some states, for example 12 global education review 12 (2) $11.45 in colorado and $15.05 in vermont (colorado department of education, 2024; teaching strategies, 2024b). because the perchild cost in nyc is not public, we are cautious about making estimations, but the nycps (2023) projected that school year 2025 would enroll between 118,700 and 127,300 children, with a capacity for 140,000 children. neoliberalism and germ in our analysis, which we assure is leading towards practical ends, the current developments in nyc are best seen as a local illustration of global political-economic forces that are often described as neoliberalism and its expression in global education reform movements (germ). neoliberalism is a term that is widely used but is under-discussed. in our understanding this speaks to a contemporary ideological kaleidoscope of sometimes paradoxical elements: libertarian antigovernmentalism, conservatism’s nostalgia for social order, and contemporary liberalism’s progressive visions of social improvement through scientific and technical innovation–all bound together by an underlying faith that free market logics and trickle-down economics will lift all boats (gledhill, 2005; lipman, 2011). in u.s. education this can be seen in calls to liberate educators from the burdens of overregulation through the creation of charter schools, improvement of traditional public education through standards, accountability, and increased competition, which in practice is often a transfer of public funding into private hands (baker & miron, 2015; lipman, 2011). importantly, pauline lipman (2011), analyzing school reforms in chicago, illustrates how neoliberal ideology pervades policies that are often thought of as separate but which, instead, act in ensemble telling tales of failure, decay, and danger: housing, economic development, policing, and education–with the end result being undermined social institutions, privatization of services, and racial containment. gledhill (2005), writing of são paolo, notes that these dynamics are often masked in celebrations of multicultural participation, inclusion, and empowerment but with no underlying structural change. while seemingly far away from ece’s children’s gardens, it bears remembering that ece, while marginal within the broader germ project, has long been within the education reform gaze, take for instance school readiness was goal one of the goals 2000: educate america act of 1994 and the world bank’s (2019) interest in early childhood as the “foundations of human capital” (p. 3, see also penn, 2002). on a final note, in interesting contrast with more typical curricular “push down” from elementary school into ece (harmon & viruru, 2018), teaching strategies has begun marketing gold for vertical integration with kindergarten-third grade (teaching strategies, 2024c, 2024d). call to action it would be understandable to see our account of the cc as another example of neoliberal, capitalist, and germ inevitability— and in honesty we have had similar feelings. however, the opportunity to come together from across institutions to discuss these issues has clarified for us that the (seemingly) unassailable germ has been a movement of people, albeit often powerful ones. therefore, it can be resisted through persistent organizing, negotiating differences of perspective, and coalitionbuilding. towards this end, we present two broad and related principles for consideration. first, those of us who seek to organize must help each other to disrupt ritualized what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 13 interaction: role-performative, sloganeering, and anti-dialogic exchanges that construct good and bad guys, winners and losers (freire, 2004; goffman, 2017; nagasawa, 2020). examples of this idea can be found in the comments sections across social media, ones where each side’s arguments can be predicted almost verbatim. our case example also runs the risk of falling into this trap. within our group, some of us are proponents of the nycps’s old curriculum which, based upon direct experience with it, allowed for flexibility, was translated into multiple languages, and was free—but it had not yet been researched. the doe’s argument, gleaned from meetings with department officials (one of which lasted three hours), was that the cc, as a “research-based curriculum,” would promote equity for children, who often move and have to adjust to an entirely different curriculum in their new setting. we could, as we did earlier, respond with evidence that belies claims about the cc and gold’s research base, its limited cultural/linguistic responsiveness, and concerns about curricula-by-algorithm, but this either/or debate leads to a circular impasse, which brings us to a second proposition. this work must be anchored in difficult commitments to resist one-best-way, purityoriented stances that often derail organizing efforts (lakoff, 2014; sen, 2003). linguist george lakoff’s (2014) popular translation of his research on ideology and language discusses foci that divide activists: socioeconomics (primary focus on class), identity politics (infighting over pieces of the pie), environmentalism (earth first), civil liberties (protecting against threats to freedom), spirituality (from observant to atheist), and antiauthoritarianism (resistance to everything). within power politics, advocacies that identify more strongly with one or others of these, such as civil liberties or environmental groups, rarely mobilize their members for others’ causes. what inhibits this collaboration? according to lakoff (2014), it is a failure to see how concerns for seemingly discrete issues actually share a common vision of a nurturing society. additionally, rinku sen (2003) notes that traditions in organizing, for instance labor movements, have sexist and racist roots that must be addressed but which adds additional complexity to the trust building needed to sustain collective action. what if, recognizing that school reforms can be viewed as part of a wider neoliberal agenda (lipman, 2011), different advocacies mobilized their people for affordable housing, economic development, safety for all residents, education, and civic engagement? final thoughts: organizing for what? however, the key questions that must always be addressed are: organizing for what, who else needs to be involved, how will priorities be set, how will these be communicated with various constituencies, and how will progress be gauged? because we are a small group, our final thoughts are in no way intended as complete answers but rather as starting points for additional, action-oriented, conversations. to the first question, what? there is existing work that can be built upon. for instance, the center for the study of child care employment (cscce, 2022) has developed the early educator engagement and empowerment toolkit (toolkit) for early childhood educators—the “best spokespeople about the conditions under which they work and what they need in order to thrive” (p. 4). the toolkit provides talking points and recommendations for many of the major issues facing the field: understanding who makes up 14 global education review 12 (2) the ece workforce, racial disparities within the profession, barriers in professional pathways, working conditions they face, the role of public funding in ece, and the need for better data (cscce, 2022). these talking points can be used to support local groups’ advocacy, which we will illustrate with examples from our analysis. working conditions the toolkit provides details about early childhood educators’ working conditions that are related to our earlier discussion of the field’s economics. for example, lack of funding often means no paid sick leave, vacation, retirement savings, and limited staffing. our analysis suggests other ways working conditions are undermined in ece through curricular and assessment policy decisions. remembering some of the teachers’ accounts of nyc’s cc implementation: rachel (“it puts a lot of stress on me”), alex (“i’m in constant fear”), and mica’s ( “it’s stripping me of my brain power, like my value”) experiences which are broader than any single curriculum or assessment and speak to the damaging potential to educators based upon how these are implemented (frazier, 2023, 2024; kim, 2016; michael-luna & heimer, 2011; peters & graves, 2021). a common dilemma is that problems are relatively easy to generate, but identifying promising alternatives can be hard. humane assessment in the last year of mayor de blasio’s term, the nyc doe (2020) launched a one-year “learning stories authentic assessment pilot,” of a “narrative approach to assessment that acknowledges and welcomes teacher, child, and family perspectives” (nyc doe, 2020). unlike the major authentic assessments in use in the u.s., which have become data warehouses of decontextualized notes and work samples, learning stories use letters to children that describe and illustrate (photos and other documentation are included) what they were doing and share thoughts about where their learning may go next (frazier, 2024). furthermore, they are meant to be shared with children and their caregivers the day they are written. because this may seem unfamiliar, it is worth sharing one letter in full, dear cecilia, during the tuesday afternoon work time, you chose to go to the cozy loft. as you were looking out at the children from the loft, you noticed some cardboard, beads, and pipe cleaners in the art area. you came down and asked if you could join the activity. first, you sorted out the beads with the letters on them and strung them on to a pipe cleaner. then, you made your pipe cleaner stick into the cardboard like a rainbow. next, you decided to make bracelets for the children in the class. children were so happy to receive your gifts. they each asked me to help them fasten the bracelet on their wrists. you were so thoughtful to use our materials to make gifts for the children. you have such a kind, generous, and joyful spirit, cecilia. thank you for being a loving member of the hawthorn community. what learning is happening here? as you strung the beads onto the pipe cleaner, you exercised the muscles in your hands. this will help you with your writing and drawing. the stronger your hand muscles get, the easier it will be for you to draw shapes and write letters. cecilia, when you were doing this activity, you also focused for a long what happened to the creative in the creative curriculum? 15 time—over 30 minutes! you kept on stringing beads to make bracelets. developing the ability to focus and pay attention is an important part of becoming a student. most of all, when you were doing this work, you showed that you care for your friends. what’s next? cecilia, after they received your bracelets, many children became excited about stringing beads. i think i will look for more beads to add to our art area so we can continue to make jewelry and sculptures. i am also wondering if you might like to draw pictures or make cards for your friends and family. from, helen (frazier, 2024, p. 4) cecelia’s mother read her the learning story that night and the next day, “her eyes were shining with recognition and pride” from being seen (p. 5). it was still early in the year and documenting her generosity was a wholly different kind of assessment—not just of one child’s abilities but also of the classroom’s developing culture and climate (frazier, 2024). unfortunately, the pilot project was interrupted by the pandemic and did not continue after the change in administrations. research collectives concurrent with nyc’s preschool expansion, the new york city early childhood research network (network) formed. this is an unusual research-practice partnership (rpp), not only because of its focus on ece but also because it is made up of the doe, nyc health department, and researchers from across nyc to address questions emerging from the city’s emerging ece system, including pay inequities (mavrides, 2022); educators’ well-being (nagasawa, 2022), and teachers’ experiences with authentic assessment (peters & graves, 2021). those of us who were members of the network had begun conversations with the nyc doe about how to draw lessons (experiential and outcomes-oriented) from the learning stories pilot. while the pandemic also affected the network, along with the precarities of grant funding, among the observations we have made from being part of this rpp is the untapped potential of working across institutional and methodological boundaries to address questions of concern to educators and policy makers. in addition to studying the learning stories pilot as a potential alternative approach, there were important questions about the implementation of the nyc doe-developed curricula, and there are currently important questions about the implementation, experiences, and outcomes of the bright starts initiative that would include not just the common is it working? question but also working for whom/not, how, why, under what conditions and so forth that should be pursued through multi-method, participatory, design-based research, which emphasizes research with, rather than on or about (bang & vossoughi, 2016). teacher power finally, the cscce’s (2022) toolkit culminates with reminders about ece’s traditions of collective action, such as the worthy wage campaign (wwc) which focused on: 1) creating collective voice; 2) agitating for tangible respect (i.e., compensation and benefits); and 3) promoting access to affordable, high-quality ece for all children (wwc, 1993). the toolkit also highlights contemporary organizing happening in washington, d.c. (under3dc.org) 16 global education review 12 (2) and north carolina (ncearlyeducationcoalition.org). in nyc, people’s early childhood began organizing following mayor adams’s attempt to eliminate early childhood instructional coaches and social workers who played important roles supporting the city’s early childhood educators, children, and their families. additionally, we are aware of ece on the move, an alliance of 600 home based early childhood educators (eceonthemove.org), new yorkers united for child care, a parent-led group organizing for free child care in nyc (https://www.united4childcare.org/), and the brooklyn coalition of early childhood programs, which formed as a support network during the pandemic (https://www.bcecp.org/; pinto-mckeen et al., 2023). we suspect that similar grassroots organizing is occurring elsewhere across the u.s. imagine if these groups were connected with each other. what if they were also coordinating with national early childhood advocacy organizations, such as the national association for the education of young children, child care aware, or the children’s defense fund? what if this developing ece coalition was allying with other collectives, such as black lives matter, the poor people’s campaign, or the human rights campaign? we are under no illusion that any of this would come about simply or painlessly but as farmworker organizer larry itliong argued about rights and justice, “you’ve got to make that come about. they are not going to give it to you.” (guillermo, 2015). references ackerman, d. j., & coley, r. j. 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(2023). ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes.” global education review, 10 (1-2), 22-35. ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” frank jacob nord universitet abstract ernst papanek (1900–1973) was an austrian pedagogue who, between 1938 and 1940, was responsible for children’s homes in france he directed for the ose (œuvre de secours aux en-fants). in these children’s homes at montmorency, close to paris, papanek tried to treat the traumatized children who had lost their homes, their parents, and those who struggled with their own identities that had been called into question by ideological propaganda and personal experiences alike. papanek decided to give their souls a new home and not only intended to keep them physically alive but also to use a new form of therapy that was supposed to treat the children as a group. in 1940, papanek had to escape from france, via spain and portugal, to the united states, and he tried to rescue the children by bringing them across the atlantic as well. however, when he advocated for the idea to continue their treatment as a group in a children’s home like the ones he had run in france, he met with resistance, as such approaches were uncommon in the united states, where social workers sought to separate the children and have them adopted into different foster families nationwide. this paper describes this transatlantic “struggle of ideas” when it comes to the role of group therapy for traumatized children and the positive impact of such children living collectively in homes. keywords ernst papanek, ose, jewish refugee children, child transports, pedagogical transnationalism, translation of pedagogical concepts introduction ernst papanek (1900–1973) was a jew, an austro-american socialist, and a progressive educator who, according to his wife, helene, felt an obligation to make the world a better place: “he had an exaggerated sense of social justice” (papanek, 1979, cited in maier, 2021, p. 24). regardless of the many lives of jewish refugee children papanek saved during the second world war and his impact as an educator and educational scholar, works about his life and impact are far from numerous (göbetzberger, 2005; hansen-schaberg, 2000; hansenschaberg, 2009; hansen-schaberg, papanek & rühl-nawabi, 2015; jacob, 2021; krohn, 2006; maier, 2021). gustav (later gus) papanek and his wife hanna (née kaiser) would later emphasize the important role ernst papanek played in the lives of the many children he worked with over the decades in different children’s homes and educational institutions on both sides of the atlantic: “it was extraordinary how eagerly ernst papanek combined his profession as a teacher and his vocation as a democratic socialist: for him, education and politics flowed seamlessly into one another. he saw his educational work with young people in socialist organizations as an extension of his political conviction that it is possible to transform the world through enlightenment and democracy” (papanek & papanek, 2015). papanek’s pedagogical views were highly influenced by the works of the danish psychologist irma kessel and the individual ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 23 psychology (individualpsychologie) of alfred adler, which papanek also applied during the second world war when he took care of jewish refugee children in france (kessel, 1937; rühlnawabi, 2015). the young girls and boys who had escaped national socialism and made it to france were traumatized because they “had seen their parents murdered and beaten and humiliated and had themselves been systematically terrorized and publicly loathed. in a strange country, they were strangers and afraid. in the truest sense of the word, they were orphans” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 95). hitler’s national socialist hordes and stormtroopers had “appl[ied] the psychology of terror on a scale so massive as to be unprecedented and … appl[ied] it, systematically, against children” (ibid., p. 97). for papanek, it was therefore naturally important to take care of the shattered souls of the children who had just arrived in france, a foreign country, where they would live in the children’s homes of the ose (œuvre de secours aux enfants), separated from their parents, if the latter were still alive (papanek, 1943a; papanek, 1968). he placed the children in homes run by the ose before he had to leave due to the german invasion of france in 1940. he would later try to save “his children” and place them into similar facilities in the united states; once there, however, he could not get the authorities to approve his idea for progressive children’s homes, especially since it would not have been easy to translate the concept to match the experiences and standards of the us context. there, children’s homes had not been used for similar purposes, but were rather linked to the housing of juvenile delinquents. there was obviously a problem with translating papanek’s own experiences and pedagogical concepts, or, what reinhart koselleck termed “erfahrungsraum,” in order to match the american expectations, the “erwartungshorizont” for pedagogical work environments and existent concepts (koselleck, 2010, pp. 349–375). the present contribution will, therefore, after a first theoretical reflection about the “translation” of pedagogical concepts, provide a critical insight into the specific concepts papanek had applied in france before taking a closer look at the issues he faced when he intended to transplant his childcare-related concepts in the united states. it will thereby highlight the extent to which educational as well as pedagogical concepts confronted national boundaries and made the arrival of immigrants in the us, often as refugees during the 1940s, challenging, to say the least. lost in translation or: the challenges of pedagogical internationalization in the 21st century, education is very much globalized and curricula, as well as pedagogical concepts, are debated and often translated so that theoretical reflections could lead to practical adaptation. however, as mckinnon, hammond, and foster emphasize with regard to the “internationalisation of the curriculum,” the “translation from theory into practice … seems still to be problematic” (2019, p. 138). while international knowledge and intercultural awareness are particularly promoted in modern day education (jones & killick 2007; leask 2015), educators, like papanek, whose case shall later serve as a concrete example, struggled in the past to gain attention and acceptation for their ideas, who had been imported from a different pedagogical as well as national context. in contrast to the situation in the 21st century, when “there is an emphasis on developing learners and teachers who are sensitive to diverse ways of perceiving and using language and are able to consider the potential impact of cultural differences on meaning-making processes,” (chen & 24 global education review 10 (1-2) mcconachy, 2021, p. 1) papanek’s situation was very much influenced by a lack of international exchange about pedagogical concepts, a nationalist and almost seclusive interpretation of education for purposes that should serve the existent social and normative order (stratton, 2016, 1–15), and the unwillingness to debate pedagogical concepts that would emphasize otherness instead of negating it. the international transfer of, i.e. the translation of pedagogical concepts, demands “close attention to patterns of linguistic variability, the cultural meanings that speakers tend to attribute to linguistic forms and practices, and ways that one’s communicative preferences and underlying assumptions may be different to others” (chen & mcconachy, 2021, p. 2). papanek’s good intents were consequently challenged in the 1940s by existing assumptions about children’s homes that were quite different from his own, but the translation of his concepts “across linguistic and cultural boundaries” (ibid.) should become quite problematic. it is actually not easy to transplant theoretical concepts about education and/or childcare, as the latter would usually be a specific consequence of national developments, transnational events (war, migration, state formation, etc.), educational trends, and last but not least, the respective intentions related to the concepts (engelmann, hemetsberger, & jacob, 2022). in the specific context of the united states in the 1940s, the idea to collectively keep children in a shared and professionally supervised home environment was uncommon— in contrast to europe, where in different countries children’s homes had been used for decades (atkinson, 1987). therefore, the existing considerations were not at all congruent with papanek’s experiences and future imaginations. consequently, he was unable to “culturally translate” his considerations and his approach. in the united states, orphanages existed since the 18th century (carp, 2014), but the idea that children who needed protection and care, possibly due to traumatic experiences, would live together in a children’s home, was relatively unknown or at least unpopular. when the second world war had caused a massive influx of parentless children, the authorities would usually respond to the situation with a plan to find families for the unaccompanied young immigrants to reach a fast integration and in a way “americanization.” although “[t]he turn of the 20th century [had been] a time of profound transition, both in the status of children in american life and in the role of the federal government in child policy” (yarrow, 2009, p.1), and regardless of the fact that “the federal government was becoming much more involved in implementing policies to promote the welfare of americans, young and old” (ibid.), it was the concept of the family as the ideal environment for a child’s upbringing that dominated american society. however, some leftist intellectuals and activists, like papanek in his youth in vienna, had debated and experimented with other forms of collective education and upbringing. when he brought his knowledge about the ose children’s homes with him to the united states, papanek could simply not translate it into english, as it were not only the words, but their national and cultural interpretation that failed to emphasize the value of the progressive approaches that had been successfully tested in france before the german invasion. the fact that a translation in this particular setting demanded more than a verbal process, but included some form of acculturation of pedagogical concepts, made the situation complex. while papanek was surprised about the unacceptance of a progressive concept, the american partners did not understand why the ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 25 austrian pedagogue promoted something that was considered unsuitable for american society and its high praise for the family as the elementary space for the healthy and secure upbringing of children. the progressive aspects of the children’s homes were consequently lost in translation, and regardless of his successes in the past, papanek was doomed to look for an audience that would actually understand his approach and arguments. although his achievements in france, which will now be taken into closer consideration, were without any doubt tremendous, papanek could not find the right way to translate his argument to attract wider support for his wish to keep the children together as a community, whose members shared similar experiences, a past, and therefore the same identity. papanek and the children’s homes in france papanek left austria during the february uprising in 1934 (weinzierl, 1994; bauer, 2019; weingand, 2020) and became an active member of the social democratic party in exile (schwarz, 2008). in 1938, his wife and children followed, and the family was reunited in paris. lene had already organized tickets to leave europe for new york city, but papanek was approached by the ose, whose representatives intended to hire the austrian educator to take care of children of political refugees, whose number had increased since the national socialists had taken power in germany. since papanek shared some of the experiences of the children, it was probably easier for him to connect, as the situation the young girls and boys found themselves in, was not needed to be “translated” for the pedagogue. he was supposed to oversee the ose’s children’s homes in france as the organization’s leading director, and the fact that papanek would have a “free hand”—in contrast to his later us experiences—with regard to the running of the facilities and would at the same time be able to save some money for the start of his family’s new life in the united states eventually made him accept the offer (papanek with linn, 1975, pp. 33–37). he later explained his decision in some detail: “to be perfectly frank, i took on the job originally for a limited time and for the most practical of all reasons: to put aside a little money. i was myself a political refugee … it was not as a political man that the ose wanted me, of course, but as a teacher” (ibid., p. 33). after visiting the children’s home in montmorency, near paris, he decided to take the job and stay in france for another six months. in his words, although “i had been basing my argument to lene solely on the opportunity it would give us to save up some money, i also had the queasy feeling that this was not a very good time for a man who had done so much talking about standing up to hitler to be running off to america” (ibid., p. 42). papanek’s progressive approaches would eventually lead to some conflicts, especially with regard to the running of facilities for orthodox jewish children, but the whole situation changed dramatically after the night of broken glass in november 1938. maier emphasizes in this regard that “[t]he children’s home project in montmorency took on a whole new meaning overnight. instead of just helping children who were already in the country, the ose and ernst papanek decided to bring children at risk to france” (2021, p. 96). one could argue, that papanek’s work was “politically translated” as well, since violent antisemitism in germany had created an increased necessity for children to be brought out. many more jewish refugee children would soon arrive in france, and the ose was not the only organization to organize transports for them. the central child reception office (bureau central d’accueil aux enfants), the rothschild foundation (fondation 26 global education review 10 (1-2) de rothschild), and the israelite committee for children from germany and central europe (comité israélite pour les enfants venant d’allemagne et d’europe centrale) also tried to get jewish children to safety, and the first transports arrived in paris in february and march 1939 after the french government had issued 200 visas for them (maier, 2020). unlike those who were brought on children’s transports (kindertransporte) to britain (göpfert, 1999; benz, 2003; fast, 2010), the ones who arrived in france were supposed to remain together as a group and would therefore be housed in the ose’s children’s homes. papanek could house some of the children at the four homes in montmorency: the villa helvetia, the villa la chesnaie, les tourelles, and la petite colonie. financially, the ose and its task of building new homes relatively quickly was supported by the baroness pierre de gunzbourg, “the french wife of a russian-born aristocrat” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 44), who provided 40,000 francs. regardless of the baroness’ claim that she would not be willing to spend any more of her money on children’s homes, papanek realized that she was a real philanthropist and would continue to support him and the ose: it was really very funny. the baroness was an imposing woman, with hatchetlike features that she refused to make the slightest attempt to pretty over, and a warm, beautiful heart that she was always trying to hide. … three weeks later, she gave us another forty thousand francs to buy a castle on the outskirts of montmorency. before the year was over, she had bought castles for us all over france at a cost of more than a million francs and was serving very actively as the chairman of our board (ibid., p. 45). in addition to the rich philanthropist, the exile community in montmorency helped to build the children’s homes as they felt obligated to provide the soon to be arriving children with some safety: “they were working for the love of the children and they were happy for the chance to be working, and that meant they were working with enthusiasm. … [a] doctor became a mason, and a pretty darn good one. lawyers became carpenters, professors became painters, former ministers of state became roofers, writers became laborers” (ibid., p. 47). when the jewish refugee children eventually arrived, it became clear to papanek and the other educators who were supposed to take care of them for an as yet unknown time span how traumatized these young girls and boys were. papanek would later remember the moment of this first encounter as follows: i explained that they were now going to have a little snack to eat and then go outside with their counselors and play until lunch was ready. a moment of silence. a somber-eyed, redheaded girl, about nine years old, raised her hand tentatively, and when i encouraged her to speak up she asked, in a sweet, tremulous little voice, “are jewish children also al-lowed to go into the park?” we were annihilated. it was all we could do not to rush out and throw our arms around her. what made it even more annihilating was that every other eye was turned up toward me waiting just as anxiously for the answer. when we did go outside, they just stood around waiting to be told what to do. they didn’t ask any questions. they didn’t even wander around aimlessly. they just followed whatever instructions or suggestions came their way. and so, at least, we knew what our first task was ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 27 going to be. we were going to have to show them how to play. we were going to have to teach them how to be children (ibid., p. 48). the children suffered “from many traumata, including an inferiority complex, as they had begun to doubt their own value as human beings. so the fact that they were treated like everybody else and they were allowed to act like children without any restriction based on their or their parents’ identities came as a surprise to them” (jacob, 2021, p. 35). however, and regardless of the fact that they were all, in a way, jewish refugees, the children shared different identities. there were 1) orthodox jewish children, who were kept as a group together at an ose home in eaubonne and with whom daily life seemed to be more difficult due to the existence of different religious rules (papanek, 2015); 2) the “cubans,” i.e. middle-class children, whose parents had previously tried to escape by ship to cuba (reinfelder, 2002; schöck-quinteros, loeber & rau, 2019); and 3) the “robinsoner,” who were political refugees’ children who had already been in france before 1938 but who arrived at the homes after the outbreak of the second world war in september 1939 when the ose decided to accept children who had no jewish background at all as well. regardless of their different identities, the children eventually grew together as a community and were, to a certain degree, drawn into that communion by papanek, who served as a central figure within the ose children’s homes, which helped 283 children find a new home in montmorency. papanek was fond of the idea of keeping the children together, as he assumed that this would help them to face their multiple traumata better and probably heal through a collective form of therapy. the director consequently argued on behalf of an anti-authoritarian approach, and “[t]he use of the first name, as the most outrageous symbol of our permissive policies, was one of the things that kept the orthodox community in a permanent state of discontent” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 87). it was important in 1939 to choose one’s words when addressing these girls and boys, who had lost their homes and families, wisely, and papanek emphasized in this regard that [w]ords do carry their own symbolism, and as a practical politician i would be the last man in the world to underestimate the importance of symbols. with the social democrats, the exchange of first names was exactly that, a conscious symbol of the children’s full status as comrades. and so it was with us. we were a community of children and adults, sharing a common danger and engaged in a common experiment. … i have always felt that the community can support the individual to a far greater extent than has ever been suggested. if we were to be a true community, if community living was to be given a fair chance, authority had to be based on something far more meaningful than mister or sir or, heaven help us, herr direktor (ibid., p. 88). papanek could relate to the experiences these children had gone through in the past few months or years, when they had been ostracized by society, quite well. it was therefore not only important to ensure their physical well-being in the children’s homes but, as the austrian pedagogue emphasized: our first educational goal was to assure the children, explicitly and implicitly, that nothing that had happened to them had been their fault. the second was to convince them that the persecution they had suffered was not their inevitable fate 28 global education review 10 (1-2) as jews. the third was to create an educational system that would return them to the world with a sense of pride, accomplishment and social consciousness (ibid., pp. 115–116). papanek was also quite progressive with regard to the schooling of the children, and no grades were applied by the teaching staff. in contrast to ordinary schools, the children would receive quarterly reports about their progress, which emphasized the latter (or lack thereof) according to the following positive and negative categories (papanek, 1940, pp. 20–21): 1) does his very best 2) is attentive and hardworking 3) takes pains over his work 4) grasps things easily 5) is interested in the subject 6) expresses himself very well 7) concentrates on his work 8) shows perseverance 9) prepares his work well 10) shows comprehension, application and perseverance 11) shows initiative 12) shows imagination 13) could make greater efforts 14) is lazy and inattentive 15) does not take great pains 16) shows no understanding of the subject 17) is devoid of interest 18) has no ability to express himself 19) is superficial in his work 20) is without perseverance 21) does not prepare his work 22) shows a lack of knowledge caused by absence 23) is not very bright 24) shows a lack of imagination instead of numerical grades, such comments “were aimed at encouraging the child to keep working rather than at merely passing judgement on work that had already been done” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 131). nevertheless, papanek not only had the background of the children in mind but also considered what would be necessary for them to learn for the future, and he was keen to train them in some kind of professional manufacturing or artisanry as well to secure them an income for the years to come. he argued that in an educational system which is truly geared to keeping instructions as close to life as possible, one also had to be mindful of the backgrounds of the children, the special circumstances under which they had come to us and the living conditions that probably awaited them. these were not children who had been sent to a boarding school by indulgent parents. they were children who would have to go out into the world to earn a living, possibly in a strange country, probably without any family tradition to guide them and ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 29 certainly without any parental connections to smooth the way (ibid., p. 129). with respect to the political education of the children, who had never experienced the privilege of a democratic society, papanek introduced a student co-administration for the children’s homes to ensure the children had some influence on the rules during trials that were held to decide on disciplinary cases. the students received responsibility for the administrative process and could learn about the latter, and papanek hoped that they would enjoy such a democratic environment, especially since most of the children were victims of a totalitarian regime. papanek’s experiences with children in wartime would eventually also influence his pedagogical considerations during his years in the united states (papanek, 1942a; papanek 1942b). however, he faced several issues with the us authorities, especially in relation to his progressive views about how traumatized children should be treated, which he failed to translate to gain the understanding of and support by the us authorities and organizations in charge. some of these issues were related to his stubborn colleagues on the us side, others to a mistranslation of the concept of “children’s homes,” and these should now be taken into closer consideration. the conceptual dispute in the united states a visitor from the united states who once observed how an ose home’s children had celebrated—they celebrated all birthdays, holidays, and any reason they could find, especially since papanek wanted to spread happiness as widely as possible among the children—described the community as a “strauss operetta,” a view the austrian pedagogue disliked: we were not a strauss operetta. neither were we one big theater party. we were a community of very special children with very special problems. they had come to us, strangers and afraid, and we had to make them happy again. not merely by creating a well-ordered home. not with parties or songs. when i speak of making them happy, i am not talking in terms of amusing them. our task was to create an atmosphere in which they could develop and bloom again (papanek with linn, 1975, pp. 86–87). when paris fell in june 1940, the ose children’s homes were moved to southern france, and an old castle in montintin near limoges was supposed to become the new home for papanek’s children. with them in safety for the moment, the austrian social democrat and exile decided to leave, as his presence would probably have endangered the future of the children’s home. he left asta imbert, a “french, catholic, and apolitical” woman (maier, 2021, p. 159), in charge, and although some of the children might have felt betrayed, papanek had no choice as the vichy regime under petain was likely to cooperate with the german invaders. the papanek family, together with oscar and marianne pollak, two other austrian socialists, were the first to be brought from france to portugal via the spanish underground’s route. on 3 september 1940, the papaneks boarded the nea hellas in lisbon and arrived in new york city on 12 september. in the united states, the family moved from place to place in the beginning, living at 151 west 94th street, 155 west 84th street, and 410 w 110th street (maier, 2021, p. 171), since they were short of money. despite these peregrinations, 30 global education review 10 (1-2) papanek immediately tried to secure rescue measures for the children in france, whom he intended to bring across the atlantic as well. papanek, who now worked as a dishwasher, hoped that the jewish labor committee or the american branch of the ose (amrose) would support his endeavor, but there was “a maze of organizations” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 218) that prevented fast action in this regard: when life and death rides on every choice you must make, you remember only those whom you did not save. and that is the bitter irony of it: those who did the most feel the most guilt. those who did the least feel the least shame. it always happens when life and death are at the toss that there are those from whom no help is expected and you find help, and there are those who exist for no other purpose than to help, and they do nothing. it must be recorded that while thousands of children survived the holocaust be-cause the underground was able to find shelter for them in monasteries, farmhouses and children’s institutions throughout europe … there were those in the united states from whom help had been confidently expected who did nothing. and in some cases, worse than nothing (ibid., pp. 31– 32). papanek must have been disappointed by the situation, which is why his statements in a report sent to social worker elsa castendyck, the former us delegate to the advisory committee on social questions of the league of nations and who had also visited the ose homes in france before, are hardly surprising: as you know, i had resisted since 1940 the desire which was shared by you … to tell the whole history of what we sometimes thought was criminal misunderstanding and neglect when organizations and people tried to prevent by hook or crook to have the children from france come over to the u.s.a. i still believe that we should not attack some organizations, wrong as they were for their terrible and fateful mistakes, because they still have to request money from the public to do another kind of work which they do well and which is still necessary (papanek, n.d.). since amrose was not the only organization in the united states that tried to rescue jewish children from europe and later coordinated their arrival (sonnert & holton, 2006, pp. 31–46), there was initially a kind of competition for visas, especially since the united states committee for the care of european children (uscom), which coordinated these attempts, “had managed to obtain visas for english children, but they had little success, in the end, in cutting the red tape for jewish children from the continent. … they would not, and could not, bring themselves to believe that the children were in mortal danger, because once they did it became incumbent up-on them to move heaven on earth to rescue them” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 217). it eventually took until march 1941 before the first visas were issued, but at least the children from the french ose homes were on the move, although, in the end, not all could be saved from the german policy to annihilate the jews (papanek, 2015, pp. 267–269), something that would haunt papanek for the rest of his life. at the moment the first of “his children” arrived on us shores, however, the austrian pedagogue was facing serious problems concerning his idea to set up new children’s homes in the us. children’s homes like the ones papanek had run ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 31 in france were uncommon in the us context, where such facilities were only known in relation to their use for juvenile criminals. the family, and in replacement of the former the foster family, was long considered the best environment for children to grow up (hacsi, 1995), and it was argued that the children arriving from europe had to be separated and spread within foster families across the country. instead of facing their trauma and being reminded about it by others, it was argued that the distance to their former life and the people who represented it, would be best for the healing and the future of the young girls and boys (curran, 2008, pp. 426–427). papanek consequently faced the problem of translating and selling a progressive pedagogical concept to an audience that was unfamiliar with it, and obviously also resistant to change the existent traditional focus on the foster family. lotte marcuse, a social worker and german-jewish children’s aid representative who was responsible for the ose children, intended to separate the children and send them to host families across the united states. she also prohibited papanek from getting in touch with the children because she intended to make them break with their past to overcome possible traumata. papanek’s ideas for children’s homes were not accepted by the educational and pedagogical establishment of the united states, and at a conference where he presented the concept of his ose homes, he was harshly criticized for his progressive form of educational care (papanek with lin, 1975, pp. 217–221). the antagonism to the idea to keep the ose children together as a group was also related to the fear that such a decision would stimulate antisemitic resentment in public perceptions of the work to save jewish refugee children from europe. the conflict eventually ended in favor of marcuse, who was in sole charge after papanek’s contract with amrose had been terminated in march 1941, and she decided the children’s fates alone. papanek was deeply sad and depressed: “what mrs. marcuse had in mind was a complete resettlement plan based on the incredible theory that the children must make a complete break with their past—as if she really believed it were possible to wipe the slate clean and begin all over again” (ibid., p. 241). in addition, marcuse did not allow papanek to meet the children once they had arrived in the us, something that really bothered the latter: “it was terrible for him. she prohibited him from seeing the children. she had the power, and he had nothing” (maier, 2021, p. 192). papanek had not been able to translate and “sell” his concept of the children’s home as a progressive form of trauma therapy for girls and boys who had suffered from terror and war in europe to the right influential person or organization, which is why, in the end, he just had to accept that at least some of the children had been saved, although they would not be allowed to continue to live as a community as they had in france since 1938. the case of papanek and the ose children therefore also emphasizes that mistranslations or misunderstandings of pedagogical concepts, here in a transatlantic context, might have had severe consequences for the lives and well-being of jewish refugee children during and after the second world war. of the 1,600 children who lived in ose facilities in france, 253 were brought to the united states, and the last of them arrived in july 1942. on 26 august 1942, montintin was raided by the authorities, and in september, papanek received a heart-breaking report of the events: last week we lived through a kind of st. bartholomew’s massacre. at five o’clock 32 global education review 10 (1-2) in the morning we had guests with trucks at the door. they took a lot of people away with them. then it was said that boys under eighteen would be released again, but in the meantime they were already sent further. allegedly to poland, but we don’t really know anything definite. among those taken was ernst koppel, benno singer, klans martin. guenther and horst, who were with their parents on vacation, were also taken. and girls from the other houses. in the days that followed there was a hunt for those who had escaped, but the forests are large. there were tragicomic scenes as well. for instance, friedman whom you know so well, slipped out of their hands twice. the second time he went to the toilet under guard, but he managed to escape from there too. yesterday the little ones from our house was taken, allegedly to be taken to their parents in the concentration camps. they took even two year olds from their nurseries, and let them sleep at the railway station. what they intended to do with them we don’t know…. (anonymous, 1942). this news left papanek a broken man, haunted by the fact that he had been unable to save all “his children” from death: “there are those who survived and found their lives, exactly as we had wished for them. there were those who survived into a vague, disquieting sense of guilt that they should have lived while so many died. there were those who did not survive and should have survived, and there is a bitterness about that which the years will never swallow” (papanek with linn, 1975, p. 31). it was questions about the things that probably could have done but were not, especially due to the struggles with the us authorities, that depressed papanek in the years to come: i had discovered that you can question and question, poke and probe, and never get back anything beyond a kind of vague disclaimer calculated to minimize the accident of their survival, to close the gap between themselves and the dead. for behind every innocent question they hear the voice of the inquisitor snap: why are you alive, and the others dead? what did you do? whom did you know? and behind all that: whom did you betray? (ibid., p. 271) papanek continued to think about his experiences with the ose children in france and decided to change american views about educational and pedagogical concepts in the future as a consequence. he enrolled at columbia university to become a social worker himself, writing his master’s thesis “on refugee children: a preliminary study” (papanek, 1943b), and not only would he continue his work with children, he also founded the american youth for world youth (aywy). eventually, one year after the end of the second world war, papanek was considered an expert on children’s homes and was asked to tour europe to inspect such facilities there for the united nations (maier, 2021, p. 210). after years as director of the brooklyn training school and home for young girls (1948/49) and later the wiltwyck school for boys (1949/58), papanek finished his phd thesis on the austrian school reform in 1960 (papanek, 1962) and taught at new york’s ernst papanek, jewish refugee children during wwii and the transatlantic dispute about “children’s homes” 33 queens college as a lecturer and then as professor of pedagogy until 1971. conclusion this case study of ernst papanek’s work as director of the ose children’s homes in france between 1938 and 1940, as well as his attempts to open similar facilities in the united states in the early 1940s, show the sort of problems progressive pedagogues and educators could have faced as a consequence of cultural differences with regard to pedagogical concepts, but it was also the current situation of the second world war, i.e. the prosecution of “political enemies” and jewish families by the nazi regime, that caused problems due to the differences with regard to existent pedagogical and educational standards in europe and the united states, i.e. their countries of origin on the one hand and their “new homes” on the other. papanek was a progressive austro-american pedagogue who tried not only to save children physically from the nightmares of persecution and death but also to give them a place to belong and to save their souls from trauma and pain. at the same time, it must have been painful for him to see that his progressive ideas and demand to keep the children together were not welcomed in the american context of the early 1940s. the “mistranslation” of papanek’s concept of children’s homes, or rather, the inability to accept a new form and interpretation of this term, eventually determined the fate of more than 250 ose children, who were instead supposed to grow up individually as americans in a world where their past did not seem to be of importance anymore. regardless of this assumption, it was papanek who left a deep impression on the children, and the memories they made in his children’s homes in france remained some of the happiest of their lives. references anonymous. 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(2016). education for empire. american schools, race, and the paths of good citizenship. berlin: de gruyter. weingand, h.-p. (2020). die kpö und der februar 1934. graz: clio verlag. weinzierl, e. (1994). der februar 1934 und die folgen für österreich. vienna: picus verlag. yarrow, a. l. (2009). “history of u.s. children’s policy, 1900-present.” first focus (april), 1–30. crossing boundaries 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: schmiedebach, mario, & wegner, claas. (2021). crossing boundaries: examples for interdisciplinary teaching. global education review, 8 (4), 1-6. crossing boundaries: examples for interdisciplinary teaching mario schmiedebach bielefeld university, germany claas wegner bielefeld university, germany “first period biology, second period math and third period geography.” – it is normal to divide the world in different subjects in school. teachers are professionals in their respective subject and students study different topics in various separate subjects. some are mandatory, others are electives. furthermore, in higher education, when students choose a major, they focus on a special field of education once again. while some are quite broad such as “biology,” others are more narrowed down and specific like “marine biology.” this differentiation between individual subjects in the educational context is human-made and does not resemble how subject matter is observed in real-life. what is interdisciplinary teaching? the origin of separate subjects in educational contexts can be traced back to the 5th to 3rd century b.c. (bomhard, 2011). in order to become a proper scholar, the greeks had to study the disciplines grammar, rhetoric, dialectics, arithmetic, geometry, astronomy, music theory and gymnastics. although the subjects have changed nowadays, the historic idea of dividing our world into “categories” is still present in education. especially due to the rapid growth of knowledge it seemed necessary to structure and systemize this knowledge. furthermore, focusing on a specific area allows scholars to become experts in a field and advance it even more (moegling, 2010). however, it often is impossible to solve problems by just one expert of one field of research since the natural world does not have boundaries itself. in order to cope with this, interdisciplinary studies might be a solution. klein and newell (1996) define interdisciplinary studies as “a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession” (pp. 393394). this definition does not only apply to highlevel academic research but also to in-school teaching. in order for students to grasp “global warming” as a 21st century problem, they need to study chemistry and physics to understand underlying processes such as the greenhouse effect and how alternative energy sources work, biology in order to learn about the structure of ecosystems and possible consequences of the extinction of species, politics to learn about laws and political interests of different parties and countries, or economy to gain insights into potential costs and changes for the economy such as tourism and so much more. this example underlines repko’s (2012) definition: “[i]nterdisciplinary studies is a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex 2 global education review 8 (4) to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline, and draws on the disciplines with the goal of integrating their insights to construct a more comprehensive understanding” (p. 16). criticizing the status quo of separate school subjects even though the tradition of dividing the world into different subjects has positive aspects as we have pointed out in the preceding section, critical voices lament the “splintering” of formal education which is caused by the incoherent sequence of different subjects and topics during a school day (see bomhard, 2011; memmert, 1997; wiater, 1995). this has several disadvantages such as: • isolated knowledge: to solve problems in “real life,” complex knowledge and coherent thinking are necessary. hence, it is not possible to depict real life problems by dividing school education into different subjects (labudde, 2003). without teaching about realistic problems, education might appear less meaningful to students. this in turn can negatively affect their learning performance (styron, 2013). • pigeonholing: complex problems are reduced to the perspective of one subject only, causing the overestimation of one subject and the underestimation of another one. (memmert, 1997) • scrappiness of knowledge: current subjects depict only a fraction of everyday-life and certain aspects, such as law, are hardly represented (memmert, 1997). • dissection of knowledge: students only get a restricted view on certain phenomena. this can in turn lead to viewing reality and certain phenomena as less complex (wiater, 1995). advantages of interdisciplinary teaching a possibility to reduce those problems is seen in multidimensional educational settings. according to häsing (2009), essential skills, such as problem-solving and social competencies, are not subject-bound and can best be trained in a multidimensional (i.e., interdisciplinary) educational setting. in interdisciplinary teaching, the holistic and comprehensive perception of a designated problem fosters the learning process (herzmann, artmann, & rabenstein, 2011). labudde (2008) argues that interdisciplinary teaching is better suited to relate to students’ mental structures since all information is connected during cognitive processing. therefore, it helps to integrate prior knowledge and preconceptions in teaching with ease and, hence, improves the growth of students’ understanding. as expressed by wentworth & davis (2002) interdisciplinary teaching can be defined as “…inquiries which critically draw upon two or more disciplines and which lead to an integration of disciplinary insights” (p. 17). by doing so, students have a more balanced appreciation of the different subjects (hillerketterer & hiller, 1997) since they experience the potential but also limitations of each subject to solve a problem (labudde, 2008). interdisciplinary teaching allows to integrate real everyday-life problems since they are rarely solved by only one subject. besides positive motivational effects of problem-oriented teaching, labudde (2014) points out that it has a more global benefit as well. our global world faces many challenges right now and will face them in the future; with our example of climate change being only one of them. in order to solve those problems on a global scale, it is important to understand how complex and interdisciplinary the problem-solving process is. crossing boundaries 3 although such problems cannot be solved in school itself, students can acquire different competencies that are necessary for future global players, leaders, and world citizens. those competencies and skills are for example critical thinking, the ability to differentiate, problemsolving skills and communication skills. all of them are more likely to be fostered in interdisciplinary and problem-oriented teaching (jones, 2009; labudde, 2014; styron, 2013; wang, et al., 2020). limits of interdisciplinary teaching despite all the benefits of interdisciplinary teaching, educators have to be aware of the limits that might hinder an extensive implementation of it: • “wholeness craze”: once looking at a topic from different subjects, many possibilities arise. it is often hard to draw lines between “necessary” and “unnecessary” connections to solve a problem. this often leads to an unconditional integration of different disciplines causing a cognitive (and timewise) overload (popp, 1997). therefore, it is equally important to somewhat keep a subject-perspective view on an interdisciplinary topic or problem. • “specialized depth”: if subject teaching is completely banned, it is hard to ensure the kind of specialized depth in the different subject that is needed to solve interdisciplinary issues (popp, 1997). hence, subject teaching is necessary for building a sophisticated foundation that allows to solve interdisciplinary challenges. this highlights that – although there are good arguments for interdisciplinary teaching – it is not a didactical concept that is meant to replace subject-specific teaching. instead, the benefits of interdisciplinary teaching should be used to allow for such teaching phases or projects in school. by doing so, the necessary depth can still be acquired in the different subjects, but students see how the different content is connected and used to solve realistic problems. this balance of subject-specific and interdisciplinary teaching is highlighted as the desired implementation in education by many researchers (moegling, 2010). however, it is still a rare concept in many schools around the globe. factors that may contribute to this circumstance include the time-consuming preparation of (new) curricula as well as integrational aspects (e.g., confusion experienced by students) (jones, 2009; weinberg & mcmeeking, 2017; zapletal, 2010). furthermore, teachers assume that they do not have enough expertise in other subjects to teach interdisciplinarily (weinberg & mcmeeking, 2017; zapletal, 2010). therefore, introducing interdisciplinary teaching on a university level could help to let future teachers experience the benefits of such an approach firsthand and reduce their concerns at the same time (santaolalla, et al., 2020). borromeo (2019) states that “interdisciplinary learning and teaching require, on the one hand, well-prepared teachers, and on the other hand, adequate teaching materials for every-day lessons in school” (p. 259). despite all positive outcomes, however, interdisciplinary teaching has yet to become a well-established practice in schools and universities across the globe. more empirical work about effects of interdisciplinary teaching in school and university settings is needed to strengthen the arguments to justify a broader implementation of interdisciplinary teaching (kramer & wegner, 2020; santaolalla, et al., 2020; woods, 2007). description of the special issue with the help of a special thematic issue, “crossing boundaries: examples for interdisciplinary teaching,” the current objective is to obtain a global perspective of interdisciplinary teaching in all subjects and 4 global education review 8 (4) levels of education. the different articles depict various aspects of interdisciplinary teaching with three focusing on high school education and one on the university level. in the study “preparing students as leaders with a global mindset: a study abroad phenomenological case study,” acker and bocarro literally cross boundaries. within an interdisciplinary program, us-american university students immersed in three european countries in order to strengthen their skills to be global-minded leaders. in their study “becoming proficient through profile classes: a longitudinal study on the development of scientific competencies,” schulte and wegner focus on scientific education and the obtained competencies in profile classes during a school year. their article evaluates an interdisciplinary focus on scientific inquiry methods which is used within those profile classes. in their study “giving meaning to the subject: the influence of interdisciplinary interventions on the subjective task value of biology and pe,” kramer and wegner investigate an interdisciplinary approach to teaching biology and pe in order to increase student interest in those subjects. for this, they developed and evaluated a one-day intervention combining neurobiology with physical movement with four classes. cummings-clay, hayes and disanto combine an educational approach with online learning in their study “shifting modalities: providing k-5 montessori education online during the pandemic.” in their article they compare the didactical concepts of montessori education and online learning in order to describe the process of transitioning to online education that combines both pedagogical ideas in an innovative interdisciplinary way. references bomhard, t. 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(2010). theoretischdidaktische überlegungen zur fundierung des fächerübergreifenden unterrichts als ein vernetztes unterrichtskonzept. wien: kaliber. about the authors mario schmiedebach started working as a teacher for math and biology at a secondary school after finishing his phd about content and language integrated learning for recently immigrated students. claas wegner is a professor at bielefeld university, germany, in the department for didactics of biology. his research focuses on gifted students in science education, and he is head of the osthushenrich center for giftedness (ozhb) at bielefeld university. didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 67 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: johansson, jan-erik. (2022). didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint. global education review, 9 (2), 67-82. didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint jan-erik johansson abstract how can we use friedrich froebel’s play theory in order to analyze ecec, early childhood education and care? wolfgang klafki builds his theory of categorical bildung on froebel’s play theory, which presupposes the interaction between child, adult and content, as in the didactic triangle. froebel’s play theory was lost in the hands of his followers bertha von marenholtz-bülow and henriette schraderbreymann. developmental theories such as the cultural level theory and the recapitulation theory had a strong influence. one result was a child-centered laissez-faire pedagogy, waiting for the child to mature enough to be able to start school. with klafki and his perspective on froebel, it is possible to ask a set of questions in order to describe and analyze contemporary ecec programs: (i) what are the didactic relations between child, adult and content, as in the didactic triangle? (ii) what is the content and how is it selected and organized? (iii) what kind of play and learning is intended? keywords friedrich froebel, wolfgang klafki, categorical bildung, play theory, didactic, curriculum introduction in this article, i explore the possibility to use the play theory that friedrich froebel (1782–1852) developed, as a starting point when analyzing ecec programs today. one important connection to today’s educational context is wolfgang klafki (1927–2016) and his theory of categorical bildung which was built upon froebel’s play theory (klafki, 1964, chapter 2). froebel had followers in many countries, but both his theory and practical work were lost in many respects after his death in 1852 (denner, 1988; heiland, 2012a; stübig, 2018). his writings were spread over different archives and were hard to access, and his followers could never agree upon any set of common ideas. some were more interested in his educational materials and following the method they hoped to find. many forgot the “authentic froebel” (cf. heiland 2012a, p. 312) who wanted to balance the child’s freedom with the teacher’s control. klafki provides an opportunity to consider if froebel’s forgotten play theory is of interest for ecec today. erika denner’s (1988) study of the reception of froebel’s theory during the 19th century is a starting point for my article together with a chapter by heinz stübig (2018) on what we can learn from froebel today. a study of norwegian ecec (johansson, 2020) and an earlier article about froebel (johansson, 2018) are also used. i will not follow the development of klafki’s critical-constructive model from the 1970’s. in the following text, there are german concepts, for instance categorical bildung, as used by klafki. kindergarten refers to the institution froebel named in 1840. to talk about institutions of today, i use the generic term early childhood education and care, ecec, referring to settings for children under mandatory school age. 68 global education review 9 (2) what follows is a present-day look at froebel’s work, firstly from the perspective of klafki’s categorical bildung, when child, adult, and the world around interact. secondly froebel’s curriculum is introduced, i.e., the content and principles used in his kindergarten. i use the two concepts didactic and curriculum as complementary. didactic refers to the parts of froebel’s theory that coincide with klafki’s categorical bildung, and curriculum refers to the content and the principles used by froebel in order to build a practical pedagogy reflecting his play theory. this application of the two concepts is a technical abstraction and does not rely upon their historical complexity (cf. hopmann, 2015, p. 14). then i discuss how froebel’s theory changed after his death. finally, i suggest that froebel’s play theory can be a starting point, when asking questions about the didactics and curricula used in ecec today. wolfgang klafki and categorical bildung bildung is a concept with many different connotations, with roots in 19th century germany (sjöström & eilks, 2021, p. 55f). with categorical bildung klafki refers to the words, concepts, and tools for thinking that we develop when we open ourselves up to the world around us, and when the world opens itself up for us. klafki focuses on school didactics. however, chapter 2 in his phd dissertation (1964) is about froebel’s theory of play. klafki (1964, p. 8) begins with two groups of theories of bildung. the first group concerns material theories where the object of the teaching is the focus. pupils are to learn a pre-defined set of facts, like name of rivers in the uk, cities in brazil etc. here we may find content aiming at classical bildung, as a selection of traditional culturally approved knowledge. the other group consists of formal theories in which the pupil’s development as a subject is the primary aim. in ecec we find child centered models where the child’s interest is the starting point for all daily work, sometimes combined with an interest in supporting children in learning how to learn. klafki (1964, p. 87) focused froebel’s play theory, and its roots in froebel’s complex thinking. in the play theory klafki sees an approach that unites the material aspects of bildung with the formal aspects. froebel’s thinking is built upon the interaction between the internal and the external, between the child’s inner life and the world outside. he started in the external world, which is to be internalized by the child as thoughts and then externalized again, not only through language but also in the child’s own activity in the world around. in this, klafki (1964, p. 110) finds the central part of froebel’s theory of play. stübig (2018, p. 314) notes that klafki uses froebel as a starting point, he neither criticizes froebel’s play theory nor return to froebel after 1964. educational researchers seem to accept klafki’s application of froebel’s play theory but forget about froebel’s original thinking. in a recent study of german didactics (meyer, meyer, & ren, 2017, p. 180) and in a study of bildung (sjöström & eilks, 2021) the connection between froebel and klafki is not commented upon. klafki wanted to connect both the internal and the external, both the formal and material aspects of bildung. bildung takes place in every situation where an immediate connection develops between a subjective, formal moment and an objective, material moment. this is what klafki (1964, p. 297f), describes as the double-sided model of categorical bildung. on one side, the world opens itself up in a categorical process, i.e., it gives insights, perceptions, and experiences. on didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 69 the other side, these insights, perceptions, and experiences, mean that we open ourselves up to the world around us. categorical bildung is not about learning a set of well-defined knowledge or skills, but about developing insights that in new situations make it possible to grasp and understand things in the world around us. this process provides knowledge and supports action. stübig (2018, p. 311) says that klafki focuses on three aspects of froebel’s theory of bildung. firstly, there is no superficial differentiation of material and formal aspects of teaching, or objective and subjective. secondly, froebel had a strong interest in the close dialectic relationship between these aspects in the phenomena of bildung. thirdly, froebel focused the resulting work with bildung in practice (klafki, 1964, p. 87). how is klafki’s categorical bildung perceived? one answer is from meinert meyer and anatoli rakhkochkine (2018, p. 22) who suggest that in school only social subjects such as history, geography, politics, and religious instruction fit into klafki’s categorical analysis, and only to some extent mathematics and languages. they (2018, p. 25f) also say that there are no concrete details in klafki’s abstract model of categorical bildung. however, froebel during the 1840’s developed a concrete and detailed kindergarten program in practice, based upon his own play theory which later became the foundation of klafki’s categorical bildung. froebel aimed at kindergarten subjects covering all aspects of children’s life, including mathematics and geometry, in order to support the child to build its own reflected understanding of the structure of life and nature. hence froebel’s original kindergarten is an instance that indicates that klafki’s abstract model and its limitations, according to meyer and rakhkochkine (2018), may be possible to overcome. i posit that categorical bildung goes on in our lives already from birth, in interaction with adults and other children when we meet the world around us. however, categorical bildung, have most likely had a limited place in the historical development of mass education. primary school has its roots in confessional religious instruction which aimed at rote learning of prayers, hymns and elementary knowledge of religious beliefs, taught in the form of catechism, where the teacher asks questions and pupils are expected to answer instantly. today this is like direct or scripted instruction, a debated mode of instruction (house, glass, mclean, & walker, 1978) which was used, for example, in the us head start program by carl bereiter and siegfried engelman (1966). it is hard to control the content a child will learn in the process of categorical bildung, a type of learning which is not aiming at the transmission of predefined facts. the content of a process of categorical bildung may be prescribed, but not its results. there is no guarantee that every child will learn the same things by taking part in a process aimed at categorical bildung. froebel’s play theory was lost after his death in 1852. there are few indications that klafki’s work more than hundred years later resulted in froebel’s reintroduction in ecec of today. however, klafki gives us a direct connection to central didactic aspects in froebel’s play theory, and then we ourselves can go back to froebel’s curriculum and his central concepts like play care and assess if they are of interest or not. froebel’s didactic and curriculum for the kindergarten friedrich froebel (1782–1852) founded the kindergarten in 1840 in eastern germany. he spent his life building upon the work of johann heinrich pestalozzi (1746–1827) and of 70 global education review 9 (2) jean-jacques rousseau (1712–1778). he studied science in berlin with professor samuel christian weiss (1780–1856), founder of mathematical crystallography (holser, 2008) which today is an important part of modern science. froebel’s religious views were based upon panentheism, formulated by the philosopher karl christian friedrich krause (1781–1832), which suggests that god is in nature like in the case of pantheism, but at the same time god is a separate entity. the following discussion of froebel is found in helmut heiland’s series of books and articles (e.g., 2012b). heiland has a focus on the “authentic froebel”, not on the froebelian tradition created by his followers, and points to the complexity of froebel’s work as it develops in the context of german philosophy and politics (heiland, 2012a, p. 317). froebel’s concepts differ from educational thinking of today. heiland says that froebel did not differentiate between educational philosophy and general education, or between primary school and early childhood education. froebel did not talk about didactics or teaching methods when he developed his thinking about spielpflege, play care (heiland, 2012a, p. 318). with play care he aimed at the child’s understanding of the world around, using the play material in interaction with the adult. heiland underlines that it is necessary not to modernize froebel and loose the authentic traits of his thinking. hence any description of the didactics in his play theory, is a perspective from outside. froebel’s theory of play is an educational not a psychological theory of play, a point that both klafki and heiland make. froebel’s theory is directly related to his educational play materials, to activities in the garden and nature, and in group play. froebel develops a theoretically based didactic, but he never presents an explicit theory, it remains implicit and presents itself in the real-life practices in his kindergarten (heiland, 2012a, p. 317). it is no surprise that his followers saw his texts as difficult to understand (denner, 1988, p. 23). it is the same with his educational materials, which were in constant development and never fully systematized by him. background from 1816 froebel tried to reform primary education, a work he reflected in die menschenerziehung from 1826, translated into english as the education of man (e.g. froebel 1885/1974). during the 1830’s froebel tried to find a field without strong conflicts with the churches and local administrations where he could continue his work with educational theory and its practical applications. he based his kindergarten play theory on his experiences from working with young children as a private tutor, and as primary school reformer in a number of settings. from 1840, he focused solely on the development of the kindergarten, and on the training of staff. the political revolutions in europe in 1848 resulted in his kindergartens being forbidden in important german states 1851–1860. followers interpreted his theory and practice in different ways in many countries worldwide (cf. wollons, 2000), often in connection with the bourgeois women’s movement (cf. allen, 1986). kindergarten pedagogy froebel’s kindergarten pedagogy consists of three parts: gifts and occupations, outside activities in the garden and nature, and play in groups (heiland, 2002, p. 56ff), in a curriculum that contains his natural philosophy together with didactics of the theory of play. the didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 71 foundation of froebel’s thinking is threefold, firstly in the enlightenment philosophers and pestalozzi; secondly in his spherical law as a principle for how everything in the world interacts; and thirdly in the sciences of mineralogy and crystallography (e.g., heiland, 2012a, p. 323ff). froebel wanted to educate free, thinking human beings, not machines for state use (lange 1862, in heiland, 2002, p. 20). froebel’s gifts and occupations consist of a set of geometrical materials and a set of everyday objects that build upon his work in schools. the geometrical gifts start in volumes; go over surfaces and lines to points. the occupations go the other way round, starting in points like beans, then over to surfaces and ending in volumes with modelling in clay. his favorite is the third gift presented with instructions in 1844 (fröbel, 1986). it consists of eight wooden cubes (figure 1). children were sometimes free to use the material, and at other occasions directly instructed about what to build. its aim is to support children’s understanding of the world’s structure. he believed that knowledge should grow in interaction between child and adult. the gifts and occupations are studied by many, for instance by norman brosterman (1997) and margitta rockstein (1999). the following figures (johansson, 2020) are based upon illustrations in a practical guide to the english kinder-garten (children’s garden) (ronge & ronge, 1858). figure 1. the third gift – 8 wooden cubes there are three ways to build, forms of life are everyday objects from the world around the child (figure 4). forms of knowledge is about mathematics (figure 2). figure 2. the third gift – forms of knowledge forms of beauty aim at creating abstract symmetrical patterns related to crystallography (figure 3). figure 3. the third gift – forms of beauty 72 global education review 9 (2) stübig (2018, p. 308ff) says that froebel saw mother and child as the unit to base the preschool years upon, refraining from a focus upon schooling and coercion. froebel wanted to foster good order among children and to strengthen their creativity. he trained staff caring for children in institutions, staff studied home care and how to interact with children. ida seele (1825–1901), froebel’s first kindergarten student teacher, wrote about her experiences from her work as his kindergarten teacher (see heiland, 2002, p. 256ff). another text about the practical work in the first kindergarten is by froebel’s close colleague wilhelm middendorf (1793–1853) (1848; translated by owen, 1906). seele describes garden work, froebel’s second content area, where wheelbarrows, loved by children, were used and children walked in rows singing. the barrows were full of stones, soil, blocks, grass etc., according to each child’s wishes, and barrows were put back in their place afterwards. there were visits to the small garden for some playful garden tasks where children offered a helping hand and observed the growing garden. the major garden work was done by older children and adults (heiland, 2002, p. 257f). froebel’s third content area, group play, was intended to open the child’s understanding of the world as a whole, with nature, family, animals, and plants (berger, 2000). the child should also experience group unity. froebel meant that group play supported bodily development, singing and language. here we find the same ideas as behind the development of his play materials. didactic and play theory when froebel started to work with young children during the 1840’s he realized the adult’s central role for learning and for the child’s interaction with the world around them. earlier froebel developed self-instructional materials, where the adult, from a didactical point of view, would only act as the inventor of the material. however, this self-instructive material did not work out as he expected. he saw a need for a direct, close interaction between child and adult, and introduced the idea of spielpflege or play care (erning, neumann, & reyer, 1987, p. 37), to support children’s active understanding of the world around them. froebel used the concept of ahnung, to aim at the pre-conceptions which children would develop into self-reflected knowledge about the world before they started school (heiland, 2002, p. 18). one example is when froebel describes how mother and child build forms of life (heiland, 1990, p. 31). they use eight blocks shaped like bricks that go together as a cube in the fourth gift (figure 4). figure 4. the fourth gift – forms of life froebel says that external objects are important in interaction with kindergarten children. the interaction between entity, variation, and unity was his tool in supporting children to become aware of the structure of the world. children should not stay with simple facts and concrete details but see the unity of reality. froebel aimed at direct knowledge about the inner truth of each object in order to bridge the gap between the child and the object (heiland, 2002, p. 70). didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 73 froebel focuses on the need for interaction between child, adult and object, i.e., all three components in the didactic triangle (figure 5). froebel’s play theory combined with the perspective of categorical bildung can be used to study other models for play and learning in ecec with the help of the didactic triangle, an abstract and general model relating three aspects of teaching (e.g. hopmann, 2007, p. 111ff). figure 5. the didactic triangle content teacher child one example is how froebel tried to balance control and freedom, he opposed both authoritarian rote learning and the total freedom of the child. how is this balance enacted in the didactics of today’s ecec programs? curriculum: content and principles for froebel, the focus on play, work, and learning is a given. his curriculum aims at the structure of the world as a whole in which god, nature and mankind are integrated by the spherical law he outlined in 1811 (heiland, 2012b, p. 356). the child should find its own way into the world, the interaction between child and adult aims at the child’s reflection of itself as the foundation of knowledge, close to the world and understanding its structure (heiland, 2012b, p. 40). according to heiland (1993, p. 6) froebel after the 1830’s no longer applies the spherical law, or the law of the internal and external and their integration. in his work on educational games, the intermediary law replaces the sphere. he introduces the law of the unification of life or lebenseinigung, when two aspects, objective and subjective, or internal and external, meet inside the child. according to froebel this is the goal of education (klafki, 1964, p. 91). froebel did not think in terms of school subjects or academic disciplines. knowledge is there in the world, and the task is to see the geometrical, mathematical structures uniting everything, an idea coming from his early academic studies of mineralogy and crystallography in berlin under the influence of weiss. this means that the child is free, but this freedom is restricted by the parameters of froebel’s theory, based upon his ideas on nature and religion. froebel’s theory of play provides the child with a possibility to find knowledge of this world system. there is neither a laissez-faire aspect in froebel’s curriculum, nor is the teacher expected to rule in an authoritarian way (liebschner, 1992). gifts and occupations, gardening, and group play are three realms of content in froebel’s kindergarten. content was chosen in accordance with his principle of mutual contradictions, entgegengesetztgleich. this concept seems to be a parallel to newton’s third law that states that when one object exerts a force on a second object, that second object exerts a force that is equal in magnitude and opposite in direction on the first object. such contradictions should be mediated in educational work in accordance with the intermediary law, the vermittlungsgesetzt. however, these ideas were not accepted by many of his followers, some argued strongly against the possibility of the applying of the 74 global education review 9 (2) intermediary law in every educational task (denner, 1988, p. 49). first followers: marenholtz-bülow and schrader-breymann froebel’s followers changed his kindergarten curriculum and didactics, with his focus on the play theory as a support for the child to understand the world as a whole. among his most important followers were bertha von marenholtz-bülow (1810–1893) and henriette schrader-breymann (1827–1899). they left his play theory and instead aimed at preparing working-class children for their future as adult workers, starting in their perspective on society and the context (denner, 1988, p. 88ff). for marenholtz-bülow, a society with political democracy was unthinkable. poor, working-class children had to be controlled in line with the authoritarian ideologies ruling in germany at her time. it is a paradox that she wanted this group of children to acquire an aesthetic training, since workers in those days had little opportunity to participate in creative tasks at their workplaces. she prepared poor children for work in factories in her volkskindergarten model and did not follow froebel’s idea of a unified kindergarten for children from all social classes (denner, 1988, p. 102ff). because of the harsh conditions of working-class children, she thought it necessary to adapt froebel’s original kindergarten to the new urban situation. she developed a socialpedagogic kindergarten, where education was used to control poor children. working-class children, she argued, should learn their place in society as citizens and prepare for future hard work in the labor market. it is not easy to see if froebel’s play theory had its place in her didactics aimed at training for work and the aesthetics of a future working life (cf. brosterman, 1997, p. 100). her primary goal and her curriculum were far removed from froebel. there was no longer a focus on a relatively free use of gifts, garden work and group play. the gifts were used in school-like lessons where the pre-school teacher first showed children how to build, and then children were to follow the teacher’s instructions step by step and copy her work (heiland, 2012a, p. 344), contradicting froebel’s play theory. the same conclusion is true regarding henriette schrader-breymann. she saw the situation for the working-class children as marenholtz-bülow did but developed another didactic and curriculum. in 1882 in berlin, she started an education for pre-school teachers, the pestalozzi-fröbel-haus, which influenced ecec in many countries. her curriculum focused on the home, motherly care, and the preparation of children for their future monotonous work in factories. she said the use of froebel’s gifts were dangerous for the children’s bodily and intellectual development. starting with pestalozzi, she wanted the kindergarten teacher to act like a mother, and the kindergarten to be like a home. froebel wanted the opposite; the home should be like a kindergarten. she hoped to compensate poor children for their lack of motherly care and to reduce the influence of the labor movement (augustin, 2012, p. 283). the characteristics of her model included the monthly theme using a project method, household work with cooking, and the idea of spiritual or intellectual motherhood. in pestalozzi, she found the home-education ideology and the mother as the teacher-at-home. however, the goal of her critique is not froebel but marenholtz-bülow, who tried to stay close to froebel with her version of his program. schrader-breymann did not use the gifts in accordance with froebel’s play care relationship to children (denner, 1988, p. 109) and there was no role for crystallography (augustin, 2012, p. didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 75 332ff). in her program there were still components from froebel, such as the idea of the teacher following the children; and didactics built upon froebel’s principle of the external becoming internal and then external again. she pointed to the need for small child groups, close to froebel’s ideal of a family-life (augustin, 2012, p. 424). opportunities for categorical bildung was not an important part of the schrader-breymann didactics in her development of passive, motherly teachers. the idea of the kindergarten as a foundation for school was lost (heiland, 2012a, p. 345). froebel’s kindergarten was transformed with the aim of controlling working-class children in urban areas and as such, the inner logic of froebel’s kindergarten became lost. his play theory was forgotten together with the ways he used gifts and occupations, garden work, and group play. there was no place for what klafki defines as categorial bildung. there was no interest in the child’s understanding of themself, others, and the structure of the world. the teacher was no longer to support activity and reflection. however, some elements of froebel’s practical work survived. for example, circle time is one daily structure that still exists (chen, zeng, & peng, 2020). other components connected to the froebel tradition include songs, storytelling, building with blocks, finger plays, group play, modelling with clay and outdoor activities. developmental theories the roles of developmental theories and child psychology have been debated for decades (cf. tatlow-golden & montgomery, 2021, p. 3f). the problems with theories about development and progress, and their complex relations to norms and school systems, are not easy to solve (cf. baker, 1999, p. 830). it is an important debate, at the same time it is evident that we all change from birth until old age, and it is hard not to think about the youngest in terms of development. froebel’s play theory was substituted by two new developmental theories, one culturaleducational, and one biological. both influenced schools and kindergartens. when the original countryside kindergarten was developed there were already many different ecec institutions of varying kinds (luc, 1999) where middle-class and working-class children often were separated (cf. read, 2010). during these years, the kindergarten became more and more influenced by developmental theories. cultural level theory was developed by tuiskon ziller (1817–1882) a german educationist. and follower of johann friedrich herbart (1776–1841), one of the founders of modern pedagogy. the idea was that humanity has evolved from the raw and primitive into the cultivated and complex, and that every child would develop in the same way as humankind had done throughout history. it means that content in school had to start with primitive culture during the early years in school, when children were at a perceived primitive level. the book robinson crusoe was used as an exemplar of primitive, low culture, as opposed to other cultures at higher and higher levels through the school years, and schoolchildren were supposed to develop in a uniform way. for marenholtzbülow this meant that childhood was the arena where immature children develop in order to become more advanced schoolchildren. froebel’s idea about childhood as important in its own respect was lost. one result was the development of authoritarian institutions for poor children (nawrotzki, 2009, p. 183) far from the authentic froebel kindergarten. a second idea focused on development is the german biologist ernst haeckel’s (1834– 76 global education review 9 (2) 1919) recapitulation theory. this said that an individual, from conception to adulthood, repeats every step of the historical development of the human species, from early simple structures to the most developed human competences. only white males had a chance to reach the highest levels of development. both theories today have lost their importance due to a lack of empirical research evidence, and because of their racial bias (baker, 1998, p. 169; fallace, 2012, p. 530). these theories were introduced in the us during the end of the 19th century, where the froebelians encountered critique, for instance from g. stanley hall (1844–1924) (cremin, 1962, p. 101ff). hall criticized authoritarian education in general, and wished to substitute rigid educational models with psychological, developmental theories in order to build upon what he saw as natural development. he argued that pre-school children, by nature, were immature, and only had to develop during the pre-school years as a preliminary for primary school (baker, 1998, p. 166). his thinking influenced ecec and school significantly. hall built upon haeckel’s recapitulation theory, and this new perspective opened the door for an interest in children (goodchild, 2012, p. 66). this was not to return to froebel’s authentic play theory and his aim to connect children to the world in a process supported by adults and teaching material. it was rather a shift towards a child centered laissez-faire freedom. froebel’s theory was described as outdated and speculative, not based upon empirical research. however, later hall encountered almost the same critique, that both his reconceptualization theory and its empirical foundation lacked vindication (brooks-gunn & johnson, 2006, p. 255). hall was not the sole critic of the american froebel tradition (manning, 2005, p. 372). one of the founders of pragmatism and progressive education, john dewey (1859–1952) also wanted to substitute parts of froebel’s educational philosophy with psychology. dewey partly followed recapitulation theory in activities like “preliterate man to modern chicago” in his laboratory school (cremin, 1962, p. 141). neither hall nor dewey, however, fully knew froebel’s authentic kindergarten play theory. hall thought it necessary to base ecec education on studies of children’s development. his idea was to let the child mature in a safe institution without external demands from adults. the resulting didactic triangle consists of three isolated components: any content will do, there is no adult who interacts closely with the child, and the child waits for the years before school to pass. the curriculum seems to be empty too, no specific content, just one principle: not to disturb the child’s development. as mentioned, haeckel’s theory has racist bias, and so has hall’s work (baker, 1998, p. 164ff). arnold gesell (1880–1961) for a long time strongly influenced ecec in many countries. he was a student of hall and thought of child development as general and universal (dalton, 2005; harris, 2011). gesell’s idea of maturation could result in a passive relation to children in ecec, where staff too often waited for development to take place. during the 1970’s gesell was substituted, for instance by the theories of jean piaget (1896–1980) and lev vygotsky (1896–1934). piaget and vygotsky started to develop their theories during the 1920’s and it is worth noticing that the practical applications of these theories were not introduced until several decades later in ecec settings. piaget was recognized early and presented his work for instance in elsinore in 1929 (brehony, 2004, p. 748) at the new education fellowship yearly conference. piaget first won broader acclaim in the us during the didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 77 early 1970’s and then became popularized in many other countries. towards the end of the 1970’s, the same happened to vygotsky. his texts were translated into english, and these influenced researchers in the us and other countries. however, the unsettled status of vygotsky’s texts and their translations (cf. van der veer & yasnitsky, 2011) means that there is no general agreement on the status of his theories today. this parallels the problems in froebel’s case: many followers found the original texts hard to access and there are few translations of his work. neither piaget nor vygotsky developed didactics and curricula for the pre-school years in the same way as froebel did. however, their thinking stimulated the development of many practical ecec applications. the same is true for other psychologists such as jerome bruner and daniel stern. there is much more to say about modern ecec programs and how psychologists have influenced ecec significantly for more than 100 years, often indirectly without an interest in the practical applications of didactics and curricula. on the other hand, psychologists opened the door to the child again, a door that was closed after froebel’s death in 1852 when his followers moved his kindergarten in an authoritarian direction. froebel’s play theory as analytical model for ecec helmuth heiland argues that froebel’s educational play theory uses a different set of concepts in comparison with theories of education and psychology of today. froebel has a global, united view of the universe as an integrated system, based upon his understanding of science and religion. the child was to observe and see this universal system, with the help of froebel’s play theory. children should recognize the world around them and integrate the knowledge they had achieved, and at the same time relate to all children and adults around them. as a contrast, today we find programs which rely on tests or evaluations, and some following the “teaching to the test” principle or using scripted instruction. a system for external control of ecec through tests was developed early in the us (cuban, 1992, p. 188). in the us tests are still used to control ecec (cf. snow & van hemel, 2008). in pennsylvania we find an instance of extensive testing, with more than 140 different instruments in use (van schaaik, 2016). for froebel childhood was a fundamental stage in life with its own intrinsic value. the years before school were important in building a firm foundation for the years to come, not by training in the “three r’s”: reading, writing and arithmetic. froebel’s aim was to support active children in meeting the world around them by interacting with adults, which fulfilled his idea of the unity of life. he did not focus separately on creativity like marenholtzbülow, or on motherly home activities like schrader-breymann; these aspects were integrated parts of his play theory. he had no intention in fostering working-class children’s readiness for their adult life as disciplined workers. his fundamental interest and purpose are in nature and children as part of nature and its ongoing development, not school subjects per se. this means that froebel’s body of work offers a much greater educational perspective that is not limited to a traditional school classroom or to authoritarian ecec programs. there are many competing models of ecec, and it would be interesting to know more in detail about their foundations and practical 78 global education review 9 (2) work. however, large empirical studies are difficult to organize. house (, 1979, p. 40) found problems in the organization of the follow through project in the us during the 1970’s. this was a huge evaluation of early childhood education programs financed through the federal head start program during the 1970s (st. pierre, 1979; bereiter, & kurland, 1981). i suggest we start with a more limited task: discussing didactics and curricula, not in order to re-introducing froebel’s model, but to use it as a contrast to ecec programs of today. what will be the future of ecec? will there be more of the traditional school teaching and learning with a focus on direct school preparation for 3-year-olds as, for instance, in the french école maternelle? are there still instances of a child-centered pedagogy in which the focus is the pre-school child’s maturation? which are the didactic relations between child, adult and content? the didactic triangle, focusing on the child, adult and content, can be found in any educational model (hopmann, 2007, p. 111ff). this is not a model that froebel himself used, but with klafki’s theory of categorical bildung, it is evident that froebel stressed the importance of both adult and content in interaction with the active child, the need for an object related to the world around the child, and a balanced relation between teacher and child. traditional educational models have used authoritarian rote learning of facts, hymns, words etc. in which content is chosen in advance, and with no place for play in any respect. this can be seen as an instance of the material side of bildung that klafki describes (1964, p. 77f). on the other side there might be laissez-faire models with a random selection of content and no structured setting for adults supporting children. here the focus is on the child as a subject, an instance of klafki’s formal aspect of bildung. child, adult and teaching object has no organized interaction, the child is waiting for maturation to take place. in a laissezfaire model, play is based upon the child’s inner life, an idea far from froebel’s play theory. heiland (2012a, p. 312) says that it is a mistake to see a conflict between froebel’s play theory applied in the kindergarten, and his model for education in school. they are not two separate entities, but two aspects of categorical bildung. in kindergarten, adult and child are supposed to playfully interact with the world, acquiring new words and tools for thinking, and school education will later use the same approach. the child will reflect upon the new knowledge which will later develop into clear concepts in school. with the help of the didactical triangle, we may study when ecec models differ and when they agree: froebel, montessori, steiner, reggio emilia and other models, discussed at length in the international handbook of early childhood education (fleer & van oers, 2018). will we find fully balanced didactic triangles as with froebel? a curricular perspective: how is content selected and organized? what is behind ecec programs? roberta wollons (2000) presents some of the diverse ideas behind ecec programs and the contributions made by religious organizations, political doctrines, and educational or psychological ideas. marenholtz-bülow and schrader-breymann aimed at fostering working class children and lost froebel’s focus on children becoming free, thinking persons. today james heckman (cf. 2008) expresses a different view when he supports investment in all didactic and curriculum in ecec from a froebelian standpoint 79 children from birth, supporting both intellectual and social development, starting in the worldviews of parents. this is more in line with froebel’s principle of life unity, lebenseinigung. klafki’s theory of categorical bildung does not say much about what children are supposed to learn. froebel’s materials, the gifts and occupations, should make the world available to the child, together with outdoor work, and organized group play. principles such as play care and unification of life were fundamental to froebel’s idea of the interaction between every single part in his system, in accordance with his spherical law. content should be presented as balanced contradictions which are to be mediated. froebel aimed at children experiencing a solid pre-conceptual understanding of human relations and the mathematical structure of the world, to acquire words, intellectual tools and knowledge (heiland, 2002, p. 61). this experience should make it possible for children to develop wellstructured, detailed concepts later in school. we may ask which principles are guiding the structure of daily work and how coherent or fragmented the program is. is the focus on pre-constructed content in accordance with explicit goals from school subjects, or is the aim to develop pre-conceptions of the world around the child as set out by froebel? is content selected in accordance with froebel’s idea of balanced contradictions to be mediated? or is such 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(2000). kindergartens and cultures: the global diffusion of an idea. new haven, ct: yale university press. using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures 12 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: greenberg, jeremy h., & so, jamie lok lam. (2024). using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures to increase play and decrease stereotypy in a student with autism spectrum disorder. global education review, 11 (3), 12-19. using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures to increase play and decrease stereotypy in a student with autism spectrum disorder jeremy h. greenberg the children's institute of hong kong jamie lok lam so the children's institute of hong kong abstract the present study used functional analysis and tested for the effects of a treatment package on the increase of play and decrease of stereotypy with a student with autism spectrum disorder (asd) who attended an inclusive international school in hong kong. the treatment package was a partial replication of a toy conditioning procedure from tsai & greer (2006). the play used was games on an ipad. the functional analysis conducted suggested that the high rates of stereotypy observed were being maintained through automatic reinforcement. furthermore, the student was chosen to be in this study due to his observed high rates of stereotypy and limited community of reinforcers. results show a correlation between the play conditioning procedure and subsequent reduction in stereotypy. keywords autism spectrum disorder, stereotypy, toy conditioning introduction one of the defining features of children with autism spectrum disorder (asd) and other types of special education needs (sen), includes a lack of functional age-appropriate play. without meaningful play behavior, children usually behave inappropriately and may be observed to have high rates of self-stimulatory behaviors known as stereotypy or passivity. most early childhood assessment instruments that are used by professional behavior analysts to assess young children include multiple test items related to play (bailey & wolery, 1989; partington, 2010). the research literature in applied behavior analysis contains a variety of strategies and tactics found to remediate inappropriate play behaviors and decrease stereotypy that include punishment or conditioning reinforcement strategies. (koegel, firestone, kramme, & dunlap, 1974; wahler & fox, 1980; greer, becker, saxe, & mirabella, 1985; nuzzologomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer, 2002). using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures 13 koegel, firestone, kramme, & dunlap (1974) provided one of the earliest applied studies on replacing self-stimulatory behaviors with play behaviors. the children were punished using vocal verbal reprimands such as “no” and were physically held to suppress or prevent the inappropriate self-stimulatory behaviors. although the researchers were somewhat successful in replacing the stereotypy using punishment techniques, the play behaviors were not maintained nor were they generalized to multiple settings. in an early study by wahler & fox (1980), four boys ranging in age from 5 to 8 years old were given a treatment package consisting of solitary toy play and time out from positive reinforcement. improvements in play were observed, however, the effects were variable. in response to the variability observed in all four boys after exposure to the treatment condition, the researchers added the time out from positive reinforcement condition that functioned to reduce the variability of the students responding and improve the overall durability of the behavior change. in both koegel, et al. (1974) and wahler & fox (1980), play behaviors were improved albeit the effects of their treatment packages were relatively weak and punishment was used. in contrast, recent research suggests that strategies based on the principle of positive reinforcement such as conditioning reinforcement and observational learning techniques are preferred. these strategies may be more successful than punishment since they aim to replace undesirable behaviors (stereotypy and passivity) with more appropriate socially significant behaviors such as play and leisure skills without the common side effects that are common with punishment procedures (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007; nuzzolo-gomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer, 2002) and include, self-management used to improve play in three children having sen (stahmer & schreibman, 1992), video modeling used to teach reciprocal play skills (dauphin, kinney, & stromer, 2004; macdonald, sacramone, mansfield, wiltz, & ahearn, 2009), and increasing in toy play in toddlers having sen (dicarlo & reid, 2004). one of the earliest studies that used positive reinforcement with five adults with developmental disabilities, found that stereotypy could be reduced and effectively replaced through the implementation of a conditioning program that paired toy play with positive reinforcement (greer, becker, saxe, & mirabella, 1985). their study was later successfully replicated by nuzzolo-gomez, leonard, ortiz, rivera, & greer (2002) using three preschool students with autism, extending the external validity of the findings to younger participants. singer-dudek, oblak, & greer (2011) used a conditioning procedure that was successful in establishing books as reinforcers. these findings were educationally significant and could signal that a protocol can be used to induce verbal milestones lacking in students with sen (greer & ross, 2008). one study that focused on using a procedure to teach observational learning was by leaf, oppenheim-leaf, leaf, courtemanche, taubman, mceachin, sheldon, & sherman (2012). in their study, leaf et. al. (2012) set out to replicate the findings of bruzek & thompson (2007) who found that typically developing preschool children’s preference for playing with stimuli was increased after they observed a peer play with that same stimulus. while typically developing children have a relatively wide community of reinforcers this is frequently lacking in students with sen (greer & mccorkle, 2003; greer, 2002). once conditioned, these new stimuli can provide the student with new motivation that will lead to success in school simply because they will have a 14 global education review 11 (3) wider community of reinforcers that teachers can use to teach language (verbal behavior), social, and other academic responses (skinner, 1957; greer, 2002, greer & ross, 2008). to expand on this notion and the above-mentioned research base, greenberg, lau & lau (2016) used an antecedent treatment package to replace stereotypy with painting as a form of appropriate play in four primary students with asd. painting can be done individually or in groups and can occur in a variety of settings that makes it an appropriate target behavior for almost all ages and may lead to the generalization of behavior change (stokes & baer, 1977). in 2006, tsai & greer used an operant conditioning (pairing) procedure to condition books as reinforcers for four students with asd. their intervention involved 20 intensive rotations of train-test trials consisting of 5 seconds each. their results show that the conditioning procedure resulted in fewer learn units needed for the students to master learning new sight words. our study aimed to test for the effects of the conditioning treatment package on the increase in play behavior and reduction of stereotypy behaviors as well as to extend the eternal validity of tsai & greer’s (2006) treatment package on stereotypy behaviors with one student with asd aged 13 using a single case experimental design. methods participants in the study a 13-year-old boy with moderate to severe asd participated in our study. the participant was a student in an inclusive international school in hong kong. student h received one-to-one special instruction with applied behavior analysis (aba) for 30 hours per week. he was recruited for this study due to his observed high rates of stereotypy. definition of behaviors and data collection baseline stereotypy and post treatment stereotypy. student h’s stereotypy was observed and recorded during regular school days of virtual one-to-one sessions before and after the toy conditioning procedure. stereotypy was defined as hand flapping, rocking, head shaking, non-sense vocalizations (palilalia), jumping, looking at lights with a side glance, mouthing fingers or inappropriate objects (pica), nose poking, and covering ears. data were recorded using five-second partial time intervals and the timer+ application on a smartphone was used to prompt the observers to record data. play probes and post probe. play probes were conducted during baseline of and after the play conditioning procedure to determine the level of appropriate play in freeplay settings in a classroom. appropriate play was defined as playing with and manipulating an ipad appropriately in the absence of stereotypy. all play probes were conducted in a free-play setting and were five-minute in length. a total of 60, 5-second intervals were conducted in each session. intervals of appropriate play were recorded using a direct observation procedure. play conditioning procedure. the target behavior of the play conditioning procedure was appropriate play using an ipad during the test trials. an ipad was used in the play conditioning procedure as student h had limited interest in toys, and ipad games was an age-appropriate toy for a 13-year old boy. appropriate play was defined as looking at and/or playing with ipad games appropriately in the absence of stereotypy for the entire 5-second duration of the test trial interval. each play conditioning session consisted of 20 pairs of train-test trials. data were recorded using a whole interval recording procedure and direct using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures 15 observation in real time. data were recorded only during the test trials. procedure a single case experimental design was used in this study and included the following conditions: functional analysis, baseline and post treatment stereotypy during virtual teaching sessions, and play-conditioning procedure (baseline play probes, train-test pairing of the play conditioning procedure, and post-conditioning play probes). functional analysis. the functional analysis consisted of direct observation and measurement of various environmental conditions such as attention, escape, and play (control) conditions (vollmer, marcus, ringdahl, and roane, 1995). each session was 10-minute in length and all sessions were conducted by one of student h’s two aba teachers. the experimenters were present for data collection and interobserver agreement measurements. the setting conditions were manipulated so that the participant would receive attention in the form of social praise, demands were stopped (learn units), or free play whereas the participant was allowed to play freely. baseline stereotypy and post treatment stereotypy (virtual sessions). stereotypy was observed and recorded during one-to-one virtual sessions. each session was 10 minutes in length. baseline play and post probes. each play probe session was five-minutes in length. during these probe sessions, various an ipad was placed on the table and the teacher instructed the student to “play.” play conditioning procedure. the play conditioning procedure was a stimulus-stimulus pairing procedure. each session consisted of 20, five-second train-test trial pairs. each of the train-test trial pairs consisted of five seconds training of appropriate play with the ipad followed by five seconds of testing immediately after the training. mastery criterion was established at 18/20 across two sessions. interobserver agreement in this study, ioa was assessed for 63% of the functional analysis sessions with a mean of 99% for attention condition, 97% for demand condition, and 99% for play (control) condition. ioa was assessed in 92% of the baseline & post treatment stereotypy of virtual sessions, 80% of the free-play probe sessions, and 100% of the play conditioning procedure sessions. the mean agreement was 96% for baseline & post treatment stereotypy of virtual , 88% of play probes, and 96% of the play conditioning procedure. results figure 1 shows the result of the functional analysis. stereotypy was observed in all three conditions. the rate of stereotypy was highest in the play condition, followed by attention condition. the results suggested that the student’s stereotypy might be maintained by automatic reinforcement and social reinforcement. figure 2 shows the visual graphic display of the effects of the play conditioning procedure on stereotypy. in baseline sessions, the data showed an increasing trend of stereotypy with a mean of 65% of intervals. after the play conditioning procedure, the student h showed a significant reduction of stereotypy with a mean of 30% of intervals. that is, the data showed that the student’s stereotypy was significantly reduced (by more than half) during virtual one-to-one teaching sessions after the play conditioning procedure. figure 3 shows the play conditioning procedure including basslines, test/trial treatment condition, and post probe condition. 16 global education review 11 (3) figure 1. functional analysis of stereotypy across three conditions: play, attention, and demand conditions figure 2. effects of the play conditioning treatment data across pretest and posttest conditions. using functional analysis and conditioning play procedures 17 figure 3. toy play conditioning visual graphic display with baseline, toy play conditioning procedure, and post probe experimental conditions. discussion the data show that the treatment package (play conditioning procedure) consisting of 20 intensive rotations of train-test trials consisting of 5 seconds each was effective in decreasing the stereotypy behaviors. a correlation was observed between the implementation of the treatment package and the subsequently observed decrease in the number of intervals containing stereotypy for one student. an educationally significant reduction of 35% was observed. much like the books for the participants in tsai & greer’s (2006) study, ipad games for our target student likely became a conditioned reinforcer as a function of the conditioning treatment package. subsequently and simultaneously, student h’s stereotypy behavior was observed to decrease. ipad games are age appropriate for student h and for mostly all teens and older children and young adults due to the variety of games and educational options that one can use across the lifespan. limitations of the present study there were at least two limitations of the present study worth discussion. the first was that there was only one participant in the study. second, during the intervention, there were a limited number of games presented during the train-test conditioning trials. implications for future research future research should test for the effectiveness of the toy conditioning procedure across multiple age groups of students and with students having different diagnoses. we showed that the play conditioning procedure can be effective in reducing stereotypy compared to tsai & greer (2006) findings of attending (observing) books. references cooper, j. o, heron, t. e., & heward, w. l. 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(1980). solitary toy play and time out: a family treatment package for children with aggressive and oppositional behavior. journal of applied behavior analysis, 13, (1), 2329. varieties of bildsamkeit 50 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kivelä, ari. (2023). varieties of bildsamkeit. global education review, 10 (1-2), 50-65. varieties of bildsamkeit ari kivelä abstract every theory of education endorses an image of a human being as someone who can be educated and is capable of self-education and self-cultivation. since j.f. herbart, educationalists have been sketching this image under the title bildsamkeit, which has become a central element of the specific german way of speaking about educational reality. herbart famously claimed that the bildsamkeit of the one who is to be educated is the basic concept of scientific pedagogy. in the first half of 20th century, w. flitner claimed that bildsamkeit is one of the key concepts of a general theory of education. bildsamkeit is even more difficult to translate than bildung. possible candidates could be educability, malleability, perfectibility, and plasticity. while the richness of this notion cannot be exhaustively translated into a single term, and while the meaning of a concept is, after all, in its use, this article aims to make explicit how this concept is used in different contexts. first, the philosophical anthropology behind this concept will be discussed. second, the focus will be on the question of how bildsamkeit is entwined in educational interaction. finally, the connections between bildsamkeit subjectivity and individuality will be thematized. these contemplations might give some provisional guidelines for future translations of this concept. keywords bildsamkeit, bildung, anthropology, education introduction every theory of education endorses an image of the human being as someone who can be educated and is capable of self-education and self-cultivation (benner, 2017; tenorth, 2020). since j.f. herbart, educationalists have been sketching this image under the title bildsamkeit, which has become a central element of a german way of speaking about educational reality. herbart (1984) famously claimed that the bildsamkeit (of the one who is to be educated) is the basic concept of scientific pedagogy. while the concept of bildung and thus theories of bildung appeared during the early years of the 20th century and made an integral part of the emerging discipline of pädagogik, the notion of bildsamkeit was cemented as a proprium of educationist language. the “cultural and human scientific pedagogics” – often called in german textbooks: geisteswissenschaftliche pädagogik – drew inspiration from the philosophical and humanistic tradition of bildung and aimed to preserve it, despite the rise of the new scientific approaches applied to the research of education. pedagogics as an academic discipline had to confront the increasing application of such disciplines as psychology, psychiatry, medicine, and biology to the research in the field of education, and bildung seemed to offer the possibility of a genuine pedagogical view of the social reality associated with problems of human development, maturing, teaching, and learning in various formal and informal contexts. most notably, hermann nohl (1933), and above all, wilhelm flitner (1968), used bildsamkeit as a conceptual tool for the development of a pedagogical theory that was neither a subdiscipline of philosophy (philosophy of education) nor an application of the other types of research following the methodological ideal of modern natural sciences. hence, they utilized the basic idea set by herbart, according to whom pedagogics as a discipline on its own right must cultivate and develop its own concepts. against all odds, bildsamkeit has survived until the last varieties of bildsamkeit 51 decades of the 20th century. for example, klaus mollenhauer (1985) suggested that the problem of bildsamkeit is an integral part of every contemplation on education. bildsamkeit is not easy to translate. possible options could be, for example, educability, malleability, perfectibility, and plasticity (benner & english, 2004; brezinka 1990; weiβ, 2018). while the richness of this notion cannot be exhaustively translated into a single term, this article aims to make explicit some ways of its usage in different contexts. in the end, the meaning of a concept is in its use. first, the philosophical anthropology behind the concept will be discussed. second, the focus will be on the question of how bildsamkeit is entwined in educational interaction. third, the connection between bildsamkeit and subjectivity will be thematized. these contemplations might give some guidelines for future receptions of the concept almost impossible to translate. philosophical anthropology and human bildsamkeit in his general theory of education, flitner (1968) makes a distinction between bildsamkeit, in its general sense, on the one hand and bildsamkeit in its specific or actual sense, on the other. it will be under the concept of general bildsamkeit (allgemeine bildsamkeit) that general attributes of the human species will be discussed. flitner (1968) speaks about “human as such” (mensch überhaupt) and “bildsamkeit an sich” (pp. 87, 89). one of the central attributes of the human species is, according to him, the ability of the “human as such” to behave during their process of development in a plastic way and respond to whatever intentional educational influence (teaching, upbringing, etc.) is done by an educator who feels deep responsibility for the development of the other person (flitner, 1968, p. 92). flitner (1968, pp. 88–89) emphasizes that bildsamkeit an sich is merely an abstract concept illustrating some universal characteristics of the human species in general and detached from the contextual and historical preconditions defining the actual forms of human existence. although bildsamkeit in this sense is not yet an educationalist concept per se, it plays an important role as one of the key concepts in the theory of education because general discussions about the fundamentals of human existence should clarify why individual humans can be educated in the first place. flitner (1968, p. 89) states that human bildsamkeit means “natural plasticity,” typical for human beings as a species. this feature of the human as an organic natural being has an “objective biologic basis for adaptation for her environment” (flitner, 1968, p. 89). although the notion of plasticity might encourage us to think that human bildsamkeit means passivity (langewand, 1995) (from the perspective of a human organism, so that the environmental influences mainly induce development of the potentials which are immanently given for the organic nature of the human species), flitner (1968) emphasizes that our relationship to our environment is both passive and active. essentially, the human species can be characterized by its facility for developing various forms of behavior necessary for the selfpreservation of the individual and the species. the forms of behavior become, in the course of time, relatively constant habits. part of the human bildsamkeit is the habituation to the given environment. the human as a living organism (lebewesen) (flitner, 1968, p. 89) responds to certain elements of the environment. in this process of habituation, human beings not only passively respond to the environment but pro-actively strives to learn those forms of behavior, allowing them to 52 global education review 10 (1-2) become inhabitants of their environment (flitner, 1968, p. 89.). although flitner (1968, p. 21) admits that the theory of bildsamkeit can utilize results from biology and medicine, he takes a critical stance against the robust naturalism presented by those disciplines. human bildsamkeit cannot be understood wholly in terms of the biological and organic nature of the human species, alone. the human being is a natural being (naturwesen), a living organism, whose growth is, without any doubt, based on its natural potentialities. however, bildsamkeit is not purely a natural phenomenon. bildsamkeit means a natural tendency or potentiality for human beings as embodied organisms to gain and develop geist or spirit for themselves. the notion of geist stands for the realm that humans themselves have brought into existence and which is sustained by human beings individually and collectively. geist is a product of human activity and bildsamkeit refers to the human ability to produce and reproduce this realm. flitner (1968) defines this as a typically human facility to “use tools and understand symbols and ability to produce these both” (p. 35). hence, bildsamkeit refers to two aspects of an essentially human potential. humans as a species are able to work on their material environment and additionally, form communities, which are structured by intersubjectively-shared meanings and language. human bildsamkeit marks our ability for labor and interaction. it also allows for the development of forms of interaction between human beings and the physical world, on the one hand, which we as human species use to secure the material basis of our existence and, on the other, develop social formations between human beings. flitner’s notion of bildsamkeit seems to float between naturalism and cultural historicism – between nature and spirit (geist). human bildsamkeit is always a part of nature. it is something defining the human species in general and is actually an expression of “biologic needs” (flitner, 1968, p. 94), which must be satisfied so that both the self-preservation of the species and the individual are secured. flitner (1968, p. 94) discusses the vitality and human urge for life (drang zum leben). these are the very essence of human bildsamkeit as a natural phenomenon. vitality has its expression in the active relationship of humans to their environment, in which they seek to satisfy their needs rooted originally in their organic nature. this relation to the world is a dynamic and active one. human beings share this aspect of bildsamkeit with other animals, but what makes bildsamkeit a typically human feature, however, is that, based on the vitality and fundamental urge for sustaining their life, humans seem to begin to develop much more complex ways of interacting with their environment: humans gradually form a social and cultural world, which largely mediates their relation to the material and physical environment important for the satisfaction of organic and biologic needs. in other words: besides the natural urge for the self-preservation of its own vitality, the human species has the urge for social life, which eventually becomes cultivated into the urge to spiritualization (vergeistigung) (flitner, 1968, p. 94). becoming spiritualized or attaining the spirit, geist, does not mean for flitner some sort of uplifting experience of supernatural or divine realm. it rather refers to the enculturation and development of human consciousness intertwined with the possibility that humans can develop for themselves collectively-shared cultural resources such as language, knowledge, varieties of bildsamkeit 53 and technologies, and use them jointly for the purposes of sustaining both their individual life and the human species (flitner, 1968, pp. 94, 96). the realm of geist appears to be a reality in its own right and yet rooted in human nature. while geist is basically a product of the human species and its activity, it remains in the same trajectory with the evolution of human organic nature and stems from the fundamental human need to secure life and vitality. according to flitner (1968, pp. 94–95), the essentially human urge for attaining the realm of spirit, ranging from the use of language and diverse ways of being conscious to cultural formations, such as systems of values and aesthetic products, originate already from the ensemble of various factors typical for human organic life. the human enterprises for knowledge, understanding, comprehension, indicating, and describing the things in the environment, they all have their evolutionary fundament in the need for human self-preservation. the most rudimentary forms of consciousness are responses to natural (biologic and organic) needs. they are functional for the satisfaction of those needs: “language and knowledge, recollection and memory with foresight and calculation of coming are biologic needs” (flitner, 1968, p. 94). hence, spirit is for the human being also a “pure outer necessity of life” (lebensnotwendigkeit) (flitner, 1968, p. 94). what flitner calls geist, is vitally important in a twofold way: first, the realm of geist is the result of the struggle for survival of humans as a biologic and organic species. its evolution secures the survival of the human species in the natural and material environment. second, geist (i.e., human culture in the broadest sense) offers a reservoir of various ways or means for satisfying the needs typical for us as human species. the development of geist is initially rooted in these rudimentary forms, but gradually leads to appearances of human and cultural existence, which become constantly more complex, so that, eventually, it can hardly be reduced anymore to the original needs based on the organic constitution of the human species (flitner, 1968, p. 95). bildsamkeit does not simply refer to the ability of the human species to adapt and react to diverse physical and material environments, but have the potential to detach themselves from their initial natural and immediate relation, which stands between their living organism and environment (based on the needs and desires given by their organic nature) and eventually shift toward an existence structured by culture and consciousness. (flitner, 1968, p. 96). that humans have the potential to move forward from the pure natural existence to the realm of culture and become conscious does not exhaustively explain the meaning bildsamkeit seems to have. bildsamkeit is not only a human potential in the positive meaning of the word, but the whole concept is defined by negative anthropology. the human species develops, and it must develop in a culturally and symbolically mediated relation to the world, because, quite simply, the genetic qualities resulting from the natural evolution of the species are relatively modest. accordingly, bildsamkeit is perhaps more an expression of human imperfection than human potential. the human is an imperfect being who must produce with his own conscious activity the means, tools, and cultural resources that can be used to secure human selfpreservation in varying environments (roth, 1966, p. 115). hence, bildsamkeit is not solely the potential of the human species, but the result of its inability for self-preservation based solely on its organic capacities. the human species compensates for this natural inability by 54 global education review 10 (1-2) creating an environment that is no longer just a natural and material environment consisting of objective and observable entities, which can be exploited and consumed immediately by human beings, but the realm of culture, tradition, language, habits, and conscious action. according to the tradition of classical german philosophy, which can be traced to hegel, this very realm has been called geist. it offers “constantly growing resources of linguistic and other means of symbolization, of images and concepts as knowledge,” (flitner, 1968, p. 96) which are available for individuals and the whole human species, and can be used for selfpreservation. geist therefore makes it possible for humans to compensate for the organic deficits occurring naturally to them and eventually inhabit various material environments and transform them into a world of their own making. flitner’s contemplations of bildsamkeit are dependent on the intellectual context in which they originally emerged. the theoretical language reflects some aspects typical for german intellectual culture of the first half of the 20th century. in particular, the extensive use of the notion of geist (spirit) and the quite poietic (reitemeyer, 2019, p. 17) expressions indicate the intellectual context quite clearly. however, the idea of bildsamkeit can be reconceptualized and updated quite easily, as klaus mollenhauer (1985, orig. 1983) shows while summarizing the standard interpretation of bildsamkeit. he gives an updated version of the notion of bildsamkeit, which was developed originally by flitner in the context of geisteswissenschaftliche pädagogik. mollenhauer (1985, p. 83) writes as follows: bildsamkeit is the case with all mammals, human children are born with a genetic endowment; but humans need to be cared for and protected over a much longer period. this gap between the child’s initial physical endowment and what is needed for survival must be compensated for. children make up for this gap through their malleability (i.e. bildsamkeit a.k) – an openness to learning and to new experiences that is unknown elsewhere in the animal kingdom. collectively (i.e. during the history of humans as species beings; a.k.), this compensatory process is driven by “culture;” ...children have an organic predisposition to malleability (plasticity). but a child’s bildsamkeit can only be described as a response to the challenge posed by culture. i follow here the translation by norm friesen (mollenhauer, 2004), although his use of the word “collectively” is perhaps not the best option here. originally, mollenhauer uses an expression “gattungsgeschitlich” (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 83). the notion of gattungsgeschichte (species history) has a much richer meaning than expressions like “collective” or “collectively.” it stems from the philosophical anthropology of the marxian philosophy. species history combines two inseparable aspects typical for the development of humanity. human development is a part of natural history. the human species is a result of natural evolution, which has formed the essence of human beings in a particular way. the human being is a species-being (gattungswesen), having specific organic characteristics and biological needs and desires, which it aims to satisfy by using and “manipulating” the natural environment. with those organic needs and their satisfaction, the human species is a part of nature. however, it cannot be totally subsumed under the category of nature, because the human species is also a historical being. it sustains its own existence while satisfying the organic and varieties of bildsamkeit 55 biological needs in action, which mediates human organic nature with the objective processes in the material environment. at the same time, the human species begins to use new historical ways and habits to satisfy its needs. eventually, it produces and forms itself through its own action by producing new needs and ways of satisfying these needs. basically, this was the main idea in the famous feuerbach-chapter of german ideology by young marx and engels (marx, & engels, 1973). of course, it can be said that humans produce themselves collectively while aiming to satisfy the needs typical for human nature. individual members of the species join their efforts and gradually form collectively-shared types of action, which make the satisfaction of those needs, and hence, also human self-preservation, much more efficient at the level of the human species. the emergence of collective and intersubjectively shared forms of action (family, distribution of labor, language, institutions, and culture) is a part of species history, but the species history and the alleged essence or nature of human species-being cannot be replaced with the concept of a freefloating collective alone. despite the deep anthropologic train of thought which also contains some naturalistic overtones discussed above, bildsamkeit is not just “natural fact” or something invariant. instead, it is a historical phenomenon and must be understood historically. the historicity of bildsamkeit leads to the next variety of bildsamkeit typical of german educational theory. bildsamkeit and educative interaction what makes bildsamkeit truly one of the basic concepts of educational theory is that bildsamkeit depends on diverse forms of interaction and interpersonal relations oriented by the educational intentionality of an educator – the educative will (der erziehende wille), as flitner (1988, p. 143) puts it. not only social and historical context are relevant for our understanding of bildsamkeit, but the specific will or intention to educate and a specific educational reality must be taken into account while theorizing about it (flitner, 1968, p. 90). the modus operandi of the educational situation is that the one who educates considers the addressee of education (i.e. student) as someone who can be attributed with bildsamkeit and, based on this expectation, aims to organize the situation so that eventually the latter begins to bring their bildsamkeit into appearance (flitner, 1968, pp. 93, 95). herman nohl, flitner’s contemporary and colleague, makes clear that bildsamkeit is an aspect of educational interaction and has something to do with an educator (teacher, parent, mentor etc.) and their attitude toward the one who is about to be educated. nohl (1933, p. 36) writes as follows: “yet, it is clear, that the concept of bildsamkeit itself stems still from the perspective of educator. it is the decisive prerequisite her educational work.” mollenhauer (1985) summarizes the traditional educationalist understanding by stating simply that bildsamkeit is the result of a specific educational attitude: educational interaction is based on the trust or even belief that a child has an ability or inclination or will to learn. despite mollenhauer’s clear reference to children, bildsamkeit as a theoretical concept covers every educational situation, regardless of the age or developmental stage of the addressee of education. adults also can be attributed with bildsamkeit when educational deeds are addressed to them (flitner, 1968, pp. 86, 95). a person who educates assumes that every person is, in principle, a creature attributed with bildsamkeit (flitner, 1968, p. 95). in this case, bildsamkeit refers to an interpretation or image constructed by an educator during the interpersonal pedagogical 56 global education review 10 (1-2) relationship. it concerns the assumed possibilities, developmental abilities, and inclinations of the other person. hence bildsamkeit is a construct of the potentialities and possibilities that an educator suggests or even hopes to characterize in the other person in the educational situation. it is a result of interpretative achievement and an act of understanding done by an educator. flitner (1968, p. 87) underlines that this cannot be done simply by applying a scientific theory of bildsamkeit to a concrete, individual case. instead, intuitive contact with the other (i.e. child, pupil, student), accompanied by a knowledge of human nature (menschenkenntnis) and a general understanding of diverse aspects of human life (das allgemeine lebensverständnis) appears to offer the only way for such interpretative work by an educator encountering the developing and growing person. unfortunately, flitner does not elaborate what the intuitive encounter would mean or how it is done in the educational situation. yet, he underlines that commitment to a bildsamkeit of the other is the methodical main principle (hauptsatz) of education (flitner, 1968, p. 143). accordingly, every intentional pedagogical activity is based on some sort of interpretation of bildsamkeit, but this interpretation itself must remain always vague, un-secure: the interpretation of a concrete bildsamkeit remains a venture (flitner 1968, p. 98) that must be undertaken fearlessly by an educator so that educational activities can be initiated. mollenhauer (1985) sharpens the view sketched out by flitner (1968), in the following way: pedagogical activity takes the form of an “experiment,” in the sense that it is directed through hypotheses and is always open to the future of the child. the hypothesis is a necessary component because it serves as the image the educator has of the child’s bildsamkeit. if such a hypothesis is not constantly open to correction in pedagogical engagement – if it petrifies so that it actually bars the way to new experiences with the child – the open experiment of pedagogical activity becomes a closed ritual that threatens to extinguish the child’s bildsamkeit (pp. 103–104). bildsamkeit is not only an educator’s hypothetical interpretation of the abilities and potentials belonging to the one being educated. it is not just a hypothetical interpretative construct, always involving a risk. it can be successful or false and incorrect, as well as pertinent and apt. it is eventually more or less fluid and constantly convertible, depending on the abilities of the educator, who aims to understand and interpret the other in the flow of various educational encounters. without being an invariant fact, bildsamkeit is, nevertheless real, as flitner (1968, p. 143) reminds us. after all, bildsamkeit is a concrete phenomenon, deeply and in a very profound way intertwined with any interaction taking place in an educational situation. flitner (1968, p. 90) expresses this as follows: “bildsamkeit does not reveal itself outside the realm where it is expected, and where bildsamkeit is already efficacious, it ought to show its own possibility.” flitner tries to clarify this perhaps cryptic expression while accentuating how the bildsamkeit of a pupil is not something that can be understood somehow and somewhere as selfcontained and independent from intentional educative influence and the ideals behind it (flitner, 1968, pp. 90–91). bildsamkeit and its appearance depends on the structure of interaction typical of varieties of bildsamkeit 57 educational situations and their specific atmospheres created by a competent educator(s). expected and anticipated – even predicted – by the educator is that the addressee of an educational influence has a kind of potentiality, which can manifest itself in the given educational situation or in the course of a series of educational situations and eventually in the future of that individual’s chosen path of life (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 98). from the educationalist point of view, bildsamkeit is neither a self-sufficient nor selfinduced phenomenon. it can be manifested only in the complex network of human interactions designed to arouse or even provoke it (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 103). mollenhauer (1985, p. 90) describes the logic of a specifically educational interaction as an exchange of calls and answers. the description is a metaphorical one. educational interaction has a quasi-dialogic structure, but not quite in the sense of exchanging arguments, so that consensus about the epistemic or moral state of affairs can be reached by communicatively competent agents. neither can educative interaction be understood in the sense of giving and asking reasons in the form of linguistically well-formed sentences articulated by competent persons who collectively share the same social space, including norms, role-expectations, institutionalized rules, and so on. rather, pedagogical interaction is based on the flow of calling and answering in a manner that an educator can organize and set up situations, which – metaphorically speaking – call on the assumed bildsamkeit to manifest itself. those manifestations in the actions of the one being educated are answers to calls, which are rather summons or demands (benner, 2015, p. 82) to realize the bildsamkeit as expected, hoped, and anticipated by an educator. hence, bildsamkeit is constructed time after time in the pedagogical interaction or, as mollenhauer (1985, p. 98) rephrases the flitnerian ideas discussed above: “we know that a child’s bildsamkeit is either nurtured or damaged by the forms of interaction to which the child is exposed.” the manifested bildsamkeit of the other person will always be something other than the suggested interpretative image constructed by an educator (mollenhauer 1985, p. 89). responses to educational deeds spring from the bildsamkeit of the one being educated, which in the first place was not wholly grasped by the educator. the image of the other made by an educator can never be a perfect description of the factual potentialities of the other person. interestingly, with the concept of bildsamkeit, the focus of theorizing about education shifts beyond the conventional and well-known dualisms between genetic heredity and environment or between nature and nurture (benner, 2015). these dualisms go back to a traditional dilemma between the omnipotence and powerlessness of education and upbringing: the question, in other words, whether education can be understood as a kind of social technology, having supposedly more or less total and with high degree of certainty calculated control over its intended outcomes. or should we instead suppose that education, despite all the hopes we willingly set to it, is senseless, hopeless, and more-or-less groundless – if not an impossible task – is actually a misleading one. according to flitner (1968, pp. 88–89), discussions about bildsamkeit in fact indicate that this kind of confrontation is simply false. education or upbringing is not powerless and in vain simply because the best it can do is to provoke bildsamkeit to manifest itself. and there is no reason for any kind of hybris or fantasy of omnipotence from the educator, because the bildsamkeit of the other remains always partly out of reach from the educator and her attempts 58 global education review 10 (1-2) to understand it. something not wholly comprehensible and understood cannot be brought under control and mastered by educational actions. bildsamkeit of the other can be only known to the degree it has manifested itself in the life of the other. therefore, bildsamkeit as a manifest phenomenon is not the end-product of educative influence. this manifestation, however, is induced by both the previous educational deeds and the partly unknown, while not yet potentialities and possibilities, of the one who should be educated. hence, the notion of bildsamkeit as a principle of the educative interaction is a way to thematize not only the possibility and even the necessity of education, but also the limits of educational influence (flitner, 1968, p. 88). bildsamkeit as a principle or description of the specific nature of educational interaction seems to have three different meanings: first, bildsamkeit is an interpretative image of the other constructed by an educator. second, it seems to mark the potentiality of the other, which cannot be completely understood by an educator. third, bildsamkeit is the potential manifested in the educational situation or series of situations. the manifestation is possible only when it will be called by an educator and when the other responds or answers for those calls, based on the personal or individual bildsamkeit, which always transcends even the most elaborate acts of understanding done by an educator. hence, every educational action is “bounded with bildsamkeit” (flitner, 1968, p. 143) in a twofold way. first, education would be impossible without the general bildsamkeit typical for the human species. second, a concrete bildsamkeit, taking its appearance in the form of individual life, requires proper education; and thus, human bildsamkeit is in fact a phenomenon that starts to flourish with the right educational action. bildsamkeit is at the same time an anthropologic category, describing something that makes the essence of human world-encountering and, likewise, a strictly educationalist concept, describing something about the pedagogical interaction. bildsamkeit between subject and individuality eventually, bildsamkeit is also a concept that seems to have something to do with subjectivity and the individuality of the one being educated. flitner speaks constantly about bildsamkeit, referring to concepts like person, individual, self, or subjective. in this sense, bildsamkeit has something to do with the development of a person and its individual character (flitner, 1968, pp. 91–93, 95). additionally, flitner (1968) suggests that an individual person has a “relation to herself as a person” (p. 93). in other words, bildsamkeit at this subjective and individual level implies that persons are self-conscious beings in such a way that they clearly can have a twofold self-relation: first, they are aware of their existence and second, they have an ability for selfdetermination and self-reflection of their own individual actions (flitner, 1968, pp. 93, 95). this particular use of bildsamkeit can be traced to johann friedrich herbart’s famous claim that the “bildsamkeit of an educatee is the basic concept of educational science.” for him, bildsamkeit is partly a unity of the mental or psychological features of an individual person, who is an empirical entity among other entities. hence, bildsamkeit appears to be a personal mental disposition or even aggregate of those dispositions, which have been since the days of herbart clearly the theme for psychological (whether theoretical or empirical) inquiry (flitner, 1989, 371; hornstein, 1959). varieties of bildsamkeit 59 unfortunately, flitner’s contemplations in this respect are very fragmentary and tentative by their nature. generally speaking, the use of concepts like subject, individual, and person, is not by all means unambiguous (tenorth, 2020, 170–175) but rather highly dependent on a theoretical framework, the chosen theoretical paradigm, and even the diverse traditions ranging from german idealism to the contemporary philosophy of mind, sociology, and modern psychology. however, mollenhauer has also made some interesting attempts to discuss bildsamkeit and subjectivity or subject. although bildsamkeit can be seen as a subjective, personal, or individual feature, it does not follow that bildsamkeit could be seen as a category covering only the psychological aspect or inner mental life. bildsamkeit marks the border or line between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, or between the unspoken and spoken (mollenhauer, 1986, 86–87). the most elementary aspect of human development, which mollenhauer (1985) understands in the sense of bildung (pp. 127– 128), is the acquisition of the ability to use language. mollenhauer (1985, p. 89) describes this process as a “transformation of subjectivity into intersubjectivity.” it would be oversimplifying to claim this transformation means that a human organism would be first a prelinguistic and a-socialized self (das unsozialisiertes ich) who then gradually leaves this stage of development behind and enters in the realm of language and intersubjectivity (mollenhauer, 1985, pp. 87–88). there is no doubt that these processes happen: individual human beings are initiated into and socialized in the social systems of using symbols and language. initiation or socialization, however, is never perfectly complete so that it leads to the total identification of an individual person with the linguistic structure (mollenhauer, 1986, p. 128). rather, mollenhauer emphasizes the border between unspoken and spoken is not something that could be completely encountered during the individual ontogenetic development or maturation as if we could totally leave behind the pre-linguistic existence of ours. this border remains throughout of our life path (mollenhauer, 1986, p. 123). our conscious being in the world or with the world is defined constantly by the spoken and unspoken. it could be said that our existence is constituted by the difference or rift between these two aspects. accordingly, our conscious life is characterized by bildsamkeit when we try to translate our subjective desires, aims, motives, hopes, and fantasies into the language and forms of action, which then can be communicated and made comprehensible and understandable for others and also ourselves. subjectivity itself remains beyond the spoken and intersubjective (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 127), yet it is always present with our world encountering. one could say, alternatively: the unspoken accompanies our consciousness. subjectivity does not simply vanish behind language, symbols, and cultural arrangements to which one has been more or less successfully initiated; nor will it ever be totally suppressed by the linguistic structure, which presents (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 87) the given cultural and traditional forms of life and standards set by it for interpreting the world. on the contrary, subjectivity surfaces and manifests itself in our actions, in our interpretations of ourselves and the world, which for this reason cannot be wholly subsumed under collectively shared meanings. subjectivity always leaves a trace in our existence, in some form or another. it comes into play “in our bodily movements, in remembrance and in discrepancies in the use of vocabulary” (mollenhauer, 1986, p. 127). in this 60 global education review 10 (1-2) sense, subjectivity is something that cannot be controlled or comprehended. however, humans struggle all the time, from the earliest stages of individual development, to transform the “subjective character” into the “objective” one (flitner, 1968, 96–97). we try to make the originally-unspoken into the spoken, and express or articulate it so that it can be understood by those who share the same intersubjective space constructed by a shared language and cultural background. individual bildsamkeit is an expression of our attempts to find our way of bringing or “transforming” (mollenhauer, 1985, 89) our subjectivity into the realm of language, communication, and interaction. bildsamkeit is clearly a word for the irreducibility of the individual existence. despite acquiring language and intersubjectively-shared symbolic forms, and the whole system of meanings and rules defining the proper use of linguistic expressions, we are still not yet completely defined by them. individual beings cannot be identified through the use of linguistic expressions, which follow linguistic rules, nor with the linguistic structure that dictates the individual expressions. the reason for this seems to be simply that in our conscious existence there is always a trace of something, which cannot be expressed and communicated or transformed completely into the public sphere, but which seems to be the source of our urge for individual self-articulation in the media of own actions and speech that constitute our relations to ourselves and the world. this something is traditionally called subject or subjectivity (ameriks, 1995). although subjectivity is an element of our world relations, individuality is not something that can simply be deduced or derived from it. the concept of bildsamkeit is a cipher for the consideration that, despite subjectivity, individual beings are not simply a result of self-sufficient or self-induced activity. subjectivity needs to open to the world, language, culture, and other beings, in order to become real. simultaneously, the process of the opening of subjectivity will be determined by them, but not comprehensively. hence, individual bildsamkeit expresses subjectivity in the medium of language and symbols without giving itself totally in the collectively-shared forms of communication and intersubjectivity. mollenhauer’s (1985; 1986) treatise on bildsamkeit is based on various theoretical vocabularies he does not discuss explicitly but, rather, uses them mainly as an inspiration for his own contemplations. fortunately, the basic idea seems to be clear: the problem of bildsamkeit emerges precisely on the boundary between subjectivity and intersubjectivity (unspoken and spoken) (mollenhauer, 1985, pp. 86–90). this boundary is an integral part of individual consciousness. our conscious life keeps hovering constantly between the boundary-lines within our own individual life. to the extent that we can transcend the line between subjectivity and intersubjectivity and start to articulate ourselves in intersubjectively shared forms of language, we simultaneously begin to belong to the world. and as long as we are not able to make this step, or just hesitate to make it, we remain in the sphere of our subjectivity and do not open up for the world of intersubjective meanings (mollenhauer, 1985, p. 85). this quite preliminary idea of individual bildsamkeit can be elaborated further by utilizing the contemporary, continental, philosophy of mind and subjectivity: namely, the numerous works written by dieter henrich and manfred frank. interestingly, mollenhauer (1986) seems to be familiar with frank’s contributions to the philosophy of subjectivity, language, and intersubjectivity (p. 177). the varieties of bildsamkeit 61 idea of individual bildsamkeit as a rift between subjectivity and intersubjectivity can perhaps be made more explicit with the concepts: subject, person, and individual. both henrich (1987; 1997) and frank (2012) emphasize that the human as a conscious being is both subject and person. as conscious beings, we are inclined to “conceive of ourselves in a twofold way” (henrich 1987, 119). we have two perspectives into our existence or into our “life within the world” (henrich, 1987, p. 120; henrich 1997, p. 107). henrich (1987, p. 119) illustrates this duplicity inherent to the human consciousness as follows: “we are (1) entities within the world and among others of the same kind (persons) and (2) points of view and anchors of reference with regard to everything an even every world (subjects).” these are two “equally original” (henrich, 1997, p. 107) dimensions of conscious life (i.e., the life we live and conduct as individuals), and we tend to describe ourselves from these two perspectives. we are subjects in the sense that we have immediate certainty of our own existence and our ability to interact with the world and have an impact in it while “acting solely from” (henrich, 1997, p. 119) ourselves. as persons, we are both embodied beings who live in the physical and natural world among other entities and beings who live in the social intersubjectively-shared world (i.e. culture). according to henrich, we, as individual human beings, are simultaneously subjects and persons. these are the indisputable dimensions of our individual existence in the world and “we are the one only insofar as we are the other” (henrich, 1997, p. 107). these dimensions cannot be reduced to each other; instead, subject and person are the facets that “rather presuppose their opposite, although they also tend to subsume it under their respective dominance” (henrich, 1987, p. 119). however, “none of two, neither person nor subject, can subsume the other entirely” (henrich, 1997, p. 117). if self-centering subject were the proper reality of conscious life, then the former could render this life in principle independent of the course of the world. inversely, if subjectivity were only derivative property of personality, then it would be tied up in the context of dependency that is to be observed in all worldly things. (henrich, 1997, p. 118) our subjectivity is always embodied by its opening to the social world and, moreover, needing to be guided into it. hence, we are never solely subjects as such. as persons, we are embedded in the social world: our world views and our conceptual ways or interpretations of the world are produced and determined by social life, traditions, and systems of using language. however, we are never just persons as such, either. we may have the peculiar experience of freedom and subjectivity which taints the otherwise pre-stabilized harmony of the language and mutual intersubjectivity. in action and speaking, we feel an independence and selfhood, which cannot be explained through social programming or conditioning into the life world (henrich, 1997, p. 118). since conscious life is structured by the two tendencies of being both subject and person, we live constantly as individuals in the tension between subjectivity and personhood. these cancel or contradict each other constantly. we are aware of our subjectivity in a way that cannot be made intelligible from the perspective stemming from “conditions of being person” (henrich, 1997, p. 117) and “subject as such can never understand the reality of the world out of itself” (henrich, 1997, p. 117). although we are “from the beginning of our conscious life torn between conflicting selfdescriptions” (henrich, 1987, p. 119), it can be said: “the human being realizes himor herself 62 global education review 10 (1-2) in everything that is essential to himor herself out of the tension between the two perspectives that together structure his or her life in his or her world” (henrich 1997, p. 117). the complexity of this process of self-realization, which, for lack of a better expression, i would call bildung, is rooted in the tension constituting our conscious life in its relation to the world. thus, the process of bildung is not something brought up by the activity of self-centered and self-sufficient individual subject. nor is it the process that just happens in the medium of language, either. the process of bildung is the manifestation of an individual’s attempt to find the reconciliation between the two tendencies of life: namely, subjectivity and personhood. however, this very reconciliation cannot be ever reached in our lives, because this would take the dynamics of our conscious life away. thus, bildung is something that ought to be understood as the never-ending or unending approach to the reconciliation, which we may experience in our individual conscious life as only momentary and fragmentary. when mollenhauer describes bildsamkeit as a boundary between subjectivity and intersubjectivity, the spoken and unspoken, he thematizes as a matter of fact the very same problem as both henrich and frank. both emphasize how subjectivity and personhood are two equally primordial, yet contradicting, tendencies of conscious life. what appears to be the bildsamkeit of an individual is an exhibition of an attempt to overcome this rift and find a reconciliation between these tendencies structuring one’s conscious life. it would be perhaps more appropriate to say that bildsamkeit is an indication of individualization, that is: the transformation of subjectivity or “not yet discursive impulse” of subject so that they could be integrated with the community based on communication and intersubjectivity (mollenhauer, 1986, p. 128). the subjective impulses are interpreted from the perspective of personhood, which allows a conscious being to use linguistic and symbolic (i.e., cultural) capacities, while interpreting and reflecting the original subjective elements of her conscious life (henrich, 1997, p. 118). persons are rooted in the intersubjectively-shared world of meanings, but subjectivity signifies that individual conscious life has a character not to be “determinable like a thing in the world” (henrich, 1997, p. 118). individual consciousness is not simply identical with the collectively shared forms of interpretations and meanings nor determined by them. according to frank (1997), individuality means precisely that world views and the ways of making meanings and interpreting things do not simply echo the intersubjective prestabilized structure, with which we, as persons, are interwoven. rather, they are unique “projections of meaning” that are not “predicted” by the knowledge of linguistic rules constituting the intersubjectivity or derived from the “semantic-pragmatic universals” (frank, 1997, p. 26) on which we as persons are dependent; nor are they sheer expressions or products of a freefloating subject or subjectivity and its “selfsufficiency” and “self-production” (henrich, 1997, p. 119) detached from the worldlines or the partial world-immanence vital for the emergence human conscious life and existence (henrich, 1997, p. 109). this uniqueness can be explained only through our subjectivity and our human ability to bring the subjective element to communication and find an individual style to express the subjective in the medium of intersubjective communication so that “other individuals in the community of communication” (frank, 1997, p. 26) can varieties of bildsamkeit 63 comprehend it. the very meaning of individual bildsamkeit, which mollenhauer perhaps tried to capture is, put simply, the ability to make one’s own subjectivity comprehensible for oneself, in one’s own individual selfinterpretation, as well as for other individuals living in the same realm of intersubjectivity. the integration of subjective with the intersubjective world (mollenhauer, 1985, pp. 86–90) and finding “reconciliation” (henrich, 1987) between being subject and person along with it, can only happen by way of “individuation” (frank, 2004, p. 269). concluding remarks: to translate or not to translate as i have shown above, bildsamkeit is a multifaceted and even fuzzy concept, having diverse varieties of meaning depending on the use of it. it can be applied to diverse contexts, ranging from the highly speculative use under the terms of philosophical anthropology (describing the essence of the human species or human conscious life) to descriptions of the modus operandi of educative interaction or pedagogical situation. from there follows that it is extremely difficult to translate it into one single concept. how, then, can a concept like bildsamkeit be translated into other languages? or should we simply leave it untranslated, as it has become customary with the german concept of bildung, which rarely becomes translated these days. no simple solution for the questions like this can be given. there are possible options for translation. unfortunately, they are hardly ever able to grasp the concept of bildsamkeit in all its richness. those singular translations can only express a fairly narrow aspect of the whole spectrum typical for the original concept. for example, if bildsamkeit is translated into “ability learn” or “learning ability,” the translation does not take into consideration the philosophicanthropologic aspects described by the traditional use of bildsamkeit typical of the traditional german theory of education. if “malleability” or “plasticity” are offered as possible translations of bildsamkeit, then the important aspect of human bildsamkeit can easily fade away. those translations do not take into account how the theoretical discourse about bildsamkeit accentuates the active role of human subjectivity in the world-encountering. in addition, those translations tend to dismiss bildsamkeit as the reason for why the possible outcomes of educational activities cannot always be calculated with great certainty. in this sense, bildsamkeit is a traditional expression for the suggested self-reference and self-regulation of an evolving individual person. however, from translating bildsamkeit into “self-reference,” further difficulties ensue. one might raise the fundamental philosophical issue of what “self” we are then talking about, and what kind of relation this self can take to itself. the problem of self-reflection and its possibility arises here. concepts like self-reference or self-organization tend to shift the focus toward a systems theory, suggesting concepts and theoretical language that differs significantly from the humanistic tradition behind the pedagogical theory discussed here. bildsamkeit could also be translated into a notion of ability or potentiality for bildung. however, a translation of this kind would only create more problems, since bildung and its possible variants and possibilities of translation would make things more complicated. if it seems impossible to find a singular translation for bildsamkeit, it would be perhaps important to ask how the whole way of thinking behind the notion bildsamkeit could be made more accessible for a public unfamiliar with the tradition of german pedagogical theory. the 64 global education review 10 (1-2) whole rich field of problems to which this notion obviously refers still exists, whether we have a suitable name for it or not. our thinking about education and questions about what makes education possible in the first place is not possible without assuming the set of properties that can be distilled into the notion of bildsamkeit. whatever our theories from the historical, cultural, and paradigmatic reasons about education might ever be, and whatever singular concepts might be their structural components, there is little doubt that when we theorize or philosophize about education, we simultaneously endorse the claim that education is possible. this claim, however, is a priori in the sense that we must accept or anticipate the possibility of education before we start to make a theory about it. otherwise, our attempts to make a theory about education are senseless. a german word, bildsamkeit, has proved itself to be a convenient conceptual tool for pulling together the various aspects of human worldencountering, human interaction, and human subjectivity and individuality, which help us to understand why we humans are creatures who can be educated and need to be educated. whether to translate or not translate the concept of bildsamkeit takes, at the end of the day, a secondary status. more important by far is that those among us who understand themselves as theoreticians, philosophers, and researchers of education keep asking from themselves, why and how the ability to educate and to be educated is the essential attribute of humanity. references ameriks, k. 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(2019). a spirit of trust. a reading of hegel’s phenomenology. cambridge, massachusetts: the bellknap press of harvard university press. brezinka, w. (1994). basic concepts of educational science. analysis, critique, proposals (j. s. brice, trans.). lanham, maryland: university press of america. fichte, j. g. (1966). grundlage des naturrechts nach prinzipien der wissenschaftslehre. in r. lauth, h. jacob & r. schottky (eds.), j.g. fichte gesamtausgabe i, 3 (pp. 290–460). stuttgart-bad cannstatt: friedrich frommann verlag. flitner, w. (1968). allgemeine pädagogik (12th ed.). stuttgart: ernst klett verlag. flitner, w. (1989). die geisteswissenschaften und die pädagogische aufgabe. in u. hermann (ed.), wilhelm flitner. theoretische schriften (pp. 370–377). paderborn: ferdinand schöning. frank, m. (1980). das sagbare und das unsagbare. studien zur deutschfranzösischen hermeneutik und texttheorie. frankfurt am main: suhrkamp verlag. frank, m. 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(2018). mollenhauer. in p. smeyers (ed.), international handbook of philosophy of education. part 1 (pp. 269–282). springer international publishing. current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 4 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: dumcke, rico, hanke, isabelle, rahe-meyer, niels, & wegner, claas. (2024). current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students during bystander-cardiopulmonary resuscitation training: a comparative interventional study between two teaching models. global education review, 11 (2), 4-24. current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students during bystandercardiopulmonary resuscitation training: a comparative interventional study between two teaching models rico dumcke isabelle hanke niels rahe-meyer claas wegner abstract the implementation of educating “basic life support (bls) competences” in german schools is particularly affected by the often reported “implementational gap” –limited transfer of empirical findings into practice. this design-based research (dbr) study evaluates two different methodologies for bls teaching, generating implications for transfer. students (n = 136) of a secondary school (11-13 years) were assigned to different methodological approaches. a test group (tg) received intervention implemented into regular biology lessons (10 units; n = 48); the control group (cg) participated in a basic instruction (2 units; n = 68). both large-scale methods – subject-matter teaching (tg) and project activity (cg) – were compared regarding current motivation, self-efficacy, constructivist instruction, cognitive load, and practical skills. data from n = 125 students (tg=48; tg=68) could be included into analysis (mage=11,16; sd=.45; 55.2% female). probability of success and interest increased, anxiety perception decreased (no group-interaction effect), whereas challenge perception remained constantly. self-efficacy overall improved from before to after intervention, with tg reporting higher social self-efficacy and less negative outcome expectancies. no differences were found for practical bls performance. manova (after intervention) showed higher values for anxiety in tg, and for self-efficacy, cg has higher values for negative outcome expectancies (post hoc analysis). for cognitive load and constructivist instruction, no differences between groups were found. in conclusion, both methodological approaches seem to have their own pedagogical justification. schools’ implementation processes may benefit from combining (subject-matter) curriculum content with bls information or content to facilitate time and resourcesaving realization. keywords dbr-research; basic life support; implementation, design, teaching, cpr introduction the approach of teaching basic life support (bls) to students during their schooling aims to avoid a considerable number of out-ofhospital cardiac deaths by creating an effect on future bystander resuscitation rates (böttiger, semeraro, & wingen, 2017). however, this current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 5 “matter of life and death” is imprinted with not only the demands of a serious medical content as indicated by zinckernagel et al. (2016, p. 5) but also with the common challenges of innovative projects in educational institutions (dumcke, wegner, böttiger, kucknat, & rahe-meyer, 2019; dumcke, wegner, & rahe-meyer, 2021): an insufficient transfer of findings from educational research into schools’ regular practice, with changes in daily routines, was frequently reported (einsiedler, 2010; schmiedebach & wegner, 2021; the dbr collective, 2003). a potential solution for those transfer difficulties in educational organizations was described and enhanced by introducing design-based research (dbr) (anderson & shattuck, 2012; fischer, waibel, & wecker, 2005). for such an interprofessional perspective the dbr approach was determined as the fundament of the project “saving lives meets schools” (german original title: leben retten macht schule). this contribution describes the repetitive design process as well as findings of a concept evaluation using two largescale methods within the project. the project aimed to increase the relevant knowledge on student education in bls in the german educational system, recognizing that the implementation is still facing some barriers, negative considerations and lacking awareness (dumcke, wegner et al., 2019). although bls competencies should be available to every student across ethical, religious, and economic disparities, a solid approach is needed to foster scientific and educational large-scale progress since a subject like health education or first aid is not yet established part of curricula. compared to other european nations (malta hansen et al., 2017; mpotos & iserbyt, 2017) or the us (brown, lynes, carroll, & halperin, 2017), the implementation in germany is – also due to the federal structure of the educational sector – still local and dependent on few persons’ or initiatives’ engagement (rücker, wingen, rott, & böttiger, 2022; schroeder, ecker, wingen, semeraro, & böttiger, 2017). these circumstances have led to very heterogeneous concepts and practices up to an undermining of the benefits (rücker et al., 2022) that cpr/bls education in schools seems to be a promising instrument of improvement for resuscitation rates and outcome (wissenberg et al., 2013). theoretical background: pedagogical measurements of learning current motivation rheinberg and vollmeyer (2012) emphasize the activating and energetic moment of motivation towards a positively valued target state. according to learning motivation in educational settings, it positively influences learning strategies and students’ intentions to learn novel competencies to achieve certain learning outcomes (schiefele & schaffner, 2015). motivation is supported by intrinsic (e.g. interest, exploration behavior) and extrinsic factors (e.g. social recognition, good marks). current motivation refers to the reciprocal effect of persistent personal characteristics (motives) and situational stimuli, which can result in aligning and energizing behavioral consequences (rheinberg & vollmeyer, 2012; rheinberg, vollmeyer, & burns, 2001). current motivation is characterized by dispositional motivational features, such as achievement motive, goal orientation and interest. the achievement motive can be divided into an approach motive (“hope/probability of success”) and an avoidance motive (“fear of failure/anxiety”) (schiefele & schaffner, 2015, p. 162). whereas success represents positive assumptions about good outcome, avoidance relates to negative stimuli during learning caused by perceived 6 global education review 11 (2) pressure (rheinberg et al., 2001). in terms of the theory of interest genesis (krapp, 1998; renninger & hidi, 2011), (situational) interest is another disposition that is object-related, whereas challenge captures a person’s ambition to perform a given learning activity (rheinberg et al., 2001). according to bls education, measuring current motivation can provide more distinct information about students’ initial dispositional motives, as both, fear and disgust (e.g. iserbyt, 2016) as well as general willingness and interest (kanstad, nilsen, & fredriksen, 2011; smedt et al., 2018) were reported. specific, situational self-efficacy self-efficacy and outcome expectancies are components of bandura’s (1977) self-efficacy theory. self-efficacy is one’s personal belief that strongly influences thinking, feelings, motivation, and action and is a strong indicator for change behavior. it describes an individual’s confidence to master new or difficult tasks based on their own capabilities (dumcke, rahe-meyer, & wegner, 2021b). believed consequences of action are a second dimension of self-efficacy theory. in context of specific situations (as cardiac arrest or emergencies), both components are directly related to certain tasks and the perceived competence to master it – cpr, for instance. self-efficacy has subordinate dimensions, which are psychological, social and, for outcome expectancies, valence, temporal proximity and area of consequences (fasbender, 2018), of which only valence (positive–negative) was addressed here. for more detailed information please refer to dumcke, rahemeyer, and wegner (2021b). self-efficacy as a predominant indicator for changing intentions and the perception to act in stressful situations is important to investigate when teaching bls in schools. however, evidence so far focused on less suitable concepts as self-confidence or addressed self-perception unsystematically (felzen et al., 2018; meissner, kloppe, & hanefeld, 2012; wingen et al., 2018). with a specific instrument for bls, certain crucial inhibitory or enhancing pattern of thought can be determined. prior analyses revealed that negative associated consequences may persist for longer training periods than expected by the hands-on performance outcome (dumcke et al., 2021b). constructivist instruction and cognitive load process features, as well as cognitive load, are both methodological relevant factors that influence knowledge acquisition and flow experience in educational settings (renkl, 2015). constructivist instruction is a paradigm in learning theory supposing knowledge to be individually developed and processed (reinmann & mandl, 2006). following a moderate perspective, learning environments offer students open structures and opportunities to build up knowledge. instruction should be an active, situated, social, self-determined, emotional and constructivist process (basten et al., 2015). by investigating constructivist instruction with reference to bls education, learning processes may be enhanced by looking at these features and compare “traditional” lecture formats with pedagogically advanced interactive formats. cognitive load (cl) is a common reported barrier to learning achievements (paas, renkl, & sweller, 2003; sweller, 2003). the basic assumption is that the acquisition of knowledge is limited because the working memory is unnecessarily burdened (renkl, 2015). cognitive load can be divided into these forms: intrinsic, extrinsic and germane. whereas intrinsic and germane load are connected to cognitive enhancement, extrinsic load is ineffective. extrinsic load is caused by activities of learners that are inherent to instructional current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 7 design, e.g. information that is separated but belongs together, or if the level of language is not appropriate. intrinsic load is caused by the complexity of a task itself (e.g. bls algorithm) and germane load is the capacity needed to integrate schema acquisition and automation into learning (e.g. a certain sequence of action) (paas et al., 2003). as especially for the training of bls, with a certain chronological order, parallelism and narrow time frames, the restricted capacity of the learners working memory should be relieved by improved instruction (e.g. of materials, tasks, environment), as indicated by broad concepts (groß, böttiger, & thaiss, 2019; schroeder et al., 2023). an analysis of cognitive load in educational concepts can help to review the suitability of the content and the developed materials, as sometimes it is assumed that bls, particularly in young students, is beyond their learning capabilities. research objectives the general research concern of the combined study can be stated as follows: do two “resuscitation and health teaching” interventions – differently designed in content and length –lead to a different perception and performance of secondary school students? the presented assessment was conducted at the final stage of a dbr evaluation phase and focusses on design development rather than on macro-implementation. the refined design solution (see educational structure) was carried out in-field, following a regular lesson schedule and environment (design = test group). it was compared to a standard short intervention, (= control group) as a classic “project activity” off the schedule. to assess learning progression in general, as the primary measurement endpoint, we investigated global differences in (1) the current motivation, (2) self-reported selfefficacy/outcome expectancies, (3) measured bls quality criteria (see study design) before (baseline, t0) and after (final, t1) intervention together with an interaction effect of group assignment. according to the interactive and reflexive design of the test condition, we assumed a better stimulation of self-related expectations in the training: h1 students performed better after intervention, independently of the group assignment for current motivation, self-efficacy scales and quality parameters, respectively. second endpoint was the comparison of the learning performance and process evaluation after the intervention for each condition (tg vs. cg), hypothesizing: tg students compared to cg students… h2 …report an improved current motivation (cf. qcm, i.e. higher interest, probability of success, less anxiety) h3 …report improved self-efficacy (cf. bls-set; i.e. higher self-efficacy; lower negative outcome expectations) h4 …report a higher experience of constructivist features as well as less cognitive load (i.e. lower extraneous/germane load) h5 …perform better in the assessed hands-on quality parameter (compression depth and frequency, full decompression). methods the design-based research approach design-based research (dbr) describes a research model that aims to enable a sustainable integration and transferability of innovations from theory-based, knowledgeoriented educational research into everyday classroom practice (anderson & shattuck, 2012; 8 global education review 11 (2) reinmann, 2005; the dbr collective, 2003) by holistically looking at interactions between materials, teachers, and students (the dbr collective, 2003, p. 5). a general dbr principle is iterative cycles of testing and collaborative partnership between scientists and practitioners at their daily locations (e.g. anderson & shattuck, 2012; cobb, confrey, disessa, lehrer, & schauble, 2003; fishman, penuel, allen, cheng, & sabelli, 2013). the systematic dbr is globally divided into three phases (plomp, 2013) (fig. 1). figure 1: dbr-design process (modified from schmiedebach & wegner, 2021) one recommended application of dbr is under the condition of missing “how-toguidelines” for a certain implementation, insufficient literature analyses, for instance (kelly, 2013, p. 137). those typical negative “baseline conditions” (cf. kelly, 2013, p. 138) are also found for the implementation of educational concepts in bystander resuscitation due to new (medical) knowledge or limited pedagogical expertise (anonymized, 2019; zinckernagel et al., 2016). from 2018 onwards, the project saving lives meets school aimed to facilitate the implementation of life-saving first aid into sustainable school routines and subject-matter teaching. to investigate contexts and causes of the mentioned “implementation gap”, a multiperspective and interdisciplinary dbrcollaboration of researchers with practitioners was initiated (plomp, 2013, p. 23). these included intensive care physicians and paramedics, first aid instructors and educators. the whole implementation study’s project design is given in the summary table in supplementary material 1. secondly, didactic-methodological questions for a successful teaching and learning process, which are caused by the specificity of bls and medical knowledge required, were left unanswered. for this reason, a secondary objective was to evaluate educational resources and concepts on classroom level for application in school programs (plomp, 2013, p. 23). besides dbr, mixed methods according to creswell and plano clark (2007, 2018) were applied (quantitative, qualitative), to triangulate or converge the information from implementation and design perspective. educational structure of the evaluation the dbr-design outlined before was finally tested for feasibility in a learning environment. the study took place in the regular current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 9 schedule of a german “gymnasium” from october to december 2021 and all sessions were taught by two scientifically instructed, pedagogical persons as teaching tandem, supported by regular teachers. figure 2: empirical setting according to the educational plan in test (tg) and control (cg) group. the educational plan was different for both conditions (fig. 2). the cg received a standardized training according to the kids save lives check-call-compress principle, which pronounces a simplified bystander algorithm for cpr, focusing on high-quality chest compressions only (schroeder et al., 2023) – this algorithm is commonly used to reduce germane and extrinsic cognitive load. cg participants were lectured very basic information about circulation, cardiac arrest, brain damage and bls-steps using a presentation; the procedure was demonstrated, followed by modular exercises on manikins (little anne qcpr, laerdal, stavanger) in groups of two or three. each student practiced a) alone and b) alternating with his/her partner for 3 minutes. between the exercises the previous task was shortly discussed for feedback. the tg was part of regular biology classes and was embedded into the content domain “cardiovascular system and blood” of the 6th grade curriculum for german schools in northrhine westphalia (msb nrw, 2019, pp. 24– 25). the units were designed following a situated, active and problem-oriented approach to enhance learning according to constructivist principles: therefore, in the first lesson a short self-experiment (heart rate modulation), in unit two video sequences (human heart) and, in units 3 to 5, roleplaying (bls-scenarios) and simulation techniques (with manikins) were used as alternating methods (cf. fig. 2). the tg was introduced into the bls content more carefully by switching from the physiological function of the human circulation to the abnormal and life-threatening emergency. a special focus was laid out on behavioral change and communicative skills (e.g. call for help, recognize and express own limits…). this approach aims to incorporate sources of and 10 global education review 11 (2) promote specific self-efficacy. the check-callcompress hands-on activities in lesson five were identical to the cg (see above). participants and sampling in total 136 students between 11 and 12 years of a german 6th grade were included in the study. two and three classes, respectively, participated in the test and the control condition. figure 3 shows the participants’ flow though the intervention. from n = 136 students, eleven did not provide any parental consent and were therefore excluded. from five classes n = 125 students were allocated to the two conditions. overall, n = 8 students did not take part in the lessons and n = 5 participants were lost to follow-up after intervention. for data analysis 48 (tg) and 68 students (cg) were included, a total of 116 participants (fig. 3). sample characteristics are displayed in table 1. results showed nearly balanced distributions of age and gender over the conditions. due to organizational constraints, the biology-integrated tg was only applicable in two out of five classes. figure 3: flow chart of the evaluation study. tg = test group. cg = control group. assessed for eligibility (n=136) excluded (n=11)  not meeting inclusion criteria (n=11) no informed consent (n=11) analysed (n=48)  excluded from analysis (n=0) lost to follow-up (illness, absence) (n=4) discontinued intervention (n=0) test group (tg) (2 classes) allocated to intervention (n=53)  received allocated intervention (n=48)  did not receive allocated intervention (illness, absence) (n=5) lost to follow-up (illness, absence) (n=1) discontinued intervention (n=0) control group (ct) (3 classes) allocated to intervention (n=72)  received allocated intervention (n=69)  did not receive allocated intervention (illness, absence, etc.) (n=3) analysed (n=68)  excluded from analysis (n=0) allocation analysis follow-up randomized allocation by class (n=125) enrollment current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 11 research design and materials the evaluation was assessed by two quantitative methods. questionnaire the theoretical variables were assessed by a paper-pencil questionnaire given to the students approximately 7 to 10 days before the first and after the last lesson they received, respectively. besides background data (i.e. codeid, group affiliation, age, gender) validated instruments in pedagogical research were adopted to evaluate both the learning and the didactic conceptualization (cf. table 2). for the german questionnaire development, we applied translated originals with careful modifications due to the young participants. translation changes included some wording issues, as well as subscales were shortened by deleting items with lowest factor loads or discriminatory power. current motivation questionnaire (qcm) the qcm (rheinberg et al., 2001) was shortened to 12 of originally 18 items due to economic and motivational considerations reflecting the 6graders’ abilities (one item for each subscale except anxiety with two items reduced). items were selected for deletion by semantic (doublette) or statistical reasons (lowest factor loads). the phrase “task” was converted to “exercise” and post intervention analysis items were transferred into past tense. it contained four subscales: interest, challenge, probability of success, and anxiety (cf. tab. 2). situational self-efficacy bls/cpr (set-bls) self-efficacy was measured as an indicator for perceptual change in important helping behavior. the set-bls questionnaire from dumcke, rahe-meyer, & wegner (2021b). was used without modifications and consisted of four domains, psychological (5) and social (4) self-efficacy as well as negative (5) and positive (5) outcome expectations (cf. tab. 2). features of constructivist instruction short version (s-fci) constructivist instruction means a set of features which affect learning in the natural science education (basten et al., 2015). the german short scale used here, consisted of 19 table 1: overview of main sample characteristics. 1 tg cg total n 48 (58.6%) 68 (41.4%) 116 (100%) gender1 f m n/a 27 (56.3%) 21 (43.8%) 0.0 37 (54.4%) 30 (44.1%) 1 (1.5%) 64 (55.2%) 51 (44.0%) 1 (0.9%) age (m) 10-11 12-13 n/a 11.15 (sd=.47) 40 (83.4%) 7 (17.6%) 1 (2.1%) 11,16 (sd=.45) 57 (83.9%) 11 (16.2%) 0.0 11,16 (sd=.45) 97 (83.6%) 18 (15.5%) 1 (0.9%) witnessed ca 2 (4,2%) 6 (8.8%) 8 (6.9%) 1 other gender affiliations were not given. tg = test group. cg = control group. ca = cardiac arrest. 2 12 global education review 11 (2) items in 6 subscales (cf. tab. 2). the subscales “constructivist” and “self-determined” were supplemented with one item each from urhahne, marsch, wilde, and krüger (2011) due to semantic ambiguities, number of items and limited loadings. cognitive load inventory (cli) the used cli questionnaire was composed by combining two instruments (klepsch, schmitz, & seufert, 2017; leppink, paas, van der vleuten, van gog, & van merriënboer, 2013) in adoption to the issue bls teaching, following the three dimensions of cognitive load (sweller, 2003): intrinsic load, extrinsic load and germane load (cf. tab. 2) practical “hands-on” assessment identical simulation tests on a manikin with a presented cardiac arrest scenario were conducted at baseline and after intervention. at baseline, students were asked to perform anything they think is appropriate to help an unconscious and not normally breathing person. afterwards, they were invited to react as they learned during intervention. every single student was separated during the test (stopped after one minute), which was organized into small groups of six participants. erc-guideline compliant (cf. olasveengen et al., 2021) and clinically relevant variables were measured by using the qcpr instructor app (laerdal medical, 2021) for android: mean compression depth (mm), mean frequency (min-1) as well as compressions that were of correct depth (= 50-60mm), frequency (= 100-120 min-1) and decompression of the chest (= fully decompressed) in percent. power and randomization a-priori power was calculated using g*power (faul, erdfelder, lang, & buchner, 2007) and an online calculator (hemmerich, 2018) for analysis of variance at an alpha level of α = .050 for two groups. minimum power was set 80% according to cohen (1988) and at a medium for educational settings (η2 ≥ .06) (bortz & döring, 2016). total sample size was 125, resulting in 63 participants needed per group. this size was finally not met for tg (see limitations). classes were cluster-randomized and assigned to both conditions using randomizer.org (5 numbers, range: 1-2, nonunique). data analysis statistical analyses were performed with the statistical package for the social sciences (spss v.29, ibm corp., armonk). reliability scores (cf. tab. 2) were calculated using cronbach’s α. with a few exceptions, sufficient coefficients (α ≥ .70; schmitt, 1996), were given. all scores (r >.50) are acceptable for groupbased comparisons according to lienert and raatz (1998, p. 14 also see schecker, 2014; cf. "limitations") for the comparison of the time effect between the assessment cycles according to group affiliation (tg vs. cg) mixed anovas were calculated (cf. supplementary material 4). the comparison of both, tg and cg were conducted with one-way multivariate comparisons (manova) for each instrument and the bls quality parameters (cf. supplementary material 3). homogeneity of variance-covariance was assessed with box m test (α ≤ .001) according to medium sized groups n > 30 (hahsvaughn, 2016; verma, 2016) and by the robust brown-forsythe variant of the levene’s test (α ≤ .05) due to diverging group sizes (sharma & kibria, 2013). in manova, unbalanced distribution and partial heterogeneity of variance was considered interpreting wilks lambda with α ≤ .05 (ateş, kaymaz, kale, tekindal, & zhao, 2019). for time as well as tg current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 13 and cg comparisons, means (m) and standard deviations (sd) were provided in supplementary tables. effect size η2p was rated with reference to cohen (1988, p. 285). table 2: overview of assessment inventory, reliability and exemplary statements. qcm: german original: fam; s-fci = german original: prozessmerkmale gemäßigten konstruktivismus, kurzskala, kurz-pgk; cli: cognitive load inventory is modified. a two values because two study populations were analyzed by basten et al. instrument subscale(s) no. items cr. α (t0/) t1 (ref.) original reference example (translated into english) q u e s ti o n n a ir e o f c u r r e n t m o ti v a ti o n (q c m ) interest (i) 4 .73/.75 (.74 1) rheinberg et al., 2001, modified anxiety: “i was feeling under pressure to complete the tasks or activities well.” 0 – fully disagree; 5 – fully agree challenge (c) 3 75/.69 (.71 1) probability of success (ps) 3 .58/.53 (.72 1) anxiety (a) 3 .74/.64 (.83 1) s e lf -e ff ic a c y -t h e o r y s c a le s f o r b a s ic l if e s u p p o r t (s e t -b l s ) se bls (p)sychological 5 .78/.78 .81 anonymized, 2021b social se: instruction: i‘m sure i can perform cpr even if... ...no one around me offers to help me voluntarily. negative oe: if i resuscitate someone, i can cause even more severe injuries. 0 – fully disagree; 5 – fully agree se bls (s)ocial 4 .80/.87 .85 oe bls p(ositive) 5 .54/.55 .66 oe bls n(egative) 5 .51/.50 .55 f e a tu r e s o f c o n s tr u c ti v is t in s tr u c ti o n s h o r t v e r s io n ( s -f c i) constructivist 4 --/.69 .69 / .74a basten et al., 2015, modified situated: during the last lessons dealing with “cardiovascular system, cardiac arrest and resuscitation”.... ...i learned something that i can make good use of. 0 – fully disagree; 5 – fully agree self-determined 3 --/.67 .77 / .72a active 3 --/.67 .77 / .84a situated 3 --/.68 .82 / .89a emotional 3 --/.75 .81 / .86a social 3 --/.70 .79 / .68a c o g n it iv e lo a d in v e n to r y (c l i) intrinsic 4 --/.61 .86 based on klepsch et al., 2017 for items icl 1,4; ecl 3,4; gcl 1,2; other: leppink et al., 2013 extraneous: the working tools accompanying the exercises were not helpful to actually learn anything. 0 – fully disagree; 5 – fully agree extraneous 4 --/.73 .80 germane 3 --/.72 .80 14 global education review 11 (2) results learning progression and interaction of groups overall, results showed significant time effects in mixed anova (for means and deviation, cf. supplementary material 4). in general, students reported reduced anxiety (qcm a; f(1,114) = 14.05; p < .001; η2p = .110) and stated they were more interested (qcm i; f(1,114) = 6.80; p = .010; η2p = .056) and could better achieve success (qcm ps; f(1,114) = 12.56; p = .001; η2p = .099). however, after the intervention students felt still as challenged as before (qcm c; f(1,114) = 10.12; p = .132) on a high level which in case positively means, they still want to improve their knowledge and present their performance in bls. even if challenge perceptions in the tg lowered from baseline to final assessment (fig. 4), no significant interaction (timegroup) was observed (cf. supplementary material 4). the specific self-efficacy as behavioral change indicator was assessed with four subscales before and after the educational intervention, of which all showed significant time differences with medium effect (η2p; cohen, 1988). highest effect was on the expectancies of positively-associated outcome (e.g. better survival, effectivity as team; f(1,113) = 13.00; p < .001; η2p = .104); similarly psychological and social dimensions of efficacy perception improved, with higher values for social interactions (f(1,113) = 6.15; p < .015; η2p = .52 and f(1,113) = 9.79; p < .002; η2p = .080; fig. 5). negative outcome expectancies (i.e. believed negative consequences of action) were rated on a medium agreement level and were lower after intervention (f(1,113) = 9.43; p < .003; η2p = .78); here, significant interaction was observed (f(1,113) = 3.94; p < .008; η2p = .062): while the negative outcome perception (oe bls n, fig. 4) decreased from 2.64±0.86 to 2.07±0.76 for students in tg, it stagnated in the control (2.58±0.83 vs. 2.54±0.94). vice versa, an significant interaction effect was measured for social self-efficacy (se bls s) (e.g. teamwork, be a leader, refrained assistance): tg improved social self-efficacy afterwards as cg does not (f(1,113) = 5.89; p < .017; η2p = .050; cf. supplementary material 4; fig. 5). figures 4-6: line chart comparing baseline and final outcome of a) qcm, b) set-bls and c) quality of bls performance. straight line indicates tg, dotted indicates cg. current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 15 for abbreviations see tab 2, means and standard deviation are given in supplementary material 3. * indicates interaction effect (timegroup): p ≤ .050. for the practical skills, the interventions globally also led to improved measurements of guideline-relevant parameter with great effect (η2 > .14): compression depth (f(1,100) = 231.98; p < .001; η2p = .699), frequency of compressions (f(1,100) = 6.46; p < .001; η2p = .361), and fully decompression (f(1,113) = 11.46; p < .001; η2p = .0.103) increased. students of both tg and cg performed significantly better after intervention, with no interaction effects, with correct compression depth being increased from less than 10% to over 60% (supplementary material 4). optimized drive: a look on current motivation and self-efficacy outcomes of the four qcm subscales for tg and cg, respectively, showed no significantly different omnibus tests in manova (f(4,111) = 1.63; p = .171; wilks λ = 0.944). however, if considering mean values and post-hoc anova, anxiety was higher in cg that in tg (m = 1.50 ± 1.15 vs. 1.09 ± 0.87; f(1,114) = 4.25; p = .042; η2p = .036), whereas no differences were found for interest, probability of success and challenge (p = .065; .270 and .561; cf. supplementary material 3). the combined subscales of the set-bls inventory showed a significant manova, indicating a difference between cg and tg within the dependent subscales (f(4,110) = 3.07; p = .019; η2p = 010; wilks λ = 0.900). of the subscales, however, none resulted in significant post-hoc anovas (p = .136 for psychological; p = .152 for social self-efficacy and p = .169 for positive outcome expectation values), except negative outcome expectations. students in the tg on average (m = 2.07 ± 0.76) had lower agreement levels for negative consequences than the cg (m = 2.56 ± 0.94) (anova, f(1,113) = 8.79; p = .003; η2p = .074; supplementary material 3). pedagogical value: the promotion of learning for the assessment of a learner-oriented educational concept, constructivist features and cognitive load were surveyed. multivariate testing including the six subscales of the s-fci did not become significant (f(6,104) = 158; p = .160; wilks λ = 0.916). considering post-hoc analysis, only the rating of activity made a difference between cg and tg: cg students scored activity levels higher than tg’s (4.27 ± 0.68 vs. 3.90± 0.97; anova, f(1,109) = 5.57; p = .020; η2p.= 049). the cli scale was without statistically different ratings of both, the students of tg and cg on multivariate level (manova, f(3,107) = 0.85; p = .469; wilks λ = 0.024) and also in post-hoc analysis (see supplementary material 3). hands-on effects: what about the quality according to the erc resuscitation guidelines of 2021 (olasveengen et al., 2021), relevant parameter of chest compression-only bls outcome (cf. practical “hands-on” assessment) were analyzed. compared between groups after intervention, the interdependent proportions (%) of correct depth, frequency and pressure release did not differ significantly (manova, f(3,98) = 0.67; p = .572; wilks λ = 0.980). discussion the dbr process can be used to introduce a more scientific and evidence-based culture of change in educational systems, because decisions are often made according to political interest rather than are they driven by 16 global education review 11 (2) transferred knowledge (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021, p. 2). this article adds information on the small body of evidence which used in-field designed concepts for study conduction and analysis. as far as known, different large-scale methods (regularly subjectmatter vs. project activity) were not analyzed for the implementation of bls student education. the more potential learning outcomes of bls education are widely documented (plant & taylor, 2013; schroeder et al., 2023; wingen et al., 2021), the less is known about processes and organization at the mesoand micro-level of teaching (= school and classroom). the results of this dbr assessment not only view at if and how behavioral beliefs and skills are influenced by method, but also review pedagogical quality. the participating students profit from the learning opportunity. an intervention with both, subject-matter and project approach, generated learning progress (accept h1). the success of short-term trainings (45-90 min.) was already reported by several studies, e.g. for selfconfidence (wingen et al., 2018) or bls performance (meissner et al., 2012) or by peertutors included (beck, issleib, daubmann, & zollner, 2015). especially motivational factors – interest and challenge – showed high agreement and remained on similar levels, also in both conditions (rejecting h2). accordingly, as kanstad et al. (2011, p. 1054), for instance, reported, 80% of 16-19-year old students wished more bls education to avoid “unnecessary death.” bls as topic may evoke more genuine excitement and curiosity than it is an emotional burden. however, decreasing of interest may be an indicator for loss of interest and the influence of novelty effects, respectively: since the students assumably had no contact to bls before, the situation induces a strong baseline effect, which reduces by time. thereby, interest may be overestimated in typical cross-sectional designs – which would favor shorter and more frequent units. in contrast, self-efficacy dimensions were all promoted by intervention, but single interactions between ct and cg were observed (partly accept h1). bandura (1977) describes self-efficacy as motor of change for behavior. to react and promptly solve a medical problem, one requires a self-effective mindset, which best can be supported by mastery experience (e.g. try bls on a manikin) or verbal persuasion (i.e. talk, reflect, get feedback). less self-efficacious persons also focus on problems and doubts, so that they are more likely to surrender to challenges. statistically, social self-efficacy (se bls s) and negative expectations (oe bls n) of emergency behavior were dependent from being in tg or cg. additionally, negative expectations were also significantly different when comparing tg and cg at final assessment (t1) (partly accept h3). iserbyt (2016) reported a non-affected level of willingness to e.g. perform bls on strangers, which was assessed before and after a skillfocused 50 min. bls training for n = 313 students (12-18 years). a reason for this observation, matching our results, could be the character of social or outcome-related factors. interactive challenges or ethical questions cannot be trained on a manikin or with software. skill based, short interventions therefore do methodologically and by time limitations do not offer the required promoting opportunities: longer, integrated learning arrangements beside practice, also offer social and communicative experiences. in roleplays students are able to build up a self-determined handling of interactive scenarios, or special task cards address real, frequent anxieties or related uncertainties of people. thus, a sustainable bls education should not only view at psychomotor skills, but holistically at the whole context of the situation (iserbyt, 2016). consequently, the recent ilcor statement explicitly incorporates current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 17 “motivational aspects” (schroeder et al., 2023). despite, negative considerations seem to be particularly more persistent (dumcke et al., 2021b, cf.) than the acquisition of motorand treatment processes, even for relatively young students (dumcke, rahe-meyer, & wegner, 2021a). the quality of education, as well as practical bls outcome, did not result in significant differences between tg and cg (rejecting h4-5). that no cognitive overload neither by extraneous (task cards, instructions, manikins, information overload) nor intrinsic (e.g. bls procedure itself) or germane factors (e.g. complex case scenarios/roleplays) were found, is good news: hands-on lessons may remain short and sharp but can be framed by instruction in regular class without negative influence on learning. that students of the cg rated their 90 min project-course more activating than those who also learned physiological background and were cognitively engaged to reflect over five weeks, is quite expectable (i.e. “memory effect”) and should not derogate teaching bls in subject-matter sequences. design recommendations for bls teaching what can be considered as implications of the evaluative assessment? the core of dbr is steady revision. taking the meso-level (i.e. school), common implementation challenges (gräsel, 2010) and the results into perspective, both methods have their own justification: • project-based activities detach lessons from curricular obligations and place less of a burden on subjects and topics that are relevant to exams. even many students can be integrated in a short period of time with little organizational effort (see e.g. wegner, peperkorn, & dumcke, 2020, with 5 stations). • in addition to the material and room requirements of simultaneous conducted bls activities, the pedagogical benefit of subject-matter teaching must be considered: cognitive and self-reflective instruction can be reliably integrated (see materials e.g. dumcke, rahe-meyer, & wegner, 2023 for biology). the preliminary solution to reduce concerns (dumcke, rahe-meyer, & wegner, 2019; wingen et al., 2021) and deficits in learning is to creatively include the content of bls into mandatory elements of the curriculum. when a subject-specific method should be built (e.g. writing a report), bls can be its content dimension. thus, curriculum goals and bls implementation at the same time must not contradict each other. figure 7 shows a possible application of both methods across school years 5-10 considering an increasing and/or alternating level of complexity. the alternating implementation of subject-integrated (6th grade, biology), cognitive-reflective sequences and skill-focused project activities (9th grade, themed day) may be a viable proposal. following this path, annual repetitions also operate the action memory considered important to develop routine (lukas et al., 2016; schroeder et al., 2023). 18 global education review 11 (2) figure 7: prospective conversion of both methods into a secondary curriculum. limitations the study has limitations. first, due to covid-19 regulations and infections, the calculated sample size per group was not reached in tg, which may subsequently have resulted in missed detection of significant differences at medium effect sizes. a second weakness is partly unsatisfactory internal consistency (schmitt, 1996) for some subscales. however, the intraclass coefficient may be also achieved by other desirable properties according to schmitt (1996, p. 352) and schecker (2014, p. 5) as it is no indicator of homogeneity (=unidimensionality). homogeneity was assumed by using (adopted) validated and established instruments. regarding qcm scales (probability of success, anxiety) and cli intrinsic cognitive load, we assume that due to the novelty of the issue bls, the students lacked a benchmark for assessment and that variance reduced the consistency of the scales. we decided to retain them either way. the operationalization of outcome expectations (bls oe) was complex (dumcke et al., 2021a) and broad content coverage was reasonably preferred over consistency (cf. schmitt, 1996) – because as shown in bls literature, relevant factors originate from many dimensions (e.g. becker et al., 2019; for students: smedt et al., 2018). the s-fci scales self-determined, active, situated showed discriminatory power higher than .40 and were retained for correct didactic coverage. however, semantic misunderstandings may occur, because bls was not understood as something useful for “everyday life”, as one item for situatedness stated (if deleted, α = .78). thirdly, by cluster randomization per class biased nested data must be considered. however, it is unlikely to occur because the content of the intervention was new to all of the students. furthermore, we deleted risk factors: a) compensatory equivalization by the same instructors over both groups and in all classes, b) resentful demoralization by not announcing treatment and control assignments and c) practical inequality by applying same core exercises (e.g. manikin practice) to both groups. current motivation, self-efficacy, cognitive load, and hands-on performance of secondary school students 19 nevertheless, to enhance study power and generalizability, the concept can be reevaluated and upscaled including more schools on meso-level to reduce c-rct effect and to identify general practicability under alternating local conditions. references anderson, t., & shattuck, j. 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(2016). what are the barriers to implementation of cardiopulmonary resuscitation training in secondary schools? a qualitative study. bmj open, 6(4), e010481. https://doi.org/10.1136/bmjopen2015-010481 the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 92 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: nijhawan, subin, elsner, daniela, & engartner, tim. (2021). the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms through content and language integrated learning (clil) in the social sciences. global education review, 8 (2-3), 92-115. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms through content and language integrated learning (clil) in the social sciences subin nijhawan goethe university frankfurt (germany) daniela elsner goethe university frankfurt (germany) tim engartner goethe university frankfurt (germany) abstract our article argues for content and language integrated learning (clil) in the social sciences, as part of a new literacy towards 21st century challenges at school. at first, we will show how multilingualism is closely juxtaposed with global discourses in a worldwide network of glocalities. thereafter, for the conceptual framework of the suggested pedagogy, we explain why cosmopolitanism must constitute an integral part thereof, accompanying the genesis of classroom glocalities. the heart of our competence model for clil in the social sciences fosters the promotion of global discourse competence with adolescent students. in short, this learning aim is a hybrid of subject and language learning, incorporating the merits of language didactics as well as “21st century skills”. finally, in the last step, we will present #climonomics, a simulation of a multilingual eu parliamentary debate about climate change and climate action for secondary students. this example intends to demonstrate how multilingualism through clil amplifies the magnitude of global discourses during a simulation yet realistic setting. it should provide ‘food for thought’ for similar initiatives in research and teaching, to encourage the facilitation of cosmopolitan visions in classroom glocalities. keywords sustainability, climate change, multilingualism, cosmopolitanism, content and language integrated learning (clil) “world, we have a problem…!” about our 21st century challenges greta tintin eleonora ernman thunberg, climate activist, and founder of the fridays for future (fff) movement: “i have learned you are never too small to make a difference.” [her speech at the united conference of parties (cop) 24 climate talks, katowice, december 2018] “together and united, we are unstoppable.” [her speech at the largest climate strike in history with around 250,000 people attending globally, new york, september 2019] after reading this article, it hopefully becomes evident why these two quotes, lucidly illustrating young people's urge for climate action, were chosen for opening this article. the young swedish climate activist greta thunberg was able to attract the world’s attention for one of the utmost and pressing 21st century challenges, namely the hazardous condition of the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 93 93 the climate for our sustainable future. owing to scientific reason, to her passion and commitment, and out of her personal concern but also for reasons of solidarity, fff, a global movement of thousands of local groups, emerged. fff stands for democratic activism and civil disobedience of the present younger generation to raise awareness for acting against climate change. fff is an illustrative example for the emergence of so-called glocalities, a hybrid of the global and the local. glocalities, as we will show in this article, are a space where the global and the local cannot be strictly distinguished anymore. they provide for democratic negotiation and political action, a precursor of agency. thunberg’s quotations underline her commitment, and it deserves to respectfully note the pressure a young adolescent exerted on political decision makers, along with its tremendous policy impact. we will also be closing this article with greta thunberg’s words, as her voice is likely the most relevant and impactful in speaking to these issues. the article will be structured as follows: we will map the vicissitude of modern globalization, and outline the nature of 21st century challenges, calling for immediate democratic action. here, we will amplify the juncture of the global and the local, too often understood as distinct and separated spheres. glocalities, as we will learn, provide the main arena for democratic discourse in people’s life. the presence of multilingualism and the language use in glocalities deserves close attention. it is uncontested that when speaking about language, a close proximity to culture and identity is established – as a matter of fact, language is culture (kramsch, 1998), with its strong relation to personal identity. for this reason, we will outline modes of language use in different spheres. the ideas will be made applicable for education in establishing a new literacies approach in line with the developments of the 21st century. thus, we will speak of classroom glocalities, within which “21st century skills” (trilling & fadel, 2009) should be pronounced, in order to support students in becoming active citizens within a democratic and transnational civil society. the transnational dimension in a global age prompts us to formulate an unambiguous plea for cosmopolitanism. in order to eschew its common elitist connotation, we will wrap up that section with the concept of relational cosmopolitanism (baildon & damico, 2010), enabling the genesis of organically-grown cosmopolitanism from below in our classrooms. content and language integrated learning (clil), building on a biand multilingual pedagogy, makes language a central pillar of classroom glocalities. all of these thoughts will be captured in a competence model for clil classes in the social sciences. in order to exemplify the competence model, we will present #climonomics, a multilingual eu parliamentary debate about climate change and climate action for about 200 students, at the end of the article. #climonomics demonstrates that our suggested pedagogy, synonymous with the promotion of 21st century skills, is not merely a vision. rather, it can be regarded as a tangible concept, as we will elucidate in the optimistic outlook during the closure of the article. entrenching democracy and promoting sustainability in glocalities the vicissitude of modern globalization with the end of the cold war and the rise of information technology, the world has become an even more interconnected place, paving the way for globalization processes to gain a newfound momentum. globalization is 94 global education review 8 (2-3) virtually felt in every niche of the world, not to neglect the borderless digital space. not only has the world thus transmuted to something like a smaller place, because interactions between different people around the globe are increasing but also political, economic and cultural questions are becoming increasingly global in nature. we see this in the rise of international and regional institutions like the united nations (un) and the european union (eu), and global efforts to combat climate change, and, more recently, to coordinate initiatives to find a vaccine against the corona virus under the auspices of an internationalized regime. most of all our 21st century challenges (like combatting climate change, eradicating poverty and fighting inequality, promoting human rights, and living together in a multicultural world) are global in nature. it is true that someone’s own concern can be the same concern of a person ten thousand and more miles far away. while, no matter where, fighting for survival, clean water, access to education, in a broad sense for human rights and sustainability, that individual or group is never alone. the discourse about these challenges happens both at the local (e.g. community) as well the global level (e.g. un, state and other summits, ngos, increasingly in the digital space). of course, this also applies for the intermediate space (e.g. the eu or nation states at a smaller level). giddens (1999), among many others, has given an excellent account in his classic “runaway world”, sketching the new form of global dynamics happening all over the world, being felt decentralized in localities. robertson (1990; 1995) coined this idea with the much-echoed expression of glocalization. glocalization is equated with the emergence of glocalities that span around the world like a spider’s web. they emit the potential and immediate need for new forms of participatory and transnational democracy, to pay tribute to a de facto borderless society. the size of a glocality can vary, in accordance with communication structures given. their emergence is not static but dynamic and not constrained to a fixed territory, because glocalities do not have clearly demarked but fluid and permeable boundaries. even the world as a whole, or the digital space, can be characterized as a glocality under certain conditions, or said to consist of myriad glocalities during certain snapshots of our times. glocalities are characterized by the interplay of global and local forces. sometimes the former dominates and deterritorializes their existence, sometimes the latter rather leads to (re-)territorialization. at present, we can witness different political forces on different levels, like the civil society as well as the governing administrations. on the one side, people in different glocalities are exerting pressure on authoritarian governments to democratize political structures (e.g. in hong kong, belarus, sudan). on the other side, many ‘experienced democracies’ are feeling new counterforces of nationalization and chauvinism (e.g. usa, india, turkey, brazil, the uk, to take brexit). they are increasingly been pushed to the verge, following the surge of populism on a global level the last years. social media, always bearing a potential of revolutionary force (be it democratic or antidemocratic), plays a significant role. thus, the question how to entrench and improve democracy in glocalities, and promote transnational democratic structures becomes pressing in our times. social movements by the transnational civil society to realize the universal declaration of human rights (udhr), and to (re)define and revitalize democracy and sustainable living conditions, are on the rise. this is concomitant with making prosperity a realistic concept and a human right for the entire world population. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 95 95 such counterhegemonic forces are at first positive, as they can be equated with the emergence of transnational democratic networks. as a matter of fact, they want to render the opportunities encapsulated in globalization more human – increasingly also in the global north, to deconstruct the myth that development as a shallow concept only applies to less economically developed countries (evans, 2003). the vicissitude and dynamics of globalization per se are most obviously felt by the world population in their respective localities, negotiated and (re)interpreted at that very place in first instance, transforming the local sphere into glocalities. realizing that we live in one world, the need to improve our existence and habitat mutually and together arises. we need to foster ways of “thinking and acting both locally and globally at the same time” (karliner, 2000, p. 199) – thus per definition in glocalities. the emergence of the digital cyberspace has had a tremendous impact on the understanding of glocalities the last decades, making them borderless. glocalities are now less confided to physical space as in the past, because interaction can now theoretically happen between all individuals and groups. this requires engagement in a dialogue on eye-level with other world citizens, as ultimately cosmopolitanism and togetherness include many opportunities for conflict settlement and universal peace, for poverty eradication and sustainability in general. promoting global discourse competence among the world population in pioneering educational ventures and making democracy of the 21st century a living and participatory construct, is set as a milestone. the role multilingualism occupies in glocalities needs not to be underestimated, as we will see in the following section. multilingualism in glocalities: the role of languages the role of languages and the increase in multilingualism within globalization has so far mainly been a domain of humanities and cultural studies. for transnational agency, communication across linguistic groups must be facilitated, simultaneously embracing participation of people in their most dominant language or other languages they feel most comfortable in. fusing the valuable insights of applied linguistics with globalization from a social science perspective illustrates the dynamics of a fluid language use within glocalities per se. to lead to the concomitant genesis of glocalities, we will take one small step backwards and imagine distinct layers. we can contemplate that global discourses happen, roughly speaking, mainly on two levels: in the (1) global and the (2) local sphere. we should turn to each of them separately and deliberate on the respective modes of languages. global space occasions: discourses within the global sphere can be witnessed during personal encounters, e.g. during family and friends’ visits, migration, traveling, living away from home, conferences, workshops, within formal and informal networks. this can be physical, but also increasingly digital, within the global media, in the cyberspace, and especially within social networks, more or less with your smartphone in your pocket. language use: in general, global discourses are held multilingually. it may happen that family members or friends who grew up together meet again and speak in their first language (l1). or speakers with different l1s have a common proficiency in another 96 global education review 8 (2-3) second or foreign language (lx)1 and hold their discourses in the relevant language of common proficiency. in many cases, as a result of modern globalization, these discourses happen in english as the global lingua franca, especially if people are unknown to each other and from different regions of the world. 1.27 billion people speak english as their l1 or equivalent lx (eberhard, simons, & fennig, 2020). the emergence of a digital space and digital media, and its political impact, further fuels the uncontested omnipresence of english as the main language of global discourse, as compared to the consecutively ranked world languages of l1 speakers, namely chinese, hindi, spanish, french and standard arabic (eberhard et al., 2020). at a trade exhibition or international conference, english will be the quantitatively most spoken language. against this trend, it is not unlikely, that e.g. spanish, french, hindi/urdu or chinese speakers with the relevant l1 may use the same at. in digital communication, like with social media, when people are willing to reach the widest audience possible, english is a likely reference, or an english translation for reaching a larger audience is provided (common caption of posts: “for the english version please scroll below”). other languages, both national or regional lingua francas, or minority and indigenous languages, are used nevertheless. although everyone wants to speak english for a good reason, the policies of international or supranational organizations like the united nations (un) or the european union (eu), promote linguistic diversity (e.g. council of europe, 2018). 1 during the last decade, it has become a norm during the last decade to speak about l1 (first language) and l2 (second or foreign language) in distinguishing different roles of languages with individuals. to pay tribute to the emergence local space occasions: multilingualism in local spaces is as much a common phenomenon, even in regions with only one official language. discussions happen formally at gatherings, festivals, workshops, and so on. informal occasions offer another important space of unstructured discourse, as at cultural events, in bars and pubs, private homes, at associations, and many more get-togethers. media and the virtual space like social networks, instant messengers, etc., also play an important role. election hustings and democratic franchise serve as a very prominent example. but smaller settings need not to be neglected. language use: as with the global sphere, de facto multilingualism as a characteristic of local discourses is common, with some significant differences though. the surrounding dominant language, e.g. german in germany, occupies the place of the lingua franca, as with english in global spaces (of course, it can also be english, or any of the ‘englishes’ in their different variations). the surrounding local language can be the l1 or the lx of a speaker, even in de jure monolingual regions. we can observe an overall decentralization of multilingualism and transculturality to the very local and thus a wide array of different l1s in localities. it is hard to imagine of any locality without a multilingual reality, be it by language variety and dialects, or even completely different language families. a speaker may take part in global discourses at the local level in his or her l1 and/or lx. a mixed language use, in different frequencies, has become a quotidian phenomenon. of multilingualism, and the difficulty of mapping a clear language history with individuals, we adopt dewaele’s (2017) suggestion to refer to lx for any language other than the most dominant language of an individual. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 97 97 this twofold distinction models the multilingual presence of global discourses in the two different spheres, called glocality when fused within one framework. as languages play a significant role during the construction of the glocality and its intensity, the well-known postulate “the limits of my language are the limits of my world” (original: "die grenzen meiner sprachen bedeuten die grenzen meiner welt", by wittgenstein, 1963) brings it to the core. this scenario will now be exemplified with the german setting, not only for contextualizing the last and practical part of the article, but also for understanding the transformative power of glocalities in general. per definition, german is the only official language (with some minority language protection in sorbian and frisian areas as well as for the danish minority in the region bordering denmark). most of the public discourse about global challenges in the localities takes place in german, the dominant surrounding language, especially in the media and social networks. nevertheless, we do not want to neglect that many topics are discussed in other languages, namely, minority languages, during different unofficial or private occasions. ethnic minorities, for example polish and turkish l1 speakers in germany, with german as lx, illustrate this train of thought. the “multilingual reality” (mohanty, 2019), and processes of transculturality (welsch, 1999) have transformed, more or less, the concept of unequivocal lingua francas to be more blurry in the global age. a language might be dominant, but not necessarily decisive when it comes to the formation of individual political and economic judgements and decisions. we should now turn to education and in particular to everyday school classrooms, for assessing their potential of multilayered multilingual approaches to our global 21st century challenges. we will learn that constructing ‘classroom glocalities’ needs to be embedded within a framework of an education for cosmopolitan citizenship. classroom glocalities in education the given framework of the preceding section outlined how global discourses about our 21st century challenges are negotiated in different spheres, with a differentiated and multilingual language use. it is apparent that glocalities constitute a microcosm and bring global discourses close to people, feeling and experiencing these challenges every day. the role of education becomes instrumental in providing the coming generation with knowledge and facts, preparing them for an active participation and their agency within a democratic and transnational civil society. classrooms serve as an apt arena for the construction of glocalities with tailored pedagogies and a problem-based approach. the goal can be defined to engender classroom glocalities as a space for the seamless promotion of global discourse competences, with integrated “21st century skills” (categorized in "learning and innovation skills, digital literacy skills und life and career skills", according to trilling & fadel, 2009). this can be regarded as prerequisite for the sustainable future of present and coming generations. about cosmopolitan visions we will develop an argument for all pedagogies within classroom glocalities, during our turbulent global times, to require one decisive characteristic: a purely cosmopolitan nature. an excursus why cosmopolitanism is juxtaposed with the genesis of glocalities in classrooms will follow. by no means do we have the space for a complete overview about the field 98 global education review 8 (2-3) of cosmopolitanism.2 rather we will select the most salient thoughts of a very contemporary body of literature in order to relate it to our concept of glocalities and classroom cosmopolitanism. the idea of cosmopolis is an ancient greek idea and was rejuvenated during the age of enlightenment. the renaissance of cosmopolitanism as a modern academic field of study occurred after the end of the cold war, same as with the attention the sociology of modern globalization attracted. mendieta (2017, p. 253) argues that “[i]t could be claimed that we live in an age of cosmopolitanism, just as kant can be said to have lived in an age of enlightenment.” what can already be called classical accounts of the two decades after the fall of the iron curtain, have in turn opened the arena and set the stage for present-day debates, mainly launched in the last decade. academics from all over the globe have been critically tracing and examining the presence of everyday cosmopolitanism in everyone’s live, in an endeavor to omit its initially elite character and to design conceptional accounts for our future on the globe. many interdisciplinary ‘from below approaches’ have commenced to redefine the field, deconstructing the post-cold war euphoria surrounding around ideas of a world government under institutional auspices of the un. they challenge universalist approaches from above, often synonymous with a liberal and modernist western outline of the new monopolar world order (e.g. fukuyama, 1992) and thus an elite and privileged notion of the metaphoric frequent traveler (hawkins, 2018; ingram, 2016; kurasawa, 2004). 2 nearly every one of the cited publications contains a history of cosmopolitanism from ancient greece via the epoch of enlightenment with special reference to kant to the new post-cold war world order. the edited reader by brown according to this new and growing research strand, cosmopolitanism has its main roots in the local sphere, also explaining the genesis and the power of glocalities. held (2010) argues that linking the global and the local has already been identified as one of the most important endeavors in our times. there have been voices suggesting that the purest form of cosmopolitanism organically grows at the local level. especially, but not exclusively, modern migration with people in motion deserve special attention. this is because “migrant cosmopolitanism” plays a significant role within glocalities and their interconnectedness, as “[t]he twenty-first century will be the century of the migrant” (nail, 2015, p. 187). this not only counts for controlled migration but is especially relevant for a large group of people having suffered forced migration, namely refugees. refugees have to quickly adapt to new circumstances in the wake of their migrant trajectory, acquire language and everyday skills in their new environments, contributing an indigenous form of a cosmopolitan outline and surpassing any national-bound identity formation. any personal encounters of ‘new locals’ with other people in their environment, who in turn may already possess alternate interpretations of cosmopolitan awareness, lead to a new form of exchange. cosmopolitanism appears more as a way of life and thinking in a constructivist fashion, individually, sociologically and culturally. it has by no means ethnic hybridity or any other hard criteria as precondition but stands for an individual or collective philosophy. hawkins (2018, p. 67) offers the lens of “critical cosmopolitanism to integrate a focus on creating and sustaining just, equitable, and affirming relations with and held (2010) offers an excellent set of texts with general and mor specific accounts for obtaining an idea of an academic field in transition. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 99 99 global (and local) others in global engagements and interactions through attending to the workings of status, privilege, and power between people and groups of people.” building on her notion, the construction of glocalities, with physical and digital, real-time and asynchronous interaction, across time and space, trespassing language boundaries, constitutes a roadmap towards promoting critical cosmopolitanism. from the view of education, classrooms with commonly diverse student bodies constitute natural glocalities, calling for a tailored pedagogy to emerge the potential of students’ inherent cosmopolitan knowledge and awareness. to use beck’s (2006) popular title in context of the main principles of the eu, we will now sketch our “cosmopolitan vision” for today’s classroom glocalities. it falls in line with a democratic outline of the well-established teaching and learning culture. ingram (2016, pp. 68, 76) states that “[…] cosmopolitanism must be contestatory […] radically democratic.” thus, such debate culture has its core in factbased, open and controversial discourses about our 21st century challenges, recognizing the multitude of opinions. mendieta (2017, p. 254) summarizes this overall train of thought: “there is no single cosmopolitan vision, but a process of arriving at it through an engagement with a dialogical imagination that opens up the spaces of mutual transformation.” the presence of diverging cosmopolitan visions is felicitated, paving the way for unity & diversity and valuing the transcultural dynamics within our multicultural world. we as authors subscribe to the plural form cosmopolitan visions in sincerity, and value the uniqueness of every glocality, be it a global megacity or a small, more remote space. once again, germany exemplifies the power of cosmopolitanism for the construction of classroom glocalities. current demographics from 2019 tell us that almost 40% of all german students have a migration history (this category is relevant with at least one parent holding another citizenship than german). compared to the numbers of 2005, this proportion has gradually been on a rise, with an ongoing trend (table 1). we have no official numbers about the first (l1) and any other languages (lx) being spoken by these students. however, we can carefully infer that an increasingly multilingual cohort has become common in german classrooms today, with a wide array of different l1 and lx that – directly and indirectly – find entrance into german classrooms, adding to the cosmopolitan spirit. table 1 lists the amount of students with a migration history, born inand outside of germany (data source: bevölkerung mit migrationshintergrund ergebnisse des mikrozensus fachserie 1 reihe 2.2 – statistisches bundesamt: https://www.statistischebibliothek.de/mir/receive/d eserie_mods_00000020). year of survey country of birth: de germany ot – out of germany 2019 2015 2010 2005 de (%) ot (%) de (%) ot (%) de (%) ot (%) de (%) ot (%) students officially counted with a migration history 28.2 | 10.3 38.5 27 | 5.9 32.9 24 | 5.2 29.2 18.8 | 7.6 26.4 https://www.statistischebibliothek.de/mir/receive/deserie_mods_00000020 https://www.statistischebibliothek.de/mir/receive/deserie_mods_00000020 100 global education review 8 (2-3) glocalities cannot be automated with a cosmopolitan outcome, reasoning the need for a tailored pedagogical approach. how can we transform classroom glocalities into arenas of cosmopolitan citizenship? the resources and worldly knowledge the diverse body of students possesses from home provide as helpful for the outset of classes (e.g. “my father was born in …; “my mother grew up in and speaks lx…”; “my friend was born in…”). personal encounters along with a dialogical nature from an early age also leads to cosmopolitan awareness and spirit with all remaining students with genuinely local roots, as ethnic diversity is no required criterion. classroom cosmopolitanism can be equated with praising diversity and looking beyond boundaries as a personal philosophy. providing ample space for an organic growth and assembly of diversified forms of cosmopolitanism in educational contexts facilitates the transformation of classrooms into educational glocalities. a pedagogy making the existing cosmopolitanism visible and further promoting cosmopolitanism awareness and transnational spirit, thus amplifying the role of glocalities in combatting 21st century challenges sustainably, will be sketched in the following section. our suggestion to engender educational glocalities is an amended concept in accordance with baildon and damico (2010), proposing “relational cosmopolitanism” as a new literacy for 21st century challenges. their approach resembles a pedagogy for education for sustainable development (esd), because their pedagogy means to “help prepare students to live in ‘new times’” (baildon & damico, 2010, p. 1), requiring them to mutually work towards identifying problems and deliberating on pathways for their solution within a transnational democratic framework. moreover, also elucidating the role of the media and new technologies in the global world, this new literacy has a clear nexus to trilling & fadel’s (2009) 21st century skills, we made an argument for before. relational cosmopolitanism welcomes different local interpretations of global issues and promotes awareness for a shared global destiny. the term relational means that there is no universal cosmopolitan vision, building on contesting and perpetually (re)defining plural cosmopolitan visions in glocalities within a global framework. the pedagogy moves along the following definition: relational cosmopolitanism begins with an integrated view of knowledge within the social studies. rather than understanding knowledge as segmented, disjointed, and fragmented, an integrated perspective helps frame social studies content and curricula in ways that understand various social, economic, political, historical, and contemporary issues and problems as interconnected and shared. […] one particular way to promote a stance of interconnectedness is to integrate local dimensions of human experience with global conditions and concerns. for instance, a complex and multifaceted issue, such as poverty, pollution, immigration, income inequality, war, or climate change, can and needs to be investigated as it occurs in a particular place and it needs to be investigated as an issue that cuts across the globe in comparable and distinct ways. (baildon & damico, 2010, p. 26) the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 101 101 we will introduce a conceptual framework for clil lessons in the social sciences as panacea and put language, in particular foreign language education on eye level with the content of the suggested new literacy. our approach follows the seminal work of osler and starkey (2015), arguing that foreign language education is education for cosmopolitan citizenship. reference to l1 besides the school language as well as other surrounding or available languages constitutes another key feature of the suggested pedagogy, to foster multilingual skills for cosmopolitan visions in glocalities. after the presentation of the competence model, we will exemplify our thoughts with a practical example, namely #climonomics, a multilingual eu conference on combatting climate change. clil and the promotion of global discourse competences: the poleculeproject realizing the potential of clil in the social sciences to transform classrooms into cosmopolitan glocalities, the polecule-project at goethe-university frankfurt was founded, yielding an innovative and symbiotic partnership of didactic research with school practice.3 thus far, no educational standards had been defined for any clil subject, despite the exponential growth of clil programs in the 1990s, mostly in english (breidbach & viebrock, 2012). polecule’s first target was set to develop a conceptual framework with a competence model for clil classes in politics, economics & culture, adding culture as addendum to highlight the humanist approach. the second step foresaw the practical implementation of the 3 more about the project can be found online at www.polecule.com. 4 the full document can be found at elsner, engartner, nijhawan, and rodmann (2019). a closer analysis has been conceptual framework with teaching methods, recognizing the demand for general and subjectspecific clil didactics, and responding to the scarcity of clil teaching materials. clil in the social sciences with its globalization-related curriculum offers an apt arena for global discourses. the multilingual approach sets the stage for realizing a diversified language approach. the target language is english as the main language of global discourse. it needs to be clearly highlighted at this point, however, that the bilingual approach with english as foreign language and german as the official school language only defines the starting point of the project due to many different l1s of students. the teaching methods and material will incorporate multilingual facets beyond mere bilingualism, to pay tribute to the potpourri of languages in glocalities, as demonstrated during the presentation of #climonomics in the final section. the remainder of this section presents the most salient points of the competence model (figure 1), recognizing our envisaged promotion of cosmopolitan classroom glocalities from the preceding sections.4 composed by nijhawan (2019), and a review of the work written by wohnig (2020). 102 global education review 8 (2-3) figure 1 contains the competence model for clil classes in politics, economics & culture for social science education (taken from elsner et al., 2019, p. 24). clil can already be regarded as an early effort of a reformist pedagogy, realizing its genesis out of a “grassroots movement” (marsh, 2002, p. 56) in its initial stage of development. the transcurricular approach, combining language with subject learning, constitutes a more holistic view of education. the theoretical thoughts have been translated into global discourse competence as the main competence aim, summarized as the ability to understand, assess and act towards a sustainable future within a democratic, multicultural and transnational civil society. the model builds on constructivist approaches to education, realizing the need for problem-solving pedagogies amidst the demand for 21st century literacies (baildon & damico, 2010). the grand innovation proposed by the model is the pivotal role of language, language learning and language awareness, juxtaposed with the inherent achievements of language didactics. this has been manifested with the foreign language and communicative competence as one subcompetence. in terms of the cosmopolitan outlook within the classroom as glocality, inter and transcultural literacy, realizing the merits of foreign language didactics, embellishes the model. interculturality mainly focuses on the relationship towards alternate cultural patterns (with the prominent development of the 5 savoirs by byram, 1997). looking deeper, kramsch (1993) defines “third places” within classrooms, engendering during the negotiation of culture and meaning in foreign language classes. during cross-cultural communication, intercultural communicative competence develops herein. her notion, to some extent, also includes transculturality and the genesis of both stable and dynamic third cultures. transculturality, as a concept or process, recognizes the dynamic and perpetual change of cultures in our modern age of global mobility, owing to the increasing encounter and mixture of people with different backgrounds and experiences (welsch, 1999). it has been added to the competence model, to partly the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 103 103 challenge the idea of interculturalism with its static notion of isolated, and often nation-state based cultures. the inclusion of more dynamic cultural models, felicitating the fluidity of culture during modern globalization and migration, thus questioning the definition of otherness and looking “beyond other cultures” (schulze-engler & doff, 2011)5, amplify the cosmopolitan design of the model. it highlights ‘unity in diversity’ as spirit, enabling togetherness and cosmopolitanism from below. code-switching languages as well as constructed “translanguaging spaces” (wei, 2011), as common in cosmopolitan glocalities, play a significant role. translanguaging promotes empathy and solidarity, using affect control as well as a balanced stance towards selfinterest and altruism (nijhawan, 2020). this overall approach also manifests an opposition towards the surge of populism and nationalism by more recent communitarian trends (merkel, 2017), with serious parochial, provincial and chauvinist threats to local and transnational democracy. the competence model we presented with its endeavor to construct classrooms glocalities with cosmopolitan visions can be seen as a further development of interand 5 this edited volume is highly recommended as a source of inspiration to understand teaching concepts and practices transculturality. figure 2 binds the preceding sections together. figure 2 sketches different spheres of global discourses, with classroom glocalities as intersection for promoting cosmopolitan visions. the next section will introduce #climonomics as a practical example for the implementation of the given framework. the roadmap was set to construct the conference room as a cosmopolitan glocality for motivating the students towards climate action. a cosmopolitan approach towards climate change: #climonomics following the widespread media attention fff is still attracting, #climonomics, a multilingual eu parliamentary debate about that deconstruct the perception of otherness, still common in contemporary classrooms. 104 global education review 8 (2-3) climate change and climate action, was designed by the polecule project. in october 2019, almost 200 students across germany assembled and debated eu climate politics and developed masterplans for local, regional and global climate action, to promote their agency in the future. the large-scale event served as piloting exercise to refine the conceptual framework. we wanted to make #climonomics available also for later simulation in everyday classrooms as well as with larger student populations, across schools, and even beyond country borders, and ultimately also as digital project in the virtual cyberspace, to recognize that physical constraints of glocalities are abating. the following part presents the idea of the project, students’ data, the proceedings and selected evaluation results. project and objectives the central objectives of #climonomics is to address two of the most burning and contemporary 21st century challenges in society with a tailored and integrative pedagogical concept: (1) climate change and (2) cohesion in the eu in promoting democratic awareness. amidst the dynamics of the global fff movement, #climonomics means to equip secondary school students across the age of 1319 years with scientific climate facts. it offers a differentiated pedagogical concept to render widespread participation at related debates, and consequently students’ agency possible. moreover, noting with concern current disintegrating developments in the eu (i.e. brexit and the surge of populist parties), #climonomics intends to frame the simulation of the eu parliamentary debate, in order to strengthen democracy in its core. the heart of #climonomics is the simulation of a multilingual debate, highlighting the merits of pluralism and transnational cooperation, mirroring the multilingual reality of the world. for rather complicated scenarios related to the climate, games and simulations, both online and offline have proven to be effective tools. wu and lee (2015) were able to demonstrate that real world simulations, with an active engagement of students, help to engage a broader student population with the controversy. bandura and cherry (2019) highlight the role of social media and its reach and motivation for the youth when it comes to exerting pressure for an effective global environmental regime. with their model, they point out social-cognitive theory as a resource for “children’s innovative practices”, leading to behavioral change as consequence of the global movement, with a variety of remedies in “diverse social milieus” (p. 6). the idea to develop the project mainly resulted due to the evolution of fff, involving young people globally to be engaged in their local communities. fff’s objectives, with greta thunberg initially refusing to attend school in order to protest for immediate climate action, have significantly transformed in due process. not only have demands been expressed to combat climate change and promote a sustainable future for enabling human mankind a livelihood in dignity. but also fff now goes further in urging far-reaching societal reforms up to a complete system change, away from the growth economy to a more solidaric societal outline. there has been criticism that fff has an ‘elitist character‘, with supporters mainly from the youth of the educated middle class, while large parts of students from mostly marginalized backgrounds do not have access to the discourse gravitating around climate change. furthermore, recent populist movements, in its extreme form expressed in brexit, indicate disenfranchisement with politics. in accordance with held (2016), we can tie all of the objectives of #climonomics together, in arguing that cosmopolitanism, as the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 105 105 the competence model envisions, would only be possible in a democratic and sustainable world. one of the core features is the multilingual outline of #climonomics. on the one side, multilingual approaches can serve as positive resources and valuable scaffolding tools, enabling and supporting the seamless participation of a wider student community with native languages other than the official school language. on the other side, such an approach has also proven to be a modern pedagogy for foreign language learning. here, the transformation of clil has undergone within the last decade to a problem-based pedagogy, as a solution for 21st century challenges (coyle, hood, & marsh, 2010) plays into hands. the integration of content and language, constituting clil’s dna, has rendered it to be an apt approach for global discourses within glocalities, using novel multilingual methods for deeper cognitive processing of the content matter (nikula & moore, 2019). this idea is displayed in the competence model of the previous section. in order to enable students of all competence levels and with different language proficiencies an active participation, a digital and student-reviewed conference reader was developed.6 the reader organized the project threefold (interand transcultural literacy and foreign language and communicative competence as well as the methodological competence are promoted within all phases). the reader caters students’ affordances and takes differentiated steps. knowledge and analytical competence 6 a reworked version of the #climonomics reader, incorporating the experiences and evaluation results of #climonomics, is currently under review and nearly ready for publication by a renowned publishing house. it is a pilot equipping students with information on the eu and its institutions as well as scientific facts about climate change constituted the beginning of #climonomics. in a stakeholder-led exercise, optional multilingual sources were researched by students with other l1 than german and english. they served as differentiated and affordance-based supplement for students with various language histories, concomitantly highlighting different perspectives and the desired plurality of opinions. perspective changes were initiated with role cards, prompting the students to enter the topic from their allocated role. as didactics suggests, they help students to form a legitimate and multilayered judgement during controversial discourses, also respecting alternative views along with a genesis of empathy. the majority of role cards represented eu parliamentary groups/parties, but also other important actors from politics and civil society beyond the eu were added to offer a more global view (e.g. ibrahim solih, president from the maledives, ram nath kovind, president of india, greta thunberg, michael o’leary from ryanair from the private sector etc.). this underlines that perspectives on climate politics are not unequivocal, while finding compromises in democracies is not as easy as it appears. the groups were mainly composed in accordance with language skills, amplifying the multilingual concept, and encouraging students to use less dominant languages as well. moreover, this arrangement facilitated language learning. decision and literacy of judgement the students proceeded to the eu parliamentary debate, also chaired by them. half project to broadly disseminate the project in the form of a hybrid product (digital/printed), to develop digital forms of teaching materials. 106 global education review 8 (2-3) of the groups spoke in english the first half of the conference, the other in german. after half the time, they had to switch to the other language. thus, they had to bilingually prepare beforehand during the group phase. students were, however, encouraged to use any other language. any such contribution was given priority, provided one group member was ready to immediately translate into one of the two main conference languages for all other participants. students were able and actively requested to send real-time tweets from the accounts of their role to the main screen of the conference venue, in order to make the debate even more controversial, and also more realistic – keeping in mind that social media with its groundbreaking dynamics has become a decisive sphere of political discourse (see examples in the appendix). literacy of agency after the one-hour long debate, turning out to be very spectacular in its nature, the participants were supposed to turn back to their own personality. this last step was supposed to motivate students to become politically active, be engaged in a transnational civil society, realizing the merits of the eu as a citizens’ network for peace, exchange and mutual understanding. now, they were asked to develop local, european and global masterplans to combat climate change on different levels, in accordance with the knowledge they accrued the preceding phase as well as balancing the legitimate opinions of other actors. figure 3 visualizes the process of #climonomics. figure 3 illustrates the outline of the #climonomics conference. it deserves mention that the #climonomics conference had an attached teacher workshop, split in two parts. participants had observation tasks and were requested to take structured notes. at a second session, the observations set the basis for the development of teaching models in terms of multilingualism and climate change in classroom glocalities. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 107 107 information and data about participating students an application to take part at #climonomics was open to every student in germany. in some cases, teachers from schools requested to take part with their whole learning group. the set goal was to have at least 30% of students from secondary schools other than the elite gymnasiums7. this decision had been made, because there had repeatedly been concerns expressed that projects like #climonomics are in many cases exclusively addressed towards privileged students, leaving students with rather weaker socioeconomic backgrounds often behind. in total, 193 students registered for #climonomics. the detailed data, mainly the data on language proficiency, was used for the planning of the conference. table 2 shows the overall student profiles, also containing basic information on languages spoken by students. student responses in the registration survey (n=193) age range 13-19 average age / median age / standard deviation (sd) 16.05 / 16 / 1.3 students from non-gymnasium background 30% 7 in most of germany, students visit an elementary school for the first four years. in 2018/2019, about 2.8 million children were at an elementary school. thereafter, they continue either at a gymnasium (40%), a realschule (14%), a hauptschule (7%), a cooperative comprehensive school (10%) with different models, an integrated comprehensive school with mutual learning (19%), a school for students with special needs (6%), or at another state-permitted school (5%). the gymnasium as a traditional and elite institution is a classical grammar school, ending with the abitur (a-level proficiency in number of languages beyond german and english (covering all competence levels) 29 highest frequencies ≧5: english: all students french: 75 spanish 34 italian, 25 turkish & kurdish, 13 persian, 7 serbian, croatian and bosnian: 5 students with first languages other than german, or another (second) language proficiency close to a first language (often a language spoken at home) 59 students (31 %); 19 different first or equivalent second languages highest frequency of first or equivalent other (second) language, ≧5: turkish: 12 persian: 7 polish: 6 portuguese: 5 serbian, croatian and bosnian: 5 table 2 contains basic data that helped to plan and assemble groups for #climonomics. equivalent graduation, enabling to enroll in higher education) after either 8 or 9 years. the other schools are in general rather for weaker students, and often more practically oriented. vertical movements of students exceeding or missing the expectations of each school type is possible. numbers in brackets indicate the percentage of students enrolled at each of the school types in 2018/19 (data source: https://de.statista.com/statistik/daten/studie/3377/umfrage/a nzahl-der-schueler-nach-einzelnen-schularten/). 108 global education review 8 (2-3) overall, the set quota of 30% students from non-gymnasium background was just fulfilled. the data lets us observe an impressive pool of language proficiency in 28 languages beyond german and english. 19 of these languages were first or equivalent second languages of students. we should note the common fact that students do not have to have a proficiency in the first languages of their parents (even if both parents have the same first language). noteworthy is that some students indicated in the survey’s comment field their proficiency not only in other national languages, but also in certain regional or minority languages and dialects, respectively (e.g. telugu, spoken in the indian state of andhra pradesh). they indeed were willing to narrate and explain their personal language history and showed awareness and dedication. the given language diversity of the participants justifies #climonomics’ multilingual cli pedagogy for integrating students’ l1 both as resource and additional perspective into the concept. in line with the theoretical account of the preceding sections, it facilitates the construction of the conference room as educational glocality. it not only constructs a realistic setting of transnational politics, but also promotes multiply of thought and arguments in line with the given notion of cosmopolitanism from below, rooted in diversity. proceedings the group size was 8-10 students. in accordance with the concept, groups for the roles during the simulation were mainly assembled in accordance with the language competences students brought along, building on clil’s meticulous approach to promote multilingualism with diversified l1 use. especially when the number of students with l1 other than german or english were at least 5, their l1 constituted the majority within the group. the group work was quite concentrated, as the students were motivated with the prospects for the debate. languages other than german or english were often spoken. at the same time, they were directed not to hold secret talks but to mediate their content in german or english to their group members not proficient in their l1. they apparently felt comfortable and even proud when using the multilingual source section of the digital reader with their electronic devices, to look at opinions beyond that of german and international english media. we observed a very vividly held debate about a topic of immediate concern of the coming generation. participation was strong, even though not every statement could be given during the 90 minutes debate. the natural adherence to the language rules after a couple of minutes, resembling a habit, made the debate truly multilingual. this is indeed natural when compared e.g. to the european parliament, a un summit, or other conferences. mainly the contributions were in english and german, the main conference languages. other contributions were also given in polish (with both translations to english and german), portuguese and turkish. some of these contributions came from non-gymnasium students, emanating pride in demonstrating a competence not shared by everyone in the lecture hall. here, we learned that clil’s unique pedagogy with systematic l1 use results in a genesis of multilingualism and prepares students to feel comfortable within such environments. the contributions on twitter were by times rational and fact-based, but at times sarcastic, satirical and humorous. they aptly mirrored the proceeding of the debate ending without a climate deal. the appendix contains a selection of tweets that were projected in real-time on the main screen of the projector. not even a minimal consensus could be reached due to conflicting positions. the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 109 109 the last and final phase was meant to equip students with hope and a sense of agency and enabled them to take an individual cosmopolitan perspective on the controversies. they could freely choose groups, in which they were supposed to negotiate either local, regional or global masterplans with measures they identified as appropriate to combat climate change. the language choice was free, but results had to be composed at least in both german and english. the results were handed to the patron of the conference, mr. peter feldmann, the major of frankfurt, urging to act towards climate justice immediately. since the concept of the conference was very innovative, and the topic of debate one of the prime topics in public discourse, media attention was tremendous. tv, nationwide newspapers and radio stations as well as other observers attended the conference and enabled a widespread news coverage.8 in all three phases, clil’s distinction of being a genuinely transcurricular approach became visible. the multilingual methods employed not only resembled an authentic setting, but also caused students’ deliberation of a more careful language use, to make sure they deliver their point appropriately and are actually understood. this clearly led to deeper cognitive processing to facilitate seamless deand encoding, having a positive effect on the content. it appeared the multilingual climate facts offered security and scaffold to the group, since clear reference was given throughout to the material, mediating the content diligently. we believe this thwarted affective behavior and had a positive effect also on subject-based learning, which however was not formally assessed but can only 8 a conference video as well as the full media portfolio can be accessed here: http://polecule.com/2019/11/05/climonomics-so-liefbe concluded from the overall proceedings and the final results of the last phase. for the entire conference, we felt the power of the glocality and the cosmopolitan visions of the students. evaluation in order to gain insights for further research and development of the poleculeproject, both for science and teaching practice, the students were asked to voluntarily participate in an evaluation at the end of the day. they were given a quanqual questionnaire. 108 students gave their feedback (56%), summarized in the following paragraph. detailed results are available in table 3 of the appendix. the quantitative part of the evaluation shows overall satisfaction with the multilingual concept of the conference. it does not seem that it disrupted the global understanding of climate change. as many qualitative comments indicate, it seemed to be a refreshing exercise, and helped the students to absorb the topic of climate change from different perspectives due to the higher use of cognitive resources necessary for following the conference. some students indicated in the qualitative part of the survey that they had to concentrate more than usual, but in the end were able to improve language skills and language awareness, and to better understand the complexity of the subject. disappointment about not being able to have ample speech time was expressed, as proxy for the overall motivation to actively take part in the proceedings. students were also asked to provide feedback with one emoji on their smartphones, unsere-mehrsprachige-eu-klimakonferenz-fuerschuelerinnen-25-10-2019/ 110 global education review 8 (2-3) in order to have a capture of their emotional state and feelings. a software tool was used to create a visual representation of the most frequently used emojis by size, while removing single-use emoji. figure 4 shows the result. we learned that many questions remain open, that further work is necessary, but also a certain state of confusion and even desperation, in accordance with the debate ending without an agreement. the positive smiley faces appear to indicate positive emotions and feelings about the project day. on the other side, also boredom was expressed, which should not be surprising considering the size of the conference. figure 4 emulates the emotional snapshot immediately after the conference, displayed by an emoji of choice. the questionnaire as well as the immediate oral feedback serves as an incentive for refinement and project development for multilingual teaching concepts about 21st century challenges. it provides stimuli about how classroom glocalities can be constructed. in accordance with the informed consent of the students, the conference was fully videotaped. the close analysis of the footage will end in a more detailed videographic analysis. the digital reader has been edited and is in the process of publishing, to make #climonomics available not only for special events, but also for everyday teaching. looking to the future: an optimistic outlook from #climonomics, we learned that the construction of classroom glocalities with cosmopolitan visions in order to teach new literacies is more than just a theoretical model or a concept we had presented in the preceding sections. the development of both classroom and project-based teaching material, in accordance with research on sustainability didactics defining new literacies to prepare students for their agency towards 21st century challenges, remains an exciting exercise. we want to highlight that a theory-practice cooperation is essential for successful implementation of such ambitious visions. such a cooperation builds on the practical knowledge of stakeholders in schools (teachers and students), to render their pool of knowledge scientific, for further dissemination purposes. polecule’s idea of thought were such partnerships, to produce sustainable teaching methods and material together with practitioners and students. realizing often acrimonious debates about migration and refugees, to us it appears that a framework of seeing the positive sides of migration and cultural hybridity meets one of the main 21st century challenges, an epoch characterized by globalization. classroom glocalities with cosmopolitan visions, mirroring the multilingual everyday reality, provide an apt conceptional framework for reformist movements in education. both language skills and awareness as well as subject knowledge can be productively used by using student’s knowledge and resources as productive starting points. esd, as legally concluded by the member states of the united nations economic, social and cultural organization (unesco), provides for a desired concept in line with the needs for coming generations. polecule as a project will end mid of 2021. due to the demand in accordance with the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 111 111 official political targets, funding for “the blue planet” as a follow-up project with the goal to promote a didactic for esd in similar spirit has already be secured. it seems that many young people have already understood the challenges that await them. the task of didactic and educational research is to provide them with tools to develop agency and meet these challenges. as previously stated, we opened this article with two quotes from greta thunberg, as her voice exemplifies the importance of youth speaking out about glocal issues, and now we will conclude with her powerful and pointed words. "this is the year 2019. this is not the time and place for dreams. this is the time to wake up. this is a moment in history where we need to be wide awake." [her speech in front of the united states congress, washington, d.c., september 2019] acknowledgements we would like to thank the anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for the very detailed and helpful comments to improve the course of arguments in the article. appendix a selection of tweets during the main #climonomics parliamentary debate the following selected tweets, which on purpose remain uncommented for the readers of the article to develop own impressions, mirror the proceedings of the eu plenary debate of #climonomics. 112 global education review 8 (2-3) evaluation data of #climonomics item average sd i liked the digital conference reader… 1.8 0.8 i liked the multilingual concept of the conference… 1.7 0.7 4 point liekert scale: 1 – very much; 4 – not at all (positive scaling) item average sd i learned a lot of new climate facts… 3.3 1.1 the multilingual concept was instrumental for properly occupying my role during the debate… 2.9 1.4 i feel insecure answering in a foreign language in front of others… 2.4 1.2 multilingualism actually led to miscommunication in groups and the plenary… 1.7 1 using foreign languages lead me to see the topic more globally… 3.4 1.4 it was more difficult for me to persuade others in a foreign language… 2.7 1.2 i was able to note that my political judgement is different in a foreign as compared to my first language… 2.0 1.3 i listened more carefully during multilingual phases… 3.5 1.3 switching languages also enabled me to switch to other positions … 2.7 1.3 i could participate better, because i was allowed to use my first language besides german and english (only for non-first language users of german and english: n=16)… 2.8 1.5 i rather consider the multilingual part as unnatural… 2.2 1.1 thanks to the multilingual concept, i was able to improve my english language skills in the topic area beyond my german knowledge 3.7 1.1 5 point liekert scale: 1 – completely disagree; 3neutral; 5 – completely agree (negative scaling) table 3 lists selected quantitative evaluation results (n = 108). the construction of cosmopolitan glocalities in secondary classrooms 113 113 bibliography baildon, m., & damico, j. s. 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(2015). climate change games as tools for education and engagement.nature climate change, 5, 413. doi:10.1038/nclimate2566 toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 29 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: mligo, ignasia renatus. (2023). toward effective provision of under-five childcare services: experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania. global education review, 10 (3), 29-45. toward effective provision of under-five childcare services: experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania ignasia renatus mligo abstract the aim of this study was to assess the effectiveness of the provision of under-five childcare services taking experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania. this interpretive study employs phenomenology design to investigate the views of stakeholders based on childcare services. the focus was to determine the childcare interest, needs and requirements of caregivers living in vulnerable and marginalized communities in tanzania and across the world. this study was grounded by parenting and child-rearing theory which emphasizes in caring for young children from the early stages. the findings indicated that the situation of children and childcare services amongst marginalized and vulnerable communities was not satisfactory. several ngos and networks have been supporting childcare services with minimal support from the government. the government and the responsible ministries and departments are responsible for reducing the vulnerability of children and their families through accessible, comprehensive, and integrated quality childcare services. this study recommends that to improve the current situation and attain the quality provision of childcare services the government policy planners in collaboration with childcare service providers and practitioners need to establish a strong commitment to the provision of quality childcare services and programs in marginalized and vulnerable communities. keywords childcare, early childhood development, caregivers, marginalized and vulnerable communities, service providers, tanzania introduction early childhood development (ecd) refers to the process by which children grow and thrive, physically, socio-emotionally, cognitively, and in language and communication from conception to eight (0-8) years of age (amani eccd,2001; heckman & masterov, 2007; nsamenang, 2008; world health organization, 2018; unicef; 2017). these early years have a longer-lasting impact on the full life course than any other period in life. in tanzania, and elsewhere many parents and families are found in situations where they are not able to spend adequate time with their younger children due to increased social life complexities (amani eccd, 2001, unicef, 2017). parents and caregivers struggle to balance the demands of work and childcare. as a result, evidence of children facing violence, abuse and neglect happens at family and community levels that lack guided childcare and support services for young children (mohcdgec, 2019; vac,2009). furthermore, this leads to missed early investment opportunities for young children to grow and become productive adults in their society. the establishment and management of daycare centers are key in addressing the challenges faced in early childhood development (eurofound, 2015). these centers complement parents’ and caregivers’ parenting practices in promoting early childhood 30 global education review 10 (3) development and help to build a solid and broad foundation for children’s well-being and lifelong learning. however, the establishment, management and monitoring of these centers have been inconsistent due to a lack of comprehensive national guidelines (mohcdgec,2020). different stakeholders have been providing these services without welldefined standards and guidelines that make monitoring and evaluation of ecd services difficult. the change in social-economic activities has increased the demand for early childhood stimulation services in urban, semi-urban and rural areas supporting parents to take care of their children as they get engaged in incomegenerating activities (mitchell, et al; 2008; mtahabwa, 2009; oecd, 2006). the government was compelled to develop comprehensive national guidelines for the establishment and management of daycare centers in 2020 to ensure the provision of uniform ecd services in the country (mohcdgec, 2020). the guidelines provide the blueprint on how to establish, manage and monitor these institutions ensuring quality and consistency in ecd services provision. over time, childcare and support services have been decreasing due to changing contexts in the changing world where inequalities are higher in developing countries (kojan and clifford, 2018; mauney, 2014). families and communities concentrate more on income-generation activities to sustain household demands and needs due to increased poverty levels (kojan and clifford, 2018; mauney, 2014; unicef –state of the world children 2019). this has a direct impact on the growth and development of young children focusing on the quality of investment in young children at an early age. in sub-saharan africa, data indicate only 26% of the population under five years in the region attend early childhood education, while only 51% get early stimulation and responsive care giving by adults; 7% of children have learning materials at home and 35% of children under five year left alone or in the care of another child younger than 10 years of age for more than one hour at least once in the past week (unicef –state of the world children 2019). thousands of marginalized children lack access to early childhood development and care services and are exposed to conditions that may impair their optimal development (eurofound 2015; mauney,2014). young children cannot protect themselves and are vulnerable to unexpected danger, physical pain and emotional stress (kojan and clifford, 2018; mauney, 2014). extreme poverty and low income bring serious risks that have to be mitigated by social support that may include material of financial services. current situation of childcare services in tanzania the situation of childcare services in tanzania is guided by the law of child act no 21 of 2009-part xi section 147 to 151 (mohcdgec, 2020). these sections provide a framework that supports development of guidelines and regulations used in establishing, management and monitoring and evaluation daycare centers (mohcdgec, 2020). by the end of july 2022, about 2523 daycare centers had been registered, with a total of 173,254 children where by 82,382 are boys and 90, 872 are girls, and many of which are in towns and peri-urban areas. there are 36 registered childcare workers training institutions, 35 privately owned and one owned by the government (mohcdgec, 2020). these 36 institutions provide certificates, but the intention of the responsible ministry is to toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 31 provide diploma, bachelor up to phd levels for childcare workers. however, there are many actors operating daycare centers across the country which are not registered, and ministry has no data related to this category. the ministry of community development, gender, women and special groups (mocdgwsg) by then was (mohcdgec)has provided guidelines which are providing a framework for the government to monitor and evaluate the provision of these services (mocdgwsg, 2022). the government (mocdgwsg, moest, and kswti) works collaboratively with karibu tanzania organization integrating ecd courses in fdcs, whereby 20 tutors from 10 fdcs have received ecd training as an effort to increase childcare workers’ workforce. furthermore, the team of experts in early childhood development currently are conducting training to social welfare workers and daycare center owners in different cities, councils and municipals across all regions in tanzania. the aim is to raise awareness on how to support the childcare workers and the owners of the daycare centers on how to provide integrated services. facilitators have a training manual package which contains nurturing care components needed for childcare services at large. components such as health, nutrition, responsive care, safety and security (including birth registration, wash, social safety netstasaf), opportunities for early learning) and a module on mental well-being for facility and community level service providers addressing (individual needs of children including those with malnutrition, disabilities, developmental delays, sick children, gender, hiv+ or exposed, abused, mental wellbeing of parents) accordingly (mohcdgec, 2020). by the end of july 2022, about 173, 254 under-five children are accessing ecd services through daycare centers (mocdgwsg, 2022). all registered daycare centers had qualified childcare workers from recognized childcare workers training institutions supporting learning and childcare activities. with support from non-governmental organizations (ngos) and other development partners these volunteers received on-the-job training to build their capacity on ecd (mocdgwsg, 2022). services provided in many daycare centers are not holistic in nature, childcare workers mostly address parents’ needs as opposed to the provision of holistic needs of young children that include early learning and stimulation, nutrition, care and protection and health care services (mtahabwa, 2009; smith, 2013). furthermore, in tanzania, the responsible ministry is in the process of developing the national ecd curriculum for child care workers (nta level 4-6) that will facilitate trainers to understand key learning areas and training content to be covered. apart from having such registered childcare centers in tanzania, the quality of services is still problematic. quality and access remain a challenge, particularly for poor and vulnerable groups in the country’s rural areas (amani eccd, 2001). with quality childcare services, the women could focus more on work knowing that their children are well cared with qualified childcare workers. childcare workers need two years of training in a recognized institution (mohcdgec, 2020). there are 36 registered childcare workers training institutions, 35 privately owned and one owned by the government (mocdgwsg, 2020). women some time to meet with other women to exchange experience, knowledge and information, which contributed to increasing their self-awareness and confidence. despite the fact that the benefits of childcare are well known, paying a reliable caregiver or placing a toddler in quality childcare 32 global education review 10 (3) can be expensive to many families (eurofound, 2015; unesco, 2017). often only the more welloff parents can afford to pay someone to look after their child while they are at work. women’s decision to become employed after having a child, and the decision to use out-of-home care services, are affected in large part by the price and availability of quality childcare services. like in other countries, in tanzania when the price of care is high, low and middle-income parents are often faced with the difficult choice of either reducing the amount of time one of the parents (unesco, 2017). usually, the woman who works outside of the home and consequently reducing the household’s income; leaving the child with poor-quality care; or leaving the child with no care at all. whatever their choice, both the child and parents will likely suffer. so, the government has realized the problems many families face in ensuring that children are well looked after while their parents work, and that lack of childcare is leading to the inefficient functioning of labor markets, underutilization of public investments in human resources and insufficient care of the next generation. thus, it is in the public interest for the government to support and facilitate access to childcare. childcare plays an important role in providing educational and social benefits for poor and vulnerable children. it is widely recognized that basic life skills for all children should begin before pre-school and that early childhood care service is an important way to address inequality and social disadvantage (amani eccd, 2001; eurofound, 2015). findings from the literature indicate the many benefits childcare services can bring to girls and boys, and how can help to reduce sex-based and other types of discrimination against children and families (international organization, 2015).socially disadvantaged boys and girls who attend childcare services are more ready for preschool, would perform better in pre-schools and are less likely to drop out than their peers who do not attend daycare centers. much remains unknown about the status of childcare services in the marginalized /vulnerable communities in tanzania. the little information available has never been put together to provide a holistic picture of the progress so far made in this important area. objective of the study the main objective of the current study was to assess the effectiveness of the provision of under-five childcare services taking experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania. the study intends to synchronize the information available in tanzania for the purpose of depicting the country's holistic situation. this will serve as an important database for future actions as well as make childcare services providers in tanzania aware of the challenges ahead. overall, the type, quantity and quality of services delivered to young children in tanzania tend to differ according to program ownership, location of programs and children's ages. therefore, the focus of this study is to gain knowledge and understanding about the effective provision of under-five childcare services in marginalized communities in tanzania. the main question of the current study was to investigate the effectiveness of the provision of the under-five childcare services taking experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania. the study is expected to explore how educational stakeholders, ngos and networks collaborate on the provision of childcare services, especially in marginalized/vulnerable communities. also, to examine childcare toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 33 interests, needs and requirements of caregivers living in vulnerable communities, caregivers’ interest in childcare services and perceived benefits of enrolling children in childcare and considerations in choosing a childcare service (featherstone, 2016; kojan and clifford, 2018; mauney, 2014). service providers need to understand ecd programs and childcare services needed in the marginalized/vulnerable communities, and what support requires in the development of young children and their families(mitchell et al., 2008; oecd, 2006; smith, 2013).therefore, the findings from this study may inform us of the benefits of locating childcare services in marginalized/vulnerable communities through the partnerships approach, engaging various stakeholders, ngos and networks available in the country. hence, when childcare services are improved young children can fulfil their potential, equally and with dignity. taking in mind the framework’s vision which denotes “a world in which every child is able to develop their full potential and no child is left behind” (world health organization (2018). research methods design this interpretive study employs phenomenology design for investigating the views, perceptions, and opinions of the social welfare department, under the ministry of community development, gender, women and special groups (mocdgwsg), caregivers, owners of the daycare centers, networks and ngos about their experiences, knowledge, and possibilities, found during the provision of childcare services in the marginalized/vulnerable communities in tanzania (bernard, 2013; wahyuni, 2012). phenomenology is the study of the nature and meaning of things, a phenomenon’s essence and essentials that define what it is (willig, 2013; saldana, 2011). that means is a form of qualitative research in which the researcher attempts to understand how one or more individuals experience a phenomenon (sarantakos, 2005; saldaña, 2011). it refers to a detailed investigation of how people observe, see or experience themselves and their world, how people interpret the world, and the phenomena that surround them (hammersley, 2012; saldaña, 2011). the researcher in the present study decided to choose the interpretive paradigm because of its potential to generate rich data and to inform the study due to the nature of the study and the types of data that the researcher considered could answer the research questions (sarantakos, 2005). the interpretive paradigm was used in this study in order to explore meaning in the everyday world of childcare services. it is argued that social reality is viewed and interpreted by the individual himself or herself according to the ideological positions she/he holds (best & kahn, 2006; neuman, 2007, 2011; sarantakos, 2005). sampling for this study was purposive: suitable participants were selected through nonprobability sampling (bernard 2013; best and kahn 2006; neuman 2011; sarantakos 2005). the six participated childcare centers were located in different regions of tanzania such as tabora, dodoma, arusha, and morogoro regions. also, participants from the social welfare department, caregivers, and owners of the daycare centers, networks and ngos were selected based on the support they provided in the daycare settings. the criteria were the participating providers who supported the provision of childcare services in marginalized/vulnerable communities. the selection of the study participants stopped when 34 global education review 10 (3) the researcher was satisfied by the ngos and networks that met the criteria. data collection this study used interviews, focus group discussions and documentary reviews for data collection. data was collected from the owners of the daycare centers, caregivers, parents/guardians, and social welfare staff under the ministry of community development, networks and non-governmental organizations (ngos).the owners of daycare centers, social welfare staff, networks and ngos were interviewed twice, the second time as a followup to fill gaps observed after the analysis of the first interview, and each interview lasted for 45– 55 minutes. focus group discussion was conducted once to parents/guardians and lasted for 45-55 minutes. caregivers were interviewed three times with the intention of understanding in detail their needs and requirements for living in vulnerable communities. to explore more about caregivers’ interest in childcare services and the perceived benefits of enrolling children in childcare. also, the average costs of childcare and the ability of caregivers to pay for childcare services as determined, the income and cost of childcare. the first and second interviews for other groups concerned their perceptions regarding the provision of childcare services in marginalized/vulnerable communities, and the third interview was a follow-up to fill gaps identified during the initial analysis of the previous two interviews. the interviews varied in duration from 40 to 60 minutes and were conducted in the daycare centers during working hours. parents were interviewed once, for between 30 and 45 minutes, by appointment at their homes. during the follow-up interviews, data that were found largely to repeat previously generated data from various participants were not recorded because this provided no new or surprising information (strauss and corbin 2016). recruitment was conducted for all study participants for three days. all the study participants gave their consent for the interviews to be recorded with a voice recorder. to conceal the identity of the study participants, no names were recorded on the audio tapes. data analyses the data of this study was qualitative in nature and the analysis was informed by a phenomenological approach. to minimize the influence of biases during data analysis and interpretation of the findings the researcher employed reflexive journaling by writing down her thoughts, feelings and perceptions about the topic and reflected on the same throughout the research process. the researcher had to hold out her pre-conceptions, beliefs, and experiences about the phenomena under investigation prior to and throughout the investigation (tufford & newman, 2012. after completing the data generation, the exercise of transcription started. therefore, coding of the transcripts from the interviews with caregivers and service providers emerged from the basic question: do children in marginalized/vulnerable communities receive effective childcare services? the analysis of the data began with open coding (strauss & corbin, 2016), a process by which concepts are identified and established by asking questions, and labelling and grouping similar occurrences and events into categories. with the help of the nvivo10 software, the researcher coded all the data, addressing the research questions for each separate participant. the use of nvivo as a tool for data analysis was useful in data organization, sorting and locating the main ideas and patterns to the particular themes and sub-themes (richards, 1999). for this study nvivo was helpful because the researcher used it for coding processes and was able to browse and retrieve all the data coded there, rethink, re-code, and ask questions about the category in the searches. toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 35 the data were grouped into themes and analyzed for each participant separately. the following were the two main themes that the researcher looked for: (1) what were the childcare interests, needs, and requirements of caregivers living in marginalized/vulnerable communities? and (2) what support structures were needed from key stakeholders to support the provision of childcare services? the main guide research questions helped to address the above themes. the next step was to reduce the data within some codes to a series of matrices within the relevant themes. the intention was to clarify information within and between item analyses (miles & huberman, 1994), and a comparison was made between cases by identifying the similarities and differences amongst cases. phenomenological approach helped the researcher to understand on how people interpret the world, and the phenomena that surround them (hammersley, 2012; saldaña, 2011). to augment accuracy, the researcher reviewed the data analyses in detail to ensure that she had apprehended the participants’ intended meanings and descriptions. ethical statement to access the institution where the research is to be conducted, acceptance by those whose permission one needs before embarking on the task, is essential (cohen et al. 2007; creswell 2014). the study ethical clearance was approved by the university of dodoma research and publication committee under the regulation of 2008.permission to conduct the study was secured from the regional administrative secretaries (ras) in dodoma, tabora and arusha regions in tanzania, where the study was conducted. the participants were informed that their participation in the study was voluntary, so they were free to withdraw at any stage of the study if they found they were not comfortable. also, participants were assured of anonymity in the research report. results the results presented in this section are mainly based on analyses from documentary reviews and interviews with owners of childcare centers, caregivers, social welfare officers, parents/guardians, networks and ngos since their points of view are the main focus of this study. during the presentation of data, it will become obvious that comparable information largely on the interview themes is overlapping and similar for all study participants (i.e., caregivers, parents/guardians) and (social welfare officers, networks and ngos). in order to underscore the results, therefore, representative quotes have been included to clarify the points under discussion. research question 1: what are the childcare interests, needs, and requirements of caregivers living in marginalized/vulnerable communities? an initial task was to define vulnerable and marginalized communities in the context of this study, which are orphans, pastoral communities, urban informal settlements, women’s prisons and large commercial agricultural settlements. this marginalization results in lost opportunities such as childcare services and other benefits for human beings. the findings from the owners of childcare settings and caregivers indicated various childcare interests, needs and requirements of the daycare setting and caregivers. study participants were asked to identify the childcare interests, needs and requirements of caregivers living in vulnerable communities. the findings indicated that the government of tanzania is willing to locate childcare services all over the regions in the community centers. 36 global education review 10 (3) unfortunately, the interests, needs and requirements of childcare are not met, and caregivers living in marginalized/vulnerable communities claim not to get childcare services. the following quote illustrates the view: of course, the coverage of daycare services is not extensive in our region. and the few available childcare centers are not in good condition in terms of services, infrastructure, and qualifications of caregivers. for example, some parents enroll kids of one to two years, at young ages, when the immune system is developing, children are much more vulnerable to infections and disease than when they are somewhat older. this means that they need close care in terms of health (vaccination), nutrition and sanitation conditions, unfortunately, the services are not in a good standard. i suggest the government invest much in this area for the welfare of young children [social welfare officer/interview, 2022]. the quote above indicates that marginalization affects family life. families in contact with child protection normally have severely deficient social and helping networks and dysfunctional family relationships. these tend to be associated with poor social integration, not only for parents but also for their children. the study findings indicated that immunizing children against vaccinepreventable diseases can greatly reduce childhood morbidity and mortality. however, parents (mothers) reported that children in marginalized areas had no access to the service. vulnerable and marginalized children were identified by the study participants in the target areas visited. however, the list was not inclusive of all vulnerable children in tanzania as it highlighted the vulnerabilities only in the visited areas. based on the feeding practices to reduce dehydration and minimize the effects of diarrhea on nutritional status, parents (mothers)reported continuing normal feeding of children with diarrhea and to increase the number of fluids given to the child. in some cases, children lack appropriate feeding practices. for instance, children with diarrhea need to be given more liquids than usual, and as much food or more than usual. the following quote illustrates the view: we are pastoralists and keep on moving from one place to another to hunt food for our livestock. so, it is not possible to send our children to daycare centers and even we mothers when we are pregnant is hard to attend the clinic because we are in movement all the time. we miss vaccination, appropriate feeding practices, and nutritional foods and sometimes our children get diarrhea we try to give them fluidly without medical directives. we suggest the government give us a permanent settlement which can accommodate our livestock and for our children to be enrolled in daycare centers where they can get proper services from qualified caregivers [parent (mother)/ fgd/ september, 2022]. the above quote concurred with children with families migrating for work. migration to work was another very common factor reported to lead to child vulnerability. study participants reported that parents commonly migrated to farming during rainy season to work on farm activities and would either take children with them or leave them with elderly grandparents, who could not afford toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 37 to send children to daycare centers. during the focus group discussion, one parent reported “children of migrant families are left with grandparents that can’t always send them to daycare centers. sometimes the children are expected to work themselves” [parent/interview/ september, 2022]. another sub-themes that emerged from the data was about children living in poor families. children living in poor families were the most commonly identified group of vulnerable or marginalized children and failed to enroll at the childcare center (featherstone, 2016). when asked all study participants reported that poor children are the most vulnerable and are marginalized. children in these families were characterized by large family sizes, unstable livelihoods, or lacking income stability. as a result, families did not have money to pay service fees at the daycare center, buy school supplies or uniforms and also faced challenges in providing basic needs such as nutrition and health care. the following quote illustrates the view: of course, poverty is the main reason children are vulnerable in our community, parents cannot enroll them for daycare centers. parents do not have a stable income so they cannot send the children to childcare centers regularly. as a result, children miss their rights to socialize with their fellow children at the center and other services available at the place. it could be much appreciated if the government in collaboration with ngos and networks would address this issue [caregiver/interview 2022]. the above quote indicated that children living in poor families were the most commonly identified group of vulnerable and marginalized children. children living in or working on streets; children in exploitative labor; children at risk of or experiencing violence, abuse, neglect and exploitation; and trafficked children; with such environments, children are likely to face difficulties in developing their potential. with this in mind, guidelines are also intended to facilitate ownership of the process of identification of most vulnerable children (mvc) using local government authorities (lgas) and local communities. thereafter, it needs to find out what kind of intervention is suitable for the children based on their difficulties. research question 2: what are the support structures needed from key stakeholders to support the provision of childcare services? findings indicated that there were different support structures from key ecd stakeholders to support the provision of childcare services. a number of international and local ngos in tanzania such as brac maendeleo tanzania (bmt), the elizabeth glaser pediatric aids foundation (egpaf), children in crossfire (cic),tanzania early childhood development network (tecden), partnership for nutrition in tanzania (panita), unicef, right to play, save children to mention but a few recognize that marginalized and vulnerable children are at risk for abuse and face challenges in access to education, learning and participation. this includes providing support to orphaned children, children with disability, children living in poor families, families having domestic violence incidents, minority children, children affected by poor health conditions, children affected by hiv/aids, children living in care centers/shelters, and children living in the neglected family. children have the right to equal opportunities for education and participation. 38 global education review 10 (3) furthermore, the findings indicated that the ngos and networks collaborated in the provision of childcare services. the support these ngos and networks performed has been summarized in table 1.1 (see appendix) table 1.1 above summarizes the few key stakeholders that support the provision of childcare services. findings indicated that ngos and networks collaborate in facilitating the welfare of young children. the activities, achievements, challenges and the best way to do them are closely related in the cases. this implies that all ngos focus to improve the welfare of the children, however, low government support to provide quality services to the ecd centers. this implies that much depends on the ngos so when projects phase out the centers remain in poor conditions. the government needs to work closely with different ecd stakeholders such as international and local ngos, networks, civil society organizations (csos) and community-based organizations (cbos) for quality childcare services. the findings from the documentary review indicated that for a long period of time daycare centers have been conducted by different stakeholders. however, the establishment, management and monitoring of these centers have been inconsistent due to a lack of comprehensive national guidelines. different stakeholders have been providing these services without well-defined standards and guidelines that make monitoring and evaluation of ecd services difficult. therefore, the ministry of health and community development, gender, elderly and children (mohcdgec) prepared various standard guidelines that direct on how to conduct daycare centers. for instance: •national guidelines for establishment and management of day-care centres of 2020. •national guidelines for the establishment and management of safe houses for victims of trafficking in persons and survivors of violence of 2019. •national guidelines on children’s reintegration with families of 2019. •national guidelines for identification of most vulnerable children and linkage to care, support and protection of 2017. the government is compelled to develop comprehensive national guidelines for the establishment and management of day care centres to ensure the provision of uniform ecd services in the country. the guidelines provide the blueprint on how to establish, manage and monitor these institutions ensuring quality and consistency in ecd services provision (mohcdgec, 2020). in tanzania, many parents and families are found in situations where they are not able to spend adequate time with their younger children due to increased social life complexities. parents and caregivers struggle to balance work demands and childcare activities. this leads to missed early investment opportunities for young children to grow and become productive adults in their society. the establishment and management of daycare centers are key in addressing the challenges faced in early childhood development. these centers complement parents’ and caregivers’ parenting practices in promoting early childhood development and help to build a solid and broad foundation for children’s well-being and lifelong learning. toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 39 therefore, this study is confident that these guidelines will be helpful towards the delivery of inclusive, quality, effective, efficient and equitable ecd services by all stakeholders at all levels in tanzania and across the world. discussion marginalized groups have been defined as populations outside of “mainstream society”' and 'highly vulnerable populations that are systemically excluded from national or international policy-making forums (kojan & clifford 2018; makuu, 2019; mauney, 2014). for the context of this study, it refers to the communities in which according to their location children fail to get access to childcare services such as orphans, urban informal settlements, women’s prisons, communities of pastoralists, children with special needs and large commercial agricultural settlements. eventually, the findings indicated that 50.1% of all people in tanzania mainland are children (national bureau of statistics, 2014). children who are considered most vulnerable are estimated to be 6.6 million, nearly half of them living with and affected by hiv (measure evaluation, 2017). on the other hand, based on the mid-2015 projected population of children 0-17 years, the estimated population of orphans and vulnerable children, as defined by pepfar, is 3,330,254 (measure evaluation, 2017). furthermore, the recent tanzania demographic health survey and malaria indicator survey (tdhs-mis 2015-2016) estimates the population of orphans from all causes to be 2,159,474 (range 2,020,862 – 2,295,324) (mohcdgec, moh, nbs, ocgs, and icf, 2016). marginalization affects family life(featherstone, 2016; kojan & clifford, 2018; mauney, 2014). findings have indicated that social vulnerability is created by poverty and marginalization, but as child health professionals, we are able to appreciate the very real effects of poverty and concomitant social exclusion on the health of our young patients. findings have shown that children from lowincome families are facing a diversity of problems including a lack of access to childcare services. low-income families are more likely to miss the opportunities to be registered in special education classes than children from middleor upper-income families. the ministry of health, community development, gender, elderly and children (mohcdgec) through the department of social welfare (dsw) is responsible for reducing vulnerability of children and their families through accessible, comprehensive, and integrated quality health and social welfare services. care, support and protection of these children must include effective referrals to health and social welfare services through functional linkages between health facilities and communities (mohcdgec, 2017). studies by makuu (2019) and mauney (2014) reported that addressing marginalization will require a responsive and caring workforce and a progressive manpower policy on the part of the government and support from development partners. there is a reason why new shingles tend to go up in middleand upper-income communities, there are few incentives for new practitioners to set up practice in socially vulnerable communities (the highly politicized and important rural initiatives notwithstanding, although i would argue that the huge demographic of the urban poor have been largely forgotten in this debate. we need enlightened policies that promote practice among vulnerable communities (which also address issues of access, such as those encountered by non-status persons), and that includes competitive remuneration and 40 global education review 10 (3) adequate infrastructure (mauney, 2014; makuu, 2019; unicef, 2018). the most vulnerable children identified in the study were children that are from very poor families, have families that migrate for work, have a disability and other vulnerabilities such as illness, divorce, domestic violence or are orphaned (featherstone, 2016; kojan & clifford, 2018; makuu, 2019; unicef, 2018). these categories were identified by all study participants with a significant emphasis on very poor families and the challenges resulting from migration for work. clearly, poverty is a significant factor in children not being able to attend school and learn (featherstone, 2016; kojan & clifford, 2018). poverty results in children needing to work, poor nutrition, bad health, and lack of money for school supplies, or for extra classes, transportation and other school costs. the current study also observed a significant challenge for children with disabilities. they were marginalized, the only children with disabilities that were identified as participating in daycare centers were children with minor physical disabilities. children with more severe disabilities and children with intellectual disabilities were not expected to be able to participate in pre-school by the teachers, parents or community leaders. the reason cited was the lack of resources including infrastructure, teacher capacity, teaching resources or adaptation equipment and building accessibility. conclusion and recommendation the main aim of the current study was to assess the effectiveness of the provision of under-five childcare services taking experiences from marginalized and vulnerable communities in tanzania. the study intends to synchronize the information available in tanzania for the purpose of depicting the country's holistic situation. the intention was to gain knowledge and understanding about the effective provision of under-five childcare services in marginalized communities in tanzania. these early years have a longer-lasting impact on the full life course than any other period in life. the findings of this study suggest that quality early investment is very important. childcare not only improves mothers’ and fathers’ access to paid work but also contributes to job creation in the childcare service sector, replacing unpaid household work such as cleaning and food preparation for children. all young children regardless of their situation need quality childcare services in all domains as stipulated by nurturing care framework in 2018 such as nutrition, health, responsive caregiving, safety and security, and early learning. childcare centers complement parents’ and caregivers’ parenting practices in promoting early childhood development and help to build a solid and broad foundation for children’s well-being and lifelong learning. findings have indicated that many children live in vulnerable and marginalized situations due to a number of factors including poverty, low-income families, orphans, social inclusion, urban informal settlements, women’s prisons, communities of pastoralists, children with special needs and large commercial agricultural settlements and the like. the government and responsible ministries and departments are responsible for reducing the vulnerability of children and their families through accessible, comprehensive, and integrated quality health and social welfare services. care, support, and protection of these children must include effective referrals to health and social welfare services through functional linkages between health facilities and communities. addressing vulnerability and toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 41 marginalization will require a responsive and caring workforce and a progressive manpower policy on the part of the government and support from development partners. overall, this study suggests that childcare service providers and practitioners need to establish a strong commitment to various childcare service programs, and in order to achieve collaboration between government policymakers, early childhood development stakeholders, teachers and parents, so it needs political will. this new line of research has generated important findings that have practical implications for the government, suggesting the need to strengthen childcare services. in addition, this study has implications for government policy planners concerning the need to provide professional development to caregivers for participatory processes in caring for young children and to provide rich resources and a conducive environment for children to develop their potential. bibliography amani eccd. 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(2013). introducing qualitative research in psychology (3rd ed.). new york, ny: open university press. world health organization (2018). nurturing care for early childhood development: a framework for helping children survive and thrive to transform health and human potential. report, printed in switzerland. 44 global education review 10 (3) appendix table 1.1: list of key stakeholders which support the provision of childcare services s/n name of the provider activities achievements challenges best practice 1 cic they work in partnership with local organisations in tanzania and ethiopia to improve the lives of the most disadvantaged young children, with a particular focus on early childhood education (ece). by improving childhood care services they are changing lives and empowering young children and their communities to build a better future. leading support to the government of tanzania and the wider ecd stakeholder ecosystem to increasingly raise the profile of ecd policy and programming in tanzania, low government support to provide quality services to the ecd centres much is depends on the ngos so when projects phase out the centres remain in poor conditions multisectoral engagement with different partners to ensure a child receives holistic interventions. 2 brac maendeleo tanzania (bmt) establishing community based ecd centres through construction or renting within communities advocacy activities related to the establishment of ecd centres using government's appetite to invest in ecd is still low ngos/csos need to work in synergies to complement each other as toward effective provision of under-five childcare services 45 sustainable models no organization can provide all the needed services at once. 3 egpaf egpaf advocates for the development of policies that facilitate greater access to services and support those disadvantaged children egpaf work through health facilities to integrate nurturing care framework services high incidence of under-five mortality among marginalised communities at the community level, they have been working with community health workers. 4 panita panita focuses on nutrition and nutrition-sensitive interventions and is seriously committed to expanding and strengthening issues of nutrition all over tanzania. improvement in childcare service in terms of health issues: nutrition, food security, and children’s rights into policies and strategies across sectors. an inadequate number of community health workers to provide childcare services (2 chws per village). continuous capacity building of service providers destiny or decision 128 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: liu, jia, & chen, yueling. (2023). destiny or decision: revealing the change of the concept of ming 命 and its pedagogical implications. global education review, 10 (1-2), 128-141. destiny or decision: revealing the change of the concept of ming命 and its pedagogical implications jia liu yueling chen abstract in chinese philosophy, scholars have been discussing a long-standing and unresolved matter (fan, 2019; lupke, 2005; wu, 2009), namely ming命. ming, often translated as life, fate, or command, was initially understood as orders and arrangements from heaven (fan, 2019). however, since the kongzi (confucius) period, the focus of ming命 has shifted to people themselves and how they should live their lives. furthermore, ming命 has been recognized by people as human life as well as the survival of one’s life journey. in the contemporary age, the concept of ming命 has shifted again. it ensures that people, instead of the predetermined power of nature and its kind, have most of the ability to decide how to live their lives. the study of ming命 has thus become one of the essential philosophical fields for chinese and international thinkers, and academic researchers, to explore the question of heaven and human existence. in this paper, the analysis of four texts throughout chinese history will serve as a simple reflective example of the difficulties of interpretation, revealing the evolving meaning of the concept and its pedagogical implications. keywords ming命; contextual meaning; pedagogical implication; transition introduction over thousands of years, different chinese philosophers have discussed numerous aspects of ming命 (fan, 2019; lupke, 2005; wu, 2009). according to the study of the formation of this concept, ming命 may originate from the beginning of the western zhou dynasty (1046 bc to 771 bc) (wu, 2009). generally, ming命, often translated into life, fate, and command, was initially understood as orders and arrangements from heaven (fan, 2019). however, since the kongzi period, the discussion on ming命 has turned to how people themselves decide how to live their lives. the amount of literature and research on this topic is 1 the translation of the four texts is more for readers’ reference, whilst the authors interpret the meaning of ming substantial, and these viewpoints and concepts are constantly being reviewed at present, as they have been for several years (fu, 2006; liu & zhang, 2019; tang, 1999). nevertheless, little research has been conducted to connect this concept to pedagogy and the pedagogical implications associated with its ever-changing meanings. in this paper, four texts throughout chinese history have been selected to indicate the development of this concept’s evolving meanings and its pedagogical implications over time.1 in the first section, ming命 as the command of heaven will be discussed through “wei tian zhi ming 周颂·维天之命” of “the book 命 in the analysis based on their bilingual background and advantage. destiny or decision 129 of songs 诗经.” kongzi’s (551 bc to 479 bc, often referred to as confucius in anglophone countries) viewed ming命 as the coexistence between humans. heaven will be explored later in “the yanyuan of the analects 论语·颜渊.” furthermore, a famous classical essay, “chen qing biao陈情表,” will be used to analyze the meaning of ming命 as human life and survival. finally, we will examine the modern usage of ming命 in xi jinping’s report “never forget the original intention and remember the mission 不忘初心,牢记使命.” however, the selection of these texts does not suggest these are the only stamps in time in which the meaning of ming命 has shifted. as time changes, the cultural and contextual meaning of this notion shifts simultaneously. accordingly, these texts are chosen as examples to discuss ming命’s different meanings and pedagogical implications in particular contexts. whilst dissecting the connection between this concept and pedagogy, and the respective pedagogical implications derived from this notion’s changing meaning, this paper will utilize the framework of the pedagogical triangle (kenklies, 2019; lewin, 2018; friesen & osguthorpe, 2018). the framework suggests in the pedagogical process that there are three key factors, namely, the educator, the educand, and something in relation with the student, which forms a solid “pedagogical triangle” (friesen & osguthorpe, 2018). a necessary condition is that the student needs to improve the relation between themselves and something. meanwhile, the teacher has an intention to improve this relation. to start this dissection, ming命 as the command of heaven will first be reviewed in the next section. the transitional concept of ming命 in four texts ming命 as the command of heaven justification of the text in the pedagogical lens “the book of songs诗经” is the first known collection of poems in china. it states that during the western zhou dynasty (1046bc to 771bc), officials were assigned by the emperor to collect the poetry. these officials traveled deep into the country to gather folk tunes that could portray the joys and pains of the people (chen, 2013). since the han dynasty (202 bc to 220 ad), kongzi taught his followers how to read the “book of songs” as the standard of speaking and doing to achieve success in life. since then, given the dominant position of confucianism in ancient china, the book of songs was primarily employed as an instructional book in both home-schooling and formal educational settings. the poem, “wei tian zhi ming 周颂·维 天之命,” is the second chapter of the “book of songs.” “ode to zhou,” is first and foremost a song of worship and adoration for king wen, who the zhou people revered as the highest power. in this poem, king wen is portrayed as the manifestation of heaven’s command, namely, as a “godlike” person who has been adored and believed in by the people of ancient china (legge, 1872). all eight sentences in the poem can be divided into two sections, which is how the poem is organized: 130 global education review 10 (1-2) 维天之命,2 于穆不已。于乎不显，文王 之德之纯。假以溢我，我其收之。骏惠我 文王，曾孙笃之（zhu, 2006, p.1） the ordinances of heaven/how deep are they and unintermitting!/ and oh! how illustrious/was the singleness of the virtue of king wen!/how does he (now) show his kindness?/we will receive (his favor)/ striving to be in accord with him, our king wen/and may his remotest descendant be abundantly the same (james legge, as cited by the chinese text project, 2022, p.1)!3 the first four sentences of the poem state that king wen is directed by heaven and has a moral character that is pure and beautiful. this section stresses king wen’s supremacy with ming命 as the direction of heaven. the final section of the four phrases declares the intention of this poem by stating that king wen was beloved by his successors and that future generations should follow in his footsteps and continue the tradition of their ancestors. it is stated in this poem that king wen is heaven’s command and that his destiny is linked to that of the zhou dynasty, as revealed in the poem. therefore, the individual (king wen) is thus referenced as the descendant of heaven. consequently, king wen’s descendants became the descendants of heaven, and they were able to carry on his ideal destiny in perpetuity. as a result, when the poem is read and sung, the descendants experience an inner sense of delight and satisfaction, as though their lives and the life 2 the chinese character ming 命 in the citations is in bold for visual clearance. 3 this version of the translation was selected for its clear and classic interpretation of the “book of songs” translated by james legge, cited and adapted from the chinese text of the dynasty will continue. thus, king wen is as perfect and as moral as heaven, and the zhou dynasty and its subjects will continue to exist in harmony and stability. although the poem’s claimed goal is to praise and revere the nobility of king wen, the author can discern that its underlying goal is to educate people to obey the arrangement of heaven or authority from above unconditionally; thereby, they may be blessed for all time. meaning of ming命 in this text from the time of the zhou dynasty (104bc to 256bc), people relied on their senses to understand the world around them. when faced with unexplained or invisible occurrences in nature and culture, they assumed mysterious powers manipulated them. this mysterious power was then referred to as the command of heaven and identified as ming命. moreover, since culture and politics were inextricably linked in ancient china, the worship of heaven was used to permeate the divinity of the ruling class to the people, creating the impression that the monarchy’s power had been granted by heaven. this helped to maintain the position of the ruling class. consequently, the people believed that through worshipping king wen, they might build a spiritual connection with heaven to receive the answer to the question of the right way of living (chen, 2013). ming命, in this poem, implies that it is heaven’s command to choose king wen to rule the country, and king wen’s destiny is linked to that of the zhou dynasty. with the blessing of heaven to king wen, the zhou dynasty and its people will continue to live in perpetual peace project, an online open-access digital database. legge’s work on translation is widely recognized and was chosen merely for reference. destiny or decision 131 and safety. here, the author can infer the definition of ming命 in this context, as the command of heaven; how a person will live their life is in the hands of heaven. as such, it indicates humanity’s unstoppable future. there is nothing a person can do to alter the command of heaven; this command dictates whether a person will be affluent, glorious, and long-lived, and their efforts will make little difference. pedagogical implications in this section, the author has discussed ming命 as the command of heaven and its meaning embodied in the “book of song.” the author of this text, as the educator, attempted to educate people to respect and obey king wen, who is regarded as the descendant of heaven. the people served as educands in this process, improving their relationship with heaven and its descendent, king wen. ming命, as the command of heaven, was intentionally delivered through this pedagogical process. as it was believed that such a command was long-lasting, this command needed to be passed on and carried on across the generations. it was not to be resisted but inherited through poems or songs as a form of education. by praising the king, this form of text intended to improve the relation between the young generation and their understanding of king wen; since the king is a descendant of heaven, he is viewed as an extension of heaven’s command. people are enlightened when they are led by example (chen, 2015). the pedagogical implication here is that the descendants from heaven are expected to become the model for the people to be educated. however, such absolute command strikes fear and unwavering belief (wan, 2019). with such respect and fear, other forms of education are unnecessary. the only form of education needed were the ones from heaven above or the king, the descendant of heaven. it suggests that when the belief in an absolute mandate from heaven is strong, the call for education is neglected because such belief denies the necessity for its existence. furthermore, as heaven or the authority above has designed the order for how the universe works and how all the individuals are to live their lives, any effort that attempts to disobey or even reverse the predetermined law of the universe, if it exists, was considered nonsensical. similarly, the qualities embedded in the nobleman and the virtues sprouted in the younger generations are not inherited from their ancestors or acquired from education or socialization but endowed with heaven’s command (lupke, 2005). this understanding brings numbness to the recognition of life; nothing can be changed for the better or worse, thus, nothing needs to be improved. hence, there is no need for education, such as personal growth. such ideology could be used by the noblemen and their families to justify their privilege, and further, disregard the need and opportunities for their populaces’ individual growth. ming命 as the coexistence between humans and heaven justification of the text in the pedagogical lens moving forward to the spring and autumn period (770 bc to 476 bc), people began to recognize the power of individuals, and the understanding of ming命 as the command of heaven has slightly changed, which is explicitly discussed in the “analects of kongzi论语.” the “analects of kongzi” (2018) is a collection of quotations compiled by kongzi’s disciples during the spring and autumn period to record the words and acts of kongzi and his disciples, 132 global education review 10 (1-2) embodying kongzi’s political beliefs, ethical thoughts, moral conceptions, and educational principles. the “analects of kongzi” was designated as one of “the four books” since the song dynasty (960ad to 1127ad), becoming the official textbook in ancient schools and was required reading for imperial examinations. the “yanyuan 颜渊” of the “analects” is frequently quoted by scholars for its most famous conversations about benevolence between kongzi and his disciples. in one of those chapters, sze-ma new was concerned that he would be dying alone because he announced that he did not recognize huan yu as his brother: 司马牛忧曰： “人皆有兄弟，我独亡” 子 夏曰：“商闻之矣：死生有命，富贵在天 。君子敬而无失，与人恭而有礼。四海之 内，皆兄弟也——君子何患乎无兄弟也?” sze-ma new, full of anxiety, said, “other men all have their brothers, i only have not.” tsze-hea said to him, “there is the following saying which i have heard, ‘death and life have their determined appointment; riches and honors depend upon heaven.’ let the superior man never fail reverentially to order his own conduct and let him be respectful to others and observant of propriety; then all within the four seas will be his brothers. what has the superior man to do with being distressed because he has no brothers” (edited and translated by james legge, 1861, p. 116)4?4 as the text reveals, sze-ma new was concerned that he would live alone, without brothers and 4 the source of translation was recorded from one of the most classic books of james legge, which is named “the chinese classics: vol. 1: confucian analects, the great friends. tsze-hea consoled sze-ma new in the same chapter, telling him that life and death are not decided by him but by ming命. however, if his words and deeds were in keeping with kindness, he would be praised by people all across the world. thus, there was no need to worry about his lack of siblings because he would find other brothers and friends who “exist all over the world.” in the text, kongzi and his disciple tsze-hea offer sze-ma new (as well as the readers) keywords of wisdom on aspects such as how to handle the dilemma, how to be deliberate, and how to alter the situation, by suggesting sze-ma new to be respectful, courteous, and polite toward others, with morality and compassion and righteousness. in this respect, this text intends to educate people on how to better communicate and create a harmonious atmosphere with other individuals in the world. meaning of ming命 in this text from this text, the author can observe that the role of ming命 as a predetermined destination designed by the highest power is not dismissed by kongzi and his disciples. nevertheless, more importantly, they emphasized the subjective initiative of individuals during one’s life journey. as fan (2019) affirms, from kongzi’s perspective, the most crucial thing is that one must believe in and obey ming命 but also actively recognize ming命, take moral responsibility, and constantly strive to improve one’s society as they do the whole world. the author can also perceive, from the instruction of this text, that although success or failure would be the result of their own causes and consequences, people would be lost in fear and worries if they gave up learning, and the doctrine of the mean.” legge’s work on translation is widely recognized, and it was chosen merely for reference. destiny or decision 133 putting up their best efforts to conduct tasks. to prevent the regrets of avoiding making an attempt, people can still work to conduct their previous statements under the condition of a clear conscience, with respect to the arrangement of ming命. in kongzi’s discussion of ming命, heaven remains the highest power; however, to distinguish itself from the earlier definition of ming命 as the command of heaven, ming命 in this context implies that an individual’s future is in their own hands, under the guidance and supervision of heaven (zhang, 2009). this alteration is more optimistic because it reminds people that they can take control of their lives, whereas in the first text, people could only obey the command of heaven. pedagogical implication in this section, the author analyzed the coexistence of humans and heaven and its meaning in the “yanyuan” of the “analects.” kongzi and his disciples acted as educators, endeavoring especially to cultivate people’s moral character. the people functioned as educands, improving their relationship between their own images and that of the sage. ming命, as the coexistence between humans and heaven, was intentionally used as the condition for people to practice their own moral ideas and form their own moral pursuits. kongzi suggests that people actively practiced their moral standards in their predetermined life and could experience unprecedented inner peace and even joy in the process without worrying about the end (zhang, 1997). as a result, the author can perceive that, different from the ming命 discussed earlier as heaven’s command, which does not require other forms of education, kongzi encouraged actively exploring ming命 based on one’s belief in it, and he emphasized the importance of making a change in one’s life because of one’s exploration. correspondingly, kongzi’s idea on subjective efforts should be interpreted as being coherent with the arrangement of the ming命, rather than rejecting it entirely. in this context, the whole of the human endeavor is tinged with a degree of uncertainty, and numerous factors are beyond their control. kongzi’s perception of ming命 offers more room for individuals to make changes in their lives, in the world, and gradually improve their minds and personalities during this process. to calmly deal with those predetermined but unknown issues, one must learn to situate themselves appropriately in this world and cultivate oneself with openness and acceptance of the command of heaven. this means that to create as many beneficial conditions as possible, a state of coexistence between humans and heaven is highly encouraged in this text. as such, although people are constantly struggling with an uncontrolled future, people can have their own moral pursuits and practice their own moral ideals. in this respect, people are free and have free will. in the process of this paradox, people improve their moral status and shape their noble personalities. ming命 as human life and survival justification of the text in the pedagogical lens in the three kingdom period (220 ad to 280 ad), the meaning of ming命 began to shift and expand. aside from heaven’s command and the coexistence between humans and heaven, it also began to imply orders, designation, and human life itself. to study this transition, the article “chen qing biao 陈情表” written by li mi in the west jin dynasty (265 ad 134 global education review 10 (1-2) to 317 ad) will be analyzed. as one of the officials for the emperor wu of the jin dynasty, li mi wrote this piece to emperor wu to renounce a designated position and petition for leave due to the poor health of his grandmother. “biao表” is a form of text written by officials to their emperors. amongst four categories, “biao” is primarily for stating facts or describing situations. “biao” are to express loyalty and hope from the advisors or officials to the emperor, and state political requests and appeals. employed as a means to an end, this form of article is usually embedded with strong emotional expression to achieve its purpose. therefore, the character of this form of text is to convince or persuade through emotions. understanding the usage of “biao” allows one to identify the pedagogical element in the text itself. since the purpose of writing such articles is to change the emperor’s relation favorably to a particular event or a specific person, electing to use this form already represents an active intention to improve. in this case, it could be argued that li mi (li, translated by luo, 2005, p.10) wrote this article to improve the emperor’s understanding of filial piety. the chosen piece in this text is the core of the petition and highlights emperor wu’s guiding principles of ruling the country, and leading through the standards of filial piety. it strongly connects such standards to his personal experience with his grandmother and strongly argues for petitioning his absence owing to his grandmother’s health. the character of ming命 was used more than once in this article, and it represents different meanings. for instance, it was used once in the second paragraph and once in the third paragraph with the meaning of designation. moreover, it was also used twice in the third paragraph, signifying human life or survival. in this section, the third paragraph of the article will be further explored to explain the usage of the concept ming命 with its meaning as human life and its pedagogical implications. the reason for choosing this meaning to discuss in this piece is that the usage here connects human life to emotion and the notion of filial piety. 伏惟圣朝以孝治天下，凡在故老，犹蒙矜 育，况臣孤苦，特为尤甚。且臣少仕伪朝 ，历职郎署，本图宦达，不矜名节。今臣 亡国贱俘，至微至陋，过蒙拔擢，宠命优 渥，岂敢盘桓，有所希冀！但以刘日薄西 山，气息奄奄，人命危浅，朝不虑夕。臣 无祖母，无以至今日，祖母无臣，无以终 余年。母、孙二人，更相为命，是以区区 不能废远。 now your majesty is ruling the country on the principle of filial piety. old people of high virtue are being taken care of and well provided for. it is apparent that i am more distressed than others. besides, out of vainglory to secure a high position in the government regardless of my personal integrity, i served in the last dynasty during my youth as shangshulang, and now, i, a captive, a slave, am getting undeserved favor from your majesty. how dare i hesitate and cherish any aspirations? but my grandmother is at her last breath, and she is like the setting sun beyond the western hills. her life is at stake, and she may die at any moment. but for her, i would not have become what i am today. but for me, she would have been long dead. it is because the two of us depend upon each other that i, destiny or decision 135 your humble servant, cannot leave home at present (li, translated by luo, 2005, p.10).5 “陈” means stating and “情” holds two common meanings. it could imply a situation, as well as an emotion. in this context, these two meanings are intertwined. the article states the author’s situation, namely that he cannot accept the designated position and he expresses his emotion to the emperor. he also needs to follow the filial piety standard to look after his grandmother. he used the emotional elements to convince the emperor by bringing forth his love for his grandmother and connecting such love to the emperor’s filial piety ruling principle and the emperor’s comprehension of filial piety. meaning of ming命 in this context ming命 was used three times in this paragraph. it was used in the phrases “宠命优,” “人命危浅,” and “更相为命,” respectively. in the first phrase “宠命优渥,” ming命 implies designation, a job, or order or a task given by a higher-rank fellow human. this meaning will be further discussed in the next section with a different text from xi jinping. this section will focus on the other two phrases with the meaning of life, human life, or further, survival. in “人命 危浅,” ming命 implies explicitly human life. in contrast to the different aforementioned use, the use of ming命 here does not suggest heavenly command or the coexistence between humans and heaven. it merely implies the life of humans, as in its length, liveliness, and existence. ming命 here no longer connects to a higher power but 5 the translation chosen here for the text was made by luo jingguo. li (2019) used luo’s work as an example to adapt gadama’s hermeneutics framework, a fusion of horizons, to explain and compare translation. she suggests that luo’s simply a natural state of being. ming命 in “更相 为命” pushes it a little further to suggest such a state could be affected by the action; it could be established (“为”). therefore, it implies more than merely being alive; it also implies surviving. ming命 in this context stresses what the grandmother’s living and being signifies to li mi. this character was used here to express the urgency of his grandmother’s life in a thin, dangerous, near-death state. furthermore, it also binds ming命 to human emotional connections. li mi values human life, specifically his grandmother’s life. it suggests that ming命 as survival does not simply regard one person’s life. instead, it is a part of a connection to others, such as their family. this understanding is also culturally accepted. in this context, ming命 is no longer a command from heaven that can only be followed and received, or the co-existence of humans and heaven, but it suggests that life can be controlled or improved in a certain way. otherwise, survival cannot be affected by the action. pedagogical implication in this session, the author has discussed ming命 as human life and survival and its meaning in “chen qing biao.” in this text, li mi, as the author of the article as well as the educator, sought to educate the emperor to respect human life. the emperor, as the educand of this process, improved his relationship with the standard of filial piety. ming命, as human life and survival, was intentionally utilized to imply a form of life that has value on its own, particularly consistent with filial piety and translation for “chen qing biao” is adequate to deliver the meaning of the content to target the reader’s comprehension, especially for the readers who come from different cultures that do not possess the same cultural understanding. 136 global education review 10 (1-2) respect for life when socially and emotionally related. in such a context, education is meaningful at different levels. firstly, it is consistent with the need for life education. the common understanding of life education is to care, explore, and recognize the meaning of life, respect and cherish the value of life and love and develop the unique liveliness of each individual (huang, 2013). life has value in itself, and such education could improve people’s relation to this value, not just for themselves but also for the lives of others who share that value. education becomes two dimensional at this point, as it: a) improves one’s relation to the content in itself; and b) improves one’s relation to the content with regards to others. an example would be educating for filial piety. in chinese culture, filial piety is one of the most widely discussed educational topics. when one disregards their own life or is irresponsible for their own lives in a way that affects their elderly next of kin, they are considered unfilial. this would be regarded as a significant breach of moral or personal virtue because filial piety comes before all other virtues. ming命 as the mission justification of the text in the pedagogical lens xi jinping’s report at the 19th national congress of the communist party of china is the core programmatic literature for the chinese communists and the people of all ethnic groups in the new era (wang, 2022). reports are commonly first announced by the chairman of china during the national people’s congress meeting before subsequently distributing to the subordinate government and institutions for study and implementation. the whole process of the distribution is simultaneously a pedagogical process. after the report was first proposed in the 19th national congress of the communist party in late 2017, the political bureau of the cpc central committee held a special meeting and asked the whole party to conduct theme education accordingly. for example, in accordance with the central committee’s instruction, the shandong province government deploys two batches of educational initiatives (wang, 2021). colleges and universities undertake the work measures outlined in the report of the 19th national congress and provide funds to assist students and teachers in putting the guideline research into action at the institutional level (xu, 2021; zhi, 2022; li & fu, 2021). local party media held news competitions on the research based on xi’s report and organized the study of the excellent articles that won the prize (gao & wang, 2022). furthermore, xi delivered a series of essential expositions on the original intention and mission of the communist party of china through speeches, instructions, conversations, instructions, replies, and other means. in the report, general secretary xin jinping stated initially: 不忘初心，方得始终。中国共产党人的初 心和使命，就是为中国人民谋幸福，为中 华民族谋复兴 (xi, 2017, p.1). never forget why you started, and you can accomplish your mission. the original aspiration and the mission of chinese communists is to seek happiness for the chinese people and rejuvenation for the chinese nation destiny or decision 137 (edited and translated by xinhua, 2017, p.1).6 as the interpretation of the text reveals, ming命 is translated as a mission that people should never forget. this mission is not invented by xi jinping, but it has experienced a series of continuations and developments. mao zedong said that the goal of the communist party was to serve the people wholeheartedly (mao, 1991). meanwhile, deng xiaoping insisted that the interests of the people were above all else and earnestly safeguarded the rights and interests of the people (deng, 1994); jiang zemin continued to seek benefits for the people, and he insisted the party represents the fundamental interests of the majority (jiang, 2006). meanwhile, hu jintao adhered to the scientific development thought of “people-oriented” and constantly enriched the relevant viewpoints of “original intention” and “mission” (hu, 2010). this connects to the meaning of ming命 as an externally endowed responsibility from another human man or party, normally with a higher rank, not command from heaven or the designed destination from a higher power, but from another human man or party, normally with a higher rank. meaning of ming命 in this text the short version of the above two sentences in xi’s report is a more frequently used slogan “不忘初心、牢记使命” of the contemporary era, which in short is translated to “never forget the original intention and remember the mission.” ming命, translated as “mission” in the text, refers to a significant duty assigned to a person or group of people with a strong sense of calling. as xi (2017) explains in 6 this translation was retrieved from the english version newspaper china daily, based on the report content published on the chinese official news website xinhua net. the report, the original intention is to serve people and seek happiness for them under the leadership of the communist party of china, which is also the mission for all the chinese populace, not least the members of the communist party of china. this advocate has a profound effect by entrusting individuals to pursue happiness for themselves, which has dramatically boosted people’s enthusiasm. scholars such as zhou (2012) believe the understanding of serving people as ming命 (mission) originates from the theory of benevolence by kongzi. confucianism advocates “benevolence” in leading the country and emphasizes the importance of people. the thought of loving and benevolent people has long been an integral part of the people-oriented thought in chinese culture. ming命, as a mission under the leadership of the communist party of china, follows in the footsteps of this peopleoriented idea, which is a modern interpretation and historical extension of people-oriented philosophy. pedagogical implication in this section, the author analyzed ming命 as the mission and its meaning in xi jinping’s report “never forget the original intention and remember the mission.” xi, who acted as the educator and attempted to educate people about life with duty in the text. as the educands in this process, the people improved their relations with other people in this world. ming命, as the mission, was intentionally entrusted to the people with the task of serving people. missions that are given out are embedded with expectations. such expectations this news network is published and recognized by authorities. 138 global education review 10 (1-2) could be interpreted on three levels. the first is the expectation of completing the mission. the second is the expectation of completing the mission well. the third is the expectation of completing such a mission continuously. the pedagogy lies in the third layer. when the order giver puts the intention in hoping the order receiver to complete the task better, it forms the pedagogical triangle. in this context, such intention is clear and obvious. the use of a mission here is not an easy task to be completed over a short period of time. conducting the mission implies keeping reminding oneself of the task, reviewing and improving oneself whilst doing it, because seeking happiness for a country and its people requires constant revaluation and continuous effort. it is also not something that can be completed merely through selfassessment. external feedback is needed when deciding if one is on the task. moreover, more resources have been gathered to guarantee the distribution and implementation in this context, and people are more likely to accept it with those multi-channel and multi-mode distributions. conclusion and limitations this paper analyzed the different meanings of the concept ming命 using pedagogical texts from four various time-stamps in chinese history. the author explored how the concept of ming命 has shifted and changed over time, and the pedagogical implications indicated in the respective contexts. firstly, the author could conclude that when ming命 was interpreted as heaven’s command in “the book of song,” it implied that education was contextual. education was needed when the specific form was within the primary context. such an implication suggests that the impact of education was weak, and the attempt to inflict change was meaningless and futile. further along, the author discussed the meaning of ming命 as a coexistence between heaven and people in “the yanyuan of the analects.” when connecting this meaning to kongzi’s work, the author examined the pedagogical element and pointed out that kongzi’s view has developed further from the “book of song诗经.” he advocated that ming命 could be the command of heaven, but he also brought forth the concept that human action was meaningful here and encouraged the active seeking of change as it was in line with the designed fate. thirdly, ming命 as human life and its relation to filial piety was reviewed in li mi’s article “chen qing biao.” it reveals the extent to which the meaning of ming命 was expanded, and it was more related to life education and education on the notion of filial piety. the author stresses that life education exists on the basis that life itself has value. therefore, it should be explored and cherished. this suggestion extends to education for individuals, however, the relationships between individuals, since human life is meaningful as an individual or as part of a larger group, namely family, community, and society. finally, such relation brings forth the last piece of analysis, which is ming命 in xi jinping’s slogan “never forget the original intention and remember the mission.” the meaning of orders from another human was employed here to interpret ming命 as a mission. this explores the pedagogical element of responsibility and expectation. in conclusion, the author has demonstrated how ming命 has changed, developed, and expanded throughout history and the author analyzed its pedagogical implications derived from the changing destiny or decision 139 meanings of this concept. based on these textual interpretations, the author can perceive a trend that reflects how the authority of ming命 moves from up to down incrementally (wu, 2009). precisely, the source of power that directs people’s actions and lives gradually shifts from heaven to the mixture of heaven and human until it reaches the hand of only humans themselves. this trajectory also indicates a shifting in educational thinking, from the unawareness of education, to cultivating the self to coexist with heaven, to value life and its connection through education, and ultimately, to the education for mission and responsibility. this shifting does not imply pure freedom because restriction from the external environment is inevitable. however, it indicates making one’s own decisions and controlling one’s own way of living become possible. this is when people need to learn from the outside world and reflect on the inner world, which requires education. with the limited time and space, this paper only analyzes four particular texts to observe how the meaning of ming命 has evolved over time and their respective pedagogical implication. the character of ming命 indeed possesses more meanings than the four texts employed for the present study. those meanings have been widely used in numerous different contexts, and the other meanings of this concept could be further explored other than the four examples chosen in the present study. additionally, the pedagogical implications identified in the present study could also be further expanded in possible future studies. despite those limitations, the author has demonstrated the shifting meaning of ming embedded in songs, texts, petitions, and speeches. the texts in this paper indicate that shifting is not merely time and textual based but also ideological and contextual based, like its educational thinking. the usage of these texts changes through time whilst the pedagogical implications evolve with it. for instance, the interpretation of a single character could be rather different in numerous contexts. therefore, one must be conscious of the context they are referring to. furthermore, one should be aware that the same notion could be interpreted differently over time. such awareness should be taken into consideration, as the other ideologies, for example, educational thinking, behind those interpretations could lead to a diversity of directions. moreover, the meaning of a notion and its interpretation could be counter-related to people’s educational thinking, as the paper has demonstrated. this analysis is merely an example of the various meanings that a single character could have in different contexts. it could serve as a simple reflection of the difficulties of interpretation, wherein the meaning of the concept as well as its pedagogical implications are evolving. references chen, l. 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(2023). words in motion: struggles of translation, adaption, transposition, and ignorance. global education review, 10 (1-2), 1-6. words in motion: struggles of translation, adaption, transposition, and ignorance sebastian engelmann karsten kenklies the increase in international pedagogical discussions in recent years has shown that dialogue is challenging since pedagogical notions often do not easily translate from one language into another. adopting english as the lingua franca of the scientific community has merely covered up such differences, with the incongruences surfacing very quickly when discussions dive more deeply. it has become increasingly obvious that hasty translations of pedagogical terms from or into english (or any other language) increase the bewilderment instead of facilitating smoother communication. over the last few years, interest in the numerous challenges involved in translating and rewriting educational theories has visibly increased (biesta 2012; friesen 2021). thus, it has been recognized that, for all those who work and do research in the field of education studies, it is equally desirable and difficult to transcend the boundaries of one’s own language – not only to be able to engage in meaningful communication with international colleagues, but also to broaden the conceptual horizons of often quite parochial educational reflections. furthermore, it is indeed only from the viewpoint of an informed multilinguality that one can become aware of the often complex conceptual shifts that accompany those translations and transpositions. that there are such differences is as expected as it is surprising: expected, as everyone who speaks more than one language knows that languages do not translate into each other so easily; surprising, as there always have been exchanges of theories and ideas across national and cultural borders not only within europe, but also across the whole globe. sometimes voluntarily – on the backs of reasoning or fashions –, sometimes because of enforced enculturation, discursive seeds were sown and grew. however, something happened in this process, and what grew turned out to be very different breeds of pedagogical musings. anglophone education studies represent a very different approach to pedagogical theorizing than, to name but one, the german erziehungswissenschaft despite, for example, the widely available – but differing in quality and scope – translations of comenius, herbart, fröbel, pestalozzi, spencer, dewey, and others. paths of reception are, of course, eternally muddled, and all sorts of influences weigh heavily on such processes. however, it might not be too bold to claim that the differences are at least partially the result of the ways in which central notions and concepts have been translated, adapted, transposed, or even completely ignored. what on the surface looks like a mere moving of a concept from one language into another one, or from one cultural context into the next, turns out to be a much more fundamental rewriting or reconceptualization. to give just a brief example to illustrate the inherent difficulties that bewitch every attempt to translate: a notion that is often referred to in relation to the questioned translatability of terms in education studies – or at least in philosophy, theory and history of education in western-european countries – is the term bildung (horlacher 2016). bildung serves as a signifier for a variety of things, and 2 global education review 10 (1-2) scholars tend to say that it cannot really be translated. however, there certainly are attempts to grasp the meaning of the term bildung – attempts that might, for example, use a notion such as self-formation. and the various discussions about subjectivation and subjectivity also connect with this understanding of bildung as self-formation. however, as always, the choice of words depends which theory of bildung one actually has in mind when translating; there is more than just one developed understanding since bildung as a concept has a long and complex history – a history during which it very significantly changed its meaning with regard to important aspects. for example, already a close reading of wilhelm von humboldt (humboldt 2000) – widely considered and cited as one of the central figures in the german history of bildung as a concept – proves that he more or less completely reversed the meaning of the notion in comparison to its original understanding as conceived by meister eckhart (kenklies 2018). translations usually do not take into account such historical and conceptual varieties; to be possible, they have to petrify the normal fluidity and conceptual development of language and its (theoretical) notions. another example of the ensuing difficulties is the translation of friedrich fröbel's writings. there do exist translations of presumably key texts by fröbel. however, as helge wasmuth points out (wasmuth 2018; wasmuth 2020), these are not equipped to grasp the theoretical undercurrents that set fröbel's work in motion (see also engelmann 2023). the same is true in any other direction. for example, the writings of john dewey, which span several bookshelves, have not even come close to being translated into other languages. or one could consider how the reception of bell hooks in language territories other than the englishspeaking world is only slowly getting started – precisely because translations are few and far between or appear in places that cannot necessarily be understood as the epicenter of scholarly discussion. the difficulties exposed above cannot entirely be avoided. in fact, maybe for researchers, it is indeed not a question of avoidance, but a challenge of awareness for the shifts in meaning that occur when notions and concepts move either vertically through times, or horizontally through places – or even simultaneously through both, as in the example of bildung above. in the end, reflections like these merely confirm what should generally be known: conceptual and historical discussions are always intertwined. the history of pedagogy remains blind when not guided by conceptual considerations, and the attempts to conceptualize remain empty if the offered pedagogical notions are not “fleshed out” with meaning by historical analyses. it is for those reasons that international communication is more than difficult, and it explains (without justifying) that international exchanges about education are often turned into discussions about numbers: discussions around words seem to be so much more difficult. translation projects show in their practical aspects that communication across different languages is more than complex. such undertakings – in the broadest sense obviously also including working in multilingual research groups, preparing a talk with a scholar from a different field or going abroad for a research visit – often induce peculiar experiences that take up a lot of resources and force the people involved in it to move outside their comfort zones. however, everyday communication in the field of education studies seems to be unproblematic as everyone in this context is presumably talking about the same object: education. however, it is all too-often forgotten that this notoriously under-defined term has not only its own theoretical history, but also that it hardly has an equivalent in any other language. this also leads to theoretical discussions diverging without ever noticing each other – and to missed opportunities or simply misunderstandings that result from the complex process of translation whose pitfalls are not normally recognized in such discussions. academic discussions like to come along wrapped in a cloak of universality. in doing so, they often conceal or are unaware of their own words in motion 3 point of view. recent work in education studies has focused on what it means to speak from a certain position. in particular, the conditions of speaking are taken into account because it does make a difference from what position one speaks and with what intention. since scholars, too, are subjects bound to place and time and woven into language – often enough subservient to language – those restrictions in the possibilities of knowledge are only human. but those limitations are not generally made explicit. if, for example, an object like zen (which, of course, has not only its own history but also its own variations) is contemplated in english (or any other language) in western europe, it is necessary to point out that one's own perception of this object contributes quite significantly to its construction (kenklies 2020; lewin/kenklies 2020). our assumption is that being confined to a scientific language is not without consequences for the construction of disciplinary objects. understanding is highly improbable. especially for communication between different languages of scholarship, a great sensitivity is needed for the translation processes that are carried out at every moment. when one's own system of thought is applied in other contexts, it will almost inevitably generate types of friction between both systems. appropriation, rewriting, straightening, and integration are phenomena that arise from those frictions, although in many cases the discrepancies are not immediately recognized. the authors in this issue have taken it upon themselves to trace these movements of translations and appropriations, of applications and contextualizations. in doing so, they attempt to locate ideas historically, culturally, and systematically, examining in this way the character and the extent of certain systematic shifts and adjustments. the results of those explorations are now available here. we hope that with this special issue we can contribute to putting the topic of the motions of words, the travels of ideas and their appropriation and integration back on the agenda. the eleven papers that form this special issue approach the outlined context from different directions. they are situated in different ways in the discipline (or field) of education studies. however, they share the sensitivity in approach and thus show very clearly how productive an engagement with words is – with their movements, translations, discussions. following the invitation through an open call and undergoing a double-blind peerreview process, the papers gathered here inevitably only represent a certain spectrum of what would be possible and maybe even necessary to discuss. unfortunately, the global south is not as represented here as it should be. likewise, no explicitly postcolonial perspectives were offered in response to the call. it is imperative that further explorations of the topic address those regrettable omissions. for now, we hope the individual chapters, which will be introduced in the next few paragraphs, will serve as an introduction to a very important field of educational research. the first two papers indicate a more historical interest and present case studies of processes in which concepts are re-writing or inscribed into new contexts. in his paper, marcel scholz examines the ways in which the ideas of the german educator johann friedrich herbart became mediated and adopted in the united states of america. as an example, he considers the reception of johann friedrich herbart's formal stage theory by the mcmurry brothers. scholz focuses in particular on the strategies the brothers used to make herbart's work accessible for the readership in the united states. the following chapter by frank jacob deals with the ideas of ernst papanek on pedagogy. in 1940, papanek had to escape from france, via spain and portugal, to the united states of america – trying to rescue children by bringing them across the atlantic on his flight. however, when he advocated for continuing this care for them as a group in a children’s home, he was met with resistance. the paper describes this transatlantic struggle of ideas with regard to the role of group therapy for traumatized children and the assumption that living collectively in homes would make a positive impact on those children. 4 global education review 10 (1-2) the third paper changes the approach from a more historical point of view to a systematic perspective that engages with questions around the architecture of theories. ari kivelä discusses the various notions of the term bildsamkeit that is not only equally central for more germanic pedagogical discussions as bildung (mentioned above) but also even more difficult to translate than bildung. in his text, kivelä discusses the philosophical anthropology behind bildsamkeit and its relation to the concept of subjectivity to provide further insights to the question of how bildsamkeit might be translated and adapted in the future. the fourth contribution by seyda subasi singh, barbara hager and michelle proyer offers a case study on how researchers in different languages and different cultural contexts understand and use the term inclusive education. the paper presents three case studies that hint at the various notions and understandings of inclusive education. the authors show how even in one specific context – education studies – the understanding of inclusive education varies when it comes to translating the phrase across language borders, creating certain responsibilities of the researchers in multilingual research settings. the fifth contribution – officially starting the second part of the special issue – by aurora jacobsen evenshaug and elin rødahl lie allows readers insights into the current educational discourse and its history in norway. the authors especially focus on the concept of danning, which has been central to norwegian educational theory and practice for quite some time. while danning as a word has its roots in the german word bildung, it is not identical with any of the more popular understandings the notion of bildung invites. the sixth contribution by louis waterman-evans offers a conceptual analysis of an educational concept in motion. the author finds that bildung and the danish dannelse, while historically connected, can be considered parallel concepts of similarity in their shared emphasis on the mother-tongue as a “living language” and their focus on social cohesion. as such, the paper contributes to the understanding how concepts in translation do not only move spatially but also semantically while they are being adapted and rewritten to fit a specific context. the seventh contribution by susann hofbauer, peter kelly and anna beck traces the term evidence in various educational contexts. the article shows how evidence entered the language of german educational research after 2000. while it can be assumed that this development has been initiated by european evidence policy & the establishment of empirical educational research, and was expedited by what in german is called the pisa shock, i.e. the discovery of a discrepancy between a german self-image and the result of the international student assessment study, the situation is different for england. here, pisa, the oecd and thus the external perception of their own education system hardly seemed to have played a significant role due to years of awareness of the need for reform. the eighth paper by karsten kenklies deals with the concept of pedagogical tact that was first introduced by johann friedrich herbart to solve the problem of how to relate pedagogical theory and practice. concentrating on herbart’s tact, the paper then explores the way in which this specific concept was at first widely ignored in anglophone contexts despite a heightened interest in herbartian pedagogy, only to get adapted in a re-conceptualized form much later that seemingly does not respond at all to the problem herbart originally attempted to solve by introducing the concept of pedagogical tact in the first place. the ninth paper by jia liu and yueling chen introduces the readers to the pedagogically relevant concept of ming 命. ming, often translated as “life,” “fate,” or “command,” was initially understood as “orders and arrangements from heaven.” in this paper, four texts throughout chinese history are selected as examples to indicate how the meaning of this concept – and with it its pedagogical words in motion 5 implications – moves, develops and changes throughout different cultural periods of china. the tenth paper by johannes westberg addresses the question of what english language terminology should be used when denoting “schools,” “teachers” and “pupils” in non-anglosaxon countries. he addresses this question by examining the case of swedish 19th-century “primary schools.” by relating these “schools” to those in other countries, and the terminology used in the research literature, the article provides suggestions for the english-language terms to be used when referring to these institutions, their different types, and the professionals working in them, and problematises the use of terms such as “compulsory,” “public,” and “national schools” in 19th-century contexts as, e.g., that of sweden. in the eleventh paper, jochen laub and thomas mikhail give the first complete overview of all translations of kant’s vorlesungen über pädagogik (“lectures on pedagogy”). they show that translations of those lectures have appeared in 18 different languages with 50 first editions. this is astonishing against the background that in the german-speaking world the number of scholars who deal intensively with kant’s pedagogy is assumed to be far lower. the article shows how far the vorlesungen über pädagogik have spread worldwide, how editors framed the text differently and how the lectures were evaluated by the editors. we wish to express our gratitude to all authors for sharing this writing and publication journey with us. we are grateful for their disciplined cooperation and always pleasant communication over a long period of time. in addition, we thank the main editors of the global education review for inviting us to conceive of and publish this special issue, as well as their great support throughout the process. we are sure that they agree with us on the perception that the individual chapters of the special issue have been very successful in raising awareness for the problems around the movements of pedagogical words and notions through space and time, and for the conceptual fissures that result from those motions. references biesta, gert (2012). “wanted, dead or alive: educationalists. on the need for academic bilingualism in education” in c. aubry, m. geiss, v. magyar-haas, & d. miller (eds.), positionierungen. zum verhältnis von wissenschaft, pädagogik und politik (pp. 20 – 33). weinheim: beltz. engelmann, sebastian (2023). “translating pedagogy – reading fröbel” in different languages in h. wasmuth, & t. bruce (eds.). the bloomsbury handbook on friedrich fröbel. camden: bloomsbury. friesen, norm (2021). ‘the necessity of translation in education: theory and practice’ in a. wilmers, & s. jornitz (eds.), international perspectives on school settings, education policy and digital strategies. transatlantic discourse in education research (pp. 347–361). opladen/berlin/toronto: budrich. horlacher, rebekka (2016). the educated subject and the german concept of bildung: a comparative cultural history. new york: routledge. humboldt, wilhelm von (2000). “theory of bildung” in i. westbury et al. (eds.), teaching as reflective practice: the german didaktik tradition (pp. 57 – 61). new york: routledge. kenklies, karsten (2020). “alienation and inhabitation: the educating journey in west and east” in d. lewin, & k. kenklies (eds.), east asian pedagogies: education as formation and transformation across cultures and borders (pp. 121–134). cham: springer. kenklies, karsten (2018). “(self-)transformation as translation: the birth of the individual from german bildung and japanese kata.” tetsugaku: international journal of the philosophical association of japan, 2, 248-262. 6 global education review 10 (1-2) lewin, david, & kenklies, karsten (2020). “introduction: positioning, encountering, translating, reflecting” in d. lewin, & k. kenklies (eds.), east asian pedagogies: education as formation and transformation across cultures and borders (pp. 3–7). springer: cham. wasmuth, helge (2018). “in search of fröbel– challenges of analyzing the authentic fröbel and the introduction of his kindergarten pedagogy in the united states” in u. sauerbrey, m. winkler, n. tolba, & s. großkopf (eds.), zwischen blankenburg und kairo. historischpädagogische studien zur geschichte des kindergartens (pp. 89–108). baden-baden: ergon. wasmuth, helge (2020). fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play. modifications in germany and the united states. new york/london: routledge. enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 55 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kramer, niklas, & wegner, claas. (2024). enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units. global education review, 11 (1), 55-75. enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units niklas kramer claas wegner abstract due to its constructivist nature, interdisciplinary teaching appears ideal for increasing students' interests in subjects (brassler, 2020; kramer & wegner, 2021). although many argue in favor of a more comprehensive implementation of interdisciplinary teaching in schools, many practical barriers arise during the realization that need to be resolved following the design-based research approach (dbr) (kramer & wegner, 2022b). especially at the upper secondary school level, implementation seems to be difficult. the question arises of how interdisciplinary instruction can be usefully implemented in the upper grades. as a first potential solution, interdisciplinary project days were developed in the subject combination of biology and physical education and evaluated with the help of an initial study. the prototypes developed increased both students’ situational interests and their perceptions of the utility value of the subjects involved (kramer & wegner, 2021; 2022a). however, the implementation process could be optimized, as it currently depends on reducing other school subjects. therefore, following the iterative cycle of dbr, a new prototype was developed involving interdisciplinary units within the regular subject lessons. the second prototype was empirically evaluated with a control-group design. in contrast to the first prototype, only descriptive trends were found, indicating that the interdisciplinary units trigger situational interest and stabilize individual interest. however, this cannot be supported statistically. due to a high data dropout, the sample size should be increased, and the trends should be further investigated. in terms of practical feasibility, the second prototype has an advantage as it does not require any cancellation of subject lessons. however, implementing a second subject may reduce the time available for subject-specific content. keywords interdisciplinary education, subjective task values, interest development, design-based research introduction in today’s society, we encounter numerous transformative challenges that require adaptations to new demands across various levels, including politics, economy, and society (stentoft, 2017). to cope with the transformative needs, interdisciplinary competencies such as problem-solving skills, critical thinking, or collaboration are increasingly relevant apart from professional expertise (stentoft, 2017; ye & xu, 2023). the importance of these factors extends beyond adult education and should be emphasized in schools (wang et al., 2020). the effective promotion of those competencies is a central characteristic of interdisciplinary education (labudde, 2014; ye & xu, 2023). these approaches are, therefore, becoming increasingly important in international education systems (european council, 2018; kmk, 2023; wang & song, 2021; ye & xu, 56 global education review 11 (1) 2023). in upper secondary school, there is a special emphasis on providing interdisciplinary instruction to students. this approach aims to familiarize individuals with scientific inquiry and assist them in building connections between the fundamental principles of various disciplines (kmk, 2023). when implementing these teaching scenarios in upper secondary grades, an organizational problem arises. due to the elective course system in germany, the courses are composed of different students. therefore, two courses to be combined do not have the same student population (kramer & wegner, 2022b). thus, the implementation of interdisciplinary projects in upper grades is quite challenging, which leads to a difficult question for educators and professionals in this field: how can interdisciplinary education be usefully implemented within upper secondary school? (kramer & wegner, 2022b). the project "sport-bio-logisch!" examines this problem and focuses on an interdisciplinary approach within the methodological framework of design-based research. the project aims to develop and empirically examine interdisciplinary teaching units combining biology and physical education for the upper school as possible solutions to the problem. after preliminary research in terms of a systematic literature review, a first prototype solution was created. however, upon evaluation, it was found that the prototype does not fully meet the demands of schools, and further development is required (kramer & wegner, 2020, 2021, 2022a, 2022b). consequently, the project is currently evaluating a second prototype. on the research level, student attitudes are surveyed including their interests in both subjects. this paper presents a comparison of the results of the second prototype with the first study, focusing on the development of student interest. additionally, we discuss the practicality of implementing the prototype in upper secondary schools. focusing on the development of interest as a partial aspect of the project, the present study is placed in the overall context of the project, making the methodological approach of design-based research transparent. interdisciplinary education interdisciplinary education encompasses various models, resulting in a range of associated terms (weinberg & sample mcmeeking, 2017; ye & xu, 2023). a highly divergent picture of definitions emerges, making discourse in research and practice difficult (kramer & wegner, 2020). however, the central ideas of the different conceptual forms can be found in klein and newell's (1996) definition. they describe interdisciplinary instruction as "a process of answering a question, solving a problem, or addressing a topic that is too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single discipline or profession" (klein & newell, 1996, p. 3). the main focus is on a particular issue or inquiry that is being addressed in instruction (kramer & wegner, 2020). the issue should be relevant, multifaceted, and multifactorial so that at least two disciplines need to be equally involved in the development of solutions (caviola et al., 2011; labudde, 2003). integrating preexisting knowledge from the respective disciplines is fundamental to this process (weinberg & sample mcmeeking, 2017). consequently, interdisciplinary education builds on the basic knowledge acquired in the subjects, rather than being seen as an alternative to subject teaching. accordingly, problem orientation and a moderate constructivist approach are constituting characteristics of interdisciplinary teaching (brassler, 2016; brassler & dettmers, 2017). during instruction, students engage with an authentic and complex problem that requires the perspectives of at least two subjects to reach enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 57 a solution. to adequately address issues in a particular field, students must utilize their existing knowledge and experiences while also actively expanding upon this foundation by considering diverse perspectives. this takes place in contexts relevant to the students (labudde, 2008). encouraging students to recognize the boundaries of subject disciplines, and to interconnect relevant content of these to develop answers to complex problems in collaborative settings, is one way to foster 21st-century generic competencies (wang & song, 2021; ye & xu, 2023). there are profound arguments that support endeavors to increase interdisciplinary education. it is argued that interest is increased since learning takes place in meaningful contexts and students gain individual access to the subject matter (labudde, 2014). the argument can be strengthened by scrutinizing specific subject combinations, such as those in the fields of biology and physical education (pe). pe has the unique attribute of experience. engaging in physical activities can provide students with first-hand experiences that deepen their understanding of biological concepts (ukley et al., 2013). conversely, biology allows them to explain practical phenomena in sports (ukley et al., 2013). integrating pe makes it possible to establish personally relevant contexts. these postulated benefits are often based on theoretical considerations or experiential reports from teachers and students (applebee et al., 2007; kramer & wegner, 2020; stentoft, 2017). there seems to be limited empirical evidence of the positive effects of interdisciplinary education (kramer & wegner, 2020). nevertheless, the implementation has become increasingly popular, leading to organizational issues at the upper secondary level. design-based research the project "sport-bio-logisch!" intends to address this problem by following the three phases of the design-based research approach, to which a fourth phase "solution" has been added (reinmann, 2017; schmiedebach & wegner, 2021, see figure 1). the project will be presented along the different phases of the iterative cycle with a focus on the evaluation of the second prototype (see also figure 1). figure 1: expanded dbr cycle of the ozhb the cycle consists of a preliminary review to capture the current state of research and practice (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). this is followed by the development of a prototype as a potential solution to the initial problem, which is examined in the iterative assessment phase consisting of intervention, evaluation, and revisions. ideally, this iterative 58 global education review 11 (1) process results in a recommended solution to the initially posed problem. related theories are also refined and new ones are created (schmiedebach & wegner, 2021). the focus of this article is to assess the research and findings related to the second dbr cycle. however, to give a complete picture of the project, a brief overview of the first cycle is also provided. table 1 (see appendix) summarizes the project's development phases according to the dbr approach. preliminary research initially, a systematic literature review was conducted to identify the current state of research on interdisciplinary education in the subject combination of biology and pe. a total of 14 studies were found in the period from 2000 to 2019 (kramer & wegner, 2020). it was found that few concepts have been developed and scientifically tested for upper grades. the research focused on students' knowledge acquisition and activity levels. there has been limited research on the impact of interdisciplinary interventions on affectivemotivational levels (kramer & wegner, 2020). consequently, there seems to be a lack of empirical support for the promotion of interest through interdisciplinary education as postulated by the theoretical discourse. this, in turn, led to the research focus on investigating the development of interest (kramer & wegner, 2020). from a research perspective, the findings of the study can serve as indicators for promoting the use of prototypes in schools. excursus: interest in order to comprehend how interdisciplinary education can promote interest, it's important to delve into the concept of interest as such. the construct “interest” is described as an “interactive relation between an individual and certain aspects of his or her environment (e.g., objects, events, ideas)” (hidi & harachiewicz, 2000, p. 152). it can be understood as a psychological stage but also as a motivational disposition (renninger & hidi, 2017). within a psychological dimension, interest is characterized by heightened attention, increased concentration, and effort during an engagement (renninger & hidi, 2017). two forms of interest can be differentiated as motivational dispositions, depending on a temporal determinant (renninger & hidi, 2017). individual interest can be defined as a time-stable dispositional preference for engaging with a particular topic or subject area regardless of occurring difficulties (ainley et al., 2002). individual interest is not limited to one area of interest. a person may possess a whole network of different individual interests that are highly specific to particular subject areas or, more generally, to new phenomena (ainley et al., 2002). individual interests are tied to positive attitudes toward the object of interest (ainley et al., 2002). in contrast, situational interest is determined by its temporal limitation. it is caused by an external trigger that attracts the person's attention (krapp, 2002). the associated emotions can be both positive and negative (ainley et al., 2002). situational interest can either decrease or develop into a more stable form (ainley et al., 2002; hidi & renninger, 2006). consequently, interest as a motivational disposition is highly variable and can be influenced externally. in a heterogeneous class, students have different dispositions, though they can be transferred into the same psychological state (renninger & hidi, 2017). how interest develops from situational interest to individual interest can be explained by hidi & renninger's four-phase model of interest (2006, see figure 2). enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 59 the first two phases can be assigned to situational interest. in the "triggered situational interest" phase, interest is induced by an external trigger. this can be, for example, a phenomenon or an experiment. if the trigger is perceived as individually important, it can lead to further engagement with the topic. this transition to a "maintained situational interest" usually requires external support, such as a teacher explaining the relevance of the object to the student's life or their academic development. a stable value conception, basic prior knowledge, and a positive attitude towards the topic can lead to a development of so-called "emerging individual interest." students with individual interests follow their own questions about the content and look up additional information. here, too, external influence can help to consolidate individual interests, especially when problems arise. if such problems do not lead to a decrease in interest and the students continue to work on the subject matter, their individual interest can be described as “well-developed.” although the phase has a high degree of autonomy, interest can also be positively influenced by external sources (wigfield & cambria, 2010). while the model suggests a linear development of interest, the different stages of interest do not necessarily imply a ranking. for instance, in a school context, situational interest appears to have great importance in getting the attention of individuals who are not yet interested in the topic (hidi & harackiewicz, 2000). however, it is important to support these initial situational interests to ensure that students remain engaged with the subject matter for an extended period of time, rather than only capturing their attention for a single moment (wigfield & cambria, 2010). maintained interest in the subject matter is crucial for students to stay motivated and continue learning in future lessons (wigfield & cambria, 2010). further individual interest is also desirable to increase students' interest in a subject and to generate excitement about the related academic fields and associated jobs. interests develop as a part of the interaction between a person and the contexts they engage with (wigfield & cambria, 2010). thus, interest can be promoted or diminished by the individual and by the environment (wigfield & cambria, 2010). the initial two phases and the shift toward the third phase can be affected by external factors, both positively and negatively. this makes them ideal opportunities for creating and maintaining interests through instruction. between the first two and between the second and the third phases, value conceptions constitute a crucial factor to strengthen the initially triggered interest and to transfer it into figure 2: illustration of the four-phase model of interest development by hidi & renninger (2006) 60 global education review 11 (1) a more stable form. in this context, schiefele (2009) highlights that the promotion of interest depends on three factors. first, the content must be meaningful. in addition, it should have a practical application to the reality of the student’s lives and, ideally, be connected to existing interests (schiefele, 2009). promoting interest in school is crucial as it improves the quality of learning through increased engagement and attention (steidtmann et al., 2023). furthermore, interest affects motivation, academic achievement, and later career choices (schiefele, 2009; canning & harackiewicz, 2019). although interest is highly relevant, declining interest is observed over the course of students’ time at school. this has been found especially for science subjects including biology (holstermann & bögeholz, 2007; löwe, 1987; prokop et al., 2007; potvin & hansi, 2014; vlckova, kubiatko & usak, 2019; wegner & schmiedebach, 2020) but also for pe (bös et al., 2006; potvin & hasni, 2014). throughout one's lifetime, differing interests may arise, providing potential explanations for the decline. at first, students display a general curiosity towards various subjects. however, over time, they tend to develop a specific interest in particular subject areas and topics (wigfield, 2010). this is a natural process bolstered by course selection in the upper secondary classes. the change in teaching methods from a holistic approach during primary education to a subject-specific approach during secondary education (tröbst et al., 2016) constitutes another potential reason for the decline of student interest. holistic approaches enable teaching to become close to students' everyday experiences, making it meaningful (tröbst et al., 2016). in subjectspecific courses, it is challenging to address everyday experiences and related issues from a single disciplinary perspective. constructivist and problem-based instruction, meanwhile, can promote interest because they combine interest promoting factors (schiefele, 2009). the questions associated with the problem trigger situational interest (harackiewicz et al., 2016). if the problem is complex enough and several connecting questions arise, situational interest can be stabilized (harackiewicz et al., 2016). problem-based and constructivist instruction has the potential for students to access their own prior experiences and actively construct new knowledge based on phenomena and questions to be solved (wegner & kramer 2022a). interdisciplinary education combines both approaches and, therefore, theoretically provides a good basis for promoting interest in the participating disciplines. prototype i based on the central practical problem of how interdisciplinary education can be usefully implemented in the upper school, as well as the systematic review of interdisciplinary education projects in the subject combination of science subjects and pe, a first prototype was developed. the requirements for the prototype were usability in upper grades, the subject combination of pe and biology, and an orientation to the central definition of interdisciplinary education. as potential prototypes for the assessment phase, one-day workshops on various topics were developed. one of the developed workshops is called “learning through movement” and will be described briefly as it is the basis of both assessment phases (see table 1 in appendix). the intervention begins with a practical coordination exercise. in this exercise, students throw two balls in the air, cross their hands, and catch the balls again. the resulting question "why do we have such a problem with this coordinative task?" can be answered from the perspectives of biology and physical education. at first, different brain areas and their role in enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 61 creating a movement are investigated. the primary focus is on the executive functions, which are located in the frontal lobe. through psychological tests and additional sports exercises, the students learn about the executive functions in more detail and how they influence not only the execution of the initial exercise but also other actions in everyday life. finally, practical sports training that improves executive functions is developed and tested. in addition, the training's effects on the brain will be worked out. the unit closes with a reference back to the initial question. a more detailed description of the intervention can be found in kramer, großecosmann & wegner (2022). since interdisciplinary education is considered to have a positive influence on interest development due to its constructivist and problem-oriented approach, the effects of the interdisciplinary prototype on interest development were investigated. a quantitative instrument was used to examine situational interest and subjective task values in a pre-post design. the subjective task value consisting of intrinsic value, utility value, attainment value, and cost are predictors of sustained interest (acee et al., 2018; tibbetts et al., 2015) and are defined as follows: the “intrinsic value” of a task is the enjoyment derived from the task itself (eccles et al., 1983). it is often referred to as interest or interest value (steinmayr & spinath, 2010). the “utility” of a task refers to its relevance for achieving future goals. the task may have purely functional characteristics and need not correspond to any intrinsic value. therefore, it may have some extrinsic characteristics (eccles et al., 1983). the “attainment value” of a task is determined by its relevance to one's personal and social identity. if the task challenges and addresses traits important to one's self-esteem, its “attainment value” is considered high. this depends on the affirmation of personally significant character traits (wigfield & eccles, 2020). the “cost” of a task is described by the effort and time a person has to invest in dealing with the task (wigfield & eccles, 2020). in the study, we utilized the assessment tool developed by steinmayr and spinath (2010). this tool associates subjective task values with entire school subjects instead of individual tasks and consists of items that can be rated by the students on a rating scale. since intrinsic value combines the dimensions of situational and individual interest (wigfield & cambria, 2010), the construct was divided in "situational intrinsic value" according to wegner (2009) and “intrinsic value” according to steinmayr and spinath (2010). assessment phase i in the first cycle, the concepts were piloted in school classes, evaluated in terms of their feasibility, and conceptually adapted. in the second cycle, the concept named "learning through movement" (kramer, großecosmann & wegner, 2022; kramer & wegner, 2021) was tested as a day workshop with 75 students from upper secondary classes. the evaluation was conducted using the quantitative test instrument, initially without the intrinsic value subscale since no effect on individual interest can be assumed for short-term interventions. mixed anovas showed a significant positive effect of the interdisciplinary intervention on the 62 global education review 11 (1) situational intrinsic value in biology and pe and on the utility value of the two individual subjects (kramer & wegner, 2021). the attainment value of the two subjects showed no significant change. these first empirical results show positive effects of interdisciplinary instruction on the interest development. a first situational interest could be increased. in addition, the utility value indicates that the students recognized a value in the thematic examination for their lives, indicating further engagement with the discipline. consequently, the results hint at the fact that the first phase of triggered interest can be evoked and stabilized through interdisciplinary education. solution i from a research perspective, this first prototype is suitable for implementation at the upper secondary level. project days are ideal for carrying out interdisciplinary instruction in a chosen combination of subjects. however, this is at the expense of other subjects whose lessons are cancelled for the duration of the project. consequently, the frequency of interdisciplinary projects in the form of project days or weekly workshops is limited. as a result, the prototype did not provide an ideal solution to the problem in the field, and the dbr cycle has been repeated to develop a second prototype. prototype ii during a second dbr cycle, the preliminary review was not required. a new prototype was developed based on the limitations of the first prototype. the main criticism was the reduction of other subject lessons and consequently rather limited feasibility in schools. the new prototype had to be implementable in regular school settings without affecting other subjects and their organizational frameworks. as described at the beginning, course selection within upper grades severely limits the coordination of interdisciplinary education between two subject teachers, since their courses are attended by different students. consequently, the new prototype had to be feasible in one course. its content was based on the workshop of the piloted first prototype “learning through movement” (kramer, großecosmann & wegner, 2022; kramer & wegner, 2021). the workshop phases were divided into single lessons in order to obtain completed lessons for the school. a total of 10 lessons were designed. if necessary, the entire teaching unit can be conducted in one subject. practical pe elements were designed to be held in a classroom, eliminating the need for a gymnasium. the test instrument was also slightly adapted. in addition to a follow-up survey to investigate long-term effects (six to eight weeks), the test instrument was supplemented by the "intrinsic value" of steinmayr & spinath (2010), which, in addition to the "situational intrinsic value," rather measures individual interest. all items could be rated on a six-point rating scale. the test instrument was examined for internal consistency. table 2 (see appendix) shows the results of the analysis. all subscales of the test instrument were found to be acceptable. assessment phase ii in the second assessment phase, the first evaluation phase was skipped. instead, the prototype was directly accompanied by the test instrument. only minor didactic adjustments were made (e.g., using material with clearer task instructions, additional support materials), which were based on feedback from the students and teachers, but did not change the content or methodology of the lessons. enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 63 hypotheses following the theory of interest development, the prototype was examined with regard to the question: how do interdisciplinary teaching units in biology and pe influence the students’ interest development? for that purpose, the following hypotheses were formulated: through its problem-based and constructivist approach, interdisciplinary education provides a theoretically well-suited basis for promoting initial situational interest (harackiewicz et al., 2016). therefore, the following hypotheses were formulated: h1: the “situational intrinsic value” of biology is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. h2: the “situational intrinsic value” of pe is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. following scheifele’s (2009) argumentation that problem-based approaches combine all three prerequisites to promote interest, students might experience the subject as relevant to their lives and practical issues through interdisciplinary education as a problem-based approach. the study of the first prototype already showed an increased utility value for both subjects, which confirmed the assumption for the first prototype (kramer & wegner, 2021). accordingly, it was hypothesized: h3: the “utility value” of biology is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. h4: the “utility value” of pe is rated higher after the intervention than before the intervention. the attainment value relates to personal and social identity. when those character traits are addressed, the attainment value also increases. since character traits are not directly addressed in the intervention it was assumed: h5: the “attainment value” of biology will not change throughout the intervention. h6: the “attainment value” of pe will not change throughout the intervention. interest can be promoted through interdisciplinary projects (labudde, 2014, schiefele, 2009). although the second prototype is conducted over a longer period of time, it is still comparatively short in terms of the temporal dimension of interest development. therefore, the interventions were not expected to foster the development of individual interest. for this reason, the following hypotheses were stated: h7: the “intrinsic value” of biology will not change throughout the intervention. h8: the “intrinsic value” of pe will not change throughout the intervention. sample the unit was offered at schools in the region of bielefeld university. the teachers responded voluntarily to participate in the project. a control group was requested at all participating schools. since both biology and pe courses participated in the intervention, the respective control course consisted of a parallel course. unfortunately, it was not possible to survey a control course at every school. 64 global education review 11 (1) a total of 505 students participated in twelve intervention courses and seven control courses. due to the exclusion of individuals who attended only one of the two testing points, only 107 individuals could be examined for the intervention group and 49 individuals for the control group. the large data dropout can be attributed to the effects of the covid-19 pandemic. due to a significant increase in data dropout, the follow-up analysis was not considered. therefore, further studies are needed to investigate long-term effects. method the four scales were checked for outliers. only minor deviations were found, which, upon closer analysis of the cases, did not justify exclusion. the data were examined using a mixed anova, in which "group" (intervention and control group) was examined as a betweensubjects effect in addition to the temporal main effect. the mixed anova was calculated in spss 29. in addition, a power analysis was performed by using g-power to determine the appropriate sample size. results show that for the interaction effects, a sample of 212 students would have been needed to reveal medium interaction effects. the mixed anova with 156 probands can only reveal strong interaction effects. nevertheless, a mixed anova was chosen as a robust test procedure. the results must be interpreted in the context of the power analysis. results the results of the mixed anovas are presented following the order of our hypotheses. the results of the mauchly test are omitted as only two measurement points were examined. situational intrinsic value starting with biology, levene's test confirmed homogeneity of variances (t0: p = .78; t1: p = .211). the mixed anova revealed a main effect of “time” with medium effect size (f(1,143) = 9.99, p = .002, partial η2 = .065). mean scores increased throughout the intervention from m = 2.77 (sd = 1.29) to m = 3.1 (sd =1.32). however, no interaction effect between “time” and “group” was found (f(1,143) = 0.583, p = .277). on a descriptive level, it appears that the mean score of the intervention group increased more (t0: m = 2.84, sd = 1.28; t1: m = 3.12, sd = 1.27) than the mean score of the control group (t0: m = 2.63, sd = 1.33; t1: m = 2.81, sd = 3.22; see figure 3). figure 3: mean values of the construct “situational intrinsic value” for biology and pe over the intervention period, divided into an intervention group (pe n=104, biology n=102) and a control group (n=47, n=43, respectively). looking at the results for pe, the homogeneity of the error variances was confirmed by levene's test (t0: p = .123; t1: p = .835). neither a main effect of “time” (f(1,149) = 0.25, p = .621) nor an interaction effect between “time” and “group” could be found (f(1,149) = 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 sit_intrinsic_t0 sit_intrinsic_t1 biology intervention biology control pe intervention pe control enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 65 2.03, p = .157). descriptively, the mean scores show that the intervention group rated the construct higher after the intervention (t0: m= 3.44, sd= 1.19. ; t1: m= 3.64, sd= 1.26; see figure 3), while the control group's “situational intrinsic value” for pe decreased slightly (t0: m= 3.23, sd= 1.39; t1: m= 3.13, sd= 1.26; see figure 3). utility value levene's test revealed that equal variances could be assumed for the scale “utility value” in biology (t0: p = .554; t1: p = .676). results of the mixed anova showed no main effect of “time” (f(1,153) = 0.267, p = .606). descriptive data analysis showed that the mean score of the intervention group increased slightly over the intervention (t0: m= 3.41, sd= 1.22; t1: m= 3.51, sd= 1.26). meanwhile, the control group's mean score decreased (t0: m= 3.19, sd= 1.13; t1: m= 3.01, sd= 1.29). however, the mixed anova did not suggest a significant interaction between “time” and “group” (f(1,153) = 3.21, p = .075). figure 4: mean values of the construct “utility value” for biology and pe over the intervention period, divided into an intervention group (pe n=102, biology n=107) and a control group (n=46, n=48, respectively). for pe, the homogeneity of variances could also be confirmed (levene's test, t0: p = .376; t1: p = .059). no main effect of “time” (f(1,146) = 0.01, p = .940) could be found. furthermore, no interaction effect was discovered between “time” and “group” (f(1,146) = 0.09, p = .593). attainment value looking at the “attainment value” results regarding pe, levene's test showed equal variances (t0: p = .499; t1: p = .808). the mean decreased over time (t0: m = 3.93, sd = 1.39; t1: m= 3.78, sd= 1.39). however, the mixed anova revealed no main effect of “time” (f(1,147) = 2.14, p = .146) and no interaction effect between “time” and “group” (f(1,147) = 0.13, p = .599). for pe equal variances could be assumed based on levene's test (t0: p = .356; t1: p = .876). as in biology, the mean value for the “attainment value” decreased over the course of the intervention period. this was more prominent in the control group (t0: m = 4.68, sd = 1.39; t1: m = 4.30, sd = 1.26) than in the intervention group (t0: m = 4.77, sd = 1.19; t1: m = 4.62, sd = 1.32). a main effect of “time” was found (f(1,152) = 12.82, p ≤ .001, partial η2 = .078) with medium effect size but no interaction effect between “time” and “group” (f(1,152) = 0.92, p = .113). 1 1.5 2 2.5 3 3.5 4 4.5 5 5.5 6 utility_t0 utility_t1 biology intervention biology control pe intervention pe control 66 global education review 11 (1) figure 5: mean values of the construct “attainment value” for biology and pe over the intervention period, divided into an intervention group (pe n=105, biology n=104) and a control group (n=49, n=45, respectively). intrinsic value for biology, levene's test showed homogeneity of variance (t0: p = .905; t1: p = .527). descriptively, the mean of the intervention group remained stable (t0: m = 3.72, sd = 1.34; t1: m = 3.73, sd = 1.40), while the mean of the control group decreased slightly (t0: m = 3.74, sd = 1.30; t1: m = 3.53, sd = 1.35). based on the mixed anova results, there were no significant differences observed for both the main effect of “time” (f(1,150) = 2.11, p = .149) and the interaction effect between “time” and “group” (f(1,150) = 2.68, p = .104). figure 6: mean values of the construct “intrinsic value” for biology and pe over the intervention period, divided into an intervention group (pe n=105, biology n=105) and a control group (n=48, n=47, respectively). the data for pe showed homogeneity of variances (levene's test, t0: p = .356; t1: p = .876). the mixed anova revealed a main effect of “time” with a medium effect size (f(1,151) = 13.56, p ≤ .001, partial η2 = .082). in addition, an interaction effect between “time” and “group” with small effect size was found (f(1,151) = 6.73, p = .010, partial η2 = .043). the mean scores of the control group (t0: m = 4.95, sd = 1.17; t1: m = 4.55, sd = 1.19) decreased more in comparison to the intervention group (t0: m = 4.8, sd = 1.21; t1: m = 4.73, sd = 1.21). discussion the results showed barely any differences between the intervention and the control group, which strongly limits the interpretation regarding the effects of the intervention. only for the construct “intrinsic value” a significant interaction effect between “time” and the “group” could be found for pe. after the intervention, the intrinsic value of the control group decreased, while students in the intervention group maintained stable attitudes towards it. it appears that the intervention had a stabilizing effect on individual interest. hypothesis h8 can be accepted, as the measurement for the intervention group remained constant. although no interaction effect could be reported for biology, thus confirming h7, the descriptive data showed a similar trend. the acceptance decreased only in the control group. accordingly, the data indicated a stabilization of already existing individual interests in the participating subjects. the data also highlight that an external influence could have a positive effect on the stages of individual interest (wigfield & cambria, 2010). simultaneously, the main effect of “time” for biology and the descriptive data of pe showed a decrease in individual interest over the intervention period, confirming the 1 2 3 4 5 6 attainment_t0 attainment_t1 biology intervention biology control pe intervention pe control 1 2 3 4 5 6 intrinsic_t0 intrinsic_t1 biology intervention biology control pe intervention pe control enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 67 assumptions of a decreasing interest over the school career (among others, potvin & hasni, 2014). the scale “situational intrinsic value” showed a significant main effect of “time” only for biology. unfortunately, due to the missing interaction effect, it was not possible to draw any conclusions regarding the effectiveness of the intervention. descriptive data showed a slightly higher increase in the mean scores in the intervention group. in pe, although there was no main effect of time, a trend was evident through the descriptive data. compared to biology, there was a higher increase in mean scores in the intervention group compared to the control group. the trend suggested that interdisciplinary interventions could raise situational interest in the subjects. looking at the items' wording in the context of the duration of the intervention, the scale might display a maintained situational interest, since it asks for the last lessons of the subject and not just for a specific situation. thus, the initial problem and the interdisciplinary work on the posed question could slightly increase or at least stabilize situational interest (harackiewicz et al., 2016). however, for now, the hypotheses associated with the scale (h1 & h2) must be rejected. regarding the utility value, neither hypothesis (h3 & h4) was confirmed for the second prototype. the trend in biology indicated that the subject combination with pe could lead to an increase in the utility value for biology (labudde, 2014). the practical application of biological concepts increased students’ perceptions of the relevance of biology for their own future. however, further analysis is needed to strengthen these assumptions. the utility value regarding pe, meanwhile, remained relatively constant. explaining the biological principles did not seem to lead to an increased sense of utility for pe. the stabilization of the intrinsic value and the increase in situational intrinsic value could not be explained by an increase in utility value. the attainment value relates to the student’s personal and social identity. the hypothesis that the attainment value is not addressed by the intervention and does not change could be confirmed (h5 & h6). a main effect of “time” was found regarding pe, but no interaction effect between “time” and “group.” only descriptive data indicated an effect of the intervention. the results suggested that the intervention was closer to the students’ perceptions, keeping their attainment value and intrinsic value stable instead of decreasing. the observable trends could currently not be fully supported through closer statistical analysis. nevertheless, they indicated a positive influence. as already mentioned in the method chapter, the current sample size only reveals strong interaction effects. therefore, the sample size should be expanded and recalculations should be made. limitations unfortunately, the impact of covid-19 resulted in a small sample size and made a follow-up survey unattainable due to significant dropouts. both, a larger sample and a follow up survey, need to be considered in future studies in order to investigate long-term effects of the interventions and to detect small to medium effects by mixed anova. additionally, there was a difference in the subject matter taught in the control group compared to the intervention group. while it would be ideal to control this, it is challenging in interdisciplinary settings. since two subjects were combined, the students in the control group needed to be taught in pe and biology. to ensure consistency in content for the interdisciplinary project, coordination of lessons in both subjects is necessary. at the same time, however, this would lead to a reduced form of 68 global education review 11 (1) interdisciplinary education, which in turn negates the control function of the control group. particularly in the context of designbased research, the chosen research methodology should be improved and refined. solution ii the second prototype needs to be evaluated based on two different dimensions. from a practical standpoint, the teaching unit can be more seamlessly integrated into the daily school routine when compared to the first prototype. however, it is important to mention that this prototype cannot be implemented without limitations. the curriculum must provide adequate time resources available for interdisciplinary projects. it must be noted that the integration of a second subject reduces the time available for the other. despite this, teachers can teach interdisciplinary education in their subject and no other subject teaching is eliminated. based on current research regarding interest development, a one-day intervention is the preferred option because it increases the situational intrinsic value and utility value for both subjects, which is not yet confirmed for the second prototype. in addition to the development of interest, however, other research issues such as evaluating the process characteristics of moderate constructivism need to be included in the discussion. acknowledgment this project biprofessional is part of the “qualitätsoffensive lehrerbildung,” a joint initiative of the federal government and the länder which aims to improve the quality of teacher training (funding number 01ja1908). the programme is funded by the federal ministry of education and research. the authors are responsible for the content of this publication. 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(2023). a case study of interdisciplinary thematic learning curriculum to cultivate "4c skills." frontiers in psychology, 14, 1080811. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1080811 https://doi.org/10.1111/ssm.12224 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.dr.2009.12.001 https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2023.1080811 enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 73 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: kramer, niklas, & wegner, claas. (2024). enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units. global education review, 11 (1), 55-75. appendix table 1: development phases of the project “sport-bio-logisch!” along the dbr approach. dbr cycle phasen realization in the context interest development source f ir s t d b r c y c le preliminary research a systematic literature review was conducted kramer & wegner, 2020 prototyping phase i interdisciplinary one-day workshops were developed a test instrument was determined kramer, großecosmann & wegner, 2022 kramer & wegner, 2021 assessment phase i the one-day workshop “learning through movement” was investigated regarding its effects on the interest development kramer, großecosmann & wegner, 2022 kramer & wegner, 2021 solution i the first prototype was assessed kramer & wegner, 2021; 2022b s e c o n d d b r c y c le prototyping phase ii the one-day workshop “learning through movement” was transformed into a teaching unit the test instrument was adapted part of this article assessment phase ii the teaching unit was investigated regarding its effects on the interest development solution ii the second prototype was assessed 74 global education review 11 (1) table 2: internal consistencies, example items, and the number of items in the respective subscales of subjective task values (situational intrinsic value, utility value, attainment value, intrinsic value) depending on the individual subject and measurement time, modified and extended according to steinmayr & spinath (2010) and wegner (2009). subscale example item (insert specific subject) number of items subject and measuring time cronbach's alpha situational intrinsic value the last hours of …really interested me. 3 biology (t0) 0,932 biology (t1) 0,930 pe (t0) 0,827 pe (t1) 0,895 utility value … is useful for my future 3 biology (t0) 0,883 biology (t1) 0,909 pe (t0) 0,863 pe (t1) 0,835 attainment value it is important for me to be good at … 3 biology (t0) 0,928 biology (t1) 0,942 pe (t0) 0,938 pe (t1) 0,941 intrinsic value i enjoy … 3 biology (t0) 0,922 biology (t1) 0,925 enhancing subject-specific interests through interdisciplinary teaching units 75 pe (t0) 0,900 pe (t1) 0,892 holistic multilingual early learning 38 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: lilly padia, luisiana melendez, and sandra osorio. (2025). holistic multilingual early learning: lessons from families, educators, and administrators in a preschool program. global education review, 12 (2), 38-56 holistic multilingual early learning: lessons from families, educators, and administrators in a preschool program lilly padia, luisiana melendez, and sandra osorio abstract the reggio emilia approach, including the concept of the hundred languages that children use, offers expansive opportunities for affirming and sustaining the multilingual identities of young children (fyfe et al., 2023). this paper counters the authoritarian culture of power (delpit, 1988) in schooling that privileges monolingual, monomodal english as superior and dominant. we examine the intersections of multilingualism and a reggio emilia approach in the early childhood context. we draw on data from a study with a public, reggio-inspired preschool dual language program in a large midwest city in the us, created and operated in close collaboration amongst administrators, families, teachers, and staff. through individual interviews and focus groups, families, educators, and administrators shared their perspectives on the history and the current implementation of the program’s curricula, the program structures that sustain the quality of the educators and staff, the impact on children’s development and learning, and the contributions of families and community. we analyze bilingual identity development for young children and their families in the context of dual language schooling, as well as the necessity of uplifting and amplifying multilingualism within foundation pedagogical approaches like reggio. finally, we identify ways that multilingual pedagogies, including but not limited to translanguaging and translanguaging universal design for learning (trudl) (cioè-peña, 2022), are inextricably linked with other seminal approaches to early learning, rather than an afterthought or appendage that must be squeezed into preexisting learning structures. keywords multilingualism, early childhood education, dual language, family partnerships introduction dual language programs have increased dramatically across the united states. research from the american councils research center (arc) found that forty-four states report dual language and immersion (dli) programs. arc counted 3,649 programs in 27 languages. spanish programs were eighty percent of all programs (dli research alliance, n.d.). however, research on the programmatic features of dual language programs at the preschool level are few (zheng et al., 2021). more needs to be known about the characteristics of programs that serve young emergent bilinguals and multilinguals and their families so these programs may grow in number and effectiveness. this research examines a preschool in a public school district in chicago to get a better understanding of how key stakeholders administrators, teachers, caregivers/families viewed the transition process to a dual language model. the program was chosen for several reasons: its long presence in the community; a history of parental activism in alliance with school administrators, teachers, and staff; and global education review 12 (2) 39 the demographics of the children and families the program currently serves. additionally, the program also had previously collaborated with the institution of higher education where the pis of the study presently work. the program’s history, in particular its long-standing record of equitable collaboration between administrators, teachers, staff, and caregivers, its demographics, and its intentional decision to effectively serve young multilinguals provided favorable conditions for the exploration of how program administrators, educators, and families describe the principles guiding the study. specifically, we were guided by the research question: how do administrators, teachers, families, and staff describe the impact of the program on children’s development and learning? our study was framed using three of the five principles proposed by melendez & syc (2021) for capturing essential features of programs serving young emergent bilinguals/multilinguals: 1) creating and sustaining a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, not only for individual children and families, but also for all children and larger society; 2) developing strong partnerships with linguistically diverse families that center explicitly on emergent bilingualism; and 3) integration of families’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge into every aspect of the program, including its curricula. the following section outlines theoretical perspectives that inform each of these principles. we ground our theoretical framing and findings in the context of these three principles. a review of relevant literature and theoretical perspectives we offer a critical, but admittedly far from comprehensive, overview of how research and empirical literature inform the three principles at the center of our case study. we have selected literature that spotlights practices in early care and education and young multilingual children and their families. the principles discussed should not be considered in isolation, as their intersection and synergy is genuine, not only conceptually, but also in regard to their practical application. we return to this point in the discussion of our findings. principle 1: creating and sustaining a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, not only for individual children and families, but also for all children and larger society. multilingualism in early childhood education requires attention and intention to support the holistic growth of our bi/multilingual young learners. in the united states, more than 25 percent of children in early head start and head start programs nationwide come from homes where the primary language is a language other than english (mcnamara, 2016). in addition, these young emergent bilinguals are diverse in their countries of origin, racial/ethnic backgrounds, languages spoken at home, family income, family structure, and parental educational attainment, which has motivated the notion that they must be considered ‘superdiverse’ (park et al. 2018, p.6) despite this substantial population of multilingual children and families, the dominant schooling system is governed by a culture of power (delpit, 1988) that privileges monolingual, monomodal spoken “standard” english as superior (cioè-peña, 2022)–and as the ultimate goal and marker of children’s success. theories and ideas that aim to legitimize practice in early childhood education (tout et al. 2013), as well as the criteria framing definitions of programmatic quality in ece (yoshikawa & kabay, 2015) are usually entrenched in 40 holistic multilingual early learning hegemonies of white, middle-class values and beliefs regarding child development, parenting, and what defines optimal development and learning for very young children (robinson & jones-diaz, 2006). these deficit interpretations support understandings of non-dominant cultures and languages as deficient, and promote compensatory actions meant to address the ‘deficits’ attached to membership in certain groups (martínez & rury, 2012; salazar pérez & saavedra, 2017). discourses that privilege western and middle-class standards for child development competencies and parenting can also contribute to these deficit perspectives (garcia-coll et al, 1996; ladson-billings, 2000; martinez & rury, 2012; pence & nsamenang, 2008). moreover, deficit views of nonmainstream children and families frame inflexible conceptualizations of quality and best practice in early childhood education that are mediated by social stratification variables such as race, ethnicity, language, and class, among others. in consequence, status, power, and/or wealth are recognized as facilitating or obstructing access to quality early childhood programs that genuinely incorporate the resources of minoritized children and families to effectively support their development and learning (kerbo, 2011; simpson et al., 2018). thus, by categorizing individuals according to group membership, social stratification variables translate into systemic power-differentials that silence or ignore the voices of those lacking social capital (kerbo, 2011) and what they identify as desirable early learning experiences for children (canella & viruru, 2004; martinez & rury, 2012). the resulting characterizations of quality and best practice in early childhood education are then situated in dominant discourses that fail to acknowledge the child development competencies and parenting practices of minoritized communities of color. this is often the case in relation to children and families who use a language other than english at home (souto-manning, 2016). rewiring our conceptions of what ‘counts’ as language and learning is crucial to challenging ideologically oppressive expectations of child development that are premised on a mythical neurotypical, monolingual english speaking white child (brown, 2020; souto-manning, 2016) and moving towards expansive opportunities for affirming and sustaining the multilingual identities of young children (fyfe et al., 2023). the aspiration to disrupt prevalent ideas about what counts in language learning to validate and incorporate differences in child development outcomes and/or parenting as associated with the practices of certain cultural, ethnic, and/or racial communities is recognized as foundational to more equitable and socially just early childhood programming (bloch, 2013; brown & grigg, 2017; cannella & viruru, 2004; guo, 2015; robinson & jones-díaz, 2006; salazarpérez & saavedra, 2017; spring, 2010). as a result, efforts that aspire to erase the inequalities that exist in early learning programs must include acknowledgement of children’s right to their own language. in order to do this, integrating children, family, and community members as linguistic models and resources is a necessary condition. acknowledging and responding to young children’s bilingualism has the potential to set in motion a more equitable conceptualization of early development and learning by virtue of encouraging programs and practitioners to challenge prevalent hegemonies that favor the majority language over other languages spoken in the home. thus, practitioners that understand the language socialization practices of global education review 12 (2) 41 minoritized families and incorporate these understandings into their work with bilingual children and families may facilitate the scrutiny of larger social and political issues regarding power and voice differentials (bloch, 2013). this arguably reinforces the identification of programs as engines for effectuating the creation and sustaining of a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, not only for individual children and families, but also for all children and larger society. our examination of how the center that is the focus of our study enacts the values pertinent to the first principle, also consider the reggio emilia approach to early childhood, specifically the possibilities and offerings of a reggio approach in the context of multilingualism. the reggio emilia approach identifies a ‘culture of the hundred languages,’ wherein “children, especially very young ones, understand each other without the language of words. they…talk in ways unknown to us…” (rinaldi, 2023). we argue that the reggio approach exemplifies an educational philosophy that incorporates multiple modalities of expression and understanding such as visual, print kinesthetic, gestural, and dramatic in support of language development (rowsell & collier, 2021). principle 2: developing strong partnerships with linguistically diverse families that center explicitly on emergent bilingualism. educational partnerships occur at the intersection of early childhood education and care, families, and the surrounding community (bergroth & palviainen, 2020). however, differences between the social positions and demographics of families and program administrators and practitioners can result in power differentials that disrupt equitable relationships with families. the integration of children, family, and community as equal partners demand the intentional intersection of bilingual/multilingual children and families and social justice in early care and education settings (bloch, 2013). the importance of developing and sustaining effective partnerships with families has been constant in the early childhood literature for many years (housel, 2020). however, during the last decade, the examination of how to establish and sustain equitable and collaborative relationships with the families and communities of the children in early care and education programs has increasingly been grounded in the acknowledgement that often these partnerships occur in ways that perpetuate existing power differentials, institutionalized barriers and biases (brown & grigg, 2017; housel, 2020; moss, 2014; souto-manning & rabadi-raol 2018). bloch (2013) contends that acknowledging and responding to young children’s bilingualism has the potential to set in motion a more equitable conceptualization of early care and education by virtue of encouraging programs and practitioners to challenge prevalent hegemonies that favor the majority language over other languages spoken in the home. a study by pacini-ketchabaw and mcivor (2005) illustrates the challenges programs often encounter in challenging the hegemonies of the dominant language. findings from focus groups with 54 mothers and caregivers representing twelve minoritized languages revealed that families’ were highly motivated to preserve the home language, and cited reasons that included connections to country of origin and to family members who do not speak the new language, the potential 42 holistic multilingual early learning impact of bilingualism on future job opportunities, healthy identity formation, and promoting and sustaining a sense of belonging to family and community (pacini-ketchabaw & mcivor, 2005). in contrast, data from interviews with ten early childhood practitioners serving these families across 10 different programs showed that none of the 10 ece programs had any language goals for the children beyond learning english as the new language (pacini-ketchabaw & mcivor, 2005). since the publication of the work of pacini-ketchabaw & mcivor (2005) almost two decades ago, research on effective family partnerships with families of children growing bilingually within and outside of the united states has steadily grown and the field is increasingly acknowledging their importance for equitable and effective programs serving multilingual young children (usdhhs & usdoe, 2016; national institute of early education research, 2016; national association for the education of young children, 2016; national academy of science, engineering, and medicine, 2017; office of head start, 2018). nevertheless, the features characterizing egalitarian partnerships with the families of multilingual children demands further examination that sheds light on the contributions of context, program, characteristics, to name just a couple. principle 3: integration of families’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge into every aspect of the program, including its curricula. the introduction of the term culturally relevant pedagogy (crp) by gloria ladson billing (1995) marked a critical shift in education, one that highlighted, among many other important points, the importance of the intentional, sustained, and purposeful incorporation of students’ culture and background as an essential element “...to increase the engagement and success of students from culturally diverse and minoritized backgrounds (walker, 2019 p. 1). a few years after the original publication of the crp framework, ladson-billings (2000), refers to “systems of knowing” (p. 957) that frame scholarly discourse, including the discourses that guide educational philosophy and curricular choices, are positioned in eurocentric worldviews that favor a particular way of understanding and being that are often intentionally detached from those of minoritized communities and families. therefore, if we recognize the types of knowledge that dominate early childhood research and practice as rooted in eurocentric thought and worldviews, it follows that these may prompt perceptions of non-mainstream childhoods, development, and learning as lacking. thus, we argue that culturally relevant pedagogy, in particular the intentional adoption of families’ culture into all aspects of programs serving multilingual children and their families, is vital to both the success of the children and the effectiveness of the program. below is a brief discussion of some of the conceptual underpinnings that justify this characterization. although the definition of the term funds of knowledge introduced by luis moll and colleagues (moll et al. 1992) has evolved over time, currently funds of knowledge in education refer to ways to acknowledge and use the “existing resources, competences, and knowledge” of a particular cultural community in educational settings to promote learning and strengthen connections between students and schools (anderson et al., 2017, 21). recently, alfaro & bartolomé (2023) explicitly argued that language variations are important expressions of global education review 12 (2) 43 families’ and communities’ funds of knowledge. therefore, deliberately tapping and incorporating families’ culture and language into program actions and practices is a one way to effectively incorporate the funds of knowledge of the families and communities. freire & valdez (2017) in their study of 8 elementary teachers working with emergent bilinguals suggested that lack of knowledge about their students was one of the explanations of teachers’ failure to practice culturally relevant pedagogy. in particular, the lack of familiarity with the communities and families where students came from made it difficult for educators to utilize materials that represented the lived experiences and the understandings that these students brought to the classroom. in a recent study exploring the intersection of the constructs of funds of knowledge and funds of identity, d’warte and woodrow (2022) affirm that intentionality in their application to the curriculum and pedagogy of early childhood programs may enable a “move towards curriculum and pedagogy that recognizes and acknowledges the complexity of teaching, learning and assessment in our globally diverse settings” promoted by a recognition of “what children and families bring to the classroom, and building on their strengths rather than starting with what they might lack” (d’warte & woodrow, 2022, 1). the findings will include a discussion that illustrates ways in which families and caregivers speak to the inclusion of funds of knowledge and identity into various aspects of the program. methods context the tiny seeds early childhood center where this research took place is located in the city of chicago. the center has always been located within the working class neighborhood that, in 1836, housed irish immigrants working on the illinois and michigan canal. the preschool serves children ages three to five years old. the demographics of the children and families served by the center in the 2022-23 academic year attest to the ethnic and racial heterogeneity of the neighborhood as 70% identified as hispanic or latine; 13% as white; 12% asian or pacific islander; and 5% as two or more races. in addition, half of the students classify as low-income and 50% of the children had an iep. the tiny seeds program has been operating in the same working class neighborhood for close to five decades. in the 1980s, it was a k-6 school where novice teachers could be mentored and supported by more experienced educators. in the early 1990s, tiny seeds transformed into a child-parent center, serving primarily neighborhood children between three and five, a focus that it maintains until today. the program affiliated to a large urban public school district in 2005. through its close to five decades of existence, tiny seeds faced imminent closing on more than one occasion and in every instance survived due primarily to parental activism implemented in alliance with school administrators, teachers and staff. the central role families have played throughout the history of the center is exemplified by a quote from a senior administrator, who has been at the center for 28 years: “so, we owe this center to parents, and it's always been my belief that their role in the school is absolutely essential.” data collection data collection for phase 1 of the study took place across four months in the spring of 44 holistic multilingual early learning 2023. all teachers, administrators and families/caregivers were invited to be part of the study. the authors attended a staff meeting at tiny seeds to invite teachers and administrators to participate. a follow-up email was then sent to teachers and administrators. families and caregivers were invited through an announcement on the parent board outside the school, followed by conversations with families during the after-school program pick-up time. these efforts recruited three teachers, four school administrators or individuals in leadership roles, and twenty-four caregiver interviews. six caregivers were interviewed individually. the rest participated in one of four focus groups held in spanish, english, and mandarin, according to the participants’ preference. the questions across the interviews and focus groups were the same and developed using the tenets of melendez et al. (2021). caregivers included not only parents, but grandparents and other caregivers. participating teachers included a lead teacher, an assistant teacher, and a special education classroom assistant. data analysis all interviews were fully transcribed, which resulted in approximately 100 pages of transcriptions. they were then uploaded to the data analysis software, dedoose, where all three members of the research team conducted qualitative analytic coding. this was a two-phase process which began with open-coding and then focused coding was employed (emerson et al., 1995). initial codes included ‘cultural connections,’ ‘familiarity/trust,’ ‘program components,’ ‘parent involvement,’ and ‘supporting bilingualism.’ interviews were conducted in english, spanish, and chinese. as all three of us are spanish-english bilingual, we coded the original transcripts from english and spanish interviews, and coded chinese transcripts that had been translated to english. findings we present the findings focusing on the first three principles of melendez et al. (2021): 1) creating and sustaining a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, not only for individual children and families, but also for all children and larger society; 2) developing strong partnerships with linguistically diverse families that center explicitly on emergent bilingualism; and 3) integration of families’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge into every aspect of the program, including its curricula. the other two principles: 4) adopt and implement practices that align with the language development goals adopted by programs in partnership with families and 5) offer ongoing professional development efforts to support practitioners’ understanding of early bilingual and multilingual language development, and the application of this knowledge, in order to support programs’ language allocation practices are explored in phase two of the ongoing research that centers on the program. the quotes from family and caregivers are presented in both english and spanish, in keeping with the school’s ideology of dual language, translanguaging, and pushing back against linguistic hegemony in ece. principle 1: creating and sustaining a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, not only for individual children and families, but also for all children and larger society in speaking about the creation and maintenance of a climate that embraces bilingualism as an asset, many families referred to this as a strength of tiny seeds early childhood center. some families shared that global education review 12 (2) 45 one of the main reasons for enrolling in the program was the program’s support of bilingualism, its emphasis on multiculturalism, and the strong intersection between dual language and reggio emilio. family members/caregivers indicated that the sense of diversity, global citizenship, and windows and mirrors (as described by bishop, 1990) into their own identities/cultures/communities and other identities/cultures/communities was a significant aspect of their happiness with the education their children received at the center. this mother’s comment illustrates a common sentiment among participants: “...having kids speak different languages, i think that makes [me] feel that's something that maybe i lacked in my education. which was thinking that it's normal to be different. it's like it's okay, to be different, to look different, to speak different…and you know i just i really compare my daughter's education to my own education…. it's just a very different philosophy here.” –mother. many families shared similar sentiments. caregivers who grew up with another language shared their own experiences and struggles with multilingualism. they also spoke about their satisfaction that their child received the opportunity to be multilingual, and in general believed the center provided a better education than they had access to because of the value of their multilingualism. "everything in this school is different than i was used to …it makes me wonder if i had this kind of experience, what kind of person would i be?” –mother the caregivers' appreciation for tiny seed’s support for multilingualism aligns with studies like surrain’s (2018), which found that families agreed being bilingual was an advantage that enhanced family connections and economic opportunity. we interpret these participants’ experiences as reflective of a collective disruption of the culture of power (delpit, 1988) that privileges monolingual, monomodal spoken “standardized” english as superior (cioè-peña, 2022). in contrast, this program provided their children with the opportunity to speak to various members of their families since some might be monolingual in the non-english language. the following caregiver quote illustrates how this was expressed by families: “ [...]está muy bien el programa exactamente porque les ha ayudado a comunicarse en dos idiomas.” one grandfather shared, describing what he considered tiny seeds to do well, i think it's successful in the fact that it lets kids express themselves. i only can compare to how i went to grade school, it was book learning mostly. you didn't get to express yourself. [...] the school [lets] them express themselves [...] even to dream. and even if their answers come out… patchwork. …as you grow, you know all those pieces come together. [...] playing and learning go together. you create….and…that helps your brain grow like a tree and its roots. this grandfather recognized the center’s approach to teaching children in a way that honors their full selves. and when he referenced answers coming out ‘patchwork,’ he spoke to what kaiser (2024) and wei (2011) refer to as the multimodality of translanguaging; children were provided the space to utilize their full meaning-making toolkit in order to expand their minds, engage with the world, and become their fullest selves. the concept of multicompetence 46 holistic multilingual early learning was embodied by the center, according to this grandfather; not only was the center affirming the use and identity/ies of named languages like spanish and english, but of the ways playing, learning, and creating are forms of legitimate languaging and expression that the center honors for both children and their families. principle 2: developing strong partnerships with linguistically diverse families that center explicitly on emergent bilingualism parents and caregivers expressed their views on how strong partnerships were developed between program staff and the children’s families. overall, the data sustains families’ recognition of administrators, teachers, and staff as strong partners. participants also spoke of a sense of familiarity and trust with tiny seeds, paired with a strong commitment to the program and pride in the growth they saw in their children. many caregivers indicated they felt that the school community was an extension of their own families. others shared that the center staff felt like a part of a team there to support not only their child, but also them as a family unit. a mother spoke of this partnership by saying, “they make sure to notify me. they try to work with me like, ok try this at home. let’s work together and that’s what i do.” caregivers also shared they felt everyone, from administrators to support personnel, took time to get to know their child and family. one father shared, “i feel so comfortable. i love all the teachers… there is not one person in this building that doesn’t know my daughter.” another mother said “i love it. i love coming here.” the fact that families and caregivers reported feeling comfortable, welcomed and seen at the school bolstered the home-school relationship. families felt they could come to the center staff for support and that their child’s needs were recognized and addressed. families also expressed a strong commitment to the school, partly grounded in the fact that some of their older offspring had also attended tiny seeds. the frequent word-of-mouth promotion of the program, mentioned by several caregivers, also speaks to connections outside the program that enable families to hear about tiny seeds from others in their social network. one caregiver, acknowledging the value of this kind of referrals, talked about the length they traveled to get to the school, recognizing that it was out of her way, but worth it. this mother was driving over forty five minutes each morning to drop off her child at tiny seeds. she shared, “me ha sido pesado. pero te digo, lo hago porque la escuela vale la pena.” families identified the school as a place that values children’s bilingualism. a number of families also opined that although the school was officially subsumed under the monolingual english ideology that governs us schooling (kroll & mendoza, 2022), it is challenging this language supremacy through the intentionality of their programs for multilingual students, including the dual language program and its embrace of the multiple cultural identities of the children and families who are a part of tiny seeds. the following quote exemplifies how one mother perceives the center is challenging institutionalized barriers and biases behind monolingual hegemonies: ¿pero si que se supone vinimos a américa y debemos hablar inglés, claro, no? por ejemplo, en el salón de moisés cantan el buenos días [en] inglés, [...] español, y [...] en mandarin, y en portugues tambien. es muy…. a mí se me hace súper padre, verdad? global education review 12 (2) 47 one teacher noted that the school is strengthened by family partnerships. families and educators at tiny seeds share a commitment to each child’s right to their own identity and language and to deliberately integrating children, family, and community members as linguistic models and resources into classroom practices (bloch, 2013). our analysis of interviews and focus groups with families and educators show that developing strong relationships with families is highly valued by program staff, as well as by families and caregivers. more importantly, our analysis of the transcriptions of these interviews and focus groups indicate that this is a principle that intentionally drives many of the program practices. principle 3: integration of families’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge into every aspect of the program, including its curricula. throughout the interviews, there were various examples of how families’ cultural and linguistic funds of knowledge were integrated into the program and curricula. there were clear connections between the school, program, and household. many families spoke to how their children came home and shared what they were learning or how they had noticed changes in their children, given everything they were learning at the school. a mother of a child with a disability shared, “me doy cuenta lo que le están enseñando, porque él llega a casa y quiere a su manera contarme lo que está haciendo.” during the interviews with families and caregivers, there were tears shed as individuals reflected on their own experiences and how different and beneficial the experiences of their children were. their child’s education at tiny seeds early childhood center impacted caregivers' own sense of identity development and reflexivity. as one mother who described herself as 1.5 generation (a first-generation immigrants who immigrated to the new country before or during their early teens) shared how she connected to her own identity through her child’s education at [school]: what does it mean to be mexican? what does it mean to be bilingual? you know the language is one aspect. but culturally what? what does it mean to be mexican? and how do i define that. and the fact that there is no one definition. if you feel mexican, you're mexican, right? this quote demonstrates how this mother realized through her child's participation in the program that no one else can dictate your own identity, but that it's a process of (re)claiming how you feel and who you are. the curriculum and teacher practices implemented were inclusion of a funds of knowledge approach (moll et al., 1992) that not only influences the children’s sense of self, but those of the families as many saw their cultural and linguistic practices centered for one of the first times. the caregivers indicated that the curriculum at the school impacted their own understandings of identity, and there was also evidence that this was a bidirectional relationship, with families’ identities, values, and strengths influencing the school in turn. a teacher shared strategies the school staff had been implementing to make sure they included all families, which included using interpreters or translators and sending all family invitations and letters in all the languages families use. she said, “we value all the families’ cultures.” this quote demonstrates how families' languages and identities are incorporated into logistical components like school documents and larger access concerns, like translations and interpretations at meetings. while this is not a 48 holistic multilingual early learning direct curricular collaboration, this is a crucial component of linguistic integration of families into the overall mechanics of the school. the center is integrating a culturally relevant pedagogy (ladson-billings, 1995) by intentionally and purposefully incorporating children’s culture and linguistic backgrounds in order to increase family engagement. tiny seeds administrators provided consensus regarding the importance of acknowledging, incorporating and sustaining the language and culture of the children and families. all administrators spoke to how their practices at the school were grounded in their understanding of the research and literature on this subject and their own professional and personal experiences. administrators described their journey to embracing multilingualism at the school as a dynamically evolving and expanding process driven by collaborative decision making regarding the program’s philosophy and practices on multilingualism. this involved strong communication among all stakeholders (administrators, teachers, staff, families); and by approaching conflict, confusion, or dissent as an opportunity for growth. the intersection of emergent bilingualism and inclusive education was a theme that signaled a focus on holistic growth. tiny seeds as a program challenges the notion that disability and language are separate from cultural considerations in curriculum. the mother of a child in the dual language program who has an individualized education program shared, “...a mi me recomendaron mucho desde que ella empezó. pues que miren, [...] la importancia del programa dual, para mi es que ella tenga una oportunidad de crecer con dos idiomas [...].” parents and caregivers of children with disabilities shared their perspectives on their children’s learning growth through both the dual language and reggio-inspired structure of the center. they indicated appreciation for the supportive environment for children with ieps and their learning needs, particularly citing the extensive spanish language growth that they saw for their children. in addition, many families spoke about the growth they had noticed in their child throughout their time at tiny seeds. it was not just about academics, but many caregivers spoke about the social and emotional growth in each of their children. one mother shared, “si la ha hecho más independiente,” when speaking about her child. many families were impressed with the level of growth their child had been able to attain in such a short time. this growth has been impressive for caregivers but also led to some concerns knowing that for kindergarten their child will have to go to a vastly different school– most likely a school without dual language instruction and definitely no reggio emilia. tiny seeds’ attention to intersections like disability and language, as well as their focus on the whole child, challenges policies and practices that move us away from holistic early learning. discussion while we presented the principles individually in the findings section, it is important to recognize that these principles interrelate; the principles are addressed across intersecting data points. we aim to demonstrate how all of these principles work together to provide a rich educational experience for multilingual children. across the different sources of data from administrators, teachers, and caregivers, the identities and cultures of the children and their families were seen as integral to the successful implementation of tiny seeds’ global education review 12 (2) 49 early childhood education program. the data highlights the importance of acknowledging and supporting the cultural and linguistic identities the children and families bring to the program. the building of trust and partnership between the program and its personnel and the families emerged as a prominent topic, in alignment with trends in the field (usdhhs & usdoe, 2016; barnett et al, 2016; national academy of science, engineering, and medicine, 2017; office of head start, n.d.). the importance of developing and sustaining trusting and collaborative partnerships among families, teachers, and administrators was frequently illustrated by participants. these examples indicate the ways in which tiny seeds diverges from many of the hegemonic constructions about sociocultural identity and language that dominate the early childhood landscape (housel, 2020; soutomanning& rabadi-raol 2018). similarly, the intentional incorporation of the families’ funds of knowledge into the curricula and other aspects of the program solidifies the collaborative nature of the relationship between program and caregivers. the previously presented data demonstrated how the strength of the tiny seeds early childhood center is grounded in the relationships across the families, teachers and administrators. across these three groups, we consistently heard how they worked together to address needs of the children, while capitalizing on the individual and collective assets of families. research has demonstrated the importance of having these strong partnerships with families (bergroth & palviainen 2020). the current hegemonic ece that continues to center white eurocentric ideologies and practices must be problematized. as demonstrated through this research, the majority of latine families at tiny seeds disrupted what many might view as “typical” family engagement and relationships. they noted that centering the cultural practices and funds of knowledge of families could benefit children’s overall success in schooling. this disruption to hegemony was also demonstrated by families when they reflected on their own educational experiences in comparison to those of their children. families recognized that they needed to reject the pervasive idea that they needed to give up their home language and focus only on their english development. the growth they were seeing in their children at tiny seeds early childhood center demonstrated to families that multilingualism would be of great benefit for their children. we also saw this disruption with families who had children with ieps, which made up 50 percent of the school population. families had previously been told how their child with identified disabilities should not be in any sort of bilingual program because it would cause confusion for the child; they were told instead that their child should be placed in a monolingual setting to ensure they received the services they needed. this idea was disrupted by tiny seeds early childhood center as they demonstrated how children with ieps can still receive services and have their needs met without having to give up their home language(s). one of the ways that tiny seeds early childhood center succeeds in challenging authoritarianism in ece is found in its intersections of the reggio emilia approach, multimodal pedagogy, and philosophy of multilingualism. situated at these intersections, tiny seeds disrupts traditional notions of what ‘counts’ as quality learning in early childhood and turns towards holistic learning that honors and encourages children’s interests and identities as integral parts of the learning 50 holistic multilingual early learning process. building on the reggio foundation of ‘the hundred languages’ (vecchi, 2010), tiny seeds reconceptualizes language beyond words, towards “a meaning-making process for individuals and groups” (yu & reyes, 2023, p. 33). early childhood education is often dismissed as being all play and no ‘real’ learning; tiny seeds disrupts the binary between play and learning. through exploration of nature, the learning environment, peer engagement, use of multiple named languages and forms of expression (including, but not limited to body language, sensory engagement, drawing and painting, etc.), tiny seeds not only led children to more traditional metrics of academic success, but also nurtured a love of learning, a deep curiosity, and a multi-faceted engagement with themselves and the world around them. implications there are many implications for administrators and educators from the research presented here. the research presented demonstrates the importance of intentionality as a requirement to enact these principles. none of the principles happened without explicit decisions being made by the administrators, educators, and families to work together to prioritize bilingualism, build partnerships that were reciprocal and not unidirectional, and use partnerships to learn together by integrating families’ cultural and linguistic practices into the curricula. the principles presented here can be used by any administrators and educators that serve the needs of multilingual children to meet the needs of both the children and families and provide an experience of belonging. it is important to acknowledge that the transformative, affirming community of tiny seeds is, unfortunately, in many ways a selfcontained bubble. as many caregivers lamented, there is no continuum after children age out of the program, and they wish there were continuations or extensions of the program– including its structure, values, and approach to learning–when children enter the k-5 pipeline. extensions of this type of programming would encourage the sustaining of multilingualism, as well as community-oriented learning, in older grade levels in the way that it happens here. unfortunately, part of the challenge with extending and sustaining programs like this one across early childhood and elementary childhood is the undervaluation of early childhood education in k-12 discourses and the lack of understanding of this developmental stage as foundational for bilingualism and biliteracy. we argue that the principles and practices described by tiny seeds’ administrators, teachers, and families represent a defiant and functional challenge to the u.s. language policies, ambivalent at best and oppressive and authoritarian at worst. participants' voices describe the validation of the cultures and languages of the children and families attending tiny seeds; the program challenges prevalent hegemonies that favor the majority language over other languages used in the home. in addition, the data from our case study of tiny seeds indicates that administrators, educators, and families are collaboratively disrupting existing power differentials between the majority culture and language and the cultures and languages present in the program, which are arguably representative of the linguistic and cultural diversity that characterizes the u.s. today. global education review 12 (2) 51 references alfaro, c., & bartolomé, l. 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(2021). supporting multilingual development in early childhood education: a scoping review. international journal of educational research, 110, 101894. conceptualizations of children in persian 5 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: hosseini, seyed mohammad & talaee, ebrahim (2025). a corpus-based study of the conceptualizations of childhood in the iranian culture and their implications for early childhood education. global education review, 12 (1), 5-26. a corpus-based study of the conceptualizations of childhood in the iranian culture and their implications for early childhood education seyed mohammad hosseini arak university (iran) ebrahim talaee tarbiat modares university (iran) abstract this study investigates the conceptualizations of childhood in the iranian culture through a linguistic analysis of three persian lexical items for a child (bache, kudak, tefl) and their implications for early childhood education (ece). employing a corpus-based approach supplemented with ethnographic insights, the study investigates how the persian speaking members of the iranian culture understand childhood as a cognitive cultural concept. the findings highlight a divergence between traditional and modern conceptualizations of children, where a traditional, socially determined, non-chronological definition coexists with an age-based definition. it is shown that the concept of ‘evil’ child as understood in western societies is absent in the iranian culture. diverse cultural conceptualizations of childhood are identified, including children as a source of joy, playful and mischievous, innocent and vulnerable, naïve and simple-minded, compliant subordinates and, in some cases, out-of-control beings, who also attempt to negotiate their agency. the study highlights the heterogeneity of iranians’ conceptualizations of childhood that are shaped by ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity. this heterogeneity has direct and vicarious implications for ece, which highlight both the role of parents and educators in dealing with children and educational materials. keywords child, childhood, cultural conceptualization, iranian culture, persian, ece 1. introduction in recent decades, there has been considerable debate regarding the various ways children and childhood are conceptualized. these differing perspectives lead to conflicting views on what it means to be a child (james, jenks, & prout, 1998; mayall, 2002; qvortrup, 1994). these perspectives influence not only societal attitudes and beliefs about the role of children but also the educational practices closely connected to their everyday lives. moreover, it is generally believed that early experiences have an enduring impact on an individual’s later life. people’s early experiences are shaped by their caregivers’ and significant others’ perceptions and conceptualizations of what a child is and should be. these perceptions and conceptualizations may appear to be individual, formed in a person’s mind based on their personal experiences. however, research into conceptualizations has shown that many are culturally shared due to common experiences conceptualizations of children in persian 26 within the same community (e.g., sharifian, 2017; quinn & holland, 1987). despite the resurgence of studies on childhood concepts in western culture over the past 30 years, most previous research on the concept of the child has focused on western culture and the english-speaking world (james & james, 2008, among others), with scant research on non-english-speaking communities. this research attempts to fill this gap by focusing on the conceptualizations of the ‘child’ and childhood through a linguistic analysis of the polysemy of words denoting a child in a noneuropean culture, namely, the persian-speaking members of the iranian culture. it is assumed that lexical items and expressions in a language provide insights into the cultural cognition of a people, much of which is shared and perpetuated among members of a cultural group, often beneath their level of consciousness. by focusing on the uses of the words denoting a child in persian in a large corpus of chiefly novels and autobiographies, as well as spoken persian, the authors aim to explore emic, folk understandings of children and childhood among the persian speaking members of the iranian culture, rather than etic, theory-oriented understandings based on some pre-conceptions and pre-fabricated categories. in the following paragraphs, first, a brief review will be provided in section 2 of the conceptualizations of the child and childhood in sociology. then, we will briefly explore the field of cultural linguistics and the concept of cognitive cultural conceptualizations. next, the main persian words for the concept of the child will be introduced in section 4. after describing the methodology in section 5, section 6 will present the findings and analyze the conceptualizations of the child and childhood. section 7 will discuss the implications of the multiplicity of conceptualizations for early childhood education. finally, section 8 will conclude the paper. 2. sociological theories of childhood over the past few decades, the study of children and childhood has gained momentum in various disciplines including psychology, sociology, anthropology and cultural studies (gittins, 1998; montgomery, 2009; kehily, 2015; corsaro, 2018; allerton, 2023; among others), resulting in new understandings of childhood. a classical dichotomy in the conceptualization of children has been the distinction between the ‘evil child’ and the ‘innocent child.’ the evil child concept originated from the 16th-century puritan belief that all children are the product of the original sin by adam and eve and the result of a sinful relationship between parents (jenks, 2005; james & james, 2012). a corollary to seeing children as inherently evil by nature was that they needed moral supervision and were subjected to harsh and strict discipline with corporal punishment as a necessary requirement so that the evil would be beaten out of them, and they could turn into decent and virtuous adults. the concept of the innocent child was raised by rousseau in his groundbreaking book emile to counter the evil child concept (james & james, 2012). as innocent beings, children are assumed to be blank slates or tabula rasa, incompetent and ready to be educated into competent adults. in this view, the child is conceptualized as essentially passive recipient of education, acquiring skills and knowledge to become a competent adult. a common consequence of the above concepts is that a child is visualized as an ignorant and incompetent being that needs supervision or protection to turn into a good or a competent adult human being. in these views, adults conceptualize children “in a forwardlooking way,” envisioning them as “future adults 25 global education review 12 (1) with a place in the social order and contributions to make to it” (corsaro, 2018). research in sociological theory has shifted attentions from the dichotomy of innocent and evil child to “the diversity of children’s experiences” (james, 2007; norozi & moen, 2016; kehily, 2015). it has been shown that “biological immaturity is a fact of ‘childhood’; innocence is a socially constructed phenomenon (james & prout, 1990, cited in woodrow, 1999). children are seen as active agents in their social environments, with the ability to shape their world in a number of ways by reflecting on their environment and their position with respect to other actors, other children and adults, within it (james, 2007). in the constructionist view, children are constituted within socially and historically situated discourse. according to jenks (2005, p. 29) child is “a status of person which is comprised through a series of, often heterogeneous, images, representations, codes and constructs.” in line with the diversity of conceptualizations and experiences of child and childhood, woodrow (1999) explores the three major frames: child as innocent (the dominant frame), as threat, and as embryo adult. sorin (2005) identifies ten constructs in the literature on childhood, namely, the innocent child, the evil child, the child as adult-in-training, the miniature adult, as well as the noble/savior child, the snowballing child, the out-of-control child, the child as commodity, the child as victim, and the agentic child. in this research, we attempted to identify the conceptualizations of the child in persian through the study of a number of lexemes as cognitive cultural concepts. section 3 will briefly explore our understanding of cognitive cultural conceptualizations. 3. cognitive cultural conceptualizations following cultural linguistics (sharifian 2008, 2017), we assume that lexical items and linguistic expressions in any language offer insights into the collective cultural cognition of a community. by cultural cognition is meant “a multidisciplinary understanding of cognition that moves beyond the level of the individual mind.” cultural cognition “comes about as a result of social and linguistic interactions between individuals across time and space” (sharifian 2017, p. 3). it is a form of distributed cognition in the sense that cognition is not just situated within an individual's mind but is distributed across objects, artifacts and other individuals in the environment. cultural conceptualizations are not uniformly imprinted in the minds of individuals within a cultural group but are “heterogeneously distributed across the minds of a cultural group”, i.e., they are shared and represented across multiple minds within that group in varying degrees (sharifian, 2011, p. 8). with their polysemy and as cultural conceptualizations, words and linguistic expressions contain knowledge produced over generations of people. in this sense, the concept of ‘child’ and words referring to the child are emergent schemas that "result from the interactions between the members of a cultural group across time and space” and are ‘heterogeneously distributed’ in the sense that there are variations between individuals in how they conceptualize them (sharifian, 2017). this view of language is in line with the social constructionist perspectives on language where language and culture are viewed as deeply interconnected, with language serving as both a medium and outcome of sociocultural processes (see berger and luckmann, 1966). in the social constructionist view, ‘child’ is a socially constructed concept that is heterogeneous (jenks, 2005; among others), as is the case in cultural linguistics with any cultural concept conceptualizations of children in persian 26 embodied through words and linguistic expressions. 4. on persian words for ‘child’ in persian, the official and historically dominant language in iran, there are a number of lexical items that denote a child or stages in childhood. the most common words that refer to a child in persian are bache (‘a’ is pronounced as in ‘bag’, ‘ch’ as in ‘church’, and ‘e’ as in the vowel in ‘bed’), kudak (with u pronounced as the vowel in ‘root’), and less frequently tefl. below is a brief description of the etymology, meaning and the most common compounds and collocates of each: bache ‘a child,’ ‘an infant,’ ‘a kid’. etymologically of an indo-european origin attested in middle persian (since around the 3rd century bce to 9th century a.d.) (hassandoust, 2014); in current usage, it refers to the offspring of both humans and animals. it is the one used most widely both in spoken and written persian and in various contexts. some of its compounds are bachedozdi ‘kidnap’ (lit. ‘child-theft’), bachebāzi ‘child molestation’, ‘pedophilia’ (lit. ‘child-play’), bachedusti ‘love of children’, ‘being kind to children’ (lit. ‘child-liking’), bache nane ‘crybaby’ (lit. ‘child-mother’ or ‘mummy’s child’). the opposite of bache is bozorg (“[adj] 1. big, large 2. grand 3. great 4. major 5. grown-up, adult 6. [n] a chief, an elder 7. an important person, a vip” (emami, 2006). kudak ‘a child,’ ‘an infant,’ also has an indo-european origin meaning ‘little,’ ‘small’ and ‘young one.’ in avestan and old persian (before 300 bce), as well as in middle persian, it referred to human children as well as some animals’ young ones (hassandoust, 2014). in contemporary usage, its meaning is restricted to the ‘human child’ only. it is defined in the dictionary as “human offspring till the age of puberty/maturity” (anvari, 2002), and is used in compounds such as kudakāzāri ‘child abuse’ (lit. ‘child harassment’), kudak hamsari, roughly ‘child marriage’ (lit. ‘child spouseness’), kudakyāri ‘professional babysitting’ (lit. ‘child assistance’), kāre kudakān ‘child labor’ and kudake kār ‘working child’ (lit. ‘child of work’), and hoghughe kudakān ‘children’s rights’-all denoting modern ideas about children. the equivalent of kindergarten in persian is kudakestān which literally means ‘children’s place’. kudak is mainly limited to spoken and written styles suitable for formal situations. this implies that although every speaker of persian knows and understands kudak, it is unlikely to be part of the active vocabulary of an illiterate or lowly educated person. the opposite of kudak is bozorgsāl “adult, grown-up” (lit. ‘big year’). tefl ‘a child’ is a word of arabic origin meaning “a child before puberty age” (dehkhoda, 1998). tefl is limited in usage and has little or no productivity in the sense that rarely any new words can be made with it. only three forms of it have been used in persian, namely tefl, atfāl ‘children’ and tofuliyat ‘childhood period’. its most common collocates in modern persian are tefle masoom ‘innocent child’, tebe atfāl ‘children’s medicine’, motekhasese atfāl ‘pediatrician’, falaje atfāl ‘polio’, and dādgāhe atfāl ‘children’s court.’ there is a series of other words denoting a child including farzand (‘a child,’ ‘a son or a daughter,’ ‘an offspring’), and owlād ‘children,’ ‘offspring,’ both defining a child in relation to parents. to give a taste of how some of these words are understood by native speakers, we offer some examples. in persian, it is ok to say “i have 3 baches/farzands” but not “i have 3 kudaks”. one may hear “three kudaks/baches are playing in the yard” but not “three farzands are playing in the yard”. in none of these 25 global education review 12 (1) sentences can tefl be used in modern standard persian. there are other words that refer to different stages of childhood such as nowzād ‘infant’ (lit. now, pronounced like english ‘no’ meaning ‘new’, ‘fresh’ plus zād, ‘born’), nowpā ‘toddler’ (lit. now plus pā ‘foot’, ‘leg’), khordsāl, with kh pronounced like ‘ch’ in the scottish loch, meaning ‘a little boy or girl’ (lit. khord ‘small’, ‘little’, plus sāl ‘year’), nownahāl ‘a young boy or girl’ (lit. now plus nahāl ‘sapling’, ‘a young tree ready for planting’), nowjavān ‘adolescent, teenage, teen’ (lit. now plus javān ‘young,’ ‘youth,’ ‘juvenile’) and javān ‘young,’ ‘youth.’ as mentioned previously, of all these terms, the most general is bache, followed by kudak and tefl which will be the focus of this research. javān is also very general but it covers years way beyond childhood as conventionally understood. 5. methodology the data for this research were collected from the corpus of persian constructed by the academy of persian language and literature at http://dadegan.apll.ir. the corpus consists of all poetry and many prose texts written in persian since the 10th century a.d. we limited the scope of our searches for words equivalent to ‘child’ to untranslated prose texts originally produced in persian over the past one hundred years, i.e., since 1921, the beginning of the 14th century in iranian calendar. the extracted tokens were mostly from novels and autobiographies and, in a few cases, newspaper articles and film scripts. a potential critique is that because the majority of tokens are from novels, the situations are constructed and inauthentic. however, we argue that although a novelist often creates fictional characters in fictional worlds, and the language of literature is representational, “representation is a strongly conventionalized process upon which the medium … exerts some restricting influences” (fowler, 1977: 71). one restriction on the literary content is that it “is made out of a conventional stock of processes, roles and semantic features … deriving … from the structure of the institutions and preoccupations of particular societies” (p. 72). in other words, literary writers, if they want their work to be appreciated, ought to commit themselves to the ideological and the discourse norms and conventions of the particular society for which they write. as a result, dialogs and characterization in fiction are shaped by and reflect the norms of language use in everyday real situations (short, 1996; culpeper, 2001). thus, albeit the data for this research are largely based on tokens of the use of the selected concepts in novels and autobiographies, we can safely assume that they are representations of conventional understandings of these concepts in the persian speaking communities in iran. we also argue that the selection of a corpus of this sort provides us with an advantage, because in no other means of data collection, such as sociological interviews or questionnaires, can the selected words be examined in a wide range of contexts and situations because the novels included characters from a variety of social groups and classes in a large number of contexts. this variety of contexts is also appropriate for a more comprehensive understanding of the diverse cultural conceptualizations that are both emergent and distributed across the minds of individuals (sharifian 2008, 2011, 2017). the words bache and kudak and their adjectival and adverbial derivatives bachegāne and kudakāne, as well as the word tefl were searched in the corpus. the tokens with only referential value, i.e., ones that identified a person or persons in the context with no further associations, were excluded. all the other tokens were scrutinized for their associative, nonreferential meanings in the context. the corpus conceptualizations of children in persian 26 presents every token in at least one full sentence and cites the source and page numbers. in many cases, the original source was consulted to obtain further contextual information. on various occasions, the selected words described adults or adult behavior. these cases were best for uncovering hidden ideologies about children, some of which may even be denied if explicitly pointed out. over 330 instances of the use of bache and bachegāne, out of a total of about 3,500 tokens, and more than 150 instances of kudak and kudakāne out of a total of about 1,400 tokens were semantically and pragmatically analyzed, using both the linguistic co-text and the wider discourse context. a number of tokens containing the selected words in daily interactions among native speakers were also used to supplement the selected corpus. as natives to the persian language brought up in iran, the authors also drew on their cultural insider knowledge to provide a more nuanced description. based on this type of knowledge, we can claim that all the examples in the corpus represented possible situations in modern iran, and albeit some may sound more popular and some marginalized and old-fashioned, they all represent existing ideologies and conceptualizations by at least some members of the culture. section 6 presents and discusses the findings in a classified manner. 6. analysis and discussion 6.1 defining a child in the iranian culture: the word kudak mainly denotes an individual below puberty age. however, bache is more complicated. this difference is also reflected in their definitions as shown in section 4: while the opposite of bache is bozorg ‘big,’ ‘large,’ ‘elder,’ ‘grownup,’ and ‘adult,’ the opposite of kudak is bozorgsāl that has ‘sāl,’ the word for ‘year,’ in it. an important factor other than chronological age in categorizing someone as a bache is physique in the sense of general body size and strength. in the following extract, after mamadu, a 16-year-old boy, has physically assaulted ghadam in a local teahouse, others urge her to forgive mamadu because ‘he’s a child.’ ghadam rejects the idea referring to mamadu’s physical strength: (1)“anvar mashadi places his cup before ghadam and says: ‘forgive him. he’s a child [bache]! ghadam’s eyes widened: ‘is he a child [bache]? i’m 40 and he has a stronger physique than me.’” in (2) the mere reference to size shows the implicit expectation that size counts in labelling someone a child or an adult: (2) “we were both as tall as big people [ādam bozorghā, i.e., adults] but were children [bache] anyway.” after having made a mistake about love, the 13-year-old narrator describes himself and his beloved, a girl of 14, as children ‘bache’ despite their height, which indicates the greater significance of the ability to make the right decision than simply height in describing somebody as an adult. moreover, any young or middle-aged person may be labeled a child, depending on the context and in relation to others, witness the following extract from a conversation in a novel: (3) “she said: ‘i want to name him enāyatollāh’. i laughed out loud. a little child [bache] and such a long name! mum hurriedly said: ‘stop it! stop the playing. it’s not a children’s game [bachebāzi]. normally elders choose a child’s [bache] name.’” here the parents of a newborn baby are considered children/bache simply because they are going to select their baby’s name. until a few 25 global education review 12 (1) decades ago, and still so in some small towns and families with a more traditional structure, selecting a newborn’s name was the prerogative of grandparents. even in large cities where young parents are free to select their children’s names, they are expected to consult their (grand)parents as a gesture of respect, which in turn shows they are competent adults. in (3), the young parents in their 20s, are labeled “children” because they are not mature enough to show respect for the tradition, which in turn implies that having developed the competence to act in society in conformity with traditional values is sometimes considered a rite of passage into adulthood. similarly, a chronological child may be labeled a grownup based on manners and how they handle difficult situations. in other words, the shift from childhood to adulthood may sometimes be a sudden shift that comes about with a significant event in one’s life such as marriage or the death of a major caregiver, primarily a parent, regardless of chronological age, as in the following examples: (4) “sohrab cried. kamran’s aunt whispered: it seems as if he has grown 10 years bigger [i.e., older] since his father’s death.” (5) i saw her in a strange condition: you see a girl who has painted her fingers with ink, her knees are dirty, who boisterously runs about chasing boys. and then, suddenly she’s not a child [bache] anymore; the feeling in her eyes changes, her walking style changes—she can’t live without love. the curve in her eyes show this. in (4), sohrab, an early teenager whose father has passed away recently and he has been forced to endure both the sorrow of his loss and some of his late father’s responsibilities is described as ‘big’ or grownup. the description as ‘bigger’ (bozorg) does not imply older (in which case the word pir ‘old’ would be more appropriate); rather, it implies the transition from a carefree child into someone carrying responsibilities, who shows the self-restraint and wisdom expected of adults. excerpt (5), describing a girl of 14, indicates that the experience of love may also transform a child into an adult. a child is defined in article 1 of the un convention on the rights of the child (uncrc) (1989) as “every human being below the age of eighteen years unless under the law applicable to the child, majority is attained earlier.” in the iranian culture, however, no particular age is defined as the limit of childhood. there is only a puberty/maturity age: the persian word for ‘puberty’ is bolugh, borrowed from arabic, which also means ‘maturity.’ the two are separated by the collocations bolughe jesmi ‘physical maturity’, i.e., puberty’ and bolughe aghli ‘intellectual maturity.’ bolugh is defined according to sharia law according to chronological age, which is 9 (or 13 for some modernist religious leaders) for girls and 15 for boys, at which age they will be responsible for performing religious duties such as daily prayers and fasting during ramadan. this religious perspective is reflected in iran’s civil law where in the first note of article 1210, bolugh age is defined as 15 and 9 lunar years for boys and girls, respectively. the legal marriageability age is defined as 13 in article 1041 of the same law but marriage of someone above 9 is allowed with the father’s permission only, and in cases of dispute, a judge’s verdict on the intellectual maturity of the girl should be sought. surprisingly, conventionally, the age for many economic and political acts requiring sound judgment and responsibility is 18. a person under 18 cannot sign contracts, have an conceptualizations of children in persian 26 independent bank account, vote in public elections and is not allowed to own property or drive. the discrepancy between the religious and legal institutions, on the one hand, and the modern institutions influenced by international laws, on the other hand, shows itself in public discourse, and sometimes disputes, concerning ‘child marriage,’ ‘child execution,’ and ‘child labor’: while the legal system follows a local definition based on perceptions of maturity, the modernist children’s rights activists insist on a definition based on chronological age, as in the uncrc. in summary, it appears that in islamic sharia laws, someone below puberty age is generally known as a child but other factors such as manners, the way a person behaves in the face of difficulties, including demonstrating maturity in one’s choices as well as physique have a significant impact in real situational contexts on describing someone as a child or an adult. in other words, childhood is socially constructed and situationally negotiated. in persian, this is more true of bache, which is the more common one in everyday discourse, and less of kudak, which is more about chronological age and is more, but not exclusively, used in academic and bureaucratic discourse on children and childhood. this non-chronological definition of ‘child’ in the iranian culture and the emphasis on intellectual maturity challenges the universalist definitions of childhood based solely on chronological age and lends support to perspectives that advocate a social constructionist view that focuses on historical and cultural variations (e.g., james and prout, 1997; gittins, 1998; montgomery, 2009). the confusion over the non-age-based, traditional and the age-based, universalist definitions is reflected in, and is the locus of, an ongoing discursive and political conflict in the iranian culture between tradition and western style modernity (see adelkhah, 1999 for the complexities of modernity in iran). in sections 6.2 to 6.14, we will present the varied conceptualizations associated with child and childhood based on our corpus. we will use the word ‘child’ as a general term to refer to both bache and kudak, as well as tefl. however, the original persian words will be added in parentheses or after a slash mark in the translations and where differences are important. 6.2 child as the source of light, love, joy and happiness: children, especially newborns, are generally thought of positively in the iranian culture. when someone is pregnant or has recently had a baby, people would say ‘may light be in your eyes’ as a cliché form of congratulation. until recently, and still in many families, not having a child was equated with unhappiness because a child is considered the source of light in the household and cause of happiness of an individual or a family, as in the following comments: (6) “anyone who hasn’t had a child [bache], who can’t have one, their house is dark (i.e., gloomy) and desolate.” (7) “āmirzā abdozzaki didn’t have a child [bache] and that was an incurable pain.” (8) “you don’t understand it now. hopefully, when you die for your child [bache] [i.e., when you love your child], i’ll remind you of today. boy, life without a child [bache] is like hell.” in these examples, a child is described as ‘light,’ and ‘delight’ and a childless life is described as ‘gloomy and desolate,’ ‘incurable pain, and ‘hell.’ in other expressions in the corpus, a child was described as “happiness,” “light in the eyes,” 25 global education review 12 (1) “god’s bounty,” “one’s survival” both in marriage and the continuation of life and “seal of love”, i.e., creating love between husband and wife. thus, one of the most widespread, though not uncontested (see 6.10), conceptualizations of a child in the iranian culture is that a child is a precious being, god’s bounty, that brings joy and happiness to parents’ and the extended family’s life, strengthens marital love, and helps the survival of the family. 6.3 child as a lovely, joyful, curious and energetic being: perhaps the reason why children are seen as a source of joy in the family, other than being god’s bounty, is that they are frequently envisioned as joyful and lovely creatures with inexhaustible energy and natural curiosity as in (9) to (11): (9) you don’t want children [bache]! that’s a lie.… children are lovely. what do you mean i don’t want one? (10) “childhood [kudakāne] curiosity impelled me sometimes to open it and read it in the absence of my uncle”. (11) “i was a child [bache], and full of energy, like any other child [bache].” the collocation “childhood/kudakāne curiosity” in (10) implies that curiosity is a natural characteristic of children. in still other examples from the corpus, not presented for space limitations, children are described as “blissful,” “gleeful,” “delightful,” “joyful,” “excited,” “ingenious,” and “imaginative” almost all with kudak rather than bache. in many instances, the joyfulness of childhood is contrasted with the pains and sorrows of adulthood as in (12): (12) “boys get old. pains replace the childhood [kudakāneh] joys in their faces and then they die.” these uses conceptualize childhood as a period of freedom from responsibility as well (see 6.7). 6.4 playful/mischievous child: children’s playfulness is sometimes referred to as sheytanat literally ‘deviltry’, which derives from the word sheytān (‘satan’ or ‘the devil’). a mischievous child may be described as bacheye sheytun, the spoken pronunciation of sheytān. this may trigger the “evil child’ conceptualization for some people. however, no relation was found in our data between the devil or satan and the word sheytanat. sheytanat is often used in relation to children to mean ‘mild mischief,’ ‘naughtiness,’ ‘pranks,’ ‘playfulness’ or ‘playful tricks’ mostly with a positive overtone, and collocates with the persian equivalents of ‘freshness’ and ‘vigor,’ joyfulness, curiosity, frolicsomeness and esprit as in (13) to (15): (13) “children [bache] immediately go on with their sheytanat [naughtiness] and playing. their group is generally full of warmth and happiness. it’s as if they’re always partying.” (14) “the children [bache] had gone to the bags and were inspecting them out of sheytanat [‘childhood curiosity or playfulness’], betting on their ability to guess at the contents by simply looking at the outside appearances.” (15) “‘well, dearest khātun, he’s a child [bache] and sheytun [naughty/playful]. he’ll bother you and will disturb your convenience’, said golchehreh. “‘what is all this nonsense talk! a child [bache] has to play, has to be free. the hustle and bustle of innocent and conceptualizations of children in persian 26 simple-hearted children [bache] gives one deep joy and happiness’, replied nāzkhātun.” the idea of sheytanat, since it is often treated lightly and tolerated by adults as in (15), is in line with the conceptualization of children as source of happiness and lovely and joyful beings, and constructs childhood as a period of exploration and learning, testing the limits of society, and defying authority whether in the family or at school. this will give them a degree of freedom to act against the rules though only to a degree that the adult will permit. going beyond the limits may activate the tokhs ‘out-ofcontrol’ (section 6.11) conceptualization. 6.5 carefree child: children are considered not liable or responsible for their conduct as in the following excerpt where the concept of freedom from responsibility is explicitly referred to: (16) “what can be done to a playful child [bache]? he’s a child [bache]. what can be done to a child [bache] who has used a matchstick to set a house on fire out of playfulness or curiosity?” this freedom from responsibility is seen as a significant element of contrast between a child and an adult as documented in (17): (17) i feel unsettled, especially because i’m not a child [bache] any longer, not in the eyes of others, and cannot wander around in the alleys like i used to. in (17) it is the beginning of summer holidays and the speaker, 17 or 18, has completed his senior high school. he considers himself a child in the sense of wanting to be carefree but is aware that people expect him to act responsibly, i.e., be an adult. in other words, and as seen in the social definition of childhood in section 5.1, preparedness to shoulder responsibilities seems to be the rite of passage into adulthood. there were several nostalgic comments in the corpus where adults longed to return to the carefree childhood paradise. 6.6 innocent child: in the corpus of the present study, the concept of the 'evil child' in the sense of a being who is "a product of their parents’ intimacy, who must have the evil beaten out and replaced by good" (sorin, 2005) had no equivalent and was absent. on the contrary, infants are believed to be clean and pure at birth in both pre-islamic zoroastrianism and in islam and, therefore, ‘innocent’ because their mind is believed to be a tabula rasa or a clean slate until the age of puberty when they are expected to have been equipped with the toolkit to distinguish between good and evil, from which time they will be considered liable for their speech and conduct. before that age, people are advised to be careful about what they say and do before children: (18) “the child’s [bache’s] mind was like a clean slate, susceptible to any design. they had to be more careful.” in (18), the narrator has narrated a situation where philosophical thoughts and ideas about a spiritual cult have been spoken to a 9-year-old girl who is deeply affected, although she does not understand them. seeing a child’s mind as a tabula rasa has significant implications in practices of socialization and education, one of which is that it will make them moldable as in (19) quoted from a book in the corpus by samad behrangi (1939-1967), a teacher, author and one of the first social activists writing about the education of children back in the 1960s: 25 global education review 12 (1) (19) “the gist of the matter […] is that a child [bache] should be given a precise worldview.” viewing children’s minds as clean slates will also make their minds pure and free from evil as in the following extract: (20) “i answered all the questions as much as my knowledge allowed with children’s [kudakāne] cleanness of heart.” “children’s cleanness of heart” in (20) implicates truthfulness with no intentional deception in mind. there is a popular aphorism in persian that says: “hear the truth from a child,” implying that children are honest and more reliable in a situation where the truth is likely to be concealed by adults. the words for innocent1 in persian are the arabic masoom ‘guiltless,’ ‘innocent,’ and ‘immaculate’ (emami, 2006) and the persian bigonāh ‘without guilt/sin.’ in our corpus, tefl and kudak, but less so for bache, collocate with the adjective masoom. however, ‘innocent’ is used in describing children in a number of contexts with little to do with innocence in its religious sense. for instance, in (21) a boy is invited to attach a charm that dispels evil eyes to the abdomen of a pregnant woman beneath her dress, which will expose him to her private body parts: (21) because i was an innocent seyed child [bache] who, unlike today’s children [bache], was quite cheshm-ogush baste [naïve/ignorant, lit. ‘eyeand-ear closed’], they forced me to attach it [i.e., the charm] to her belly 1 etymologically, the english ‘innocent’ means ‘not knowing’, ‘ignorant’ or ‘silly’, but masoom in from beneath her dress as a sign of good omen. he is described as a bache seyed, a descendant of the prophet muhammad, that will make him, in popular belief, less likely to have evil intentions, and cheshm-o-gush baste ‘lacking knowledge of the ways of the world’ (lit. ‘eyeand-ear closed’) to imply that the boy is ignorant of intimate body parts and relations and, in popular and religious jargon, has not yet become momayez (lit. ‘able to distinguish’), i.e., not reached the age of puberty and unfamiliar with sexual matters, as well as unable to distinguish right and wrong. thus, innocent in this context means ‘unaware of sex and sex organs,’ implying that conscious knowledge about sex organs will taint the child’s mind. it is partly this conceptualization that was behind the resistance against approving and applying the unesco’s education 2030 document (i.e., incheon declaration and framework for action) in iranian educational system because of its advocacy of sexual education, which will prematurely open children’s eyes and ears, something that has turned into another locus of political and discursive disputes between traditionalist and modernist forces in the country. in (22) simple-mindedness is placed against slyness and deceptiveness: (22) i looked at him. i couldn’t know him. i didn’t know if he was simple or clever. sometimes he was as simple and innocent as a little boy, and sometimes sly and secretive. innocence of a child in this context is understood as unsophisticatedness, simplicity persian is an arabic borrowing that means ‘infallible’, ‘unable to sin’ or ‘guiltless’. conceptualizations of children in persian 26 and freedom from deception and trickery, which is associated with their purity of heart. in most other contexts, however, innocent/masoom collocates with tefl, and is used where a child has been helpless, vulnerable and unprotected, or treated unfairly as in (23) to (26): (23) “the innocent child [tefl] is probably missing his mother; he’s probably missing his father.” (24) “innocent child [tefl]! you don’t know that your mother is of noble birth and considers it beneath her to touch your nose to help you blow it. it’s the duty of servants.” (25) “what guilt has this little, innocent, tongue-tied child [tefl] committed that nobody knows who her black eyes and black hair have taken after!” (26) “the innocent girl, we brought so many accusations against her, but she is too innocent and too clean to be capable of wrongdoing” in (23) the child’s parents have abandoned her. (24) showcases a situation where a child does not have a caring mother (from the perspective of the housemaid and babysitter), and (25) illustrates a situation where a foundling’s parents are unknown. in (26), the child is innocent because false accusations have been made against her without her being able to defend herself. in all these and other examples, an innocent child is conceptualized as a vulnerable, unprotected, and helpless being at the mercy of, or oppressed by, adults; who needs support and protection; and is the object of the onlookers’ pity. to summarize, ‘innocent child’ in persian conceptualizes children as pure and guiltless beings who can be trusted because of their pure hearts, not yet stained with trickery and deception and not yet aware of sex and sexual relations. at the same time, ‘innocent child’ refers to children’s vulnerability and need for protection against evils of the adult world. as a result, growing up partly involves losing one’s innocence. 6.7 naïve child: a corollary of conceptualizing a child’s mind as a blank slate is that a child is viewed as a simple-minded, inexperienced and incompetent being who is deficient in the practical wisdom that is a necessary requirement of adult life. this naivety is sometimes evaluated positively in the sense of purity of heart and cleanness as in (20) above and (27) below: (27) we were all like this and it was quite normal. it was like children’s [bache] fights. we fought but never held a grudge and five minutes later we were friends and colleagues again. shared pain had cleaned our souls and we were all children [bache] once more. we fought over the slightest thing, sharply criticized one another and quickly forgave each other. sometimes the same naivety is assessed negatively as a form of inexperience mingled with stupidity as in (28): (28) “i’m not that simple and a child [bache] [i.e., not stupid], i know what’s what. you get paid to lay bricks and when i help you, it makes your job easier.” (28) is uttered by a 14-year-old boy in order to demand that he should be paid for his role in the bricklaying job. 25 global education review 12 (1) a further consequence of viewing children as naïve beings is that they are deemed ‘ignorant’ and ‘stupid’ beings incapable of distinguishing between right and wrong, or appropriate and inappropriate. in (29), a 16year-old boy from a well-reputed family has engaged in political activity against the government. the local sheriff, an acquaintance of the family, suggests that the mother petition the high-ranking officials who would arrive the following day, and ask for forgiveness pleading that her son is ‘a child [bache]’ and ‘an ignorant person’: (29) “tell her to write: ‘he’s a child [bache] and has done something childish[bachegāne]; he has been ignorant. children [bache] err, elders [‘bozorgtar’ implying both adults and ones higher in social hierarchy] forgive.’ i think this will help.” in the rest of the story, the young boy objects to his parents’ decision saying that he has selected his way knowingly, but the mother’s petition works and he is pardoned. the type of knowledge expected of an adult presumably not found in children is not information but is a practical wisdom, a type of cleverness or cunning, that can save lives in difficult situations. in the following excerpt, a police officer is searching for a fugitive. he enters a young barber’s shop and threatens him in order to elicit information about the whereabouts of the fugitive. the barber, in his early 20s, acts defiantly and responds aggressively. after the officer orders him handcuffed, rahman, an older citizen in his 50s, meddles and the following conversation ensues: (30) “rahman held the captain’s hand: ‘he doesn’t know what he’s saying, captain. he’s a child [bache].’ ‘you call him a child [bache]?’ ‘don’t look at his height, captain.’” here, “he’s a child” implies that the barber is too young and inexperienced to know how to speak to a high-ranking officer. later, after the officer leaves, rahman advises the young barber that he should speak deferentially and obediently in these situations if he does not want trouble. the idea that children cannot understand or do not have the power to distinguish is one of the most common conceptualizations often expressed with bache, rather than kudak. while kudak is more commonly used in the sense of simplicity and simple-mindedness positively, bache carries the negative connotation of stupidity too. this distinction becomes clear when we compare the not untypical pairs of collocations like konjkāvi kudakāne that denotes ‘children’s curiosity,’ as in example (10), and konjkāvi bachegāne denoting ‘childish/stupid curiosity.’ one other consequence of conceptualizing children as simple-minded is that they are seen as easily deceivable, something that was frequently observed in our corpus, only with bache rather than kudak: (31) “what is all this nonsense? do you think you are deceiving a child [bache]?” though this has changed dramatically in recent years and many see children, especially the younger generations, as intelligent and cunning: (32) “now that i think about it, i realize that the intellect and sagacity of a modern child [bache] is greater than a hundred of those [older generation] adults.” conceptualizations of children in persian 26 therefore, a child is conceptualized as someone simple-minded, both positively and negatively, inexperienced and ignorant of adult ways, unable to make sound judgments. 6.8 intolerant child: another conceptualization of children is that they are perceived to be intolerant in a particular cultural sense. in (33), that occurred on the night after presidential election in 2024, on a social media platform, a supporter of the winning candidate, masoud pezeshkian, writes an emotional comment and another person, a supporter of the losing candidate, evaluates it as childish, bachegāne, behavior: (33) a: mr. doctor pezeshkian, you have been a good father to your children for 30 years. from tonight on you will be the nation’s father. please be a good father to us. b: how childish [bachegāne]! a: dear friend, janbe dāshte bāsh [roughly, ‘be a good sport’]. a child [bache] is someone who cannot accept defeat. the use of bachegāne in response to the emotional comment constructs a child as someone sensational and incapable of rational thinking. in response to that, the first speaker says: janbe dāshte bash, ‘have janbe’ roughly translated as ‘be a good sport.’ the keyword here is janbe which appears to be a ‘cultural keyword’ (wierzbicka, 1997) with, to our knowledge, no direct equivalent in english. janbe literally means ‘side’, ‘aspect’ (emami, 2006) or ‘dimension.’ it is defined as “the mental power and capability to accept something” (anvari, 2002) often used in the positive adjective bājanbe (with janbe) and the negative adjectives kamjanbe ‘of little janbe’ and bijanbe (‘without janbe’) to describe people’s behavior, denoting: “1. one who has no tolerance for unpleasant things or speech and shows illogical reaction to them; 2. the quality of someone who forgets his former [inferior] social position and looks down upon others when he reaches a high position” (anvari, 2002). janbe covers many aspects of behavior, including showing tolerance, admittance to defeat, sportsmanship, open-mindedness, low sensitivity to criticism, ability to take humor and the like. as a result, when someone is described as a child who lacks janbe, it construes children as beings that have to learn these qualities to become adults. in other words, an adult without janbe is not a full adult and still resembles children. 6.9 inferior, complaisant child: considering that a child is conceptualized as a naïve being still unacquainted with the ways of the world, it is not surprising that in many instances in the corpus, a child is considered as inferior to adults, expected to be obedient and comply with the desires and injunctions of adults because they know what is best for the child. (34) mirzā was a modest and humble person who said hello even to a child [bache]. in (34) the word ‘even’ implicates that a child is inferior in status to adults and has to say hello first rather than the other way around. traditionally, it is the obligation of the younger person to say hello to an older person. this expectation is not limited to the relationship between adults and children but permeates other relations where status differences hold. by being obligated to say hello first to their superior 25 global education review 12 (1) in age, the child is internalizing the rules of social hierarchy that run through almost any relationship in the iranian culture (beeman, 1986). moreover, a collocate of the word bache, but less so of kudak and tefl, and a positively valenced description of children, is harfgushkon (lit. ‘talk-listener,’ ‘obedient’) ‘someone who listens to, i.e., obeys, what is said’: (35) “a child [bache] should not interfere in adults’ talk, shouldn’t argue about anything.” (36) listen to [i.e., follow] what is said, child! [harf gush kon, bache!] we know your best interests better. (37) you’re his father and have authority. you certainly know better than the child [bache] what is good for him. as illustrated in (35) and (36), a child is expected to obey their elders, especially their father (37) and avoid disagreeing with them because elders know what the child’s best interests are. historically, though not in all families nowadays, one means of achieving this complaisance has been through inflicting fear in the child of elders, especially parents and teachers, as illustrated in (38): (38) if they [i.e., teachers] do even worse than this [i.e., punishment] to a child, one should accept it. a child has to be afraid of teachers and elders. a subtler, and perhaps more common, strategy for achieving complaisance is through keeping a distance between adults, especially parents and teachers, and children so they would know their place in the hierarchy: (39) parents have learnt by experience that when dealing with children [bache] they should not put the formalities aside [nabāyad ru dād]. there should always be a veil in between. a child has to be kept wavering between fear and hope. what is rendered as ‘not put the formalities aside’ is ‘ru nadādan’ (lit. ‘face not give’) in persian which has an important place in the presentation of self in the iranian culture (hosseini et al. 2018; hosseini, 2022). ru (lit. ‘face’ or ‘front part of the head’) as a cultural keyword, is sometimes associated with selfdenial and the suppression of self but in (39) it designates keeping a distance between the adult and the child in terms of degree of relational closeness, and not letting the child get the upper hand in the relationship. this implies that the adult has to keep the balance in the powerdistance equilibrium so that the child would not dominate the relationship. in cases where a child controls the relationship a likely criticism would be “ru dādei ke porru shode” (lit. ‘you have given face so s/he has become full-face’) ‘you have been too indulgent’ or ‘you’ve spoiled the child’ (on the concept of ru and its place in the iranian culture see hosseini, 2022). that is why a frequent piece of advice to young teachers in the iranian culture is to keep their social distance from students, so that they can hold their control and dominance. 6.10 child as a nuisance: although children are generally conceptualized positively as a source of light, and full of energy, they may be seen as a nuisance, and annoyance as well, especially among some educated individuals: (40) instead of writing poems, i found [i.e., had] 18 or so children who are life pests [i.e., a nuisance], and early orphans [because they are late children]. conceptualizations of children in persian 26 (41) i belong in a higher world, i’m a superior man. i’m happy i don’t have a child. mahmood says, ‘a child means prison, it means sin’. ‘nobody is qualified enough to have a child, not even us’ he added. in (40) a father who sees his children as the reason for his life failures labels them ‘life pests’ or a nuisance. in (41), having children is conceptualized as a jail that restricts parents’ freedom and having children is considered a sin because they are difficult and no one is qualified enough to train them. 6.11 out-of-control child: an uncontrollably mischievous child is described as tokhs (kh pronounced like ch in the scottish loch) which is a word of unknown origin defined as “a vile and naughty child,” denoting “a restless and mischievous child … who has an insatiable greed for playing, and a tendency toward orneriness, and vexing others, used to describe children under around 14 or 16” (dehkhoda 1998). collocates of the word in the corpus were sharur ‘vile’, sarkesh ‘rebellious’, harfnashnow ‘disobedient’, nafahm ‘not amenable to reason’, kaleshagh ‘pigheaded’, badzabān ‘foulmouthed’, and vahshi ‘wild’. excerpt (42) offers an example description: (42) “while we were doing the construction work, the village’s tokhs [vile] children pissed on the cement and plaster, out of malice. i wondered how much piss their bladders could hold!” precisely what distinguishes a sheytun child from a tokhs one is a matter of ideology: for example, one may describe one’s own child sheytun but another’s tokhs, showing its social rather than biological nature. the adjective tokhs collocates only with bache and always has negative connotations. 6.12 cursed child: perhaps the closest concept to the evil child is nahs (‘cursed’, ‘unlucky’) child and only collocates with bache. a child is considered cursed that would bring bad luck when, for example, their mother dies in childbirth, a disaster coincides with their birth, or is the result of an extramarital affair: (43) my birth was in the latest cholera year in which it is said a third of iran’s population died. my mother caught cholera at the time of my birth and died. every one said that the child [bache] is a jinx and, frankly, they were not totally wrong. an unwanted child may also be called a curse as in (44): (44) she held her protruded belly, which was really similar to an exploding mountain, between her hands and said: ‘i don’t want this child [bache]. i hate this cursed child. this child is malevolent, a disaster.’ it is a common, but nowadays controversial, belief that a misbegotten child is unlikely to become a decent person, or a legitimate child whose parents earn all or part of their living through religiously forbidden methods may turn into a villain or criminal. thus, a child’s behavior depends on their parents’ deeds. the following comment is made by an aunt after a nephew has stolen an expensive rug from her house: (45) “gosh! what had my late older brother eaten that made this child [bache] such a degenerate person?” the belief that some children are born malevolent and cursed and bring evil to others’ life is outdated and may be heard only in the speech of the uneducated elderly people. 25 global education review 12 (1) 6.13 child-in-control: there was no direct reference to the snowballing child (sorin, 2005), or “child in control in the adult-child relationship,” in our data. however, over the past two decades and in analogy with pedarsālāri ‘patriarchy’, the word farzandsālāri (‘filiarchy,’ ‘filiocracy’ or ‘pediarchy’) has been coined to describe a situation in which the child is the dominant figure in the family. a common complaint these days by parents who are in their fifties is: “when we were kids, there was patriarchy and now that we are parents there’s filiarchy” which reflects changes in the iranian society in the status and conceptualization of children (see adelkhah, 1999). 6.14 agency and negotiation in childadult relations: even though our data was predominantly of a written type, we could still see traces of how children negotiate their position in relation to others and the situation, thus playing a more or less active role in their life. we argued in section 6.4 that sheytanat involves a degree of agency by children in testing the limits of society and tolerance of adults. however, children’s agency is not limited to that. in (46), from a best-seller children’s novel, a 12year-old boy is trying to negotiate his position by pointing to his competency as proof of his entrance into adulthood: (46) i’m not a child [bache]. i’m a poet. my poem has been published in this magazine. come and see. “i’m a poet whose poem has been published” as the boy’s proof for the end of childhood, uncovers the ideology that showing competence in what adults normally do is the rite of passage into adulthood in the iranian culture-as we saw in the definition of childhood based on the word bache. moreover, children may use the multiple conceptualizations of childhood to their advantage, thus negotiating their wants with major caregivers, as in (47): (47) “grandma said [to auntie]: i say may god protect him. he’s still a child [bache] and has a long time, he still has his education to finish. i said: ‘how am i a child [bache], grandma? frankly, i want it [i.e., marriage] very much!’ […] ‘but as grandma said, i’m still a child and my mouth smells of [mama’s] milk!’” the conversation is from a novel in which the main character, the 14-year-old son of a landlord, has fallen in love with a live-in housemaid, though nobody yet knows who. when the grandmother calls him too young [bache] to marry, he resists by saying ‘how am i a child?’, implying that he is a grownup. however, when he realizes that his aunt has a different girl in mind for him, he prefers to be called a child/bache. even younger children may engage in negotiation with their parents and educators as the following not untypical conversation between the first author and his 9-year-old son shows: (48) child: you and mum don’t let me decide for myself. father: can you give an example? child: you don’t let me decide for my money. father: but you are free. only you need to learn how to spend it. conceptualizations of children in persian 26 child: you think i’m not wise enough (lit., you think i don’t have the brain). in other words, children in modern iran, as elsewhere in the world, are “active, creative social agents who produce their own unique children’s cultures while simultaneously contributing to the production of adult societies” (corsaro, 2018). however, the precise mechanisms and the tools they use to shape their world and create their own culture is something that needs to be studied. as cultural insiders, we can add that conceptualizing children as active agents is a relatively recent understanding primarily found in some families with higher education. children have now greater leverage in negotiating their positions in matters concerning their own life and sometimes the family’s life. however, the parents’ and teachers’ (sub)conscious conceptualization of children and childhood plays a more prominent role in the quality and quantity of this negotiation. to sum up this section, in the iranian culture, childhood as conceptualized in bache, as the more common word, is socially constructed, and reflects fluid, context-dependent definitions with emphasis on intellectual and physical maturity and responsibility. however, kudak, the formal term, emphasizes chronological age. our linguistic analysis illustrates that, on the one hand, children are seen positively as divine blessings that bring light, joy and happiness to life; as innocent and pure beings viewed as clean slates that are vulnerable and morally untainted until puberty; and their curiosity, playfulness and mild mischief (sheytanat) is tolerated and even appreciated as exploration and energy. on the other hand, they are viewed negatively as naïve and inexperienced beings that lack practical wisdom, sometimes dismissed as ignorant or easily deceived; as inferior ones in the social hierarchy expected to be obedient; as intolerant and emotionally driven lacking the patience and rationality expected of an adult; and as nuisance, and burden limiting personal freedom; as out-of-control and unruly (tokhs) creatures, and less commonly, as cursed (nahs) ones in cases of malevolence. despite these, children increasingly assert agency by, for example, negotiating roles or challenging adults, particularly in more modernized households. concepts like filiarchy (farzandsālāri), where children dominate the household, illustrate shifting power dynamics from parents, especially the father to children, in the iranian society. these competing conceptualizations underscore the heterogeneity of the iranian cultural schema of childhood (kudaki) shaped by competing discourses of tradition (e.g., sharia-based injunctions and cultural values of obedience, purity, and respect for status) and modernity (e.g., self-assertion, individuality and agency, and children’s rights). as cognitive cultural concepts, these conceptualizations are emergent and are heterogeneously distributed in the minds of people, which means not everyone has all the concepts in mind at any given time. instead, they are in the collective consciousness of the society and each, or some, is evoked/emerges in real time situations and can be negotiated in the context. 7. implications for early childhood education the findings of the study highlights the heterogeneity of iranians’ conceptualizations of childhood that are shaped by ongoing negotiations between tradition and modernity. this diverse conceptualization is reflected in both parents and educators’ practices in dealing with children and the educational materials that they utilize with children. the positive conceptualizations of children in iranian culture, wherein a child is 25 global education review 12 (1) seen as a source of light, delight, and happiness, might have had implications for childhood education. this cultural perspective fosters an environment where children are highly valued, leading to educational practices that emphasize the emotional and social well-being of the child. in early childhood education, this can translate to nurturing environments that prioritize the joy and happiness of children, recognizing them as essential to the emotional fabric of the family and society. for example, when a child is considered “god’s bounty” and a “seal of love” within a family, early childhood educators might be encouraged to reinforce the child's sense of belonging and worth within the classroom. activities that promote love, bonding, and a strong sense of community are likely to be emphasized. moreover, the belief that a child strengthens marital love and family survival can lead educators to collaborate closely with parents, ensuring that the child’s educational experiences align with the values and happiness of the family. this partnership between educators and families underscores the importance of holistic development, where a child's emotional and social growth is as critical as their cognitive development. however, these implications and consequent actions in the curriculum and pedagogy of ece are quite recent and as discussed by talaee (2019), one sees a gap between this conceptualization of children and the real acts of the adults in regard to the education and upbringing of children in the early years of the 20th century in iran. one can argue that the new child-centered educational approaches in ece is under the dominance of transnational discourse of ece in iran and that might explain why some conservative policies, developed by highly centralized and religionbased education system, seek to go against the hegemony of westernized, purely child-centered paradigms of childhood education. based on these conceptual analyses of children and childhood in the persian corpus, we argue that in the iranian cultural context, as echoed in the international discourse (e.g. arneil, 2002; mintz, 2018), one can see a diverse array of understanding of the child and/or childhood and its corresponding educational practices. this lack of homogeneity, primarily espoused by the negotiation between tradition and modernity, demonstrates itself in two primary ways of conceptualizing children: the "becoming" child which is viewed as an "adult in the making," someone who is on the path to becoming rational and competent like an adult. in this view, education is centered around the teacher, with students seen as recipients of knowledge, expected to learn truths and facts established by adult society through a professionally designed curriculum. on the other hand, the "being" child is considered a social actor in their own right, capable of actively shaping their own childhood. in this approach, education is student-centered, requiring teachers to create an environment that allows children to develop in their own unique ways. translating these two conceptualizations into pedagogical practices, one can distinguish an “either-or” and “both-and” educational approach at both policy and practice levels of ece in contemporary iran. the former is highlighted mainly at the practice level where early childhood educators and leaders have competitive and sometime paradoxical factors to take into account, such as complying with the country’s centralized ece national curriculum for official purposes and addressing family’s requests and needs. the latter is highlighted mainly at the research level where academics emphasize the “deschoolifying” of early childhood pedagogy. conceptualizations of children in persian 26 8. conclusions this study aimed to elucidate the uses of the persian words for ‘child’ as cognitive cultural conceptualizations combining corpus-based data collection methods with ethnographic analyses in cultural linguistics. we were able to show the variability in understandings of the concept of a child as a distributed cognitive cultural conceptualization. the findings underscored the coexistence of competing, age-based and social definitions of a child that echo the ongoing clashes between tradition and modernity in the iranian culture, thus, showcasing how the study of conceptualizations of childhood can contribute to uncovering some cultural values and conflicts (see gilliam & gulløv, 2022). we also noted that generally, children are positively conceptualized and the evil child as understood in the west is alien to the iranian culture. multiple, sometimes conflicting, conceptualizations were found that reflect the heterogeneity of society as well as the multiplicity of social contexts. the study contributes to the literature on childhood by showing the diversity of childhood concepts within a non-european culture, and how cultural values shape these understandings. since the selected corpus was primarily based on written materials produced over the past one hundred years, no statistical information could be provided on the prevalence of each conceptualization not only in the iranian culture at large, but also in different social groups and through time. moreover, because the iranian society is a 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(1999). revisiting images of the child in early childhood education: reflections and considerations. australasian journal of early childhood, 24(4), 7–12. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27119-0_6 https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27119-0_6 supporting good habits 21 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: martone, eric. (2023). supporting good habits: the rockefellers, the sisters of mercy, and higher education in new york state. global education review, 10 (4), 21-36. supporting good habits: the rockefellers, the sisters of mercy, and higher education in new york state eric martone mercy university abstract in 1950, the sisters of mercy opened mercy junior college in tarrytown, new york for younger members of their order. in 1961, with financial assistance from the rockefeller family, they relaunched it as a private 4-year institution for women at a new complex in dobbs ferry. from 1911 onward, however, the rockefellers had a complex relationship with the sisters of mercy, who then lived in tarrytown next to the main rockefeller estate of kykuit. while the rockefellers’ financial support of the sisters toward the construction of a new complex in dobbs ferry is modest in comparison to the rockefellers’ other philanthropic endeavors in the field of education, it represents the most significant support to new york higher education outside of rockefeller university, which rockefeller, sr. founded in 1901 as an institute for medical research. this article consequently explores the complex relationship between the rockefellers and the sisters of mercy to illuminate a neglected aspect of rockefeller philanthropy in their home state of new york. as a result of the rockefellers’ aid, mercy college was able to thrive and evolve into a multi-campus, co-educational and secular institution. today, as mercy university, it offers nearly 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and its main campus in westchester county still consists primarily of the buildings built with rockefeller assistance. keywords mercy university; sisters of mercy; john d. rockefeller; john d. rockefeller jr.; nelson rockefeller; new york state; westchester county; higher education; education history introduction on sunday, may 20, 1962, a collection of new york state and catholic church dignitaries made its way to dobbs ferry for the dedication ceremony of mount mercy-on-the-hudson, a magnificent new complex comprised of over 80 acres overlooking the hudson river for the new york province of the sisters of mercy. the sisters had already moved into the unfinished facility during the fall of 1961, but the stress of moving and construction delays had prevented a proper dedication ceremony. that time had finally come, and all the individuals involved in this massive undertaking now had a moment to bask in the glory of their accomplishments. the complex, which had cost more than $6 million to build at a time when the national average price for a house was less than $20,000, included eight impressive brick buildings “of contemporary architecture”: the provincial house, a residence for student sisters, a faculty residence, a residence for senior sisters, a chapel, our lady of victory academy, a parish elementary school, and what was then mercy college (now mercy university).1 although francis spellman, cardinal and archbishop of new york, presided over the ceremony and blessed the complex with the assistance of rev. john maguire, vicar general of the archdiocese of new york and chancellor of mercy college, the star of the ceremony was new york governor (and future vice president of the united states) nelson rockefeller. his role in the celebration exceeded his capacity as governor; he stood as the symbol of the rockefeller family, whose financial contributions to the sisters’ educational endeavors had culminated in a generous $1.6 million gift to finance part of the complex’s construction. nelson, his father, john d. rockefeller, jr., and grandfather, john d. rockefeller, sr., had all 22 global education review 10 (4) donated funds to aid the sisters when they had resided in their previous complex, located in tarrytown near kykuit, the main rockefeller mansion. however, it was nelson’s father who made this especially magnanimous gift on top of his offer to purchase the sisters’ too-small tarrytown property. without his financial assistance, the sisters’ dreams of expanding their educational mission, the heart of which was the launching of mercy college as a fouryear institution, could never have materialized. since he had died in 1960, the sisters had eagerly been awaiting an opportunity to express publicly their heartfelt expressions of gratitude to his son.2 malcolm wilson, lieutenant governor of new york under nelson rockefeller and onetime trustee of mercy college, later lectured at its commencement exercises on how significant the move had been to the development of mercy college: more than i suspect many of you know, 1827 in dublin, ireland marked the beginning of the sisters of mercy…the new york province…was established in 1846 and i was present at the 100th anniversary in 1946 in st. patrick’s cathedral, new york city. the mother house of the new york province stood in tarrytown diagonally across the road from the pocantico hills estate of the rockefeller family. as a matter of fact, when i first started going up to see the governor and later vice president [nelson rockefeller], i entered the grounds by way of what was then known as “the sisters’ gate.” in 1950 a college, not for general registration but for members of the order, provided higher education for the sisters. by the late 1950s it was very evident that they would have to serve a larger constituency. not only did mr. rockefeller, notably john d. rockefeller, jr., purchase the house and all the buildings and grounds but also provided a very generous gift that made it possible to move mercy college to dobbs.3 as a result of the rockefellers’ aid, mercy college was able to thrive and evolve into a multi-campus, co-educational and secular institution. today, as mercy university, it offers nearly 100 undergraduate and graduate degree programs and its main campus at dobbs ferry still consists primarily of the buildings built with rockefeller assistance. the rockefellers’ support of the sisters and the development of mercy university is an important component of broader new york history. john d. rockefeller, sr., progenitor of the rockefeller dynasty, founded standard oil company, one of the largest corporations in its day, and became one of the wealthiest americans of his time.4 rockefeller, sr. who embraced the “american ideal of responsible stewardship”—the idea that with great wealth “comes the duty to serve the public good and improve the conditions of mankind”—has often been praised as “perhaps the most significant philanthropist the united states has ever produced” and that his philanthropy “distinguished him from most other great industrialists.”5 his son, rockefeller, jr., continued his philanthropic work.6 although the rockefellers chose to support a variety of causes, they contributed much in the area of education. from 1911 onward, the rockefellers developed a complex relationship with the sisters of mercy, who then lived in tarrytown next to the main rockefeller estate of kykuit. while the rockefellers’ financial support of the sisters toward the construction of a new complex in dobbs ferry to help develop mercy university is modest in comparison to the rockefellers’ other philanthropic endeavors in the field of education, such as the family’s support of the university of chicago (a total of $35 million between 1889 and 1910), it represents the most significant support to new york higher education outside of rockefeller university, which rockefeller, sr. founded in 1901 as an institute for medical research.7 rockefeller university, however, only offers advanced, specialized graduate-level programs and is neither a comprehensive nor liberal arts college. the relationship between the rockefellers and the sisters of mercy, especially in connection with the development of mercy university, has received only minimal scholarly attention.8 this article consequently explores the complex relationship between the rockefellers and the sisters of mercy to illuminate a neglected aspect of rockefeller philanthropy in their home state of new york. tarrytown neighbors: rockefellers and the sisters of mercy the sisters of mercy, after forming in ireland in the early nineteenth century, supporting good habits 23 branched out to other parts of the atlantic world. at a time when most women could not generally own property as individuals because of their subordinate status as wives, sisters could collectivize wealth, derive business revenue, sign contracts, get loans, and incorporate institutions under female control.9 the sisters began their work in new york city during the mid-1800s with an orphanage. they also started an industrial school for young women to teach them skills like sewing and opened up a select school for girls, where daughters of wealthier people in the community could get “a proper english education.” later, they spread to other locations, including pelham bay and the bronx. on december 23, 1892, the sisters expanded to tarrytown after acquiring the roughly thirtyacre kingsland estate. the estate took its name from ambrose kingsland, a mid-nineteenth century merchant and former mayor of new york city, who had built a mansion on part of this land (which became known as “wilson park,” after nineteenth-century new york city merchant william wilson built a large home in the area). the sisters later discovered remnants of colonial slave quarters on their property’s northern end, dating from its philipsburg manor days.10 the sisters’ move to tarrytown coincided with the time when the area was becoming a favorite residence for the many prominent industrialists and business figures of the era. although john d. rockefeller, sr., spent his adolescence and early adult years in ohio, he was born in richmond, new york in 1839. in 1884, he finally moved back to new york state when he established a residence in new york city. tarrytown, however, soon became the rockefellers’ new york retreat. in 1893, rockefeller, sr. purchased about 400 acres at pocantico hills, including kykuit hill (a name imposed by dutch colonists, meaning “lookout”) overlooking the majestic hudson river. he continued to expand this parcel of land. by the early twentieth century, it reached about 2,000 acres.11 he initially stayed at the parsonswentworth house, near the present-day coach barn, until it burned down in 1902. rockefeller, sr. then resided at existing residences on the property. none of them, however, commanded an impressive view of the hudson or took advantage of the property’s full beauty. consequently, his son, john d. rockefeller, jr., decided to oversee the construction of kykuit, a home he intended to be “a house appropriate to his [rockefeller, sr.’s] stature as one of the country’s leading industrialists and philanthropists.”12 the lavish mansion, which became the rockefeller family’s “principal home,” was constructed in two phases between 1906 and 1913. rockefeller, sr. and his wife, laura spelman rockefeller, spent the fall at kykuit in 1908. however, the hard-to-please couple was sorely disappointed: the guest rooms were too small, the fireplaces too smoky, and noise from the kitchen area could be heard in the mansion’s private quarters. consequently, rockefeller, jr. literally went back to the drawing board to prove himself to his parents. he redesigned and renovated kykuit during 1911 to 1913.13 the new kykuit met rockefeller, sr.’s approval and the mansion served as a retreat for him until his death in 1937. it subsequently served as a retreat for rockefeller, jr. until his death in 1960, and for his son, nelson rockefeller, until his death in 1979. shortly after being built, the rockefellers began to have some unexpected problems with their neighbors, the sisters of mercy. many sisters, who came predominantly from working-class backgrounds, were amazed by the new “palace” next door. indeed, it embraced a degree of extravagance that many of them had neither seen nor imagined. the magnificence of kykuit, especially its gardens, proved to be a local “wonder” that particularly entranced the younger members of the order. sometimes the sisters wandered into the garden in amazement and ended up near the main mansion, much to the rockefellers’ disapproval. while the rockefellers did not necessarily mind their new neighbors’ admiration, they felt that the sisters wandered too close to their private quarters and intruded upon their privacy. a polite, but firm letter was sent to the sisters’ superior.14 however, more pressing annoyances emerged. rockefeller, sr., while certainly not opposed in principle to the sisters’ not-for-profit business activities, never truly warmed to the occurrence of these endeavors next to his estate. at times, he expressed his view that the sisters’ complex was an eyesore. for example, as tradition has it, rockefeller, sr. asked the sisters if he could arrange to have their roof, which he could see from kykuit, painted from a distracting red to green to better match the landscape.15 yet, he also had to deal with his wife’s complaints, a bane to any husband’s ears. rockefeller, sr.’s wife, laura, who died in 1915, was not in good health during her years at kykuit. in an uncomfortable state, she especially did not enjoy the noise coming from 24 global education review 10 (4) the sisters’ property, which then housed an orphanage for children committed to the sisters by the city of new york. as one rockefeller representative diplomatically phrased it in a 1911 letter, “mrs. rockefeller has expressed herself that the noise made by the children at the school was many times heard on their place, and perhaps not always pleasantly.”16 as rockefeller, jr. explained more bluntly several years later, the actions on the sisters’ property “detract from our enjoyment of the kykuit property.”17 as a result, its very existence next to the rockefeller estate compromised their individual privacy and their property’s residential sanctity. in fact, the rockefellers were so obsessive about the maintenance of this privacy/sanctity that they eventually paid to relocate the noisy new york and putnam railroad, which they felt traveled too close to their estate. the railroad actually passed through the sisters’ property and made a stop at pocantico hills. in 1929, however, rockefeller, jr. paid to reroute the new york and putnam railroad out of pocantico hills. a new right-of-way was built and the railroad ceased running there by 1931, thereby improving the rockefellers’—and inadvertently the sisters’— living situations.18 the rockefellers had entertained a similar approach to the sisters, hoping that they could get rid of them by buying their property and helping them move elsewhere. rockefeller, sr. approached the sisters in december 1911 about buying their property, the size of which was estimated at about 33 acres. negotiations over this possibility ultimately created much ado throughout 1912.19 the tarrytown sisters and their administrators, then located at 1073 madison avenue in new york city, were initially surprised at the sudden offer, but nevertheless supported a deal in principle. at the time, the tarrytown sisters wanted to be closer to new york city. however, the order needed to locate a suitable replacement location as well as the necessary funds to replicate the tarrytown facility on this new site. the sisters also desired approval from the local church hierarchy, which served as their advisors. in january 1912, after contemplating what to do, the sisters set a high asking price of $600,000 based on what mother rose, the superior, estimated as the cost to purchase ($300,000) and renovate ($360,000) a 9-acre site on aqueduct avenue, near 177th street, that the order was interested in acquiring as a substitute.20 rockefeller, sr. felt that that price was unreasonable, but the sisters, prodded by their church advisors, seemed slow to budge. figure 1: this postcard from the hugh c. leighton company, circa 1912, depicts the tarrytown-onhudson home of the sisters of mercy. the property was comprised primarily of two buildings: the sisters’ convent, housed in the former kingsland mansion (located to the right), and the school building (located to the left). in june, at rockefeller, sr.’s bequest, three private appraisers naturally assessed the property for much less than the sum of $600,000. the estimates, however, ranged widely from $200,000 to $450,000. the appraiser for the highest estimate based his value on the fact that the “buildings on this property are very well built. they have fire-proof stair casings, extra thick walls all the way through.” despite the variances, the estimates generally corresponded with the amount of $300,000 that the sisters wanted in order to purchase a replacement property, since their intentionally inflated total sum of $600,000 included the amount necessary to cover supporting good habits 25 additional renovation costs. by august, eugene quin, who represented the sisters in the negotiations, sought to break the impasse by suggesting a sale price of $350,000.21 quin knew that rockefeller, sr. would grumble at this offer. he consequently sought to frame the price as a cumulative sum for the property and a charitable “gift.” as he wrote in a letter to rockefeller, sr.: “when i think of the unstinted liberality you have so readily extended to other philanthropic institutions throughout this entire country, i cannot but hope that you may feel inclined to extend the same liberality to the good sisters whose appreciation would be so deep, and which i am sure would return a reward of a thousand fold in the feelings of satisfaction that would surely come to you for your magnanimity.”22 rockefeller, sr. was receptive to the ploy and warmed to the idea of giving the sisters a donation in addition to a sum for their property. but the crux of the problem was that in his mind the property was only worth about $75,000. he therefore wanted to pay about $125,000, an amount that included a $50,000 “gift.” to rockefeller, sr., the buildings on the property were utterly worthless; he wanted to demolish them. after all, the purpose for acquiring the property was for it to buttress his estate’s privacy. in addition, he argued that the new york and putnam railroad, which then still cut through the property, greatly reduced its value. despite all of his money, despite how much he wanted the sisters to relocate, he refused (in his mind) to overpay.23 by the end of the summer, negotiations cooled off and the tarrytown sisters received some news from their administrators about the future of the site. as quin revealed in a november 1912 letter to rockefeller sr., the sisters were “preparing to convert their tarrytown institution into one of a different nature [a school for girls] than now conducted, and that this will involve the withdrawing of the property from further consideration of selling.”24 nevertheless, negotiations lingered on for years. the sisters, however, held firm on a high asking price, which still remained at $500,000 in march 1921.25 during the late 1920s, discussions to purchase the property regained traction, this time with rockefeller, jr.26 negotiations followed the same general terms as had existed between the sisters and his father: a “fair market value” for the property along with a donation to help cover the costs of reconstructing the tarrytown facility elsewhere. naturally, problems arose during attempts to set a specific sum for the two components. in 1928, rockefeller, jr. finally decided that he was willing to pay an amount closer to what the sisters desired.27 but to religious officials, it seemed that he was too late. mother mathilde, the sisters’ new mother provincial in new york city, supported the sale. however, she did not feel optimistic about its success because “the sisters [at tarrytown] did not care to sell.” consequently, rockefeller, jr. “would have to wait for a change of administration [there] to get a change of attitude.”28 church officials were also eager to sanction the transaction. still, they too revealed their conviction that “sentimental reasons” would delay the sisters from acquiescing to a deal. by this time, the sisters had grown accustomed to life in westchester and no longer wished to relocate out of the county, as they feared religious officials would decree.29 nevertheless, october seemed to be the month of miracles. a deal was nearly struck to purchase the roughly 20-acre property—about nine acres of which had been previously sold— for $100,000, with an additional $200,000 gift based on the condition that the sisters could secure a suitable new site. rockefeller, jr. even offered to let the sisters remain on “the premises for a period of two years from the date of the deed” to help them with their move.30 the sisters, however, were still reluctant and discussions crawled into 1929. in january, the contrary sisters again set a high price of around $500,000, but began the hunt for a new location.31 by november, rockefeller, jr. began to tire of these negotiations and made the sisters, who had recently secured permission to re-locate in westchester county, his “best and last offer” of $600,000: $100,000 for the property and a $500,000 gift. yet, the sisters then decided that they wanted rockefeller, jr. to cover the full, specific construction costs for relocating to a new site. consequently, negotiations once again cooled off.32 during the 1930s, sporadic talk of buying the property occurred, but the rockefellers had become frustrated with the “tarrytown situation,” as lawyer franklin brooks liked to term it.33 as the rockefellers generally abandoned efforts to purchase the sisters’ property, they began to enjoy increased cordial relations with their neighbors, often assisting them financially with their school and maintenance repairs. the rockefellers generally gave friendly waves and engaged in brief social interactions with the sisters as they passed each other. nevertheless, the rockefellers were not always quite sure of the sisters’ individual names or proper etiquette 26 global education review 10 (4) in terms of how to address the order’s superiors for formal matters (such as in a letter). meanwhile, the sisters often took advantage of the rockefeller family’s desires to have their property well-maintained to get them to pay for various maintenance and service needs. the rockefellers thus took various short-term measures to improve the appearance of the complex, often taking the view that if the most offensive objects on the property were out of site, they were out of mind. over the course of decades, the rockefellers, somewhat begrudgingly, became one of the sisters’ largest and most consistent benefactors. the sisters tended to go to them whenever they were soliciting donations or organizing fund raisers for their non-profit business activities. the rockefellers sent donations, usually modest ones, on a case by case basis. they generally donated simply to maintain good neighborly relations, but avoided sending a response and/or a donation if they felt that they could do so. nevertheless, the rockefellers’ financial support was both needed and appreciated. since most sisters and catholics of the era hailed from relatively recent immigrant stock, the constituents of catholic parishes during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did not have vast financial resources to fund initiatives in the areas of charity work and education.34 sisters faced constant pressure to find revenue to support their order, their institutions, and work. consequently, money was often tight and the sisters ironically came to view the (protestant) rockefellers as their patrons. it is interesting to note that each subsequent generation of the rockefellers that occupied kykuit developed a more sympathetic attitude toward the sisters. nelson rockefeller, who was born in 1908, grew up with the sisters as his neighbors. he had a fondness for them that surpassed that of both his father, rockefeller, jr., and certainly his grandfather, rockefeller, sr. as an adult, nelson’s home, located away from the main rockefeller estate, was situated directly across from the sisters’ property. as a result, he took a greater interest than his father in taking care of the sisters’ property’s maintenance needs. however, his father often reimbursed him in part or in full for expenses incurred on the sisters’ behalf. for example, he was so pleased with the relocation of a playground to reduce noise that he decided to reimburse nelson in full. in a letter to his son, he wrote: “i am realizing…what a great advantage it is to the entire place. not only is the view as one drives up the county house road to the sisters’ gate much more attractive, but the noise is practically eliminated.”35 over time, nelson spent thousands of dollars to cover the costs of improvements for the sisters’ property. during the mid-1930s, for example, he bought them a tractor to replace their horse and helped turn their barn into a gymnasium. in 1939, he paid around $2,000 to pave the driveway running through the sisters’ property. he also frequently paid to have it plowed during the winter. later, in 1952, nelson sent “sister superior” mary gratia maher 130 shares of stock valued at $5,000 to help cover building renovations.36 establishing mercy college by the 1940s, the sisters of mercy became involved in the management of various hospitals and schools throughout new york. however, to be qualified to staff these institutions, young sisters needed an education. they often studied for credit granted from local catholic colleges. a 1938 “thank you” letter from sister mary gertrude, supervisor of schools, to their neighbor, rockefeller, jr., for a recent library donation described this arrangement in detail. after explaining that the new books would aid sisters in training, she informed rockefeller, jr.: “it may interest you to know that our future teachers spend at least two and one-half years at tarrytown. during that time, in addition to their religious training, the potential teachers receive training in secular subjects. each sister destined for the schools completes two years of college work. this…includes courses that are usually given at normal training schools. however, the work done here is accredited college work. after leaving tarrytown, the sister who continues study does so on the third year level at college.”37 supplying external educations to all sisters proved to be a costly commitment. as a result, the sisters decided to establish their own private junior college to educate their order’s younger members. the province’s superior ultimately charged sister mary gratia maher, who was still completing her doctoral dissertation examining religious instruction at women’s catholic colleges, with making this institution a reality. she had substantial educational administrative experience, having been a school teacher as well as a former principal of saint catharine academy in new york city.38as sister mary agnes parrell, who worked with sister gratia, recalled, “leaders somehow always rise from out supporting good habits 27 [of] their time. in fact, they stand above time. such a scholar was sister mary gratia,” who quickly developed the new college’s curriculum, established its organization, and selected its faculty.39 the sisters’ efforts in new york, however, were not unique. other mercy convents across the us faced similar circumstances and a movement developed that placed educating sisters a priority before sending them into the field. as a result, “mercy junior college,” as it was initially known, was among the five “sister formation colleges” that opened during the 1950s.40 of course, mercy junior college needed a state charter in order to have the authority to confer degrees. the sisters, however, were in a hurry. time is money, as the adage goes. as a result, they negotiated a temporary credit agreement in august 1950 with the catholic university of america. the college’s first classes began during the following month at the sisters’ site in tarrytown. in 1952, the new york state board of regents finally granted the college a charter authorizing its associate degree programs of studies for members of the sisters’ order. to retain a degree of its former student constituency, many local catholic colleges, such as manhattan college and st. john’s university, offered mercy junior college’s seniors scholarships to continue their studies.41 over the course of the 1950s, the sisters developed plans to expand mercy junior college. the expansion of this college came to hold special meaning for the sisters. indeed, it came to embody the heart of their mission. during these early years, however, the rockefellers seem to have been oblivious to the college’s existence, likely because it served only sisters. as a result, they did not notice any additional personnel, students, traffic, or noise. sometime during the mid-1950s, the sisters made the monumental decision to expand the college to lay women. naturally, they petitioned their neighbor, nelson rockefeller, in 1956 for a donation to support their efforts. the new york board of regents had approved the proposed college “in principle” and gave the sisters “a time limit,” soon to expire, to meet their requirements, one of the most significant of which was an expanded physical facility. nelson, however, was not interested. 42 when his father heard about the sisters’ plans, he predictably became concerned over his property’s privacy and even considered making the sisters an offer of over $1 million to build the college elsewhere.43 figure two: sister hilda, librarian, stands in the early mercy library. at this time, it seems that the sisters contemplated opening their junior college to women as a way to extend their secondary school programs offered on their tarrytown site at our lady of victory academy. ultimately, the sisters decided to change course: mercy college was to be re-launched as a private four-year institution for women. sister gratia worked with 28 global education review 10 (4) state officials during the late 1950s to change the college’s name to “mercy college” (accomplished in 1956) as well as to establish the institution as a four-year college. according to sister agnes, a member of the founding faculty, the decision to become a four-year college was based on the following factors: 1) the need to equip sister students to teach in mercy grammar and high schools; 2) the cost of sending all juniors, novices, and postulants to other colleges was too expensive; and 3) a desire to not “impose on local college’s generosity” in supplying further scholarships. furthermore, “as the community was founded to equip young women to take their places in society with the necessary skills and knowledge to be successful persons,” the new college decided to admit female lay students.44 the board of regents approved an amendment granting the sisters’ desired changes by 1960. figure three: sisters studying at “mercy college” in tarrytown during the 1950s. meanwhile, the sisters began a serious hunt to find a new location to support their educational initiatives. as sister mary jeanne ferrier, provincial of the mercy community, conveyed in a private letter, the sisters recognized that their tarrytown property was inadequate “because of size, character of land and obsolescence of the buildings. the present structures do not lend themselves to either modernizing or expansion of facilities. there is not enough land available near the present site for further expansion and after investigation we have discovered that economically we could not provide for our needs if we remain here.”45 during 1956 and 1957, the sisters explored about 10 different options and came close to purchasing sites in cortlandt and scarborough.46 a dream realized news that the sisters were finally seeking to relocate reached rockefeller, jr. his representatives had never believed that the rockefellers had fully abandoned the dream of acquiring the sisters’ property and, like faithful watchdogs, had kept an eye on the property’s status. rockefeller, jr. confirmed to his agent that he was interested in resuming negotiations to purchase the sisters’ tarrytown property if the opportunity arose. his agent suggested that he make a large gift in excess of the “fair market value” to assure the sisters’ move.47 rockefeller, jr. was, therefore, prepared to revisit the terms of the previous negotiations between his family and the sisters. he estimated that the current cost for duplicating the sisters’ facility was around $1.5 million. this estimate served as the guide for his “gift.”48 during the summer of 1957, the sisters made a successful bid of $350,000 for the 85-acre former estate of edwin gould, son of robber baron jay gould, in dobbs ferry.49 despite years of rockefeller prodding, the sisters were now finally moving on their own terms. the sale of the sisters’ tarrytown property was imminent and rockefeller, jr. authorized his representatives to negotiate with the sisters on his behalf. he capped his price at $1.75 million, an amount based on his estimate to reconstruct the sisters’ facility and the supporting good habits 29 property’s $150,000 “fair market value.” the sisters, however, were reluctant to let go of their tarrytown property and felt that they had much to lose if either end of the deal fell through. consequently, the sisters wanted rockefeller, jr.’s personal commitment before proceeding to purchase the gould estate.50 in march 1958, sister mary jeanne wrote him a heartfelt letter: during the years since the sisters of mercy have been located on the property at wilson park, the organization has grown tremendously. for a long period of time it has been realized that the property is inadequate for our use…therefore, it is our decision to relocate. we have been searching for a suitable site for over a two-year period, and since the gould property in dobbs ferry appears to meet our requirements, it seems very desirable. in order to pursue this further with a view to negotiating for its purchase, we are appealing to you, our good neighbor of many years, to assist us that we may continue our charitable endeavors for humanity. the expansion program that we are considering will involve a huge expenditure far beyond our normal capacity. the accomplishment of this will not be possible unless we can secure the market sale price for our tarrytown site and a substantial donation over and above. aware of your manifold charities and your genuinely sincere interest in education and social welfare agencies, it is with confident hope that i present our needs to you.51 rockefeller, jr. drafted several versions of a response, contemplating how much detail to provide in sections concerning the history between the sisters and his family and his intentions to buy the property. in april, he finally sent sister mary jeanne the following letter of pledge: i have received your very kind and gracious letter of march 25 relative to the expansion program of the sisters of mercy. you say that due to your tremendous growth and the limitations of your present property you have been forced to look elsewhere… and you have found in the gould property at dobbs ferry the suitable site that will answer your requirements. in view of the pleasant and neighborly relations which have existed for so many years between the sisters and the members of our family, i…am now confirming…[my representative, mr. william yates’s] verbal commitment to you on my behalf—namely, that on your assurance that you have acquired title to the gould property…and that you will immediately proceed with the erection thereon of buildings required by your institution, i agree to contribute to the institution of mercy securities having a market value of $1,600,000 at the time of delivery.52 the sisters heaved a sigh of relief, but only temporarily. new difficulties emerged on the horizon in 1958 as the result of a dispute between the catholic church and the local board of education over the sisters’ desired property in dobbs ferry. the board was contemplating the erection of a new school to alleviate overcrowding issues and had its eye on the former edwin gould estate as the potential site for a new school. the board therefore wanted the sisters to refrain from purchasing the entire estate to leave room for a school. however, the sisters had already planned on selling the part of the estate that the board wanted to sacred heart catholic church for the building of a parochial school. the sisters intended to use this sum to help offset the costs for acquiring and constructing their new complex in dobbs ferry. cardinal spellman carried the dispute into the local press, arguing that a parochial school would remedy the overcrowding issue.53 rockefeller, jr.’s counsel suggested that he abort his plans to acquire the sisters’ property if they did not secure the gould property by the end of the year. however, the sisters decided that they would not sell their tarrytown property until they had the property in dobbs ferry first. consequently, rockefeller, jr., so close to realizing the rockefeller acquisition of the sisters’ property after 47 years of effort, paid close personal attention to developments.54 for their part, the sisters quickly grew impatient with the school board, which forced the issue to be resolved through a public referendum. the village had already rezoned the gould property for the sisters’ use without any objections (although there was one abstention).55 the sisters felt that the school board had demonstrated no interest in the gould property until they wished to acquire it. nevertheless, the sisters had decided early on 30 global education review 10 (4) that they would relinquish their expansion plans and allow the district to have the property if the public referendum results supported it. however, after the school board failed to obtain residents’ approval in the first referendum, the sisters felt that there should have been no further interference.56 yet, the school board pressed for additional referendums, each time making a claim for why the previous results should be invalidated. the sisters, in the midst of leading a drive to raise $500,000 for the site, became frustrated with local officials. apparently, even the patience of sisters has limits. the executors of the gould estate had also opposed the school board’s plan since they wanted to sell the property en masse. however, all parties involved played along with village officials to avoid the possible usage of eminent domain to seize the property. after four referendums, local residents repeatedly voted against the school board’s expansion plan and the matter was put to rest.57 the agreement of sale between rockefeller, jr. and the sisters for their tarrytown property (about ten percent of which technically resided in sleepy hollow) was signed in may 1958. the sisters received 32,200 shares of standard oil valued at $1.75 million. rockefeller, jr. received the title on august 19, during which time he was in maine.58 that same month, the sisters completed their transaction to acquire the gould property.59 however, rockefeller, jr. made an unusual request. he asked the sisters to refrain from publicly announcing his $1.6 million gift until later in the year, in part to help boost nelson rockefeller’s campaign for governor with positive press.60 the sisters, happy to oblige, did not announce the gift until october. the pretense created the public perception that the gift was a purely magnanimous act on the part of the rockefellers unrelated to the purchasing of the sisters’ tarrytown property.61 the ploy worked. not only did the gift receive wide media coverage, the rockefellers received several thank you letters from catholics for supporting the sisters and their educational pursuits with such a gift, especially since he was not a catholic.62 within the broader context of conflicts between catholic and protestant reformers that had plagued the early twentieth century, this act was indeed noteworthy.63 that same month, the sisters, no longer forced to conceal their abundant gratitude, sent their “esteemed benefactor” a framed manuscript as a token of their appreciation. the sisters had long perceived the rockefellers as their patrons, and this gift was viewed as the culmination of their financial support. as the manuscript said, “each of the four hundred sisters of mercy of the province of new york, in deep and sincere gratitude, has offered to god one day of prayer labor sacrifice in the spiritual and corporal works of mercy.” it concluded with a quote from ephesians 3:6-19.64 meanwhile, rockefeller, jr. and his associates expressed relief that this “long drawnout and at times very trying transaction” was over.65 however, they were sadly mistaken, for the drama continued as a bitter and drawn-out tax dispute developed between the village of tarrytown and rockefeller, jr. over the valuation of the property. rockefeller, jr.’s gift to the sisters was tax deductible. as a result, he believed that the property could not be assessed for much higher than the “fair market value” he paid for it: $150,000. tarrytown, perhaps too eager to have the sisters’ former property back on the tax rolls, since religious property was exempt from civil property tax, estimated its worth at over $250,000. rockefeller thus sued to lower the valuation.66 the sisters, although they now owned the former gould estate, could not live there until they finished the construction of their new complex. rockefeller, jr. therefore leased to the sisters their former tarrytown property for $1. the two-year lease called for the sisters to acquire insurance to protect two cottages on the property that he wanted to keep. it also contained a provision allowing for an extension on a month-to-month basis, “if, after…due diligence, the tenant is unable to complete the construction of such new buildings.”67 the sisters continued to seek donations for the mercy building fund and even secured an anonymous $1,000 donation from nelson rockefeller.68 the sisters even unsuccessfully asked rockefeller, jr. if he would grant them a low-interest loan for the remaining amount necessary to complete their dobbs ferry complex, mount mercy-on-the-hudson.69 in december 1959, the sisters signed a contract to begin the complex’s construction, which was scheduled to be completed in 550 days. sister mary jeanne promptly informed rockefeller, jr. that the sisters intended to move in 1961.70 as the complex’s construction was underway, sister mary jeanne continued to correspond with rockefeller, jr. during the negotiations to sell the sisters’ tarrytown property, she made a favorable impression on rockefeller, jr.—who described her in private as “wise, able and gracious”—and with his supporting good habits 31 associates, one of whom perceived her as “quite a business lady.”71 consequently, she and rockefeller, jr. developed a sense of mutual respect. as she confided to him in one letter, “the plans for our new mount mercy [complex]… are rapidly approaching completion…eight buildings present a challenge to one’s mental efforts as the endeavor is made to avoid any and all mistakes which might arise from insufficient consideration. this is a tremendous project and we shall always be grateful to you. it embodies our prayers, hopes and dreams for an expansion of our facilities that will enable us to work ever more effectively for…the underprivileged of our country and in particular of our eastern area.”72 in april 1960, shortly before his death, she sent him an easter card, addressing him as the sisters’ “friend and benefactor,” and urging his recovery.73 figure 4: a sketch of mount mercy-on-the-hudson from the program for the december 1959 groundbreaking ceremony. during the fall of 1961, the sisters moved from tarrytown to mount mercy. meanwhile, the main buildings on their former tarrytown property were razed. during the early twenty-first century, construction companies purchased the site of mercy college’s original campus and, despite local opposition, built luxury homes on the property near the intersection of wilson park drive and county house road.74 in 1969, mercy college became a non-sectarian and co-educational institution. during a period of unprecedented expansion during the 1970s and 1980s, mercy college began to establish branch campuses and extension centers throughout the new york metropolitan region, diversified its academic programs, and first achieved national recognition as one of the most innovative institutions of higher education in the united states. mercy college, comprised of only the “college building” (now main hall) in 1961, soon absorbed the other buildings within the mount mercy complex into its main campus as the sisters sold off their complex piece by piece. by 2013, it had united six of the eight buildings built with rockefeller money under its 32 global education review 10 (4) auspices.75 ten years later, it was granted university status. throughout its history, mercy university, literally a “house that the rockefellers built,” has retained a deep commitment to community service and to providing motivated students innovative programs that provide the opportunity to transform their lives through higher education. acknowledgements a version of this article appeared previously in the new york history review 7, 1 (2013): 134159. the views expressed in this article are those of the author and do not represent the official position of mercy university. references archival sources mercy university library archives, dobbs ferry, new york. rockefeller family archives, rockefeller archive center, sleepy hollow, new york. periodicals catholic news daily news (tarrytown, ny) new york times tarrytown-sleepy hollow patch books bacon, edgar mayhew. (1897). chronicles of tarrytown and sleepy hollow. new york: g.p. putnam’s sons, 1897. burton, katherine. (1946). his mercy endureth forever. tarrytown: sisters of mercy. blackford, mansel g., & kerr, k. austin. (1994). business enterprise in american history, 3rd ed. boston: houghton mifflin. daigler, sister mary jeremy. (2001). through the windows: a history of the work of higher education among the sisters of mercy of the americas. scranton: university of scranton press. fitzgerald, maureen. (2011). habits of compassion: irish american nuns in new york city. in women’s america: refocusing the past, eds. linda kerber, jane sherron de hart, and cornelia hughes dayton, 7th ed. new york: oxford university press. gallo, daniel, & kramer, frederick. (1981). the putnam division: new york central's bygone route through westchester county. new york: quadrant press. joyce, henry, altman, cynthia bronson, & and greenstein, susan t. (2005). kykuit: the house and gardens of the rockefeller family, 2nd ed. pocantico hills: historic hudson valley press. maher, sister mary gratia. (1951). the organization of religious instruction in catholic colleges for women. washington, dc: the catholic university of america press. martone, eric, & perrota, michael. (2013). mercy college: yesterday and today. charleston, south carlonia: the history press. parrell, sister mary agnes (1985). a history of mercy college, 1950-1982. dobbs ferry, ny: mercy college. szanto, andras, ed. (2011). rockefeller philanthropy: a selected guide. sleepy hollow, ny: rockefeller archive center. vetare, margaret. (2004). philipsburg manor upper mills. pocantico hills: historic hudson valley press. supporting good habits 33 notes 1 program for the mount mercy groundbreaking ceremony, december 12, 1959, mercy university library archives, dobbs ferry, ny; “rockefeller helps dedicate a convent that father aided,” new york times, may 21, 1962. 2 “rockefeller helps dedicate a convent that father aided”; sister mary agnes parrell, a history of mercy college, 1950-1982 (dobbs ferry, ny: mercy college, 1985), 8. 3 malcolm wilson, address, commencement exercises, january 1982, in parrell, mercy, 65. 4 mansel g. blackford and k. austin kerr, business enterprise in american history, 3rd ed. (boston: houghton mifflin, 1994), 125-225. 5 andras szanto, ed., rockefeller philanthropy: a selected guide (sleepy hollow, ny: rockefeller archive center, 2011), 8; henry joyce with cynthia bronson altman and susan t. greenstein, kykuit: the house and gardens of the rockefeller family, 2nd ed. (pocantico hills: historic hudson valley press, 2005), 7. 6 joyce, kykuit, 7. 7 szanto, rockefeller philanthropy, 40-47. 8 the topic is addressed briefly in sister mary agnes parrell’s early history of mercy university, which was limited to 20 spiral-bound copies. see: parrell, mercy, 4, 8. 9 maureen fitzgerald, “habits of compassion: irish american nuns in new york city,” in women’s america: refocusing the past, eds. linda kerber, jane sherron de hart, and cornelia hughes dayton, 7th ed. (new york: oxford university press, 2011), 219. 10 see: margaret vetare, philipsburg manor upper mills (pocantico hills: historic hudson valley press, 2004), 18-22; edgar mayhew bacon, chronicles of tarrytown and sleepy hollow (new york: g.p. putnam’s sons, 1897); on the slave quarters on the sisters’ tarrytown property, see: katherine burton, his mercy endureth forever (tarrytown: sisters of mercy, 1946). 11 joyce, kykuit, 9. 12 ibid. 13 ibid., 7, 11-13. 14 folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, record group 2 office of the messrs. rockefeller (omr), rockefeller family archives, rockefeller archive center, sleepy hollow, new york (hereafter designated rac). 15 daily news (tarrytown), august 21, 1958. 16 george mackay to henry cooper, december 19, 1911, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 17 letter from john d. rockefeller, jr., october 24, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 18 see: daniel gallo and frederick kramer, the putnam division: new york central's bygone route through westchester county (new york: quadrant press, 1981). 19 folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 20 eugene quin to george mackay, february 2, 1912, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 21 appraisal from bryan kennelly, march 12, 1912, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; memorandum, january 17, 1928, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 22 eugene quin to john d. rockefeller, sr., october 17, 1912, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 23 memo (charles heydt), november 29, 1912, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 24 eugene quin to john d. rockefeller, sr., november 22, 1912, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 25 memorandum, january 17, 1928, folder 230, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 26 see: folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 27 charles heydt to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 5, 1928, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 28 charles heydt to john d. rockefeller, jr., april 11, 1928, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 34 global education review 10 (4) 29 letter to john d. rockefeller, jr., may 28, 1928, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 30 charles heydt to george gillespie, october 1, 1928, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 31 george gillespie to charles heydt, january 19, 1929, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 32 william conklin to charles heydt, september 23, 1929, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; chales heydt to george gillespie, november 6, 1929, folder 231, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 33 folder 232, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 34 fitzgerald, “habits of compassion,” 217, 220. 35 john d. rockefeller, jr. to nelson rockefeller, december 19, 1936, folder 233b, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 36 sr. m. immaculata to nelson rockefeller, june 15, 1939; letter from elizabeth phillips, june 28, 1939, folder 232, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; dana creel to nelson rockefeller, june 29, 1954, folder 233a, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; jay downer to mother provincial, may 29, 1936 and nelson rockefeller to john d. rockefeller, jr., december 21, 1936, folder 233b, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; nelson rockefeller to sr. mary gratia maher, july 28, 1952, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 37 sister mary gertrude to john d. rockefeller, jr., folder 232, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 38 although the school is still open today in the bronx, sister gratia was principal when the school was located at a former location. 39 parrell, mercy, 6. 40 sister mary jeremy daigler, through the windows: a history of the work of higher education among the sisters of mercy of the americas (scranton: university of scranton press, 2001), 131; sister mary gratia maher, the organization of religious instruction in catholic colleges for women (washington, dc: the catholic university of america press, 1951). 41 parrell, mercy, 2-4; daigler, through the windows, 132. 42 dana creel to nelson rockefeller, february 8, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; public memory also ignores the fact that mercy university operated on the site. in a 2011, articles covering local opposition to the construction of luxury homes on the sisters’ former tarrytown property fail to mention that mercy university opened and operated there for 10 years, instead focusing on only our lady of victory academy. see: elaine marranzano, “‘mansions’ return to tarrytown’s wilson park,” tarrytownsleepy hollow patch, july 26, 2011. <http://tarrytown.patch.com/articles/mansionsreturn-to-tarrytowns-wilson-park-but-pale-incomparison-to-majestic-estates-of-past> 43 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., november 19, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 44 parrell, mercy, 4. 45 mother mary jeanne ferrier to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 25, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 46 mother mary jeanne ferrier to william yates, december 4, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., october 22, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., may 23, 1957, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 47 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., february 15, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 3, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., october 22, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; letter from john d. rockefeller, jr., october 24, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 48 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., february 15, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 3, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., october 22, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, supporting good habits 35 rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; letter from john d. rockefeller, jr., october 24, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 49 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., july 15, 1957, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 50 philip keebler to john d. rockefeller, jr., april 8, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to philip keebler, march 28, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 51 mother mary jeanne ferrier to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 25, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 52 john d. rockefeller, jr. to mother mary jeanne ferrier, april 8, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 53 new york times, june 23, 1958. 54 letter to philip keebler, april 7, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 55 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., june 25, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 56 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., november 6, 1957, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 57 daily news (tarrytown), june 1958; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., july 19, 1957, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., march 10, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 58 memorandum to mother mary jeanne ferrier, july 6, 1959, folder 234, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; memorandum to philip keebler, august 19, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 59 parrell, mercy, 4; william yates to paul folwell, august 6, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 60 philip keebler to william yates, july 22, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 61 the event received wide media coverage. examples: catholic news, october 25, 1958; new york times, october 22, 1958; daily news (tarrytown), october 21, 1958. 62 the letters are contained in: folder 234, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 63 protestant reformers, often from the middle and upper classes, had perceived poverty as a moral problem rooted in particular cultures. thus, in protestant logic, it was the immigrant cultures (a part of which was the catholic religion) that posed the root of the problem. consequently, protestant progressives had generally opposed the formation of catholic schools, which they perceived as institutions that would perpetuate conditions of dependency. see: fitzgerald, “habits of compassion,” 215. 64 the transcript is contained in: folder 234, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 65 william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., august 19, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 66 william yates to philip keebler, april 1, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; daily news (tarrytown), august 21, 1958; daily news (tarrytown), december 15, 1959. 67 philip keebler to robert gumbel, september 4, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; philip keebler to william sanders, september 4, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 68 vera goeller to sister mary brendon, december 18, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 69 william yates to philip keebler, january 29, 1959, folder 234, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 70 philip keebler to john d. rockefeller, jr., january 5, 1960, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 71 john d. rockefeller, jr. to william yates, march 13, 1958, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac; william yates to john d. rockefeller, jr., october 22, 1956, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 36 global education review 10 (4) 72 mother mary jeanne ferrier to john d. rockefeller, jr., june 28, 1959, folder 234, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 73 mother mary jeanne to john d. rockefeller, jr., 1960, folder 233, box 35, educational interests series, rg 2 omr, rockefeller family archives, rac. 74 marranzano, “‘mansions’ return to tarrytown’s wilson park.” 75 the two buildings built with rockefeller assistance that are not currently part of mercy university’s dobbs ferry campus are the provincial house (also known as christie hall), which was demolished during the late 1980s to make room for what became the landing at dobbs ferry, a townhouse development; and the sacred heart catholic church’s parochial school, which is now the alcott montessori school. “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 168 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: bradley, jon, & allison, sam. (2021). “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program. global education review, 8 (2-3), 168-178. “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program jon bradley mcgill university (canada) sam allison mcgill university (canada) [the purpose of history is] “…to understand the requirements of citizenship and have a greater understanding of ourselves and the global community in the past, present, and future tense” (anonymous student, independent report, page 29). abstract in sharp contrast to the musings of a senior student, the mandatory history texts follow a narrow provincial orientation. the recently introduced quebec high school history program offers adolescents a slanted narrative devoid of larger interconnected contexts as hailed; for example, by oakeshott (2004), macmillan (2009), and/or canadine (2013). in our view, secondary students are forced to travel a historical journey that deals with canadian and quebec events through a “unique” quebec lens (woods, 2014). the widely engrained twenty-first century concept of global interconnectedness, first articulated on a wide scale over a hundred years ago (wells, 1920), has been replaced by one anchored in a retronineteenth-century construct viewing only carefully selected unconnected historical snippets devoid of a contextualized narrative. anchored in a narrow political perspective, this secondary course of study forces adolescents into a stilted and fragmented “patch-work” historical landscape. this journey silences many voices, brushes others from the chronicle, and twists recognized historiography to fit a specific contemporary self-determined internalized orientation. we review the official course of study to unpack several major world themes demonstrating this constrained point-of-view via a close investigation of one of the approved english language student texts. further, we illustrate how the deliberate manipulation of historical stories, as well as “alternate facts,” leads adolescents into a realm deprived of meaningful connections. keywords anti-glocality, curriculum development, alternate history, false narratives, & educational propaganda. the program and student texts on the quebec education landscape quebec is one of the few canadian provinces that demands history as a high school graduation certification subject. as canada does not have a unified or federally mandated educational system, the ten provinces and three territories operate independent school systems akin to silos on a landscape. each looks similar but is nonetheless independent regarding kind and length of courses, student texts, instructional materials, etc. hence, the history program and authorized textbooks in quebec will be different from every other region. in fact, half of the school systems across the country do not even offer the domain of history at the senior high school levels or demand satisfactory completion of any history course for the awarding of certification. unlike so-called “international” “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 169 169 subjects, such as sciences and mathematics, there are no outside agencies which scrutinize history programs, student course books, related instructional materials or examination benchmarks. each separate ministry of education internally self-checks without outside perusal and implements programs, courses, classroom materials, and evaluation regimes free from any objective academic or pedagogical oversight. this constitutional arrangement means that canada, as a nation, cannot mandate anything of an educational concern within the domain of elementary and secondary public education. for example, this weakness is glaringly evident in that the many and varied educational orientated recommendations emanating from the truth and reconciliation commission (2015), a multi-year first nations, inuit and metis investigation into the sordid history of residential and indian day schools, cannot be implemented by the federal government. each province and territory will separately enact what appeals – determined by local political orientations. tragically, any possible pan-canadian education initiatives, no matter how meritorious, are moot. although the majority language in quebec is french, there is a vibrant minority english speaking cohort which is guaranteed specific educational rights via canada’s constitutions. however, the english schools are mirrors of the french systems in all curriculum issues. therefore, the same history program, student texts, and final examinations will be used simultaneously in both networks. reflections.qc.ca: 1840 to our times (fortin, et al., 2016), authorized for use by quebec authorities at this level (grade 10/secondary iv), is a direct translation (with no accounting for linguistic adaptation) from a book originally written and published in french. best described as a “graphic comic,” this colorful hard bound volume totals some 430 glossy pages approximately 23cm by 28cm. each page is roughly made up of 50% written text in several short separate statements surrounded or overlaid by copious images (maps, diagrams, pictures, quotations, etc.). while very colourful and perhaps initially visually appealing, the amount of meaningful textual historical narrative is severely limited due to this overall arrangement with the result that complex and interconnected situations (for example; migration, population shifts, territorial occupation, citizenship, economic relationships, etc.) are reduced to stark linguistic fragments lacking relationships. developed to replace an existing program that was barely a decade old, this new “history of quebec and canada” course of study was grounded on two major underpinnings. the first being that history would be studied through a specific quebec lens (education et enseignement superieur, 2016, pages 3-4) with the second being that the global concept of citizenship education, which a foundational document termed “civic preaching”, would not form any part of this new historical template (beauchemin & fahmy-eld, 2014, page 16). in sharp contrast, the replaced curriculum carried the far more inclusive title of “history and citizenship education” and opened with the following statement: the history and citizenship education program has two educational aims: to enable students to develop their understanding of the present in the light of the past and to prepare them to 170 global education review 8 (2-3) participate as informed citizens in the social life of a democratic, pluralistic society that is receptive to a complex world. (quebec, 2011, page 295). on the other hand, this new course of study cogently observes in a subsection termed the “nature of the program”: studying the particular features of the path taken by a nation…helps its members to view themselves from a long-term perspective and to construct their identity as active participants in the historical process.” as well as “the history of quebec and canada program focuses on the characterization and interpretation of the particular features of the path taken by quebec society. (quebec, 2017, page 1). allocated 100 instructional hours over a 180-day school year, the import of this history course cannot be understated. as noted, passing the uniform june examination is a necessity for the awarding of the secondary school certificate. the only authorized in-school instructional materials are the student textbooks from which the final examination questions are drawn. contumacious in the face of widespread criticism reaction to both the official history course and the student material was swift and vocal. however, criticisms were scattered and emanated from various elements within society who may have had a specific orientation. for example, the lack of any kind of overview acknowledging immigrant contributions to the historical tapestry were decried (cooper, 2016; commins, 2016; laville & dagenais, 2016; allison & bradley, 2017; lalonde, 2020). further, the absence of anglophone (english speaking quebecers) contributions to quebec’s development was seen as an insult to this large and important minority societal segment (valiante, 2016; nadeau, 2016; scott, 2016; allison & bradley, 2018). additionally, some directly challenged the decision of english school boards to accept what was viewed as a flawed student textbook (montreal gazette editorial, 2016; valiante, 2018). complicating the import of these criticisms, was the reality that these opinions were authored by scattered groups within the overall community. many came from specific cultural groups (first nations peoples, inuit, immigrant and religious communities, etc.) which may well be viewed as having a vested interest in promoting their own specific historical stance. however, perhaps the most damning and comprehensive review of both the new program and imposed classroom texts came from an independent group of professional historians. an independent report of the history experts committee on the provincial history of quebec and canada program and approved english textbooks was issued in october of 2018 having been commissioned by the english montreal school board. this systematic independent study over several months by three eminent canadian historians found that both the program of study and textbooks were fallacious and, in a scathing recommendation, declared that the “authorized textbooks …are fundamentally flawed and must be withdrawn from all high schools” (page 22). furthermore, this independent report characterized the overall program as “driven by a particular view of the past and its connection to a specific vision of the present and future” (page 3). “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 171 171 in spite of a swath of relentless public criticism over many months highlighting a crescendo of glaring weaknesses, in the face of the findings articulated in the independent report, and even after spending approximately 1.6-million dollars (taken from a federal grant designed for second-language learning) to correct some aboriginal language issues and reprint the texts (the canadian press, 2018), the education ministry would not ‘hit pause’ and forged ahead with full implementation. in the words of the quebec minister of education, jean-francois roberge, “history will always be subject to debate” (shingler, 2018). it may have been germane for the minister, instead of so quickly dismissing the independent report, to have internalized the salient comments in an appendix at the end of the report. here, a high school student whose quotation headed this expose and who was one of the first to use the new textbook, further commented: • “another goal of history is to eliminate ignorance and stereotypes, but that becomes impossible when the information provided isn’t enough to actually combat any of those things.” • “…women tend to not be written about as if they were an inherent part of history, but instead sectioned off and talked about only under the context of feminism.” • “in order to keep students interested in history you need to make it relevant, and that means including social issues regarding diverse communities…” (independent report, 2018, pages 27-29). in order to account for the phasing out of the older program and books, the new program and texts commenced with the september 2018 school year. viewed as a ‘transition’ period, some students were finishing the old program while others stated the new. therefore, the september 2019-june 2020 school year was to be full implementation. however, both the school year and scheduled june uniform examinations were derailed by the world-wide covid-19 pandemic with all schools in quebec closed for in-school instruction as of mid-march. as a result, no june examinations took place and individual class grades were used to determine the history mark for certification purposes. unfortunately, with the continued imposition of wide-spread covid-19 restrictions, the september 2020 to june 2021 school year was also truncated. schools throughout the province were forced to offer alternate schooling strategies ranging from temporary school closures to “class bubbles” to zoom sessions. definitely not a normal year in any sense, the june certification examinations were again cancelled with final marks being determined via individual in-school class tests. nationalist history had fueled the conflagration novelist and science fiction writer herbert george wells (born 1866 and forever known as hg) had spent the world war one years (1914-1918) in a flurry of frenzied literary activity. he threw himself into various writing projects and by any measure produced a watershed of accomplished works; including, a half-dozen novels (for example, boon, the 172 global education review 8 (2-3) research magnificent, the soul of a bishop as well as joan and peter: the story of an education) along with scores of short stories and newspaper articles. his many various newspaper articles published in the early months of the war were released at the end of 1914 as the war that will end war. this latter collection postulated that this current war would demonstrate the futility of war, in and of itself, and render future wars moot! he even found time and energy to work for the british government in 1918 and seriously lobby (in speeches and writing) for the creation of what would become the league of nations. more importantly, however, according to biographer david c. smith (1960), the war fundamentally changed wells and directed his significant energies, notoriety, and resources into fields that would occupy him until his last breath in 1946! hg became convinced that unchecked nationalism had created the conditions that permitted world war one to take root and expand. as an antidote, he sought new avenues that would blunt these negative emotions. although originally trained in biology with a bsc from the university of london external programme, with his first published books being a two-volume tome on biology, he saw german and other nations’ nationalism and militarism as the root causes for the war. in his mind, the domains of history and education must become the instruments to thwart narrowly focused nationalistic rhetoric by offering a more balanced and nuanced world narrative overview that did not attempt to exalt one country over another. smith oft quotes the wellsian phrase of “what did matter was the future of the world, of the species; …who would win the race between education and catastrophe?” (smith, 1960, page 218; sherborne, 2010, page 251).). biographer john hammond suggests that wells – like many others – had been fundamentally negatively impacted by the carnage that was world war one. the years following 1914 had decimated the existing world order and cast a pall over wells and his literary output. his articles and books had taken a “dark” turn. however, with the hope he now saw in the outline of history, wells became reenergized and threw himself into this project that he felt would stem future tides of unchecked nationalism (hammond, 2001, pages 61-62). not since edward gibbon’s 6-volume publishing triumph of the history of the decline and fall of the roman empire in the late 1770s, had the english-speaking world seen such a literaryhistorical undertaking. writing and researching almost non-stop, with his wife acting as researcher and typist, wells wrote the world’s journey in a twelve-month period. he had to undertake the task himself – although not a professional historian – as not one historian he approached would support his endeavor or even consent to take on the writing task. originally appearing in november of 1919 in a 24fortnightly illustrated format (hammond, 2001, page 61), the outline of history was an immediate success. the first single book version appeared very shortly thereafter in late 1920. importantly, the work has been revised and updated numerous times (including 1931, 1940, 1949, 1956, and 1961) over the ensuing half century, translated into several languages, with the last revised enlarged english language print edition appearing in 1971. while exact sales are difficult to chart, it is estimated that several million copies of all editions have been sold world-wide. “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 173 173 hg’s hope was that his outline would provide an overview that highlighted world citizenship and global connectedness rather than country specific nationalism. unfortunately, his book never became overly popular at university levels but, on the other hand, became a sort of “every man” staple whereby his tome found itself onto the shelves of countless homes throughout the world. in his own introduction, wells cogently observed: men and women tried to recall the narrow history teaching of their brief schooldays and found an uninspiring and partially forgotten list of national kings or presidents. they tried to read about these matters, and found an endless wilderness of books. they had been taught history, they found, in nationalistic blinkers, ignoring every country but their own, and now they were turned into a blaze. it was extraordinarily difficult for them to determine the relative values of the matters under discussion (wells, 1956, page 2). great conversations provide global connectedness in his 1961 revision, raymond postgate contextualized outline and stated that its genesis grew from the continuing ravages as world war one seemed to drag on and on: it was the last, the weariest, most disillusioned year of the first world war. everywhere there were unwanted privations; everywhere there was mourning. the tale of the dead and mutilated had mounted to many millions. men felt they had come to a crisis in the world’s affairs. … there was a copious discussion of possible new arrangements of world politics; of world treaties for the abolition of war, of leagues of nations, leagues of peoples. everyone was “thinking internationally” (page 1). more succinctly, sherborne (2012) noted that “if an alternate account of history, emphasizing human unity, could be put into the hands of teachers and general readers around the world, it might have the reverse effect and help create a culture for future peace” (page 251). over the ensuing decades, wells’ challenge to both educators and historians resonated but sidetracked by the realities of politics and historical slants. nonetheless, eminent academics have continued to voice for balance in historical narratives that eschew nationalistic points of view. michael oakeshott (1901-1990) maintained a basic premise that major philosophical quests are interconnected and can only be unpacked via wide-ranging critical investigations. he further surmised that individual freedom was challenged by nationalistic politics (oakeshott, 1991). david cannadine (1950 -) suggests that simplistic historical slogans and catch political phrases hide complexities and block detailed investigations. he argues that the world has always been a complicated overlaid landscape and simple narratives without context do an injustice to the convoluted human journey (cannadine, 2013). on the other hand, margaret macmillan (1940 -) argues that too much of contemporary historiography has slipped into a study of 174 global education review 8 (2-3) minutia. she further states that detailed and narrowly focused studies do not accurate reflect the overall global reality and often skew for specific orientations. she admonished developers of history programs and authors of textbooks to note that “history should not be written to make the present generation feel good but to remind us that human affairs are complicated” (2009, page 138). from a canadian perspective, jack granatstein (1939 -) challenged historians and teachers with the release of who killed canadian history? the tome argued that the study of canadian history had devolved into meaningless studies of little-known small segments that in no way contributed to a pancanadian debate. he suggested that the constant (re)examination of separate and local events distorted a national landscape and contributed to separateness with a lack of a global connectedness (granatstein, 2007). granatsteina suggested a set of “benchmarks” to guide history curriculum development. as examples, he highlighted that “standards should strike a balance between broader themes and the study of specific events…”; “standards must stress techniques of reading, understanding, and researching the past”; and “standards for history should be intellectually rigorous and aim to promote questioning, not passive absorption of facts” (2007, pages 45). anti-glocality leads to fake history there are many ways for educators to evaluate textbooks and templates abound on the internet. while differing in scope and scale, all generally lead the educator through a series of items that deal with vocabulary, visuals, textual material, quizzes, etc. the purpose of all such procedures is for teachers to ascertain comparable features for possible classroom use. for example, cunningsworth (1995) prefaces his book with the admonishment that “it is of great importance that the best and most appropriate materials available should be adopted” (page v). the independent report (2018) noted that “the [official] program [of study] focuses narrowly on the experience of and events pertaining to the french canadiens/quebecois, from contact until the present day. it pays too little attention to other canadian content”. furthermore, “nationalism narrows the focus, as it is not addressed as part of a larger phenomenon having its roots in europe in the late 18th century” (page 3). offering a comment specifically on the textbook, the report noted: as in the program, there is but one ideological bent in the textbooks rather than a more objective approach or an attempt to explain history from various ideological perspectives. this limits the students’ interpretation and understanding of historical developments (page 4). scattered throughout reflections are four “my story” vignettes. designed to intimately offer a very personal view to adolescents, these are two-page narratives highlighting specific events in quebec’s history. the four short stories are: “from riviere-ouelle to lowell: 1895” (pages 26-27); “evelyne, the bluebird: 1914-1918” (pages 112-113); “the generation gap: 1973” (pages 202-203); and “from mosul and from montreal: 2009” (page 284-285). very visual with much more narrative than many other sections of the text, these tales “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 175 175 highlight specific historical people. unfortunately – all are fake! ponder for a moment: a required history text that actively uses composite stories supposedly depicting real people to tell a real story. the drama of the tale palls in comparison to its falsehood! surely, real narratives abound, and the textbook authors did not have to resort to the questionable anti-history technique of inserting fiction into a factual landscape. the tales are fallacious, the people never existed, and yet the presentation purports to be historically accurate. the director of educational services for the quebec ministry of education stated that these vignettes “offer a snapshot of life of an ordinary person who might have lived during the period targeted in the chapter. the intention is to present the period under study in a way that will spark students’ interest” (emphasis added; lord, personal letter, 2018). mock stories can lead to many unanticipated consequences. profoundly, one may question what else is false within the text? are other events depicted as “might have been” or even “wish it were so”? the idea of peppering a student text with false and misleading “stories” to engage the learner is counter productive. after all, is the student text a “history book” or a “historical novel”? is real and true history not interesting enough in its own right to grab attention? an added insult to the intelligence of both student and teacher in inserting false narratives concerns where such fables may lead. for example, “bluebirds” was a descriptor of affection bestowed upon canadian nurses in wwi by wounded soldiers. it was a term of respect and endearment commenting on the blue capes/white blouses worn as part of their official dress uniform. unfortunately, the authors did not exercise due diligence and while enthralled in the crafting of narrative falsehoods neglected to verify that an internet search of “bluebird” will lead inquisitive adolescents into the vile world of pornography. the (mis)use of the internet is excused by lord in that “nowhere in the student textbook or the teacher’s guide are students instructed to consult a website or do internet research…” (lord, 2018). pagination suggests importance it is a truism that greater space is devoted to more significant events or to incidents that the authors deem important. complicated and wide-ranging historical incidents of a global nature will necessarily demand a more detailed and nuisance telling. in reflections, students read about several of the most important events in the twentieth-century through truncated narratives. for example, world war one covers 10-pages (pages 154-163); the inter-war years 12-pages (pages 164-177); while world war two receives 9-pages (pages 178-188). in both war segments, the reasons for warfare are not engaged; background information is absent; it is if countries simply decided to fight! the complex notions of international connectedness, for example of treaties with belgium and/or poland, were non-existent. going to war is the most serious of decisions a country can make; yet any sort of global contextualization is absent, and quebec adolescents are left simply to wonder: “why”? in the inter-war section, most of the information concerns minor local quebec politicians who espoused isolation. the evolving world-wide concerns surrounding fascism, communism and/or totalitarianism associated with events in europe (the spanish civil war?) 176 global education review 8 (2-3) and asia (european colonialism along with japanese expansion?) are simply absent from the landscape. for example, one of the most important pan-canadian social aspects to come from wwi, and one reflected throughout the western world, was the right of canadian women to vote at the federal level – in fact, some of the first canadian women to vote were those very “bluebird” nurses in france. yet, the equally interesting fact that the province of quebec did not permit women to vote in provincial elections for another twenty years is avoided. additionally, conscription is a gordian conundrum fraught with deep societal complications that faced every country! forcing people to fight, and maybe so in far away places, always calls for deep thought and reflection. the suggestion in the text that conscription was only an issue in quebec and was somehow directed solely against french-canadians by the canadian authorities twists the historical record and stifles deeper debate. conscription encompasses the most basic of clashes between individual freedoms and the need for the greater society to protect itself, and must be appreciated and contextualized within a wide global setting. surprisingly, for the adolescent reader, there was no war against japan in world war two! no mention is made of the dropping of the two atomic bombs! if there was one single action that had a global impact from 1945, it certainly was the bombing of both nagasaki and hiroshima. the continuing world-wide nuclear tension, arms races, and global political tensions permeates many aspects of contemporary political realities. equally questionable, a two-page spread on the holocaust devotes half of its scarce space to “residence” of the nazis (page 184-185). the horrors of concentration camps are relegated to a single black & white photo along with 75-words with little attention paid to the lasting impact and consequences of nazi horrors. glocality thwarted two of the standards articulated by granatstein (2007) highlight large historical issues; namely, “standards should contribute to citizenship education through the development of understanding about our common civic identity and shared values, and through the analysis of major policy issues” as well as “standards must reflect the global context…” (pages 45-46). granatstein stresses the concern that the teaching of history must not fall into the trap of narrow interpretations. he cogently argues that history must be taught with all of the warts and foibles, but in a large global context such that connections can be entertained by the learner. furthermore, as postulated by hg, narrow nationalist interpretations that deliberately place one country/culture over another must be eschewed. as he noted, nationalistic narratives do not lead to global understanding. instead of embracing a global and interconnected historical narrative, the most recent quebec program and student school texts take adolescents on a stilted journey. as aptly criticized by scores, and especially as articulated by the independent report, the education authorities refused all suggestions for globalization, citizenship education, and contextualization. while every quebec student must follow a course called “the history of quebec and canada” and required to successfully pass a “anti-glocality” grounds new quebec history program 177 177 ministerial imposed uniform examination, their understanding of the past will be deficient. unfortunately, their historical journey will be narrowly focused, wrapped in a specific political orientation, and devoid of an overall world view. references allison, sam and jon bradley. 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(1920/1961). the outline of history: the whole study of man (volume i). garden city, ny: garden city books. woods, allan. (2014). quebec history courses should be rewritten with nationalist focus, report suggests. thestar.com. (february 27). toward a model of educational equality 1 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: greenberg, jeremy h., & cheung, hiu ching. (2022). toward a model of educational equality: establishing social validity measures for inclusion. global education review, 9 (4), 1-11. toward a model of educational equality: establishing social validity measures for inclusion jeremy h. greenberg the children’s institute of hong kong hiu ching cheung the children’s institute of hong kong abstract inclusion of students with special education needs (sen) and especially autism spectrum disorder (asd) into general education curricula is a challenging practice. in recent years, the practice of inclusion has been expanding within the international school community. outside of the united states, the process of inclusion is developing rapidly due to an ever-increasing demand. the demand is fueled by families and is compounded by the scarcity of international schools with developed programs and inclusive classrooms. applied behavior analysis provides evidence-based strategies and tactics that support educators and those responsible for inclusion of students sen and asd. the purpose of the present study was to use behavioral observation techniques to determine socially valid performance criterion for attending behaviors in typically developing primary school students during group instruction and independent desk work. no direct observation data were found on this subject, to date. direct observations occurred in situ using whole interval recording procedures across typical students across primary grades one through eight, inclusive. data were collected under two types of conditions, lecture style instruction, and independent desk work for boys and girls across all grades. the performance criterion could then be used to guide decisions by iep teams to fade out support of those students with sen in the general education setting. results show that typical students attend to the teacher during live lectures an average of 93% of the time using a time sampling data collection technique and 96% during independent desk work. key words autism, special education needs, inclusion, applied behavior analysis, attending behaviors, on task, international school inclusion of students with special education needs (sen) and especially autism spectrum disorder (asd) into general education classes is a challenging practice. in recent years, the practice of inclusion has been expanding within the international school community in some parts of asia such as in hong kong due to increased demand (greenberg & greenberg, 2014). the practice of inclusion was described in detail years ago, as a challenging and controversial practice (stainback & stainback, 1995). there were and still are many factors that have been a part of the collective conversation about inclusion in the research literature. those factors include: teacher efficacy (beacham & rouse, 2012; chen, lau, & jin, 2006; harrower, 1999; sharma, loreman, & forlin, 2012), attitudes of primary school principles (sharma & chow, 2008), the effects that inclusion might have on the regular education students (feldman, 2002; koegel, vernon, koegel, koegel, & paullin, 2012; rea, mclaughlin, & walther-thomas, 2001), effects on students with emotional disturbances and severe disabilities (mckenna, solis, brigham, & adamson, 2018; harrower, 1999), and the preparedness of teacher training programs (forlin, 2010; greer, 2002; yuen, westwood, & wong, 2005; forlin & sin, 2010; mckenna, newton, brigham, & 2 global education review 9 (4) garwood, 2021). studies investigating parent experiences with inclusion (tsai & fung, 2009), and applied studies that have improved students’ attending behaviors and social skills (caballero & connell, 2010; callahan & rademacher, 1999; conroy, asmus, sellers, & ladwig, 2005; greenberg, tang, & tsoi, 2010; owen-deschryver, carr, cale, & blakeley-smith, 2008) have expanded the discussion on inclusive education in the us and abroad. despite the complexity that the practice of inclusion presents to a given school community, inclusion remains central to the mission of many of today’s schools in the us and abroad. in the us, the education of all handicapped children’s act (public law 94-142, 1975) contained a least restrictive environment (lre) directive so that students with special education needs receive lessons to the maximum extent possible alongside their neurotypical peers, in an individualized manner. decades later, the us continues to grapple with the lre directive and include students into regular classes in an appropriate manner. meanwhile, inclusive opportunities for students with sen and asd that lead to meaningful changes in those students outside of the us such as in asia are few and far between. published research on the subject is scarce. (greenberg & greenberg, 2014; poon-mcbrayer, 2004; wong & hui, 2008). even with the growing demand for effective inclusion practices, services and inclusion initiatives have been particularly slow going in southeast asia and specifically in hong kong (forlin, 2010; wong & hiu, 2008). one of the significant barriers that teachers and parents face when including students with sen into the general education setting are deficits in the area of listener behavior, joint attention and other verbal behavior deficits (greer & ross, 2008). joint attention combines social and communication behavior in young children in which the child and adult or peer use gestures and gaze to share attention with respect to interesting objects or events. this skill plays a critical role in social and language development (jones & carr, 2004). joint attention can be viewed within the response class of attending behavior. attending behavior has been targeted for improvement through applied research applications in our field of behavior analysis using various strategies and tactics since the early days (walker & buckley, 1968). in the more recent literature on the topic of joint attention, variations in gestures have been found to predict language development in young children (mundy, sigman, & kasari, 1990) and joint attention has been termed a pivotal skill in the development of appropriate language in young children (charman, 2003). empirical studies have documented successful tactics found to improve joint attention when it is missing in young children through initiating bids for attention (taylor & hoch, 2008) and using script fading to promote bids for attention (pollard, betz, & higbee, 2012). attention to the teacher is just one of the many responses or literacies (e.g. listener literacy, reading literacy, writing literacy, digital literacy, and scientific literacy) that students are expected to do in classrooms in order to benefit from general education curricula. in our international school setting we have observed that there are nine behaviors that students are expected to perform regularly on a daily or weekly basis. we call these simply group learning skills (see table 2). the question for the special education teacher, therefore, becomes how well do we need to prepare our students for group learning? how much attending behavior do neurotypical students have? applied behavior analysis offers reliable techniques for validating the social behavior of students such as group learning skills toward a model of educational equality 3 the concept of social validity can be determined by using direct observation techniques with adults or competent individuals performing the target behavior of interest. the term was first described in great detail by montrose m. wolf (1978) in an effort to elaborate on a commentary from colleague donald baer. the topic of the commentary and their discussion was to define the purpose of the journal of applied behavior analysis as being the publication to describe applications of the analysis of behavior for problems of social importance. wolf recognized that an investigation of the true meaning of social importance was warranted. subsequently, wolf set out to define and describe how behavior analysts might discover measures of social validity across various behavioral applications. research on the topic of social validity has since been brought forward by modern practitioners who have advocated for its continued use. social validity measures have a wide range of applications and, as a concept, have functioned as guiding principle across our science over the decades (hanley, 2010; nicolson, lazo-pearson, & shandy, 2020). one useful technique for determining social validity is whole interval recording (cooper, heron, & heward, 2007). when paired with interobserver agreement techniques, the outcomes can be viewed as highly reliable measures of student behavior. applied behavior analysis (aba) is a science dedicated to improving the behavior and lives of people to a significant degree through various evidence-based strategies and tactics. aba has a long history of supporting educators and those responsible for inclusion of students sen and asd (cooper, heron, & heward, 1987; 2007; 2019). the purpose of the present study was to collect data in situ on the behavior of attending to the teacher as well as independent desk work using typically developing students across primary grades one through eight. an equal number of both boys and girls were included as participants. results would be used to inform special education teachers as to the level of services that a given student with sen might need in order to be included successfully in a general education class and to signal the process of moving students into a lesser restrictive environment and towards great independence in general education classrooms. method participants and setting a total of 16 students (grade 1 8; 6 13 years of age) from the harbour school (international school) were included for data collection. one boy and one girl from each grade were nominated to participate in this study based on their overall anecdotal and subjective description as “appropriate or typical” according to their general education class teacher. these students received no additional small group nor one-on-one learning support. furthermore, their typical attending behavior was reflected in their average to above average map (measure of academic progress) scores from term 1 of the 2019 2020 school year (see table 1). data collection took place in the classrooms of the harbour school during lesson time of the four core academic subjects (literacy, mathematics, science and social studies). individual student’s attending behaviors were observed under the two lesson conditions of lecture style instruction and independent desk work. socioeconomic status for the students was middle class to upper-middle class. data from table 3 show the demographics and results from the students observed. definition of behavior attending behavior were defined using an operational definition that was included both observable and measurable components. students were observed to keep their eyes on the 4 global education review 9 (4) teacher or instructional materials and as defined as on-task and engaging in any assigned activity. if the student looked away from the teacher or instructional materials, stopped engaging in the assigned activity for more than two seconds, their behavior would be counted as an incorrect response. plus “+” and minus “-“signs were recorded on the data sheets using pen for correct on task and incorrect off task responses to each of the 10 second intervals throughout the measurement duration using time sampling. procedure direct observations occurred in situ using whole interval recording procedures. data were collected under two types of conditions, lecture style instruction, and independent desk work for boys and girls, across all grades. using whole interval recording with 10-second intervals, the students’ attending behavior was recorded every 10 seconds for 5 minutes, resulting in 30 recordings. percentages of each student’s attending behavior (on task) were calculated by dividing the number of intervals of correct responses (student attending and staying on-task), by the total number of intervals (30 per observation) and multiplying the result by 100. we used a modified whole interval recording procedure. if the student looked away from the teacher during the lecture observations for one to two seconds, but was observed to redirect themselves to the teacher, the interval was counted as on task. the researchers and data collectors were the authors of the study. the first author had a doctoral degree in special education applied behavior analysis and has been in the field for about 30 years and has been a board certified behavior analyst for 22 years. the second author had a masters in applied behavior analysis and has been in the field for about 8 years and has been a board certified behavior analyst for 6 years. interobserver agreement interobserver agreement (ioa) was calculated by dividing the number of intervals of agreement of correct responses emitted by each participant, by the total number of intervals and multiplying the result by 100. table 4 shows the results of the ioa. an agreement consisted of two independent observers agreeing that a participant had emitted a correct response based on the antecedent given. correct responses were pre-determined and operationally defined prior to beginning the study. a disagreement consisted of one observer having considered a response to be correct while the second observed considered the response to be incorrect. in phase 1, for participants a and b, in vivo ioa was assessed using the trial-by-trial method for 100% of naming experience sessions with 100% agreement, and 100% of post-naming experience probe sessions with 100% agreement. for participants c and d, ioa was assessed for 86% of naming experience sessions with 100% agreement and 86% of post-naming experience probe sessions with 100% agreement. in phase 2, in vivo trial-by trial ioa was collected for 39% of slu presentations for all participants with 100% agreement. ioa was calculated for 38% of id lu presentations for all participants with 100% agreement. toward a model of educational equality 5 table 1. scores on 16 participants from the measures of academic progress (map) standardized test fall 2020 table 2. group learning skills response class with nine target behavior and objectives student grade math reading language a 1 n/a n/a n/a b 1 n/a n/a n/a c 2 n/a n/a n/a d 2 247 217 217 e 3 199 189 192 f 3 192 190 185 g 4 212 210 211 h 4 249 220 217 i 5 231 223 220 j 5 225 218 n/a k 6 220 222 211 l 6 210 211 212 m 7 218 199 211 n 7 247 218 212 o 8 205 216 203 p 8 246 n/a 232 percentile (average = 41-60) 1-20 21-40 41-60 61-80 81-100 group learning skills target objectives proper sitting and attention to the class teacher the student will attend and stay seated appropriately in class to criterion (80% or higher across all subjects). respond to instruction given by class teacher (large group) or peers (small group) the student will correctly respond to instructions from the teacher 80% or higher accuracy across all subjects. hand raising appropriately the student will avoid calling out, raising their hand when they know the answer. choral responding the student will correctly respond to vocal verbal instruction in unison with peers. ignore inappropriate behaviors of other students the student will attend to the teacher and avoid distractions from other students and inform the teacher. note taking (grade 3 and upper primary) the student will record notes during lectures. independent & worksheet skills the student will perform steps in independent desk work & worksheets observational learning/ naming observation learning and naming should be observed at 80% as per verbal behavior analysis protocol. presentation skills the student will independently deliver presentations in class as per the school curriculum. 6 global education review 9 (4) results the percentages of on task behavior for all 16 participants in both lecture and independent desk work conditions are presented in table 4. percentages of each student’s attending behavior were calculated by dividing the number of intervals of correct responses (student attending and staying on-task according to the operational definition of target behavior) emitted by the participant, by the total number of intervals (30 recordings per observation) and multiplying the result by 100. table 3. percentage of on task behavior for all boys and girls in lecture and independent desk work conditions with a total of 16 observations in each condition across grades 1 through 8, inclusive. as shown in table 4, 78% of our observations (25 out of 32) have a percentage of on-task behavior ranging from 90% to 100%. only 22% (7 out of 32) of the observations were recorded with a percentage of on-task behavior lower than 90% and none of our observations has a percentage lower than 80%. overall, the mean percentages for on-task behavior were observed to be 93% of the time during lecture style instruction and 96% of the time recorded during independent desk work. the percentages of ontask behavior in both lesson conditions ranged from 80% to 100%. there was no significant difference in the percentages of attending between students’ age, gender, grade level, and the two types of instructional formats observed. however, the independent desk work condition on task behaviors were 3% higher than the lecture condition on task behaviors. there was no positive correlation between the percentages of a student’s attending behavior and his or her map score. the standardized test called map (measure of academic progress) is an assessment used by schools worldwide to measure students’ growth and achievement in grades k to 12 mathematics, reading, language usage and science. it provides information on how individual students are making progress on standards and if there are any gaps in their learning. students individually receive a rit (rasch unit) score in each tested area and rit scores generally range between 140 and 190. for students with an academic level equivalent of student gender ethnicity grade lecture style instruction independent desk work a boy white 1 100% 100% b girl asian 1 93% 100% c girl white 2 83% 100% d boy asian 2 83% 100% e boy white 3 93% 80% f girl white 3 100% 100% g girl white 4 97% 100% h boy asian 4 100% 97% i girl white 5 97% 97% j boy white 5 90% 83% k girl white 6 90% 97% l girl white 6 97% 80% m girl asian 7 97% 100% n boy asian 7 87% 100% o girl white 8 100% 100% p boy asian 8 80% 97% student n=16 grade n=8 mean = 93% range = (80, 100) mean = 96% range = (80, 100) toward a model of educational equality 7 a grade 3, scoring ranged from score somewhere between 140 and 190. in higher grade levels, they may progress to a score between 240 and 300. the range of scores from each grade define the average performance in terms of scores. results are showed in table 1. for all but one student in one area (student l in math) all of the student scores were in the average or above average range. discussion the data show that the average neurotypical student in one international school attended to group instruction 93% of the time and attended to independent desk work 96% of the time. a few observations can be made from our data, however limited. first, there was only a 3% difference in the type of instructional format observed between group instruction and independent desk work. in other words, there were no educationally significant differences in attending behaviors observed across lecture and independent desk work instructional formats. second, the attending behaviors that were observed across the grade 1 through grade 8 students did not differ significantly across the grade levels. third, no significant differences were observed across boys and girls. there were eight boys and eight girls in each of the grade levels included in the present study. comparisons with the joint attention literature are difficult to make here since language is typically the dependent variable of concern in these studies. in our field of applied behavior analysis, there has been a significant lack of behavioral research data using direct observation procedures such as time sampling on the attending behavior of neurotypical students. we chose to substantiate our findings through reporting on the map standardized test scores. this comparison functions to validate that the attending behaviors of our students subsequently translates to age appropriate and grade level responding. limitations of the present study our direct observation procedures were limited to two instructional formats in academic subjects. while we included literacy and numeracy classes only, the external validity of our findings could be expanded if additional subjects (e.g. science, social studies) and special subjects (e.g. art, music, physical education) were included as well. of note is the cultural population enrolled into our international school. about 85% of the students are expatriate students from twenty or more countries while the remaining 15% are from hong kong. while this does represent a relatively diverse population of children, there might be cultural differences observed in the attending behavior in students from other ethic or cultural backgrounds. our international school also uses english medium instruction and a us based curriculum. these factors might bias the data in one direction, for example. table 4. interobserver agreement grades 1-8 number of ioa observations 17 percentage of observations with ioa 53% mean 96% range (67%, 100%) 8 global education review 9 (4) implications for future research future research should investigate a few variables that were limited in the present study. those variables, in our view, include the subject matter being taught, the specific cultural and ethnic backgrounds of the students, and the limited sample size. our data show results for approximately 5% of the students in each grade level. more direct observational data needs to be collected across more students as well as across more subjects. additionally, data collection using additional schools and cultures would test for the external validity of our findings. it should be noted that international school students generally represent a middle to upper middle class socioeconomic status. if data were collected, for example, in a local school with all cantonese speaking students, the data might be observed to be different. differences might reflect the disciplinary styles in the schools and general cultural trends across populations. in conclusion, direct observation data from applied behavior 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(2022). froebel box: a tool for participatory and creative learning. global education review, 9 (4), 12-29. froebel box: a tool for participatory and creative learning taina sillanpää ebeneser foundation (finland) fredrika visuri ebeneser foundation (finland) inkeri ruokonen university of turku (finland) abstract historically, finnish early childhood education has been largely based on friedrich froebel's pedagogy. however, froebelian pedagogy is no longer as well known in finland as it once was. we at the kindergarten museum in helsinki wanted to increase awareness of the froebelian tradition. together with artist alexander reichstein, we came up with the idea of enriching children’s play by making use of the idea of froebel gifts. to this end, we invented a set of equipment called the froebel box. the aim of our research project is to discover how children learn and interact through froebel box activities. we use educational design research, which refers to a process in which we develop our pedagogical tool together with the teachers and children from our collaboration early childhood education and care (ecec) centers. the data was collected from three finnish ecec centers and analyzed with qualitative content analysis of teacher’s interviews. according to our findings, froebelian applications increase participative play and children’s interaction and learning in a holistic way. by playing with giant-sized blocks, children develop their social and motor skills and their mathematical and spatial understanding. giant blocks are a way that children can express themselves with their bodies. based on the interviews conducted, in the future we will concentrate on developing the participation of adults in the children’s play with the blocks, and on enriching the potential of the froebel box as a pedagogical tool. there are lots of possibilities for how the froebel box could be developed as a tool for spatial reasoning that would take into account bodily interaction, the role of teachers in supporting play, and different ways of using spatial concepts for play. key words froebelian gifts, the froebel box, holistic learning, participatory play, adult play skills, giant-sized blocks, museums introduction the kindergarten museum in helsinki provides a record of the history of the finnish kindergarten for the public and is also responsible for documenting current finnish early childhood education practices. museum pedagogy also wishes to contribute to the future of principles of early childhood pedagogy. since finnish early childhood pedagogy has its roots in an educational program invented by the german educator friedrich froebel (1782-1852), we wanted to bring froebelian ideas to our museum’s pedagogy in a new way by designing froebel box material for museum visitors and for collaboration with early childhood education and care (ecec) centers. froebel’s (1887) pedagogy and humanistic values, which foster children’s agency and autonomy, inspire finnish early childhood education (kumpulainen, 2018). the principles of finnish early childhood education and care (ecec) pedagogy (finnish national froebel box 13 agency for education, 2018) promote the sociocultural nature of learning with children’s active agency and interaction with their environment and fellow community members. bruce (2021, pp. 4, 6) points out according to froebel’s philosophy, education needs to form part of a nurturing environment: enriching the environment and developing children’s own thinking, and learning by doing, especially through play. according to kumpulainen (2018), in finnish early childhood education it is essential that children’s trust in their abilities and strengths as learners is fostered through positive experiences, child-centered play, creative activities, inquiry, and imagination. in the finnish ecec curriculum, some froebelian methods are still used, such as play, exploring nature, and singing (kinos & al., 2021). we created new innovations, giantsized blocks and a “you and froebel” construction kit in collaboration with artist alexander reichstein on the basis of friedrich froebel’s pedagogy. these innovations change the learning dynamic to one of group activities and promote dialogue in social situations, as froebel’s gifts and occupations concentrate more on individual work of a child or pair work between a child and an adult. we combined our two innovations and froebel’s first six gifts to make what we called the froebel box. it is a rental construction and creative learning set aimed mainly at ecec centers. the aim of our research project is to discover how children learn and interact through froebel box activities and to further develop this tool. the data was collected from three finnish ecec centers and analyzed using qualitative content analysis of teacher’s interviews. finnish early childhood education and froebelian roots finnish early childhood pedagogy has its roots in the ideas developed by friedrich froebel. hanna rothman (1856–1920) founded the first folk kindergarten in finland in september 1888. together with her colleague elisabeth alander (1859–1940), rothman initiated the education of kindergarten teachers in 1892. rothman and alander both studied in pestalozzi-froebel-haus in berlin, with henriette schrader-breymann (1827–1899) as their teacher. they brought froebelian pedagogy to finland and developed it over the course of many decades. (sillanpää and ruokonen, 2014) in 1882, schrader-breymann started an education institution for pre-school teachers in berlin and developed some of froebel’s curriculum and didactics. her curriculum focused on home and motherly care, and she used monthly themes as a project method, which included household work and the idea of spiritual motherhood. (johansson, 2022, p. 74) rothman and alander adopted schraderbreymann’s concept of spiritual motherhood, as well as monthly themes and household work, but they also highlighted froebel’s main works, mother play and nursery songs (mutterund kose-lieder) and the education of man (die menschenerziehung) and used elements of his play theory, including the whole of gifts and occupations. according to froebel, play is the main activity of young children (wasmuth, 2020, p. 75). froebel developed his materials, the whole of gifts and occupations, by observing children’s play. children prepare themselves into natural reality, when playing designing and building with the material (wasmuth, 2020, p. 79). the gifts can be returned together to form an entity matching the original presentation, “the process of whole to parts to whole”; however, the occupations are not completed this way (bruce, 2021, pp. 102-103). with the occupations something new is created permanently. the occupations also include different activities such as drawing, pricking, sewing, paper cutting, 14 global education review 9 (4) folding, and weaving. froebel’s first six gifts include woolen balls in six different colors, a combination of wooden sphere, cylinder, and cube, and wooden boxes with sliding lids containing blocks, which enable block play (bruce, 2021; brosterman1997; kinchin 2012, p. 33). the forms of the first six gifts are threedimensional. through gifts, children can explore and develop their ideas and thinking. according to bruce (2021), block play gives children freedom to be thoughtful and make connections. education is carried out holistically in terms of the children. the pedagogical aim of the gifts was to present universal aspects of the external word to children, while the occupations developed children’s skills at furnishing new material. (bruce 2020, pp. 93-96, 106-123.) the interaction between entity, variation, and unity was froebel’s tool for helping children to develop awareness of the structure of the world (johansson, 2022, p. 72; wasmuth, 2020, pp. 80–81). according to froebel, the idea of holistic education exists in unity and wholeness. today, the finnish national core curriculum of ecec promotes the holistic and socio-cultural conception of learning in which children grow, learn, and develop in interaction with those closest to them and their immediate learning environment. children learn everywhere and in a very holistic way (kumpulainen, 2018). they learn by playing, exploring, moving, and expressing themselves through activities based on the arts (finnish national agency for education, 2018, 22). today, the underlying values of finnish ecec include a belief in the intrinsic value of childhood, equity, equality and diversity and a healthy and sustainable way of living (finnish national agency for education, 2018, pp. 20-22). ecec is the first part of the finnish education system. it is based on the act of early childhood education and care (540/2018) and the national core curriculum of early childhood education and care (finnish national agency for education, 2018). the national core curriculum of pre-primary education (finnish national agency for education, 2016) is based on the basic education act (628/1998) and forms part of early childhood education and care in finland. both national core curricula promote the united nations (1989) convention on the rights of the child so that finnish local authorities are responsible for offering early childhood education and care to all children (10 months to six years) and families willing to participate in ecec. pre-primary education (for 6-7-year-old children) that precedes compulsory education is obligatory for all children in finland. municipalities prepare their local ecec curricula in accordance with the national core curriculum. helsinki´s curriculum for early childhood education and care (2019) emphasizes the importance of learning in richly varied ways and the right of children to gain a wide range of experiences. the areas of learning are divided into five subsections in the curriculum: the diverse world of languages; various forms of expression; our community and i; i explore and act in my environment; and i grow, move, and develop. all five areas contain different themes that can be combined and applied in practice, taking children´s interests and abilities into account. moreover, helsinki´s curriculum for early childhood education and care (2019) states that learning environments are designed together with children, and that these environments inspire children to play, to move using their whole body, and to actively study their surroundings using all their senses. staff in ecec centers should value pedagogically supported play by observing and reacting to forms of play initiated by children (helsinki´s curriculum for early childhood education and care 2019, p. 11). froebel box 15 froebel’s ideas in the kindergarten museum pedagogy although, historically, finnish early childhood education has largely been based on friedrich froebel's pedagogy, it is no longer as well-known as it once was. froebelian methods are still present in finnish ecec, but the origins of froebel’s pedagogical principles are not clear, and the fundamentals are missing. according to the finnish froebelian tradition as well as the values of finnish ecec, nature and outdoor environments play an important role in children’s activity. considering these values, we devised the idea of enriching the outdoor environment of our museum and aimed to raise awareness of the froebelian tradition at the center. we wanted our museum pedagogy to be active and for the environment stimulating for not only the children, but also the adults. together with artist alexander reichstein, we began a project to update froebel’s ideas. reichstein was born in moscow, but has lived and worked in helsinki since 1990, making art both for children and with children. we wanted to collaborate with reichstein since he has created exhibitions where children and adults get the chance to be active both mentally and physically and to experience unusual artistic impressions in a playful manner, using all their senses. all of us who work at the kindergarten museum have a professional background as ecec teachers and considered it important that the collaboration had a pedagogical starting point. we wanted to have something for the children to engage in their creativity, cooperation, and playful learning. the giant-sized building blocks, made from lightweight plastic foam, were designed as large-scale toys for the yard of the kindergarten museum. these giant blocks were inspired by froebel’s wooden play gifts. however, reichstein significantly increased the size of the blocks (niemelä, reichstein & sillanpää, 2019). the shape of frobel’s wooden blocks are somewhat basic, and so the artist with whom we collaborated was inspired to create his own version of the cubes. the giant blocks designed by the artist contain all the shapes of froebel´s first six gifts: a sphere, a cube, a cylinder, a cuboid in three, and a triangular prism in two different variations. however, in addition to these shapes, reichstein halved a sphere (hemisphere) and made two cylinders of different heights (aspect ratios 1:1 and 1:2), with the aim of diversifying play and construction with the giant blocks. the giant blocks are packed in a cubeshaped box similar to the froebel gifts: a huge wooden box containing 90 blocks in different shapes with an edge length of 40 centimeters. as with the original froebel blocks, it is essential that children get experience of handling the blocks and are able to correctly put the giant blocks back in the large box by themselves. even the smallest children can play with the giant blocks; since they are made from plastic foam, they are lightweight and safe. they are suitably pliant and can easily withstand being sat upon, even by adults. furthermore, they are so large that children can build playhouses into which they can hide or play in other ways. image 1. children playing with the giant blocks in the kindergarten museums yard in helsinki. photo: kindergarten museum, helsinki 16 global education review 9 (4) image 2. the original froebel blocks compared with one giant-sized cylinder block. photo: kindergarten museum, helsinki the reason for making a giant version of the originally hand-held blocks was so that the blocks could be used in a different way. we assumed that because of the size of the giant blocks, cooperation between children would increase when the area of play expanded. the participatory way of learning is essential in finnish ecec. teachers listen to children’s interests, thoughts, and needs to provide them with engaging opportunities to learn in a playful way (kangas, ojala & venninen, 2015). however, based on their research findings, kangas et al. (2019) suggest more emphasis on participatory play-based pedagogy in finnish ecec than is currently being implemented. they also propose the construction of new approaches and solutions in pedagogical environments for supporting and enriching the pedagogical practice of play-as-learning. according to their conclusions, finnish ecec pedagogy should focus on developing physical structures as a key to supporting children’s play and learning. they also promote peer-to-peer engagement as a foundational element of learning and children’s well-being. hart (1992) points out that the experience of participation requires a common language in which a group can communicate. according to him, children should also be provided with sufficient information about their situation and the environment so that they can have agency in their actions. when working with new equipment and even when working with equipment as old and familiar as the original froebel blocks, adults should know the meaning of orientation. without a common language, even the simplest equipment might not increase cooperation or creativity among children. this is one reason why we believed from the beginning that when working with the giant blocks, there should always first be guidance for how to use them in different ways. froebel had an idea of freedom with guidance or an interactionist approach to play, in which both a child and an adult take the leading role in turns and engage actively in play (bruce, 2021, p. 68). an adult takes the leading role first to introduce the equipment. with giant-sized blocks, we recommend different playful activities for introducing opportunities for how to use blocks and, importantly, how to encourage children to use them creatively. it is recommended that proper concepts of forms are used during activities. after that, children take center stage. the second innovation we designed in cooperation with reichstein was the “you and froebel” construction kit. it is a playset that combines art and handicrafts that can be used for play. the construction kit contains basic wooden blocks from froebel´s second gift: a ball, a cube, and a cylinder, as well as bits of broken toys. the wooden blocks have magnets embedded in them, so children can fix broken bits with steel screws or plates. the construction kit can be gradually replenished with toy parts brought in by the children, a process which has the benefit of promoting awareness of recycling and ecology. (niemelä, reichstein & sillanpää, 2019). with the giant blocks, children get to know the blocks’ possibilities together with an adult, whereas with the construction kit, the froebel box 17 possibilities are clear from the start since children recognize broken bits of the toys and easily understand the mechanism of magnets. we could say that the construction kit itself leads children to play and create an imaginary world. the kit can also be used as a group activity with the guidance of an adult, for example, as a part of an art session for creating an installation that has a story behind it. the kit is very versatile, and we are designing various inspired ways for how it can be used. after designing the giant-sized blocks and “you and froebel” construction kit, we got invitations to visit children’s festivals and events as a pop-up museum. we had giant blocks for working with on the floor and we also had froebel blocks for construction on a table. for the original blocks, we had photos of blocks constructed from froebel’s models to present life forms (repetitions of the real world). we made observations of how the giant blocks and the original froebel blocks work side by side, and we were amazed by what we found. it was at this point that we decided to combine these two kinds of blocks and make something new; we decided that the “you and froebel” construction kit could be evolved in interesting ways. we have since created a set of three different construction tools for creating and playful learning, which we call the froebel box. the froebel box according to whitton (2018), there are three aspects of playful learning: playful tools, techniques, and tactics. first, it is important that tools like objects or artefacts as well as new technologies signify a playful environment. second, it is essential that pedagogies and learning approaches facilitate playful learning. third, there are many tactics for engendering playfulness, such as fairy-tale mystery, surprise, humor, and storytelling. these have all affected the design process of the froebel box and can be used during playful and participatory learning activities using the box material. the idea of the froebel box is that it can be rented out to ecec centers seeking to encourage and develop creative building. it also enables comprehensive project work with a variety of open-ended materials. the playset can be used to create a joint project that is accessible to all children and adults. the box also enables families to participate. meaningful activities together increase the interaction between children and adults. the box can be rented for four weeks at a time or according to an agreement. the rental price for a four-week period is 300 euros, which includes an introduction to the use of the box through a demo workshop for one group of children. the intention is that children and adults in the demo workshop will later instruct other groups of children to use the froebel box correctly. because we wanted the froebel box to be easily and quickly moved in different locations, we needed to make a smaller package of the giant blocks. the first set, which is used at the kindergarten museum yard was too big and it was impractical for it to be relocated from one ecec center to another. for the froebel box, we made a repetition from the base of the first set using only approximately half the number of the blocks. as a result, we got a cube that was 120 centimeters from one edge and contained 42 giant blocks. the demo workshop begins with a presentation of the life of friedrich froebel and his first six gifts. children can sample different structures from model images with blocks from the fourth gift. finally, the whole group switches over to the box of giant blocks. children are advised that the giant box has the same shape as the fourth gift box. members of the group open the box and find its secret: the giant blocks. they examine the laws of forms, and at the end of the 18 global education review 9 (4) construction, the blocks should be returned to the box correctly. usually, this causes hilarity in children, as they are extremely excited about the size and large number of blocks. they have such comments as, “how can they ever fit there again? is that possible? wow!” we can only imagine the various ways in which children perceive the giant blocks! construction begins by first carrying all the blocks to the center of the space. collective construction can only begin when all the blocks are out of the box. the workshop instructor allows the children to decide what to build together. this, in our view, increases the children’s realization that they themselves have the power to plan and implement. the demo workshop can take approximately an hour. the workshop ends when the giant blocks are placed back in their boxes. finally, the children are reminded that they now know how to work properly with the blocks, and they have an important role in guiding all kindergarten children to use the blocks. in the demo workshop, there is no role for the “you and froebel” construction kit. the kit’s possibilities are introduced to the adults of the group, but the demo workshop concentrates only on the original froebel blocks and the giant blocks. to maximize the use of the froebel box during the rental period, we encourage staff in ecec centers to plan how they will teach other children and adults to use the equipment in the box. study design the methodological approach of this study is educational design research, which is a process that aims to change or develop pedagogical conventions and conduct research in interactive and iterative cycles where planning, execution, analysis, and new planning are done sequentially (plomp, 2013). educational design research uses existing knowledge in problem solving to find results that promote sustained innovation (scardamalia & bereiter, 2014). in this study, the existing knowledge is in froebel-based early childhood pedagogy, which is a child-centered, holistic view of education in which play is valued. the aim is to further develop the tool based on froebel’s ideas and to promote creative, collaborative, and constructive play, as well as holistic bodily and verbal expression. in this article, the first case study to evaluate new material is reported. the evaluation and pedagogical development of this design research will continue to develop the pedagogical knowledge and possibilities for using this tool in early childhood pedagogy. the approach of this case study is qualitative. our aim is to observe and develop children’s participatory play and learning with the froebel box developed as part of froebelian pedagogy in the kindergarten museum. the data of this study has been collected from three ecec centers that each used the froebel box in their pedagogy for a period of four weeks. research questions the research questions were as follows: 1. how do teachers describe children’s learning and interaction through froebel box activities in the context of the finnish ecec curriculum? 2. how do children use the froebel box (the original froebel blocks, the giant-sized blocks, and the construction kit) during their participatory activity? data gathering the qualitative data were gathered by interviews with teachers about the teachers’ experiences of using the froebel box with children. the interviews included a total of 24 questions, which were seen in advance by the teachers (see appendix 1). as an introduction, froebel box 19 we wanted to know the teachers’ knowledge of froebel’s pedagogy. we also wanted to know how the practical arrangements for the froebel box had been made between the groups at the ecec centers. we asked how the equipment had been used and how much the children had been allowed to influence its use. we wanted to know how the equipment was combined with pedagogical activities and the curriculum. we asked if the pedagogical goals set for the activities were reached. we also wanted to know about the children’s free actions with the equipment, if any. data analysis the data (interviews n=7) from three finnish ecec centers were analyzed using qualitative content analysis (schreier, 2012). the qualitative data were reduced and grouped according to braun and clarke’s (2006) model of qualitative thematic analysis, that is, from the material; the core messages were extracted into descriptive themes and then into the specific categories. explanations or confirmation and interpretations of the analysis are reflected in the background theories of playful and participatory learning and ecec local curriculum learning areas, requirements for playful spaces, and interaction through abductive reasoning. we divided the data using three aspects of playful learning, which are, according to whitton (2018), techniques, tactics, and playful tools. first, we highlighted the techniques by using the ecec local curriculum’s holistic conception of learning. second, we focused on play itself as a playful tactic in terms of play modelling, the role of the adults, and play as collaboration. third, we concentrated on the environment and, in particular, tools concerning the froebel box. results the data were reduced and grouped into themes according to qualitative thematic analysis. the results obtained consist of three themes, which have been grouped from the raw data of the interviews. the themes are 1) the whole child, 2) adult and child´s play skills, and 3) interaction with the environment. in the chapter the whole child the froebel box is examined in different areas of learning according to helsinki´s curriculum for early childhood education and care (2019). adult and child´s play skills include play modelling, collaboration, and the role of adult participation both in play and as a supporter of the play. interaction with the environment introduces different ways in which children operate with the frobel box as a tool for active and collaborative play while simultaneously transforming their environment. the whole child according to the teachers (=t1–t7) interviewed, the goal of using the froebel box as a tool for wide-ranging learning in different areas was successfully achieved. here, the findings are divided into four categories that emerged from the data, which also adapt to the ecec local curriculum learning areas. various forms of expression. according to all interviews (n=7), many forms of expression, both bodily and verbal, are important for children and could be developed through froebel box activities. for older children, verbal expression is natural as language develops. children’s understanding of preposition concepts develops during construction. for young children, children having difficulties with language or children with special needs, bodily expression can be an important way to communicate and express ideas. giant blocks are equipment that can be used for that process. one teacher noted, “the 20 global education review 9 (4) use of the froebel box also promotes children’s language skills and abilities, such as naming directions and shapes” (t5). learning to play is a priority. all teachers emphasized the importance of construction in enriching imagination and bodily communication. learning to play was a priority in many groups. when building with giant blocks, children develop their commitment to play, and their play skills improve. during play, children learn to take turns, share, and give space to friends. a teacher who was interviewed said, “children also learn to follow instructions from adults and other children and to give instructions themselves and make compromises” (t4). giant blocks were an inspiring tool for the children, and the enthusiasm they instilled increased the children's interaction and desire to learn. the large size of the blocks “drove” children to cooperate and to build, for example, a small house or a castle in which they could play further. exploring and thinking. the use of the froebel box develops children’s mathematical thinking and spatial perception. when building, children perceive the three-dimensional shapes and evaluate the shapes and their sizes. according to one teacher, “playing with the giant blocks was very functional math” (t5). construction also promotes the development of logical thinking. when a child acts, their action leads to another act. one important feature of the blocks is that the children must figure out how to make all the blocks fit into one large box. the teachers said that putting both the original froebel blocks and the giant blocks back in their boxes was an interesting and thought-provoking task for the children. one mentioned, “maybe it’s just that the blocks go into those boxes in a certain way. that kind of action creates satisfaction for the children when they succeed in putting the blocks back in the box” (t6). moving and developing. even the smallest children, of 1-2 years old, can use the giant blocks to study shapes and their features. one teacher reported how children’s play with a large ball excited the kids: “children pushed the ball down along a foam pad that was placed against the wall, watched the ball slide down, how it bounced to the floor, and what kind of sounds it made during the process. the operation was then repeated several times” (t3). with younger children, motor development, movement, and learning to control their bodies are all important areas of learning. the children learned to push, pull, and lift the blocks as well as to spin the ball and climb on top of the blocks. in summary, the teachers believe that the construction supports the holistic development of children, especially when using giant-sized blocks in accordance with the principles of the finnish early childhood education curriculum. the whole child is also strongly present in the finnish early childhood education debate. kumpulainen (2018) describes the unique features of finnish ecec as its “whole child”-centered approach, including the value of play and trust it places on teachers and institutions instead of externally controlled testing systems. adult and children’s play skills the research material revealed that the froebel box equipment supports the play skills of both adults and children. the play skills that emerged from the data can be further divided into three themes: play modelling, the role of the adult as a supporter of children's play, and play as collaboration. the study highlighted the importance of giant-sized blocks as enablers of development of play skills. they were seen as developing interaction and negotiation skills, teaching rotation, and enabling peer learning. play modeling. most of the interviewees mentioned that the process of acquainting froebel box 21 children with the tools of the froebel box was begun in an adult-led way. the teachers introduced the equipment to the children through guided activity sessions and play. the teachers told the children the names of the different shapes of blocks, which helped the children learn the right concepts as well as the potential of those shapes. according to the interviewees, after the guidance, children were more willing to act and experiment independently. based on the interviews, the teachers devised activities from the perspective of participation. although the activity may initially have been adult-led, interviewees pointed out that it was still child-initiated. the adult observed the direction of the children's interests, and the activity always proceeded on the children's terms. for example, one teacher in a group of children under three years of age pointed out that the mere fact that the gym was an unfamiliar place to visit was very exciting for children, and adults needed to understand how the child perceived the situation as being very exciting(t3). the children first did the same as the teacher had presented the previous time, but then began to vary the play and come up with their own uses so that some shape might even be a computer screen. “hey! this could be a rocket! now, we drive a rocket!” they always changed what the device was. there were benches and screens, as if in a nerve center, where three children were side by side (t6). in this example, the play was initiated by the adult, but was varied and honed by children into an inspiring adventure track. the froebel blocks were built not only according to the model, but also by modifying the design. the ones made according to the model were compared with the modified structures, and the fact that construction problems can be solved in many ways was taken into account. sometimes children didn´t even need to build anything figurative to be able to enjoy working with blocks. in particular, one teacher suggested, “placing the third and fourth gift blocks back in their boxes was interesting to the younger children, and they periodically repeated the routine several times” (t6). an adult as a supporter of play. from the research data, it emerged that common challenges in current early childhood education are committing children to long-term play, developing the interaction skills required for joint play, and encouraging the use of imagination. one teacher took advantage of working with giant-sized blocks to reach the goal. about half of the activities were tentatively planned by adults and half by the children themselves. this teacher summarized: it required around 4-5 times working with giant blocks before the children internalized their opportunities and the activities deepened. after this, the motivation to play was clearly visible, even before the activity began. the kids didn’t want to wait for the giant box to open before they got to work (t2). the adult's most active role as a supporter of play occurs when working for the first time with the froebel box equipment. as the equipment became more familiar, the role of the adult receded to the background, but if necessary, he or she could give new play suggestions. by learning to work with the equipment and understanding the limitless possibilities, children learn to plan and direct activities themselves. the adult’s role as a 22 global education review 9 (4) supporter of the play continues as an observer (t2; t5). recently, there has been much discussion in finland about adult play and adults’ play skills. this study also highlights the importance of adult play skills for children’s play. in the interview (t1), concerns were expressed about the role of professionals in early childhood education as being just supervisors of play, instead of participating and having their own role in the play. the giant blocks presented a useful opportunity for adults to develop their own play skills. although the interviewees were not more familiar with froebel’s philosophy, they saw construction as an easy way for adults to participate in play. the importance of educator participation in children’s play has also been observed in studies, and adult participation has been found to enrich and develop children’s play (van oers, 2013). the role of an adult in play is usually themed either as an organizer of play facilitations (so-called stage manager) or as a player (singer et al., 2014). in addition to the role of stage manager and player, the role of the educator as an enricher of the play, a mediator in various problem situations, and as a play planner have also been highlighted (jones & reynolds, 2011). play as a collaboration. most of the interviewees said that they had worked with giant-sized blocks with only half of a group of children at a time. two of the interviewees stated that the best joint play was successful when there were no more than 4-6 children (t1; t2). according to the interviewees, in challenging play, the challenge was generated by skills in interaction, compromise, and alternation. when building a common entity, negotiation skills were also required. two of the interviewees thought that even though the giant blocks invite collaborative play because of their size, encouragement from the adult is still required and children should be encouraged to play collaboratively from the beginning. there are a lot of blocks, but still, there is only a limited number and so if children want a larger structure, everyone needs to work together. adult support was required to remind the children of the benefits of achieving a common goal (t1; t7). the set goal of learning play skills also includes many other life-relevant skills for the child's development (wyness, 2015). according to leonard (2016), the experience of inclusion and one's own opportunities to be equal in the group are the child's first experiences of belonging to the community. she continues that through participation, the child is taught the skills, independence, and actions necessary to participate in social communities. in some groups, the children also learned to modify the structures they made separately so that, when they were completed, the children themselves created a narrative between the structures, eventually forming a whole in which they could play together. one of the interviewees stated that “the idea of building a shared object and a collective play space was self-feeding so that after being reminded, the children were happy to work in that direction” (t6). during the participatory play, one group of children managed to vary the activities with giant blocks toward a game with rules: the gym floor was lava, and the children moved by stepping on the blocks without being allowed to touch the floor. whoever touched the floor three times lost their lives. a child could earn five more lives by going to a corner of the gym to dance where there was music. the dancing was initiated by the children and invented to get back into the game (t2). froebel box 23 the collective construction play at first turned into a gymnastics moment, as the blocks formed a track where the children walked. the stunt track eventually became a game platform as the floor turned into lava. the adult’s role as a presenter of possibilities and variations and as a supporter of play is highlighted in this example. interaction with the environment when the environment is viewed as a relational process, it is built in everyday practices and shaped by children and staff (raittila & vuorisalo, 2021). according to fuller & löw (2017, p. 470) researchers using the concept of relational space are interested in how space affects people, how it shapes people and human activities, and how people build space for their own needs. working together with the giant blocks, children build, reproduce, and transform their environment in a new, active way. the giant blocks in particular support the children's imagination and always enable a new kind of experimentation and construction. according to one teacher, the mere form allows children to use their imagination in ways that ready-made play equipment cannot provide: “the giant blocks represent a tool that allows children to engage in the exchange of thoughts, ideas, feelings, and interactions” (t5). the different affordances of the original and the giant versions. the giant blocks encouraged collaboration and interaction between the children and the supported activity. one teacher noticed that “two-year-old children carried heavier blocks together on their own initiative and began to build spontaneously” (t3). in some groups, the use of the froebel box was more versatile; the original froebel blocks were also actively used. according to one interviewee, children played with froebel blocks on their own or with a friend: “when playing with the small blocks, children brought animals, princesses, pet shop characters along. working with the small blocks was an individual activity, while playing with the giant blocks was done in a larger group” (t5). after the children had practiced cooperation with the giant blocks, they wanted to work together and mix the original froebel blocks with each other. however, some of the teachers clung to individual work and feared that as the blocks shuffled, they would no longer know how to return them to the boxes. it seems that the children were more eager and courageous than the adults when it came to changing the patterns: but that is exactly when the teacher was directing the participatory play; children learned to work and build together so there could be a castle or whatever children wanted. participatory play succeeded very well with this group. with the small blocks, i just noticed that the kids wanted to combine those pieces with pleasure, so i thought that ‘oh my god now children are mixing them. how do we manage to get them back in those boxes? (laughs). the children also wanted to cooperate with the small blocks, so the participatory play shifted from playing with the giant blocks to playing with the small ones (t8). one teacher found the idea of studying the relationship between small and giant blocks with children interesting. they pondered using small blocks as miniatures when designing the construction with the giant blocks: “i think that children’s learning begins bodily when working with the giant blocks. then, it is easier to move to smaller blocks. it would also be possible to first plan with the small blocks what to build with the giant ones. in my opinion, there are good opportunities to develop that” (t7). 24 global education review 9 (4) bodily interaction. in groups with special needs, cooperation with peer children was both linguistic and physical. for children with special needs, the activity was above all bodily. altogether, teachers thought that construction with the giant blocks was very functional and required less discussion. the children followed and imitated each other. according to one teacher, a child’s learning starts with bodily actions. the children supporting the integrated group were competent with words, language, and interaction. they were able to develop a story that served as a scheme for imaginative play: “in the case of children with special needs, progress was made through their bodies and touching different shapes” (t5). according to one teacher, in an integrated group, participatory play is fundamentally different. in this group, for example, two autistic children got involved in the activities by balancing and rolling on cylinders and a sphere or stepping on triangles. while other children were focused on constructing, the autistic children explored various shapes through their senses (t2). work with giant blocks can be carried out without any use of spoken language. the most important thing is an enthusiastic atmosphere (t5). horizontal and vertical stacking. play with the giant blocks was divided into two different levels: horizontal and vertical. according to whinnet (2012), children typically begin their block play by stacking vertically or horizontally. for example, building a long garage shows horizontal stacking and mathematical forms of knowledge in the one-to-one correspondence of vehicles. a castle shows vertical stacking, where blocks are carefully balanced both physically and visually (whinnet, 2012, pp.117–118). in finnish ecec centers, construction on the horizontal level is characterized by extensive surfaces, such as trick tracks, along which children can rotate and progress block by block. as the teacher described: one common form of play was building a large track along which the children went around together. children innovated so that they could ride a moped through slots of the blocks. children wondered how big a gap there should be for the moped to ride through. the track was formed when all the children began to transport blocks around the space (t4). another way for children to build was three-dimensional. children built castles, towers, campers, police, and fire trucks. according to the teachers, building different vehicles was inspired by the round shapes in some of the blocks (divided cylinders). in one group, the children built a working center with computers, various ships, and traditional princess castles. the children visited each other’s castles, and play developed through these visits. in some groups, children were proactive in finding additional tools for play. the children asked for fabrics or foam pads when making roofs for the houses. while building campers, the children were looking for steering wheels, seats, and other supplies for the trip. some teachers mentioned that “teddy bears, for example, were also brought into the camper as passengers” (t6; t7). the opportunity to influence their own environments motivated children to work with giant blocks. one teacher pointed out that spaces for children’s groups are often relatively stable, and children’s ability to modify the spaces may be limited to moving a pair of foam pads or beds. a teacher explained: by constructing the giant blocks freely, the children were allowed to influence froebel box 25 the design and implementation of their physical play environment. the children could use their imaginations to implement something concrete, which served as a starting point for enthusiastic participation in the group’s activities (t2). conclusion and discussion the research results support our presumption of holistic learning using the froebel box. the box invites children to participate, collaborate, and play, and is based on the froebelian principles of children actively playing and exploring in a relational environment. we were glad to discover that the teachers also saw the possibilities of the froebel box, even though the relatively short rental period posed its own challenges to the implementation of all ideas. our presumption of the usability of the giant blocks in group activities was also reflected in the results. it was inspiring to hear how adults had also understood the potential of the giant blocks in group activities and encouraged children to collaborate. working with the blocks allowed for the emergence of a dialogue between children, which sometimes even turned into a common imaginative journey from one play activity to another. learning through play was a common narrative thread throughout all the interviews. another interesting result was the idea of the opportunity provided by the giant blocks for giving children an experience of modifying the play environment. this was an aspect that we had been aware of, but we did not realize to recommend this approach to the ecec centers to further benefit from the giant blocks. construction and play with the original froebel blocks remained minor with the groups. reasons why it remained minor included the adults not having the courage or their own, first-hand experience of how versatile the original froebel blocks can be. furthermore, we understood that there were difficulties in timetabling the use of original blocks inside the ecec center when normally the giant-sized blocks were placed in the gym room for everyone to access. the giant blocks were new and exciting to the children, and due to their large size, they were also an exceptional tool for indoor play and allowed for physical, sporty play to be carried out inside. we are going to further develop ways to encourage and guide teachers in the use of the froebel box as a whole. there could also be more interaction between the original froebel blocks and the giant blocks. in this study, the blocks also adhered to a very model-oriented construction instead of a free construction. the reason for this could be the example learned in the demo workshop. although the intention is to provide the basics, which can then be set to try and create new ways, the demo workshop can also present a challenge if seen as a model for the only way in which the equipment can be used. as generally defined in educational design research, we will continue collaboration with two of the ecec centers that participated in this study. in 2022–2023 we will develop our equipment further. here, our existing knowledge from the teachers will play an essential role. based on the interviews conducted, we will concentrate on developing and enriching participation of adults and roles for them in play, and expand the possibilities of the froebel box as a pedagogical tool. froebel used the concept spielpflege [freely translated as “nurture of play”], which emphasizes the importance of an acting and supportive adult (wasmuth, 2020 p. 66). to get adults more involved in play, we will hold demo workshops specifically for the adults of the ecec center. according to our study, adults can have difficulties supporting 26 global education review 9 (4) children’s play or participating themselves in play. also, considering the results of original froebel blocks not being used as much as we wished, we have started to plan how we can get adults to be more committed and see more possibilities in their use. we will extend the content of the workshop so that when playing with the giant blocks, we will use different methods for action. we will try to make adults more aware of tactile and bodily expression, essential for children’s knowledge. we want to encourage them to examine their roles as players, organizers, enrichers, planners, and mediators by letting them play by themselves (singer et al., 2014; jones & reynolds, 2011). this could also lead to another case study in which teachers are seen as co-researchers. the teachers also pointed out the necessity of written instructions and examples or videos to show the possibilities of the boxes. together with the teachers, we will develop more goal-directed methods of using the froebel box as a tool for both bodily and verbal expression, cooperation and play skills, mathematical thinking and spatial perception, architectural education, and motor development. it would also be interesting to study further the dialogue between the giant blocks and the original froebel blocks. we are also curious about how children perceive the connections between the original wooden blocks and the giant blocks, the resemblances in terms of form, partition, and wholeness, and the differences between weight, size, and material. according to newcombe and shipley (2015), early childhood pedagogy needs to develop new ways for children to practice and learn spatial thinking, because the future world will require new tools that require higher spatial thinking to be designed. there is interesting new scientific research about spatial skills. according to boriello and liben (2018), better spatial skills are correlated with more spatial play and more parental attention to spatial concepts. jakonen, szabo, and fenyvesi (2021) argue that body, cognition, and cooperation are deeply correlated with spatial understanding. there are lots of possibilities to develop the froebel box as a tool for spatial reasoning, taking into account bodily interaction, teachers’ role as a supporter of play, and different ways of using spatial concepts in a playful manner. froebel had a holistic philosophy about humanity and education, in which people, nature, the world, and the universe were interconnected; he believed that when children become aware of this interconnectedness, they will develop deeper knowledge about themselves and the world. according to froebel, every child has the right to a holistic education, which includes the development of the self in the world (wasmuth, 2021, p.27; heiland, 2002). froebel said that play has the potential to teach children mathematics, language, beauty and artistic endeavors, scientific construction, stories, and other representations of everyday life, as well as enable them to be physically competent and skilled. the wholeness of learning means that each aspect of experience is interconnected. 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(2013). the malleability of spatial skills: a meta-analysis of training studies. psychological bulletin, 139(2), 352. wasmuth, helge (2020). fröbel’s pedagogy of kindergarten and play: modifications in germany and the united states. routledge. wasmuth, helge (2022). what does it mean to be a froebelian in the 21st century? global educational review, 9(2), 22–37. https://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/vie w/586 whinnet, j. (2012). froebel’s gifts (wooden block play) and occupations (construction and workshop experiences) today. in t. bruce (eds.) early childhood practice: froebel today (117–130). sage publications. whitton, n. (2018). playful learning: tools, techniques, and tactics. research in learning technology, 26, 1-12. wyness, michael (2015). childhood. polity. https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2021.1872396 https://doi.org/10.1080/17457823.2021.1872396 https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text https://www.unicef.org/child-rights-convention/convention-text https://doi.org/10.4471/ijep.2014.09 https://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/view/586 https://ger.mercy.edu/index.php/ger/article/view/586 froebel box 29 appendix 1: fröbel box interview frame 1. our introduction 2. can i record the interview? 3. introduction of interviewees (name, group, age range of children) 4. how familiar are the tools and pedagogy created by froebel? 5. how is the use of the froebel box organized between groups in the ecec centre? 6. has the activity with the froebel box been recorded (photos, recordings, children's stories, drawings, portfolios, social media, others?) 7. how was the demo workshop and introduction to using the box? 8. looking back, what kinds of additional tips would you have needed for working with the froebel box? 9. how were the giant blocks, froebel's blocks, and construction kit introduced? 10. did the initiative to use the equipment come from children/adults? 11. did the children have free access to work with the equipment? 12. what kind of activity was created (for example, play): froebel's blocks, construction kit, giant blocks? 13. was the froebel box equipment combined with other materials of the ecec centre (toys, music, props, etc.)? if this happened, by whom (children spontaneously, adults spontaneously/planned)? did it deepen the play, or did the different materials otherwise work well? if the materials were not combined with the equipment of the box, do you remember afterwards what could have been combined? 14. was the box's equipment used as part of separate guided action? how? 15. what are your thoughts on the froebel box as a whole? what thoughts from a child's point of view? 16. what observations did you make about working with equipment with children of different ages or with linguistic challenges? linguistic or bodily interactions when working with the froebel box? 17. what kind of observations did you make about the children's (joint) activities? for example, did working with giant blocks affect the dynamics of the group? what was the children's mutual interaction like during the construction? 18. did the equipment of the froebel box correlate with the ecec curriculum, or was it used in particular for an area of learning presented in the helsinki curriculum (2019) (see figure below)? 19. what kind of learning experience do you think froebel's blocks, construction kit, and giant blocks as their own entities offered to the children? what about adults? any concrete examples? 20. were some of the learning outcomes achieved with the help of the box's equipment, with the goals being pursued perhaps without being known in advance but being achieved nevertheless? 21. did your ecec centre have any operating practices, ideas, or new thoughts after the froebel box time was over? 22. to what other material/equipment already in the kindergarten could the contents of the froebel box be compared indoors and/or outdoors? 23. what other material/equipment is there in the kindergarten that the whole group can work with at the same time? 24. what else would you like to say? enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 30 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy college, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: winstead, lisa, shehab, hanem, & brye, michelle. (2022). enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism through prolonged critical reflection: influences of socializing forces on educational beliefs and practice. global education review, 9 (4), 30-46. enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism through prolonged critical reflection: influences of socializing forces on educational beliefs and practice lisa winstead california state university, fullerton hanem shehab university of las vegas, nevada michelle brye california state university, fullerton abstract a graduate course in curriculum and instruction was utilized as an intervention to enhance teacher awareness about their teaching practice. the researchers employed a purposeful and prolonged critical reflection approach for graduate students, who are also teachers, over a 15-week period. the teachers juxtaposed their prior experiences against a frame of educational philosophies. the researchers found that prolonged critical reflection about educational philosophies and associated approaches increased teacher ability to discern and disentangle their teaching dispositions from their teaching practices and articulate these distinctions. additional significant outcomes included teachers questioning of socializing forces that influence their instruction, prompting action and agency. similarly, teachers commented about gaining increased open-mindedness and a willingness to transform schools. triangulation of data corpuses that included journal reflections/blogs, field notes, and assignments revealed four salient phases associated with their enhanced awareness and transformation: (1) uncertainty, (2) development and growth, (3) realization and agency, and (4) self-characterization associated with this critical reflection process. key words reflection, critical reflection, dewey, teacher beliefs, teacher practice, professional development, educational philosophy, socializing forces having progressed through this course thus far, i have realized how my teaching beliefs and pedagogy clash and why they do. my beliefs are fundamentally progressivist in nature; however, my teaching practices resemble essentialism. i know i am a progressivist because i strongly believe that instruction should be learnercentered with a bit of essentialism tied into it. unfortunately, due to my lack of support currently and lack of experience, i cannot take full advantage of my situation and resort to essentialism more than i wish to do so. having gone through student teaching and surrounding myself with essentialist practices, i discovered that those practices are what i fall back on… (sandra, narrative) research about how teachers can critically reflect on their teaching conceptions enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 31 and practices is a topic of much discussion especially in the last couple of decades. weshah (2013) notes, however, that while several teacher education models exist, there is “[…] little evidence of attempts to identify discernible gains in student ability to reflect upon and synthesize their belief/value systems as they relate to their perspective roles as classroom teachers” (p. 115). requiring that teachers develop a sense of personal biography and professional history is one way of having them begin to overcome their inertia and unwillingness to question where particular teaching practices came from, and to that extent, no longer accepting teaching actions as natural or common sense and unquestionable (smyth, 1989, p. 11). hytten (2000) also notes that it is extremely uncommon to have students, let alone teachers reflect through personal narratives. researchers have suggested that teachers gain greater satisfaction and knowledge is extended if they are challenged and that perhaps teachers and preservice teachers alike should defend and provide reasons for their beliefs (beatty et al., 2020b; dewey, 1933; schon, 1995; warfield, wood, & lehman; 2006). philosophical schemes provide a frame for promoting a consciousdriven practice that grants individuals opportunities to ponder their beliefs in relation to their present and actual experiences (beatty et al., 2020a; dewey, 1933; taylor & valli, 1992; valli, 1992). little research exists about how to make the connection from abstract philosophies to provide evaluative purpose in actual teaching practice (beatty et al., 2020a; bredo, 2002; dewey, 1916 [2004]; hytten, 2000; taylor & valli, 1992; weshah, 2013). teachers who are not fully aware or understand how their teaching practices emanate from particular philosophies have trouble disentangling their beliefs from their actual teaching practices (beatty et al., 2020c; hofer, 2002; olafson et al., 2010; trigwell & prosser, 1996). “attention to the beliefs of teachers and teacher candidates can inform educational practice in ways that prevailing research agendas have not and cannot” (pajares, 1992, p. 329). this type of purposeful reflection promotes further insight about the internal beliefs as well as the possible external factors that may interfere with or influence their conceptions of teaching that they may not have considered before (beatty et al., 2020a; dewey, 1933; gerges, 2001; johnston, 1984; ponterotto, 2005). reflection as a tool for enhancing teacher awareness reflection is often used as a tool for professional development during preservice preparation and can be employed with teachers, but opportunities to do engage in meaningful reflection are rare unless they participate in induction programs. much reflective practice is outcomes-based, passive, and not deliberately focused through means that contribute to an evaluation on a more contextual level (beatty et al., 2020b; davis, 2006; ; valli, 1997) and challenges their preconceptions (lasley, 1980; crookes, 2015). preservice teachers as well as those in induction programs provide evidence of how they are improving their practice yet oftentimes they do not have the opportunity to critically reflect on their epistemological beliefs that contribute to who they are as educators within the situated context of socializing forces (moss & lee, 2010; packer & goicoechea, 2000; pantarotto, 2005; ; zeichner, 1999; zeichner & tabachnick, 1981). reflection about teaching outcomes provides teachers with information about learner outcomes but does not promote 32 global education review 9 (4) reflection about their role in this process (davis, 2006; gerges, 2001; moss & lee, 2010; niessen et al. 2008; taylor & valli, 1992). active, productive, or deep critical reflection that hones their true beliefs helps them interpret their actions to positively affect the approaches they utilize in their classrooms (davis, 2006; dewey, 1933; hytten, 2000; moss & lee, 2010). it is not just reflection for the sake of learning student outcomes and producing modifications but purposeful reflection in which teachers understand the theoretical implications of their practice. moreover, deep reflective approaches which can be contextualized for learner interaction can range from the deliberate approach of considering other theoretical perspectives, the personalist approach based on narratives of their teacher selves and experiences, and/or the critical approach in which they consider their teaching selves in comparison to their outer world and socializing external policies they believe may influence their teaching conceptions and practice (crookes, 2015; gerges, 2001; mansvelder-langayroux et al., 2008; moss & lee, 2010; packer & goicoechea, 2000; pantarotto, 2005). social and political forces can influence teacher practice and the ways in which teachers can be influenced by their environment or become actively involved in creating change (freire, 1970; gerges, 2001; moss & lee, 2010; zeichner & tabachnick, 1981). several authors have noted the importance of utilizing and comparing learning theories and educational philosophies to enhance teachers’ ability to more clearly express what influences their instructional beliefs and practices in early education (farquhar & white, 2014; hedges & cullen, 2011) and higher education contexts (reber, 2011; weshah, 2013). critical evaluation about educational philosophies provides a constructivist basis for challenging teachers' instructional conceptions (beatty, leigh, & dean, 2020b; crookes, 2015; dewey, 1933; johnston, 1984; moss & lee, 2010). hofer (2004), among other researchers, advocate for more research that explores and identifies approaches that promote the facilitation and co-construction knowledge to help teachers gain an understanding of their instructional motivations in heuristic ways (beatty et al., 2020c; kitchener, 1984; moss & lee, 2010; posner, strike, hewson, & gertzog, 1982; taylor & valli, 1992). therefore, as researchers, we were not only concerned about how educational philosophies guided teacher development but also how teachers “process” their understanding to understand underlying motivations through critical reflection. beatty, leigh, & dean (2020a) recommend research that delves into how “one’s espoused teaching philosophy and one’s enacted teaching philosophy differ” and what patterns emerge as their teaching narrative evolves (p. 539). guiding framework to gain an understanding of oneself is to have a space from which to experience, reflect upon experience, and rationalize about that experience to gain an understanding of self within the context of our world. dewey (1933) argues for careful and prolonged consideration of our situated experiences as juxtaposed against our beliefs, values, and judgments to become aware of our practices. engaging in prolonged critical reflection is related to dewey’s model of reflective practice that involves conscious driven systematic inquiry. prolonged reflection promotes increased understanding about the self and situated experiential context. reflection promotes dialectical meaning-making or making sense out of one’s experience to provide a metacognitive space to rationalize and transform their teaching through deconstruction, reconstruction, and reconceptualization of enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 33 knowledge (as suggested by bendixen & rule, 2004). dewey’s six phase conceptual model of critical reflection is the theoretical frame of reference for this study. the teachers juxtaposed their prior experiences and knowledge about their teaching and teaching beliefs against novel educational philosophical research through prolonged critical reflection. dewey’s six phases can be summarized as: (1) identify an actual experience for reflection, (2) spontaneous questioning of the experience, (3) interpreting as well as investigating the experience based on new knowledge (3) begin to decipher their experience based on new knowledge, (4) abstract what they’ve found with possible hypotheses about their experience, (5) building of general hypothesis to justify their understanding of the experience, and then (6) testing or evaluation of rationale for taking action. these stages are similarly indicative of a sociocultural frame of reference that reveals the spiraling nature of epistemic change, through continual cognitive awareness, and/or realization, as well as consideration of external environmental influences described by bendixen (2002). study context the study takes place at a state university in a large urban area of southern california. the school is attended by more than 26,000 students and is a commuter campus. this study explored the ways in which 17 novice teachers, with less than five years’ experience who are graduate students in a master’s in curriculum and instruction, volunteered to participate in this study. of the 17 teacher participants, three had limited curriculum leadership expertise and were relatively inexperienced about education philosophies per the initial demographic survey administered. 1 existentialism which is more associated within the context of the study of varying philosophies such as realism, idealism, tends to be one that is often this study was exploratory and context specific to this bound system of teachers who are graduate students in a curriculum and instruction course. critical reflection was utilized as a tool to help extend teacher knowledge about their own epistemological beliefs as well as their pedagogical practices in the classroom (dewey, 1933). the course instructor prompted the teachers to relate their epistemological beliefs through weekly reflection. the teachers were asked to write in their journals about specific practices during the two initial sessions before they began an in-depth study of educational philosophies. their essays provided a base of evidence about their teaching practices and why they believe and teach in certain ways. during the first and second session respectively, they were asked to describe a favorite lesson and how they would teach, and then described what they believed to be the best approaches to classroom management (as suggested by crookes, 2015; lasley, 1980; reber, 2011). subsequently, the teachers delved into the literature about educational philosophies, the various processes of critical reflection, as well as thinking about what or who influenced their instructional decisions and whether this had a bearing on their teaching beliefs and attitudes. the instructional tone was primarily constructionist in nature (golding, 2009). teachers gained an understanding of educational philosophies that the professor applied to realistic classroom experiences through instructor modeling (as recommended by beatty et al., 2020b; hofer, 2004; niessen et al., 2008). four educational philosophies (and one philosophy respectively) were the primary focus of their curricular understanding: perennialism, essentialism,1 progressivism, social reconstructionism, and existentialism. for referred to in educational research as an educational philosophy beyond the four core educational philosophies aforementioned (jersin, 1972). 34 global education review 9 (4) instance, a more essentialist philosophical tone is associated with the authority figure who disseminates knowledge through lectures, promotes foundational knowledge, and may use little to no student-to-student interaction. similarly, perennialism is teacher-centered yet includes the study and mastery of the classics (including literature, fine arts, and foreign language study), and promotes intellectual reasoning. a progressivist style would denote less teacher lecture and more facilitative cooperative student-to-student approaches towards learning. social reconstructionism has the aim of creating a classroom environment that facilitates student learning, acknowledges prior knowledge, yet also creates a classroom environment that promotes agency, change, and/or social reform in society and institutions (beatty et al., 2020a; crookes, 2015; mansvelder-langaroux et al., 2008; moss & lee, 2010). thus, within this context, teachers were asked to reflect on each of the educational philosophies, their own teaching practices, and describe what influences, e.g., ramifications of educational, institutional, and social policies of practice promoted in schools have influenced their teaching philosophies, related approaches, and their instructional beliefs. using enactivism, the course instructor facilitated class and peergroup interactions in class through deep reflection and dialogue about blogs and assignments to promote greater awareness of the dynamic relationships that exist between the “student–teacher, individual–community, [and] cognition” (niessen, et al., 2008, p. 27) congruent with dewey’s (1933) phases of critical reflection. methodology the researchers were interested in exploring how sustained critical reflection over a 15-week-period could help the teachers make meaning of their teacher selves by reflecting about their teaching environments. the researchers chose a qualitative case study approach to analyze how the teachers defined their instructional beliefs through selfdiscernment based on critical reflection. the aim of the researchers was to uncover how sustained critical reflection might enhance the teachers’ ability to reason out why they teach and believe in certain ways. merriam’s (2009) critical research frame was employed to explore but also challenge teachers’ notions of themselves and their teaching world. understanding the ramifications of varied educational philosophies instructional styles can help teachers define the beliefs and goals of their own teaching and whether their goals align with the instructional missions of their schools. the research focused on whether teachers found the process of sustained critical reflection useful in defining their beliefs about teaching and why they engage in certain types of instructional approaches. in this way, the research is focused on answering the following question: 1)how might sustained critical reflection about their teaching beliefs and practices lead to enhanced understanding of their teacher selves, teaching context, and forces that influence that context? data analysis the purposeful sample of participant cases was analyzed to gain insight about how sustained critical reflection may transform their understandings within their world. the researchers directly examined the qualitative data (survey, field notes, in-class journal reflections, online blogs) to identify recurring patterns to generate an inductive coding scheme. recurring and co-occurring codes were further collapsed into major categories and themes. the enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 35 researchers used the coding paradigm to reexamine the data corpuses to achieve intercoder reliability—a form of inter-rater reliability (patton, 2002). triangulation of the various data pieces are reflected in the coding paradigm utilized to characterize the participants’ exploration of their teacher identities and instructional practices, as well as their perception within their bound institutional systems (merriam, 2009; patton, 2002). through this process and the examination and re-examination of the data corpuses, four salient phases emerged which permitted for further data categorization and analysis: phase i: uncertainty; phase ii: development and growth; phase iii: realization and action (agency); and phase iv: characterization of teacher self. the phases are indicative of how the course flowed and the overall group responses to course content and materials within an evolving community of inquiry (beatty et al., 2020b, golding, 2009; packer & goicoechea, 2000). the teachers were encouraged to continue to reflect, analyze and rationalize about their teacher selves based on prior teaching evidence (e.g., lesson and classroom management essays) and studies about critical reflection, curricular approaches, educational philosophies, as well as social and institutional policies. themes emerged were indicative of phases of initial inquiry as they progressed through conscious-driven practice of reflection to explain and think about the why of their teaching beliefs and practices. the following table provides an overview of the phases that emerged, themes as subthemes from data analysis, and brief outline of topics the teachers reflected upon. table 1. spiraling model of critical reflection and selfcharacterization coded phase descriptions themes and subthemes data sources (icf=in-class reflection; blog=online reflection) phase i: uncertainty (weeks 1-3) themes: vagueness sense-making subthemes: conflict, motivation week 1 icf about “lesson and approaches” week 2 icf about “classroom management beliefs and approaches” week 2 blog about luft & roehrig (2007) about teacher beliefs, practices. week 3 icf about jersin’s educational philosophies survey outcomes and whether matches their beliefs and practices. phase ii: development and growth (weeks 4-7) themes: cognitive evaluation, cognitive dissonance week 4 icf about initial understanding of personal philosophy. 36 global education review 9 (4) (teachers were conflicted when personal beliefs did not match their instructional practice and what they perceived as institutional interference) awareness (becoming more self-aware) subthemes: motivation week 5 blog about curricular designs and how it compares with school and beliefs about teaching and practice. week 6 blog: online synopsis of mansvelderlangayroux et al. (2008) and connections to teaching. week 7 fieldwork report and analysis about school’s principal and school mission and educational philosophy. phase iii: realization and action (weeks 811) themes: development and growth (teachers realize that their practice and beliefs are influenced by institutional policies) agency and action (teachers reveal a desire to week 8 icf about social foundations of curriculum, society, social and institutional policies (ornstein & hunkins, 2009. week 9 blog about curricular models (ornstein & hunkins, 2009) week 10 blog about historical transform curriculum to better reflects their beliefs rather than the status quo) foundations and change (ornstein & hunkins, 2009). week 11 blog about elementary school programs and/or issues that are relevant to your teaching context. phase iv: teacher selfcharacterization (weeks 12-15) themes: transformation and growth agency and action (subtheme: external forces, e.g., educational policies, mandates) week 12 personal belief narrative draft week 13 personal belief narrative rationale week 14 personal belief narrative final week 15 curriculum rationale final analysis of findings the study revealed how the process of prolonged critical reflection can promote greater depth of understanding, analysis, critical thinking, and metacognition about teaching practices. the process of self-reflection for selfdiscernment was novel for participants and challenged their outcomes-based critical reflective practices. engaging in a reflective process without the fear of grade reprisal was novel for them. thus, teachers were free to enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 37 engage in reflection for their own professional development. this self-reflective process itself evoked a level of initial uncertainty and lack of clarity about whether what they genuinely believed aligned with their practice or vice-aversa. phase i: uncertainty two prominent themes that emerge in the uncertainty phase are vagueness and sense making. at this stage many of the teachers referred to their pre-service teacher experiences to compare and reflect upon their understanding of their beliefs and practices. the type of approach utilized by teachers is personalist in nature as they try to identify and define their own philosophy(ies) and teacher identities (mansvelder-langaroux et al., 2009). 1.1. vagueness the teachers note their uncertainty about their development or their progress in understanding whether the educational philosophies that described them in the jersin (1972) survey truly measured their educational philosophy. they reflected about whether the jersin measure accurately indicated their philosophical bent. thus, the measurement tool was used to create a conversation and have them reflect further and apply their knowledge from the course about the varying philosophies. in reflecting upon scores from an educational philosophy test: “i felt that as i went through the test, i didn't have a strong feeling of agreement towards only one answer for many of the questions. i was surprised that i didn’t have any responses in the essentialism category because i went through school in an era more or less with influences of this type of educational philosophy. i think that if i were teaching, my answers may have varied some but right now i think my ideas are more idealistic than they may be after i have more experience in the classroom” (teresa, phase i, in-class reflection). teresa also echoed what other teachers mentioned—the idea that once they enter the schooling systems as full-time teachers that they may become more essentialist due to accountability mandates and testing expectations. furthermore, participants overall noted how they are still developing their conceptions about teaching and how that is related to their teaching practices. 1.2 sense-making associated with participants’ uncertainty was their need to make sense of the newer content which was unfamiliar. as part of the facilitative learning environment, they were exposed to various articles intended to facilitate their understanding of the terminology such as epistemology and the difference between teacher beliefs, practices, and attitudes. they were asked to reflectively explore how information in luft and roehrig (2007) might affect their own understanding of their beliefs and pedagogy. the article points out that our beliefs about how […individuals] learn are a predictor for our actions in the classroom, and i agree. i didn’t really understand why it is important to understand our beliefs and how they relate to our teaching methods, but i now understand that understanding my beliefs in relation to knowledge and learning can allow me to effectively grow as an educator. i will be able to take in information and suggestions and relate them to my methods in the classroom. an interesting question to consider is can teachers control the influence that our beliefs have and do our beliefs or its 38 global education review 9 (4) influence change over time? (helen, phase i, luft & roehrig, 2007, blog) initially, the lack of familiarity with new information promoted a sense of uncertainty about tying a particular educational philosophy that would match their beliefs about teaching. at this stage, they ask spontaneous questions and attempt to answer them. the teachers also begin to make sense and explain their initial epiphanies about their beliefs versus instruction, leading them to create and reformulate their ideals about teaching perspectives. phase ii: development and growth during the development and growth stage ii, reflective article and blog responses provide evidence of intellectualization and reasoning about their teaching beliefs and practices (crookes, 2015; dewey, 1916, 1933; olafson et al., 2010). much of their reflections at this stage were about gaps between their teaching beliefs and pedagogy and how to bridge those gaps. at this stage they begin to identify with educational philosophies. reflecting and assimilating new knowledge is demanding as they engage in cognitive evaluation of their experience. engaging in cognitive evaluation helped them gain the ability to identify with particular educational philosophies and attain a modicum of awareness (self-awareness) of their teaching practice during the still developing stage. the most dominant theme during phase ii was growth and/or development discussed below. other relevant subthemes noted were conflict and awareness (e.g., increased epiphanies and connections with subject matter). 2.1 cognitive evaluation accordingly, teachers wrote about how critical reflection for “real purposes” leads to their self-development (professional development) and growth while enhancing their learning. journaling and dialogue permitted them to critically evaluate, clarify, and reformulate their beliefs. they are beginning to note the benefits of this type of metacognitive activity for translating and evaluating how they actually believe about instructional practice. through this class we are beginning to reflect on our thinking and practices through in class activities and the readings. this will help us when it comes to writing our personal narrative because we will have been forced to analyze what we think and how we translate our principles into practice. i remember having a guide [in the credential program] from which i was supposed to develop my reflections. for the most part, i was supposed to reflect on the end results of my lesson, and its success by the amount of understanding the overall class [scores] obtained. i don’t remember being asked about my epistemology and my ways of teaching. in regard to my beliefs, i believe reflecting on oneself is important because not only do we grow as educators and people, but we can see from another perspective if what we are doing is working or not (joanna, phase ii, in-class reflection). like joanna, other teachers also began to recognize that journaling promoted critical evaluation and re-evaluation, and clarification of their beliefs. moreover, teachers commented on how this was becoming part and parcel of their professional development. 2.2 conflict the teachers read articles about reflection on teaching and whether their teaching habits might be influenced by schooling institutional aims or goals. reflecting upon this enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 39 new information within their own context challenged them to re-evaluate their ideas of their own teaching beliefs and approaches as juxtaposed against institutional aims. this supplementary information caused them to question whether their beliefs and approaches were their own or influenced by socializing institutional forces. leticia is in conflict about whether her environment caused her to choose more essentialist types of responses on her jersin (1972) educational philosophy questionnaire the prior week or whether she was inherently an essentialist. taking a critical comparative approach to understanding why she scored primarily essentialist rather than childcentered, or progressivist, leticia ponders whether the school has influenced her performance-based essentialist disposition and actions. i believe that a crucial step in developing a self-awareness of critical reflection practice refers to knowing who you are and what works well for you. as exemplified through the mansvelder et al. (2008) article, learning activities encouraged the student teachers to become aware of their own actions, functioning and development. i reflected on this piece by referring to my own student teaching. i did have to conduct weekly reflections [then] yet i seemed to center on student outcomes as compared to my own process of thinking. this lays true in my teaching philosophy of essentialism. although i did mention some aspects of whole child-centered curriculum, my reflections were more academic-based oriented. perhaps this was due to my lack of experience or being that i had been placed in a high performing academically centered school in a high socioeconomic location. nevertheless, my reflections exuded academic performance. this would be beneficial to my recollection for the [upcoming] personal [narrative] because i will have to consider whether or not i made a choice or if it was a choice already laid out for me (leticia, phase ii, mansvelder-langayroux et al., 2008, blog). teachers at this stage became conflicted while reasoning why they behave, instruct, or believe in particular ways. at this stage, greater questioning about the intent behind socializing forces that might affect instruction and beliefs emerged. teachers similarly show greater interest and excitement about their selfawareness, and their self-reflections were more extensive during this stage. 2.3 awareness closely related to conflict gained through comparing and contrasting of prior and new knowledge during critical reflection, were the epiphanies about themselves. although the teachers were not asked to pull information from prior teacher education courses when reflecting, many of them did, curious about how their beliefs were changed or influenced over time. thus, teaching philosophy statements and other primary source documents surfaced as part of their own self-directed analysis. lindsey, like leticia, was also motivated to review her twoyear-old teaching statements from the credential program. surprisingly, i found that many of my [prior] statements fit into a progressivism philosophy…the surprising factor for me was that nowhere in my teaching philosophy did i ever mention california content standards, holding students accountable 40 global education review 9 (4) for their learning, or maintained a rigor with my instruction to ensure all students are growing as learners. now that i have worked for almost two years, i believe that my original teaching philosophy has changed since leaving the credential program. i tend to now lean toward an essentialist view with behavioral objectives. this may be because i have been submersed in an environment that is so heavily influenced by standardized testing (lindsey, phase ii, mansvelderlangayroux et al., 2008, blog). as teachers acknowledged their increased development and growth (and awareness) by the second phase, they continued to examine literature related to teaching beliefs and practices juxtaposed against educational philosophies and corresponding subject design contexts. greater awareness occurred during this second phase as major epiphanies were based primarily on their personal and local schooling influences and experiences. sustained reflection prompted revision, reformulation, and greater ability to concretize their teaching contexts. by the third phase, however, teachers looked increasingly outward for explanations about what external factors influenced their beliefs and instruction. the dialogue moved from inner consciousness towards outer consciousness when hypothesizing about their teaching context, resulting in a greater realization about what external factors influence their instruction. phase iii: realization and action thus, teachers, such as lindsey, expressed curiosity about their teaching beliefs and practices and acknowledged initial awareness about their teacher selves. the epiphanies were associated with conflict in what they saw as a change in their belief and/or teaching practices when reviewing articles about society, institutional policies, and historical foundations of teaching. the increased awareness of socializing influences on their teaching resulted in teacher resistance towards what they perceived to be uniformistic essentialist agendas (as recorded in blogs and other reflections). this concern was further voiced when they realized how their teaching beliefs and instructional desires diverged from school policy. although i work in an environment that is essentialist, i don’t necessarily agree with that philosophy. the basic subjects are a foundation that needs to be taught to all students. however, the method can be modified. i believe that if teachers would be “allowed” the opportunity to incorporate the arts, music, and social science and/or science into daily lessons, students would benefit from their learning. in our group we discussed the value of a score and how we “teach” to the test. it’s difficult to change the status quo. we also discussed that if we don’t teach to the test or scores may not be good enough and we may be frowned upon by our leaders and fellow colleagues. we also mentioned that there are some schools that do not follow essentialist philosophy. this type of learning is a great way to get students thinking about real-world situations. however, it may not work in all communities (amanda, phase iii, week 8 in-class reflection). 3.1 action and agency teachers not only identified aspects of the null and hidden curriculum but agendas that would not provide for equity pedagogy or multicultural curriculum. three preschool enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 41 teachers feared that the encroachment of language arts and mathematics came at the expense of losing humanistic, artistic, and culturally relevant approaches to learning. paul, who is a sixth-grade teacher, similarly advocated for and took action to remedy this absence by incorporating multicultural literature and culturally responsive approaches reflective of the classroom population. my goal is to integrate the students’ multifarious cultures with the required reading that is designated by the district. for example, when reading a story, “yunmi and halmoni’s trip,” about a korean-american girl’s visit in seoul, i considered the various countries of origin represented in the group of students that i was working with and brought in photographs that were familiar to them…this lesson eventually led into an interdisciplinary math activity wherein the students were required to use measurement skills to help me prepare empanadas of our own. as trivial and irrelevant as these experiences may seem to some, i believe that they give me a unique opportunity to bond with my students and teach affective and academic lessons concurrently. this realization, though, did not come to me with ease. the reflective activities required of me during this course supplied me with opportunities to compare my ideologies and pedagogical practices with established curricular philosophies (paul, phase iii, blog: elementary school programs and issues). phase iv: teacher self-characterization one of the last course assignments was the personal belief narrative where they must provide a rationale for their educational philosophy and how it aligns with their belief and instructional practice. during this last phase, teachers further reflected upon their own evidence as recorded in blogs and journal summaries and class notes to verify which educational philosophy best represented their teaching beliefs and practices. there is mention of greater selfawareness about internal as well as external socializing forces that influenced their practice. similarly, teachers showed great confidence in their ability to self-characterize, and continued points about their desire to take action and make change. major themes were self-awareness (ability to self-characterize), agency and action (or reaction to social forces that interfere with the authentic development of a teacher persona), growth and transformation, as well as associated connections between theory and practice. the readings in the class helped me make connections between my teaching practices and theoretical philosophies. for example, when i observed my own classroom environment, i noticed that i had the desks and chairs in rows. would that make me an essentialist? in terms of the curriculum that i use for the program, the subjects are clearly delineated, and materials being taught are focused on specific goals and objectives. moreover, reflecting on one of my favorite lessons in class, i noticed that i conduct a lot of direct instruction or “teacher talk” [referring to journal reflection #1]. by reflecting on that aspect of the curriculum, i noticed that it reflects more of an essentialist style […]. in contrast, my instructional practices reflect more of a progressive way of teaching. for instance, my willingness to encourage whole and 42 global education review 9 (4) small group discussions and encouraging my students to think critically show a more student-centered approach (sandra, phase iv, in-class reflection #3). 4.1 transformation and growth the phases reveal how knowledge is gained, received, and then assimilated, which leads to greater reflection and deconstruction of their role as teachers. “the course forced me to critically examine, analyze, and deconstruct how i teach, what i teach, and why i teach the way i do in the context of my own classroom” (eng, personal belief narrative). while an important outcome included their perceived ability to engage in general reflection about their own teaching and their socialized educational experiences, another significant finding was their notion of transformation and growth. teachers wrote about how, considering their beliefs, they were able to transform or, to a lesser extent, change their teaching approaches and classroom methods. maria, who has not yet found work as a teacher, convinced the inclusion teacher she supports to concede greater choice which is associated with the existentialist approach. at the beginning of the course, i did not have an open mind. as i have progressed through this course and through the year as a teacher’s assistant, i feel my experience and knowledge has matured. […] through my reflections i discovered that i did not know myself as a teacher. i felt my practices completely conflicted with my beliefs. it was frustrating for me to teach in someone else’s classroom. […] in my second reflection i stated that i do have the opportunity to exercise my beliefs in my practice to an extent. the inclusion teacher has progressively given me more freedom in her classroom, and i have started to connect my beliefs with my practice. i have worked with the sixth graders on their novel. i give the students options for their activities and their tests (maria, phase iv, personal belief narrative). new knowledge was continually incorporated, evaluated, reasoned, justified, reevaluated, and incorporated. epiphanies and realizations occurred that provided teachers with indications of their own development, growth, increased self-awareness, and the ability to characterize as well as recognize their teacher selves towards the end of class. also significant was the realization that they had engaged in transformation about the way they would think and, consequently, teach in the classroom. moreover, the teachers admitted that they began to transform by questioning not only their instructional beliefs and actions but also the actions of their schools. considering these findings, the researchers discovered that when teachers gain knowledge about educational philosophies within social, historical, political context, they were able to deepen and critically analyze the educational institutions objectives and influence. teachers came to understand and recognize the types of curricular formats that epitomized prescriptive or essentialist and other types of practices such as progressive learning formats. furthermore, the prescription of an institution’s curricular formats can interfere with teacher’s inherent beliefs about what teaching approaches may be the most effective way of engaging and including diverse students. those teachers who associated their beliefs and instructional approaches with progressivism as well as constructionism expressed a greater desire to change and/or question the status quo. enhancing teacher awareness and professionalism 43 discussion and implications prior research reveals that preservice and classroom teachers have trouble disentangling their beliefs from their practices. hofer (2004) asks if the use of critical analysis can help individuals reconcile their conflict about teaching conceptions versus teaching practices. using sustained critical reflection throughout the course provided these individuals with a space from which to engage in inner dialogue and introspection about their true teacher beliefs and practices and develop as critical educators (beatty et al., 2020a; bendixen & rule; 2004; bredo, 2002: cheng et al., 2009; crookes, 2015; dewey, 1933; moss & lee, 2010). what occurred was a spiraling of cognitive dissonance, reincorporating and restructuring their beliefs based on that new knowledge. the teachers evaluated and challenged educational theories that contradicted how they had originally defined their classroom beliefs and practices (dewey, 1933). the teachers were conflicted and questioned their beliefs when sharing or defending ideas about teaching and instructional practices in their journal reflections yet came to identify a particular educational philosophy that matched the ways their beliefs emanate from their lived experiences (beatty et al., 2020c; bendixen & rule, 2004; packer & goicoechea, 2000). congruently, teachers described their frustrations and internal conflicts, of how they perceived their instruction and their teaching selves within an institutional context governed by mandated federal policies that were not culturally and linguistically appropriate for the diverse students. epiphanies about the ways in which the schooling environment and associated political forces influenced their teaching practices and beliefs were more prominent in teacher reflection comments during the selfcharacterization phase. it is during this phase that teachers not only hypothesize but test their hypotheses. even in the last stage, teachers continued to re-conceptualize and revisit their ideals about their teacher selves yet at higher levels of cognition. reflection prompted increased metacognition about their practice and recognition of the types of socializing forces that influence their beliefs. while much of the inner conflicts were sustained throughout their exploration of their teacher selves, greater understanding and argumentation about how external social and political forces associated with teacher training have shaped their instructional decisions. in describing how external socialization processes (state and federal educational policies) affected their teaching, they voiced their resistance. the hidden curriculum of primarily teaching language arts and mathematics at the expense of valuable subjects such as social studies/history, science, and the arts was denounced. teachers expressed a desire to become advocates for expanding the curriculum to include more creativity, inclusivity, as well as culturally responsive approaches (as suggested by cheng et al., 2009; 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(2013). investigating the effects of professional practice program on teacher education students’ ability to articulate educational philosophy, international journal of humanities and social science, 3(4), 114-124. 46 global education review 9 (4) zeichner, k. 1999. the new scholarship in teacher education: alternative paradigms for teacher education. educational researcher, 28(9), 4-15. zeichner & tabachnick, 1981. are the effects of university education “washed out” by school experience? journal of teacher education, 32(1), 7-10. semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 23 _______________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ global education review is a publication of the school of education at mercy university, new york. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution 4.0 international license, permitting all non-commercial use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. citation: invernizzi, pietro luigi, scurati, raffaele, signorini, gabriele, mauro, franco, rigon, marta, d'elia, francesca, & raiola, gaetano. (2024). semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education in the italian context. global education review, 11 (1), 23-54. semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education in the italian context pietro luigi invernizzi raffaele scurati gabriele signorini franco mauro marta rigon francesca d'elia gaetano raiola abstract nowadays, we face a profound fragmentation of knowledge, which is addressed in distinctive ways, conforming to the specifics of each field of knowledge and having a specific lexicon and ways to interpret reality. to better understand and communicate the complexity of the reality of motor and sports sciences in italy, it is necessary to study its ontology based on a holistic and comprehensive approach such as system thinking (st). so, this preliminary review aimed to verify the coherence of terminology used by italian academics (who study methodologies related to teaching) and practical communities (who live the reality of daily teaching) in motor and sports sciences, specifically regarding the didactic of physical and sports education. for this purpose, according to design based research (dbr), a first investigation of the interpretative semantics of the discipline’s specific terms was accomplished with the support of multiple sources of information such as documents, databases, and brainstorming performed by experts (representing the guiding team and stakeholders from all considered communities). moreover, the frequency of some terms and keywords considered in european (erc) and italian (cun) legislation was assessed to contextualize better the impact of common practice community keywords on the scientific and regulatory community. successively, the studies that analyzed the terms from 2000 to 2020 in the leading scientific search engines (scopus and web of science) were also investigated. results indicate that in the cun and erc areas, there is a total absence of the most relevant lemma to the community of practice. furthermore, significant terms such as play, sports education, psychomotricity, and gymnastics are less considered or unconsidered in the specific scientific and didactic fields. possible solutions for a specific semantic model to reduce the gap are finally hypothesized and presented. premise a new semantic concept of physical education and sport as means of an integrative approach between theory and practice (design of the preliminary research). the preliminary research presented in this paper is based on design-based research (dbr) (easterday et al., 2014). it integrates eight phases of analysis (focus, understand, aims definitions, conceive a plan, 24 global education review 11 (1) preliminary evidence, design evaluation and improvement, future investigation, summary) to draw attention to physical education’s semantics with the aim of highlighting possible language gaps in practice and research applied to physical and sports education. keywords semantic knowledge, syntax, teaching, etymological identity, academic community, community of practice; integration of knowledge; normative etymology; design-based research introduction phase 1 – focus on topics: the multilevel socioecological model and the system thinking applied to physical and sports education. the cultural scenario inherited from the past and that we face today is sometimes characterized by a fragmentation of knowledge (harland, kieser, & meldrum, 2006; hastings & larsen, 2021), where each piece of knowledge addresses reality in its specific determinate way, with its specific lexicon and its specific way of posing itself in the interpretation of knowledge. conversely, a culture that cares for human formation should address the whole context system to understand the complexity of the interaction between educational processes. in this sense, physical and sports education can be interpreted as a tool that encourages one to look at the bigger picture (osberg, 2005; sanford, hopper, & starr, 2015) (figure 1). from this point of view, the socioecological multilevel model based on a system thinking (st) approach (who regional office for europe, 2022) represents a current model of scientific interpretation of reality that encourages looking at all factors (type of communities involved, policy, specific characteristics of context) that can impact on a specific considered system. in this case, the system could be represented by educational research related to physical and sports education (bronfenbrenner, 1977; schölmerich & kawachi, 2016; whitehead, 2010). from this perspective, the idea of fragmentation of reality is no longer conceivable to understand the value of comprehensive educational research based on integrated information, where the body and movement have a central and recognized value in acquiring a conscious experience of the world (seth, 2013; seth & tsakiris, 2018). figure 1. timeline related to an outdated fragmentation model and an actual socio-ecological multilevel model based on system thinking (st) as a current way of interpreting the complexity of the educational learning process. phase 2 – understanding: material ontology and community of practice. to better understand and communicate the complexity of the reality of motor and sports sciences, a study of its ontology is necessary. furthermore, the importance of ontologies is recognized in numerous fields of disciplinary research, including educational and formative semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 25 contexts in general (galliani, petrucco, & dal bon, 2004). starting from the general philosophical definition of ontology as a general view of reality (varzi, 2005), it is possible to move toward an applied material ontology of a descriptive and hermeneutic (interpretative) type proper to the human and social sciences. in these specific collocations into the scientific reality related to teaching, learning is conceived as an intracommunity social/relational act (wenger, 2006) where multiple contexts have a complementary representation and an alternative value (lave, 1988). to neglect the community of practice means to miss all the richness of reflective intentionality nuance typical of storytelling and inherent in physical education learning (bruner, 1996; standal & moe, 2013). understanding: practical experience as a means of semantic interpretations of physical and sport education words. to better analyze the ontological plan of physical and sports education, examining the scope of semantics that characterizes the discipline is necessary. the conception of culture as the best-integrated interpretation of the world and reality is linked to the information concept. in a different context, the same word denotes different notions and concepts (labar & cabeza, 2006; loprinzi, frith, & edwards, 2019). every term is rich in information, but deciphering it requires a mind that can understand it, a shared history, and a connection of lived experiences. only with these premises can a term be generalized to a community, and its interpretation can be well defined. thus, the semantics closely related to the terms’ meaning are the cognitive and experiential basis for a better understanding of what one wants to express (boleda, 2020). however, consistent and competent use of the correct syntax of words (choice of use and combination) is required when it is necessary to communicate and transmit meanings relating to experience, knowledge, and expertise. the use of syntax has inherent limitations. this means of transmission limits the complexity of the physical education’s discipline so closely linked to personal experience. the interaction of emotions, feelings, and knowledge related to one's experience creates a complex network of meanings that words often fail to convey totally. therefore, using appropriate terminology and a common language among experts in the field is necessary to better share knowledge and individual and subjective lived experience (cattaruzza, 2008; marrone, 2001; tulving & bower, 1974). awareness about the value of practical experience and integrated information, based on the common and shared use attributed to the meaning of words, are the key elements to reduce the semantic gaps between the theory and the practice of physical and sport education (fedorenko, blank, siegelman, & mineroff, 2020; siedentop & tannehill, 2000). understanding: the normative terminology of the academic community and its links to the community of practice the italian academic scientific organization is based on normative containers and scientific disciplinary sectors, which are titled and declined in individual fields of knowledge. on the contrary, in the european union and the international community, the academic organization is based on a system of official keywords and concepts (419) spread across three scientific areas and twenty-seven 26 global education review 11 (1) research areas, according to the european research council (erc) system, which is the inevitable framework from which individual lines of research derive. italy must align itself with the international framework because that is one of the objectives to be achieved to become a full member of the european union, not least because of the huge financial resources allocated. at first sight, the difference between the two classification models is quite apparent: on the one hand, the italian system is characterized by a rigid declination of scientific knowledge to which researchers must adhere scrupulously (otherwise the lines of personal research will be incoherent with those of official research); on the other hand, the european system is based on a semi-free system which declines equal but general knowledge, aimed at grafting individual lines of research in order to encourage interdisciplinarity (d'isanto, 2019). common links could be found, deepening the connection between these two apparently opposite systems. before going into the links, it is appropriate to describe the state of the art and the prospects for alignment, which, for epistemological clarification (syntax and semantics) of the key and broad concept of physical (motor) and sports education, it is essential to highlight. in italy, a disciplinary scientific declaratory of motor and sport sciences is being developed by cun (the italian national university council) that better declines the contents in aggregated and disaggregated form by disciplinary knowledge distinguished into motor activities and sport activities, the socalled disciplinary scientific sectors (d.m. 30/10 n. 855, 2015). as an aggregate form, it develops scientific topics related to movement and sports fields (figure 2). in disaggregate form, these topics are divided and specifically addressed to one of the two areas (movement and sports fields). in this “state of the art” analysis, we highlight the preservation of the italian descriptive model of the organization of scientific academic knowledge that, in 2016, had declined 2,400 keywords. these keywords are relevant to the italian motor and sport sciences, which at the time aimed at establishing a "flexible link" with the erc references. the areas listed below are derived from the keywords mentioned above and can be referred to in aggregate and disaggregated forms: training; learning; wellness; didactics of motor and sports activities; fitness and wellness medicine; sport pedagogy; sports performance; exercise and sports sciences; motor development. in europe, the research institution annually draws up panels and sub-panels within the three scientific areas (physical and engineering sciences, humanities and life sciences, and social sciences), which are assimilated with italian research fields, keywords, and topics. the latest erc update of 2021-22, among the 419 subpanels, presents fields in which motor and sport sciences can be included (european research council, 2020). figure 2 highlights relationships between the terminology used by the academic (erc and cun terms) and practical communities (terms commonly known and used by pe teachers, whose choice will be clarified in the following paragraphs). semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 27 figure 2. integrations of key terms analyzed as a function of educational and scientific terminology (building bridges) phase 3 – building aims and hypothesis: identity of etymology as the conjunction between new and continuous scientific discoveries and their applicability by the practical community. using a specific language in motor and sports science allows the creation of a characterizing identity culture and the transmission of ideas, thoughts, and reflections inherent in the subject matter most clearly and inclusively possible (norton & toohey, 2011). a terminology based only on a single scientific domain is insufficient to develop an identity language. therefore, it becomes necessary to consider a vocabulary that includes subjective interpretation from the experience of the direct users of that specific practical application language. following design-based research (dbr) purposes, creating a solid bridge between theory and practice is necessary. commune etymological identity represents the basis for close communication between all the stakeholders involved in the physical education field (practical, scientific, and normative integration) (vaezi, moonaghi, & golbaf, 2019). according to the dbr, this process should be guided by a defined research design. with this purpose, the first aim (first step) of this preliminary study is to verify if the normative/scientific terminology of the academic (national and international) community that relates to other stakeholders and specific terminological references is consistent with the terminology of the practical community and applied field. the hypothesis is that, in relation to the type of classification considered, there may be different types of terms chosen or definitions of the system of thought used and the meaning attributed to the terms. the second aim of the study (second step) is to understand how much and at what "depth" in terms of the number of studies, the terminologies attributed to the community of practice are considered in the normative and 28 global education review 11 (1) scientific field. the hypothesis is that the scientific community has not attributed many studies to the educational and formative terms considered fundamental for the community of practice. methods phase 4 – conceive a plan. the rationale of the present investigation is synthesized in figure 3, which describes the fundamental stages of the protocol concept and relative connections. figure 3. rationale of the study protocol. the study’s rationale aimed to solve the practical problem of identifying a common and flexible research language based on practical experience. to reach this purpose, according to dbr principles, it is necessary to involve multiple actors and sources of information as described in the following steps (herrington, reeves, & oliver, 2014). conceive a plan: terminological definition analysis (step 1) the application phases of this terminological definition analysis emerged as brainstorming considering a guiding team (vaezi et al., 2019) composed of academic experts (five associated professors and a researcher in the faculty of pe and sport) and practical communities (five teachers of pe having at least ten years of experience in public schools) of pe and motor science, and consulting specific terms in some specific documents and database study following a historical, etymological, normative, scientific, public cultural diffusion route (beyer, 1992; haag, mess, haag, & von johannes hanke, 2012; mumford, 2021). historical references have been of particular relevance. indeed, many historical documents have been consulted during this step, as they represent the common "root" of the etymology and the community of practice (boni, 1962; di donato, 1984; frasca, 1979; grifi, 1989; ulmann, 1968; valletti, 1893). a procedural way based on a sequential structure better clarifies the conceived material ontological plan (figure 4). semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 29 figure 4. procedural construction of the ontological reference plan for physical and sport education. details of each stage are provided in appendix i. the specific stages of the sequential development (tools and actions chosen) are realized based on these three points: i. choice of paradigm of reference: the boundaries of etymology are not clear-cut, and the motivation for choosing a term must be addressed to its meaning and the interpretative ideas that emerge from the experience of the practical community (leontiev, 2013; pennebaker, mehl, & niederhoffer, 2003). in particular, the choice is addressed to the terms physical education, sport, sports education, play, psychomotricity, gymnastic and motor education, which represent operational form that teachers of pe use with their experience, consciousness, energy and relationship capacity in order to educate, to form and to transmit the basic skills of physical literacy (buccino, colagè, gobbi, & bonaccorso, 2016; snowden, griffiths, & neary, 1995). motor science is not used in this choice as it is considered an improper term used in ministerial school normative to define physical education (brainstorming outcome). the choice of the term physical and sports education (where education is the peculiar element) is determined by empirical experience as physical and sports education teachers in school settings and by the field of research/study related to didactics and educational research (buccino et al., 2016; snowden et al., 1995). consciousness and self-mastery, goals of physical education and sports, are the foundation that connects the operational plan of reference to the theoretical plan based on a holistic paradigm. semantics is based on the meaning we attribute to words representing the true ontology in which the affective-emotionalexperiential component allows us to attribute warmth to terminological interpretation. in this 30 global education review 11 (1) paper, therefore, we want to avoid a sterile, aseptic, obscure, and empty copy of various hyper-specialized terminological labels, risking neglecting the fullness of meaning due to a fragmentation that oppresses the interactions and relationships of a complex and multidimensional system (harland et al., 2006; hastings & larsen, 2021). ii. a vision of a practice of theory: a theoretical culture based on the scientific foundations of physical and sports education (disciplines such as physiology, anatomy, psychology, sociology, pedagogy, and biomechanics) is the knowledge of a theoretical framework not directly applicable to practice. no physiologist, pedagogue, anatomist, or general education expert can apply his or her science to jumping leap forward, learning to dunk, or any other motor/sport skill (stenhouse, 1983). the practical synthesis of these theories through a transdisciplinary approach becomes a culture (specific practical didactics) when it can be directly applied to the solution of a problematic learning or training situation in an applied field of education or health (lier, 2010) (figure 5). figure 5. transdisciplinary convergence of a theory of practice into a practice of theory (brainstorming outcomes). iii. preliminary explorative terminological analysis: a preliminary terminological analysis of the most representative terms included in figure 4 based on the st approach (cavana & clifford, 2006; who regional office for europe, 2022) was conducted by brainstorming among experts from the academic and practical physical education community. terms of stages 1 and 2 emerged as priorities. the analysis of stage 3 further highlighted different term classifications following the origin of documents and studies on historical, etymological, normative, scientific, and public cultural paths. appendix i provides full details of the brainstorming and document analysis results. conceive a plan: number of studies in the normative/scientific field that consider the terms relevant to the community of practice (step 2) this second phase is based on two observations, constituting a preliminary analysis, which should be oriented toward further investigation and verification through a systematic literature review. observation 1. the first observation investigates how frequently a keyword relevant to our study appears in the cun and erc aims. specifically, the following terms related to the community of practice and terms related to the academic community have been considered and compared: i. terms related to the community of practice: pe, sports education, play, gymnastics, motor education, psychomotricity, sport. ii. terms related to the research community (2016 cun – erc linking keywords) are classified into three pillars: subject 1 general didactics subject 2 physio logy subject 3 pedagogy subject 4 biomechanics subject 5 psycho logy subject 6 socio logy didactics of physical and sports education practical application of theory subject # … others … semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 31 educative pillar: teaching motor activities, teaching sports activities, learning, and motor development. sports pillar: training, performance, sport pedagogy, sports science health pillar: wellness, fitness, wellness medicine, exercise science. observation 2. the second observation investigates the key terms retrieved on scopus and web of science (wos) search engines. this analysis in the preliminary form of the studies was conducted by analyzing the frequencies of the key terms in the research conducted from 2000 to 2020 (trend by range of every five years). the search was performed on abstracts, keywords, and titles as references related to: a comparison of the general health, education, and sports areas. an analysis of the most frequent and relevant words related to the community of practice (selected by brainstorming) and italian normative keywords (2016 cun-erc). a comparison of the most frequent and relevant words occurring in the specific education research (selected by brainstorming). results phase 5 – build preliminary evidence: first step of investigation. the preliminary explorative etymological observation (figure 4, appendix i) highlighted the following problem identification: it is evident that many terms (psychomotricity, gymnastics, play, sports education, motor education, pe) considered fundamental for the community of practice do not find a direct expression and reference in the terms most used by the academic/scientific community and normative requirements. in etymological and historical analysis, specific terms related to the community of practice (sport, game/play, sports education, pe, gymnastics, psychomotricity, motor education) often presented ambiguous, confused, and overlapped semantic interpretations which are also indirectly reflected in the most accessible information source by non-academic and nonspecialized people. as highlighted in the conceptual synthesis of figure 6 (and appendix i), terminology related to the community of practice represents an evolution of the historical stages that have characterized it and conditioned the etymological root of the different terms (ulmann, 1968). even the popular terminology derives from the terminology of the community of practice that constitutes a simplified derivation of it (figure 6). this way, further investigation involving the community of practice and other non-specialist communities is considered indispensable to verify the interpretative coherence of the different terms. the scientific-cultural terminology should constitute a reference for further evolution of semantics, strictly inherent to the meaning attributed to the words used by the community of practice (haff, 2010). circularly, the terminology of the community of practice should be the reference for the orientation of scientific study, which in turn forms the basis for policy decisions on current legislation regarding both national and international scientific regulations and ministerial educational programs on physical education (willimczik, 1992). this way, according to the st approach (cavana & clifford, 2006; who regional office for europe, 2022), figure 6 represents an attempt to highlight the links between the different factors by identifying the "leverage 32 global education review 11 (1) points" (the point of the system by acting on which the most remarkable changes can be determined) that could be found in the normative terminology. as a practical example, the italian educational normative (ministerial scholastic guidelines) uses the term motor science unproperly to indicate the terms physical and motor education, which are more coherent with what is used by the community of practice. this lack of coherence in terminology used by different stakeholders is amplified by a circular reinforcement negative reinforcing loop caused by more problematic linkage issues of the scientific area resistance point as the point of system that creates a resistance to the change of status with the practical community’s educative/applicative needs terminology mainly pedagogical-didactic in the normative area; mainly neuro-psycho-physiological in the scientific area; mainly operational in the community of practice (ennis, 2011; wandersman, 2003). figure 6 identifies possible future investigations and hypotheses of solutions on leverage and resistance points, which will be clarified in the discussion. figure 6. a causal loop diagram of st: definition attempt of links of terminologies identifying the intervention points, referring to appendix i. r= reinforcing loop. build preliminary evidence: second step of investigation (referred to online databases) figures 7 to 12 show the main relative results of the two observations that constitute the second step of the investigation. the first observation investigated how frequently a keyword relevant to the community of practice appears in the cun and erc aims. figure 7 highlights the number of times the keyword appears in the normative document directly or indirectly linked to the field of exercise and sports sciences (coherence) and the total time the keyword appears in the normative document (total). raw frequencies expressed are indicated on the right side of the graph (e.g., 3/14 = coherence/total). graphs do not show terms missing in cun and erc. the second observation investigated the key terms retrieved on scopus and wos search engines. the search by the general terms of sport, education, and health in the primary scientific search engines and their global trend from 2000 to 2020 are shown in figures 8, 9, and table 1. the number of studies addressed to general health differs from studies addressed to the educational/pedagogical sphere, and both differ from studies addressed to the sports sphere with semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 33 a range of differences that has continued to increase over the years. figure 7. percentage of coherence refers to the keywords under investigation compared with the total times the term is used in the considered national (cun) and international (erc) normative. figure 8. number of records returned from scopus and wos searches with sport, education, and health as keywords. 0 20 40 60 80 100 development performance didactics / teaching education pedagogy sport teaching of sports activity teaching of motor activity percentage of coherence cun 1/1 1/1 1/1 1/1 3/4 3/5 0/1 0/1 0 20 40 60 80 100 play / game performance development learning education exercise percentage of coherence erc 1/1 2/4 3/4 3/14 0/1 0/2 sport education health 0 2×106 4×106 6×106 8×106 p a p e rs ( n ) overall searches (scopus & wos 2000 to 2020) scopus wos 34 global education review 11 (1) figure 9. trends by range years of papers in health, education, and sport general areas in scopus and wos. table 1: trends of delta referred to different range years of papers in health, education, and sport general areas in scopus and wos values represent the number of studies between the range years (delta n) in the context of the second observation, a subsequent investigation was conducted by analyzing the frequencies of the specific keywords of the community of practice and academic community (2016 cun – erc linking keywords) in the research conducted from 2000 to 2020. the terms motor education and motor science are completely absent. furthermore, the terms play, psychomotricity, sport pedagogy, sports education, and gymnastics highlight a marginal number of studies compared to other terms such as physical education, performance, fitness, motor development, training, learning, and sports science. these analyses could generate a new consideration to verify that there is a need to increase studies that deal more directly with some operational application forms of practical community (figure 10, search by key terms). 2000 to 2005 2006 to 2010 2011 to 2015 2016 to 2020 0.0 5.0×105 1.0×106 1.5×106 scopus (2000 to 2020) p a p e rs ( n ) 2000 to 2005 2006 to 2010 2011 to 2015 2016 to 2020 0 2×104 4×104 6×104 8×104 1×105 wos (2000 to 2020) p a p e rs ( n ) trend of occurences health, education, and sport pillars sporteducationhealth semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 35 figure 10. outcomes of search by keywords on scopus and wos (the terms have been selected as representative of the community of practice and related to the 2016 cun – erc linking keywords). the following investigations present the analysis relating to the comparison between the “umbrella terms” (figure 4) physical education, sport education, and sport pedagogy (assimilable to sport education) in the research conducted from 2000 to 2020 (every five years) and the frequencies of the specific key terms that appear relevant in specific educational research (defined by brainstorming). specifically, the terms sport education and sport pedagogy are marginally present compared to the term physical education (figures 11, table 2). in scientific educational research, the terms motor competence, physical literacy, and perceived motor competence are less considered in the specific fields of learning and didactic of physical education and sports education (figure 12). 0 10,000 20,000 30,000 40,000 50,000 physical education performance physical fitness motor development training learning sport science gymnastic sport education sport pedagogy psychomotricity play wellness physical exercise science sport didactics physical activity didactics papers by subject (scopus & wos 2000 to 2020) scopus wos 36 global education review 11 (1) figure 11. trend analysis of the terms physical education, sport education and sport pedagogy in scopus and wos. table 2: trends of delta referred to different range years of papers in physical education, sport education and sport pedagogy in scopus and wos. values represent the number of studies between the range years (delta n) 2000 to 2005 2006 to 2010 2011 to 2015 2016 to 2020 0.0 5.0×103 1.0×104 1.5×104 scopus (2000 to 2020) p a p e rs ( n ) 2000 to 2005 2006 to 2010 2011 to 2015 2016 to 2020 0 1×104 2×104 3×104 4×104 wos (2000 to 2020) p a p e rs ( n ) physical education sport education sport pedagogy trend of occurences for physical education, sport education, and sport pedagogy terms semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 37 figure 12. other keywords considered relevant (brainstorming) in specific educational research in addition to 2016 cun-erc linking keywords and to the key terms representative of the community of practice (scopus and wos; 2000 to 2020). discussion phase 6 – evaluation and improvement of design with solutions proposal regarding the first step of the investigation, considering the terms’ etymological roots and their historical origin or the common meaning attributed to them, the analysis shows that semantic intrusions are evident for many terms. for example (appendix i), the term sport, historically and etymologically, invades the term game/entertainment (abbreviation of the english word disport that derives from the french word desport, which in turn means fun. even today, the olympic games start with an opening match and the beginning of many sport with a party, a conjunction between sport and entertainment) (grion & bernard, 2021). again, in italian culture, the word game can be historically considered as an interpretative form of gymnastics based on competition (baumann, 1907). a solution to solve this confusion is highlighted in figure 6 and in the future outlook paragraph (phase 7 – future investigations), where a questionnaire (appendix ii) to be administered to specialists (physical education teachers) and generalists (other comparison populations) is proposed. it could help to define better the cultural identity of physical and sports education in italian reality. a comparison with the normative criteria of the didactic/scholastic pillar and scientific criteria related to the educationalmethodological field, shows how, in these areas, the most used key terms differ from those of the community of practice of pe teachers and are more directed to terminologies related to a pedagogical field such as didactics, teaching, motor development, physical literacy, competence, executive functions, self-efficacy, and enjoyment. these considerations are confirmed in the subsequent analyses (second step of investigation). this way, in the preliminary examination (figure 7) considering the terms relevant to the community of pe teachers in the normative/scientific field (first observation of second step of investigation), it is highlighted that in the cun and erc areas the most relevant lemmas to the community of practice in the composed form are missing (e.g., sports self efficacy executive functions enjoyment motor competence physical literacy perceived motor competence 0 20,000 40,000 60,000 80,000 100,000 83,746 63,526 24,419 921 656 125 84,756 19,187 19,340 961 542 153 p a p e rs ( n ) paper occurences by subjects (scopus & wos 2000 to 2020) scopus wos 38 global education review 11 (1) education or physical education). moreover, several terms that consider only a term in its discomposed form (e.g., learning, play, game, performance, or education) are not always pertinent to the physical and sports education area (porretta, nesbitt, & labanowich, 1993). a question that arises spontaneously from the overall observations is understanding how many academics have had a practical path connected to physical education and sports disciplines in their curriculum instead of learning and formative experiences based purely on a theoretical approach. curricular differences or similitudes could constitute possible difficulties or advantages when changes are proposed to solve practical problems in physical education (who regional office for europe, 2022). it is fundamental to identify the hypothesized action solutions in the leverage point and the resistance point (cavana & clifford, 2006; who regional office for europe, 2022), as, in this design-based research (dolmans & tigelaar, 2012), we are considering the semantics of the complex system of physical and sports education to try to solve problems that emerged in the previous analyses with an st approach (figure 6). in the considered system, for the leverage point, an intervention hypothesis is represented by the collaboration between stakeholders representing a group building model to act with a proper semantic terminology on the specific scientific normative. category associations, sports organizations, pe teacher organizations, and academic representatives must constitute the mixed group model building (siokou, morgan, & shiell, 2014) that, facing the political community, could determine a more coherent and adequate use of the educative research terminology. group model building can compare different points of view and develop common solutions favouring the most appropriate interpretative synergies between theories, practice, and research. they also represent an opportunity to develop consensus regarding the goal to achieve through the st approach (bérard, 2010). conversely, different interests or a lack of a common language between stakeholders could represent resistance to changes. one of the main problems of educational research is a different priority of researchers compared to that of the practical community (dede, 2005). researchers are often more oriented towards data collection and analysis rather than solving concrete problems of practical reality (dede, 2005). hence, to avoid the system’s resistance to the change (figure 6), it could be useful to standardize the terminology used and the research conducted by the academic community with the needs of the practical community (dede, 2005; dolmans & tigelaar, 2012). in this vision, the academic community should be oriented to research action (cohen, manion, & morrison, 2017; mcateer, 2013) aiming to solve the practical community’s daily concrete educative and didactic-methodologic problems. more specific characterization of the terminology increases the communication efficacy between the stakeholders involved, improving the consciousness about the meanings of the terminology used (cavana & clifford, 2006; kang, nembhard, ghahramani, & curry, 2018). the process necessary to integrate theory, practice, and research within the specific ontology proper to physical and sports education, which is expressed in this article, is schematized in figure 13. this way, a close chain of the proposed interventions hypothesis determining the feedback loop includes the concept of how the system fits together as a whole, highlighting the relative connections of the individual levels. semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 39 figure 13. representative diagram of levels and processes required to integrate normative, practice, and research in the field of physical and sport education. limits the present review is only a preliminary study having limited raw data that must be integrated by a more articulated analysis (systematic review), including more scientific search engines. this should return complete, more precise, and consistent pictures of keywords used in scientific, normative, and practical fields related to physical and sports education. phase 7 – future investigations using the vision of the dbr, the research design needs to be continuously implemented, modified, and integrated based on research and experiences previously conducted (vaezi et al., 2019). hence, based on the outcomes of the present research, further developments of a semantic framework of reference are based on a proposal of a specific questionnaire to the community of practice to directly verify the interpretation of the different specific terms from the community of specialists and clarify the terminological ambiguities highlighted in the first step of our study. the mentioned questionnaire (appendix ii) could be useful to test the semantic interpretation of the terms that emerged in this study and are considered fundamental in teaching physical and sports education. it also will be implemented with further checks to compare populations with different sociocultural backgrounds and experiences. specifically, the comparisons will consider the following areas: i. generalist vs. specialist teachers in elementary school. ii. teachers of pe and motor science (literal translation by the italian term “scienze motorie”) vs. teachers of other subjects (italian, maths, science...) in the middle and high school setting and different institutions. iii. pe and motor science teachers vs. federal sports technicians. iv. pe students vs. pe teachers. v. middle and high school students vs. pe teacher’s teaching styles. vi. practical community vs. academic community furthermore, future research should extend the physical education terms investigation and the proposed questionnaire to a large scale in the european community, not confined in the italian reality. 40 global education review 11 (1) in addition, further analysis based on group model building should involve trade associations, scientific societies, representatives of the scholastic and sports world, and political representatives. these stakeholders should be invited to select and define the common semantic general states of physical education starting from the results’ analysis emerging from the questionnaire. in this way, a virtuous iterative process considering the previous arrival point as a starting point for the next proposal might be created (easterday, lewis, & gerber, 2014). finally, a group of specialized researchers trained in dbr (herrington, mckenney, reeves, & oliver, 2007) with practical competence in physical education should start further action research in different realities and fields (didactic/scholastic; sport/club; health/preventive) with the additional aim of sharing a common terminology. conclusion phase 8 – summary: final synthesis of preliminary concept description and subsequent intervention solutions in this preliminary design-based research utilizing a system-thinking approach, we identified the need for greater terminological consistency in the italian physical education and sports context. in particular, in normative and academic field organizations, a lack of attention has been found to the terms that, in the operational motor field, are relevant for the community of practice. starting from this information obtained through a systemic approach, barriers, facilitators, and hypotheses of solutions were identified. figure 14 evidences the sustainability of semantic st methodology based on the sharing of knowledge, skills, procedure, and data interpretation, accomplished by dynamics actors (people, populations, and organizations) that interacting can really reduce the ambiguity of terminology and the semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sport education in the italian context. figure 14. semantic st approach as a set of procedures involving different actors and multiple perspectives. we think the semantic problems revealed by this preliminary study and the future development of group model buildings, research actions, and questionnaires could be used as a bridge between practice, normative, and scientific terminology. this necessary close communication based on the st approach and dbr principles could be generalizable to different realities and stakeholders involved in the field of sport (football club, artistic semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 41 gymnastics, combat sport, swimming, sports for the disabled, manager, etc.), physical activities for health (yoga, pilates, rehabilitation gymnastics, gymnastics for the elderly, personal trainer, etc.), and physical education at school (school principals, support teachers, parents, municipal administrators, etc.). the present conceptual framework, by approaches such as st and reference principle as dbr, tried to enrich the horizon of physical education’s semantic and modernizing forms of sharing. references baumann, e. 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(1992). interdisciplinary sport science: a science in search of its identity. in h. haag, o. grupe, & a. kirsch (eds.), sport science in germany: an interdisciplinary anthology (pp. 7-36). berlin, heidelberg: springer berlin heidelberg. 46 global education review 11 (1) appendix i. the terminological analysis stag e criterium term definition stage 1 definition of the first principle (key concept, “umbrella” term) physical and sports education discipline that uses human motor skills and sports to stimulate and foster human's physical, motor, social, affective, intellectual, and moral growth throughout his life span (brainstorming outcome). stage 2 s.2a definition of terms directly related to the first principle motor education (literal translation by the italian) school discipline that uses human motor skills for formative purposes to foster in children a complete formation of personality (enrile, 1968). sports type of physical activity that involves structured competitive situations with established rules (brainstorming outcome). psychomotricity set of practices that concern the mutual integration of psychic functions with motor functions (gori, 1982) s.2b definition of the operational forms through which the first principle finds practical application "in the field" (enrile, 1968) gymnastics organized activity through ordered series of physical and motor exercises with the aim of promoting the general health of the individual and optimal bodily mastery (brainstorming outcome). game/play activity based on distensive, recreational forms of actions focused more on participation than on a result, allows for activity with low gradient of responsibility and constraint favoring a more relaxed and natural participation (enrile, 1968). motor science is not used in this choice why considered improper term used in ministerial school normative to define physical education (brainstorming outcome). stage 3 s.3a1 historical root of the terms (boni, 1962; di donato, 1984; frasca, 1979; grifi, 1989; ulmann, 1968) gymnastics the science that studies physical exercise, its effects on the human organism, and ending in the attainment and maintenance of good health (mercuriale, 1573). linked to the term gymnastics is the term exercise, which baumann interprets as a deliberate and specified motor act (baumann, 1873, 1913). giuoco (game/play) competition between two or more parties to the one who surpasses the other in a given quality, physical or intellectual or moral [...] all gymnastic exercises, none excluded, can be made the subject of a joust, and consequently, the essential thing is that one knows how to make the schoolchildren joust [...] the whole substance of the joust lies in the competition and nothing else but this (baumann, 1922). sports competition between athletes, carried out in the presence of interested spectators, aimed at the achievement of a prize by victory (grion & bernard, 2021). physical education the practical application of hygienic norms (baumann, 1870)."physical education is a philosophical goal which has as its effect the complete development of the personality through progressive and rational training in the meaning of life" (tissié, 1919). interestingly, baumann, in 1873 and 1913, in two of his books, made use of the term psychokinesis, understanding it as the art of forming character and as education of the spirit by education of the body. this term can thus be considered the forerunner of the term psychomotricity and highlights the influence that gymnastics has on man's character and spirit (baumann, 1873, 1913). s.3a2 etymological root of the terms gymnastics the word gymnastics has a peculiar etymology; on the one hand, it is properly understood as the art of exercising and training (gimnastiké. techné, art); on the other hand, the root of the word gimna is gymnos, which means "naked," as exercise among the greeks was practiced naked (treccani, 2023b). giuoco (play) the word comes from the latin iôcus, which means joke, mockery, or prank and from the greek paignion, which has the same root as pais, meaning child and finds a connection with paizen, which refers to playing, dancing, playing, making love and with paideia which refers to education and culture (treccani, 2023c). sports sport is an english term abbreviation of disport, which means "fun." the english word disport is derived from the french word desport, meaning enjoyment. the french word desport is derived from the latin word deportare, which means "to take away," in the sense of "to go outside one's city, one's walls, to engage in physical activities." in turn, the word amusement comes from the latin verb divertere, which always means to get away. paradoxically, the word athletics is derived from the greek word athlos and recalls the concept of agon, of fighting, of winning the prize, usually attributable to sports (treccani, 2023d). didactic/schola stic didactics of motor activities: referring to the greek etymology, this term is derived from didaskálos meaning teacher and the term didaskalía, meaning teaching; referring semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 47 s.3b normative criterion. (2016 cun – erc linking keywords) pillar to latin etymology, the derivation is from didàctica meaning the art of teaching (treccani, 2023a). this term is related to pedagogical theory and, referring to the activities inherent in physical-motor education, relates to the ability to teach this discipline (brainstorming outcome). didactics of sports activities: it generally refers to the same general premises as didactics of motor activities. it is oriented more toward a specific domain of a given sports discipline that needs to be known to transmit it effectively and with educational values that consider the characteristics and age of the subjects it addresses (brainstorming outcome). learning: represents a change in behavior and performance that is relatively stable due to experience and has a direct relationship with the didactics and teaching styles used by the teacher (brainstorming outcome). motor development: constitutes a process of modification of physical and mental dispositions leading to an end state of formation, construction, and differentiation of physical abilities and motor skills (brainstorming outcome). sports pillar training: complex process consisting of a set of programmed actions and interventions having the purpose of developing sports performance considering the different domains (physical, technical, psychological, mental, social) that condition it (brainstorming outcome). performance: represents the result of an action that, regarding the competitive sports sphere, is identified with how the activity is carried out in terms of performance in competitions (brainstorming outcome). sports pedagogy: generally, it represents the science that analyses the relationships between sports activities and the educational processes that sports can foster (brainstorming outcome). sports science: represents the totality of scientific discoveries, knowledge, and methodologies related to sports and their characterizations (brainstorming outcome). health-clinical preventive pillar well-being: is identified with the concept of quality of life and absence of discomfort. it considers all personal domains of the individual (physical, psychological, social, mental) and the types of environments (physical, social, cultural, economic, ...) in which the individual lives and relates (brainstorming outcome). fitness: this term is associated with health, quality of life, and physical efficiency (brainstorming outcome). wellness medicine: this term is associated with planned interventions aimed at disease prevention, the fight to delay aging processes, and interventions aimed at promoting or restoring bodily, social, and cognitive well-being (brainstorming outcome). exercise science: is based on the scientific evidence studying the effects of exercise and physical activity or lack thereof by making the results of studies known for prevention, therapy, and rehabilitation. (brainstorming outcome). s.3c criterion related to the most accessible information source by nonacademic and non-specialized people (terms actually retrieved from wikipedia: www.wikipedia.or g) physical education a branch of education concerned with improving through the motor and sporting activity the mental and physical development and health of the individual and the social […] game […] means a voluntary and intrinsically motivated activity carried out for recreational purposes. [...] the word "game" is also employed more specifically, referring to recreational activities that are competitive in nature and characterized by strictly defined goals and rules [...] gymnastics a term for various sports […] sport motor and sport science any form of competitive activity or game that aims to use, maintain, or improve psychophysical skills and abilities by providing enjoyment to participants and, in some cases, entertainment to spectators [... (literal translation by italian) set of disciplines that deal with physical activities and sport through the transversal study of medicine, psychology, physiology and sport education. motor education / sports education (literal translation by italian) do not exist in wikipedia; both relate to the term physical education. psychomotricity a discipline developed in france [...] the term "psychomotricity" refers to a set of practices that use play and especially movement play, as their main tool to accompany and, if necessary, help the evolution and development of the personality, understood as a unity of body, mind and emotion, in the different stages of growth and life [...]. s.3d criterion related to terminological internationality (the key concepts related to the need physical literacy the concept of physical literacy has stimulated increasing attention in scientific pedagogical research in recent years (29 studies in 2014). it is referable, in a metaphorical sense, to the "motor literacy development" inherent in a cultural process of growth, synonymous not only with motor literacy but, above all, with a broader formative process that, if used consciously, makes it possible to transform simple, aseptic and abstract grammatical-motor notions into a process that allows the acquired http://www.wikipedia.org/ http://www.wikipedia.org/ 48 global education review 11 (1) for semantic analysis that emerge from this classification are related to scientifically oriented terminology that frequently emerges in scientific publications that are oriented toward issues with a specific educationalmethodological character) knowledge and skills to be used for its own social utility in real contexts of relational or professional life (harwood, keegan, smith, & raine, 2015). in essence, the analogy in the literary field with writing and reading (the term, in fact, means "physical literature") should not be reduced to a concept of pure logical or grammatical analysis but integrated into an enriching cultural process that allows one to use knowledge and skills to solve real-life problems (corbin, 2016; whitehead, 2010). executive functions functions involved in the regulation/management of behaviour and pertain to selfcontrol/inhibition, working memory, and flexibility of response by allowing one to exercise optimal planning and control and management of one's psycho-motor behaviours (ball et al., 2011). actual motor competence a person's ability to perform a wide range of motor actions that are useful for social life, sports practice, and fitness (robinson et al., 2015). perceived motor competence it relates to an individual's perception of his or her motor skills and is considered a primary motivational factor related to the practice of physical activity and sports (estevan & barnett, 2018). self-efficacy self-efficacy represents self-perception, self-awareness, self-mastery, and confidence in the ability to successfully master a situation in various everyday contexts and activities (bandura, 1995). enjoyment in the motor-sport domain, it is defined as "a positive affective response toward motor-sport experience that reflects generalized feelings such as pleasure, liking, and enjoyment" (mccarthy, jones, & clark-carter, 2008). references ball, g., stokes, p. r., rhodes, r. a., bose, s. k., rezek, i., wink, a. m., . . . turkheimer, f. e. (2011). executive functions and prefrontal cortex: a matter of persistence? frontiers in systems neuroscience, 5, 3. doi:10.3389/fnsys.2011.00003 bandura, a. (1995). self-efficacy in changing societies. new york, ny, us: cambridge university press. baumann, e. (1870). la ginnastica ne' suoi rapporti con la medicina e la igiene : tesi per l'esame di laurea del candidato emilio baumann. baumann, e. (1873). psico-cinesia ovvero l'arte di formare il carattere. roma: presso l’autore. baumann, e. (1913). psicocinesia, ovvero, l'educazione dello spirito mediante quella del corpo. roma: presso l’autore. baumann, e. (1922). manuale di ginnastica italiana : ad uso degli insegnanti elementari e delle scuole normali. roma. boni, o. (1962). la motricità educativa (vol. 2). bologna: csef. corbin, j. (2016). taking an analytic journey. in developing grounded theory (pp. 35-54): routledge. di donato, m. (1984). storia dell'educazione fisica e sportiva. roma: edizioni studium enrile, e. (1968). i principi fondamentali dell'educazione fisica (vol. i della teoria delle attività motorie educative). roma: società stampa sportiva. estevan, i., & barnett, l. m. (2018). considerations related to the definition, measurement and analysis of perceived motor competence. sports medicine, 48(12), 2685-2694. doi:10.1007/s40279-018-0940-2 frasca, r. (1979). l'educazione fisica e lo sport. da filangieri ai nostri giorni. chieti: solfanelli. gori, m. (1982). l’educazione fisica contemporanea. roma: società stampa sportiva. grifi, g. (1989). ginnastica storia dell’educazione fisica e dello sport. roma: barain edizioni. grion, l., & bernard, s. (2021). bernard suits. la filosofia del gioco. brescia: scholé. harwood, c. g., keegan, r. j., smith, j. m. j., & raine, a. s. (2015). a systematic review of the intrapersonal correlates of motivational climate perceptions in sport and physical activity. psychology of sport and exercise, 18, 9-25. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.11.005 mccarthy, p. j., jones, m. v., & clark-carter, d. (2008). understanding enjoyment in youth sport: a developmental perspective. psychology of sport and exercise, 9(2), 142-156. doi:https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2007.01.005 mercuriale, g. (1573). de arte gymnastica. venetiis: apud iuntas. robinson, l. e., stodden, d. f., barnett, l. m., lopes, v. p., logan, s. w., rodrigues, l. p., & d'hondt, e. (2015). motor competence and its effect on positive developmental trajectories of health. sports medicine (auckland, n.z.), 45(9), 1273-1284. doi:10.1007/s40279-015-0351-6 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2014.11.005 https://doi.org/10.1016/j.psychsport.2007.01.005 semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 49 tissié, p. (1919). l'éducation physique et la race : santé, travail, longévité / dr philippe tissié. paris: ernest flammarion, éditeur. treccani. (2023a). didattico enciclopedia online. retrieved from https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/didattico/ treccani. (2023b). ginnastica vocabolario online. retrieved from https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ginnastica/ treccani. (2023c). giuoco enciclopedia online. retrieved from https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ricerca/giuoco/ treccani. (2023d). sport enciclopedia online. retrieved from https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/sport/ ulmann, j. (1968). ginnastica, educazione fisica e sport. dall'antichità ad oggi. roma: armando editore. whitehead, m. (2010). physical literacy: throughout the lifecourse: taylor & francis. https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/didattico/ https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ginnastica/ https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/ricerca/giuoco/ https://www.treccani.it/vocabolario/sport/ 50 global education review 11 (1) appendix ii. transdisciplinary convergence of the theory of practice into the practice of theory. the original italian questionnaire for teachers' interpretation of terms used in motor sciences, physical education, and sport. research on the interpretation of terminology in the fields of motor sciences, physical education, and sport personal data 1. sex m f other 2. age _______ 3. degree 4. length of service primary school diploma 0-5 years middle school diploma 10-15 years high school graduation 15 25 years degree 25 30 years postgraduate > 30 years 5. type of school or institution where you work 6. role within the school complex classical high school principal scientific high school role teacher linguistic high school support teacher technical or vocational school substitute psycho-pedagogical institute other ___________________ primary school lower secondary school 7. role in sports fields instructor youth coach high-level coach trainer no role other _______________ 6. discipline taught __________________________________________________________ semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 51 the terms that we will consider in this questionnaire as an object of semantic interpretation will be the following: sport physical education gymnastics game motor sciences physical education psychomotricity sports education for each meaning proposed, in relation to each term, put a cross on the box relating to the numbers that best reflect your opinion, using the following scale of values. in the free boxes, you can enter further meanings which, in your opinion, better characterize the term in question. 1 i do not at all agree 2 disagree 3 neutral 4 agree 5 very much agree 1. sport is: 1. competition 1 2 3 4 5 2. fun 1 2 3 4 5 3. game 1 2 3 4 5 4. socialization 1 2 3 4 5 5. excessive selection 1 2 3 4 5 6. reduction of other social activities and willingness to study 1 2 3 4 5 7. training 1 2 3 4 5 8. means of education 1 2 3 4 5 9. positive influence on the psyche 1 2 3 4 5 10. physical-motor development 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 2. physical education is: 1. motor development 1 2 3 4 5 2. means of education 1 2 3 4 5 3. discipline that can promote the learning of other school subjects 1 2 3 4 5 4. practical school subject 1 2 3 4 5 5. free play and recreation 1 2 3 4 5 6. health education 1 2 3 4 5 7. sport 1 2 3 4 5 52 global education review 11 (1) 8. not very useful in school 1 2 3 4 5 9. gymnastics 1 2 3 4 5 10. training 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 3. gymnastics is: 1. form of school physical education 1 2 3 4 5 2. health education 1 2 3 4 5 3. discipline no longer current 1 2 3 4 5 4. fun 1 2 3 4 5 5. discipline that promotes bodily mastery 1 2 3 4 5 6. activity organized through an ordered series of physical and motor exercises 1 2 3 4 5 7. sport 1 2 3 4 5 8. exclusively scholastic discipline 1 2 3 4 5 9. discipline that promotes self-control 1 2 3 4 5 10. boring discipline 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 4. the game is: 1. fantasy 1 2 3 4 5 2. fun 1 2 3 4 5 3. emotional involvement 1 2 3 4 5 4. waste of time 1 2 3 4 5 5. activity that favors the acquisition of rules and roles 1 2 3 4 5 6. form of physical education 1 2 3 4 5 7. form of sport 1 2 3 4 5 8. activity that promotes psychological and cognitive development 1 2 3 4 5 9. activities with a low degree of responsibility 1 2 3 4 5 10. activity that may lead to exclusion 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 5. motor sciences are: 1. physical education 1 2 3 4 5 2. game 1 2 3 4 5 3. scientific discipline 1 2 3 4 5 4. practical school discipline 1 2 3 4 5 5. with a predominantly theoretical approach 1 2 3 4 5 6. sport 1 2 3 4 5 semantic gaps in the theory and the practice of physical and sports education 53 7. discipline unsuitable for a school setting 1 2 3 4 5 8. university study course 1 2 3 4 5 9. healthcare discipline 1 2 3 4 5 10. pedagogical discipline 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 6. motor education is: 1. physical education 1 2 3 4 5 2. exclusively scholastic subject 1 2 3 4 5 3. free play and recreation 1 2 3 4 5 4. discipline that promotes health 1 2 3 4 5 5. secondary school discipline 1 2 3 4 5 6. discipline that can promote the learning of other school subjects 1 2 3 4 5 7. play education 1 2 3 4 5 8. sports education 1 2 3 4 5 9. psychomotricity 1 2 3 4 5 10. physical development 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 7. psychomotricity is: 1. physical education 1 2 3 4 5 2. motor education 1 2 3 4 5 3. game 1 2 3 4 5 4. practical discipline that favors the development of the mind 1 2 3 4 5 5. discipline that promotes motor control 1 2 3 4 5 6. motor sciences 1 2 3 4 5 7. psycho-pedagogical discipline 1 2 3 4 5 8. discipline that can be placed in child neuropsychiatry and learning disorders 1 2 3 4 5 9. boring 1 2 3 4 5 10. discipline that is not physically demanding 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5 8. sports education is: 1. sport 1 2 3 4 5 2. school discipline 1 2 3 4 5 3. introduction to competitive sport 1 2 3 4 5 4. training 1 2 3 4 5 54 global education review 11 (1) 5. positive for all areas of the personality (cognitive, social, affective) 1 2 3 4 5 6. educational and social tool 1 2 3 4 5 7. form of physical education 1 2 3 4 5 8. game 1 2 3 4 5 9. selective 1 2 3 4 5 10. excessively focused on competition 1 2 3 4 5 11. other: 1 2 3 4 5 12. other: 1 2 3 4 5